Cloud Architect Contract Job Trends

Cloud Architect
UK

The median Cloud Architect daily rate in the UK is £625, according to job vacancies posted in the 6 months leading up to 23 January 2026.

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

6 months to
23 Jan 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 398 309 362
Rank change year-on-year -89 +53 -29
Contract jobs requiring a Cloud Architect 190 232 227
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.50% 0.73% 0.52%
As % of the Job Titles category 0.55% 0.79% 0.56%
Number of daily rates quoted 143 148 158
10th Percentile £460 £487 £525
25th Percentile £525 £527 £588
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £625 £675 £650
Median % change year-on-year -7.41% +3.85% -3.70%
75th Percentile £700 £800 £738
90th Percentile £795 £838 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £561 £625 £650
% change year-on-year -10.20% -3.85% +4.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 1 0 1
Median hourly rate £75.00 - £78.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate - - £78.00
% change year-on-year - - +11.43%

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 34,674 29,426 40,527
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 91.44% 92.86% 93.08%
Number of daily rates quoted 21,946 18,016 26,864
10th Percentile £300 £288 £275
25th Percentile £406 £409 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £615 £638 £638
90th Percentile £720 £738 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £477 £500
% change year-on-year -0.31% -4.70% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,058 877 1,975
10th Percentile £14.38 £15.91 £13.41
25th Percentile £18.50 £21.25 £17.72
Median hourly rate £27.50 £32.50 £39.55
Median % change year-on-year -15.38% -17.83% +13.00%
75th Percentile £60.60 £62.50 £62.50
90th Percentile £70.00 £73.85 £74.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £25.59 £31.64 £40.28
% change year-on-year -19.11% -21.44% +34.25%

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 23 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 15 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 23 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 -56 165 £625 -1.96% 37
London -28 110 £638 -2.86% 23
Work from Home -43 57 £620 -14.48% 28
UK excluding London -64 56 £561 -10.20% 23
North of England -51 24 £600 -4.00% 2
North West -29 16 £460 -26.40% 2
South East -27 15 £600 -11.11% 7
Midlands -41 10 £550 +30.02% 2
East Midlands -23 7 £545 +28.84% 1
Yorkshire -47 6 £613 +36.11%
Wales - 3 £500 -
South West -15 2 £663 -1.12% 5
East of England -25 2 £550 -8.33% 2
North East - 2 £725 -
West Midlands - 2 £638 - 1

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

For the 6 months to 23 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 87 (45.79%) AWS
2 72 (37.89%) Azure
3 51 (26.84%) DevOps
3 51 (26.84%) Terraform
4 42 (22.11%) CI/CD
5 41 (21.58%) Infrastructure as Code
6 39 (20.53%) GCP
7 38 (20.00%) Microsoft
8 36 (18.95%) Security Cleared
9 35 (18.42%) Migration
9 35 (18.42%) SC Cleared
10 34 (17.89%) Roadmaps
11 33 (17.37%) Kubernetes
12 31 (16.32%) Agile
12 31 (16.32%) Problem-Solving
13 29 (15.26%) Cloud Security
13 29 (15.26%) Serverless
14 26 (13.68%) Stakeholder Management
15 25 (13.16%) Virtual Private Cloud
16 24 (12.63%) Technical Leadership
17 23 (12.11%) AWS Certification
17 23 (12.11%) Microservices
18 22 (11.58%) Google
19 21 (11.05%) Containerisation
19 21 (11.05%) Docker
20 20 (10.53%) AWS CloudFormation
20 20 (10.53%) Salesforce
21 19 (10.00%) Amazon S3
21 19 (10.00%) Degree
21 19 (10.00%) Oracle

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 (2.11%) Confluence
2 2 (1.05%) Apache
2 2 (1.05%) nginx
2 2 (1.05%) Oracle HTTP Server
2 2 (1.05%) Tomcat
2 2 (1.05%) WebLogic
3 1 (0.53%) Apache Airflow
3 1 (0.53%) ArcGIS
3 1 (0.53%) GeoServer
Business Applications
1 4 (2.11%) SAP S/4HANA
2 3 (1.58%) Salesforce CRM
3 2 (1.05%) Oracle General Ledger
4 1 (0.53%) Dynamics AX
4 1 (0.53%) Oracle ERP
Cloud Services
1 87 (45.79%) AWS
2 72 (37.89%) Azure
3 39 (20.53%) GCP
4 29 (15.26%) Serverless
5 25 (13.16%) Virtual Private Cloud
6 20 (10.53%) AWS CloudFormation
7 19 (10.00%) Amazon S3
8 18 (9.47%) SaaS
9 17 (8.95%) AWS Lambda
10 16 (8.42%) Amazon CloudWatch
10 16 (8.42%) Amazon EKS
11 15 (7.89%) GitHub
11 15 (7.89%) GitHub Actions
12 13 (6.84%) OCI
13 12 (6.32%) Entra ID
13 12 (6.32%) Route 53
14 10 (5.26%) Amazon GuardDuty
14 10 (5.26%) Amazon Kinesis
15 9 (4.74%) AWS Control Tower
15 9 (4.74%) AWS KMS
Communications & Networking
1 17 (8.95%) DNS
2 14 (7.37%) Network Security
2 14 (7.37%) VPN
3 13 (6.84%) Firewall
4 8 (4.21%) WAN
5 6 (3.16%) SD-WAN
6 3 (1.58%) DMZ
7 2 (1.05%) BGP
7 2 (1.05%) HTTP
7 2 (1.05%) Internet
7 2 (1.05%) OpenVPN
7 2 (1.05%) OSPF
7 2 (1.05%) SSL
7 2 (1.05%) TCP/IP
7 2 (1.05%) VSAN
8 1 (0.53%) Broadband
8 1 (0.53%) LAN
8 1 (0.53%) MQTT
8 1 (0.53%) NaaS
8 1 (0.53%) NetScaler
Database & Business Intelligence
1 12 (6.32%) DynamoDB
2 6 (3.16%) BigQuery
3 5 (2.63%) Amazon RDS
3 5 (2.63%) DocumentDB
3 5 (2.63%) NoSQL
3 5 (2.63%) PostgreSQL
4 4 (2.11%) Amazon Aurora
4 4 (2.11%) Data Lake
4 4 (2.11%) MySQL
4 4 (2.11%) Redis
5 2 (1.05%) Data Warehouse
5 2 (1.05%) Elasticsearch
5 2 (1.05%) Oracle Database
6 1 (0.53%) Amazon Redshift
6 1 (0.53%) Oracle Reports
6 1 (0.53%) Power BI
6 1 (0.53%) Semantic Layer
6 1 (0.53%) Spatial Data
6 1 (0.53%) SQL Server
6 1 (0.53%) Star Schema
Development Applications
1 14 (7.37%) Jenkins
2 9 (4.74%) GitLab
3 4 (2.11%) JIRA
3 4 (2.11%) Terragrunt
4 2 (1.05%) Bitbucket
4 2 (1.05%) SonarQube
5 1 (0.53%) ERwin
5 1 (0.53%) Oracle Forms
General
1 48 (25.26%) Finance
2 47 (24.74%) Social Skills
3 24 (12.63%) Analytical Skills
3 24 (12.63%) Public Sector
4 19 (10.00%) Banking
5 15 (7.89%) Marketing
6 12 (6.32%) Presentation Skills
7 7 (3.68%) Documentation Skills
8 5 (2.63%) Retail
9 4 (2.11%) Influencing Skills
10 3 (1.58%) Financial Institution
10 3 (1.58%) Manufacturing
10 3 (1.58%) Telecoms
11 2 (1.05%) Electronics
11 2 (1.05%) General Ledger
11 2 (1.05%) Law
12 1 (0.53%) Inclusion and Diversity
12 1 (0.53%) Legal
12 1 (0.53%) Local Government
12 1 (0.53%) Police
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 14 (7.37%) Kafka
2 13 (6.84%) Middleware
3 10 (5.26%) OpenID
4 9 (4.74%) REST
5 8 (4.21%) OAuth
6 6 (3.16%) ActiveMQ
6 6 (3.16%) Oracle Fusion
7 5 (2.63%) OAuth2
7 5 (2.63%) RESTful
8 4 (2.11%) Elastic Stack
8 4 (2.11%) gRPC
8 4 (2.11%) Hibernate
8 4 (2.11%) JPA
8 4 (2.11%) OpenTelemetry
8 4 (2.11%) SAML
8 4 (2.11%) Spring
8 4 (2.11%) Spring Boot
8 4 (2.11%) Spring Cloud
9 3 (1.58%) CSS
9 3 (1.58%) HTML
Miscellaneous
1 39 (20.53%) Cloud Native
2 11 (5.79%) Hybrid Cloud
2 11 (5.79%) Public Cloud
3 10 (5.26%) Distributed Systems
4 5 (2.63%) Data Centre
4 5 (2.63%) Enterprise Cloud
5 4 (2.11%) Onboarding
6 3 (1.58%) Data Structures
6 3 (1.58%) IoT
6 3 (1.58%) Product Ownership
6 3 (1.58%) Virtual Team
7 2 (1.05%) Enterprise Software
7 2 (1.05%) Legacy Systems
7 2 (1.05%) Management Information System
7 2 (1.05%) Operational Technology
7 2 (1.05%) PKI
7 2 (1.05%) Private Cloud
7 2 (1.05%) SCADA
8 1 (0.53%) AI Agents
8 1 (0.53%) Security Posture
Operating Systems
1 4 (2.11%) Windows
2 3 (1.58%) Linux
3 2 (1.05%) Android
3 2 (1.05%) Apple iOS
3 2 (1.05%) CentOS
3 2 (1.05%) Mac OS
3 2 (1.05%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
3 2 (1.05%) Ubuntu
3 2 (1.05%) Unix
3 2 (1.05%) Windows Server
4 1 (0.53%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 51 (26.84%) DevOps
2 42 (22.11%) CI/CD
3 41 (21.58%) Infrastructure as Code
4 35 (18.42%) Migration
5 34 (17.89%) Roadmaps
6 31 (16.32%) Agile
6 31 (16.32%) Problem-Solving
7 29 (15.26%) Cloud Security
8 26 (13.68%) Stakeholder Management
9 24 (12.63%) Technical Leadership
10 23 (12.11%) Microservices
11 21 (11.05%) Containerisation
12 18 (9.47%) Decision-Making
13 17 (8.95%) Cost Optimisation
14 16 (8.42%) Computer Science
14 16 (8.42%) Stakeholder Engagement
15 15 (7.89%) Event-Driven
15 15 (7.89%) Identity Access Management
15 15 (7.89%) Integration Patterns
16 14 (7.37%) Project Delivery
Programming Languages
1 12 (6.32%) Java
1 12 (6.32%) SQL
2 11 (5.79%) Python
3 7 (3.68%) Bicep
4 3 (1.58%) Bash
4 3 (1.58%) Go
4 3 (1.58%) JavaScript
4 3 (1.58%) Korn
5 2 (1.05%) PowerShell
6 1 (0.53%) Apex Code
6 1 (0.53%) C
6 1 (0.53%) Kusto Query Language
6 1 (0.53%) PL/SQL
Qualifications
1 36 (18.95%) Security Cleared
2 35 (18.42%) SC Cleared
3 23 (12.11%) AWS Certification
4 19 (10.00%) Degree
5 16 (8.42%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
5 16 (8.42%) Computer Science Degree
6 10 (5.26%) Azure Certification
7 9 (4.74%) Master's Degree
8 6 (3.16%) BPSS Clearance
9 3 (1.58%) DV Cleared
9 3 (1.58%) MCP
10 2 (1.05%) RHCE
10 2 (1.05%) SAP Certification
10 2 (1.05%) VCDX
11 1 (0.53%) (ISC)2 CCSP
11 1 (0.53%) Cisco Certification
11 1 (0.53%) Microsoft Certification
11 1 (0.53%) Oracle Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 11 (5.79%) GDPR
1 11 (5.79%) NCSC
2 10 (5.26%) NIST
2 10 (5.26%) PCI DSS
3 9 (4.74%) ISO/IEC 27001
4 6 (3.16%) Cyber Essentials
5 4 (2.11%) HIPAA
5 4 (2.11%) QA
6 3 (1.58%) Data Quality
6 3 (1.58%) Sarbanes-Oxley
7 2 (1.05%) FedRAMP
7 2 (1.05%) GRC
8 1 (0.53%) ISO/IEC 27002 (supersedes ISO/IEC 17799)
8 1 (0.53%) SLA
8 1 (0.53%) SOC 2
System Software
1 21 (11.05%) Docker
2 6 (3.16%) Active Directory
2 6 (3.16%) Virtual Desktop
2 6 (3.16%) VMware Infrastructure
3 2 (1.05%) Squid
3 2 (1.05%) VMware NSX
3 2 (1.05%) vSphere
Systems Management
1 51 (26.84%) Terraform
2 33 (17.37%) Kubernetes
3 10 (5.26%) Ansible
4 4 (2.11%) Kibana
4 4 (2.11%) Prometheus
5 3 (1.58%) Karpenter
5 3 (1.58%) Single Sign-On
6 2 (1.05%) Consul
6 2 (1.05%) FortiGate
6 2 (1.05%) Grafana
6 2 (1.05%) Istio
6 2 (1.05%) Nagios
6 2 (1.05%) Progress Chef
6 2 (1.05%) Puppet
7 1 (0.53%) Suricata
Vendors
1 38 (20.00%) Microsoft
2 22 (11.58%) Google
3 20 (10.53%) Salesforce
4 19 (10.00%) Oracle
5 10 (5.26%) Salesforce Marketing Cloud
6 9 (4.74%) SAP
6 9 (4.74%) Software AG
7 8 (4.21%) Citrix
7 8 (4.21%) VMware
8 6 (3.16%) CloudEndure
9 5 (2.63%) Databricks
10 4 (2.11%) Cisco
10 4 (2.11%) Splunk
11 3 (1.58%) Atlassian
12 2 (1.05%) AVEVA
12 2 (1.05%) Brocade
12 2 (1.05%) Dynatrace
12 2 (1.05%) Fortinet
12 2 (1.05%) MuleSoft
12 2 (1.05%) Solace