Cloud Engineer Contract Job Trends

Cloud Engineer
UK

The median Cloud Engineer daily rate in the UK is £516, according to job vacancies posted in the 6 months leading up to 9 September 2026.

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

6 months to
9 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 205 315 327
Rank change year-on-year +110 +12 -69
Contract jobs requiring a Cloud Engineer 775 251 246
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 1.42% 0.77% 0.65%
As % of the Job Titles category 1.54% 0.84% 0.69%
Number of daily rates quoted 510 183 153
10th Percentile £400 £400 £389
25th Percentile £450 £431 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £516 £500 £550
Median % change year-on-year +3.25% -9.09% -
75th Percentile £588 £575 £625
90th Percentile £675 £638 £675
UK excluding London median daily rate £510 £500 £525
% change year-on-year +2.00% -4.76% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 28 7 0
10th Percentile £23.20 £29.00 -
25th Percentile £55.67 £29.50 -
Median hourly rate £77.00 £45.00 -
Median % change year-on-year +71.11% - -
75th Percentile £81.25 £86.25 -
90th Percentile £82.38 £110.00 -
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 50,326 29,813 35,459
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.39% 91.05% 93.07%
Number of daily rates quoted 29,971 18,780 22,045
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% -0.94%
75th Percentile £625 £621 £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 3,688 1,551 1,736
10th Percentile £14.82 £13.65 £14.73
25th Percentile £20.31 £17.00 £20.50
Median hourly rate £42.50 £25.15 £43.00
Median % change year-on-year +68.99% -41.51% +1.18%
75th Percentile £67.91 £53.13 £65.00
90th Percentile £80.00 £70.16 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £42.50 £25.15 £45.00
% change year-on-year +68.99% -44.11% +11.35%

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 9 September 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 9 September 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 9 September 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 +117 671 £525 +5.00% 688
UK excluding London +101 425 £510 +2.00% 355
London +49 301 £525 +2.44% 416
Work from Home +17 189 £540 +9.37% 227
North of England +18 131 £513 +13.89% 87
South East +14 128 £538 +7.50% 68
North West +11 80 £525 +20.00% 51
Midlands +5 68 £500 -6.10% 40
Scotland +18 57 £447 -14.86% 63
Yorkshire -2 43 £455 -9.00% 28
East Midlands +11 35 £475 - 20
West Midlands -18 32 £525 -27.18% 20
East of England -6 19 £488 +0.52% 27
South West -38 16 £575 +4.55% 49
North East -43 8 £525 +14.13% 8
Wales -10 7 - - 3

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

For the 6 months to 9 September 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.

1 366 (47.23%) Azure
2 312 (40.26%) Terraform
3 271 (34.97%) Infrastructure as Code
4 270 (34.84%) AWS
5 263 (33.94%) CI/CD
6 210 (27.10%) DevOps
7 202 (26.06%) Kubernetes
8 199 (25.68%) Security Cleared
9 193 (24.90%) Python
10 176 (22.71%) Cloud Security
11 175 (22.58%) Microsoft
12 169 (21.81%) GCP
13 158 (20.39%) Infrastructure Engineering
13 158 (20.39%) PowerShell
14 152 (19.61%) Platform Engineering
15 144 (18.58%) SC Cleared
16 115 (14.84%) Google
16 115 (14.84%) Windows
17 108 (13.94%) Entra ID
18 102 (13.16%) AI
19 98 (12.65%) Active Directory
20 92 (11.87%) Migration
21 89 (11.48%) Agile
22 88 (11.35%) Containerisation
23 85 (10.97%) GitHub
24 83 (10.71%) DNS
25 82 (10.58%) Bash
25 82 (10.58%) Firewall
25 82 (10.58%) Observability
26 79 (10.19%) 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 (1.68%) Microsoft Exchange
2 11 (1.42%) Apache
3 8 (1.03%) Apache Airflow
4 6 (0.77%) Confluence
4 6 (0.77%) SharePoint
5 3 (0.39%) IIS
5 3 (0.39%) nginx
5 3 (0.39%) Tomcat
6 2 (0.26%) CloudStack
6 2 (0.26%) OpenStack
7 1 (0.13%) Apache Pulsar
7 1 (0.13%) Apache Spark
Applications
1 1 (0.13%) Chatbot
Business Applications
1 1 (0.13%) Aladdin
Cloud Services
1 366 (47.23%) Azure
2 270 (34.84%) AWS
3 169 (21.81%) GCP
4 108 (13.94%) Entra ID
5 85 (10.97%) GitHub
6 56 (7.23%) Azure DevOps
7 54 (6.97%) Serverless
8 52 (6.71%) GitHub Actions
9 48 (6.19%) IaaS
10 47 (6.06%) AWS CloudFormation
11 41 (5.29%) AWS Lambda
12 39 (5.03%) Azure AKS
12 39 (5.03%) Azure Monitor
13 38 (4.90%) Google Kubernetes Engine
14 35 (4.52%) PaaS
15 34 (4.39%) Amazon CloudWatch
15 34 (4.39%) Amazon EKS
15 34 (4.39%) Microsoft 365
16 32 (4.13%) Amazon EC2
16 32 (4.13%) SaaS
Communications & Networking
1 83 (10.71%) DNS
2 82 (10.58%) Firewall
3 41 (5.29%) Network Security
4 37 (4.77%) VPN
5 19 (2.45%) DHCP
6 17 (2.19%) WAN
7 15 (1.94%) TCP/IP
8 12 (1.55%) Internet
9 7 (0.90%) VLAN
10 6 (0.77%) SD-WAN
10 6 (0.77%) VSAN
11 5 (0.65%) LAN
11 5 (0.65%) SSL
12 4 (0.52%) Wireless
13 3 (0.39%) BGP
13 3 (0.39%) IPv4
13 3 (0.39%) Kerberos
13 3 (0.39%) OSPF
13 3 (0.39%) SAN
13 3 (0.39%) SMTP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 26 (3.35%) SQL Server
2 20 (2.58%) Amazon RDS
3 18 (2.32%) PostgreSQL
4 11 (1.42%) BigQuery
5 9 (1.16%) Data Lake
6 8 (1.03%) Oracle Exadata
7 7 (0.90%) DynamoDB
8 6 (0.77%) Azure SQL Database
9 5 (0.65%) Amazon Athena
9 5 (0.65%) NoSQL
9 5 (0.65%) Oracle Database
10 3 (0.39%) Flink
10 3 (0.39%) Looker
10 3 (0.39%) Metadata
10 3 (0.39%) MongoDB
10 3 (0.39%) MySQL
10 3 (0.39%) Oracle Database 12c
11 2 (0.26%) Big Data
11 2 (0.26%) Data Warehouse
11 2 (0.26%) Redis
Development Applications
1 55 (7.10%) GitLab
2 48 (6.19%) Jenkins
3 40 (5.16%) Git
4 18 (2.32%) JIRA
5 8 (1.03%) Artifactory
6 7 (0.90%) Claude Code
7 5 (0.65%) Bitbucket
8 3 (0.39%) Selenium
8 3 (0.39%) Terragrunt
9 2 (0.26%) Atlassian Bamboo
9 2 (0.26%) Cypress.io
9 2 (0.26%) Gatling
9 2 (0.26%) JMeter
9 2 (0.26%) Octopus Deploy
9 2 (0.26%) Robot Framework
9 2 (0.26%) SonarQube
10 1 (0.13%) Burp Suite
10 1 (0.13%) eggPlant
10 1 (0.13%) Metasploit
10 1 (0.13%) sqlmap
General
1 95 (12.26%) Finance
2 78 (10.06%) Social Skills
3 70 (9.03%) Public Sector
4 31 (4.00%) Analytical Skills
5 26 (3.35%) Banking
6 10 (1.29%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 8 (1.03%) Manufacturing
8 7 (0.90%) Documentation Skills
8 7 (0.90%) Investment Banking
8 7 (0.90%) Legal
9 5 (0.65%) Law
9 5 (0.65%) Local Government
10 4 (0.52%) Pharmaceutical
10 4 (0.52%) Presentation Skills
11 3 (0.39%) Aerospace
11 3 (0.39%) Front Office
11 3 (0.39%) Italian Language
11 3 (0.39%) Marketing
11 3 (0.39%) Military
11 3 (0.39%) Police
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 312 (40.26%) Terraform
2 25 (3.23%) REST
3 16 (2.06%) ARM Templates
4 13 (1.68%) Kafka
5 11 (1.42%) Spring
5 11 (1.42%) Spring Boot
6 9 (1.16%) Node.js
6 9 (1.16%) OAuth
6 9 (1.16%) OAuth2
7 8 (1.03%) AWS CDK
7 8 (1.03%) React
7 8 (1.03%) YAML
8 7 (0.90%) .NET
8 7 (0.90%) Keycloak
9 6 (0.77%) FastAPI
9 6 (0.77%) Flask
10 5 (0.65%) Azure Blueprints
10 5 (0.65%) PySpark
11 4 (0.52%) Hugging Face
11 4 (0.52%) Model Context Protocol
Miscellaneous
1 124 (16.00%) Cloud Native
2 58 (7.48%) Security Posture
3 44 (5.68%) Enterprise Cloud
4 38 (4.90%) Hybrid Cloud
5 31 (4.00%) Onboarding
6 30 (3.87%) Cloud Security Posture
7 24 (3.10%) Enterprise Software
8 21 (2.71%) Management Information System
9 20 (2.58%) Data Centre
9 20 (2.58%) Distributed Systems
10 17 (2.19%) Public Cloud
11 12 (1.55%) Private Cloud
11 12 (1.55%) Product Ownership
12 11 (1.42%) Linux Command Line
13 9 (1.16%) PKI
14 8 (1.03%) AI Agents
14 8 (1.03%) Data Protection Act
15 7 (0.90%) Legacy Systems
16 5 (0.65%) Distributed Architecture
17 4 (0.52%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 115 (14.84%) Windows
2 77 (9.94%) Linux
3 60 (7.74%) Windows Server
4 31 (4.00%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 13 (1.68%) Windows Server 2019
6 8 (1.03%) Ubuntu
7 4 (0.52%) VMS
8 3 (0.39%) CentOS
9 2 (0.26%) Windows Server 2012
Processes & Methodologies
1 271 (34.97%) Infrastructure as Code
2 263 (33.94%) CI/CD
3 210 (27.10%) DevOps
4 176 (22.71%) Cloud Security
5 158 (20.39%) Infrastructure Engineering
6 152 (19.61%) Platform Engineering
7 102 (13.16%) AI
8 92 (11.87%) Migration
9 89 (11.48%) Agile
10 88 (11.35%) Containerisation
11 82 (10.58%) Observability
12 64 (8.26%) Technical Leadership
13 61 (7.87%) Software Engineering
14 59 (7.61%) Continuous Improvement
15 58 (7.48%) DevSecOps
15 58 (7.48%) Infrastructure Automation
16 57 (7.35%) Problem-Solving
17 54 (6.97%) Cybersecurity
18 51 (6.58%) Deployment Automation
19 49 (6.32%) Change Management
Programming Languages
1 193 (24.90%) Python
2 158 (20.39%) PowerShell
3 82 (10.58%) Bash
4 74 (9.55%) Bicep
5 62 (8.00%) SQL
6 39 (5.03%) Java
7 16 (2.06%) Shell Script
8 15 (1.94%) C#
9 12 (1.55%) JavaScript
10 10 (1.29%) Go
11 4 (0.52%) Groovy
11 4 (0.52%) TypeScript
12 3 (0.39%) C
12 3 (0.39%) Scala
13 2 (0.26%) Kusto Query Language
14 1 (0.13%) Apex Code
14 1 (0.13%) Data Analysis Expressions
14 1 (0.13%) Kotlin
14 1 (0.13%) Perl
14 1 (0.13%) R
Qualifications
1 199 (25.68%) Security Cleared
2 144 (18.58%) SC Cleared
3 70 (9.03%) DV Cleared
4 45 (5.81%) Azure Certification
5 44 (5.68%) AWS Certification
6 32 (4.13%) Degree
7 20 (2.58%) Microsoft Certification
8 18 (2.32%) CISSP
9 13 (1.68%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
10 9 (1.16%) Cisco Certification
11 8 (1.03%) MCSE
12 7 (0.90%) BPSS Clearance
12 7 (0.90%) CCNP
12 7 (0.90%) Computer Science Degree
13 6 (0.77%) CISM
14 5 (0.65%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
14 5 (0.65%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
15 4 (0.52%) CCIE
16 3 (0.39%) CEH
17 2 (0.26%) GSEC
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 16 (2.06%) ISO/IEC 27001
2 13 (1.68%) Data Quality
3 12 (1.55%) NIST
4 10 (1.29%) NCSC
4 10 (1.29%) QA
5 7 (0.90%) Cyber Essentials
6 5 (0.65%) GDPR
7 3 (0.39%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
7 3 (0.39%) Disclosure Scotland
7 3 (0.39%) SLA
8 2 (0.26%) PCI DSS
9 1 (0.13%) Accessibility
9 1 (0.13%) Actionable Recommendations
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 98 (12.65%) Active Directory
2 79 (10.19%) Docker
3 49 (6.32%) VMware Infrastructure
4 32 (4.13%) Virtual Machines
4 32 (4.13%) VMware ESXi
5 27 (3.48%) VMware NSX
6 21 (2.71%) Virtual Desktop
6 21 (2.71%) vSphere
7 15 (1.94%) vCloud
8 12 (1.55%) Hyper-V
9 7 (0.90%) Squid
10 4 (0.52%) Firmware
11 3 (0.39%) Ceph
11 3 (0.39%) Dovecot
11 3 (0.39%) NFS
11 3 (0.39%) Postfix
12 2 (0.26%) KVM
12 2 (0.26%) Virtual Servers
13 1 (0.13%) BitLocker
13 1 (0.13%) IAG
Systems Management
1 202 (26.06%) Kubernetes
2 51 (6.58%) Ansible
3 29 (3.74%) vCenter Server
4 25 (3.23%) SCOM
5 23 (2.97%) Microsoft Intune
6 21 (2.71%) Grafana
7 19 (2.45%) Progress Chef
7 19 (2.45%) Prometheus
8 16 (2.06%) Single Sign-On
9 14 (1.81%) Puppet
10 11 (1.42%) Istio
11 7 (0.90%) Cilium
12 6 (0.77%) Argo
12 6 (0.77%) Packer
13 5 (0.65%) VxRail
14 4 (0.52%) Suricata
15 3 (0.39%) Active Directory Federation Services
15 3 (0.39%) HAProxy
15 3 (0.39%) Karpenter
15 3 (0.39%) vRealize
Vendors
1 175 (22.58%) Microsoft
2 115 (14.84%) Google
3 74 (9.55%) VMware
4 34 (4.39%) Oracle
5 23 (2.97%) Databricks
6 19 (2.45%) Red Hat
7 17 (2.19%) Okta
8 16 (2.06%) Zscaler
9 13 (1.68%) Palo Alto
10 12 (1.55%) OpenAI
10 12 (1.55%) ServiceNow
10 12 (1.55%) SolarWinds
10 12 (1.55%) Splunk
11 11 (1.42%) Broadcom
12 10 (1.29%) Cisco
13 9 (1.16%) CrowdStrike
13 9 (1.16%) Salesforce
14 8 (1.03%) BeyondTrust
14 8 (1.03%) Dynatrace
14 8 (1.03%) New Relic