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 20 November 2025, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
20 Nov 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 6 5 5
Rank change year-on-year -1 0 0
Contract jobs citing Azure 5,590 5,389 6,893
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 15.62% 14.77% 14.99%
As % of the Cloud Services category 40.66% 41.79% 42.59%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,881 3,607 5,052
10th Percentile £350 £338 £350
25th Percentile £420 £425 £431
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £520 £525 £545
Median % change year-on-year -0.95% -3.67% -3.11%
75th Percentile £625 £638 £650
90th Percentile £713 £725 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £519
% change year-on-year - -3.61% -1.19%
Number of hourly rates quoted 60 44 87
10th Percentile £16.27 £20.05 £17.75
25th Percentile £26.00 £23.80 £25.88
Median hourly rate £45.23 £30.50 £46.18
Median % change year-on-year +48.30% -33.95% +14.02%
75th Percentile £78.13 £60.19 £68.00
90th Percentile £95.00 £76.75 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.75 £31.00 £46.18
% change year-on-year +112.10% -32.87% +8.02%

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 13,747 12,895 16,186
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 38.41% 35.34% 35.20%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,304 8,504 11,577
10th Percentile £306 £313 £300
25th Percentile £406 £419 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £613 £638 £638
90th Percentile £711 £738 £731
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £500 £500
% change year-on-year -5.00% - -
Number of hourly rates quoted 341 174 301
10th Percentile £15.50 £18.74 £14.50
25th Percentile £18.87 £23.59 £18.00
Median hourly rate £26.00 £32.75 £30.00
Median % change year-on-year -20.61% +9.17% +36.36%
75th Percentile £51.00 £58.56 £61.88
90th Percentile £78.75 £70.00 £78.17
UK excluding London median hourly rate £22.50 £30.00 £22.00
% change year-on-year -25.00% +36.36% +17.33%

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 20 November 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 20 November 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 20 November 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 4,765 £522 -2.88% 5,248
London +1 2,564 £543 -1.36% 2,372
UK excluding London 0 2,317 £500 - 3,455
Work from Home 0 1,832 £511 -2.62% 2,919
North of England -1 591 £475 -5.00% 820
South East -4 559 £500 -4.76% 1,071
Midlands -2 430 £525 - 540
South West +7 314 £500 - 383
West Midlands +2 313 £550 +2.33% 362
North West -1 288 £465 -7.00% 489
Yorkshire -3 275 £489 -2.25% 237
Scotland +4 252 £500 +11.11% 228
East of England +1 154 £500 +25.00% 299
East Midlands -2 114 £450 -10.00% 177
Wales +1 67 £450 -14.29% 103
North East -9 32 £515 +15.21% 98
Channel Islands - 7 £640 -
Northern Ireland -8 6 - - 56

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
1 257 (4.60%) SharePoint
2 187 (3.35%) Microsoft Exchange
3 142 (2.54%) Confluence
4 125 (2.24%) Apache Spark
5 87 (1.56%) Apache
6 84 (1.50%) Apache Airflow
7 29 (0.52%) CMS
8 27 (0.48%) SAS
9 22 (0.39%) OpenStack
10 19 (0.34%) nginx
11 17 (0.30%) WebLogic
12 12 (0.21%) Anypoint
13 10 (0.18%) IIS
13 10 (0.18%) Jupyter
13 10 (0.18%) Mule
13 10 (0.18%) Skype for Business
13 10 (0.18%) SugarCRM
14 9 (0.16%) WebSphere
15 8 (0.14%) GeoServer
16 7 (0.13%) Exchange Server 2013
Applications
1 125 (2.24%) Microsoft Excel
2 88 (1.57%) Microsoft Office
3 38 (0.68%) MS Visio
4 35 (0.63%) Microsoft Project
5 34 (0.61%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 16 (0.29%) Chatbot
7 10 (0.18%) Mozilla Thunderbird
8 8 (0.14%) Trello
9 5 (0.089%) Weka
10 3 (0.054%) Spreadsheet
11 2 (0.036%) Adobe Creative Suite
11 2 (0.036%) Windchill
12 1 (0.018%) Acrobat
12 1 (0.018%) FrameMaker
12 1 (0.018%) Revit
12 1 (0.018%) Siemens NX
Business Applications
1 101 (1.81%) Dynamics CRM
2 53 (0.95%) SAP S/4HANA
3 19 (0.34%) Aladdin
4 16 (0.29%) Payment Gateway
5 14 (0.25%) Endur
6 11 (0.20%) Salesforce CRM
7 9 (0.16%) Dynamics AX
7 9 (0.16%) Workday HCM
8 8 (0.14%) Oracle ERP
8 8 (0.14%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
9 7 (0.13%) Oracle EBS
10 6 (0.11%) Maximo
10 6 (0.11%) SAP ERP
10 6 (0.11%) Teamcenter
11 5 (0.089%) NetSuite
11 5 (0.089%) Remedy ITSM
12 4 (0.072%) Cloudability
12 4 (0.072%) Fidessa
12 4 (0.072%) Primavera
12 4 (0.072%) thinkFolio
Cloud Services
1 2,060 (36.85%) AWS
2 1,111 (19.87%) Azure DevOps
3 1,095 (19.59%) GCP
4 705 (12.61%) Power Platform
5 639 (11.43%) Microsoft 365
6 625 (11.18%) Entra ID
7 534 (9.55%) GitHub
8 347 (6.21%) Azure Data Factory
9 312 (5.58%) GitHub Actions
10 288 (5.15%) Serverless
11 248 (4.44%) SaaS
12 246 (4.40%) Dynamics 365
13 245 (4.38%) Azure Synapse Analytics
14 219 (3.92%) Azure AKS
15 209 (3.74%) Power Automate
16 207 (3.70%) Snowflake
17 198 (3.54%) PaaS
18 193 (3.45%) Azure Monitor
19 192 (3.43%) Azure Sentinel
20 191 (3.42%) PowerApps
Communications & Networking
1 411 (7.35%) Firewall
2 210 (3.76%) DNS
3 175 (3.13%) VPN
4 152 (2.72%) Network Security
5 116 (2.08%) WAN
6 105 (1.88%) DHCP
7 87 (1.56%) TCP/IP
8 76 (1.36%) LAN
9 69 (1.23%) HTTP
10 62 (1.11%) VLAN
11 61 (1.09%) Wi-Fi
12 56 (1.00%) SD-WAN
13 43 (0.77%) BGP
14 41 (0.73%) SAN
15 36 (0.64%) Internet
16 33 (0.59%) MPLS
17 31 (0.55%) OSPF
17 31 (0.55%) SSL
18 28 (0.50%) Wireless
19 20 (0.36%) SSH
Database & Business Intelligence
1 484 (8.66%) Power BI
2 313 (5.60%) SQL Server
3 261 (4.67%) Data Warehouse
4 253 (4.53%) PostgreSQL
5 251 (4.49%) Data Lake
6 184 (3.29%) NoSQL
7 180 (3.22%) Azure SQL Database
8 131 (2.34%) Relational Database
9 112 (2.00%) Metadata
10 110 (1.97%) MongoDB
11 89 (1.59%) MySQL
12 83 (1.48%) Big Data
13 67 (1.20%) Delta Lake
14 64 (1.14%) Tableau
15 63 (1.13%) SQL Server Integration Services
16 62 (1.11%) BigQuery
17 55 (0.98%) Redis
18 46 (0.82%) Oracle Database
19 44 (0.79%) Amazon RDS
20 39 (0.70%) Hadoop
Development Applications
1 489 (8.75%) Git
2 421 (7.53%) JIRA
3 327 (5.85%) Jenkins
4 224 (4.01%) GitLab
5 97 (1.74%) Selenium
6 86 (1.54%) Postman
7 84 (1.50%) SonarQube
8 66 (1.18%) JUnit
9 47 (0.84%) Cypress.io
9 47 (0.84%) JMeter
10 46 (0.82%) Bitbucket
11 45 (0.81%) Cucumber
12 44 (0.79%) Maven
13 37 (0.66%) Oracle APEX
13 37 (0.66%) Visual Studio
14 32 (0.57%) CircleCI
14 32 (0.57%) ERwin
14 32 (0.57%) Gradle
15 30 (0.54%) SpecFlow
16 29 (0.52%) Mockito
General
1 1,802 (32.24%) Social Skills
2 1,062 (19.00%) Finance
3 649 (11.61%) Public Sector
4 538 (9.62%) Analytical Skills
5 373 (6.67%) Banking
6 201 (3.60%) Documentation Skills
7 129 (2.31%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 100 (1.79%) Retail
9 98 (1.75%) Investment Banking
10 96 (1.72%) Marketing
11 90 (1.61%) Influencing Skills
12 87 (1.56%) Legal
13 78 (1.40%) Presentation Skills
14 71 (1.27%) Telecoms
15 67 (1.20%) Manufacturing
16 60 (1.07%) Law
17 50 (0.89%) Local Government
18 46 (0.82%) Front Office
19 43 (0.77%) Financial Institution
19 43 (0.77%) Organisational Skills
Job Titles
1 923 (16.51%) Developer
2 907 (16.23%) Architect
3 558 (9.98%) Senior
4 425 (7.60%) Analyst
5 410 (7.33%) Azure Engineer
6 388 (6.94%) Lead
7 351 (6.28%) Data Engineer
8 312 (5.58%) Solutions Architect
9 272 (4.87%) DevOps Engineer
10 215 (3.85%) Consultant
11 183 (3.27%) Security Engineer
12 175 (3.13%) Senior Developer
13 162 (2.90%) Infrastructure Engineer
14 161 (2.88%) Azure Architect
15 137 (2.45%) Cloud Engineer
16 133 (2.38%) Platform Engineer
17 123 (2.20%) Data Architect
18 115 (2.06%) Software Engineer
19 114 (2.04%) Business Analyst
20 113 (2.02%) Support Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 472 (8.44%) .NET
2 353 (6.31%) REST
3 268 (4.79%) RESTful
4 257 (4.60%) React
5 207 (3.70%) Kafka
6 205 (3.67%) Node.js
7 191 (3.42%) HTML
8 189 (3.38%) Spring
9 178 (3.18%) OAuth
10 168 (3.01%) AngularJS
11 162 (2.90%) Spring Boot
12 158 (2.83%) JSON
13 152 (2.72%) CSS
14 147 (2.63%) PySpark
15 135 (2.42%) SOAP
16 109 (1.95%) PyTorch
17 104 (1.86%) XML
18 102 (1.82%) Web Services
19 100 (1.79%) SAML
20 99 (1.77%) TensorFlow
Miscellaneous
1 429 (7.67%) Cloud Native
2 196 (3.51%) Product Ownership
3 185 (3.31%) Onboarding
4 156 (2.79%) Hybrid Cloud
5 144 (2.58%) Legacy Systems
6 133 (2.38%) Data Centre
7 118 (2.11%) Security Posture
8 109 (1.95%) Distributed Systems
8 109 (1.95%) Enterprise Software
9 100 (1.79%) Public Cloud
10 83 (1.48%) Algorithms
11 77 (1.38%) Data Protection Act
11 77 (1.38%) Management Information System
12 69 (1.23%) Greenfield Project
13 57 (1.02%) Replication
14 54 (0.97%) AI Agents
14 54 (0.97%) Data Structures
14 54 (0.97%) Low-Code
15 52 (0.93%) PKI
16 49 (0.88%) NHS
Operating Systems
1 645 (11.54%) Windows
2 376 (6.73%) Linux
3 185 (3.31%) Windows Server
4 109 (1.95%) Unix
5 95 (1.70%) Windows 10
6 60 (1.07%) Android
7 52 (0.93%) Apple iOS
8 46 (0.82%) VMS
9 38 (0.68%) Mac OS
10 27 (0.48%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
11 20 (0.36%) Ubuntu
12 12 (0.21%) Solaris
13 10 (0.18%) Amazon Linux
13 10 (0.18%) Windows Server 2016
13 10 (0.18%) Windows Server 2019
14 9 (0.16%) CentOS
14 9 (0.16%) Windows Server 2012
15 6 (0.11%) Mac OS X
16 5 (0.089%) Windows 7
17 4 (0.072%) AIX
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,028 (36.28%) DevOps
2 1,636 (29.27%) CI/CD
3 1,505 (26.92%) Agile
4 1,029 (18.41%) Problem-Solving
5 756 (13.52%) Infrastructure as Code
6 744 (13.31%) Analytics
7 656 (11.74%) Migration
8 626 (11.20%) AI
9 551 (9.86%) Business Intelligence
10 540 (9.66%) Stakeholder Management
11 537 (9.61%) Containerisation
12 484 (8.66%) Test Automation
13 479 (8.57%) Microservices
14 471 (8.43%) Data Modelling
14 471 (8.43%) Machine Learning
15 441 (7.89%) Stakeholder Engagement
16 437 (7.82%) Continuous Improvement
17 435 (7.78%) Cybersecurity
18 429 (7.67%) Scrum
19 393 (7.03%) ETL
Programming Languages
1 1,424 (25.47%) Python
2 1,211 (21.66%) SQL
3 594 (10.63%) PowerShell
4 564 (10.09%) Java
5 508 (9.09%) C#
6 455 (8.14%) JavaScript
7 286 (5.12%) Bash
8 244 (4.36%) TypeScript
9 152 (2.72%) Bicep
10 95 (1.70%) Go
11 74 (1.32%) Kusto Query Language
12 66 (1.18%) Scala
13 59 (1.06%) PL/SQL
14 58 (1.04%) R
15 52 (0.93%) T-SQL
16 48 (0.86%) C++
17 41 (0.73%) Data Analysis Expressions
18 36 (0.64%) Shell Script
19 32 (0.57%) Perl
20 30 (0.54%) Groovy
Qualifications
1 1,154 (20.64%) Security Cleared
2 938 (16.78%) SC Cleared
3 481 (8.60%) Degree
4 332 (5.94%) Azure Certification
5 186 (3.33%) CISSP
6 182 (3.26%) Microsoft Certification
7 170 (3.04%) Computer Science Degree
8 141 (2.52%) AWS Certification
9 135 (2.42%) DV Cleared
10 103 (1.84%) CISM
11 97 (1.74%) Cisco Certification
12 85 (1.52%) BPSS Clearance
13 83 (1.48%) Master's Degree
14 48 (0.86%) ISTQB
15 45 (0.81%) CCNP
16 39 (0.70%) OSCP
17 36 (0.64%) PMI Certification
18 34 (0.61%) (ISC)2 CCSP
19 33 (0.59%) MCP
20 32 (0.57%) TOGAF Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 348 (6.23%) GDPR
2 325 (5.81%) ISO/IEC 27001
3 312 (5.58%) QA
4 262 (4.69%) NIST
5 247 (4.42%) Data Quality
6 142 (2.54%) Accessibility
7 81 (1.45%) NCSC
8 73 (1.31%) PCI DSS
9 55 (0.98%) Cyber Essentials
10 54 (0.97%) HIPAA
11 38 (0.68%) SOC 2
12 36 (0.64%) SLA
13 31 (0.55%) Sarbanes-Oxley
13 31 (0.55%) WCAG
14 28 (0.50%) EU AI Act
15 27 (0.48%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
16 25 (0.45%) GRC
17 24 (0.43%) PSD2
18 21 (0.38%) NIST 800
18 21 (0.38%) PMO
System Software
1 697 (12.47%) Docker
2 686 (12.27%) Active Directory
3 167 (2.99%) VMware Infrastructure
4 75 (1.34%) Hyper-V
5 70 (1.25%) Virtual Machines
6 62 (1.11%) Virtual Desktop
7 49 (0.88%) vSphere
8 25 (0.45%) VMware NSX
9 15 (0.27%) Squid
10 14 (0.25%) VMware ESXi
11 13 (0.23%) DFS Replication
11 13 (0.23%) Slurm Workload Manager
12 10 (0.18%) Dovecot
12 10 (0.18%) Firmware
12 10 (0.18%) Postfix
12 10 (0.18%) zsh
13 8 (0.14%) KVM
13 8 (0.14%) NFS
13 8 (0.14%) Oracle RAC
14 7 (0.13%) Snort
Systems Management
1 824 (14.74%) Terraform
2 781 (13.97%) Kubernetes
3 302 (5.40%) Microsoft Intune
4 296 (5.30%) Ansible
5 143 (2.56%) Single Sign-On
6 129 (2.31%) SCCM
7 126 (2.25%) Grafana
8 122 (2.18%) Prometheus
9 40 (0.72%) Argo
10 33 (0.59%) Puppet
11 31 (0.55%) Active Directory Federation Services
12 27 (0.48%) Nessus
13 23 (0.41%) Kibana
14 21 (0.38%) Nmap
15 20 (0.36%) NetBackup
16 19 (0.34%) Oracle RMAN
17 18 (0.32%) Progress Chef
18 17 (0.30%) QRadar
18 17 (0.30%) vRealize
19 16 (0.29%) Podman
Vendors
1 1,791 (32.04%) Microsoft
2 490 (8.77%) Databricks
3 321 (5.74%) Oracle
4 271 (4.85%) Google
5 225 (4.03%) VMware
6 211 (3.77%) ServiceNow
7 171 (3.06%) Cisco
8 153 (2.74%) SAP
9 137 (2.45%) Splunk
10 126 (2.25%) Salesforce
11 107 (1.91%) OpenAI
12 90 (1.61%) Palo Alto
13 84 (1.50%) Citrix
14 82 (1.47%) CyberArk
15 60 (1.07%) Red Hat
16 59 (1.06%) F5
16 59 (1.06%) IBM
16 59 (1.06%) Okta
17 56 (1.00%) Foundry
18 51 (0.91%) Dynatrace