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 18 August 2026.

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

6 months to
18 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 202 306 320
Rank change year-on-year +104 +14 -45
Contract jobs requiring a Cloud Engineer 743 259 250
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 1.39% 0.79% 0.65%
As % of the Job Titles category 1.50% 0.86% 0.69%
Number of daily rates quoted 480 191 165
10th Percentile £400 £402 £386
25th Percentile £450 £425 £450
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £550
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -9.09% -
75th Percentile £600 £575 £625
90th Percentile £676 £638 £675
UK excluding London median daily rate £510 £500 £515
% change year-on-year +2.00% -2.91% -3.74%
Number of hourly rates quoted 27 6 1
10th Percentile £23.20 £29.00 -
25th Percentile £47.10 £29.25 £27.50
Median hourly rate £77.00 £37.50 £30.00
Median % change year-on-year +105.33% +25.00% -
75th Percentile £81.25 £58.75 £32.50
90th Percentile £82.75 £86.25 -
UK excluding London median hourly rate £72.00 - £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 49,538 30,006 36,016
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.49% 91.28% 92.96%
Number of daily rates quoted 29,704 18,935 23,189
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% -1.87%
75th Percentile £625 £621 £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 3,506 1,542 1,988
10th Percentile £15.00 £13.56 £14.16
25th Percentile £20.69 £17.30 £20.00
Median hourly rate £41.74 £25.15 £43.00
Median % change year-on-year +65.94% -41.51% +3.61%
75th Percentile £67.84 £53.83 £65.00
90th Percentile £80.00 £72.50 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £42.50 £25.15 £44.02
% change year-on-year +68.99% -42.87% +22.28%

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 18 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 18 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 18 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 +84 638 £525 +5.00% 220
UK excluding London +89 388 £510 +2.00% 149
London +56 306 £525 - 101
Work from Home +30 189 £540 +8.00% 95
South East +1 115 £538 +7.50% 31
North of England -6 109 £525 +16.67% 50
North West -3 65 £533 +21.83% 25
Midlands -1 63 £500 +5.26% 16
Scotland +34 58 £442 -11.60% 11
Yorkshire -14 37 £475 -5.00% 16
West Midlands -18 32 £525 +8.81% 12
East Midlands +4 30 £450 -5.26% 4
East of England -3 22 £505 +4.12% 10
South West -33 15 £600 +9.09% 24
Wales -12 7 - - 3
North East -38 7 £525 +10.53% 9

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

For the 6 months to 18 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.

1 354 (47.64%) Azure
2 319 (42.93%) Terraform
3 271 (36.47%) AWS
4 265 (35.67%) CI/CD
5 264 (35.53%) Infrastructure as Code
6 211 (28.40%) DevOps
7 196 (26.38%) Python
8 192 (25.84%) Kubernetes
9 189 (25.44%) Security Cleared
10 173 (23.28%) Cloud Security
11 171 (23.01%) Microsoft
12 167 (22.48%) GCP
13 162 (21.80%) PowerShell
14 152 (20.46%) Infrastructure Engineering
15 142 (19.11%) SC Cleared
16 138 (18.57%) Platform Engineering
17 119 (16.02%) Google
18 116 (15.61%) Windows
19 98 (13.19%) Entra ID
20 95 (12.79%) AI
21 92 (12.38%) GitHub
22 89 (11.98%) Containerisation
23 88 (11.84%) Active Directory
23 88 (11.84%) Migration
24 87 (11.71%) Agile
25 85 (11.44%) Bash
26 83 (11.17%) Firewall
26 83 (11.17%) Observability
27 81 (10.90%) Docker
28 77 (10.36%) 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 (1.75%) Microsoft Exchange
2 10 (1.35%) Apache
3 7 (0.94%) Apache Airflow
4 6 (0.81%) 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
1 354 (47.64%) Azure
2 271 (36.47%) AWS
3 167 (22.48%) GCP
4 98 (13.19%) Entra ID
5 92 (12.38%) GitHub
6 59 (7.94%) GitHub Actions
7 57 (7.67%) Serverless
8 55 (7.40%) Azure DevOps
9 48 (6.46%) AWS CloudFormation
9 48 (6.46%) Azure AKS
10 45 (6.06%) IaaS
11 42 (5.65%) Google Kubernetes Engine
12 41 (5.52%) AWS Lambda
13 38 (5.11%) Amazon S3
14 37 (4.98%) Azure Monitor
15 36 (4.85%) Amazon EC2
16 35 (4.71%) Amazon EKS
16 35 (4.71%) Virtual Private Cloud
17 34 (4.58%) Microsoft 365
17 34 (4.58%) PaaS
Communications & Networking
1 83 (11.17%) Firewall
2 76 (10.23%) DNS
3 38 (5.11%) VPN
4 36 (4.85%) Network Security
5 17 (2.29%) DHCP
5 17 (2.29%) WAN
6 14 (1.88%) TCP/IP
7 12 (1.62%) Internet
8 6 (0.81%) SD-WAN
8 6 (0.81%) VLAN
9 5 (0.67%) LAN
9 5 (0.67%) SSL
10 4 (0.54%) BGP
10 4 (0.54%) Reverse Proxy
10 4 (0.54%) SAN
10 4 (0.54%) SMTP
10 4 (0.54%) VSAN
11 3 (0.40%) IPv4
11 3 (0.40%) NGFW
11 3 (0.40%) tcpdump
Database & Business Intelligence
1 28 (3.77%) SQL Server
2 19 (2.56%) Amazon RDS
3 16 (2.15%) PostgreSQL
4 12 (1.62%) BigQuery
5 8 (1.08%) Amazon Athena
5 8 (1.08%) Oracle Exadata
6 7 (0.94%) Data Lake
6 7 (0.94%) DynamoDB
7 6 (0.81%) Azure SQL Database
8 5 (0.67%) Oracle Database
9 4 (0.54%) Amazon Redshift
10 3 (0.40%) Amazon QuickSight
10 3 (0.40%) Flink
10 3 (0.40%) Looker
10 3 (0.40%) Metadata
10 3 (0.40%) MongoDB
10 3 (0.40%) MySQL
10 3 (0.40%) Oracle Database 12c
11 2 (0.27%) Elasticsearch
11 2 (0.27%) NoSQL
Development Applications
1 54 (7.27%) GitLab
2 48 (6.46%) Jenkins
3 38 (5.11%) Git
4 18 (2.42%) JIRA
5 9 (1.21%) Artifactory
6 6 (0.81%) Claude Code
7 5 (0.67%) Bitbucket
8 3 (0.40%) Selenium
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
9 2 (0.27%) Terragrunt
10 1 (0.13%) Chocolatey
10 1 (0.13%) CircleCI
10 1 (0.13%) Spinnaker
10 1 (0.13%) TestRail
General
1 98 (13.19%) Finance
2 82 (11.04%) Social Skills
3 68 (9.15%) Public Sector
4 30 (4.04%) Analytical Skills
5 28 (3.77%) Banking
6 12 (1.62%) Documentation Skills
6 12 (1.62%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 8 (1.08%) Investment Banking
8 5 (0.67%) Law
8 5 (0.67%) Legal
8 5 (0.67%) Local Government
9 4 (0.54%) Manufacturing
9 4 (0.54%) Pharmaceutical
10 3 (0.40%) Digital Health
10 3 (0.40%) Front Office
10 3 (0.40%) Italian Language
10 3 (0.40%) Military
10 3 (0.40%) Police
10 3 (0.40%) Presentation Skills
10 3 (0.40%) Retail
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 24 (3.23%) REST
2 14 (1.88%) ARM Templates
3 11 (1.48%) Node.js
3 11 (1.48%) OAuth
3 11 (1.48%) OAuth2
3 11 (1.48%) Spring
3 11 (1.48%) Spring Boot
4 10 (1.35%) Kafka
5 8 (1.08%) AWS CDK
5 8 (1.08%) React
5 8 (1.08%) YAML
6 7 (0.94%) .NET
7 6 (0.81%) FastAPI
7 6 (0.81%) Flask
7 6 (0.81%) Keycloak
7 6 (0.81%) Model Context Protocol
7 6 (0.81%) OpenID
8 4 (0.54%) Azure Blueprints
8 4 (0.54%) PySpark
8 4 (0.54%) PyTorch
Miscellaneous
1 128 (17.23%) Cloud Native
2 55 (7.40%) Security Posture
3 41 (5.52%) Enterprise Cloud
4 34 (4.58%) Hybrid Cloud
5 30 (4.04%) Onboarding
6 27 (3.63%) Cloud Security Posture
7 23 (3.10%) Enterprise Software
8 18 (2.42%) Data Centre
8 18 (2.42%) Distributed Systems
8 18 (2.42%) Management Information System
8 18 (2.42%) Public Cloud
9 10 (1.35%) Linux Command Line
9 10 (1.35%) Product Ownership
10 9 (1.21%) Private Cloud
11 8 (1.08%) AI Agents
11 8 (1.08%) Data Protection Act
11 8 (1.08%) PKI
11 8 (1.08%) Self-Motivation
12 7 (0.94%) Legacy Systems
13 4 (0.54%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 116 (15.61%) Windows
2 77 (10.36%) Linux
3 56 (7.54%) Windows Server
4 32 (4.31%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 10 (1.35%) Windows Server 2019
6 8 (1.08%) Ubuntu
7 4 (0.54%) VMS
8 3 (0.40%) CentOS
9 2 (0.27%) Windows Server 2012
Processes & Methodologies
1 265 (35.67%) CI/CD
2 264 (35.53%) Infrastructure as Code
3 211 (28.40%) DevOps
4 173 (23.28%) Cloud Security
5 152 (20.46%) Infrastructure Engineering
6 138 (18.57%) Platform Engineering
7 95 (12.79%) AI
8 89 (11.98%) Containerisation
9 88 (11.84%) Migration
10 87 (11.71%) Agile
11 83 (11.17%) Observability
12 60 (8.08%) Software Engineering
13 58 (7.81%) Continuous Improvement
14 56 (7.54%) Technical Leadership
15 54 (7.27%) Infrastructure Automation
16 52 (7.00%) DevSecOps
17 51 (6.86%) Problem-Solving
18 48 (6.46%) Change Management
18 48 (6.46%) Deployment Automation
19 46 (6.19%) Cybersecurity
Programming Languages
1 196 (26.38%) Python
2 162 (21.80%) PowerShell
3 85 (11.44%) Bash
4 69 (9.29%) Bicep
5 63 (8.48%) SQL
6 39 (5.25%) Java
7 21 (2.83%) C#
8 16 (2.15%) Shell Script
9 12 (1.62%) JavaScript
10 10 (1.35%) Go
11 6 (0.81%) TypeScript
12 4 (0.54%) Groovy
13 3 (0.40%) C
13 3 (0.40%) Scala
14 2 (0.27%) Kusto Query Language
14 2 (0.27%) Ruby
15 1 (0.13%) Apex Code
15 1 (0.13%) Data Analysis Expressions
15 1 (0.13%) Perl
15 1 (0.13%) R
Qualifications
1 189 (25.44%) Security Cleared
2 142 (19.11%) SC Cleared
3 61 (8.21%) DV Cleared
4 49 (6.59%) AWS Certification
5 47 (6.33%) Azure Certification
6 30 (4.04%) Degree
7 17 (2.29%) CISSP
8 16 (2.15%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
8 16 (2.15%) Microsoft Certification
9 9 (1.21%) Cisco Certification
10 8 (1.08%) MCSE
11 7 (0.94%) BPSS Clearance
11 7 (0.94%) CCNP
11 7 (0.94%) Computer Science Degree
12 5 (0.67%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
12 5 (0.67%) CISM
13 4 (0.54%) CCIE
13 4 (0.54%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
14 3 (0.40%) AWS Certified SysOps Administrator
14 3 (0.40%) CEH
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 14 (1.88%) Data Quality
2 13 (1.75%) ISO/IEC 27001
3 10 (1.35%) NIST
3 10 (1.35%) QA
4 9 (1.21%) NCSC
5 5 (0.67%) Cyber Essentials
5 5 (0.67%) GDPR
6 3 (0.40%) Disclosure Scotland
6 3 (0.40%) SLA
7 2 (0.27%) Actionable Recommendations
7 2 (0.27%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
7 2 (0.27%) PCI DSS
8 1 (0.13%) Accessibility
8 1 (0.13%) Government Security Classifications
8 1 (0.13%) GRC
8 1 (0.13%) SOC 2
8 1 (0.13%) WCAG
System Software
1 88 (11.84%) Active Directory
2 81 (10.90%) Docker
3 40 (5.38%) VMware Infrastructure
4 32 (4.31%) Virtual Machines
5 26 (3.50%) VMware ESXi
6 23 (3.10%) VMware NSX
7 20 (2.69%) Virtual Desktop
8 18 (2.42%) vSphere
9 13 (1.75%) vCloud
10 10 (1.35%) Hyper-V
11 7 (0.94%) Squid
12 4 (0.54%) 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
1 319 (42.93%) Terraform
2 192 (25.84%) Kubernetes
3 51 (6.86%) Ansible
4 24 (3.23%) Microsoft Intune
5 23 (3.10%) Grafana
6 22 (2.96%) vCenter Server
7 21 (2.83%) Progress Chef
7 21 (2.83%) Prometheus
8 20 (2.69%) SCOM
9 18 (2.42%) Single Sign-On
10 15 (2.02%) Puppet
11 9 (1.21%) Istio
12 8 (1.08%) Packer
13 6 (0.81%) Argo
13 6 (0.81%) Cilium
14 5 (0.67%) VxRail
15 4 (0.54%) Suricata
16 3 (0.40%) Active Directory Federation Services
16 3 (0.40%) Salt
16 3 (0.40%) vRealize
Vendors
1 171 (23.01%) Microsoft
2 119 (16.02%) Google
3 62 (8.34%) VMware
4 32 (4.31%) Oracle
5 19 (2.56%) Red Hat
6 17 (2.29%) Okta
6 17 (2.29%) Zscaler
7 13 (1.75%) Databricks
7 13 (1.75%) Palo Alto
7 13 (1.75%) ServiceNow
7 13 (1.75%) Splunk
8 12 (1.62%) OpenAI
9 10 (1.35%) Cisco
10 9 (1.21%) CrowdStrike
10 9 (1.21%) Dynatrace
10 9 (1.21%) Salesforce
11 8 (1.08%) BeyondTrust
11 8 (1.08%) Broadcom
11 8 (1.08%) New Relic
11 8 (1.08%) SolarWinds