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

6 months to
8 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 12 15 15
Rank change year-on-year +3 0 -2
Contract jobs citing DevOps 5,707 3,566 3,864
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.65% 10.84% 9.92%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.53% 11.98% 11.59%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,956 2,541 2,628
10th Percentile £385 £360 £381
25th Percentile £438 £425 £461
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £518 £550
Median % change year-on-year +1.45% -5.91% -4.35%
75th Percentile £613 £625 £650
90th Percentile £700 £725 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £494 £550
% change year-on-year +1.32% -10.27% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 124 26 87
10th Percentile £35.67 £32.63 £59.25
25th Percentile £56.25 £51.56 £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 £86.37 £74.22
90th Percentile £87.10 £93.75 £85.41
UK excluding London median hourly rate £67.50 £67.00 £70.00
% change year-on-year +0.75% -4.29% +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 45,557 29,755 33,330
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.99% 90.46% 85.57%
Number of daily rates quoted 28,078 18,625 21,348
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% -4.11%
75th Percentile £625 £625 £638
90th Percentile £725 £726 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,814 1,660 1,859
10th Percentile £14.25 £14.20 £14.00
25th Percentile £19.22 £17.32 £18.22
Median hourly rate £42.50 £25.15 £40.50
Median % change year-on-year +68.99% -37.90% -4.71%
75th Percentile £68.00 £50.00 £64.25
90th Percentile £82.25 £68.00 £74.45
UK excluding London median hourly rate £43.96 £23.10 £41.25
% change year-on-year +90.30% -44.00% +7.56%

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 8 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 8 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 8 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 4,880 £525 - 2,453
London +1 2,537 £550 - 1,320
UK excluding London +1 2,476 £500 +1.32% 1,362
Work from Home +1 1,634 £525 +2.44% 1,147
North of England 0 839 £500 +5.26% 399
South East -9 470 £525 +5.00% 368
Midlands -1 465 £490 -2.00% 192
Yorkshire +1 414 £500 +3.63% 117
West Midlands -2 382 £492 -4.47% 127
North West -3 332 £524 +11.49% 206
South West +11 322 £525 +0.96% 162
Scotland 0 203 £493 -1.10% 90
East of England +18 140 £505 +1.00% 80
North East +14 110 £425 -19.05% 78
East Midlands +2 78 £488 +7.26% 65
Wales -3 46 £500 +41.61% 41
Northern Ireland +19 22 £475 +7.95% 36
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
1 342 (5.99%) Confluence
2 136 (2.38%) SharePoint
3 134 (2.35%) Apache Spark
4 124 (2.17%) Apache Airflow
5 110 (1.93%) Apache
6 87 (1.52%) SAS
7 44 (0.77%) CMS
8 37 (0.65%) IIS
9 36 (0.63%) Jupyter
10 25 (0.44%) Microsoft Exchange
10 25 (0.44%) nginx
11 16 (0.28%) WebSphere
12 15 (0.26%) 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%) Mendix
17 8 (0.14%) Tomcat
Applications
1 63 (1.10%) Microsoft Project
2 59 (1.03%) Microsoft Excel
3 38 (0.67%) Microsoft Office
4 37 (0.65%) MS Visio
5 27 (0.47%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 11 (0.19%) Chatbot
7 9 (0.16%) CPLEX
7 9 (0.16%) Spreadsheet
8 7 (0.12%) Trello
9 5 (0.088%) Notion
10 1 (0.018%) 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 70 (1.23%) Dynamics CRM
2 39 (0.68%) 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 5 (0.088%) Maximo
7 5 (0.088%) OpenText MBPM
7 5 (0.088%) Oracle BPM
7 5 (0.088%) SAP ERP
8 4 (0.070%) Endur
9 3 (0.053%) Findur
9 3 (0.053%) SAP BPC
9 3 (0.053%) Shopify
9 3 (0.053%) Teamcenter
Cloud Services
1 3,094 (54.21%) Azure
2 2,012 (35.25%) AWS
3 1,763 (30.89%) Azure DevOps
4 985 (17.26%) GitHub
5 737 (12.91%) GCP
6 607 (10.64%) GitHub Actions
7 465 (8.15%) Power Platform
8 447 (7.83%) Serverless
9 299 (5.24%) Amazon S3
10 269 (4.71%) AWS Lambda
11 266 (4.66%) Entra ID
12 252 (4.42%) AWS CloudFormation
13 237 (4.15%) Amazon EKS
14 230 (4.03%) Azure AKS
15 211 (3.70%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 205 (3.59%) Azure Monitor
17 197 (3.45%) Azure Data Factory
18 183 (3.21%) Amazon EC2
19 162 (2.84%) Dynamics 365
20 153 (2.68%) Power Automate
Communications & Networking
1 248 (4.35%) Firewall
2 167 (2.93%) DNS
3 125 (2.19%) VPN
4 114 (2.00%) Network Security
5 64 (1.12%) TCP/IP
6 49 (0.86%) WAN
7 44 (0.77%) SSL
8 43 (0.75%) DHCP
9 36 (0.63%) SD-WAN
10 33 (0.58%) BGP
11 32 (0.56%) HTTP
11 32 (0.56%) Internet
12 28 (0.49%) Wi-Fi
13 25 (0.44%) OSPF
14 21 (0.37%) SAN
14 21 (0.37%) SSH
15 20 (0.35%) VLAN
16 18 (0.32%) VXLAN
17 17 (0.30%) BIG-IP
17 17 (0.30%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
Database & Business Intelligence
1 317 (5.55%) Power BI
2 294 (5.15%) SQL Server
3 279 (4.89%) PostgreSQL
4 202 (3.54%) Data Warehouse
5 194 (3.40%) NoSQL
6 184 (3.22%) Relational Database
7 177 (3.10%) MongoDB
8 167 (2.93%) Data Lake
9 119 (2.09%) Amazon RDS
10 116 (2.03%) Metadata
11 114 (2.00%) Azure SQL Database
12 99 (1.73%) DynamoDB
13 91 (1.59%) Delta Lake
14 83 (1.45%) Oracle Database
15 71 (1.24%) Redis
16 70 (1.23%) Amazon Redshift
16 70 (1.23%) MySQL
17 68 (1.19%) Big Data
18 62 (1.09%) Amazon Athena
19 56 (0.98%) SQL Server Integration Services
Development Applications
1 822 (14.40%) Jenkins
2 792 (13.88%) Git
3 693 (12.14%) JIRA
4 598 (10.48%) GitLab
5 133 (2.33%) Selenium
6 105 (1.84%) SonarQube
7 104 (1.82%) Postman
8 91 (1.59%) JUnit
9 86 (1.51%) Maven
10 85 (1.49%) Bitbucket
11 68 (1.19%) REST Assured
12 67 (1.17%) Cypress.io
12 67 (1.17%) JMeter
13 58 (1.02%) Cucumber
14 55 (0.96%) Gradle
15 50 (0.88%) Gatling
16 45 (0.79%) Mockito
17 44 (0.77%) LoadRunner
18 40 (0.70%) Claude Code
18 40 (0.70%) Visual Studio
General
1 1,432 (25.09%) Social Skills
2 1,016 (17.80%) Finance
3 839 (14.70%) Public Sector
4 505 (8.85%) Analytical Skills
5 379 (6.64%) Banking
6 147 (2.58%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 106 (1.86%) Retail
8 99 (1.73%) Documentation Skills
9 71 (1.24%) Influencing Skills
10 70 (1.23%) Organisational Skills
11 67 (1.17%) Legal
12 55 (0.96%) Marketing
13 51 (0.89%) Investment Banking
14 48 (0.84%) Telecoms
15 47 (0.82%) Military
16 45 (0.79%) Aerospace
17 44 (0.77%) Front Office
17 44 (0.77%) Law
18 43 (0.75%) Financial Institution
19 41 (0.72%) Manufacturing
Job Titles
1 1,106 (19.38%) DevOps Engineer
2 943 (16.52%) Developer
3 832 (14.58%) Senior
4 634 (11.11%) Architect
5 548 (9.60%) Lead
6 346 (6.06%) Azure Engineer
7 332 (5.82%) Data Engineer
8 288 (5.05%) Analyst
9 276 (4.84%) AWS Engineer
10 234 (4.10%) Platform Engineer
11 212 (3.71%) Cloud Engineer
12 205 (3.59%) Senior DevOps
13 195 (3.42%) Java Developer
14 193 (3.38%) AWS DevOps
15 189 (3.31%) Senior DevOps Engineer
16 187 (3.28%) Azure DevOps Engineer
17 182 (3.19%) Solutions Architect
18 180 (3.15%) AWS DevOps Engineer
19 153 (2.68%) Software Engineer
20 151 (2.65%) Senior Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 585 (10.25%) REST
2 494 (8.66%) .NET
3 344 (6.03%) RESTful
4 342 (5.99%) Kafka
5 304 (5.33%) Spring
6 293 (5.13%) React
7 284 (4.98%) Spring Boot
8 223 (3.91%) Node.js
9 178 (3.12%) JSON
10 172 (3.01%) OAuth
10 172 (3.01%) PySpark
11 169 (2.96%) Playwright
12 153 (2.68%) AngularJS
13 142 (2.49%) SOAP
14 140 (2.45%) .NET Framework
15 132 (2.31%) HTML
16 122 (2.14%) OAuth2
17 112 (1.96%) YAML
18 110 (1.93%) Middleware
19 109 (1.91%) CSS
Miscellaneous
1 1,032 (18.08%) Cloud Native
2 410 (7.18%) Product Ownership
3 270 (4.73%) Distributed Systems
4 172 (3.01%) Enterprise Software
5 171 (3.00%) Onboarding
6 157 (2.75%) Legacy Systems
7 143 (2.51%) Hybrid Cloud
8 91 (1.59%) Data Protection Act
9 86 (1.51%) Public Cloud
10 84 (1.47%) Self-Motivation
11 77 (1.35%) Management Information System
12 72 (1.26%) Data Centre
12 72 (1.26%) Data Structures
13 71 (1.24%) AI Agents
14 68 (1.19%) Security Posture
15 63 (1.10%) Replication
16 58 (1.02%) Enterprise Cloud
17 56 (0.98%) Mobile App
18 55 (0.96%) Virtual Team
19 48 (0.84%) Greenfield Project
Operating Systems
1 509 (8.92%) Linux
2 310 (5.43%) Windows
3 108 (1.89%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 87 (1.52%) Unix
5 84 (1.47%) Windows Server
6 35 (0.61%) VMS
7 29 (0.51%) Ubuntu
8 28 (0.49%) Apple iOS
9 18 (0.32%) Android
10 11 (0.19%) Solaris
11 9 (0.16%) Windows Server 2019
11 9 (0.16%) zOS
12 8 (0.14%) AIX
13 7 (0.12%) Amazon Linux
13 7 (0.12%) CentOS
13 7 (0.12%) Windows Server 2016
14 6 (0.11%) Mac OS
14 6 (0.11%) Windows Server 2008
15 4 (0.070%) Alpine Linux
15 4 (0.070%) Data ONTAP
Processes & Methodologies
1 3,371 (59.07%) CI/CD
2 2,288 (40.09%) Agile
3 1,573 (27.56%) Infrastructure as Code
4 945 (16.56%) Containerisation
5 926 (16.23%) Continuous Improvement
6 885 (15.51%) Test Automation
7 882 (15.45%) Problem-Solving
8 831 (14.56%) Microservices
9 792 (13.88%) AI
10 791 (13.86%) Stakeholder Management
11 729 (12.77%) Observability
12 711 (12.46%) Scrum
13 697 (12.21%) Platform Engineering
14 690 (12.09%) Software Engineering
15 680 (11.92%) Migration
16 625 (10.95%) Analytics
17 543 (9.51%) Technical Leadership
18 533 (9.34%) Stakeholder Engagement
19 515 (9.02%) Data Modelling
20 470 (8.24%) Roadmaps
Programming Languages
1 1,628 (28.53%) Python
2 1,053 (18.45%) SQL
3 803 (14.07%) Java
4 519 (9.09%) C#
5 470 (8.24%) Bash
6 468 (8.20%) JavaScript
7 450 (7.89%) PowerShell
8 318 (5.57%) TypeScript
9 226 (3.96%) Bicep
10 104 (1.82%) Go
11 71 (1.24%) Shell Script
12 70 (1.23%) Apex Code
12 70 (1.23%) T-SQL
13 65 (1.14%) PL/SQL
14 63 (1.10%) Scala
15 56 (0.98%) Groovy
16 33 (0.58%) C++
17 31 (0.54%) Data Analysis Expressions
18 27 (0.47%) C
18 27 (0.47%) Kotlin
Qualifications
1 1,816 (31.82%) Security Cleared
2 1,529 (26.79%) SC Cleared
3 330 (5.78%) Degree
4 227 (3.98%) Azure Certification
5 222 (3.89%) BPSS Clearance
6 194 (3.40%) AWS Certification
7 193 (3.38%) DV Cleared
8 127 (2.23%) Computer Science Degree
9 85 (1.49%) Microsoft Certification
10 82 (1.44%) CISSP
11 63 (1.10%) ISTQB
12 60 (1.05%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 56 (0.98%) Cisco Certification
14 46 (0.81%) PMP
15 43 (0.75%) PMI Certification
16 38 (0.67%) Master's Degree
17 33 (0.58%) CISM
18 31 (0.54%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
19 26 (0.46%) ITIL Certification
20 24 (0.42%) (ISC)2 CCSP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 519 (9.09%) QA
2 291 (5.10%) Data Quality
3 197 (3.45%) Accessibility
4 154 (2.70%) GDPR
5 96 (1.68%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 79 (1.38%) WCAG
7 77 (1.35%) NIST
8 55 (0.96%) NCSC
9 47 (0.82%) PMO
10 39 (0.68%) PCI DSS
11 35 (0.61%) SLA
12 28 (0.49%) GRC
12 28 (0.49%) Sarbanes-Oxley
13 12 (0.21%) ISO 20022
14 11 (0.19%) Disclosure Scotland
14 11 (0.19%) HIPAA
15 10 (0.18%) Actionable Recommendations
15 10 (0.18%) Cyber Essentials
16 9 (0.16%) PSD2
16 9 (0.16%) SEPA
System Software
1 1,138 (19.94%) Docker
2 184 (3.22%) Active Directory
3 85 (1.49%) VMware Infrastructure
4 82 (1.44%) Virtual Machines
5 26 (0.46%) vSphere
6 25 (0.44%) Hyper-V
7 20 (0.35%) VMware NSX
8 17 (0.30%) VMware ESXi
9 15 (0.26%) Virtual Desktop
10 14 (0.25%) Oracle RAC
10 14 (0.25%) Squid
11 12 (0.21%) Postfix
12 8 (0.14%) IAG
12 8 (0.14%) KVM
13 7 (0.12%) zsh
14 6 (0.11%) Corosync
14 6 (0.11%) HDFS
14 6 (0.11%) NFS
15 5 (0.088%) Microsoft App-V
15 5 (0.088%) SRDF
Systems Management
1 1,653 (28.96%) Terraform
2 1,480 (25.93%) Kubernetes
3 534 (9.36%) Ansible
4 375 (6.57%) Grafana
5 317 (5.55%) Prometheus
6 86 (1.51%) Argo
7 64 (1.12%) Puppet
8 60 (1.05%) Single Sign-On
9 46 (0.81%) Istio
9 46 (0.81%) Progress Chef
10 35 (0.61%) Microsoft Intune
11 33 (0.58%) Packer
12 20 (0.35%) vCenter Server
13 19 (0.33%) Kibana
14 18 (0.32%) Kustomize
14 18 (0.32%) SCCM
15 17 (0.30%) Oracle RMAN
16 16 (0.28%) HP ALM
17 14 (0.25%) Kubeflow
18 13 (0.23%) Consul
Vendors
1 1,050 (18.40%) Microsoft
2 315 (5.52%) Oracle
3 284 (4.98%) Databricks
4 280 (4.91%) Google
5 206 (3.61%) ServiceNow
6 190 (3.33%) Salesforce
7 181 (3.17%) Splunk
8 143 (2.51%) Dynatrace
9 125 (2.19%) SAP
10 119 (2.09%) VMware
11 108 (1.89%) Red Hat
12 65 (1.14%) IBM
13 62 (1.09%) OpenAI
14 61 (1.07%) Informatica
15 55 (0.96%) MuleSoft
16 54 (0.95%) Atlassian
17 49 (0.86%) Cisco
18 45 (0.79%) Foundry
19 43 (0.75%) AppDynamics
19 43 (0.75%) Okta