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 25 March 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
25 Mar 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 6 6 6
Rank change year-on-year 0 0 -1
Contract jobs citing Azure 7,002 4,672 6,013
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 15.95% 16.06% 13.58%
As % of the Cloud Services category 43.00% 42.09% 41.58%
Number of daily rates quoted 4,976 3,332 4,335
10th Percentile £356 £350 £338
25th Percentile £425 £425 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £520 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -0.95% - -6.25%
75th Percentile £625 £638 £638
90th Percentile £714 £725 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £500
% change year-on-year - - -4.76%
Number of hourly rates quoted 122 43 66
10th Percentile £25.38 £22.50 £17.78
25th Percentile £47.00 £23.80 £22.13
Median hourly rate £57.50 £32.50 £46.12
Median % change year-on-year +76.92% -29.53% -16.15%
75th Percentile £68.75 £70.63 £59.95
90th Percentile £80.00 £79.74 £65.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £57.50 £32.00 £46.18
% change year-on-year +79.69% -30.71% -22.78%

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 16,284 11,101 14,460
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 37.10% 38.17% 32.66%
Number of daily rates quoted 11,111 7,773 10,237
10th Percentile £313 £313 £290
25th Percentile £413 £413 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £600 £625 £635
90th Percentile £700 £725 £725
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £478 £489
% change year-on-year -0.63% -2.25% -2.93%
Number of hourly rates quoted 453 212 358
10th Percentile £15.52 £15.30 £14.00
25th Percentile £21.00 £19.99 £16.06
Median hourly rate £37.50 £26.50 £21.00
Median % change year-on-year +41.51% +26.19% -18.64%
75th Percentile £63.75 £42.23 £40.75
90th Percentile £81.00 £74.88 £62.15
UK excluding London median hourly rate £44.31 £24.00 £17.72
% change year-on-year +84.60% +35.44% -19.45%

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 25 March 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 25 March 2026.

Hourly rate histogram for Azure in the UK

Azure
Top 17 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 25 March 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 5,934 £525 - 2,909
London +1 3,232 £540 -1.82% 1,004
UK excluding London +1 2,851 £500 - 2,332
Work from Home -1 2,146 £525 +1.55% 1,365
North of England +3 804 £488 - 604
South East 0 738 £500 -9.09% 685
Midlands -3 479 £500 - 369
North West +1 436 £475 -5.00% 303
West Midlands -1 356 £500 -4.76% 205
South West +6 349 £500 -4.76% 291
Yorkshire -1 323 £488 +8.33% 208
Scotland +6 293 £535 +12.53% 115
East of England +4 148 £550 -8.33% 207
East Midlands -2 115 £436 -8.21% 163
Wales -3 84 £400 -3.03% 73
North East -4 47 £525 +10.53% 97
Northern Ireland +2 14 £475 - 24

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
1 313 (4.47%) SharePoint
2 214 (3.06%) Microsoft Exchange
3 197 (2.81%) Confluence
4 185 (2.64%) Apache Spark
5 105 (1.50%) Apache
6 93 (1.33%) Apache Airflow
7 24 (0.34%) IIS
8 22 (0.31%) OpenStack
9 19 (0.27%) SAS
10 17 (0.24%) ArcGIS
10 17 (0.24%) CMS
11 15 (0.21%) Appian
11 15 (0.21%) Camunda
12 13 (0.19%) Mendix
13 11 (0.16%) HCL Notes
14 10 (0.14%) GeoServer
15 9 (0.13%) Jupyter
15 9 (0.13%) Palantir Foundry
16 8 (0.11%) Smallworld
17 7 (0.100%) Anypoint
Applications
1 124 (1.77%) Microsoft Excel
2 90 (1.29%) Microsoft Office
3 57 (0.81%) Microsoft Project
4 45 (0.64%) MS Visio
5 42 (0.60%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 16 (0.23%) Chatbot
7 8 (0.11%) Trello
8 5 (0.071%) Acrobat
8 5 (0.071%) PTC Creo
8 5 (0.071%) Spreadsheet
8 5 (0.071%) Weka
9 4 (0.057%) Adobe XD
10 2 (0.029%) CPLEX
10 2 (0.029%) SOLIDWORKS
11 1 (0.014%) Adobe Creative Suite
11 1 (0.014%) AutoCAD
11 1 (0.014%) InDesign
Business Applications
1 106 (1.51%) Dynamics CRM
2 77 (1.10%) SAP S/4HANA
3 12 (0.17%) Maximo
4 11 (0.16%) NEC Housing
5 10 (0.14%) Payment Gateway
6 8 (0.11%) Aladdin
7 7 (0.100%) NetSuite
7 7 (0.100%) Remedy ITSM
7 7 (0.100%) Teamcenter
8 6 (0.086%) Oracle EBS
8 6 (0.086%) SAP ERP
8 6 (0.086%) Workday HCM
9 5 (0.071%) Dynamics AX
9 5 (0.071%) Dynamics NAV
9 5 (0.071%) Endur
9 5 (0.071%) SAP MDG
10 4 (0.057%) Cloudability
10 4 (0.057%) Oracle FAH
10 4 (0.057%) Oracle Payables
10 4 (0.057%) ResourceLink
Cloud Services
1 2,428 (34.68%) AWS
2 1,462 (20.88%) Azure DevOps
3 1,338 (19.11%) GCP
4 932 (13.31%) Power Platform
5 842 (12.03%) Entra ID
6 773 (11.04%) Microsoft 365
7 732 (10.45%) GitHub
8 500 (7.14%) Azure Data Factory
9 426 (6.08%) GitHub Actions
10 414 (5.91%) Serverless
11 331 (4.73%) Azure Synapse Analytics
12 287 (4.10%) Dynamics 365
13 275 (3.93%) SaaS
14 262 (3.74%) Power Automate
15 254 (3.63%) Azure AKS
16 245 (3.50%) Azure Monitor
17 244 (3.48%) Azure Functions
18 226 (3.23%) PaaS
19 217 (3.10%) Azure Logic Apps
20 215 (3.07%) Snowflake
Communications & Networking
1 453 (6.47%) Firewall
2 298 (4.26%) DNS
3 252 (3.60%) VPN
4 234 (3.34%) Network Security
5 186 (2.66%) WAN
6 164 (2.34%) DHCP
7 130 (1.86%) LAN
8 95 (1.36%) TCP/IP
9 94 (1.34%) SD-WAN
10 93 (1.33%) Wi-Fi
11 73 (1.04%) VLAN
12 68 (0.97%) Kerberos
13 53 (0.76%) BGP
14 46 (0.66%) HTTP
14 46 (0.66%) OSPF
15 43 (0.61%) Wireless
16 37 (0.53%) SSL
17 36 (0.51%) SAN
18 32 (0.46%) Internet
18 32 (0.46%) MPLS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 639 (9.13%) Power BI
2 406 (5.80%) SQL Server
3 376 (5.37%) Data Warehouse
4 340 (4.86%) Data Lake
5 265 (3.78%) PostgreSQL
6 262 (3.74%) Azure SQL Database
7 205 (2.93%) NoSQL
8 169 (2.41%) Metadata
9 142 (2.03%) Delta Lake
10 118 (1.69%) Relational Database
11 110 (1.57%) Big Data
12 97 (1.39%) SQL Server Integration Services
13 90 (1.29%) MongoDB
14 82 (1.17%) Tableau
15 74 (1.06%) MySQL
16 67 (0.96%) Oracle Database
17 62 (0.89%) BigQuery
18 59 (0.84%) Snowflake Schema
19 55 (0.79%) Star Schema
20 49 (0.70%) Hadoop
Development Applications
1 535 (7.64%) Git
2 498 (7.11%) JIRA
3 381 (5.44%) Jenkins
4 278 (3.97%) GitLab
5 133 (1.90%) Selenium
6 87 (1.24%) Postman
7 79 (1.13%) JMeter
8 77 (1.10%) Cucumber
9 73 (1.04%) JUnit
10 52 (0.74%) MLflow
11 49 (0.70%) REST Assured
12 47 (0.67%) Visual Studio
13 46 (0.66%) Cypress.io
14 39 (0.56%) SonarQube
15 35 (0.50%) Artifactory
16 33 (0.47%) Oracle APEX
17 32 (0.46%) TestRail
18 31 (0.44%) SpecFlow
18 31 (0.44%) WebDriver
19 30 (0.43%) Gatling
General
1 2,002 (28.59%) Social Skills
2 1,266 (18.08%) Finance
3 835 (11.93%) Public Sector
4 692 (9.88%) Analytical Skills
5 380 (5.43%) Banking
6 218 (3.11%) Documentation Skills
7 166 (2.37%) Legal
8 111 (1.59%) Inclusion and Diversity
9 107 (1.53%) Influencing Skills
10 87 (1.24%) Retail
11 86 (1.23%) Presentation Skills
12 84 (1.20%) Organisational Skills
13 81 (1.16%) Marketing
14 73 (1.04%) Telecoms
15 68 (0.97%) Financial Institution
16 58 (0.83%) Law
17 55 (0.79%) Investment Banking
18 52 (0.74%) Front Office
19 48 (0.69%) Manufacturing
20 47 (0.67%) Local Government
Job Titles
1 1,183 (16.90%) Architect
2 964 (13.77%) Developer
3 815 (11.64%) Senior
4 604 (8.63%) Azure Engineer
5 569 (8.13%) Data Engineer
6 526 (7.51%) Lead
7 454 (6.48%) Analyst
8 344 (4.91%) DevOps Engineer
9 317 (4.53%) Solutions Architect
10 308 (4.40%) Consultant
11 191 (2.73%) Infrastructure Engineer
12 187 (2.67%) Cloud Engineer
13 177 (2.53%) Azure Architect
14 173 (2.47%) Security Engineer
15 161 (2.30%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
16 159 (2.27%) Platform Engineer
17 158 (2.26%) Senior Developer
18 156 (2.23%) Data Architect
19 140 (2.00%) Azure DevOps Engineer
20 139 (1.99%) Tester
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 557 (7.95%) .NET
2 482 (6.88%) REST
3 341 (4.87%) React
4 263 (3.76%) RESTful
5 262 (3.74%) Kafka
6 260 (3.71%) PySpark
7 250 (3.57%) Node.js
8 220 (3.14%) Spring
9 204 (2.91%) OAuth
10 202 (2.88%) AngularJS
11 179 (2.56%) Spring Boot
12 172 (2.46%) HTML
13 149 (2.13%) JSON
13 149 (2.13%) LDAP
14 148 (2.11%) CSS
15 134 (1.91%) PyTorch
16 131 (1.87%) Middleware
16 131 (1.87%) SOAP
17 123 (1.76%) SAML
18 122 (1.74%) TensorFlow
Miscellaneous
1 625 (8.93%) Cloud Native
2 274 (3.91%) Onboarding
3 264 (3.77%) Product Ownership
4 192 (2.74%) Hybrid Cloud
5 186 (2.66%) Data Centre
6 167 (2.39%) Security Posture
7 163 (2.33%) Legacy Systems
8 161 (2.30%) Enterprise Software
9 142 (2.03%) Distributed Systems
9 142 (2.03%) Public Cloud
10 113 (1.61%) AI Agents
11 90 (1.29%) Data Structures
12 87 (1.24%) Data Protection Act
13 83 (1.19%) Replication
14 76 (1.09%) Management Information System
15 73 (1.04%) Algorithms
16 66 (0.94%) Greenfield Project
16 66 (0.94%) Low-Code
17 65 (0.93%) PKI
18 61 (0.87%) NHS
Operating Systems
1 758 (10.83%) Windows
2 378 (5.40%) Linux
3 228 (3.26%) Windows Server
4 122 (1.74%) Windows 10
5 75 (1.07%) Unix
6 72 (1.03%) VMS
7 55 (0.79%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
8 43 (0.61%) Mac OS
9 37 (0.53%) Apple iOS
10 30 (0.43%) Android
11 23 (0.33%) Windows Server 2019
12 21 (0.30%) Windows Server 2016
13 19 (0.27%) Ubuntu
14 13 (0.19%) Windows Server 2012
15 10 (0.14%) Data ONTAP
16 6 (0.086%) CoreOS
16 6 (0.086%) Windows 7
17 5 (0.071%) AIX
17 5 (0.071%) CentOS
17 5 (0.071%) Solaris
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,634 (37.62%) DevOps
2 2,153 (30.75%) CI/CD
3 1,690 (24.14%) Agile
4 1,166 (16.65%) Problem-Solving
5 1,051 (15.01%) Analytics
6 975 (13.92%) AI
7 948 (13.54%) Infrastructure as Code
8 915 (13.07%) Migration
9 755 (10.78%) Data Modelling
10 725 (10.35%) Stakeholder Management
11 705 (10.07%) Business Intelligence
12 684 (9.77%) Containerisation
13 678 (9.68%) Continuous Improvement
14 647 (9.24%) Microservices
15 634 (9.05%) Data Pipeline
16 632 (9.03%) ETL
17 614 (8.77%) Machine Learning
18 593 (8.47%) Stakeholder Engagement
19 579 (8.27%) Data Engineering
20 572 (8.17%) Test Automation
Programming Languages
1 1,831 (26.15%) Python
2 1,561 (22.29%) SQL
3 749 (10.70%) PowerShell
4 611 (8.73%) C#
5 597 (8.53%) Java
6 496 (7.08%) JavaScript
7 298 (4.26%) TypeScript
8 259 (3.70%) Bash
9 214 (3.06%) Bicep
10 101 (1.44%) Scala
11 83 (1.19%) Data Analysis Expressions
12 80 (1.14%) Go
12 80 (1.14%) Kusto Query Language
13 77 (1.10%) PL/SQL
14 74 (1.06%) T-SQL
15 51 (0.73%) Shell Script
16 48 (0.69%) R
17 37 (0.53%) C++
18 27 (0.39%) PHP
19 25 (0.36%) Ruby
Qualifications
1 1,701 (24.29%) Security Cleared
2 1,410 (20.14%) SC Cleared
3 557 (7.95%) Degree
4 375 (5.36%) Azure Certification
5 222 (3.17%) Computer Science Degree
6 193 (2.76%) CISSP
7 163 (2.33%) Microsoft Certification
8 144 (2.06%) AWS Certification
9 143 (2.04%) BPSS Clearance
10 138 (1.97%) DV Cleared
11 135 (1.93%) Cisco Certification
12 120 (1.71%) CISM
13 90 (1.29%) Master's Degree
14 69 (0.99%) CCNP
15 64 (0.91%) TOGAF Certification
16 62 (0.89%) PMI Certification
16 62 (0.89%) PMP
17 61 (0.87%) ISTQB
18 47 (0.67%) (ISC)2 CCSP
19 35 (0.50%) CCNA
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 493 (7.04%) Data Quality
2 401 (5.73%) GDPR
3 385 (5.50%) QA
4 305 (4.36%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 253 (3.61%) NIST
6 135 (1.93%) Accessibility
7 103 (1.47%) NCSC
8 88 (1.26%) PCI DSS
9 67 (0.96%) Cyber Essentials
10 65 (0.93%) Sarbanes-Oxley
11 62 (0.89%) SLA
12 59 (0.84%) PMO
13 39 (0.56%) HIPAA
13 39 (0.56%) WCAG
14 37 (0.53%) GRC
15 28 (0.40%) SOC 2
16 27 (0.39%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
17 24 (0.34%) HMG Security Policy Framework
17 24 (0.34%) ISO 20022
18 23 (0.33%) NIST 800
System Software
1 883 (12.61%) Active Directory
2 835 (11.93%) Docker
3 208 (2.97%) VMware Infrastructure
4 107 (1.53%) Hyper-V
5 97 (1.39%) Virtual Machines
6 80 (1.14%) Virtual Desktop
7 79 (1.13%) vSphere
8 31 (0.44%) VMware NSX
9 28 (0.40%) VMware ESXi
10 20 (0.29%) Firmware
11 17 (0.24%) NFS
12 8 (0.11%) Postfix
13 7 (0.100%) Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services
14 6 (0.086%) BitLocker
14 6 (0.086%) GPFS
14 6 (0.086%) Lustre
14 6 (0.086%) Oracle RAC
14 6 (0.086%) Slurm Workload Manager
14 6 (0.086%) Snort
15 5 (0.071%) RACF
Systems Management
1 1,096 (15.65%) Terraform
2 1,036 (14.80%) Kubernetes
3 365 (5.21%) Microsoft Intune
4 332 (4.74%) Ansible
5 191 (2.73%) Grafana
6 164 (2.34%) Prometheus
7 163 (2.33%) Single Sign-On
8 125 (1.79%) SCCM
9 73 (1.04%) Active Directory Federation Services
10 50 (0.71%) Argo
11 34 (0.49%) Istio
12 31 (0.44%) Puppet
13 29 (0.41%) FortiGate
14 28 (0.40%) Progress Chef
15 26 (0.37%) vRealize
16 25 (0.36%) vCenter Server
17 24 (0.34%) Jamf Pro
18 21 (0.30%) HP ALM
19 16 (0.23%) Nmap
20 15 (0.21%) Kibana
Vendors
1 2,234 (31.91%) Microsoft
2 700 (10.00%) Databricks
3 339 (4.84%) Google
4 331 (4.73%) Oracle
5 284 (4.06%) VMware
6 281 (4.01%) ServiceNow
7 202 (2.88%) SAP
8 181 (2.58%) Cisco
9 178 (2.54%) OpenAI
10 157 (2.24%) Splunk
11 133 (1.90%) CyberArk
12 115 (1.64%) Palo Alto
13 112 (1.60%) Foundry
14 92 (1.31%) Salesforce
15 86 (1.23%) Okta
16 80 (1.14%) Red Hat
17 77 (1.10%) Informatica
18 72 (1.03%) BeyondTrust
18 72 (1.03%) IBM
19 69 (0.99%) Citrix