Cloud Native Contract Job Trends in England

Cloud Native
UK > England

The table below looks at the prevalence of the term Cloud Native in contract job vacancies in England. Included is a benchmarking guide to the contractor rates offered in vacancies that cited Cloud Native over the 6 months leading up to 11 February 2026, comparing them to the same period in the previous two years.

6 months to
11 Feb 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 82 257 282
Rank change year-on-year +175 +25 -15
Contract jobs citing Cloud Native 1,028 252 295
As % of all contract jobs in England 3.03% 0.97% 0.78%
As % of the Miscellaneous category 8.81% 2.93% 2.51%
Number of daily rates quoted 710 162 186
10th Percentile £400 £425 £446
25th Percentile £450 £500 £500
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £600 £600
Median % change year-on-year -12.50% - -7.69%
75th Percentile £638 £680 £675
90th Percentile £750 £775 £744
UK median daily rate £525 £600 £600
% change year-on-year -12.50% - -7.69%
Number of hourly rates quoted 16 2 4
10th Percentile £35.00 £57.98 £38.20
25th Percentile £56.88 £62.06 £50.93
Median hourly rate £72.00 £70.25 £68.00
Median % change year-on-year +2.49% +3.31% -
75th Percentile £95.00 £79.56 £78.00
90th Percentile £96.25 £84.33 -
UK median hourly rate £68.00 £70.25 £68.00
% change year-on-year -3.20% +3.31% -

All Generic Skills
England

Cloud Native falls under the General and Transferable Skills category. For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all contract job vacancies requiring generic IT skills in England.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for generic IT skills 11,662 8,611 11,773
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 34.43% 33.23% 31.10%
Number of daily rates quoted 7,458 5,225 7,759
10th Percentile £275 £275 £255
25th Percentile £406 £410 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £508 £549 £549
Median % change year-on-year -7.40% -0.08% -4.52%
75th Percentile £625 £673 £660
90th Percentile £738 £775 £775
UK median daily rate £500 £525 £525
% change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 582 244 747
10th Percentile £15.35 £18.73 £13.00
25th Percentile £18.82 £24.25 £16.96
Median hourly rate £31.18 £39.04 £32.50
Median % change year-on-year -20.13% +20.12% +44.44%
75th Percentile £63.75 £68.19 £58.75
90th Percentile £74.64 £84.46 £70.00
UK median hourly rate £30.00 £35.13 £32.12
% change year-on-year -14.59% +9.37% +42.83%

Cloud Native
Job Vacancy Trend in England

Historical trend showing the proportion of contract IT job postings citing Cloud Native relative to all contract IT jobs advertised in England.

Cloud Native job vacancy trend in England

Cloud Native
Daily Rate Trend in England

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in England citing Cloud Native.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in England citing Cloud Native

Cloud Native
Daily Rate Histogram in England

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Cloud Native in England over the 6 months to 11 February 2026.

Daily rate histogram for Cloud Native in England

Cloud Native
Hourly Rate Trend in England

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in England citing Cloud Native.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in England citing Cloud Native

Cloud Native
Hourly Rate Histogram in England

Hourly rate distribution of jobs citing Cloud Native in England over the 6 months to 11 February 2026.

Hourly rate histogram for Cloud Native in England

Cloud Native
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 Native within the England region over the 6 months to 11 February 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 +138 599 £550 -8.33% 218
North of England +53 164 £500 -9.09% 83
Yorkshire +17 90 £500 - 20
Midlands +21 87 £513 -5.70% 29
South East +19 87 £450 -21.74% 94
North West +22 68 £481 -21.43% 56
West Midlands +10 63 £540 +6.72% 20
South West +12 43 £600 +6.67% 63
East of England +3 37 £550 -10.20% 13
East Midlands -2 24 £425 -26.09% 9
North East -8 6 £573 +4.09% 8
Cloud Native
UK

Cloud Native
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 46 (4.47%) Apache Spark
2 34 (3.31%) Confluence
3 27 (2.63%) Apache Airflow
4 24 (2.33%) Apache
5 9 (0.88%) OpenStack
6 6 (0.58%) nginx
6 6 (0.58%) SharePoint
7 4 (0.39%) CMS
7 4 (0.39%) Jupyter
7 4 (0.39%) SAS
8 3 (0.29%) Tomcat
9 2 (0.19%) Adobe Experience Manager
9 2 (0.19%) Apache Pulsar
9 2 (0.19%) Appian
9 2 (0.19%) ArcGIS
9 2 (0.19%) Headless CMS
9 2 (0.19%) Oracle Coherence
9 2 (0.19%) Oracle HTTP Server
9 2 (0.19%) WebLogic
10 1 (0.097%) Camunda
Applications
1 6 (0.58%) Microsoft Excel
2 5 (0.49%) Chatbot
3 3 (0.29%) LaTeX
3 3 (0.29%) Microsoft Project
4 2 (0.19%) Spreadsheet
5 1 (0.097%) CPLEX
5 1 (0.097%) Notion
Business Applications
1 6 (0.58%) Aladdin
2 3 (0.29%) Dynamics CRM
3 2 (0.19%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
4 1 (0.097%) Cloudability
4 1 (0.097%) Exchequer
4 1 (0.097%) Fidessa
4 1 (0.097%) Finacle
4 1 (0.097%) Payment Gateway
4 1 (0.097%) SAP S/4HANA
4 1 (0.097%) thinkFolio
Cloud Services
1 578 (56.23%) AWS
2 474 (46.11%) Azure
3 267 (25.97%) GCP
4 211 (20.53%) Serverless
5 190 (18.48%) GitHub
6 125 (12.16%) Amazon S3
7 117 (11.38%) GitHub Actions
8 112 (10.89%) Azure DevOps
9 99 (9.63%) AWS Lambda
10 89 (8.66%) AWS CloudFormation
11 79 (7.68%) Azure AKS
12 66 (6.42%) OpenShift
13 62 (6.03%) Amazon EKS
14 58 (5.64%) Amazon ECS
15 49 (4.77%) SaaS
16 47 (4.57%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 43 (4.18%) PaaS
17 43 (4.18%) Power Platform
18 42 (4.09%) Azure Functions
19 41 (3.99%) Amazon EC2
Communications & Networking
1 39 (3.79%) Firewall
2 30 (2.92%) DNS
3 27 (2.63%) Network Security
4 25 (2.43%) VPN
5 16 (1.56%) WAN
6 9 (0.88%) BGP
6 9 (0.88%) MPLS
6 9 (0.88%) SD-WAN
7 7 (0.68%) LAN
8 5 (0.49%) NX-OS
8 5 (0.49%) Reverse Proxy
9 4 (0.39%) HTTP
10 3 (0.29%) 5G
10 3 (0.29%) Broadband
10 3 (0.29%) NaaS
10 3 (0.29%) SSL
10 3 (0.29%) TCP/IP
10 3 (0.29%) VSAN
11 2 (0.19%) Calico
11 2 (0.19%) NAS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 94 (9.14%) PostgreSQL
2 66 (6.42%) NoSQL
3 42 (4.09%) Data Lake
4 38 (3.70%) Amazon RDS
5 36 (3.50%) Power BI
6 34 (3.31%) DynamoDB
7 33 (3.21%) MongoDB
8 31 (3.02%) Metadata
8 31 (3.02%) SQL Server
9 30 (2.92%) Amazon Athena
10 29 (2.82%) BigQuery
11 25 (2.43%) Data Warehouse
12 24 (2.33%) Redis
12 24 (2.33%) Relational Database
13 21 (2.04%) Amazon Redshift
14 19 (1.85%) MySQL
15 17 (1.65%) Big Data
15 17 (1.65%) Mixpanel
16 14 (1.36%) Azure SQL Database
16 14 (1.36%) Elasticsearch
Development Applications
1 195 (18.97%) Jenkins
2 122 (11.87%) GitLab
3 113 (10.99%) Git
4 64 (6.23%) JIRA
5 30 (2.92%) Liquibase
6 16 (1.56%) MLflow
7 14 (1.36%) JUnit
8 10 (0.97%) JMeter
9 8 (0.78%) Gatling
9 8 (0.78%) Postman
9 8 (0.78%) Selenium
9 8 (0.78%) SonarQube
10 7 (0.68%) CircleCI
10 7 (0.68%) Mocha
10 7 (0.68%) Mockito
11 6 (0.58%) Cucumber
11 6 (0.58%) Cypress.io
11 6 (0.58%) Gradle
12 5 (0.49%) Bitbucket
12 5 (0.49%) Maven
General
1 283 (27.53%) Social Skills
2 209 (20.33%) Finance
3 126 (12.26%) Public Sector
4 98 (9.53%) Banking
5 58 (5.64%) Analytical Skills
6 31 (3.02%) Documentation Skills
7 23 (2.24%) Financial Institution
8 22 (2.14%) Influencing Skills
9 17 (1.65%) Retail
10 15 (1.46%) Telecoms
11 14 (1.36%) Front Office
11 14 (1.36%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 14 (1.36%) Pharmaceutical
12 13 (1.26%) Investment Banking
13 9 (0.88%) Billing
14 8 (0.78%) Aviation
15 7 (0.68%) Legal
16 6 (0.58%) Marketing
16 6 (0.58%) Presentation Skills
17 5 (0.49%) Military
Job Titles
1 252 (24.51%) Architect
2 175 (17.02%) Developer
3 154 (14.98%) Senior
4 92 (8.95%) Lead
5 78 (7.59%) Software Engineer
6 77 (7.49%) Data Engineer
7 71 (6.91%) DevOps Engineer
8 69 (6.71%) Solutions Architect
9 60 (5.84%) AWS Engineer
9 60 (5.84%) Cloud Engineer
10 41 (3.99%) Cloud Architect
11 39 (3.79%) Senior Developer
12 38 (3.70%) Azure Engineer
12 38 (3.70%) Full-Stack Developer
13 32 (3.11%) Java Developer
14 30 (2.92%) Backend Developer
15 29 (2.82%) Site Reliability Engineer
16 27 (2.63%) Java Engineer
16 27 (2.63%) Senior Software Engineer
17 26 (2.53%) Consultant
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 126 (12.26%) Node.js
2 121 (11.77%) REST
3 107 (10.41%) Kafka
4 98 (9.53%) RESTful
5 91 (8.85%) Spring
6 90 (8.75%) .NET
7 88 (8.56%) React
8 79 (7.68%) Spring Boot
9 57 (5.54%) GraphQL
10 54 (5.25%) AngularJS
11 46 (4.47%) Playwright
12 39 (3.79%) Elastic Stack
13 38 (3.70%) OpenTelemetry
14 33 (3.21%) OpenID
15 32 (3.11%) OAuth
16 31 (3.02%) Vitest
17 28 (2.72%) FastAPI
17 28 (2.72%) Middleware
17 28 (2.72%) YAML
18 27 (2.63%) SAML
Miscellaneous
1 107 (10.41%) Distributed Systems
2 44 (4.28%) Hybrid Cloud
2 44 (4.28%) Public Cloud
3 43 (4.18%) Product Ownership
4 40 (3.89%) Onboarding
5 31 (3.02%) Legacy Systems
6 28 (2.72%) Enterprise Software
7 25 (2.43%) Security Posture
8 24 (2.33%) Algorithms
9 21 (2.04%) Virtual Team
10 16 (1.56%) AI Agents
11 14 (1.36%) Data Protection Act
12 13 (1.26%) Fixed Income
12 13 (1.26%) NHS
13 12 (1.17%) Data Centre
13 12 (1.17%) Equities
13 12 (1.17%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
13 12 (1.17%) Genomics
14 11 (1.07%) Distributed Computing
14 11 (1.07%) Life Science
Operating Systems
1 99 (9.63%) Linux
2 16 (1.56%) Unix
3 15 (1.46%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 13 (1.26%) Windows
5 9 (0.88%) VMS
6 7 (0.68%) Windows Server
7 3 (0.29%) Android
8 2 (0.19%) Apple iOS
8 2 (0.19%) CentOS
8 2 (0.19%) Solaris
8 2 (0.19%) Ubuntu
Processes & Methodologies
1 632 (61.48%) CI/CD
2 553 (53.79%) DevOps
3 370 (35.99%) Agile
4 342 (33.27%) Infrastructure as Code
5 304 (29.57%) Containerisation
6 278 (27.04%) Microservices
7 204 (19.84%) Software Engineering
8 196 (19.07%) Problem-Solving
9 194 (18.87%) AI
10 166 (16.15%) Test Automation
11 154 (14.98%) Observability
12 148 (14.40%) Machine Learning
13 142 (13.81%) Migration
14 124 (12.06%) Analytics
15 121 (11.77%) Roadmaps
16 120 (11.67%) Data Pipeline
17 115 (11.19%) Mentoring
18 112 (10.89%) Event-Driven
19 105 (10.21%) Data Modelling
19 105 (10.21%) Stakeholder Management
Programming Languages
1 387 (37.65%) Python
2 219 (21.30%) SQL
3 191 (18.58%) Java
4 107 (10.41%) TypeScript
5 66 (6.42%) C#
5 66 (6.42%) Go
6 62 (6.03%) JavaScript
7 59 (5.74%) Bash
8 39 (3.79%) PowerShell
9 38 (3.70%) Bicep
10 15 (1.46%) Shell Script
11 12 (1.17%) Scala
12 11 (1.07%) Ruby
13 8 (0.78%) Kotlin
14 7 (0.68%) R
15 6 (0.58%) VBA
16 5 (0.49%) Korn
17 3 (0.29%) Cypher
17 3 (0.29%) MATLAB
17 3 (0.29%) PL/SQL
Qualifications
1 218 (21.21%) Security Cleared
2 190 (18.48%) SC Cleared
3 98 (9.53%) Degree
4 58 (5.64%) Computer Science Degree
5 53 (5.16%) AWS Certification
6 50 (4.86%) Azure Certification
7 45 (4.38%) Master's Degree
8 31 (3.02%) TOGAF Certification
9 28 (2.72%) BPSS Clearance
10 26 (2.53%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
11 21 (2.04%) DV Cleared
12 19 (1.85%) CISSP
13 17 (1.65%) Cisco Certification
14 14 (1.36%) CISM
14 14 (1.36%) PhD
15 13 (1.26%) Microsoft Certified Professional
16 12 (1.17%) Microsoft Certification
17 10 (0.97%) CCIE
18 7 (0.68%) RHCE
19 6 (0.58%) JNCIE
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 59 (5.74%) NIST
2 56 (5.45%) QA
3 54 (5.25%) GDPR
4 47 (4.57%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 46 (4.47%) Data Quality
6 19 (1.85%) NCSC
6 19 (1.85%) PCI DSS
7 18 (1.75%) EU AI Act
8 13 (1.26%) ISO 20022
9 12 (1.17%) PSD2
10 11 (1.07%) SEPA
11 8 (0.78%) SOC 2
12 7 (0.68%) Cyber Essentials
13 6 (0.58%) Accessibility
13 6 (0.58%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
13 6 (0.58%) HIPAA
14 5 (0.49%) GRC
14 5 (0.49%) SLA
15 3 (0.29%) ISO/IEC 27002 (supersedes ISO/IEC 17799)
15 3 (0.29%) Sarbanes-Oxley
System Software
1 327 (31.81%) Docker
2 36 (3.50%) VMware Infrastructure
3 20 (1.95%) Active Directory
4 19 (1.85%) vSphere
5 18 (1.75%) VMware NSX
6 13 (1.26%) Virtual Machines
7 8 (0.78%) Hyper-V
8 2 (0.19%) Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services
9 1 (0.097%) Snort
9 1 (0.097%) VMware ESXi
Systems Management
1 411 (39.98%) Kubernetes
2 318 (30.93%) Terraform
3 103 (10.02%) Grafana
4 93 (9.05%) Prometheus
5 85 (8.27%) Ansible
6 47 (4.57%) Argo
7 18 (1.75%) Istio
7 18 (1.75%) Kibana
8 14 (1.36%) Puppet
9 9 (0.88%) Kustomize
9 9 (0.88%) vCenter Server
10 8 (0.78%) logstash
10 8 (0.78%) Single Sign-On
11 7 (0.68%) FortiGate
12 6 (0.58%) ITRS Geneos
12 6 (0.58%) Microsoft Intune
13 5 (0.49%) Packer
13 5 (0.49%) Progress Chef
14 4 (0.39%) AirWatch
14 4 (0.39%) Nagios
Vendors
1 170 (16.54%) Microsoft
2 95 (9.24%) Google
3 94 (9.14%) Databricks
4 67 (6.52%) Splunk
5 47 (4.57%) VMware
6 44 (4.28%) Red Hat
7 31 (3.02%) Oracle
8 27 (2.63%) CyberArk
9 23 (2.24%) Cisco
10 17 (1.65%) Salesforce
11 16 (1.56%) Dynatrace
12 15 (1.46%) Foundry
12 15 (1.46%) MuleSoft
12 15 (1.46%) ServiceNow
13 12 (1.17%) OpenAI
14 11 (1.07%) SAP
15 10 (0.97%) AppDynamics
16 9 (0.88%) Centrify
16 9 (0.88%) Pure Storage
16 9 (0.88%) Solace