Cloud Engineer Contract Job Trends

Cloud Engineer
UK

The median Cloud Engineer daily rate in the UK is £520, according to job vacancies posted in the 6 months leading up to 25 August 2026.

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

6 months to
25 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 203 310 327
Rank change year-on-year +107 +17 -68
Contract jobs requiring a Cloud Engineer 747 255 249
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 1.39% 0.78% 0.64%
As % of the Job Titles category 1.51% 0.85% 0.69%
Number of daily rates quoted 483 188 160
10th Percentile £401 £400 £385
25th Percentile £450 £434 £450
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £520 £500 £550
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% -9.09% -
75th Percentile £600 £575 £625
90th Percentile £681 £634 £675
UK excluding London median daily rate £510 £500 £525
% change year-on-year +2.00% -4.76% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 27 6 0
10th Percentile £23.20 £29.00 -
25th Percentile £47.10 £29.25 -
Median hourly rate £77.00 £37.50 -
Median % change year-on-year +105.33% - -
75th Percentile £81.25 £58.75 -
90th Percentile £82.75 £86.25 -
UK excluding London median hourly rate £72.00 - -

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 49,605 29,863 36,126
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.47% 91.22% 93.00%
Number of daily rates quoted 29,683 18,859 22,977
10th Percentile £325 £280 £300
25th Percentile £425 £400 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -1.87%
75th Percentile £625 £623 £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 3,539 1,568 1,933
10th Percentile £14.99 £13.64 £14.16
25th Percentile £20.53 £17.21 £19.50
Median hourly rate £41.92 £25.15 £43.00
Median % change year-on-year +66.68% -41.51% -1.58%
75th Percentile £67.84 £53.99 £65.00
90th Percentile £80.00 £71.50 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £42.50 £25.15 £43.00
% change year-on-year +68.99% -41.51% +7.50%

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 25 August 2026.

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 25 August 2026.

Hourly rate histogram for Cloud Engineer in the UK

Cloud Engineer
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 Engineer within the UK over the 6 months to 25 August 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 +101 642 £525 +5.00% 140
UK excluding London +99 397 £510 +2.00% 129
London +52 301 £525 - 44
Work from Home +17 187 £540 +8.00% 57
South East +12 118 £538 +7.50% 30
North of England +14 116 £513 +13.89% 44
North West +9 69 £529 +20.91% 25
Midlands -9 64 £500 - 17
Scotland +33 58 £442 -11.60% 7
Yorkshire -5 40 £474 -5.24% 15
West Midlands -16 32 £525 -2.78% 13
East Midlands +5 31 £450 -5.26% 4
East of England -2 21 £500 +3.09% 5
South West -35 14 £625 +13.64% 25
Wales -8 7 - - 2
North East -38 7 £525 +10.53% 4

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

For the 6 months to 25 August 2026, 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.

1 355 (47.52%) Azure
2 307 (41.10%) Terraform
3 262 (35.07%) AWS
4 260 (34.81%) Infrastructure as Code
5 255 (34.14%) CI/CD
6 204 (27.31%) DevOps
7 191 (25.57%) Kubernetes
8 190 (25.44%) Security Cleared
9 188 (25.17%) Python
10 171 (22.89%) Cloud Security
10 171 (22.89%) Microsoft
11 163 (21.82%) GCP
12 160 (21.42%) PowerShell
13 156 (20.88%) Infrastructure Engineering
14 144 (19.28%) Platform Engineering
15 140 (18.74%) SC Cleared
16 114 (15.26%) Windows
17 112 (14.99%) Google
18 99 (13.25%) Entra ID
19 95 (12.72%) AI
20 89 (11.91%) Active Directory
20 89 (11.91%) GitHub
21 85 (11.38%) Containerisation
22 84 (11.24%) Migration
23 83 (11.11%) Agile
24 81 (10.84%) Bash
24 81 (10.84%) Observability
25 77 (10.31%) Firewall
26 76 (10.17%) DNS
27 73 (9.77%) Docker

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 13 (1.74%) Microsoft Exchange
2 10 (1.34%) Apache
3 7 (0.94%) Apache Airflow
4 6 (0.80%) Confluence
5 5 (0.67%) SharePoint
6 3 (0.40%) IIS
6 3 (0.40%) nginx
6 3 (0.40%) Tomcat
7 2 (0.27%) CloudStack
7 2 (0.27%) OpenStack
8 1 (0.13%) Apache Pulsar
8 1 (0.13%) Apache Spark
Applications
1 1 (0.13%) Chatbot
Business Applications
1 2 (0.27%) Aladdin
Cloud Services
1 355 (47.52%) Azure
2 262 (35.07%) AWS
3 163 (21.82%) GCP
4 99 (13.25%) Entra ID
5 89 (11.91%) GitHub
6 57 (7.63%) Azure DevOps
7 56 (7.50%) GitHub Actions
8 55 (7.36%) Serverless
9 46 (6.16%) AWS CloudFormation
9 46 (6.16%) Azure AKS
10 44 (5.89%) IaaS
11 41 (5.49%) AWS Lambda
12 39 (5.22%) Azure Monitor
13 36 (4.82%) Google Kubernetes Engine
14 35 (4.69%) Amazon EC2
14 35 (4.69%) Amazon EKS
14 35 (4.69%) Amazon S3
15 34 (4.55%) Microsoft 365
16 32 (4.28%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 32 (4.28%) PaaS
Communications & Networking
1 77 (10.31%) Firewall
2 76 (10.17%) DNS
3 37 (4.95%) Network Security
3 37 (4.95%) VPN
4 17 (2.28%) DHCP
4 17 (2.28%) WAN
5 14 (1.87%) TCP/IP
6 12 (1.61%) Internet
7 6 (0.80%) SD-WAN
7 6 (0.80%) VLAN
8 5 (0.67%) LAN
8 5 (0.67%) SSL
9 4 (0.54%) BGP
9 4 (0.54%) SAN
9 4 (0.54%) SMTP
9 4 (0.54%) VSAN
10 3 (0.40%) NGFW
10 3 (0.40%) Reverse Proxy
10 3 (0.40%) tcpdump
10 3 (0.40%) Wireless
Database & Business Intelligence
1 28 (3.75%) SQL Server
2 20 (2.68%) Amazon RDS
3 16 (2.14%) PostgreSQL
4 11 (1.47%) BigQuery
5 8 (1.07%) Oracle Exadata
6 7 (0.94%) Data Lake
6 7 (0.94%) DynamoDB
7 6 (0.80%) Amazon Athena
8 5 (0.67%) Azure SQL Database
8 5 (0.67%) Oracle Database
9 3 (0.40%) Amazon Redshift
9 3 (0.40%) Flink
9 3 (0.40%) Looker
9 3 (0.40%) Metadata
9 3 (0.40%) MongoDB
9 3 (0.40%) MySQL
9 3 (0.40%) Oracle Database 12c
10 2 (0.27%) Amazon QuickSight
10 2 (0.27%) Delta Lake
10 2 (0.27%) Relational Database
Development Applications
1 53 (7.10%) GitLab
2 47 (6.29%) Jenkins
3 37 (4.95%) Git
4 18 (2.41%) JIRA
5 8 (1.07%) Artifactory
6 6 (0.80%) Claude Code
7 5 (0.67%) Bitbucket
8 3 (0.40%) Selenium
9 2 (0.27%) Atlassian Bamboo
9 2 (0.27%) Cypress.io
9 2 (0.27%) Gatling
9 2 (0.27%) JMeter
9 2 (0.27%) Octopus Deploy
9 2 (0.27%) Robot Framework
9 2 (0.27%) SonarQube
9 2 (0.27%) Terragrunt
10 1 (0.13%) Chocolatey
10 1 (0.13%) CircleCI
10 1 (0.13%) Spinnaker
10 1 (0.13%) TestRail
General
1 93 (12.45%) Finance
2 81 (10.84%) Social Skills
3 68 (9.10%) Public Sector
4 31 (4.15%) Analytical Skills
5 27 (3.61%) Banking
6 10 (1.34%) Documentation Skills
6 10 (1.34%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 8 (1.07%) Investment Banking
8 6 (0.80%) Manufacturing
9 5 (0.67%) Law
9 5 (0.67%) Local Government
10 4 (0.54%) Pharmaceutical
11 3 (0.40%) Digital Health
11 3 (0.40%) Front Office
11 3 (0.40%) Italian Language
11 3 (0.40%) Legal
11 3 (0.40%) Military
11 3 (0.40%) Police
11 3 (0.40%) Presentation Skills
11 3 (0.40%) Retail
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 307 (41.10%) Terraform
2 23 (3.08%) REST
3 14 (1.87%) ARM Templates
4 12 (1.61%) Kafka
5 11 (1.47%) Spring
5 11 (1.47%) Spring Boot
6 10 (1.34%) Node.js
6 10 (1.34%) OAuth
6 10 (1.34%) OAuth2
7 8 (1.07%) AWS CDK
7 8 (1.07%) React
7 8 (1.07%) YAML
8 7 (0.94%) .NET
9 6 (0.80%) FastAPI
9 6 (0.80%) Flask
9 6 (0.80%) Keycloak
10 5 (0.67%) Model Context Protocol
10 5 (0.67%) OpenID
11 4 (0.54%) Azure Blueprints
11 4 (0.54%) Hugging Face
Miscellaneous
1 123 (16.47%) Cloud Native
2 55 (7.36%) Security Posture
3 42 (5.62%) Enterprise Cloud
4 34 (4.55%) Hybrid Cloud
5 31 (4.15%) Onboarding
6 28 (3.75%) Cloud Security Posture
7 22 (2.95%) Enterprise Software
8 20 (2.68%) Distributed Systems
9 18 (2.41%) Management Information System
10 17 (2.28%) Data Centre
11 15 (2.01%) Public Cloud
12 12 (1.61%) Product Ownership
13 11 (1.47%) Private Cloud
14 10 (1.34%) Linux Command Line
15 8 (1.07%) AI Agents
15 8 (1.07%) Data Protection Act
15 8 (1.07%) PKI
16 7 (0.94%) Legacy Systems
16 7 (0.94%) Self-Motivation
17 4 (0.54%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 114 (15.26%) Windows
2 73 (9.77%) Linux
3 57 (7.63%) Windows Server
4 29 (3.88%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 10 (1.34%) Windows Server 2019
6 8 (1.07%) Ubuntu
7 4 (0.54%) VMS
8 3 (0.40%) CentOS
9 2 (0.27%) Windows Server 2012
Processes & Methodologies
1 260 (34.81%) Infrastructure as Code
2 255 (34.14%) CI/CD
3 204 (27.31%) DevOps
4 171 (22.89%) Cloud Security
5 156 (20.88%) Infrastructure Engineering
6 144 (19.28%) Platform Engineering
7 95 (12.72%) AI
8 85 (11.38%) Containerisation
9 84 (11.24%) Migration
10 83 (11.11%) Agile
11 81 (10.84%) Observability
12 59 (7.90%) Continuous Improvement
12 59 (7.90%) Software Engineering
13 58 (7.76%) Technical Leadership
14 54 (7.23%) DevSecOps
15 53 (7.10%) Infrastructure Automation
16 51 (6.83%) Problem-Solving
17 49 (6.56%) Cybersecurity
17 49 (6.56%) Deployment Automation
18 45 (6.02%) Change Management
Programming Languages
1 188 (25.17%) Python
2 160 (21.42%) PowerShell
3 81 (10.84%) Bash
4 69 (9.24%) Bicep
5 61 (8.17%) SQL
6 36 (4.82%) Java
7 20 (2.68%) C#
8 16 (2.14%) Shell Script
9 11 (1.47%) JavaScript
10 9 (1.20%) Go
11 5 (0.67%) TypeScript
12 4 (0.54%) Groovy
13 3 (0.40%) C
13 3 (0.40%) Scala
14 2 (0.27%) Kusto Query Language
15 1 (0.13%) Apex Code
15 1 (0.13%) Data Analysis Expressions
15 1 (0.13%) Perl
15 1 (0.13%) R
15 1 (0.13%) Ruby
Qualifications
1 190 (25.44%) Security Cleared
2 140 (18.74%) SC Cleared
3 64 (8.57%) DV Cleared
4 46 (6.16%) AWS Certification
5 45 (6.02%) Azure Certification
6 30 (4.02%) Degree
7 17 (2.28%) Microsoft Certification
8 16 (2.14%) CISSP
9 15 (2.01%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
10 9 (1.20%) Cisco Certification
11 8 (1.07%) MCSE
12 7 (0.94%) CCNP
12 7 (0.94%) Computer Science Degree
13 6 (0.80%) BPSS Clearance
13 6 (0.80%) CISM
14 5 (0.67%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
15 4 (0.54%) CCIE
15 4 (0.54%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
16 3 (0.40%) AWS Certified SysOps Administrator
16 3 (0.40%) CEH
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 14 (1.87%) Data Quality
1 14 (1.87%) ISO/IEC 27001
2 11 (1.47%) NIST
3 10 (1.34%) QA
4 9 (1.20%) NCSC
5 6 (0.80%) Cyber Essentials
6 5 (0.67%) GDPR
7 3 (0.40%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
7 3 (0.40%) Disclosure Scotland
7 3 (0.40%) SLA
8 2 (0.27%) Actionable Recommendations
8 2 (0.27%) PCI DSS
9 1 (0.13%) Accessibility
9 1 (0.13%) Government Security Classifications
9 1 (0.13%) GRC
9 1 (0.13%) SOC 2
9 1 (0.13%) WCAG
System Software
1 89 (11.91%) Active Directory
2 73 (9.77%) Docker
3 42 (5.62%) VMware Infrastructure
4 32 (4.28%) Virtual Machines
5 27 (3.61%) VMware ESXi
6 24 (3.21%) VMware NSX
7 20 (2.68%) Virtual Desktop
8 18 (2.41%) vSphere
9 14 (1.87%) vCloud
10 10 (1.34%) Hyper-V
11 7 (0.94%) Squid
12 4 (0.54%) Firmware
13 3 (0.40%) Ceph
13 3 (0.40%) Dovecot
13 3 (0.40%) NFS
13 3 (0.40%) Postfix
14 2 (0.27%) KVM
14 2 (0.27%) Virtual Servers
15 1 (0.13%) BitLocker
Systems Management
1 191 (25.57%) Kubernetes
2 49 (6.56%) Ansible
3 23 (3.08%) Microsoft Intune
3 23 (3.08%) vCenter Server
4 21 (2.81%) Grafana
4 21 (2.81%) SCOM
5 19 (2.54%) Prometheus
6 18 (2.41%) Progress Chef
7 17 (2.28%) Single Sign-On
8 14 (1.87%) Puppet
9 10 (1.34%) Istio
10 8 (1.07%) Packer
11 6 (0.80%) Argo
11 6 (0.80%) Cilium
12 5 (0.67%) VxRail
13 4 (0.54%) Suricata
14 3 (0.40%) Active Directory Federation Services
14 3 (0.40%) HAProxy
14 3 (0.40%) Karpenter
14 3 (0.40%) vRealize
Vendors
1 171 (22.89%) Microsoft
2 112 (14.99%) Google
3 65 (8.70%) VMware
4 32 (4.28%) Oracle
5 17 (2.28%) Okta
5 17 (2.28%) Zscaler
6 16 (2.14%) Red Hat
7 15 (2.01%) Databricks
8 13 (1.74%) Palo Alto
9 12 (1.61%) OpenAI
9 12 (1.61%) ServiceNow
9 12 (1.61%) Splunk
10 9 (1.20%) Cisco
10 9 (1.20%) CrowdStrike
10 9 (1.20%) Dynatrace
11 8 (1.07%) BeyondTrust
11 8 (1.07%) Broadcom
11 8 (1.07%) New Relic
11 8 (1.07%) Salesforce
11 8 (1.07%) SolarWinds