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 12 September 2026.

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

6 months to
12 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 197 326 329
Rank change year-on-year +129 +3 -69
Contract jobs requiring a Cloud Engineer 782 252 249
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 1.43% 0.76% 0.65%
As % of the Job Titles category 1.55% 0.84% 0.69%
Number of daily rates quoted 515 183 154
10th Percentile £406 £400 £400
25th Percentile £450 £442 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £500 £558
Median % change year-on-year +2.50% -10.39% +1.45%
75th Percentile £588 £575 £634
90th Percentile £675 £638 £696
UK excluding London median daily rate £510 £500 £575
% change year-on-year +2.00% -13.04% +9.52%
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 50,382 30,069 35,903
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.35% 91.09% 93.06%
Number of daily rates quoted 29,936 18,968 22,276
10th Percentile £325 £280 £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 3,746 1,571 1,738
10th Percentile £14.58 £13.75 £14.73
25th Percentile £20.25 £17.04 £20.50
Median hourly rate £42.00 £25.15 £43.00
Median % change year-on-year +67.00% -41.51% -
75th Percentile £67.50 £52.33 £65.00
90th Percentile £78.88 £70.00 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £42.50 £25.15 £45.59
% change year-on-year +68.99% -44.83% +12.32%

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 12 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 12 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 12 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 +102 677 £525 +5.00% 779
UK excluding London +107 433 £510 +2.00% 387
London +56 298 £525 +2.44% 448
Work from Home +22 191 £540 +8.00% 403
North of England +19 133 £513 +13.89% 110
South East +26 130 £538 +7.50% 82
North West +18 80 £525 +20.00% 62
Midlands +6 72 £500 -7.41% 48
Scotland +18 57 £447 -18.73% 60
Yorkshire -11 45 £450 -10.00% 36
East Midlands +13 39 £488 +2.63% 21
West Midlands -22 32 £525 -4.55% 27
East of England -4 19 £488 +0.52% 31
South West -33 16 £575 +4.55% 39
North East -42 8 £525 +14.13% 12
Wales -10 7 - - 5

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

For the 6 months to 12 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.

1 371 (47.44%) Azure
2 310 (39.64%) Terraform
3 276 (35.29%) Infrastructure as Code
4 271 (34.65%) AWS
5 267 (34.14%) CI/CD
6 211 (26.98%) DevOps
7 206 (26.34%) Kubernetes
8 205 (26.21%) Security Cleared
9 195 (24.94%) Python
10 179 (22.89%) Microsoft
11 177 (22.63%) Cloud Security
12 165 (21.10%) GCP
13 161 (20.59%) PowerShell
14 158 (20.20%) Infrastructure Engineering
15 154 (19.69%) Platform Engineering
16 148 (18.93%) SC Cleared
17 119 (15.22%) Windows
18 111 (14.19%) Entra ID
19 110 (14.07%) Google
20 104 (13.30%) AI
21 100 (12.79%) Active Directory
22 93 (11.89%) Migration
23 92 (11.76%) Agile
24 91 (11.64%) Containerisation
25 87 (11.13%) Observability
26 86 (11.00%) GitHub
27 84 (10.74%) DNS
27 84 (10.74%) Firewall
28 83 (10.61%) Docker
29 82 (10.49%) 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 (1.92%) 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
1 371 (47.44%) Azure
2 271 (34.65%) AWS
3 165 (21.10%) GCP
4 111 (14.19%) Entra ID
5 86 (11.00%) GitHub
6 56 (7.16%) Azure DevOps
7 55 (7.03%) GitHub Actions
8 54 (6.91%) Serverless
9 49 (6.27%) IaaS
10 47 (6.01%) AWS CloudFormation
11 41 (5.24%) AWS Lambda
12 40 (5.12%) Azure AKS
12 40 (5.12%) Azure Monitor
13 38 (4.86%) Google Kubernetes Engine
14 36 (4.60%) PaaS
15 34 (4.35%) Amazon CloudWatch
15 34 (4.35%) Amazon EKS
15 34 (4.35%) Microsoft 365
16 32 (4.09%) Amazon EC2
17 31 (3.96%) Amazon S3
Communications & Networking
1 84 (10.74%) DNS
1 84 (10.74%) Firewall
2 42 (5.37%) Network Security
3 38 (4.86%) VPN
4 21 (2.69%) DHCP
5 18 (2.30%) WAN
6 16 (2.05%) TCP/IP
7 12 (1.53%) Internet
8 8 (1.02%) VLAN
9 7 (0.90%) SD-WAN
10 6 (0.77%) VSAN
11 5 (0.64%) LAN
11 5 (0.64%) SSL
11 5 (0.64%) Wireless
12 4 (0.51%) BGP
12 4 (0.51%) Kerberos
12 4 (0.51%) NGFW
12 4 (0.51%) OSPF
13 3 (0.38%) Reverse Proxy
13 3 (0.38%) tcpdump
Database & Business Intelligence
1 26 (3.32%) SQL Server
2 20 (2.56%) Amazon RDS
3 18 (2.30%) 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%) Azure SQL Database
9 5 (0.64%) Oracle Database
10 3 (0.38%) Flink
10 3 (0.38%) Looker
10 3 (0.38%) Metadata
10 3 (0.38%) MongoDB
10 3 (0.38%) MySQL
10 3 (0.38%) Oracle Database 12c
11 2 (0.26%) Big Data
11 2 (0.26%) Data Warehouse
11 2 (0.26%) Redis
Development Applications
1 55 (7.03%) GitLab
2 47 (6.01%) 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%) Burp Suite
10 1 (0.13%) CircleCI
10 1 (0.13%) Spinnaker
10 1 (0.13%) TestRail
General
1 96 (12.28%) Finance
2 80 (10.23%) Social Skills
3 73 (9.34%) Public Sector
4 31 (3.96%) Analytical Skills
5 25 (3.20%) Banking
6 10 (1.28%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 9 (1.15%) 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 (0.38%) Aerospace
12 3 (0.38%) Digital Health
12 3 (0.38%) Digital Healthcare
12 3 (0.38%) Front Office
12 3 (0.38%) Marketing
12 3 (0.38%) Retail
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 310 (39.64%) 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
8 8 (1.02%) 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
1 123 (15.73%) Cloud Native
2 58 (7.42%) Security Posture
3 45 (5.75%) Enterprise Cloud
4 38 (4.86%) Hybrid Cloud
5 31 (3.96%) Onboarding
6 30 (3.84%) Cloud Security Posture
7 25 (3.20%) Enterprise Software
8 21 (2.69%) Management Information System
9 20 (2.56%) Data Centre
9 20 (2.56%) Distributed Systems
10 17 (2.17%) Public Cloud
11 13 (1.66%) Product Ownership
12 12 (1.53%) Private Cloud
13 11 (1.41%) Linux Command Line
14 10 (1.28%) PKI
15 8 (1.02%) AI Agents
15 8 (1.02%) Data Protection Act
16 7 (0.90%) Legacy Systems
17 6 (0.77%) Distributed Architecture
18 4 (0.51%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 119 (15.22%) Windows
2 81 (10.36%) Linux
3 62 (7.93%) Windows Server
4 31 (3.96%) 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
1 276 (35.29%) Infrastructure as Code
2 267 (34.14%) CI/CD
3 211 (26.98%) DevOps
4 177 (22.63%) Cloud Security
5 158 (20.20%) Infrastructure Engineering
6 154 (19.69%) Platform Engineering
7 104 (13.30%) AI
8 93 (11.89%) Migration
9 92 (11.76%) Agile
10 91 (11.64%) Containerisation
11 87 (11.13%) Observability
12 65 (8.31%) Technical Leadership
13 61 (7.80%) Software Engineering
14 60 (7.67%) Continuous Improvement
14 60 (7.67%) DevSecOps
15 59 (7.54%) Infrastructure Automation
16 58 (7.42%) Problem-Solving
17 57 (7.29%) Cybersecurity
18 52 (6.65%) Deployment Automation
19 50 (6.39%) Change Management
Programming Languages
1 195 (24.94%) Python
2 161 (20.59%) PowerShell
3 82 (10.49%) Bash
4 75 (9.59%) Bicep
5 61 (7.80%) SQL
6 39 (4.99%) Java
7 16 (2.05%) Shell Script
8 15 (1.92%) C#
9 12 (1.53%) 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%) Perl
14 1 (0.13%) R
14 1 (0.13%) Ruby
Qualifications
1 205 (26.21%) Security Cleared
2 148 (18.93%) SC Cleared
3 71 (9.08%) DV Cleared
4 46 (5.88%) Azure Certification
5 43 (5.50%) AWS Certification
6 34 (4.35%) Degree
7 22 (2.81%) Microsoft Certification
8 18 (2.30%) CISSP
9 12 (1.53%) 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 16 (2.05%) ISO/IEC 27001
2 13 (1.66%) Data Quality
3 12 (1.53%) NIST
4 11 (1.41%) QA
5 10 (1.28%) NCSC
6 7 (0.90%) Cyber Essentials
7 6 (0.77%) GDPR
8 3 (0.38%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
8 3 (0.38%) Disclosure Scotland
9 2 (0.26%) PCI DSS
9 2 (0.26%) SLA
10 1 (0.13%) Accessibility
10 1 (0.13%) Actionable Recommendations
10 1 (0.13%) Government Security Classifications
10 1 (0.13%) GRC
10 1 (0.13%) WCAG
System Software
1 100 (12.79%) Active Directory
2 83 (10.61%) Docker
3 50 (6.39%) VMware Infrastructure
4 33 (4.22%) Virtual Machines
4 33 (4.22%) VMware ESXi
5 27 (3.45%) VMware NSX
6 21 (2.69%) Virtual Desktop
6 21 (2.69%) vSphere
7 15 (1.92%) vCloud
8 12 (1.53%) 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
1 206 (26.34%) Kubernetes
2 53 (6.78%) Ansible
3 30 (3.84%) vCenter Server
4 26 (3.32%) Microsoft Intune
4 26 (3.32%) SCOM
5 23 (2.94%) Grafana
6 21 (2.69%) Prometheus
7 19 (2.43%) Progress Chef
8 17 (2.17%) 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%) FortiGate
15 3 (0.38%) HAProxy
15 3 (0.38%) Karpenter
Vendors
1 179 (22.89%) Microsoft
2 110 (14.07%) Google
3 75 (9.59%) VMware
4 34 (4.35%) Oracle
5 24 (3.07%) Databricks
6 19 (2.43%) Red Hat
7 17 (2.17%) Okta
8 16 (2.05%) Zscaler
9 14 (1.79%) Palo Alto
10 13 (1.66%) SolarWinds
11 12 (1.53%) Broadcom
11 12 (1.53%) OpenAI
11 12 (1.53%) ServiceNow
11 12 (1.53%) Splunk
12 11 (1.41%) Cisco
13 9 (1.15%) CrowdStrike
13 9 (1.15%) Dynatrace
13 9 (1.15%) Salesforce
14 8 (1.02%) BeyondTrust
14 8 (1.02%) New Relic