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

6 months to
6 Apr 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 12 15 16
Rank change year-on-year +3 +1 -5
Contract jobs citing DevOps 4,938 3,143 3,947
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.92% 10.75% 9.00%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.78% 11.87% 10.42%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,457 2,316 2,752
10th Percentile £381 £393 £401
25th Percentile £431 £450 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £520 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -5.45% - -6.38%
75th Percentile £604 £650 £650
90th Percentile £709 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £513 £525
% change year-on-year -2.44% -2.38% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 99 23 89
10th Percentile £39.53 £29.45 £54.25
25th Percentile £45.46 £57.82 £61.25
Median hourly rate £63.73 £73.23 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year -12.97% +12.65% -0.76%
75th Percentile £75.88 £81.86 £70.00
90th Percentile £92.50 £87.50 £87.09
UK excluding London median hourly rate £63.73 £67.50 £65.00
% change year-on-year -5.59% +3.85% -0.76%

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 38,628 26,479 37,892
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 85.41% 90.55% 86.36%
Number of daily rates quoted 24,477 17,189 24,572
10th Percentile £314 £308 £300
25th Percentile £413 £413 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £613 £638 £638
90th Percentile £725 £744 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £487 £488 £500
% change year-on-year -0.10% -2.50% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,295 988 2,354
10th Percentile £15.00 £15.00 £12.75
25th Percentile £19.00 £19.99 £16.00
Median hourly rate £35.91 £31.58 £32.50
Median % change year-on-year +13.71% -2.83% -13.33%
75th Percentile £65.00 £63.75 £57.50
90th Percentile £77.50 £75.73 £70.27
UK excluding London median hourly rate £35.55 £30.00 £32.12
% change year-on-year +18.50% -6.59% -13.90%

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 6 April 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 6 April 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 6 April 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 4,237 £525 -4.55% 1,414
UK excluding London +8 2,192 £500 -2.44% 1,103
London 0 2,143 £543 -5.57% 512
Work from Home -4 1,354 £525 -1.59% 782
North of England +5 748 £500 -4.76% 306
South East 0 447 £525 -4.55% 307
Midlands +6 424 £492 -1.60% 142
Yorkshire 0 398 £500 -4.76% 86
West Midlands +8 333 £500 - 98
North West +3 294 £490 -6.67% 159
South West +13 285 £523 -8.73% 165
Scotland +5 173 £450 - 52
East of England +23 118 £550 +6.80% 92
East Midlands +6 88 £450 -5.26% 44
North East +3 61 £475 -9.52% 63
Wales +10 46 £468 +108.41% 43
Northern Ireland -9 10 £475 +13.77% 10
Channel Islands - 3 £450 - 1

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
1 297 (6.01%) Confluence
2 117 (2.37%) Apache Spark
3 103 (2.09%) SharePoint
4 101 (2.05%) SAS
5 90 (1.82%) Apache
6 71 (1.44%) Apache Airflow
7 34 (0.69%) nginx
8 33 (0.67%) CMS
9 31 (0.63%) OpenStack
10 28 (0.57%) Microsoft Exchange
11 23 (0.47%) IIS
12 15 (0.30%) Mendix
13 11 (0.22%) Adobe Experience Manager
13 11 (0.22%) HCL Notes
13 11 (0.22%) Sitecore CMS
14 9 (0.18%) WebLogic
15 8 (0.16%) ArcGIS
15 8 (0.16%) Camunda
16 7 (0.14%) Palantir Foundry
16 7 (0.14%) WebSphere
Applications
1 87 (1.76%) Microsoft Excel
2 61 (1.24%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 54 (1.09%) Microsoft Project
4 32 (0.65%) Microsoft Office
5 25 (0.51%) MS Visio
6 10 (0.20%) Chatbot
7 6 (0.12%) Weka
8 5 (0.10%) Trello
9 2 (0.041%) Adobe XD
9 2 (0.041%) CPLEX
9 2 (0.041%) Spreadsheet
10 1 (0.020%) InDesign
10 1 (0.020%) Maya
Business Applications
1 74 (1.50%) Dynamics CRM
2 15 (0.30%) SAP S/4HANA
3 13 (0.26%) Oracle ERP
4 10 (0.20%) Aladdin
5 9 (0.18%) Maximo
5 9 (0.18%) NEC Housing
6 6 (0.12%) Endur
6 6 (0.12%) Payment Gateway
6 6 (0.12%) Remedy ITSM
7 5 (0.10%) Dynamics AX
7 5 (0.10%) Oracle EBS
7 5 (0.10%) SAP ERP
7 5 (0.10%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
8 4 (0.081%) SAP BPC
8 4 (0.081%) SAP CO
8 4 (0.081%) SAP FI
8 4 (0.081%) SAP FI/CO
9 3 (0.061%) Findur
9 3 (0.061%) NetSuite
9 3 (0.061%) Salesforce CRM
Cloud Services
1 2,660 (53.87%) Azure
2 1,695 (34.33%) AWS
3 1,478 (29.93%) Azure DevOps
4 904 (18.31%) GitHub
5 661 (13.39%) GCP
6 568 (11.50%) Serverless
7 505 (10.23%) GitHub Actions
8 417 (8.44%) Power Platform
9 302 (6.12%) AWS CloudFormation
10 281 (5.69%) AWS Lambda
11 272 (5.51%) Amazon S3
12 240 (4.86%) Azure Data Factory
13 225 (4.56%) Entra ID
14 222 (4.50%) Azure AKS
15 204 (4.13%) Amazon EKS
16 197 (3.99%) OpenShift
17 185 (3.75%) Azure Monitor
18 169 (3.42%) Dynamics 365
19 166 (3.36%) PaaS
20 158 (3.20%) Azure Functions
Communications & Networking
1 213 (4.31%) Firewall
2 115 (2.33%) DNS
3 102 (2.07%) Network Security
4 85 (1.72%) VPN
5 40 (0.81%) TCP/IP
6 27 (0.55%) HTTP
6 27 (0.55%) SSL
7 25 (0.51%) WAN
8 24 (0.49%) SD-WAN
9 22 (0.45%) DHCP
10 19 (0.38%) SAN
11 18 (0.36%) BGP
12 17 (0.34%) IPsec
13 16 (0.32%) MPLS
14 14 (0.28%) Reverse Proxy
15 13 (0.26%) Internet
16 12 (0.24%) 5G
16 12 (0.24%) LAN
17 11 (0.22%) OpenVPN
18 10 (0.20%) Kerberos
Database & Business Intelligence
1 272 (5.51%) PostgreSQL
2 256 (5.18%) Power BI
3 232 (4.70%) SQL Server
4 193 (3.91%) NoSQL
5 172 (3.48%) Data Lake
6 147 (2.98%) Relational Database
7 131 (2.65%) Data Warehouse
8 119 (2.41%) Amazon RDS
8 119 (2.41%) Azure SQL Database
9 112 (2.27%) MongoDB
10 96 (1.94%) DynamoDB
11 89 (1.80%) Metadata
12 79 (1.60%) Delta Lake
13 77 (1.56%) Oracle Database
14 72 (1.46%) Elasticsearch
15 66 (1.34%) Big Data
16 59 (1.19%) MySQL
17 57 (1.15%) Amazon Athena
17 57 (1.15%) Tableau
18 51 (1.03%) BigQuery
Development Applications
1 774 (15.67%) Jenkins
2 644 (13.04%) Git
3 641 (12.98%) JIRA
4 531 (10.75%) GitLab
5 140 (2.84%) Selenium
6 109 (2.21%) JUnit
7 95 (1.92%) Postman
8 78 (1.58%) Bitbucket
9 73 (1.48%) SonarQube
10 63 (1.28%) Cucumber
11 56 (1.13%) JMeter
12 54 (1.09%) REST Assured
13 53 (1.07%) Maven
14 51 (1.03%) Artifactory
15 50 (1.01%) Cypress.io
16 41 (0.83%) Sonatype Nexus
17 39 (0.79%) Mockito
18 36 (0.73%) Visual Studio
19 34 (0.69%) Oracle APEX
20 30 (0.61%) Liquibase
General
1 1,338 (27.10%) Social Skills
2 913 (18.49%) Finance
3 652 (13.20%) Public Sector
4 403 (8.16%) Analytical Skills
5 357 (7.23%) Banking
6 166 (3.36%) Documentation Skills
7 71 (1.44%) Influencing Skills
8 65 (1.32%) Inclusion and Diversity
9 61 (1.24%) Retail
10 58 (1.17%) Marketing
11 57 (1.15%) Financial Institution
12 53 (1.07%) Legal
13 52 (1.05%) Organisational Skills
14 51 (1.03%) Front Office
15 48 (0.97%) Investment Banking
16 44 (0.89%) Presentation Skills
17 40 (0.81%) Telecoms
18 31 (0.63%) Military
19 24 (0.49%) Law
19 24 (0.49%) Pharmaceutical
Job Titles
1 912 (18.47%) DevOps Engineer
2 782 (15.84%) Developer
3 685 (13.87%) Senior
4 549 (11.12%) Architect
5 423 (8.57%) Lead
6 320 (6.48%) Azure Engineer
7 295 (5.97%) Data Engineer
8 269 (5.45%) Analyst
9 249 (5.04%) AWS Engineer
10 193 (3.91%) AWS DevOps
11 183 (3.71%) Platform Engineer
12 181 (3.67%) Cloud Engineer
13 168 (3.40%) AWS DevOps Engineer
14 156 (3.16%) Solutions Architect
15 153 (3.10%) Azure DevOps Engineer
16 152 (3.08%) Software Engineer
17 148 (3.00%) Senior Developer
18 141 (2.86%) Senior DevOps
19 133 (2.69%) Senior DevOps Engineer
20 131 (2.65%) Business Analyst
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 520 (10.53%) REST
2 429 (8.69%) .NET
3 310 (6.28%) Node.js
4 306 (6.20%) React
5 284 (5.75%) Kafka
6 274 (5.55%) Spring
7 272 (5.51%) RESTful
8 256 (5.18%) Spring Boot
9 180 (3.65%) AngularJS
10 152 (3.08%) JSON
10 152 (3.08%) OAuth
11 143 (2.90%) PySpark
11 143 (2.90%) YAML
12 140 (2.84%) Playwright
13 126 (2.55%) HTML
14 122 (2.47%) SOAP
15 115 (2.33%) Middleware
16 112 (2.27%) Elastic Stack
17 106 (2.15%) CSS
18 98 (1.98%) XML
Miscellaneous
1 732 (14.82%) Cloud Native
2 308 (6.24%) Product Ownership
3 185 (3.75%) Distributed Systems
4 124 (2.51%) Onboarding
5 123 (2.49%) Public Cloud
6 101 (2.05%) Legacy Systems
7 98 (1.98%) Hybrid Cloud
8 90 (1.82%) Enterprise Software
9 71 (1.44%) Data Protection Act
10 64 (1.30%) Virtual Team
11 57 (1.15%) Management Information System
12 51 (1.03%) Data Centre
13 48 (0.97%) NHS
13 48 (0.97%) Self-Motivation
14 43 (0.87%) Private Cloud
15 42 (0.85%) AI Agents
15 42 (0.85%) Data Structures
16 40 (0.81%) Security Posture
17 37 (0.75%) Greenfield Project
17 37 (0.75%) Low-Code
Operating Systems
1 468 (9.48%) Linux
2 254 (5.14%) Windows
3 89 (1.80%) Unix
4 71 (1.44%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 48 (0.97%) VMS
6 44 (0.89%) Windows Server
7 24 (0.49%) Ubuntu
8 14 (0.28%) CentOS
9 9 (0.18%) Windows 10
10 8 (0.16%) Android
11 7 (0.14%) Apple iOS
11 7 (0.14%) Windows Server 2019
12 5 (0.10%) Solaris
12 5 (0.10%) Windows Server 2012
13 4 (0.081%) Mac OS
13 4 (0.081%) Windows Server 2016
14 3 (0.061%) Oracle Linux
14 3 (0.061%) Rocky
14 3 (0.061%) Windows Server 2008
14 3 (0.061%) zOS
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,800 (56.70%) CI/CD
2 1,900 (38.48%) Agile
3 1,250 (25.31%) Infrastructure as Code
4 870 (17.62%) Problem-Solving
5 867 (17.56%) Containerisation
6 742 (15.03%) Microservices
7 733 (14.84%) Test Automation
8 657 (13.30%) Continuous Improvement
9 625 (12.66%) Analytics
10 590 (11.95%) Migration
11 548 (11.10%) Observability
12 546 (11.06%) Scrum
13 524 (10.61%) Stakeholder Management
14 522 (10.57%) AI
15 456 (9.23%) Data Modelling
16 436 (8.83%) Software Engineering
17 397 (8.04%) Mentoring
18 386 (7.82%) Data Pipeline
19 383 (7.76%) Platform Engineering
20 357 (7.23%) Roadmaps
Programming Languages
1 1,459 (29.55%) Python
2 1,038 (21.02%) SQL
3 645 (13.06%) Java
4 515 (10.43%) C#
5 430 (8.71%) JavaScript
6 374 (7.57%) PowerShell
7 345 (6.99%) Bash
8 297 (6.01%) TypeScript
9 166 (3.36%) Bicep
10 127 (2.57%) Go
11 84 (1.70%) PL/SQL
12 69 (1.40%) Scala
13 59 (1.19%) Shell Script
14 48 (0.97%) T-SQL
15 45 (0.91%) Groovy
16 42 (0.85%) C++
17 41 (0.83%) Ruby
18 35 (0.71%) Apex Code
19 28 (0.57%) Perl
20 23 (0.47%) Rust
Qualifications
1 1,555 (31.49%) Security Cleared
2 1,283 (25.98%) SC Cleared
3 354 (7.17%) Degree
4 208 (4.21%) Azure Certification
5 172 (3.48%) Computer Science Degree
6 156 (3.16%) DV Cleared
7 144 (2.92%) AWS Certification
8 140 (2.84%) BPSS Clearance
9 84 (1.70%) CISSP
10 69 (1.40%) Master's Degree
11 64 (1.30%) ISTQB
12 62 (1.26%) CISM
13 57 (1.15%) Microsoft Certification
14 56 (1.13%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
15 49 (0.99%) PMI Certification
16 41 (0.83%) PMP
17 36 (0.73%) Cisco Certification
18 31 (0.63%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
19 26 (0.53%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
20 25 (0.51%) TOGAF Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 438 (8.87%) QA
2 224 (4.54%) Data Quality
3 192 (3.89%) GDPR
4 163 (3.30%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 132 (2.67%) NIST
6 122 (2.47%) Accessibility
7 76 (1.54%) NCSC
8 43 (0.87%) WCAG
9 42 (0.85%) PCI DSS
10 38 (0.77%) PMO
11 31 (0.63%) Sarbanes-Oxley
11 31 (0.63%) SLA
12 21 (0.43%) HIPAA
13 16 (0.32%) HMG Security Policy Framework
13 16 (0.32%) ISO 20022
14 15 (0.30%) NIST 800
15 14 (0.28%) SOC 2
16 13 (0.26%) GRC
16 13 (0.26%) PSD2
17 11 (0.22%) SEPA
System Software
1 1,073 (21.73%) Docker
2 184 (3.73%) Active Directory
3 77 (1.56%) VMware Infrastructure
4 71 (1.44%) Virtual Machines
5 44 (0.89%) vSphere
6 34 (0.69%) VMware NSX
7 16 (0.32%) Hyper-V
8 14 (0.28%) Virtual Desktop
9 12 (0.24%) Squid
10 10 (0.20%) Postfix
11 9 (0.18%) Lustre
11 9 (0.18%) Slurm Workload Manager
12 8 (0.16%) Firmware
12 8 (0.16%) VMware ESXi
13 7 (0.14%) GPFS
13 7 (0.14%) Virtual Servers
14 6 (0.12%) Ceph
14 6 (0.12%) HDFS
14 6 (0.12%) Oracle RAC
15 5 (0.10%) RACF
Systems Management
1 1,426 (28.88%) Terraform
2 1,340 (27.14%) Kubernetes
3 482 (9.76%) Ansible
4 333 (6.74%) Grafana
5 272 (5.51%) Prometheus
6 100 (2.03%) Argo
7 74 (1.50%) Single Sign-On
8 69 (1.40%) Puppet
9 63 (1.28%) Istio
10 31 (0.63%) Progress Chef
11 29 (0.59%) Packer
12 28 (0.57%) vCenter Server
13 24 (0.49%) Kibana
14 21 (0.43%) Active Directory Federation Services
14 21 (0.43%) HP ALM
15 19 (0.38%) Microsoft Intune
15 19 (0.38%) Rancher
16 18 (0.36%) FortiGate
17 17 (0.34%) Podman
18 16 (0.32%) Consul
Vendors
1 857 (17.36%) Microsoft
2 336 (6.80%) Oracle
3 292 (5.91%) Databricks
4 247 (5.00%) Google
5 200 (4.05%) Splunk
6 162 (3.28%) ServiceNow
7 141 (2.86%) Red Hat
8 139 (2.81%) Salesforce
9 129 (2.61%) VMware
10 108 (2.19%) SAP
11 84 (1.70%) OpenAI
12 76 (1.54%) Dynatrace
13 66 (1.34%) Atlassian
14 62 (1.26%) CyberArk
15 47 (0.95%) IBM
16 46 (0.93%) Talend
17 44 (0.89%) Cisco
18 39 (0.79%) Denodo
19 35 (0.71%) Foundry
20 34 (0.69%) Informatica