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

6 months to
15 May 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 13 15 16
Rank change year-on-year +2 +1 -5
Contract jobs citing DevOps 5,042 3,006 3,970
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.57% 10.34% 9.30%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.53% 11.37% 10.79%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,514 2,194 2,733
10th Percentile £381 £388 £400
25th Percentile £438 £450 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £520 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year -0.95% -4.55% -5.66%
75th Percentile £608 £640 £650
90th Percentile £700 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £525
% change year-on-year - -4.76% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 112 19 109
10th Percentile £39.53 £34.05 £56.25
25th Percentile £56.06 £53.75 £61.25
Median hourly rate £67.50 £73.23 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year -7.82% +12.65% -0.76%
75th Percentile £77.63 £85.23 £77.50
90th Percentile £95.00 £88.50 £87.09
UK excluding London median hourly rate £67.50 £70.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year -3.57% +7.69% -0.76%

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 40,228 26,443 36,791
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.35% 90.98% 86.22%
Number of daily rates quoted 25,265 17,000 23,677
10th Percentile £325 £305 £300
25th Percentile £413 £410 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £505 £515 £525
Median % change year-on-year -1.94% -1.90% -4.55%
75th Percentile £613 £626 £638
90th Percentile £725 £738 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £492 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +3.58% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,380 1,081 2,436
10th Percentile £14.89 £14.42 £12.75
25th Percentile £19.91 £18.38 £16.00
Median hourly rate £42.50 £28.75 £36.50
Median % change year-on-year +47.83% -21.23% +0.29%
75th Percentile £67.31 £60.00 £60.00
90th Percentile £80.00 £75.00 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £45.00 £26.50 £38.00
% change year-on-year +69.81% -30.26% +8.57%

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 15 May 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 15 May 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 15 May 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 4,299 £525 -4.55% 1,368
UK excluding London +10 2,222 £500 - 973
London +3 2,197 £550 -4.35% 544
Work from Home -3 1,359 £525 - 728
North of England +9 748 £500 -2.44% 282
South East +3 476 £513 - 306
Yorkshire +5 408 £500 -2.44% 73
Midlands +5 394 £488 -2.50% 102
West Midlands +3 306 £500 -4.31% 60
South West +17 287 £525 -4.55% 118
North West +2 282 £500 - 154
Scotland +2 180 £475 +0.42% 51
East of England +25 128 £525 +3.45% 84
East Midlands -3 85 £466 -0.53% 42
North East +7 70 £453 -13.81% 58
Wales +8 45 £425 +39.13% 28
Northern Ireland -3 13 £525 +25.75% 17
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
1 286 (5.67%) Confluence
2 131 (2.60%) Apache Spark
3 115 (2.28%) SharePoint
4 85 (1.69%) Apache
5 81 (1.61%) SAS
6 67 (1.33%) Apache Airflow
7 39 (0.77%) CMS
8 31 (0.61%) Microsoft Exchange
9 30 (0.60%) nginx
10 24 (0.48%) OpenStack
11 23 (0.46%) IIS
12 14 (0.28%) Mendix
13 12 (0.24%) WebSphere
14 11 (0.22%) Jupyter
15 10 (0.20%) Adobe Experience Manager
15 10 (0.20%) Camunda
15 10 (0.20%) HCL Notes
16 9 (0.18%) Sitecore CMS
17 8 (0.16%) ArcGIS
17 8 (0.16%) Palantir Foundry
Applications
1 73 (1.45%) Microsoft Excel
2 59 (1.17%) Microsoft Project
3 48 (0.95%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 33 (0.65%) Microsoft Office
5 24 (0.48%) MS Visio
6 4 (0.079%) Chatbot
6 4 (0.079%) CPLEX
6 4 (0.079%) Trello
7 2 (0.040%) Adobe XD
7 2 (0.040%) Spreadsheet
8 1 (0.020%) InDesign
8 1 (0.020%) Maya
8 1 (0.020%) Weka
Business Applications
1 62 (1.23%) Dynamics CRM
2 29 (0.58%) SAP S/4HANA
3 14 (0.28%) Oracle ERP
4 12 (0.24%) Payment Gateway
5 9 (0.18%) Aladdin
5 9 (0.18%) Maximo
5 9 (0.18%) NEC Housing
6 8 (0.16%) Dynamics AX
7 6 (0.12%) Remedy ITSM
8 5 (0.099%) Oracle EBS
8 5 (0.099%) SAP MDG
9 4 (0.079%) Endur
9 4 (0.079%) Magento
9 4 (0.079%) SAP BPC
10 3 (0.060%) Findur
10 3 (0.060%) SAP ERP
10 3 (0.060%) SAP Oil and Gas
11 2 (0.040%) SAP CO
11 2 (0.040%) SAP FI
11 2 (0.040%) Summit
Cloud Services
1 2,738 (54.30%) Azure
2 1,707 (33.86%) AWS
3 1,486 (29.47%) Azure DevOps
4 855 (16.96%) GitHub
5 667 (13.23%) GCP
6 502 (9.96%) GitHub Actions
7 489 (9.70%) Serverless
8 432 (8.57%) Power Platform
9 271 (5.37%) Amazon S3
10 263 (5.22%) AWS CloudFormation
11 248 (4.92%) AWS Lambda
12 227 (4.50%) Entra ID
13 224 (4.44%) Azure AKS
14 218 (4.32%) Azure Data Factory
15 202 (4.01%) Amazon EKS
16 173 (3.43%) OpenShift
17 167 (3.31%) PaaS
18 166 (3.29%) Azure Monitor
19 154 (3.05%) Amazon CloudWatch
20 153 (3.03%) Amazon EC2
Communications & Networking
1 214 (4.24%) Firewall
2 122 (2.42%) DNS
3 99 (1.96%) Network Security
4 94 (1.86%) VPN
5 43 (0.85%) TCP/IP
6 35 (0.69%) WAN
7 31 (0.61%) SD-WAN
8 27 (0.54%) BGP
8 27 (0.54%) HTTP
9 26 (0.52%) SSL
10 22 (0.44%) DHCP
10 22 (0.44%) SAN
11 20 (0.40%) Wi-Fi
12 19 (0.38%) IPsec
13 18 (0.36%) OSPF
14 16 (0.32%) MPLS
14 16 (0.32%) Reverse Proxy
15 14 (0.28%) LAN
16 13 (0.26%) Internet
16 13 (0.26%) VXLAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 283 (5.61%) Power BI
2 248 (4.92%) SQL Server
3 241 (4.78%) PostgreSQL
4 177 (3.51%) NoSQL
5 173 (3.43%) Data Lake
6 158 (3.13%) Relational Database
7 136 (2.70%) Data Warehouse
8 120 (2.38%) MongoDB
9 113 (2.24%) Azure SQL Database
10 104 (2.06%) Amazon RDS
11 93 (1.84%) DynamoDB
12 92 (1.82%) Metadata
13 90 (1.79%) Delta Lake
14 74 (1.47%) Big Data
15 70 (1.39%) Oracle Database
16 68 (1.35%) Elasticsearch
17 61 (1.21%) Amazon Athena
18 55 (1.09%) Redis
19 52 (1.03%) BigQuery
20 48 (0.95%) Tableau
Development Applications
1 732 (14.52%) Jenkins
2 640 (12.69%) Git
3 610 (12.10%) JIRA
4 514 (10.19%) GitLab
5 104 (2.06%) Postman
6 103 (2.04%) Selenium
7 82 (1.63%) SonarQube
8 79 (1.57%) JUnit
9 65 (1.29%) Bitbucket
10 59 (1.17%) Maven
10 59 (1.17%) REST Assured
11 55 (1.09%) Cucumber
12 54 (1.07%) JMeter
13 52 (1.03%) Artifactory
14 47 (0.93%) Cypress.io
15 41 (0.81%) Gatling
16 34 (0.67%) Gradle
17 32 (0.63%) Mockito
18 30 (0.60%) Sonatype Nexus
19 29 (0.58%) Visual Studio
General
1 1,240 (24.59%) Social Skills
2 906 (17.97%) Finance
3 633 (12.55%) Public Sector
4 404 (8.01%) Analytical Skills
5 316 (6.27%) Banking
6 145 (2.88%) Documentation Skills
7 71 (1.41%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 69 (1.37%) Influencing Skills
9 64 (1.27%) Legal
10 61 (1.21%) Retail
11 54 (1.07%) Marketing
12 53 (1.05%) Financial Institution
13 50 (0.99%) Organisational Skills
14 42 (0.83%) Front Office
15 41 (0.81%) Presentation Skills
16 39 (0.77%) Military
17 37 (0.73%) Investment Banking
18 35 (0.69%) Telecoms
19 24 (0.48%) Aerospace
19 24 (0.48%) Law
Job Titles
1 1,030 (20.43%) DevOps Engineer
2 740 (14.68%) Developer
3 705 (13.98%) Senior
4 584 (11.58%) Architect
5 412 (8.17%) Lead
6 340 (6.74%) Azure Engineer
7 311 (6.17%) Data Engineer
8 306 (6.07%) Analyst
9 236 (4.68%) AWS Engineer
10 182 (3.61%) Cloud Engineer
11 177 (3.51%) Platform Engineer
12 173 (3.43%) Solutions Architect
13 172 (3.41%) AWS DevOps
14 166 (3.29%) Azure DevOps Engineer
15 164 (3.25%) Senior DevOps
16 158 (3.13%) AWS DevOps Engineer
17 152 (3.01%) Software Engineer
18 151 (2.99%) Senior DevOps Engineer
19 150 (2.98%) Business Analyst
20 138 (2.74%) Java Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 453 (8.98%) REST
2 445 (8.83%) .NET
3 296 (5.87%) React
4 282 (5.59%) Kafka
5 277 (5.49%) Spring
6 262 (5.20%) Spring Boot
7 261 (5.18%) Node.js
8 252 (5.00%) RESTful
9 168 (3.33%) AngularJS
10 155 (3.07%) Playwright
11 152 (3.01%) PySpark
12 146 (2.90%) OAuth
13 142 (2.82%) JSON
14 129 (2.56%) YAML
15 114 (2.26%) Middleware
16 112 (2.22%) HTML
16 112 (2.22%) SOAP
17 97 (1.92%) OpenID
18 96 (1.90%) .NET Framework
18 96 (1.90%) CSS
Miscellaneous
1 800 (15.87%) Cloud Native
2 319 (6.33%) Product Ownership
3 194 (3.85%) Distributed Systems
4 129 (2.56%) Onboarding
5 107 (2.12%) Legacy Systems
5 107 (2.12%) Public Cloud
6 97 (1.92%) Enterprise Software
7 93 (1.84%) Hybrid Cloud
8 83 (1.65%) Data Protection Act
9 63 (1.25%) Data Centre
10 56 (1.11%) Management Information System
11 51 (1.01%) Self-Motivation
12 48 (0.95%) Virtual Team
13 45 (0.89%) Private Cloud
14 44 (0.87%) Low-Code
15 43 (0.85%) Data Structures
15 43 (0.85%) Greenfield Project
15 43 (0.85%) Replication
16 42 (0.83%) AI Agents
16 42 (0.83%) NHS
Operating Systems
1 444 (8.81%) Linux
2 251 (4.98%) Windows
3 83 (1.65%) Unix
4 78 (1.55%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 46 (0.91%) Windows Server
6 42 (0.83%) VMS
7 22 (0.44%) Ubuntu
8 18 (0.36%) Apple iOS
9 15 (0.30%) Android
10 11 (0.22%) CentOS
11 10 (0.20%) Windows Server 2019
12 8 (0.16%) Windows 10
13 7 (0.14%) Windows Server 2016
14 6 (0.12%) Solaris
15 5 (0.099%) Amazon Linux
15 5 (0.099%) Mac OS
15 5 (0.099%) Windows Server 2012
16 4 (0.079%) Windows Server 2008
16 4 (0.079%) zOS
17 3 (0.060%) Debian
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,882 (57.16%) CI/CD
2 1,846 (36.61%) Agile
3 1,287 (25.53%) Infrastructure as Code
4 828 (16.42%) Containerisation
5 786 (15.59%) Problem-Solving
6 725 (14.38%) Microservices
7 708 (14.04%) Test Automation
8 660 (13.09%) Continuous Improvement
9 605 (12.00%) Migration
10 597 (11.84%) Observability
11 580 (11.50%) Analytics
12 536 (10.63%) Stakeholder Management
13 533 (10.57%) Scrum
14 515 (10.21%) AI
15 483 (9.58%) Data Modelling
16 472 (9.36%) Software Engineering
17 447 (8.87%) Platform Engineering
18 394 (7.81%) Mentoring
19 390 (7.74%) Data Pipeline
20 386 (7.66%) Technical Leadership
Programming Languages
1 1,387 (27.51%) Python
2 994 (19.71%) SQL
3 659 (13.07%) Java
4 491 (9.74%) C#
5 377 (7.48%) JavaScript
6 349 (6.92%) PowerShell
7 347 (6.88%) Bash
8 278 (5.51%) TypeScript
9 171 (3.39%) Bicep
10 110 (2.18%) Go
11 69 (1.37%) Scala
12 63 (1.25%) Shell Script
13 55 (1.09%) PL/SQL
14 52 (1.03%) Apex Code
15 48 (0.95%) Groovy
16 44 (0.87%) T-SQL
17 38 (0.75%) C++
18 27 (0.54%) Ruby
19 25 (0.50%) Data Analysis Expressions
20 24 (0.48%) Perl
Qualifications
1 1,599 (31.71%) Security Cleared
2 1,328 (26.34%) SC Cleared
3 319 (6.33%) Degree
4 207 (4.11%) Azure Certification
5 155 (3.07%) BPSS Clearance
6 151 (2.99%) DV Cleared
7 145 (2.88%) Computer Science Degree
8 137 (2.72%) AWS Certification
9 78 (1.55%) CISSP
10 57 (1.13%) Microsoft Certification
11 55 (1.09%) ISTQB
12 54 (1.07%) CISM
13 53 (1.05%) Master's Degree
14 49 (0.97%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
15 45 (0.89%) PMI Certification
16 43 (0.85%) Cisco Certification
17 40 (0.79%) PMP
18 28 (0.56%) TOGAF Certification
19 27 (0.54%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
20 21 (0.42%) IIBA
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 438 (8.69%) QA
2 243 (4.82%) Data Quality
3 181 (3.59%) GDPR
4 133 (2.64%) Accessibility
5 132 (2.62%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 123 (2.44%) NIST
7 67 (1.33%) NCSC
8 51 (1.01%) WCAG
9 46 (0.91%) PCI DSS
10 35 (0.69%) PMO
11 34 (0.67%) SLA
12 33 (0.65%) Sarbanes-Oxley
13 20 (0.40%) GRC
14 17 (0.34%) HIPAA
15 15 (0.30%) ISO 20022
16 14 (0.28%) NIST 800
16 14 (0.28%) PSD2
17 12 (0.24%) SEPA
17 12 (0.24%) SOC 2
18 10 (0.20%) HL7
System Software
1 974 (19.32%) Docker
2 173 (3.43%) Active Directory
3 80 (1.59%) Virtual Machines
4 69 (1.37%) VMware Infrastructure
5 32 (0.63%) vSphere
6 26 (0.52%) VMware NSX
7 18 (0.36%) Squid
7 18 (0.36%) Virtual Desktop
8 13 (0.26%) Hyper-V
9 12 (0.24%) Postfix
10 10 (0.20%) VMware ESXi
11 8 (0.16%) Firmware
11 8 (0.16%) HDFS
12 6 (0.12%) Corosync
12 6 (0.12%) Oracle RAC
12 6 (0.12%) RACF
13 5 (0.099%) Ceph
13 5 (0.099%) NFS
14 4 (0.079%) Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services
14 4 (0.079%) Lustre
Systems Management
1 1,425 (28.26%) Terraform
2 1,293 (25.64%) Kubernetes
3 485 (9.62%) Ansible
4 348 (6.90%) Grafana
5 284 (5.63%) Prometheus
6 94 (1.86%) Argo
7 70 (1.39%) Single Sign-On
8 68 (1.35%) Puppet
9 65 (1.29%) Istio
10 28 (0.56%) Progress Chef
11 26 (0.52%) Microsoft Intune
11 26 (0.52%) Packer
12 23 (0.46%) HP ALM
12 23 (0.46%) Kibana
13 21 (0.42%) vCenter Server
14 20 (0.40%) Active Directory Federation Services
15 16 (0.32%) Rancher
16 15 (0.30%) SCCM
17 14 (0.28%) Consul
17 14 (0.28%) FortiGate
Vendors
1 871 (17.27%) Microsoft
2 286 (5.67%) Databricks
3 283 (5.61%) Oracle
4 237 (4.70%) Google
5 196 (3.89%) Splunk
6 177 (3.51%) ServiceNow
7 158 (3.13%) Salesforce
8 137 (2.72%) Red Hat
9 120 (2.38%) SAP
10 114 (2.26%) VMware
11 102 (2.02%) Dynatrace
12 71 (1.41%) OpenAI
13 52 (1.03%) CyberArk
14 48 (0.95%) Atlassian
15 44 (0.87%) IBM
16 43 (0.85%) Informatica
17 41 (0.81%) Cisco
18 38 (0.75%) AppDynamics
19 37 (0.73%) Foundry
20 36 (0.71%) Denodo