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

6 months to
16 Mar 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 12 15 16
Rank change year-on-year +3 +1 -5
Contract jobs citing DevOps 4,805 3,176 3,922
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 11.14% 10.74% 8.82%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.96% 11.89% 10.19%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,344 2,307 2,764
10th Percentile £376 £390 £405
25th Percentile £431 £453 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £519 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -5.63% - -6.38%
75th Percentile £606 £656 £650
90th Percentile £700 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £521 £525
% change year-on-year -4.08% -0.71% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 81 25 95
10th Percentile £39.53 £32.45 £48.05
25th Percentile £45.46 £59.39 £58.33
Median hourly rate £67.50 £73.23 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year -7.82% +12.65% -0.76%
75th Percentile £77.50 £80.75 £66.88
90th Percentile £93.75 £87.50 £85.15
UK excluding London median hourly rate £61.00 £70.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year -12.86% +7.69% -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 37,084 26,717 38,494
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 86.01% 90.37% 86.56%
Number of daily rates quoted 23,485 17,170 25,048
10th Percentile £313 £306 £300
25th Percentile £413 £413 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £610 £638 £638
90th Percentile £723 £745 £744
UK excluding London median daily rate £480 £490 £500
% change year-on-year -2.04% -2.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,212 916 2,333
10th Percentile £14.83 £15.26 £13.00
25th Percentile £18.50 £21.00 £16.02
Median hourly rate £30.00 £32.50 £32.50
Median % change year-on-year -7.69% - -7.14%
75th Percentile £65.00 £64.79 £57.50
90th Percentile £75.00 £77.50 £70.40
UK excluding London median hourly rate £27.36 £31.76 £31.50
% change year-on-year -13.85% +0.83% -10.00%

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 16 March 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 16 March 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 16 March 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 4,108 £525 -4.55% 1,344
UK excluding London +9 2,130 £500 -4.08% 1,095
London 0 2,067 £541 -6.75% 499
Work from Home -3 1,330 £525 -2.05% 769
North of England +4 739 £500 -4.76% 314
South East -1 441 £525 -8.70% 334
Midlands +13 409 £500 +2.30% 140
Yorkshire +1 385 £500 -4.76% 95
West Midlands +12 329 £502 +2.35% 88
North West +3 299 £491 -6.48% 163
South West +12 272 £525 -12.50% 133
Scotland +5 174 £450 - 75
East of England +18 118 £573 +12.81% 74
East Midlands +4 78 £438 -7.89% 52
North East +3 60 £475 -9.52% 59
Wales +13 42 £443 +97.27% 31
Northern Ireland -4 11 £475 +18.75% 10

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 (6.12%) Confluence
2 117 (2.43%) Apache Spark
3 94 (1.96%) SharePoint
4 90 (1.87%) Apache
5 83 (1.73%) SAS
6 64 (1.33%) Apache Airflow
7 34 (0.71%) OpenStack
8 32 (0.67%) CMS
9 31 (0.65%) nginx
10 28 (0.58%) Microsoft Exchange
11 22 (0.46%) IIS
12 15 (0.31%) Mendix
13 12 (0.25%) Sitecore CMS
13 12 (0.25%) WebLogic
14 11 (0.23%) Adobe Experience Manager
14 11 (0.23%) HCL Notes
15 10 (0.21%) Camunda
16 9 (0.19%) Palantir Foundry
17 8 (0.17%) GeoServer
17 8 (0.17%) JBoss
Applications
1 92 (1.91%) Microsoft Excel
2 66 (1.37%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 46 (0.96%) Microsoft Project
4 30 (0.62%) Microsoft Office
5 22 (0.46%) MS Visio
6 13 (0.27%) Chatbot
7 8 (0.17%) Weka
8 4 (0.083%) Trello
9 2 (0.042%) Adobe XD
10 1 (0.021%) CPLEX
10 1 (0.021%) InDesign
10 1 (0.021%) Maya
10 1 (0.021%) Spreadsheet
Business Applications
1 74 (1.54%) Dynamics CRM
2 16 (0.33%) SAP S/4HANA
3 13 (0.27%) Oracle ERP
4 12 (0.25%) Aladdin
5 11 (0.23%) Maximo
6 9 (0.19%) NEC Housing
7 8 (0.17%) Dynamics AX
8 6 (0.12%) Endur
8 6 (0.12%) Remedy ITSM
8 6 (0.12%) SAP ERP
9 5 (0.10%) Oracle EBS
9 5 (0.10%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
10 4 (0.083%) Payment Gateway
11 3 (0.062%) NetSuite
11 3 (0.062%) Salesforce CRM
11 3 (0.062%) SAP BPC
11 3 (0.062%) SAP CO
11 3 (0.062%) SAP FI
11 3 (0.062%) SAP FI/CO
11 3 (0.062%) Workday HCM
Cloud Services
1 2,546 (52.99%) Azure
2 1,688 (35.13%) AWS
3 1,389 (28.91%) Azure DevOps
4 911 (18.96%) GitHub
5 683 (14.21%) GCP
6 566 (11.78%) Serverless
7 504 (10.49%) GitHub Actions
8 406 (8.45%) Power Platform
9 299 (6.22%) AWS CloudFormation
10 272 (5.66%) AWS Lambda
11 256 (5.33%) Amazon S3
12 239 (4.97%) Azure Data Factory
13 218 (4.54%) Amazon EKS
14 214 (4.45%) Azure AKS
14 214 (4.45%) Entra ID
15 197 (4.10%) OpenShift
16 184 (3.83%) Azure Monitor
17 177 (3.68%) Dynamics 365
18 162 (3.37%) Amazon ECS
19 159 (3.31%) Azure Functions
Communications & Networking
1 210 (4.37%) Firewall
2 108 (2.25%) DNS
3 93 (1.94%) Network Security
4 85 (1.77%) VPN
5 45 (0.94%) TCP/IP
6 28 (0.58%) HTTP
7 25 (0.52%) WAN
8 24 (0.50%) SSL
9 23 (0.48%) SD-WAN
10 20 (0.42%) DHCP
11 18 (0.37%) SAN
12 17 (0.35%) HTTPS
13 16 (0.33%) BGP
14 15 (0.31%) MPLS
15 14 (0.29%) IPsec
16 13 (0.27%) Internet
16 13 (0.27%) Reverse Proxy
17 11 (0.23%) LAN
18 10 (0.21%) Kerberos
18 10 (0.21%) OpenVPN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 280 (5.83%) PostgreSQL
2 250 (5.20%) Power BI
3 210 (4.37%) SQL Server
4 187 (3.89%) NoSQL
5 165 (3.43%) Data Lake
6 132 (2.75%) Relational Database
7 125 (2.60%) Amazon RDS
8 122 (2.54%) Data Warehouse
9 118 (2.46%) MongoDB
10 112 (2.33%) Azure SQL Database
11 85 (1.77%) DynamoDB
12 76 (1.58%) Delta Lake
13 74 (1.54%) Oracle Database
14 73 (1.52%) Elasticsearch
15 69 (1.44%) MySQL
16 68 (1.42%) Metadata
17 64 (1.33%) Big Data
18 58 (1.21%) Redis
19 56 (1.17%) Amazon Athena
20 55 (1.14%) Tableau
Development Applications
1 791 (16.46%) Jenkins
2 645 (13.42%) Git
3 631 (13.13%) JIRA
4 564 (11.74%) GitLab
5 147 (3.06%) Selenium
6 112 (2.33%) JUnit
7 100 (2.08%) Postman
8 81 (1.69%) Bitbucket
9 69 (1.44%) Cucumber
10 68 (1.42%) SonarQube
11 60 (1.25%) Cypress.io
12 57 (1.19%) JMeter
13 50 (1.04%) Artifactory
13 50 (1.04%) REST Assured
14 48 (1.00%) Sonatype Nexus
15 46 (0.96%) Maven
16 39 (0.81%) Visual Studio
17 35 (0.73%) Oracle APEX
18 34 (0.71%) Mockito
19 32 (0.67%) Gradle
General
1 1,338 (27.85%) Social Skills
2 889 (18.50%) Finance
3 639 (13.30%) Public Sector
4 404 (8.41%) Analytical Skills
5 351 (7.30%) Banking
6 161 (3.35%) Documentation Skills
7 79 (1.64%) Influencing Skills
8 64 (1.33%) Financial Institution
9 62 (1.29%) Retail
10 60 (1.25%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 54 (1.12%) Marketing
12 48 (1.00%) Front Office
13 44 (0.92%) Investment Banking
13 44 (0.92%) Presentation Skills
14 43 (0.89%) Organisational Skills
15 40 (0.83%) Legal
15 40 (0.83%) Telecoms
16 34 (0.71%) Military
17 31 (0.65%) Pharmaceutical
18 27 (0.56%) Manufacturing
Job Titles
1 884 (18.40%) DevOps Engineer
2 796 (16.57%) Developer
3 660 (13.74%) Senior
4 522 (10.86%) Architect
5 407 (8.47%) Lead
6 299 (6.22%) Azure Engineer
7 281 (5.85%) Data Engineer
8 257 (5.35%) Analyst
9 253 (5.27%) AWS Engineer
10 199 (4.14%) AWS DevOps
11 184 (3.83%) Cloud Engineer
12 174 (3.62%) AWS DevOps Engineer
13 165 (3.43%) Platform Engineer
14 154 (3.20%) Software Engineer
15 144 (3.00%) Solutions Architect
16 143 (2.98%) Senior Developer
17 136 (2.83%) Azure DevOps Engineer
18 130 (2.71%) Senior DevOps
19 126 (2.62%) Business Analyst
20 122 (2.54%) Full-Stack Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 536 (11.16%) REST
2 429 (8.93%) .NET
3 318 (6.62%) Node.js
4 315 (6.56%) React
5 269 (5.60%) Spring
6 267 (5.56%) Kafka
7 263 (5.47%) RESTful
8 242 (5.04%) Spring Boot
9 190 (3.95%) AngularJS
10 163 (3.39%) JSON
11 154 (3.20%) OAuth
12 141 (2.93%) HTML
13 140 (2.91%) PySpark
14 137 (2.85%) YAML
15 132 (2.75%) SOAP
16 131 (2.73%) Playwright
17 127 (2.64%) Elastic Stack
18 117 (2.43%) CSS
19 114 (2.37%) XML
20 109 (2.27%) Middleware
Miscellaneous
1 717 (14.92%) Cloud Native
2 274 (5.70%) Product Ownership
3 172 (3.58%) Distributed Systems
4 126 (2.62%) Public Cloud
5 125 (2.60%) Onboarding
6 108 (2.25%) Legacy Systems
7 98 (2.04%) Hybrid Cloud
8 79 (1.64%) Enterprise Software
9 62 (1.29%) Data Protection Act
10 57 (1.19%) Management Information System
10 57 (1.19%) Virtual Team
11 54 (1.12%) Data Centre
12 46 (0.96%) NHS
12 46 (0.96%) Self-Motivation
13 44 (0.92%) Private Cloud
13 44 (0.92%) Security Posture
14 43 (0.89%) AI Agents
15 42 (0.87%) Greenfield Project
16 41 (0.85%) Data Structures
17 38 (0.79%) Low-Code
Operating Systems
1 478 (9.95%) Linux
2 251 (5.22%) Windows
3 92 (1.91%) Unix
4 66 (1.37%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 47 (0.98%) Windows Server
6 43 (0.89%) VMS
7 23 (0.48%) Ubuntu
8 15 (0.31%) CentOS
9 11 (0.23%) Android
10 10 (0.21%) Windows 10
11 9 (0.19%) Apple iOS
12 7 (0.15%) Windows Server 2016
12 7 (0.15%) Windows Server 2019
13 5 (0.10%) Solaris
13 5 (0.10%) Windows Server 2012
14 4 (0.083%) Mac OS
15 2 (0.042%) Debian
15 2 (0.042%) Rocky
15 2 (0.042%) Windows Server 2008
15 2 (0.042%) zOS
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,766 (57.57%) CI/CD
2 1,850 (38.50%) Agile
3 1,229 (25.58%) Infrastructure as Code
4 884 (18.40%) Problem-Solving
5 877 (18.25%) Containerisation
6 728 (15.15%) Test Automation
7 727 (15.13%) Microservices
8 620 (12.90%) Analytics
9 614 (12.78%) Continuous Improvement
10 574 (11.95%) Migration
11 538 (11.20%) Scrum
12 530 (11.03%) Observability
13 513 (10.68%) AI
14 493 (10.26%) Stakeholder Management
15 427 (8.89%) Data Modelling
16 420 (8.74%) Software Engineering
17 385 (8.01%) Mentoring
18 354 (7.37%) Data Pipeline
19 339 (7.06%) Platform Engineering
20 329 (6.85%) ETL
Programming Languages
1 1,469 (30.57%) Python
2 1,014 (21.10%) SQL
3 632 (13.15%) Java
4 501 (10.43%) C#
5 456 (9.49%) JavaScript
6 379 (7.89%) PowerShell
7 345 (7.18%) Bash
8 310 (6.45%) TypeScript
9 159 (3.31%) Bicep
10 132 (2.75%) Go
11 81 (1.69%) PL/SQL
12 68 (1.42%) Scala
13 54 (1.12%) Shell Script
14 49 (1.02%) C++
14 49 (1.02%) T-SQL
15 48 (1.00%) Ruby
16 37 (0.77%) Groovy
17 31 (0.65%) Perl
18 30 (0.62%) Rust
19 28 (0.58%) Kusto Query Language
Qualifications
1 1,500 (31.22%) Security Cleared
2 1,227 (25.54%) SC Cleared
3 382 (7.95%) Degree
4 210 (4.37%) Azure Certification
5 189 (3.93%) Computer Science Degree
6 152 (3.16%) AWS Certification
7 150 (3.12%) DV Cleared
8 130 (2.71%) BPSS Clearance
9 83 (1.73%) CISSP
10 80 (1.66%) Master's Degree
11 63 (1.31%) ISTQB
12 62 (1.29%) CISM
13 61 (1.27%) Microsoft Certification
14 56 (1.17%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
15 46 (0.96%) PMI Certification
16 36 (0.75%) Cisco Certification
16 36 (0.75%) PMP
17 33 (0.69%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
18 29 (0.60%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
19 26 (0.54%) TOGAF Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 421 (8.76%) QA
2 202 (4.20%) Data Quality
3 187 (3.89%) GDPR
4 155 (3.23%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 127 (2.64%) Accessibility
6 125 (2.60%) NIST
7 72 (1.50%) NCSC
8 41 (0.85%) PCI DSS
9 37 (0.77%) WCAG
10 33 (0.69%) PMO
11 27 (0.56%) Sarbanes-Oxley
11 27 (0.56%) SLA
12 25 (0.52%) HIPAA
13 16 (0.33%) HMG Security Policy Framework
13 16 (0.33%) SOC 2
14 15 (0.31%) ISO 20022
15 13 (0.27%) PSD2
16 12 (0.25%) NIST 800
17 11 (0.23%) Disclosure Scotland
17 11 (0.23%) GRC
System Software
1 1,093 (22.75%) Docker
2 177 (3.68%) Active Directory
3 80 (1.66%) Virtual Machines
4 69 (1.44%) VMware Infrastructure
5 41 (0.85%) vSphere
6 28 (0.58%) VMware NSX
7 15 (0.31%) Virtual Desktop
8 13 (0.27%) Slurm Workload Manager
9 12 (0.25%) Hyper-V
10 11 (0.23%) Lustre
11 9 (0.19%) GPFS
11 9 (0.19%) Squid
12 8 (0.17%) Firmware
12 8 (0.17%) Virtual Servers
13 7 (0.15%) Postfix
14 6 (0.12%) HDFS
15 5 (0.10%) KVM
15 5 (0.10%) NFS
15 5 (0.10%) RACF
15 5 (0.10%) VMware ESXi
Systems Management
1 1,434 (29.84%) Terraform
2 1,329 (27.66%) Kubernetes
3 498 (10.36%) Ansible
4 339 (7.06%) Grafana
5 278 (5.79%) Prometheus
6 101 (2.10%) Argo
7 73 (1.52%) Puppet
8 61 (1.27%) Single Sign-On
9 58 (1.21%) Istio
10 31 (0.65%) Packer
11 28 (0.58%) Progress Chef
12 27 (0.56%) Kibana
13 24 (0.50%) vCenter Server
14 21 (0.44%) Podman
15 20 (0.42%) HP ALM
16 19 (0.40%) Rancher
17 18 (0.37%) Active Directory Federation Services
17 18 (0.37%) Microsoft Intune
18 17 (0.35%) Consul
19 16 (0.33%) FortiGate
Vendors
1 826 (17.19%) Microsoft
2 308 (6.41%) Oracle
3 295 (6.14%) Databricks
4 268 (5.58%) Google
5 199 (4.14%) Splunk
6 161 (3.35%) ServiceNow
7 141 (2.93%) Red Hat
8 120 (2.50%) VMware
9 118 (2.46%) Salesforce
10 110 (2.29%) SAP
11 85 (1.77%) OpenAI
12 69 (1.44%) Dynatrace
13 67 (1.39%) Atlassian
14 59 (1.23%) CyberArk
15 43 (0.89%) IBM
16 38 (0.79%) Cisco
16 38 (0.79%) Talend
17 35 (0.73%) Foundry
18 34 (0.71%) Denodo
19 28 (0.58%) MuleSoft