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 18 September 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
18 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 15 14 14
Rank change year-on-year -1 0 -1
Contract jobs citing DevOps 5,601 3,673 3,817
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.29% 11.15% 9.91%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.19% 12.31% 11.56%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,895 2,557 2,556
10th Percentile £381 £363 £381
25th Percentile £438 £425 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £520 £550
Median % change year-on-year +0.96% -5.45% -4.35%
75th Percentile £619 £623 £650
90th Percentile £700 £700 £725
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £550
% change year-on-year - -9.09% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 123 24 71
10th Percentile £37.45 £45.13 £57.50
25th Percentile £56.25 £52.88 £65.00
Median hourly rate £68.75 £67.00 £70.00
Median % change year-on-year +2.61% -4.29% +7.69%
75th Percentile £77.50 £87.81 £74.44
90th Percentile £91.60 £95.00 £85.25
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 45,960 29,830 33,021
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.47% 90.53% 85.70%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,897 18,534 20,247
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 £625 £625 £638
90th Percentile £730 £725 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 3,123 1,812 1,459
10th Percentile £13.84 £14.23 £14.96
25th Percentile £17.25 £17.30 £20.00
Median hourly rate £40.00 £25.15 £43.00
Median % change year-on-year +59.05% -41.51% -1.91%
75th Percentile £67.50 £44.76 £65.00
90th Percentile £78.75 £67.00 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £41.56 £22.50 £43.00
% change year-on-year +84.69% -47.67% +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 18 September 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 18 September 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 18 September 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 4,754 £525 - 4,374
London 0 2,515 £550 - 2,250
UK excluding London -4 2,392 £500 - 2,382
Work from Home 0 1,593 £525 +2.44% 1,991
North of England -2 768 £500 +5.26% 734
South East -10 450 £525 +5.00% 552
Midlands -5 436 £488 -2.74% 297
Yorkshire -2 387 £500 +3.09% 194
West Midlands -6 343 £500 -4.58% 170
South West +6 322 £550 +4.76% 286
North West -5 289 £525 +13.51% 420
Scotland -1 226 £475 -4.62% 193
East of England +6 149 £505 -3.81% 198
North East +11 107 £444 -14.66% 123
East Midlands 0 90 £465 +3.33% 127
Wales -6 47 £463 +23.33% 64
Northern Ireland +20 23 £450 -4.26% 65
Channel Islands - 5 £450 - 1

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
1 335 (5.98%) Confluence
2 161 (2.87%) SharePoint
3 131 (2.34%) Apache Airflow
4 128 (2.29%) Apache Spark
5 113 (2.02%) Apache
6 61 (1.09%) SAS
7 44 (0.79%) CMS
8 41 (0.73%) Jupyter
9 29 (0.52%) nginx
10 26 (0.46%) IIS
11 20 (0.36%) Microsoft Exchange
12 14 (0.25%) Camunda
13 13 (0.23%) OpenStack
13 13 (0.23%) WebLogic
14 12 (0.21%) Anypoint
14 12 (0.21%) Oracle SOA Suite
15 11 (0.20%) Oracle Workflow
16 10 (0.18%) WebSphere
17 9 (0.16%) Appian
18 8 (0.14%) Palantir Foundry
Applications
1 69 (1.23%) Microsoft Excel
2 53 (0.95%) Microsoft Project
3 50 (0.89%) MS Visio
4 36 (0.64%) Microsoft Office
5 34 (0.61%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 12 (0.21%) Chatbot
7 9 (0.16%) Spreadsheet
8 8 (0.14%) CPLEX
9 6 (0.11%) Trello
9 6 (0.11%) Windchill
10 5 (0.089%) Notion
11 2 (0.036%) Adobe XD
11 2 (0.036%) Mingle
12 1 (0.018%) EngageOne
12 1 (0.018%) Gliffy
12 1 (0.018%) Mozilla Thunderbird
12 1 (0.018%) Sketch
12 1 (0.018%) Weka
Business Applications
1 82 (1.46%) Dynamics CRM
2 40 (0.71%) 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 8 (0.14%) 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 (0.089%) OpenText MBPM
10 5 (0.089%) Oracle BPM
11 4 (0.071%) Oracle ERP
12 3 (0.054%) Endur
12 3 (0.054%) Maximo
12 3 (0.054%) Oracle Payroll
12 3 (0.054%) Oracle Receivables
12 3 (0.054%) SAP ERP
12 3 (0.054%) Teamcenter
Cloud Services
1 3,038 (54.24%) Azure
2 2,018 (36.03%) AWS
3 1,739 (31.05%) Azure DevOps
4 971 (17.34%) GitHub
5 735 (13.12%) GCP
6 618 (11.03%) GitHub Actions
7 487 (8.69%) Power Platform
8 459 (8.19%) Serverless
9 310 (5.53%) Amazon S3
10 288 (5.14%) AWS Lambda
11 255 (4.55%) Entra ID
12 249 (4.45%) Amazon EKS
13 243 (4.34%) Amazon CloudWatch
14 230 (4.11%) AWS CloudFormation
15 217 (3.87%) Azure AKS
16 208 (3.71%) Azure Monitor
17 199 (3.55%) Amazon EC2
18 193 (3.45%) Azure Data Factory
19 187 (3.34%) Dynamics 365
20 165 (2.95%) Power Automate
Communications & Networking
1 244 (4.36%) Firewall
2 174 (3.11%) DNS
3 121 (2.16%) VPN
4 114 (2.04%) Network Security
5 72 (1.29%) TCP/IP
6 57 (1.02%) SSL
7 51 (0.91%) DHCP
8 47 (0.84%) WAN
9 37 (0.66%) HTTP
10 34 (0.61%) BGP
11 30 (0.54%) SD-WAN
12 29 (0.52%) SSH
13 28 (0.50%) Internet
14 25 (0.45%) OSPF
15 24 (0.43%) Wi-Fi
16 20 (0.36%) VLAN
17 18 (0.32%) HTTPS
17 18 (0.32%) LAN
17 18 (0.32%) SAN
18 17 (0.30%) BIG-IP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 318 (5.68%) Power BI
2 302 (5.39%) PostgreSQL
3 296 (5.28%) SQL Server
4 212 (3.79%) Data Warehouse
5 184 (3.29%) MongoDB
6 183 (3.27%) NoSQL
7 174 (3.11%) Data Lake
8 170 (3.04%) Relational Database
9 148 (2.64%) Amazon RDS
10 132 (2.36%) Metadata
11 96 (1.71%) Azure SQL Database
12 94 (1.68%) DynamoDB
13 89 (1.59%) Delta Lake
13 89 (1.59%) Oracle Database
14 88 (1.57%) MySQL
15 82 (1.46%) Redis
16 69 (1.23%) Amazon Redshift
17 65 (1.16%) Big Data
18 62 (1.11%) SQL Server Integration Services
19 57 (1.02%) BigQuery
Development Applications
1 837 (14.94%) Git
2 808 (14.43%) Jenkins
3 668 (11.93%) JIRA
4 650 (11.61%) GitLab
5 142 (2.54%) Selenium
6 103 (1.84%) SonarQube
7 96 (1.71%) Maven
7 96 (1.71%) Postman
8 93 (1.66%) JUnit
9 73 (1.30%) Bitbucket
10 71 (1.27%) REST Assured
11 70 (1.25%) Cypress.io
12 67 (1.20%) Cucumber
12 67 (1.20%) Gradle
13 64 (1.14%) JMeter
14 52 (0.93%) Claude Code
15 46 (0.82%) Mockito
16 45 (0.80%) Gatling
17 40 (0.71%) Sonatype Nexus
18 38 (0.68%) Visual Studio
General
1 1,462 (26.10%) Social Skills
2 990 (17.68%) Finance
3 800 (14.28%) Public Sector
4 524 (9.36%) Analytical Skills
5 387 (6.91%) Banking
6 170 (3.04%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 107 (1.91%) Retail
8 84 (1.50%) Documentation Skills
8 84 (1.50%) Influencing Skills
9 64 (1.14%) Organisational Skills
10 62 (1.11%) Legal
11 55 (0.98%) Aerospace
11 55 (0.98%) Marketing
12 54 (0.96%) Military
13 51 (0.91%) Investment Banking
14 50 (0.89%) Telecoms
15 45 (0.80%) Law
16 43 (0.77%) Manufacturing
17 41 (0.73%) Front Office
18 37 (0.66%) Financial Institution
Job Titles
1 1,144 (20.42%) DevOps Engineer
2 911 (16.26%) Developer
3 852 (15.21%) Senior
4 639 (11.41%) Architect
5 531 (9.48%) Lead
6 349 (6.23%) Azure Engineer
7 310 (5.53%) Data Engineer
8 264 (4.71%) Analyst
9 262 (4.68%) AWS Engineer
10 233 (4.16%) Platform Engineer
11 210 (3.75%) Azure DevOps Engineer
12 209 (3.73%) Cloud Engineer
13 200 (3.57%) Senior DevOps
14 198 (3.54%) Java Developer
15 187 (3.34%) Senior DevOps Engineer
16 182 (3.25%) AWS DevOps
17 178 (3.18%) Solutions Architect
18 171 (3.05%) AWS DevOps Engineer
19 156 (2.79%) Senior Developer
20 143 (2.55%) Software Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 1,673 (29.87%) Terraform
2 619 (11.05%) REST
3 470 (8.39%) .NET
4 386 (6.89%) Kafka
5 357 (6.37%) RESTful
6 309 (5.52%) Spring
7 304 (5.43%) Spring Boot
8 287 (5.12%) React
9 202 (3.61%) Node.js
10 184 (3.29%) JSON
11 181 (3.23%) OAuth
12 162 (2.89%) Playwright
13 158 (2.82%) PySpark
14 144 (2.57%) HTML
15 132 (2.36%) CSS
16 130 (2.32%) OAuth2
17 127 (2.27%) SOAP
18 122 (2.18%) .NET Framework
19 120 (2.14%) AngularJS
20 118 (2.11%) Middleware
Miscellaneous
1 1,022 (18.25%) Cloud Native
2 424 (7.57%) Product Ownership
3 266 (4.75%) Distributed Systems
4 205 (3.66%) Enterprise Software
5 200 (3.57%) Onboarding
6 149 (2.66%) Hybrid Cloud
7 142 (2.54%) Legacy Systems
8 101 (1.80%) AI Agents
9 95 (1.70%) Management Information System
10 83 (1.48%) Self-Motivation
11 80 (1.43%) Data Protection Act
12 76 (1.36%) Replication
13 75 (1.34%) Data Structures
13 75 (1.34%) Public Cloud
14 73 (1.30%) Security Posture
15 71 (1.27%) Data Centre
16 64 (1.14%) Virtual Team
17 59 (1.05%) Enterprise Cloud
18 57 (1.02%) PKI
19 53 (0.95%) NHS
Operating Systems
1 555 (9.91%) Linux
2 316 (5.64%) Windows
3 120 (2.14%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 109 (1.95%) Unix
5 94 (1.68%) Windows Server
6 36 (0.64%) Ubuntu
7 34 (0.61%) VMS
8 32 (0.57%) Apple iOS
9 22 (0.39%) Android
10 14 (0.25%) CentOS
11 11 (0.20%) zOS
12 10 (0.18%) Amazon Linux
13 9 (0.16%) Windows Server 2016
13 9 (0.16%) Windows Server 2019
14 8 (0.14%) Solaris
15 7 (0.12%) AIX
16 5 (0.089%) Mac OS
16 5 (0.089%) Windows Server 2008
17 4 (0.071%) Alpine Linux
17 4 (0.071%) Data ONTAP
Processes & Methodologies
1 3,414 (60.95%) CI/CD
2 2,288 (40.85%) Agile
3 1,660 (29.64%) Infrastructure as Code
4 956 (17.07%) Continuous Improvement
5 945 (16.87%) Containerisation
6 927 (16.55%) Stakeholder Management
7 893 (15.94%) Problem-Solving
8 889 (15.87%) Test Automation
9 855 (15.27%) AI
10 832 (14.85%) Microservices
11 778 (13.89%) Observability
12 767 (13.69%) Platform Engineering
13 734 (13.10%) Software Engineering
14 682 (12.18%) Scrum
15 673 (12.02%) Migration
16 613 (10.94%) Technical Leadership
17 588 (10.50%) Analytics
18 531 (9.48%) Stakeholder Engagement
19 489 (8.73%) Roadmaps
20 485 (8.66%) Data Modelling
Programming Languages
1 1,622 (28.96%) Python
2 987 (17.62%) SQL
3 821 (14.66%) Java
4 497 (8.87%) Bash
5 493 (8.80%) PowerShell
6 487 (8.69%) C#
7 461 (8.23%) JavaScript
8 311 (5.55%) TypeScript
9 256 (4.57%) Bicep
10 115 (2.05%) Go
11 78 (1.39%) Shell Script
12 67 (1.20%) Scala
12 67 (1.20%) T-SQL
13 65 (1.16%) Apex Code
14 64 (1.14%) Groovy
15 62 (1.11%) PL/SQL
16 38 (0.68%) Data Analysis Expressions
17 35 (0.62%) Perl
18 30 (0.54%) C++
19 25 (0.45%) Kusto Query Language
Qualifications
1 1,810 (32.32%) Security Cleared
2 1,515 (27.05%) SC Cleared
3 354 (6.32%) Degree
4 250 (4.46%) Azure Certification
5 239 (4.27%) BPSS Clearance
6 234 (4.18%) DV Cleared
7 187 (3.34%) AWS Certification
8 143 (2.55%) Computer Science Degree
9 113 (2.02%) Microsoft Certification
10 77 (1.37%) CISSP
11 59 (1.05%) ISTQB
12 52 (0.93%) Cisco Certification
13 49 (0.87%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
14 44 (0.79%) PMP
15 41 (0.73%) Master's Degree
16 40 (0.71%) PMI Certification
17 31 (0.55%) CISM
18 25 (0.45%) ITIL Certification
19 24 (0.43%) (ISC)2 CCSP
19 24 (0.43%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 542 (9.68%) QA
2 292 (5.21%) Data Quality
3 211 (3.77%) Accessibility
4 130 (2.32%) GDPR
5 88 (1.57%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 85 (1.52%) WCAG
7 76 (1.36%) NIST
8 54 (0.96%) NCSC
9 48 (0.86%) PMO
10 37 (0.66%) SLA
11 29 (0.52%) PCI DSS
12 28 (0.50%) GRC
13 24 (0.43%) Sarbanes-Oxley
14 21 (0.37%) ISO 20022
15 15 (0.27%) Cyber Essentials
16 13 (0.23%) Disclosure Scotland
16 13 (0.23%) HIPAA
16 13 (0.23%) SEPA
17 11 (0.20%) SOC 2
18 10 (0.18%) Actionable Recommendations
System Software
1 1,164 (20.78%) Docker
2 166 (2.96%) Active Directory
3 87 (1.55%) VMware Infrastructure
4 78 (1.39%) Virtual Machines
5 29 (0.52%) vSphere
6 26 (0.46%) VMware ESXi
7 24 (0.43%) Hyper-V
8 20 (0.36%) Virtual Desktop
9 16 (0.29%) VMware NSX
10 14 (0.25%) Squid
11 11 (0.20%) IAG
12 10 (0.18%) Oracle RAC
13 9 (0.16%) Postfix
14 7 (0.12%) zsh
15 6 (0.11%) Apache ZooKeeper
15 6 (0.11%) Corosync
15 6 (0.11%) KVM
15 6 (0.11%) Microsoft App-V
15 6 (0.11%) Virtual Servers
16 5 (0.089%) RACF
Systems Management
1 1,547 (27.62%) Kubernetes
2 541 (9.66%) Ansible
3 375 (6.70%) Grafana
4 320 (5.71%) Prometheus
5 75 (1.34%) Argo
6 63 (1.12%) Puppet
7 52 (0.93%) Progress Chef
8 51 (0.91%) Single Sign-On
9 46 (0.82%) Microsoft Intune
10 36 (0.64%) Packer
11 31 (0.55%) Kibana
12 30 (0.54%) Istio
13 21 (0.37%) Kustomize
14 20 (0.36%) Kubeflow
15 19 (0.34%) Oracle RMAN
15 19 (0.34%) vCenter Server
16 17 (0.30%) SCCM
17 16 (0.29%) HP ALM
18 14 (0.25%) HAProxy
19 13 (0.23%) SCOM
Vendors
1 1,101 (19.66%) Microsoft
2 308 (5.50%) Oracle
3 305 (5.45%) Databricks
4 281 (5.02%) Google
5 214 (3.82%) ServiceNow
6 186 (3.32%) Splunk
7 180 (3.21%) Salesforce
8 146 (2.61%) Dynatrace
9 132 (2.36%) VMware
10 112 (2.00%) SAP
11 101 (1.80%) Red Hat
12 69 (1.23%) OpenAI
13 66 (1.18%) IBM
14 65 (1.16%) MuleSoft
15 53 (0.95%) Foundry
16 52 (0.93%) Informatica
17 49 (0.87%) Cisco
18 42 (0.75%) AppDynamics
19 40 (0.71%) Atlassian
19 40 (0.71%) Okta