Public Cloud Contract Job Trends

Public Cloud
UK

The table below looks at the prevalence of the term Public Cloud in contract job vacancies. Included is a benchmarking guide to the contractor rates offered in vacancies that cited Public Cloud over the 6 months leading up to 31 January 2026, comparing them to the same period in the previous two years.

6 months to
31 Jan 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 313 255 292
Rank change year-on-year -58 +37 -85
Contract jobs citing Public Cloud 302 316 350
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.78% 1.00% 0.78%
As % of the Miscellaneous category 2.29% 3.09% 2.54%
Number of daily rates quoted 189 212 230
10th Percentile £395 £438 £446
25th Percentile £450 £525 £512
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £543 £600 £575
Median % change year-on-year -9.58% +4.35% -4.17%
75th Percentile £675 £688 £700
90th Percentile £738 £777 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £525 £575 £582
% change year-on-year -8.70% -1.20% +1.22%
Number of hourly rates quoted 0 2 3
10th Percentile - £45.95 £62.00
25th Percentile - £50.38 £68.00
Median hourly rate - £59.00 £78.00
Median % change year-on-year - -24.36% +48.57%
75th Percentile - £68.88 -
90th Percentile - £74.05 -
UK excluding London median hourly rate - £75.00 £78.00
% change year-on-year - -3.85% -

All Generic Skills
UK

Public Cloud falls under the General and Transferable Skills category. For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all contract job vacancies requiring generic IT skills.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for generic IT skills 13,195 10,232 13,771
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 34.06% 32.54% 30.78%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,334 6,079 8,979
10th Percentile £275 £263 £253
25th Percentile £405 £407 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £535
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% -1.87% -2.82%
75th Percentile £625 £656 £650
90th Percentile £738 £769 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £500 £500
% change year-on-year -5.00% - -
Number of hourly rates quoted 624 312 773
10th Percentile £15.00 £19.25 £14.00
25th Percentile £18.27 £23.60 £17.25
Median hourly rate £28.50 £35.00 £35.00
Median % change year-on-year -18.56% - +56.18%
75th Percentile £63.03 £65.00 £60.00
90th Percentile £75.00 £80.75 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £27.50 £32.50 £35.65
% change year-on-year -15.38% -8.84% +70.33%

Public Cloud
Job Vacancy Trend

Historical trend showing the proportion of contract IT job postings citing Public Cloud relative to all contract IT jobs advertised.

Public Cloud job vacancy trend in the UK

Public Cloud
Daily Rate Trend

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing Public Cloud.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing Public Cloud

Public Cloud
Daily Rate Histogram

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Public Cloud over the 6 months to 31 January 2026.

Daily rate histogram for Public Cloud in the UK

Public Cloud
Hourly Rate Trend

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing Public Cloud.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing Public Cloud

Public Cloud
Top 17 Contract Job Locations

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing Public Cloud within the UK over the 6 months to 31 January 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 -66 254 £537 -10.50% 87
UK excluding London -35 157 £525 -8.70% 61
London -68 104 £600 - 40
Work from Home -23 70 £575 -5.74% 35
North of England -14 65 £520 +0.58% 22
Yorkshire -19 40 £525 +1.55% 9
Midlands -17 34 £525 +12.42% 3
North West -18 24 £450 -10.00% 8
South East -57 23 £522 -10.39% 22
South West -4 20 £650 +13.04% 9
East Midlands -8 18 £395 -1.25% 1
West Midlands -30 15 £530 -33.75% 2
Scotland 0 13 £543 -6.47% 4
East of England -20 9 £413 -31.25% 1
Wales -2 3 £214 -64.40%
North East -15 2 - - 5
Northern Ireland - 1 £385 -

Public Cloud
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 (2.32%) OpenStack
2 6 (1.99%) SAS
3 5 (1.66%) Confluence
4 3 (0.99%) Apache Airflow
5 2 (0.66%) Palantir Foundry
5 2 (0.66%) SharePoint
6 1 (0.33%) Oracle SOA Suite
Applications
1 5 (1.66%) Weka
2 3 (0.99%) Microsoft Excel
3 2 (0.66%) Microsoft Project
4 1 (0.33%) Adobe Premiere
4 1 (0.33%) Camtasia
4 1 (0.33%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 1 (0.33%) MS Visio
Business Applications
1 48 (15.89%) SAP S/4HANA
2 7 (2.32%) Oracle ERP
2 7 (2.32%) SAP ERP
2 7 (2.32%) SAP FI
3 6 (1.99%) SAP CO
3 6 (1.99%) SAP FI/CO
4 1 (0.33%) SAP SD
Cloud Services
1 119 (39.40%) Azure
2 118 (39.07%) AWS
3 105 (34.77%) GCP
4 33 (10.93%) Serverless
5 30 (9.93%) GitHub
6 18 (5.96%) OCI
7 15 (4.97%) Azure DevOps
7 15 (4.97%) Google Kubernetes Engine
7 15 (4.97%) IaaS
8 14 (4.64%) PaaS
9 13 (4.30%) SuccessFactors
10 11 (3.64%) Cloud Computing
10 11 (3.64%) GitHub Actions
11 10 (3.31%) AWS KMS
11 10 (3.31%) Power Platform
12 9 (2.98%) SaaS
13 6 (1.99%) Microsoft 365
13 6 (1.99%) Nutanix
14 5 (1.66%) Amazon S3
14 5 (1.66%) Azure AKS
Communications & Networking
1 32 (10.60%) Firewall
2 21 (6.95%) Network Security
3 19 (6.29%) VPN
4 17 (5.63%) DNS
5 16 (5.30%) TCP/IP
6 15 (4.97%) WAN
7 8 (2.65%) SD-WAN
8 7 (2.32%) Internet
9 6 (1.99%) Kerberos
10 5 (1.66%) DHCP
10 5 (1.66%) LAN
11 4 (1.32%) Multicast
11 4 (1.32%) NetScaler
12 3 (0.99%) BGP
12 3 (0.99%) OSPF
12 3 (0.99%) SAN
12 3 (0.99%) VXLAN
13 2 (0.66%) Cisco IOS
13 2 (0.66%) IOS XR
13 2 (0.66%) NX-OS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 34 (11.26%) NoSQL
2 16 (5.30%) PostgreSQL
3 10 (3.31%) Power BI
4 8 (2.65%) Data Warehouse
4 8 (2.65%) MongoDB
4 8 (2.65%) SQL Server
5 7 (2.32%) Oracle Database
6 6 (1.99%) Relational Database
7 4 (1.32%) BigQuery
8 3 (0.99%) Data Vault
8 3 (0.99%) Delta Lake
8 3 (0.99%) Oracle Exadata
9 2 (0.66%) Amazon Redshift
9 2 (0.66%) Apache Cassandra
9 2 (0.66%) Data Mining
9 2 (0.66%) Elasticsearch
9 2 (0.66%) MySQL
9 2 (0.66%) RDBMS
9 2 (0.66%) Redis
9 2 (0.66%) SAP HANA
Development Applications
1 54 (17.88%) Jenkins
2 47 (15.56%) GitLab
3 21 (6.95%) Liquibase
4 15 (4.97%) JIRA
5 12 (3.97%) Postman
6 11 (3.64%) Git
7 5 (1.66%) SoapUI
7 5 (1.66%) TeamCity
8 2 (0.66%) Cucumber
8 2 (0.66%) JUnit
8 2 (0.66%) Mocha
9 1 (0.33%) Snyk
9 1 (0.33%) Vite
General
1 105 (34.77%) Finance
2 89 (29.47%) Social Skills
3 47 (15.56%) Banking
3 47 (15.56%) Public Sector
4 22 (7.28%) Financial Institution
5 20 (6.62%) Analytical Skills
6 18 (5.96%) Local Government
7 6 (1.99%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 6 (1.99%) Influencing Skills
7 6 (1.99%) Presentation Skills
8 5 (1.66%) General Ledger
8 5 (1.66%) Law
8 5 (1.66%) Manufacturing
9 4 (1.32%) Investment Banking
9 4 (1.32%) Police
10 3 (0.99%) Documentation Skills
10 3 (0.99%) German Language
10 3 (0.99%) Military
11 2 (0.66%) Public Speaking
11 2 (0.66%) Telecoms
Job Titles
1 62 (20.53%) Architect
2 44 (14.57%) Senior
3 36 (11.92%) Cloud Engineer
4 27 (8.94%) GCP Engineer
5 21 (6.95%) Software Engineer
6 19 (6.29%) DevOps Engineer
7 18 (5.96%) AWS Engineer
7 18 (5.96%) Lead
7 18 (5.96%) Solutions Architect
8 15 (4.97%) Consultant
8 15 (4.97%) Senior Software Engineer
9 14 (4.64%) Analyst
10 13 (4.30%) Developer
11 12 (3.97%) SAP Manager
12 11 (3.64%) Cloud Architect
12 11 (3.64%) Infrastructure Engineer
13 10 (3.31%) Data Engineer
13 10 (3.31%) Infrastructure Architect
14 9 (2.98%) SAP Analyst
14 9 (2.98%) Senior DevOps
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 53 (17.55%) REST
2 31 (10.26%) RESTful
3 28 (9.27%) Elastic Stack
4 14 (4.64%) OAuth
5 13 (4.30%) JSON
6 12 (3.97%) JWT
6 12 (3.97%) SOAP
7 11 (3.64%) Oracle Fusion
7 11 (3.64%) Spring Boot
7 11 (3.64%) XML
7 11 (3.64%) XSLT
8 10 (3.31%) Middleware
8 10 (3.31%) Web Services
9 8 (2.65%) Spring
10 7 (2.32%) Kafka
11 6 (1.99%) AngularJS
11 6 (1.99%) React
12 3 (0.99%) Node.js
12 3 (0.99%) Pandas
12 3 (0.99%) SAP Fiori
Miscellaneous
1 50 (16.56%) Cloud Native
2 27 (8.94%) Distributed Systems
3 23 (7.62%) Data Centre
4 19 (6.29%) Private Cloud
5 13 (4.30%) Hybrid Cloud
6 10 (3.31%) Product Ownership
7 7 (2.32%) Legacy Systems
8 6 (1.99%) Cloud Security Posture
8 6 (1.99%) Data Structures
8 6 (1.99%) Security Posture
9 5 (1.66%) Grid Computing
9 5 (1.66%) PKI
10 4 (1.32%) Data Protection Act
10 4 (1.32%) Legacy Applications
10 4 (1.32%) Replication
11 3 (0.99%) Distributed Applications
11 3 (0.99%) Enterprise Software
11 3 (0.99%) Mainframe
11 3 (0.99%) NHS
11 3 (0.99%) Reinsurance
Operating Systems
1 57 (18.87%) Linux
2 30 (9.93%) Windows
3 11 (3.64%) Windows Server
4 8 (2.65%) Unix
5 7 (2.32%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 7 (2.32%) Windows Server 2019
6 5 (1.66%) VMS
7 4 (1.32%) Windows Server 2012
8 3 (0.99%) Windows Server 2016
9 1 (0.33%) CentOS
9 1 (0.33%) Ubuntu
9 1 (0.33%) Windows 10
Processes & Methodologies
1 120 (39.74%) DevOps
2 88 (29.14%) CI/CD
3 87 (28.81%) Agile
4 82 (27.15%) Infrastructure as Code
5 56 (18.54%) Migration
6 49 (16.23%) Containerisation
7 43 (14.24%) Microservices
8 40 (13.25%) Cybersecurity
9 38 (12.58%) Stakeholder Management
10 34 (11.26%) Infrastructure Automation
10 34 (11.26%) Root Cause Analysis
11 32 (10.60%) Software Engineering
12 30 (9.93%) Computer Science
12 30 (9.93%) High Availability
13 29 (9.60%) Problem-Solving
14 28 (9.27%) Cryptography
15 27 (8.94%) Analytics
15 27 (8.94%) Change Management
15 27 (8.94%) Cost Optimisation
16 25 (8.28%) Continuous Delivery
Programming Languages
1 83 (27.48%) Python
2 32 (10.60%) Go
3 25 (8.28%) SQL
4 24 (7.95%) Java
5 9 (2.98%) Bash
6 8 (2.65%) PowerShell
7 4 (1.32%) JavaScript
7 4 (1.32%) PL/SQL
8 3 (0.99%) TypeScript
9 2 (0.66%) Ruby
9 2 (0.66%) Shell Script
10 1 (0.33%) ABAP
10 1 (0.33%) Bicep
10 1 (0.33%) C++
10 1 (0.33%) Perl
10 1 (0.33%) T-SQL
Qualifications
1 68 (22.52%) Security Cleared
2 49 (16.23%) SC Cleared
3 42 (13.91%) Degree
4 29 (9.60%) Computer Science Degree
5 27 (8.94%) Master's Degree
6 15 (4.97%) AWS Certification
7 10 (3.31%) BPSS Clearance
8 7 (2.32%) Cisco Certification
8 7 (2.32%) DV Cleared
8 7 (2.32%) ISTQB
9 6 (1.99%) Azure Certification
10 5 (1.66%) AWS Certified Developer
10 5 (1.66%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
10 5 (1.66%) SAP Certification
11 4 (1.32%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
11 4 (1.32%) CCNP
11 4 (1.32%) PMI Certification
12 3 (0.99%) CCSP
12 3 (0.99%) CISSP
12 3 (0.99%) Microsoft Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 10 (3.31%) ISO/IEC 27001
2 9 (2.98%) NCSC
3 7 (2.32%) SLA
4 6 (1.99%) ISO/IEC 27002 (supersedes ISO/IEC 17799)
4 6 (1.99%) NIST
5 5 (1.66%) GDPR
5 5 (1.66%) ISO/IEC 27005
5 5 (1.66%) QA
6 4 (1.32%) Data Quality
7 3 (0.99%) PCI DSS
8 2 (0.66%) Accessibility
8 2 (0.66%) PSD2
8 2 (0.66%) WCAG
9 1 (0.33%) COBIT
9 1 (0.33%) GAMP
9 1 (0.33%) HIPAA
9 1 (0.33%) ISO 15022
9 1 (0.33%) ISO 20022
9 1 (0.33%) RMADS
9 1 (0.33%) Sarbanes-Oxley
System Software
1 54 (17.88%) Docker
2 17 (5.63%) VMware Infrastructure
3 15 (4.97%) Hyper-V
4 7 (2.32%) Virtual Machines
5 6 (1.99%) Active Directory
5 6 (1.99%) vSphere
6 5 (1.66%) GPFS
6 5 (1.66%) Lustre
6 5 (1.66%) Slurm Workload Manager
7 4 (1.32%) Virtual Desktop
8 3 (0.99%) Oracle RAC
9 2 (0.66%) VMware NSX
10 1 (0.33%) Ceph
10 1 (0.33%) KVM
10 1 (0.33%) QEMU
Systems Management
1 81 (26.82%) Terraform
2 75 (24.83%) Kubernetes
3 57 (18.87%) Ansible
4 32 (10.60%) Prometheus
5 30 (9.93%) Grafana
6 13 (4.30%) Istio
7 5 (1.66%) Microsoft Intune
8 4 (1.32%) Active Directory Federation Services
8 4 (1.32%) Data Guard
8 4 (1.32%) Oracle RMAN
8 4 (1.32%) SCCM
9 3 (0.99%) Kubeflow
9 3 (0.99%) Puppet
9 3 (0.99%) vCenter Server
10 2 (0.66%) Red Hat Satellite
10 2 (0.66%) Single Sign-On
10 2 (0.66%) vMotion
11 1 (0.33%) Argo
11 1 (0.33%) Consul
11 1 (0.33%) Demisto
Vendors
1 56 (18.54%) SAP
2 41 (13.58%) Google
3 33 (10.93%) Oracle
4 32 (10.60%) Splunk
5 28 (9.27%) VMware
6 22 (7.28%) Microsoft
7 11 (3.64%) Ariba
8 10 (3.31%) Cisco
9 8 (2.65%) F5
9 8 (2.65%) Palo Alto
9 8 (2.65%) ServiceNow
10 6 (1.99%) MuleSoft
11 5 (1.66%) Aruba
11 5 (1.66%) Databricks
11 5 (1.66%) Fortinet
11 5 (1.66%) Veeam
12 4 (1.32%) Red Hat
13 3 (0.99%) Informatica
13 3 (0.99%) Juniper
13 3 (0.99%) Mercator