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

6 months to
21 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 13 15 14
Rank change year-on-year +2 -1 -1
Contract jobs citing DevOps 5,591 3,411 4,038
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.61% 10.47% 9.77%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.48% 11.58% 11.44%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,860 2,433 2,767
10th Percentile £385 £363 £385
25th Percentile £438 £425 £458
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £520 £550
Median % change year-on-year +0.96% -5.45% -4.35%
75th Percentile £613 £625 £650
90th Percentile £700 £725 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £525
% change year-on-year - -4.76% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 114 24 105
10th Percentile £37.25 £37.25 £56.25
25th Percentile £61.78 £52.19 £61.60
Median hourly rate £70.00 £67.00 £70.00
Median % change year-on-year +4.48% -4.29% +6.87%
75th Percentile £77.50 £84.10 £75.00
90th Percentile £93.81 £88.38 £85.65
UK excluding London median hourly rate £70.00 £67.00 £70.00
% change year-on-year +4.48% -4.29% +6.87%

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 44,806 29,445 35,310
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.99% 90.36% 85.44%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,768 18,486 22,647
10th Percentile £325 £300 £306
25th Percentile £419 £405 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £520 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% -4.76% -4.11%
75th Percentile £625 £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 2,649 1,571 2,189
10th Percentile £14.85 £14.20 £13.06
25th Percentile £20.00 £17.44 £16.86
Median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £38.12
Median % change year-on-year +74.79% -34.02% -10.31%
75th Percentile £68.55 £50.88 £62.50
90th Percentile £83.00 £68.75 £73.55
UK excluding London median hourly rate £45.00 £24.00 £40.00
% change year-on-year +87.50% -40.00% -1.45%

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 21 July 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 21 July 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 21 July 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 4,750 £525 - 1,613
UK excluding London +5 2,457 £500 - 1,045
London +2 2,438 £550 - 738
Work from Home 0 1,608 £525 +2.44% 778
North of England +5 861 £500 +2.04% 315
South East -9 456 £525 +5.00% 281
Midlands +1 450 £488 -1.52% 161
Yorkshire +2 447 £500 - 89
West Midlands -1 360 £499 -0.25% 113
North West -1 333 £523 +10.11% 169
South West +15 314 £510 -5.34% 127
Scotland 0 207 £475 - 57
East of England +19 140 £518 +3.50% 65
North East +10 100 £425 -18.66% 60
East Midlands -1 85 £488 +5.41% 48
Wales -5 47 £425 +37.10% 26
Northern Ireland +17 22 £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
1 336 (6.01%) Confluence
2 134 (2.40%) SharePoint
3 132 (2.36%) Apache Spark
4 112 (2.00%) Apache Airflow
5 100 (1.79%) Apache
6 78 (1.40%) SAS
7 47 (0.84%) CMS
8 36 (0.64%) IIS
9 35 (0.63%) Jupyter
10 32 (0.57%) nginx
11 28 (0.50%) Microsoft Exchange
12 16 (0.29%) WebSphere
13 14 (0.25%) Camunda
13 14 (0.25%) OpenStack
14 13 (0.23%) Palantir Foundry
15 11 (0.20%) Oracle Workflow
16 9 (0.16%) Appian
17 8 (0.14%) Tomcat
17 8 (0.14%) WebLogic
18 7 (0.13%) JBoss
Applications
1 67 (1.20%) Microsoft Excel
2 65 (1.16%) Microsoft Project
3 44 (0.79%) Microsoft Office
4 37 (0.66%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 35 (0.63%) MS Visio
6 10 (0.18%) CPLEX
7 9 (0.16%) Spreadsheet
8 7 (0.13%) Chatbot
9 6 (0.11%) Trello
10 4 (0.072%) Notion
11 2 (0.036%) Adobe XD
12 1 (0.018%) EngageOne
12 1 (0.018%) InDesign
12 1 (0.018%) Maya
12 1 (0.018%) Weka
Business Applications
1 66 (1.18%) Dynamics CRM
2 39 (0.70%) SAP S/4HANA
3 10 (0.18%) Aladdin
3 10 (0.18%) Oracle EBS
3 10 (0.18%) Payment Gateway
4 9 (0.16%) Magento
4 9 (0.16%) Oracle ERP
4 9 (0.16%) Remedy ITSM
5 8 (0.14%) Dynamics AX
5 8 (0.14%) SAP MDG
6 6 (0.11%) Maximo
7 5 (0.089%) Endur
7 5 (0.089%) OpenText MBPM
7 5 (0.089%) Oracle BPM
7 5 (0.089%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
8 3 (0.054%) Findur
8 3 (0.054%) Infor LN
8 3 (0.054%) OpenText VIM for SAP
8 3 (0.054%) SAP BPC
8 3 (0.054%) Temenos T24
Cloud Services
1 3,011 (53.85%) Azure
2 2,003 (35.83%) AWS
3 1,669 (29.85%) Azure DevOps
4 942 (16.85%) GitHub
5 705 (12.61%) GCP
6 578 (10.34%) GitHub Actions
7 455 (8.14%) Serverless
8 451 (8.07%) Power Platform
9 311 (5.56%) Amazon S3
10 276 (4.94%) AWS Lambda
11 251 (4.49%) AWS CloudFormation
12 249 (4.45%) Entra ID
13 225 (4.02%) Amazon EKS
14 221 (3.95%) Azure AKS
15 194 (3.47%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 190 (3.40%) Azure Monitor
17 188 (3.36%) Amazon EC2
18 180 (3.22%) Azure Data Factory
19 155 (2.77%) OpenShift
19 155 (2.77%) PaaS
Communications & Networking
1 238 (4.26%) Firewall
2 156 (2.79%) DNS
3 118 (2.11%) Network Security
3 118 (2.11%) VPN
4 59 (1.06%) TCP/IP
5 46 (0.82%) WAN
6 39 (0.70%) SSL
7 35 (0.63%) SD-WAN
8 34 (0.61%) DHCP
9 32 (0.57%) BGP
10 29 (0.52%) Internet
11 27 (0.48%) HTTP
11 27 (0.48%) Wi-Fi
12 24 (0.43%) OSPF
12 24 (0.43%) SAN
13 17 (0.30%) BIG-IP
13 17 (0.30%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
13 17 (0.30%) SSH
13 17 (0.30%) VLAN
13 17 (0.30%) VXLAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 300 (5.37%) Power BI
2 285 (5.10%) SQL Server
3 270 (4.83%) PostgreSQL
4 184 (3.29%) Relational Database
5 182 (3.26%) NoSQL
6 173 (3.09%) Data Warehouse
6 173 (3.09%) MongoDB
7 151 (2.70%) Data Lake
8 119 (2.13%) Amazon RDS
9 108 (1.93%) Metadata
10 103 (1.84%) DynamoDB
11 99 (1.77%) Azure SQL Database
12 85 (1.52%) Oracle Database
13 83 (1.48%) Delta Lake
14 74 (1.32%) Big Data
15 68 (1.22%) Amazon Redshift
16 66 (1.18%) Amazon Athena
17 65 (1.16%) Redis
18 63 (1.13%) Elasticsearch
19 62 (1.11%) MySQL
Development Applications
1 810 (14.49%) Jenkins
2 744 (13.31%) Git
3 684 (12.23%) JIRA
4 570 (10.19%) GitLab
5 131 (2.34%) Selenium
6 103 (1.84%) Postman
7 98 (1.75%) SonarQube
8 97 (1.73%) JUnit
9 81 (1.45%) Maven
10 75 (1.34%) Bitbucket
11 74 (1.32%) REST Assured
12 62 (1.11%) Cucumber
13 60 (1.07%) Cypress.io
14 58 (1.04%) JMeter
15 53 (0.95%) Gradle
16 44 (0.79%) Gatling
16 44 (0.79%) Mockito
17 37 (0.66%) Artifactory
17 37 (0.66%) Visual Studio
18 34 (0.61%) LoadRunner
General
1 1,378 (24.65%) Social Skills
2 1,013 (18.12%) Finance
3 805 (14.40%) Public Sector
4 459 (8.21%) Analytical Skills
5 356 (6.37%) Banking
6 128 (2.29%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 124 (2.22%) Documentation Skills
8 90 (1.61%) Retail
9 73 (1.31%) Influencing Skills
10 70 (1.25%) Legal
11 66 (1.18%) Organisational Skills
12 56 (1.00%) Marketing
13 48 (0.86%) Military
14 44 (0.79%) Telecoms
15 43 (0.77%) Investment Banking
16 42 (0.75%) Law
17 39 (0.70%) Financial Institution
17 39 (0.70%) Manufacturing
18 36 (0.64%) Front Office
19 32 (0.57%) Presentation Skills
Job Titles
1 1,122 (20.07%) DevOps Engineer
2 915 (16.37%) Developer
3 786 (14.06%) Senior
4 636 (11.38%) Architect
5 510 (9.12%) Lead
6 337 (6.03%) Azure Engineer
7 313 (5.60%) Data Engineer
8 302 (5.40%) Analyst
9 279 (4.99%) AWS Engineer
10 229 (4.10%) Platform Engineer
11 210 (3.76%) Cloud Engineer
12 200 (3.58%) Java Developer
13 198 (3.54%) Senior DevOps
14 197 (3.52%) AWS DevOps
15 184 (3.29%) Azure DevOps Engineer
16 183 (3.27%) AWS DevOps Engineer
17 182 (3.26%) Senior DevOps Engineer
17 182 (3.26%) Solutions Architect
18 154 (2.75%) Business Analyst
19 145 (2.59%) Software Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 535 (9.57%) REST
2 486 (8.69%) .NET
3 323 (5.78%) RESTful
4 319 (5.71%) Spring
5 317 (5.67%) Kafka
6 302 (5.40%) Spring Boot
7 301 (5.38%) React
8 231 (4.13%) Node.js
9 163 (2.92%) Playwright
10 161 (2.88%) JSON
10 161 (2.88%) OAuth
10 161 (2.88%) PySpark
11 160 (2.86%) AngularJS
12 137 (2.45%) SOAP
13 132 (2.36%) .NET Framework
14 129 (2.31%) HTML
15 114 (2.04%) OAuth2
16 107 (1.91%) CSS
17 105 (1.88%) Middleware
18 103 (1.84%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 983 (17.58%) Cloud Native
2 396 (7.08%) Product Ownership
3 255 (4.56%) Distributed Systems
4 172 (3.08%) Onboarding
5 155 (2.77%) Enterprise Software
6 151 (2.70%) Legacy Systems
7 123 (2.20%) Hybrid Cloud
8 95 (1.70%) Public Cloud
9 91 (1.63%) Data Protection Act
10 83 (1.48%) Self-Motivation
11 78 (1.40%) Data Centre
12 70 (1.25%) Management Information System
13 69 (1.23%) Security Posture
14 67 (1.20%) Data Structures
15 61 (1.09%) Replication
16 58 (1.04%) Virtual Team
17 57 (1.02%) AI Agents
18 54 (0.97%) Enterprise Cloud
19 53 (0.95%) Mobile App
20 51 (0.91%) Greenfield Project
Operating Systems
1 487 (8.71%) Linux
2 293 (5.24%) Windows
3 106 (1.90%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 81 (1.45%) Unix
5 71 (1.27%) Windows Server
6 34 (0.61%) VMS
7 27 (0.48%) Ubuntu
8 26 (0.47%) Apple iOS
9 17 (0.30%) Android
10 11 (0.20%) Solaris
11 10 (0.18%) Windows Server 2019
12 8 (0.14%) zOS
13 7 (0.13%) CentOS
13 7 (0.13%) Windows Server 2016
14 6 (0.11%) AIX
14 6 (0.11%) Amazon Linux
14 6 (0.11%) Mac OS
14 6 (0.11%) Windows Server 2008
15 4 (0.072%) Data ONTAP
15 4 (0.072%) Windows 10
Processes & Methodologies
1 3,271 (58.50%) CI/CD
2 2,210 (39.53%) Agile
3 1,510 (27.01%) Infrastructure as Code
4 924 (16.53%) Containerisation
5 854 (15.27%) Continuous Improvement
6 842 (15.06%) Problem-Solving
7 825 (14.76%) Test Automation
8 809 (14.47%) Microservices
9 732 (13.09%) Stakeholder Management
10 711 (12.72%) AI
11 685 (12.25%) Observability
12 681 (12.18%) Scrum
13 674 (12.06%) Migration
14 657 (11.75%) Platform Engineering
15 626 (11.20%) Software Engineering
16 587 (10.50%) Analytics
17 487 (8.71%) Technical Leadership
18 486 (8.69%) Stakeholder Engagement
19 483 (8.64%) Data Modelling
20 463 (8.28%) Roadmaps
Programming Languages
1 1,554 (27.79%) Python
2 1,007 (18.01%) SQL
3 781 (13.97%) Java
4 500 (8.94%) C#
5 443 (7.92%) Bash
6 430 (7.69%) JavaScript
7 409 (7.32%) PowerShell
8 296 (5.29%) TypeScript
9 200 (3.58%) Bicep
10 113 (2.02%) Go
11 69 (1.23%) Apex Code
12 68 (1.22%) PL/SQL
13 67 (1.20%) Shell Script
14 66 (1.18%) T-SQL
15 55 (0.98%) Groovy
16 54 (0.97%) Scala
17 28 (0.50%) C++
17 28 (0.50%) Kotlin
18 24 (0.43%) Data Analysis Expressions
19 23 (0.41%) C
Qualifications
1 1,762 (31.51%) Security Cleared
2 1,479 (26.45%) SC Cleared
3 336 (6.01%) Degree
4 220 (3.93%) Azure Certification
5 203 (3.63%) BPSS Clearance
6 192 (3.43%) DV Cleared
7 191 (3.42%) AWS Certification
8 122 (2.18%) Computer Science Degree
9 82 (1.47%) CISSP
10 79 (1.41%) Microsoft Certification
11 58 (1.04%) ISTQB
12 57 (1.02%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 53 (0.95%) Cisco Certification
14 44 (0.79%) Master's Degree
14 44 (0.79%) PMP
15 43 (0.77%) PMI Certification
16 36 (0.64%) CISM
17 31 (0.55%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
18 26 (0.47%) ITIL Certification
19 22 (0.39%) CCNP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 491 (8.78%) QA
2 261 (4.67%) Data Quality
3 193 (3.45%) Accessibility
4 166 (2.97%) GDPR
5 102 (1.82%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 92 (1.65%) NIST
7 76 (1.36%) WCAG
8 61 (1.09%) NCSC
9 43 (0.77%) PMO
10 42 (0.75%) PCI DSS
11 36 (0.64%) SLA
12 30 (0.54%) GRC
13 27 (0.48%) Sarbanes-Oxley
14 13 (0.23%) HIPAA
15 12 (0.21%) Disclosure Scotland
15 12 (0.21%) SOC 2
16 10 (0.18%) ISO 20022
16 10 (0.18%) PSD2
17 9 (0.16%) Cyber Essentials
17 9 (0.16%) SEPA
System Software
1 1,088 (19.46%) Docker
2 181 (3.24%) Active Directory
3 82 (1.47%) Virtual Machines
4 81 (1.45%) VMware Infrastructure
5 31 (0.55%) vSphere
6 27 (0.48%) VMware NSX
7 20 (0.36%) Squid
8 18 (0.32%) Virtual Desktop
9 17 (0.30%) VMware ESXi
10 16 (0.29%) Hyper-V
11 14 (0.25%) Postfix
12 12 (0.21%) Oracle RAC
13 8 (0.14%) KVM
14 7 (0.13%) IAG
15 6 (0.11%) Corosync
15 6 (0.11%) HDFS
15 6 (0.11%) NFS
15 6 (0.11%) RACF
16 5 (0.089%) Microsoft App-V
16 5 (0.089%) SRDF
Systems Management
1 1,617 (28.92%) Terraform
2 1,438 (25.72%) Kubernetes
3 523 (9.35%) Ansible
4 382 (6.83%) Grafana
5 326 (5.83%) Prometheus
6 94 (1.68%) Argo
7 73 (1.31%) Single Sign-On
8 60 (1.07%) Puppet
9 45 (0.80%) Istio
10 40 (0.72%) Progress Chef
11 35 (0.63%) Microsoft Intune
12 30 (0.54%) Packer
13 27 (0.48%) vCenter Server
14 20 (0.36%) HP ALM
15 18 (0.32%) Kibana
16 17 (0.30%) Consul
16 17 (0.30%) SCCM
17 16 (0.29%) Kustomize
18 15 (0.27%) Active Directory Federation Services
18 15 (0.27%) Oracle RMAN
Vendors
1 994 (17.78%) Microsoft
2 318 (5.69%) Oracle
3 266 (4.76%) Databricks
4 256 (4.58%) Google
5 201 (3.60%) ServiceNow
6 188 (3.36%) Splunk
7 183 (3.27%) Salesforce
8 132 (2.36%) Dynatrace
9 130 (2.33%) SAP
10 120 (2.15%) VMware
11 113 (2.02%) Red Hat
12 66 (1.18%) OpenAI
13 62 (1.11%) IBM
14 57 (1.02%) Informatica
15 54 (0.97%) Atlassian
16 48 (0.86%) Cisco
16 48 (0.86%) MuleSoft
17 44 (0.79%) Foundry
18 43 (0.77%) CyberArk
19 42 (0.75%) Okta