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 15 December 2025, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
15 Dec 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 462 388 328
Rank change year-on-year -74 -60 -52
Contract jobs citing Puppet 124 167 303
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.34% 0.49% 0.68%
As % of the Systems Management category 2.10% 3.32% 4.94%
Number of daily rates quoted 79 88 217
10th Percentile £375 £379 £413
25th Percentile £463 £452 £488
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £559 £550
Median % change year-on-year -6.04% +1.59% -8.33%
75th Percentile £588 £622 £650
90th Percentile £657 £663 £730
UK excluding London median daily rate £525 £495 £560
% change year-on-year +6.06% -11.61% -2.61%
Number of hourly rates quoted 0 2 8
10th Percentile - £23.45 £66.69
25th Percentile - £35.38 £71.25
Median hourly rate - £55.50 £78.00
Median % change year-on-year - -28.85% -
75th Percentile - £75.38 -
90th Percentile - £87.15 £78.35
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 5,893 5,023 6,132
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 16.17% 14.65% 13.81%
Number of daily rates quoted 4,007 3,202 4,334
10th Percentile £312 £313 £300
25th Percentile £413 £417 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £510 £525 £538
Median % change year-on-year -2.86% -2.42% -6.43%
75th Percentile £600 £638 £650
90th Percentile £690 £734 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £513
% change year-on-year - -2.44% -2.38%
Number of hourly rates quoted 127 68 170
10th Percentile £16.25 £18.40 £17.65
25th Percentile £20.13 £22.50 £22.97
Median hourly rate £40.00 £26.75 £46.18
Median % change year-on-year +49.53% -42.07% +44.31%
75th Percentile £64.88 £52.19 £72.35
90th Percentile £80.80 £74.13 £78.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £45.00 £24.50 £46.18
% change year-on-year +83.67% -46.95% +77.62%

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 15 December 2025.

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 15 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 -44 115 £525 -7.08% 49
UK excluding London -39 72 £525 +6.06% 37
London -45 39 £525 -7.08% 17
Work from Home -33 31 £525 - 11
Midlands -14 30 £550 +2.80% 6
West Midlands -7 28 £550 +2.80% 4
North of England -45 18 £479 -19.07% 8
Yorkshire -33 17 £475 -18.45% 3
South East -10 11 £590 +19.19% 14
East of England - 8 £575 - 2
South West -15 6 £600 +17.65% 6
East Midlands - 2 £525 - 2
North West -32 1 £525 -12.50% 4

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 18 (14.52%) Apache
2 15 (12.10%) Confluence
3 9 (7.26%) JBoss
3 9 (7.26%) WebLogic
4 7 (5.65%) OpenStack
5 6 (4.84%) Apache Airflow
5 6 (4.84%) Apache Spark
6 4 (3.23%) SAS
7 3 (2.42%) Oracle SOA Suite
8 2 (1.61%) Tomcat
9 1 (0.81%) CICS
9 1 (0.81%) IIS
9 1 (0.81%) Luigi
9 1 (0.81%) WebSphere
9 1 (0.81%) WebSphere Application Server
Applications
1 4 (3.23%) Weka
2 1 (0.81%) Microsoft Office
2 1 (0.81%) MS Visio
Business Applications
1 3 (2.42%) Oracle BPM
Cloud Services
1 74 (59.68%) AWS
2 38 (30.65%) Azure
3 32 (25.81%) GitHub
4 29 (23.39%) AWS CloudFormation
5 25 (20.16%) Amazon EC2
5 25 (20.16%) Amazon EKS
5 25 (20.16%) GCP
6 22 (17.74%) Amazon S3
7 17 (13.71%) Azure DevOps
8 16 (12.90%) Cloud Computing
9 14 (11.29%) Amazon ECS
9 14 (11.29%) GitHub Actions
10 13 (10.48%) Serverless
11 11 (8.87%) OpenShift
12 10 (8.06%) AWS Lambda
12 10 (8.06%) Azure AKS
12 10 (8.06%) IaaS
13 9 (7.26%) Virtual Private Cloud
14 8 (6.45%) Datadog
15 7 (5.65%) Amazon CloudWatch
Communications & Networking
1 16 (12.90%) TCP/IP
2 13 (10.48%) DNS
3 10 (8.06%) Firewall
4 6 (4.84%) HTTP
5 4 (3.23%) Internet
5 4 (3.23%) VPN
6 3 (2.42%) DHCP
6 3 (2.42%) Network Security
7 2 (1.61%) InfiniBand
7 2 (1.61%) Software-Defined Networking
8 1 (0.81%) Cisco Nexus
8 1 (0.81%) Ethernet
8 1 (0.81%) FCoE
8 1 (0.81%) Fibre Channel
8 1 (0.81%) iSCSI
8 1 (0.81%) Kerberos
8 1 (0.81%) MQTT
8 1 (0.81%) Multicast
8 1 (0.81%) NAS
8 1 (0.81%) SAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 21 (16.94%) Amazon RDS
2 18 (14.52%) PostgreSQL
3 14 (11.29%) SQL Server
4 13 (10.48%) Elasticsearch
4 13 (10.48%) MongoDB
5 10 (8.06%) MySQL
6 9 (7.26%) Hadoop
7 5 (4.03%) Apache Hive
7 5 (4.03%) HBase
8 4 (3.23%) Amazon Aurora
8 4 (3.23%) NoSQL
8 4 (3.23%) Relational Database
9 3 (2.42%) DynamoDB
9 3 (2.42%) MariaDB
9 3 (2.42%) Oracle Database
10 2 (1.61%) InfluxDB
11 1 (0.81%) Amazon Redshift
11 1 (0.81%) ArangoDB
11 1 (0.81%) Data Lake
11 1 (0.81%) Power BI
Development Applications
1 44 (35.48%) Git
2 42 (33.87%) Jenkins
3 32 (25.81%) GitLab
4 19 (15.32%) JIRA
5 15 (12.10%) Bitbucket
5 15 (12.10%) Selenium
6 14 (11.29%) JUnit
7 9 (7.26%) Artifactory
7 9 (7.26%) Eclipse
7 9 (7.26%) IntelliJ
7 9 (7.26%) SonarQube
8 8 (6.45%) Gradle
8 8 (6.45%) Postman
8 8 (6.45%) Sonatype Nexus
9 7 (5.65%) Cypress.io
9 7 (5.65%) Maven
10 6 (4.84%) CircleCI
11 5 (4.03%) Snyk
11 5 (4.03%) webpack
12 3 (2.42%) Vagrant
General
1 38 (30.65%) Social Skills
2 19 (15.32%) Finance
3 14 (11.29%) Analytical Skills
4 11 (8.87%) Public Sector
5 9 (7.26%) Influencing Skills
6 4 (3.23%) Marketing
6 4 (3.23%) Presentation Skills
6 4 (3.23%) Telecoms
7 3 (2.42%) Financial Institution
8 2 (1.61%) Banking
8 2 (1.61%) Electronics
8 2 (1.61%) Manufacturing
8 2 (1.61%) Pharmaceutical
9 1 (0.81%) Aerospace
9 1 (0.81%) Documentation Skills
9 1 (0.81%) Investment Banking
Job Titles
1 31 (25.00%) DevOps Engineer
2 20 (16.13%) Site Engineer
3 18 (14.52%) Site Reliability Engineer
4 12 (9.68%) Senior
5 9 (7.26%) Automation Engineer
5 9 (7.26%) AWS Engineer
5 9 (7.26%) Splunk Engineer
6 8 (6.45%) Platform Engineer
7 7 (5.65%) Administrator
8 6 (4.84%) Developer
9 5 (4.03%) AWS DevOps
9 5 (4.03%) AWS DevOps Engineer
9 5 (4.03%) Data Engineer
9 5 (4.03%) Hadoop Engineer
9 5 (4.03%) Java Engineer
9 5 (4.03%) Senior DevOps
9 5 (4.03%) Senior DevOps Engineer
9 5 (4.03%) Systems Administrator
10 4 (3.23%) Cloud Engineer
11 3 (2.42%) Operations Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 29 (23.39%) Elastic Stack
2 21 (16.94%) REST
3 15 (12.10%) JSON
4 10 (8.06%) XML
5 9 (7.26%) EJB
5 9 (7.26%) Hibernate
5 9 (7.26%) HTML
5 9 (7.26%) HTML5
5 9 (7.26%) J2EE
5 9 (7.26%) J2SE
5 9 (7.26%) Play Framework
5 9 (7.26%) SOAP
5 9 (7.26%) Spring
6 8 (6.45%) YAML
7 6 (4.84%) Node.js
8 5 (4.03%) Kafka
8 5 (4.03%) Spark Streaming
9 3 (2.42%) ActiveMQ
9 3 (2.42%) LAMP
9 3 (2.42%) RESTful
Miscellaneous
1 16 (12.90%) Cloud Native
2 12 (9.68%) Management Information System
3 9 (7.26%) Data Centre
4 7 (5.65%) Private Cloud
5 6 (4.84%) Hybrid Cloud
6 5 (4.03%) Blog
6 5 (4.03%) Enterprise Storage
7 4 (3.23%) Product Ownership
8 3 (2.42%) Data Protection Act
9 2 (1.61%) Clustering
9 2 (1.61%) Data Structures
9 2 (1.61%) e-Learning
9 2 (1.61%) Enterprise Software
9 2 (1.61%) Grid Computing
9 2 (1.61%) Hedge funds
9 2 (1.61%) Linux Command Line
9 2 (1.61%) Public Cloud
10 1 (0.81%) Data Fabric
10 1 (0.81%) Distributed Systems
10 1 (0.81%) Onboarding
Operating Systems
1 74 (59.68%) Linux
2 31 (25.00%) Unix
3 18 (14.52%) Windows
4 9 (7.26%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 8 (6.45%) CentOS
6 6 (4.84%) Windows Server
7 5 (4.03%) Ubuntu
8 3 (2.42%) Debian
9 1 (0.81%) MVS
9 1 (0.81%) Solaris
9 1 (0.81%) Windows Server 2003
9 1 (0.81%) zOS
Processes & Methodologies
1 77 (62.10%) DevOps
2 69 (55.65%) CI/CD
3 65 (52.42%) Configuration Management
4 61 (49.19%) Infrastructure as Code
5 60 (48.39%) Containerisation
6 43 (34.68%) Agile
7 36 (29.03%) Problem-Solving
8 27 (21.77%) Site Reliability Engineering
9 25 (20.16%) Software Engineering
10 24 (19.35%) Continuous Integration
11 22 (17.74%) Continuous Improvement
12 20 (16.13%) Deployment Automation
13 19 (15.32%) Scrum
14 18 (14.52%) Computer Science
14 18 (14.52%) Infrastructure Automation
14 18 (14.52%) Microservices
14 18 (14.52%) Observability
15 17 (13.71%) Migration
16 16 (12.90%) Continuous Delivery
17 15 (12.10%) Task Automation
Programming Languages
1 83 (66.94%) Python
2 48 (38.71%) Bash
3 21 (16.94%) Java
4 20 (16.13%) SQL
5 19 (15.32%) Shell Script
6 15 (12.10%) PowerShell
7 11 (8.87%) Scala
8 10 (8.06%) Go
9 6 (4.84%) C++
9 6 (4.84%) Perl
10 5 (4.03%) JavaScript
10 5 (4.03%) PHP
11 3 (2.42%) Groovy
11 3 (2.42%) Ruby
12 1 (0.81%) C#
12 1 (0.81%) Rust
Qualifications
1 29 (23.39%) Security Cleared
2 22 (17.74%) Degree
3 15 (12.10%) Computer Science Degree
3 15 (12.10%) SC Cleared
4 13 (10.48%) DV Cleared
5 6 (4.84%) AWS Certification
6 4 (3.23%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
6 4 (3.23%) BPSS Clearance
6 4 (3.23%) RHCE
6 4 (3.23%) RHCSA
7 3 (2.42%) Azure Certification
7 3 (2.42%) CCNA
7 3 (2.42%) CCNP
7 3 (2.42%) Cisco Certification
8 2 (1.61%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
9 1 (0.81%) AWS Certified SysOps Administrator
9 1 (0.81%) Master's Degree
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 8 (6.45%) QA
2 2 (1.61%) PCI DSS
3 1 (0.81%) Data Quality
3 1 (0.81%) SLA
System Software
1 76 (61.29%) Docker
2 15 (12.10%) VMware Infrastructure
3 5 (4.03%) HDFS
3 5 (4.03%) KVM
3 5 (4.03%) Lustre
4 4 (3.23%) Active Directory
4 4 (3.23%) GPFS
4 4 (3.23%) Slurm Workload Manager
4 4 (3.23%) VMware ESXi
5 3 (2.42%) Hyper-V
6 2 (1.61%) NFS
6 2 (1.61%) VirtualBox
7 1 (0.81%) BitLocker
7 1 (0.81%) Microsoft App-V
7 1 (0.81%) SRDF
7 1 (0.81%) Veritas Cluster Server
7 1 (0.81%) Xen
Systems Management
1 97 (78.23%) Ansible
2 67 (54.03%) Terraform
3 56 (45.16%) Kubernetes
4 43 (34.68%) Progress Chef
5 29 (23.39%) Grafana
6 23 (18.55%) Prometheus
7 10 (8.06%) Kibana
7 10 (8.06%) Salt
8 8 (6.45%) NetBackup
9 7 (5.65%) Podman
10 5 (4.03%) Hadoop YARN
11 4 (3.23%) Istio
11 4 (3.23%) vCenter Server
12 3 (2.42%) Ambari
12 3 (2.42%) Docker Swarm
12 3 (2.42%) Microsoft Clustering
12 3 (2.42%) Nagios
12 3 (2.42%) Red Hat Satellite
12 3 (2.42%) SCCM
12 3 (2.42%) ZABBIX
Vendors
1 21 (16.94%) Splunk
2 15 (12.10%) Red Hat
2 15 (12.10%) VMware
3 14 (11.29%) Microsoft
4 9 (7.26%) webMethods
5 8 (6.45%) Commvault
5 8 (6.45%) PagerDuty
6 5 (4.03%) Google
6 5 (4.03%) MuleSoft
6 5 (4.03%) Oracle
6 5 (4.03%) SnapLogic
7 3 (2.42%) Cisco
7 3 (2.42%) Rackspace
7 3 (2.42%) ServiceNow
8 2 (1.61%) Dell
8 2 (1.61%) Dynatrace
8 2 (1.61%) IBM
8 2 (1.61%) New Relic
8 2 (1.61%) SAP
8 2 (1.61%) Zend