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 9 July 2026.

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

6 months to
9 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 216 289 320
Rank change year-on-year +73 +31 -43
Contract jobs requiring a Cloud Engineer 550 224 247
As % of all contract jobs in England 1.23% 0.83% 0.66%
As % of the Job Titles category 1.33% 0.90% 0.71%
Number of daily rates quoted 369 172 174
10th Percentile £400 £400 £390
25th Percentile £462 £425 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £550
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -9.09% -
75th Percentile £625 £588 £625
90th Percentile £688 £638 £675
UK median daily rate £525 £500 £550
% change year-on-year +5.00% -9.09% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 20 3 3
10th Percentile £66.22 £32.50 -
25th Percentile £73.75 £36.25 £27.50
Median hourly rate £77.00 £45.00 £30.00
Median % change year-on-year +71.11% +50.00% -
75th Percentile £81.25 £55.00 £32.50
90th Percentile - £59.50 -
UK median hourly rate £77.00 £45.00 £30.00
% change year-on-year +71.11% +50.00% -

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 41,323 24,840 34,624
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.42% 92.06% 92.91%
Number of daily rates quoted 25,324 16,186 22,692
10th Percentile £325 £293 £300
25th Percentile £420 £404 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £513 £525
Median % change year-on-year +2.44% -2.38% -4.55%
75th Percentile £625 £630 £638
90th Percentile £738 £745 £750
UK median daily rate £523 £500 £525
% change year-on-year +4.50% -4.76% -2.33%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,956 1,184 2,511
10th Percentile £16.01 £13.76 £12.88
25th Percentile £22.08 £17.87 £17.00
Median hourly rate £45.00 £28.00 £40.00
Median % change year-on-year +60.71% -30.00% -9.09%
75th Percentile £67.84 £57.50 £63.75
90th Percentile £80.00 £73.75 £74.37
UK median hourly rate £43.50 £26.39 £37.50
% change year-on-year +64.87% -29.64% -12.79%

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 9 July 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 9 July 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 9 July 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 +56 301 £540 +3.35% 64
North of England -30 80 £500 +11.11% 44
South East -13 74 £538 +7.50% 42
Midlands -30 45 £513 +7.89% 22
North West -19 39 £475 +14.87% 31
Yorkshire -20 34 £475 -2.56% 9
West Midlands -44 26 £525 - 11
East of England -5 22 £505 +60.32% 9
East Midlands -4 18 £450 -5.26% 11
South West -26 16 £550 -2.22% 16
North East -35 7 £525 +5.00% 4
Cloud Engineer
UK

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

For the 6 months to 9 July 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.

1 278 (50.55%) Azure
2 253 (46.00%) Terraform
3 231 (42.00%) AWS
4 210 (38.18%) CI/CD
5 199 (36.18%) Infrastructure as Code
6 180 (32.73%) DevOps
7 150 (27.27%) Security Cleared
8 132 (24.00%) Python
9 125 (22.73%) Cloud Security
10 116 (21.09%) GCP
10 116 (21.09%) SC Cleared
11 115 (20.91%) Microsoft
12 113 (20.55%) Kubernetes
13 112 (20.36%) PowerShell
14 100 (18.18%) Infrastructure Engineering
15 95 (17.27%) Platform Engineering
16 84 (15.27%) Windows
17 81 (14.73%) Migration
18 80 (14.55%) Google
19 78 (14.18%) GitHub
20 69 (12.55%) Agile
21 67 (12.18%) AI
22 66 (12.00%) Firewall
23 61 (11.09%) Docker
24 60 (10.91%) Containerisation
24 60 (10.91%) DNS
25 58 (10.55%) Bash
26 56 (10.18%) Serverless
27 54 (9.82%) SQL
28 53 (9.64%) Active Directory

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 12 (2.18%) Microsoft Exchange
2 6 (1.09%) Confluence
3 5 (0.91%) Apache
3 5 (0.91%) nginx
4 4 (0.73%) SharePoint
5 3 (0.55%) IIS
5 3 (0.55%) Tomcat
6 2 (0.36%) Apache Spark
6 2 (0.36%) CloudStack
7 1 (0.18%) Apache Airflow
7 1 (0.18%) Apache Pulsar
7 1 (0.18%) OpenStack
7 1 (0.18%) SAS
7 1 (0.18%) Traefik
Applications
1 1 (0.18%) Chatbot
Business Applications
1 2 (0.36%) Aladdin
Cloud Services
1 278 (50.55%) Azure
2 231 (42.00%) AWS
3 116 (21.09%) GCP
4 78 (14.18%) GitHub
5 56 (10.18%) Serverless
6 52 (9.45%) Entra ID
7 49 (8.91%) GitHub Actions
8 40 (7.27%) Azure AKS
8 40 (7.27%) IaaS
8 40 (7.27%) PaaS
9 37 (6.73%) Amazon S3
9 37 (6.73%) Azure DevOps
10 35 (6.36%) AWS CloudFormation
11 34 (6.18%) AWS Lambda
11 34 (6.18%) Google Kubernetes Engine
12 32 (5.82%) Virtual Private Cloud
13 30 (5.45%) Amazon EC2
14 28 (5.09%) Amazon ECS
14 28 (5.09%) SaaS
15 26 (4.73%) Azure Monitor
Communications & Networking
1 66 (12.00%) Firewall
2 60 (10.91%) DNS
3 30 (5.45%) VPN
4 25 (4.55%) Network Security
5 15 (2.73%) WAN
6 14 (2.55%) DHCP
7 13 (2.36%) TCP/IP
8 6 (1.09%) Reverse Proxy
8 6 (1.09%) SD-WAN
9 5 (0.91%) Internet
9 5 (0.91%) SSL
9 5 (0.91%) VLAN
10 4 (0.73%) BGP
10 4 (0.73%) LAN
10 4 (0.73%) Software-Defined Networking
11 3 (0.55%) IPv4
11 3 (0.55%) OSPF
11 3 (0.55%) SAN
11 3 (0.55%) SMTP
12 2 (0.36%) Kerberos
Database & Business Intelligence
1 21 (3.82%) SQL Server
2 11 (2.00%) Amazon RDS
2 11 (2.00%) PostgreSQL
3 9 (1.64%) Amazon Athena
4 8 (1.45%) DynamoDB
5 7 (1.27%) BigQuery
6 6 (1.09%) Azure SQL Database
7 5 (0.91%) Oracle Database
8 4 (0.73%) Amazon QuickSight
8 4 (0.73%) Amazon Redshift
9 3 (0.55%) Big Data
9 3 (0.55%) Data Lake
9 3 (0.55%) MySQL
9 3 (0.55%) Oracle Database 12c
10 2 (0.36%) Metadata
10 2 (0.36%) Relational Database
11 1 (0.18%) Data Warehouse
11 1 (0.18%) InfluxDB
11 1 (0.18%) Power BI
11 1 (0.18%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 38 (6.91%) GitLab
1 38 (6.91%) Jenkins
2 36 (6.55%) Git
3 11 (2.00%) JIRA
4 9 (1.64%) Artifactory
5 3 (0.55%) Selenium
5 3 (0.55%) Team Foundation Server
6 2 (0.36%) Bitbucket
6 2 (0.36%) Claude Code
6 2 (0.36%) Cypress.io
6 2 (0.36%) Liquibase
6 2 (0.36%) Robot Framework
7 1 (0.18%) Burp Suite
7 1 (0.18%) Chocolatey
7 1 (0.18%) CircleCI
7 1 (0.18%) Gatling
7 1 (0.18%) REST Assured
7 1 (0.18%) SonarQube
7 1 (0.18%) sqlmap
7 1 (0.18%) TestRail
General
1 62 (11.27%) Finance
2 60 (10.91%) Social Skills
3 47 (8.55%) Public Sector
4 22 (4.00%) Banking
5 18 (3.27%) Analytical Skills
6 10 (1.82%) Documentation Skills
7 7 (1.27%) Investment Banking
8 6 (1.09%) Legal
9 5 (0.91%) Inclusion and Diversity
9 5 (0.91%) Law
9 5 (0.91%) Presentation Skills
10 4 (0.73%) Military
10 4 (0.73%) Pharmaceutical
11 3 (0.55%) Local Government
11 3 (0.55%) Retail
12 2 (0.36%) Financial Institution
12 2 (0.36%) International Banking
12 2 (0.36%) Manufacturing
12 2 (0.36%) Marketing
12 2 (0.36%) Police
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 20 (3.64%) REST
2 12 (2.18%) OAuth
2 12 (2.18%) OAuth2
3 9 (1.64%) ARM Templates
3 9 (1.64%) Spring
3 9 (1.64%) Spring Boot
4 8 (1.45%) Kafka
4 8 (1.45%) Node.js
5 7 (1.27%) .NET
5 7 (1.27%) OpenID
5 7 (1.27%) React
6 6 (1.09%) YAML
7 5 (0.91%) Model Context Protocol
7 5 (0.91%) Playwright
8 4 (0.73%) AWS CDK
8 4 (0.73%) Express.js
8 4 (0.73%) FastAPI
8 4 (0.73%) Flask
8 4 (0.73%) Jest
9 3 (0.55%) Oracle Fusion
Miscellaneous
1 101 (18.36%) Cloud Native
2 34 (6.18%) Hybrid Cloud
3 30 (5.45%) Security Posture
4 26 (4.73%) Public Cloud
5 20 (3.64%) Data Centre
6 15 (2.73%) Cloud Security Posture
6 15 (2.73%) Enterprise Cloud
7 13 (2.36%) Management Information System
8 12 (2.18%) Onboarding
9 11 (2.00%) Distributed Systems
10 9 (1.64%) Self-Motivation
11 8 (1.45%) Enterprise Software
12 7 (1.27%) Legacy Systems
12 7 (1.27%) Product Ownership
13 5 (0.91%) Linux Command Line
13 5 (0.91%) Private Cloud
14 4 (0.73%) AI Agents
14 4 (0.73%) Cyber Threat
14 4 (0.73%) Virtual Team
15 3 (0.55%) Distributed Architecture
Operating Systems
1 84 (15.27%) Windows
2 50 (9.09%) Linux
3 47 (8.55%) Windows Server
4 19 (3.45%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 8 (1.45%) Ubuntu
6 7 (1.27%) Windows Server 2019
7 3 (0.55%) CentOS
8 2 (0.36%) VMS
8 2 (0.36%) Windows Server 2012
9 1 (0.18%) Mac OS
Processes & Methodologies
1 210 (38.18%) CI/CD
2 199 (36.18%) Infrastructure as Code
3 180 (32.73%) DevOps
4 125 (22.73%) Cloud Security
5 100 (18.18%) Infrastructure Engineering
6 95 (17.27%) Platform Engineering
7 81 (14.73%) Migration
8 69 (12.55%) Agile
9 67 (12.18%) AI
10 60 (10.91%) Containerisation
11 49 (8.91%) Observability
12 44 (8.00%) Technical Leadership
13 43 (7.82%) Infrastructure Automation
14 42 (7.64%) Software Engineering
15 39 (7.09%) Problem-Solving
16 38 (6.91%) Continuous Improvement
16 38 (6.91%) DevSecOps
17 37 (6.73%) Cybersecurity
18 32 (5.82%) Change Management
19 30 (5.45%) Mentoring
Programming Languages
1 132 (24.00%) Python
2 112 (20.36%) PowerShell
3 58 (10.55%) Bash
4 54 (9.82%) SQL
5 44 (8.00%) Bicep
6 29 (5.27%) Java
7 16 (2.91%) C#
8 10 (1.82%) TypeScript
9 9 (1.64%) Go
9 9 (1.64%) JavaScript
10 6 (1.09%) Groovy
11 2 (0.36%) Kusto Query Language
11 2 (0.36%) Ruby
11 2 (0.36%) Shell Script
12 1 (0.18%) Apex Code
12 1 (0.18%) Cypher
12 1 (0.18%) Data Analysis Expressions
12 1 (0.18%) Kotlin
12 1 (0.18%) Perl
12 1 (0.18%) R
Qualifications
1 150 (27.27%) Security Cleared
2 116 (21.09%) SC Cleared
3 44 (8.00%) DV Cleared
4 43 (7.82%) Azure Certification
5 30 (5.45%) AWS Certification
6 19 (3.45%) Degree
7 13 (2.36%) CISSP
8 12 (2.18%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
8 12 (2.18%) Microsoft Certification
9 11 (2.00%) Cisco Certification
10 8 (1.45%) Computer Science Degree
11 6 (1.09%) CCNP
12 5 (0.91%) (ISC)2 CCSP
13 4 (0.73%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
13 4 (0.73%) CCIE
13 4 (0.73%) MCSE
14 3 (0.55%) BPSS Clearance
14 3 (0.55%) CCSP
14 3 (0.55%) CISM
14 3 (0.55%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 12 (2.18%) NIST
2 10 (1.82%) ISO/IEC 27001
3 9 (1.64%) QA
4 7 (1.27%) GDPR
4 7 (1.27%) NCSC
5 6 (1.09%) Data Quality
5 6 (1.09%) PCI DSS
6 2 (0.36%) Cyber Essentials
6 2 (0.36%) SLA
7 1 (0.18%) Accessibility
7 1 (0.18%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
7 1 (0.18%) Disclosure Scotland
7 1 (0.18%) Government Security Classifications
7 1 (0.18%) GRC
7 1 (0.18%) SOC 2
7 1 (0.18%) WCAG
System Software
1 61 (11.09%) Docker
2 53 (9.64%) Active Directory
3 26 (4.73%) VMware Infrastructure
4 24 (4.36%) Virtual Machines
5 21 (3.82%) VMware ESXi
6 20 (3.64%) VMware NSX
7 15 (2.73%) vSphere
8 14 (2.55%) Virtual Desktop
9 12 (2.18%) vCloud
10 11 (2.00%) Hyper-V
11 7 (1.27%) Squid
12 4 (0.73%) Firmware
13 3 (0.55%) Dovecot
13 3 (0.55%) NFS
13 3 (0.55%) Postfix
14 2 (0.36%) Ceph
14 2 (0.36%) KVM
Systems Management
1 253 (46.00%) Terraform
2 113 (20.55%) Kubernetes
3 42 (7.64%) Ansible
4 20 (3.64%) Grafana
4 20 (3.64%) Prometheus
5 18 (3.27%) vCenter Server
6 16 (2.91%) SCOM
7 15 (2.73%) Microsoft Intune
8 13 (2.36%) Progress Chef
9 12 (2.18%) Puppet
9 12 (2.18%) Single Sign-On
10 9 (1.64%) Istio
10 9 (1.64%) Packer
11 4 (0.73%) HAProxy
11 4 (0.73%) Salt
11 4 (0.73%) Suricata
11 4 (0.73%) VxRail
12 3 (0.55%) Active Directory Federation Services
12 3 (0.55%) vRealize
13 2 (0.36%) SELinux
Vendors
1 115 (20.91%) Microsoft
2 80 (14.55%) Google
3 46 (8.36%) VMware
4 23 (4.18%) Oracle
5 15 (2.73%) Red Hat
5 15 (2.73%) Zscaler
6 11 (2.00%) Palo Alto
6 11 (2.00%) ServiceNow
7 9 (1.64%) Cisco
7 9 (1.64%) Salesforce
8 8 (1.45%) Dynatrace
9 7 (1.27%) CrowdStrike
9 7 (1.27%) Fortinet
10 6 (1.09%) OpenAI
10 6 (1.09%) Splunk
11 5 (0.91%) Broadcom
11 5 (0.91%) Citrix
11 5 (0.91%) Databricks
11 5 (0.91%) Rapid7
11 5 (0.91%) SolarWinds