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

6 months to
13 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 5 6 6
Rank change year-on-year +1 0 -2
Contract jobs citing Azure 7,712 4,498 5,964
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 15.42% 15.24% 13.66%
As % of the Cloud Services category 43.47% 40.27% 42.12%
Number of daily rates quoted 5,424 3,151 4,304
10th Percentile £363 £350 £350
25th Percentile £425 £425 £440
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 173 34 51
10th Percentile £19.25 £26.45 £17.80
25th Percentile £31.25 £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 £72.50 £78.40 £60.78
90th Percentile £93.50 £96.63 £65.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £57.50 £67.50 £52.50
% change year-on-year -14.81% +28.57% -12.90%

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 17,740 11,169 14,158
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 35.46% 37.85% 32.42%
Number of daily rates quoted 11,861 7,555 9,988
10th Percentile £325 £313 £300
25th Percentile £413 £413 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £510 £503 £525
Median % change year-on-year +1.49% -4.29% -4.55%
75th Percentile £613 £619 £634
90th Percentile £712 £725 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £495 £475 £490
% change year-on-year +4.21% -3.06% -2.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 580 270 359
10th Percentile £16.00 £15.15 £14.00
25th Percentile £20.80 £18.13 £16.06
Median hourly rate £36.86 £28.55 £21.64
Median % change year-on-year +29.09% +31.93% -39.26%
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 £20.00
% change year-on-year +94.60% -3.65% -26.87%

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 13 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 13 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 13 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 6,543 £525 - 2,488
London +1 3,485 £540 -1.82% 935
UK excluding London +3 3,282 £500 - 1,977
Work from Home -1 2,364 £525 +2.44% 1,285
North of England +5 938 £500 +5.26% 483
South East +3 832 £505 +1.00% 610
Midlands +1 529 £500 - 283
North West +5 475 £500 +4.17% 275
South West +7 419 £538 +4.88% 257
West Midlands +1 392 £500 -4.76% 179
Yorkshire +8 381 £500 +5.26% 129
Scotland +11 326 £525 +5.00% 101
East of England +7 159 £550 -2.65% 177
East Midlands +5 127 £475 +2.70% 104
Wales +1 106 £425 +6.25% 54
North East +5 94 £525 +5.00% 80
Northern Ireland +13 18 £531 +11.84% 50
Channel Islands +4 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
1 374 (4.85%) SharePoint
2 230 (2.98%) Confluence
3 190 (2.46%) Microsoft Exchange
4 185 (2.40%) Apache Spark
5 118 (1.53%) Apache Airflow
6 106 (1.37%) Apache
7 40 (0.52%) SAS
8 27 (0.35%) IIS
9 19 (0.25%) CMS
10 17 (0.22%) SharePoint Server
11 15 (0.19%) OpenStack
11 15 (0.19%) Palantir Foundry
12 11 (0.14%) Mendix
13 10 (0.13%) Appian
13 10 (0.13%) ArcGIS
13 10 (0.13%) Camunda
13 10 (0.13%) nginx
14 8 (0.10%) HCL Notes
14 8 (0.10%) Umbraco
14 8 (0.10%) WebSphere
Applications
1 105 (1.36%) Microsoft Excel
2 74 (0.96%) Microsoft Office
3 66 (0.86%) Microsoft Project
4 38 (0.49%) MS Visio
5 29 (0.38%) 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 77 (1.00%) SAP S/4HANA
3 23 (0.30%) 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%) Shopify
10 6 (0.078%) Oracle EBS
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 2,655 (34.43%) AWS
2 1,577 (20.45%) Azure DevOps
3 1,289 (16.71%) GCP
4 1,001 (12.98%) Power Platform
5 939 (12.18%) Entra ID
6 784 (10.17%) Microsoft 365
7 711 (9.22%) GitHub
8 476 (6.17%) Azure Data Factory
9 431 (5.59%) GitHub Actions
10 383 (4.97%) Serverless
11 309 (4.01%) Azure Synapse Analytics
12 295 (3.83%) SaaS
13 281 (3.64%) Azure AKS
14 263 (3.41%) Power Automate
15 252 (3.27%) Dynamics 365
16 243 (3.15%) Azure Monitor
17 241 (3.13%) PaaS
18 230 (2.98%) PowerApps
19 206 (2.67%) Snowflake
20 200 (2.59%) Azure AI
Communications & Networking
1 452 (5.86%) Firewall
2 339 (4.40%) DNS
3 261 (3.38%) Network Security
4 251 (3.25%) VPN
5 224 (2.90%) WAN
6 177 (2.30%) DHCP
7 134 (1.74%) LAN
8 125 (1.62%) SD-WAN
9 99 (1.28%) TCP/IP
10 90 (1.17%) Wi-Fi
11 88 (1.14%) BGP
12 70 (0.91%) VLAN
13 69 (0.89%) OSPF
14 60 (0.78%) Kerberos
15 57 (0.74%) SSL
16 51 (0.66%) SAN
17 50 (0.65%) VXLAN
18 49 (0.64%) Wireless
19 45 (0.58%) IPsec
20 39 (0.51%) Internet
Database & Business Intelligence
1 663 (8.60%) Power BI
2 440 (5.71%) SQL Server
3 374 (4.85%) Data Lake
4 372 (4.82%) Data Warehouse
5 267 (3.46%) PostgreSQL
6 226 (2.93%) Azure SQL Database
7 200 (2.59%) NoSQL
8 184 (2.39%) Metadata
9 144 (1.87%) Delta Lake
10 122 (1.58%) Relational Database
11 116 (1.50%) Big Data
12 99 (1.28%) MongoDB
13 95 (1.23%) SQL Server Integration Services
14 76 (0.99%) Tableau
15 72 (0.93%) Snowflake Schema
16 66 (0.86%) MySQL
17 61 (0.79%) BigQuery
17 61 (0.79%) Oracle Database
18 54 (0.70%) Star Schema
19 50 (0.65%) Spark SQL
Development Applications
1 559 (7.25%) JIRA
2 558 (7.24%) Git
3 387 (5.02%) Jenkins
4 323 (4.19%) GitLab
5 121 (1.57%) Selenium
6 78 (1.01%) JMeter
7 74 (0.96%) Postman
8 63 (0.82%) Cucumber
9 60 (0.78%) JUnit
10 57 (0.74%) REST Assured
11 47 (0.61%) SonarQube
12 46 (0.60%) MLflow
13 44 (0.57%) Visual Studio
14 40 (0.52%) WebDriver
15 38 (0.49%) Cypress.io
16 36 (0.47%) Gatling
17 31 (0.40%) Maven
18 30 (0.39%) Artifactory
19 27 (0.35%) LoadRunner
20 25 (0.32%) NUnit
General
1 1,967 (25.51%) Social Skills
2 1,427 (18.50%) Finance
3 845 (10.96%) Public Sector
4 689 (8.93%) Analytical Skills
5 396 (5.13%) Banking
6 231 (3.00%) Documentation Skills
7 196 (2.54%) Legal
8 149 (1.93%) Inclusion and Diversity
9 133 (1.72%) Retail
10 90 (1.17%) Organisational Skills
11 75 (0.97%) Influencing Skills
12 71 (0.92%) 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 60 (0.78%) Telecoms
17 58 (0.75%) Presentation Skills
18 51 (0.66%) Manufacturing
19 43 (0.56%) Military
Job Titles
1 1,357 (17.60%) Architect
2 974 (12.63%) Developer
3 928 (12.03%) Senior
4 677 (8.78%) Azure Engineer
5 590 (7.65%) Lead
6 586 (7.60%) Data Engineer
7 476 (6.17%) Analyst
8 414 (5.37%) DevOps Engineer
9 374 (4.85%) Solutions Architect
10 324 (4.20%) Consultant
11 273 (3.54%) Cloud Engineer
12 266 (3.45%) Infrastructure Engineer
13 216 (2.80%) Azure Architect
14 214 (2.77%) Data Architect
15 202 (2.62%) Security Engineer
16 193 (2.50%) Platform Engineer
17 177 (2.30%) Azure DevOps Engineer
18 176 (2.28%) Technical Architect
19 169 (2.19%) Business Analyst
19 169 (2.19%) Project Manager
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 613 (7.95%) .NET
2 545 (7.07%) REST
3 341 (4.42%) React
4 279 (3.62%) Kafka
5 259 (3.36%) RESTful
6 257 (3.33%) PySpark
7 221 (2.87%) OAuth
8 213 (2.76%) Node.js
9 209 (2.71%) Spring
10 184 (2.39%) AngularJS
11 177 (2.30%) Spring Boot
12 167 (2.17%) LDAP
13 161 (2.09%) JSON
14 144 (1.87%) SAML
15 142 (1.84%) HTML
16 138 (1.79%) OpenID
16 138 (1.79%) SOAP
17 134 (1.74%) Middleware
18 117 (1.52%) CSS
19 115 (1.49%) .NET Framework
Miscellaneous
1 780 (10.11%) Cloud Native
2 323 (4.19%) Onboarding
3 298 (3.86%) Product Ownership
4 251 (3.25%) Data Centre
5 216 (2.80%) Hybrid Cloud
6 196 (2.54%) Distributed Systems
7 193 (2.50%) Legacy Systems
8 176 (2.28%) Enterprise Software
9 169 (2.19%) Security Posture
10 162 (2.10%) AI Agents
11 159 (2.06%) Public Cloud
12 108 (1.40%) Data Protection Act
12 108 (1.40%) Data Structures
13 90 (1.17%) Management Information System
13 90 (1.17%) Replication
14 80 (1.04%) Low-Code
15 79 (1.02%) PKI
16 76 (0.99%) Self-Motivation
17 71 (0.92%) Enterprise Cloud
18 70 (0.91%) Greenfield Project
Operating Systems
1 877 (11.37%) Windows
2 392 (5.08%) Linux
3 276 (3.58%) Windows Server
4 113 (1.47%) Windows 10
5 79 (1.02%) Apple iOS
6 73 (0.95%) Unix
7 71 (0.92%) Mac OS
8 68 (0.88%) Android
9 64 (0.83%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
10 62 (0.80%) VMS
11 32 (0.41%) Windows Server 2019
12 31 (0.40%) Ubuntu
13 18 (0.23%) Windows Server 2016
14 17 (0.22%) Windows Server 2012
15 14 (0.18%) Data ONTAP
16 12 (0.16%) CentOS
17 10 (0.13%) Debian
17 10 (0.13%) Windows 7
18 7 (0.091%) CoreOS
18 7 (0.091%) Rocky
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,867 (37.18%) DevOps
2 2,394 (31.04%) CI/CD
3 1,824 (23.65%) Agile
4 1,141 (14.80%) Infrastructure as Code
5 1,117 (14.48%) AI
6 1,107 (14.35%) Migration
7 1,076 (13.95%) Analytics
8 1,065 (13.81%) Problem-Solving
9 859 (11.14%) Data Modelling
10 848 (11.00%) Stakeholder Management
11 754 (9.78%) Continuous Improvement
12 723 (9.38%) Data Pipeline
13 716 (9.28%) Business Intelligence
14 702 (9.10%) Containerisation
15 696 (9.02%) Roadmaps
16 688 (8.92%) Microservices
17 680 (8.82%) ETL
18 661 (8.57%) Stakeholder Engagement
19 608 (7.88%) Test Automation
20 592 (7.68%) Data Engineering
Programming Languages
1 1,800 (23.34%) Python
2 1,565 (20.29%) SQL
3 760 (9.85%) PowerShell
4 636 (8.25%) Java
5 621 (8.05%) C#
6 452 (5.86%) JavaScript
7 300 (3.89%) TypeScript
8 256 (3.32%) Bash
9 255 (3.31%) Bicep
10 92 (1.19%) Data Analysis Expressions
11 88 (1.14%) T-SQL
12 80 (1.04%) Scala
13 76 (0.99%) Go
14 48 (0.62%) Kusto Query Language
15 45 (0.58%) Shell Script
16 43 (0.56%) R
17 39 (0.51%) PL/SQL
18 30 (0.39%) C++
19 29 (0.38%) Kotlin
20 16 (0.21%) Groovy
Qualifications
1 1,914 (24.82%) Security Cleared
2 1,619 (20.99%) SC Cleared
3 527 (6.83%) Degree
4 397 (5.15%) Azure Certification
5 233 (3.02%) CISSP
6 199 (2.58%) BPSS Clearance
7 186 (2.41%) Computer Science Degree
8 183 (2.37%) DV Cleared
9 182 (2.36%) Cisco Certification
10 170 (2.20%) Microsoft Certification
11 167 (2.17%) AWS Certification
12 129 (1.67%) CISM
13 85 (1.10%) CCNP
14 81 (1.05%) PMP
15 77 (1.00%) PMI Certification
16 72 (0.93%) (ISC)2 CCSP
17 61 (0.79%) ISTQB
18 54 (0.70%) TOGAF Certification
19 53 (0.69%) Master's Degree
20 48 (0.62%) CCSP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 528 (6.85%) Data Quality
2 387 (5.02%) QA
3 334 (4.33%) GDPR
4 284 (3.68%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 273 (3.54%) NIST
6 154 (2.00%) Accessibility
7 110 (1.43%) NCSC
8 97 (1.26%) SLA
9 80 (1.04%) PCI DSS
10 69 (0.89%) Cyber Essentials
11 66 (0.86%) Sarbanes-Oxley
12 57 (0.74%) GRC
13 56 (0.73%) WCAG
14 45 (0.58%) PMO
15 38 (0.49%) HIPAA
16 27 (0.35%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
17 26 (0.34%) NIST 800
17 26 (0.34%) SOC 2
18 18 (0.23%) California Consumer Privacy Act
19 17 (0.22%) Disclosure Scotland
System Software
1 932 (12.09%) Active Directory
2 800 (10.37%) Docker
3 222 (2.88%) VMware Infrastructure
4 136 (1.76%) Virtual Desktop
5 121 (1.57%) Hyper-V
6 118 (1.53%) 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%) Oracle RAC
15 6 (0.078%) RACF
16 5 (0.065%) EMC RecoverPoint
Systems Management
1 1,212 (15.72%) Terraform
2 1,087 (14.09%) Kubernetes
3 406 (5.26%) Microsoft Intune
4 359 (4.66%) Ansible
5 217 (2.81%) Grafana
6 189 (2.45%) Prometheus
7 163 (2.11%) Single Sign-On
8 106 (1.37%) SCCM
9 71 (0.92%) Active Directory Federation Services
10 43 (0.56%) FortiGate
10 43 (0.56%) Jamf Pro
11 42 (0.54%) Argo
12 38 (0.49%) Progress Chef
13 37 (0.48%) Puppet
14 35 (0.45%) 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 2,450 (31.77%) Microsoft
2 739 (9.58%) Databricks
3 330 (4.28%) ServiceNow
4 305 (3.95%) VMware
5 289 (3.75%) Google
6 281 (3.64%) Oracle
7 213 (2.76%) Cisco
8 212 (2.75%) SAP
9 192 (2.49%) OpenAI
10 160 (2.07%) Splunk
11 145 (1.88%) Palo Alto
12 139 (1.80%) CyberArk
13 131 (1.70%) Salesforce
14 117 (1.52%) Foundry
15 101 (1.31%) Okta
16 90 (1.17%) Dynatrace
17 82 (1.06%) Informatica
18 76 (0.99%) Zscaler
19 72 (0.93%) Citrix
20 66 (0.86%) Red Hat