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 30 July 2026.

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

 6 months to
30 Jul 2026		 Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 196 289 325
Rank change year-on-year +93 +36 -44
Contract jobs requiring a Cloud Engineer 601 222 215
As % of all contract jobs in England 1.33% 0.81% 0.63%
As % of the Job Titles category 1.44% 0.88% 0.68%
Number of daily rates quoted 397 174 149
10th Percentile £400 £402 £397
25th Percentile £463 £428 £450
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £565
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -11.50% +2.73%
75th Percentile £625 £575 £625
90th Percentile £689 £638 £675
UK median daily rate £525 £500 £550
% change year-on-year +5.00% -9.09% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 23 4 1
10th Percentile £23.20 £33.75 -
25th Percentile £71.00 £39.38 £27.50
Median hourly rate £77.00 £53.75 £30.00
Median % change year-on-year +43.26% +79.17% -
75th Percentile £81.25 £74.38 £32.50
90th Percentile - £95.75 -
UK median hourly rate £77.00 £53.75 £30.00
% change year-on-year +43.26% +79.17% -

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 41,843 25,227 31,663
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.58% 91.72% 92.93%
Number of daily rates quoted 25,472 16,394 20,893
10th Percentile £328 £288 £300
25th Percentile £425 £402 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £510 £525
Median % change year-on-year +2.94% -2.86% -4.55%
75th Percentile £625 £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 3,058 1,280 1,957
10th Percentile £15.99 £13.74 £14.05
25th Percentile £22.25 £17.79 £20.00
Median hourly rate £45.56 £26.02 £43.00
Median % change year-on-year +75.08% -39.49% -1.58%
75th Percentile £68.00 £55.62 £65.00
90th Percentile £80.10 £75.00 £75.00
UK median hourly rate £43.61 £25.15 £42.50
% change year-on-year +73.38% -40.82% -1.88%

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 30 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 30 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 30 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 +60 299 £525 +0.48% 233
South East +3 105 £538 +2.38% 37
North of England -9 96 £525 +13.51% 60
Midlands -15 56 £525 +10.53% 24
North West -15 55 £535 +25.94% 36
Yorkshire -20 34 £463 -7.50% 16
West Midlands -38 30 £525 +8.81% 17
East Midlands +5 25 £450 -5.26% 7
East of England +4 22 £505 +26.25% 13
South West -28 16 £563 - 25
North East -45 7 £525 +7.69% 8
Cloud Engineer
UK

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

For the 6 months to 30 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.

1 308 (51.25%) Azure
2 259 (43.09%) Terraform
3 234 (38.94%) AWS
4 214 (35.61%) CI/CD
5 211 (35.11%) Infrastructure as Code
6 178 (29.62%) DevOps
7 164 (27.29%) Security Cleared
8 146 (24.29%) Python
9 142 (23.63%) Cloud Security
10 138 (22.96%) PowerShell
11 130 (21.63%) Infrastructure Engineering
12 129 (21.46%) Kubernetes
13 127 (21.13%) Microsoft
14 124 (20.63%) GCP
14 124 (20.63%) SC Cleared
15 100 (16.64%) Windows
16 99 (16.47%) Platform Engineering
17 82 (13.64%) Google
18 80 (13.31%) Agile
19 79 (13.14%) Migration
20 72 (11.98%) Firewall
21 71 (11.81%) AI
21 71 (11.81%) DNS
22 70 (11.65%) Bash
22 70 (11.65%) GitHub
23 65 (10.82%) Entra ID
24 64 (10.65%) Docker
24 64 (10.65%) Linux
25 61 (10.15%) Active Directory
25 61 (10.15%) Containerisation

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 (2.00%) Microsoft Exchange
2 7 (1.16%) Apache
2 7 (1.16%) Confluence
3 5 (0.83%) SharePoint
4 4 (0.67%) nginx
5 3 (0.50%) Apache Airflow
5 3 (0.50%) IIS
5 3 (0.50%) Tomcat
6 2 (0.33%) CloudStack
6 2 (0.33%) OpenStack
7 1 (0.17%) Apache Pulsar
7 1 (0.17%) Apache Spark
7 1 (0.17%) Traefik
Applications
1 1 (0.17%) Chatbot
Business Applications
1 2 (0.33%) Aladdin
Cloud Services
1 308 (51.25%) Azure
2 234 (38.94%) AWS
3 124 (20.63%) GCP
4 70 (11.65%) GitHub
5 65 (10.82%) Entra ID
6 56 (9.32%) Serverless
7 47 (7.82%) GitHub Actions
8 43 (7.15%) Azure DevOps
8 43 (7.15%) IaaS
9 40 (6.66%) Azure AKS
10 36 (5.99%) Google Kubernetes Engine
11 34 (5.66%) AWS CloudFormation
11 34 (5.66%) AWS Lambda
12 33 (5.49%) Amazon S3
12 33 (5.49%) PaaS
13 31 (5.16%) Virtual Private Cloud
14 30 (4.99%) Amazon EC2
15 27 (4.49%) Azure Monitor
16 26 (4.33%) SaaS
17 25 (4.16%) Amazon EKS
Communications & Networking
1 72 (11.98%) Firewall
2 71 (11.81%) DNS
3 34 (5.66%) VPN
4 28 (4.66%) Network Security
5 16 (2.66%) DHCP
5 16 (2.66%) WAN
6 14 (2.33%) TCP/IP
7 9 (1.50%) Internet
8 6 (1.00%) SD-WAN
8 6 (1.00%) VLAN
9 5 (0.83%) Reverse Proxy
9 5 (0.83%) SSL
10 4 (0.67%) BGP
10 4 (0.67%) LAN
10 4 (0.67%) SAN
11 3 (0.50%) IPv4
11 3 (0.50%) OSPF
11 3 (0.50%) SMTP
11 3 (0.50%) VSAN
11 3 (0.50%) Wireless
Database & Business Intelligence
1 22 (3.66%) SQL Server
2 12 (2.00%) Amazon RDS
3 10 (1.66%) PostgreSQL
4 9 (1.50%) Amazon Athena
4 9 (1.50%) BigQuery
5 6 (1.00%) Azure SQL Database
5 6 (1.00%) DynamoDB
6 5 (0.83%) Oracle Database
6 5 (0.83%) Oracle Exadata
7 4 (0.67%) Data Lake
8 3 (0.50%) Amazon QuickSight
8 3 (0.50%) Amazon Redshift
8 3 (0.50%) MySQL
8 3 (0.50%) Oracle Database 12c
9 2 (0.33%) Big Data
9 2 (0.33%) Flink
9 2 (0.33%) Looker
10 1 (0.17%) InfluxDB
10 1 (0.17%) Metadata
10 1 (0.17%) Power BI
Development Applications
1 41 (6.82%) GitLab
2 35 (5.82%) Jenkins
3 28 (4.66%) Git
4 12 (2.00%) JIRA
5 8 (1.33%) Artifactory
6 3 (0.50%) Selenium
6 3 (0.50%) Team Foundation Server
7 2 (0.33%) Bitbucket
7 2 (0.33%) Claude Code
7 2 (0.33%) Cypress.io
7 2 (0.33%) Liquibase
7 2 (0.33%) Octopus Deploy
7 2 (0.33%) Robot Framework
8 1 (0.17%) Burp Suite
8 1 (0.17%) Chocolatey
8 1 (0.17%) CircleCI
8 1 (0.17%) Postman
8 1 (0.17%) REST Assured
8 1 (0.17%) SonarQube
8 1 (0.17%) TestRail
General
1 75 (12.48%) Finance
2 63 (10.48%) Social Skills
3 52 (8.65%) Public Sector
4 23 (3.83%) Banking
5 22 (3.66%) Analytical Skills
6 9 (1.50%) Documentation Skills
7 6 (1.00%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 6 (1.00%) Investment Banking
8 5 (0.83%) Law
8 5 (0.83%) Local Government
9 4 (0.67%) Legal
9 4 (0.67%) Pharmaceutical
10 3 (0.50%) Front Office
10 3 (0.50%) Military
10 3 (0.50%) Telecoms
11 2 (0.33%) Aerospace
11 2 (0.33%) Back Office
11 2 (0.33%) Financial Institution
11 2 (0.33%) International Banking
11 2 (0.33%) Manufacturing
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 23 (3.83%) REST
2 12 (2.00%) OAuth
2 12 (2.00%) OAuth2
3 11 (1.83%) ARM Templates
4 9 (1.50%) Spring
4 9 (1.50%) Spring Boot
5 7 (1.16%) Node.js
5 7 (1.16%) OpenID
6 6 (1.00%) FastAPI
6 6 (1.00%) Flask
6 6 (1.00%) React
6 6 (1.00%) YAML
7 5 (0.83%) Kafka
7 5 (0.83%) Model Context Protocol
7 5 (0.83%) Playwright
8 4 (0.67%) AWS CDK
8 4 (0.67%) Express.js
8 4 (0.67%) Hugging Face
8 4 (0.67%) PyTorch
8 4 (0.67%) TensorFlow
Miscellaneous
1 107 (17.80%) Cloud Native
2 42 (6.99%) Security Posture
3 32 (5.32%) Hybrid Cloud
4 25 (4.16%) Enterprise Cloud
5 23 (3.83%) Public Cloud
6 18 (3.00%) Cloud Security Posture
7 17 (2.83%) Data Centre
8 15 (2.50%) Management Information System
9 14 (2.33%) Onboarding
10 12 (2.00%) Distributed Systems
11 11 (1.83%) Enterprise Software
12 9 (1.50%) Self-Motivation
13 8 (1.33%) Product Ownership
14 7 (1.16%) AI Agents
14 7 (1.16%) Legacy Systems
15 6 (1.00%) Linux Command Line
16 5 (0.83%) Private Cloud
17 4 (0.67%) PKI
17 4 (0.67%) Virtual Team
18 3 (0.50%) Distributed Architecture
Operating Systems
1 100 (16.64%) Windows
2 64 (10.65%) Linux
3 50 (8.32%) Windows Server
4 27 (4.49%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 10 (1.66%) Windows Server 2019
6 8 (1.33%) Ubuntu
7 3 (0.50%) CentOS
8 2 (0.33%) VMS
8 2 (0.33%) Windows Server 2012
9 1 (0.17%) Mac OS
Processes & Methodologies
1 214 (35.61%) CI/CD
2 211 (35.11%) Infrastructure as Code
3 178 (29.62%) DevOps
4 142 (23.63%) Cloud Security
5 130 (21.63%) Infrastructure Engineering
6 99 (16.47%) Platform Engineering
7 80 (13.31%) Agile
8 79 (13.14%) Migration
9 71 (11.81%) AI
10 61 (10.15%) Containerisation
11 56 (9.32%) Observability
12 52 (8.65%) Software Engineering
13 48 (7.99%) Technical Leadership
14 47 (7.82%) Infrastructure Automation
15 43 (7.15%) Continuous Improvement
16 42 (6.99%) Problem-Solving
17 41 (6.82%) DevSecOps
18 40 (6.66%) Change Management
19 37 (6.16%) Cybersecurity
20 33 (5.49%) Mentoring
Programming Languages
1 146 (24.29%) Python
2 138 (22.96%) PowerShell
3 70 (11.65%) Bash
4 58 (9.65%) SQL
5 57 (9.48%) Bicep
6 31 (5.16%) Java
7 17 (2.83%) C#
8 10 (1.66%) JavaScript
9 9 (1.50%) Go
9 9 (1.50%) TypeScript
10 5 (0.83%) Groovy
11 4 (0.67%) Shell Script
12 2 (0.33%) C
12 2 (0.33%) Kusto Query Language
12 2 (0.33%) Ruby
12 2 (0.33%) Scala
13 1 (0.17%) Cypher
13 1 (0.17%) Data Analysis Expressions
13 1 (0.17%) Kotlin
13 1 (0.17%) R
Qualifications
1 164 (27.29%) Security Cleared
2 124 (20.63%) SC Cleared
3 55 (9.15%) DV Cleared
4 47 (7.82%) Azure Certification
5 42 (6.99%) AWS Certification
6 26 (4.33%) Degree
7 14 (2.33%) CISSP
8 13 (2.16%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
8 13 (2.16%) Microsoft Certification
9 9 (1.50%) Cisco Certification
10 8 (1.33%) Computer Science Degree
11 6 (1.00%) CCNP
12 5 (0.83%) CISM
13 4 (0.67%) CCIE
13 4 (0.67%) MCSE
13 4 (0.67%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
14 3 (0.50%) (ISC)2 CCSP
14 3 (0.50%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
14 3 (0.50%) BPSS Clearance
15 2 (0.33%) CCIE Security
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 12 (2.00%) ISO/IEC 27001
2 10 (1.66%) Data Quality
2 10 (1.66%) QA
3 8 (1.33%) NCSC
3 8 (1.33%) NIST
4 4 (0.67%) GDPR
5 2 (0.33%) Cyber Essentials
5 2 (0.33%) Disclosure Scotland
5 2 (0.33%) PCI DSS
5 2 (0.33%) SLA
6 1 (0.17%) Accessibility
6 1 (0.17%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
6 1 (0.17%) Government Security Classifications
6 1 (0.17%) GRC
6 1 (0.17%) SOC 2
6 1 (0.17%) WCAG
System Software
1 64 (10.65%) Docker
2 61 (10.15%) Active Directory
3 34 (5.66%) VMware Infrastructure
4 29 (4.83%) Virtual Machines
5 25 (4.16%) VMware ESXi
6 21 (3.49%) VMware NSX
7 17 (2.83%) vSphere
8 15 (2.50%) Virtual Desktop
9 12 (2.00%) vCloud
10 10 (1.66%) Hyper-V
11 7 (1.16%) Squid
12 5 (0.83%) Firmware
13 3 (0.50%) Ceph
13 3 (0.50%) Dovecot
13 3 (0.50%) NFS
13 3 (0.50%) Postfix
14 2 (0.33%) KVM
14 2 (0.33%) Virtual Servers
Systems Management
1 259 (43.09%) Terraform
2 129 (21.46%) Kubernetes
3 47 (7.82%) Ansible
4 21 (3.49%) vCenter Server
5 19 (3.16%) Grafana
5 19 (3.16%) Progress Chef
5 19 (3.16%) Prometheus
5 19 (3.16%) SCOM
6 17 (2.83%) Microsoft Intune
7 15 (2.50%) Puppet
8 11 (1.83%) Single Sign-On
9 8 (1.33%) Istio
9 8 (1.33%) Packer
10 5 (0.83%) VxRail
11 4 (0.67%) HAProxy
11 4 (0.67%) Suricata
12 3 (0.50%) Active Directory Federation Services
12 3 (0.50%) Salt
12 3 (0.50%) vRealize
13 2 (0.33%) Cilium
Vendors
1 127 (21.13%) Microsoft
2 82 (13.64%) Google
3 55 (9.15%) VMware
4 24 (3.99%) Oracle
5 17 (2.83%) Red Hat
6 15 (2.50%) Zscaler
7 12 (2.00%) ServiceNow
8 11 (1.83%) Palo Alto
9 10 (1.66%) Splunk
10 9 (1.50%) Cisco
10 9 (1.50%) Dynatrace
10 9 (1.50%) Salesforce
11 8 (1.33%) Broadcom
11 8 (1.33%) SolarWinds
12 7 (1.16%) CrowdStrike
12 7 (1.16%) OpenAI
13 6 (1.00%) Databricks
13 6 (1.00%) Fortinet
14 5 (0.83%) New Relic
15 4 (0.67%) CyberArk
389 Cloud Engineer jobs in England