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

6 months to
27 Jan 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 11 14 16
Rank change year-on-year +3 +2 -5
Contract jobs citing DevOps 4,397 3,277 3,952
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 11.55% 10.54% 8.90%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 13.22% 11.83% 10.19%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,080 2,253 2,855
10th Percentile £375 £400 £406
25th Percentile £426 £463 £475
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £520 £560 £560
Median % change year-on-year -7.14% - -6.67%
75th Percentile £613 £663 £654
90th Percentile £707 £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 56 24 103
10th Percentile - £36.58 £46.18
25th Percentile £45.46 £53.73 £56.58
Median hourly rate £51.25 £70.36 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year -27.16% +8.25% -0.92%
75th Percentile £83.50 £80.19 £70.63
90th Percentile £95.00 £80.75 £80.60
UK excluding London median hourly rate £47.50 £70.36 £65.00
% change year-on-year -32.49% +8.25% -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 33,264 27,700 38,783
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 87.38% 89.09% 87.36%
Number of daily rates quoted 21,060 16,780 25,534
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 2,011 875 1,974
10th Percentile £14.50 £15.62 £13.50
25th Percentile £17.69 £21.00 £16.88
Median hourly rate £25.15 £32.50 £36.00
Median % change year-on-year -22.62% -9.72% +12.50%
75th Percentile £57.50 £62.50 £62.50
90th Percentile £70.00 £75.00 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £24.71 £30.43 £37.50
% change year-on-year -18.80% -18.85% +44.23%

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 27 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 27 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 27 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 3,758 £525 -8.70% 2,023
UK excluding London +7 1,972 £500 -4.76% 1,832
London -1 1,890 £536 -10.67% 488
Work from Home 0 1,256 £525 -2.78% 1,126
North of England +5 672 £500 -2.20% 407
South East +1 393 £525 -9.48% 585
Midlands +24 390 £519 +3.70% 211
Yorkshire +1 341 £500 -0.74% 156
West Midlands +24 316 £525 +1.25% 101
North West +5 284 £463 -8.78% 191
South West +9 241 £525 -12.50% 222
Scotland +5 202 £475 +5.56% 98
East of England +20 108 £570 +10.68% 227
East Midlands +15 74 £425 -10.53% 106
North East -6 48 £475 -15.93% 61
Wales +2 33 £425 +57.41% 85
Northern Ireland -9 8 - - 38

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
1 261 (5.94%) Confluence
2 87 (1.98%) SharePoint
3 86 (1.96%) Apache
4 79 (1.80%) Apache Spark
5 77 (1.75%) SAS
6 62 (1.41%) Apache Airflow
7 40 (0.91%) nginx
8 36 (0.82%) OpenStack
9 35 (0.80%) CMS
10 25 (0.57%) IIS
11 21 (0.48%) Microsoft Exchange
12 19 (0.43%) JBoss
13 13 (0.30%) WebLogic
14 12 (0.27%) CICS
15 10 (0.23%) HCL Notes
15 10 (0.23%) Mendix
15 10 (0.23%) WebSphere
16 9 (0.20%) iPlanet
16 9 (0.20%) Sitecore CMS
16 9 (0.20%) WebSphere Application Server
Applications
1 97 (2.21%) Microsoft Excel
2 63 (1.43%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 36 (0.82%) Microsoft Project
4 34 (0.77%) Microsoft Office
5 19 (0.43%) MS Visio
6 15 (0.34%) Chatbot
7 8 (0.18%) Mozilla Thunderbird
7 8 (0.18%) Weka
8 4 (0.091%) Trello
9 1 (0.023%) Adobe XD
9 1 (0.023%) Revit
Business Applications
1 66 (1.50%) Dynamics CRM
2 16 (0.36%) SAP S/4HANA
3 11 (0.25%) Endur
3 11 (0.25%) VisionPLUS
4 10 (0.23%) Aladdin
5 9 (0.20%) Maximo
5 9 (0.20%) Oracle ERP
6 8 (0.18%) NEC Housing
7 5 (0.11%) Dynamics AX
7 5 (0.11%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
8 4 (0.091%) NetSuite
8 4 (0.091%) Oracle EBS
8 4 (0.091%) Payment Gateway
8 4 (0.091%) SAP ERP
9 3 (0.068%) Oracle Assets
9 3 (0.068%) Oracle General Ledger
9 3 (0.068%) Oracle Payables
9 3 (0.068%) Oracle Receivables
9 3 (0.068%) SAP CO
9 3 (0.068%) Workday HCM
Cloud Services
1 2,238 (50.90%) Azure
2 1,588 (36.12%) AWS
3 1,209 (27.50%) Azure DevOps
4 805 (18.31%) GitHub
5 642 (14.60%) GCP
6 532 (12.10%) Serverless
7 466 (10.60%) GitHub Actions
8 362 (8.23%) Power Platform
9 286 (6.50%) AWS CloudFormation
10 263 (5.98%) AWS Lambda
11 250 (5.69%) Amazon S3
12 216 (4.91%) Azure Data Factory
13 201 (4.57%) Azure AKS
14 186 (4.23%) Amazon EKS
15 183 (4.16%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 182 (4.14%) OpenShift
17 173 (3.93%) Entra ID
18 171 (3.89%) Dynamics 365
19 169 (3.84%) Amazon ECS
20 166 (3.78%) Amazon EC2
Communications & Networking
1 213 (4.84%) Firewall
2 114 (2.59%) DNS
3 93 (2.12%) VPN
4 88 (2.00%) Network Security
5 60 (1.36%) TCP/IP
6 52 (1.18%) SSL
7 39 (0.89%) HTTP
8 34 (0.77%) HTTPS
9 24 (0.55%) WAN
10 19 (0.43%) DHCP
11 17 (0.39%) BGP
12 16 (0.36%) Kerberos
12 16 (0.36%) MPLS
12 16 (0.36%) SD-WAN
12 16 (0.36%) SSH
13 15 (0.34%) FTP
13 15 (0.34%) SMTP
14 13 (0.30%) LAN
15 11 (0.25%) SAN
16 10 (0.23%) Internet
Database & Business Intelligence
1 250 (5.69%) PostgreSQL
2 232 (5.28%) Power BI
3 174 (3.96%) SQL Server
4 160 (3.64%) NoSQL
5 139 (3.16%) Amazon RDS
6 135 (3.07%) Data Lake
7 113 (2.57%) Relational Database
8 107 (2.43%) Data Warehouse
9 101 (2.30%) MongoDB
10 94 (2.14%) Azure SQL Database
11 79 (1.80%) Oracle Database
12 68 (1.55%) DynamoDB
12 68 (1.55%) Elasticsearch
13 63 (1.43%) MySQL
14 55 (1.25%) Tableau
15 53 (1.21%) Metadata
16 52 (1.18%) Redis
17 50 (1.14%) Amazon Aurora
17 50 (1.14%) Delta Lake
18 46 (1.05%) Big Data
Development Applications
1 794 (18.06%) Jenkins
2 612 (13.92%) Git
3 605 (13.76%) JIRA
4 578 (13.15%) GitLab
5 130 (2.96%) Selenium
6 94 (2.14%) JUnit
6 94 (2.14%) Postman
7 76 (1.73%) SonarQube
8 72 (1.64%) Bitbucket
9 71 (1.61%) Sonatype Nexus
10 67 (1.52%) Cypress.io
11 60 (1.36%) Cucumber
12 51 (1.16%) Artifactory
13 49 (1.11%) Gradle
14 47 (1.07%) JMeter
14 47 (1.07%) Maven
15 41 (0.93%) Liquibase
16 38 (0.86%) Oracle APEX
17 37 (0.84%) CircleCI
18 36 (0.82%) REST Assured
General
1 1,322 (30.07%) Social Skills
2 798 (18.15%) Finance
3 555 (12.62%) Public Sector
4 363 (8.26%) Analytical Skills
5 351 (7.98%) Banking
6 158 (3.59%) Documentation Skills
7 80 (1.82%) Influencing Skills
8 69 (1.57%) Financial Institution
8 69 (1.57%) Inclusion and Diversity
9 59 (1.34%) Marketing
10 49 (1.11%) Presentation Skills
11 48 (1.09%) Investment Banking
11 48 (1.09%) Retail
12 47 (1.07%) Front Office
13 44 (1.00%) Telecoms
14 35 (0.80%) Military
15 33 (0.75%) Pharmaceutical
16 29 (0.66%) Organisational Skills
17 27 (0.61%) Legal
18 25 (0.57%) Law
Job Titles
1 866 (19.70%) DevOps Engineer
2 766 (17.42%) Developer
3 596 (13.55%) Senior
4 412 (9.37%) Architect
5 329 (7.48%) Lead
6 259 (5.89%) Azure Engineer
7 252 (5.73%) AWS Engineer
8 227 (5.16%) Data Engineer
9 218 (4.96%) Analyst
10 197 (4.48%) AWS DevOps
11 173 (3.93%) AWS DevOps Engineer
12 161 (3.66%) Cloud Engineer
13 160 (3.64%) Software Engineer
14 148 (3.37%) Senior Developer
15 147 (3.34%) Platform Engineer
16 127 (2.89%) Azure DevOps Engineer
17 123 (2.80%) Solutions Architect
18 121 (2.75%) Consultant
19 119 (2.71%) Senior DevOps
20 114 (2.59%) Business Analyst
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 501 (11.39%) REST
2 377 (8.57%) .NET
3 291 (6.62%) React
4 286 (6.50%) Node.js
5 261 (5.94%) RESTful
6 246 (5.59%) Kafka
7 225 (5.12%) Spring
8 205 (4.66%) Spring Boot
9 182 (4.14%) JSON
10 160 (3.64%) OAuth
11 151 (3.43%) AngularJS
12 142 (3.23%) Elastic Stack
13 137 (3.12%) XML
14 131 (2.98%) HTML
14 131 (2.98%) SOAP
15 127 (2.89%) YAML
16 109 (2.48%) Playwright
17 103 (2.34%) CSS
18 97 (2.21%) Middleware
18 97 (2.21%) PySpark
Miscellaneous
1 631 (14.35%) Cloud Native
2 236 (5.37%) Product Ownership
3 162 (3.68%) Distributed Systems
4 118 (2.68%) Onboarding
5 116 (2.64%) Public Cloud
6 89 (2.02%) Legacy Systems
7 80 (1.82%) Hybrid Cloud
8 71 (1.61%) Enterprise Software
9 58 (1.32%) Virtual Team
10 57 (1.30%) Data Protection Act
11 54 (1.23%) Management Information System
12 52 (1.18%) Data Centre
13 48 (1.09%) Private Cloud
13 48 (1.09%) Replication
14 47 (1.07%) Security Posture
15 46 (1.05%) Mobile App
16 44 (1.00%) NHS
17 41 (0.93%) AI Agents
17 41 (0.93%) CMDB
17 41 (0.93%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 495 (11.26%) Linux
2 255 (5.80%) Windows
3 111 (2.52%) Unix
4 57 (1.30%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 57 (1.30%) Windows Server
5 49 (1.11%) VMS
6 30 (0.68%) Ubuntu
7 26 (0.59%) Android
8 23 (0.52%) Apple iOS
9 20 (0.45%) Windows 10
10 18 (0.41%) CentOS
11 12 (0.27%) 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 (0.091%) Mac OS
16 4 (0.091%) Windows Server 2012
17 2 (0.045%) Debian
18 1 (0.023%) Embedded Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,519 (57.29%) CI/CD
2 1,743 (39.64%) Agile
3 1,164 (26.47%) Infrastructure as Code
4 851 (19.35%) Containerisation
4 851 (19.35%) Problem-Solving
5 677 (15.40%) Test Automation
6 652 (14.83%) Microservices
7 526 (11.96%) Continuous Improvement
8 507 (11.53%) Analytics
9 502 (11.42%) Migration
10 487 (11.08%) Scrum
11 457 (10.39%) Observability
12 423 (9.62%) AI
13 398 (9.05%) Software Engineering
14 395 (8.98%) Stakeholder Management
15 345 (7.85%) Data Modelling
16 335 (7.62%) Mentoring
17 300 (6.82%) Data Pipeline
18 297 (6.75%) Business Intelligence
19 291 (6.62%) Stakeholder Engagement
Programming Languages
1 1,354 (30.79%) Python
2 878 (19.97%) SQL
3 590 (13.42%) Java
4 427 (9.71%) JavaScript
5 424 (9.64%) C#
6 384 (8.73%) PowerShell
7 352 (8.01%) Bash
8 310 (7.05%) TypeScript
9 149 (3.39%) Bicep
10 143 (3.25%) Go
11 77 (1.75%) PL/SQL
12 71 (1.61%) Shell Script
13 60 (1.36%) Scala
14 52 (1.18%) Groovy
15 51 (1.16%) Ruby
16 47 (1.07%) C++
17 44 (1.00%) T-SQL
18 41 (0.93%) Perl
19 25 (0.57%) Rust
20 21 (0.48%) PHP
Qualifications
1 1,335 (30.36%) Security Cleared
2 1,111 (25.27%) SC Cleared
3 377 (8.57%) Degree
4 195 (4.43%) Computer Science Degree
5 186 (4.23%) Azure Certification
6 142 (3.23%) AWS Certification
7 140 (3.18%) DV Cleared
8 109 (2.48%) BPSS Clearance
9 83 (1.89%) Master's Degree
10 73 (1.66%) CISSP
11 63 (1.43%) Microsoft Certification
12 57 (1.30%) CISM
13 46 (1.05%) ISTQB
14 44 (1.00%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
15 38 (0.86%) PMI Certification
16 31 (0.71%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
17 30 (0.68%) Cisco Certification
17 30 (0.68%) PMP
18 22 (0.50%) IIBA
19 20 (0.45%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 376 (8.55%) QA
2 167 (3.80%) GDPR
3 161 (3.66%) Data Quality
4 145 (3.30%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 124 (2.82%) NIST
6 123 (2.80%) Accessibility
7 70 (1.59%) NCSC
8 36 (0.82%) PCI DSS
9 34 (0.77%) WCAG
10 28 (0.64%) HIPAA
11 27 (0.61%) Sarbanes-Oxley
12 26 (0.59%) PMO
12 26 (0.59%) SLA
13 18 (0.41%) SOC 2
14 17 (0.39%) PSD2
15 15 (0.34%) ISO 20022
16 13 (0.30%) SEPA
17 11 (0.25%) HMG Security Policy Framework
17 11 (0.25%) NIST 800
18 9 (0.20%) Disclosure Scotland
System Software
1 1,110 (25.24%) Docker
2 173 (3.93%) Active Directory
3 70 (1.59%) VMware Infrastructure
4 65 (1.48%) Virtual Machines
5 30 (0.68%) 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 (0.20%) 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 1,383 (31.45%) Terraform
2 1,288 (29.29%) Kubernetes
3 519 (11.80%) Ansible
4 332 (7.55%) Grafana
5 295 (6.71%) Prometheus
6 84 (1.91%) Argo
7 76 (1.73%) Puppet
8 59 (1.34%) Single Sign-On
9 44 (1.00%) Istio
10 40 (0.91%) Progress Chef
11 38 (0.86%) Kibana
12 32 (0.73%) Packer
13 22 (0.50%) Podman
14 20 (0.45%) SCCM
15 17 (0.39%) Rancher
16 16 (0.36%) Microsoft Intune
17 15 (0.34%) Consul
17 15 (0.34%) Proxmox
18 14 (0.32%) Active Directory Federation Services
18 14 (0.32%) NetBackup
Vendors
1 754 (17.15%) Microsoft
2 311 (7.07%) Oracle
3 252 (5.73%) Google
4 244 (5.55%) Databricks
5 225 (5.12%) Splunk
6 159 (3.62%) ServiceNow
7 128 (2.91%) Red Hat
8 114 (2.59%) Salesforce
9 113 (2.57%) VMware
10 103 (2.34%) SAP
11 72 (1.64%) Dynatrace
12 66 (1.50%) OpenAI
13 53 (1.21%) CyberArk
14 50 (1.14%) F5
15 48 (1.09%) IBM
16 45 (1.02%) Atlassian
17 42 (0.96%) Talend
18 41 (0.93%) Palo Alto
19 40 (0.91%) Cisco
20 38 (0.86%) Denodo