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

6 months to
11 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 115 232 292
Rank change year-on-year +117 +60 -26
Contract jobs citing Platform Engineering 581 147 85
As % of all contract jobs in the UK excluding London 2.12% 0.96% 0.46%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 2.61% 1.08% 0.56%
Number of daily rates quoted 337 103 64
10th Percentile £387 £400 £408
25th Percentile £425 £454 £464
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year -2.38% -4.55% -8.33%
75th Percentile £588 £579 £676
90th Percentile £693 £657 £738
UK median daily rate £550 £525 £600
% change year-on-year +4.76% -12.50% -2.04%
Number of hourly rates quoted 31 1 0
10th Percentile £66.50 - -
25th Percentile £71.22 £68.75 -
Median hourly rate £82.41 £72.50 -
Median % change year-on-year +13.67% - -
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 22,281 13,616 15,204
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK excluding London 81.44% 89.27% 83.09%
Number of daily rates quoted 13,022 8,200 9,107
10th Percentile £300 £240 £250
25th Percentile £406 £369 £387
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £475 £500
Median % change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
75th Percentile £594 £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 2,439 1,342 1,553
10th Percentile £14.10 £13.86 £13.77
25th Percentile £18.27 £17.02 £16.82
Median hourly rate £43.96 £22.74 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year +93.36% -46.51% +17.24%
75th Percentile £68.00 £44.78 £65.00
90th Percentile £81.22 £70.00 £75.00
UK median hourly rate £42.50 £25.15 £40.94
% change year-on-year +68.99% -38.57% -1.35%

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 11 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 11 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 11 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 +66 199 £500 +5.26% 189
Yorkshire +51 115 £500 -4.76% 65
South East -3 109 £575 +15.00% 129
Midlands +6 105 £488 -2.50% 54
West Midlands -15 80 £466 -6.75% 28
North West +19 75 £506 +26.56% 113
South West +19 74 £550 -8.33% 88
Scotland +26 66 £425 -15.00% 66
East of England 0 25 £550 -16.98% 29
East Midlands +13 24 £488 -30.36% 26
North East -34 11 £438 -20.45% 11
Wales - 6 £325 - 15
Northern Ireland - 1 - - 12
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 22 (3.79%) Confluence
2 7 (1.20%) Apache
2 7 (1.20%) Apache Airflow
2 7 (1.20%) Apache Spark
3 4 (0.69%) Microsoft Exchange
3 4 (0.69%) SharePoint
4 3 (0.52%) OpenStack
4 3 (0.52%) Palantir Foundry
5 2 (0.34%) Apache Superset
5 2 (0.34%) Blackberry Enterprise Server
5 2 (0.34%) IBM HTTP Server
5 2 (0.34%) Oracle HTTP Server
5 2 (0.34%) Tomcat
5 2 (0.34%) WebSphere
5 2 (0.34%) WebSphere Application Server
5 2 (0.34%) WebSphere Portal
6 1 (0.17%) SAS
6 1 (0.17%) SharePoint Server
6 1 (0.17%) Tuxedo
6 1 (0.17%) WebLogic
Applications
1 1 (0.17%) MS Visio
Business Applications
1 5 (0.86%) Dynamics CRM
2 4 (0.69%) NetSuite
2 4 (0.69%) Sage X3
3 1 (0.17%) SAP S/4HANA
Cloud Services
1 252 (43.37%) AWS
2 243 (41.82%) Azure
3 102 (17.56%) GCP
4 100 (17.21%) GitHub
5 80 (13.77%) GitHub Actions
6 64 (11.02%) Azure DevOps
7 51 (8.78%) Serverless
8 38 (6.54%) Amazon EKS
9 36 (6.20%) Amazon CloudWatch
9 36 (6.20%) AWS Lambda
10 31 (5.34%) Power Platform
11 30 (5.16%) OpenShift
12 29 (4.99%) Entra ID
13 27 (4.65%) Amazon S3
14 26 (4.48%) Amazon EC2
15 24 (4.13%) Google Kubernetes Engine
16 23 (3.96%) Amazon ECS
16 23 (3.96%) AWS CloudFormation
17 22 (3.79%) Snowflake
18 21 (3.61%) Azure Monitor
Communications & Networking
1 56 (9.64%) DNS
2 48 (8.26%) Firewall
3 33 (5.68%) TCP/IP
4 31 (5.34%) DHCP
5 23 (3.96%) VSAN
6 22 (3.79%) VPN
7 18 (3.10%) Network Security
8 11 (1.89%) HTTP
9 7 (1.20%) SNMP
10 4 (0.69%) SSH
11 3 (0.52%) HTTPS
11 3 (0.52%) NAS
11 3 (0.52%) SAN
11 3 (0.52%) SSL
11 3 (0.52%) WAN
11 3 (0.52%) WebEx
12 2 (0.34%) Internet
12 2 (0.34%) LAN
12 2 (0.34%) Multicast
12 2 (0.34%) Software-Defined Networking
Database & Business Intelligence
1 34 (5.85%) PostgreSQL
2 24 (4.13%) SQL Server
3 17 (2.93%) Data Warehouse
4 14 (2.41%) DynamoDB
4 14 (2.41%) Power BI
5 13 (2.24%) MySQL
6 12 (2.07%) Relational Database
7 8 (1.38%) Amazon Redshift
7 8 (1.38%) Big Data
7 8 (1.38%) Metadata
7 8 (1.38%) NoSQL
7 8 (1.38%) Oracle Exadata
8 7 (1.20%) Data Lake
9 6 (1.03%) Ataccama
9 6 (1.03%) BigQuery
9 6 (1.03%) Tableau
10 5 (0.86%) Azure SQL Database
10 5 (0.86%) Neo4j
11 4 (0.69%) Amazon RDS
11 4 (0.69%) MongoDB
Development Applications
1 83 (14.29%) Jenkins
2 59 (10.15%) Git
3 53 (9.12%) GitLab
4 39 (6.71%) JIRA
5 21 (3.61%) Bitbucket
6 8 (1.38%) Maven
7 7 (1.20%) Gatling
7 7 (1.20%) SonarQube
7 7 (1.20%) Sonatype Nexus
8 6 (1.03%) Artifactory
9 5 (0.86%) Claude Code
10 4 (0.69%) MSBuild
10 4 (0.69%) Visual Studio
11 3 (0.52%) Jaeger
11 3 (0.52%) JUnit
11 3 (0.52%) Mockito
11 3 (0.52%) Selenium
12 2 (0.34%) Atlassian Bamboo
12 2 (0.34%) MSI
12 2 (0.34%) Terragrunt
General
1 112 (19.28%) Social Skills
2 83 (14.29%) Finance
3 67 (11.53%) Public Sector
4 29 (4.99%) Analytical Skills
5 25 (4.30%) Banking
6 23 (3.96%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 16 (2.75%) Aerospace
8 15 (2.58%) Telecoms
9 14 (2.41%) Documentation Skills
10 9 (1.55%) Influencing Skills
10 9 (1.55%) Military
11 7 (1.20%) Billing
12 6 (1.03%) Retail
13 4 (0.69%) Financial Institution
13 4 (0.69%) Health Technology
13 4 (0.69%) Law
13 4 (0.69%) Legal
13 4 (0.69%) Local Government
13 4 (0.69%) Police
14 3 (0.52%) Investment Banking
Job Titles
1 235 (40.45%) Platform Engineer
2 103 (17.73%) Senior
3 91 (15.66%) DevOps Engineer
4 77 (13.25%) Cloud Platform Engineer
5 60 (10.33%) Cloud Engineer
6 55 (9.47%) Data Engineer
7 46 (7.92%) Senior Platform Engineer
8 45 (7.75%) Azure Engineer
9 41 (7.06%) Architect
10 39 (6.71%) Infrastructure Engineer
11 35 (6.02%) AWS Engineer
12 32 (5.51%) Lead
13 30 (5.16%) Developer
14 29 (4.99%) Azure Platform Engineer
15 27 (4.65%) GCP Engineer
16 25 (4.30%) DevOps Platform Engineer
17 23 (3.96%) Site Reliability Engineer
18 22 (3.79%) Senior Data Engineer
19 21 (3.61%) Senior DevOps
19 21 (3.61%) Senior DevOps Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 36 (6.20%) Kafka
2 20 (3.44%) REST
3 19 (3.27%) ARM Templates
4 18 (3.10%) JSON
4 18 (3.10%) OpenTelemetry
5 16 (2.75%) AWS CDK
5 16 (2.75%) OAuth
6 15 (2.58%) .NET
6 15 (2.58%) OAuth2
7 14 (2.41%) YAML
8 12 (2.07%) Node.js
9 11 (1.89%) OpenID
9 11 (1.89%) React
10 10 (1.72%) Spring Boot
11 9 (1.55%) SAML
12 8 (1.38%) Playwright
12 8 (1.38%) Spring
13 7 (1.20%) LDAP
14 6 (1.03%) RabbitMQ
14 6 (1.03%) SOAP
Miscellaneous
1 113 (19.45%) Cloud Native
2 46 (7.92%) Product Ownership
3 34 (5.85%) Hybrid Cloud
4 28 (4.82%) Distributed Systems
5 26 (4.48%) Data Centre
6 24 (4.13%) PKI
7 21 (3.61%) Data Protection Act
8 20 (3.44%) Onboarding
9 16 (2.75%) Enterprise Cloud
9 16 (2.75%) Enterprise Software
10 12 (2.07%) Public Cloud
11 10 (1.72%) NHS
12 9 (1.55%) Linux Command Line
13 8 (1.38%) AI Agents
14 7 (1.20%) Data Structures
14 7 (1.20%) Management Information System
14 7 (1.20%) Replication
14 7 (1.20%) Self-Motivation
15 6 (1.03%) Private Cloud
16 5 (0.86%) Security Posture
Operating Systems
1 125 (21.51%) Linux
2 61 (10.50%) Windows
3 28 (4.82%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 18 (3.10%) Windows Server
5 14 (2.41%) Unix
6 9 (1.55%) VMS
7 5 (0.86%) Ubuntu
8 2 (0.34%) CentOS
8 2 (0.34%) Data ONTAP
8 2 (0.34%) Debian
8 2 (0.34%) Oracle Linux
8 2 (0.34%) SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
8 2 (0.34%) Windows 10
9 1 (0.17%) Mac OS
Processes & Methodologies
1 316 (54.39%) CI/CD
2 300 (51.64%) DevOps
3 257 (44.23%) Infrastructure as Code
4 161 (27.71%) Observability
5 124 (21.34%) Agile
6 112 (19.28%) Containerisation
7 110 (18.93%) Continuous Improvement
8 93 (16.01%) Site Reliability Engineering
9 91 (15.66%) DevSecOps
10 84 (14.46%) Technical Leadership
11 80 (13.77%) AI
12 78 (13.43%) Infrastructure Engineering
13 72 (12.39%) Migration
14 70 (12.05%) Problem-Solving
15 60 (10.33%) Software Engineering
16 56 (9.64%) Test Automation
17 55 (9.47%) Cloud Security
18 54 (9.29%) Roadmaps
19 53 (9.12%) Infrastructure Automation
20 49 (8.43%) Stakeholder Management
Programming Languages
1 222 (38.21%) Python
2 102 (17.56%) Bash
3 101 (17.38%) PowerShell
4 59 (10.15%) Java
5 46 (7.92%) SQL
6 35 (6.02%) Bicep
7 19 (3.27%) C#
8 18 (3.10%) Go
9 12 (2.07%) JavaScript
10 9 (1.55%) Groovy
10 9 (1.55%) TypeScript
11 8 (1.38%) Scala
12 7 (1.20%) Shell Script
13 4 (0.69%) C++
13 4 (0.69%) Perl
14 3 (0.52%) Kusto Query Language
15 2 (0.34%) Jython
15 2 (0.34%) PHP
15 2 (0.34%) VBScript
16 1 (0.17%) PL/SQL
Qualifications
1 192 (33.05%) Security Cleared
2 143 (24.61%) SC Cleared
3 49 (8.43%) DV Cleared
4 21 (3.61%) BPSS Clearance
5 19 (3.27%) AWS Certification
5 19 (3.27%) Degree
6 17 (2.93%) Azure Certification
7 12 (2.07%) Computer Science Degree
7 12 (2.07%) Microsoft Certification
8 11 (1.89%) SAFe Agilist
8 11 (1.89%) VCAP
9 9 (1.55%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
10 8 (1.38%) CISSP
10 8 (1.38%) RHCE
11 6 (1.03%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
12 4 (0.69%) Cisco Certification
13 3 (0.52%) (ISC)2 CCSP
13 3 (0.52%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 3 (0.52%) CompTIA Security+
13 3 (0.52%) TOGAF Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 18 (3.10%) QA
2 17 (2.93%) Data Quality
3 13 (2.24%) Accessibility
4 9 (1.55%) NCSC
5 8 (1.38%) GRC
6 6 (1.03%) GDPR
6 6 (1.03%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 6 (1.03%) NIST
7 4 (0.69%) PCI DSS
8 3 (0.52%) Cyber Essentials
8 3 (0.52%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
8 3 (0.52%) Disclosure Scotland
9 2 (0.34%) GxP
10 1 (0.17%) HL7
10 1 (0.17%) NIST 800
System Software
1 102 (17.56%) Docker
2 46 (7.92%) VMware Infrastructure
3 43 (7.40%) Active Directory
4 30 (5.16%) vSphere
5 23 (3.96%) VMware NSX
6 20 (3.44%) Hyper-V
7 13 (2.24%) Virtual Machines
8 9 (1.55%) VMware ESXi
9 2 (0.34%) EMC RecoverPoint
9 2 (0.34%) Firmware
9 2 (0.34%) NFS
9 2 (0.34%) Squid
9 2 (0.34%) SRDF
9 2 (0.34%) Virtual Servers
10 1 (0.17%) Ceph
10 1 (0.17%) zsh
Systems Management
1 272 (46.82%) Terraform
2 206 (35.46%) Kubernetes
3 99 (17.04%) Ansible
4 38 (6.54%) Grafana
5 37 (6.37%) Prometheus
6 33 (5.68%) Argo
7 19 (3.27%) Istio
8 13 (2.24%) VxRail
9 8 (1.38%) Kustomize
9 8 (1.38%) Microsoft Intune
10 7 (1.20%) Puppet
10 7 (1.20%) vCenter Server
11 6 (1.03%) HAProxy
11 6 (1.03%) SCCM
12 5 (0.86%) Progress Chef
13 4 (0.69%) Podman
13 4 (0.69%) PowerCLI
13 4 (0.69%) Rancher
14 3 (0.52%) Check_MK
14 3 (0.52%) Packer
Vendors
1 88 (15.15%) Microsoft
2 53 (9.12%) VMware
3 49 (8.43%) Google
4 28 (4.82%) Red Hat
5 24 (4.13%) Oracle
6 22 (3.79%) Splunk
7 20 (3.44%) Databricks
8 17 (2.93%) Dynatrace
9 16 (2.75%) ServiceNow
10 13 (2.24%) CyberArk
11 8 (1.38%) Cisco
12 6 (1.03%) ForgeRock
12 6 (1.03%) Salesforce
13 5 (0.86%) Cribl.io
13 5 (0.86%) CrowdStrike
13 5 (0.86%) NetApp
13 5 (0.86%) PagerDuty
14 4 (0.69%) Dell
14 4 (0.69%) Sage
14 4 (0.69%) Sonatype