Infrastructure Engineer Contract Job Trends

Infrastructure Engineer
UK

The median Infrastructure Engineer daily rate in the UK is £524, according to job vacancies posted in the 6 months leading up to 24 June 2026.

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

6 months to
24 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 144 216 149
Rank change year-on-year +72 -67 +20
Contract jobs requiring an Infrastructure Engineer 888 380 692
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 1.74% 1.27% 1.59%
As % of the Job Titles category 1.89% 1.37% 1.71%
Number of daily rates quoted 574 250 528
10th Percentile £340 £328 £310
25th Percentile £425 £400 £375
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £524 £525 £464
Median % change year-on-year -0.19% +13.18% -7.23%
75th Percentile £600 £588 £575
90th Percentile £673 £638 £638
UK excluding London median daily rate £515 £525 £463
% change year-on-year -1.90% +13.51% -7.50%
Number of hourly rates quoted 41 2 6
10th Percentile £33.64 - £20.60
25th Percentile £58.43 - £31.88
Median hourly rate £72.54 £200.00 £72.25
Median % change year-on-year -63.73% +176.82% -0.34%
75th Percentile £76.50 - £77.00
90th Percentile £78.75 - £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £72.54 £200.00 £45.00
% change year-on-year -63.73% +344.44% -36.84%

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 47,021 27,678 40,406
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.36% 92.16% 92.96%
Number of daily rates quoted 28,598 17,771 25,926
10th Percentile £325 £288 £281
25th Percentile £414 £402 £410
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £518 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +3.50% -4.76% -2.33%
75th Percentile £625 £625 £638
90th Percentile £725 £738 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £493
% change year-on-year +5.26% -3.65% -1.40%
Number of hourly rates quoted 3,150 1,209 2,937
10th Percentile £15.38 £13.84 £12.84
25th Percentile £21.00 £17.44 £16.37
Median hourly rate £43.00 £27.38 £37.50
Median % change year-on-year +57.08% -27.00% -12.79%
75th Percentile £67.50 £57.50 £62.50
90th Percentile £80.00 £74.00 £74.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £44.50 £25.15 £40.00
% change year-on-year +76.94% -37.13% -

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 24 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 24 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 24 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 +57 767 £525 - 224
UK excluding London +51 617 £515 -1.90% 214
London +2 197 £525 - 48
Work from Home +37 194 £536 +7.25% 102
North of England +23 189 £500 - 54
South East +10 163 £525 -4.55% 49
South West +24 100 £538 -6.52% 52
Yorkshire -7 81 £356 -32.14% 15
Midlands -8 76 £450 +12.50% 23
North West -2 69 £575 +15.00% 30
North East -1 47 £600 -7.69% 10
Scotland +13 46 £570 +17.22% 2
West Midlands -32 46 £475 +22.58% 12
East of England -20 32 £450 - 15
East Midlands +4 29 £450 +12.50% 11
Wales 0 14 £400 -11.11% 21
Northern Ireland - 1 - - 2
Channel Islands - 1 £550 -

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

For the 6 months to 24 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.

1 873 (98.31%) Infrastructure Engineering
2 328 (36.94%) Security Cleared
3 268 (30.18%) Azure
4 265 (29.84%) Windows
5 223 (25.11%) VMware
6 218 (24.55%) SC Cleared
7 180 (20.27%) Microsoft
8 172 (19.37%) Windows Server
9 168 (18.92%) Active Directory
10 163 (18.36%) VMware Infrastructure
11 158 (17.79%) Infrastructure as Code
12 147 (16.55%) Terraform
13 137 (15.43%) Linux
14 135 (15.20%) DNS
15 133 (14.98%) DevOps
16 126 (14.19%) Firewall
17 124 (13.96%) AWS
17 124 (13.96%) PowerShell
18 123 (13.85%) Python
19 119 (13.40%) DV Cleared
20 112 (12.61%) CI/CD
21 94 (10.59%) DHCP
22 90 (10.14%) Kubernetes
23 88 (9.91%) Problem-Solving
24 85 (9.57%) Ansible
25 79 (8.90%) Migration
26 76 (8.56%) Hyper-V
27 68 (7.66%) High Availability
28 67 (7.55%) VMware ESXi
29 64 (7.21%) vSphere

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 44 (4.95%) Microsoft Exchange
2 9 (1.01%) SharePoint
3 7 (0.79%) Confluence
4 5 (0.56%) WebSphere
5 4 (0.45%) CICS
5 4 (0.45%) TPMS
6 3 (0.34%) Apache
7 2 (0.23%) CloudStack
8 1 (0.11%) Apache Airflow
8 1 (0.11%) IBM HTTP Server
8 1 (0.11%) MS Project Server
8 1 (0.11%) SharePoint Server
8 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
1 268 (30.18%) Azure
2 124 (13.96%) AWS
3 63 (7.09%) GitHub
4 59 (6.64%) Microsoft 365
5 56 (6.31%) GCP
6 52 (5.86%) Entra ID
7 42 (4.73%) IaaS
8 38 (4.28%) OCI
9 37 (4.17%) SaaS
10 33 (3.72%) PaaS
11 29 (3.27%) Azure DevOps
12 23 (2.59%) Nutanix
13 22 (2.48%) GitHub Actions
14 21 (2.36%) Azure Monitor
15 20 (2.25%) Azure AKS
16 18 (2.03%) Google Kubernetes Engine
17 8 (0.90%) Cohesity
18 7 (0.79%) Azure Stack
18 7 (0.79%) OpenShift
19 5 (0.56%) Power Platform
Communications & Networking
1 135 (15.20%) DNS
2 126 (14.19%) Firewall
3 94 (10.59%) DHCP
4 48 (5.41%) VLAN
5 44 (4.95%) WAN
6 43 (4.84%) SAN
7 39 (4.39%) VPN
8 33 (3.72%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
8 33 (3.72%) Network Security
9 30 (3.38%) BIG-IP
10 28 (3.15%) LAN
11 26 (2.93%) TCP/IP
12 24 (2.70%) BGP
13 23 (2.59%) Ethernet VPN
14 22 (2.48%) SD-WAN
14 22 (2.48%) VXLAN
15 20 (2.25%) OSPF
16 18 (2.03%) Wi-Fi
17 15 (1.69%) VSAN
18 14 (1.58%) SMTP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 34 (3.83%) SQL Server
2 9 (1.01%) Elasticsearch
3 8 (0.90%) Amazon RDS
4 5 (0.56%) Oracle Database
4 5 (0.56%) Relational Database
5 4 (0.45%) Azure SQL Database
5 4 (0.45%) PostgreSQL
6 3 (0.34%) Big Data
6 3 (0.34%) Data Mining
6 3 (0.34%) NonStop SQL
6 3 (0.34%) Power BI
7 2 (0.23%) BigQuery
7 2 (0.23%) DynamoDB
7 2 (0.23%) Oracle Exadata
7 2 (0.23%) RDBMS
8 1 (0.11%) Data Lake
8 1 (0.11%) Flink
8 1 (0.11%) MongoDB
8 1 (0.11%) NoSQL
8 1 (0.11%) TimescaleDB
Development Applications
1 36 (4.05%) GitLab
2 29 (3.27%) Jenkins
3 26 (2.93%) JIRA
4 9 (1.01%) 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%) MLflow
6 1 (0.11%) MSI
6 1 (0.11%) Robot Framework
6 1 (0.11%) Sonatype Nexus
General
1 97 (10.92%) Social Skills
2 72 (8.11%) Public Sector
3 49 (5.52%) Finance
4 34 (3.83%) Analytical Skills
5 24 (2.70%) Documentation Skills
6 19 (2.14%) Legal
7 18 (2.03%) Banking
8 14 (1.58%) Inclusion and Diversity
9 11 (1.24%) Aerospace
10 10 (1.13%) Manufacturing
10 10 (1.13%) Marketing
11 7 (0.79%) Military
12 5 (0.56%) Billing
13 4 (0.45%) Telecoms
14 3 (0.34%) Law
15 2 (0.23%) Advertising
15 2 (0.23%) Investment Banking
15 2 (0.23%) Local Government
15 2 (0.23%) Retail
16 1 (0.11%) Mandarin Language
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 8 (0.90%) LDAP
1 8 (0.90%) Middleware
2 7 (0.79%) Flash
2 7 (0.79%) REST
3 6 (0.68%) Elastic Stack
4 5 (0.56%) ARM Templates
4 5 (0.56%) Keycloak
5 4 (0.45%) JSON
5 4 (0.45%) OpenID
5 4 (0.45%) SOAP
5 4 (0.45%) YAML
6 3 (0.34%) Apache NiFi
6 3 (0.34%) Oracle Fusion
6 3 (0.34%) SAML
7 2 (0.23%) 802.1X
7 2 (0.23%) Bazel
7 2 (0.23%) Kafka
7 2 (0.23%) Node.js
7 2 (0.23%) OAuth2
7 2 (0.23%) RabbitMQ
Miscellaneous
1 95 (10.70%) Data Centre
2 47 (5.29%) Hybrid Cloud
3 42 (4.73%) PKI
4 36 (4.05%) Public Cloud
5 25 (2.82%) Cloud Native
6 23 (2.59%) Onboarding
7 20 (2.25%) Enterprise Storage
8 17 (1.91%) Self-Motivation
9 13 (1.46%) Clustering
10 12 (1.35%) Replication
11 11 (1.24%) Operational Technology
12 10 (1.13%) Distributed Systems
12 10 (1.13%) Private Cloud
13 9 (1.01%) Enterprise Software
13 9 (1.01%) Linux Command Line
14 8 (0.90%) Smartcard
14 8 (0.90%) Virtual Team
15 7 (0.79%) Management Information System
16 6 (0.68%) SCADA
16 6 (0.68%) YubiKey
Operating Systems
1 265 (29.84%) Windows
2 172 (19.37%) Windows Server
3 137 (15.43%) Linux
4 27 (3.04%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 20 (2.25%) Windows Server 2019
6 16 (1.80%) Windows 10
7 14 (1.58%) Windows Server 2016
8 12 (1.35%) Ubuntu
9 10 (1.13%) Apple iOS
9 10 (1.13%) Unix
10 9 (1.01%) Mac OS
10 9 (1.01%) VMS
11 8 (0.90%) Android
12 7 (0.79%) Windows Server 2003
13 6 (0.68%) CentOS
13 6 (0.68%) Debian
13 6 (0.68%) Windows Server 2012
14 4 (0.45%) zOS
15 3 (0.34%) AIX
16 2 (0.23%) Rocky
Processes & Methodologies
1 873 (98.31%) Infrastructure Engineering
2 158 (17.79%) Infrastructure as Code
3 133 (14.98%) DevOps
4 112 (12.61%) CI/CD
5 88 (9.91%) Problem-Solving
6 79 (8.90%) Migration
7 68 (7.66%) High Availability
8 63 (7.09%) Infrastructure Automation
9 53 (5.97%) Agile
10 52 (5.86%) Disaster Recovery
11 48 (5.41%) ITIL
11 48 (5.41%) Project Delivery
11 48 (5.41%) Zero Trust
12 45 (5.07%) Validation
13 38 (4.28%) Continuous Improvement
14 37 (4.17%) Site Reliability Engineering
15 36 (4.05%) Cybersecurity
16 30 (3.38%) Load Balancing
16 30 (3.38%) Root Cause Analysis
17 29 (3.27%) Platform Engineering
Programming Languages
1 124 (13.96%) PowerShell
2 123 (13.85%) Python
3 41 (4.62%) Bash
4 27 (3.04%) SQL
5 20 (2.25%) Bicep
6 16 (1.80%) 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
1 328 (36.94%) Security Cleared
2 218 (24.55%) SC Cleared
3 119 (13.40%) DV Cleared
4 28 (3.15%) Degree
5 17 (1.91%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
6 16 (1.80%) 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 5 (0.56%) RHCA
13 4 (0.45%) AWS Certification
13 4 (0.45%) FFIEC
13 4 (0.45%) MCSA
14 3 (0.34%) APMG
14 3 (0.34%) CompTIA Security+
14 3 (0.34%) Computer Science Degree
14 3 (0.34%) SSCP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 25 (2.82%) QA
2 21 (2.36%) ISO/IEC 27001
3 20 (2.25%) NIST
4 16 (1.80%) Cyber Essentials
5 7 (0.79%) NCSC
5 7 (0.79%) SLA
6 6 (0.68%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
6 6 (0.68%) GDPR
7 4 (0.45%) Disclosure Scotland
7 4 (0.45%) GLBA
7 4 (0.45%) PCI DSS
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
1 168 (18.92%) Active Directory
2 163 (18.36%) VMware Infrastructure
3 76 (8.56%) Hyper-V
4 67 (7.55%) VMware ESXi
5 64 (7.21%) vSphere
6 35 (3.94%) Docker
7 30 (3.38%) VMware NSX
8 28 (3.15%) Virtual Machines
9 17 (1.91%) Virtual Desktop
10 12 (1.35%) NFS
11 11 (1.24%) BitLocker
12 9 (1.01%) Microsoft App-V
13 5 (0.56%) Firmware
13 5 (0.56%) GPFS
14 4 (0.45%) Terminal Services
15 3 (0.34%) Virtual Servers
16 2 (0.23%) Oracle RAC
16 2 (0.23%) SRDF
16 2 (0.23%) UAG
16 2 (0.23%) VMware Workstation
Systems Management
1 147 (16.55%) Terraform
2 90 (10.14%) Kubernetes
3 85 (9.57%) Ansible
4 43 (4.84%) vCenter Server
5 40 (4.50%) Microsoft Intune
6 31 (3.49%) SCCM
7 16 (1.80%) WSUS
8 15 (1.69%) Prometheus
9 14 (1.58%) Grafana
9 14 (1.58%) Puppet
10 12 (1.35%) SCOM
11 11 (1.24%) Istio
11 11 (1.24%) Single Sign-On
12 9 (1.01%) Nessus
12 9 (1.01%) vMotion
12 9 (1.01%) vRealize
12 9 (1.01%) VxRail
13 8 (0.90%) AirWatch
14 6 (0.68%) Packer
14 6 (0.68%) Red Hat Satellite
Vendors
1 223 (25.11%) VMware
2 180 (20.27%) Microsoft
3 58 (6.53%) Citrix
4 57 (6.42%) Cisco
5 40 (4.50%) F5
6 34 (3.83%) Veeam
7 33 (3.72%) Google
8 31 (3.49%) Palo Alto
9 25 (2.82%) Dell
9 25 (2.82%) Red Hat
10 24 (2.70%) NetApp
11 23 (2.59%) Aruba
11 23 (2.59%) Oracle
12 20 (2.25%) Arista
13 14 (1.58%) ServiceNow
13 14 (1.58%) SolarWinds
14 12 (1.35%) Juniper
14 12 (1.35%) Tenable
15 11 (1.24%) Fortinet
15 11 (1.24%) IBM