DevOps Contract Job Trends

DevOps
UK

The table below provides summary statistics and contractor rates for jobs requiring DevOps skills. It covers vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 18 September 2025, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
18 Sep 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 14 14 13
Rank change year-on-year 0 -1 -5
Contract jobs citing DevOps 3,671 3,818 5,066
As % of all contract jobs advertised in the UK 11.14% 9.91% 10.29%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.31% 11.57% 11.55%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,557 2,564 3,697
10th Percentile £363 £381 £413
25th Percentile £425 £463 £481
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £520 £550 £575
Median % change year-on-year -5.45% -4.35% -2.13%
75th Percentile £625 £650 £675
90th Percentile £700 £727 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £550 £550
% change year-on-year -9.09% - +1.85%
Number of hourly rates quoted 24 71 104
10th Percentile £45.13 £57.50 £46.18
25th Percentile £52.88 £65.00 £52.38
Median hourly rate £67.00 £70.00 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year -4.29% +7.69% -0.92%
75th Percentile £87.81 £74.44 £78.00
90th Percentile £95.00 £85.25 £85.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £67.00 £70.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year -4.29% +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 29,826 33,000 43,850
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 90.52% 85.68% 89.07%
Number of daily rates quoted 18,546 20,284 29,794
10th Percentile £300 £308 £313
25th Percentile £404 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £540
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% -2.78% -1.82%
75th Percentile £625 £638 £650
90th Percentile £725 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £500 £500
% change year-on-year -5.00% - -
Number of hourly rates quoted 1,802 1,460 1,537
10th Percentile £14.25 £14.84 £14.25
25th Percentile £17.30 £20.00 £18.70
Median hourly rate £25.15 £43.00 £43.00
Median % change year-on-year -41.51% - +48.28%
75th Percentile £44.78 £65.00 £65.00
90th Percentile £67.00 £75.00 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £22.56 £43.00 £41.90
% change year-on-year -47.53% +2.63% +80.76%

DevOps
Job Vacancy Trend

Job postings citing DevOps as a proportion of all IT jobs advertised.

Job vacancy trend for DevOps 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 18 September 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 18 September 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 18 September 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 0 3,017 £525 -4.55% 2,091
London -2 1,603 £550 - 849
UK excluding London +4 1,547 £500 -9.09% 1,710
Work from Home -1 1,220 £514 -6.55% 1,384
North of England +3 480 £475 -8.65% 409
South East +4 334 £500 -14.89% 555
Midlands +11 291 £513 -6.82% 232
Yorkshire 0 257 £484 -3.25% 123
West Midlands +14 228 £525 -8.70% 137
Scotland +3 212 £500 +8.11% 155
North West +1 211 £466 -11.19% 236
South West -4 137 £525 -11.02% 177
East of England +34 75 £523 -5.00% 121
East Midlands +12 63 £450 +1.12% 86
Wales +13 40 £375 -14.29% 66
North East -16 13 £520 -20.00% 54
Northern Ireland -15 6 £470 -18.26% 14

DevOps
Co-occurring Skills and Capabilities by Category

The follow tables expand on the table above by listing co-occurrences grouped by category. The same employment type, locality and period is covered with up to 20 co-occurrences shown in each of the following categories:

Application Platforms
1 220 (5.99%) Confluence
2 95 (2.59%) Apache
3 60 (1.63%) SharePoint
4 55 (1.50%) Apache Spark
5 52 (1.42%) Apache Airflow
6 41 (1.12%) CMS
7 34 (0.93%) nginx
8 30 (0.82%) SAS
9 28 (0.76%) CICS
9 28 (0.76%) JBoss
9 28 (0.76%) Microsoft Exchange
10 26 (0.71%) IIS
10 26 (0.71%) WebLogic
11 23 (0.63%) WebSphere
12 20 (0.54%) OpenStack
13 18 (0.49%) Oracle SOA Suite
14 16 (0.44%) Anypoint
14 16 (0.44%) Mule
15 15 (0.41%) Oracle Service Bus
16 14 (0.38%) WordPress
Applications
1 52 (1.42%) Microsoft Excel
2 32 (0.87%) Microsoft Office
3 31 (0.84%) Microsoft Project
4 23 (0.63%) MS Visio
5 18 (0.49%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 14 (0.38%) Trello
7 12 (0.33%) Mozilla Thunderbird
8 10 (0.27%) Chatbot
9 2 (0.054%) Notion
10 1 (0.027%) Adobe Creative Suite
10 1 (0.027%) InVision
10 1 (0.027%) Moqups
10 1 (0.027%) Revit
10 1 (0.027%) Sketch
Business Applications
1 41 (1.12%) Dynamics CRM
2 28 (0.76%) Endur
2 28 (0.76%) Oracle BPM
3 18 (0.49%) SAP S/4HANA
4 17 (0.46%) VisionPLUS
5 15 (0.41%) Remedy ITSM
6 13 (0.35%) Aladdin
7 12 (0.33%) Maximo
8 11 (0.30%) FLEXCUBE
9 6 (0.16%) Oracle EBS
10 5 (0.14%) Dynamics AX
10 5 (0.14%) Payment Gateway
11 4 (0.11%) Fidessa
11 4 (0.11%) SAP PM
11 4 (0.11%) Teamcenter
11 4 (0.11%) thinkFolio
12 2 (0.054%) NetSuite
12 2 (0.054%) Oracle ERP
12 2 (0.054%) SAP ERP
12 2 (0.054%) Temenos T24
Cloud Services
1 1,742 (47.45%) Azure
2 1,354 (36.88%) AWS
3 960 (26.15%) Azure DevOps
4 491 (13.38%) GitHub
5 455 (12.39%) GCP
6 360 (9.81%) Serverless
7 300 (8.17%) GitHub Actions
8 232 (6.32%) Amazon S3
9 230 (6.27%) Power Platform
10 202 (5.50%) Amazon CloudWatch
11 201 (5.48%) AWS CloudFormation
12 196 (5.34%) AWS Lambda
13 169 (4.60%) Amazon EC2
14 145 (3.95%) Azure AKS
15 139 (3.79%) SaaS
16 119 (3.24%) Amazon EKS
17 118 (3.21%) Azure Data Factory
17 118 (3.21%) PaaS
18 117 (3.19%) Virtual Private Cloud
19 116 (3.16%) Entra ID
Communications & Networking
1 199 (5.42%) Firewall
2 142 (3.87%) DNS
3 82 (2.23%) VPN
4 76 (2.07%) SSL
5 70 (1.91%) TCP/IP
6 69 (1.88%) HTTP
7 57 (1.55%) Network Security
8 47 (1.28%) SMTP
9 35 (0.95%) SSH
10 30 (0.82%) HTTPS
11 28 (0.76%) FTP
12 26 (0.71%) DHCP
13 24 (0.65%) BGP
13 24 (0.65%) WAN
14 18 (0.49%) LAN
14 18 (0.49%) OpenLDAP
15 15 (0.41%) Kerberos
15 15 (0.41%) MPLS
15 15 (0.41%) OSPF
16 12 (0.33%) IMAP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 244 (6.65%) PostgreSQL
2 184 (5.01%) SQL Server
3 160 (4.36%) NoSQL
4 152 (4.14%) Amazon RDS
5 149 (4.06%) Power BI
6 127 (3.46%) MongoDB
7 123 (3.35%) Relational Database
8 78 (2.12%) Oracle Database
9 73 (1.99%) Azure SQL Database
9 73 (1.99%) Data Warehouse
10 67 (1.83%) Data Lake
11 63 (1.72%) DynamoDB
12 60 (1.63%) MySQL
13 57 (1.55%) Big Data
14 56 (1.53%) Redis
15 54 (1.47%) Elasticsearch
16 51 (1.39%) Amazon Aurora
17 39 (1.06%) Delta Lake
18 36 (0.98%) Metadata
19 26 (0.71%) BigQuery
Development Applications
1 705 (19.20%) Jenkins
2 579 (15.77%) Git
3 518 (14.11%) JIRA
4 424 (11.55%) GitLab
5 123 (3.35%) Selenium
6 114 (3.11%) SonarQube
7 107 (2.91%) JUnit
8 95 (2.59%) Bitbucket
9 86 (2.34%) Postman
10 85 (2.32%) Sonatype Nexus
11 80 (2.18%) Cypress.io
12 72 (1.96%) Gradle
13 70 (1.91%) Maven
14 67 (1.83%) Liquibase
15 61 (1.66%) Cucumber
16 55 (1.50%) Mockito
17 51 (1.39%) TeamCity
18 43 (1.17%) Visual Studio
19 37 (1.01%) JMeter
20 35 (0.95%) Artifactory
General
1 1,069 (29.12%) Social Skills
2 708 (19.29%) Finance
3 441 (12.01%) Public Sector
4 355 (9.67%) Analytical Skills
5 330 (8.99%) Banking
6 91 (2.48%) Documentation Skills
7 87 (2.37%) Investment Banking
8 75 (2.04%) Telecoms
9 71 (1.93%) Marketing
10 57 (1.55%) Retail
11 52 (1.42%) Inclusion and Diversity
12 48 (1.31%) Manufacturing
13 44 (1.20%) Front Office
14 43 (1.17%) Presentation Skills
15 39 (1.06%) Financial Institution
16 35 (0.95%) Military
17 34 (0.93%) Back Office
18 31 (0.84%) Law
19 29 (0.79%) Electronics
20 28 (0.76%) Legal
Job Titles
1 788 (21.47%) Developer
2 680 (18.52%) DevOps Engineer
3 435 (11.85%) Senior
4 344 (9.37%) Architect
5 265 (7.22%) Lead
6 215 (5.86%) AWS Engineer
7 187 (5.09%) Azure Engineer
8 166 (4.52%) Analyst
9 163 (4.44%) Java Developer
10 162 (4.41%) AWS DevOps
11 149 (4.06%) Software Engineer
12 142 (3.87%) AWS DevOps Engineer
13 138 (3.76%) Data Engineer
14 127 (3.46%) Senior Developer
15 117 (3.19%) Cloud Engineer
15 117 (3.19%) Consultant
16 109 (2.97%) Platform Engineer
17 99 (2.70%) Solutions Architect
18 95 (2.59%) Azure DevOps Engineer
19 89 (2.42%) .NET Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 353 (9.62%) .NET
1 353 (9.62%) REST
2 281 (7.65%) RESTful
3 254 (6.92%) React
4 251 (6.84%) Kafka
5 191 (5.20%) Node.js
6 185 (5.04%) Spring Boot
7 173 (4.71%) Spring
8 166 (4.52%) JSON
9 163 (4.44%) HTML
10 158 (4.30%) OAuth
11 153 (4.17%) SOAP
12 128 (3.49%) AngularJS
13 121 (3.30%) Elastic Stack
14 117 (3.19%) CSS
15 112 (3.05%) XML
16 94 (2.56%) ARM Templates
17 90 (2.45%) .NET Core
17 90 (2.45%) Web Services
17 90 (2.45%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 442 (12.04%) Cloud Native
2 182 (4.96%) Product Ownership
3 142 (3.87%) Distributed Systems
4 118 (3.21%) Onboarding
5 89 (2.42%) Legacy Systems
6 79 (2.15%) Public Cloud
7 73 (1.99%) Mobile App
8 65 (1.77%) Data Protection Act
9 62 (1.69%) Data Centre
10 59 (1.61%) Greenfield Project
11 58 (1.58%) Replication
12 55 (1.50%) Management Information System
13 53 (1.44%) Virtual Team
14 50 (1.36%) Hybrid Cloud
15 49 (1.33%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
16 46 (1.25%) Security Posture
17 45 (1.23%) PKI
18 43 (1.17%) Algorithms
18 43 (1.17%) Enterprise Software
19 36 (0.98%) Data Structures
Operating Systems
1 464 (12.64%) Linux
2 253 (6.89%) Windows
3 99 (2.70%) Unix
4 82 (2.23%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 69 (1.88%) Windows Server
6 58 (1.58%) Android
7 49 (1.33%) Apple iOS
8 38 (1.04%) VMS
9 26 (0.71%) Amazon Linux
10 25 (0.68%) CentOS
11 21 (0.57%) Solaris
12 20 (0.54%) Ubuntu
13 13 (0.35%) Mac OS
14 12 (0.33%) Windows 10
15 11 (0.30%) zOS
16 8 (0.22%) SUSE
16 8 (0.22%) Windows Server 2019
17 6 (0.16%) HPUX
18 4 (0.11%) Windows Server 2003
19 3 (0.082%) AIX
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,953 (53.20%) CI/CD
2 1,575 (42.90%) Agile
3 873 (23.78%) Infrastructure as Code
4 654 (17.82%) Problem-Solving
5 646 (17.60%) Containerisation
6 574 (15.64%) Test Automation
7 568 (15.47%) Microservices
8 438 (11.93%) Scrum
9 412 (11.22%) Migration
10 402 (10.95%) Software Engineering
11 315 (8.58%) Continuous Improvement
12 292 (7.95%) Analytics
13 287 (7.82%) Artificial Intelligence
14 285 (7.76%) SDLC
15 272 (7.41%) Mentoring
16 270 (7.35%) Observability
17 261 (7.11%) TDD
18 240 (6.54%) Infrastructure Automation
19 237 (6.46%) Continuous Integration
20 235 (6.40%) Stakeholder Management
Programming Languages
1 1,083 (29.50%) Python
2 691 (18.82%) SQL
3 629 (17.13%) Java
4 398 (10.84%) C#
5 373 (10.16%) JavaScript
6 337 (9.18%) Bash
7 325 (8.85%) PowerShell
8 266 (7.25%) TypeScript
9 150 (4.09%) Go
10 120 (3.27%) Bicep
11 86 (2.34%) Shell Script
12 65 (1.77%) Groovy
13 52 (1.42%) PL/SQL
14 51 (1.39%) Scala
15 50 (1.36%) Perl
16 47 (1.28%) C++
17 40 (1.09%) Kotlin
18 36 (0.98%) PHP
19 22 (0.60%) COBOL
19 22 (0.60%) T-SQL
Qualifications
1 848 (23.10%) Security Cleared
2 687 (18.71%) SC Cleared
3 302 (8.23%) Degree
4 154 (4.20%) Computer Science Degree
5 140 (3.81%) AWS Certification
6 128 (3.49%) Azure Certification
7 120 (3.27%) DV Cleared
8 66 (1.80%) Master's Degree
9 64 (1.74%) BPSS Clearance
10 53 (1.44%) Microsoft Certification
11 48 (1.31%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
12 45 (1.23%) CISSP
13 33 (0.90%) Cisco Certification
14 28 (0.76%) ISTQB
15 25 (0.68%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
16 21 (0.57%) CISM
16 21 (0.57%) PMI Certification
16 21 (0.57%) PMP
17 16 (0.44%) ITIL Certification
17 16 (0.44%) Oracle Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 316 (8.61%) QA
2 128 (3.49%) GDPR
3 116 (3.16%) Accessibility
4 100 (2.72%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 84 (2.29%) Data Quality
6 76 (2.07%) NIST
7 35 (0.95%) PCI DSS
8 26 (0.71%) NCSC
9 25 (0.68%) HIPAA
9 25 (0.68%) WCAG
10 23 (0.63%) SLA
11 20 (0.54%) SOC 2
12 12 (0.33%) PMO
12 12 (0.33%) Sarbanes-Oxley
12 12 (0.33%) SEPA
13 10 (0.27%) GRC
13 10 (0.27%) ISO 20022
13 10 (0.27%) PSD2
14 9 (0.25%) Cyber Essentials
14 9 (0.25%) MiFID
System Software
1 842 (22.94%) Docker
2 169 (4.60%) Active Directory
3 69 (1.88%) VMware Infrastructure
4 49 (1.33%) Virtual Machines
5 26 (0.71%) DFS Replication
6 18 (0.49%) Postfix
6 18 (0.49%) VMware ESXi
7 17 (0.46%) vSphere
8 15 (0.41%) Hyper-V
9 14 (0.38%) Oracle RAC
10 13 (0.35%) Microsoft App-V
10 13 (0.35%) Squid
10 13 (0.35%) Virtual Desktop
11 12 (0.33%) Dovecot
12 9 (0.25%) BitLocker
12 9 (0.25%) Terminal Services
13 8 (0.22%) Tivoli Directory Server
14 6 (0.16%) Apache ZooKeeper
14 6 (0.16%) Veritas Cluster Server
15 5 (0.14%) KVM
Systems Management
1 1,119 (30.48%) Terraform
2 1,043 (28.41%) Kubernetes
3 498 (13.57%) Ansible
4 265 (7.22%) Prometheus
5 256 (6.97%) Grafana
6 95 (2.59%) Puppet
7 73 (1.99%) Progress Chef
7 73 (1.99%) Single Sign-On
8 51 (1.39%) Argo
9 49 (1.33%) Kibana
10 27 (0.74%) Istio
11 24 (0.65%) Packer
12 23 (0.63%) ITRS Geneos
12 23 (0.63%) Podman
13 22 (0.60%) SCCM
14 19 (0.52%) HP ALM
14 19 (0.52%) Microsoft Intune
15 18 (0.49%) Nagios
15 18 (0.49%) Nessus
16 17 (0.46%) CA Endevor
Vendors
1 637 (17.35%) Microsoft
2 259 (7.06%) Oracle
3 188 (5.12%) Google
4 179 (4.88%) Splunk
5 146 (3.98%) ServiceNow
6 142 (3.87%) Databricks
7 121 (3.30%) SAP
8 98 (2.67%) Salesforce
9 90 (2.45%) VMware
10 79 (2.15%) Red Hat
11 60 (1.63%) Dynatrace
12 57 (1.55%) IBM
13 55 (1.50%) MuleSoft
14 45 (1.23%) Cisco
15 44 (1.20%) HP
16 36 (0.98%) F5
17 34 (0.93%) AppDynamics
18 31 (0.84%) Palo Alto
19 27 (0.74%) Atlassian
20 26 (0.71%) CheckPoint