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

6 months to
26 Jan 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 11 14 17
Rank change year-on-year +3 +3 -6
Contract jobs citing DevOps 4,359 3,291 3,940
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 11.56% 10.52% 8.89%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 13.23% 11.82% 10.18%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,063 2,262 2,847
10th Percentile £375 £400 £406
25th Percentile £428 £463 £475
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £520 £560 £561
Median % change year-on-year -7.14% -0.11% -6.56%
75th Percentile £613 £663 £650
90th Percentile £706 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £525 £534
% change year-on-year -4.76% -1.69% -2.91%
Number of hourly rates quoted 54 25 100
10th Percentile - £36.85 £46.18
25th Percentile £45.46 £46.18 £56.61
Median hourly rate £48.75 £67.50 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year -27.78% +3.85% -0.92%
75th Percentile £82.00 £80.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £93.75 £80.75 £78.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £47.50 £67.50 £65.00
% change year-on-year -29.63% +3.85% -0.92%

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 32,948 27,851 38,703
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 87.34% 89.03% 87.36%
Number of daily rates quoted 20,870 16,883 25,489
10th Percentile £305 £306 £300
25th Percentile £408 £413 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £613 £638 £643
90th Percentile £723 £738 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £480 £500 £500
% change year-on-year -4.00% - -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,006 881 1,954
10th Percentile £14.50 £15.62 £13.69
25th Percentile £17.69 £21.00 £17.00
Median hourly rate £25.15 £32.50 £36.02
Median % change year-on-year -22.62% -9.78% +12.89%
75th Percentile £57.50 £62.50 £62.47
90th Percentile £70.00 £75.00 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £24.71 £30.45 £37.50
% change year-on-year -18.85% -18.80% +41.24%

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 January 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 January 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 26 January 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 +3 3,730 £525 -8.70% 2,084
UK excluding London +7 1,948 £500 -4.76% 1,904
London -1 1,884 £537 -10.54% 487
Work from Home 0 1,243 £525 -2.78% 1,114
North of England +3 662 £500 -1.96% 421
Midlands +25 388 £519 +3.70% 216
South East +2 388 £525 -10.26% 598
Yorkshire +1 335 £500 - 161
West Midlands +25 315 £525 +2.54% 98
North West +6 280 £463 -8.78% 199
South West +7 239 £525 -12.50% 242
Scotland +5 198 £475 +5.56% 100
East of England +18 108 £570 +10.68% 240
East Midlands +15 73 £425 -10.53% 114
North East -6 48 £475 -15.93% 62
Wales +3 32 £430 +59.26% 90
Northern Ireland -9 8 - - 40

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
1 257 (5.90%) Confluence
2 87 (2.00%) SharePoint
3 84 (1.93%) Apache
4 77 (1.77%) SAS
5 75 (1.72%) Apache Spark
6 62 (1.42%) Apache Airflow
7 40 (0.92%) nginx
8 36 (0.83%) OpenStack
9 35 (0.80%) CMS
10 25 (0.57%) IIS
11 21 (0.48%) Microsoft Exchange
12 19 (0.44%) JBoss
13 13 (0.30%) WebLogic
14 12 (0.28%) CICS
15 10 (0.23%) HCL Notes
15 10 (0.23%) Mendix
15 10 (0.23%) WebSphere
16 9 (0.21%) iPlanet
16 9 (0.21%) Sitecore CMS
16 9 (0.21%) WebSphere Application Server
Applications
1 92 (2.11%) Microsoft Excel
2 61 (1.40%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 34 (0.78%) Microsoft Project
4 33 (0.76%) Microsoft Office
5 19 (0.44%) MS Visio
6 15 (0.34%) Chatbot
7 8 (0.18%) Mozilla Thunderbird
7 8 (0.18%) Weka
8 4 (0.092%) Trello
9 1 (0.023%) Adobe XD
9 1 (0.023%) Revit
Business Applications
1 66 (1.51%) Dynamics CRM
2 16 (0.37%) SAP S/4HANA
3 11 (0.25%) Endur
3 11 (0.25%) VisionPLUS
4 10 (0.23%) Aladdin
5 9 (0.21%) Maximo
5 9 (0.21%) Oracle ERP
6 8 (0.18%) NEC Housing
7 5 (0.11%) Dynamics AX
7 5 (0.11%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
8 4 (0.092%) NetSuite
8 4 (0.092%) Oracle EBS
8 4 (0.092%) Payment Gateway
8 4 (0.092%) SAP ERP
9 3 (0.069%) Oracle Assets
9 3 (0.069%) Oracle General Ledger
9 3 (0.069%) SAP CO
9 3 (0.069%) SAP FI
9 3 (0.069%) SAP FI/CO
9 3 (0.069%) Teamcenter
Cloud Services
1 2,222 (50.97%) Azure
2 1,575 (36.13%) AWS
3 1,199 (27.51%) Azure DevOps
4 802 (18.40%) GitHub
5 634 (14.54%) GCP
6 526 (12.07%) Serverless
7 465 (10.67%) GitHub Actions
8 359 (8.24%) Power Platform
9 282 (6.47%) AWS CloudFormation
10 259 (5.94%) AWS Lambda
11 244 (5.60%) Amazon S3
12 215 (4.93%) Azure Data Factory
13 200 (4.59%) Azure AKS
14 184 (4.22%) Amazon EKS
15 182 (4.18%) Amazon CloudWatch
15 182 (4.18%) OpenShift
16 171 (3.92%) Dynamics 365
17 170 (3.90%) Entra ID
18 165 (3.79%) Amazon ECS
19 163 (3.74%) Amazon EC2
Communications & Networking
1 211 (4.84%) Firewall
2 113 (2.59%) DNS
3 93 (2.13%) VPN
4 87 (2.00%) Network Security
5 60 (1.38%) TCP/IP
6 51 (1.17%) SSL
7 39 (0.89%) HTTP
8 34 (0.78%) HTTPS
9 24 (0.55%) WAN
10 18 (0.41%) DHCP
11 17 (0.39%) BGP
12 16 (0.37%) MPLS
12 16 (0.37%) SD-WAN
12 16 (0.37%) SSH
13 15 (0.34%) FTP
13 15 (0.34%) Kerberos
13 15 (0.34%) SMTP
14 13 (0.30%) LAN
15 11 (0.25%) SAN
16 10 (0.23%) Internet
Database & Business Intelligence
1 247 (5.67%) PostgreSQL
2 229 (5.25%) Power BI
3 174 (3.99%) SQL Server
4 160 (3.67%) NoSQL
5 136 (3.12%) Amazon RDS
6 132 (3.03%) Data Lake
7 111 (2.55%) Relational Database
8 107 (2.45%) Data Warehouse
9 100 (2.29%) MongoDB
10 93 (2.13%) Azure SQL Database
11 78 (1.79%) Oracle Database
12 66 (1.51%) Elasticsearch
13 65 (1.49%) DynamoDB
14 63 (1.45%) MySQL
15 55 (1.26%) Tableau
16 51 (1.17%) Redis
17 50 (1.15%) Amazon Aurora
17 50 (1.15%) Metadata
18 49 (1.12%) Delta Lake
19 43 (0.99%) Big Data
Development Applications
1 791 (18.15%) Jenkins
2 599 (13.74%) JIRA
3 598 (13.72%) Git
4 576 (13.21%) GitLab
5 130 (2.98%) Selenium
6 95 (2.18%) JUnit
7 94 (2.16%) Postman
8 75 (1.72%) SonarQube
9 72 (1.65%) Bitbucket
10 70 (1.61%) Sonatype Nexus
11 68 (1.56%) Cypress.io
12 60 (1.38%) Cucumber
13 51 (1.17%) Artifactory
14 48 (1.10%) JMeter
15 46 (1.06%) Gradle
16 44 (1.01%) Maven
17 41 (0.94%) Liquibase
18 37 (0.85%) CircleCI
18 37 (0.85%) Oracle APEX
19 36 (0.83%) REST Assured
General
1 1,318 (30.24%) Social Skills
2 792 (18.17%) Finance
3 548 (12.57%) Public Sector
4 362 (8.30%) Analytical Skills
5 352 (8.08%) Banking
6 157 (3.60%) Documentation Skills
7 79 (1.81%) Influencing Skills
8 68 (1.56%) Inclusion and Diversity
9 67 (1.54%) Financial Institution
10 59 (1.35%) Marketing
11 49 (1.12%) Presentation Skills
12 48 (1.10%) Investment Banking
13 47 (1.08%) Front Office
14 46 (1.06%) Retail
15 44 (1.01%) Telecoms
16 35 (0.80%) Military
17 32 (0.73%) Pharmaceutical
18 27 (0.62%) Legal
18 27 (0.62%) Organisational Skills
19 25 (0.57%) Law
Job Titles
1 857 (19.66%) DevOps Engineer
2 759 (17.41%) Developer
3 589 (13.51%) Senior
4 408 (9.36%) Architect
5 328 (7.52%) Lead
6 254 (5.83%) Azure Engineer
7 250 (5.74%) AWS Engineer
8 225 (5.16%) Data Engineer
9 213 (4.89%) Analyst
10 195 (4.47%) AWS DevOps
11 171 (3.92%) AWS DevOps Engineer
12 158 (3.62%) Software Engineer
13 157 (3.60%) Cloud Engineer
14 147 (3.37%) Senior Developer
15 146 (3.35%) Platform Engineer
16 124 (2.84%) Azure DevOps Engineer
17 121 (2.78%) Consultant
17 121 (2.78%) Solutions Architect
18 119 (2.73%) Senior DevOps
19 112 (2.57%) Business Analyst
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 495 (11.36%) REST
2 376 (8.63%) .NET
3 286 (6.56%) React
4 280 (6.42%) Node.js
5 259 (5.94%) RESTful
6 243 (5.57%) Kafka
7 220 (5.05%) Spring
8 199 (4.57%) Spring Boot
9 181 (4.15%) JSON
10 158 (3.62%) OAuth
11 150 (3.44%) AngularJS
12 142 (3.26%) Elastic Stack
13 137 (3.14%) XML
14 131 (3.01%) HTML
14 131 (3.01%) SOAP
15 125 (2.87%) YAML
16 109 (2.50%) Playwright
17 103 (2.36%) CSS
18 96 (2.20%) Middleware
18 96 (2.20%) PySpark
Miscellaneous
1 617 (14.15%) Cloud Native
2 231 (5.30%) Product Ownership
3 161 (3.69%) Distributed Systems
4 116 (2.66%) Onboarding
4 116 (2.66%) Public Cloud
5 89 (2.04%) Legacy Systems
6 80 (1.84%) Hybrid Cloud
7 71 (1.63%) Enterprise Software
8 56 (1.28%) Data Protection Act
9 55 (1.26%) Virtual Team
10 53 (1.22%) Management Information System
11 52 (1.19%) Data Centre
12 48 (1.10%) Private Cloud
12 48 (1.10%) Replication
13 45 (1.03%) Mobile App
13 45 (1.03%) Security Posture
14 42 (0.96%) NHS
15 41 (0.94%) AI Agents
15 41 (0.94%) CMDB
15 41 (0.94%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 492 (11.29%) Linux
2 255 (5.85%) Windows
3 110 (2.52%) Unix
4 57 (1.31%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 57 (1.31%) Windows Server
5 49 (1.12%) VMS
6 30 (0.69%) Ubuntu
7 26 (0.60%) Android
8 23 (0.53%) Apple iOS
9 20 (0.46%) Windows 10
10 18 (0.41%) CentOS
11 12 (0.28%) Amazon Linux
12 10 (0.23%) Solaris
13 7 (0.16%) Windows Server 2019
14 6 (0.14%) Windows Server 2016
15 5 (0.11%) zOS
16 4 (0.092%) Mac OS
16 4 (0.092%) Windows Server 2012
17 2 (0.046%) Debian
18 1 (0.023%) Mac OS X
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,494 (57.21%) CI/CD
2 1,734 (39.78%) Agile
3 1,148 (26.34%) Infrastructure as Code
4 844 (19.36%) Containerisation
5 842 (19.32%) Problem-Solving
6 671 (15.39%) Test Automation
7 648 (14.87%) Microservices
8 517 (11.86%) Continuous Improvement
9 500 (11.47%) Analytics
10 495 (11.36%) Migration
11 484 (11.10%) Scrum
12 452 (10.37%) Observability
13 420 (9.64%) AI
14 394 (9.04%) Software Engineering
15 389 (8.92%) Stakeholder Management
16 338 (7.75%) Data Modelling
17 331 (7.59%) Mentoring
18 299 (6.86%) Data Pipeline
19 294 (6.74%) Business Intelligence
20 290 (6.65%) Stakeholder Engagement
Programming Languages
1 1,345 (30.86%) Python
2 869 (19.94%) SQL
3 584 (13.40%) Java
4 425 (9.75%) JavaScript
5 422 (9.68%) C#
6 379 (8.69%) PowerShell
7 350 (8.03%) Bash
8 310 (7.11%) TypeScript
9 147 (3.37%) Bicep
10 142 (3.26%) Go
11 76 (1.74%) PL/SQL
12 71 (1.63%) Shell Script
13 59 (1.35%) Scala
14 52 (1.19%) Groovy
15 50 (1.15%) Ruby
16 47 (1.08%) C++
17 44 (1.01%) T-SQL
18 41 (0.94%) Perl
19 24 (0.55%) Rust
20 21 (0.48%) PHP
Qualifications
1 1,326 (30.42%) Security Cleared
2 1,103 (25.30%) SC Cleared
3 370 (8.49%) Degree
4 194 (4.45%) Computer Science Degree
5 185 (4.24%) Azure Certification
6 141 (3.23%) AWS Certification
7 140 (3.21%) DV Cleared
8 107 (2.45%) BPSS Clearance
9 82 (1.88%) Master's Degree
10 73 (1.67%) CISSP
11 63 (1.45%) Microsoft Certification
12 57 (1.31%) CISM
13 46 (1.06%) ISTQB
14 44 (1.01%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
15 38 (0.87%) PMI Certification
16 30 (0.69%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
16 30 (0.69%) PMP
17 29 (0.67%) Cisco Certification
18 22 (0.50%) IIBA
19 20 (0.46%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 378 (8.67%) QA
2 162 (3.72%) GDPR
3 156 (3.58%) Data Quality
4 145 (3.33%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 123 (2.82%) Accessibility
5 123 (2.82%) NIST
6 70 (1.61%) NCSC
7 36 (0.83%) PCI DSS
8 34 (0.78%) WCAG
9 28 (0.64%) HIPAA
10 27 (0.62%) Sarbanes-Oxley
11 26 (0.60%) PMO
12 25 (0.57%) SLA
13 17 (0.39%) PSD2
13 17 (0.39%) SOC 2
14 15 (0.34%) ISO 20022
15 13 (0.30%) SEPA
16 11 (0.25%) HMG Security Policy Framework
16 11 (0.25%) NIST 800
17 9 (0.21%) Disclosure Scotland
System Software
1 1,104 (25.33%) Docker
2 172 (3.95%) Active Directory
3 70 (1.61%) VMware Infrastructure
4 65 (1.49%) Virtual Machines
5 30 (0.69%) vSphere
6 18 (0.41%) VMware NSX
7 15 (0.34%) DFS Replication
7 15 (0.34%) Squid
7 15 (0.34%) Virtual Desktop
8 13 (0.30%) Hyper-V
8 13 (0.30%) Slurm Workload Manager
9 11 (0.25%) Lustre
9 11 (0.25%) Virtual Servers
10 9 (0.21%) GPFS
11 8 (0.18%) Dovecot
11 8 (0.18%) NFS
11 8 (0.18%) Postfix
11 8 (0.18%) Tivoli Directory Server
11 8 (0.18%) VMware ESXi
12 7 (0.16%) Firmware
Systems Management
1 1,366 (31.34%) Terraform
2 1,280 (29.36%) Kubernetes
3 520 (11.93%) Ansible
4 329 (7.55%) Grafana
5 292 (6.70%) Prometheus
6 83 (1.90%) Argo
7 76 (1.74%) Puppet
8 56 (1.28%) Single Sign-On
9 44 (1.01%) Istio
10 40 (0.92%) Progress Chef
11 38 (0.87%) Kibana
12 32 (0.73%) Packer
13 22 (0.50%) Podman
14 20 (0.46%) SCCM
15 17 (0.39%) Rancher
16 16 (0.37%) Microsoft Intune
17 15 (0.34%) Consul
17 15 (0.34%) Proxmox
18 14 (0.32%) NetBackup
19 13 (0.30%) Nessus
Vendors
1 745 (17.09%) Microsoft
2 306 (7.02%) Oracle
3 248 (5.69%) Google
4 241 (5.53%) Databricks
5 222 (5.09%) Splunk
6 158 (3.62%) ServiceNow
7 128 (2.94%) Red Hat
8 114 (2.62%) Salesforce
9 113 (2.59%) VMware
10 103 (2.36%) SAP
11 71 (1.63%) Dynatrace
12 66 (1.51%) OpenAI
13 53 (1.22%) CyberArk
14 50 (1.15%) F5
15 48 (1.10%) IBM
16 45 (1.03%) Atlassian
17 42 (0.96%) Talend
18 41 (0.94%) Palo Alto
19 40 (0.92%) Cisco
20 38 (0.87%) Denodo