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

6 months to
5 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 14 14 15
Rank change year-on-year 0 +1 -2
Contract jobs citing DevOps 5,625 3,603 3,791
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.42% 11.08% 9.98%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.32% 12.25% 11.68%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,914 2,528 2,587
10th Percentile £382 £360 £384
25th Percentile £438 £425 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £518 £550
Median % change year-on-year +1.33% -5.80% -4.35%
75th Percentile £615 £619 £650
90th Percentile £700 £700 £730
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £550
% change year-on-year - -9.09% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 125 27 74
10th Percentile £37.24 £39.50 £56.45
25th Percentile £55.50 £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 £74.00
90th Percentile £94.13 £95.00 £85.18
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 45,646 29,409 32,455
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.59% 90.41% 85.44%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,910 18,256 20,327
10th Percentile £325 £300 £310
25th Percentile £425 £402 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -3.67%
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 2,932 1,750 1,541
10th Percentile £14.00 £14.20 £14.41
25th Percentile £17.72 £17.30 £20.00
Median hourly rate £41.00 £25.15 £42.88
Median % change year-on-year +63.02% -41.35% +3.33%
75th Percentile £67.85 £45.79 £65.00
90th Percentile £80.00 £67.03 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £42.50 £22.63 £43.00
% change year-on-year +87.80% -47.37% +12.13%

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 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 5 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 5 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 4,799 £525 - 2,940
London 0 2,527 £550 - 1,650
UK excluding London -3 2,419 £500 - 1,635
Work from Home 0 1,611 £525 +1.45% 1,476
North of England -1 801 £500 +5.26% 440
South East -13 452 £525 +5.00% 388
Midlands -3 445 £488 -2.50% 194
Yorkshire -3 393 £500 +3.90% 121
West Midlands -5 349 £492 -5.33% 109
South West +7 318 £550 +5.77% 252
North West -2 314 £521 +15.80% 242
Scotland -7 211 £485 +2.16% 132
East of England +12 150 £505 -3.81% 139
North East +18 109 £425 -18.27% 79
East Midlands +2 92 £463 +2.78% 85
Wales -5 48 £500 +33.33% 37
Northern Ireland +21 23 £450 +2.27% 67
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
1 339 (6.03%) Confluence
2 148 (2.63%) SharePoint
3 130 (2.31%) Apache Spark
4 129 (2.29%) Apache Airflow
5 114 (2.03%) Apache
6 60 (1.07%) SAS
7 44 (0.78%) CMS
8 39 (0.69%) Jupyter
9 33 (0.59%) IIS
10 26 (0.46%) nginx
11 17 (0.30%) Microsoft Exchange
12 16 (0.28%) Camunda
13 13 (0.23%) OpenStack
14 12 (0.21%) Anypoint
14 12 (0.21%) WebSphere
15 11 (0.20%) Oracle Workflow
16 10 (0.18%) Palantir Foundry
17 9 (0.16%) Appian
17 9 (0.16%) WebLogic
18 8 (0.14%) Oracle SOA Suite
Applications
1 65 (1.16%) Microsoft Excel
2 62 (1.10%) Microsoft Project
3 45 (0.80%) MS Visio
4 37 (0.66%) Microsoft Office
5 33 (0.59%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 9 (0.16%) Chatbot
6 9 (0.16%) CPLEX
6 9 (0.16%) Spreadsheet
7 7 (0.12%) Trello
8 5 (0.089%) Notion
8 5 (0.089%) Windchill
9 2 (0.036%) Adobe XD
10 1 (0.018%) EngageOne
10 1 (0.018%) Gliffy
10 1 (0.018%) Mingle
10 1 (0.018%) Mozilla Thunderbird
10 1 (0.018%) Sketch
10 1 (0.018%) Weka
Business Applications
1 76 (1.35%) Dynamics CRM
2 36 (0.64%) SAP S/4HANA
3 13 (0.23%) Payment Gateway
4 11 (0.20%) Oracle EBS
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%) Remedy ITSM
8 5 (0.089%) Aladdin
8 5 (0.089%) OpenText MBPM
8 5 (0.089%) Oracle BPM
8 5 (0.089%) Oracle ERP
9 4 (0.071%) Endur
10 3 (0.053%) Findur
10 3 (0.053%) Maximo
10 3 (0.053%) Oracle Receivables
10 3 (0.053%) SAP Oil and Gas
10 3 (0.053%) Shopify
10 3 (0.053%) Teamcenter
Cloud Services
1 3,090 (54.93%) Azure
2 2,012 (35.77%) AWS
3 1,781 (31.66%) Azure DevOps
4 987 (17.55%) GitHub
5 719 (12.78%) GCP
6 613 (10.90%) GitHub Actions
7 490 (8.71%) Power Platform
8 463 (8.23%) Serverless
9 302 (5.37%) Amazon S3
10 286 (5.08%) AWS Lambda
11 256 (4.55%) Entra ID
12 240 (4.27%) Amazon EKS
13 236 (4.20%) Amazon CloudWatch
14 235 (4.18%) AWS CloudFormation
15 215 (3.82%) Azure AKS
16 214 (3.80%) Azure Monitor
17 205 (3.64%) Azure Data Factory
18 185 (3.29%) Amazon EC2
19 178 (3.16%) Dynamics 365
20 158 (2.81%) Power Automate
Communications & Networking
1 253 (4.50%) Firewall
2 176 (3.13%) DNS
3 122 (2.17%) VPN
4 115 (2.04%) Network Security
5 67 (1.19%) TCP/IP
6 53 (0.94%) SSL
7 49 (0.87%) WAN
8 47 (0.84%) DHCP
9 36 (0.64%) HTTP
10 34 (0.60%) SD-WAN
11 31 (0.55%) BGP
12 30 (0.53%) Internet
13 28 (0.50%) SSH
13 28 (0.50%) Wi-Fi
14 22 (0.39%) OSPF
15 19 (0.34%) SAN
15 19 (0.34%) VLAN
16 17 (0.30%) BIG-IP
16 17 (0.30%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
16 17 (0.30%) HTTPS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 328 (5.83%) Power BI
2 299 (5.32%) PostgreSQL
2 299 (5.32%) SQL Server
3 212 (3.77%) Data Warehouse
4 187 (3.32%) NoSQL
5 182 (3.24%) MongoDB
6 179 (3.18%) Relational Database
7 177 (3.15%) Data Lake
8 142 (2.52%) Amazon RDS
9 126 (2.24%) Metadata
10 110 (1.96%) Azure SQL Database
11 95 (1.69%) Delta Lake
11 95 (1.69%) DynamoDB
12 84 (1.49%) Oracle Database
13 83 (1.48%) MySQL
14 80 (1.42%) Redis
15 69 (1.23%) Amazon Redshift
16 64 (1.14%) Big Data
17 61 (1.08%) SQL Server Integration Services
18 53 (0.94%) BigQuery
Development Applications
1 799 (14.20%) Git
2 792 (14.08%) Jenkins
3 681 (12.11%) JIRA
4 626 (11.13%) GitLab
5 140 (2.49%) Selenium
6 100 (1.78%) SonarQube
7 99 (1.76%) Postman
8 95 (1.69%) JUnit
9 93 (1.65%) Maven
10 79 (1.40%) Bitbucket
11 75 (1.33%) JMeter
12 73 (1.30%) REST Assured
13 70 (1.24%) Cypress.io
14 64 (1.14%) Gradle
15 59 (1.05%) Cucumber
16 50 (0.89%) Gatling
17 47 (0.84%) Claude Code
18 45 (0.80%) Mockito
19 44 (0.78%) Sonatype Nexus
20 43 (0.76%) LoadRunner
General
1 1,458 (25.92%) Social Skills
2 991 (17.62%) Finance
3 813 (14.45%) Public Sector
4 518 (9.21%) Analytical Skills
5 371 (6.60%) Banking
6 164 (2.92%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 108 (1.92%) Retail
8 91 (1.62%) Documentation Skills
9 76 (1.35%) Influencing Skills
10 65 (1.16%) Organisational Skills
11 64 (1.14%) Legal
12 56 (1.00%) Marketing
13 54 (0.96%) Military
14 51 (0.91%) Aerospace
15 50 (0.89%) Investment Banking
15 50 (0.89%) Telecoms
16 46 (0.82%) Law
17 42 (0.75%) Front Office
18 40 (0.71%) Manufacturing
19 39 (0.69%) Financial Institution
Job Titles
1 1,127 (20.04%) DevOps Engineer
2 906 (16.11%) Developer
3 852 (15.15%) Senior
4 631 (11.22%) Architect
5 538 (9.56%) Lead
6 355 (6.31%) Azure Engineer
7 316 (5.62%) Data Engineer
8 277 (4.92%) Analyst
9 265 (4.71%) AWS Engineer
10 234 (4.16%) Platform Engineer
11 208 (3.70%) Cloud Engineer
12 205 (3.64%) Azure DevOps Engineer
13 197 (3.50%) Senior DevOps
14 192 (3.41%) Java Developer
15 183 (3.25%) Senior DevOps Engineer
16 181 (3.22%) AWS DevOps
17 178 (3.16%) Solutions Architect
18 170 (3.02%) AWS DevOps Engineer
19 159 (2.83%) Senior Developer
20 143 (2.54%) Software Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 1,674 (29.76%) Terraform
2 599 (10.65%) REST
3 472 (8.39%) .NET
4 379 (6.74%) Kafka
5 349 (6.20%) RESTful
6 304 (5.40%) Spring
7 293 (5.21%) React
8 292 (5.19%) Spring Boot
9 202 (3.59%) Node.js
10 185 (3.29%) JSON
11 168 (2.99%) OAuth
12 165 (2.93%) Playwright
13 162 (2.88%) PySpark
14 140 (2.49%) HTML
15 129 (2.29%) CSS
16 127 (2.26%) .NET Framework
17 125 (2.22%) AngularJS
17 125 (2.22%) SOAP
18 119 (2.12%) OAuth2
19 114 (2.03%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 1,029 (18.29%) Cloud Native
2 430 (7.64%) Product Ownership
3 264 (4.69%) Distributed Systems
4 194 (3.45%) Enterprise Software
5 183 (3.25%) Onboarding
6 152 (2.70%) Hybrid Cloud
7 151 (2.68%) Legacy Systems
8 92 (1.64%) AI Agents
9 86 (1.53%) Management Information System
10 85 (1.51%) Data Protection Act
11 82 (1.46%) Self-Motivation
12 76 (1.35%) Public Cloud
13 75 (1.33%) Replication
14 74 (1.32%) Data Structures
15 69 (1.23%) Security Posture
16 65 (1.16%) Data Centre
17 57 (1.01%) Virtual Team
18 56 (1.00%) Enterprise Cloud
19 51 (0.91%) Mobile App
19 51 (0.91%) NHS
Operating Systems
1 532 (9.46%) Linux
2 307 (5.46%) Windows
3 113 (2.01%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 108 (1.92%) Unix
5 96 (1.71%) Windows Server
6 38 (0.68%) VMS
7 32 (0.57%) Ubuntu
8 31 (0.55%) Apple iOS
9 21 (0.37%) Android
10 10 (0.18%) Amazon Linux
10 10 (0.18%) zOS
11 9 (0.16%) CentOS
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 6 (0.11%) Mac OS
15 5 (0.089%) Windows Server 2008
16 4 (0.071%) Alpine Linux
16 4 (0.071%) Data ONTAP
Processes & Methodologies
1 3,380 (60.09%) CI/CD
2 2,288 (40.68%) Agile
3 1,627 (28.92%) Infrastructure as Code
4 939 (16.69%) Continuous Improvement
5 933 (16.59%) Containerisation
6 892 (15.86%) Stakeholder Management
7 884 (15.72%) Test Automation
8 882 (15.68%) Problem-Solving
9 825 (14.67%) AI
10 824 (14.65%) Microservices
11 748 (13.30%) Observability
12 744 (13.23%) Platform Engineering
13 712 (12.66%) Software Engineering
14 686 (12.20%) Scrum
15 680 (12.09%) Migration
16 590 (10.49%) Technical Leadership
17 587 (10.44%) Analytics
18 529 (9.40%) Stakeholder Engagement
19 488 (8.68%) Data Modelling
20 481 (8.55%) Roadmaps
Programming Languages
1 1,618 (28.76%) Python
2 1,023 (18.19%) SQL
3 811 (14.42%) Java
4 487 (8.66%) Bash
5 486 (8.64%) C#
5 486 (8.64%) PowerShell
6 462 (8.21%) JavaScript
7 310 (5.51%) TypeScript
8 254 (4.52%) Bicep
9 101 (1.80%) Go
10 80 (1.42%) Shell Script
11 69 (1.23%) Apex Code
11 69 (1.23%) T-SQL
12 67 (1.19%) Scala
13 63 (1.12%) Groovy
14 58 (1.03%) PL/SQL
15 38 (0.68%) Data Analysis Expressions
16 35 (0.62%) Perl
17 30 (0.53%) C++
18 23 (0.41%) Kotlin
Qualifications
1 1,799 (31.98%) Security Cleared
2 1,512 (26.88%) SC Cleared
3 346 (6.15%) Degree
4 241 (4.28%) Azure Certification
5 233 (4.14%) BPSS Clearance
6 213 (3.79%) DV Cleared
7 186 (3.31%) AWS Certification
8 136 (2.42%) Computer Science Degree
9 107 (1.90%) Microsoft Certification
10 75 (1.33%) CISSP
11 63 (1.12%) ISTQB
12 54 (0.96%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 49 (0.87%) Cisco Certification
14 44 (0.78%) PMP
15 41 (0.73%) PMI Certification
16 37 (0.66%) Master's Degree
17 30 (0.53%) CISM
18 24 (0.43%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
18 24 (0.43%) ITIL Certification
19 23 (0.41%) (ISC)2 CCSP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 545 (9.69%) QA
2 292 (5.19%) Data Quality
3 204 (3.63%) Accessibility
4 132 (2.35%) GDPR
5 101 (1.80%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 83 (1.48%) WCAG
7 80 (1.42%) NIST
8 52 (0.92%) NCSC
8 52 (0.92%) PMO
9 39 (0.69%) SLA
10 31 (0.55%) PCI DSS
11 29 (0.52%) GRC
12 24 (0.43%) Sarbanes-Oxley
13 17 (0.30%) ISO 20022
14 13 (0.23%) Disclosure Scotland
15 12 (0.21%) Cyber Essentials
16 10 (0.18%) Actionable Recommendations
16 10 (0.18%) HIPAA
16 10 (0.18%) HL7
16 10 (0.18%) SEPA
System Software
1 1,155 (20.53%) Docker
2 171 (3.04%) Active Directory
3 89 (1.58%) VMware Infrastructure
4 81 (1.44%) Virtual Machines
5 27 (0.48%) Hyper-V
5 27 (0.48%) vSphere
6 22 (0.39%) VMware ESXi
7 20 (0.36%) VMware NSX
8 17 (0.30%) Virtual Desktop
9 14 (0.25%) Squid
10 11 (0.20%) IAG
10 11 (0.20%) Oracle RAC
11 9 (0.16%) Postfix
12 7 (0.12%) KVM
12 7 (0.12%) zsh
13 6 (0.11%) Corosync
13 6 (0.11%) Microsoft App-V
13 6 (0.11%) Virtual Servers
14 5 (0.089%) Apache ZooKeeper
14 5 (0.089%) Ceph
Systems Management
1 1,519 (27.00%) Kubernetes
2 535 (9.51%) Ansible
3 368 (6.54%) Grafana
4 310 (5.51%) Prometheus
5 83 (1.48%) Argo
6 58 (1.03%) Puppet
7 53 (0.94%) Single Sign-On
8 48 (0.85%) Progress Chef
9 43 (0.76%) Microsoft Intune
10 34 (0.60%) Packer
11 33 (0.59%) Istio
12 26 (0.46%) Kibana
13 21 (0.37%) Kustomize
14 20 (0.36%) vCenter Server
15 19 (0.34%) SCCM
16 18 (0.32%) Kubeflow
17 16 (0.28%) Oracle RMAN
18 15 (0.27%) HP ALM
19 13 (0.23%) SCOM
20 12 (0.21%) HAProxy
Vendors
1 1,104 (19.63%) Microsoft
2 309 (5.49%) Databricks
3 308 (5.48%) Oracle
4 274 (4.87%) Google
5 205 (3.64%) ServiceNow
6 186 (3.31%) Splunk
7 185 (3.29%) Salesforce
8 145 (2.58%) Dynatrace
9 130 (2.31%) VMware
10 113 (2.01%) SAP
11 108 (1.92%) Red Hat
12 66 (1.17%) IBM
13 64 (1.14%) OpenAI
14 62 (1.10%) Informatica
15 61 (1.08%) MuleSoft
16 51 (0.91%) Foundry
17 47 (0.84%) AppDynamics
18 45 (0.80%) Cisco
19 42 (0.75%) Atlassian
20 35 (0.62%) CyberArk