DevOps Contract Job Trends in the West Midlands

DevOps
England > West Midlands

The table below provides summary statistics and contractor rates for jobs advertised in the West Midlands requiring DevOps skills. It covers contract job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 28 February 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
28 Feb 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 11 24 28
Rank change year-on-year +13 +4 -5
Contract jobs citing DevOps 331 94 102
As % of all contract jobs in the West Midlands 12.12% 6.70% 5.37%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 14.22% 7.44% 6.37%
Number of daily rates quoted 248 61 77
10th Percentile £413 £363 £314
25th Percentile £463 £419 £400
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £517 £500 £463
Median % change year-on-year +3.40% +8.11% -19.57%
75th Percentile £578 £588 £553
90th Percentile £652 £638 £643
England median daily rate £525 £573 £568
% change year-on-year -8.30% +0.88% -5.42%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2 1 2
10th Percentile £73.45 - £55.13
25th Percentile £74.88 £56.25 £55.31
Median hourly rate £78.50 £57.50 £55.63
Median % change year-on-year +36.52% +3.37% -
75th Percentile £80.88 £58.75 £55.94
90th Percentile £81.55 - £56.13
England median hourly rate £63.50 £74.44 £65.00
% change year-on-year -14.70% +14.52% -0.76%

All Process & Methodology Skills
West Midlands

DevOps falls under the Processes and Methodologies category. For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all contract job vacancies requiring process or methodology skills in the West Midlands.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for process or methodology skills 2,328 1,264 1,601
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the West Midlands 85.24% 90.03% 84.22%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,537 806 1,059
10th Percentile £300 £210 £275
25th Percentile £402 £400 £375
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £475
Median % change year-on-year - +5.26% -5.00%
75th Percentile £580 £600 £600
90th Percentile £675 £700 £688
England median daily rate £505 £525 £525
% change year-on-year -3.81% - -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 81 55 112
10th Percentile £14.00 £12.62 £12.10
25th Percentile £16.10 £14.96 £16.38
Median hourly rate £21.46 £19.00 £23.00
Median % change year-on-year +12.95% -17.39% +29.87%
75th Percentile £27.21 £30.68 £47.81
90th Percentile £47.50 £40.08 £66.63
England median hourly rate £28.50 £35.00 £34.77
% change year-on-year -18.57% +0.68% -0.67%

DevOps
Job Vacancy Trend in the West Midlands

Historical trend showing the proportion of contract IT job postings citing DevOps relative to all contract IT jobs advertised in the West Midlands.

DevOps job vacancy trend in the West Midlands

DevOps
Daily Rate Trend in the West Midlands

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the West Midlands citing DevOps.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the West Midlands citing DevOps

DevOps
Daily Rate Histogram in the West Midlands

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing DevOps in the West Midlands over the 6 months to 28 February 2026.

Daily rate histogram for DevOps in the West Midlands

DevOps
Hourly Rate Trend in the West Midlands

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the West Midlands citing DevOps.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the West Midlands citing DevOps

DevOps
Contract Job Locations in the West Midlands

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing DevOps within the West Midlands region over the 6 months to 28 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
Birmingham +8 111 £525 +10.53% 39
Shropshire +7 110 £493 - 12
Worcestershire +9 40 £644 +7.29% 2
Warwickshire +8 38 £523 +4.50% 7
Herefordshire +4 32 £650 -7.14%
Coventry -5 14 £407 - 6
Solihull -3 8 £575 - 7
Wolverhampton - 2 - -
Staffordshire -2 1 £463 -11.90% 4
DevOps
England

DevOps
Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities in the West Midlands 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 75 (22.66%) SAS
2 32 (9.67%) Confluence
3 12 (3.63%) OpenStack
4 9 (2.72%) Apache
4 9 (2.72%) WebLogic
5 8 (2.42%) JBoss
6 6 (1.81%) SharePoint
7 2 (0.60%) Adobe Experience Manager
7 2 (0.60%) nginx
8 1 (0.30%) IIS
8 1 (0.30%) LiveCycle
8 1 (0.30%) Tuxedo
Applications
1 11 (3.32%) Microsoft Project
2 7 (2.11%) Microsoft Excel
3 4 (1.21%) Microsoft Office
4 2 (0.60%) Mozilla Thunderbird
4 2 (0.60%) MS Visio
Business Applications
1 4 (1.21%) Dynamics CRM
2 2 (0.60%) Workday HCM
3 1 (0.30%) Maximo
3 1 (0.30%) SAP S/4HANA
Cloud Services
1 133 (40.18%) Azure
2 95 (28.70%) AWS
3 62 (18.73%) Azure DevOps
4 51 (15.41%) GCP
5 50 (15.11%) GitHub
6 38 (11.48%) Serverless
7 30 (9.06%) Azure Data Factory
7 30 (9.06%) OpenShift
8 27 (8.16%) GitHub Actions
9 17 (5.14%) Amazon S3
9 17 (5.14%) AWS KMS
9 17 (5.14%) Power Platform
10 16 (4.83%) Amazon EC2
10 16 (4.83%) Azure Key Vault
11 15 (4.53%) Amazon CloudWatch
12 12 (3.63%) Azure Synapse Analytics
13 11 (3.32%) Dynamics 365
13 11 (3.32%) Route 53
14 10 (3.02%) Datadog
14 10 (3.02%) Entra ID
Communications & Networking
1 14 (4.23%) Firewall
2 9 (2.72%) DNS
3 7 (2.11%) VPN
4 5 (1.51%) Network Security
4 5 (1.51%) SSL
5 4 (1.21%) TCP/IP
6 3 (0.91%) FTP
6 3 (0.91%) HTTP
6 3 (0.91%) SMTP
6 3 (0.91%) SSH
7 2 (0.60%) IMAP
7 2 (0.60%) OpenLDAP
8 1 (0.30%) Kerberos
8 1 (0.30%) LAN
8 1 (0.30%) SD-WAN
8 1 (0.30%) SMS
8 1 (0.30%) WAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 54 (16.31%) PostgreSQL
2 39 (11.78%) Pentaho
3 32 (9.67%) Elasticsearch
4 15 (4.53%) NoSQL
4 15 (4.53%) Oracle Database
4 15 (4.53%) SAS Enterprise Guide
5 13 (3.93%) Relational Database
6 12 (3.63%) Amazon RDS
7 10 (3.02%) Amazon Aurora
7 10 (3.02%) Power BI
8 9 (2.72%) Data Warehouse
8 9 (2.72%) MongoDB
8 9 (2.72%) Redis
9 8 (2.42%) DynamoDB
9 8 (2.42%) MySQL
10 4 (1.21%) Apache Hive
10 4 (1.21%) Data Mining
10 4 (1.21%) Hadoop
10 4 (1.21%) Impala
10 4 (1.21%) SAS Visual Analytics
Development Applications
1 116 (35.05%) Jenkins
2 103 (31.12%) Git
3 70 (21.15%) JIRA
4 55 (16.62%) GitLab
5 39 (11.78%) JUnit
6 36 (10.88%) Selenium
7 19 (5.74%) SonarQube
8 13 (3.93%) Maven
9 11 (3.32%) Bitbucket
9 11 (3.32%) Liquibase
10 8 (2.42%) Eclipse
10 8 (2.42%) IntelliJ
10 8 (2.42%) Mockito
11 7 (2.11%) CircleCI
12 6 (1.81%) DbUnit
12 6 (1.81%) jMock
13 5 (1.51%) Artifactory
14 4 (1.21%) Atlassian Bamboo
14 4 (1.21%) Bitbucket Server
14 4 (1.21%) Cypress.io
General
1 114 (34.44%) Social Skills
2 50 (15.11%) Public Sector
3 47 (14.20%) Analytical Skills
4 43 (12.99%) Finance
5 17 (5.14%) Banking
6 10 (3.02%) Documentation Skills
6 10 (3.02%) Financial Institution
7 9 (2.72%) Influencing Skills
8 5 (1.51%) Presentation Skills
9 4 (1.21%) Telecoms
10 3 (0.91%) Retail
11 2 (0.60%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 2 (0.60%) Military
11 2 (0.60%) Organisational Skills
12 1 (0.30%) Advertising
12 1 (0.30%) Marketing
12 1 (0.30%) Publishing
Job Titles
1 51 (15.41%) Data Engineer
2 49 (14.80%) Developer
3 48 (14.50%) Senior
4 35 (10.57%) DevOps Engineer
5 23 (6.95%) Architect
6 20 (6.04%) Test Specialist
7 18 (5.44%) Cloud Engineer
7 18 (5.44%) Software Engineer
8 15 (4.53%) GCP Engineer
9 14 (4.23%) Analyst
9 14 (4.23%) Site Engineer
9 14 (4.23%) Site Reliability Engineer
9 14 (4.23%) Splunk Engineer
10 13 (3.93%) Engagement Manager
10 13 (3.93%) Senior Data Engineer
10 13 (3.93%) Senior DevOps
10 13 (3.93%) Senior DevOps Engineer
11 12 (3.63%) AWS Engineer
11 12 (3.63%) Full-Stack Developer
11 12 (3.63%) Project Manager
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 69 (20.85%) REST
2 41 (12.39%) Elastic Stack
3 24 (7.25%) Node.js
4 21 (6.34%) RESTful
4 21 (6.34%) YAML
5 20 (6.04%) pytest
6 19 (5.74%) Flask
7 18 (5.44%) Spring
8 16 (4.83%) Hibernate
8 16 (4.83%) Kafka
8 16 (4.83%) SOAP
9 15 (4.53%) JSON
10 14 (4.23%) .NET
10 14 (4.23%) HTML
10 14 (4.23%) React
11 13 (3.93%) AngularJS
12 12 (3.63%) FastAPI
12 12 (3.63%) Keycloak
12 12 (3.63%) Middleware
13 11 (3.32%) Play Framework
Miscellaneous
1 38 (11.48%) Cloud Native
2 22 (6.65%) Distributed Systems
3 15 (4.53%) Management Information System
3 15 (4.53%) Public Cloud
4 14 (4.23%) Product Ownership
5 13 (3.93%) Hybrid Cloud
5 13 (3.93%) Onboarding
6 10 (3.02%) Enterprise Software
7 5 (1.51%) Cyber Threat
8 3 (0.91%) Private Cloud
8 3 (0.91%) Replication
8 3 (0.91%) Security Posture
9 2 (0.60%) CMDB
9 2 (0.60%) Data Centre
9 2 (0.60%) Greenfield Project
9 2 (0.60%) Legacy Applications
10 1 (0.30%) Data Protection Act
10 1 (0.30%) IoT
10 1 (0.30%) Mobile App
10 1 (0.30%) PDA
Operating Systems
1 50 (15.11%) Linux
2 27 (8.16%) Unix
3 14 (4.23%) Windows
4 3 (0.91%) Amazon Linux
4 3 (0.91%) VMS
4 3 (0.91%) Windows Server
5 2 (0.60%) Ubuntu
6 1 (0.30%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 218 (65.86%) CI/CD
2 172 (51.96%) Agile
3 114 (34.44%) Containerisation
4 104 (31.42%) Problem-Solving
5 90 (27.19%) Analytics
6 86 (25.98%) Scrum
7 78 (23.56%) Data Pipeline
8 77 (23.26%) Test Automation
9 67 (20.24%) Data Modelling
10 66 (19.94%) Stakeholder Management
11 65 (19.64%) ETL
12 61 (18.43%) Change Management
12 61 (18.43%) Continuous Improvement
13 59 (17.82%) Infrastructure as Code
14 57 (17.22%) Microservices
14 57 (17.22%) Migration
15 50 (15.11%) Data Integration
16 47 (14.20%) Business Intelligence
17 44 (13.29%) Deployment Automation
18 41 (12.39%) Data Virtualisation
Programming Languages
1 118 (35.65%) Python
2 109 (32.93%) SQL
3 42 (12.69%) Go
4 30 (9.06%) Bash
4 30 (9.06%) Java
5 23 (6.95%) JavaScript
6 20 (6.04%) PowerShell
7 14 (4.23%) C#
8 12 (3.63%) Scala
9 8 (2.42%) TypeScript
10 7 (2.11%) Bicep
11 6 (1.81%) Groovy
12 5 (1.51%) PL/SQL
13 4 (1.21%) VBA
14 3 (0.91%) HiveQL
14 3 (0.91%) VB
15 2 (0.60%) Shell Script
16 1 (0.30%) Perl
16 1 (0.30%) Ruby
16 1 (0.30%) VB6
Qualifications
1 164 (49.55%) Security Cleared
2 141 (42.60%) SC Cleared
3 43 (12.99%) Degree
4 36 (10.88%) Computer Science Degree
5 27 (8.16%) Azure Certification
6 22 (6.65%) DV Cleared
7 16 (4.83%) Master's Degree
8 11 (3.32%) AWS Certification
9 9 (2.72%) IIBA
10 7 (2.11%) BPSS Clearance
11 6 (1.81%) Microsoft Certification
12 3 (0.91%) CISSP
12 3 (0.91%) ISTQB
12 3 (0.91%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
13 2 (0.60%) AWS Certified Developer
13 2 (0.60%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
13 2 (0.60%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 2 (0.60%) PMI Certification
13 2 (0.60%) PMP
13 2 (0.60%) PRINCE2 Practitioner
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 39 (11.78%) Data Quality
2 32 (9.67%) QA
3 10 (3.02%) GDPR
4 8 (2.42%) ISO/IEC 27001
4 8 (2.42%) NCSC
5 5 (1.51%) Accessibility
6 4 (1.21%) NIST
6 4 (1.21%) SLA
7 1 (0.30%) Cyber Essentials
7 1 (0.30%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
7 1 (0.30%) FATCA
7 1 (0.30%) PMO
System Software
1 161 (48.64%) Docker
2 8 (2.42%) Postfix
3 6 (1.81%) Active Directory
4 4 (1.21%) HDFS
5 3 (0.91%) DFS Replication
5 3 (0.91%) VMware Infrastructure
6 2 (0.60%) Dovecot
6 2 (0.60%) Squid
6 2 (0.60%) VMware NSX
6 2 (0.60%) vSphere
7 1 (0.30%) Hyper-V
7 1 (0.30%) Virtual Machines
Systems Management
1 152 (45.92%) Kubernetes
2 75 (22.66%) Terraform
3 58 (17.52%) Grafana
4 57 (17.22%) Ansible
5 43 (12.99%) Prometheus
6 25 (7.55%) Puppet
7 19 (5.74%) Kibana
8 7 (2.11%) Argo
9 5 (1.51%) logstash
10 4 (1.21%) HP ALM
11 3 (0.91%) Podman
11 3 (0.91%) Progress Chef
12 2 (0.60%) HP Quality Center
12 2 (0.60%) Nessus
12 2 (0.60%) Proxmox
12 2 (0.60%) Single Sign-On
12 2 (0.60%) vCenter Server
13 1 (0.30%) Docker Swarm
13 1 (0.30%) Microsoft Intune
13 1 (0.30%) Packer
Vendors
1 56 (16.92%) Microsoft
2 44 (13.29%) Splunk
3 40 (12.08%) Oracle
4 39 (11.78%) Talend
5 38 (11.48%) Denodo
6 18 (5.44%) ServiceNow
7 14 (4.23%) Google
7 14 (4.23%) SAP
8 13 (3.93%) Atlassian
9 10 (3.02%) Jaspersoft
10 9 (2.72%) CyberArk
11 8 (2.42%) webMethods
12 7 (2.11%) AppDynamics
12 7 (2.11%) Dynatrace
13 6 (1.81%) Red Hat
14 4 (1.21%) CheckPoint
14 4 (1.21%) F5
14 4 (1.21%) HP
14 4 (1.21%) Palo Alto
14 4 (1.21%) VMware