Platform Engineering Contract Job Trends in the UK excluding London

Platform Engineering
UK > UK excluding London

The table below provides summary statistics and contractor rates for jobs advertised in the UK excluding London requiring Platform Engineering skills. It covers contract job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 22 September 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
22 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 104 213 276
Rank change year-on-year +109 +63 -1
Contract jobs citing Platform Engineering 672 176 89
As % of all contract jobs in the UK excluding London 2.38% 1.15% 0.50%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 2.95% 1.29% 0.61%
Number of daily rates quoted 392 123 63
10th Percentile £381 £400 £413
25th Percentile £425 £450 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £518 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -1.29% - -12.50%
75th Percentile £588 £609 £586
90th Percentile £687 £685 £685
UK median daily rate £550 £525 £575
% change year-on-year +4.76% -8.70% -4.25%
Number of hourly rates quoted 31 0 0
10th Percentile £67.50 - -
25th Percentile £71.97 - -
Median hourly rate £83.50 - -
75th Percentile £99.41 - -
90th Percentile £100.00 - -
UK median hourly rate £77.50 - £55.00
% change year-on-year - - -29.49%

All Process & Methodology Skills
UK excluding London

Platform Engineering falls under the Processes and Methodologies category. For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all contract job vacancies requiring process or methodology skills in the UK excluding London.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for process or methodology skills 22,760 13,612 14,679
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK excluding London 80.76% 89.17% 83.20%
Number of daily rates quoted 12,900 8,181 8,414
10th Percentile £300 £235 £243
25th Percentile £410 £369 £387
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £475 £500
Median % change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
75th Percentile £600 £575 £600
90th Percentile £688 £663 £688
UK median daily rate £525 £500 £525
% change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -2.78%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,726 1,446 1,177
10th Percentile £13.50 £14.00 £14.70
25th Percentile £17.00 £17.00 £18.00
Median hourly rate £40.08 £22.32 £43.00
Median % change year-on-year +79.61% -48.10% +1.18%
75th Percentile £67.50 £41.82 £65.00
90th Percentile £78.13 £67.00 £74.60
UK median hourly rate £40.00 £25.15 £42.69
% change year-on-year +59.05% -41.09% -1.10%

Platform Engineering
Job Vacancy Trend in the UK excluding London

Historical trend showing the proportion of contract IT job postings citing Platform Engineering relative to all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK excluding London.

Platform Engineering job vacancy trend in the UK excluding London

Platform Engineering
Daily Rate Trend in the UK excluding London

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK excluding London citing Platform Engineering.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK excluding London citing Platform Engineering

Platform Engineering
Daily Rate Histogram in the UK excluding London

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Platform Engineering in the UK excluding London over the 6 months to 22 September 2026.

Daily rate histogram for Platform Engineering in the UK excluding London

Platform Engineering
Hourly Rate Trend in the UK excluding London

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK excluding London citing Platform Engineering.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK excluding London citing Platform Engineering

Platform Engineering
Hourly Rate Histogram in the UK excluding London

Hourly rate distribution of jobs citing Platform Engineering in the UK excluding London over the 6 months to 22 September 2026.

Hourly rate histogram for Platform Engineering in the UK excluding London

Platform Engineering
Contract Job Locations in the UK excluding London

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing Platform Engineering within the UK excluding London region over the 6 months to 22 September 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
North of England +76 218 £513 +13.89% 249
Yorkshire +64 134 £500 -5.88% 72
South East +17 123 £575 +17.95% 226
Midlands +6 119 £450 -10.00% 86
Scotland +27 89 £450 -15.89% 111
South West +26 86 £550 -8.33% 132
West Midlands -19 83 £443 -11.40% 45
North West -2 72 £550 +36.82% 151
East Midlands +20 35 £488 -30.36% 41
East of England -11 31 £525 -10.26% 50
North East -24 14 £425 -5.56% 26
Wales - 9 £325 - 17
Northern Ireland - 1 - - 37
Channel Islands - 1 - -
Platform Engineering
UK

Platform Engineering
Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities in the UK excluding London 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 14 (2.08%) Confluence
2 12 (1.79%) SharePoint
3 7 (1.04%) Apache
4 6 (0.89%) Apache Airflow
4 6 (0.89%) Apache Spark
5 3 (0.45%) OpenStack
5 3 (0.45%) Palantir Foundry
6 2 (0.30%) Apache Superset
6 2 (0.30%) Microsoft Exchange
6 2 (0.30%) Tomcat
7 1 (0.15%) Blackberry Enterprise Server
7 1 (0.15%) IBM HTTP Server
7 1 (0.15%) nginx
7 1 (0.15%) Oracle Coherence
7 1 (0.15%) Oracle HTTP Server
7 1 (0.15%) SAS
7 1 (0.15%) SharePoint Server
7 1 (0.15%) WebSphere
7 1 (0.15%) WebSphere Application Server
7 1 (0.15%) WebSphere Portal
Applications
1 1 (0.15%) MS Visio
1 1 (0.15%) Spreadsheet
Business Applications
1 16 (2.38%) Dynamics CRM
2 4 (0.60%) NetSuite
2 4 (0.60%) Sage X3
3 1 (0.15%) SAP S/4HANA
Cloud Services
1 287 (42.71%) Azure
2 283 (42.11%) AWS
3 120 (17.86%) GCP
4 106 (15.77%) GitHub
5 83 (12.35%) Azure DevOps
6 75 (11.16%) GitHub Actions
7 58 (8.63%) Serverless
8 44 (6.55%) Power Platform
9 38 (5.65%) Amazon EKS
10 37 (5.51%) OpenShift
11 33 (4.91%) AWS Lambda
12 31 (4.61%) Amazon CloudWatch
13 30 (4.46%) Azure Monitor
13 30 (4.46%) Entra ID
14 28 (4.17%) Power Automate
14 28 (4.17%) PowerApps
15 25 (3.72%) Azure AKS
16 23 (3.42%) Amazon S3
16 23 (3.42%) Google Kubernetes Engine
17 22 (3.27%) Snowflake
Communications & Networking
1 67 (9.97%) DNS
2 52 (7.74%) Firewall
3 37 (5.51%) DHCP
3 37 (5.51%) TCP/IP
4 24 (3.57%) VPN
5 23 (3.42%) VSAN
6 18 (2.68%) Network Security
7 12 (1.79%) HTTP
8 6 (0.89%) SNMP
9 5 (0.74%) SSH
10 4 (0.60%) SSL
11 3 (0.45%) HTTPS
11 3 (0.45%) NAS
11 3 (0.45%) SAN
11 3 (0.45%) Software-Defined Networking
11 3 (0.45%) WAN
12 2 (0.30%) Internet
12 2 (0.30%) Intrusion Detection
12 2 (0.30%) LAN
12 2 (0.30%) Multicast
Database & Business Intelligence
1 32 (4.76%) PostgreSQL
2 29 (4.32%) SQL Server
3 15 (2.23%) MySQL
4 14 (2.08%) Data Warehouse
5 13 (1.93%) DynamoDB
5 13 (1.93%) Power BI
6 11 (1.64%) Relational Database
7 9 (1.34%) Big Data
8 8 (1.19%) Data Lake
8 8 (1.19%) Oracle Exadata
9 7 (1.04%) Amazon Redshift
9 7 (1.04%) BigQuery
9 7 (1.04%) Neo4j
10 6 (0.89%) Ataccama
10 6 (0.89%) NoSQL
11 5 (0.74%) Azure SQL Database
11 5 (0.74%) Delta Lake
11 5 (0.74%) Metadata
11 5 (0.74%) Tableau
12 4 (0.60%) Amazon RDS
Development Applications
1 75 (11.16%) Jenkins
2 63 (9.38%) Git
3 60 (8.93%) GitLab
4 28 (4.17%) JIRA
5 16 (2.38%) Bitbucket
6 8 (1.19%) Claude Code
7 6 (0.89%) SonarQube
8 5 (0.74%) Maven
9 4 (0.60%) Gatling
9 4 (0.60%) MSBuild
9 4 (0.60%) Sonatype Nexus
9 4 (0.60%) Visual Studio
10 3 (0.45%) Artifactory
10 3 (0.45%) JUnit
10 3 (0.45%) Mockito
10 3 (0.45%) Selenium
11 2 (0.30%) Atlassian Bamboo
12 1 (0.15%) Gerrit
12 1 (0.15%) LoadRunner
12 1 (0.15%) MSI
General
1 127 (18.90%) Social Skills
2 104 (15.48%) Finance
3 78 (11.61%) Public Sector
4 35 (5.21%) Inclusion and Diversity
5 33 (4.91%) Banking
6 29 (4.32%) Analytical Skills
7 23 (3.42%) Aerospace
8 15 (2.23%) Documentation Skills
8 15 (2.23%) Telecoms
9 8 (1.19%) Billing
9 8 (1.19%) Influencing Skills
9 8 (1.19%) Investment Banking
9 8 (1.19%) Military
10 6 (0.89%) Retail
11 5 (0.74%) Law
11 5 (0.74%) Local Government
12 4 (0.60%) Financial Institution
12 4 (0.60%) Health Technology
12 4 (0.60%) Police
12 4 (0.60%) Publishing
Job Titles
1 263 (39.14%) Platform Engineer
2 136 (20.24%) Senior
3 104 (15.48%) DevOps Engineer
4 95 (14.14%) Cloud Platform Engineer
5 74 (11.01%) Cloud Engineer
6 64 (9.52%) Senior Platform Engineer
7 59 (8.78%) Data Engineer
8 51 (7.59%) Azure Engineer
9 49 (7.29%) Developer
9 49 (7.29%) Lead
10 47 (6.99%) Architect
11 43 (6.40%) Infrastructure Engineer
12 40 (5.95%) AWS Engineer
13 32 (4.76%) DevOps Platform Engineer
14 30 (4.46%) Azure Platform Engineer
15 26 (3.87%) GCP Engineer
15 26 (3.87%) Principal Engineer
15 26 (3.87%) Senior Data Engineer
16 25 (3.72%) Site Reliability Engineer
17 24 (3.57%) AWS Platform Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 310 (46.13%) Terraform
2 51 (7.59%) Kafka
3 29 (4.32%) JSON
4 25 (3.72%) ARM Templates
5 24 (3.57%) REST
6 18 (2.68%) .NET
7 17 (2.53%) OAuth
7 17 (2.53%) YAML
8 16 (2.38%) OAuth2
9 15 (2.23%) OpenTelemetry
10 14 (2.08%) React
11 12 (1.79%) AWS CDK
11 12 (1.79%) Node.js
11 12 (1.79%) OpenID
11 12 (1.79%) Spring Boot
12 11 (1.64%) SAML
13 10 (1.49%) XML
14 9 (1.34%) Spring
15 8 (1.19%) XSLT
16 7 (1.04%) LDAP
Miscellaneous
1 145 (21.58%) Cloud Native
2 58 (8.63%) Product Ownership
3 45 (6.70%) Distributed Systems
4 37 (5.51%) Hybrid Cloud
5 35 (5.21%) Onboarding
6 31 (4.61%) Data Protection Act
7 30 (4.46%) Private Cloud
8 29 (4.32%) PKI
9 25 (3.72%) Data Centre
10 21 (3.13%) Enterprise Software
11 19 (2.83%) Enterprise Cloud
12 18 (2.68%) Management Information System
13 15 (2.23%) Linux Command Line
13 15 (2.23%) Public Cloud
14 13 (1.93%) NHS
15 12 (1.79%) AI Agents
16 8 (1.19%) Low-Code
16 8 (1.19%) Taxonomies
16 8 (1.19%) Virtual Team
17 7 (1.04%) Replication
Operating Systems
1 131 (19.49%) Linux
2 66 (9.82%) Windows
3 27 (4.02%) Windows Server
4 26 (3.87%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 14 (2.08%) Unix
6 10 (1.49%) VMS
7 6 (0.89%) Ubuntu
8 3 (0.45%) Windows 10
9 2 (0.30%) CentOS
9 2 (0.30%) Data ONTAP
9 2 (0.30%) Debian
10 1 (0.15%) Mac OS
10 1 (0.15%) Oracle Linux
10 1 (0.15%) Rocky
10 1 (0.15%) SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
10 1 (0.15%) Windows Server 2016
10 1 (0.15%) Windows Server 2019
Processes & Methodologies
1 374 (55.65%) CI/CD
2 351 (52.23%) DevOps
3 314 (46.73%) Infrastructure as Code
4 198 (29.46%) Observability
5 141 (20.98%) Agile
6 133 (19.79%) Containerisation
7 132 (19.64%) Technical Leadership
8 129 (19.20%) Continuous Improvement
9 116 (17.26%) DevSecOps
10 109 (16.22%) Site Reliability Engineering
11 106 (15.77%) AI
12 92 (13.69%) Infrastructure Engineering
13 84 (12.50%) Software Engineering
14 80 (11.90%) Problem-Solving
15 79 (11.76%) Migration
15 79 (11.76%) Stakeholder Management
16 71 (10.57%) Roadmaps
17 67 (9.97%) Cybersecurity
18 64 (9.52%) Infrastructure Automation
19 61 (9.08%) Test Automation
Programming Languages
1 242 (36.01%) Python
2 105 (15.63%) Bash
3 103 (15.33%) PowerShell
4 66 (9.82%) Java
5 45 (6.70%) Bicep
6 43 (6.40%) SQL
7 37 (5.51%) C#
8 24 (3.57%) JavaScript
9 20 (2.98%) Go
10 13 (1.93%) TypeScript
11 8 (1.19%) Groovy
11 8 (1.19%) Shell Script
12 6 (0.89%) Scala
13 5 (0.74%) Perl
14 4 (0.60%) Kusto Query Language
15 3 (0.45%) C++
16 2 (0.30%) PHP
16 2 (0.30%) VBScript
17 1 (0.15%) Ada
17 1 (0.15%) MATLAB
Qualifications
1 200 (29.76%) Security Cleared
2 144 (21.43%) SC Cleared
3 61 (9.08%) DV Cleared
4 31 (4.61%) Azure Certification
5 27 (4.02%) AWS Certification
5 27 (4.02%) Degree
6 24 (3.57%) Microsoft Certification
7 22 (3.27%) BPSS Clearance
8 12 (1.79%) Computer Science Degree
8 12 (1.79%) VCAP
9 10 (1.49%) CISSP
10 8 (1.19%) SAFe Agilist
11 7 (1.04%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
12 6 (0.89%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
12 6 (0.89%) RHCE
13 5 (0.74%) PMI Certification
13 5 (0.74%) PMP
14 4 (0.60%) (ISC)2 CCSP
14 4 (0.60%) Cisco Certification
14 4 (0.60%) CompTIA Security+
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 24 (3.57%) QA
2 23 (3.42%) Accessibility
3 14 (2.08%) Data Quality
4 12 (1.79%) NCSC
5 11 (1.64%) GDPR
6 8 (1.19%) WCAG
7 7 (1.04%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 7 (1.04%) NIST
8 5 (0.74%) GRC
9 4 (0.60%) Cyber Essentials
9 4 (0.60%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
10 3 (0.45%) Disclosure Scotland
11 2 (0.30%) GxP
11 2 (0.30%) PCI DSS
11 2 (0.30%) SLA
12 1 (0.15%) HL7
12 1 (0.15%) JSP 440
System Software
1 110 (16.37%) Docker
2 67 (9.97%) VMware Infrastructure
3 47 (6.99%) Active Directory
4 36 (5.36%) vSphere
5 22 (3.27%) Hyper-V
5 22 (3.27%) VMware NSX
6 16 (2.38%) Virtual Machines
7 13 (1.93%) VMware ESXi
8 5 (0.74%) Virtual Servers
9 2 (0.30%) EMC RecoverPoint
9 2 (0.30%) NFS
9 2 (0.30%) Squid
9 2 (0.30%) SRDF
10 1 (0.15%) Ceph
10 1 (0.15%) Firmware
10 1 (0.15%) Virtual Desktop
10 1 (0.15%) zsh
Systems Management
1 267 (39.73%) Kubernetes
2 114 (16.96%) Ansible
3 36 (5.36%) Grafana
4 32 (4.76%) Prometheus
5 30 (4.46%) Argo
6 14 (2.08%) Istio
6 14 (2.08%) VxRail
7 11 (1.64%) Kustomize
8 9 (1.34%) vCenter Server
9 8 (1.19%) Microsoft Intune
10 7 (1.04%) SCCM
11 5 (0.74%) Puppet
12 4 (0.60%) HAProxy
12 4 (0.60%) Packer
12 4 (0.60%) Podman
12 4 (0.60%) Progress Chef
13 3 (0.45%) Check_MK
13 3 (0.45%) PowerCLI
14 2 (0.30%) EMC VPLEX
14 2 (0.30%) SnapMirror
Vendors
1 113 (16.82%) Microsoft
2 76 (11.31%) VMware
3 57 (8.48%) Google
4 28 (4.17%) Red Hat
5 25 (3.72%) Splunk
6 22 (3.27%) Oracle
7 21 (3.13%) Databricks
8 16 (2.38%) Dynatrace
9 14 (2.08%) CyberArk
9 14 (2.08%) ServiceNow
10 10 (1.49%) Salesforce
11 7 (1.04%) CrowdStrike
12 6 (0.89%) ForgeRock
13 5 (0.74%) Cribl.io
13 5 (0.74%) NetApp
13 5 (0.74%) PagerDuty
14 4 (0.60%) Foundry
14 4 (0.60%) OpenAI
14 4 (0.60%) Sage
14 4 (0.60%) SAP