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

6 months to
19 Jan 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 11 14 16
Rank change year-on-year +3 +2 -5
Contract jobs citing DevOps 4,272 3,319 3,926
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 11.55% 10.54% 9.09%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 13.19% 11.86% 10.38%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,999 2,273 2,857
10th Percentile £370 £400 £406
25th Percentile £425 £463 £475
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £520 £565 £563
Median % change year-on-year -7.96% +0.44% -6.25%
75th Percentile £613 £675 £656
90th Percentile £700 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £525 £540
% change year-on-year -4.76% -2.78% -1.82%
Number of hourly rates quoted 55 25 88
10th Percentile £41.90 £36.85 £46.18
25th Percentile £45.46 £46.18 £51.81
Median hourly rate £47.50 £67.50 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year -29.63% +3.85% -0.76%
75th Percentile £82.50 £80.00 £66.81
90th Percentile £94.50 £80.75 £77.65
UK excluding London median hourly rate £47.50 £67.50 £65.00
% change year-on-year -29.63% +3.85% -0.84%

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 32,398 27,994 37,832
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 87.63% 88.92% 87.58%
Number of daily rates quoted 20,495 16,988 25,007
10th Percentile £305 £307 £300
25th Percentile £406 £413 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £613 £638 £645
90th Percentile £723 £738 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £500 £500
% change year-on-year -5.00% - -
Number of hourly rates quoted 1,977 897 1,738
10th Percentile £14.52 £15.62 £14.02
25th Percentile £17.69 £20.94 £17.50
Median hourly rate £25.15 £32.50 £38.85
Median % change year-on-year -22.62% -16.34% +19.54%
75th Percentile £57.00 £62.50 £63.75
90th Percentile £69.25 £74.92 £75.25
UK excluding London median hourly rate £24.00 £30.83 £40.28
% change year-on-year -22.15% -23.46% +54.90%

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 19 January 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 19 January 2026.

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 19 January 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 3,666 £525 -8.70% 2,256
UK excluding London +7 1,925 £500 -4.76% 2,071
London -2 1,832 £540 -10.00% 483
Work from Home -1 1,214 £525 -2.78% 1,094
North of England +7 662 £492 -3.77% 436
Midlands +23 387 £515 +0.73% 256
South East 0 384 £525 -12.50% 631
Yorkshire +1 346 £500 -1.48% 189
West Midlands +24 316 £525 - 111
North West +4 271 £455 -9.00% 189
South West +10 235 £525 -12.50% 278
Scotland +6 188 £487 +8.22% 87
East of England +20 101 £565 +11.33% 287
East Midlands +14 71 £425 -10.53% 140
North East -7 46 £475 -17.03% 60
Wales +4 34 £475 +75.93% 104
Northern Ireland -8 8 - - 44

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
1 253 (5.92%) Confluence
2 85 (1.99%) SharePoint
3 82 (1.92%) Apache
4 79 (1.85%) SAS
5 67 (1.57%) Apache Spark
6 62 (1.45%) Apache Airflow
7 33 (0.77%) nginx
7 33 (0.77%) OpenStack
8 32 (0.75%) CMS
9 24 (0.56%) IIS
10 21 (0.49%) Microsoft Exchange
11 19 (0.44%) JBoss
12 17 (0.40%) WebLogic
13 14 (0.33%) CICS
14 10 (0.23%) HCL Notes
14 10 (0.23%) Mendix
14 10 (0.23%) WebSphere
15 9 (0.21%) iPlanet
15 9 (0.21%) WebSphere Application Server
16 8 (0.19%) Smallworld
Applications
1 91 (2.13%) Microsoft Excel
2 58 (1.36%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 32 (0.75%) Microsoft Project
4 27 (0.63%) Microsoft Office
5 17 (0.40%) MS Visio
6 15 (0.35%) Chatbot
7 9 (0.21%) Mozilla Thunderbird
8 8 (0.19%) Weka
9 5 (0.12%) Trello
10 1 (0.023%) Adobe Creative Suite
10 1 (0.023%) Adobe XD
10 1 (0.023%) Moqups
10 1 (0.023%) Revit
Business Applications
1 62 (1.45%) Dynamics CRM
2 16 (0.37%) SAP S/4HANA
3 13 (0.30%) VisionPLUS
4 11 (0.26%) Endur
5 10 (0.23%) Aladdin
6 9 (0.21%) Maximo
6 9 (0.21%) Oracle ERP
7 7 (0.16%) NEC Housing
8 5 (0.12%) Dynamics AX
8 5 (0.12%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
9 4 (0.094%) NetSuite
9 4 (0.094%) Oracle BPM
9 4 (0.094%) Oracle EBS
9 4 (0.094%) Payment Gateway
9 4 (0.094%) Remedy ITSM
9 4 (0.094%) SAP ERP
9 4 (0.094%) Teamcenter
10 3 (0.070%) SAP CO
10 3 (0.070%) SAP FI
10 3 (0.070%) SAP FI/CO
Cloud Services
1 2,158 (50.51%) Azure
2 1,551 (36.31%) AWS
3 1,161 (27.18%) Azure DevOps
4 783 (18.33%) GitHub
5 624 (14.61%) GCP
6 511 (11.96%) Serverless
7 452 (10.58%) GitHub Actions
8 341 (7.98%) Power Platform
9 272 (6.37%) AWS CloudFormation
10 250 (5.85%) AWS Lambda
11 238 (5.57%) Amazon S3
12 208 (4.87%) Azure Data Factory
13 200 (4.68%) Azure AKS
14 183 (4.28%) Amazon CloudWatch
15 177 (4.14%) Amazon EKS
16 170 (3.98%) OpenShift
17 167 (3.91%) Amazon ECS
18 165 (3.86%) Dynamics 365
18 165 (3.86%) Entra ID
19 158 (3.70%) Amazon EC2
Communications & Networking
1 204 (4.78%) Firewall
2 110 (2.57%) DNS
3 88 (2.06%) VPN
4 81 (1.90%) Network Security
5 54 (1.26%) SSL
5 54 (1.26%) TCP/IP
6 42 (0.98%) HTTP
7 34 (0.80%) HTTPS
8 23 (0.54%) WAN
9 18 (0.42%) BGP
9 18 (0.42%) SSH
10 17 (0.40%) FTP
10 17 (0.40%) MPLS
10 17 (0.40%) SD-WAN
10 17 (0.40%) SMTP
11 16 (0.37%) DHCP
12 15 (0.35%) Kerberos
13 11 (0.26%) Internet
14 10 (0.23%) LAN
15 9 (0.21%) IMAP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 254 (5.95%) PostgreSQL
2 223 (5.22%) Power BI
3 170 (3.98%) SQL Server
4 162 (3.79%) NoSQL
5 136 (3.18%) Amazon RDS
6 128 (3.00%) Data Lake
7 111 (2.60%) Relational Database
8 108 (2.53%) MongoDB
9 105 (2.46%) Data Warehouse
10 90 (2.11%) Azure SQL Database
11 83 (1.94%) Oracle Database
12 68 (1.59%) DynamoDB
13 64 (1.50%) MySQL
14 59 (1.38%) Elasticsearch
15 54 (1.26%) Tableau
16 52 (1.22%) Amazon Aurora
17 50 (1.17%) Redis
18 46 (1.08%) Delta Lake
18 46 (1.08%) Metadata
19 41 (0.96%) Amazon Athena
Development Applications
1 780 (18.26%) Jenkins
2 609 (14.26%) Git
3 593 (13.88%) JIRA
4 567 (13.27%) GitLab
5 131 (3.07%) Selenium
6 100 (2.34%) JUnit
7 88 (2.06%) Postman
8 74 (1.73%) SonarQube
9 73 (1.71%) Sonatype Nexus
10 69 (1.62%) Cypress.io
11 67 (1.57%) Bitbucket
12 59 (1.38%) Cucumber
13 50 (1.17%) Artifactory
14 47 (1.10%) Gradle
15 46 (1.08%) JMeter
16 43 (1.01%) Liquibase
16 43 (1.01%) Maven
17 37 (0.87%) Oracle APEX
18 36 (0.84%) CircleCI
19 32 (0.75%) REST Assured
General
1 1,295 (30.31%) Social Skills
2 769 (18.00%) Finance
3 542 (12.69%) Public Sector
4 360 (8.43%) Banking
5 340 (7.96%) Analytical Skills
6 140 (3.28%) Documentation Skills
7 70 (1.64%) Financial Institution
8 67 (1.57%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 67 (1.57%) Influencing Skills
9 60 (1.40%) Marketing
10 49 (1.15%) Presentation Skills
11 48 (1.12%) Investment Banking
12 47 (1.10%) Front Office
13 45 (1.05%) Retail
14 44 (1.03%) Telecoms
15 35 (0.82%) Military
16 34 (0.80%) Pharmaceutical
17 30 (0.70%) Organisational Skills
18 27 (0.63%) Back Office
19 24 (0.56%) Law
Job Titles
1 838 (19.62%) DevOps Engineer
2 744 (17.42%) Developer
3 588 (13.76%) Senior
4 377 (8.82%) Architect
5 325 (7.61%) Lead
6 245 (5.74%) AWS Engineer
7 243 (5.69%) Azure Engineer
8 222 (5.20%) Data Engineer
9 212 (4.96%) Analyst
10 190 (4.45%) AWS DevOps
11 166 (3.89%) AWS DevOps Engineer
12 164 (3.84%) Software Engineer
13 155 (3.63%) Cloud Engineer
14 148 (3.46%) Senior Developer
15 140 (3.28%) Platform Engineer
16 125 (2.93%) Consultant
17 120 (2.81%) Azure DevOps Engineer
17 120 (2.81%) Senior DevOps
18 116 (2.72%) Solutions Architect
19 113 (2.65%) Java Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 488 (11.42%) REST
2 362 (8.47%) .NET
3 267 (6.25%) React
4 265 (6.20%) Node.js
4 265 (6.20%) RESTful
5 250 (5.85%) Kafka
6 220 (5.15%) Spring
7 200 (4.68%) Spring Boot
8 191 (4.47%) JSON
9 153 (3.58%) OAuth
10 143 (3.35%) AngularJS
11 139 (3.25%) Elastic Stack
11 139 (3.25%) SOAP
12 138 (3.23%) XML
13 128 (3.00%) HTML
14 126 (2.95%) YAML
15 104 (2.43%) Playwright
16 97 (2.27%) CSS
17 93 (2.18%) PySpark
18 90 (2.11%) Middleware
Miscellaneous
1 600 (14.04%) Cloud Native
2 233 (5.45%) Product Ownership
3 164 (3.84%) Distributed Systems
4 117 (2.74%) Onboarding
5 112 (2.62%) Public Cloud
6 85 (1.99%) Legacy Systems
7 78 (1.83%) Hybrid Cloud
8 70 (1.64%) Enterprise Software
9 56 (1.31%) Data Protection Act
10 55 (1.29%) Virtual Team
11 54 (1.26%) Management Information System
12 52 (1.22%) Data Centre
13 49 (1.15%) Replication
14 45 (1.05%) Mobile App
15 44 (1.03%) NHS
15 44 (1.03%) Security Posture
16 42 (0.98%) Private Cloud
17 41 (0.96%) CMDB
18 40 (0.94%) Self-Motivation
19 37 (0.87%) AI Agents
Operating Systems
1 487 (11.40%) Linux
2 245 (5.74%) Windows
3 110 (2.57%) Unix
4 54 (1.26%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 54 (1.26%) Windows Server
5 50 (1.17%) VMS
6 29 (0.68%) Android
6 29 (0.68%) Ubuntu
7 26 (0.61%) Apple iOS
8 19 (0.44%) Windows 10
9 17 (0.40%) CentOS
10 14 (0.33%) Amazon Linux
11 10 (0.23%) Solaris
12 6 (0.14%) Windows Server 2016
12 6 (0.14%) Windows Server 2019
13 5 (0.12%) Mac OS
13 5 (0.12%) zOS
14 3 (0.070%) Windows Server 2012
15 2 (0.047%) Debian
16 1 (0.023%) Embedded Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,433 (56.95%) CI/CD
2 1,716 (40.17%) Agile
3 1,122 (26.26%) Infrastructure as Code
4 837 (19.59%) Containerisation
5 818 (19.15%) Problem-Solving
6 657 (15.38%) Test Automation
7 645 (15.10%) Microservices
8 498 (11.66%) Continuous Improvement
9 485 (11.35%) Analytics
10 478 (11.19%) Scrum
11 475 (11.12%) Migration
12 440 (10.30%) Observability
13 409 (9.57%) AI
14 405 (9.48%) Software Engineering
15 364 (8.52%) Stakeholder Management
16 324 (7.58%) Mentoring
17 322 (7.54%) Data Modelling
18 295 (6.91%) Data Pipeline
19 288 (6.74%) Stakeholder Engagement
20 287 (6.72%) Business Intelligence
Programming Languages
1 1,328 (31.09%) Python
2 848 (19.85%) SQL
3 593 (13.88%) Java
4 419 (9.81%) JavaScript
5 406 (9.50%) C#
6 372 (8.71%) PowerShell
7 348 (8.15%) Bash
8 298 (6.98%) TypeScript
9 144 (3.37%) Bicep
10 142 (3.32%) Go
11 77 (1.80%) PL/SQL
12 76 (1.78%) Shell Script
13 51 (1.19%) Ruby
14 50 (1.17%) Groovy
14 50 (1.17%) Scala
15 49 (1.15%) C++
16 41 (0.96%) Perl
16 41 (0.96%) T-SQL
17 24 (0.56%) Rust
18 22 (0.51%) PHP
Qualifications
1 1,282 (30.01%) Security Cleared
2 1,065 (24.93%) SC Cleared
3 364 (8.52%) Degree
4 193 (4.52%) Computer Science Degree
5 180 (4.21%) Azure Certification
6 140 (3.28%) DV Cleared
7 138 (3.23%) AWS Certification
8 101 (2.36%) BPSS Clearance
9 82 (1.92%) Master's Degree
10 72 (1.69%) CISSP
11 63 (1.47%) Microsoft Certification
12 56 (1.31%) CISM
13 44 (1.03%) ISTQB
14 43 (1.01%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
15 37 (0.87%) PMI Certification
16 29 (0.68%) PMP
17 28 (0.66%) Cisco Certification
18 26 (0.61%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
19 18 (0.42%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
20 17 (0.40%) IIBA
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 379 (8.87%) QA
2 160 (3.75%) GDPR
3 152 (3.56%) Data Quality
4 135 (3.16%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 117 (2.74%) Accessibility
6 111 (2.60%) NIST
7 58 (1.36%) NCSC
8 35 (0.82%) PCI DSS
9 32 (0.75%) WCAG
10 27 (0.63%) Sarbanes-Oxley
11 25 (0.59%) HIPAA
12 24 (0.56%) PMO
13 23 (0.54%) SLA
14 17 (0.40%) PSD2
15 16 (0.37%) ISO 20022
15 16 (0.37%) SOC 2
16 13 (0.30%) SEPA
17 10 (0.23%) HL7
17 10 (0.23%) HMG Security Policy Framework
17 10 (0.23%) NIST 800
System Software
1 1,096 (25.66%) Docker
2 166 (3.89%) Active Directory
3 65 (1.52%) VMware Infrastructure
4 62 (1.45%) Virtual Machines
5 29 (0.68%) vSphere
6 17 (0.40%) DFS Replication
7 15 (0.35%) VMware NSX
8 14 (0.33%) Virtual Desktop
9 13 (0.30%) Hyper-V
10 12 (0.28%) Slurm Workload Manager
11 11 (0.26%) Squid
11 11 (0.26%) Virtual Servers
12 10 (0.23%) Lustre
12 10 (0.23%) Oracle RAC
13 9 (0.21%) Dovecot
13 9 (0.21%) Postfix
14 8 (0.19%) GPFS
14 8 (0.19%) NFS
14 8 (0.19%) Tivoli Directory Server
15 7 (0.16%) VMware ESXi
Systems Management
1 1,344 (31.46%) Terraform
2 1,258 (29.45%) Kubernetes
3 526 (12.31%) Ansible
4 315 (7.37%) Grafana
5 281 (6.58%) Prometheus
6 82 (1.92%) Argo
7 79 (1.85%) Puppet
8 50 (1.17%) Single Sign-On
9 44 (1.03%) Progress Chef
10 43 (1.01%) Istio
11 37 (0.87%) Kibana
12 31 (0.73%) Packer
13 23 (0.54%) Podman
14 18 (0.42%) SCCM
15 17 (0.40%) Rancher
16 16 (0.37%) Proxmox
17 15 (0.35%) Microsoft Intune
18 14 (0.33%) Nessus
18 14 (0.33%) NetBackup
19 13 (0.30%) Data Guard
Vendors
1 726 (16.99%) Microsoft
2 313 (7.33%) Oracle
3 247 (5.78%) Google
4 233 (5.45%) Databricks
5 213 (4.99%) Splunk
6 163 (3.82%) ServiceNow
7 121 (2.83%) Red Hat
8 108 (2.53%) VMware
9 106 (2.48%) Salesforce
10 101 (2.36%) SAP
11 72 (1.69%) Dynatrace
12 63 (1.47%) OpenAI
13 47 (1.10%) F5
13 47 (1.10%) IBM
14 42 (0.98%) Cisco
14 42 (0.98%) CyberArk
14 42 (0.98%) Talend
15 40 (0.94%) Palo Alto
16 39 (0.91%) Atlassian
17 38 (0.89%) Denodo