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 1 October 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
1 Oct 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 15 14 14
Rank change year-on-year -1 0 -1
Contract jobs citing DevOps 5,656 3,736 3,745
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.30% 11.30% 9.90%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.19% 12.47% 11.53%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,926 2,605 2,484
10th Percentile £381 £362 £381
25th Percentile £437 £425 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £520 £550
Median % change year-on-year +0.96% -5.45% -4.35%
75th Percentile £623 £619 £650
90th Percentile £700 £700 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £550
% change year-on-year - -9.09% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 121 24 65
10th Percentile £38.25 £45.13 £54.50
25th Percentile £56.75 £55.81 £65.00
Median hourly rate £69.00 £67.00 £70.00
Median % change year-on-year +2.99% -4.29% +7.69%
75th Percentile £78.00 £87.81 £74.00
90th Percentile £92.50 £95.00 £85.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £70.00 £67.00 £70.00
% change year-on-year +4.48% -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 46,382 29,970 32,481
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.48% 90.66% 85.86%
Number of daily rates quoted 28,008 18,622 19,630
10th Percentile £325 £300 £308
25th Percentile £425 £404 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -2.78%
75th Percentile £630 £625 £638
90th Percentile £733 £725 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 3,245 1,858 1,349
10th Percentile £13.70 £14.32 £15.00
25th Percentile £17.19 £17.30 £20.12
Median hourly rate £39.00 £25.15 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year +55.07% -40.82% -
75th Percentile £65.60 £43.75 £65.00
90th Percentile £78.64 £65.00 £74.44
UK excluding London median hourly rate £39.50 £22.32 £43.00
% change year-on-year +77.01% -48.10% +1.18%

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 1 October 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 1 October 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 1 October 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 4,804 £525 - 4,167
London -1 2,531 £550 - 2,033
UK excluding London -3 2,414 £500 - 2,328
Work from Home -1 1,599 £525 +1.69% 1,953
North of England -2 797 £500 +5.26% 692
South East -12 450 £525 +5.00% 473
Midlands -7 429 £488 -5.34% 294
Yorkshire -2 389 £500 +2.04% 205
West Midlands -8 344 £500 -4.76% 178
South West +5 328 £550 +0.46% 317
North West -3 313 £528 +16.45% 389
Scotland -2 224 £475 -5.00% 189
East of England +5 159 £505 -3.81% 208
North East +12 112 £450 -18.18% 103
East Midlands -3 82 £459 +1.94% 116
Wales -10 44 £425 +13.33% 96
Northern Ireland +24 23 £450 - 73
Channel Islands - 2 £500 -

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
1 345 (6.10%) Confluence
2 161 (2.85%) SharePoint
3 133 (2.35%) Apache Spark
4 125 (2.21%) Apache Airflow
5 121 (2.14%) Apache
6 51 (0.90%) SAS
7 44 (0.78%) CMS
7 44 (0.78%) Jupyter
8 30 (0.53%) IIS
9 27 (0.48%) nginx
10 20 (0.35%) Microsoft Exchange
11 16 (0.28%) Camunda
12 13 (0.23%) OpenStack
12 13 (0.23%) WebLogic
13 12 (0.21%) Anypoint
14 11 (0.19%) WebSphere
15 10 (0.18%) Oracle SOA Suite
15 10 (0.18%) Tomcat
16 9 (0.16%) Appian
16 9 (0.16%) Oracle Workflow
Applications
1 68 (1.20%) Microsoft Excel
2 54 (0.95%) MS Visio
3 52 (0.92%) Microsoft Project
4 36 (0.64%) Microsoft Office
5 35 (0.62%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 14 (0.25%) Chatbot
7 8 (0.14%) CPLEX
7 8 (0.14%) Spreadsheet
7 8 (0.14%) Windchill
8 5 (0.088%) Notion
8 5 (0.088%) Trello
9 3 (0.053%) Mingle
10 2 (0.035%) Adobe XD
10 2 (0.035%) Gliffy
11 1 (0.018%) EngageOne
11 1 (0.018%) Mozilla Thunderbird
11 1 (0.018%) Sketch
11 1 (0.018%) Weka
Business Applications
1 82 (1.45%) Dynamics CRM
2 47 (0.83%) SAP S/4HANA
3 15 (0.27%) Oracle EBS
4 13 (0.23%) Payment Gateway
5 12 (0.21%) SAP MDG
6 10 (0.18%) Magento
7 9 (0.16%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
8 7 (0.12%) Oracle EBS R12
9 6 (0.11%) Aladdin
9 6 (0.11%) Dynamics AX
9 6 (0.11%) Remedy ITSM
10 5 (0.088%) OpenText MBPM
10 5 (0.088%) Oracle BPM
10 5 (0.088%) Temenos T24
11 4 (0.071%) Oracle ERP
11 4 (0.071%) Oracle Payroll
11 4 (0.071%) Workday HCM
12 3 (0.053%) Maximo
12 3 (0.053%) SAP ERP
12 3 (0.053%) Teamcenter
Cloud Services
1 3,059 (54.08%) Azure
2 2,037 (36.01%) AWS
3 1,753 (30.99%) Azure DevOps
4 976 (17.26%) GitHub
5 754 (13.33%) GCP
6 619 (10.94%) GitHub Actions
7 496 (8.77%) Power Platform
8 469 (8.29%) Serverless
9 314 (5.55%) Amazon S3
10 290 (5.13%) AWS Lambda
11 264 (4.67%) Amazon EKS
12 258 (4.56%) Entra ID
13 256 (4.53%) Amazon CloudWatch
14 239 (4.23%) AWS CloudFormation
15 215 (3.80%) Azure AKS
16 210 (3.71%) Azure Monitor
17 204 (3.61%) Amazon EC2
18 193 (3.41%) Azure Data Factory
19 190 (3.36%) Dynamics 365
20 176 (3.11%) Amazon ECS
Communications & Networking
1 242 (4.28%) Firewall
2 173 (3.06%) DNS
3 122 (2.16%) VPN
4 115 (2.03%) Network Security
5 75 (1.33%) TCP/IP
6 54 (0.95%) SSL
7 51 (0.90%) DHCP
8 45 (0.80%) WAN
9 37 (0.65%) HTTP
10 36 (0.64%) BGP
11 28 (0.50%) Internet
11 28 (0.50%) SSH
12 27 (0.48%) OSPF
12 27 (0.48%) SD-WAN
13 23 (0.41%) Wi-Fi
14 21 (0.37%) LAN
14 21 (0.37%) VLAN
15 18 (0.32%) SAN
16 17 (0.30%) BIG-IP
16 17 (0.30%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
Database & Business Intelligence
1 323 (5.71%) Power BI
2 302 (5.34%) PostgreSQL
3 296 (5.23%) SQL Server
4 211 (3.73%) Data Warehouse
5 188 (3.32%) MongoDB
6 181 (3.20%) Data Lake
6 181 (3.20%) NoSQL
7 163 (2.88%) Relational Database
8 153 (2.71%) Amazon RDS
9 128 (2.26%) Metadata
10 100 (1.77%) Azure SQL Database
11 93 (1.64%) DynamoDB
12 89 (1.57%) MySQL
13 88 (1.56%) Oracle Database
14 86 (1.52%) Delta Lake
15 85 (1.50%) Redis
16 69 (1.22%) Amazon Redshift
17 64 (1.13%) Big Data
17 64 (1.13%) SQL Server Integration Services
18 57 (1.01%) BigQuery
Development Applications
1 858 (15.17%) Git
2 807 (14.27%) Jenkins
3 671 (11.86%) JIRA
4 660 (11.67%) GitLab
5 145 (2.56%) Selenium
6 102 (1.80%) JUnit
7 99 (1.75%) Maven
8 98 (1.73%) SonarQube
9 96 (1.70%) Postman
10 77 (1.36%) Cucumber
11 75 (1.33%) REST Assured
12 70 (1.24%) Bitbucket
13 69 (1.22%) Cypress.io
14 68 (1.20%) Gradle
15 65 (1.15%) JMeter
16 54 (0.95%) Claude Code
17 50 (0.88%) Mockito
18 43 (0.76%) Sonatype Nexus
19 42 (0.74%) Gatling
19 42 (0.74%) Visual Studio
General
1 1,477 (26.11%) Social Skills
2 1,020 (18.03%) Finance
3 815 (14.41%) Public Sector
4 536 (9.48%) Analytical Skills
5 402 (7.11%) Banking
6 171 (3.02%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 110 (1.94%) Retail
8 92 (1.63%) Influencing Skills
9 82 (1.45%) Documentation Skills
10 59 (1.04%) Legal
11 58 (1.03%) Aerospace
11 58 (1.03%) Organisational Skills
12 56 (0.99%) Marketing
13 55 (0.97%) Military
14 53 (0.94%) Investment Banking
15 52 (0.92%) Telecoms
16 49 (0.87%) Manufacturing
17 43 (0.76%) Law
18 41 (0.72%) Financial Institution
18 41 (0.72%) Local Government
Job Titles
1 1,138 (20.12%) DevOps Engineer
2 923 (16.32%) Developer
3 861 (15.22%) Senior
4 647 (11.44%) Architect
5 539 (9.53%) Lead
6 347 (6.14%) Azure Engineer
7 307 (5.43%) Data Engineer
8 275 (4.86%) Analyst
9 258 (4.56%) AWS Engineer
10 227 (4.01%) Platform Engineer
11 204 (3.61%) Azure DevOps Engineer
12 203 (3.59%) Cloud Engineer
13 202 (3.57%) Senior DevOps
14 198 (3.50%) Java Developer
15 184 (3.25%) AWS DevOps
15 184 (3.25%) Senior DevOps Engineer
16 177 (3.13%) Solutions Architect
17 173 (3.06%) AWS DevOps Engineer
18 151 (2.67%) Senior Developer
19 145 (2.56%) Software Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 1,707 (30.18%) Terraform
2 657 (11.62%) REST
3 480 (8.49%) .NET
4 399 (7.05%) Kafka
5 367 (6.49%) RESTful
6 310 (5.48%) Spring
7 305 (5.39%) Spring Boot
8 295 (5.22%) React
9 197 (3.48%) Node.js
10 192 (3.39%) OAuth
11 185 (3.27%) JSON
12 157 (2.78%) Playwright
13 151 (2.67%) PySpark
14 149 (2.63%) HTML
15 136 (2.40%) SOAP
16 135 (2.39%) CSS
17 133 (2.35%) .NET Framework
17 133 (2.35%) OAuth2
18 126 (2.23%) Middleware
19 122 (2.16%) AngularJS
Miscellaneous
1 1,054 (18.64%) Cloud Native
2 430 (7.60%) Product Ownership
3 268 (4.74%) Distributed Systems
4 220 (3.89%) Enterprise Software
5 210 (3.71%) Onboarding
6 153 (2.71%) Hybrid Cloud
7 148 (2.62%) Legacy Systems
8 111 (1.96%) AI Agents
9 97 (1.71%) Management Information System
10 86 (1.52%) Self-Motivation
11 78 (1.38%) Public Cloud
12 77 (1.36%) Data Protection Act
13 74 (1.31%) Data Structures
13 74 (1.31%) Replication
13 74 (1.31%) Security Posture
14 73 (1.29%) Data Centre
15 62 (1.10%) Enterprise Cloud
16 61 (1.08%) PKI
17 58 (1.03%) Virtual Team
18 53 (0.94%) Mobile App
Operating Systems
1 573 (10.13%) Linux
2 319 (5.64%) Windows
3 122 (2.16%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 114 (2.02%) Unix
5 98 (1.73%) Windows Server
6 38 (0.67%) Ubuntu
7 34 (0.60%) VMS
8 30 (0.53%) Apple iOS
9 21 (0.37%) Android
10 17 (0.30%) CentOS
11 12 (0.21%) zOS
12 11 (0.19%) Amazon Linux
13 9 (0.16%) Windows Server 2016
13 9 (0.16%) Windows Server 2019
14 7 (0.12%) AIX
14 7 (0.12%) Solaris
15 6 (0.11%) Mac OS
16 4 (0.071%) Alpine Linux
16 4 (0.071%) Data ONTAP
16 4 (0.071%) Windows Server 2008
Processes & Methodologies
1 3,484 (61.60%) CI/CD
2 2,324 (41.09%) Agile
3 1,690 (29.88%) Infrastructure as Code
4 975 (17.24%) Stakeholder Management
5 970 (17.15%) Continuous Improvement
6 965 (17.06%) Containerisation
7 925 (16.35%) Test Automation
8 906 (16.02%) AI
9 891 (15.75%) Problem-Solving
10 843 (14.90%) Microservices
11 790 (13.97%) Observability
12 786 (13.90%) Platform Engineering
13 749 (13.24%) Software Engineering
14 705 (12.46%) Scrum
15 689 (12.18%) Migration
16 632 (11.17%) Technical Leadership
17 580 (10.25%) Analytics
18 534 (9.44%) Stakeholder Engagement
19 492 (8.70%) Roadmaps
20 483 (8.54%) Event-Driven
Programming Languages
1 1,645 (29.08%) Python
2 986 (17.43%) SQL
3 832 (14.71%) Java
4 508 (8.98%) Bash
5 500 (8.84%) C#
6 496 (8.77%) PowerShell
7 468 (8.27%) JavaScript
8 315 (5.57%) TypeScript
9 267 (4.72%) Bicep
10 132 (2.33%) Go
11 81 (1.43%) Shell Script
12 68 (1.20%) Scala
13 67 (1.18%) T-SQL
14 60 (1.06%) Apex Code
14 60 (1.06%) PL/SQL
15 59 (1.04%) Groovy
16 39 (0.69%) Data Analysis Expressions
17 34 (0.60%) Perl
18 33 (0.58%) C++
19 27 (0.48%) Kusto Query Language
Qualifications
1 1,819 (32.16%) Security Cleared
2 1,522 (26.91%) SC Cleared
3 371 (6.56%) Degree
4 252 (4.46%) Azure Certification
5 246 (4.35%) BPSS Clearance
6 241 (4.26%) DV Cleared
7 197 (3.48%) AWS Certification
8 146 (2.58%) Computer Science Degree
9 113 (2.00%) Microsoft Certification
10 74 (1.31%) CISSP
11 61 (1.08%) ISTQB
12 54 (0.95%) PMP
13 53 (0.94%) Cisco Certification
14 48 (0.85%) PMI Certification
15 47 (0.83%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
16 42 (0.74%) Master's Degree
17 28 (0.50%) CISM
18 25 (0.44%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
19 23 (0.41%) (ISC)2 CCSP
19 23 (0.41%) ITIL Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 558 (9.87%) QA
2 280 (4.95%) Data Quality
3 220 (3.89%) Accessibility
4 120 (2.12%) GDPR
5 91 (1.61%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 84 (1.49%) WCAG
7 70 (1.24%) NIST
8 56 (0.99%) NCSC
9 45 (0.80%) PMO
10 35 (0.62%) SLA
11 31 (0.55%) PCI DSS
12 29 (0.51%) GRC
13 23 (0.41%) ISO 20022
14 20 (0.35%) Sarbanes-Oxley
15 15 (0.27%) HIPAA
16 14 (0.25%) Cyber Essentials
16 14 (0.25%) Disclosure Scotland
16 14 (0.25%) SEPA
16 14 (0.25%) SOC 2
17 12 (0.21%) Actionable Recommendations
System Software
1 1,170 (20.69%) Docker
2 163 (2.88%) Active Directory
3 86 (1.52%) VMware Infrastructure
4 79 (1.40%) Virtual Machines
5 33 (0.58%) vSphere
6 25 (0.44%) VMware ESXi
7 22 (0.39%) Hyper-V
8 20 (0.35%) Virtual Desktop
9 16 (0.28%) VMware NSX
10 11 (0.19%) Squid
11 10 (0.18%) IAG
11 10 (0.18%) Oracle RAC
12 8 (0.14%) Postfix
12 8 (0.14%) zsh
13 6 (0.11%) Apache ZooKeeper
13 6 (0.11%) Corosync
13 6 (0.11%) KVM
13 6 (0.11%) Microsoft App-V
13 6 (0.11%) RACF
14 5 (0.088%) NFS
Systems Management
1 1,568 (27.72%) Kubernetes
2 545 (9.64%) Ansible
3 378 (6.68%) Grafana
4 325 (5.75%) Prometheus
5 76 (1.34%) Argo
6 59 (1.04%) Puppet
7 48 (0.85%) Microsoft Intune
8 47 (0.83%) Progress Chef
9 42 (0.74%) Single Sign-On
10 39 (0.69%) Packer
11 35 (0.62%) Kibana
12 32 (0.57%) Istio
13 22 (0.39%) Kubeflow
14 21 (0.37%) Kustomize
15 20 (0.35%) vCenter Server
16 17 (0.30%) Oracle RMAN
17 16 (0.28%) SCCM
18 15 (0.27%) HP ALM
19 13 (0.23%) Consul
19 13 (0.23%) SCOM
Vendors
1 1,113 (19.68%) Microsoft
2 307 (5.43%) Databricks
3 303 (5.36%) Google
4 299 (5.29%) Oracle
5 204 (3.61%) ServiceNow
6 192 (3.39%) Splunk
7 174 (3.08%) Salesforce
8 147 (2.60%) Dynatrace
9 129 (2.28%) VMware
10 117 (2.07%) SAP
11 98 (1.73%) Red Hat
12 75 (1.33%) OpenAI
13 70 (1.24%) IBM
14 66 (1.17%) MuleSoft
15 57 (1.01%) Foundry
16 49 (0.87%) Cisco
17 44 (0.78%) Informatica
18 42 (0.74%) AppDynamics
19 41 (0.72%) Okta
20 39 (0.69%) Atlassian