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

6 months to
16 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 13 15 14
Rank change year-on-year +2 -1 -2
Contract jobs citing DevOps 5,340 3,069 4,139
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.64% 10.36% 9.50%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.54% 11.38% 11.17%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,730 2,208 2,839
10th Percentile £385 £375 £400
25th Percentile £436 £437 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year - -4.55% -5.98%
75th Percentile £613 £633 £650
90th Percentile £700 £750 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £525
% change year-on-year - -4.76% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 114 16 123
10th Percentile £39.53 £32.63 £56.50
25th Percentile £61.78 £51.25 £61.60
Median hourly rate £70.00 £76.00 £67.50
Median % change year-on-year -7.89% +12.59% +2.97%
75th Percentile £77.50 £87.50 £74.44
90th Percentile £93.81 £90.63 £85.65
UK excluding London median hourly rate £70.00 £70.00 £66.50
% change year-on-year - +5.26% +1.53%

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 42,574 26,968 37,058
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.80% 91.03% 85.06%
Number of daily rates quoted 26,549 17,103 23,600
10th Percentile £325 £300 £300
25th Percentile £413 £406 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £506 £525
Median % change year-on-year +1.28% -3.62% -4.55%
75th Percentile £619 £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 2,556 1,231 2,598
10th Percentile £14.82 £14.20 £12.75
25th Percentile £20.00 £17.87 £16.01
Median hourly rate £43.96 £26.32 £37.18
Median % change year-on-year +67.02% -29.21% +6.23%
75th Percentile £68.00 £55.25 £61.30
90th Percentile £81.25 £73.75 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £44.50 £25.15 £38.12
% change year-on-year +76.94% -34.02% +17.29%

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 16 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 16 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 16 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 4,538 £525 - 1,510
UK excluding London +6 2,350 £500 - 1,061
London +4 2,331 £550 - 650
Work from Home -1 1,474 £525 - 822
North of England +7 834 £500 - 313
South East -3 458 £510 +2.00% 292
Yorkshire +2 451 £504 +0.85% 97
Midlands +3 422 £488 -2.50% 136
West Midlands 0 334 £500 -2.44% 88
North West +2 310 £500 +1.63% 172
South West +14 284 £525 -4.55% 123
Scotland +4 198 £500 +1.21% 59
East of England +22 131 £525 +7.69% 89
North East +11 91 £450 -16.28% 49
East Midlands -2 84 £466 +0.81% 48
Wales +4 51 £425 +37.10% 35
Northern Ireland +12 21 £475 +11.76% 38
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
1 317 (5.94%) Confluence
2 138 (2.58%) Apache Spark
3 122 (2.28%) SharePoint
4 100 (1.87%) Apache Airflow
5 94 (1.76%) Apache
6 86 (1.61%) SAS
7 46 (0.86%) CMS
8 32 (0.60%) Microsoft Exchange
9 31 (0.58%) nginx
10 30 (0.56%) Jupyter
11 27 (0.51%) IIS
12 18 (0.34%) OpenStack
13 15 (0.28%) Camunda
14 14 (0.26%) WebSphere
15 12 (0.22%) Palantir Foundry
16 10 (0.19%) Mendix
17 9 (0.17%) Sitecore CMS
18 8 (0.15%) Oracle Workflow
19 7 (0.13%) ArcGIS
19 7 (0.13%) Tomcat
Applications
1 77 (1.44%) Microsoft Excel
2 57 (1.07%) Microsoft Project
3 50 (0.94%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 37 (0.69%) Microsoft Office
5 29 (0.54%) MS Visio
6 9 (0.17%) CPLEX
7 7 (0.13%) Chatbot
8 4 (0.075%) Notion
9 3 (0.056%) Trello
10 2 (0.037%) Adobe XD
10 2 (0.037%) Spreadsheet
11 1 (0.019%) InDesign
11 1 (0.019%) Maya
11 1 (0.019%) Weka
Business Applications
1 67 (1.25%) Dynamics CRM
2 33 (0.62%) SAP S/4HANA
3 12 (0.22%) Payment Gateway
4 10 (0.19%) Maximo
5 9 (0.17%) Oracle ERP
5 9 (0.17%) Remedy ITSM
6 8 (0.15%) Aladdin
6 8 (0.15%) Dynamics AX
7 6 (0.11%) Endur
7 6 (0.11%) SAP MDG
8 5 (0.094%) Magento
8 5 (0.094%) Oracle EBS
9 4 (0.075%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
10 3 (0.056%) NEC Housing
10 3 (0.056%) Oracle BPM
10 3 (0.056%) Salesforce CRM
10 3 (0.056%) SAP BPC
10 3 (0.056%) SAP ERP
10 3 (0.056%) SAP MM
10 3 (0.056%) SAP Oil and Gas
Cloud Services
1 2,874 (53.82%) Azure
2 1,860 (34.83%) AWS
3 1,578 (29.55%) Azure DevOps
4 892 (16.70%) GitHub
5 678 (12.70%) GCP
6 533 (9.98%) GitHub Actions
7 481 (9.01%) Serverless
8 458 (8.58%) Power Platform
9 293 (5.49%) Amazon S3
10 263 (4.93%) AWS Lambda
11 249 (4.66%) AWS CloudFormation
12 235 (4.40%) Entra ID
13 222 (4.16%) Azure AKS
14 215 (4.03%) Amazon EKS
15 197 (3.69%) Azure Data Factory
16 179 (3.35%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 170 (3.18%) Amazon EC2
18 161 (3.01%) PaaS
19 160 (3.00%) Azure Monitor
20 154 (2.88%) OpenShift
Communications & Networking
1 239 (4.48%) Firewall
2 138 (2.58%) DNS
3 115 (2.15%) Network Security
4 104 (1.95%) VPN
5 46 (0.86%) WAN
6 45 (0.84%) TCP/IP
7 36 (0.67%) SD-WAN
8 33 (0.62%) BGP
9 30 (0.56%) SSL
10 27 (0.51%) Wi-Fi
11 26 (0.49%) DHCP
12 25 (0.47%) SAN
13 24 (0.45%) OSPF
14 22 (0.41%) HTTP
14 22 (0.41%) Internet
15 18 (0.34%) IPsec
16 17 (0.32%) VXLAN
17 16 (0.30%) BIG-IP
17 16 (0.30%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
17 16 (0.30%) MPLS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 295 (5.52%) Power BI
2 257 (4.81%) SQL Server
3 253 (4.74%) PostgreSQL
4 187 (3.50%) NoSQL
5 170 (3.18%) Data Lake
6 161 (3.01%) Relational Database
7 151 (2.83%) Data Warehouse
8 147 (2.75%) MongoDB
9 115 (2.15%) Amazon RDS
10 105 (1.97%) Azure SQL Database
11 99 (1.85%) Metadata
12 98 (1.84%) DynamoDB
13 89 (1.67%) Delta Lake
14 73 (1.37%) Big Data
14 73 (1.37%) Oracle Database
15 71 (1.33%) Amazon Athena
16 68 (1.27%) Redis
17 63 (1.18%) Elasticsearch
18 60 (1.12%) Amazon Redshift
19 54 (1.01%) BigQuery
Development Applications
1 758 (14.19%) Jenkins
2 676 (12.66%) Git
3 644 (12.06%) JIRA
4 565 (10.58%) GitLab
5 115 (2.15%) Selenium
6 101 (1.89%) Postman
7 90 (1.69%) SonarQube
8 88 (1.65%) JUnit
9 70 (1.31%) Bitbucket
9 70 (1.31%) REST Assured
10 67 (1.25%) Maven
11 60 (1.12%) Cucumber
12 56 (1.05%) JMeter
13 50 (0.94%) Cypress.io
14 45 (0.84%) Artifactory
14 45 (0.84%) Gradle
15 43 (0.81%) Gatling
16 38 (0.71%) Mockito
17 35 (0.66%) Visual Studio
18 32 (0.60%) LoadRunner
General
1 1,333 (24.96%) Social Skills
2 971 (18.18%) Finance
3 724 (13.56%) Public Sector
4 415 (7.77%) Analytical Skills
5 341 (6.39%) Banking
6 143 (2.68%) Documentation Skills
7 105 (1.97%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 76 (1.42%) Influencing Skills
9 75 (1.40%) Retail
10 69 (1.29%) Legal
11 57 (1.07%) Marketing
12 54 (1.01%) Organisational Skills
13 49 (0.92%) Financial Institution
14 45 (0.84%) Military
15 40 (0.75%) Presentation Skills
16 38 (0.71%) Law
17 36 (0.67%) Investment Banking
18 33 (0.62%) Telecoms
19 29 (0.54%) Front Office
20 27 (0.51%) Aerospace
Job Titles
1 1,098 (20.56%) DevOps Engineer
2 803 (15.04%) Developer
3 751 (14.06%) Senior
4 624 (11.69%) Architect
5 481 (9.01%) Lead
6 344 (6.44%) Azure Engineer
7 326 (6.10%) Analyst
8 315 (5.90%) Data Engineer
9 263 (4.93%) AWS Engineer
10 203 (3.80%) Cloud Engineer
11 197 (3.69%) Platform Engineer
12 193 (3.61%) AWS DevOps
13 181 (3.39%) AWS DevOps Engineer
14 180 (3.37%) Solutions Architect
15 177 (3.31%) Azure DevOps Engineer
15 177 (3.31%) Java Developer
16 176 (3.30%) Senior DevOps
17 165 (3.09%) Business Analyst
18 160 (3.00%) Senior DevOps Engineer
19 142 (2.66%) Software Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 482 (9.03%) REST
2 455 (8.52%) .NET
3 310 (5.81%) React
4 308 (5.77%) Spring
5 295 (5.52%) Spring Boot
6 289 (5.41%) Kafka
7 283 (5.30%) RESTful
8 240 (4.49%) Node.js
9 171 (3.20%) AngularJS
10 163 (3.05%) PySpark
11 154 (2.88%) OAuth
12 153 (2.87%) Playwright
13 132 (2.47%) JSON
14 122 (2.28%) YAML
15 117 (2.19%) SOAP
16 112 (2.10%) .NET Framework
17 107 (2.00%) HTML
18 105 (1.97%) Middleware
18 105 (1.97%) OpenID
19 103 (1.93%) OAuth2
Miscellaneous
1 917 (17.17%) Cloud Native
2 344 (6.44%) Product Ownership
3 221 (4.14%) Distributed Systems
4 142 (2.66%) Onboarding
5 123 (2.30%) Legacy Systems
6 116 (2.17%) Enterprise Software
7 110 (2.06%) Hybrid Cloud
8 107 (2.00%) Public Cloud
9 84 (1.57%) Data Centre
10 80 (1.50%) Data Protection Act
11 68 (1.27%) Management Information System
12 61 (1.14%) Self-Motivation
13 55 (1.03%) Mobile App
13 55 (1.03%) Security Posture
14 51 (0.96%) AI Agents
15 50 (0.94%) Data Structures
15 50 (0.94%) Virtual Team
16 49 (0.92%) Greenfield Project
17 43 (0.81%) Low-Code
17 43 (0.81%) Private Cloud
Operating Systems
1 451 (8.45%) Linux
2 263 (4.93%) Windows
3 101 (1.89%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 79 (1.48%) Unix
5 58 (1.09%) Windows Server
6 36 (0.67%) VMS
7 30 (0.56%) Ubuntu
8 24 (0.45%) Apple iOS
9 17 (0.32%) Android
10 14 (0.26%) CentOS
11 10 (0.19%) Solaris
12 9 (0.17%) Windows Server 2019
13 6 (0.11%) Mac OS
13 6 (0.11%) Windows Server 2008
13 6 (0.11%) Windows Server 2016
14 5 (0.094%) Amazon Linux
14 5 (0.094%) Windows 10
15 4 (0.075%) Alpine Linux
15 4 (0.075%) Data ONTAP
15 4 (0.075%) Windows Server 2012
Processes & Methodologies
1 3,087 (57.81%) CI/CD
2 1,989 (37.25%) Agile
3 1,428 (26.74%) Infrastructure as Code
4 856 (16.03%) Containerisation
5 792 (14.83%) Problem-Solving
6 763 (14.29%) Microservices
7 759 (14.21%) Test Automation
8 749 (14.03%) Continuous Improvement
9 646 (12.10%) Migration
10 644 (12.06%) Observability
11 633 (11.85%) Stakeholder Management
12 616 (11.54%) AI
13 607 (11.37%) Analytics
14 602 (11.27%) Scrum
15 557 (10.43%) Platform Engineering
16 538 (10.07%) Software Engineering
17 490 (9.18%) Data Modelling
18 451 (8.45%) Technical Leadership
19 432 (8.09%) Mentoring
20 430 (8.05%) Roadmaps
Programming Languages
1 1,494 (27.98%) Python
2 1,002 (18.76%) SQL
3 725 (13.58%) Java
4 493 (9.23%) C#
5 385 (7.21%) JavaScript
6 379 (7.10%) Bash
7 375 (7.02%) PowerShell
8 265 (4.96%) TypeScript
9 183 (3.43%) Bicep
10 111 (2.08%) Go
11 64 (1.20%) Apex Code
11 64 (1.20%) Scala
12 62 (1.16%) Shell Script
13 52 (0.97%) T-SQL
14 49 (0.92%) PL/SQL
15 45 (0.84%) Groovy
16 31 (0.58%) C++
17 26 (0.49%) Kotlin
18 25 (0.47%) Data Analysis Expressions
18 25 (0.47%) Ruby
Qualifications
1 1,689 (31.63%) Security Cleared
2 1,419 (26.57%) SC Cleared
3 323 (6.05%) Degree
4 215 (4.03%) Azure Certification
5 176 (3.30%) BPSS Clearance
6 172 (3.22%) AWS Certification
7 160 (3.00%) DV Cleared
8 130 (2.43%) Computer Science Degree
9 85 (1.59%) CISSP
10 73 (1.37%) Microsoft Certification
11 57 (1.07%) ISTQB
12 51 (0.96%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 48 (0.90%) CISM
14 46 (0.86%) Cisco Certification
15 45 (0.84%) PMI Certification
16 43 (0.81%) Master's Degree
17 42 (0.79%) PMP
18 28 (0.52%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
19 26 (0.49%) TOGAF Certification
20 24 (0.45%) ITIL Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 444 (8.31%) QA
2 256 (4.79%) Data Quality
3 176 (3.30%) GDPR
4 157 (2.94%) Accessibility
5 126 (2.36%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 116 (2.17%) NIST
7 73 (1.37%) NCSC
8 65 (1.22%) WCAG
9 50 (0.94%) PCI DSS
10 43 (0.81%) SLA
11 32 (0.60%) Sarbanes-Oxley
12 29 (0.54%) PMO
13 25 (0.47%) GRC
14 19 (0.36%) HIPAA
15 15 (0.28%) SOC 2
16 12 (0.22%) ISO 20022
16 12 (0.22%) PSD2
17 11 (0.21%) NIST 800
18 10 (0.19%) SEPA
19 9 (0.17%) Disclosure Scotland
System Software
1 1,018 (19.06%) Docker
2 176 (3.30%) Active Directory
3 78 (1.46%) VMware Infrastructure
4 74 (1.39%) Virtual Machines
5 33 (0.62%) vSphere
6 27 (0.51%) VMware NSX
7 20 (0.37%) Virtual Desktop
8 18 (0.34%) Squid
9 17 (0.32%) VMware ESXi
10 16 (0.30%) Hyper-V
11 14 (0.26%) Postfix
12 9 (0.17%) Oracle RAC
13 7 (0.13%) RACF
14 6 (0.11%) Corosync
14 6 (0.11%) Firmware
14 6 (0.11%) HDFS
15 5 (0.094%) KVM
15 5 (0.094%) Microsoft App-V
15 5 (0.094%) NFS
15 5 (0.094%) SRDF
Systems Management
1 1,535 (28.75%) Terraform
2 1,347 (25.22%) Kubernetes
3 511 (9.57%) Ansible
4 363 (6.80%) Grafana
5 313 (5.86%) Prometheus
6 93 (1.74%) Argo
7 77 (1.44%) Single Sign-On
8 68 (1.27%) Puppet
9 63 (1.18%) Istio
10 32 (0.60%) Progress Chef
11 30 (0.56%) Microsoft Intune
11 30 (0.56%) Packer
12 26 (0.49%) vCenter Server
13 22 (0.41%) Active Directory Federation Services
14 21 (0.39%) HP ALM
15 18 (0.34%) Consul
15 18 (0.34%) Kibana
16 15 (0.28%) Kustomize
17 14 (0.26%) SCCM
18 13 (0.24%) NetBackup
Vendors
1 928 (17.38%) Microsoft
2 279 (5.22%) Databricks
3 269 (5.04%) Oracle
4 258 (4.83%) Google
5 187 (3.50%) Splunk
6 179 (3.35%) ServiceNow
7 172 (3.22%) Salesforce
8 134 (2.51%) Red Hat
9 120 (2.25%) SAP
9 120 (2.25%) VMware
10 111 (2.08%) Dynatrace
11 75 (1.40%) OpenAI
12 55 (1.03%) Atlassian
13 53 (0.99%) IBM
14 52 (0.97%) Informatica
15 47 (0.88%) CyberArk
16 41 (0.77%) Cisco
17 39 (0.73%) Foundry
17 39 (0.73%) Okta
18 36 (0.67%) MuleSoft