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

6 months to
22 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 142 257 314
Rank change year-on-year +115 +57 -63
Contract jobs citing Platform Engineering 430 98 84
As % of all contract jobs in the UK excluding London 1.66% 0.73% 0.39%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 2.03% 0.80% 0.48%
Number of daily rates quoted 265 67 59
10th Percentile £358 £400 £415
25th Percentile £423 £450 £457
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year - -4.76% -11.95%
75th Percentile £575 £588 £650
90th Percentile £675 £663 £715
UK median daily rate £525 £537 £575
% change year-on-year -2.23% -6.61% -5.19%
Number of hourly rates quoted 15 1 0
10th Percentile £66.50 - -
25th Percentile £67.00 £68.75 -
Median hourly rate £74.26 £72.50 -
Median % change year-on-year +2.43% - -
75th Percentile £80.00 £76.25 -
90th Percentile £84.20 - -
UK median hourly rate £76.25 £72.50 £60.50
% change year-on-year +5.17% +19.83% -22.44%

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 21,220 12,176 17,676
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK excluding London 81.78% 90.43% 82.33%
Number of daily rates quoted 12,618 7,495 10,340
10th Percentile £301 £235 £250
25th Percentile £405 £368 £380
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £475 £500
Median % change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
75th Percentile £592 £575 £600
90th Percentile £688 £650 £688
UK median daily rate £513 £502 £525
% change year-on-year +2.04% -4.33% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,239 983 2,226
10th Percentile £14.25 £14.14 £12.50
25th Percentile £19.34 £16.95 £15.50
Median hourly rate £45.00 £25.15 £38.12
Median % change year-on-year +78.93% -34.02% +17.65%
75th Percentile £68.00 £55.00 £61.60
90th Percentile £81.09 £75.00 £73.75
UK median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £37.50
% change year-on-year +74.79% -32.93% +7.14%

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 June 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 June 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 June 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 +52 177 £488 -7.14% 61
Yorkshire +31 103 £488 -11.36% 17
North West +15 71 £458 +7.65% 38
South East -17 67 £525 +10.53% 85
Scotland +37 61 £450 -8.07% 6
Midlands -14 61 £488 -2.50% 40
West Midlands -27 48 £496 -0.80% 28
South West -3 41 £540 -10.00% 28
East of England -5 20 £475 -40.63% 15
East Midlands -8 13 £488 -2.50% 11
Wales - 6 £374 - 6
North East -35 5 £453 -17.73% 7
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 23 (5.35%) Confluence
2 10 (2.33%) Apache Spark
3 6 (1.40%) Apache Airflow
4 4 (0.93%) Microsoft Exchange
4 4 (0.93%) SharePoint
5 3 (0.70%) Apache
5 3 (0.70%) Palantir Foundry
6 2 (0.47%) Apache Pulsar
6 2 (0.47%) Blackberry Enterprise Server
6 2 (0.47%) IBM HTTP Server
6 2 (0.47%) nginx
6 2 (0.47%) Oracle HTTP Server
6 2 (0.47%) Tomcat
6 2 (0.47%) WebSphere
6 2 (0.47%) WebSphere Application Server
6 2 (0.47%) WebSphere Portal
7 1 (0.23%) Apache Superset
7 1 (0.23%) Oracle Coherence
7 1 (0.23%) SAS
7 1 (0.23%) WebLogic
Applications
1 3 (0.70%) Microsoft Project
Business Applications
1 3 (0.70%) Dynamics CRM
1 3 (0.70%) NetSuite
1 3 (0.70%) Sage X3
2 1 (0.23%) Payment Gateway
2 1 (0.23%) SAP S/4HANA
Cloud Services
1 166 (38.60%) Azure
2 160 (37.21%) AWS
3 78 (18.14%) GitHub
4 74 (17.21%) GCP
5 63 (14.65%) GitHub Actions
6 41 (9.53%) Azure DevOps
7 38 (8.84%) Serverless
8 36 (8.37%) Amazon EKS
9 30 (6.98%) OpenShift
10 28 (6.51%) Amazon CloudWatch
11 27 (6.28%) Entra ID
11 27 (6.28%) Google Kubernetes Engine
12 25 (5.81%) Amazon S3
12 25 (5.81%) AWS Lambda
13 24 (5.58%) Amazon EC2
14 23 (5.35%) Azure AKS
15 21 (4.88%) Virtual Private Cloud
16 20 (4.65%) AWS CloudFormation
17 19 (4.42%) Power Platform
18 18 (4.19%) Amazon ECS
Communications & Networking
1 24 (5.58%) Firewall
2 17 (3.95%) DNS
2 17 (3.95%) Network Security
3 13 (3.02%) VPN
4 8 (1.86%) SAN
5 6 (1.40%) SNMP
5 6 (1.40%) TCP/IP
5 6 (1.40%) VSAN
6 5 (1.16%) DHCP
6 5 (1.16%) NAS
7 4 (0.93%) Fibre Channel
7 4 (0.93%) HTTP
8 3 (0.70%) IPsec
8 3 (0.70%) MQTT
8 3 (0.70%) SD-WAN
8 3 (0.70%) SSL
8 3 (0.70%) WebEx
9 2 (0.47%) NetScaler
10 1 (0.23%) AMQP
10 1 (0.23%) Modbus
Database & Business Intelligence
1 27 (6.28%) PostgreSQL
2 19 (4.42%) SQL Server
3 16 (3.72%) Data Warehouse
4 14 (3.26%) Relational Database
5 13 (3.02%) Power BI
6 10 (2.33%) DynamoDB
7 9 (2.09%) MySQL
7 9 (2.09%) NoSQL
8 8 (1.86%) Metadata
8 8 (1.86%) Neo4j
8 8 (1.86%) Tableau
9 7 (1.63%) Big Data
10 6 (1.40%) Amazon Redshift
10 6 (1.40%) Ataccama
11 5 (1.16%) BigQuery
11 5 (1.16%) Hadoop
12 4 (0.93%) Amazon RDS
13 3 (0.70%) Azure SQL Database
13 3 (0.70%) Redis
13 3 (0.70%) SQL Server Integration Services
Development Applications
1 71 (16.51%) Jenkins
2 48 (11.16%) GitLab
3 47 (10.93%) JIRA
4 40 (9.30%) Git
5 15 (3.49%) Bitbucket
6 10 (2.33%) Gatling
7 6 (1.40%) Artifactory
8 5 (1.16%) Maven
9 4 (0.93%) JMeter
9 4 (0.93%) LoadRunner
9 4 (0.93%) NeoLoad
9 4 (0.93%) Postman
9 4 (0.93%) Sonatype Nexus
10 3 (0.70%) Jaeger
10 3 (0.70%) SonarQube
11 2 (0.47%) Introscope
11 2 (0.47%) Terragrunt
11 2 (0.47%) Visual Studio
12 1 (0.23%) GoCD
12 1 (0.23%) ScriptRunner
General
1 83 (19.30%) Social Skills
2 71 (16.51%) Finance
3 46 (10.70%) Public Sector
4 27 (6.28%) Banking
5 18 (4.19%) Analytical Skills
6 10 (2.33%) Documentation Skills
6 10 (2.33%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 6 (1.40%) Aerospace
7 6 (1.40%) Influencing Skills
7 6 (1.40%) Telecoms
8 5 (1.16%) Legal
8 5 (1.16%) Military
9 4 (0.93%) Health Technology
9 4 (0.93%) Retail
10 3 (0.70%) Billing
10 3 (0.70%) Financial Institution
10 3 (0.70%) Investment Banking
10 3 (0.70%) Law
10 3 (0.70%) Police
11 2 (0.47%) Local Government
Job Titles
1 178 (41.40%) Platform Engineer
2 73 (16.98%) Cloud Platform Engineer
3 71 (16.51%) Senior
4 67 (15.58%) DevOps Engineer
5 43 (10.00%) Cloud Engineer
6 42 (9.77%) Azure Engineer
7 37 (8.60%) Data Engineer
8 35 (8.14%) Azure Platform Engineer
9 30 (6.98%) Lead
10 29 (6.74%) Architect
11 25 (5.81%) Senior Platform Engineer
12 24 (5.58%) DevOps Platform Engineer
13 21 (4.88%) AWS Engineer
14 18 (4.19%) GCP Engineer
14 18 (4.19%) Site Reliability Engineer
15 17 (3.95%) Senior DevOps
15 17 (3.95%) Senior DevOps Engineer
16 16 (3.72%) Infrastructure Engineer
17 15 (3.49%) Developer
17 15 (3.49%) Software Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 16 (3.72%) Kafka
1 16 (3.72%) REST
2 13 (3.02%) OpenTelemetry
3 12 (2.79%) AWS CDK
3 12 (2.79%) Playwright
4 11 (2.56%) Node.js
4 11 (2.56%) OAuth
5 10 (2.33%) OAuth2
6 9 (2.09%) LDAP
6 9 (2.09%) OpenID
6 9 (2.09%) SailPoint
7 8 (1.86%) ADO
7 8 (1.86%) React
8 7 (1.63%) Spring Boot
8 7 (1.63%) YAML
9 6 (1.40%) .NET
10 5 (1.16%) JSON
10 5 (1.16%) Middleware
10 5 (1.16%) SOAP
10 5 (1.16%) Spring
Miscellaneous
1 80 (18.60%) Cloud Native
2 39 (9.07%) Product Ownership
3 16 (3.72%) Onboarding
4 15 (3.49%) Distributed Systems
4 15 (3.49%) Private Cloud
5 13 (3.02%) Data Centre
6 11 (2.56%) Data Protection Act
6 11 (2.56%) Hybrid Cloud
7 9 (2.09%) Public Cloud
8 7 (1.63%) NHS
8 7 (1.63%) Replication
8 7 (1.63%) Security Posture
9 6 (1.40%) Enterprise Cloud
9 6 (1.40%) Enterprise Software
9 6 (1.40%) Management Information System
10 5 (1.16%) Self-Motivation
10 5 (1.16%) Virtual Team
11 4 (0.93%) Legacy Systems
11 4 (0.93%) NVMe
11 4 (0.93%) Operational Technology
Operating Systems
1 70 (16.28%) Linux
2 34 (7.91%) Windows
3 23 (5.35%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 15 (3.49%) Unix
5 8 (1.86%) Windows Server
6 7 (1.63%) VMS
7 2 (0.47%) CentOS
7 2 (0.47%) Data ONTAP
7 2 (0.47%) Oracle Linux
7 2 (0.47%) SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
7 2 (0.47%) Ubuntu
7 2 (0.47%) Windows Server 2012
7 2 (0.47%) Windows Server 2019
8 1 (0.23%) Debian
8 1 (0.23%) Mac OS
8 1 (0.23%) Solaris
8 1 (0.23%) Windows 10
Processes & Methodologies
1 230 (53.49%) CI/CD
2 208 (48.37%) DevOps
3 167 (38.84%) Infrastructure as Code
4 98 (22.79%) Observability
5 95 (22.09%) Agile
6 69 (16.05%) Continuous Improvement
6 69 (16.05%) Migration
7 67 (15.58%) Containerisation
7 67 (15.58%) Site Reliability Engineering
8 51 (11.86%) Roadmaps
9 50 (11.63%) Infrastructure Engineering
10 48 (11.16%) Software Engineering
10 48 (11.16%) Test Automation
11 46 (10.70%) Technical Leadership
12 43 (10.00%) Problem-Solving
13 42 (9.77%) AI
14 41 (9.53%) Cloud Security
15 39 (9.07%) DevSecOps
16 38 (8.84%) Scrum
17 37 (8.60%) Infrastructure Automation
Programming Languages
1 154 (35.81%) Python
2 49 (11.40%) Java
2 49 (11.40%) PowerShell
3 48 (11.16%) Bash
4 33 (7.67%) SQL
5 21 (4.88%) Bicep
6 12 (2.79%) Go
6 12 (2.79%) Scala
7 9 (2.09%) TypeScript
8 6 (1.40%) JavaScript
9 5 (1.16%) C#
9 5 (1.16%) Groovy
9 5 (1.16%) Perl
10 4 (0.93%) Cypher
10 4 (0.93%) Shell Script
11 2 (0.47%) C++
11 2 (0.47%) Jython
11 2 (0.47%) PHP
12 1 (0.23%) C
12 1 (0.23%) PL/SQL
Qualifications
1 127 (29.53%) Security Cleared
2 110 (25.58%) SC Cleared
3 15 (3.49%) DV Cleared
4 14 (3.26%) BPSS Clearance
5 13 (3.02%) Degree
6 11 (2.56%) SAFe Agilist
7 10 (2.33%) Azure Certification
8 9 (2.09%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
9 8 (1.86%) AWS Certification
10 7 (1.63%) Computer Science Degree
10 7 (1.63%) RHCE
11 4 (0.93%) NCDA
11 4 (0.93%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
12 3 (0.70%) CISSP
13 2 (0.47%) CCNA
13 2 (0.47%) Cisco Certification
13 2 (0.47%) Microsoft Certification
13 2 (0.47%) NCIE
13 2 (0.47%) PMI Certification
13 2 (0.47%) PMP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 19 (4.42%) Data Quality
2 15 (3.49%) QA
3 13 (3.02%) NCSC
4 8 (1.86%) GDPR
5 5 (1.16%) Accessibility
5 5 (1.16%) GRC
5 5 (1.16%) PCI DSS
6 3 (0.70%) NIST
6 3 (0.70%) NIST 800
7 2 (0.47%) Disclosure Scotland
7 2 (0.47%) GxP
8 1 (0.23%) ISO 20022
8 1 (0.23%) ISO 8583
System Software
1 52 (12.09%) Docker
2 29 (6.74%) VMware Infrastructure
3 19 (4.42%) Active Directory
4 15 (3.49%) Virtual Machines
5 13 (3.02%) vSphere
6 10 (2.33%) VMware NSX
7 7 (1.63%) VMware ESXi
8 4 (0.93%) Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services
9 2 (0.47%) EMC RecoverPoint
9 2 (0.47%) Firmware
9 2 (0.47%) Hyper-V
9 2 (0.47%) NFS
9 2 (0.47%) Squid
9 2 (0.47%) SRDF
9 2 (0.47%) Virtual Desktop
10 1 (0.23%) Ceph
10 1 (0.23%) KVM
10 1 (0.23%) Virtual Servers
Systems Management
1 166 (38.60%) Terraform
2 133 (30.93%) Kubernetes
3 61 (14.19%) Ansible
4 33 (7.67%) Grafana
5 31 (7.21%) Prometheus
6 25 (5.81%) Argo
7 18 (4.19%) Istio
8 7 (1.63%) Kustomize
9 6 (1.40%) HAProxy
9 6 (1.40%) PowerCLI
10 5 (1.16%) Microsoft Intune
10 5 (1.16%) Packer
10 5 (1.16%) Puppet
10 5 (1.16%) vCenter Server
10 5 (1.16%) vRealize
11 4 (0.93%) Rancher
11 4 (0.93%) vMotion
12 3 (0.70%) NetBackup
12 3 (0.70%) Progress Chef
13 2 (0.47%) EMC NetWorker
Vendors
1 42 (9.77%) Microsoft
2 31 (7.21%) VMware
3 29 (6.74%) Google
4 22 (5.12%) Red Hat
5 21 (4.88%) Oracle
6 18 (4.19%) ServiceNow
7 15 (3.49%) Databricks
8 13 (3.02%) Splunk
9 10 (2.33%) Cisco
9 10 (2.33%) Dynatrace
10 6 (1.40%) Citrix
11 5 (1.16%) BiZZdesign
11 5 (1.16%) Brocade
11 5 (1.16%) NetApp
12 4 (0.93%) Cribl.io
12 4 (0.93%) F5
12 4 (0.93%) Foundry
12 4 (0.93%) PagerDuty
12 4 (0.93%) Pure Storage
12 4 (0.93%) Veeam