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

6 months to
3 Oct 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 14 14 14
Rank change year-on-year 0 0 -1
Contract jobs citing DevOps 5,650 3,748 3,764
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.30% 11.31% 9.90%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.19% 12.49% 11.52%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,927 2,613 2,497
10th Percentile £381 £360 £381
25th Percentile £438 £425 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £520 £550
Median % change year-on-year +0.96% -5.45% -4.35%
75th Percentile £625 £619 £650
90th Percentile £700 £700 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £550
% change year-on-year - -9.09% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 120 23 66
10th Percentile £38.15 £44.25 £55.00
25th Percentile £61.56 £54.88 £67.19
Median hourly rate £69.50 £67.00 £70.00
Median % change year-on-year +3.73% -4.29% +7.69%
75th Percentile £78.06 £88.13 £74.33
90th Percentile £92.63 £95.00 £85.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £70.00 £67.00 £70.00
% change year-on-year +4.48% -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 46,356 30,019 32,670
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.50% 90.58% 85.90%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,940 18,640 19,751
10th Percentile £325 £300 £308
25th Percentile £425 £404 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -2.78%
75th Percentile £632 £625 £638
90th Percentile £736 £725 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 3,287 1,869 1,348
10th Percentile £13.69 £14.32 £15.00
25th Percentile £17.17 £17.30 £20.12
Median hourly rate £38.72 £25.15 £42.27
Median % change year-on-year +53.96% -40.49% -0.55%
75th Percentile £65.60 £43.75 £65.00
90th Percentile £78.75 £65.00 £74.44
UK excluding London median hourly rate £39.02 £22.32 £43.00
% change year-on-year +74.86% -48.10% +1.18%

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 October 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 October 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 October 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 -1 4,795 £525 - 5,235
London -1 2,531 £550 - 2,458
UK excluding London -4 2,409 £500 - 3,717
Work from Home -1 1,595 £525 +2.44% 3,314
North of England -3 800 £500 +5.26% 907
South East -12 451 £525 +5.00% 701
Midlands -7 418 £488 -5.34% 415
Yorkshire -3 390 £500 +1.46% 268
West Midlands -8 335 £500 -4.76% 249
South West +5 332 £550 +1.38% 399
North West -3 316 £525 +16.67% 481
Scotland -1 225 £475 -5.00% 551
East of England +2 155 £505 -6.05% 301
North East +11 110 £450 -18.18% 169
East Midlands -8 81 £459 +9.23% 166
Wales -6 44 £425 +13.33% 254
Northern Ireland +24 24 £525 - 219
Channel Islands - 2 £500 -

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
1 348 (6.16%) Confluence
2 159 (2.81%) SharePoint
3 136 (2.41%) Apache Spark
4 122 (2.16%) Apache Airflow
5 121 (2.14%) Apache
6 50 (0.88%) SAS
7 44 (0.78%) Jupyter
8 43 (0.76%) CMS
9 30 (0.53%) IIS
10 27 (0.48%) nginx
11 20 (0.35%) Microsoft Exchange
12 16 (0.28%) Camunda
13 13 (0.23%) OpenStack
14 12 (0.21%) Anypoint
14 12 (0.21%) WebLogic
15 11 (0.19%) Oracle SOA Suite
15 11 (0.19%) WebSphere
16 10 (0.18%) Tomcat
17 9 (0.16%) Appian
18 8 (0.14%) Palantir Foundry
Applications
1 69 (1.22%) Microsoft Excel
2 53 (0.94%) Microsoft Project
2 53 (0.94%) MS Visio
3 38 (0.67%) Microsoft Office
4 35 (0.62%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 14 (0.25%) Chatbot
6 8 (0.14%) CPLEX
6 8 (0.14%) Spreadsheet
6 8 (0.14%) Windchill
7 5 (0.088%) Notion
7 5 (0.088%) Trello
8 3 (0.053%) Mingle
9 2 (0.035%) Adobe XD
9 2 (0.035%) Gliffy
10 1 (0.018%) EngageOne
10 1 (0.018%) Mozilla Thunderbird
10 1 (0.018%) Sketch
10 1 (0.018%) Weka
Business Applications
1 82 (1.45%) Dynamics CRM
2 47 (0.83%) SAP S/4HANA
3 15 (0.27%) Oracle EBS
4 12 (0.21%) Payment Gateway
4 12 (0.21%) SAP MDG
5 9 (0.16%) Magento
5 9 (0.16%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
6 7 (0.12%) Oracle EBS R12
7 6 (0.11%) Aladdin
7 6 (0.11%) Dynamics AX
7 6 (0.11%) Remedy ITSM
8 5 (0.088%) OpenText MBPM
8 5 (0.088%) Oracle BPM
8 5 (0.088%) Temenos T24
9 4 (0.071%) Oracle Payroll
9 4 (0.071%) Teamcenter
9 4 (0.071%) Workday HCM
10 3 (0.053%) Endur
10 3 (0.053%) Maximo
10 3 (0.053%) Oracle ERP
Cloud Services
1 3,052 (54.02%) Azure
2 2,029 (35.91%) AWS
3 1,751 (30.99%) Azure DevOps
4 984 (17.42%) GitHub
5 760 (13.45%) GCP
6 623 (11.03%) GitHub Actions
7 495 (8.76%) Power Platform
8 471 (8.34%) Serverless
9 315 (5.58%) Amazon S3
10 286 (5.06%) AWS Lambda
11 271 (4.80%) Amazon EKS
12 258 (4.57%) Entra ID
13 257 (4.55%) Amazon CloudWatch
14 240 (4.25%) AWS CloudFormation
15 214 (3.79%) Azure AKS
16 209 (3.70%) Azure Monitor
17 203 (3.59%) Amazon EC2
18 198 (3.50%) Azure Data Factory
19 193 (3.42%) Dynamics 365
20 177 (3.13%) Amazon ECS
Communications & Networking
1 240 (4.25%) Firewall
2 174 (3.08%) DNS
3 120 (2.12%) VPN
4 114 (2.02%) Network Security
5 78 (1.38%) TCP/IP
6 55 (0.97%) SSL
7 53 (0.94%) DHCP
8 46 (0.81%) WAN
9 37 (0.65%) BGP
9 37 (0.65%) HTTP
10 30 (0.53%) Internet
11 28 (0.50%) SD-WAN
11 28 (0.50%) SSH
12 27 (0.48%) OSPF
13 21 (0.37%) LAN
13 21 (0.37%) Wi-Fi
14 20 (0.35%) VLAN
15 18 (0.32%) BIG-IP
15 18 (0.32%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
15 18 (0.32%) SAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 322 (5.70%) Power BI
2 304 (5.38%) PostgreSQL
3 298 (5.27%) SQL Server
4 213 (3.77%) Data Warehouse
5 189 (3.35%) MongoDB
6 182 (3.22%) Data Lake
6 182 (3.22%) NoSQL
7 164 (2.90%) Relational Database
8 153 (2.71%) Amazon RDS
9 128 (2.27%) Metadata
10 101 (1.79%) Azure SQL Database
11 89 (1.58%) DynamoDB
12 88 (1.56%) MySQL
13 87 (1.54%) Delta Lake
13 87 (1.54%) Oracle Database
14 84 (1.49%) Redis
15 69 (1.22%) Amazon Redshift
16 65 (1.15%) Big Data
17 64 (1.13%) SQL Server Integration Services
18 58 (1.03%) BigQuery
Development Applications
1 859 (15.20%) Git
2 808 (14.30%) Jenkins
3 671 (11.88%) JIRA
4 664 (11.75%) GitLab
5 144 (2.55%) Selenium
6 101 (1.79%) JUnit
7 98 (1.73%) Maven
8 96 (1.70%) SonarQube
9 95 (1.68%) Postman
10 81 (1.43%) Cucumber
11 77 (1.36%) REST Assured
12 72 (1.27%) Bitbucket
13 69 (1.22%) Cypress.io
14 68 (1.20%) Gradle
15 66 (1.17%) JMeter
16 55 (0.97%) Claude Code
17 49 (0.87%) Mockito
18 44 (0.78%) Sonatype Nexus
19 42 (0.74%) Gatling
19 42 (0.74%) Visual Studio
General
1 1,482 (26.23%) Social Skills
2 1,029 (18.21%) Finance
3 808 (14.30%) Public Sector
4 539 (9.54%) Analytical Skills
5 411 (7.27%) Banking
6 169 (2.99%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 112 (1.98%) Retail
8 91 (1.61%) Influencing Skills
9 77 (1.36%) Documentation Skills
10 58 (1.03%) Aerospace
10 58 (1.03%) Organisational Skills
11 57 (1.01%) Legal
12 56 (0.99%) Marketing
12 56 (0.99%) Military
13 55 (0.97%) Investment Banking
14 52 (0.92%) Telecoms
15 51 (0.90%) Manufacturing
16 44 (0.78%) Financial Institution
16 44 (0.78%) Law
17 42 (0.74%) Local Government
Job Titles
1 1,144 (20.25%) DevOps Engineer
2 923 (16.34%) Developer
3 864 (15.29%) Senior
4 636 (11.26%) Architect
5 541 (9.58%) Lead
6 347 (6.14%) Azure Engineer
7 312 (5.52%) Data Engineer
8 270 (4.78%) Analyst
9 261 (4.62%) AWS Engineer
10 229 (4.05%) Platform Engineer
11 208 (3.68%) Senior DevOps
12 207 (3.66%) Cloud Engineer
13 203 (3.59%) Azure DevOps Engineer
14 196 (3.47%) Java Developer
15 190 (3.36%) Senior DevOps Engineer
16 186 (3.29%) AWS DevOps
17 175 (3.10%) AWS DevOps Engineer
18 173 (3.06%) Solutions Architect
19 148 (2.62%) Senior Developer
20 144 (2.55%) Software Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 1,718 (30.41%) Terraform
2 663 (11.73%) REST
3 485 (8.58%) .NET
4 401 (7.10%) Kafka
5 364 (6.44%) RESTful
6 303 (5.36%) Spring
7 298 (5.27%) Spring Boot
8 295 (5.22%) React
9 195 (3.45%) OAuth
10 193 (3.42%) Node.js
11 188 (3.33%) JSON
12 157 (2.78%) Playwright
13 152 (2.69%) PySpark
14 149 (2.64%) HTML
15 135 (2.39%) CSS
16 133 (2.35%) .NET Framework
16 133 (2.35%) OAuth2
17 130 (2.30%) SOAP
18 127 (2.25%) Middleware
19 123 (2.18%) AngularJS
Miscellaneous
1 1,057 (18.71%) Cloud Native
2 427 (7.56%) Product Ownership
3 263 (4.65%) Distributed Systems
4 225 (3.98%) Enterprise Software
5 210 (3.72%) Onboarding
6 153 (2.71%) Hybrid Cloud
7 147 (2.60%) Legacy Systems
8 114 (2.02%) AI Agents
9 96 (1.70%) Management Information System
10 87 (1.54%) Self-Motivation
11 79 (1.40%) Data Protection Act
11 79 (1.40%) Public Cloud
12 76 (1.35%) Replication
13 74 (1.31%) Data Centre
13 74 (1.31%) Data Structures
13 74 (1.31%) Security Posture
14 64 (1.13%) PKI
15 61 (1.08%) Enterprise Cloud
16 58 (1.03%) Virtual Team
17 53 (0.94%) Mobile App
Operating Systems
1 576 (10.19%) Linux
2 321 (5.68%) Windows
3 125 (2.21%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 113 (2.00%) Unix
5 98 (1.73%) Windows Server
6 38 (0.67%) Ubuntu
7 35 (0.62%) VMS
8 30 (0.53%) Apple iOS
9 22 (0.39%) Android
10 17 (0.30%) CentOS
11 12 (0.21%) zOS
12 11 (0.19%) Amazon Linux
13 9 (0.16%) Windows Server 2016
13 9 (0.16%) Windows Server 2019
14 7 (0.12%) AIX
14 7 (0.12%) Solaris
15 6 (0.11%) Mac OS
16 4 (0.071%) Alpine Linux
16 4 (0.071%) Data ONTAP
16 4 (0.071%) Windows Server 2008
Processes & Methodologies
1 3,487 (61.72%) CI/CD
2 2,322 (41.10%) Agile
3 1,695 (30.00%) Infrastructure as Code
4 976 (17.27%) Continuous Improvement
5 971 (17.19%) Stakeholder Management
6 957 (16.94%) Containerisation
7 929 (16.44%) Test Automation
8 916 (16.21%) AI
9 900 (15.93%) Problem-Solving
10 837 (14.81%) Microservices
11 797 (14.11%) Observability
12 790 (13.98%) Platform Engineering
13 756 (13.38%) Software Engineering
14 699 (12.37%) Scrum
15 685 (12.12%) Migration
16 629 (11.13%) Technical Leadership
17 576 (10.19%) Analytics
18 532 (9.42%) Stakeholder Engagement
19 491 (8.69%) Roadmaps
20 485 (8.58%) Event-Driven
Programming Languages
1 1,659 (29.36%) Python
2 996 (17.63%) SQL
3 826 (14.62%) Java
4 517 (9.15%) Bash
5 505 (8.94%) C#
6 501 (8.87%) PowerShell
7 467 (8.27%) JavaScript
8 319 (5.65%) TypeScript
9 264 (4.67%) Bicep
10 131 (2.32%) Go
11 83 (1.47%) Shell Script
12 69 (1.22%) T-SQL
13 68 (1.20%) Scala
14 60 (1.06%) PL/SQL
15 59 (1.04%) Groovy
16 58 (1.03%) Apex Code
17 39 (0.69%) Data Analysis Expressions
18 34 (0.60%) C++
18 34 (0.60%) Perl
19 28 (0.50%) Kusto Query Language
Qualifications
1 1,815 (32.12%) Security Cleared
2 1,513 (26.78%) SC Cleared
3 371 (6.57%) Degree
4 249 (4.41%) Azure Certification
5 246 (4.35%) BPSS Clearance
6 243 (4.30%) DV Cleared
7 200 (3.54%) AWS Certification
8 147 (2.60%) Computer Science Degree
9 112 (1.98%) Microsoft Certification
10 74 (1.31%) CISSP
11 60 (1.06%) ISTQB
12 56 (0.99%) PMP
13 52 (0.92%) Cisco Certification
14 51 (0.90%) PMI Certification
15 48 (0.85%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
16 42 (0.74%) Master's Degree
17 28 (0.50%) CISM
18 27 (0.48%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
19 23 (0.41%) (ISC)2 CCSP
19 23 (0.41%) ITIL Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 557 (9.86%) QA
2 284 (5.03%) Data Quality
3 220 (3.89%) Accessibility
4 120 (2.12%) GDPR
5 88 (1.56%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 84 (1.49%) WCAG
7 69 (1.22%) NIST
8 54 (0.96%) NCSC
9 46 (0.81%) PMO
10 35 (0.62%) SLA
11 31 (0.55%) PCI DSS
12 28 (0.50%) GRC
13 23 (0.41%) ISO 20022
14 19 (0.34%) Sarbanes-Oxley
15 15 (0.27%) HIPAA
16 14 (0.25%) Cyber Essentials
16 14 (0.25%) Disclosure Scotland
16 14 (0.25%) SEPA
16 14 (0.25%) SOC 2
17 13 (0.23%) Actionable Recommendations
System Software
1 1,174 (20.78%) Docker
2 165 (2.92%) Active Directory
3 86 (1.52%) VMware Infrastructure
4 78 (1.38%) Virtual Machines
5 32 (0.57%) vSphere
6 24 (0.42%) VMware ESXi
7 22 (0.39%) Hyper-V
8 21 (0.37%) Virtual Desktop
9 14 (0.25%) VMware NSX
10 11 (0.19%) Squid
11 10 (0.18%) IAG
11 10 (0.18%) Oracle RAC
12 8 (0.14%) zsh
13 6 (0.11%) Apache ZooKeeper
13 6 (0.11%) Corosync
13 6 (0.11%) KVM
13 6 (0.11%) Microsoft App-V
13 6 (0.11%) Postfix
13 6 (0.11%) RACF
14 5 (0.088%) Virtual Servers
Systems Management
1 1,571 (27.81%) Kubernetes
2 552 (9.77%) Ansible
3 379 (6.71%) Grafana
4 326 (5.77%) Prometheus
5 76 (1.35%) Argo
6 59 (1.04%) Puppet
7 48 (0.85%) Microsoft Intune
7 48 (0.85%) Progress Chef
8 42 (0.74%) Single Sign-On
9 38 (0.67%) Packer
10 34 (0.60%) Kibana
11 31 (0.55%) Istio
12 23 (0.41%) Kubeflow
13 21 (0.37%) Kustomize
14 19 (0.34%) vCenter Server
15 17 (0.30%) Oracle RMAN
15 17 (0.30%) SCCM
16 14 (0.25%) HP ALM
17 13 (0.23%) Consul
17 13 (0.23%) Karpenter
Vendors
1 1,124 (19.89%) Microsoft
2 315 (5.58%) Databricks
3 307 (5.43%) Google
4 297 (5.26%) Oracle
5 201 (3.56%) ServiceNow
6 193 (3.42%) Splunk
7 170 (3.01%) Salesforce
8 147 (2.60%) Dynatrace
9 127 (2.25%) VMware
10 115 (2.04%) SAP
11 98 (1.73%) Red Hat
12 75 (1.33%) OpenAI
13 69 (1.22%) IBM
14 66 (1.17%) MuleSoft
15 60 (1.06%) Foundry
16 46 (0.81%) Informatica
17 43 (0.76%) Cisco
18 42 (0.74%) AppDynamics
19 39 (0.69%) Atlassian
20 38 (0.67%) Okta