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 14 February 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
14 Feb 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 12 14 16
Rank change year-on-year +2 +2 -5
Contract jobs citing DevOps 4,498 3,293 3,968
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 11.21% 10.64% 8.85%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.89% 11.88% 10.17%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,152 2,294 2,865
10th Percentile £375 £392 £406
25th Percentile £427 £463 £469
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £520 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -5.45% - -6.78%
75th Percentile £613 £663 £650
90th Percentile £704 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £525 £525
% change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 59 23 101
10th Percentile £44.27 £36.30 £46.18
25th Percentile £45.46 £58.45 £56.65
Median hourly rate £52.50 £73.23 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year -28.30% +12.65% -0.76%
75th Percentile £77.50 £80.75 £71.90
90th Percentile £93.75 £87.50 £81.25
UK excluding London median hourly rate £47.50 £70.36 £65.00
% change year-on-year -32.49% +8.25% -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 34,907 27,716 39,026
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 86.98% 89.51% 87.08%
Number of daily rates quoted 22,112 17,001 25,591
10th Percentile £310 £306 £300
25th Percentile £409 £413 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £613 £638 £638
90th Percentile £720 £738 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £480 £495 £500
% change year-on-year -3.03% -1.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,104 852 2,127
10th Percentile £14.61 £15.62 £13.25
25th Percentile £17.87 £21.00 £16.25
Median hourly rate £25.15 £32.50 £33.50
Median % change year-on-year -22.62% -2.99% +2.15%
75th Percentile £60.00 £63.75 £60.32
90th Percentile £70.00 £75.00 £73.69
UK excluding London median hourly rate £25.15 £30.62 £35.00
% change year-on-year -17.85% -12.53% +7.69%

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 14 February 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 14 February 2026.

Hourly rate histogram for DevOps in the UK

DevOps
Top 17 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 14 February 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 +1 3,833 £525 -8.70% 1,308
UK excluding London +7 2,010 £500 -4.76% 1,039
London -2 1,924 £534 -11.04% 440
Work from Home -3 1,276 £525 -2.78% 742
North of England +5 687 £500 -1.96% 298
South East +2 417 £525 -8.70% 339
Midlands +22 388 £509 +2.36% 135
Yorkshire +1 357 £500 - 99
West Midlands +17 309 £525 +5.00% 95
North West +3 282 £473 -6.71% 164
South West +13 247 £525 -12.50% 138
Scotland +6 195 £450 - 57
East of England +17 115 £575 +11.65% 52
East Midlands +10 79 £425 -10.53% 41
North East -4 51 £475 -9.52% 38
Wales +6 37 £425 +72.44% 26
Northern Ireland -7 9 £475 +26.67% 10

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
1 271 (6.02%) Confluence
2 93 (2.07%) Apache Spark
3 89 (1.98%) SharePoint
4 87 (1.93%) Apache
5 56 (1.24%) Apache Airflow
5 56 (1.24%) SAS
6 38 (0.84%) OpenStack
7 36 (0.80%) nginx
8 31 (0.69%) CMS
9 24 (0.53%) Microsoft Exchange
10 21 (0.47%) IIS
11 15 (0.33%) JBoss
12 14 (0.31%) WebLogic
13 12 (0.27%) Sitecore CMS
14 11 (0.24%) Adobe Experience Manager
14 11 (0.24%) Mendix
15 10 (0.22%) HCL Notes
16 9 (0.20%) WebSphere
17 8 (0.18%) Palantir Foundry
17 8 (0.18%) Smallworld
Applications
1 99 (2.20%) Microsoft Excel
2 66 (1.47%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 42 (0.93%) Microsoft Project
4 33 (0.73%) Microsoft Office
5 20 (0.44%) MS Visio
6 14 (0.31%) Chatbot
7 8 (0.18%) Weka
8 6 (0.13%) Mozilla Thunderbird
9 4 (0.089%) Trello
10 2 (0.044%) Adobe XD
11 1 (0.022%) CPLEX
11 1 (0.022%) Maya
11 1 (0.022%) Revit
11 1 (0.022%) Spreadsheet
Business Applications
1 68 (1.51%) Dynamics CRM
2 11 (0.24%) Endur
2 11 (0.24%) SAP S/4HANA
3 10 (0.22%) Maximo
3 10 (0.22%) Oracle ERP
4 8 (0.18%) Aladdin
4 8 (0.18%) NEC Housing
5 5 (0.11%) Dynamics AX
5 5 (0.11%) SAP ERP
5 5 (0.11%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
6 4 (0.089%) Oracle EBS
6 4 (0.089%) Payment Gateway
6 4 (0.089%) VisionPLUS
7 3 (0.067%) NetSuite
7 3 (0.067%) Oracle Assets
7 3 (0.067%) Oracle General Ledger
7 3 (0.067%) Oracle Payables
7 3 (0.067%) Oracle Receivables
7 3 (0.067%) SAP FI/CO
7 3 (0.067%) Workday HCM
Cloud Services
1 2,350 (52.25%) Azure
2 1,629 (36.22%) AWS
3 1,264 (28.10%) Azure DevOps
4 852 (18.94%) GitHub
5 674 (14.98%) GCP
6 541 (12.03%) Serverless
7 487 (10.83%) GitHub Actions
8 371 (8.25%) Power Platform
9 287 (6.38%) AWS CloudFormation
10 265 (5.89%) AWS Lambda
11 250 (5.56%) Amazon S3
12 222 (4.94%) Azure Data Factory
13 217 (4.82%) Azure AKS
14 205 (4.56%) Amazon EKS
15 188 (4.18%) OpenShift
16 178 (3.96%) Entra ID
17 177 (3.94%) Amazon ECS
18 174 (3.87%) Amazon CloudWatch
19 172 (3.82%) Dynamics 365
20 164 (3.65%) Azure Monitor
Communications & Networking
1 201 (4.47%) Firewall
2 111 (2.47%) DNS
3 95 (2.11%) Network Security
4 92 (2.05%) VPN
5 54 (1.20%) TCP/IP
6 46 (1.02%) SSL
7 35 (0.78%) HTTP
8 34 (0.76%) HTTPS
9 22 (0.49%) WAN
10 16 (0.36%) DHCP
10 16 (0.36%) Kerberos
11 15 (0.33%) BGP
12 14 (0.31%) SD-WAN
13 13 (0.29%) MPLS
13 13 (0.29%) SAN
14 11 (0.24%) FTP
14 11 (0.24%) LAN
14 11 (0.24%) Reverse Proxy
15 10 (0.22%) Internet
15 10 (0.22%) IPsec
Database & Business Intelligence
1 266 (5.91%) PostgreSQL
2 238 (5.29%) Power BI
3 181 (4.02%) SQL Server
4 173 (3.85%) NoSQL
5 145 (3.22%) Data Lake
6 138 (3.07%) Amazon RDS
7 123 (2.73%) Relational Database
8 112 (2.49%) Data Warehouse
9 107 (2.38%) MongoDB
10 99 (2.20%) Azure SQL Database
11 78 (1.73%) Oracle Database
12 77 (1.71%) DynamoDB
13 76 (1.69%) Elasticsearch
14 69 (1.53%) MySQL
15 61 (1.36%) Delta Lake
16 58 (1.29%) Metadata
17 56 (1.24%) Redis
18 51 (1.13%) Big Data
18 51 (1.13%) Tableau
19 50 (1.11%) Amazon Aurora
Development Applications
1 785 (17.45%) Jenkins
2 603 (13.41%) Git
3 587 (13.05%) GitLab
4 585 (13.01%) JIRA
5 135 (3.00%) Selenium
6 99 (2.20%) JUnit
7 91 (2.02%) Postman
8 67 (1.49%) Bitbucket
9 64 (1.42%) SonarQube
10 63 (1.40%) Cucumber
10 63 (1.40%) Sonatype Nexus
11 62 (1.38%) Cypress.io
12 51 (1.13%) Maven
13 50 (1.11%) Artifactory
14 49 (1.09%) JMeter
15 47 (1.04%) REST Assured
16 41 (0.91%) Gradle
17 40 (0.89%) Liquibase
18 38 (0.84%) Oracle APEX
19 32 (0.71%) Visual Studio
General
1 1,335 (29.68%) Social Skills
2 802 (17.83%) Finance
3 583 (12.96%) Public Sector
4 373 (8.29%) Analytical Skills
5 337 (7.49%) Banking
6 157 (3.49%) Documentation Skills
7 80 (1.78%) Influencing Skills
8 67 (1.49%) Financial Institution
8 67 (1.49%) Inclusion and Diversity
9 64 (1.42%) Marketing
10 51 (1.13%) Retail
11 48 (1.07%) Presentation Skills
12 44 (0.98%) Front Office
13 42 (0.93%) Investment Banking
13 42 (0.93%) Telecoms
14 37 (0.82%) Organisational Skills
15 34 (0.76%) Military
16 33 (0.73%) Legal
17 30 (0.67%) Pharmaceutical
18 27 (0.60%) Law
Job Titles
1 896 (19.92%) DevOps Engineer
2 769 (17.10%) Developer
3 625 (13.90%) Senior
4 463 (10.29%) Architect
5 348 (7.74%) Lead
6 275 (6.11%) Azure Engineer
7 253 (5.62%) AWS Engineer
8 237 (5.27%) Data Engineer
9 232 (5.16%) Analyst
10 199 (4.42%) AWS DevOps
11 176 (3.91%) AWS DevOps Engineer
12 170 (3.78%) Cloud Engineer
13 159 (3.53%) Software Engineer
14 156 (3.47%) Platform Engineer
15 144 (3.20%) Senior Developer
16 137 (3.05%) Azure DevOps Engineer
17 133 (2.96%) Solutions Architect
18 128 (2.85%) Senior DevOps
19 122 (2.71%) Senior DevOps Engineer
20 121 (2.69%) Business Analyst
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 512 (11.38%) REST
2 403 (8.96%) .NET
3 310 (6.89%) React
4 302 (6.71%) Node.js
5 260 (5.78%) RESTful
6 254 (5.65%) Kafka
7 250 (5.56%) Spring
8 230 (5.11%) Spring Boot
9 170 (3.78%) JSON
10 161 (3.58%) OAuth
11 158 (3.51%) AngularJS
12 142 (3.16%) Elastic Stack
13 131 (2.91%) HTML
14 128 (2.85%) YAML
15 127 (2.82%) SOAP
16 125 (2.78%) XML
17 120 (2.67%) Playwright
18 117 (2.60%) PySpark
19 113 (2.51%) CSS
20 102 (2.27%) Middleware
Miscellaneous
1 659 (14.65%) Cloud Native
2 248 (5.51%) Product Ownership
3 166 (3.69%) Distributed Systems
4 123 (2.73%) Onboarding
5 122 (2.71%) Public Cloud
6 96 (2.13%) Legacy Systems
7 83 (1.85%) Hybrid Cloud
8 75 (1.67%) Enterprise Software
9 56 (1.24%) Management Information System
10 53 (1.18%) Virtual Team
11 52 (1.16%) Data Protection Act
12 49 (1.09%) Data Centre
13 48 (1.07%) NHS
13 48 (1.07%) Private Cloud
14 47 (1.04%) Security Posture
15 42 (0.93%) Mobile App
16 41 (0.91%) Replication
17 38 (0.84%) Self-Motivation
18 36 (0.80%) AI Agents
18 36 (0.80%) Greenfield Project
Operating Systems
1 489 (10.87%) Linux
2 247 (5.49%) Windows
3 107 (2.38%) Unix
4 56 (1.24%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 47 (1.04%) Windows Server
6 46 (1.02%) VMS
7 29 (0.64%) Ubuntu
8 20 (0.44%) Windows 10
9 19 (0.42%) Android
10 18 (0.40%) Apple iOS
11 17 (0.38%) CentOS
12 10 (0.22%) Solaris
13 9 (0.20%) Amazon Linux
14 8 (0.18%) Windows Server 2019
15 7 (0.16%) Windows Server 2016
16 5 (0.11%) Windows Server 2012
17 4 (0.089%) Mac OS
18 2 (0.044%) Debian
18 2 (0.044%) zOS
19 1 (0.022%) Embedded Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,604 (57.89%) CI/CD
2 1,738 (38.64%) Agile
3 1,206 (26.81%) Infrastructure as Code
4 877 (19.50%) Containerisation
5 865 (19.23%) Problem-Solving
6 686 (15.25%) Microservices
7 678 (15.07%) Test Automation
8 543 (12.07%) Continuous Improvement
9 529 (11.76%) Analytics
10 513 (11.41%) Migration
11 493 (10.96%) Observability
12 476 (10.58%) Scrum
13 459 (10.20%) AI
14 428 (9.52%) Stakeholder Management
15 408 (9.07%) Software Engineering
16 359 (7.98%) Data Modelling
16 359 (7.98%) Mentoring
17 307 (6.83%) Data Pipeline
18 306 (6.80%) Platform Engineering
19 297 (6.60%) Business Intelligence
Programming Languages
1 1,386 (30.81%) Python
2 897 (19.94%) SQL
3 595 (13.23%) Java
4 453 (10.07%) C#
5 427 (9.49%) JavaScript
6 374 (8.31%) PowerShell
7 348 (7.74%) Bash
8 320 (7.11%) TypeScript
9 154 (3.42%) Bicep
10 148 (3.29%) Go
11 78 (1.73%) PL/SQL
12 64 (1.42%) Scala
13 60 (1.33%) Shell Script
14 49 (1.09%) Ruby
15 48 (1.07%) C++
15 48 (1.07%) Groovy
16 43 (0.96%) T-SQL
17 34 (0.76%) Perl
18 28 (0.62%) Rust
19 23 (0.51%) PHP
Qualifications
1 1,372 (30.50%) Security Cleared
2 1,132 (25.17%) SC Cleared
3 385 (8.56%) Degree
4 199 (4.42%) Azure Certification
5 195 (4.34%) Computer Science Degree
6 147 (3.27%) DV Cleared
7 145 (3.22%) AWS Certification
8 115 (2.56%) BPSS Clearance
9 92 (2.05%) Master's Degree
10 75 (1.67%) CISSP
11 70 (1.56%) Microsoft Certification
12 59 (1.31%) CISM
13 50 (1.11%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
14 49 (1.09%) ISTQB
15 38 (0.84%) PMI Certification
16 32 (0.71%) Cisco Certification
17 31 (0.69%) PMP
18 29 (0.64%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
19 23 (0.51%) IIBA
20 22 (0.49%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 390 (8.67%) QA
2 179 (3.98%) GDPR
3 166 (3.69%) Data Quality
4 142 (3.16%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 124 (2.76%) Accessibility
6 122 (2.71%) NIST
7 71 (1.58%) NCSC
8 35 (0.78%) PCI DSS
9 34 (0.76%) WCAG
10 28 (0.62%) PMO
11 27 (0.60%) HIPAA
12 26 (0.58%) SLA
13 24 (0.53%) Sarbanes-Oxley
14 18 (0.40%) SOC 2
15 16 (0.36%) ISO 20022
15 16 (0.36%) PSD2
16 14 (0.31%) SEPA
17 11 (0.24%) Disclosure Scotland
17 11 (0.24%) HMG Security Policy Framework
17 11 (0.24%) NIST 800
System Software
1 1,104 (24.54%) Docker
2 171 (3.80%) Active Directory
3 77 (1.71%) Virtual Machines
4 71 (1.58%) VMware Infrastructure
5 40 (0.89%) vSphere
6 27 (0.60%) VMware NSX
7 16 (0.36%) Virtual Desktop
8 15 (0.33%) Squid
9 13 (0.29%) Slurm Workload Manager
10 11 (0.24%) DFS Replication
10 11 (0.24%) Hyper-V
10 11 (0.24%) Lustre
10 11 (0.24%) Virtual Servers
11 9 (0.20%) GPFS
11 9 (0.20%) Postfix
12 7 (0.16%) Firmware
12 7 (0.16%) VMware ESXi
13 6 (0.13%) Dovecot
13 6 (0.13%) NFS
13 6 (0.13%) Tivoli Directory Server
Systems Management
1 1,423 (31.64%) Terraform
2 1,323 (29.41%) Kubernetes
3 496 (11.03%) Ansible
4 340 (7.56%) Grafana
5 293 (6.51%) Prometheus
6 97 (2.16%) Argo
7 75 (1.67%) Puppet
8 68 (1.51%) Single Sign-On
9 42 (0.93%) Istio
10 36 (0.80%) Kibana
11 32 (0.71%) Progress Chef
12 29 (0.64%) Packer
13 23 (0.51%) Podman
14 21 (0.47%) vCenter Server
15 19 (0.42%) SCCM
16 18 (0.40%) Active Directory Federation Services
16 18 (0.40%) Microsoft Intune
17 16 (0.36%) Consul
18 15 (0.33%) FortiGate
18 15 (0.33%) Rancher
Vendors
1 773 (17.19%) Microsoft
2 289 (6.43%) Oracle
3 272 (6.05%) Databricks
4 262 (5.82%) Google
5 218 (4.85%) Splunk
6 156 (3.47%) ServiceNow
7 131 (2.91%) Red Hat
8 123 (2.73%) VMware
9 117 (2.60%) Salesforce
10 106 (2.36%) SAP
11 79 (1.76%) OpenAI
12 63 (1.40%) Dynatrace
13 54 (1.20%) CyberArk
14 51 (1.13%) IBM
15 49 (1.09%) Atlassian
16 40 (0.89%) F5
17 39 (0.87%) Cisco
18 33 (0.73%) Palo Alto
19 31 (0.69%) Foundry
20 30 (0.67%) MuleSoft