Cloud Engineer Contract Job Trends

Cloud Engineer
UK

The median Cloud Engineer daily rate in the UK is £523, according to job vacancies posted in the 6 months leading up to 16 February 2026.

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

6 months to
16 Feb 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 251 306 263
Rank change year-on-year +55 -43 -7
Contract jobs requiring a Cloud Engineer 434 231 394
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 1.09% 0.75% 0.88%
As % of the Job Titles category 1.19% 0.81% 0.94%
Number of daily rates quoted 305 154 276
10th Percentile £400 £380 £409
25th Percentile £450 £458 £474
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £523 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -5.00% - -
75th Percentile £613 £644 £625
90th Percentile £725 £698 £700
UK excluding London median daily rate £524 £500 £530
% change year-on-year +4.70% -5.66% +0.95%
Number of hourly rates quoted 4 0 4
10th Percentile - - -
25th Percentile £25.13 - £27.50
Median hourly rate £38.88 - £50.00
75th Percentile £67.81 - £76.94
90th Percentile £93.13 - £84.93
UK excluding London median hourly rate - - £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 36,541 28,512 41,697
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 91.61% 92.94% 93.14%
Number of daily rates quoted 22,964 17,617 27,442
10th Percentile £304 £288 £275
25th Percentile £406 £406 £410
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £614 £638 £638
90th Percentile £720 £738 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £478 £475 £489
% change year-on-year +0.53% -2.86% -2.20%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,238 809 2,311
10th Percentile £14.61 £16.20 £13.13
25th Percentile £18.87 £21.46 £16.30
Median hourly rate £30.00 £33.54 £35.00
Median % change year-on-year -10.55% -4.17% -5.74%
75th Percentile £61.55 £63.75 £60.75
90th Percentile £72.51 £75.00 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £29.60 £32.50 £35.00
% change year-on-year -8.92% -7.14% -

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 16 February 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 16 February 2026.

Hourly rate histogram for Cloud Engineer in the UK

Cloud Engineer
Top 15 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 16 February 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 +40 349 £525 -4.55% 117
UK excluding London +33 195 £524 +4.70% 97
London +12 179 £525 -4.55% 40
Work from Home +19 108 £491 -6.55% 57
North of England -17 62 £500 +11.11% 20
South East -3 42 £500 -16.67% 30
Midlands -30 40 £575 +21.05% 9
Yorkshire -23 39 £513 +24.24% 7
Scotland +32 35 £513 -2.38% 5
West Midlands -22 35 £670 +3.08% 6
North West -14 23 £425 -5.56% 11
South West -11 19 £544 -5.43% 23
East of England -19 10 £438 +37.58% 10
East Midlands -24 5 £575 +26.51% 3
Wales -3 1 £425 +41.67%

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

For the 6 months to 16 February 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.

1 205 (47.24%) AWS
2 189 (43.55%) CI/CD
3 182 (41.94%) Terraform
4 171 (39.40%) Infrastructure as Code
5 170 (39.17%) DevOps
6 167 (38.48%) Azure
7 126 (29.03%) Security Cleared
8 125 (28.80%) Python
9 117 (26.96%) Kubernetes
10 99 (22.81%) GitHub
11 98 (22.58%) GCP
12 87 (20.05%) SC Cleared
13 83 (19.12%) Containerisation
14 75 (17.28%) Agile
14 75 (17.28%) Cloud Security
15 73 (16.82%) Microsoft
16 71 (16.36%) Docker
17 65 (14.98%) Google
18 63 (14.52%) Serverless
19 60 (13.82%) GitHub Actions
20 57 (13.13%) Jenkins
21 51 (11.75%) Infrastructure Automation
21 51 (11.75%) Migration
22 48 (11.06%) GitLab
22 48 (11.06%) Platform Engineering
23 46 (10.60%) PowerShell
24 45 (10.37%) Microservices
25 44 (10.14%) AWS CloudFormation
26 43 (9.91%) Infrastructure Engineering
26 43 (9.91%) Problem-Solving

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 9 (2.07%) Apache Spark
2 5 (1.15%) Apache
3 4 (0.92%) Confluence
3 4 (0.92%) Microsoft Exchange
4 2 (0.46%) Apache Airflow
4 2 (0.46%) nginx
5 1 (0.23%) Apache Superset
5 1 (0.23%) CMS
5 1 (0.23%) Headless CMS
5 1 (0.23%) SAS
5 1 (0.23%) SharePoint
Applications
1 2 (0.46%) Chatbot
Business Applications
1 4 (0.92%) Dynamics CRM
Cloud Services
1 205 (47.24%) AWS
2 167 (38.48%) Azure
3 99 (22.81%) GitHub
4 98 (22.58%) GCP
5 63 (14.52%) Serverless
6 60 (13.82%) GitHub Actions
7 44 (10.14%) AWS CloudFormation
8 39 (8.99%) Entra ID
9 35 (8.06%) Azure DevOps
10 34 (7.83%) PaaS
11 32 (7.37%) Amazon EKS
12 31 (7.14%) Amazon S3
13 28 (6.45%) AWS Lambda
14 27 (6.22%) IaaS
15 26 (5.99%) Google Kubernetes Engine
16 25 (5.76%) Amazon ECS
17 23 (5.30%) Azure AKS
18 17 (3.92%) OCI
19 16 (3.69%) Azure Monitor
20 14 (3.23%) Microsoft 365
Communications & Networking
1 31 (7.14%) Firewall
2 19 (4.38%) Cisco Firepower
2 19 (4.38%) Cisco IOS
2 19 (4.38%) Cisco ISE
2 19 (4.38%) Junos
2 19 (4.38%) Network Security
3 16 (3.69%) VPN
4 12 (2.76%) DNS
5 5 (1.15%) NX-OS
6 4 (0.92%) Software-Defined Networking
7 3 (0.69%) DHCP
7 3 (0.69%) WAN
8 2 (0.46%) BGP
8 2 (0.46%) IPsec
8 2 (0.46%) LAN
8 2 (0.46%) Reverse Proxy
8 2 (0.46%) TCP/IP
8 2 (0.46%) Unified Communications
8 2 (0.46%) VLAN
9 1 (0.23%) WLAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 27 (6.22%) NoSQL
2 22 (5.07%) PostgreSQL
3 10 (2.30%) Amazon Athena
3 10 (2.30%) BigQuery
4 9 (2.07%) DynamoDB
4 9 (2.07%) Power BI
5 7 (1.61%) Amazon RDS
5 7 (1.61%) Elasticsearch
6 6 (1.38%) Data Lake
7 5 (1.15%) Data Warehouse
8 4 (0.92%) Azure SQL Database
8 4 (0.92%) Big Data
8 4 (0.92%) Delta Lake
8 4 (0.92%) Oracle Database
9 3 (0.69%) Amazon Redshift
10 2 (0.46%) OLAP
10 2 (0.46%) OLTP
10 2 (0.46%) Relational Database
10 2 (0.46%) Snowflake Schema
10 2 (0.46%) SQL Server Integration Services
Development Applications
1 57 (13.13%) Jenkins
2 48 (11.06%) GitLab
3 29 (6.68%) Git
4 10 (2.30%) JIRA
5 9 (2.07%) Liquibase
6 3 (0.69%) MLflow
6 3 (0.69%) Postman
6 3 (0.69%) Team Foundation Server
7 2 (0.46%) Bitbucket
7 2 (0.46%) CircleCI
7 2 (0.46%) Sonatype Nexus
7 2 (0.46%) Spinnaker
8 1 (0.23%) Artifactory
8 1 (0.23%) Gemini Tracker
8 1 (0.23%) RStudio
8 1 (0.23%) TeamCity
8 1 (0.23%) Travis CI
8 1 (0.23%) Visual Studio Code
General
1 77 (17.74%) Social Skills
2 65 (14.98%) Finance
3 41 (9.45%) Public Sector
4 32 (7.37%) Banking
5 25 (5.76%) Analytical Skills
6 15 (3.46%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 12 (2.76%) Financial Institution
8 8 (1.84%) Retail
9 7 (1.61%) Aeronautics
10 6 (1.38%) Presentation Skills
10 6 (1.38%) Telecoms
11 5 (1.15%) Aviation
12 4 (0.92%) Documentation Skills
12 4 (0.92%) Pharmaceutical
13 3 (0.69%) Legal
13 3 (0.69%) Local Government
14 2 (0.46%) Billing
14 2 (0.46%) Investment Banking
14 2 (0.46%) Marketing
14 2 (0.46%) Military
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 43 (9.91%) REST
2 25 (5.76%) Elastic Stack
3 24 (5.53%) Node.js
4 19 (4.38%) RESTful
5 13 (3.00%) Kafka
6 12 (2.76%) React
7 10 (2.30%) ARM Templates
7 10 (2.30%) OpenTelemetry
8 9 (2.07%) LangChain
8 9 (2.07%) OpenAPI
8 9 (2.07%) OpenID
8 9 (2.07%) Oracle Fusion
9 8 (1.84%) .NET
9 8 (1.84%) SAML
9 8 (1.84%) SOAP
9 8 (1.84%) Spring
9 8 (1.84%) Spring Boot
10 7 (1.61%) AWS CDK
10 7 (1.61%) Lambda Expressions
10 7 (1.61%) NestJS
Miscellaneous
1 71 (16.36%) Cloud Native
2 39 (8.99%) Public Cloud
3 22 (5.07%) Distributed Systems
4 13 (3.00%) Hybrid Cloud
5 11 (2.53%) Data Centre
6 9 (2.07%) PKI
6 9 (2.07%) Product Ownership
7 6 (1.38%) Security Posture
8 5 (1.15%) Cyber Threat
9 4 (0.92%) Algorithms
9 4 (0.92%) Cloud Security Posture
9 4 (0.92%) Data Protection Act
10 3 (0.69%) AI Agents
10 3 (0.69%) Distributed Computing
10 3 (0.69%) Genomics
10 3 (0.69%) Life Science
10 3 (0.69%) Linux Command Line
10 3 (0.69%) Onboarding
10 3 (0.69%) Replication
10 3 (0.69%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 42 (9.68%) Linux
2 27 (6.22%) Windows
3 19 (4.38%) Windows Server
4 8 (1.84%) Unix
5 4 (0.92%) VMS
6 1 (0.23%) Alpine Linux
6 1 (0.23%) Mac OS
6 1 (0.23%) Ubuntu
Processes & Methodologies
1 189 (43.55%) CI/CD
2 171 (39.40%) Infrastructure as Code
3 170 (39.17%) DevOps
4 83 (19.12%) Containerisation
5 75 (17.28%) Agile
5 75 (17.28%) Cloud Security
6 51 (11.75%) Infrastructure Automation
6 51 (11.75%) Migration
7 48 (11.06%) Platform Engineering
8 45 (10.37%) Microservices
9 43 (9.91%) Infrastructure Engineering
9 43 (9.91%) Problem-Solving
10 40 (9.22%) Cybersecurity
11 38 (8.76%) Continuous Improvement
11 38 (8.76%) Observability
12 37 (8.53%) DevSecOps
13 35 (8.06%) AI
14 31 (7.14%) Software Engineering
15 30 (6.91%) High Availability
16 29 (6.68%) Analytics
Programming Languages
1 125 (28.80%) Python
2 46 (10.60%) PowerShell
3 36 (8.29%) SQL
4 25 (5.76%) Java
5 22 (5.07%) Bash
6 20 (4.61%) Bicep
6 20 (4.61%) Go
7 15 (3.46%) TypeScript
8 9 (2.07%) JavaScript
8 9 (2.07%) Shell Script
9 5 (1.15%) C#
10 4 (0.92%) BeanShell
10 4 (0.92%) Perl
11 3 (0.69%) Ruby
12 2 (0.46%) Groovy
12 2 (0.46%) Kusto Query Language
12 2 (0.46%) PL/SQL
13 1 (0.23%) C
13 1 (0.23%) Cypher
13 1 (0.23%) Kotlin
Qualifications
1 126 (29.03%) Security Cleared
2 87 (20.05%) SC Cleared
3 40 (9.22%) Azure Certification
4 36 (8.29%) DV Cleared
5 33 (7.60%) Degree
6 31 (7.14%) AWS Certification
7 21 (4.84%) Computer Science Degree
8 18 (4.15%) Master's Degree
9 13 (3.00%) Microsoft Certification
10 11 (2.53%) CISSP
11 10 (2.30%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
11 10 (2.30%) BPSS Clearance
12 9 (2.07%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
13 8 (1.84%) Cisco Certification
14 7 (1.61%) CISM
15 6 (1.38%) (ISC)2 CCSP
16 5 (1.15%) CCSP
16 5 (1.15%) TOGAF Certification
17 4 (0.92%) AWS Certified Developer
18 3 (0.69%) SANS
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 15 (3.46%) GDPR
2 12 (2.76%) ISO/IEC 27001
2 12 (2.76%) NIST
3 10 (2.30%) NCSC
4 8 (1.84%) QA
5 6 (1.38%) PCI DSS
6 5 (1.15%) Data Quality
6 5 (1.15%) GRC
7 3 (0.69%) Cyber Essentials
8 2 (0.46%) HIPAA
8 2 (0.46%) SOC 2
9 1 (0.23%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
9 1 (0.23%) FedRAMP
9 1 (0.23%) JSP 440
System Software
1 71 (16.36%) Docker
2 32 (7.37%) Active Directory
3 19 (4.38%) VMware NSX
4 13 (3.00%) Virtual Machines
5 7 (1.61%) Virtual Desktop
6 6 (1.38%) Hyper-V
7 5 (1.15%) Firmware
7 5 (1.15%) VMware Infrastructure
8 2 (0.46%) Virtual Servers
9 1 (0.23%) KVM
9 1 (0.23%) Squid
9 1 (0.23%) vSphere
Systems Management
1 182 (41.94%) Terraform
2 117 (26.96%) Kubernetes
3 38 (8.76%) Ansible
4 32 (7.37%) Grafana
4 32 (7.37%) Prometheus
5 19 (4.38%) vCenter Server
6 16 (3.69%) Istio
7 15 (3.46%) Argo
8 10 (2.30%) Single Sign-On
9 7 (1.61%) Kibana
9 7 (1.61%) logstash
10 4 (0.92%) Microsoft Intune
10 4 (0.92%) Podman
11 3 (0.69%) Proxmox
12 2 (0.46%) Consul
12 2 (0.46%) Packer
12 2 (0.46%) Puppet
13 1 (0.23%) PaperCut
13 1 (0.23%) Progress Chef
13 1 (0.23%) Salt
Vendors
1 73 (16.82%) Microsoft
2 65 (14.98%) Google
3 21 (4.84%) Cisco
3 21 (4.84%) Splunk
4 20 (4.61%) Juniper
5 19 (4.38%) Oracle
5 19 (4.38%) SolarWinds
6 15 (3.46%) Databricks
7 11 (2.53%) ServiceNow
8 7 (1.61%) Dynatrace
8 7 (1.61%) Ping Identity
9 5 (1.15%) Broadcom
9 5 (1.15%) MuleSoft
9 5 (1.15%) Palo Alto
9 5 (1.15%) PeopleSoft
9 5 (1.15%) Rapid7
9 5 (1.15%) VMware
10 4 (0.92%) Cloudera
10 4 (0.92%) Zscaler
11 3 (0.69%) Salesforce