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 17 November 2025, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
17 Nov 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 178 266 284
Rank change year-on-year +88 +18 -8
Contract jobs citing Platform Engineering 250 92 136
As % of all contract jobs in the UK excluding London 1.45% 0.56% 0.65%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 1.65% 0.66% 0.74%
Number of daily rates quoted 187 67 99
10th Percentile £413 £414 £465
25th Percentile £463 £470 £513
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £530 £525 £582
Median % change year-on-year +0.95% -9.79% +1.22%
75th Percentile £588 £606 £638
90th Percentile £668 £675 £700
UK median daily rate £540 £600 £586
% change year-on-year -10.00% +2.39% -2.33%
Number of hourly rates quoted 4 1 2
10th Percentile - - -
25th Percentile £59.75 £59.39 -
Median hourly rate £69.38 £63.79 £78.00
Median % change year-on-year +8.77% -18.22% -22.00%
75th Percentile £74.26 £68.18 -
90th Percentile - - -
UK median hourly rate £69.38 £63.79 £67.00
% change year-on-year +8.77% -4.80% -33.00%

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 15,164 13,884 18,457
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK excluding London 88.00% 84.19% 88.25%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,206 7,937 12,063
10th Percentile £219 £249 £250
25th Percentile £369 £382 £400
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £475 £500 £500
Median % change year-on-year -5.00% - -
75th Percentile £575 £600 £600
90th Percentile £675 £688 £688
UK median daily rate £500 £525 £530
% change year-on-year -4.76% -0.94% -3.64%
Number of hourly rates quoted 1,732 874 1,294
10th Percentile £14.23 £15.00 £14.25
25th Percentile £17.28 £18.91 £17.72
Median hourly rate £22.63 £33.93 £43.95
Median % change year-on-year -33.30% -22.80% +48.98%
75th Percentile £43.75 £65.00 £65.00
90th Percentile £67.00 £72.50 £77.50
UK median hourly rate £25.15 £35.00 £43.84
% change year-on-year -28.14% -20.16% +25.24%

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 17 November 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 17 November 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
North of England 0 78 £525 +2.44% 66
Midlands +20 65 £535 -6.14% 18
West Midlands +19 64 £536 -10.67% 14
North West +17 51 £550 -13.73% 40
South East +32 45 £488 -14.47% 79
Scotland +10 31 £545 +9.00% 14
South West +28 28 £575 +4.55% 35
Yorkshire -40 24 £523 +4.50% 22
East of England -2 14 £525 -4.55% 9
North East - 6 £550 - 5
East Midlands -15 1 £430 -9.47% 4
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 35 (14.00%) Confluence
2 12 (4.80%) Microsoft Exchange
2 12 (4.80%) nginx
3 11 (4.40%) Apache
4 9 (3.60%) SharePoint
5 6 (2.40%) CICS
5 6 (2.40%) WebLogic
6 5 (2.00%) OpenStack
7 4 (1.60%) JBoss
7 4 (1.60%) WebSphere
7 4 (1.60%) WebSphere Application Server
8 3 (1.20%) Apache Spark
8 3 (1.20%) SharePoint Server
9 2 (0.80%) Apache Airflow
9 2 (0.80%) IIS
9 2 (0.80%) iPlanet
10 1 (0.40%) CMS
10 1 (0.40%) Documentum
10 1 (0.40%) Tomcat
Applications
1 12 (4.80%) Mozilla Thunderbird
Business Applications
1 1 (0.40%) Finacle
1 1 (0.40%) Magento
1 1 (0.40%) SAP S/4HANA
1 1 (0.40%) Shopify
Cloud Services
1 107 (42.80%) AWS
2 94 (37.60%) Azure
3 37 (14.80%) GitHub
4 35 (14.00%) Amazon CloudWatch
5 33 (13.20%) Amazon EC2
5 33 (13.20%) Amazon S3
6 32 (12.80%) OpenShift
7 31 (12.40%) Virtual Private Cloud
8 27 (10.80%) GCP
9 26 (10.40%) AWS KMS
10 24 (9.60%) Amazon ELB
11 16 (6.40%) Amazon ECS
11 16 (6.40%) AWS CloudFormation
11 16 (6.40%) Entra ID
12 15 (6.00%) Amazon EKS
12 15 (6.00%) Microsoft 365
12 15 (6.00%) Route 53
12 15 (6.00%) Serverless
13 14 (5.60%) GitHub Actions
14 13 (5.20%) AWS Lambda
Communications & Networking
1 46 (18.40%) Firewall
2 39 (15.60%) DNS
3 24 (9.60%) SMTP
4 22 (8.80%) FTP
4 22 (8.80%) HTTP
4 22 (8.80%) SSH
5 12 (4.80%) IMAP
5 12 (4.80%) OpenLDAP
6 7 (2.80%) WebEx
7 6 (2.40%) BGP
7 6 (2.40%) Software-Defined Networking
7 6 (2.40%) VLAN
8 4 (1.60%) TCP/IP
9 3 (1.20%) Network Security
9 3 (1.20%) Skype
10 2 (0.80%) Calico
10 2 (0.80%) DHCP
10 2 (0.80%) IPsec
10 2 (0.80%) Kerberos
10 2 (0.80%) SD-WAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 36 (14.40%) Amazon RDS
2 24 (9.60%) PostgreSQL
3 12 (4.80%) Amazon Aurora
4 11 (4.40%) NoSQL
4 11 (4.40%) Redis
5 7 (2.80%) Amazon Redshift
6 6 (2.40%) Couchbase
6 6 (2.40%) SQL Server
7 5 (2.00%) Big Data
7 5 (2.00%) Relational Database
8 4 (1.60%) Data Lake
8 4 (1.60%) DynamoDB
9 3 (1.20%) Hadoop
9 3 (1.20%) Power BI
10 2 (0.80%) Apache Hive
10 2 (0.80%) Data Warehouse
10 2 (0.80%) Elasticsearch
10 2 (0.80%) MongoDB
10 2 (0.80%) Oracle Database
11 1 (0.40%) BigQuery
Development Applications
1 75 (30.00%) Jenkins
2 47 (18.80%) Git
3 37 (14.80%) JIRA
4 29 (11.60%) GitLab
5 24 (9.60%) Vagrant
6 11 (4.40%) SonarQube
7 4 (1.60%) Maven
7 4 (1.60%) Terragrunt
8 3 (1.20%) Bitbucket Server
8 3 (1.20%) CA Release Automation
9 2 (0.80%) Cucumber
9 2 (0.80%) JUnit
9 2 (0.80%) Mockito
9 2 (0.80%) MSI
9 2 (0.80%) Selenium
9 2 (0.80%) Sonatype Nexus
10 1 (0.40%) Artifactory
10 1 (0.40%) Pylint
10 1 (0.40%) TeamCity
General
1 67 (26.80%) Social Skills
2 38 (15.20%) Public Sector
3 24 (9.60%) Finance
4 17 (6.80%) Analytical Skills
4 17 (6.80%) Banking
5 14 (5.60%) Legal
6 11 (4.40%) Presentation Skills
7 7 (2.80%) Documentation Skills
8 6 (2.40%) Retail
9 4 (1.60%) Games
9 4 (1.60%) Retail Banking
10 2 (0.80%) Aerospace
10 2 (0.80%) Telecoms
11 1 (0.40%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 1 (0.40%) Tech for Good
11 1 (0.40%) Wholesale Banking
Job Titles
1 158 (63.20%) Platform Engineer
2 48 (19.20%) Cloud Platform Engineer
3 46 (18.40%) DevOps Engineer
4 38 (15.20%) AWS Engineer
5 27 (10.80%) AWS Platform Engineer
6 20 (8.00%) AWS DevOps
6 20 (8.00%) AWS DevOps Engineer
7 14 (5.60%) Azure Engineer
7 14 (5.60%) DevOps Platform Engineer
8 13 (5.20%) Data Engineer
9 12 (4.80%) Senior
10 10 (4.00%) Azure Platform Engineer
10 10 (4.00%) DevSecOps Engineer
11 7 (2.80%) Architect
11 7 (2.80%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
11 7 (2.80%) Infrastructure Engineer
11 7 (2.80%) Python Engineer
12 6 (2.40%) Cloud Engineer
12 6 (2.40%) Implementation Specialist
12 6 (2.40%) Senior Platform Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 19 (7.60%) YAML
2 18 (7.20%) Kafka
3 14 (5.60%) Elastic Stack
3 14 (5.60%) LDAP
3 14 (5.60%) React
4 13 (5.20%) Middleware
5 8 (3.20%) FastAPI
5 8 (3.20%) Keycloak
5 8 (3.20%) OAuth
6 7 (2.80%) XMPP
7 6 (2.40%) ISPF
7 6 (2.40%) OAuth2
7 6 (2.40%) Spring Boot
8 5 (2.00%) OpenID
8 5 (2.00%) REST
8 5 (2.00%) RESTful
8 5 (2.00%) Spring
9 4 (1.60%) LangChain
9 4 (1.60%) LangGraph
9 4 (1.60%) Oracle Fusion
Miscellaneous
1 31 (12.40%) Replication
2 17 (6.80%) Private Cloud
3 16 (6.40%) Product Ownership
4 15 (6.00%) Onboarding
5 14 (5.60%) Cloud Native
6 9 (3.60%) Data Centre
7 8 (3.20%) PKI
8 7 (2.80%) Distributed Systems
8 7 (2.80%) Legacy Systems
9 6 (2.40%) Mainframe
9 6 (2.40%) NHS
9 6 (2.40%) VSAM
10 5 (2.00%) Data Protection Act
10 5 (2.00%) Hybrid Cloud
10 5 (2.00%) IBM Mainframe
11 3 (1.20%) Analytical Mindset
11 3 (1.20%) Public Cloud
12 2 (0.80%) SCADA
12 2 (0.80%) Shadow IT
12 2 (0.80%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 100 (40.00%) Linux
2 76 (30.40%) Windows
3 28 (11.20%) VMS
4 27 (10.80%) Amazon Linux
5 19 (7.60%) Windows Server
6 17 (6.80%) Unix
7 16 (6.40%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
8 10 (4.00%) Ubuntu
9 9 (3.60%) Windows 10
10 6 (2.40%) zOS
11 3 (1.20%) Windows Server 2016
12 2 (0.80%) Android
12 2 (0.80%) Apple iOS
Processes & Methodologies
1 126 (50.40%) DevOps
2 118 (47.20%) CI/CD
3 94 (37.60%) Infrastructure as Code
4 51 (20.40%) Containerisation
4 51 (20.40%) Observability
5 48 (19.20%) Configuration Management
6 46 (18.40%) Agile
6 46 (18.40%) Problem-Solving
7 42 (16.80%) Migration
8 36 (14.40%) Continuous Improvement
9 30 (12.00%) Cloud Security
10 28 (11.20%) Patch Management
11 26 (10.40%) Change Management
11 26 (10.40%) Performance Tuning
12 25 (10.00%) Service Management
13 22 (8.80%) High Availability
13 22 (8.80%) Site Reliability Engineering
14 21 (8.40%) Incident Response
15 20 (8.00%) Analytics
16 19 (7.60%) AI
Programming Languages
1 111 (44.40%) Python
2 61 (24.40%) PowerShell
3 39 (15.60%) SQL
4 36 (14.40%) Bash
5 35 (14.00%) Java
6 26 (10.40%) Groovy
7 24 (9.60%) Perl
8 18 (7.20%) JavaScript
9 10 (4.00%) C#
10 8 (3.20%) Shell Script
11 6 (2.40%) CLIST
11 6 (2.40%) Go
11 6 (2.40%) JCL
11 6 (2.40%) REXX
12 3 (1.20%) TypeScript
13 2 (0.80%) Apex Code
13 2 (0.80%) Erlang
13 2 (0.80%) Prolog
13 2 (0.80%) SOQL
14 1 (0.40%) COBOL
Qualifications
1 123 (49.20%) Security Cleared
2 109 (43.60%) SC Cleared
3 22 (8.80%) DV Cleared
4 16 (6.40%) AWS Certification
5 14 (5.60%) Degree
6 11 (4.40%) Azure Certification
7 9 (3.60%) CCNA
7 9 (3.60%) Cisco Certification
8 8 (3.20%) BPSS Clearance
8 8 (3.20%) CCDP
8 8 (3.20%) CCNP
9 3 (1.20%) CSPO
10 1 (0.40%) Computer Science Degree
10 1 (0.40%) Master's Degree
10 1 (0.40%) Microsoft Certification
10 1 (0.40%) Server+ Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 12 (4.80%) NCSC
2 6 (2.40%) COBIT
3 4 (1.60%) Data Quality
4 3 (1.20%) GDPR
5 2 (0.80%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 2 (0.80%) NIST
5 2 (0.80%) WCAG
6 1 (0.40%) Cyber Essentials
6 1 (0.40%) Disclosure Scotland
6 1 (0.40%) PCI DSS
6 1 (0.40%) QA
System Software
1 69 (27.60%) Docker
2 45 (18.00%) Active Directory
3 26 (10.40%) VMware Infrastructure
4 22 (8.80%) DFS Replication
5 12 (4.80%) Dovecot
5 12 (4.80%) Postfix
5 12 (4.80%) Squid
6 8 (3.20%) Virtual Machines
7 6 (2.40%) Time Sharing Option
8 4 (1.60%) vSphere
9 3 (1.20%) VMware NSX
10 2 (0.80%) Virtual Desktop
11 1 (0.40%) GPFS
11 1 (0.40%) Tivoli Directory Server
Systems Management
1 118 (47.20%) Terraform
2 79 (31.60%) Kubernetes
3 56 (22.40%) Grafana
4 52 (20.80%) Prometheus
5 40 (16.00%) Ansible
6 13 (5.20%) Proxmox
7 12 (4.80%) Nessus
7 12 (4.80%) Packer
8 10 (4.00%) Argo
8 10 (4.00%) vCenter Server
9 9 (3.60%) Active Directory Federation Services
10 8 (3.20%) Istio
11 6 (2.40%) Kibana
11 6 (2.40%) OMEGAMON
12 5 (2.00%) CA Endevor
13 3 (1.20%) Microsoft Intune
13 3 (1.20%) Podman
13 3 (1.20%) Progress Chef
13 3 (1.20%) Single Sign-On
13 3 (1.20%) WSUS
Vendors
1 42 (16.80%) Microsoft
2 35 (14.00%) Red Hat
3 34 (13.60%) VMware
4 33 (13.20%) Splunk
5 30 (12.00%) Dynatrace
6 27 (10.80%) Cisco
6 27 (10.80%) ServiceNow
7 23 (9.20%) Oracle
8 20 (8.00%) IBM
9 17 (6.80%) AppDynamics
10 12 (4.80%) Citrix
10 12 (4.80%) Jaspersoft
11 11 (4.40%) F5
12 7 (2.80%) CheckPoint
12 7 (2.80%) Dell
12 7 (2.80%) HP
13 6 (2.40%) Confluent
13 6 (2.40%) Databricks
14 5 (2.00%) Veeam
15 4 (1.60%) Salesforce