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 4 June 2026.

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

6 months to
4 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 225 306 331
Rank change year-on-year +81 +25 -73
Contract jobs requiring a Cloud Engineer 572 227 273
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 1.17% 0.79% 0.64%
As % of the Job Titles category 1.27% 0.85% 0.69%
Number of daily rates quoted 381 175 187
10th Percentile £400 £400 £400
25th Percentile £462 £449 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £550
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -9.09% -2.00%
75th Percentile £613 £575 £625
90th Percentile £688 £633 £675
UK excluding London median daily rate £522 £500 £510
% change year-on-year +4.40% -1.96% -7.27%
Number of hourly rates quoted 11 1 3
10th Percentile £25.13 - -
25th Percentile £61.13 £42.50 £27.50
Median hourly rate £76.00 £45.00 £30.00
Median % change year-on-year +68.89% +50.00% -59.60%
75th Percentile £83.13 £47.50 £32.50
90th Percentile £85.00 - -
UK excluding London median hourly rate £74.00 - £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 45,181 26,628 39,798
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.32% 92.36% 92.85%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,497 17,201 25,733
10th Percentile £325 £287 £280
25th Percentile £413 £404 £408
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £504 £525
Median % change year-on-year +1.69% -4.00% -2.78%
75th Percentile £619 £625 £638
90th Percentile £725 £738 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £488
% change year-on-year +5.26% -2.56% -2.50%
Number of hourly rates quoted 3,016 1,081 2,844
10th Percentile £15.03 £14.00 £12.83
25th Percentile £20.53 £17.80 £16.30
Median hourly rate £42.70 £28.00 £37.50
Median % change year-on-year +52.48% -25.33% -16.67%
75th Percentile £67.50 £58.75 £61.60
90th Percentile £80.00 £75.00 £73.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £45.00 £25.15 £40.00
% change year-on-year +78.93% -37.13% -5.88%

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 4 June 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 4 June 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 4 June 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 +74 478 £525 +5.00% 295
London +57 286 £525 +5.00% 125
UK excluding London +13 220 £522 +4.40% 199
Work from Home +10 144 £539 +7.75% 137
North of England -34 61 £505 +1.00% 49
South East -32 54 £538 +7.50% 56
Scotland +20 43 £451 -14.19% 11
North West -7 33 £505 +25.62% 35
Midlands -50 24 £525 +5.00% 22
East of England -16 22 £505 +2.54% 9
Yorkshire -42 21 £481 -3.75% 13
West Midlands -45 20 £525 - 13
South West -21 17 £550 -2.22% 45
North East -29 7 £525 -4.55% 1
East Midlands -28 4 £425 -10.53% 9

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

For the 6 months to 4 June 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.

1 260 (45.45%) Azure
2 258 (45.10%) Terraform
3 251 (43.88%) AWS
4 240 (41.96%) CI/CD
5 213 (37.24%) Infrastructure as Code
6 198 (34.62%) DevOps
7 146 (25.52%) Security Cleared
8 137 (23.95%) Kubernetes
8 137 (23.95%) Python
9 129 (22.55%) GCP
10 120 (20.98%) Cloud Security
11 116 (20.28%) SC Cleared
12 105 (18.36%) GitHub
13 101 (17.66%) Microsoft
14 99 (17.31%) Platform Engineering
15 97 (16.96%) Google
16 89 (15.56%) PowerShell
17 86 (15.03%) Infrastructure Engineering
18 82 (14.34%) Migration
19 73 (12.76%) Containerisation
20 70 (12.24%) Agile
21 68 (11.89%) GitHub Actions
22 64 (11.19%) AI
23 63 (11.01%) Docker
23 63 (11.01%) Windows
24 61 (10.66%) Firewall
25 58 (10.14%) Serverless
26 57 (9.97%) Observability
27 55 (9.62%) Bash
28 53 (9.27%) Problem-Solving

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 7 (1.22%) Apache
1 7 (1.22%) Microsoft Exchange
2 6 (1.05%) Confluence
3 5 (0.87%) nginx
4 4 (0.70%) Apache Spark
5 3 (0.52%) IIS
5 3 (0.52%) SharePoint
5 3 (0.52%) Tomcat
6 2 (0.35%) CloudStack
7 1 (0.17%) Apache Airflow
7 1 (0.17%) Apache Pulsar
7 1 (0.17%) OpenStack
7 1 (0.17%) SAS
7 1 (0.17%) Traefik
Business Applications
1 1 (0.17%) Aladdin
Cloud Services
1 260 (45.45%) Azure
2 251 (43.88%) AWS
3 129 (22.55%) GCP
4 105 (18.36%) GitHub
5 68 (11.89%) GitHub Actions
6 58 (10.14%) Serverless
7 46 (8.04%) Azure DevOps
7 46 (8.04%) Entra ID
8 43 (7.52%) AWS CloudFormation
9 39 (6.82%) Google Kubernetes Engine
10 38 (6.64%) Azure AKS
10 38 (6.64%) PaaS
11 37 (6.47%) Amazon S3
11 37 (6.47%) IaaS
12 35 (6.12%) AWS Lambda
13 34 (5.94%) Amazon EKS
14 31 (5.42%) Virtual Private Cloud
15 30 (5.24%) Amazon ECS
16 28 (4.90%) Amazon EC2
17 24 (4.20%) OCI
Communications & Networking
1 61 (10.66%) Firewall
2 44 (7.69%) DNS
3 26 (4.55%) Network Security
3 26 (4.55%) VPN
4 8 (1.40%) DHCP
4 8 (1.40%) TCP/IP
4 8 (1.40%) WAN
5 6 (1.05%) Reverse Proxy
6 5 (0.87%) SSL
7 4 (0.70%) SD-WAN
7 4 (0.70%) Software-Defined Networking
7 4 (0.70%) VLAN
8 3 (0.52%) BGP
8 3 (0.52%) Internet
8 3 (0.52%) SMTP
9 2 (0.35%) BIG-IP
9 2 (0.35%) Kerberos
9 2 (0.35%) NGFW
9 2 (0.35%) SAN
9 2 (0.35%) VXLAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 14 (2.45%) Amazon Athena
2 13 (2.27%) DynamoDB
3 12 (2.10%) BigQuery
3 12 (2.10%) SQL Server
4 10 (1.75%) Amazon RDS
5 8 (1.40%) PostgreSQL
6 6 (1.05%) Amazon Redshift
6 6 (1.05%) Azure SQL Database
7 5 (0.87%) Oracle Database
8 4 (0.70%) Amazon QuickSight
8 4 (0.70%) Data Lake
9 3 (0.52%) Big Data
9 3 (0.52%) Data Warehouse
9 3 (0.52%) Metadata
9 3 (0.52%) MySQL
9 3 (0.52%) Oracle Database 12c
9 3 (0.52%) Relational Database
9 3 (0.52%) Snowflake Schema
10 2 (0.35%) Redis
10 2 (0.35%) SQL Server Integration Services
Development Applications
1 50 (8.74%) GitLab
2 49 (8.57%) Jenkins
3 42 (7.34%) Git
4 12 (2.10%) JIRA
5 10 (1.75%) Artifactory
6 3 (0.52%) Bitbucket
6 3 (0.52%) Selenium
6 3 (0.52%) Team Foundation Server
7 2 (0.35%) Atlassian Bamboo
7 2 (0.35%) Claude Code
7 2 (0.35%) Cypress.io
7 2 (0.35%) Liquibase
7 2 (0.35%) Postman
7 2 (0.35%) Robot Framework
8 1 (0.17%) Burp Suite
8 1 (0.17%) Gatling
8 1 (0.17%) SonarQube
8 1 (0.17%) sqlmap
8 1 (0.17%) TestRail
8 1 (0.17%) Travis CI
General
1 72 (12.59%) Social Skills
2 61 (10.66%) Finance
3 46 (8.04%) Public Sector
4 21 (3.67%) Analytical Skills
5 20 (3.50%) Banking
6 13 (2.27%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 11 (1.92%) Documentation Skills
8 9 (1.57%) Retail
9 6 (1.05%) Investment Banking
9 6 (1.05%) Legal
9 6 (1.05%) Telecoms
10 5 (0.87%) Pharmaceutical
10 5 (0.87%) Presentation Skills
11 4 (0.70%) Local Government
11 4 (0.70%) Marketing
11 4 (0.70%) Military
12 3 (0.52%) Financial Institution
12 3 (0.52%) Police
13 2 (0.35%) Corporate Banking
13 2 (0.35%) Retail Banking
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 18 (3.15%) REST
2 14 (2.45%) Node.js
2 14 (2.45%) React
2 14 (2.45%) Spring
2 14 (2.45%) Spring Boot
3 12 (2.10%) OAuth
3 12 (2.10%) OAuth2
4 11 (1.92%) Kafka
5 9 (1.57%) .NET
5 9 (1.57%) OpenTelemetry
6 7 (1.22%) OpenID
6 7 (1.22%) Oracle Fusion
7 6 (1.05%) AngularJS
7 6 (1.05%) ARM Templates
7 6 (1.05%) LangChain
8 5 (0.87%) Model Context Protocol
8 5 (0.87%) Playwright
8 5 (0.87%) YAML
9 4 (0.70%) PySpark
9 4 (0.70%) Web Services
Miscellaneous
1 105 (18.36%) Cloud Native
2 28 (4.90%) Hybrid Cloud
2 28 (4.90%) Public Cloud
3 24 (4.20%) Data Centre
4 20 (3.50%) Security Posture
5 16 (2.80%) Enterprise Cloud
6 14 (2.45%) Onboarding
7 13 (2.27%) Enterprise Software
8 10 (1.75%) Distributed Systems
9 9 (1.57%) Management Information System
9 9 (1.57%) Product Ownership
10 8 (1.40%) Cloud Security Posture
10 8 (1.40%) Data Protection Act
11 7 (1.22%) Self-Motivation
12 6 (1.05%) Cyber Threat
13 5 (0.87%) Private Cloud
14 4 (0.70%) Legacy Systems
14 4 (0.70%) PKI
14 4 (0.70%) Virtual Team
15 3 (0.52%) CMDB
Operating Systems
1 63 (11.01%) Windows
2 39 (6.82%) Linux
3 36 (6.29%) Windows Server
4 11 (1.92%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 5 (0.87%) Ubuntu
6 3 (0.52%) CentOS
6 3 (0.52%) Windows Server 2019
7 2 (0.35%) VMS
7 2 (0.35%) Windows Server 2012
8 1 (0.17%) Mac OS
Processes & Methodologies
1 240 (41.96%) CI/CD
2 213 (37.24%) Infrastructure as Code
3 198 (34.62%) DevOps
4 120 (20.98%) Cloud Security
5 99 (17.31%) Platform Engineering
6 86 (15.03%) Infrastructure Engineering
7 82 (14.34%) Migration
8 73 (12.76%) Containerisation
9 70 (12.24%) Agile
10 64 (11.19%) AI
11 57 (9.97%) Observability
12 53 (9.27%) Problem-Solving
13 48 (8.39%) Infrastructure Automation
13 48 (8.39%) Software Engineering
14 46 (8.04%) Continuous Improvement
15 43 (7.52%) Cybersecurity
15 43 (7.52%) Technical Leadership
16 40 (6.99%) DevSecOps
17 32 (5.59%) Mentoring
18 30 (5.24%) Deployment Automation
Programming Languages
1 137 (23.95%) Python
2 89 (15.56%) PowerShell
3 55 (9.62%) Bash
4 47 (8.22%) SQL
5 37 (6.47%) Bicep
6 32 (5.59%) Java
7 14 (2.45%) C#
8 11 (1.92%) Go
9 10 (1.75%) JavaScript
10 9 (1.57%) TypeScript
11 5 (0.87%) Groovy
12 3 (0.52%) Ruby
13 1 (0.17%) Cypher
13 1 (0.17%) Kotlin
13 1 (0.17%) Kusto Query Language
13 1 (0.17%) Perl
13 1 (0.17%) R
13 1 (0.17%) Shell Script
Qualifications
1 146 (25.52%) Security Cleared
2 116 (20.28%) SC Cleared
3 44 (7.69%) Azure Certification
4 30 (5.24%) AWS Certification
5 29 (5.07%) DV Cleared
6 20 (3.50%) Degree
7 14 (2.45%) Microsoft Certification
8 13 (2.27%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
8 13 (2.27%) CISSP
9 12 (2.10%) BPSS Clearance
10 9 (1.57%) Cisco Certification
10 9 (1.57%) Computer Science Degree
11 6 (1.05%) (ISC)2 CCSP
12 5 (0.87%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
12 5 (0.87%) TOGAF Certification
13 4 (0.70%) CCSP
13 4 (0.70%) MCSE
14 3 (0.52%) CCNP
14 3 (0.52%) CISM
14 3 (0.52%) Master's Degree
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 13 (2.27%) NIST
2 11 (1.92%) GDPR
3 10 (1.75%) ISO/IEC 27001
3 10 (1.75%) NCSC
3 10 (1.75%) QA
4 5 (0.87%) Data Quality
4 5 (0.87%) PCI DSS
5 3 (0.52%) Cyber Essentials
5 3 (0.52%) GRC
6 2 (0.35%) SLA
6 2 (0.35%) SOC 2
7 1 (0.17%) Accessibility
7 1 (0.17%) Actionable Recommendations
7 1 (0.17%) WCAG
System Software
1 63 (11.01%) Docker
2 41 (7.17%) Active Directory
3 18 (3.15%) VMware Infrastructure
4 17 (2.97%) Virtual Desktop
5 16 (2.80%) VMware NSX
6 15 (2.62%) Virtual Machines
7 14 (2.45%) VMware ESXi
8 13 (2.27%) vSphere
9 9 (1.57%) Hyper-V
10 8 (1.40%) vCloud
11 7 (1.22%) Squid
12 3 (0.52%) Dovecot
12 3 (0.52%) Firmware
12 3 (0.52%) Postfix
13 2 (0.35%) Ceph
13 2 (0.35%) KVM
13 2 (0.35%) NFS
Systems Management
1 258 (45.10%) Terraform
2 137 (23.95%) Kubernetes
3 33 (5.77%) Ansible
4 24 (4.20%) Grafana
5 21 (3.67%) Prometheus
6 17 (2.97%) Single Sign-On
7 15 (2.62%) Microsoft Intune
8 14 (2.45%) Argo
8 14 (2.45%) Istio
9 12 (2.10%) vCenter Server
10 10 (1.75%) Progress Chef
10 10 (1.75%) SCOM
11 7 (1.22%) Packer
11 7 (1.22%) Puppet
12 6 (1.05%) Cilium
13 4 (0.70%) HAProxy
13 4 (0.70%) Salt
13 4 (0.70%) Suricata
14 3 (0.52%) Active Directory Federation Services
15 2 (0.35%) SELinux
Vendors
1 101 (17.66%) Microsoft
2 97 (16.96%) Google
3 32 (5.59%) VMware
4 25 (4.37%) Oracle
5 15 (2.62%) Palo Alto
5 15 (2.62%) Zscaler
6 12 (2.10%) Red Hat
7 9 (1.57%) Databricks
8 8 (1.40%) Cisco
8 8 (1.40%) Dynatrace
9 7 (1.22%) Salesforce
9 7 (1.22%) ServiceNow
9 7 (1.22%) Splunk
10 6 (1.05%) Okta
10 6 (1.05%) OpenAI
11 5 (0.87%) Citrix
11 5 (0.87%) Fortinet
11 5 (0.87%) PeopleSoft
12 4 (0.70%) Juniper
12 4 (0.70%) Rapid7