Cloud Engineer Contract Job Trends

Cloud Engineer
UK

The median Cloud Engineer daily rate in the UK is £516, according to job vacancies posted in the 6 months leading up to 11 September 2026.

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

6 months to
11 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 197 323 328
Rank change year-on-year +126 +5 -71
Contract jobs requiring a Cloud Engineer 779 254 250
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 1.43% 0.77% 0.65%
As % of the Job Titles category 1.55% 0.84% 0.70%
Number of daily rates quoted 512 185 156
10th Percentile £406 £401 £393
25th Percentile £450 £438 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £516 £500 £551
Median % change year-on-year +3.25% -9.17% +0.09%
75th Percentile £590 £575 £628
90th Percentile £675 £638 £694
UK excluding London median daily rate £510 £500 £550
% change year-on-year +2.00% -9.09% +4.76%
Number of hourly rates quoted 29 7 0
10th Percentile - £29.00 -
25th Percentile £23.20 £29.50 -
Median hourly rate £77.00 £45.00 -
Median % change year-on-year +71.11% - -
75th Percentile £81.25 £86.25 -
90th Percentile £82.00 £110.00 -
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 50,390 30,066 35,884
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.29% 91.06% 93.05%
Number of daily rates quoted 29,936 18,964 22,304
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% -0.94%
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 3,743 1,564 1,744
10th Percentile £14.56 £13.69 £14.73
25th Percentile £20.07 £17.06 £20.50
Median hourly rate £42.00 £25.15 £43.00
Median % change year-on-year +67.00% -41.51% +1.18%
75th Percentile £67.60 £52.50 £65.00
90th Percentile £79.00 £70.16 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £42.50 £25.15 £45.00
% change year-on-year +68.99% -44.11% +12.50%

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 11 September 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 11 September 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 11 September 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 +109 675 £525 +5.00% 578
UK excluding London +110 433 £510 +2.00% 296
London +55 297 £525 +2.44% 335
Work from Home +15 190 £540 +8.00% 193
North of England +22 132 £513 +13.89% 84
South East +26 130 £538 +7.50% 64
North West +18 80 £525 +20.00% 49
Midlands +9 71 £500 -7.41% 39
Scotland +26 57 £447 -18.73% 50
Yorkshire -6 44 £450 -10.00% 27
East Midlands +16 38 £488 +2.63% 20
West Midlands -20 32 £525 -4.55% 19
East of England -14 20 £488 +0.52% 20
South West -37 17 £575 +4.55% 26
North East -43 8 £525 +14.13% 8
Wales -8 7 - - 2

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

For the 6 months to 11 September 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.

1 368 (47.24%) Azure
2 310 (39.79%) Terraform
3 273 (35.04%) Infrastructure as Code
4 270 (34.66%) AWS
5 265 (34.02%) CI/CD
6 211 (27.09%) DevOps
7 206 (26.44%) Kubernetes
8 203 (26.06%) Security Cleared
9 192 (24.65%) Python
10 178 (22.85%) Microsoft
11 176 (22.59%) Cloud Security
12 167 (21.44%) GCP
13 160 (20.54%) PowerShell
14 159 (20.41%) Infrastructure Engineering
15 153 (19.64%) Platform Engineering
16 146 (18.74%) SC Cleared
17 119 (15.28%) Windows
18 112 (14.38%) Google
19 110 (14.12%) Entra ID
20 104 (13.35%) AI
21 99 (12.71%) Active Directory
22 92 (11.81%) Migration
23 91 (11.68%) Agile
24 89 (11.42%) Containerisation
25 85 (10.91%) DNS
25 85 (10.91%) Firewall
25 85 (10.91%) GitHub
25 85 (10.91%) Observability
26 82 (10.53%) Docker
27 81 (10.40%) Bash

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 15 (1.93%) Microsoft Exchange
2 11 (1.41%) Apache
3 8 (1.03%) Apache Airflow
3 8 (1.03%) SharePoint
4 6 (0.77%) Confluence
5 3 (0.39%) IIS
5 3 (0.39%) nginx
5 3 (0.39%) Tomcat
6 2 (0.26%) CloudStack
6 2 (0.26%) OpenStack
7 1 (0.13%) Apache Pulsar
7 1 (0.13%) Apache Spark
Applications
1 1 (0.13%) Chatbot
Business Applications
1 1 (0.13%) Aladdin
Cloud Services
1 368 (47.24%) Azure
2 270 (34.66%) AWS
3 167 (21.44%) GCP
4 110 (14.12%) Entra ID
5 85 (10.91%) GitHub
6 55 (7.06%) Azure DevOps
7 54 (6.93%) Serverless
8 53 (6.80%) GitHub Actions
9 48 (6.16%) IaaS
10 47 (6.03%) AWS CloudFormation
11 41 (5.26%) AWS Lambda
12 39 (5.01%) Azure AKS
12 39 (5.01%) Azure Monitor
12 39 (5.01%) Google Kubernetes Engine
13 35 (4.49%) Microsoft 365
13 35 (4.49%) PaaS
14 34 (4.36%) Amazon CloudWatch
14 34 (4.36%) Amazon EKS
15 32 (4.11%) Amazon EC2
16 31 (3.98%) Amazon S3
Communications & Networking
1 85 (10.91%) DNS
1 85 (10.91%) Firewall
2 42 (5.39%) Network Security
3 39 (5.01%) VPN
4 20 (2.57%) DHCP
5 17 (2.18%) WAN
6 15 (1.93%) TCP/IP
7 12 (1.54%) Internet
8 7 (0.90%) VLAN
9 6 (0.77%) SD-WAN
9 6 (0.77%) VSAN
10 5 (0.64%) LAN
10 5 (0.64%) SSL
11 4 (0.51%) Kerberos
11 4 (0.51%) NGFW
11 4 (0.51%) Wireless
12 3 (0.39%) BGP
12 3 (0.39%) OSPF
12 3 (0.39%) SAN
12 3 (0.39%) SMTP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 26 (3.34%) SQL Server
2 20 (2.57%) Amazon RDS
3 18 (2.31%) PostgreSQL
4 11 (1.41%) BigQuery
5 10 (1.28%) Data Lake
6 8 (1.03%) Oracle Exadata
7 7 (0.90%) DynamoDB
8 6 (0.77%) NoSQL
9 5 (0.64%) Amazon Athena
9 5 (0.64%) Azure SQL Database
9 5 (0.64%) Oracle Database
10 3 (0.39%) Flink
10 3 (0.39%) Looker
10 3 (0.39%) Metadata
10 3 (0.39%) MongoDB
10 3 (0.39%) MySQL
10 3 (0.39%) Oracle Database 12c
11 2 (0.26%) Big Data
11 2 (0.26%) Data Warehouse
11 2 (0.26%) Redis
Development Applications
1 56 (7.19%) GitLab
2 48 (6.16%) Jenkins
3 40 (5.13%) Git
4 18 (2.31%) JIRA
5 8 (1.03%) Artifactory
6 7 (0.90%) Claude Code
7 5 (0.64%) Bitbucket
8 3 (0.39%) Selenium
8 3 (0.39%) Terragrunt
9 2 (0.26%) Atlassian Bamboo
9 2 (0.26%) Cypress.io
9 2 (0.26%) Gatling
9 2 (0.26%) JMeter
9 2 (0.26%) Octopus Deploy
9 2 (0.26%) Robot Framework
9 2 (0.26%) SonarQube
10 1 (0.13%) Burp Suite
10 1 (0.13%) eggPlant
10 1 (0.13%) Metasploit
10 1 (0.13%) sqlmap
General
1 95 (12.20%) Finance
2 79 (10.14%) Social Skills
3 72 (9.24%) Public Sector
4 31 (3.98%) Analytical Skills
5 25 (3.21%) Banking
6 10 (1.28%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 9 (1.16%) Manufacturing
8 7 (0.90%) Documentation Skills
8 7 (0.90%) Legal
9 6 (0.77%) Investment Banking
10 5 (0.64%) Law
10 5 (0.64%) Local Government
11 4 (0.51%) Pharmaceutical
11 4 (0.51%) Presentation Skills
12 3 (0.39%) Aerospace
12 3 (0.39%) Digital Health
12 3 (0.39%) Digital Healthcare
12 3 (0.39%) Front Office
12 3 (0.39%) Military
12 3 (0.39%) Police
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 310 (39.79%) Terraform
2 25 (3.21%) REST
3 17 (2.18%) ARM Templates
4 14 (1.80%) Kafka
5 11 (1.41%) Spring
5 11 (1.41%) Spring Boot
6 10 (1.28%) OAuth
6 10 (1.28%) OAuth2
7 9 (1.16%) Node.js
8 8 (1.03%) AWS CDK
8 8 (1.03%) Keycloak
8 8 (1.03%) React
9 7 (0.90%) .NET
9 7 (0.90%) YAML
10 6 (0.77%) FastAPI
10 6 (0.77%) Flask
11 5 (0.64%) Azure Blueprints
11 5 (0.64%) OpenID
11 5 (0.64%) PySpark
12 4 (0.51%) TensorFlow
Miscellaneous
1 124 (15.92%) Cloud Native
2 58 (7.45%) Security Posture
3 45 (5.78%) Enterprise Cloud
4 38 (4.88%) Hybrid Cloud
5 31 (3.98%) Onboarding
6 30 (3.85%) Cloud Security Posture
7 25 (3.21%) Enterprise Software
8 21 (2.70%) Management Information System
9 20 (2.57%) Data Centre
9 20 (2.57%) Distributed Systems
10 17 (2.18%) Public Cloud
11 13 (1.67%) Product Ownership
12 12 (1.54%) Private Cloud
13 11 (1.41%) Linux Command Line
14 10 (1.28%) PKI
15 8 (1.03%) AI Agents
15 8 (1.03%) Data Protection Act
16 7 (0.90%) Legacy Systems
17 6 (0.77%) Distributed Architecture
18 4 (0.51%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 119 (15.28%) Windows
2 80 (10.27%) Linux
3 62 (7.96%) Windows Server
4 31 (3.98%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 14 (1.80%) Windows Server 2019
6 8 (1.03%) Ubuntu
7 4 (0.51%) VMS
8 3 (0.39%) CentOS
9 2 (0.26%) Windows Server 2012
10 1 (0.13%) Unix
Processes & Methodologies
1 273 (35.04%) Infrastructure as Code
2 265 (34.02%) CI/CD
3 211 (27.09%) DevOps
4 176 (22.59%) Cloud Security
5 159 (20.41%) Infrastructure Engineering
6 153 (19.64%) Platform Engineering
7 104 (13.35%) AI
8 92 (11.81%) Migration
9 91 (11.68%) Agile
10 89 (11.42%) Containerisation
11 85 (10.91%) Observability
12 65 (8.34%) Technical Leadership
13 60 (7.70%) Continuous Improvement
13 60 (7.70%) Software Engineering
14 59 (7.57%) DevSecOps
15 58 (7.45%) Infrastructure Automation
15 58 (7.45%) Problem-Solving
16 56 (7.19%) Cybersecurity
17 52 (6.68%) Deployment Automation
18 50 (6.42%) Change Management
Programming Languages
1 192 (24.65%) Python
2 160 (20.54%) PowerShell
3 81 (10.40%) Bash
4 76 (9.76%) Bicep
5 62 (7.96%) SQL
6 39 (5.01%) Java
7 16 (2.05%) Shell Script
8 15 (1.93%) C#
9 12 (1.54%) JavaScript
10 10 (1.28%) Go
11 4 (0.51%) TypeScript
12 3 (0.39%) C
12 3 (0.39%) Groovy
12 3 (0.39%) Scala
13 2 (0.26%) 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
1 203 (26.06%) Security Cleared
2 146 (18.74%) SC Cleared
3 71 (9.11%) DV Cleared
4 45 (5.78%) Azure Certification
5 44 (5.65%) AWS Certification
6 34 (4.36%) Degree
7 21 (2.70%) Microsoft Certification
8 18 (2.31%) CISSP
9 13 (1.67%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
10 9 (1.16%) Cisco Certification
10 9 (1.16%) MCSE
11 8 (1.03%) BPSS Clearance
12 7 (0.90%) CCNP
12 7 (0.90%) Computer Science Degree
13 6 (0.77%) CISM
14 5 (0.64%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
14 5 (0.64%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
15 4 (0.51%) CCIE
16 3 (0.39%) CEH
16 3 (0.39%) DBS Check
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 15 (1.93%) ISO/IEC 27001
2 13 (1.67%) Data Quality
3 12 (1.54%) NIST
4 10 (1.28%) NCSC
4 10 (1.28%) QA
5 7 (0.90%) Cyber Essentials
6 5 (0.64%) GDPR
7 3 (0.39%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
7 3 (0.39%) Disclosure Scotland
8 2 (0.26%) PCI DSS
8 2 (0.26%) SLA
9 1 (0.13%) Accessibility
9 1 (0.13%) Actionable Recommendations
9 1 (0.13%) Government Security Classifications
9 1 (0.13%) GRC
9 1 (0.13%) WCAG
System Software
1 99 (12.71%) Active Directory
2 82 (10.53%) Docker
3 50 (6.42%) VMware Infrastructure
4 33 (4.24%) VMware ESXi
5 32 (4.11%) Virtual Machines
6 27 (3.47%) VMware NSX
7 22 (2.82%) Virtual Desktop
8 21 (2.70%) vSphere
9 15 (1.93%) vCloud
10 12 (1.54%) Hyper-V
11 7 (0.90%) Squid
12 4 (0.51%) Firmware
13 3 (0.39%) Ceph
13 3 (0.39%) Dovecot
13 3 (0.39%) NFS
13 3 (0.39%) Postfix
14 2 (0.26%) KVM
14 2 (0.26%) Virtual Servers
15 1 (0.13%) BitLocker
15 1 (0.13%) IAG
Systems Management
1 206 (26.44%) Kubernetes
2 53 (6.80%) Ansible
3 30 (3.85%) vCenter Server
4 26 (3.34%) Microsoft Intune
4 26 (3.34%) SCOM
5 22 (2.82%) Grafana
6 20 (2.57%) Prometheus
7 19 (2.44%) Progress Chef
8 16 (2.05%) Single Sign-On
9 14 (1.80%) Puppet
10 10 (1.28%) Istio
11 8 (1.03%) Cilium
12 6 (0.77%) Argo
12 6 (0.77%) Packer
13 5 (0.64%) VxRail
14 4 (0.51%) Suricata
15 3 (0.39%) Active Directory Federation Services
15 3 (0.39%) HAProxy
15 3 (0.39%) Karpenter
15 3 (0.39%) vRealize
Vendors
1 178 (22.85%) Microsoft
2 112 (14.38%) Google
3 75 (9.63%) VMware
4 34 (4.36%) Oracle
5 24 (3.08%) Databricks
6 19 (2.44%) Red Hat
7 17 (2.18%) Okta
8 16 (2.05%) Zscaler
9 13 (1.67%) Palo Alto
9 13 (1.67%) SolarWinds
10 12 (1.54%) Broadcom
10 12 (1.54%) OpenAI
10 12 (1.54%) ServiceNow
10 12 (1.54%) Splunk
11 10 (1.28%) Cisco
12 9 (1.16%) CrowdStrike
12 9 (1.16%) Salesforce
13 8 (1.03%) BeyondTrust
13 8 (1.03%) Dynatrace
13 8 (1.03%) New Relic