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

6 months to
25 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 109 213 282
Rank change year-on-year +104 +69 -2
Contract jobs citing Platform Engineering 616 156 87
As % of all contract jobs in the UK excluding London 2.23% 1.02% 0.48%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 2.75% 1.14% 0.58%
Number of daily rates quoted 357 107 63
10th Percentile £381 £401 £413
25th Percentile £425 £454 £470
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year -2.38% -4.55% -8.33%
75th Percentile £588 £603 £675
90th Percentile £693 £668 £728
UK median daily rate £550 £528 £575
% change year-on-year +4.27% -8.26% -6.50%
Number of hourly rates quoted 31 1 0
10th Percentile £66.50 - -
25th Percentile £71.00 £68.75 -
Median hourly rate £85.00 £72.50 -
Median % change year-on-year +17.24% - -
75th Percentile £99.41 £76.25 -
90th Percentile £100.00 - -
UK median hourly rate £77.50 £72.50 £55.00
% change year-on-year +6.90% +31.82% -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 22,383 13,648 15,028
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK excluding London 80.96% 89.12% 82.69%
Number of daily rates quoted 13,017 8,212 8,943
10th Percentile £300 £238 £250
25th Percentile £406 £367 £388
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £475 £500
Median % change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
75th Percentile £595 £575 £600
90th Percentile £688 £650 £688
UK median daily rate £525 £500 £525
% change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -3.67%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,495 1,393 1,427
10th Percentile £13.99 £13.92 £13.67
25th Percentile £17.64 £16.95 £16.30
Median hourly rate £43.96 £22.63 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year +94.26% -46.75% +6.25%
75th Percentile £68.00 £44.00 £65.00
90th Percentile £80.00 £69.47 £75.00
UK median hourly rate £41.56 £25.15 £40.94
% change year-on-year +65.23% -38.57% -3.67%

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 August 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 August 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 August 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 +74 212 £500 +11.11% 80
Yorkshire +60 123 £500 -4.76% 24
South East +4 111 £575 +15.00% 85
Midlands -7 110 £463 -8.87% 32
South West +20 81 £550 -8.33% 75
North West +18 79 £522 +30.19% 47
West Midlands -14 78 £456 -8.80% 20
Scotland +34 73 £450 -17.43% 17
East Midlands +12 31 £488 -30.36% 12
East of England -1 25 £549 -17.09% 7
North East -30 12 £425 -22.73% 10
Wales - 7 £325 - 5
Northern Ireland - 1 - - 4
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 20 (3.25%) Confluence
2 7 (1.14%) Apache
2 7 (1.14%) Apache Airflow
3 6 (0.97%) Apache Spark
4 3 (0.49%) OpenStack
4 3 (0.49%) Palantir Foundry
4 3 (0.49%) SharePoint
5 2 (0.32%) Apache Superset
5 2 (0.32%) Blackberry Enterprise Server
5 2 (0.32%) IBM HTTP Server
5 2 (0.32%) Microsoft Exchange
5 2 (0.32%) Oracle HTTP Server
5 2 (0.32%) Tomcat
5 2 (0.32%) WebSphere
5 2 (0.32%) WebSphere Application Server
5 2 (0.32%) WebSphere Portal
6 1 (0.16%) nginx
6 1 (0.16%) Oracle Coherence
6 1 (0.16%) SAS
6 1 (0.16%) SharePoint Server
Applications
1 1 (0.16%) MS Visio
Business Applications
1 6 (0.97%) Dynamics CRM
2 4 (0.65%) NetSuite
2 4 (0.65%) Sage X3
3 1 (0.16%) SAP S/4HANA
Cloud Services
1 265 (43.02%) AWS
2 256 (41.56%) Azure
3 110 (17.86%) GitHub
4 109 (17.69%) GCP
5 82 (13.31%) GitHub Actions
6 70 (11.36%) Azure DevOps
7 50 (8.12%) Serverless
8 43 (6.98%) Amazon EKS
9 35 (5.68%) Power Platform
10 34 (5.52%) AWS Lambda
11 33 (5.36%) Amazon CloudWatch
12 28 (4.55%) Entra ID
12 28 (4.55%) OpenShift
13 25 (4.06%) Azure Monitor
13 25 (4.06%) PowerApps
14 24 (3.90%) Amazon EC2
14 24 (3.90%) Amazon S3
15 23 (3.73%) Amazon ECS
15 23 (3.73%) Azure AKS
15 23 (3.73%) Google Kubernetes Engine
Communications & Networking
1 66 (10.71%) DNS
2 52 (8.44%) Firewall
3 37 (6.01%) TCP/IP
4 35 (5.68%) DHCP
5 25 (4.06%) VSAN
6 23 (3.73%) VPN
7 18 (2.92%) Network Security
8 13 (2.11%) HTTP
9 7 (1.14%) SNMP
10 5 (0.81%) SSH
11 3 (0.49%) HTTPS
11 3 (0.49%) NAS
11 3 (0.49%) SAN
11 3 (0.49%) SSL
11 3 (0.49%) WAN
12 2 (0.32%) Internet
12 2 (0.32%) Intrusion Detection
12 2 (0.32%) LAN
12 2 (0.32%) Multicast
12 2 (0.32%) Software-Defined Networking
Database & Business Intelligence
1 35 (5.68%) PostgreSQL
2 24 (3.90%) SQL Server
3 17 (2.76%) Data Warehouse
4 14 (2.27%) Power BI
5 13 (2.11%) MySQL
6 12 (1.95%) DynamoDB
6 12 (1.95%) Relational Database
7 8 (1.30%) Amazon Redshift
7 8 (1.30%) Big Data
7 8 (1.30%) NoSQL
7 8 (1.30%) Oracle Exadata
8 7 (1.14%) BigQuery
8 7 (1.14%) Data Lake
9 6 (0.97%) Ataccama
9 6 (0.97%) Tableau
10 5 (0.81%) Azure SQL Database
10 5 (0.81%) Neo4j
11 4 (0.65%) Amazon RDS
11 4 (0.65%) Metadata
11 4 (0.65%) MongoDB
Development Applications
1 82 (13.31%) Jenkins
2 60 (9.74%) Git
3 56 (9.09%) GitLab
4 39 (6.33%) JIRA
5 21 (3.41%) Bitbucket
6 8 (1.30%) Maven
7 7 (1.14%) Claude Code
7 7 (1.14%) Gatling
7 7 (1.14%) SonarQube
7 7 (1.14%) Sonatype Nexus
8 6 (0.97%) Artifactory
9 4 (0.65%) MSBuild
9 4 (0.65%) Visual Studio
10 3 (0.49%) JUnit
10 3 (0.49%) Mockito
10 3 (0.49%) Selenium
11 2 (0.32%) Atlassian Bamboo
11 2 (0.32%) Introscope
11 2 (0.32%) MSI
11 2 (0.32%) Terragrunt
General
1 115 (18.67%) Social Skills
2 90 (14.61%) Finance
3 69 (11.20%) Public Sector
4 32 (5.19%) Banking
5 29 (4.71%) Analytical Skills
6 26 (4.22%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 17 (2.76%) Aerospace
8 15 (2.44%) Telecoms
9 14 (2.27%) Documentation Skills
10 9 (1.46%) Military
11 8 (1.30%) Billing
11 8 (1.30%) Influencing Skills
12 6 (0.97%) Retail
13 5 (0.81%) Investment Banking
14 4 (0.65%) Financial Institution
14 4 (0.65%) Health Technology
14 4 (0.65%) Law
14 4 (0.65%) Local Government
14 4 (0.65%) Police
15 3 (0.49%) Publishing
Job Titles
1 249 (40.42%) Platform Engineer
2 120 (19.48%) Senior
3 96 (15.58%) DevOps Engineer
4 82 (13.31%) Cloud Platform Engineer
5 68 (11.04%) Cloud Engineer
6 59 (9.58%) Data Engineer
7 56 (9.09%) Senior Platform Engineer
8 48 (7.79%) Azure Engineer
9 43 (6.98%) Infrastructure Engineer
10 40 (6.49%) Architect
11 38 (6.17%) AWS Engineer
12 36 (5.84%) Lead
13 34 (5.52%) Developer
14 29 (4.71%) Azure Platform Engineer
15 26 (4.22%) DevOps Platform Engineer
15 26 (4.22%) GCP Engineer
15 26 (4.22%) Principal Engineer
16 25 (4.06%) Senior Data Engineer
17 23 (3.73%) Senior DevOps
17 23 (3.73%) Site Reliability Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 294 (47.73%) Terraform
2 43 (6.98%) Kafka
3 21 (3.41%) ARM Templates
4 20 (3.25%) JSON
5 19 (3.08%) REST
6 18 (2.92%) OpenTelemetry
7 16 (2.60%) AWS CDK
8 15 (2.44%) .NET
8 15 (2.44%) OAuth
9 14 (2.27%) OAuth2
10 13 (2.11%) YAML
11 12 (1.95%) Node.js
11 12 (1.95%) OpenID
11 12 (1.95%) React
11 12 (1.95%) Spring Boot
12 9 (1.46%) SAML
12 9 (1.46%) Spring
13 8 (1.30%) Playwright
14 7 (1.14%) LDAP
14 7 (1.14%) RESTful
Miscellaneous
1 124 (20.13%) Cloud Native
2 53 (8.60%) Product Ownership
3 35 (5.68%) Distributed Systems
3 35 (5.68%) Hybrid Cloud
4 28 (4.55%) Onboarding
5 27 (4.38%) Data Centre
5 27 (4.38%) PKI
6 22 (3.57%) Data Protection Act
7 18 (2.92%) Enterprise Cloud
7 18 (2.92%) Private Cloud
8 17 (2.76%) Enterprise Software
9 12 (1.95%) Linux Command Line
9 12 (1.95%) Public Cloud
10 11 (1.79%) NHS
11 8 (1.30%) AI Agents
12 7 (1.14%) Management Information System
12 7 (1.14%) Replication
12 7 (1.14%) Self-Motivation
13 6 (0.97%) ARM Cortex
14 5 (0.81%) Low-Code
Operating Systems
1 131 (21.27%) Linux
2 64 (10.39%) Windows
3 26 (4.22%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 21 (3.41%) Windows Server
5 16 (2.60%) Unix
6 9 (1.46%) VMS
7 5 (0.81%) Ubuntu
8 2 (0.32%) CentOS
8 2 (0.32%) Data ONTAP
8 2 (0.32%) Debian
8 2 (0.32%) Oracle Linux
8 2 (0.32%) SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
8 2 (0.32%) Windows 10
9 1 (0.16%) Mac OS
Processes & Methodologies
1 339 (55.03%) CI/CD
2 316 (51.30%) DevOps
3 277 (44.97%) Infrastructure as Code
4 176 (28.57%) Observability
5 127 (20.62%) Agile
6 125 (20.29%) Containerisation
7 114 (18.51%) Continuous Improvement
8 102 (16.56%) Technical Leadership
9 101 (16.40%) DevSecOps
10 99 (16.07%) Site Reliability Engineering
11 84 (13.64%) AI
12 83 (13.47%) Infrastructure Engineering
13 73 (11.85%) Migration
14 69 (11.20%) Problem-Solving
15 66 (10.71%) Software Engineering
16 58 (9.42%) Infrastructure Automation
16 58 (9.42%) Test Automation
17 56 (9.09%) Roadmaps
18 55 (8.93%) Cybersecurity
19 54 (8.77%) Cloud Security
Programming Languages
1 228 (37.01%) Python
2 105 (17.05%) Bash
3 101 (16.40%) PowerShell
4 64 (10.39%) Java
5 46 (7.47%) SQL
6 42 (6.82%) Bicep
7 22 (3.57%) C#
8 20 (3.25%) Go
9 14 (2.27%) JavaScript
10 10 (1.62%) TypeScript
11 9 (1.46%) Shell Script
12 8 (1.30%) Scala
13 7 (1.14%) Groovy
14 5 (0.81%) Perl
15 3 (0.49%) C++
15 3 (0.49%) Kusto Query Language
16 2 (0.32%) Jython
16 2 (0.32%) PHP
16 2 (0.32%) VBScript
17 1 (0.16%) Ada
Qualifications
1 198 (32.14%) Security Cleared
2 144 (23.38%) SC Cleared
3 55 (8.93%) DV Cleared
4 22 (3.57%) AWS Certification
5 20 (3.25%) Degree
6 18 (2.92%) Azure Certification
6 18 (2.92%) BPSS Clearance
7 14 (2.27%) Microsoft Certification
8 12 (1.95%) Computer Science Degree
8 12 (1.95%) VCAP
9 11 (1.79%) SAFe Agilist
10 10 (1.62%) CISSP
11 9 (1.46%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
12 6 (0.97%) RHCE
12 6 (0.97%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
13 5 (0.81%) Cisco Certification
14 4 (0.65%) (ISC)2 CCSP
14 4 (0.65%) CompTIA Security+
15 3 (0.49%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
15 3 (0.49%) TOGAF Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 19 (3.08%) QA
2 14 (2.27%) Accessibility
2 14 (2.27%) Data Quality
3 9 (1.46%) NCSC
4 7 (1.14%) GRC
4 7 (1.14%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 6 (0.97%) NIST
6 4 (0.65%) Cyber Essentials
6 4 (0.65%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
6 4 (0.65%) GDPR
7 3 (0.49%) Disclosure Scotland
7 3 (0.49%) PCI DSS
8 2 (0.32%) GxP
8 2 (0.32%) SLA
9 1 (0.16%) HL7
System Software
1 110 (17.86%) Docker
2 56 (9.09%) VMware Infrastructure
3 44 (7.14%) Active Directory
4 33 (5.36%) vSphere
5 25 (4.06%) VMware NSX
6 21 (3.41%) Hyper-V
7 15 (2.44%) Virtual Machines
8 12 (1.95%) VMware ESXi
9 4 (0.65%) Virtual Servers
10 2 (0.32%) EMC RecoverPoint
10 2 (0.32%) Firmware
10 2 (0.32%) NFS
10 2 (0.32%) Squid
10 2 (0.32%) SRDF
11 1 (0.16%) Ceph
11 1 (0.16%) zsh
Systems Management
1 236 (38.31%) Kubernetes
2 109 (17.69%) Ansible
3 37 (6.01%) Grafana
4 36 (5.84%) Prometheus
5 34 (5.52%) Argo
6 19 (3.08%) Istio
7 14 (2.27%) VxRail
8 8 (1.30%) Kustomize
8 8 (1.30%) Microsoft Intune
8 8 (1.30%) vCenter Server
9 7 (1.14%) Puppet
9 7 (1.14%) SCCM
10 6 (0.97%) HAProxy
11 5 (0.81%) Packer
11 5 (0.81%) PowerCLI
11 5 (0.81%) Progress Chef
12 4 (0.65%) Podman
13 3 (0.49%) Check_MK
13 3 (0.49%) NetBackup
13 3 (0.49%) Rancher
Vendors
1 93 (15.10%) Microsoft
2 63 (10.23%) VMware
3 54 (8.77%) Google
4 26 (4.22%) Red Hat
5 24 (3.90%) Oracle
6 23 (3.73%) Splunk
7 20 (3.25%) Databricks
8 17 (2.76%) Dynatrace
9 16 (2.60%) ServiceNow
10 14 (2.27%) CyberArk
11 7 (1.14%) Salesforce
12 6 (0.97%) Cisco
12 6 (0.97%) CrowdStrike
12 6 (0.97%) ForgeRock
13 5 (0.81%) Cribl.io
13 5 (0.81%) NetApp
13 5 (0.81%) PagerDuty
14 4 (0.65%) Dell
14 4 (0.65%) IBM
14 4 (0.65%) Sage