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 20 May 2026.

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

6 months to
20 May 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 224 309 322
Rank change year-on-year +85 +13 -59
Contract jobs requiring a Cloud Engineer 530 231 273
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 1.10% 0.79% 0.64%
As % of the Job Titles category 1.19% 0.86% 0.69%
Number of daily rates quoted 351 181 184
10th Percentile £400 £400 £400
25th Percentile £462 £447 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £550
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -9.09% -
75th Percentile £613 £594 £616
90th Percentile £688 £650 £675
UK excluding London median daily rate £525 £510 £510
% change year-on-year +2.97% -0.03% -7.27%
Number of hourly rates quoted 6 0 3
10th Percentile £25.13 - -
25th Percentile £31.66 - £27.50
Median hourly rate £62.25 - £30.00
75th Percentile £75.25 - £32.50
90th Percentile £76.00 - -
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 44,449 26,943 39,487
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.32% 92.37% 92.79%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,215 17,536 25,722
10th Percentile £325 £293 £280
25th Percentile £413 £406 £410
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £510 £525
Median % change year-on-year +0.49% -2.86% -3.23%
75th Percentile £615 £625 £638
90th Percentile £725 £738 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £490
% change year-on-year +5.26% -3.06% -2.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,895 1,057 2,674
10th Percentile £15.00 £14.00 £12.83
25th Percentile £20.31 £18.13 £16.30
Median hourly rate £42.69 £28.00 £36.50
Median % change year-on-year +52.45% -23.29% -18.89%
75th Percentile £66.13 £61.25 £61.30
90th Percentile £77.80 £75.00 £72.90
UK excluding London median hourly rate £44.00 £27.00 £40.00
% change year-on-year +62.96% -32.50% -5.88%

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 20 May 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 20 May 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 20 May 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 +52 440 £525 +5.00% 233
London +63 261 £525 +5.00% 103
UK excluding London +18 209 £525 +2.97% 160
Work from Home +4 131 £525 +5.00% 109
North of England -27 58 £510 +2.00% 30
South East -39 49 £525 -4.55% 46
Scotland +13 39 £451 -14.19% 11
North West -21 30 £538 +33.71% 19
East of England -11 24 £505 +2.54% 13
Yorkshire -36 22 £481 +13.24% 6
South West -23 20 £550 -4.35% 38
Midlands -60 20 £675 +35.00% 20
West Midlands -42 17 £675 +14.89% 12
North East -26 6 £525 -4.55% 5
East Midlands -34 3 - - 8

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

For the 6 months to 20 May 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.

1 240 (45.28%) Azure
2 237 (44.72%) Terraform
3 226 (42.64%) AWS
4 224 (42.26%) CI/CD
5 201 (37.92%) Infrastructure as Code
6 187 (35.28%) DevOps
7 143 (26.98%) Security Cleared
8 127 (23.96%) Python
9 122 (23.02%) GCP
10 121 (22.83%) Kubernetes
11 117 (22.08%) SC Cleared
12 105 (19.81%) Cloud Security
13 101 (19.06%) GitHub
14 92 (17.36%) Microsoft
15 90 (16.98%) Google
16 87 (16.42%) Platform Engineering
17 81 (15.28%) Migration
18 80 (15.09%) Infrastructure Engineering
19 78 (14.72%) PowerShell
20 68 (12.83%) Agile
21 66 (12.45%) Containerisation
22 63 (11.89%) GitHub Actions
23 58 (10.94%) AI
24 55 (10.38%) Docker
25 53 (10.00%) Firewall
25 53 (10.00%) Serverless
26 51 (9.62%) Windows
27 48 (9.06%) Problem-Solving
28 47 (8.87%) Observability
29 45 (8.49%) Continuous Improvement

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 7 (1.32%) Microsoft Exchange
2 5 (0.94%) Apache
2 5 (0.94%) Apache Spark
2 5 (0.94%) Confluence
3 2 (0.38%) CloudStack
3 2 (0.38%) nginx
4 1 (0.19%) Apache Airflow
4 1 (0.19%) SAS
4 1 (0.19%) SharePoint
4 1 (0.19%) Traefik
Applications
1 2 (0.38%) Chatbot
Business Applications
1 1 (0.19%) Aladdin
1 1 (0.19%) Dynamics CRM
Cloud Services
1 240 (45.28%) Azure
2 226 (42.64%) AWS
3 122 (23.02%) GCP
4 101 (19.06%) GitHub
5 63 (11.89%) GitHub Actions
6 53 (10.00%) Serverless
7 44 (8.30%) Azure DevOps
8 41 (7.74%) Entra ID
9 40 (7.55%) AWS CloudFormation
10 39 (7.36%) Azure AKS
11 37 (6.98%) PaaS
12 35 (6.60%) Amazon S3
12 35 (6.60%) IaaS
13 31 (5.85%) Amazon EKS
13 31 (5.85%) AWS Lambda
13 31 (5.85%) Google Kubernetes Engine
14 26 (4.91%) Amazon EC2
14 26 (4.91%) Virtual Private Cloud
15 25 (4.72%) Amazon ECS
16 21 (3.96%) OCI
Communications & Networking
1 53 (10.00%) Firewall
2 32 (6.04%) DNS
3 24 (4.53%) Network Security
4 22 (4.15%) VPN
5 6 (1.13%) DHCP
5 6 (1.13%) Reverse Proxy
5 6 (1.13%) TCP/IP
5 6 (1.13%) WAN
6 4 (0.75%) Software-Defined Networking
6 4 (0.75%) VLAN
7 3 (0.57%) BGP
7 3 (0.57%) SD-WAN
7 3 (0.57%) SMTP
7 3 (0.57%) SSL
8 2 (0.38%) Cisco Firepower
8 2 (0.38%) DKIM
8 2 (0.38%) Internet
8 2 (0.38%) Kerberos
8 2 (0.38%) NGFW
8 2 (0.38%) VXLAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 15 (2.83%) Amazon Athena
2 12 (2.26%) BigQuery
3 11 (2.08%) DynamoDB
4 8 (1.51%) SQL Server
5 7 (1.32%) Amazon RDS
6 6 (1.13%) Amazon Redshift
6 6 (1.13%) Azure SQL Database
6 6 (1.13%) Oracle Database
7 5 (0.94%) Data Lake
7 5 (0.94%) PostgreSQL
8 4 (0.75%) Amazon QuickSight
9 3 (0.57%) Big Data
9 3 (0.57%) Data Warehouse
9 3 (0.57%) Metadata
9 3 (0.57%) NoSQL
9 3 (0.57%) Oracle Database 12c
9 3 (0.57%) Power BI
9 3 (0.57%) Snowflake Schema
10 2 (0.38%) OLAP
10 2 (0.38%) OLTP
Development Applications
1 45 (8.49%) GitLab
1 45 (8.49%) Jenkins
2 42 (7.92%) Git
3 10 (1.89%) Artifactory
3 10 (1.89%) JIRA
4 3 (0.57%) Team Foundation Server
5 2 (0.38%) Claude Code
5 2 (0.38%) Liquibase
5 2 (0.38%) Postman
5 2 (0.38%) Robot Framework
5 2 (0.38%) Selenium
5 2 (0.38%) Spinnaker
6 1 (0.19%) Burp Suite
6 1 (0.19%) Chocolatey
6 1 (0.19%) CircleCI
6 1 (0.19%) Metasploit
6 1 (0.19%) RStudio
6 1 (0.19%) SonarQube
6 1 (0.19%) sqlmap
6 1 (0.19%) Travis CI
General
1 69 (13.02%) Social Skills
2 52 (9.81%) Finance
3 44 (8.30%) Public Sector
4 20 (3.77%) Analytical Skills
5 16 (3.02%) Banking
6 13 (2.45%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 11 (2.08%) Documentation Skills
8 10 (1.89%) Retail
9 5 (0.94%) Legal
9 5 (0.94%) Presentation Skills
9 5 (0.94%) Telecoms
10 4 (0.75%) Investment Banking
10 4 (0.75%) Marketing
10 4 (0.75%) Military
10 4 (0.75%) Pharmaceutical
11 3 (0.57%) Financial Institution
11 3 (0.57%) Police
12 2 (0.38%) Corporate Banking
12 2 (0.38%) Local Government
12 2 (0.38%) Retail Banking
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 18 (3.40%) REST
2 15 (2.83%) Node.js
3 13 (2.45%) React
3 13 (2.45%) Spring
3 13 (2.45%) Spring Boot
4 11 (2.08%) Kafka
5 10 (1.89%) OAuth
6 9 (1.70%) .NET
6 9 (1.70%) OAuth2
6 9 (1.70%) OpenTelemetry
7 8 (1.51%) OpenID
7 8 (1.51%) Oracle Fusion
8 6 (1.13%) AngularJS
8 6 (1.13%) ARM Templates
8 6 (1.13%) LangChain
9 5 (0.94%) Model Context Protocol
9 5 (0.94%) OpenAPI
9 5 (0.94%) Playwright
9 5 (0.94%) PySpark
9 5 (0.94%) Web Services
Miscellaneous
1 91 (17.17%) Cloud Native
2 29 (5.47%) Public Cloud
3 25 (4.72%) Hybrid Cloud
4 21 (3.96%) Data Centre
5 14 (2.64%) Onboarding
6 12 (2.26%) Enterprise Cloud
6 12 (2.26%) Enterprise Software
6 12 (2.26%) Security Posture
7 10 (1.89%) Product Ownership
8 7 (1.32%) Self-Motivation
9 6 (1.13%) Cyber Threat
9 6 (1.13%) Data Protection Act
9 6 (1.13%) Distributed Systems
10 4 (0.75%) Cloud Security Posture
10 4 (0.75%) Legacy Systems
10 4 (0.75%) Management Information System
10 4 (0.75%) PKI
10 4 (0.75%) Private Cloud
10 4 (0.75%) Virtual Team
11 3 (0.57%) Replication
Operating Systems
1 51 (9.62%) Windows
2 31 (5.85%) Linux
3 29 (5.47%) Windows Server
4 5 (0.94%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 2 (0.38%) Ubuntu
5 2 (0.38%) Unix
5 2 (0.38%) VMS
6 1 (0.19%) Mac OS
6 1 (0.19%) Windows Server 2019
Processes & Methodologies
1 224 (42.26%) CI/CD
2 201 (37.92%) Infrastructure as Code
3 187 (35.28%) DevOps
4 105 (19.81%) Cloud Security
5 87 (16.42%) Platform Engineering
6 81 (15.28%) Migration
7 80 (15.09%) Infrastructure Engineering
8 68 (12.83%) Agile
9 66 (12.45%) Containerisation
10 58 (10.94%) AI
11 48 (9.06%) Problem-Solving
12 47 (8.87%) Observability
13 45 (8.49%) Continuous Improvement
14 42 (7.92%) DevSecOps
14 42 (7.92%) Infrastructure Automation
14 42 (7.92%) Software Engineering
15 38 (7.17%) Cybersecurity
16 33 (6.23%) Technical Leadership
17 32 (6.04%) Mentoring
18 27 (5.09%) Deployment Automation
Programming Languages
1 127 (23.96%) Python
2 78 (14.72%) PowerShell
3 44 (8.30%) Bash
4 43 (8.11%) SQL
5 35 (6.60%) Bicep
6 26 (4.91%) Java
7 17 (3.21%) C#
8 9 (1.70%) Go
8 9 (1.70%) JavaScript
9 8 (1.51%) TypeScript
10 5 (0.94%) Groovy
11 2 (0.38%) Kusto Query Language
11 2 (0.38%) Ruby
11 2 (0.38%) Shell Script
12 1 (0.19%) BeanShell
12 1 (0.19%) Cypher
12 1 (0.19%) Kotlin
12 1 (0.19%) R
Qualifications
1 143 (26.98%) Security Cleared
2 117 (22.08%) SC Cleared
3 38 (7.17%) Azure Certification
4 22 (4.15%) AWS Certification
5 21 (3.96%) DV Cleared
6 14 (2.64%) Microsoft Certification
7 13 (2.45%) Degree
8 12 (2.26%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
8 12 (2.26%) BPSS Clearance
9 10 (1.89%) CISSP
10 9 (1.70%) Cisco Certification
11 8 (1.51%) Computer Science Degree
12 6 (1.13%) (ISC)2 CCSP
13 5 (0.94%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
13 5 (0.94%) TOGAF Certification
14 4 (0.75%) CCSP
14 4 (0.75%) CISM
14 4 (0.75%) MCSE
15 3 (0.57%) CCNP
15 3 (0.57%) Master's Degree
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 12 (2.26%) NIST
2 11 (2.08%) GDPR
2 11 (2.08%) QA
3 10 (1.89%) NCSC
4 9 (1.70%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 6 (1.13%) Data Quality
5 6 (1.13%) PCI DSS
6 4 (0.75%) GRC
7 2 (0.38%) Cyber Essentials
7 2 (0.38%) SLA
7 2 (0.38%) SOC 2
8 1 (0.19%) Accessibility
8 1 (0.19%) Actionable Recommendations
8 1 (0.19%) HIPAA
8 1 (0.19%) WCAG
System Software
1 55 (10.38%) Docker
2 34 (6.42%) Active Directory
3 17 (3.21%) Virtual Desktop
4 14 (2.64%) VMware Infrastructure
5 13 (2.45%) Virtual Machines
5 13 (2.45%) VMware NSX
6 10 (1.89%) vSphere
7 8 (1.51%) Hyper-V
7 8 (1.51%) VMware ESXi
8 7 (1.32%) Squid
9 5 (0.94%) vCloud
10 3 (0.57%) Firmware
11 2 (0.38%) Ceph
11 2 (0.38%) KVM
11 2 (0.38%) NFS
Systems Management
1 237 (44.72%) Terraform
2 121 (22.83%) Kubernetes
3 23 (4.34%) Ansible
4 22 (4.15%) Grafana
5 19 (3.58%) Prometheus
6 15 (2.83%) Istio
6 15 (2.83%) Microsoft Intune
7 13 (2.45%) Argo
7 13 (2.45%) Single Sign-On
8 8 (1.51%) vCenter Server
9 7 (1.32%) Packer
10 6 (1.13%) Puppet
10 6 (1.13%) SCOM
11 5 (0.94%) Cilium
11 5 (0.94%) Progress Chef
12 4 (0.75%) Salt
12 4 (0.75%) Suricata
13 2 (0.38%) SELinux
14 1 (0.19%) HAProxy
14 1 (0.19%) SCCM
Vendors
1 92 (17.36%) Microsoft
2 90 (16.98%) Google
3 26 (4.91%) VMware
4 24 (4.53%) Oracle
5 11 (2.08%) Databricks
5 11 (2.08%) Palo Alto
5 11 (2.08%) Zscaler
6 10 (1.89%) Dynatrace
7 8 (1.51%) ServiceNow
8 7 (1.32%) Salesforce
9 6 (1.13%) Cisco
10 5 (0.94%) Citrix
10 5 (0.94%) Fortinet
10 5 (0.94%) PeopleSoft
10 5 (0.94%) Red Hat
10 5 (0.94%) Splunk
11 4 (0.75%) Okta
11 4 (0.75%) Rapid7
11 4 (0.75%) Salesforce Marketing Cloud
12 3 (0.57%) OpenAI