Cloud Engineer Contract Job Trends

Cloud Engineer
UK

The median Cloud Engineer daily rate in the UK is £523, according to job vacancies posted in the 6 months leading up to 9 April 2026.

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

6 months to
9 Apr 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 251 303 301
Rank change year-on-year +52 -2 -47
Contract jobs requiring a Cloud Engineer 482 232 319
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 1.05% 0.79% 0.72%
As % of the Job Titles category 1.14% 0.86% 0.78%
Number of daily rates quoted 323 175 220
10th Percentile £400 £388 £400
25th Percentile £450 £438 £461
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £523 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year -0.48% -4.55% -
75th Percentile £613 £625 £621
90th Percentile £693 £675 £689
UK excluding London median daily rate £522 £500 £520
% change year-on-year +4.40% -3.85% -0.95%
Number of hourly rates quoted 3 0 4
10th Percentile - - -
25th Percentile £25.13 - £27.50
Median hourly rate £25.25 - £30.00
75th Percentile £39.56 - £42.50
90th Percentile £48.08 - £60.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate - - £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 42,236 27,096 40,842
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.26% 92.72% 92.78%
Number of daily rates quoted 26,288 17,831 26,727
10th Percentile £313 £300 £275
25th Percentile £413 £407 £408
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £520 £525
Median % change year-on-year -3.85% -0.95% -2.78%
75th Percentile £613 £630 £638
90th Percentile £725 £738 £744
UK excluding London median daily rate £488 £475 £490
% change year-on-year +2.63% -3.06% -2.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,660 965 2,571
10th Percentile £15.00 £14.99 £12.86
25th Percentile £20.00 £20.26 £16.25
Median hourly rate £40.54 £31.76 £35.00
Median % change year-on-year +27.64% -9.26% -21.40%
75th Percentile £65.00 £64.50 £60.00
90th Percentile £77.50 £76.25 £71.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £41.94 £30.45 £35.00
% change year-on-year +37.73% -13.00% -16.97%

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 April 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 April 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 9 April 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 +21 396 £525 - 126
London +37 226 £525 - 47
UK excluding London +5 199 £522 +4.40% 95
Work from Home +2 119 £510 -2.86% 70
North of England -38 55 £500 +5.26% 33
South East -29 41 £522 -7.20% 29
Scotland +31 36 £513 -2.38% 5
North West -16 28 £513 +13.89% 17
Midlands -51 28 £673 +41.58% 8
Yorkshire -30 27 £500 +53.85% 13
South West -9 22 £550 -4.35% 15
West Midlands -46 22 £680 +15.74% 5
East of England -23 19 £510 +3.55% 5
East Midlands -34 6 £575 +21.05% 3
Wales -13 1 £425 +41.67% 1

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

For the 6 months to 9 April 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.

1 216 (44.81%) Terraform
2 213 (44.19%) AWS
3 202 (41.91%) Azure
4 199 (41.29%) CI/CD
5 187 (38.80%) Infrastructure as Code
6 175 (36.31%) DevOps
7 134 (27.80%) Security Cleared
8 120 (24.90%) Kubernetes
9 118 (24.48%) GCP
10 117 (24.27%) Python
11 108 (22.41%) SC Cleared
12 106 (21.99%) GitHub
13 99 (20.54%) Cloud Security
14 90 (18.67%) Google
15 87 (18.05%) Microsoft
16 77 (15.98%) Agile
17 74 (15.35%) Platform Engineering
18 70 (14.52%) Containerisation
18 70 (14.52%) Infrastructure Engineering
18 70 (14.52%) PowerShell
19 65 (13.49%) Migration
20 63 (13.07%) GitHub Actions
21 61 (12.66%) Docker
22 55 (11.41%) Serverless
23 50 (10.37%) Continuous Improvement
24 48 (9.96%) Jenkins
24 48 (9.96%) Observability
25 45 (9.34%) Firewall
25 45 (9.34%) Infrastructure Automation
26 43 (8.92%) AWS CloudFormation

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 6 (1.24%) Microsoft Exchange
2 5 (1.04%) Apache Spark
2 5 (1.04%) Confluence
3 4 (0.83%) Apache
4 3 (0.62%) nginx
5 2 (0.41%) SharePoint
6 1 (0.21%) Apache Airflow
6 1 (0.21%) CMS
6 1 (0.21%) Headless CMS
6 1 (0.21%) SAS
6 1 (0.21%) Traefik
Applications
1 2 (0.41%) Chatbot
Business Applications
1 2 (0.41%) Dynamics CRM
2 1 (0.21%) Aladdin
Cloud Services
1 213 (44.19%) AWS
2 202 (41.91%) Azure
3 118 (24.48%) GCP
4 106 (21.99%) GitHub
5 63 (13.07%) GitHub Actions
6 55 (11.41%) Serverless
7 43 (8.92%) AWS CloudFormation
8 41 (8.51%) Azure DevOps
9 38 (7.88%) Entra ID
10 37 (7.68%) PaaS
11 34 (7.05%) Amazon S3
11 34 (7.05%) Google Kubernetes Engine
12 33 (6.85%) Azure AKS
13 31 (6.43%) Amazon EKS
13 31 (6.43%) IaaS
14 30 (6.22%) AWS Lambda
15 26 (5.39%) Amazon ECS
16 21 (4.36%) Virtual Private Cloud
17 20 (4.15%) SaaS
18 19 (3.94%) OCI
Communications & Networking
1 45 (9.34%) Firewall
2 20 (4.15%) DNS
3 18 (3.73%) Network Security
4 16 (3.32%) VPN
5 9 (1.87%) Cisco Firepower
6 8 (1.66%) Cisco IOS
6 8 (1.66%) Cisco ISE
6 8 (1.66%) Junos
7 6 (1.24%) Reverse Proxy
8 5 (1.04%) NX-OS
9 4 (0.83%) DHCP
9 4 (0.83%) Software-Defined Networking
10 3 (0.62%) BGP
11 2 (0.41%) DKIM
11 2 (0.41%) SMTP
11 2 (0.41%) TCP/IP
11 2 (0.41%) Unified Communications
11 2 (0.41%) VLAN
12 1 (0.21%) Wireless
12 1 (0.21%) Wireshark
Database & Business Intelligence
1 14 (2.90%) Amazon Athena
2 10 (2.07%) BigQuery
2 10 (2.07%) DynamoDB
3 8 (1.66%) Amazon RDS
3 8 (1.66%) PostgreSQL
4 7 (1.45%) Amazon Redshift
4 7 (1.45%) NoSQL
4 7 (1.45%) Power BI
5 6 (1.24%) Azure SQL Database
5 6 (1.24%) Data Lake
6 5 (1.04%) Big Data
7 4 (0.83%) Amazon QuickSight
7 4 (0.83%) Data Warehouse
7 4 (0.83%) Elasticsearch
7 4 (0.83%) SQL Server
8 3 (0.62%) Oracle Database
8 3 (0.62%) Snowflake Schema
9 2 (0.41%) Delta Lake
9 2 (0.41%) Metadata
9 2 (0.41%) Mixpanel
Development Applications
1 48 (9.96%) Jenkins
2 37 (7.68%) GitLab
3 34 (7.05%) Git
4 6 (1.24%) JIRA
5 4 (0.83%) Artifactory
6 3 (0.62%) CircleCI
6 3 (0.62%) Liquibase
6 3 (0.62%) Postman
6 3 (0.62%) Team Foundation Server
7 2 (0.41%) Robot Framework
7 2 (0.41%) Selenium
7 2 (0.41%) Spinnaker
8 1 (0.21%) Burp Suite
8 1 (0.21%) Chocolatey
8 1 (0.21%) IntelliJ
8 1 (0.21%) JUnit
8 1 (0.21%) Metasploit
8 1 (0.21%) SonarQube
8 1 (0.21%) sqlmap
8 1 (0.21%) Travis CI
General
1 70 (14.52%) Social Skills
2 61 (12.66%) Finance
3 42 (8.71%) Public Sector
4 20 (4.15%) Analytical Skills
5 19 (3.94%) Banking
6 17 (3.53%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 8 (1.66%) Documentation Skills
7 8 (1.66%) Retail
8 7 (1.45%) Aeronautics
9 6 (1.24%) Legal
9 6 (1.24%) Presentation Skills
9 6 (1.24%) Telecoms
10 4 (0.83%) Financial Institution
10 4 (0.83%) Investment Banking
11 3 (0.62%) Marketing
11 3 (0.62%) Military
12 2 (0.41%) Billing
12 2 (0.41%) Law
12 2 (0.41%) Local Government
12 2 (0.41%) Pharmaceutical
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 28 (5.81%) REST
2 24 (4.98%) Node.js
3 13 (2.70%) Kafka
4 11 (2.28%) OpenTelemetry
5 10 (2.07%) Elastic Stack
5 10 (2.07%) React
6 9 (1.87%) .NET
6 9 (1.87%) ARM Templates
6 9 (1.87%) Oracle Fusion
6 9 (1.87%) Spring
6 9 (1.87%) Spring Boot
7 8 (1.66%) OAuth
7 8 (1.66%) Playwright
7 8 (1.66%) SOAP
8 7 (1.45%) AngularJS
8 7 (1.45%) LangChain
8 7 (1.45%) NestJS
8 7 (1.45%) OpenAPI
8 7 (1.45%) OpenID
8 7 (1.45%) Web Services
Miscellaneous
1 85 (17.63%) Cloud Native
2 34 (7.05%) Public Cloud
3 16 (3.32%) Hybrid Cloud
4 13 (2.70%) Data Centre
5 10 (2.07%) Product Ownership
6 9 (1.87%) Security Posture
7 8 (1.66%) Distributed Systems
7 8 (1.66%) PKI
8 7 (1.45%) Self-Motivation
9 6 (1.24%) Cyber Threat
9 6 (1.24%) Enterprise Software
9 6 (1.24%) Legacy Systems
9 6 (1.24%) Onboarding
10 5 (1.04%) Enterprise Cloud
10 5 (1.04%) Virtual Team
11 3 (0.62%) Cloud Security Posture
11 3 (0.62%) Management Information System
11 3 (0.62%) Replication
12 2 (0.41%) Clustering
12 2 (0.41%) Greenfield Project
Operating Systems
1 33 (6.85%) Windows
2 32 (6.64%) Linux
3 15 (3.11%) Windows Server
4 4 (0.83%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 4 (0.83%) Unix
4 4 (0.83%) VMS
5 1 (0.21%) Mac OS
Processes & Methodologies
1 199 (41.29%) CI/CD
2 187 (38.80%) Infrastructure as Code
3 175 (36.31%) DevOps
4 99 (20.54%) Cloud Security
5 77 (15.98%) Agile
6 74 (15.35%) Platform Engineering
7 70 (14.52%) Containerisation
7 70 (14.52%) Infrastructure Engineering
8 65 (13.49%) Migration
9 50 (10.37%) Continuous Improvement
10 48 (9.96%) Observability
11 45 (9.34%) Infrastructure Automation
12 42 (8.71%) DevSecOps
13 40 (8.30%) AI
14 39 (8.09%) Problem-Solving
15 35 (7.26%) Microservices
15 35 (7.26%) Software Engineering
16 33 (6.85%) Cybersecurity
17 31 (6.43%) Mentoring
18 26 (5.39%) Analytics
Programming Languages
1 117 (24.27%) Python
2 70 (14.52%) PowerShell
3 40 (8.30%) SQL
4 35 (7.26%) Bash
5 28 (5.81%) Java
6 25 (5.19%) Bicep
7 16 (3.32%) TypeScript
8 13 (2.70%) C#
9 11 (2.28%) Go
10 6 (1.24%) JavaScript
11 4 (0.83%) BeanShell
11 4 (0.83%) Groovy
11 4 (0.83%) Shell Script
12 2 (0.41%) Kusto Query Language
12 2 (0.41%) Perl
12 2 (0.41%) Ruby
13 1 (0.21%) C
13 1 (0.21%) Cypher
13 1 (0.21%) Kotlin
13 1 (0.21%) R
Qualifications
1 134 (27.80%) Security Cleared
2 108 (22.41%) SC Cleared
3 41 (8.51%) Azure Certification
4 29 (6.02%) AWS Certification
5 25 (5.19%) DV Cleared
6 19 (3.94%) Degree
7 15 (3.11%) Microsoft Certification
8 13 (2.70%) CISSP
9 12 (2.49%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
10 11 (2.28%) Computer Science Degree
11 10 (2.07%) BPSS Clearance
12 9 (1.87%) Cisco Certification
13 7 (1.45%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
13 7 (1.45%) CISM
14 6 (1.24%) (ISC)2 CCSP
15 5 (1.04%) Master's Degree
15 5 (1.04%) TOGAF Certification
16 4 (0.83%) CCSP
17 3 (0.62%) AWS Certified SysOps Administrator
17 3 (0.62%) CCNP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 13 (2.70%) GDPR
2 12 (2.49%) NCSC
2 12 (2.49%) NIST
3 10 (2.07%) ISO/IEC 27001
4 9 (1.87%) QA
5 6 (1.24%) Data Quality
5 6 (1.24%) PCI DSS
6 5 (1.04%) GRC
7 3 (0.62%) Cyber Essentials
7 3 (0.62%) SOC 2
8 2 (0.41%) HIPAA
8 2 (0.41%) SLA
9 1 (0.21%) Accessibility
9 1 (0.21%) Actionable Recommendations
9 1 (0.21%) FedRAMP
9 1 (0.21%) WCAG
System Software
1 61 (12.66%) Docker
2 26 (5.39%) Active Directory
3 14 (2.90%) Virtual Desktop
4 13 (2.70%) VMware NSX
5 11 (2.28%) Virtual Machines
6 6 (1.24%) Firmware
6 6 (1.24%) Hyper-V
7 5 (1.04%) VMware Infrastructure
7 5 (1.04%) vSphere
8 1 (0.21%) Squid
Systems Management
1 216 (44.81%) Terraform
2 120 (24.90%) Kubernetes
3 26 (5.39%) Ansible
3 26 (5.39%) Prometheus
4 25 (5.19%) Grafana
5 19 (3.94%) Istio
6 14 (2.90%) Argo
7 12 (2.49%) Microsoft Intune
8 11 (2.28%) Single Sign-On
9 9 (1.87%) vCenter Server
10 6 (1.24%) Packer
11 5 (1.04%) Progress Chef
11 5 (1.04%) Puppet
12 4 (0.83%) Kibana
12 4 (0.83%) logstash
12 4 (0.83%) Salt
13 3 (0.62%) Podman
14 2 (0.41%) Consul
14 2 (0.41%) Proxmox
15 1 (0.21%) Cilium
Vendors
1 90 (18.67%) Google
2 87 (18.05%) Microsoft
3 18 (3.73%) Oracle
4 14 (2.90%) Cisco
5 11 (2.28%) Databricks
6 10 (2.07%) Dynatrace
6 10 (2.07%) ServiceNow
6 10 (2.07%) VMware
7 9 (1.87%) Juniper
7 9 (1.87%) Splunk
8 8 (1.66%) SolarWinds
9 7 (1.45%) Ping Identity
10 6 (1.24%) Salesforce
11 5 (1.04%) Broadcom
11 5 (1.04%) Citrix
11 5 (1.04%) Fortinet
11 5 (1.04%) PeopleSoft
11 5 (1.04%) Rapid7
11 5 (1.04%) Zscaler
12 4 (0.83%) Palo Alto