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 February 2026.

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

6 months to
24 Feb 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 245 310 253
Rank change year-on-year +65 -57 -10
Contract jobs requiring a Cloud Engineer 453 226 396
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 1.11% 0.75% 0.89%
As % of the Job Titles category 1.20% 0.81% 0.96%
Number of daily rates quoted 315 153 277
10th Percentile £400 £380 £409
25th Percentile £450 £458 £475
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -4.55% - -
75th Percentile £613 £632 £625
90th Percentile £725 £688 £700
UK excluding London median daily rate £525 £500 £530
% change year-on-year +5.00% -5.66% +0.95%
Number of hourly rates quoted 4 0 5
10th Percentile - - -
25th Percentile £25.13 - £27.50
Median hourly rate £38.88 - £30.00
75th Percentile £67.81 - £72.50
90th Percentile £93.13 - £83.15
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 37,601 28,063 41,310
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 91.77% 92.89% 93.00%
Number of daily rates quoted 23,630 17,563 27,190
10th Percentile £306 £293 £275
25th Percentile £408 £406 £409
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £613 £638 £638
90th Percentile £720 £738 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £481 £475 £488
% change year-on-year +1.32% -2.56% -2.50%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,287 822 2,342
10th Percentile £14.61 £16.25 £13.15
25th Percentile £18.87 £21.46 £16.30
Median hourly rate £32.00 £35.00 £35.00
Median % change year-on-year -8.57% - -10.88%
75th Percentile £63.75 £64.50 £60.00
90th Percentile £74.26 £75.00 £71.99
UK excluding London median hourly rate £30.00 £32.50 £35.00
% change year-on-year -7.69% -7.14% -5.74%

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 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 24 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 24 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 +49 368 £525 -4.55% 118
UK excluding London +49 206 £525 +5.00% 99
London +15 187 £525 -4.55% 39
Work from Home +23 112 £500 -4.76% 51
North of England -14 71 £500 +5.32% 25
Yorkshire -16 43 £513 +24.24% 10
South East -6 41 £500 -14.89% 29
Midlands -34 41 £575 +21.05% 11
Scotland +35 35 £513 -2.38% 5
West Midlands -30 35 £670 +14.04% 6
North West -11 28 £500 +11.11% 13
South West -7 20 £550 -4.35% 21
East of England -17 11 £450 +41.51% 8
East Midlands -31 6 £575 +26.51% 5
Wales -4 1 £425 +41.67%

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

For the 6 months to 24 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.

1 217 (47.90%) AWS
2 201 (44.37%) CI/CD
3 195 (43.05%) Terraform
4 180 (39.74%) Infrastructure as Code
5 178 (39.29%) DevOps
6 176 (38.85%) Azure
7 134 (29.58%) Python
8 126 (27.81%) Security Cleared
9 125 (27.59%) Kubernetes
10 104 (22.96%) GCP
11 101 (22.30%) GitHub
12 89 (19.65%) Containerisation
12 89 (19.65%) SC Cleared
13 82 (18.10%) Cloud Security
14 79 (17.44%) Docker
14 79 (17.44%) Microsoft
15 78 (17.22%) Agile
16 71 (15.67%) Google
17 66 (14.57%) Serverless
18 62 (13.69%) GitHub Actions
19 60 (13.25%) Jenkins
20 56 (12.36%) Migration
21 53 (11.70%) PowerShell
22 52 (11.48%) Infrastructure Automation
22 52 (11.48%) Platform Engineering
23 50 (11.04%) GitLab
24 46 (10.15%) AWS CloudFormation
24 46 (10.15%) Microservices
25 45 (9.93%) Linux
25 45 (9.93%) 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 (1.99%) Apache Spark
2 5 (1.10%) Apache
3 4 (0.88%) Confluence
3 4 (0.88%) Microsoft Exchange
4 3 (0.66%) nginx
5 2 (0.44%) Apache Airflow
6 1 (0.22%) Apache Superset
6 1 (0.22%) CMS
6 1 (0.22%) Headless CMS
6 1 (0.22%) SAS
6 1 (0.22%) SharePoint
6 1 (0.22%) Traefik
Applications
1 2 (0.44%) Chatbot
Business Applications
1 4 (0.88%) Dynamics CRM
Cloud Services
1 217 (47.90%) AWS
2 176 (38.85%) Azure
3 104 (22.96%) GCP
4 101 (22.30%) GitHub
5 66 (14.57%) Serverless
6 62 (13.69%) GitHub Actions
7 46 (10.15%) AWS CloudFormation
8 41 (9.05%) Entra ID
9 36 (7.95%) PaaS
10 34 (7.51%) Amazon S3
10 34 (7.51%) Azure DevOps
11 31 (6.84%) Amazon EKS
12 29 (6.40%) AWS Lambda
12 29 (6.40%) Google Kubernetes Engine
13 28 (6.18%) IaaS
14 26 (5.74%) Amazon ECS
15 25 (5.52%) Azure AKS
16 18 (3.97%) OCI
17 17 (3.75%) Virtual Private Cloud
18 16 (3.53%) Azure Monitor
Communications & Networking
1 35 (7.73%) Firewall
2 20 (4.42%) Network Security
3 18 (3.97%) VPN
4 17 (3.75%) Cisco Firepower
4 17 (3.75%) Cisco IOS
4 17 (3.75%) Cisco ISE
4 17 (3.75%) Junos
5 14 (3.09%) DNS
6 5 (1.10%) NX-OS
7 4 (0.88%) DHCP
7 4 (0.88%) Reverse Proxy
7 4 (0.88%) Software-Defined Networking
8 3 (0.66%) TCP/IP
8 3 (0.66%) WAN
9 2 (0.44%) LAN
9 2 (0.44%) Unified Communications
10 1 (0.22%) IPsec
10 1 (0.22%) VLAN
10 1 (0.22%) Wireless
10 1 (0.22%) WLAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 27 (5.96%) NoSQL
2 23 (5.08%) PostgreSQL
3 11 (2.43%) Amazon Athena
3 11 (2.43%) BigQuery
4 10 (2.21%) DynamoDB
5 9 (1.99%) Power BI
6 7 (1.55%) Amazon RDS
6 7 (1.55%) Elasticsearch
7 6 (1.32%) Data Lake
8 5 (1.10%) Azure SQL Database
8 5 (1.10%) Data Warehouse
9 4 (0.88%) Amazon Redshift
9 4 (0.88%) Big Data
9 4 (0.88%) Delta Lake
9 4 (0.88%) Oracle Database
10 2 (0.44%) Amazon QuickSight
10 2 (0.44%) Metadata
10 2 (0.44%) Mixpanel
10 2 (0.44%) Relational Database
10 2 (0.44%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 60 (13.25%) Jenkins
2 50 (11.04%) GitLab
3 32 (7.06%) Git
4 10 (2.21%) JIRA
4 10 (2.21%) Liquibase
5 3 (0.66%) MLflow
5 3 (0.66%) Postman
5 3 (0.66%) Team Foundation Server
6 2 (0.44%) Artifactory
6 2 (0.44%) Bitbucket
6 2 (0.44%) CircleCI
6 2 (0.44%) Sonatype Nexus
6 2 (0.44%) Spinnaker
7 1 (0.22%) Gemini Tracker
7 1 (0.22%) RStudio
7 1 (0.22%) TeamCity
7 1 (0.22%) Travis CI
7 1 (0.22%) Visual Studio Code
General
1 80 (17.66%) Social Skills
2 71 (15.67%) Finance
3 41 (9.05%) Public Sector
4 33 (7.28%) Banking
5 25 (5.52%) Analytical Skills
6 17 (3.75%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 13 (2.87%) Financial Institution
8 8 (1.77%) Retail
9 7 (1.55%) Aeronautics
10 6 (1.32%) Documentation Skills
10 6 (1.32%) Presentation Skills
10 6 (1.32%) Telecoms
11 5 (1.10%) Aviation
11 5 (1.10%) Legal
12 4 (0.88%) Pharmaceutical
13 3 (0.66%) Local Government
14 2 (0.44%) Billing
14 2 (0.44%) Investment Banking
14 2 (0.44%) Marketing
14 2 (0.44%) Military
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 44 (9.71%) REST
2 26 (5.74%) Elastic Stack
3 25 (5.52%) Node.js
4 19 (4.19%) RESTful
5 13 (2.87%) Kafka
6 12 (2.65%) React
7 10 (2.21%) ARM Templates
7 10 (2.21%) OpenID
7 10 (2.21%) OpenTelemetry
8 9 (1.99%) OpenAPI
8 9 (1.99%) Oracle Fusion
9 8 (1.77%) .NET
9 8 (1.77%) LangChain
9 8 (1.77%) SAML
9 8 (1.77%) SOAP
9 8 (1.77%) Spring
9 8 (1.77%) Spring Boot
10 7 (1.55%) AngularJS
10 7 (1.55%) Lambda Expressions
10 7 (1.55%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 78 (17.22%) Cloud Native
2 41 (9.05%) Public Cloud
3 22 (4.86%) Distributed Systems
4 13 (2.87%) Hybrid Cloud
5 12 (2.65%) Data Centre
6 9 (1.99%) PKI
6 9 (1.99%) Product Ownership
7 8 (1.77%) Security Posture
8 5 (1.10%) Cyber Threat
8 5 (1.10%) Onboarding
9 4 (0.88%) Algorithms
9 4 (0.88%) Cloud Security Posture
9 4 (0.88%) Data Protection Act
10 3 (0.66%) Distributed Computing
10 3 (0.66%) Enterprise Software
10 3 (0.66%) Genomics
10 3 (0.66%) Life Science
10 3 (0.66%) Linux Command Line
10 3 (0.66%) Replication
10 3 (0.66%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 45 (9.93%) Linux
2 28 (6.18%) Windows
3 17 (3.75%) Windows Server
4 8 (1.77%) Unix
5 4 (0.88%) VMS
6 3 (0.66%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
7 1 (0.22%) Alpine Linux
7 1 (0.22%) Mac OS
7 1 (0.22%) Ubuntu
Processes & Methodologies
1 201 (44.37%) CI/CD
2 180 (39.74%) Infrastructure as Code
3 178 (39.29%) DevOps
4 89 (19.65%) Containerisation
5 82 (18.10%) Cloud Security
6 78 (17.22%) Agile
7 56 (12.36%) Migration
8 52 (11.48%) Infrastructure Automation
8 52 (11.48%) Platform Engineering
9 46 (10.15%) Microservices
10 45 (9.93%) Problem-Solving
11 44 (9.71%) Infrastructure Engineering
11 44 (9.71%) Observability
12 41 (9.05%) Cybersecurity
13 39 (8.61%) Continuous Improvement
14 37 (8.17%) DevSecOps
15 36 (7.95%) AI
16 33 (7.28%) Software Engineering
17 31 (6.84%) Cost Optimisation
18 30 (6.62%) Analytics
Programming Languages
1 134 (29.58%) Python
2 53 (11.70%) PowerShell
3 39 (8.61%) SQL
4 28 (6.18%) Java
5 27 (5.96%) Bash
6 22 (4.86%) Bicep
6 22 (4.86%) Go
7 16 (3.53%) TypeScript
8 9 (1.99%) JavaScript
9 8 (1.77%) Shell Script
10 6 (1.32%) C#
11 4 (0.88%) BeanShell
11 4 (0.88%) Perl
11 4 (0.88%) Ruby
12 2 (0.44%) Groovy
12 2 (0.44%) Kusto Query Language
12 2 (0.44%) PL/SQL
13 1 (0.22%) C
13 1 (0.22%) Cypher
13 1 (0.22%) Kotlin
Qualifications
1 126 (27.81%) Security Cleared
2 89 (19.65%) SC Cleared
3 44 (9.71%) Azure Certification
4 35 (7.73%) Degree
5 34 (7.51%) AWS Certification
6 32 (7.06%) DV Cleared
7 22 (4.86%) Computer Science Degree
8 18 (3.97%) Master's Degree
9 14 (3.09%) Microsoft Certification
10 13 (2.87%) CISSP
11 11 (2.43%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
11 11 (2.43%) BPSS Clearance
12 9 (1.99%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
13 8 (1.77%) Cisco Certification
14 7 (1.55%) CISM
15 6 (1.32%) (ISC)2 CCSP
16 5 (1.10%) CCSP
16 5 (1.10%) TOGAF Certification
17 4 (0.88%) AWS Certified Developer
18 3 (0.66%) SANS
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 15 (3.31%) GDPR
2 11 (2.43%) ISO/IEC 27001
2 11 (2.43%) NIST
3 9 (1.99%) NCSC
4 8 (1.77%) QA
5 6 (1.32%) PCI DSS
6 5 (1.10%) Data Quality
6 5 (1.10%) GRC
7 3 (0.66%) Cyber Essentials
8 2 (0.44%) HIPAA
8 2 (0.44%) SOC 2
9 1 (0.22%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
9 1 (0.22%) FedRAMP
9 1 (0.22%) JSP 440
System Software
1 79 (17.44%) Docker
2 31 (6.84%) Active Directory
3 17 (3.75%) VMware NSX
4 13 (2.87%) Virtual Machines
5 8 (1.77%) Virtual Desktop
6 6 (1.32%) Hyper-V
7 5 (1.10%) Firmware
7 5 (1.10%) VMware Infrastructure
8 2 (0.44%) Virtual Servers
9 1 (0.22%) vSphere
Systems Management
1 195 (43.05%) Terraform
2 125 (27.59%) Kubernetes
3 39 (8.61%) Ansible
4 34 (7.51%) Grafana
4 34 (7.51%) Prometheus
5 17 (3.75%) Istio
5 17 (3.75%) vCenter Server
6 15 (3.31%) Argo
7 11 (2.43%) Single Sign-On
8 7 (1.55%) Kibana
8 7 (1.55%) logstash
9 6 (1.32%) Microsoft Intune
10 4 (0.88%) Podman
11 3 (0.66%) Progress Chef
11 3 (0.66%) Proxmox
11 3 (0.66%) Puppet
12 2 (0.44%) Consul
12 2 (0.44%) Packer
12 2 (0.44%) Salt
13 1 (0.22%) Docker Swarm
Vendors
1 79 (17.44%) Microsoft
2 71 (15.67%) Google
3 22 (4.86%) Splunk
4 20 (4.42%) Cisco
4 20 (4.42%) Oracle
5 17 (3.75%) Juniper
5 17 (3.75%) SolarWinds
6 15 (3.31%) Databricks
7 12 (2.65%) ServiceNow
8 8 (1.77%) Dynatrace
9 7 (1.55%) Ping Identity
10 5 (1.10%) Broadcom
10 5 (1.10%) MuleSoft
10 5 (1.10%) PeopleSoft
10 5 (1.10%) Rapid7
10 5 (1.10%) VMware
11 4 (0.88%) Citrix
11 4 (0.88%) Cloudera
11 4 (0.88%) Palo Alto
11 4 (0.88%) Salesforce