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 9 December 2025, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
9 Dec 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 6 5 5
Rank change year-on-year -1 0 0
Contract jobs citing Azure 5,644 5,396 6,801
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 15.56% 15.11% 14.96%
As % of the Cloud Services category 40.90% 42.05% 42.60%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,945 3,616 4,976
10th Percentile £350 £338 £350
25th Percentile £420 £425 £435
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £520 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year -0.95% -4.55% -2.22%
75th Percentile £625 £636 £650
90th Percentile £700 £720 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £515
% change year-on-year - -2.91% -1.90%
Number of hourly rates quoted 59 50 82
10th Percentile £16.10 £19.97 £17.75
25th Percentile £25.47 £23.64 £25.19
Median hourly rate £45.46 £30.50 £46.18
Median % change year-on-year +49.05% -33.95% +31.94%
75th Percentile £77.38 £58.75 £66.00
90th Percentile £95.00 £75.00 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £50.00 £29.25 £46.18
% change year-on-year +70.94% -36.66% -5.76%

All Cloud 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 13,800 12,832 15,966
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 38.04% 35.93% 35.11%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,381 8,507 11,432
10th Percentile £306 £313 £300
25th Percentile £406 £418 £419
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £610 £638 £638
90th Percentile £700 £738 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £500 £500
% change year-on-year -5.00% - -0.10%
Number of hourly rates quoted 326 179 296
10th Percentile £15.00 £17.44 £14.31
25th Percentile £18.87 £21.46 £17.72
Median hourly rate £25.74 £29.00 £25.69
Median % change year-on-year -11.26% +12.88% +14.18%
75th Percentile £51.38 £46.84 £58.75
90th Percentile £78.75 £69.80 £78.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £22.50 £27.13 £21.05
% change year-on-year -17.05% +28.86% +9.27%

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 9 December 2025.

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 9 December 2025.

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 9 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
England -1 4,798 £520 -3.26% 2,931
London +1 2,572 £539 -2.05% 1,031
UK excluding London 0 2,339 £500 - 2,581
Work from Home -1 1,804 £510 -2.86% 1,517
North of England -2 610 £475 -5.00% 621
South East -4 573 £500 -4.76% 880
Midlands -1 434 £534 +2.69% 355
West Midlands 0 327 £550 +4.76% 224
South West +6 308 £509 -0.25% 264
North West 0 300 £450 -10.00% 340
Yorkshire -2 282 £482 -3.60% 213
Scotland +1 253 £518 +15.06% 170
East of England +3 152 £500 +17.65% 206
East Midlands -2 104 £450 -10.00% 127
Wales -1 63 £463 -7.50% 99
North East -9 32 £515 +13.44% 77
Channel Islands - 7 £640 -
Northern Ireland -5 6 - - 27

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
1 274 (4.85%) SharePoint
2 194 (3.44%) Microsoft Exchange
3 143 (2.53%) Confluence
4 123 (2.18%) Apache Spark
5 82 (1.45%) Apache Airflow
6 81 (1.44%) Apache
7 28 (0.50%) SAS
8 24 (0.43%) CMS
9 22 (0.39%) OpenStack
10 17 (0.30%) WebLogic
11 15 (0.27%) nginx
12 14 (0.25%) IIS
13 12 (0.21%) Anypoint
14 10 (0.18%) Mule
14 10 (0.18%) Skype for Business
14 10 (0.18%) SugarCRM
15 9 (0.16%) ArcGIS
15 9 (0.16%) Jupyter
16 8 (0.14%) Camunda
16 8 (0.14%) GeoServer
Applications
1 125 (2.21%) Microsoft Excel
2 100 (1.77%) Microsoft Office
3 43 (0.76%) MS Visio
4 40 (0.71%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 36 (0.64%) Microsoft Project
6 17 (0.30%) Chatbot
7 11 (0.19%) Trello
8 10 (0.18%) Mozilla Thunderbird
9 5 (0.089%) Weka
10 2 (0.035%) Adobe Creative Suite
10 2 (0.035%) Windchill
11 1 (0.018%) Acrobat
11 1 (0.018%) FrameMaker
11 1 (0.018%) Revit
11 1 (0.018%) Siemens NX
11 1 (0.018%) SOLIDWORKS
11 1 (0.018%) Spreadsheet
Business Applications
1 93 (1.65%) Dynamics CRM
2 55 (0.97%) SAP S/4HANA
3 18 (0.32%) Aladdin
4 13 (0.23%) Payment Gateway
5 11 (0.19%) Salesforce CRM
6 10 (0.18%) Workday HCM
7 9 (0.16%) Dynamics AX
7 9 (0.16%) Endur
7 9 (0.16%) Oracle ERP
8 8 (0.14%) NetSuite
8 8 (0.14%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
9 6 (0.11%) NEC Housing
9 6 (0.11%) SAP ERP
9 6 (0.11%) Teamcenter
10 5 (0.089%) Cloudability
10 5 (0.089%) Oracle EBS
11 4 (0.071%) Oracle General Ledger
11 4 (0.071%) Oracle Payables
11 4 (0.071%) SAP MDG
11 4 (0.071%) thinkFolio
Cloud Services
1 2,059 (36.48%) AWS
2 1,115 (19.76%) GCP
3 1,111 (19.68%) Azure DevOps
4 728 (12.90%) Power Platform
5 644 (11.41%) Microsoft 365
6 635 (11.25%) Entra ID
7 537 (9.51%) GitHub
8 362 (6.41%) Azure Data Factory
9 321 (5.69%) GitHub Actions
10 309 (5.47%) Serverless
11 252 (4.46%) Dynamics 365
12 247 (4.38%) Azure Synapse Analytics
13 246 (4.36%) SaaS
14 228 (4.04%) Azure AKS
15 226 (4.00%) Power Automate
16 222 (3.93%) Snowflake
17 208 (3.69%) PowerApps
18 201 (3.56%) Azure Monitor
19 194 (3.44%) PaaS
20 193 (3.42%) Azure Sentinel
Communications & Networking
1 407 (7.21%) Firewall
2 211 (3.74%) DNS
3 174 (3.08%) VPN
4 145 (2.57%) Network Security
5 114 (2.02%) WAN
6 108 (1.91%) DHCP
7 87 (1.54%) TCP/IP
8 74 (1.31%) LAN
9 73 (1.29%) HTTP
10 63 (1.12%) Wi-Fi
11 58 (1.03%) SD-WAN
12 56 (0.99%) VLAN
13 38 (0.67%) BGP
14 37 (0.66%) SAN
15 35 (0.62%) Internet
16 34 (0.60%) MPLS
17 31 (0.55%) Wireless
18 27 (0.48%) SSL
19 26 (0.46%) OSPF
20 22 (0.39%) VSAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 510 (9.04%) Power BI
2 303 (5.37%) SQL Server
3 264 (4.68%) Data Warehouse
4 248 (4.39%) PostgreSQL
5 240 (4.25%) Data Lake
6 185 (3.28%) Azure SQL Database
6 185 (3.28%) NoSQL
7 125 (2.21%) Relational Database
8 119 (2.11%) Metadata
9 102 (1.81%) MongoDB
10 81 (1.44%) MySQL
11 76 (1.35%) Big Data
11 76 (1.35%) Delta Lake
12 68 (1.20%) Tableau
13 63 (1.12%) SQL Server Integration Services
14 60 (1.06%) BigQuery
15 57 (1.01%) Oracle Database
16 51 (0.90%) Redis
17 43 (0.76%) Amazon RDS
17 43 (0.76%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 493 (8.73%) Git
2 411 (7.28%) JIRA
3 337 (5.97%) Jenkins
4 228 (4.04%) GitLab
5 96 (1.70%) Selenium
6 89 (1.58%) Postman
7 70 (1.24%) SonarQube
8 67 (1.19%) JUnit
9 49 (0.87%) Cucumber
10 47 (0.83%) JMeter
11 46 (0.82%) Cypress.io
12 45 (0.80%) Bitbucket
13 37 (0.66%) Oracle APEX
14 36 (0.64%) Maven
15 33 (0.58%) CircleCI
16 31 (0.55%) Visual Studio
17 30 (0.53%) MLflow
17 30 (0.53%) SpecFlow
18 29 (0.51%) Mockito
19 28 (0.50%) ERwin
General
1 1,809 (32.05%) Social Skills
2 1,064 (18.85%) Finance
3 675 (11.96%) Public Sector
4 530 (9.39%) Analytical Skills
5 372 (6.59%) Banking
6 192 (3.40%) Documentation Skills
7 130 (2.30%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 96 (1.70%) Influencing Skills
9 92 (1.63%) Investment Banking
9 92 (1.63%) Marketing
10 87 (1.54%) Retail
11 83 (1.47%) Legal
12 81 (1.44%) Presentation Skills
13 75 (1.33%) Telecoms
14 65 (1.15%) Manufacturing
15 51 (0.90%) Law
16 49 (0.87%) Organisational Skills
17 48 (0.85%) Financial Institution
18 47 (0.83%) Front Office
19 41 (0.73%) Military
Job Titles
1 905 (16.03%) Architect
2 899 (15.93%) Developer
3 577 (10.22%) Senior
4 420 (7.44%) Azure Engineer
5 413 (7.32%) Analyst
6 394 (6.98%) Lead
7 378 (6.70%) Data Engineer
8 319 (5.65%) Solutions Architect
9 283 (5.01%) DevOps Engineer
10 229 (4.06%) Consultant
11 166 (2.94%) Security Engineer
12 162 (2.87%) Senior Developer
13 160 (2.83%) Infrastructure Engineer
14 151 (2.68%) Azure Architect
15 140 (2.48%) Cloud Engineer
16 133 (2.36%) Platform Engineer
17 118 (2.09%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
18 116 (2.06%) Data Architect
19 115 (2.04%) Java Developer
20 112 (1.98%) Software Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 461 (8.17%) .NET
2 347 (6.15%) REST
3 255 (4.52%) RESTful
4 242 (4.29%) React
5 220 (3.90%) Kafka
6 199 (3.53%) Spring
7 191 (3.38%) Node.js
8 177 (3.14%) OAuth
9 171 (3.03%) Spring Boot
10 169 (2.99%) PySpark
11 164 (2.91%) HTML
12 163 (2.89%) AngularJS
13 161 (2.85%) JSON
14 135 (2.39%) SOAP
15 130 (2.30%) CSS
16 123 (2.18%) PyTorch
17 112 (1.98%) TensorFlow
18 102 (1.81%) SAML
18 102 (1.81%) XML
19 100 (1.77%) Middleware
Miscellaneous
1 463 (8.20%) Cloud Native
2 201 (3.56%) Product Ownership
3 195 (3.45%) Onboarding
4 163 (2.89%) Hybrid Cloud
5 147 (2.60%) Legacy Systems
6 128 (2.27%) Data Centre
7 122 (2.16%) Security Posture
8 118 (2.09%) Distributed Systems
9 107 (1.90%) Enterprise Software
10 94 (1.67%) Public Cloud
11 76 (1.35%) Data Protection Act
11 76 (1.35%) Management Information System
12 75 (1.33%) Algorithms
13 68 (1.20%) Greenfield Project
14 64 (1.13%) Replication
15 63 (1.12%) AI Agents
16 61 (1.08%) Low-Code
17 56 (0.99%) Data Structures
18 53 (0.94%) PKI
19 52 (0.92%) CMDB
Operating Systems
1 633 (11.22%) Windows
2 389 (6.89%) Linux
3 192 (3.40%) Windows Server
4 111 (1.97%) Unix
5 95 (1.68%) Windows 10
6 50 (0.89%) Android
7 48 (0.85%) Apple iOS
8 47 (0.83%) VMS
9 38 (0.67%) Mac OS
10 29 (0.51%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
11 22 (0.39%) Ubuntu
12 14 (0.25%) Windows Server 2016
13 11 (0.19%) Solaris
13 11 (0.19%) Windows Server 2019
14 10 (0.18%) Amazon Linux
15 9 (0.16%) CentOS
16 6 (0.11%) AIX
16 6 (0.11%) Mac OS X
16 6 (0.11%) Windows Server 2012
17 4 (0.071%) Windows 7
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,041 (36.16%) DevOps
2 1,661 (29.43%) CI/CD
3 1,511 (26.77%) Agile
4 1,024 (18.14%) Problem-Solving
5 758 (13.43%) Analytics
6 738 (13.08%) Infrastructure as Code
7 672 (11.91%) AI
8 669 (11.85%) Migration
9 582 (10.31%) Stakeholder Management
10 580 (10.28%) Business Intelligence
11 576 (10.21%) Containerisation
12 496 (8.79%) Microservices
13 490 (8.68%) Data Modelling
14 485 (8.59%) Machine Learning
15 470 (8.33%) Test Automation
16 457 (8.10%) Stakeholder Engagement
17 449 (7.96%) Continuous Improvement
18 417 (7.39%) Scrum
19 405 (7.18%) Data Pipeline
20 398 (7.05%) ETL
Programming Languages
1 1,450 (25.69%) Python
2 1,206 (21.37%) SQL
3 591 (10.47%) PowerShell
4 563 (9.98%) Java
5 501 (8.88%) C#
6 429 (7.60%) JavaScript
7 274 (4.85%) Bash
8 231 (4.09%) TypeScript
9 152 (2.69%) Bicep
10 91 (1.61%) Go
11 75 (1.33%) Kusto Query Language
12 73 (1.29%) Scala
13 69 (1.22%) PL/SQL
14 58 (1.03%) R
15 52 (0.92%) T-SQL
16 46 (0.82%) Data Analysis Expressions
17 40 (0.71%) C++
18 39 (0.69%) Shell Script
19 32 (0.57%) PHP
20 29 (0.51%) Perl
Qualifications
1 1,194 (21.16%) Security Cleared
2 973 (17.24%) SC Cleared
3 489 (8.66%) Degree
4 332 (5.88%) Azure Certification
5 179 (3.17%) Microsoft Certification
6 174 (3.08%) CISSP
7 172 (3.05%) Computer Science Degree
8 142 (2.52%) AWS Certification
9 129 (2.29%) DV Cleared
10 101 (1.79%) CISM
11 95 (1.68%) Cisco Certification
12 87 (1.54%) Master's Degree
13 84 (1.49%) BPSS Clearance
14 47 (0.83%) ISTQB
15 44 (0.78%) CCNP
16 39 (0.69%) MCP
17 38 (0.67%) PMI Certification
18 35 (0.62%) TOGAF Certification
19 33 (0.58%) (ISC)2 CCSP
19 33 (0.58%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 357 (6.33%) GDPR
2 323 (5.72%) ISO/IEC 27001
3 318 (5.63%) QA
4 270 (4.78%) Data Quality
5 258 (4.57%) NIST
6 123 (2.18%) Accessibility
7 82 (1.45%) PCI DSS
8 76 (1.35%) NCSC
9 51 (0.90%) Cyber Essentials
10 50 (0.89%) HIPAA
11 35 (0.62%) SOC 2
12 34 (0.60%) Sarbanes-Oxley
13 33 (0.58%) SLA
14 31 (0.55%) WCAG
15 29 (0.51%) GRC
16 28 (0.50%) EU AI Act
17 27 (0.48%) PMO
18 25 (0.44%) PSD2
19 21 (0.37%) COBIT
19 21 (0.37%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
System Software
1 722 (12.79%) Docker
2 686 (12.15%) Active Directory
3 169 (2.99%) VMware Infrastructure
4 75 (1.33%) Hyper-V
5 71 (1.26%) Virtual Machines
6 61 (1.08%) Virtual Desktop
7 47 (0.83%) vSphere
8 23 (0.41%) VMware NSX
9 16 (0.28%) Squid
10 13 (0.23%) Slurm Workload Manager
11 11 (0.19%) DFS Replication
11 11 (0.19%) VMware ESXi
12 10 (0.18%) Dovecot
12 10 (0.18%) Oracle RAC
12 10 (0.18%) Postfix
13 9 (0.16%) NFS
14 8 (0.14%) Firmware
14 8 (0.14%) KVM
14 8 (0.14%) Snort
14 8 (0.14%) zsh
Systems Management
1 847 (15.01%) Terraform
2 810 (14.35%) Kubernetes
3 305 (5.40%) Ansible
4 296 (5.24%) Microsoft Intune
5 135 (2.39%) SCCM
6 132 (2.34%) Single Sign-On
7 131 (2.32%) Grafana
8 127 (2.25%) Prometheus
9 37 (0.66%) Argo
10 36 (0.64%) Puppet
11 33 (0.58%) Active Directory Federation Services
12 26 (0.46%) Nessus
13 25 (0.44%) Kibana
14 22 (0.39%) Progress Chef
15 21 (0.37%) NetBackup
15 21 (0.37%) vRealize
16 20 (0.35%) Oracle RMAN
17 17 (0.30%) Nmap
18 16 (0.28%) Podman
18 16 (0.28%) SCOM
Vendors
1 1,813 (32.12%) Microsoft
2 533 (9.44%) Databricks
3 341 (6.04%) Oracle
4 280 (4.96%) Google
5 230 (4.08%) ServiceNow
6 226 (4.00%) VMware
7 162 (2.87%) Cisco
8 156 (2.76%) SAP
9 148 (2.62%) Splunk
10 124 (2.20%) Salesforce
11 119 (2.11%) OpenAI
12 85 (1.51%) CyberArk
12 85 (1.51%) Palo Alto
13 79 (1.40%) Citrix
14 59 (1.05%) Foundry
14 59 (1.05%) Red Hat
15 57 (1.01%) IBM
16 55 (0.97%) F5
17 54 (0.96%) HP
18 53 (0.94%) Dynatrace