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

6 months to
24 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 12 15 15
Rank change year-on-year +3 0 -2
Contract jobs citing DevOps 5,647 3,604 3,833
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.53% 10.92% 9.87%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.45% 12.07% 11.56%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,920 2,553 2,609
10th Percentile £385 £363 £382
25th Percentile £438 £425 £462
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £520 £550
Median % change year-on-year +0.96% -5.45% -4.35%
75th Percentile £613 £625 £650
90th Percentile £700 £713 £728
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £550
% change year-on-year - -9.09% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 125 27 81
10th Percentile £37.24 £33.10 £56.25
25th Percentile £55.50 £51.88 £65.00
Median hourly rate £67.50 £67.00 £70.00
Median % change year-on-year +0.75% -4.29% +6.87%
75th Percentile £77.50 £87.50 £74.00
90th Percentile £90.70 £95.00 £85.00
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 45,360 29,849 33,165
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.57% 90.48% 85.38%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,797 18,603 21,010
10th Percentile £325 £300 £310
25th Percentile £425 £402 £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 2,875 1,763 1,706
10th Percentile £14.22 £14.20 £13.87
25th Percentile £18.27 £17.30 £18.13
Median hourly rate £42.00 £25.15 £40.94
Median % change year-on-year +67.00% -38.57% -3.67%
75th Percentile £67.89 £47.81 £65.00
90th Percentile £80.00 £67.50 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £43.96 £22.74 £42.50
% change year-on-year +93.36% -46.51% +7.39%

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 24 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 24 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 24 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 +2 4,822 £525 - 1,180
London 0 2,545 £550 - 471
UK excluding London +1 2,416 £500 - 953
Work from Home +1 1,616 £525 +1.40% 650
North of England 0 801 £500 +4.17% 254
South East -11 464 £525 +5.00% 281
Midlands 0 453 £488 -2.50% 123
Yorkshire 0 395 £500 +1.46% 76
West Midlands -1 360 £490 -5.50% 76
North West -3 312 £523 +10.69% 131
South West +5 311 £525 +1.45% 180
Scotland -1 202 £494 +3.95% 42
East of England +11 139 £505 -3.35% 50
North East +15 111 £425 -19.05% 50
East Midlands +10 89 £455 -1.62% 47
Wales -4 50 £513 +36.67% 27
Northern Ireland +18 23 £475 +7.95% 10
Channel Islands - 5 £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
1 336 (5.95%) Confluence
2 149 (2.64%) SharePoint
3 125 (2.21%) Apache Spark
4 123 (2.18%) Apache Airflow
5 110 (1.95%) Apache
6 68 (1.20%) SAS
7 43 (0.76%) CMS
8 38 (0.67%) IIS
8 38 (0.67%) Jupyter
9 24 (0.43%) Microsoft Exchange
10 23 (0.41%) nginx
11 14 (0.25%) Camunda
12 13 (0.23%) Anypoint
12 13 (0.23%) WebSphere
13 12 (0.21%) OpenStack
14 11 (0.19%) Oracle Workflow
14 11 (0.19%) Palantir Foundry
15 9 (0.16%) Appian
16 7 (0.12%) Mule
16 7 (0.12%) Tomcat
Applications
1 62 (1.10%) Microsoft Excel
1 62 (1.10%) Microsoft Project
2 42 (0.74%) MS Visio
3 36 (0.64%) Microsoft Office
4 31 (0.55%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 9 (0.16%) Chatbot
5 9 (0.16%) CPLEX
6 8 (0.14%) Spreadsheet
7 6 (0.11%) Trello
8 5 (0.089%) Notion
9 4 (0.071%) Windchill
10 1 (0.018%) Adobe XD
10 1 (0.018%) EngageOne
10 1 (0.018%) Gliffy
10 1 (0.018%) InDesign
10 1 (0.018%) Weka
Business Applications
1 73 (1.29%) Dynamics CRM
2 37 (0.66%) SAP S/4HANA
3 12 (0.21%) Payment Gateway
4 10 (0.18%) Aladdin
4 10 (0.18%) Oracle EBS
5 9 (0.16%) Dynamics AX
5 9 (0.16%) Magento
6 8 (0.14%) SAP MDG
7 7 (0.12%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
8 6 (0.11%) Oracle ERP
8 6 (0.11%) Remedy ITSM
9 5 (0.089%) Maximo
9 5 (0.089%) OpenText MBPM
9 5 (0.089%) Oracle BPM
10 4 (0.071%) Endur
11 3 (0.053%) Findur
11 3 (0.053%) Oracle Receivables
11 3 (0.053%) SAP ERP
11 3 (0.053%) Shopify
11 3 (0.053%) Teamcenter
Cloud Services
1 3,111 (55.09%) Azure
2 2,009 (35.58%) AWS
3 1,790 (31.70%) Azure DevOps
4 977 (17.30%) GitHub
5 723 (12.80%) GCP
6 612 (10.84%) GitHub Actions
7 482 (8.54%) Power Platform
8 452 (8.00%) Serverless
9 285 (5.05%) Amazon S3
10 274 (4.85%) AWS Lambda
11 261 (4.62%) Entra ID
12 242 (4.29%) AWS CloudFormation
13 240 (4.25%) Amazon EKS
14 229 (4.06%) Azure AKS
15 215 (3.81%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 213 (3.77%) Azure Monitor
17 197 (3.49%) Azure Data Factory
18 178 (3.15%) Dynamics 365
19 176 (3.12%) Amazon EC2
20 162 (2.87%) Power Automate
Communications & Networking
1 244 (4.32%) Firewall
2 169 (2.99%) DNS
3 123 (2.18%) VPN
4 110 (1.95%) Network Security
5 64 (1.13%) TCP/IP
6 54 (0.96%) WAN
7 47 (0.83%) SSL
8 44 (0.78%) DHCP
9 39 (0.69%) SD-WAN
10 36 (0.64%) BGP
11 32 (0.57%) HTTP
11 32 (0.57%) Internet
12 29 (0.51%) Wi-Fi
13 26 (0.46%) OSPF
14 25 (0.44%) SSH
15 21 (0.37%) SAN
15 21 (0.37%) VLAN
16 18 (0.32%) LAN
16 18 (0.32%) MPLS
16 18 (0.32%) VXLAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 321 (5.68%) Power BI
2 299 (5.29%) PostgreSQL
3 295 (5.22%) SQL Server
4 204 (3.61%) Data Warehouse
5 193 (3.42%) NoSQL
6 180 (3.19%) MongoDB
6 180 (3.19%) Relational Database
7 162 (2.87%) Data Lake
8 127 (2.25%) Amazon RDS
9 122 (2.16%) Metadata
10 110 (1.95%) Azure SQL Database
11 92 (1.63%) DynamoDB
12 82 (1.45%) Delta Lake
12 82 (1.45%) Oracle Database
13 79 (1.40%) Redis
14 73 (1.29%) MySQL
15 70 (1.24%) Amazon Redshift
16 62 (1.10%) Big Data
17 59 (1.04%) SQL Server Integration Services
18 52 (0.92%) BigQuery
Development Applications
1 805 (14.26%) Jenkins
2 787 (13.94%) Git
3 685 (12.13%) JIRA
4 604 (10.70%) GitLab
5 138 (2.44%) Selenium
6 103 (1.82%) Postman
7 96 (1.70%) SonarQube
8 89 (1.58%) JUnit
9 87 (1.54%) Bitbucket
10 85 (1.51%) Maven
11 72 (1.28%) JMeter
12 70 (1.24%) Cypress.io
13 68 (1.20%) REST Assured
14 59 (1.04%) Cucumber
15 58 (1.03%) Gradle
16 50 (0.89%) Gatling
17 44 (0.78%) LoadRunner
18 43 (0.76%) Claude Code
19 41 (0.73%) Mockito
20 40 (0.71%) Visual Studio
General
1 1,445 (25.59%) Social Skills
2 1,006 (17.81%) Finance
3 832 (14.73%) Public Sector
4 509 (9.01%) Analytical Skills
5 367 (6.50%) Banking
6 156 (2.76%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 107 (1.89%) Retail
8 99 (1.75%) Documentation Skills
9 70 (1.24%) Influencing Skills
10 66 (1.17%) Legal
11 65 (1.15%) Organisational Skills
12 56 (0.99%) Marketing
13 50 (0.89%) Investment Banking
14 48 (0.85%) Aerospace
14 48 (0.85%) Telecoms
15 46 (0.81%) Military
16 45 (0.80%) Law
17 44 (0.78%) Front Office
18 41 (0.73%) Manufacturing
19 40 (0.71%) Financial Institution
Job Titles
1 1,112 (19.69%) DevOps Engineer
2 928 (16.43%) Developer
3 836 (14.80%) Senior
4 634 (11.23%) Architect
5 548 (9.70%) Lead
6 354 (6.27%) Azure Engineer
7 308 (5.45%) Data Engineer
8 269 (4.76%) Analyst
9 255 (4.52%) AWS Engineer
10 232 (4.11%) Platform Engineer
11 206 (3.65%) Cloud Engineer
12 201 (3.56%) Senior DevOps
13 198 (3.51%) Azure DevOps Engineer
14 191 (3.38%) Java Developer
15 185 (3.28%) Senior DevOps Engineer
16 177 (3.13%) AWS DevOps
17 176 (3.12%) Solutions Architect
18 165 (2.92%) AWS DevOps Engineer
19 157 (2.78%) Senior Developer
20 146 (2.59%) Software Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 1,655 (29.31%) Terraform
2 596 (10.55%) REST
3 498 (8.82%) .NET
4 360 (6.38%) Kafka
5 347 (6.14%) RESTful
6 301 (5.33%) Spring
7 285 (5.05%) React
8 283 (5.01%) Spring Boot
9 209 (3.70%) Node.js
10 187 (3.31%) JSON
11 170 (3.01%) OAuth
12 169 (2.99%) Playwright
13 159 (2.82%) PySpark
14 145 (2.57%) AngularJS
15 139 (2.46%) HTML
16 138 (2.44%) .NET Framework
17 137 (2.43%) SOAP
18 124 (2.20%) OAuth2
19 117 (2.07%) CSS
20 114 (2.02%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 1,024 (18.13%) Cloud Native
2 421 (7.46%) Product Ownership
3 267 (4.73%) Distributed Systems
4 190 (3.36%) Enterprise Software
5 177 (3.13%) Onboarding
6 158 (2.80%) Legacy Systems
7 146 (2.59%) Hybrid Cloud
8 91 (1.61%) Data Protection Act
9 84 (1.49%) AI Agents
10 82 (1.45%) Self-Motivation
11 75 (1.33%) Management Information System
12 74 (1.31%) Public Cloud
13 70 (1.24%) Data Centre
13 70 (1.24%) Data Structures
14 66 (1.17%) Replication
15 64 (1.13%) Security Posture
16 63 (1.12%) Enterprise Cloud
17 56 (0.99%) Virtual Team
18 53 (0.94%) Mobile App
19 50 (0.89%) NHS
Operating Systems
1 507 (8.98%) Linux
2 307 (5.44%) Windows
3 107 (1.89%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 97 (1.72%) Unix
5 86 (1.52%) Windows Server
6 37 (0.66%) VMS
7 31 (0.55%) Apple iOS
8 30 (0.53%) Ubuntu
9 20 (0.35%) Android
10 9 (0.16%) Solaris
10 9 (0.16%) zOS
11 8 (0.14%) AIX
11 8 (0.14%) Amazon Linux
11 8 (0.14%) Windows Server 2019
12 7 (0.12%) CentOS
12 7 (0.12%) Windows Server 2016
13 6 (0.11%) Mac OS
14 5 (0.089%) Windows Server 2008
15 4 (0.071%) Alpine Linux
15 4 (0.071%) Data ONTAP
Processes & Methodologies
1 3,357 (59.45%) CI/CD
2 2,293 (40.61%) Agile
3 1,595 (28.25%) Infrastructure as Code
4 939 (16.63%) Continuous Improvement
5 936 (16.58%) Containerisation
6 887 (15.71%) Test Automation
7 877 (15.53%) Problem-Solving
8 850 (15.05%) Stakeholder Management
9 827 (14.64%) Microservices
10 787 (13.94%) AI
11 728 (12.89%) Observability
12 719 (12.73%) Platform Engineering
13 690 (12.22%) Software Engineering
14 688 (12.18%) Migration
15 683 (12.09%) Scrum
16 587 (10.39%) Analytics
17 577 (10.22%) Technical Leadership
18 535 (9.47%) Stakeholder Engagement
19 480 (8.50%) Data Modelling
20 467 (8.27%) Roadmaps
Programming Languages
1 1,590 (28.16%) Python
2 1,031 (18.26%) SQL
3 808 (14.31%) Java
4 510 (9.03%) C#
5 481 (8.52%) PowerShell
6 470 (8.32%) Bash
7 466 (8.25%) JavaScript
8 310 (5.49%) TypeScript
9 251 (4.44%) Bicep
10 96 (1.70%) Go
11 75 (1.33%) Shell Script
12 72 (1.28%) Apex Code
13 69 (1.22%) T-SQL
14 63 (1.12%) PL/SQL
15 61 (1.08%) Scala
16 60 (1.06%) Groovy
17 32 (0.57%) C++
17 32 (0.57%) Data Analysis Expressions
18 31 (0.55%) Perl
19 24 (0.43%) Kusto Query Language
Qualifications
1 1,828 (32.37%) Security Cleared
2 1,544 (27.34%) SC Cleared
3 326 (5.77%) Degree
4 228 (4.04%) Azure Certification
5 222 (3.93%) BPSS Clearance
6 198 (3.51%) DV Cleared
7 187 (3.31%) AWS Certification
8 124 (2.20%) Computer Science Degree
9 92 (1.63%) Microsoft Certification
10 71 (1.26%) CISSP
11 65 (1.15%) ISTQB
12 57 (1.01%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 54 (0.96%) Cisco Certification
14 43 (0.76%) PMP
15 41 (0.73%) PMI Certification
16 37 (0.66%) Master's Degree
17 29 (0.51%) CISM
18 27 (0.48%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
19 25 (0.44%) CCNP
19 25 (0.44%) ITIL Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 535 (9.47%) QA
2 281 (4.98%) Data Quality
3 199 (3.52%) Accessibility
4 134 (2.37%) GDPR
5 97 (1.72%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 77 (1.36%) WCAG
7 76 (1.35%) NIST
8 52 (0.92%) NCSC
9 49 (0.87%) PMO
10 41 (0.73%) SLA
11 33 (0.58%) PCI DSS
12 30 (0.53%) GRC
13 27 (0.48%) Sarbanes-Oxley
14 14 (0.25%) ISO 20022
15 12 (0.21%) Disclosure Scotland
16 11 (0.19%) Cyber Essentials
17 10 (0.18%) Actionable Recommendations
17 10 (0.18%) HIPAA
17 10 (0.18%) HL7
17 10 (0.18%) SEPA
System Software
1 1,130 (20.01%) Docker
2 174 (3.08%) Active Directory
3 88 (1.56%) VMware Infrastructure
4 78 (1.38%) Virtual Machines
5 27 (0.48%) Hyper-V
5 27 (0.48%) vSphere
6 20 (0.35%) VMware ESXi
6 20 (0.35%) VMware NSX
7 15 (0.27%) Virtual Desktop
8 13 (0.23%) Squid
9 12 (0.21%) Oracle RAC
10 10 (0.18%) IAG
11 9 (0.16%) Postfix
12 8 (0.14%) KVM
13 7 (0.12%) zsh
14 6 (0.11%) Corosync
14 6 (0.11%) Microsoft App-V
14 6 (0.11%) NFS
15 5 (0.089%) Apache ZooKeeper
15 5 (0.089%) Firmware
Systems Management
1 1,501 (26.58%) Kubernetes
2 531 (9.40%) Ansible
3 370 (6.55%) Grafana
4 311 (5.51%) Prometheus
5 86 (1.52%) Argo
6 59 (1.04%) Puppet
7 56 (0.99%) Single Sign-On
8 47 (0.83%) Progress Chef
9 41 (0.73%) Istio
10 38 (0.67%) Microsoft Intune
11 34 (0.60%) Packer
12 22 (0.39%) Kibana
13 20 (0.35%) Kustomize
13 20 (0.35%) vCenter Server
14 19 (0.34%) SCCM
15 18 (0.32%) HP ALM
16 17 (0.30%) Kubeflow
17 15 (0.27%) Oracle RMAN
18 13 (0.23%) Control-M
18 13 (0.23%) systemd
Vendors
1 1,088 (19.27%) Microsoft
2 307 (5.44%) Oracle
3 283 (5.01%) Databricks
4 273 (4.83%) Google
5 204 (3.61%) ServiceNow
6 186 (3.29%) Salesforce
7 177 (3.13%) Splunk
8 145 (2.57%) Dynatrace
9 122 (2.16%) VMware
10 114 (2.02%) SAP
11 103 (1.82%) Red Hat
12 63 (1.12%) Informatica
13 61 (1.08%) IBM
14 60 (1.06%) MuleSoft
15 59 (1.04%) OpenAI
16 52 (0.92%) Atlassian
16 52 (0.92%) Cisco
17 46 (0.81%) AppDynamics
17 46 (0.81%) Foundry
18 40 (0.71%) Okta