DevOps Contract Job Trends

DevOps
UK

The table below provides summary statistics and contractor rates for jobs requiring DevOps skills. It covers contract job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 11 June 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
11 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 13 15 14
Rank change year-on-year +2 -1 -3
Contract jobs citing DevOps 5,313 3,062 4,151
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.65% 10.42% 9.51%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.56% 11.45% 11.16%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,698 2,198 2,859
10th Percentile £385 £375 £400
25th Percentile £438 £438 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year - -4.55% -6.14%
75th Percentile £613 £630 £650
90th Percentile £700 £747 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £525
% change year-on-year - -4.76% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 120 17 120
10th Percentile £39.53 £33.10 £56.48
25th Percentile £56.63 £51.25 £61.51
Median hourly rate £70.00 £70.00 £66.50
Median % change year-on-year - +5.26% +1.53%
75th Percentile £77.50 £87.50 £74.58
90th Percentile £92.69 £90.25 £85.78
UK excluding London median hourly rate £67.50 £68.75 £65.50
% change year-on-year -1.82% +4.96% -

All Process & Methodology Skills
UK

DevOps falls under the Processes and Methodologies category. For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all contract job vacancies requiring process or methodology skills.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for process or methodology skills 42,291 26,731 37,187
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.76% 91.01% 85.22%
Number of daily rates quoted 26,385 16,984 23,772
10th Percentile £325 £300 £300
25th Percentile £413 £406 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £508 £525
Median % change year-on-year +0.99% -3.33% -4.55%
75th Percentile £619 £625 £638
90th Percentile £725 £738 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,541 1,182 2,587
10th Percentile £14.68 £14.20 £12.75
25th Percentile £20.00 £17.87 £16.00
Median hourly rate £43.96 £27.28 £36.50
Median % change year-on-year +61.14% -25.26% +1.39%
75th Percentile £68.00 £56.00 £61.16
90th Percentile £81.25 £73.75 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £45.00 £25.15 £38.12
% change year-on-year +78.93% -34.02% +8.91%

DevOps
Job Vacancy Trend

Historical trend showing the proportion of contract IT job postings citing DevOps relative to all contract IT jobs advertised.

DevOps job vacancy trend in the UK

DevOps
Daily Rate Trend

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing DevOps.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing DevOps

DevOps
Daily Rate Histogram

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing DevOps over the 6 months to 11 June 2026.

Daily rate histogram for DevOps in the UK

DevOps
Hourly Rate Trend

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing DevOps.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing DevOps

DevOps
Hourly Rate Histogram

Hourly rate distribution of jobs citing DevOps over the 6 months to 11 June 2026.

Hourly rate histogram for DevOps in the UK

DevOps
Top 18 Contract Job Locations

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing DevOps within the UK over the 6 months to 11 June 2026. The 'Rank Change' column provides an indication of the change in demand within each location based on the same 6 month period last year.

Location Rank Change
on Same Period
Last Year
Matching
Contract
IT Job Ads
Median
Daily Rate
Past 6 Months
Median Daily Rate
% Change
on Same Period
Last Year
Live
Jobs
England +2 4,515 £525 - 1,168
UK excluding London +6 2,345 £500 - 900
London +4 2,311 £550 - 429
Work from Home -1 1,456 £525 - 785
North of England +7 830 £500 - 262
South East 0 470 £513 +2.50% 277
Yorkshire +2 453 £500 - 78
Midlands +3 419 £488 -2.50% 103
West Midlands +3 330 £500 -4.58% 68
North West +1 310 £510 +3.29% 151
South West +14 277 £523 -5.00% 110
Scotland +1 196 £525 +6.28% 45
East of England +24 129 £525 +6.33% 78
North East +9 85 £450 -16.28% 38
East Midlands -3 85 £465 +0.54% 35
Wales +6 51 £425 +28.33% 24
Northern Ireland +11 20 £475 +15.85% 20
Channel Islands - 3 £450 -

DevOps
Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities by Category

The following tables expand on the one above by listing co-occurrences grouped by category. They cover the same employment type, locality and period, with up to 20 co-occurrences shown in each category:

Application Platforms
1 306 (5.76%) Confluence
2 137 (2.58%) Apache Spark
3 121 (2.28%) SharePoint
4 98 (1.84%) Apache Airflow
5 93 (1.75%) Apache
6 86 (1.62%) SAS
7 47 (0.88%) CMS
8 31 (0.58%) Microsoft Exchange
8 31 (0.58%) nginx
9 27 (0.51%) IIS
9 27 (0.51%) Jupyter
10 19 (0.36%) OpenStack
11 15 (0.28%) Camunda
12 14 (0.26%) WebSphere
13 12 (0.23%) Palantir Foundry
14 10 (0.19%) Mendix
15 9 (0.17%) Sitecore CMS
16 8 (0.15%) Oracle Workflow
17 7 (0.13%) ArcGIS
17 7 (0.13%) Tomcat
Applications
1 77 (1.45%) Microsoft Excel
2 57 (1.07%) Microsoft Project
3 50 (0.94%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 37 (0.70%) Microsoft Office
5 27 (0.51%) MS Visio
6 8 (0.15%) CPLEX
7 6 (0.11%) Chatbot
8 4 (0.075%) Notion
9 3 (0.056%) Trello
10 2 (0.038%) Adobe XD
10 2 (0.038%) Spreadsheet
11 1 (0.019%) InDesign
11 1 (0.019%) Maya
11 1 (0.019%) Weka
Business Applications
1 66 (1.24%) Dynamics CRM
2 32 (0.60%) SAP S/4HANA
3 13 (0.24%) Oracle ERP
4 12 (0.23%) Payment Gateway
5 10 (0.19%) Maximo
6 8 (0.15%) Aladdin
6 8 (0.15%) Dynamics AX
6 8 (0.15%) Remedy ITSM
7 6 (0.11%) Endur
7 6 (0.11%) SAP MDG
8 5 (0.094%) Magento
8 5 (0.094%) Oracle EBS
9 4 (0.075%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
10 3 (0.056%) NEC Housing
10 3 (0.056%) Oracle BPM
10 3 (0.056%) Salesforce CRM
10 3 (0.056%) SAP BPC
10 3 (0.056%) SAP ERP
10 3 (0.056%) SAP MM
10 3 (0.056%) SAP Oil and Gas
Cloud Services
1 2,866 (53.94%) Azure
2 1,844 (34.71%) AWS
3 1,564 (29.44%) Azure DevOps
4 887 (16.69%) GitHub
5 683 (12.86%) GCP
6 532 (10.01%) GitHub Actions
7 479 (9.02%) Serverless
8 450 (8.47%) Power Platform
9 285 (5.36%) Amazon S3
10 259 (4.87%) AWS Lambda
11 255 (4.80%) AWS CloudFormation
12 237 (4.46%) Entra ID
13 220 (4.14%) Azure AKS
14 214 (4.03%) Amazon EKS
15 197 (3.71%) Azure Data Factory
16 171 (3.22%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 167 (3.14%) PaaS
18 164 (3.09%) Amazon EC2
19 159 (2.99%) Azure Monitor
20 156 (2.94%) OpenShift
Communications & Networking
1 244 (4.59%) Firewall
2 141 (2.65%) DNS
3 112 (2.11%) Network Security
4 104 (1.96%) VPN
5 48 (0.90%) TCP/IP
6 45 (0.85%) WAN
7 37 (0.70%) SD-WAN
8 33 (0.62%) BGP
9 30 (0.56%) SSL
10 27 (0.51%) DHCP
10 27 (0.51%) Wi-Fi
11 25 (0.47%) SAN
12 24 (0.45%) OSPF
13 22 (0.41%) HTTP
13 22 (0.41%) Internet
14 19 (0.36%) IPsec
15 17 (0.32%) VXLAN
16 16 (0.30%) BIG-IP
16 16 (0.30%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
16 16 (0.30%) MPLS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 291 (5.48%) Power BI
2 264 (4.97%) SQL Server
3 242 (4.55%) PostgreSQL
4 183 (3.44%) NoSQL
5 172 (3.24%) Data Lake
6 157 (2.96%) Relational Database
7 145 (2.73%) Data Warehouse
8 139 (2.62%) MongoDB
9 112 (2.11%) Amazon RDS
10 108 (2.03%) Azure SQL Database
11 98 (1.84%) Metadata
12 97 (1.83%) DynamoDB
13 90 (1.69%) Delta Lake
14 73 (1.37%) Oracle Database
15 72 (1.36%) Big Data
16 66 (1.24%) Amazon Athena
17 62 (1.17%) Elasticsearch
18 61 (1.15%) Redis
19 55 (1.04%) BigQuery
20 54 (1.02%) Amazon Redshift
Development Applications
1 753 (14.17%) Jenkins
2 659 (12.40%) Git
3 631 (11.88%) JIRA
4 557 (10.48%) GitLab
5 116 (2.18%) Selenium
6 109 (2.05%) Postman
7 87 (1.64%) SonarQube
8 84 (1.58%) JUnit
9 73 (1.37%) REST Assured
10 68 (1.28%) Bitbucket
11 62 (1.17%) Cucumber
11 62 (1.17%) Maven
12 56 (1.05%) JMeter
13 47 (0.88%) Cypress.io
14 46 (0.87%) Artifactory
15 42 (0.79%) Gatling
16 41 (0.77%) Gradle
17 38 (0.72%) Mockito
18 35 (0.66%) Visual Studio
19 31 (0.58%) LoadRunner
General
1 1,324 (24.92%) Social Skills
2 951 (17.90%) Finance
3 701 (13.19%) Public Sector
4 409 (7.70%) Analytical Skills
5 338 (6.36%) Banking
6 145 (2.73%) Documentation Skills
7 99 (1.86%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 78 (1.47%) Influencing Skills
9 73 (1.37%) Retail
10 69 (1.30%) Legal
11 58 (1.09%) Marketing
12 53 (1.00%) Organisational Skills
13 50 (0.94%) Financial Institution
14 46 (0.87%) Military
15 39 (0.73%) Presentation Skills
16 38 (0.72%) Investment Banking
17 36 (0.68%) Law
18 31 (0.58%) Front Office
19 30 (0.56%) Telecoms
20 27 (0.51%) Aerospace
Job Titles
1 1,095 (20.61%) DevOps Engineer
2 785 (14.78%) Developer
3 749 (14.10%) Senior
4 622 (11.71%) Architect
5 481 (9.05%) Lead
6 344 (6.47%) Azure Engineer
7 318 (5.99%) Analyst
8 309 (5.82%) Data Engineer
9 262 (4.93%) AWS Engineer
10 201 (3.78%) Cloud Engineer
11 196 (3.69%) Platform Engineer
12 191 (3.59%) AWS DevOps
13 182 (3.43%) Solutions Architect
14 180 (3.39%) AWS DevOps Engineer
15 176 (3.31%) Azure DevOps Engineer
15 176 (3.31%) Senior DevOps
16 169 (3.18%) Java Developer
17 162 (3.05%) Business Analyst
18 160 (3.01%) Senior DevOps Engineer
19 149 (2.80%) Software Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 482 (9.07%) REST
2 464 (8.73%) .NET
3 307 (5.78%) React
4 300 (5.65%) Spring
5 288 (5.42%) Kafka
5 288 (5.42%) Spring Boot
6 272 (5.12%) RESTful
7 238 (4.48%) Node.js
8 174 (3.27%) AngularJS
9 160 (3.01%) PySpark
10 158 (2.97%) OAuth
11 151 (2.84%) Playwright
12 136 (2.56%) JSON
13 122 (2.30%) YAML
14 120 (2.26%) SOAP
15 113 (2.13%) .NET Framework
16 111 (2.09%) OpenID
17 109 (2.05%) HTML
18 107 (2.01%) Middleware
19 103 (1.94%) OAuth2
Miscellaneous
1 902 (16.98%) Cloud Native
2 332 (6.25%) Product Ownership
3 217 (4.08%) Distributed Systems
4 139 (2.62%) Onboarding
5 128 (2.41%) Legacy Systems
6 112 (2.11%) Enterprise Software
6 112 (2.11%) Public Cloud
7 109 (2.05%) Hybrid Cloud
8 84 (1.58%) Data Centre
9 81 (1.52%) Data Protection Act
10 66 (1.24%) Management Information System
11 61 (1.15%) Self-Motivation
12 54 (1.02%) Mobile App
13 51 (0.96%) AI Agents
13 51 (0.96%) Security Posture
13 51 (0.96%) Virtual Team
14 49 (0.92%) Greenfield Project
15 46 (0.87%) Data Structures
15 46 (0.87%) Private Cloud
16 43 (0.81%) NHS
Operating Systems
1 454 (8.55%) Linux
2 265 (4.99%) Windows
3 97 (1.83%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 78 (1.47%) Unix
5 57 (1.07%) Windows Server
6 40 (0.75%) VMS
7 27 (0.51%) Ubuntu
8 22 (0.41%) Apple iOS
9 17 (0.32%) Android
10 13 (0.24%) CentOS
11 10 (0.19%) Solaris
11 10 (0.19%) Windows Server 2019
12 7 (0.13%) Windows Server 2016
13 6 (0.11%) Windows 10
13 6 (0.11%) Windows Server 2008
14 5 (0.094%) Amazon Linux
14 5 (0.094%) Mac OS
14 5 (0.094%) Windows Server 2012
15 4 (0.075%) Alpine Linux
15 4 (0.075%) Data ONTAP
Processes & Methodologies
1 3,071 (57.80%) CI/CD
2 1,958 (36.85%) Agile
3 1,417 (26.67%) Infrastructure as Code
4 844 (15.89%) Containerisation
5 780 (14.68%) Problem-Solving
6 762 (14.34%) Microservices
7 745 (14.02%) Test Automation
8 730 (13.74%) Continuous Improvement
9 650 (12.23%) Migration
10 644 (12.12%) Observability
11 617 (11.61%) Stakeholder Management
12 604 (11.37%) Analytics
13 600 (11.29%) AI
14 589 (11.09%) Scrum
15 542 (10.20%) Platform Engineering
16 533 (10.03%) Software Engineering
17 487 (9.17%) Data Modelling
18 448 (8.43%) Technical Leadership
19 431 (8.11%) Mentoring
20 421 (7.92%) Roadmaps
Programming Languages
1 1,481 (27.88%) Python
2 1,006 (18.93%) SQL
3 728 (13.70%) Java
4 500 (9.41%) C#
5 391 (7.36%) JavaScript
6 379 (7.13%) PowerShell
7 378 (7.11%) Bash
8 266 (5.01%) TypeScript
9 183 (3.44%) Bicep
10 112 (2.11%) Go
11 66 (1.24%) Shell Script
12 64 (1.20%) Scala
13 62 (1.17%) Apex Code
14 50 (0.94%) T-SQL
15 49 (0.92%) PL/SQL
16 44 (0.83%) Groovy
17 33 (0.62%) C++
18 28 (0.53%) Kotlin
19 26 (0.49%) Data Analysis Expressions
19 26 (0.49%) Ruby
Qualifications
1 1,679 (31.60%) Security Cleared
2 1,408 (26.50%) SC Cleared
3 324 (6.10%) Degree
4 213 (4.01%) Azure Certification
5 175 (3.29%) BPSS Clearance
6 165 (3.11%) AWS Certification
7 157 (2.96%) DV Cleared
8 131 (2.47%) Computer Science Degree
9 83 (1.56%) CISSP
10 66 (1.24%) Microsoft Certification
11 56 (1.05%) ISTQB
12 51 (0.96%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 49 (0.92%) CISM
14 46 (0.87%) Cisco Certification
15 44 (0.83%) PMI Certification
16 42 (0.79%) Master's Degree
17 41 (0.77%) PMP
18 29 (0.55%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
19 26 (0.49%) TOGAF Certification
20 24 (0.45%) ITIL Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 441 (8.30%) QA
2 250 (4.71%) Data Quality
3 177 (3.33%) GDPR
4 148 (2.79%) Accessibility
5 127 (2.39%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 118 (2.22%) NIST
7 74 (1.39%) NCSC
8 60 (1.13%) WCAG
9 48 (0.90%) PCI DSS
10 45 (0.85%) SLA
11 32 (0.60%) PMO
12 31 (0.58%) Sarbanes-Oxley
13 25 (0.47%) GRC
14 18 (0.34%) HIPAA
15 14 (0.26%) SOC 2
16 12 (0.23%) ISO 20022
16 12 (0.23%) NIST 800
16 12 (0.23%) PSD2
17 10 (0.19%) SEPA
18 9 (0.17%) Disclosure Scotland
System Software
1 1,003 (18.88%) Docker
2 177 (3.33%) Active Directory
3 80 (1.51%) VMware Infrastructure
4 75 (1.41%) Virtual Machines
5 35 (0.66%) vSphere
6 28 (0.53%) VMware NSX
7 20 (0.38%) Virtual Desktop
8 18 (0.34%) Squid
9 16 (0.30%) VMware ESXi
10 15 (0.28%) Hyper-V
11 14 (0.26%) Postfix
12 8 (0.15%) Oracle RAC
13 7 (0.13%) Firmware
13 7 (0.13%) RACF
14 6 (0.11%) Corosync
14 6 (0.11%) HDFS
15 5 (0.094%) KVM
15 5 (0.094%) NFS
15 5 (0.094%) SRDF
16 4 (0.075%) Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services
Systems Management
1 1,530 (28.80%) Terraform
2 1,339 (25.20%) Kubernetes
3 507 (9.54%) Ansible
4 363 (6.83%) Grafana
5 311 (5.85%) Prometheus
6 94 (1.77%) Argo
7 77 (1.45%) Single Sign-On
8 67 (1.26%) Puppet
9 62 (1.17%) Istio
10 31 (0.58%) Progress Chef
11 30 (0.56%) Microsoft Intune
12 29 (0.55%) Packer
13 25 (0.47%) vCenter Server
14 23 (0.43%) Active Directory Federation Services
15 20 (0.38%) HP ALM
16 18 (0.34%) Consul
16 18 (0.34%) Kibana
17 16 (0.30%) SCCM
18 15 (0.28%) Kustomize
19 13 (0.24%) FortiGate
Vendors
1 917 (17.26%) Microsoft
2 282 (5.31%) Databricks
3 279 (5.25%) Oracle
4 252 (4.74%) Google
5 188 (3.54%) Splunk
6 182 (3.43%) ServiceNow
7 168 (3.16%) Salesforce
8 136 (2.56%) Red Hat
9 123 (2.32%) VMware
10 120 (2.26%) SAP
11 111 (2.09%) Dynatrace
12 73 (1.37%) OpenAI
13 52 (0.98%) IBM
14 50 (0.94%) Atlassian
15 48 (0.90%) CyberArk
15 48 (0.90%) Informatica
16 42 (0.79%) Cisco
17 39 (0.73%) Foundry
18 38 (0.72%) AppDynamics
18 38 (0.72%) Okta