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

6 months to
20 Feb 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 114 136 238
Rank change year-on-year +22 +102 -42
Contract jobs citing GitLab 961 601 444
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.35% 1.95% 1.00%
As % of the Development Applications category 17.01% 14.36% 8.30%
Number of daily rates quoted 714 405 332
10th Percentile £381 £361 £405
25th Percentile £416 £438 £473
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -9.09% - -8.33%
75th Percentile £575 £650 £639
90th Percentile £664 £725 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £492 £500 £520
% change year-on-year -1.60% -3.85% -3.70%
Number of hourly rates quoted 25 4 3
10th Percentile £39.53 £64.33 £43.75
25th Percentile £52.50 £70.83 £49.38
Median hourly rate £55.00 £79.72 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year -31.01% +32.87% +14.29%
75th Percentile £65.00 £89.38 £69.38
90th Percentile £82.60 £92.75 £74.25
UK excluding London median hourly rate £55.00 £79.72 £67.50
% change year-on-year -31.01% +18.10% +28.57%

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 5,649 4,184 5,352
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 13.83% 13.56% 12.05%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,853 2,681 3,703
10th Percentile £344 £331 £363
25th Percentile £405 £408 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year - -4.76% -4.55%
75th Percentile £588 £620 £627
90th Percentile £688 £725 £713
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £475 £500
% change year-on-year - -5.00% -4.76%
Number of hourly rates quoted 150 64 212
10th Percentile £34.53 £25.55 £37.75
25th Percentile £52.50 £47.88 £47.96
Median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% -3.85% +5.69%
75th Percentile £70.00 £71.25 £75.06
90th Percentile £83.00 £79.54 £84.36
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £65.00
% change year-on-year +4.00% -3.85% +4.00%

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 20 February 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 20 February 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 20 February 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 +10 793 £500 -10.91% 315
UK excluding London +41 484 £492 -1.60% 248
London -14 327 £525 -8.70% 99
Work from Home +8 258 £475 -9.87% 117
North of England +9 234 £488 -5.34% 55
North West +10 112 £435 -8.42% 26
Midlands +22 102 £495 +3.77% 30
West Midlands +18 93 £500 +3.52% 19
Yorkshire -3 92 £506 -20.59% 21
South West +13 48 £523 -16.40% 33
South East -22 48 £500 -13.04% 90
Scotland +17 41 £425 -0.87% 5
North East -7 37 £488 -6.25% 8
East of England -10 20 £485 -1.77% 27
East Midlands -20 9 £400 +28.62% 11
Northern Ireland +3 6 - - 6
Wales 0 5 £435 -16.35% 7

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 62 (6.45%) Confluence
2 35 (3.64%) SAS
3 29 (3.02%) Apache Airflow
4 24 (2.50%) Apache
5 18 (1.87%) nginx
5 18 (1.87%) OpenStack
6 16 (1.66%) Apache Spark
7 5 (0.52%) Appian
8 4 (0.42%) Microsoft Exchange
9 3 (0.31%) CMS
9 3 (0.31%) Ethereum
9 3 (0.31%) Hyperledger
10 2 (0.21%) SharePoint
11 1 (0.10%) Adobe Experience Manager
11 1 (0.10%) CICS
11 1 (0.10%) Cloud Foundry
11 1 (0.10%) Documentum
11 1 (0.10%) FileNet
11 1 (0.10%) Jupyter
11 1 (0.10%) Luigi
Applications
1 3 (0.31%) Adobe XD
2 1 (0.10%) Chatbot
2 1 (0.10%) Microsoft Excel
Business Applications
1 3 (0.31%) Oracle Applications
1 3 (0.31%) SAP BRIM
2 2 (0.21%) SAP S/4HANA
3 1 (0.10%) Actimize
3 1 (0.10%) Aladdin
3 1 (0.10%) Oracle EBS
3 1 (0.10%) SAP BPC
3 1 (0.10%) SAP CO
3 1 (0.10%) SAP FS
Cloud Services
1 587 (61.08%) AWS
2 273 (28.41%) GitHub
3 266 (27.68%) Azure
4 186 (19.35%) GitHub Actions
5 179 (18.63%) GCP
6 165 (17.17%) Serverless
7 133 (13.84%) Amazon S3
8 124 (12.90%) Amazon EKS
9 118 (12.28%) AWS Lambda
10 116 (12.07%) Amazon CloudWatch
10 116 (12.07%) Amazon EC2
11 113 (11.76%) AWS CloudFormation
12 93 (9.68%) OpenShift
13 91 (9.47%) Azure DevOps
14 84 (8.74%) Virtual Private Cloud
15 80 (8.32%) Amazon ECS
16 32 (3.33%) Azure AKS
17 26 (2.71%) Datadog
18 23 (2.39%) Route 53
19 22 (2.29%) Snowflake
Communications & Networking
1 61 (6.35%) Firewall
2 44 (4.58%) DNS
3 40 (4.16%) VPN
4 31 (3.23%) TCP/IP
5 24 (2.50%) Network Security
6 14 (1.46%) SSL
7 7 (0.73%) Reverse Proxy
8 6 (0.62%) Kerberos
8 6 (0.62%) WAN
9 5 (0.52%) HTTP
9 5 (0.52%) Multicast
9 5 (0.52%) SD-WAN
10 4 (0.42%) SAN
10 4 (0.42%) VSAN
11 3 (0.31%) BGP
11 3 (0.31%) DHCP
11 3 (0.31%) Ethernet VPN
11 3 (0.31%) FTP
11 3 (0.31%) NAS
11 3 (0.31%) VXLAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 99 (10.30%) PostgreSQL
2 79 (8.22%) MongoDB
3 77 (8.01%) NoSQL
4 69 (7.18%) Amazon RDS
5 32 (3.33%) Data Lake
6 31 (3.23%) Relational Database
7 29 (3.02%) DynamoDB
8 26 (2.71%) MySQL
9 24 (2.50%) Data Warehouse
9 24 (2.50%) Redis
10 23 (2.39%) Amazon Athena
11 21 (2.19%) Big Data
12 19 (1.98%) SQL Server
13 17 (1.77%) Oracle Database
14 16 (1.66%) Power BI
15 15 (1.56%) Apache Cassandra
16 12 (1.25%) Delta Lake
17 11 (1.14%) BigQuery
17 11 (1.14%) DocumentDB
17 11 (1.14%) Spark SQL
Development Applications
1 476 (49.53%) Jenkins
2 228 (23.73%) Git
3 136 (14.15%) JIRA
4 103 (10.72%) Selenium
5 75 (7.80%) JUnit
6 72 (7.49%) Cucumber
7 50 (5.20%) Postman
8 38 (3.95%) JMeter
8 38 (3.95%) REST Assured
9 34 (3.54%) Bitbucket
10 33 (3.43%) Maven
11 32 (3.33%) Artifactory
11 32 (3.33%) Gatling
12 31 (3.23%) SonarQube
13 28 (2.91%) Cypress.io
14 27 (2.81%) CircleCI
14 27 (2.81%) Gradle
15 26 (2.71%) Sonatype Nexus
16 24 (2.50%) Liquibase
17 22 (2.29%) Mockito
General
1 250 (26.01%) Social Skills
2 158 (16.44%) Finance
3 148 (15.40%) Public Sector
4 106 (11.03%) Banking
5 71 (7.39%) Analytical Skills
6 25 (2.60%) Financial Institution
7 21 (2.19%) Documentation Skills
8 15 (1.56%) Telecoms
9 14 (1.46%) Military
10 11 (1.14%) Aerospace
10 11 (1.14%) Investment Banking
11 10 (1.04%) Influencing Skills
11 10 (1.04%) Retail
12 8 (0.83%) Retail Banking
13 7 (0.73%) Inclusion and Diversity
14 6 (0.62%) Games
15 5 (0.52%) Presentation Skills
16 3 (0.31%) Corporate Banking
16 3 (0.31%) Law
16 3 (0.31%) Organisational Skills
Job Titles
1 231 (24.04%) DevOps Engineer
2 190 (19.77%) Developer
3 149 (15.50%) Senior
4 102 (10.61%) AWS Engineer
5 78 (8.12%) AWS DevOps
6 74 (7.70%) Lead
7 65 (6.76%) AWS DevOps Engineer
8 58 (6.04%) Java Developer
9 57 (5.93%) Software Engineer
10 52 (5.41%) Data Engineer
11 50 (5.20%) Test Engineer
12 49 (5.10%) Cloud Engineer
13 47 (4.89%) Architect
14 45 (4.68%) Senior DevOps
14 45 (4.68%) Senior DevOps Engineer
15 36 (3.75%) Platform Engineer
16 32 (3.33%) GCP Engineer
17 30 (3.12%) Senior Developer
18 29 (3.02%) Full-Stack Developer
19 26 (2.71%) Test Automation Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 156 (16.23%) REST
2 137 (14.26%) Kafka
3 129 (13.42%) Spring
4 115 (11.97%) Spring Boot
5 103 (10.72%) Elastic Stack
6 100 (10.41%) RESTful
7 96 (9.99%) Node.js
8 69 (7.18%) React
9 61 (6.35%) Playwright
10 41 (4.27%) PySpark
11 38 (3.95%) HTML
12 34 (3.54%) OpenTelemetry
12 34 (3.54%) pytest
13 33 (3.43%) RabbitMQ
14 31 (3.23%) OpenID
15 30 (3.12%) Jest
15 30 (3.12%) JSON
16 29 (3.02%) LDAP
17 28 (2.91%) CSS
17 28 (2.91%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 152 (15.82%) Cloud Native
2 79 (8.22%) Distributed Systems
3 50 (5.20%) Public Cloud
4 48 (4.99%) Product Ownership
5 28 (2.91%) Onboarding
6 16 (1.66%) Data Centre
7 15 (1.56%) Private Cloud
8 14 (1.46%) Hybrid Cloud
9 11 (1.14%) Enterprise Software
9 11 (1.14%) Linux Command Line
9 11 (1.14%) PKI
10 10 (1.04%) Legacy Systems
11 9 (0.94%) Management Information System
11 9 (0.94%) Security Posture
12 8 (0.83%) Data Protection Act
12 8 (0.83%) Virtual Team
13 7 (0.73%) Algorithms
13 7 (0.73%) Distributed Computing
13 7 (0.73%) Mainframe
13 7 (0.73%) Synthetic Data
Operating Systems
1 201 (20.92%) Linux
2 61 (6.35%) Windows
3 33 (3.43%) Unix
4 30 (3.12%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 17 (1.77%) Windows Server
6 11 (1.14%) Apple iOS
7 10 (1.04%) Android
7 10 (1.04%) CentOS
8 8 (0.83%) VMS
9 5 (0.52%) Ubuntu
10 3 (0.31%) Solaris
10 3 (0.31%) Windows Server 2016
10 3 (0.31%) Windows Server 2019
10 3 (0.31%) zOS
11 2 (0.21%) Debian
11 2 (0.21%) Rocky
12 1 (0.10%) Amazon Linux
12 1 (0.10%) Windows 10
Processes & Methodologies
1 770 (80.12%) CI/CD
2 587 (61.08%) DevOps
3 376 (39.13%) Infrastructure as Code
4 363 (37.77%) Agile
5 351 (36.52%) Containerisation
6 283 (29.45%) Test Automation
7 208 (21.64%) Microservices
8 175 (18.21%) Problem-Solving
9 164 (17.07%) Observability
10 134 (13.94%) Software Engineering
11 118 (12.28%) Scrum
12 116 (12.07%) Continuous Improvement
13 100 (10.41%) Analytics
14 84 (8.74%) Platform Engineering
15 82 (8.53%) DevSecOps
16 81 (8.43%) TDD
17 79 (8.22%) Data Pipeline
18 76 (7.91%) Infrastructure Automation
19 75 (7.80%) Test Strategy
20 68 (7.08%) Migration
Programming Languages
1 427 (44.43%) Python
2 290 (30.18%) Java
3 159 (16.55%) Bash
3 159 (16.55%) SQL
4 110 (11.45%) JavaScript
5 88 (9.16%) Go
6 85 (8.84%) TypeScript
7 78 (8.12%) PowerShell
8 50 (5.20%) Shell Script
9 19 (1.98%) C#
10 18 (1.87%) Ruby
11 16 (1.66%) Kotlin
12 12 (1.25%) PL/SQL
13 10 (1.04%) Perl
14 9 (0.94%) Groovy
14 9 (0.94%) Rust
14 9 (0.94%) Scala
15 8 (0.83%) Bicep
16 7 (0.73%) Korn
16 7 (0.73%) MATLAB
Qualifications
1 346 (36.00%) Security Cleared
2 280 (29.14%) SC Cleared
3 63 (6.56%) Degree
4 55 (5.72%) Computer Science Degree
5 48 (4.99%) BPSS Clearance
6 42 (4.37%) AWS Certification
7 32 (3.33%) Master's Degree
8 28 (2.91%) DV Cleared
9 21 (2.19%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
10 14 (1.46%) CISSP
11 13 (1.35%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
11 13 (1.35%) CISM
12 9 (0.94%) Oracle Certification
13 8 (0.83%) OCA
14 7 (0.73%) AWS Certified Developer
15 6 (0.62%) Azure Certification
16 5 (0.52%) Microsoft Certification
17 4 (0.42%) ISTQB
18 3 (0.31%) AWS Certified SysOps Administrator
18 3 (0.31%) ITIL Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 123 (12.80%) QA
2 61 (6.35%) Accessibility
3 23 (2.39%) Data Quality
4 22 (2.29%) WCAG
5 20 (2.08%) GDPR
5 20 (2.08%) NIST
6 17 (1.77%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 14 (1.46%) Sarbanes-Oxley
7 14 (1.46%) SLA
8 11 (1.14%) NCSC
9 6 (0.62%) PCI DSS
10 4 (0.42%) Def Stans
11 2 (0.21%) HL7
12 1 (0.10%) IEC 61508
12 1 (0.10%) ISO 20022
12 1 (0.10%) JSP 440
12 1 (0.10%) MiFID
12 1 (0.10%) NIST 800
12 1 (0.10%) SOC 2
12 1 (0.10%) Software Quality Assurance
System Software
1 425 (44.22%) Docker
2 24 (2.50%) Active Directory
3 13 (1.35%) Virtual Machines
3 13 (1.35%) VMware Infrastructure
4 8 (0.83%) Virtual Servers
5 4 (0.42%) Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services
6 3 (0.31%) VMware NSX
6 3 (0.31%) vSphere
7 2 (0.21%) HDFS
7 2 (0.21%) Hyper-V
8 1 (0.10%) Squid
8 1 (0.10%) VMware ESXi
Systems Management
1 507 (52.76%) Kubernetes
2 455 (47.35%) Terraform
3 241 (25.08%) Grafana
4 224 (23.31%) Ansible
5 194 (20.19%) Prometheus
6 51 (5.31%) Argo
7 21 (2.19%) Podman
8 18 (1.87%) Istio
8 18 (1.87%) Puppet
9 17 (1.77%) Kibana
9 17 (1.77%) Progress Chef
10 12 (1.25%) Fluentd
11 11 (1.14%) Packer
12 9 (0.94%) Red Hat Satellite
13 8 (0.83%) Karpenter
14 7 (0.73%) Check_MK
14 7 (0.73%) Sysdig
15 6 (0.62%) linkerd
15 6 (0.62%) Nagios
16 5 (0.52%) Single Sign-On
Vendors
1 104 (10.82%) Splunk
2 74 (7.70%) Microsoft
3 66 (6.87%) Oracle
4 48 (4.99%) Google
4 48 (4.99%) Red Hat
5 34 (3.54%) VMware
6 27 (2.81%) ServiceNow
7 23 (2.39%) Databricks
8 17 (1.77%) Dynatrace
8 17 (1.77%) Salesforce
9 16 (1.66%) F5
10 15 (1.56%) Atlassian
10 15 (1.56%) CheckPoint
10 15 (1.56%) Palo Alto
11 14 (1.46%) Cribl.io
11 14 (1.46%) Veracode
12 13 (1.35%) Cisco
13 11 (1.14%) IBM
13 11 (1.14%) Informatica
14 8 (0.83%) Adobe