Cloud Engineer Contract Job Trends in England

Cloud Engineer
UK > England

The median Cloud Engineer daily rate in England is £525, according to job vacancies posted in the 6 months leading up to 14 October 2026.

The table below compares current contractor rates and summary statistics with the previous two years.

6 months to
14 Oct 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 195 289 324
Rank change year-on-year +94 +35 -66
Contract jobs requiring a Cloud Engineer 718 248 210
As % of all contract jobs in England 1.53% 0.88% 0.66%
As % of the Job Titles category 1.67% 0.97% 0.71%
Number of daily rates quoted 468 188 124
10th Percentile £407 £401 £378
25th Percentile £455 £449 £450
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £563
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -11.11% +2.27%
75th Percentile £600 £575 £639
90th Percentile £688 £645 £709
UK median daily rate £513 £500 £550
% change year-on-year +2.50% -9.09% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 32 7 0
10th Percentile £22.69 £29.00 -
25th Percentile £23.20 £29.50 -
Median hourly rate £74.00 £45.00 -
Median % change year-on-year +64.44% - -
75th Percentile £78.06 £86.25 -
90th Percentile £81.25 £110.00 -
UK median hourly rate £76.00 £45.00 -
% change year-on-year +68.89% - -

All Contract IT Job Roles
England

For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all contract IT job vacancies in England. 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 contract jobs in our overall sample.

Contract vacancies in England with a recognized job title 43,082 25,631 29,757
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.00% 91.12% 93.12%
Number of daily rates quoted 25,349 16,509 18,162
10th Percentile £325 £276 £300
25th Percentile £425 £402 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £510 £525
Median % change year-on-year +2.94% -2.86% -2.78%
75th Percentile £638 £625 £638
90th Percentile £738 £725 £750
UK median daily rate £525 £500 £525
% change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 3,775 1,440 1,248
10th Percentile £14.50 £13.80 £15.10
25th Percentile £20.25 £17.32 £21.25
Median hourly rate £42.31 £25.15 £43.00
Median % change year-on-year +68.23% -41.51% -6.89%
75th Percentile £68.00 £50.81 £67.50
90th Percentile £80.00 £70.00 £75.00
UK median hourly rate £41.71 £25.15 £41.27
% change year-on-year +65.84% -39.05% -8.30%

Cloud Engineer
Job Vacancy Trend in England

Historical trend showing the proportion of contract IT job postings featuring 'Cloud Engineer' in the job title relative to all contract IT jobs advertised in England.

Cloud Engineer job vacancy trend in England

Cloud Engineer
Daily Rate Trend in England

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for Cloud Engineer job vacancies in England.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for Cloud Engineer job vacancies in England

Cloud Engineer
Daily Rate Histogram in England

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Cloud Engineer in England over the 6 months to 14 October 2026.

Daily rate histogram for Cloud Engineer in England

Cloud Engineer
Hourly Rate Trend in England

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for Cloud Engineer job vacancies in England.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for Cloud Engineer job vacancies in England

Cloud Engineer
Hourly Rate Histogram in England

Hourly rate distribution of jobs citing Cloud Engineer in England over the 6 months to 14 October 2026.

Hourly rate histogram for Cloud Engineer in England

Cloud Engineer
Contract Job Locations in England

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing Cloud Engineer within the England region over the 6 months to 14 October 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
London +39 311 £525 +2.44% 635
North of England +25 150 £510 +7.37% 181
South East +18 137 £538 +7.50% 132
North West +19 89 £513 +20.59% 105
Midlands +6 83 £500 -4.76% 90
Yorkshire -6 50 £450 -13.46% 44
East Midlands +21 48 £500 +5.26% 42
West Midlands -29 34 £525 - 48
East of England -21 14 £475 +10.14% 76
South West -25 14 £538 -2.27% 82
North East -35 11 £525 +14.13% 32
Cloud Engineer
UK

Cloud Engineer Skill Set
Top 30 Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities in England

For the 6 months to 14 October 2026, Cloud Engineer contract 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 contract job ads across the England region featuring Cloud Engineer in the job title.

1 360 (50.14%) Azure
2 274 (38.16%) Terraform
3 252 (35.10%) Infrastructure as Code
4 233 (32.45%) CI/CD
5 225 (31.34%) AWS
6 188 (26.18%) Security Cleared
7 181 (25.21%) DevOps
8 168 (23.40%) Microsoft
9 167 (23.26%) Kubernetes
10 166 (23.12%) Python
11 165 (22.98%) Cloud Security
12 164 (22.84%) PowerShell
13 158 (22.01%) Infrastructure Engineering
14 131 (18.25%) SC Cleared
15 130 (18.11%) GCP
16 128 (17.83%) Platform Engineering
17 114 (15.88%) Entra ID
18 111 (15.46%) Windows
19 93 (12.95%) Active Directory
20 89 (12.40%) Migration
21 86 (11.98%) AI
22 85 (11.84%) Google
23 81 (11.28%) Firewall
24 80 (11.14%) DNS
25 79 (11.00%) Agile
25 79 (11.00%) Observability
26 75 (10.45%) Linux
27 74 (10.31%) Bicep
28 73 (10.17%) Bash
28 73 (10.17%) VMware

Cloud Engineer Skill Set
Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities in England 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 17 (2.37%) Microsoft Exchange
2 11 (1.53%) Apache
3 10 (1.39%) SharePoint
4 7 (0.97%) Confluence
5 6 (0.84%) Apache Airflow
6 3 (0.42%) IIS
6 3 (0.42%) nginx
6 3 (0.42%) OpenStack
6 3 (0.42%) Tomcat
7 2 (0.28%) Apache Spark
7 2 (0.28%) CloudStack
8 1 (0.14%) Apache Pulsar
Applications
1 1 (0.14%) Chatbot
Business Applications
1 1 (0.14%) Aladdin
1 1 (0.14%) iTrent
Cloud Services
1 360 (50.14%) Azure
2 225 (31.34%) AWS
3 130 (18.11%) GCP
4 114 (15.88%) Entra ID
5 72 (10.03%) GitHub
6 63 (8.77%) IaaS
7 52 (7.24%) Azure DevOps
8 50 (6.96%) GitHub Actions
9 48 (6.69%) Serverless
10 47 (6.55%) Microsoft 365
11 42 (5.85%) Azure Monitor
11 42 (5.85%) Google Kubernetes Engine
12 41 (5.71%) PaaS
13 40 (5.57%) AWS CloudFormation
14 35 (4.87%) AWS Lambda
15 34 (4.74%) Amazon EKS
15 34 (4.74%) Azure AKS
16 30 (4.18%) OCI
17 28 (3.90%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 28 (3.90%) SaaS
Communications & Networking
1 81 (11.28%) Firewall
2 80 (11.14%) DNS
3 44 (6.13%) Network Security
4 34 (4.74%) VPN
5 20 (2.79%) DHCP
5 20 (2.79%) WAN
6 18 (2.51%) TCP/IP
7 15 (2.09%) Internet
8 9 (1.25%) SD-WAN
9 7 (0.97%) VSAN
10 6 (0.84%) BGP
10 6 (0.84%) NGFW
10 6 (0.84%) VLAN
11 5 (0.70%) Kerberos
12 4 (0.56%) LAN
12 4 (0.56%) SSL
12 4 (0.56%) Wireless
13 3 (0.42%) IPv4
13 3 (0.42%) OSPF
13 3 (0.42%) SAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 28 (3.90%) SQL Server
2 16 (2.23%) Amazon RDS
3 13 (1.81%) Data Lake
4 12 (1.67%) PostgreSQL
5 11 (1.53%) BigQuery
6 10 (1.39%) NoSQL
7 8 (1.11%) Oracle Exadata
8 6 (0.84%) Azure SQL Database
8 6 (0.84%) DynamoDB
8 6 (0.84%) Oracle Database
9 4 (0.56%) Amazon Athena
9 4 (0.56%) MySQL
10 3 (0.42%) Flink
10 3 (0.42%) Looker
10 3 (0.42%) Metadata
10 3 (0.42%) Oracle Database 12c
11 2 (0.28%) Big Data
11 2 (0.28%) Data Warehouse
11 2 (0.28%) Delta Lake
11 2 (0.28%) Elasticsearch
Development Applications
1 43 (5.99%) GitLab
2 38 (5.29%) Jenkins
3 25 (3.48%) Git
4 10 (1.39%) JIRA
5 5 (0.70%) Artifactory
6 4 (0.56%) Claude Code
7 3 (0.42%) Bitbucket
7 3 (0.42%) Terragrunt
8 2 (0.28%) Cucumber
8 2 (0.28%) Cypress.io
8 2 (0.28%) Gatling
8 2 (0.28%) JMeter
8 2 (0.28%) Octopus Deploy
9 1 (0.14%) Atlassian Bamboo
9 1 (0.14%) eggPlant
9 1 (0.14%) Postman
9 1 (0.14%) REST Assured
9 1 (0.14%) Selenium
9 1 (0.14%) Spinnaker
9 1 (0.14%) TestRail
General
1 91 (12.67%) Finance
2 74 (10.31%) Social Skills
3 71 (9.89%) Public Sector
4 34 (4.74%) Analytical Skills
5 32 (4.46%) Banking
6 11 (1.53%) Manufacturing
7 8 (1.11%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 8 (1.11%) Legal
8 7 (0.97%) Documentation Skills
9 6 (0.84%) Front Office
10 5 (0.70%) Local Government
10 5 (0.70%) Presentation Skills
11 4 (0.56%) Investment Banking
11 4 (0.56%) Pharmaceutical
12 3 (0.42%) Aerospace
12 3 (0.42%) Automotive
12 3 (0.42%) Back Office
12 3 (0.42%) Digital Health
12 3 (0.42%) Italian Language
12 3 (0.42%) Law
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 274 (38.16%) Terraform
2 21 (2.92%) REST
3 18 (2.51%) ARM Templates
4 14 (1.95%) Kafka
4 14 (1.95%) OAuth
5 12 (1.67%) OAuth2
6 11 (1.53%) Spring
6 11 (1.53%) Spring Boot
7 9 (1.25%) OpenID
7 9 (1.25%) YAML
8 7 (0.97%) React
9 6 (0.84%) AWS CDK
9 6 (0.84%) FastAPI
9 6 (0.84%) Flask
10 5 (0.70%) .NET
10 5 (0.70%) Azure Blueprints
11 4 (0.56%) Elastic Stack
12 3 (0.42%) Apache Beam
12 3 (0.42%) Keycloak
12 3 (0.42%) SailPoint
Miscellaneous
1 112 (15.60%) Cloud Native
2 61 (8.50%) Security Posture
3 39 (5.43%) Hybrid Cloud
4 38 (5.29%) Enterprise Cloud
5 32 (4.46%) Cloud Security Posture
6 24 (3.34%) Data Centre
7 20 (2.79%) Management Information System
8 19 (2.65%) Distributed Systems
9 18 (2.51%) Onboarding
9 18 (2.51%) Public Cloud
10 16 (2.23%) Enterprise Software
11 14 (1.95%) Private Cloud
12 13 (1.81%) Product Ownership
13 9 (1.25%) AI Agents
14 8 (1.11%) PKI
15 7 (0.97%) Linux Command Line
16 6 (0.84%) Distributed Architecture
17 5 (0.70%) CMDB
17 5 (0.70%) Greenfield Project
18 4 (0.56%) Replication
Operating Systems
1 111 (15.46%) Windows
2 75 (10.45%) Linux
3 58 (8.08%) Windows Server
4 30 (4.18%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 15 (2.09%) Windows Server 2019
6 9 (1.25%) Ubuntu
7 7 (0.97%) VMS
8 3 (0.42%) CentOS
9 2 (0.28%) Windows Server 2012
10 1 (0.14%) Data ONTAP
10 1 (0.14%) Unix
Processes & Methodologies
1 252 (35.10%) Infrastructure as Code
2 233 (32.45%) CI/CD
3 181 (25.21%) DevOps
4 165 (22.98%) Cloud Security
5 158 (22.01%) Infrastructure Engineering
6 128 (17.83%) Platform Engineering
7 89 (12.40%) Migration
8 86 (11.98%) AI
9 79 (11.00%) Agile
9 79 (11.00%) Observability
10 68 (9.47%) Containerisation
11 64 (8.91%) Cybersecurity
12 62 (8.64%) Infrastructure Automation
12 62 (8.64%) Technical Leadership
13 56 (7.80%) Software Engineering
14 55 (7.66%) Continuous Improvement
14 55 (7.66%) Deployment Automation
15 51 (7.10%) DevSecOps
16 49 (6.82%) RBAC
17 48 (6.69%) Analytics
Programming Languages
1 166 (23.12%) Python
2 164 (22.84%) PowerShell
3 74 (10.31%) Bicep
4 73 (10.17%) Bash
5 69 (9.61%) SQL
6 34 (4.74%) Java
7 12 (1.67%) C#
8 11 (1.53%) Go
9 9 (1.25%) JavaScript
9 9 (1.25%) Shell Script
10 6 (0.84%) Kotlin
11 4 (0.56%) TypeScript
12 3 (0.42%) C
12 3 (0.42%) Scala
13 2 (0.28%) Groovy
13 2 (0.28%) Kusto Query Language
14 1 (0.14%) Apex Code
14 1 (0.14%) Data Analysis Expressions
14 1 (0.14%) R
14 1 (0.14%) Ruby
Qualifications
1 188 (26.18%) Security Cleared
2 131 (18.25%) SC Cleared
3 69 (9.61%) DV Cleared
4 46 (6.41%) Azure Certification
5 41 (5.71%) AWS Certification
6 38 (5.29%) Degree
7 22 (3.06%) Microsoft Certification
8 17 (2.37%) CISSP
9 10 (1.39%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
10 8 (1.11%) MCSE
11 6 (0.84%) CISM
11 6 (0.84%) Computer Science Degree
11 6 (0.84%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
12 5 (0.70%) Cisco Certification
13 4 (0.56%) BPSS Clearance
13 4 (0.56%) CCNP
14 3 (0.42%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
14 3 (0.42%) CCIE
14 3 (0.42%) CEH
15 2 (0.28%) CCIE Security
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 19 (2.65%) ISO/IEC 27001
2 12 (1.67%) NIST
3 11 (1.53%) Data Quality
4 8 (1.11%) GDPR
5 6 (0.84%) Cyber Essentials
5 6 (0.84%) NCSC
5 6 (0.84%) QA
6 4 (0.56%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
6 4 (0.56%) PCI DSS
7 2 (0.28%) Disclosure Scotland
7 2 (0.28%) SLA
8 1 (0.14%) Actionable Recommendations
8 1 (0.14%) Government Security Classifications
8 1 (0.14%) GRC
System Software
1 93 (12.95%) Active Directory
2 68 (9.47%) Docker
3 51 (7.10%) VMware Infrastructure
4 44 (6.13%) Virtual Machines
5 34 (4.74%) VMware ESXi
6 23 (3.20%) VMware NSX
7 20 (2.79%) Virtual Desktop
8 18 (2.51%) vSphere
9 15 (2.09%) vCloud
10 11 (1.53%) Hyper-V
11 6 (0.84%) Squid
12 4 (0.56%) Firmware
12 4 (0.56%) NFS
13 3 (0.42%) Ceph
13 3 (0.42%) Dovecot
13 3 (0.42%) Postfix
14 2 (0.28%) IAG
14 2 (0.28%) KVM
14 2 (0.28%) Virtual Servers
Systems Management
1 167 (23.26%) Kubernetes
2 46 (6.41%) Ansible
3 30 (4.18%) vCenter Server
4 27 (3.76%) Microsoft Intune
4 27 (3.76%) SCOM
5 22 (3.06%) Grafana
6 19 (2.65%) Progress Chef
7 18 (2.51%) Prometheus
8 12 (1.67%) Puppet
9 11 (1.53%) Istio
10 5 (0.70%) Single Sign-On
10 5 (0.70%) VxRail
11 4 (0.56%) Packer
11 4 (0.56%) Suricata
12 3 (0.42%) Active Directory Federation Services
12 3 (0.42%) FortiGate
12 3 (0.42%) HAProxy
12 3 (0.42%) vRealize
13 2 (0.28%) Argo
13 2 (0.28%) Cilium
Vendors
1 168 (23.40%) Microsoft
2 85 (11.84%) Google
3 73 (10.17%) VMware
4 36 (5.01%) Oracle
5 29 (4.04%) Databricks
6 20 (2.79%) Red Hat
7 16 (2.23%) SolarWinds
8 14 (1.95%) Palo Alto
8 14 (1.95%) Zscaler
9 13 (1.81%) Broadcom
9 13 (1.81%) Splunk
10 12 (1.67%) Cisco
11 11 (1.53%) OpenAI
12 10 (1.39%) ServiceNow
13 9 (1.25%) Dynatrace
13 9 (1.25%) Salesforce
14 8 (1.11%) New Relic
15 7 (0.97%) CrowdStrike
16 5 (0.70%) CyberArk
17 3 (0.42%) F5