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

6 months to
22 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 13 14 14
Rank change year-on-year +1 0 -1
Contract jobs citing DevOps 5,602 3,416 4,037
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.62% 10.47% 9.77%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.50% 11.59% 11.44%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,870 2,436 2,766
10th Percentile £385 £363 £385
25th Percentile £438 £425 £458
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £520 £550
Median % change year-on-year +1.01% -5.50% -4.35%
75th Percentile £613 £625 £650
90th Percentile £700 £725 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £525
% change year-on-year - -4.76% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 114 24 105
10th Percentile £37.25 £37.25 £56.25
25th Percentile £61.78 £52.19 £61.60
Median hourly rate £70.00 £67.00 £70.00
Median % change year-on-year +4.48% -4.29% +6.87%
75th Percentile £77.50 £84.10 £75.00
90th Percentile £93.81 £88.38 £85.65
UK excluding London median hourly rate £70.00 £67.00 £70.00
% change year-on-year +4.48% -4.29% +6.87%

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 44,825 29,480 35,296
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.99% 90.35% 85.43%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,802 18,519 22,641
10th Percentile £325 £300 £306
25th Percentile £419 £404 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £520 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% -4.76% -4.11%
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 2,641 1,572 2,187
10th Percentile £14.82 £14.20 £13.06
25th Percentile £20.00 £17.44 £16.86
Median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £38.12
Median % change year-on-year +74.79% -34.02% -10.31%
75th Percentile £68.50 £50.75 £62.50
90th Percentile £83.00 £68.75 £73.60
UK excluding London median hourly rate £45.00 £24.34 £40.00
% change year-on-year +84.88% -39.15% -1.95%

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 22 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 22 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 22 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 4,766 £525 - 1,620
UK excluding London +5 2,459 £500 - 1,051
London +2 2,449 £550 - 742
Work from Home 0 1,609 £525 +2.44% 776
North of England +5 864 £500 +2.30% 321
South East -9 458 £525 +5.00% 278
Midlands +3 446 £489 +2.89% 163
Yorkshire +2 445 £500 - 91
West Midlands 0 358 £499 -0.25% 114
North West +1 338 £518 +9.01% 171
South West +14 316 £503 -5.19% 129
Scotland -1 205 £475 -4.04% 58
East of England +20 141 £510 +2.00% 64
North East +11 100 £425 -18.66% 62
East Midlands 0 83 £488 +5.41% 49
Wales -5 47 £425 +32.57% 26
Northern Ireland +19 22 £475 +11.76% 30
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
1 339 (6.05%) Confluence
2 134 (2.39%) Apache Spark
2 134 (2.39%) SharePoint
3 112 (2.00%) Apache Airflow
4 102 (1.82%) Apache
5 78 (1.39%) SAS
6 46 (0.82%) CMS
7 36 (0.64%) IIS
8 35 (0.62%) Jupyter
9 32 (0.57%) nginx
10 28 (0.50%) Microsoft Exchange
11 16 (0.29%) WebSphere
12 14 (0.25%) Camunda
12 14 (0.25%) OpenStack
13 13 (0.23%) Palantir Foundry
14 11 (0.20%) Oracle Workflow
15 9 (0.16%) Appian
16 8 (0.14%) Anypoint
16 8 (0.14%) Tomcat
16 8 (0.14%) WebLogic
Applications
1 65 (1.16%) Microsoft Project
2 63 (1.12%) Microsoft Excel
3 40 (0.71%) Microsoft Office
4 35 (0.62%) MS Visio
5 33 (0.59%) 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 66 (1.18%) 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
4 9 (0.16%) Magento
4 9 (0.16%) Oracle ERP
4 9 (0.16%) Remedy ITSM
5 8 (0.14%) Dynamics AX
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
9 3 (0.054%) Findur
9 3 (0.054%) Infor LN
9 3 (0.054%) OpenText VIM for SAP
9 3 (0.054%) Shopify
9 3 (0.054%) Temenos T24
Cloud Services
1 3,018 (53.87%) Azure
2 2,002 (35.74%) AWS
3 1,681 (30.01%) Azure DevOps
4 941 (16.80%) GitHub
5 712 (12.71%) GCP
6 578 (10.32%) GitHub Actions
7 459 (8.19%) Serverless
8 450 (8.03%) Power Platform
9 310 (5.53%) Amazon S3
10 279 (4.98%) AWS Lambda
11 253 (4.52%) AWS CloudFormation
12 252 (4.50%) Entra ID
13 229 (4.09%) Amazon EKS
14 226 (4.03%) Azure AKS
15 196 (3.50%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 194 (3.46%) Azure Monitor
17 188 (3.36%) Amazon EC2
18 181 (3.23%) Azure Data Factory
19 156 (2.78%) PaaS
20 154 (2.75%) OpenShift
Communications & Networking
1 241 (4.30%) Firewall
2 158 (2.82%) DNS
3 122 (2.18%) VPN
4 120 (2.14%) Network Security
5 61 (1.09%) TCP/IP
6 48 (0.86%) WAN
7 40 (0.71%) SSL
8 37 (0.66%) SD-WAN
9 35 (0.62%) DHCP
10 33 (0.59%) BGP
11 30 (0.54%) Internet
12 27 (0.48%) HTTP
12 27 (0.48%) Wi-Fi
13 25 (0.45%) OSPF
14 22 (0.39%) SAN
15 18 (0.32%) VLAN
15 18 (0.32%) VXLAN
16 17 (0.30%) BIG-IP
16 17 (0.30%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
16 17 (0.30%) SSH
Database & Business Intelligence
1 299 (5.34%) Power BI
2 286 (5.11%) SQL Server
3 274 (4.89%) PostgreSQL
4 188 (3.36%) NoSQL
5 184 (3.28%) Relational Database
6 175 (3.12%) MongoDB
7 173 (3.09%) Data Warehouse
8 152 (2.71%) Data Lake
9 119 (2.12%) Amazon RDS
10 108 (1.93%) Metadata
11 105 (1.87%) DynamoDB
12 102 (1.82%) Azure SQL Database
13 85 (1.52%) Oracle Database
14 82 (1.46%) Delta Lake
15 74 (1.32%) Big Data
16 67 (1.20%) Amazon Redshift
17 66 (1.18%) Amazon Athena
17 66 (1.18%) MySQL
17 66 (1.18%) Redis
18 61 (1.09%) Elasticsearch
Development Applications
1 811 (14.48%) Jenkins
2 754 (13.46%) Git
3 685 (12.23%) JIRA
4 574 (10.25%) GitLab
5 132 (2.36%) Selenium
6 104 (1.86%) Postman
7 100 (1.79%) JUnit
7 100 (1.79%) SonarQube
8 82 (1.46%) Maven
9 77 (1.37%) Bitbucket
10 74 (1.32%) REST Assured
11 62 (1.11%) Cucumber
12 61 (1.09%) Cypress.io
13 57 (1.02%) JMeter
14 54 (0.96%) Gradle
15 46 (0.82%) Mockito
16 43 (0.77%) Gatling
17 37 (0.66%) Visual Studio
18 36 (0.64%) Artifactory
19 35 (0.62%) Sonatype Nexus
General
1 1,373 (24.51%) Social Skills
2 1,013 (18.08%) Finance
3 807 (14.41%) Public Sector
4 463 (8.26%) Analytical Skills
5 360 (6.43%) Banking
6 128 (2.28%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 121 (2.16%) Documentation Skills
8 91 (1.62%) Retail
9 71 (1.27%) Influencing Skills
10 70 (1.25%) Legal
11 66 (1.18%) Organisational Skills
12 57 (1.02%) Marketing
13 48 (0.86%) Military
14 45 (0.80%) Telecoms
15 43 (0.77%) Investment Banking
15 43 (0.77%) Law
16 39 (0.70%) Financial Institution
16 39 (0.70%) Manufacturing
17 38 (0.68%) Front Office
18 33 (0.59%) Presentation Skills
Job Titles
1 1,123 (20.05%) DevOps Engineer
2 922 (16.46%) Developer
3 789 (14.08%) Senior
4 635 (11.34%) Architect
5 513 (9.16%) Lead
6 338 (6.03%) Azure Engineer
7 312 (5.57%) Data Engineer
8 300 (5.36%) Analyst
9 280 (5.00%) AWS Engineer
10 229 (4.09%) Platform Engineer
11 209 (3.73%) Cloud Engineer
12 200 (3.57%) Java Developer
13 197 (3.52%) AWS DevOps
13 197 (3.52%) Senior DevOps
14 185 (3.30%) Azure DevOps Engineer
14 185 (3.30%) Solutions Architect
15 183 (3.27%) AWS DevOps Engineer
16 181 (3.23%) Senior DevOps Engineer
17 150 (2.68%) Business Analyst
18 147 (2.62%) Software Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 546 (9.75%) REST
2 488 (8.71%) .NET
3 328 (5.86%) RESTful
4 321 (5.73%) Kafka
4 321 (5.73%) Spring
5 304 (5.43%) Spring Boot
6 297 (5.30%) React
7 229 (4.09%) Node.js
8 166 (2.96%) JSON
9 164 (2.93%) OAuth
10 163 (2.91%) PySpark
11 162 (2.89%) Playwright
12 159 (2.84%) AngularJS
13 141 (2.52%) SOAP
14 134 (2.39%) .NET Framework
15 127 (2.27%) HTML
16 113 (2.02%) OAuth2
17 108 (1.93%) Middleware
18 106 (1.89%) YAML
19 105 (1.87%) CSS
Miscellaneous
1 987 (17.62%) Cloud Native
2 397 (7.09%) Product Ownership
3 262 (4.68%) Distributed Systems
4 170 (3.03%) Onboarding
5 158 (2.82%) Enterprise Software
6 149 (2.66%) Legacy Systems
7 126 (2.25%) Hybrid Cloud
8 98 (1.75%) Public Cloud
9 90 (1.61%) Data Protection Act
10 84 (1.50%) Self-Motivation
11 76 (1.36%) Data Centre
12 73 (1.30%) Management Information System
13 70 (1.25%) Data Structures
14 69 (1.23%) Security Posture
15 62 (1.11%) Replication
16 60 (1.07%) AI Agents
16 60 (1.07%) Virtual Team
17 55 (0.98%) Enterprise Cloud
18 53 (0.95%) Mobile App
19 50 (0.89%) NHS
Operating Systems
1 491 (8.76%) Linux
2 293 (5.23%) Windows
3 105 (1.87%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 83 (1.48%) Unix
5 71 (1.27%) Windows Server
6 34 (0.61%) VMS
7 28 (0.50%) Ubuntu
8 26 (0.46%) Apple iOS
9 17 (0.30%) Android
10 11 (0.20%) Solaris
11 10 (0.18%) Windows Server 2019
12 9 (0.16%) zOS
13 7 (0.12%) CentOS
13 7 (0.12%) Windows Server 2016
14 6 (0.11%) AIX
14 6 (0.11%) Amazon Linux
14 6 (0.11%) Mac OS
14 6 (0.11%) Windows Server 2008
15 4 (0.071%) Alpine Linux
15 4 (0.071%) Data ONTAP
Processes & Methodologies
1 3,280 (58.55%) CI/CD
2 2,214 (39.52%) Agile
3 1,510 (26.95%) Infrastructure as Code
4 926 (16.53%) Containerisation
5 857 (15.30%) Continuous Improvement
6 842 (15.03%) Problem-Solving
7 836 (14.92%) Test Automation
8 814 (14.53%) Microservices
9 732 (13.07%) Stakeholder Management
10 722 (12.89%) AI
11 690 (12.32%) Observability
12 681 (12.16%) Scrum
13 672 (12.00%) Migration
14 660 (11.78%) Platform Engineering
15 637 (11.37%) Software Engineering
16 595 (10.62%) Analytics
17 490 (8.75%) Stakeholder Engagement
17 490 (8.75%) Technical Leadership
18 484 (8.64%) Data Modelling
19 466 (8.32%) Roadmaps
Programming Languages
1 1,564 (27.92%) Python
2 1,015 (18.12%) SQL
3 784 (14.00%) Java
4 503 (8.98%) C#
5 446 (7.96%) Bash
6 427 (7.62%) JavaScript
7 414 (7.39%) PowerShell
8 295 (5.27%) TypeScript
9 203 (3.62%) Bicep
10 114 (2.03%) Go
11 69 (1.23%) Apex Code
12 68 (1.21%) PL/SQL
13 67 (1.20%) Shell Script
13 67 (1.20%) T-SQL
14 55 (0.98%) Groovy
15 51 (0.91%) Scala
16 29 (0.52%) C++
17 28 (0.50%) Kotlin
18 24 (0.43%) C
18 24 (0.43%) Data Analysis Expressions
Qualifications
1 1,757 (31.36%) Security Cleared
2 1,474 (26.31%) SC Cleared
3 334 (5.96%) Degree
4 222 (3.96%) Azure Certification
5 202 (3.61%) BPSS Clearance
6 193 (3.45%) DV Cleared
7 189 (3.37%) AWS Certification
8 122 (2.18%) Computer Science Degree
9 81 (1.45%) CISSP
10 79 (1.41%) Microsoft Certification
11 58 (1.04%) ISTQB
12 57 (1.02%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 55 (0.98%) Cisco Certification
14 44 (0.79%) Master's Degree
14 44 (0.79%) PMP
15 42 (0.75%) PMI Certification
16 36 (0.64%) CISM
17 30 (0.54%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
18 26 (0.46%) ITIL Certification
19 24 (0.43%) CCNP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 493 (8.80%) QA
2 264 (4.71%) Data Quality
3 192 (3.43%) Accessibility
4 166 (2.96%) GDPR
5 98 (1.75%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 88 (1.57%) NIST
7 77 (1.37%) WCAG
8 58 (1.04%) NCSC
9 44 (0.79%) PMO
10 41 (0.73%) PCI DSS
11 36 (0.64%) SLA
12 29 (0.52%) GRC
13 27 (0.48%) Sarbanes-Oxley
14 13 (0.23%) HIPAA
15 11 (0.20%) Disclosure Scotland
15 11 (0.20%) SOC 2
16 10 (0.18%) ISO 20022
16 10 (0.18%) PSD2
17 9 (0.16%) Cyber Essentials
17 9 (0.16%) SEPA
System Software
1 1,092 (19.49%) Docker
2 183 (3.27%) Active Directory
3 83 (1.48%) Virtual Machines
4 80 (1.43%) VMware Infrastructure
5 32 (0.57%) vSphere
6 27 (0.48%) VMware NSX
7 20 (0.36%) Squid
8 18 (0.32%) Virtual Desktop
9 17 (0.30%) VMware ESXi
10 16 (0.29%) Hyper-V
11 14 (0.25%) Postfix
12 12 (0.21%) Oracle RAC
13 8 (0.14%) KVM
14 7 (0.12%) IAG
15 6 (0.11%) Corosync
15 6 (0.11%) HDFS
15 6 (0.11%) NFS
15 6 (0.11%) RACF
16 5 (0.089%) Microsoft App-V
16 5 (0.089%) SRDF
Systems Management
1 1,617 (28.86%) Terraform
2 1,442 (25.74%) Kubernetes
3 523 (9.34%) Ansible
4 381 (6.80%) Grafana
5 327 (5.84%) Prometheus
6 93 (1.66%) Argo
7 72 (1.29%) Single Sign-On
8 62 (1.11%) Puppet
9 45 (0.80%) Istio
10 42 (0.75%) Progress Chef
11 35 (0.62%) Microsoft Intune
12 31 (0.55%) Packer
13 27 (0.48%) vCenter Server
14 20 (0.36%) HP ALM
15 17 (0.30%) Consul
15 17 (0.30%) Kibana
16 16 (0.29%) Kustomize
16 16 (0.29%) SCCM
17 15 (0.27%) Active Directory Federation Services
17 15 (0.27%) Oracle RMAN
Vendors
1 1,002 (17.89%) Microsoft
2 320 (5.71%) Oracle
3 265 (4.73%) Databricks
4 263 (4.69%) Google
5 202 (3.61%) ServiceNow
6 186 (3.32%) Splunk
7 185 (3.30%) Salesforce
8 133 (2.37%) Dynatrace
9 132 (2.36%) SAP
10 120 (2.14%) VMware
11 113 (2.02%) Red Hat
12 68 (1.21%) OpenAI
13 63 (1.12%) IBM
14 57 (1.02%) Informatica
15 54 (0.96%) Atlassian
16 49 (0.87%) MuleSoft
17 48 (0.86%) Cisco
18 44 (0.79%) Foundry
19 42 (0.75%) Okta
20 40 (0.71%) CyberArk