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 22 May 2026.

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

6 months to
22 May 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 224 302 316
Rank change year-on-year +78 +14 -49
Contract jobs requiring a Cloud Engineer 535 233 273
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 1.11% 0.81% 0.64%
As % of the Job Titles category 1.20% 0.88% 0.69%
Number of daily rates quoted 352 183 183
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% -0.36%
75th Percentile £613 £588 £614
90th Percentile £688 £650 £675
UK excluding London median daily rate £525 £500 £510
% change year-on-year +5.00% -1.96% -7.27%
Number of hourly rates quoted 6 0 3
10th Percentile £25.13 - -
25th Percentile £31.66 - £27.50
Median hourly rate £62.25 - £30.00
75th Percentile £75.25 - £32.50
90th Percentile £76.00 - -
UK excluding London median hourly rate £76.00 - £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 44,606 26,623 39,417
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.31% 92.40% 92.82%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,281 17,328 25,680
10th Percentile £325 £290 £280
25th Percentile £413 £406 £410
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £510 £525
Median % change year-on-year +0.49% -2.86% -3.31%
75th Percentile £615 £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 2,914 1,023 2,675
10th Percentile £15.00 £14.00 £12.82
25th Percentile £20.36 £18.17 £16.30
Median hourly rate £42.69 £28.15 £36.50
Median % change year-on-year +51.63% -22.88% -18.89%
75th Percentile £66.50 £60.00 £61.30
90th Percentile £78.75 £75.00 £72.74
UK excluding London median hourly rate £45.00 £27.13 £40.00
% change year-on-year +65.90% -32.19% -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 22 May 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 22 May 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 22 May 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 +53 444 £525 +5.00% 228
London +57 265 £525 +5.00% 96
UK excluding London -2 209 £525 +5.00% 161
Work from Home +15 132 £531 +6.25% 93
North of England -35 57 £525 +5.00% 27
South East -28 51 £538 -2.27% 52
Scotland +20 40 £451 -14.19% 12
North West -25 29 £538 +33.71% 22
East of England -10 24 £505 +2.54% 14
Yorkshire -34 21 £481 -3.75% 2
South West -14 19 £550 -4.35% 37
Midlands -62 19 £670 +30.73% 18
West Midlands -46 16 £670 +14.04% 11
North East -29 7 £525 -4.55% 3
East Midlands -28 3 - - 7

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

For the 6 months to 22 May 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.

1 242 (45.23%) Azure
2 236 (44.11%) Terraform
3 225 (42.06%) AWS
4 223 (41.68%) CI/CD
5 199 (37.20%) Infrastructure as Code
6 185 (34.58%) DevOps
7 143 (26.73%) Security Cleared
8 125 (23.36%) Python
9 121 (22.62%) Kubernetes
10 120 (22.43%) GCP
11 116 (21.68%) SC Cleared
12 107 (20.00%) Cloud Security
13 98 (18.32%) GitHub
14 95 (17.76%) Microsoft
15 91 (17.01%) Google
16 88 (16.45%) Platform Engineering
17 81 (15.14%) Infrastructure Engineering
18 80 (14.95%) Migration
18 80 (14.95%) PowerShell
19 67 (12.52%) Agile
19 67 (12.52%) Containerisation
20 62 (11.59%) GitHub Actions
21 58 (10.84%) AI
22 55 (10.28%) Windows
23 54 (10.09%) Firewall
23 54 (10.09%) Serverless
24 52 (9.72%) Docker
25 51 (9.53%) Problem-Solving
26 46 (8.60%) GitLab
27 45 (8.41%) Observability

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 (1.31%) Microsoft Exchange
2 6 (1.12%) Apache
3 5 (0.93%) Apache Spark
3 5 (0.93%) Confluence
4 3 (0.56%) nginx
5 2 (0.37%) CloudStack
5 2 (0.37%) SharePoint
6 1 (0.19%) Apache Airflow
6 1 (0.19%) IIS
6 1 (0.19%) OpenStack
6 1 (0.19%) SAS
6 1 (0.19%) Tomcat
6 1 (0.19%) Traefik
Applications
1 2 (0.37%) Chatbot
Business Applications
1 1 (0.19%) Aladdin
1 1 (0.19%) Dynamics CRM
Cloud Services
1 242 (45.23%) Azure
2 225 (42.06%) AWS
3 120 (22.43%) GCP
4 98 (18.32%) GitHub
5 62 (11.59%) GitHub Actions
6 54 (10.09%) Serverless
7 44 (8.22%) Azure DevOps
7 44 (8.22%) Entra ID
8 39 (7.29%) AWS CloudFormation
9 38 (7.10%) PaaS
10 37 (6.92%) Azure AKS
11 36 (6.73%) IaaS
12 35 (6.54%) Amazon S3
13 31 (5.79%) AWS Lambda
14 30 (5.61%) Amazon EKS
14 30 (5.61%) Google Kubernetes Engine
15 26 (4.86%) Amazon EC2
15 26 (4.86%) Virtual Private Cloud
16 25 (4.67%) Amazon ECS
17 22 (4.11%) OCI
Communications & Networking
1 54 (10.09%) Firewall
2 36 (6.73%) DNS
3 25 (4.67%) Network Security
4 23 (4.30%) VPN
5 7 (1.31%) DHCP
5 7 (1.31%) TCP/IP
6 6 (1.12%) Reverse Proxy
6 6 (1.12%) WAN
7 4 (0.75%) Software-Defined Networking
7 4 (0.75%) VLAN
8 3 (0.56%) BGP
8 3 (0.56%) SD-WAN
8 3 (0.56%) SMTP
8 3 (0.56%) SSL
9 2 (0.37%) DKIM
9 2 (0.37%) Internet
9 2 (0.37%) Kerberos
9 2 (0.37%) NGFW
9 2 (0.37%) SAN
9 2 (0.37%) VXLAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 15 (2.80%) Amazon Athena
2 13 (2.43%) BigQuery
3 11 (2.06%) DynamoDB
4 9 (1.68%) SQL Server
5 7 (1.31%) Amazon RDS
6 6 (1.12%) Amazon Redshift
6 6 (1.12%) Azure SQL Database
7 5 (0.93%) Data Lake
7 5 (0.93%) Oracle Database
7 5 (0.93%) PostgreSQL
8 4 (0.75%) Amazon QuickSight
9 3 (0.56%) Big Data
9 3 (0.56%) Data Warehouse
9 3 (0.56%) Metadata
9 3 (0.56%) Oracle Database 12c
9 3 (0.56%) Power BI
9 3 (0.56%) Snowflake Schema
10 2 (0.37%) OLAP
10 2 (0.37%) OLTP
10 2 (0.37%) SQL Server Integration Services
Development Applications
1 46 (8.60%) GitLab
2 43 (8.04%) Jenkins
3 41 (7.66%) Git
4 11 (2.06%) JIRA
5 10 (1.87%) Artifactory
6 3 (0.56%) Team Foundation Server
7 2 (0.37%) Claude Code
7 2 (0.37%) Liquibase
7 2 (0.37%) Postman
7 2 (0.37%) Robot Framework
7 2 (0.37%) Selenium
8 1 (0.19%) Burp Suite
8 1 (0.19%) Chocolatey
8 1 (0.19%) CircleCI
8 1 (0.19%) IntelliJ
8 1 (0.19%) JUnit
8 1 (0.19%) Metasploit
8 1 (0.19%) SonarQube
8 1 (0.19%) sqlmap
8 1 (0.19%) Travis CI
General
1 69 (12.90%) Social Skills
2 54 (10.09%) Finance
3 43 (8.04%) Public Sector
4 21 (3.93%) Analytical Skills
5 17 (3.18%) Banking
6 13 (2.43%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 11 (2.06%) Documentation Skills
8 9 (1.68%) Retail
9 6 (1.12%) Telecoms
10 5 (0.93%) Investment Banking
10 5 (0.93%) Legal
10 5 (0.93%) Presentation Skills
11 4 (0.75%) Marketing
11 4 (0.75%) Military
11 4 (0.75%) Pharmaceutical
12 3 (0.56%) Financial Institution
12 3 (0.56%) Local Government
12 3 (0.56%) Police
13 2 (0.37%) Corporate Banking
13 2 (0.37%) Retail Banking
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 17 (3.18%) REST
2 13 (2.43%) Node.js
2 13 (2.43%) React
2 13 (2.43%) Spring
2 13 (2.43%) Spring Boot
3 11 (2.06%) Kafka
3 11 (2.06%) OAuth
4 10 (1.87%) OAuth2
5 9 (1.68%) .NET
5 9 (1.68%) OpenTelemetry
6 8 (1.50%) OpenID
6 8 (1.50%) Oracle Fusion
7 6 (1.12%) AngularJS
7 6 (1.12%) ARM Templates
7 6 (1.12%) LangChain
8 5 (0.93%) Model Context Protocol
8 5 (0.93%) Playwright
8 5 (0.93%) Web Services
9 4 (0.75%) Jest
9 4 (0.75%) PySpark
Miscellaneous
1 92 (17.20%) Cloud Native
2 28 (5.23%) Public Cloud
3 25 (4.67%) Hybrid Cloud
4 21 (3.93%) Data Centre
5 14 (2.62%) Onboarding
6 13 (2.43%) Enterprise Cloud
6 13 (2.43%) Enterprise Software
6 13 (2.43%) Security Posture
7 10 (1.87%) Product Ownership
8 7 (1.31%) Self-Motivation
9 6 (1.12%) Cyber Threat
9 6 (1.12%) Data Protection Act
9 6 (1.12%) Distributed Systems
10 5 (0.93%) Cloud Security Posture
10 5 (0.93%) Management Information System
10 5 (0.93%) PKI
11 4 (0.75%) Legacy Systems
11 4 (0.75%) Private Cloud
11 4 (0.75%) Virtual Team
12 3 (0.56%) Replication
Operating Systems
1 55 (10.28%) Windows
2 32 (5.98%) Windows Server
3 31 (5.79%) Linux
4 5 (0.93%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 3 (0.56%) Ubuntu
6 2 (0.37%) VMS
7 1 (0.19%) CentOS
7 1 (0.19%) Mac OS
7 1 (0.19%) Unix
7 1 (0.19%) Windows Server 2019
Processes & Methodologies
1 223 (41.68%) CI/CD
2 199 (37.20%) Infrastructure as Code
3 185 (34.58%) DevOps
4 107 (20.00%) Cloud Security
5 88 (16.45%) Platform Engineering
6 81 (15.14%) Infrastructure Engineering
7 80 (14.95%) Migration
8 67 (12.52%) Agile
8 67 (12.52%) Containerisation
9 58 (10.84%) AI
10 51 (9.53%) Problem-Solving
11 45 (8.41%) Observability
12 44 (8.22%) Continuous Improvement
13 42 (7.85%) Infrastructure Automation
13 42 (7.85%) Software Engineering
14 41 (7.66%) DevSecOps
15 38 (7.10%) Cybersecurity
16 37 (6.92%) Technical Leadership
17 32 (5.98%) Mentoring
18 27 (5.05%) Deployment Automation
Programming Languages
1 125 (23.36%) Python
2 80 (14.95%) PowerShell
3 44 (8.22%) Bash
3 44 (8.22%) SQL
4 34 (6.36%) Bicep
5 25 (4.67%) Java
6 15 (2.80%) C#
7 9 (1.68%) Go
7 9 (1.68%) JavaScript
8 8 (1.50%) TypeScript
9 5 (0.93%) Groovy
10 2 (0.37%) Kusto Query Language
10 2 (0.37%) Ruby
11 1 (0.19%) BeanShell
11 1 (0.19%) Cypher
11 1 (0.19%) Kotlin
11 1 (0.19%) R
11 1 (0.19%) Shell Script
Qualifications
1 143 (26.73%) Security Cleared
2 116 (21.68%) SC Cleared
3 37 (6.92%) Azure Certification
4 25 (4.67%) DV Cleared
5 21 (3.93%) AWS Certification
6 15 (2.80%) Degree
7 13 (2.43%) Microsoft Certification
8 12 (2.24%) BPSS Clearance
9 11 (2.06%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
10 10 (1.87%) CISSP
11 9 (1.68%) Cisco Certification
11 9 (1.68%) Computer Science Degree
12 6 (1.12%) (ISC)2 CCSP
13 5 (0.93%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
13 5 (0.93%) TOGAF Certification
14 4 (0.75%) CCSP
14 4 (0.75%) CISM
14 4 (0.75%) MCSE
15 3 (0.56%) CCNP
15 3 (0.56%) Master's Degree
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 12 (2.24%) GDPR
1 12 (2.24%) NIST
2 11 (2.06%) QA
3 10 (1.87%) NCSC
4 9 (1.68%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 6 (1.12%) Data Quality
5 6 (1.12%) PCI DSS
6 4 (0.75%) GRC
7 2 (0.37%) Cyber Essentials
7 2 (0.37%) SLA
7 2 (0.37%) SOC 2
8 1 (0.19%) Accessibility
8 1 (0.19%) Actionable Recommendations
8 1 (0.19%) HIPAA
8 1 (0.19%) WCAG
System Software
1 52 (9.72%) Docker
2 38 (7.10%) Active Directory
3 17 (3.18%) Virtual Desktop
4 16 (2.99%) VMware Infrastructure
4 16 (2.99%) VMware NSX
5 13 (2.43%) Virtual Machines
6 11 (2.06%) VMware ESXi
6 11 (2.06%) vSphere
7 8 (1.50%) Hyper-V
8 7 (1.31%) Squid
8 7 (1.31%) vCloud
9 4 (0.75%) Firmware
10 2 (0.37%) Ceph
10 2 (0.37%) KVM
10 2 (0.37%) NFS
11 1 (0.19%) Dovecot
11 1 (0.19%) Postfix
Systems Management
1 236 (44.11%) Terraform
2 121 (22.62%) Kubernetes
3 24 (4.49%) Ansible
4 22 (4.11%) Grafana
5 19 (3.55%) Prometheus
6 15 (2.80%) Microsoft Intune
7 14 (2.62%) Argo
7 14 (2.62%) Single Sign-On
8 13 (2.43%) Istio
9 12 (2.24%) vCenter Server
10 9 (1.68%) SCOM
11 7 (1.31%) Packer
12 6 (1.12%) Cilium
12 6 (1.12%) Puppet
13 5 (0.93%) Progress Chef
14 4 (0.75%) Salt
14 4 (0.75%) Suricata
15 2 (0.37%) HAProxy
15 2 (0.37%) SELinux
16 1 (0.19%) SCCM
Vendors
1 95 (17.76%) Microsoft
2 91 (17.01%) Google
3 30 (5.61%) VMware
4 24 (4.49%) Oracle
5 11 (2.06%) Palo Alto
5 11 (2.06%) Zscaler
6 10 (1.87%) Databricks
7 8 (1.50%) Dynatrace
7 8 (1.50%) ServiceNow
8 7 (1.31%) Cisco
8 7 (1.31%) Salesforce
9 6 (1.12%) Red Hat
10 5 (0.93%) Citrix
10 5 (0.93%) Fortinet
10 5 (0.93%) Okta
10 5 (0.93%) PeopleSoft
10 5 (0.93%) Splunk
11 4 (0.75%) OpenAI
11 4 (0.75%) Rapid7
11 4 (0.75%) Salesforce Marketing Cloud