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 13 July 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
13 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 129 252 311
Rank change year-on-year +123 +59 -49
Contract jobs citing Platform Engineering 500 121 81
As % of all contract jobs in the UK excluding London 1.86% 0.81% 0.39%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 2.26% 0.91% 0.47%
Number of daily rates quoted 303 85 59
10th Percentile £361 £400 £415
25th Percentile £423 £425 £461
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £538
Median % change year-on-year - -6.98% -10.42%
75th Percentile £575 £588 £650
90th Percentile £650 £637 £715
UK median daily rate £535 £530 £575
% change year-on-year +0.94% -7.83% -8.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 18 1 0
10th Percentile £66.50 - -
25th Percentile £69.19 £68.75 -
Median hourly rate £74.26 £72.50 -
Median % change year-on-year +2.43% - -
75th Percentile £92.50 £76.25 -
90th Percentile £100.00 - -
UK median hourly rate £77.50 £72.50 £60.50
% change year-on-year +6.90% +19.83% -22.44%

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 22,120 13,270 17,200
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK excluding London 82.09% 89.29% 82.94%
Number of daily rates quoted 13,124 8,096 10,160
10th Percentile £300 £235 £250
25th Percentile £406 £366 £381
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £475 £500
Median % change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
75th Percentile £588 £575 £600
90th Percentile £678 £650 £688
UK median daily rate £520 £501 £525
% change year-on-year +3.81% -4.67% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,305 1,178 2,076
10th Percentile £14.50 £14.13 £12.53
25th Percentile £19.33 £16.96 £15.62
Median hourly rate £45.00 £24.66 £38.12
Median % change year-on-year +82.48% -35.31% +0.51%
75th Percentile £68.00 £51.76 £62.13
90th Percentile £82.25 £72.50 £73.50
UK median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £38.12
% change year-on-year +74.79% -34.02% -4.70%

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 13 July 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 13 July 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 13 July 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 +56 196 £500 - 93
Yorkshire +38 112 £500 -13.04% 25
South East -25 82 £539 +10.17% 78
North West +3 78 £506 +19.12% 60
Midlands -1 78 £488 -2.50% 50
Scotland +38 71 £449 -20.88% 21
West Midlands -33 58 £500 +5.26% 35
South West +10 54 £550 -8.33% 85
East Midlands +2 19 £488 -2.50% 14
East of England - 17 £551 - 19
North East -28 8 £438 -20.45% 8
Wales - 6 £325 - 5
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 23 (4.60%) Confluence
2 11 (2.20%) Apache Spark
3 7 (1.40%) Apache Airflow
4 4 (0.80%) Apache
4 4 (0.80%) Microsoft Exchange
4 4 (0.80%) SharePoint
5 3 (0.60%) Palantir Foundry
6 2 (0.40%) Apache Pulsar
6 2 (0.40%) Blackberry Enterprise Server
6 2 (0.40%) IBM HTTP Server
6 2 (0.40%) nginx
6 2 (0.40%) OpenStack
6 2 (0.40%) Oracle HTTP Server
6 2 (0.40%) Tomcat
6 2 (0.40%) WebSphere
6 2 (0.40%) WebSphere Application Server
6 2 (0.40%) WebSphere Portal
7 1 (0.20%) Apache Superset
7 1 (0.20%) SAS
7 1 (0.20%) WebLogic
Applications
1 3 (0.60%) Microsoft Project
2 1 (0.20%) MS Visio
Business Applications
1 4 (0.80%) Dynamics CRM
1 4 (0.80%) NetSuite
1 4 (0.80%) Sage X3
2 1 (0.20%) Payment Gateway
2 1 (0.20%) SAP S/4HANA
Cloud Services
1 205 (41.00%) AWS
2 200 (40.00%) Azure
3 92 (18.40%) GCP
4 90 (18.00%) GitHub
5 69 (13.80%) GitHub Actions
6 47 (9.40%) Azure DevOps
7 40 (8.00%) Serverless
8 37 (7.40%) Amazon EKS
9 31 (6.20%) Amazon CloudWatch
9 31 (6.20%) OpenShift
10 29 (5.80%) Google Kubernetes Engine
11 27 (5.40%) Amazon S3
12 26 (5.20%) AWS Lambda
13 25 (5.00%) Amazon EC2
13 25 (5.00%) Azure AKS
13 25 (5.00%) Entra ID
14 24 (4.80%) Power Platform
15 23 (4.60%) AWS CloudFormation
15 23 (4.60%) Virtual Private Cloud
16 20 (4.00%) Snowflake
Communications & Networking
1 32 (6.40%) Firewall
2 30 (6.00%) DNS
3 21 (4.20%) Network Security
4 16 (3.20%) VPN
5 13 (2.60%) TCP/IP
6 12 (2.40%) DHCP
7 10 (2.00%) VSAN
8 8 (1.60%) SAN
9 7 (1.40%) SNMP
10 5 (1.00%) HTTP
10 5 (1.00%) NAS
11 4 (0.80%) Fibre Channel
12 3 (0.60%) IPsec
12 3 (0.60%) MQTT
12 3 (0.60%) SD-WAN
12 3 (0.60%) SSL
12 3 (0.60%) WAN
12 3 (0.60%) WebEx
13 2 (0.40%) Internet
13 2 (0.40%) LAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 29 (5.80%) PostgreSQL
2 25 (5.00%) SQL Server
3 17 (3.40%) Data Warehouse
4 14 (2.80%) Relational Database
5 13 (2.60%) Power BI
6 10 (2.00%) DynamoDB
6 10 (2.00%) MySQL
7 8 (1.60%) Metadata
7 8 (1.60%) Neo4j
7 8 (1.60%) NoSQL
7 8 (1.60%) Tableau
8 7 (1.40%) Amazon Redshift
8 7 (1.40%) Big Data
9 6 (1.20%) Ataccama
9 6 (1.20%) BigQuery
10 5 (1.00%) Amazon RDS
10 5 (1.00%) Azure SQL Database
10 5 (1.00%) Hadoop
10 5 (1.00%) MongoDB
11 4 (0.80%) Redis
Development Applications
1 82 (16.40%) Jenkins
2 52 (10.40%) GitLab
3 51 (10.20%) Git
4 49 (9.80%) JIRA
5 15 (3.00%) Bitbucket
6 10 (2.00%) Gatling
7 8 (1.60%) Sonatype Nexus
8 6 (1.20%) Artifactory
8 6 (1.20%) Visual Studio
9 5 (1.00%) Maven
10 4 (0.80%) JMeter
10 4 (0.80%) LoadRunner
10 4 (0.80%) MSBuild
10 4 (0.80%) NeoLoad
10 4 (0.80%) Postman
10 4 (0.80%) SonarQube
11 3 (0.60%) Jaeger
12 2 (0.40%) Claude Code
12 2 (0.40%) MSI
12 2 (0.40%) Terragrunt
General
1 99 (19.80%) Social Skills
2 81 (16.20%) Finance
3 59 (11.80%) Public Sector
4 29 (5.80%) Banking
5 20 (4.00%) Analytical Skills
6 16 (3.20%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 14 (2.80%) Documentation Skills
8 9 (1.80%) Telecoms
9 8 (1.60%) Aerospace
9 8 (1.60%) Influencing Skills
10 6 (1.20%) Billing
11 5 (1.00%) Financial Institution
11 5 (1.00%) Legal
11 5 (1.00%) Military
11 5 (1.00%) Retail
12 4 (0.80%) Health Technology
12 4 (0.80%) Police
13 3 (0.60%) Investment Banking
13 3 (0.60%) Law
13 3 (0.60%) Local Government
Job Titles
1 209 (41.80%) Platform Engineer
2 83 (16.60%) DevOps Engineer
2 83 (16.60%) Senior
3 75 (15.00%) Cloud Platform Engineer
4 54 (10.80%) Cloud Engineer
5 52 (10.40%) Data Engineer
6 44 (8.80%) Azure Engineer
7 34 (6.80%) Architect
7 34 (6.80%) Senior Platform Engineer
8 32 (6.40%) Azure Platform Engineer
9 28 (5.60%) Lead
10 26 (5.20%) AWS Engineer
11 25 (5.00%) Infrastructure Engineer
12 23 (4.60%) DevOps Platform Engineer
13 22 (4.40%) GCP Engineer
14 21 (4.20%) Site Reliability Engineer
15 20 (4.00%) Senior Data Engineer
16 19 (3.80%) Senior DevOps
16 19 (3.80%) Senior DevOps Engineer
17 18 (3.60%) Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 24 (4.80%) Kafka
2 17 (3.40%) REST
3 15 (3.00%) OpenTelemetry
4 12 (2.40%) .NET
4 12 (2.40%) AWS CDK
4 12 (2.40%) Playwright
5 11 (2.20%) OAuth
6 10 (2.00%) JSON
6 10 (2.00%) LDAP
6 10 (2.00%) OAuth2
7 9 (1.80%) Node.js
7 9 (1.80%) OpenID
7 9 (1.80%) SailPoint
8 8 (1.60%) React
8 8 (1.60%) Spring Boot
8 8 (1.60%) YAML
9 7 (1.40%) ADO
10 6 (1.20%) ARM Templates
10 6 (1.20%) SOAP
10 6 (1.20%) Spring
Miscellaneous
1 95 (19.00%) Cloud Native
2 42 (8.40%) Product Ownership
3 22 (4.40%) Onboarding
4 18 (3.60%) Data Protection Act
5 17 (3.40%) Distributed Systems
5 17 (3.40%) Hybrid Cloud
6 16 (3.20%) Data Centre
7 13 (2.60%) Private Cloud
8 12 (2.40%) Enterprise Cloud
8 12 (2.40%) Enterprise Software
9 10 (2.00%) Public Cloud
10 8 (1.60%) NHS
10 8 (1.60%) PKI
11 7 (1.40%) Replication
11 7 (1.40%) Security Posture
11 7 (1.40%) Self-Motivation
12 6 (1.20%) Management Information System
13 5 (1.00%) Linux Command Line
13 5 (1.00%) Virtual Team
14 4 (0.80%) Legacy Systems
Operating Systems
1 92 (18.40%) Linux
2 47 (9.40%) Windows
3 28 (5.60%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 14 (2.80%) Unix
5 10 (2.00%) Windows Server
6 8 (1.60%) VMS
7 4 (0.80%) Ubuntu
8 2 (0.40%) CentOS
8 2 (0.40%) Data ONTAP
8 2 (0.40%) Debian
8 2 (0.40%) Oracle Linux
8 2 (0.40%) SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
8 2 (0.40%) Windows 10
8 2 (0.40%) Windows Server 2012
8 2 (0.40%) Windows Server 2019
9 1 (0.20%) Mac OS
Processes & Methodologies
1 269 (53.80%) CI/CD
2 259 (51.80%) DevOps
3 200 (40.00%) Infrastructure as Code
4 126 (25.20%) Observability
5 109 (21.80%) Agile
6 94 (18.80%) Containerisation
7 84 (16.80%) Site Reliability Engineering
8 82 (16.40%) Continuous Improvement
9 74 (14.80%) Migration
10 65 (13.00%) Technical Leadership
11 63 (12.60%) Infrastructure Engineering
12 57 (11.40%) AI
13 55 (11.00%) Problem-Solving
14 54 (10.80%) DevSecOps
14 54 (10.80%) Test Automation
15 52 (10.40%) Roadmaps
16 44 (8.80%) Cloud Security
16 44 (8.80%) Scrum
17 43 (8.60%) Software Engineering
18 40 (8.00%) Stakeholder Engagement
Programming Languages
1 190 (38.00%) Python
2 70 (14.00%) PowerShell
3 69 (13.80%) Bash
4 51 (10.20%) Java
5 41 (8.20%) SQL
6 25 (5.00%) Bicep
7 14 (2.80%) Go
8 12 (2.40%) Scala
9 9 (1.80%) C#
9 9 (1.80%) JavaScript
9 9 (1.80%) TypeScript
10 7 (1.40%) Groovy
11 6 (1.20%) Shell Script
12 5 (1.00%) Perl
13 4 (0.80%) Cypher
14 2 (0.40%) C++
14 2 (0.40%) Data Analysis Expressions
14 2 (0.40%) Jython
14 2 (0.40%) PHP
14 2 (0.40%) VBScript
Qualifications
1 147 (29.40%) Security Cleared
2 122 (24.40%) SC Cleared
3 24 (4.80%) DV Cleared
4 17 (3.40%) BPSS Clearance
5 15 (3.00%) AWS Certification
5 15 (3.00%) Degree
6 11 (2.20%) Azure Certification
6 11 (2.20%) SAFe Agilist
7 9 (1.80%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
7 9 (1.80%) Computer Science Degree
7 9 (1.80%) RHCE
8 7 (1.40%) Microsoft Certification
9 5 (1.00%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
10 4 (0.80%) CISSP
10 4 (0.80%) NCDA
11 3 (0.60%) VCAP
12 2 (0.40%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
12 2 (0.40%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
12 2 (0.40%) TOGAF Certification
12 2 (0.40%) VCP6
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 20 (4.00%) Data Quality
2 18 (3.60%) QA
3 8 (1.60%) Accessibility
3 8 (1.60%) GDPR
3 8 (1.60%) NCSC
4 5 (1.00%) GRC
4 5 (1.00%) PCI DSS
5 4 (0.80%) Disclosure Scotland
6 3 (0.60%) NIST
6 3 (0.60%) NIST 800
7 2 (0.40%) GxP
8 1 (0.20%) ISO 20022
8 1 (0.20%) ISO 8583
System Software
1 76 (15.20%) Docker
2 37 (7.40%) VMware Infrastructure
3 26 (5.20%) Active Directory
4 18 (3.60%) vSphere
5 17 (3.40%) Virtual Machines
6 14 (2.80%) VMware NSX
7 9 (1.80%) Hyper-V
8 7 (1.40%) VMware ESXi
9 4 (0.80%) Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services
10 2 (0.40%) EMC RecoverPoint
10 2 (0.40%) Firmware
10 2 (0.40%) NFS
10 2 (0.40%) Squid
10 2 (0.40%) SRDF
10 2 (0.40%) Virtual Desktop
11 1 (0.20%) Ceph
11 1 (0.20%) KVM
11 1 (0.20%) Virtual Servers
Systems Management
1 209 (41.80%) Terraform
2 166 (33.20%) Kubernetes
3 79 (15.80%) Ansible
4 40 (8.00%) Grafana
5 37 (7.40%) Prometheus
6 27 (5.40%) Argo
7 18 (3.60%) Istio
8 8 (1.60%) Kustomize
9 6 (1.20%) HAProxy
9 6 (1.20%) PowerCLI
10 5 (1.00%) Microsoft Intune
10 5 (1.00%) Packer
10 5 (1.00%) Puppet
10 5 (1.00%) vCenter Server
10 5 (1.00%) vRealize
11 4 (0.80%) Rancher
11 4 (0.80%) vMotion
12 3 (0.60%) NetBackup
12 3 (0.60%) Progress Chef
12 3 (0.60%) SCCM
Vendors
1 59 (11.80%) Microsoft
2 39 (7.80%) VMware
3 37 (7.40%) Google
4 26 (5.20%) Red Hat
5 23 (4.60%) Oracle
6 18 (3.60%) ServiceNow
7 17 (3.40%) Databricks
8 15 (3.00%) Splunk
9 12 (2.40%) Dynatrace
10 11 (2.20%) Cisco
11 7 (1.40%) NetApp
12 6 (1.20%) Citrix
12 6 (1.20%) CyberArk
13 5 (1.00%) BiZZdesign
13 5 (1.00%) Brocade
13 5 (1.00%) Cribl.io
13 5 (1.00%) PagerDuty
14 4 (0.80%) F5
14 4 (0.80%) Foundry
14 4 (0.80%) Veeam