Cloud Architect Contract Job Trends

Cloud Architect
UK

The median Cloud Architect daily rate in the UK is £610, according to job vacancies posted in the 6 months leading up to 5 June 2026.

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

6 months to
5 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 336 310 366
Rank change year-on-year -26 +56 -50
Contract jobs requiring a Cloud Architect 340 223 230
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.69% 0.77% 0.54%
As % of the Job Titles category 0.75% 0.83% 0.58%
Number of daily rates quoted 238 162 160
10th Percentile £493 £451 £500
25th Percentile £550 £513 £559
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £610 £625 £671
Median % change year-on-year -2.40% -6.89% -0.56%
75th Percentile £750 £775 £775
90th Percentile £775 £838 £825
UK excluding London median daily rate £600 £608 £650
% change year-on-year -1.28% -6.50% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 1 0 0
Median hourly rate £70.00 - -
UK excluding London median hourly rate £70.00 - -

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 45,342 26,733 39,846
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.33% 92.39% 92.87%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,608 17,258 25,745
10th Percentile £325 £287 £280
25th Percentile £413 £404 £408
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £501 £525
Median % change year-on-year +2.40% -4.67% -2.78%
75th Percentile £619 £625 £638
90th Percentile £725 £738 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £488
% change year-on-year +5.26% -2.56% -2.50%
Number of hourly rates quoted 3,029 1,088 2,850
10th Percentile £15.05 £14.00 £12.86
25th Percentile £20.69 £17.87 £16.30
Median hourly rate £43.69 £28.00 £37.50
Median % change year-on-year +56.04% -25.33% -16.67%
75th Percentile £67.50 £58.75 £61.60
90th Percentile £80.00 £75.00 £73.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £45.00 £25.15 £40.00
% change year-on-year +78.93% -37.13% -5.88%

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 June 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 5 June 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 +4 283 £620 -0.80% 168
London +12 196 £625 -1.19% 92
Work from Home -35 101 £608 -2.41% 88
UK excluding London -69 92 £600 -1.28% 85
Midlands -31 27 £588 -2.08% 8
North of England -73 18 £563 +2.27% 24
West Midlands -43 15 £713 +42.07% 7
North West -27 14 £600 +33.33% 12
Scotland +4 13 £650 +4.00% 9
South West -29 13 £600 -10.45% 9
East Midlands -16 11 £545 - 1
South East -57 11 £650 +34.85% 22
East of England -24 10 £600 -11.11% 2
Yorkshire -56 3 £500 -9.09% 12
Wales -27 1 £500 +4.17% 9
North East - 1 - -

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

For the 6 months to 5 June 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.

1 198 (58.24%) AWS
2 120 (35.29%) Azure
3 96 (28.24%) Migration
4 87 (25.59%) Security Cleared
5 75 (22.06%) SC Cleared
6 74 (21.76%) CI/CD
7 70 (20.59%) DevOps
8 64 (18.82%) GCP
9 62 (18.24%) Infrastructure as Code
10 57 (16.76%) Terraform
11 48 (14.12%) Roadmaps
12 45 (13.24%) Microsoft
13 44 (12.94%) Cloud Security
13 44 (12.94%) Serverless
14 43 (12.65%) Stakeholder Management
14 43 (12.65%) Technical Leadership
15 42 (12.35%) Problem-Solving
16 41 (12.06%) Kubernetes
17 37 (10.88%) Analytics
18 35 (10.29%) Integration Patterns
19 33 (9.71%) Microservices
20 32 (9.41%) Agile
20 32 (9.41%) Containerisation
20 32 (9.41%) Firewall
21 31 (9.12%) VPN
22 30 (8.82%) Stakeholder Engagement
23 29 (8.53%) Google
24 26 (7.65%) AWS CloudFormation
24 26 (7.65%) Security Architecture
24 26 (7.65%) 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 (1.76%) Palantir Foundry
2 4 (1.18%) Confluence
3 2 (0.59%) nginx
3 2 (0.59%) SAS
3 2 (0.59%) SharePoint
4 1 (0.29%) Apache Spark
4 1 (0.29%) Appian
4 1 (0.29%) Camunda
4 1 (0.29%) Cloud Foundry
4 1 (0.29%) Mendix
Applications
1 1 (0.29%) Chatbot
Business Applications
1 4 (1.18%) Payment Gateway
1 4 (1.18%) Salesforce CRM
2 2 (0.59%) SAP S/4HANA
3 1 (0.29%) Oracle ERP
Cloud Services
1 198 (58.24%) AWS
2 120 (35.29%) Azure
3 64 (18.82%) GCP
4 44 (12.94%) Serverless
5 26 (7.65%) AWS CloudFormation
6 24 (7.06%) Amazon EKS
6 24 (7.06%) SaaS
7 22 (6.47%) Virtual Private Cloud
8 18 (5.29%) Entra ID
8 18 (5.29%) GitHub
9 16 (4.71%) Amazon S3
10 15 (4.41%) GitHub Actions
11 14 (4.12%) AWS Lambda
11 14 (4.12%) Route 53
12 12 (3.53%) Amazon CloudWatch
13 9 (2.65%) Amazon EC2
14 8 (2.35%) Amazon GuardDuty
14 8 (2.35%) Azure AKS
14 8 (2.35%) PaaS
14 8 (2.35%) Snowflake
Communications & Networking
1 32 (9.41%) Firewall
2 31 (9.12%) VPN
3 22 (6.47%) Network Security
4 18 (5.29%) DNS
5 6 (1.76%) WAN
6 3 (0.88%) BGP
6 3 (0.88%) OSPF
6 3 (0.88%) SD-WAN
7 2 (0.59%) DMZ
7 2 (0.59%) Intrusion Detection
7 2 (0.59%) NGFW
7 2 (0.59%) OpenVPN
7 2 (0.59%) TCP/IP
8 1 (0.29%) CTI
8 1 (0.29%) DMVPN
8 1 (0.29%) Internet
8 1 (0.29%) LAN
8 1 (0.29%) MPLS
8 1 (0.29%) PSTN
8 1 (0.29%) Radio Access Network
Database & Business Intelligence
1 24 (7.06%) Data Lake
2 11 (3.24%) BigQuery
3 8 (2.35%) NoSQL
4 7 (2.06%) Data Warehouse
5 6 (1.76%) Amazon RDS
5 6 (1.76%) DynamoDB
5 6 (1.76%) PostgreSQL
6 5 (1.47%) DocumentDB
7 4 (1.18%) Amazon Aurora
7 4 (1.18%) MySQL
7 4 (1.18%) Oracle Database
7 4 (1.18%) Redis
8 2 (0.59%) Delta Lake
8 2 (0.59%) Elasticsearch
8 2 (0.59%) Power BI
8 2 (0.59%) Tableau
9 1 (0.29%) Metadata
9 1 (0.29%) Relational Database
9 1 (0.29%) SAP HANA
9 1 (0.29%) Semantic Layer
Development Applications
1 13 (3.82%) Jenkins
2 9 (2.65%) GitLab
3 7 (2.06%) JIRA
4 5 (1.47%) Git
5 4 (1.18%) SonarQube
5 4 (1.18%) Terragrunt
6 2 (0.59%) Bitbucket
6 2 (0.59%) IntelliJ
6 2 (0.59%) JUnit
6 2 (0.59%) MLflow
7 1 (0.29%) AppScan
7 1 (0.29%) Burp Suite
7 1 (0.29%) Hudson
7 1 (0.29%) Metasploit
7 1 (0.29%) Oracle APEX
General
1 68 (20.00%) Social Skills
2 55 (16.18%) Finance
3 32 (9.41%) Public Sector
4 27 (7.94%) Banking
5 21 (6.18%) Documentation Skills
6 18 (5.29%) Analytical Skills
7 15 (4.41%) Presentation Skills
8 12 (3.53%) Retail
9 10 (2.94%) Marketing
10 5 (1.47%) Influencing Skills
11 3 (0.88%) Billing
11 3 (0.88%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 3 (0.88%) Telecoms
12 2 (0.59%) Law
13 1 (0.29%) Aviation
13 1 (0.29%) Back Office
13 1 (0.29%) Investment Banking
13 1 (0.29%) Legal
13 1 (0.29%) Military
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 24 (7.06%) Middleware
2 17 (5.00%) REST
3 11 (3.24%) Kafka
3 11 (3.24%) OAuth
3 11 (3.24%) OpenID
4 6 (1.76%) Spring
4 6 (1.76%) Spring Boot
5 5 (1.47%) ARM Templates
5 5 (1.47%) OAuth2
5 5 (1.47%) Oracle Fusion
5 5 (1.47%) RESTful
5 5 (1.47%) SAML
6 4 (1.18%) AWS CDK
6 4 (1.18%) Hibernate
6 4 (1.18%) JPA
6 4 (1.18%) Lightning Web Components
6 4 (1.18%) Node.js
6 4 (1.18%) OpenTelemetry
6 4 (1.18%) SailPoint
6 4 (1.18%) SOAP
Miscellaneous
1 74 (21.76%) Cloud Native
2 22 (6.47%) Management Information System
3 21 (6.18%) Data Centre
4 18 (5.29%) Onboarding
5 17 (5.00%) Distributed Systems
6 16 (4.71%) Public Cloud
7 15 (4.41%) Enterprise Cloud
8 14 (4.12%) Hybrid Cloud
9 8 (2.35%) Legacy Systems
9 8 (2.35%) Product Ownership
10 7 (2.06%) Private Cloud
11 4 (1.18%) Enterprise Software
11 4 (1.18%) PKI
12 3 (0.88%) Data Protection Act
12 3 (0.88%) NHS
12 3 (0.88%) SCADA
12 3 (0.88%) Security Posture
12 3 (0.88%) Wiki
13 2 (0.59%) AI Agents
13 2 (0.59%) N-Tier
Operating Systems
1 10 (2.94%) Windows
2 3 (0.88%) Android
2 3 (0.88%) Apple iOS
2 3 (0.88%) Mac OS
3 2 (0.59%) Linux
3 2 (0.59%) Unix
4 1 (0.29%) AIX
4 1 (0.29%) Kali Linux
4 1 (0.29%) Solaris
4 1 (0.29%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 96 (28.24%) Migration
2 74 (21.76%) CI/CD
3 70 (20.59%) DevOps
4 62 (18.24%) Infrastructure as Code
5 48 (14.12%) Roadmaps
6 44 (12.94%) Cloud Security
7 43 (12.65%) Stakeholder Management
7 43 (12.65%) Technical Leadership
8 42 (12.35%) Problem-Solving
9 37 (10.88%) Analytics
10 35 (10.29%) Integration Patterns
11 33 (9.71%) Microservices
12 32 (9.41%) Agile
12 32 (9.41%) Containerisation
13 30 (8.82%) Stakeholder Engagement
14 26 (7.65%) Security Architecture
14 26 (7.65%) Technical Architecture
15 24 (7.06%) AI
15 24 (7.06%) Cost Optimisation
15 24 (7.06%) Data Engineering
Programming Languages
1 15 (4.41%) Bicep
1 15 (4.41%) Java
2 14 (4.12%) SQL
3 11 (3.24%) Python
4 8 (2.35%) JavaScript
5 4 (1.18%) Apex Code
5 4 (1.18%) C#
6 3 (0.88%) Go
7 2 (0.59%) Bash
7 2 (0.59%) Korn
7 2 (0.59%) PowerShell
8 1 (0.29%) C
8 1 (0.29%) Lisp
8 1 (0.29%) PL/SQL
8 1 (0.29%) TypeScript
Qualifications
1 87 (25.59%) Security Cleared
2 75 (22.06%) SC Cleared
3 24 (7.06%) AWS Certification
4 14 (4.12%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
5 10 (2.94%) Computer Science Degree
5 10 (2.94%) Degree
6 9 (2.65%) DV Cleared
7 7 (2.06%) Azure Certification
7 7 (2.06%) Master's Degree
8 6 (1.76%) BPSS Clearance
9 5 (1.47%) Cisco Certification
9 5 (1.47%) Microsoft Certification
10 4 (1.18%) CCNP
11 3 (0.88%) CISSP
12 2 (0.59%) MCSE
12 2 (0.59%) Microsoft Certified Professional
13 1 (0.29%) CCSP
13 1 (0.29%) CISM
13 1 (0.29%) MBA
13 1 (0.29%) SAP Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 22 (6.47%) ISO/IEC 27001
2 20 (5.88%) PCI DSS
3 19 (5.59%) NIST
4 9 (2.65%) GDPR
5 6 (1.76%) NCSC
5 6 (1.76%) QA
6 2 (0.59%) COBIT
6 2 (0.59%) Data Quality
6 2 (0.59%) Disclosure Scotland
6 2 (0.59%) FedRAMP
6 2 (0.59%) GRC
6 2 (0.59%) HIPAA
7 1 (0.29%) Cyber Essentials
7 1 (0.29%) ISO 20022
7 1 (0.29%) ISO/IEC 27002 (supersedes ISO/IEC 17799)
7 1 (0.29%) NIST 800
7 1 (0.29%) PSD2
7 1 (0.29%) Sarbanes-Oxley
7 1 (0.29%) SLA
7 1 (0.29%) SOC 2
System Software
1 20 (5.88%) Docker
2 14 (4.12%) Active Directory
3 4 (1.18%) VMware NSX
4 2 (0.59%) Squid
4 2 (0.59%) VMware ESXi
4 2 (0.59%) VMware Infrastructure
5 1 (0.29%) Varnish
5 1 (0.29%) Virtual Desktop
5 1 (0.29%) Virtual Machines
Systems Management
1 57 (16.76%) Terraform
2 41 (12.06%) Kubernetes
3 10 (2.94%) Ansible
4 4 (1.18%) Kibana
4 4 (1.18%) Progress Chef
4 4 (1.18%) Single Sign-On
5 3 (0.88%) Karpenter
5 3 (0.88%) Puppet
6 2 (0.59%) Consul
6 2 (0.59%) FortiGate
6 2 (0.59%) Grafana
6 2 (0.59%) Istio
6 2 (0.59%) Microsoft Intune
6 2 (0.59%) Prometheus
7 1 (0.29%) CloudForms
7 1 (0.29%) Nessus
7 1 (0.29%) QRadar
7 1 (0.29%) Suricata
Vendors
1 45 (13.24%) Microsoft
2 29 (8.53%) Google
3 23 (6.76%) Salesforce
4 16 (4.71%) Databricks
5 12 (3.53%) Oracle
6 11 (3.24%) SAP
7 10 (2.94%) CyberArk
8 8 (2.35%) VMware
9 7 (2.06%) Cisco
9 7 (2.06%) Salesforce Marketing Cloud
9 7 (2.06%) Splunk
10 6 (1.76%) Foundry
10 6 (1.76%) Palantir
10 6 (1.76%) Software AG
11 5 (1.47%) IBM
11 5 (1.47%) Red Hat
12 4 (1.18%) ServiceNow
12 4 (1.18%) Virgin Media
13 3 (0.88%) Atlassian
13 3 (0.88%) MuleSoft