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

6 months to
18 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 140 137 178
Rank change year-on-year -3 +41 +64
Contract jobs citing GitLab 1,083 692 537
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 1.99% 2.10% 1.39%
As % of the Development Applications category 17.22% 13.85% 10.49%
Number of daily rates quoted 758 464 367
10th Percentile £381 £375 £354
25th Percentile £425 £445 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £544
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% -3.49% -1.09%
75th Percentile £590 £600 £650
90th Percentile £688 £688 £713
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £513
% change year-on-year - -2.44% -5.09%
Number of hourly rates quoted 29 9 6
10th Percentile - £59.75 £69.50
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 - £74.44
90th Percentile £95.00 £68.10 £74.72
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 6,291 4,998 5,118
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 11.56% 15.17% 13.28%
Number of daily rates quoted 4,019 3,359 3,268
10th Percentile £355 £325 £350
25th Percentile £413 £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 £723
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £475 £500
% change year-on-year - -5.00% -1.96%
Number of hourly rates quoted 261 111 176
10th Percentile £25.05 £30.75 £28.62
25th Percentile £51.25 £50.50 £51.19
Median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £65.00
75th Percentile £70.00 £73.75 £70.00
90th Percentile £76.00 £83.00 £72.81
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 18 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 18 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 18 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 -2 913 £500 -3.85% 697
UK excluding London -9 521 £500 - 414
London +11 391 £513 -3.30% 334
Work from Home +6 372 £489 -6.90% 309
North of England -36 181 £475 -1.04% 118
Midlands +33 140 £473 -12.50% 44
West Midlands +37 131 £475 -13.64% 37
South East -23 84 £550 +9.89% 71
North East 0 77 £413 -12.70% 28
North West -33 75 £569 +21.32% 61
South West -8 64 £550 -8.33% 82
East of England -20 40 £450 -7.69% 42
Yorkshire -54 40 £550 +10.00% 29
Scotland -22 25 £424 +0.95% 34
East Midlands -12 9 £405 +50.00% 7
Wales -12 2 - - 8
Northern Ireland -1 1 - - 16

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
1 100 (9.23%) Confluence
2 76 (7.02%) Apache Spark
3 72 (6.65%) Apache Airflow
4 58 (5.36%) Apache
5 34 (3.14%) Jupyter
6 30 (2.77%) SAS
7 12 (1.11%) Camunda
8 6 (0.55%) nginx
9 5 (0.46%) OpenStack
9 5 (0.46%) Palantir Foundry
10 4 (0.37%) CICS
11 3 (0.28%) Oracle Workflow
12 2 (0.18%) CMS
12 2 (0.18%) PowerExchange
12 2 (0.18%) SharePoint
12 2 (0.18%) Traefik
12 2 (0.18%) WebSphere
13 1 (0.092%) FactoryTalk
13 1 (0.092%) WebSphere Portal
13 1 (0.092%) WordPress
Applications
1 4 (0.37%) Trello
2 1 (0.092%) Adobe XD
2 1 (0.092%) Chatbot
2 1 (0.092%) Sketch
Business Applications
1 2 (0.18%) Payment Gateway
2 1 (0.092%) SDL Web 8
Cloud Services
1 710 (65.56%) AWS
2 373 (34.44%) Azure
3 358 (33.06%) GitHub
4 251 (23.18%) GitHub Actions
5 182 (16.81%) Azure DevOps
6 174 (16.07%) GCP
7 145 (13.39%) Amazon S3
8 140 (12.93%) Serverless
9 131 (12.10%) Amazon CloudWatch
10 130 (12.00%) Amazon EKS
10 130 (12.00%) AWS Lambda
11 103 (9.51%) Amazon EC2
12 78 (7.20%) AWS CloudFormation
13 67 (6.19%) Amazon ECS
13 67 (6.19%) Virtual Private Cloud
14 58 (5.36%) OpenShift
15 54 (4.99%) Amazon EMR
16 46 (4.25%) Amazon SQS
17 38 (3.51%) Google Kubernetes Engine
18 37 (3.42%) Datadog
Communications & Networking
1 46 (4.25%) Firewall
2 37 (3.42%) DNS
3 30 (2.77%) Network Security
4 29 (2.68%) BGP
4 29 (2.68%) Ethernet VPN
4 29 (2.68%) VXLAN
5 26 (2.40%) TCP/IP
6 23 (2.12%) Wi-Fi
7 22 (2.03%) WAN
8 21 (1.94%) SD-WAN
9 20 (1.85%) OSPF
10 19 (1.75%) BIG-IP
10 19 (1.75%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
11 13 (1.20%) VPN
12 12 (1.11%) HTTP
13 11 (1.02%) WLAN
14 10 (0.92%) 5G
14 10 (0.92%) NX-OS
15 9 (0.83%) 4G
15 9 (0.83%) SSL
Database & Business Intelligence
1 98 (9.05%) PostgreSQL
2 88 (8.13%) MongoDB
3 56 (5.17%) Relational Database
4 55 (5.08%) Amazon Athena
5 53 (4.89%) Data Warehouse
6 50 (4.62%) Amazon RDS
7 47 (4.34%) NoSQL
8 46 (4.25%) Amazon Redshift
9 41 (3.79%) DynamoDB
10 40 (3.69%) Data Lake
11 37 (3.42%) SQL Server
12 36 (3.32%) Oracle Database
13 35 (3.23%) Redis
14 34 (3.14%) MySQL
15 33 (3.05%) Big Data
15 33 (3.05%) Power BI
16 30 (2.77%) Pentaho
17 27 (2.49%) RDBMS
18 15 (1.39%) BigQuery
19 14 (1.29%) Elasticsearch
Development Applications
1 432 (39.89%) Jenkins
2 263 (24.28%) Git
3 144 (13.30%) JIRA
4 89 (8.22%) Selenium
5 81 (7.48%) JUnit
6 63 (5.82%) SonarQube
7 62 (5.72%) Cucumber
8 51 (4.71%) Maven
9 39 (3.60%) Gradle
10 38 (3.51%) Gatling
10 38 (3.51%) Mockito
11 35 (3.23%) Bitbucket
12 33 (3.05%) REST Assured
13 31 (2.86%) Artifactory
14 30 (2.77%) JMeter
15 26 (2.40%) Sonatype Nexus
16 23 (2.12%) Postman
17 19 (1.75%) WebDriver
18 17 (1.57%) Cypress.io
19 16 (1.48%) Snyk
General
1 209 (19.30%) Social Skills
2 201 (18.56%) Public Sector
3 110 (10.16%) Finance
4 71 (6.56%) Analytical Skills
5 68 (6.28%) Banking
6 30 (2.77%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 23 (2.12%) Military
8 18 (1.66%) Telecoms
9 16 (1.48%) Documentation Skills
10 14 (1.29%) Law
11 11 (1.02%) Aerospace
11 11 (1.02%) Legal
12 7 (0.65%) Publishing
13 6 (0.55%) Back Office
13 6 (0.55%) Investment Banking
13 6 (0.55%) Police
14 4 (0.37%) Local Government
14 4 (0.37%) Marketing
14 4 (0.37%) Retail
15 3 (0.28%) Pharmaceutical
Job Titles
1 246 (22.71%) DevOps Engineer
2 190 (17.54%) Developer
3 184 (16.99%) Senior
4 128 (11.82%) AWS Engineer
5 101 (9.33%) Data Engineer
6 80 (7.39%) AWS DevOps
7 73 (6.74%) AWS DevOps Engineer
8 71 (6.56%) Lead
9 60 (5.54%) Java Developer
10 56 (5.17%) Cloud Engineer
11 52 (4.80%) Software Engineer
12 49 (4.52%) Infrastructure Engineer
13 47 (4.34%) Platform Engineer
13 47 (4.34%) Test Engineer
14 45 (4.16%) Architect
15 44 (4.06%) Software Developer
16 36 (3.32%) Full-Stack Developer
17 30 (2.77%) Azure Engineer
17 30 (2.77%) Senior DevOps
18 29 (2.68%) Senior DevOps Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 533 (49.22%) Terraform
2 162 (14.96%) Kafka
3 143 (13.20%) Spring
4 129 (11.91%) Spring Boot
5 127 (11.73%) REST
6 77 (7.11%) RESTful
7 76 (7.02%) React
8 72 (6.65%) Playwright
9 55 (5.08%) Node.js
9 55 (5.08%) RabbitMQ
10 54 (4.99%) PySpark
11 53 (4.89%) JSON
12 41 (3.79%) HTML
13 36 (3.32%) CSS
13 36 (3.32%) YAML
14 34 (3.14%) OAuth
15 31 (2.86%) JPA
16 30 (2.77%) Keycloak
16 30 (2.77%) pytest
17 29 (2.68%) .NET
Miscellaneous
1 219 (20.22%) Cloud Native
2 59 (5.45%) Distributed Systems
3 53 (4.89%) Product Ownership
4 38 (3.51%) Data Centre
5 36 (3.32%) Hybrid Cloud
6 31 (2.86%) Data Structures
7 30 (2.77%) Onboarding
8 28 (2.59%) Enterprise Software
9 20 (1.85%) AI Agents
10 17 (1.57%) Algorithms
11 16 (1.48%) PKI
12 15 (1.39%) Public Cloud
13 14 (1.29%) Distributed Architecture
13 14 (1.29%) Legacy Systems
14 13 (1.20%) Mainframe
15 12 (1.11%) Private Cloud
16 10 (0.92%) Replication
16 10 (0.92%) Security Posture
17 9 (0.83%) Greenfield Project
18 8 (0.74%) Linux Command Line
Operating Systems
1 217 (20.04%) Linux
2 52 (4.80%) Unix
3 49 (4.52%) Windows
4 44 (4.06%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 17 (1.57%) CentOS
6 15 (1.39%) Ubuntu
7 12 (1.11%) AIX
7 12 (1.11%) VMS
8 11 (1.02%) zOS
9 10 (0.92%) Windows Server
10 2 (0.18%) Debian
10 2 (0.18%) Rocky
10 2 (0.18%) Windows Server 2016
11 1 (0.092%) Amazon Linux
11 1 (0.092%) Android
11 1 (0.092%) Apple iOS
11 1 (0.092%) Oracle Linux
11 1 (0.092%) SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 918 (84.76%) CI/CD
2 650 (60.02%) DevOps
3 504 (46.54%) Infrastructure as Code
4 434 (40.07%) Agile
5 371 (34.26%) Containerisation
6 328 (30.29%) Test Automation
7 218 (20.13%) Microservices
8 197 (18.19%) Observability
9 181 (16.71%) Scrum
10 177 (16.34%) Software Engineering
11 160 (14.77%) Continuous Improvement
12 159 (14.68%) Platform Engineering
13 145 (13.39%) Problem-Solving
14 144 (13.30%) AI
15 114 (10.53%) Mentoring
16 113 (10.43%) Migration
17 112 (10.34%) DevSecOps
18 108 (9.97%) Deployment Automation
18 108 (9.97%) ETL
19 107 (9.88%) Event-Driven
Programming Languages
1 480 (44.32%) Python
2 270 (24.93%) Java
3 251 (23.18%) SQL
4 191 (17.64%) Bash
5 100 (9.23%) JavaScript
6 92 (8.49%) PowerShell
7 68 (6.28%) C#
8 65 (6.00%) TypeScript
9 46 (4.25%) Go
10 41 (3.79%) Shell Script
11 22 (2.03%) Bicep
12 21 (1.94%) PL/SQL
13 14 (1.29%) C++
14 13 (1.20%) Groovy
15 11 (1.02%) Scala
16 9 (0.83%) Kotlin
17 7 (0.65%) R
18 6 (0.55%) Kusto Query Language
19 5 (0.46%) Cypher
19 5 (0.46%) Search Processing Language
Qualifications
1 523 (48.29%) Security Cleared
2 421 (38.87%) SC Cleared
3 85 (7.85%) BPSS Clearance
4 80 (7.39%) DV Cleared
5 52 (4.80%) Degree
6 51 (4.71%) AWS Certification
7 38 (3.51%) Computer Science Degree
8 20 (1.85%) Azure Certification
9 17 (1.57%) CISSP
10 16 (1.48%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
10 16 (1.48%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
11 15 (1.39%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
12 13 (1.20%) ISTQB
13 9 (0.83%) Cisco Certification
14 8 (0.74%) SAFe Agilist
15 7 (0.65%) (ISC)2 CCSP
16 6 (0.55%) CSSLP
17 5 (0.46%) CompTIA Security+
17 5 (0.46%) GCFA
17 5 (0.46%) GCIH
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 136 (12.56%) QA
2 59 (5.45%) Accessibility
3 48 (4.43%) Data Quality
4 25 (2.31%) WCAG
5 17 (1.57%) NIST
6 14 (1.29%) GDPR
7 13 (1.20%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 11 (1.02%) NCSC
9 10 (0.92%) PCI DSS
10 8 (0.74%) Sarbanes-Oxley
11 7 (0.65%) SLA
12 6 (0.55%) ISO 20022
13 5 (0.46%) FATCA
14 3 (0.28%) Cyber Essentials
14 3 (0.28%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
15 1 (0.092%) Disclosure Scotland
15 1 (0.092%) JSP 440
15 1 (0.092%) MIL-STD-1553
15 1 (0.092%) NIST 800
15 1 (0.092%) OpenSCAP
System Software
1 453 (41.83%) Docker
2 26 (2.40%) VMware Infrastructure
3 24 (2.22%) Active Directory
4 13 (1.20%) Oracle RAC
5 10 (0.92%) Virtual Machines
6 8 (0.74%) VMware NSX
7 5 (0.46%) Squid
8 4 (0.37%) HDFS
9 3 (0.28%) Virtual Desktop
9 3 (0.28%) VirtualBox
10 2 (0.18%) Apache ZooKeeper
10 2 (0.18%) Firmware
10 2 (0.18%) Hyper-V
10 2 (0.18%) iptables
10 2 (0.18%) Slurm Workload Manager
11 1 (0.092%) VMware ESXi
11 1 (0.092%) vSphere
Systems Management
1 498 (45.98%) Kubernetes
2 263 (24.28%) Ansible
3 180 (16.62%) Grafana
4 156 (14.40%) Prometheus
5 49 (4.52%) Argo
6 42 (3.88%) Puppet
7 31 (2.86%) Progress Chef
8 22 (2.03%) Kibana
9 15 (1.39%) Istio
10 14 (1.29%) Packer
11 13 (1.20%) Data Guard
11 13 (1.20%) Oracle RMAN
12 10 (0.92%) Podman
12 10 (0.92%) Single Sign-On
13 9 (0.83%) Cilium
13 9 (0.83%) Kustomize
14 5 (0.46%) CASB
14 5 (0.46%) Red Hat Satellite
15 4 (0.37%) Control-M
15 4 (0.37%) Salt
Vendors
1 123 (11.36%) Oracle
2 75 (6.93%) Google
3 72 (6.65%) Microsoft
4 58 (5.36%) Splunk
5 55 (5.08%) Talend
6 50 (4.62%) Informatica
7 46 (4.25%) VMware
8 40 (3.69%) Databricks
9 37 (3.42%) Dynatrace
10 27 (2.49%) Red Hat
11 26 (2.40%) Denodo
12 24 (2.22%) ServiceNow
13 23 (2.12%) IBM
14 21 (1.94%) Palo Alto
15 20 (1.85%) F5
16 18 (1.66%) Arista
16 18 (1.66%) Aruba
16 18 (1.66%) Trend Micro
17 14 (1.29%) Cisco
18 13 (1.20%) Veracode