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 4 June 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
4 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 12 15 14
Rank change year-on-year +3 -1 -3
Contract jobs citing DevOps 5,222 3,008 4,073
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.67% 10.43% 9.50%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.60% 11.47% 11.12%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,647 2,169 2,818
10th Percentile £386 £380 £400
25th Percentile £438 £440 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year - -4.55% -6.30%
75th Percentile £610 £638 £650
90th Percentile £700 £750 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £525
% change year-on-year - -4.76% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 117 16 115
10th Percentile £39.53 £32.63 £56.35
25th Percentile £61.00 £51.25 £61.25
Median hourly rate £70.00 £71.61 £65.50
Median % change year-on-year -2.25% +9.33% -
75th Percentile £77.50 £87.50 £76.25
90th Percentile £92.50 £90.00 £86.46
UK excluding London median hourly rate £67.50 £71.61 £65.50
% change year-on-year -5.74% +9.33% -

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 41,432 26,234 36,612
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.66% 91.00% 85.42%
Number of daily rates quoted 25,858 16,712 23,486
10th Percentile £325 £300 £300
25th Percentile £413 £406 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £513 £525
Median % change year-on-year - -2.38% -4.55%
75th Percentile £614 £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 2,493 1,127 2,523
10th Percentile £14.64 £14.20 £12.75
25th Percentile £20.00 £17.87 £16.00
Median hourly rate £42.71 £27.64 £36.50
Median % change year-on-year +54.50% -24.27% +1.39%
75th Percentile £67.84 £56.25 £60.75
90th Percentile £81.24 £73.75 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £45.00 £25.15 £38.12
% change year-on-year +78.93% -34.02% +8.91%

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 4 June 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 4 June 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 4 June 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 +3 4,446 £525 - 1,634
UK excluding London +8 2,309 £500 - 1,107
London +3 2,263 £550 - 704
Work from Home -1 1,435 £525 - 1,042
North of England +7 813 £500 - 326
South East +1 471 £525 +5.00% 294
Yorkshire +2 448 £500 - 91
Midlands +3 415 £488 -2.50% 129
West Midlands +2 327 £500 -4.58% 89
North West +3 301 £500 - 190
South West +15 278 £523 -5.00% 146
Scotland +1 187 £500 +5.26% 62
East of England +21 128 £525 +5.00% 85
East Midlands 0 84 £465 +0.54% 40
North East +8 82 £450 -14.29% 46
Wales +5 50 £425 +39.13% 37
Northern Ireland +7 15 £525 +28.05% 47
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
1 297 (5.69%) Confluence
2 136 (2.60%) Apache Spark
3 118 (2.26%) SharePoint
4 97 (1.86%) Apache
5 93 (1.78%) Apache Airflow
6 85 (1.63%) SAS
7 45 (0.86%) CMS
8 32 (0.61%) nginx
9 30 (0.57%) Microsoft Exchange
10 27 (0.52%) IIS
11 24 (0.46%) Jupyter
12 19 (0.36%) OpenStack
13 15 (0.29%) Camunda
14 13 (0.25%) WebSphere
15 12 (0.23%) Mendix
15 12 (0.23%) Palantir Foundry
16 9 (0.17%) Sitecore CMS
17 8 (0.15%) HCL Notes
17 8 (0.15%) Oracle Workflow
18 7 (0.13%) Tomcat
Applications
1 75 (1.44%) Microsoft Excel
2 54 (1.03%) Microsoft Project
3 50 (0.96%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 35 (0.67%) Microsoft Office
5 27 (0.52%) MS Visio
6 5 (0.096%) CPLEX
7 4 (0.077%) Chatbot
7 4 (0.077%) Notion
8 3 (0.057%) Trello
9 2 (0.038%) Adobe XD
9 2 (0.038%) Spreadsheet
10 1 (0.019%) InDesign
10 1 (0.019%) Maya
10 1 (0.019%) Weka
Business Applications
1 65 (1.24%) Dynamics CRM
2 32 (0.61%) SAP S/4HANA
3 13 (0.25%) Oracle ERP
4 12 (0.23%) Payment Gateway
5 8 (0.15%) Aladdin
5 8 (0.15%) Dynamics AX
5 8 (0.15%) Maximo
6 7 (0.13%) Remedy ITSM
7 6 (0.11%) SAP MDG
8 5 (0.096%) Endur
8 5 (0.096%) Magento
8 5 (0.096%) Oracle EBS
9 3 (0.057%) Findur
9 3 (0.057%) NEC Housing
9 3 (0.057%) OpenText MBPM
9 3 (0.057%) Oracle BPM
9 3 (0.057%) SAP BPC
9 3 (0.057%) SAP ERP
9 3 (0.057%) SAP MM
9 3 (0.057%) SAP Oil and Gas
Cloud Services
1 2,833 (54.25%) Azure
2 1,796 (34.39%) AWS
3 1,535 (29.39%) Azure DevOps
4 888 (17.00%) GitHub
5 669 (12.81%) GCP
6 529 (10.13%) GitHub Actions
7 479 (9.17%) Serverless
8 446 (8.54%) Power Platform
9 280 (5.36%) Amazon S3
10 255 (4.88%) AWS Lambda
11 249 (4.77%) AWS CloudFormation
12 234 (4.48%) Entra ID
13 224 (4.29%) Azure AKS
14 205 (3.93%) Amazon EKS
14 205 (3.93%) Azure Data Factory
15 167 (3.20%) PaaS
16 165 (3.16%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 163 (3.12%) Azure Monitor
18 162 (3.10%) Amazon EC2
19 158 (3.03%) OpenShift
Communications & Networking
1 236 (4.52%) Firewall
2 135 (2.59%) DNS
3 111 (2.13%) Network Security
4 101 (1.93%) VPN
5 48 (0.92%) TCP/IP
6 44 (0.84%) WAN
7 36 (0.69%) SD-WAN
8 33 (0.63%) BGP
9 26 (0.50%) SSL
9 26 (0.50%) Wi-Fi
10 25 (0.48%) DHCP
10 25 (0.48%) SAN
11 24 (0.46%) HTTP
12 23 (0.44%) OSPF
13 20 (0.38%) Internet
14 19 (0.36%) IPsec
15 17 (0.33%) MPLS
15 17 (0.33%) VXLAN
16 16 (0.31%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
16 16 (0.31%) LAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 287 (5.50%) Power BI
2 269 (5.15%) SQL Server
3 243 (4.65%) PostgreSQL
4 179 (3.43%) NoSQL
5 178 (3.41%) Data Lake
6 154 (2.95%) Relational Database
7 149 (2.85%) Data Warehouse
8 137 (2.62%) MongoDB
9 116 (2.22%) Azure SQL Database
10 113 (2.16%) Amazon RDS
11 97 (1.86%) DynamoDB
12 93 (1.78%) Metadata
13 90 (1.72%) Delta Lake
14 79 (1.51%) Oracle Database
15 71 (1.36%) Big Data
16 65 (1.24%) Amazon Athena
17 64 (1.23%) Elasticsearch
18 58 (1.11%) Redis
19 55 (1.05%) BigQuery
20 54 (1.03%) Amazon Redshift
Development Applications
1 737 (14.11%) Jenkins
2 651 (12.47%) Git
3 618 (11.83%) JIRA
4 547 (10.47%) GitLab
5 113 (2.16%) Selenium
6 105 (2.01%) Postman
7 85 (1.63%) SonarQube
8 81 (1.55%) JUnit
9 67 (1.28%) REST Assured
10 65 (1.24%) Bitbucket
11 60 (1.15%) Maven
12 59 (1.13%) Cucumber
13 56 (1.07%) JMeter
14 52 (1.00%) Artifactory
15 49 (0.94%) Cypress.io
16 43 (0.82%) Gatling
17 39 (0.75%) Gradle
17 39 (0.75%) Mockito
18 33 (0.63%) Visual Studio
19 32 (0.61%) Sonatype Nexus
General
1 1,292 (24.74%) Social Skills
2 932 (17.85%) Finance
3 684 (13.10%) Public Sector
4 406 (7.77%) Analytical Skills
5 333 (6.38%) Banking
6 144 (2.76%) Documentation Skills
7 91 (1.74%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 73 (1.40%) Influencing Skills
9 70 (1.34%) Legal
10 68 (1.30%) Retail
11 54 (1.03%) Marketing
12 51 (0.98%) Financial Institution
13 49 (0.94%) Organisational Skills
14 40 (0.77%) Military
15 39 (0.75%) Investment Banking
16 38 (0.73%) Presentation Skills
17 35 (0.67%) Law
18 34 (0.65%) Front Office
19 30 (0.57%) Telecoms
20 27 (0.52%) Pharmaceutical
Job Titles
1 1,074 (20.57%) DevOps Engineer
2 758 (14.52%) Developer
3 735 (14.08%) Senior
4 614 (11.76%) Architect
5 455 (8.71%) Lead
6 344 (6.59%) Azure Engineer
7 309 (5.92%) Data Engineer
8 308 (5.90%) Analyst
9 253 (4.84%) AWS Engineer
10 198 (3.79%) Cloud Engineer
11 185 (3.54%) Platform Engineer
12 180 (3.45%) AWS DevOps
13 179 (3.43%) Solutions Architect
14 175 (3.35%) Azure DevOps Engineer
15 174 (3.33%) Senior DevOps
16 168 (3.22%) AWS DevOps Engineer
17 160 (3.06%) Business Analyst
18 158 (3.03%) Senior DevOps Engineer
19 153 (2.93%) Java Developer
20 150 (2.87%) Software Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 475 (9.10%) REST
2 461 (8.83%) .NET
3 308 (5.90%) React
4 281 (5.38%) Spring
5 277 (5.30%) Kafka
6 271 (5.19%) Spring Boot
7 259 (4.96%) RESTful
8 242 (4.63%) Node.js
9 174 (3.33%) AngularJS
10 159 (3.04%) PySpark
11 158 (3.03%) OAuth
12 152 (2.91%) Playwright
13 134 (2.57%) JSON
14 126 (2.41%) YAML
15 115 (2.20%) SOAP
16 109 (2.09%) OpenID
17 107 (2.05%) .NET Framework
17 107 (2.05%) Middleware
18 106 (2.03%) HTML
19 104 (1.99%) OAuth2
Miscellaneous
1 880 (16.85%) Cloud Native
2 327 (6.26%) Product Ownership
3 207 (3.96%) Distributed Systems
4 137 (2.62%) Onboarding
5 121 (2.32%) Legacy Systems
6 110 (2.11%) Public Cloud
7 107 (2.05%) Enterprise Software
8 105 (2.01%) Hybrid Cloud
9 82 (1.57%) Data Protection Act
10 79 (1.51%) Data Centre
11 65 (1.24%) Management Information System
12 56 (1.07%) Self-Motivation
13 49 (0.94%) Mobile App
13 49 (0.94%) Security Posture
13 49 (0.94%) Virtual Team
14 47 (0.90%) AI Agents
15 46 (0.88%) Greenfield Project
15 46 (0.88%) Private Cloud
16 44 (0.84%) Data Structures
16 44 (0.84%) Replication
Operating Systems
1 454 (8.69%) Linux
2 269 (5.15%) Windows
3 97 (1.86%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 80 (1.53%) Unix
5 56 (1.07%) Windows Server
6 39 (0.75%) VMS
7 27 (0.52%) Ubuntu
8 21 (0.40%) Apple iOS
9 16 (0.31%) Android
10 13 (0.25%) CentOS
11 10 (0.19%) Solaris
11 10 (0.19%) Windows Server 2019
12 8 (0.15%) Windows 10
13 7 (0.13%) Windows Server 2016
14 6 (0.11%) Windows Server 2008
15 5 (0.096%) Amazon Linux
15 5 (0.096%) Mac OS
15 5 (0.096%) Windows Server 2012
16 4 (0.077%) Alpine Linux
16 4 (0.077%) Data ONTAP
Processes & Methodologies
1 3,018 (57.79%) CI/CD
2 1,903 (36.44%) Agile
3 1,379 (26.41%) Infrastructure as Code
4 820 (15.70%) Containerisation
5 765 (14.65%) Problem-Solving
6 744 (14.25%) Test Automation
7 739 (14.15%) Microservices
8 711 (13.62%) Continuous Improvement
9 644 (12.33%) Migration
10 634 (12.14%) Observability
11 596 (11.41%) Analytics
12 592 (11.34%) Stakeholder Management
13 574 (10.99%) AI
13 574 (10.99%) Scrum
14 520 (9.96%) Software Engineering
15 516 (9.88%) Platform Engineering
16 484 (9.27%) Data Modelling
17 431 (8.25%) Technical Leadership
18 421 (8.06%) Mentoring
19 419 (8.02%) Roadmaps
Programming Languages
1 1,444 (27.65%) Python
2 1,017 (19.48%) SQL
3 691 (13.23%) Java
4 490 (9.38%) C#
5 381 (7.30%) JavaScript
6 380 (7.28%) PowerShell
7 375 (7.18%) Bash
8 268 (5.13%) TypeScript
9 184 (3.52%) Bicep
10 106 (2.03%) Go
11 66 (1.26%) Scala
12 65 (1.24%) Shell Script
13 59 (1.13%) Apex Code
14 51 (0.98%) PL/SQL
15 49 (0.94%) T-SQL
16 42 (0.80%) Groovy
17 34 (0.65%) C++
18 25 (0.48%) Data Analysis Expressions
18 25 (0.48%) Kotlin
18 25 (0.48%) Perl
Qualifications
1 1,640 (31.41%) Security Cleared
2 1,358 (26.01%) SC Cleared
3 322 (6.17%) Degree
4 217 (4.16%) Azure Certification
5 168 (3.22%) BPSS Clearance
6 156 (2.99%) DV Cleared
7 153 (2.93%) AWS Certification
8 135 (2.59%) Computer Science Degree
9 82 (1.57%) CISSP
10 63 (1.21%) Microsoft Certification
11 53 (1.01%) ISTQB
12 49 (0.94%) CISM
13 47 (0.90%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
14 46 (0.88%) Cisco Certification
14 46 (0.88%) Master's Degree
15 44 (0.84%) PMI Certification
16 41 (0.79%) PMP
17 26 (0.50%) TOGAF Certification
18 25 (0.48%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
19 22 (0.42%) ITIL Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 437 (8.37%) QA
2 246 (4.71%) Data Quality
3 180 (3.45%) GDPR
4 142 (2.72%) Accessibility
5 127 (2.43%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 118 (2.26%) NIST
7 68 (1.30%) NCSC
8 58 (1.11%) WCAG
9 47 (0.90%) PCI DSS
10 44 (0.84%) SLA
11 32 (0.61%) PMO
11 32 (0.61%) Sarbanes-Oxley
12 22 (0.42%) GRC
13 18 (0.34%) HIPAA
14 14 (0.27%) SOC 2
15 13 (0.25%) NIST 800
16 12 (0.23%) ISO 20022
16 12 (0.23%) PSD2
17 9 (0.17%) SEPA
18 8 (0.15%) HMG Security Policy Framework
System Software
1 986 (18.88%) Docker
2 173 (3.31%) Active Directory
3 76 (1.46%) VMware Infrastructure
4 75 (1.44%) Virtual Machines
5 35 (0.67%) vSphere
6 27 (0.52%) VMware NSX
7 19 (0.36%) Virtual Desktop
8 18 (0.34%) Squid
9 14 (0.27%) Postfix
9 14 (0.27%) VMware ESXi
10 13 (0.25%) Hyper-V
11 8 (0.15%) Oracle RAC
12 7 (0.13%) Firmware
12 7 (0.13%) HDFS
12 7 (0.13%) RACF
13 6 (0.11%) Corosync
14 5 (0.096%) NFS
14 5 (0.096%) SRDF
15 4 (0.077%) Ceph
15 4 (0.077%) Varnish
Systems Management
1 1,500 (28.72%) Terraform
2 1,317 (25.22%) Kubernetes
3 499 (9.56%) Ansible
4 356 (6.82%) Grafana
5 301 (5.76%) Prometheus
6 90 (1.72%) Argo
7 75 (1.44%) Single Sign-On
8 66 (1.26%) Puppet
9 62 (1.19%) Istio
10 33 (0.63%) Progress Chef
11 29 (0.56%) Microsoft Intune
12 28 (0.54%) Packer
13 23 (0.44%) vCenter Server
14 22 (0.42%) Active Directory Federation Services
14 22 (0.42%) HP ALM
15 20 (0.38%) Kibana
16 18 (0.34%) Consul
17 15 (0.29%) Oracle RMAN
17 15 (0.29%) SCCM
18 14 (0.27%) FortiGate
Vendors
1 911 (17.45%) Microsoft
2 284 (5.44%) Databricks
3 282 (5.40%) Oracle
4 248 (4.75%) Google
5 191 (3.66%) Splunk
6 177 (3.39%) ServiceNow
7 162 (3.10%) Salesforce
8 144 (2.76%) Red Hat
9 119 (2.28%) VMware
10 117 (2.24%) SAP
11 108 (2.07%) Dynatrace
12 72 (1.38%) OpenAI
13 50 (0.96%) Atlassian
14 49 (0.94%) CyberArk
14 49 (0.94%) IBM
15 48 (0.92%) Informatica
16 43 (0.82%) Cisco
17 39 (0.75%) Foundry
18 38 (0.73%) AppDynamics
18 38 (0.73%) Okta