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 17 December 2025, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
17 Dec 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 11 14 15
Rank change year-on-year +3 +1 -5
Contract jobs citing DevOps 4,259 3,516 4,189
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 11.58% 10.22% 9.55%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 13.09% 11.61% 10.79%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,981 2,398 3,050
10th Percentile £363 £381 £408
25th Percentile £425 £463 £475
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £563 £568
Median % change year-on-year -6.67% -0.88% -5.42%
75th Percentile £615 £664 £667
90th Percentile £700 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £540 £550
% change year-on-year -7.41% -1.82% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 54 30 88
10th Percentile - £38.23 £46.18
25th Percentile £45.46 £46.18 £49.05
Median hourly rate £57.25 £70.00 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year -18.21% +7.69% -0.84%
75th Percentile £80.88 £78.47 £70.00
90th Percentile £94.63 £80.75 £78.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £53.00 £70.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year -24.29% +7.69% -0.76%

All Process and 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 32,541 30,291 38,815
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 88.45% 88.04% 88.49%
Number of daily rates quoted 20,482 18,505 25,899
10th Percentile £300 £306 £308
25th Percentile £406 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £530
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% -0.94% -3.64%
75th Percentile £618 £638 £650
90th Percentile £723 £744 £745
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £500 £500
% change year-on-year -5.00% - -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,089 1,000 1,504
10th Percentile £14.53 £15.61 £14.38
25th Percentile £17.50 £20.30 £18.95
Median hourly rate £25.15 £32.50 £43.84
Median % change year-on-year -22.62% -25.86% +25.25%
75th Percentile £48.75 £62.50 £65.00
90th Percentile £68.00 £73.78 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £23.00 £32.28 £44.50
% change year-on-year -28.75% -27.46% +39.06%

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 17 December 2025.

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 17 December 2025.

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 17 December 2025. 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 +2 3,627 £525 -8.70% 1,391
UK excluding London +6 1,914 £500 -7.41% 1,175
London -1 1,817 £550 -6.38% 506
Work from Home +1 1,298 £525 -2.78% 824
North of England +3 633 £482 -6.18% 312
South East 0 385 £514 -14.33% 402
Midlands +17 373 £515 -1.90% 136
Yorkshire 0 331 £500 - 130
West Midlands +16 305 £525 -1.52% 84
North West +5 264 £450 -14.29% 142
South West +5 233 £538 -10.42% 144
Scotland +7 200 £475 +5.56% 67
East of England +23 107 £525 -12.50% 105
East Midlands +16 68 £423 -11.05% 50
Wales +5 41 £450 +53.16% 27
North East -7 40 £515 -10.24% 44
Northern Ireland -7 8 - - 9

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
1 252 (5.92%) Confluence
2 88 (2.07%) Apache
3 77 (1.81%) SharePoint
4 72 (1.69%) Apache Airflow
5 66 (1.55%) SAS
6 61 (1.43%) Apache Spark
7 37 (0.87%) CMS
8 35 (0.82%) nginx
9 30 (0.70%) OpenStack
10 28 (0.66%) WebLogic
11 27 (0.63%) IIS
12 24 (0.56%) JBoss
13 21 (0.49%) CICS
14 19 (0.45%) Microsoft Exchange
15 15 (0.35%) Oracle SOA Suite
16 14 (0.33%) Anypoint
16 14 (0.33%) Mule
17 13 (0.31%) WebSphere
18 10 (0.23%) Oracle Service Bus
18 10 (0.23%) WebSphere Application Server
Applications
1 70 (1.64%) Microsoft Excel
2 41 (0.96%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 32 (0.75%) Microsoft Project
4 29 (0.68%) Microsoft Office
5 17 (0.40%) MS Visio
6 16 (0.38%) Chatbot
7 11 (0.26%) Mozilla Thunderbird
8 8 (0.19%) Trello
8 8 (0.19%) Weka
9 1 (0.023%) Adobe Creative Suite
9 1 (0.023%) Moqups
9 1 (0.023%) Revit
Business Applications
1 62 (1.46%) Dynamics CRM
2 19 (0.45%) SAP S/4HANA
3 17 (0.40%) Endur
4 16 (0.38%) Aladdin
5 15 (0.35%) Oracle BPM
5 15 (0.35%) Remedy ITSM
6 14 (0.33%) VisionPLUS
7 7 (0.16%) Oracle ERP
8 6 (0.14%) Dynamics AX
8 6 (0.14%) Maximo
8 6 (0.14%) NEC Housing
8 6 (0.14%) Oracle EBS
9 5 (0.12%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
10 4 (0.094%) Fidessa
10 4 (0.094%) NetSuite
10 4 (0.094%) SAP ERP
10 4 (0.094%) SAP FI
10 4 (0.094%) Teamcenter
10 4 (0.094%) thinkFolio
10 4 (0.094%) Workday HCM
Cloud Services
1 2,110 (49.54%) Azure
2 1,609 (37.78%) AWS
3 1,136 (26.67%) Azure DevOps
4 767 (18.01%) GitHub
5 620 (14.56%) GCP
6 505 (11.86%) Serverless
7 461 (10.82%) GitHub Actions
8 298 (7.00%) Power Platform
9 278 (6.53%) AWS CloudFormation
10 274 (6.43%) AWS Lambda
11 269 (6.32%) Amazon S3
12 211 (4.95%) Amazon CloudWatch
13 192 (4.51%) Amazon EC2
14 190 (4.46%) Azure AKS
15 188 (4.41%) Amazon EKS
16 184 (4.32%) Azure Data Factory
17 174 (4.09%) Amazon ECS
18 172 (4.04%) OpenShift
19 156 (3.66%) SaaS
20 152 (3.57%) Dynamics 365
Communications & Networking
1 198 (4.65%) Firewall
2 124 (2.91%) DNS
3 92 (2.16%) VPN
4 71 (1.67%) Network Security
5 66 (1.55%) SSL
6 59 (1.39%) TCP/IP
7 53 (1.24%) HTTP
8 36 (0.85%) HTTPS
9 27 (0.63%) SSH
10 24 (0.56%) WAN
11 23 (0.54%) SMTP
12 21 (0.49%) FTP
13 20 (0.47%) BGP
14 17 (0.40%) MPLS
15 16 (0.38%) Kerberos
16 15 (0.35%) OpenLDAP
16 15 (0.35%) SD-WAN
17 14 (0.33%) DHCP
18 12 (0.28%) Internet
18 12 (0.28%) LAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 283 (6.64%) PostgreSQL
2 190 (4.46%) Power BI
3 170 (3.99%) NoSQL
3 170 (3.99%) SQL Server
4 161 (3.78%) Amazon RDS
5 125 (2.93%) MongoDB
6 107 (2.51%) Relational Database
7 105 (2.47%) Data Lake
8 104 (2.44%) Data Warehouse
9 92 (2.16%) Oracle Database
10 79 (1.85%) Azure SQL Database
11 70 (1.64%) MySQL
12 68 (1.60%) DynamoDB
13 58 (1.36%) Elasticsearch
14 56 (1.31%) Redis
15 54 (1.27%) Amazon Aurora
16 48 (1.13%) Metadata
17 46 (1.08%) Big Data
18 45 (1.06%) Delta Lake
19 43 (1.01%) Tableau
Development Applications
1 818 (19.21%) Jenkins
2 668 (15.68%) Git
3 610 (14.32%) JIRA
4 569 (13.36%) GitLab
5 144 (3.38%) Selenium
6 94 (2.21%) SonarQube
7 92 (2.16%) JUnit
8 88 (2.07%) Postman
9 86 (2.02%) Sonatype Nexus
10 85 (2.00%) Bitbucket
11 72 (1.69%) Cypress.io
12 64 (1.50%) Cucumber
13 56 (1.31%) Liquibase
14 54 (1.27%) Artifactory
15 47 (1.10%) JMeter
16 46 (1.08%) Gradle
17 45 (1.06%) CircleCI
18 43 (1.01%) Maven
19 38 (0.89%) Oracle APEX
20 34 (0.80%) Visual Studio
General
1 1,308 (30.71%) Social Skills
2 782 (18.36%) Finance
3 538 (12.63%) Public Sector
4 364 (8.55%) Banking
5 338 (7.94%) Analytical Skills
6 125 (2.93%) Documentation Skills
7 71 (1.67%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 69 (1.62%) Financial Institution
9 67 (1.57%) Investment Banking
10 63 (1.48%) Marketing
11 56 (1.31%) Influencing Skills
12 52 (1.22%) Telecoms
13 51 (1.20%) Front Office
13 51 (1.20%) Retail
14 41 (0.96%) Presentation Skills
15 34 (0.80%) Back Office
16 32 (0.75%) Pharmaceutical
17 28 (0.66%) Military
18 27 (0.63%) Manufacturing
18 27 (0.63%) Organisational Skills
Job Titles
1 817 (19.18%) DevOps Engineer
2 790 (18.55%) Developer
3 581 (13.64%) Senior
4 364 (8.55%) Architect
5 310 (7.28%) Lead
6 259 (6.08%) AWS Engineer
7 221 (5.19%) Azure Engineer
8 205 (4.81%) Data Engineer
9 199 (4.67%) AWS DevOps
10 180 (4.23%) Analyst
11 171 (4.02%) AWS DevOps Engineer
12 166 (3.90%) Software Engineer
13 158 (3.71%) Senior Developer
14 150 (3.52%) Cloud Engineer
14 150 (3.52%) Platform Engineer
15 126 (2.96%) Consultant
16 122 (2.86%) Senior DevOps
17 119 (2.79%) Java Developer
18 111 (2.61%) Senior DevOps Engineer
19 104 (2.44%) Azure DevOps Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 491 (11.53%) REST
2 375 (8.80%) .NET
3 302 (7.09%) RESTful
4 271 (6.36%) Node.js
5 259 (6.08%) React
6 250 (5.87%) Kafka
7 222 (5.21%) JSON
8 197 (4.63%) Spring
9 185 (4.34%) Spring Boot
10 177 (4.16%) SOAP
11 163 (3.83%) Elastic Stack
12 157 (3.69%) OAuth
13 156 (3.66%) HTML
14 155 (3.64%) AngularJS
15 153 (3.59%) XML
16 116 (2.72%) YAML
17 107 (2.51%) CSS
18 99 (2.32%) Playwright
19 92 (2.16%) .NET Core
20 80 (1.88%) GraphQL
Miscellaneous
1 577 (13.55%) Cloud Native
2 229 (5.38%) Product Ownership
3 177 (4.16%) Distributed Systems
4 128 (3.01%) Onboarding
5 108 (2.54%) Legacy Systems
6 107 (2.51%) Public Cloud
7 85 (2.00%) Hybrid Cloud
8 69 (1.62%) Data Protection Act
9 64 (1.50%) Virtual Team
10 60 (1.41%) Mobile App
11 57 (1.34%) Enterprise Software
11 57 (1.34%) Replication
12 51 (1.20%) Security Posture
13 48 (1.13%) Data Centre
13 48 (1.13%) Greenfield Project
14 45 (1.06%) Management Information System
15 42 (0.99%) CMDB
15 42 (0.99%) NHS
15 42 (0.99%) Self-Motivation
16 37 (0.87%) Private Cloud
Operating Systems
1 527 (12.37%) Linux
2 253 (5.94%) Windows
3 116 (2.72%) Unix
4 59 (1.39%) Windows Server
5 57 (1.34%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 53 (1.24%) VMS
7 44 (1.03%) Android
8 35 (0.82%) Apple iOS
9 26 (0.61%) Ubuntu
10 20 (0.47%) Amazon Linux
11 19 (0.45%) Windows 10
12 17 (0.40%) CentOS
13 12 (0.28%) Solaris
14 11 (0.26%) zOS
15 7 (0.16%) Mac OS
16 6 (0.14%) Windows Server 2016
16 6 (0.14%) Windows Server 2019
17 3 (0.070%) Debian
18 1 (0.023%) Mac OS X
18 1 (0.023%) SUSE
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,458 (57.71%) CI/CD
2 1,799 (42.24%) Agile
3 1,110 (26.06%) Infrastructure as Code
4 866 (20.33%) Containerisation
5 827 (19.42%) Problem-Solving
6 665 (15.61%) Test Automation
7 654 (15.36%) Microservices
8 514 (12.07%) Scrum
9 482 (11.32%) Migration
10 451 (10.59%) Continuous Improvement
11 425 (9.98%) Analytics
12 424 (9.96%) Software Engineering
13 407 (9.56%) Observability
14 393 (9.23%) AI
15 333 (7.82%) Stakeholder Management
16 309 (7.26%) Mentoring
17 284 (6.67%) Infrastructure Automation
18 283 (6.64%) SDLC
19 281 (6.60%) Data Pipeline
20 280 (6.57%) Stakeholder Engagement
Programming Languages
1 1,374 (32.26%) Python
2 811 (19.04%) SQL
3 632 (14.84%) Java
4 440 (10.33%) JavaScript
5 417 (9.79%) C#
6 392 (9.20%) Bash
7 381 (8.95%) PowerShell
8 317 (7.44%) TypeScript
9 177 (4.16%) Go
10 127 (2.98%) Bicep
11 88 (2.07%) PL/SQL
12 80 (1.88%) Shell Script
13 61 (1.43%) Groovy
14 56 (1.31%) C++
15 51 (1.20%) Perl
16 48 (1.13%) Ruby
17 47 (1.10%) Scala
18 38 (0.89%) T-SQL
19 33 (0.77%) Kotlin
20 32 (0.75%) PHP
Qualifications
1 1,205 (28.29%) Security Cleared
2 991 (23.27%) SC Cleared
3 368 (8.64%) Degree
4 205 (4.81%) Computer Science Degree
5 172 (4.04%) Azure Certification
6 154 (3.62%) AWS Certification
7 139 (3.26%) DV Cleared
8 96 (2.25%) BPSS Clearance
9 86 (2.02%) Master's Degree
10 66 (1.55%) CISSP
11 65 (1.53%) Microsoft Certification
12 55 (1.29%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 43 (1.01%) CISM
14 41 (0.96%) ISTQB
15 35 (0.82%) Cisco Certification
15 35 (0.82%) PMI Certification
16 30 (0.70%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
17 28 (0.66%) PMP
18 18 (0.42%) Oracle Certification
19 17 (0.40%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 402 (9.44%) QA
2 157 (3.69%) GDPR
3 139 (3.26%) ISO/IEC 27001
4 127 (2.98%) Accessibility
5 126 (2.96%) Data Quality
6 108 (2.54%) NIST
7 49 (1.15%) NCSC
8 35 (0.82%) PCI DSS
9 30 (0.70%) WCAG
10 28 (0.66%) HIPAA
11 22 (0.52%) PMO
12 20 (0.47%) Sarbanes-Oxley
13 17 (0.40%) SLA
14 15 (0.35%) MiFID
14 15 (0.35%) SOC 2
15 14 (0.33%) PSD2
16 13 (0.31%) ISO 20022
17 11 (0.26%) EU AI Act
17 11 (0.26%) SEPA
18 10 (0.23%) Cyber Essentials
System Software
1 1,117 (26.23%) Docker
2 168 (3.94%) Active Directory
3 63 (1.48%) VMware Infrastructure
4 62 (1.46%) Virtual Machines
5 24 (0.56%) vSphere
6 19 (0.45%) DFS Replication
7 16 (0.38%) VMware NSX
8 12 (0.28%) Hyper-V
8 12 (0.28%) Oracle RAC
8 12 (0.28%) Slurm Workload Manager
8 12 (0.28%) Squid
9 11 (0.26%) Dovecot
9 11 (0.26%) Postfix
9 11 (0.26%) Virtual Desktop
9 11 (0.26%) Virtual Servers
10 10 (0.23%) Lustre
11 8 (0.19%) GPFS
11 8 (0.19%) NFS
11 8 (0.19%) Tivoli Directory Server
11 8 (0.19%) VMware ESXi
Systems Management
1 1,376 (32.31%) Terraform
2 1,290 (30.29%) Kubernetes
3 553 (12.98%) Ansible
4 343 (8.05%) Grafana
5 316 (7.42%) Prometheus
6 87 (2.04%) Argo
7 78 (1.83%) Puppet
8 63 (1.48%) Progress Chef
9 56 (1.31%) Single Sign-On
10 46 (1.08%) Kibana
11 38 (0.89%) Packer
12 34 (0.80%) Istio
13 23 (0.54%) Podman
14 18 (0.42%) ITRS Geneos
14 18 (0.42%) SCCM
15 17 (0.40%) CA Endevor
15 17 (0.40%) Nessus
15 17 (0.40%) Proxmox
16 16 (0.38%) logstash
16 16 (0.38%) Rancher
Vendors
1 700 (16.44%) Microsoft
2 337 (7.91%) Oracle
3 228 (5.35%) Google
4 222 (5.21%) Splunk
5 211 (4.95%) Databricks
6 181 (4.25%) ServiceNow
7 117 (2.75%) Salesforce
8 112 (2.63%) SAP
9 108 (2.54%) Red Hat
10 106 (2.49%) VMware
11 69 (1.62%) Dynatrace
12 53 (1.24%) IBM
12 53 (1.24%) OpenAI
13 47 (1.10%) F5
14 43 (1.01%) Cisco
15 41 (0.96%) MuleSoft
16 39 (0.92%) Palo Alto
17 38 (0.89%) Atlassian
17 38 (0.89%) CyberArk
18 37 (0.87%) Talend