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 10 September 2026.

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

6 months to
10 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 203 306 329
Rank change year-on-year +103 +23 -70
Contract jobs requiring a Cloud Engineer 776 255 249
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 1.42% 0.77% 0.65%
As % of the Job Titles category 1.54% 0.85% 0.70%
Number of daily rates quoted 512 186 156
10th Percentile £401 £401 £393
25th Percentile £450 £438 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £516 £500 £551
Median % change year-on-year +3.25% -9.17% +0.09%
75th Percentile £590 £575 £628
90th Percentile £675 £638 £694
UK excluding London median daily rate £510 £500 £550
% change year-on-year +2.00% -9.09% +4.76%
Number of hourly rates quoted 29 7 0
10th Percentile - £29.00 -
25th Percentile £23.20 £29.50 -
Median hourly rate £77.00 £45.00 -
Median % change year-on-year +71.11% - -
75th Percentile £81.25 £86.25 -
90th Percentile £82.00 £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 50,324 30,039 35,625
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.36% 91.06% 93.05%
Number of daily rates quoted 29,923 18,938 22,148
10th Percentile £325 £281 £300
25th Percentile £425 £400 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -1.32%
75th Percentile £625 £622 £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 3,732 1,556 1,742
10th Percentile £14.56 £13.67 £14.73
25th Percentile £20.00 £17.06 £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 £52.81 £65.00
90th Percentile £79.90 £70.16 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £42.50 £25.15 £45.00
% change year-on-year +68.99% -44.11% +12.50%

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 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 10 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 10 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 +114 672 £525 +5.00% 572
UK excluding London +91 429 £510 +2.00% 293
London +55 298 £525 +2.44% 338
Work from Home +24 188 £540 +8.00% 195
North of England +18 131 £513 +13.89% 81
South East +20 130 £538 +7.50% 63
North West +6 80 £525 +20.00% 48
Midlands +3 70 £500 -6.10% 36
Scotland +2 57 £447 -18.73% 50
Yorkshire -12 43 £455 -9.00% 26
East Midlands +11 37 £488 +2.63% 19
West Midlands -15 32 £525 -27.18% 17
East of England -11 19 £488 +0.52% 20
South West -33 16 £575 +4.55% 29
North East -43 8 £525 +14.13% 7
Wales -5 7 - - 3

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

For the 6 months to 10 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 (47.16%) Azure
2 310 (39.95%) Terraform
3 272 (35.05%) Infrastructure as Code
4 269 (34.66%) AWS
5 265 (34.15%) CI/CD
6 210 (27.06%) DevOps
7 204 (26.29%) Kubernetes
8 202 (26.03%) Security Cleared
9 193 (24.87%) Python
10 176 (22.68%) Cloud Security
11 175 (22.55%) Microsoft
12 167 (21.52%) GCP
13 159 (20.49%) Infrastructure Engineering
14 158 (20.36%) PowerShell
15 153 (19.72%) Platform Engineering
16 145 (18.69%) SC Cleared
17 118 (15.21%) Windows
18 113 (14.56%) Google
19 108 (13.92%) Entra ID
20 103 (13.27%) AI
21 98 (12.63%) Active Directory
22 91 (11.73%) Migration
23 90 (11.60%) Agile
24 88 (11.34%) Containerisation
25 85 (10.95%) GitHub
26 84 (10.82%) DNS
26 84 (10.82%) Firewall
26 84 (10.82%) Observability
27 81 (10.44%) Bash
27 81 (10.44%) 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 14 (1.80%) 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 (47.16%) Azure
2 269 (34.66%) AWS
3 167 (21.52%) GCP
4 108 (13.92%) Entra ID
5 85 (10.95%) GitHub
6 54 (6.96%) Azure DevOps
6 54 (6.96%) Serverless
7 53 (6.83%) GitHub Actions
8 48 (6.19%) IaaS
9 47 (6.06%) AWS CloudFormation
10 41 (5.28%) AWS Lambda
11 39 (5.03%) Azure AKS
11 39 (5.03%) Azure Monitor
11 39 (5.03%) Google Kubernetes Engine
12 35 (4.51%) PaaS
13 34 (4.38%) Amazon CloudWatch
13 34 (4.38%) Amazon EKS
13 34 (4.38%) Microsoft 365
14 32 (4.12%) Amazon EC2
14 32 (4.12%) SaaS
Communications & Networking
1 84 (10.82%) DNS
1 84 (10.82%) Firewall
2 42 (5.41%) Network Security
3 38 (4.90%) VPN
4 19 (2.45%) DHCP
5 17 (2.19%) WAN
6 15 (1.93%) TCP/IP
7 12 (1.55%) Internet
8 7 (0.90%) VLAN
9 6 (0.77%) SD-WAN
9 6 (0.77%) VSAN
10 5 (0.64%) LAN
10 5 (0.64%) SSL
11 4 (0.52%) Wireless
12 3 (0.39%) BGP
12 3 (0.39%) IPv4
12 3 (0.39%) Kerberos
12 3 (0.39%) OSPF
12 3 (0.39%) SAN
12 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 10 (1.29%) Data Lake
6 8 (1.03%) Oracle Exadata
7 7 (0.90%) DynamoDB
8 6 (0.77%) Azure SQL Database
8 6 (0.77%) NoSQL
9 5 (0.64%) Amazon Athena
9 5 (0.64%) 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%) Elasticsearch
Development Applications
1 56 (7.22%) GitLab
2 48 (6.19%) Jenkins
3 39 (5.03%) Git
4 18 (2.32%) JIRA
5 8 (1.03%) Artifactory
6 7 (0.90%) Claude Code
7 5 (0.64%) 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 (12.24%) Finance
2 79 (10.18%) Social Skills
3 70 (9.02%) Public Sector
4 31 (3.99%) Analytical Skills
5 25 (3.22%) Banking
6 10 (1.29%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 9 (1.16%) Manufacturing
8 7 (0.90%) Documentation Skills
8 7 (0.90%) Legal
9 6 (0.77%) Investment Banking
10 5 (0.64%) Law
10 5 (0.64%) Local Government
11 4 (0.52%) Pharmaceutical
11 4 (0.52%) Presentation Skills
12 3 (0.39%) Aerospace
12 3 (0.39%) Digital Health
12 3 (0.39%) Digital Healthcare
12 3 (0.39%) Front Office
12 3 (0.39%) Military
12 3 (0.39%) Police
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 310 (39.95%) Terraform
2 25 (3.22%) REST
3 16 (2.06%) ARM Templates
4 14 (1.80%) 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%) Keycloak
7 8 (1.03%) React
8 7 (0.90%) .NET
8 7 (0.90%) YAML
9 6 (0.77%) FastAPI
9 6 (0.77%) Flask
10 5 (0.64%) Azure Blueprints
10 5 (0.64%) PySpark
11 4 (0.52%) Hugging Face
11 4 (0.52%) PyTorch
Miscellaneous
1 124 (15.98%) Cloud Native
2 59 (7.60%) Security Posture
3 44 (5.67%) Enterprise Cloud
4 38 (4.90%) Hybrid Cloud
5 31 (3.99%) Onboarding
6 30 (3.87%) Cloud Security Posture
7 24 (3.09%) 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 10 (1.29%) PKI
14 8 (1.03%) AI Agents
14 8 (1.03%) Data Protection Act
15 7 (0.90%) Legacy Systems
16 6 (0.77%) Distributed Architecture
17 4 (0.52%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 118 (15.21%) Windows
2 80 (10.31%) Linux
3 62 (7.99%) Windows Server
4 31 (3.99%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 14 (1.80%) 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
10 1 (0.13%) Unix
Processes & Methodologies
1 272 (35.05%) Infrastructure as Code
2 265 (34.15%) CI/CD
3 210 (27.06%) DevOps
4 176 (22.68%) Cloud Security
5 159 (20.49%) Infrastructure Engineering
6 153 (19.72%) Platform Engineering
7 103 (13.27%) AI
8 91 (11.73%) Migration
9 90 (11.60%) Agile
10 88 (11.34%) Containerisation
11 84 (10.82%) Observability
12 65 (8.38%) Technical Leadership
13 61 (7.86%) Software Engineering
14 59 (7.60%) Continuous Improvement
15 58 (7.47%) DevSecOps
15 58 (7.47%) Infrastructure Automation
15 58 (7.47%) Problem-Solving
16 55 (7.09%) Cybersecurity
17 51 (6.57%) Deployment Automation
18 50 (6.44%) Change Management
Programming Languages
1 193 (24.87%) Python
2 158 (20.36%) PowerShell
3 81 (10.44%) Bash
4 74 (9.54%) Bicep
5 63 (8.12%) SQL
6 39 (5.03%) Java
7 16 (2.06%) Shell Script
8 15 (1.93%) C#
9 12 (1.55%) JavaScript
10 10 (1.29%) Go
11 4 (0.52%) TypeScript
12 3 (0.39%) C
12 3 (0.39%) Groovy
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%) Perl
14 1 (0.13%) R
14 1 (0.13%) Ruby
Qualifications
1 202 (26.03%) Security Cleared
2 145 (18.69%) SC Cleared
3 71 (9.15%) DV Cleared
4 44 (5.67%) AWS Certification
4 44 (5.67%) Azure Certification
5 33 (4.25%) Degree
6 19 (2.45%) Microsoft Certification
7 18 (2.32%) CISSP
8 13 (1.68%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
9 9 (1.16%) Cisco Certification
10 8 (1.03%) BPSS Clearance
10 8 (1.03%) MCSE
11 7 (0.90%) CCNP
11 7 (0.90%) Computer Science Degree
12 6 (0.77%) CISM
13 5 (0.64%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
13 5 (0.64%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
14 4 (0.52%) CCIE
15 3 (0.39%) CEH
15 3 (0.39%) DBS Check
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 (0.64%) GDPR
7 3 (0.39%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
7 3 (0.39%) Disclosure Scotland
8 2 (0.26%) PCI DSS
8 2 (0.26%) SLA
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 (12.63%) Active Directory
2 81 (10.44%) Docker
3 50 (6.44%) VMware Infrastructure
4 33 (4.25%) VMware ESXi
5 32 (4.12%) Virtual Machines
6 27 (3.48%) VMware NSX
7 21 (2.71%) Virtual Desktop
7 21 (2.71%) vSphere
8 15 (1.93%) vCloud
9 12 (1.55%) Hyper-V
10 7 (0.90%) Squid
11 4 (0.52%) Firmware
12 3 (0.39%) Ceph
12 3 (0.39%) Dovecot
12 3 (0.39%) NFS
12 3 (0.39%) Postfix
13 2 (0.26%) KVM
13 2 (0.26%) Virtual Servers
14 1 (0.13%) BitLocker
14 1 (0.13%) IAG
Systems Management
1 204 (26.29%) Kubernetes
2 53 (6.83%) Ansible
3 30 (3.87%) vCenter Server
4 26 (3.35%) SCOM
5 24 (3.09%) Microsoft Intune
6 22 (2.84%) Grafana
7 20 (2.58%) Prometheus
8 19 (2.45%) Progress Chef
9 16 (2.06%) Single Sign-On
10 14 (1.80%) Puppet
11 10 (1.29%) Istio
12 8 (1.03%) Cilium
13 6 (0.77%) Argo
13 6 (0.77%) Packer
14 5 (0.64%) VxRail
15 4 (0.52%) Suricata
16 3 (0.39%) Active Directory Federation Services
16 3 (0.39%) HAProxy
16 3 (0.39%) Karpenter
16 3 (0.39%) vRealize
Vendors
1 175 (22.55%) Microsoft
2 113 (14.56%) Google
3 75 (9.66%) VMware
4 34 (4.38%) Oracle
5 24 (3.09%) Databricks
6 19 (2.45%) Red Hat
7 17 (2.19%) Okta
8 16 (2.06%) Zscaler
9 13 (1.68%) Palo Alto
9 13 (1.68%) SolarWinds
10 12 (1.55%) Broadcom
10 12 (1.55%) OpenAI
10 12 (1.55%) ServiceNow
10 12 (1.55%) Splunk
11 10 (1.29%) Cisco
12 9 (1.16%) CrowdStrike
12 9 (1.16%) Salesforce
13 8 (1.03%) BeyondTrust
13 8 (1.03%) Dynatrace
13 8 (1.03%) New Relic