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 24 July 2026.

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

6 months to
24 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 210 312 342
Rank change year-on-year +102 +30 -68
Contract jobs requiring a Cloud Engineer 690 256 259
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 1.31% 0.78% 0.63%
As % of the Job Titles category 1.41% 0.86% 0.68%
Number of daily rates quoted 450 192 176
10th Percentile £399 £402 £386
25th Percentile £450 £434 £450
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £550
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -9.09% -
75th Percentile £617 £575 £625
90th Percentile £688 £638 £675
UK excluding London median daily rate £510 £500 £510
% change year-on-year +2.00% -1.96% -7.27%
Number of hourly rates quoted 24 4 1
10th Percentile £23.20 £33.75 -
25th Percentile £73.06 £39.38 £27.50
Median hourly rate £77.00 £53.75 £30.00
Median % change year-on-year +43.26% +79.17% -
75th Percentile £81.25 £74.38 £32.50
90th Percentile £83.88 £95.75 -
UK excluding London median hourly rate £76.00 - £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 48,872 29,931 38,007
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.61% 91.58% 93.07%
Number of daily rates quoted 29,492 19,056 24,610
10th Percentile £328 £283 £298
25th Percentile £420 £400 £410
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -2.02%
75th Percentile £625 £623 £638
90th Percentile £725 £727 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 3,302 1,437 2,371
10th Percentile £15.81 £13.75 £13.60
25th Percentile £21.25 £17.30 £18.17
Median hourly rate £43.55 £25.15 £40.94
Median % change year-on-year +73.17% -38.57% -6.42%
75th Percentile £67.89 £55.00 £65.00
90th Percentile £80.92 £73.75 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £45.00 £25.15 £42.91
% change year-on-year +78.93% -41.39% +7.28%

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 24 July 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 24 July 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 24 July 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 +87 578 £525 +5.00% 420
UK excluding London +66 339 £510 +2.00% 224
London +49 298 £525 - 223
Work from Home +11 178 £540 +8.00% 169
South East -3 94 £538 +2.38% 47
North of England -8 89 £525 +16.67% 84
Scotland +41 64 £437 -12.60% 13
Midlands -15 51 £525 +10.53% 31
North West -14 49 £531 +25.00% 53
Yorkshire -17 33 £475 -2.56% 25
West Midlands -38 28 £525 +5.00% 19
East Midlands +2 22 £450 -5.26% 12
East of England 0 22 £505 +26.25% 14
South West -33 16 £550 -2.22% 29
North East -35 7 £525 +7.69% 6
Wales -11 5 - - 7

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

For the 6 months to 24 July 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.

1 325 (47.10%) Azure
2 297 (43.04%) Terraform
3 281 (40.72%) AWS
4 254 (36.81%) CI/CD
5 247 (35.80%) Infrastructure as Code
6 212 (30.72%) DevOps
7 182 (26.38%) Python
8 170 (24.64%) Security Cleared
9 165 (23.91%) Kubernetes
10 158 (22.90%) GCP
11 154 (22.32%) Cloud Security
12 147 (21.30%) Microsoft
13 139 (20.14%) PowerShell
14 137 (19.86%) Infrastructure Engineering
15 134 (19.42%) Platform Engineering
16 131 (18.99%) SC Cleared
17 111 (16.09%) Google
18 107 (15.51%) Windows
19 90 (13.04%) GitHub
20 89 (12.90%) Migration
21 87 (12.61%) AI
21 87 (12.61%) Containerisation
22 86 (12.46%) Agile
23 77 (11.16%) Active Directory
24 76 (11.01%) Entra ID
25 75 (10.87%) Observability
26 74 (10.72%) Bash
27 73 (10.58%) DNS
27 73 (10.58%) Firewall
28 72 (10.43%) Docker

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 (1.88%) Microsoft Exchange
2 9 (1.30%) Apache
3 8 (1.16%) Confluence
4 5 (0.72%) Apache Airflow
4 5 (0.72%) SharePoint
5 4 (0.58%) Apache Spark
5 4 (0.58%) nginx
6 3 (0.43%) IIS
6 3 (0.43%) Tomcat
7 2 (0.29%) CloudStack
7 2 (0.29%) OpenStack
8 1 (0.14%) Apache Pulsar
8 1 (0.14%) Traefik
Applications
1 1 (0.14%) Chatbot
Business Applications
1 2 (0.29%) Aladdin
Cloud Services
1 325 (47.10%) Azure
2 281 (40.72%) AWS
3 158 (22.90%) GCP
4 90 (13.04%) GitHub
5 76 (11.01%) Entra ID
6 63 (9.13%) Serverless
7 57 (8.26%) GitHub Actions
8 49 (7.10%) Azure AKS
9 45 (6.52%) Azure DevOps
10 42 (6.09%) AWS CloudFormation
11 41 (5.94%) Amazon S3
12 40 (5.80%) AWS Lambda
13 39 (5.65%) IaaS
14 37 (5.36%) Google Kubernetes Engine
15 36 (5.22%) Virtual Private Cloud
16 35 (5.07%) Amazon EC2
16 35 (5.07%) Amazon EKS
17 33 (4.78%) PaaS
18 30 (4.35%) Amazon CloudWatch
18 30 (4.35%) Amazon ECS
Communications & Networking
1 73 (10.58%) DNS
1 73 (10.58%) Firewall
2 39 (5.65%) VPN
3 29 (4.20%) Network Security
4 16 (2.32%) DHCP
5 15 (2.17%) WAN
6 14 (2.03%) TCP/IP
7 8 (1.16%) Internet
8 6 (0.87%) SD-WAN
8 6 (0.87%) VLAN
9 5 (0.72%) BGP
9 5 (0.72%) Reverse Proxy
9 5 (0.72%) SSL
10 4 (0.58%) LAN
10 4 (0.58%) SAN
11 3 (0.43%) OSPF
11 3 (0.43%) SMTP
11 3 (0.43%) Software-Defined Networking
11 3 (0.43%) VSAN
11 3 (0.43%) Wireless
Database & Business Intelligence
1 25 (3.62%) SQL Server
2 16 (2.32%) Amazon RDS
3 14 (2.03%) PostgreSQL
4 11 (1.59%) BigQuery
5 10 (1.45%) Amazon Athena
5 10 (1.45%) DynamoDB
6 6 (0.87%) Azure SQL Database
7 5 (0.72%) Amazon Redshift
7 5 (0.72%) Data Lake
7 5 (0.72%) Oracle Database
8 3 (0.43%) Amazon QuickSight
8 3 (0.43%) Big Data
8 3 (0.43%) MySQL
8 3 (0.43%) Oracle Database 12c
8 3 (0.43%) Oracle Exadata
8 3 (0.43%) Relational Database
9 2 (0.29%) Elasticsearch
9 2 (0.29%) Flink
9 2 (0.29%) Looker
9 2 (0.29%) Redis
Development Applications
1 51 (7.39%) Jenkins
2 48 (6.96%) GitLab
3 37 (5.36%) Git
4 19 (2.75%) JIRA
5 9 (1.30%) Artifactory
6 5 (0.72%) Bitbucket
6 5 (0.72%) Claude Code
7 3 (0.43%) Selenium
7 3 (0.43%) Team Foundation Server
8 2 (0.29%) Atlassian Bamboo
8 2 (0.29%) Cypress.io
8 2 (0.29%) Liquibase
8 2 (0.29%) Robot Framework
8 2 (0.29%) SonarQube
9 1 (0.14%) Burp Suite
9 1 (0.14%) CircleCI
9 1 (0.14%) Gatling
9 1 (0.14%) RStudio
9 1 (0.14%) sqlmap
9 1 (0.14%) TestRail
General
1 90 (13.04%) Finance
2 80 (11.59%) Social Skills
3 63 (9.13%) Public Sector
4 25 (3.62%) Banking
5 22 (3.19%) Analytical Skills
6 11 (1.59%) Documentation Skills
7 9 (1.30%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 8 (1.16%) Investment Banking
9 5 (0.72%) Law
9 5 (0.72%) Pharmaceutical
10 4 (0.58%) Legal
10 4 (0.58%) Local Government
10 4 (0.58%) Retail
11 3 (0.43%) Financial Institution
11 3 (0.43%) Military
11 3 (0.43%) Police
11 3 (0.43%) Telecoms
12 2 (0.29%) Aerospace
12 2 (0.29%) Front Office
12 2 (0.29%) Manufacturing
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 28 (4.06%) REST
2 14 (2.03%) Node.js
3 13 (1.88%) OAuth
3 13 (1.88%) OAuth2
4 11 (1.59%) ARM Templates
5 10 (1.45%) React
6 9 (1.30%) Spring
6 9 (1.30%) Spring Boot
7 8 (1.16%) Model Context Protocol
8 7 (1.01%) AWS CDK
8 7 (1.01%) Kafka
8 7 (1.01%) OpenID
9 6 (0.87%) FastAPI
9 6 (0.87%) Flask
9 6 (0.87%) YAML
10 5 (0.72%) .NET
10 5 (0.72%) Playwright
10 5 (0.72%) PyTorch
10 5 (0.72%) TensorFlow
11 4 (0.58%) Express.js
Miscellaneous
1 128 (18.55%) Cloud Native
2 38 (5.51%) Security Posture
3 33 (4.78%) Hybrid Cloud
4 32 (4.64%) Enterprise Cloud
5 26 (3.77%) Onboarding
6 23 (3.33%) Public Cloud
7 21 (3.04%) Data Centre
8 19 (2.75%) Enterprise Software
9 17 (2.46%) Distributed Systems
10 16 (2.32%) Cloud Security Posture
11 14 (2.03%) Management Information System
12 9 (1.30%) Linux Command Line
12 9 (1.30%) Self-Motivation
13 8 (1.16%) Data Protection Act
13 8 (1.16%) Product Ownership
14 7 (1.01%) Legacy Systems
15 6 (0.87%) AI Agents
16 5 (0.72%) PKI
16 5 (0.72%) Private Cloud
17 4 (0.58%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 107 (15.51%) Windows
2 67 (9.71%) Linux
3 52 (7.54%) Windows Server
4 28 (4.06%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 9 (1.30%) Windows Server 2019
6 8 (1.16%) Ubuntu
7 3 (0.43%) CentOS
7 3 (0.43%) VMS
8 2 (0.29%) Windows Server 2012
9 1 (0.14%) Mac OS
Processes & Methodologies
1 254 (36.81%) CI/CD
2 247 (35.80%) Infrastructure as Code
3 212 (30.72%) DevOps
4 154 (22.32%) Cloud Security
5 137 (19.86%) Infrastructure Engineering
6 134 (19.42%) Platform Engineering
7 89 (12.90%) Migration
8 87 (12.61%) AI
8 87 (12.61%) Containerisation
9 86 (12.46%) Agile
10 75 (10.87%) Observability
11 55 (7.97%) Infrastructure Automation
11 55 (7.97%) Software Engineering
12 54 (7.83%) Technical Leadership
13 53 (7.68%) Problem-Solving
14 49 (7.10%) Continuous Improvement
15 43 (6.23%) Deployment Automation
15 43 (6.23%) DevSecOps
15 43 (6.23%) Mentoring
16 39 (5.65%) Change Management
Programming Languages
1 182 (26.38%) Python
2 139 (20.14%) PowerShell
3 74 (10.72%) Bash
4 60 (8.70%) SQL
5 58 (8.41%) Bicep
6 34 (4.93%) Java
7 18 (2.61%) C#
8 13 (1.88%) JavaScript
9 11 (1.59%) Shell Script
10 10 (1.45%) Go
11 9 (1.30%) TypeScript
12 5 (0.72%) Groovy
13 2 (0.29%) Kusto Query Language
13 2 (0.29%) R
13 2 (0.29%) Ruby
13 2 (0.29%) Scala
14 1 (0.14%) Apex Code
14 1 (0.14%) Cypher
14 1 (0.14%) Kotlin
14 1 (0.14%) Perl
Qualifications
1 170 (24.64%) Security Cleared
2 131 (18.99%) SC Cleared
3 51 (7.39%) DV Cleared
4 48 (6.96%) AWS Certification
5 46 (6.67%) Azure Certification
6 24 (3.48%) Degree
7 17 (2.46%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
8 15 (2.17%) CISSP
8 15 (2.17%) Microsoft Certification
9 11 (1.59%) Cisco Certification
10 8 (1.16%) BPSS Clearance
11 7 (1.01%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
11 7 (1.01%) CCNP
11 7 (1.01%) Computer Science Degree
12 6 (0.87%) MCSE
13 4 (0.58%) (ISC)2 CCSP
13 4 (0.58%) CCIE
13 4 (0.58%) CISM
14 3 (0.43%) AWS Certified SysOps Administrator
14 3 (0.43%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 12 (1.74%) Data Quality
2 10 (1.45%) ISO/IEC 27001
2 10 (1.45%) NIST
2 10 (1.45%) QA
3 8 (1.16%) NCSC
4 4 (0.58%) Cyber Essentials
5 3 (0.43%) Disclosure Scotland
5 3 (0.43%) GDPR
6 2 (0.29%) PCI DSS
6 2 (0.29%) SLA
7 1 (0.14%) Accessibility
7 1 (0.14%) Actionable Recommendations
7 1 (0.14%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
7 1 (0.14%) Government Security Classifications
7 1 (0.14%) GRC
7 1 (0.14%) SOC 2
7 1 (0.14%) WCAG
System Software
1 77 (11.16%) Active Directory
2 72 (10.43%) Docker
3 34 (4.93%) VMware Infrastructure
4 25 (3.62%) Virtual Machines
5 24 (3.48%) VMware ESXi
6 21 (3.04%) VMware NSX
7 17 (2.46%) vSphere
8 15 (2.17%) Virtual Desktop
9 12 (1.74%) Hyper-V
9 12 (1.74%) vCloud
10 7 (1.01%) Squid
11 4 (0.58%) Firmware
12 3 (0.43%) Ceph
12 3 (0.43%) Dovecot
12 3 (0.43%) NFS
12 3 (0.43%) Postfix
13 2 (0.29%) KVM
13 2 (0.29%) Virtual Servers
Systems Management
1 297 (43.04%) Terraform
2 165 (23.91%) Kubernetes
3 50 (7.25%) Ansible
4 24 (3.48%) Grafana
5 23 (3.33%) Prometheus
6 20 (2.90%) Single Sign-On
6 20 (2.90%) vCenter Server
7 19 (2.75%) Progress Chef
8 18 (2.61%) Microsoft Intune
8 18 (2.61%) SCOM
9 15 (2.17%) Puppet
10 9 (1.30%) Istio
11 8 (1.16%) Packer
12 7 (1.01%) Argo
13 6 (0.87%) Cilium
14 4 (0.58%) HAProxy
14 4 (0.58%) Suricata
14 4 (0.58%) VxRail
15 3 (0.43%) Salt
15 3 (0.43%) vRealize
Vendors
1 147 (21.30%) Microsoft
2 111 (16.09%) Google
3 54 (7.83%) VMware
4 27 (3.91%) Oracle
5 17 (2.46%) Red Hat
5 17 (2.46%) Zscaler
6 16 (2.32%) Okta
7 15 (2.17%) ServiceNow
8 13 (1.88%) Palo Alto
9 10 (1.45%) Cisco
9 10 (1.45%) Dynatrace
9 10 (1.45%) Splunk
10 9 (1.30%) CrowdStrike
10 9 (1.30%) Salesforce
11 8 (1.16%) BeyondTrust
11 8 (1.16%) Databricks
11 8 (1.16%) OpenAI
12 7 (1.01%) Broadcom
12 7 (1.01%) SolarWinds
13 6 (0.87%) Fortinet