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

6 months to
5 Oct 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 136 134 159
Rank change year-on-year -2 +25 +97
Contract jobs citing GitLab 1,116 713 561
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.05% 2.16% 1.48%
As % of the Development Applications category 17.72% 14.10% 11.10%
Number of daily rates quoted 779 486 375
10th Percentile £376 £371 £356
25th Percentile £425 £438 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £543
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% -3.23% -1.36%
75th Percentile £600 £600 £650
90th Percentile £688 £688 £725
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £500
% change year-on-year - - -4.76%
Number of hourly rates quoted 32 9 7
10th Percentile £61.37 £59.75 £70.40
25th Percentile £65.00 £61.75 -
Median hourly rate £66.61 £67.00 £74.00
Median % change year-on-year -0.59% -9.46% +86.87%
75th Percentile £75.00 - £74.72
90th Percentile £95.00 £68.10 £80.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £67.00 £74.00
% change year-on-year -2.99% -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 6,298 5,058 5,052
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 11.58% 15.32% 13.29%
Number of daily rates quoted 4,035 3,419 3,161
10th Percentile £351 £325 £350
25th Percentile £413 £405 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year - -4.76% -4.55%
75th Percentile £600 £600 £625
90th Percentile £688 £688 £723
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £475 £500
% change year-on-year - -5.00% -2.44%
Number of hourly rates quoted 262 110 174
10th Percentile £22.68 £21.93 £31.80
25th Percentile £51.19 £50.00 £51.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £65.00
75th Percentile £70.00 £69.25 £70.00
90th Percentile £76.00 £75.25 £73.93
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 5 October 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 5 October 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 5 October 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 -3 936 £513 -2.38% 924
UK excluding London -14 533 £500 - 732
London +11 402 £525 -1.64% 340
Work from Home +2 386 £498 -5.24% 636
North of England -30 185 £500 +5.15% 175
Midlands +44 155 £475 -12.84% 86
West Midlands +36 146 £475 -13.64% 57
North East +1 79 £413 -24.31% 43
North West -28 79 £569 +36.29% 95
South East -28 75 £540 +7.89% 117
South West -12 62 £550 -8.33% 115
East of England -16 38 £450 -7.69% 78
Yorkshire -59 38 £550 +10.00% 37
Scotland -10 30 £450 +1.98% 100
East Midlands -7 9 £405 +50.00% 29
Northern Ireland +1 2 £600 - 16
Wales -14 2 - - 48

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
1 106 (9.50%) Confluence
2 85 (7.62%) Apache Spark
3 71 (6.36%) Apache Airflow
4 67 (6.00%) Apache
5 34 (3.05%) Jupyter
6 20 (1.79%) SAS
7 12 (1.08%) Camunda
8 8 (0.72%) nginx
9 5 (0.45%) OpenStack
9 5 (0.45%) Palantir Foundry
10 3 (0.27%) CICS
10 3 (0.27%) WebLogic
11 2 (0.18%) CMS
11 2 (0.18%) PowerExchange
11 2 (0.18%) Traefik
11 2 (0.18%) WebSphere
12 1 (0.090%) Appian
12 1 (0.090%) FactoryTalk
12 1 (0.090%) SharePoint
12 1 (0.090%) WordPress
Applications
1 4 (0.36%) Trello
2 1 (0.090%) Adobe XD
2 1 (0.090%) CATIA
2 1 (0.090%) Chatbot
2 1 (0.090%) Simulink
2 1 (0.090%) Sketch
Business Applications
1 1 (0.090%) FLEXCUBE
1 1 (0.090%) Payment Gateway
1 1 (0.090%) SDL Web 8
Cloud Services
1 743 (66.58%) AWS
2 372 (33.33%) Azure
3 360 (32.26%) GitHub
4 247 (22.13%) GitHub Actions
5 176 (15.77%) Azure DevOps
5 176 (15.77%) GCP
6 158 (14.16%) Amazon S3
7 146 (13.08%) Serverless
8 145 (12.99%) Amazon CloudWatch
9 141 (12.63%) Amazon EKS
10 134 (12.01%) AWS Lambda
11 113 (10.13%) Amazon EC2
12 79 (7.08%) AWS CloudFormation
13 78 (6.99%) Amazon ECS
14 72 (6.45%) Virtual Private Cloud
15 63 (5.65%) OpenShift
16 54 (4.84%) Amazon EMR
16 54 (4.84%) Amazon SQS
17 40 (3.58%) Power Platform
18 38 (3.41%) Google Kubernetes Engine
Communications & Networking
1 49 (4.39%) Firewall
2 41 (3.67%) DNS
3 32 (2.87%) Network Security
4 30 (2.69%) BGP
4 30 (2.69%) Ethernet VPN
4 30 (2.69%) VXLAN
5 29 (2.60%) TCP/IP
6 26 (2.33%) Wi-Fi
7 22 (1.97%) WAN
8 21 (1.88%) SD-WAN
9 20 (1.79%) BIG-IP
9 20 (1.79%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
9 20 (1.79%) OSPF
10 15 (1.34%) VPN
11 12 (1.08%) 5G
11 12 (1.08%) HTTP
12 11 (0.99%) 4G
12 11 (0.99%) IPv4
12 11 (0.99%) SSL
12 11 (0.99%) WLAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 102 (9.14%) PostgreSQL
2 101 (9.05%) MongoDB
3 59 (5.29%) Amazon Athena
4 55 (4.93%) Data Warehouse
5 54 (4.84%) Amazon RDS
6 53 (4.75%) NoSQL
7 51 (4.57%) Relational Database
8 47 (4.21%) Amazon Redshift
9 43 (3.85%) Data Lake
10 39 (3.49%) DynamoDB
11 38 (3.41%) Power BI
11 38 (3.41%) SQL Server
12 36 (3.23%) Big Data
13 35 (3.14%) Oracle Database
13 35 (3.14%) Redis
14 34 (3.05%) MySQL
14 34 (3.05%) Pentaho
15 27 (2.42%) RDBMS
16 16 (1.43%) Apache Hive
16 16 (1.43%) Hadoop
Development Applications
1 436 (39.07%) Jenkins
2 283 (25.36%) Git
3 153 (13.71%) JIRA
4 92 (8.24%) JUnit
4 92 (8.24%) Selenium
5 75 (6.72%) Cucumber
6 67 (6.00%) SonarQube
7 61 (5.47%) Maven
8 45 (4.03%) Gatling
8 45 (4.03%) Mockito
9 40 (3.58%) Gradle
10 36 (3.23%) REST Assured
11 35 (3.14%) Bitbucket
12 33 (2.96%) Artifactory
12 33 (2.96%) Sonatype Nexus
13 30 (2.69%) JMeter
14 23 (2.06%) Postman
15 19 (1.70%) Cypress.io
16 18 (1.61%) WebDriver
17 14 (1.25%) Snyk
General
1 223 (19.98%) Social Skills
2 210 (18.82%) Public Sector
3 117 (10.48%) Finance
4 76 (6.81%) Analytical Skills
5 70 (6.27%) Banking
6 34 (3.05%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 25 (2.24%) Military
8 23 (2.06%) Telecoms
9 13 (1.16%) Law
10 11 (0.99%) Aerospace
10 11 (0.99%) Legal
11 10 (0.90%) Documentation Skills
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%) Front Office
15 4 (0.36%) Local Government
15 4 (0.36%) Retail
16 3 (0.27%) Billing
Job Titles
1 250 (22.40%) DevOps Engineer
2 207 (18.55%) Developer
3 194 (17.38%) Senior
4 130 (11.65%) AWS Engineer
5 101 (9.05%) Data Engineer
6 81 (7.26%) AWS DevOps
7 74 (6.63%) AWS DevOps Engineer
7 74 (6.63%) Lead
8 66 (5.91%) Java Developer
9 53 (4.75%) Cloud Engineer
10 52 (4.66%) Test Engineer
11 51 (4.57%) Infrastructure Engineer
12 49 (4.39%) Architect
12 49 (4.39%) Software Developer
13 48 (4.30%) Platform Engineer
14 47 (4.21%) Software Engineer
15 41 (3.67%) Full-Stack Developer
15 41 (3.67%) Java Engineer
16 33 (2.96%) Senior DevOps
17 32 (2.87%) Senior DevOps Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 554 (49.64%) Terraform
2 170 (15.23%) Kafka
3 163 (14.61%) Spring
4 141 (12.63%) Spring Boot
5 140 (12.54%) REST
6 81 (7.26%) Playwright
7 78 (6.99%) React
8 76 (6.81%) RESTful
9 56 (5.02%) Node.js
10 55 (4.93%) JSON
10 55 (4.93%) RabbitMQ
11 50 (4.48%) PySpark
12 40 (3.58%) HTML
13 36 (3.23%) CSS
13 36 (3.23%) JPA
14 35 (3.14%) Elastic Stack
14 35 (3.14%) OAuth
15 34 (3.05%) .NET
15 34 (3.05%) OpenAPI
16 33 (2.96%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 228 (20.43%) Cloud Native
2 66 (5.91%) Distributed Systems
3 55 (4.93%) Product Ownership
4 36 (3.23%) Data Centre
4 36 (3.23%) Hybrid Cloud
5 34 (3.05%) Data Structures
5 34 (3.05%) Onboarding
6 28 (2.51%) Enterprise Software
7 20 (1.79%) PKI
8 19 (1.70%) Algorithms
9 18 (1.61%) AI Agents
10 16 (1.43%) Public Cloud
11 14 (1.25%) Distributed Architecture
11 14 (1.25%) Legacy Systems
12 12 (1.08%) Linux Command Line
12 12 (1.08%) Mainframe
12 12 (1.08%) Private Cloud
13 11 (0.99%) Replication
14 10 (0.90%) Security Posture
15 9 (0.81%) Greenfield Project
Operating Systems
1 227 (20.34%) Linux
2 51 (4.57%) Windows
3 50 (4.48%) Unix
4 43 (3.85%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 16 (1.43%) CentOS
5 16 (1.43%) Ubuntu
6 13 (1.16%) VMS
7 12 (1.08%) AIX
8 10 (0.90%) Windows Server
8 10 (0.90%) zOS
9 2 (0.18%) Debian
9 2 (0.18%) Rocky
9 2 (0.18%) Windows Server 2016
10 1 (0.090%) Amazon Linux
10 1 (0.090%) Android
10 1 (0.090%) Apple iOS
Processes & Methodologies
1 947 (84.86%) CI/CD
2 660 (59.14%) DevOps
3 514 (46.06%) Infrastructure as Code
4 462 (41.40%) Agile
5 385 (34.50%) Containerisation
6 347 (31.09%) Test Automation
7 235 (21.06%) Microservices
8 210 (18.82%) Observability
9 203 (18.19%) Scrum
10 179 (16.04%) Continuous Improvement
11 178 (15.95%) Software Engineering
12 165 (14.78%) Platform Engineering
13 155 (13.89%) AI
14 150 (13.44%) Problem-Solving
15 121 (10.84%) Mentoring
16 118 (10.57%) Deployment Automation
17 115 (10.30%) DevSecOps
18 114 (10.22%) Stakeholder Management
19 113 (10.13%) Migration
20 110 (9.86%) Software Delivery
Programming Languages
1 493 (44.18%) Python
2 297 (26.61%) Java
3 260 (23.30%) SQL
4 194 (17.38%) Bash
5 108 (9.68%) JavaScript
6 90 (8.06%) PowerShell
7 66 (5.91%) C#
8 63 (5.65%) TypeScript
9 49 (4.39%) Go
10 46 (4.12%) Shell Script
11 20 (1.79%) Bicep
11 20 (1.79%) PL/SQL
12 14 (1.25%) Groovy
12 14 (1.25%) Scala
13 13 (1.16%) C++
14 8 (0.72%) Kotlin
15 7 (0.63%) R
16 6 (0.54%) Kusto Query Language
17 5 (0.45%) Cypher
17 5 (0.45%) Search Processing Language
Qualifications
1 524 (46.95%) Security Cleared
2 410 (36.74%) SC Cleared
3 107 (9.59%) BPSS Clearance
4 94 (8.42%) DV Cleared
5 57 (5.11%) AWS Certification
6 56 (5.02%) Degree
7 38 (3.41%) Computer Science Degree
8 17 (1.52%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
8 17 (1.52%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
8 17 (1.52%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
9 16 (1.43%) CISSP
10 14 (1.25%) Azure Certification
11 12 (1.08%) ISTQB
12 8 (0.72%) 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
1 148 (13.26%) QA
2 67 (6.00%) Accessibility
3 45 (4.03%) Data Quality
4 32 (2.87%) WCAG
5 19 (1.70%) NIST
6 15 (1.34%) GDPR
7 14 (1.25%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 11 (0.99%) NCSC
9 10 (0.90%) PCI DSS
10 8 (0.72%) Sarbanes-Oxley
11 7 (0.63%) SLA
12 6 (0.54%) ISO 20022
13 5 (0.45%) FATCA
14 3 (0.27%) Cyber Essentials
14 3 (0.27%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
15 1 (0.090%) Disclosure Scotland
15 1 (0.090%) MIL-STD-1553
15 1 (0.090%) NIST 800
15 1 (0.090%) OpenSCAP
15 1 (0.090%) SEPA
System Software
1 470 (42.11%) Docker
2 25 (2.24%) VMware Infrastructure
3 24 (2.15%) Active Directory
4 13 (1.16%) Oracle RAC
5 11 (0.99%) Virtual Machines
6 8 (0.72%) VMware NSX
7 5 (0.45%) HDFS
7 5 (0.45%) Squid
8 4 (0.36%) Virtual Desktop
8 4 (0.36%) VirtualBox
9 3 (0.27%) Firmware
10 2 (0.18%) Apache ZooKeeper
10 2 (0.18%) Hyper-V
10 2 (0.18%) Slurm Workload Manager
11 1 (0.090%) iptables
11 1 (0.090%) VMware ESXi
11 1 (0.090%) vSphere
Systems Management
1 519 (46.51%) Kubernetes
2 270 (24.19%) Ansible
3 190 (17.03%) Grafana
4 166 (14.87%) Prometheus
5 51 (4.57%) Argo
6 41 (3.67%) Puppet
7 32 (2.87%) Kibana
8 28 (2.51%) Progress Chef
9 17 (1.52%) Istio
9 17 (1.52%) Packer
10 13 (1.16%) Data Guard
10 13 (1.16%) Oracle RMAN
11 10 (0.90%) Single Sign-On
12 9 (0.81%) Cilium
12 9 (0.81%) Kustomize
13 8 (0.72%) Podman
14 5 (0.45%) CASB
14 5 (0.45%) HP Fortify
15 4 (0.36%) linkerd
15 4 (0.36%) Suricata
Vendors
1 124 (11.11%) Oracle
2 79 (7.08%) Google
3 70 (6.27%) Microsoft
4 65 (5.82%) Splunk
5 55 (4.93%) Talend
6 50 (4.48%) Informatica
7 44 (3.94%) VMware
8 40 (3.58%) Dynatrace
9 35 (3.14%) Databricks
10 27 (2.42%) ServiceNow
11 24 (2.15%) IBM
12 23 (2.06%) Red Hat
13 22 (1.97%) Denodo
13 22 (1.97%) Palo Alto
14 21 (1.88%) F5
15 18 (1.61%) Arista
15 18 (1.61%) Aruba
15 18 (1.61%) Trend Micro
16 14 (1.25%) Cisco
16 14 (1.25%) Veracode