Infrastructure Engineer Contract Job Trends

Infrastructure Engineer
UK

The median Infrastructure Engineer daily rate in the UK is £525, according to job vacancies posted in the 6 months leading up to 21 June 2026.

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

6 months to
21 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 150 214 153
Rank change year-on-year +64 -61 +20
Contract jobs requiring an Infrastructure Engineer 886 381 697
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 1.75% 1.27% 1.59%
As % of the Job Titles category 1.89% 1.38% 1.71%
Number of daily rates quoted 577 252 531
10th Percentile £340 £329 £310
25th Percentile £425 £400 £375
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £525 £465
Median % change year-on-year - +12.85% -6.96%
75th Percentile £600 £588 £575
90th Percentile £675 £638 £638
UK excluding London median daily rate £515 £513 £465
% change year-on-year +0.44% +10.28% -7.01%
Number of hourly rates quoted 41 2 7
10th Percentile £33.64 - £20.73
25th Percentile £58.43 - £21.25
Median hourly rate £72.54 £200.00 £67.50
Median % change year-on-year -63.73% +196.30% +3.85%
75th Percentile £76.50 - £77.00
90th Percentile £78.75 - £77.40
UK excluding London median hourly rate £72.54 £200.00 £22.50
% change year-on-year -63.73% +788.89% -65.38%

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 46,817 27,571 40,801
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.38% 92.17% 92.92%
Number of daily rates quoted 28,459 17,717 26,128
10th Percentile £325 £289 £281
25th Percentile £414 £402 £409
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £515 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +3.00% -4.76% -2.33%
75th Percentile £625 £625 £638
90th Percentile £725 £738 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £492
% change year-on-year +5.26% -3.36% -1.70%
Number of hourly rates quoted 3,118 1,192 3,003
10th Percentile £15.33 £14.00 £12.86
25th Percentile £21.00 £17.58 £16.45
Median hourly rate £43.69 £27.45 £37.50
Median % change year-on-year +59.16% -26.80% -16.67%
75th Percentile £67.50 £57.50 £62.50
90th Percentile £80.00 £75.00 £74.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £45.00 £25.15 £40.00
% change year-on-year +78.93% -37.13% -1.45%

Infrastructure Engineer
Job Vacancy Trend

Historical trend showing the proportion of contract IT job postings featuring 'Infrastructure Engineer' in the job title relative to all contract IT jobs advertised.

Infrastructure Engineer job vacancy trend in the UK

Infrastructure Engineer
Daily Rate Trend

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for Infrastructure Engineer job vacancies in the UK.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for Infrastructure Engineer job vacancies in the UK

Infrastructure Engineer
Daily Rate Histogram

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Infrastructure Engineer over the 6 months to 21 June 2026.

Daily rate histogram for Infrastructure Engineer in the UK

Infrastructure Engineer
Hourly Rate Trend

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for Infrastructure Engineer job vacancies in the UK.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for Infrastructure Engineer job vacancies in the UK

Infrastructure Engineer
Hourly Rate Histogram

Hourly rate distribution of jobs citing Infrastructure Engineer over the 6 months to 21 June 2026.

Hourly rate histogram for Infrastructure Engineer in the UK

Infrastructure Engineer
Top 18 Contract Job Locations

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing Infrastructure Engineer within the UK over the 6 months to 21 June 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 +51 765 £525 - 213
UK excluding London +56 616 £515 +0.44% 214
London +1 195 £533 +1.43% 45
Work from Home +33 194 £540 +8.00% 100
North of England +29 188 £520 +7.77% 52
South East +7 163 £520 -5.45% 47
South West +20 98 £538 -6.52% 51
Yorkshire -10 80 £363 -30.95% 14
Midlands -13 76 £450 +12.50% 25
North West +5 69 £575 +29.94% 30
North East 0 47 £600 -7.69% 9
Scotland +21 46 £570 +17.22% 1
West Midlands -33 46 £475 +22.58% 12
East of England -17 34 £475 +5.56% 13
East Midlands +4 29 £450 +12.50% 13
Wales -2 14 £400 -11.11% 25
Northern Ireland - 1 - - 5
Channel Islands - 1 £550 -

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

For the 6 months to 21 June 2026, Infrastructure 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 Infrastructure Engineer in the job title.

1 871 (98.31%) Infrastructure Engineering
2 327 (36.91%) Security Cleared
3 266 (30.02%) Azure
3 266 (30.02%) Windows
4 221 (24.94%) VMware
5 214 (24.15%) SC Cleared
6 179 (20.20%) Microsoft
7 171 (19.30%) Windows Server
8 166 (18.74%) Active Directory
9 162 (18.28%) VMware Infrastructure
10 157 (17.72%) Infrastructure as Code
11 147 (16.59%) Terraform
12 138 (15.58%) Linux
13 135 (15.24%) DNS
14 134 (15.12%) DevOps
15 126 (14.22%) Firewall
16 124 (14.00%) PowerShell
17 123 (13.88%) AWS
18 122 (13.77%) Python
19 121 (13.66%) DV Cleared
20 114 (12.87%) CI/CD
21 94 (10.61%) DHCP
22 88 (9.93%) Ansible
23 87 (9.82%) Kubernetes
24 86 (9.71%) Problem-Solving
25 77 (8.69%) Migration
26 75 (8.47%) Hyper-V
27 66 (7.45%) High Availability
28 64 (7.22%) Infrastructure Automation
28 64 (7.22%) VMware ESXi

Infrastructure 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 43 (4.85%) Microsoft Exchange
2 9 (1.02%) SharePoint
3 7 (0.79%) Confluence
4 6 (0.68%) TPMS
5 4 (0.45%) Apache
6 2 (0.23%) CloudStack
6 2 (0.23%) WebSphere
7 1 (0.11%) CICS
7 1 (0.11%) IBM HTTP Server
7 1 (0.11%) IIS
7 1 (0.11%) MS Project Server
7 1 (0.11%) WebSphere Application Server
Applications
1 7 (0.79%) Microsoft Office
2 3 (0.34%) Microsoft Excel
3 1 (0.11%) Microsoft Project
Business Applications
1 2 (0.23%) Remedy ITSM
2 1 (0.11%) Teamcenter
Cloud Services
1 266 (30.02%) Azure
2 123 (13.88%) AWS
3 63 (7.11%) GitHub
4 60 (6.77%) Microsoft 365
5 56 (6.32%) GCP
6 55 (6.21%) Entra ID
7 42 (4.74%) IaaS
8 38 (4.29%) OCI
9 36 (4.06%) SaaS
10 33 (3.72%) PaaS
11 30 (3.39%) Azure DevOps
12 23 (2.60%) Nutanix
13 22 (2.48%) GitHub Actions
14 20 (2.26%) Azure Monitor
14 20 (2.26%) Google Kubernetes Engine
15 19 (2.14%) Azure AKS
16 8 (0.90%) Cohesity
17 7 (0.79%) Azure Stack
17 7 (0.79%) OpenShift
18 5 (0.56%) Amazon EKS
Communications & Networking
1 135 (15.24%) DNS
2 126 (14.22%) Firewall
3 94 (10.61%) DHCP
4 48 (5.42%) VLAN
5 44 (4.97%) WAN
6 40 (4.51%) VPN
7 38 (4.29%) SAN
8 33 (3.72%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
8 33 (3.72%) Network Security
9 30 (3.39%) BIG-IP
10 28 (3.16%) LAN
11 26 (2.93%) TCP/IP
12 24 (2.71%) BGP
13 23 (2.60%) Ethernet VPN
14 22 (2.48%) SD-WAN
14 22 (2.48%) VXLAN
15 20 (2.26%) OSPF
16 18 (2.03%) Wi-Fi
17 15 (1.69%) SMTP
17 15 (1.69%) VSAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 31 (3.50%) SQL Server
2 10 (1.13%) Elasticsearch
3 8 (0.90%) Amazon RDS
4 5 (0.56%) Oracle Database
4 5 (0.56%) Relational Database
5 3 (0.34%) Azure SQL Database
5 3 (0.34%) Big Data
5 3 (0.34%) Data Mining
5 3 (0.34%) NonStop SQL
5 3 (0.34%) PostgreSQL
5 3 (0.34%) Power BI
6 2 (0.23%) BigQuery
6 2 (0.23%) DynamoDB
6 2 (0.23%) Oracle Exadata
6 2 (0.23%) RDBMS
7 1 (0.11%) Flink
7 1 (0.11%) MongoDB
7 1 (0.11%) NoSQL
7 1 (0.11%) Snowflake Schema
7 1 (0.11%) TimescaleDB
Development Applications
1 35 (3.95%) GitLab
2 29 (3.27%) Jenkins
3 24 (2.71%) JIRA
4 11 (1.24%) Git
5 4 (0.45%) Artifactory
5 4 (0.45%) Bitbucket
6 1 (0.11%) Chocolatey
6 1 (0.11%) Claude Code
6 1 (0.11%) CMake
6 1 (0.11%) GoCD
6 1 (0.11%) Gradle
6 1 (0.11%) IntelliJ
6 1 (0.11%) Introscope
6 1 (0.11%) MSI
6 1 (0.11%) Robot Framework
6 1 (0.11%) Sonatype Nexus
General
1 97 (10.95%) Social Skills
2 74 (8.35%) Public Sector
3 51 (5.76%) Finance
4 34 (3.84%) Analytical Skills
5 24 (2.71%) Documentation Skills
6 18 (2.03%) Banking
7 17 (1.92%) Legal
8 14 (1.58%) Inclusion and Diversity
9 10 (1.13%) Aerospace
9 10 (1.13%) Marketing
10 9 (1.02%) Manufacturing
11 7 (0.79%) Billing
12 6 (0.68%) Military
12 6 (0.68%) Telecoms
13 3 (0.34%) Law
14 2 (0.23%) Advertising
14 2 (0.23%) Investment Banking
14 2 (0.23%) Local Government
14 2 (0.23%) Retail
15 1 (0.11%) Publishing
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 8 (0.90%) LDAP
2 7 (0.79%) Flash
2 7 (0.79%) REST
3 6 (0.68%) Elastic Stack
4 5 (0.56%) Keycloak
4 5 (0.56%) Middleware
5 4 (0.45%) ARM Templates
5 4 (0.45%) JSON
5 4 (0.45%) OpenID
5 4 (0.45%) SOAP
6 3 (0.34%) Apache NiFi
6 3 (0.34%) Oracle Fusion
6 3 (0.34%) SAML
6 3 (0.34%) YAML
7 2 (0.23%) .NET
7 2 (0.23%) ADO
7 2 (0.23%) Node.js
7 2 (0.23%) OAuth
7 2 (0.23%) RabbitMQ
7 2 (0.23%) XML
Miscellaneous
1 92 (10.38%) Data Centre
2 47 (5.30%) Hybrid Cloud
3 42 (4.74%) PKI
4 36 (4.06%) Public Cloud
5 25 (2.82%) Cloud Native
6 23 (2.60%) Onboarding
7 19 (2.14%) Enterprise Storage
8 18 (2.03%) Self-Motivation
9 12 (1.35%) Clustering
9 12 (1.35%) Replication
10 11 (1.24%) Operational Technology
11 10 (1.13%) Distributed Systems
11 10 (1.13%) Private Cloud
12 9 (1.02%) Enterprise Software
12 9 (1.02%) Linux Command Line
13 8 (0.90%) Virtual Team
14 7 (0.79%) Management Information System
15 6 (0.68%) SCADA
15 6 (0.68%) Smartcard
15 6 (0.68%) YubiKey
Operating Systems
1 266 (30.02%) Windows
2 171 (19.30%) Windows Server
3 138 (15.58%) Linux
4 26 (2.93%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 20 (2.26%) Windows Server 2019
6 16 (1.81%) Windows 10
7 14 (1.58%) Windows Server 2016
8 13 (1.47%) Ubuntu
9 11 (1.24%) VMS
10 10 (1.13%) Apple iOS
10 10 (1.13%) Unix
11 9 (1.02%) Mac OS
12 8 (0.90%) Android
12 8 (0.90%) Debian
12 8 (0.90%) Windows Server 2003
13 6 (0.68%) CentOS
13 6 (0.68%) Windows Server 2012
14 3 (0.34%) AIX
15 2 (0.23%) Rocky
16 1 (0.11%) Data ONTAP
Processes & Methodologies
1 871 (98.31%) Infrastructure Engineering
2 157 (17.72%) Infrastructure as Code
3 134 (15.12%) DevOps
4 114 (12.87%) CI/CD
5 86 (9.71%) Problem-Solving
6 77 (8.69%) Migration
7 66 (7.45%) High Availability
8 64 (7.22%) Infrastructure Automation
9 54 (6.09%) Agile
10 51 (5.76%) Disaster Recovery
11 49 (5.53%) ITIL
12 48 (5.42%) Zero Trust
13 47 (5.30%) Project Delivery
14 43 (4.85%) Validation
15 38 (4.29%) Cybersecurity
16 37 (4.18%) Site Reliability Engineering
17 36 (4.06%) Continuous Improvement
18 32 (3.61%) Observability
19 30 (3.39%) Load Balancing
19 30 (3.39%) Root Cause Analysis
Programming Languages
1 124 (14.00%) PowerShell
2 122 (13.77%) Python
3 40 (4.51%) Bash
4 26 (2.93%) SQL
5 20 (2.26%) Bicep
6 16 (1.81%) C#
7 10 (1.13%) Java
8 8 (0.90%) ActionScript
9 5 (0.56%) Go
9 5 (0.56%) Shell Script
10 4 (0.45%) PHP
11 3 (0.34%) JavaScript
12 2 (0.23%) TypeScript
13 1 (0.11%) C
13 1 (0.11%) C++
13 1 (0.11%) Jython
13 1 (0.11%) VB
Qualifications
1 327 (36.91%) Security Cleared
2 214 (24.15%) SC Cleared
3 121 (13.66%) DV Cleared
4 28 (3.16%) Degree
5 17 (1.92%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
6 16 (1.81%) Cisco Certification
7 14 (1.58%) Microsoft Certification
8 12 (1.35%) Azure Certification
9 11 (1.24%) CCNA
9 11 (1.24%) MCSE
10 8 (0.90%) CCNP
11 7 (0.79%) VCAP
12 6 (0.68%) FFIEC
13 5 (0.56%) RHCA
14 4 (0.45%) AWS Certification
14 4 (0.45%) MCSA
15 3 (0.34%) APMG
15 3 (0.34%) CompTIA Security+
15 3 (0.34%) Computer Science Degree
15 3 (0.34%) GIAC
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 22 (2.48%) NIST
1 22 (2.48%) QA
2 21 (2.37%) ISO/IEC 27001
3 16 (1.81%) Cyber Essentials
4 8 (0.90%) GDPR
4 8 (0.90%) SLA
5 7 (0.79%) NCSC
6 6 (0.68%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
6 6 (0.68%) GLBA
6 6 (0.68%) PCI DSS
7 4 (0.45%) Disclosure Scotland
8 3 (0.34%) NIST 800
9 2 (0.23%) SOC 2
10 1 (0.11%) FedRAMP
10 1 (0.11%) Sarbanes-Oxley
System Software
1 166 (18.74%) Active Directory
2 162 (18.28%) VMware Infrastructure
3 75 (8.47%) Hyper-V
4 64 (7.22%) VMware ESXi
4 64 (7.22%) vSphere
5 34 (3.84%) Docker
6 29 (3.27%) VMware NSX
7 27 (3.05%) Virtual Machines
8 17 (1.92%) Virtual Desktop
9 12 (1.35%) BitLocker
9 12 (1.35%) NFS
10 10 (1.13%) Microsoft App-V
11 5 (0.56%) Firmware
11 5 (0.56%) GPFS
12 4 (0.45%) Terminal Services
13 3 (0.34%) Virtual Servers
14 2 (0.23%) Oracle RAC
14 2 (0.23%) QEMU
14 2 (0.23%) UAG
14 2 (0.23%) VMware Workstation
Systems Management
1 147 (16.59%) Terraform
2 88 (9.93%) Ansible
3 87 (9.82%) Kubernetes
4 43 (4.85%) vCenter Server
5 41 (4.63%) Microsoft Intune
6 32 (3.61%) SCCM
7 15 (1.69%) Prometheus
7 15 (1.69%) Puppet
8 14 (1.58%) Grafana
8 14 (1.58%) WSUS
9 12 (1.35%) SCOM
9 12 (1.35%) Single Sign-On
10 11 (1.24%) Istio
11 10 (1.13%) vMotion
12 9 (1.02%) Nessus
12 9 (1.02%) vRealize
12 9 (1.02%) VxRail
13 8 (0.90%) AirWatch
14 6 (0.68%) Packer
14 6 (0.68%) Red Hat Satellite
Vendors
1 221 (24.94%) VMware
2 179 (20.20%) Microsoft
3 60 (6.77%) Citrix
4 55 (6.21%) Cisco
5 40 (4.51%) F5
6 33 (3.72%) Veeam
7 32 (3.61%) Google
7 32 (3.61%) Palo Alto
8 25 (2.82%) Dell
8 25 (2.82%) NetApp
9 24 (2.71%) Red Hat
10 23 (2.60%) Aruba
10 23 (2.60%) Oracle
11 20 (2.26%) Arista
12 15 (1.69%) SolarWinds
13 14 (1.58%) ServiceNow
14 12 (1.35%) Tenable
15 11 (1.24%) Fortinet
15 11 (1.24%) Thales
16 10 (1.13%) Juniper