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 17 June 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
17 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 13 15 14
Rank change year-on-year +2 -1 -2
Contract jobs citing DevOps 5,349 3,084 4,141
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.63% 10.39% 9.50%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.53% 11.42% 11.17%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,743 2,218 2,841
10th Percentile £385 £367 £400
25th Percentile £438 £433 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year - -4.55% -5.94%
75th Percentile £613 £632 £650
90th Percentile £700 £750 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £525
% change year-on-year - -4.76% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 114 16 123
10th Percentile £39.53 £32.63 £56.50
25th Percentile £61.78 £51.25 £61.60
Median hourly rate £70.00 £76.00 £67.50
Median % change year-on-year -7.89% +12.59% +2.89%
75th Percentile £77.50 £87.50 £74.44
90th Percentile £93.81 £90.63 £85.65
UK excluding London median hourly rate £70.00 £70.00 £66.50
% change year-on-year - +5.26% +1.53%

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 42,679 27,009 37,072
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.81% 91.00% 85.05%
Number of daily rates quoted 26,607 17,137 23,609
10th Percentile £325 £300 £300
25th Percentile £413 £406 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £508 £525
Median % change year-on-year +0.99% -3.33% -4.55%
75th Percentile £619 £625 £638
90th Percentile £725 £738 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,567 1,242 2,598
10th Percentile £14.82 £14.20 £12.75
25th Percentile £20.09 £17.87 £16.03
Median hourly rate £43.96 £26.27 £37.34
Median % change year-on-year +67.37% -29.66% +6.69%
75th Percentile £68.00 £55.25 £61.30
90th Percentile £81.25 £73.75 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £44.50 £25.15 £38.12
% change year-on-year +76.94% -34.02% +17.29%

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 17 June 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 17 June 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 17 June 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 +4 4,541 £525 - 2,306
UK excluding London +6 2,358 £500 - 2,347
London +4 2,327 £550 - 560
Work from Home -2 1,472 £525 - 2,126
North of England +7 840 £500 - 554
South East -3 456 £519 +3.75% 548
Yorkshire 0 454 £502 +0.40% 185
Midlands +3 421 £488 -2.50% 263
West Midlands +2 333 £500 -2.44% 142
North West 0 312 £500 - 261
South West +16 286 £510 -7.27% 217
Scotland +1 201 £500 +1.21% 226
East of England +24 133 £525 +6.33% 284
North East +10 92 £450 -16.28% 113
East Midlands -1 84 £466 +1.19% 121
Wales +7 50 £425 +38.10% 147
Northern Ireland +12 20 £475 +11.76% 150
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
1 322 (6.02%) Confluence
2 139 (2.60%) Apache Spark
3 122 (2.28%) SharePoint
4 101 (1.89%) Apache Airflow
5 95 (1.78%) Apache
6 86 (1.61%) SAS
7 48 (0.90%) CMS
8 32 (0.60%) Microsoft Exchange
9 31 (0.58%) Jupyter
9 31 (0.58%) nginx
10 28 (0.52%) IIS
11 19 (0.36%) OpenStack
12 16 (0.30%) Camunda
13 14 (0.26%) WebSphere
14 12 (0.22%) Palantir Foundry
15 11 (0.21%) Mendix
16 9 (0.17%) Oracle Workflow
16 9 (0.17%) Sitecore CMS
17 7 (0.13%) ArcGIS
17 7 (0.13%) Tomcat
Applications
1 77 (1.44%) Microsoft Excel
2 57 (1.07%) Microsoft Project
3 50 (0.93%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 37 (0.69%) Microsoft Office
5 29 (0.54%) MS Visio
6 9 (0.17%) CPLEX
7 7 (0.13%) Chatbot
8 4 (0.075%) Notion
9 3 (0.056%) Adobe XD
9 3 (0.056%) Trello
10 2 (0.037%) Spreadsheet
11 1 (0.019%) InDesign
11 1 (0.019%) Maya
11 1 (0.019%) Weka
Business Applications
1 66 (1.23%) Dynamics CRM
2 33 (0.62%) SAP S/4HANA
3 12 (0.22%) Payment Gateway
4 10 (0.19%) Maximo
5 9 (0.17%) Oracle ERP
5 9 (0.17%) Remedy ITSM
6 8 (0.15%) Aladdin
6 8 (0.15%) Dynamics AX
7 6 (0.11%) Endur
7 6 (0.11%) SAP MDG
8 5 (0.093%) Magento
8 5 (0.093%) Oracle EBS
9 4 (0.075%) OpenText MBPM
9 4 (0.075%) Oracle BPM
9 4 (0.075%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
10 3 (0.056%) NEC Housing
10 3 (0.056%) Salesforce CRM
10 3 (0.056%) SAP BPC
10 3 (0.056%) SAP ERP
10 3 (0.056%) SAP Oil and Gas
Cloud Services
1 2,883 (53.90%) Azure
2 1,864 (34.85%) AWS
3 1,582 (29.58%) Azure DevOps
4 883 (16.51%) GitHub
5 680 (12.71%) GCP
6 528 (9.87%) GitHub Actions
7 480 (8.97%) Serverless
8 456 (8.52%) Power Platform
9 292 (5.46%) Amazon S3
10 263 (4.92%) AWS Lambda
11 245 (4.58%) AWS CloudFormation
12 235 (4.39%) Entra ID
13 224 (4.19%) Azure AKS
14 214 (4.00%) Amazon EKS
15 194 (3.63%) Azure Data Factory
16 181 (3.38%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 171 (3.20%) Amazon EC2
18 162 (3.03%) PaaS
19 161 (3.01%) Azure Monitor
20 154 (2.88%) Dynamics 365
Communications & Networking
1 238 (4.45%) Firewall
2 138 (2.58%) DNS
3 116 (2.17%) Network Security
4 105 (1.96%) VPN
5 47 (0.88%) WAN
6 45 (0.84%) TCP/IP
7 36 (0.67%) SD-WAN
8 34 (0.64%) BGP
9 31 (0.58%) SSL
10 27 (0.50%) Wi-Fi
11 26 (0.49%) DHCP
12 25 (0.47%) SAN
13 24 (0.45%) OSPF
14 23 (0.43%) HTTP
14 23 (0.43%) Internet
15 18 (0.34%) IPsec
16 17 (0.32%) LAN
16 17 (0.32%) MPLS
16 17 (0.32%) VXLAN
17 16 (0.30%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
Database & Business Intelligence
1 294 (5.50%) Power BI
2 259 (4.84%) SQL Server
3 250 (4.67%) PostgreSQL
4 191 (3.57%) NoSQL
5 167 (3.12%) Data Lake
6 162 (3.03%) Relational Database
7 153 (2.86%) Data Warehouse
8 149 (2.79%) MongoDB
9 114 (2.13%) Amazon RDS
10 106 (1.98%) Azure SQL Database
11 98 (1.83%) Metadata
12 97 (1.81%) DynamoDB
13 88 (1.65%) Delta Lake
14 74 (1.38%) Oracle Database
15 71 (1.33%) Amazon Athena
15 71 (1.33%) Big Data
16 65 (1.22%) Redis
17 63 (1.18%) Amazon Redshift
18 62 (1.16%) Elasticsearch
19 54 (1.01%) BigQuery
Development Applications
1 763 (14.26%) Jenkins
2 681 (12.73%) Git
3 650 (12.15%) JIRA
4 569 (10.64%) GitLab
5 115 (2.15%) Selenium
6 103 (1.93%) Postman
7 90 (1.68%) JUnit
7 90 (1.68%) SonarQube
8 70 (1.31%) Bitbucket
8 70 (1.31%) REST Assured
9 68 (1.27%) Maven
10 60 (1.12%) Cucumber
11 58 (1.08%) JMeter
12 50 (0.93%) Cypress.io
13 46 (0.86%) Gradle
14 43 (0.80%) Gatling
15 41 (0.77%) Artifactory
16 39 (0.73%) Mockito
17 35 (0.65%) Visual Studio
18 32 (0.60%) LoadRunner
General
1 1,332 (24.90%) Social Skills
2 968 (18.10%) Finance
3 732 (13.68%) Public Sector
4 414 (7.74%) Analytical Skills
5 345 (6.45%) Banking
6 142 (2.65%) Documentation Skills
7 109 (2.04%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 76 (1.42%) Influencing Skills
8 76 (1.42%) Retail
9 69 (1.29%) Legal
10 59 (1.10%) Marketing
11 55 (1.03%) Organisational Skills
12 49 (0.92%) Financial Institution
13 45 (0.84%) Military
14 40 (0.75%) Presentation Skills
15 38 (0.71%) Law
16 36 (0.67%) Investment Banking
17 33 (0.62%) Telecoms
18 29 (0.54%) Front Office
19 27 (0.50%) Pharmaceutical
Job Titles
1 1,097 (20.51%) DevOps Engineer
2 809 (15.12%) Developer
3 755 (14.11%) Senior
4 626 (11.70%) Architect
5 482 (9.01%) Lead
6 343 (6.41%) Azure Engineer
7 323 (6.04%) Analyst
8 318 (5.95%) Data Engineer
9 263 (4.92%) AWS Engineer
10 203 (3.80%) Cloud Engineer
11 196 (3.66%) Platform Engineer
12 194 (3.63%) AWS DevOps
13 181 (3.38%) AWS DevOps Engineer
13 181 (3.38%) Java Developer
13 181 (3.38%) Solutions Architect
14 179 (3.35%) Azure DevOps Engineer
15 177 (3.31%) Senior DevOps
16 162 (3.03%) Business Analyst
17 161 (3.01%) Senior DevOps Engineer
18 142 (2.65%) Software Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 487 (9.10%) REST
2 455 (8.51%) .NET
3 313 (5.85%) React
4 312 (5.83%) Spring
5 299 (5.59%) Spring Boot
6 291 (5.44%) Kafka
7 288 (5.38%) RESTful
8 237 (4.43%) Node.js
9 172 (3.22%) AngularJS
10 166 (3.10%) PySpark
11 155 (2.90%) OAuth
12 150 (2.80%) Playwright
13 133 (2.49%) JSON
14 121 (2.26%) YAML
15 117 (2.19%) SOAP
16 115 (2.15%) .NET Framework
17 110 (2.06%) HTML
18 106 (1.98%) OpenID
19 105 (1.96%) Middleware
20 104 (1.94%) OAuth2
Miscellaneous
1 923 (17.26%) Cloud Native
2 348 (6.51%) Product Ownership
3 225 (4.21%) Distributed Systems
4 147 (2.75%) Onboarding
5 126 (2.36%) Legacy Systems
6 120 (2.24%) Enterprise Software
7 112 (2.09%) Hybrid Cloud
8 107 (2.00%) Public Cloud
9 85 (1.59%) Data Centre
10 80 (1.50%) Data Protection Act
11 67 (1.25%) Management Information System
12 63 (1.18%) Self-Motivation
13 55 (1.03%) Security Posture
14 54 (1.01%) Mobile App
15 52 (0.97%) Data Structures
16 51 (0.95%) AI Agents
17 50 (0.93%) Greenfield Project
17 50 (0.93%) Virtual Team
18 43 (0.80%) Low-Code
18 43 (0.80%) Private Cloud
Operating Systems
1 449 (8.39%) Linux
2 267 (4.99%) Windows
3 101 (1.89%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 80 (1.50%) Unix
5 58 (1.08%) Windows Server
6 39 (0.73%) VMS
7 30 (0.56%) Ubuntu
8 24 (0.45%) Apple iOS
9 15 (0.28%) Android
10 14 (0.26%) CentOS
11 10 (0.19%) Solaris
12 9 (0.17%) Windows Server 2019
13 6 (0.11%) Mac OS
13 6 (0.11%) Windows Server 2008
13 6 (0.11%) Windows Server 2016
14 5 (0.093%) Amazon Linux
14 5 (0.093%) Windows 10
15 4 (0.075%) Alpine Linux
15 4 (0.075%) Data ONTAP
15 4 (0.075%) Windows Server 2012
Processes & Methodologies
1 3,085 (57.67%) CI/CD
2 2,005 (37.48%) Agile
3 1,425 (26.64%) Infrastructure as Code
4 856 (16.00%) Containerisation
5 791 (14.79%) Problem-Solving
6 774 (14.47%) Microservices
7 761 (14.23%) Test Automation
8 751 (14.04%) Continuous Improvement
9 643 (12.02%) Migration
10 641 (11.98%) Stakeholder Management
11 637 (11.91%) Observability
12 614 (11.48%) AI
13 609 (11.39%) Analytics
14 602 (11.25%) Scrum
15 555 (10.38%) Platform Engineering
16 540 (10.10%) Software Engineering
17 493 (9.22%) Data Modelling
18 455 (8.51%) Technical Leadership
19 430 (8.04%) Roadmaps
20 428 (8.00%) Mentoring
Programming Languages
1 1,496 (27.97%) Python
2 1,009 (18.86%) SQL
3 729 (13.63%) Java
4 495 (9.25%) C#
5 389 (7.27%) JavaScript
6 381 (7.12%) Bash
7 378 (7.07%) PowerShell
8 266 (4.97%) TypeScript
9 186 (3.48%) Bicep
10 113 (2.11%) Go
11 65 (1.22%) Apex Code
12 64 (1.20%) Scala
13 63 (1.18%) Shell Script
14 52 (0.97%) T-SQL
15 49 (0.92%) PL/SQL
16 45 (0.84%) Groovy
17 31 (0.58%) C++
18 26 (0.49%) Data Analysis Expressions
19 25 (0.47%) Ruby
20 24 (0.45%) Perl
Qualifications
1 1,689 (31.58%) Security Cleared
2 1,419 (26.53%) SC Cleared
3 320 (5.98%) Degree
4 215 (4.02%) Azure Certification
5 173 (3.23%) BPSS Clearance
6 172 (3.22%) AWS Certification
7 159 (2.97%) DV Cleared
8 128 (2.39%) Computer Science Degree
9 85 (1.59%) CISSP
10 72 (1.35%) Microsoft Certification
11 58 (1.08%) ISTQB
12 51 (0.95%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 48 (0.90%) CISM
14 47 (0.88%) Cisco Certification
15 45 (0.84%) PMI Certification
16 43 (0.80%) Master's Degree
16 43 (0.80%) PMP
17 28 (0.52%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
18 26 (0.49%) TOGAF Certification
19 24 (0.45%) ITIL Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 447 (8.36%) QA
2 260 (4.86%) Data Quality
3 178 (3.33%) GDPR
4 161 (3.01%) Accessibility
5 126 (2.36%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 116 (2.17%) NIST
7 73 (1.36%) NCSC
8 67 (1.25%) WCAG
9 49 (0.92%) PCI DSS
10 44 (0.82%) SLA
11 32 (0.60%) Sarbanes-Oxley
12 29 (0.54%) PMO
13 25 (0.47%) GRC
14 19 (0.36%) HIPAA
15 15 (0.28%) SOC 2
16 12 (0.22%) ISO 20022
16 12 (0.22%) PSD2
17 11 (0.21%) NIST 800
18 10 (0.19%) Disclosure Scotland
18 10 (0.19%) SEPA
System Software
1 1,020 (19.07%) Docker
2 176 (3.29%) Active Directory
3 78 (1.46%) VMware Infrastructure
4 76 (1.42%) Virtual Machines
5 33 (0.62%) vSphere
6 27 (0.50%) VMware NSX
7 20 (0.37%) Virtual Desktop
8 18 (0.34%) Squid
9 17 (0.32%) VMware ESXi
10 16 (0.30%) Hyper-V
11 14 (0.26%) Postfix
12 9 (0.17%) Oracle RAC
13 7 (0.13%) RACF
14 6 (0.11%) Corosync
14 6 (0.11%) Firmware
14 6 (0.11%) HDFS
14 6 (0.11%) KVM
15 5 (0.093%) Microsoft App-V
15 5 (0.093%) NFS
15 5 (0.093%) SRDF
Systems Management
1 1,532 (28.64%) Terraform
2 1,345 (25.14%) Kubernetes
3 508 (9.50%) Ansible
4 361 (6.75%) Grafana
5 311 (5.81%) Prometheus
6 89 (1.66%) Argo
7 77 (1.44%) Single Sign-On
8 67 (1.25%) Puppet
9 60 (1.12%) Istio
10 32 (0.60%) Progress Chef
11 30 (0.56%) Microsoft Intune
11 30 (0.56%) Packer
12 26 (0.49%) vCenter Server
13 22 (0.41%) Active Directory Federation Services
14 21 (0.39%) HP ALM
15 18 (0.34%) Consul
15 18 (0.34%) Kibana
16 15 (0.28%) Kustomize
17 14 (0.26%) SCCM
18 13 (0.24%) NetBackup
Vendors
1 930 (17.39%) Microsoft
2 282 (5.27%) Databricks
3 273 (5.10%) Oracle
4 257 (4.80%) Google
5 184 (3.44%) Splunk
6 181 (3.38%) ServiceNow
7 173 (3.23%) Salesforce
8 131 (2.45%) Red Hat
9 120 (2.24%) SAP
10 117 (2.19%) VMware
11 113 (2.11%) Dynatrace
12 75 (1.40%) OpenAI
13 57 (1.07%) Atlassian
14 53 (0.99%) IBM
14 53 (0.99%) Informatica
15 47 (0.88%) CyberArk
16 41 (0.77%) Cisco
17 40 (0.75%) Okta
18 38 (0.71%) Foundry
19 36 (0.67%) MuleSoft