Cloud Architect Contract Job Trends

Cloud Architect
UK

The median Cloud Architect daily rate in the UK is £635, according to job vacancies posted in the 6 months leading up to 18 December 2025.

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

6 months to
18 Dec 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 431 320 367
Rank change year-on-year -111 +47 -7
Contract jobs requiring a Cloud Architect 166 234 244
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.45% 0.68% 0.55%
As % of the Job Titles category 0.50% 0.74% 0.59%
Number of daily rates quoted 112 153 162
10th Percentile £464 £455 £525
25th Percentile £525 £525 £588
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £635 £675 £672
Median % change year-on-year -5.93% +0.45% -0.44%
75th Percentile £713 £750 £745
90th Percentile £798 £800 £800
UK excluding London median daily rate £600 £675 £650
% change year-on-year -11.11% +3.85% +1.96%
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 33,289 31,718 41,239
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 90.98% 92.78% 93.40%
Number of daily rates quoted 21,068 19,534 27,738
10th Percentile £290 £300 £288
25th Percentile £404 £409 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £618 £638 £644
90th Percentile £720 £738 £740
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £489 £500
% change year-on-year -2.86% -2.20% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 1,959 999 1,468
10th Percentile £14.25 £15.52 £15.14
25th Percentile £18.19 £21.22 £19.06
Median hourly rate £25.47 £34.00 £44.50
Median % change year-on-year -25.09% -23.60% +48.33%
75th Percentile £57.50 £62.84 £65.00
90th Percentile £71.46 £72.55 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £25.15 £32.50 £45.00
% change year-on-year -22.62% -27.78% +80.76%

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 18 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 18 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 -86 134 £638 -5.56% 42
London -29 84 £650 -0.76% 25
Work from Home -42 65 £643 +5.16% 31
UK excluding London -66 53 £600 -11.11% 26
South East -33 22 £575 -14.81% 13
North of England -53 19 £630 +0.80% 3
North West -23 14 £460 -26.40% 2
South West -2 7 £643 +35.26% 4
Yorkshire -40 3 £625 +11.11% 1
Wales +8 2 £556 -
Scotland +4 2 - -
North East - 2 £725 -
East Midlands -17 1 £435 +2.84% 1
Midlands -40 1 £435 +2.84% 6

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

For the 6 months to 18 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 69 (41.57%) Azure
2 66 (39.76%) AWS
3 45 (27.11%) DevOps
4 44 (26.51%) Terraform
5 40 (24.10%) Infrastructure as Code
5 40 (24.10%) Microsoft
6 35 (21.08%) Security Cleared
7 34 (20.48%) CI/CD
7 34 (20.48%) Migration
8 32 (19.28%) GCP
9 27 (16.27%) Cloud Security
9 27 (16.27%) Roadmaps
9 27 (16.27%) SC Cleared
10 24 (14.46%) Oracle
10 24 (14.46%) Problem-Solving
11 21 (12.65%) Agile
12 20 (12.05%) AWS Certification
12 20 (12.05%) Degree
12 20 (12.05%) Kubernetes
13 19 (11.45%) Stakeholder Management
13 19 (11.45%) Technical Leadership
13 19 (11.45%) Virtual Private Cloud
14 18 (10.84%) Containerisation
15 17 (10.24%) Computer Science
15 17 (10.24%) Computer Science Degree
15 17 (10.24%) GDPR
16 16 (9.64%) AWS CloudFormation
16 16 (9.64%) Azure Certification
16 16 (9.64%) ISO/IEC 27001
17 15 (9.04%) RBAC

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 (1.20%) Apache
1 2 (1.20%) Apache Airflow
1 2 (1.20%) Oracle HTTP Server
1 2 (1.20%) Tomcat
1 2 (1.20%) WebLogic
2 1 (0.60%) ArcGIS
2 1 (0.60%) Confluence
2 1 (0.60%) GeoServer
Business Applications
1 2 (1.20%) Oracle ERP
1 2 (1.20%) Oracle General Ledger
1 2 (1.20%) SAP S/4HANA
2 1 (0.60%) Dynamics AX
Cloud Services
1 69 (41.57%) Azure
2 66 (39.76%) AWS
3 32 (19.28%) GCP
4 19 (11.45%) Virtual Private Cloud
5 16 (9.64%) AWS CloudFormation
6 14 (8.43%) Entra ID
6 14 (8.43%) OCI
6 14 (8.43%) Serverless
7 13 (7.83%) SaaS
8 12 (7.23%) Amazon S3
8 12 (7.23%) AWS Lambda
9 10 (6.02%) Amazon CloudWatch
10 9 (5.42%) Amazon GuardDuty
10 9 (5.42%) AWS CloudTrail
10 9 (5.42%) AWS KMS
10 9 (5.42%) Azure DevOps
10 9 (5.42%) GitHub
10 9 (5.42%) GitHub Actions
11 8 (4.82%) Amazon EKS
11 8 (4.82%) Amazon Glacier
Communications & Networking
1 12 (7.23%) VPN
2 10 (6.02%) DNS
3 9 (5.42%) Firewall
4 7 (4.22%) Network Security
5 4 (2.41%) WAN
6 3 (1.81%) SD-WAN
6 3 (1.81%) VSAN
7 2 (1.20%) HTTP
7 2 (1.20%) Internet
7 2 (1.20%) SSL
7 2 (1.20%) TCP/IP
8 1 (0.60%) Broadband
8 1 (0.60%) DHCP
8 1 (0.60%) DMZ
8 1 (0.60%) MPLS
8 1 (0.60%) MQTT
8 1 (0.60%) NaaS
8 1 (0.60%) NAS
8 1 (0.60%) NetScaler
8 1 (0.60%) SAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 8 (4.82%) DynamoDB
2 4 (2.41%) BigQuery
2 4 (2.41%) Data Lake
2 4 (2.41%) Delta Lake
3 2 (1.20%) Amazon Athena
3 2 (1.20%) Amazon RDS
3 2 (1.20%) Amazon Redshift
3 2 (1.20%) Data Warehouse
3 2 (1.20%) Oracle Database
4 1 (0.60%) Azure SQL Database
4 1 (0.60%) Metadata
4 1 (0.60%) Oracle Reports
4 1 (0.60%) Power BI
4 1 (0.60%) Spatial Data
4 1 (0.60%) SQL Server
4 1 (0.60%) Star Schema
Development Applications
1 9 (5.42%) Jenkins
2 4 (2.41%) GitLab
2 4 (2.41%) Terragrunt
3 1 (0.60%) ERwin
3 1 (0.60%) JIRA
3 1 (0.60%) Oracle Forms
General
1 41 (24.70%) Social Skills
2 40 (24.10%) Finance
3 21 (12.65%) Public Sector
4 16 (9.64%) Analytical Skills
5 11 (6.63%) Marketing
6 10 (6.02%) Presentation Skills
7 9 (5.42%) Banking
8 8 (4.82%) Retail
9 5 (3.01%) Influencing Skills
10 4 (2.41%) Legal
10 4 (2.41%) Telecoms
11 3 (1.81%) Documentation Skills
11 3 (1.81%) Financial Institution
11 3 (1.81%) Manufacturing
12 2 (1.20%) Electronics
12 2 (1.20%) General Ledger
13 1 (0.60%) French Language
13 1 (0.60%) Inclusion and Diversity
13 1 (0.60%) Local Government
13 1 (0.60%) Police
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 10 (6.02%) Kafka
2 8 (4.82%) Middleware
3 7 (4.22%) Oracle Fusion
4 6 (3.61%) ActiveMQ
5 5 (3.01%) REST
6 4 (2.41%) Elastic Stack
7 3 (1.81%) ARM Templates
7 3 (1.81%) Web Services
8 2 (1.20%) SOAP
9 1 (0.60%) .NET
9 1 (0.60%) AWS CDK
9 1 (0.60%) Faiss
9 1 (0.60%) Google JAX
9 1 (0.60%) Hugging Face
9 1 (0.60%) JAX
9 1 (0.60%) JSON
9 1 (0.60%) LangChain
9 1 (0.60%) Lightning Web Components
9 1 (0.60%) RESTful
9 1 (0.60%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 28 (16.87%) Cloud Native
2 10 (6.02%) Hybrid Cloud
3 8 (4.82%) Data Centre
4 7 (4.22%) Public Cloud
5 5 (3.01%) Enterprise Cloud
5 5 (3.01%) IoT
5 5 (3.01%) Reinsurance
6 3 (1.81%) Distributed Systems
6 3 (1.81%) Legacy Systems
6 3 (1.81%) Management Information System
6 3 (1.81%) Onboarding
6 3 (1.81%) Security Posture
7 2 (1.20%) AI Agents
7 2 (1.20%) Cloud Security Posture
7 2 (1.20%) Operational Technology
7 2 (1.20%) PKI
7 2 (1.20%) Virtual Team
8 1 (0.60%) Analytical Mindset
8 1 (0.60%) Greenfield Project
8 1 (0.60%) Renewable Energy
Operating Systems
1 5 (3.01%) Windows
2 4 (2.41%) Linux
3 2 (1.20%) CentOS
3 2 (1.20%) Mac OS
3 2 (1.20%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
3 2 (1.20%) Ubuntu
3 2 (1.20%) Unix
3 2 (1.20%) VMS
3 2 (1.20%) Windows 10
3 2 (1.20%) Windows Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 45 (27.11%) DevOps
2 40 (24.10%) Infrastructure as Code
3 34 (20.48%) CI/CD
3 34 (20.48%) Migration
4 27 (16.27%) Cloud Security
4 27 (16.27%) Roadmaps
5 24 (14.46%) Problem-Solving
6 21 (12.65%) Agile
7 19 (11.45%) Stakeholder Management
7 19 (11.45%) Technical Leadership
8 18 (10.84%) Containerisation
9 17 (10.24%) Computer Science
10 15 (9.04%) RBAC
10 15 (9.04%) Stakeholder Engagement
10 15 (9.04%) TOGAF
11 14 (8.43%) Analytics
11 14 (8.43%) Decision-Making
11 14 (8.43%) Microservices
12 12 (7.23%) Data Protection
12 12 (7.23%) Enterprise Architecture
Programming Languages
1 10 (6.02%) PowerShell
2 9 (5.42%) Python
3 8 (4.82%) Bicep
4 7 (4.22%) Bash
4 7 (4.22%) Java
5 6 (3.61%) SQL
6 3 (1.81%) Go
7 1 (0.60%) Apex Code
7 1 (0.60%) C
7 1 (0.60%) Korn
7 1 (0.60%) Kusto Query Language
7 1 (0.60%) PL/SQL
Qualifications
1 35 (21.08%) Security Cleared
2 27 (16.27%) SC Cleared
3 20 (12.05%) AWS Certification
3 20 (12.05%) Degree
4 17 (10.24%) Computer Science Degree
5 16 (9.64%) Azure Certification
6 14 (8.43%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
7 8 (4.82%) Master's Degree
8 6 (3.61%) DV Cleared
9 4 (2.41%) BPSS Clearance
9 4 (2.41%) Microsoft Certification
10 3 (1.81%) Cisco Certification
11 2 (1.20%) (ISC)2 CCSP
11 2 (1.20%) Citrix Certification
11 2 (1.20%) RHCE
11 2 (1.20%) VCDX
12 1 (0.60%) CCNP
12 1 (0.60%) CCSP
12 1 (0.60%) CISSP
12 1 (0.60%) Postgraduate
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 17 (10.24%) GDPR
2 16 (9.64%) ISO/IEC 27001
3 11 (6.63%) NIST
4 9 (5.42%) NCSC
5 8 (4.82%) Cyber Essentials
6 5 (3.01%) PCI DSS
7 3 (1.81%) Data Quality
7 3 (1.81%) HIPAA
7 3 (1.81%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 2 (1.20%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
9 1 (0.60%) GRC
9 1 (0.60%) SLA
9 1 (0.60%) SOC 2
System Software
1 14 (8.43%) Docker
2 10 (6.02%) VMware Infrastructure
3 9 (5.42%) Active Directory
4 6 (3.61%) Virtual Desktop
5 3 (1.81%) VMware NSX
5 3 (1.81%) vSphere
6 1 (0.60%) Virtual Machines
Systems Management
1 44 (26.51%) Terraform
2 20 (12.05%) Kubernetes
3 9 (5.42%) Ansible
4 4 (2.41%) Kibana
4 4 (2.41%) Microsoft Intune
4 4 (2.41%) Prometheus
5 3 (1.81%) Karpenter
6 2 (1.20%) Grafana
6 2 (1.20%) Nagios
6 2 (1.20%) SCCM
7 1 (0.60%) Suricata
Vendors
1 40 (24.10%) Microsoft
2 24 (14.46%) Oracle
3 15 (9.04%) Salesforce
4 14 (8.43%) Google
5 12 (7.23%) VMware
6 10 (6.02%) Citrix
7 6 (3.61%) Cisco
7 6 (3.61%) CloudEndure
7 6 (3.61%) Databricks
7 6 (3.61%) Salesforce Marketing Cloud
8 5 (3.01%) SAP
8 5 (3.01%) Software AG
9 4 (2.41%) OpenAI
10 3 (1.81%) Splunk
11 2 (1.20%) Brocade
11 2 (1.20%) Extreme Networks
11 2 (1.20%) NetApp
11 2 (1.20%) Sophos
12 1 (0.60%) Fortinet
12 1 (0.60%) Isilon