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

6 months to
25 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 12 15 15
Rank change year-on-year +3 0 -3
Contract jobs citing DevOps 5,640 3,574 3,832
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.51% 10.92% 9.86%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.43% 12.07% 11.56%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,919 2,526 2,609
10th Percentile £385 £363 £382
25th Percentile £440 £425 £462
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £520 £550
Median % change year-on-year +1.01% -5.50% -4.35%
75th Percentile £613 £625 £650
90th Percentile £700 £713 £728
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £550
% change year-on-year - -9.09% -
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 £67.60 £67.00 £70.00
Median % change year-on-year +0.90% -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 £67.60 £67.00 £70.00
% change year-on-year +0.90% -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 45,365 29,616 33,160
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.57% 90.47% 85.36%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,789 18,444 20,998
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 2,884 1,758 1,700
10th Percentile £14.22 £14.20 £13.87
25th Percentile £18.00 £17.30 £18.13
Median hourly rate £41.56 £25.15 £40.94
Median % change year-on-year +65.23% -38.57% -3.67%
75th Percentile £67.99 £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 25 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 25 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 25 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 4,815 £525 - 1,165
London 0 2,544 £550 - 460
UK excluding London 0 2,412 £500 - 956
Work from Home +1 1,616 £525 +1.94% 651
North of England +1 801 £500 +4.17% 254
South East -10 464 £525 +5.00% 279
Midlands 0 447 £488 -2.50% 119
Yorkshire 0 391 £500 +1.63% 75
West Midlands -3 355 £490 -5.50% 72
North West -2 317 £519 +10.46% 133
South West +6 309 £525 +1.45% 189
Scotland -4 205 £495 +4.21% 45
East of England +11 140 £505 -3.35% 49
North East +14 110 £425 -19.05% 50
East Midlands +6 88 £455 -1.62% 47
Wales -4 50 £513 +36.67% 24
Northern Ireland +17 23 £475 +7.95% 11
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 (5.99%) Confluence
2 149 (2.64%) SharePoint
3 125 (2.22%) Apache Airflow
3 125 (2.22%) Apache Spark
4 110 (1.95%) Apache
5 63 (1.12%) SAS
6 42 (0.74%) CMS
7 38 (0.67%) IIS
7 38 (0.67%) Jupyter
8 24 (0.43%) Microsoft Exchange
8 24 (0.43%) nginx
9 17 (0.30%) Camunda
10 13 (0.23%) Anypoint
10 13 (0.23%) OpenStack
10 13 (0.23%) WebSphere
11 11 (0.20%) Oracle Workflow
11 11 (0.20%) Palantir Foundry
12 9 (0.16%) Appian
13 7 (0.12%) Mule
13 7 (0.12%) WebLogic
Applications
1 61 (1.08%) Microsoft Excel
1 61 (1.08%) Microsoft Project
2 42 (0.74%) MS Visio
3 37 (0.66%) Microsoft Office
4 30 (0.53%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 9 (0.16%) Chatbot
5 9 (0.16%) CPLEX
5 9 (0.16%) Spreadsheet
6 6 (0.11%) Trello
7 5 (0.089%) Notion
8 4 (0.071%) Windchill
9 1 (0.018%) Adobe XD
9 1 (0.018%) EngageOne
9 1 (0.018%) Gliffy
9 1 (0.018%) InDesign
9 1 (0.018%) Mozilla Thunderbird
9 1 (0.018%) Weka
Business Applications
1 74 (1.31%) Dynamics CRM
2 36 (0.64%) 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%) Infor LN
11 3 (0.053%) SAP ERP
11 3 (0.053%) Shopify
11 3 (0.053%) Teamcenter
Cloud Services
1 3,106 (55.07%) Azure
2 2,006 (35.57%) AWS
3 1,786 (31.67%) Azure DevOps
4 974 (17.27%) GitHub
5 719 (12.75%) GCP
6 613 (10.87%) GitHub Actions
7 481 (8.53%) Power Platform
8 458 (8.12%) Serverless
9 286 (5.07%) Amazon S3
10 276 (4.89%) AWS Lambda
11 261 (4.63%) Entra ID
12 245 (4.34%) AWS CloudFormation
13 239 (4.24%) Amazon EKS
14 230 (4.08%) Azure AKS
15 220 (3.90%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 213 (3.78%) Azure Monitor
17 197 (3.49%) Azure Data Factory
18 179 (3.17%) Dynamics 365
19 178 (3.16%) Amazon EC2
20 164 (2.91%) Power Automate
Communications & Networking
1 244 (4.33%) Firewall
2 169 (3.00%) DNS
3 121 (2.15%) VPN
4 110 (1.95%) Network Security
5 64 (1.13%) TCP/IP
6 54 (0.96%) WAN
7 47 (0.83%) SSL
8 44 (0.78%) DHCP
9 39 (0.69%) SD-WAN
10 36 (0.64%) BGP
10 36 (0.64%) HTTP
11 32 (0.57%) Internet
12 29 (0.51%) Wi-Fi
13 28 (0.50%) SSH
14 26 (0.46%) OSPF
15 21 (0.37%) SAN
15 21 (0.37%) VLAN
16 18 (0.32%) LAN
16 18 (0.32%) MPLS
16 18 (0.32%) VXLAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 320 (5.67%) Power BI
2 298 (5.28%) SQL Server
3 297 (5.27%) PostgreSQL
4 204 (3.62%) Data Warehouse
5 194 (3.44%) NoSQL
6 181 (3.21%) MongoDB
7 179 (3.17%) Relational Database
8 163 (2.89%) Data Lake
9 129 (2.29%) Amazon RDS
10 121 (2.15%) Metadata
11 112 (1.99%) Azure SQL Database
12 92 (1.63%) DynamoDB
13 82 (1.45%) Delta Lake
13 82 (1.45%) Oracle Database
14 79 (1.40%) Redis
15 72 (1.28%) MySQL
16 69 (1.22%) Amazon Redshift
17 61 (1.08%) Big Data
18 59 (1.05%) SQL Server Integration Services
19 52 (0.92%) BigQuery
Development Applications
1 802 (14.22%) Jenkins
2 783 (13.88%) Git
3 686 (12.16%) JIRA
4 608 (10.78%) GitLab
5 139 (2.46%) Selenium
6 103 (1.83%) Postman
7 97 (1.72%) SonarQube
8 91 (1.61%) JUnit
9 85 (1.51%) Maven
10 84 (1.49%) Bitbucket
11 72 (1.28%) JMeter
12 71 (1.26%) REST Assured
13 70 (1.24%) Cypress.io
14 61 (1.08%) Gradle
15 58 (1.03%) Cucumber
16 50 (0.89%) Gatling
17 44 (0.78%) LoadRunner
18 43 (0.76%) Claude Code
18 43 (0.76%) Mockito
19 39 (0.69%) Visual Studio
General
1 1,454 (25.78%) Social Skills
2 1,006 (17.84%) Finance
3 828 (14.68%) Public Sector
4 509 (9.02%) Analytical Skills
5 369 (6.54%) Banking
6 156 (2.77%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 107 (1.90%) Retail
8 96 (1.70%) Documentation Skills
9 71 (1.26%) Influencing Skills
10 66 (1.17%) Legal
10 66 (1.17%) Organisational Skills
11 54 (0.96%) Marketing
12 50 (0.89%) Investment Banking
13 49 (0.87%) Telecoms
14 48 (0.85%) Aerospace
15 47 (0.83%) Military
16 46 (0.82%) Law
17 44 (0.78%) Front Office
18 42 (0.74%) Manufacturing
19 40 (0.71%) Financial Institution
Job Titles
1 1,117 (19.80%) DevOps Engineer
2 929 (16.47%) Developer
3 840 (14.89%) Senior
4 632 (11.21%) Architect
5 542 (9.61%) Lead
6 354 (6.28%) Azure Engineer
7 307 (5.44%) Data Engineer
8 271 (4.80%) Analyst
9 261 (4.63%) AWS Engineer
10 235 (4.17%) Platform Engineer
11 204 (3.62%) Cloud Engineer
11 204 (3.62%) Senior DevOps
12 199 (3.53%) Azure DevOps Engineer
13 189 (3.35%) Java Developer
14 188 (3.33%) Senior DevOps Engineer
15 181 (3.21%) AWS DevOps
16 175 (3.10%) Solutions Architect
17 169 (3.00%) AWS DevOps Engineer
18 154 (2.73%) Senior Developer
19 145 (2.57%) Infrastructure Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 1,651 (29.27%) Terraform
2 596 (10.57%) REST
3 495 (8.78%) .NET
4 362 (6.42%) Kafka
5 344 (6.10%) RESTful
6 297 (5.27%) Spring
7 286 (5.07%) React
8 283 (5.02%) Spring Boot
9 210 (3.72%) Node.js
10 188 (3.33%) JSON
11 170 (3.01%) OAuth
12 168 (2.98%) Playwright
13 158 (2.80%) PySpark
14 140 (2.48%) AngularJS
15 139 (2.46%) HTML
16 138 (2.45%) .NET Framework
17 136 (2.41%) SOAP
18 123 (2.18%) OAuth2
19 120 (2.13%) CSS
20 115 (2.04%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 1,023 (18.14%) Cloud Native
2 424 (7.52%) Product Ownership
3 266 (4.72%) Distributed Systems
4 191 (3.39%) Enterprise Software
5 180 (3.19%) Onboarding
6 158 (2.80%) Legacy Systems
7 146 (2.59%) Hybrid Cloud
8 91 (1.61%) Data Protection Act
9 84 (1.49%) AI Agents
10 83 (1.47%) Self-Motivation
11 75 (1.33%) Management Information System
11 75 (1.33%) Public Cloud
12 74 (1.31%) Data Structures
13 71 (1.26%) Data Centre
14 68 (1.21%) Replication
15 63 (1.12%) Security Posture
16 57 (1.01%) Enterprise Cloud
17 56 (0.99%) Virtual Team
18 53 (0.94%) Mobile App
19 50 (0.89%) NHS
Operating Systems
1 512 (9.08%) Linux
2 305 (5.41%) Windows
3 107 (1.90%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 95 (1.68%) Unix
5 87 (1.54%) Windows Server
6 38 (0.67%) VMS
7 32 (0.57%) Ubuntu
8 31 (0.55%) Apple iOS
9 20 (0.35%) 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 3,354 (59.47%) CI/CD
2 2,289 (40.59%) Agile
3 1,598 (28.33%) Infrastructure as Code
4 941 (16.68%) Continuous Improvement
5 934 (16.56%) Containerisation
6 886 (15.71%) Test Automation
7 880 (15.60%) Problem-Solving
8 852 (15.11%) Stakeholder Management
9 827 (14.66%) Microservices
10 784 (13.90%) AI
11 731 (12.96%) Observability
12 724 (12.84%) Platform Engineering
13 693 (12.29%) Software Engineering
14 686 (12.16%) Migration
15 678 (12.02%) Scrum
16 585 (10.37%) Analytics
17 574 (10.18%) Technical Leadership
18 537 (9.52%) Stakeholder Engagement
19 478 (8.48%) Data Modelling
20 470 (8.33%) Roadmaps
Programming Languages
1 1,588 (28.16%) Python
2 1,026 (18.19%) SQL
3 806 (14.29%) Java
4 505 (8.95%) C#
5 479 (8.49%) PowerShell
6 470 (8.33%) Bash
7 462 (8.19%) JavaScript
8 307 (5.44%) TypeScript
9 252 (4.47%) Bicep
10 96 (1.70%) Go
11 77 (1.37%) Shell Script
12 72 (1.28%) Apex Code
13 68 (1.21%) T-SQL
14 62 (1.10%) Groovy
14 62 (1.10%) Scala
15 61 (1.08%) PL/SQL
16 32 (0.57%) C++
16 32 (0.57%) Data Analysis Expressions
16 32 (0.57%) Perl
17 24 (0.43%) Kusto Query Language
Qualifications
1 1,815 (32.18%) Security Cleared
2 1,534 (27.20%) SC Cleared
3 330 (5.85%) Degree
4 229 (4.06%) Azure Certification
5 221 (3.92%) BPSS Clearance
6 197 (3.49%) DV Cleared
7 184 (3.26%) AWS Certification
8 127 (2.25%) Computer Science Degree
9 92 (1.63%) Microsoft Certification
10 71 (1.26%) CISSP
11 64 (1.13%) ISTQB
12 57 (1.01%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 54 (0.96%) Cisco Certification
14 43 (0.76%) PMP
15 41 (0.73%) PMI Certification
16 37 (0.66%) Master's Degree
17 29 (0.51%) CISM
18 28 (0.50%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
19 25 (0.44%) CCNP
19 25 (0.44%) ITIL Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 529 (9.38%) QA
2 279 (4.95%) Data Quality
3 200 (3.55%) Accessibility
4 132 (2.34%) GDPR
5 98 (1.74%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 77 (1.37%) NIST
6 77 (1.37%) WCAG
7 52 (0.92%) NCSC
8 49 (0.87%) PMO
9 41 (0.73%) SLA
10 33 (0.59%) 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 1,131 (20.05%) Docker
2 172 (3.05%) Active Directory
3 89 (1.58%) VMware Infrastructure
4 79 (1.40%) 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 10 (0.18%) IAG
11 10 (0.18%) Postfix
12 8 (0.14%) KVM
13 7 (0.12%) zsh
14 6 (0.11%) Corosync
14 6 (0.11%) Microsoft App-V
14 6 (0.11%) NFS
15 5 (0.089%) Apache ZooKeeper
15 5 (0.089%) Firmware
Systems Management
1 1,498 (26.56%) Kubernetes
2 532 (9.43%) Ansible
3 368 (6.52%) Grafana
4 312 (5.53%) Prometheus
5 86 (1.52%) Argo
6 60 (1.06%) Puppet
7 55 (0.98%) Single Sign-On
8 45 (0.80%) Progress Chef
9 41 (0.73%) Istio
10 38 (0.67%) Microsoft Intune
11 34 (0.60%) Packer
12 23 (0.41%) Kibana
13 20 (0.35%) Kustomize
13 20 (0.35%) vCenter Server
14 19 (0.34%) SCCM
15 18 (0.32%) HP ALM
16 17 (0.30%) Kubeflow
17 15 (0.27%) Oracle RMAN
18 13 (0.23%) Control-M
18 13 (0.23%) systemd
Vendors
1 1,087 (19.27%) Microsoft
2 306 (5.43%) Oracle
3 285 (5.05%) Databricks
4 267 (4.73%) Google
5 203 (3.60%) ServiceNow
6 185 (3.28%) Salesforce
7 182 (3.23%) Splunk
8 143 (2.54%) Dynatrace
9 123 (2.18%) VMware
10 114 (2.02%) SAP
11 101 (1.79%) Red Hat
12 64 (1.13%) IBM
13 61 (1.08%) Informatica
13 61 (1.08%) MuleSoft
14 59 (1.05%) OpenAI
15 52 (0.92%) Cisco
16 48 (0.85%) Atlassian
17 46 (0.82%) AppDynamics
17 46 (0.82%) Foundry
18 40 (0.71%) Okta