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 20 August 2026.

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

 6 months to
20 Aug 2026		 Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 204 285 306
Rank change year-on-year +81 +21 -38
Contract jobs requiring a Cloud Engineer 636 224 219
As % of all contract jobs in England 1.39% 0.81% 0.66%
As % of the Job Titles category 1.51% 0.89% 0.71%
Number of daily rates quoted 418 170 146
10th Percentile £407 £402 £374
25th Percentile £462 £440 £450
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £550
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -9.09% -
75th Percentile £618 £575 £625
90th Percentile £688 £641 £675
UK median daily rate £525 £500 £550
% change year-on-year +5.00% -9.09% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 25 6 1
10th Percentile - £29.00 -
25th Percentile £23.20 £29.25 £27.50
Median hourly rate £77.00 £37.50 £30.00
Median % change year-on-year +105.33% +25.00% -
75th Percentile £81.25 £58.75 £32.50
90th Percentile - £86.25 -
UK median hourly rate £77.00 £37.50 £30.00
% change year-on-year +105.33% +25.00% -

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 42,197 25,269 30,827
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.44% 91.56% 92.94%
Number of daily rates quoted 25,494 16,320 20,128
10th Percentile £325 £281 £300
25th Percentile £425 £400 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £510 £525
Median % change year-on-year +2.94% -2.86% -4.55%
75th Percentile £630 £625 £638
90th Percentile £738 £738 £750
UK median daily rate £525 £500 £525
% change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -1.87%
Number of hourly rates quoted 3,196 1,350 1,742
10th Percentile £15.24 £13.64 £14.16
25th Percentile £21.25 £17.79 £21.00
Median hourly rate £42.50 £26.00 £45.00
Median % change year-on-year +63.46% -42.22% +6.95%
75th Percentile £68.00 £55.00 £66.33
90th Percentile £80.00 £73.75 £75.00
UK median hourly rate £41.74 £25.15 £43.00
% change year-on-year +65.94% -41.51% +2.38%

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 20 August 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 20 August 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 20 August 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 +53 303 £525 - 34
South East +18 115 £538 +7.50% 34
North of England +15 109 £525 +16.67% 44
North West +8 65 £533 +21.83% 22
Midlands -3 64 £500 - 15
Yorkshire -10 37 £475 -5.00% 15
West Midlands -25 32 £525 -2.78% 10
East Midlands +6 31 £450 -5.26% 5
East of England +1 22 £505 +4.12% 3
South West -30 15 £600 +9.09% 17
North East -37 7 £525 +10.53% 7
Cloud Engineer
UK

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

For the 6 months to 20 August 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.

1 326 (51.26%) Azure
2 268 (42.14%) Terraform
3 227 (35.69%) AWS
4 222 (34.91%) Infrastructure as Code
5 220 (34.59%) CI/CD
6 179 (28.14%) DevOps
7 178 (27.99%) Security Cleared
8 156 (24.53%) Cloud Security
9 153 (24.06%) Python
10 149 (23.43%) Kubernetes
11 148 (23.27%) PowerShell
12 142 (22.33%) Microsoft
13 141 (22.17%) Infrastructure Engineering
14 134 (21.07%) SC Cleared
15 128 (20.13%) GCP
16 108 (16.98%) Platform Engineering
17 104 (16.35%) Windows
18 85 (13.36%) Google
19 77 (12.11%) Agile
19 77 (12.11%) Entra ID
19 77 (12.11%) Firewall
20 76 (11.95%) AI
21 74 (11.64%) Bash
21 74 (11.64%) Migration
22 73 (11.48%) GitHub
23 71 (11.16%) DNS
24 68 (10.69%) Active Directory
25 67 (10.53%) Linux
26 65 (10.22%) Observability
27 64 (10.06%) Bicep

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 13 (2.04%) Microsoft Exchange
2 9 (1.42%) Apache
3 6 (0.94%) Confluence
4 5 (0.79%) Apache Airflow
4 5 (0.79%) SharePoint
5 3 (0.47%) IIS
5 3 (0.47%) nginx
5 3 (0.47%) Tomcat
6 2 (0.31%) CloudStack
6 2 (0.31%) OpenStack
7 1 (0.16%) Apache Pulsar
Applications
1 1 (0.16%) Chatbot
Business Applications
1 2 (0.31%) Aladdin
Cloud Services
1 326 (51.26%) Azure
2 227 (35.69%) AWS
3 128 (20.13%) GCP
4 77 (12.11%) Entra ID
5 73 (11.48%) GitHub
6 52 (8.18%) Azure DevOps
7 51 (8.02%) Serverless
8 48 (7.55%) GitHub Actions
9 44 (6.92%) IaaS
10 41 (6.45%) Azure AKS
11 40 (6.29%) Google Kubernetes Engine
12 38 (5.97%) AWS CloudFormation
13 37 (5.82%) AWS Lambda
14 35 (5.50%) Azure Monitor
15 32 (5.03%) PaaS
16 31 (4.87%) Amazon EC2
17 30 (4.72%) Amazon EKS
18 29 (4.56%) Microsoft 365
18 29 (4.56%) Virtual Private Cloud
19 28 (4.40%) SaaS
Communications & Networking
1 77 (12.11%) Firewall
2 71 (11.16%) DNS
3 37 (5.82%) Network Security
4 32 (5.03%) VPN
5 17 (2.67%) WAN
6 16 (2.52%) DHCP
7 14 (2.20%) TCP/IP
8 12 (1.89%) Internet
9 6 (0.94%) SD-WAN
10 5 (0.79%) LAN
10 5 (0.79%) SSL
10 5 (0.79%) VLAN
11 4 (0.63%) BGP
11 4 (0.63%) Reverse Proxy
11 4 (0.63%) SAN
11 4 (0.63%) SMTP
12 3 (0.47%) IPv4
12 3 (0.47%) Kerberos
12 3 (0.47%) OSPF
12 3 (0.47%) Wireless
Database & Business Intelligence
1 25 (3.93%) SQL Server
2 14 (2.20%) Amazon RDS
3 11 (1.73%) PostgreSQL
4 10 (1.57%) BigQuery
5 8 (1.26%) Oracle Exadata
6 7 (1.10%) Amazon Athena
7 6 (0.94%) Azure SQL Database
7 6 (0.94%) Data Lake
8 5 (0.79%) Oracle Database
9 4 (0.63%) DynamoDB
10 3 (0.47%) Amazon QuickSight
10 3 (0.47%) Amazon Redshift
10 3 (0.47%) Flink
10 3 (0.47%) Looker
10 3 (0.47%) MySQL
10 3 (0.47%) Oracle Database 12c
11 2 (0.31%) Big Data
11 2 (0.31%) Metadata
11 2 (0.31%) NoSQL
12 1 (0.16%) Redis
Development Applications
1 45 (7.08%) GitLab
2 33 (5.19%) Jenkins
3 28 (4.40%) Git
4 11 (1.73%) JIRA
5 8 (1.26%) Artifactory
6 3 (0.47%) Selenium
7 2 (0.31%) Bitbucket
7 2 (0.31%) Claude Code
7 2 (0.31%) Cypress.io
7 2 (0.31%) Gatling
7 2 (0.31%) JMeter
7 2 (0.31%) Octopus Deploy
7 2 (0.31%) Robot Framework
7 2 (0.31%) Terragrunt
8 1 (0.16%) Chocolatey
8 1 (0.16%) CircleCI
8 1 (0.16%) Postman
8 1 (0.16%) REST Assured
8 1 (0.16%) Spinnaker
8 1 (0.16%) TestRail
General
1 78 (12.26%) Finance
2 67 (10.53%) Social Skills
3 58 (9.12%) Public Sector
4 26 (4.09%) Analytical Skills
5 24 (3.77%) Banking
6 10 (1.57%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 9 (1.42%) Documentation Skills
8 6 (0.94%) Investment Banking
9 5 (0.79%) Law
9 5 (0.79%) Local Government
9 5 (0.79%) Manufacturing
10 3 (0.47%) Digital Health
10 3 (0.47%) Digital Healthcare
10 3 (0.47%) Front Office
10 3 (0.47%) Italian Language
10 3 (0.47%) Legal
10 3 (0.47%) Military
10 3 (0.47%) Pharmaceutical
10 3 (0.47%) Presentation Skills
11 2 (0.31%) Police
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 268 (42.14%) Terraform
2 18 (2.83%) REST
3 13 (2.04%) ARM Templates
4 11 (1.73%) Spring
4 11 (1.73%) Spring Boot
5 10 (1.57%) Kafka
5 10 (1.57%) OAuth
5 10 (1.57%) OAuth2
6 8 (1.26%) YAML
7 6 (0.94%) FastAPI
7 6 (0.94%) Flask
7 6 (0.94%) React
8 5 (0.79%) AWS CDK
8 5 (0.79%) OpenID
9 4 (0.63%) .NET
9 4 (0.63%) Azure Blueprints
9 4 (0.63%) Hugging Face
9 4 (0.63%) Node.js
9 4 (0.63%) PyTorch
9 4 (0.63%) TensorFlow
Miscellaneous
1 106 (16.67%) Cloud Native
2 55 (8.65%) Security Posture
3 33 (5.19%) Hybrid Cloud
4 31 (4.87%) Enterprise Cloud
5 28 (4.40%) Cloud Security Posture
6 17 (2.67%) Management Information System
6 17 (2.67%) Onboarding
7 16 (2.52%) Distributed Systems
7 16 (2.52%) Public Cloud
8 14 (2.20%) Enterprise Software
9 13 (2.04%) Data Centre
10 11 (1.73%) Product Ownership
11 10 (1.57%) Private Cloud
12 8 (1.26%) AI Agents
13 7 (1.10%) Legacy Systems
13 7 (1.10%) Self-Motivation
14 6 (0.94%) Linux Command Line
15 5 (0.79%) PKI
16 4 (0.63%) NHS
16 4 (0.63%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 104 (16.35%) Windows
2 67 (10.53%) Linux
3 53 (8.33%) Windows Server
4 29 (4.56%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 10 (1.57%) Windows Server 2019
6 8 (1.26%) Ubuntu
7 3 (0.47%) CentOS
7 3 (0.47%) VMS
8 2 (0.31%) Windows Server 2012
Processes & Methodologies
1 222 (34.91%) Infrastructure as Code
2 220 (34.59%) CI/CD
3 179 (28.14%) DevOps
4 156 (24.53%) Cloud Security
5 141 (22.17%) Infrastructure Engineering
6 108 (16.98%) Platform Engineering
7 77 (12.11%) Agile
8 76 (11.95%) AI
9 74 (11.64%) Migration
10 65 (10.22%) Observability
11 62 (9.75%) Containerisation
12 52 (8.18%) Continuous Improvement
12 52 (8.18%) Technical Leadership
13 51 (8.02%) Software Engineering
14 49 (7.70%) DevSecOps
15 46 (7.23%) Change Management
16 45 (7.08%) Cybersecurity
17 44 (6.92%) Infrastructure Automation
18 41 (6.45%) Deployment Automation
18 41 (6.45%) Problem-Solving
Programming Languages
1 153 (24.06%) Python
2 148 (23.27%) PowerShell
3 74 (11.64%) Bash
4 64 (10.06%) Bicep
5 60 (9.43%) SQL
6 33 (5.19%) Java
7 18 (2.83%) C#
8 9 (1.42%) Go
8 9 (1.42%) JavaScript
9 8 (1.26%) Shell Script
10 5 (0.79%) TypeScript
11 4 (0.63%) Groovy
12 3 (0.47%) C
12 3 (0.47%) Scala
13 2 (0.31%) Kusto Query Language
14 1 (0.16%) Apex Code
14 1 (0.16%) Data Analysis Expressions
14 1 (0.16%) Perl
14 1 (0.16%) R
14 1 (0.16%) Ruby
Qualifications
1 178 (27.99%) Security Cleared
2 134 (21.07%) SC Cleared
3 61 (9.59%) DV Cleared
4 46 (7.23%) Azure Certification
5 43 (6.76%) AWS Certification
6 28 (4.40%) Degree
7 15 (2.36%) CISSP
8 14 (2.20%) Microsoft Certification
9 12 (1.89%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
10 7 (1.10%) Cisco Certification
10 7 (1.10%) Computer Science Degree
11 6 (0.94%) CCNP
11 6 (0.94%) MCSE
12 5 (0.79%) CISM
13 4 (0.63%) CCIE
13 4 (0.63%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
14 3 (0.47%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
14 3 (0.47%) CEH
15 2 (0.31%) CCIE Security
15 2 (0.31%) MCSA
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 13 (2.04%) ISO/IEC 27001
2 11 (1.73%) Data Quality
3 10 (1.57%) QA
4 8 (1.26%) NCSC
4 8 (1.26%) NIST
5 5 (0.79%) GDPR
6 3 (0.47%) Cyber Essentials
6 3 (0.47%) SLA
7 2 (0.31%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
7 2 (0.31%) Disclosure Scotland
7 2 (0.31%) PCI DSS
8 1 (0.16%) Accessibility
8 1 (0.16%) Actionable Recommendations
8 1 (0.16%) Government Security Classifications
8 1 (0.16%) GRC
8 1 (0.16%) SOC 2
8 1 (0.16%) WCAG
System Software
1 68 (10.69%) Active Directory
2 64 (10.06%) Docker
3 39 (6.13%) VMware Infrastructure
4 31 (4.87%) Virtual Machines
5 26 (4.09%) VMware ESXi
6 22 (3.46%) VMware NSX
7 19 (2.99%) Virtual Desktop
8 17 (2.67%) vSphere
9 13 (2.04%) vCloud
10 9 (1.42%) Hyper-V
11 7 (1.10%) Squid
12 4 (0.63%) Firmware
13 3 (0.47%) Ceph
13 3 (0.47%) Dovecot
13 3 (0.47%) NFS
13 3 (0.47%) Postfix
14 2 (0.31%) KVM
14 2 (0.31%) Virtual Servers
Systems Management
1 149 (23.43%) Kubernetes
2 45 (7.08%) Ansible
3 22 (3.46%) Microsoft Intune
3 22 (3.46%) vCenter Server
4 20 (3.14%) Progress Chef
4 20 (3.14%) SCOM
5 19 (2.99%) Grafana
6 18 (2.83%) Prometheus
7 15 (2.36%) Puppet
8 9 (1.42%) Istio
9 8 (1.26%) Packer
9 8 (1.26%) Single Sign-On
10 5 (0.79%) VxRail
11 4 (0.63%) Suricata
12 3 (0.47%) Active Directory Federation Services
12 3 (0.47%) HAProxy
12 3 (0.47%) Salt
12 3 (0.47%) vRealize
13 2 (0.31%) FortiGate
13 2 (0.31%) SELinux
Vendors
1 142 (22.33%) Microsoft
2 85 (13.36%) Google
3 61 (9.59%) VMware
4 29 (4.56%) Oracle
5 18 (2.83%) Red Hat
6 16 (2.52%) Zscaler
7 12 (1.89%) Databricks
8 11 (1.73%) Palo Alto
8 11 (1.73%) ServiceNow
8 11 (1.73%) Splunk
9 10 (1.57%) OpenAI
10 9 (1.42%) Cisco
10 9 (1.42%) Dynatrace
11 8 (1.26%) Broadcom
11 8 (1.26%) Salesforce
11 8 (1.26%) SolarWinds
12 7 (1.10%) CrowdStrike
12 7 (1.10%) New Relic
13 6 (0.94%) Fortinet
14 5 (0.79%) CyberArk
133 Cloud Engineer jobs in England