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 vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 16 September 2025, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
16 Sep 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 198 285 287
Rank change year-on-year +87 +2 -12
Contract jobs citing Platform Engineering 182 89 144
As % of all contract jobs advertised in the UK excluding London 1.19% 0.50% 0.67%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 1.33% 0.61% 0.75%
Number of daily rates quoted 127 63 112
10th Percentile £401 £413 £473
25th Percentile £450 £463 £513
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £525 £600
Median % change year-on-year - -12.50% +4.35%
75th Percentile £588 £597 £675
90th Percentile £663 £685 £834
UK median daily rate £530 £575 £613
% change year-on-year -7.83% -6.12% +2.08%
Number of hourly rates quoted 0 0 3
Median hourly rate - - £78.00
UK median hourly rate - £55.00 £78.00
% change year-on-year - -29.49% -18.86%

All Process and 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 13,680 14,701 19,112
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK excluding London 89.21% 82.94% 88.27%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,222 8,462 12,594
10th Percentile £235 £246 £260
25th Percentile £368 £390 £400
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £475 £500 £500
Median % change year-on-year -5.00% - -
75th Percentile £575 £600 £600
90th Percentile £662 £688 £688
UK median daily rate £500 £525 £540
% change year-on-year -4.76% -2.78% -1.82%
Number of hourly rates quoted 1,425 1,215 1,261
10th Percentile £14.03 £14.52 £14.25
25th Percentile £17.08 £18.00 £17.72
Median hourly rate £22.63 £43.00 £40.59
Median % change year-on-year -47.37% +5.94% +75.90%
75th Percentile £42.50 £65.50 £65.00
90th Percentile £67.00 £75.00 £77.50
UK median hourly rate £25.15 £43.00 £42.50
% change year-on-year -41.51% +1.18% +46.55%

Platform Engineering
Job Vacancy Trend in the UK excluding London

Job postings citing Platform Engineering as a proportion of all IT jobs advertised in the UK excluding London.

Job vacancy trend for Platform Engineering 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 16 September 2025.

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
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 16 September 2025. 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
Midlands +27 56 £525 -23.36% 86
West Midlands +26 55 £520 -24.09% 48
South East +46 39 £488 -12.95% 106
Scotland +4 32 £545 +12.66% 24
North of England -12 30 £450 -9.09% 88
South West +37 21 £600 +11.11% 53
North West 0 20 £401 -25.40% 53
East of England - 10 £585 - 54
Yorkshire -26 8 £525 +7.14% 30
North East - 3 £450 - 5
East Midlands - 1 £700 - 32
Platform Engineering
UK

Platform Engineering
Co-occurring Skills and Capabilities in the UK excluding London by Category

The follow tables expand on the table above by listing co-occurrences grouped by category. The same employment type, locality and period is covered with up to 20 co-occurrences shown in each of the following categories:

Application Platforms
1 32 (17.58%) Confluence
2 12 (6.59%) nginx
3 10 (5.49%) Apache
4 5 (2.75%) CICS
4 5 (2.75%) WebLogic
5 4 (2.20%) JBoss
5 4 (2.20%) WebSphere
5 4 (2.20%) WebSphere Application Server
6 2 (1.10%) Apache Airflow
6 2 (1.10%) Apache Spark
6 2 (1.10%) IIS
6 2 (1.10%) iPlanet
6 2 (1.10%) SharePoint
7 1 (0.55%) CMS
7 1 (0.55%) Documentum
7 1 (0.55%) Microsoft Exchange
7 1 (0.55%) OpenStack
7 1 (0.55%) SharePoint Server
7 1 (0.55%) Tomcat
Applications
1 12 (6.59%) Mozilla Thunderbird
Business Applications
1 1 (0.55%) Finacle
1 1 (0.55%) Magento
1 1 (0.55%) Shopify
Cloud Services
1 81 (44.51%) AWS
2 70 (38.46%) Azure
3 35 (19.23%) Amazon CloudWatch
4 32 (17.58%) OpenShift
5 29 (15.93%) Amazon EC2
5 29 (15.93%) Amazon S3
6 27 (14.84%) Virtual Private Cloud
7 26 (14.29%) AWS KMS
8 25 (13.74%) Amazon ELB
9 23 (12.64%) GitHub
10 17 (9.34%) Amazon EKS
11 15 (8.24%) GCP
12 13 (7.14%) AWS CloudFormation
12 13 (7.14%) Route 53
13 12 (6.59%) Amazon ECS
13 12 (6.59%) Amazon Glacier
13 12 (6.59%) Microsoft 365
14 10 (5.49%) Azure DevOps
14 10 (5.49%) GitHub Actions
14 10 (5.49%) IaaS
Communications & Networking
1 28 (15.38%) DNS
1 28 (15.38%) Firewall
2 24 (13.19%) SMTP
3 22 (12.09%) FTP
3 22 (12.09%) HTTP
3 22 (12.09%) SSH
4 12 (6.59%) IMAP
4 12 (6.59%) OpenLDAP
5 2 (1.10%) Calico
5 2 (1.10%) IPsec
5 2 (1.10%) Kerberos
5 2 (1.10%) SD-WAN
6 1 (0.55%) Skype
6 1 (0.55%) SSL
6 1 (0.55%) TCP/IP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 34 (18.68%) Amazon RDS
2 18 (9.89%) PostgreSQL
3 13 (7.14%) Amazon Aurora
4 9 (4.95%) Redis
5 7 (3.85%) NoSQL
6 5 (2.75%) Amazon Redshift
6 5 (2.75%) Couchbase
7 3 (1.65%) Big Data
7 3 (1.65%) Power BI
7 3 (1.65%) SQL Server
8 2 (1.10%) Elasticsearch
8 2 (1.10%) Oracle Database
8 2 (1.10%) Relational Database
9 1 (0.55%) BusinessObjects
9 1 (0.55%) BusinessObjects Business Intelligence
9 1 (0.55%) RDBMS
9 1 (0.55%) SAP Data Services
9 1 (0.55%) Tableau
9 1 (0.55%) Tableau Desktop
9 1 (0.55%) Tableau Server
Development Applications
1 77 (42.31%) Jenkins
2 50 (27.47%) Git
3 36 (19.78%) JIRA
4 24 (13.19%) Vagrant
5 23 (12.64%) GitLab
6 7 (3.85%) SonarQube
7 4 (2.20%) Terragrunt
8 3 (1.65%) Bitbucket Server
8 3 (1.65%) CA Release Automation
8 3 (1.65%) Selenium
9 2 (1.10%) Maven
9 2 (1.10%) Sonatype Nexus
10 1 (0.55%) Appium
10 1 (0.55%) Artifactory
10 1 (0.55%) Cypress.io
10 1 (0.55%) Postman
10 1 (0.55%) Pylint
10 1 (0.55%) Snyk
10 1 (0.55%) TeamCity
10 1 (0.55%) TestRail
General
1 52 (28.57%) Social Skills
2 34 (18.68%) Public Sector
3 19 (10.44%) Finance
4 11 (6.04%) Banking
5 10 (5.49%) Presentation Skills
6 8 (4.40%) Analytical Skills
7 4 (2.20%) Documentation Skills
7 4 (2.20%) Legal
7 4 (2.20%) Retail
8 2 (1.10%) Aerospace
8 2 (1.10%) Games
8 2 (1.10%) Retail Banking
9 1 (0.55%) Wholesale Banking
Job Titles
1 118 (64.84%) Platform Engineer
2 47 (25.82%) DevOps Engineer
3 36 (19.78%) Cloud Platform Engineer
4 26 (14.29%) AWS Engineer
5 21 (11.54%) AWS DevOps
6 20 (10.99%) AWS DevOps Engineer
7 16 (8.79%) AWS Platform Engineer
8 14 (7.69%) DevOps Platform Engineer
9 13 (7.14%) Python Engineer
10 11 (6.04%) Azure Engineer
11 9 (4.95%) Data Engineer
11 9 (4.95%) Linux Engineer
12 8 (4.40%) Kubernetes Engineer
12 8 (4.40%) VMware Engineer
13 7 (3.85%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
13 7 (3.85%) Azure Platform Engineer
13 7 (3.85%) Senior
13 7 (3.85%) Senior Platform Engineer
14 6 (3.30%) Cloud Engineer
15 5 (2.75%) Lead
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 15 (8.24%) Kafka
2 14 (7.69%) LDAP
2 14 (7.69%) YAML
3 12 (6.59%) Elastic Stack
3 12 (6.59%) Middleware
4 11 (6.04%) React
5 8 (4.40%) FastAPI
6 6 (3.30%) Keycloak
7 5 (2.75%) ISPF
7 5 (2.75%) OAuth
8 4 (2.20%) LangChain
8 4 (2.20%) LangGraph
8 4 (2.20%) Node.js
8 4 (2.20%) RESTful
8 4 (2.20%) Spring Boot
9 3 (1.65%) ADO
9 3 (1.65%) Flask
9 3 (1.65%) OAuth2
9 3 (1.65%) Spring
10 2 (1.10%) SAML
Miscellaneous
1 28 (15.38%) Replication
2 16 (8.79%) Private Cloud
3 12 (6.59%) Distributed Systems
4 11 (6.04%) Cloud Native
4 11 (6.04%) Onboarding
5 8 (4.40%) Management Information System
5 8 (4.40%) Virtual Team
6 5 (2.75%) Legacy Systems
6 5 (2.75%) Mainframe
6 5 (2.75%) VSAM
7 4 (2.20%) Data Centre
7 4 (2.20%) Data Protection Act
7 4 (2.20%) IBM Mainframe
8 3 (1.65%) Hybrid Cloud
8 3 (1.65%) PKI
9 2 (1.10%) AI Agents
9 2 (1.10%) Low-Code
9 2 (1.10%) Operational Technology
9 2 (1.10%) SCADA
9 2 (1.10%) Shadow IT
Operating Systems
1 82 (45.05%) Linux
2 54 (29.67%) Windows
3 25 (13.74%) VMS
4 24 (13.19%) Amazon Linux
5 21 (11.54%) Unix
6 11 (6.04%) Ubuntu
7 5 (2.75%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
7 5 (2.75%) Windows 10
7 5 (2.75%) zOS
8 3 (1.65%) Windows Server
9 2 (1.10%) Android
9 2 (1.10%) Apple iOS
10 1 (0.55%) Windows Server 2016
Processes & Methodologies
1 96 (52.75%) DevOps
2 94 (51.65%) CI/CD
3 69 (37.91%) Infrastructure as Code
4 50 (27.47%) Configuration Management
5 39 (21.43%) Agile
6 35 (19.23%) Observability
7 34 (18.68%) Migration
8 32 (17.58%) Containerisation
9 27 (14.84%) Cloud Security
10 26 (14.29%) Change Management
10 26 (14.29%) Patch Management
11 24 (13.19%) High Availability
12 23 (12.64%) Performance Tuning
12 23 (12.64%) Problem-Solving
13 16 (8.79%) Artificial Intelligence
13 16 (8.79%) Continuous Improvement
14 15 (8.24%) Site Reliability Engineering
15 13 (7.14%) Microservices
16 12 (6.59%) Incident Management
16 12 (6.59%) Test Automation
Programming Languages
1 97 (53.30%) Python
2 47 (25.82%) PowerShell
3 44 (24.18%) SQL
4 34 (18.68%) Java
5 27 (14.84%) Groovy
6 23 (12.64%) Perl
7 19 (10.44%) JavaScript
8 15 (8.24%) Bash
9 11 (6.04%) C#
10 8 (4.40%) Erlang
10 8 (4.40%) Prolog
10 8 (4.40%) Shell Script
11 5 (2.75%) CLIST
11 5 (2.75%) JCL
11 5 (2.75%) REXX
12 3 (1.65%) Bicep
12 3 (1.65%) Go
13 1 (0.55%) PHP
13 1 (0.55%) Rust
13 1 (0.55%) Scala
Qualifications
1 78 (42.86%) Security Cleared
2 70 (38.46%) SC Cleared
3 16 (8.79%) AWS Certification
4 13 (7.14%) DV Cleared
5 12 (6.59%) Degree
6 11 (6.04%) Azure Certification
7 5 (2.75%) BPSS Clearance
8 4 (2.20%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
9 2 (1.10%) Computer Science Degree
9 2 (1.10%) ISTQB
10 1 (0.55%) CCNA
10 1 (0.55%) Cisco Certification
10 1 (0.55%) Master's Degree
10 1 (0.55%) Server+ Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 7 (3.85%) NCSC
2 4 (2.20%) COBIT
3 2 (1.10%) Accessibility
3 2 (1.10%) Data Quality
3 2 (1.10%) ISO/IEC 27001
3 2 (1.10%) QA
4 1 (0.55%) Disclosure Scotland
4 1 (0.55%) ISO 9001
4 1 (0.55%) NIST
System Software
1 48 (26.37%) Docker
2 26 (14.29%) Active Directory
3 22 (12.09%) DFS Replication
4 13 (7.14%) VMware Infrastructure
5 12 (6.59%) Dovecot
5 12 (6.59%) Postfix
5 12 (6.59%) Squid
6 5 (2.75%) Time Sharing Option
6 5 (2.75%) Virtual Machines
7 1 (0.55%) GPFS
7 1 (0.55%) Tivoli Directory Server
7 1 (0.55%) Virtual Desktop
7 1 (0.55%) VMware NSX
Systems Management
1 93 (51.10%) Terraform
2 64 (35.16%) Kubernetes
3 46 (25.27%) Prometheus
4 45 (24.73%) Grafana
5 39 (21.43%) Ansible
6 13 (7.14%) Nessus
7 10 (5.49%) Proxmox
8 8 (4.40%) Argo
9 7 (3.85%) Istio
10 6 (3.30%) Packer
11 5 (2.75%) OMEGAMON
11 5 (2.75%) vCenter Server
12 4 (2.20%) CA Endevor
12 4 (2.20%) Kibana
13 3 (1.65%) Progress Chef
14 2 (1.10%) CA Single Sign-On
14 2 (1.10%) CA Wily
14 2 (1.10%) Kustomize
15 1 (0.55%) Active Directory Federation Services
15 1 (0.55%) Cilium
Vendors
1 24 (13.19%) ServiceNow
2 23 (12.64%) Dynatrace
2 23 (12.64%) Red Hat
3 22 (12.09%) Microsoft
4 20 (10.99%) VMware
5 18 (9.89%) IBM
6 16 (8.79%) Oracle
6 16 (8.79%) Splunk
7 12 (6.59%) Jaspersoft
8 11 (6.04%) Cisco
9 10 (5.49%) AppDynamics
10 5 (2.75%) CheckPoint
10 5 (2.75%) Confluent
10 5 (2.75%) Dell
10 5 (2.75%) HP
11 4 (2.20%) Databricks
11 4 (2.20%) F5
12 2 (1.10%) Broadcom
12 2 (1.10%) SAP
13 1 (0.55%) Adobe