Azure Cognitive Search Contract Job Trends

Microsoft Azure Cognitive Search (formerly Azure Search)
UK

The table below provides summary statistics and contractor rates for jobs requiring Azure Cognitive Search skills. It covers contract job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 18 December 2025, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
18 Dec 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 592 538 590
Rank change year-on-year -54 +52 +178
Contract jobs citing Azure Cognitive Search 3 6 15
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.008% 0.018% 0.034%
As % of the Cloud Services category 0.022% 0.048% 0.097%
Number of daily rates quoted 0 2 13
10th Percentile - £522 £515
25th Percentile - £535 £575
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) - £566 £650
Median % change year-on-year - -12.88% +15.56%
75th Percentile - £593 £675
90th Percentile - £604 -
UK excluding London median daily rate - - £600

All Cloud Skills
UK

Azure Cognitive Search falls under the Cloud Services category. For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all contract job vacancies requiring cloud computing skills.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for cloud computing skills 13,933 12,403 15,413
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 38.08% 36.28% 34.91%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,519 8,250 11,053
10th Percentile £307 £313 £300
25th Percentile £406 £415 £419
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £604 £638 £638
90th Percentile £700 £732 £725
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £500 £500
% change year-on-year -5.00% - -
Number of hourly rates quoted 324 172 273
10th Percentile £14.83 £18.19 £14.39
25th Percentile £18.87 £21.46 £17.72
Median hourly rate £26.50 £27.75 £25.00
Median % change year-on-year -4.50% +11.00% +11.11%
75th Percentile £55.00 £46.18 £58.00
90th Percentile £77.08 £68.75 £78.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £25.00 £26.50 £21.00
% change year-on-year -5.66% +26.19% +7.69%

Azure Cognitive Search
Job Vacancy Trend

Historical trend showing the proportion of contract IT job postings citing Azure Cognitive Search relative to all contract IT jobs advertised.

Azure Cognitive Search job vacancy trend in the UK

Azure Cognitive Search
Daily Rate Trend

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing Azure Cognitive Search.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing Azure Cognitive Search

Azure Cognitive Search
Top 2 Contract Job Locations

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing Azure Cognitive Search within the UK over the 6 months to 18 December 2025. 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 -1 3 - - 2
England -41 3 - - 28

Azure Cognitive Search
Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities 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:

Cloud Services
1 3 (100.00%) Azure
1 3 (100.00%) Azure Machine Learning
2 1 (33.33%) Azure Cognitive Services
2 1 (33.33%) Azure Data Factory
2 1 (33.33%) Azure Pipelines
2 1 (33.33%) Azure Synapse Analytics
2 1 (33.33%) SaaS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 1 (33.33%) Data Lake
Development Applications
1 1 (33.33%) JMeter
1 1 (33.33%) LoadRunner
1 1 (33.33%) MLflow
General
1 1 (33.33%) Social Skills
Job Titles
1 1 (33.33%) Data Scientist
1 1 (33.33%) Developer
1 1 (33.33%) Machine Learning Engineer
1 1 (33.33%) QA Engineer
1 1 (33.33%) Senior
1 1 (33.33%) Senior QA Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 1 (33.33%) LangChain
1 1 (33.33%) PyTorch
1 1 (33.33%) scikit-learn
1 1 (33.33%) TensorFlow
Processes & Methodologies
1 3 (100.00%) AI
1 3 (100.00%) Machine Learning
2 2 (66.67%) Data Pipeline
2 2 (66.67%) Retrieval-Augmented Generation
3 1 (33.33%) Actionable Insight
3 1 (33.33%) Business Intelligence
3 1 (33.33%) CRM
3 1 (33.33%) Data Governance
3 1 (33.33%) Data Integration
3 1 (33.33%) Data Science
3 1 (33.33%) DevOps
3 1 (33.33%) ERP
3 1 (33.33%) ETL
3 1 (33.33%) Generative AI
3 1 (33.33%) LLM
3 1 (33.33%) MLOps
3 1 (33.33%) Open Source
3 1 (33.33%) Performance Testing
3 1 (33.33%) Security Testing
3 1 (33.33%) Test Automation
Programming Languages
1 2 (66.67%) Python
2 1 (33.33%) C#
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 1 (33.33%) QA
System Software
1 1 (33.33%) Docker
Systems Management
1 1 (33.33%) Kubernetes
Vendors
1 3 (100.00%) Microsoft
2 2 (66.67%) OpenAI