Cloud Architect Contract Job Trends

Cloud Architect
UK

The median Cloud Architect daily rate in the UK is £643, according to job vacancies posted in the 6 months leading up to 8 January 2026.

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

6 months to
8 Jan 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 427 316 386
Rank change year-on-year -111 +70 -38
Contract jobs requiring a Cloud Architect 165 225 220
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.45% 0.70% 0.52%
As % of the Job Titles category 0.49% 0.75% 0.56%
Number of daily rates quoted 119 144 149
10th Percentile £492 £450 £525
25th Percentile £550 £525 £588
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £643 £669 £650
Median % change year-on-year -3.93% +2.88% -3.70%
75th Percentile £725 £775 £738
90th Percentile £825 £800 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £600 £675 £650
% change year-on-year -11.11% +3.85% +5.05%
Number of hourly rates quoted 1 0 2
10th Percentile - - £78.83
25th Percentile - - £80.06
Median hourly rate £75.00 - £82.75
75th Percentile - - £86.06
90th Percentile - - £87.68
UK excluding London median hourly rate - - £82.75
% change year-on-year - - +18.21%

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 33,689 29,904 39,536
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 91.29% 92.67% 93.32%
Number of daily rates quoted 21,326 18,317 26,399
10th Percentile £300 £293 £281
25th Percentile £405 £409 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £618 £638 £638
90th Percentile £719 £738 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £480 £500
% change year-on-year -1.04% -4.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 1,972 925 1,611
10th Percentile £14.35 £15.57 £14.18
25th Percentile £18.25 £21.00 £19.06
Median hourly rate £26.54 £32.50 £44.50
Median % change year-on-year -18.35% -26.97% +34.85%
75th Percentile £60.00 £62.50 £65.00
90th Percentile £71.41 £73.75 £76.53
UK excluding London median hourly rate £25.15 £31.10 £45.88
% change year-on-year -19.13% -32.21% +69.13%

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 8 January 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 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 8 January 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 -85 137 £650 -0.95% 30
London -30 90 £653 -0.57% 16
Work from Home -51 52 £646 +3.90% 23
UK excluding London -79 48 £600 -11.11% 15
North of England -53 19 £630 +0.80% 2
South East -32 18 £600 -11.11% 8
North West -26 14 £460 -26.40% 2
Midlands -35 5 £545 +28.84% 3
South West -10 4 £663 +39.47% 1
East Midlands -25 3 £545 +28.84% 1
Yorkshire -45 3 £625 +38.89%
North East - 2 £725 -
Wales - 2 £556 -
West Midlands - 2 £638 - 2

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

For the 6 months to 8 January 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 70 (42.42%) AWS
2 62 (37.58%) Azure
3 40 (24.24%) DevOps
4 39 (23.64%) Terraform
5 34 (20.61%) Microsoft
6 33 (20.00%) Infrastructure as Code
6 33 (20.00%) Migration
7 31 (18.79%) Security Cleared
8 30 (18.18%) CI/CD
9 29 (17.58%) Roadmaps
10 27 (16.36%) SC Cleared
11 26 (15.76%) Cloud Security
11 26 (15.76%) GCP
12 25 (15.15%) Problem-Solving
13 24 (14.55%) Agile
14 22 (13.33%) Kubernetes
14 22 (13.33%) Oracle
14 22 (13.33%) Stakeholder Management
15 21 (12.73%) Technical Leadership
16 20 (12.12%) Virtual Private Cloud
17 19 (11.52%) Microservices
18 18 (10.91%) AWS Certification
18 18 (10.91%) Salesforce
19 17 (10.30%) Degree
20 16 (9.70%) AWS CloudFormation
20 16 (9.70%) Containerisation
20 16 (9.70%) Serverless
20 16 (9.70%) Stakeholder Engagement
21 15 (9.09%) Docker
21 15 (9.09%) SaaS

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 (1.21%) Apache
1 2 (1.21%) Oracle HTTP Server
1 2 (1.21%) Tomcat
1 2 (1.21%) WebLogic
2 1 (0.61%) Apache Airflow
2 1 (0.61%) ArcGIS
2 1 (0.61%) Confluence
2 1 (0.61%) GeoServer
Business Applications
1 3 (1.82%) SAP S/4HANA
2 2 (1.21%) Oracle ERP
2 2 (1.21%) Oracle General Ledger
3 1 (0.61%) Dynamics AX
3 1 (0.61%) Salesforce CRM
Cloud Services
1 70 (42.42%) AWS
2 62 (37.58%) Azure
3 26 (15.76%) GCP
4 20 (12.12%) Virtual Private Cloud
5 16 (9.70%) AWS CloudFormation
5 16 (9.70%) Serverless
6 15 (9.09%) SaaS
7 14 (8.48%) Amazon S3
7 14 (8.48%) AWS Lambda
7 14 (8.48%) OCI
8 13 (7.88%) Amazon CloudWatch
9 11 (6.67%) Entra ID
10 10 (6.06%) Amazon EKS
11 9 (5.45%) Amazon Kinesis
11 9 (5.45%) AWS KMS
12 8 (4.85%) GitHub
12 8 (4.85%) GitHub Actions
13 7 (4.24%) Amazon Glacier
13 7 (4.24%) AWS CloudTrail
13 7 (4.24%) AWS Control Tower
Communications & Networking
1 10 (6.06%) DNS
1 10 (6.06%) VPN
2 9 (5.45%) Network Security
3 7 (4.24%) Firewall
4 4 (2.42%) SD-WAN
4 4 (2.42%) WAN
5 2 (1.21%) DMZ
5 2 (1.21%) HTTP
5 2 (1.21%) Internet
5 2 (1.21%) SSL
5 2 (1.21%) VSAN
6 1 (0.61%) Broadband
6 1 (0.61%) LAN
6 1 (0.61%) MPLS
6 1 (0.61%) MQTT
6 1 (0.61%) NaaS
6 1 (0.61%) NetScaler
6 1 (0.61%) Wi-Fi
6 1 (0.61%) Wireshark
Database & Business Intelligence
1 10 (6.06%) DynamoDB
2 4 (2.42%) Amazon RDS
2 4 (2.42%) Data Lake
3 3 (1.82%) Amazon Aurora
3 3 (1.82%) BigQuery
3 3 (1.82%) DocumentDB
3 3 (1.82%) MySQL
3 3 (1.82%) NoSQL
3 3 (1.82%) PostgreSQL
3 3 (1.82%) Redis
4 2 (1.21%) Data Warehouse
4 2 (1.21%) Oracle Database
5 1 (0.61%) Amazon Athena
5 1 (0.61%) Amazon Redshift
5 1 (0.61%) Azure SQL Database
5 1 (0.61%) Power BI
5 1 (0.61%) Semantic Layer
5 1 (0.61%) Spatial Data
5 1 (0.61%) SQL Server
5 1 (0.61%) Star Schema
Development Applications
1 11 (6.67%) Jenkins
2 7 (4.24%) GitLab
3 4 (2.42%) Terragrunt
4 1 (0.61%) ERwin
4 1 (0.61%) JIRA
4 1 (0.61%) Oracle Forms
General
1 45 (27.27%) Finance
2 39 (23.64%) Social Skills
3 21 (12.73%) Public Sector
4 18 (10.91%) Analytical Skills
5 13 (7.88%) Marketing
6 12 (7.27%) Banking
6 12 (7.27%) Presentation Skills
7 5 (3.03%) Documentation Skills
7 5 (3.03%) Retail
8 4 (2.42%) Legal
9 3 (1.82%) Financial Institution
9 3 (1.82%) Influencing Skills
9 3 (1.82%) Manufacturing
9 3 (1.82%) Telecoms
10 2 (1.21%) Electronics
10 2 (1.21%) General Ledger
11 1 (0.61%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 1 (0.61%) Local Government
11 1 (0.61%) Organisational Skills
11 1 (0.61%) Police
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 12 (7.27%) Kafka
2 11 (6.67%) Middleware
3 7 (4.24%) Oracle Fusion
3 7 (4.24%) REST
4 6 (3.64%) ActiveMQ
5 4 (2.42%) Elastic Stack
5 4 (2.42%) RESTful
6 3 (1.82%) ARM Templates
6 3 (1.82%) gRPC
6 3 (1.82%) Hibernate
6 3 (1.82%) JPA
6 3 (1.82%) OAuth
6 3 (1.82%) OAuth2
6 3 (1.82%) OpenID
6 3 (1.82%) OpenTelemetry
6 3 (1.82%) Spring
6 3 (1.82%) Spring Boot
6 3 (1.82%) Spring Cloud
7 2 (1.21%) CSS
7 2 (1.21%) HTML
Miscellaneous
1 28 (16.97%) Cloud Native
2 7 (4.24%) Distributed Systems
2 7 (4.24%) Public Cloud
3 6 (3.64%) Data Centre
3 6 (3.64%) Hybrid Cloud
4 5 (3.03%) Enterprise Cloud
5 3 (1.82%) IoT
5 3 (1.82%) Management Information System
5 3 (1.82%) Security Posture
6 2 (1.21%) Cloud Security Posture
6 2 (1.21%) Data Structures
6 2 (1.21%) Legacy Systems
6 2 (1.21%) Operational Technology
6 2 (1.21%) PKI
6 2 (1.21%) Virtual Team
7 1 (0.61%) Analytical Mindset
7 1 (0.61%) Greenfield Project
7 1 (0.61%) Reinsurance
7 1 (0.61%) Renewable Energy
7 1 (0.61%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 3 (1.82%) Linux
2 2 (1.21%) CentOS
2 2 (1.21%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
2 2 (1.21%) Ubuntu
2 2 (1.21%) Unix
2 2 (1.21%) VMS
2 2 (1.21%) Windows
2 2 (1.21%) Windows Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 40 (24.24%) DevOps
2 33 (20.00%) Infrastructure as Code
2 33 (20.00%) Migration
3 30 (18.18%) CI/CD
4 29 (17.58%) Roadmaps
5 26 (15.76%) Cloud Security
6 25 (15.15%) Problem-Solving
7 24 (14.55%) Agile
8 22 (13.33%) Stakeholder Management
9 21 (12.73%) Technical Leadership
10 19 (11.52%) Microservices
11 16 (9.70%) Containerisation
11 16 (9.70%) Stakeholder Engagement
12 14 (8.48%) Computer Science
12 14 (8.48%) Decision-Making
13 12 (7.27%) Analytics
13 12 (7.27%) Architectural Design
13 12 (7.27%) Data Integration
13 12 (7.27%) Design Patterns
14 11 (6.67%) Validation
Programming Languages
1 10 (6.06%) Java
2 8 (4.85%) SQL
3 6 (3.64%) Python
4 4 (2.42%) Bicep
4 4 (2.42%) PowerShell
5 3 (1.82%) Bash
5 3 (1.82%) Korn
6 2 (1.21%) JavaScript
7 1 (0.61%) Apex Code
7 1 (0.61%) C
7 1 (0.61%) Go
7 1 (0.61%) Kusto Query Language
7 1 (0.61%) PL/SQL
Qualifications
1 31 (18.79%) Security Cleared
2 27 (16.36%) SC Cleared
3 18 (10.91%) AWS Certification
4 17 (10.30%) Degree
5 14 (8.48%) Computer Science Degree
6 13 (7.88%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
7 11 (6.67%) Azure Certification
8 8 (4.85%) Master's Degree
9 4 (2.42%) DV Cleared
10 3 (1.82%) BPSS Clearance
11 2 (1.21%) (ISC)2 CCSP
11 2 (1.21%) Cisco Certification
11 2 (1.21%) MCP
11 2 (1.21%) RHCE
11 2 (1.21%) SAP Certification
11 2 (1.21%) VCDX
12 1 (0.61%) CCSP
12 1 (0.61%) CISM
12 1 (0.61%) CISSP
12 1 (0.61%) SSCP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 10 (6.06%) GDPR
1 10 (6.06%) ISO/IEC 27001
1 10 (6.06%) NCSC
2 9 (5.45%) NIST
3 8 (4.85%) Cyber Essentials
4 6 (3.64%) PCI DSS
5 3 (1.82%) Data Quality
5 3 (1.82%) QA
5 3 (1.82%) Sarbanes-Oxley
6 2 (1.21%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
6 2 (1.21%) HIPAA
7 1 (0.61%) GRC
7 1 (0.61%) SLA
System Software
1 15 (9.09%) Docker
2 6 (3.64%) Active Directory
2 6 (3.64%) Virtual Desktop
2 6 (3.64%) VMware Infrastructure
3 2 (1.21%) VMware NSX
3 2 (1.21%) vSphere
4 1 (0.61%) Virtual Machines
Systems Management
1 39 (23.64%) Terraform
2 22 (13.33%) Kubernetes
3 9 (5.45%) Ansible
4 4 (2.42%) Kibana
5 3 (1.82%) Karpenter
6 2 (1.21%) Microsoft Intune
6 2 (1.21%) Nagios
6 2 (1.21%) Prometheus
7 1 (0.61%) Suricata
Vendors
1 34 (20.61%) Microsoft
2 22 (13.33%) Oracle
3 18 (10.91%) Salesforce
4 10 (6.06%) Google
5 8 (4.85%) Citrix
5 8 (4.85%) Salesforce Marketing Cloud
5 8 (4.85%) Software AG
5 8 (4.85%) VMware
6 6 (3.64%) Cisco
6 6 (3.64%) CloudEndure
6 6 (3.64%) SAP
7 3 (1.82%) Databricks
7 3 (1.82%) Splunk
8 2 (1.21%) Brocade
8 2 (1.21%) Extreme Networks
8 2 (1.21%) Fortinet
8 2 (1.21%) Sophos
9 1 (0.61%) Aruba
9 1 (0.61%) ESRI
9 1 (0.61%) ServiceNow