Cloud Engineer Contract Job Trends

Cloud Engineer
UK

The median Cloud Engineer daily rate in the UK is £513, according to job vacancies posted in the 6 months leading up to 16 December 2025.

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

6 months to
16 Dec 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 291 324 239
Rank change year-on-year +33 -85 +8
Contract jobs requiring a Cloud Engineer 350 231 440
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.95% 0.67% 1.00%
As % of the Job Titles category 1.05% 0.73% 1.07%
Number of daily rates quoted 263 137 314
10th Percentile £400 £392 £417
25th Percentile £425 £450 £475
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -6.82% - -
75th Percentile £588 £650 £638
90th Percentile £691 £705 £700
UK excluding London median daily rate £513 £487 £536
% change year-on-year +5.18% -9.14% +2.14%
Number of hourly rates quoted 7 0 2
10th Percentile £29.00 - £69.43
25th Percentile £29.50 - £72.31
Median hourly rate £52.50 - £79.25
75th Percentile £86.25 - £85.81
90th Percentile £110.00 - £88.48
UK excluding London median hourly rate - - £88.50

All Contract IT Job Vacancies
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 33,396 31,755 41,279
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 90.97% 92.76% 93.40%
Number of daily rates quoted 21,158 19,530 27,755
10th Percentile £290 £300 £288
25th Percentile £404 £410 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £619 £638 £644
90th Percentile £723 £738 £740
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £490 £500
% change year-on-year -3.06% -2.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 1,967 1,021 1,465
10th Percentile £14.25 £15.48 £15.19
25th Percentile £18.11 £21.00 £19.18
Median hourly rate £25.15 £34.00 £45.00
Median % change year-on-year -26.03% -24.44% +50.00%
75th Percentile £57.50 £62.69 £65.00
90th Percentile £71.47 £72.75 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £25.15 £32.50 £45.00
% change year-on-year -22.62% -27.78% +80.00%

Cloud Engineer
Job Vacancy Trend

Historical trend showing the proportion of contract IT job postings featuring 'Cloud Engineer' in the job title relative to all contract IT jobs advertised.

Cloud Engineer job vacancy trend in the UK

Cloud Engineer
Daily Rate Trend

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for Cloud Engineer job vacancies in the UK.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for Cloud Engineer job vacancies in the UK

Cloud Engineer
Daily Rate Histogram

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Cloud Engineer over the 6 months to 16 December 2025.

Daily rate histogram for Cloud Engineer in the UK

Cloud Engineer
Hourly Rate Trend

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for Cloud Engineer job vacancies in the UK.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for Cloud Engineer job vacancies in the UK

Cloud Engineer
Hourly Rate Histogram

Hourly rate distribution of jobs citing Cloud Engineer over the 6 months to 16 December 2025.

Hourly rate histogram for Cloud Engineer in the UK

Cloud Engineer
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 Engineer within the UK over the 6 months to 16 December 2025. 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 +28 295 £513 -6.82% 123
UK excluding London +36 174 £513 +5.18% 103
London +16 141 £513 -13.50% 51
Work from Home +7 81 £470 -10.48% 63
North of England -16 52 £506 +22.73% 18
South East +6 41 £500 -6.98% 38
Midlands -15 40 £575 +21.05% 14
West Midlands -9 32 £575 -11.54% 11
Yorkshire -24 29 £520 +26.06% 5
Scotland +26 26 £513 +2.50% 6
North West -23 23 £450 - 11
South West +2 17 £538 -6.52% 21
East of England -16 10 £438 +38.23% 5
East Midlands -14 8 £450 - 3
Wales - 1 £425 - 4

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

For the 6 months to 16 December 2025, Cloud Engineer 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 Engineer in the job title.

1 168 (48.00%) AWS
2 152 (43.43%) DevOps
3 145 (41.43%) CI/CD
3 145 (41.43%) Terraform
4 144 (41.14%) Azure
5 131 (37.43%) Infrastructure as Code
6 117 (33.43%) Python
7 111 (31.71%) Security Cleared
8 95 (27.14%) Kubernetes
9 86 (24.57%) GCP
10 73 (20.86%) SC Cleared
11 69 (19.71%) Agile
12 68 (19.43%) GitHub
13 65 (18.57%) Microsoft
14 63 (18.00%) Docker
15 62 (17.71%) Containerisation
16 57 (16.29%) Cloud Security
17 53 (15.14%) Jenkins
18 49 (14.00%) Google
19 46 (13.14%) Linux
20 44 (12.57%) REST
21 43 (12.29%) PowerShell
21 43 (12.29%) Serverless
22 41 (11.71%) GitHub Actions
23 40 (11.43%) GitLab
23 40 (11.43%) Infrastructure Engineering
23 40 (11.43%) Problem-Solving
24 39 (11.14%) Ansible
25 38 (10.86%) SQL
26 37 (10.57%) Infrastructure Automation

Cloud Engineer 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 10 (2.86%) SharePoint
2 6 (1.71%) Apache Spark
3 5 (1.43%) Apache
4 4 (1.14%) Confluence
4 4 (1.14%) Microsoft Exchange
5 3 (0.86%) Apache Airflow
6 2 (0.57%) NetWeaver
7 1 (0.29%) Apache Superset
7 1 (0.29%) CMS
7 1 (0.29%) Headless CMS
7 1 (0.29%) nginx
7 1 (0.29%) WebLogic
Applications
1 2 (0.57%) Chatbot
Business Applications
1 4 (1.14%) Dynamics CRM
Cloud Services
1 168 (48.00%) AWS
2 144 (41.14%) Azure
3 86 (24.57%) GCP
4 68 (19.43%) GitHub
5 43 (12.29%) Serverless
6 41 (11.71%) GitHub Actions
7 33 (9.43%) AWS CloudFormation
8 32 (9.14%) Entra ID
9 26 (7.43%) Azure DevOps
10 24 (6.86%) Amazon EKS
11 22 (6.29%) PaaS
12 21 (6.00%) Amazon S3
13 20 (5.71%) Google Kubernetes Engine
13 20 (5.71%) IaaS
13 20 (5.71%) Microsoft 365
14 16 (4.57%) AWS Lambda
15 14 (4.00%) Azure Monitor
16 13 (3.71%) Azure AKS
17 11 (3.14%) Amazon EC2
17 11 (3.14%) Amazon ECS
Communications & Networking
1 33 (9.43%) Firewall
2 23 (6.57%) VPN
3 21 (6.00%) Cisco Firepower
3 21 (6.00%) Cisco IOS
3 21 (6.00%) Cisco ISE
3 21 (6.00%) Junos
4 12 (3.43%) DNS
4 12 (3.43%) Network Security
5 6 (1.71%) WAN
6 5 (1.43%) NX-OS
7 4 (1.14%) TCP/IP
8 2 (0.57%) BGP
8 2 (0.57%) LAN
8 2 (0.57%) MPLS
8 2 (0.57%) SAN
8 2 (0.57%) SD-WAN
8 2 (0.57%) Wi-Fi
9 1 (0.29%) OSPF
9 1 (0.29%) SSL
9 1 (0.29%) WLAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 32 (9.14%) NoSQL
2 29 (8.29%) PostgreSQL
3 9 (2.57%) Power BI
4 7 (2.00%) Elasticsearch
5 6 (1.71%) Amazon RDS
5 6 (1.71%) Azure SQL Database
5 6 (1.71%) Data Warehouse
6 5 (1.43%) Amazon Athena
6 5 (1.43%) BigQuery
6 5 (1.43%) Data Lake
7 4 (1.14%) Delta Lake
7 4 (1.14%) DynamoDB
7 4 (1.14%) SQL Server
8 3 (0.86%) Amazon Aurora
8 3 (0.86%) Big Data
8 3 (0.86%) Oracle Database
9 2 (0.57%) Azure SQL Data Warehouse
9 2 (0.57%) Mixpanel
9 2 (0.57%) OLAP
9 2 (0.57%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 53 (15.14%) Jenkins
2 40 (11.43%) GitLab
3 26 (7.43%) Git
4 16 (4.57%) JIRA
4 16 (4.57%) Liquibase
5 3 (0.86%) MLflow
5 3 (0.86%) Postman
6 2 (0.57%) Bitbucket
6 2 (0.57%) CircleCI
6 2 (0.57%) Sonatype Nexus
6 2 (0.57%) Spinnaker
7 1 (0.29%) Gemini Tracker
7 1 (0.29%) SonarQube
7 1 (0.29%) TeamCity
7 1 (0.29%) Travis CI
7 1 (0.29%) Visual Studio Code
General
1 73 (20.86%) Social Skills
2 65 (18.57%) Finance
3 33 (9.43%) Banking
4 27 (7.71%) Analytical Skills
5 25 (7.14%) Public Sector
6 15 (4.29%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 11 (3.14%) Financial Institution
8 7 (2.00%) Aeronautics
8 7 (2.00%) Documentation Skills
9 6 (1.71%) Local Government
10 5 (1.43%) Aviation
10 5 (1.43%) Pharmaceutical
11 3 (0.86%) Retail
12 2 (0.57%) Billing
12 2 (0.57%) Law
12 2 (0.57%) Presentation Skills
13 1 (0.29%) Influencing Skills
13 1 (0.29%) Investment Banking
13 1 (0.29%) Legal
13 1 (0.29%) Military
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 44 (12.57%) REST
2 26 (7.43%) Elastic Stack
3 21 (6.00%) RESTful
4 15 (4.29%) Node.js
5 13 (3.71%) Kafka
6 12 (3.43%) ARM Templates
7 9 (2.57%) SOAP
8 8 (2.29%) OpenAPI
8 8 (2.29%) SAML
9 7 (2.00%) AWS CDK
9 7 (2.00%) GraphQL
9 7 (2.00%) Lambda Expressions
9 7 (2.00%) OpenID
9 7 (2.00%) Oracle Fusion
9 7 (2.00%) Web Services
10 6 (1.71%) FastAPI
10 6 (1.71%) JSON
10 6 (1.71%) pytest
10 6 (1.71%) XSD
11 5 (1.43%) NestJS
Miscellaneous
1 52 (14.86%) Cloud Native
2 34 (9.71%) Public Cloud
3 21 (6.00%) Distributed Systems
4 9 (2.57%) PKI
5 7 (2.00%) Data Centre
6 6 (1.71%) Data Protection Act
6 6 (1.71%) Legacy Systems
6 6 (1.71%) Security Posture
7 5 (1.43%) Cloud Security Posture
7 5 (1.43%) Genomics
7 5 (1.43%) Hybrid Cloud
8 4 (1.14%) Algorithms
8 4 (1.14%) Life Science
9 3 (0.86%) AI Agents
9 3 (0.86%) Distributed Computing
9 3 (0.86%) Replication
10 2 (0.57%) Linux Command Line
10 2 (0.57%) Management Information System
10 2 (0.57%) Onboarding
11 1 (0.29%) Greenfield Project
Operating Systems
1 46 (13.14%) Linux
2 36 (10.29%) Windows
3 23 (6.57%) Windows Server
4 10 (2.86%) Unix
5 4 (1.14%) VMS
6 1 (0.29%) Alpine Linux
6 1 (0.29%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 1 (0.29%) Ubuntu
Processes & Methodologies
1 152 (43.43%) DevOps
2 145 (41.43%) CI/CD
3 131 (37.43%) Infrastructure as Code
4 69 (19.71%) Agile
5 62 (17.71%) Containerisation
6 57 (16.29%) Cloud Security
7 40 (11.43%) Infrastructure Engineering
7 40 (11.43%) Problem-Solving
8 37 (10.57%) Infrastructure Automation
9 36 (10.29%) Migration
10 30 (8.57%) Microservices
11 29 (8.29%) Software Engineering
12 28 (8.00%) Cost Optimisation
12 28 (8.00%) High Availability
12 28 (8.00%) Observability
13 27 (7.71%) Cybersecurity
14 25 (7.14%) AI
15 24 (6.86%) ITSM
15 24 (6.86%) Service Management
16 23 (6.57%) Analytics
Programming Languages
1 117 (33.43%) Python
2 43 (12.29%) PowerShell
3 38 (10.86%) SQL
4 34 (9.71%) Go
5 30 (8.57%) Java
6 28 (8.00%) Bash
7 16 (4.57%) Bicep
8 11 (3.14%) Shell Script
8 11 (3.14%) TypeScript
9 10 (2.86%) Perl
10 9 (2.57%) JavaScript
11 7 (2.00%) C#
12 4 (1.14%) BeanShell
13 3 (0.86%) Ruby
14 2 (0.57%) Kusto Query Language
14 2 (0.57%) PL/SQL
14 2 (0.57%) T-SQL
14 2 (0.57%) VB
15 1 (0.29%) Apex Code
15 1 (0.29%) C
Qualifications
1 111 (31.71%) Security Cleared
2 73 (20.86%) SC Cleared
3 36 (10.29%) DV Cleared
4 32 (9.14%) AWS Certification
4 32 (9.14%) Azure Certification
4 32 (9.14%) Degree
5 19 (5.43%) Computer Science Degree
6 17 (4.86%) Master's Degree
7 11 (3.14%) Microsoft Certification
8 10 (2.86%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
9 6 (1.71%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
10 5 (1.43%) Cisco Certification
10 5 (1.43%) CISSP
11 4 (1.14%) AWS Certified Developer
11 4 (1.14%) CISM
12 3 (0.86%) CCSP
12 3 (0.86%) DBS Check
13 2 (0.57%) (ISC)2 CCSP
13 2 (0.57%) AWS Certified SysOps Administrator
13 2 (0.57%) BPSS Clearance
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 12 (3.43%) NIST
2 11 (3.14%) ISO/IEC 27001
3 9 (2.57%) QA
4 7 (2.00%) GDPR
5 6 (1.71%) PCI DSS
6 5 (1.43%) GRC
6 5 (1.43%) NCSC
7 4 (1.14%) Data Quality
8 3 (0.86%) Cyber Essentials
8 3 (0.86%) HIPAA
9 1 (0.29%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
9 1 (0.29%) FedRAMP
9 1 (0.29%) JSP 440
9 1 (0.29%) SOC 2
System Software
1 63 (18.00%) Docker
2 35 (10.00%) Active Directory
3 21 (6.00%) VMware NSX
4 7 (2.00%) Virtual Machines
5 6 (1.71%) VMware Infrastructure
6 4 (1.14%) Firmware
6 4 (1.14%) Hyper-V
7 2 (0.57%) Virtual Desktop
7 2 (0.57%) Virtual Servers
8 1 (0.29%) KVM
8 1 (0.29%) Squid
Systems Management
1 145 (41.43%) Terraform
2 95 (27.14%) Kubernetes
3 39 (11.14%) Ansible
4 32 (9.14%) Grafana
5 30 (8.57%) Prometheus
6 21 (6.00%) vCenter Server
7 8 (2.29%) Argo
8 7 (2.00%) Istio
8 7 (2.00%) Kibana
8 7 (2.00%) logstash
8 7 (2.00%) Microsoft Intune
9 6 (1.71%) Single Sign-On
10 4 (1.14%) Puppet
11 3 (0.86%) Podman
11 3 (0.86%) Proxmox
11 3 (0.86%) QRadar
12 2 (0.57%) FortiGate
12 2 (0.57%) Packer
13 1 (0.29%) Nessus
13 1 (0.29%) SCCM
Vendors
1 65 (18.57%) Microsoft
2 49 (14.00%) Google
3 25 (7.14%) Cisco
4 23 (6.57%) Splunk
5 22 (6.29%) Juniper
6 21 (6.00%) SolarWinds
7 15 (4.29%) Oracle
8 13 (3.71%) Databricks
9 10 (2.86%) ServiceNow
10 8 (2.29%) VMware
11 7 (2.00%) Palo Alto
12 6 (1.71%) Dynatrace
12 6 (1.71%) MuleSoft
12 6 (1.71%) Zscaler
13 5 (1.43%) Broadcom
13 5 (1.43%) Ping Identity
14 4 (1.14%) SAP
15 3 (0.86%) Axway
15 3 (0.86%) Cloudera
15 3 (0.86%) Darktrace