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 13 August 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
13 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 12 15 15
Rank change year-on-year +3 0 -2
Contract jobs citing DevOps 5,670 3,584 3,832
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.63% 10.88% 9.84%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.53% 12.03% 11.51%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,923 2,544 2,610
10th Percentile £385 £360 £381
25th Percentile £439 £425 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £520 £550
Median % change year-on-year +1.01% -5.50% -4.35%
75th Percentile £613 £625 £650
90th Percentile £700 £725 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £550
% change year-on-year - -9.09% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 126 26 87
10th Percentile £37.24 £32.63 £56.25
25th Percentile £56.25 £51.56 £63.30
Median hourly rate £67.50 £67.00 £70.00
Median % change year-on-year +0.75% -4.29% +6.87%
75th Percentile £77.50 £86.37 £74.22
90th Percentile £86.50 £93.75 £85.41
UK excluding London median hourly rate £67.50 £67.00 £70.00
% change year-on-year +0.75% -4.29% +7.69%

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 45,250 29,801 33,299
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.81% 90.48% 85.50%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,843 18,616 21,279
10th Percentile £325 £300 £310
25th Percentile £423 £404 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -3.67%
75th Percentile £625 £625 £638
90th Percentile £725 £725 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,819 1,703 1,838
10th Percentile £14.22 £14.20 £14.05
25th Percentile £18.75 £17.31 £18.50
Median hourly rate £42.50 £25.15 £41.50
Median % change year-on-year +68.99% -39.40% -1.55%
75th Percentile £68.00 £47.81 £65.00
90th Percentile £81.38 £68.00 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £43.96 £22.74 £42.50
% change year-on-year +93.36% -46.51% +13.33%

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 13 August 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 13 August 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 13 August 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 +3 4,856 £525 - 2,459
London +1 2,536 £550 - 1,322
UK excluding London -1 2,447 £500 - 1,380
Work from Home +1 1,641 £525 +2.44% 1,152
North of England 0 831 £500 +4.17% 386
South East -10 468 £525 +5.00% 380
Midlands -2 459 £489 -2.25% 184
Yorkshire 0 410 £500 +2.04% 111
West Midlands -3 376 £490 -4.85% 118
North West -2 327 £525 +11.70% 197
South West +11 318 £525 +0.96% 181
Scotland -2 190 £500 +1.01% 96
East of England +15 140 £505 +1.00% 79
North East +13 111 £425 -19.05% 80
East Midlands +2 78 £488 +8.33% 65
Wales -5 48 £513 +45.15% 46
Northern Ireland +21 23 £475 +7.95% 32
Channel Islands - 3 £450 - 1

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
1 334 (5.89%) Confluence
2 139 (2.45%) SharePoint
3 132 (2.33%) Apache Spark
4 125 (2.20%) Apache Airflow
5 112 (1.98%) Apache
6 88 (1.55%) SAS
7 42 (0.74%) CMS
8 38 (0.67%) Jupyter
9 37 (0.65%) IIS
10 25 (0.44%) Microsoft Exchange
11 24 (0.42%) nginx
12 16 (0.28%) WebSphere
13 15 (0.26%) Camunda
14 13 (0.23%) Anypoint
15 11 (0.19%) OpenStack
15 11 (0.19%) Oracle Workflow
15 11 (0.19%) Palantir Foundry
16 9 (0.16%) Appian
17 8 (0.14%) Mendix
17 8 (0.14%) WebLogic
Applications
1 62 (1.09%) Microsoft Project
2 57 (1.01%) Microsoft Excel
3 37 (0.65%) Microsoft Office
4 35 (0.62%) MS Visio
5 25 (0.44%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 11 (0.19%) Chatbot
7 9 (0.16%) CPLEX
8 8 (0.14%) Spreadsheet
9 7 (0.12%) Trello
10 5 (0.088%) Notion
11 1 (0.018%) Adobe XD
11 1 (0.018%) EngageOne
11 1 (0.018%) Gliffy
11 1 (0.018%) InDesign
11 1 (0.018%) Weka
Business Applications
1 68 (1.20%) Dynamics CRM
2 39 (0.69%) SAP S/4HANA
3 11 (0.19%) Remedy ITSM
4 10 (0.18%) Aladdin
4 10 (0.18%) Oracle EBS
5 9 (0.16%) Magento
5 9 (0.16%) Payment Gateway
6 8 (0.14%) Dynamics AX
6 8 (0.14%) Oracle ERP
6 8 (0.14%) SAP MDG
7 7 (0.12%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
8 5 (0.088%) Maximo
8 5 (0.088%) OpenText MBPM
8 5 (0.088%) Oracle BPM
8 5 (0.088%) SAP ERP
9 4 (0.071%) Endur
10 3 (0.053%) Findur
10 3 (0.053%) Shopify
10 3 (0.053%) Teamcenter
10 3 (0.053%) Temenos T24
Cloud Services
1 3,073 (54.20%) Azure
2 2,008 (35.41%) AWS
3 1,756 (30.97%) Azure DevOps
4 974 (17.18%) GitHub
5 727 (12.82%) GCP
6 605 (10.67%) GitHub Actions
7 468 (8.25%) Power Platform
8 446 (7.87%) Serverless
9 299 (5.27%) Amazon S3
10 269 (4.74%) AWS Lambda
11 265 (4.67%) Entra ID
12 249 (4.39%) AWS CloudFormation
13 237 (4.18%) Amazon EKS
14 222 (3.92%) Azure AKS
15 211 (3.72%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 200 (3.53%) Azure Data Factory
17 199 (3.51%) Azure Monitor
18 180 (3.17%) Amazon EC2
19 162 (2.86%) Dynamics 365
20 155 (2.73%) Power Automate
Communications & Networking
1 248 (4.37%) Firewall
2 162 (2.86%) DNS
3 122 (2.15%) VPN
4 114 (2.01%) Network Security
5 61 (1.08%) TCP/IP
6 50 (0.88%) WAN
7 45 (0.79%) SSL
8 44 (0.78%) DHCP
9 36 (0.63%) SD-WAN
10 33 (0.58%) HTTP
11 32 (0.56%) BGP
11 32 (0.56%) Internet
12 28 (0.49%) Wi-Fi
13 25 (0.44%) OSPF
14 21 (0.37%) SAN
14 21 (0.37%) SSH
15 20 (0.35%) VLAN
16 18 (0.32%) VXLAN
17 17 (0.30%) BIG-IP
17 17 (0.30%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
Database & Business Intelligence
1 315 (5.56%) Power BI
2 291 (5.13%) SQL Server
3 281 (4.96%) PostgreSQL
4 202 (3.56%) Data Warehouse
5 184 (3.25%) NoSQL
6 181 (3.19%) Relational Database
7 176 (3.10%) MongoDB
8 165 (2.91%) Data Lake
9 122 (2.15%) Amazon RDS
10 119 (2.10%) Metadata
11 111 (1.96%) Azure SQL Database
12 90 (1.59%) DynamoDB
13 88 (1.55%) Delta Lake
14 81 (1.43%) Oracle Database
15 71 (1.25%) Amazon Redshift
16 70 (1.23%) Redis
17 66 (1.16%) MySQL
18 65 (1.15%) Big Data
19 57 (1.01%) Amazon Athena
20 56 (0.99%) SQL Server Integration Services
Development Applications
1 823 (14.51%) Jenkins
2 782 (13.79%) Git
3 687 (12.12%) JIRA
4 596 (10.51%) GitLab
5 133 (2.35%) Selenium
6 103 (1.82%) Postman
7 101 (1.78%) SonarQube
8 91 (1.60%) JUnit
9 86 (1.52%) Maven
10 83 (1.46%) Bitbucket
11 67 (1.18%) Cypress.io
12 66 (1.16%) JMeter
12 66 (1.16%) REST Assured
13 58 (1.02%) Cucumber
14 57 (1.01%) Gradle
15 49 (0.86%) Gatling
16 43 (0.76%) LoadRunner
17 42 (0.74%) Mockito
18 41 (0.72%) Claude Code
19 40 (0.71%) Visual Studio
General
1 1,440 (25.40%) Social Skills
2 1,012 (17.85%) Finance
3 828 (14.60%) Public Sector
4 505 (8.91%) Analytical Skills
5 374 (6.60%) Banking
6 148 (2.61%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 103 (1.82%) Retail
8 98 (1.73%) Documentation Skills
9 71 (1.25%) Influencing Skills
10 69 (1.22%) Legal
11 67 (1.18%) Organisational Skills
12 54 (0.95%) Marketing
13 53 (0.93%) Investment Banking
14 47 (0.83%) Aerospace
14 47 (0.83%) Military
14 47 (0.83%) Telecoms
15 45 (0.79%) Law
16 44 (0.78%) Front Office
17 43 (0.76%) Financial Institution
18 40 (0.71%) Manufacturing
Job Titles
1 1,094 (19.29%) DevOps Engineer
2 931 (16.42%) Developer
3 830 (14.64%) Senior
4 625 (11.02%) Architect
5 546 (9.63%) Lead
6 343 (6.05%) Azure Engineer
7 326 (5.75%) Data Engineer
8 283 (4.99%) Analyst
9 273 (4.81%) AWS Engineer
10 234 (4.13%) Platform Engineer
11 211 (3.72%) Cloud Engineer
12 204 (3.60%) Senior DevOps
13 195 (3.44%) Java Developer
14 191 (3.37%) AWS DevOps
15 188 (3.32%) Azure DevOps Engineer
16 187 (3.30%) Senior DevOps Engineer
17 178 (3.14%) AWS DevOps Engineer
17 178 (3.14%) Solutions Architect
18 154 (2.72%) Senior Developer
19 152 (2.68%) Software Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 583 (10.28%) REST
2 486 (8.57%) .NET
3 351 (6.19%) Kafka
4 338 (5.96%) RESTful
5 300 (5.29%) Spring
6 284 (5.01%) React
7 282 (4.97%) Spring Boot
8 214 (3.77%) Node.js
9 179 (3.16%) JSON
10 167 (2.95%) Playwright
11 164 (2.89%) OAuth
12 163 (2.87%) PySpark
13 149 (2.63%) AngularJS
14 140 (2.47%) SOAP
15 135 (2.38%) .NET Framework
16 131 (2.31%) HTML
17 117 (2.06%) OAuth2
18 113 (1.99%) YAML
19 112 (1.98%) Middleware
20 108 (1.90%) CSS
Miscellaneous
1 1,017 (17.94%) Cloud Native
2 405 (7.14%) Product Ownership
3 266 (4.69%) Distributed Systems
4 178 (3.14%) Enterprise Software
5 173 (3.05%) Onboarding
6 154 (2.72%) Legacy Systems
7 149 (2.63%) Hybrid Cloud
8 93 (1.64%) Data Protection Act
9 81 (1.43%) Public Cloud
9 81 (1.43%) Self-Motivation
10 76 (1.34%) Management Information System
11 74 (1.31%) AI Agents
12 73 (1.29%) Data Structures
13 71 (1.25%) Data Centre
13 71 (1.25%) Security Posture
14 64 (1.13%) Replication
15 60 (1.06%) Enterprise Cloud
16 55 (0.97%) Virtual Team
17 50 (0.88%) Mobile App
18 48 (0.85%) NHS
Operating Systems
1 514 (9.07%) Linux
2 307 (5.41%) Windows
3 113 (1.99%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 91 (1.60%) Unix
5 84 (1.48%) Windows Server
6 34 (0.60%) VMS
7 29 (0.51%) Ubuntu
8 28 (0.49%) Apple iOS
9 18 (0.32%) Android
10 10 (0.18%) Solaris
11 9 (0.16%) Windows Server 2019
11 9 (0.16%) zOS
12 8 (0.14%) AIX
13 7 (0.12%) Amazon Linux
13 7 (0.12%) CentOS
13 7 (0.12%) Windows Server 2016
14 6 (0.11%) Mac OS
14 6 (0.11%) Windows Server 2008
15 4 (0.071%) Alpine Linux
15 4 (0.071%) Data ONTAP
Processes & Methodologies
1 3,347 (59.03%) CI/CD
2 2,281 (40.23%) Agile
3 1,570 (27.69%) Infrastructure as Code
4 935 (16.49%) Continuous Improvement
5 923 (16.28%) Containerisation
6 877 (15.47%) Problem-Solving
6 877 (15.47%) Test Automation
7 818 (14.43%) Microservices
8 807 (14.23%) Stakeholder Management
9 787 (13.88%) AI
10 716 (12.63%) Observability
11 698 (12.31%) Platform Engineering
12 697 (12.29%) Scrum
13 686 (12.10%) Software Engineering
14 681 (12.01%) Migration
15 609 (10.74%) Analytics
16 546 (9.63%) Technical Leadership
17 534 (9.42%) Stakeholder Engagement
18 501 (8.84%) Data Modelling
19 468 (8.25%) Roadmaps
Programming Languages
1 1,604 (28.29%) Python
2 1,039 (18.32%) SQL
3 799 (14.09%) Java
4 508 (8.96%) C#
5 471 (8.31%) Bash
6 464 (8.18%) PowerShell
7 463 (8.17%) JavaScript
8 310 (5.47%) TypeScript
9 228 (4.02%) Bicep
10 98 (1.73%) Go
11 72 (1.27%) Apex Code
12 70 (1.23%) Shell Script
13 69 (1.22%) T-SQL
14 65 (1.15%) PL/SQL
15 64 (1.13%) Scala
16 59 (1.04%) Groovy
17 33 (0.58%) C++
18 31 (0.55%) Data Analysis Expressions
19 29 (0.51%) Perl
20 26 (0.46%) C
Qualifications
1 1,821 (32.12%) Security Cleared
2 1,538 (27.13%) SC Cleared
3 324 (5.71%) Degree
4 225 (3.97%) BPSS Clearance
5 223 (3.93%) Azure Certification
6 196 (3.46%) DV Cleared
7 192 (3.39%) AWS Certification
8 121 (2.13%) Computer Science Degree
9 86 (1.52%) Microsoft Certification
10 81 (1.43%) CISSP
11 64 (1.13%) ISTQB
12 58 (1.02%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 54 (0.95%) Cisco Certification
14 47 (0.83%) PMP
15 44 (0.78%) PMI Certification
16 34 (0.60%) Master's Degree
17 33 (0.58%) CISM
18 29 (0.51%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
19 27 (0.48%) ITIL Certification
20 22 (0.39%) CCNP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 517 (9.12%) QA
2 287 (5.06%) Data Quality
3 199 (3.51%) Accessibility
4 151 (2.66%) GDPR
5 97 (1.71%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 79 (1.39%) WCAG
7 78 (1.38%) NIST
8 55 (0.97%) NCSC
9 48 (0.85%) PMO
10 38 (0.67%) PCI DSS
11 37 (0.65%) SLA
12 30 (0.53%) Sarbanes-Oxley
13 28 (0.49%) GRC
14 13 (0.23%) ISO 20022
15 12 (0.21%) HIPAA
16 11 (0.19%) Actionable Recommendations
16 11 (0.19%) Cyber Essentials
17 10 (0.18%) Disclosure Scotland
18 9 (0.16%) PSD2
18 9 (0.16%) SEPA
System Software
1 1,120 (19.75%) Docker
2 182 (3.21%) Active Directory
3 85 (1.50%) VMware Infrastructure
4 77 (1.36%) Virtual Machines
5 25 (0.44%) Hyper-V
5 25 (0.44%) vSphere
6 18 (0.32%) VMware NSX
7 17 (0.30%) Virtual Desktop
7 17 (0.30%) VMware ESXi
8 13 (0.23%) Oracle RAC
8 13 (0.23%) Squid
9 11 (0.19%) Postfix
10 9 (0.16%) IAG
11 8 (0.14%) KVM
12 7 (0.12%) zsh
13 6 (0.11%) Corosync
13 6 (0.11%) Microsoft App-V
13 6 (0.11%) NFS
14 5 (0.088%) Apache ZooKeeper
14 5 (0.088%) Firmware
Systems Management
1 1,651 (29.12%) Terraform
2 1,484 (26.17%) Kubernetes
3 531 (9.37%) Ansible
4 364 (6.42%) Grafana
5 313 (5.52%) Prometheus
6 83 (1.46%) Argo
7 64 (1.13%) Puppet
8 59 (1.04%) Single Sign-On
9 48 (0.85%) Progress Chef
10 45 (0.79%) Istio
11 37 (0.65%) Microsoft Intune
12 34 (0.60%) Packer
13 20 (0.35%) Kibana
14 19 (0.34%) Kustomize
15 18 (0.32%) SCCM
15 18 (0.32%) vCenter Server
16 17 (0.30%) HP ALM
17 16 (0.28%) Kubeflow
17 16 (0.28%) Oracle RMAN
18 13 (0.23%) Control-M
Vendors
1 1,057 (18.64%) Microsoft
2 315 (5.56%) Oracle
3 274 (4.83%) Databricks
4 273 (4.81%) Google
5 209 (3.69%) ServiceNow
6 191 (3.37%) Salesforce
7 173 (3.05%) Splunk
8 142 (2.50%) Dynatrace
9 125 (2.20%) SAP
10 117 (2.06%) VMware
11 110 (1.94%) Red Hat
12 66 (1.16%) IBM
13 62 (1.09%) Informatica
14 57 (1.01%) MuleSoft
14 57 (1.01%) OpenAI
15 52 (0.92%) Atlassian
16 49 (0.86%) Cisco
17 44 (0.78%) Okta
18 43 (0.76%) Foundry
19 42 (0.74%) AppDynamics