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

6 months to
9 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 13 15 14
Rank change year-on-year +2 -1 -1
Contract jobs citing DevOps 5,622 3,368 4,187
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.71% 10.43% 9.65%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.58% 11.52% 11.30%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,899 2,409 2,856
10th Percentile £385 £363 £395
25th Percentile £438 £425 £456
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year - -4.55% -4.35%
75th Percentile £613 £625 £650
90th Percentile £700 £738 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £525
% change year-on-year - -4.76% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 117 23 123
10th Percentile £38.25 £36.50 £56.30
25th Percentile £61.87 £51.88 £61.43
Median hourly rate £70.00 £67.00 £70.00
Median % change year-on-year +4.48% -4.29% +6.78%
75th Percentile £77.50 £85.23 £74.44
90th Percentile £93.25 £88.50 £85.65
UK excluding London median hourly rate £70.00 £67.00 £70.00
% change year-on-year +4.48% -4.29% +6.87%

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 44,694 29,246 37,042
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 85.15% 90.54% 85.41%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,812 18,436 23,663
10th Percentile £325 £300 £300
25th Percentile £415 £405 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £518 £505 £525
Median % change year-on-year +2.50% -3.81% -4.55%
75th Percentile £623 £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 2,657 1,477 2,496
10th Percentile £14.94 £14.20 £12.75
25th Percentile £20.09 £17.61 £16.06
Median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £37.50
Median % change year-on-year +74.79% -32.93% -6.25%
75th Percentile £68.00 £53.50 £61.30
90th Percentile £82.25 £70.00 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £44.50 £24.66 £38.12
% change year-on-year +80.45% -35.31% -3.62%

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 9 July 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 9 July 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 9 July 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 4,759 £525 - 1,380
UK excluding London +5 2,468 £500 - 1,036
London +3 2,446 £550 - 548
Work from Home 0 1,600 £525 - 746
North of England +5 875 £500 - 294
Yorkshire +3 470 £500 - 77
South East -7 460 £525 +5.00% 279
Midlands -1 442 £499 -0.25% 125
West Midlands -1 351 £500 -2.34% 76
North West 0 327 £510 +7.37% 168
South West +14 302 £525 -4.55% 153
Scotland +2 212 £475 -4.04% 45
East of England +24 146 £525 +5.00% 81
North East +13 97 £425 -18.66% 50
East Midlands -2 86 £488 +8.33% 48
Wales 0 54 £425 +38.10% 39
Northern Ireland +18 22 £475 +11.76% 41
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
1 328 (5.83%) Confluence
2 137 (2.44%) Apache Spark
3 130 (2.31%) SharePoint
4 108 (1.92%) Apache Airflow
5 103 (1.83%) Apache
6 82 (1.46%) SAS
7 50 (0.89%) CMS
8 34 (0.60%) IIS
8 34 (0.60%) Jupyter
9 31 (0.55%) Microsoft Exchange
9 31 (0.55%) nginx
10 17 (0.30%) OpenStack
11 16 (0.28%) WebSphere
12 15 (0.27%) Camunda
12 15 (0.27%) Palantir Foundry
13 11 (0.20%) Oracle Workflow
14 9 (0.16%) Appian
14 9 (0.16%) Sitecore CMS
15 7 (0.12%) Anypoint
15 7 (0.12%) Mendix
Applications
1 74 (1.32%) Microsoft Excel
2 63 (1.12%) Microsoft Project
3 43 (0.76%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 41 (0.73%) Microsoft Office
5 36 (0.64%) MS Visio
6 10 (0.18%) CPLEX
7 9 (0.16%) Spreadsheet
8 7 (0.12%) Chatbot
9 4 (0.071%) Notion
10 3 (0.053%) Adobe XD
10 3 (0.053%) Trello
11 1 (0.018%) EngageOne
11 1 (0.018%) InDesign
11 1 (0.018%) Maya
11 1 (0.018%) Weka
Business Applications
1 73 (1.30%) Dynamics CRM
2 39 (0.69%) SAP S/4HANA
3 10 (0.18%) Aladdin
3 10 (0.18%) Payment Gateway
4 9 (0.16%) Oracle EBS
4 9 (0.16%) Oracle ERP
4 9 (0.16%) Remedy ITSM
5 8 (0.14%) Dynamics AX
5 8 (0.14%) Magento
5 8 (0.14%) SAP MDG
6 6 (0.11%) Endur
6 6 (0.11%) Maximo
7 5 (0.089%) OpenText MBPM
7 5 (0.089%) Oracle BPM
7 5 (0.089%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
8 3 (0.053%) OpenText VIM for SAP
8 3 (0.053%) Salesforce CRM
8 3 (0.053%) SAP BPC
8 3 (0.053%) SAP Oil and Gas
8 3 (0.053%) Temenos T24
Cloud Services
1 3,022 (53.75%) Azure
2 1,992 (35.43%) AWS
3 1,665 (29.62%) Azure DevOps
4 935 (16.63%) GitHub
5 707 (12.58%) GCP
6 564 (10.03%) GitHub Actions
7 483 (8.59%) Serverless
8 473 (8.41%) Power Platform
9 317 (5.64%) Amazon S3
10 278 (4.94%) AWS Lambda
11 257 (4.57%) AWS CloudFormation
12 251 (4.46%) Entra ID
13 225 (4.00%) Azure AKS
14 223 (3.97%) Amazon EKS
15 192 (3.42%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 190 (3.38%) Amazon EC2
17 185 (3.29%) Azure Monitor
18 181 (3.22%) Azure Data Factory
19 162 (2.88%) PaaS
20 160 (2.85%) OpenShift
Communications & Networking
1 234 (4.16%) Firewall
2 144 (2.56%) DNS
3 118 (2.10%) Network Security
4 111 (1.97%) VPN
5 50 (0.89%) WAN
6 43 (0.76%) TCP/IP
7 38 (0.68%) SSL
8 37 (0.66%) SD-WAN
9 34 (0.60%) BGP
10 28 (0.50%) Internet
11 27 (0.48%) Wi-Fi
12 26 (0.46%) HTTP
13 25 (0.44%) DHCP
14 24 (0.43%) OSPF
15 23 (0.41%) SAN
16 18 (0.32%) LAN
17 17 (0.30%) BIG-IP
17 17 (0.30%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
17 17 (0.30%) IPsec
17 17 (0.30%) MPLS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 308 (5.48%) Power BI
2 284 (5.05%) SQL Server
3 267 (4.75%) PostgreSQL
4 192 (3.42%) NoSQL
5 180 (3.20%) Relational Database
6 167 (2.97%) Data Warehouse
6 167 (2.97%) MongoDB
7 155 (2.76%) Data Lake
8 122 (2.17%) Amazon RDS
9 104 (1.85%) Azure SQL Database
10 101 (1.80%) Metadata
11 98 (1.74%) DynamoDB
12 89 (1.58%) Delta Lake
13 79 (1.41%) Oracle Database
14 72 (1.28%) Big Data
15 71 (1.26%) Amazon Athena
16 69 (1.23%) Amazon Redshift
17 67 (1.19%) Redis
18 64 (1.14%) Elasticsearch
19 53 (0.94%) MySQL
Development Applications
1 818 (14.55%) Jenkins
2 733 (13.04%) Git
3 691 (12.29%) JIRA
4 586 (10.42%) GitLab
5 130 (2.31%) Selenium
6 116 (2.06%) Postman
7 98 (1.74%) JUnit
8 91 (1.62%) SonarQube
9 81 (1.44%) REST Assured
10 76 (1.35%) Bitbucket
11 74 (1.32%) Maven
12 63 (1.12%) Cucumber
13 62 (1.10%) JMeter
14 57 (1.01%) Cypress.io
15 49 (0.87%) Gradle
16 47 (0.84%) Gatling
17 40 (0.71%) Mockito
18 38 (0.68%) Artifactory
19 37 (0.66%) Visual Studio
20 36 (0.64%) LoadRunner
General
1 1,399 (24.88%) Social Skills
2 1,027 (18.27%) Finance
3 786 (13.98%) Public Sector
4 459 (8.16%) Analytical Skills
5 368 (6.55%) Banking
6 134 (2.38%) Documentation Skills
7 118 (2.10%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 84 (1.49%) Retail
9 73 (1.30%) Influencing Skills
10 69 (1.23%) Legal
11 60 (1.07%) Organisational Skills
12 59 (1.05%) Marketing
13 46 (0.82%) Military
14 45 (0.80%) Investment Banking
15 42 (0.75%) Law
16 41 (0.73%) Financial Institution
17 36 (0.64%) Front Office
17 36 (0.64%) Presentation Skills
18 35 (0.62%) Manufacturing
18 35 (0.62%) Telecoms
Job Titles
1 1,127 (20.05%) DevOps Engineer
2 918 (16.33%) Developer
3 781 (13.89%) Senior
4 651 (11.58%) Architect
5 501 (8.91%) Lead
6 340 (6.05%) Azure Engineer
7 326 (5.80%) Data Engineer
8 307 (5.46%) Analyst
9 280 (4.98%) AWS Engineer
10 219 (3.90%) Platform Engineer
11 210 (3.74%) Cloud Engineer
12 206 (3.66%) AWS DevOps
13 200 (3.56%) Java Developer
14 192 (3.42%) AWS DevOps Engineer
15 191 (3.40%) Senior DevOps
16 188 (3.34%) Solutions Architect
17 178 (3.17%) Azure DevOps Engineer
18 175 (3.11%) Senior DevOps Engineer
19 157 (2.79%) Software Engineer
20 156 (2.77%) Business Analyst
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 541 (9.62%) REST
2 497 (8.84%) .NET
3 329 (5.85%) Spring
4 324 (5.76%) RESTful
5 306 (5.44%) Kafka
5 306 (5.44%) React
5 306 (5.44%) Spring Boot
6 240 (4.27%) Node.js
7 171 (3.04%) AngularJS
8 168 (2.99%) OAuth
8 168 (2.99%) Playwright
9 165 (2.93%) PySpark
10 153 (2.72%) JSON
11 136 (2.42%) SOAP
12 133 (2.37%) .NET Framework
13 126 (2.24%) HTML
14 114 (2.03%) OAuth2
15 110 (1.96%) OpenID
16 109 (1.94%) Middleware
17 107 (1.90%) CSS
Miscellaneous
1 1,000 (17.79%) Cloud Native
2 381 (6.78%) Product Ownership
3 243 (4.32%) Distributed Systems
4 166 (2.95%) Onboarding
5 148 (2.63%) Enterprise Software
6 145 (2.58%) Legacy Systems
7 119 (2.12%) Hybrid Cloud
8 98 (1.74%) Public Cloud
9 86 (1.53%) Data Protection Act
10 80 (1.42%) Data Centre
11 76 (1.35%) Self-Motivation
12 73 (1.30%) Management Information System
13 66 (1.17%) Security Posture
14 61 (1.09%) Data Structures
15 58 (1.03%) Virtual Team
16 57 (1.01%) AI Agents
17 56 (1.00%) Mobile App
18 53 (0.94%) Replication
19 52 (0.92%) Enterprise Cloud
20 51 (0.91%) Greenfield Project
Operating Systems
1 483 (8.59%) Linux
2 296 (5.27%) Windows
3 101 (1.80%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 80 (1.42%) Unix
5 66 (1.17%) Windows Server
6 35 (0.62%) VMS
7 27 (0.48%) Ubuntu
8 24 (0.43%) Apple iOS
9 15 (0.27%) Android
10 10 (0.18%) Solaris
11 9 (0.16%) Windows Server 2019
12 8 (0.14%) CentOS
13 6 (0.11%) Amazon Linux
13 6 (0.11%) Mac OS
13 6 (0.11%) Windows Server 2008
13 6 (0.11%) Windows Server 2016
13 6 (0.11%) zOS
14 5 (0.089%) Windows 10
15 4 (0.071%) Alpine Linux
15 4 (0.071%) Data ONTAP
Processes & Methodologies
1 3,292 (58.56%) CI/CD
2 2,185 (38.87%) Agile
3 1,506 (26.79%) Infrastructure as Code
4 940 (16.72%) Containerisation
5 863 (15.35%) Problem-Solving
6 833 (14.82%) Test Automation
7 820 (14.59%) Continuous Improvement
8 813 (14.46%) Microservices
9 694 (12.34%) Stakeholder Management
10 679 (12.08%) Migration
11 677 (12.04%) AI
12 674 (11.99%) Observability
13 671 (11.94%) Scrum
14 636 (11.31%) Platform Engineering
15 606 (10.78%) Software Engineering
16 599 (10.65%) Analytics
17 490 (8.72%) Data Modelling
18 481 (8.56%) Technical Leadership
19 474 (8.43%) Stakeholder Engagement
20 450 (8.00%) Roadmaps
Programming Languages
1 1,568 (27.89%) Python
2 1,030 (18.32%) SQL
3 782 (13.91%) Java
4 525 (9.34%) C#
5 427 (7.60%) JavaScript
6 420 (7.47%) Bash
7 394 (7.01%) PowerShell
8 300 (5.34%) TypeScript
9 199 (3.54%) Bicep
10 115 (2.05%) Go
11 70 (1.25%) Apex Code
12 69 (1.23%) Scala
13 68 (1.21%) Shell Script
14 63 (1.12%) PL/SQL
15 61 (1.09%) T-SQL
16 53 (0.94%) Groovy
17 33 (0.59%) C++
18 28 (0.50%) Kotlin
19 24 (0.43%) Data Analysis Expressions
20 22 (0.39%) Ruby
Qualifications
1 1,787 (31.79%) Security Cleared
2 1,505 (26.77%) SC Cleared
3 343 (6.10%) Degree
4 210 (3.74%) Azure Certification
5 198 (3.52%) BPSS Clearance
6 182 (3.24%) DV Cleared
7 179 (3.18%) AWS Certification
8 133 (2.37%) Computer Science Degree
9 82 (1.46%) CISSP
10 77 (1.37%) Microsoft Certification
11 60 (1.07%) ISTQB
12 57 (1.01%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 51 (0.91%) Cisco Certification
14 46 (0.82%) Master's Degree
15 44 (0.78%) PMI Certification
15 44 (0.78%) PMP
16 40 (0.71%) CISM
17 29 (0.52%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
18 26 (0.46%) ITIL Certification
19 24 (0.43%) TOGAF Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 484 (8.61%) QA
2 261 (4.64%) Data Quality
3 187 (3.33%) Accessibility
4 170 (3.02%) GDPR
5 114 (2.03%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 102 (1.81%) NIST
7 74 (1.32%) WCAG
8 67 (1.19%) NCSC
9 46 (0.82%) PCI DSS
10 39 (0.69%) SLA
11 38 (0.68%) PMO
12 29 (0.52%) Sarbanes-Oxley
13 27 (0.48%) GRC
14 19 (0.34%) HIPAA
15 15 (0.27%) SOC 2
16 13 (0.23%) Disclosure Scotland
17 12 (0.21%) PSD2
18 11 (0.20%) ISO 20022
18 11 (0.20%) SEPA
19 9 (0.16%) HL7
System Software
1 1,088 (19.35%) Docker
2 179 (3.18%) Active Directory
3 82 (1.46%) Virtual Machines
4 77 (1.37%) VMware Infrastructure
5 29 (0.52%) vSphere
6 27 (0.48%) VMware NSX
7 20 (0.36%) Squid
8 18 (0.32%) Virtual Desktop
8 18 (0.32%) VMware ESXi
9 16 (0.28%) Hyper-V
10 14 (0.25%) Postfix
11 9 (0.16%) Oracle RAC
12 6 (0.11%) Corosync
12 6 (0.11%) HDFS
12 6 (0.11%) IAG
12 6 (0.11%) KVM
12 6 (0.11%) NFS
12 6 (0.11%) RACF
13 5 (0.089%) Microsoft App-V
13 5 (0.089%) SRDF
Systems Management
1 1,622 (28.85%) Terraform
2 1,452 (25.83%) Kubernetes
3 523 (9.30%) Ansible
4 375 (6.67%) Grafana
5 326 (5.80%) Prometheus
6 91 (1.62%) Argo
7 74 (1.32%) Single Sign-On
8 66 (1.17%) Puppet
9 49 (0.87%) Istio
10 38 (0.68%) Progress Chef
11 33 (0.59%) Packer
12 27 (0.48%) Microsoft Intune
12 27 (0.48%) vCenter Server
13 23 (0.41%) HP ALM
14 22 (0.39%) Kibana
15 19 (0.34%) Consul
16 17 (0.30%) Kustomize
17 15 (0.27%) Active Directory Federation Services
18 13 (0.23%) HAProxy
18 13 (0.23%) Kubeflow
Vendors
1 991 (17.63%) Microsoft
2 305 (5.43%) Oracle
3 275 (4.89%) Databricks
4 263 (4.68%) Google
5 202 (3.59%) ServiceNow
6 190 (3.38%) Splunk
7 184 (3.27%) Salesforce
8 131 (2.33%) SAP
9 125 (2.22%) Dynatrace
10 115 (2.05%) VMware
11 109 (1.94%) Red Hat
12 72 (1.28%) OpenAI
13 58 (1.03%) Informatica
14 57 (1.01%) IBM
15 53 (0.94%) Atlassian
16 48 (0.85%) CyberArk
16 48 (0.85%) Foundry
17 44 (0.78%) MuleSoft
18 43 (0.76%) Okta
19 42 (0.75%) Cisco