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 5 April 2026.

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

6 months to
5 Apr 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 365 314 360
Rank change year-on-year -51 +46 -29
Contract jobs requiring a Cloud Architect 281 228 250
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.62% 0.78% 0.57%
As % of the Job Titles category 0.67% 0.84% 0.61%
Number of daily rates quoted 193 163 180
10th Percentile £465 £451 £524
25th Percentile £550 £513 £588
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £625 £625 £675
Median % change year-on-year - -7.41% -
75th Percentile £750 £775 £766
90th Percentile £775 £838 £825
UK excluding London median daily rate £600 £616 £650
% change year-on-year -2.52% -5.31% +4.00%
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 41,784 27,118 40,940
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.22% 92.78% 92.79%
Number of daily rates quoted 26,031 17,841 26,815
10th Percentile £313 £300 £275
25th Percentile £413 £406 £408
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £520 £525
Median % change year-on-year -3.85% -0.95% -3.31%
75th Percentile £613 £630 £638
90th Percentile £725 £738 £743
UK excluding London median daily rate £488 £475 £488
% change year-on-year +2.63% -2.56% -2.50%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,612 956 2,534
10th Percentile £15.00 £14.99 £12.86
25th Percentile £19.91 £20.26 £16.25
Median hourly rate £40.00 £32.00 £33.78
Median % change year-on-year +25.00% -5.26% -24.15%
75th Percentile £65.00 £64.50 £60.00
90th Percentile £77.50 £76.25 £71.60
UK excluding London median hourly rate £41.06 £31.29 £34.61
% change year-on-year +31.21% -9.58% -18.32%

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 5 April 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 5 April 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 -51 233 £628 +1.21% 48
London -7 163 £640 +2.40% 29
Work from Home -36 87 £620 -2.75% 21
UK excluding London -79 73 £600 -2.52% 25
South East -41 18 £650 -3.70% 16
Midlands -56 17 £550 -8.33% 1
North of England -76 17 £500 -4.76% 4
North West -42 13 £460 -14.10% 1
West Midlands -49 9 £588 -2.57% 1
East Midlands -30 7 £545 +53.09%
South West -32 7 £600 -6.07% 3
Scotland +10 6 £745 +19.20% 1
East of England -28 6 £550 -8.33%
Yorkshire -61 4 £568 +8.10% 3
Wales -14 2 £456 +2.99%

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

For the 6 months to 5 April 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.

1 151 (53.74%) AWS
2 103 (36.65%) Azure
3 76 (27.05%) Migration
4 75 (26.69%) Security Cleared
5 70 (24.91%) DevOps
6 65 (23.13%) SC Cleared
7 58 (20.64%) Terraform
8 56 (19.93%) CI/CD
9 54 (19.22%) GCP
10 52 (18.51%) Infrastructure as Code
11 44 (15.66%) Problem-Solving
11 44 (15.66%) Roadmaps
12 43 (15.30%) Microsoft
13 41 (14.59%) Kubernetes
14 40 (14.23%) Cloud Security
14 40 (14.23%) Stakeholder Management
15 38 (13.52%) Serverless
16 32 (11.39%) Analytics
17 30 (10.68%) Agile
17 30 (10.68%) Containerisation
18 29 (10.32%) Microservices
19 28 (9.96%) AWS Certification
19 28 (9.96%) AWS CloudFormation
19 28 (9.96%) Google
19 28 (9.96%) Technical Leadership
20 27 (9.61%) Virtual Private Cloud
21 25 (8.90%) Integration Patterns
21 25 (8.90%) VPN
22 24 (8.54%) Salesforce
23 23 (8.19%) Cost Optimisation

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 (1.42%) Confluence
2 2 (0.71%) nginx
2 2 (0.71%) SAS
3 1 (0.36%) Appian
3 1 (0.36%) ArcGIS
3 1 (0.36%) Camunda
3 1 (0.36%) Cloud Foundry
3 1 (0.36%) GeoServer
3 1 (0.36%) Mendix
Applications
1 1 (0.36%) Chatbot
Business Applications
1 4 (1.42%) SAP S/4HANA
2 3 (1.07%) Salesforce CRM
3 2 (0.71%) Oracle ERP
3 2 (0.71%) Oracle General Ledger
4 1 (0.36%) Dynamics AX
Cloud Services
1 151 (53.74%) AWS
2 103 (36.65%) Azure
3 54 (19.22%) GCP
4 38 (13.52%) Serverless
5 28 (9.96%) AWS CloudFormation
6 27 (9.61%) Virtual Private Cloud
7 22 (7.83%) SaaS
8 21 (7.47%) Amazon EKS
9 20 (7.12%) Entra ID
10 15 (5.34%) Amazon S3
10 15 (5.34%) GitHub
10 15 (5.34%) GitHub Actions
11 14 (4.98%) Route 53
12 12 (4.27%) AWS Lambda
13 11 (3.91%) Amazon CloudWatch
13 11 (3.91%) Amazon GuardDuty
14 10 (3.56%) AWS Control Tower
15 9 (3.20%) AWS CloudTrail
15 9 (3.20%) AWS KMS
15 9 (3.20%) IaaS
Communications & Networking
1 25 (8.90%) VPN
2 23 (8.19%) Firewall
3 20 (7.12%) Network Security
4 17 (6.05%) DNS
5 7 (2.49%) WAN
6 4 (1.42%) SD-WAN
7 3 (1.07%) BGP
7 3 (1.07%) OSPF
8 2 (0.71%) DMZ
8 2 (0.71%) MPLS
8 2 (0.71%) OpenVPN
8 2 (0.71%) TCP/IP
9 1 (0.36%) Anycast
9 1 (0.36%) Broadband
9 1 (0.36%) Cisco ASA
9 1 (0.36%) DMVPN
9 1 (0.36%) Internet
9 1 (0.36%) LAN
9 1 (0.36%) NaaS
9 1 (0.36%) NGFW
Database & Business Intelligence
1 19 (6.76%) Data Lake
2 8 (2.85%) BigQuery
3 6 (2.14%) Amazon RDS
3 6 (2.14%) Data Warehouse
3 6 (2.14%) DynamoDB
3 6 (2.14%) NoSQL
3 6 (2.14%) PostgreSQL
4 5 (1.78%) DocumentDB
5 4 (1.42%) Amazon Aurora
5 4 (1.42%) MySQL
5 4 (1.42%) Oracle Database
5 4 (1.42%) Redis
6 2 (0.71%) Elasticsearch
6 2 (0.71%) SQL Server
7 1 (0.36%) Metadata
7 1 (0.36%) Power BI
7 1 (0.36%) Relational Database
7 1 (0.36%) SAP HANA
7 1 (0.36%) Semantic Layer
7 1 (0.36%) Spatial Data
Development Applications
1 11 (3.91%) Jenkins
2 9 (3.20%) GitLab
3 5 (1.78%) JIRA
4 4 (1.42%) Terragrunt
5 2 (0.71%) Bitbucket
5 2 (0.71%) SonarQube
6 1 (0.36%) AppScan
6 1 (0.36%) Burp Suite
6 1 (0.36%) Metasploit
General
1 58 (20.64%) Social Skills
2 54 (19.22%) Finance
3 35 (12.46%) Public Sector
4 24 (8.54%) Analytical Skills
4 24 (8.54%) Banking
5 18 (6.41%) Documentation Skills
6 17 (6.05%) Marketing
6 17 (6.05%) Presentation Skills
7 7 (2.49%) Retail
8 5 (1.78%) Influencing Skills
9 4 (1.42%) Telecoms
10 2 (0.71%) Electronics
10 2 (0.71%) General Ledger
10 2 (0.71%) Law
10 2 (0.71%) Manufacturing
11 1 (0.36%) Investment Banking
11 1 (0.36%) Legal
11 1 (0.36%) Local Government
11 1 (0.36%) Organisational Skills
11 1 (0.36%) Police
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 19 (6.76%) Middleware
2 11 (3.91%) Kafka
3 10 (3.56%) OpenID
4 8 (2.85%) OAuth
4 8 (2.85%) REST
5 5 (1.78%) OAuth2
5 5 (1.78%) RESTful
6 4 (1.42%) Elastic Stack
6 4 (1.42%) gRPC
6 4 (1.42%) Hibernate
6 4 (1.42%) JPA
6 4 (1.42%) OpenTelemetry
6 4 (1.42%) Oracle Fusion
6 4 (1.42%) SAML
6 4 (1.42%) Spring
6 4 (1.42%) Spring Boot
6 4 (1.42%) Spring Cloud
7 3 (1.07%) ARM Templates
7 3 (1.07%) AWS CDK
7 3 (1.07%) HTML
Miscellaneous
1 51 (18.15%) Cloud Native
2 15 (5.34%) Data Centre
3 14 (4.98%) Management Information System
4 13 (4.63%) Distributed Systems
4 13 (4.63%) Public Cloud
5 11 (3.91%) Hybrid Cloud
6 10 (3.56%) Enterprise Cloud
7 7 (2.49%) Legacy Systems
8 6 (2.14%) Onboarding
8 6 (2.14%) Private Cloud
9 5 (1.78%) Product Ownership
10 4 (1.42%) Enterprise Software
11 3 (1.07%) Data Structures
11 3 (1.07%) SCADA
11 3 (1.07%) Virtual Team
12 2 (0.71%) Mobile Banking
12 2 (0.71%) N-Tier
12 2 (0.71%) PKI
13 1 (0.36%) Data Protection Act
13 1 (0.36%) IoT
Operating Systems
1 10 (3.56%) Windows
2 3 (1.07%) Android
2 3 (1.07%) Apple iOS
2 3 (1.07%) Mac OS
3 2 (0.71%) Linux
3 2 (0.71%) Unix
3 2 (0.71%) VMS
4 1 (0.36%) Kali Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 76 (27.05%) Migration
2 70 (24.91%) DevOps
3 56 (19.93%) CI/CD
4 52 (18.51%) Infrastructure as Code
5 44 (15.66%) Problem-Solving
5 44 (15.66%) Roadmaps
6 40 (14.23%) Cloud Security
6 40 (14.23%) Stakeholder Management
7 32 (11.39%) Analytics
8 30 (10.68%) Agile
8 30 (10.68%) Containerisation
9 29 (10.32%) Microservices
10 28 (9.96%) Technical Leadership
11 25 (8.90%) Integration Patterns
12 23 (8.19%) Cost Optimisation
12 23 (8.19%) Stakeholder Engagement
13 22 (7.83%) Identity Access Management
14 21 (7.47%) Architectural Design
15 20 (7.12%) Data Engineering
16 19 (6.76%) RBAC
Programming Languages
1 13 (4.63%) SQL
2 11 (3.91%) Python
3 10 (3.56%) Bicep
3 10 (3.56%) Java
4 4 (1.42%) JavaScript
5 3 (1.07%) Go
5 3 (1.07%) Korn
5 3 (1.07%) PowerShell
6 2 (0.71%) Apex Code
6 2 (0.71%) Bash
6 2 (0.71%) C#
7 1 (0.36%) C
7 1 (0.36%) Lisp
7 1 (0.36%) PL/SQL
Qualifications
1 75 (26.69%) Security Cleared
2 65 (23.13%) SC Cleared
3 28 (9.96%) AWS Certification
4 19 (6.76%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
5 18 (6.41%) Degree
6 16 (5.69%) Computer Science Degree
7 11 (3.91%) Azure Certification
8 10 (3.56%) Master's Degree
9 9 (3.20%) DV Cleared
10 8 (2.85%) BPSS Clearance
11 5 (1.78%) Microsoft Certification
12 4 (1.42%) Cisco Certification
13 3 (1.07%) CCNP
14 2 (0.71%) MCSE
14 2 (0.71%) Microsoft Certified Professional
14 2 (0.71%) SAP Certification
15 1 (0.36%) CCSP
15 1 (0.36%) CISSP
15 1 (0.36%) MBA
15 1 (0.36%) Oracle Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 20 (7.12%) ISO/IEC 27001
2 18 (6.41%) PCI DSS
3 15 (5.34%) NIST
4 13 (4.63%) NCSC
5 10 (3.56%) GDPR
6 6 (2.14%) Cyber Essentials
7 4 (1.42%) Data Quality
7 4 (1.42%) QA
7 4 (1.42%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 3 (1.07%) HIPAA
9 2 (0.71%) COBIT
9 2 (0.71%) FedRAMP
9 2 (0.71%) GRC
9 2 (0.71%) SLA
10 1 (0.36%) Disclosure Scotland
10 1 (0.36%) ISO 20022
10 1 (0.36%) ISO/IEC 27002 (supersedes ISO/IEC 17799)
10 1 (0.36%) PSD2
10 1 (0.36%) SOC 2
System Software
1 19 (6.76%) Docker
2 9 (3.20%) Active Directory
3 6 (2.14%) Virtual Desktop
4 4 (1.42%) VMware Infrastructure
5 2 (0.71%) Squid
5 2 (0.71%) VMware ESXi
5 2 (0.71%) VMware NSX
6 1 (0.36%) Varnish
6 1 (0.36%) Virtual Machines
Systems Management
1 58 (20.64%) Terraform
2 41 (14.59%) Kubernetes
3 10 (3.56%) Ansible
4 4 (1.42%) Kibana
4 4 (1.42%) Progress Chef
5 3 (1.07%) Karpenter
5 3 (1.07%) Puppet
5 3 (1.07%) Single Sign-On
6 2 (0.71%) Consul
6 2 (0.71%) FortiGate
6 2 (0.71%) Grafana
6 2 (0.71%) Istio
6 2 (0.71%) Microsoft Intune
6 2 (0.71%) Prometheus
7 1 (0.36%) Nessus
7 1 (0.36%) Suricata
Vendors
1 43 (15.30%) Microsoft
2 28 (9.96%) Google
3 24 (8.54%) Salesforce
4 11 (3.91%) SAP
5 10 (3.56%) Oracle
5 10 (3.56%) Salesforce Marketing Cloud
6 9 (3.20%) Software AG
7 8 (2.85%) Databricks
7 8 (2.85%) VMware
8 7 (2.49%) Citrix
9 6 (2.14%) CloudEndure
10 5 (1.78%) IBM
11 4 (1.42%) Cisco
11 4 (1.42%) Splunk
11 4 (1.42%) Virgin Media
12 3 (1.07%) Atlassian
12 3 (1.07%) CyberArk
12 3 (1.07%) MuleSoft
12 3 (1.07%) Red Hat
13 2 (0.71%) Mitel