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 16 March 2026.

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

6 months to
16 Mar 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 389 308 346
Rank change year-on-year -81 +38 -13
Contract jobs requiring a Cloud Architect 253 231 255
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.59% 0.78% 0.57%
As % of the Job Titles category 0.64% 0.84% 0.62%
Number of daily rates quoted 176 168 179
10th Percentile £455 £454 £513
25th Percentile £549 £513 £588
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £623 £625 £675
Median % change year-on-year -0.40% -7.41% -
75th Percentile £727 £800 £763
90th Percentile £800 £838 £830
UK excluding London median daily rate £600 £606 £650
% change year-on-year -1.03% -6.73% +1.56%
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 39,618 27,480 41,303
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 91.89% 92.95% 92.87%
Number of daily rates quoted 24,739 17,860 27,103
10th Percentile £313 £297 £272
25th Percentile £410 £406 £406
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.37%
75th Percentile £613 £638 £638
90th Percentile £720 £738 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £480 £475 £485
% change year-on-year +1.05% -2.06% -3.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,468 883 2,495
10th Percentile £14.99 £15.25 £12.95
25th Percentile £19.00 £21.03 £16.25
Median hourly rate £35.71 £32.81 £32.90
Median % change year-on-year +8.84% -0.26% -22.60%
75th Percentile £65.00 £65.00 £59.94
90th Percentile £75.85 £77.44 £71.25
UK excluding London median hourly rate £35.00 £32.50 £32.50
% change year-on-year +7.69% - -20.36%

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 16 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 16 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 -57 211 £625 +0.93% 43
London -23 142 £640 +0.39% 31
Work from Home -40 76 £623 -12.63% 29
UK excluding London -73 71 £600 -1.03% 24
North of England -56 22 £625 +25.00% 3
Midlands -47 17 £550 +12.24% 2
South East -40 16 £600 -11.11% 13
North West -36 15 £460 -8.00% 2
East Midlands -26 8 £545 +28.84% 1
West Midlands -54 8 £575 - 1
East of England -28 5 £550 -8.33%
South West -36 5 £600 -6.07% 3
Yorkshire -60 5 £625 +19.05% 1
Scotland +8 4 £745 +19.20% 3
Wales -5 2 £456 +93.33%
North East - 2 £725 -

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

For the 6 months to 16 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.

1 126 (49.80%) AWS
2 95 (37.55%) Azure
3 64 (25.30%) Security Cleared
4 63 (24.90%) DevOps
5 60 (23.72%) Terraform
6 58 (22.92%) Migration
7 57 (22.53%) SC Cleared
8 54 (21.34%) CI/CD
9 49 (19.37%) Infrastructure as Code
10 47 (18.58%) GCP
11 42 (16.60%) Microsoft
12 41 (16.21%) Kubernetes
13 40 (15.81%) Cloud Security
14 39 (15.42%) Roadmaps
15 37 (14.62%) Serverless
16 36 (14.23%) Problem-Solving
16 36 (14.23%) Stakeholder Management
17 29 (11.46%) Agile
18 28 (11.07%) AWS CloudFormation
18 28 (11.07%) Containerisation
19 27 (10.67%) AWS Certification
19 27 (10.67%) Virtual Private Cloud
20 26 (10.28%) Google
20 26 (10.28%) Microservices
20 26 (10.28%) Technical Leadership
21 23 (9.09%) Cost Optimisation
22 22 (8.70%) Identity Access Management
22 22 (8.70%) Integration Patterns
22 22 (8.70%) Salesforce
22 22 (8.70%) Stakeholder Engagement

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 (1.58%) Confluence
2 2 (0.79%) nginx
3 1 (0.40%) ArcGIS
3 1 (0.40%) GeoServer
3 1 (0.40%) Mendix
3 1 (0.40%) SAS
Applications
1 1 (0.40%) Chatbot
Business Applications
1 4 (1.58%) SAP S/4HANA
2 3 (1.19%) Salesforce CRM
3 2 (0.79%) Oracle ERP
3 2 (0.79%) Oracle General Ledger
4 1 (0.40%) Dynamics AX
Cloud Services
1 126 (49.80%) AWS
2 95 (37.55%) Azure
3 47 (18.58%) GCP
4 37 (14.62%) Serverless
5 28 (11.07%) AWS CloudFormation
6 27 (10.67%) Virtual Private Cloud
7 21 (8.30%) Amazon EKS
8 20 (7.91%) SaaS
9 19 (7.51%) Entra ID
10 17 (6.72%) Amazon S3
11 16 (6.32%) GitHub
11 16 (6.32%) GitHub Actions
12 14 (5.53%) AWS Lambda
12 14 (5.53%) Route 53
13 13 (5.14%) Amazon CloudWatch
13 13 (5.14%) OCI
14 11 (4.35%) Amazon GuardDuty
15 10 (3.95%) AWS Control Tower
16 9 (3.56%) AWS CloudTrail
16 9 (3.56%) AWS KMS
Communications & Networking
1 22 (8.70%) VPN
2 19 (7.51%) Network Security
3 18 (7.11%) Firewall
4 16 (6.32%) DNS
5 6 (2.37%) WAN
6 4 (1.58%) SD-WAN
7 3 (1.19%) BGP
7 3 (1.19%) OSPF
8 2 (0.79%) DMZ
8 2 (0.79%) MPLS
8 2 (0.79%) OpenVPN
8 2 (0.79%) TCP/IP
9 1 (0.40%) Anycast
9 1 (0.40%) Cisco ASA
9 1 (0.40%) DMVPN
9 1 (0.40%) Internet
9 1 (0.40%) NaaS
9 1 (0.40%) NGFW
9 1 (0.40%) VSAN
9 1 (0.40%) Wi-Fi
Database & Business Intelligence
1 8 (3.16%) Data Lake
1 8 (3.16%) DynamoDB
2 6 (2.37%) Amazon RDS
2 6 (2.37%) BigQuery
2 6 (2.37%) NoSQL
3 5 (1.98%) DocumentDB
3 5 (1.98%) PostgreSQL
4 4 (1.58%) Amazon Aurora
4 4 (1.58%) Data Warehouse
4 4 (1.58%) MySQL
4 4 (1.58%) Redis
5 3 (1.19%) Oracle Database
6 2 (0.79%) Elasticsearch
7 1 (0.40%) Metadata
7 1 (0.40%) Oracle Reports
7 1 (0.40%) Power BI
7 1 (0.40%) SAP HANA
7 1 (0.40%) Semantic Layer
7 1 (0.40%) Spatial Data
7 1 (0.40%) SQL Server
Development Applications
1 11 (4.35%) Jenkins
2 9 (3.56%) GitLab
3 5 (1.98%) JIRA
4 4 (1.58%) Terragrunt
5 2 (0.79%) Bitbucket
5 2 (0.79%) SonarQube
6 1 (0.40%) AppScan
6 1 (0.40%) Burp Suite
6 1 (0.40%) ERwin
6 1 (0.40%) Metasploit
6 1 (0.40%) Oracle Forms
General
1 57 (22.53%) Social Skills
2 54 (21.34%) Finance
3 34 (13.44%) Public Sector
4 25 (9.88%) Analytical Skills
5 24 (9.49%) Banking
6 16 (6.32%) Documentation Skills
7 15 (5.93%) Marketing
7 15 (5.93%) Presentation Skills
8 6 (2.37%) Retail
9 4 (1.58%) Influencing Skills
10 3 (1.19%) Financial Institution
10 3 (1.19%) Telecoms
11 2 (0.79%) Electronics
11 2 (0.79%) General Ledger
11 2 (0.79%) Law
11 2 (0.79%) Manufacturing
12 1 (0.40%) Investment Banking
12 1 (0.40%) Local Government
12 1 (0.40%) Organisational Skills
12 1 (0.40%) Police
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 17 (6.72%) Middleware
2 12 (4.74%) Kafka
3 10 (3.95%) OpenID
3 10 (3.95%) REST
4 8 (3.16%) OAuth
5 5 (1.98%) OAuth2
5 5 (1.98%) Oracle Fusion
6 4 (1.58%) Elastic Stack
6 4 (1.58%) gRPC
6 4 (1.58%) Hibernate
6 4 (1.58%) JPA
6 4 (1.58%) OpenTelemetry
6 4 (1.58%) RESTful
6 4 (1.58%) SAML
6 4 (1.58%) Spring
6 4 (1.58%) Spring Boot
6 4 (1.58%) Spring Cloud
7 3 (1.19%) ARM Templates
7 3 (1.19%) CSS
7 3 (1.19%) HTML
Miscellaneous
1 47 (18.58%) Cloud Native
2 12 (4.74%) Data Centre
2 12 (4.74%) Distributed Systems
3 11 (4.35%) Public Cloud
4 10 (3.95%) Hybrid Cloud
4 10 (3.95%) Management Information System
5 7 (2.77%) Enterprise Cloud
6 6 (2.37%) Onboarding
7 5 (1.98%) Legacy Systems
8 4 (1.58%) Private Cloud
8 4 (1.58%) Product Ownership
9 3 (1.19%) Data Structures
9 3 (1.19%) Enterprise Software
9 3 (1.19%) SCADA
9 3 (1.19%) Virtual Team
10 2 (0.79%) IoT
10 2 (0.79%) Mobile Banking
10 2 (0.79%) N-Tier
10 2 (0.79%) Operational Technology
10 2 (0.79%) PKI
Operating Systems
1 8 (3.16%) Windows
2 3 (1.19%) Android
2 3 (1.19%) Apple iOS
2 3 (1.19%) Mac OS
3 2 (0.79%) Linux
3 2 (0.79%) Unix
4 1 (0.40%) Kali Linux
4 1 (0.40%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 63 (24.90%) DevOps
2 58 (22.92%) Migration
3 54 (21.34%) CI/CD
4 49 (19.37%) Infrastructure as Code
5 40 (15.81%) Cloud Security
6 39 (15.42%) Roadmaps
7 36 (14.23%) Problem-Solving
7 36 (14.23%) Stakeholder Management
8 29 (11.46%) Agile
9 28 (11.07%) Containerisation
10 26 (10.28%) Microservices
10 26 (10.28%) Technical Leadership
11 23 (9.09%) Cost Optimisation
12 22 (8.70%) Identity Access Management
12 22 (8.70%) Integration Patterns
12 22 (8.70%) Stakeholder Engagement
13 19 (7.51%) Analytics
13 19 (7.51%) Architectural Design
14 18 (7.11%) Decision-Making
14 18 (7.11%) Security Architecture
Programming Languages
1 13 (5.14%) SQL
2 12 (4.74%) Java
3 11 (4.35%) Bicep
3 11 (4.35%) Python
4 4 (1.58%) JavaScript
5 3 (1.19%) Apex Code
5 3 (1.19%) Go
5 3 (1.19%) Korn
5 3 (1.19%) PowerShell
6 2 (0.79%) Bash
6 2 (0.79%) C#
7 1 (0.40%) C
7 1 (0.40%) Kusto Query Language
7 1 (0.40%) Lisp
7 1 (0.40%) PL/SQL
Qualifications
1 64 (25.30%) Security Cleared
2 57 (22.53%) SC Cleared
3 27 (10.67%) AWS Certification
4 18 (7.11%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
5 17 (6.72%) Degree
6 15 (5.93%) Computer Science Degree
7 11 (4.35%) Azure Certification
8 9 (3.56%) Master's Degree
9 8 (3.16%) BPSS Clearance
10 7 (2.77%) DV Cleared
11 3 (1.19%) Cisco Certification
11 3 (1.19%) Microsoft Certification
12 2 (0.79%) (ISC)2 CCSP
12 2 (0.79%) Microsoft Certified Professional
12 2 (0.79%) SAP Certification
13 1 (0.40%) CCNP
13 1 (0.40%) CCSP
13 1 (0.40%) CISSP
13 1 (0.40%) Oracle Certification
13 1 (0.40%) VCDX
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 17 (6.72%) ISO/IEC 27001
2 16 (6.32%) PCI DSS
3 12 (4.74%) NIST
4 11 (4.35%) NCSC
5 10 (3.95%) GDPR
6 6 (2.37%) Cyber Essentials
7 5 (1.98%) Data Quality
8 4 (1.58%) QA
8 4 (1.58%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 3 (1.19%) HIPAA
10 2 (0.79%) COBIT
10 2 (0.79%) FedRAMP
10 2 (0.79%) GRC
10 2 (0.79%) SLA
11 1 (0.40%) Disclosure Scotland
11 1 (0.40%) ISO 20022
11 1 (0.40%) ISO/IEC 27002 (supersedes ISO/IEC 17799)
11 1 (0.40%) PSD2
11 1 (0.40%) SOC 2
System Software
1 19 (7.51%) Docker
2 8 (3.16%) Active Directory
3 6 (2.37%) Virtual Desktop
4 4 (1.58%) VMware Infrastructure
5 2 (0.79%) Squid
6 1 (0.40%) Varnish
6 1 (0.40%) VMware NSX
6 1 (0.40%) vSphere
Systems Management
1 60 (23.72%) Terraform
2 41 (16.21%) Kubernetes
3 10 (3.95%) Ansible
4 4 (1.58%) Kibana
4 4 (1.58%) Progress Chef
5 3 (1.19%) Karpenter
5 3 (1.19%) Puppet
5 3 (1.19%) Single Sign-On
6 2 (0.79%) Consul
6 2 (0.79%) FortiGate
6 2 (0.79%) Grafana
6 2 (0.79%) Istio
6 2 (0.79%) Microsoft Intune
6 2 (0.79%) Prometheus
7 1 (0.40%) Nessus
7 1 (0.40%) Suricata
Vendors
1 42 (16.60%) Microsoft
2 26 (10.28%) Google
3 22 (8.70%) Salesforce
4 17 (6.72%) Oracle
5 10 (3.95%) Salesforce Marketing Cloud
6 9 (3.56%) SAP
6 9 (3.56%) Software AG
7 7 (2.77%) Citrix
7 7 (2.77%) VMware
8 6 (2.37%) CloudEndure
8 6 (2.37%) Databricks
9 4 (1.58%) Splunk
9 4 (1.58%) Virgin Media
10 3 (1.19%) Atlassian
10 3 (1.19%) Cisco
10 3 (1.19%) CyberArk
10 3 (1.19%) IBM
10 3 (1.19%) MuleSoft
11 2 (0.79%) Mitel
11 2 (0.79%) Red Hat