Cloud Architect Contract Job Trends

Cloud Architect
UK

The median Cloud Architect daily rate in the UK is £625, according to job vacancies posted in the 6 months leading up to 29 March 2026.

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

6 months to
29 Mar 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 375 304 344
Rank change year-on-year -71 +40 -20
Contract jobs requiring a Cloud Architect 271 225 255
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.61% 0.77% 0.58%
As % of the Job Titles category 0.66% 0.83% 0.62%
Number of daily rates quoted 187 161 183
10th Percentile £480 £450 £515
25th Percentile £550 £513 £588
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £625 £625 £675
Median % change year-on-year - -7.41% -
75th Percentile £750 £775 £763
90th Percentile £780 £838 £825
UK excluding London median daily rate £600 £613 £650
% change year-on-year -2.04% -5.77% +1.56%
Number of hourly rates quoted 1 0 0
Median hourly rate £75.00 - -
UK excluding London median hourly rate - - -

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 40,989 27,183 41,081
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.01% 92.83% 92.84%
Number of daily rates quoted 25,539 17,878 26,912
10th Percentile £313 £300 £275
25th Percentile £413 £406 £407
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £520 £525
Median % change year-on-year -3.85% -0.95% -3.67%
75th Percentile £613 £630 £638
90th Percentile £725 £738 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £485 £475 £488
% change year-on-year +2.11% -2.56% -2.50%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,552 945 2,521
10th Percentile £15.00 £15.09 £12.86
25th Percentile £19.50 £21.00 £16.25
Median hourly rate £37.50 £32.50 £33.00
Median % change year-on-year +15.38% -1.52% -24.36%
75th Percentile £65.00 £64.50 £60.00
90th Percentile £77.50 £76.81 £71.87
UK excluding London median hourly rate £38.63 £32.25 £33.00
% change year-on-year +19.78% -2.27% -21.07%

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 29 March 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 16 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 29 March 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 -53 224 £628 +1.46% 48
London -13 155 £643 +2.80% 29
Work from Home -23 83 £620 -0.80% 21
UK excluding London -84 70 £600 -2.04% 25
North of England -64 19 £635 +20.95% 4
Midlands -56 17 £550 -8.33% 1
South East -39 16 £640 -5.19% 16
North West -38 14 £557 +3.92% 1
West Midlands -48 9 £588 -2.57% 1
East Midlands -27 7 £545 +53.09%
South West -35 7 £600 -6.07% 3
East of England -29 5 £550 -8.33%
Scotland +6 4 £745 +19.20% 1
Yorkshire -64 4 £568 +8.10% 3
Wales -9 2 £456 +93.33%
North East - 1 £750 -

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

For the 6 months to 29 March 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.

1 142 (52.40%) AWS
2 98 (36.16%) Azure
3 72 (26.57%) Security Cleared
4 69 (25.46%) Migration
5 66 (24.35%) DevOps
6 63 (23.25%) SC Cleared
7 60 (22.14%) Terraform
8 54 (19.93%) CI/CD
9 53 (19.56%) GCP
10 51 (18.82%) Infrastructure as Code
11 42 (15.50%) Microsoft
12 41 (15.13%) Kubernetes
12 41 (15.13%) Roadmaps
13 40 (14.76%) Cloud Security
14 39 (14.39%) Problem-Solving
15 38 (14.02%) Stakeholder Management
16 36 (13.28%) Serverless
17 29 (10.70%) Google
18 28 (10.33%) Agile
18 28 (10.33%) Analytics
18 28 (10.33%) AWS Certification
18 28 (10.33%) AWS CloudFormation
18 28 (10.33%) Containerisation
18 28 (10.33%) Technical Leadership
19 27 (9.96%) Microservices
19 27 (9.96%) Virtual Private Cloud
20 25 (9.23%) Integration Patterns
21 23 (8.49%) Cost Optimisation
21 23 (8.49%) Salesforce
21 23 (8.49%) Stakeholder Engagement

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 4 (1.48%) Confluence
2 2 (0.74%) nginx
2 2 (0.74%) SAS
3 1 (0.37%) ArcGIS
3 1 (0.37%) Cloud Foundry
3 1 (0.37%) GeoServer
3 1 (0.37%) Mendix
Applications
1 1 (0.37%) Chatbot
Business Applications
1 4 (1.48%) SAP S/4HANA
2 3 (1.11%) Salesforce CRM
3 2 (0.74%) Oracle ERP
3 2 (0.74%) Oracle General Ledger
4 1 (0.37%) Dynamics AX
Cloud Services
1 142 (52.40%) AWS
2 98 (36.16%) Azure
3 53 (19.56%) GCP
4 36 (13.28%) Serverless
5 28 (10.33%) AWS CloudFormation
6 27 (9.96%) Virtual Private Cloud
7 22 (8.12%) SaaS
8 21 (7.75%) Amazon EKS
9 19 (7.01%) Entra ID
10 15 (5.54%) Amazon S3
10 15 (5.54%) GitHub
10 15 (5.54%) GitHub Actions
11 14 (5.17%) Route 53
12 12 (4.43%) AWS Lambda
13 11 (4.06%) Amazon CloudWatch
13 11 (4.06%) Amazon GuardDuty
14 10 (3.69%) AWS Control Tower
15 9 (3.32%) AWS CloudTrail
15 9 (3.32%) AWS KMS
15 9 (3.32%) IaaS
Communications & Networking
1 23 (8.49%) VPN
2 20 (7.38%) Network Security
3 19 (7.01%) Firewall
4 16 (5.90%) DNS
5 6 (2.21%) WAN
6 4 (1.48%) SD-WAN
7 3 (1.11%) BGP
7 3 (1.11%) OSPF
8 2 (0.74%) DMZ
8 2 (0.74%) MPLS
8 2 (0.74%) OpenVPN
8 2 (0.74%) TCP/IP
9 1 (0.37%) Anycast
9 1 (0.37%) Cisco ASA
9 1 (0.37%) DMVPN
9 1 (0.37%) Intrusion Detection
9 1 (0.37%) IPsec
9 1 (0.37%) NaaS
9 1 (0.37%) NGFW
9 1 (0.37%) Wi-Fi
Database & Business Intelligence
1 15 (5.54%) Data Lake
2 8 (2.95%) BigQuery
3 6 (2.21%) Amazon RDS
3 6 (2.21%) DynamoDB
3 6 (2.21%) NoSQL
4 5 (1.85%) Data Warehouse
4 5 (1.85%) DocumentDB
4 5 (1.85%) PostgreSQL
5 4 (1.48%) Amazon Aurora
5 4 (1.48%) MySQL
5 4 (1.48%) Oracle Database
5 4 (1.48%) Redis
6 2 (0.74%) Elasticsearch
7 1 (0.37%) Metadata
7 1 (0.37%) Power BI
7 1 (0.37%) Relational Database
7 1 (0.37%) SAP HANA
7 1 (0.37%) Semantic Layer
7 1 (0.37%) Spatial Data
7 1 (0.37%) SQL Server
Development Applications
1 11 (4.06%) Jenkins
2 9 (3.32%) GitLab
3 5 (1.85%) JIRA
4 4 (1.48%) Terragrunt
5 2 (0.74%) Bitbucket
5 2 (0.74%) SonarQube
6 1 (0.37%) AppScan
6 1 (0.37%) Burp Suite
6 1 (0.37%) Metasploit
General
1 56 (20.66%) Finance
1 56 (20.66%) Social Skills
2 35 (12.92%) Public Sector
3 25 (9.23%) Banking
4 24 (8.86%) Analytical Skills
5 16 (5.90%) Documentation Skills
6 15 (5.54%) Marketing
6 15 (5.54%) Presentation Skills
7 9 (3.32%) Retail
8 4 (1.48%) Influencing Skills
9 3 (1.11%) Telecoms
10 2 (0.74%) Electronics
10 2 (0.74%) Financial Institution
10 2 (0.74%) General Ledger
10 2 (0.74%) Law
10 2 (0.74%) Manufacturing
11 1 (0.37%) Investment Banking
11 1 (0.37%) Local Government
11 1 (0.37%) Organisational Skills
11 1 (0.37%) Police
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 18 (6.64%) Middleware
2 11 (4.06%) Kafka
3 10 (3.69%) OpenID
4 9 (3.32%) REST
5 8 (2.95%) OAuth
6 5 (1.85%) OAuth2
6 5 (1.85%) RESTful
7 4 (1.48%) Elastic Stack
7 4 (1.48%) gRPC
7 4 (1.48%) Hibernate
7 4 (1.48%) JPA
7 4 (1.48%) OpenTelemetry
7 4 (1.48%) Oracle Fusion
7 4 (1.48%) SAML
7 4 (1.48%) Spring
7 4 (1.48%) Spring Boot
7 4 (1.48%) Spring Cloud
8 3 (1.11%) CSS
8 3 (1.11%) HTML
8 3 (1.11%) Lightning Web Components
Miscellaneous
1 50 (18.45%) Cloud Native
2 14 (5.17%) Data Centre
3 13 (4.80%) Management Information System
4 12 (4.43%) Distributed Systems
4 12 (4.43%) Public Cloud
5 10 (3.69%) Hybrid Cloud
6 9 (3.32%) Enterprise Cloud
7 6 (2.21%) Legacy Systems
7 6 (2.21%) Onboarding
7 6 (2.21%) Private Cloud
8 5 (1.85%) Product Ownership
9 4 (1.48%) Enterprise Software
10 3 (1.11%) Data Structures
10 3 (1.11%) SCADA
10 3 (1.11%) Virtual Team
11 2 (0.74%) Mobile Banking
11 2 (0.74%) N-Tier
11 2 (0.74%) PKI
12 1 (0.37%) Data Protection Act
12 1 (0.37%) IoT
Operating Systems
1 9 (3.32%) Windows
2 3 (1.11%) Android
2 3 (1.11%) Apple iOS
2 3 (1.11%) Mac OS
3 2 (0.74%) Linux
3 2 (0.74%) Unix
4 1 (0.37%) Kali Linux
4 1 (0.37%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 69 (25.46%) Migration
2 66 (24.35%) DevOps
3 54 (19.93%) CI/CD
4 51 (18.82%) Infrastructure as Code
5 41 (15.13%) Roadmaps
6 40 (14.76%) Cloud Security
7 39 (14.39%) Problem-Solving
8 38 (14.02%) Stakeholder Management
9 28 (10.33%) Agile
9 28 (10.33%) Analytics
9 28 (10.33%) Containerisation
9 28 (10.33%) Technical Leadership
10 27 (9.96%) Microservices
11 25 (9.23%) Integration Patterns
12 23 (8.49%) Cost Optimisation
12 23 (8.49%) Stakeholder Engagement
13 22 (8.12%) Identity Access Management
14 20 (7.38%) Architectural Design
15 18 (6.64%) Decision-Making
15 18 (6.64%) Security Architecture
Programming Languages
1 13 (4.80%) SQL
2 11 (4.06%) Python
3 10 (3.69%) Bicep
4 9 (3.32%) Java
5 4 (1.48%) JavaScript
6 3 (1.11%) Apex Code
6 3 (1.11%) Go
6 3 (1.11%) Korn
6 3 (1.11%) PowerShell
7 2 (0.74%) Bash
7 2 (0.74%) C#
8 1 (0.37%) C
8 1 (0.37%) Lisp
8 1 (0.37%) PL/SQL
Qualifications
1 72 (26.57%) Security Cleared
2 63 (23.25%) SC Cleared
3 28 (10.33%) AWS Certification
4 19 (7.01%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
5 18 (6.64%) Degree
6 16 (5.90%) Computer Science Degree
7 11 (4.06%) Azure Certification
8 10 (3.69%) Master's Degree
9 8 (2.95%) BPSS Clearance
9 8 (2.95%) DV Cleared
10 4 (1.48%) Cisco Certification
10 4 (1.48%) Microsoft Certification
11 2 (0.74%) (ISC)2 CCSP
11 2 (0.74%) CCNP
11 2 (0.74%) Microsoft Certified Professional
11 2 (0.74%) SAP Certification
12 1 (0.37%) CCSP
12 1 (0.37%) CISSP
12 1 (0.37%) MBA
12 1 (0.37%) MCSE
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 18 (6.64%) ISO/IEC 27001
2 17 (6.27%) PCI DSS
3 14 (5.17%) NIST
4 12 (4.43%) NCSC
5 10 (3.69%) GDPR
6 6 (2.21%) Cyber Essentials
7 5 (1.85%) Data Quality
8 4 (1.48%) QA
8 4 (1.48%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 3 (1.11%) HIPAA
10 2 (0.74%) COBIT
10 2 (0.74%) FedRAMP
10 2 (0.74%) GRC
10 2 (0.74%) SLA
11 1 (0.37%) Disclosure Scotland
11 1 (0.37%) ISO 20022
11 1 (0.37%) ISO/IEC 27002 (supersedes ISO/IEC 17799)
11 1 (0.37%) PSD2
11 1 (0.37%) SOC 2
System Software
1 19 (7.01%) Docker
2 8 (2.95%) Active Directory
3 6 (2.21%) Virtual Desktop
4 4 (1.48%) VMware Infrastructure
5 2 (0.74%) Squid
6 1 (0.37%) Varnish
6 1 (0.37%) VMware ESXi
6 1 (0.37%) VMware NSX
Systems Management
1 60 (22.14%) Terraform
2 41 (15.13%) Kubernetes
3 10 (3.69%) Ansible
4 4 (1.48%) Kibana
4 4 (1.48%) Progress Chef
5 3 (1.11%) Karpenter
5 3 (1.11%) Puppet
5 3 (1.11%) Single Sign-On
6 2 (0.74%) Consul
6 2 (0.74%) FortiGate
6 2 (0.74%) Grafana
6 2 (0.74%) Istio
6 2 (0.74%) Microsoft Intune
6 2 (0.74%) Prometheus
7 1 (0.37%) Nessus
7 1 (0.37%) Suricata
Vendors
1 42 (15.50%) Microsoft
2 29 (10.70%) Google
3 23 (8.49%) Salesforce
4 14 (5.17%) Oracle
5 11 (4.06%) SAP
6 10 (3.69%) Salesforce Marketing Cloud
7 9 (3.32%) Software AG
8 7 (2.58%) Citrix
8 7 (2.58%) Databricks
8 7 (2.58%) VMware
9 6 (2.21%) CloudEndure
10 5 (1.85%) IBM
11 4 (1.48%) Cisco
11 4 (1.48%) Splunk
11 4 (1.48%) Virgin Media
12 3 (1.11%) Atlassian
12 3 (1.11%) CyberArk
12 3 (1.11%) MuleSoft
12 3 (1.11%) Red Hat
13 2 (0.74%) Mitel