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

6 months to
31 Jan 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 110 143 238
Rank change year-on-year +33 +95 -50
Contract jobs citing GitLab 951 589 459
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.45% 1.87% 1.03%
As % of the Development Applications category 17.21% 13.76% 8.42%
Number of daily rates quoted 715 393 345
10th Percentile £380 £364 £406
25th Percentile £425 £450 £475
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £551 £560
Median % change year-on-year -9.17% -1.70% -6.67%
75th Percentile £575 £663 £645
90th Percentile £673 £734 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £525
% change year-on-year - -4.76% -2.78%
Number of hourly rates quoted 26 4 2
10th Percentile £39.53 £64.33 £41.88
25th Percentile £52.50 £70.83 £44.69
Median hourly rate £56.25 £79.72 £50.00
Median % change year-on-year -29.44% +59.44% -23.08%
75th Percentile £65.00 £89.38 £55.94
90th Percentile £82.50 £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 5,525 4,281 5,451
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 14.26% 13.62% 12.18%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,788 2,685 3,811
10th Percentile £344 £337 £363
25th Percentile £406 £410 £431
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year - -4.76% -4.55%
75th Percentile £588 £625 £636
90th Percentile £696 £725 £715
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £480 £500
% change year-on-year -1.04% -4.00% -4.76%
Number of hourly rates quoted 138 68 212
10th Percentile £39.00 £26.43 £40.13
25th Percentile £52.50 £47.75 £49.62
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 £75.57
90th Percentile £85.00 £76.63 £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 31 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 31 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 31 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 +15 784 £513 -10.48% 233
UK excluding London +52 488 £500 - 197
London -6 313 £525 -12.50% 76
Work from Home +21 255 £485 -11.82% 141
North of England +7 241 £488 -6.25% 48
North West +7 115 £433 -13.40% 31
Yorkshire +9 95 £513 -10.87% 15
Midlands +26 93 £525 +8.70% 16
West Midlands +22 85 £525 +7.25% 10
South East -21 51 £500 -4.76% 73
South West +13 49 £525 -22.08% 23
Scotland +20 40 £447 +4.26% 18
North East -8 38 £488 -7.14% 2
East of England +1 22 £478 +1.97% 15
East Midlands -16 8 £400 +20.57% 6
Northern Ireland +4 6 - -
Wales 0 5 £435 -16.35% 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 63 (6.62%) Confluence
2 33 (3.47%) Apache Airflow
3 32 (3.36%) SAS
4 21 (2.21%) Apache
5 19 (2.00%) OpenStack
6 17 (1.79%) nginx
7 16 (1.68%) Apache Spark
8 7 (0.74%) Appian
9 4 (0.42%) Microsoft Exchange
9 4 (0.42%) Oracle Workflow
10 3 (0.32%) CMS
10 3 (0.32%) Ethereum
10 3 (0.32%) Hyperledger
11 2 (0.21%) SharePoint
12 1 (0.11%) Adobe Experience Manager
12 1 (0.11%) Cloud Foundry
12 1 (0.11%) Documentum
12 1 (0.11%) FileNet
12 1 (0.11%) Jupyter
12 1 (0.11%) Luigi
Applications
1 2 (0.21%) Adobe XD
2 1 (0.11%) Microsoft Excel
2 1 (0.11%) Oracle Smart View
Business Applications
1 3 (0.32%) Oracle Applications
1 3 (0.32%) SAP BRIM
2 2 (0.21%) 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
1 581 (61.09%) AWS
2 260 (27.34%) GitHub
3 256 (26.92%) Azure
4 177 (18.61%) GitHub Actions
5 170 (17.88%) GCP
6 161 (16.93%) Serverless
7 129 (13.56%) Amazon S3
8 120 (12.62%) Amazon EKS
9 119 (12.51%) Amazon CloudWatch
10 118 (12.41%) AWS CloudFormation
11 116 (12.20%) Amazon EC2
11 116 (12.20%) AWS Lambda
12 88 (9.25%) OpenShift
13 87 (9.15%) Azure DevOps
14 80 (8.41%) Virtual Private Cloud
15 79 (8.31%) Amazon ECS
16 35 (3.68%) Azure AKS
17 31 (3.26%) Datadog
18 24 (2.52%) Route 53
19 22 (2.31%) Amazon SQS
Communications & Networking
1 61 (6.41%) Firewall
2 45 (4.73%) DNS
3 42 (4.42%) VPN
4 32 (3.36%) TCP/IP
5 25 (2.63%) Network Security
6 17 (1.79%) SSL
7 7 (0.74%) Reverse Proxy
8 6 (0.63%) Kerberos
8 6 (0.63%) WAN
9 5 (0.53%) Multicast
9 5 (0.53%) SD-WAN
10 4 (0.42%) BGP
10 4 (0.42%) HTTP
10 4 (0.42%) SAN
11 3 (0.32%) DHCP
11 3 (0.32%) Ethernet VPN
11 3 (0.32%) FTP
11 3 (0.32%) Software-Defined Networking
11 3 (0.32%) VSAN
11 3 (0.32%) VXLAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 95 (9.99%) PostgreSQL
2 81 (8.52%) MongoDB
3 77 (8.10%) NoSQL
4 73 (7.68%) Amazon RDS
5 31 (3.26%) Data Lake
6 29 (3.05%) Relational Database
7 28 (2.94%) DynamoDB
8 26 (2.73%) MySQL
9 24 (2.52%) Redis
10 23 (2.42%) Amazon Athena
11 20 (2.10%) Big Data
12 19 (2.00%) SQL Server
13 16 (1.68%) Oracle Database
14 15 (1.58%) Data Warehouse
15 14 (1.47%) Apache Cassandra
16 12 (1.26%) Power BI
17 11 (1.16%) SAS Enterprise Guide
18 10 (1.05%) BigQuery
18 10 (1.05%) DocumentDB
18 10 (1.05%) Elasticsearch
Development Applications
1 458 (48.16%) Jenkins
2 216 (22.71%) Git
3 139 (14.62%) JIRA
4 94 (9.88%) Selenium
5 67 (7.05%) Cucumber
6 63 (6.62%) JUnit
7 47 (4.94%) Postman
8 37 (3.89%) SonarQube
9 35 (3.68%) Maven
10 34 (3.58%) REST Assured
11 31 (3.26%) Artifactory
11 31 (3.26%) JMeter
12 30 (3.15%) Bitbucket
12 30 (3.15%) Cypress.io
13 28 (2.94%) CircleCI
13 28 (2.94%) Gradle
13 28 (2.94%) Sonatype Nexus
14 27 (2.84%) Gatling
15 22 (2.31%) Liquibase
16 19 (2.00%) Mockito
General
1 231 (24.29%) Social Skills
2 154 (16.19%) Finance
3 140 (14.72%) Public Sector
4 102 (10.73%) Banking
5 70 (7.36%) Analytical Skills
6 25 (2.63%) Financial Institution
7 22 (2.31%) Documentation Skills
8 18 (1.89%) Telecoms
9 14 (1.47%) Military
10 11 (1.16%) Aerospace
11 10 (1.05%) Investment Banking
11 10 (1.05%) Retail
12 8 (0.84%) Retail Banking
13 7 (0.74%) Games
13 7 (0.74%) Influencing Skills
14 5 (0.53%) Inclusion and Diversity
15 4 (0.42%) Presentation Skills
16 3 (0.32%) Corporate Banking
16 3 (0.32%) Law
16 3 (0.32%) Marketing
Job Titles
1 231 (24.29%) DevOps Engineer
2 193 (20.29%) Developer
3 153 (16.09%) Senior
4 107 (11.25%) AWS Engineer
5 82 (8.62%) AWS DevOps
6 76 (7.99%) Lead
7 70 (7.36%) AWS DevOps Engineer
8 59 (6.20%) Java Developer
9 58 (6.10%) Software Engineer
10 48 (5.05%) Test Engineer
11 46 (4.84%) Cloud Engineer
12 45 (4.73%) Data Engineer
12 45 (4.73%) Senior DevOps
12 45 (4.73%) Senior DevOps Engineer
13 41 (4.31%) Architect
14 35 (3.68%) Senior Developer
15 34 (3.58%) Automation Engineer
16 33 (3.47%) Platform Engineer
17 29 (3.05%) Full-Stack Developer
17 29 (3.05%) GCP Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 152 (15.98%) REST
2 134 (14.09%) Kafka
3 122 (12.83%) Spring
4 114 (11.99%) Spring Boot
5 103 (10.83%) Elastic Stack
6 102 (10.73%) Node.js
6 102 (10.73%) RESTful
7 62 (6.52%) React
8 56 (5.89%) Playwright
9 35 (3.68%) HTML
10 34 (3.58%) OpenTelemetry
11 32 (3.36%) JSON
11 32 (3.36%) PySpark
11 32 (3.36%) RabbitMQ
12 31 (3.26%) OpenID
13 29 (3.05%) Jest
14 28 (2.94%) LDAP
14 28 (2.94%) pytest
14 28 (2.94%) YAML
15 24 (2.52%) CSS
Miscellaneous
1 145 (15.25%) Cloud Native
2 69 (7.26%) Distributed Systems
3 53 (5.57%) Product Ownership
4 47 (4.94%) Public Cloud
5 26 (2.73%) Onboarding
6 17 (1.79%) Private Cloud
7 15 (1.58%) Data Centre
7 15 (1.58%) Hybrid Cloud
8 13 (1.37%) Legacy Systems
9 12 (1.26%) Linux Command Line
9 12 (1.26%) PKI
10 9 (0.95%) Enterprise Software
10 9 (0.95%) Management Information System
10 9 (0.95%) Security Posture
10 9 (0.95%) Synthetic Data
11 8 (0.84%) Algorithms
12 7 (0.74%) Data Protection Act
12 7 (0.74%) Distributed Computing
12 7 (0.74%) Legacy Applications
12 7 (0.74%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 200 (21.03%) Linux
2 58 (6.10%) Windows
3 32 (3.36%) Unix
4 27 (2.84%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 16 (1.68%) Windows Server
6 11 (1.16%) CentOS
7 10 (1.05%) Android
7 10 (1.05%) Apple iOS
8 8 (0.84%) VMS
9 4 (0.42%) Ubuntu
10 3 (0.32%) Solaris
10 3 (0.32%) Windows Server 2016
10 3 (0.32%) Windows Server 2019
11 1 (0.11%) Debian
11 1 (0.11%) Rocky
11 1 (0.11%) Windows 10
11 1 (0.11%) zOS
Processes & Methodologies
1 764 (80.34%) CI/CD
2 586 (61.62%) DevOps
3 374 (39.33%) Infrastructure as Code
4 354 (37.22%) Containerisation
5 341 (35.86%) Agile
6 274 (28.81%) Test Automation
7 205 (21.56%) Microservices
8 176 (18.51%) Problem-Solving
9 162 (17.03%) Observability
10 138 (14.51%) Software Engineering
11 116 (12.20%) Scrum
12 108 (11.36%) Continuous Improvement
13 94 (9.88%) Analytics
14 85 (8.94%) DevSecOps
14 85 (8.94%) Infrastructure Automation
15 78 (8.20%) Platform Engineering
16 75 (7.89%) Migration
16 75 (7.89%) TDD
17 70 (7.36%) Data Pipeline
17 70 (7.36%) High Availability
Programming Languages
1 423 (44.48%) Python
2 287 (30.18%) Java
3 176 (18.51%) Bash
4 149 (15.67%) SQL
5 113 (11.88%) JavaScript
6 94 (9.88%) Go
7 85 (8.94%) TypeScript
8 80 (8.41%) PowerShell
9 49 (5.15%) Shell Script
10 21 (2.21%) C#
11 17 (1.79%) Ruby
12 16 (1.68%) Kotlin
13 14 (1.47%) PL/SQL
14 11 (1.16%) Perl
15 10 (1.05%) Rust
16 9 (0.95%) Groovy
17 8 (0.84%) C
17 8 (0.84%) C++
17 8 (0.84%) Scala
18 7 (0.74%) Korn
Qualifications
1 337 (35.44%) Security Cleared
2 270 (28.39%) SC Cleared
3 61 (6.41%) Degree
4 50 (5.26%) Computer Science Degree
5 42 (4.42%) BPSS Clearance
6 40 (4.21%) AWS Certification
7 34 (3.58%) DV Cleared
8 32 (3.36%) Master's Degree
9 20 (2.10%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
10 14 (1.47%) CISSP
11 13 (1.37%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
11 13 (1.37%) CISM
12 11 (1.16%) Oracle Certification
13 10 (1.05%) OCA
14 7 (0.74%) AWS Certified Developer
15 5 (0.53%) Azure Certification
16 4 (0.42%) Microsoft Certification
17 3 (0.32%) CCNP
17 3 (0.32%) Cisco Certification
17 3 (0.32%) ITIL Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 120 (12.62%) QA
2 53 (5.57%) Accessibility
3 22 (2.31%) GDPR
4 20 (2.10%) NIST
4 20 (2.10%) WCAG
5 17 (1.79%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 14 (1.47%) Data Quality
6 14 (1.47%) SLA
7 13 (1.37%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 12 (1.26%) NCSC
9 6 (0.63%) PCI DSS
10 4 (0.42%) Def Stans
11 2 (0.21%) HL7
12 1 (0.11%) Disclosure Scotland
12 1 (0.11%) IEC 61508
12 1 (0.11%) ISO 20022
12 1 (0.11%) JSP 440
12 1 (0.11%) MiFID
12 1 (0.11%) MISRA
12 1 (0.11%) MISRA C
System Software
1 426 (44.79%) Docker
2 22 (2.31%) Active Directory
3 16 (1.68%) VMware Infrastructure
4 9 (0.95%) Virtual Machines
5 8 (0.84%) Virtual Servers
6 4 (0.42%) Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services
7 3 (0.32%) VMware NSX
7 3 (0.32%) vSphere
8 2 (0.21%) HDFS
8 2 (0.21%) Hyper-V
9 1 (0.11%) Squid
9 1 (0.11%) VMware ESXi
Systems Management
1 498 (52.37%) Kubernetes
2 445 (46.79%) Terraform
3 241 (25.34%) Grafana
4 234 (24.61%) Ansible
5 196 (20.61%) Prometheus
6 51 (5.36%) Argo
7 22 (2.31%) Istio
8 21 (2.21%) Podman
9 20 (2.10%) Puppet
10 18 (1.89%) Progress Chef
11 16 (1.68%) Kibana
12 12 (1.26%) Fluentd
12 12 (1.26%) Packer
13 10 (1.05%) NetBackup
14 9 (0.95%) Red Hat Satellite
15 8 (0.84%) Karpenter
15 8 (0.84%) linkerd
16 7 (0.74%) Check_MK
16 7 (0.74%) Rancher
16 7 (0.74%) Sysdig
Vendors
1 104 (10.94%) Splunk
2 76 (7.99%) Microsoft
3 69 (7.26%) Oracle
4 54 (5.68%) Red Hat
5 44 (4.63%) Google
6 38 (4.00%) VMware
7 26 (2.73%) ServiceNow
8 24 (2.52%) Databricks
9 19 (2.00%) Dynatrace
9 19 (2.00%) F5
10 17 (1.79%) CheckPoint
10 17 (1.79%) Palo Alto
11 16 (1.68%) Cisco
11 16 (1.68%) Veracode
12 14 (1.47%) Atlassian
12 14 (1.47%) Salesforce
13 13 (1.37%) Cribl.io
14 11 (1.16%) Veritas
15 10 (1.05%) Commvault
15 10 (1.05%) IBM