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

6 months to
16 Oct 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 14 13 13
Rank change year-on-year -1 0 +1
Contract jobs citing DevOps 5,756 3,828 3,747
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.41% 11.51% 9.96%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.27% 12.71% 11.58%
Number of daily rates quoted 4,021 2,657 2,508
10th Percentile £381 £363 £376
25th Percentile £433 £425 £460
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 £734
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £540
% change year-on-year - -7.41% -1.82%
Number of hourly rates quoted 111 24 60
10th Percentile £37.25 £45.13 £46.18
25th Percentile £56.25 £55.81 £65.00
Median hourly rate £69.00 £67.00 £70.00
Median % change year-on-year +2.99% -4.29% +7.69%
75th Percentile £77.50 £90.00 £73.50
90th Percentile £93.75 £95.00 £78.95
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 46,911 30,121 32,352
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.81% 90.54% 86.01%
Number of daily rates quoted 28,189 18,721 19,488
10th Percentile £325 £296 £308
25th Percentile £425 £404 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -2.42%
75th Percentile £638 £623 £638
90th Percentile £738 £725 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 3,476 1,911 1,239
10th Percentile £13.51 £14.38 £15.00
25th Percentile £16.75 £17.30 £20.12
Median hourly rate £37.24 £25.15 £40.00
Median % change year-on-year +48.07% -37.13% -10.11%
75th Percentile £65.00 £42.79 £65.00
90th Percentile £78.75 £66.00 £73.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £37.24 £22.27 £40.00
% change year-on-year +67.26% -44.34% -8.88%

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 16 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 16 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 16 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 0 4,875 £525 - 867
London -1 2,608 £549 -0.18% 319
UK excluding London -3 2,398 £500 - 653
Work from Home -2 1,644 £525 - 540
North of England -4 804 £500 +4.17% 184
South East -7 452 £550 +9.90% 175
Midlands -7 419 £484 -6.02% 92
Yorkshire -3 384 £500 - 63
West Midlands -8 341 £490 -6.67% 56
South West +6 329 £550 - 105
North West -3 323 £510 +13.33% 92
Scotland -9 223 £475 -4.90% 31
East of England -2 142 £505 -7.13% 44
North East +11 111 £450 -18.18% 33
East Midlands -6 76 £425 +3.03% 36
Wales -9 41 £375 -8.54% 25
Northern Ireland +23 23 £600 - 8
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
1 349 (6.06%) Confluence
2 159 (2.76%) SharePoint
3 134 (2.33%) Apache Spark
4 126 (2.19%) Apache
5 123 (2.14%) Apache Airflow
6 55 (0.96%) SAS
7 46 (0.80%) Jupyter
8 42 (0.73%) CMS
9 33 (0.57%) nginx
10 30 (0.52%) IIS
11 21 (0.36%) Microsoft Exchange
12 17 (0.30%) Camunda
13 12 (0.21%) Anypoint
13 12 (0.21%) OpenStack
13 12 (0.21%) WebLogic
14 11 (0.19%) Oracle SOA Suite
15 10 (0.17%) Tomcat
15 10 (0.17%) WebSphere
16 9 (0.16%) Appian
16 9 (0.16%) Oracle Workflow
Applications
1 74 (1.29%) Microsoft Excel
2 56 (0.97%) Microsoft Project
2 56 (0.97%) MS Visio
3 43 (0.75%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 40 (0.69%) Microsoft Office
5 14 (0.24%) Chatbot
6 9 (0.16%) Spreadsheet
7 8 (0.14%) Windchill
8 7 (0.12%) CPLEX
9 5 (0.087%) Notion
9 5 (0.087%) Trello
10 3 (0.052%) Gliffy
10 3 (0.052%) Mingle
11 2 (0.035%) Adobe XD
12 1 (0.017%) EngageOne
12 1 (0.017%) Mozilla Thunderbird
12 1 (0.017%) Sketch
Business Applications
1 81 (1.41%) Dynamics CRM
2 45 (0.78%) SAP S/4HANA
3 15 (0.26%) Oracle EBS
4 12 (0.21%) SAP MDG
5 11 (0.19%) Payment Gateway
6 10 (0.17%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
7 9 (0.16%) Magento
8 7 (0.12%) Oracle EBS R12
9 6 (0.10%) Aladdin
9 6 (0.10%) Remedy ITSM
10 5 (0.087%) Dynamics AX
10 5 (0.087%) OpenText MBPM
10 5 (0.087%) Oracle BPM
10 5 (0.087%) Oracle ERP
10 5 (0.087%) Teamcenter
10 5 (0.087%) Temenos T24
11 4 (0.069%) Maximo
11 4 (0.069%) Oracle Payroll
11 4 (0.069%) Workday HCM
12 3 (0.052%) Endur
Cloud Services
1 3,140 (54.55%) Azure
2 2,057 (35.74%) AWS
3 1,807 (31.39%) Azure DevOps
4 1,035 (17.98%) GitHub
5 792 (13.76%) GCP
6 650 (11.29%) GitHub Actions
7 508 (8.83%) Power Platform
8 490 (8.51%) Serverless
9 312 (5.42%) Amazon S3
10 291 (5.06%) AWS Lambda
11 277 (4.81%) Amazon EKS
11 277 (4.81%) Entra ID
12 265 (4.60%) Amazon CloudWatch
13 243 (4.22%) AWS CloudFormation
14 234 (4.07%) Azure AKS
15 230 (4.00%) Azure Monitor
16 210 (3.65%) Amazon EC2
17 207 (3.60%) Azure Data Factory
18 203 (3.53%) Dynamics 365
19 193 (3.35%) Amazon ECS
Communications & Networking
1 243 (4.22%) Firewall
2 191 (3.32%) DNS
3 126 (2.19%) Network Security
4 121 (2.10%) VPN
5 83 (1.44%) TCP/IP
6 56 (0.97%) DHCP
7 55 (0.96%) SSL
8 46 (0.80%) WAN
9 39 (0.68%) BGP
10 37 (0.64%) HTTP
11 31 (0.54%) Internet
12 30 (0.52%) SSH
13 28 (0.49%) OSPF
13 28 (0.49%) SD-WAN
14 21 (0.36%) LAN
14 21 (0.36%) VLAN
15 19 (0.33%) BIG-IP
15 19 (0.33%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
16 18 (0.31%) Wi-Fi
17 16 (0.28%) SAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 319 (5.54%) Power BI
2 310 (5.39%) PostgreSQL
3 309 (5.37%) SQL Server
4 205 (3.56%) Data Warehouse
5 196 (3.41%) MongoDB
6 183 (3.18%) Data Lake
7 179 (3.11%) NoSQL
8 168 (2.92%) Relational Database
9 164 (2.85%) Amazon RDS
10 128 (2.22%) Metadata
11 112 (1.95%) Azure SQL Database
12 90 (1.56%) DynamoDB
13 89 (1.55%) MySQL
13 89 (1.55%) Oracle Database
14 86 (1.49%) Delta Lake
14 86 (1.49%) Redis
15 65 (1.13%) SQL Server Integration Services
16 62 (1.08%) Big Data
17 60 (1.04%) Amazon Redshift
18 58 (1.01%) Elasticsearch
Development Applications
1 896 (15.57%) Git
2 852 (14.80%) Jenkins
3 686 (11.92%) GitLab
4 678 (11.78%) JIRA
5 154 (2.68%) Selenium
6 104 (1.81%) JUnit
7 99 (1.72%) Postman
8 96 (1.67%) Maven
9 88 (1.53%) SonarQube
10 86 (1.49%) Cucumber
11 78 (1.36%) REST Assured
12 77 (1.34%) Cypress.io
13 75 (1.30%) Bitbucket
14 69 (1.20%) Gradle
15 65 (1.13%) JMeter
16 59 (1.03%) Claude Code
17 51 (0.89%) Mockito
18 47 (0.82%) Visual Studio
19 46 (0.80%) Sonatype Nexus
20 38 (0.66%) Artifactory
General
1 1,553 (26.98%) Social Skills
2 1,087 (18.88%) Finance
3 841 (14.61%) Public Sector
4 569 (9.89%) Analytical Skills
5 439 (7.63%) Banking
6 173 (3.01%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 116 (2.02%) Retail
8 93 (1.62%) Influencing Skills
9 80 (1.39%) Documentation Skills
10 65 (1.13%) Legal
11 62 (1.08%) Aerospace
12 60 (1.04%) Organisational Skills
13 58 (1.01%) Investment Banking
14 57 (0.99%) Marketing
15 56 (0.97%) Military
16 53 (0.92%) Telecoms
17 51 (0.89%) Financial Institution
17 51 (0.89%) Manufacturing
18 48 (0.83%) Local Government
19 47 (0.82%) Law
Job Titles
1 1,148 (19.94%) DevOps Engineer
2 949 (16.49%) Developer
3 873 (15.17%) Senior
4 649 (11.28%) Architect
5 564 (9.80%) Lead
6 360 (6.25%) Azure Engineer
7 326 (5.66%) Data Engineer
8 265 (4.60%) AWS Engineer
9 254 (4.41%) Analyst
10 239 (4.15%) Platform Engineer
11 210 (3.65%) Cloud Engineer
12 202 (3.51%) Azure DevOps Engineer
13 201 (3.49%) Senior DevOps
14 195 (3.39%) Java Developer
15 188 (3.27%) AWS DevOps
16 184 (3.20%) Senior DevOps Engineer
17 176 (3.06%) AWS DevOps Engineer
17 176 (3.06%) Solutions Architect
18 157 (2.73%) Senior Developer
19 147 (2.55%) Software Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 1,788 (31.06%) Terraform
2 726 (12.61%) REST
3 519 (9.02%) .NET
4 413 (7.18%) Kafka
5 374 (6.50%) RESTful
6 317 (5.51%) Spring
7 312 (5.42%) Spring Boot
8 308 (5.35%) React
9 210 (3.65%) OAuth
10 199 (3.46%) Node.js
11 189 (3.28%) JSON
12 161 (2.80%) Playwright
13 159 (2.76%) PySpark
14 144 (2.50%) HTML
15 141 (2.45%) OAuth2
16 136 (2.36%) .NET Framework
16 136 (2.36%) Middleware
16 136 (2.36%) SOAP
17 130 (2.26%) CSS
18 128 (2.22%) AngularJS
Miscellaneous
1 1,097 (19.06%) Cloud Native
2 432 (7.51%) Product Ownership
3 288 (5.00%) Distributed Systems
4 248 (4.31%) Enterprise Software
5 226 (3.93%) Onboarding
6 162 (2.81%) Hybrid Cloud
7 152 (2.64%) Legacy Systems
8 119 (2.07%) AI Agents
9 109 (1.89%) Management Information System
10 84 (1.46%) Public Cloud
10 84 (1.46%) Self-Motivation
11 79 (1.37%) Security Posture
12 78 (1.36%) Data Protection Act
13 77 (1.34%) Data Centre
14 76 (1.32%) Data Structures
15 72 (1.25%) Replication
16 69 (1.20%) PKI
17 67 (1.16%) Enterprise Cloud
18 58 (1.01%) Virtual Team
19 53 (0.92%) Mobile App
Operating Systems
1 592 (10.28%) Linux
2 339 (5.89%) Windows
3 124 (2.15%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 118 (2.05%) Unix
5 105 (1.82%) Windows Server
6 39 (0.68%) Ubuntu
7 35 (0.61%) VMS
8 25 (0.43%) Apple iOS
9 19 (0.33%) CentOS
10 17 (0.30%) Android
11 12 (0.21%) zOS
12 11 (0.19%) Amazon Linux
13 8 (0.14%) AIX
13 8 (0.14%) macOS
13 8 (0.14%) Windows Server 2016
13 8 (0.14%) Windows Server 2019
14 6 (0.10%) Solaris
15 5 (0.087%) Alpine Linux
16 3 (0.052%) Rocky
16 3 (0.052%) Windows Server 2008
Processes & Methodologies
1 3,613 (62.77%) CI/CD
2 2,364 (41.07%) Agile
3 1,768 (30.72%) Infrastructure as Code
4 1,041 (18.09%) Stakeholder Management
5 1,020 (17.72%) Continuous Improvement
6 988 (17.16%) Test Automation
7 984 (17.10%) Containerisation
8 948 (16.47%) AI
9 930 (16.16%) Problem-Solving
10 868 (15.08%) Microservices
11 842 (14.63%) Observability
12 826 (14.35%) Platform Engineering
13 792 (13.76%) Software Engineering
14 722 (12.54%) Migration
15 700 (12.16%) Scrum
16 647 (11.24%) Technical Leadership
17 584 (10.15%) Analytics
18 538 (9.35%) Stakeholder Engagement
19 526 (9.14%) Roadmaps
20 520 (9.03%) Event-Driven
Programming Languages
1 1,710 (29.71%) Python
2 1,005 (17.46%) SQL
3 842 (14.63%) Java
4 542 (9.42%) C#
5 541 (9.40%) Bash
6 540 (9.38%) PowerShell
7 489 (8.50%) JavaScript
8 355 (6.17%) TypeScript
9 290 (5.04%) Bicep
10 134 (2.33%) Go
11 83 (1.44%) Shell Script
12 70 (1.22%) Scala
13 68 (1.18%) Groovy
14 66 (1.15%) T-SQL
15 60 (1.04%) Apex Code
16 56 (0.97%) PL/SQL
17 40 (0.69%) Data Analysis Expressions
18 36 (0.63%) C++
19 34 (0.59%) Kusto Query Language
19 34 (0.59%) Perl
Qualifications
1 1,843 (32.02%) Security Cleared
2 1,531 (26.60%) SC Cleared
3 380 (6.60%) Degree
4 267 (4.64%) Azure Certification
5 262 (4.55%) DV Cleared
6 256 (4.45%) BPSS Clearance
7 223 (3.87%) AWS Certification
8 153 (2.66%) Computer Science Degree
9 109 (1.89%) Microsoft Certification
10 83 (1.44%) CISSP
11 68 (1.18%) ISTQB
12 61 (1.06%) PMP
13 58 (1.01%) PMI Certification
14 56 (0.97%) Cisco Certification
15 50 (0.87%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
16 41 (0.71%) Master's Degree
17 33 (0.57%) CISM
18 28 (0.49%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
19 26 (0.45%) (ISC)2 CCSP
20 25 (0.43%) ITIL Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 574 (9.97%) QA
2 297 (5.16%) Data Quality
3 221 (3.84%) Accessibility
4 132 (2.29%) GDPR
5 100 (1.74%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 82 (1.42%) WCAG
7 66 (1.15%) NIST
8 58 (1.01%) NCSC
9 48 (0.83%) PMO
10 37 (0.64%) SLA
11 35 (0.61%) PCI DSS
12 26 (0.45%) GRC
13 23 (0.40%) ISO 20022
14 18 (0.31%) Sarbanes-Oxley
15 16 (0.28%) HIPAA
15 16 (0.28%) SOC 2
16 15 (0.26%) Cyber Essentials
16 15 (0.26%) Disclosure Scotland
16 15 (0.26%) SEPA
17 13 (0.23%) Actionable Recommendations
System Software
1 1,226 (21.30%) Docker
2 175 (3.04%) Active Directory
3 81 (1.41%) VMware Infrastructure
4 80 (1.39%) Virtual Machines
5 32 (0.56%) vSphere
6 24 (0.42%) Virtual Desktop
7 23 (0.40%) VMware ESXi
8 22 (0.38%) Hyper-V
9 14 (0.24%) VMware NSX
10 11 (0.19%) Squid
11 10 (0.17%) IAG
11 10 (0.17%) Oracle RAC
12 8 (0.14%) zsh
13 7 (0.12%) Virtual Servers
14 6 (0.10%) Apache ZooKeeper
14 6 (0.10%) Microsoft App-V
14 6 (0.10%) RACF
15 5 (0.087%) KVM
15 5 (0.087%) Postfix
16 4 (0.069%) BitLocker
Systems Management
1 1,616 (28.08%) Kubernetes
2 557 (9.68%) Ansible
3 384 (6.67%) Grafana
4 321 (5.58%) Prometheus
5 79 (1.37%) Argo
6 55 (0.96%) Puppet
7 50 (0.87%) Microsoft Intune
8 49 (0.85%) Progress Chef
9 43 (0.75%) Single Sign-On
10 42 (0.73%) Kibana
11 39 (0.68%) Packer
12 32 (0.56%) Istio
13 25 (0.43%) Kubeflow
14 23 (0.40%) Kustomize
15 21 (0.36%) SCCM
16 17 (0.30%) vCenter Server
17 15 (0.26%) Oracle RMAN
18 13 (0.23%) Control-M
18 13 (0.23%) HP ALM
18 13 (0.23%) SCOM
Vendors
1 1,181 (20.52%) Microsoft
2 335 (5.82%) Databricks
2 335 (5.82%) Google
3 308 (5.35%) Oracle
4 196 (3.41%) ServiceNow
5 194 (3.37%) Splunk
6 167 (2.90%) Salesforce
7 161 (2.80%) Dynatrace
8 123 (2.14%) VMware
9 115 (2.00%) SAP
10 97 (1.69%) Red Hat
11 80 (1.39%) OpenAI
12 71 (1.23%) MuleSoft
13 68 (1.18%) IBM
14 64 (1.11%) Foundry
15 47 (0.82%) Informatica
16 44 (0.76%) Cisco
17 40 (0.69%) Atlassian
18 39 (0.68%) Okta
19 38 (0.66%) AppDynamics