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

6 months to
4 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 12 15 15
Rank change year-on-year +3 0 -2
Contract jobs citing DevOps 5,587 3,546 3,904
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.57% 10.78% 9.96%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.45% 11.92% 11.64%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,868 2,534 2,667
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 £614 £625 £650
90th Percentile £700 £725 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £488 £539
% change year-on-year +2.56% -9.47% -2.09%
Number of hourly rates quoted 121 25 89
10th Percentile £35.00 £32.15 £56.25
25th Percentile £56.75 £51.25 £65.00
Median hourly rate £67.50 £67.00 £70.00
Median % change year-on-year +0.75% -4.29% +6.87%
75th Percentile £77.50 £82.96 £74.44
90th Percentile £88.00 £91.00 £85.33
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 44,879 29,748 33,534
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.93% 90.41% 85.55%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,704 18,653 21,488
10th Percentile £325 £300 £310
25th Percentile £420 £404 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -4.55%
75th Percentile £625 £625 £638
90th Percentile £725 £725 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,741 1,659 1,873
10th Percentile £14.50 £14.20 £14.00
25th Percentile £19.50 £17.30 £18.14
Median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £40.50
Median % change year-on-year +74.79% -37.90% -4.71%
75th Percentile £68.00 £50.00 £65.00
90th Percentile £82.25 £68.00 £74.91
UK excluding London median hourly rate £43.96 £23.05 £40.94
% change year-on-year +90.72% -43.70% +3.38%

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 4 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 4 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 4 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 +2 4,787 £525 - 2,582
London +1 2,476 £550 - 1,371
UK excluding London +4 2,441 £500 +2.56% 1,456
Work from Home +1 1,596 £525 +2.44% 1,333
North of England +1 834 £500 +5.26% 409
Midlands +1 460 £488 +2.63% 209
South East -10 460 £525 +5.00% 386
Yorkshire +2 412 £500 +2.04% 136
West Midlands -1 376 £491 -1.80% 144
North West -1 334 £524 +12.69% 207
South West +13 320 £525 +0.96% 186
Scotland +1 198 £488 -2.50% 95
East of England +15 135 £506 +1.20% 86
North East +12 105 £425 -18.27% 68
East Midlands +4 79 £488 +7.26% 63
Wales -6 44 £460 +43.49% 43
Northern Ireland +20 22 £475 +7.95% 47
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
1 339 (6.07%) Confluence
2 133 (2.38%) SharePoint
3 132 (2.36%) Apache Spark
4 121 (2.17%) Apache Airflow
5 107 (1.92%) Apache
6 85 (1.52%) SAS
7 43 (0.77%) CMS
8 37 (0.66%) IIS
9 35 (0.63%) Jupyter
10 25 (0.45%) Microsoft Exchange
10 25 (0.45%) nginx
11 16 (0.29%) WebSphere
12 15 (0.27%) Camunda
13 13 (0.23%) Anypoint
13 13 (0.23%) Palantir Foundry
14 11 (0.20%) Oracle Workflow
15 10 (0.18%) OpenStack
16 9 (0.16%) Appian
17 8 (0.14%) Tomcat
17 8 (0.14%) WebLogic
Applications
1 60 (1.07%) Microsoft Project
2 56 (1.00%) Microsoft Excel
3 37 (0.66%) Microsoft Office
4 35 (0.63%) MS Visio
5 26 (0.47%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 10 (0.18%) Chatbot
6 10 (0.18%) CPLEX
7 9 (0.16%) Spreadsheet
8 7 (0.13%) Trello
9 4 (0.072%) Notion
10 2 (0.036%) Adobe XD
11 1 (0.018%) EngageOne
11 1 (0.018%) InDesign
11 1 (0.018%) Maya
11 1 (0.018%) Weka
Business Applications
1 68 (1.22%) Dynamics CRM
2 39 (0.70%) SAP S/4HANA
3 10 (0.18%) Aladdin
3 10 (0.18%) Oracle EBS
3 10 (0.18%) Remedy ITSM
4 9 (0.16%) Magento
4 9 (0.16%) Payment Gateway
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 (0.089%) OpenText MBPM
7 5 (0.089%) Oracle BPM
7 5 (0.089%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
8 4 (0.072%) Endur
8 4 (0.072%) SAP ERP
9 3 (0.054%) OpenText VIM for SAP
9 3 (0.054%) Shopify
9 3 (0.054%) Teamcenter
9 3 (0.054%) Temenos T24
Cloud Services
1 3,027 (54.18%) Azure
2 1,977 (35.39%) AWS
3 1,722 (30.82%) Azure DevOps
4 943 (16.88%) GitHub
5 714 (12.78%) GCP
6 583 (10.43%) GitHub Actions
7 454 (8.13%) Power Platform
8 442 (7.91%) Serverless
9 300 (5.37%) Amazon S3
10 266 (4.76%) AWS Lambda
11 255 (4.56%) Entra ID
12 248 (4.44%) AWS CloudFormation
13 229 (4.10%) Amazon EKS
14 228 (4.08%) Azure AKS
15 203 (3.63%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 194 (3.47%) Azure Monitor
17 190 (3.40%) Azure Data Factory
18 180 (3.22%) Amazon EC2
19 161 (2.88%) Dynamics 365
20 150 (2.68%) Power Automate
Communications & Networking
1 242 (4.33%) Firewall
2 157 (2.81%) DNS
3 121 (2.17%) VPN
4 112 (2.00%) Network Security
5 58 (1.04%) TCP/IP
6 49 (0.88%) WAN
7 42 (0.75%) SSL
8 40 (0.72%) DHCP
9 36 (0.64%) SD-WAN
10 33 (0.59%) BGP
11 31 (0.55%) Internet
12 28 (0.50%) Wi-Fi
13 26 (0.47%) HTTP
14 25 (0.45%) OSPF
15 21 (0.38%) SAN
16 20 (0.36%) 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
1 309 (5.53%) Power BI
2 291 (5.21%) SQL Server
3 276 (4.94%) PostgreSQL
4 192 (3.44%) Data Warehouse
5 187 (3.35%) NoSQL
6 179 (3.20%) Relational Database
7 176 (3.15%) MongoDB
8 156 (2.79%) Data Lake
9 114 (2.04%) Amazon RDS
10 107 (1.92%) Metadata
11 106 (1.90%) Azure SQL Database
12 100 (1.79%) DynamoDB
13 89 (1.59%) Delta Lake
14 82 (1.47%) Oracle Database
15 69 (1.24%) Amazon Redshift
16 67 (1.20%) MySQL
16 67 (1.20%) Redis
17 66 (1.18%) Big Data
18 62 (1.11%) Amazon Athena
19 55 (0.98%) SQL Server Integration Services
Development Applications
1 802 (14.35%) Jenkins
2 767 (13.73%) Git
3 683 (12.22%) JIRA
4 574 (10.27%) GitLab
5 127 (2.27%) Selenium
6 103 (1.84%) Postman
7 102 (1.83%) SonarQube
8 94 (1.68%) JUnit
9 84 (1.50%) Bitbucket
10 82 (1.47%) Maven
11 68 (1.22%) REST Assured
12 65 (1.16%) JMeter
13 64 (1.15%) Cypress.io
14 58 (1.04%) Cucumber
15 51 (0.91%) Gradle
16 48 (0.86%) Gatling
17 47 (0.84%) Mockito
18 43 (0.77%) LoadRunner
19 37 (0.66%) Visual Studio
20 36 (0.64%) Artifactory
General
1 1,390 (24.88%) Social Skills
2 993 (17.77%) Finance
3 823 (14.73%) Public Sector
4 482 (8.63%) Analytical Skills
5 367 (6.57%) Banking
6 141 (2.52%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 101 (1.81%) Retail
8 99 (1.77%) Documentation Skills
9 68 (1.22%) Influencing Skills
10 67 (1.20%) Legal
11 66 (1.18%) Organisational Skills
12 55 (0.98%) Marketing
13 49 (0.88%) Investment Banking
14 46 (0.82%) Military
15 44 (0.79%) Law
16 43 (0.77%) Financial Institution
16 43 (0.77%) Telecoms
17 42 (0.75%) Aerospace
18 41 (0.73%) Front Office
19 40 (0.72%) Manufacturing
Job Titles
1 1,090 (19.51%) DevOps Engineer
2 934 (16.72%) Developer
3 808 (14.46%) Senior
4 617 (11.04%) Architect
5 539 (9.65%) Lead
6 338 (6.05%) Azure Engineer
7 325 (5.82%) Data Engineer
8 288 (5.15%) Analyst
9 273 (4.89%) AWS Engineer
10 227 (4.06%) Platform Engineer
11 208 (3.72%) Cloud Engineer
12 200 (3.58%) Senior DevOps
13 199 (3.56%) Java Developer
14 191 (3.42%) AWS DevOps
15 184 (3.29%) Azure DevOps Engineer
15 184 (3.29%) Senior DevOps Engineer
16 181 (3.24%) Solutions Architect
17 178 (3.19%) AWS DevOps Engineer
18 151 (2.70%) Senior Developer
19 147 (2.63%) Software Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 564 (10.09%) REST
2 485 (8.68%) .NET
3 334 (5.98%) RESTful
4 325 (5.82%) Kafka
5 307 (5.49%) Spring
6 288 (5.15%) React
7 287 (5.14%) Spring Boot
8 220 (3.94%) Node.js
9 171 (3.06%) PySpark
10 170 (3.04%) JSON
11 166 (2.97%) OAuth
11 166 (2.97%) Playwright
12 154 (2.76%) AngularJS
13 143 (2.56%) SOAP
14 138 (2.47%) .NET Framework
15 126 (2.26%) HTML
16 117 (2.09%) OAuth2
17 110 (1.97%) Middleware
18 107 (1.92%) YAML
19 104 (1.86%) CSS
Miscellaneous
1 1,002 (17.93%) Cloud Native
2 400 (7.16%) Product Ownership
3 271 (4.85%) Distributed Systems
4 164 (2.94%) Enterprise Software
5 163 (2.92%) Onboarding
6 156 (2.79%) Legacy Systems
7 137 (2.45%) Hybrid Cloud
8 92 (1.65%) Data Protection Act
9 86 (1.54%) Public Cloud
10 84 (1.50%) Self-Motivation
11 76 (1.36%) Management Information System
12 74 (1.32%) Data Centre
13 72 (1.29%) Data Structures
14 66 (1.18%) AI Agents
15 65 (1.16%) Security Posture
16 63 (1.13%) Replication
17 56 (1.00%) Enterprise Cloud
18 55 (0.98%) Virtual Team
19 52 (0.93%) Mobile App
20 46 (0.82%) PKI
Operating Systems
1 489 (8.75%) Linux
2 302 (5.41%) Windows
3 104 (1.86%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 83 (1.49%) Unix
5 79 (1.41%) Windows Server
6 33 (0.59%) VMS
7 29 (0.52%) Ubuntu
8 27 (0.48%) Apple iOS
9 18 (0.32%) Android
10 11 (0.20%) Solaris
11 9 (0.16%) Windows Server 2019
12 8 (0.14%) AIX
12 8 (0.14%) zOS
13 7 (0.13%) Amazon Linux
13 7 (0.13%) Windows Server 2016
14 6 (0.11%) CentOS
14 6 (0.11%) Mac OS
14 6 (0.11%) Windows Server 2008
15 4 (0.072%) Alpine Linux
15 4 (0.072%) Data ONTAP
Processes & Methodologies
1 3,282 (58.74%) CI/CD
2 2,237 (40.04%) Agile
3 1,522 (27.24%) Infrastructure as Code
4 926 (16.57%) Containerisation
5 895 (16.02%) Continuous Improvement
6 864 (15.46%) Problem-Solving
7 850 (15.21%) Test Automation
8 814 (14.57%) Microservices
9 767 (13.73%) Stakeholder Management
10 753 (13.48%) AI
11 707 (12.65%) Observability
12 702 (12.56%) Scrum
13 673 (12.05%) Platform Engineering
14 667 (11.94%) Migration
15 657 (11.76%) Software Engineering
16 602 (10.78%) Analytics
17 521 (9.33%) Technical Leadership
18 515 (9.22%) Stakeholder Engagement
19 500 (8.95%) Data Modelling
20 461 (8.25%) Roadmaps
Programming Languages
1 1,563 (27.98%) Python
2 1,025 (18.35%) SQL
3 785 (14.05%) Java
4 502 (8.99%) C#
5 448 (8.02%) JavaScript
6 447 (8.00%) Bash
7 431 (7.71%) PowerShell
8 310 (5.55%) TypeScript
9 222 (3.97%) Bicep
10 104 (1.86%) Go
11 70 (1.25%) T-SQL
12 69 (1.24%) Apex Code
13 66 (1.18%) PL/SQL
14 65 (1.16%) Shell Script
15 54 (0.97%) Groovy
15 54 (0.97%) Scala
16 32 (0.57%) C++
17 30 (0.54%) Data Analysis Expressions
18 27 (0.48%) C
18 27 (0.48%) Kotlin
Qualifications
1 1,776 (31.79%) Security Cleared
2 1,497 (26.79%) SC Cleared
3 325 (5.82%) Degree
4 225 (4.03%) Azure Certification
5 215 (3.85%) BPSS Clearance
6 194 (3.47%) DV Cleared
7 192 (3.44%) AWS Certification
8 124 (2.22%) Computer Science Degree
9 84 (1.50%) Microsoft Certification
10 80 (1.43%) CISSP
11 59 (1.06%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
11 59 (1.06%) ISTQB
12 54 (0.97%) Cisco Certification
13 44 (0.79%) PMP
14 41 (0.73%) PMI Certification
15 38 (0.68%) Master's Degree
16 32 (0.57%) CISM
17 31 (0.55%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
18 25 (0.45%) ITIL Certification
19 22 (0.39%) CCNP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 503 (9.00%) QA
2 278 (4.98%) Data Quality
3 194 (3.47%) Accessibility
4 152 (2.72%) GDPR
5 94 (1.68%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 79 (1.41%) WCAG
7 76 (1.36%) NIST
8 54 (0.97%) NCSC
9 44 (0.79%) PMO
10 39 (0.70%) PCI DSS
11 33 (0.59%) SLA
12 28 (0.50%) GRC
13 27 (0.48%) Sarbanes-Oxley
14 11 (0.20%) Disclosure Scotland
14 11 (0.20%) HIPAA
15 10 (0.18%) Cyber Essentials
16 9 (0.16%) Actionable Recommendations
16 9 (0.16%) PSD2
16 9 (0.16%) SOC 2
17 8 (0.14%) HL7
System Software
1 1,103 (19.74%) Docker
2 181 (3.24%) Active Directory
3 82 (1.47%) Virtual Machines
4 81 (1.45%) VMware Infrastructure
5 26 (0.47%) vSphere
6 23 (0.41%) Hyper-V
7 20 (0.36%) VMware NSX
8 17 (0.30%) VMware ESXi
9 15 (0.27%) Squid
10 14 (0.25%) Oracle RAC
10 14 (0.25%) Postfix
10 14 (0.25%) Virtual Desktop
11 8 (0.14%) KVM
12 7 (0.13%) IAG
13 6 (0.11%) Corosync
13 6 (0.11%) HDFS
13 6 (0.11%) NFS
14 5 (0.089%) Microsoft App-V
14 5 (0.089%) SRDF
14 5 (0.089%) zsh
Systems Management
1 1,604 (28.71%) Terraform
2 1,437 (25.72%) Kubernetes
3 524 (9.38%) Ansible
4 367 (6.57%) Grafana
5 310 (5.55%) Prometheus
6 85 (1.52%) Argo
7 62 (1.11%) Puppet
8 58 (1.04%) Single Sign-On
9 44 (0.79%) Progress Chef
10 43 (0.77%) Istio
11 35 (0.63%) Microsoft Intune
12 31 (0.55%) Packer
13 20 (0.36%) vCenter Server
14 18 (0.32%) Kibana
14 18 (0.32%) SCCM
15 17 (0.30%) Oracle RMAN
16 16 (0.29%) HP ALM
16 16 (0.29%) Kustomize
17 14 (0.25%) Kubeflow
18 13 (0.23%) Data Guard
Vendors
1 1,019 (18.24%) Microsoft
2 311 (5.57%) Oracle
3 274 (4.90%) Databricks
4 266 (4.76%) Google
5 201 (3.60%) ServiceNow
6 188 (3.36%) Salesforce
7 176 (3.15%) Splunk
8 140 (2.51%) Dynatrace
9 125 (2.24%) SAP
10 114 (2.04%) VMware
11 107 (1.92%) Red Hat
12 62 (1.11%) IBM
13 61 (1.09%) Informatica
14 60 (1.07%) OpenAI
15 56 (1.00%) Atlassian
16 53 (0.95%) MuleSoft
17 48 (0.86%) Cisco
18 43 (0.77%) AppDynamics
19 41 (0.73%) Okta
20 40 (0.72%) Foundry