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 25 March 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
25 Mar 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 152 249 302
Rank change year-on-year +97 +53 -54
Contract jobs citing Platform Engineering 367 85 99
As % of all contract jobs in the UK excluding London 1.66% 0.67% 0.47%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 2.01% 0.75% 0.55%
Number of daily rates quoted 258 58 74
10th Percentile £363 £413 £422
25th Percentile £425 £468 £465
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £536 £550
Median % change year-on-year -6.72% -2.55% -4.35%
75th Percentile £559 £600 £650
90th Percentile £638 £658 £700
UK median daily rate £525 £552 £563
% change year-on-year -4.89% -1.87% -6.25%
Number of hourly rates quoted 17 2 0
10th Percentile £59.75 £60.33 -
25th Percentile £66.50 £61.73 -
Median hourly rate £74.26 £68.14 -
Median % change year-on-year +8.98% - -
75th Percentile - £74.23 -
90th Percentile £82.40 £75.44 -
UK median hourly rate £74.26 £68.14 £60.00
% change year-on-year +8.98% +13.57% -29.41%

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 18,263 11,401 17,956
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK excluding London 82.83% 90.53% 85.48%
Number of daily rates quoted 11,109 7,268 10,954
10th Percentile £265 £243 £233
25th Percentile £400 £375 £381
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £482 £488 £500
Median % change year-on-year -1.13% -2.50% -
75th Percentile £576 £588 £600
90th Percentile £675 £675 £688
UK median daily rate £500 £525 £525
% change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 1,910 730 1,937
10th Percentile £14.38 £14.99 £12.40
25th Percentile £17.87 £19.25 £15.17
Median hourly rate £30.00 £31.76 £31.50
Median % change year-on-year -5.54% +0.83% -12.50%
75th Percentile £65.00 £65.00 £58.75
90th Percentile £75.00 £76.34 £71.25
UK median hourly rate £32.50 £32.50 £32.50
% change year-on-year - - -9.72%

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 25 March 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 25 March 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 25 March 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 +35 151 £500 -9.09% 94
North West +25 78 £550 -0.45% 53
South East +11 75 £525 +5.00% 75
Yorkshire -7 71 £475 -13.64% 33
Scotland +41 45 £450 -14.38% 6
Midlands -38 43 £525 +5.00% 27
West Midlands -22 38 £538 +0.09% 19
South West +2 28 £550 -8.52% 32
East of England -11 26 £450 -35.71% 10
North East -7 5 £550 - 8
East Midlands -33 5 £525 +10.53% 8
Wales -8 2 £424 - 9
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 18 (4.90%) Confluence
2 15 (4.09%) Microsoft Exchange
3 10 (2.72%) Apache Spark
4 9 (2.45%) SharePoint
5 6 (1.63%) Apache
6 4 (1.09%) OpenStack
7 3 (0.82%) Apache Airflow
7 3 (0.82%) WebLogic
8 2 (0.54%) Apache Pulsar
8 2 (0.54%) IBM HTTP Server
8 2 (0.54%) nginx
8 2 (0.54%) Oracle HTTP Server
8 2 (0.54%) Tuxedo
8 2 (0.54%) WebSphere
8 2 (0.54%) WebSphere Application Server
8 2 (0.54%) WebSphere Portal
9 1 (0.27%) Blackberry Enterprise Server
9 1 (0.27%) CICS
9 1 (0.27%) IIS
9 1 (0.27%) SharePoint Server
Applications
1 3 (0.82%) Microsoft Project
Business Applications
1 1 (0.27%) Payment Gateway
1 1 (0.27%) SAP S/4HANA
Cloud Services
1 136 (37.06%) Azure
2 118 (32.15%) AWS
3 67 (18.26%) GitHub
4 51 (13.90%) GCP
5 44 (11.99%) GitHub Actions
6 35 (9.54%) Azure DevOps
7 34 (9.26%) Entra ID
8 28 (7.63%) Serverless
9 27 (7.36%) OpenShift
10 24 (6.54%) Azure AKS
11 22 (5.99%) Amazon EKS
12 21 (5.72%) AWS CloudFormation
13 18 (4.90%) AWS Lambda
14 16 (4.36%) Amazon CloudWatch
15 15 (4.09%) Amazon S3
16 14 (3.81%) Amazon EC2
17 12 (3.27%) SaaS
18 11 (3.00%) Google Kubernetes Engine
18 11 (3.00%) PaaS
18 11 (3.00%) Virtual Private Cloud
Communications & Networking
1 37 (10.08%) Firewall
2 26 (7.08%) DNS
3 13 (3.54%) Network Security
4 12 (3.27%) TCP/IP
5 10 (2.72%) DHCP
5 10 (2.72%) WebEx
6 7 (1.91%) BGP
6 7 (1.91%) VLAN
7 6 (1.63%) Software-Defined Networking
8 5 (1.36%) SAN
8 5 (1.36%) VPN
9 4 (1.09%) Fibre Channel
9 4 (1.09%) IPsec
9 4 (1.09%) MQTT
9 4 (1.09%) SD-WAN
9 4 (1.09%) SSL
9 4 (1.09%) VSAN
10 3 (0.82%) Internet
11 2 (0.54%) HTTP
11 2 (0.54%) SNMP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 24 (6.54%) PostgreSQL
2 10 (2.72%) NoSQL
3 9 (2.45%) Data Warehouse
3 9 (2.45%) DynamoDB
3 9 (2.45%) Metadata
3 9 (2.45%) Redis
3 9 (2.45%) SQL Server
4 8 (2.18%) Big Data
4 8 (2.18%) Hadoop
5 7 (1.91%) Relational Database
6 6 (1.63%) Amazon RDS
6 6 (1.63%) Amazon Redshift
6 6 (1.63%) Power BI
7 4 (1.09%) Data Lake
7 4 (1.09%) Neo4j
8 3 (0.82%) Amazon Athena
8 3 (0.82%) Tableau
9 2 (0.54%) Apache Hive
9 2 (0.54%) Impala
9 2 (0.54%) MongoDB
Development Applications
1 54 (14.71%) Jenkins
2 46 (12.53%) GitLab
3 35 (9.54%) Git
4 34 (9.26%) JIRA
5 7 (1.91%) Bitbucket
5 7 (1.91%) Gatling
5 7 (1.91%) SonarQube
6 5 (1.36%) Artifactory
6 5 (1.36%) Maven
6 5 (1.36%) Sonatype Nexus
7 4 (1.09%) JMeter
7 4 (1.09%) LoadRunner
7 4 (1.09%) MSI
7 4 (1.09%) NeoLoad
7 4 (1.09%) Postman
8 2 (0.54%) Cucumber
8 2 (0.54%) Introscope
8 2 (0.54%) Jaeger
8 2 (0.54%) Mockito
8 2 (0.54%) Spinnaker
General
1 77 (20.98%) Social Skills
2 32 (8.72%) Public Sector
3 31 (8.45%) Finance
4 22 (5.99%) Analytical Skills
5 18 (4.90%) Banking
6 14 (3.81%) Legal
7 4 (1.09%) Documentation Skills
8 3 (0.82%) Telecoms
9 2 (0.54%) Games
9 2 (0.54%) Law
10 1 (0.27%) Advertising
10 1 (0.27%) Aerospace
10 1 (0.27%) Electronics
10 1 (0.27%) Financial Institution
10 1 (0.27%) Influencing Skills
10 1 (0.27%) Investment Banking
10 1 (0.27%) Military
10 1 (0.27%) Presentation Skills
10 1 (0.27%) Retail
10 1 (0.27%) Retail Banking
Job Titles
1 187 (50.95%) Platform Engineer
2 65 (17.71%) Cloud Platform Engineer
3 46 (12.53%) Senior
4 36 (9.81%) DevOps Engineer
5 35 (9.54%) Cloud Engineer
6 32 (8.72%) Azure Engineer
7 27 (7.36%) Azure Platform Engineer
8 24 (6.54%) Data Engineer
8 24 (6.54%) Infrastructure Engineer
9 22 (5.99%) AWS Engineer
9 22 (5.99%) Lead
10 20 (5.45%) Architect
11 14 (3.81%) AWS Platform Engineer
12 12 (3.27%) DevSecOps Engineer
12 12 (3.27%) Software Engineer
13 11 (3.00%) VMware Engineer
14 10 (2.72%) DevOps Platform Engineer
14 10 (2.72%) GCP Engineer
15 9 (2.45%) Project Manager
16 8 (2.18%) Senior Platform Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 17 (4.63%) Kafka
2 12 (3.27%) REST
3 11 (3.00%) YAML
4 10 (2.72%) Elastic Stack
4 10 (2.72%) XMPP
5 9 (2.45%) Keycloak
5 9 (2.45%) OpenID
5 9 (2.45%) Playwright
6 8 (2.18%) ADO
6 8 (2.18%) Middleware
6 8 (2.18%) OAuth
6 8 (2.18%) OAuth2
7 7 (1.91%) Node.js
7 7 (1.91%) OpenTelemetry
7 7 (1.91%) Oracle Fusion
7 7 (1.91%) React
8 6 (1.63%) .NET
8 6 (1.63%) AWS CDK
9 5 (1.36%) LDAP
9 5 (1.36%) Spring
Miscellaneous
1 35 (9.54%) Cloud Native
2 30 (8.17%) Product Ownership
3 16 (4.36%) PKI
3 16 (4.36%) Private Cloud
4 15 (4.09%) Onboarding
5 13 (3.54%) Data Centre
6 12 (3.27%) Distributed Systems
6 12 (3.27%) Hybrid Cloud
7 9 (2.45%) Public Cloud
8 8 (2.18%) NHS
8 8 (2.18%) Security Posture
9 7 (1.91%) Data Protection Act
10 5 (1.36%) Fat Client
10 5 (1.36%) Operational Technology
10 5 (1.36%) Replication
10 5 (1.36%) Thin Client
10 5 (1.36%) Virtual Team
11 4 (1.09%) Analytical Mindset
11 4 (1.09%) NVMe
12 3 (0.82%) Legacy Systems
Operating Systems
1 86 (23.43%) Linux
2 61 (16.62%) Windows
3 27 (7.36%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 24 (6.54%) Windows Server
5 12 (3.27%) Unix
6 6 (1.63%) VMS
7 3 (0.82%) Amazon Linux
7 3 (0.82%) Windows Server 2019
8 2 (0.54%) Oracle Linux
8 2 (0.54%) Solaris
8 2 (0.54%) SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
8 2 (0.54%) Windows 10
8 2 (0.54%) Windows Server 2012
8 2 (0.54%) Windows Server 2016
9 1 (0.27%) CentOS
9 1 (0.27%) zOS
Processes & Methodologies
1 164 (44.69%) CI/CD
2 141 (38.42%) DevOps
3 130 (35.42%) Infrastructure as Code
4 71 (19.35%) Observability
5 67 (18.26%) Containerisation
6 66 (17.98%) Agile
7 59 (16.08%) Continuous Improvement
7 59 (16.08%) Problem-Solving
8 53 (14.44%) Infrastructure Engineering
9 48 (13.08%) Migration
10 42 (11.44%) Software Engineering
11 41 (11.17%) Infrastructure Automation
12 36 (9.81%) DevSecOps
12 36 (9.81%) Site Reliability Engineering
13 31 (8.45%) Roadmaps
14 29 (7.90%) Cloud Security
15 28 (7.63%) Analytics
15 28 (7.63%) Incident Response
15 28 (7.63%) Test Automation
16 27 (7.36%) Identity Access Management
Programming Languages
1 130 (35.42%) Python
2 69 (18.80%) Bash
3 61 (16.62%) PowerShell
4 29 (7.90%) Java
5 26 (7.08%) SQL
6 19 (5.18%) Bicep
7 15 (4.09%) Perl
8 8 (2.18%) TypeScript
9 7 (1.91%) C#
9 7 (1.91%) Scala
10 6 (1.63%) Go
10 6 (1.63%) JavaScript
11 4 (1.09%) Cypher
11 4 (1.09%) Shell Script
12 3 (0.82%) Groovy
13 2 (0.54%) Apex Code
13 2 (0.54%) C++
13 2 (0.54%) Jython
13 2 (0.54%) PHP
13 2 (0.54%) SOQL
Qualifications
1 145 (39.51%) Security Cleared
2 114 (31.06%) SC Cleared
3 20 (5.45%) DV Cleared
4 13 (3.54%) Degree
5 11 (3.00%) BPSS Clearance
6 10 (2.72%) CCNA
6 10 (2.72%) Cisco Certification
7 9 (2.45%) CCDP
7 9 (2.45%) CCNP
8 6 (1.63%) AWS Certification
9 5 (1.36%) Azure Certification
9 5 (1.36%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
10 4 (1.09%) Computer Science Degree
11 3 (0.82%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
11 3 (0.82%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
11 3 (0.82%) CSPO
11 3 (0.82%) RHCE
11 3 (0.82%) SAFe Agilist
12 2 (0.54%) PMI Certification
12 2 (0.54%) PMP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 17 (4.63%) NCSC
2 13 (3.54%) Data Quality
3 11 (3.00%) GDPR
4 6 (1.63%) QA
5 5 (1.36%) NIST
5 5 (1.36%) PCI DSS
6 4 (1.09%) NIST 800
7 3 (0.82%) GRC
8 2 (0.54%) WCAG
9 1 (0.27%) Accessibility
9 1 (0.27%) COBIT
9 1 (0.27%) Cyber Essentials
9 1 (0.27%) Disclosure Scotland
9 1 (0.27%) ISO 20022
9 1 (0.27%) ISO 8583
9 1 (0.27%) ISO/IEC 27001
System Software
1 59 (16.08%) Docker
2 46 (12.53%) VMware Infrastructure
3 37 (10.08%) Active Directory
4 14 (3.81%) vSphere
5 13 (3.54%) Virtual Machines
6 9 (2.45%) VMware NSX
7 5 (1.36%) VMware ESXi
8 4 (1.09%) Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services
8 4 (1.09%) Hyper-V
9 3 (0.82%) Virtual Desktop
10 2 (0.54%) Firmware
11 1 (0.27%) GPFS
11 1 (0.27%) KVM
11 1 (0.27%) Time Sharing Option
Systems Management
1 129 (35.15%) Terraform
2 116 (31.61%) Kubernetes
3 68 (18.53%) Ansible
4 42 (11.44%) Grafana
5 35 (9.54%) Prometheus
6 23 (6.27%) Istio
7 14 (3.81%) Argo
8 11 (3.00%) Packer
9 10 (2.72%) Active Directory Federation Services
10 8 (2.18%) Microsoft Intune
11 7 (1.91%) linkerd
12 6 (1.63%) Puppet
13 5 (1.36%) PowerCLI
13 5 (1.36%) SCCM
13 5 (1.36%) Single Sign-On
13 5 (1.36%) vCenter Server
14 4 (1.09%) Rancher
14 4 (1.09%) vMotion
14 4 (1.09%) vRealize
15 3 (0.82%) Kibana
Vendors
1 58 (15.80%) VMware
2 51 (13.90%) Microsoft
3 33 (8.99%) Red Hat
4 31 (8.45%) Splunk
5 22 (5.99%) Cisco
6 21 (5.72%) Google
7 20 (5.45%) Dynatrace
8 18 (4.90%) Citrix
8 18 (4.90%) Oracle
9 11 (3.00%) ServiceNow
10 9 (2.45%) AppDynamics
10 9 (2.45%) F5
11 8 (2.18%) Databricks
12 6 (1.63%) Veeam
13 5 (1.36%) IBM
13 5 (1.36%) PeopleSoft
14 4 (1.09%) BiZZdesign
14 4 (1.09%) Dell
14 4 (1.09%) Greenplum
14 4 (1.09%) Palo Alto