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

6 months to
23 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 13 15 14
Rank change year-on-year +2 -1 -2
Contract jobs citing DevOps 5,410 3,110 4,134
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.65% 10.38% 9.47%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.55% 11.40% 11.15%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,781 2,231 2,830
10th Percentile £381 £367 £400
25th Percentile £438 £431 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year - -4.55% -5.66%
75th Percentile £613 £626 £650
90th Percentile £700 £745 £725
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 £56.30
25th Percentile £61.87 £49.06 £61.43
Median hourly rate £70.00 £76.00 £70.00
Median % change year-on-year -7.89% +8.57% +6.70%
75th Percentile £77.50 £87.50 £74.44
90th Percentile £93.81 £90.63 £85.65
UK excluding London median hourly rate £70.00 £76.00 £67.50
% change year-on-year -7.89% +12.59% +2.97%

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 43,108 27,270 37,060
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.89% 91.01% 84.94%
Number of daily rates quoted 26,889 17,271 23,587
10th Percentile £325 £300 £300
25th Percentile £413 £406 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £502 £525
Median % change year-on-year +2.09% -4.38% -4.55%
75th Percentile £620 £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 2,584 1,289 2,614
10th Percentile £14.82 £14.20 £12.70
25th Percentile £20.09 £17.87 £16.06
Median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £37.50
Median % change year-on-year +74.79% -32.93% +7.14%
75th Percentile £68.00 £55.00 £61.30
90th Percentile £81.25 £72.50 £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 23 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 23 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 23 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 4,585 £525 - 1,087
UK excluding London +5 2,388 £500 - 842
London +4 2,349 £550 - 441
Work from Home 0 1,510 £525 - 599
North of England +7 848 £500 - 249
Yorkshire +2 456 £511 +2.25% 68
South East -3 449 £511 +2.25% 263
Midlands -1 437 £491 -1.80% 102
West Midlands +1 347 £500 -3.24% 61
North West +2 319 £500 +2.09% 142
South West +15 289 £515 -6.36% 95
Scotland +2 206 £500 +1.21% 33
East of England +25 136 £525 +7.69% 65
North East +8 91 £450 -14.29% 42
East Midlands 0 86 £466 +2.59% 41
Wales +4 51 £425 +39.13% 25
Northern Ireland +11 20 £475 +11.76% 30
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
1 330 (6.10%) Confluence
2 140 (2.59%) Apache Spark
3 122 (2.26%) SharePoint
4 104 (1.92%) Apache Airflow
5 96 (1.77%) Apache
6 86 (1.59%) SAS
7 48 (0.89%) CMS
8 33 (0.61%) Microsoft Exchange
9 31 (0.57%) Jupyter
9 31 (0.57%) nginx
10 29 (0.54%) IIS
11 17 (0.31%) Camunda
11 17 (0.31%) OpenStack
12 14 (0.26%) WebSphere
13 13 (0.24%) Palantir Foundry
14 10 (0.18%) Mendix
14 10 (0.18%) Oracle Workflow
15 9 (0.17%) Sitecore CMS
16 7 (0.13%) ArcGIS
16 7 (0.13%) Tomcat
Applications
1 78 (1.44%) Microsoft Excel
2 57 (1.05%) Microsoft Project
3 51 (0.94%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 38 (0.70%) Microsoft Office
5 29 (0.54%) MS Visio
6 10 (0.18%) CPLEX
7 7 (0.13%) Chatbot
8 4 (0.074%) Notion
9 3 (0.055%) Adobe XD
9 3 (0.055%) Trello
10 2 (0.037%) Spreadsheet
11 1 (0.018%) InDesign
11 1 (0.018%) Maya
11 1 (0.018%) Weka
Business Applications
1 69 (1.28%) Dynamics CRM
2 35 (0.65%) SAP S/4HANA
3 12 (0.22%) Payment Gateway
4 10 (0.18%) 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 7 (0.13%) SAP MDG
8 5 (0.092%) Endur
8 5 (0.092%) Magento
8 5 (0.092%) OpenText MBPM
8 5 (0.092%) Oracle BPM
8 5 (0.092%) Oracle EBS
8 5 (0.092%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
9 3 (0.055%) Findur
9 3 (0.055%) SAP BPC
9 3 (0.055%) SAP ERP
9 3 (0.055%) SAP MM
9 3 (0.055%) SAP Oil and Gas
Cloud Services
1 2,907 (53.73%) Azure
2 1,905 (35.21%) AWS
3 1,605 (29.67%) Azure DevOps
4 883 (16.32%) GitHub
5 676 (12.50%) GCP
6 526 (9.72%) GitHub Actions
7 485 (8.96%) Serverless
8 459 (8.48%) Power Platform
9 298 (5.51%) Amazon S3
10 270 (4.99%) AWS Lambda
11 250 (4.62%) AWS CloudFormation
12 240 (4.44%) Entra ID
13 225 (4.16%) Azure AKS
14 214 (3.96%) Amazon EKS
15 191 (3.53%) Azure Data Factory
16 183 (3.38%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 177 (3.27%) Amazon EC2
18 166 (3.07%) Azure Monitor
19 156 (2.88%) OpenShift
19 156 (2.88%) PaaS
Communications & Networking
1 235 (4.34%) Firewall
2 135 (2.50%) DNS
3 117 (2.16%) Network Security
4 106 (1.96%) VPN
5 48 (0.89%) WAN
6 43 (0.79%) TCP/IP
7 36 (0.67%) SD-WAN
8 34 (0.63%) BGP
9 29 (0.54%) SSL
10 27 (0.50%) Wi-Fi
11 24 (0.44%) OSPF
12 23 (0.43%) HTTP
13 22 (0.41%) DHCP
13 22 (0.41%) Internet
13 22 (0.41%) SAN
14 17 (0.31%) BIG-IP
14 17 (0.31%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
14 17 (0.31%) IPsec
14 17 (0.31%) LAN
14 17 (0.31%) MPLS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 298 (5.51%) Power BI
2 260 (4.81%) SQL Server
3 251 (4.64%) PostgreSQL
4 192 (3.55%) NoSQL
5 173 (3.20%) Relational Database
6 162 (2.99%) Data Lake
7 156 (2.88%) Data Warehouse
7 156 (2.88%) MongoDB
8 118 (2.18%) Amazon RDS
9 106 (1.96%) Azure SQL Database
10 99 (1.83%) Metadata
11 98 (1.81%) DynamoDB
12 87 (1.61%) Delta Lake
13 75 (1.39%) Oracle Database
14 72 (1.33%) Amazon Athena
14 72 (1.33%) Big Data
15 68 (1.26%) Redis
16 67 (1.24%) Amazon Redshift
17 61 (1.13%) Elasticsearch
18 51 (0.94%) MySQL
Development Applications
1 773 (14.29%) Jenkins
2 681 (12.59%) Git
3 670 (12.38%) JIRA
4 578 (10.68%) GitLab
5 116 (2.14%) Selenium
6 104 (1.92%) Postman
7 92 (1.70%) JUnit
8 91 (1.68%) SonarQube
9 73 (1.35%) Bitbucket
10 71 (1.31%) Maven
10 71 (1.31%) REST Assured
11 61 (1.13%) Cucumber
12 58 (1.07%) JMeter
13 49 (0.91%) Cypress.io
14 48 (0.89%) Gradle
15 43 (0.79%) Gatling
16 40 (0.74%) Mockito
17 39 (0.72%) Artifactory
18 38 (0.70%) Visual Studio
19 32 (0.59%) LoadRunner
General
1 1,351 (24.97%) Social Skills
2 990 (18.30%) Finance
3 753 (13.92%) Public Sector
4 422 (7.80%) Analytical Skills
5 356 (6.58%) Banking
6 134 (2.48%) Documentation Skills
7 110 (2.03%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 76 (1.40%) Influencing Skills
9 75 (1.39%) Retail
10 68 (1.26%) Legal
11 59 (1.09%) Marketing
12 57 (1.05%) Organisational Skills
13 48 (0.89%) Military
14 45 (0.83%) Financial Institution
15 39 (0.72%) Presentation Skills
16 38 (0.70%) Investment Banking
16 38 (0.70%) Law
17 32 (0.59%) Telecoms
18 31 (0.57%) Front Office
19 28 (0.52%) Pharmaceutical
Job Titles
1 1,095 (20.24%) DevOps Engineer
2 834 (15.42%) Developer
3 762 (14.09%) Senior
4 638 (11.79%) Architect
5 483 (8.93%) Lead
6 339 (6.27%) Azure Engineer
7 319 (5.90%) Analyst
8 317 (5.86%) Data Engineer
9 268 (4.95%) AWS Engineer
10 199 (3.68%) AWS DevOps
10 199 (3.68%) Cloud Engineer
11 197 (3.64%) Platform Engineer
12 185 (3.42%) AWS DevOps Engineer
13 184 (3.40%) Solutions Architect
14 183 (3.38%) Senior DevOps
15 182 (3.36%) Java Developer
16 177 (3.27%) Azure DevOps Engineer
17 167 (3.09%) Senior DevOps Engineer
18 159 (2.94%) Business Analyst
19 154 (2.85%) Software Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 499 (9.22%) REST
2 468 (8.65%) .NET
3 311 (5.75%) React
3 311 (5.75%) Spring
4 297 (5.49%) RESTful
4 297 (5.49%) Spring Boot
5 290 (5.36%) Kafka
6 231 (4.27%) Node.js
7 172 (3.18%) AngularJS
8 167 (3.09%) PySpark
9 158 (2.92%) OAuth
10 151 (2.79%) Playwright
11 135 (2.50%) JSON
12 123 (2.27%) .NET Framework
13 120 (2.22%) SOAP
14 116 (2.14%) HTML
15 113 (2.09%) YAML
16 109 (2.01%) Middleware
17 108 (2.00%) OpenID
18 104 (1.92%) OAuth2
Miscellaneous
1 951 (17.58%) Cloud Native
2 366 (6.77%) Product Ownership
3 232 (4.29%) Distributed Systems
4 149 (2.75%) Onboarding
5 129 (2.38%) Legacy Systems
6 128 (2.37%) Enterprise Software
7 113 (2.09%) Hybrid Cloud
8 105 (1.94%) Public Cloud
9 85 (1.57%) Data Centre
10 79 (1.46%) Data Protection Act
11 71 (1.31%) Management Information System
12 66 (1.22%) Self-Motivation
13 64 (1.18%) Security Posture
14 57 (1.05%) Data Structures
15 54 (1.00%) Mobile App
16 53 (0.98%) Virtual Team
17 52 (0.96%) AI Agents
18 49 (0.91%) Greenfield Project
19 45 (0.83%) NHS
20 43 (0.79%) Replication
Operating Systems
1 463 (8.56%) Linux
2 274 (5.06%) Windows
3 102 (1.89%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 80 (1.48%) Unix
5 57 (1.05%) Windows Server
6 36 (0.67%) VMS
7 29 (0.54%) Ubuntu
8 24 (0.44%) Apple iOS
9 15 (0.28%) Android
10 14 (0.26%) CentOS
11 10 (0.18%) Solaris
12 9 (0.17%) Windows Server 2019
13 6 (0.11%) Windows Server 2008
13 6 (0.11%) Windows Server 2016
14 5 (0.092%) Amazon Linux
14 5 (0.092%) Mac OS
14 5 (0.092%) Windows 10
15 4 (0.074%) Alpine Linux
15 4 (0.074%) Data ONTAP
15 4 (0.074%) zOS
Processes & Methodologies
1 3,134 (57.93%) CI/CD
2 2,069 (38.24%) Agile
3 1,424 (26.32%) Infrastructure as Code
4 863 (15.95%) Containerisation
5 811 (14.99%) Problem-Solving
6 781 (14.44%) Microservices
7 773 (14.29%) Continuous Improvement
8 771 (14.25%) Test Automation
9 666 (12.31%) Migration
10 662 (12.24%) Stakeholder Management
11 640 (11.83%) Observability
12 631 (11.66%) AI
13 627 (11.59%) Scrum
14 617 (11.40%) Analytics
15 574 (10.61%) Platform Engineering
16 559 (10.33%) Software Engineering
17 492 (9.09%) Data Modelling
18 460 (8.50%) Technical Leadership
19 438 (8.10%) Roadmaps
20 434 (8.02%) Mentoring
Programming Languages
1 1,512 (27.95%) Python
2 1,007 (18.61%) SQL
3 736 (13.60%) Java
4 507 (9.37%) C#
5 403 (7.45%) JavaScript
6 380 (7.02%) Bash
7 364 (6.73%) PowerShell
8 269 (4.97%) TypeScript
9 190 (3.51%) Bicep
10 112 (2.07%) Go
11 67 (1.24%) Apex Code
12 64 (1.18%) Shell Script
13 63 (1.16%) Scala
14 53 (0.98%) T-SQL
15 50 (0.92%) PL/SQL
16 45 (0.83%) Groovy
17 35 (0.65%) C++
18 26 (0.48%) Data Analysis Expressions
19 24 (0.44%) Kotlin
19 24 (0.44%) Perl
Qualifications
1 1,712 (31.65%) Security Cleared
2 1,441 (26.64%) SC Cleared
3 330 (6.10%) Degree
4 212 (3.92%) Azure Certification
5 173 (3.20%) AWS Certification
6 172 (3.18%) BPSS Clearance
7 164 (3.03%) DV Cleared
8 130 (2.40%) Computer Science Degree
9 84 (1.55%) CISSP
10 71 (1.31%) Microsoft Certification
11 58 (1.07%) ISTQB
12 53 (0.98%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 47 (0.87%) Cisco Certification
14 46 (0.85%) PMI Certification
15 45 (0.83%) CISM
16 44 (0.81%) Master's Degree
16 44 (0.81%) PMP
17 27 (0.50%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
18 26 (0.48%) ITIL Certification
19 24 (0.44%) TOGAF Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 455 (8.41%) QA
2 262 (4.84%) Data Quality
3 173 (3.20%) GDPR
4 164 (3.03%) Accessibility
5 126 (2.33%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 115 (2.13%) NIST
7 73 (1.35%) NCSC
8 64 (1.18%) WCAG
9 50 (0.92%) PCI DSS
10 43 (0.79%) SLA
11 32 (0.59%) Sarbanes-Oxley
12 29 (0.54%) PMO
13 25 (0.46%) GRC
14 19 (0.35%) HIPAA
15 15 (0.28%) SOC 2
16 11 (0.20%) Disclosure Scotland
16 11 (0.20%) ISO 20022
16 11 (0.20%) NIST 800
16 11 (0.20%) PSD2
17 10 (0.18%) SEPA
System Software
1 1,023 (18.91%) Docker
2 177 (3.27%) Active Directory
3 75 (1.39%) Virtual Machines
4 74 (1.37%) VMware Infrastructure
5 28 (0.52%) vSphere
6 26 (0.48%) VMware NSX
7 19 (0.35%) Virtual Desktop
8 17 (0.31%) Squid
8 17 (0.31%) VMware ESXi
9 16 (0.30%) Hyper-V
10 14 (0.26%) Postfix
11 9 (0.17%) Oracle RAC
12 6 (0.11%) Corosync
12 6 (0.11%) Firmware
12 6 (0.11%) HDFS
12 6 (0.11%) KVM
12 6 (0.11%) RACF
13 5 (0.092%) Microsoft App-V
13 5 (0.092%) NFS
13 5 (0.092%) SRDF
Systems Management
1 1,547 (28.60%) Terraform
2 1,361 (25.16%) Kubernetes
3 516 (9.54%) Ansible
4 355 (6.56%) Grafana
5 308 (5.69%) Prometheus
6 82 (1.52%) Argo
7 73 (1.35%) Single Sign-On
8 68 (1.26%) Puppet
9 51 (0.94%) Istio
10 32 (0.59%) Progress Chef
11 31 (0.57%) Packer
12 27 (0.50%) Microsoft Intune
13 26 (0.48%) vCenter Server
14 22 (0.41%) HP ALM
14 22 (0.41%) Kibana
15 18 (0.33%) Consul
16 17 (0.31%) Active Directory Federation Services
17 15 (0.28%) Kustomize
18 13 (0.24%) FortiGate
18 13 (0.24%) HAProxy
Vendors
1 937 (17.32%) Microsoft
2 274 (5.06%) Databricks
3 273 (5.05%) Oracle
4 256 (4.73%) Google
5 188 (3.48%) ServiceNow
6 183 (3.38%) Splunk
7 180 (3.33%) Salesforce
8 128 (2.37%) Red Hat
9 122 (2.26%) SAP
10 114 (2.11%) Dynatrace
11 113 (2.09%) VMware
12 78 (1.44%) OpenAI
13 58 (1.07%) Atlassian
14 57 (1.05%) IBM
15 54 (1.00%) Informatica
16 48 (0.89%) CyberArk
17 42 (0.78%) Cisco
18 40 (0.74%) MuleSoft
18 40 (0.74%) Okta
19 39 (0.72%) Foundry