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 5 March 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
5 Mar 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 12 15 16
Rank change year-on-year +3 +1 -4
Contract jobs citing DevOps 4,776 3,246 3,843
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 11.22% 10.73% 8.73%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.98% 11.90% 10.06%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,339 2,301 2,729
10th Percentile £375 £394 £410
25th Percentile £429 £456 £469
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £520 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -5.45% - -7.17%
75th Percentile £613 £663 £650
90th Percentile £708 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £525 £525
% change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 69 23 100
10th Percentile £44.27 £36.30 £46.18
25th Percentile £45.46 £62.82 £59.16
Median hourly rate £62.00 £74.44 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year -16.71% +14.52% -0.76%
75th Percentile £77.50 £80.75 £72.53
90th Percentile £92.50 £87.50 £84.52
UK excluding London median hourly rate £55.00 £73.23 £65.00
% change year-on-year -24.89% +12.65% -0.76%

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 36,798 27,287 38,212
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 86.45% 90.16% 86.77%
Number of daily rates quoted 23,332 17,120 24,896
10th Percentile £313 £306 £300
25th Percentile £413 £413 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £613 £638 £638
90th Percentile £725 £738 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £482 £492 £500
% change year-on-year -2.03% -1.60% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,175 894 2,252
10th Percentile £14.64 £15.62 £13.25
25th Percentile £18.25 £21.05 £16.11
Median hourly rate £28.00 £32.50 £32.85
Median % change year-on-year -13.85% -1.05% -6.16%
75th Percentile £63.75 £63.75 £58.75
90th Percentile £73.63 £75.00 £71.90
UK excluding London median hourly rate £25.15 £31.76 £33.28
% change year-on-year -20.81% -4.57% -4.91%

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 5 March 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 5 March 2026.

Hourly rate histogram for DevOps in the UK

DevOps
Top 17 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 5 March 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 4,083 £525 -7.37% 1,589
UK excluding London +7 2,125 £500 -4.76% 1,315
London -3 2,051 £543 -7.26% 542
Work from Home -3 1,331 £525 -2.05% 885
North of England +6 746 £500 -4.76% 361
South East +1 433 £525 -8.70% 392
Midlands +14 419 £500 +1.01% 172
Yorkshire +2 393 £500 -2.44% 113
West Midlands +12 335 £515 +3.00% 109
North West +5 302 £492 -6.29% 198
South West +11 264 £525 -12.50% 174
Scotland +6 181 £450 - 90
East of England +19 114 £588 +17.50% 96
East Midlands +3 83 £434 -8.68% 60
North East -2 56 £475 -9.52% 55
Wales +14 39 £425 +80.08% 35
Northern Ireland -4 11 £475 +15.15% 10

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
1 286 (5.99%) Confluence
2 107 (2.24%) Apache Spark
3 98 (2.05%) SharePoint
4 91 (1.91%) Apache
5 87 (1.82%) SAS
6 63 (1.32%) Apache Airflow
7 33 (0.69%) CMS
7 33 (0.69%) nginx
7 33 (0.69%) OpenStack
8 32 (0.67%) Microsoft Exchange
9 22 (0.46%) IIS
10 15 (0.31%) WebLogic
11 14 (0.29%) Mendix
12 13 (0.27%) JBoss
13 12 (0.25%) Adobe Experience Manager
13 12 (0.25%) Sitecore CMS
14 10 (0.21%) HCL Notes
15 9 (0.19%) Camunda
15 9 (0.19%) Palantir Foundry
16 8 (0.17%) GeoServer
Applications
1 92 (1.93%) Microsoft Excel
2 66 (1.38%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 43 (0.90%) Microsoft Project
4 32 (0.67%) Microsoft Office
5 23 (0.48%) MS Visio
6 15 (0.31%) Chatbot
7 8 (0.17%) Weka
8 5 (0.10%) Trello
9 2 (0.042%) Adobe XD
10 1 (0.021%) CPLEX
10 1 (0.021%) InDesign
10 1 (0.021%) Maya
10 1 (0.021%) Mozilla Thunderbird
10 1 (0.021%) Spreadsheet
Business Applications
1 72 (1.51%) Dynamics CRM
2 15 (0.31%) SAP S/4HANA
3 12 (0.25%) Oracle ERP
4 11 (0.23%) Maximo
5 10 (0.21%) Endur
6 8 (0.17%) Aladdin
6 8 (0.17%) NEC Housing
7 7 (0.15%) Dynamics AX
8 6 (0.13%) Remedy ITSM
8 6 (0.13%) SAP ERP
9 5 (0.10%) Oracle EBS
9 5 (0.10%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
10 4 (0.084%) Payment Gateway
11 3 (0.063%) NetSuite
11 3 (0.063%) Salesforce CRM
11 3 (0.063%) SAP BPC
11 3 (0.063%) SAP CO
11 3 (0.063%) SAP FI
11 3 (0.063%) SAP FI/CO
11 3 (0.063%) Workday HCM
Cloud Services
1 2,492 (52.18%) Azure
2 1,706 (35.72%) AWS
3 1,351 (28.29%) Azure DevOps
4 891 (18.66%) GitHub
5 695 (14.55%) GCP
6 564 (11.81%) Serverless
7 504 (10.55%) GitHub Actions
8 400 (8.38%) Power Platform
9 299 (6.26%) AWS CloudFormation
10 271 (5.67%) AWS Lambda
11 265 (5.55%) Amazon S3
12 236 (4.94%) Azure Data Factory
13 226 (4.73%) Azure AKS
14 212 (4.44%) Amazon EKS
15 210 (4.40%) Entra ID
16 205 (4.29%) OpenShift
17 180 (3.77%) Azure Monitor
18 177 (3.71%) Dynamics 365
19 169 (3.54%) Amazon ECS
20 165 (3.45%) Amazon EC2
Communications & Networking
1 213 (4.46%) Firewall
2 113 (2.37%) DNS
3 95 (1.99%) Network Security
3 95 (1.99%) VPN
4 53 (1.11%) TCP/IP
5 35 (0.73%) SSL
6 31 (0.65%) HTTP
7 21 (0.44%) WAN
8 18 (0.38%) HTTPS
8 18 (0.38%) SD-WAN
9 17 (0.36%) DHCP
10 16 (0.34%) SAN
11 15 (0.31%) Kerberos
12 13 (0.27%) BGP
12 13 (0.27%) MPLS
12 13 (0.27%) Reverse Proxy
13 10 (0.21%) Internet
13 10 (0.21%) IPsec
13 10 (0.21%) OpenVPN
14 8 (0.17%) 5G
Database & Business Intelligence
1 283 (5.93%) PostgreSQL
2 251 (5.26%) Power BI
3 205 (4.29%) SQL Server
4 186 (3.89%) NoSQL
5 155 (3.25%) Data Lake
6 131 (2.74%) Relational Database
7 128 (2.68%) Amazon RDS
8 123 (2.58%) Data Warehouse
9 122 (2.55%) MongoDB
10 105 (2.20%) Azure SQL Database
11 86 (1.80%) DynamoDB
12 80 (1.68%) Elasticsearch
13 77 (1.61%) Oracle Database
14 72 (1.51%) MySQL
15 68 (1.42%) Delta Lake
16 64 (1.34%) Metadata
17 58 (1.21%) Big Data
18 56 (1.17%) Amazon Athena
19 55 (1.15%) Redis
20 53 (1.11%) Tableau
Development Applications
1 825 (17.27%) Jenkins
2 656 (13.74%) Git
3 630 (13.19%) JIRA
4 599 (12.54%) GitLab
5 144 (3.02%) Selenium
6 107 (2.24%) JUnit
7 94 (1.97%) Postman
8 79 (1.65%) Bitbucket
9 73 (1.53%) SonarQube
10 70 (1.47%) Cucumber
11 60 (1.26%) Cypress.io
12 57 (1.19%) Sonatype Nexus
13 55 (1.15%) Maven
14 51 (1.07%) Artifactory
15 49 (1.03%) JMeter
16 47 (0.98%) REST Assured
17 36 (0.75%) Oracle APEX
18 35 (0.73%) Liquibase
19 34 (0.71%) Gradle
19 34 (0.71%) Visual Studio
General
1 1,359 (28.45%) Social Skills
2 879 (18.40%) Finance
3 624 (13.07%) Public Sector
4 401 (8.40%) Analytical Skills
5 355 (7.43%) Banking
6 160 (3.35%) Documentation Skills
7 79 (1.65%) Influencing Skills
8 66 (1.38%) Financial Institution
9 65 (1.36%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 59 (1.24%) Marketing
11 58 (1.21%) Retail
12 47 (0.98%) Presentation Skills
13 46 (0.96%) Front Office
14 43 (0.90%) Investment Banking
15 42 (0.88%) Organisational Skills
16 40 (0.84%) Telecoms
17 38 (0.80%) Legal
18 35 (0.73%) Military
19 33 (0.69%) Pharmaceutical
20 27 (0.57%) Manufacturing
Job Titles
1 913 (19.12%) DevOps Engineer
2 798 (16.71%) Developer
3 656 (13.74%) Senior
4 490 (10.26%) Architect
5 391 (8.19%) Lead
6 294 (6.16%) Azure Engineer
7 273 (5.72%) Data Engineer
8 258 (5.40%) Analyst
8 258 (5.40%) AWS Engineer
9 205 (4.29%) AWS DevOps
10 184 (3.85%) Cloud Engineer
11 180 (3.77%) AWS DevOps Engineer
12 166 (3.48%) Platform Engineer
13 165 (3.45%) Software Engineer
14 143 (2.99%) Senior Developer
15 139 (2.91%) Senior DevOps
15 139 (2.91%) Solutions Architect
16 137 (2.87%) Azure DevOps Engineer
17 130 (2.72%) Senior DevOps Engineer
18 127 (2.66%) Business Analyst
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 522 (10.93%) REST
2 430 (9.00%) .NET
3 321 (6.72%) React
4 318 (6.66%) Node.js
5 269 (5.63%) RESTful
6 259 (5.42%) Kafka
7 256 (5.36%) Spring
8 236 (4.94%) Spring Boot
9 181 (3.79%) AngularJS
10 162 (3.39%) JSON
11 158 (3.31%) OAuth
12 145 (3.04%) HTML
13 140 (2.93%) Elastic Stack
14 134 (2.81%) YAML
15 133 (2.78%) PySpark
16 132 (2.76%) Playwright
17 128 (2.68%) SOAP
18 116 (2.43%) XML
19 114 (2.39%) CSS
20 105 (2.20%) Middleware
Miscellaneous
1 708 (14.82%) Cloud Native
2 265 (5.55%) Product Ownership
3 174 (3.64%) Distributed Systems
4 129 (2.70%) Onboarding
5 126 (2.64%) Public Cloud
6 101 (2.11%) Legacy Systems
7 94 (1.97%) Hybrid Cloud
8 77 (1.61%) Enterprise Software
9 59 (1.24%) Data Protection Act
9 59 (1.24%) Management Information System
10 55 (1.15%) Virtual Team
11 52 (1.09%) Data Centre
11 52 (1.09%) Security Posture
12 47 (0.98%) NHS
13 45 (0.94%) Private Cloud
14 39 (0.82%) AI Agents
14 39 (0.82%) Data Structures
14 39 (0.82%) Greenfield Project
14 39 (0.82%) Low-Code
15 38 (0.80%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 490 (10.26%) Linux
2 254 (5.32%) Windows
3 104 (2.18%) Unix
4 66 (1.38%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 45 (0.94%) Windows Server
6 39 (0.82%) VMS
7 24 (0.50%) Ubuntu
8 18 (0.38%) CentOS
9 13 (0.27%) Android
9 13 (0.27%) Apple iOS
10 12 (0.25%) Windows 10
11 9 (0.19%) Solaris
12 7 (0.15%) Windows Server 2016
12 7 (0.15%) Windows Server 2019
13 5 (0.10%) Windows Server 2012
14 4 (0.084%) Mac OS
15 3 (0.063%) Amazon Linux
16 2 (0.042%) Debian
16 2 (0.042%) Windows Server 2008
16 2 (0.042%) zOS
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,761 (57.81%) CI/CD
2 1,841 (38.55%) Agile
3 1,260 (26.38%) Infrastructure as Code
4 900 (18.84%) Containerisation
4 900 (18.84%) Problem-Solving
5 723 (15.14%) Test Automation
6 710 (14.87%) Microservices
7 608 (12.73%) Continuous Improvement
8 607 (12.71%) Analytics
9 558 (11.68%) Migration
10 528 (11.06%) Scrum
11 525 (10.99%) Observability
12 500 (10.47%) AI
13 475 (9.95%) Stakeholder Management
14 431 (9.02%) Software Engineering
15 423 (8.86%) Data Modelling
16 396 (8.29%) Mentoring
17 349 (7.31%) Data Pipeline
18 341 (7.14%) Platform Engineering
19 327 (6.85%) Business Intelligence
Programming Languages
1 1,464 (30.65%) Python
2 978 (20.48%) SQL
3 627 (13.13%) Java
4 497 (10.41%) C#
5 462 (9.67%) JavaScript
6 389 (8.14%) PowerShell
7 367 (7.68%) Bash
8 326 (6.83%) TypeScript
9 154 (3.22%) Bicep
10 143 (2.99%) Go
11 81 (1.70%) PL/SQL
12 66 (1.38%) Scala
13 60 (1.26%) Shell Script
14 49 (1.03%) C++
14 49 (1.03%) Ruby
14 49 (1.03%) T-SQL
15 44 (0.92%) Groovy
16 33 (0.69%) Perl
17 31 (0.65%) Rust
18 28 (0.59%) Kusto Query Language
Qualifications
1 1,491 (31.22%) Security Cleared
2 1,224 (25.63%) SC Cleared
3 383 (8.02%) Degree
4 212 (4.44%) Azure Certification
5 192 (4.02%) Computer Science Degree
6 158 (3.31%) AWS Certification
7 153 (3.20%) DV Cleared
8 127 (2.66%) BPSS Clearance
9 86 (1.80%) Master's Degree
10 83 (1.74%) CISSP
11 67 (1.40%) Microsoft Certification
12 62 (1.30%) CISM
13 58 (1.21%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
14 56 (1.17%) ISTQB
15 42 (0.88%) PMI Certification
16 38 (0.80%) Cisco Certification
17 34 (0.71%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
17 34 (0.71%) PMP
18 28 (0.59%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
19 24 (0.50%) TOGAF Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 416 (8.71%) QA
2 196 (4.10%) Data Quality
3 186 (3.89%) GDPR
4 144 (3.02%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 130 (2.72%) Accessibility
6 124 (2.60%) NIST
7 74 (1.55%) NCSC
8 40 (0.84%) PCI DSS
9 37 (0.77%) WCAG
10 30 (0.63%) PMO
11 26 (0.54%) HIPAA
11 26 (0.54%) Sarbanes-Oxley
12 25 (0.52%) SLA
13 18 (0.38%) SOC 2
14 15 (0.31%) ISO 20022
15 13 (0.27%) PSD2
16 12 (0.25%) NIST 800
17 11 (0.23%) Disclosure Scotland
17 11 (0.23%) HMG Security Policy Framework
18 10 (0.21%) SEPA
System Software
1 1,130 (23.66%) Docker
2 182 (3.81%) Active Directory
3 78 (1.63%) Virtual Machines
4 73 (1.53%) VMware Infrastructure
5 42 (0.88%) vSphere
6 27 (0.57%) VMware NSX
7 15 (0.31%) Virtual Desktop
8 13 (0.27%) Slurm Workload Manager
9 11 (0.23%) Lustre
10 10 (0.21%) Squid
11 9 (0.19%) GPFS
11 9 (0.19%) Hyper-V
12 8 (0.17%) Postfix
12 8 (0.17%) Virtual Servers
12 8 (0.17%) VMware ESXi
13 7 (0.15%) Firmware
14 6 (0.13%) HDFS
14 6 (0.13%) NFS
15 5 (0.10%) DFS Replication
15 5 (0.10%) RACF
Systems Management
1 1,453 (30.42%) Terraform
2 1,355 (28.37%) Kubernetes
3 513 (10.74%) Ansible
4 345 (7.22%) Grafana
5 288 (6.03%) Prometheus
6 99 (2.07%) Argo
7 76 (1.59%) Puppet
8 65 (1.36%) Single Sign-On
9 53 (1.11%) Istio
10 34 (0.71%) Progress Chef
11 33 (0.69%) Kibana
12 32 (0.67%) Packer
13 23 (0.48%) vCenter Server
14 22 (0.46%) Podman
15 20 (0.42%) Microsoft Intune
16 19 (0.40%) HP ALM
17 18 (0.38%) Active Directory Federation Services
18 17 (0.36%) Consul
18 17 (0.36%) Rancher
19 16 (0.34%) FortiGate
Vendors
1 826 (17.29%) Microsoft
2 309 (6.47%) Oracle
3 285 (5.97%) Databricks
4 270 (5.65%) Google
5 217 (4.54%) Splunk
6 171 (3.58%) ServiceNow
7 140 (2.93%) Red Hat
8 124 (2.60%) VMware
9 119 (2.49%) Salesforce
10 108 (2.26%) SAP
11 80 (1.68%) OpenAI
12 66 (1.38%) Dynatrace
13 62 (1.30%) Atlassian
14 56 (1.17%) CyberArk
15 48 (1.01%) IBM
16 43 (0.90%) Talend
17 39 (0.82%) Cisco
17 39 (0.82%) Denodo
18 37 (0.77%) F5
19 34 (0.71%) Foundry