Cloud Architect Contract Job Trends

Cloud Architect
UK

The median Cloud Architect daily rate in the UK is £630, according to job vacancies posted in the 6 months leading up to 15 January 2026.

The table below compares current contractor rates and summary statistics with the previous two years.

6 months to
15 Jan 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 409 317 375
Rank change year-on-year -92 +58 -17
Contract jobs requiring a Cloud Architect 171 225 212
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.46% 0.71% 0.50%
As % of the Job Titles category 0.50% 0.76% 0.54%
Number of daily rates quoted 126 141 145
10th Percentile £460 £482 £525
25th Percentile £539 £525 £588
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £630 £675 £663
Median % change year-on-year -6.67% +1.89% -1.85%
75th Percentile £713 £790 £738
90th Percentile £813 £838 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £588 £665 £650
% change year-on-year -11.65% +2.31% +4.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 1 0 1
Median hourly rate £75.00 - £78.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate - - £78.00
% change year-on-year - - +11.43%

All Contract IT Job Roles
UK

For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all contract IT job vacancies. Most job vacancies include a discernible job title that can be normalized. As such, the figures in the second row provide an indication of the number of contract jobs in our overall sample.

Contract vacancies in the UK with a recognized job title 33,883 29,520 39,341
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 91.34% 92.72% 93.17%
Number of daily rates quoted 21,433 18,105 26,194
10th Percentile £300 £288 £280
25th Percentile £405 £408 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £618 £638 £638
90th Percentile £720 £738 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £475 £500
% change year-on-year - -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 1,985 889 1,660
10th Percentile £14.38 £15.50 £14.16
25th Percentile £18.24 £21.05 £18.93
Median hourly rate £26.30 £32.50 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year -19.08% -23.53% +21.43%
75th Percentile £60.00 £62.24 £65.00
90th Percentile £70.00 £73.75 £76.25
UK excluding London median hourly rate £25.15 £31.29 £45.00
% change year-on-year -19.62% -30.47% +55.17%

Cloud Architect
Job Vacancy Trend

Historical trend showing the proportion of contract IT job postings featuring 'Cloud Architect' in the job title relative to all contract IT jobs advertised.

Cloud Architect job vacancy trend in the UK

Cloud Architect
Daily Rate Trend

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for Cloud Architect job vacancies in the UK.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for Cloud Architect job vacancies in the UK

Cloud Architect
Daily Rate Histogram

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Cloud Architect over the 6 months to 15 January 2026.

Daily rate histogram for Cloud Architect in the UK

Cloud Architect
Hourly Rate Trend

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for Cloud Architect job vacancies in the UK.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for Cloud Architect job vacancies in the UK

Cloud Architect
Top 15 Contract Job Locations

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing Cloud Architect within the UK over the 6 months to 15 January 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 -72 144 £641 -3.39% 33
London -38 96 £650 -2.80% 15
Work from Home -38 53 £623 -11.07% 17
UK excluding London -70 50 £588 -11.65% 21
North of England -41 21 £625 - 6
South East -22 15 £600 -11.11% 9
North West -26 15 £460 -26.40% 2
Midlands -31 7 £550 +30.02% 3
East Midlands -24 5 £545 +28.84% 1
Yorkshire -45 4 £625 +38.89% 4
South West -24 3 £675 +1.50% 3
Wales - 3 £500 -
West Midlands - 2 £638 - 2
North East - 2 £725 -
East of England -23 1 £550 +4.76% 2

Cloud Architect Skill Set
Top 30 Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities

For the 6 months to 15 January 2026, Cloud Architect contract job roles required the following skills and capabilities in order of popularity. The figures indicate the absolute number of co-occurrences and as a proportion of all contract job ads featuring Cloud Architect in the job title.

1 76 (44.44%) AWS
2 63 (36.84%) Azure
3 43 (25.15%) DevOps
4 41 (23.98%) Terraform
5 36 (21.05%) CI/CD
6 35 (20.47%) Infrastructure as Code
6 35 (20.47%) Microsoft
7 32 (18.71%) Migration
7 32 (18.71%) Security Cleared
8 31 (18.13%) Roadmaps
9 30 (17.54%) GCP
9 30 (17.54%) SC Cleared
10 28 (16.37%) Problem-Solving
11 27 (15.79%) Cloud Security
12 26 (15.20%) Agile
12 26 (15.20%) Stakeholder Management
13 24 (14.04%) Kubernetes
14 22 (12.87%) Technical Leadership
15 21 (12.28%) Microservices
15 21 (12.28%) Virtual Private Cloud
16 20 (11.70%) Oracle
16 20 (11.70%) Salesforce
17 19 (11.11%) AWS Certification
17 19 (11.11%) Serverless
18 18 (10.53%) Degree
19 17 (9.94%) AWS CloudFormation
19 17 (9.94%) Containerisation
19 17 (9.94%) Docker
20 16 (9.36%) Stakeholder Engagement
21 15 (8.77%) Amazon S3

Cloud Architect Skill Set
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 2 (1.17%) Apache
1 2 (1.17%) Oracle HTTP Server
1 2 (1.17%) Tomcat
1 2 (1.17%) WebLogic
2 1 (0.58%) Apache Airflow
2 1 (0.58%) ArcGIS
2 1 (0.58%) Confluence
2 1 (0.58%) GeoServer
Business Applications
1 3 (1.75%) Salesforce CRM
1 3 (1.75%) SAP S/4HANA
2 2 (1.17%) Oracle General Ledger
3 1 (0.58%) Dynamics AX
3 1 (0.58%) Oracle ERP
Cloud Services
1 76 (44.44%) AWS
2 63 (36.84%) Azure
3 30 (17.54%) GCP
4 21 (12.28%) Virtual Private Cloud
5 19 (11.11%) Serverless
6 17 (9.94%) AWS CloudFormation
7 15 (8.77%) Amazon S3
7 15 (8.77%) AWS Lambda
7 15 (8.77%) SaaS
8 14 (8.19%) Amazon CloudWatch
9 13 (7.60%) GitHub
9 13 (7.60%) GitHub Actions
9 13 (7.60%) OCI
10 11 (6.43%) Amazon EKS
11 10 (5.85%) Amazon Kinesis
11 10 (5.85%) Entra ID
12 9 (5.26%) AWS KMS
13 7 (4.09%) Amazon GuardDuty
13 7 (4.09%) AWS CloudTrail
13 7 (4.09%) AWS Control Tower
Communications & Networking
1 12 (7.02%) DNS
2 11 (6.43%) Network Security
3 8 (4.68%) Firewall
3 8 (4.68%) VPN
4 5 (2.92%) WAN
5 4 (2.34%) SD-WAN
6 3 (1.75%) DMZ
7 2 (1.17%) HTTP
7 2 (1.17%) Internet
7 2 (1.17%) SSL
7 2 (1.17%) VSAN
8 1 (0.58%) Broadband
8 1 (0.58%) LAN
8 1 (0.58%) MPLS
8 1 (0.58%) MQTT
8 1 (0.58%) NaaS
8 1 (0.58%) NetScaler
8 1 (0.58%) Wi-Fi
8 1 (0.58%) Wireshark
Database & Business Intelligence
1 11 (6.43%) DynamoDB
2 5 (2.92%) Amazon RDS
3 4 (2.34%) Amazon Aurora
3 4 (2.34%) Data Lake
3 4 (2.34%) DocumentDB
3 4 (2.34%) MySQL
3 4 (2.34%) NoSQL
3 4 (2.34%) PostgreSQL
3 4 (2.34%) Redis
4 3 (1.75%) BigQuery
5 2 (1.17%) Data Warehouse
5 2 (1.17%) Oracle Database
6 1 (0.58%) Amazon Athena
6 1 (0.58%) Amazon Redshift
6 1 (0.58%) Oracle Reports
6 1 (0.58%) Power BI
6 1 (0.58%) Semantic Layer
6 1 (0.58%) Spatial Data
6 1 (0.58%) SQL Server
6 1 (0.58%) Star Schema
Development Applications
1 12 (7.02%) Jenkins
2 8 (4.68%) GitLab
3 4 (2.34%) Terragrunt
4 1 (0.58%) ERwin
4 1 (0.58%) JIRA
4 1 (0.58%) Oracle Forms
General
1 44 (25.73%) Finance
2 42 (24.56%) Social Skills
3 23 (13.45%) Public Sector
4 21 (12.28%) Analytical Skills
5 15 (8.77%) Marketing
6 13 (7.60%) Banking
7 11 (6.43%) Presentation Skills
8 6 (3.51%) Retail
9 5 (2.92%) Documentation Skills
10 4 (2.34%) Influencing Skills
11 3 (1.75%) Financial Institution
11 3 (1.75%) Manufacturing
11 3 (1.75%) Telecoms
12 2 (1.17%) Electronics
12 2 (1.17%) General Ledger
12 2 (1.17%) Law
13 1 (0.58%) Legal
13 1 (0.58%) Local Government
13 1 (0.58%) Organisational Skills
13 1 (0.58%) Police
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 13 (7.60%) Kafka
2 11 (6.43%) Middleware
3 9 (5.26%) REST
4 6 (3.51%) ActiveMQ
4 6 (3.51%) Oracle Fusion
5 5 (2.92%) RESTful
6 4 (2.34%) Elastic Stack
6 4 (2.34%) gRPC
6 4 (2.34%) Hibernate
6 4 (2.34%) JPA
6 4 (2.34%) OAuth
6 4 (2.34%) OAuth2
6 4 (2.34%) OpenID
6 4 (2.34%) OpenTelemetry
6 4 (2.34%) Spring
6 4 (2.34%) Spring Boot
6 4 (2.34%) Spring Cloud
7 3 (1.75%) ARM Templates
7 3 (1.75%) CSS
7 3 (1.75%) HTML
Miscellaneous
1 32 (18.71%) Cloud Native
2 9 (5.26%) Distributed Systems
3 8 (4.68%) Hybrid Cloud
4 7 (4.09%) Public Cloud
5 5 (2.92%) Enterprise Cloud
6 4 (2.34%) Data Centre
7 3 (1.75%) Data Structures
7 3 (1.75%) IoT
7 3 (1.75%) Management Information System
8 2 (1.17%) Cloud Security Posture
8 2 (1.17%) Legacy Systems
8 2 (1.17%) Onboarding
8 2 (1.17%) Operational Technology
8 2 (1.17%) PKI
8 2 (1.17%) Private Cloud
8 2 (1.17%) Product Ownership
8 2 (1.17%) Security Posture
8 2 (1.17%) Virtual Team
9 1 (0.58%) Greenfield Project
9 1 (0.58%) Renewable Energy
Operating Systems
1 3 (1.75%) Linux
1 3 (1.75%) Windows
2 2 (1.17%) CentOS
2 2 (1.17%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
2 2 (1.17%) Ubuntu
2 2 (1.17%) Unix
2 2 (1.17%) Windows Server
3 1 (0.58%) Android
3 1 (0.58%) Apple iOS
3 1 (0.58%) Mac OS
3 1 (0.58%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 43 (25.15%) DevOps
2 36 (21.05%) CI/CD
3 35 (20.47%) Infrastructure as Code
4 32 (18.71%) Migration
5 31 (18.13%) Roadmaps
6 28 (16.37%) Problem-Solving
7 27 (15.79%) Cloud Security
8 26 (15.20%) Agile
8 26 (15.20%) Stakeholder Management
9 22 (12.87%) Technical Leadership
10 21 (12.28%) Microservices
11 17 (9.94%) Containerisation
12 16 (9.36%) Stakeholder Engagement
13 15 (8.77%) Computer Science
13 15 (8.77%) Cost Optimisation
13 15 (8.77%) Integration Patterns
14 14 (8.19%) Decision-Making
15 13 (7.60%) Design Patterns
16 12 (7.02%) Architectural Design
16 12 (7.02%) Project Delivery
Programming Languages
1 12 (7.02%) Java
2 9 (5.26%) SQL
3 7 (4.09%) Python
4 6 (3.51%) Bicep
5 3 (1.75%) Bash
5 3 (1.75%) JavaScript
5 3 (1.75%) Korn
6 2 (1.17%) PowerShell
7 1 (0.58%) Apex Code
7 1 (0.58%) C
7 1 (0.58%) Kusto Query Language
7 1 (0.58%) PL/SQL
Qualifications
1 32 (18.71%) Security Cleared
2 30 (17.54%) SC Cleared
3 19 (11.11%) AWS Certification
4 18 (10.53%) Degree
5 15 (8.77%) Computer Science Degree
6 14 (8.19%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
7 10 (5.85%) Azure Certification
8 8 (4.68%) Master's Degree
9 4 (2.34%) BPSS Clearance
10 3 (1.75%) DV Cleared
10 3 (1.75%) MCP
11 2 (1.17%) (ISC)2 CCSP
11 2 (1.17%) Cisco Certification
11 2 (1.17%) RHCE
11 2 (1.17%) SAP Certification
11 2 (1.17%) VCDX
12 1 (0.58%) CISM
12 1 (0.58%) Microsoft Certification
12 1 (0.58%) Oracle Certification
12 1 (0.58%) SSCP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 11 (6.43%) NCSC
2 10 (5.85%) GDPR
2 10 (5.85%) NIST
3 9 (5.26%) ISO/IEC 27001
4 8 (4.68%) PCI DSS
5 6 (3.51%) Cyber Essentials
6 4 (2.34%) QA
7 3 (1.75%) Data Quality
7 3 (1.75%) HIPAA
7 3 (1.75%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 1 (0.58%) FedRAMP
8 1 (0.58%) GRC
8 1 (0.58%) SLA
System Software
1 17 (9.94%) Docker
2 6 (3.51%) Virtual Desktop
2 6 (3.51%) VMware Infrastructure
3 5 (2.92%) Active Directory
4 2 (1.17%) VMware NSX
4 2 (1.17%) vSphere
5 1 (0.58%) Virtual Machines
Systems Management
1 41 (23.98%) Terraform
2 24 (14.04%) Kubernetes
3 8 (4.68%) Ansible
4 4 (2.34%) Kibana
5 3 (1.75%) Karpenter
6 2 (1.17%) Nagios
6 2 (1.17%) Prometheus
7 1 (0.58%) Istio
7 1 (0.58%) Suricata
Vendors
1 35 (20.47%) Microsoft
2 20 (11.70%) Oracle
2 20 (11.70%) Salesforce
3 14 (8.19%) Google
4 10 (5.85%) Salesforce Marketing Cloud
5 8 (4.68%) Citrix
5 8 (4.68%) Software AG
5 8 (4.68%) VMware
6 6 (3.51%) CloudEndure
6 6 (3.51%) SAP
7 4 (2.34%) Cisco
8 3 (1.75%) Databricks
8 3 (1.75%) Splunk
9 2 (1.17%) Brocade
9 2 (1.17%) Extreme Networks
9 2 (1.17%) Fortinet
9 2 (1.17%) MuleSoft
10 1 (0.58%) Aruba
10 1 (0.58%) CyberArk
10 1 (0.58%) ServiceNow