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

6 months to
13 Feb 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 149 252 281
Rank change year-on-year +103 +29 -26
Contract jobs citing Platform Engineering 325 90 124
As % of all contract jobs in the UK excluding London 1.63% 0.67% 0.59%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 1.93% 0.75% 0.69%
Number of daily rates quoted 242 61 82
10th Percentile £405 £413 £434
25th Percentile £438 £463 £465
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £525 £535
Median % change year-on-year - -1.87% -2.73%
75th Percentile £575 £588 £585
90th Percentile £674 £656 £675
UK median daily rate £525 £570 £550
% change year-on-year -7.89% +3.64% -8.33%
Number of hourly rates quoted 11 1 1
10th Percentile £59.75 - -
25th Percentile £64.88 £59.39 -
Median hourly rate £74.26 £63.79 £78.00
Median % change year-on-year +16.42% -18.22% -0.95%
75th Percentile £77.13 £68.18 -
90th Percentile £80.00 - -
UK median hourly rate £74.26 £63.79 £60.00
% change year-on-year +16.42% +6.31% -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 16,814 12,057 17,982
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK excluding London 84.18% 89.09% 86.21%
Number of daily rates quoted 10,260 7,181 11,188
10th Percentile £238 £232 £248
25th Percentile £381 £375 £390
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £480 £496 £500
Median % change year-on-year -3.25% -0.77% -
75th Percentile £575 £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 1,814 648 1,728
10th Percentile £14.25 £15.25 £13.00
25th Percentile £17.25 £20.12 £15.50
Median hourly rate £25.15 £30.78 £35.00
Median % change year-on-year -18.29% -12.06% +9.38%
75th Percentile £60.00 £64.50 £60.75
90th Percentile £70.00 £75.00 £72.79
UK median hourly rate £25.15 £32.50 £33.53
% change year-on-year -22.62% -3.06% +3.15%

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 February 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 February 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 February 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 +12 112 £518 -5.91% 62
South East +10 67 £519 +3.75% 58
North West +13 59 £550 -4.35% 39
Yorkshire -38 50 £475 -13.64% 15
Midlands -14 48 £542 +14.00% 14
West Midlands -6 45 £550 +34.80% 11
Scotland +28 41 £475 -8.83% 17
South West +19 35 £575 +4.55% 20
East of England +4 29 £475 -32.14% 5
North East - 6 £550 - 9
East Midlands -32 3 £525 +10.53% 3
Wales -3 2 £424 - 6
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 (6.15%) Confluence
2 15 (4.62%) Microsoft Exchange
3 10 (3.08%) SharePoint
4 8 (2.46%) nginx
5 7 (2.15%) Apache Spark
6 5 (1.54%) Apache
7 4 (1.23%) OpenStack
8 3 (0.92%) SharePoint Server
9 2 (0.62%) Apache Pulsar
9 2 (0.62%) IIS
9 2 (0.62%) JBoss
9 2 (0.62%) WebLogic
10 1 (0.31%) Apache Airflow
10 1 (0.31%) CICS
10 1 (0.31%) CMS
10 1 (0.31%) Documentum
10 1 (0.31%) iPlanet
10 1 (0.31%) Tuxedo
10 1 (0.31%) WebSphere
10 1 (0.31%) WebSphere Application Server
Applications
1 6 (1.85%) Mozilla Thunderbird
2 3 (0.92%) Microsoft Project
Business Applications
1 1 (0.31%) Payment Gateway
1 1 (0.31%) SAP S/4HANA
Cloud Services
1 120 (36.92%) Azure
2 115 (35.38%) AWS
3 59 (18.15%) GitHub
4 42 (12.92%) GCP
5 33 (10.15%) GitHub Actions
6 29 (8.92%) Entra ID
7 25 (7.69%) AWS CloudFormation
7 25 (7.69%) Azure DevOps
7 25 (7.69%) Serverless
8 24 (7.38%) OpenShift
9 22 (6.77%) Amazon CloudWatch
10 21 (6.46%) Azure AKS
11 17 (5.23%) Amazon EC2
11 17 (5.23%) Amazon S3
11 17 (5.23%) AWS Lambda
12 16 (4.92%) OCI
12 16 (4.92%) Virtual Private Cloud
13 14 (4.31%) Amazon EKS
14 13 (4.00%) Amazon ECS
15 12 (3.69%) SaaS
Communications & Networking
1 44 (13.54%) Firewall
2 34 (10.46%) DNS
3 10 (3.08%) Network Security
3 10 (3.08%) TCP/IP
4 8 (2.46%) DHCP
4 8 (2.46%) FTP
4 8 (2.46%) HTTP
4 8 (2.46%) SMTP
4 8 (2.46%) SSH
4 8 (2.46%) WebEx
5 7 (2.15%) BGP
5 7 (2.15%) VLAN
6 6 (1.85%) IMAP
6 6 (1.85%) OpenLDAP
6 6 (1.85%) Software-Defined Networking
7 5 (1.54%) SAN
8 4 (1.23%) Fibre Channel
9 3 (0.92%) Internet
9 3 (0.92%) IPsec
9 3 (0.92%) MQTT
Database & Business Intelligence
1 24 (7.38%) PostgreSQL
2 18 (5.54%) Amazon RDS
3 13 (4.00%) NoSQL
4 9 (2.77%) Metadata
5 8 (2.46%) Amazon Redshift
5 8 (2.46%) Big Data
5 8 (2.46%) DynamoDB
5 8 (2.46%) Redis
5 8 (2.46%) SQL Server
6 6 (1.85%) Amazon Aurora
6 6 (1.85%) Couchbase
6 6 (1.85%) Data Warehouse
6 6 (1.85%) Hadoop
7 5 (1.54%) Relational Database
8 4 (1.23%) Data Lake
8 4 (1.23%) Neo4j
9 3 (0.92%) Power BI
10 2 (0.62%) Amazon Athena
10 2 (0.62%) Apache Hive
10 2 (0.62%) Tableau
Development Applications
1 53 (16.31%) Jenkins
2 42 (12.92%) GitLab
3 33 (10.15%) Git
4 30 (9.23%) JIRA
5 11 (3.38%) SonarQube
6 8 (2.46%) Vagrant
7 4 (1.23%) Gatling
7 4 (1.23%) JMeter
7 4 (1.23%) LoadRunner
7 4 (1.23%) NeoLoad
7 4 (1.23%) Postman
8 3 (0.92%) MSI
8 3 (0.92%) Sonatype Nexus
9 2 (0.62%) Cucumber
9 2 (0.62%) JUnit
9 2 (0.62%) Maven
9 2 (0.62%) Mockito
9 2 (0.62%) Selenium
9 2 (0.62%) Spinnaker
9 2 (0.62%) Visual Studio
General
1 63 (19.38%) Social Skills
2 33 (10.15%) Public Sector
3 28 (8.62%) Finance
4 19 (5.85%) Analytical Skills
5 18 (5.54%) Banking
6 15 (4.62%) Legal
7 7 (2.15%) Documentation Skills
7 7 (2.15%) Presentation Skills
8 4 (1.23%) Games
8 4 (1.23%) Retail
8 4 (1.23%) Retail Banking
9 3 (0.92%) Telecoms
10 1 (0.31%) Advertising
10 1 (0.31%) Aerospace
10 1 (0.31%) Financial Institution
10 1 (0.31%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 1 (0.31%) Investment Banking
10 1 (0.31%) Law
10 1 (0.31%) Tech for Good
Job Titles
1 170 (52.31%) Platform Engineer
2 55 (16.92%) Cloud Platform Engineer
3 33 (10.15%) Senior
4 31 (9.54%) DevOps Engineer
5 26 (8.00%) AWS Engineer
6 24 (7.38%) Cloud Engineer
7 22 (6.77%) Lead
8 20 (6.15%) Architect
9 19 (5.85%) AWS Platform Engineer
9 19 (5.85%) Azure Engineer
9 19 (5.85%) Infrastructure Engineer
10 18 (5.54%) Data Engineer
11 17 (5.23%) Azure Platform Engineer
11 17 (5.23%) DevSecOps Engineer
12 11 (3.38%) DevOps Platform Engineer
12 11 (3.38%) Project Manager
13 10 (3.08%) Software Engineer
14 8 (2.46%) AWS DevOps
14 8 (2.46%) AWS DevOps Engineer
15 7 (2.15%) VMware Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 18 (5.54%) Kafka
2 16 (4.92%) YAML
3 13 (4.00%) REST
4 11 (3.38%) Elastic Stack
4 11 (3.38%) LDAP
5 9 (2.77%) OAuth
5 9 (2.77%) OpenID
6 8 (2.46%) Keycloak
6 8 (2.46%) OAuth2
6 8 (2.46%) XMPP
7 7 (2.15%) Node.js
7 7 (2.15%) Oracle Fusion
7 7 (2.15%) React
8 6 (1.85%) Playwright
8 6 (1.85%) Spring
8 6 (1.85%) Spring Boot
9 5 (1.54%) ADO
9 5 (1.54%) Middleware
9 5 (1.54%) OpenAPI
9 5 (1.54%) Swagger
Miscellaneous
1 32 (9.85%) Cloud Native
2 23 (7.08%) Product Ownership
3 19 (5.85%) PKI
4 18 (5.54%) Replication
5 17 (5.23%) Onboarding
6 16 (4.92%) Private Cloud
7 13 (4.00%) Distributed Systems
8 12 (3.69%) Data Centre
9 10 (3.08%) Public Cloud
10 8 (2.46%) Data Protection Act
10 8 (2.46%) NHS
11 7 (2.15%) Hybrid Cloud
12 6 (1.85%) Legacy Systems
13 4 (1.23%) NVMe
13 4 (1.23%) Operational Technology
13 4 (1.23%) Security Posture
13 4 (1.23%) Virtual Team
14 3 (0.92%) Analytical Mindset
14 3 (0.92%) Fat Client
14 3 (0.92%) Reference Data
Operating Systems
1 91 (28.00%) Linux
2 73 (22.46%) Windows
3 26 (8.00%) Windows Server
4 20 (6.15%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 13 (4.00%) Unix
6 12 (3.69%) VMS
7 11 (3.38%) Amazon Linux
8 9 (2.77%) Windows 10
9 6 (1.85%) Ubuntu
10 4 (1.23%) Windows Server 2016
11 3 (0.92%) Windows Server 2019
12 2 (0.62%) Solaris
12 2 (0.62%) Windows Server 2012
13 1 (0.31%) CentOS
13 1 (0.31%) zOS
Processes & Methodologies
1 152 (46.77%) CI/CD
2 135 (41.54%) DevOps
3 118 (36.31%) Infrastructure as Code
4 64 (19.69%) Containerisation
5 61 (18.77%) Observability
6 54 (16.62%) Problem-Solving
7 49 (15.08%) Agile
7 49 (15.08%) Continuous Improvement
8 45 (13.85%) Infrastructure Engineering
9 44 (13.54%) Migration
10 36 (11.08%) DevSecOps
11 34 (10.46%) Infrastructure Automation
11 34 (10.46%) Software Engineering
12 32 (9.85%) Cloud Security
13 30 (9.23%) Site Reliability Engineering
14 26 (8.00%) Roadmaps
15 24 (7.38%) Incident Response
15 24 (7.38%) RBAC
15 24 (7.38%) Test Automation
16 23 (7.08%) Analytics
Programming Languages
1 123 (37.85%) Python
2 58 (17.85%) Bash
3 53 (16.31%) PowerShell
4 22 (6.77%) Java
4 22 (6.77%) SQL
5 15 (4.62%) Perl
6 14 (4.31%) Bicep
7 12 (3.69%) Groovy
8 8 (2.46%) Shell Script
8 8 (2.46%) TypeScript
9 7 (2.15%) JavaScript
10 6 (1.85%) C#
11 5 (1.54%) Go
12 4 (1.23%) Cypher
12 4 (1.23%) Scala
13 2 (0.62%) Apex Code
13 2 (0.62%) PHP
13 2 (0.62%) SOQL
14 1 (0.31%) CLIST
14 1 (0.31%) Rust
Qualifications
1 140 (43.08%) Security Cleared
2 110 (33.85%) SC Cleared
3 29 (8.92%) DV Cleared
4 16 (4.92%) Degree
5 15 (4.62%) AWS Certification
6 11 (3.38%) Azure Certification
7 10 (3.08%) CCNA
7 10 (3.08%) Cisco Certification
8 9 (2.77%) CCDP
8 9 (2.77%) CCNP
9 8 (2.46%) BPSS Clearance
10 5 (1.54%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
11 3 (0.92%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
11 3 (0.92%) Computer Science Degree
11 3 (0.92%) CSPO
12 2 (0.62%) NCDA
12 2 (0.62%) VCP6
13 1 (0.31%) Microsoft Certification
13 1 (0.31%) RHCSA
13 1 (0.31%) VCAP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 23 (7.08%) NCSC
2 11 (3.38%) Data Quality
3 9 (2.77%) GDPR
4 5 (1.54%) NIST
4 5 (1.54%) QA
5 4 (1.23%) COBIT
6 3 (0.92%) NIST 800
6 3 (0.92%) PCI DSS
7 2 (0.62%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 2 (0.62%) WCAG
8 1 (0.31%) Cyber Essentials
8 1 (0.31%) Disclosure Scotland
8 1 (0.31%) ISO 20022
8 1 (0.31%) ISO 8583
System Software
1 62 (19.08%) Docker
2 48 (14.77%) VMware Infrastructure
3 44 (13.54%) Active Directory
4 14 (4.31%) Virtual Machines
5 10 (3.08%) vSphere
6 8 (2.46%) DFS Replication
7 7 (2.15%) VMware NSX
8 6 (1.85%) Dovecot
8 6 (1.85%) Postfix
8 6 (1.85%) Squid
9 4 (1.23%) Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services
9 4 (1.23%) Hyper-V
10 3 (0.92%) Virtual Desktop
11 1 (0.31%) GPFS
11 1 (0.31%) KVM
11 1 (0.31%) Time Sharing Option
11 1 (0.31%) Tivoli Directory Server
11 1 (0.31%) VMware ESXi
Systems Management
1 124 (38.15%) Terraform
2 103 (31.69%) Kubernetes
3 56 (17.23%) Ansible
4 47 (14.46%) Grafana
5 36 (11.08%) Prometheus
6 16 (4.92%) Istio
7 12 (3.69%) Active Directory Federation Services
8 11 (3.38%) vCenter Server
9 10 (3.08%) Argo
10 9 (2.77%) Packer
10 9 (2.77%) Proxmox
11 7 (2.15%) linkerd
12 6 (1.85%) Microsoft Intune
12 6 (1.85%) Nessus
13 5 (1.54%) SCCM
13 5 (1.54%) Single Sign-On
14 4 (1.23%) Kibana
14 4 (1.23%) vMotion
15 3 (0.92%) Progress Chef
15 3 (0.92%) vRealize
Vendors
1 60 (18.46%) VMware
2 45 (13.85%) Microsoft
3 30 (9.23%) Splunk
4 27 (8.31%) Cisco
4 27 (8.31%) Red Hat
5 26 (8.00%) Dynatrace
6 20 (6.15%) Oracle
7 17 (5.23%) ServiceNow
8 16 (4.92%) Citrix
9 12 (3.69%) F5
9 12 (3.69%) Google
10 11 (3.38%) IBM
11 8 (2.46%) AppDynamics
11 8 (2.46%) Veeam
12 6 (1.85%) Confluent
12 6 (1.85%) Jaspersoft
13 5 (1.54%) CheckPoint
13 5 (1.54%) Dell
13 5 (1.54%) HP
13 5 (1.54%) PeopleSoft