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

6 months to
21 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 145 138 176
Rank change year-on-year -7 +38 +68
Contract jobs citing GitLab 1,075 690 543
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 1.98% 2.11% 1.41%
As % of the Development Applications category 17.16% 13.90% 10.66%
Number of daily rates quoted 754 460 370
10th Percentile £381 £375 £355
25th Percentile £425 £450 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £543
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% -3.36% -1.23%
75th Percentile £594 £605 £650
90th Percentile £688 £693 £700
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £518
% change year-on-year - -3.38% -4.17%
Number of hourly rates quoted 29 9 7
10th Percentile - £59.75 £70.40
25th Percentile £65.00 £61.75 -
Median hourly rate £70.00 £67.00 £74.00
Median % change year-on-year +4.48% -9.46% +86.87%
75th Percentile £75.00 - £74.72
90th Percentile £95.00 £68.10 £80.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £68.22 £67.00 £74.00
% change year-on-year +1.81% -9.46% +23.33%

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 6,264 4,965 5,092
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 11.53% 15.20% 13.26%
Number of daily rates quoted 4,002 3,337 3,251
10th Percentile £355 £325 £350
25th Percentile £414 £406 £420
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year - -4.76% -4.55%
75th Percentile £600 £600 £625
90th Percentile £694 £688 £719
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £475 £500
% change year-on-year - -5.00% -1.96%
Number of hourly rates quoted 267 111 176
10th Percentile £24.11 £29.00 £28.62
25th Percentile £51.25 £50.00 £51.19
Median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £65.00
75th Percentile £70.00 £73.13 £70.00
90th Percentile £76.00 £80.00 £73.88
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £65.00

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 21 September 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 21 September 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 21 September 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 -5 906 £500 -4.76% 855
UK excluding London -8 519 £500 - 489
London +8 386 £513 -3.30% 422
Work from Home +8 373 £492 -7.06% 398
North of England -39 180 £475 -1.04% 149
Midlands +36 142 £473 -12.50% 49
West Midlands +37 133 £475 -13.64% 41
South East -24 84 £550 +9.89% 67
North East +1 77 £413 -13.61% 30
North West -33 75 £569 +21.84% 85
South West -12 63 £550 -8.33% 104
Yorkshire -61 39 £550 +10.00% 35
East of England -20 38 £463 -5.13% 50
Scotland -27 25 £424 +0.95% 46
East Midlands -11 9 £405 +50.00% 8
Wales -12 2 - - 8
Northern Ireland +1 1 - - 18

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
1 101 (9.40%) Confluence
2 78 (7.26%) Apache Spark
3 73 (6.79%) Apache Airflow
4 58 (5.40%) Apache
5 35 (3.26%) Jupyter
6 30 (2.79%) SAS
7 12 (1.12%) Camunda
8 6 (0.56%) nginx
9 5 (0.47%) OpenStack
9 5 (0.47%) Palantir Foundry
10 4 (0.37%) CICS
11 3 (0.28%) Oracle Workflow
12 2 (0.19%) CMS
12 2 (0.19%) PowerExchange
12 2 (0.19%) Traefik
12 2 (0.19%) WebSphere
13 1 (0.093%) Oracle HTTP Server
13 1 (0.093%) SharePoint
13 1 (0.093%) WebSphere Portal
13 1 (0.093%) WordPress
Applications
1 4 (0.37%) Trello
2 1 (0.093%) Adobe XD
2 1 (0.093%) Chatbot
2 1 (0.093%) Sketch
Business Applications
1 2 (0.19%) Payment Gateway
2 1 (0.093%) SDL Web 8
Cloud Services
1 707 (65.77%) AWS
2 367 (34.14%) Azure
3 348 (32.37%) GitHub
4 243 (22.60%) GitHub Actions
5 175 (16.28%) Azure DevOps
6 170 (15.81%) GCP
7 143 (13.30%) Amazon S3
8 138 (12.84%) Serverless
9 132 (12.28%) Amazon CloudWatch
10 131 (12.19%) Amazon EKS
11 128 (11.91%) AWS Lambda
12 105 (9.77%) Amazon EC2
13 77 (7.16%) AWS CloudFormation
14 67 (6.23%) Amazon ECS
14 67 (6.23%) Virtual Private Cloud
15 57 (5.30%) OpenShift
16 54 (5.02%) Amazon EMR
17 46 (4.28%) Amazon SQS
18 37 (3.44%) Google Kubernetes Engine
19 36 (3.35%) OCI
Communications & Networking
1 46 (4.28%) Firewall
2 37 (3.44%) DNS
3 29 (2.70%) BGP
3 29 (2.70%) Ethernet VPN
3 29 (2.70%) Network Security
3 29 (2.70%) VXLAN
4 26 (2.42%) TCP/IP
5 23 (2.14%) Wi-Fi
6 22 (2.05%) WAN
7 21 (1.95%) SD-WAN
8 20 (1.86%) OSPF
9 19 (1.77%) BIG-IP
9 19 (1.77%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
10 12 (1.12%) HTTP
10 12 (1.12%) VPN
11 11 (1.02%) WLAN
12 10 (0.93%) 5G
12 10 (0.93%) NX-OS
13 9 (0.84%) 4G
13 9 (0.84%) SSL
Database & Business Intelligence
1 98 (9.12%) PostgreSQL
2 89 (8.28%) MongoDB
3 56 (5.21%) Amazon Athena
4 55 (5.12%) Relational Database
5 51 (4.74%) Data Warehouse
6 50 (4.65%) Amazon RDS
7 47 (4.37%) NoSQL
8 45 (4.19%) Amazon Redshift
9 42 (3.91%) DynamoDB
10 41 (3.81%) Data Lake
11 37 (3.44%) SQL Server
12 36 (3.35%) Oracle Database
13 35 (3.26%) Redis
14 33 (3.07%) Big Data
14 33 (3.07%) MySQL
14 33 (3.07%) Power BI
15 30 (2.79%) Pentaho
16 27 (2.51%) RDBMS
17 15 (1.40%) BigQuery
17 15 (1.40%) Elasticsearch
Development Applications
1 424 (39.44%) Jenkins
2 262 (24.37%) Git
3 145 (13.49%) JIRA
4 89 (8.28%) Selenium
5 84 (7.81%) JUnit
6 64 (5.95%) SonarQube
7 63 (5.86%) Cucumber
8 54 (5.02%) Maven
9 41 (3.81%) Mockito
10 40 (3.72%) Gradle
11 39 (3.63%) Gatling
12 36 (3.35%) Bitbucket
13 33 (3.07%) REST Assured
14 30 (2.79%) Artifactory
14 30 (2.79%) JMeter
15 27 (2.51%) Sonatype Nexus
16 23 (2.14%) Postman
17 18 (1.67%) WebDriver
18 17 (1.58%) Cypress.io
19 16 (1.49%) Snyk
General
1 208 (19.35%) Social Skills
2 201 (18.70%) Public Sector
3 108 (10.05%) Finance
4 72 (6.70%) Analytical Skills
5 67 (6.23%) Banking
6 32 (2.98%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 23 (2.14%) Military
8 18 (1.67%) Telecoms
9 16 (1.49%) Documentation Skills
10 14 (1.30%) Law
11 11 (1.02%) Aerospace
11 11 (1.02%) Legal
12 7 (0.65%) Publishing
13 6 (0.56%) Back Office
13 6 (0.56%) Investment Banking
13 6 (0.56%) Police
14 4 (0.37%) Local Government
14 4 (0.37%) Marketing
14 4 (0.37%) Retail
15 3 (0.28%) Front Office
Job Titles
1 239 (22.23%) DevOps Engineer
2 190 (17.67%) Developer
3 182 (16.93%) Senior
4 125 (11.63%) AWS Engineer
5 97 (9.02%) Data Engineer
6 79 (7.35%) AWS DevOps
7 72 (6.70%) AWS DevOps Engineer
8 71 (6.60%) Lead
9 60 (5.58%) Java Developer
10 55 (5.12%) Cloud Engineer
11 51 (4.74%) Software Engineer
12 49 (4.56%) Infrastructure Engineer
13 47 (4.37%) Platform Engineer
13 47 (4.37%) Test Engineer
14 46 (4.28%) Architect
15 45 (4.19%) Software Developer
16 36 (3.35%) Full-Stack Developer
17 31 (2.88%) Java Engineer
18 30 (2.79%) Azure Engineer
18 30 (2.79%) Senior DevOps
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 526 (48.93%) Terraform
2 162 (15.07%) Kafka
3 146 (13.58%) Spring
4 131 (12.19%) Spring Boot
5 125 (11.63%) REST
6 76 (7.07%) React
7 75 (6.98%) RESTful
8 73 (6.79%) Playwright
9 55 (5.12%) RabbitMQ
10 53 (4.93%) JSON
10 53 (4.93%) Node.js
10 53 (4.93%) PySpark
11 41 (3.81%) HTML
12 36 (3.35%) CSS
13 34 (3.16%) JPA
13 34 (3.16%) OAuth
14 33 (3.07%) YAML
15 32 (2.98%) OpenAPI
16 30 (2.79%) Keycloak
16 30 (2.79%) pytest
Miscellaneous
1 214 (19.91%) Cloud Native
2 58 (5.40%) Distributed Systems
3 52 (4.84%) Product Ownership
4 38 (3.53%) Data Centre
5 36 (3.35%) Hybrid Cloud
6 31 (2.88%) Data Structures
6 31 (2.88%) Onboarding
7 28 (2.60%) Enterprise Software
8 21 (1.95%) AI Agents
9 17 (1.58%) Algorithms
10 16 (1.49%) PKI
11 14 (1.30%) Distributed Architecture
11 14 (1.30%) Legacy Systems
11 14 (1.30%) Public Cloud
12 13 (1.21%) Mainframe
13 12 (1.12%) Private Cloud
14 10 (0.93%) Replication
14 10 (0.93%) Security Posture
15 9 (0.84%) Greenfield Project
16 8 (0.74%) Linux Command Line
Operating Systems
1 216 (20.09%) Linux
2 52 (4.84%) Unix
3 49 (4.56%) Windows
4 44 (4.09%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 17 (1.58%) CentOS
6 15 (1.40%) Ubuntu
7 12 (1.12%) AIX
7 12 (1.12%) VMS
8 11 (1.02%) zOS
9 10 (0.93%) Windows Server
10 2 (0.19%) Debian
10 2 (0.19%) Rocky
10 2 (0.19%) Windows Server 2016
11 1 (0.093%) Amazon Linux
11 1 (0.093%) Android
11 1 (0.093%) Apple iOS
11 1 (0.093%) Oracle Linux
11 1 (0.093%) SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 908 (84.47%) CI/CD
2 638 (59.35%) DevOps
3 498 (46.33%) Infrastructure as Code
4 433 (40.28%) Agile
5 366 (34.05%) Containerisation
6 327 (30.42%) Test Automation
7 215 (20.00%) Microservices
8 196 (18.23%) Observability
9 185 (17.21%) Scrum
10 175 (16.28%) Software Engineering
11 159 (14.79%) Continuous Improvement
12 154 (14.33%) Platform Engineering
13 147 (13.67%) AI
14 143 (13.30%) Problem-Solving
15 113 (10.51%) Mentoring
16 112 (10.42%) Migration
17 109 (10.14%) Deployment Automation
17 109 (10.14%) DevSecOps
18 106 (9.86%) Event-Driven
19 105 (9.77%) ETL
Programming Languages
1 469 (43.63%) Python
2 270 (25.12%) Java
3 249 (23.16%) SQL
4 185 (17.21%) Bash
5 99 (9.21%) JavaScript
6 88 (8.19%) PowerShell
7 66 (6.14%) C#
8 64 (5.95%) TypeScript
9 47 (4.37%) Go
10 42 (3.91%) Shell Script
11 21 (1.95%) PL/SQL
12 19 (1.77%) Bicep
13 14 (1.30%) C++
13 14 (1.30%) Groovy
14 12 (1.12%) Scala
15 9 (0.84%) Kotlin
16 7 (0.65%) R
17 6 (0.56%) Kusto Query Language
18 5 (0.47%) Cypher
18 5 (0.47%) Search Processing Language
Qualifications
1 517 (48.09%) Security Cleared
2 416 (38.70%) SC Cleared
3 86 (8.00%) BPSS Clearance
4 79 (7.35%) DV Cleared
5 53 (4.93%) Degree
6 50 (4.65%) AWS Certification
7 39 (3.63%) Computer Science Degree
8 16 (1.49%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
8 16 (1.49%) Azure Certification
8 16 (1.49%) CISSP
9 15 (1.40%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
9 15 (1.40%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
10 13 (1.21%) ISTQB
11 9 (0.84%) Cisco Certification
12 8 (0.74%) SAFe Agilist
13 7 (0.65%) (ISC)2 CCSP
14 5 (0.47%) CSSLP
14 5 (0.47%) GCFA
14 5 (0.47%) GCIH
14 5 (0.47%) Microsoft Certified Professional
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 137 (12.74%) QA
2 60 (5.58%) Accessibility
3 45 (4.19%) Data Quality
4 26 (2.42%) WCAG
5 18 (1.67%) NIST
6 14 (1.30%) GDPR
7 13 (1.21%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 11 (1.02%) NCSC
9 10 (0.93%) PCI DSS
10 8 (0.74%) Sarbanes-Oxley
11 7 (0.65%) SLA
12 6 (0.56%) ISO 20022
13 5 (0.47%) FATCA
14 3 (0.28%) Cyber Essentials
14 3 (0.28%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
15 1 (0.093%) Disclosure Scotland
15 1 (0.093%) GRC
15 1 (0.093%) JSP 440
15 1 (0.093%) OpenSCAP
15 1 (0.093%) Software Quality Assurance
System Software
1 448 (41.67%) Docker
2 26 (2.42%) VMware Infrastructure
3 24 (2.23%) Active Directory
4 13 (1.21%) Oracle RAC
5 10 (0.93%) Virtual Machines
6 8 (0.74%) VMware NSX
7 5 (0.47%) Squid
8 4 (0.37%) HDFS
9 3 (0.28%) Virtual Desktop
9 3 (0.28%) VirtualBox
10 2 (0.19%) Apache ZooKeeper
10 2 (0.19%) Firmware
10 2 (0.19%) Hyper-V
10 2 (0.19%) iptables
10 2 (0.19%) Slurm Workload Manager
11 1 (0.093%) VMware ESXi
11 1 (0.093%) vSphere
Systems Management
1 490 (45.58%) Kubernetes
2 258 (24.00%) Ansible
3 178 (16.56%) Grafana
4 154 (14.33%) Prometheus
5 49 (4.56%) Argo
6 38 (3.53%) Puppet
7 27 (2.51%) Progress Chef
8 24 (2.23%) Kibana
9 15 (1.40%) Istio
10 14 (1.30%) Packer
11 13 (1.21%) Data Guard
11 13 (1.21%) Oracle RMAN
12 10 (0.93%) Podman
12 10 (0.93%) Single Sign-On
13 9 (0.84%) Cilium
13 9 (0.84%) Kustomize
14 5 (0.47%) CASB
14 5 (0.47%) HP Fortify
14 5 (0.47%) Red Hat Satellite
15 4 (0.37%) Salt
Vendors
1 124 (11.53%) Oracle
2 74 (6.88%) Google
3 72 (6.70%) Microsoft
4 59 (5.49%) Splunk
5 55 (5.12%) Talend
6 48 (4.47%) Informatica
7 46 (4.28%) VMware
8 38 (3.53%) Dynatrace
9 35 (3.26%) Databricks
10 26 (2.42%) Denodo
10 26 (2.42%) Red Hat
11 24 (2.23%) ServiceNow
12 23 (2.14%) IBM
13 21 (1.95%) Palo Alto
14 20 (1.86%) F5
15 18 (1.67%) Arista
15 18 (1.67%) Aruba
15 18 (1.67%) Trend Micro
16 14 (1.30%) Cisco
17 13 (1.21%) Veracode