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 10 August 2026.

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

6 months to
10 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 205 306 331
Rank change year-on-year +101 +25 -60
Contract jobs requiring a Cloud Engineer 722 263 249
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 1.35% 0.79% 0.64%
As % of the Job Titles category 1.46% 0.87% 0.69%
Number of daily rates quoted 466 197 165
10th Percentile £400 £400 £386
25th Percentile £451 £425 £450
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £550
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -9.09% -
75th Percentile £613 £575 £625
90th Percentile £688 £657 £675
UK excluding London median daily rate £515 £500 £520
% change year-on-year +3.00% -3.85% -0.95%
Number of hourly rates quoted 27 5 1
10th Percentile £23.20 £29.40 -
25th Percentile £47.10 £30.00 £27.50
Median hourly rate £77.00 £45.00 £30.00
Median % change year-on-year +71.11% +50.00% -
75th Percentile £81.25 £62.50 £32.50
90th Percentile £82.75 £91.00 -
UK excluding London median hourly rate £72.00 - £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 49,375 30,298 36,046
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.56% 91.39% 92.91%
Number of daily rates quoted 29,671 19,217 23,307
10th Percentile £328 £283 £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 £625 £638
90th Percentile £727 £725 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 3,467 1,516 2,023
10th Percentile £15.00 £13.60 £14.16
25th Percentile £20.72 £17.21 £20.50
Median hourly rate £42.00 £25.15 £43.00
Median % change year-on-year +67.00% -41.51% +1.18%
75th Percentile £67.84 £53.75 £65.00
90th Percentile £80.00 £72.63 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £42.50 £25.11 £45.00
% change year-on-year +69.26% -44.20% +20.00%

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 10 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 10 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 10 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 +93 619 £525 +5.00% 833
UK excluding London +86 366 £515 +3.00% 363
London +49 308 £525 - 509
Work from Home +27 183 £539 +7.80% 302
South East -3 108 £538 +7.50% 59
North of England -1 96 £525 +16.67% 118
Midlands -3 59 £500 +5.26% 33
Scotland +36 58 £442 -11.60% 47
North West -7 56 £538 +22.86% 70
Yorkshire -15 33 £450 -10.00% 33
West Midlands -23 31 £525 +8.81% 19
East Midlands +9 27 £450 -5.26% 14
East of England +2 22 £505 +26.25% 33
South West -32 17 £550 - 56
Wales -10 7 - - 4
North East -41 7 £525 +10.53% 15

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

For the 6 months to 10 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.

1 348 (48.20%) Azure
2 312 (43.21%) Terraform
3 269 (37.26%) AWS
4 256 (35.46%) CI/CD
5 255 (35.32%) Infrastructure as Code
6 210 (29.09%) DevOps
7 190 (26.32%) Python
8 178 (24.65%) Security Cleared
9 176 (24.38%) Kubernetes
10 166 (22.99%) Cloud Security
11 165 (22.85%) Microsoft
12 164 (22.71%) GCP
13 155 (21.47%) PowerShell
14 145 (20.08%) Infrastructure Engineering
15 135 (18.70%) SC Cleared
16 133 (18.42%) Platform Engineering
17 115 (15.93%) Google
18 114 (15.79%) Windows
19 92 (12.74%) AI
20 91 (12.60%) Entra ID
20 91 (12.60%) GitHub
21 88 (12.19%) Containerisation
21 88 (12.19%) Migration
22 87 (12.05%) Agile
23 84 (11.63%) Active Directory
24 79 (10.94%) Bash
25 78 (10.80%) Firewall
26 77 (10.66%) Observability
27 76 (10.53%) DNS
28 75 (10.39%) 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 12 (1.66%) Microsoft Exchange
2 9 (1.25%) Apache
3 7 (0.97%) Confluence
4 6 (0.83%) Apache Airflow
5 5 (0.69%) SharePoint
6 4 (0.55%) nginx
7 3 (0.42%) IIS
7 3 (0.42%) Tomcat
8 2 (0.28%) CloudStack
8 2 (0.28%) OpenStack
9 1 (0.14%) Apache Pulsar
9 1 (0.14%) Apache Spark
9 1 (0.14%) Traefik
Applications
1 1 (0.14%) Chatbot
Business Applications
1 2 (0.28%) Aladdin
Cloud Services
1 348 (48.20%) Azure
2 269 (37.26%) AWS
3 164 (22.71%) GCP
4 91 (12.60%) Entra ID
4 91 (12.60%) GitHub
5 58 (8.03%) Serverless
6 57 (7.89%) GitHub Actions
7 51 (7.06%) Azure DevOps
8 47 (6.51%) Azure AKS
9 44 (6.09%) IaaS
10 43 (5.96%) AWS CloudFormation
11 39 (5.40%) Amazon S3
11 39 (5.40%) AWS Lambda
12 38 (5.26%) Virtual Private Cloud
13 37 (5.12%) Google Kubernetes Engine
14 36 (4.99%) Amazon EC2
15 35 (4.85%) Azure Monitor
16 34 (4.71%) Amazon EKS
17 33 (4.57%) PaaS
18 29 (4.02%) Microsoft 365
Communications & Networking
1 78 (10.80%) Firewall
2 76 (10.53%) DNS
3 39 (5.40%) VPN
4 31 (4.29%) Network Security
5 18 (2.49%) DHCP
6 16 (2.22%) WAN
7 15 (2.08%) TCP/IP
8 12 (1.66%) Internet
9 6 (0.83%) SD-WAN
9 6 (0.83%) VLAN
10 5 (0.69%) BGP
10 5 (0.69%) Reverse Proxy
10 5 (0.69%) SSL
11 4 (0.55%) LAN
11 4 (0.55%) SAN
11 4 (0.55%) VSAN
12 3 (0.42%) Kerberos
12 3 (0.42%) NGFW
12 3 (0.42%) SMTP
12 3 (0.42%) Wireless
Database & Business Intelligence
1 26 (3.60%) SQL Server
2 17 (2.35%) Amazon RDS
3 13 (1.80%) PostgreSQL
4 11 (1.52%) BigQuery
5 9 (1.25%) Amazon Athena
6 7 (0.97%) DynamoDB
6 7 (0.97%) Oracle Exadata
7 6 (0.83%) Azure SQL Database
8 5 (0.69%) Data Lake
8 5 (0.69%) Oracle Database
9 4 (0.55%) Amazon Redshift
10 3 (0.42%) Amazon QuickSight
10 3 (0.42%) Flink
10 3 (0.42%) Looker
10 3 (0.42%) MySQL
10 3 (0.42%) Oracle Database 12c
11 2 (0.28%) Big Data
11 2 (0.28%) Elasticsearch
11 2 (0.28%) Redis
11 2 (0.28%) Relational Database
Development Applications
1 52 (7.20%) GitLab
2 49 (6.79%) Jenkins
3 39 (5.40%) Git
4 19 (2.63%) JIRA
5 9 (1.25%) Artifactory
6 6 (0.83%) Claude Code
7 5 (0.69%) Bitbucket
8 3 (0.42%) Selenium
8 3 (0.42%) Team Foundation Server
9 2 (0.28%) Atlassian Bamboo
9 2 (0.28%) Cypress.io
9 2 (0.28%) Gatling
9 2 (0.28%) JMeter
9 2 (0.28%) Octopus Deploy
9 2 (0.28%) Robot Framework
9 2 (0.28%) SonarQube
10 1 (0.14%) Chocolatey
10 1 (0.14%) CircleCI
10 1 (0.14%) Spinnaker
10 1 (0.14%) TestRail
General
1 91 (12.60%) Finance
2 81 (11.22%) Social Skills
3 64 (8.86%) Public Sector
4 29 (4.02%) Analytical Skills
5 25 (3.46%) Banking
6 12 (1.66%) Documentation Skills
7 10 (1.39%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 8 (1.11%) Investment Banking
9 5 (0.69%) Law
9 5 (0.69%) Legal
9 5 (0.69%) Local Government
10 4 (0.55%) Pharmaceutical
11 3 (0.42%) Front Office
11 3 (0.42%) Italian Language
11 3 (0.42%) Military
11 3 (0.42%) Police
11 3 (0.42%) Presentation Skills
11 3 (0.42%) Retail
12 2 (0.28%) Billing
12 2 (0.28%) Manufacturing
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 24 (3.32%) REST
2 13 (1.80%) ARM Templates
3 12 (1.66%) Node.js
3 12 (1.66%) OAuth
3 12 (1.66%) OAuth2
4 10 (1.39%) Spring
4 10 (1.39%) Spring Boot
5 8 (1.11%) AWS CDK
5 8 (1.11%) React
6 7 (0.97%) Model Context Protocol
6 7 (0.97%) OpenID
7 6 (0.83%) .NET
7 6 (0.83%) FastAPI
7 6 (0.83%) Flask
7 6 (0.83%) Kafka
7 6 (0.83%) YAML
8 4 (0.55%) Hugging Face
8 4 (0.55%) Playwright
8 4 (0.55%) PyTorch
8 4 (0.55%) TensorFlow
Miscellaneous
1 127 (17.59%) Cloud Native
2 50 (6.93%) Security Posture
3 38 (5.26%) Enterprise Cloud
4 34 (4.71%) Hybrid Cloud
5 27 (3.74%) Onboarding
6 22 (3.05%) Enterprise Software
6 22 (3.05%) Public Cloud
7 21 (2.91%) Cloud Security Posture
8 18 (2.49%) Data Centre
9 16 (2.22%) Management Information System
10 14 (1.94%) Distributed Systems
11 10 (1.39%) Linux Command Line
12 9 (1.25%) Data Protection Act
12 9 (1.25%) Self-Motivation
13 8 (1.11%) AI Agents
13 8 (1.11%) Product Ownership
14 7 (0.97%) Legacy Systems
14 7 (0.97%) PKI
15 5 (0.69%) Private Cloud
16 4 (0.55%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 114 (15.79%) Windows
2 72 (9.97%) Linux
3 54 (7.48%) Windows Server
4 30 (4.16%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 10 (1.39%) Windows Server 2019
6 8 (1.11%) Ubuntu
7 4 (0.55%) VMS
8 3 (0.42%) CentOS
9 2 (0.28%) Windows Server 2012
10 1 (0.14%) Mac OS
Processes & Methodologies
1 256 (35.46%) CI/CD
2 255 (35.32%) Infrastructure as Code
3 210 (29.09%) DevOps
4 166 (22.99%) Cloud Security
5 145 (20.08%) Infrastructure Engineering
6 133 (18.42%) Platform Engineering
7 92 (12.74%) AI
8 88 (12.19%) Containerisation
8 88 (12.19%) Migration
9 87 (12.05%) Agile
10 77 (10.66%) Observability
11 59 (8.17%) Software Engineering
12 54 (7.48%) Continuous Improvement
13 53 (7.34%) Technical Leadership
14 52 (7.20%) Infrastructure Automation
14 52 (7.20%) Problem-Solving
15 47 (6.51%) DevSecOps
16 44 (6.09%) Deployment Automation
17 43 (5.96%) Change Management
18 41 (5.68%) Mentoring
Programming Languages
1 190 (26.32%) Python
2 155 (21.47%) PowerShell
3 79 (10.94%) Bash
4 64 (8.86%) Bicep
5 60 (8.31%) SQL
6 36 (4.99%) Java
7 20 (2.77%) C#
8 14 (1.94%) Shell Script
9 13 (1.80%) JavaScript
10 9 (1.25%) Go
11 7 (0.97%) TypeScript
12 4 (0.55%) Groovy
13 3 (0.42%) C
13 3 (0.42%) Scala
14 2 (0.28%) Kusto Query Language
14 2 (0.28%) Ruby
15 1 (0.14%) Apex Code
15 1 (0.14%) Data Analysis Expressions
15 1 (0.14%) Perl
15 1 (0.14%) R
Qualifications
1 178 (24.65%) Security Cleared
2 135 (18.70%) SC Cleared
3 57 (7.89%) DV Cleared
4 47 (6.51%) AWS Certification
4 47 (6.51%) Azure Certification
5 28 (3.88%) Degree
6 17 (2.35%) CISSP
7 16 (2.22%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
7 16 (2.22%) Microsoft Certification
8 11 (1.52%) Cisco Certification
9 9 (1.25%) Computer Science Degree
10 7 (0.97%) CCNP
10 7 (0.97%) MCSE
11 6 (0.83%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
11 6 (0.83%) BPSS Clearance
11 6 (0.83%) CISM
12 4 (0.55%) (ISC)2 CCSP
12 4 (0.55%) CCIE
12 4 (0.55%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
13 3 (0.42%) CEH
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 13 (1.80%) Data Quality
1 13 (1.80%) ISO/IEC 27001
2 10 (1.39%) NIST
2 10 (1.39%) QA
3 9 (1.25%) NCSC
4 6 (0.83%) GDPR
5 4 (0.55%) Cyber Essentials
6 3 (0.42%) Disclosure Scotland
7 2 (0.28%) Actionable Recommendations
7 2 (0.28%) PCI DSS
7 2 (0.28%) SLA
8 1 (0.14%) Accessibility
8 1 (0.14%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
8 1 (0.14%) Government Security Classifications
8 1 (0.14%) GRC
8 1 (0.14%) SOC 2
8 1 (0.14%) WCAG
System Software
1 84 (11.63%) Active Directory
2 75 (10.39%) Docker
3 37 (5.12%) VMware Infrastructure
4 33 (4.57%) Virtual Machines
5 25 (3.46%) VMware ESXi
6 22 (3.05%) VMware NSX
7 20 (2.77%) Virtual Desktop
8 18 (2.49%) vSphere
9 12 (1.66%) vCloud
10 11 (1.52%) Hyper-V
11 7 (0.97%) Squid
12 5 (0.69%) Firmware
13 3 (0.42%) Ceph
13 3 (0.42%) Dovecot
13 3 (0.42%) NFS
13 3 (0.42%) Postfix
14 2 (0.28%) KVM
14 2 (0.28%) Virtual Servers
Systems Management
1 312 (43.21%) Terraform
2 176 (24.38%) Kubernetes
3 52 (7.20%) Ansible
4 22 (3.05%) Grafana
4 22 (3.05%) Microsoft Intune
5 21 (2.91%) vCenter Server
6 20 (2.77%) Progress Chef
6 20 (2.77%) Prometheus
7 19 (2.63%) SCOM
7 19 (2.63%) Single Sign-On
8 16 (2.22%) Puppet
9 8 (1.11%) Argo
9 8 (1.11%) Istio
9 8 (1.11%) Packer
10 6 (0.83%) Cilium
11 5 (0.69%) VxRail
12 4 (0.55%) HAProxy
12 4 (0.55%) Suricata
13 3 (0.42%) Salt
13 3 (0.42%) vRealize
Vendors
1 165 (22.85%) Microsoft
2 115 (15.93%) Google
3 58 (8.03%) VMware
4 27 (3.74%) Oracle
5 17 (2.35%) Okta
5 17 (2.35%) Red Hat
5 17 (2.35%) Zscaler
6 14 (1.94%) ServiceNow
7 13 (1.80%) Palo Alto
7 13 (1.80%) Splunk
8 11 (1.52%) OpenAI
9 10 (1.39%) Cisco
10 9 (1.25%) CrowdStrike
10 9 (1.25%) Dynatrace
10 9 (1.25%) Salesforce
11 8 (1.11%) BeyondTrust
11 8 (1.11%) Broadcom
11 8 (1.11%) Databricks
11 8 (1.11%) New Relic
11 8 (1.11%) SolarWinds