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

6 months to
4 Jan 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 110 143 239
Rank change year-on-year +33 +96 -68
Contract jobs citing GitLab 904 601 441
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.46% 1.85% 1.03%
As % of the Development Applications category 16.63% 13.99% 8.14%
Number of daily rates quoted 676 409 338
10th Percentile £375 £363 £404
25th Percentile £426 £450 £475
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -6.82% - -4.35%
75th Percentile £588 £663 £638
90th Percentile £673 £725 £700
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £550
% change year-on-year - -9.09% +1.85%
Number of hourly rates quoted 28 5 1
10th Percentile - £65.60 -
25th Percentile £52.50 £74.00 £58.75
Median hourly rate £62.50 £74.44 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year -16.04% +24.07% +9.09%
75th Percentile £67.00 £87.50 £61.25
90th Percentile £78.85 £92.00 -
UK excluding London median hourly rate £62.50 £74.44 £60.00
% change year-on-year -16.04% +24.07% +9.09%

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 5,436 4,296 5,417
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 14.77% 13.26% 12.60%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,737 2,703 3,790
10th Percentile £338 £330 £363
25th Percentile £406 £410 £439
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £510 £538
Median % change year-on-year -1.96% -5.12% -2.27%
75th Percentile £600 £626 £638
90th Percentile £688 £725 £713
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £485 £513
% change year-on-year -2.06% -5.37% -2.38%
Number of hourly rates quoted 138 72 201
10th Percentile £39.00 £28.88 £41.25
25th Percentile £52.81 £46.25 £50.00
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 £77.50
90th Percentile £83.60 £76.15 £90.00
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 January 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 January 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 January 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 +12 739 £520 -8.45% 409
UK excluding London +51 460 £500 - 359
London -3 289 £525 -12.50% 80
Work from Home +20 244 £500 -9.09% 248
North of England +9 208 £488 -2.50% 92
Yorkshire +5 91 £500 +5.26% 49
North West -1 88 £420 -16.00% 36
Midlands +25 87 £525 +10.06% 54
West Midlands +19 79 £525 +7.36% 30
South East -11 58 £500 - 91
South West +20 44 £525 -27.34% 55
Scotland +17 38 £411 -6.00% 11
East of England +10 33 £478 +27.47% 51
North East -11 33 £508 -3.33% 7
East Midlands -18 8 £400 +30.08% 21
Wales -5 5 £435 -18.12% 6
Northern Ireland -6 5 - - 5

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 59 (6.53%) Confluence
2 35 (3.87%) Apache Airflow
3 28 (3.10%) SAS
4 23 (2.54%) Apache
5 19 (2.10%) Apache Spark
6 14 (1.55%) OpenStack
7 13 (1.44%) nginx
8 7 (0.77%) Appian
8 7 (0.77%) Microsoft Exchange
9 4 (0.44%) Anypoint
9 4 (0.44%) CMS
9 4 (0.44%) Mule
9 4 (0.44%) Oracle Workflow
10 3 (0.33%) Ethereum
10 3 (0.33%) Hyperledger
11 2 (0.22%) Jupyter
11 2 (0.22%) SharePoint
12 1 (0.11%) Luigi
12 1 (0.11%) MQSeries
12 1 (0.11%) Tomcat
Applications
1 1 (0.11%) Microsoft Excel
1 1 (0.11%) Oracle Smart View
Business Applications
1 3 (0.33%) Oracle Applications
1 3 (0.33%) SAP BRIM
2 2 (0.22%) SAP S/4HANA
3 1 (0.11%) Actimize
3 1 (0.11%) Aladdin
3 1 (0.11%) Oracle EBS
3 1 (0.11%) Oracle ERP
3 1 (0.11%) SAP BPC
3 1 (0.11%) SAP CO
3 1 (0.11%) SAP FS
Cloud Services
1 548 (60.62%) AWS
2 255 (28.21%) Azure
3 253 (27.99%) GitHub
4 179 (19.80%) GCP
5 173 (19.14%) GitHub Actions
6 155 (17.15%) Serverless
7 127 (14.05%) Amazon S3
8 126 (13.94%) Amazon CloudWatch
9 119 (13.16%) AWS CloudFormation
10 117 (12.94%) Amazon EKS
11 113 (12.50%) Amazon EC2
12 109 (12.06%) AWS Lambda
13 93 (10.29%) Azure DevOps
14 87 (9.62%) Virtual Private Cloud
15 85 (9.40%) OpenShift
16 80 (8.85%) Amazon ECS
17 37 (4.09%) Azure AKS
18 31 (3.43%) Datadog
19 26 (2.88%) Route 53
20 24 (2.65%) Google Kubernetes Engine
Communications & Networking
1 65 (7.19%) Firewall
2 52 (5.75%) DNS
3 43 (4.76%) VPN
4 33 (3.65%) TCP/IP
5 22 (2.43%) Network Security
6 20 (2.21%) SSL
7 6 (0.66%) Kerberos
8 5 (0.55%) BGP
8 5 (0.55%) OpenLDAP
8 5 (0.55%) SD-WAN
8 5 (0.55%) WAN
9 4 (0.44%) AMQP
9 4 (0.44%) DSL
9 4 (0.44%) HTTP
9 4 (0.44%) SAN
9 4 (0.44%) VXLAN
10 3 (0.33%) DHCP
10 3 (0.33%) FTP
10 3 (0.33%) NAS
10 3 (0.33%) OSPF
Database & Business Intelligence
1 98 (10.84%) PostgreSQL
2 84 (9.29%) MongoDB
3 82 (9.07%) NoSQL
4 78 (8.63%) Amazon RDS
5 32 (3.54%) Data Lake
6 28 (3.10%) DynamoDB
7 24 (2.65%) Redis
8 23 (2.54%) Amazon Athena
8 23 (2.54%) MySQL
9 21 (2.32%) Relational Database
10 20 (2.21%) SQL Server
11 17 (1.88%) Big Data
12 15 (1.66%) Data Warehouse
13 14 (1.55%) Apache Cassandra
14 13 (1.44%) Oracle Database
15 12 (1.33%) Power BI
16 11 (1.22%) SAS Enterprise Guide
17 10 (1.11%) BigQuery
18 8 (0.88%) Delta Lake
19 7 (0.77%) Aerospike
Development Applications
1 445 (49.23%) Jenkins
2 227 (25.11%) Git
3 132 (14.60%) JIRA
4 84 (9.29%) Selenium
5 60 (6.64%) Cucumber
6 58 (6.42%) JUnit
7 42 (4.65%) Artifactory
8 39 (4.31%) SonarQube
9 38 (4.20%) Postman
10 37 (4.09%) Maven
11 33 (3.65%) Cypress.io
12 31 (3.43%) Gradle
13 30 (3.32%) Bitbucket
13 30 (3.32%) JMeter
14 27 (2.99%) Liquibase
14 27 (2.99%) Sonatype Nexus
15 26 (2.88%) REST Assured
16 23 (2.54%) CircleCI
17 21 (2.32%) Gatling
18 15 (1.66%) Mockito
General
1 238 (26.33%) Social Skills
2 149 (16.48%) Finance
3 120 (13.27%) Public Sector
4 100 (11.06%) Banking
5 62 (6.86%) Analytical Skills
6 26 (2.88%) Financial Institution
7 22 (2.43%) Telecoms
8 20 (2.21%) Aerospace
9 17 (1.88%) Documentation Skills
10 13 (1.44%) Military
11 9 (1.00%) Investment Banking
12 8 (0.88%) Games
13 7 (0.77%) Retail
13 7 (0.77%) Retail Banking
14 6 (0.66%) Influencing Skills
15 4 (0.44%) Inclusion and Diversity
15 4 (0.44%) Law
16 3 (0.33%) Front Office
16 3 (0.33%) Local Government
16 3 (0.33%) Marketing
Job Titles
1 212 (23.45%) DevOps Engineer
2 174 (19.25%) Developer
3 150 (16.59%) Senior
4 97 (10.73%) AWS Engineer
5 70 (7.74%) Lead
6 67 (7.41%) AWS DevOps
7 65 (7.19%) Software Engineer
8 56 (6.19%) AWS DevOps Engineer
8 56 (6.19%) Java Developer
9 45 (4.98%) Cloud Engineer
10 44 (4.87%) Senior DevOps
10 44 (4.87%) Senior DevOps Engineer
11 41 (4.54%) Architect
11 41 (4.54%) Test Engineer
12 38 (4.20%) Data Engineer
13 34 (3.76%) Automation Engineer
13 34 (3.76%) Senior Developer
14 31 (3.43%) GCP Engineer
15 29 (3.21%) Platform Engineer
16 24 (2.65%) Full-Stack Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 154 (17.04%) REST
2 134 (14.82%) Kafka
3 104 (11.50%) Elastic Stack
4 101 (11.17%) Node.js
5 98 (10.84%) Spring
6 96 (10.62%) RESTful
7 93 (10.29%) Spring Boot
8 59 (6.53%) React
9 42 (4.65%) Playwright
10 39 (4.31%) HTML
11 38 (4.20%) JSON
12 33 (3.65%) PySpark
12 33 (3.65%) RabbitMQ
13 31 (3.43%) pytest
14 30 (3.32%) OpenTelemetry
15 29 (3.21%) .NET
16 28 (3.10%) AngularJS
17 27 (2.99%) CSS
18 25 (2.77%) OAuth
19 24 (2.65%) Jest
Miscellaneous
1 132 (14.60%) Cloud Native
2 82 (9.07%) Distributed Systems
3 46 (5.09%) Public Cloud
4 45 (4.98%) Product Ownership
5 24 (2.65%) Onboarding
6 18 (1.99%) Algorithms
7 15 (1.66%) Hybrid Cloud
7 15 (1.66%) Private Cloud
8 14 (1.55%) Data Centre
8 14 (1.55%) Legacy Systems
8 14 (1.55%) PKI
9 13 (1.44%) Linux Command Line
10 12 (1.33%) Data Protection Act
10 12 (1.33%) Synthetic Data
11 11 (1.22%) Data Structures
12 9 (1.00%) Enterprise Software
13 8 (0.88%) Distributed Computing
13 8 (0.88%) Legacy Applications
13 8 (0.88%) Management Information System
13 8 (0.88%) Security Posture
Operating Systems
1 192 (21.24%) Linux
2 59 (6.53%) Windows
3 28 (3.10%) Unix
4 23 (2.54%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 20 (2.21%) Windows Server
6 11 (1.22%) CentOS
7 10 (1.11%) Android
7 10 (1.11%) Apple iOS
8 9 (1.00%) VMS
9 4 (0.44%) Solaris
10 3 (0.33%) Windows Server 2016
10 3 (0.33%) Windows Server 2019
11 2 (0.22%) Ubuntu
11 2 (0.22%) zOS
12 1 (0.11%) Oracle Linux
12 1 (0.11%) Windows 10
Processes & Methodologies
1 726 (80.31%) CI/CD
2 575 (63.61%) DevOps
3 381 (42.15%) Infrastructure as Code
4 350 (38.72%) Containerisation
5 338 (37.39%) Agile
6 248 (27.43%) Test Automation
7 210 (23.23%) Microservices
8 164 (18.14%) Problem-Solving
9 152 (16.81%) Observability
10 141 (15.60%) Software Engineering
11 110 (12.17%) Scrum
12 100 (11.06%) Infrastructure Automation
13 91 (10.07%) Continuous Improvement
14 86 (9.51%) DevSecOps
14 86 (9.51%) Migration
15 82 (9.07%) Analytics
15 82 (9.07%) Computer Science
16 80 (8.85%) High Availability
17 72 (7.96%) Data Pipeline
18 71 (7.85%) Continuous Integration
Programming Languages
1 436 (48.23%) Python
2 250 (27.65%) Java
3 178 (19.69%) Bash
4 139 (15.38%) SQL
5 110 (12.17%) JavaScript
6 101 (11.17%) Go
7 84 (9.29%) PowerShell
8 77 (8.52%) TypeScript
9 45 (4.98%) Shell Script
10 28 (3.10%) C#
11 15 (1.66%) C++
11 15 (1.66%) Kotlin
11 15 (1.66%) Ruby
12 14 (1.55%) PL/SQL
13 12 (1.33%) Perl
14 10 (1.11%) Rust
15 9 (1.00%) C
15 9 (1.00%) Groovy
16 7 (0.77%) Korn
17 6 (0.66%) Bicep
Qualifications
1 305 (33.74%) Security Cleared
2 242 (26.77%) SC Cleared
3 73 (8.08%) Degree
4 66 (7.30%) Computer Science Degree
5 51 (5.64%) AWS Certification
6 39 (4.31%) BPSS Clearance
7 38 (4.20%) Master's Degree
8 37 (4.09%) DV Cleared
9 31 (3.43%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
10 14 (1.55%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
11 12 (1.33%) CISSP
12 11 (1.22%) Azure Certification
13 10 (1.11%) CISM
13 10 (1.11%) OCA
13 10 (1.11%) Oracle Certification
14 6 (0.66%) AWS Certified Developer
15 5 (0.55%) Microsoft Certification
16 3 (0.33%) AWS Certified SysOps Administrator
16 3 (0.33%) CCNP
16 3 (0.33%) Cisco Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 128 (14.16%) QA
2 44 (4.87%) Accessibility
3 22 (2.43%) GDPR
4 20 (2.21%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 18 (1.99%) WCAG
6 17 (1.88%) NIST
7 16 (1.77%) NCSC
8 13 (1.44%) SLA
9 12 (1.33%) Data Quality
9 12 (1.33%) Sarbanes-Oxley
10 7 (0.77%) PCI DSS
11 4 (0.44%) Def Stans
12 2 (0.22%) HL7
12 2 (0.22%) SOC 2
13 1 (0.11%) EU AI Act
13 1 (0.11%) IEC 61508
13 1 (0.11%) ISO 20022
13 1 (0.11%) JSP 440
13 1 (0.11%) MiFID
13 1 (0.11%) Software Quality Assurance
System Software
1 409 (45.24%) Docker
2 27 (2.99%) Active Directory
3 18 (1.99%) VMware Infrastructure
4 10 (1.11%) Virtual Machines
5 8 (0.88%) Virtual Servers
6 6 (0.66%) VMware NSX
6 6 (0.66%) vSphere
7 2 (0.22%) HDFS
8 1 (0.11%) Apache ZooKeeper
8 1 (0.11%) Hyper-V
8 1 (0.11%) KVM
8 1 (0.11%) Squid
Systems Management
1 484 (53.54%) Kubernetes
2 453 (50.11%) Terraform
3 256 (28.32%) Ansible
4 237 (26.22%) Grafana
5 190 (21.02%) Prometheus
6 47 (5.20%) Argo
7 23 (2.54%) Istio
8 22 (2.43%) Puppet
9 19 (2.10%) Podman
10 17 (1.88%) Progress Chef
11 15 (1.66%) Packer
12 13 (1.44%) Fluentd
12 13 (1.44%) Kibana
13 10 (1.11%) linkerd
13 10 (1.11%) NetBackup
14 7 (0.77%) Karpenter
14 7 (0.77%) Rancher
14 7 (0.77%) Sysdig
15 6 (0.66%) Jamf Pro
15 6 (0.66%) Red Hat Satellite
Vendors
1 114 (12.61%) Splunk
2 77 (8.52%) Microsoft
3 65 (7.19%) Oracle
4 49 (5.42%) Google
5 48 (5.31%) Red Hat
6 39 (4.31%) VMware
7 28 (3.10%) Dynatrace
8 23 (2.54%) Databricks
9 22 (2.43%) F5
10 21 (2.32%) Palo Alto
11 20 (2.21%) CheckPoint
12 18 (1.99%) Atlassian
12 18 (1.99%) ServiceNow
13 16 (1.77%) Cisco
14 15 (1.66%) IBM
15 13 (1.44%) Cribl.io
16 11 (1.22%) Commvault
16 11 (1.22%) Veritas
17 8 (0.88%) MuleSoft
17 8 (0.88%) Veracode