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 December 2025, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
3 Dec 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 12 14 15
Rank change year-on-year +2 +1 -5
Contract jobs citing DevOps 4,183 3,608 4,316
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 11.55% 10.07% 9.58%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.97% 11.53% 10.82%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,929 2,432 3,145
10th Percentile £363 £380 £406
25th Percentile £425 £463 £470
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £560 £563
Median % change year-on-year -6.25% -0.44% -6.25%
75th Percentile £616 £663 £663
90th Percentile £700 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £550 £550
% change year-on-year -9.09% - -
Number of hourly rates quoted 46 36 88
10th Percentile - £39.88 £46.18
25th Percentile £45.46 £53.73 £49.05
Median hourly rate £59.25 £70.00 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year -15.36% +7.69% -0.92%
75th Percentile £82.50 £74.11 £70.47
90th Percentile £95.00 £80.75 £78.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £56.75 £70.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year -18.93% +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 32,257 31,288 39,893
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 89.04% 87.36% 88.56%
Number of daily rates quoted 20,268 18,944 26,694
10th Percentile £300 £309 £310
25th Percentile £404 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £533
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% -1.50% -3.09%
75th Percentile £619 £638 £650
90th Percentile £725 £744 £745
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £500 £500
% change year-on-year -5.00% - -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,091 1,103 1,539
10th Percentile £14.61 £15.23 £14.36
25th Percentile £17.50 £20.19 £19.06
Median hourly rate £25.15 £32.50 £43.75
Median % change year-on-year -22.62% -25.71% +25.00%
75th Percentile £45.61 £63.42 £65.00
90th Percentile £67.50 £73.75 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £22.85 £32.39 £43.95
% change year-on-year -29.45% -26.30% +40.82%

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 December 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 3 December 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 3 December 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 +2 3,547 £525 -8.70% 1,395
UK excluding London +5 1,890 £500 -9.09% 1,248
London 0 1,775 £550 -5.98% 562
Work from Home +1 1,314 £525 -2.78% 817
North of England +2 610 £492 -4.00% 285
South East +1 376 £506 -15.63% 518
Midlands +16 372 £515 -1.90% 129
Yorkshire -1 311 £500 - 110
West Midlands +15 301 £525 -4.55% 90
North West +6 264 £453 -14.93% 135
South West +3 226 £538 -10.42% 145
Scotland +7 208 £475 +5.56% 80
East of England +26 110 £523 -9.13% 74
East Midlands +20 71 £418 -12.11% 37
Wales +6 44 £410 -0.61% 41
North East -9 37 £520 -11.11% 42
Northern Ireland -1 7 - - 9

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
1 258 (6.17%) Confluence
2 89 (2.13%) Apache
3 75 (1.79%) SharePoint
4 70 (1.67%) Apache Airflow
5 64 (1.53%) SAS
6 59 (1.41%) Apache Spark
7 37 (0.88%) CMS
8 36 (0.86%) nginx
9 29 (0.69%) IIS
10 27 (0.65%) JBoss
10 27 (0.65%) OpenStack
10 27 (0.65%) WebLogic
11 23 (0.55%) CICS
12 21 (0.50%) Microsoft Exchange
13 15 (0.36%) Anypoint
13 15 (0.36%) Mule
13 15 (0.36%) WebSphere
14 14 (0.33%) Oracle SOA Suite
15 10 (0.24%) Oracle Service Bus
15 10 (0.24%) WebSphere Application Server
Applications
1 72 (1.72%) Microsoft Excel
2 41 (0.98%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 33 (0.79%) Microsoft Office
4 32 (0.77%) Microsoft Project
5 19 (0.45%) MS Visio
6 16 (0.38%) Chatbot
7 12 (0.29%) Mozilla Thunderbird
8 9 (0.22%) Trello
9 8 (0.19%) Weka
10 1 (0.024%) Adobe Creative Suite
10 1 (0.024%) Moqups
10 1 (0.024%) Revit
Business Applications
1 62 (1.48%) Dynamics CRM
2 19 (0.45%) Endur
3 18 (0.43%) Aladdin
3 18 (0.43%) SAP S/4HANA
4 17 (0.41%) Oracle BPM
5 15 (0.36%) Remedy ITSM
6 14 (0.33%) VisionPLUS
7 8 (0.19%) Maximo
8 7 (0.17%) Dynamics AX
9 5 (0.12%) NEC Housing
9 5 (0.12%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
10 4 (0.096%) Fidessa
10 4 (0.096%) SAP CO
10 4 (0.096%) SAP ERP
10 4 (0.096%) SAP FI
10 4 (0.096%) SAP FI/CO
10 4 (0.096%) Teamcenter
10 4 (0.096%) thinkFolio
10 4 (0.096%) Workday HCM
11 3 (0.072%) Oracle EBS
Cloud Services
1 2,051 (49.03%) Azure
2 1,580 (37.77%) AWS
3 1,115 (26.66%) Azure DevOps
4 736 (17.60%) GitHub
5 591 (14.13%) GCP
6 487 (11.64%) Serverless
7 431 (10.30%) GitHub Actions
8 285 (6.81%) Power Platform
9 271 (6.48%) AWS CloudFormation
10 266 (6.36%) Amazon S3
11 265 (6.34%) AWS Lambda
12 215 (5.14%) Amazon CloudWatch
13 197 (4.71%) Amazon EC2
14 182 (4.35%) Amazon EKS
14 182 (4.35%) Azure AKS
15 166 (3.97%) Amazon ECS
15 166 (3.97%) Azure Data Factory
16 160 (3.83%) SaaS
17 154 (3.68%) Entra ID
18 152 (3.63%) Dynamics 365
Communications & Networking
1 195 (4.66%) Firewall
2 127 (3.04%) DNS
3 88 (2.10%) VPN
4 70 (1.67%) Network Security
5 64 (1.53%) SSL
6 59 (1.41%) TCP/IP
7 53 (1.27%) HTTP
8 35 (0.84%) HTTPS
9 30 (0.72%) SSH
10 28 (0.67%) SMTP
11 27 (0.65%) WAN
12 23 (0.55%) FTP
13 18 (0.43%) BGP
13 18 (0.43%) Kerberos
14 17 (0.41%) DHCP
15 16 (0.38%) OpenLDAP
16 15 (0.36%) MPLS
17 14 (0.33%) LAN
17 14 (0.33%) SD-WAN
18 12 (0.29%) Internet
Database & Business Intelligence
1 280 (6.69%) PostgreSQL
2 176 (4.21%) Power BI
3 174 (4.16%) NoSQL
4 166 (3.97%) Amazon RDS
5 153 (3.66%) SQL Server
6 121 (2.89%) MongoDB
7 105 (2.51%) Relational Database
8 99 (2.37%) Data Warehouse
9 91 (2.18%) Data Lake
10 87 (2.08%) Oracle Database
11 71 (1.70%) Azure SQL Database
12 65 (1.55%) DynamoDB
13 63 (1.51%) MySQL
14 61 (1.46%) Redis
15 56 (1.34%) Amazon Aurora
16 53 (1.27%) Elasticsearch
17 47 (1.12%) Metadata
18 43 (1.03%) Big Data
18 43 (1.03%) Delta Lake
19 39 (0.93%) Amazon Athena
Development Applications
1 803 (19.20%) Jenkins
2 665 (15.90%) Git
3 610 (14.58%) JIRA
4 536 (12.81%) GitLab
5 145 (3.47%) Selenium
6 107 (2.56%) JUnit
7 99 (2.37%) SonarQube
8 91 (2.18%) Sonatype Nexus
9 89 (2.13%) Bitbucket
10 79 (1.89%) Postman
11 68 (1.63%) Cypress.io
12 63 (1.51%) Cucumber
13 59 (1.41%) Liquibase
14 51 (1.22%) Maven
15 46 (1.10%) Gradle
15 46 (1.10%) JMeter
16 45 (1.08%) Artifactory
17 40 (0.96%) CircleCI
18 39 (0.93%) Oracle APEX
19 38 (0.91%) Visual Studio
General
1 1,305 (31.20%) Social Skills
2 771 (18.43%) Finance
3 532 (12.72%) Public Sector
4 354 (8.46%) Banking
5 334 (7.98%) Analytical Skills
6 125 (2.99%) Documentation Skills
7 71 (1.70%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 69 (1.65%) Financial Institution
9 66 (1.58%) Investment Banking
10 63 (1.51%) Marketing
11 55 (1.31%) Influencing Skills
12 54 (1.29%) Telecoms
13 53 (1.27%) Retail
14 44 (1.05%) Front Office
15 43 (1.03%) Presentation Skills
16 36 (0.86%) Back Office
17 31 (0.74%) Pharmaceutical
18 30 (0.72%) Military
19 28 (0.67%) Manufacturing
20 26 (0.62%) Organisational Skills
Job Titles
1 805 (19.24%) Developer
2 782 (18.69%) DevOps Engineer
3 565 (13.51%) Senior
4 360 (8.61%) Architect
5 313 (7.48%) Lead
6 260 (6.22%) AWS Engineer
7 213 (5.09%) Azure Engineer
8 199 (4.76%) AWS DevOps
9 194 (4.64%) Data Engineer
10 192 (4.59%) Analyst
11 169 (4.04%) AWS DevOps Engineer
12 160 (3.83%) Senior Developer
12 160 (3.83%) Software Engineer
13 148 (3.54%) Cloud Engineer
14 144 (3.44%) Platform Engineer
15 135 (3.23%) Java Developer
16 125 (2.99%) Consultant
17 112 (2.68%) Senior DevOps
18 103 (2.46%) Azure DevOps Engineer
19 102 (2.44%) Solutions Architect
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 479 (11.45%) REST
2 366 (8.75%) .NET
3 312 (7.46%) RESTful
4 255 (6.10%) Node.js
4 255 (6.10%) React
5 247 (5.90%) Kafka
6 215 (5.14%) JSON
7 204 (4.88%) Spring
8 194 (4.64%) Spring Boot
9 180 (4.30%) SOAP
10 159 (3.80%) OAuth
11 158 (3.78%) HTML
12 156 (3.73%) Elastic Stack
13 153 (3.66%) AngularJS
14 144 (3.44%) XML
15 113 (2.70%) YAML
16 111 (2.65%) CSS
17 88 (2.10%) .NET Core
17 88 (2.10%) Playwright
18 85 (2.03%) OAuth2
Miscellaneous
1 565 (13.51%) Cloud Native
2 231 (5.52%) Product Ownership
3 180 (4.30%) Distributed Systems
4 128 (3.06%) Onboarding
5 106 (2.53%) Legacy Systems
6 101 (2.41%) Public Cloud
7 76 (1.82%) Hybrid Cloud
8 70 (1.67%) Data Protection Act
9 68 (1.63%) Virtual Team
10 63 (1.51%) Mobile App
11 59 (1.41%) Replication
12 54 (1.29%) Enterprise Software
12 54 (1.29%) Security Posture
13 53 (1.27%) Greenfield Project
14 47 (1.12%) Management Information System
15 45 (1.08%) Self-Motivation
16 44 (1.05%) Data Centre
17 41 (0.98%) NHS
18 40 (0.96%) Algorithms
19 39 (0.93%) CMDB
Operating Systems
1 508 (12.14%) Linux
2 244 (5.83%) Windows
3 115 (2.75%) Unix
4 58 (1.39%) Windows Server
5 56 (1.34%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 48 (1.15%) Android
7 47 (1.12%) VMS
8 42 (1.00%) Apple iOS
9 27 (0.65%) Ubuntu
10 23 (0.55%) Amazon Linux
11 19 (0.45%) CentOS
12 16 (0.38%) Windows 10
13 12 (0.29%) Solaris
14 11 (0.26%) zOS
15 10 (0.24%) Mac OS
16 5 (0.12%) Windows Server 2016
16 5 (0.12%) Windows Server 2019
17 3 (0.072%) Debian
18 2 (0.048%) SUSE
19 1 (0.024%) Mac OS X
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,382 (56.94%) CI/CD
2 1,820 (43.51%) Agile
3 1,087 (25.99%) Infrastructure as Code
4 836 (19.99%) Containerisation
5 817 (19.53%) Problem-Solving
6 661 (15.80%) Test Automation
7 648 (15.49%) Microservices
8 524 (12.53%) Scrum
9 451 (10.78%) Migration
10 444 (10.61%) Continuous Improvement
11 419 (10.02%) Software Engineering
12 407 (9.73%) Analytics
13 381 (9.11%) AI
14 366 (8.75%) Observability
15 326 (7.79%) Stakeholder Management
16 308 (7.36%) Mentoring
17 295 (7.05%) SDLC
18 285 (6.81%) Infrastructure Automation
19 278 (6.65%) DevSecOps
20 271 (6.48%) Stakeholder Engagement
Programming Languages
1 1,333 (31.87%) Python
2 780 (18.65%) SQL
3 639 (15.28%) Java
4 436 (10.42%) JavaScript
5 411 (9.83%) C#
6 386 (9.23%) Bash
7 371 (8.87%) PowerShell
8 297 (7.10%) TypeScript
9 176 (4.21%) Go
10 119 (2.84%) Bicep
11 83 (1.98%) PL/SQL
12 73 (1.75%) Shell Script
13 61 (1.46%) Groovy
14 54 (1.29%) Perl
15 53 (1.27%) C++
16 50 (1.20%) Scala
17 45 (1.08%) Ruby
18 35 (0.84%) T-SQL
19 29 (0.69%) Kotlin
20 28 (0.67%) PHP
Qualifications
1 1,149 (27.47%) Security Cleared
2 956 (22.85%) SC Cleared
3 351 (8.39%) Degree
4 194 (4.64%) Computer Science Degree
5 154 (3.68%) Azure Certification
6 153 (3.66%) AWS Certification
7 131 (3.13%) DV Cleared
8 89 (2.13%) BPSS Clearance
9 83 (1.98%) Master's Degree
10 66 (1.58%) CISSP
11 63 (1.51%) Microsoft Certification
12 54 (1.29%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 43 (1.03%) CISM
14 41 (0.98%) ISTQB
15 37 (0.88%) Cisco Certification
16 31 (0.74%) PMI Certification
17 27 (0.65%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
18 25 (0.60%) PMP
19 17 (0.41%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
20 15 (0.36%) ITIL Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 395 (9.44%) QA
2 155 (3.71%) GDPR
3 142 (3.39%) ISO/IEC 27001
4 123 (2.94%) Accessibility
5 119 (2.84%) Data Quality
6 108 (2.58%) NIST
7 48 (1.15%) NCSC
8 39 (0.93%) PCI DSS
9 29 (0.69%) HIPAA
9 29 (0.69%) WCAG
10 21 (0.50%) PMO
11 20 (0.48%) SLA
12 19 (0.45%) Sarbanes-Oxley
12 19 (0.45%) SOC 2
13 15 (0.36%) MiFID
14 14 (0.33%) PSD2
15 13 (0.31%) ISO 20022
15 13 (0.31%) SEPA
16 11 (0.26%) EU AI Act
17 10 (0.24%) HMG Security Policy Framework
System Software
1 1,075 (25.70%) Docker
2 181 (4.33%) Active Directory
3 68 (1.63%) VMware Infrastructure
4 59 (1.41%) Virtual Machines
5 25 (0.60%) vSphere
6 23 (0.55%) DFS Replication
7 15 (0.36%) VMware NSX
8 13 (0.31%) Postfix
8 13 (0.31%) Squid
9 12 (0.29%) Dovecot
9 12 (0.29%) Oracle RAC
10 11 (0.26%) Hyper-V
10 11 (0.26%) Virtual Desktop
10 11 (0.26%) Virtual Servers
11 10 (0.24%) Slurm Workload Manager
12 8 (0.19%) GPFS
12 8 (0.19%) Lustre
12 8 (0.19%) Tivoli Directory Server
12 8 (0.19%) VMware ESXi
13 7 (0.17%) KVM
Systems Management
1 1,328 (31.75%) Terraform
2 1,220 (29.17%) Kubernetes
3 527 (12.60%) Ansible
4 327 (7.82%) Grafana
5 308 (7.36%) Prometheus
6 80 (1.91%) Puppet
7 79 (1.89%) Argo
8 68 (1.63%) Single Sign-On
9 60 (1.43%) Progress Chef
10 43 (1.03%) Kibana
11 40 (0.96%) Packer
12 31 (0.74%) Istio
13 22 (0.53%) Podman
14 20 (0.48%) ITRS Geneos
15 18 (0.43%) Microsoft Intune
15 18 (0.43%) Nessus
16 17 (0.41%) CA Endevor
16 17 (0.41%) Proxmox
17 16 (0.38%) SCCM
18 15 (0.36%) logstash
Vendors
1 693 (16.57%) Microsoft
2 310 (7.41%) Oracle
3 230 (5.50%) Google
4 207 (4.95%) Splunk
5 198 (4.73%) Databricks
6 179 (4.28%) ServiceNow
7 123 (2.94%) Salesforce
8 113 (2.70%) SAP
9 104 (2.49%) VMware
10 97 (2.32%) Red Hat
11 63 (1.51%) Dynatrace
12 53 (1.27%) IBM
13 51 (1.22%) OpenAI
14 48 (1.15%) MuleSoft
15 46 (1.10%) F5
16 43 (1.03%) Cisco
17 39 (0.93%) Atlassian
18 38 (0.91%) Palo Alto
19 37 (0.88%) Talend
20 36 (0.86%) CyberArk