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

6 months to
29 May 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 13 15 15
Rank change year-on-year +2 0 -4
Contract jobs citing DevOps 5,215 2,986 4,054
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.66% 10.38% 9.47%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.60% 11.41% 11.04%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,640 2,165 2,814
10th Percentile £386 £384 £400
25th Percentile £438 £440 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £522 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year -0.62% -4.55% -6.38%
75th Percentile £605 £638 £650
90th Percentile £700 £750 £744
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £525
% change year-on-year - -4.76% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 119 17 112
10th Percentile £39.53 £33.10 £56.28
25th Percentile £58.88 £51.25 £61.25
Median hourly rate £70.00 £73.23 £65.25
Median % change year-on-year -4.40% +12.22% -0.38%
75th Percentile £77.50 £87.50 £77.50
90th Percentile £92.50 £89.50 £86.86
UK excluding London median hourly rate £67.50 £73.23 £65.25
% change year-on-year -7.82% +12.22% -0.38%

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 41,377 26,173 36,711
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.59% 91.02% 85.72%
Number of daily rates quoted 25,864 16,755 23,656
10th Percentile £325 £300 £300
25th Percentile £413 £408 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £512 £513 £525
Median % change year-on-year -0.10% -2.38% -4.55%
75th Percentile £613 £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 2,474 1,096 2,500
10th Percentile £14.68 £14.20 £12.75
25th Percentile £19.87 £17.87 £16.00
Median hourly rate £42.30 £27.59 £36.50
Median % change year-on-year +53.34% -24.42% +1.04%
75th Percentile £67.65 £57.50 £60.00
90th Percentile £80.76 £74.38 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £45.00 £25.15 £38.00
% change year-on-year +78.93% -33.82% +8.57%

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 29 May 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 29 May 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 29 May 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 4,441 £525 -0.94% 876
UK excluding London +9 2,299 £500 - 727
London +3 2,266 £550 -1.08% 311
Work from Home -2 1,418 £525 - 486
North of England +7 803 £500 - 216
South East +3 476 £513 +2.50% 213
Yorkshire +2 456 £500 - 51
Midlands +4 407 £488 -2.50% 97
West Midlands +3 318 £500 -4.31% 66
North West 0 287 £500 - 128
South West +15 285 £525 -4.55% 88
Scotland +2 187 £500 +5.26% 35
East of England +19 128 £525 +5.00% 59
East Midlands -1 85 £465 +0.54% 31
North East +5 76 £450 -14.29% 39
Wales +5 49 £425 +39.13% 24
Northern Ireland +2 14 £531 +27.25% 7
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
1 293 (5.62%) Confluence
2 133 (2.55%) Apache Spark
3 120 (2.30%) SharePoint
4 93 (1.78%) Apache
5 81 (1.55%) Apache Airflow
6 78 (1.50%) SAS
7 43 (0.82%) CMS
8 30 (0.58%) nginx
9 29 (0.56%) Microsoft Exchange
10 26 (0.50%) IIS
11 21 (0.40%) OpenStack
12 18 (0.35%) Jupyter
13 15 (0.29%) Camunda
14 14 (0.27%) Mendix
15 13 (0.25%) WebSphere
16 12 (0.23%) Palantir Foundry
17 10 (0.19%) HCL Notes
18 9 (0.17%) Sitecore CMS
19 8 (0.15%) Adobe Experience Manager
19 8 (0.15%) Oracle Workflow
Applications
1 76 (1.46%) Microsoft Excel
2 57 (1.09%) Microsoft Project
3 51 (0.98%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 35 (0.67%) Microsoft Office
5 26 (0.50%) MS Visio
6 4 (0.077%) Chatbot
6 4 (0.077%) CPLEX
6 4 (0.077%) Notion
7 3 (0.058%) Trello
8 2 (0.038%) Adobe XD
8 2 (0.038%) Spreadsheet
9 1 (0.019%) InDesign
9 1 (0.019%) Maya
9 1 (0.019%) Weka
Business Applications
1 63 (1.21%) Dynamics CRM
2 30 (0.58%) SAP S/4HANA
3 14 (0.27%) Oracle ERP
4 11 (0.21%) Payment Gateway
5 9 (0.17%) Maximo
6 8 (0.15%) Aladdin
6 8 (0.15%) Dynamics AX
7 6 (0.12%) Remedy ITSM
7 6 (0.12%) SAP MDG
8 5 (0.096%) Endur
8 5 (0.096%) Magento
8 5 (0.096%) NEC Housing
8 5 (0.096%) Oracle EBS
9 3 (0.058%) Findur
9 3 (0.058%) OpenText MBPM
9 3 (0.058%) Oracle BPM
9 3 (0.058%) SAP BPC
9 3 (0.058%) SAP ERP
9 3 (0.058%) SAP MM
9 3 (0.058%) SAP Oil and Gas
Cloud Services
1 2,830 (54.27%) Azure
2 1,779 (34.11%) AWS
3 1,539 (29.51%) Azure DevOps
4 882 (16.91%) GitHub
5 674 (12.92%) GCP
6 525 (10.07%) GitHub Actions
7 475 (9.11%) Serverless
8 443 (8.49%) Power Platform
9 276 (5.29%) Amazon S3
10 258 (4.95%) AWS CloudFormation
11 246 (4.72%) AWS Lambda
12 235 (4.51%) Entra ID
13 226 (4.33%) Azure AKS
14 212 (4.07%) Azure Data Factory
15 197 (3.78%) Amazon EKS
16 180 (3.45%) OpenShift
17 169 (3.24%) Azure Monitor
18 162 (3.11%) PaaS
19 158 (3.03%) Amazon EC2
20 153 (2.93%) Amazon CloudWatch
Communications & Networking
1 231 (4.43%) Firewall
2 133 (2.55%) DNS
3 107 (2.05%) Network Security
4 100 (1.92%) VPN
5 47 (0.90%) TCP/IP
6 40 (0.77%) WAN
7 35 (0.67%) SD-WAN
8 32 (0.61%) BGP
9 29 (0.56%) SSL
10 26 (0.50%) SAN
11 25 (0.48%) DHCP
12 24 (0.46%) HTTP
12 24 (0.46%) Wi-Fi
13 22 (0.42%) OSPF
14 19 (0.36%) IPsec
15 17 (0.33%) Internet
15 17 (0.33%) MPLS
16 16 (0.31%) Reverse Proxy
16 16 (0.31%) VXLAN
17 15 (0.29%) LAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 284 (5.45%) Power BI
2 265 (5.08%) SQL Server
3 244 (4.68%) PostgreSQL
4 181 (3.47%) Data Lake
5 179 (3.43%) NoSQL
6 152 (2.91%) Relational Database
7 140 (2.68%) Data Warehouse
8 131 (2.51%) MongoDB
9 114 (2.19%) Azure SQL Database
10 110 (2.11%) Amazon RDS
11 98 (1.88%) DynamoDB
12 94 (1.80%) Metadata
13 92 (1.76%) Delta Lake
14 75 (1.44%) Oracle Database
15 73 (1.40%) Big Data
16 66 (1.27%) Elasticsearch
17 62 (1.19%) Amazon Athena
18 56 (1.07%) BigQuery
19 55 (1.05%) Redis
20 51 (0.98%) Amazon Redshift
Development Applications
1 737 (14.13%) Jenkins
2 647 (12.41%) Git
3 617 (11.83%) JIRA
4 542 (10.39%) GitLab
5 113 (2.17%) Selenium
6 107 (2.05%) Postman
7 86 (1.65%) SonarQube
8 82 (1.57%) JUnit
9 66 (1.27%) REST Assured
10 63 (1.21%) Bitbucket
11 61 (1.17%) Cucumber
11 61 (1.17%) Maven
12 56 (1.07%) JMeter
13 51 (0.98%) Artifactory
14 48 (0.92%) Cypress.io
15 43 (0.82%) Gatling
16 39 (0.75%) Mockito
17 38 (0.73%) Gradle
18 33 (0.63%) Visual Studio
19 32 (0.61%) Sonatype Nexus
General
1 1,278 (24.51%) Social Skills
2 926 (17.76%) Finance
3 668 (12.81%) Public Sector
4 400 (7.67%) Analytical Skills
5 332 (6.37%) Banking
6 143 (2.74%) Documentation Skills
7 82 (1.57%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 73 (1.40%) Influencing Skills
9 70 (1.34%) Legal
10 67 (1.28%) Retail
11 52 (1.00%) Marketing
12 51 (0.98%) Financial Institution
13 49 (0.94%) Organisational Skills
14 40 (0.77%) Military
15 39 (0.75%) Investment Banking
16 38 (0.73%) Presentation Skills
17 34 (0.65%) Front Office
18 30 (0.58%) Law
19 28 (0.54%) Telecoms
20 25 (0.48%) Pharmaceutical
Job Titles
1 1,074 (20.59%) DevOps Engineer
2 761 (14.59%) Developer
3 733 (14.06%) Senior
4 609 (11.68%) Architect
5 453 (8.69%) Lead
6 345 (6.62%) Azure Engineer
7 311 (5.96%) Analyst
7 311 (5.96%) Data Engineer
8 252 (4.83%) AWS Engineer
9 194 (3.72%) Cloud Engineer
10 184 (3.53%) Platform Engineer
11 179 (3.43%) AWS DevOps
12 177 (3.39%) Solutions Architect
13 175 (3.36%) Azure DevOps Engineer
14 173 (3.32%) Senior DevOps
15 167 (3.20%) AWS DevOps Engineer
16 158 (3.03%) Senior DevOps Engineer
17 156 (2.99%) Business Analyst
18 151 (2.90%) Java Developer
18 151 (2.90%) Software Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 468 (8.97%) REST
2 465 (8.92%) .NET
3 313 (6.00%) React
4 280 (5.37%) Spring
5 278 (5.33%) Kafka
6 270 (5.18%) Spring Boot
7 259 (4.97%) RESTful
8 249 (4.77%) Node.js
9 171 (3.28%) AngularJS
10 158 (3.03%) OAuth
11 157 (3.01%) PySpark
12 155 (2.97%) Playwright
13 137 (2.63%) JSON
14 130 (2.49%) YAML
15 115 (2.21%) SOAP
16 111 (2.13%) Middleware
17 109 (2.09%) HTML
18 107 (2.05%) OpenID
19 106 (2.03%) .NET Framework
20 102 (1.96%) OAuth2
Miscellaneous
1 859 (16.47%) Cloud Native
2 330 (6.33%) Product Ownership
3 202 (3.87%) Distributed Systems
4 134 (2.57%) Onboarding
5 118 (2.26%) Legacy Systems
6 108 (2.07%) Public Cloud
7 105 (2.01%) Hybrid Cloud
8 104 (1.99%) Enterprise Software
9 81 (1.55%) Data Protection Act
10 78 (1.50%) Data Centre
11 63 (1.21%) Management Information System
12 56 (1.07%) Self-Motivation
13 49 (0.94%) Virtual Team
14 47 (0.90%) AI Agents
14 47 (0.90%) Private Cloud
15 46 (0.88%) Greenfield Project
15 46 (0.88%) Mobile App
15 46 (0.88%) Replication
15 46 (0.88%) Security Posture
16 44 (0.84%) Low-Code
Operating Systems
1 464 (8.90%) Linux
2 266 (5.10%) Windows
3 93 (1.78%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 80 (1.53%) Unix
5 55 (1.05%) Windows Server
6 42 (0.81%) VMS
7 29 (0.56%) Ubuntu
8 19 (0.36%) Apple iOS
9 14 (0.27%) Android
10 13 (0.25%) CentOS
11 10 (0.19%) Windows Server 2019
12 8 (0.15%) Windows 10
13 7 (0.13%) Windows Server 2016
14 6 (0.12%) Solaris
15 5 (0.096%) Amazon Linux
15 5 (0.096%) Mac OS
15 5 (0.096%) Windows Server 2012
16 4 (0.077%) Alpine Linux
16 4 (0.077%) Data ONTAP
16 4 (0.077%) Windows Server 2008
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,998 (57.49%) CI/CD
2 1,889 (36.22%) Agile
3 1,363 (26.14%) Infrastructure as Code
4 820 (15.72%) Containerisation
5 769 (14.75%) Problem-Solving
6 740 (14.19%) Microservices
7 738 (14.15%) Test Automation
8 696 (13.35%) Continuous Improvement
9 639 (12.25%) Migration
10 636 (12.20%) Observability
11 591 (11.33%) Analytics
12 573 (10.99%) Stakeholder Management
13 571 (10.95%) Scrum
14 569 (10.91%) AI
15 511 (9.80%) Software Engineering
16 507 (9.72%) Platform Engineering
17 487 (9.34%) Data Modelling
18 430 (8.25%) Technical Leadership
19 421 (8.07%) Mentoring
20 414 (7.94%) Roadmaps
Programming Languages
1 1,442 (27.65%) Python
2 1,017 (19.50%) SQL
3 688 (13.19%) Java
4 495 (9.49%) C#
5 382 (7.33%) JavaScript
6 375 (7.19%) Bash
7 374 (7.17%) PowerShell
8 275 (5.27%) TypeScript
9 185 (3.55%) Bicep
10 108 (2.07%) Go
11 66 (1.27%) Scala
12 65 (1.25%) Shell Script
13 59 (1.13%) Apex Code
14 53 (1.02%) PL/SQL
15 46 (0.88%) Groovy
15 46 (0.88%) T-SQL
16 35 (0.67%) C++
17 27 (0.52%) Data Analysis Expressions
17 27 (0.52%) Ruby
18 24 (0.46%) Perl
Qualifications
1 1,631 (31.28%) Security Cleared
2 1,346 (25.81%) SC Cleared
3 319 (6.12%) Degree
4 213 (4.08%) Azure Certification
5 165 (3.16%) BPSS Clearance
6 155 (2.97%) DV Cleared
7 146 (2.80%) AWS Certification
8 134 (2.57%) Computer Science Degree
9 83 (1.59%) CISSP
10 63 (1.21%) Microsoft Certification
11 54 (1.04%) ISTQB
12 53 (1.02%) CISM
13 46 (0.88%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
14 45 (0.86%) Cisco Certification
14 45 (0.86%) Master's Degree
14 45 (0.86%) PMI Certification
15 42 (0.81%) PMP
16 26 (0.50%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
16 26 (0.50%) TOGAF Certification
17 22 (0.42%) ITIL Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 431 (8.26%) QA
2 246 (4.72%) Data Quality
3 180 (3.45%) GDPR
4 142 (2.72%) Accessibility
5 128 (2.45%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 121 (2.32%) NIST
7 66 (1.27%) NCSC
8 56 (1.07%) WCAG
9 45 (0.86%) PCI DSS
10 43 (0.82%) SLA
11 33 (0.63%) PMO
12 32 (0.61%) Sarbanes-Oxley
13 22 (0.42%) GRC
14 18 (0.35%) HIPAA
15 14 (0.27%) SOC 2
16 13 (0.25%) NIST 800
17 12 (0.23%) ISO 20022
18 11 (0.21%) PSD2
19 9 (0.17%) Disclosure Scotland
19 9 (0.17%) SEPA
System Software
1 981 (18.81%) Docker
2 173 (3.32%) Active Directory
3 77 (1.48%) Virtual Machines
4 73 (1.40%) VMware Infrastructure
5 35 (0.67%) vSphere
6 27 (0.52%) VMware NSX
7 19 (0.36%) Virtual Desktop
8 18 (0.35%) Squid
9 14 (0.27%) Postfix
10 13 (0.25%) Hyper-V
11 12 (0.23%) VMware ESXi
12 8 (0.15%) Firmware
13 7 (0.13%) HDFS
13 7 (0.13%) Oracle RAC
13 7 (0.13%) RACF
14 6 (0.12%) Corosync
14 6 (0.12%) NFS
15 5 (0.096%) Ceph
15 5 (0.096%) SRDF
16 4 (0.077%) Varnish
Systems Management
1 1,494 (28.65%) Terraform
2 1,330 (25.50%) Kubernetes
3 507 (9.72%) Ansible
4 360 (6.90%) Grafana
5 303 (5.81%) Prometheus
6 92 (1.76%) Argo
7 74 (1.42%) Single Sign-On
8 69 (1.32%) Puppet
9 62 (1.19%) Istio
10 34 (0.65%) Progress Chef
11 29 (0.56%) Microsoft Intune
12 28 (0.54%) Packer
13 23 (0.44%) vCenter Server
14 22 (0.42%) HP ALM
14 22 (0.42%) Kibana
15 21 (0.40%) Active Directory Federation Services
16 18 (0.35%) Consul
17 15 (0.29%) SCCM
18 14 (0.27%) FortiGate
18 14 (0.27%) Oracle RMAN
Vendors
1 915 (17.55%) Microsoft
2 293 (5.62%) Databricks
3 284 (5.45%) Oracle
4 245 (4.70%) Google
5 196 (3.76%) Splunk
6 178 (3.41%) ServiceNow
7 163 (3.13%) Salesforce
8 143 (2.74%) Red Hat
9 116 (2.22%) VMware
10 113 (2.17%) SAP
11 103 (1.98%) Dynatrace
12 73 (1.40%) OpenAI
13 50 (0.96%) Atlassian
14 48 (0.92%) CyberArk
14 48 (0.92%) IBM
15 45 (0.86%) Informatica
16 43 (0.82%) Cisco
17 39 (0.75%) Foundry
18 37 (0.71%) AppDynamics
18 37 (0.71%) Okta