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 12 January 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
12 Jan 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 11 14 16
Rank change year-on-year +3 +2 -5
Contract jobs citing DevOps 4,191 3,322 3,957
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 11.56% 10.54% 9.21%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 13.17% 11.89% 10.50%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,937 2,276 2,889
10th Percentile £371 £388 £409
25th Percentile £425 £463 £475
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £563 £563
Median % change year-on-year -6.67% - -6.25%
75th Percentile £615 £675 £656
90th Percentile £700 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £525 £550
% change year-on-year -4.76% -4.55% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 52 26 83
10th Percentile - £37.13 £46.18
25th Percentile £45.46 £46.18 £50.63
Median hourly rate £47.50 £67.50 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year -29.63% +3.85% -0.76%
75th Percentile £83.50 £79.62 £70.00
90th Percentile £94.88 £80.75 £77.90
UK excluding London median hourly rate £47.50 £67.50 £65.00
% change year-on-year -29.63% +3.85% -0.76%

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 31,821 27,941 37,669
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 87.79% 88.66% 87.71%
Number of daily rates quoted 20,057 16,962 24,992
10th Percentile £304 £306 £304
25th Percentile £406 £413 £415
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £614 £638 £650
90th Percentile £723 £744 £742
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £500 £500
% change year-on-year -5.00% - -
Number of hourly rates quoted 1,969 885 1,593
10th Percentile £14.60 £15.62 £14.18
25th Percentile £17.69 £20.48 £18.25
Median hourly rate £25.15 £32.25 £40.50
Median % change year-on-year -22.00% -20.38% +16.41%
75th Percentile £56.00 £61.76 £65.00
90th Percentile £69.49 £74.82 £77.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £23.83 £30.11 £43.90
% change year-on-year -20.86% -31.42% +59.64%

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 12 January 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 12 January 2026.

Hourly rate histogram for DevOps in the UK

DevOps
Top 17 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 12 January 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 3,598 £525 -8.70% 2,113
UK excluding London +6 1,879 £500 -4.76% 1,902
London -1 1,794 £548 -8.75% 472
Work from Home 0 1,206 £525 -2.78% 971
North of England +5 638 £487 -4.51% 432
South East 0 384 £525 -10.64% 567
Midlands +21 381 £515 -1.67% 248
Yorkshire +1 329 £500 -1.96% 193
West Midlands +20 309 £525 - 103
North West +4 266 £455 -9.00% 180
South West +6 232 £531 -11.46% 261
Scotland +5 181 £475 +5.56% 68
East of England +14 96 £550 +8.37% 240
East Midlands +18 72 £425 -10.53% 141
North East -8 44 £475 -17.21% 60
Wales +5 31 £506 +87.50% 88
Northern Ireland -6 8 - - 39

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
1 251 (5.99%) Confluence
2 84 (2.00%) SharePoint
3 80 (1.91%) Apache
4 75 (1.79%) SAS
5 65 (1.55%) Apache Airflow
6 63 (1.50%) Apache Spark
7 32 (0.76%) CMS
7 32 (0.76%) nginx
7 32 (0.76%) OpenStack
8 24 (0.57%) IIS
9 20 (0.48%) JBoss
9 20 (0.48%) WebLogic
10 19 (0.45%) Microsoft Exchange
11 16 (0.38%) CICS
12 10 (0.24%) HCL Notes
12 10 (0.24%) Mendix
12 10 (0.24%) WebSphere
13 9 (0.21%) Mule
13 9 (0.21%) Oracle SOA Suite
13 9 (0.21%) WebSphere Application Server
Applications
1 84 (2.00%) Microsoft Excel
2 53 (1.26%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 31 (0.74%) Microsoft Project
4 27 (0.64%) Microsoft Office
5 15 (0.36%) Chatbot
5 15 (0.36%) MS Visio
6 9 (0.21%) Mozilla Thunderbird
7 8 (0.19%) Weka
8 5 (0.12%) Trello
9 1 (0.024%) Adobe Creative Suite
9 1 (0.024%) Moqups
9 1 (0.024%) Revit
Business Applications
1 61 (1.46%) Dynamics CRM
2 17 (0.41%) SAP S/4HANA
3 14 (0.33%) VisionPLUS
4 11 (0.26%) Aladdin
4 11 (0.26%) Endur
5 9 (0.21%) Maximo
6 8 (0.19%) Oracle BPM
7 7 (0.17%) NEC Housing
7 7 (0.17%) Oracle ERP
8 5 (0.12%) Dynamics AX
8 5 (0.12%) Remedy ITSM
8 5 (0.12%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
9 4 (0.095%) NetSuite
9 4 (0.095%) Oracle EBS
9 4 (0.095%) Payment Gateway
9 4 (0.095%) SAP ERP
9 4 (0.095%) Teamcenter
10 3 (0.072%) Oracle Assets
10 3 (0.072%) Oracle Payables
10 3 (0.072%) Workday HCM
Cloud Services
1 2,113 (50.42%) Azure
2 1,527 (36.44%) AWS
3 1,130 (26.96%) Azure DevOps
4 778 (18.56%) GitHub
5 602 (14.36%) GCP
6 506 (12.07%) Serverless
7 458 (10.93%) GitHub Actions
8 327 (7.80%) Power Platform
9 262 (6.25%) AWS CloudFormation
10 255 (6.08%) AWS Lambda
11 239 (5.70%) Amazon S3
12 199 (4.75%) Azure AKS
13 198 (4.72%) Azure Data Factory
14 192 (4.58%) Amazon CloudWatch
15 174 (4.15%) Amazon EKS
16 170 (4.06%) OpenShift
17 164 (3.91%) Amazon EC2
18 163 (3.89%) Dynamics 365
19 159 (3.79%) Amazon ECS
20 155 (3.70%) Entra ID
Communications & Networking
1 202 (4.82%) Firewall
2 116 (2.77%) DNS
3 87 (2.08%) VPN
4 75 (1.79%) Network Security
5 57 (1.36%) TCP/IP
6 55 (1.31%) SSL
7 44 (1.05%) HTTP
8 34 (0.81%) HTTPS
9 22 (0.52%) WAN
10 20 (0.48%) SSH
11 19 (0.45%) BGP
12 18 (0.43%) FTP
12 18 (0.43%) SMTP
13 17 (0.41%) DHCP
13 17 (0.41%) MPLS
14 15 (0.36%) Kerberos
14 15 (0.36%) SD-WAN
15 13 (0.31%) Internet
15 13 (0.31%) OpenLDAP
16 10 (0.24%) LAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 257 (6.13%) PostgreSQL
2 214 (5.11%) Power BI
3 163 (3.89%) SQL Server
4 160 (3.82%) NoSQL
5 141 (3.36%) Amazon RDS
6 125 (2.98%) Data Lake
7 109 (2.60%) MongoDB
8 107 (2.55%) Relational Database
9 102 (2.43%) Data Warehouse
10 88 (2.10%) Azure SQL Database
10 88 (2.10%) Oracle Database
11 67 (1.60%) MySQL
12 66 (1.57%) DynamoDB
13 57 (1.36%) Elasticsearch
14 55 (1.31%) Amazon Aurora
14 55 (1.31%) Redis
15 51 (1.22%) Tableau
16 46 (1.10%) Metadata
17 40 (0.95%) Delta Lake
18 39 (0.93%) Big Data
Development Applications
1 770 (18.37%) Jenkins
2 614 (14.65%) Git
3 584 (13.93%) JIRA
4 551 (13.15%) GitLab
5 131 (3.13%) Selenium
6 97 (2.31%) JUnit
7 83 (1.98%) Postman
8 80 (1.91%) SonarQube
9 72 (1.72%) Sonatype Nexus
10 71 (1.69%) Bitbucket
10 71 (1.69%) Cypress.io
11 60 (1.43%) Cucumber
12 50 (1.19%) Artifactory
13 49 (1.17%) Liquibase
14 46 (1.10%) CircleCI
15 44 (1.05%) Gradle
15 44 (1.05%) JMeter
16 39 (0.93%) Maven
17 38 (0.91%) Oracle APEX
18 32 (0.76%) REST Assured
General
1 1,268 (30.26%) Social Skills
2 747 (17.82%) Finance
3 541 (12.91%) Public Sector
4 351 (8.38%) Banking
5 330 (7.87%) Analytical Skills
6 135 (3.22%) Documentation Skills
7 69 (1.65%) Financial Institution
8 67 (1.60%) Inclusion and Diversity
9 64 (1.53%) Influencing Skills
10 58 (1.38%) Marketing
11 50 (1.19%) Investment Banking
12 46 (1.10%) Front Office
13 45 (1.07%) Presentation Skills
13 45 (1.07%) Telecoms
14 44 (1.05%) Retail
15 34 (0.81%) Pharmaceutical
16 33 (0.79%) Military
17 29 (0.69%) Organisational Skills
18 27 (0.64%) Back Office
19 24 (0.57%) Law
Job Titles
1 825 (19.69%) DevOps Engineer
2 741 (17.68%) Developer
3 585 (13.96%) Senior
4 359 (8.57%) Architect
5 324 (7.73%) Lead
6 244 (5.82%) Azure Engineer
7 241 (5.75%) AWS Engineer
8 208 (4.96%) Data Engineer
9 201 (4.80%) Analyst
10 187 (4.46%) AWS DevOps
11 166 (3.96%) Software Engineer
12 162 (3.87%) AWS DevOps Engineer
13 154 (3.67%) Senior Developer
14 153 (3.65%) Cloud Engineer
15 143 (3.41%) Platform Engineer
16 122 (2.91%) Senior DevOps
17 121 (2.89%) Azure DevOps Engineer
18 120 (2.86%) Consultant
19 113 (2.70%) Senior DevOps Engineer
20 110 (2.62%) Java Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 486 (11.60%) REST
2 361 (8.61%) .NET
3 269 (6.42%) React
4 264 (6.30%) Node.js
5 263 (6.28%) RESTful
6 249 (5.94%) Kafka
7 204 (4.87%) Spring
8 196 (4.68%) JSON
9 189 (4.51%) Spring Boot
10 152 (3.63%) OAuth
11 144 (3.44%) SOAP
12 143 (3.41%) AngularJS
13 141 (3.36%) Elastic Stack
14 139 (3.32%) XML
15 128 (3.05%) HTML
16 127 (3.03%) YAML
17 98 (2.34%) Playwright
18 91 (2.17%) CSS
19 89 (2.12%) Middleware
20 85 (2.03%) .NET Core
Miscellaneous
1 578 (13.79%) Cloud Native
2 224 (5.34%) Product Ownership
3 162 (3.87%) Distributed Systems
4 115 (2.74%) Onboarding
5 107 (2.55%) Public Cloud
6 91 (2.17%) Legacy Systems
7 77 (1.84%) Hybrid Cloud
8 68 (1.62%) Enterprise Software
9 57 (1.36%) Virtual Team
10 54 (1.29%) Data Protection Act
11 50 (1.19%) Replication
12 49 (1.17%) Data Centre
13 48 (1.15%) Management Information System
14 45 (1.07%) Mobile App
15 44 (1.05%) Security Posture
16 42 (1.00%) CMDB
16 42 (1.00%) NHS
16 42 (1.00%) Self-Motivation
17 41 (0.98%) Private Cloud
18 37 (0.88%) Greenfield Project
Operating Systems
1 484 (11.55%) Linux
2 237 (5.65%) Windows
3 109 (2.60%) Unix
4 54 (1.29%) Windows Server
5 53 (1.26%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 52 (1.24%) VMS
7 30 (0.72%) Android
8 28 (0.67%) Ubuntu
9 26 (0.62%) Apple iOS
10 19 (0.45%) Windows 10
11 16 (0.38%) CentOS
12 15 (0.36%) Amazon Linux
13 10 (0.24%) Solaris
14 6 (0.14%) Windows Server 2016
14 6 (0.14%) Windows Server 2019
14 6 (0.14%) zOS
15 5 (0.12%) Mac OS
16 2 (0.048%) Debian
16 2 (0.048%) Windows Server 2012
17 1 (0.024%) Kali Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,376 (56.69%) CI/CD
2 1,710 (40.80%) Agile
3 1,091 (26.03%) Infrastructure as Code
4 822 (19.61%) Containerisation
5 796 (18.99%) Problem-Solving
6 640 (15.27%) Microservices
7 631 (15.06%) Test Automation
8 476 (11.36%) Migration
9 475 (11.33%) Continuous Improvement
10 466 (11.12%) Scrum
11 456 (10.88%) Analytics
12 429 (10.24%) Observability
13 410 (9.78%) Software Engineering
14 402 (9.59%) AI
15 350 (8.35%) Stakeholder Management
16 315 (7.52%) Mentoring
17 306 (7.30%) Data Modelling
18 281 (6.70%) Data Pipeline
18 281 (6.70%) Stakeholder Engagement
19 273 (6.51%) DevSecOps
Programming Languages
1 1,310 (31.26%) Python
2 827 (19.73%) SQL
3 579 (13.82%) Java
4 411 (9.81%) JavaScript
5 401 (9.57%) C#
6 371 (8.85%) PowerShell
7 350 (8.35%) Bash
8 296 (7.06%) TypeScript
9 155 (3.70%) Go
10 137 (3.27%) Bicep
11 85 (2.03%) PL/SQL
12 75 (1.79%) Shell Script
13 52 (1.24%) Groovy
14 51 (1.22%) Ruby
15 46 (1.10%) Scala
16 45 (1.07%) C++
17 43 (1.03%) Perl
18 41 (0.98%) T-SQL
19 26 (0.62%) PHP
20 24 (0.57%) Kotlin
Qualifications
1 1,243 (29.66%) Security Cleared
2 1,031 (24.60%) SC Cleared
3 354 (8.45%) Degree
4 192 (4.58%) Computer Science Degree
5 176 (4.20%) Azure Certification
6 136 (3.25%) DV Cleared
7 135 (3.22%) AWS Certification
8 100 (2.39%) BPSS Clearance
9 84 (2.00%) Master's Degree
10 71 (1.69%) CISSP
11 62 (1.48%) Microsoft Certification
12 53 (1.26%) CISM
13 44 (1.05%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
14 41 (0.98%) ISTQB
15 36 (0.86%) PMI Certification
16 29 (0.69%) Cisco Certification
16 29 (0.69%) PMP
17 27 (0.64%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
18 18 (0.43%) Oracle Certification
19 17 (0.41%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 383 (9.14%) QA
2 156 (3.72%) GDPR
3 142 (3.39%) Data Quality
4 136 (3.25%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 120 (2.86%) Accessibility
6 112 (2.67%) NIST
7 55 (1.31%) NCSC
8 35 (0.84%) WCAG
9 31 (0.74%) PCI DSS
10 25 (0.60%) Sarbanes-Oxley
11 24 (0.57%) PMO
12 22 (0.52%) HIPAA
12 22 (0.52%) SLA
13 15 (0.36%) PSD2
14 14 (0.33%) ISO 20022
15 13 (0.31%) SOC 2
16 11 (0.26%) SEPA
17 9 (0.21%) HL7
17 9 (0.21%) HMG Security Policy Framework
17 9 (0.21%) NIST 800
System Software
1 1,089 (25.98%) Docker
2 168 (4.01%) Active Directory
3 64 (1.53%) VMware Infrastructure
4 58 (1.38%) Virtual Machines
5 29 (0.69%) vSphere
6 18 (0.43%) DFS Replication
7 16 (0.38%) VMware NSX
8 14 (0.33%) Virtual Desktop
9 12 (0.29%) Hyper-V
9 12 (0.29%) Oracle RAC
9 12 (0.29%) Slurm Workload Manager
10 11 (0.26%) Squid
10 11 (0.26%) Virtual Servers
11 10 (0.24%) Lustre
12 9 (0.21%) Dovecot
12 9 (0.21%) Postfix
13 8 (0.19%) GPFS
13 8 (0.19%) NFS
13 8 (0.19%) Tivoli Directory Server
14 7 (0.17%) KVM
Systems Management
1 1,322 (31.54%) Terraform
2 1,237 (29.52%) Kubernetes
3 524 (12.50%) Ansible
4 328 (7.83%) Grafana
5 296 (7.06%) Prometheus
6 82 (1.96%) Argo
7 76 (1.81%) Puppet
8 50 (1.19%) Single Sign-On
9 47 (1.12%) Progress Chef
10 40 (0.95%) Istio
10 40 (0.95%) Kibana
11 30 (0.72%) Packer
12 25 (0.60%) Podman
13 19 (0.45%) SCCM
14 16 (0.38%) Proxmox
14 16 (0.38%) Rancher
15 15 (0.36%) Data Guard
15 15 (0.36%) Microsoft Intune
16 14 (0.33%) Nessus
16 14 (0.33%) NetBackup
Vendors
1 713 (17.01%) Microsoft
2 320 (7.64%) Oracle
3 230 (5.49%) Google
4 218 (5.20%) Databricks
5 213 (5.08%) Splunk
6 161 (3.84%) ServiceNow
7 125 (2.98%) Red Hat
8 109 (2.60%) Salesforce
9 108 (2.58%) VMware
10 100 (2.39%) SAP
11 76 (1.81%) Dynatrace
12 59 (1.41%) OpenAI
13 48 (1.15%) IBM
14 47 (1.12%) F5
15 43 (1.03%) Atlassian
15 43 (1.03%) Cisco
16 39 (0.93%) CyberArk
16 39 (0.93%) Palo Alto
17 38 (0.91%) Talend
18 37 (0.88%) MuleSoft