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

6 months to
21 May 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 136 144 217
Rank change year-on-year +8 +73 +6
Contract jobs citing GitLab 928 580 460
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 1.92% 1.99% 1.08%
As % of the Development Applications category 16.01% 13.94% 8.98%
Number of daily rates quoted 649 369 331
10th Percentile £386 £370 £375
25th Percentile £425 £440 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% -4.55% -4.35%
75th Percentile £575 £600 £650
90th Percentile £663 £688 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £487 £500 £550
% change year-on-year -2.60% -9.09% +1.85%
Number of hourly rates quoted 34 1 8
10th Percentile £43.42 - £40.00
25th Percentile £52.50 - £52.00
Median hourly rate £62.50 £82.96 £68.22
Median % change year-on-year -24.66% +21.61% +72.27%
75th Percentile £65.00 - £75.21
90th Percentile £80.65 - £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £61.75 £82.96 £74.44
% change year-on-year -25.57% +11.45% +87.98%

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 5,797 4,162 5,125
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 12.01% 14.30% 12.05%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,797 2,787 3,445
10th Percentile £350 £338 £353
25th Percentile £409 £410 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year - -4.76% -4.55%
75th Percentile £588 £594 £625
90th Percentile £688 £700 £725
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £475 £500
% change year-on-year - -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 242 71 207
10th Percentile £35.00 £25.00 £32.48
25th Percentile £56.40 £47.21 £46.50
Median hourly rate £65.00 £57.75 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +12.55% -11.15% +5.69%
75th Percentile £71.94 £74.38 £70.00
90th Percentile £88.00 £82.96 £78.30
UK excluding London median hourly rate £67.50 £60.50 £65.00
% change year-on-year +11.57% -6.92% +5.69%

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 May 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 May 2026.

Hourly rate histogram for GitLab in the UK

GitLab
Top 16 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 May 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 +10 781 £500 -4.76% 216
UK excluding London +23 466 £487 -2.60% 160
London -4 317 £525 -0.94% 63
Work from Home +3 274 £475 -5.00% 96
North of England -14 189 £500 - 61
Midlands +16 112 £463 -6.09% 24
West Midlands +8 97 £469 -10.67% 17
North West -2 93 £513 +2.50% 28
Yorkshire -20 67 £494 -6.00% 14
South East -30 60 £550 +9.89% 43
South West +3 58 £500 +8.70% 18
North East -2 42 £450 -12.62% 19
East of England -2 33 £483 +7.22% 8
Scotland -8 25 £401 -7.93% 3
East Midlands -17 15 £414 +32.96% 7
Northern Ireland 0 2 - - 3

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 70 (7.54%) Confluence
2 31 (3.34%) SAS
3 28 (3.02%) Apache Spark
4 25 (2.69%) Apache
4 25 (2.69%) Apache Airflow
5 14 (1.51%) nginx
6 12 (1.29%) OpenStack
7 10 (1.08%) Jupyter
8 5 (0.54%) CICS
9 4 (0.43%) Microsoft Exchange
10 3 (0.32%) Camunda
10 3 (0.32%) CMS
10 3 (0.32%) Oracle Workflow
11 2 (0.22%) IBM HTTP Server
11 2 (0.22%) Oracle HTTP Server
11 2 (0.22%) SharePoint
11 2 (0.22%) WebSphere
11 2 (0.22%) WebSphere Application Server
11 2 (0.22%) WebSphere Portal
12 1 (0.11%) Traefik
Applications
1 3 (0.32%) Adobe XD
2 1 (0.11%) Chatbot
2 1 (0.11%) Microsoft Office
Business Applications
1 3 (0.32%) Oracle Applications
2 1 (0.11%) Actimize
2 1 (0.11%) Oracle EBS
2 1 (0.11%) Payment Gateway
2 1 (0.11%) SAP BRIM
2 1 (0.11%) SAP Hybris
2 1 (0.11%) SAP S/4HANA
2 1 (0.11%) SDL Web 8
Cloud Services
1 554 (59.70%) AWS
2 316 (34.05%) GitHub
3 311 (33.51%) Azure
4 225 (24.25%) GitHub Actions
5 157 (16.92%) GCP
6 140 (15.09%) Serverless
7 127 (13.69%) Amazon S3
8 119 (12.82%) Amazon EKS
9 115 (12.39%) AWS Lambda
10 111 (11.96%) Azure DevOps
11 96 (10.34%) Amazon EC2
12 94 (10.13%) AWS CloudFormation
13 93 (10.02%) Amazon CloudWatch
14 70 (7.54%) Virtual Private Cloud
15 65 (7.00%) OpenShift
16 48 (5.17%) Amazon ECS
17 38 (4.09%) Amazon SQS
17 38 (4.09%) Azure AKS
18 28 (3.02%) Power Platform
19 27 (2.91%) AWS CodePipeline
Communications & Networking
1 44 (4.74%) Firewall
2 30 (3.23%) DNS
3 23 (2.48%) TCP/IP
4 20 (2.16%) Network Security
5 19 (2.05%) BGP
6 18 (1.94%) OSPF
7 17 (1.83%) Ethernet VPN
7 17 (1.83%) VXLAN
7 17 (1.83%) WAN
8 15 (1.62%) BIG-IP
8 15 (1.62%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
8 15 (1.62%) SD-WAN
8 15 (1.62%) VPN
9 11 (1.19%) HTTP
9 11 (1.19%) Wi-Fi
10 10 (1.08%) Reverse Proxy
11 7 (0.75%) WLAN
12 4 (0.43%) Multicast
12 4 (0.43%) SAN
12 4 (0.43%) SSL
Database & Business Intelligence
1 80 (8.62%) PostgreSQL
2 61 (6.57%) MongoDB
3 44 (4.74%) Relational Database
4 43 (4.63%) NoSQL
5 40 (4.31%) Amazon RDS
6 39 (4.20%) DynamoDB
7 33 (3.56%) Amazon Athena
7 33 (3.56%) MySQL
8 32 (3.45%) Amazon Redshift
9 29 (3.13%) Data Warehouse
10 28 (3.02%) Redis
11 27 (2.91%) Data Lake
11 27 (2.91%) Power BI
12 26 (2.80%) SQL Server
13 24 (2.59%) Pentaho
14 23 (2.48%) Big Data
15 15 (1.62%) Oracle Database
16 14 (1.51%) DocumentDB
17 12 (1.29%) Metadata
18 11 (1.19%) BigQuery
Development Applications
1 420 (45.26%) Jenkins
2 202 (21.77%) Git
3 125 (13.47%) JIRA
4 88 (9.48%) Selenium
5 67 (7.22%) JUnit
6 50 (5.39%) Cucumber
7 45 (4.85%) Postman
7 45 (4.85%) REST Assured
8 38 (4.09%) JMeter
9 34 (3.66%) Gradle
10 32 (3.45%) SonarQube
11 31 (3.34%) Bitbucket
12 29 (3.13%) Artifactory
12 29 (3.13%) Gatling
13 25 (2.69%) Mockito
14 23 (2.48%) CircleCI
15 19 (2.05%) WebDriver
16 17 (1.83%) Snyk
16 17 (1.83%) Sonatype Nexus
17 16 (1.72%) Maven
General
1 184 (19.83%) Social Skills
2 173 (18.64%) Public Sector
3 97 (10.45%) Finance
4 61 (6.57%) Banking
5 53 (5.71%) Analytical Skills
6 25 (2.69%) Documentation Skills
7 13 (1.40%) Military
8 11 (1.19%) Aerospace
8 11 (1.19%) Retail
9 10 (1.08%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 9 (0.97%) Investment Banking
11 8 (0.86%) Financial Institution
11 8 (0.86%) Law
12 7 (0.75%) Legal
13 4 (0.43%) Influencing Skills
13 4 (0.43%) Organisational Skills
13 4 (0.43%) Police
13 4 (0.43%) Presentation Skills
14 3 (0.32%) Local Government
14 3 (0.32%) Retail Banking
Job Titles
1 194 (20.91%) DevOps Engineer
2 160 (17.24%) Developer
3 147 (15.84%) Senior
4 92 (9.91%) AWS Engineer
5 77 (8.30%) Data Engineer
6 64 (6.90%) Lead
7 61 (6.57%) Software Engineer
8 60 (6.47%) AWS DevOps
9 54 (5.82%) AWS DevOps Engineer
10 53 (5.71%) Java Developer
11 49 (5.28%) Architect
12 45 (4.85%) Cloud Engineer
13 42 (4.53%) Test Engineer
14 40 (4.31%) Platform Engineer
15 30 (3.23%) Infrastructure Engineer
16 28 (3.02%) Full-Stack Developer
16 28 (3.02%) Senior DevOps
17 27 (2.91%) Senior DevOps Engineer
18 26 (2.80%) GCP Engineer
18 26 (2.80%) Senior Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 133 (14.33%) Kafka
2 131 (14.12%) Spring
3 114 (12.28%) Spring Boot
4 111 (11.96%) REST
5 77 (8.30%) RESTful
6 75 (8.08%) Node.js
7 65 (7.00%) React
8 52 (5.60%) Elastic Stack
9 46 (4.96%) Playwright
10 36 (3.88%) OpenTelemetry
10 36 (3.88%) PySpark
11 33 (3.56%) LDAP
12 31 (3.34%) OAuth
13 29 (3.13%) pytest
13 29 (3.13%) YAML
14 28 (3.02%) Jest
15 27 (2.91%) HTML
15 27 (2.91%) RabbitMQ
16 26 (2.80%) AngularJS
16 26 (2.80%) OpenID
Miscellaneous
1 154 (16.59%) Cloud Native
2 59 (6.36%) Distributed Systems
3 55 (5.93%) Product Ownership
4 36 (3.88%) Data Centre
5 32 (3.45%) Onboarding
6 20 (2.16%) Hybrid Cloud
7 17 (1.83%) Enterprise Software
7 17 (1.83%) Public Cloud
8 15 (1.62%) Private Cloud
9 12 (1.29%) Algorithms
9 12 (1.29%) Management Information System
10 11 (1.19%) NHS
11 10 (1.08%) Distributed Architecture
11 10 (1.08%) PKI
12 8 (0.86%) Distributed Computing
13 7 (0.75%) Linux Command Line
13 7 (0.75%) Mainframe
14 6 (0.65%) Data Protection Act
14 6 (0.65%) Greenfield Project
15 5 (0.54%) Legacy Code
Operating Systems
1 169 (18.21%) Linux
2 48 (5.17%) Windows
3 44 (4.74%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 41 (4.42%) Unix
5 15 (1.62%) CentOS
6 9 (0.97%) Ubuntu
7 7 (0.75%) Apple iOS
7 7 (0.75%) VMS
7 7 (0.75%) zOS
8 5 (0.54%) Android
9 4 (0.43%) Debian
9 4 (0.43%) Rocky
9 4 (0.43%) Windows Server
10 2 (0.22%) Oracle Linux
10 2 (0.22%) SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
11 1 (0.11%) AIX
11 1 (0.11%) Amazon Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 745 (80.28%) CI/CD
2 525 (56.57%) DevOps
3 346 (37.28%) Infrastructure as Code
4 323 (34.81%) Agile
5 308 (33.19%) Containerisation
6 275 (29.63%) Test Automation
7 179 (19.29%) Microservices
8 173 (18.64%) Observability
9 141 (15.19%) Software Engineering
10 136 (14.66%) Scrum
11 128 (13.79%) Problem-Solving
12 125 (13.47%) Continuous Improvement
13 121 (13.04%) Platform Engineering
14 89 (9.59%) DevSecOps
14 89 (9.59%) ETL
15 81 (8.73%) TDD
16 78 (8.41%) Analytics
17 74 (7.97%) AI
18 73 (7.87%) Migration
19 71 (7.65%) Performance Testing
Programming Languages
1 353 (38.04%) Python
2 255 (27.48%) Java
3 199 (21.44%) SQL
4 142 (15.30%) Bash
5 91 (9.81%) JavaScript
6 78 (8.41%) TypeScript
7 64 (6.90%) PowerShell
8 46 (4.96%) Shell Script
9 40 (4.31%) Go
10 35 (3.77%) C#
11 20 (2.16%) Bicep
12 19 (2.05%) Kotlin
12 19 (2.05%) PL/SQL
13 15 (1.62%) C++
14 12 (1.29%) Scala
15 11 (1.19%) MATLAB
15 11 (1.19%) Ruby
16 9 (0.97%) C
17 8 (0.86%) Groovy
17 8 (0.86%) PHP
Qualifications
1 407 (43.86%) Security Cleared
2 341 (36.75%) SC Cleared
3 47 (5.06%) BPSS Clearance
4 41 (4.42%) Degree
5 34 (3.66%) DV Cleared
6 31 (3.34%) Computer Science Degree
7 24 (2.59%) AWS Certification
8 11 (1.19%) Azure Certification
9 10 (1.08%) SAFe Agilist
10 9 (0.97%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
11 8 (0.86%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
11 8 (0.86%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
12 7 (0.75%) ISTQB
13 5 (0.54%) CISSP
14 4 (0.43%) Cisco Certification
14 4 (0.43%) CSSLP
14 4 (0.43%) ITIL Certification
14 4 (0.43%) Oracle Certification
14 4 (0.43%) TOGAF Certification
15 3 (0.32%) OCA
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 97 (10.45%) QA
2 52 (5.60%) Accessibility
3 29 (3.13%) Data Quality
4 21 (2.26%) SLA
5 16 (1.72%) GDPR
6 14 (1.51%) WCAG
7 11 (1.19%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 10 (1.08%) NIST
8 10 (1.08%) PCI DSS
9 6 (0.65%) ISO/IEC 27001
9 6 (0.65%) NCSC
10 5 (0.54%) FATCA
11 4 (0.43%) ISO 20022
12 2 (0.22%) SOC 2
13 1 (0.11%) Def Stans
13 1 (0.11%) Disclosure Scotland
13 1 (0.11%) GRC
13 1 (0.11%) IEC 61508
13 1 (0.11%) OpenSCAP
13 1 (0.11%) Software Quality Assurance
System Software
1 381 (41.06%) Docker
2 24 (2.59%) Active Directory
3 17 (1.83%) VMware Infrastructure
4 15 (1.62%) Virtual Machines
5 6 (0.65%) HDFS
5 6 (0.65%) Squid
6 4 (0.43%) Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services
7 3 (0.32%) Hyper-V
7 3 (0.32%) VMware NSX
8 2 (0.22%) iptables
8 2 (0.22%) vSphere
9 1 (0.11%) Oracle RAC
9 1 (0.11%) VirtualBox
9 1 (0.11%) VMware ESXi
9 1 (0.11%) zsh
Systems Management
1 422 (45.47%) Kubernetes
2 413 (44.50%) Terraform
3 204 (21.98%) Grafana
4 201 (21.66%) Ansible
5 171 (18.43%) Prometheus
6 54 (5.82%) Argo
7 29 (3.13%) Puppet
8 20 (2.16%) Istio
9 17 (1.83%) Progress Chef
10 16 (1.72%) Podman
11 14 (1.51%) Red Hat Satellite
12 11 (1.19%) Check_MK
13 10 (1.08%) Kibana
14 9 (0.97%) linkerd
15 7 (0.75%) Packer
15 7 (0.75%) Single Sign-On
16 6 (0.65%) Karpenter
17 5 (0.54%) Cilium
18 4 (0.43%) Rancher
18 4 (0.43%) Suricata
Vendors
1 88 (9.48%) Oracle
2 68 (7.33%) Splunk
3 60 (6.47%) Microsoft
4 47 (5.06%) Red Hat
5 45 (4.85%) Google
6 38 (4.09%) VMware
7 37 (3.99%) ServiceNow
7 37 (3.99%) Talend
8 34 (3.66%) Informatica
9 31 (3.34%) Databricks
10 25 (2.69%) Dynatrace
11 21 (2.26%) Denodo
12 20 (2.16%) Salesforce
13 18 (1.94%) Arista
13 18 (1.94%) F5
14 16 (1.72%) Palo Alto
15 14 (1.51%) Aruba
16 10 (1.08%) Tenable
16 10 (1.08%) Veracode
17 8 (0.86%) IBM