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

6 months to
11 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 13 15 14
Rank change year-on-year +2 -1 -1
Contract jobs citing DevOps 5,673 3,373 4,131
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.73% 10.39% 9.61%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.59% 11.49% 11.25%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,925 2,411 2,813
10th Percentile £385 £363 £391
25th Percentile £440 £425 £456
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £523 £550
Median % change year-on-year +0.48% -5.00% -4.35%
75th Percentile £613 £625 £650
90th Percentile £700 £738 £725
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £525
% change year-on-year - -4.76% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 116 23 122
10th Percentile £38.25 £36.50 £56.28
25th Percentile £61.87 £51.88 £61.34
Median hourly rate £70.00 £67.00 £70.00
Median % change year-on-year +4.48% -4.29% +6.87%
75th Percentile £77.50 £85.23 £74.44
90th Percentile £93.44 £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 45,068 29,357 36,726
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 85.21% 90.46% 85.41%
Number of daily rates quoted 28,042 18,505 23,449
10th Percentile £325 £300 £300
25th Percentile £415 £405 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £518 £501 £525
Median % change year-on-year +3.40% -4.67% -4.55%
75th Percentile £624 £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 2,667 1,497 2,458
10th Percentile £14.85 £14.20 £12.79
25th Percentile £20.01 £17.45 £16.25
Median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £38.12
Median % change year-on-year +74.79% -34.02% -4.70%
75th Percentile £68.00 £53.75 £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% -2.91%

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 11 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 11 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 11 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 +3 4,799 £525 - 1,228
UK excluding London +4 2,493 £500 - 930
London +3 2,464 £550 - 473
Work from Home +2 1,628 £525 +0.96% 685
North of England +5 885 £500 +1.54% 268
Yorkshire +2 472 £500 - 72
South East -7 464 £525 +5.00% 265
Midlands 0 443 £500 +1.01% 129
West Midlands -2 352 £500 -0.25% 83
North West -2 335 £510 +7.37% 148
South West +14 306 £520 -5.45% 118
Scotland 0 216 £475 -4.23% 40
East of England +22 148 £525 +5.00% 66
North East +15 97 £425 -18.27% 49
East Midlands -4 86 £488 +8.33% 46
Wales +1 54 £425 +39.13% 29
Northern Ireland +17 22 £475 +11.76% 34
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
1 331 (5.83%) Confluence
2 140 (2.47%) Apache Spark
3 133 (2.34%) SharePoint
4 109 (1.92%) Apache Airflow
5 105 (1.85%) Apache
6 82 (1.45%) SAS
7 50 (0.88%) CMS
8 37 (0.65%) IIS
9 34 (0.60%) Jupyter
10 32 (0.56%) nginx
11 31 (0.55%) Microsoft Exchange
12 17 (0.30%) OpenStack
13 16 (0.28%) WebSphere
14 15 (0.26%) Camunda
14 15 (0.26%) Palantir Foundry
15 11 (0.19%) Oracle Workflow
16 9 (0.16%) Appian
16 9 (0.16%) Sitecore CMS
17 8 (0.14%) Tomcat
18 7 (0.12%) WebLogic
Applications
1 76 (1.34%) Microsoft Excel
2 64 (1.13%) Microsoft Project
3 44 (0.78%) Microsoft Office
4 43 (0.76%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 36 (0.63%) 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 (1.29%) Dynamics CRM
2 39 (0.69%) SAP S/4HANA
3 10 (0.18%) Aladdin
3 10 (0.18%) Oracle ERP
3 10 (0.18%) Payment Gateway
4 9 (0.16%) Oracle EBS
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 (0.088%) OpenText MBPM
7 5 (0.088%) Oracle BPM
7 5 (0.088%) 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 ERP
8 3 (0.053%) SAP Oil and Gas
Cloud Services
1 3,041 (53.60%) Azure
2 2,027 (35.73%) AWS
3 1,679 (29.60%) Azure DevOps
4 945 (16.66%) GitHub
5 718 (12.66%) GCP
6 571 (10.07%) GitHub Actions
7 486 (8.57%) Serverless
8 474 (8.36%) Power Platform
9 321 (5.66%) Amazon S3
10 282 (4.97%) AWS Lambda
11 260 (4.58%) AWS CloudFormation
12 252 (4.44%) Entra ID
13 225 (3.97%) Amazon EKS
14 224 (3.95%) Azure AKS
15 193 (3.40%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 192 (3.38%) Amazon EC2
17 187 (3.30%) Azure Monitor
18 184 (3.24%) Azure Data Factory
19 162 (2.86%) PaaS
20 161 (2.84%) OpenShift
Communications & Networking
1 235 (4.14%) Firewall
2 146 (2.57%) DNS
3 118 (2.08%) Network Security
4 111 (1.96%) VPN
5 50 (0.88%) WAN
6 44 (0.78%) TCP/IP
7 38 (0.67%) SSL
8 37 (0.65%) SD-WAN
9 34 (0.60%) BGP
10 28 (0.49%) HTTP
10 28 (0.49%) Internet
11 27 (0.48%) Wi-Fi
12 26 (0.46%) DHCP
13 24 (0.42%) OSPF
14 23 (0.41%) SAN
15 18 (0.32%) LAN
16 17 (0.30%) BIG-IP
16 17 (0.30%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
16 17 (0.30%) IPsec
16 17 (0.30%) MPLS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 310 (5.46%) Power BI
2 290 (5.11%) SQL Server
3 269 (4.74%) PostgreSQL
4 192 (3.38%) NoSQL
5 186 (3.28%) Relational Database
6 170 (3.00%) Data Warehouse
7 168 (2.96%) MongoDB
8 157 (2.77%) Data Lake
9 122 (2.15%) Amazon RDS
10 105 (1.85%) Azure SQL Database
11 102 (1.80%) Metadata
12 100 (1.76%) DynamoDB
13 91 (1.60%) Delta Lake
14 82 (1.45%) Oracle Database
15 73 (1.29%) Big Data
16 71 (1.25%) Amazon Athena
17 69 (1.22%) Amazon Redshift
18 67 (1.18%) Elasticsearch
19 66 (1.16%) Redis
20 54 (0.95%) MySQL
Development Applications
1 827 (14.58%) Jenkins
2 754 (13.29%) Git
3 697 (12.29%) JIRA
4 589 (10.38%) GitLab
5 129 (2.27%) Selenium
6 116 (2.04%) Postman
7 98 (1.73%) JUnit
8 95 (1.67%) SonarQube
9 80 (1.41%) REST Assured
10 78 (1.37%) Maven
11 76 (1.34%) Bitbucket
12 62 (1.09%) Cucumber
12 62 (1.09%) JMeter
13 56 (0.99%) Cypress.io
14 51 (0.90%) Gradle
15 47 (0.83%) Gatling
16 41 (0.72%) Mockito
16 41 (0.72%) Visual Studio
17 38 (0.67%) Artifactory
18 36 (0.63%) LoadRunner
General
1 1,415 (24.94%) Social Skills
2 1,037 (18.28%) Finance
3 795 (14.01%) Public Sector
4 464 (8.18%) Analytical Skills
5 369 (6.50%) Banking
6 135 (2.38%) Documentation Skills
7 121 (2.13%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 87 (1.53%) Retail
9 74 (1.30%) Influencing Skills
10 69 (1.22%) Legal
11 62 (1.09%) Organisational Skills
12 58 (1.02%) Marketing
13 48 (0.85%) Military
14 45 (0.79%) Investment Banking
15 42 (0.74%) Law
16 41 (0.72%) Financial Institution
17 37 (0.65%) Manufacturing
18 36 (0.63%) Front Office
18 36 (0.63%) Presentation Skills
19 35 (0.62%) Telecoms
Job Titles
1 1,140 (20.10%) DevOps Engineer
2 931 (16.41%) Developer
3 788 (13.89%) Senior
4 651 (11.48%) Architect
5 513 (9.04%) Lead
6 341 (6.01%) Azure Engineer
7 330 (5.82%) Data Engineer
8 307 (5.41%) Analyst
9 285 (5.02%) AWS Engineer
10 224 (3.95%) Platform Engineer
11 215 (3.79%) Cloud Engineer
12 209 (3.68%) AWS DevOps
13 203 (3.58%) Java Developer
14 195 (3.44%) AWS DevOps Engineer
14 195 (3.44%) Senior DevOps
15 189 (3.33%) Solutions Architect
16 180 (3.17%) Azure DevOps Engineer
17 179 (3.16%) Senior DevOps Engineer
18 157 (2.77%) Software Engineer
19 156 (2.75%) Business Analyst
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 548 (9.66%) REST
2 503 (8.87%) .NET
3 333 (5.87%) Spring
4 331 (5.83%) RESTful
5 315 (5.55%) React
6 314 (5.53%) Kafka
7 310 (5.46%) Spring Boot
8 247 (4.35%) Node.js
9 171 (3.01%) AngularJS
9 171 (3.01%) PySpark
10 168 (2.96%) OAuth
11 167 (2.94%) Playwright
12 157 (2.77%) JSON
13 136 (2.40%) SOAP
14 134 (2.36%) .NET Framework
14 134 (2.36%) HTML
15 114 (2.01%) OAuth2
16 112 (1.97%) CSS
17 110 (1.94%) Middleware
18 109 (1.92%) OpenID
Miscellaneous
1 1,015 (17.89%) Cloud Native
2 383 (6.75%) Product Ownership
3 246 (4.34%) Distributed Systems
4 172 (3.03%) Onboarding
5 151 (2.66%) Enterprise Software
6 147 (2.59%) Legacy Systems
7 120 (2.12%) Hybrid Cloud
8 102 (1.80%) Public Cloud
9 87 (1.53%) Data Protection Act
10 80 (1.41%) Data Centre
11 76 (1.34%) Self-Motivation
12 73 (1.29%) Management Information System
13 67 (1.18%) Security Posture
14 61 (1.08%) Data Structures
15 59 (1.04%) Virtual Team
16 58 (1.02%) AI Agents
16 58 (1.02%) Replication
17 56 (0.99%) Mobile App
18 53 (0.93%) Enterprise Cloud
19 52 (0.92%) Greenfield Project
Operating Systems
1 487 (8.58%) Linux
2 299 (5.27%) Windows
3 100 (1.76%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 79 (1.39%) Unix
5 66 (1.16%) Windows Server
6 35 (0.62%) VMS
7 27 (0.48%) Ubuntu
8 24 (0.42%) Apple iOS
9 15 (0.26%) Android
10 11 (0.19%) Solaris
11 9 (0.16%) Windows Server 2019
12 8 (0.14%) CentOS
13 7 (0.12%) zOS
14 6 (0.11%) Amazon Linux
14 6 (0.11%) Mac OS
14 6 (0.11%) Windows Server 2008
14 6 (0.11%) Windows Server 2016
15 5 (0.088%) Windows 10
16 4 (0.071%) Alpine Linux
16 4 (0.071%) Data ONTAP
Processes & Methodologies
1 3,333 (58.75%) CI/CD
2 2,208 (38.92%) Agile
3 1,533 (27.02%) Infrastructure as Code
4 953 (16.80%) Containerisation
5 870 (15.34%) Problem-Solving
6 843 (14.86%) Test Automation
7 838 (14.77%) Continuous Improvement
8 828 (14.60%) Microservices
9 700 (12.34%) Stakeholder Management
10 688 (12.13%) AI
11 687 (12.11%) Migration
11 687 (12.11%) Observability
12 680 (11.99%) Scrum
13 648 (11.42%) Platform Engineering
14 617 (10.88%) Software Engineering
15 603 (10.63%) Analytics
16 493 (8.69%) Technical Leadership
17 492 (8.67%) Data Modelling
18 480 (8.46%) Stakeholder Engagement
19 456 (8.04%) Roadmaps
Programming Languages
1 1,589 (28.01%) Python
2 1,041 (18.35%) SQL
3 788 (13.89%) Java
4 528 (9.31%) C#
5 439 (7.74%) JavaScript
6 423 (7.46%) Bash
7 394 (6.95%) PowerShell
8 309 (5.45%) TypeScript
9 200 (3.53%) Bicep
10 117 (2.06%) Go
11 70 (1.23%) Apex Code
12 69 (1.22%) Scala
13 67 (1.18%) PL/SQL
13 67 (1.18%) Shell Script
14 65 (1.15%) T-SQL
15 53 (0.93%) Groovy
16 34 (0.60%) C++
17 28 (0.49%) Kotlin
18 24 (0.42%) Data Analysis Expressions
19 22 (0.39%) Ruby
Qualifications
1 1,806 (31.84%) Security Cleared
2 1,522 (26.83%) SC Cleared
3 345 (6.08%) Degree
4 213 (3.75%) Azure Certification
5 207 (3.65%) BPSS Clearance
6 187 (3.30%) AWS Certification
7 182 (3.21%) DV Cleared
8 135 (2.38%) Computer Science Degree
9 82 (1.45%) CISSP
10 77 (1.36%) Microsoft Certification
11 60 (1.06%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
12 59 (1.04%) ISTQB
13 53 (0.93%) Cisco Certification
14 48 (0.85%) Master's Degree
15 43 (0.76%) PMI Certification
15 43 (0.76%) PMP
16 39 (0.69%) CISM
17 29 (0.51%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
18 26 (0.46%) ITIL Certification
19 24 (0.42%) TOGAF Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 491 (8.66%) QA
2 264 (4.65%) Data Quality
3 189 (3.33%) Accessibility
4 170 (3.00%) GDPR
5 112 (1.97%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 100 (1.76%) NIST
7 74 (1.30%) WCAG
8 68 (1.20%) NCSC
9 45 (0.79%) PCI DSS
10 39 (0.69%) SLA
11 37 (0.65%) PMO
12 29 (0.51%) Sarbanes-Oxley
13 27 (0.48%) GRC
14 19 (0.33%) HIPAA
15 15 (0.26%) SOC 2
16 14 (0.25%) Disclosure Scotland
17 12 (0.21%) PSD2
18 11 (0.19%) ISO 20022
18 11 (0.19%) SEPA
19 9 (0.16%) HL7
System Software
1 1,105 (19.48%) Docker
2 179 (3.16%) Active Directory
3 82 (1.45%) Virtual Machines
4 79 (1.39%) VMware Infrastructure
5 30 (0.53%) vSphere
6 27 (0.48%) VMware NSX
7 20 (0.35%) 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 10 (0.18%) 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 (0.088%) Firmware
13 5 (0.088%) Microsoft App-V
Systems Management
1 1,645 (29.00%) Terraform
2 1,475 (26.00%) Kubernetes
3 526 (9.27%) Ansible
4 377 (6.65%) Grafana
5 328 (5.78%) Prometheus
6 94 (1.66%) Argo
7 73 (1.29%) Single Sign-On
8 65 (1.15%) Puppet
9 49 (0.86%) Istio
10 38 (0.67%) Progress Chef
11 33 (0.58%) Packer
12 27 (0.48%) Microsoft Intune
12 27 (0.48%) vCenter Server
13 23 (0.41%) HP ALM
14 21 (0.37%) Kibana
15 19 (0.33%) Consul
16 17 (0.30%) Kustomize
17 15 (0.26%) Active Directory Federation Services
18 13 (0.23%) HAProxy
18 13 (0.23%) Kubeflow
Vendors
1 998 (17.59%) Microsoft
2 315 (5.55%) Oracle
3 282 (4.97%) Databricks
4 263 (4.64%) Google
5 201 (3.54%) ServiceNow
6 190 (3.35%) Splunk
7 183 (3.23%) Salesforce
8 131 (2.31%) SAP
9 125 (2.20%) Dynatrace
10 117 (2.06%) VMware
11 110 (1.94%) Red Hat
12 71 (1.25%) OpenAI
13 59 (1.04%) IBM
14 58 (1.02%) Informatica
15 54 (0.95%) Atlassian
16 49 (0.86%) CyberArk
17 48 (0.85%) Foundry
18 44 (0.78%) MuleSoft
19 43 (0.76%) Cisco
19 43 (0.76%) Okta