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 15 October 2026.

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

6 months to
15 Oct 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 201 296 331
Rank change year-on-year +95 +35 -85
Contract jobs requiring a Cloud Engineer 814 293 242
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 1.47% 0.88% 0.64%
As % of the Job Titles category 1.60% 0.97% 0.69%
Number of daily rates quoted 523 218 143
10th Percentile £405 £400 £386
25th Percentile £450 £438 £450
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £500 £550
Median % change year-on-year +2.50% -9.09% -
75th Percentile £588 £575 £638
90th Percentile £681 £645 £710
UK excluding London median daily rate £510 £500 £500
% change year-on-year +2.00% - -9.09%
Number of hourly rates quoted 34 7 0
10th Percentile £22.69 £29.00 -
25th Percentile £23.20 £29.50 -
Median hourly rate £76.00 £45.00 -
Median % change year-on-year +68.89% - -
75th Percentile £81.25 £86.25 -
90th Percentile - £110.00 -
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 50,841 30,184 35,017
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 91.94% 90.90% 93.00%
Number of daily rates quoted 29,834 19,073 21,148
10th Percentile £325 £275 £300
25th Percentile £425 £400 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -
75th Percentile £638 £623 £638
90th Percentile £738 £725 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £490
% change year-on-year +5.26% -3.06% -2.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 4,158 1,652 1,437
10th Percentile £14.31 £13.80 £15.09
25th Percentile £19.33 £17.30 £20.50
Median hourly rate £41.56 £25.15 £41.27
Median % change year-on-year +65.23% -39.05% -8.30%
75th Percentile £67.50 £50.00 £65.00
90th Percentile £79.30 £68.52 £73.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £41.06 £25.00 £42.50
% change year-on-year +64.24% -41.18% -4.49%

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 15 October 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 15 October 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 15 October 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 +90 714 £525 +5.00% 85
UK excluding London +90 447 £510 +2.00% 76
London +52 310 £525 +2.44% 18
Work from Home +27 222 £540 +8.00% 61
North of England +18 149 £511 +7.63% 23
South East +14 136 £538 +7.50% 22
North West +18 89 £513 +20.59% 12
Midlands +10 82 £500 -4.76% 14
Yorkshire -13 50 £450 -13.46% 7
East Midlands +27 48 £500 +5.26% 4
Scotland +4 47 £428 -18.57% 5
West Midlands -27 33 £525 - 10
East of England -20 14 £475 +10.14% 2
South West -28 14 £538 -2.27% 8
North East -31 10 £525 +14.13% 4
Wales -6 7 - - 3

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

For the 6 months to 15 October 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.

1 388 (47.67%) Azure
2 316 (38.82%) Terraform
3 290 (35.63%) Infrastructure as Code
4 274 (33.66%) CI/CD
5 263 (32.31%) AWS
6 211 (25.92%) Kubernetes
7 210 (25.80%) DevOps
8 199 (24.45%) Microsoft
8 199 (24.45%) Python
9 197 (24.20%) Security Cleared
10 180 (22.11%) Cloud Security
11 179 (21.99%) PowerShell
12 166 (20.39%) Infrastructure Engineering
13 164 (20.15%) GCP
14 153 (18.80%) Platform Engineering
15 138 (16.95%) Entra ID
15 138 (16.95%) SC Cleared
16 125 (15.36%) Windows
17 116 (14.25%) Active Directory
18 111 (13.64%) Google
19 105 (12.90%) Migration
20 103 (12.65%) AI
21 96 (11.79%) Observability
22 92 (11.30%) Firewall
23 91 (11.18%) Containerisation
24 90 (11.06%) GitHub
25 87 (10.69%) DNS
26 86 (10.57%) Agile
27 83 (10.20%) Bash
28 82 (10.07%) Linux

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 17 (2.09%) Microsoft Exchange
2 12 (1.47%) Apache
3 10 (1.23%) SharePoint
4 8 (0.98%) Apache Airflow
5 6 (0.74%) Confluence
6 5 (0.61%) nginx
7 3 (0.37%) Apache Spark
7 3 (0.37%) IIS
7 3 (0.37%) OpenStack
7 3 (0.37%) Tomcat
8 2 (0.25%) CloudStack
8 2 (0.25%) Traefik
9 1 (0.12%) Apache Pulsar
Applications
1 1 (0.12%) Chatbot
Business Applications
1 1 (0.12%) Aladdin
1 1 (0.12%) iTrent
Cloud Services
1 388 (47.67%) Azure
2 263 (32.31%) AWS
3 164 (20.15%) GCP
4 138 (16.95%) Entra ID
5 90 (11.06%) GitHub
6 62 (7.62%) IaaS
7 59 (7.25%) GitHub Actions
8 57 (7.00%) Azure DevOps
9 50 (6.14%) Microsoft 365
10 49 (6.02%) Serverless
11 48 (5.90%) AWS CloudFormation
12 47 (5.77%) Azure Monitor
13 42 (5.16%) Google Kubernetes Engine
14 41 (5.04%) PaaS
15 40 (4.91%) Azure AKS
16 38 (4.67%) Amazon EKS
17 36 (4.42%) AWS Lambda
18 34 (4.18%) Amazon CloudWatch
19 33 (4.05%) OCI
20 29 (3.56%) SaaS
Communications & Networking
1 92 (11.30%) Firewall
2 87 (10.69%) DNS
3 48 (5.90%) Network Security
4 41 (5.04%) VPN
5 21 (2.58%) DHCP
6 20 (2.46%) WAN
7 18 (2.21%) TCP/IP
8 15 (1.84%) Internet
9 9 (1.11%) SD-WAN
9 9 (1.11%) VSAN
10 7 (0.86%) NGFW
10 7 (0.86%) VLAN
11 6 (0.74%) BGP
12 5 (0.61%) Kerberos
13 4 (0.49%) LAN
13 4 (0.49%) Reverse Proxy
13 4 (0.49%) SAN
13 4 (0.49%) SSL
13 4 (0.49%) Wireless
14 3 (0.37%) Cisco ISE
Database & Business Intelligence
1 31 (3.81%) SQL Server
2 21 (2.58%) Amazon RDS
3 18 (2.21%) PostgreSQL
4 14 (1.72%) Data Lake
5 12 (1.47%) BigQuery
6 10 (1.23%) NoSQL
7 8 (0.98%) DynamoDB
7 8 (0.98%) Oracle Exadata
8 6 (0.74%) Azure SQL Database
9 5 (0.61%) MongoDB
9 5 (0.61%) Oracle Database
10 4 (0.49%) Metadata
10 4 (0.49%) MySQL
10 4 (0.49%) Redis
11 3 (0.37%) Amazon Athena
11 3 (0.37%) Delta Lake
11 3 (0.37%) Elasticsearch
11 3 (0.37%) Flink
11 3 (0.37%) Looker
11 3 (0.37%) Oracle Database 12c
Development Applications
1 51 (6.27%) Jenkins
2 50 (6.14%) GitLab
3 36 (4.42%) Git
4 16 (1.97%) JIRA
5 8 (0.98%) Claude Code
6 6 (0.74%) Artifactory
6 6 (0.74%) Bitbucket
7 4 (0.49%) Terragrunt
8 2 (0.25%) Atlassian Bamboo
8 2 (0.25%) Cucumber
8 2 (0.25%) Gatling
8 2 (0.25%) JMeter
8 2 (0.25%) Octopus Deploy
9 1 (0.12%) Cypress.io
9 1 (0.12%) eggPlant
9 1 (0.12%) LoadRunner
9 1 (0.12%) Selenium
9 1 (0.12%) SonarQube
9 1 (0.12%) Spinnaker
9 1 (0.12%) TestRail
General
1 104 (12.78%) Finance
2 89 (10.93%) Social Skills
3 76 (9.34%) Public Sector
4 36 (4.42%) Banking
5 35 (4.30%) Analytical Skills
6 11 (1.35%) Manufacturing
7 9 (1.11%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 8 (0.98%) Documentation Skills
8 8 (0.98%) Legal
9 6 (0.74%) Front Office
9 6 (0.74%) Investment Banking
10 5 (0.61%) Local Government
10 5 (0.61%) Pharmaceutical
10 5 (0.61%) Presentation Skills
11 3 (0.37%) Aviation
11 3 (0.37%) Back Office
11 3 (0.37%) Digital Health
11 3 (0.37%) Digital Healthcare
11 3 (0.37%) Italian Language
11 3 (0.37%) Retail
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 316 (38.82%) Terraform
2 27 (3.32%) REST
3 20 (2.46%) ARM Templates
4 16 (1.97%) Kafka
4 16 (1.97%) OAuth
5 14 (1.72%) OAuth2
6 12 (1.47%) OpenID
7 11 (1.35%) Spring
7 11 (1.35%) Spring Boot
8 9 (1.11%) AWS CDK
8 9 (1.11%) Node.js
8 9 (1.11%) YAML
9 8 (0.98%) .NET
10 7 (0.86%) React
11 6 (0.74%) FastAPI
11 6 (0.74%) Flask
11 6 (0.74%) Keycloak
11 6 (0.74%) OpenTelemetry
12 5 (0.61%) Azure Blueprints
13 4 (0.49%) Elastic Stack
Miscellaneous
1 127 (15.60%) Cloud Native
2 61 (7.49%) Security Posture
3 47 (5.77%) Enterprise Cloud
4 41 (5.04%) Hybrid Cloud
5 32 (3.93%) Cloud Security Posture
6 31 (3.81%) Onboarding
7 27 (3.32%) Data Centre
8 26 (3.19%) Enterprise Software
9 21 (2.58%) Distributed Systems
10 20 (2.46%) Management Information System
11 18 (2.21%) Public Cloud
12 14 (1.72%) Private Cloud
13 13 (1.60%) Product Ownership
14 12 (1.47%) Linux Command Line
15 10 (1.23%) PKI
16 9 (1.11%) AI Agents
17 8 (0.98%) Data Protection Act
18 6 (0.74%) Distributed Architecture
18 6 (0.74%) Replication
19 5 (0.61%) Greenfield Project
Operating Systems
1 125 (15.36%) Windows
2 82 (10.07%) Linux
3 61 (7.49%) Windows Server
4 32 (3.93%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 15 (1.84%) Windows Server 2019
6 9 (1.11%) Ubuntu
7 8 (0.98%) VMS
8 3 (0.37%) CentOS
9 2 (0.25%) Data ONTAP
9 2 (0.25%) Windows Server 2012
10 1 (0.12%) Unix
Processes & Methodologies
1 290 (35.63%) Infrastructure as Code
2 274 (33.66%) CI/CD
3 210 (25.80%) DevOps
4 180 (22.11%) Cloud Security
5 166 (20.39%) Infrastructure Engineering
6 153 (18.80%) Platform Engineering
7 105 (12.90%) Migration
8 103 (12.65%) AI
9 96 (11.79%) Observability
10 91 (11.18%) Containerisation
11 86 (10.57%) Agile
12 69 (8.48%) Infrastructure Automation
13 66 (8.11%) Cybersecurity
14 65 (7.99%) Technical Leadership
15 63 (7.74%) Deployment Automation
16 62 (7.62%) RBAC
16 62 (7.62%) Software Engineering
17 57 (7.00%) Continuous Improvement
18 56 (6.88%) Problem-Solving
19 55 (6.76%) DevSecOps
Programming Languages
1 199 (24.45%) Python
2 179 (21.99%) PowerShell
3 83 (10.20%) Bash
4 79 (9.71%) Bicep
5 70 (8.60%) SQL
6 37 (4.55%) Java
7 17 (2.09%) Shell Script
8 14 (1.72%) C#
9 11 (1.35%) Go
10 10 (1.23%) JavaScript
11 6 (0.74%) Kotlin
12 3 (0.37%) C
12 3 (0.37%) Kusto Query Language
12 3 (0.37%) Scala
12 3 (0.37%) TypeScript
13 2 (0.25%) Groovy
14 1 (0.12%) Apex Code
14 1 (0.12%) Perl
14 1 (0.12%) R
14 1 (0.12%) Ruby
Qualifications
1 197 (24.20%) Security Cleared
2 138 (16.95%) SC Cleared
3 69 (8.48%) DV Cleared
4 47 (5.77%) Azure Certification
5 44 (5.41%) AWS Certification
6 39 (4.79%) Degree
7 23 (2.83%) Microsoft Certification
8 18 (2.21%) CISSP
9 12 (1.47%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
10 8 (0.98%) Cisco Certification
10 8 (0.98%) MCSE
11 7 (0.86%) BPSS Clearance
11 7 (0.86%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
12 6 (0.74%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
12 6 (0.74%) CCNP
12 6 (0.74%) CISM
12 6 (0.74%) Computer Science Degree
13 3 (0.37%) CCIE
13 3 (0.37%) CEH
13 3 (0.37%) DBS Check
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 21 (2.58%) ISO/IEC 27001
2 15 (1.84%) NIST
3 14 (1.72%) Data Quality
4 8 (0.98%) GDPR
5 6 (0.74%) Cyber Essentials
5 6 (0.74%) NCSC
5 6 (0.74%) PCI DSS
5 6 (0.74%) QA
6 4 (0.49%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
7 3 (0.37%) Disclosure Scotland
8 2 (0.25%) SLA
9 1 (0.12%) Actionable Recommendations
9 1 (0.12%) Government Security Classifications
9 1 (0.12%) GRC
System Software
1 116 (14.25%) Active Directory
2 81 (9.95%) Docker
3 52 (6.39%) VMware Infrastructure
4 47 (5.77%) Virtual Machines
5 35 (4.30%) VMware ESXi
6 24 (2.95%) VMware NSX
7 21 (2.58%) Virtual Desktop
8 20 (2.46%) vSphere
9 15 (1.84%) vCloud
10 11 (1.35%) Hyper-V
11 6 (0.74%) Squid
12 5 (0.61%) Firmware
13 4 (0.49%) NFS
14 3 (0.37%) Ceph
14 3 (0.37%) Dovecot
14 3 (0.37%) Postfix
15 2 (0.25%) IAG
15 2 (0.25%) KVM
15 2 (0.25%) Virtual Servers
16 1 (0.12%) DFS Replication
Systems Management
1 211 (25.92%) Kubernetes
2 52 (6.39%) Ansible
3 31 (3.81%) vCenter Server
4 28 (3.44%) Microsoft Intune
5 27 (3.32%) Grafana
5 27 (3.32%) SCOM
6 21 (2.58%) Prometheus
7 19 (2.33%) Progress Chef
8 15 (1.84%) Single Sign-On
9 12 (1.47%) Puppet
10 11 (1.35%) Istio
11 7 (0.86%) Argo
11 7 (0.86%) Cilium
12 5 (0.61%) HAProxy
12 5 (0.61%) VxRail
13 4 (0.49%) Packer
13 4 (0.49%) Suricata
14 3 (0.37%) Active Directory Federation Services
14 3 (0.37%) Karpenter
14 3 (0.37%) vRealize
Vendors
1 199 (24.45%) Microsoft
2 111 (13.64%) Google
3 74 (9.09%) VMware
4 37 (4.55%) Oracle
5 31 (3.81%) Databricks
6 20 (2.46%) Red Hat
7 19 (2.33%) Okta
7 19 (2.33%) Palo Alto
8 16 (1.97%) SolarWinds
9 15 (1.84%) Cisco
9 15 (1.84%) Splunk
9 15 (1.84%) Zscaler
10 14 (1.72%) ServiceNow
11 13 (1.60%) Broadcom
11 13 (1.60%) OpenAI
12 9 (1.11%) CrowdStrike
12 9 (1.11%) Dynatrace
12 9 (1.11%) New Relic
12 9 (1.11%) Salesforce
13 8 (0.98%) BeyondTrust