Cloud Architect Contract Job Trends

Cloud Architect
UK

The median Cloud Architect daily rate in the UK is £646, according to job vacancies posted in the 6 months leading up to 11 January 2026.

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

6 months to
11 Jan 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 430 308 378
Rank change year-on-year -122 +70 -26
Contract jobs requiring a Cloud Architect 160 222 218
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.44% 0.70% 0.51%
As % of the Job Titles category 0.48% 0.75% 0.54%
Number of daily rates quoted 116 140 148
10th Percentile £492 £481 £525
25th Percentile £550 £525 £588
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £646 £675 £656
Median % change year-on-year -4.26% +2.86% -2.78%
75th Percentile £725 £782 £738
90th Percentile £825 £813 £788
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 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 33,229 29,465 40,074
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 91.31% 92.70% 93.26%
Number of daily rates quoted 21,002 18,045 26,741
10th Percentile £300 £291 £280
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 £720 £738 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £480 £500
% change year-on-year -1.04% -4.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 1,953 888 1,677
10th Percentile £14.38 £15.60 £14.16
25th Percentile £18.25 £21.22 £18.93
Median hourly rate £26.50 £32.50 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year -18.46% -23.53% +28.79%
75th Percentile £60.00 £62.31 £65.00
90th Percentile £70.60 £73.75 £76.25
UK excluding London median hourly rate £25.15 £31.51 £44.78
% change year-on-year -20.18% -29.63% +65.05%

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 11 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 11 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 -78 134 £650 -3.70% 31
London -26 90 £653 -1.51% 13
Work from Home -58 47 £650 -7.14% 16
UK excluding London -70 45 £600 -11.11% 20
North of England -41 19 £630 +0.80% 5
South East -19 16 £600 -11.11% 9
North West -29 14 £460 -26.40% 1
Midlands -36 5 £545 +28.84% 4
South West -17 3 £675 +14.89% 2
East Midlands -21 3 £545 +28.84% 1
Yorkshire -46 3 £625 +38.89% 4
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 11 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 71 (44.38%) AWS
2 58 (36.25%) Azure
3 40 (25.00%) DevOps
4 39 (24.38%) Terraform
5 32 (20.00%) Microsoft
6 31 (19.38%) CI/CD
6 31 (19.38%) Infrastructure as Code
7 30 (18.75%) Migration
7 30 (18.75%) Roadmaps
8 29 (18.13%) Security Cleared
9 27 (16.88%) SC Cleared
10 26 (16.25%) GCP
11 25 (15.63%) Cloud Security
11 25 (15.63%) Problem-Solving
12 24 (15.00%) Agile
13 23 (14.38%) Stakeholder Management
14 22 (13.75%) Kubernetes
15 21 (13.13%) Oracle
15 21 (13.13%) Technical Leadership
15 21 (13.13%) Virtual Private Cloud
16 20 (12.50%) Microservices
17 18 (11.25%) AWS Certification
17 18 (11.25%) Salesforce
18 17 (10.63%) AWS CloudFormation
18 17 (10.63%) Degree
18 17 (10.63%) Serverless
19 16 (10.00%) Containerisation
19 16 (10.00%) Docker
19 16 (10.00%) Stakeholder Engagement
20 15 (9.38%) Amazon S3

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 (1.25%) Apache
1 2 (1.25%) Oracle HTTP Server
1 2 (1.25%) Tomcat
1 2 (1.25%) WebLogic
2 1 (0.63%) Apache Airflow
2 1 (0.63%) ArcGIS
2 1 (0.63%) Confluence
2 1 (0.63%) GeoServer
Business Applications
1 3 (1.88%) SAP S/4HANA
2 2 (1.25%) Oracle ERP
2 2 (1.25%) Oracle General Ledger
3 1 (0.63%) Dynamics AX
3 1 (0.63%) Salesforce CRM
Cloud Services
1 71 (44.38%) AWS
2 58 (36.25%) Azure
3 26 (16.25%) GCP
4 21 (13.13%) Virtual Private Cloud
5 17 (10.63%) AWS CloudFormation
5 17 (10.63%) Serverless
6 15 (9.38%) Amazon S3
6 15 (9.38%) AWS Lambda
6 15 (9.38%) SaaS
7 14 (8.75%) Amazon CloudWatch
8 13 (8.13%) OCI
9 11 (6.88%) Amazon EKS
10 10 (6.25%) Amazon Kinesis
11 9 (5.63%) AWS KMS
11 9 (5.63%) Entra ID
11 9 (5.63%) GitHub
11 9 (5.63%) GitHub Actions
12 7 (4.38%) Amazon Glacier
12 7 (4.38%) Amazon GuardDuty
12 7 (4.38%) AWS CloudTrail
Communications & Networking
1 11 (6.88%) DNS
2 10 (6.25%) Network Security
3 8 (5.00%) VPN
4 7 (4.38%) Firewall
5 4 (2.50%) SD-WAN
5 4 (2.50%) WAN
6 3 (1.88%) DMZ
7 2 (1.25%) HTTP
7 2 (1.25%) Internet
7 2 (1.25%) SSL
7 2 (1.25%) VSAN
8 1 (0.63%) Broadband
8 1 (0.63%) LAN
8 1 (0.63%) MPLS
8 1 (0.63%) MQTT
8 1 (0.63%) NaaS
8 1 (0.63%) NetScaler
8 1 (0.63%) Wi-Fi
8 1 (0.63%) Wireshark
Database & Business Intelligence
1 11 (6.88%) DynamoDB
2 5 (3.13%) Amazon RDS
3 4 (2.50%) Amazon Aurora
3 4 (2.50%) Data Lake
3 4 (2.50%) DocumentDB
3 4 (2.50%) MySQL
3 4 (2.50%) NoSQL
3 4 (2.50%) PostgreSQL
3 4 (2.50%) Redis
4 3 (1.88%) BigQuery
5 2 (1.25%) Data Warehouse
5 2 (1.25%) Oracle Database
6 1 (0.63%) Amazon Redshift
6 1 (0.63%) Azure SQL Database
6 1 (0.63%) Oracle Reports
6 1 (0.63%) Power BI
6 1 (0.63%) Semantic Layer
6 1 (0.63%) Spatial Data
6 1 (0.63%) SQL Server
6 1 (0.63%) Star Schema
Development Applications
1 12 (7.50%) Jenkins
2 8 (5.00%) GitLab
3 4 (2.50%) Terragrunt
4 1 (0.63%) ERwin
4 1 (0.63%) JIRA
4 1 (0.63%) Oracle Forms
General
1 44 (27.50%) Finance
2 38 (23.75%) Social Skills
3 21 (13.13%) Public Sector
4 18 (11.25%) Analytical Skills
5 13 (8.13%) Marketing
6 12 (7.50%) Banking
7 11 (6.88%) Presentation Skills
8 5 (3.13%) Documentation Skills
8 5 (3.13%) Retail
9 3 (1.88%) Financial Institution
9 3 (1.88%) Influencing Skills
9 3 (1.88%) Manufacturing
9 3 (1.88%) Telecoms
10 2 (1.25%) Electronics
10 2 (1.25%) General Ledger
11 1 (0.63%) Law
11 1 (0.63%) Legal
11 1 (0.63%) Local Government
11 1 (0.63%) Organisational Skills
11 1 (0.63%) Police
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 13 (8.13%) Kafka
2 11 (6.88%) Middleware
3 8 (5.00%) REST
4 7 (4.38%) Oracle Fusion
5 6 (3.75%) ActiveMQ
6 5 (3.13%) RESTful
7 4 (2.50%) Elastic Stack
7 4 (2.50%) gRPC
7 4 (2.50%) Hibernate
7 4 (2.50%) JPA
7 4 (2.50%) OAuth
7 4 (2.50%) OAuth2
7 4 (2.50%) OpenID
7 4 (2.50%) OpenTelemetry
7 4 (2.50%) Spring
7 4 (2.50%) Spring Boot
7 4 (2.50%) Spring Cloud
8 3 (1.88%) ARM Templates
9 2 (1.25%) CSS
9 2 (1.25%) HTML
Miscellaneous
1 29 (18.13%) Cloud Native
2 8 (5.00%) Distributed Systems
3 7 (4.38%) Hybrid Cloud
3 7 (4.38%) Public Cloud
4 5 (3.13%) Enterprise Cloud
5 4 (2.50%) Data Centre
6 3 (1.88%) IoT
6 3 (1.88%) Management Information System
7 2 (1.25%) Cloud Security Posture
7 2 (1.25%) Data Structures
7 2 (1.25%) Legacy Systems
7 2 (1.25%) Operational Technology
7 2 (1.25%) PKI
7 2 (1.25%) Security Posture
7 2 (1.25%) Virtual Team
8 1 (0.63%) AI Agents
8 1 (0.63%) Greenfield Project
8 1 (0.63%) Onboarding
8 1 (0.63%) Product Ownership
8 1 (0.63%) Renewable Energy
Operating Systems
1 3 (1.88%) Linux
2 2 (1.25%) CentOS
2 2 (1.25%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
2 2 (1.25%) Ubuntu
2 2 (1.25%) Unix
2 2 (1.25%) VMS
2 2 (1.25%) Windows
2 2 (1.25%) Windows Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 40 (25.00%) DevOps
2 31 (19.38%) CI/CD
2 31 (19.38%) Infrastructure as Code
3 30 (18.75%) Migration
3 30 (18.75%) Roadmaps
4 25 (15.63%) Cloud Security
4 25 (15.63%) Problem-Solving
5 24 (15.00%) Agile
6 23 (14.38%) Stakeholder Management
7 21 (13.13%) Technical Leadership
8 20 (12.50%) Microservices
9 16 (10.00%) Containerisation
9 16 (10.00%) Stakeholder Engagement
10 14 (8.75%) Computer Science
10 14 (8.75%) Decision-Making
11 13 (8.13%) Design Patterns
12 12 (7.50%) Architectural Design
12 12 (7.50%) Cost Optimisation
12 12 (7.50%) Data Integration
12 12 (7.50%) Integration Patterns
Programming Languages
1 11 (6.88%) Java
2 9 (5.63%) SQL
3 5 (3.13%) Python
4 4 (2.50%) Bicep
5 3 (1.88%) Bash
5 3 (1.88%) Korn
6 2 (1.25%) JavaScript
6 2 (1.25%) PowerShell
7 1 (0.63%) Apex Code
7 1 (0.63%) C
7 1 (0.63%) Kusto Query Language
7 1 (0.63%) PL/SQL
Qualifications
1 29 (18.13%) Security Cleared
2 27 (16.88%) SC Cleared
3 18 (11.25%) AWS Certification
4 17 (10.63%) Degree
5 14 (8.75%) Computer Science Degree
6 13 (8.13%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
7 11 (6.88%) Azure Certification
8 8 (5.00%) Master's Degree
9 3 (1.88%) BPSS Clearance
9 3 (1.88%) DV Cleared
10 2 (1.25%) (ISC)2 CCSP
10 2 (1.25%) Cisco Certification
10 2 (1.25%) MCP
10 2 (1.25%) RHCE
10 2 (1.25%) SAP Certification
10 2 (1.25%) VCDX
11 1 (0.63%) CISM
11 1 (0.63%) Microsoft Certification
11 1 (0.63%) Oracle Certification
11 1 (0.63%) SSCP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 10 (6.25%) GDPR
1 10 (6.25%) NCSC
1 10 (6.25%) NIST
2 9 (5.63%) ISO/IEC 27001
3 7 (4.38%) PCI DSS
4 6 (3.75%) Cyber Essentials
5 4 (2.50%) QA
6 3 (1.88%) Data Quality
6 3 (1.88%) Sarbanes-Oxley
7 2 (1.25%) HIPAA
8 1 (0.63%) GRC
8 1 (0.63%) SLA
System Software
1 16 (10.00%) Docker
2 6 (3.75%) Virtual Desktop
2 6 (3.75%) VMware Infrastructure
3 4 (2.50%) Active Directory
4 2 (1.25%) VMware NSX
4 2 (1.25%) vSphere
5 1 (0.63%) Virtual Machines
Systems Management
1 39 (24.38%) Terraform
2 22 (13.75%) Kubernetes
3 9 (5.63%) Ansible
4 4 (2.50%) Kibana
5 3 (1.88%) Karpenter
6 2 (1.25%) Nagios
6 2 (1.25%) Prometheus
7 1 (0.63%) Suricata
Vendors
1 32 (20.00%) Microsoft
2 21 (13.13%) Oracle
3 18 (11.25%) Salesforce
4 10 (6.25%) Google
5 8 (5.00%) Citrix
5 8 (5.00%) Salesforce Marketing Cloud
5 8 (5.00%) Software AG
5 8 (5.00%) VMware
6 6 (3.75%) CloudEndure
6 6 (3.75%) SAP
7 4 (2.50%) Cisco
8 3 (1.88%) Databricks
8 3 (1.88%) Splunk
9 2 (1.25%) Brocade
9 2 (1.25%) Extreme Networks
9 2 (1.25%) Fortinet
10 1 (0.63%) Aruba
10 1 (0.63%) CyberArk
10 1 (0.63%) ESRI
10 1 (0.63%) ServiceNow