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

6 months to
17 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 13 15 14
Rank change year-on-year +2 -1 -1
Contract jobs citing DevOps 5,612 3,393 4,080
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.66% 10.43% 9.67%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.53% 11.54% 11.32%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,885 2,423 2,787
10th Percentile £385 £363 £385
25th Percentile £440 £425 £456
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £520 £550
Median % change year-on-year +0.96% -5.45% -4.35%
75th Percentile £613 £625 £650
90th Percentile £700 £725 £725
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £525
% change year-on-year - -4.76% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 114 24 112
10th Percentile £37.55 £37.25 £56.50
25th Percentile £61.87 £52.19 £61.51
Median hourly rate £70.00 £67.00 £70.00
Median % change year-on-year +4.48% -4.29% +6.87%
75th Percentile £77.50 £84.10 £77.50
90th Percentile £93.81 £88.38 £86.86
UK excluding London median hourly rate £70.00 £67.00 £70.00
% change year-on-year +4.48% -4.29% +6.87%

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 44,805 29,397 36,049
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 85.08% 90.38% 85.43%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,846 18,489 23,062
10th Percentile £325 £300 £303
25th Percentile £419 £405 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £520 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% -4.76% -4.55%
75th Percentile £625 £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 2,636 1,550 2,325
10th Percentile £15.00 £14.20 £13.00
25th Percentile £20.09 £17.34 £16.30
Median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £38.12
Median % change year-on-year +74.79% -34.02% -5.88%
75th Percentile £68.50 £51.65 £61.60
90th Percentile £82.75 £70.00 £73.40
UK excluding London median hourly rate £45.00 £24.33 £38.12
% change year-on-year +84.96% -36.18% -4.70%

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 July 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 July 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 July 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 4,759 £525 - 1,109
UK excluding London +5 2,461 £500 - 813
London +2 2,447 £550 - 449
Work from Home 0 1,620 £525 +2.39% 564
North of England +5 861 £500 +2.04% 233
South East -10 456 £525 +5.00% 227
Yorkshire +2 454 £500 - 51
Midlands +2 446 £492 -0.61% 125
West Midlands -3 356 £500 - 91
North West -3 330 £523 +10.11% 135
South West +15 313 £525 -4.11% 121
Scotland +1 211 £475 -1.96% 35
East of England +25 147 £525 +5.00% 51
North East +13 96 £425 -18.66% 48
East Midlands -2 85 £488 +5.41% 34
Wales -5 48 £425 +38.10% 24
Northern Ireland +16 22 £475 +11.76% 17
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
1 332 (5.92%) Confluence
2 136 (2.42%) Apache Spark
3 133 (2.37%) SharePoint
4 110 (1.96%) Apache Airflow
5 103 (1.84%) Apache
6 78 (1.39%) SAS
7 50 (0.89%) CMS
8 37 (0.66%) IIS
9 35 (0.62%) Jupyter
10 34 (0.61%) nginx
11 29 (0.52%) Microsoft Exchange
12 16 (0.29%) Camunda
12 16 (0.29%) OpenStack
12 16 (0.29%) WebSphere
13 14 (0.25%) Palantir Foundry
14 11 (0.20%) Oracle Workflow
15 9 (0.16%) Appian
15 9 (0.16%) Sitecore CMS
16 8 (0.14%) Tomcat
17 7 (0.12%) JBoss
Applications
1 70 (1.25%) Microsoft Excel
2 64 (1.14%) Microsoft Project
3 46 (0.82%) Microsoft Office
4 39 (0.69%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 36 (0.64%) MS Visio
6 10 (0.18%) CPLEX
7 9 (0.16%) Spreadsheet
8 7 (0.12%) Chatbot
9 6 (0.11%) Trello
10 4 (0.071%) Notion
11 2 (0.036%) Adobe XD
12 1 (0.018%) EngageOne
12 1 (0.018%) InDesign
12 1 (0.018%) Maya
12 1 (0.018%) Weka
Business Applications
1 71 (1.27%) Dynamics CRM
2 40 (0.71%) SAP S/4HANA
3 10 (0.18%) Aladdin
3 10 (0.18%) Payment Gateway
4 9 (0.16%) Magento
4 9 (0.16%) Oracle EBS
4 9 (0.16%) Oracle ERP
4 9 (0.16%) Remedy ITSM
5 8 (0.14%) Dynamics AX
5 8 (0.14%) SAP MDG
6 6 (0.11%) Maximo
7 5 (0.089%) Endur
7 5 (0.089%) OpenText MBPM
7 5 (0.089%) Oracle BPM
7 5 (0.089%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
8 3 (0.053%) Findur
8 3 (0.053%) OpenText VIM for SAP
8 3 (0.053%) Salesforce CRM
8 3 (0.053%) SAP BPC
8 3 (0.053%) SAP MM
Cloud Services
1 3,031 (54.01%) Azure
2 2,008 (35.78%) AWS
3 1,682 (29.97%) Azure DevOps
4 944 (16.82%) GitHub
5 713 (12.70%) GCP
6 578 (10.30%) GitHub Actions
7 467 (8.32%) Serverless
8 461 (8.21%) Power Platform
9 316 (5.63%) Amazon S3
10 279 (4.97%) AWS Lambda
11 253 (4.51%) AWS CloudFormation
12 241 (4.29%) Entra ID
13 222 (3.96%) Amazon EKS
14 217 (3.87%) Azure AKS
15 195 (3.47%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 191 (3.40%) Amazon EC2
17 184 (3.28%) Azure Monitor
18 180 (3.21%) Azure Data Factory
19 160 (2.85%) OpenShift
20 159 (2.83%) Dynamics 365
Communications & Networking
1 235 (4.19%) Firewall
2 149 (2.66%) DNS
3 115 (2.05%) Network Security
4 112 (2.00%) VPN
5 51 (0.91%) TCP/IP
6 49 (0.87%) WAN
7 38 (0.68%) SSL
8 35 (0.62%) SD-WAN
9 34 (0.61%) BGP
10 29 (0.52%) DHCP
10 29 (0.52%) Internet
11 27 (0.48%) HTTP
11 27 (0.48%) Wi-Fi
12 25 (0.45%) SAN
13 24 (0.43%) OSPF
14 18 (0.32%) LAN
15 17 (0.30%) BIG-IP
15 17 (0.30%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
15 17 (0.30%) MPLS
15 17 (0.30%) VXLAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 304 (5.42%) Power BI
2 285 (5.08%) SQL Server
3 266 (4.74%) PostgreSQL
4 186 (3.31%) NoSQL
5 182 (3.24%) Relational Database
6 173 (3.08%) Data Warehouse
7 169 (3.01%) MongoDB
8 155 (2.76%) Data Lake
9 120 (2.14%) Amazon RDS
10 105 (1.87%) Metadata
11 101 (1.80%) Azure SQL Database
11 101 (1.80%) DynamoDB
12 84 (1.50%) Oracle Database
13 83 (1.48%) Delta Lake
14 71 (1.27%) Big Data
15 68 (1.21%) Amazon Athena
16 67 (1.19%) Amazon Redshift
17 65 (1.16%) Redis
18 63 (1.12%) Elasticsearch
19 58 (1.03%) MySQL
Development Applications
1 816 (14.54%) Jenkins
2 752 (13.40%) Git
3 685 (12.21%) JIRA
4 575 (10.25%) GitLab
5 135 (2.41%) Selenium
6 109 (1.94%) Postman
7 98 (1.75%) JUnit
8 97 (1.73%) SonarQube
9 81 (1.44%) Maven
10 79 (1.41%) REST Assured
11 75 (1.34%) Bitbucket
12 62 (1.10%) Cucumber
12 62 (1.10%) Cypress.io
13 58 (1.03%) JMeter
14 54 (0.96%) Gradle
15 44 (0.78%) Gatling
16 43 (0.77%) Mockito
17 39 (0.69%) Visual Studio
18 36 (0.64%) Artifactory
19 33 (0.59%) Sonatype Nexus
General
1 1,390 (24.77%) Social Skills
2 1,017 (18.12%) Finance
3 804 (14.33%) Public Sector
4 466 (8.30%) Analytical Skills
5 356 (6.34%) Banking
6 128 (2.28%) Documentation Skills
7 120 (2.14%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 90 (1.60%) Retail
9 74 (1.32%) Influencing Skills
10 67 (1.19%) Legal
11 64 (1.14%) Organisational Skills
12 56 (1.00%) Marketing
13 46 (0.82%) Military
14 43 (0.77%) Law
15 42 (0.75%) Investment Banking
15 42 (0.75%) Telecoms
16 39 (0.69%) Financial Institution
16 39 (0.69%) Manufacturing
17 34 (0.61%) Front Office
18 32 (0.57%) Presentation Skills
Job Titles
1 1,128 (20.10%) DevOps Engineer
2 928 (16.54%) Developer
3 775 (13.81%) Senior
4 638 (11.37%) Architect
5 512 (9.12%) Lead
6 344 (6.13%) Azure Engineer
7 317 (5.65%) Data Engineer
8 303 (5.40%) Analyst
9 281 (5.01%) AWS Engineer
10 226 (4.03%) Platform Engineer
11 209 (3.72%) Cloud Engineer
12 203 (3.62%) AWS DevOps
12 203 (3.62%) Java Developer
13 194 (3.46%) Senior DevOps
14 189 (3.37%) AWS DevOps Engineer
15 186 (3.31%) Azure DevOps Engineer
16 183 (3.26%) Solutions Architect
17 178 (3.17%) Senior DevOps Engineer
18 154 (2.74%) Business Analyst
19 148 (2.64%) Software Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 547 (9.75%) REST
2 493 (8.78%) .NET
3 327 (5.83%) RESTful
3 327 (5.83%) Spring
4 314 (5.60%) React
5 312 (5.56%) Kafka
6 308 (5.49%) Spring Boot
7 239 (4.26%) Node.js
8 168 (2.99%) AngularJS
9 166 (2.96%) Playwright
10 164 (2.92%) OAuth
11 163 (2.90%) PySpark
12 158 (2.82%) JSON
13 135 (2.41%) SOAP
14 132 (2.35%) .NET Framework
14 132 (2.35%) HTML
15 114 (2.03%) OAuth2
16 109 (1.94%) CSS
17 107 (1.91%) Middleware
18 104 (1.85%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 990 (17.64%) Cloud Native
2 386 (6.88%) Product Ownership
3 251 (4.47%) Distributed Systems
4 172 (3.06%) Onboarding
5 152 (2.71%) Enterprise Software
5 152 (2.71%) Legacy Systems
6 121 (2.16%) Hybrid Cloud
7 97 (1.73%) Public Cloud
8 87 (1.55%) Data Protection Act
9 81 (1.44%) Self-Motivation
10 79 (1.41%) Data Centre
11 67 (1.19%) Security Posture
12 66 (1.18%) Data Structures
13 65 (1.16%) Management Information System
14 61 (1.09%) Replication
15 58 (1.03%) AI Agents
15 58 (1.03%) Virtual Team
16 55 (0.98%) Mobile App
17 53 (0.94%) Enterprise Cloud
17 53 (0.94%) Greenfield Project
Operating Systems
1 475 (8.46%) Linux
2 289 (5.15%) Windows
3 102 (1.82%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 78 (1.39%) Unix
5 67 (1.19%) Windows Server
6 34 (0.61%) VMS
7 28 (0.50%) Ubuntu
8 26 (0.46%) Apple iOS
9 17 (0.30%) Android
10 11 (0.20%) Solaris
11 10 (0.18%) Windows Server 2019
12 8 (0.14%) zOS
13 7 (0.12%) CentOS
13 7 (0.12%) Windows Server 2016
14 6 (0.11%) Amazon Linux
14 6 (0.11%) Mac OS
14 6 (0.11%) Windows Server 2008
15 5 (0.089%) AIX
15 5 (0.089%) Windows 10
16 4 (0.071%) Data ONTAP
Processes & Methodologies
1 3,286 (58.55%) CI/CD
2 2,219 (39.54%) Agile
3 1,509 (26.89%) Infrastructure as Code
4 928 (16.54%) Containerisation
5 853 (15.20%) Problem-Solving
6 842 (15.00%) Continuous Improvement
7 836 (14.90%) Test Automation
8 822 (14.65%) Microservices
9 723 (12.88%) Stakeholder Management
10 703 (12.53%) AI
11 684 (12.19%) Migration
11 684 (12.19%) Scrum
12 682 (12.15%) Observability
13 641 (11.42%) Platform Engineering
14 622 (11.08%) Software Engineering
15 577 (10.28%) Analytics
16 488 (8.70%) Technical Leadership
17 483 (8.61%) Data Modelling
18 479 (8.54%) Stakeholder Engagement
19 450 (8.02%) Roadmaps
Programming Languages
1 1,564 (27.87%) Python
2 1,020 (18.18%) SQL
3 783 (13.95%) Java
4 509 (9.07%) C#
5 432 (7.70%) Bash
5 432 (7.70%) JavaScript
6 401 (7.15%) PowerShell
7 305 (5.43%) TypeScript
8 191 (3.40%) Bicep
9 116 (2.07%) Go
10 70 (1.25%) Apex Code
11 69 (1.23%) PL/SQL
12 67 (1.19%) Shell Script
12 67 (1.19%) T-SQL
13 60 (1.07%) Scala
14 54 (0.96%) Groovy
15 28 (0.50%) C++
15 28 (0.50%) Kotlin
16 24 (0.43%) Data Analysis Expressions
17 23 (0.41%) C
Qualifications
1 1,782 (31.75%) Security Cleared
2 1,498 (26.69%) SC Cleared
3 335 (5.97%) Degree
4 215 (3.83%) Azure Certification
5 205 (3.65%) BPSS Clearance
6 189 (3.37%) AWS Certification
7 186 (3.31%) DV Cleared
8 128 (2.28%) Computer Science Degree
9 78 (1.39%) CISSP
10 74 (1.32%) Microsoft Certification
11 62 (1.10%) ISTQB
12 57 (1.02%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 55 (0.98%) Cisco Certification
14 47 (0.84%) Master's Degree
15 43 (0.77%) PMI Certification
15 43 (0.77%) PMP
16 35 (0.62%) CISM
17 33 (0.59%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
18 27 (0.48%) ITIL Certification
19 22 (0.39%) CCNP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 493 (8.78%) QA
2 260 (4.63%) Data Quality
3 191 (3.40%) Accessibility
4 166 (2.96%) GDPR
5 105 (1.87%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 94 (1.67%) NIST
7 75 (1.34%) WCAG
8 65 (1.16%) NCSC
9 41 (0.73%) PCI DSS
10 39 (0.69%) PMO
11 37 (0.66%) SLA
12 28 (0.50%) GRC
13 27 (0.48%) Sarbanes-Oxley
14 16 (0.29%) HIPAA
15 13 (0.23%) Disclosure Scotland
16 12 (0.21%) SOC 2
17 10 (0.18%) PSD2
18 9 (0.16%) ISO 20022
18 9 (0.16%) SEPA
19 8 (0.14%) HMG Security Policy Framework
System Software
1 1,093 (19.48%) Docker
2 173 (3.08%) Active Directory
3 81 (1.44%) VMware Infrastructure
4 80 (1.43%) Virtual Machines
5 31 (0.55%) vSphere
6 27 (0.48%) VMware NSX
7 20 (0.36%) Squid
8 18 (0.32%) Virtual Desktop
8 18 (0.32%) VMware ESXi
9 16 (0.29%) Hyper-V
10 14 (0.25%) Postfix
11 12 (0.21%) Oracle RAC
12 8 (0.14%) KVM
13 7 (0.12%) IAG
14 6 (0.11%) Corosync
14 6 (0.11%) HDFS
14 6 (0.11%) NFS
14 6 (0.11%) RACF
15 5 (0.089%) Firmware
15 5 (0.089%) Microsoft App-V
Systems Management
1 1,611 (28.71%) Terraform
2 1,439 (25.64%) Kubernetes
3 522 (9.30%) Ansible
4 381 (6.79%) Grafana
5 328 (5.84%) Prometheus
6 95 (1.69%) Argo
7 74 (1.32%) Single Sign-On
8 61 (1.09%) Puppet
9 45 (0.80%) Istio
10 38 (0.68%) Progress Chef
11 32 (0.57%) Packer
12 29 (0.52%) Microsoft Intune
13 27 (0.48%) vCenter Server
14 23 (0.41%) HP ALM
15 19 (0.34%) Consul
15 19 (0.34%) Kibana
16 16 (0.29%) Kustomize
17 15 (0.27%) Active Directory Federation Services
17 15 (0.27%) Oracle RMAN
18 14 (0.25%) Kubeflow
Vendors
1 998 (17.78%) Microsoft
2 315 (5.61%) Oracle
3 268 (4.78%) Databricks
4 256 (4.56%) Google
5 197 (3.51%) ServiceNow
6 186 (3.31%) Splunk
7 185 (3.30%) Salesforce
8 131 (2.33%) SAP
9 128 (2.28%) Dynatrace
10 119 (2.12%) VMware
11 113 (2.01%) Red Hat
12 68 (1.21%) OpenAI
13 62 (1.10%) IBM
14 57 (1.02%) Informatica
15 54 (0.96%) Atlassian
16 47 (0.84%) Cisco
16 47 (0.84%) CyberArk
17 46 (0.82%) Foundry
18 44 (0.78%) MuleSoft
19 41 (0.73%) Okta