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

6 months to
24 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 136 131 174
Rank change year-on-year -5 +43 +75
Contract jobs citing GitLab 1,104 708 539
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.01% 2.15% 1.41%
As % of the Development Applications category 17.41% 14.05% 10.68%
Number of daily rates quoted 777 474 368
10th Percentile £375 £375 £356
25th Percentile £425 £450 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £543
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% -3.23% -1.36%
75th Percentile £594 £603 £650
90th Percentile £688 £698 £700
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £514
% change year-on-year - -2.68% -2.14%
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 6,342 5,038 5,047
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 11.55% 15.28% 13.24%
Number of daily rates quoted 4,051 3,391 3,202
10th Percentile £354 £325 £350
25th Percentile £415 £406 £419
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 268 109 176
10th Percentile £24.13 £28.88 £28.62
25th Percentile £51.25 £50.00 £51.19
Median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £65.00
75th Percentile £70.00 £71.50 £70.00
90th Percentile £76.00 £80.60 £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 24 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 24 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 24 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 +3 929 £500 -4.76% 716
UK excluding London -18 537 £500 - 424
London +9 391 £520 -2.58% 339
Work from Home -2 382 £492 -7.58% 325
North of England -32 185 £475 -2.56% 124
Midlands +40 151 £473 -12.50% 52
West Midlands +44 142 £475 -13.64% 43
South East -28 84 £550 +9.89% 65
North East -5 79 £413 -17.50% 29
North West -33 77 £569 +21.84% 73
South West -8 64 £550 -8.33% 86
Yorkshire -55 40 £550 +10.00% 22
East of England -22 39 £450 -7.69% 39
Scotland -24 27 £424 -3.91% 38
East Midlands -15 9 £405 +50.00% 9
Wales -12 2 - - 8
Northern Ireland 0 1 - - 13

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
1 104 (9.42%) Confluence
2 79 (7.16%) Apache Spark
3 74 (6.70%) Apache Airflow
4 58 (5.25%) Apache
5 35 (3.17%) Jupyter
6 30 (2.72%) SAS
7 12 (1.09%) Camunda
8 7 (0.63%) nginx
9 5 (0.45%) OpenStack
9 5 (0.45%) Palantir Foundry
10 4 (0.36%) CICS
11 3 (0.27%) Oracle Workflow
11 3 (0.27%) WebSphere
12 2 (0.18%) CMS
12 2 (0.18%) PowerExchange
12 2 (0.18%) Traefik
13 1 (0.091%) IBM HTTP Server
13 1 (0.091%) Oracle HTTP Server
13 1 (0.091%) SharePoint
13 1 (0.091%) WebSphere Application Server
Applications
1 4 (0.36%) Trello
2 1 (0.091%) Adobe XD
2 1 (0.091%) Chatbot
2 1 (0.091%) Sketch
Business Applications
1 2 (0.18%) Payment Gateway
2 1 (0.091%) SDL Web 8
Cloud Services
1 731 (66.21%) AWS
2 373 (33.79%) Azure
3 353 (31.97%) GitHub
4 244 (22.10%) GitHub Actions
5 176 (15.94%) Azure DevOps
6 173 (15.67%) GCP
7 147 (13.32%) Amazon S3
8 144 (13.04%) Serverless
9 140 (12.68%) Amazon CloudWatch
10 135 (12.23%) Amazon EKS
11 133 (12.05%) AWS Lambda
12 107 (9.69%) Amazon EC2
13 80 (7.25%) AWS CloudFormation
14 73 (6.61%) Amazon ECS
15 68 (6.16%) Virtual Private Cloud
16 58 (5.25%) OpenShift
17 54 (4.89%) Amazon EMR
18 52 (4.71%) Amazon SQS
19 37 (3.35%) Google Kubernetes Engine
20 36 (3.26%) Power Platform
Communications & Networking
1 48 (4.35%) Firewall
2 40 (3.62%) DNS
3 30 (2.72%) BGP
3 30 (2.72%) Ethernet VPN
3 30 (2.72%) Network Security
3 30 (2.72%) VXLAN
4 26 (2.36%) TCP/IP
5 24 (2.17%) Wi-Fi
6 22 (1.99%) WAN
7 21 (1.90%) SD-WAN
8 20 (1.81%) OSPF
9 19 (1.72%) BIG-IP
9 19 (1.72%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
10 13 (1.18%) VPN
11 12 (1.09%) HTTP
12 11 (1.00%) 5G
12 11 (1.00%) NX-OS
12 11 (1.00%) WLAN
13 10 (0.91%) 4G
13 10 (0.91%) SSL
Database & Business Intelligence
1 100 (9.06%) PostgreSQL
2 97 (8.79%) MongoDB
3 57 (5.16%) Amazon Athena
4 55 (4.98%) Relational Database
5 53 (4.80%) Data Warehouse
6 51 (4.62%) Amazon RDS
7 48 (4.35%) NoSQL
8 45 (4.08%) Amazon Redshift
9 43 (3.89%) Data Lake
10 42 (3.80%) DynamoDB
11 38 (3.44%) SQL Server
12 36 (3.26%) Oracle Database
12 36 (3.26%) Redis
13 35 (3.17%) MySQL
14 34 (3.08%) Power BI
15 33 (2.99%) Big Data
16 30 (2.72%) Pentaho
17 27 (2.45%) RDBMS
18 16 (1.45%) Elasticsearch
19 15 (1.36%) Apache Hive
Development Applications
1 431 (39.04%) Jenkins
2 278 (25.18%) Git
3 149 (13.50%) JIRA
4 94 (8.51%) Selenium
5 91 (8.24%) JUnit
6 67 (6.07%) Cucumber
7 65 (5.89%) SonarQube
8 57 (5.16%) Maven
9 44 (3.99%) Mockito
10 43 (3.89%) Gatling
11 40 (3.62%) Gradle
12 36 (3.26%) Bitbucket
13 33 (2.99%) REST Assured
14 31 (2.81%) Artifactory
15 30 (2.72%) JMeter
16 29 (2.63%) Sonatype Nexus
17 24 (2.17%) Postman
18 18 (1.63%) WebDriver
19 17 (1.54%) Cypress.io
20 16 (1.45%) Snyk
General
1 218 (19.75%) Social Skills
2 211 (19.11%) Public Sector
3 108 (9.78%) Finance
4 71 (6.43%) Analytical Skills
5 69 (6.25%) Banking
6 34 (3.08%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 23 (2.08%) Military
8 21 (1.90%) Telecoms
9 16 (1.45%) Documentation Skills
10 14 (1.27%) Law
11 11 (1.00%) Aerospace
11 11 (1.00%) Legal
12 8 (0.72%) Publishing
13 7 (0.63%) Investment Banking
14 6 (0.54%) Back Office
14 6 (0.54%) Police
15 4 (0.36%) Local Government
15 4 (0.36%) Marketing
15 4 (0.36%) Retail
16 3 (0.27%) Pharmaceutical
Job Titles
1 246 (22.28%) DevOps Engineer
2 196 (17.75%) Developer
3 186 (16.85%) Senior
4 128 (11.59%) AWS Engineer
5 96 (8.70%) Data Engineer
6 81 (7.34%) AWS DevOps
7 74 (6.70%) AWS DevOps Engineer
8 72 (6.52%) Lead
9 62 (5.62%) Java Developer
10 55 (4.98%) Cloud Engineer
11 52 (4.71%) Software Engineer
12 51 (4.62%) Test Engineer
13 50 (4.53%) Infrastructure Engineer
14 49 (4.44%) Architect
14 49 (4.44%) Platform Engineer
15 48 (4.35%) Software Developer
16 36 (3.26%) Full-Stack Developer
17 34 (3.08%) Java Engineer
18 32 (2.90%) Senior DevOps
19 31 (2.81%) Senior DevOps Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 538 (48.73%) Terraform
2 166 (15.04%) Kafka
3 153 (13.86%) Spring
4 134 (12.14%) Spring Boot
5 130 (11.78%) REST
6 79 (7.16%) Playwright
7 78 (7.07%) React
7 78 (7.07%) RESTful
8 57 (5.16%) JSON
8 57 (5.16%) RabbitMQ
9 56 (5.07%) Node.js
10 51 (4.62%) PySpark
11 41 (3.71%) HTML
12 37 (3.35%) JPA
13 36 (3.26%) CSS
13 36 (3.26%) OAuth
14 35 (3.17%) OpenAPI
15 33 (2.99%) YAML
16 31 (2.81%) Keycloak
16 31 (2.81%) pytest
Miscellaneous
1 221 (20.02%) Cloud Native
2 59 (5.34%) Distributed Systems
3 54 (4.89%) Product Ownership
4 39 (3.53%) Data Centre
5 36 (3.26%) Hybrid Cloud
6 33 (2.99%) Data Structures
7 32 (2.90%) Onboarding
8 31 (2.81%) Enterprise Software
9 20 (1.81%) AI Agents
10 17 (1.54%) Algorithms
10 17 (1.54%) PKI
11 15 (1.36%) Public Cloud
12 14 (1.27%) Distributed Architecture
12 14 (1.27%) Legacy Systems
13 13 (1.18%) Mainframe
14 12 (1.09%) Private Cloud
15 10 (0.91%) Replication
15 10 (0.91%) Security Posture
16 9 (0.82%) Greenfield Project
17 8 (0.72%) Linux Command Line
Operating Systems
1 223 (20.20%) Linux
2 53 (4.80%) Unix
3 51 (4.62%) Windows
4 45 (4.08%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 18 (1.63%) CentOS
6 15 (1.36%) Ubuntu
7 12 (1.09%) AIX
7 12 (1.09%) VMS
8 11 (1.00%) zOS
9 10 (0.91%) Windows Server
10 2 (0.18%) Debian
10 2 (0.18%) Rocky
10 2 (0.18%) Windows Server 2016
11 1 (0.091%) Amazon Linux
11 1 (0.091%) Android
11 1 (0.091%) Apple iOS
11 1 (0.091%) Oracle Linux
11 1 (0.091%) SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 930 (84.24%) CI/CD
2 650 (58.88%) DevOps
3 509 (46.11%) Infrastructure as Code
4 450 (40.76%) Agile
5 377 (34.15%) Containerisation
6 342 (30.98%) Test Automation
7 223 (20.20%) Microservices
8 204 (18.48%) Observability
9 194 (17.57%) Scrum
10 180 (16.30%) Software Engineering
11 167 (15.13%) Continuous Improvement
12 159 (14.40%) Platform Engineering
13 150 (13.59%) AI
14 144 (13.04%) Problem-Solving
15 116 (10.51%) Mentoring
16 115 (10.42%) Deployment Automation
17 114 (10.33%) Migration
18 111 (10.05%) DevSecOps
19 109 (9.87%) Event-Driven
20 108 (9.78%) Stakeholder Management
Programming Languages
1 479 (43.39%) Python
2 281 (25.45%) Java
3 253 (22.92%) SQL
4 190 (17.21%) Bash
5 104 (9.42%) JavaScript
6 89 (8.06%) PowerShell
7 68 (6.16%) C#
8 66 (5.98%) TypeScript
9 47 (4.26%) Go
10 45 (4.08%) Shell Script
11 21 (1.90%) PL/SQL
12 19 (1.72%) Bicep
13 15 (1.36%) C++
14 14 (1.27%) Groovy
14 14 (1.27%) Scala
15 9 (0.82%) Kotlin
16 7 (0.63%) R
17 6 (0.54%) Kusto Query Language
18 5 (0.45%) Cypher
18 5 (0.45%) Search Processing Language
Qualifications
1 525 (47.55%) Security Cleared
2 420 (38.04%) SC Cleared
3 97 (8.79%) BPSS Clearance
4 82 (7.43%) DV Cleared
5 53 (4.80%) AWS Certification
6 52 (4.71%) Degree
7 38 (3.44%) Computer Science Degree
8 16 (1.45%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
8 16 (1.45%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
8 16 (1.45%) CISSP
9 15 (1.36%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
9 15 (1.36%) Azure Certification
10 13 (1.18%) ISTQB
11 9 (0.82%) Cisco Certification
12 8 (0.72%) SAFe Agilist
13 7 (0.63%) (ISC)2 CCSP
14 6 (0.54%) Microsoft Certified Professional
15 5 (0.45%) GCFA
15 5 (0.45%) GCIH
16 4 (0.36%) CEH
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 145 (13.13%) QA
2 63 (5.71%) Accessibility
3 45 (4.08%) Data Quality
4 29 (2.63%) WCAG
5 19 (1.72%) NIST
6 15 (1.36%) GDPR
7 14 (1.27%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 11 (1.00%) NCSC
9 10 (0.91%) PCI DSS
10 8 (0.72%) Sarbanes-Oxley
10 8 (0.72%) SLA
11 6 (0.54%) ISO 20022
12 5 (0.45%) FATCA
13 3 (0.27%) Cyber Essentials
13 3 (0.27%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
14 1 (0.091%) GRC
14 1 (0.091%) MIL-STD-1553
14 1 (0.091%) NIST 800
14 1 (0.091%) OpenSCAP
14 1 (0.091%) Software Quality Assurance
System Software
1 465 (42.12%) Docker
2 27 (2.45%) VMware Infrastructure
3 25 (2.26%) Active Directory
4 13 (1.18%) Oracle RAC
5 11 (1.00%) Virtual Machines
6 9 (0.82%) VMware NSX
7 5 (0.45%) HDFS
7 5 (0.45%) Squid
8 3 (0.27%) Virtual Desktop
8 3 (0.27%) VirtualBox
9 2 (0.18%) Apache ZooKeeper
9 2 (0.18%) Firmware
9 2 (0.18%) Hyper-V
9 2 (0.18%) iptables
9 2 (0.18%) Slurm Workload Manager
10 1 (0.091%) VMware ESXi
10 1 (0.091%) vSphere
Systems Management
1 505 (45.74%) Kubernetes
2 263 (23.82%) Ansible
3 184 (16.67%) Grafana
4 160 (14.49%) Prometheus
5 51 (4.62%) Argo
6 39 (3.53%) Puppet
7 28 (2.54%) Kibana
8 27 (2.45%) Progress Chef
9 16 (1.45%) Istio
10 14 (1.27%) Packer
11 13 (1.18%) Data Guard
11 13 (1.18%) Oracle RMAN
12 11 (1.00%) Single Sign-On
13 10 (0.91%) Podman
14 9 (0.82%) Cilium
14 9 (0.82%) Kustomize
15 5 (0.45%) CASB
15 5 (0.45%) HP Fortify
15 5 (0.45%) Red Hat Satellite
16 4 (0.36%) Salt
Vendors
1 127 (11.50%) Oracle
2 75 (6.79%) Google
3 72 (6.52%) Microsoft
4 60 (5.43%) Splunk
5 55 (4.98%) Talend
6 47 (4.26%) Informatica
6 47 (4.26%) VMware
7 40 (3.62%) Dynatrace
8 33 (2.99%) Databricks
9 27 (2.45%) Red Hat
10 26 (2.36%) Denodo
10 26 (2.36%) ServiceNow
11 24 (2.17%) IBM
12 21 (1.90%) Palo Alto
13 20 (1.81%) F5
14 18 (1.63%) Arista
14 18 (1.63%) Aruba
14 18 (1.63%) Trend Micro
15 15 (1.36%) Cisco
16 13 (1.18%) Veracode