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

6 months to
9 Oct 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 15 13 14
Rank change year-on-year -2 +1 -1
Contract jobs citing DevOps 5,625 3,787 3,767
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.32% 11.42% 9.92%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.20% 12.62% 11.53%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,919 2,633 2,501
10th Percentile £381 £363 £380
25th Percentile £435 £425 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £520 £550
Median % change year-on-year +0.96% -5.45% -4.35%
75th Percentile £625 £620 £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 114 23 65
10th Percentile £37.55 £44.25 £48.71
25th Percentile £57.44 £54.88 £66.25
Median hourly rate £68.88 £67.00 £70.00
Median % change year-on-year +2.80% -4.29% +7.69%
75th Percentile £77.50 £88.13 £74.00
90th Percentile £92.03 £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 46,102 30,004 32,672
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.59% 90.46% 86.03%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,718 18,629 19,703
10th Percentile £325 £294 £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 £638 £623 £638
90th Percentile £738 £725 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 3,326 1,885 1,303
10th Percentile £13.58 £14.33 £15.00
25th Percentile £17.00 £17.30 £20.00
Median hourly rate £37.50 £25.15 £40.00
Median % change year-on-year +49.11% -37.13% -8.31%
75th Percentile £65.00 £43.00 £65.00
90th Percentile £78.52 £65.00 £73.95
UK excluding London median hourly rate £37.50 £22.27 £41.25
% change year-on-year +68.43% -46.02% -2.94%

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 9 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 9 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 9 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 4,776 £525 - 4,836
London 0 2,543 £550 - 2,560
UK excluding London -3 2,368 £500 - 2,452
Work from Home -2 1,617 £525 +2.14% 2,189
North of England -3 790 £500 +5.15% 741
South East -8 447 £535 +7.00% 552
Midlands -8 404 £488 -5.34% 294
Yorkshire -5 375 £500 +0.70% 228
South West +6 327 £550 - 275
West Midlands -9 327 £500 -4.76% 182
North West -3 320 £523 +16.22% 397
Scotland -7 222 £475 -4.90% 205
East of England +4 148 £504 -7.31% 235
North East +10 109 £450 -18.18% 120
East Midlands -12 75 £449 +6.79% 111
Wales -7 42 £375 - 79
Northern Ireland +25 23 £600 - 80
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
1 340 (6.04%) Confluence
2 158 (2.81%) SharePoint
3 135 (2.40%) Apache Spark
4 125 (2.22%) Apache
4 125 (2.22%) Apache Airflow
5 48 (0.85%) SAS
6 44 (0.78%) Jupyter
7 41 (0.73%) CMS
8 34 (0.60%) nginx
9 31 (0.55%) IIS
10 21 (0.37%) Microsoft Exchange
11 16 (0.28%) Camunda
12 13 (0.23%) OpenStack
13 12 (0.21%) Anypoint
13 12 (0.21%) WebLogic
14 11 (0.20%) Oracle SOA Suite
14 11 (0.20%) WebSphere
15 10 (0.18%) Tomcat
16 9 (0.16%) Appian
16 9 (0.16%) Oracle Workflow
Applications
1 73 (1.30%) Microsoft Excel
2 52 (0.92%) Microsoft Project
3 51 (0.91%) MS Visio
4 40 (0.71%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 39 (0.69%) Microsoft Office
6 14 (0.25%) Chatbot
7 8 (0.14%) CPLEX
7 8 (0.14%) Spreadsheet
7 8 (0.14%) Windchill
8 5 (0.089%) Notion
8 5 (0.089%) Trello
9 3 (0.053%) Mingle
10 2 (0.036%) Adobe XD
10 2 (0.036%) 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 81 (1.44%) Dynamics CRM
2 46 (0.82%) SAP S/4HANA
3 15 (0.27%) Oracle EBS
4 12 (0.21%) SAP MDG
5 11 (0.20%) Payment Gateway
6 9 (0.16%) Magento
6 9 (0.16%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
7 7 (0.12%) Oracle EBS R12
8 6 (0.11%) Remedy ITSM
9 5 (0.089%) Aladdin
9 5 (0.089%) Dynamics AX
9 5 (0.089%) OpenText MBPM
9 5 (0.089%) Oracle BPM
9 5 (0.089%) Temenos T24
10 4 (0.071%) Maximo
10 4 (0.071%) Oracle Payroll
10 4 (0.071%) Teamcenter
10 4 (0.071%) Workday HCM
11 3 (0.053%) Endur
11 3 (0.053%) FLEXCUBE
Cloud Services
1 3,058 (54.36%) Azure
2 2,023 (35.96%) AWS
3 1,745 (31.02%) Azure DevOps
4 1,003 (17.83%) GitHub
5 771 (13.71%) GCP
6 635 (11.29%) GitHub Actions
7 500 (8.89%) Power Platform
8 478 (8.50%) Serverless
9 313 (5.56%) Amazon S3
10 288 (5.12%) AWS Lambda
11 269 (4.78%) Entra ID
12 268 (4.76%) Amazon EKS
13 259 (4.60%) Amazon CloudWatch
14 236 (4.20%) AWS CloudFormation
15 221 (3.93%) Azure Monitor
16 220 (3.91%) Azure AKS
17 204 (3.63%) Amazon EC2
18 197 (3.50%) Azure Data Factory
19 195 (3.47%) Dynamics 365
20 184 (3.27%) Amazon ECS
Communications & Networking
1 239 (4.25%) Firewall
2 181 (3.22%) DNS
3 121 (2.15%) VPN
4 120 (2.13%) Network Security
5 82 (1.46%) TCP/IP
6 55 (0.98%) DHCP
7 54 (0.96%) SSL
8 45 (0.80%) WAN
9 38 (0.68%) BGP
9 38 (0.68%) HTTP
10 30 (0.53%) Internet
11 29 (0.52%) SSH
12 28 (0.50%) OSPF
13 27 (0.48%) SD-WAN
14 21 (0.37%) LAN
14 21 (0.37%) VLAN
15 19 (0.34%) Wi-Fi
16 18 (0.32%) BIG-IP
16 18 (0.32%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
17 16 (0.28%) VXLAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 319 (5.67%) Power BI
2 303 (5.39%) PostgreSQL
2 303 (5.39%) SQL Server
3 210 (3.73%) Data Warehouse
4 192 (3.41%) MongoDB
5 183 (3.25%) NoSQL
6 180 (3.20%) Data Lake
7 166 (2.95%) Relational Database
8 158 (2.81%) Amazon RDS
9 128 (2.28%) Metadata
10 108 (1.92%) Azure SQL Database
11 91 (1.62%) DynamoDB
12 90 (1.60%) MySQL
13 89 (1.58%) Oracle Database
14 86 (1.53%) Redis
15 84 (1.49%) Delta Lake
16 65 (1.16%) Big Data
16 65 (1.16%) SQL Server Integration Services
17 64 (1.14%) Amazon Redshift
18 57 (1.01%) BigQuery
Development Applications
1 868 (15.43%) Git
2 830 (14.76%) Jenkins
3 670 (11.91%) GitLab
4 655 (11.64%) JIRA
5 148 (2.63%) Selenium
6 102 (1.81%) JUnit
7 97 (1.72%) Maven
7 97 (1.72%) Postman
8 92 (1.64%) SonarQube
9 81 (1.44%) Cucumber
10 74 (1.32%) Cypress.io
10 74 (1.32%) REST Assured
11 72 (1.28%) Bitbucket
12 67 (1.19%) Gradle
13 63 (1.12%) JMeter
14 56 (1.00%) Claude Code
15 51 (0.91%) Mockito
16 45 (0.80%) Sonatype Nexus
17 44 (0.78%) Visual Studio
18 39 (0.69%) Gatling
General
1 1,504 (26.74%) Social Skills
2 1,037 (18.44%) Finance
3 819 (14.56%) Public Sector
4 550 (9.78%) Analytical Skills
5 415 (7.38%) Banking
6 167 (2.97%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 113 (2.01%) Retail
8 93 (1.65%) Influencing Skills
9 80 (1.42%) Documentation Skills
10 61 (1.08%) Aerospace
11 59 (1.05%) Legal
11 59 (1.05%) Organisational Skills
12 58 (1.03%) Investment Banking
13 56 (1.00%) Marketing
13 56 (1.00%) Military
14 51 (0.91%) Telecoms
15 49 (0.87%) Manufacturing
16 46 (0.82%) Local Government
17 45 (0.80%) Financial Institution
17 45 (0.80%) Law
Job Titles
1 1,128 (20.05%) DevOps Engineer
2 931 (16.55%) Developer
3 859 (15.27%) Senior
4 635 (11.29%) Architect
5 545 (9.69%) Lead
6 345 (6.13%) Azure Engineer
7 312 (5.55%) Data Engineer
8 262 (4.66%) AWS Engineer
9 252 (4.48%) Analyst
10 225 (4.00%) Platform Engineer
11 206 (3.66%) Cloud Engineer
12 203 (3.61%) Senior DevOps
13 198 (3.52%) Azure DevOps Engineer
14 194 (3.45%) Java Developer
15 187 (3.32%) AWS DevOps
16 185 (3.29%) Senior DevOps Engineer
17 176 (3.13%) AWS DevOps Engineer
18 175 (3.11%) Solutions Architect
19 152 (2.70%) Senior Developer
20 144 (2.56%) Software Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 1,725 (30.67%) Terraform
2 692 (12.30%) REST
3 501 (8.91%) .NET
4 402 (7.15%) Kafka
5 366 (6.51%) RESTful
6 303 (5.39%) Spring
7 299 (5.32%) React
8 298 (5.30%) Spring Boot
9 206 (3.66%) OAuth
10 191 (3.40%) Node.js
11 186 (3.31%) JSON
12 161 (2.86%) Playwright
13 154 (2.74%) PySpark
14 149 (2.65%) HTML
15 141 (2.51%) OAuth2
16 136 (2.42%) .NET Framework
17 135 (2.40%) CSS
18 133 (2.36%) Middleware
18 133 (2.36%) SOAP
19 128 (2.28%) AngularJS
Miscellaneous
1 1,055 (18.76%) Cloud Native
2 420 (7.47%) Product Ownership
3 274 (4.87%) Distributed Systems
4 234 (4.16%) Enterprise Software
5 215 (3.82%) Onboarding
6 160 (2.84%) Hybrid Cloud
7 147 (2.61%) Legacy Systems
8 115 (2.04%) AI Agents
9 107 (1.90%) Management Information System
10 87 (1.55%) Self-Motivation
11 78 (1.39%) Data Protection Act
11 78 (1.39%) Public Cloud
11 78 (1.39%) Security Posture
12 76 (1.35%) Data Structures
13 74 (1.32%) Data Centre
14 73 (1.30%) Replication
15 67 (1.19%) PKI
16 64 (1.14%) Enterprise Cloud
17 55 (0.98%) Virtual Team
18 51 (0.91%) Mobile App
Operating Systems
1 590 (10.49%) Linux
2 334 (5.94%) Windows
3 124 (2.20%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 114 (2.03%) Unix
5 104 (1.85%) Windows Server
6 37 (0.66%) Ubuntu
7 35 (0.62%) VMS
8 26 (0.46%) Apple iOS
9 18 (0.32%) Android
10 17 (0.30%) CentOS
11 12 (0.21%) zOS
12 11 (0.20%) 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 4 (0.071%) Alpine Linux
15 4 (0.071%) Mac OS
15 4 (0.071%) Windows Server 2008
16 3 (0.053%) Rocky
Processes & Methodologies
1 3,504 (62.29%) CI/CD
2 2,293 (40.76%) Agile
3 1,710 (30.40%) Infrastructure as Code
4 997 (17.72%) Stakeholder Management
5 981 (17.44%) Continuous Improvement
6 953 (16.94%) Containerisation
7 950 (16.89%) Test Automation
8 924 (16.43%) AI
9 903 (16.05%) Problem-Solving
10 845 (15.02%) Microservices
11 804 (14.29%) Observability
12 793 (14.10%) Platform Engineering
13 760 (13.51%) Software Engineering
14 685 (12.18%) Migration
14 685 (12.18%) Scrum
15 633 (11.25%) Technical Leadership
16 578 (10.28%) Analytics
17 526 (9.35%) Stakeholder Engagement
18 502 (8.92%) Event-Driven
18 502 (8.92%) Roadmaps
Programming Languages
1 1,674 (29.76%) Python
2 982 (17.46%) SQL
3 828 (14.72%) Java
4 529 (9.40%) Bash
5 521 (9.26%) C#
5 521 (9.26%) PowerShell
6 473 (8.41%) JavaScript
7 336 (5.97%) TypeScript
8 274 (4.87%) Bicep
9 128 (2.28%) Go
10 83 (1.48%) Shell Script
11 70 (1.24%) Scala
12 68 (1.21%) T-SQL
13 65 (1.16%) Groovy
14 58 (1.03%) Apex Code
15 57 (1.01%) PL/SQL
16 38 (0.68%) Data Analysis Expressions
17 36 (0.64%) Perl
18 34 (0.60%) C++
19 29 (0.52%) Kusto Query Language
Qualifications
1 1,815 (32.27%) Security Cleared
2 1,516 (26.95%) SC Cleared
3 375 (6.67%) Degree
4 253 (4.50%) Azure Certification
5 250 (4.44%) DV Cleared
6 247 (4.39%) BPSS Clearance
7 204 (3.63%) AWS Certification
8 150 (2.67%) Computer Science Degree
9 108 (1.92%) Microsoft Certification
10 80 (1.42%) CISSP
11 64 (1.14%) ISTQB
12 56 (1.00%) PMP
13 55 (0.98%) Cisco Certification
14 53 (0.94%) PMI Certification
15 49 (0.87%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
16 42 (0.75%) Master's Degree
17 32 (0.57%) CISM
18 28 (0.50%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
19 25 (0.44%) (ISC)2 CCSP
20 24 (0.43%) ITIL Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 558 (9.92%) QA
2 281 (5.00%) Data Quality
3 222 (3.95%) Accessibility
4 122 (2.17%) GDPR
5 95 (1.69%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 83 (1.48%) WCAG
7 66 (1.17%) NIST
8 56 (1.00%) NCSC
9 47 (0.84%) PMO
10 34 (0.60%) SLA
11 33 (0.59%) PCI DSS
12 27 (0.48%) GRC
13 23 (0.41%) ISO 20022
14 18 (0.32%) Sarbanes-Oxley
15 15 (0.27%) HIPAA
15 15 (0.27%) SEPA
15 15 (0.27%) SOC 2
16 14 (0.25%) Cyber Essentials
16 14 (0.25%) Disclosure Scotland
17 13 (0.23%) Actionable Recommendations
System Software
1 1,178 (20.94%) Docker
2 173 (3.08%) Active Directory
3 83 (1.48%) VMware Infrastructure
4 79 (1.40%) Virtual Machines
5 31 (0.55%) vSphere
6 24 (0.43%) Virtual Desktop
6 24 (0.43%) VMware ESXi
7 21 (0.37%) Hyper-V
8 14 (0.25%) VMware NSX
9 11 (0.20%) Squid
10 10 (0.18%) IAG
10 10 (0.18%) Oracle RAC
11 8 (0.14%) zsh
12 7 (0.12%) Virtual Servers
13 6 (0.11%) Apache ZooKeeper
13 6 (0.11%) Microsoft App-V
13 6 (0.11%) Postfix
13 6 (0.11%) RACF
14 5 (0.089%) Corosync
14 5 (0.089%) KVM
Systems Management
1 1,563 (27.79%) Kubernetes
2 549 (9.76%) Ansible
3 381 (6.77%) Grafana
4 320 (5.69%) Prometheus
5 72 (1.28%) Argo
6 57 (1.01%) Puppet
7 50 (0.89%) Microsoft Intune
8 49 (0.87%) Progress Chef
9 43 (0.76%) Kibana
10 41 (0.73%) Single Sign-On
11 37 (0.66%) Packer
12 31 (0.55%) Istio
13 24 (0.43%) Kubeflow
14 23 (0.41%) Kustomize
15 20 (0.36%) SCCM
16 17 (0.30%) vCenter Server
17 15 (0.27%) Oracle RMAN
18 14 (0.25%) HP ALM
19 13 (0.23%) Karpenter
19 13 (0.23%) SCOM
Vendors
1 1,147 (20.39%) Microsoft
2 321 (5.71%) Google
3 315 (5.60%) Databricks
4 302 (5.37%) Oracle
5 199 (3.54%) ServiceNow
6 188 (3.34%) Splunk
7 164 (2.92%) Salesforce
8 156 (2.77%) Dynatrace
9 123 (2.19%) VMware
10 119 (2.12%) SAP
11 97 (1.72%) Red Hat
12 75 (1.33%) OpenAI
13 71 (1.26%) IBM
14 70 (1.24%) MuleSoft
15 62 (1.10%) Foundry
16 46 (0.82%) Informatica
17 44 (0.78%) Cisco
18 39 (0.69%) AppDynamics
18 39 (0.69%) Atlassian
18 39 (0.69%) Okta