Cloud Engineer Contract Job Trends

Cloud Engineer
UK

The median Cloud Engineer daily rate in the UK is £525, according to job vacancies posted in the 6 months leading up to 3 March 2026.

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

6 months to
3 Mar 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 246 307 266
Rank change year-on-year +61 -41 -8
Contract jobs requiring a Cloud Engineer 460 229 392
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 1.10% 0.77% 0.88%
As % of the Job Titles category 1.20% 0.83% 0.95%
Number of daily rates quoted 322 162 273
10th Percentile £400 £380 £402
25th Percentile £450 £450 £473
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £537 £550
Median % change year-on-year -2.23% -2.36% -
75th Percentile £613 £636 £625
90th Percentile £725 £693 £700
UK excluding London median daily rate £525 £500 £525
% change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 3 0 5
10th Percentile - - -
25th Percentile £25.13 - £27.50
Median hourly rate £25.25 - £30.00
75th Percentile £39.56 - £72.50
90th Percentile £48.08 - £83.15
UK excluding London median hourly rate - - £30.00

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 38,312 27,714 41,419
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 91.84% 92.81% 92.95%
Number of daily rates quoted 24,044 17,552 27,221
10th Percentile £310 £290 £275
25th Percentile £409 £406 £406
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £613 £638 £638
90th Percentile £723 £738 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £481 £475 £487
% change year-on-year +1.32% -2.46% -2.60%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,352 838 2,415
10th Percentile £14.83 £16.25 £13.05
25th Percentile £18.87 £21.46 £16.25
Median hourly rate £33.50 £34.31 £34.08
Median % change year-on-year -2.35% +0.66% -15.85%
75th Percentile £64.03 £64.74 £60.00
90th Percentile £75.00 £75.33 £71.90
UK excluding London median hourly rate £32.50 £32.50 £35.00
% change year-on-year - -7.14% -9.68%

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 3 March 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 3 March 2026.

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 3 March 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 +48 375 £525 -4.55% 129
UK excluding London +34 207 £525 +5.00% 109
London +21 193 £525 -4.55% 39
Work from Home +3 113 £500 -4.76% 53
North of England -4 71 £513 +7.95% 35
South East -5 41 £505 -12.17% 30
Yorkshire -23 41 £513 +60.78% 14
Midlands -33 40 £575 +21.05% 11
Scotland +34 35 £513 -2.38% 6
West Midlands -25 35 £670 +14.04% 7
North West -14 30 £506 +12.50% 19
South West -4 20 £550 -4.35% 18
East of England -20 13 £450 +41.51% 9
East Midlands -34 5 £575 +25.27% 4
Wales -6 1 £425 +41.67%

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

For the 6 months to 3 March 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.

1 220 (47.83%) AWS
2 205 (44.57%) CI/CD
3 201 (43.70%) Terraform
4 184 (40.00%) Infrastructure as Code
5 182 (39.57%) DevOps
6 180 (39.13%) Azure
7 133 (28.91%) Python
8 130 (28.26%) Kubernetes
9 128 (27.83%) Security Cleared
10 106 (23.04%) GCP
11 103 (22.39%) GitHub
12 92 (20.00%) SC Cleared
13 91 (19.78%) Containerisation
14 87 (18.91%) Cloud Security
15 82 (17.83%) Docker
16 81 (17.61%) Microsoft
17 80 (17.39%) Agile
18 75 (16.30%) Google
19 68 (14.78%) Serverless
20 62 (13.48%) GitHub Actions
21 60 (13.04%) Jenkins
22 58 (12.61%) Migration
23 56 (12.17%) PowerShell
24 54 (11.74%) Platform Engineering
25 52 (11.30%) Infrastructure Automation
26 50 (10.87%) GitLab
27 48 (10.43%) Infrastructure Engineering
28 47 (10.22%) Azure Certification
28 47 (10.22%) Microservices
29 46 (10.00%) AWS CloudFormation

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 8 (1.74%) Apache Spark
2 5 (1.09%) Apache
2 5 (1.09%) Microsoft Exchange
3 4 (0.87%) Confluence
4 3 (0.65%) nginx
5 1 (0.22%) Apache Airflow
5 1 (0.22%) Apache Superset
5 1 (0.22%) CMS
5 1 (0.22%) Headless CMS
5 1 (0.22%) SAS
5 1 (0.22%) SharePoint
5 1 (0.22%) Traefik
Applications
1 2 (0.43%) Chatbot
Business Applications
1 4 (0.87%) Dynamics CRM
Cloud Services
1 220 (47.83%) AWS
2 180 (39.13%) Azure
3 106 (23.04%) GCP
4 103 (22.39%) GitHub
5 68 (14.78%) Serverless
6 62 (13.48%) GitHub Actions
7 46 (10.00%) AWS CloudFormation
8 41 (8.91%) Entra ID
9 37 (8.04%) PaaS
10 36 (7.83%) Azure DevOps
11 35 (7.61%) Amazon S3
12 33 (7.17%) Google Kubernetes Engine
13 32 (6.96%) Amazon EKS
14 29 (6.30%) AWS Lambda
15 28 (6.09%) Azure AKS
15 28 (6.09%) IaaS
16 27 (5.87%) Amazon ECS
17 20 (4.35%) Virtual Private Cloud
18 18 (3.91%) OCI
19 16 (3.48%) Azure Monitor
Communications & Networking
1 39 (8.48%) Firewall
2 20 (4.35%) Network Security
2 20 (4.35%) VPN
3 16 (3.48%) Cisco Firepower
3 16 (3.48%) Cisco IOS
3 16 (3.48%) Cisco ISE
3 16 (3.48%) Junos
4 15 (3.26%) DNS
5 5 (1.09%) NX-OS
6 4 (0.87%) DHCP
6 4 (0.87%) Reverse Proxy
6 4 (0.87%) Software-Defined Networking
7 3 (0.65%) TCP/IP
7 3 (0.65%) WAN
8 2 (0.43%) BGP
8 2 (0.43%) LAN
8 2 (0.43%) Unified Communications
9 1 (0.22%) HTTP
9 1 (0.22%) SMTP
9 1 (0.22%) WLAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 26 (5.65%) NoSQL
2 21 (4.57%) PostgreSQL
3 11 (2.39%) Amazon Athena
3 11 (2.39%) BigQuery
3 11 (2.39%) DynamoDB
4 9 (1.96%) Power BI
5 7 (1.52%) Amazon RDS
5 7 (1.52%) Elasticsearch
6 5 (1.09%) Data Lake
7 4 (0.87%) Amazon Redshift
7 4 (0.87%) Azure SQL Database
7 4 (0.87%) Big Data
7 4 (0.87%) Data Warehouse
8 3 (0.65%) Oracle Database
9 2 (0.43%) Amazon QuickSight
9 2 (0.43%) Mixpanel
9 2 (0.43%) OLAP
9 2 (0.43%) OLTP
9 2 (0.43%) Snowflake Schema
9 2 (0.43%) SQL Server Integration Services
Development Applications
1 60 (13.04%) Jenkins
2 50 (10.87%) GitLab
3 32 (6.96%) Git
4 10 (2.17%) JIRA
5 9 (1.96%) Liquibase
6 3 (0.65%) MLflow
6 3 (0.65%) Postman
6 3 (0.65%) Team Foundation Server
7 2 (0.43%) Artifactory
7 2 (0.43%) Bitbucket
7 2 (0.43%) CircleCI
7 2 (0.43%) Sonatype Nexus
7 2 (0.43%) Spinnaker
8 1 (0.22%) Gemini Tracker
8 1 (0.22%) RStudio
8 1 (0.22%) Travis CI
8 1 (0.22%) Visual Studio Code
General
1 79 (17.17%) Social Skills
2 70 (15.22%) Finance
3 41 (8.91%) Public Sector
4 32 (6.96%) Banking
5 24 (5.22%) Analytical Skills
6 16 (3.48%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 13 (2.83%) Financial Institution
8 8 (1.74%) Retail
9 7 (1.52%) Aeronautics
10 6 (1.30%) Documentation Skills
10 6 (1.30%) Presentation Skills
10 6 (1.30%) Telecoms
11 5 (1.09%) Aviation
11 5 (1.09%) Legal
12 4 (0.87%) Pharmaceutical
13 3 (0.65%) Local Government
14 2 (0.43%) Billing
14 2 (0.43%) Investment Banking
14 2 (0.43%) Marketing
14 2 (0.43%) Military
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 43 (9.35%) REST
2 26 (5.65%) Elastic Stack
2 26 (5.65%) Node.js
3 19 (4.13%) RESTful
4 12 (2.61%) Kafka
4 12 (2.61%) React
5 11 (2.39%) OpenID
6 10 (2.17%) ARM Templates
6 10 (2.17%) OpenTelemetry
7 9 (1.96%) OpenAPI
7 9 (1.96%) Oracle Fusion
8 8 (1.74%) LangChain
8 8 (1.74%) OAuth
8 8 (1.74%) Playwright
8 8 (1.74%) SAML
8 8 (1.74%) SOAP
8 8 (1.74%) Spring
8 8 (1.74%) Spring Boot
9 7 (1.52%) AngularJS
9 7 (1.52%) Lambda Expressions
Miscellaneous
1 83 (18.04%) Cloud Native
2 41 (8.91%) Public Cloud
3 22 (4.78%) Distributed Systems
4 13 (2.83%) Hybrid Cloud
5 12 (2.61%) Data Centre
6 9 (1.96%) PKI
6 9 (1.96%) Product Ownership
6 9 (1.96%) Security Posture
7 5 (1.09%) Cyber Threat
7 5 (1.09%) Onboarding
8 4 (0.87%) Algorithms
8 4 (0.87%) Cloud Security Posture
8 4 (0.87%) Data Protection Act
8 4 (0.87%) Self-Motivation
9 3 (0.65%) Distributed Computing
9 3 (0.65%) Genomics
9 3 (0.65%) Legacy Systems
9 3 (0.65%) Life Science
9 3 (0.65%) Linux Command Line
9 3 (0.65%) Replication
Operating Systems
1 46 (10.00%) Linux
2 31 (6.74%) Windows
3 17 (3.70%) Windows Server
4 8 (1.74%) Unix
5 4 (0.87%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 4 (0.87%) VMS
6 1 (0.22%) Alpine Linux
6 1 (0.22%) Mac OS
6 1 (0.22%) Ubuntu
Processes & Methodologies
1 205 (44.57%) CI/CD
2 184 (40.00%) Infrastructure as Code
3 182 (39.57%) DevOps
4 91 (19.78%) Containerisation
5 87 (18.91%) Cloud Security
6 80 (17.39%) Agile
7 58 (12.61%) Migration
8 54 (11.74%) Platform Engineering
9 52 (11.30%) Infrastructure Automation
10 48 (10.43%) Infrastructure Engineering
11 47 (10.22%) Microservices
12 46 (10.00%) Observability
13 43 (9.35%) Problem-Solving
14 40 (8.70%) Cybersecurity
15 39 (8.48%) Continuous Improvement
16 38 (8.26%) AI
17 37 (8.04%) DevSecOps
18 31 (6.74%) Cost Optimisation
18 31 (6.74%) Software Engineering
19 29 (6.30%) High Availability
Programming Languages
1 133 (28.91%) Python
2 56 (12.17%) PowerShell
3 39 (8.48%) SQL
4 29 (6.30%) Bash
5 28 (6.09%) Java
6 23 (5.00%) Bicep
7 21 (4.57%) Go
8 17 (3.70%) TypeScript
9 9 (1.96%) JavaScript
10 8 (1.74%) C#
11 6 (1.30%) Shell Script
12 4 (0.87%) BeanShell
12 4 (0.87%) Perl
12 4 (0.87%) Ruby
13 2 (0.43%) Groovy
13 2 (0.43%) Kusto Query Language
14 1 (0.22%) C
14 1 (0.22%) Cypher
14 1 (0.22%) Kotlin
14 1 (0.22%) R
Qualifications
1 128 (27.83%) Security Cleared
2 92 (20.00%) SC Cleared
3 47 (10.22%) Azure Certification
4 36 (7.83%) AWS Certification
5 35 (7.61%) Degree
6 31 (6.74%) DV Cleared
7 22 (4.78%) Computer Science Degree
8 18 (3.91%) Master's Degree
9 14 (3.04%) Microsoft Certification
10 13 (2.83%) CISSP
11 12 (2.61%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
12 11 (2.39%) BPSS Clearance
13 9 (1.96%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
13 9 (1.96%) Cisco Certification
14 7 (1.52%) CISM
15 6 (1.30%) (ISC)2 CCSP
16 5 (1.09%) CCSP
16 5 (1.09%) TOGAF Certification
17 4 (0.87%) AWS Certified Developer
18 3 (0.65%) SANS
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 15 (3.26%) GDPR
2 11 (2.39%) ISO/IEC 27001
2 11 (2.39%) NIST
3 9 (1.96%) NCSC
4 7 (1.52%) QA
5 6 (1.30%) PCI DSS
6 5 (1.09%) GRC
7 4 (0.87%) Data Quality
8 3 (0.65%) Cyber Essentials
9 2 (0.43%) HIPAA
9 2 (0.43%) SOC 2
10 1 (0.22%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
10 1 (0.22%) FedRAMP
10 1 (0.22%) JSP 440
System Software
1 82 (17.83%) Docker
2 30 (6.52%) Active Directory
3 16 (3.48%) VMware NSX
4 13 (2.83%) Virtual Machines
5 8 (1.74%) Virtual Desktop
6 6 (1.30%) Hyper-V
7 5 (1.09%) Firmware
7 5 (1.09%) VMware Infrastructure
8 2 (0.43%) Virtual Servers
9 1 (0.22%) vSphere
Systems Management
1 201 (43.70%) Terraform
2 130 (28.26%) Kubernetes
3 39 (8.48%) Ansible
4 34 (7.39%) Grafana
4 34 (7.39%) Prometheus
5 17 (3.70%) Istio
6 16 (3.48%) vCenter Server
7 15 (3.26%) Argo
8 12 (2.61%) Single Sign-On
9 7 (1.52%) Kibana
9 7 (1.52%) logstash
9 7 (1.52%) Microsoft Intune
10 5 (1.09%) Progress Chef
11 4 (0.87%) Podman
12 3 (0.65%) Packer
12 3 (0.65%) Proxmox
12 3 (0.65%) Puppet
13 2 (0.43%) Consul
13 2 (0.43%) Salt
14 1 (0.22%) vRealize
Vendors
1 81 (17.61%) Microsoft
2 75 (16.30%) Google
3 22 (4.78%) Splunk
4 20 (4.35%) Cisco
5 19 (4.13%) Oracle
6 16 (3.48%) Juniper
6 16 (3.48%) SolarWinds
7 13 (2.83%) Databricks
8 11 (2.39%) ServiceNow
9 8 (1.74%) Dynatrace
10 7 (1.52%) Ping Identity
11 5 (1.09%) Broadcom
11 5 (1.09%) MuleSoft
11 5 (1.09%) PeopleSoft
11 5 (1.09%) Rapid7
11 5 (1.09%) VMware
11 5 (1.09%) Zscaler
12 4 (0.87%) Citrix
12 4 (0.87%) Red Hat
12 4 (0.87%) Salesforce