GitLab Contract Job Trends

GitLab
UK

The table below provides summary statistics and contractor rates for jobs requiring GitLab skills. It covers contract job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 4 February 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
4 Feb 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 111 142 247
Rank change year-on-year +31 +105 -55
Contract jobs citing GitLab 959 589 438
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.46% 1.90% 0.98%
As % of the Development Applications category 17.38% 13.98% 8.14%
Number of daily rates quoted 722 392 332
10th Percentile £380 £368 £405
25th Percentile £425 £450 £475
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £550 £563
Median % change year-on-year -9.09% -2.22% -4.66%
75th Percentile £575 £658 £650
90th Percentile £670 £734 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £540
% change year-on-year - -7.41% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 25 4 2
10th Percentile £39.53 £64.33 £41.88
25th Percentile £52.50 £70.83 £44.69
Median hourly rate £55.00 £79.72 £50.00
Median % change year-on-year -31.01% +59.44% -23.08%
75th Percentile £65.00 £89.38 £55.94
90th Percentile £82.60 £92.75 £59.13
UK excluding London median hourly rate £55.00 £79.72 £60.00
% change year-on-year -31.01% +32.87% -7.69%

All Development Application Skills
UK

GitLab falls under the Development Applications category. For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all contract job vacancies requiring development application skills.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for development application skills 5,519 4,214 5,384
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 14.13% 13.62% 12.03%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,784 2,648 3,765
10th Percentile £344 £337 £363
25th Percentile £406 £409 £431
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year - -4.76% -4.55%
75th Percentile £588 £625 £630
90th Percentile £698 £725 £715
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £477 £500
% change year-on-year -0.42% -4.60% -4.76%
Number of hourly rates quoted 140 67 211
10th Percentile £35.43 £26.40 £41.25
25th Percentile £52.50 £47.50 £50.63
Median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% -3.85% +5.69%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.75 £75.89
90th Percentile £85.00 £76.75 £88.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £65.00
% change year-on-year +4.00% -3.85% -

GitLab
Job Vacancy Trend

Historical trend showing the proportion of contract IT job postings citing GitLab relative to all contract IT jobs advertised.

GitLab job vacancy trend in the UK

GitLab
Daily Rate Trend

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing GitLab.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing GitLab

GitLab
Daily Rate Histogram

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing GitLab over the 6 months to 4 February 2026.

Daily rate histogram for GitLab in the UK

GitLab
Hourly Rate Trend

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing GitLab.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing GitLab

GitLab
Hourly Rate Histogram

Hourly rate distribution of jobs citing GitLab over the 6 months to 4 February 2026.

Hourly rate histogram for GitLab in the UK

GitLab
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 GitLab within the UK over the 6 months to 4 February 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 +10 791 £513 -9.77% 216
UK excluding London +50 492 £500 - 167
London -18 315 £525 -11.58% 70
Work from Home +17 255 £477 -12.08% 112
North of England +12 244 £494 -5.95% 43
North West +11 117 £433 -13.40% 29
Yorkshire +10 96 £513 -10.87% 11
Midlands +19 94 £519 +7.35% 14
West Midlands +21 86 £525 +7.25% 10
South East -19 52 £500 -13.04% 62
South West +15 48 £525 -22.08% 29
Scotland +25 39 £447 +4.26% 2
North East -8 38 £488 -7.14% 3
East of England -9 23 £485 +3.47% 15
East Midlands -21 8 £400 +20.57% 4
Northern Ireland +3 6 - -
Wales +4 5 £435 -16.35% 3

GitLab
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 61 (6.36%) Confluence
2 34 (3.55%) Apache Airflow
3 33 (3.44%) SAS
4 21 (2.19%) Apache
5 18 (1.88%) OpenStack
6 17 (1.77%) nginx
7 15 (1.56%) Apache Spark
8 7 (0.73%) Appian
9 4 (0.42%) Microsoft Exchange
9 4 (0.42%) Oracle Workflow
10 3 (0.31%) CMS
10 3 (0.31%) Ethereum
10 3 (0.31%) Hyperledger
11 2 (0.21%) SharePoint
12 1 (0.10%) Adobe Experience Manager
12 1 (0.10%) CICS
12 1 (0.10%) Documentum
12 1 (0.10%) FileNet
12 1 (0.10%) Jupyter
12 1 (0.10%) Luigi
Applications
1 2 (0.21%) Adobe XD
2 1 (0.10%) Microsoft Excel
2 1 (0.10%) Oracle Smart View
Business Applications
1 3 (0.31%) Oracle Applications
1 3 (0.31%) SAP BRIM
2 2 (0.21%) SAP S/4HANA
3 1 (0.10%) Actimize
3 1 (0.10%) Aladdin
3 1 (0.10%) Oracle EBS
3 1 (0.10%) Oracle ERP
3 1 (0.10%) SAP BPC
3 1 (0.10%) SAP CO
3 1 (0.10%) SAP FS
Cloud Services
1 584 (60.90%) AWS
2 265 (27.63%) GitHub
3 256 (26.69%) Azure
4 181 (18.87%) GitHub Actions
5 172 (17.94%) GCP
6 162 (16.89%) Serverless
7 128 (13.35%) Amazon S3
8 120 (12.51%) Amazon EKS
9 118 (12.30%) Amazon CloudWatch
10 116 (12.10%) AWS Lambda
11 115 (11.99%) Amazon EC2
11 115 (11.99%) AWS CloudFormation
12 92 (9.59%) OpenShift
13 86 (8.97%) Azure DevOps
14 80 (8.34%) Amazon ECS
14 80 (8.34%) Virtual Private Cloud
15 31 (3.23%) Azure AKS
16 30 (3.13%) Datadog
17 24 (2.50%) Route 53
18 22 (2.29%) Amazon SQS
Communications & Networking
1 60 (6.26%) Firewall
2 43 (4.48%) DNS
3 41 (4.28%) VPN
4 30 (3.13%) TCP/IP
5 24 (2.50%) Network Security
6 15 (1.56%) SSL
7 7 (0.73%) Reverse Proxy
8 6 (0.63%) Kerberos
8 6 (0.63%) WAN
9 5 (0.52%) Multicast
9 5 (0.52%) SD-WAN
10 4 (0.42%) BGP
10 4 (0.42%) HTTP
10 4 (0.42%) SAN
11 3 (0.31%) DHCP
11 3 (0.31%) Ethernet VPN
11 3 (0.31%) FTP
11 3 (0.31%) Software-Defined Networking
11 3 (0.31%) VSAN
11 3 (0.31%) VXLAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 97 (10.11%) PostgreSQL
2 80 (8.34%) MongoDB
3 79 (8.24%) NoSQL
4 72 (7.51%) Amazon RDS
5 31 (3.23%) Data Lake
6 30 (3.13%) Relational Database
7 29 (3.02%) DynamoDB
8 26 (2.71%) MySQL
9 24 (2.50%) Redis
10 23 (2.40%) Amazon Athena
11 20 (2.09%) Big Data
12 19 (1.98%) SQL Server
13 17 (1.77%) Data Warehouse
13 17 (1.77%) Oracle Database
14 14 (1.46%) Apache Cassandra
15 12 (1.25%) Power BI
15 12 (1.25%) SAS Enterprise Guide
16 11 (1.15%) DocumentDB
17 10 (1.04%) BigQuery
17 10 (1.04%) Elasticsearch
Development Applications
1 465 (48.49%) Jenkins
2 216 (22.52%) Git
3 139 (14.49%) JIRA
4 97 (10.11%) Selenium
5 69 (7.19%) Cucumber
6 65 (6.78%) JUnit
7 49 (5.11%) Postman
8 37 (3.86%) REST Assured
9 35 (3.65%) SonarQube
10 34 (3.55%) JMeter
10 34 (3.55%) Maven
11 30 (3.13%) Artifactory
12 29 (3.02%) Cypress.io
13 28 (2.92%) Bitbucket
13 28 (2.92%) Gatling
13 28 (2.92%) Gradle
14 27 (2.82%) CircleCI
15 26 (2.71%) Sonatype Nexus
16 22 (2.29%) Liquibase
17 21 (2.19%) Mockito
General
1 235 (24.50%) Social Skills
2 155 (16.16%) Finance
3 146 (15.22%) Public Sector
4 102 (10.64%) Banking
5 71 (7.40%) Analytical Skills
6 26 (2.71%) Financial Institution
7 23 (2.40%) Documentation Skills
8 18 (1.88%) Telecoms
9 14 (1.46%) Military
10 10 (1.04%) Aerospace
10 10 (1.04%) Investment Banking
10 10 (1.04%) Retail
11 8 (0.83%) Retail Banking
12 7 (0.73%) Games
12 7 (0.73%) Influencing Skills
13 5 (0.52%) Inclusion and Diversity
14 4 (0.42%) Presentation Skills
15 3 (0.31%) Corporate Banking
15 3 (0.31%) Local Government
15 3 (0.31%) Marketing
Job Titles
1 230 (23.98%) DevOps Engineer
2 196 (20.44%) Developer
3 150 (15.64%) Senior
4 106 (11.05%) AWS Engineer
5 82 (8.55%) AWS DevOps
6 77 (8.03%) Lead
7 69 (7.19%) AWS DevOps Engineer
8 61 (6.36%) Java Developer
9 56 (5.84%) Software Engineer
10 49 (5.11%) Test Engineer
11 46 (4.80%) Cloud Engineer
12 45 (4.69%) Senior DevOps
12 45 (4.69%) Senior DevOps Engineer
13 44 (4.59%) Architect
14 43 (4.48%) Data Engineer
15 34 (3.55%) Senior Developer
16 33 (3.44%) Platform Engineer
17 32 (3.34%) Automation Engineer
18 29 (3.02%) Full-Stack Developer
18 29 (3.02%) GCP Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 154 (16.06%) REST
2 135 (14.08%) Kafka
3 126 (13.14%) Spring
4 117 (12.20%) Spring Boot
5 105 (10.95%) RESTful
6 103 (10.74%) Elastic Stack
7 102 (10.64%) Node.js
8 62 (6.47%) React
9 55 (5.74%) Playwright
10 36 (3.75%) OpenTelemetry
11 35 (3.65%) HTML
12 32 (3.34%) JSON
12 32 (3.34%) OpenID
12 32 (3.34%) PySpark
12 32 (3.34%) RabbitMQ
13 29 (3.02%) Jest
13 29 (3.02%) LDAP
13 29 (3.02%) pytest
14 28 (2.92%) YAML
15 24 (2.50%) CSS
Miscellaneous
1 150 (15.64%) Cloud Native
2 72 (7.51%) Distributed Systems
3 51 (5.32%) Product Ownership
4 47 (4.90%) Public Cloud
5 26 (2.71%) Onboarding
6 16 (1.67%) Private Cloud
7 15 (1.56%) Data Centre
7 15 (1.56%) Hybrid Cloud
8 13 (1.36%) Legacy Systems
9 12 (1.25%) PKI
10 11 (1.15%) Enterprise Software
10 11 (1.15%) Linux Command Line
11 9 (0.94%) Management Information System
11 9 (0.94%) Security Posture
11 9 (0.94%) Synthetic Data
12 8 (0.83%) Algorithms
12 8 (0.83%) Virtual Team
13 7 (0.73%) Distributed Computing
13 7 (0.73%) Legacy Applications
13 7 (0.73%) Mainframe
Operating Systems
1 202 (21.06%) Linux
2 61 (6.36%) Windows
3 32 (3.34%) Unix
4 27 (2.82%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 16 (1.67%) Windows Server
6 11 (1.15%) CentOS
7 10 (1.04%) Android
7 10 (1.04%) Apple iOS
8 8 (0.83%) VMS
9 4 (0.42%) Ubuntu
10 3 (0.31%) Solaris
10 3 (0.31%) Windows Server 2016
10 3 (0.31%) Windows Server 2019
10 3 (0.31%) zOS
11 1 (0.10%) Debian
11 1 (0.10%) Rocky
11 1 (0.10%) Windows 10
Processes & Methodologies
1 774 (80.71%) CI/CD
2 592 (61.73%) DevOps
3 375 (39.10%) Infrastructure as Code
4 360 (37.54%) Containerisation
5 346 (36.08%) Agile
6 281 (29.30%) Test Automation
7 209 (21.79%) Microservices
8 178 (18.56%) Problem-Solving
9 166 (17.31%) Observability
10 133 (13.87%) Software Engineering
11 115 (11.99%) Scrum
12 107 (11.16%) Continuous Improvement
13 97 (10.11%) Analytics
14 84 (8.76%) DevSecOps
15 83 (8.65%) Infrastructure Automation
16 79 (8.24%) Platform Engineering
17 77 (8.03%) Migration
17 77 (8.03%) TDD
18 72 (7.51%) Data Pipeline
19 69 (7.19%) Test Strategy
Programming Languages
1 425 (44.32%) Python
2 293 (30.55%) Java
3 173 (18.04%) Bash
4 152 (15.85%) SQL
5 112 (11.68%) JavaScript
6 96 (10.01%) Go
7 83 (8.65%) TypeScript
8 79 (8.24%) PowerShell
9 50 (5.21%) Shell Script
10 20 (2.09%) C#
11 18 (1.88%) Ruby
12 16 (1.67%) Kotlin
13 14 (1.46%) PL/SQL
14 11 (1.15%) Perl
15 10 (1.04%) Rust
16 9 (0.94%) Groovy
17 8 (0.83%) Scala
18 7 (0.73%) C++
18 7 (0.73%) Korn
18 7 (0.73%) MATLAB
Qualifications
1 342 (35.66%) Security Cleared
2 272 (28.36%) SC Cleared
3 60 (6.26%) Degree
4 50 (5.21%) Computer Science Degree
5 44 (4.59%) BPSS Clearance
6 41 (4.28%) AWS Certification
7 34 (3.55%) DV Cleared
8 32 (3.34%) Master's Degree
9 21 (2.19%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
10 14 (1.46%) CISSP
11 13 (1.36%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
11 13 (1.36%) CISM
12 11 (1.15%) Oracle Certification
13 10 (1.04%) OCA
14 7 (0.73%) AWS Certified Developer
15 5 (0.52%) Azure Certification
16 4 (0.42%) Microsoft Certification
17 3 (0.31%) CCNP
17 3 (0.31%) Cisco Certification
17 3 (0.31%) ITIL Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 120 (12.51%) QA
2 55 (5.74%) Accessibility
3 22 (2.29%) GDPR
4 20 (2.09%) NIST
4 20 (2.09%) WCAG
5 17 (1.77%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 15 (1.56%) Data Quality
7 14 (1.46%) SLA
8 13 (1.36%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 12 (1.25%) NCSC
10 6 (0.63%) PCI DSS
11 4 (0.42%) Def Stans
12 2 (0.21%) HL7
13 1 (0.10%) Disclosure Scotland
13 1 (0.10%) IEC 61508
13 1 (0.10%) ISO 20022
13 1 (0.10%) JSP 440
13 1 (0.10%) MiFID
13 1 (0.10%) SOC 2
13 1 (0.10%) Software Quality Assurance
System Software
1 431 (44.94%) Docker
2 22 (2.29%) Active Directory
3 16 (1.67%) VMware Infrastructure
4 11 (1.15%) Virtual Machines
5 8 (0.83%) Virtual Servers
6 4 (0.42%) Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services
7 3 (0.31%) VMware NSX
7 3 (0.31%) vSphere
8 2 (0.21%) HDFS
8 2 (0.21%) Hyper-V
9 1 (0.10%) Squid
9 1 (0.10%) VMware ESXi
Systems Management
1 507 (52.87%) Kubernetes
2 448 (46.72%) Terraform
3 244 (25.44%) Grafana
4 230 (23.98%) Ansible
5 198 (20.65%) Prometheus
6 52 (5.42%) Argo
7 21 (2.19%) Istio
8 20 (2.09%) Podman
9 18 (1.88%) Puppet
10 17 (1.77%) Progress Chef
11 16 (1.67%) Kibana
12 12 (1.25%) Fluentd
12 12 (1.25%) Packer
13 9 (0.94%) Red Hat Satellite
14 8 (0.83%) Karpenter
14 8 (0.83%) linkerd
14 8 (0.83%) NetBackup
15 7 (0.73%) Check_MK
15 7 (0.73%) Rancher
15 7 (0.73%) Sysdig
Vendors
1 105 (10.95%) Splunk
2 74 (7.72%) Microsoft
3 72 (7.51%) Oracle
4 54 (5.63%) Red Hat
5 46 (4.80%) Google
6 38 (3.96%) VMware
7 27 (2.82%) ServiceNow
8 23 (2.40%) Databricks
9 19 (1.98%) Dynatrace
10 17 (1.77%) F5
11 16 (1.67%) CheckPoint
11 16 (1.67%) Cisco
11 16 (1.67%) Palo Alto
11 16 (1.67%) Salesforce
11 16 (1.67%) Veracode
12 15 (1.56%) Atlassian
13 14 (1.46%) Cribl.io
14 11 (1.15%) IBM
15 9 (0.94%) Veritas
16 8 (0.83%) Commvault