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

6 months to
27 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 13 15 15
Rank change year-on-year +2 0 -2
Contract jobs citing DevOps 5,610 3,473 3,964
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.63% 10.54% 9.87%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.51% 11.66% 11.55%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,885 2,471 2,728
10th Percentile £385 £361 £385
25th Percentile £438 £425 £460
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £518 £550
Median % change year-on-year +1.45% -5.91% -4.35%
75th Percentile £613 £625 £650
90th Percentile £700 £725 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £490 £535
% change year-on-year +2.04% -8.41% -2.73%
Number of hourly rates quoted 115 26 94
10th Percentile £35.90 £32.63 £56.33
25th Percentile £58.88 £51.56 £62.45
Median hourly rate £68.50 £67.00 £70.00
Median % change year-on-year +2.24% -4.29% +6.87%
75th Percentile £77.50 £86.37 £74.86
90th Percentile £88.00 £90.63 £85.65
UK excluding London median hourly rate £67.50 £67.00 £70.00
% change year-on-year +0.75% -4.29% +7.28%

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 44,856 29,798 34,328
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.96% 90.42% 85.47%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,798 18,719 22,071
10th Percentile £325 £300 £308
25th Percentile £419 £404 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £520 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% -4.76% -3.67%
75th Percentile £625 £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 2,670 1,616 2,026
10th Percentile £14.82 £14.20 £13.56
25th Percentile £20.02 £17.33 £17.55
Median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £40.00
Median % change year-on-year +74.79% -37.13% -5.88%
75th Percentile £68.38 £50.00 £63.75
90th Percentile £82.38 £68.75 £73.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £43.96 £23.82 £40.00
% change year-on-year +84.59% -40.46% -

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 27 July 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 27 July 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 27 July 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 +4 4,795 £525 - 1,592
London +2 2,464 £550 - 748
UK excluding London +5 2,463 £500 +2.04% 1,023
Work from Home 0 1,602 £525 +2.44% 781
North of England +4 863 £500 +3.90% 318
Midlands +2 458 £489 +2.89% 149
South East -10 458 £525 +5.00% 282
Yorkshire +2 439 £500 +2.04% 80
West Midlands -2 370 £498 -0.50% 108
North West -1 338 £525 +10.53% 170
South West +11 320 £525 - 124
Scotland 0 197 £488 -1.32% 55
East of England +19 140 £510 +2.00% 62
North East +12 105 £425 -18.66% 70
East Midlands -1 83 £488 +6.21% 41
Wales -7 45 £443 +38.03% 26
Northern Ireland +17 22 £475 +7.95% 23
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
1 341 (6.08%) Confluence
2 134 (2.39%) SharePoint
3 132 (2.35%) Apache Spark
4 112 (2.00%) Apache Airflow
5 104 (1.85%) Apache
6 81 (1.44%) SAS
7 45 (0.80%) CMS
8 37 (0.66%) IIS
9 35 (0.62%) Jupyter
10 27 (0.48%) Microsoft Exchange
10 27 (0.48%) nginx
11 16 (0.29%) WebSphere
12 14 (0.25%) Camunda
12 14 (0.25%) OpenStack
13 13 (0.23%) Palantir Foundry
14 11 (0.20%) Oracle Workflow
15 9 (0.16%) Appian
16 8 (0.14%) Anypoint
16 8 (0.14%) Tomcat
16 8 (0.14%) WebLogic
Applications
1 62 (1.11%) Microsoft Project
2 57 (1.02%) Microsoft Excel
3 38 (0.68%) Microsoft Office
4 34 (0.61%) MS Visio
5 30 (0.53%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 10 (0.18%) CPLEX
7 9 (0.16%) Spreadsheet
8 7 (0.12%) Chatbot
9 6 (0.11%) Trello
10 4 (0.071%) Notion
11 2 (0.036%) Adobe XD
12 1 (0.018%) EngageOne
12 1 (0.018%) InDesign
12 1 (0.018%) Maya
12 1 (0.018%) Weka
Business Applications
1 68 (1.21%) Dynamics CRM
2 39 (0.70%) SAP S/4HANA
3 10 (0.18%) Aladdin
3 10 (0.18%) Oracle EBS
3 10 (0.18%) Payment Gateway
3 10 (0.18%) Remedy ITSM
4 9 (0.16%) Magento
4 9 (0.16%) Oracle ERP
5 8 (0.14%) Dynamics AX
5 8 (0.14%) SAP MDG
6 6 (0.11%) Maximo
7 5 (0.089%) OpenText MBPM
7 5 (0.089%) Oracle BPM
7 5 (0.089%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
8 4 (0.071%) Endur
8 4 (0.071%) SAP ERP
9 3 (0.053%) Findur
9 3 (0.053%) SAP BPC
9 3 (0.053%) Shopify
9 3 (0.053%) Temenos T24
Cloud Services
1 3,024 (53.90%) Azure
2 2,004 (35.72%) AWS
3 1,694 (30.20%) Azure DevOps
4 943 (16.81%) GitHub
5 714 (12.73%) GCP
6 575 (10.25%) GitHub Actions
7 454 (8.09%) Power Platform
8 449 (8.00%) Serverless
9 299 (5.33%) Amazon S3
10 270 (4.81%) AWS Lambda
11 252 (4.49%) Entra ID
12 248 (4.42%) AWS CloudFormation
13 228 (4.06%) Amazon EKS
13 228 (4.06%) Azure AKS
14 195 (3.48%) Amazon CloudWatch
15 192 (3.42%) Azure Monitor
16 178 (3.17%) Amazon EC2
17 177 (3.16%) Azure Data Factory
18 157 (2.80%) Dynamics 365
19 150 (2.67%) PaaS
Communications & Networking
1 236 (4.21%) Firewall
2 152 (2.71%) DNS
3 119 (2.12%) Network Security
3 119 (2.12%) VPN
4 55 (0.98%) TCP/IP
5 49 (0.87%) WAN
6 42 (0.75%) SSL
7 36 (0.64%) SD-WAN
8 33 (0.59%) BGP
8 33 (0.59%) DHCP
9 30 (0.53%) Internet
10 27 (0.48%) HTTP
10 27 (0.48%) Wi-Fi
11 25 (0.45%) OSPF
12 21 (0.37%) SAN
13 18 (0.32%) VLAN
13 18 (0.32%) VXLAN
14 17 (0.30%) BIG-IP
14 17 (0.30%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
14 17 (0.30%) SSH
Database & Business Intelligence
1 304 (5.42%) Power BI
2 291 (5.19%) SQL Server
3 276 (4.92%) PostgreSQL
4 193 (3.44%) NoSQL
5 185 (3.30%) Relational Database
6 179 (3.19%) MongoDB
7 178 (3.17%) Data Warehouse
8 154 (2.75%) Data Lake
9 116 (2.07%) Amazon RDS
10 106 (1.89%) Metadata
11 102 (1.82%) Azure SQL Database
11 102 (1.82%) DynamoDB
12 85 (1.52%) Oracle Database
13 84 (1.50%) Delta Lake
14 68 (1.21%) Amazon Redshift
14 68 (1.21%) Redis
15 67 (1.19%) Big Data
15 67 (1.19%) MySQL
16 64 (1.14%) Amazon Athena
17 55 (0.98%) Elasticsearch
Development Applications
1 810 (14.44%) Jenkins
2 747 (13.32%) Git
3 686 (12.23%) JIRA
4 573 (10.21%) GitLab
5 133 (2.37%) Selenium
6 106 (1.89%) Postman
7 98 (1.75%) JUnit
8 96 (1.71%) SonarQube
9 81 (1.44%) Bitbucket
9 81 (1.44%) Maven
10 74 (1.32%) REST Assured
11 61 (1.09%) Cypress.io
12 60 (1.07%) Cucumber
12 60 (1.07%) JMeter
13 51 (0.91%) Gradle
14 46 (0.82%) Gatling
14 46 (0.82%) Mockito
15 37 (0.66%) Visual Studio
16 36 (0.64%) Artifactory
17 35 (0.62%) Sonatype Nexus
General
1 1,386 (24.71%) Social Skills
2 1,006 (17.93%) Finance
3 818 (14.58%) Public Sector
4 467 (8.32%) Analytical Skills
5 365 (6.51%) Banking
6 133 (2.37%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 107 (1.91%) Documentation Skills
8 93 (1.66%) Retail
9 69 (1.23%) Legal
10 67 (1.19%) Influencing Skills
11 66 (1.18%) Organisational Skills
12 59 (1.05%) Marketing
13 50 (0.89%) Military
14 45 (0.80%) Law
15 44 (0.78%) Investment Banking
15 44 (0.78%) Telecoms
16 40 (0.71%) Financial Institution
16 40 (0.71%) Manufacturing
17 39 (0.70%) Front Office
18 36 (0.64%) Presentation Skills
Job Titles
1 1,117 (19.91%) DevOps Engineer
2 927 (16.52%) Developer
3 791 (14.10%) Senior
4 628 (11.19%) Architect
5 524 (9.34%) Lead
6 336 (5.99%) Azure Engineer
7 314 (5.60%) Data Engineer
8 293 (5.22%) Analyst
9 281 (5.01%) AWS Engineer
10 236 (4.21%) Platform Engineer
11 209 (3.73%) Cloud Engineer
12 203 (3.62%) Java Developer
13 199 (3.55%) Senior DevOps
14 195 (3.48%) AWS DevOps
15 185 (3.30%) Solutions Architect
16 184 (3.28%) Azure DevOps Engineer
17 183 (3.26%) Senior DevOps Engineer
18 182 (3.24%) AWS DevOps Engineer
19 149 (2.66%) Software Engineer
20 148 (2.64%) Senior Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 560 (9.98%) REST
2 495 (8.82%) .NET
3 333 (5.94%) RESTful
4 325 (5.79%) Kafka
5 317 (5.65%) Spring
6 299 (5.33%) Spring Boot
7 294 (5.24%) React
8 220 (3.92%) Node.js
9 167 (2.98%) JSON
10 166 (2.96%) PySpark
11 162 (2.89%) OAuth
11 162 (2.89%) Playwright
12 158 (2.82%) AngularJS
13 144 (2.57%) SOAP
14 140 (2.50%) .NET Framework
15 128 (2.28%) HTML
16 111 (1.98%) OAuth2
17 109 (1.94%) Middleware
18 108 (1.93%) YAML
19 106 (1.89%) CSS
Miscellaneous
1 992 (17.68%) Cloud Native
2 400 (7.13%) Product Ownership
3 267 (4.76%) Distributed Systems
4 167 (2.98%) Onboarding
5 161 (2.87%) Enterprise Software
6 152 (2.71%) Legacy Systems
7 131 (2.34%) Hybrid Cloud
8 94 (1.68%) Public Cloud
9 90 (1.60%) Data Protection Act
10 86 (1.53%) Self-Motivation
11 77 (1.37%) Data Centre
12 73 (1.30%) Management Information System
13 70 (1.25%) Data Structures
14 68 (1.21%) Security Posture
15 63 (1.12%) Replication
16 62 (1.11%) AI Agents
17 57 (1.02%) Virtual Team
18 56 (1.00%) Enterprise Cloud
19 49 (0.87%) Greenfield Project
19 49 (0.87%) Mobile App
Operating Systems
1 488 (8.70%) Linux
2 291 (5.19%) Windows
3 103 (1.84%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 80 (1.43%) Unix
5 73 (1.30%) Windows Server
6 34 (0.61%) VMS
7 28 (0.50%) Ubuntu
8 25 (0.45%) Apple iOS
9 16 (0.29%) Android
10 11 (0.20%) Solaris
11 9 (0.16%) Windows Server 2019
11 9 (0.16%) zOS
12 7 (0.12%) AIX
12 7 (0.12%) Windows Server 2016
13 6 (0.11%) Amazon Linux
13 6 (0.11%) CentOS
13 6 (0.11%) Mac OS
13 6 (0.11%) Windows Server 2008
14 4 (0.071%) Alpine Linux
14 4 (0.071%) Data ONTAP
Processes & Methodologies
1 3,293 (58.70%) CI/CD
2 2,239 (39.91%) Agile
3 1,515 (27.01%) Infrastructure as Code
4 938 (16.72%) Containerisation
5 867 (15.45%) Continuous Improvement
6 851 (15.17%) Problem-Solving
7 842 (15.01%) Test Automation
8 829 (14.78%) Microservices
9 744 (13.26%) Stakeholder Management
10 736 (13.12%) AI
11 697 (12.42%) Observability
12 696 (12.41%) Scrum
13 677 (12.07%) Migration
14 668 (11.91%) Platform Engineering
15 655 (11.68%) Software Engineering
16 599 (10.68%) Analytics
17 504 (8.98%) Technical Leadership
18 500 (8.91%) Stakeholder Engagement
19 485 (8.65%) Data Modelling
20 466 (8.31%) Roadmaps
Programming Languages
1 1,569 (27.97%) Python
2 1,011 (18.02%) SQL
3 789 (14.06%) Java
4 511 (9.11%) C#
5 447 (7.97%) Bash
6 430 (7.66%) JavaScript
7 412 (7.34%) PowerShell
8 300 (5.35%) TypeScript
9 209 (3.73%) Bicep
10 112 (2.00%) Go
11 69 (1.23%) Apex Code
12 67 (1.19%) PL/SQL
13 66 (1.18%) T-SQL
14 65 (1.16%) Shell Script
15 55 (0.98%) Groovy
16 51 (0.91%) Scala
17 30 (0.53%) C++
18 28 (0.50%) Kotlin
19 25 (0.45%) C
20 24 (0.43%) Data Analysis Expressions
Qualifications
1 1,770 (31.55%) Security Cleared
2 1,483 (26.43%) SC Cleared
3 328 (5.85%) Degree
4 223 (3.98%) Azure Certification
5 207 (3.69%) BPSS Clearance
6 196 (3.49%) DV Cleared
7 189 (3.37%) AWS Certification
8 122 (2.17%) Computer Science Degree
9 83 (1.48%) Microsoft Certification
10 80 (1.43%) CISSP
11 59 (1.05%) ISTQB
12 58 (1.03%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 54 (0.96%) Cisco Certification
14 44 (0.78%) Master's Degree
15 43 (0.77%) PMP
16 41 (0.73%) PMI Certification
17 35 (0.62%) CISM
18 28 (0.50%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
19 25 (0.45%) ITIL Certification
20 24 (0.43%) CCNP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 496 (8.84%) QA
2 266 (4.74%) Data Quality
3 195 (3.48%) Accessibility
4 165 (2.94%) GDPR
5 92 (1.64%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 80 (1.43%) NIST
7 76 (1.35%) WCAG
8 52 (0.93%) NCSC
9 43 (0.77%) PMO
10 40 (0.71%) PCI DSS
11 34 (0.61%) SLA
12 29 (0.52%) GRC
13 27 (0.48%) Sarbanes-Oxley
14 13 (0.23%) HIPAA
15 11 (0.20%) Disclosure Scotland
15 11 (0.20%) PSD2
16 10 (0.18%) ISO 20022
16 10 (0.18%) SEPA
16 10 (0.18%) SOC 2
17 9 (0.16%) Cyber Essentials
System Software
1 1,100 (19.61%) Docker
2 179 (3.19%) Active Directory
3 83 (1.48%) Virtual Machines
4 80 (1.43%) VMware Infrastructure
5 32 (0.57%) vSphere
6 26 (0.46%) VMware NSX
7 17 (0.30%) Hyper-V
7 17 (0.30%) Virtual Desktop
7 17 (0.30%) VMware ESXi
8 15 (0.27%) Squid
9 14 (0.25%) Postfix
10 13 (0.23%) Oracle RAC
11 8 (0.14%) KVM
12 7 (0.12%) IAG
13 6 (0.11%) Corosync
13 6 (0.11%) HDFS
13 6 (0.11%) NFS
14 5 (0.089%) Microsoft App-V
14 5 (0.089%) RACF
14 5 (0.089%) SRDF
Systems Management
1 1,617 (28.82%) Terraform
2 1,448 (25.81%) Kubernetes
3 530 (9.45%) Ansible
4 370 (6.60%) Grafana
5 316 (5.63%) Prometheus
6 95 (1.69%) Argo
7 63 (1.12%) Puppet
8 62 (1.11%) Single Sign-On
9 43 (0.77%) Istio
9 43 (0.77%) Progress Chef
10 34 (0.61%) Microsoft Intune
11 31 (0.55%) Packer
12 27 (0.48%) vCenter Server
13 20 (0.36%) HP ALM
14 17 (0.30%) Kibana
15 16 (0.29%) Kustomize
15 16 (0.29%) Oracle RMAN
15 16 (0.29%) SCCM
16 13 (0.23%) Kubeflow
16 13 (0.23%) NetBackup
Vendors
1 1,001 (17.84%) Microsoft
2 317 (5.65%) Oracle
3 266 (4.74%) Databricks
4 264 (4.71%) Google
5 203 (3.62%) ServiceNow
6 184 (3.28%) Salesforce
7 181 (3.23%) Splunk
8 131 (2.34%) SAP
9 130 (2.32%) Dynatrace
10 120 (2.14%) VMware
11 108 (1.93%) Red Hat
12 70 (1.25%) OpenAI
13 64 (1.14%) IBM
14 58 (1.03%) Informatica
15 57 (1.02%) Atlassian
16 49 (0.87%) MuleSoft
17 47 (0.84%) Cisco
18 44 (0.78%) Foundry
19 42 (0.75%) Okta
20 37 (0.66%) CyberArk