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

6 months to
1 Oct 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 136 135 174
Rank change year-on-year -1 +39 +78
Contract jobs citing GitLab 1,130 713 552
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.06% 2.16% 1.46%
As % of the Development Applications category 17.74% 14.00% 11.01%
Number of daily rates quoted 788 483 376
10th Percentile £380 £369 £358
25th Percentile £425 £438 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £547
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% -4.02% -0.55%
75th Percentile £600 £603 £650
90th Percentile £688 £688 £725
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £513
% change year-on-year - -2.44% -2.38%
Number of hourly rates quoted 31 9 7
10th Percentile £62.40 £59.75 £70.40
25th Percentile £65.00 £61.75 -
Median hourly rate £68.22 £67.00 £74.00
Median % change year-on-year +1.81% -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 6,371 5,092 5,012
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 11.60% 15.40% 13.25%
Number of daily rates quoted 4,070 3,437 3,152
10th Percentile £352 £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 £690 £688 £723
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £475 £500
% change year-on-year - -5.00% -2.44%
Number of hourly rates quoted 262 111 172
10th Percentile £22.68 £22.05 £31.43
25th Percentile £50.29 £50.00 £51.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £65.00
75th Percentile £70.00 £70.08 £70.00
90th Percentile £76.00 £77.50 £73.98
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 1 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 1 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 1 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 +2 946 £507 -3.38% 651
UK excluding London -11 546 £500 - 414
London +22 399 £523 -1.42% 284
Work from Home +5 389 £494 -6.78% 319
North of England -33 187 £500 +4.60% 122
Midlands +41 159 £473 -13.30% 46
West Midlands +46 150 £475 -13.64% 39
South East -29 80 £546 +9.14% 56
North West -33 80 £560 +31.65% 79
North East +2 79 £413 -24.31% 28
South West -7 64 £550 -8.33% 81
East of England -18 39 £450 -7.69% 42
Yorkshire -58 39 £550 +10.00% 15
Scotland -19 30 £450 -2.70% 38
East Midlands -12 9 £405 +50.00% 7
Northern Ireland +4 2 - - 20
Wales -15 2 - - 10

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 (9.38%) Confluence
2 84 (7.43%) Apache Spark
3 75 (6.64%) Apache Airflow
4 66 (5.84%) Apache
5 35 (3.10%) Jupyter
6 28 (2.48%) SAS
7 12 (1.06%) Camunda
8 8 (0.71%) nginx
9 5 (0.44%) OpenStack
9 5 (0.44%) 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 (0.088%) Appian
12 1 (0.088%) FactoryTalk
12 1 (0.088%) SharePoint
12 1 (0.088%) WordPress
Applications
1 4 (0.35%) Trello
2 1 (0.088%) Adobe XD
2 1 (0.088%) Chatbot
2 1 (0.088%) Sketch
Business Applications
1 2 (0.18%) Payment Gateway
2 1 (0.088%) FLEXCUBE
2 1 (0.088%) SDL Web 8
Cloud Services
1 747 (66.11%) AWS
2 377 (33.36%) Azure
3 361 (31.95%) GitHub
4 249 (22.04%) GitHub Actions
5 177 (15.66%) Azure DevOps
6 175 (15.49%) GCP
7 157 (13.89%) Amazon S3
8 145 (12.83%) Serverless
9 143 (12.65%) Amazon CloudWatch
10 140 (12.39%) Amazon EKS
11 133 (11.77%) AWS Lambda
12 112 (9.91%) Amazon EC2
13 78 (6.90%) AWS CloudFormation
14 77 (6.81%) Amazon ECS
15 71 (6.28%) Virtual Private Cloud
16 63 (5.58%) OpenShift
17 55 (4.87%) Amazon EMR
18 53 (4.69%) Amazon SQS
19 40 (3.54%) Power Platform
20 38 (3.36%) Google Kubernetes Engine
Communications & Networking
1 49 (4.34%) Firewall
2 40 (3.54%) DNS
3 31 (2.74%) Network Security
4 30 (2.65%) BGP
4 30 (2.65%) Ethernet VPN
4 30 (2.65%) VXLAN
5 28 (2.48%) TCP/IP
6 26 (2.30%) Wi-Fi
7 22 (1.95%) WAN
8 21 (1.86%) SD-WAN
9 20 (1.77%) OSPF
10 19 (1.68%) BIG-IP
10 19 (1.68%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
11 15 (1.33%) VPN
12 12 (1.06%) 5G
13 11 (0.97%) 4G
13 11 (0.97%) HTTP
13 11 (0.97%) IPv4
13 11 (0.97%) IPv6
13 11 (0.97%) NX-OS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 104 (9.20%) PostgreSQL
2 102 (9.03%) MongoDB
3 58 (5.13%) Amazon Athena
4 57 (5.04%) Data Warehouse
5 53 (4.69%) Amazon RDS
6 52 (4.60%) Relational Database
7 51 (4.51%) NoSQL
8 46 (4.07%) Amazon Redshift
9 44 (3.89%) Data Lake
10 39 (3.45%) DynamoDB
11 38 (3.36%) Power BI
11 38 (3.36%) SQL Server
12 36 (3.19%) MySQL
12 36 (3.19%) Oracle Database
12 36 (3.19%) Redis
13 35 (3.10%) Big Data
14 30 (2.65%) Pentaho
15 27 (2.39%) RDBMS
16 17 (1.50%) Elasticsearch
17 16 (1.42%) Hadoop
Development Applications
1 437 (38.67%) Jenkins
2 283 (25.04%) Git
3 153 (13.54%) JIRA
4 94 (8.32%) Selenium
5 93 (8.23%) JUnit
6 74 (6.55%) Cucumber
7 67 (5.93%) SonarQube
8 62 (5.49%) Maven
9 46 (4.07%) Gatling
10 45 (3.98%) Mockito
11 41 (3.63%) Gradle
12 36 (3.19%) REST Assured
13 35 (3.10%) Bitbucket
14 33 (2.92%) Artifactory
14 33 (2.92%) Sonatype Nexus
15 31 (2.74%) JMeter
16 24 (2.12%) Postman
17 19 (1.68%) Cypress.io
18 18 (1.59%) WebDriver
19 14 (1.24%) Snyk
General
1 227 (20.09%) Social Skills
2 216 (19.12%) Public Sector
3 116 (10.27%) Finance
4 76 (6.73%) Analytical Skills
5 69 (6.11%) Banking
6 34 (3.01%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 25 (2.21%) Military
8 23 (2.04%) Telecoms
9 13 (1.15%) Law
10 11 (0.97%) Aerospace
10 11 (0.97%) Documentation Skills
10 11 (0.97%) Legal
11 8 (0.71%) Publishing
12 7 (0.62%) Investment Banking
13 6 (0.53%) Back Office
13 6 (0.53%) Police
14 4 (0.35%) Front Office
14 4 (0.35%) Local Government
14 4 (0.35%) Retail
15 3 (0.27%) Pharmaceutical
Job Titles
1 251 (22.21%) DevOps Engineer
2 206 (18.23%) Developer
3 192 (16.99%) Senior
4 129 (11.42%) AWS Engineer
5 104 (9.20%) Data Engineer
6 82 (7.26%) AWS DevOps
7 75 (6.64%) AWS DevOps Engineer
8 74 (6.55%) Lead
9 65 (5.75%) Java Developer
10 54 (4.78%) Cloud Engineer
10 54 (4.78%) Test Engineer
11 51 (4.51%) Infrastructure Engineer
12 50 (4.42%) Architect
13 49 (4.34%) Platform Engineer
14 48 (4.25%) Software Developer
15 47 (4.16%) Software Engineer
16 41 (3.63%) Full-Stack Developer
17 40 (3.54%) Java Engineer
18 32 (2.83%) Senior DevOps
19 31 (2.74%) Senior DevOps Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 554 (49.03%) Terraform
2 170 (15.04%) Kafka
3 163 (14.42%) Spring
4 141 (12.48%) Spring Boot
5 140 (12.39%) REST
6 83 (7.35%) Playwright
7 79 (6.99%) React
8 77 (6.81%) RESTful
9 56 (4.96%) JSON
9 56 (4.96%) Node.js
10 55 (4.87%) RabbitMQ
11 51 (4.51%) PySpark
12 40 (3.54%) HTML
13 37 (3.27%) JPA
14 36 (3.19%) CSS
14 36 (3.19%) OAuth
15 35 (3.10%) OpenAPI
16 34 (3.01%) .NET
16 34 (3.01%) Elastic Stack
17 33 (2.92%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 231 (20.44%) Cloud Native
2 63 (5.58%) Distributed Systems
3 56 (4.96%) Product Ownership
4 37 (3.27%) Data Centre
5 36 (3.19%) Hybrid Cloud
6 34 (3.01%) Data Structures
7 33 (2.92%) Onboarding
8 28 (2.48%) Enterprise Software
9 21 (1.86%) Algorithms
10 20 (1.77%) PKI
11 18 (1.59%) AI Agents
12 16 (1.42%) Public Cloud
13 14 (1.24%) Distributed Architecture
13 14 (1.24%) Legacy Systems
14 12 (1.06%) Linux Command Line
14 12 (1.06%) Mainframe
14 12 (1.06%) Private Cloud
15 11 (0.97%) Replication
16 10 (0.88%) Security Posture
17 9 (0.80%) Greenfield Project
Operating Systems
1 234 (20.71%) Linux
2 54 (4.78%) Unix
3 52 (4.60%) Windows
4 44 (3.89%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 17 (1.50%) Ubuntu
6 16 (1.42%) CentOS
7 13 (1.15%) VMS
8 12 (1.06%) AIX
9 10 (0.88%) Windows Server
9 10 (0.88%) zOS
10 2 (0.18%) Debian
10 2 (0.18%) Rocky
10 2 (0.18%) Windows Server 2016
11 1 (0.088%) Amazon Linux
11 1 (0.088%) Android
11 1 (0.088%) Apple iOS
Processes & Methodologies
1 957 (84.69%) CI/CD
2 660 (58.41%) DevOps
3 517 (45.75%) Infrastructure as Code
4 466 (41.24%) Agile
5 390 (34.51%) Containerisation
6 350 (30.97%) Test Automation
7 235 (20.80%) Microservices
8 211 (18.67%) Observability
9 202 (17.88%) Scrum
10 180 (15.93%) Software Engineering
11 178 (15.75%) Continuous Improvement
12 166 (14.69%) Platform Engineering
13 154 (13.63%) AI
14 149 (13.19%) Problem-Solving
15 119 (10.53%) Deployment Automation
15 119 (10.53%) Mentoring
16 117 (10.35%) Migration
17 115 (10.18%) DevSecOps
17 115 (10.18%) Stakeholder Management
18 109 (9.65%) Software Delivery
Programming Languages
1 496 (43.89%) Python
2 301 (26.64%) Java
3 264 (23.36%) SQL
4 191 (16.90%) Bash
5 109 (9.65%) JavaScript
6 88 (7.79%) PowerShell
7 70 (6.19%) C#
8 64 (5.66%) TypeScript
9 49 (4.34%) Go
10 46 (4.07%) Shell Script
11 21 (1.86%) PL/SQL
12 20 (1.77%) Bicep
13 16 (1.42%) C++
14 14 (1.24%) Groovy
14 14 (1.24%) Scala
15 8 (0.71%) Kotlin
16 7 (0.62%) R
17 6 (0.53%) Kusto Query Language
18 5 (0.44%) Cypher
18 5 (0.44%) Search Processing Language
Qualifications
1 536 (47.43%) Security Cleared
2 422 (37.35%) SC Cleared
3 105 (9.29%) BPSS Clearance
4 91 (8.05%) DV Cleared
5 56 (4.96%) Degree
6 55 (4.87%) AWS Certification
7 39 (3.45%) Computer Science Degree
8 16 (1.42%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
8 16 (1.42%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
8 16 (1.42%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
8 16 (1.42%) CISSP
9 14 (1.24%) Azure Certification
10 12 (1.06%) ISTQB
11 9 (0.80%) Cisco Certification
12 8 (0.71%) SAFe Agilist
13 7 (0.62%) (ISC)2 CCSP
14 6 (0.53%) Microsoft Certified Professional
15 5 (0.44%) GCFA
15 5 (0.44%) GCIH
16 4 (0.35%) CEH
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 149 (13.19%) QA
2 67 (5.93%) Accessibility
3 45 (3.98%) Data Quality
4 32 (2.83%) WCAG
5 19 (1.68%) NIST
6 15 (1.33%) GDPR
7 14 (1.24%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 11 (0.97%) NCSC
9 10 (0.88%) PCI DSS
10 8 (0.71%) Sarbanes-Oxley
11 7 (0.62%) ISO 20022
11 7 (0.62%) SLA
12 5 (0.44%) FATCA
13 3 (0.27%) Cyber Essentials
13 3 (0.27%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
14 1 (0.088%) Disclosure Scotland
14 1 (0.088%) JSP 440
14 1 (0.088%) MIL-STD-1553
14 1 (0.088%) NIST 800
14 1 (0.088%) SEPA
System Software
1 477 (42.21%) Docker
2 27 (2.39%) VMware Infrastructure
3 24 (2.12%) Active Directory
4 13 (1.15%) Oracle RAC
5 11 (0.97%) Virtual Machines
6 9 (0.80%) VMware NSX
7 5 (0.44%) HDFS
7 5 (0.44%) Squid
8 4 (0.35%) Virtual Desktop
8 4 (0.35%) 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 (0.088%) iptables
11 1 (0.088%) VMware ESXi
11 1 (0.088%) vSphere
Systems Management
1 523 (46.28%) Kubernetes
2 271 (23.98%) Ansible
3 191 (16.90%) Grafana
4 166 (14.69%) Prometheus
5 52 (4.60%) Argo
6 42 (3.72%) Puppet
7 32 (2.83%) Kibana
8 28 (2.48%) Progress Chef
9 17 (1.50%) Istio
9 17 (1.50%) Packer
10 13 (1.15%) Data Guard
10 13 (1.15%) Oracle RMAN
11 11 (0.97%) Single Sign-On
12 9 (0.80%) Cilium
12 9 (0.80%) Kustomize
13 8 (0.71%) Podman
14 5 (0.44%) CASB
14 5 (0.44%) HP Fortify
15 4 (0.35%) Consul
15 4 (0.35%) Rancher
Vendors
1 132 (11.68%) Oracle
2 80 (7.08%) Google
3 72 (6.37%) Microsoft
4 64 (5.66%) Splunk
5 55 (4.87%) Talend
6 47 (4.16%) Informatica
7 46 (4.07%) VMware
8 40 (3.54%) Dynatrace
9 33 (2.92%) Databricks
10 27 (2.39%) ServiceNow
11 26 (2.30%) Denodo
12 24 (2.12%) IBM
12 24 (2.12%) Red Hat
13 22 (1.95%) Palo Alto
14 20 (1.77%) F5
15 18 (1.59%) Arista
15 18 (1.59%) Aruba
15 18 (1.59%) Trend Micro
16 15 (1.33%) Cisco
17 14 (1.24%) Veracode