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 7 December 2025, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
7 Dec 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 12 14 15
Rank change year-on-year +2 +1 -5
Contract jobs citing DevOps 4,181 3,608 4,327
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 11.52% 10.10% 9.51%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.97% 11.55% 10.74%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,931 2,446 3,163
10th Percentile £363 £380 £406
25th Percentile £425 £463 £474
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £523 £550 £563
Median % change year-on-year -5.04% -2.18% -6.25%
75th Percentile £615 £663 £663
90th Percentile £700 £746 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £540 £550
% change year-on-year -7.41% -1.82% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 46 33 88
10th Percentile - £39.05 £46.18
25th Percentile £45.46 £46.18 £49.05
Median hourly rate £59.25 £70.00 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year -15.36% +7.69% -0.92%
75th Percentile £82.50 £77.50 £70.47
90th Percentile £95.00 £80.75 £78.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £56.75 £70.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year -18.93% +7.69% -0.92%

All Process and 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 32,247 31,236 40,271
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 88.88% 87.47% 88.55%
Number of daily rates quoted 20,285 18,990 26,947
10th Percentile £300 £308 £310
25th Percentile £405 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £533
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% -1.50% -3.09%
75th Percentile £619 £638 £650
90th Percentile £725 £738 £745
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £500 £500
% change year-on-year -5.00% - -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,090 1,084 1,559
10th Percentile £14.50 £15.25 £14.36
25th Percentile £17.50 £20.19 £18.94
Median hourly rate £25.13 £33.00 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year -23.86% -22.35% +21.43%
75th Percentile £45.46 £63.75 £65.00
90th Percentile £67.50 £74.00 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £22.63 £32.50 £42.50
% change year-on-year -30.37% -23.53% +30.77%

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 7 December 2025.

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 7 December 2025.

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 7 December 2025. 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 3,551 £525 -8.70% 1,657
UK excluding London +4 1,884 £500 -7.41% 1,462
London 0 1,782 £550 -5.98% 531
Work from Home 0 1,293 £525 -2.78% 1,193
North of England +2 621 £487 -6.35% 358
Midlands +16 372 £515 -1.81% 175
South East 0 363 £513 -14.58% 506
Yorkshire 0 325 £500 - 138
West Midlands +15 303 £525 - 110
North West +6 261 £453 -13.71% 171
South West +2 224 £538 -10.42% 188
Scotland +7 207 £475 +5.56% 84
East of England +26 110 £523 -9.13% 130
East Midlands +21 69 £420 -11.58% 59
Wales +6 44 £410 +9.33% 45
North East -8 37 £518 -10.00% 51
Northern Ireland -5 7 - - 9

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
1 259 (6.19%) Confluence
2 89 (2.13%) Apache
3 74 (1.77%) SharePoint
4 70 (1.67%) Apache Airflow
5 64 (1.53%) SAS
6 62 (1.48%) Apache Spark
7 36 (0.86%) CMS
8 34 (0.81%) nginx
9 30 (0.72%) IIS
10 28 (0.67%) OpenStack
10 28 (0.67%) WebLogic
11 24 (0.57%) JBoss
12 21 (0.50%) CICS
12 21 (0.50%) Microsoft Exchange
13 15 (0.36%) Anypoint
13 15 (0.36%) Mule
13 15 (0.36%) WebSphere
14 14 (0.33%) Oracle SOA Suite
15 10 (0.24%) Oracle Service Bus
15 10 (0.24%) WebSphere Application Server
Applications
1 70 (1.67%) Microsoft Excel
2 41 (0.98%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 35 (0.84%) Microsoft Project
4 33 (0.79%) Microsoft Office
5 19 (0.45%) MS Visio
6 16 (0.38%) Chatbot
7 11 (0.26%) Mozilla Thunderbird
8 9 (0.22%) Trello
9 8 (0.19%) Weka
10 1 (0.024%) Adobe Creative Suite
10 1 (0.024%) Moqups
10 1 (0.024%) Revit
Business Applications
1 60 (1.44%) Dynamics CRM
2 18 (0.43%) SAP S/4HANA
3 17 (0.41%) Aladdin
3 17 (0.41%) Endur
3 17 (0.41%) Oracle BPM
4 15 (0.36%) Remedy ITSM
5 14 (0.33%) VisionPLUS
6 8 (0.19%) Maximo
7 7 (0.17%) Dynamics AX
8 6 (0.14%) NEC Housing
9 5 (0.12%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
10 4 (0.096%) Fidessa
10 4 (0.096%) NetSuite
10 4 (0.096%) SAP CO
10 4 (0.096%) SAP ERP
10 4 (0.096%) SAP FI
10 4 (0.096%) SAP FI/CO
10 4 (0.096%) Teamcenter
10 4 (0.096%) thinkFolio
10 4 (0.096%) Workday HCM
Cloud Services
1 2,041 (48.82%) Azure
2 1,573 (37.62%) AWS
3 1,110 (26.55%) Azure DevOps
4 733 (17.53%) GitHub
5 594 (14.21%) GCP
6 493 (11.79%) Serverless
7 433 (10.36%) GitHub Actions
8 286 (6.84%) Power Platform
9 277 (6.63%) AWS CloudFormation
10 271 (6.48%) AWS Lambda
11 269 (6.43%) Amazon S3
12 215 (5.14%) Amazon CloudWatch
13 195 (4.66%) Amazon EC2
14 189 (4.52%) Azure AKS
15 185 (4.42%) Amazon EKS
16 170 (4.07%) Amazon ECS
17 169 (4.04%) Azure Data Factory
18 158 (3.78%) OpenShift
18 158 (3.78%) SaaS
19 152 (3.64%) Entra ID
Communications & Networking
1 192 (4.59%) Firewall
2 126 (3.01%) DNS
3 88 (2.10%) VPN
4 69 (1.65%) Network Security
5 66 (1.58%) SSL
6 59 (1.41%) TCP/IP
7 52 (1.24%) HTTP
8 35 (0.84%) HTTPS
9 29 (0.69%) SSH
10 27 (0.65%) WAN
11 26 (0.62%) SMTP
12 22 (0.53%) FTP
13 20 (0.48%) BGP
14 17 (0.41%) MPLS
15 16 (0.38%) Kerberos
16 15 (0.36%) OpenLDAP
17 14 (0.33%) DHCP
17 14 (0.33%) LAN
17 14 (0.33%) SD-WAN
18 12 (0.29%) Internet
Database & Business Intelligence
1 272 (6.51%) PostgreSQL
2 179 (4.28%) Power BI
3 172 (4.11%) NoSQL
4 163 (3.90%) Amazon RDS
5 150 (3.59%) SQL Server
6 122 (2.92%) MongoDB
7 103 (2.46%) Relational Database
8 99 (2.37%) Data Warehouse
9 91 (2.18%) Data Lake
10 86 (2.06%) Oracle Database
11 71 (1.70%) Azure SQL Database
12 67 (1.60%) DynamoDB
13 64 (1.53%) MySQL
14 57 (1.36%) Redis
15 54 (1.29%) Amazon Aurora
15 54 (1.29%) Elasticsearch
16 47 (1.12%) Metadata
17 43 (1.03%) Big Data
17 43 (1.03%) Delta Lake
18 40 (0.96%) Amazon Athena
Development Applications
1 808 (19.33%) Jenkins
2 670 (16.02%) Git
3 609 (14.57%) JIRA
4 553 (13.23%) GitLab
5 144 (3.44%) Selenium
6 102 (2.44%) JUnit
7 99 (2.37%) SonarQube
8 90 (2.15%) Bitbucket
8 90 (2.15%) Sonatype Nexus
9 81 (1.94%) Postman
10 68 (1.63%) Cypress.io
11 62 (1.48%) Cucumber
12 58 (1.39%) Liquibase
13 47 (1.12%) Maven
14 46 (1.10%) JMeter
15 44 (1.05%) Artifactory
15 44 (1.05%) Gradle
16 41 (0.98%) CircleCI
17 39 (0.93%) Oracle APEX
18 37 (0.88%) Visual Studio
General
1 1,303 (31.16%) Social Skills
2 771 (18.44%) Finance
3 539 (12.89%) Public Sector
4 356 (8.51%) Banking
5 334 (7.99%) Analytical Skills
6 125 (2.99%) Documentation Skills
7 72 (1.72%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 68 (1.63%) Financial Institution
9 63 (1.51%) Investment Banking
9 63 (1.51%) Marketing
10 55 (1.32%) Influencing Skills
11 53 (1.27%) Telecoms
12 51 (1.22%) Retail
13 47 (1.12%) Front Office
14 44 (1.05%) Presentation Skills
15 34 (0.81%) Back Office
16 31 (0.74%) Pharmaceutical
17 30 (0.72%) Military
18 27 (0.65%) Manufacturing
19 26 (0.62%) Organisational Skills
Job Titles
1 799 (19.11%) Developer
2 786 (18.80%) DevOps Engineer
3 569 (13.61%) Senior
4 355 (8.49%) Architect
5 308 (7.37%) Lead
6 261 (6.24%) AWS Engineer
7 211 (5.05%) Azure Engineer
8 198 (4.74%) AWS DevOps
9 197 (4.71%) Data Engineer
10 190 (4.54%) Analyst
11 169 (4.04%) AWS DevOps Engineer
12 161 (3.85%) Senior Developer
13 158 (3.78%) Software Engineer
14 150 (3.59%) Cloud Engineer
15 147 (3.52%) Platform Engineer
16 130 (3.11%) Java Developer
17 123 (2.94%) Consultant
18 113 (2.70%) Senior DevOps
19 104 (2.49%) Solutions Architect
20 102 (2.44%) Senior DevOps Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 468 (11.19%) REST
2 363 (8.68%) .NET
3 307 (7.34%) RESTful
4 258 (6.17%) Node.js
5 255 (6.10%) React
6 245 (5.86%) Kafka
7 218 (5.21%) JSON
8 199 (4.76%) Spring
9 187 (4.47%) Spring Boot
10 179 (4.28%) SOAP
11 159 (3.80%) HTML
12 158 (3.78%) Elastic Stack
12 158 (3.78%) OAuth
13 152 (3.64%) AngularJS
14 149 (3.56%) XML
15 110 (2.63%) CSS
15 110 (2.63%) YAML
16 90 (2.15%) Playwright
17 88 (2.10%) .NET Core
18 82 (1.96%) OAuth2
Miscellaneous
1 568 (13.59%) Cloud Native
2 237 (5.67%) Product Ownership
3 177 (4.23%) Distributed Systems
4 128 (3.06%) Onboarding
5 104 (2.49%) Legacy Systems
6 101 (2.42%) Public Cloud
7 79 (1.89%) Hybrid Cloud
8 71 (1.70%) Data Protection Act
9 67 (1.60%) Virtual Team
10 61 (1.46%) Mobile App
11 60 (1.44%) Replication
12 53 (1.27%) Enterprise Software
12 53 (1.27%) Greenfield Project
12 53 (1.27%) Security Posture
13 46 (1.10%) Data Centre
13 46 (1.10%) Management Information System
14 42 (1.00%) Self-Motivation
15 41 (0.98%) CMDB
16 40 (0.96%) NHS
17 38 (0.91%) Algorithms
Operating Systems
1 505 (12.08%) Linux
2 242 (5.79%) Windows
3 115 (2.75%) Unix
4 59 (1.41%) Windows Server
5 55 (1.32%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 48 (1.15%) VMS
7 47 (1.12%) Android
8 41 (0.98%) Apple iOS
9 26 (0.62%) Ubuntu
10 21 (0.50%) Amazon Linux
11 18 (0.43%) CentOS
12 16 (0.38%) Windows 10
13 12 (0.29%) Solaris
14 11 (0.26%) zOS
15 9 (0.22%) Mac OS
16 5 (0.12%) Windows Server 2016
16 5 (0.12%) Windows Server 2019
17 3 (0.072%) Debian
18 1 (0.024%) Mac OS X
18 1 (0.024%) SUSE
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,398 (57.35%) CI/CD
2 1,815 (43.41%) Agile
3 1,080 (25.83%) Infrastructure as Code
4 846 (20.23%) Containerisation
5 820 (19.61%) Problem-Solving
6 654 (15.64%) Test Automation
7 646 (15.45%) Microservices
8 528 (12.63%) Scrum
9 460 (11.00%) Migration
10 443 (10.60%) Continuous Improvement
11 415 (9.93%) Software Engineering
12 407 (9.73%) Analytics
13 384 (9.18%) AI
14 374 (8.95%) Observability
15 330 (7.89%) Stakeholder Management
16 308 (7.37%) Mentoring
17 293 (7.01%) SDLC
18 279 (6.67%) Infrastructure Automation
19 272 (6.51%) Stakeholder Engagement
20 270 (6.46%) DevSecOps
Programming Languages
1 1,340 (32.05%) Python
2 778 (18.61%) SQL
3 628 (15.02%) Java
4 432 (10.33%) JavaScript
5 411 (9.83%) C#
6 385 (9.21%) Bash
7 368 (8.80%) PowerShell
8 297 (7.10%) TypeScript
9 177 (4.23%) Go
10 115 (2.75%) Bicep
11 85 (2.03%) PL/SQL
12 72 (1.72%) Shell Script
13 62 (1.48%) Groovy
14 54 (1.29%) C++
15 53 (1.27%) Perl
16 51 (1.22%) Scala
17 47 (1.12%) Ruby
18 37 (0.88%) T-SQL
19 29 (0.69%) Kotlin
20 28 (0.67%) PHP
Qualifications
1 1,154 (27.60%) Security Cleared
2 957 (22.89%) SC Cleared
3 357 (8.54%) Degree
4 195 (4.66%) Computer Science Degree
5 158 (3.78%) Azure Certification
6 154 (3.68%) AWS Certification
7 131 (3.13%) DV Cleared
8 88 (2.10%) BPSS Clearance
9 85 (2.03%) Master's Degree
10 67 (1.60%) CISSP
11 64 (1.53%) Microsoft Certification
12 55 (1.32%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 44 (1.05%) CISM
14 41 (0.98%) ISTQB
15 38 (0.91%) Cisco Certification
16 34 (0.81%) PMI Certification
17 29 (0.69%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
18 28 (0.67%) PMP
19 17 (0.41%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
20 15 (0.36%) PRINCE2 Practitioner
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 394 (9.42%) QA
2 157 (3.76%) GDPR
3 139 (3.32%) ISO/IEC 27001
4 123 (2.94%) Accessibility
5 120 (2.87%) Data Quality
6 105 (2.51%) NIST
7 47 (1.12%) NCSC
8 38 (0.91%) PCI DSS
9 29 (0.69%) HIPAA
10 28 (0.67%) WCAG
11 21 (0.50%) PMO
12 20 (0.48%) Sarbanes-Oxley
13 18 (0.43%) SLA
13 18 (0.43%) SOC 2
14 15 (0.36%) MiFID
15 14 (0.33%) PSD2
16 13 (0.31%) ISO 20022
16 13 (0.31%) SEPA
17 11 (0.26%) EU AI Act
17 11 (0.26%) GRC
System Software
1 1,083 (25.90%) Docker
2 175 (4.19%) Active Directory
3 65 (1.55%) VMware Infrastructure
4 58 (1.39%) Virtual Machines
5 22 (0.53%) vSphere
6 20 (0.48%) DFS Replication
7 15 (0.36%) VMware NSX
8 12 (0.29%) Oracle RAC
8 12 (0.29%) Squid
9 11 (0.26%) Dovecot
9 11 (0.26%) Hyper-V
9 11 (0.26%) Postfix
9 11 (0.26%) Slurm Workload Manager
9 11 (0.26%) Virtual Desktop
9 11 (0.26%) Virtual Servers
10 9 (0.22%) Lustre
11 8 (0.19%) GPFS
11 8 (0.19%) NFS
11 8 (0.19%) Tivoli Directory Server
11 8 (0.19%) VMware ESXi
Systems Management
1 1,333 (31.88%) Terraform
2 1,249 (29.87%) Kubernetes
3 536 (12.82%) Ansible
4 329 (7.87%) Grafana
5 309 (7.39%) Prometheus
6 81 (1.94%) Argo
7 79 (1.89%) Puppet
8 66 (1.58%) Single Sign-On
9 63 (1.51%) Progress Chef
10 44 (1.05%) Kibana
11 38 (0.91%) Packer
12 31 (0.74%) Istio
13 22 (0.53%) Podman
14 18 (0.43%) ITRS Geneos
15 17 (0.41%) CA Endevor
15 17 (0.41%) Nessus
15 17 (0.41%) Proxmox
16 16 (0.38%) logstash
16 16 (0.38%) Rancher
16 16 (0.38%) SCCM
Vendors
1 688 (16.46%) Microsoft
2 309 (7.39%) Oracle
3 228 (5.45%) Google
4 207 (4.95%) Splunk
5 201 (4.81%) Databricks
6 179 (4.28%) ServiceNow
7 121 (2.89%) Salesforce
8 112 (2.68%) SAP
9 101 (2.42%) VMware
10 92 (2.20%) Red Hat
11 63 (1.51%) Dynatrace
12 54 (1.29%) IBM
13 52 (1.24%) OpenAI
14 48 (1.15%) F5
15 47 (1.12%) MuleSoft
16 44 (1.05%) Cisco
17 39 (0.93%) Palo Alto
18 38 (0.91%) Atlassian
19 37 (0.88%) Talend
20 35 (0.84%) CyberArk