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 11 October 2026.

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

6 months to
11 Oct 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 186 284 324
Rank change year-on-year +98 +40 -64
Contract jobs requiring a Cloud Engineer 710 242 213
As % of all contract jobs in England 1.53% 0.86% 0.66%
As % of the Job Titles category 1.67% 0.95% 0.71%
Number of daily rates quoted 465 182 126
10th Percentile £407 £402 £381
25th Percentile £455 £450 £450
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £575
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -13.04% +4.55%
75th Percentile £600 £575 £645
90th Percentile £688 £649 £713
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 42,569 25,573 30,075
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.03% 91.11% 93.13%
Number of daily rates quoted 25,022 16,463 18,384
10th Percentile £325 £277 £300
25th Percentile £425 £402 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £510 £525
Median % change year-on-year +2.94% -2.86% -3.67%
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% -0.94%
Number of hourly rates quoted 3,727 1,438 1,284
10th Percentile £14.50 £13.80 £15.00
25th Percentile £20.25 £17.30 £21.25
Median hourly rate £42.50 £25.15 £43.00
Median % change year-on-year +68.99% -41.51% -6.89%
75th Percentile £67.94 £50.94 £67.81
90th Percentile £80.00 £70.00 £75.00
UK median hourly rate £41.71 £25.15 £41.50
% change year-on-year +65.84% -39.40% -7.78%

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 11 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 11 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 11 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 +52 305 £525 +2.44% 655
North of England +21 150 £510 +7.37% 199
South East +19 134 £538 +7.50% 128
North West +20 89 £513 +18.84% 116
Midlands +13 83 £500 -4.76% 91
Yorkshire 0 50 £450 -13.88% 49
East Midlands +29 48 £500 +5.26% 40
West Midlands -31 34 £525 -1.41% 51
South West -18 15 £556 +1.14% 84
East of England -19 14 £475 +10.14% 69
North East -33 11 £525 +14.13% 34
Cloud Engineer
UK

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

For the 6 months to 11 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.

1 355 (50.00%) Azure
2 267 (37.61%) Terraform
3 245 (34.51%) Infrastructure as Code
4 226 (31.83%) CI/CD
5 222 (31.27%) AWS
6 186 (26.20%) Security Cleared
7 177 (24.93%) DevOps
8 164 (23.10%) Kubernetes
8 164 (23.10%) Microsoft
9 162 (22.82%) Cloud Security
10 161 (22.68%) PowerShell
10 161 (22.68%) Python
11 156 (21.97%) Infrastructure Engineering
12 129 (18.17%) SC Cleared
13 128 (18.03%) GCP
14 125 (17.61%) Platform Engineering
15 111 (15.63%) Entra ID
15 111 (15.63%) Windows
16 91 (12.82%) Active Directory
17 87 (12.25%) Migration
18 84 (11.83%) AI
19 83 (11.69%) Google
20 79 (11.13%) DNS
20 79 (11.13%) Firewall
21 76 (10.70%) Agile
21 76 (10.70%) Observability
22 74 (10.42%) Linux
23 73 (10.28%) VMware
24 72 (10.14%) Bicep
25 71 (10.00%) Bash

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 15 (2.11%) Microsoft Exchange
2 11 (1.55%) Apache
3 10 (1.41%) SharePoint
4 7 (0.99%) Confluence
5 6 (0.85%) 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
1 355 (50.00%) Azure
2 222 (31.27%) AWS
3 128 (18.03%) GCP
4 111 (15.63%) Entra ID
5 70 (9.86%) GitHub
6 62 (8.73%) IaaS
7 51 (7.18%) Azure DevOps
8 49 (6.90%) GitHub Actions
9 48 (6.76%) Serverless
10 46 (6.48%) Microsoft 365
11 43 (6.06%) Google Kubernetes Engine
12 41 (5.77%) PaaS
13 40 (5.63%) Azure Monitor
14 38 (5.35%) AWS CloudFormation
15 35 (4.93%) AWS Lambda
16 34 (4.79%) Azure AKS
17 33 (4.65%) Amazon EKS
18 30 (4.23%) OCI
19 28 (3.94%) SaaS
20 27 (3.80%) Amazon CloudWatch
Communications & Networking
1 79 (11.13%) DNS
1 79 (11.13%) Firewall
2 43 (6.06%) Network Security
3 33 (4.65%) VPN
4 20 (2.82%) DHCP
5 19 (2.68%) WAN
6 17 (2.39%) TCP/IP
7 14 (1.97%) Internet
8 8 (1.13%) SD-WAN
9 7 (0.99%) VSAN
10 6 (0.85%) NGFW
10 6 (0.85%) VLAN
11 5 (0.70%) BGP
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 (3.94%) SQL Server
2 16 (2.25%) Amazon RDS
3 13 (1.83%) Data Lake
4 12 (1.69%) PostgreSQL
5 11 (1.55%) BigQuery
6 10 (1.41%) NoSQL
7 8 (1.13%) Oracle Exadata
8 6 (0.85%) DynamoDB
8 6 (0.85%) Oracle Database
9 5 (0.70%) Azure SQL Database
10 4 (0.56%) Amazon Athena
10 4 (0.56%) MySQL
11 3 (0.42%) Flink
11 3 (0.42%) Looker
11 3 (0.42%) Metadata
11 3 (0.42%) Oracle Database 12c
12 2 (0.28%) Big Data
12 2 (0.28%) Data Warehouse
12 2 (0.28%) Delta Lake
12 2 (0.28%) Elasticsearch
Development Applications
1 43 (6.06%) GitLab
2 36 (5.07%) Jenkins
3 25 (3.52%) Git
4 10 (1.41%) JIRA
5 5 (0.70%) Artifactory
6 3 (0.42%) Bitbucket
6 3 (0.42%) Claude Code
6 3 (0.42%) Terragrunt
7 2 (0.28%) Cypress.io
7 2 (0.28%) Gatling
7 2 (0.28%) JMeter
7 2 (0.28%) Octopus Deploy
8 1 (0.14%) Atlassian Bamboo
8 1 (0.14%) Cucumber
8 1 (0.14%) eggPlant
8 1 (0.14%) LoadRunner
8 1 (0.14%) REST Assured
8 1 (0.14%) Selenium
8 1 (0.14%) Spinnaker
8 1 (0.14%) TestRail
General
1 88 (12.39%) Finance
2 72 (10.14%) Social Skills
3 70 (9.86%) Public Sector
4 33 (4.65%) Analytical Skills
5 31 (4.37%) Banking
6 11 (1.55%) Manufacturing
7 8 (1.13%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 8 (1.13%) Legal
8 7 (0.99%) Documentation Skills
9 6 (0.85%) 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
1 267 (37.61%) Terraform
2 21 (2.96%) REST
3 18 (2.54%) ARM Templates
4 14 (1.97%) Kafka
4 14 (1.97%) OAuth
5 12 (1.69%) OAuth2
6 11 (1.55%) Spring
6 11 (1.55%) Spring Boot
7 9 (1.27%) OpenID
7 9 (1.27%) YAML
8 7 (0.99%) React
9 6 (0.85%) FastAPI
9 6 (0.85%) Flask
10 5 (0.70%) .NET
10 5 (0.70%) AWS CDK
10 5 (0.70%) Azure Blueprints
11 3 (0.42%) Elastic Stack
11 3 (0.42%) LAMP
11 3 (0.42%) LEMP Stack
11 3 (0.42%) SAML
Miscellaneous
1 111 (15.63%) Cloud Native
2 61 (8.59%) Security Posture
3 38 (5.35%) Hybrid Cloud
4 36 (5.07%) Enterprise Cloud
5 32 (4.51%) Cloud Security Posture
6 23 (3.24%) Data Centre
7 20 (2.82%) Management Information System
8 18 (2.54%) Distributed Systems
8 18 (2.54%) Onboarding
9 16 (2.25%) Enterprise Software
9 16 (2.25%) Public Cloud
10 14 (1.97%) Private Cloud
11 13 (1.83%) Product Ownership
12 8 (1.13%) AI Agents
12 8 (1.13%) PKI
13 7 (0.99%) Linux Command Line
14 6 (0.85%) Distributed Architecture
15 5 (0.70%) CMDB
15 5 (0.70%) Greenfield Project
16 4 (0.56%) Replication
Operating Systems
1 111 (15.63%) Windows
2 74 (10.42%) Linux
3 58 (8.17%) Windows Server
4 30 (4.23%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 15 (2.11%) Windows Server 2019
6 9 (1.27%) Ubuntu
7 7 (0.99%) 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
1 245 (34.51%) Infrastructure as Code
2 226 (31.83%) CI/CD
3 177 (24.93%) DevOps
4 162 (22.82%) Cloud Security
5 156 (21.97%) Infrastructure Engineering
6 125 (17.61%) Platform Engineering
7 87 (12.25%) Migration
8 84 (11.83%) AI
9 76 (10.70%) Agile
9 76 (10.70%) Observability
10 65 (9.15%) Containerisation
10 65 (9.15%) Cybersecurity
11 62 (8.73%) Technical Leadership
12 59 (8.31%) Infrastructure Automation
13 55 (7.75%) Continuous Improvement
13 55 (7.75%) Deployment Automation
14 54 (7.61%) Software Engineering
15 50 (7.04%) DevSecOps
16 48 (6.76%) Analytics
17 47 (6.62%) Change Management
Programming Languages
1 161 (22.68%) PowerShell
1 161 (22.68%) Python
2 72 (10.14%) Bicep
3 71 (10.00%) Bash
4 68 (9.58%) SQL
5 34 (4.79%) Java
6 12 (1.69%) C#
7 10 (1.41%) Go
8 9 (1.27%) JavaScript
9 8 (1.13%) Shell Script
10 5 (0.70%) 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%) Perl
14 1 (0.14%) Ruby
Qualifications
1 186 (26.20%) Security Cleared
2 129 (18.17%) SC Cleared
3 69 (9.72%) DV Cleared
4 46 (6.48%) Azure Certification
5 41 (5.77%) AWS Certification
6 38 (5.35%) Degree
7 22 (3.10%) Microsoft Certification
8 17 (2.39%) CISSP
9 10 (1.41%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
10 8 (1.13%) MCSE
11 6 (0.85%) CISM
11 6 (0.85%) Computer Science Degree
11 6 (0.85%) 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 (2.68%) ISO/IEC 27001
2 11 (1.55%) Data Quality
2 11 (1.55%) NIST
3 8 (1.13%) GDPR
4 6 (0.85%) Cyber Essentials
4 6 (0.85%) NCSC
4 6 (0.85%) QA
5 4 (0.56%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
5 4 (0.56%) PCI DSS
6 2 (0.28%) Disclosure Scotland
6 2 (0.28%) SLA
7 1 (0.14%) Actionable Recommendations
7 1 (0.14%) Government Security Classifications
7 1 (0.14%) GRC
System Software
1 91 (12.82%) Active Directory
2 67 (9.44%) Docker
3 51 (7.18%) VMware Infrastructure
4 43 (6.06%) Virtual Machines
5 34 (4.79%) VMware ESXi
6 23 (3.24%) VMware NSX
7 20 (2.82%) Virtual Desktop
8 18 (2.54%) vSphere
9 15 (2.11%) vCloud
10 11 (1.55%) Hyper-V
11 6 (0.85%) 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
1 164 (23.10%) Kubernetes
2 46 (6.48%) Ansible
3 30 (4.23%) vCenter Server
4 27 (3.80%) Microsoft Intune
4 27 (3.80%) SCOM
5 20 (2.82%) Grafana
6 19 (2.68%) Progress Chef
7 16 (2.25%) Prometheus
8 12 (1.69%) Puppet
9 11 (1.55%) 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%) Cilium
13 2 (0.28%) linkerd
Vendors
1 164 (23.10%) Microsoft
2 83 (11.69%) Google
3 73 (10.28%) VMware
4 36 (5.07%) Oracle
5 28 (3.94%) Databricks
6 20 (2.82%) Red Hat
7 16 (2.25%) SolarWinds
8 14 (1.97%) Palo Alto
8 14 (1.97%) Zscaler
9 13 (1.83%) Broadcom
9 13 (1.83%) Splunk
10 12 (1.69%) Cisco
11 10 (1.41%) OpenAI
11 10 (1.41%) ServiceNow
12 9 (1.27%) Dynatrace
12 9 (1.27%) Salesforce
13 8 (1.13%) New Relic
14 7 (0.99%) CrowdStrike
15 5 (0.70%) CyberArk
16 3 (0.42%) Rapid7