Cloud Architect Contract Job Trends

Cloud Architect
UK

The median Cloud Architect daily rate in the UK is £600, according to job vacancies posted in the 6 months leading up to 11 September 2026.

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

6 months to
11 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 340 389 340
Rank change year-on-year +49 -49 +15
Contract jobs requiring a Cloud Architect 374 179 236
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.68% 0.54% 0.61%
As % of the Job Titles category 0.74% 0.60% 0.66%
Number of daily rates quoted 247 129 153
10th Percentile £454 £462 £492
25th Percentile £541 £513 £525
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £600 £625 £650
Median % change year-on-year -4.00% -3.85% -3.70%
75th Percentile £698 £713 £763
90th Percentile £775 £775 £798
UK excluding London median daily rate £600 £640 £675
% change year-on-year -6.25% -5.19% +3.85%
Number of hourly rates quoted 9 0 0
10th Percentile £23.10 - -
25th Percentile £23.20 - -
Median hourly rate £25.47 - -
75th Percentile £27.73 - -
90th Percentile £36.19 - -
UK excluding London median hourly rate £25.47 - -

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 50,390 30,066 35,884
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.29% 91.06% 93.05%
Number of daily rates quoted 29,936 18,964 22,304
10th Percentile £325 £281 £300
25th Percentile £425 £400 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -0.94%
75th Percentile £625 £621 £638
90th Percentile £725 £725 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 3,743 1,564 1,744
10th Percentile £14.56 £13.69 £14.73
25th Percentile £20.07 £17.06 £20.50
Median hourly rate £42.00 £25.15 £43.00
Median % change year-on-year +67.00% -41.51% +1.18%
75th Percentile £67.60 £52.50 £65.00
90th Percentile £79.00 £70.16 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £42.50 £25.15 £45.00
% change year-on-year +68.99% -44.11% +12.50%

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 11 September 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
Hourly Rate Histogram

Hourly rate distribution of jobs citing Cloud Architect over the 6 months to 11 September 2026.

Hourly rate histogram for Cloud Architect 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 11 September 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 +36 303 £600 -6.25% 282
London +3 173 £650 +1.56% 182
UK excluding London -1 145 £600 -6.25% 108
Work from Home -49 109 £600 -0.50% 111
South East -29 39 £575 +5.50% 32
North of England -39 36 £600 -16.96% 37
Midlands -27 23 £700 +39.58% 9
Scotland +2 20 £450 - 16
North West -25 18 £600 - 19
Yorkshire -24 17 £650 -10.03% 16
South West -46 13 £600 -6.61% 8
East Midlands - 13 £538 - 4
East of England -25 10 £600 -11.11% 4
West Midlands -39 10 £725 +44.57% 5
Wales -19 5 £625 +30.21% 1
North East - 1 - - 2

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

For the 6 months to 11 September 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.

1 178 (47.59%) AWS
2 157 (41.98%) Azure
3 100 (26.74%) Migration
4 92 (24.60%) Security Cleared
5 84 (22.46%) GCP
6 74 (19.79%) SC Cleared
7 69 (18.45%) Infrastructure as Code
8 67 (17.91%) CI/CD
9 66 (17.65%) DevOps
9 66 (17.65%) Microsoft
10 62 (16.58%) Technical Leadership
11 59 (15.78%) Stakeholder Management
12 56 (14.97%) Roadmaps
13 54 (14.44%) Cloud Security
14 47 (12.57%) Kubernetes
15 46 (12.30%) Terraform
16 42 (11.23%) Google
17 41 (10.96%) Architectural Patterns
18 39 (10.43%) Analytics
18 39 (10.43%) SaaS
18 39 (10.43%) Stakeholder Engagement
18 39 (10.43%) TOGAF
19 38 (10.16%) AI
20 37 (9.89%) Oracle
21 36 (9.63%) Security Architecture
22 34 (9.09%) Problem-Solving
23 31 (8.29%) Enterprise Architecture
24 30 (8.02%) Platform Engineering
25 28 (7.49%) Integration Patterns
25 28 (7.49%) Mentoring

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 6 (1.60%) Palantir Foundry
2 3 (0.80%) Apache Spark
3 2 (0.53%) Apache
3 2 (0.53%) Apache Airflow
3 2 (0.53%) SAS
3 2 (0.53%) SharePoint
4 1 (0.27%) Appian
4 1 (0.27%) Camunda
4 1 (0.27%) Cloud Foundry
4 1 (0.27%) Confluence
Business Applications
1 5 (1.34%) Payment Gateway
2 3 (0.80%) Cloudability
2 3 (0.80%) Oracle Retail
3 2 (0.53%) SAP S/4HANA
4 1 (0.27%) Oracle ERP
4 1 (0.27%) Oracle Payables
4 1 (0.27%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
4 1 (0.27%) Oracle Receivables
4 1 (0.27%) Oracle SCM
4 1 (0.27%) Salesforce CRM
Cloud Services
1 178 (47.59%) AWS
2 157 (41.98%) Azure
3 84 (22.46%) GCP
4 39 (10.43%) SaaS
5 23 (6.15%) PaaS
5 23 (6.15%) Serverless
6 20 (5.35%) OCI
7 17 (4.55%) Entra ID
8 14 (3.74%) GitHub
9 13 (3.48%) IaaS
10 11 (2.94%) Azure DevOps
11 10 (2.67%) AWS CloudFormation
11 10 (2.67%) Azure Sentinel
11 10 (2.67%) Salesforce Service Cloud
11 10 (2.67%) Snowflake
12 8 (2.14%) Amazon EKS
12 8 (2.14%) Azure AKS
12 8 (2.14%) GitHub Actions
13 7 (1.87%) Microsoft 365
14 6 (1.60%) Salesforce Commerce Cloud
Communications & Networking
1 26 (6.95%) Firewall
2 19 (5.08%) VPN
3 13 (3.48%) Network Security
4 4 (1.07%) DNS
5 2 (0.53%) Internet
6 1 (0.27%) 5G
6 1 (0.27%) CTI
6 1 (0.27%) DAB
6 1 (0.27%) Intrusion Detection
6 1 (0.27%) NGFW
6 1 (0.27%) PCoIP
6 1 (0.27%) PSTN
6 1 (0.27%) Radio Access Network
6 1 (0.27%) Remote Desktop
6 1 (0.27%) RTP
6 1 (0.27%) VSAN
6 1 (0.27%) WAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 25 (6.68%) Data Lake
2 15 (4.01%) Oracle Database
3 10 (2.67%) BigQuery
4 6 (1.60%) Amazon RDS
5 4 (1.07%) Oracle Exadata
6 3 (0.80%) Data Warehouse
6 3 (0.80%) NoSQL
7 2 (0.53%) Delta Lake
7 2 (0.53%) MySQL
7 2 (0.53%) Power BI
7 2 (0.53%) SQL Server
7 2 (0.53%) Tableau
8 1 (0.27%) Amazon Redshift
8 1 (0.27%) Big Data
8 1 (0.27%) Cloudera CDH
8 1 (0.27%) Flink
8 1 (0.27%) HBase
8 1 (0.27%) Oracle ODI
8 1 (0.27%) Relational Database
8 1 (0.27%) SAP HANA
Development Applications
1 7 (1.87%) Git
2 6 (1.60%) Jenkins
3 5 (1.34%) JIRA
4 3 (0.80%) Claude Code
5 2 (0.53%) GitLab
5 2 (0.53%) IntelliJ
5 2 (0.53%) JUnit
5 2 (0.53%) MLflow
5 2 (0.53%) Oracle Forms
5 2 (0.53%) SonarQube
6 1 (0.27%) Hudson
6 1 (0.27%) Oracle APEX
General
1 63 (16.84%) Social Skills
2 56 (14.97%) Finance
3 38 (10.16%) Public Sector
4 28 (7.49%) Banking
5 20 (5.35%) Documentation Skills
5 20 (5.35%) Retail
6 14 (3.74%) Analytical Skills
7 7 (1.87%) Influencing Skills
8 6 (1.60%) Billing
8 6 (1.60%) Marketing
9 4 (1.07%) Legal
9 4 (1.07%) Presentation Skills
10 3 (0.80%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 3 (0.80%) Telecoms
11 2 (0.53%) Military
12 1 (0.27%) Aviation
12 1 (0.27%) Back Office
12 1 (0.27%) Manufacturing
12 1 (0.27%) Organisational Skills
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 46 (12.30%) Terraform
2 20 (5.35%) Middleware
3 17 (4.55%) REST
4 11 (2.94%) Kafka
5 9 (2.41%) Lightning Web Components
5 9 (2.41%) Oracle Fusion
6 8 (2.14%) SOAP
7 6 (1.60%) OAuth
8 4 (1.07%) ARM Templates
8 4 (1.07%) Node.js
8 4 (1.07%) SailPoint
9 3 (0.80%) Pulumi
10 2 (0.53%) .NET Core
10 2 (0.53%) .NET Framework
10 2 (0.53%) AngularJS
10 2 (0.53%) JWT
10 2 (0.53%) Keycloak
10 2 (0.53%) OpenID
10 2 (0.53%) React
10 2 (0.53%) Spring Boot
Miscellaneous
1 77 (20.59%) Cloud Native
2 29 (7.75%) Enterprise Cloud
3 23 (6.15%) Hybrid Cloud
4 22 (5.88%) Management Information System
5 19 (5.08%) Onboarding
6 17 (4.55%) Data Centre
7 16 (4.28%) Public Cloud
8 14 (3.74%) Private Cloud
9 11 (2.94%) Distributed Systems
10 9 (2.41%) Product Ownership
10 9 (2.41%) Security Posture
11 8 (2.14%) Legacy Systems
12 6 (1.60%) Data Fabric
12 6 (1.60%) Enterprise Software
12 6 (1.60%) Legacy Applications
13 5 (1.34%) AI Agents
14 3 (0.80%) Cloud Security Posture
14 3 (0.80%) CMDB
14 3 (0.80%) Greenfield Project
14 3 (0.80%) NHS
Operating Systems
1 12 (3.21%) Windows
2 7 (1.87%) Linux
2 7 (1.87%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
2 7 (1.87%) Windows Server
3 4 (1.07%) Unix
4 1 (0.27%) AIX
4 1 (0.27%) Solaris
4 1 (0.27%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 100 (26.74%) Migration
2 69 (18.45%) Infrastructure as Code
3 67 (17.91%) CI/CD
4 66 (17.65%) DevOps
5 62 (16.58%) Technical Leadership
6 59 (15.78%) Stakeholder Management
7 56 (14.97%) Roadmaps
8 54 (14.44%) Cloud Security
9 41 (10.96%) Architectural Patterns
10 39 (10.43%) Analytics
10 39 (10.43%) Stakeholder Engagement
10 39 (10.43%) TOGAF
11 38 (10.16%) AI
12 36 (9.63%) Security Architecture
13 34 (9.09%) Problem-Solving
14 31 (8.29%) Enterprise Architecture
15 30 (8.02%) Platform Engineering
16 28 (7.49%) Integration Patterns
16 28 (7.49%) Mentoring
16 28 (7.49%) Technical Architecture
Programming Languages
1 12 (3.21%) Bicep
2 10 (2.67%) Java
3 9 (2.41%) Apex Code
3 9 (2.41%) Python
4 6 (1.60%) JavaScript
5 5 (1.34%) Bash
5 5 (1.34%) SQL
6 4 (1.07%) PowerShell
7 2 (0.53%) C
7 2 (0.53%) C#
7 2 (0.53%) Shell Script
8 1 (0.27%) PL/SQL
8 1 (0.27%) ProC
8 1 (0.27%) Scala
8 1 (0.27%) TypeScript
Qualifications
1 92 (24.60%) Security Cleared
2 74 (19.79%) SC Cleared
3 24 (6.42%) AWS Certification
4 12 (3.21%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
4 12 (3.21%) Cisco Certification
4 12 (3.21%) CISSP
5 11 (2.94%) Azure Certification
6 9 (2.41%) (ISC)2 CCSP
6 9 (2.41%) CCSP
6 9 (2.41%) Microsoft Certification
7 7 (1.87%) DV Cleared
8 6 (1.60%) Degree
9 5 (1.34%) CISM
10 3 (0.80%) CCNP
10 3 (0.80%) ISO 27001 Lead Auditor
10 3 (0.80%) TOGAF Certification
11 2 (0.53%) BPSS Clearance
11 2 (0.53%) Computer Science Degree
11 2 (0.53%) ITIL Certification
11 2 (0.53%) Master's Degree
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 18 (4.81%) ISO/IEC 27001
2 17 (4.55%) NIST
3 11 (2.94%) PCI DSS
4 10 (2.67%) GDPR
5 4 (1.07%) Data Quality
5 4 (1.07%) GRC
5 4 (1.07%) NCSC
6 2 (0.53%) QA
7 1 (0.27%) Disclosure Scotland
7 1 (0.27%) NIST 800
System Software
1 15 (4.01%) Active Directory
2 6 (1.60%) Docker
2 6 (1.60%) VMware Infrastructure
2 6 (1.60%) VMware NSX
3 3 (0.80%) VMware ESXi
4 2 (0.53%) Virtual Machines
4 2 (0.53%) vSphere
4 2 (0.53%) zsh
5 1 (0.27%) vCloud
Systems Management
1 47 (12.57%) Kubernetes
2 5 (1.34%) Ansible
3 4 (1.07%) Single Sign-On
4 3 (0.80%) Grafana
4 3 (0.80%) Prometheus
5 2 (0.53%) CASB
5 2 (0.53%) Progress Chef
5 2 (0.53%) Puppet
6 1 (0.27%) CloudForms
6 1 (0.27%) QRadar
6 1 (0.27%) Salt
6 1 (0.27%) SCOM
6 1 (0.27%) vCenter Server
Vendors
1 66 (17.65%) Microsoft
2 42 (11.23%) Google
3 37 (9.89%) Oracle
4 25 (6.68%) Salesforce
5 19 (5.08%) Databricks
6 15 (4.01%) VMware
7 10 (2.67%) CyberArk
7 10 (2.67%) SAP
8 9 (2.41%) Cisco
9 7 (1.87%) Foundry
10 6 (1.60%) Palantir
11 5 (1.34%) Red Hat
11 5 (1.34%) ServiceNow
12 4 (1.07%) IBM
12 4 (1.07%) Splunk
13 3 (0.80%) MuleSoft
13 3 (0.80%) Salesforce Marketing Cloud
14 2 (0.53%) Checkmarx
14 2 (0.53%) Dynatrace
14 2 (0.53%) SaltStack