Cloud Architect Contract Job Trends

Cloud Architect
UK

The median Cloud Architect daily rate in the UK is £650, according to job vacancies posted in the 6 months leading up to 5 January 2026.

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

6 months to
5 Jan 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 426 314 384
Rank change year-on-year -112 +70 -27
Contract jobs requiring a Cloud Architect 161 223 221
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.44% 0.69% 0.52%
As % of the Job Titles category 0.48% 0.75% 0.55%
Number of daily rates quoted 115 142 149
10th Percentile £492 £450 £525
25th Percentile £550 £525 £588
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £650 £656 £663
Median % change year-on-year -0.95% -0.94% -1.85%
75th Percentile £725 £775 £738
90th Percentile £825 £800 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £613 £675 £650
% change year-on-year -9.26% +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 33,604 29,846 39,976
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 91.27% 92.67% 93.32%
Number of daily rates quoted 21,305 18,264 26,748
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 1,949 929 1,593
10th Percentile £14.25 £15.52 £14.18
25th Percentile £18.25 £21.05 £19.05
Median hourly rate £26.50 £32.50 £44.50
Median % change year-on-year -18.46% -26.97% +36.92%
75th Percentile £60.00 £62.50 £65.00
90th Percentile £71.50 £73.75 £76.53
UK excluding London median hourly rate £25.15 £31.52 £45.00
% change year-on-year -20.21% -29.96% +68.54%

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 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 5 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 -85 136 £650 -0.95% 27
London -24 89 £655 -0.19% 14
Work from Home -46 55 £643 +7.08% 19
UK excluding London -72 48 £613 -9.26% 15
North of England -52 19 £630 +0.80% 1
South East -32 18 £600 -11.11% 8
North West -31 14 £460 -26.40% 1
South West -8 5 £650 +36.84% 3
Midlands -34 4 £545 +28.84% 3
East Midlands -23 3 £545 +28.84%
Yorkshire -45 3 £625 +38.89%
North East - 2 £725 -
Wales - 2 £556 -
West Midlands - 1 £700 - 3

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

For the 6 months to 5 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 67 (41.61%) AWS
2 63 (39.13%) Azure
3 42 (26.09%) DevOps
4 41 (25.47%) Terraform
5 35 (21.74%) Infrastructure as Code
5 35 (21.74%) Microsoft
6 33 (20.50%) Migration
7 32 (19.88%) CI/CD
7 32 (19.88%) Security Cleared
8 28 (17.39%) Roadmaps
9 27 (16.77%) SC Cleared
10 26 (16.15%) Cloud Security
10 26 (16.15%) GCP
11 24 (14.91%) Problem-Solving
12 23 (14.29%) Agile
13 22 (13.66%) Kubernetes
13 22 (13.66%) Oracle
13 22 (13.66%) Stakeholder Management
14 20 (12.42%) Technical Leadership
14 20 (12.42%) Virtual Private Cloud
15 18 (11.18%) AWS Certification
15 18 (11.18%) Microservices
16 17 (10.56%) Salesforce
17 16 (9.94%) AWS CloudFormation
17 16 (9.94%) Containerisation
17 16 (9.94%) Degree
17 16 (9.94%) Serverless
17 16 (9.94%) Stakeholder Engagement
18 15 (9.32%) Docker
19 14 (8.70%) 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 (1.24%) Apache
1 2 (1.24%) Oracle HTTP Server
1 2 (1.24%) Tomcat
1 2 (1.24%) WebLogic
2 1 (0.62%) Apache Airflow
2 1 (0.62%) ArcGIS
2 1 (0.62%) Confluence
2 1 (0.62%) GeoServer
Business Applications
1 3 (1.86%) SAP S/4HANA
2 2 (1.24%) Oracle ERP
2 2 (1.24%) Oracle General Ledger
3 1 (0.62%) Dynamics AX
3 1 (0.62%) Salesforce CRM
Cloud Services
1 67 (41.61%) AWS
2 63 (39.13%) Azure
3 26 (16.15%) GCP
4 20 (12.42%) Virtual Private Cloud
5 16 (9.94%) AWS CloudFormation
5 16 (9.94%) Serverless
6 14 (8.70%) Amazon S3
6 14 (8.70%) AWS Lambda
6 14 (8.70%) OCI
6 14 (8.70%) SaaS
7 13 (8.07%) Amazon CloudWatch
8 11 (6.83%) Entra ID
9 10 (6.21%) Amazon EKS
9 10 (6.21%) GitHub
9 10 (6.21%) GitHub Actions
10 9 (5.59%) Amazon Kinesis
10 9 (5.59%) AWS KMS
11 7 (4.35%) Amazon Glacier
11 7 (4.35%) AWS CloudTrail
11 7 (4.35%) Azure DevOps
Communications & Networking
1 10 (6.21%) DNS
1 10 (6.21%) VPN
2 9 (5.59%) Network Security
3 7 (4.35%) Firewall
4 4 (2.48%) SD-WAN
4 4 (2.48%) WAN
5 2 (1.24%) DMZ
5 2 (1.24%) HTTP
5 2 (1.24%) Internet
5 2 (1.24%) SSL
5 2 (1.24%) VSAN
6 1 (0.62%) Broadband
6 1 (0.62%) LAN
6 1 (0.62%) MPLS
6 1 (0.62%) MQTT
6 1 (0.62%) NaaS
6 1 (0.62%) NetScaler
6 1 (0.62%) Wi-Fi
6 1 (0.62%) Wireshark
Database & Business Intelligence
1 10 (6.21%) DynamoDB
2 4 (2.48%) Amazon RDS
2 4 (2.48%) Data Lake
3 3 (1.86%) Amazon Aurora
3 3 (1.86%) BigQuery
3 3 (1.86%) DocumentDB
3 3 (1.86%) MySQL
3 3 (1.86%) NoSQL
3 3 (1.86%) PostgreSQL
3 3 (1.86%) Redis
4 2 (1.24%) Data Warehouse
4 2 (1.24%) Delta Lake
4 2 (1.24%) Oracle Database
5 1 (0.62%) Amazon Athena
5 1 (0.62%) Amazon Redshift
5 1 (0.62%) Azure SQL Database
5 1 (0.62%) Power BI
5 1 (0.62%) Semantic Layer
5 1 (0.62%) Spatial Data
5 1 (0.62%) Star Schema
Development Applications
1 11 (6.83%) Jenkins
2 7 (4.35%) GitLab
3 4 (2.48%) Terragrunt
4 1 (0.62%) ERwin
4 1 (0.62%) JIRA
4 1 (0.62%) Oracle Forms
General
1 43 (26.71%) Finance
2 38 (23.60%) Social Skills
3 21 (13.04%) Public Sector
4 17 (10.56%) Analytical Skills
5 13 (8.07%) Marketing
6 11 (6.83%) Banking
6 11 (6.83%) Presentation Skills
7 5 (3.11%) Documentation Skills
7 5 (3.11%) Retail
8 4 (2.48%) Legal
9 3 (1.86%) Financial Institution
9 3 (1.86%) Influencing Skills
9 3 (1.86%) Manufacturing
9 3 (1.86%) Telecoms
10 2 (1.24%) Electronics
10 2 (1.24%) General Ledger
11 1 (0.62%) Law
11 1 (0.62%) Local Government
11 1 (0.62%) Organisational Skills
11 1 (0.62%) Police
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 12 (7.45%) Kafka
2 10 (6.21%) Middleware
3 7 (4.35%) Oracle Fusion
3 7 (4.35%) REST
4 6 (3.73%) ActiveMQ
5 4 (2.48%) Elastic Stack
5 4 (2.48%) RESTful
6 3 (1.86%) ARM Templates
6 3 (1.86%) gRPC
6 3 (1.86%) Hibernate
6 3 (1.86%) JPA
6 3 (1.86%) OAuth
6 3 (1.86%) OAuth2
6 3 (1.86%) OpenID
6 3 (1.86%) OpenTelemetry
6 3 (1.86%) Spring
6 3 (1.86%) Spring Boot
6 3 (1.86%) Spring Cloud
7 2 (1.24%) CSS
7 2 (1.24%) HTML
Miscellaneous
1 28 (17.39%) Cloud Native
2 8 (4.97%) Hybrid Cloud
3 7 (4.35%) Distributed Systems
3 7 (4.35%) Public Cloud
4 6 (3.73%) Data Centre
5 5 (3.11%) Enterprise Cloud
6 3 (1.86%) IoT
6 3 (1.86%) Management Information System
6 3 (1.86%) Reinsurance
6 3 (1.86%) Security Posture
7 2 (1.24%) Cloud Security Posture
7 2 (1.24%) Data Structures
7 2 (1.24%) Legacy Systems
7 2 (1.24%) Operational Technology
7 2 (1.24%) PKI
7 2 (1.24%) Virtual Team
8 1 (0.62%) Data Protection Act
8 1 (0.62%) Hedge funds
8 1 (0.62%) Life Science
8 1 (0.62%) Private Cloud
Operating Systems
1 3 (1.86%) Linux
2 2 (1.24%) CentOS
2 2 (1.24%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
2 2 (1.24%) Ubuntu
2 2 (1.24%) Unix
2 2 (1.24%) VMS
2 2 (1.24%) Windows
2 2 (1.24%) Windows Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 42 (26.09%) DevOps
2 35 (21.74%) Infrastructure as Code
3 33 (20.50%) Migration
4 32 (19.88%) CI/CD
5 28 (17.39%) Roadmaps
6 26 (16.15%) Cloud Security
7 24 (14.91%) Problem-Solving
8 23 (14.29%) Agile
9 22 (13.66%) Stakeholder Management
10 20 (12.42%) Technical Leadership
11 18 (11.18%) Microservices
12 16 (9.94%) Containerisation
12 16 (9.94%) Stakeholder Engagement
13 13 (8.07%) Computer Science
13 13 (8.07%) Decision-Making
13 13 (8.07%) RBAC
14 12 (7.45%) Analytics
14 12 (7.45%) Design Patterns
15 11 (6.83%) Data Integration
15 11 (6.83%) Integration Patterns
Programming Languages
1 10 (6.21%) Java
2 8 (4.97%) SQL
3 6 (3.73%) Bicep
3 6 (3.73%) PowerShell
3 6 (3.73%) Python
4 3 (1.86%) Bash
4 3 (1.86%) Korn
5 2 (1.24%) JavaScript
6 1 (0.62%) Apex Code
6 1 (0.62%) C
6 1 (0.62%) Go
6 1 (0.62%) Kusto Query Language
6 1 (0.62%) PL/SQL
Qualifications
1 32 (19.88%) Security Cleared
2 27 (16.77%) SC Cleared
3 18 (11.18%) AWS Certification
4 16 (9.94%) Degree
5 13 (8.07%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
5 13 (8.07%) Azure Certification
5 13 (8.07%) Computer Science Degree
6 7 (4.35%) Master's Degree
7 5 (3.11%) DV Cleared
8 3 (1.86%) BPSS Clearance
9 2 (1.24%) (ISC)2 CCSP
9 2 (1.24%) Cisco Certification
9 2 (1.24%) MCP
9 2 (1.24%) RHCE
9 2 (1.24%) SAP Certification
9 2 (1.24%) VCDX
10 1 (0.62%) CCSP
10 1 (0.62%) CISM
10 1 (0.62%) CISSP
10 1 (0.62%) SSCP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 12 (7.45%) GDPR
1 12 (7.45%) ISO/IEC 27001
2 11 (6.83%) NIST
3 10 (6.21%) NCSC
4 8 (4.97%) Cyber Essentials
5 6 (3.73%) PCI DSS
6 3 (1.86%) Data Quality
6 3 (1.86%) QA
6 3 (1.86%) Sarbanes-Oxley
7 2 (1.24%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
7 2 (1.24%) HIPAA
8 1 (0.62%) GRC
8 1 (0.62%) SLA
System Software
1 15 (9.32%) Docker
2 6 (3.73%) Active Directory
2 6 (3.73%) Virtual Desktop
2 6 (3.73%) VMware Infrastructure
3 2 (1.24%) VMware NSX
3 2 (1.24%) vSphere
4 1 (0.62%) Virtual Machines
Systems Management
1 41 (25.47%) Terraform
2 22 (13.66%) Kubernetes
3 9 (5.59%) Ansible
4 4 (2.48%) Kibana
5 3 (1.86%) Karpenter
6 2 (1.24%) Microsoft Intune
6 2 (1.24%) Nagios
6 2 (1.24%) Prometheus
7 1 (0.62%) Suricata
Vendors
1 35 (21.74%) Microsoft
2 22 (13.66%) Oracle
3 17 (10.56%) Salesforce
4 10 (6.21%) Google
5 8 (4.97%) Citrix
5 8 (4.97%) Salesforce Marketing Cloud
5 8 (4.97%) VMware
6 7 (4.35%) Software AG
7 6 (3.73%) Cisco
7 6 (3.73%) CloudEndure
7 6 (3.73%) SAP
8 5 (3.11%) Databricks
9 3 (1.86%) Splunk
10 2 (1.24%) Brocade
10 2 (1.24%) Extreme Networks
10 2 (1.24%) Fortinet
10 2 (1.24%) OpenAI
10 2 (1.24%) Sophos
11 1 (0.62%) Arista
11 1 (0.62%) Poppulo