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 23 February 2026.

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

6 months to
23 Feb 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 382 300 359
Rank change year-on-year -82 +59 -25
Contract jobs requiring a Cloud Architect 234 241 248
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.58% 0.79% 0.56%
As % of the Job Titles category 0.63% 0.85% 0.60%
Number of daily rates quoted 169 171 172
10th Percentile £458 £475 £513
25th Percentile £538 £515 £588
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £620 £663 £650
Median % change year-on-year -6.42% +1.92% -3.70%
75th Percentile £713 £795 £763
90th Percentile £800 £838 £848
UK excluding London median daily rate £600 £616 £650
% change year-on-year -2.52% -5.31% +4.00%
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 37,309 28,353 41,398
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 91.77% 92.89% 93.02%
Number of daily rates quoted 23,419 17,689 27,239
10th Percentile £306 £291 £275
25th Percentile £406 £406 £409
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £613 £638 £638
90th Percentile £719 £738 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £480 £475 £488
% change year-on-year +1.05% -2.56% -2.50%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,278 825 2,334
10th Percentile £14.61 £16.25 £13.15
25th Percentile £18.87 £21.46 £16.30
Median hourly rate £31.76 £35.00 £35.00
Median % change year-on-year -9.27% - -12.01%
75th Percentile £63.75 £64.50 £60.00
90th Percentile £74.26 £75.00 £72.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £30.00 £32.50 £35.80
% change year-on-year -7.69% -9.22% -0.98%

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 February 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 23 February 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 -50 202 £625 +0.24% 37
London -16 135 £638 -1.92% 24
UK excluding London -54 71 £600 -2.52% 18
Work from Home -42 68 £625 -13.79% 24
North of England -49 24 £600 +20.00% 2
South East -25 17 £600 -11.11% 7
North West -28 16 £460 -8.00% 1
Midlands -41 16 £550 +30.02% 5
West Midlands -48 8 £575 - 3
East Midlands -23 7 £545 +28.84% 2
Yorkshire -58 6 £613 +16.67% 1
South West -26 5 £600 -6.07% 4
Scotland +10 4 £745 +19.20%
East of England -29 3 £550 -8.33%
Wales -4 2 £456 +93.33%
North East - 2 £725 -

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

For the 6 months to 23 February 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.

1 107 (45.73%) AWS
2 90 (38.46%) Azure
3 57 (24.36%) Terraform
4 56 (23.93%) DevOps
5 53 (22.65%) Security Cleared
6 51 (21.79%) CI/CD
7 49 (20.94%) SC Cleared
8 47 (20.09%) Migration
9 45 (19.23%) GCP
9 45 (19.23%) Infrastructure as Code
10 41 (17.52%) Microsoft
11 38 (16.24%) Kubernetes
12 37 (15.81%) Roadmaps
13 36 (15.38%) Cloud Security
14 34 (14.53%) Stakeholder Management
15 33 (14.10%) Problem-Solving
16 32 (13.68%) Serverless
17 31 (13.25%) Agile
18 27 (11.54%) Containerisation
18 27 (11.54%) Technical Leadership
18 27 (11.54%) Virtual Private Cloud
19 26 (11.11%) Microservices
20 24 (10.26%) AWS Certification
21 23 (9.83%) AWS CloudFormation
21 23 (9.83%) Docker
21 23 (9.83%) Google
22 22 (9.40%) Salesforce
23 21 (8.97%) Integration Patterns
23 21 (8.97%) Oracle
24 20 (8.55%) Amazon S3

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 (1.71%) Confluence
2 2 (0.85%) Apache
2 2 (0.85%) nginx
2 2 (0.85%) Oracle HTTP Server
2 2 (0.85%) Tomcat
2 2 (0.85%) WebLogic
3 1 (0.43%) ArcGIS
3 1 (0.43%) GeoServer
3 1 (0.43%) Mendix
3 1 (0.43%) SAS
Applications
1 1 (0.43%) Chatbot
Business Applications
1 4 (1.71%) SAP S/4HANA
2 3 (1.28%) Salesforce CRM
3 2 (0.85%) Oracle ERP
3 2 (0.85%) Oracle General Ledger
4 1 (0.43%) Dynamics AX
Cloud Services
1 107 (45.73%) AWS
2 90 (38.46%) Azure
3 45 (19.23%) GCP
4 32 (13.68%) Serverless
5 27 (11.54%) Virtual Private Cloud
6 23 (9.83%) AWS CloudFormation
7 20 (8.55%) Amazon S3
8 18 (7.69%) Amazon EKS
8 18 (7.69%) Entra ID
8 18 (7.69%) SaaS
9 17 (7.26%) Amazon CloudWatch
9 17 (7.26%) AWS Lambda
10 16 (6.84%) GitHub
10 16 (6.84%) GitHub Actions
11 14 (5.98%) OCI
11 14 (5.98%) Route 53
12 11 (4.70%) Amazon GuardDuty
13 10 (4.27%) Amazon Kinesis
13 10 (4.27%) AWS Control Tower
14 9 (3.85%) AWS KMS
Communications & Networking
1 19 (8.12%) VPN
2 18 (7.69%) DNS
2 18 (7.69%) Network Security
3 17 (7.26%) Firewall
4 6 (2.56%) WAN
5 4 (1.71%) SD-WAN
6 3 (1.28%) BGP
6 3 (1.28%) OSPF
7 2 (0.85%) DMZ
7 2 (0.85%) HTTP
7 2 (0.85%) MPLS
7 2 (0.85%) OpenVPN
7 2 (0.85%) SSL
7 2 (0.85%) TCP/IP
7 2 (0.85%) VSAN
8 1 (0.43%) Anycast
8 1 (0.43%) Cisco ASA
8 1 (0.43%) DMVPN
8 1 (0.43%) MQTT
8 1 (0.43%) NaaS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 12 (5.13%) DynamoDB
2 6 (2.56%) Amazon RDS
2 6 (2.56%) BigQuery
2 6 (2.56%) NoSQL
3 5 (2.14%) Data Lake
3 5 (2.14%) DocumentDB
3 5 (2.14%) PostgreSQL
4 4 (1.71%) Amazon Aurora
4 4 (1.71%) MySQL
4 4 (1.71%) Redis
5 3 (1.28%) Data Warehouse
5 3 (1.28%) Oracle Database
6 2 (0.85%) Elasticsearch
7 1 (0.43%) Metadata
7 1 (0.43%) Oracle Reports
7 1 (0.43%) Power BI
7 1 (0.43%) SAP HANA
7 1 (0.43%) Semantic Layer
7 1 (0.43%) Spatial Data
7 1 (0.43%) SQL Server
Development Applications
1 14 (5.98%) Jenkins
2 9 (3.85%) GitLab
3 5 (2.14%) JIRA
4 4 (1.71%) Terragrunt
5 2 (0.85%) Bitbucket
5 2 (0.85%) SonarQube
6 1 (0.43%) AppScan
6 1 (0.43%) Burp Suite
6 1 (0.43%) ERwin
6 1 (0.43%) Metasploit
6 1 (0.43%) Oracle Forms
General
1 53 (22.65%) Social Skills
2 52 (22.22%) Finance
3 30 (12.82%) Public Sector
4 24 (10.26%) Analytical Skills
5 22 (9.40%) Banking
6 16 (6.84%) Presentation Skills
7 15 (6.41%) Marketing
8 14 (5.98%) Documentation Skills
9 6 (2.56%) Retail
10 4 (1.71%) Influencing Skills
11 3 (1.28%) Financial Institution
11 3 (1.28%) Manufacturing
11 3 (1.28%) Telecoms
12 2 (0.85%) Electronics
12 2 (0.85%) General Ledger
12 2 (0.85%) Law
13 1 (0.43%) Legal
13 1 (0.43%) Local Government
13 1 (0.43%) Organisational Skills
13 1 (0.43%) Police
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 16 (6.84%) Middleware
2 13 (5.56%) Kafka
3 10 (4.27%) OpenID
3 10 (4.27%) REST
4 8 (3.42%) OAuth
5 7 (2.99%) Oracle Fusion
6 6 (2.56%) ActiveMQ
7 5 (2.14%) OAuth2
7 5 (2.14%) RESTful
8 4 (1.71%) Elastic Stack
8 4 (1.71%) gRPC
8 4 (1.71%) Hibernate
8 4 (1.71%) JPA
8 4 (1.71%) OpenTelemetry
8 4 (1.71%) SAML
8 4 (1.71%) Spring
8 4 (1.71%) Spring Boot
8 4 (1.71%) Spring Cloud
9 3 (1.28%) AWS CDK
9 3 (1.28%) Lightning Web Components
Miscellaneous
1 42 (17.95%) Cloud Native
2 12 (5.13%) Distributed Systems
3 10 (4.27%) Public Cloud
4 9 (3.85%) Data Centre
4 9 (3.85%) Hybrid Cloud
5 7 (2.99%) Enterprise Cloud
6 6 (2.56%) Onboarding
7 5 (2.14%) Management Information System
8 4 (1.71%) Private Cloud
8 4 (1.71%) Product Ownership
9 3 (1.28%) Data Structures
9 3 (1.28%) Enterprise Software
9 3 (1.28%) IoT
9 3 (1.28%) Legacy Systems
9 3 (1.28%) Operational Technology
9 3 (1.28%) SCADA
9 3 (1.28%) Virtual Team
10 2 (0.85%) Mobile Banking
10 2 (0.85%) PKI
11 1 (0.43%) Data Protection Act
Operating Systems
1 6 (2.56%) Windows
2 4 (1.71%) Linux
2 4 (1.71%) Unix
3 3 (1.28%) Android
3 3 (1.28%) Apple iOS
3 3 (1.28%) Mac OS
4 2 (0.85%) CentOS
4 2 (0.85%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 2 (0.85%) Ubuntu
5 1 (0.43%) Kali Linux
5 1 (0.43%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 56 (23.93%) DevOps
2 51 (21.79%) CI/CD
3 47 (20.09%) Migration
4 45 (19.23%) Infrastructure as Code
5 37 (15.81%) Roadmaps
6 36 (15.38%) Cloud Security
7 34 (14.53%) Stakeholder Management
8 33 (14.10%) Problem-Solving
9 31 (13.25%) Agile
10 27 (11.54%) Containerisation
10 27 (11.54%) Technical Leadership
11 26 (11.11%) Microservices
12 21 (8.97%) Integration Patterns
13 20 (8.55%) Cost Optimisation
13 20 (8.55%) Identity Access Management
14 19 (8.12%) Decision-Making
15 17 (7.26%) Architectural Design
15 17 (7.26%) RBAC
15 17 (7.26%) Security Architecture
15 17 (7.26%) Stakeholder Engagement
Programming Languages
1 15 (6.41%) Java
2 13 (5.56%) Python
2 13 (5.56%) SQL
3 11 (4.70%) Bicep
4 4 (1.71%) JavaScript
5 3 (1.28%) Apex Code
5 3 (1.28%) Bash
5 3 (1.28%) Go
5 3 (1.28%) Korn
6 2 (0.85%) C#
6 2 (0.85%) PowerShell
7 1 (0.43%) C
7 1 (0.43%) Kusto Query Language
7 1 (0.43%) Lisp
7 1 (0.43%) PL/SQL
Qualifications
1 53 (22.65%) Security Cleared
2 49 (20.94%) SC Cleared
3 24 (10.26%) AWS Certification
4 18 (7.69%) Degree
5 17 (7.26%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
6 16 (6.84%) Computer Science Degree
7 9 (3.85%) Azure Certification
7 9 (3.85%) Master's Degree
8 8 (3.42%) BPSS Clearance
9 5 (2.14%) DV Cleared
10 3 (1.28%) Cisco Certification
11 2 (0.85%) (ISC)2 CCSP
11 2 (0.85%) Microsoft Certified Professional
11 2 (0.85%) RHCE
11 2 (0.85%) SAP Certification
11 2 (0.85%) VCDX
12 1 (0.43%) CCNP
12 1 (0.43%) CCSP
12 1 (0.43%) CISSP
12 1 (0.43%) Microsoft Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 14 (5.98%) PCI DSS
2 12 (5.13%) ISO/IEC 27001
3 11 (4.70%) GDPR
3 11 (4.70%) NCSC
3 11 (4.70%) NIST
4 6 (2.56%) Cyber Essentials
5 5 (2.14%) Data Quality
6 4 (1.71%) QA
6 4 (1.71%) Sarbanes-Oxley
7 3 (1.28%) HIPAA
8 2 (0.85%) COBIT
8 2 (0.85%) FedRAMP
8 2 (0.85%) GRC
8 2 (0.85%) SLA
9 1 (0.43%) Disclosure Scotland
9 1 (0.43%) ISO 20022
9 1 (0.43%) ISO/IEC 27002 (supersedes ISO/IEC 17799)
9 1 (0.43%) PSD2
9 1 (0.43%) SOC 2
System Software
1 23 (9.83%) Docker
2 7 (2.99%) Active Directory
3 6 (2.56%) Virtual Desktop
4 4 (1.71%) VMware Infrastructure
5 2 (0.85%) Squid
5 2 (0.85%) VMware NSX
5 2 (0.85%) vSphere
Systems Management
1 57 (24.36%) Terraform
2 38 (16.24%) Kubernetes
3 11 (4.70%) Ansible
4 4 (1.71%) Kibana
4 4 (1.71%) Prometheus
5 3 (1.28%) Karpenter
5 3 (1.28%) Progress Chef
5 3 (1.28%) Single Sign-On
6 2 (0.85%) Consul
6 2 (0.85%) FortiGate
6 2 (0.85%) Grafana
6 2 (0.85%) Istio
6 2 (0.85%) Microsoft Intune
6 2 (0.85%) Nagios
6 2 (0.85%) Puppet
7 1 (0.43%) Nessus
7 1 (0.43%) Suricata
Vendors
1 41 (17.52%) Microsoft
2 23 (9.83%) Google
3 22 (9.40%) Salesforce
4 21 (8.97%) Oracle
5 10 (4.27%) Salesforce Marketing Cloud
5 10 (4.27%) SAP
6 9 (3.85%) Software AG
7 8 (3.42%) VMware
8 7 (2.99%) Citrix
9 6 (2.56%) CloudEndure
10 5 (2.14%) Databricks
10 5 (2.14%) Splunk
11 4 (1.71%) Virgin Media
12 3 (1.28%) Atlassian
12 3 (1.28%) Cisco
12 3 (1.28%) MuleSoft
13 2 (0.85%) Dynatrace
13 2 (0.85%) Mitel
13 2 (0.85%) Red Hat
13 2 (0.85%) Solace