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 5 December 2025, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
5 Dec 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 6 5 5
Rank change year-on-year -1 0 0
Contract jobs citing Azure 5,688 5,428 6,726
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 15.58% 15.03% 14.95%
As % of the Cloud Services category 40.91% 41.92% 42.54%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,983 3,634 4,927
10th Percentile £350 £340 £350
25th Percentile £420 £425 £435
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £520 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year -0.95% -4.55% -2.22%
75th Percentile £625 £637 £650
90th Percentile £700 £720 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £516
% change year-on-year - -3.15% -1.67%
Number of hourly rates quoted 58 49 82
10th Percentile £16.03 £20.23 £17.75
25th Percentile £25.60 £23.80 £25.19
Median hourly rate £45.73 £31.00 £46.18
Median % change year-on-year +47.52% -32.87% +31.94%
75th Percentile £77.44 £60.00 £66.00
90th Percentile £95.00 £75.00 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £56.50 £30.00 £46.18
% change year-on-year +88.33% -35.04% -5.76%

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 13,903 12,948 15,811
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 38.09% 35.84% 35.14%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,469 8,560 11,316
10th Percentile £306 £313 £300
25th Percentile £406 £419 £419
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £606 £638 £638
90th Percentile £700 £738 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £500 £500
% change year-on-year -5.00% - -0.40%
Number of hourly rates quoted 322 184 295
10th Percentile £15.50 £17.66 £14.29
25th Percentile £18.87 £21.46 £17.72
Median hourly rate £26.30 £30.00 £25.38
Median % change year-on-year -12.33% +18.20% +13.66%
75th Percentile £52.00 £53.75 £58.75
90th Percentile £78.75 £70.00 £78.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £23.00 £27.24 £21.05
% change year-on-year -15.56% +29.39% +9.27%

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 5 December 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 5 December 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 5 December 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 4,842 £520 -3.26% 4,389
London +1 2,592 £538 -2.27% 1,128
UK excluding London 0 2,361 £500 - 4,087
Work from Home -1 1,829 £510 -2.86% 2,411
North of England -2 609 £475 -5.00% 938
South East -4 584 £500 -4.76% 1,282
Midlands -1 436 £525 - 627
West Midlands 0 326 £550 +4.76% 366
South West +6 315 £503 -1.47% 420
North West -1 298 £450 -10.00% 492
Yorkshire -3 283 £482 -3.60% 343
Scotland +1 254 £513 +10.33% 263
East of England +1 154 £500 +18.34% 419
East Midlands -2 107 £450 -10.00% 237
Wales -1 63 £463 -7.50% 140
North East -12 32 £515 +13.44% 113
Channel Islands - 7 £640 - 2
Northern Ireland -2 6 - - 53

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
1 275 (4.83%) SharePoint
2 194 (3.41%) Microsoft Exchange
3 144 (2.53%) Confluence
4 124 (2.18%) Apache Spark
5 83 (1.46%) Apache
6 82 (1.44%) Apache Airflow
7 27 (0.47%) SAS
8 26 (0.46%) CMS
9 22 (0.39%) OpenStack
10 17 (0.30%) WebLogic
11 15 (0.26%) nginx
12 14 (0.25%) IIS
13 12 (0.21%) Anypoint
14 10 (0.18%) Mule
14 10 (0.18%) Skype for Business
14 10 (0.18%) SugarCRM
15 9 (0.16%) ArcGIS
15 9 (0.16%) Jupyter
16 8 (0.14%) Camunda
16 8 (0.14%) GeoServer
Applications
1 130 (2.29%) Microsoft Excel
2 101 (1.78%) Microsoft Office
3 42 (0.74%) MS Visio
4 40 (0.70%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 36 (0.63%) Microsoft Project
6 17 (0.30%) Chatbot
7 11 (0.19%) Trello
8 10 (0.18%) Mozilla Thunderbird
9 5 (0.088%) Weka
10 2 (0.035%) Adobe Creative Suite
10 2 (0.035%) Windchill
11 1 (0.018%) Acrobat
11 1 (0.018%) FrameMaker
11 1 (0.018%) Revit
11 1 (0.018%) Siemens NX
11 1 (0.018%) SOLIDWORKS
11 1 (0.018%) Spreadsheet
Business Applications
1 95 (1.67%) Dynamics CRM
2 55 (0.97%) SAP S/4HANA
3 18 (0.32%) Aladdin
4 16 (0.28%) Payment Gateway
5 11 (0.19%) Salesforce CRM
6 9 (0.16%) Dynamics AX
6 9 (0.16%) Endur
6 9 (0.16%) Oracle ERP
6 9 (0.16%) Workday HCM
7 8 (0.14%) NetSuite
7 8 (0.14%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
8 6 (0.11%) NEC Housing
8 6 (0.11%) SAP ERP
8 6 (0.11%) Teamcenter
9 5 (0.088%) Cloudability
9 5 (0.088%) Oracle EBS
10 4 (0.070%) Fidessa
10 4 (0.070%) Oracle 11i
10 4 (0.070%) Primavera
10 4 (0.070%) SAP MDG
Cloud Services
1 2,071 (36.41%) AWS
2 1,120 (19.69%) GCP
3 1,119 (19.67%) Azure DevOps
4 732 (12.87%) Power Platform
5 648 (11.39%) Microsoft 365
6 641 (11.27%) Entra ID
7 537 (9.44%) GitHub
8 362 (6.36%) Azure Data Factory
9 322 (5.66%) GitHub Actions
10 311 (5.47%) Serverless
11 256 (4.50%) Dynamics 365
12 249 (4.38%) Azure Synapse Analytics
13 247 (4.34%) SaaS
14 228 (4.01%) Power Automate
15 227 (3.99%) Azure AKS
16 220 (3.87%) Snowflake
17 209 (3.67%) PowerApps
18 202 (3.55%) Azure Monitor
19 197 (3.46%) PaaS
20 195 (3.43%) Azure Sentinel
Communications & Networking
1 412 (7.24%) Firewall
2 213 (3.74%) DNS
3 172 (3.02%) VPN
4 148 (2.60%) Network Security
5 115 (2.02%) WAN
6 108 (1.90%) DHCP
7 87 (1.53%) TCP/IP
8 74 (1.30%) LAN
9 72 (1.27%) HTTP
10 61 (1.07%) Wi-Fi
11 59 (1.04%) SD-WAN
12 56 (0.98%) VLAN
13 38 (0.67%) BGP
13 38 (0.67%) SAN
14 35 (0.62%) Internet
15 33 (0.58%) MPLS
16 31 (0.55%) Wireless
17 27 (0.47%) SSL
18 26 (0.46%) OSPF
19 21 (0.37%) VSAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 512 (9.00%) Power BI
2 310 (5.45%) SQL Server
3 266 (4.68%) Data Warehouse
4 250 (4.40%) PostgreSQL
5 243 (4.27%) Data Lake
6 186 (3.27%) Azure SQL Database
7 183 (3.22%) NoSQL
8 125 (2.20%) Relational Database
9 122 (2.14%) Metadata
10 104 (1.83%) MongoDB
11 81 (1.42%) MySQL
12 77 (1.35%) Big Data
13 76 (1.34%) Delta Lake
14 69 (1.21%) Tableau
15 63 (1.11%) SQL Server Integration Services
16 61 (1.07%) BigQuery
17 56 (0.98%) Oracle Database
18 54 (0.95%) Redis
19 43 (0.76%) Amazon RDS
20 42 (0.74%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 492 (8.65%) Git
2 417 (7.33%) JIRA
3 338 (5.94%) Jenkins
4 227 (3.99%) GitLab
5 96 (1.69%) Selenium
6 89 (1.56%) Postman
7 70 (1.23%) SonarQube
8 67 (1.18%) JUnit
9 49 (0.86%) Cucumber
10 47 (0.83%) JMeter
11 46 (0.81%) Bitbucket
11 46 (0.81%) Cypress.io
12 37 (0.65%) Oracle APEX
13 36 (0.63%) Maven
14 32 (0.56%) CircleCI
14 32 (0.56%) Visual Studio
15 30 (0.53%) MLflow
15 30 (0.53%) SpecFlow
16 29 (0.51%) Mockito
17 28 (0.49%) ERwin
General
1 1,813 (31.87%) Social Skills
2 1,079 (18.97%) Finance
3 673 (11.83%) Public Sector
4 529 (9.30%) Analytical Skills
5 379 (6.66%) Banking
6 193 (3.39%) Documentation Skills
7 129 (2.27%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 97 (1.71%) Influencing Skills
9 94 (1.65%) Marketing
10 93 (1.64%) Investment Banking
11 89 (1.56%) Legal
12 88 (1.55%) Retail
13 79 (1.39%) Presentation Skills
14 75 (1.32%) Telecoms
15 68 (1.20%) Manufacturing
16 54 (0.95%) Law
17 49 (0.86%) Financial Institution
18 48 (0.84%) Organisational Skills
19 47 (0.83%) Front Office
20 42 (0.74%) Local Government
Job Titles
1 913 (16.05%) Developer
2 912 (16.03%) Architect
3 577 (10.14%) Senior
4 423 (7.44%) Analyst
5 419 (7.37%) Azure Engineer
6 400 (7.03%) Lead
7 377 (6.63%) Data Engineer
8 317 (5.57%) Solutions Architect
9 284 (4.99%) DevOps Engineer
10 228 (4.01%) Consultant
11 172 (3.02%) Security Engineer
12 163 (2.87%) Senior Developer
13 162 (2.85%) Infrastructure Engineer
14 152 (2.67%) Azure Architect
15 141 (2.48%) Cloud Engineer
16 135 (2.37%) Platform Engineer
17 117 (2.06%) Data Architect
18 116 (2.04%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
18 116 (2.04%) Java Developer
19 113 (1.99%) Software Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 470 (8.26%) .NET
2 351 (6.17%) REST
3 259 (4.55%) RESTful
4 253 (4.45%) React
5 221 (3.89%) Kafka
6 200 (3.52%) Node.js
7 199 (3.50%) Spring
8 178 (3.13%) OAuth
9 170 (2.99%) HTML
9 170 (2.99%) Spring Boot
10 169 (2.97%) PySpark
11 167 (2.94%) AngularJS
12 160 (2.81%) JSON
13 137 (2.41%) CSS
14 134 (2.36%) SOAP
15 122 (2.14%) PyTorch
16 110 (1.93%) TensorFlow
17 103 (1.81%) SAML
18 101 (1.78%) Middleware
18 101 (1.78%) XML
Miscellaneous
1 461 (8.10%) Cloud Native
2 203 (3.57%) Product Ownership
3 195 (3.43%) Onboarding
4 162 (2.85%) Hybrid Cloud
5 145 (2.55%) Legacy Systems
6 131 (2.30%) Data Centre
7 124 (2.18%) Security Posture
8 119 (2.09%) Distributed Systems
9 108 (1.90%) Enterprise Software
10 96 (1.69%) Public Cloud
11 77 (1.35%) Algorithms
12 76 (1.34%) Data Protection Act
12 76 (1.34%) Management Information System
13 69 (1.21%) Greenfield Project
14 63 (1.11%) AI Agents
14 63 (1.11%) Replication
15 61 (1.07%) Low-Code
16 55 (0.97%) Data Structures
17 53 (0.93%) PKI
18 52 (0.91%) CMDB
Operating Systems
1 638 (11.22%) Windows
2 388 (6.82%) Linux
3 194 (3.41%) Windows Server
4 110 (1.93%) Unix
5 96 (1.69%) Windows 10
6 51 (0.90%) Android
7 47 (0.83%) Apple iOS
7 47 (0.83%) VMS
8 37 (0.65%) Mac OS
9 27 (0.47%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
10 22 (0.39%) Ubuntu
11 14 (0.25%) Windows Server 2016
12 11 (0.19%) Solaris
12 11 (0.19%) Windows Server 2019
13 10 (0.18%) Amazon Linux
14 9 (0.16%) CentOS
15 6 (0.11%) AIX
15 6 (0.11%) Mac OS X
15 6 (0.11%) Windows Server 2012
16 4 (0.070%) Windows 7
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,061 (36.23%) DevOps
2 1,671 (29.38%) CI/CD
3 1,522 (26.76%) Agile
4 1,022 (17.97%) Problem-Solving
5 764 (13.43%) Analytics
6 745 (13.10%) Infrastructure as Code
7 673 (11.83%) AI
8 670 (11.78%) Migration
9 584 (10.27%) Business Intelligence
10 579 (10.18%) Stakeholder Management
11 576 (10.13%) Containerisation
12 506 (8.90%) Microservices
13 492 (8.65%) Data Modelling
14 488 (8.58%) Machine Learning
15 476 (8.37%) Test Automation
16 459 (8.07%) Stakeholder Engagement
17 451 (7.93%) Continuous Improvement
18 419 (7.37%) Scrum
19 411 (7.23%) Cybersecurity
20 405 (7.12%) ETL
Programming Languages
1 1,455 (25.58%) Python
2 1,215 (21.36%) SQL
3 590 (10.37%) PowerShell
4 565 (9.93%) Java
5 508 (8.93%) C#
6 435 (7.65%) JavaScript
7 275 (4.83%) Bash
8 239 (4.20%) TypeScript
9 156 (2.74%) Bicep
10 92 (1.62%) Go
11 75 (1.32%) Kusto Query Language
12 72 (1.27%) Scala
13 68 (1.20%) PL/SQL
14 59 (1.04%) R
15 53 (0.93%) T-SQL
16 46 (0.81%) Data Analysis Expressions
17 40 (0.70%) C++
18 38 (0.67%) Shell Script
19 32 (0.56%) PHP
20 31 (0.55%) Perl
Qualifications
1 1,195 (21.01%) Security Cleared
2 973 (17.11%) SC Cleared
3 492 (8.65%) Degree
4 334 (5.87%) Azure Certification
5 182 (3.20%) Microsoft Certification
6 174 (3.06%) CISSP
7 171 (3.01%) Computer Science Degree
8 141 (2.48%) AWS Certification
9 130 (2.29%) DV Cleared
10 100 (1.76%) CISM
11 94 (1.65%) Cisco Certification
12 86 (1.51%) Master's Degree
13 85 (1.49%) BPSS Clearance
14 47 (0.83%) ISTQB
15 44 (0.77%) CCNP
16 39 (0.69%) MCP
17 37 (0.65%) PMI Certification
18 35 (0.62%) TOGAF Certification
19 32 (0.56%) (ISC)2 CCSP
19 32 (0.56%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 357 (6.28%) GDPR
2 326 (5.73%) ISO/IEC 27001
3 320 (5.63%) QA
4 268 (4.71%) Data Quality
5 259 (4.55%) NIST
6 129 (2.27%) Accessibility
7 81 (1.42%) PCI DSS
8 76 (1.34%) NCSC
9 53 (0.93%) Cyber Essentials
10 50 (0.88%) HIPAA
11 37 (0.65%) SOC 2
12 35 (0.62%) SLA
13 34 (0.60%) Sarbanes-Oxley
14 32 (0.56%) WCAG
15 29 (0.51%) GRC
16 28 (0.49%) EU AI Act
17 27 (0.47%) PMO
18 25 (0.44%) PSD2
19 22 (0.39%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
20 21 (0.37%) COBIT
System Software
1 724 (12.73%) Docker
2 689 (12.11%) Active Directory
3 171 (3.01%) VMware Infrastructure
4 74 (1.30%) Hyper-V
5 72 (1.27%) Virtual Machines
6 63 (1.11%) Virtual Desktop
7 48 (0.84%) vSphere
8 23 (0.40%) VMware NSX
9 16 (0.28%) Squid
10 13 (0.23%) DFS Replication
10 13 (0.23%) Slurm Workload Manager
11 11 (0.19%) VMware ESXi
12 10 (0.18%) Dovecot
12 10 (0.18%) Postfix
13 9 (0.16%) NFS
13 9 (0.16%) Oracle RAC
14 8 (0.14%) Firmware
14 8 (0.14%) KVM
14 8 (0.14%) Snort
14 8 (0.14%) zsh
Systems Management
1 850 (14.94%) Terraform
2 813 (14.29%) Kubernetes
3 307 (5.40%) Ansible
4 299 (5.26%) Microsoft Intune
5 136 (2.39%) Single Sign-On
6 135 (2.37%) SCCM
7 131 (2.30%) Grafana
8 127 (2.23%) Prometheus
9 38 (0.67%) Argo
10 35 (0.62%) Puppet
11 33 (0.58%) Active Directory Federation Services
12 27 (0.47%) Nessus
13 24 (0.42%) Kibana
14 21 (0.37%) NetBackup
14 21 (0.37%) Progress Chef
15 20 (0.35%) vRealize
16 19 (0.33%) Oracle RMAN
17 17 (0.30%) Nmap
18 16 (0.28%) QRadar
18 16 (0.28%) SCOM
Vendors
1 1,835 (32.26%) Microsoft
2 532 (9.35%) Databricks
3 340 (5.98%) Oracle
4 285 (5.01%) Google
5 231 (4.06%) ServiceNow
6 228 (4.01%) VMware
7 163 (2.87%) Cisco
8 157 (2.76%) SAP
9 148 (2.60%) Splunk
10 124 (2.18%) Salesforce
11 120 (2.11%) OpenAI
12 87 (1.53%) Palo Alto
13 86 (1.51%) CyberArk
14 81 (1.42%) Citrix
15 61 (1.07%) Red Hat
16 60 (1.05%) Foundry
17 56 (0.98%) IBM
18 55 (0.97%) F5
19 54 (0.95%) Dynatrace
20 52 (0.91%) Okta