Site Reliability Engineer Job Trends

Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)
UK

The median Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) salary in the UK is £73,801 per year, according to job vacancies posted during the 6 months leading to 16 January 2026.

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

6 months to
16 Jan 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 591 612 582
Rank change year-on-year +21 -30 +25
Permanent jobs requiring a Site Reliability Engineer 63 94 141
As % of all permanent jobs in the UK 0.10% 0.18% 0.25%
As % of the Job Titles category 0.11% 0.19% 0.26%
Number of salaries quoted 51 83 129
10th Percentile £37,500 £65,250 £55,000
25th Percentile £61,250 £69,125 £63,631
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £73,801 £77,500 £82,500
Median % change year-on-year -4.77% -6.06% +6.45%
75th Percentile £103,750 £112,500 £116,250
90th Percentile £150,000 £127,250 £138,750
UK excluding London median annual salary £73,151 £75,000 £65,000
% change year-on-year -2.47% +15.38% +6.24%

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 55,047 49,557 53,408
% of permanent jobs with a recognized job title 90.74% 92.77% 95.24%
Number of salaries quoted 34,113 25,668 41,151
10th Percentile £28,500 £33,500 £30,000
25th Percentile £37,000 £45,000 £41,250
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £55,000 £60,000 £57,500
Median % change year-on-year -8.33% +4.35% -4.17%
75th Percentile £75,000 £78,750 £77,500
90th Percentile £95,000 £97,500 £95,500
UK excluding London median annual salary £50,000 £52,609 £50,000
% change year-on-year -4.96% +5.22% -5.25%

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 16 January 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 16 January 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 +39 54 £75,000 -6.25% 38
UK excluding London +43 38 £73,151 -2.47% 25
Work from Home +59 37 £73,801 -1.60% 9
North of England +22 21 £60,000 -20.00% 5
London +24 20 £110,000 +12.82% 16
North West +28 16 £40,000 -46.67% 5
South West +11 5 £92,500 +23.33% 5
Yorkshire -6 4 £67,500 +8.00%
Scotland +2 3 £97,500 +39.29% 1
Midlands +32 2 £71,901 +2.72% 3
West Midlands +28 2 £71,901 +2.72% 3
East of England +26 2 £65,000 -
South East +21 2 £78,750 +5.00% 11
Wales +7 2 £69,401 +6.77%
Northern Ireland -12 1 £73,801 -13.18%
North East - 1 £73,801 -

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

For the 6 months to 16 January 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 62 (98.41%) Site Reliability Engineering
2 41 (65.08%) AWS
3 38 (60.32%) CI/CD
4 36 (57.14%) DevOps
4 36 (57.14%) Python
5 27 (42.86%) Terraform
6 26 (41.27%) Java
6 26 (41.27%) Kubernetes
7 24 (38.10%) Linux
8 23 (36.51%) Infrastructure as Code
9 22 (34.92%) Docker
10 19 (30.16%) Platform Engineering
11 18 (28.57%) Observability
12 16 (25.40%) Kafka
13 15 (23.81%) Grafana
13 15 (23.81%) Prometheus
14 13 (20.63%) Agile
14 13 (20.63%) Amazon RDS
14 13 (20.63%) Azure
14 13 (20.63%) GitHub
14 13 (20.63%) GitHub Actions
14 13 (20.63%) Security Cleared
15 12 (19.05%) Amazon ECS
15 12 (19.05%) GCP
15 12 (19.05%) SC Cleared
16 11 (17.46%) Ansible
16 11 (17.46%) Argo
16 11 (17.46%) AWS CloudFormation
16 11 (17.46%) Containerisation
16 11 (17.46%) PostgreSQL

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 6 (9.52%) Mule
Cloud Services
1 41 (65.08%) AWS
2 13 (20.63%) Azure
2 13 (20.63%) GitHub
2 13 (20.63%) GitHub Actions
3 12 (19.05%) Amazon ECS
3 12 (19.05%) GCP
4 11 (17.46%) AWS CloudFormation
5 10 (15.87%) Amazon EKS
5 10 (15.87%) Amazon Kinesis
6 8 (12.70%) Amazon ECR
6 8 (12.70%) dbt
6 8 (12.70%) Pulumi
7 6 (9.52%) AWS Lambda
7 6 (9.52%) Serverless
8 5 (7.94%) Amazon EC2
8 5 (7.94%) Datadog
9 4 (6.35%) OpenShift
10 3 (4.76%) Amazon S3
11 1 (1.59%) Azure DevOps
11 1 (1.59%) IaaS
Communications & Networking
1 8 (12.70%) TCP/IP
2 6 (9.52%) DNS
2 6 (9.52%) HTTP
2 6 (9.52%) SSL
3 3 (4.76%) AMQP
4 1 (1.59%) Firewall
4 1 (1.59%) Internet
Database & Business Intelligence
1 13 (20.63%) Amazon RDS
2 11 (17.46%) PostgreSQL
3 10 (15.87%) Flink
4 9 (14.29%) Redis
5 8 (12.70%) Elasticsearch
6 6 (9.52%) Oracle Database
7 4 (6.35%) Relational Database
8 3 (4.76%) InfluxDB
9 2 (3.17%) MySQL
10 1 (1.59%) MongoDB
10 1 (1.59%) TimescaleDB
Development Applications
1 7 (11.11%) Jenkins
2 3 (4.76%) GitLab
3 2 (3.17%) Git
4 1 (1.59%) JIRA
4 1 (1.59%) TeamCity
General
1 17 (26.98%) Finance
2 16 (25.40%) Banking
3 14 (22.22%) Social Skills
4 10 (15.87%) Front Office
5 2 (3.17%) Games
6 1 (1.59%) Analytical Skills
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 16 (25.40%) Kafka
2 8 (12.70%) Django
3 7 (11.11%) React
4 3 (4.76%) RabbitMQ
5 2 (3.17%) Node.js
5 2 (3.17%) OpenTelemetry
6 1 (1.59%) .NET
6 1 (1.59%) Jest
6 1 (1.59%) Loki
6 1 (1.59%) Playwright
6 1 (1.59%) Spring
6 1 (1.59%) Spring Boot
6 1 (1.59%) Vitest
Miscellaneous
1 10 (15.87%) Distributed Systems
2 6 (9.52%) Fixed Income
3 4 (6.35%) Linux Command Line
4 3 (4.76%) Cloud Native
5 1 (1.59%) Derivative
5 1 (1.59%) PKI
5 1 (1.59%) Public Cloud
Operating Systems
1 24 (38.10%) Linux
2 9 (14.29%) Windows
3 8 (12.70%) Unix
4 2 (3.17%) Ubuntu
4 2 (3.17%) Windows Server
5 1 (1.59%) Debian
Processes & Methodologies
1 62 (98.41%) Site Reliability Engineering
2 38 (60.32%) CI/CD
3 36 (57.14%) DevOps
4 23 (36.51%) Infrastructure as Code
5 19 (30.16%) Platform Engineering
6 18 (28.57%) Observability
7 13 (20.63%) Agile
8 11 (17.46%) Containerisation
9 10 (15.87%) Investment Management
10 9 (14.29%) Technical Leadership
11 8 (12.70%) Application Performance Monitoring
11 8 (12.70%) Clean Code
11 8 (12.70%) Incident Management
11 8 (12.70%) Performance Monitoring
11 8 (12.70%) Service-Level Objective
12 7 (11.11%) Incident Response
13 6 (9.52%) Front End Development
13 6 (9.52%) High Availability
13 6 (9.52%) Microservices
13 6 (9.52%) Problem-Solving
Programming Languages
1 36 (57.14%) Python
2 26 (41.27%) Java
3 9 (14.29%) Go
4 6 (9.52%) TypeScript
5 5 (7.94%) Bash
6 4 (6.35%) PowerShell
6 4 (6.35%) Shell Script
6 4 (6.35%) SQL
7 3 (4.76%) JavaScript
8 2 (3.17%) Ruby
9 1 (1.59%) PHP
Qualifications
1 13 (20.63%) Security Cleared
2 12 (19.05%) SC Cleared
3 5 (7.94%) DV Cleared
4 2 (3.17%) AWS Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 1 (1.59%) QA
System Software
1 22 (34.92%) Docker
2 1 (1.59%) VMware ESXi
Systems Management
1 27 (42.86%) Terraform
2 26 (41.27%) Kubernetes
3 15 (23.81%) Grafana
3 15 (23.81%) Prometheus
4 11 (17.46%) Ansible
4 11 (17.46%) Argo
5 3 (4.76%) Docker Swarm
5 3 (4.76%) Progress Chef
6 2 (3.17%) Nagios
7 1 (1.59%) Control-M
7 1 (1.59%) Istio
Vendors
1 10 (15.87%) Google
2 8 (12.70%) Splunk
3 6 (9.52%) Oracle
3 6 (9.52%) SolarWinds
4 2 (3.17%) Dynatrace
5 1 (1.59%) AppDynamics
5 1 (1.59%) Red Hat