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

6 months to
1 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 12 15 14
Rank change year-on-year +3 -1 -3
Contract jobs citing DevOps 5,221 3,026 4,079
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.67% 10.39% 9.49%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.60% 11.41% 11.09%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,649 2,188 2,826
10th Percentile £385 £380 £400
25th Percentile £438 £440 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £523 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year -0.38% -4.55% -6.34%
75th Percentile £606 £638 £650
90th Percentile £700 £750 £739
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £525
% change year-on-year - -4.76% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 119 17 115
10th Percentile £39.53 £33.10 £56.35
25th Percentile £58.88 £51.25 £61.25
Median hourly rate £70.00 £73.23 £65.50
Median % change year-on-year -4.40% +11.79% -
75th Percentile £77.50 £87.50 £76.25
90th Percentile £92.50 £89.50 £86.46
UK excluding London median hourly rate £67.50 £73.23 £65.50
% change year-on-year -7.82% +11.79% -

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 41,434 26,510 36,773
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.66% 90.99% 85.55%
Number of daily rates quoted 25,895 16,942 23,625
10th Percentile £325 £300 £300
25th Percentile £413 £408 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £513 £525
Median % change year-on-year - -2.38% -4.55%
75th Percentile £613 £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 2,481 1,120 2,526
10th Percentile £14.64 £14.20 £12.75
25th Percentile £19.85 £17.87 £16.00
Median hourly rate £42.50 £27.97 £36.50
Median % change year-on-year +51.98% -23.38% -0.11%
75th Percentile £67.84 £57.50 £60.71
90th Percentile £81.05 £75.00 £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 1 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 1 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 1 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 +3 4,445 £525 -0.94% 1,644
UK excluding London +9 2,308 £500 - 1,104
London +3 2,263 £550 -0.09% 729
Work from Home -2 1,425 £525 - 883
North of England +6 816 £500 - 334
South East +3 473 £523 +4.50% 269
Yorkshire +2 457 £500 - 88
Midlands +4 408 £488 -2.50% 133
West Midlands +4 320 £500 -4.31% 92
North West +1 294 £500 - 189
South West +15 280 £525 -4.55% 143
Scotland +2 188 £500 +5.26% 70
East of England +19 129 £525 +5.00% 83
East Midlands +1 84 £465 +0.54% 41
North East +5 81 £450 -14.29% 58
Wales +6 50 £425 +39.13% 42
Northern Ireland +3 14 £531 +27.25% 47
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
1 294 (5.63%) Confluence
2 135 (2.59%) Apache Spark
3 119 (2.28%) SharePoint
4 95 (1.82%) Apache
5 85 (1.63%) Apache Airflow
6 79 (1.51%) SAS
7 43 (0.82%) CMS
8 30 (0.57%) Microsoft Exchange
8 30 (0.57%) nginx
9 26 (0.50%) IIS
10 21 (0.40%) Jupyter
10 21 (0.40%) OpenStack
11 15 (0.29%) Camunda
12 14 (0.27%) Mendix
13 13 (0.25%) WebSphere
14 12 (0.23%) Palantir Foundry
15 10 (0.19%) HCL Notes
16 9 (0.17%) Sitecore CMS
17 8 (0.15%) Adobe Experience Manager
17 8 (0.15%) Oracle Workflow
Applications
1 75 (1.44%) Microsoft Excel
2 57 (1.09%) Microsoft Project
3 50 (0.96%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 35 (0.67%) Microsoft Office
5 26 (0.50%) MS Visio
6 4 (0.077%) Chatbot
6 4 (0.077%) CPLEX
6 4 (0.077%) Notion
7 3 (0.057%) Trello
8 2 (0.038%) Adobe XD
8 2 (0.038%) Spreadsheet
9 1 (0.019%) InDesign
9 1 (0.019%) Maya
9 1 (0.019%) Weka
Business Applications
1 63 (1.21%) Dynamics CRM
2 30 (0.57%) SAP S/4HANA
3 14 (0.27%) Oracle ERP
4 12 (0.23%) Payment Gateway
5 9 (0.17%) Maximo
6 8 (0.15%) Aladdin
6 8 (0.15%) Dynamics AX
7 6 (0.11%) Remedy ITSM
7 6 (0.11%) SAP MDG
8 5 (0.096%) Endur
8 5 (0.096%) Magento
8 5 (0.096%) Oracle EBS
9 4 (0.077%) NEC Housing
10 3 (0.057%) Findur
10 3 (0.057%) OpenText MBPM
10 3 (0.057%) Oracle BPM
10 3 (0.057%) SAP BPC
10 3 (0.057%) SAP ERP
10 3 (0.057%) SAP MM
10 3 (0.057%) SAP Oil and Gas
Cloud Services
1 2,829 (54.19%) Azure
2 1,791 (34.30%) AWS
3 1,534 (29.38%) Azure DevOps
4 884 (16.93%) GitHub
5 675 (12.93%) GCP
6 527 (10.09%) GitHub Actions
7 480 (9.19%) Serverless
8 440 (8.43%) Power Platform
9 278 (5.32%) Amazon S3
10 259 (4.96%) AWS CloudFormation
11 249 (4.77%) AWS Lambda
12 236 (4.52%) Entra ID
13 226 (4.33%) Azure AKS
14 211 (4.04%) Azure Data Factory
15 201 (3.85%) Amazon EKS
16 180 (3.45%) OpenShift
17 166 (3.18%) Azure Monitor
18 162 (3.10%) PaaS
19 160 (3.06%) Amazon CloudWatch
19 160 (3.06%) Amazon EC2
Communications & Networking
1 234 (4.48%) Firewall
2 133 (2.55%) DNS
3 109 (2.09%) Network Security
4 99 (1.90%) VPN
5 47 (0.90%) TCP/IP
6 41 (0.79%) WAN
7 35 (0.67%) SD-WAN
8 32 (0.61%) BGP
9 29 (0.56%) SSL
10 26 (0.50%) SAN
11 25 (0.48%) DHCP
11 25 (0.48%) Wi-Fi
12 23 (0.44%) HTTP
13 22 (0.42%) OSPF
14 19 (0.36%) IPsec
15 17 (0.33%) Internet
15 17 (0.33%) MPLS
16 16 (0.31%) LAN
16 16 (0.31%) Reverse Proxy
16 16 (0.31%) VXLAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 282 (5.40%) Power BI
2 269 (5.15%) SQL Server
3 246 (4.71%) PostgreSQL
4 179 (3.43%) Data Lake
5 178 (3.41%) NoSQL
6 153 (2.93%) Relational Database
7 144 (2.76%) Data Warehouse
8 131 (2.51%) MongoDB
9 116 (2.22%) Azure SQL Database
10 113 (2.16%) Amazon RDS
11 99 (1.90%) DynamoDB
12 94 (1.80%) Metadata
13 90 (1.72%) Delta Lake
14 76 (1.46%) Oracle Database
15 72 (1.38%) Big Data
16 66 (1.26%) Elasticsearch
17 62 (1.19%) Amazon Athena
18 55 (1.05%) BigQuery
18 55 (1.05%) Redis
19 50 (0.96%) Amazon Redshift
Development Applications
1 742 (14.21%) Jenkins
2 648 (12.41%) Git
3 618 (11.84%) JIRA
4 551 (10.55%) GitLab
5 112 (2.15%) Selenium
6 106 (2.03%) Postman
7 86 (1.65%) SonarQube
8 82 (1.57%) JUnit
9 66 (1.26%) REST Assured
10 64 (1.23%) Bitbucket
11 61 (1.17%) Maven
12 60 (1.15%) Cucumber
13 56 (1.07%) JMeter
14 51 (0.98%) Artifactory
15 48 (0.92%) Cypress.io
16 43 (0.82%) Gatling
17 39 (0.75%) Gradle
17 39 (0.75%) Mockito
18 33 (0.63%) Visual Studio
19 32 (0.61%) Sonatype Nexus
General
1 1,282 (24.55%) Social Skills
2 931 (17.83%) Finance
3 678 (12.99%) Public Sector
4 402 (7.70%) Analytical Skills
5 334 (6.40%) Banking
6 143 (2.74%) Documentation Skills
7 88 (1.69%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 73 (1.40%) Influencing Skills
9 70 (1.34%) Legal
10 67 (1.28%) Retail
11 52 (1.00%) Marketing
12 51 (0.98%) Financial Institution
13 48 (0.92%) Organisational Skills
14 39 (0.75%) Investment Banking
14 39 (0.75%) Military
15 38 (0.73%) Presentation Skills
16 34 (0.65%) Front Office
16 34 (0.65%) Law
17 28 (0.54%) Telecoms
18 25 (0.48%) Pharmaceutical
Job Titles
1 1,072 (20.53%) DevOps Engineer
2 764 (14.63%) Developer
3 728 (13.94%) Senior
4 612 (11.72%) Architect
5 456 (8.73%) Lead
6 344 (6.59%) Azure Engineer
7 312 (5.98%) Data Engineer
8 309 (5.92%) Analyst
9 252 (4.83%) AWS Engineer
10 197 (3.77%) Cloud Engineer
11 186 (3.56%) Platform Engineer
12 179 (3.43%) Solutions Architect
13 178 (3.41%) AWS DevOps
14 173 (3.31%) Azure DevOps Engineer
15 171 (3.28%) Senior DevOps
16 166 (3.18%) AWS DevOps Engineer
17 157 (3.01%) Business Analyst
18 156 (2.99%) Senior DevOps Engineer
19 151 (2.89%) Java Developer
19 151 (2.89%) Software Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 468 (8.96%) REST
2 467 (8.94%) .NET
3 316 (6.05%) React
4 280 (5.36%) Spring
5 277 (5.31%) Kafka
6 270 (5.17%) Spring Boot
7 261 (5.00%) RESTful
8 247 (4.73%) Node.js
9 173 (3.31%) AngularJS
10 161 (3.08%) OAuth
11 157 (3.01%) PySpark
12 155 (2.97%) Playwright
13 136 (2.60%) JSON
14 130 (2.49%) YAML
15 117 (2.24%) SOAP
16 112 (2.15%) Middleware
17 111 (2.13%) HTML
18 110 (2.11%) OpenID
19 107 (2.05%) .NET Framework
20 104 (1.99%) OAuth2
Miscellaneous
1 870 (16.66%) Cloud Native
2 330 (6.32%) Product Ownership
3 203 (3.89%) Distributed Systems
4 134 (2.57%) Onboarding
5 119 (2.28%) Legacy Systems
6 109 (2.09%) Public Cloud
7 106 (2.03%) Enterprise Software
8 105 (2.01%) Hybrid Cloud
9 82 (1.57%) Data Protection Act
10 79 (1.51%) Data Centre
11 65 (1.24%) Management Information System
12 56 (1.07%) Self-Motivation
13 49 (0.94%) Security Posture
13 49 (0.94%) Virtual Team
14 47 (0.90%) AI Agents
14 47 (0.90%) Mobile App
14 47 (0.90%) Private Cloud
15 46 (0.88%) Greenfield Project
15 46 (0.88%) Replication
16 44 (0.84%) Low-Code
Operating Systems
1 467 (8.94%) Linux
2 268 (5.13%) Windows
3 96 (1.84%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 81 (1.55%) Unix
5 56 (1.07%) Windows Server
6 42 (0.80%) VMS
7 28 (0.54%) Ubuntu
8 20 (0.38%) Apple iOS
9 16 (0.31%) Android
10 13 (0.25%) CentOS
11 10 (0.19%) Windows Server 2019
12 8 (0.15%) Windows 10
13 7 (0.13%) Solaris
13 7 (0.13%) Windows Server 2016
14 5 (0.096%) Amazon Linux
14 5 (0.096%) Mac OS
14 5 (0.096%) Windows Server 2012
15 4 (0.077%) Alpine Linux
15 4 (0.077%) Data ONTAP
15 4 (0.077%) Windows Server 2008
Processes & Methodologies
1 3,016 (57.77%) CI/CD
2 1,898 (36.35%) Agile
3 1,370 (26.24%) Infrastructure as Code
4 829 (15.88%) Containerisation
5 770 (14.75%) Problem-Solving
6 740 (14.17%) Microservices
7 739 (14.15%) Test Automation
8 703 (13.46%) Continuous Improvement
9 644 (12.33%) Migration
10 639 (12.24%) Observability
11 593 (11.36%) Analytics
12 583 (11.17%) Stakeholder Management
13 575 (11.01%) Scrum
14 574 (10.99%) AI
15 514 (9.84%) Software Engineering
16 513 (9.83%) Platform Engineering
17 485 (9.29%) Data Modelling
18 436 (8.35%) Technical Leadership
19 426 (8.16%) Mentoring
20 419 (8.03%) Roadmaps
Programming Languages
1 1,448 (27.73%) Python
2 1,020 (19.54%) SQL
3 688 (13.18%) Java
4 494 (9.46%) C#
5 382 (7.32%) Bash
5 382 (7.32%) JavaScript
5 382 (7.32%) PowerShell
6 275 (5.27%) TypeScript
7 187 (3.58%) Bicep
8 108 (2.07%) Go
9 66 (1.26%) Scala
9 66 (1.26%) Shell Script
10 59 (1.13%) Apex Code
11 52 (1.00%) PL/SQL
12 49 (0.94%) T-SQL
13 46 (0.88%) Groovy
14 35 (0.67%) C++
15 27 (0.52%) Data Analysis Expressions
15 27 (0.52%) Ruby
16 25 (0.48%) Kotlin
Qualifications
1 1,631 (31.24%) Security Cleared
2 1,348 (25.82%) SC Cleared
3 326 (6.24%) Degree
4 217 (4.16%) Azure Certification
5 167 (3.20%) BPSS Clearance
6 153 (2.93%) DV Cleared
7 151 (2.89%) AWS Certification
8 139 (2.66%) Computer Science Degree
9 85 (1.63%) CISSP
10 64 (1.23%) Microsoft Certification
11 54 (1.03%) ISTQB
12 52 (1.00%) CISM
13 47 (0.90%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 47 (0.90%) Master's Degree
14 46 (0.88%) Cisco Certification
15 45 (0.86%) PMI Certification
16 42 (0.80%) PMP
17 27 (0.52%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
18 26 (0.50%) TOGAF Certification
19 22 (0.42%) ITIL Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 435 (8.33%) QA
2 244 (4.67%) Data Quality
3 181 (3.47%) GDPR
4 144 (2.76%) Accessibility
5 127 (2.43%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 120 (2.30%) NIST
7 68 (1.30%) NCSC
8 57 (1.09%) WCAG
9 46 (0.88%) PCI DSS
10 43 (0.82%) SLA
11 32 (0.61%) PMO
11 32 (0.61%) Sarbanes-Oxley
12 22 (0.42%) GRC
13 18 (0.34%) HIPAA
14 14 (0.27%) SOC 2
15 13 (0.25%) NIST 800
16 12 (0.23%) ISO 20022
16 12 (0.23%) PSD2
17 9 (0.17%) Disclosure Scotland
17 9 (0.17%) SEPA
System Software
1 988 (18.92%) Docker
2 174 (3.33%) Active Directory
3 77 (1.47%) Virtual Machines
4 73 (1.40%) VMware Infrastructure
5 35 (0.67%) vSphere
6 27 (0.52%) VMware NSX
7 19 (0.36%) Virtual Desktop
8 18 (0.34%) Squid
9 14 (0.27%) Postfix
10 13 (0.25%) Hyper-V
11 12 (0.23%) VMware ESXi
12 8 (0.15%) Firmware
13 7 (0.13%) HDFS
13 7 (0.13%) Oracle RAC
13 7 (0.13%) RACF
14 6 (0.11%) Corosync
14 6 (0.11%) NFS
15 5 (0.096%) Ceph
15 5 (0.096%) SRDF
16 4 (0.077%) Varnish
Systems Management
1 1,502 (28.77%) Terraform
2 1,342 (25.70%) Kubernetes
3 509 (9.75%) Ansible
4 362 (6.93%) Grafana
5 306 (5.86%) Prometheus
6 91 (1.74%) Argo
7 75 (1.44%) Single Sign-On
8 69 (1.32%) Puppet
9 62 (1.19%) Istio
10 36 (0.69%) Progress Chef
11 29 (0.56%) Microsoft Intune
12 27 (0.52%) Packer
13 23 (0.44%) vCenter Server
14 22 (0.42%) Active Directory Federation Services
14 22 (0.42%) HP ALM
14 22 (0.42%) Kibana
15 18 (0.34%) Consul
16 15 (0.29%) SCCM
17 14 (0.27%) FortiGate
17 14 (0.27%) Oracle RMAN
Vendors
1 920 (17.62%) Microsoft
2 292 (5.59%) Databricks
3 280 (5.36%) Oracle
4 247 (4.73%) Google
5 196 (3.75%) Splunk
6 178 (3.41%) ServiceNow
7 163 (3.12%) Salesforce
8 146 (2.80%) Red Hat
9 115 (2.20%) VMware
10 114 (2.18%) SAP
11 104 (1.99%) Dynatrace
12 73 (1.40%) OpenAI
13 50 (0.96%) Atlassian
14 49 (0.94%) CyberArk
15 48 (0.92%) IBM
16 45 (0.86%) Informatica
17 43 (0.82%) Cisco
18 38 (0.73%) Foundry
18 38 (0.73%) Okta
19 37 (0.71%) AppDynamics