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

6 months to
26 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 12 15 15
Rank change year-on-year +3 0 -3
Contract jobs citing DevOps 5,635 3,577 3,831
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.51% 10.93% 9.86%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.42% 12.09% 11.56%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,910 2,530 2,608
10th Percentile £385 £363 £382
25th Percentile £438 £425 £462
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £519 £550
Median % change year-on-year +1.25% -5.73% -4.35%
75th Percentile £613 £625 £650
90th Percentile £700 £713 £728
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £498 £550
% change year-on-year +0.40% -9.45% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 124 27 81
10th Percentile £37.24 £33.10 £56.25
25th Percentile £56.06 £51.88 £65.00
Median hourly rate £67.96 £67.00 £70.00
Median % change year-on-year +1.43% -4.29% +6.87%
75th Percentile £77.50 £87.50 £74.00
90th Percentile £91.15 £95.00 £85.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £67.96 £67.00 £70.00
% change year-on-year +1.43% -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 45,367 29,590 33,147
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.58% 90.44% 85.35%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,794 18,422 20,982
10th Percentile £325 £300 £310
25th Percentile £425 £402 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -3.67%
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 2,879 1,766 1,695
10th Percentile £14.22 £14.20 £13.86
25th Percentile £17.97 £17.30 £18.13
Median hourly rate £41.06 £25.15 £40.50
Median % change year-on-year +63.26% -37.90% -4.71%
75th Percentile £67.89 £47.50 £65.00
90th Percentile £80.00 £67.50 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £43.96 £22.63 £42.50
% change year-on-year +94.26% -46.75% +6.25%

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 26 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 26 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 26 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 4,812 £525 - 973
London 0 2,537 £550 - 360
UK excluding London +1 2,418 £500 +0.40% 739
Work from Home +1 1,614 £525 +2.14% 534
North of England 0 805 £500 +4.71% 223
South East -9 464 £525 +5.00% 143
Midlands 0 447 £488 -2.50% 104
Yorkshire -1 393 £500 +2.04% 71
West Midlands -3 355 £490 -5.18% 54
North West -2 319 £518 +10.31% 110
South West +5 308 £525 +0.96% 174
Scotland -2 204 £498 +4.74% 37
East of England +14 143 £505 -2.88% 42
North East +16 110 £425 -18.27% 46
East Midlands +7 88 £455 -0.27% 50
Wales -4 51 £500 +33.33% 19
Northern Ireland +18 24 £475 +7.95% 12
Channel Islands - 5 £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
1 338 (6.00%) Confluence
2 151 (2.68%) SharePoint
3 125 (2.22%) Apache Airflow
4 123 (2.18%) Apache Spark
5 111 (1.97%) Apache
6 63 (1.12%) SAS
7 42 (0.75%) CMS
8 38 (0.67%) IIS
8 38 (0.67%) Jupyter
9 25 (0.44%) Microsoft Exchange
10 24 (0.43%) nginx
11 17 (0.30%) Camunda
12 14 (0.25%) OpenStack
13 13 (0.23%) Anypoint
13 13 (0.23%) WebSphere
14 11 (0.20%) Oracle Workflow
15 10 (0.18%) Palantir Foundry
16 9 (0.16%) Appian
17 7 (0.12%) JBoss
17 7 (0.12%) Tomcat
Applications
1 63 (1.12%) Microsoft Excel
2 61 (1.08%) Microsoft Project
3 42 (0.75%) MS Visio
4 37 (0.66%) Microsoft Office
5 30 (0.53%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 9 (0.16%) Chatbot
6 9 (0.16%) CPLEX
6 9 (0.16%) Spreadsheet
7 6 (0.11%) Trello
8 5 (0.089%) Notion
9 4 (0.071%) Windchill
10 1 (0.018%) Adobe XD
10 1 (0.018%) EngageOne
10 1 (0.018%) Gliffy
10 1 (0.018%) InDesign
10 1 (0.018%) Mozilla Thunderbird
10 1 (0.018%) Weka
Business Applications
1 74 (1.31%) Dynamics CRM
2 37 (0.66%) SAP S/4HANA
3 12 (0.21%) Payment Gateway
4 10 (0.18%) Oracle EBS
5 9 (0.16%) Aladdin
5 9 (0.16%) Dynamics AX
5 9 (0.16%) Magento
6 8 (0.14%) SAP MDG
7 7 (0.12%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
8 6 (0.11%) Oracle ERP
8 6 (0.11%) Remedy ITSM
9 5 (0.089%) OpenText MBPM
9 5 (0.089%) Oracle BPM
10 4 (0.071%) Endur
10 4 (0.071%) Maximo
11 3 (0.053%) Findur
11 3 (0.053%) Oracle Receivables
11 3 (0.053%) SAP ERP
11 3 (0.053%) Shopify
11 3 (0.053%) Teamcenter
Cloud Services
1 3,106 (55.12%) Azure
2 2,003 (35.55%) AWS
3 1,788 (31.73%) Azure DevOps
4 975 (17.30%) GitHub
5 720 (12.78%) GCP
6 613 (10.88%) GitHub Actions
7 483 (8.57%) Power Platform
8 451 (8.00%) Serverless
9 287 (5.09%) Amazon S3
10 272 (4.83%) AWS Lambda
11 258 (4.58%) Entra ID
12 243 (4.31%) AWS CloudFormation
13 238 (4.22%) Amazon EKS
14 224 (3.98%) Azure AKS
15 221 (3.92%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 214 (3.80%) Azure Monitor
17 197 (3.50%) Azure Data Factory
18 181 (3.21%) Dynamics 365
19 177 (3.14%) Amazon EC2
20 166 (2.95%) Power Automate
Communications & Networking
1 245 (4.35%) Firewall
2 172 (3.05%) DNS
3 123 (2.18%) VPN
4 111 (1.97%) Network Security
5 65 (1.15%) TCP/IP
6 53 (0.94%) WAN
7 47 (0.83%) SSL
8 45 (0.80%) DHCP
9 38 (0.67%) HTTP
9 38 (0.67%) SD-WAN
10 35 (0.62%) BGP
11 32 (0.57%) Internet
12 29 (0.51%) SSH
12 29 (0.51%) Wi-Fi
13 25 (0.44%) OSPF
14 21 (0.37%) SAN
14 21 (0.37%) VLAN
15 18 (0.32%) LAN
16 17 (0.30%) HTTPS
16 17 (0.30%) MPLS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 321 (5.70%) Power BI
2 301 (5.34%) SQL Server
3 298 (5.29%) PostgreSQL
4 204 (3.62%) Data Warehouse
5 191 (3.39%) NoSQL
6 183 (3.25%) MongoDB
7 181 (3.21%) Relational Database
8 162 (2.87%) Data Lake
9 131 (2.32%) Amazon RDS
10 122 (2.17%) Metadata
11 112 (1.99%) Azure SQL Database
12 91 (1.61%) DynamoDB
13 83 (1.47%) Delta Lake
13 83 (1.47%) Oracle Database
14 80 (1.42%) Redis
15 73 (1.30%) MySQL
16 68 (1.21%) Amazon Redshift
17 59 (1.05%) Big Data
17 59 (1.05%) SQL Server Integration Services
18 52 (0.92%) BigQuery
Development Applications
1 799 (14.18%) Jenkins
2 782 (13.88%) Git
3 687 (12.19%) JIRA
4 610 (10.83%) GitLab
5 141 (2.50%) Selenium
6 102 (1.81%) Postman
7 98 (1.74%) SonarQube
8 92 (1.63%) JUnit
9 87 (1.54%) Maven
10 84 (1.49%) Bitbucket
11 72 (1.28%) JMeter
11 72 (1.28%) REST Assured
12 70 (1.24%) Cypress.io
13 61 (1.08%) Gradle
14 58 (1.03%) Cucumber
15 50 (0.89%) Gatling
16 44 (0.78%) Claude Code
16 44 (0.78%) LoadRunner
17 43 (0.76%) Mockito
18 39 (0.69%) Sonatype Nexus
General
1 1,457 (25.86%) Social Skills
2 1,006 (17.85%) Finance
3 828 (14.69%) Public Sector
4 510 (9.05%) Analytical Skills
5 369 (6.55%) Banking
6 156 (2.77%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 104 (1.85%) Retail
8 96 (1.70%) Documentation Skills
9 72 (1.28%) Influencing Skills
10 67 (1.19%) Legal
11 65 (1.15%) Organisational Skills
12 54 (0.96%) Marketing
13 50 (0.89%) Investment Banking
13 50 (0.89%) Telecoms
14 49 (0.87%) Aerospace
15 48 (0.85%) Military
16 46 (0.82%) Law
17 43 (0.76%) Manufacturing
18 42 (0.75%) Front Office
19 41 (0.73%) Financial Institution
Job Titles
1 1,113 (19.75%) DevOps Engineer
2 923 (16.38%) Developer
3 838 (14.87%) Senior
4 633 (11.23%) Architect
5 542 (9.62%) Lead
6 351 (6.23%) Azure Engineer
7 305 (5.41%) Data Engineer
8 273 (4.84%) Analyst
9 260 (4.61%) AWS Engineer
10 234 (4.15%) Platform Engineer
11 204 (3.62%) Senior DevOps
12 203 (3.60%) Cloud Engineer
13 198 (3.51%) Azure DevOps Engineer
14 188 (3.34%) Senior DevOps Engineer
15 186 (3.30%) Java Developer
16 182 (3.23%) AWS DevOps
17 175 (3.11%) Solutions Architect
18 169 (3.00%) AWS DevOps Engineer
19 154 (2.73%) Senior Developer
20 145 (2.57%) Software Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 1,650 (29.28%) Terraform
2 592 (10.51%) REST
3 492 (8.73%) .NET
4 367 (6.51%) Kafka
5 343 (6.09%) RESTful
6 299 (5.31%) Spring
7 287 (5.09%) React
8 285 (5.06%) Spring Boot
9 209 (3.71%) Node.js
10 186 (3.30%) JSON
11 173 (3.07%) OAuth
12 170 (3.02%) Playwright
13 156 (2.77%) PySpark
14 139 (2.47%) .NET Framework
14 139 (2.47%) HTML
15 137 (2.43%) AngularJS
16 135 (2.40%) SOAP
17 124 (2.20%) OAuth2
18 122 (2.17%) CSS
19 115 (2.04%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 1,017 (18.05%) Cloud Native
2 423 (7.51%) Product Ownership
3 264 (4.69%) Distributed Systems
4 192 (3.41%) Enterprise Software
5 185 (3.28%) Onboarding
6 155 (2.75%) Legacy Systems
7 147 (2.61%) Hybrid Cloud
8 92 (1.63%) Data Protection Act
9 85 (1.51%) AI Agents
10 84 (1.49%) Self-Motivation
11 76 (1.35%) Management Information System
12 75 (1.33%) Data Structures
13 74 (1.31%) Public Cloud
14 70 (1.24%) Data Centre
15 68 (1.21%) Replication
16 63 (1.12%) Security Posture
17 56 (0.99%) Enterprise Cloud
17 56 (0.99%) Virtual Team
18 53 (0.94%) Mobile App
19 50 (0.89%) NHS
Operating Systems
1 514 (9.12%) Linux
2 303 (5.38%) Windows
3 108 (1.92%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 95 (1.69%) Unix
5 87 (1.54%) Windows Server
6 38 (0.67%) VMS
7 33 (0.59%) Ubuntu
8 32 (0.57%) Apple iOS
9 21 (0.37%) Android
10 10 (0.18%) Amazon Linux
11 9 (0.16%) Solaris
11 9 (0.16%) zOS
12 8 (0.14%) AIX
12 8 (0.14%) CentOS
12 8 (0.14%) Windows Server 2019
13 7 (0.12%) Windows Server 2016
14 6 (0.11%) Mac OS
15 5 (0.089%) Windows Server 2008
16 4 (0.071%) Alpine Linux
16 4 (0.071%) Data ONTAP
Processes & Methodologies
1 3,347 (59.40%) CI/CD
2 2,289 (40.62%) Agile
3 1,597 (28.34%) Infrastructure as Code
4 941 (16.70%) Continuous Improvement
5 932 (16.54%) Containerisation
6 886 (15.72%) Test Automation
7 882 (15.65%) Problem-Solving
8 865 (15.35%) Stakeholder Management
9 826 (14.66%) Microservices
10 784 (13.91%) AI
11 738 (13.10%) Observability
12 724 (12.85%) Platform Engineering
13 690 (12.24%) Software Engineering
14 682 (12.10%) Migration
15 676 (12.00%) Scrum
16 585 (10.38%) Analytics
17 575 (10.20%) Technical Leadership
18 536 (9.51%) Stakeholder Engagement
19 476 (8.45%) Roadmaps
20 473 (8.39%) Data Modelling
Programming Languages
1 1,584 (28.11%) Python
2 1,024 (18.17%) SQL
3 803 (14.25%) Java
4 501 (8.89%) C#
5 483 (8.57%) PowerShell
6 469 (8.32%) Bash
7 456 (8.09%) JavaScript
8 308 (5.47%) TypeScript
9 253 (4.49%) Bicep
10 96 (1.70%) Go
11 77 (1.37%) Shell Script
12 71 (1.26%) Apex Code
13 68 (1.21%) T-SQL
14 64 (1.14%) Scala
15 62 (1.10%) Groovy
16 61 (1.08%) PL/SQL
17 32 (0.57%) C++
17 32 (0.57%) Data Analysis Expressions
17 32 (0.57%) Perl
18 24 (0.43%) Kusto Query Language
Qualifications
1 1,812 (32.16%) Security Cleared
2 1,530 (27.15%) SC Cleared
3 331 (5.87%) Degree
4 230 (4.08%) Azure Certification
5 223 (3.96%) BPSS Clearance
6 198 (3.51%) DV Cleared
7 183 (3.25%) AWS Certification
8 128 (2.27%) Computer Science Degree
9 95 (1.69%) Microsoft Certification
10 72 (1.28%) CISSP
11 64 (1.14%) ISTQB
12 55 (0.98%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 54 (0.96%) Cisco Certification
14 43 (0.76%) PMP
15 42 (0.75%) PMI Certification
16 37 (0.66%) Master's Degree
17 30 (0.53%) CISM
18 27 (0.48%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
19 26 (0.46%) ITIL Certification
20 24 (0.43%) CCNP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 534 (9.48%) QA
2 280 (4.97%) Data Quality
3 202 (3.58%) Accessibility
4 131 (2.32%) GDPR
5 98 (1.74%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 79 (1.40%) WCAG
7 78 (1.38%) NIST
8 52 (0.92%) NCSC
8 52 (0.92%) PMO
9 41 (0.73%) SLA
10 34 (0.60%) PCI DSS
11 30 (0.53%) GRC
12 27 (0.48%) Sarbanes-Oxley
13 15 (0.27%) ISO 20022
14 12 (0.21%) Disclosure Scotland
15 11 (0.20%) Cyber Essentials
16 10 (0.18%) Actionable Recommendations
16 10 (0.18%) HIPAA
16 10 (0.18%) HL7
16 10 (0.18%) SEPA
System Software
1 1,134 (20.12%) Docker
2 172 (3.05%) Active Directory
3 89 (1.58%) VMware Infrastructure
4 78 (1.38%) Virtual Machines
5 27 (0.48%) Hyper-V
5 27 (0.48%) vSphere
6 21 (0.37%) VMware ESXi
7 20 (0.35%) VMware NSX
8 15 (0.27%) Virtual Desktop
9 14 (0.25%) Squid
10 12 (0.21%) Oracle RAC
11 11 (0.20%) IAG
12 10 (0.18%) Postfix
13 8 (0.14%) KVM
14 7 (0.12%) zsh
15 6 (0.11%) Corosync
15 6 (0.11%) Microsoft App-V
15 6 (0.11%) NFS
16 5 (0.089%) Apache ZooKeeper
16 5 (0.089%) Firmware
Systems Management
1 1,498 (26.58%) Kubernetes
2 529 (9.39%) Ansible
3 371 (6.58%) Grafana
4 314 (5.57%) Prometheus
5 86 (1.53%) Argo
6 60 (1.06%) Puppet
7 55 (0.98%) Single Sign-On
8 46 (0.82%) Progress Chef
9 40 (0.71%) Istio
10 39 (0.69%) Microsoft Intune
11 35 (0.62%) Packer
12 24 (0.43%) Kibana
13 20 (0.35%) Kustomize
13 20 (0.35%) vCenter Server
14 19 (0.34%) HP ALM
14 19 (0.34%) SCCM
15 17 (0.30%) Kubeflow
16 15 (0.27%) Oracle RMAN
17 13 (0.23%) Control-M
17 13 (0.23%) systemd
Vendors
1 1,098 (19.49%) Microsoft
2 308 (5.47%) Oracle
3 285 (5.06%) Databricks
4 266 (4.72%) Google
5 205 (3.64%) ServiceNow
6 185 (3.28%) Salesforce
7 184 (3.27%) Splunk
8 144 (2.56%) Dynatrace
9 123 (2.18%) VMware
10 115 (2.04%) SAP
11 101 (1.79%) Red Hat
12 65 (1.15%) IBM
13 61 (1.08%) Informatica
13 61 (1.08%) MuleSoft
14 60 (1.06%) OpenAI
15 51 (0.91%) Cisco
16 48 (0.85%) Atlassian
17 46 (0.82%) AppDynamics
18 44 (0.78%) Foundry
19 35 (0.62%) CyberArk