Curious what a job in UK tech pays, or which skills to focus on? IT support roles pay a median of £32k; cloud, DevOps and platform roles pay £64k. The move is worth about £32,000 a year, in live UK job ads from September 2026. Terraform, Kubernetes, Docker and Ansible all median £70k+.
Edition: September 2026. Data pulled 23 September 2026 from live UK job ads. Free to read, quote and link: please credit ReadTheManual’s UK Skills Radar.
The headline numbers
- The climb from IT support into cloud and DevOps is worth about £32,000 a year at the median: £32k for an IT support role against £64k for cloud, DevOps and platform roles.
- Every infrastructure-as-code and orchestration skill we track (Terraform, Kubernetes, Docker, Ansible) has a median at or above £70k, the top of the measurable scale.
- The AI market splits in two. “Generative AI” appears in 6,217 ads (+47% since July 2026) at a £54k median, while LLM (2,191 ads) and MLOps (804) both median £70k+. The infrastructure side of AI pays; the buzzword side is everywhere.
- Same directory, different decade: Entra ID ads median £56k, Active Directory £46k. Knowing the cloud version is worth about £10k.
- Watch for job-board noise. This month one bulk advertiser posted around 6,400 near-identical “IT Engineer” and “Technical Support” ads naming Azure and Intune at £30k to £40k, and a training provider’s “Trainee Network Engineer” course adverts made up nearly a third of recent network engineer listings. Counted in, they would have halved Azure’s median and taken £20k off network engineering. We left both out; it is worth doing the same when you read any job board.
Your homelab, priced
Everything you build at home maps to a skill employers pay for. This is what each one is worth in live UK job ads, with the guide to build it.
| Build it at home | The job-ad skill | UK ads | Median salary |
|---|---|---|---|
| Docker Compose stacks | Docker | 3,123 | £70k+ |
| k3s on a Raspberry Pi 5 | Kubernetes | 3,907 | £70k+ |
| Ansible playbooks for your nodes | Ansible | 1,125 | £70k+ |
| Terraform against your lab | Terraform | 2,897 | £70k+ |
| Ubuntu servers you run yourself | Linux | 3,532 | £68,700 |
| PowerShell automation | PowerShell | 1,531 | £62,700 |
| A Proxmox cluster | VMware | 1,008 | £58,500 |
| Windows Server Active Directory, DNS and DHCP | Active Directory | 1,612 | £46,300 |
| Azure identity on the free tier | Entra ID | 1,208 | £55,800 |
| The AZ-104 lab series | Azure | 8,269 | £60,000* |
Demand and pay by role
| Role | Live UK vacancies | Median salary |
|---|---|---|
| IT Support / Helpdesk "it support", "service desk", "helpdesk" |
1,117 | £30k to £32k |
| Network / Infrastructure "infrastructure engineer", "network engineer", "systems administrator" |
1,606 | £39k to £58k |
| Cloud Engineer "cloud engineer" |
506 | £63k |
| DevOps / Platform "platform engineer", "devops" |
1,499 | £64k to £70k |
| AI / ML Infrastructure "machine learning engineer", "ml engineer" |
450 | £70k to £78k |
Vacancies are summed across the title phrases shown; the median range spans those phrases.
Demand and pay by skill
| Skill | UK ads mentioning it | Change since July 2026 | Median salary |
|---|---|---|---|
| Python | 12,315 | +8% | £69,900 |
| AWS | 8,997 | +8% | £70k+ |
| Azure | 8,269 | -2% | £60,000* |
| Generative AI | 6,217 | +47% | £54,100 |
| Kubernetes | 3,907 | +11% | £70k+ |
| Linux | 3,532 | +8% | £68,700 |
| Docker | 3,123 | +12% | £70k+ |
| Terraform | 2,897 | +3% | £70k+ |
| LLM | 2,191 | +27% | £70k+ |
| Active Directory | 1,612 | -4% | £46,300 |
| PowerShell | 1,531 | +12% | £62,700 |
| Cisco | 1,238 | -6% | £47,400 |
| Entra ID | 1,208 | +6% | £55,800 |
| Ansible | 1,125 | +4% | £70k+ |
| VMware | 1,008 | +4% | £58,500 |
| Intune | 860 | -2% | £44,500* |
| MLOps | 804 | +24% | £70k+ |
£70k+ means the median sits in the open top salary band, at or above £70,000. * Median from a 250-ad sample, see methodology; not directly comparable with July 2026.
What this means for your path
The gap between the bottom and the top of these tables is not a mystery skill. It is the same handful of tools: Linux, a cloud platform, infrastructure as code and containers. They are the tools you can learn in a homelab before anyone pays you to use them. The support-to-cloud move is the biggest single pay step in UK infrastructure work, and the skills that carry it are the ones this site’s guides are built around. If you already run a lab, put it on your CV; if you are starting from the helpdesk, the career starter guide is the first step.
If you are in support now, the cheapest next step is the one in the Entra ID and Active Directory numbers: learn the cloud version of what you already manage. If you are already in cloud, the AI rows say where the next premium is: running models in production, not talking about them.
How this report was made
Data comes from the Adzuna Jobs API for Great Britain, pulled on 23 September 2026, and covers live vacancies at that moment. Role figures match job titles on the phrases listed under each role; counts can overlap where a title contains two phrases. Role medians are the median midpoint of the advertised salary range across up to 250 of the most recent ads per phrase; Adzuna’s own salary estimates are included where an ad has none. Skill figures match the keyword anywhere in the ad, and skill medians are interpolated from Adzuna’s salary histogram. That histogram’s top band is open-ended at £70,000, so medians in it are shown as £70k+ rather than a false exact figure. This edition excludes two kinds of noise: one bulk advertiser whose several thousand near-identical listings would otherwise have distorted the counts and medians, and training-course “traineeship” adverts that promise a job after a paid course rather than advertising a vacancy. Where those ads made up more than a fifth of a skill’s matches (Azure and Intune), the median comes from a sample of 250 recent ads instead of the histogram, marked with an asterisk; elsewhere the histogram is kept, and any leftover noise could only pull it down. Changes are against the July 2026 edition. Medians are used throughout because contract day rates, annualised, drag averages upwards. Nothing is adjusted, weighted or rounded up; every figure can be reproduced from the stated queries.
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