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

6 months to
1 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 13 15 15
Rank change year-on-year +2 0 -2
Contract jobs citing DevOps 5,651 3,505 3,915
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.60% 10.66% 9.92%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.47% 11.78% 11.61%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,922 2,497 2,683
10th Percentile £385 £360 £381
25th Percentile £438 £425 £458
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £515 £550
Median % change year-on-year +1.94% -6.36% -4.35%
75th Percentile £613 £625 £650
90th Percentile £700 £725 £736
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £488 £538
% change year-on-year +2.56% -9.30% -2.27%
Number of hourly rates quoted 115 25 92
10th Percentile £35.00 £32.15 £56.75
25th Percentile £56.25 £51.25 £65.00
Median hourly rate £67.50 £67.00 £70.00
Median % change year-on-year +0.75% -4.29% +7.28%
75th Percentile £77.50 £82.96 £74.58
90th Percentile £88.00 £91.00 £85.65
UK excluding London median hourly rate £67.50 £67.00 £70.00
% change year-on-year +0.75% -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 45,324 29,743 33,722
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 85.01% 90.43% 85.47%
Number of daily rates quoted 28,013 18,657 21,666
10th Percentile £325 £300 £308
25th Percentile £420 £404 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £523 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +4.60% -4.76% -4.55%
75th Percentile £625 £625 £638
90th Percentile £725 £734 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,761 1,640 1,941
10th Percentile £14.50 £14.20 £13.86
25th Percentile £19.50 £17.32 £17.80
Median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £40.00
Median % change year-on-year +74.79% -37.13% -5.88%
75th Percentile £68.00 £50.00 £63.75
90th Percentile £82.25 £68.75 £74.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £43.96 £23.57 £40.94
% change year-on-year +86.55% -42.44% +2.35%

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 1 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 1 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 1 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 +3 4,834 £525 - 2,094
London +2 2,501 £550 - 1,041
UK excluding London +4 2,466 £500 +2.56% 1,293
Work from Home 0 1,610 £525 +2.44% 1,083
North of England +3 853 £500 +5.26% 383
Midlands +1 465 £488 +2.63% 178
South East -9 460 £525 +5.00% 324
Yorkshire +2 432 £500 +3.09% 112
West Midlands -2 380 £492 -1.60% 134
North West -3 334 £523 +10.11% 205
South West +13 319 £525 - 175
Scotland -1 201 £483 -2.23% 73
East of England +17 137 £509 +1.70% 66
North East +11 105 £425 -18.27% 68
East Midlands +1 80 £488 +7.26% 44
Wales -5 45 £480 +49.73% 61
Northern Ireland +16 22 £475 +7.95% 41
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 (6.05%) Confluence
2 137 (2.42%) SharePoint
3 133 (2.35%) Apache Spark
4 121 (2.14%) Apache Airflow
5 108 (1.91%) Apache
6 84 (1.49%) SAS
7 44 (0.78%) CMS
8 37 (0.65%) IIS
9 35 (0.62%) Jupyter
10 27 (0.48%) Microsoft Exchange
11 25 (0.44%) nginx
12 16 (0.28%) WebSphere
13 15 (0.27%) Camunda
14 13 (0.23%) Anypoint
14 13 (0.23%) Palantir Foundry
15 11 (0.19%) Oracle Workflow
16 10 (0.18%) OpenStack
17 9 (0.16%) Appian
18 8 (0.14%) Tomcat
18 8 (0.14%) WebLogic
Applications
1 62 (1.10%) Microsoft Project
2 58 (1.03%) Microsoft Excel
3 38 (0.67%) Microsoft Office
4 35 (0.62%) MS Visio
5 26 (0.46%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 10 (0.18%) CPLEX
7 9 (0.16%) Spreadsheet
8 8 (0.14%) Chatbot
9 7 (0.12%) Trello
10 4 (0.071%) Notion
11 2 (0.035%) Adobe XD
12 1 (0.018%) EngageOne
12 1 (0.018%) InDesign
12 1 (0.018%) Maya
12 1 (0.018%) Weka
Business Applications
1 68 (1.20%) Dynamics CRM
2 39 (0.69%) SAP S/4HANA
3 10 (0.18%) Aladdin
3 10 (0.18%) Oracle EBS
3 10 (0.18%) Payment Gateway
3 10 (0.18%) Remedy ITSM
4 9 (0.16%) Magento
5 8 (0.14%) Dynamics AX
5 8 (0.14%) Oracle ERP
5 8 (0.14%) SAP MDG
6 6 (0.11%) Maximo
7 5 (0.088%) OpenText MBPM
7 5 (0.088%) Oracle BPM
7 5 (0.088%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
8 4 (0.071%) Endur
8 4 (0.071%) SAP ERP
9 3 (0.053%) Findur
9 3 (0.053%) SAP BPC
9 3 (0.053%) Shopify
9 3 (0.053%) Teamcenter
Cloud Services
1 3,054 (54.04%) Azure
2 2,014 (35.64%) AWS
3 1,726 (30.54%) Azure DevOps
4 962 (17.02%) GitHub
5 730 (12.92%) GCP
6 594 (10.51%) GitHub Actions
7 460 (8.14%) Power Platform
8 454 (8.03%) Serverless
9 305 (5.40%) Amazon S3
10 270 (4.78%) AWS Lambda
11 257 (4.55%) Entra ID
12 252 (4.46%) AWS CloudFormation
13 235 (4.16%) Amazon EKS
14 232 (4.11%) Azure AKS
15 205 (3.63%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 196 (3.47%) Azure Monitor
17 191 (3.38%) Azure Data Factory
18 181 (3.20%) Amazon EC2
19 160 (2.83%) Dynamics 365
20 155 (2.74%) PaaS
Communications & Networking
1 244 (4.32%) Firewall
2 158 (2.80%) DNS
3 124 (2.19%) VPN
4 115 (2.04%) Network Security
5 56 (0.99%) TCP/IP
6 49 (0.87%) WAN
7 45 (0.80%) SSL
8 37 (0.65%) DHCP
9 36 (0.64%) SD-WAN
10 33 (0.58%) BGP
11 31 (0.55%) Internet
12 28 (0.50%) Wi-Fi
13 27 (0.48%) HTTP
14 25 (0.44%) OSPF
15 21 (0.37%) SAN
16 20 (0.35%) VLAN
17 18 (0.32%) SSH
17 18 (0.32%) VXLAN
18 17 (0.30%) BIG-IP
18 17 (0.30%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
Database & Business Intelligence
1 314 (5.56%) Power BI
2 296 (5.24%) SQL Server
3 283 (5.01%) PostgreSQL
4 194 (3.43%) NoSQL
5 191 (3.38%) Data Warehouse
6 182 (3.22%) Relational Database
7 179 (3.17%) MongoDB
8 156 (2.76%) Data Lake
9 114 (2.02%) Amazon RDS
10 107 (1.89%) Metadata
11 105 (1.86%) Azure SQL Database
12 102 (1.80%) DynamoDB
13 87 (1.54%) Delta Lake
14 81 (1.43%) Oracle Database
15 72 (1.27%) Amazon Redshift
16 69 (1.22%) MySQL
16 69 (1.22%) Redis
17 67 (1.19%) Big Data
18 64 (1.13%) Amazon Athena
19 54 (0.96%) SQL Server Integration Services
Development Applications
1 823 (14.56%) Jenkins
2 766 (13.56%) Git
3 685 (12.12%) JIRA
4 584 (10.33%) GitLab
5 133 (2.35%) Selenium
6 105 (1.86%) Postman
7 102 (1.80%) SonarQube
8 100 (1.77%) JUnit
9 84 (1.49%) Bitbucket
10 83 (1.47%) Maven
11 72 (1.27%) REST Assured
12 66 (1.17%) JMeter
13 65 (1.15%) Cypress.io
14 61 (1.08%) Cucumber
15 52 (0.92%) Gradle
16 49 (0.87%) Mockito
17 46 (0.81%) Gatling
18 41 (0.73%) LoadRunner
19 39 (0.69%) Visual Studio
20 36 (0.64%) Artifactory
General
1 1,396 (24.70%) Social Skills
2 1,006 (17.80%) Finance
3 828 (14.65%) Public Sector
4 480 (8.49%) Analytical Skills
5 368 (6.51%) Banking
6 138 (2.44%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 102 (1.80%) Retail
8 101 (1.79%) Documentation Skills
9 68 (1.20%) Organisational Skills
10 67 (1.19%) Influencing Skills
10 67 (1.19%) Legal
11 56 (0.99%) Marketing
12 49 (0.87%) Investment Banking
13 48 (0.85%) Military
14 45 (0.80%) Law
15 44 (0.78%) Telecoms
16 43 (0.76%) Financial Institution
17 41 (0.73%) Front Office
17 41 (0.73%) Manufacturing
18 37 (0.65%) Aerospace
Job Titles
1 1,101 (19.48%) DevOps Engineer
2 950 (16.81%) Developer
3 810 (14.33%) Senior
4 627 (11.10%) Architect
5 542 (9.59%) Lead
6 339 (6.00%) Azure Engineer
7 323 (5.72%) Data Engineer
8 289 (5.11%) Analyst
9 276 (4.88%) AWS Engineer
10 234 (4.14%) Platform Engineer
11 211 (3.73%) Cloud Engineer
12 207 (3.66%) Java Developer
13 199 (3.52%) Senior DevOps
14 192 (3.40%) AWS DevOps
15 184 (3.26%) Azure DevOps Engineer
16 183 (3.24%) Senior DevOps Engineer
17 181 (3.20%) Solutions Architect
18 178 (3.15%) AWS DevOps Engineer
19 152 (2.69%) Senior Developer
20 150 (2.65%) Software Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 575 (10.18%) REST
2 491 (8.69%) .NET
3 339 (6.00%) RESTful
4 329 (5.82%) Kafka
5 319 (5.65%) Spring
6 299 (5.29%) Spring Boot
7 298 (5.27%) React
8 224 (3.96%) Node.js
9 173 (3.06%) JSON
9 173 (3.06%) PySpark
10 171 (3.03%) OAuth
11 166 (2.94%) Playwright
12 161 (2.85%) AngularJS
13 148 (2.62%) SOAP
14 139 (2.46%) .NET Framework
15 127 (2.25%) HTML
16 120 (2.12%) OAuth2
17 112 (1.98%) Middleware
18 107 (1.89%) YAML
19 105 (1.86%) CSS
Miscellaneous
1 1,011 (17.89%) Cloud Native
2 401 (7.10%) Product Ownership
3 272 (4.81%) Distributed Systems
4 166 (2.94%) Onboarding
5 164 (2.90%) Enterprise Software
6 155 (2.74%) Legacy Systems
7 135 (2.39%) Hybrid Cloud
8 89 (1.57%) Data Protection Act
9 88 (1.56%) Public Cloud
10 85 (1.50%) Self-Motivation
11 76 (1.34%) Data Centre
11 76 (1.34%) Management Information System
12 73 (1.29%) Data Structures
13 67 (1.19%) AI Agents
14 66 (1.17%) Security Posture
15 62 (1.10%) Replication
16 57 (1.01%) Enterprise Cloud
16 57 (1.01%) Virtual Team
17 50 (0.88%) Mobile App
18 47 (0.83%) PKI
Operating Systems
1 490 (8.67%) Linux
2 299 (5.29%) Windows
3 103 (1.82%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 84 (1.49%) Unix
5 78 (1.38%) Windows Server
6 33 (0.58%) VMS
7 29 (0.51%) Ubuntu
8 26 (0.46%) Apple iOS
9 17 (0.30%) Android
10 11 (0.19%) Solaris
11 9 (0.16%) Windows Server 2019
11 9 (0.16%) zOS
12 8 (0.14%) Windows Server 2016
13 7 (0.12%) AIX
13 7 (0.12%) Amazon Linux
14 6 (0.11%) CentOS
14 6 (0.11%) Mac OS
14 6 (0.11%) Windows Server 2008
15 4 (0.071%) Alpine Linux
15 4 (0.071%) Data ONTAP
Processes & Methodologies
1 3,334 (59.00%) CI/CD
2 2,273 (40.22%) Agile
3 1,541 (27.27%) Infrastructure as Code
4 937 (16.58%) Containerisation
5 900 (15.93%) Continuous Improvement
6 867 (15.34%) Problem-Solving
7 864 (15.29%) Test Automation
8 833 (14.74%) Microservices
9 768 (13.59%) Stakeholder Management
10 753 (13.33%) AI
11 714 (12.63%) Observability
12 708 (12.53%) Scrum
13 679 (12.02%) Platform Engineering
14 675 (11.94%) Migration
15 664 (11.75%) Software Engineering
16 607 (10.74%) Analytics
17 521 (9.22%) Technical Leadership
18 507 (8.97%) Stakeholder Engagement
19 503 (8.90%) Data Modelling
20 465 (8.23%) Roadmaps
Programming Languages
1 1,594 (28.21%) Python
2 1,040 (18.40%) SQL
3 803 (14.21%) Java
4 509 (9.01%) C#
5 455 (8.05%) Bash
6 454 (8.03%) JavaScript
7 428 (7.57%) PowerShell
8 312 (5.52%) TypeScript
9 216 (3.82%) Bicep
10 110 (1.95%) Go
11 69 (1.22%) Apex Code
11 69 (1.22%) T-SQL
12 67 (1.19%) PL/SQL
13 64 (1.13%) Shell Script
14 55 (0.97%) Groovy
15 54 (0.96%) Scala
16 32 (0.57%) C++
17 30 (0.53%) Data Analysis Expressions
18 28 (0.50%) Kotlin
19 26 (0.46%) C
Qualifications
1 1,786 (31.61%) Security Cleared
2 1,501 (26.56%) SC Cleared
3 326 (5.77%) Degree
4 224 (3.96%) Azure Certification
5 215 (3.80%) BPSS Clearance
6 196 (3.47%) DV Cleared
7 193 (3.42%) AWS Certification
8 124 (2.19%) Computer Science Degree
9 84 (1.49%) Microsoft Certification
10 78 (1.38%) CISSP
11 61 (1.08%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
12 60 (1.06%) ISTQB
13 54 (0.96%) Cisco Certification
14 44 (0.78%) PMP
15 41 (0.73%) PMI Certification
16 38 (0.67%) Master's Degree
17 32 (0.57%) CISM
18 30 (0.53%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
19 25 (0.44%) ITIL Certification
20 23 (0.41%) CCNP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 513 (9.08%) QA
2 277 (4.90%) Data Quality
3 196 (3.47%) Accessibility
4 154 (2.73%) GDPR
5 91 (1.61%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 78 (1.38%) WCAG
7 76 (1.34%) NIST
8 52 (0.92%) NCSC
9 45 (0.80%) PMO
10 40 (0.71%) PCI DSS
11 35 (0.62%) SLA
12 28 (0.50%) GRC
13 27 (0.48%) Sarbanes-Oxley
14 12 (0.21%) Disclosure Scotland
15 11 (0.19%) HIPAA
16 10 (0.18%) SOC 2
17 9 (0.16%) Actionable Recommendations
17 9 (0.16%) Cyber Essentials
17 9 (0.16%) PSD2
18 8 (0.14%) HL7
System Software
1 1,114 (19.71%) Docker
2 181 (3.20%) Active Directory
3 84 (1.49%) Virtual Machines
4 82 (1.45%) VMware Infrastructure
5 31 (0.55%) vSphere
6 25 (0.44%) VMware NSX
7 21 (0.37%) Hyper-V
8 17 (0.30%) VMware ESXi
9 15 (0.27%) Squid
9 15 (0.27%) Virtual Desktop
10 14 (0.25%) Postfix
11 13 (0.23%) Oracle RAC
12 8 (0.14%) KVM
13 7 (0.12%) IAG
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%) RACF
15 5 (0.088%) SRDF
Systems Management
1 1,628 (28.81%) Terraform
2 1,461 (25.85%) Kubernetes
3 527 (9.33%) Ansible
4 372 (6.58%) Grafana
5 313 (5.54%) Prometheus
6 91 (1.61%) Argo
7 62 (1.10%) Puppet
8 61 (1.08%) Single Sign-On
9 43 (0.76%) Istio
9 43 (0.76%) Progress Chef
10 35 (0.62%) Microsoft Intune
11 31 (0.55%) Packer
12 25 (0.44%) vCenter Server
13 18 (0.32%) HP ALM
13 18 (0.32%) Kibana
13 18 (0.32%) SCCM
14 16 (0.28%) Kustomize
14 16 (0.28%) Oracle RMAN
15 14 (0.25%) Kubeflow
16 13 (0.23%) NetBackup
Vendors
1 1,027 (18.17%) Microsoft
2 316 (5.59%) Oracle
3 275 (4.87%) Databricks
4 274 (4.85%) Google
5 207 (3.66%) ServiceNow
6 191 (3.38%) Salesforce
7 178 (3.15%) Splunk
8 141 (2.50%) Dynatrace
9 128 (2.27%) SAP
10 118 (2.09%) VMware
11 109 (1.93%) Red Hat
12 64 (1.13%) IBM
13 61 (1.08%) OpenAI
14 60 (1.06%) Informatica
15 58 (1.03%) Atlassian
16 53 (0.94%) MuleSoft
17 48 (0.85%) Cisco
18 42 (0.74%) AppDynamics
18 42 (0.74%) Okta
19 40 (0.71%) Foundry