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 25 November 2025, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
25 Nov 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 12 14 16
Rank change year-on-year +2 +2 -7
Contract jobs citing DevOps 4,156 3,626 4,413
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 11.61% 9.98% 9.58%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.98% 11.50% 10.82%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,908 2,424 3,207
10th Percentile £363 £381 £406
25th Percentile £425 £463 £475
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £560 £563
Median % change year-on-year -6.25% -0.44% -6.25%
75th Percentile £616 £663 £663
90th Percentile £700 £738 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £550 £550
% change year-on-year -9.09% - -
Number of hourly rates quoted 44 39 96
10th Percentile - £40.70 £46.18
25th Percentile £45.46 £58.45 £51.81
Median hourly rate £61.25 £70.00 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year -12.50% +7.69% -0.92%
75th Percentile £85.63 £74.00 £75.67
90th Percentile £95.00 £80.75 £78.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £58.50 £70.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year -16.43% +7.69% -0.92%

All Process and 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 32,027 31,522 40,787
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 89.46% 86.80% 88.53%
Number of daily rates quoted 20,051 18,965 27,382
10th Percentile £300 £310 £308
25th Percentile £404 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £533
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% -1.41% -3.18%
75th Percentile £619 £638 £650
90th Percentile £725 £738 £745
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £500 £500
% change year-on-year -5.00% - -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,103 1,143 1,561
10th Percentile £14.50 £15.22 £14.27
25th Percentile £17.50 £20.15 £19.06
Median hourly rate £25.15 £35.00 £44.50
Median % change year-on-year -28.14% -21.35% +27.14%
75th Percentile £45.46 £63.75 £65.00
90th Percentile £67.50 £73.75 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £22.85 £32.50 £44.50
% change year-on-year -29.69% -26.97% +48.33%

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 25 November 2025.

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 25 November 2025.

Hourly rate histogram for DevOps in the UK

DevOps
Top 17 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 25 November 2025. 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 3,522 £525 -8.70% 1,442
UK excluding London +4 1,879 £500 -9.09% 1,201
London 0 1,766 £550 -5.98% 604
Work from Home 0 1,329 £525 -4.55% 1,023
North of England +4 607 £493 -1.40% 231
South East +2 370 £513 -14.58% 479
Midlands +14 369 £515 -6.36% 141
Yorkshire -1 320 £500 - 71
West Midlands +13 299 £525 -5.15% 92
North West +5 259 £453 -14.93% 121
South West +2 222 £538 -10.42% 156
Scotland +9 215 £475 +5.56% 87
East of England +25 105 £520 -0.95% 81
East Midlands +21 70 £418 -12.11% 45
Wales +7 44 £450 +9.09% 43
North East -11 30 £550 -5.98% 40
Northern Ireland -1 7 - - 11

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
1 259 (6.23%) Confluence
2 95 (2.29%) Apache
3 70 (1.68%) Apache Airflow
3 70 (1.68%) SharePoint
4 64 (1.54%) SAS
5 58 (1.40%) Apache Spark
6 40 (0.96%) CMS
7 39 (0.94%) nginx
8 29 (0.70%) IIS
8 29 (0.70%) JBoss
9 28 (0.67%) OpenStack
10 27 (0.65%) WebLogic
11 25 (0.60%) CICS
12 21 (0.51%) Microsoft Exchange
13 18 (0.43%) WebSphere
14 15 (0.36%) Anypoint
14 15 (0.36%) Mule
15 14 (0.34%) Oracle SOA Suite
16 12 (0.29%) WebSphere Application Server
17 10 (0.24%) Oracle Service Bus
Applications
1 73 (1.76%) Microsoft Excel
2 40 (0.96%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 35 (0.84%) Microsoft Office
4 31 (0.75%) Microsoft Project
5 19 (0.46%) MS Visio
6 15 (0.36%) Chatbot
7 12 (0.29%) Mozilla Thunderbird
8 8 (0.19%) Trello
8 8 (0.19%) Weka
9 1 (0.024%) Adobe Creative Suite
9 1 (0.024%) Moqups
9 1 (0.024%) Revit
Business Applications
1 65 (1.56%) Dynamics CRM
2 20 (0.48%) Endur
3 19 (0.46%) SAP S/4HANA
4 18 (0.43%) Oracle BPM
5 17 (0.41%) Aladdin
6 16 (0.38%) VisionPLUS
7 15 (0.36%) Remedy ITSM
8 8 (0.19%) Maximo
9 7 (0.17%) Dynamics AX
10 5 (0.12%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
11 4 (0.096%) Fidessa
11 4 (0.096%) NEC Housing
11 4 (0.096%) SAP CO
11 4 (0.096%) SAP ERP
11 4 (0.096%) SAP FI
11 4 (0.096%) SAP FI/CO
11 4 (0.096%) Teamcenter
11 4 (0.096%) thinkFolio
11 4 (0.096%) Workday HCM
12 3 (0.072%) Oracle EBS
Cloud Services
1 2,028 (48.80%) Azure
2 1,567 (37.70%) AWS
3 1,121 (26.97%) Azure DevOps
4 726 (17.47%) GitHub
5 583 (14.03%) GCP
6 475 (11.43%) Serverless
7 419 (10.08%) GitHub Actions
8 280 (6.74%) Power Platform
9 269 (6.47%) Amazon S3
10 266 (6.40%) AWS CloudFormation
11 265 (6.38%) AWS Lambda
12 219 (5.27%) Amazon CloudWatch
13 201 (4.84%) Amazon EC2
14 180 (4.33%) Azure AKS
15 174 (4.19%) Amazon EKS
16 160 (3.85%) Amazon ECS
17 159 (3.83%) SaaS
18 158 (3.80%) Azure Data Factory
19 151 (3.63%) Dynamics 365
20 148 (3.56%) Entra ID
Communications & Networking
1 204 (4.91%) Firewall
2 130 (3.13%) DNS
3 88 (2.12%) VPN
4 70 (1.68%) Network Security
5 68 (1.64%) TCP/IP
6 67 (1.61%) SSL
7 51 (1.23%) HTTP
8 36 (0.87%) HTTPS
9 34 (0.82%) SSH
10 30 (0.72%) SMTP
10 30 (0.72%) WAN
11 24 (0.58%) FTP
12 20 (0.48%) BGP
13 18 (0.43%) DHCP
13 18 (0.43%) Kerberos
14 16 (0.38%) LAN
14 16 (0.38%) OpenLDAP
15 15 (0.36%) MPLS
15 15 (0.36%) SD-WAN
16 12 (0.29%) IMAP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 278 (6.69%) PostgreSQL
2 169 (4.07%) Amazon RDS
2 169 (4.07%) Power BI
3 168 (4.04%) NoSQL
4 158 (3.80%) SQL Server
5 119 (2.86%) MongoDB
6 104 (2.50%) Relational Database
7 101 (2.43%) Data Warehouse
8 92 (2.21%) Data Lake
9 89 (2.14%) Oracle Database
10 71 (1.71%) Azure SQL Database
11 68 (1.64%) DynamoDB
12 67 (1.61%) MySQL
13 61 (1.47%) Redis
14 57 (1.37%) Amazon Aurora
15 50 (1.20%) Metadata
16 49 (1.18%) Elasticsearch
17 40 (0.96%) Big Data
17 40 (0.96%) Delta Lake
18 36 (0.87%) Amazon Athena
Development Applications
1 810 (19.49%) Jenkins
2 675 (16.24%) Git
3 612 (14.73%) JIRA
4 534 (12.85%) GitLab
5 144 (3.46%) Selenium
6 110 (2.65%) JUnit
7 100 (2.41%) SonarQube
8 95 (2.29%) Bitbucket
9 94 (2.26%) Sonatype Nexus
10 87 (2.09%) Postman
11 67 (1.61%) Cypress.io
12 62 (1.49%) Cucumber
12 62 (1.49%) Liquibase
13 60 (1.44%) Maven
14 50 (1.20%) Artifactory
14 50 (1.20%) Gradle
15 45 (1.08%) JMeter
16 43 (1.03%) Visual Studio
17 40 (0.96%) CircleCI
18 39 (0.94%) Oracle APEX
General
1 1,304 (31.38%) Social Skills
2 763 (18.36%) Finance
3 528 (12.70%) Public Sector
4 350 (8.42%) Banking
5 347 (8.35%) Analytical Skills
6 133 (3.20%) Documentation Skills
7 70 (1.68%) Investment Banking
8 69 (1.66%) Inclusion and Diversity
9 65 (1.56%) Marketing
10 62 (1.49%) Financial Institution
11 60 (1.44%) Telecoms
12 56 (1.35%) Retail
13 53 (1.28%) Influencing Skills
14 44 (1.06%) Presentation Skills
15 40 (0.96%) Front Office
16 35 (0.84%) Back Office
17 31 (0.75%) Pharmaceutical
18 29 (0.70%) Manufacturing
18 29 (0.70%) Military
19 28 (0.67%) Law
Job Titles
1 824 (19.83%) Developer
2 767 (18.46%) DevOps Engineer
3 565 (13.59%) Senior
4 349 (8.40%) Architect
5 312 (7.51%) Lead
6 257 (6.18%) AWS Engineer
7 208 (5.00%) Azure Engineer
8 196 (4.72%) AWS DevOps
9 193 (4.64%) Analyst
10 187 (4.50%) Data Engineer
11 169 (4.07%) Senior Developer
12 167 (4.02%) AWS DevOps Engineer
13 158 (3.80%) Software Engineer
14 149 (3.59%) Cloud Engineer
15 144 (3.46%) Platform Engineer
16 139 (3.34%) Java Developer
17 125 (3.01%) Consultant
18 109 (2.62%) Business Analyst
18 109 (2.62%) Senior DevOps
19 103 (2.48%) Azure DevOps Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 476 (11.45%) REST
2 372 (8.95%) .NET
3 317 (7.63%) RESTful
4 252 (6.06%) React
5 250 (6.02%) Node.js
6 235 (5.65%) Kafka
7 209 (5.03%) JSON
8 190 (4.57%) Spring
9 184 (4.43%) Spring Boot
10 180 (4.33%) SOAP
11 162 (3.90%) HTML
12 158 (3.80%) OAuth
13 155 (3.73%) AngularJS
13 155 (3.73%) Elastic Stack
14 142 (3.42%) XML
15 113 (2.72%) CSS
16 110 (2.65%) YAML
17 90 (2.17%) .NET Core
18 84 (2.02%) OAuth2
19 83 (2.00%) Web Services
Miscellaneous
1 544 (13.09%) Cloud Native
2 232 (5.58%) Product Ownership
3 176 (4.23%) Distributed Systems
4 126 (3.03%) Onboarding
5 109 (2.62%) Legacy Systems
6 101 (2.43%) Public Cloud
7 73 (1.76%) Hybrid Cloud
8 70 (1.68%) Data Protection Act
9 67 (1.61%) Virtual Team
10 65 (1.56%) Mobile App
11 62 (1.49%) Replication
12 53 (1.28%) Enterprise Software
12 53 (1.28%) Greenfield Project
13 52 (1.25%) Security Posture
14 50 (1.20%) Management Information System
15 44 (1.06%) Data Centre
15 44 (1.06%) Self-Motivation
16 42 (1.01%) Algorithms
17 39 (0.94%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
18 37 (0.89%) NHS
Operating Systems
1 516 (12.42%) Linux
2 253 (6.09%) Windows
3 115 (2.77%) Unix
4 64 (1.54%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 60 (1.44%) Windows Server
6 53 (1.28%) Android
7 48 (1.15%) VMS
8 46 (1.11%) Apple iOS
9 26 (0.63%) Amazon Linux
10 25 (0.60%) Ubuntu
11 20 (0.48%) CentOS
12 16 (0.38%) Solaris
12 16 (0.38%) Windows 10
13 11 (0.26%) Mac OS
13 11 (0.26%) zOS
14 6 (0.14%) Windows Server 2019
15 5 (0.12%) Windows Server 2016
16 3 (0.072%) AIX
16 3 (0.072%) Debian
16 3 (0.072%) SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,343 (56.38%) CI/CD
2 1,829 (44.01%) Agile
3 1,079 (25.96%) Infrastructure as Code
4 823 (19.80%) Problem-Solving
5 809 (19.47%) Containerisation
6 657 (15.81%) Test Automation
7 630 (15.16%) Microservices
8 524 (12.61%) Scrum
9 458 (11.02%) Migration
10 442 (10.64%) Continuous Improvement
11 420 (10.11%) Software Engineering
12 408 (9.82%) Analytics
13 370 (8.90%) AI
14 357 (8.59%) Observability
15 320 (7.70%) Stakeholder Management
16 307 (7.39%) Mentoring
17 297 (7.15%) SDLC
18 286 (6.88%) Infrastructure Automation
19 272 (6.54%) DevSecOps
20 269 (6.47%) Stakeholder Engagement
Programming Languages
1 1,344 (32.34%) Python
2 792 (19.06%) SQL
3 620 (14.92%) Java
4 438 (10.54%) JavaScript
5 420 (10.11%) C#
6 396 (9.53%) Bash
7 379 (9.12%) PowerShell
8 286 (6.88%) TypeScript
9 177 (4.26%) Go
10 116 (2.79%) Bicep
11 82 (1.97%) PL/SQL
12 74 (1.78%) Shell Script
13 65 (1.56%) Groovy
14 57 (1.37%) Perl
15 54 (1.30%) C++
16 47 (1.13%) Scala
17 46 (1.11%) Ruby
18 36 (0.87%) T-SQL
19 31 (0.75%) Kotlin
20 29 (0.70%) PHP
Qualifications
1 1,119 (26.92%) Security Cleared
2 928 (22.33%) SC Cleared
3 342 (8.23%) Degree
4 183 (4.40%) Computer Science Degree
5 152 (3.66%) AWS Certification
6 151 (3.63%) Azure Certification
7 131 (3.15%) DV Cleared
8 85 (2.05%) BPSS Clearance
9 79 (1.90%) Master's Degree
10 68 (1.64%) CISSP
11 64 (1.54%) Microsoft Certification
12 53 (1.28%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 46 (1.11%) CISM
14 38 (0.91%) ISTQB
15 35 (0.84%) Cisco Certification
16 32 (0.77%) PMI Certification
17 28 (0.67%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
18 26 (0.63%) PMP
19 18 (0.43%) ITIL Certification
20 15 (0.36%) PRINCE2 Practitioner
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 386 (9.29%) QA
2 153 (3.68%) GDPR
3 139 (3.34%) ISO/IEC 27001
4 129 (3.10%) Accessibility
5 115 (2.77%) Data Quality
6 105 (2.53%) NIST
7 47 (1.13%) NCSC
8 35 (0.84%) PCI DSS
9 28 (0.67%) WCAG
10 27 (0.65%) HIPAA
11 20 (0.48%) PMO
11 20 (0.48%) SLA
12 19 (0.46%) SOC 2
13 16 (0.38%) Sarbanes-Oxley
14 14 (0.34%) MiFID
15 13 (0.31%) PSD2
16 12 (0.29%) Cyber Essentials
16 12 (0.29%) ISO 20022
16 12 (0.29%) SEPA
17 11 (0.26%) EU AI Act
System Software
1 1,053 (25.34%) Docker
2 186 (4.48%) Active Directory
3 79 (1.90%) VMware Infrastructure
4 60 (1.44%) Virtual Machines
5 27 (0.65%) vSphere
6 24 (0.58%) DFS Replication
7 15 (0.36%) Postfix
7 15 (0.36%) VMware NSX
8 13 (0.31%) Squid
9 12 (0.29%) Dovecot
9 12 (0.29%) Hyper-V
9 12 (0.29%) Oracle RAC
9 12 (0.29%) Virtual Desktop
10 11 (0.26%) Virtual Servers
11 10 (0.24%) Slurm Workload Manager
12 9 (0.22%) VMware ESXi
13 8 (0.19%) GPFS
13 8 (0.19%) Lustre
13 8 (0.19%) Tivoli Directory Server
14 7 (0.17%) KVM
Systems Management
1 1,322 (31.81%) Terraform
2 1,212 (29.16%) Kubernetes
3 535 (12.87%) Ansible
4 325 (7.82%) Grafana
5 310 (7.46%) Prometheus
6 87 (2.09%) Puppet
7 80 (1.92%) Argo
8 69 (1.66%) Single Sign-On
9 59 (1.42%) Progress Chef
10 44 (1.06%) Kibana
11 41 (0.99%) Packer
12 34 (0.82%) Istio
13 21 (0.51%) ITRS Geneos
13 21 (0.51%) Podman
14 20 (0.48%) Microsoft Intune
14 20 (0.48%) SCCM
15 17 (0.41%) CA Endevor
15 17 (0.41%) Nessus
15 17 (0.41%) Proxmox
16 15 (0.36%) logstash
Vendors
1 706 (16.99%) Microsoft
2 303 (7.29%) Oracle
3 231 (5.56%) Google
4 202 (4.86%) Splunk
5 182 (4.38%) Databricks
6 174 (4.19%) ServiceNow
7 120 (2.89%) Salesforce
8 112 (2.69%) VMware
9 110 (2.65%) SAP
10 96 (2.31%) Red Hat
11 65 (1.56%) Dynatrace
12 59 (1.42%) MuleSoft
13 55 (1.32%) IBM
14 49 (1.18%) OpenAI
15 46 (1.11%) F5
16 44 (1.06%) Atlassian
17 43 (1.03%) Cisco
18 38 (0.91%) Palo Alto
19 37 (0.89%) Talend
20 36 (0.87%) CyberArk