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

6 months to
5 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 12 15 15
Rank change year-on-year +3 0 -2
Contract jobs citing DevOps 5,642 3,546 3,904
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.61% 10.78% 9.96%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.49% 11.92% 11.64%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,908 2,534 2,667
10th Percentile £385 £360 £381
25th Percentile £438 £425 £458
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £515 £550
Median % change year-on-year +1.94% -6.36% -4.35%
75th Percentile £615 £625 £650
90th Percentile £700 £725 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £488 £539
% change year-on-year +2.56% -9.47% -2.09%
Number of hourly rates quoted 123 25 89
10th Percentile £35.45 £32.15 £56.25
25th Percentile £56.25 £51.25 £65.00
Median hourly rate £67.50 £67.00 £70.00
Median % change year-on-year +0.75% -4.29% +6.87%
75th Percentile £77.50 £82.96 £74.44
90th Percentile £87.40 £91.00 £85.33
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 45,167 29,748 33,534
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.91% 90.41% 85.55%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,886 18,653 21,488
10th Percentile £325 £300 £310
25th Percentile £420 £404 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -4.55%
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 2,759 1,659 1,873
10th Percentile £14.50 £14.20 £14.00
25th Percentile £19.47 £17.30 £18.14
Median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £40.50
Median % change year-on-year +74.79% -37.90% -4.71%
75th Percentile £68.00 £50.00 £65.00
90th Percentile £82.25 £68.00 £74.91
UK excluding London median hourly rate £43.96 £23.05 £40.94
% change year-on-year +90.72% -43.70% +3.38%

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 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 5 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 5 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 +2 4,835 £525 - 2,591
London +1 2,496 £550 - 1,368
UK excluding London +5 2,471 £500 +2.56% 1,467
Work from Home 0 1,607 £525 +2.44% 1,336
North of England +1 836 £500 +5.26% 424
South East -10 469 £525 +5.00% 370
Midlands +1 468 £490 +3.16% 217
Yorkshire +2 414 £500 +2.04% 130
West Midlands -1 384 £492 -1.60% 152
North West -2 334 £524 +12.69% 228
South West +14 321 £525 +0.96% 195
Scotland 0 202 £488 -2.50% 87
East of England +19 141 £505 +1.00% 84
North East +13 105 £425 -18.27% 68
East Midlands +3 79 £488 +7.26% 64
Wales -5 44 £460 +43.49% 45
Northern Ireland +20 22 £475 +7.95% 51
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
1 345 (6.11%) Confluence
2 134 (2.38%) SharePoint
3 133 (2.36%) Apache Spark
4 122 (2.16%) Apache Airflow
5 108 (1.91%) Apache
6 87 (1.54%) SAS
7 44 (0.78%) CMS
8 37 (0.66%) IIS
9 35 (0.62%) Jupyter
10 25 (0.44%) Microsoft Exchange
10 25 (0.44%) nginx
11 16 (0.28%) WebSphere
12 15 (0.27%) Camunda
13 13 (0.23%) Anypoint
13 13 (0.23%) Palantir Foundry
14 12 (0.21%) OpenStack
15 11 (0.19%) Oracle Workflow
16 9 (0.16%) Appian
17 8 (0.14%) Tomcat
17 8 (0.14%) WebLogic
Applications
1 62 (1.10%) Microsoft Project
2 57 (1.01%) Microsoft Excel
3 37 (0.66%) Microsoft Office
3 37 (0.66%) MS Visio
4 26 (0.46%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 10 (0.18%) Chatbot
5 10 (0.18%) CPLEX
6 9 (0.16%) Spreadsheet
7 7 (0.12%) Trello
8 5 (0.089%) Notion
9 2 (0.035%) Adobe XD
10 1 (0.018%) EngageOne
10 1 (0.018%) Gliffy
10 1 (0.018%) InDesign
10 1 (0.018%) Maya
10 1 (0.018%) Weka
Business Applications
1 68 (1.21%) Dynamics CRM
2 39 (0.69%) SAP S/4HANA
3 10 (0.18%) Aladdin
3 10 (0.18%) Oracle EBS
3 10 (0.18%) Remedy ITSM
4 9 (0.16%) Magento
4 9 (0.16%) Payment Gateway
5 8 (0.14%) Dynamics AX
5 8 (0.14%) Oracle ERP
5 8 (0.14%) SAP MDG
6 7 (0.12%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
7 6 (0.11%) Maximo
8 5 (0.089%) OpenText MBPM
8 5 (0.089%) Oracle BPM
9 4 (0.071%) Endur
9 4 (0.071%) SAP ERP
10 3 (0.053%) SAP BPC
10 3 (0.053%) Shopify
10 3 (0.053%) Teamcenter
10 3 (0.053%) Temenos T24
Cloud Services
1 3,052 (54.09%) Azure
2 1,991 (35.29%) AWS
3 1,737 (30.79%) Azure DevOps
4 952 (16.87%) GitHub
5 721 (12.78%) GCP
6 588 (10.42%) GitHub Actions
7 458 (8.12%) Power Platform
8 447 (7.92%) Serverless
9 304 (5.39%) Amazon S3
10 269 (4.77%) AWS Lambda
11 259 (4.59%) Entra ID
12 249 (4.41%) AWS CloudFormation
13 233 (4.13%) Amazon EKS
14 229 (4.06%) Azure AKS
15 207 (3.67%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 196 (3.47%) Azure Monitor
17 193 (3.42%) Azure Data Factory
18 182 (3.23%) Amazon EC2
19 161 (2.85%) Dynamics 365
20 150 (2.66%) Power Automate
Communications & Networking
1 242 (4.29%) Firewall
2 160 (2.84%) DNS
3 121 (2.14%) VPN
4 112 (1.99%) Network Security
5 61 (1.08%) TCP/IP
6 49 (0.87%) WAN
7 42 (0.74%) SSL
8 40 (0.71%) DHCP
9 36 (0.64%) SD-WAN
10 33 (0.58%) BGP
11 32 (0.57%) Internet
12 29 (0.51%) HTTP
13 28 (0.50%) Wi-Fi
14 25 (0.44%) OSPF
15 21 (0.37%) SAN
15 21 (0.37%) SSH
16 20 (0.35%) VLAN
17 18 (0.32%) VXLAN
18 17 (0.30%) BIG-IP
18 17 (0.30%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
Database & Business Intelligence
1 313 (5.55%) Power BI
2 291 (5.16%) SQL Server
3 281 (4.98%) PostgreSQL
4 198 (3.51%) Data Warehouse
5 194 (3.44%) NoSQL
6 183 (3.24%) Relational Database
7 179 (3.17%) MongoDB
8 162 (2.87%) Data Lake
9 116 (2.06%) Amazon RDS
10 115 (2.04%) Metadata
11 108 (1.91%) Azure SQL Database
12 102 (1.81%) DynamoDB
13 90 (1.60%) Delta Lake
14 82 (1.45%) Oracle Database
15 71 (1.26%) Redis
16 70 (1.24%) MySQL
17 69 (1.22%) Amazon Redshift
18 66 (1.17%) Big Data
19 62 (1.10%) Amazon Athena
20 55 (0.97%) SQL Server Integration Services
Development Applications
1 810 (14.36%) Jenkins
2 779 (13.81%) Git
3 691 (12.25%) JIRA
4 579 (10.26%) GitLab
5 130 (2.30%) Selenium
6 104 (1.84%) SonarQube
7 103 (1.83%) Postman
8 94 (1.67%) JUnit
9 84 (1.49%) Bitbucket
9 84 (1.49%) Maven
10 68 (1.21%) REST Assured
11 65 (1.15%) JMeter
12 64 (1.13%) Cypress.io
13 58 (1.03%) Cucumber
14 52 (0.92%) Gradle
15 48 (0.85%) Gatling
16 47 (0.83%) Mockito
17 43 (0.76%) LoadRunner
18 37 (0.66%) Visual Studio
19 36 (0.64%) Artifactory
General
1 1,412 (25.03%) Social Skills
2 999 (17.71%) Finance
3 834 (14.78%) Public Sector
4 495 (8.77%) Analytical Skills
5 369 (6.54%) Banking
6 141 (2.50%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 105 (1.86%) Retail
8 99 (1.75%) Documentation Skills
9 71 (1.26%) Influencing Skills
10 68 (1.21%) Organisational Skills
11 67 (1.19%) Legal
12 55 (0.97%) Marketing
13 49 (0.87%) Investment Banking
14 46 (0.82%) Military
14 46 (0.82%) Telecoms
15 44 (0.78%) Law
16 43 (0.76%) Aerospace
16 43 (0.76%) Financial Institution
17 41 (0.73%) Front Office
18 40 (0.71%) Manufacturing
Job Titles
1 1,092 (19.35%) DevOps Engineer
2 944 (16.73%) Developer
3 815 (14.45%) Senior
4 626 (11.10%) Architect
5 545 (9.66%) Lead
6 341 (6.04%) Azure Engineer
7 329 (5.83%) Data Engineer
8 288 (5.10%) Analyst
9 274 (4.86%) AWS Engineer
10 229 (4.06%) Platform Engineer
11 211 (3.74%) Cloud Engineer
12 201 (3.56%) Java Developer
13 200 (3.54%) Senior DevOps
14 191 (3.39%) AWS DevOps
15 185 (3.28%) Azure DevOps Engineer
16 184 (3.26%) Senior DevOps Engineer
17 183 (3.24%) Solutions Architect
18 178 (3.15%) AWS DevOps Engineer
19 152 (2.69%) Senior Developer
20 149 (2.64%) Software Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 574 (10.17%) REST
2 485 (8.60%) .NET
3 343 (6.08%) RESTful
4 332 (5.88%) Kafka
5 310 (5.49%) Spring
6 290 (5.14%) Spring Boot
7 288 (5.10%) React
8 222 (3.93%) Node.js
9 172 (3.05%) JSON
10 171 (3.03%) PySpark
11 168 (2.98%) Playwright
12 167 (2.96%) OAuth
13 154 (2.73%) AngularJS
14 144 (2.55%) SOAP
15 138 (2.45%) .NET Framework
16 129 (2.29%) HTML
17 118 (2.09%) OAuth2
18 110 (1.95%) Middleware
19 109 (1.93%) YAML
20 107 (1.90%) CSS
Miscellaneous
1 1,016 (18.01%) Cloud Native
2 404 (7.16%) Product Ownership
3 272 (4.82%) Distributed Systems
4 167 (2.96%) Enterprise Software
4 167 (2.96%) Onboarding
5 157 (2.78%) Legacy Systems
6 140 (2.48%) Hybrid Cloud
7 92 (1.63%) Data Protection Act
8 86 (1.52%) Public Cloud
9 84 (1.49%) Self-Motivation
10 76 (1.35%) Management Information System
11 74 (1.31%) Data Centre
11 74 (1.31%) Data Structures
12 68 (1.21%) Security Posture
13 66 (1.17%) AI Agents
14 63 (1.12%) Replication
15 57 (1.01%) Enterprise Cloud
16 55 (0.97%) Virtual Team
17 54 (0.96%) Mobile App
18 47 (0.83%) PKI
Operating Systems
1 493 (8.74%) Linux
2 303 (5.37%) Windows
3 104 (1.84%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 83 (1.47%) Unix
5 79 (1.40%) Windows Server
6 33 (0.58%) VMS
7 29 (0.51%) Ubuntu
8 28 (0.50%) Apple iOS
9 18 (0.32%) Android
10 11 (0.19%) Solaris
11 9 (0.16%) Windows Server 2019
12 8 (0.14%) AIX
12 8 (0.14%) zOS
13 7 (0.12%) Amazon Linux
13 7 (0.12%) Windows Server 2016
14 6 (0.11%) CentOS
14 6 (0.11%) Mac OS
14 6 (0.11%) Windows Server 2008
15 4 (0.071%) Alpine Linux
15 4 (0.071%) Data ONTAP
Processes & Methodologies
1 3,311 (58.68%) CI/CD
2 2,266 (40.16%) Agile
3 1,540 (27.30%) Infrastructure as Code
4 932 (16.52%) Containerisation
5 909 (16.11%) Continuous Improvement
6 877 (15.54%) Problem-Solving
7 859 (15.23%) Test Automation
8 823 (14.59%) Microservices
9 776 (13.75%) Stakeholder Management
10 772 (13.68%) AI
11 712 (12.62%) Observability
12 708 (12.55%) Scrum
13 678 (12.02%) Platform Engineering
14 675 (11.96%) Migration
15 665 (11.79%) Software Engineering
16 615 (10.90%) Analytics
17 529 (9.38%) Technical Leadership
18 525 (9.31%) Stakeholder Engagement
19 508 (9.00%) Data Modelling
20 466 (8.26%) Roadmaps
Programming Languages
1 1,581 (28.02%) Python
2 1,038 (18.40%) SQL
3 792 (14.04%) Java
4 503 (8.92%) C#
5 455 (8.06%) Bash
6 450 (7.98%) JavaScript
7 434 (7.69%) PowerShell
8 312 (5.53%) TypeScript
9 225 (3.99%) Bicep
10 104 (1.84%) Go
11 71 (1.26%) Apex Code
12 70 (1.24%) T-SQL
13 69 (1.22%) Shell Script
14 66 (1.17%) PL/SQL
15 57 (1.01%) Scala
16 55 (0.97%) Groovy
17 32 (0.57%) C++
18 30 (0.53%) Data Analysis Expressions
19 27 (0.48%) C
19 27 (0.48%) Kotlin
Qualifications
1 1,795 (31.81%) Security Cleared
2 1,514 (26.83%) SC Cleared
3 332 (5.88%) Degree
4 225 (3.99%) Azure Certification
5 218 (3.86%) BPSS Clearance
6 194 (3.44%) AWS Certification
6 194 (3.44%) DV Cleared
7 130 (2.30%) Computer Science Degree
8 84 (1.49%) Microsoft Certification
9 81 (1.44%) CISSP
10 60 (1.06%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
10 60 (1.06%) ISTQB
11 55 (0.97%) Cisco Certification
12 45 (0.80%) PMP
13 42 (0.74%) PMI Certification
14 38 (0.67%) Master's Degree
15 32 (0.57%) CISM
16 31 (0.55%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
17 26 (0.46%) ITIL Certification
18 23 (0.41%) (ISC)2 CCSP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 512 (9.07%) QA
2 286 (5.07%) Data Quality
3 197 (3.49%) Accessibility
4 153 (2.71%) GDPR
5 94 (1.67%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 80 (1.42%) WCAG
7 76 (1.35%) NIST
8 54 (0.96%) NCSC
9 45 (0.80%) PMO
10 39 (0.69%) PCI DSS
11 34 (0.60%) SLA
12 28 (0.50%) GRC
13 27 (0.48%) Sarbanes-Oxley
14 11 (0.19%) Disclosure Scotland
14 11 (0.19%) HIPAA
15 10 (0.18%) Cyber Essentials
16 9 (0.16%) Actionable Recommendations
16 9 (0.16%) ISO 20022
16 9 (0.16%) PSD2
16 9 (0.16%) SOC 2
System Software
1 1,114 (19.74%) Docker
2 182 (3.23%) Active Directory
3 82 (1.45%) Virtual Machines
4 81 (1.44%) VMware Infrastructure
5 26 (0.46%) vSphere
6 23 (0.41%) Hyper-V
7 20 (0.35%) VMware NSX
8 17 (0.30%) VMware ESXi
9 15 (0.27%) Squid
10 14 (0.25%) Oracle RAC
10 14 (0.25%) Postfix
10 14 (0.25%) Virtual Desktop
11 8 (0.14%) IAG
11 8 (0.14%) KVM
12 6 (0.11%) Corosync
12 6 (0.11%) HDFS
12 6 (0.11%) NFS
12 6 (0.11%) zsh
13 5 (0.089%) Firmware
13 5 (0.089%) SRDF
Systems Management
1 1,618 (28.68%) Terraform
2 1,450 (25.70%) Kubernetes
3 527 (9.34%) Ansible
4 370 (6.56%) Grafana
5 312 (5.53%) Prometheus
6 86 (1.52%) Argo
7 62 (1.10%) Puppet
8 59 (1.05%) Single Sign-On
9 44 (0.78%) Istio
9 44 (0.78%) Progress Chef
10 35 (0.62%) Microsoft Intune
11 31 (0.55%) Packer
12 20 (0.35%) vCenter Server
13 18 (0.32%) Kibana
13 18 (0.32%) SCCM
14 17 (0.30%) Oracle RMAN
15 16 (0.28%) HP ALM
15 16 (0.28%) Kustomize
16 14 (0.25%) Kubeflow
17 13 (0.23%) Data Guard
Vendors
1 1,028 (18.22%) Microsoft
2 312 (5.53%) Oracle
3 277 (4.91%) Databricks
4 272 (4.82%) Google
5 204 (3.62%) ServiceNow
6 191 (3.39%) Salesforce
7 176 (3.12%) Splunk
8 142 (2.52%) Dynatrace
9 126 (2.23%) SAP
10 114 (2.02%) VMware
11 107 (1.90%) Red Hat
12 63 (1.12%) IBM
13 61 (1.08%) Informatica
14 60 (1.06%) OpenAI
15 56 (0.99%) Atlassian
16 53 (0.94%) MuleSoft
17 48 (0.85%) Cisco
18 43 (0.76%) AppDynamics
19 41 (0.73%) Okta
20 40 (0.71%) Foundry