Cloud Engineer Contracts

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 30 April 2025.

The table below provides contractor rate benchmarking and summary statistics, comparing them to the same period in the previous two years.

6 months to
30 Apr 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 311 323 255
Rank change year-on-year +12 -68 -16
Contract jobs requiring a Cloud Engineer 225 295 629
As % of all contract jobs advertised in the UK 0.77% 0.68% 1.05%
As % of the Job Titles category 0.83% 0.73% 1.11%
Number of daily rates quoted 171 201 431
10th Percentile £400 £400 £413
25th Percentile £431 £463 £475
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -4.55% - -4.35%
75th Percentile £616 £625 £650
90th Percentile £675 £688 £713
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £524 £550
% change year-on-year -4.53% -4.77% +4.76%
Number of hourly rates quoted 0 3 4
10th Percentile - - £39.80
25th Percentile - £27.50 £47.00
Median hourly rate - £30.00 £73.00
Median % change year-on-year - -58.90% +61.72%
75th Percentile - £32.50 £102.81
90th Percentile - - £103.38
UK excluding London median hourly rate - £30.00 -

All Contract IT Job Vacancies
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 27,050 40,453 56,471
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.52% 92.79% 94.61%
Number of daily rates quoted 17,687 26,352 39,474
10th Percentile £300 £275 £313
25th Percentile £406 £409 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £515 £525 £540
Median % change year-on-year -1.90% -2.78% +2.86%
75th Percentile £625 £638 £650
90th Percentile £738 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £493 £500
% change year-on-year -3.55% -1.50% +5.26%
Number of hourly rates quoted 1,031 2,658 1,569
10th Percentile £14.20 £12.86 £14.29
25th Percentile £18.51 £16.30 £19.50
Median hourly rate £29.07 £36.00 £45.00
Median % change year-on-year -19.25% -20.00% +91.86%
75th Percentile £62.50 £60.75 £65.75
90th Percentile £75.00 £72.50 £75.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £28.75 £38.50 £42.50
% change year-on-year -25.32% -9.41% +117.95%

Cloud Engineer
Job Vacancy Trend

Job postings that featured Cloud Engineer in the job title as a proportion of all IT jobs advertised.

Job vacancy trend for Cloud Engineer in the UK

Cloud Engineer
Contractor Daily Rate Trend

3-month moving average daily rate quoted in jobs citing Cloud Engineer.

Daily rate trend for Cloud Engineer in the UK

Cloud Engineer
Daily Rate Histogram

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Cloud Engineer over the 6 months to 30 April 2025.

Daily rate histogram for Cloud Engineer in the UK

Cloud Engineer
Contractor Hourly Rate Trend

3-month moving average hourly rates quoted in jobs citing Cloud Engineer.

Hourly rate trend for Cloud Engineer in the UK

Cloud Engineer
Top 16 Contract 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 30 April 2025. 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 +9 186 £525 -4.55% 249
London +17 114 £525 -8.30% 86
UK excluding London +28 85 £500 -4.53% 171
Work from Home +9 82 £500 -16.67% 204
South East +44 21 £563 +6.13% 44
North of England +23 21 £450 -14.29% 67
Midlands +24 15 £488 -6.70% 20
Scotland +3 15 £525 -12.50% 8
North West +6 12 £450 -11.76% 38
West Midlands +14 8 £588 -9.62% 16
East Midlands +12 7 £475 +33.43% 4
North East - 7 £600 - 8
East of England +38 6 £493 +3.68% 8
South West +25 5 £575 +15.00% 23
Wales +4 2 £300 -53.85% 2
Yorkshire +7 1 £425 -29.17% 21

Cloud Engineer Skill Set
Top 30 Co-occurring Skills and Capabilities

For the 6 months to 30 April 2025, Cloud Engineer contract job roles required the following skills and capabilities in order of popularity. The figures indicate the absolute number co-occurrences and as a proportion of all contract job ads featuring Cloud Engineer in the job title.

1 111 (49.33%) AWS
2 107 (47.56%) Azure
3 103 (45.78%) Terraform
4 90 (40.00%) Python
5 87 (38.67%) DevOps
6 84 (37.33%) CI/CD
7 76 (33.78%) Infrastructure as Code
8 61 (27.11%) Kubernetes
9 55 (24.44%) Cloud Security
10 53 (23.56%) Social Skills
11 48 (21.33%) Problem-Solving
12 44 (19.56%) Docker
13 40 (17.78%) Finance
14 39 (17.33%) AWS CloudFormation
14 39 (17.33%) GitHub
15 38 (16.89%) Microsoft
16 37 (16.44%) Linux
17 36 (16.00%) Containerisation
18 34 (15.11%) SQL
19 31 (13.78%) GCP
19 31 (13.78%) Jenkins
20 29 (12.89%) Ansible
20 29 (12.89%) Serverless
20 29 (12.89%) Migration
20 29 (12.89%) PowerShell
21 28 (12.44%) Firewall
22 27 (12.00%) Infrastructure Automation
22 27 (12.00%) Azure DevOps
23 26 (11.56%) IaaS
23 26 (11.56%) GitLab

Cloud Engineer Skill Set
Co-occurring Skills and Capabilities by Category

The follow tables expand on the table above by listing co-occurrences grouped by category. The same employment type, locality and period is covered with up to 20 co-occurrences shown in each of the following categories:

Application Platforms
1 7 (3.11%) Apache Airflow
2 6 (2.67%) Apache Spark
2 6 (2.67%) nginx
3 5 (2.22%) Apache
3 5 (2.22%) SharePoint
4 4 (1.78%) JBoss
4 4 (1.78%) Microsoft Exchange
4 4 (1.78%) OpenStack
5 2 (0.89%) Confluence
5 2 (0.89%) Oracle SOA Suite
6 1 (0.44%) Cloud Foundry
6 1 (0.44%) IIS
6 1 (0.44%) Jupyter
6 1 (0.44%) Tomcat
Applications
1 2 (0.89%) 1Password
1 2 (0.89%) Notion
2 1 (0.44%) Trello
Business Applications
1 2 (0.89%) Payment Gateway
2 1 (0.44%) NetSuite
2 1 (0.44%) SAP HCM
2 1 (0.44%) SAP IBP
2 1 (0.44%) SAP S/4HANA
Cloud Services
1 111 (49.33%) AWS
2 107 (47.56%) Azure
3 39 (17.33%) AWS CloudFormation
3 39 (17.33%) GitHub
4 31 (13.78%) GCP
5 29 (12.89%) Serverless
6 27 (12.00%) Azure DevOps
7 26 (11.56%) IaaS
8 24 (10.67%) AWS Lambda
9 23 (10.22%) PaaS
10 20 (8.89%) Microsoft 365
11 19 (8.44%) Amazon S3
12 18 (8.00%) Entra ID
13 15 (6.67%) Snowflake
14 14 (6.22%) GitHub Actions
15 13 (5.78%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 10 (4.44%) SaaS
17 9 (4.00%) Azure Monitor
17 9 (4.00%) Power Platform
18 8 (3.56%) Azure Sentinel
Communications & Networking
1 28 (12.44%) Firewall
2 16 (7.11%) VPN
3 12 (5.33%) DNS
4 9 (4.00%) Network Security
4 9 (4.00%) TCP/IP
5 7 (3.11%) WAN
6 6 (2.67%) MPLS
7 5 (2.22%) HTTP
7 5 (2.22%) Reverse Proxy
7 5 (2.22%) VSAN
8 3 (1.33%) Wi-Fi
9 2 (0.89%) BGP
9 2 (0.89%) OSPF
10 1 (0.44%) Internet
10 1 (0.44%) IPv6
10 1 (0.44%) LAN
10 1 (0.44%) SAN
10 1 (0.44%) SMS
10 1 (0.44%) TACACS
10 1 (0.44%) Wireless
Database & Business Intelligence
1 19 (8.44%) Data Warehouse
2 16 (7.11%) Amazon Redshift
3 10 (4.44%) DynamoDB
3 10 (4.44%) NoSQL
3 10 (4.44%) PostgreSQL
4 9 (4.00%) Amazon RDS
4 9 (4.00%) Parquet
5 8 (3.56%) Amazon Athena
5 8 (3.56%) Power BI
6 7 (3.11%) Relational Database
7 6 (2.67%) Apache Hive
7 6 (2.67%) Oracle Database
8 5 (2.22%) Amazon Aurora
8 5 (2.22%) Apache Iceberg
8 5 (2.22%) Data Lake
8 5 (2.22%) Elasticsearch
8 5 (2.22%) Hadoop
8 5 (2.22%) Presto
8 5 (2.22%) SQL Server
9 3 (1.33%) RDBMS
Development Applications
1 31 (13.78%) Jenkins
2 26 (11.56%) GitLab
3 13 (5.78%) Git
4 9 (4.00%) JIRA
5 5 (2.22%) Poetry
5 5 (2.22%) TeamCity
6 4 (1.78%) Bitbucket Server
6 4 (1.78%) CA Release Automation
6 4 (1.78%) SonarQube
6 4 (1.78%) Sonatype Nexus
7 2 (0.89%) Artifactory
7 2 (0.89%) Bitbucket
7 2 (0.89%) Visual Studio Code
8 1 (0.44%) Atlassian Bamboo
8 1 (0.44%) Locust
8 1 (0.44%) MLflow
8 1 (0.44%) Postman
General
1 53 (23.56%) Social Skills
2 40 (17.78%) Finance
3 19 (8.44%) Analytical Skills
4 14 (6.22%) Public Sector
5 10 (4.44%) Banking
6 6 (2.67%) Financial Institution
7 5 (2.22%) Law
7 5 (2.22%) Retail
8 4 (1.78%) Documentation Skills
8 4 (1.78%) Marketing
8 4 (1.78%) Presentation Skills
8 4 (1.78%) Telecoms
9 3 (1.33%) Local Government
10 2 (0.89%) Investment Banking
10 2 (0.89%) Pharmaceutical
11 1 (0.44%) Aviation
11 1 (0.44%) Back Office
11 1 (0.44%) Danish Language
11 1 (0.44%) Korean Language
11 1 (0.44%) Retail Banking
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 9 (4.00%) AWS CDK
2 8 (3.56%) Elastic Stack
3 7 (3.11%) Kafka
3 7 (3.11%) Node.js
3 7 (3.11%) React
4 6 (2.67%) AngularJS
5 5 (2.22%) .NET
5 5 (2.22%) CSS
5 5 (2.22%) Dask
5 5 (2.22%) HTML
5 5 (2.22%) LAPP Stack
6 4 (1.78%) Angular 2
6 4 (1.78%) HTML5
6 4 (1.78%) JSON
6 4 (1.78%) Spring Boot
6 4 (1.78%) YAML
7 3 (1.33%) NumPy
7 3 (1.33%) Pandas
7 3 (1.33%) PySpark
7 3 (1.33%) RESTful
Miscellaneous
1 18 (8.00%) Public Cloud
2 17 (7.56%) Cloud Native
3 12 (5.33%) Onboarding
4 9 (4.00%) Hybrid Cloud
5 7 (3.11%) Greenfield Project
5 7 (3.11%) Private Cloud
6 5 (2.22%) Data Centre
6 5 (2.22%) Security Posture
7 4 (1.78%) Management Information System
7 4 (1.78%) Product Ownership
8 3 (1.33%) BYOD
8 3 (1.33%) Hedge funds
9 2 (0.89%) Cloud Security Posture
9 2 (0.89%) Clustering
9 2 (0.89%) Data Protection Act
9 2 (0.89%) Distributed Denial-of-Service
9 2 (0.89%) Replication
10 1 (0.44%) Distributed Systems
10 1 (0.44%) Life Science
10 1 (0.44%) Team-Oriented Environment
Operating Systems
1 37 (16.44%) Linux
2 22 (9.78%) Windows
3 13 (5.78%) Windows Server
4 10 (4.44%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 2 (0.89%) CentOS
5 2 (0.89%) SUSE
5 2 (0.89%) VMS
5 2 (0.89%) Windows Server 2016
6 1 (0.44%) Apple iOS
6 1 (0.44%) Mac OS
6 1 (0.44%) Windows 10
Processes & Methodologies
1 87 (38.67%) DevOps
2 84 (37.33%) CI/CD
3 76 (33.78%) Infrastructure as Code
4 55 (24.44%) Cloud Security
5 48 (21.33%) Problem-Solving
6 36 (16.00%) Containerisation
7 29 (12.89%) Migration
8 27 (12.00%) Infrastructure Automation
9 22 (9.78%) Agile
10 19 (8.44%) Identity Access Management
11 18 (8.00%) Data Pipeline
11 18 (8.00%) High Availability
12 17 (7.56%) Collaborative Working
12 17 (7.56%) Data Engineering
13 16 (7.11%) Computer Science
13 16 (7.11%) Disaster Recovery
14 15 (6.67%) ETL
14 15 (6.67%) Infrastructure Engineering
14 15 (6.67%) Platform Engineering
15 14 (6.22%) Cost Optimisation
Programming Languages
1 90 (40.00%) Python
2 34 (15.11%) SQL
3 29 (12.89%) PowerShell
4 19 (8.44%) Bash
5 14 (6.22%) Java
6 10 (4.44%) Bicep
7 9 (4.00%) TypeScript
8 8 (3.56%) JavaScript
9 4 (1.78%) Perl
10 3 (1.33%) C#
10 3 (1.33%) Ruby
11 2 (0.89%) Scala
11 2 (0.89%) Shell Script
12 1 (0.44%) ABAP
12 1 (0.44%) Apex Code
12 1 (0.44%) C
12 1 (0.44%) Go
12 1 (0.44%) Korn
12 1 (0.44%) PHP
12 1 (0.44%) VBA
Qualifications
1 24 (10.67%) Security Cleared
2 21 (9.33%) Degree
3 20 (8.89%) AWS Certification
3 20 (8.89%) SC Cleared
4 16 (7.11%) Azure Certification
5 14 (6.22%) Computer Science Degree
6 8 (3.56%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
7 7 (3.11%) Cisco Certification
8 5 (2.22%) CCIE
9 4 (1.78%) DV Cleared
10 3 (1.33%) Microsoft Certification
11 2 (0.89%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
12 1 (0.44%) (ISC)2 CCSP
12 1 (0.44%) CCNP
12 1 (0.44%) CCSP
12 1 (0.44%) CISSP
12 1 (0.44%) DBS Check
12 1 (0.44%) OCP
12 1 (0.44%) Oracle Certification
12 1 (0.44%) SANS
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 8 (3.56%) Data Quality
2 5 (2.22%) GDPR
2 5 (2.22%) ISO/IEC 27001
3 4 (1.78%) NIST
4 2 (0.89%) Disclosure Scotland
4 2 (0.89%) NCSC
4 2 (0.89%) QA
5 1 (0.44%) 21 CFR Part 11
5 1 (0.44%) Accessibility
5 1 (0.44%) GxP
5 1 (0.44%) HIPAA
System Software
1 44 (19.56%) Docker
2 16 (7.11%) Active Directory
3 10 (4.44%) Virtual Machines
4 9 (4.00%) vSphere
5 4 (1.78%) VMware Infrastructure
5 4 (1.78%) VMware NSX
6 3 (1.33%) Virtual Desktop
7 1 (0.44%) Apache ZooKeeper
7 1 (0.44%) Ceph
7 1 (0.44%) Hyper-V
Systems Management
1 103 (45.78%) Terraform
2 61 (27.11%) Kubernetes
3 29 (12.89%) Ansible
4 6 (2.67%) Argo
4 6 (2.67%) Microsoft Intune
4 6 (2.67%) Progress Chef
5 4 (1.78%) Kibana
5 4 (1.78%) Puppet
5 4 (1.78%) SCCM
5 4 (1.78%) Single Sign-On
6 3 (1.33%) Prometheus
7 2 (0.89%) Consul
7 2 (0.89%) Grafana
7 2 (0.89%) vRealize
7 2 (0.89%) WSUS
8 1 (0.44%) CASB
8 1 (0.44%) Kustomize
8 1 (0.44%) logstash
8 1 (0.44%) Packer
8 1 (0.44%) ZABBIX
Vendors
1 38 (16.89%) Microsoft
2 18 (8.00%) Google
3 11 (4.89%) Oracle
3 11 (4.89%) Splunk
3 11 (4.89%) VMware
4 10 (4.44%) Cisco
4 10 (4.44%) SAP
5 9 (4.00%) Citrix
5 9 (4.00%) Red Hat
5 9 (4.00%) Zscaler
6 8 (3.56%) CheckPoint
6 8 (3.56%) Fortinet
7 5 (2.22%) F5
8 4 (1.78%) AppDynamics
8 4 (1.78%) Databricks
8 4 (1.78%) SolarWinds
9 3 (1.33%) Confluent
9 3 (1.33%) Netskope
9 3 (1.33%) Salesforce
9 3 (1.33%) ServiceNow