Cloud Architect Contract Job Trends

Cloud Architect
UK

The median Cloud Architect daily rate in the UK is £620, according to job vacancies posted in the 6 months leading up to 5 May 2026.

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

6 months to
5 May 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 330 317 355
Rank change year-on-year -13 +38 -33
Contract jobs requiring a Cloud Architect 319 212 239
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.67% 0.72% 0.55%
As % of the Job Titles category 0.73% 0.78% 0.60%
Number of daily rates quoted 224 154 167
10th Percentile £500 £450 £523
25th Percentile £550 £513 £588
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £620 £623 £675
Median % change year-on-year -0.40% -7.78% -
75th Percentile £750 £759 £775
90th Percentile £800 £838 £825
UK excluding London median daily rate £600 £619 £675
% change year-on-year -3.03% -8.33% +6.93%
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 43,868 27,092 40,027
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.28% 92.49% 92.76%
Number of daily rates quoted 26,987 17,695 26,061
10th Percentile £316 £300 £280
25th Percentile £413 £406 £409
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £505 £515 £525
Median % change year-on-year -1.94% -1.90% -2.78%
75th Percentile £613 £625 £638
90th Percentile £725 £738 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £492 £475 £490
% change year-on-year +3.58% -3.06% -2.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,833 1,048 2,666
10th Percentile £15.00 £14.18 £12.86
25th Percentile £20.38 £18.50 £16.30
Median hourly rate £44.00 £29.00 £36.50
Median % change year-on-year +51.72% -20.55% -18.89%
75th Percentile £66.25 £62.50 £61.29
90th Percentile £78.75 £75.00 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £45.56 £28.00 £40.00
% change year-on-year +62.70% -30.00% -5.35%

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 May 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 5 May 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 -11 262 £625 +0.81% 58
London +16 180 £635 +3.04% 21
Work from Home -32 93 £620 -0.80% 30
UK excluding London -60 88 £600 -3.03% 43
Midlands -52 24 £575 -4.41% 7
South East -46 17 £650 -3.70% 6
West Midlands -47 13 £685 +13.60% 5
North of England -61 13 £653 +18.73% 14
South West -38 12 £600 -6.07% 9
Scotland -3 11 £650 +4.00% 1
East Midlands -26 10 £545 - 2
North West -34 10 £664 +6.24% 14
East of England -39 10 £600 - 1
Yorkshire -50 3 £500 -9.09%
Wales -21 1 £500 +4.17% 2

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

For the 6 months to 5 May 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.

1 181 (56.74%) AWS
2 112 (35.11%) Azure
3 87 (27.27%) Migration
4 79 (24.76%) Security Cleared
5 76 (23.82%) DevOps
6 71 (22.26%) CI/CD
7 70 (21.94%) SC Cleared
8 62 (19.44%) GCP
9 61 (19.12%) Terraform
10 60 (18.81%) Infrastructure as Code
11 50 (15.67%) Microsoft
12 48 (15.05%) Roadmaps
13 46 (14.42%) Problem-Solving
14 42 (13.17%) Cloud Security
15 41 (12.85%) Kubernetes
15 41 (12.85%) Stakeholder Management
16 40 (12.54%) Serverless
17 37 (11.60%) Technical Leadership
18 35 (10.97%) Containerisation
19 34 (10.66%) Analytics
20 33 (10.34%) Agile
20 33 (10.34%) Microservices
21 31 (9.72%) Google
21 31 (9.72%) Integration Patterns
22 30 (9.40%) AWS Certification
22 30 (9.40%) AWS CloudFormation
23 27 (8.46%) Salesforce
23 27 (8.46%) Virtual Private Cloud
24 26 (8.15%) Firewall
24 26 (8.15%) VPN

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 (1.25%) Confluence
2 3 (0.94%) Palantir Foundry
3 2 (0.63%) nginx
3 2 (0.63%) SAS
3 2 (0.63%) SharePoint
4 1 (0.31%) Appian
4 1 (0.31%) Camunda
4 1 (0.31%) Cloud Foundry
4 1 (0.31%) Mendix
Applications
1 1 (0.31%) Chatbot
Business Applications
1 3 (0.94%) Payment Gateway
1 3 (0.94%) Salesforce CRM
1 3 (0.94%) SAP S/4HANA
2 2 (0.63%) Oracle ERP
3 1 (0.31%) Dynamics AX
Cloud Services
1 181 (56.74%) AWS
2 112 (35.11%) Azure
3 62 (19.44%) GCP
4 40 (12.54%) Serverless
5 30 (9.40%) AWS CloudFormation
6 27 (8.46%) Virtual Private Cloud
7 23 (7.21%) Amazon EKS
8 21 (6.58%) Entra ID
9 20 (6.27%) SaaS
10 18 (5.64%) GitHub
11 15 (4.70%) Amazon S3
11 15 (4.70%) GitHub Actions
12 14 (4.39%) Route 53
13 12 (3.76%) Amazon GuardDuty
13 12 (3.76%) AWS Lambda
14 11 (3.45%) Amazon CloudWatch
15 10 (3.13%) AWS CloudTrail
15 10 (3.13%) AWS Control Tower
15 10 (3.13%) AWS KMS
16 8 (2.51%) Google Kubernetes Engine
Communications & Networking
1 26 (8.15%) Firewall
1 26 (8.15%) VPN
2 18 (5.64%) Network Security
3 17 (5.33%) DNS
4 6 (1.88%) WAN
5 3 (0.94%) BGP
5 3 (0.94%) OSPF
5 3 (0.94%) SD-WAN
6 2 (0.63%) DMZ
6 2 (0.63%) OpenVPN
6 2 (0.63%) TCP/IP
7 1 (0.31%) DMVPN
7 1 (0.31%) Internet
7 1 (0.31%) Intrusion Detection
7 1 (0.31%) IPsec
7 1 (0.31%) LAN
7 1 (0.31%) MPLS
7 1 (0.31%) Reverse Proxy
7 1 (0.31%) Wi-Fi
7 1 (0.31%) Wireshark
Database & Business Intelligence
1 22 (6.90%) Data Lake
2 11 (3.45%) BigQuery
3 8 (2.51%) NoSQL
4 6 (1.88%) Amazon RDS
4 6 (1.88%) Data Warehouse
4 6 (1.88%) DynamoDB
4 6 (1.88%) PostgreSQL
5 5 (1.57%) DocumentDB
6 4 (1.25%) Amazon Aurora
6 4 (1.25%) MySQL
6 4 (1.25%) Oracle Database
6 4 (1.25%) Redis
7 2 (0.63%) Delta Lake
7 2 (0.63%) Elasticsearch
8 1 (0.31%) Metadata
8 1 (0.31%) Power BI
8 1 (0.31%) Relational Database
8 1 (0.31%) SAP HANA
8 1 (0.31%) Semantic Layer
8 1 (0.31%) SQL Server
Development Applications
1 11 (3.45%) Jenkins
2 9 (2.82%) GitLab
3 5 (1.57%) Git
3 5 (1.57%) JIRA
4 4 (1.25%) SonarQube
4 4 (1.25%) Terragrunt
5 2 (0.63%) Bitbucket
5 2 (0.63%) IntelliJ
5 2 (0.63%) JUnit
5 2 (0.63%) MLflow
6 1 (0.31%) AppScan
6 1 (0.31%) Burp Suite
6 1 (0.31%) Hudson
6 1 (0.31%) Metasploit
6 1 (0.31%) Oracle APEX
General
1 65 (20.38%) Social Skills
2 57 (17.87%) Finance
3 35 (10.97%) Public Sector
4 31 (9.72%) Banking
5 21 (6.58%) Analytical Skills
6 20 (6.27%) Documentation Skills
7 19 (5.96%) Presentation Skills
8 16 (5.02%) Marketing
9 12 (3.76%) Retail
10 4 (1.25%) Telecoms
11 3 (0.94%) Influencing Skills
12 2 (0.63%) Electronics
12 2 (0.63%) Law
12 2 (0.63%) Manufacturing
13 1 (0.31%) Back Office
13 1 (0.31%) Billing
13 1 (0.31%) Investment Banking
13 1 (0.31%) Legal
13 1 (0.31%) Organisational Skills
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 22 (6.90%) Middleware
2 13 (4.08%) REST
3 12 (3.76%) Kafka
4 10 (3.13%) OpenID
5 8 (2.51%) OAuth
6 6 (1.88%) Spring
6 6 (1.88%) Spring Boot
7 5 (1.57%) OAuth2
7 5 (1.57%) RESTful
8 4 (1.25%) Elastic Stack
8 4 (1.25%) gRPC
8 4 (1.25%) Hibernate
8 4 (1.25%) JPA
8 4 (1.25%) Lightning Web Components
8 4 (1.25%) OpenTelemetry
8 4 (1.25%) SAML
8 4 (1.25%) Spring Cloud
9 3 (0.94%) AWS CDK
9 3 (0.94%) HTML
9 3 (0.94%) Node.js
Miscellaneous
1 64 (20.06%) Cloud Native
2 18 (5.64%) Data Centre
2 18 (5.64%) Management Information System
3 17 (5.33%) Public Cloud
4 15 (4.70%) Distributed Systems
5 13 (4.08%) Hybrid Cloud
5 13 (4.08%) Onboarding
6 12 (3.76%) Enterprise Cloud
7 8 (2.51%) Legacy Systems
8 7 (2.19%) Private Cloud
9 5 (1.57%) Product Ownership
10 4 (1.25%) Enterprise Software
11 3 (0.94%) Data Structures
11 3 (0.94%) NHS
11 3 (0.94%) SCADA
11 3 (0.94%) Security Posture
11 3 (0.94%) Virtual Team
11 3 (0.94%) Wiki
12 2 (0.63%) Data Protection Act
12 2 (0.63%) PKI
Operating Systems
1 10 (3.13%) Windows
2 3 (0.94%) Android
2 3 (0.94%) Apple iOS
2 3 (0.94%) Mac OS
3 2 (0.63%) Linux
3 2 (0.63%) Unix
4 1 (0.31%) AIX
4 1 (0.31%) Kali Linux
4 1 (0.31%) Solaris
4 1 (0.31%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 87 (27.27%) Migration
2 76 (23.82%) DevOps
3 71 (22.26%) CI/CD
4 60 (18.81%) Infrastructure as Code
5 48 (15.05%) Roadmaps
6 46 (14.42%) Problem-Solving
7 42 (13.17%) Cloud Security
8 41 (12.85%) Stakeholder Management
9 37 (11.60%) Technical Leadership
10 35 (10.97%) Containerisation
11 34 (10.66%) Analytics
12 33 (10.34%) Agile
12 33 (10.34%) Microservices
13 31 (9.72%) Integration Patterns
14 24 (7.52%) Architectural Design
14 24 (7.52%) Data Engineering
15 22 (6.90%) Cost Optimisation
15 22 (6.90%) Security Architecture
16 21 (6.58%) Stakeholder Engagement
16 21 (6.58%) Technical Architecture
Programming Languages
1 14 (4.39%) Java
2 12 (3.76%) SQL
3 11 (3.45%) Bicep
3 11 (3.45%) Python
4 7 (2.19%) JavaScript
5 4 (1.25%) Apex Code
5 4 (1.25%) C#
6 3 (0.94%) Go
6 3 (0.94%) Korn
7 2 (0.63%) Bash
7 2 (0.63%) PowerShell
8 1 (0.31%) C
8 1 (0.31%) Lisp
8 1 (0.31%) PL/SQL
Qualifications
1 79 (24.76%) Security Cleared
2 70 (21.94%) SC Cleared
3 30 (9.40%) AWS Certification
4 21 (6.58%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
5 17 (5.33%) Degree
6 15 (4.70%) Computer Science Degree
7 10 (3.13%) Master's Degree
8 9 (2.82%) DV Cleared
9 8 (2.51%) Azure Certification
10 6 (1.88%) BPSS Clearance
11 5 (1.57%) Cisco Certification
12 4 (1.25%) CCNP
12 4 (1.25%) Microsoft Certification
13 2 (0.63%) MCSE
13 2 (0.63%) Microsoft Certified Professional
14 1 (0.31%) CCSP
14 1 (0.31%) CISSP
14 1 (0.31%) MBA
14 1 (0.31%) Oracle Certification
14 1 (0.31%) SAP Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 18 (5.64%) ISO/IEC 27001
1 18 (5.64%) PCI DSS
2 17 (5.33%) NIST
3 12 (3.76%) NCSC
4 10 (3.13%) GDPR
5 6 (1.88%) Cyber Essentials
5 6 (1.88%) QA
6 4 (1.25%) Data Quality
7 2 (0.63%) COBIT
7 2 (0.63%) Disclosure Scotland
7 2 (0.63%) FedRAMP
7 2 (0.63%) HIPAA
8 1 (0.31%) GRC
8 1 (0.31%) ISO 20022
8 1 (0.31%) ISO/IEC 27002 (supersedes ISO/IEC 17799)
8 1 (0.31%) PSD2
8 1 (0.31%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 1 (0.31%) SLA
8 1 (0.31%) SOC 2
System Software
1 20 (6.27%) Docker
2 12 (3.76%) Active Directory
3 6 (1.88%) Virtual Desktop
4 3 (0.94%) VMware NSX
5 2 (0.63%) Squid
5 2 (0.63%) VMware ESXi
6 1 (0.31%) Varnish
6 1 (0.31%) Virtual Machines
6 1 (0.31%) VMware Infrastructure
Systems Management
1 61 (19.12%) Terraform
2 41 (12.85%) Kubernetes
3 11 (3.45%) Ansible
4 4 (1.25%) Kibana
4 4 (1.25%) Progress Chef
5 3 (0.94%) Karpenter
5 3 (0.94%) Puppet
5 3 (0.94%) Single Sign-On
6 2 (0.63%) Consul
6 2 (0.63%) FortiGate
6 2 (0.63%) Grafana
6 2 (0.63%) Istio
6 2 (0.63%) Microsoft Intune
6 2 (0.63%) Prometheus
7 1 (0.31%) Nessus
7 1 (0.31%) QRadar
7 1 (0.31%) Suricata
Vendors
1 50 (15.67%) Microsoft
2 31 (9.72%) Google
3 27 (8.46%) Salesforce
4 14 (4.39%) Databricks
5 13 (4.08%) SAP
6 12 (3.76%) Salesforce Marketing Cloud
7 9 (2.82%) Software AG
8 8 (2.51%) Oracle
9 7 (2.19%) Citrix
10 6 (1.88%) CloudEndure
10 6 (1.88%) Splunk
10 6 (1.88%) VMware
11 5 (1.57%) CyberArk
11 5 (1.57%) IBM
12 4 (1.25%) Virgin Media
13 3 (0.94%) Atlassian
13 3 (0.94%) Foundry
13 3 (0.94%) MuleSoft
13 3 (0.94%) Palantir
13 3 (0.94%) ServiceNow