Azure Contract Job Trends

Microsoft Azure
UK

The table below provides summary statistics and contractor rates for jobs requiring Azure skills. It covers contract job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 13 August 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
13 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 6 6 6
Rank change year-on-year 0 0 -1
Contract jobs citing Azure 8,306 4,825 5,581
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 15.57% 14.65% 14.33%
As % of the Cloud Services category 44.33% 39.43% 42.55%
Number of daily rates quoted 5,798 3,306 3,981
10th Percentile £375 £350 £345
25th Percentile £438 £423 £430
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £520 £525
Median % change year-on-year +0.96% -0.95% -4.55%
75th Percentile £625 £625 £638
90th Percentile £725 £725 £725
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £500
% change year-on-year - - -4.76%
Number of hourly rates quoted 187 42 39
10th Percentile £18.40 £18.87 £18.09
25th Percentile £23.00 £26.91 £23.80
Median hourly rate £52.50 £40.73 £35.00
Median % change year-on-year +28.91% +16.36% -35.19%
75th Percentile £78.00 £77.19 £61.60
90th Percentile £93.27 £99.50 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £52.50 £53.23 £31.00
% change year-on-year -1.36% +71.69% -32.87%

All Cloud Computing Skills
UK

Azure 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 18,735 12,238 13,117
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 35.11% 37.16% 33.68%
Number of daily rates quoted 12,373 8,183 9,139
10th Percentile £325 £313 £313
25th Percentile £425 £411 £419
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £523 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +4.50% -4.76% -2.78%
75th Percentile £625 £615 £638
90th Percentile £713 £725 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 613 318 262
10th Percentile £15.81 £15.22 £14.27
25th Percentile £19.25 £18.51 £16.35
Median hourly rate £35.00 £27.88 £24.92
Median % change year-on-year +25.54% +11.88% -28.80%
75th Percentile £69.75 £47.41 £54.69
90th Percentile £82.25 £67.15 £70.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £34.13 £18.87 £21.37
% change year-on-year +80.84% -11.70% -15.37%

Azure
Job Vacancy Trend

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

Azure job vacancy trend in the UK

Azure
Daily Rate Trend

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

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

Azure
Daily Rate Histogram

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Azure over the 6 months to 13 August 2026.

Daily rate histogram for Azure in the UK

Azure
Hourly Rate Trend

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing Azure.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing Azure

Azure
Hourly Rate Histogram

Hourly rate distribution of jobs citing Azure over the 6 months to 13 August 2026.

Hourly rate histogram for Azure in the UK

Azure
Top 18 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 within the UK over the 6 months to 13 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
England +1 7,145 £525 - 5,874
London +1 3,735 £550 - 3,107
UK excluding London +3 3,580 £500 - 3,544
Work from Home -1 2,568 £525 +5.00% 2,813
North of England +8 1,038 £500 +5.26% 968
South East +2 923 £525 +5.00% 939
Midlands +4 651 £498 -0.60% 450
North West +7 539 £500 +2.83% 564
West Midlands +3 486 £493 -6.19% 298
South West +6 436 £540 +8.00% 417
Yorkshire +6 417 £500 +5.26% 283
Scotland +9 284 £525 +5.85% 291
East of England +3 175 £525 -4.55% 268
East Midlands +10 152 £500 +8.11% 152
North East +5 95 £513 +2.50% 133
Wales 0 92 £475 +6.50% 108
Northern Ireland +14 15 £644 +35.53% 142
Channel Islands +1 8 £450 -29.69% 1

Azure
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:

Application Platforms
1 437 (5.26%) SharePoint
2 278 (3.35%) Confluence
3 201 (2.42%) Microsoft Exchange
4 169 (2.03%) Apache Spark
5 147 (1.77%) Apache Airflow
6 118 (1.42%) Apache
7 41 (0.49%) SAS
8 35 (0.42%) IIS
9 27 (0.33%) SharePoint Server
10 19 (0.23%) CMS
11 15 (0.18%) OpenStack
12 14 (0.17%) ArcGIS
13 13 (0.16%) Palantir Foundry
14 11 (0.13%) nginx
15 10 (0.12%) Mendix
16 9 (0.11%) Jupyter
17 8 (0.096%) Umbraco
17 8 (0.096%) WebSphere
18 7 (0.084%) Camunda
19 6 (0.072%) Ethereum
Applications
1 121 (1.46%) Microsoft Excel
2 79 (0.95%) Microsoft Office
3 74 (0.89%) Microsoft Project
4 37 (0.45%) Chatbot
5 34 (0.41%) MS Visio
6 30 (0.36%) Microsoft PowerPoint
7 13 (0.16%) AutoCAD
8 11 (0.13%) Trello
9 9 (0.11%) CPLEX
10 8 (0.096%) Revit
10 8 (0.096%) Spreadsheet
11 5 (0.060%) Notion
12 3 (0.036%) Houdini
12 3 (0.036%) NUKE
13 2 (0.024%) Adobe Creative Suite
13 2 (0.024%) Adobe XD
14 1 (0.012%) CINEMA 4D
14 1 (0.012%) PlantUML
14 1 (0.012%) Sketch
14 1 (0.012%) Weka
Business Applications
1 118 (1.42%) Dynamics CRM
2 80 (0.96%) SAP S/4HANA
3 26 (0.31%) Remedy ITSM
4 12 (0.14%) Aladdin
5 10 (0.12%) SAP MDG
5 10 (0.12%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
6 9 (0.11%) Dynamics AX
6 9 (0.11%) Oracle EBS
7 8 (0.096%) Magento
8 7 (0.084%) Shopify
9 6 (0.072%) Maximo
9 6 (0.072%) R3 Corda
10 5 (0.060%) Dynamics GP
10 5 (0.060%) NetSuite
10 5 (0.060%) Payment Gateway
10 5 (0.060%) Teamcenter
10 5 (0.060%) Unit4 Business World
10 5 (0.060%) Workday HCM
11 4 (0.048%) Adobe Campaign
11 4 (0.048%) Salesforce CRM
Cloud Services
1 2,941 (35.41%) AWS
2 1,756 (21.14%) Azure DevOps
3 1,413 (17.01%) GCP
4 1,068 (12.86%) Entra ID
5 1,037 (12.48%) Power Platform
6 838 (10.09%) GitHub
7 834 (10.04%) Microsoft 365
8 510 (6.14%) GitHub Actions
9 477 (5.74%) Azure Data Factory
10 345 (4.15%) Serverless
11 342 (4.12%) SaaS
12 308 (3.71%) Azure Synapse Analytics
13 301 (3.62%) Azure Monitor
14 300 (3.61%) Azure AKS
15 281 (3.38%) Power Automate
16 269 (3.24%) PowerApps
17 261 (3.14%) Dynamics 365
18 253 (3.05%) PaaS
19 252 (3.03%) Snowflake
20 232 (2.79%) Azure AI
Communications & Networking
1 527 (6.34%) Firewall
2 414 (4.98%) DNS
3 330 (3.97%) VPN
4 303 (3.65%) Network Security
5 211 (2.54%) DHCP
6 198 (2.38%) WAN
7 167 (2.01%) TCP/IP
8 123 (1.48%) LAN
9 111 (1.34%) BGP
10 103 (1.24%) SD-WAN
11 93 (1.12%) VLAN
12 89 (1.07%) OSPF
13 82 (0.99%) Wi-Fi
14 73 (0.88%) SSL
15 61 (0.73%) SAN
16 56 (0.67%) Wireless
17 50 (0.60%) HTTP
18 48 (0.58%) IPsec
19 46 (0.55%) VXLAN
20 43 (0.52%) Internet
Database & Business Intelligence
1 713 (8.58%) Power BI
2 461 (5.55%) SQL Server
3 406 (4.89%) Data Warehouse
4 365 (4.39%) Data Lake
5 292 (3.52%) PostgreSQL
6 220 (2.65%) Metadata
7 216 (2.60%) Azure SQL Database
7 216 (2.60%) NoSQL
8 140 (1.69%) Relational Database
9 135 (1.63%) Delta Lake
10 101 (1.22%) Big Data
10 101 (1.22%) SQL Server Integration Services
11 98 (1.18%) MongoDB
12 81 (0.98%) MySQL
13 64 (0.77%) Snowflake Schema
13 64 (0.77%) Tableau
14 60 (0.72%) BigQuery
15 59 (0.71%) Amazon Redshift
16 57 (0.69%) Redis
16 57 (0.69%) Star Schema
Development Applications
1 666 (8.02%) Git
2 637 (7.67%) JIRA
3 454 (5.47%) Jenkins
4 352 (4.24%) GitLab
5 135 (1.63%) Selenium
6 75 (0.90%) Postman
7 70 (0.84%) JUnit
8 66 (0.79%) JMeter
9 60 (0.72%) Cucumber
9 60 (0.72%) Cypress.io
10 56 (0.67%) SonarQube
11 50 (0.60%) Maven
12 48 (0.58%) Visual Studio
13 46 (0.55%) WebDriver
14 42 (0.51%) Claude Code
14 42 (0.51%) REST Assured
15 40 (0.48%) Gradle
16 33 (0.40%) MLflow
17 31 (0.37%) LoadRunner
18 28 (0.34%) Gatling
General
1 2,180 (26.25%) Social Skills
2 1,550 (18.66%) Finance
3 962 (11.58%) Public Sector
4 806 (9.70%) Analytical Skills
5 443 (5.33%) Banking
6 234 (2.82%) Documentation Skills
7 201 (2.42%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 188 (2.26%) Legal
9 187 (2.25%) Retail
10 94 (1.13%) Telecoms
11 93 (1.12%) Organisational Skills
12 92 (1.11%) Influencing Skills
13 91 (1.10%) Manufacturing
14 75 (0.90%) Law
15 73 (0.88%) Investment Banking
16 72 (0.87%) Aerospace
17 71 (0.85%) Financial Institution
17 71 (0.85%) Marketing
18 61 (0.73%) Front Office
19 59 (0.71%) Military
Job Titles
1 1,499 (18.05%) Architect
2 1,039 (12.51%) Senior
3 1,035 (12.46%) Developer
4 728 (8.76%) Azure Engineer
5 696 (8.38%) Lead
6 604 (7.27%) Data Engineer
7 493 (5.94%) Analyst
8 439 (5.29%) Solutions Architect
9 427 (5.14%) DevOps Engineer
10 348 (4.19%) Cloud Engineer
11 315 (3.79%) Infrastructure Engineer
12 305 (3.67%) Consultant
13 253 (3.05%) Data Architect
14 231 (2.78%) Platform Engineer
15 226 (2.72%) Azure Architect
16 195 (2.35%) Project Manager
17 194 (2.34%) Technical Architect
18 193 (2.32%) Security Engineer
19 188 (2.26%) Azure DevOps Engineer
20 184 (2.22%) Security Architect
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 646 (7.78%) REST
2 631 (7.60%) .NET
3 341 (4.11%) Kafka
4 321 (3.86%) React
5 287 (3.46%) RESTful
6 256 (3.08%) PySpark
7 236 (2.84%) OAuth
8 214 (2.58%) JSON
9 213 (2.56%) Spring
10 189 (2.28%) Node.js
11 178 (2.14%) Spring Boot
12 168 (2.02%) AngularJS
13 152 (1.83%) HTML
14 150 (1.81%) SAML
15 146 (1.76%) OpenID
16 140 (1.69%) Middleware
16 140 (1.69%) OAuth2
17 134 (1.61%) Playwright
18 133 (1.60%) .NET Framework
19 121 (1.46%) SOAP
Miscellaneous
1 893 (10.75%) Cloud Native
2 402 (4.84%) Onboarding
3 350 (4.21%) Product Ownership
4 270 (3.25%) Hybrid Cloud
5 267 (3.21%) Distributed Systems
6 259 (3.12%) AI Agents
7 258 (3.11%) Data Centre
8 241 (2.90%) Enterprise Software
9 235 (2.83%) Legacy Systems
10 180 (2.17%) Security Posture
11 142 (1.71%) Data Structures
12 141 (1.70%) Public Cloud
13 138 (1.66%) Management Information System
14 115 (1.38%) Data Protection Act
15 112 (1.35%) Enterprise Cloud
16 111 (1.34%) PKI
17 96 (1.16%) Self-Motivation
18 94 (1.13%) Replication
19 78 (0.94%) CMDB
20 76 (0.92%) Low-Code
Operating Systems
1 970 (11.68%) Windows
2 495 (5.96%) Linux
3 349 (4.20%) Windows Server
4 119 (1.43%) Windows 10
5 84 (1.01%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 84 (1.01%) Unix
6 81 (0.98%) Android
7 74 (0.89%) Apple iOS
8 69 (0.83%) Mac OS
9 59 (0.71%) VMS
10 47 (0.57%) Ubuntu
11 24 (0.29%) Windows Server 2019
12 16 (0.19%) Windows Server 2016
13 14 (0.17%) Windows Server 2012
14 12 (0.14%) CentOS
14 12 (0.14%) Data ONTAP
15 10 (0.12%) Debian
16 6 (0.072%) AIX
16 6 (0.072%) Amazon Linux
16 6 (0.072%) Windows 7
Processes & Methodologies
1 3,073 (37.00%) DevOps
2 2,604 (31.35%) CI/CD
3 2,078 (25.02%) Agile
4 1,316 (15.84%) Infrastructure as Code
5 1,300 (15.65%) AI
6 1,227 (14.77%) Stakeholder Management
7 1,224 (14.74%) Migration
8 1,126 (13.56%) Analytics
9 1,088 (13.10%) Problem-Solving
10 926 (11.15%) Continuous Improvement
11 922 (11.10%) Data Modelling
12 823 (9.91%) Stakeholder Engagement
13 782 (9.41%) Roadmaps
14 778 (9.37%) Data Pipeline
15 765 (9.21%) Containerisation
16 755 (9.09%) Business Intelligence
17 742 (8.93%) Microservices
18 695 (8.37%) Test Automation
19 672 (8.09%) ETL
20 652 (7.85%) Technical Leadership
Programming Languages
1 1,899 (22.86%) Python
2 1,605 (19.32%) SQL
3 844 (10.16%) PowerShell
4 691 (8.32%) Java
5 614 (7.39%) C#
6 502 (6.04%) JavaScript
7 384 (4.62%) Bash
8 329 (3.96%) Bicep
9 301 (3.62%) TypeScript
10 101 (1.22%) Data Analysis Expressions
11 94 (1.13%) T-SQL
12 72 (0.87%) Go
13 59 (0.71%) Scala
14 58 (0.70%) Shell Script
15 56 (0.67%) Kusto Query Language
16 40 (0.48%) Kotlin
16 40 (0.48%) PL/SQL
17 39 (0.47%) R
18 32 (0.39%) Groovy
19 26 (0.31%) C++
Qualifications
1 2,118 (25.50%) Security Cleared
2 1,724 (20.76%) SC Cleared
3 556 (6.69%) Degree
4 447 (5.38%) Azure Certification
5 273 (3.29%) DV Cleared
6 255 (3.07%) CISSP
7 247 (2.97%) BPSS Clearance
8 226 (2.72%) Microsoft Certification
9 210 (2.53%) Cisco Certification
10 196 (2.36%) AWS Certification
11 179 (2.16%) Computer Science Degree
12 125 (1.50%) CISM
13 100 (1.20%) CCNP
14 88 (1.06%) PMI Certification
15 87 (1.05%) PMP
16 83 (1.00%) (ISC)2 CCSP
17 71 (0.85%) ISTQB
18 60 (0.72%) Master's Degree
19 54 (0.65%) CCSP
20 52 (0.63%) TOGAF Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 579 (6.97%) Data Quality
2 437 (5.26%) QA
3 326 (3.92%) GDPR
4 303 (3.65%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 302 (3.64%) NIST
6 198 (2.38%) Accessibility
7 123 (1.48%) NCSC
8 104 (1.25%) SLA
9 76 (0.92%) GRC
9 76 (0.92%) WCAG
10 72 (0.87%) Cyber Essentials
10 72 (0.87%) PCI DSS
11 61 (0.73%) Sarbanes-Oxley
12 58 (0.70%) PMO
13 31 (0.37%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
14 30 (0.36%) HIPAA
15 27 (0.33%) SOC 2
16 21 (0.25%) Actionable Recommendations
16 21 (0.25%) NIST 800
17 18 (0.22%) ISO 20022
System Software
1 994 (11.97%) Active Directory
2 906 (10.91%) Docker
3 244 (2.94%) VMware Infrastructure
4 148 (1.78%) Virtual Desktop
5 141 (1.70%) Virtual Machines
6 128 (1.54%) Hyper-V
7 70 (0.84%) vSphere
8 54 (0.65%) VMware ESXi
9 40 (0.48%) VMware NSX
10 29 (0.35%) Firmware
11 24 (0.29%) NFS
12 15 (0.18%) IAG
13 13 (0.16%) Postfix
14 12 (0.14%) Microsoft App-V
15 9 (0.11%) zsh
16 8 (0.096%) Ceph
17 7 (0.084%) Varnish
17 7 (0.084%) Virtual Servers
18 6 (0.072%) BitLocker
18 6 (0.072%) EMC RecoverPoint
Systems Management
1 1,372 (16.52%) Terraform
2 1,270 (15.29%) Kubernetes
3 438 (5.27%) Ansible
4 426 (5.13%) Microsoft Intune
5 263 (3.17%) Grafana
6 218 (2.62%) Prometheus
7 150 (1.81%) Single Sign-On
8 118 (1.42%) SCCM
9 59 (0.71%) Progress Chef
10 57 (0.69%) Argo
11 48 (0.58%) Puppet
12 41 (0.49%) Jamf Pro
13 37 (0.45%) FortiGate
14 33 (0.40%) Istio
15 32 (0.39%) Active Directory Federation Services
16 21 (0.25%) SCOM
16 21 (0.25%) vCenter Server
17 20 (0.24%) Packer
18 19 (0.23%) HAProxy
19 17 (0.20%) HP ALM
Vendors
1 2,781 (33.48%) Microsoft
2 792 (9.54%) Databricks
3 406 (4.89%) ServiceNow
4 346 (4.17%) Google
5 344 (4.14%) VMware
6 315 (3.79%) Oracle
7 240 (2.89%) Cisco
8 228 (2.75%) SAP
9 201 (2.42%) OpenAI
10 197 (2.37%) Splunk
11 164 (1.97%) Salesforce
12 150 (1.81%) Palo Alto
13 149 (1.79%) CyberArk
14 139 (1.67%) Foundry
15 119 (1.43%) Dynatrace
16 106 (1.28%) Zscaler
17 91 (1.10%) Okta
18 86 (1.04%) Informatica
19 77 (0.93%) Citrix
20 75 (0.90%) Fortinet