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

6 months to
13 Mar 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 12 15 16
Rank change year-on-year +3 +1 -4
Contract jobs citing DevOps 4,776 3,161 3,921
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 11.15% 10.73% 8.80%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.96% 11.87% 10.16%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,326 2,283 2,771
10th Percentile £375 £395 £405
25th Percentile £431 £454 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £520 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -5.45% - -6.38%
75th Percentile £606 £656 £650
90th Percentile £700 £750 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £525 £525
% change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 80 25 98
10th Percentile £39.53 £32.45 £46.58
25th Percentile £45.46 £59.39 £60.31
Median hourly rate £66.25 £74.44 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year -11.00% +14.52% -0.76%
75th Percentile £77.50 £80.75 £68.94
90th Percentile £93.75 £87.50 £84.77
UK excluding London median hourly rate £58.50 £73.23 £65.00
% change year-on-year -20.11% +12.65% -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 36,854 26,627 38,581
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 86.05% 90.37% 86.59%
Number of daily rates quoted 23,339 16,995 25,088
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 £613 £638 £638
90th Percentile £725 £744 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £480 £490 £500
% change year-on-year -2.04% -2.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,197 898 2,338
10th Percentile £14.82 £15.48 £13.00
25th Percentile £18.50 £21.00 £16.06
Median hourly rate £30.00 £32.50 £32.50
Median % change year-on-year -7.69% - -7.14%
75th Percentile £65.00 £65.00 £57.50
90th Percentile £75.00 £77.50 £70.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £27.36 £32.50 £31.50
% change year-on-year -15.82% +3.17% -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 13 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 13 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 13 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 4,080 £525 -6.25% 1,444
UK excluding London +8 2,114 £500 -4.76% 1,132
London -2 2,057 £545 -6.84% 564
Work from Home -3 1,329 £525 -2.23% 810
North of England +5 733 £500 -4.76% 327
South East -1 437 £524 -8.91% 344
Midlands +14 408 £500 +2.04% 147
Yorkshire +2 386 £500 -4.76% 108
West Midlands +13 330 £500 +1.52% 98
North West +2 292 £500 -4.76% 173
South West +14 270 £525 -12.50% 144
Scotland +5 173 £450 - 73
East of England +16 115 £575 +13.30% 72
East Midlands +3 76 £438 -7.89% 49
North East +1 60 £475 -9.52% 48
Wales +13 43 £425 +89.47% 31
Northern Ireland -4 11 £475 +18.75% 8

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
1 290 (6.07%) Confluence
2 116 (2.43%) Apache Spark
3 94 (1.97%) SharePoint
4 91 (1.91%) Apache
5 83 (1.74%) SAS
6 64 (1.34%) Apache Airflow
7 34 (0.71%) OpenStack
8 32 (0.67%) CMS
9 31 (0.65%) nginx
10 28 (0.59%) Microsoft Exchange
11 23 (0.48%) IIS
12 15 (0.31%) Mendix
13 13 (0.27%) WebLogic
14 12 (0.25%) Sitecore CMS
15 11 (0.23%) Adobe Experience Manager
15 11 (0.23%) HCL Notes
16 10 (0.21%) Camunda
16 10 (0.21%) JBoss
17 9 (0.19%) Palantir Foundry
18 8 (0.17%) GeoServer
Applications
1 92 (1.93%) Microsoft Excel
2 66 (1.38%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 44 (0.92%) Microsoft Project
4 30 (0.63%) Microsoft Office
5 22 (0.46%) MS Visio
6 13 (0.27%) Chatbot
7 8 (0.17%) Weka
8 4 (0.084%) 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 (1.55%) Dynamics CRM
2 16 (0.34%) SAP S/4HANA
3 13 (0.27%) Oracle ERP
4 12 (0.25%) Aladdin
5 11 (0.23%) Maximo
6 8 (0.17%) Dynamics AX
6 8 (0.17%) NEC Housing
7 6 (0.13%) Endur
7 6 (0.13%) Remedy ITSM
7 6 (0.13%) SAP ERP
8 5 (0.10%) Oracle EBS
8 5 (0.10%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
9 4 (0.084%) Payment Gateway
10 3 (0.063%) NetSuite
10 3 (0.063%) Salesforce CRM
10 3 (0.063%) SAP BPC
10 3 (0.063%) SAP CO
10 3 (0.063%) SAP FI
10 3 (0.063%) SAP FI/CO
10 3 (0.063%) Workday HCM
Cloud Services
1 2,525 (52.87%) Azure
2 1,681 (35.20%) AWS
3 1,378 (28.85%) Azure DevOps
4 902 (18.89%) GitHub
5 679 (14.22%) GCP
6 561 (11.75%) Serverless
7 497 (10.41%) GitHub Actions
8 404 (8.46%) Power Platform
9 295 (6.18%) AWS CloudFormation
10 270 (5.65%) AWS Lambda
11 253 (5.30%) Amazon S3
12 237 (4.96%) Azure Data Factory
13 216 (4.52%) Amazon EKS
13 216 (4.52%) Azure AKS
14 210 (4.40%) Entra ID
15 197 (4.12%) OpenShift
16 183 (3.83%) Azure Monitor
17 177 (3.71%) Dynamics 365
18 161 (3.37%) Amazon ECS
19 158 (3.31%) Azure Functions
Communications & Networking
1 206 (4.31%) Firewall
2 108 (2.26%) DNS
3 91 (1.91%) Network Security
4 85 (1.78%) VPN
5 45 (0.94%) TCP/IP
6 28 (0.59%) HTTP
7 25 (0.52%) WAN
8 24 (0.50%) SSL
9 23 (0.48%) SD-WAN
10 20 (0.42%) DHCP
11 18 (0.38%) SAN
12 17 (0.36%) HTTPS
13 16 (0.34%) BGP
14 15 (0.31%) MPLS
15 13 (0.27%) Internet
15 13 (0.27%) IPsec
15 13 (0.27%) Reverse Proxy
16 11 (0.23%) Kerberos
16 11 (0.23%) LAN
17 10 (0.21%) OpenVPN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 276 (5.78%) PostgreSQL
2 250 (5.23%) Power BI
3 209 (4.38%) SQL Server
4 187 (3.92%) NoSQL
5 163 (3.41%) Data Lake
6 130 (2.72%) Relational Database
7 122 (2.55%) Amazon RDS
8 121 (2.53%) Data Warehouse
9 117 (2.45%) MongoDB
10 110 (2.30%) Azure SQL Database
11 85 (1.78%) DynamoDB
12 75 (1.57%) Delta Lake
12 75 (1.57%) Oracle Database
13 72 (1.51%) Elasticsearch
14 70 (1.47%) Metadata
15 68 (1.42%) MySQL
16 64 (1.34%) Big Data
17 58 (1.21%) Redis
18 56 (1.17%) Amazon Athena
19 55 (1.15%) Tableau
Development Applications
1 786 (16.46%) Jenkins
2 640 (13.40%) Git
3 624 (13.07%) JIRA
4 564 (11.81%) GitLab
5 146 (3.06%) Selenium
6 109 (2.28%) JUnit
7 97 (2.03%) Postman
8 81 (1.70%) Bitbucket
9 68 (1.42%) Cucumber
10 65 (1.36%) SonarQube
11 58 (1.21%) Cypress.io
12 55 (1.15%) JMeter
13 49 (1.03%) Artifactory
13 49 (1.03%) Sonatype Nexus
14 47 (0.98%) Maven
14 47 (0.98%) REST Assured
15 39 (0.82%) Visual Studio
16 35 (0.73%) Oracle APEX
17 33 (0.69%) Mockito
18 32 (0.67%) Gradle
General
1 1,333 (27.91%) Social Skills
2 884 (18.51%) Finance
3 635 (13.30%) Public Sector
4 404 (8.46%) Analytical Skills
5 349 (7.31%) Banking
6 160 (3.35%) Documentation Skills
7 79 (1.65%) Influencing Skills
8 65 (1.36%) Financial Institution
9 61 (1.28%) Retail
10 59 (1.24%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 55 (1.15%) Marketing
12 47 (0.98%) Front Office
13 44 (0.92%) Presentation Skills
14 43 (0.90%) Investment Banking
14 43 (0.90%) Organisational Skills
15 40 (0.84%) Legal
15 40 (0.84%) Telecoms
16 34 (0.71%) Military
17 33 (0.69%) Pharmaceutical
18 26 (0.54%) Manufacturing
Job Titles
1 884 (18.51%) DevOps Engineer
2 793 (16.60%) Developer
3 655 (13.71%) Senior
4 519 (10.87%) Architect
5 397 (8.31%) Lead
6 299 (6.26%) Azure Engineer
7 279 (5.84%) Data Engineer
8 258 (5.40%) Analyst
9 251 (5.26%) AWS Engineer
10 199 (4.17%) AWS DevOps
11 181 (3.79%) Cloud Engineer
12 174 (3.64%) AWS DevOps Engineer
13 162 (3.39%) Platform Engineer
14 155 (3.25%) Software Engineer
15 143 (2.99%) Solutions Architect
16 141 (2.95%) Senior Developer
17 139 (2.91%) Azure DevOps Engineer
18 129 (2.70%) Senior DevOps
19 127 (2.66%) Business Analyst
20 122 (2.55%) Full-Stack Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 530 (11.10%) REST
2 427 (8.94%) .NET
3 315 (6.60%) Node.js
4 313 (6.55%) React
5 265 (5.55%) Kafka
5 265 (5.55%) Spring
6 263 (5.51%) RESTful
7 238 (4.98%) Spring Boot
8 189 (3.96%) AngularJS
9 163 (3.41%) JSON
10 153 (3.20%) OAuth
11 142 (2.97%) HTML
12 139 (2.91%) PySpark
13 137 (2.87%) YAML
14 132 (2.76%) SOAP
15 129 (2.70%) Playwright
16 128 (2.68%) Elastic Stack
17 117 (2.45%) CSS
18 114 (2.39%) XML
19 109 (2.28%) Middleware
Miscellaneous
1 716 (14.99%) Cloud Native
2 271 (5.67%) Product Ownership
3 173 (3.62%) Distributed Systems
4 127 (2.66%) Onboarding
5 125 (2.62%) Public Cloud
6 108 (2.26%) Legacy Systems
7 97 (2.03%) Hybrid Cloud
8 77 (1.61%) Enterprise Software
9 60 (1.26%) Data Protection Act
10 56 (1.17%) Management Information System
10 56 (1.17%) Virtual Team
11 52 (1.09%) Data Centre
12 47 (0.98%) NHS
13 46 (0.96%) Security Posture
14 44 (0.92%) AI Agents
14 44 (0.92%) Private Cloud
14 44 (0.92%) Self-Motivation
15 41 (0.86%) Data Structures
15 41 (0.86%) Greenfield Project
16 38 (0.80%) Low-Code
Operating Systems
1 477 (9.99%) Linux
2 250 (5.23%) Windows
3 95 (1.99%) Unix
4 65 (1.36%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 48 (1.01%) Windows Server
6 42 (0.88%) 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 6 (0.13%) Solaris
14 5 (0.10%) Windows Server 2012
15 4 (0.084%) Mac OS
16 2 (0.042%) Debian
16 2 (0.042%) Rocky
16 2 (0.042%) Windows Server 2008
16 2 (0.042%) zOS
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,744 (57.45%) CI/CD
2 1,848 (38.69%) Agile
3 1,220 (25.54%) Infrastructure as Code
4 882 (18.47%) Problem-Solving
5 875 (18.32%) Containerisation
6 726 (15.20%) Microservices
7 720 (15.08%) Test Automation
8 616 (12.90%) Analytics
9 613 (12.84%) Continuous Improvement
10 574 (12.02%) Migration
11 533 (11.16%) Scrum
12 526 (11.01%) Observability
13 513 (10.74%) AI
14 489 (10.24%) Stakeholder Management
15 427 (8.94%) Data Modelling
16 422 (8.84%) Software Engineering
17 385 (8.06%) Mentoring
18 351 (7.35%) Data Pipeline
19 336 (7.04%) Platform Engineering
20 326 (6.83%) ETL
Programming Languages
1 1,460 (30.57%) Python
2 1,006 (21.06%) SQL
3 624 (13.07%) Java
4 499 (10.45%) C#
5 455 (9.53%) JavaScript
6 376 (7.87%) PowerShell
7 342 (7.16%) Bash
8 309 (6.47%) TypeScript
9 156 (3.27%) Bicep
10 133 (2.78%) Go
11 81 (1.70%) PL/SQL
12 68 (1.42%) Scala
13 55 (1.15%) Shell Script
14 49 (1.03%) C++
14 49 (1.03%) T-SQL
15 48 (1.01%) Ruby
16 37 (0.77%) Groovy
17 31 (0.65%) Perl
18 30 (0.63%) Rust
19 28 (0.59%) Kusto Query Language
Qualifications
1 1,494 (31.28%) Security Cleared
2 1,225 (25.65%) SC Cleared
3 384 (8.04%) Degree
4 212 (4.44%) Azure Certification
5 191 (4.00%) Computer Science Degree
6 154 (3.22%) AWS Certification
7 148 (3.10%) DV Cleared
8 130 (2.72%) BPSS Clearance
9 81 (1.70%) CISSP
9 81 (1.70%) Master's Degree
10 63 (1.32%) ISTQB
11 61 (1.28%) Microsoft Certification
12 60 (1.26%) CISM
13 56 (1.17%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
14 46 (0.96%) PMI Certification
15 36 (0.75%) Cisco Certification
15 36 (0.75%) PMP
16 33 (0.69%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
17 29 (0.61%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
18 27 (0.57%) TOGAF Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 420 (8.79%) QA
2 200 (4.19%) Data Quality
3 186 (3.89%) GDPR
4 149 (3.12%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 127 (2.66%) Accessibility
6 120 (2.51%) NIST
7 70 (1.47%) NCSC
8 41 (0.86%) PCI DSS
9 36 (0.75%) WCAG
10 33 (0.69%) PMO
11 27 (0.57%) Sarbanes-Oxley
11 27 (0.57%) SLA
12 25 (0.52%) HIPAA
13 16 (0.34%) HMG Security Policy Framework
13 16 (0.34%) 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 1,088 (22.78%) Docker
2 175 (3.66%) Active Directory
3 78 (1.63%) Virtual Machines
4 69 (1.44%) VMware Infrastructure
5 41 (0.86%) vSphere
6 28 (0.59%) 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 (0.13%) 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 1,424 (29.82%) Terraform
2 1,323 (27.70%) Kubernetes
3 495 (10.36%) Ansible
4 337 (7.06%) Grafana
5 276 (5.78%) Prometheus
6 100 (2.09%) Argo
7 74 (1.55%) Puppet
8 59 (1.24%) Single Sign-On
9 56 (1.17%) Istio
10 31 (0.65%) Packer
11 29 (0.61%) Progress Chef
12 27 (0.57%) Kibana
13 24 (0.50%) vCenter Server
14 21 (0.44%) Podman
15 20 (0.42%) HP ALM
16 18 (0.38%) Active Directory Federation Services
16 18 (0.38%) Microsoft Intune
16 18 (0.38%) Rancher
17 17 (0.36%) Consul
18 16 (0.34%) FortiGate
Vendors
1 825 (17.27%) Microsoft
2 307 (6.43%) Oracle
3 295 (6.18%) Databricks
4 266 (5.57%) Google
5 200 (4.19%) Splunk
6 161 (3.37%) ServiceNow
7 139 (2.91%) Red Hat
8 120 (2.51%) VMware
9 115 (2.41%) Salesforce
10 111 (2.32%) SAP
11 85 (1.78%) OpenAI
12 68 (1.42%) Dynatrace
13 67 (1.40%) Atlassian
14 58 (1.21%) CyberArk
15 43 (0.90%) IBM
16 38 (0.80%) Cisco
16 38 (0.80%) Talend
17 35 (0.73%) Foundry
18 34 (0.71%) Denodo
19 29 (0.61%) MuleSoft