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

6 months to
30 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 13 15 14
Rank change year-on-year +2 -1 -1
Contract jobs citing DevOps 5,474 3,171 4,122
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.67% 10.36% 9.55%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.55% 11.40% 11.20%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,798 2,267 2,805
10th Percentile £381 £363 £400
25th Percentile £438 £425 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year - -4.55% -4.35%
75th Percentile £613 £625 £650
90th Percentile £700 £738 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £525
% change year-on-year - -4.76% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 118 16 123
10th Percentile £39.15 £32.63 £56.30
25th Percentile £61.87 £49.06 £61.43
Median hourly rate £70.00 £76.00 £70.00
Median % change year-on-year -7.89% +8.57% +6.70%
75th Percentile £77.50 £87.50 £74.44
90th Percentile £93.06 £90.63 £85.65
UK excluding London median hourly rate £70.00 £76.00 £70.00
% change year-on-year -7.89% +8.57% +6.87%

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 43,613 27,816 36,814
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.98% 90.91% 85.28%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,139 17,565 23,448
10th Percentile £325 £300 £300
25th Percentile £414 £405 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £515 £504 £525
Median % change year-on-year +2.18% -4.00% -4.55%
75th Percentile £623 £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 2,612 1,364 2,554
10th Percentile £14.82 £14.20 £12.74
25th Percentile £20.00 £17.49 £16.06
Median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £37.50
Median % change year-on-year +74.79% -32.93% +4.17%
75th Percentile £68.00 £53.95 £61.30
90th Percentile £81.25 £70.00 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £44.50 £25.00 £38.12
% change year-on-year +78.00% -34.42% +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 30 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 30 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 30 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 4,642 £525 - 1,069
UK excluding London +5 2,415 £500 - 830
London +3 2,377 £550 - 422
Work from Home 0 1,547 £525 - 587
North of England +7 862 £500 - 227
Yorkshire +2 463 £510 +2.00% 67
South East -4 453 £525 +5.00% 282
Midlands 0 435 £492 -1.60% 101
West Midlands -1 343 £500 -2.39% 65
North West +1 323 £500 +3.09% 122
South West +15 289 £525 -4.55% 97
Scotland -1 207 £493 +3.68% 40
East of England +23 139 £525 +5.00% 67
North East +10 94 £450 -13.88% 41
East Midlands 0 88 £475 +5.56% 36
Wales +3 52 £425 +39.13% 28
Northern Ireland +14 22 £475 +11.76% 9
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
1 322 (5.88%) Confluence
2 137 (2.50%) Apache Spark
3 127 (2.32%) SharePoint
4 105 (1.92%) Apache Airflow
5 97 (1.77%) Apache
6 83 (1.52%) SAS
7 48 (0.88%) CMS
8 32 (0.58%) Microsoft Exchange
9 31 (0.57%) IIS
9 31 (0.57%) Jupyter
9 31 (0.57%) nginx
10 17 (0.31%) OpenStack
11 16 (0.29%) Camunda
12 15 (0.27%) WebSphere
13 14 (0.26%) Palantir Foundry
14 11 (0.20%) Oracle Workflow
15 9 (0.16%) Mendix
15 9 (0.16%) Sitecore CMS
16 7 (0.13%) Tomcat
17 6 (0.11%) Appian
Applications
1 73 (1.33%) Microsoft Excel
2 58 (1.06%) Microsoft Project
3 45 (0.82%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 39 (0.71%) Microsoft Office
5 34 (0.62%) MS Visio
6 10 (0.18%) CPLEX
7 7 (0.13%) Chatbot
8 4 (0.073%) Notion
8 4 (0.073%) Spreadsheet
9 3 (0.055%) Adobe XD
9 3 (0.055%) Trello
10 1 (0.018%) InDesign
10 1 (0.018%) Maya
10 1 (0.018%) Weka
Business Applications
1 72 (1.32%) Dynamics CRM
2 35 (0.64%) SAP S/4HANA
3 11 (0.20%) Payment Gateway
4 9 (0.16%) Oracle ERP
4 9 (0.16%) Remedy ITSM
5 8 (0.15%) Aladdin
5 8 (0.15%) Dynamics AX
5 8 (0.15%) Maximo
6 7 (0.13%) SAP MDG
7 6 (0.11%) Magento
7 6 (0.11%) Oracle EBS
8 5 (0.091%) Endur
8 5 (0.091%) OpenText MBPM
8 5 (0.091%) Oracle BPM
8 5 (0.091%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
9 3 (0.055%) OpenText VIM for SAP
9 3 (0.055%) Salesforce CRM
9 3 (0.055%) SAP BPC
9 3 (0.055%) SAP ERP
9 3 (0.055%) SAP Oil and Gas
Cloud Services
1 2,944 (53.78%) Azure
2 1,929 (35.24%) AWS
3 1,620 (29.59%) Azure DevOps
4 904 (16.51%) GitHub
5 681 (12.44%) GCP
6 541 (9.88%) GitHub Actions
7 488 (8.91%) Serverless
8 466 (8.51%) Power Platform
9 308 (5.63%) Amazon S3
10 272 (4.97%) AWS Lambda
11 250 (4.57%) AWS CloudFormation
12 247 (4.51%) Entra ID
13 226 (4.13%) Azure AKS
14 215 (3.93%) Amazon EKS
15 190 (3.47%) Azure Data Factory
16 186 (3.40%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 182 (3.32%) Amazon EC2
18 177 (3.23%) Azure Monitor
19 157 (2.87%) PaaS
20 156 (2.85%) Dynamics 365
Communications & Networking
1 232 (4.24%) Firewall
2 139 (2.54%) DNS
3 118 (2.16%) Network Security
4 106 (1.94%) VPN
5 48 (0.88%) WAN
6 42 (0.77%) TCP/IP
7 36 (0.66%) SD-WAN
8 35 (0.64%) SSL
9 34 (0.62%) BGP
10 27 (0.49%) Wi-Fi
11 24 (0.44%) DHCP
11 24 (0.44%) Internet
11 24 (0.44%) OSPF
12 23 (0.42%) HTTP
12 23 (0.42%) SAN
13 17 (0.31%) BIG-IP
13 17 (0.31%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
13 17 (0.31%) IPsec
13 17 (0.31%) LAN
13 17 (0.31%) MPLS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 305 (5.57%) Power BI
2 280 (5.12%) SQL Server
3 262 (4.79%) PostgreSQL
4 195 (3.56%) NoSQL
5 174 (3.18%) Relational Database
6 165 (3.01%) MongoDB
7 161 (2.94%) Data Warehouse
8 159 (2.90%) Data Lake
9 121 (2.21%) Amazon RDS
10 106 (1.94%) Azure SQL Database
11 100 (1.83%) DynamoDB
12 99 (1.81%) Metadata
13 87 (1.59%) Delta Lake
14 76 (1.39%) Oracle Database
15 72 (1.32%) Amazon Athena
15 72 (1.32%) Big Data
16 68 (1.24%) Amazon Redshift
17 67 (1.22%) Redis
18 62 (1.13%) Elasticsearch
19 56 (1.02%) MySQL
Development Applications
1 793 (14.49%) Jenkins
2 708 (12.93%) Git
3 665 (12.15%) JIRA
4 576 (10.52%) GitLab
5 126 (2.30%) Selenium
6 111 (2.03%) Postman
7 99 (1.81%) JUnit
8 91 (1.66%) SonarQube
9 79 (1.44%) REST Assured
10 74 (1.35%) Bitbucket
11 73 (1.33%) Maven
12 63 (1.15%) Cucumber
13 60 (1.10%) JMeter
14 51 (0.93%) Cypress.io
15 49 (0.90%) Gradle
16 44 (0.80%) Gatling
17 41 (0.75%) Mockito
18 39 (0.71%) Artifactory
19 38 (0.69%) Visual Studio
20 35 (0.64%) LoadRunner
General
1 1,355 (24.75%) Social Skills
2 1,003 (18.32%) Finance
3 760 (13.88%) Public Sector
4 437 (7.98%) Analytical Skills
5 360 (6.58%) Banking
6 133 (2.43%) Documentation Skills
7 114 (2.08%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 78 (1.42%) Retail
9 76 (1.39%) Influencing Skills
10 69 (1.26%) Legal
11 59 (1.08%) Organisational Skills
12 58 (1.06%) Marketing
13 47 (0.86%) Military
14 44 (0.80%) Investment Banking
15 43 (0.79%) Financial Institution
16 40 (0.73%) Law
17 36 (0.66%) Presentation Skills
18 33 (0.60%) Front Office
18 33 (0.60%) Telecoms
19 29 (0.53%) Manufacturing
Job Titles
1 1,098 (20.06%) DevOps Engineer
2 870 (15.89%) Developer
3 761 (13.90%) Senior
4 634 (11.58%) Architect
5 488 (8.91%) Lead
6 337 (6.16%) Azure Engineer
7 318 (5.81%) Data Engineer
8 313 (5.72%) Analyst
9 276 (5.04%) AWS Engineer
10 204 (3.73%) AWS DevOps
11 203 (3.71%) Platform Engineer
12 202 (3.69%) Cloud Engineer
13 191 (3.49%) Java Developer
14 190 (3.47%) AWS DevOps Engineer
15 183 (3.34%) Senior DevOps
15 183 (3.34%) Solutions Architect
16 174 (3.18%) Azure DevOps Engineer
17 167 (3.05%) Senior DevOps Engineer
18 155 (2.83%) Business Analyst
19 153 (2.80%) Software Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 515 (9.41%) REST
2 485 (8.86%) .NET
3 323 (5.90%) Spring
4 306 (5.59%) RESTful
5 305 (5.57%) React
6 304 (5.55%) Spring Boot
7 297 (5.43%) Kafka
8 230 (4.20%) Node.js
9 171 (3.12%) AngularJS
10 167 (3.05%) PySpark
11 161 (2.94%) OAuth
12 160 (2.92%) Playwright
13 142 (2.59%) JSON
14 129 (2.36%) SOAP
15 128 (2.34%) .NET Framework
16 117 (2.14%) HTML
17 111 (2.03%) OpenID
18 110 (2.01%) OAuth2
19 108 (1.97%) Middleware
20 106 (1.94%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 967 (17.67%) Cloud Native
2 368 (6.72%) Product Ownership
3 238 (4.35%) Distributed Systems
4 149 (2.72%) Onboarding
5 136 (2.48%) Enterprise Software
6 134 (2.45%) Legacy Systems
7 115 (2.10%) Hybrid Cloud
8 102 (1.86%) Public Cloud
9 83 (1.52%) Data Centre
10 81 (1.48%) Data Protection Act
11 74 (1.35%) Management Information System
12 68 (1.24%) Self-Motivation
13 65 (1.19%) Security Posture
14 61 (1.11%) Data Structures
15 56 (1.02%) Virtual Team
16 54 (0.99%) Mobile App
17 53 (0.97%) AI Agents
18 51 (0.93%) Greenfield Project
19 48 (0.88%) Replication
20 47 (0.86%) NHS
Operating Systems
1 472 (8.62%) Linux
2 281 (5.13%) Windows
3 103 (1.88%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 79 (1.44%) Unix
5 64 (1.17%) Windows Server
6 37 (0.68%) VMS
7 30 (0.55%) Ubuntu
8 24 (0.44%) Apple iOS
9 15 (0.27%) Android
10 11 (0.20%) CentOS
11 10 (0.18%) Solaris
12 9 (0.16%) Windows Server 2019
13 6 (0.11%) Windows Server 2008
13 6 (0.11%) Windows Server 2016
14 5 (0.091%) Amazon Linux
14 5 (0.091%) Mac OS
14 5 (0.091%) Windows 10
15 4 (0.073%) Alpine Linux
15 4 (0.073%) Data ONTAP
15 4 (0.073%) zOS
Processes & Methodologies
1 3,182 (58.13%) CI/CD
2 2,106 (38.47%) Agile
3 1,440 (26.31%) Infrastructure as Code
4 883 (16.13%) Containerisation
5 831 (15.18%) Problem-Solving
6 795 (14.52%) Test Automation
7 794 (14.50%) Microservices
8 787 (14.38%) Continuous Improvement
9 673 (12.29%) Migration
10 664 (12.13%) Stakeholder Management
11 650 (11.87%) AI
12 646 (11.80%) Observability
13 644 (11.76%) Scrum
14 607 (11.09%) Analytics
15 593 (10.83%) Platform Engineering
16 573 (10.47%) Software Engineering
17 492 (8.99%) Data Modelling
18 456 (8.33%) Technical Leadership
19 438 (8.00%) Roadmaps
20 435 (7.95%) Stakeholder Engagement
Programming Languages
1 1,530 (27.95%) Python
2 1,021 (18.65%) SQL
3 750 (13.70%) Java
4 519 (9.48%) C#
5 410 (7.49%) JavaScript
6 399 (7.29%) Bash
7 380 (6.94%) PowerShell
8 281 (5.13%) TypeScript
9 193 (3.53%) Bicep
10 112 (2.05%) Go
11 68 (1.24%) Apex Code
12 66 (1.21%) Scala
13 65 (1.19%) Shell Script
14 58 (1.06%) T-SQL
15 55 (1.00%) PL/SQL
16 49 (0.90%) Groovy
17 34 (0.62%) C++
18 26 (0.47%) Kotlin
19 23 (0.42%) Data Analysis Expressions
19 23 (0.42%) Ruby
Qualifications
1 1,734 (31.68%) Security Cleared
2 1,462 (26.71%) SC Cleared
3 339 (6.19%) Degree
4 207 (3.78%) Azure Certification
5 179 (3.27%) BPSS Clearance
6 176 (3.22%) AWS Certification
7 167 (3.05%) DV Cleared
8 133 (2.43%) Computer Science Degree
9 82 (1.50%) CISSP
10 73 (1.33%) Microsoft Certification
11 57 (1.04%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
11 57 (1.04%) ISTQB
12 50 (0.91%) Cisco Certification
13 45 (0.82%) PMI Certification
14 44 (0.80%) PMP
15 43 (0.79%) Master's Degree
16 41 (0.75%) CISM
17 29 (0.53%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
18 25 (0.46%) ITIL Certification
19 24 (0.44%) TOGAF Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 470 (8.59%) QA
2 258 (4.71%) Data Quality
3 173 (3.16%) Accessibility
4 171 (3.12%) GDPR
5 121 (2.21%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 110 (2.01%) NIST
7 68 (1.24%) NCSC
8 66 (1.21%) WCAG
9 50 (0.91%) PCI DSS
10 41 (0.75%) SLA
11 31 (0.57%) Sarbanes-Oxley
12 29 (0.53%) PMO
13 26 (0.47%) GRC
14 19 (0.35%) HIPAA
15 15 (0.27%) SOC 2
16 12 (0.22%) PSD2
17 11 (0.20%) Disclosure Scotland
17 11 (0.20%) ISO 20022
17 11 (0.20%) SEPA
18 8 (0.15%) Actionable Recommendations
System Software
1 1,053 (19.24%) Docker
2 176 (3.22%) Active Directory
3 83 (1.52%) Virtual Machines
4 75 (1.37%) VMware Infrastructure
5 29 (0.53%) vSphere
6 26 (0.47%) VMware NSX
7 20 (0.37%) Squid
8 18 (0.33%) Virtual Desktop
9 17 (0.31%) VMware ESXi
10 16 (0.29%) Hyper-V
11 14 (0.26%) Postfix
12 9 (0.16%) Oracle RAC
13 6 (0.11%) Corosync
13 6 (0.11%) HDFS
13 6 (0.11%) KVM
13 6 (0.11%) RACF
14 5 (0.091%) Firmware
14 5 (0.091%) Microsoft App-V
14 5 (0.091%) NFS
14 5 (0.091%) SRDF
Systems Management
1 1,565 (28.59%) Terraform
2 1,394 (25.47%) Kubernetes
3 512 (9.35%) Ansible
4 354 (6.47%) Grafana
5 306 (5.59%) Prometheus
6 85 (1.55%) Argo
7 74 (1.35%) Single Sign-On
8 66 (1.21%) Puppet
9 50 (0.91%) Istio
10 35 (0.64%) Progress Chef
11 31 (0.57%) Packer
12 27 (0.49%) Microsoft Intune
13 26 (0.47%) vCenter Server
14 23 (0.42%) HP ALM
15 22 (0.40%) Kibana
16 19 (0.35%) Consul
17 16 (0.29%) Active Directory Federation Services
18 15 (0.27%) Kustomize
19 13 (0.24%) HAProxy
19 13 (0.24%) NetBackup
Vendors
1 960 (17.54%) Microsoft
2 286 (5.22%) Oracle
3 279 (5.10%) Databricks
4 259 (4.73%) Google
5 196 (3.58%) ServiceNow
6 184 (3.36%) Splunk
7 182 (3.32%) Salesforce
8 124 (2.27%) SAP
9 120 (2.19%) Dynatrace
10 117 (2.14%) Red Hat
11 114 (2.08%) VMware
12 74 (1.35%) OpenAI
13 56 (1.02%) Informatica
14 55 (1.00%) Atlassian
14 55 (1.00%) IBM
15 47 (0.86%) CyberArk
16 43 (0.79%) Cisco
17 42 (0.77%) Foundry
18 41 (0.75%) Okta
19 39 (0.71%) MuleSoft