Cloud Architect Contract Job Trends

Cloud Architect
UK

The median Cloud Architect daily rate in the UK is £600, according to job vacancies posted in the 6 months leading up to 5 September 2026.

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

 6 months to
5 Sep 2026		 Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 350 375 349
Rank change year-on-year +25 -26 +19
Contract jobs requiring a Cloud Architect 368 175 230
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.68% 0.54% 0.61%
As % of the Job Titles category 0.74% 0.59% 0.65%
Number of daily rates quoted 243 127 152
10th Percentile £455 £462 £491
25th Percentile £550 £513 £525
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £600 £625 £650
Median % change year-on-year -4.00% -3.85% -2.77%
75th Percentile £700 £719 £763
90th Percentile £775 £775 £799
UK excluding London median daily rate £600 £641 £675
% change year-on-year -6.43% -5.00% +3.85%
Number of hourly rates quoted 8 0 0
10th Percentile - - -
25th Percentile £23.20 - -
Median hourly rate £25.47 - -
75th Percentile £27.73 - -
90th Percentile £40.41 - -
UK excluding London median hourly rate £25.47 - -

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 49,872 29,645 35,352
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.42% 91.14% 93.07%
Number of daily rates quoted 29,754 18,681 22,225
10th Percentile £325 £280 £300
25th Percentile £425 £400 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -1.69%
75th Percentile £625 £623 £638
90th Percentile £725 £725 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 3,620 1,543 1,776
10th Percentile £14.85 £13.61 £14.47
25th Percentile £20.50 £16.98 £20.24
Median hourly rate £42.50 £25.15 £43.00
Median % change year-on-year +68.99% -41.51% +1.18%
75th Percentile £67.85 £53.75 £65.00
90th Percentile £79.00 £70.16 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £42.50 £25.15 £45.00
% change year-on-year +68.99% -44.11% +12.50%

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 September 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
Hourly Rate Histogram

Hourly rate distribution of jobs citing Cloud Architect over the 6 months to 5 September 2026.

Hourly rate histogram for Cloud Architect 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 5 September 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 +24 299 £600 -6.25% 331
London -5 171 £650 +2.77% 219
UK excluding London +3 142 £600 -6.43% 127
Work from Home -31 109 £608 -0.04% 125
South East -40 38 £575 +6.48% 37
North of England -37 35 £600 -18.51% 36
Midlands -34 22 £700 +39.58% 15
Scotland -16 19 £450 - 14
North West -43 18 £600 - 23
Yorkshire -30 16 £650 -12.31% 13
South West -35 13 £600 -6.61% 13
East Midlands - 12 £538 - 9
East of England -14 11 £600 -11.11% 6
West Midlands -39 10 £725 +44.57% 6
Wales -21 5 £625 +30.21% 1
North East - 1 - -

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

For the 6 months to 5 September 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.

1 179 (48.64%) AWS
2 152 (41.30%) Azure
3 98 (26.63%) Migration
4 96 (26.09%) Security Cleared
5 78 (21.20%) GCP
6 77 (20.92%) SC Cleared
7 66 (17.93%) DevOps
7 66 (17.93%) Microsoft
8 65 (17.66%) CI/CD
9 64 (17.39%) Infrastructure as Code
10 57 (15.49%) Stakeholder Management
10 57 (15.49%) Technical Leadership
11 54 (14.67%) Roadmaps
12 53 (14.40%) Cloud Security
13 42 (11.41%) Terraform
14 41 (11.14%) Stakeholder Engagement
15 40 (10.87%) AI
15 40 (10.87%) Analytics
15 40 (10.87%) Google
15 40 (10.87%) Kubernetes
16 39 (10.60%) SaaS
16 39 (10.60%) TOGAF
17 38 (10.33%) Architectural Patterns
18 36 (9.78%) Oracle
18 36 (9.78%) Security Architecture
19 35 (9.51%) Problem-Solving
20 29 (7.88%) Enterprise Architecture
21 28 (7.61%) Integration Patterns
21 28 (7.61%) Mentoring
21 28 (7.61%) Technical Architecture

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 6 (1.63%) Palantir Foundry
2 3 (0.82%) Apache Spark
3 2 (0.54%) Apache
3 2 (0.54%) Apache Airflow
3 2 (0.54%) SAS
3 2 (0.54%) SharePoint
4 1 (0.27%) Appian
4 1 (0.27%) Camunda
4 1 (0.27%) Cloud Foundry
4 1 (0.27%) Confluence
Business Applications
1 5 (1.36%) Payment Gateway
2 3 (0.82%) Cloudability
2 3 (0.82%) Oracle Retail
3 2 (0.54%) SAP S/4HANA
4 1 (0.27%) Oracle ERP
4 1 (0.27%) Oracle Payables
4 1 (0.27%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
4 1 (0.27%) Oracle Receivables
4 1 (0.27%) Oracle SCM
4 1 (0.27%) Salesforce CRM
Cloud Services
1 179 (48.64%) AWS
2 152 (41.30%) Azure
3 78 (21.20%) GCP
4 39 (10.60%) SaaS
5 24 (6.52%) Serverless
6 23 (6.25%) PaaS
7 19 (5.16%) Entra ID
7 19 (5.16%) OCI
8 13 (3.53%) IaaS
9 11 (2.99%) GitHub
10 10 (2.72%) Salesforce Service Cloud
10 10 (2.72%) Snowflake
11 9 (2.45%) Azure DevOps
12 7 (1.90%) AWS CloudFormation
12 7 (1.90%) Azure Sentinel
12 7 (1.90%) Microsoft 365
13 6 (1.63%) Amazon EKS
13 6 (1.63%) Azure Synapse Analytics
13 6 (1.63%) Salesforce Commerce Cloud
13 6 (1.63%) Salesforce Sales Cloud
Communications & Networking
1 26 (7.07%) Firewall
2 19 (5.16%) VPN
3 13 (3.53%) Network Security
4 3 (0.82%) DNS
5 2 (0.54%) Internet
6 1 (0.27%) 5G
6 1 (0.27%) CTI
6 1 (0.27%) DAB
6 1 (0.27%) Intrusion Detection
6 1 (0.27%) NGFW
6 1 (0.27%) PCoIP
6 1 (0.27%) PSTN
6 1 (0.27%) Radio Access Network
6 1 (0.27%) Remote Desktop
6 1 (0.27%) RTP
6 1 (0.27%) VSAN
6 1 (0.27%) WAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 26 (7.07%) Data Lake
2 15 (4.08%) Oracle Database
3 9 (2.45%) BigQuery
4 6 (1.63%) Amazon RDS
5 4 (1.09%) Oracle Exadata
6 3 (0.82%) Data Warehouse
6 3 (0.82%) NoSQL
7 2 (0.54%) Delta Lake
7 2 (0.54%) MySQL
7 2 (0.54%) Power BI
7 2 (0.54%) SQL Server
7 2 (0.54%) Tableau
8 1 (0.27%) Amazon Redshift
8 1 (0.27%) Big Data
8 1 (0.27%) Cloudera CDH
8 1 (0.27%) Flink
8 1 (0.27%) HBase
8 1 (0.27%) Oracle ODI
8 1 (0.27%) Relational Database
8 1 (0.27%) SAP HANA
Development Applications
1 7 (1.90%) Git
2 5 (1.36%) JIRA
3 4 (1.09%) Jenkins
4 3 (0.82%) Claude Code
5 2 (0.54%) IntelliJ
5 2 (0.54%) JUnit
5 2 (0.54%) MLflow
5 2 (0.54%) Oracle Forms
5 2 (0.54%) SonarQube
6 1 (0.27%) Hudson
6 1 (0.27%) Oracle APEX
General
1 62 (16.85%) Social Skills
2 53 (14.40%) Finance
3 38 (10.33%) Public Sector
4 25 (6.79%) Banking
5 21 (5.71%) Documentation Skills
6 19 (5.16%) Retail
7 14 (3.80%) Analytical Skills
8 7 (1.90%) Influencing Skills
9 6 (1.63%) Billing
9 6 (1.63%) Marketing
10 4 (1.09%) Legal
10 4 (1.09%) Presentation Skills
11 3 (0.82%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 3 (0.82%) Telecoms
12 2 (0.54%) Military
13 1 (0.27%) Aviation
13 1 (0.27%) Back Office
13 1 (0.27%) Manufacturing
13 1 (0.27%) Organisational Skills
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 42 (11.41%) Terraform
2 20 (5.43%) Middleware
3 17 (4.62%) REST
4 11 (2.99%) Kafka
5 9 (2.45%) Lightning Web Components
5 9 (2.45%) Oracle Fusion
6 8 (2.17%) SOAP
7 6 (1.63%) OAuth
8 4 (1.09%) ARM Templates
8 4 (1.09%) Node.js
8 4 (1.09%) SailPoint
9 2 (0.54%) .NET Core
9 2 (0.54%) .NET Framework
9 2 (0.54%) AngularJS
9 2 (0.54%) JWT
9 2 (0.54%) Keycloak
9 2 (0.54%) OpenID
9 2 (0.54%) React
9 2 (0.54%) Spring
9 2 (0.54%) Spring Boot
Miscellaneous
1 75 (20.38%) Cloud Native
2 28 (7.61%) Enterprise Cloud
3 23 (6.25%) Management Information System
4 22 (5.98%) Hybrid Cloud
5 18 (4.89%) Onboarding
6 17 (4.62%) Data Centre
7 14 (3.80%) Public Cloud
8 10 (2.72%) Distributed Systems
9 9 (2.45%) Security Posture
10 8 (2.17%) Legacy Systems
10 8 (2.17%) Product Ownership
11 7 (1.90%) Private Cloud
12 6 (1.63%) Data Fabric
12 6 (1.63%) Enterprise Software
13 5 (1.36%) AI Agents
14 4 (1.09%) Legacy Applications
15 3 (0.82%) Cloud Security Posture
15 3 (0.82%) Greenfield Project
15 3 (0.82%) NHS
15 3 (0.82%) PKI
Operating Systems
1 12 (3.26%) Windows
2 7 (1.90%) Linux
2 7 (1.90%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
2 7 (1.90%) Windows Server
3 4 (1.09%) Unix
4 1 (0.27%) AIX
4 1 (0.27%) Solaris
4 1 (0.27%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 98 (26.63%) Migration
2 66 (17.93%) DevOps
3 65 (17.66%) CI/CD
4 64 (17.39%) Infrastructure as Code
5 57 (15.49%) Stakeholder Management
5 57 (15.49%) Technical Leadership
6 54 (14.67%) Roadmaps
7 53 (14.40%) Cloud Security
8 41 (11.14%) Stakeholder Engagement
9 40 (10.87%) AI
9 40 (10.87%) Analytics
10 39 (10.60%) TOGAF
11 38 (10.33%) Architectural Patterns
12 36 (9.78%) Security Architecture
13 35 (9.51%) Problem-Solving
14 29 (7.88%) Enterprise Architecture
15 28 (7.61%) Integration Patterns
15 28 (7.61%) Mentoring
15 28 (7.61%) Technical Architecture
16 27 (7.34%) Platform Engineering
Programming Languages
1 10 (2.72%) Bicep
1 10 (2.72%) Java
2 9 (2.45%) Apex Code
2 9 (2.45%) Python
3 6 (1.63%) Bash
3 6 (1.63%) JavaScript
4 5 (1.36%) PowerShell
4 5 (1.36%) SQL
5 2 (0.54%) C#
5 2 (0.54%) Shell Script
6 1 (0.27%) C
6 1 (0.27%) PL/SQL
6 1 (0.27%) ProC
6 1 (0.27%) Scala
6 1 (0.27%) TypeScript
Qualifications
1 96 (26.09%) Security Cleared
2 77 (20.92%) SC Cleared
3 25 (6.79%) AWS Certification
4 13 (3.53%) Azure Certification
5 12 (3.26%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
5 12 (3.26%) Cisco Certification
5 12 (3.26%) CISSP
6 10 (2.72%) Microsoft Certification
7 9 (2.45%) (ISC)2 CCSP
7 9 (2.45%) CCSP
8 8 (2.17%) DV Cleared
9 6 (1.63%) Degree
10 5 (1.36%) CISM
11 3 (0.82%) CCNP
11 3 (0.82%) ISO 27001 Lead Auditor
11 3 (0.82%) TOGAF Certification
12 2 (0.54%) BPSS Clearance
12 2 (0.54%) Computer Science Degree
12 2 (0.54%) GIAC
12 2 (0.54%) Master's Degree
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 19 (5.16%) ISO/IEC 27001
2 17 (4.62%) NIST
3 11 (2.99%) PCI DSS
4 10 (2.72%) GDPR
5 4 (1.09%) Data Quality
5 4 (1.09%) GRC
5 4 (1.09%) NCSC
6 2 (0.54%) QA
7 1 (0.27%) Disclosure Scotland
7 1 (0.27%) NIST 800
System Software
1 17 (4.62%) Active Directory
2 6 (1.63%) Docker
2 6 (1.63%) VMware NSX
3 5 (1.36%) VMware Infrastructure
4 3 (0.82%) VMware ESXi
5 2 (0.54%) Virtual Machines
5 2 (0.54%) vSphere
5 2 (0.54%) zsh
6 1 (0.27%) vCloud
Systems Management
1 40 (10.87%) Kubernetes
2 4 (1.09%) Single Sign-On
3 3 (0.82%) Ansible
4 2 (0.54%) CASB
5 1 (0.27%) CloudForms
5 1 (0.27%) Grafana
5 1 (0.27%) Prometheus
5 1 (0.27%) QRadar
5 1 (0.27%) Salt
5 1 (0.27%) SCOM
5 1 (0.27%) vCenter Server
Vendors
1 66 (17.93%) Microsoft
2 40 (10.87%) Google
3 36 (9.78%) Oracle
4 25 (6.79%) Salesforce
5 19 (5.16%) Databricks
6 12 (3.26%) VMware
7 10 (2.72%) CyberArk
7 10 (2.72%) SAP
8 9 (2.45%) Cisco
9 7 (1.90%) Foundry
10 6 (1.63%) Palantir
11 5 (1.36%) IBM
11 5 (1.36%) Red Hat
11 5 (1.36%) ServiceNow
12 4 (1.09%) Splunk
13 3 (0.82%) MuleSoft
13 3 (0.82%) Salesforce Marketing Cloud
14 2 (0.54%) Checkmarx
15 1 (0.27%) Denodo
15 1 (0.27%) Pure Storage
398 Cloud Architect jobs Nationwide