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 10 September 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
10 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 14 14 15
Rank change year-on-year 0 +1 -2
Contract jobs citing DevOps 5,656 3,658 3,831
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.38% 11.09% 10.01%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.27% 12.26% 11.70%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,933 2,566 2,591
10th Percentile £381 £363 £381
25th Percentile £438 £425 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £520 £550
Median % change year-on-year +1.01% -5.50% -4.35%
75th Percentile £615 £620 £650
90th Percentile £700 £700 £734
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £550
% change year-on-year - -9.09% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 123 27 71
10th Percentile £37.24 £39.50 £56.00
25th Percentile £55.25 £52.75 £65.00
Median hourly rate £67.50 £67.00 £70.00
Median % change year-on-year +0.75% -4.29% +7.69%
75th Percentile £77.50 £87.50 £74.22
90th Percentile £93.50 £95.00 £85.25
UK excluding London median hourly rate £68.11 £67.00 £70.00
% change year-on-year +1.65% -4.29% +7.69%

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 46,112 29,840 32,750
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.63% 90.46% 85.54%
Number of daily rates quoted 28,098 18,520 20,299
10th Percentile £325 £300 £312
25th Percentile £425 £403 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -2.78%
75th Percentile £625 £625 £638
90th Percentile £725 £725 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 3,038 1,780 1,507
10th Percentile £13.87 £14.23 £14.70
25th Percentile £17.38 £17.30 £20.12
Median hourly rate £40.00 £25.15 £43.00
Median % change year-on-year +59.05% -41.51% +2.87%
75th Percentile £67.50 £45.00 £65.00
90th Percentile £80.00 £67.00 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £40.03 £22.63 £43.00
% change year-on-year +76.89% -47.37% +8.65%

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 10 September 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 10 September 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 10 September 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 +1 4,809 £525 - 2,183
London 0 2,546 £550 - 1,113
UK excluding London -4 2,418 £500 - 1,306
Work from Home 0 1,626 £525 +2.14% 1,067
North of England -1 798 £500 +5.26% 381
South East -11 454 £525 +5.00% 335
Midlands -3 439 £488 -4.88% 161
Yorkshire -2 393 £500 +3.90% 116
West Midlands -6 344 £500 -4.76% 95
South West +9 316 £550 +5.26% 194
North West -3 313 £519 +15.37% 197
Scotland -5 218 £483 +1.63% 90
East of England +7 149 £505 -3.81% 104
North East +17 107 £425 -18.27% 71
East Midlands -1 92 £463 +2.78% 66
Wales -2 50 £500 +33.33% 36
Northern Ireland +21 23 £450 +2.27% 25
Channel Islands - 5 £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
1 342 (6.05%) Confluence
2 149 (2.63%) SharePoint
3 130 (2.30%) Apache Airflow
4 129 (2.28%) Apache Spark
5 112 (1.98%) Apache
6 60 (1.06%) SAS
7 44 (0.78%) CMS
8 39 (0.69%) Jupyter
9 33 (0.58%) IIS
10 26 (0.46%) nginx
11 19 (0.34%) Microsoft Exchange
12 15 (0.27%) Camunda
13 13 (0.23%) OpenStack
14 12 (0.21%) Anypoint
14 12 (0.21%) WebLogic
14 12 (0.21%) WebSphere
15 11 (0.19%) Oracle SOA Suite
15 11 (0.19%) Oracle Workflow
16 10 (0.18%) Palantir Foundry
17 9 (0.16%) Appian
Applications
1 65 (1.15%) Microsoft Excel
2 61 (1.08%) Microsoft Project
3 45 (0.80%) MS Visio
4 37 (0.65%) Microsoft Office
5 33 (0.58%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 9 (0.16%) Chatbot
6 9 (0.16%) CPLEX
6 9 (0.16%) Spreadsheet
7 7 (0.12%) Trello
8 5 (0.088%) Notion
8 5 (0.088%) Windchill
9 2 (0.035%) Adobe XD
9 2 (0.035%) Mingle
10 1 (0.018%) EngageOne
10 1 (0.018%) Gliffy
10 1 (0.018%) Mozilla Thunderbird
10 1 (0.018%) Sketch
10 1 (0.018%) Weka
Business Applications
1 76 (1.34%) Dynamics CRM
2 36 (0.64%) SAP S/4HANA
3 14 (0.25%) Oracle EBS
4 13 (0.23%) Payment Gateway
5 10 (0.18%) Magento
6 8 (0.14%) SAP MDG
6 8 (0.14%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
7 6 (0.11%) Dynamics AX
7 6 (0.11%) Oracle EBS R12
7 6 (0.11%) Remedy ITSM
8 5 (0.088%) Aladdin
8 5 (0.088%) OpenText MBPM
8 5 (0.088%) Oracle BPM
8 5 (0.088%) Oracle ERP
9 4 (0.071%) Endur
10 3 (0.053%) Findur
10 3 (0.053%) Maximo
10 3 (0.053%) SAP ERP
10 3 (0.053%) SAP Oil and Gas
10 3 (0.053%) Teamcenter
Cloud Services
1 3,092 (54.67%) Azure
2 2,028 (35.86%) AWS
3 1,767 (31.24%) Azure DevOps
4 992 (17.54%) GitHub
5 728 (12.87%) GCP
6 621 (10.98%) GitHub Actions
7 488 (8.63%) Power Platform
8 464 (8.20%) Serverless
9 310 (5.48%) Amazon S3
10 289 (5.11%) AWS Lambda
11 255 (4.51%) Entra ID
12 245 (4.33%) Amazon EKS
13 238 (4.21%) Amazon CloudWatch
14 236 (4.17%) AWS CloudFormation
15 212 (3.75%) Azure AKS
16 210 (3.71%) Azure Monitor
17 207 (3.66%) Azure Data Factory
18 195 (3.45%) Amazon EC2
19 179 (3.16%) Dynamics 365
20 158 (2.79%) Power Automate
Communications & Networking
1 250 (4.42%) Firewall
2 178 (3.15%) DNS
3 120 (2.12%) VPN
4 114 (2.02%) Network Security
5 66 (1.17%) TCP/IP
6 52 (0.92%) SSL
7 48 (0.85%) DHCP
8 47 (0.83%) WAN
9 36 (0.64%) HTTP
10 32 (0.57%) SD-WAN
11 30 (0.53%) BGP
12 29 (0.51%) Internet
13 28 (0.50%) SSH
13 28 (0.50%) Wi-Fi
14 21 (0.37%) OSPF
15 20 (0.35%) SAN
16 19 (0.34%) VLAN
17 17 (0.30%) BIG-IP
17 17 (0.30%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
17 17 (0.30%) HTTPS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 324 (5.73%) Power BI
2 301 (5.32%) SQL Server
3 300 (5.30%) PostgreSQL
4 213 (3.77%) Data Warehouse
5 185 (3.27%) MongoDB
5 185 (3.27%) NoSQL
6 180 (3.18%) Relational Database
7 179 (3.16%) Data Lake
8 145 (2.56%) Amazon RDS
9 128 (2.26%) Metadata
10 109 (1.93%) Azure SQL Database
11 95 (1.68%) DynamoDB
12 92 (1.63%) Delta Lake
13 89 (1.57%) Oracle Database
14 84 (1.49%) MySQL
15 78 (1.38%) Redis
16 69 (1.22%) Amazon Redshift
17 65 (1.15%) Big Data
18 61 (1.08%) SQL Server Integration Services
19 54 (0.95%) Elasticsearch
Development Applications
1 805 (14.23%) Git
2 799 (14.13%) Jenkins
3 683 (12.08%) JIRA
4 635 (11.23%) GitLab
5 140 (2.48%) Selenium
6 101 (1.79%) SonarQube
7 98 (1.73%) JUnit
7 98 (1.73%) Postman
8 95 (1.68%) Maven
9 79 (1.40%) Bitbucket
10 74 (1.31%) REST Assured
11 72 (1.27%) JMeter
12 70 (1.24%) Cypress.io
13 67 (1.18%) Gradle
14 60 (1.06%) Cucumber
15 50 (0.88%) Claude Code
16 47 (0.83%) Gatling
16 47 (0.83%) Mockito
17 44 (0.78%) Sonatype Nexus
18 40 (0.71%) LoadRunner
General
1 1,464 (25.88%) Social Skills
2 1,002 (17.72%) Finance
3 812 (14.36%) Public Sector
4 521 (9.21%) Analytical Skills
5 376 (6.65%) Banking
6 164 (2.90%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 109 (1.93%) Retail
8 90 (1.59%) Documentation Skills
9 77 (1.36%) Influencing Skills
10 65 (1.15%) Legal
10 65 (1.15%) Organisational Skills
11 56 (0.99%) Marketing
12 54 (0.95%) Military
13 51 (0.90%) Aerospace
13 51 (0.90%) Telecoms
14 50 (0.88%) Investment Banking
15 46 (0.81%) Law
16 45 (0.80%) Front Office
17 42 (0.74%) Manufacturing
18 39 (0.69%) Financial Institution
Job Titles
1 1,126 (19.91%) DevOps Engineer
2 920 (16.27%) Developer
3 866 (15.31%) Senior
4 634 (11.21%) Architect
5 541 (9.57%) Lead
6 359 (6.35%) Azure Engineer
7 321 (5.68%) Data Engineer
8 274 (4.84%) Analyst
9 264 (4.67%) AWS Engineer
10 235 (4.15%) Platform Engineer
11 210 (3.71%) Cloud Engineer
12 207 (3.66%) Azure DevOps Engineer
13 199 (3.52%) Senior DevOps
14 198 (3.50%) Java Developer
15 185 (3.27%) Senior DevOps Engineer
16 179 (3.16%) AWS DevOps
17 178 (3.15%) Solutions Architect
18 168 (2.97%) AWS DevOps Engineer
19 162 (2.86%) Senior Developer
20 145 (2.56%) Software Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 1,672 (29.56%) Terraform
2 604 (10.68%) REST
3 477 (8.43%) .NET
4 385 (6.81%) Kafka
5 358 (6.33%) RESTful
6 310 (5.48%) Spring
7 301 (5.32%) Spring Boot
8 294 (5.20%) React
9 200 (3.54%) Node.js
10 184 (3.25%) JSON
11 168 (2.97%) OAuth
12 165 (2.92%) Playwright
13 164 (2.90%) PySpark
14 142 (2.51%) HTML
15 131 (2.32%) CSS
16 128 (2.26%) .NET Framework
17 125 (2.21%) SOAP
18 124 (2.19%) AngularJS
19 119 (2.10%) OAuth2
20 113 (2.00%) Middleware
Miscellaneous
1 1,041 (18.41%) Cloud Native
2 433 (7.66%) Product Ownership
3 264 (4.67%) Distributed Systems
4 197 (3.48%) Enterprise Software
5 185 (3.27%) Onboarding
6 153 (2.71%) Hybrid Cloud
7 151 (2.67%) Legacy Systems
8 96 (1.70%) AI Agents
9 87 (1.54%) Data Protection Act
10 86 (1.52%) Management Information System
11 82 (1.45%) Self-Motivation
12 77 (1.36%) Public Cloud
13 76 (1.34%) Replication
14 75 (1.33%) Data Structures
15 70 (1.24%) Security Posture
16 67 (1.18%) Data Centre
17 60 (1.06%) Virtual Team
18 56 (0.99%) Enterprise Cloud
19 54 (0.95%) PKI
20 53 (0.94%) NHS
Operating Systems
1 543 (9.60%) Linux
2 309 (5.46%) Windows
3 114 (2.02%) Unix
4 113 (2.00%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 97 (1.71%) Windows Server
6 38 (0.67%) VMS
7 32 (0.57%) Apple iOS
8 31 (0.55%) Ubuntu
9 22 (0.39%) Android
10 10 (0.18%) Amazon Linux
10 10 (0.18%) zOS
11 9 (0.16%) CentOS
11 9 (0.16%) Solaris
12 8 (0.14%) Windows Server 2016
12 8 (0.14%) Windows Server 2019
13 7 (0.12%) AIX
14 5 (0.088%) Mac OS
14 5 (0.088%) Windows Server 2008
15 4 (0.071%) Alpine Linux
15 4 (0.071%) Data ONTAP
Processes & Methodologies
1 3,401 (60.13%) CI/CD
2 2,299 (40.65%) Agile
3 1,634 (28.89%) Infrastructure as Code
4 951 (16.81%) Continuous Improvement
5 944 (16.69%) Containerisation
6 898 (15.88%) Stakeholder Management
7 892 (15.77%) Test Automation
8 888 (15.70%) Problem-Solving
9 836 (14.78%) Microservices
10 834 (14.75%) AI
11 750 (13.26%) Observability
12 749 (13.24%) Platform Engineering
13 726 (12.84%) Software Engineering
14 694 (12.27%) Scrum
15 682 (12.06%) Migration
16 596 (10.54%) Technical Leadership
17 589 (10.41%) Analytics
18 531 (9.39%) Stakeholder Engagement
19 491 (8.68%) Data Modelling
20 484 (8.56%) Roadmaps
Programming Languages
1 1,626 (28.75%) Python
2 1,027 (18.16%) SQL
3 822 (14.53%) Java
4 491 (8.68%) C#
5 490 (8.66%) PowerShell
6 486 (8.59%) Bash
7 461 (8.15%) JavaScript
8 310 (5.48%) TypeScript
9 252 (4.46%) Bicep
10 106 (1.87%) Go
11 82 (1.45%) Shell Script
12 69 (1.22%) Apex Code
12 69 (1.22%) T-SQL
13 67 (1.18%) Scala
14 61 (1.08%) Groovy
14 61 (1.08%) PL/SQL
15 39 (0.69%) Data Analysis Expressions
16 35 (0.62%) Perl
17 30 (0.53%) C++
18 24 (0.42%) Kotlin
Qualifications
1 1,813 (32.05%) Security Cleared
2 1,521 (26.89%) SC Cleared
3 347 (6.14%) Degree
4 241 (4.26%) Azure Certification
5 237 (4.19%) BPSS Clearance
6 216 (3.82%) DV Cleared
7 188 (3.32%) AWS Certification
8 137 (2.42%) Computer Science Degree
9 106 (1.87%) Microsoft Certification
10 76 (1.34%) CISSP
11 61 (1.08%) ISTQB
12 53 (0.94%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 50 (0.88%) Cisco Certification
14 45 (0.80%) PMP
15 42 (0.74%) PMI Certification
16 37 (0.65%) Master's Degree
17 30 (0.53%) CISM
18 24 (0.42%) (ISC)2 CCSP
18 24 (0.42%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
18 24 (0.42%) ITIL Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 550 (9.72%) QA
2 294 (5.20%) Data Quality
3 204 (3.61%) Accessibility
4 130 (2.30%) GDPR
5 99 (1.75%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 83 (1.47%) WCAG
7 80 (1.41%) NIST
8 52 (0.92%) NCSC
8 52 (0.92%) PMO
9 40 (0.71%) SLA
10 31 (0.55%) PCI DSS
11 29 (0.51%) GRC
12 24 (0.42%) Sarbanes-Oxley
13 18 (0.32%) ISO 20022
14 13 (0.23%) Disclosure Scotland
15 12 (0.21%) Cyber Essentials
16 11 (0.19%) HIPAA
17 10 (0.18%) Actionable Recommendations
17 10 (0.18%) HL7
17 10 (0.18%) SEPA
System Software
1 1,164 (20.58%) Docker
2 172 (3.04%) Active Directory
3 90 (1.59%) VMware Infrastructure
4 79 (1.40%) Virtual Machines
5 29 (0.51%) vSphere
6 26 (0.46%) Hyper-V
7 24 (0.42%) VMware ESXi
8 20 (0.35%) VMware NSX
9 19 (0.34%) Virtual Desktop
10 14 (0.25%) Squid
11 11 (0.19%) IAG
11 11 (0.19%) Oracle RAC
12 9 (0.16%) Postfix
13 7 (0.12%) KVM
13 7 (0.12%) zsh
14 6 (0.11%) Apache ZooKeeper
14 6 (0.11%) Corosync
14 6 (0.11%) Microsoft App-V
14 6 (0.11%) Virtual Servers
15 5 (0.088%) Firmware
Systems Management
1 1,530 (27.05%) Kubernetes
2 536 (9.48%) Ansible
3 370 (6.54%) Grafana
4 311 (5.50%) Prometheus
5 83 (1.47%) Argo
6 58 (1.03%) Puppet
7 52 (0.92%) Single Sign-On
8 48 (0.85%) Progress Chef
9 43 (0.76%) Microsoft Intune
10 34 (0.60%) Packer
11 32 (0.57%) Istio
12 26 (0.46%) Kibana
13 22 (0.39%) vCenter Server
14 21 (0.37%) Kustomize
15 19 (0.34%) Oracle RMAN
15 19 (0.34%) SCCM
16 18 (0.32%) Kubeflow
17 15 (0.27%) HP ALM
18 13 (0.23%) SCOM
18 13 (0.23%) systemd
Vendors
1 1,099 (19.43%) Microsoft
2 315 (5.57%) Oracle
3 309 (5.46%) Databricks
4 277 (4.90%) Google
5 205 (3.62%) ServiceNow
6 186 (3.29%) Salesforce
7 184 (3.25%) Splunk
8 141 (2.49%) Dynatrace
9 131 (2.32%) VMware
10 110 (1.94%) SAP
11 109 (1.93%) Red Hat
12 66 (1.17%) IBM
13 65 (1.15%) OpenAI
14 62 (1.10%) MuleSoft
15 60 (1.06%) Informatica
16 51 (0.90%) Foundry
17 45 (0.80%) Cisco
18 44 (0.78%) AppDynamics
19 43 (0.76%) Atlassian
20 35 (0.62%) CyberArk