Cloud Engineer Contract Job Trends

Cloud Engineer
UK

The median Cloud Engineer daily rate in the UK is £513, according to job vacancies posted in the 6 months leading up to 14 September 2026.

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

6 months to
14 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 194 318 329
Rank change year-on-year +124 +11 -68
Contract jobs requiring a Cloud Engineer 781 251 248
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 1.44% 0.77% 0.65%
As % of the Job Titles category 1.56% 0.84% 0.69%
Number of daily rates quoted 515 182 153
10th Percentile £406 £400 £400
25th Percentile £450 £447 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £500 £551
Median % change year-on-year +2.50% -9.26% +0.18%
75th Percentile £588 £575 £638
90th Percentile £675 £638 £698
UK excluding London median daily rate £510 £500 £550
% change year-on-year +2.00% -9.09% +4.76%
Number of hourly rates quoted 30 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 £81.63 £110.00 -
UK excluding London median hourly rate £70.00 - -

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 49,990 29,768 35,726
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.35% 91.07% 93.04%
Number of daily rates quoted 29,655 18,799 22,146
10th Percentile £325 £278 £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 £620 £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 3,750 1,555 1,711
10th Percentile £14.59 £13.69 £14.73
25th Percentile £20.27 £17.00 £20.50
Median hourly rate £42.00 £25.15 £43.00
Median % change year-on-year +67.00% -41.51% -1.71%
75th Percentile £67.50 £51.72 £65.00
90th Percentile £78.75 £70.00 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £42.50 £25.15 £45.00
% change year-on-year +68.99% -44.11% +8.43%

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 14 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 14 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 14 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 +113 677 £525 +5.00% 971
UK excluding London +109 431 £510 +2.00% 470
London +53 299 £525 +2.44% 572
Work from Home +24 192 £540 +8.00% 451
North of England +17 134 £513 +13.89% 122
South East +30 130 £538 +7.50% 95
North West +11 81 £525 +18.31% 66
Midlands +10 71 £500 -7.41% 49
Scotland +19 56 £447 -18.73% 84
Yorkshire +1 45 £450 -16.28% 45
East Midlands +13 39 £488 +2.63% 19
West Midlands -20 31 £525 -4.55% 30
East of England -14 18 £475 -2.06% 35
South West -37 16 £575 +4.55% 56
North East -36 8 £525 +14.13% 11
Wales -6 7 - - 8

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

For the 6 months to 14 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.

1 369 (47.25%) Azure
2 307 (39.31%) Terraform
3 273 (34.96%) Infrastructure as Code
4 268 (34.31%) AWS
5 265 (33.93%) CI/CD
6 207 (26.50%) DevOps
7 206 (26.38%) Security Cleared
8 205 (26.25%) Kubernetes
9 192 (24.58%) Python
10 179 (22.92%) Microsoft
11 174 (22.28%) Cloud Security
12 165 (21.13%) GCP
13 160 (20.49%) PowerShell
14 157 (20.10%) Infrastructure Engineering
15 154 (19.72%) Platform Engineering
16 148 (18.95%) SC Cleared
17 119 (15.24%) Windows
18 112 (14.34%) Entra ID
19 110 (14.08%) Google
20 104 (13.32%) AI
21 101 (12.93%) Active Directory
22 93 (11.91%) Migration
23 91 (11.65%) Agile
23 91 (11.65%) Containerisation
24 88 (11.27%) Observability
25 85 (10.88%) GitHub
26 84 (10.76%) DNS
27 83 (10.63%) Firewall
28 82 (10.50%) Bash
28 82 (10.50%) 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 15 (1.92%) Microsoft Exchange
2 11 (1.41%) Apache
3 8 (1.02%) Apache Airflow
3 8 (1.02%) SharePoint
4 6 (0.77%) Confluence
5 3 (0.38%) IIS
5 3 (0.38%) nginx
5 3 (0.38%) 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
1 369 (47.25%) Azure
2 268 (34.31%) AWS
3 165 (21.13%) GCP
4 112 (14.34%) Entra ID
5 85 (10.88%) GitHub
6 55 (7.04%) Azure DevOps
7 54 (6.91%) GitHub Actions
8 53 (6.79%) Serverless
9 49 (6.27%) IaaS
10 46 (5.89%) AWS CloudFormation
11 40 (5.12%) AWS Lambda
11 40 (5.12%) Azure Monitor
12 39 (4.99%) Azure AKS
12 39 (4.99%) Google Kubernetes Engine
13 36 (4.61%) PaaS
14 35 (4.48%) Microsoft 365
15 34 (4.35%) Amazon EKS
16 33 (4.23%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 31 (3.97%) Amazon EC2
18 30 (3.84%) Amazon S3
Communications & Networking
1 84 (10.76%) DNS
2 83 (10.63%) Firewall
3 42 (5.38%) Network Security
4 38 (4.87%) VPN
5 21 (2.69%) DHCP
6 18 (2.30%) WAN
7 16 (2.05%) TCP/IP
8 12 (1.54%) Internet
9 8 (1.02%) VLAN
10 7 (0.90%) SD-WAN
11 6 (0.77%) VSAN
12 5 (0.64%) LAN
12 5 (0.64%) SSL
12 5 (0.64%) Wireless
13 4 (0.51%) BGP
13 4 (0.51%) Kerberos
13 4 (0.51%) NGFW
13 4 (0.51%) OSPF
14 3 (0.38%) Reverse Proxy
14 3 (0.38%) tcpdump
Database & Business Intelligence
1 26 (3.33%) SQL Server
2 19 (2.43%) Amazon RDS
3 17 (2.18%) PostgreSQL
4 11 (1.41%) BigQuery
5 10 (1.28%) Data Lake
6 8 (1.02%) Oracle Exadata
7 7 (0.90%) DynamoDB
8 6 (0.77%) NoSQL
9 5 (0.64%) Amazon Athena
9 5 (0.64%) Oracle Database
10 4 (0.51%) Azure SQL Database
11 3 (0.38%) Flink
11 3 (0.38%) Looker
11 3 (0.38%) Metadata
11 3 (0.38%) MongoDB
11 3 (0.38%) MySQL
11 3 (0.38%) Oracle Database 12c
12 2 (0.26%) Amazon QuickSight
12 2 (0.26%) Elasticsearch
12 2 (0.26%) Relational Database
Development Applications
1 55 (7.04%) GitLab
2 47 (6.02%) Jenkins
3 39 (4.99%) Git
4 18 (2.30%) JIRA
5 8 (1.02%) Artifactory
6 7 (0.90%) Claude Code
7 5 (0.64%) Bitbucket
8 3 (0.38%) Selenium
8 3 (0.38%) 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%) CircleCI
10 1 (0.13%) JUnit
10 1 (0.13%) Spinnaker
10 1 (0.13%) TestRail
General
1 95 (12.16%) Finance
2 78 (9.99%) Social Skills
3 74 (9.48%) Public Sector
4 31 (3.97%) Analytical Skills
5 25 (3.20%) Banking
6 9 (1.15%) Inclusion and Diversity
6 9 (1.15%) Manufacturing
7 7 (0.90%) Documentation Skills
7 7 (0.90%) Legal
8 6 (0.77%) Investment Banking
9 5 (0.64%) Law
9 5 (0.64%) Local Government
10 4 (0.51%) Pharmaceutical
10 4 (0.51%) Presentation Skills
11 3 (0.38%) Aerospace
11 3 (0.38%) Digital Health
11 3 (0.38%) Digital Healthcare
11 3 (0.38%) Front Office
11 3 (0.38%) Police
11 3 (0.38%) Retail
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 307 (39.31%) Terraform
2 25 (3.20%) REST
3 18 (2.30%) ARM Templates
4 14 (1.79%) Kafka
5 11 (1.41%) Spring
5 11 (1.41%) Spring Boot
6 10 (1.28%) OAuth
6 10 (1.28%) OAuth2
7 9 (1.15%) Node.js
8 8 (1.02%) AWS CDK
8 8 (1.02%) Keycloak
9 7 (0.90%) .NET
9 7 (0.90%) React
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
1 122 (15.62%) Cloud Native
2 59 (7.55%) Security Posture
3 45 (5.76%) Enterprise Cloud
4 38 (4.87%) Hybrid Cloud
5 31 (3.97%) Onboarding
6 30 (3.84%) Cloud Security Posture
7 24 (3.07%) Enterprise Software
8 21 (2.69%) Management Information System
9 20 (2.56%) Data Centre
9 20 (2.56%) Distributed Systems
10 17 (2.18%) Public Cloud
11 13 (1.66%) Product Ownership
12 12 (1.54%) Private Cloud
13 11 (1.41%) Linux Command Line
14 10 (1.28%) PKI
15 8 (1.02%) AI Agents
16 7 (0.90%) 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 (15.24%) Windows
2 81 (10.37%) Linux
3 62 (7.94%) Windows Server
4 31 (3.97%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 14 (1.79%) Windows Server 2019
6 8 (1.02%) Ubuntu
7 4 (0.51%) VMS
8 3 (0.38%) CentOS
9 2 (0.26%) Windows Server 2012
10 1 (0.13%) Unix
Processes & Methodologies
1 273 (34.96%) Infrastructure as Code
2 265 (33.93%) CI/CD
3 207 (26.50%) DevOps
4 174 (22.28%) Cloud Security
5 157 (20.10%) Infrastructure Engineering
6 154 (19.72%) Platform Engineering
7 104 (13.32%) AI
8 93 (11.91%) Migration
9 91 (11.65%) Agile
9 91 (11.65%) Containerisation
10 88 (11.27%) Observability
11 65 (8.32%) Technical Leadership
12 61 (7.81%) Continuous Improvement
12 61 (7.81%) Software Engineering
13 60 (7.68%) DevSecOps
14 58 (7.43%) Cybersecurity
14 58 (7.43%) Infrastructure Automation
15 57 (7.30%) Problem-Solving
16 51 (6.53%) Deployment Automation
17 49 (6.27%) Change Management
Programming Languages
1 192 (24.58%) Python
2 160 (20.49%) PowerShell
3 82 (10.50%) Bash
4 74 (9.48%) Bicep
5 59 (7.55%) SQL
6 39 (4.99%) Java
7 16 (2.05%) Shell Script
8 15 (1.92%) C#
9 11 (1.41%) JavaScript
10 10 (1.28%) Go
11 4 (0.51%) TypeScript
12 3 (0.38%) C
12 3 (0.38%) Groovy
12 3 (0.38%) 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%) Kotlin
14 1 (0.13%) R
14 1 (0.13%) Ruby
Qualifications
1 206 (26.38%) Security Cleared
2 148 (18.95%) SC Cleared
3 72 (9.22%) DV Cleared
4 46 (5.89%) Azure Certification
5 43 (5.51%) AWS Certification
6 35 (4.48%) Degree
7 23 (2.94%) Microsoft Certification
8 18 (2.30%) CISSP
9 12 (1.54%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
10 9 (1.15%) MCSE
11 8 (1.02%) BPSS Clearance
11 8 (1.02%) Cisco Certification
12 7 (0.90%) Computer Science Degree
13 6 (0.77%) CCNP
13 6 (0.77%) CISM
14 5 (0.64%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
14 5 (0.64%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
15 3 (0.38%) CCIE
15 3 (0.38%) CEH
15 3 (0.38%) DBS Check
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 14 (1.79%) ISO/IEC 27001
2 13 (1.66%) Data Quality
3 11 (1.41%) NIST
3 11 (1.41%) QA
4 10 (1.28%) NCSC
5 7 (0.90%) Cyber Essentials
6 6 (0.77%) GDPR
7 3 (0.38%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
7 3 (0.38%) 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
1 101 (12.93%) Active Directory
2 82 (10.50%) Docker
3 50 (6.40%) VMware Infrastructure
4 33 (4.23%) Virtual Machines
4 33 (4.23%) VMware ESXi
5 27 (3.46%) VMware NSX
6 21 (2.69%) Virtual Desktop
6 21 (2.69%) vSphere
7 15 (1.92%) vCloud
8 12 (1.54%) Hyper-V
9 7 (0.90%) Squid
10 4 (0.51%) Firmware
11 3 (0.38%) Ceph
11 3 (0.38%) Dovecot
11 3 (0.38%) NFS
11 3 (0.38%) Postfix
12 2 (0.26%) KVM
12 2 (0.26%) Virtual Servers
13 1 (0.13%) BitLocker
13 1 (0.13%) IAG
Systems Management
1 205 (26.25%) Kubernetes
2 52 (6.66%) Ansible
3 30 (3.84%) vCenter Server
4 26 (3.33%) Microsoft Intune
4 26 (3.33%) SCOM
5 23 (2.94%) Grafana
6 21 (2.69%) Prometheus
7 19 (2.43%) Progress Chef
8 16 (2.05%) Single Sign-On
9 14 (1.79%) Puppet
10 10 (1.28%) Istio
11 8 (1.02%) Cilium
12 6 (0.77%) Argo
12 6 (0.77%) Packer
13 5 (0.64%) VxRail
14 4 (0.51%) Suricata
15 3 (0.38%) Active Directory Federation Services
15 3 (0.38%) HAProxy
15 3 (0.38%) Karpenter
15 3 (0.38%) vRealize
Vendors
1 179 (22.92%) Microsoft
2 110 (14.08%) Google
3 75 (9.60%) VMware
4 35 (4.48%) Oracle
5 24 (3.07%) Databricks
6 19 (2.43%) Red Hat
7 17 (2.18%) Okta
8 16 (2.05%) Zscaler
9 14 (1.79%) Palo Alto
10 13 (1.66%) SolarWinds
11 12 (1.54%) Broadcom
11 12 (1.54%) OpenAI
11 12 (1.54%) Splunk
12 11 (1.41%) ServiceNow
13 10 (1.28%) Cisco
14 9 (1.15%) CrowdStrike
14 9 (1.15%) Dynatrace
14 9 (1.15%) Salesforce
15 8 (1.02%) BeyondTrust
15 8 (1.02%) New Relic