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 4 February 2026.

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

6 months to
4 Feb 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 398 299 371
Rank change year-on-year -99 +72 -24
Contract jobs requiring a Cloud Architect 207 239 241
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.53% 0.77% 0.54%
As % of the Job Titles category 0.58% 0.83% 0.58%
Number of daily rates quoted 156 158 167
10th Percentile £460 £469 £525
25th Percentile £534 £525 £588
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £625 £675 £650
Median % change year-on-year -7.41% +3.85% -3.70%
75th Percentile £713 £800 £750
90th Percentile £794 £838 £805
UK excluding London median daily rate £588 £625 £650
% change year-on-year -6.00% -3.85% +6.12%
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 35,739 28,752 41,680
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 91.51% 92.94% 93.14%
Number of daily rates quoted 22,524 17,628 27,555
10th Percentile £300 £293 £275
25th Percentile £405 £408 £410
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £613 £638 £638
90th Percentile £719 £738 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £476 £493
% change year-on-year -0.21% -3.45% -1.40%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,144 847 2,284
10th Percentile £14.50 £15.92 £13.15
25th Percentile £18.55 £21.25 £16.63
Median hourly rate £30.00 £33.00 £35.00
Median % change year-on-year -9.09% -5.71% -
75th Percentile £61.52 £62.50 £61.55
90th Percentile £71.00 £75.00 £72.90
UK excluding London median hourly rate £28.00 £31.76 £36.00
% change year-on-year -11.84% -11.78% +11.63%

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 4 February 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 4 February 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 -76 178 £625 - 38
London -26 120 £635 -2.31% 19
UK excluding London -57 63 £588 -6.00% 27
Work from Home -54 62 £625 -13.79% 27
North of England -56 24 £600 +20.00% 1
North West -28 16 £460 -19.44% 1
South East -29 16 £600 -11.11% 9
Midlands -44 12 £550 +30.02% 5
East Midlands -23 7 £545 +28.84% 2
Yorkshire -49 6 £613 +28.95%
Scotland +11 4 £745 +19.20%
West Midlands -39 4 £638 - 3
Wales - 3 £500 -
South West -27 2 £663 +3.72% 11
East of England -28 2 £550 -8.33%
North East - 2 £725 -

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

For the 6 months to 4 February 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 93 (44.93%) AWS
2 81 (39.13%) Azure
3 55 (26.57%) Terraform
4 52 (25.12%) DevOps
5 47 (22.71%) CI/CD
6 45 (21.74%) Infrastructure as Code
7 43 (20.77%) Security Cleared
8 42 (20.29%) SC Cleared
9 41 (19.81%) GCP
9 41 (19.81%) Migration
10 40 (19.32%) Microsoft
11 36 (17.39%) Roadmaps
12 34 (16.43%) Kubernetes
13 33 (15.94%) Cloud Security
13 33 (15.94%) Problem-Solving
14 31 (14.98%) Agile
15 30 (14.49%) Serverless
15 30 (14.49%) Stakeholder Management
16 29 (14.01%) Virtual Private Cloud
17 26 (12.56%) Technical Leadership
18 24 (11.59%) AWS Certification
19 23 (11.11%) Containerisation
19 23 (11.11%) Google
19 23 (11.11%) Microservices
20 22 (10.63%) AWS CloudFormation
20 22 (10.63%) Docker
21 21 (10.14%) Amazon S3
22 20 (9.66%) Cost Optimisation
22 20 (9.66%) Salesforce
23 19 (9.18%) Degree

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 (1.93%) Confluence
2 2 (0.97%) Apache
2 2 (0.97%) nginx
2 2 (0.97%) Oracle HTTP Server
2 2 (0.97%) Tomcat
2 2 (0.97%) WebLogic
3 1 (0.48%) Apache Airflow
3 1 (0.48%) ArcGIS
3 1 (0.48%) GeoServer
Applications
1 1 (0.48%) Chatbot
Business Applications
1 4 (1.93%) SAP S/4HANA
2 3 (1.45%) Salesforce CRM
3 2 (0.97%) Oracle General Ledger
4 1 (0.48%) Dynamics AX
4 1 (0.48%) Oracle ERP
Cloud Services
1 93 (44.93%) AWS
2 81 (39.13%) Azure
3 41 (19.81%) GCP
4 30 (14.49%) Serverless
5 29 (14.01%) Virtual Private Cloud
6 22 (10.63%) AWS CloudFormation
7 21 (10.14%) Amazon S3
8 18 (8.70%) Amazon EKS
8 18 (8.70%) AWS Lambda
8 18 (8.70%) SaaS
9 17 (8.21%) Amazon CloudWatch
10 16 (7.73%) GitHub
10 16 (7.73%) GitHub Actions
11 15 (7.25%) Entra ID
12 14 (6.76%) Route 53
13 13 (6.28%) OCI
14 11 (5.31%) Amazon GuardDuty
15 10 (4.83%) Amazon Kinesis
15 10 (4.83%) AWS Control Tower
16 9 (4.35%) Amazon EC2
Communications & Networking
1 18 (8.70%) DNS
2 16 (7.73%) Network Security
2 16 (7.73%) VPN
3 13 (6.28%) Firewall
4 8 (3.86%) WAN
5 6 (2.90%) SD-WAN
6 3 (1.45%) BGP
6 3 (1.45%) OSPF
7 2 (0.97%) DMZ
7 2 (0.97%) HTTP
7 2 (0.97%) MPLS
7 2 (0.97%) OpenVPN
7 2 (0.97%) SSL
7 2 (0.97%) TCP/IP
7 2 (0.97%) VSAN
8 1 (0.48%) Anycast
8 1 (0.48%) Broadband
8 1 (0.48%) DMVPN
8 1 (0.48%) Internet
8 1 (0.48%) LAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 13 (6.28%) DynamoDB
2 7 (3.38%) Amazon RDS
3 6 (2.90%) BigQuery
4 5 (2.42%) DocumentDB
4 5 (2.42%) NoSQL
4 5 (2.42%) PostgreSQL
5 4 (1.93%) Amazon Aurora
5 4 (1.93%) Data Lake
5 4 (1.93%) MySQL
5 4 (1.93%) Redis
6 2 (0.97%) Data Warehouse
6 2 (0.97%) Elasticsearch
6 2 (0.97%) Oracle Database
7 1 (0.48%) Amazon Athena
7 1 (0.48%) Amazon Redshift
7 1 (0.48%) Oracle Reports
7 1 (0.48%) Power BI
7 1 (0.48%) Semantic Layer
7 1 (0.48%) SQL Server
7 1 (0.48%) Star Schema
Development Applications
1 14 (6.76%) Jenkins
2 9 (4.35%) GitLab
3 5 (2.42%) JIRA
4 4 (1.93%) Terragrunt
5 2 (0.97%) Bitbucket
5 2 (0.97%) SonarQube
6 1 (0.48%) AppScan
6 1 (0.48%) Burp Suite
6 1 (0.48%) ERwin
6 1 (0.48%) Metasploit
6 1 (0.48%) Oracle Forms
General
1 51 (24.64%) Social Skills
2 50 (24.15%) Finance
3 26 (12.56%) Public Sector
4 25 (12.08%) Analytical Skills
5 19 (9.18%) Banking
6 15 (7.25%) Marketing
7 14 (6.76%) Presentation Skills
8 11 (5.31%) Documentation Skills
9 5 (2.42%) Retail
10 4 (1.93%) Influencing Skills
11 3 (1.45%) Financial Institution
11 3 (1.45%) Manufacturing
11 3 (1.45%) Telecoms
12 2 (0.97%) Electronics
12 2 (0.97%) General Ledger
12 2 (0.97%) Law
13 1 (0.48%) Legal
13 1 (0.48%) Local Government
13 1 (0.48%) Organisational Skills
13 1 (0.48%) Police
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 14 (6.76%) Kafka
2 13 (6.28%) Middleware
3 10 (4.83%) OpenID
4 9 (4.35%) REST
5 8 (3.86%) OAuth
6 6 (2.90%) ActiveMQ
6 6 (2.90%) Oracle Fusion
7 5 (2.42%) OAuth2
7 5 (2.42%) RESTful
8 4 (1.93%) Elastic Stack
8 4 (1.93%) gRPC
8 4 (1.93%) Hibernate
8 4 (1.93%) JPA
8 4 (1.93%) OpenTelemetry
8 4 (1.93%) SAML
8 4 (1.93%) Spring
8 4 (1.93%) Spring Boot
8 4 (1.93%) Spring Cloud
9 3 (1.45%) CSS
9 3 (1.45%) HTML
Miscellaneous
1 40 (19.32%) Cloud Native
2 11 (5.31%) Distributed Systems
2 11 (5.31%) Hybrid Cloud
2 11 (5.31%) Public Cloud
3 7 (3.38%) Data Centre
4 6 (2.90%) Enterprise Cloud
4 6 (2.90%) Onboarding
5 3 (1.45%) Data Structures
5 3 (1.45%) IoT
5 3 (1.45%) Operational Technology
5 3 (1.45%) Product Ownership
5 3 (1.45%) SCADA
5 3 (1.45%) Virtual Team
6 2 (0.97%) Enterprise Software
6 2 (0.97%) Legacy Systems
6 2 (0.97%) Management Information System
6 2 (0.97%) PKI
6 2 (0.97%) Private Cloud
7 1 (0.48%) Mobile Banking
7 1 (0.48%) Reinsurance
Operating Systems
1 6 (2.90%) Windows
2 4 (1.93%) Linux
3 3 (1.45%) Android
3 3 (1.45%) Apple iOS
3 3 (1.45%) Mac OS
4 2 (0.97%) CentOS
4 2 (0.97%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 2 (0.97%) Ubuntu
4 2 (0.97%) Unix
4 2 (0.97%) Windows Server
5 1 (0.48%) Kali Linux
5 1 (0.48%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 52 (25.12%) DevOps
2 47 (22.71%) CI/CD
3 45 (21.74%) Infrastructure as Code
4 41 (19.81%) Migration
5 36 (17.39%) Roadmaps
6 33 (15.94%) Cloud Security
6 33 (15.94%) Problem-Solving
7 31 (14.98%) Agile
8 30 (14.49%) Stakeholder Management
9 26 (12.56%) Technical Leadership
10 23 (11.11%) Containerisation
10 23 (11.11%) Microservices
11 20 (9.66%) Cost Optimisation
12 19 (9.18%) Identity Access Management
13 18 (8.70%) Decision-Making
14 16 (7.73%) Computer Science
14 16 (7.73%) Integration Patterns
14 16 (7.73%) RBAC
14 16 (7.73%) Stakeholder Engagement
15 15 (7.25%) Observability
Programming Languages
1 12 (5.80%) Java
1 12 (5.80%) SQL
2 11 (5.31%) Python
3 10 (4.83%) Bicep
4 3 (1.45%) Bash
4 3 (1.45%) Go
4 3 (1.45%) JavaScript
4 3 (1.45%) Korn
5 2 (0.97%) PowerShell
6 1 (0.48%) Apex Code
6 1 (0.48%) C
6 1 (0.48%) Kusto Query Language
6 1 (0.48%) Lisp
6 1 (0.48%) PL/SQL
Qualifications
1 43 (20.77%) Security Cleared
2 42 (20.29%) SC Cleared
3 24 (11.59%) AWS Certification
4 19 (9.18%) Degree
5 17 (8.21%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
6 16 (7.73%) Computer Science Degree
7 10 (4.83%) Azure Certification
8 9 (4.35%) Master's Degree
9 7 (3.38%) BPSS Clearance
10 3 (1.45%) DV Cleared
11 2 (0.97%) Microsoft Certified Professional
11 2 (0.97%) RHCE
11 2 (0.97%) SAP Certification
11 2 (0.97%) VCDX
12 1 (0.48%) (ISC)2 CCSP
12 1 (0.48%) Cisco Certification
12 1 (0.48%) Microsoft Certification
12 1 (0.48%) Oracle Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 12 (5.80%) GDPR
2 11 (5.31%) NCSC
2 11 (5.31%) NIST
2 11 (5.31%) PCI DSS
3 10 (4.83%) ISO/IEC 27001
4 6 (2.90%) Cyber Essentials
5 4 (1.93%) HIPAA
5 4 (1.93%) QA
6 3 (1.45%) Data Quality
6 3 (1.45%) Sarbanes-Oxley
7 2 (0.97%) FedRAMP
7 2 (0.97%) GRC
8 1 (0.48%) COBIT
8 1 (0.48%) Disclosure Scotland
8 1 (0.48%) ISO/IEC 27002 (supersedes ISO/IEC 17799)
8 1 (0.48%) SLA
8 1 (0.48%) SOC 2
System Software
1 22 (10.63%) Docker
2 7 (3.38%) Active Directory
3 6 (2.90%) Virtual Desktop
3 6 (2.90%) VMware Infrastructure
4 2 (0.97%) Squid
4 2 (0.97%) VMware NSX
4 2 (0.97%) vSphere
Systems Management
1 55 (26.57%) Terraform
2 34 (16.43%) Kubernetes
3 11 (5.31%) Ansible
4 4 (1.93%) Kibana
4 4 (1.93%) Prometheus
5 3 (1.45%) Karpenter
5 3 (1.45%) Progress Chef
5 3 (1.45%) Single Sign-On
6 2 (0.97%) Consul
6 2 (0.97%) FortiGate
6 2 (0.97%) Grafana
6 2 (0.97%) Istio
6 2 (0.97%) Nagios
6 2 (0.97%) Puppet
7 1 (0.48%) Microsoft Intune
7 1 (0.48%) Nessus
7 1 (0.48%) Suricata
Vendors
1 40 (19.32%) Microsoft
2 23 (11.11%) Google
3 20 (9.66%) Salesforce
4 19 (9.18%) Oracle
5 10 (4.83%) Salesforce Marketing Cloud
6 9 (4.35%) SAP
6 9 (4.35%) Software AG
7 8 (3.86%) VMware
8 7 (3.38%) Citrix
9 6 (2.90%) CloudEndure
10 5 (2.42%) Databricks
10 5 (2.42%) Splunk
11 4 (1.93%) Cisco
12 3 (1.45%) Atlassian
12 3 (1.45%) Virgin Media
13 2 (0.97%) AVEVA
13 2 (0.97%) Brocade
13 2 (0.97%) CyberArk
13 2 (0.97%) Fortinet
13 2 (0.97%) Globalscape