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 September 2026.

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

 6 months to
14 Sep 2026		 Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 193 306 311
Rank change year-on-year +113 +5 -41
Contract jobs requiring a Cloud Engineer 677 216 215
As % of all contract jobs in England 1.47% 0.78% 0.66%
As % of the Job Titles category 1.59% 0.86% 0.70%
Number of daily rates quoted 454 161 135
10th Percentile £405 £402 £403
25th Percentile £455 £450 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £575
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -13.04% +4.55%
75th Percentile £600 £575 £638
90th Percentile £675 £638 £695
UK median daily rate £513 £500 £551
% change year-on-year +2.50% -9.26% +0.18%
Number of hourly rates quoted 28 7 0
10th Percentile - £29.00 -
25th Percentile £23.20 £29.50 -
Median hourly rate £76.50 £45.00 -
Median % change year-on-year +70.00% - -
75th Percentile £81.25 £86.25 -
90th Percentile - £110.00 -
UK median hourly rate £77.00 £45.00 -
% change year-on-year +71.11% - -

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 42,472 25,165 30,541
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.34% 91.31% 93.07%
Number of daily rates quoted 25,344 16,231 19,205
10th Percentile £325 £280 £304
25th Percentile £425 £400 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £506 £525
Median % change year-on-year +3.75% -3.62% -4.55%
75th Percentile £638 £625 £638
90th Percentile £738 £738 £750
UK median daily rate £525 £500 £525
% change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -0.94%
Number of hourly rates quoted 3,400 1,346 1,510
10th Percentile £14.96 £13.67 £14.64
25th Percentile £21.14 £17.30 £21.25
Median hourly rate £43.08 £25.15 £47.50
Median % change year-on-year +71.27% -47.05% +5.56%
75th Percentile £68.00 £53.75 £67.50
90th Percentile £80.00 £71.35 £75.00
UK median hourly rate £42.00 £25.15 £43.00
% change year-on-year +67.00% -41.51% -1.71%

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 September 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 September 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 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
Contract
IT Job Ads		 Median
Daily Rate
Past 6 Months		 Median Daily Rate
% Change
on Same Period
Last Year		 Live
Jobs
London +53 299 £525 +2.44% 577
North of England +17 134 £513 +13.89% 123
South East +30 130 £538 +7.50% 100
North West +11 81 £525 +18.31% 66
Midlands +10 71 £500 -7.41% 50
Yorkshire +1 45 £450 -16.28% 45
East Midlands +13 39 £488 +2.63% 19
West Midlands -20 31 £525 -4.55% 31
East of England -14 18 £475 -2.06% 36
South West -37 16 £575 +4.55% 56
North East -36 8 £525 +14.13% 12
Cloud Engineer
UK

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

For the 6 months to 14 September 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.

1 340 (50.22%) Azure
2 260 (38.40%) Terraform
3 233 (34.42%) Infrastructure as Code
4 232 (34.27%) AWS
5 225 (33.23%) CI/CD
6 195 (28.80%) Security Cleared
7 177 (26.14%) DevOps
8 163 (24.08%) Kubernetes
9 159 (23.49%) Cloud Security
10 155 (22.90%) Python
11 149 (22.01%) Microsoft
12 147 (21.71%) PowerShell
13 144 (21.27%) Infrastructure Engineering
14 139 (20.53%) SC Cleared
15 130 (19.20%) GCP
16 124 (18.32%) Platform Engineering
17 109 (16.10%) Windows
18 88 (13.00%) Entra ID
19 86 (12.70%) AI
20 83 (12.26%) Migration
21 82 (12.11%) Agile
22 80 (11.82%) Active Directory
22 80 (11.82%) Google
23 78 (11.52%) DNS
24 77 (11.37%) Firewall
25 74 (10.93%) Linux
25 74 (10.93%) Observability
26 73 (10.78%) Bash
26 73 (10.78%) VMware
27 72 (10.64%) DV Cleared

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 (2.22%) Microsoft Exchange
2 10 (1.48%) Apache
3 8 (1.18%) SharePoint
4 6 (0.89%) Apache Airflow
4 6 (0.89%) Confluence
5 3 (0.44%) IIS
5 3 (0.44%) nginx
5 3 (0.44%) Tomcat
6 2 (0.30%) CloudStack
6 2 (0.30%) OpenStack
7 1 (0.15%) Apache Pulsar
Applications
1 1 (0.15%) Chatbot
Business Applications
1 1 (0.15%) Aladdin
Cloud Services
1 340 (50.22%) Azure
2 232 (34.27%) AWS
3 130 (19.20%) GCP
4 88 (13.00%) Entra ID
5 67 (9.90%) GitHub
6 50 (7.39%) Azure DevOps
6 50 (7.39%) Serverless
7 49 (7.24%) IaaS
8 45 (6.65%) GitHub Actions
9 39 (5.76%) Google Kubernetes Engine
10 38 (5.61%) AWS CloudFormation
11 37 (5.47%) AWS Lambda
12 36 (5.32%) Azure Monitor
12 36 (5.32%) PaaS
13 33 (4.87%) Azure AKS
14 31 (4.58%) Microsoft 365
15 29 (4.28%) Amazon EKS
16 28 (4.14%) SaaS
17 27 (3.99%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 27 (3.99%) Amazon EC2
Communications & Networking
1 78 (11.52%) DNS
2 77 (11.37%) Firewall
3 40 (5.91%) Network Security
4 32 (4.73%) VPN
5 20 (2.95%) DHCP
6 18 (2.66%) WAN
7 16 (2.36%) TCP/IP
8 12 (1.77%) Internet
9 7 (1.03%) SD-WAN
9 7 (1.03%) VLAN
10 5 (0.74%) LAN
10 5 (0.74%) SSL
10 5 (0.74%) VSAN
10 5 (0.74%) Wireless
11 4 (0.59%) BGP
11 4 (0.59%) Kerberos
11 4 (0.59%) NGFW
11 4 (0.59%) OSPF
12 3 (0.44%) IPv4
12 3 (0.44%) SAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 23 (3.40%) SQL Server
2 15 (2.22%) Amazon RDS
3 12 (1.77%) PostgreSQL
4 10 (1.48%) BigQuery
4 10 (1.48%) Data Lake
5 8 (1.18%) Oracle Exadata
6 6 (0.89%) DynamoDB
6 6 (0.89%) NoSQL
7 5 (0.74%) Amazon Athena
7 5 (0.74%) Oracle Database
8 4 (0.59%) Azure SQL Database
9 3 (0.44%) Flink
9 3 (0.44%) Looker
9 3 (0.44%) MySQL
9 3 (0.44%) Oracle Database 12c
10 2 (0.30%) Amazon QuickSight
10 2 (0.30%) Amazon Redshift
10 2 (0.30%) Big Data
10 2 (0.30%) Data Warehouse
10 2 (0.30%) Metadata
Development Applications
1 48 (7.09%) GitLab
2 34 (5.02%) Jenkins
3 29 (4.28%) Git
4 11 (1.62%) JIRA
5 7 (1.03%) Artifactory
6 3 (0.44%) Claude Code
6 3 (0.44%) Selenium
6 3 (0.44%) Terragrunt
7 2 (0.30%) Bitbucket
7 2 (0.30%) Cypress.io
7 2 (0.30%) Gatling
7 2 (0.30%) JMeter
7 2 (0.30%) Octopus Deploy
7 2 (0.30%) Robot Framework
8 1 (0.15%) Atlassian Bamboo
8 1 (0.15%) eggPlant
8 1 (0.15%) IntelliJ
8 1 (0.15%) JUnit
8 1 (0.15%) LoadRunner
8 1 (0.15%) SonarQube
General
1 81 (11.96%) Finance
2 65 (9.60%) Public Sector
3 64 (9.45%) Social Skills
4 28 (4.14%) Analytical Skills
5 22 (3.25%) Banking
6 9 (1.33%) Manufacturing
7 8 (1.18%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 7 (1.03%) Legal
9 6 (0.89%) Documentation Skills
10 5 (0.74%) Law
10 5 (0.74%) Local Government
11 4 (0.59%) Investment Banking
11 4 (0.59%) Presentation Skills
12 3 (0.44%) Aerospace
12 3 (0.44%) Digital Health
12 3 (0.44%) Digital Healthcare
12 3 (0.44%) Italian Language
12 3 (0.44%) Marketing
12 3 (0.44%) Military
12 3 (0.44%) Pharmaceutical
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 260 (38.40%) Terraform
2 19 (2.81%) REST
3 16 (2.36%) ARM Templates
4 14 (2.07%) Kafka
5 11 (1.62%) Spring
5 11 (1.62%) Spring Boot
6 10 (1.48%) OAuth
6 10 (1.48%) OAuth2
7 7 (1.03%) YAML
8 6 (0.89%) FastAPI
8 6 (0.89%) Flask
8 6 (0.89%) React
9 5 (0.74%) AWS CDK
9 5 (0.74%) Azure Blueprints
9 5 (0.74%) Keycloak
9 5 (0.74%) OpenID
10 4 (0.59%) .NET
10 4 (0.59%) Hugging Face
10 4 (0.59%) PyTorch
10 4 (0.59%) TensorFlow
Miscellaneous
1 105 (15.51%) Cloud Native
2 59 (8.71%) Security Posture
3 36 (5.32%) Hybrid Cloud
4 34 (5.02%) Enterprise Cloud
5 30 (4.43%) Cloud Security Posture
6 21 (3.10%) Management Information System
7 18 (2.66%) Distributed Systems
7 18 (2.66%) Onboarding
8 17 (2.51%) Public Cloud
9 16 (2.36%) Data Centre
10 14 (2.07%) Enterprise Software
11 13 (1.92%) Product Ownership
12 12 (1.77%) Private Cloud
13 8 (1.18%) AI Agents
14 7 (1.03%) Legacy Systems
14 7 (1.03%) Linux Command Line
14 7 (1.03%) PKI
15 6 (0.89%) Distributed Architecture
16 4 (0.59%) CMDB
16 4 (0.59%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 109 (16.10%) Windows
2 74 (10.93%) Linux
3 59 (8.71%) Windows Server
4 29 (4.28%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 14 (2.07%) Windows Server 2019
6 8 (1.18%) Ubuntu
7 3 (0.44%) CentOS
7 3 (0.44%) VMS
8 2 (0.30%) Windows Server 2012
9 1 (0.15%) Unix
Processes & Methodologies
1 233 (34.42%) Infrastructure as Code
2 225 (33.23%) CI/CD
3 177 (26.14%) DevOps
4 159 (23.49%) Cloud Security
5 144 (21.27%) Infrastructure Engineering
6 124 (18.32%) Platform Engineering
7 86 (12.70%) AI
8 83 (12.26%) Migration
9 82 (12.11%) Agile
10 74 (10.93%) Observability
11 67 (9.90%) Containerisation
12 61 (9.01%) Technical Leadership
13 56 (8.27%) Cybersecurity
13 56 (8.27%) DevSecOps
14 55 (8.12%) Continuous Improvement
15 54 (7.98%) Software Engineering
16 50 (7.39%) Infrastructure Automation
17 48 (7.09%) Change Management
18 46 (6.79%) Problem-Solving
19 44 (6.50%) Deployment Automation
Programming Languages
1 155 (22.90%) Python
2 147 (21.71%) PowerShell
3 73 (10.78%) Bash
4 69 (10.19%) Bicep
5 57 (8.42%) SQL
6 35 (5.17%) Java
7 13 (1.92%) C#
8 10 (1.48%) Go
9 9 (1.33%) JavaScript
10 8 (1.18%) Shell Script
11 4 (0.59%) TypeScript
12 3 (0.44%) C
12 3 (0.44%) Groovy
12 3 (0.44%) Scala
13 2 (0.30%) Kusto Query Language
14 1 (0.15%) Apex Code
14 1 (0.15%) Data Analysis Expressions
14 1 (0.15%) Perl
14 1 (0.15%) R
14 1 (0.15%) Ruby
Qualifications
1 195 (28.80%) Security Cleared
2 139 (20.53%) SC Cleared
3 72 (10.64%) DV Cleared
4 44 (6.50%) Azure Certification
5 41 (6.06%) AWS Certification
6 34 (5.02%) Degree
7 20 (2.95%) Microsoft Certification
8 17 (2.51%) CISSP
9 10 (1.48%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
10 7 (1.03%) Computer Science Degree
10 7 (1.03%) MCSE
11 6 (0.89%) Cisco Certification
11 6 (0.89%) CISM
12 5 (0.74%) CCNP
12 5 (0.74%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
13 4 (0.59%) BPSS Clearance
14 3 (0.44%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
14 3 (0.44%) CCIE
14 3 (0.44%) CEH
15 2 (0.30%) CCIE Security
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 14 (2.07%) ISO/IEC 27001
2 11 (1.62%) QA
3 10 (1.48%) Data Quality
4 9 (1.33%) NCSC
4 9 (1.33%) NIST
5 6 (0.89%) GDPR
6 5 (0.74%) Cyber Essentials
7 3 (0.44%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
8 2 (0.30%) Disclosure Scotland
8 2 (0.30%) PCI DSS
8 2 (0.30%) SLA
9 1 (0.15%) Accessibility
9 1 (0.15%) Actionable Recommendations
9 1 (0.15%) Government Security Classifications
9 1 (0.15%) GRC
9 1 (0.15%) WCAG
System Software
1 80 (11.82%) Active Directory
2 70 (10.34%) Docker
3 48 (7.09%) VMware Infrastructure
4 33 (4.87%) VMware ESXi
5 31 (4.58%) Virtual Machines
6 26 (3.84%) VMware NSX
7 20 (2.95%) Virtual Desktop
7 20 (2.95%) vSphere
8 15 (2.22%) vCloud
9 11 (1.62%) Hyper-V
10 7 (1.03%) Squid
11 4 (0.59%) Firmware
12 3 (0.44%) Ceph
12 3 (0.44%) Dovecot
12 3 (0.44%) NFS
12 3 (0.44%) Postfix
13 2 (0.30%) KVM
13 2 (0.30%) Virtual Servers
14 1 (0.15%) IAG
Systems Management
1 163 (24.08%) Kubernetes
2 47 (6.94%) Ansible
3 30 (4.43%) vCenter Server
4 26 (3.84%) SCOM
5 25 (3.69%) Microsoft Intune
6 21 (3.10%) Grafana
7 20 (2.95%) Prometheus
8 19 (2.81%) Progress Chef
9 14 (2.07%) Puppet
10 10 (1.48%) Istio
11 6 (0.89%) Packer
11 6 (0.89%) Single Sign-On
12 5 (0.74%) VxRail
13 4 (0.59%) Cilium
13 4 (0.59%) Suricata
14 3 (0.44%) Active Directory Federation Services
14 3 (0.44%) FortiGate
14 3 (0.44%) HAProxy
14 3 (0.44%) vRealize
15 2 (0.30%) SELinux
Vendors
1 149 (22.01%) Microsoft
2 80 (11.82%) Google
3 73 (10.78%) VMware
4 33 (4.87%) Oracle
5 22 (3.25%) Databricks
6 19 (2.81%) Red Hat
7 15 (2.22%) Zscaler
8 13 (1.92%) SolarWinds
9 12 (1.77%) Broadcom
9 12 (1.77%) Palo Alto
10 11 (1.62%) Splunk
11 10 (1.48%) OpenAI
12 9 (1.33%) Cisco
12 9 (1.33%) Dynatrace
12 9 (1.33%) Salesforce
12 9 (1.33%) ServiceNow
13 7 (1.03%) CrowdStrike
13 7 (1.03%) New Relic
14 5 (0.74%) CyberArk
14 5 (0.74%) Fortinet
983 Cloud Engineer jobs in England