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 12 June 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
12 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 5 6 6
Rank change year-on-year +1 0 -2
Contract jobs citing Azure 7,719 4,499 5,956
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 15.44% 15.29% 13.65%
As % of the Cloud Services category 43.53% 40.43% 42.12%
Number of daily rates quoted 5,431 3,152 4,303
10th Percentile £363 £350 £350
25th Percentile £425 £425 £439
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £525 £538
Median % change year-on-year - -2.33% -2.27%
75th Percentile £625 £631 £638
90th Percentile £725 £738 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £500
% change year-on-year - - -4.76%
Number of hourly rates quoted 172 34 50
10th Percentile £19.25 £26.45 £17.80
25th Percentile £34.06 £29.50 £22.61
Median hourly rate £57.50 £49.25 £35.00
Median % change year-on-year +16.75% +40.71% -43.41%
75th Percentile £72.81 £78.40 £61.19
90th Percentile £93.94 £96.63 £65.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £57.50 £67.50 £51.25
% change year-on-year -14.81% +31.71% -14.97%

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 17,731 11,129 14,142
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 35.48% 37.81% 32.41%
Number of daily rates quoted 11,865 7,522 9,999
10th Percentile £325 £313 £300
25th Percentile £413 £413 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £510 £502 £525
Median % change year-on-year +1.59% -4.38% -4.55%
75th Percentile £613 £619 £635
90th Percentile £712 £725 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £495 £475 £489
% change year-on-year +4.21% -2.86% -2.20%
Number of hourly rates quoted 575 270 355
10th Percentile £16.00 £15.15 £14.00
25th Percentile £20.86 £18.13 £16.06
Median hourly rate £37.12 £28.55 £21.50
Median % change year-on-year +30.02% +32.79% -39.65%
75th Percentile £68.75 £47.50 £43.75
90th Percentile £82.25 £72.63 £70.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £37.50 £19.27 £19.17
% change year-on-year +94.60% +0.52% -29.26%

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 12 June 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 12 June 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 12 June 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 6,542 £525 - 2,225
London +1 3,488 £540 -1.82% 791
UK excluding London +3 3,281 £500 - 1,840
Work from Home -1 2,364 £525 +2.44% 1,117
North of England +5 939 £500 +5.26% 448
South East +3 834 £505 +1.00% 589
Midlands +1 529 £500 - 268
North West +4 472 £500 +5.26% 256
South West +5 415 £538 +4.88% 237
West Midlands +1 391 £500 -4.76% 174
Yorkshire +9 386 £500 +5.26% 116
Scotland +11 329 £525 +5.00% 81
East of England +6 156 £550 -5.17% 169
East Midlands +4 128 £475 +2.70% 94
Wales +1 106 £425 +6.25% 50
North East +2 93 £525 +5.00% 77
Northern Ireland +13 18 £531 +11.84% 37
Channel Islands +3 8 £450 +51.26%

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
1 375 (4.86%) SharePoint
2 228 (2.95%) Confluence
3 189 (2.45%) Apache Spark
3 189 (2.45%) Microsoft Exchange
4 118 (1.53%) Apache Airflow
5 107 (1.39%) Apache
6 39 (0.51%) SAS
7 27 (0.35%) IIS
8 19 (0.25%) CMS
9 17 (0.22%) SharePoint Server
10 15 (0.19%) OpenStack
10 15 (0.19%) Palantir Foundry
11 11 (0.14%) Appian
11 11 (0.14%) Mendix
12 10 (0.13%) ArcGIS
12 10 (0.13%) Camunda
12 10 (0.13%) nginx
13 8 (0.10%) Jupyter
13 8 (0.10%) Umbraco
13 8 (0.10%) WebSphere
Applications
1 105 (1.36%) Microsoft Excel
2 75 (0.97%) Microsoft Office
3 66 (0.86%) Microsoft Project
4 38 (0.49%) MS Visio
5 30 (0.39%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 26 (0.34%) Chatbot
7 11 (0.14%) AutoCAD
8 8 (0.10%) CPLEX
9 7 (0.091%) Revit
9 7 (0.091%) Spreadsheet
10 5 (0.065%) Adobe XD
10 5 (0.065%) PTC Creo
11 4 (0.052%) Acrobat
11 4 (0.052%) Notion
11 4 (0.052%) Trello
12 2 (0.026%) SOLIDWORKS
13 1 (0.013%) InDesign
13 1 (0.013%) PlantUML
13 1 (0.013%) Sketch
13 1 (0.013%) Weka
Business Applications
1 107 (1.39%) Dynamics CRM
2 76 (0.98%) SAP S/4HANA
3 22 (0.29%) Remedy ITSM
4 12 (0.16%) Aladdin
5 11 (0.14%) Maximo
6 10 (0.13%) Teamcenter
7 9 (0.12%) Payment Gateway
7 9 (0.12%) SAP MDG
8 8 (0.10%) Dynamics AX
9 7 (0.091%) Oracle EBS
9 7 (0.091%) Shopify
10 6 (0.078%) SimCorp Dimension
10 6 (0.078%) Unit4 Business World
11 5 (0.065%) Endur
11 5 (0.065%) NEC Housing
11 5 (0.065%) SAP MM
11 5 (0.065%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
12 4 (0.052%) Quorum
12 4 (0.052%) R3 Corda
12 4 (0.052%) Ripple
Cloud Services
1 2,652 (34.36%) AWS
2 1,571 (20.35%) Azure DevOps
3 1,298 (16.82%) GCP
4 999 (12.94%) Power Platform
5 938 (12.15%) Entra ID
6 787 (10.20%) Microsoft 365
7 709 (9.19%) GitHub
8 478 (6.19%) Azure Data Factory
9 432 (5.60%) GitHub Actions
10 381 (4.94%) Serverless
11 308 (3.99%) Azure Synapse Analytics
12 302 (3.91%) SaaS
13 282 (3.65%) Azure AKS
14 262 (3.39%) Power Automate
15 253 (3.28%) Dynamics 365
16 242 (3.14%) Azure Monitor
17 241 (3.12%) PaaS
18 230 (2.98%) PowerApps
19 202 (2.62%) Snowflake
20 199 (2.58%) Azure AI
Communications & Networking
1 449 (5.82%) Firewall
2 339 (4.39%) DNS
3 259 (3.36%) Network Security
4 250 (3.24%) VPN
5 223 (2.89%) WAN
6 177 (2.29%) DHCP
7 134 (1.74%) LAN
8 125 (1.62%) SD-WAN
9 98 (1.27%) TCP/IP
10 89 (1.15%) Wi-Fi
11 87 (1.13%) BGP
12 69 (0.89%) VLAN
13 68 (0.88%) OSPF
14 63 (0.82%) Kerberos
15 57 (0.74%) SSL
16 51 (0.66%) SAN
17 50 (0.65%) VXLAN
18 48 (0.62%) Wireless
19 43 (0.56%) IPsec
20 39 (0.51%) Internet
Database & Business Intelligence
1 661 (8.56%) Power BI
2 446 (5.78%) SQL Server
3 370 (4.79%) Data Warehouse
4 368 (4.77%) Data Lake
5 262 (3.39%) PostgreSQL
6 229 (2.97%) Azure SQL Database
7 203 (2.63%) NoSQL
8 180 (2.33%) Metadata
9 144 (1.87%) Delta Lake
10 118 (1.53%) Relational Database
11 116 (1.50%) Big Data
12 98 (1.27%) MongoDB
13 96 (1.24%) SQL Server Integration Services
14 75 (0.97%) Tableau
15 69 (0.89%) MySQL
16 68 (0.88%) Snowflake Schema
17 63 (0.82%) BigQuery
18 61 (0.79%) Oracle Database
19 52 (0.67%) Star Schema
20 49 (0.63%) Spark SQL
Development Applications
1 559 (7.24%) Git
2 557 (7.22%) JIRA
3 390 (5.05%) Jenkins
4 327 (4.24%) GitLab
5 126 (1.63%) Selenium
6 80 (1.04%) Postman
7 78 (1.01%) JMeter
8 66 (0.86%) Cucumber
9 61 (0.79%) JUnit
10 60 (0.78%) REST Assured
11 46 (0.60%) MLflow
11 46 (0.60%) SonarQube
12 44 (0.57%) Visual Studio
13 41 (0.53%) WebDriver
14 38 (0.49%) Cypress.io
15 35 (0.45%) Gatling
16 31 (0.40%) Maven
17 30 (0.39%) Artifactory
18 26 (0.34%) LoadRunner
19 25 (0.32%) NUnit
General
1 1,968 (25.50%) Social Skills
2 1,421 (18.41%) Finance
3 846 (10.96%) Public Sector
4 680 (8.81%) Analytical Skills
5 394 (5.10%) Banking
6 230 (2.98%) Documentation Skills
7 195 (2.53%) Legal
8 145 (1.88%) Inclusion and Diversity
9 130 (1.68%) Retail
10 90 (1.17%) Organisational Skills
11 75 (0.97%) Influencing Skills
12 70 (0.91%) Law
13 68 (0.88%) Investment Banking
13 68 (0.88%) Marketing
14 67 (0.87%) Financial Institution
15 64 (0.83%) Front Office
16 61 (0.79%) Telecoms
17 56 (0.73%) Presentation Skills
18 50 (0.65%) Manufacturing
19 45 (0.58%) Military
Job Titles
1 1,354 (17.54%) Architect
2 971 (12.58%) Developer
3 929 (12.04%) Senior
4 681 (8.82%) Azure Engineer
5 592 (7.67%) Lead
6 589 (7.63%) Data Engineer
7 475 (6.15%) Analyst
8 415 (5.38%) DevOps Engineer
9 371 (4.81%) Solutions Architect
10 322 (4.17%) Consultant
11 273 (3.54%) Cloud Engineer
12 267 (3.46%) Infrastructure Engineer
13 217 (2.81%) Azure Architect
14 211 (2.73%) Data Architect
15 202 (2.62%) Security Engineer
16 192 (2.49%) Platform Engineer
17 178 (2.31%) Azure DevOps Engineer
18 177 (2.29%) Technical Architect
19 169 (2.19%) Senior Developer
20 168 (2.18%) Business Analyst
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 619 (8.02%) .NET
2 548 (7.10%) REST
3 343 (4.44%) React
4 277 (3.59%) Kafka
5 259 (3.36%) PySpark
6 257 (3.33%) RESTful
7 223 (2.89%) OAuth
8 212 (2.75%) Node.js
9 208 (2.69%) Spring
10 186 (2.41%) AngularJS
11 176 (2.28%) LDAP
11 176 (2.28%) Spring Boot
12 160 (2.07%) JSON
13 147 (1.90%) SAML
14 145 (1.88%) OpenID
15 143 (1.85%) HTML
16 139 (1.80%) SOAP
17 134 (1.74%) Middleware
18 118 (1.53%) CSS
19 116 (1.50%) OAuth2
Miscellaneous
1 780 (10.10%) Cloud Native
2 324 (4.20%) Onboarding
3 297 (3.85%) Product Ownership
4 250 (3.24%) Data Centre
5 213 (2.76%) Hybrid Cloud
6 193 (2.50%) Distributed Systems
6 193 (2.50%) Legacy Systems
7 176 (2.28%) Enterprise Software
8 171 (2.22%) Security Posture
9 161 (2.09%) AI Agents
10 160 (2.07%) Public Cloud
11 107 (1.39%) Data Protection Act
12 105 (1.36%) Data Structures
13 91 (1.18%) Management Information System
14 88 (1.14%) Replication
15 79 (1.02%) Low-Code
15 79 (1.02%) PKI
16 75 (0.97%) Self-Motivation
17 70 (0.91%) Enterprise Cloud
17 70 (0.91%) Greenfield Project
Operating Systems
1 873 (11.31%) Windows
2 388 (5.03%) Linux
3 275 (3.56%) Windows Server
4 113 (1.46%) Windows 10
5 78 (1.01%) Apple iOS
6 72 (0.93%) Mac OS
6 72 (0.93%) Unix
7 67 (0.87%) Android
8 65 (0.84%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
8 65 (0.84%) VMS
9 32 (0.41%) Windows Server 2019
10 31 (0.40%) Ubuntu
11 18 (0.23%) Windows Server 2016
12 17 (0.22%) Windows Server 2012
13 14 (0.18%) Data ONTAP
14 12 (0.16%) CentOS
15 10 (0.13%) Debian
15 10 (0.13%) Windows 7
16 7 (0.091%) CoreOS
16 7 (0.091%) Rocky
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,869 (37.17%) DevOps
2 2,394 (31.01%) CI/CD
3 1,825 (23.64%) Agile
4 1,140 (14.77%) Infrastructure as Code
5 1,114 (14.43%) AI
6 1,108 (14.35%) Migration
7 1,074 (13.91%) Analytics
8 1,065 (13.80%) Problem-Solving
9 856 (11.09%) Data Modelling
10 843 (10.92%) Stakeholder Management
11 750 (9.72%) Continuous Improvement
12 724 (9.38%) Data Pipeline
13 715 (9.26%) Business Intelligence
14 701 (9.08%) Containerisation
15 693 (8.98%) Roadmaps
16 684 (8.86%) Microservices
17 681 (8.82%) ETL
18 667 (8.64%) Stakeholder Engagement
19 613 (7.94%) Test Automation
20 591 (7.66%) Data Engineering
Programming Languages
1 1,798 (23.29%) Python
2 1,567 (20.30%) SQL
3 762 (9.87%) PowerShell
4 638 (8.27%) Java
5 624 (8.08%) C#
6 457 (5.92%) JavaScript
7 300 (3.89%) TypeScript
8 256 (3.32%) Bash
9 254 (3.29%) Bicep
10 91 (1.18%) Data Analysis Expressions
11 88 (1.14%) T-SQL
12 82 (1.06%) Scala
13 77 (1.00%) Go
14 48 (0.62%) Kusto Query Language
15 46 (0.60%) Shell Script
16 40 (0.52%) R
17 39 (0.51%) PL/SQL
18 30 (0.39%) C++
19 29 (0.38%) Kotlin
20 16 (0.21%) Groovy
Qualifications
1 1,915 (24.81%) Security Cleared
2 1,621 (21.00%) SC Cleared
3 529 (6.85%) Degree
4 397 (5.14%) Azure Certification
5 233 (3.02%) CISSP
6 198 (2.57%) BPSS Clearance
7 187 (2.42%) Computer Science Degree
8 183 (2.37%) DV Cleared
9 182 (2.36%) Cisco Certification
10 169 (2.19%) Microsoft Certification
11 167 (2.16%) AWS Certification
12 129 (1.67%) CISM
13 85 (1.10%) CCNP
14 80 (1.04%) PMP
15 75 (0.97%) PMI Certification
16 72 (0.93%) (ISC)2 CCSP
17 62 (0.80%) ISTQB
18 55 (0.71%) TOGAF Certification
19 53 (0.69%) Master's Degree
20 48 (0.62%) CCSP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 527 (6.83%) Data Quality
2 394 (5.10%) QA
3 334 (4.33%) GDPR
4 285 (3.69%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 273 (3.54%) NIST
6 152 (1.97%) Accessibility
7 111 (1.44%) NCSC
8 97 (1.26%) SLA
9 80 (1.04%) PCI DSS
10 69 (0.89%) Cyber Essentials
11 65 (0.84%) Sarbanes-Oxley
12 58 (0.75%) GRC
13 55 (0.71%) WCAG
14 45 (0.58%) PMO
15 38 (0.49%) HIPAA
16 27 (0.35%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
17 26 (0.34%) SOC 2
18 25 (0.32%) NIST 800
19 18 (0.23%) California Consumer Privacy Act
20 17 (0.22%) Disclosure Scotland
System Software
1 934 (12.10%) Active Directory
2 797 (10.33%) Docker
3 223 (2.89%) VMware Infrastructure
4 135 (1.75%) Virtual Desktop
5 122 (1.58%) Hyper-V
6 117 (1.52%) Virtual Machines
7 71 (0.92%) vSphere
8 53 (0.69%) VMware ESXi
9 30 (0.39%) Firmware
10 28 (0.36%) VMware NSX
11 22 (0.29%) NFS
12 17 (0.22%) Postfix
13 10 (0.13%) Microsoft App-V
14 8 (0.10%) BitLocker
14 8 (0.10%) Varnish
15 6 (0.078%) Ceph
15 6 (0.078%) KVM
15 6 (0.078%) RACF
16 5 (0.065%) Oracle RAC
16 5 (0.065%) VMware Workstation
Systems Management
1 1,210 (15.68%) Terraform
2 1,087 (14.08%) Kubernetes
3 405 (5.25%) Microsoft Intune
4 358 (4.64%) Ansible
5 216 (2.80%) Grafana
6 188 (2.44%) Prometheus
7 163 (2.11%) Single Sign-On
8 106 (1.37%) SCCM
9 73 (0.95%) Active Directory Federation Services
10 43 (0.56%) Argo
10 43 (0.56%) Jamf Pro
11 41 (0.53%) FortiGate
12 38 (0.49%) Progress Chef
13 37 (0.48%) Puppet
14 34 (0.44%) Istio
15 24 (0.31%) vCenter Server
16 20 (0.26%) HAProxy
16 20 (0.26%) HP ALM
17 17 (0.22%) linkerd
18 16 (0.21%) Packer
Vendors
1 2,453 (31.78%) Microsoft
2 744 (9.64%) Databricks
3 333 (4.31%) ServiceNow
4 306 (3.96%) VMware
5 289 (3.74%) Google
6 283 (3.67%) Oracle
7 212 (2.75%) Cisco
7 212 (2.75%) SAP
8 189 (2.45%) OpenAI
9 158 (2.05%) Splunk
10 144 (1.87%) Palo Alto
11 140 (1.81%) CyberArk
12 131 (1.70%) Salesforce
13 117 (1.52%) Foundry
14 102 (1.32%) Okta
15 85 (1.10%) Dynatrace
16 81 (1.05%) Informatica
17 75 (0.97%) Zscaler
18 72 (0.93%) Citrix
19 67 (0.87%) Red Hat