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

6 months to
22 May 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 144 245 310
Rank change year-on-year +101 +65 -73
Contract jobs citing Platform Engineering 394 86 85
As % of all contract jobs in the UK excluding London 1.60% 0.68% 0.42%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 1.97% 0.74% 0.50%
Number of daily rates quoted 257 53 57
10th Percentile £363 £413 £414
25th Percentile £413 £500 £450
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £488 £537 £525
Median % change year-on-year -9.22% +2.29% -10.64%
75th Percentile £560 £603 £650
90th Percentile £638 £663 £743
UK median daily rate £520 £550 £566
% change year-on-year -5.45% -2.87% -7.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 13 1 0
10th Percentile - - -
25th Percentile £66.50 £68.75 -
Median hourly rate £74.26 £72.50 -
Median % change year-on-year +2.43% - -
75th Percentile - £76.25 -
90th Percentile £80.00 - -
UK median hourly rate £74.26 £72.50 £60.50
% change year-on-year +2.43% +19.83% -25.77%

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 19,983 11,545 17,047
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK excluding London 81.08% 90.66% 84.18%
Number of daily rates quoted 11,994 7,234 10,190
10th Percentile £300 £231 £250
25th Percentile £401 £375 £380
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £497 £475 £500
Median % change year-on-year +4.66% -5.00% -
75th Percentile £588 £575 £600
90th Percentile £678 £650 £688
UK median daily rate £510 £513 £525
% change year-on-year -0.49% -2.38% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,084 819 2,065
10th Percentile £14.37 £14.20 £12.35
25th Percentile £18.89 £17.34 £15.38
Median hourly rate £45.00 £25.15 £38.00
Median % change year-on-year +78.93% -33.82% +8.57%
75th Percentile £67.84 £63.20 £61.30
90th Percentile £80.00 £75.00 £72.50
UK median hourly rate £42.50 £28.18 £36.05
% change year-on-year +50.82% -21.82% +0.13%

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 May 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 May 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 May 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 +46 155 £475 -10.38% 82
Yorkshire +18 84 £475 -12.64% 24
South East -5 71 £525 +9.83% 76
North West +12 68 £447 -14.86% 52
Scotland +34 59 £450 -12.20% 14
Midlands -34 46 £488 -9.22% 35
East of England +3 34 £475 -40.63% 18
West Midlands -31 34 £495 -8.92% 27
South West -11 27 £538 -10.42% 29
East Midlands -15 12 £488 -2.50% 7
North East -25 5 £453 -17.73% 6
Wales -11 4 £374 - 3
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 24 (6.09%) Confluence
2 9 (2.28%) Apache Spark
3 5 (1.27%) Apache Airflow
4 4 (1.02%) Apache
4 4 (1.02%) Microsoft Exchange
4 4 (1.02%) SharePoint
5 2 (0.51%) Apache Pulsar
5 2 (0.51%) Blackberry Enterprise Server
5 2 (0.51%) IBM HTTP Server
5 2 (0.51%) nginx
5 2 (0.51%) Oracle HTTP Server
5 2 (0.51%) Tomcat
5 2 (0.51%) Tuxedo
5 2 (0.51%) WebLogic
5 2 (0.51%) WebSphere
5 2 (0.51%) WebSphere Application Server
5 2 (0.51%) WebSphere Portal
6 1 (0.25%) Apache Superset
6 1 (0.25%) IIS
6 1 (0.25%) SAS
Applications
1 3 (0.76%) Microsoft Project
Business Applications
1 3 (0.76%) Dynamics CRM
2 1 (0.25%) Payment Gateway
2 1 (0.25%) SAP S/4HANA
Cloud Services
1 144 (36.55%) Azure
2 137 (34.77%) AWS
3 77 (19.54%) GitHub
4 61 (15.48%) GitHub Actions
5 59 (14.97%) GCP
6 40 (10.15%) Azure DevOps
7 35 (8.88%) Amazon EKS
7 35 (8.88%) Serverless
8 32 (8.12%) OpenShift
9 27 (6.85%) Amazon CloudWatch
10 26 (6.60%) Entra ID
11 24 (6.09%) Azure AKS
12 23 (5.84%) AWS Lambda
12 23 (5.84%) Google Kubernetes Engine
13 22 (5.58%) Amazon EC2
13 22 (5.58%) Amazon S3
14 19 (4.82%) AWS CloudFormation
14 19 (4.82%) Virtual Private Cloud
15 16 (4.06%) Power Platform
15 16 (4.06%) Snowflake
Communications & Networking
1 21 (5.33%) Firewall
2 17 (4.31%) DNS
2 17 (4.31%) Network Security
3 13 (3.30%) VPN
4 7 (1.78%) SAN
4 7 (1.78%) TCP/IP
5 6 (1.52%) SNMP
6 5 (1.27%) DHCP
6 5 (1.27%) VSAN
7 4 (1.02%) Fibre Channel
7 4 (1.02%) IPsec
7 4 (1.02%) MQTT
7 4 (1.02%) NAS
7 4 (1.02%) SD-WAN
7 4 (1.02%) SSL
8 3 (0.76%) HTTP
8 3 (0.76%) Internet
8 3 (0.76%) WebEx
9 2 (0.51%) NetScaler
10 1 (0.25%) Modbus
Database & Business Intelligence
1 33 (8.38%) PostgreSQL
2 18 (4.57%) SQL Server
3 14 (3.55%) Relational Database
4 13 (3.30%) Power BI
5 9 (2.28%) DynamoDB
5 9 (2.28%) MySQL
6 8 (2.03%) Data Warehouse
6 8 (2.03%) Metadata
6 8 (2.03%) Neo4j
6 8 (2.03%) NoSQL
6 8 (2.03%) Redis
6 8 (2.03%) Tableau
7 6 (1.52%) Big Data
8 5 (1.27%) Ataccama
8 5 (1.27%) Hadoop
9 4 (1.02%) Amazon Redshift
10 3 (0.76%) Amazon Athena
10 3 (0.76%) Amazon RDS
10 3 (0.76%) SQL Server Integration Services
11 2 (0.51%) Spark SQL
Development Applications
1 69 (17.51%) Jenkins
2 52 (13.20%) GitLab
3 49 (12.44%) JIRA
4 40 (10.15%) Git
5 14 (3.55%) Bitbucket
6 10 (2.54%) Gatling
7 7 (1.78%) Artifactory
8 5 (1.27%) Maven
8 5 (1.27%) SonarQube
8 5 (1.27%) Sonatype Nexus
9 4 (1.02%) JMeter
9 4 (1.02%) LoadRunner
9 4 (1.02%) NeoLoad
9 4 (1.02%) Postman
10 3 (0.76%) Jaeger
11 2 (0.51%) Introscope
11 2 (0.51%) MSI
11 2 (0.51%) Terragrunt
11 2 (0.51%) Visual Studio
12 1 (0.25%) GoCD
General
1 75 (19.04%) Social Skills
2 47 (11.93%) Finance
3 41 (10.41%) Public Sector
4 24 (6.09%) Banking
5 10 (2.54%) Analytical Skills
6 6 (1.52%) Documentation Skills
7 5 (1.27%) Influencing Skills
7 5 (1.27%) Legal
8 4 (1.02%) Health Technology
9 3 (0.76%) Financial Institution
9 3 (0.76%) Investment Banking
9 3 (0.76%) Law
9 3 (0.76%) Military
9 3 (0.76%) Retail
10 2 (0.51%) Telecoms
11 1 (0.25%) Advertising
11 1 (0.25%) Aerospace
11 1 (0.25%) Corporate Banking
11 1 (0.25%) Electronics
11 1 (0.25%) Retail Banking
Job Titles
1 162 (41.12%) Platform Engineer
2 68 (17.26%) DevOps Engineer
3 63 (15.99%) Senior
4 62 (15.74%) Cloud Platform Engineer
5 38 (9.64%) Cloud Engineer
6 36 (9.14%) Azure Engineer
7 30 (7.61%) Lead
8 29 (7.36%) Architect
8 29 (7.36%) Azure Platform Engineer
9 25 (6.35%) DevOps Platform Engineer
10 22 (5.58%) Data Engineer
11 19 (4.82%) Senior DevOps
11 19 (4.82%) Senior DevOps Engineer
11 19 (4.82%) Senior Platform Engineer
12 17 (4.31%) Infrastructure Engineer
12 17 (4.31%) Site Reliability Engineer
13 16 (4.06%) AWS Engineer
13 16 (4.06%) GCP Engineer
14 15 (3.81%) Software Engineer
15 13 (3.30%) Scrum Master
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 20 (5.08%) Kafka
2 15 (3.81%) REST
3 12 (3.05%) OpenTelemetry
4 11 (2.79%) AWS CDK
4 11 (2.79%) Playwright
5 10 (2.54%) ADO
5 10 (2.54%) OAuth
6 9 (2.28%) Node.js
6 9 (2.28%) OAuth2
7 8 (2.03%) Keycloak
7 8 (2.03%) LDAP
7 8 (2.03%) OpenID
8 7 (1.78%) .NET
8 7 (1.78%) Elastic Stack
8 7 (1.78%) React
8 7 (1.78%) Spring Boot
8 7 (1.78%) YAML
9 6 (1.52%) Spring
10 5 (1.27%) Middleware
10 5 (1.27%) SailPoint
Miscellaneous
1 70 (17.77%) Cloud Native
2 26 (6.60%) Product Ownership
3 18 (4.57%) Private Cloud
4 17 (4.31%) Distributed Systems
5 14 (3.55%) Onboarding
6 13 (3.30%) Data Centre
7 11 (2.79%) Hybrid Cloud
8 10 (2.54%) Public Cloud
9 8 (2.03%) Data Protection Act
10 7 (1.78%) PKI
10 7 (1.78%) Security Posture
11 6 (1.52%) NHS
11 6 (1.52%) Replication
12 5 (1.27%) Management Information System
12 5 (1.27%) Operational Technology
12 5 (1.27%) Self-Motivation
12 5 (1.27%) Virtual Team
13 4 (1.02%) Enterprise Cloud
13 4 (1.02%) NVMe
14 3 (0.76%) Thin Client
Operating Systems
1 70 (17.77%) Linux
2 37 (9.39%) Windows
3 20 (5.08%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 17 (4.31%) Unix
5 10 (2.54%) Windows Server
6 5 (1.27%) VMS
7 3 (0.76%) Windows Server 2019
8 2 (0.51%) CentOS
8 2 (0.51%) Oracle Linux
8 2 (0.51%) SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
8 2 (0.51%) Ubuntu
8 2 (0.51%) Windows Server 2012
9 1 (0.25%) Data ONTAP
9 1 (0.25%) Debian
9 1 (0.25%) Mac OS
9 1 (0.25%) Solaris
9 1 (0.25%) Windows 10
9 1 (0.25%) Windows Server 2016
Processes & Methodologies
1 211 (53.55%) CI/CD
2 185 (46.95%) DevOps
3 151 (38.32%) Infrastructure as Code
4 84 (21.32%) Agile
4 84 (21.32%) Observability
5 66 (16.75%) Containerisation
6 59 (14.97%) Continuous Improvement
7 58 (14.72%) Migration
7 58 (14.72%) Site Reliability Engineering
8 52 (13.20%) Infrastructure Engineering
9 50 (12.69%) Software Engineering
10 41 (10.41%) Problem-Solving
10 41 (10.41%) Test Automation
11 40 (10.15%) DevSecOps
12 37 (9.39%) Roadmaps
13 36 (9.14%) Technical Leadership
14 35 (8.88%) GitOps
15 34 (8.63%) Infrastructure Automation
16 32 (8.12%) Root Cause Analysis
17 31 (7.87%) Stakeholder Engagement
Programming Languages
1 140 (35.53%) Python
2 50 (12.69%) Bash
2 50 (12.69%) Java
3 46 (11.68%) PowerShell
4 25 (6.35%) SQL
5 21 (5.33%) Bicep
6 11 (2.79%) Scala
7 10 (2.54%) Go
8 8 (2.03%) TypeScript
9 5 (1.27%) Groovy
9 5 (1.27%) Perl
9 5 (1.27%) Shell Script
10 4 (1.02%) C#
10 4 (1.02%) Cypher
10 4 (1.02%) JavaScript
11 2 (0.51%) C++
11 2 (0.51%) Jython
11 2 (0.51%) PHP
12 1 (0.25%) PL/SQL
12 1 (0.25%) VBScript
Qualifications
1 120 (30.46%) Security Cleared
2 96 (24.37%) SC Cleared
3 15 (3.81%) DV Cleared
4 12 (3.05%) BPSS Clearance
5 11 (2.79%) Degree
6 10 (2.54%) SAFe Agilist
7 8 (2.03%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
8 6 (1.52%) Azure Certification
8 6 (1.52%) RHCE
9 5 (1.27%) AWS Certification
9 5 (1.27%) Computer Science Degree
10 3 (0.76%) NCDA
10 3 (0.76%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
11 2 (0.51%) CCNA
11 2 (0.51%) Cisco Certification
11 2 (0.51%) PMI Certification
11 2 (0.51%) PMP
11 2 (0.51%) VCP6
12 1 (0.25%) CCDP
12 1 (0.25%) CCNP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 15 (3.81%) QA
2 13 (3.30%) NCSC
3 12 (3.05%) Data Quality
4 8 (2.03%) GDPR
5 5 (1.27%) PCI DSS
6 4 (1.02%) GRC
6 4 (1.02%) NIST
6 4 (1.02%) NIST 800
7 3 (0.76%) Accessibility
8 2 (0.51%) Disclosure Scotland
9 1 (0.25%) ISO 20022
9 1 (0.25%) ISO 8583
System Software
1 53 (13.45%) Docker
2 34 (8.63%) VMware Infrastructure
3 18 (4.57%) Active Directory
4 15 (3.81%) Virtual Machines
5 13 (3.30%) vSphere
6 10 (2.54%) VMware NSX
7 6 (1.52%) VMware ESXi
8 4 (1.02%) Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services
9 2 (0.51%) Firmware
9 2 (0.51%) Virtual Desktop
10 1 (0.25%) Ceph
10 1 (0.25%) EMC RecoverPoint
10 1 (0.25%) Hyper-V
10 1 (0.25%) KVM
10 1 (0.25%) NFS
10 1 (0.25%) Squid
10 1 (0.25%) SRDF
10 1 (0.25%) Virtual Servers
Systems Management
1 146 (37.06%) Terraform
2 129 (32.74%) Kubernetes
3 72 (18.27%) Ansible
4 38 (9.64%) Grafana
5 35 (8.88%) Prometheus
6 25 (6.35%) Argo
7 24 (6.09%) Istio
8 7 (1.78%) Puppet
9 6 (1.52%) HAProxy
9 6 (1.52%) linkerd
9 6 (1.52%) Microsoft Intune
9 6 (1.52%) PowerCLI
10 5 (1.27%) Kustomize
10 5 (1.27%) Packer
10 5 (1.27%) Rancher
10 5 (1.27%) vRealize
11 4 (1.02%) vCenter Server
11 4 (1.02%) vMotion
12 3 (0.76%) Active Directory Federation Services
12 3 (0.76%) Single Sign-On
Vendors
1 41 (10.41%) Microsoft
2 40 (10.15%) VMware
3 24 (6.09%) Google
4 21 (5.33%) Oracle
4 21 (5.33%) Red Hat
5 17 (4.31%) Splunk
6 16 (4.06%) ServiceNow
7 9 (2.28%) Cisco
7 9 (2.28%) Dynatrace
8 7 (1.78%) Citrix
9 6 (1.52%) Databricks
10 5 (1.27%) BiZZdesign
10 5 (1.27%) PeopleSoft
11 4 (1.02%) Brocade
11 4 (1.02%) Cribl.io
11 4 (1.02%) F5
11 4 (1.02%) NetApp
12 3 (0.76%) BeyondTrust
12 3 (0.76%) Greenplum
12 3 (0.76%) Pure Storage