Site Reliability Engineer Job Trends

Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)
UK

The median Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) salary in the UK is £80,000 per year, according to job vacancies posted during the 6 months leading to 18 September 2026.

The table below compares current salary benchmarking and summary statistics with the previous two years.

6 months to
18 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 631 604 596
Rank change year-on-year -27 -8 -18
Permanent jobs requiring a Site Reliability Engineer 174 71 197
As % of all permanent jobs in the UK 0.15% 0.14% 0.25%
As % of the Job Titles category 0.16% 0.16% 0.26%
Number of salaries quoted 135 42 172
10th Percentile £60,000 £53,000 £62,500
25th Percentile £67,500 £63,750 £72,500
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £80,000 £75,000 £87,500
Median % change year-on-year +6.67% -14.29% +29.63%
75th Percentile £81,875 £85,000 £118,750
90th Percentile £94,500 £102,125 £143,750
UK excluding London median annual salary £80,000 £70,000 £75,000
% change year-on-year +14.29% -6.67% +18.76%

All Permanent IT Job Roles
UK

For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all permanent 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 permanent jobs in our overall sample.

Permanent vacancies in the UK with a recognized job title 107,455 44,314 74,420
% of permanent jobs with a recognized job title 93.24% 89.66% 95.24%
Number of salaries quoted 73,770 26,055 44,614
10th Percentile £30,000 £28,250 £30,000
25th Percentile £40,250 £36,250 £40,000
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £58,589 £55,000 £55,000
Median % change year-on-year +6.53% - -8.33%
75th Percentile £77,500 £75,000 £73,750
90th Percentile £100,000 £95,000 £92,500
UK excluding London median annual salary £55,000 £47,500 £50,000
% change year-on-year +15.79% -5.00% -4.76%

Site Reliability Engineer
Job Vacancy Trend

Historical trend showing the proportion of permanent IT job postings featuring 'Site Reliability Engineer' in the job title relative to all permanent IT jobs advertised.

Site Reliability Engineer job vacancy trend in the UK

Site Reliability Engineer
Salary Trend

Salary distribution trend for Site Reliability Engineer job vacancies in the UK.

Salary distribution trend for Site Reliability Engineer job vacancies in the UK

Site Reliability Engineer
Salary Histogram

Salary distribution for jobs citing Site Reliability Engineer over the 6 months to 18 September 2026.

Salary histogram for Site Reliability Engineer in the UK

Site Reliability Engineer
Top 16 Job Locations

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median salaries quoted in IT jobs citing Site Reliability Engineer within the UK over the 6 months to 18 September 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
Permanent
IT Job Ads
Median Salary
Past 6 Months
Median Salary
% Change
on Same Period
Last Year
Live
Jobs
England -28 132 £80,000 +6.67% 242
UK excluding London -51 116 £80,000 +14.29% 153
Work from Home +9 56 £71,991 -5.59% 102
London -41 49 £80,000 -5.88% 122
North of England -33 41 £80,000 +14.29% 38
North West +5 23 £70,996 +77.49% 27
Scotland +14 21 £80,000 +33.33% 27
South East -29 15 £66,250 -10.17% 15
East of England -22 10 £100,000 +48.15% 9
North East - 10 £80,000 - 3
Yorkshire -42 8 £75,000 +3.45% 8
Wales -62 8 £80,000 +23.08% 5
South West -83 8 £75,000 -16.67% 29
Midlands -42 7 £80,000 +18.52% 19
West Midlands -42 7 £80,000 +18.52% 16
Northern Ireland - 6 £80,000 - 12

Site Reliability Engineer Skill Set
Top 30 Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities

For the 6 months to 18 September 2026, Site Reliability Engineer 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 permanent job ads featuring Site Reliability Engineer in the job title.

1 170 (97.70%) Site Reliability Engineering
2 115 (66.09%) Python
3 100 (57.47%) Observability
4 73 (41.95%) Azure
5 72 (41.38%) Infrastructure as Code
6 70 (40.23%) Software Engineering
7 66 (37.93%) Terraform
8 64 (36.78%) AWS
9 58 (33.33%) CI/CD
10 54 (31.03%) DevOps
11 51 (29.31%) GCP
12 47 (27.01%) Continuous Improvement
13 40 (22.99%) Grafana
14 36 (20.69%) Datadog
15 35 (20.11%) Linux
15 35 (20.11%) Security Cleared
16 34 (19.54%) Ansible
17 33 (18.97%) Root Cause Analysis
18 31 (17.82%) Incident Response
18 31 (17.82%) SC Cleared
19 29 (16.67%) Kubernetes
20 28 (16.09%) PowerShell
21 26 (14.94%) GitOps
21 26 (14.94%) Mentoring
22 25 (14.37%) ITIL
23 24 (13.79%) Problem-Solving
24 23 (13.22%) Service-Level Objective
25 22 (12.64%) Incident Management
25 22 (12.64%) Task Automation
26 21 (12.07%) Dynatrace

Site Reliability Engineer 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:

Application Platforms
1 4 (2.30%) Confluence
2 1 (0.57%) OpenStack
Cloud Services
1 73 (41.95%) Azure
2 64 (36.78%) AWS
3 51 (29.31%) GCP
4 36 (20.69%) Datadog
5 18 (10.34%) AWS CloudFormation
6 14 (8.05%) dbt
6 14 (8.05%) SaaS
7 12 (6.90%) GitHub
8 8 (4.60%) OpenShift
9 7 (4.02%) GitHub Actions
10 6 (3.45%) Amazon ECS
10 6 (3.45%) Amazon OpenSearch
10 6 (3.45%) Azure DevOps
11 5 (2.87%) Azure AKS
11 5 (2.87%) Azure Monitor
12 4 (2.30%) Amazon EKS
12 4 (2.30%) Azure Stack
12 4 (2.30%) Snowflake
13 3 (1.72%) Amazon CloudWatch
14 2 (1.15%) AWS CodeBuild
Communications & Networking
1 16 (9.20%) TCP/IP
2 4 (2.30%) ATM
3 3 (1.72%) Broadband
Database & Business Intelligence
1 8 (4.60%) PostgreSQL
2 5 (2.87%) KDB
2 5 (2.87%) Redis
3 4 (2.30%) Elasticsearch
4 3 (1.72%) NonStop SQL
5 2 (1.15%) Amazon RDS
6 1 (0.57%) BigQuery
6 1 (0.57%) MongoDB
6 1 (0.57%) NoSQL
Development Applications
1 5 (2.87%) Git
1 5 (2.87%) GitLab
1 5 (2.87%) Jenkins
2 4 (2.30%) JIRA
General
1 39 (22.41%) Social Skills
2 37 (21.26%) Finance
3 24 (13.79%) Analytical Skills
4 16 (9.20%) Banking
5 6 (3.45%) Digital Economy
5 6 (3.45%) Financial Institution
6 5 (2.87%) Front Office
7 4 (2.30%) Documentation Skills
8 3 (1.72%) Public Sector
9 2 (1.15%) Influencing Skills
10 1 (0.57%) Local Government
10 1 (0.57%) Military
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 66 (37.93%) Terraform
2 8 (4.60%) ARM Templates
3 7 (4.02%) Loki
4 5 (2.87%) FIX Protocol
5 4 (2.30%) AWS CDK
6 3 (1.72%) Node.js
7 2 (1.15%) Django
8 1 (0.57%) .NET
8 1 (0.57%) Elastic Stack
8 1 (0.57%) OpenTelemetry
8 1 (0.57%) Web Services
Miscellaneous
1 25 (14.37%) Distributed Systems
2 17 (9.77%) Cloud Native
3 8 (4.60%) Public Cloud
4 5 (2.87%) Fixed Income
5 4 (2.30%) Analytical Mindset
6 3 (1.72%) Clustering
6 3 (1.72%) EMV
6 3 (1.72%) Management Information System
6 3 (1.72%) Virtual Team
7 2 (1.15%) Hackathon
7 2 (1.15%) Linux Command Line
7 2 (1.15%) Product Ownership
8 1 (0.57%) Cyber Threat
8 1 (0.57%) Data Protection Act
8 1 (0.57%) Data Structures
8 1 (0.57%) Enterprise Cloud
8 1 (0.57%) Greenfield Project
8 1 (0.57%) Hedge funds
8 1 (0.57%) NHS
8 1 (0.57%) Social Media
Operating Systems
1 35 (20.11%) Linux
2 17 (9.77%) Unix
3 8 (4.60%) Windows
4 4 (2.30%) CentOS
4 4 (2.30%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 4 (2.30%) Ubuntu
4 4 (2.30%) Windows Server
4 4 (2.30%) Windows Server 2019
Processes & Methodologies
1 170 (97.70%) Site Reliability Engineering
2 100 (57.47%) Observability
3 72 (41.38%) Infrastructure as Code
4 70 (40.23%) Software Engineering
5 58 (33.33%) CI/CD
6 54 (31.03%) DevOps
7 47 (27.01%) Continuous Improvement
8 33 (18.97%) Root Cause Analysis
9 31 (17.82%) Incident Response
10 26 (14.94%) GitOps
10 26 (14.94%) Mentoring
11 25 (14.37%) ITIL
12 24 (13.79%) Problem-Solving
13 23 (13.22%) Service-Level Objective
14 22 (12.64%) Incident Management
14 22 (12.64%) Task Automation
15 21 (12.07%) Platform Engineering
16 20 (11.49%) Agile
16 20 (11.49%) Deployment Automation
17 19 (10.92%) Collaborative Engineering
Programming Languages
1 115 (66.09%) Python
2 28 (16.09%) PowerShell
3 18 (10.34%) Bash
4 11 (6.32%) Java
5 6 (3.45%) Go
6 5 (2.87%) PHP
6 5 (2.87%) Shell Script
6 5 (2.87%) TypeScript
7 4 (2.30%) SQL
8 3 (1.72%) COBOL
8 3 (1.72%) JavaScript
8 3 (1.72%) Kotlin
9 2 (1.15%) Bicep
10 1 (0.57%) C
10 1 (0.57%) Erlang
10 1 (0.57%) Groovy
10 1 (0.57%) PL/SQL
10 1 (0.57%) PromQL
Qualifications
1 35 (20.11%) Security Cleared
2 31 (17.82%) SC Cleared
3 8 (4.60%) AWS Certification
3 8 (4.60%) Degree
3 8 (4.60%) DV Cleared
4 4 (2.30%) Computer Science Degree
5 3 (1.72%) PhD
6 2 (1.15%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
6 2 (1.15%) Azure Certification
7 1 (0.57%) Master's Degree
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 8 (4.60%) SLA
2 3 (1.72%) GDPR
2 3 (1.72%) ISO 20022
2 3 (1.72%) ISO 8583
3 2 (1.15%) QA
4 1 (0.57%) Data Quality
System Software
1 17 (9.77%) Docker
2 4 (2.30%) Virtual Machines
3 1 (0.57%) Virtual Servers
Systems Management
1 40 (22.99%) Grafana
2 34 (19.54%) Ansible
3 29 (16.67%) Kubernetes
4 21 (12.07%) Prometheus
5 7 (4.02%) Argo
6 6 (3.45%) Kustomize
7 5 (2.87%) Istio
8 4 (2.30%) Docker Swarm
8 4 (2.30%) Nagios
8 4 (2.30%) Podman
9 2 (1.15%) logstash
10 1 (0.57%) ITRS Geneos
10 1 (0.57%) Progress Chef
Vendors
1 21 (12.07%) Dynatrace
2 19 (10.92%) Google
3 6 (3.45%) Oracle
3 6 (3.45%) Red Hat
4 5 (2.87%) AppDynamics
4 5 (2.87%) Splunk
5 4 (2.30%) VocaLink
6 3 (1.72%) Databricks
6 3 (1.72%) HP
7 2 (1.15%) Microsoft
8 1 (0.57%) SGI