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

6 months to
29 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 7 6 6
Rank change year-on-year -1 0 -1
Contract jobs citing Azure 8,249 4,889 5,493
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 15.10% 15.00% 14.50%
As % of the Cloud Services category 43.60% 39.47% 42.25%
Number of daily rates quoted 5,764 3,346 3,737
10th Percentile £363 £350 £343
25th Percentile £447 £415 £430
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £518 £530
Median % change year-on-year +1.40% -2.31% -3.64%
75th Percentile £638 £625 £638
90th Percentile £725 £723 £725
UK excluding London median daily rate £513 £500 £500
% change year-on-year +2.50% - -4.76%
Number of hourly rates quoted 183 43 34
10th Percentile £18.25 £15.50 £20.34
25th Percentile £22.16 £22.44 £23.80
Median hourly rate £45.20 £34.48 £35.00
Median % change year-on-year +31.09% -1.49% -24.21%
75th Percentile £79.50 £67.25 £59.38
90th Percentile £100.00 £88.50 £83.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £45.20 £25.89 £46.18
% change year-on-year +74.62% -43.95% -

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 18,921 12,386 13,002
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 34.64% 37.99% 34.32%
Number of daily rates quoted 12,563 8,276 8,646
10th Percentile £325 £308 £313
25th Percentile £425 £409 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -0.94%
75th Percentile £625 £613 £638
90th Percentile £713 £720 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 613 291 185
10th Percentile £15.32 £15.50 £16.00
25th Percentile £17.75 £18.87 £21.37
Median hourly rate £30.00 £26.30 £33.54
Median % change year-on-year +14.07% -21.59% +1.64%
75th Percentile £67.50 £52.50 £64.73
90th Percentile £79.80 £67.00 £70.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £30.00 £19.14 £33.00
% change year-on-year +56.78% -42.02% +34.83%

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 29 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 29 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 29 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 -1 7,020 £526 +0.19% 6,317
London 0 3,679 £550 +0.92% 2,976
UK excluding London +1 3,490 £513 +2.50% 3,724
Work from Home -2 2,496 £528 +5.60% 3,034
North of England +8 992 £500 +5.26% 1,072
South East +1 900 £525 +5.53% 785
Midlands +1 644 £493 -4.37% 595
West Midlands +2 492 £488 -11.36% 356
North West +6 486 £500 +5.26% 580
Yorkshire +4 423 £500 +2.56% 368
South West +2 411 £550 +9.45% 426
Scotland +2 287 £520 +4.00% 312
East of England +2 196 £505 +1.00% 291
East Midlands +3 147 £500 +8.11% 239
North East +3 98 £516 +3.25% 131
Wales 0 85 £450 - 124
Northern Ireland +15 14 £650 - 157
Channel Islands -5 5 £500 -21.88%

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
1 469 (5.69%) SharePoint
2 261 (3.16%) Confluence
3 194 (2.35%) Microsoft Exchange
4 184 (2.23%) Apache Spark
5 160 (1.94%) Apache Airflow
6 113 (1.37%) Apache
7 42 (0.51%) SAS
8 30 (0.36%) IIS
9 27 (0.33%) SharePoint Server
10 23 (0.28%) CMS
11 15 (0.18%) ArcGIS
11 15 (0.18%) nginx
11 15 (0.18%) Palantir Foundry
12 14 (0.17%) OpenStack
13 9 (0.11%) Umbraco
14 8 (0.097%) Apache Superset
15 7 (0.085%) Mendix
16 6 (0.073%) Ethereum
16 6 (0.073%) Hyperledger
16 6 (0.073%) Traefik
Applications
1 118 (1.43%) Microsoft Excel
2 89 (1.08%) Microsoft Office
3 56 (0.68%) Microsoft Project
4 47 (0.57%) MS Visio
5 42 (0.51%) Chatbot
6 39 (0.47%) Microsoft PowerPoint
7 13 (0.16%) AutoCAD
8 8 (0.097%) Revit
8 8 (0.097%) Trello
9 7 (0.085%) CPLEX
10 5 (0.061%) Notion
11 4 (0.048%) Spreadsheet
12 3 (0.036%) 1Password
12 3 (0.036%) Houdini
12 3 (0.036%) Mingle
12 3 (0.036%) NUKE
13 2 (0.024%) Adobe Creative Suite
13 2 (0.024%) Adobe XD
13 2 (0.024%) Windchill
14 1 (0.012%) Mozilla Thunderbird
Business Applications
1 131 (1.59%) Dynamics CRM
2 76 (0.92%) SAP S/4HANA
3 26 (0.32%) Remedy ITSM
4 14 (0.17%) Aladdin
4 14 (0.17%) SAP MDG
5 13 (0.16%) Workday HCM
6 11 (0.13%) Payment Gateway
7 10 (0.12%) Dynamics AX
7 10 (0.12%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
8 9 (0.11%) Oracle EBS
9 8 (0.097%) Magento
10 7 (0.085%) Cloudability
10 7 (0.085%) Shopify
11 6 (0.073%) R3 Corda
11 6 (0.073%) Temenos T24
12 5 (0.061%) Dynamics NAV
12 5 (0.061%) FLEXCUBE
12 5 (0.061%) Maximo
13 4 (0.048%) SAP Oil and Gas
13 4 (0.048%) SimCorp Dimension
Cloud Services
1 2,960 (35.88%) AWS
2 1,733 (21.01%) Azure DevOps
3 1,453 (17.61%) GCP
4 1,117 (13.54%) Entra ID
5 1,072 (13.00%) Power Platform
6 876 (10.62%) Microsoft 365
7 847 (10.27%) GitHub
8 487 (5.90%) GitHub Actions
9 453 (5.49%) Azure Data Factory
10 374 (4.53%) Serverless
11 359 (4.35%) SaaS
12 313 (3.79%) Azure Monitor
13 305 (3.70%) Power Automate
14 299 (3.62%) Dynamics 365
15 294 (3.56%) Azure Synapse Analytics
16 290 (3.52%) Snowflake
17 287 (3.48%) Azure AKS
18 285 (3.45%) PowerApps
19 251 (3.04%) Microsoft Copilot
20 244 (2.96%) Azure AI
Communications & Networking
1 511 (6.19%) Firewall
2 413 (5.01%) DNS
3 314 (3.81%) VPN
4 287 (3.48%) Network Security
5 230 (2.79%) DHCP
6 180 (2.18%) WAN
7 165 (2.00%) TCP/IP
8 106 (1.29%) LAN
9 105 (1.27%) BGP
10 97 (1.18%) SD-WAN
11 84 (1.02%) OSPF
11 84 (1.02%) VLAN
12 81 (0.98%) Wi-Fi
13 73 (0.88%) SSL
14 66 (0.80%) Wireless
15 61 (0.74%) SAN
16 45 (0.55%) HTTP
16 45 (0.55%) IPsec
17 42 (0.51%) VXLAN
18 40 (0.48%) Internet
Database & Business Intelligence
1 694 (8.41%) Power BI
2 464 (5.62%) SQL Server
3 400 (4.85%) Data Warehouse
4 388 (4.70%) Data Lake
5 287 (3.48%) PostgreSQL
6 249 (3.02%) Metadata
7 211 (2.56%) NoSQL
8 192 (2.33%) Azure SQL Database
9 141 (1.71%) Relational Database
10 125 (1.52%) Delta Lake
11 114 (1.38%) SQL Server Integration Services
12 102 (1.24%) MongoDB
13 101 (1.22%) MySQL
14 90 (1.09%) Big Data
15 71 (0.86%) Amazon Redshift
16 68 (0.82%) Redis
17 62 (0.75%) BigQuery
18 59 (0.72%) Oracle Database
18 59 (0.72%) Tableau
19 56 (0.68%) Amazon RDS
Development Applications
1 741 (8.98%) Git
2 598 (7.25%) JIRA
3 460 (5.58%) Jenkins
4 369 (4.47%) GitLab
5 135 (1.64%) Selenium
6 86 (1.04%) Postman
7 64 (0.78%) Cypress.io
8 61 (0.74%) JUnit
9 60 (0.73%) Cucumber
10 56 (0.68%) Claude Code
10 56 (0.68%) JMeter
11 53 (0.64%) Maven
12 52 (0.63%) SonarQube
13 50 (0.61%) Visual Studio
14 49 (0.59%) Gradle
15 47 (0.57%) REST Assured
16 37 (0.45%) WebDriver
17 34 (0.41%) LoadRunner
18 32 (0.39%) MLflow
19 31 (0.38%) Gatling
General
1 2,276 (27.59%) Social Skills
2 1,572 (19.06%) Finance
3 951 (11.53%) Public Sector
4 799 (9.69%) Analytical Skills
5 492 (5.96%) Banking
6 224 (2.72%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 215 (2.61%) Retail
8 207 (2.51%) Documentation Skills
9 167 (2.02%) Legal
10 112 (1.36%) Influencing Skills
11 111 (1.35%) Manufacturing
12 93 (1.13%) Investment Banking
13 92 (1.12%) Telecoms
14 89 (1.08%) Marketing
15 87 (1.05%) Aerospace
16 83 (1.01%) Organisational Skills
17 78 (0.95%) Military
18 68 (0.82%) Law
19 60 (0.73%) Local Government
20 58 (0.70%) Financial Institution
Job Titles
1 1,581 (19.17%) Architect
2 1,046 (12.68%) Senior
3 1,005 (12.18%) Developer
4 721 (8.74%) Azure Engineer
5 683 (8.28%) Lead
6 587 (7.12%) Data Engineer
7 489 (5.93%) Solutions Architect
8 467 (5.66%) Analyst
9 456 (5.53%) DevOps Engineer
10 383 (4.64%) Cloud Engineer
11 317 (3.84%) Infrastructure Engineer
12 314 (3.81%) Consultant
13 267 (3.24%) Data Architect
14 236 (2.86%) Platform Engineer
15 220 (2.67%) Azure Architect
16 208 (2.52%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
17 204 (2.47%) Azure DevOps Engineer
18 203 (2.46%) Technical Architect
19 198 (2.40%) Security Engineer
20 180 (2.18%) Security Architect
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 1,406 (17.04%) Terraform
2 745 (9.03%) REST
3 617 (7.48%) .NET
4 393 (4.76%) Kafka
5 304 (3.69%) React
6 297 (3.60%) RESTful
7 273 (3.31%) OAuth
8 264 (3.20%) PySpark
9 236 (2.86%) JSON
10 189 (2.29%) Spring
11 180 (2.18%) Spring Boot
12 163 (1.98%) OAuth2
13 162 (1.96%) OpenID
14 156 (1.89%) HTML
15 153 (1.85%) Node.js
16 149 (1.81%) Middleware
16 149 (1.81%) SAML
17 146 (1.77%) SOAP
18 144 (1.75%) AngularJS
19 131 (1.59%) Playwright
Miscellaneous
1 930 (11.27%) Cloud Native
2 425 (5.15%) Onboarding
3 389 (4.72%) Product Ownership
4 316 (3.83%) Enterprise Software
5 312 (3.78%) AI Agents
6 286 (3.47%) Hybrid Cloud
7 274 (3.32%) Distributed Systems
8 252 (3.05%) Data Centre
9 231 (2.80%) Legacy Systems
10 183 (2.22%) Security Posture
11 178 (2.16%) Management Information System
12 149 (1.81%) Data Structures
13 148 (1.79%) Public Cloud
14 123 (1.49%) PKI
15 112 (1.36%) Enterprise Cloud
16 110 (1.33%) Data Protection Act
17 100 (1.21%) Self-Motivation
18 96 (1.16%) Replication
19 88 (1.07%) CMDB
20 87 (1.05%) Low-Code
Operating Systems
1 986 (11.95%) Windows
2 523 (6.34%) Linux
3 374 (4.53%) Windows Server
4 149 (1.81%) Windows 10
5 91 (1.10%) Android
6 89 (1.08%) Unix
7 86 (1.04%) Apple iOS
8 83 (1.01%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
9 75 (0.91%) Mac OS
10 53 (0.64%) Ubuntu
11 49 (0.59%) VMS
12 27 (0.33%) CentOS
13 19 (0.23%) Windows Server 2019
14 17 (0.21%) Windows Server 2016
15 13 (0.16%) Windows Server 2012
16 9 (0.11%) Amazon Linux
17 7 (0.085%) Debian
18 6 (0.073%) AIX
18 6 (0.073%) Windows 7
19 4 (0.048%) Alpine Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 3,032 (36.76%) DevOps
2 2,669 (32.36%) CI/CD
3 2,064 (25.02%) Agile
4 1,492 (18.09%) Stakeholder Management
5 1,426 (17.29%) AI
6 1,413 (17.13%) Infrastructure as Code
7 1,232 (14.94%) Migration
8 1,125 (13.64%) Problem-Solving
9 1,116 (13.53%) Analytics
10 949 (11.50%) Continuous Improvement
11 901 (10.92%) Data Modelling
12 851 (10.32%) Roadmaps
13 788 (9.55%) Stakeholder Engagement
14 782 (9.48%) Containerisation
15 757 (9.18%) Business Intelligence
16 752 (9.12%) Technical Leadership
17 738 (8.95%) Test Automation
18 727 (8.81%) Data Pipeline
19 725 (8.79%) Microservices
20 655 (7.94%) Data Engineering
Programming Languages
1 1,895 (22.97%) Python
2 1,576 (19.11%) SQL
3 890 (10.79%) PowerShell
4 684 (8.29%) Java
5 600 (7.27%) C#
6 506 (6.13%) JavaScript
7 410 (4.97%) Bash
8 363 (4.40%) Bicep
9 306 (3.71%) TypeScript
10 101 (1.22%) Data Analysis Expressions
11 92 (1.12%) T-SQL
12 81 (0.98%) Go
13 66 (0.80%) Scala
14 62 (0.75%) Shell Script
15 58 (0.70%) Kusto Query Language
16 42 (0.51%) PL/SQL
17 36 (0.44%) R
18 32 (0.39%) Groovy
18 32 (0.39%) Kotlin
19 31 (0.38%) C++
Qualifications
1 2,153 (26.10%) Security Cleared
2 1,735 (21.03%) SC Cleared
3 560 (6.79%) Degree
4 474 (5.75%) Azure Certification
5 309 (3.75%) DV Cleared
6 273 (3.31%) BPSS Clearance
7 270 (3.27%) CISSP
8 249 (3.02%) Microsoft Certification
9 214 (2.59%) AWS Certification
10 195 (2.36%) Cisco Certification
11 181 (2.19%) Computer Science Degree
12 138 (1.67%) CISM
13 92 (1.12%) (ISC)2 CCSP
14 90 (1.09%) PMI Certification
15 85 (1.03%) PMP
16 84 (1.02%) CCNP
17 66 (0.80%) ISTQB
18 64 (0.78%) CCSP
19 63 (0.76%) Master's Degree
20 51 (0.62%) TOGAF Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 608 (7.37%) Data Quality
2 469 (5.69%) QA
3 303 (3.67%) ISO/IEC 27001
4 293 (3.55%) NIST
5 287 (3.48%) GDPR
6 207 (2.51%) Accessibility
7 120 (1.45%) NCSC
8 108 (1.31%) SLA
9 86 (1.04%) GRC
10 83 (1.01%) WCAG
11 79 (0.96%) Cyber Essentials
12 74 (0.90%) PCI DSS
13 52 (0.63%) Sarbanes-Oxley
14 49 (0.59%) PMO
15 44 (0.53%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
16 33 (0.40%) SOC 2
17 27 (0.33%) ISO 20022
18 26 (0.32%) HIPAA
19 22 (0.27%) Actionable Recommendations
20 20 (0.24%) COBIT
System Software
1 1,022 (12.39%) Active Directory
2 916 (11.10%) Docker
3 241 (2.92%) VMware Infrastructure
4 145 (1.76%) Virtual Machines
5 142 (1.72%) Virtual Desktop
6 125 (1.52%) Hyper-V
7 70 (0.85%) vSphere
8 48 (0.58%) VMware ESXi
9 31 (0.38%) VMware NSX
10 21 (0.25%) Firmware
11 17 (0.21%) IAG
12 16 (0.19%) NFS
13 11 (0.13%) Postfix
14 10 (0.12%) Microsoft App-V
14 10 (0.12%) Virtual Servers
15 9 (0.11%) zsh
16 8 (0.097%) BitLocker
17 7 (0.085%) Ceph
18 6 (0.073%) Apache ZooKeeper
19 5 (0.061%) Dovecot
Systems Management
1 1,301 (15.77%) Kubernetes
2 453 (5.49%) Ansible
3 445 (5.39%) Microsoft Intune
4 263 (3.19%) Grafana
5 207 (2.51%) Prometheus
6 147 (1.78%) Single Sign-On
7 133 (1.61%) SCCM
8 59 (0.72%) Argo
8 59 (0.72%) Progress Chef
9 46 (0.56%) Puppet
10 37 (0.45%) FortiGate
11 36 (0.44%) Jamf Pro
12 34 (0.41%) SCOM
13 30 (0.36%) Istio
14 25 (0.30%) Active Directory Federation Services
15 20 (0.24%) CASB
16 18 (0.22%) Packer
16 18 (0.22%) QRadar
16 18 (0.22%) vCenter Server
17 16 (0.19%) HP ALM
Vendors
1 2,985 (36.19%) Microsoft
2 857 (10.39%) Databricks
3 413 (5.01%) ServiceNow
4 392 (4.75%) Google
5 353 (4.28%) VMware
6 345 (4.18%) Oracle
7 239 (2.90%) Cisco
8 233 (2.82%) Splunk
9 219 (2.65%) SAP
10 218 (2.64%) OpenAI
11 190 (2.30%) Salesforce
12 150 (1.82%) CyberArk
13 147 (1.78%) Palo Alto
14 134 (1.62%) Foundry
15 129 (1.56%) Dynatrace
16 93 (1.13%) Zscaler
17 89 (1.08%) IBM
18 81 (0.98%) Informatica
18 81 (0.98%) Okta
19 79 (0.96%) Fortinet