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

6 months to
12 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 3,058 4,159
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.63% 10.39% 9.53%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.54% 11.42% 11.19%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,704 2,194 2,867
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 £750 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £525
% change year-on-year - -4.76% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 118 17 120
10th Percentile £39.53 £33.10 £56.48
25th Percentile £61.00 £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 £93.06 £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 42,365 26,787 37,171
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.77% 91.01% 85.18%
Number of daily rates quoted 26,429 17,005 23,768
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 2,540 1,187 2,585
10th Percentile £14.68 £14.20 £12.75
25th Percentile £20.00 £17.87 £16.00
Median hourly rate £43.96 £27.21 £36.50
Median % change year-on-year +61.56% -25.45% +4.20%
75th Percentile £68.00 £56.00 £61.25
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% +15.02%

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 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 12 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 12 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 4,516 £525 - 1,045
UK excluding London +6 2,339 £500 - 836
London +4 2,319 £545 -0.91% 380
Work from Home -1 1,458 £525 - 724
North of England +7 829 £500 - 245
South East -2 462 £525 +5.00% 251
Yorkshire +3 451 £500 - 72
Midlands +3 420 £488 -2.50% 104
West Midlands 0 331 £500 -4.03% 69
North West +1 309 £510 +2.00% 141
South West +14 277 £523 -5.00% 107
Scotland +3 198 £513 +3.74% 35
East of England +21 130 £525 +6.33% 71
North East +6 87 £450 -16.28% 37
East Midlands -1 85 £465 +0.54% 35
Wales +5 51 £425 +28.33% 26
Northern Ireland +9 20 £475 +15.85% 16
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
1 308 (5.80%) Confluence
2 137 (2.58%) Apache Spark
3 121 (2.28%) SharePoint
4 99 (1.86%) Apache Airflow
5 93 (1.75%) Apache
6 86 (1.62%) SAS
7 46 (0.87%) CMS
8 31 (0.58%) Microsoft Exchange
8 31 (0.58%) nginx
9 28 (0.53%) Jupyter
10 27 (0.51%) IIS
11 18 (0.34%) OpenStack
12 15 (0.28%) Camunda
13 14 (0.26%) WebSphere
14 12 (0.23%) Palantir Foundry
15 10 (0.19%) Mendix
16 9 (0.17%) Sitecore CMS
17 8 (0.15%) Oracle Workflow
18 7 (0.13%) ArcGIS
18 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 7 (0.13%) 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 31 (0.58%) SAP S/4HANA
3 12 (0.23%) Payment Gateway
4 10 (0.19%) Maximo
4 10 (0.19%) Oracle ERP
5 8 (0.15%) Aladdin
5 8 (0.15%) Dynamics AX
5 8 (0.15%) Remedy ITSM
6 6 (0.11%) Endur
6 6 (0.11%) Oracle EBS
6 6 (0.11%) SAP MDG
7 5 (0.094%) Magento
8 4 (0.075%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
9 3 (0.056%) NEC Housing
9 3 (0.056%) OpenText MBPM
9 3 (0.056%) Oracle BPM
9 3 (0.056%) Salesforce CRM
9 3 (0.056%) SAP BPC
9 3 (0.056%) SAP ERP
9 3 (0.056%) SAP Oil and Gas
Cloud Services
1 2,869 (54.00%) Azure
2 1,851 (34.84%) AWS
3 1,564 (29.44%) Azure DevOps
4 893 (16.81%) GitHub
5 682 (12.84%) GCP
6 537 (10.11%) GitHub Actions
7 480 (9.03%) Serverless
8 453 (8.53%) Power Platform
9 288 (5.42%) Amazon S3
10 263 (4.95%) AWS Lambda
11 255 (4.80%) AWS CloudFormation
12 234 (4.40%) Entra ID
13 221 (4.16%) Azure AKS
14 214 (4.03%) Amazon EKS
15 197 (3.71%) Azure Data Factory
16 175 (3.29%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 168 (3.16%) Amazon EC2
18 161 (3.03%) PaaS
19 158 (2.97%) Azure Monitor
20 156 (2.94%) OpenShift
Communications & Networking
1 241 (4.54%) Firewall
2 140 (2.64%) DNS
3 112 (2.11%) Network Security
4 104 (1.96%) VPN
5 47 (0.88%) TCP/IP
6 46 (0.87%) WAN
7 36 (0.68%) SD-WAN
8 33 (0.62%) BGP
9 30 (0.56%) SSL
10 27 (0.51%) Wi-Fi
11 26 (0.49%) DHCP
12 25 (0.47%) SAN
13 24 (0.45%) OSPF
14 22 (0.41%) HTTP
14 22 (0.41%) Internet
15 18 (0.34%) IPsec
16 17 (0.32%) VXLAN
17 16 (0.30%) BIG-IP
17 16 (0.30%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
17 16 (0.30%) MPLS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 292 (5.50%) Power BI
2 263 (4.95%) SQL Server
3 248 (4.67%) PostgreSQL
4 185 (3.48%) NoSQL
5 169 (3.18%) Data Lake
6 158 (2.97%) Relational Database
7 147 (2.77%) Data Warehouse
8 144 (2.71%) MongoDB
9 112 (2.11%) Amazon RDS
10 106 (2.00%) Azure SQL Database
11 99 (1.86%) Metadata
12 97 (1.83%) DynamoDB
13 89 (1.68%) Delta Lake
14 73 (1.37%) Oracle Database
15 72 (1.36%) Big Data
16 68 (1.28%) Amazon Athena
17 66 (1.24%) Redis
18 62 (1.17%) Elasticsearch
19 57 (1.07%) Amazon Redshift
20 54 (1.02%) BigQuery
Development Applications
1 757 (14.25%) Jenkins
2 670 (12.61%) Git
3 636 (11.97%) JIRA
4 564 (10.62%) GitLab
5 115 (2.16%) Selenium
6 102 (1.92%) Postman
7 87 (1.64%) JUnit
7 87 (1.64%) SonarQube
8 72 (1.36%) REST Assured
9 70 (1.32%) Bitbucket
10 66 (1.24%) Maven
11 61 (1.15%) Cucumber
12 56 (1.05%) JMeter
13 47 (0.88%) Cypress.io
14 45 (0.85%) Artifactory
15 43 (0.81%) Gradle
16 42 (0.79%) Gatling
17 38 (0.72%) Mockito
18 35 (0.66%) Visual Studio
19 31 (0.58%) LoadRunner
General
1 1,318 (24.81%) Social Skills
2 955 (17.97%) Finance
3 705 (13.27%) Public Sector
4 412 (7.75%) Analytical Skills
5 336 (6.32%) Banking
6 142 (2.67%) Documentation Skills
7 101 (1.90%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 78 (1.47%) Influencing Skills
9 74 (1.39%) Retail
10 69 (1.30%) Legal
11 57 (1.07%) Marketing
12 52 (0.98%) Organisational Skills
13 49 (0.92%) Financial Institution
14 45 (0.85%) Military
15 39 (0.73%) Law
15 39 (0.73%) Presentation Skills
16 36 (0.68%) Investment Banking
17 31 (0.58%) Front Office
17 31 (0.58%) Telecoms
18 27 (0.51%) Pharmaceutical
Job Titles
1 1,097 (20.65%) DevOps Engineer
2 793 (14.93%) Developer
3 752 (14.15%) Senior
4 623 (11.73%) Architect
5 479 (9.02%) Lead
6 344 (6.47%) Azure Engineer
7 319 (6.00%) Analyst
8 312 (5.87%) Data Engineer
9 262 (4.93%) AWS Engineer
10 201 (3.78%) Cloud Engineer
11 197 (3.71%) Platform Engineer
12 191 (3.59%) AWS DevOps
13 180 (3.39%) AWS DevOps Engineer
13 180 (3.39%) Solutions Architect
14 178 (3.35%) Azure DevOps Engineer
14 178 (3.35%) Senior DevOps
15 173 (3.26%) Java Developer
16 162 (3.05%) Business Analyst
16 162 (3.05%) Senior DevOps Engineer
17 146 (2.75%) Software Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 483 (9.09%) REST
2 463 (8.71%) .NET
3 310 (5.83%) React
4 303 (5.70%) Spring
5 290 (5.46%) Spring Boot
6 288 (5.42%) Kafka
7 277 (5.21%) RESTful
8 240 (4.52%) Node.js
9 173 (3.26%) AngularJS
10 162 (3.05%) PySpark
11 156 (2.94%) OAuth
12 150 (2.82%) Playwright
13 134 (2.52%) JSON
14 125 (2.35%) YAML
15 117 (2.20%) SOAP
16 113 (2.13%) .NET Framework
17 110 (2.07%) OpenID
18 107 (2.01%) HTML
18 107 (2.01%) Middleware
19 103 (1.94%) OAuth2
Miscellaneous
1 908 (17.09%) Cloud Native
2 333 (6.27%) Product Ownership
3 218 (4.10%) Distributed Systems
4 141 (2.65%) Onboarding
5 127 (2.39%) Legacy Systems
6 116 (2.18%) Enterprise Software
7 110 (2.07%) Hybrid Cloud
8 107 (2.01%) Public Cloud
9 83 (1.56%) Data Centre
10 81 (1.52%) Data Protection Act
11 65 (1.22%) Management Information System
12 61 (1.15%) Self-Motivation
13 54 (1.02%) Mobile App
14 53 (1.00%) Security Posture
15 51 (0.96%) AI Agents
16 50 (0.94%) Virtual Team
17 49 (0.92%) Greenfield Project
18 48 (0.90%) Data Structures
19 44 (0.83%) Private Cloud
20 43 (0.81%) NHS
Operating Systems
1 453 (8.53%) Linux
2 262 (4.93%) Windows
3 101 (1.90%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 79 (1.49%) Unix
5 56 (1.05%) Windows Server
6 38 (0.72%) VMS
7 30 (0.56%) Ubuntu
8 22 (0.41%) Apple iOS
9 17 (0.32%) Android
10 14 (0.26%) 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
15 4 (0.075%) Alpine Linux
15 4 (0.075%) Data ONTAP
15 4 (0.075%) Windows Server 2012
Processes & Methodologies
1 3,079 (57.95%) CI/CD
2 1,961 (36.91%) Agile
3 1,425 (26.82%) Infrastructure as Code
4 850 (16.00%) Containerisation
5 786 (14.79%) Problem-Solving
6 764 (14.38%) Microservices
7 750 (14.12%) Test Automation
8 736 (13.85%) Continuous Improvement
9 649 (12.22%) Migration
10 642 (12.08%) Observability
11 620 (11.67%) Stakeholder Management
12 609 (11.46%) AI
13 603 (11.35%) Analytics
14 591 (11.12%) Scrum
15 548 (10.31%) Platform Engineering
16 535 (10.07%) Software Engineering
17 486 (9.15%) Data Modelling
18 443 (8.34%) Technical Leadership
19 433 (8.15%) Mentoring
20 425 (8.00%) Roadmaps
Programming Languages
1 1,489 (28.03%) Python
2 1,004 (18.90%) SQL
3 727 (13.68%) Java
4 494 (9.30%) C#
5 389 (7.32%) JavaScript
6 380 (7.15%) Bash
7 378 (7.11%) PowerShell
8 264 (4.97%) TypeScript
9 182 (3.43%) Bicep
10 112 (2.11%) Go
11 66 (1.24%) Shell Script
12 64 (1.20%) Scala
13 62 (1.17%) Apex Code
14 51 (0.96%) T-SQL
15 49 (0.92%) PL/SQL
16 45 (0.85%) Groovy
17 31 (0.58%) C++
18 26 (0.49%) Data Analysis Expressions
18 26 (0.49%) Kotlin
18 26 (0.49%) Ruby
Qualifications
1 1,675 (31.53%) Security Cleared
2 1,406 (26.46%) SC Cleared
3 321 (6.04%) Degree
4 213 (4.01%) Azure Certification
5 176 (3.31%) BPSS Clearance
6 168 (3.16%) AWS Certification
7 157 (2.96%) DV Cleared
8 129 (2.43%) Computer Science Degree
9 83 (1.56%) CISSP
10 67 (1.26%) Microsoft Certification
11 55 (1.04%) ISTQB
12 51 (0.96%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 49 (0.92%) CISM
14 46 (0.87%) Cisco Certification
15 43 (0.81%) PMI Certification
16 41 (0.77%) Master's Degree
17 40 (0.75%) PMP
18 29 (0.55%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
19 26 (0.49%) TOGAF Certification
20 24 (0.45%) ITIL Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 439 (8.26%) QA
2 253 (4.76%) Data Quality
3 175 (3.29%) GDPR
4 150 (2.82%) Accessibility
5 127 (2.39%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 118 (2.22%) NIST
7 73 (1.37%) NCSC
8 61 (1.15%) WCAG
9 50 (0.94%) PCI DSS
10 45 (0.85%) SLA
11 32 (0.60%) Sarbanes-Oxley
12 29 (0.55%) PMO
13 26 (0.49%) GRC
14 19 (0.36%) HIPAA
15 15 (0.28%) SOC 2
16 12 (0.23%) ISO 20022
16 12 (0.23%) PSD2
17 11 (0.21%) NIST 800
18 10 (0.19%) SEPA
19 9 (0.17%) Disclosure Scotland
System Software
1 1,007 (18.95%) Docker
2 175 (3.29%) Active Directory
3 78 (1.47%) VMware Infrastructure
4 75 (1.41%) Virtual Machines
5 33 (0.62%) vSphere
6 27 (0.51%) 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%) RACF
14 6 (0.11%) Corosync
14 6 (0.11%) Firmware
14 6 (0.11%) HDFS
15 5 (0.094%) KVM
15 5 (0.094%) NFS
15 5 (0.094%) SRDF
16 4 (0.075%) Microsoft App-V
Systems Management
1 1,535 (28.89%) Terraform
2 1,341 (25.24%) Kubernetes
3 511 (9.62%) Ansible
4 363 (6.83%) Grafana
5 311 (5.85%) Prometheus
6 94 (1.77%) Argo
7 77 (1.45%) Single Sign-On
8 68 (1.28%) Puppet
9 61 (1.15%) Istio
10 31 (0.58%) Progress Chef
11 30 (0.56%) Microsoft Intune
11 30 (0.56%) Packer
12 25 (0.47%) vCenter Server
13 22 (0.41%) Active Directory Federation Services
14 20 (0.38%) HP ALM
15 18 (0.34%) Consul
15 18 (0.34%) Kibana
16 15 (0.28%) Kustomize
16 15 (0.28%) SCCM
17 13 (0.24%) FortiGate
Vendors
1 924 (17.39%) Microsoft
2 281 (5.29%) Databricks
3 275 (5.18%) Oracle
4 252 (4.74%) Google
5 189 (3.56%) Splunk
6 184 (3.46%) ServiceNow
7 168 (3.16%) Salesforce
8 136 (2.56%) Red Hat
9 121 (2.28%) VMware
10 118 (2.22%) SAP
11 112 (2.11%) Dynatrace
12 74 (1.39%) OpenAI
13 52 (0.98%) IBM
14 51 (0.96%) Informatica
15 50 (0.94%) Atlassian
16 48 (0.90%) CyberArk
17 41 (0.77%) Cisco
18 39 (0.73%) Foundry
18 39 (0.73%) Okta
19 38 (0.72%) AppDynamics