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

6 months to
11 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 14 14 14
Rank change year-on-year 0 0 -1
Contract jobs citing DevOps 5,675 3,662 3,859
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.39% 11.09% 10.01%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.28% 12.26% 11.70%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,942 2,564 2,609
10th Percentile £382 £363 £381
25th Percentile £438 £425 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £520 £550
Median % change year-on-year +1.01% -5.50% -4.35%
75th Percentile £618 £623 £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 120 27 71
10th Percentile £37.25 £39.50 £56.00
25th Percentile £55.38 £52.75 £65.00
Median hourly rate £67.50 £67.00 £70.00
Median % change year-on-year +0.75% -4.29% +7.69%
75th Percentile £77.50 £87.50 £74.22
90th Percentile £92.63 £95.00 £85.25
UK excluding London median hourly rate £68.11 £67.00 £70.00
% change year-on-year +1.65% -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 46,202 29,871 32,996
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.62% 90.47% 85.56%
Number of daily rates quoted 28,118 18,549 20,447
10th Percentile £325 £300 £311
25th Percentile £425 £403 £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 £725 £725 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 3,059 1,786 1,512
10th Percentile £13.85 £14.23 £14.71
25th Percentile £17.36 £17.30 £20.09
Median hourly rate £40.00 £25.15 £43.00
Median % change year-on-year +59.05% -41.51% +3.61%
75th Percentile £67.50 £45.00 £65.00
90th Percentile £80.00 £67.00 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £40.00 £22.63 £43.00
% change year-on-year +76.76% -47.37% +8.72%

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 11 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 11 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 11 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 4,829 £525 - 2,217
London 0 2,557 £550 - 1,116
UK excluding London -4 2,432 £500 - 1,331
Work from Home 0 1,617 £525 +2.44% 1,056
North of England -1 798 £500 +5.26% 381
South East -12 456 £525 +5.00% 345
Midlands -3 442 £488 -4.88% 165
Yorkshire -2 392 £500 +3.36% 114
West Midlands -6 347 £500 -4.76% 98
South West +5 321 £550 +5.77% 198
North West -3 313 £519 +15.37% 198
Scotland -4 221 £483 +1.63% 89
East of England +8 150 £506 -3.62% 107
North East +15 108 £425 -18.27% 72
East Midlands +4 92 £463 +2.78% 67
Wales -3 50 £500 +33.33% 37
Northern Ireland +19 23 £450 +2.27% 26
Channel Islands - 5 £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
1 343 (6.04%) Confluence
2 158 (2.78%) SharePoint
3 130 (2.29%) Apache Airflow
4 125 (2.20%) Apache Spark
5 111 (1.96%) Apache
6 60 (1.06%) SAS
7 43 (0.76%) CMS
8 39 (0.69%) Jupyter
9 32 (0.56%) IIS
10 27 (0.48%) nginx
11 19 (0.33%) Microsoft Exchange
12 15 (0.26%) Camunda
13 13 (0.23%) OpenStack
14 12 (0.21%) Anypoint
14 12 (0.21%) WebLogic
15 11 (0.19%) Oracle SOA Suite
15 11 (0.19%) Oracle Workflow
15 11 (0.19%) WebSphere
16 9 (0.16%) Appian
16 9 (0.16%) Palantir Foundry
Applications
1 65 (1.15%) Microsoft Excel
2 61 (1.07%) Microsoft Project
3 46 (0.81%) MS Visio
4 37 (0.65%) Microsoft Office
5 33 (0.58%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 12 (0.21%) Chatbot
7 9 (0.16%) CPLEX
7 9 (0.16%) Spreadsheet
8 7 (0.12%) Trello
9 5 (0.088%) Notion
9 5 (0.088%) Windchill
10 2 (0.035%) Adobe XD
10 2 (0.035%) Mingle
11 1 (0.018%) EngageOne
11 1 (0.018%) Gliffy
11 1 (0.018%) Mozilla Thunderbird
11 1 (0.018%) Sketch
11 1 (0.018%) Weka
Business Applications
1 78 (1.37%) Dynamics CRM
2 37 (0.65%) SAP S/4HANA
3 14 (0.25%) Oracle EBS
4 13 (0.23%) Payment Gateway
5 10 (0.18%) Magento
6 8 (0.14%) SAP MDG
6 8 (0.14%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
7 6 (0.11%) Dynamics AX
7 6 (0.11%) Oracle EBS R12
7 6 (0.11%) Remedy ITSM
8 5 (0.088%) Aladdin
8 5 (0.088%) OpenText MBPM
8 5 (0.088%) Oracle BPM
9 4 (0.070%) Endur
9 4 (0.070%) Oracle ERP
10 3 (0.053%) Findur
10 3 (0.053%) Maximo
10 3 (0.053%) SAP ERP
10 3 (0.053%) SAP Oil and Gas
10 3 (0.053%) Teamcenter
Cloud Services
1 3,104 (54.70%) Azure
2 2,033 (35.82%) AWS
3 1,780 (31.37%) Azure DevOps
4 999 (17.60%) GitHub
5 742 (13.07%) GCP
6 628 (11.07%) GitHub Actions
7 493 (8.69%) Power Platform
8 469 (8.26%) Serverless
9 309 (5.44%) Amazon S3
10 290 (5.11%) AWS Lambda
11 255 (4.49%) Entra ID
12 247 (4.35%) Amazon EKS
13 241 (4.25%) AWS CloudFormation
14 240 (4.23%) Amazon CloudWatch
15 217 (3.82%) Azure AKS
16 210 (3.70%) Azure Monitor
17 204 (3.59%) Azure Data Factory
18 196 (3.45%) Amazon EC2
19 181 (3.19%) Dynamics 365
20 165 (2.91%) Power Automate
Communications & Networking
1 248 (4.37%) Firewall
2 178 (3.14%) DNS
3 120 (2.11%) VPN
4 113 (1.99%) Network Security
5 66 (1.16%) TCP/IP
6 52 (0.92%) SSL
7 50 (0.88%) DHCP
8 47 (0.83%) WAN
9 35 (0.62%) HTTP
10 32 (0.56%) SD-WAN
11 30 (0.53%) BGP
12 29 (0.51%) Internet
13 28 (0.49%) SSH
14 27 (0.48%) Wi-Fi
15 21 (0.37%) OSPF
16 20 (0.35%) SAN
17 19 (0.33%) VLAN
18 17 (0.30%) BIG-IP
18 17 (0.30%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
18 17 (0.30%) HTTPS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 323 (5.69%) Power BI
2 304 (5.36%) PostgreSQL
3 300 (5.29%) SQL Server
4 213 (3.75%) Data Warehouse
5 186 (3.28%) MongoDB
6 185 (3.26%) NoSQL
7 181 (3.19%) Relational Database
8 178 (3.14%) Data Lake
9 145 (2.56%) Amazon RDS
10 129 (2.27%) Metadata
11 108 (1.90%) Azure SQL Database
12 95 (1.67%) DynamoDB
13 91 (1.60%) Delta Lake
14 89 (1.57%) Oracle Database
15 86 (1.52%) MySQL
16 78 (1.37%) Redis
17 69 (1.22%) Amazon Redshift
18 63 (1.11%) Big Data
19 61 (1.07%) SQL Server Integration Services
20 54 (0.95%) Elasticsearch
Development Applications
1 823 (14.50%) Git
2 809 (14.26%) Jenkins
3 683 (12.04%) JIRA
4 640 (11.28%) GitLab
5 138 (2.43%) Selenium
6 104 (1.83%) SonarQube
7 99 (1.74%) JUnit
8 96 (1.69%) Maven
9 95 (1.67%) Postman
10 78 (1.37%) Bitbucket
11 74 (1.30%) REST Assured
12 69 (1.22%) Cypress.io
12 69 (1.22%) JMeter
13 68 (1.20%) Gradle
14 61 (1.07%) Cucumber
15 50 (0.88%) Claude Code
16 48 (0.85%) Mockito
17 45 (0.79%) Gatling
18 44 (0.78%) Sonatype Nexus
19 38 (0.67%) Visual Studio
General
1 1,471 (25.92%) Social Skills
2 1,009 (17.78%) Finance
3 811 (14.29%) Public Sector
4 526 (9.27%) Analytical Skills
5 380 (6.70%) Banking
6 167 (2.94%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 110 (1.94%) Retail
8 90 (1.59%) Documentation Skills
9 78 (1.37%) Influencing Skills
10 65 (1.15%) Legal
11 64 (1.13%) Organisational Skills
12 55 (0.97%) Marketing
12 55 (0.97%) Military
13 51 (0.90%) Aerospace
13 51 (0.90%) Investment Banking
14 50 (0.88%) Telecoms
15 46 (0.81%) Law
16 45 (0.79%) Front Office
17 43 (0.76%) Manufacturing
18 39 (0.69%) Financial Institution
Job Titles
1 1,139 (20.07%) DevOps Engineer
2 924 (16.28%) Developer
3 866 (15.26%) Senior
4 639 (11.26%) Architect
5 544 (9.59%) Lead
6 361 (6.36%) Azure Engineer
7 318 (5.60%) Data Engineer
8 273 (4.81%) Analyst
9 264 (4.65%) AWS Engineer
10 237 (4.18%) Platform Engineer
11 212 (3.74%) Azure DevOps Engineer
12 211 (3.72%) Cloud Engineer
13 199 (3.51%) Senior DevOps
14 198 (3.49%) Java Developer
15 185 (3.26%) Senior DevOps Engineer
16 181 (3.19%) AWS DevOps
17 179 (3.15%) Solutions Architect
18 169 (2.98%) AWS DevOps Engineer
19 164 (2.89%) Senior Developer
20 144 (2.54%) Software Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 1,686 (29.71%) Terraform
2 609 (10.73%) REST
3 478 (8.42%) .NET
4 385 (6.78%) Kafka
5 358 (6.31%) RESTful
6 311 (5.48%) Spring
7 303 (5.34%) Spring Boot
8 295 (5.20%) React
9 201 (3.54%) Node.js
10 185 (3.26%) JSON
11 169 (2.98%) OAuth
12 164 (2.89%) Playwright
13 162 (2.85%) PySpark
14 143 (2.52%) HTML
15 131 (2.31%) CSS
16 127 (2.24%) .NET Framework
16 127 (2.24%) SOAP
17 125 (2.20%) AngularJS
18 120 (2.11%) OAuth2
19 113 (1.99%) Middleware
Miscellaneous
1 1,038 (18.29%) Cloud Native
2 441 (7.77%) Product Ownership
3 263 (4.63%) Distributed Systems
4 201 (3.54%) Enterprise Software
5 188 (3.31%) Onboarding
6 153 (2.70%) Hybrid Cloud
7 150 (2.64%) Legacy Systems
8 97 (1.71%) AI Agents
9 88 (1.55%) Data Protection Act
9 88 (1.55%) Management Information System
10 82 (1.44%) Self-Motivation
11 78 (1.37%) Public Cloud
11 78 (1.37%) Replication
12 75 (1.32%) Data Structures
13 70 (1.23%) Security Posture
14 69 (1.22%) Data Centre
15 62 (1.09%) Virtual Team
16 58 (1.02%) Enterprise Cloud
17 55 (0.97%) PKI
18 53 (0.93%) Mobile App
Operating Systems
1 550 (9.69%) Linux
2 312 (5.50%) Windows
3 117 (2.06%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 113 (1.99%) Unix
5 97 (1.71%) Windows Server
6 37 (0.65%) VMS
7 34 (0.60%) Ubuntu
8 32 (0.56%) Apple iOS
9 22 (0.39%) Android
10 10 (0.18%) Amazon Linux
10 10 (0.18%) CentOS
10 10 (0.18%) zOS
11 9 (0.16%) Solaris
12 8 (0.14%) Windows Server 2016
12 8 (0.14%) Windows Server 2019
13 7 (0.12%) AIX
14 5 (0.088%) Mac OS
14 5 (0.088%) Windows Server 2008
15 4 (0.070%) Alpine Linux
15 4 (0.070%) Data ONTAP
Processes & Methodologies
1 3,424 (60.33%) CI/CD
2 2,310 (40.70%) Agile
3 1,660 (29.25%) Infrastructure as Code
4 962 (16.95%) Continuous Improvement
5 953 (16.79%) Containerisation
6 918 (16.18%) Stakeholder Management
7 901 (15.88%) Problem-Solving
8 894 (15.75%) Test Automation
9 839 (14.78%) AI
10 838 (14.77%) Microservices
11 760 (13.39%) Observability
12 759 (13.37%) Platform Engineering
13 728 (12.83%) Software Engineering
14 692 (12.19%) Scrum
15 681 (12.00%) Migration
16 604 (10.64%) Technical Leadership
17 591 (10.41%) Analytics
18 533 (9.39%) Stakeholder Engagement
19 494 (8.70%) Roadmaps
20 492 (8.67%) Data Modelling
Programming Languages
1 1,631 (28.74%) Python
2 1,028 (18.11%) SQL
3 825 (14.54%) Java
4 500 (8.81%) PowerShell
5 498 (8.78%) Bash
6 493 (8.69%) C#
7 466 (8.21%) JavaScript
8 311 (5.48%) TypeScript
9 259 (4.56%) Bicep
10 109 (1.92%) Go
11 82 (1.44%) Shell Script
12 69 (1.22%) Apex Code
12 69 (1.22%) T-SQL
13 67 (1.18%) Scala
14 64 (1.13%) Groovy
15 61 (1.07%) PL/SQL
16 38 (0.67%) Data Analysis Expressions
17 34 (0.60%) Perl
18 30 (0.53%) C++
19 24 (0.42%) Kotlin
Qualifications
1 1,826 (32.18%) Security Cleared
2 1,530 (26.96%) SC Cleared
3 351 (6.19%) Degree
4 244 (4.30%) Azure Certification
5 236 (4.16%) BPSS Clearance
6 222 (3.91%) DV Cleared
7 190 (3.35%) AWS Certification
8 139 (2.45%) Computer Science Degree
9 109 (1.92%) Microsoft Certification
10 77 (1.36%) CISSP
11 60 (1.06%) ISTQB
12 54 (0.95%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 50 (0.88%) Cisco Certification
14 46 (0.81%) PMP
15 43 (0.76%) PMI Certification
16 39 (0.69%) Master's Degree
17 31 (0.55%) CISM
18 25 (0.44%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
19 24 (0.42%) (ISC)2 CCSP
19 24 (0.42%) ITIL Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 550 (9.69%) QA
2 294 (5.18%) Data Quality
3 206 (3.63%) Accessibility
4 132 (2.33%) GDPR
5 98 (1.73%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 85 (1.50%) WCAG
7 81 (1.43%) NIST
8 53 (0.93%) NCSC
9 50 (0.88%) PMO
10 39 (0.69%) SLA
11 31 (0.55%) PCI DSS
12 29 (0.51%) GRC
13 24 (0.42%) Sarbanes-Oxley
14 19 (0.33%) ISO 20022
15 13 (0.23%) Disclosure Scotland
16 12 (0.21%) Cyber Essentials
16 12 (0.21%) SEPA
17 11 (0.19%) HIPAA
18 10 (0.18%) Actionable Recommendations
18 10 (0.18%) HL7
System Software
1 1,173 (20.67%) Docker
2 174 (3.07%) Active Directory
3 89 (1.57%) VMware Infrastructure
4 80 (1.41%) Virtual Machines
5 29 (0.51%) vSphere
6 26 (0.46%) Hyper-V
7 25 (0.44%) VMware ESXi
8 19 (0.33%) Virtual Desktop
8 19 (0.33%) VMware NSX
9 14 (0.25%) Squid
10 11 (0.19%) IAG
10 11 (0.19%) Oracle RAC
11 9 (0.16%) Postfix
12 7 (0.12%) zsh
13 6 (0.11%) Apache ZooKeeper
13 6 (0.11%) Corosync
13 6 (0.11%) KVM
13 6 (0.11%) Microsoft App-V
13 6 (0.11%) Virtual Servers
14 5 (0.088%) Firmware
Systems Management
1 1,542 (27.17%) Kubernetes
2 542 (9.55%) Ansible
3 373 (6.57%) Grafana
4 316 (5.57%) Prometheus
5 82 (1.44%) Argo
6 63 (1.11%) Puppet
7 52 (0.92%) Single Sign-On
8 51 (0.90%) Progress Chef
9 45 (0.79%) Microsoft Intune
10 34 (0.60%) Packer
11 32 (0.56%) Istio
12 26 (0.46%) Kibana
13 22 (0.39%) vCenter Server
14 21 (0.37%) Kustomize
15 19 (0.33%) Oracle RMAN
15 19 (0.33%) SCCM
16 18 (0.32%) Kubeflow
17 15 (0.26%) HP ALM
18 13 (0.23%) Control-M
18 13 (0.23%) SCOM
Vendors
1 1,111 (19.58%) Microsoft
2 313 (5.52%) Oracle
3 307 (5.41%) Databricks
4 284 (5.00%) Google
5 208 (3.67%) ServiceNow
6 186 (3.28%) Salesforce
7 181 (3.19%) Splunk
8 142 (2.50%) Dynatrace
9 132 (2.33%) VMware
10 113 (1.99%) SAP
11 108 (1.90%) Red Hat
12 68 (1.20%) OpenAI
13 66 (1.16%) IBM
14 63 (1.11%) MuleSoft
15 59 (1.04%) Informatica
16 53 (0.93%) Foundry
17 45 (0.79%) Cisco
18 43 (0.76%) Atlassian
19 41 (0.72%) AppDynamics
20 35 (0.62%) CyberArk