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 15 September 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
15 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 6 6 6
Rank change year-on-year 0 0 -1
Contract jobs citing Azure 8,279 4,782 5,515
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 15.21% 14.73% 14.46%
As % of the Cloud Services category 43.86% 39.26% 42.13%
Number of daily rates quoted 5,810 3,247 3,820
10th Percentile £363 £350 £350
25th Percentile £438 £414 £431
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £515 £525
Median % change year-on-year +1.94% -1.90% -4.55%
75th Percentile £630 £625 £637
90th Percentile £725 £725 £725
UK excluding London median daily rate £510 £500 £500
% change year-on-year +1.90% - -4.76%
Number of hourly rates quoted 174 42 34
10th Percentile £18.25 £16.49 £20.34
25th Percentile £21.27 £26.45 £23.80
Median hourly rate £38.25 £34.24 £36.75
Median % change year-on-year +11.71% -6.83% -31.94%
75th Percentile £80.00 £67.25 £59.38
90th Percentile £100.59 £88.63 £83.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £38.25 £32.77 £42.34
% change year-on-year +16.72% -22.60% -8.32%

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 18,877 12,179 13,089
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 34.69% 37.52% 34.32%
Number of daily rates quoted 12,526 8,111 8,851
10th Percentile £325 £313 £313
25th Percentile £425 £410 £420
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -2.33%
75th Percentile £625 £613 £638
90th Percentile £713 £725 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 610 297 201
10th Percentile £15.25 £15.50 £14.41
25th Percentile £17.97 £18.87 £20.30
Median hourly rate £32.50 £29.25 £30.88
Median % change year-on-year +11.11% -5.26% -11.79%
75th Percentile £67.65 £52.50 £61.06
90th Percentile £81.25 £67.25 £70.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £30.00 £19.64 £30.00
% change year-on-year +52.79% -34.55% +11.11%

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 15 September 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 15 September 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 15 September 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 0 7,077 £525 - 8,433
London +1 3,704 £550 - 4,256
UK excluding London +2 3,531 £510 +1.90% 5,107
Work from Home -1 2,514 £525 +5.00% 3,970
North of England +7 1,008 £500 +5.26% 1,409
South East +1 898 £525 +5.00% 1,182
Midlands +2 652 £488 -5.11% 741
North West +5 501 £500 +5.26% 779
West Midlands +2 482 £481 -10.93% 468
South West +2 428 £550 +10.00% 572
Yorkshire +6 426 £500 +5.26% 453
Scotland +7 286 £520 +6.01% 482
East of England +2 187 £518 +3.50% 419
East Midlands +5 160 £500 +8.11% 272
North East +6 94 £500 - 183
Wales 0 85 £450 - 145
Northern Ireland +17 14 £650 - 189
Channel Islands -1 11 £450 -29.69% 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
1 471 (5.69%) SharePoint
2 258 (3.12%) Confluence
3 197 (2.38%) Microsoft Exchange
4 176 (2.13%) Apache Spark
5 163 (1.97%) Apache Airflow
6 111 (1.34%) Apache
7 45 (0.54%) SAS
8 29 (0.35%) IIS
8 29 (0.35%) SharePoint Server
9 25 (0.30%) CMS
10 15 (0.18%) ArcGIS
11 14 (0.17%) nginx
11 14 (0.17%) Palantir Foundry
12 13 (0.16%) OpenStack
13 9 (0.11%) Umbraco
14 7 (0.085%) Apache Superset
14 7 (0.085%) Mendix
15 6 (0.072%) Cloud Foundry
15 6 (0.072%) Ethereum
15 6 (0.072%) Hyperledger
Applications
1 120 (1.45%) Microsoft Excel
2 91 (1.10%) Microsoft Office
3 70 (0.85%) Microsoft Project
4 43 (0.52%) MS Visio
5 41 (0.50%) Chatbot
6 36 (0.43%) Microsoft PowerPoint
7 13 (0.16%) AutoCAD
8 11 (0.13%) Trello
9 9 (0.11%) CPLEX
10 8 (0.097%) Revit
10 8 (0.097%) 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
13 2 (0.024%) Mingle
14 1 (0.012%) Mozilla Thunderbird
14 1 (0.012%) PlantUML
14 1 (0.012%) Sketch
Business Applications
1 135 (1.63%) Dynamics CRM
2 69 (0.83%) SAP S/4HANA
3 26 (0.31%) Remedy ITSM
4 13 (0.16%) Aladdin
5 11 (0.13%) Payment Gateway
6 10 (0.12%) Dynamics AX
6 10 (0.12%) SAP MDG
6 10 (0.12%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
7 8 (0.097%) Magento
7 8 (0.097%) Oracle EBS
8 7 (0.085%) Shopify
8 7 (0.085%) Workday HCM
9 6 (0.072%) Cloudability
9 6 (0.072%) R3 Corda
9 6 (0.072%) SAP Oil and Gas
10 5 (0.060%) NetSuite
10 5 (0.060%) Unit4 Business World
11 4 (0.048%) Dynamics NAV
11 4 (0.048%) Endur
11 4 (0.048%) SAP ERP
Cloud Services
1 2,972 (35.90%) AWS
2 1,749 (21.13%) Azure DevOps
3 1,421 (17.16%) GCP
4 1,088 (13.14%) Entra ID
5 1,082 (13.07%) Power Platform
6 873 (10.54%) Microsoft 365
7 839 (10.13%) GitHub
8 486 (5.87%) GitHub Actions
9 465 (5.62%) Azure Data Factory
10 373 (4.51%) Serverless
11 361 (4.36%) SaaS
12 308 (3.72%) Azure Monitor
13 306 (3.70%) Azure Synapse Analytics
14 305 (3.68%) Power Automate
15 295 (3.56%) Dynamics 365
16 291 (3.51%) Azure AKS
17 288 (3.48%) PowerApps
18 283 (3.42%) Snowflake
19 243 (2.94%) Azure AI
20 242 (2.92%) Microsoft Copilot
Communications & Networking
1 520 (6.28%) Firewall
2 415 (5.01%) DNS
3 314 (3.79%) VPN
4 296 (3.58%) Network Security
5 224 (2.71%) DHCP
6 188 (2.27%) WAN
7 166 (2.01%) TCP/IP
8 109 (1.32%) LAN
9 107 (1.29%) BGP
10 100 (1.21%) SD-WAN
11 95 (1.15%) VLAN
12 86 (1.04%) OSPF
12 86 (1.04%) Wi-Fi
13 77 (0.93%) SSL
14 61 (0.74%) SAN
14 61 (0.74%) Wireless
15 46 (0.56%) HTTP
16 45 (0.54%) IPsec
17 44 (0.53%) VXLAN
18 40 (0.48%) Internet
Database & Business Intelligence
1 713 (8.61%) Power BI
2 477 (5.76%) SQL Server
3 405 (4.89%) Data Warehouse
4 380 (4.59%) Data Lake
5 294 (3.55%) PostgreSQL
6 246 (2.97%) Metadata
7 215 (2.60%) NoSQL
8 202 (2.44%) Azure SQL Database
9 144 (1.74%) Relational Database
10 128 (1.55%) Delta Lake
11 111 (1.34%) SQL Server Integration Services
12 108 (1.30%) MongoDB
13 92 (1.11%) Big Data
14 89 (1.08%) MySQL
15 72 (0.87%) Amazon Redshift
16 65 (0.79%) Redis
17 62 (0.75%) BigQuery
17 62 (0.75%) Tableau
18 58 (0.70%) Snowflake Schema
19 56 (0.68%) Oracle Database
Development Applications
1 721 (8.71%) Git
2 600 (7.25%) JIRA
3 469 (5.66%) Jenkins
4 364 (4.40%) GitLab
5 124 (1.50%) Selenium
6 77 (0.93%) Postman
7 61 (0.74%) JUnit
8 60 (0.72%) Cypress.io
9 56 (0.68%) Maven
9 56 (0.68%) SonarQube
10 51 (0.62%) Claude Code
10 51 (0.62%) JMeter
11 50 (0.60%) Cucumber
12 47 (0.57%) Gradle
13 45 (0.54%) REST Assured
14 43 (0.52%) Visual Studio
15 38 (0.46%) WebDriver
16 36 (0.43%) MLflow
17 32 (0.39%) Gatling
18 31 (0.37%) LoadRunner
General
1 2,281 (27.55%) Social Skills
2 1,561 (18.85%) Finance
3 958 (11.57%) Public Sector
4 808 (9.76%) Analytical Skills
5 464 (5.60%) Banking
6 220 (2.66%) Documentation Skills
6 220 (2.66%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 209 (2.52%) Retail
8 179 (2.16%) Legal
9 105 (1.27%) Influencing Skills
10 101 (1.22%) Manufacturing
11 88 (1.06%) Marketing
11 88 (1.06%) Telecoms
12 85 (1.03%) Organisational Skills
13 81 (0.98%) Aerospace
14 79 (0.95%) Investment Banking
15 73 (0.88%) Law
15 73 (0.88%) Military
16 58 (0.70%) Financial Institution
17 57 (0.69%) Local Government
Job Titles
1 1,551 (18.73%) Architect
2 1,045 (12.62%) Senior
3 998 (12.05%) Developer
4 722 (8.72%) Azure Engineer
5 679 (8.20%) Lead
6 588 (7.10%) Data Engineer
7 482 (5.82%) Analyst
8 475 (5.74%) Solutions Architect
9 468 (5.65%) DevOps Engineer
10 370 (4.47%) Cloud Engineer
11 322 (3.89%) Consultant
12 315 (3.80%) Infrastructure Engineer
13 268 (3.24%) Data Architect
14 243 (2.94%) Platform Engineer
15 217 (2.62%) Azure Architect
16 208 (2.51%) Azure DevOps Engineer
17 196 (2.37%) Technical Architect
18 194 (2.34%) Security Engineer
19 193 (2.33%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
20 186 (2.25%) Project Manager
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 1,403 (16.95%) Terraform
2 700 (8.46%) REST
3 628 (7.59%) .NET
4 385 (4.65%) Kafka
5 304 (3.67%) React
6 288 (3.48%) RESTful
7 269 (3.25%) PySpark
8 257 (3.10%) OAuth
9 235 (2.84%) JSON
10 193 (2.33%) Spring
11 180 (2.17%) Spring Boot
12 159 (1.92%) OpenID
13 155 (1.87%) Node.js
14 152 (1.84%) HTML
14 152 (1.84%) OAuth2
15 150 (1.81%) SAML
16 149 (1.80%) AngularJS
17 138 (1.67%) Playwright
18 135 (1.63%) Middleware
19 130 (1.57%) ARM Templates
Miscellaneous
1 913 (11.03%) Cloud Native
2 414 (5.00%) Onboarding
3 386 (4.66%) Product Ownership
4 298 (3.60%) Enterprise Software
5 295 (3.56%) AI Agents
6 283 (3.42%) Hybrid Cloud
7 266 (3.21%) Distributed Systems
8 247 (2.98%) Data Centre
9 223 (2.69%) Legacy Systems
10 174 (2.10%) Security Posture
11 171 (2.07%) Management Information System
12 145 (1.75%) Data Structures
13 142 (1.72%) Public Cloud
14 114 (1.38%) Enterprise Cloud
14 114 (1.38%) PKI
15 113 (1.36%) Data Protection Act
16 106 (1.28%) Replication
17 90 (1.09%) Self-Motivation
18 84 (1.01%) CMDB
19 80 (0.97%) Low-Code
Operating Systems
1 983 (11.87%) Windows
2 517 (6.24%) Linux
3 370 (4.47%) Windows Server
4 137 (1.65%) Windows 10
5 88 (1.06%) Android
6 87 (1.05%) Unix
7 84 (1.01%) Apple iOS
8 83 (1.00%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
9 75 (0.91%) Mac OS
10 54 (0.65%) Ubuntu
11 52 (0.63%) VMS
12 22 (0.27%) CentOS
13 20 (0.24%) Windows Server 2019
14 16 (0.19%) Windows Server 2016
15 12 (0.14%) Windows Server 2012
16 9 (0.11%) Amazon Linux
16 9 (0.11%) Debian
17 6 (0.072%) AIX
17 6 (0.072%) Data ONTAP
17 6 (0.072%) Windows 7
Processes & Methodologies
1 3,056 (36.91%) DevOps
2 2,633 (31.80%) CI/CD
3 2,080 (25.12%) Agile
4 1,437 (17.36%) Stakeholder Management
5 1,407 (16.99%) AI
6 1,398 (16.89%) Infrastructure as Code
7 1,213 (14.65%) Migration
8 1,145 (13.83%) Analytics
9 1,134 (13.70%) Problem-Solving
10 949 (11.46%) Continuous Improvement
11 905 (10.93%) Data Modelling
12 842 (10.17%) Roadmaps
13 799 (9.65%) Stakeholder Engagement
14 783 (9.46%) Containerisation
15 766 (9.25%) Business Intelligence
16 752 (9.08%) Data Pipeline
17 738 (8.91%) Technical Leadership
18 722 (8.72%) Microservices
19 705 (8.52%) Test Automation
20 660 (7.97%) Data Engineering
Programming Languages
1 1,897 (22.91%) Python
2 1,585 (19.14%) SQL
3 878 (10.61%) PowerShell
4 687 (8.30%) Java
5 600 (7.25%) C#
6 496 (5.99%) JavaScript
7 407 (4.92%) Bash
8 352 (4.25%) Bicep
9 298 (3.60%) TypeScript
10 101 (1.22%) Data Analysis Expressions
11 91 (1.10%) T-SQL
12 70 (0.85%) Go
13 63 (0.76%) Scala
14 59 (0.71%) Shell Script
15 56 (0.68%) Kusto Query Language
16 41 (0.50%) PL/SQL
17 39 (0.47%) R
18 34 (0.41%) Kotlin
19 30 (0.36%) Groovy
20 26 (0.31%) Apex Code
Qualifications
1 2,157 (26.05%) Security Cleared
2 1,739 (21.00%) SC Cleared
3 565 (6.82%) Degree
4 473 (5.71%) Azure Certification
5 300 (3.62%) DV Cleared
6 268 (3.24%) CISSP
7 264 (3.19%) BPSS Clearance
8 256 (3.09%) Microsoft Certification
9 205 (2.48%) Cisco Certification
10 200 (2.42%) AWS Certification
11 181 (2.19%) Computer Science Degree
12 133 (1.61%) CISM
13 93 (1.12%) CCNP
14 91 (1.10%) PMI Certification
15 89 (1.08%) (ISC)2 CCSP
16 88 (1.06%) PMP
17 64 (0.77%) ISTQB
18 61 (0.74%) CCSP
19 59 (0.71%) Master's Degree
20 51 (0.62%) TOGAF Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 600 (7.25%) Data Quality
2 460 (5.56%) QA
3 302 (3.65%) NIST
4 300 (3.62%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 294 (3.55%) GDPR
6 205 (2.48%) Accessibility
7 118 (1.43%) NCSC
8 107 (1.29%) SLA
9 85 (1.03%) WCAG
10 84 (1.01%) Cyber Essentials
11 80 (0.97%) GRC
12 72 (0.87%) PCI DSS
13 58 (0.70%) Sarbanes-Oxley
14 55 (0.66%) PMO
15 45 (0.54%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
16 29 (0.35%) SOC 2
17 26 (0.31%) HIPAA
18 25 (0.30%) ISO 20022
19 20 (0.24%) Actionable Recommendations
19 20 (0.24%) Disclosure Scotland
System Software
1 1,024 (12.37%) Active Directory
2 921 (11.12%) Docker
3 245 (2.96%) VMware Infrastructure
4 148 (1.79%) Virtual Desktop
5 145 (1.75%) Virtual Machines
6 131 (1.58%) Hyper-V
7 70 (0.85%) vSphere
8 54 (0.65%) VMware ESXi
9 38 (0.46%) VMware NSX
10 24 (0.29%) Firmware
11 18 (0.22%) IAG
11 18 (0.22%) NFS
12 11 (0.13%) Postfix
13 10 (0.12%) Ceph
13 10 (0.12%) Microsoft App-V
14 9 (0.11%) zsh
15 8 (0.097%) Virtual Servers
16 7 (0.085%) Squid
17 6 (0.072%) Apache ZooKeeper
17 6 (0.072%) EMC RecoverPoint
Systems Management
1 1,297 (15.67%) Kubernetes
2 457 (5.52%) Ansible
3 440 (5.31%) Microsoft Intune
4 262 (3.16%) Grafana
5 206 (2.49%) Prometheus
6 152 (1.84%) Single Sign-On
7 129 (1.56%) SCCM
8 63 (0.76%) Progress Chef
9 59 (0.71%) Argo
10 49 (0.59%) Puppet
11 38 (0.46%) Jamf Pro
12 36 (0.43%) FortiGate
13 33 (0.40%) SCOM
14 31 (0.37%) Active Directory Federation Services
15 25 (0.30%) Istio
16 23 (0.28%) vCenter Server
17 20 (0.24%) QRadar
18 18 (0.22%) CASB
18 18 (0.22%) Packer
19 17 (0.21%) HAProxy
Vendors
1 2,962 (35.78%) Microsoft
2 853 (10.30%) Databricks
3 416 (5.02%) ServiceNow
4 365 (4.41%) Google
5 360 (4.35%) VMware
6 341 (4.12%) Oracle
7 253 (3.06%) Cisco
8 221 (2.67%) SAP
9 216 (2.61%) Splunk
10 208 (2.51%) OpenAI
11 181 (2.19%) Salesforce
12 154 (1.86%) Palo Alto
13 153 (1.85%) CyberArk
14 138 (1.67%) Foundry
15 123 (1.49%) Dynatrace
16 94 (1.14%) Informatica
17 90 (1.09%) Zscaler
18 81 (0.98%) Fortinet
19 79 (0.95%) IBM
19 79 (0.95%) Okta