Cloud Architect Contract Job Trends

Cloud Architect
UK

The median Cloud Architect daily rate in the UK is £641, according to job vacancies posted in the 6 months leading up to 27 December 2025.

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

6 months to
27 Dec 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 422 329 365
Rank change year-on-year -93 +36 -4
Contract jobs requiring a Cloud Architect 171 230 245
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.46% 0.68% 0.56%
As % of the Job Titles category 0.50% 0.74% 0.60%
Number of daily rates quoted 120 150 161
10th Percentile £460 £450 £525
25th Percentile £525 £525 £588
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £641 £669 £663
Median % change year-on-year -4.11% +0.94% -1.85%
75th Percentile £725 £750 £738
90th Percentile £801 £800 £800
UK excluding London median daily rate £600 £675 £650
% change year-on-year -11.11% +3.85% +4.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 1 0 3
10th Percentile - - £79.65
25th Percentile - - £82.13
Median hourly rate £75.00 - £87.50
75th Percentile - - £88.75
90th Percentile - - -
UK excluding London median hourly rate - - £87.50
% change year-on-year - - +25.00%

All Contract IT Job Vacancies
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 33,881 31,202 40,836
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 91.12% 92.74% 93.36%
Number of daily rates quoted 21,411 19,178 27,381
10th Percentile £294 £300 £285
25th Percentile £405 £409 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £615 £638 £640
90th Percentile £720 £738 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £488 £500
% change year-on-year -2.56% -2.50% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 1,992 975 1,571
10th Percentile £14.25 £15.50 £14.50
25th Percentile £18.25 £21.00 £19.06
Median hourly rate £26.00 £32.50 £45.00
Median % change year-on-year -20.00% -27.78% +46.96%
75th Percentile £58.38 £62.50 £65.00
90th Percentile £71.00 £73.68 £77.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £25.15 £32.50 £45.55
% change year-on-year -22.62% -28.64% +82.18%

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 27 December 2025.

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 14 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 27 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 -76 142 £643 -3.02% 118
London -34 89 £650 -0.76% 39
Work from Home -29 66 £643 +1.02% 96
UK excluding London -64 54 £600 -11.11% 83
South East -26 22 £575 -14.81% 24
North of England -50 19 £630 +0.80% 19
North West -23 14 £460 -26.40% 12
South West -3 7 £643 +35.26% 11
Midlands -38 4 £545 +28.84% 15
East Midlands -20 3 £545 +28.84% 2
Yorkshire -41 3 £625 +11.11% 6
North East - 2 £725 - 1
Wales - 2 £556 - 2
West Midlands - 1 £700 - 12

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

For the 6 months to 27 December 2025, 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 71 (41.52%) AWS
2 70 (40.94%) Azure
3 48 (28.07%) DevOps
4 45 (26.32%) Terraform
5 40 (23.39%) Infrastructure as Code
6 39 (22.81%) Microsoft
7 35 (20.47%) CI/CD
7 35 (20.47%) Security Cleared
8 34 (19.88%) Migration
9 33 (19.30%) GCP
10 29 (16.96%) Cloud Security
10 29 (16.96%) Roadmaps
11 28 (16.37%) SC Cleared
12 25 (14.62%) Problem-Solving
13 24 (14.04%) Agile
13 24 (14.04%) Oracle
14 22 (12.87%) Stakeholder Management
15 21 (12.28%) Degree
16 20 (11.70%) AWS Certification
16 20 (11.70%) Kubernetes
16 20 (11.70%) Technical Leadership
16 20 (11.70%) Virtual Private Cloud
17 18 (10.53%) Computer Science
17 18 (10.53%) Computer Science Degree
17 18 (10.53%) Containerisation
17 18 (10.53%) GDPR
18 17 (9.94%) Salesforce
19 16 (9.36%) AWS CloudFormation
19 16 (9.36%) Azure Certification
19 16 (9.36%) ISO/IEC 27001

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%) Apache Airflow
1 2 (1.17%) Oracle HTTP Server
1 2 (1.17%) Tomcat
1 2 (1.17%) WebLogic
2 1 (0.58%) ArcGIS
2 1 (0.58%) Confluence
2 1 (0.58%) GeoServer
Business Applications
1 3 (1.75%) SAP S/4HANA
2 2 (1.17%) Oracle ERP
2 2 (1.17%) Oracle General Ledger
3 1 (0.58%) Dynamics AX
3 1 (0.58%) Salesforce CRM
Cloud Services
1 71 (41.52%) AWS
2 70 (40.94%) Azure
3 33 (19.30%) GCP
4 20 (11.70%) Virtual Private Cloud
5 16 (9.36%) AWS CloudFormation
6 14 (8.19%) OCI
6 14 (8.19%) SaaS
6 14 (8.19%) Serverless
7 13 (7.60%) Entra ID
8 12 (7.02%) Amazon S3
8 12 (7.02%) AWS Lambda
9 10 (5.85%) Amazon CloudWatch
10 9 (5.26%) Amazon GuardDuty
10 9 (5.26%) AWS CloudTrail
10 9 (5.26%) AWS KMS
10 9 (5.26%) Azure DevOps
10 9 (5.26%) GitHub
10 9 (5.26%) GitHub Actions
11 8 (4.68%) Amazon EKS
11 8 (4.68%) Amazon Glacier
Communications & Networking
1 12 (7.02%) VPN
2 9 (5.26%) DNS
2 9 (5.26%) Firewall
3 8 (4.68%) Network Security
4 4 (2.34%) SD-WAN
4 4 (2.34%) WAN
5 2 (1.17%) HTTP
5 2 (1.17%) Internet
5 2 (1.17%) SSL
5 2 (1.17%) TCP/IP
5 2 (1.17%) VSAN
6 1 (0.58%) Broadband
6 1 (0.58%) DMZ
6 1 (0.58%) LAN
6 1 (0.58%) MPLS
6 1 (0.58%) MQTT
6 1 (0.58%) NaaS
6 1 (0.58%) NetScaler
6 1 (0.58%) Wi-Fi
6 1 (0.58%) Wireshark
Database & Business Intelligence
1 8 (4.68%) DynamoDB
2 5 (2.92%) Data Lake
3 4 (2.34%) Delta Lake
4 3 (1.75%) BigQuery
4 3 (1.75%) Data Warehouse
5 2 (1.17%) Amazon Athena
5 2 (1.17%) Amazon RDS
5 2 (1.17%) Amazon Redshift
5 2 (1.17%) Oracle Database
6 1 (0.58%) Azure SQL Database
6 1 (0.58%) Metadata
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 9 (5.26%) Jenkins
2 4 (2.34%) GitLab
2 4 (2.34%) Terragrunt
3 1 (0.58%) ERwin
3 1 (0.58%) JIRA
3 1 (0.58%) Oracle Forms
General
1 43 (25.15%) Finance
1 43 (25.15%) Social Skills
2 21 (12.28%) Public Sector
3 18 (10.53%) Analytical Skills
4 13 (7.60%) Marketing
5 10 (5.85%) Banking
5 10 (5.85%) Presentation Skills
6 7 (4.09%) Retail
7 5 (2.92%) Documentation Skills
8 4 (2.34%) Influencing Skills
8 4 (2.34%) Legal
8 4 (2.34%) Telecoms
9 3 (1.75%) Financial Institution
9 3 (1.75%) Manufacturing
10 2 (1.17%) Electronics
10 2 (1.17%) General Ledger
11 1 (0.58%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 1 (0.58%) Local Government
11 1 (0.58%) Organisational Skills
11 1 (0.58%) Police
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 10 (5.85%) Kafka
2 9 (5.26%) Middleware
3 7 (4.09%) Oracle Fusion
4 6 (3.51%) ActiveMQ
4 6 (3.51%) REST
5 4 (2.34%) Elastic Stack
6 3 (1.75%) ARM Templates
6 3 (1.75%) Web Services
7 2 (1.17%) CSS
7 2 (1.17%) HTML
7 2 (1.17%) SOAP
8 1 (0.58%) .NET
8 1 (0.58%) AWS CDK
8 1 (0.58%) CSS3
8 1 (0.58%) HTML5
8 1 (0.58%) JSON
8 1 (0.58%) Lightning Web Components
8 1 (0.58%) PySpark
8 1 (0.58%) RESTful
8 1 (0.58%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 28 (16.37%) Cloud Native
2 11 (6.43%) Hybrid Cloud
3 7 (4.09%) Data Centre
3 7 (4.09%) Public Cloud
4 5 (2.92%) Enterprise Cloud
4 5 (2.92%) IoT
4 5 (2.92%) Reinsurance
5 4 (2.34%) Distributed Systems
6 3 (1.75%) Legacy Systems
6 3 (1.75%) Management Information System
6 3 (1.75%) Security Posture
7 2 (1.17%) Cloud Security Posture
7 2 (1.17%) Data Structures
7 2 (1.17%) Onboarding
7 2 (1.17%) Operational Technology
7 2 (1.17%) PKI
7 2 (1.17%) Virtual Team
8 1 (0.58%) AI Agents
8 1 (0.58%) Greenfield Project
8 1 (0.58%) Product Ownership
Operating Systems
1 4 (2.34%) Windows
2 3 (1.75%) Linux
3 2 (1.17%) CentOS
3 2 (1.17%) Mac OS
3 2 (1.17%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
3 2 (1.17%) Ubuntu
3 2 (1.17%) Unix
3 2 (1.17%) VMS
3 2 (1.17%) Windows 10
3 2 (1.17%) Windows Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 48 (28.07%) DevOps
2 40 (23.39%) Infrastructure as Code
3 35 (20.47%) CI/CD
4 34 (19.88%) Migration
5 29 (16.96%) Cloud Security
5 29 (16.96%) Roadmaps
6 25 (14.62%) Problem-Solving
7 24 (14.04%) Agile
8 22 (12.87%) Stakeholder Management
9 20 (11.70%) Technical Leadership
10 18 (10.53%) Computer Science
10 18 (10.53%) Containerisation
11 15 (8.77%) Analytics
11 15 (8.77%) Decision-Making
11 15 (8.77%) Microservices
11 15 (8.77%) RBAC
11 15 (8.77%) Stakeholder Engagement
12 13 (7.60%) Data Modelling
12 13 (7.60%) Enterprise Architecture
13 12 (7.02%) TOGAF
Programming Languages
1 10 (5.85%) PowerShell
2 8 (4.68%) Bicep
2 8 (4.68%) Python
3 7 (4.09%) Bash
3 7 (4.09%) Java
3 7 (4.09%) SQL
4 3 (1.75%) Go
5 2 (1.17%) JavaScript
5 2 (1.17%) Korn
6 1 (0.58%) Apex Code
6 1 (0.58%) C
6 1 (0.58%) Kusto Query Language
6 1 (0.58%) PL/SQL
Qualifications
1 35 (20.47%) Security Cleared
2 28 (16.37%) SC Cleared
3 21 (12.28%) Degree
4 20 (11.70%) AWS Certification
5 18 (10.53%) Computer Science Degree
6 16 (9.36%) Azure Certification
7 14 (8.19%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
8 8 (4.68%) Master's Degree
9 7 (4.09%) DV Cleared
10 4 (2.34%) BPSS Clearance
10 4 (2.34%) Microsoft Certification
11 2 (1.17%) (ISC)2 CCSP
11 2 (1.17%) Cisco Certification
11 2 (1.17%) Citrix Certification
11 2 (1.17%) MCP
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%) SSCP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 18 (10.53%) GDPR
2 16 (9.36%) ISO/IEC 27001
3 12 (7.02%) NIST
4 9 (5.26%) NCSC
5 8 (4.68%) Cyber Essentials
6 5 (2.92%) PCI DSS
7 3 (1.75%) Data Quality
7 3 (1.75%) HIPAA
7 3 (1.75%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 2 (1.17%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
9 1 (0.58%) GRC
9 1 (0.58%) SLA
9 1 (0.58%) SOC 2
System Software
1 14 (8.19%) Docker
2 8 (4.68%) Active Directory
2 8 (4.68%) VMware Infrastructure
3 6 (3.51%) Virtual Desktop
4 2 (1.17%) VMware NSX
4 2 (1.17%) vSphere
5 1 (0.58%) Virtual Machines
Systems Management
1 45 (26.32%) Terraform
2 20 (11.70%) Kubernetes
3 10 (5.85%) Ansible
4 4 (2.34%) Kibana
4 4 (2.34%) Microsoft Intune
4 4 (2.34%) Prometheus
5 3 (1.75%) Karpenter
6 2 (1.17%) Grafana
6 2 (1.17%) Nagios
6 2 (1.17%) SCCM
7 1 (0.58%) Suricata
Vendors
1 39 (22.81%) Microsoft
2 24 (14.04%) Oracle
3 17 (9.94%) Salesforce
4 14 (8.19%) Google
5 10 (5.85%) Citrix
5 10 (5.85%) VMware
6 8 (4.68%) Salesforce Marketing Cloud
7 7 (4.09%) Databricks
8 6 (3.51%) Cisco
8 6 (3.51%) CloudEndure
8 6 (3.51%) SAP
8 6 (3.51%) Software AG
9 4 (2.34%) OpenAI
10 3 (1.75%) Splunk
11 2 (1.17%) Brocade
11 2 (1.17%) Extreme Networks
11 2 (1.17%) Fortinet
11 2 (1.17%) Sophos
12 1 (0.58%) Arista
12 1 (0.58%) Poppulo