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 23 March 2026.

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

6 months to
23 Mar 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 238 298 288
Rank change year-on-year +60 -10 -29
Contract jobs requiring a Cloud Engineer 477 234 344
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 1.09% 0.79% 0.78%
As % of the Job Titles category 1.19% 0.85% 0.84%
Number of daily rates quoted 327 173 243
10th Percentile £400 £376 £400
25th Percentile £450 £425 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year - -4.55% -
75th Percentile £613 £619 £625
90th Percentile £707 £675 £700
UK excluding London median daily rate £525 £500 £525
% change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 3 0 5
10th Percentile - - -
25th Percentile £25.13 - £27.50
Median hourly rate £25.25 - £30.00
75th Percentile £39.56 - £72.50
90th Percentile £48.08 - £83.15
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 40,245 27,473 41,117
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 91.95% 92.96% 92.87%
Number of daily rates quoted 25,132 17,911 26,933
10th Percentile £313 £300 £275
25th Percentile £410 £406 £406
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £520 £525
Median % change year-on-year -3.85% -0.95% -4.37%
75th Percentile £613 £630 £638
90th Percentile £721 £738 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £481 £475 £488
% change year-on-year +1.32% -2.56% -2.50%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,500 903 2,510
10th Percentile £15.00 £15.22 £12.86
25th Percentile £19.28 £21.01 £16.25
Median hourly rate £36.00 £32.50 £32.50
Median % change year-on-year +10.77% - -23.85%
75th Percentile £65.00 £65.00 £60.00
90th Percentile £76.58 £76.25 £71.90
UK excluding London median hourly rate £36.13 £32.50 £32.50
% change year-on-year +11.15% - -19.93%

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 23 March 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 23 March 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 23 March 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 +40 388 £525 - 118
London +39 212 £525 - 46
UK excluding London +13 204 £525 +5.00% 89
Work from Home +1 115 £500 -4.76% 60
North of England -20 69 £500 +5.26% 30
Yorkshire -27 39 £506 +55.77% 14
South East -38 38 £522 -7.20% 22
Scotland +28 37 £451 -14.19% 7
Midlands -43 37 £575 +21.05% 8
West Midlands -34 32 £623 +5.96% 5
North West -9 30 £500 +11.11% 13
South West -7 20 £544 -5.43% 16
East of England -21 14 £543 +35.12% 6
East Midlands -39 5 £575 +25.27% 3
Wales -7 1 £425 +41.67% 1

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

For the 6 months to 23 March 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.

1 219 (45.91%) Terraform
2 218 (45.70%) AWS
3 205 (42.98%) CI/CD
4 193 (40.46%) Infrastructure as Code
5 188 (39.41%) Azure
6 184 (38.57%) DevOps
7 133 (27.88%) Python
8 130 (27.25%) Kubernetes
9 125 (26.21%) Security Cleared
10 121 (25.37%) GCP
11 111 (23.27%) GitHub
12 94 (19.71%) SC Cleared
13 92 (19.29%) Cloud Security
14 90 (18.87%) Google
15 87 (18.24%) Containerisation
16 84 (17.61%) Microsoft
17 81 (16.98%) Agile
18 76 (15.93%) Docker
19 68 (14.26%) GitHub Actions
19 68 (14.26%) Serverless
20 65 (13.63%) Platform Engineering
20 65 (13.63%) PowerShell
21 61 (12.79%) Jenkins
21 61 (12.79%) Migration
22 57 (11.95%) Infrastructure Engineering
23 53 (11.11%) Infrastructure Automation
24 48 (10.06%) AWS CloudFormation
25 47 (9.85%) GitLab
25 47 (9.85%) Linux
26 45 (9.43%) Azure Certification

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 8 (1.68%) Apache Spark
2 6 (1.26%) Microsoft Exchange
3 5 (1.05%) Apache
4 4 (0.84%) Confluence
5 3 (0.63%) nginx
6 1 (0.21%) Apache Airflow
6 1 (0.21%) Apache Superset
6 1 (0.21%) CMS
6 1 (0.21%) Headless CMS
6 1 (0.21%) SAS
6 1 (0.21%) SharePoint
6 1 (0.21%) Traefik
Applications
1 2 (0.42%) Chatbot
Business Applications
1 3 (0.63%) Dynamics CRM
2 1 (0.21%) Aladdin
Cloud Services
1 218 (45.70%) AWS
2 188 (39.41%) Azure
3 121 (25.37%) GCP
4 111 (23.27%) GitHub
5 68 (14.26%) GitHub Actions
5 68 (14.26%) Serverless
6 48 (10.06%) AWS CloudFormation
7 39 (8.18%) Azure DevOps
7 39 (8.18%) Entra ID
8 36 (7.55%) PaaS
9 35 (7.34%) Amazon S3
10 34 (7.13%) Amazon EKS
10 34 (7.13%) Google Kubernetes Engine
11 31 (6.50%) AWS Lambda
12 30 (6.29%) Azure AKS
12 30 (6.29%) IaaS
13 28 (5.87%) Amazon ECS
14 22 (4.61%) Virtual Private Cloud
15 20 (4.19%) Microsoft 365
16 19 (3.98%) Azure Monitor
Communications & Networking
1 44 (9.22%) Firewall
2 20 (4.19%) VPN
3 19 (3.98%) Network Security
4 18 (3.77%) DNS
5 12 (2.52%) Cisco Firepower
5 12 (2.52%) Cisco IOS
5 12 (2.52%) Cisco ISE
5 12 (2.52%) Junos
6 5 (1.05%) NX-OS
7 4 (0.84%) DHCP
7 4 (0.84%) Reverse Proxy
7 4 (0.84%) Software-Defined Networking
8 3 (0.63%) BGP
8 3 (0.63%) LAN
9 2 (0.42%) DKIM
9 2 (0.42%) TCP/IP
9 2 (0.42%) Unified Communications
9 2 (0.42%) VLAN
9 2 (0.42%) WAN
9 2 (0.42%) Wireless
Database & Business Intelligence
1 22 (4.61%) NoSQL
2 20 (4.19%) PostgreSQL
3 12 (2.52%) Amazon Athena
4 11 (2.31%) BigQuery
5 10 (2.10%) Amazon RDS
5 10 (2.10%) DynamoDB
6 8 (1.68%) Power BI
7 6 (1.26%) Data Lake
8 5 (1.05%) Amazon Redshift
8 5 (1.05%) Azure SQL Database
9 4 (0.84%) Data Warehouse
9 4 (0.84%) Elasticsearch
9 4 (0.84%) SQL Server
10 3 (0.63%) Big Data
10 3 (0.63%) Oracle Database
10 3 (0.63%) Snowflake Schema
11 2 (0.42%) Mixpanel
11 2 (0.42%) OLAP
11 2 (0.42%) OLTP
11 2 (0.42%) SQL Server Integration Services
Development Applications
1 61 (12.79%) Jenkins
2 47 (9.85%) GitLab
3 33 (6.92%) Git
4 9 (1.89%) JIRA
5 7 (1.47%) Liquibase
6 3 (0.63%) MLflow
6 3 (0.63%) Postman
6 3 (0.63%) Team Foundation Server
7 2 (0.42%) Artifactory
7 2 (0.42%) Bitbucket
7 2 (0.42%) CircleCI
7 2 (0.42%) Sonatype Nexus
7 2 (0.42%) Spinnaker
8 1 (0.21%) Burp Suite
8 1 (0.21%) Chocolatey
8 1 (0.21%) Gemini Tracker
8 1 (0.21%) RStudio
8 1 (0.21%) sqlmap
8 1 (0.21%) Travis CI
8 1 (0.21%) Visual Studio Code
General
1 77 (16.14%) Social Skills
2 74 (15.51%) Finance
3 39 (8.18%) Public Sector
4 34 (7.13%) Banking
5 24 (5.03%) Analytical Skills
6 16 (3.35%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 12 (2.52%) Financial Institution
8 9 (1.89%) Documentation Skills
9 8 (1.68%) Retail
10 7 (1.47%) Aeronautics
11 6 (1.26%) Presentation Skills
11 6 (1.26%) Telecoms
12 5 (1.05%) Legal
13 4 (0.84%) Investment Banking
14 3 (0.63%) Local Government
14 3 (0.63%) Pharmaceutical
15 2 (0.42%) Aviation
15 2 (0.42%) Billing
15 2 (0.42%) Marketing
16 1 (0.21%) Retail Banking
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 41 (8.60%) REST
2 26 (5.45%) Node.js
3 21 (4.40%) Elastic Stack
4 17 (3.56%) RESTful
5 13 (2.73%) Kafka
5 13 (2.73%) React
6 11 (2.31%) OpenTelemetry
7 9 (1.89%) ARM Templates
7 9 (1.89%) OpenAPI
7 9 (1.89%) Oracle Fusion
8 8 (1.68%) LangChain
8 8 (1.68%) OAuth
8 8 (1.68%) OpenID
8 8 (1.68%) Playwright
8 8 (1.68%) SOAP
8 8 (1.68%) Spring
8 8 (1.68%) Spring Boot
9 7 (1.47%) .NET
9 7 (1.47%) Lambda Expressions
9 7 (1.47%) NestJS
Miscellaneous
1 87 (18.24%) Cloud Native
2 40 (8.39%) Public Cloud
3 21 (4.40%) Distributed Systems
4 16 (3.35%) Hybrid Cloud
5 13 (2.73%) Data Centre
6 10 (2.10%) PKI
6 10 (2.10%) Product Ownership
6 10 (2.10%) Security Posture
7 7 (1.47%) Self-Motivation
8 6 (1.26%) Cyber Threat
9 5 (1.05%) Onboarding
10 4 (0.84%) Algorithms
10 4 (0.84%) Cloud Security Posture
10 4 (0.84%) Enterprise Software
11 3 (0.63%) Data Protection Act
11 3 (0.63%) Distributed Computing
11 3 (0.63%) Enterprise Cloud
11 3 (0.63%) Legacy Systems
11 3 (0.63%) Replication
12 2 (0.42%) Genomics
Operating Systems
1 47 (9.85%) Linux
2 34 (7.13%) Windows
3 16 (3.35%) Windows Server
4 8 (1.68%) Unix
5 4 (0.84%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 4 (0.84%) VMS
6 1 (0.21%) Alpine Linux
6 1 (0.21%) Mac OS
6 1 (0.21%) Ubuntu
Processes & Methodologies
1 205 (42.98%) CI/CD
2 193 (40.46%) Infrastructure as Code
3 184 (38.57%) DevOps
4 92 (19.29%) Cloud Security
5 87 (18.24%) Containerisation
6 81 (16.98%) Agile
7 65 (13.63%) Platform Engineering
8 61 (12.79%) Migration
9 57 (11.95%) Infrastructure Engineering
10 53 (11.11%) Infrastructure Automation
11 45 (9.43%) Continuous Improvement
11 45 (9.43%) Microservices
11 45 (9.43%) Observability
12 41 (8.60%) Cybersecurity
12 41 (8.60%) Problem-Solving
13 39 (8.18%) AI
14 35 (7.34%) DevSecOps
15 33 (6.92%) Software Engineering
16 31 (6.50%) Analytics
17 30 (6.29%) Cost Optimisation
Programming Languages
1 133 (27.88%) Python
2 65 (13.63%) PowerShell
3 43 (9.01%) SQL
4 34 (7.13%) Bash
5 28 (5.87%) Java
6 22 (4.61%) Bicep
7 21 (4.40%) Go
8 17 (3.56%) TypeScript
9 11 (2.31%) C#
10 8 (1.68%) JavaScript
11 6 (1.26%) Shell Script
12 4 (0.84%) BeanShell
12 4 (0.84%) Perl
12 4 (0.84%) Ruby
13 3 (0.63%) Groovy
14 2 (0.42%) Kusto Query Language
15 1 (0.21%) C
15 1 (0.21%) Cypher
15 1 (0.21%) Kotlin
15 1 (0.21%) R
Qualifications
1 125 (26.21%) Security Cleared
2 94 (19.71%) SC Cleared
3 45 (9.43%) Azure Certification
4 35 (7.34%) AWS Certification
5 32 (6.71%) Degree
6 26 (5.45%) DV Cleared
7 22 (4.61%) Computer Science Degree
8 16 (3.35%) Master's Degree
8 16 (3.35%) Microsoft Certification
9 13 (2.73%) CISSP
10 12 (2.52%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
11 10 (2.10%) BPSS Clearance
11 10 (2.10%) Cisco Certification
12 7 (1.47%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
12 7 (1.47%) CISM
13 6 (1.26%) (ISC)2 CCSP
14 5 (1.05%) CCSP
14 5 (1.05%) TOGAF Certification
15 3 (0.63%) AWS Certified Developer
15 3 (0.63%) AWS Certified SysOps Administrator
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 15 (3.14%) GDPR
2 13 (2.73%) ISO/IEC 27001
3 12 (2.52%) NIST
4 10 (2.10%) NCSC
5 6 (1.26%) PCI DSS
5 6 (1.26%) QA
6 5 (1.05%) Cyber Essentials
6 5 (1.05%) Data Quality
6 5 (1.05%) GRC
7 3 (0.63%) SOC 2
8 2 (0.42%) HIPAA
8 2 (0.42%) SLA
9 1 (0.21%) Accessibility
9 1 (0.21%) Actionable Recommendations
9 1 (0.21%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
9 1 (0.21%) FedRAMP
9 1 (0.21%) JSP 440
9 1 (0.21%) WCAG
System Software
1 76 (15.93%) Docker
2 28 (5.87%) Active Directory
3 13 (2.73%) VMware NSX
4 11 (2.31%) Virtual Desktop
4 11 (2.31%) Virtual Machines
5 7 (1.47%) Hyper-V
6 6 (1.26%) Firmware
7 5 (1.05%) VMware Infrastructure
8 2 (0.42%) Virtual Servers
8 2 (0.42%) vSphere
Systems Management
1 219 (45.91%) Terraform
2 130 (27.25%) Kubernetes
3 36 (7.55%) Ansible
4 34 (7.13%) Prometheus
5 33 (6.92%) Grafana
6 19 (3.98%) Istio
7 15 (3.14%) Argo
8 13 (2.73%) vCenter Server
9 12 (2.52%) Single Sign-On
10 10 (2.10%) Microsoft Intune
11 5 (1.05%) Progress Chef
12 4 (0.84%) Kibana
12 4 (0.84%) logstash
12 4 (0.84%) Packer
12 4 (0.84%) Podman
13 3 (0.63%) Proxmox
13 3 (0.63%) Puppet
14 2 (0.42%) Consul
14 2 (0.42%) Salt
14 2 (0.42%) SCCM
Vendors
1 90 (18.87%) Google
2 84 (17.61%) Microsoft
3 20 (4.19%) Splunk
4 19 (3.98%) Oracle
5 18 (3.77%) Cisco
6 13 (2.73%) Databricks
6 13 (2.73%) Juniper
7 12 (2.52%) SolarWinds
8 11 (2.31%) ServiceNow
9 10 (2.10%) Dynatrace
10 7 (1.47%) Ping Identity
10 7 (1.47%) VMware
11 5 (1.05%) Broadcom
11 5 (1.05%) Citrix
11 5 (1.05%) MuleSoft
11 5 (1.05%) PeopleSoft
11 5 (1.05%) Rapid7
11 5 (1.05%) Zscaler
12 4 (0.84%) Red Hat
12 4 (0.84%) Salesforce