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

6 months to
28 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 13 15 15
Rank change year-on-year +2 0 -2
Contract jobs citing DevOps 5,607 3,452 3,964
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.61% 10.54% 9.87%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.49% 11.66% 11.55%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,884 2,457 2,726
10th Percentile £385 £361 £385
25th Percentile £438 £425 £459
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £515 £550
Median % change year-on-year +1.94% -6.36% -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 £35.00 £32.63 £56.33
25th Percentile £56.50 £51.56 £62.45
Median hourly rate £67.50 £67.00 £70.00
Median % change year-on-year +0.75% -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% +7.69%

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 44,902 29,618 34,312
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.94% 90.44% 85.47%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,798 18,592 22,057
10th Percentile £325 £300 £308
25th Percentile £420 £404 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £521 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +4.10% -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 2,679 1,619 2,026
10th Percentile £14.79 £14.20 £13.56
25th Percentile £20.06 £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 £68.00 £50.00 £63.75
90th Percentile £82.39 £68.75 £73.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £43.96 £23.50 £40.00
% change year-on-year +87.06% -41.25% -

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 28 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 28 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 28 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 - 1,694
London +2 2,466 £550 - 784
UK excluding London +3 2,463 £500 +2.04% 1,102
Work from Home 0 1,597 £525 +2.44% 848
North of England +4 861 £500 +3.90% 337
Midlands +2 460 £490 +3.16% 162
South East -11 459 £525 +5.00% 294
Yorkshire +2 437 £500 +2.04% 84
West Midlands -2 373 £492 -1.57% 118
North West -1 338 £525 +10.53% 178
South West +14 319 £518 -1.43% 148
Scotland 0 196 £493 +1.65% 56
East of England +16 140 £510 +2.00% 65
North East +12 105 £425 -18.66% 77
East Midlands -2 82 £488 +7.26% 44
Wales -7 46 £460 +43.49% 28
Northern Ireland +16 23 £475 +7.95% 25
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
1 340 (6.06%) Confluence
2 135 (2.41%) SharePoint
3 130 (2.32%) Apache Spark
4 111 (1.98%) Apache Airflow
5 103 (1.84%) Apache
6 82 (1.46%) SAS
7 46 (0.82%) 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
13 13 (0.23%) OpenStack
13 13 (0.23%) Palantir Foundry
14 11 (0.20%) Anypoint
14 11 (0.20%) Oracle Workflow
15 9 (0.16%) Appian
16 8 (0.14%) Tomcat
16 8 (0.14%) WebLogic
Applications
1 62 (1.11%) Microsoft Project
2 56 (1.00%) Microsoft Excel
3 38 (0.68%) Microsoft Office
4 34 (0.61%) MS Visio
5 27 (0.48%) 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
5 8 (0.14%) Dynamics AX
5 8 (0.14%) Oracle ERP
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 (0.054%) Findur
9 3 (0.054%) Shopify
9 3 (0.054%) Teamcenter
9 3 (0.054%) Temenos T24
Cloud Services
1 3,016 (53.79%) Azure
2 1,998 (35.63%) AWS
3 1,698 (30.28%) Azure DevOps
4 941 (16.78%) GitHub
5 715 (12.75%) GCP
6 578 (10.31%) GitHub Actions
7 454 (8.10%) Power Platform
8 449 (8.01%) Serverless
9 299 (5.33%) Amazon S3
10 268 (4.78%) AWS Lambda
11 252 (4.49%) Entra ID
12 251 (4.48%) AWS CloudFormation
13 229 (4.08%) Amazon EKS
14 228 (4.07%) Azure AKS
15 199 (3.55%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 194 (3.46%) Azure Monitor
17 179 (3.19%) Azure Data Factory
18 178 (3.17%) Amazon EC2
19 158 (2.82%) Dynamics 365
20 148 (2.64%) OpenShift
Communications & Networking
1 237 (4.23%) 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 (0.54%) Internet
10 27 (0.48%) HTTP
10 27 (0.48%) Wi-Fi
11 25 (0.45%) OSPF
12 20 (0.36%) 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
2 293 (5.23%) SQL Server
3 278 (4.96%) PostgreSQL
4 193 (3.44%) NoSQL
5 186 (3.32%) Relational Database
6 178 (3.17%) MongoDB
7 177 (3.16%) Data Warehouse
8 155 (2.76%) Data Lake
9 114 (2.03%) Amazon RDS
10 104 (1.85%) Metadata
11 102 (1.82%) Azure SQL Database
11 102 (1.82%) DynamoDB
12 85 (1.52%) Delta Lake
13 84 (1.50%) Oracle Database
14 68 (1.21%) Redis
15 67 (1.19%) Amazon Redshift
15 67 (1.19%) MySQL
16 66 (1.18%) Big Data
17 64 (1.14%) Amazon Athena
18 56 (1.00%) Elasticsearch
Development Applications
1 810 (14.45%) Jenkins
2 751 (13.39%) Git
3 684 (12.20%) JIRA
4 575 (10.26%) GitLab
5 130 (2.32%) Selenium
6 104 (1.85%) Postman
7 99 (1.77%) JUnit
8 97 (1.73%) SonarQube
9 82 (1.46%) Bitbucket
10 81 (1.44%) Maven
11 71 (1.27%) REST Assured
12 63 (1.12%) JMeter
13 60 (1.07%) Cucumber
13 60 (1.07%) Cypress.io
14 51 (0.91%) Gradle
15 47 (0.84%) Gatling
15 47 (0.84%) Mockito
16 38 (0.68%) LoadRunner
17 37 (0.66%) Visual Studio
18 36 (0.64%) Artifactory
General
1 1,385 (24.70%) Social Skills
2 998 (17.80%) Finance
3 822 (14.66%) Public Sector
4 467 (8.33%) Analytical Skills
5 364 (6.49%) Banking
6 133 (2.37%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 104 (1.85%) Documentation Skills
8 93 (1.66%) Retail
9 68 (1.21%) Legal
10 67 (1.19%) Influencing Skills
11 66 (1.18%) Organisational Skills
12 58 (1.03%) Marketing
13 48 (0.86%) Military
14 45 (0.80%) Investment Banking
15 44 (0.78%) Law
15 44 (0.78%) Telecoms
16 40 (0.71%) Financial Institution
16 40 (0.71%) Manufacturing
17 38 (0.68%) Front Office
18 37 (0.66%) Presentation Skills
Job Titles
1 1,107 (19.74%) DevOps Engineer
2 932 (16.62%) Developer
3 795 (14.18%) Senior
4 626 (11.16%) Architect
5 531 (9.47%) Lead
6 335 (5.97%) Azure Engineer
7 317 (5.65%) Data Engineer
8 290 (5.17%) Analyst
9 278 (4.96%) AWS Engineer
10 239 (4.26%) Platform Engineer
11 209 (3.73%) Cloud Engineer
12 204 (3.64%) Java Developer
13 199 (3.55%) Senior DevOps
14 194 (3.46%) AWS DevOps
15 184 (3.28%) Solutions Architect
16 183 (3.26%) Senior DevOps Engineer
17 181 (3.23%) AWS DevOps Engineer
17 181 (3.23%) Azure DevOps Engineer
18 150 (2.68%) Software Engineer
19 149 (2.66%) Senior Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 562 (10.02%) REST
2 493 (8.79%) .NET
3 332 (5.92%) RESTful
4 324 (5.78%) Kafka
5 315 (5.62%) Spring
6 297 (5.30%) Spring Boot
7 292 (5.21%) React
8 219 (3.91%) Node.js
9 169 (3.01%) JSON
10 167 (2.98%) PySpark
11 164 (2.92%) OAuth
12 159 (2.84%) Playwright
13 158 (2.82%) AngularJS
14 146 (2.60%) SOAP
15 139 (2.48%) .NET Framework
16 127 (2.27%) HTML
17 114 (2.03%) OAuth2
18 110 (1.96%) Middleware
19 106 (1.89%) YAML
20 105 (1.87%) CSS
Miscellaneous
1 996 (17.76%) Cloud Native
2 400 (7.13%) Product Ownership
3 270 (4.82%) Distributed Systems
4 167 (2.98%) Onboarding
5 163 (2.91%) Enterprise Software
6 151 (2.69%) Legacy Systems
7 131 (2.34%) Hybrid Cloud
8 94 (1.68%) Public Cloud
9 90 (1.61%) Data Protection Act
10 86 (1.53%) Self-Motivation
11 77 (1.37%) Data Centre
12 73 (1.30%) Management Information System
13 71 (1.27%) Data Structures
14 66 (1.18%) Security Posture
15 63 (1.12%) Replication
16 62 (1.11%) AI Agents
17 57 (1.02%) Enterprise Cloud
18 56 (1.00%) Virtual Team
19 49 (0.87%) Mobile App
20 48 (0.86%) Greenfield Project
Operating Systems
1 487 (8.69%) Linux
2 292 (5.21%) Windows
3 102 (1.82%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 80 (1.43%) Unix
5 74 (1.32%) 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 3,291 (58.69%) CI/CD
2 2,241 (39.97%) Agile
3 1,521 (27.13%) Infrastructure as Code
4 943 (16.82%) Containerisation
5 873 (15.57%) Continuous Improvement
6 851 (15.18%) Problem-Solving
7 841 (15.00%) Test Automation
8 826 (14.73%) Microservices
9 745 (13.29%) Stakeholder Management
10 736 (13.13%) AI
11 703 (12.54%) Observability
12 697 (12.43%) Scrum
13 673 (12.00%) Migration
14 668 (11.91%) Platform Engineering
15 657 (11.72%) Software Engineering
16 601 (10.72%) Analytics
17 504 (8.99%) Technical Leadership
18 496 (8.85%) Stakeholder Engagement
19 487 (8.69%) Data Modelling
20 462 (8.24%) Roadmaps
Programming Languages
1 1,570 (28.00%) Python
2 1,016 (18.12%) SQL
3 792 (14.13%) Java
4 509 (9.08%) C#
5 447 (7.97%) Bash
6 435 (7.76%) JavaScript
7 411 (7.33%) PowerShell
8 300 (5.35%) TypeScript
9 208 (3.71%) Bicep
10 112 (2.00%) Go
11 69 (1.23%) Apex Code
12 68 (1.21%) T-SQL
13 67 (1.19%) PL/SQL
14 65 (1.16%) Shell Script
15 54 (0.96%) Groovy
16 53 (0.95%) Scala
17 30 (0.54%) C++
18 28 (0.50%) Kotlin
19 25 (0.45%) C
20 24 (0.43%) Data Analysis Expressions
Qualifications
1 1,774 (31.64%) Security Cleared
2 1,485 (26.48%) SC Cleared
3 327 (5.83%) Degree
4 222 (3.96%) Azure Certification
5 210 (3.75%) BPSS Clearance
6 197 (3.51%) DV Cleared
7 191 (3.41%) AWS Certification
8 121 (2.16%) Computer Science Degree
9 82 (1.46%) Microsoft Certification
10 77 (1.37%) CISSP
11 60 (1.07%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
12 58 (1.03%) ISTQB
13 54 (0.96%) Cisco Certification
14 44 (0.78%) PMP
15 43 (0.77%) Master's Degree
16 41 (0.73%) PMI Certification
17 32 (0.57%) CISM
18 31 (0.55%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
19 25 (0.45%) ITIL Certification
20 24 (0.43%) CCNP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 500 (8.92%) QA
2 266 (4.74%) Data Quality
3 193 (3.44%) Accessibility
4 160 (2.85%) GDPR
5 88 (1.57%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 77 (1.37%) NIST
7 76 (1.36%) WCAG
8 52 (0.93%) NCSC
9 44 (0.78%) 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 12 (0.21%) PSD2
16 11 (0.20%) Disclosure Scotland
16 11 (0.20%) SEPA
17 10 (0.18%) ISO 20022
17 10 (0.18%) SOC 2
18 9 (0.16%) Cyber Essentials
System Software
1 1,105 (19.71%) Docker
2 176 (3.14%) Active Directory
3 84 (1.50%) Virtual Machines
4 79 (1.41%) 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 1,618 (28.86%) Terraform
2 1,447 (25.81%) Kubernetes
3 526 (9.38%) Ansible
4 372 (6.63%) Grafana
5 314 (5.60%) Prometheus
6 96 (1.71%) Argo
7 63 (1.12%) Puppet
8 61 (1.09%) 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 19 (0.34%) 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%) HAProxy
16 13 (0.23%) NetBackup
Vendors
1 1,003 (17.89%) Microsoft
2 316 (5.64%) Oracle
3 268 (4.78%) Google
4 267 (4.76%) Databricks
5 203 (3.62%) ServiceNow
6 189 (3.37%) Salesforce
7 182 (3.25%) Splunk
8 133 (2.37%) Dynatrace
9 131 (2.34%) SAP
10 119 (2.12%) VMware
11 107 (1.91%) Red Hat
12 69 (1.23%) OpenAI
13 64 (1.14%) IBM
14 58 (1.03%) Atlassian
14 58 (1.03%) Informatica
15 52 (0.93%) MuleSoft
16 47 (0.84%) Cisco
17 45 (0.80%) Foundry
18 42 (0.75%) Okta
19 38 (0.68%) AppDynamics