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

6 months to
20 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 12 15 15
Rank change year-on-year +3 0 -3
Contract jobs citing DevOps 5,656 3,575 3,828
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.57% 10.89% 9.87%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.48% 12.04% 11.56%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,930 2,532 2,617
10th Percentile £385 £363 £381
25th Percentile £440 £425 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £520 £550
Median % change year-on-year +1.01% -5.50% -4.35%
75th Percentile £615 £625 £650
90th Percentile £700 £725 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £550
% change year-on-year - -9.09% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 122 27 83
10th Percentile £37.24 £33.10 £56.25
25th Percentile £55.69 £51.88 £63.30
Median hourly rate £67.50 £67.00 £70.00
Median % change year-on-year +0.75% -4.29% +6.87%
75th Percentile £77.38 £87.50 £74.00
90th Percentile £88.00 £95.00 £85.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £67.50 £67.00 £70.00
% change year-on-year +0.75% -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 45,331 29,700 33,127
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.72% 90.46% 85.42%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,838 18,524 21,130
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% -3.58%
75th Percentile £625 £625 £638
90th Percentile £730 £725 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,836 1,729 1,767
10th Percentile £14.22 £14.20 £14.00
25th Percentile £18.31 £17.33 £18.14
Median hourly rate £41.63 £25.15 £40.94
Median % change year-on-year +65.54% -38.57% -0.24%
75th Percentile £67.99 £49.50 £65.00
90th Percentile £80.00 £68.00 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £43.96 £24.00 £42.50
% change year-on-year +83.17% -43.53% +17.65%

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 20 August 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 20 August 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 20 August 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 4,847 £525 - 1,202
London 0 2,541 £550 - 469
UK excluding London +1 2,437 £500 - 947
Work from Home +1 1,626 £525 +2.44% 667
North of England 0 809 £500 +3.63% 259
South East -7 476 £525 +5.00% 294
Midlands -1 461 £488 -2.50% 127
Yorkshire 0 393 £500 +1.44% 71
West Midlands -2 368 £490 -4.85% 82
North West -3 320 £525 +10.53% 136
South West +8 317 £525 +2.44% 141
Scotland -4 191 £500 +5.26% 47
East of England +17 137 £505 +1.00% 54
North East +15 113 £431 -17.86% 53
East Midlands +3 89 £475 +4.11% 45
Wales -4 50 £513 +36.67% 28
Northern Ireland +21 23 £475 +7.95% 7
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
1 337 (5.96%) Confluence
2 149 (2.63%) SharePoint
3 126 (2.23%) Apache Spark
4 121 (2.14%) Apache Airflow
5 110 (1.94%) Apache
6 73 (1.29%) SAS
7 42 (0.74%) CMS
8 39 (0.69%) Jupyter
9 38 (0.67%) IIS
10 24 (0.42%) Microsoft Exchange
10 24 (0.42%) nginx
11 14 (0.25%) Camunda
12 13 (0.23%) Anypoint
12 13 (0.23%) WebSphere
13 12 (0.21%) OpenStack
14 11 (0.19%) Oracle Workflow
14 11 (0.19%) Palantir Foundry
15 9 (0.16%) Appian
16 8 (0.14%) Tomcat
16 8 (0.14%) WebLogic
Applications
1 63 (1.11%) Microsoft Excel
2 62 (1.10%) Microsoft Project
3 42 (0.74%) MS Visio
4 38 (0.67%) Microsoft Office
5 32 (0.57%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 10 (0.18%) Chatbot
7 9 (0.16%) CPLEX
8 8 (0.14%) Spreadsheet
9 7 (0.12%) Trello
10 5 (0.088%) Notion
11 3 (0.053%) Windchill
12 1 (0.018%) Adobe XD
12 1 (0.018%) EngageOne
12 1 (0.018%) Gliffy
12 1 (0.018%) InDesign
12 1 (0.018%) Weka
Business Applications
1 70 (1.24%) Dynamics CRM
2 37 (0.65%) SAP S/4HANA
3 11 (0.19%) Payment Gateway
4 10 (0.18%) Aladdin
4 10 (0.18%) Oracle EBS
5 9 (0.16%) Magento
6 8 (0.14%) Dynamics AX
6 8 (0.14%) SAP MDG
7 7 (0.12%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
8 6 (0.11%) Oracle ERP
8 6 (0.11%) Remedy ITSM
9 5 (0.088%) Maximo
9 5 (0.088%) OpenText MBPM
9 5 (0.088%) Oracle BPM
10 4 (0.071%) Endur
11 3 (0.053%) Findur
11 3 (0.053%) Oracle Receivables
11 3 (0.053%) SAP ERP
11 3 (0.053%) Shopify
11 3 (0.053%) Teamcenter
Cloud Services
1 3,110 (54.99%) Azure
2 2,017 (35.66%) AWS
3 1,786 (31.58%) Azure DevOps
4 984 (17.40%) GitHub
5 724 (12.80%) GCP
6 616 (10.89%) GitHub Actions
7 472 (8.35%) Power Platform
8 453 (8.01%) Serverless
9 287 (5.07%) Amazon S3
10 272 (4.81%) AWS Lambda
11 265 (4.69%) Entra ID
12 243 (4.30%) AWS CloudFormation
13 235 (4.15%) Amazon EKS
14 226 (4.00%) Azure AKS
15 218 (3.85%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 209 (3.70%) Azure Monitor
17 199 (3.52%) Azure Data Factory
18 177 (3.13%) Amazon EC2
19 167 (2.95%) Dynamics 365
20 160 (2.83%) Power Automate
Communications & Networking
1 247 (4.37%) Firewall
2 163 (2.88%) DNS
3 123 (2.17%) VPN
4 112 (1.98%) Network Security
5 64 (1.13%) TCP/IP
6 53 (0.94%) WAN
7 45 (0.80%) SSL
8 43 (0.76%) DHCP
9 38 (0.67%) SD-WAN
10 34 (0.60%) BGP
11 33 (0.58%) HTTP
12 32 (0.57%) Internet
13 29 (0.51%) Wi-Fi
14 26 (0.46%) OSPF
15 23 (0.41%) SAN
16 22 (0.39%) SSH
17 21 (0.37%) VLAN
18 18 (0.32%) LAN
18 18 (0.32%) VXLAN
19 17 (0.30%) MPLS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 313 (5.53%) Power BI
2 299 (5.29%) PostgreSQL
3 297 (5.25%) SQL Server
4 199 (3.52%) Data Warehouse
5 195 (3.45%) NoSQL
6 180 (3.18%) MongoDB
7 179 (3.16%) Relational Database
8 160 (2.83%) Data Lake
9 124 (2.19%) Amazon RDS
10 119 (2.10%) Metadata
11 111 (1.96%) Azure SQL Database
12 92 (1.63%) DynamoDB
13 85 (1.50%) Delta Lake
14 81 (1.43%) Oracle Database
15 80 (1.41%) Redis
16 72 (1.27%) MySQL
17 69 (1.22%) Amazon Redshift
18 63 (1.11%) Big Data
19 57 (1.01%) SQL Server Integration Services
20 52 (0.92%) BigQuery
Development Applications
1 816 (14.43%) Jenkins
2 791 (13.99%) Git
3 688 (12.16%) JIRA
4 611 (10.80%) GitLab
5 137 (2.42%) Selenium
6 102 (1.80%) Postman
7 100 (1.77%) SonarQube
8 91 (1.61%) JUnit
9 90 (1.59%) Bitbucket
10 87 (1.54%) Maven
11 71 (1.26%) Cypress.io
12 70 (1.24%) JMeter
13 68 (1.20%) REST Assured
14 59 (1.04%) Cucumber
15 58 (1.03%) Gradle
16 50 (0.88%) Gatling
17 44 (0.78%) LoadRunner
18 43 (0.76%) Mockito
19 42 (0.74%) Claude Code
20 41 (0.72%) Visual Studio
General
1 1,449 (25.62%) Social Skills
2 1,017 (17.98%) Finance
3 833 (14.73%) Public Sector
4 511 (9.03%) Analytical Skills
5 371 (6.56%) Banking
6 155 (2.74%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 106 (1.87%) Retail
8 101 (1.79%) Documentation Skills
9 71 (1.26%) Influencing Skills
10 66 (1.17%) Legal
10 66 (1.17%) Organisational Skills
11 54 (0.95%) Marketing
12 51 (0.90%) Investment Banking
13 48 (0.85%) Telecoms
14 47 (0.83%) Aerospace
15 46 (0.81%) Military
16 45 (0.80%) Front Office
16 45 (0.80%) Law
17 43 (0.76%) Financial Institution
18 42 (0.74%) Manufacturing
Job Titles
1 1,101 (19.47%) DevOps Engineer
2 932 (16.48%) Developer
3 830 (14.67%) Senior
4 621 (10.98%) Architect
5 544 (9.62%) Lead
6 353 (6.24%) Azure Engineer
7 314 (5.55%) Data Engineer
8 273 (4.83%) Analyst
9 263 (4.65%) AWS Engineer
10 232 (4.10%) Platform Engineer
11 209 (3.70%) Cloud Engineer
12 200 (3.54%) Senior DevOps
13 195 (3.45%) Azure DevOps Engineer
14 193 (3.41%) Java Developer
15 184 (3.25%) AWS DevOps
15 184 (3.25%) Senior DevOps Engineer
16 173 (3.06%) Solutions Architect
17 171 (3.02%) AWS DevOps Engineer
18 158 (2.79%) Senior Developer
19 147 (2.60%) Software Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 1,646 (29.10%) Terraform
2 600 (10.61%) REST
3 496 (8.77%) .NET
4 357 (6.31%) Kafka
5 345 (6.10%) RESTful
6 301 (5.32%) Spring
7 287 (5.07%) React
8 283 (5.00%) Spring Boot
9 212 (3.75%) Node.js
10 183 (3.24%) JSON
11 175 (3.09%) Playwright
12 167 (2.95%) OAuth
13 159 (2.81%) PySpark
14 147 (2.60%) AngularJS
15 139 (2.46%) .NET Framework
16 138 (2.44%) SOAP
17 135 (2.39%) HTML
18 121 (2.14%) OAuth2
19 119 (2.10%) YAML
20 113 (2.00%) CSS
Miscellaneous
1 1,020 (18.03%) Cloud Native
2 411 (7.27%) Product Ownership
3 272 (4.81%) Distributed Systems
4 187 (3.31%) Enterprise Software
5 178 (3.15%) Onboarding
6 155 (2.74%) Legacy Systems
7 149 (2.63%) Hybrid Cloud
8 93 (1.64%) Data Protection Act
9 83 (1.47%) AI Agents
9 83 (1.47%) Self-Motivation
10 76 (1.34%) Management Information System
11 74 (1.31%) Public Cloud
12 69 (1.22%) Data Centre
12 69 (1.22%) Data Structures
12 69 (1.22%) Security Posture
13 64 (1.13%) Enterprise Cloud
14 63 (1.11%) Replication
15 57 (1.01%) Virtual Team
16 52 (0.92%) Mobile App
17 50 (0.88%) NHS
Operating Systems
1 518 (9.16%) Linux
2 314 (5.55%) Windows
3 114 (2.02%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 99 (1.75%) Unix
5 88 (1.56%) Windows Server
6 37 (0.65%) VMS
7 30 (0.53%) Apple iOS
7 30 (0.53%) Ubuntu
8 18 (0.32%) Android
9 10 (0.18%) Solaris
10 9 (0.16%) Windows Server 2019
10 9 (0.16%) zOS
11 8 (0.14%) AIX
11 8 (0.14%) CentOS
11 8 (0.14%) Windows Server 2016
12 7 (0.12%) Amazon Linux
13 6 (0.11%) Mac OS
13 6 (0.11%) Windows Server 2008
14 4 (0.071%) Alpine Linux
14 4 (0.071%) Data ONTAP
Processes & Methodologies
1 3,352 (59.26%) CI/CD
2 2,284 (40.38%) Agile
3 1,588 (28.08%) Infrastructure as Code
4 940 (16.62%) Continuous Improvement
5 936 (16.55%) Containerisation
6 886 (15.66%) Problem-Solving
6 886 (15.66%) Test Automation
7 848 (14.99%) Stakeholder Management
8 829 (14.66%) Microservices
9 785 (13.88%) AI
10 724 (12.80%) Observability
11 707 (12.50%) Platform Engineering
12 690 (12.20%) Scrum
13 685 (12.11%) Software Engineering
14 680 (12.02%) Migration
15 596 (10.54%) Analytics
16 563 (9.95%) Technical Leadership
17 537 (9.49%) Stakeholder Engagement
18 487 (8.61%) Data Modelling
19 467 (8.26%) Roadmaps
Programming Languages
1 1,601 (28.31%) Python
2 1,036 (18.32%) SQL
3 804 (14.21%) Java
4 512 (9.05%) C#
5 482 (8.52%) PowerShell
6 475 (8.40%) Bash
7 464 (8.20%) JavaScript
8 309 (5.46%) TypeScript
9 240 (4.24%) Bicep
10 96 (1.70%) Go
11 77 (1.36%) Shell Script
12 72 (1.27%) Apex Code
13 69 (1.22%) T-SQL
14 66 (1.17%) PL/SQL
15 62 (1.10%) Scala
16 59 (1.04%) Groovy
17 32 (0.57%) Data Analysis Expressions
18 31 (0.55%) C++
19 30 (0.53%) Perl
20 24 (0.42%) Kusto Query Language
Qualifications
1 1,827 (32.30%) Security Cleared
2 1,545 (27.32%) SC Cleared
3 328 (5.80%) Degree
4 226 (4.00%) BPSS Clearance
5 223 (3.94%) Azure Certification
6 195 (3.45%) DV Cleared
7 190 (3.36%) AWS Certification
8 123 (2.17%) Computer Science Degree
9 89 (1.57%) Microsoft Certification
10 79 (1.40%) CISSP
11 66 (1.17%) ISTQB
12 57 (1.01%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 55 (0.97%) Cisco Certification
14 45 (0.80%) PMP
15 43 (0.76%) PMI Certification
16 39 (0.69%) Master's Degree
17 33 (0.58%) CISM
18 29 (0.51%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
19 28 (0.50%) ITIL Certification
20 24 (0.42%) CCNP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 532 (9.41%) QA
2 279 (4.93%) Data Quality
3 201 (3.55%) Accessibility
4 143 (2.53%) GDPR
5 100 (1.77%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 78 (1.38%) NIST
6 78 (1.38%) WCAG
7 54 (0.95%) NCSC
8 49 (0.87%) PMO
9 41 (0.72%) SLA
10 37 (0.65%) PCI DSS
11 31 (0.55%) GRC
12 29 (0.51%) Sarbanes-Oxley
13 13 (0.23%) ISO 20022
14 12 (0.21%) Disclosure Scotland
14 12 (0.21%) HIPAA
15 11 (0.19%) Cyber Essentials
16 10 (0.18%) Actionable Recommendations
16 10 (0.18%) SEPA
17 8 (0.14%) HL7
System Software
1 1,133 (20.03%) Docker
2 176 (3.11%) Active Directory
3 90 (1.59%) VMware Infrastructure
4 77 (1.36%) Virtual Machines
5 27 (0.48%) vSphere
6 25 (0.44%) Hyper-V
7 21 (0.37%) VMware ESXi
8 20 (0.35%) VMware NSX
9 15 (0.27%) Virtual Desktop
10 13 (0.23%) Oracle RAC
10 13 (0.23%) Squid
11 10 (0.18%) IAG
11 10 (0.18%) Postfix
12 8 (0.14%) KVM
13 7 (0.12%) zsh
14 6 (0.11%) Corosync
14 6 (0.11%) Microsoft App-V
14 6 (0.11%) NFS
15 5 (0.088%) Apache ZooKeeper
15 5 (0.088%) Firmware
Systems Management
1 1,500 (26.52%) Kubernetes
2 538 (9.51%) Ansible
3 375 (6.63%) Grafana
4 314 (5.55%) Prometheus
5 85 (1.50%) Argo
6 62 (1.10%) Puppet
7 57 (1.01%) Single Sign-On
8 49 (0.87%) Progress Chef
9 44 (0.78%) Istio
10 38 (0.67%) Microsoft Intune
11 35 (0.62%) Packer
12 22 (0.39%) Kibana
13 20 (0.35%) Kustomize
13 20 (0.35%) vCenter Server
14 19 (0.34%) SCCM
15 18 (0.32%) HP ALM
16 17 (0.30%) Kubeflow
17 16 (0.28%) Oracle RMAN
18 13 (0.23%) Control-M
18 13 (0.23%) systemd
Vendors
1 1,083 (19.15%) Microsoft
2 310 (5.48%) Oracle
3 280 (4.95%) Databricks
4 274 (4.84%) Google
5 212 (3.75%) ServiceNow
6 189 (3.34%) Salesforce
7 178 (3.15%) Splunk
8 148 (2.62%) Dynatrace
9 123 (2.17%) VMware
10 117 (2.07%) SAP
11 106 (1.87%) Red Hat
12 62 (1.10%) IBM
13 61 (1.08%) Informatica
14 58 (1.03%) OpenAI
15 57 (1.01%) MuleSoft
16 53 (0.94%) Atlassian
17 52 (0.92%) Cisco
18 46 (0.81%) AppDynamics
18 46 (0.81%) Foundry
19 42 (0.74%) Okta