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

6 months to
18 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 13 15 14
Rank change year-on-year +2 -1 -2
Contract jobs citing DevOps 5,376 3,091 4,166
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.67% 10.38% 9.50%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.57% 11.41% 11.17%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,758 2,221 2,858
10th Percentile £381 £367 £400
25th Percentile £437 £435 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year - -4.55% -5.90%
75th Percentile £613 £630 £650
90th Percentile £700 £750 £731
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £525
% change year-on-year - -4.76% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 114 16 124
10th Percentile £39.53 £32.63 £56.33
25th Percentile £61.78 £51.25 £61.51
Median hourly rate £70.00 £76.00 £67.50
Median % change year-on-year -7.89% +12.59% +2.89%
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 £65.50
% change year-on-year - +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 42,754 27,087 37,306
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.83% 91.00% 85.05%
Number of daily rates quoted 26,630 17,192 23,755
10th Percentile £325 £300 £300
25th Percentile £413 £406 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £505 £525
Median % change year-on-year +1.46% -3.79% -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 2,570 1,249 2,608
10th Percentile £14.80 £14.20 £12.75
25th Percentile £20.02 £17.87 £16.02
Median hourly rate £43.96 £26.21 £37.18
Median % change year-on-year +67.72% -29.51% +6.14%
75th Percentile £68.00 £55.25 £61.30
90th Percentile £81.32 £73.75 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £45.00 £25.15 £38.12
% change year-on-year +78.93% -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 18 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 18 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 18 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 +4 4,563 £525 - 1,324
UK excluding London +7 2,370 £500 - 993
London +5 2,337 £550 - 566
Work from Home -1 1,484 £525 - 717
North of England +7 845 £500 - 292
Yorkshire +2 458 £510 +2.00% 84
South East -4 458 £513 +2.50% 274
Midlands +4 425 £488 -2.50% 110
West Midlands 0 335 £500 -2.44% 65
North West +1 314 £500 +1.63% 164
South West +16 286 £510 -7.27% 110
Scotland +3 201 £500 +1.21% 52
East of England +24 134 £525 +6.33% 74
North East +7 91 £450 -14.29% 50
East Midlands -1 86 £468 +1.47% 45
Wales +6 50 £425 +38.10% 32
Northern Ireland +10 20 £475 +11.76% 71
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
1 328 (6.10%) Confluence
2 136 (2.53%) Apache Spark
3 123 (2.29%) SharePoint
4 102 (1.90%) Apache Airflow
5 94 (1.75%) Apache
6 86 (1.60%) SAS
7 48 (0.89%) CMS
8 33 (0.61%) Microsoft Exchange
9 31 (0.58%) Jupyter
9 31 (0.58%) nginx
10 28 (0.52%) IIS
11 19 (0.35%) OpenStack
12 16 (0.30%) Camunda
13 14 (0.26%) WebSphere
14 12 (0.22%) Palantir Foundry
15 11 (0.20%) Mendix
16 9 (0.17%) Oracle Workflow
16 9 (0.17%) Sitecore CMS
17 7 (0.13%) ArcGIS
17 7 (0.13%) Tomcat
Applications
1 77 (1.43%) Microsoft Excel
2 57 (1.06%) Microsoft Project
3 50 (0.93%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 38 (0.71%) Microsoft Office
5 29 (0.54%) MS Visio
6 10 (0.19%) CPLEX
7 7 (0.13%) Chatbot
8 4 (0.074%) Notion
9 3 (0.056%) Adobe XD
9 3 (0.056%) Trello
10 2 (0.037%) Spreadsheet
11 1 (0.019%) InDesign
11 1 (0.019%) Maya
11 1 (0.019%) Weka
Business Applications
1 66 (1.23%) Dynamics CRM
2 33 (0.61%) 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%) SAP MDG
8 5 (0.093%) Endur
8 5 (0.093%) Magento
8 5 (0.093%) Oracle EBS
8 5 (0.093%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
9 4 (0.074%) OpenText MBPM
9 4 (0.074%) Oracle BPM
10 3 (0.056%) Findur
10 3 (0.056%) Salesforce CRM
10 3 (0.056%) SAP BPC
10 3 (0.056%) SAP ERP
10 3 (0.056%) SAP MM
Cloud Services
1 2,890 (53.76%) Azure
2 1,874 (34.86%) AWS
3 1,588 (29.54%) Azure DevOps
4 883 (16.42%) GitHub
5 675 (12.56%) GCP
6 527 (9.80%) GitHub Actions
7 482 (8.97%) Serverless
8 455 (8.46%) Power Platform
9 293 (5.45%) Amazon S3
10 266 (4.95%) AWS Lambda
11 247 (4.59%) Entra ID
12 244 (4.54%) AWS CloudFormation
13 223 (4.15%) Azure AKS
14 214 (3.98%) Amazon EKS
15 193 (3.59%) Azure Data Factory
16 181 (3.37%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 173 (3.22%) Amazon EC2
18 164 (3.05%) Azure Monitor
19 162 (3.01%) PaaS
20 154 (2.86%) Dynamics 365
Communications & Networking
1 239 (4.45%) Firewall
2 139 (2.59%) DNS
3 118 (2.19%) Network Security
4 106 (1.97%) VPN
5 47 (0.87%) WAN
6 45 (0.84%) TCP/IP
7 36 (0.67%) SD-WAN
8 34 (0.63%) BGP
9 31 (0.58%) SSL
10 27 (0.50%) Wi-Fi
11 26 (0.48%) DHCP
12 25 (0.47%) SAN
13 24 (0.45%) OSPF
14 23 (0.43%) HTTP
14 23 (0.43%) Internet
15 18 (0.33%) IPsec
16 17 (0.32%) BIG-IP
16 17 (0.32%) LAN
16 17 (0.32%) MPLS
16 17 (0.32%) VXLAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 294 (5.47%) Power BI
2 261 (4.85%) SQL Server
3 248 (4.61%) PostgreSQL
4 191 (3.55%) NoSQL
5 166 (3.09%) Relational Database
6 165 (3.07%) Data Lake
7 153 (2.85%) Data Warehouse
8 152 (2.83%) MongoDB
9 115 (2.14%) Amazon RDS
10 105 (1.95%) Azure SQL Database
11 98 (1.82%) DynamoDB
11 98 (1.82%) Metadata
12 87 (1.62%) Delta Lake
13 74 (1.38%) Oracle Database
14 71 (1.32%) Amazon Athena
14 71 (1.32%) Big Data
15 65 (1.21%) Amazon Redshift
16 64 (1.19%) Redis
17 60 (1.12%) Elasticsearch
18 50 (0.93%) BigQuery
Development Applications
1 762 (14.17%) Jenkins
2 680 (12.65%) Git
3 656 (12.20%) JIRA
4 578 (10.75%) GitLab
5 115 (2.14%) Selenium
6 102 (1.90%) Postman
7 91 (1.69%) SonarQube
8 90 (1.67%) JUnit
9 71 (1.32%) Bitbucket
10 70 (1.30%) REST Assured
11 68 (1.26%) Maven
12 60 (1.12%) Cucumber
13 58 (1.08%) JMeter
14 50 (0.93%) Cypress.io
15 46 (0.86%) Gradle
16 43 (0.80%) Gatling
17 42 (0.78%) Artifactory
18 39 (0.73%) Mockito
19 35 (0.65%) Visual Studio
20 32 (0.60%) LoadRunner
General
1 1,337 (24.87%) Social Skills
2 975 (18.14%) Finance
3 742 (13.80%) Public Sector
4 414 (7.70%) Analytical Skills
5 346 (6.44%) Banking
6 141 (2.62%) Documentation Skills
7 109 (2.03%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 76 (1.41%) Influencing Skills
9 72 (1.34%) Retail
10 69 (1.28%) Legal
11 59 (1.10%) Marketing
12 56 (1.04%) Organisational Skills
13 49 (0.91%) Financial Institution
14 47 (0.87%) Military
15 38 (0.71%) Presentation Skills
16 37 (0.69%) Investment Banking
16 37 (0.69%) Law
17 33 (0.61%) Telecoms
18 30 (0.56%) Front Office
19 27 (0.50%) Aerospace
Job Titles
1 1,106 (20.57%) DevOps Engineer
2 823 (15.31%) Developer
3 760 (14.14%) Senior
4 628 (11.68%) Architect
5 479 (8.91%) Lead
6 343 (6.38%) Azure Engineer
7 322 (5.99%) Analyst
8 317 (5.90%) Data Engineer
9 266 (4.95%) AWS Engineer
10 200 (3.72%) Cloud Engineer
11 196 (3.65%) AWS DevOps
11 196 (3.65%) Platform Engineer
12 183 (3.40%) AWS DevOps Engineer
13 182 (3.39%) Solutions Architect
14 181 (3.37%) Java Developer
15 180 (3.35%) Azure DevOps Engineer
16 179 (3.33%) Senior DevOps
17 163 (3.03%) Senior DevOps Engineer
18 160 (2.98%) Business Analyst
19 144 (2.68%) Software Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 492 (9.15%) REST
2 456 (8.48%) .NET
3 310 (5.77%) React
4 308 (5.73%) Spring
5 295 (5.49%) Spring Boot
6 290 (5.39%) RESTful
7 288 (5.36%) Kafka
8 230 (4.28%) Node.js
9 171 (3.18%) AngularJS
10 164 (3.05%) PySpark
11 157 (2.92%) OAuth
12 149 (2.77%) Playwright
13 136 (2.53%) JSON
14 121 (2.25%) YAML
15 119 (2.21%) SOAP
16 116 (2.16%) .NET Framework
17 112 (2.08%) HTML
18 109 (2.03%) Middleware
18 109 (2.03%) OpenID
19 107 (1.99%) OAuth2
Miscellaneous
1 930 (17.30%) Cloud Native
2 351 (6.53%) Product Ownership
3 228 (4.24%) Distributed Systems
4 148 (2.75%) Onboarding
5 126 (2.34%) Legacy Systems
6 125 (2.33%) Enterprise Software
7 113 (2.10%) Hybrid Cloud
8 106 (1.97%) Public Cloud
9 86 (1.60%) Data Centre
10 80 (1.49%) Data Protection Act
11 68 (1.26%) Management Information System
12 63 (1.17%) Self-Motivation
13 55 (1.02%) Data Structures
13 55 (1.02%) Security Posture
14 53 (0.99%) Mobile App
15 52 (0.97%) AI Agents
16 50 (0.93%) Virtual Team
17 48 (0.89%) Greenfield Project
18 43 (0.80%) Low-Code
18 43 (0.80%) Private Cloud
Operating Systems
1 455 (8.46%) Linux
2 274 (5.10%) Windows
3 101 (1.88%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 80 (1.49%) Unix
5 58 (1.08%) Windows Server
6 39 (0.73%) VMS
7 30 (0.56%) Ubuntu
8 24 (0.45%) Apple iOS
9 15 (0.28%) 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 (0.093%) Amazon Linux
14 5 (0.093%) Windows 10
15 4 (0.074%) Alpine Linux
15 4 (0.074%) Data ONTAP
15 4 (0.074%) Windows Server 2012
Processes & Methodologies
1 3,105 (57.76%) CI/CD
2 2,028 (37.72%) Agile
3 1,424 (26.49%) Infrastructure as Code
4 851 (15.83%) Containerisation
5 796 (14.81%) Problem-Solving
6 774 (14.40%) Microservices
7 765 (14.23%) Test Automation
8 756 (14.06%) Continuous Improvement
9 650 (12.09%) Migration
10 647 (12.03%) Stakeholder Management
11 629 (11.70%) Observability
12 616 (11.46%) AI
13 611 (11.37%) Analytics
14 606 (11.27%) Scrum
15 558 (10.38%) Platform Engineering
16 538 (10.01%) Software Engineering
17 491 (9.13%) Data Modelling
18 454 (8.44%) Technical Leadership
19 434 (8.07%) Roadmaps
20 428 (7.96%) Mentoring
Programming Languages
1 1,499 (27.88%) Python
2 1,010 (18.79%) SQL
3 729 (13.56%) Java
4 498 (9.26%) C#
5 396 (7.37%) JavaScript
6 380 (7.07%) Bash
7 379 (7.05%) PowerShell
8 265 (4.93%) TypeScript
9 188 (3.50%) Bicep
10 111 (2.06%) Go
11 67 (1.25%) Apex Code
12 63 (1.17%) Scala
13 62 (1.15%) Shell Script
14 53 (0.99%) T-SQL
15 50 (0.93%) PL/SQL
16 45 (0.84%) Groovy
17 32 (0.60%) C++
18 26 (0.48%) Data Analysis Expressions
19 25 (0.47%) Ruby
20 24 (0.45%) Perl
Qualifications
1 1,704 (31.70%) Security Cleared
2 1,435 (26.69%) SC Cleared
3 321 (5.97%) Degree
4 215 (4.00%) Azure Certification
5 171 (3.18%) BPSS Clearance
6 170 (3.16%) AWS Certification
7 161 (2.99%) DV Cleared
8 126 (2.34%) Computer Science Degree
9 85 (1.58%) CISSP
10 72 (1.34%) Microsoft Certification
11 58 (1.08%) ISTQB
12 51 (0.95%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 48 (0.89%) CISM
14 47 (0.87%) Cisco Certification
15 45 (0.84%) PMI Certification
16 43 (0.80%) PMP
17 42 (0.78%) Master's Degree
18 28 (0.52%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
19 26 (0.48%) ITIL Certification
20 24 (0.45%) TOGAF Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 450 (8.37%) QA
2 258 (4.80%) Data Quality
3 176 (3.27%) GDPR
4 163 (3.03%) Accessibility
5 127 (2.36%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 116 (2.16%) NIST
7 72 (1.34%) NCSC
8 66 (1.23%) WCAG
9 49 (0.91%) PCI DSS
10 44 (0.82%) SLA
11 32 (0.60%) Sarbanes-Oxley
12 29 (0.54%) PMO
13 25 (0.47%) GRC
14 19 (0.35%) HIPAA
15 15 (0.28%) SOC 2
16 11 (0.20%) ISO 20022
16 11 (0.20%) NIST 800
16 11 (0.20%) PSD2
17 10 (0.19%) Disclosure Scotland
17 10 (0.19%) SEPA
System Software
1 1,014 (18.86%) Docker
2 187 (3.48%) Active Directory
3 78 (1.45%) VMware Infrastructure
4 76 (1.41%) Virtual Machines
5 33 (0.61%) vSphere
6 27 (0.50%) VMware NSX
7 20 (0.37%) Virtual Desktop
8 18 (0.33%) 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
14 6 (0.11%) KVM
15 5 (0.093%) Microsoft App-V
15 5 (0.093%) NFS
15 5 (0.093%) SRDF
Systems Management
1 1,538 (28.61%) Terraform
2 1,340 (24.93%) Kubernetes
3 511 (9.51%) Ansible
4 357 (6.64%) Grafana
5 309 (5.75%) Prometheus
6 84 (1.56%) Argo
7 77 (1.43%) Single Sign-On
8 68 (1.26%) Puppet
9 55 (1.02%) Istio
10 32 (0.60%) Progress Chef
11 30 (0.56%) Microsoft Intune
11 30 (0.56%) Packer
12 26 (0.48%) vCenter Server
13 22 (0.41%) Active Directory Federation Services
14 21 (0.39%) HP ALM
15 18 (0.33%) Consul
15 18 (0.33%) Kibana
16 15 (0.28%) Kustomize
17 14 (0.26%) SCCM
18 13 (0.24%) NetBackup
Vendors
1 937 (17.43%) Microsoft
2 278 (5.17%) Databricks
3 271 (5.04%) Oracle
4 253 (4.71%) Google
5 187 (3.48%) ServiceNow
6 182 (3.39%) Splunk
7 179 (3.33%) Salesforce
8 130 (2.42%) Red Hat
9 119 (2.21%) SAP
10 116 (2.16%) VMware
11 112 (2.08%) Dynatrace
12 76 (1.41%) OpenAI
13 58 (1.08%) Atlassian
14 53 (0.99%) IBM
14 53 (0.99%) Informatica
15 47 (0.87%) CyberArk
16 41 (0.76%) Cisco
17 40 (0.74%) Okta
18 39 (0.73%) MuleSoft
19 38 (0.71%) Foundry