Puppet Contract Job Trends

Puppet
UK

The table below provides summary statistics and contractor rates for jobs requiring Puppet skills. It covers contract job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 14 February 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
14 Feb 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 492 354 357
Rank change year-on-year -138 +3 -58
Contract jobs citing Puppet 113 180 248
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.28% 0.58% 0.55%
As % of the Systems Management category 1.82% 3.78% 4.47%
Number of daily rates quoted 71 105 172
10th Percentile £429 £396 £422
25th Percentile £494 £500 £480
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £530 £575 £568
Median % change year-on-year -7.83% +1.32% -1.30%
75th Percentile £588 £625 £651
90th Percentile £645 £675 £761
UK excluding London median daily rate £525 £575 £554
% change year-on-year -8.70% +3.84% +0.68%
Number of hourly rates quoted 1 2 5
10th Percentile - £23.45 £54.75
25th Percentile £61.00 £35.38 £67.50
Median hourly rate £62.00 £55.50 £75.00
Median % change year-on-year +11.71% -26.00% +15.38%
75th Percentile £63.00 £75.38 £78.00
90th Percentile - £87.15 -
UK excluding London median hourly rate - £16.00 £78.00
% change year-on-year - -79.49% -

All Systems Management Skills
UK

Puppet falls under the Systems Management category. For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all contract job vacancies requiring systems management skills.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for systems management skills 6,198 4,761 5,546
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 15.44% 15.38% 12.38%
Number of daily rates quoted 4,291 3,095 3,981
10th Percentile £313 £313 £263
25th Percentile £413 £425 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -8.70%
75th Percentile £600 £638 £638
90th Percentile £688 £738 £719
UK excluding London median daily rate £490 £500 £500
% change year-on-year -2.00% - -4.76%
Number of hourly rates quoted 130 57 162
10th Percentile £17.31 £15.22 £14.08
25th Percentile £20.34 £21.05 £21.25
Median hourly rate £52.50 £24.18 £46.18
Median % change year-on-year +117.12% -47.64% +0.16%
75th Percentile £63.32 £49.75 £60.94
90th Percentile £80.20 £71.78 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £50.00 £23.00 £46.18
% change year-on-year +117.39% -50.19% +8.66%

Puppet
Job Vacancy Trend

Historical trend showing the proportion of contract IT job postings citing Puppet relative to all contract IT jobs advertised.

Puppet job vacancy trend in the UK

Puppet
Daily Rate Trend

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing Puppet.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing Puppet

Puppet
Daily Rate Histogram

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Puppet over the 6 months to 14 February 2026.

Daily rate histogram for Puppet in the UK

Puppet
Hourly Rate Trend

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing Puppet.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing Puppet

Puppet
Top 13 Contract Job Locations

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing Puppet within the UK over the 6 months to 14 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 -113 104 £530 -7.83% 31
UK excluding London -81 74 £525 -8.70% 24
Midlands -25 33 £525 +27.12% 5
West Midlands -21 31 £550 +10.00% 4
London -66 27 £553 -1.34% 3
Work from Home -57 26 £531 -3.45% 13
North of England -59 22 £523 +4.50% 3
Yorkshire -46 21 £520 +8.90% 1
South East -25 13 £650 +34.37% 4
East of England -19 4 £619 +3.13% 2
South West -45 3 £575 -6.50% 10
East Midlands -25 2 £525 +61.04% 1
North West -42 1 £525 -4.55% 2

Puppet
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 14 (12.39%) Apache
2 13 (11.50%) Confluence
3 9 (7.96%) JBoss
3 9 (7.96%) WebLogic
4 6 (5.31%) OpenStack
5 5 (4.42%) Apache Airflow
5 5 (4.42%) Apache Spark
6 2 (1.77%) SAS
7 1 (0.88%) IIS
7 1 (0.88%) Oracle SOA Suite
Applications
1 4 (3.54%) Weka
2 1 (0.88%) Microsoft Office
Business Applications
1 1 (0.88%) Oracle BPM
Cloud Services
1 55 (48.67%) AWS
2 27 (23.89%) Azure
3 24 (21.24%) GitHub
4 23 (20.35%) Amazon EKS
5 21 (18.58%) AWS CloudFormation
6 17 (15.04%) Amazon EC2
6 17 (15.04%) Amazon S3
6 17 (15.04%) GCP
7 16 (14.16%) Amazon ECS
8 12 (10.62%) Cloud Computing
8 12 (10.62%) IaaS
8 12 (10.62%) Serverless
9 10 (8.85%) GitHub Actions
9 10 (8.85%) OpenShift
10 8 (7.08%) Azure AKS
10 8 (7.08%) Azure DevOps
11 7 (6.19%) Amazon CloudWatch
11 7 (6.19%) AWS Lambda
11 7 (6.19%) Datadog
12 5 (4.42%) CloudBees
Communications & Networking
1 9 (7.96%) DNS
1 9 (7.96%) VPN
2 8 (7.08%) Firewall
2 8 (7.08%) TCP/IP
3 6 (5.31%) DHCP
4 4 (3.54%) Network Security
4 4 (3.54%) SMTP
5 2 (1.77%) HTTP
5 2 (1.77%) InfiniBand
5 2 (1.77%) Software-Defined Networking
6 1 (0.88%) Internet
6 1 (0.88%) Kerberos
6 1 (0.88%) MQTT
6 1 (0.88%) Reverse Proxy
6 1 (0.88%) SAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 20 (17.70%) Elasticsearch
2 15 (13.27%) Amazon RDS
3 13 (11.50%) PostgreSQL
4 12 (10.62%) MongoDB
5 10 (8.85%) SQL Server
6 6 (5.31%) Hadoop
6 6 (5.31%) Relational Database
7 5 (4.42%) Apache Hive
7 5 (4.42%) HBase
7 5 (4.42%) MySQL
8 3 (2.65%) DynamoDB
9 2 (1.77%) Amazon Redshift
9 2 (1.77%) InfluxDB
10 1 (0.88%) Amazon Athena
10 1 (0.88%) Amazon Aurora
10 1 (0.88%) Amazon QuickSight
10 1 (0.88%) Data Lake
10 1 (0.88%) Oracle Database
10 1 (0.88%) RDBMS
Development Applications
1 29 (25.66%) Git
2 27 (23.89%) Jenkins
3 18 (15.93%) GitLab
4 16 (14.16%) JIRA
5 13 (11.50%) JUnit
5 13 (11.50%) Selenium
6 9 (7.96%) Bitbucket
6 9 (7.96%) Eclipse
6 9 (7.96%) IntelliJ
7 7 (6.19%) Artifactory
8 6 (5.31%) Gradle
8 6 (5.31%) SonarQube
8 6 (5.31%) Sonatype Nexus
9 5 (4.42%) CircleCI
9 5 (4.42%) Maven
10 4 (3.54%) Cypress.io
10 4 (3.54%) Postman
10 4 (3.54%) Snyk
10 4 (3.54%) webpack
11 1 (0.88%) Travis CI
General
1 41 (36.28%) Social Skills
2 18 (15.93%) Analytical Skills
3 12 (10.62%) Public Sector
4 10 (8.85%) Documentation Skills
5 9 (7.96%) Finance
5 9 (7.96%) Influencing Skills
6 5 (4.42%) Banking
7 4 (3.54%) Presentation Skills
8 3 (2.65%) Financial Institution
9 2 (1.77%) Investment Banking
9 2 (1.77%) Marketing
9 2 (1.77%) Pharmaceutical
10 1 (0.88%) Military
Job Titles
1 26 (23.01%) Site Engineer
2 25 (22.12%) DevOps Engineer
3 24 (21.24%) Site Reliability Engineer
4 14 (12.39%) Splunk Engineer
5 11 (9.73%) Automation Engineer
6 9 (7.96%) AWS Engineer
6 9 (7.96%) Lead
7 7 (6.19%) Senior
8 5 (4.42%) Architect
8 5 (4.42%) AWS DevOps
8 5 (4.42%) AWS DevOps Engineer
8 5 (4.42%) Hadoop Engineer
8 5 (4.42%) Storage Engineer
9 4 (3.54%) 3rd Line Engineer
9 4 (3.54%) Developer
9 4 (3.54%) Java Engineer
9 4 (3.54%) NetApp Engineer
10 3 (2.65%) 3rd Line Infrastructure Engineer
10 3 (2.65%) Data Engineer
10 3 (2.65%) Senior DevOps
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 27 (23.89%) Elastic Stack
2 19 (16.81%) REST
3 14 (12.39%) JSON
4 13 (11.50%) YAML
5 10 (8.85%) XML
6 9 (7.96%) EJB
6 9 (7.96%) Hibernate
6 9 (7.96%) HTML
6 9 (7.96%) HTML5
6 9 (7.96%) J2EE
6 9 (7.96%) J2SE
6 9 (7.96%) Play Framework
6 9 (7.96%) SOAP
6 9 (7.96%) Spring
7 5 (4.42%) Kafka
7 5 (4.42%) Spark Streaming
8 3 (2.65%) AWS CDK
9 2 (1.77%) Loki
9 2 (1.77%) RabbitMQ
10 1 (0.88%) Node.js
Miscellaneous
1 14 (12.39%) Cloud Native
1 14 (12.39%) Management Information System
2 9 (7.96%) Data Centre
3 7 (6.19%) Enterprise Storage
4 6 (5.31%) Private Cloud
5 5 (4.42%) PKI
5 5 (4.42%) Product Ownership
6 4 (3.54%) Clustering
6 4 (3.54%) Hybrid Cloud
7 3 (2.65%) Data Protection Act
7 3 (2.65%) Data Structures
7 3 (2.65%) Enterprise Software
7 3 (2.65%) Public Cloud
8 2 (1.77%) Blog
8 2 (1.77%) Grid Computing
8 2 (1.77%) Hedge funds
8 2 (1.77%) Linux Command Line
9 1 (0.88%) Data Fabric
9 1 (0.88%) Distributed Systems
9 1 (0.88%) Enterprise Cloud
Operating Systems
1 74 (65.49%) Linux
2 31 (27.43%) Unix
3 13 (11.50%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 12 (10.62%) CentOS
4 12 (10.62%) Windows
5 10 (8.85%) Ubuntu
6 7 (6.19%) Windows Server
7 4 (3.54%) Windows Server 2003
Processes & Methodologies
1 75 (66.37%) DevOps
2 64 (56.64%) CI/CD
3 53 (46.90%) Containerisation
4 50 (44.25%) Configuration Management
5 46 (40.71%) Infrastructure as Code
6 41 (36.28%) Problem-Solving
7 33 (29.20%) Site Reliability Engineering
8 31 (27.43%) Agile
9 29 (25.66%) Continuous Improvement
10 27 (23.89%) Observability
11 20 (17.70%) Computer Science
11 20 (17.70%) Software Engineering
12 19 (16.81%) Continuous Integration
12 19 (16.81%) Migration
13 18 (15.93%) Incident Response
14 17 (15.04%) Change Management
14 17 (15.04%) Microservices
15 16 (14.16%) Infrastructure Automation
15 16 (14.16%) Test Automation
16 15 (13.27%) Knowledge Transfer
Programming Languages
1 77 (68.14%) Python
2 49 (43.36%) Bash
3 18 (15.93%) Java
4 15 (13.27%) SQL
5 12 (10.62%) Perl
5 12 (10.62%) Shell Script
6 11 (9.73%) PowerShell
6 11 (9.73%) Ruby
7 9 (7.96%) Scala
8 5 (4.42%) Go
9 2 (1.77%) C++
9 2 (1.77%) Groovy
10 1 (0.88%) Rust
Qualifications
1 30 (26.55%) Security Cleared
2 24 (21.24%) Degree
3 19 (16.81%) Computer Science Degree
4 15 (13.27%) SC Cleared
5 13 (11.50%) DV Cleared
6 12 (10.62%) RHCE
7 4 (3.54%) AWS Certification
7 4 (3.54%) RHCSA
8 2 (1.77%) BPSS Clearance
9 1 (0.88%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
9 1 (0.88%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
9 1 (0.88%) AWS Certified SysOps Administrator
9 1 (0.88%) Master's Degree
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 5 (4.42%) QA
2 2 (1.77%) SLA
System Software
1 67 (59.29%) Docker
2 9 (7.96%) VMware Infrastructure
3 8 (7.08%) Active Directory
4 5 (4.42%) HDFS
4 5 (4.42%) Hyper-V
4 5 (4.42%) Lustre
5 4 (3.54%) BitLocker
5 4 (3.54%) GPFS
5 4 (3.54%) KVM
5 4 (3.54%) Microsoft App-V
5 4 (3.54%) Slurm Workload Manager
5 4 (3.54%) VMware ESXi
6 1 (0.88%) NFS
Systems Management
1 95 (84.07%) Ansible
2 53 (46.90%) Kubernetes
3 44 (38.94%) Terraform
4 31 (27.43%) Progress Chef
5 23 (20.35%) Grafana
6 17 (15.04%) Prometheus
7 15 (13.27%) Kibana
8 10 (8.85%) NetBackup
9 7 (6.19%) Podman
10 6 (5.31%) Salt
11 5 (4.42%) Hadoop YARN
12 4 (3.54%) vCenter Server
12 4 (3.54%) vMotion
13 3 (2.65%) Argo
13 3 (2.65%) Docker Swarm
13 3 (2.65%) Red Hat Satellite
14 2 (1.77%) Istio
15 1 (0.88%) Consul
15 1 (0.88%) Dell DRAC
15 1 (0.88%) Oracle ZFS
Vendors
1 24 (21.24%) Red Hat
2 21 (18.58%) Splunk
3 15 (13.27%) Microsoft
4 10 (8.85%) Commvault
5 9 (7.96%) VMware
5 9 (7.96%) webMethods
6 8 (7.08%) PagerDuty
7 4 (3.54%) Citrix
7 4 (3.54%) NetApp
7 4 (3.54%) Veritas
8 2 (1.77%) Broadcom
8 2 (1.77%) Dell
8 2 (1.77%) New Relic
8 2 (1.77%) SnapLogic
9 1 (0.88%) AppDynamics
9 1 (0.88%) Fortinet
9 1 (0.88%) Google
9 1 (0.88%) SaltStack
9 1 (0.88%) ServiceNow
9 1 (0.88%) Tenable