Lead DevOps Contract Job Trends

Lead Development Operations
UK

The median Lead Development Operations daily rate in the UK is £588, according to job vacancies posted in the 6 months leading up to 16 December 2025.

The table below compares current contractor rates and summary statistics with the previous two years.

6 months to
16 Dec 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 547 505 537
Rank change year-on-year -42 +32 +46
Contract jobs requiring a Lead DevOps 56 39 65
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.15% 0.11% 0.15%
As % of the Job Titles category 0.17% 0.12% 0.16%
Number of daily rates quoted 39 23 43
10th Percentile £463 £502 £463
25th Percentile £519 £513 £525
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £588 £600 £625
Median % change year-on-year -2.08% -4.00% -10.71%
75th Percentile £644 £670 £681
90th Percentile £788 £741 £773
UK excluding London median daily rate £544 £588 £650
% change year-on-year -7.45% -9.62% -7.14%
Number of hourly rates quoted 0 0 1
Median hourly rate - - £52.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate - - £52.00

All Contract IT Job Vacancies
UK

For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all contract IT job vacancies. Most job vacancies include a discernible job title that can be normalized. As such, the figures in the second row provide an indication of the number of contract jobs in our overall sample.

Contract vacancies in the UK with a recognized job title 33,396 31,755 41,279
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 90.97% 92.76% 93.40%
Number of daily rates quoted 21,158 19,530 27,755
10th Percentile £290 £300 £288
25th Percentile £404 £410 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £619 £638 £644
90th Percentile £723 £738 £740
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £490 £500
% change year-on-year -3.06% -2.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 1,967 1,021 1,465
10th Percentile £14.25 £15.48 £15.19
25th Percentile £18.11 £21.00 £19.18
Median hourly rate £25.15 £34.00 £45.00
Median % change year-on-year -26.03% -24.44% +50.00%
75th Percentile £57.50 £62.69 £65.00
90th Percentile £71.47 £72.75 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £25.15 £32.50 £45.00
% change year-on-year -22.62% -27.78% +80.00%

Lead DevOps
Job Vacancy Trend

Historical trend showing the proportion of contract IT job postings featuring 'Lead DevOps' in the job title relative to all contract IT jobs advertised.

Lead DevOps job vacancy trend in the UK

Lead DevOps
Daily Rate Trend

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for Lead DevOps job vacancies in the UK.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for Lead DevOps job vacancies in the UK

Lead DevOps
Daily Rate Histogram

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Lead DevOps over the 6 months to 16 December 2025.

Daily rate histogram for Lead DevOps in the UK

Lead DevOps
Hourly Rate Trend

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for Lead DevOps job vacancies in the UK.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for Lead DevOps job vacancies in the UK

Lead DevOps
Top 11 Contract Job Locations

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing Lead DevOps within the UK over the 6 months to 16 December 2025. 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 -20 52 £600 +5.26% 14
London +20 29 £601 -5.06% 9
Work from Home +3 15 £550 -17.91% 11
UK excluding London -68 15 £544 -7.45% 8
North of England -44 11 £513 -2.38%
Yorkshire -45 6 £500 -4.76%
North West -28 5 £518 -
West Midlands -29 4 £569 -1.09% 2
Midlands -36 4 £569 -1.09% 2
North East -12 1 £750 +42.86%
South East -25 1 - - 5

Lead DevOps Skill Set
Top 30 Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities

For the 6 months to 16 December 2025, Lead DevOps contract job roles required the following skills and capabilities in order of popularity. The figures indicate the absolute number of co-occurrences and as a proportion of all contract job ads featuring Lead DevOps in the job title.

1 56 (100.00%) DevOps
2 41 (73.21%) CI/CD
3 35 (62.50%) Terraform
4 33 (58.93%) AWS
5 26 (46.43%) Infrastructure as Code
6 25 (44.64%) Security Cleared
7 22 (39.29%) SC Cleared
8 21 (37.50%) Agile
9 20 (35.71%) Azure
9 20 (35.71%) Kubernetes
10 18 (32.14%) GitLab
10 18 (32.14%) Python
11 17 (30.36%) GitHub
11 17 (30.36%) Jenkins
11 17 (30.36%) Linux
12 16 (28.57%) Containerisation
12 16 (28.57%) Observability
13 14 (25.00%) Docker
14 13 (23.21%) Amazon ECS
14 13 (23.21%) Ansible
14 13 (23.21%) Platform Engineering
15 12 (21.43%) AWS CloudFormation
15 12 (21.43%) Kafka
16 11 (19.64%) Azure DevOps
16 11 (19.64%) GitHub Actions
16 11 (19.64%) Java
17 10 (17.86%) Amazon EKS
17 10 (17.86%) Go
17 10 (17.86%) Infrastructure Automation
17 10 (17.86%) Microservices

Lead DevOps Skill Set
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:

Cloud Services
1 33 (58.93%) AWS
2 20 (35.71%) Azure
3 17 (30.36%) GitHub
4 13 (23.21%) Amazon ECS
5 12 (21.43%) AWS CloudFormation
6 11 (19.64%) Azure DevOps
6 11 (19.64%) GitHub Actions
7 10 (17.86%) Amazon EKS
8 9 (16.07%) Virtual Private Cloud
9 8 (14.29%) Amazon EC2
10 7 (12.50%) AWS Fargate
11 6 (10.71%) Amazon CloudWatch
11 6 (10.71%) Entra ID
12 4 (7.14%) Amazon S3
12 4 (7.14%) AWS Lambda
12 4 (7.14%) GCP
12 4 (7.14%) Serverless
13 3 (5.36%) AWS CodePipeline
13 3 (5.36%) Datadog
13 3 (5.36%) Power Platform
Communications & Networking
1 6 (10.71%) DNS
2 1 (1.79%) Network Security
Database & Business Intelligence
1 9 (16.07%) Amazon RDS
2 6 (10.71%) MongoDB
3 3 (5.36%) Power BI
4 2 (3.57%) Data Lake
4 2 (3.57%) Flink
5 1 (1.79%) Amazon Athena
5 1 (1.79%) Amazon Redshift
5 1 (1.79%) BigQuery
5 1 (1.79%) Cloud Spanner
5 1 (1.79%) Data Warehouse
5 1 (1.79%) Metadata
5 1 (1.79%) NoSQL
5 1 (1.79%) Tableau
Development Applications
1 18 (32.14%) GitLab
2 17 (30.36%) Jenkins
3 7 (12.50%) JIRA
4 4 (7.14%) Terragrunt
5 3 (5.36%) Git
6 1 (1.79%) Bitbucket
6 1 (1.79%) CircleCI
6 1 (1.79%) Cucumber
6 1 (1.79%) JMeter
General
1 14 (25.00%) Finance
2 13 (23.21%) Public Sector
3 6 (10.71%) Social Skills
4 5 (8.93%) Banking
5 3 (5.36%) Electronics
5 3 (5.36%) Front Office
5 3 (5.36%) Manufacturing
5 3 (5.36%) Marketing
5 3 (5.36%) Telecoms
6 2 (3.57%) Law
7 1 (1.79%) Corporate Banking
7 1 (1.79%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 1 (1.79%) Investment Banking
7 1 (1.79%) Military
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 12 (21.43%) Kafka
2 6 (10.71%) cloud-init
2 6 (10.71%) Keycloak
3 5 (8.93%) AWS CDK
4 4 (7.14%) Elastic Stack
5 3 (5.36%) .NET
5 3 (5.36%) React
5 3 (5.36%) SailPoint
6 2 (3.57%) ARM Templates
6 2 (3.57%) Web Services
7 1 (1.79%) AngularJS
7 1 (1.79%) JSON
7 1 (1.79%) JSON Schema
7 1 (1.79%) LangChain
7 1 (1.79%) LangGraph
7 1 (1.79%) Node.js
7 1 (1.79%) Playwright
7 1 (1.79%) RESTful
7 1 (1.79%) Spring
7 1 (1.79%) Spring Boot
Miscellaneous
1 6 (10.71%) PKI
2 4 (7.14%) Legacy Applications
3 3 (5.36%) Cloud Native
3 3 (5.36%) Cyber Defence
4 2 (3.57%) Cyber Threat
4 2 (3.57%) Distributed Systems
4 2 (3.57%) Hybrid Cloud
5 1 (1.79%) Cloud Security Posture
5 1 (1.79%) Cyberattack
5 1 (1.79%) Derivative
5 1 (1.79%) Equities
5 1 (1.79%) Fixed Income
5 1 (1.79%) Legacy Systems
5 1 (1.79%) NHS
5 1 (1.79%) Product Ownership
5 1 (1.79%) Security Posture
5 1 (1.79%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 17 (30.36%) Linux
2 10 (17.86%) Unix
3 7 (12.50%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 6 (10.71%) CentOS
5 2 (3.57%) Windows
Processes & Methodologies
1 56 (100.00%) DevOps
2 41 (73.21%) CI/CD
3 26 (46.43%) Infrastructure as Code
4 21 (37.50%) Agile
5 16 (28.57%) Containerisation
5 16 (28.57%) Observability
6 13 (23.21%) Platform Engineering
7 10 (17.86%) Infrastructure Automation
7 10 (17.86%) Microservices
8 9 (16.07%) Incident Response
9 8 (14.29%) Deployment Automation
9 8 (14.29%) Technical Leadership
10 7 (12.50%) Business Intelligence
10 7 (12.50%) Configuration Management
10 7 (12.50%) Site Reliability Engineering
11 6 (10.71%) ITIL
11 6 (10.71%) Roadmaps
12 5 (8.93%) Knowledge Transfer
12 5 (8.93%) Problem-Solving
12 5 (8.93%) Software Delivery
Programming Languages
1 18 (32.14%) Python
2 11 (19.64%) Java
3 10 (17.86%) Go
4 9 (16.07%) Bash
5 6 (10.71%) Shell Script
5 6 (10.71%) SQL
6 4 (7.14%) JavaScript
7 2 (3.57%) Bicep
7 2 (3.57%) Ruby
8 1 (1.79%) TypeScript
Qualifications
1 25 (44.64%) Security Cleared
2 22 (39.29%) SC Cleared
3 5 (8.93%) BPSS Clearance
4 4 (7.14%) AWS Certification
4 4 (7.14%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
5 2 (3.57%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
6 1 (1.79%) Azure Certification
6 1 (1.79%) Computer Science Degree
6 1 (1.79%) Degree
6 1 (1.79%) ITIL Certification
6 1 (1.79%) Master's Degree
6 1 (1.79%) PMI Certification
6 1 (1.79%) PMP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 6 (10.71%) NCSC
1 6 (10.71%) QA
2 5 (8.93%) Accessibility
3 2 (3.57%) PCI DSS
3 2 (3.57%) SOC 2
4 1 (1.79%) Basel III
4 1 (1.79%) Data Quality
4 1 (1.79%) GDPR
4 1 (1.79%) HIPAA
4 1 (1.79%) MiFID
4 1 (1.79%) WCAG
System Software
1 14 (25.00%) Docker
2 1 (1.79%) vSphere
Systems Management
1 35 (62.50%) Terraform
2 20 (35.71%) Kubernetes
3 13 (23.21%) Ansible
4 8 (14.29%) Prometheus
5 7 (12.50%) Packer
6 6 (10.71%) Argo
6 6 (10.71%) Grafana
6 6 (10.71%) Jamf Pro
7 2 (3.57%) ITRS Geneos
7 2 (3.57%) Progress Chef
7 2 (3.57%) Puppet
8 1 (1.79%) CASB
Vendors
1 7 (12.50%) Splunk
2 6 (10.71%) Okta
3 5 (8.93%) Databricks
3 5 (8.93%) Microsoft
4 3 (5.36%) InterSystems
4 3 (5.36%) SAP
5 2 (3.57%) Dynatrace
5 2 (3.57%) IBM
5 2 (3.57%) Red Hat
5 2 (3.57%) ServiceNow
6 1 (1.79%) Blue Prism
6 1 (1.79%) Google
6 1 (1.79%) UiPath
6 1 (1.79%) VMware