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 4 October 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
4 Oct 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 7 6 6
Rank change year-on-year -1 0 -1
Contract jobs citing Azure 8,241 5,040 5,491
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 15.08% 15.19% 14.45%
As % of the Cloud Services category 43.58% 39.94% 42.01%
Number of daily rates quoted 5,762 3,445 3,724
10th Percentile £363 £350 £343
25th Percentile £445 £415 £428
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £529 £518 £530
Median % change year-on-year +2.12% -2.26% -3.64%
75th Percentile £638 £625 £638
90th Percentile £725 £718 £725
UK excluding London median daily rate £510 £500 £500
% change year-on-year +2.00% - -4.76%
Number of hourly rates quoted 182 45 34
10th Percentile £18.25 £15.50 £20.34
25th Percentile £21.27 £18.87 £23.80
Median hourly rate £42.35 £34.00 £35.00
Median % change year-on-year +24.56% -2.86% -24.21%
75th Percentile £79.00 £67.25 £59.38
90th Percentile £100.00 £92.50 £83.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £39.50 £19.00 £46.18
% change year-on-year +107.89% -58.86% -

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 18,910 12,619 13,070
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 34.61% 38.02% 34.40%
Number of daily rates quoted 12,545 8,428 8,670
10th Percentile £325 £311 £313
25th Percentile £425 £410 £420
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -0.94%
75th Percentile £625 £613 £638
90th Percentile £715 £716 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 632 297 190
10th Percentile £15.50 £15.50 £16.00
25th Percentile £17.75 £18.87 £21.37
Median hourly rate £31.13 £26.00 £35.00
Median % change year-on-year +19.71% -25.71% +6.06%
75th Percentile £67.50 £47.50 £64.73
90th Percentile £78.98 £67.00 £70.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £30.00 £19.27 £33.00
% change year-on-year +55.68% -41.61% +42.00%

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 4 October 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 4 October 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 4 October 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 7,009 £530 +0.95% 8,059
London 0 3,690 £550 - 3,789
UK excluding London +1 3,468 £510 +2.00% 5,363
Work from Home -2 2,494 £529 +5.80% 4,271
North of England +4 997 £500 +5.26% 1,322
South East +1 894 £525 +5.53% 1,260
Midlands +1 629 £493 -5.01% 735
North West +5 485 £500 +5.26% 661
West Midlands +2 480 £481 -12.55% 437
Yorkshire +5 426 £500 +2.04% 454
South West +2 410 £550 +7.84% 581
Scotland +2 288 £520 +4.00% 589
East of England 0 194 £510 +1.49% 422
East Midlands +2 145 £500 +8.11% 297
North East +4 100 £513 +2.50% 219
Wales -1 85 £450 - 291
Northern Ireland +13 13 £650 - 199
Channel Islands -8 3 £500 -21.88% 2

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
1 465 (5.64%) SharePoint
2 269 (3.26%) Confluence
3 193 (2.34%) Microsoft Exchange
4 187 (2.27%) Apache Spark
5 156 (1.89%) Apache Airflow
6 117 (1.42%) Apache
7 36 (0.44%) SAS
8 31 (0.38%) IIS
9 26 (0.32%) SharePoint Server
10 25 (0.30%) CMS
11 16 (0.19%) nginx
12 14 (0.17%) ArcGIS
12 14 (0.17%) OpenStack
12 14 (0.17%) Palantir Foundry
13 9 (0.11%) Umbraco
14 8 (0.097%) Apache Superset
15 7 (0.085%) Mendix
16 6 (0.073%) Ethereum
16 6 (0.073%) Hyperledger
16 6 (0.073%) Traefik
Applications
1 123 (1.49%) Microsoft Excel
2 87 (1.06%) Microsoft Office
3 62 (0.75%) Microsoft Project
4 48 (0.58%) MS Visio
5 42 (0.51%) Chatbot
5 42 (0.51%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 12 (0.15%) AutoCAD
7 8 (0.097%) Trello
8 7 (0.085%) CPLEX
8 7 (0.085%) Revit
9 5 (0.061%) Notion
10 4 (0.049%) Spreadsheet
11 3 (0.036%) 1Password
11 3 (0.036%) Houdini
11 3 (0.036%) Mingle
11 3 (0.036%) NUKE
12 2 (0.024%) Adobe Creative Suite
12 2 (0.024%) Adobe XD
12 2 (0.024%) Windchill
13 1 (0.012%) Mozilla Thunderbird
Business Applications
1 129 (1.57%) Dynamics CRM
2 77 (0.93%) SAP S/4HANA
3 25 (0.30%) Remedy ITSM
4 14 (0.17%) Aladdin
4 14 (0.17%) SAP MDG
5 13 (0.16%) Workday HCM
6 10 (0.12%) Payment Gateway
6 10 (0.12%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
7 9 (0.11%) Dynamics AX
7 9 (0.11%) Oracle EBS
8 8 (0.097%) Cloudability
8 8 (0.097%) Magento
9 7 (0.085%) Shopify
10 6 (0.073%) R3 Corda
10 6 (0.073%) Teamcenter
10 6 (0.073%) Temenos T24
11 5 (0.061%) Dynamics NAV
11 5 (0.061%) FLEXCUBE
11 5 (0.061%) Maximo
12 4 (0.049%) Adobe Campaign
Cloud Services
1 2,955 (35.86%) AWS
2 1,740 (21.11%) Azure DevOps
3 1,469 (17.83%) GCP
4 1,121 (13.60%) Entra ID
5 1,065 (12.92%) Power Platform
6 880 (10.68%) Microsoft 365
7 863 (10.47%) GitHub
8 493 (5.98%) GitHub Actions
9 461 (5.59%) Azure Data Factory
10 372 (4.51%) Serverless
11 358 (4.34%) SaaS
12 317 (3.85%) Azure Monitor
13 298 (3.62%) Power Automate
14 297 (3.60%) Dynamics 365
15 295 (3.58%) Azure Synapse Analytics
16 293 (3.56%) Snowflake
17 289 (3.51%) Azure AKS
18 281 (3.41%) PowerApps
19 250 (3.03%) Azure AI
20 249 (3.02%) Microsoft Copilot
Communications & Networking
1 513 (6.22%) Firewall
2 416 (5.05%) DNS
3 310 (3.76%) VPN
4 292 (3.54%) Network Security
5 230 (2.79%) DHCP
6 177 (2.15%) WAN
7 164 (1.99%) TCP/IP
8 105 (1.27%) BGP
9 103 (1.25%) LAN
10 96 (1.16%) SD-WAN
11 84 (1.02%) OSPF
12 82 (1.00%) VLAN
13 78 (0.95%) Wi-Fi
14 70 (0.85%) SSL
15 66 (0.80%) Wireless
16 63 (0.76%) SAN
17 46 (0.56%) HTTP
18 44 (0.53%) IPsec
19 41 (0.50%) VXLAN
20 39 (0.47%) MPLS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 693 (8.41%) Power BI
2 473 (5.74%) SQL Server
3 401 (4.87%) Data Warehouse
4 386 (4.68%) Data Lake
5 286 (3.47%) PostgreSQL
6 249 (3.02%) Metadata
7 209 (2.54%) NoSQL
8 201 (2.44%) Azure SQL Database
9 145 (1.76%) Relational Database
10 129 (1.57%) Delta Lake
11 114 (1.38%) SQL Server Integration Services
12 106 (1.29%) MySQL
13 104 (1.26%) MongoDB
14 89 (1.08%) Big Data
15 71 (0.86%) Amazon Redshift
16 69 (0.84%) Redis
17 64 (0.78%) Amazon RDS
18 63 (0.76%) BigQuery
19 58 (0.70%) Oracle Database
20 56 (0.68%) Tableau
Development Applications
1 750 (9.10%) Git
2 607 (7.37%) JIRA
3 469 (5.69%) Jenkins
4 373 (4.53%) GitLab
5 136 (1.65%) Selenium
6 87 (1.06%) Postman
7 65 (0.79%) Cucumber
8 62 (0.75%) Cypress.io
8 62 (0.75%) JUnit
9 57 (0.69%) Claude Code
9 57 (0.69%) JMeter
10 52 (0.63%) Maven
10 52 (0.63%) SonarQube
11 50 (0.61%) Gradle
11 50 (0.61%) Visual Studio
12 47 (0.57%) REST Assured
13 36 (0.44%) WebDriver
14 35 (0.42%) Bitbucket
15 33 (0.40%) LoadRunner
16 31 (0.38%) MLflow
General
1 2,280 (27.67%) Social Skills
2 1,593 (19.33%) Finance
3 944 (11.45%) Public Sector
4 805 (9.77%) Analytical Skills
5 499 (6.06%) Banking
6 219 (2.66%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 217 (2.63%) Retail
8 201 (2.44%) Documentation Skills
9 168 (2.04%) Legal
10 114 (1.38%) Influencing Skills
11 113 (1.37%) Manufacturing
12 97 (1.18%) Investment Banking
13 94 (1.14%) Marketing
14 92 (1.12%) Telecoms
15 87 (1.06%) Aerospace
16 84 (1.02%) Organisational Skills
17 76 (0.92%) Military
18 66 (0.80%) Law
19 61 (0.74%) Financial Institution
19 61 (0.74%) Local Government
Job Titles
1 1,569 (19.04%) Architect
2 1,050 (12.74%) Senior
3 1,012 (12.28%) Developer
4 721 (8.75%) Azure Engineer
5 683 (8.29%) Lead
6 583 (7.07%) Data Engineer
7 486 (5.90%) Solutions Architect
8 460 (5.58%) DevOps Engineer
9 459 (5.57%) Analyst
10 382 (4.64%) Cloud Engineer
11 320 (3.88%) Infrastructure Engineer
12 315 (3.82%) Consultant
13 267 (3.24%) Data Architect
14 229 (2.78%) Platform Engineer
15 213 (2.58%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
16 211 (2.56%) Azure Architect
17 203 (2.46%) Azure DevOps Engineer
18 195 (2.37%) Security Engineer
19 194 (2.35%) Technical Architect
20 179 (2.17%) Security Architect
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 1,408 (17.09%) Terraform
2 757 (9.19%) REST
3 627 (7.61%) .NET
4 398 (4.83%) Kafka
5 311 (3.77%) React
6 299 (3.63%) RESTful
7 271 (3.29%) OAuth
8 261 (3.17%) PySpark
9 240 (2.91%) JSON
10 185 (2.24%) Spring
11 177 (2.15%) Spring Boot
12 165 (2.00%) HTML
13 163 (1.98%) OAuth2
13 163 (1.98%) OpenID
14 151 (1.83%) Middleware
15 148 (1.80%) AngularJS
15 148 (1.80%) Node.js
16 147 (1.78%) SAML
17 144 (1.75%) SOAP
18 133 (1.61%) .NET Framework
Miscellaneous
1 930 (11.29%) Cloud Native
2 421 (5.11%) Onboarding
3 390 (4.73%) Product Ownership
4 326 (3.96%) AI Agents
5 323 (3.92%) Enterprise Software
6 281 (3.41%) Hybrid Cloud
7 277 (3.36%) Distributed Systems
8 253 (3.07%) Data Centre
9 227 (2.75%) Legacy Systems
10 182 (2.21%) Security Posture
11 179 (2.17%) Management Information System
12 152 (1.84%) Data Structures
13 145 (1.76%) Public Cloud
14 128 (1.55%) PKI
15 109 (1.32%) Data Protection Act
15 109 (1.32%) Enterprise Cloud
16 100 (1.21%) Replication
17 95 (1.15%) Self-Motivation
18 89 (1.08%) Low-Code
19 88 (1.07%) CMDB
Operating Systems
1 993 (12.05%) Windows
2 530 (6.43%) Linux
3 387 (4.70%) Windows Server
4 149 (1.81%) Windows 10
5 92 (1.12%) Android
6 87 (1.06%) Apple iOS
7 86 (1.04%) Unix
8 85 (1.03%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
9 68 (0.83%) Mac OS
10 56 (0.68%) Ubuntu
11 52 (0.63%) VMS
12 27 (0.33%) CentOS
13 20 (0.24%) Windows Server 2019
14 17 (0.21%) Windows Server 2016
15 15 (0.18%) Windows Server 2012
16 9 (0.11%) Amazon Linux
17 7 (0.085%) Debian
18 6 (0.073%) AIX
18 6 (0.073%) Data ONTAP
19 5 (0.061%) Windows 7
Processes & Methodologies
1 3,034 (36.82%) DevOps
2 2,678 (32.50%) CI/CD
3 2,081 (25.25%) Agile
4 1,512 (18.35%) Stakeholder Management
5 1,440 (17.47%) AI
6 1,417 (17.19%) Infrastructure as Code
7 1,232 (14.95%) Migration
8 1,135 (13.77%) Problem-Solving
9 1,111 (13.48%) Analytics
10 966 (11.72%) Continuous Improvement
11 895 (10.86%) Data Modelling
12 863 (10.47%) Roadmaps
13 786 (9.54%) Stakeholder Engagement
14 775 (9.40%) Containerisation
15 759 (9.21%) Business Intelligence
16 750 (9.10%) Technical Leadership
16 750 (9.10%) Test Automation
17 732 (8.88%) Data Pipeline
18 726 (8.81%) Microservices
19 667 (8.09%) Data Engineering
Programming Languages
1 1,921 (23.31%) Python
2 1,589 (19.28%) SQL
3 909 (11.03%) PowerShell
4 682 (8.28%) Java
5 608 (7.38%) C#
6 517 (6.27%) JavaScript
7 421 (5.11%) Bash
8 360 (4.37%) Bicep
9 308 (3.74%) TypeScript
10 102 (1.24%) Data Analysis Expressions
11 92 (1.12%) T-SQL
12 83 (1.01%) Go
13 66 (0.80%) Scala
14 62 (0.75%) Shell Script
15 61 (0.74%) Kusto Query Language
16 43 (0.52%) PL/SQL
17 37 (0.45%) R
18 33 (0.40%) C++
18 33 (0.40%) Kotlin
19 32 (0.39%) Groovy
Qualifications
1 2,136 (25.92%) Security Cleared
2 1,717 (20.83%) SC Cleared
3 557 (6.76%) Degree
4 467 (5.67%) Azure Certification
5 309 (3.75%) DV Cleared
6 270 (3.28%) BPSS Clearance
7 264 (3.20%) CISSP
8 250 (3.03%) Microsoft Certification
9 214 (2.60%) AWS Certification
10 191 (2.32%) Cisco Certification
11 184 (2.23%) Computer Science Degree
12 137 (1.66%) CISM
13 96 (1.16%) PMI Certification
14 92 (1.12%) PMP
15 90 (1.09%) (ISC)2 CCSP
16 82 (1.00%) CCNP
17 64 (0.78%) CCSP
17 64 (0.78%) ISTQB
17 64 (0.78%) Master's Degree
18 49 (0.59%) DBS Check
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 612 (7.43%) Data Quality
2 467 (5.67%) QA
3 297 (3.60%) ISO/IEC 27001
4 287 (3.48%) NIST
5 286 (3.47%) GDPR
6 208 (2.52%) Accessibility
7 114 (1.38%) NCSC
8 109 (1.32%) SLA
9 83 (1.01%) GRC
10 82 (1.00%) WCAG
11 78 (0.95%) Cyber Essentials
12 74 (0.90%) PCI DSS
13 50 (0.61%) PMO
13 50 (0.61%) Sarbanes-Oxley
14 45 (0.55%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
15 34 (0.41%) SOC 2
16 26 (0.32%) ISO 20022
17 25 (0.30%) HIPAA
18 22 (0.27%) Actionable Recommendations
19 20 (0.24%) Disclosure Scotland
System Software
1 1,021 (12.39%) Active Directory
2 922 (11.19%) Docker
3 250 (3.03%) VMware Infrastructure
4 148 (1.80%) Virtual Machines
5 144 (1.75%) Virtual Desktop
6 131 (1.59%) Hyper-V
7 74 (0.90%) vSphere
8 51 (0.62%) VMware ESXi
9 31 (0.38%) VMware NSX
10 20 (0.24%) Firmware
11 17 (0.21%) IAG
12 14 (0.17%) NFS
13 11 (0.13%) Virtual Servers
14 10 (0.12%) Microsoft App-V
15 9 (0.11%) Postfix
15 9 (0.11%) zsh
16 7 (0.085%) BitLocker
16 7 (0.085%) Ceph
17 6 (0.073%) Apache ZooKeeper
18 5 (0.061%) Dovecot
Systems Management
1 1,302 (15.80%) Kubernetes
2 459 (5.57%) Ansible
3 444 (5.39%) Microsoft Intune
4 269 (3.26%) Grafana
5 211 (2.56%) Prometheus
6 144 (1.75%) Single Sign-On
7 138 (1.67%) SCCM
8 62 (0.75%) Argo
9 60 (0.73%) Progress Chef
10 48 (0.58%) Puppet
11 37 (0.45%) FortiGate
12 34 (0.41%) SCOM
13 33 (0.40%) Jamf Pro
14 30 (0.36%) Istio
15 24 (0.29%) Active Directory Federation Services
16 20 (0.24%) CASB
17 19 (0.23%) QRadar
17 19 (0.23%) vCenter Server
18 17 (0.21%) Packer
19 14 (0.17%) HP ALM
Vendors
1 3,008 (36.50%) Microsoft
2 861 (10.45%) Databricks
3 408 (4.95%) ServiceNow
4 402 (4.88%) Google
5 361 (4.38%) VMware
6 344 (4.17%) Oracle
7 237 (2.88%) Cisco
8 235 (2.85%) Splunk
9 222 (2.69%) OpenAI
10 221 (2.68%) SAP
11 190 (2.31%) Salesforce
12 154 (1.87%) Palo Alto
13 146 (1.77%) CyberArk
14 138 (1.67%) Foundry
15 129 (1.57%) Dynatrace
16 90 (1.09%) Zscaler
17 89 (1.08%) IBM
18 82 (1.00%) Informatica
19 79 (0.96%) Fortinet
20 78 (0.95%) MuleSoft