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

6 months to
3 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 13 15 15
Rank change year-on-year +2 0 -2
Contract jobs citing DevOps 5,618 3,546 3,887
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.57% 10.71% 9.96%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.44% 11.84% 11.64%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,895 2,526 2,667
10th Percentile £383 £361 £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 £613 £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 115 25 89
10th Percentile £35.00 £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% +7.69%
75th Percentile £77.50 £82.96 £74.44
90th Percentile £88.00 £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 45,145 29,940 33,399
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.95% 90.42% 85.56%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,873 18,766 21,491
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 £734 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,760 1,664 1,872
10th Percentile £14.50 £14.20 £14.00
25th Percentile £19.50 £17.30 £18.14
Median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £40.33
Median % change year-on-year +74.79% -37.63% -5.12%
75th Percentile £68.00 £50.00 £65.00
90th Percentile £82.25 £68.00 £74.95
UK excluding London median hourly rate £43.96 £23.63 £40.94
% change year-on-year +86.03% -42.28% +2.35%

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 3 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 3 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 3 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 +3 4,809 £525 - 2,041
London +2 2,490 £550 - 1,028
UK excluding London +4 2,450 £500 +2.56% 1,267
Work from Home 0 1,603 £525 +2.44% 1,145
North of England 0 844 £500 +5.26% 356
Midlands +1 463 £490 +3.16% 182
South East -11 460 £525 +5.00% 321
Yorkshire +2 422 £500 +3.09% 116
West Midlands 0 378 £492 -1.60% 138
North West -2 334 £523 +10.11% 181
South West +13 317 £525 - 171
Scotland +1 200 £483 -2.23% 84
East of England +18 136 £507 +1.40% 63
North East +12 106 £425 -18.27% 61
East Midlands +1 80 £488 +7.26% 42
Wales -4 44 £460 +43.49% 38
Northern Ireland +19 22 £475 +7.95% 58
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
1 341 (6.07%) Confluence
2 136 (2.42%) SharePoint
3 133 (2.37%) Apache Spark
4 121 (2.15%) Apache Airflow
5 107 (1.90%) Apache
6 83 (1.48%) SAS
7 44 (0.78%) CMS
8 37 (0.66%) IIS
9 35 (0.62%) Jupyter
10 27 (0.48%) Microsoft Exchange
11 25 (0.44%) nginx
12 16 (0.28%) WebSphere
13 15 (0.27%) Camunda
14 13 (0.23%) Anypoint
14 13 (0.23%) Palantir Foundry
15 11 (0.20%) Oracle Workflow
16 10 (0.18%) OpenStack
17 9 (0.16%) Appian
18 8 (0.14%) Tomcat
18 8 (0.14%) WebLogic
Applications
1 62 (1.10%) Microsoft Project
2 58 (1.03%) Microsoft Excel
3 38 (0.68%) Microsoft Office
4 35 (0.62%) MS Visio
5 26 (0.46%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 10 (0.18%) CPLEX
7 9 (0.16%) Spreadsheet
8 8 (0.14%) Chatbot
9 7 (0.12%) Trello
10 4 (0.071%) 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 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%) Payment Gateway
3 10 (0.18%) Remedy ITSM
4 9 (0.16%) Magento
5 8 (0.14%) Dynamics AX
5 8 (0.14%) Oracle ERP
5 8 (0.14%) SAP MDG
6 6 (0.11%) Maximo
7 5 (0.089%) OpenText MBPM
7 5 (0.089%) Oracle BPM
7 5 (0.089%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
8 4 (0.071%) Endur
8 4 (0.071%) SAP ERP
9 3 (0.053%) Findur
9 3 (0.053%) Shopify
9 3 (0.053%) Teamcenter
9 3 (0.053%) Temenos T24
Cloud Services
1 3,036 (54.04%) Azure
2 2,004 (35.67%) AWS
3 1,722 (30.65%) Azure DevOps
4 954 (16.98%) GitHub
5 725 (12.90%) GCP
6 590 (10.50%) GitHub Actions
7 456 (8.12%) Power Platform
8 450 (8.01%) Serverless
9 303 (5.39%) Amazon S3
10 269 (4.79%) AWS Lambda
11 257 (4.57%) Entra ID
12 249 (4.43%) AWS CloudFormation
13 234 (4.17%) Amazon EKS
14 229 (4.08%) Azure AKS
15 205 (3.65%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 194 (3.45%) Azure Monitor
17 190 (3.38%) Azure Data Factory
18 181 (3.22%) Amazon EC2
19 160 (2.85%) Dynamics 365
20 153 (2.72%) Power Automate
Communications & Networking
1 242 (4.31%) Firewall
2 157 (2.79%) DNS
3 122 (2.17%) VPN
4 114 (2.03%) Network Security
5 56 (1.00%) TCP/IP
6 49 (0.87%) WAN
7 43 (0.77%) SSL
8 37 (0.66%) DHCP
9 36 (0.64%) SD-WAN
10 33 (0.59%) BGP
11 31 (0.55%) Internet
12 28 (0.50%) Wi-Fi
13 27 (0.48%) HTTP
14 25 (0.44%) OSPF
15 21 (0.37%) SAN
16 20 (0.36%) VLAN
17 18 (0.32%) SSH
17 18 (0.32%) VXLAN
18 17 (0.30%) BIG-IP
18 17 (0.30%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
Database & Business Intelligence
1 310 (5.52%) Power BI
2 294 (5.23%) SQL Server
3 283 (5.04%) PostgreSQL
4 194 (3.45%) NoSQL
5 189 (3.36%) Data Warehouse
6 182 (3.24%) Relational Database
7 179 (3.19%) MongoDB
8 154 (2.74%) Data Lake
9 114 (2.03%) Amazon RDS
10 107 (1.90%) Metadata
11 104 (1.85%) Azure SQL Database
12 102 (1.82%) DynamoDB
13 87 (1.55%) Delta Lake
14 80 (1.42%) Oracle Database
15 72 (1.28%) Amazon Redshift
16 69 (1.23%) Redis
17 68 (1.21%) MySQL
18 67 (1.19%) Big Data
19 63 (1.12%) Amazon Athena
20 54 (0.96%) SQL Server Integration Services
Development Applications
1 813 (14.47%) Jenkins
2 763 (13.58%) Git
3 682 (12.14%) JIRA
4 577 (10.27%) GitLab
5 129 (2.30%) Selenium
6 103 (1.83%) Postman
7 102 (1.82%) SonarQube
8 97 (1.73%) JUnit
9 84 (1.50%) Bitbucket
10 82 (1.46%) Maven
11 70 (1.25%) REST Assured
12 65 (1.16%) Cypress.io
13 64 (1.14%) JMeter
14 60 (1.07%) Cucumber
15 52 (0.93%) Gradle
16 48 (0.85%) Mockito
17 46 (0.82%) Gatling
18 41 (0.73%) LoadRunner
19 37 (0.66%) Visual Studio
20 36 (0.64%) Artifactory
General
1 1,395 (24.83%) Social Skills
2 1,001 (17.82%) Finance
3 825 (14.68%) Public Sector
4 480 (8.54%) Analytical Skills
5 367 (6.53%) Banking
6 139 (2.47%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 102 (1.82%) Retail
8 100 (1.78%) Documentation Skills
9 67 (1.19%) Influencing Skills
9 67 (1.19%) Legal
9 67 (1.19%) Organisational Skills
10 56 (1.00%) Marketing
11 49 (0.87%) Investment Banking
12 47 (0.84%) Military
13 45 (0.80%) Law
14 43 (0.77%) Financial Institution
14 43 (0.77%) Telecoms
15 41 (0.73%) Front Office
16 40 (0.71%) Manufacturing
17 37 (0.66%) Aerospace
Job Titles
1 1,095 (19.49%) DevOps Engineer
2 944 (16.80%) Developer
3 807 (14.36%) Senior
4 618 (11.00%) Architect
5 541 (9.63%) Lead
6 338 (6.02%) Azure Engineer
7 320 (5.70%) Data Engineer
8 289 (5.14%) Analyst
9 275 (4.89%) AWS Engineer
10 232 (4.13%) Platform Engineer
11 211 (3.76%) Cloud Engineer
12 205 (3.65%) Java Developer
13 200 (3.56%) Senior DevOps
14 191 (3.40%) AWS DevOps
15 184 (3.28%) Azure DevOps Engineer
15 184 (3.28%) Senior DevOps Engineer
16 179 (3.19%) Solutions Architect
17 177 (3.15%) AWS DevOps Engineer
18 152 (2.71%) Senior Developer
19 150 (2.67%) Software Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 570 (10.15%) REST
2 488 (8.69%) .NET
3 335 (5.96%) RESTful
4 328 (5.84%) Kafka
5 316 (5.62%) Spring
6 296 (5.27%) React
6 296 (5.27%) Spring Boot
7 221 (3.93%) Node.js
8 173 (3.08%) PySpark
9 171 (3.04%) JSON
10 166 (2.95%) OAuth
10 166 (2.95%) Playwright
11 160 (2.85%) AngularJS
12 146 (2.60%) SOAP
13 139 (2.47%) .NET Framework
14 127 (2.26%) HTML
15 118 (2.10%) OAuth2
16 110 (1.96%) Middleware
17 107 (1.90%) YAML
18 105 (1.87%) CSS
Miscellaneous
1 1,002 (17.84%) Cloud Native
2 401 (7.14%) Product Ownership
3 272 (4.84%) Distributed Systems
4 166 (2.95%) Onboarding
5 163 (2.90%) Enterprise Software
6 155 (2.76%) Legacy Systems
7 133 (2.37%) Hybrid Cloud
8 89 (1.58%) Data Protection Act
9 87 (1.55%) Public Cloud
10 85 (1.51%) Self-Motivation
11 76 (1.35%) Management Information System
12 75 (1.33%) Data Centre
13 73 (1.30%) Data Structures
14 66 (1.17%) AI Agents
14 66 (1.17%) Security Posture
15 63 (1.12%) Replication
16 57 (1.01%) Enterprise Cloud
16 57 (1.01%) Virtual Team
17 50 (0.89%) Mobile App
18 47 (0.84%) NHS
Operating Systems
1 489 (8.70%) Linux
2 298 (5.30%) Windows
3 103 (1.83%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 83 (1.48%) Unix
5 77 (1.37%) Windows Server
6 33 (0.59%) VMS
7 29 (0.52%) Ubuntu
8 26 (0.46%) Apple iOS
9 17 (0.30%) Android
10 11 (0.20%) 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 3,307 (58.86%) CI/CD
2 2,261 (40.25%) Agile
3 1,530 (27.23%) Infrastructure as Code
4 930 (16.55%) Containerisation
5 902 (16.06%) Continuous Improvement
6 867 (15.43%) Problem-Solving
7 856 (15.24%) Test Automation
8 826 (14.70%) Microservices
9 766 (13.63%) Stakeholder Management
10 748 (13.31%) AI
11 712 (12.67%) Observability
12 707 (12.58%) Scrum
13 675 (12.01%) Platform Engineering
14 671 (11.94%) Migration
15 663 (11.80%) Software Engineering
16 599 (10.66%) Analytics
17 521 (9.27%) Technical Leadership
18 510 (9.08%) Stakeholder Engagement
19 499 (8.88%) Data Modelling
20 462 (8.22%) Roadmaps
Programming Languages
1 1,580 (28.12%) Python
2 1,033 (18.39%) SQL
3 796 (14.17%) Java
4 506 (9.01%) C#
5 454 (8.08%) Bash
6 452 (8.05%) JavaScript
7 428 (7.62%) PowerShell
8 311 (5.54%) TypeScript
9 216 (3.84%) Bicep
10 110 (1.96%) Go
11 69 (1.23%) Apex Code
11 69 (1.23%) T-SQL
12 67 (1.19%) PL/SQL
13 63 (1.12%) Shell Script
14 55 (0.98%) Groovy
15 53 (0.94%) Scala
16 32 (0.57%) C++
17 30 (0.53%) Data Analysis Expressions
18 28 (0.50%) Kotlin
19 26 (0.46%) C
Qualifications
1 1,780 (31.68%) Security Cleared
2 1,498 (26.66%) SC Cleared
3 327 (5.82%) Degree
4 224 (3.99%) Azure Certification
5 215 (3.83%) BPSS Clearance
6 195 (3.47%) DV Cleared
7 193 (3.44%) AWS Certification
8 125 (2.22%) Computer Science Degree
9 84 (1.50%) Microsoft Certification
10 78 (1.39%) CISSP
11 61 (1.09%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
12 60 (1.07%) ISTQB
13 54 (0.96%) Cisco Certification
14 45 (0.80%) PMP
15 41 (0.73%) PMI Certification
16 38 (0.68%) Master's Degree
17 32 (0.57%) CISM
18 30 (0.53%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
19 25 (0.44%) ITIL Certification
20 23 (0.41%) CCNP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 511 (9.10%) QA
2 275 (4.89%) Data Quality
3 195 (3.47%) Accessibility
4 152 (2.71%) GDPR
5 91 (1.62%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 78 (1.39%) WCAG
7 76 (1.35%) NIST
8 52 (0.93%) NCSC
9 45 (0.80%) PMO
10 40 (0.71%) PCI DSS
11 35 (0.62%) SLA
12 28 (0.50%) GRC
13 27 (0.48%) Sarbanes-Oxley
14 12 (0.21%) Disclosure Scotland
15 11 (0.20%) HIPAA
16 10 (0.18%) SOC 2
17 9 (0.16%) Actionable Recommendations
17 9 (0.16%) Cyber Essentials
17 9 (0.16%) PSD2
18 8 (0.14%) HL7
System Software
1 1,108 (19.72%) Docker
2 180 (3.20%) Active Directory
3 81 (1.44%) Virtual Machines
3 81 (1.44%) VMware Infrastructure
4 29 (0.52%) vSphere
5 23 (0.41%) VMware NSX
6 21 (0.37%) Hyper-V
7 17 (0.30%) VMware ESXi
8 15 (0.27%) Squid
9 14 (0.25%) Oracle RAC
9 14 (0.25%) Postfix
9 14 (0.25%) Virtual Desktop
10 8 (0.14%) KVM
11 7 (0.12%) IAG
12 6 (0.11%) Corosync
12 6 (0.11%) HDFS
12 6 (0.11%) NFS
13 5 (0.089%) Microsoft App-V
13 5 (0.089%) SRDF
14 4 (0.071%) Varnish
Systems Management
1 1,615 (28.75%) Terraform
2 1,446 (25.74%) Kubernetes
3 525 (9.34%) Ansible
4 371 (6.60%) Grafana
5 313 (5.57%) Prometheus
6 89 (1.58%) Argo
7 62 (1.10%) Puppet
8 59 (1.05%) Single Sign-On
9 43 (0.77%) Istio
9 43 (0.77%) Progress Chef
10 35 (0.62%) Microsoft Intune
11 31 (0.55%) Packer
12 23 (0.41%) vCenter Server
13 18 (0.32%) HP ALM
13 18 (0.32%) Kibana
13 18 (0.32%) SCCM
14 17 (0.30%) Oracle RMAN
15 16 (0.28%) Kustomize
16 14 (0.25%) Kubeflow
17 13 (0.23%) NetBackup
Vendors
1 1,017 (18.10%) Microsoft
2 315 (5.61%) Oracle
3 273 (4.86%) Databricks
4 269 (4.79%) Google
5 205 (3.65%) ServiceNow
6 191 (3.40%) Salesforce
7 178 (3.17%) Splunk
8 141 (2.51%) Dynatrace
9 128 (2.28%) SAP
10 116 (2.06%) VMware
11 108 (1.92%) Red Hat
12 62 (1.10%) IBM
13 60 (1.07%) Informatica
13 60 (1.07%) OpenAI
14 58 (1.03%) Atlassian
15 53 (0.94%) MuleSoft
16 48 (0.85%) Cisco
17 42 (0.75%) AppDynamics
17 42 (0.75%) Okta
18 40 (0.71%) Foundry