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 18 July 2026.

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

 6 months to
18 Jul 2026		 Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 207 288 330
Rank change year-on-year +81 +42 -49
Contract jobs requiring a Cloud Engineer 566 222 237
As % of all contract jobs in England 1.26% 0.82% 0.66%
As % of the Job Titles category 1.36% 0.89% 0.71%
Number of daily rates quoted 379 173 168
10th Percentile £400 £400 £383
25th Percentile £462 £425 £450
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £550
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -9.09% -
75th Percentile £625 £588 £625
90th Percentile £690 £638 £675
UK median daily rate £525 £500 £550
% change year-on-year +5.00% -9.09% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 21 3 1
10th Percentile £23.20 £32.50 -
25th Percentile £73.75 £36.25 £27.50
Median hourly rate £77.00 £45.00 £30.00
Median % change year-on-year +71.11% +50.00% -
75th Percentile £81.25 £55.00 £32.50
90th Percentile - £59.50 -
UK median hourly rate £77.00 £45.00 £30.00
% change year-on-year +71.11% +50.00% -

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 41,608 25,011 33,561
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.47% 91.87% 92.98%
Number of daily rates quoted 25,417 16,274 22,046
10th Percentile £325 £290 £300
25th Percentile £425 £404 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £513 £525
Median % change year-on-year +2.44% -2.38% -4.55%
75th Percentile £625 £630 £638
90th Percentile £738 £738 £750
UK median daily rate £525 £500 £525
% change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -2.33%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,980 1,235 2,309
10th Percentile £16.01 £13.75 £13.25
25th Percentile £22.08 £17.87 £18.00
Median hourly rate £45.56 £27.64 £40.33
Median % change year-on-year +64.82% -31.46% -6.22%
75th Percentile £68.00 £57.37 £65.00
90th Percentile £80.01 £75.00 £75.00
UK median hourly rate £43.69 £25.30 £40.00
% change year-on-year +72.69% -36.75% -5.88%

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 18 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 18 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 18 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 +65 303 £525 - 74
North of England -26 85 £505 +12.22% 53
South East -8 82 £538 +4.88% 42
Midlands -22 47 £513 +7.89% 25
North West -25 45 £500 +17.65% 31
Yorkshire -14 33 £475 -2.56% 17
West Midlands -39 26 £525 - 14
East of England 0 22 £505 +26.25% 8
East Midlands -1 20 £450 -5.26% 11
South West -30 16 £550 -2.22% 13
North East -33 7 £525 +7.69% 5
Cloud Engineer
UK

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

For the 6 months to 18 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.

1 285 (50.35%) Azure
2 256 (45.23%) Terraform
3 235 (41.52%) AWS
4 209 (36.93%) CI/CD
5 200 (35.34%) Infrastructure as Code
6 178 (31.45%) DevOps
7 153 (27.03%) Security Cleared
8 136 (24.03%) Python
9 130 (22.97%) Cloud Security
10 123 (21.73%) PowerShell
11 120 (21.20%) Microsoft
12 119 (21.02%) SC Cleared
13 118 (20.85%) GCP
13 118 (20.85%) Kubernetes
14 112 (19.79%) Infrastructure Engineering
15 96 (16.96%) Platform Engineering
16 91 (16.08%) Windows
17 83 (14.66%) Migration
18 80 (14.13%) Google
19 75 (13.25%) Agile
20 72 (12.72%) GitHub
21 67 (11.84%) Firewall
22 66 (11.66%) AI
23 65 (11.48%) DNS
24 63 (11.13%) Bash
25 60 (10.60%) Docker
26 58 (10.25%) Containerisation
26 58 (10.25%) Linux
27 57 (10.07%) Serverless
28 56 (9.89%) SQL

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 (2.12%) Microsoft Exchange
2 8 (1.41%) Confluence
3 6 (1.06%) Apache
4 5 (0.88%) nginx
5 4 (0.71%) SharePoint
6 3 (0.53%) IIS
6 3 (0.53%) Tomcat
7 2 (0.35%) Apache Airflow
7 2 (0.35%) Apache Spark
7 2 (0.35%) CloudStack
7 2 (0.35%) OpenStack
8 1 (0.18%) Apache Pulsar
8 1 (0.18%) SAS
8 1 (0.18%) Traefik
Applications
1 1 (0.18%) Chatbot
Business Applications
1 2 (0.35%) Aladdin
Cloud Services
1 285 (50.35%) Azure
2 235 (41.52%) AWS
3 118 (20.85%) GCP
4 72 (12.72%) GitHub
5 57 (10.07%) Serverless
6 54 (9.54%) Entra ID
7 47 (8.30%) GitHub Actions
8 40 (7.07%) Azure AKS
9 38 (6.71%) IaaS
10 37 (6.54%) Azure DevOps
11 36 (6.36%) Amazon S3
12 35 (6.18%) AWS CloudFormation
12 35 (6.18%) AWS Lambda
12 35 (6.18%) Google Kubernetes Engine
12 35 (6.18%) PaaS
13 32 (5.65%) Virtual Private Cloud
14 30 (5.30%) Amazon EC2
15 26 (4.59%) Amazon ECS
15 26 (4.59%) Amazon EKS
15 26 (4.59%) Azure Monitor
Communications & Networking
1 67 (11.84%) Firewall
2 65 (11.48%) DNS
3 33 (5.83%) VPN
4 27 (4.77%) Network Security
5 15 (2.65%) WAN
6 14 (2.47%) DHCP
7 13 (2.30%) TCP/IP
8 6 (1.06%) Internet
8 6 (1.06%) SD-WAN
9 5 (0.88%) Reverse Proxy
9 5 (0.88%) SSL
9 5 (0.88%) VLAN
10 4 (0.71%) BGP
10 4 (0.71%) LAN
10 4 (0.71%) SAN
10 4 (0.71%) Software-Defined Networking
11 3 (0.53%) IPv4
11 3 (0.53%) OSPF
11 3 (0.53%) SMTP
12 2 (0.35%) Wireless
Database & Business Intelligence
1 21 (3.71%) SQL Server
2 13 (2.30%) Amazon RDS
3 11 (1.94%) PostgreSQL
4 9 (1.59%) BigQuery
5 8 (1.41%) Amazon Athena
6 7 (1.24%) DynamoDB
7 6 (1.06%) Azure SQL Database
8 5 (0.88%) Oracle Database
9 4 (0.71%) Data Lake
10 3 (0.53%) Amazon QuickSight
10 3 (0.53%) Amazon Redshift
10 3 (0.53%) Big Data
10 3 (0.53%) MySQL
10 3 (0.53%) Oracle Database 12c
11 2 (0.35%) Oracle Exadata
11 2 (0.35%) Relational Database
12 1 (0.18%) Elasticsearch
12 1 (0.18%) Flink
12 1 (0.18%) InfluxDB
12 1 (0.18%) Metadata
Development Applications
1 39 (6.89%) GitLab
2 36 (6.36%) Jenkins
3 30 (5.30%) Git
4 13 (2.30%) JIRA
5 8 (1.41%) Artifactory
6 3 (0.53%) Selenium
6 3 (0.53%) Team Foundation Server
7 2 (0.35%) Bitbucket
7 2 (0.35%) Claude Code
7 2 (0.35%) Cypress.io
7 2 (0.35%) Liquibase
7 2 (0.35%) Robot Framework
8 1 (0.18%) Burp Suite
8 1 (0.18%) Chocolatey
8 1 (0.18%) CircleCI
8 1 (0.18%) Gatling
8 1 (0.18%) REST Assured
8 1 (0.18%) SonarQube
8 1 (0.18%) sqlmap
8 1 (0.18%) TestRail
General
1 65 (11.48%) Finance
2 64 (11.31%) Social Skills
3 52 (9.19%) Public Sector
4 21 (3.71%) Banking
5 19 (3.36%) Analytical Skills
6 9 (1.59%) Documentation Skills
7 7 (1.24%) Investment Banking
8 5 (0.88%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 5 (0.88%) Law
8 5 (0.88%) Legal
9 4 (0.71%) Pharmaceutical
10 3 (0.53%) Local Government
10 3 (0.53%) Military
10 3 (0.53%) Retail
10 3 (0.53%) Telecoms
11 2 (0.35%) Aerospace
11 2 (0.35%) Financial Institution
11 2 (0.35%) International Banking
11 2 (0.35%) Manufacturing
11 2 (0.35%) Marketing
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 21 (3.71%) REST
2 12 (2.12%) OAuth
2 12 (2.12%) OAuth2
3 9 (1.59%) Spring
3 9 (1.59%) Spring Boot
4 8 (1.41%) ARM Templates
4 8 (1.41%) Node.js
5 7 (1.24%) Kafka
5 7 (1.24%) OpenID
5 7 (1.24%) React
6 6 (1.06%) YAML
7 5 (0.88%) FastAPI
7 5 (0.88%) Flask
7 5 (0.88%) Model Context Protocol
7 5 (0.88%) Playwright
8 4 (0.71%) AWS CDK
8 4 (0.71%) Hugging Face
8 4 (0.71%) Jest
8 4 (0.71%) PyTorch
8 4 (0.71%) TensorFlow
Miscellaneous
1 104 (18.37%) Cloud Native
2 35 (6.18%) Hybrid Cloud
2 35 (6.18%) Security Posture
3 24 (4.24%) Public Cloud
4 19 (3.36%) Data Centre
5 18 (3.18%) Enterprise Cloud
6 16 (2.83%) Cloud Security Posture
7 13 (2.30%) Management Information System
7 13 (2.30%) Onboarding
8 12 (2.12%) Distributed Systems
9 9 (1.59%) Enterprise Software
9 9 (1.59%) Self-Motivation
10 8 (1.41%) Product Ownership
11 7 (1.24%) Legacy Systems
12 6 (1.06%) Linux Command Line
13 5 (0.88%) Private Cloud
14 4 (0.71%) AI Agents
14 4 (0.71%) Virtual Team
15 3 (0.53%) Cyber Threat
15 3 (0.53%) Distributed Architecture
Operating Systems
1 91 (16.08%) Windows
2 58 (10.25%) Linux
3 48 (8.48%) Windows Server
4 25 (4.42%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 8 (1.41%) Ubuntu
5 8 (1.41%) Windows Server 2019
6 3 (0.53%) CentOS
7 2 (0.35%) VMS
7 2 (0.35%) Windows Server 2012
8 1 (0.18%) Mac OS
Processes & Methodologies
1 209 (36.93%) CI/CD
2 200 (35.34%) Infrastructure as Code
3 178 (31.45%) DevOps
4 130 (22.97%) Cloud Security
5 112 (19.79%) Infrastructure Engineering
6 96 (16.96%) Platform Engineering
7 83 (14.66%) Migration
8 75 (13.25%) Agile
9 66 (11.66%) AI
10 58 (10.25%) Containerisation
11 53 (9.36%) Observability
12 46 (8.13%) Software Engineering
12 46 (8.13%) Technical Leadership
13 45 (7.95%) Infrastructure Automation
14 42 (7.42%) Continuous Improvement
15 41 (7.24%) Problem-Solving
16 38 (6.71%) DevSecOps
17 35 (6.18%) Change Management
18 34 (6.01%) Cybersecurity
19 32 (5.65%) Mentoring
Programming Languages
1 136 (24.03%) Python
2 123 (21.73%) PowerShell
3 63 (11.13%) Bash
4 56 (9.89%) SQL
5 49 (8.66%) Bicep
6 28 (4.95%) Java
7 16 (2.83%) C#
8 9 (1.59%) Go
8 9 (1.59%) JavaScript
8 9 (1.59%) TypeScript
9 5 (0.88%) Groovy
10 3 (0.53%) Shell Script
11 2 (0.35%) Kusto Query Language
11 2 (0.35%) Ruby
12 1 (0.18%) Apex Code
12 1 (0.18%) Cypher
12 1 (0.18%) Data Analysis Expressions
12 1 (0.18%) Kotlin
12 1 (0.18%) R
12 1 (0.18%) Scala
Qualifications
1 153 (27.03%) Security Cleared
2 119 (21.02%) SC Cleared
3 47 (8.30%) DV Cleared
4 44 (7.77%) Azure Certification
5 38 (6.71%) AWS Certification
6 20 (3.53%) Degree
7 13 (2.30%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
8 12 (2.12%) Microsoft Certification
9 11 (1.94%) CISSP
10 9 (1.59%) Cisco Certification
11 6 (1.06%) CCNP
11 6 (1.06%) Computer Science Degree
12 4 (0.71%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
12 4 (0.71%) BPSS Clearance
12 4 (0.71%) CCIE
12 4 (0.71%) MCSE
13 3 (0.53%) (ISC)2 CCSP
13 3 (0.53%) CISM
13 3 (0.53%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
14 2 (0.35%) MCSA
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 10 (1.77%) ISO/IEC 27001
1 10 (1.77%) QA
2 9 (1.59%) NIST
3 8 (1.41%) Data Quality
4 7 (1.24%) NCSC
5 4 (0.71%) GDPR
6 3 (0.53%) PCI DSS
7 2 (0.35%) Cyber Essentials
7 2 (0.35%) Disclosure Scotland
7 2 (0.35%) SLA
8 1 (0.18%) Accessibility
8 1 (0.18%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
8 1 (0.18%) Government Security Classifications
8 1 (0.18%) GRC
8 1 (0.18%) SOC 2
8 1 (0.18%) WCAG
System Software
1 60 (10.60%) Docker
2 55 (9.72%) Active Directory
3 29 (5.12%) VMware Infrastructure
4 25 (4.42%) Virtual Machines
5 23 (4.06%) VMware ESXi
6 20 (3.53%) VMware NSX
7 16 (2.83%) vSphere
8 13 (2.30%) Virtual Desktop
9 12 (2.12%) vCloud
10 11 (1.94%) Hyper-V
11 7 (1.24%) Squid
12 4 (0.71%) Firmware
13 3 (0.53%) Ceph
13 3 (0.53%) Dovecot
13 3 (0.53%) NFS
13 3 (0.53%) Postfix
14 2 (0.35%) KVM
15 1 (0.18%) Virtual Servers
Systems Management
1 256 (45.23%) Terraform
2 118 (20.85%) Kubernetes
3 44 (7.77%) Ansible
4 20 (3.53%) Prometheus
5 19 (3.36%) Grafana
5 19 (3.36%) vCenter Server
6 17 (3.00%) Progress Chef
6 17 (3.00%) SCOM
7 15 (2.65%) Microsoft Intune
8 14 (2.47%) Puppet
9 11 (1.94%) Single Sign-On
10 9 (1.59%) Istio
10 9 (1.59%) Packer
11 4 (0.71%) HAProxy
11 4 (0.71%) Suricata
11 4 (0.71%) VxRail
12 3 (0.53%) Active Directory Federation Services
12 3 (0.53%) Salt
12 3 (0.53%) vRealize
13 2 (0.35%) Argo
Vendors
1 120 (21.20%) Microsoft
2 80 (14.13%) Google
3 49 (8.66%) VMware
4 24 (4.24%) Oracle
5 16 (2.83%) Red Hat
6 15 (2.65%) Zscaler
7 12 (2.12%) ServiceNow
8 11 (1.94%) Palo Alto
9 9 (1.59%) Cisco
9 9 (1.59%) Dynatrace
10 8 (1.41%) Salesforce
11 7 (1.24%) CrowdStrike
11 7 (1.24%) Splunk
12 6 (1.06%) Broadcom
12 6 (1.06%) Databricks
12 6 (1.06%) Fortinet
12 6 (1.06%) SolarWinds
13 5 (0.88%) Citrix
13 5 (0.88%) OpenAI
14 4 (0.71%) CyberArk
209 Cloud Engineer jobs in England