Cloud Architect Contract Job Trends

Cloud Architect
UK

The median Cloud Architect daily rate in the UK is £623, according to job vacancies posted in the 6 months leading up to 9 March 2026.

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

6 months to
9 Mar 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 378 298 363
Rank change year-on-year -80 +65 -32
Contract jobs requiring a Cloud Architect 244 237 249
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.58% 0.80% 0.56%
As % of the Job Titles category 0.63% 0.86% 0.60%
Number of daily rates quoted 172 173 177
10th Percentile £460 £475 £513
25th Percentile £549 £518 £588
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £623 £650 £675
Median % change year-on-year -4.23% -3.70% -
75th Percentile £716 £800 £763
90th Percentile £799 £838 £835
UK excluding London median daily rate £600 £613 £650
% change year-on-year -2.04% -5.77% +0.78%
Number of hourly rates quoted 1 0 0
Median hourly rate £75.00 - -
UK excluding London median hourly rate - - -

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 38,836 27,659 41,539
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 91.96% 92.95% 92.88%
Number of daily rates quoted 24,338 17,830 27,237
10th Percentile £310 £294 £270
25th Percentile £409 £406 £406
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £613 £638 £638
90th Percentile £720 £738 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £481 £475 £488
% change year-on-year +1.26% -2.56% -2.50%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,391 872 2,505
10th Percentile £14.82 £15.81 £13.00
25th Percentile £19.00 £21.25 £16.25
Median hourly rate £34.95 £33.75 £32.69
Median % change year-on-year +3.54% +3.24% -20.33%
75th Percentile £65.00 £65.00 £60.00
90th Percentile £75.00 £76.25 £71.89
UK excluding London median hourly rate £33.50 £32.50 £32.90
% change year-on-year +3.08% -1.20% -17.30%

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 9 March 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 9 March 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 -47 208 £625 +0.40% 63
London -12 140 £640 -1.54% 26
Work from Home -50 72 £628 -13.45% 32
UK excluding London -69 70 £600 -2.04% 47
North of England -55 22 £625 +25.00% 9
South East -37 17 £600 -11.11% 18
Midlands -50 16 £550 +12.24% 2
North West -23 15 £460 -8.00% 5
West Midlands -46 8 £575 - 1
East Midlands -31 7 £545 +28.84% 1
South West -37 6 £600 -6.07% 8
Yorkshire -60 5 £625 +19.05% 4
Scotland +8 4 £745 +19.20% 3
East of England -33 3 £550 -8.33% 6
Wales -5 2 £456 +93.33% 2
North East - 2 £725 -

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

For the 6 months to 9 March 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.

1 118 (48.36%) AWS
2 94 (38.52%) Azure
3 60 (24.59%) DevOps
3 60 (24.59%) Terraform
4 59 (24.18%) Security Cleared
5 54 (22.13%) Migration
5 54 (22.13%) SC Cleared
6 51 (20.90%) CI/CD
7 50 (20.49%) Infrastructure as Code
8 49 (20.08%) GCP
9 41 (16.80%) Kubernetes
10 39 (15.98%) Microsoft
10 39 (15.98%) Roadmaps
11 38 (15.57%) Cloud Security
12 34 (13.93%) Stakeholder Management
13 33 (13.52%) Problem-Solving
13 33 (13.52%) Serverless
14 29 (11.89%) Containerisation
15 28 (11.48%) Agile
16 27 (11.07%) AWS CloudFormation
16 27 (11.07%) Virtual Private Cloud
17 26 (10.66%) AWS Certification
17 26 (10.66%) Google
18 25 (10.25%) Microservices
18 25 (10.25%) Technical Leadership
19 22 (9.02%) Salesforce
20 21 (8.61%) Cost Optimisation
20 21 (8.61%) Docker
20 21 (8.61%) Identity Access Management
20 21 (8.61%) Integration Patterns

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 4 (1.64%) Confluence
2 2 (0.82%) Apache
2 2 (0.82%) nginx
2 2 (0.82%) Oracle HTTP Server
2 2 (0.82%) Tomcat
2 2 (0.82%) WebLogic
3 1 (0.41%) ArcGIS
3 1 (0.41%) GeoServer
3 1 (0.41%) Mendix
3 1 (0.41%) SAS
Applications
1 1 (0.41%) Chatbot
Business Applications
1 4 (1.64%) SAP S/4HANA
2 3 (1.23%) Salesforce CRM
3 2 (0.82%) Oracle ERP
3 2 (0.82%) Oracle General Ledger
4 1 (0.41%) Dynamics AX
Cloud Services
1 118 (48.36%) AWS
2 94 (38.52%) Azure
3 49 (20.08%) GCP
4 33 (13.52%) Serverless
5 27 (11.07%) AWS CloudFormation
5 27 (11.07%) Virtual Private Cloud
6 20 (8.20%) Amazon EKS
6 20 (8.20%) SaaS
7 17 (6.97%) Entra ID
8 16 (6.56%) Amazon S3
8 16 (6.56%) GitHub
8 16 (6.56%) GitHub Actions
9 14 (5.74%) Route 53
10 13 (5.33%) Amazon CloudWatch
10 13 (5.33%) AWS Lambda
10 13 (5.33%) OCI
11 11 (4.51%) Amazon GuardDuty
12 10 (4.10%) AWS Control Tower
13 9 (3.69%) AWS CloudTrail
13 9 (3.69%) AWS KMS
Communications & Networking
1 21 (8.61%) VPN
2 19 (7.79%) Firewall
2 19 (7.79%) Network Security
3 18 (7.38%) DNS
4 6 (2.46%) WAN
5 4 (1.64%) SD-WAN
6 3 (1.23%) BGP
6 3 (1.23%) OSPF
7 2 (0.82%) DMZ
7 2 (0.82%) HTTP
7 2 (0.82%) MPLS
7 2 (0.82%) OpenVPN
7 2 (0.82%) SSL
7 2 (0.82%) TCP/IP
7 2 (0.82%) VSAN
8 1 (0.41%) Anycast
8 1 (0.41%) DMVPN
8 1 (0.41%) Internet
8 1 (0.41%) NaaS
8 1 (0.41%) NGFW
Database & Business Intelligence
1 8 (3.28%) DynamoDB
2 6 (2.46%) Amazon RDS
2 6 (2.46%) BigQuery
2 6 (2.46%) Data Lake
2 6 (2.46%) NoSQL
3 5 (2.05%) DocumentDB
3 5 (2.05%) PostgreSQL
4 4 (1.64%) Amazon Aurora
4 4 (1.64%) Data Warehouse
4 4 (1.64%) MySQL
4 4 (1.64%) Redis
5 3 (1.23%) Oracle Database
6 2 (0.82%) Elasticsearch
7 1 (0.41%) Metadata
7 1 (0.41%) Oracle Reports
7 1 (0.41%) Power BI
7 1 (0.41%) SAP HANA
7 1 (0.41%) Semantic Layer
7 1 (0.41%) Spatial Data
7 1 (0.41%) SQL Server
Development Applications
1 11 (4.51%) Jenkins
2 9 (3.69%) GitLab
3 5 (2.05%) JIRA
4 4 (1.64%) Terragrunt
5 2 (0.82%) Bitbucket
5 2 (0.82%) SonarQube
6 1 (0.41%) AppScan
6 1 (0.41%) Burp Suite
6 1 (0.41%) ERwin
6 1 (0.41%) Metasploit
6 1 (0.41%) Oracle Forms
General
1 55 (22.54%) Social Skills
2 54 (22.13%) Finance
3 33 (13.52%) Public Sector
4 24 (9.84%) Analytical Skills
5 23 (9.43%) Banking
6 15 (6.15%) Marketing
6 15 (6.15%) Presentation Skills
7 14 (5.74%) Documentation Skills
8 6 (2.46%) Retail
9 4 (1.64%) Influencing Skills
10 3 (1.23%) Financial Institution
10 3 (1.23%) Telecoms
11 2 (0.82%) Electronics
11 2 (0.82%) General Ledger
11 2 (0.82%) Law
11 2 (0.82%) Manufacturing
12 1 (0.41%) Inclusion and Diversity
12 1 (0.41%) Investment Banking
12 1 (0.41%) Legal
12 1 (0.41%) Local Government
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 18 (7.38%) Middleware
2 10 (4.10%) Kafka
2 10 (4.10%) OpenID
2 10 (4.10%) REST
3 8 (3.28%) OAuth
4 5 (2.05%) OAuth2
4 5 (2.05%) Oracle Fusion
5 4 (1.64%) Elastic Stack
5 4 (1.64%) gRPC
5 4 (1.64%) Hibernate
5 4 (1.64%) JPA
5 4 (1.64%) OpenTelemetry
5 4 (1.64%) RESTful
5 4 (1.64%) SAML
5 4 (1.64%) Spring
5 4 (1.64%) Spring Boot
5 4 (1.64%) Spring Cloud
6 3 (1.23%) ARM Templates
6 3 (1.23%) CSS
6 3 (1.23%) HTML
Miscellaneous
1 47 (19.26%) Cloud Native
2 12 (4.92%) Distributed Systems
3 11 (4.51%) Data Centre
3 11 (4.51%) Public Cloud
4 10 (4.10%) Hybrid Cloud
5 8 (3.28%) Management Information System
6 7 (2.87%) Enterprise Cloud
7 6 (2.46%) Onboarding
8 5 (2.05%) Legacy Systems
9 4 (1.64%) Private Cloud
9 4 (1.64%) Product Ownership
10 3 (1.23%) Data Structures
10 3 (1.23%) Enterprise Software
10 3 (1.23%) SCADA
10 3 (1.23%) Virtual Team
11 2 (0.82%) IoT
11 2 (0.82%) Mobile Banking
11 2 (0.82%) Operational Technology
11 2 (0.82%) PKI
12 1 (0.41%) Data Protection Act
Operating Systems
1 8 (3.28%) Windows
2 4 (1.64%) Linux
2 4 (1.64%) Unix
3 3 (1.23%) Android
3 3 (1.23%) Apple iOS
3 3 (1.23%) Mac OS
4 2 (0.82%) CentOS
4 2 (0.82%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 2 (0.82%) Ubuntu
5 1 (0.41%) Kali Linux
5 1 (0.41%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 60 (24.59%) DevOps
2 54 (22.13%) Migration
3 51 (20.90%) CI/CD
4 50 (20.49%) Infrastructure as Code
5 39 (15.98%) Roadmaps
6 38 (15.57%) Cloud Security
7 34 (13.93%) Stakeholder Management
8 33 (13.52%) Problem-Solving
9 29 (11.89%) Containerisation
10 28 (11.48%) Agile
11 25 (10.25%) Microservices
11 25 (10.25%) Technical Leadership
12 21 (8.61%) Cost Optimisation
12 21 (8.61%) Identity Access Management
12 21 (8.61%) Integration Patterns
13 19 (7.79%) Architectural Design
13 19 (7.79%) Stakeholder Engagement
14 18 (7.38%) Decision-Making
14 18 (7.38%) Security Architecture
15 17 (6.97%) Analytics
Programming Languages
1 13 (5.33%) Python
1 13 (5.33%) SQL
2 12 (4.92%) Java
3 11 (4.51%) Bicep
4 4 (1.64%) JavaScript
5 3 (1.23%) Apex Code
5 3 (1.23%) Bash
5 3 (1.23%) Go
5 3 (1.23%) Korn
6 2 (0.82%) C#
6 2 (0.82%) PowerShell
7 1 (0.41%) C
7 1 (0.41%) Kusto Query Language
7 1 (0.41%) Lisp
7 1 (0.41%) PL/SQL
Qualifications
1 59 (24.18%) Security Cleared
2 54 (22.13%) SC Cleared
3 26 (10.66%) AWS Certification
4 19 (7.79%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
5 17 (6.97%) Degree
6 15 (6.15%) Computer Science Degree
7 9 (3.69%) Azure Certification
7 9 (3.69%) Master's Degree
8 8 (3.28%) BPSS Clearance
9 6 (2.46%) DV Cleared
10 3 (1.23%) Cisco Certification
11 2 (0.82%) (ISC)2 CCSP
11 2 (0.82%) Microsoft Certification
11 2 (0.82%) Microsoft Certified Professional
11 2 (0.82%) RHCE
11 2 (0.82%) SAP Certification
11 2 (0.82%) VCDX
12 1 (0.41%) CCNP
12 1 (0.41%) CCSP
12 1 (0.41%) CISSP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 16 (6.56%) PCI DSS
2 15 (6.15%) ISO/IEC 27001
3 12 (4.92%) NIST
4 11 (4.51%) NCSC
5 10 (4.10%) GDPR
6 6 (2.46%) Cyber Essentials
7 5 (2.05%) Data Quality
8 4 (1.64%) QA
8 4 (1.64%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 3 (1.23%) HIPAA
10 2 (0.82%) COBIT
10 2 (0.82%) FedRAMP
10 2 (0.82%) GRC
10 2 (0.82%) SLA
11 1 (0.41%) Disclosure Scotland
11 1 (0.41%) ISO 20022
11 1 (0.41%) ISO/IEC 27002 (supersedes ISO/IEC 17799)
11 1 (0.41%) PSD2
11 1 (0.41%) SOC 2
System Software
1 21 (8.61%) Docker
2 6 (2.46%) Active Directory
2 6 (2.46%) Virtual Desktop
3 4 (1.64%) VMware Infrastructure
4 2 (0.82%) Squid
4 2 (0.82%) VMware NSX
4 2 (0.82%) vSphere
5 1 (0.41%) Varnish
Systems Management
1 60 (24.59%) Terraform
2 41 (16.80%) Kubernetes
3 12 (4.92%) Ansible
4 4 (1.64%) Kibana
4 4 (1.64%) Progress Chef
4 4 (1.64%) Prometheus
5 3 (1.23%) Karpenter
5 3 (1.23%) Puppet
5 3 (1.23%) Single Sign-On
6 2 (0.82%) Consul
6 2 (0.82%) FortiGate
6 2 (0.82%) Grafana
6 2 (0.82%) Istio
6 2 (0.82%) Microsoft Intune
6 2 (0.82%) Nagios
7 1 (0.41%) Nessus
7 1 (0.41%) Suricata
Vendors
1 39 (15.98%) Microsoft
2 26 (10.66%) Google
3 22 (9.02%) Salesforce
4 19 (7.79%) Oracle
5 10 (4.10%) Salesforce Marketing Cloud
6 9 (3.69%) SAP
6 9 (3.69%) Software AG
7 8 (3.28%) VMware
8 7 (2.87%) Citrix
9 6 (2.46%) CloudEndure
9 6 (2.46%) Splunk
10 5 (2.05%) Databricks
11 4 (1.64%) Virgin Media
12 3 (1.23%) Atlassian
12 3 (1.23%) Cisco
12 3 (1.23%) CyberArk
12 3 (1.23%) IBM
12 3 (1.23%) MuleSoft
13 2 (0.82%) Mitel
13 2 (0.82%) Red Hat