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

6 months to
18 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 112 216 294
Rank change year-on-year +104 +78 -19
Contract jobs citing Platform Engineering 593 152 85
As % of all contract jobs in the UK excluding London 2.15% 0.99% 0.47%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 2.65% 1.11% 0.56%
Number of daily rates quoted 340 106 64
10th Percentile £393 £401 £408
25th Percentile £425 £457 £464
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £525 £528
Median % change year-on-year -2.38% -0.47% -12.08%
75th Percentile £588 £598 £675
90th Percentile £700 £663 £723
UK median daily rate £550 £528 £575
% change year-on-year +4.27% -8.26% -6.12%
Number of hourly rates quoted 32 1 0
10th Percentile £66.50 - -
25th Percentile £71.00 £68.75 -
Median hourly rate £83.71 £72.50 -
Median % change year-on-year +15.46% - -
75th Percentile £99.12 £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 22,378 13,665 15,061
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK excluding London 81.17% 89.23% 82.94%
Number of daily rates quoted 13,060 8,208 9,071
10th Percentile £300 £239 £250
25th Percentile £406 £368 £388
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% -3.58%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,470 1,367 1,502
10th Percentile £14.00 £13.83 £13.69
25th Percentile £17.85 £17.00 £16.50
Median hourly rate £43.96 £23.00 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year +91.13% -45.88% +19.72%
75th Percentile £68.00 £45.00 £65.00
90th Percentile £81.05 £70.00 £75.00
UK median hourly rate £42.00 £25.15 £40.94
% change year-on-year +67.00% -38.57% +0.86%

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 18 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 18 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 18 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 +63 202 £500 - 79
Yorkshire +49 119 £500 -4.76% 24
South East -3 112 £575 +15.00% 87
Midlands +6 107 £481 -3.75% 30
South West +18 79 £550 -8.33% 51
West Midlands -12 78 £463 -7.50% 16
North West +7 74 £513 +27.81% 47
Scotland +26 65 £450 -10.00% 14
East Midlands +9 28 £488 -30.36% 14
East of England -3 25 £549 -17.09% 8
North East -31 11 £438 -20.45% 8
Wales - 6 £325 - 5
Northern Ireland - 1 - - 1
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 (3.71%) Confluence
2 7 (1.18%) Apache
2 7 (1.18%) Apache Airflow
3 6 (1.01%) Apache Spark
4 4 (0.67%) SharePoint
5 3 (0.51%) Microsoft Exchange
5 3 (0.51%) OpenStack
5 3 (0.51%) Palantir Foundry
6 2 (0.34%) Apache Superset
6 2 (0.34%) Blackberry Enterprise Server
6 2 (0.34%) IBM HTTP Server
6 2 (0.34%) Oracle HTTP Server
6 2 (0.34%) Tomcat
6 2 (0.34%) WebSphere
6 2 (0.34%) WebSphere Application Server
6 2 (0.34%) WebSphere Portal
7 1 (0.17%) SAS
7 1 (0.17%) SharePoint Server
7 1 (0.17%) Tuxedo
7 1 (0.17%) WebLogic
Applications
1 1 (0.17%) MS Visio
Business Applications
1 5 (0.84%) Dynamics CRM
2 4 (0.67%) NetSuite
2 4 (0.67%) Sage X3
3 1 (0.17%) SAP S/4HANA
Cloud Services
1 258 (43.51%) AWS
2 245 (41.32%) Azure
3 104 (17.54%) GCP
3 104 (17.54%) GitHub
4 80 (13.49%) GitHub Actions
5 65 (10.96%) Azure DevOps
6 49 (8.26%) Serverless
7 40 (6.75%) Amazon EKS
8 34 (5.73%) Amazon CloudWatch
8 34 (5.73%) AWS Lambda
9 32 (5.40%) Power Platform
10 30 (5.06%) OpenShift
11 27 (4.55%) Entra ID
12 25 (4.22%) Amazon S3
13 24 (4.05%) Amazon EC2
14 23 (3.88%) Google Kubernetes Engine
15 22 (3.71%) Azure Monitor
15 22 (3.71%) PowerApps
15 22 (3.71%) Snowflake
16 21 (3.54%) Virtual Private Cloud
Communications & Networking
1 60 (10.12%) DNS
2 51 (8.60%) Firewall
3 36 (6.07%) TCP/IP
4 33 (5.56%) DHCP
5 24 (4.05%) VSAN
6 22 (3.71%) VPN
7 17 (2.87%) Network Security
8 11 (1.85%) HTTP
9 7 (1.18%) SNMP
10 4 (0.67%) SSH
11 3 (0.51%) HTTPS
11 3 (0.51%) NAS
11 3 (0.51%) SAN
11 3 (0.51%) SSL
11 3 (0.51%) WAN
12 2 (0.34%) Internet
12 2 (0.34%) Intrusion Detection
12 2 (0.34%) LAN
12 2 (0.34%) Multicast
12 2 (0.34%) Software-Defined Networking
Database & Business Intelligence
1 34 (5.73%) PostgreSQL
2 24 (4.05%) SQL Server
3 17 (2.87%) Data Warehouse
4 13 (2.19%) MySQL
4 13 (2.19%) Power BI
5 12 (2.02%) DynamoDB
5 12 (2.02%) Relational Database
6 8 (1.35%) Amazon Redshift
6 8 (1.35%) Big Data
6 8 (1.35%) NoSQL
6 8 (1.35%) Oracle Exadata
7 7 (1.18%) BigQuery
7 7 (1.18%) Data Lake
8 6 (1.01%) Ataccama
8 6 (1.01%) Tableau
9 5 (0.84%) Azure SQL Database
9 5 (0.84%) Neo4j
10 4 (0.67%) Amazon RDS
10 4 (0.67%) Metadata
10 4 (0.67%) MongoDB
Development Applications
1 83 (14.00%) Jenkins
2 60 (10.12%) Git
3 56 (9.44%) GitLab
4 40 (6.75%) JIRA
5 21 (3.54%) Bitbucket
6 8 (1.35%) Maven
7 7 (1.18%) Gatling
7 7 (1.18%) SonarQube
7 7 (1.18%) Sonatype Nexus
8 6 (1.01%) Artifactory
8 6 (1.01%) Claude Code
9 4 (0.67%) MSBuild
9 4 (0.67%) Visual Studio
10 3 (0.51%) Jaeger
10 3 (0.51%) JUnit
10 3 (0.51%) Mockito
10 3 (0.51%) Selenium
11 2 (0.34%) Atlassian Bamboo
11 2 (0.34%) MSI
11 2 (0.34%) Terragrunt
General
1 109 (18.38%) Social Skills
2 87 (14.67%) Finance
3 69 (11.64%) Public Sector
4 29 (4.89%) Analytical Skills
4 29 (4.89%) Banking
5 24 (4.05%) Inclusion and Diversity
6 17 (2.87%) Aerospace
7 15 (2.53%) Telecoms
8 14 (2.36%) Documentation Skills
9 9 (1.52%) Influencing Skills
9 9 (1.52%) Military
10 7 (1.18%) Billing
11 6 (1.01%) Retail
12 5 (0.84%) Investment Banking
13 4 (0.67%) Financial Institution
13 4 (0.67%) Health Technology
13 4 (0.67%) Law
13 4 (0.67%) Local Government
13 4 (0.67%) Police
14 3 (0.51%) Legal
Job Titles
1 240 (40.47%) Platform Engineer
2 109 (18.38%) Senior
3 90 (15.18%) DevOps Engineer
4 77 (12.98%) Cloud Platform Engineer
5 63 (10.62%) Cloud Engineer
6 56 (9.44%) Data Engineer
7 49 (8.26%) Senior Platform Engineer
8 43 (7.25%) Azure Engineer
9 41 (6.91%) Infrastructure Engineer
10 39 (6.58%) Architect
11 37 (6.24%) AWS Engineer
12 33 (5.56%) Lead
13 32 (5.40%) Developer
14 27 (4.55%) Azure Platform Engineer
15 26 (4.38%) GCP Engineer
16 24 (4.05%) DevOps Platform Engineer
16 24 (4.05%) Senior Data Engineer
17 23 (3.88%) Principal Engineer
18 22 (3.71%) Site Reliability Engineer
19 21 (3.54%) Senior DevOps
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 40 (6.75%) Kafka
2 20 (3.37%) ARM Templates
3 19 (3.20%) JSON
4 18 (3.04%) OpenTelemetry
4 18 (3.04%) REST
5 16 (2.70%) AWS CDK
6 15 (2.53%) .NET
7 14 (2.36%) OAuth
8 13 (2.19%) OAuth2
8 13 (2.19%) YAML
9 12 (2.02%) Node.js
10 11 (1.85%) OpenID
10 11 (1.85%) React
10 11 (1.85%) Spring Boot
11 9 (1.52%) SAML
12 8 (1.35%) Playwright
12 8 (1.35%) Spring
13 7 (1.18%) LDAP
14 6 (1.01%) RabbitMQ
14 6 (1.01%) SOAP
Miscellaneous
1 114 (19.22%) Cloud Native
2 49 (8.26%) Product Ownership
3 34 (5.73%) Hybrid Cloud
4 29 (4.89%) Distributed Systems
5 27 (4.55%) Data Centre
6 26 (4.38%) PKI
7 24 (4.05%) Onboarding
8 21 (3.54%) Data Protection Act
9 17 (2.87%) Enterprise Cloud
9 17 (2.87%) Enterprise Software
10 13 (2.19%) Public Cloud
11 12 (2.02%) Linux Command Line
12 11 (1.85%) Private Cloud
13 10 (1.69%) NHS
14 8 (1.35%) AI Agents
15 7 (1.18%) Management Information System
15 7 (1.18%) Replication
15 7 (1.18%) Self-Motivation
16 6 (1.01%) ARM Cortex
17 5 (0.84%) Low-Code
Operating Systems
1 132 (22.26%) Linux
2 63 (10.62%) Windows
3 28 (4.72%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 19 (3.20%) Windows Server
5 16 (2.70%) Unix
6 9 (1.52%) VMS
7 5 (0.84%) 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
1 325 (54.81%) CI/CD
2 303 (51.10%) DevOps
3 266 (44.86%) Infrastructure as Code
4 167 (28.16%) Observability
5 125 (21.08%) Agile
6 118 (19.90%) Containerisation
7 113 (19.06%) Continuous Improvement
8 97 (16.36%) Site Reliability Engineering
9 96 (16.19%) DevSecOps
10 92 (15.51%) Technical Leadership
11 81 (13.66%) AI
12 80 (13.49%) Infrastructure Engineering
13 70 (11.80%) Problem-Solving
14 68 (11.47%) Migration
15 62 (10.46%) Software Engineering
16 56 (9.44%) Infrastructure Automation
16 56 (9.44%) Test Automation
17 54 (9.11%) Cloud Security
17 54 (9.11%) Roadmaps
18 53 (8.94%) Cybersecurity
Programming Languages
1 225 (37.94%) Python
2 106 (17.88%) Bash
3 101 (17.03%) PowerShell
4 62 (10.46%) Java
5 44 (7.42%) SQL
6 36 (6.07%) Bicep
7 20 (3.37%) C#
8 19 (3.20%) Go
9 13 (2.19%) JavaScript
10 9 (1.52%) Shell Script
10 9 (1.52%) TypeScript
11 8 (1.35%) Scala
12 7 (1.18%) Groovy
13 4 (0.67%) Perl
14 3 (0.51%) C++
14 3 (0.51%) Kusto Query Language
15 2 (0.34%) Jython
15 2 (0.34%) PHP
15 2 (0.34%) VBScript
16 1 (0.17%) Ada
Qualifications
1 196 (33.05%) Security Cleared
2 143 (24.11%) SC Cleared
3 53 (8.94%) DV Cleared
4 22 (3.71%) AWS Certification
5 19 (3.20%) BPSS Clearance
5 19 (3.20%) Degree
6 17 (2.87%) Azure Certification
7 13 (2.19%) Microsoft Certification
8 12 (2.02%) Computer Science Degree
8 12 (2.02%) VCAP
9 11 (1.85%) SAFe Agilist
10 10 (1.69%) CISSP
11 9 (1.52%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
12 8 (1.35%) RHCE
13 6 (1.01%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
14 5 (0.84%) Cisco Certification
15 4 (0.67%) (ISC)2 CCSP
15 4 (0.67%) CompTIA Security+
16 3 (0.51%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
16 3 (0.51%) TOGAF Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 19 (3.20%) QA
2 14 (2.36%) Accessibility
3 13 (2.19%) Data Quality
4 10 (1.69%) NCSC
5 8 (1.35%) GRC
6 7 (1.18%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 7 (1.18%) NIST
7 5 (0.84%) GDPR
8 4 (0.67%) Cyber Essentials
8 4 (0.67%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
8 4 (0.67%) PCI DSS
9 3 (0.51%) Disclosure Scotland
10 2 (0.34%) GxP
11 1 (0.17%) HL7
11 1 (0.17%) NIST 800
11 1 (0.17%) SLA
System Software
1 103 (17.37%) Docker
2 50 (8.43%) VMware Infrastructure
3 44 (7.42%) Active Directory
4 31 (5.23%) vSphere
5 24 (4.05%) VMware NSX
6 21 (3.54%) Hyper-V
7 13 (2.19%) Virtual Machines
8 9 (1.52%) 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
1 282 (47.55%) Terraform
2 220 (37.10%) Kubernetes
3 106 (17.88%) Ansible
4 38 (6.41%) Grafana
5 37 (6.24%) Prometheus
6 33 (5.56%) Argo
7 20 (3.37%) Istio
8 14 (2.36%) VxRail
9 8 (1.35%) Kustomize
9 8 (1.35%) Microsoft Intune
10 7 (1.18%) Puppet
10 7 (1.18%) SCCM
10 7 (1.18%) vCenter Server
11 6 (1.01%) HAProxy
12 5 (0.84%) Progress Chef
13 4 (0.67%) Podman
13 4 (0.67%) PowerCLI
13 4 (0.67%) Rancher
14 3 (0.51%) Check_MK
14 3 (0.51%) Packer
Vendors
1 89 (15.01%) Microsoft
2 57 (9.61%) VMware
3 50 (8.43%) Google
4 28 (4.72%) Red Hat
5 24 (4.05%) Oracle
6 22 (3.71%) Splunk
7 19 (3.20%) Databricks
8 16 (2.70%) Dynatrace
8 16 (2.70%) ServiceNow
9 14 (2.36%) CyberArk
10 7 (1.18%) Cisco
10 7 (1.18%) Salesforce
11 6 (1.01%) CrowdStrike
11 6 (1.01%) ForgeRock
12 5 (0.84%) Cribl.io
12 5 (0.84%) NetApp
12 5 (0.84%) PagerDuty
13 4 (0.67%) Dell
13 4 (0.67%) IBM
13 4 (0.67%) Sage