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

6 months to
21 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 121 242 303
Rank change year-on-year +121 +61 -54
Contract jobs citing Platform Engineering 530 126 85
As % of all contract jobs in the UK excluding London 1.96% 0.85% 0.43%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 2.40% 0.95% 0.52%
Number of daily rates quoted 314 87 63
10th Percentile £363 £400 £408
25th Percentile £413 £450 £457
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £530
Median % change year-on-year - -5.66% -11.67%
75th Percentile £575 £588 £650
90th Percentile £666 £636 £688
UK median daily rate £546 £530 £581
% change year-on-year +2.97% -8.82% -5.10%
Number of hourly rates quoted 21 1 0
10th Percentile £66.50 - -
25th Percentile £74.26 £68.75 -
Median hourly rate £80.00 £72.50 -
Median % change year-on-year +10.34% - -
75th Percentile £98.82 £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 22,100 13,253 16,504
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK excluding London 81.89% 89.22% 82.98%
Number of daily rates quoted 13,083 8,023 9,860
10th Percentile £300 £235 £250
25th Percentile £406 £367 £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 £675 £650 £688
UK median daily rate £520 £500 £525
% change year-on-year +4.00% -4.76% -4.11%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,291 1,233 1,853
10th Percentile £14.50 £14.00 £12.79
25th Percentile £19.34 £16.95 £16.06
Median hourly rate £45.00 £24.00 £40.00
Median % change year-on-year +87.50% -40.00% -1.45%
75th Percentile £68.75 £50.00 £63.75
90th Percentile £82.50 £71.49 £73.75
UK median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £38.12
% change year-on-year +74.79% -34.02% -10.31%

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 21 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 21 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 21 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 +68 193 £488 +2.63% 115
Yorkshire +40 108 £500 -6.98% 42
South East -17 92 £558 +11.60% 89
Midlands +12 90 £488 -2.50% 47
North West +9 79 £506 +22.43% 67
Scotland +32 75 £425 -18.66% 20
West Midlands -13 67 £488 +2.63% 29
South West +9 60 £550 -8.33% 43
East Midlands +7 22 £488 -2.50% 18
East of England - 18 £551 - 21
North East -36 8 £425 -22.73% 6
Wales - 6 £325 - 8
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 26 (4.91%) Confluence
2 12 (2.26%) Apache Spark
3 8 (1.51%) Apache Airflow
4 5 (0.94%) Apache
5 4 (0.75%) Microsoft Exchange
5 4 (0.75%) SharePoint
6 3 (0.57%) Palantir Foundry
7 2 (0.38%) Apache Pulsar
7 2 (0.38%) Blackberry Enterprise Server
7 2 (0.38%) IBM HTTP Server
7 2 (0.38%) OpenStack
7 2 (0.38%) Oracle HTTP Server
7 2 (0.38%) Tomcat
7 2 (0.38%) WebSphere
7 2 (0.38%) WebSphere Application Server
7 2 (0.38%) WebSphere Portal
8 1 (0.19%) nginx
8 1 (0.19%) Oracle Coherence
8 1 (0.19%) SAS
8 1 (0.19%) WebLogic
Applications
1 3 (0.57%) Microsoft Project
2 1 (0.19%) MS Visio
Business Applications
1 4 (0.75%) Dynamics CRM
1 4 (0.75%) NetSuite
1 4 (0.75%) Sage X3
2 1 (0.19%) Payment Gateway
2 1 (0.19%) SAP S/4HANA
Cloud Services
1 221 (41.70%) AWS
2 218 (41.13%) Azure
3 92 (17.36%) GCP
3 92 (17.36%) GitHub
4 71 (13.40%) GitHub Actions
5 53 (10.00%) Azure DevOps
6 40 (7.55%) Serverless
7 38 (7.17%) Amazon EKS
8 32 (6.04%) Amazon CloudWatch
9 29 (5.47%) OpenShift
10 28 (5.28%) Google Kubernetes Engine
11 27 (5.09%) Amazon S3
11 27 (5.09%) Entra ID
12 26 (4.91%) AWS Lambda
13 25 (4.72%) Amazon EC2
13 25 (4.72%) Power Platform
14 24 (4.53%) Azure AKS
15 23 (4.34%) AWS CloudFormation
15 23 (4.34%) Virtual Private Cloud
16 20 (3.77%) Snowflake
Communications & Networking
1 41 (7.74%) DNS
2 40 (7.55%) Firewall
3 22 (4.15%) Network Security
3 22 (4.15%) TCP/IP
4 21 (3.96%) DHCP
5 20 (3.77%) VPN
6 13 (2.45%) VSAN
7 8 (1.51%) SAN
8 7 (1.32%) SNMP
9 6 (1.13%) HTTP
10 5 (0.94%) NAS
11 4 (0.75%) Fibre Channel
11 4 (0.75%) SSH
12 3 (0.57%) SSL
12 3 (0.57%) WAN
12 3 (0.57%) WebEx
13 2 (0.38%) Internet
13 2 (0.38%) IPsec
13 2 (0.38%) LAN
13 2 (0.38%) SD-WAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 28 (5.28%) PostgreSQL
2 26 (4.91%) SQL Server
3 18 (3.40%) Data Warehouse
4 14 (2.64%) Relational Database
5 13 (2.45%) Power BI
6 11 (2.08%) Metadata
7 10 (1.89%) Big Data
7 10 (1.89%) DynamoDB
7 10 (1.89%) MySQL
8 8 (1.51%) Amazon Redshift
8 8 (1.51%) Tableau
9 7 (1.32%) NoSQL
10 6 (1.13%) Ataccama
10 6 (1.13%) BigQuery
10 6 (1.13%) Data Lake
11 5 (0.94%) Amazon RDS
11 5 (0.94%) Azure SQL Database
11 5 (0.94%) Hadoop
11 5 (0.94%) MongoDB
12 4 (0.75%) Neo4j
Development Applications
1 85 (16.04%) Jenkins
2 55 (10.38%) Git
3 51 (9.62%) GitLab
4 48 (9.06%) JIRA
5 15 (2.83%) Bitbucket
6 8 (1.51%) Maven
7 7 (1.32%) SonarQube
7 7 (1.32%) Sonatype Nexus
8 6 (1.13%) Artifactory
8 6 (1.13%) Gatling
8 6 (1.13%) Visual Studio
9 4 (0.75%) MSBuild
10 3 (0.57%) Claude Code
10 3 (0.57%) Jaeger
11 2 (0.38%) Introscope
11 2 (0.38%) MSI
11 2 (0.38%) Terragrunt
12 1 (0.19%) Atlassian Bamboo
12 1 (0.19%) Selenium
12 1 (0.19%) Snyk
General
1 104 (19.62%) Social Skills
2 84 (15.85%) Finance
3 66 (12.45%) Public Sector
4 29 (5.47%) Banking
5 24 (4.53%) Analytical Skills
6 20 (3.77%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 14 (2.64%) Documentation Skills
8 12 (2.26%) Telecoms
9 8 (1.51%) Aerospace
9 8 (1.51%) Influencing Skills
9 8 (1.51%) Military
10 6 (1.13%) Billing
11 5 (0.94%) Financial Institution
11 5 (0.94%) Legal
11 5 (0.94%) Retail
12 4 (0.75%) Health Technology
12 4 (0.75%) Police
13 3 (0.57%) Investment Banking
13 3 (0.57%) Law
13 3 (0.57%) Publishing
Job Titles
1 225 (42.45%) Platform Engineer
2 90 (16.98%) Senior
3 84 (15.85%) DevOps Engineer
4 82 (15.47%) Cloud Platform Engineer
5 59 (11.13%) Cloud Engineer
6 57 (10.75%) Data Engineer
7 48 (9.06%) Azure Engineer
8 40 (7.55%) Senior Platform Engineer
9 35 (6.60%) Azure Platform Engineer
10 34 (6.42%) Architect
11 30 (5.66%) Infrastructure Engineer
12 29 (5.47%) AWS Engineer
13 28 (5.28%) Lead
14 24 (4.53%) Site Reliability Engineer
15 23 (4.34%) GCP Engineer
15 23 (4.34%) Senior Data Engineer
16 21 (3.96%) DevOps Platform Engineer
17 20 (3.77%) Developer
18 19 (3.58%) Senior DevOps Engineer
18 19 (3.58%) Site Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 26 (4.91%) Kafka
2 15 (2.83%) OpenTelemetry
3 14 (2.64%) JSON
4 13 (2.45%) AWS CDK
4 13 (2.45%) REST
5 12 (2.26%) .NET
6 11 (2.08%) ARM Templates
6 11 (2.08%) Node.js
6 11 (2.08%) OAuth
7 10 (1.89%) OAuth2
8 9 (1.70%) YAML
9 8 (1.51%) Playwright
9 8 (1.51%) React
9 8 (1.51%) Spring Boot
10 7 (1.32%) LDAP
11 6 (1.13%) ADO
11 6 (1.13%) SOAP
11 6 (1.13%) Spring
12 5 (0.94%) Middleware
12 5 (0.94%) RabbitMQ
Miscellaneous
1 97 (18.30%) Cloud Native
2 44 (8.30%) Product Ownership
3 27 (5.09%) Onboarding
4 24 (4.53%) Hybrid Cloud
5 22 (4.15%) Data Protection Act
6 21 (3.96%) Data Centre
7 18 (3.40%) Distributed Systems
8 14 (2.64%) Enterprise Cloud
9 13 (2.45%) Enterprise Software
10 12 (2.26%) PKI
11 11 (2.08%) Private Cloud
12 10 (1.89%) Public Cloud
13 8 (1.51%) NHS
13 8 (1.51%) Virtual Team
14 7 (1.32%) Replication
14 7 (1.32%) Self-Motivation
15 6 (1.13%) Linux Command Line
15 6 (1.13%) Management Information System
15 6 (1.13%) Security Posture
16 5 (0.94%) Legacy Systems
Operating Systems
1 106 (20.00%) Linux
2 56 (10.57%) Windows
3 30 (5.66%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 15 (2.83%) Windows Server
5 14 (2.64%) Unix
6 8 (1.51%) VMS
7 4 (0.75%) Ubuntu
8 2 (0.38%) CentOS
8 2 (0.38%) Data ONTAP
8 2 (0.38%) Debian
8 2 (0.38%) Oracle Linux
8 2 (0.38%) SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
8 2 (0.38%) Windows 10
8 2 (0.38%) Windows Server 2012
8 2 (0.38%) Windows Server 2019
9 1 (0.19%) Mac OS
Processes & Methodologies
1 276 (52.08%) CI/CD
2 273 (51.51%) DevOps
3 214 (40.38%) Infrastructure as Code
4 137 (25.85%) Observability
5 119 (22.45%) Agile
6 96 (18.11%) Containerisation
7 95 (17.92%) Continuous Improvement
8 87 (16.42%) Site Reliability Engineering
9 76 (14.34%) Migration
10 72 (13.58%) Infrastructure Engineering
11 70 (13.21%) Technical Leadership
12 65 (12.26%) Problem-Solving
13 64 (12.08%) DevSecOps
14 63 (11.89%) AI
15 55 (10.38%) Roadmaps
16 51 (9.62%) Test Automation
17 47 (8.87%) Software Engineering
18 46 (8.68%) Scrum
19 45 (8.49%) Cloud Security
20 42 (7.92%) Infrastructure Automation
Programming Languages
1 200 (37.74%) Python
2 82 (15.47%) Bash
2 82 (15.47%) PowerShell
3 52 (9.81%) Java
4 42 (7.92%) SQL
5 30 (5.66%) Bicep
6 14 (2.64%) Go
7 11 (2.08%) C#
8 10 (1.89%) Groovy
8 10 (1.89%) JavaScript
9 8 (1.51%) Scala
10 7 (1.32%) Shell Script
11 6 (1.13%) Perl
12 5 (0.94%) TypeScript
13 3 (0.57%) C++
14 2 (0.38%) Data Analysis Expressions
14 2 (0.38%) Jython
14 2 (0.38%) PHP
14 2 (0.38%) VBScript
15 1 (0.19%) PL/SQL
Qualifications
1 160 (30.19%) Security Cleared
2 127 (23.96%) SC Cleared
3 32 (6.04%) DV Cleared
4 19 (3.58%) BPSS Clearance
5 18 (3.40%) Degree
6 16 (3.02%) AWS Certification
7 12 (2.26%) Azure Certification
8 11 (2.08%) SAFe Agilist
9 9 (1.70%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
9 9 (1.70%) Computer Science Degree
9 9 (1.70%) RHCE
10 8 (1.51%) Microsoft Certification
11 6 (1.13%) VCAP
12 5 (0.94%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
13 4 (0.75%) CISSP
13 4 (0.75%) NCDA
14 2 (0.38%) CCNA
14 2 (0.38%) Cisco Certification
14 2 (0.38%) NCIE
14 2 (0.38%) RHCSA
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 20 (3.77%) Data Quality
2 15 (2.83%) QA
3 9 (1.70%) Accessibility
3 9 (1.70%) GDPR
4 8 (1.51%) GRC
5 7 (1.32%) NCSC
6 6 (1.13%) PCI DSS
7 4 (0.75%) Disclosure Scotland
7 4 (0.75%) NIST
8 2 (0.38%) GxP
8 2 (0.38%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 2 (0.38%) NIST 800
9 1 (0.19%) Cyber Essentials
9 1 (0.19%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
9 1 (0.19%) ISO 20022
9 1 (0.19%) ISO 8583
System Software
1 86 (16.23%) Docker
2 41 (7.74%) VMware Infrastructure
3 36 (6.79%) Active Directory
4 22 (4.15%) vSphere
5 17 (3.21%) Virtual Machines
5 17 (3.21%) VMware NSX
6 12 (2.26%) Hyper-V
7 8 (1.51%) VMware ESXi
8 2 (0.38%) EMC RecoverPoint
8 2 (0.38%) Firmware
8 2 (0.38%) NFS
8 2 (0.38%) Squid
8 2 (0.38%) SRDF
8 2 (0.38%) Virtual Desktop
8 2 (0.38%) Virtual Servers
9 1 (0.19%) Ceph
9 1 (0.19%) KVM
Systems Management
1 228 (43.02%) Terraform
2 177 (33.40%) Kubernetes
3 86 (16.23%) Ansible
4 42 (7.92%) Grafana
5 38 (7.17%) Prometheus
6 27 (5.09%) Argo
7 17 (3.21%) Istio
8 9 (1.70%) Microsoft Intune
9 8 (1.51%) Kustomize
10 7 (1.32%) SCCM
11 6 (1.13%) HAProxy
11 6 (1.13%) PowerCLI
11 6 (1.13%) Puppet
11 6 (1.13%) VxRail
12 5 (0.94%) vCenter Server
12 5 (0.94%) vRealize
13 4 (0.75%) Packer
13 4 (0.75%) Progress Chef
13 4 (0.75%) Rancher
13 4 (0.75%) vMotion
Vendors
1 69 (13.02%) Microsoft
2 44 (8.30%) VMware
3 40 (7.55%) Google
4 25 (4.72%) Red Hat
5 24 (4.53%) Oracle
6 19 (3.58%) Databricks
7 18 (3.40%) Splunk
8 15 (2.83%) ServiceNow
9 12 (2.26%) Cisco
9 12 (2.26%) Dynatrace
10 8 (1.51%) CyberArk
11 7 (1.32%) NetApp
12 5 (0.94%) Brocade
12 5 (0.94%) Citrix
12 5 (0.94%) Cribl.io
12 5 (0.94%) PagerDuty
13 4 (0.75%) BiZZdesign
13 4 (0.75%) CrowdStrike
13 4 (0.75%) Pure Storage
13 4 (0.75%) Sonatype