Cloud Architect vs Cloud Engineer Salary: A $16,566 Gap on H-1B Filings Shrinks to 4% at the Same Wage Level

As of the Labor Department’s FY2026 Q3 file (decisions through June 30, 2026), the cloud architect vs cloud engineer salary gap on certified H-1B filings is $16,566: a $143,766 median offer against $127,200. At the same wage level the premium falls to 4.3%. These are H-1B offers only, not the pay of all cloud staff.

Source: our analysis of DOL OFLC LCA disclosure data, certified full-time H-1B filings decided July 1, 2025 to June 30, 2026. *Microsoft’s architect filings fell from 180 to 41 in the window. Without Microsoft the architect median rose 8.9%.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics has no code for either job. Its 2018 SOC title file holds 6,520 titles and none contains the word “cloud”, and the pages ranking for this query mostly repeat Glassdoor and Indeed. Labor Condition Applications are different: each one lists the employer’s actual JOB_TITLE and offered wage. We downloaded every H-1B filing from FY2022 to the third quarter of FY2026, matched titles with a published rule, and read a random sample to measure the rule’s accuracy. The FY2026 Q4 file was not on the Labor Department’s page when we checked on November 2, 2026.

The premium is mostly the job level, not the title

Architect filings sit higher on the Labor Department’s four-level scale: 61% are at Level III or IV, against 39% for engineers. Hold the level constant and the 11.5% regression premium drops to 4.3%. Matching on employer type too raises it to 6.4%, because consulting firms, which pay less, filed 58% of architect jobs and 48% of engineer jobs. Comparing inside one employer, at the same level and state, leaves 2.8%, and the bottom of its 95% interval is about zero. So an architect title rarely buys much by itself. It usually marks a more senior job.

Regression of log offered wage on an architect flag, n = 1,917. The no-controls figure is a geometric-mean gap, so it differs from the 13.0% gap between medians. Lines show 95% intervals. Dollar figures apply the percentage to the $127,200 engineer median. Filings with no OEWS level form their own category.

Cloud architect vs cloud engineer pay at each wage level

At Level II, the commonest level for engineers, architects have no lead at all: $111,550 against $112,923. The difference appears at Level III ($15,429) and Level IV ($15,000). Only 9 architect filings were at Level I, too few to report, which fits the title: few employers describe an architect job as entry level.

The result does not depend on our title rule. Filings titled exactly “Cloud Engineer” (310) and exactly “Cloud Architect” (57) have medians of $108,622 and $126,610, a $17,988 gap. Both sit lower than the family medians because plain titles leave out Senior, Lead and Principal jobs.

The Labor Department’s prevailing wage guidance defines the levels. Level I is for “beginning level employees who have only a basic understanding of the occupation.” Level II is for “qualified employees who have attained, either through education or experience, a good understanding of the occupation.” Level III is for “experienced employees who have a sound understanding of the occupation.” Level IV is for “competent employees who have sufficient experience in the occupation to plan and conduct work requiring judgment.” Employers choose the level on the filing using that guidance, so it describes the job as filed, not a tested skill grade.

The full range, with solutions architects alongside

Solutions architects outrank both at $151,504, but that title is its own market. Amazon alone filed 18% of them at a $171,400 median, against $147,586 for everyone else, and 6% of the titles name an application such as SAP or Salesforce rather than cloud infrastructure. Treat it as a separate row, not as the next step above a cloud architect.

Inside one employer

51 employers filed both titles in the 12 months. The architect median was higher at 39 of them (76%), by a median of $20,000, before any control for level. Most of these cells are tiny, so the table shows only employers with at least three filings for each title. Microsoft, the largest, runs the other way: its cloud engineers show a $182,382 median against $175,830 for its cloud architects.

AWS vs Azure vs GCP in the job title

Salary blogs rank the three vendors by pay. The filings do not support a ranking. Azure-titled jobs came in at -0.2% against AWS-titled jobs with no controls and -2.6% after matching title, level, state and employer type, with a 95% interval of -5.7% to +0.6%, which includes zero. GCP has too few filings for a firm result. These figures pool October 2024 to June 2026 to get usable counts.

What a vendor name in the title really signals is the employer. Consulting and staffing firms filed 85% of titles naming AWS, Azure or GCP, against 43% of plain “cloud” titles. Vendor-named titles look 14.5% cheaper, but only 2.4% after matching employer type, level, state and title. Amazon, Microsoft and Google together filed only 3 of the 452 vendor-named titles, so these titles tell you more about who sells services on a platform than who builds it. Revenue at those vendors is tracked in our cloud computing statistics.

Consulting firms vs their customers

Consulting and staffing firms offered cloud engineers a $112,424 median, $27,576 below end customers such as banks, insurers and retailers ($140,000) and $45,656 below technology vendors ($158,080). Consulting filings sit lower on the wage scale, which explains part of it but not all: at the same wage level and state the engineer gap with end customers is 11.0%. For architects it nearly closes, at 3.2%, with an interval that includes zero. Pay differences by employer type are bigger than the architect premium itself.

Bars span the 25th to 75th percentile; the tick marks the median. Certified full-time H-1B filings, July 2025 to June 2026.

How we split employers, and how the split held up

The rule has two steps. A short list of company names is assigned first, because product firms such as Google file under IT services code 541512. Everyone else goes by the NAICS code on the filing: 5415, 5416, 5412 and 5613 are consulting and staffing; 5182, 5112, 5132, 5191, 5192, 5179, 3341, 3342 and 3344 are technology vendors; the rest are end customers. We tested it two ways. First, on behavior the rule never sees: consulting firms told the Labor Department they would place the worker at another company on 49% of filings, end customers on 2.2% and vendors on 0.7%.

Second, we read the employer names on a random sample of 200 filings. The rule was right on 169, wrong on 24 and 7 were unclear from the name, so read every split here as roughly 84% clean. The largest error is product companies such as Zoom and JFrog that file under IT services codes: 17 of the 24 misses landed in consulting. That lifts the consulting median, so the true gap is probably larger. Keeping only consulting employers with at least one placement or H-1B dependent filing gives a $108,337 engineer median and a 13.4% gap at the same level and state. A name-free cut points the same way: cloud engineer and architect filings placed at a second company had a $110,178 median, against $140,000 for the rest.

Who files the most

Top 20 by filings, July 2025 to June 2026. Related legal entities are combined for the largest firms. A filing can cover more than one position; 2.6% of these do. Employer types come from the rule above and contain errors.

By state and metro

Among the 17 states with at least 20 engineer filings, Washington has the highest engineer median ($174,000) and Ohio the lowest ($101,899). State and metro come from the first worksite on the filing. Architect medians appear only with at least 10 filings.

What changed: dated tracker and the five-year series

Cloud engineer offers rose 2.2% between the 12 months to June 2025 and the 12 months to June 2026. The raw architect median fell 4.0%, but that is a composition effect: Microsoft had 41 cloud architect filings in the latest window against 180 before, and without it the architect median rose 8.9%. We do not know why Microsoft’s count fell. Filing counts follow the H-1B calendar, so compare a quarter with the same quarter a year earlier, not with the quarter before. For the program-wide picture, see our H-1B statistics.

*FY2026 covers October 2025 to June 2026 only and is not comparable to full years: the April to June quarter carries the cap season. Federal fiscal years start October 1.

How this compares with BLS and the job boards

When employers file these jobs they pick a federal occupation code, and that shows where the government’s numbers apply. 53% of cloud engineer filings went in as software developers, 9% as systems administrators and 8% as network architects, the code we cover in our network engineer salary report. So a BLS systems administrator median is the wrong benchmark for most of these jobs. The H-1B column also shows filings running above the BLS median in all three codes, by 1% to 8%, so do not read them as a typical wage. The periods differ: BLS is May 2025 and the filings run to June 2026.

The job-board gap is about three times ours. Coursera, citing Glassdoor in August 2026, gives cloud architects a median total pay of about $203,000, and its Glassdoor figure for cloud engineers from September 2026 is $152,000: about $51,000 apart. Indeed shows $136,793 for cloud engineers from 4.9k job postings (October 29, 2026). Those numbers measure different things. Glassdoor’s are total pay estimates; ours are base wages on filings. The two cannot be reconciled from public data, and this comparison does not show that either is wrong.

What this means for MSPs

Do not pay for the word “architect.” At Level II the title adds nothing ($111,550 vs $112,923). Pay the premium when the job really is Level III or IV work, where it is about $15,429.

Your hiring rival is your customer. A consulting firm’s cloud engineer offer is 11% below an end customer’s at the same level and state, and $27,576 below on raw medians. Clients can outbid you for an engineer you put on their account, so put a no-hire clause in the contract.

Build or buy: the break-even is about half a week of work. BLS puts wages at 69.5% of employer costs in professional and business services, so a $112,424 engineer costs about $161,761 a year. The median GSA ceiling rate for cloud engineer labor categories is $163.52 an hour across 1,777 rates, so that hire pays for itself at about 989 billable-equivalent hours a year, or 19 a week. For an architect ($125,000, $185.57 an hour) the figure is about 969 hours. Below that, buy the work in; above it, hire. These are federal ceiling rates, not commercial quotes, so replace them with your own subcontractor’s rate. See our IT hourly rates report for other roles.

No MSP-specific benchmark exists here. NAICS 541513, computer facilities management, is the closest code to an MSP, and it had only 16 filings across these titles in 12 months. That is too few to quote.

Frequently asked questions

Do cloud architects make more than cloud engineers?

Yes on the median, by $16,566: $143,766 against $127,200 on certified H-1B filings decided from July 2025 to June 2026. But 61% of architect filings are at DOL Level III or IV against 39% for engineers. At the same wage level the premium falls to 4.3%.

How much more does a cloud architect make than a cloud engineer at the same level?

At Level II there is no architect premium: $111,550 against $112,923. At Level III architects are $15,429 ahead ($154,309 vs $138,880), and at Level IV $15,000 ahead ($175,000 vs $160,000).

Does AWS, Azure or Google Cloud pay more?

The filings show no measurable gap. Azure-titled cloud jobs were -2.6% against AWS-titled jobs after matching level, state, title and employer type (95% interval -5.7% to +0.6%). GCP has only 42 filings since October 2024, too few for a firm comparison.

Do IT consulting firms pay cloud engineers less than their customers?

Yes. The median at consulting and staffing firms was $112,424, against $140,000 at end customers. Part of that is job level, but the gap is still 11.0% at the same wage level and state.

What is the BLS salary for a cloud engineer?

There is none. The 2018 SOC title file has no title containing ‘cloud’ among its 6,520 entries. On H-1B filings, 53% of cloud engineer jobs were filed as software developers (15-1252, BLS median $135,980) and 9% as systems administrators (15-1244, BLS median $99,130).

Is this what all cloud engineers earn?

No. These are base wages offered on H-1B filings only. They exclude bonuses and stock, and an offer on a filing is not proof of the wage later paid. Use them as a floor-side benchmark, not as the average pay of all cloud staff.

Methodology

References

1. U.S. Department of Labor, OFLC Performance Data: LCA Disclosure Data FY2022 to FY2026 Q3, with record layout. Accessed November 2026.
2. U.S. Department of Labor, Prevailing Wage Determination Policy Guidance (revised November 2009). Accessed November 2026.
3. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, OEWS May 2025 national estimates. Accessed November 2026.
4. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2018 SOC direct match title file. Accessed November 2026.
5. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Employer Costs for Employee Compensation, June 2026, Table 6. Accessed November 2026.
6. U.S. General Services Administration, CALC+ labor rates (API: api.gsa.gov/acquisition/calc/v3). Accessed November 2026.
7. Proclamation 10973, Restriction on Entry of Certain Nonimmigrant Workers, 90 FR 46027. Accessed November 2026.
8. DHS, Weighted Selection Process final rule, 90 FR 60864. Accessed November 2026.
9. USCIS, FY 2027 H-1B initial registration selection process completed. Accessed November 2026.
10. Coursera, Cloud Architect Salary (citing Glassdoor, August 2026) and DevOps Engineer vs Cloud Engineer (citing Glassdoor, September 2026). Accessed November 2026.
11. Indeed, Cloud Engineer Salaries. Accessed November 2026.