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 17 August 2026.

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

 6 months to
17 Aug 2026		 Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 198 300 325
Rank change year-on-year +102 +25 -50
Contract jobs requiring a Cloud Engineer 636 224 217
As % of all contract jobs in England 1.39% 0.81% 0.65%
As % of the Job Titles category 1.50% 0.88% 0.70%
Number of daily rates quoted 414 170 147
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 42,264 25,460 30,800
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.48% 91.59% 92.92%
Number of daily rates quoted 25,561 16,436 20,203
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% -1.69%
Number of hourly rates quoted 3,196 1,351 1,763
10th Percentile £15.24 £13.50 £14.16
25th Percentile £21.25 £17.48 £21.15
Median hourly rate £42.50 £25.30 £45.00
Median % change year-on-year +67.98% -43.78% +8.43%
75th Percentile £68.00 £55.00 £66.00
90th Percentile £80.00 £75.00 £75.00
UK median hourly rate £41.74 £25.15 £43.00
% change year-on-year +65.94% -41.51% +2.87%

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 17 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 17 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 17 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 +58 306 £525 - 34
South East +13 116 £538 +7.50% 24
North of England -1 107 £525 +16.67% 47
North West +3 64 £533 +21.83% 22
Midlands +4 62 £500 +5.26% 13
Yorkshire -5 36 £474 -5.12% 16
West Midlands -24 32 £525 +8.81% 10
East Midlands +5 29 £450 -5.26% 3
East of England 0 22 £505 +4.12% 3
South West -34 15 £600 +9.09% 17
North East -41 7 £525 +10.53% 9
Cloud Engineer
UK

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

For the 6 months to 17 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.

1 328 (51.57%) Azure
2 271 (42.61%) Terraform
3 232 (36.48%) AWS
4 222 (34.91%) CI/CD
5 221 (34.75%) Infrastructure as Code
6 179 (28.14%) DevOps
7 177 (27.83%) Security Cleared
8 157 (24.69%) Python
9 154 (24.21%) Cloud Security
10 149 (23.43%) Kubernetes
10 149 (23.43%) PowerShell
11 143 (22.48%) Microsoft
12 138 (21.70%) Infrastructure Engineering
13 133 (20.91%) SC Cleared
14 130 (20.44%) GCP
15 108 (16.98%) Platform Engineering
16 104 (16.35%) Windows
17 87 (13.68%) Google
18 79 (12.42%) Agile
19 78 (12.26%) Migration
20 76 (11.95%) AI
20 76 (11.95%) Firewall
21 75 (11.79%) Entra ID
22 74 (11.64%) Bash
23 73 (11.48%) GitHub
24 71 (11.16%) DNS
25 68 (10.69%) Linux
25 68 (10.69%) Observability
26 67 (10.53%) Active Directory
26 67 (10.53%) Docker

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 8 (1.26%) Apache
3 6 (0.94%) Confluence
4 5 (0.79%) SharePoint
5 4 (0.63%) Apache Airflow
6 3 (0.47%) IIS
6 3 (0.47%) nginx
6 3 (0.47%) Tomcat
7 2 (0.31%) CloudStack
7 2 (0.31%) OpenStack
8 1 (0.16%) Apache Pulsar
Applications
1 1 (0.16%) Chatbot
Business Applications
1 2 (0.31%) Aladdin
Cloud Services
1 328 (51.57%) Azure
2 232 (36.48%) AWS
3 130 (20.44%) GCP
4 75 (11.79%) Entra ID
5 73 (11.48%) GitHub
6 52 (8.18%) Serverless
7 49 (7.70%) Azure DevOps
7 49 (7.70%) GitHub Actions
8 44 (6.92%) IaaS
9 42 (6.60%) Azure AKS
10 41 (6.45%) Google Kubernetes Engine
11 38 (5.97%) AWS CloudFormation
12 36 (5.66%) AWS Lambda
13 33 (5.19%) Azure Monitor
13 33 (5.19%) PaaS
14 31 (4.87%) Amazon EC2
14 31 (4.87%) Virtual Private Cloud
15 30 (4.72%) Microsoft 365
16 29 (4.56%) Amazon EKS
16 29 (4.56%) Amazon S3
Communications & Networking
1 76 (11.95%) Firewall
2 71 (11.16%) DNS
3 35 (5.50%) Network Security
4 33 (5.19%) 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%) NGFW
12 3 (0.47%) VSAN
12 3 (0.47%) Wireless
Database & Business Intelligence
1 24 (3.77%) SQL Server
2 14 (2.20%) Amazon RDS
3 11 (1.73%) BigQuery
3 11 (1.73%) PostgreSQL
4 8 (1.26%) Oracle Exadata
5 7 (1.10%) Amazon Athena
6 6 (0.94%) Azure SQL Database
7 5 (0.79%) Data Lake
7 5 (0.79%) DynamoDB
7 5 (0.79%) Oracle Database
8 3 (0.47%) Amazon QuickSight
8 3 (0.47%) Amazon Redshift
8 3 (0.47%) Flink
8 3 (0.47%) Looker
8 3 (0.47%) MySQL
8 3 (0.47%) Oracle Database 12c
9 2 (0.31%) Big Data
9 2 (0.31%) Metadata
10 1 (0.16%) Delta Lake
10 1 (0.16%) Power BI
Development Applications
1 46 (7.23%) GitLab
2 34 (5.35%) Jenkins
3 29 (4.56%) 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
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%) Terragrunt
8 1 (0.16%) TestRail
General
1 80 (12.58%) Finance
2 68 (10.69%) Social Skills
3 58 (9.12%) Public Sector
4 26 (4.09%) Analytical Skills
5 24 (3.77%) Banking
6 10 (1.57%) Documentation Skills
6 10 (1.57%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 6 (0.94%) Investment Banking
8 5 (0.79%) Law
8 5 (0.79%) Legal
8 5 (0.79%) Local Government
9 3 (0.47%) Digital Health
9 3 (0.47%) Digital Healthcare
9 3 (0.47%) Front Office
9 3 (0.47%) Italian Language
9 3 (0.47%) Manufacturing
9 3 (0.47%) Military
9 3 (0.47%) Pharmaceutical
9 3 (0.47%) Presentation Skills
10 2 (0.31%) Financial Institution
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 19 (2.99%) REST
2 12 (1.89%) ARM Templates
3 11 (1.73%) OAuth
3 11 (1.73%) OAuth2
3 11 (1.73%) Spring
3 11 (1.73%) Spring Boot
4 8 (1.26%) Kafka
5 7 (1.10%) YAML
6 6 (0.94%) FastAPI
6 6 (0.94%) Flask
6 6 (0.94%) OpenID
6 6 (0.94%) React
7 5 (0.79%) AWS CDK
7 5 (0.79%) Node.js
8 4 (0.63%) Hugging Face
8 4 (0.63%) PyTorch
8 4 (0.63%) TensorFlow
9 3 (0.47%) Azure Blueprints
9 3 (0.47%) Model Context Protocol
9 3 (0.47%) Playwright
Miscellaneous
1 109 (17.14%) Cloud Native
2 54 (8.49%) Security Posture
3 33 (5.19%) Hybrid Cloud
4 30 (4.72%) Enterprise Cloud
5 26 (4.09%) Cloud Security Posture
6 18 (2.83%) Public Cloud
7 17 (2.67%) Management Information System
7 17 (2.67%) Onboarding
8 14 (2.20%) Data Centre
8 14 (2.20%) Enterprise Software
9 13 (2.04%) Distributed Systems
10 9 (1.42%) Product Ownership
11 8 (1.26%) AI Agents
11 8 (1.26%) Private Cloud
11 8 (1.26%) Self-Motivation
12 7 (1.10%) Legacy Systems
13 6 (0.94%) Linux Command Line
14 5 (0.79%) PKI
15 4 (0.63%) NHS
15 4 (0.63%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 104 (16.35%) Windows
2 68 (10.69%) 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%) CI/CD
2 221 (34.75%) Infrastructure as Code
3 179 (28.14%) DevOps
4 154 (24.21%) Cloud Security
5 138 (21.70%) Infrastructure Engineering
6 108 (16.98%) Platform Engineering
7 79 (12.42%) Agile
8 78 (12.26%) Migration
9 76 (11.95%) AI
10 68 (10.69%) Observability
11 63 (9.91%) Containerisation
12 53 (8.33%) Continuous Improvement
12 53 (8.33%) Software Engineering
13 51 (8.02%) Technical Leadership
14 47 (7.39%) DevSecOps
15 46 (7.23%) Change Management
16 45 (7.08%) Infrastructure Automation
17 42 (6.60%) Cybersecurity
17 42 (6.60%) Problem-Solving
18 39 (6.13%) Deployment Automation
Programming Languages
1 157 (24.69%) Python
2 149 (23.43%) PowerShell
3 74 (11.64%) Bash
4 63 (9.91%) Bicep
5 60 (9.43%) SQL
6 34 (5.35%) Java
7 18 (2.83%) C#
8 10 (1.57%) Go
9 9 (1.42%) JavaScript
10 8 (1.26%) Shell Script
11 6 (0.94%) TypeScript
12 4 (0.63%) Groovy
13 3 (0.47%) C
13 3 (0.47%) Scala
14 2 (0.31%) Kusto Query Language
14 2 (0.31%) Ruby
15 1 (0.16%) Apex Code
15 1 (0.16%) Data Analysis Expressions
15 1 (0.16%) Perl
15 1 (0.16%) R
Qualifications
1 177 (27.83%) Security Cleared
2 133 (20.91%) SC Cleared
3 61 (9.59%) DV Cleared
4 47 (7.39%) Azure Certification
5 43 (6.76%) AWS Certification
6 29 (4.56%) Degree
7 15 (2.36%) CISSP
8 14 (2.20%) Microsoft Certification
9 12 (1.89%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
10 8 (1.26%) Computer Science Degree
11 7 (1.10%) Cisco Certification
12 6 (0.94%) CCNP
12 6 (0.94%) MCSE
13 5 (0.79%) CISM
14 4 (0.63%) CCIE
14 4 (0.63%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
15 3 (0.47%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
15 3 (0.47%) BPSS Clearance
15 3 (0.47%) CEH
16 2 (0.31%) CCIE Security
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 67 (10.53%) Active Directory
1 67 (10.53%) Docker
2 37 (5.82%) VMware Infrastructure
3 31 (4.87%) Virtual Machines
4 26 (4.09%) VMware ESXi
5 22 (3.46%) VMware NSX
6 20 (3.14%) Virtual Desktop
7 17 (2.67%) vSphere
8 13 (2.04%) vCloud
9 9 (1.42%) Hyper-V
10 7 (1.10%) Squid
11 4 (0.63%) Firmware
12 3 (0.47%) Ceph
12 3 (0.47%) Dovecot
12 3 (0.47%) NFS
12 3 (0.47%) Postfix
13 2 (0.31%) KVM
13 2 (0.31%) Virtual Servers
Systems Management
1 271 (42.61%) Terraform
2 149 (23.43%) Kubernetes
3 46 (7.23%) Ansible
4 24 (3.77%) Microsoft Intune
5 22 (3.46%) vCenter Server
6 20 (3.14%) Grafana
6 20 (3.14%) Progress Chef
6 20 (3.14%) SCOM
7 19 (2.99%) Prometheus
8 15 (2.36%) Puppet
9 9 (1.42%) Istio
9 9 (1.42%) Single Sign-On
10 8 (1.26%) Packer
11 5 (0.79%) VxRail
12 4 (0.63%) Suricata
13 3 (0.47%) Active Directory Federation Services
13 3 (0.47%) HAProxy
13 3 (0.47%) Salt
13 3 (0.47%) vRealize
14 2 (0.31%) SELinux
Vendors
1 143 (22.48%) Microsoft
2 87 (13.68%) Google
3 59 (9.28%) VMware
4 30 (4.72%) Oracle
5 18 (2.83%) Red Hat
6 16 (2.52%) Zscaler
7 12 (1.89%) Splunk
8 11 (1.73%) Palo Alto
8 11 (1.73%) ServiceNow
9 10 (1.57%) Dynatrace
9 10 (1.57%) OpenAI
10 9 (1.42%) Cisco
10 9 (1.42%) Databricks
10 9 (1.42%) Salesforce
11 8 (1.26%) Broadcom
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
128 Cloud Engineer jobs in England