Operations Engineer Contracts

Operations Engineer
UK

The median Operations Engineer daily rate in the UK is £505, according to job vacancies posted in the 6 months leading up to 30 April 2025.

The table below provides contractor rate benchmarking and summary statistics, comparing them to the same period in the previous two years.

6 months to
30 Apr 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 462 490 579
Rank change year-on-year +28 +89 +127
Contract jobs requiring an Operations Engineer 57 110 134
As % of all contract jobs advertised in the UK 0.19% 0.25% 0.22%
As % of the Job Titles category 0.21% 0.27% 0.24%
Number of daily rates quoted 30 80 92
10th Percentile £393 £353 £401
25th Percentile £400 £406 £479
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £505 £550 £594
Median % change year-on-year -8.18% -7.37% +13.10%
75th Percentile £592 £650 £650
90th Percentile £750 £700 £700
UK excluding London median daily rate £400 £431 £540
% change year-on-year -7.23% -20.15% +8.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2 1 0
Median hourly rate £28.18 £38.50 -
Median % change year-on-year -26.81% - -
UK excluding London median hourly rate £28.18 £38.50 -
% change year-on-year -26.81% - -

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 27,050 40,453 56,471
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.52% 92.79% 94.61%
Number of daily rates quoted 17,687 26,352 39,474
10th Percentile £300 £275 £313
25th Percentile £406 £409 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £515 £525 £540
Median % change year-on-year -1.90% -2.78% +2.86%
75th Percentile £625 £638 £650
90th Percentile £738 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £493 £500
% change year-on-year -3.55% -1.50% +5.26%
Number of hourly rates quoted 1,031 2,658 1,569
10th Percentile £14.20 £12.86 £14.29
25th Percentile £18.51 £16.30 £19.50
Median hourly rate £29.07 £36.00 £45.00
Median % change year-on-year -19.25% -20.00% +91.86%
75th Percentile £62.50 £60.75 £65.75
90th Percentile £75.00 £72.50 £75.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £28.75 £38.50 £42.50
% change year-on-year -25.32% -9.41% +117.95%

Operations Engineer
Job Vacancy Trend

Job postings that featured Operations Engineer in the job title as a proportion of all IT jobs advertised.

Job vacancy trend for Operations Engineer in the UK

Operations Engineer
Contractor Daily Rate Trend

3-month moving average daily rate quoted in jobs citing Operations Engineer.

Daily rate trend for Operations Engineer in the UK

Operations Engineer
Daily Rate Histogram

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Operations Engineer over the 6 months to 30 April 2025.

Daily rate histogram for Operations Engineer in the UK

Operations Engineer
Contractor Hourly Rate Trend

3-month moving average hourly rates quoted in jobs citing Operations Engineer.

Hourly rate trend for Operations Engineer in the UK

Operations Engineer
Top 11 Contract Locations

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing Operations Engineer within the UK over the 6 months to 30 April 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 +13 54 £524 -4.38% 62
London +9 30 £575 -11.54% 25
Work from Home +42 21 £510 +20.00% 31
UK excluding London +23 20 £400 -7.23% 48
North of England +20 8 £325 -21.94% 14
Midlands +26 7 £469 +15.68% 11
West Midlands +18 7 £469 +15.68% 7
North West +12 7 - - 10
South East +23 3 £425 +3.41% 7
East of England +31 2 £400 -9.50% 2
Yorkshire +14 1 £325 - 3

Operations Engineer Skill Set
Top 30 Co-occurring Skills and Capabilities

For the 6 months to 30 April 2025, Operations Engineer contract job roles required the following skills and capabilities in order of popularity. The figures indicate the absolute number co-occurrences and as a proportion of all contract job ads featuring Operations Engineer in the job title.

1 20 (35.09%) Azure
2 19 (33.33%) Microsoft
3 18 (31.58%) Python
3 18 (31.58%) Social Skills
4 15 (26.32%) Security Operations
5 14 (24.56%) SIEM
5 14 (24.56%) Firewall
5 14 (24.56%) CI/CD
6 13 (22.81%) Linux
7 12 (21.05%) Virtual Machines
7 12 (21.05%) Problem-Solving
7 12 (21.05%) Ansible
7 12 (21.05%) AWS
8 11 (19.30%) Google
9 10 (17.54%) Agile
9 10 (17.54%) Security Cleared
9 10 (17.54%) DevOps
9 10 (17.54%) Palo Alto
9 10 (17.54%) Terraform
9 10 (17.54%) SOAR
10 9 (15.79%) Hyperautomation
10 9 (15.79%) MLOps
10 9 (15.79%) Incident Response
10 9 (15.79%) Machine Learning
10 9 (15.79%) Analytics
10 9 (15.79%) ITIL
10 9 (15.79%) Cisco
11 8 (14.04%) Workflow
11 8 (14.04%) SQL
11 8 (14.04%) PowerShell

Operations Engineer Skill Set
Co-occurring Skills and Capabilities by Category

The follow tables expand on the table above by listing co-occurrences grouped by category. The same employment type, locality and period is covered with up to 20 co-occurrences shown in each of the following categories:

Application Platforms
1 5 (8.77%) Mattermost
1 5 (8.77%) Skype for Business
2 1 (1.75%) Confluence
2 1 (1.75%) Jupyter
2 1 (1.75%) nginx
2 1 (1.75%) OpenStack
2 1 (1.75%) SharePoint
Business Applications
1 1 (1.75%) Oracle Payables
1 1 (1.75%) Remedy ITSM
Cloud Services
1 20 (35.09%) Azure
2 12 (21.05%) AWS
3 6 (10.53%) Azure Stack
4 4 (7.02%) Microsoft 365
5 2 (3.51%) Slack
6 1 (1.75%) Amazon CloudWatch
6 1 (1.75%) Amazon SageMaker
6 1 (1.75%) Azure AKS
6 1 (1.75%) Azure DevOps
6 1 (1.75%) Azure Sentinel
6 1 (1.75%) Entra ID
6 1 (1.75%) GCP
6 1 (1.75%) GitHub
6 1 (1.75%) Google Workspace
6 1 (1.75%) OneDrive
6 1 (1.75%) SaaS
6 1 (1.75%) Snowflake
6 1 (1.75%) Virtual Private Cloud
Communications & Networking
1 14 (24.56%) Firewall
2 5 (8.77%) Skype
2 5 (8.77%) Softphone
2 5 (8.77%) Unified Communications
2 5 (8.77%) WebEx
3 3 (5.26%) DHCP
3 3 (5.26%) DNS
3 3 (5.26%) TCP/IP
3 3 (5.26%) Wireshark
4 2 (3.51%) Network Security
4 2 (3.51%) Wi-Fi
5 1 (1.75%) BGP
5 1 (1.75%) BIG-IP
5 1 (1.75%) EIGRP
5 1 (1.75%) IPv4
5 1 (1.75%) MPLS
5 1 (1.75%) OSPF
5 1 (1.75%) SNMP
5 1 (1.75%) SSL
5 1 (1.75%) WAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 1 (1.75%) Elasticsearch
1 1 (1.75%) SAP HANA
Development Applications
1 6 (10.53%) GitLab
2 2 (3.51%) Git
2 2 (3.51%) Jenkins
2 2 (3.51%) JIRA
3 1 (1.75%) Artifactory
3 1 (1.75%) MLflow
3 1 (1.75%) SonarQube
General
1 18 (31.58%) Social Skills
2 6 (10.53%) Analytical Skills
3 4 (7.02%) Public Sector
4 2 (3.51%) Automotive
4 2 (3.51%) Finance
4 2 (3.51%) Military
5 1 (1.75%) Documentation Skills
5 1 (1.75%) Financial Institution
5 1 (1.75%) Inclusion and Diversity
5 1 (1.75%) Telecoms
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 5 (8.77%) XMPP
2 2 (3.51%) PyTorch
3 1 (1.75%) FastAPI
3 1 (1.75%) Lambda Expressions
3 1 (1.75%) LangChain
3 1 (1.75%) NumPy
3 1 (1.75%) ONNX
3 1 (1.75%) Pandas
3 1 (1.75%) PySpark
3 1 (1.75%) SQLAlchemy
3 1 (1.75%) TensorFlow
3 1 (1.75%) XGBoost
Miscellaneous
1 6 (10.53%) Management Information System
1 6 (10.53%) Product Ownership
2 3 (5.26%) Mainframe
3 2 (3.51%) Data Centre
3 2 (3.51%) Infotainment
3 2 (3.51%) PKI
3 2 (3.51%) Self-Motivation
4 1 (1.75%) Algorithms
4 1 (1.75%) Cloud Native
4 1 (1.75%) Cyber Threat
4 1 (1.75%) Data Protection Act
4 1 (1.75%) Derivative
4 1 (1.75%) Legacy Systems
4 1 (1.75%) Security Posture
Operating Systems
1 13 (22.81%) Linux
2 4 (7.02%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
2 4 (7.02%) Windows
3 3 (5.26%) MVS
4 1 (1.75%) Mac OS
4 1 (1.75%) Windows Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 15 (26.32%) Security Operations
2 14 (24.56%) CI/CD
2 14 (24.56%) SIEM
3 12 (21.05%) Problem-Solving
4 10 (17.54%) Agile
4 10 (17.54%) DevOps
4 10 (17.54%) SOAR
5 9 (15.79%) Analytics
5 9 (15.79%) Hyperautomation
5 9 (15.79%) Incident Response
5 9 (15.79%) ITIL
5 9 (15.79%) Machine Learning
5 9 (15.79%) MLOps
6 8 (14.04%) Workflow
7 7 (12.28%) Containerisation
7 7 (12.28%) Data Science
8 6 (10.53%) Change Management
8 6 (10.53%) DataOps
8 6 (10.53%) Product Strategy
8 6 (10.53%) Threat Detection
Programming Languages
1 18 (31.58%) Python
2 8 (14.04%) PowerShell
2 8 (14.04%) SQL
3 6 (10.53%) Scala
4 3 (5.26%) REXX
5 2 (3.51%) Java
6 1 (1.75%) Bash
6 1 (1.75%) Perl
6 1 (1.75%) Shell Script
6 1 (1.75%) Tcl
Qualifications
1 10 (17.54%) Security Cleared
2 8 (14.04%) Degree
3 6 (10.53%) SC Cleared
4 5 (8.77%) ITIL Certification
5 3 (5.26%) Computer Science Degree
5 3 (5.26%) CTC Cleared
6 2 (3.51%) Cisco Certification
6 2 (3.51%) CISSP
7 1 (1.75%) (ISC)2 CCSP
7 1 (1.75%) AWS Certification
7 1 (1.75%) Azure Certification
7 1 (1.75%) CCNP
7 1 (1.75%) CCSP
7 1 (1.75%) CEH
7 1 (1.75%) GCIH
7 1 (1.75%) Master's Degree
7 1 (1.75%) Microsoft Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 3 (5.26%) ISO/IEC 27001
2 2 (3.51%) Accessibility
2 2 (3.51%) COSHH
2 2 (3.51%) ISO 14001
2 2 (3.51%) SLA
3 1 (1.75%) Cyber Essentials
3 1 (1.75%) Data Quality
3 1 (1.75%) GDPR
3 1 (1.75%) NIST
3 1 (1.75%) QA
3 1 (1.75%) SOC 2
System Software
1 12 (21.05%) Virtual Machines
2 7 (12.28%) Active Directory
3 4 (7.02%) Docker
4 1 (1.75%) Apache ZooKeeper
4 1 (1.75%) VMware Infrastructure
Systems Management
1 12 (21.05%) Ansible
2 10 (17.54%) Terraform
3 5 (8.77%) Kubernetes
3 5 (8.77%) SCOM
4 4 (7.02%) Microsoft Intune
5 3 (5.26%) Consul
5 3 (5.26%) SCCM
5 3 (5.26%) WSUS
6 2 (3.51%) Opsview
6 2 (3.51%) Progress Chef
6 2 (3.51%) Prometheus
7 1 (1.75%) Argo
7 1 (1.75%) Istio
7 1 (1.75%) logstash
7 1 (1.75%) Podman
7 1 (1.75%) Puppet
Vendors
1 19 (33.33%) Microsoft
2 11 (19.30%) Google
3 10 (17.54%) Palo Alto
4 9 (15.79%) Cisco
5 8 (14.04%) Splunk
6 5 (8.77%) Red Hat
7 3 (5.26%) Broadcom
7 3 (5.26%) F5
7 3 (5.26%) NetScout
7 3 (5.26%) Rapid7
7 3 (5.26%) Sophos
8 2 (3.51%) Blue Coat
8 2 (3.51%) BMC
8 2 (3.51%) CheckPoint
8 2 (3.51%) Fortinet
8 2 (3.51%) PagerDuty
9 1 (1.75%) Citrix
9 1 (1.75%) Oracle
9 1 (1.75%) Remedy
9 1 (1.75%) SAP