Cloud Engineer Contract Job Trends

Cloud Engineer
UK

The median Cloud Engineer daily rate in the UK is £520, according to job vacancies posted in the 6 months leading up to 27 August 2026.

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

6 months to
27 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 204 315 330
Rank change year-on-year +111 +15 -60
Contract jobs requiring a Cloud Engineer 751 252 249
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 1.40% 0.77% 0.64%
As % of the Job Titles category 1.51% 0.84% 0.69%
Number of daily rates quoted 487 184 160
10th Percentile £407 £400 £385
25th Percentile £450 £425 £450
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £520 £500 £550
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% -9.09% -
75th Percentile £600 £575 £625
90th Percentile £675 £632 £675
UK excluding London median daily rate £510 £500 £515
% change year-on-year +2.00% -2.91% -1.90%
Number of hourly rates quoted 27 6 0
10th Percentile £23.20 £29.00 -
25th Percentile £47.10 £29.25 -
Median hourly rate £77.00 £37.50 -
Median % change year-on-year +105.33% - -
75th Percentile £81.25 £58.75 -
90th Percentile £82.75 £86.25 -
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 49,647 29,883 36,109
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.47% 91.23% 93.01%
Number of daily rates quoted 29,658 18,862 22,923
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% -1.87%
75th Percentile £625 £620 £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 3,547 1,583 1,920
10th Percentile £14.99 £13.66 £14.16
25th Percentile £20.51 £17.08 £19.50
Median hourly rate £41.74 £25.15 £43.00
Median % change year-on-year +65.94% -41.51% -1.44%
75th Percentile £67.84 £53.93 £65.00
90th Percentile £80.00 £71.20 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £42.50 £25.15 £43.00
% change year-on-year +68.99% -41.51% +7.50%

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 27 August 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 27 August 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 27 August 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 +105 645 £525 +5.00% 850
UK excluding London +105 400 £510 +2.00% 377
London +56 301 £525 - 536
Work from Home +22 186 £540 +8.00% 287
South East +22 120 £538 +7.50% 72
North of England +13 119 £513 +13.89% 111
North West +3 71 £529 +17.56% 61
Midlands +1 64 £500 +5.26% 35
Scotland +32 58 £442 -9.33% 47
Yorkshire -16 41 £467 -6.62% 40
West Midlands -20 32 £525 -2.78% 22
East Midlands +9 31 £450 -5.26% 13
East of England -5 19 £488 +0.52% 32
South West -34 14 £625 +13.64% 61
Wales -8 7 - - 6
North East -40 7 £525 +10.53% 10

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

For the 6 months to 27 August 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.

1 355 (47.27%) Azure
2 309 (41.15%) Terraform
3 261 (34.75%) AWS
3 261 (34.75%) Infrastructure as Code
4 255 (33.95%) CI/CD
5 203 (27.03%) DevOps
6 195 (25.97%) Kubernetes
7 192 (25.57%) Security Cleared
8 189 (25.17%) Python
9 170 (22.64%) Microsoft
10 168 (22.37%) Cloud Security
11 164 (21.84%) GCP
12 160 (21.30%) PowerShell
13 158 (21.04%) Infrastructure Engineering
14 147 (19.57%) Platform Engineering
15 141 (18.77%) SC Cleared
16 115 (15.31%) Windows
17 112 (14.91%) Google
18 99 (13.18%) Entra ID
19 96 (12.78%) AI
20 90 (11.98%) Active Directory
21 89 (11.85%) GitHub
22 85 (11.32%) Migration
23 84 (11.19%) Containerisation
24 83 (11.05%) Agile
25 82 (10.92%) Bash
25 82 (10.92%) Observability
26 77 (10.25%) DNS
27 76 (10.12%) Firewall
28 74 (9.85%) Linux

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 (1.73%) Microsoft Exchange
2 11 (1.46%) Apache
3 8 (1.07%) Apache Airflow
4 6 (0.80%) Confluence
5 5 (0.67%) SharePoint
6 3 (0.40%) IIS
6 3 (0.40%) nginx
6 3 (0.40%) Tomcat
7 2 (0.27%) CloudStack
7 2 (0.27%) OpenStack
8 1 (0.13%) Apache Pulsar
8 1 (0.13%) Apache Spark
Applications
1 1 (0.13%) Chatbot
Business Applications
1 2 (0.27%) Aladdin
Cloud Services
1 355 (47.27%) Azure
2 261 (34.75%) AWS
3 164 (21.84%) GCP
4 99 (13.18%) Entra ID
5 89 (11.85%) GitHub
6 57 (7.59%) Azure DevOps
7 56 (7.46%) GitHub Actions
8 53 (7.06%) Serverless
9 47 (6.26%) AWS CloudFormation
10 44 (5.86%) Azure AKS
11 43 (5.73%) IaaS
12 41 (5.46%) AWS Lambda
13 39 (5.19%) Azure Monitor
14 36 (4.79%) Google Kubernetes Engine
15 35 (4.66%) Amazon EC2
15 35 (4.66%) Amazon EKS
16 34 (4.53%) Amazon S3
16 34 (4.53%) Microsoft 365
17 32 (4.26%) Amazon CloudWatch
18 31 (4.13%) PaaS
Communications & Networking
1 77 (10.25%) DNS
2 76 (10.12%) Firewall
3 38 (5.06%) Network Security
4 36 (4.79%) VPN
5 17 (2.26%) DHCP
5 17 (2.26%) WAN
6 14 (1.86%) TCP/IP
7 12 (1.60%) Internet
8 6 (0.80%) SD-WAN
8 6 (0.80%) VLAN
9 5 (0.67%) LAN
9 5 (0.67%) SSL
9 5 (0.67%) VSAN
10 4 (0.53%) SAN
10 4 (0.53%) SMTP
11 3 (0.40%) IPv4
11 3 (0.40%) Kerberos
11 3 (0.40%) NGFW
11 3 (0.40%) Reverse Proxy
11 3 (0.40%) tcpdump
Database & Business Intelligence
1 28 (3.73%) SQL Server
2 20 (2.66%) Amazon RDS
3 16 (2.13%) PostgreSQL
4 11 (1.46%) BigQuery
5 8 (1.07%) Oracle Exadata
6 7 (0.93%) Data Lake
7 6 (0.80%) Amazon Athena
7 6 (0.80%) DynamoDB
8 5 (0.67%) Azure SQL Database
8 5 (0.67%) Oracle Database
9 3 (0.40%) Amazon Redshift
9 3 (0.40%) Flink
9 3 (0.40%) Looker
9 3 (0.40%) Metadata
9 3 (0.40%) MongoDB
9 3 (0.40%) MySQL
9 3 (0.40%) Oracle Database 12c
10 2 (0.27%) Amazon QuickSight
10 2 (0.27%) Delta Lake
10 2 (0.27%) Relational Database
Development Applications
1 54 (7.19%) GitLab
2 47 (6.26%) Jenkins
3 37 (4.93%) Git
4 18 (2.40%) JIRA
5 8 (1.07%) Artifactory
6 6 (0.80%) Claude Code
7 5 (0.67%) Bitbucket
8 3 (0.40%) Selenium
8 3 (0.40%) Terragrunt
9 2 (0.27%) Atlassian Bamboo
9 2 (0.27%) Cypress.io
9 2 (0.27%) Gatling
9 2 (0.27%) JMeter
9 2 (0.27%) Octopus Deploy
9 2 (0.27%) Robot Framework
9 2 (0.27%) SonarQube
10 1 (0.13%) Burp Suite
10 1 (0.13%) eggPlant
10 1 (0.13%) Metasploit
10 1 (0.13%) sqlmap
General
1 93 (12.38%) Finance
2 82 (10.92%) Social Skills
3 68 (9.05%) Public Sector
4 32 (4.26%) Analytical Skills
5 28 (3.73%) Banking
6 10 (1.33%) Documentation Skills
6 10 (1.33%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 8 (1.07%) Investment Banking
8 6 (0.80%) Manufacturing
9 5 (0.67%) Law
9 5 (0.67%) Local Government
10 4 (0.53%) Pharmaceutical
11 3 (0.40%) Front Office
11 3 (0.40%) Italian Language
11 3 (0.40%) Legal
11 3 (0.40%) Marketing
11 3 (0.40%) Military
11 3 (0.40%) Police
11 3 (0.40%) Presentation Skills
11 3 (0.40%) Retail
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 309 (41.15%) Terraform
2 24 (3.20%) REST
3 14 (1.86%) ARM Templates
3 14 (1.86%) Kafka
4 11 (1.46%) Spring
4 11 (1.46%) Spring Boot
5 9 (1.20%) Node.js
5 9 (1.20%) OAuth
5 9 (1.20%) OAuth2
6 8 (1.07%) AWS CDK
6 8 (1.07%) React
6 8 (1.07%) YAML
7 7 (0.93%) .NET
7 7 (0.93%) Keycloak
8 6 (0.80%) FastAPI
8 6 (0.80%) Flask
9 4 (0.53%) Hugging Face
9 4 (0.53%) OpenID
9 4 (0.53%) PySpark
9 4 (0.53%) TensorFlow
Miscellaneous
1 121 (16.11%) Cloud Native
2 56 (7.46%) Security Posture
3 42 (5.59%) Enterprise Cloud
4 35 (4.66%) Hybrid Cloud
5 32 (4.26%) Onboarding
6 28 (3.73%) Cloud Security Posture
7 23 (3.06%) Enterprise Software
8 21 (2.80%) Distributed Systems
9 18 (2.40%) Management Information System
10 17 (2.26%) Data Centre
11 15 (2.00%) Public Cloud
12 13 (1.73%) Product Ownership
13 12 (1.60%) Private Cloud
14 10 (1.33%) Linux Command Line
15 9 (1.20%) PKI
16 8 (1.07%) AI Agents
16 8 (1.07%) Data Protection Act
17 7 (0.93%) Legacy Systems
18 6 (0.80%) Self-Motivation
19 4 (0.53%) Distributed Architecture
Operating Systems
1 115 (15.31%) Windows
2 74 (9.85%) Linux
3 57 (7.59%) Windows Server
4 29 (3.86%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 11 (1.46%) Windows Server 2019
6 8 (1.07%) Ubuntu
7 4 (0.53%) VMS
8 3 (0.40%) CentOS
9 2 (0.27%) Windows Server 2012
Processes & Methodologies
1 261 (34.75%) Infrastructure as Code
2 255 (33.95%) CI/CD
3 203 (27.03%) DevOps
4 168 (22.37%) Cloud Security
5 158 (21.04%) Infrastructure Engineering
6 147 (19.57%) Platform Engineering
7 96 (12.78%) AI
8 85 (11.32%) Migration
9 84 (11.19%) Containerisation
10 83 (11.05%) Agile
11 82 (10.92%) Observability
12 60 (7.99%) Technical Leadership
13 59 (7.86%) Continuous Improvement
13 59 (7.86%) Software Engineering
14 55 (7.32%) DevSecOps
15 53 (7.06%) Infrastructure Automation
16 52 (6.92%) Problem-Solving
17 50 (6.66%) Cybersecurity
18 49 (6.52%) Deployment Automation
19 46 (6.13%) Change Management
Programming Languages
1 189 (25.17%) Python
2 160 (21.30%) PowerShell
3 82 (10.92%) Bash
4 69 (9.19%) Bicep
5 62 (8.26%) SQL
6 36 (4.79%) Java
7 20 (2.66%) C#
8 16 (2.13%) Shell Script
9 12 (1.60%) JavaScript
10 10 (1.33%) Go
11 4 (0.53%) Groovy
11 4 (0.53%) TypeScript
12 3 (0.40%) C
12 3 (0.40%) Scala
13 2 (0.27%) 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
1 192 (25.57%) Security Cleared
2 141 (18.77%) SC Cleared
3 65 (8.66%) DV Cleared
4 45 (5.99%) AWS Certification
5 43 (5.73%) Azure Certification
6 30 (3.99%) Degree
7 17 (2.26%) Microsoft Certification
8 16 (2.13%) CISSP
9 14 (1.86%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
10 8 (1.07%) Cisco Certification
10 8 (1.07%) MCSE
11 7 (0.93%) BPSS Clearance
11 7 (0.93%) Computer Science Degree
12 6 (0.80%) CCNP
12 6 (0.80%) CISM
13 5 (0.67%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
14 4 (0.53%) CCIE
14 4 (0.53%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
15 3 (0.40%) AWS Certified SysOps Administrator
15 3 (0.40%) CEH
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 14 (1.86%) Data Quality
1 14 (1.86%) ISO/IEC 27001
2 11 (1.46%) NIST
3 10 (1.33%) QA
4 9 (1.20%) NCSC
5 6 (0.80%) Cyber Essentials
6 5 (0.67%) GDPR
7 3 (0.40%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
7 3 (0.40%) Disclosure Scotland
7 3 (0.40%) SLA
8 2 (0.27%) Actionable Recommendations
8 2 (0.27%) PCI DSS
9 1 (0.13%) Accessibility
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 90 (11.98%) Active Directory
2 73 (9.72%) Docker
3 44 (5.86%) VMware Infrastructure
4 32 (4.26%) Virtual Machines
5 29 (3.86%) VMware ESXi
6 25 (3.33%) VMware NSX
7 20 (2.66%) Virtual Desktop
8 19 (2.53%) vSphere
9 14 (1.86%) vCloud
10 10 (1.33%) Hyper-V
11 7 (0.93%) Squid
12 4 (0.53%) Firmware
13 3 (0.40%) Ceph
13 3 (0.40%) Dovecot
13 3 (0.40%) NFS
13 3 (0.40%) Postfix
14 2 (0.27%) KVM
14 2 (0.27%) Virtual Servers
15 1 (0.13%) BitLocker
Systems Management
1 195 (25.97%) Kubernetes
2 50 (6.66%) Ansible
3 25 (3.33%) vCenter Server
4 23 (3.06%) Microsoft Intune
5 22 (2.93%) Grafana
5 22 (2.93%) SCOM
6 20 (2.66%) Prometheus
7 18 (2.40%) Progress Chef
8 16 (2.13%) Single Sign-On
9 14 (1.86%) Puppet
10 10 (1.33%) Istio
11 8 (1.07%) Packer
12 7 (0.93%) Cilium
13 6 (0.80%) Argo
14 5 (0.67%) VxRail
15 4 (0.53%) Suricata
16 3 (0.40%) Active Directory Federation Services
16 3 (0.40%) HAProxy
16 3 (0.40%) Karpenter
16 3 (0.40%) vRealize
Vendors
1 170 (22.64%) Microsoft
2 112 (14.91%) Google
3 68 (9.05%) VMware
4 32 (4.26%) Oracle
5 17 (2.26%) Okta
5 17 (2.26%) Zscaler
6 16 (2.13%) Databricks
6 16 (2.13%) Red Hat
7 13 (1.73%) Palo Alto
8 12 (1.60%) OpenAI
8 12 (1.60%) ServiceNow
8 12 (1.60%) Splunk
9 9 (1.20%) Broadcom
9 9 (1.20%) CrowdStrike
9 9 (1.20%) Dynatrace
9 9 (1.20%) Salesforce
9 9 (1.20%) SolarWinds
10 8 (1.07%) BeyondTrust
10 8 (1.07%) Cisco
10 8 (1.07%) New Relic