Kubernetes Engineer Contract Job Trends in England

Kubernetes Engineer (K8s Engineer)
UK > England

The median Kubernetes Engineer (K8s Engineer) daily rate in England is £599, according to job vacancies posted in the 6 months leading up to 27 August 2026.

The table below compares current contractor rates and summary statistics with the previous two years.

6 months to
27 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 568 469 511
Rank change year-on-year -99 +42 +8
Contract jobs requiring a Kubernetes Engineer 50 45 22
As % of all contract jobs in England 0.11% 0.16% 0.066%
As % of the Job Titles category 0.12% 0.18% 0.071%
Number of daily rates quoted 24 35 19
10th Percentile £404 £463 £432
25th Percentile £514 £513 £525
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £599 £550 £625
Median % change year-on-year +8.86% -12.00% -13.79%
75th Percentile £666 £725 £654
90th Percentile £684 £750 £795
UK median daily rate £558 £550 £575
% change year-on-year +1.36% -4.35% -17.86%
Number of hourly rates quoted 3 1 0
10th Percentile - - -
25th Percentile - - -
Median hourly rate £77.00 £95.00 -
Median % change year-on-year -18.95% - -
75th Percentile £86.00 - -
90th Percentile £91.40 - -
UK median hourly rate £77.00 £95.00 -
% change year-on-year -18.95% - -

All Contract IT Job Roles
England

For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all contract IT job vacancies in England. Most job vacancies include a discernible job title that can be normalized. As such, the figures in the second row provide an indication of the number of contract jobs in our overall sample.

Contract vacancies in England with a recognized job title 42,263 25,262 30,879
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.44% 91.54% 93.00%
Number of daily rates quoted 25,421 16,297 19,929
10th Percentile £325 £281 £300
25th Percentile £425 £400 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £508 £525
Median % change year-on-year +3.45% -3.33% -4.55%
75th Percentile £630 £625 £638
90th Percentile £738 £738 £750
UK median daily rate £525 £500 £525
% change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -1.87%
Number of hourly rates quoted 3,239 1,381 1,691
10th Percentile £15.13 £13.65 £14.16
25th Percentile £21.20 £17.38 £20.50
Median hourly rate £42.50 £25.15 £45.00
Median % change year-on-year +68.99% -44.11% +2.63%
75th Percentile £68.00 £55.00 £66.61
90th Percentile £80.00 £72.75 £75.00
UK median hourly rate £41.74 £25.15 £43.00
% change year-on-year +65.94% -41.51% -1.44%

Kubernetes Engineer
Job Vacancy Trend in England

Historical trend showing the proportion of contract IT job postings featuring 'Kubernetes Engineer' in the job title relative to all contract IT jobs advertised in England.

Kubernetes Engineer job vacancy trend in England

Kubernetes Engineer
Daily Rate Trend in England

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for Kubernetes Engineer job vacancies in England.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for Kubernetes Engineer job vacancies in England

Kubernetes Engineer
Daily Rate Histogram in England

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Kubernetes Engineer in England over the 6 months to 27 August 2026.

Daily rate histogram for Kubernetes Engineer in England

Kubernetes Engineer
Hourly Rate Trend in England

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for Kubernetes Engineer job vacancies in England.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for Kubernetes Engineer job vacancies in England

Kubernetes Engineer
Hourly Rate Histogram in England

Hourly rate distribution of jobs citing Kubernetes Engineer in England over the 6 months to 27 August 2026.

Hourly rate histogram for Kubernetes Engineer in England

Kubernetes Engineer
Contract Job Locations in England

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing Kubernetes Engineer within the England region over the 6 months to 27 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
London -68 30 £625 +4.17% 63
North of England -61 14 £610 +28.42% 14
North West -42 9 £612 +28.89% 6
Yorkshire - 5 £610 - 7
West Midlands -48 2 £528 -8.17% 2
Midlands -52 2 £528 -8.17% 3
South East -60 2 £422 - 5
East of England - 2 - - 2
Kubernetes Engineer
UK

Kubernetes Engineer Skill Set
Top 30 Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities in England

For the 6 months to 27 August 2026, Kubernetes Engineer contract job roles required the following skills and capabilities in order of popularity. The figures indicate the absolute number of co-occurrences and as a proportion of all contract job ads across the England region featuring Kubernetes Engineer in the job title.

1 50 (100.00%) Kubernetes
2 30 (60.00%) CI/CD
3 25 (50.00%) Infrastructure as Code
4 22 (44.00%) Terraform
5 21 (42.00%) DevOps
5 21 (42.00%) Python
6 20 (40.00%) Platform Engineering
7 19 (38.00%) Infrastructure Automation
8 17 (34.00%) AWS
8 17 (34.00%) Observability
9 16 (32.00%) Docker
10 14 (28.00%) Containerisation
11 13 (26.00%) Java
11 13 (26.00%) Linux
12 11 (22.00%) Security Cleared
12 11 (22.00%) Spring Boot
13 10 (20.00%) Bash
13 10 (20.00%) GitHub
13 10 (20.00%) GitHub Actions
13 10 (20.00%) Grafana
13 10 (20.00%) High Availability
13 10 (20.00%) Prometheus
14 9 (18.00%) Ansible
14 9 (18.00%) Azure
14 9 (18.00%) Infrastructure Engineering
14 9 (18.00%) OpenShift
14 9 (18.00%) Software Engineering
14 9 (18.00%) Spring
15 8 (16.00%) Git
15 8 (16.00%) Jenkins

Kubernetes Engineer Skill Set
Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities in England 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 5 (10.00%) Apache
1 5 (10.00%) Apache Spark
2 1 (2.00%) Apache Airflow
2 1 (2.00%) Oracle SOA Suite
Cloud Services
1 17 (34.00%) AWS
2 10 (20.00%) GitHub
2 10 (20.00%) GitHub Actions
3 9 (18.00%) Azure
3 9 (18.00%) OpenShift
4 7 (14.00%) Azure DevOps
4 7 (14.00%) GCP
5 4 (8.00%) Amazon EKS
5 4 (8.00%) Azure AKS
6 3 (6.00%) Amazon CloudWatch
6 3 (6.00%) Azure Monitor
6 3 (6.00%) Google Kubernetes Engine
7 2 (4.00%) Azure API Management
7 2 (4.00%) Serverless
8 1 (2.00%) AWS CloudFormation
8 1 (2.00%) AWS Lambda
8 1 (2.00%) Azure Machine Learning
8 1 (2.00%) Datadog
8 1 (2.00%) Kong
8 1 (2.00%) Virtual Private Cloud
Communications & Networking
1 5 (10.00%) VPN
2 3 (6.00%) BGP
2 3 (6.00%) MPLS
2 3 (6.00%) WAN
3 1 (2.00%) Calico
3 1 (2.00%) DNS
3 1 (2.00%) Firewall
3 1 (2.00%) OpenLDAP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 3 (6.00%) Big Data
1 3 (6.00%) MySQL
1 3 (6.00%) Relational Database
2 2 (4.00%) PostgreSQL
3 1 (2.00%) Amazon RDS
3 1 (2.00%) MongoDB
3 1 (2.00%) SQL Server
3 1 (2.00%) SQL Server Integration Services
Development Applications
1 8 (16.00%) Git
1 8 (16.00%) Jenkins
2 4 (8.00%) GitLab
3 2 (4.00%) CircleCI
4 1 (2.00%) Bitbucket
4 1 (2.00%) Jaeger
4 1 (2.00%) NUnit
4 1 (2.00%) SonarQube
4 1 (2.00%) Sonatype Nexus
General
1 8 (16.00%) Finance
2 6 (12.00%) Banking
3 5 (10.00%) Social Skills
4 3 (6.00%) Analytical Skills
4 3 (6.00%) Law
4 3 (6.00%) Telecoms
5 1 (2.00%) Presentation Skills
5 1 (2.00%) Public Sector
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 22 (44.00%) Terraform
2 11 (22.00%) Spring Boot
3 9 (18.00%) Spring
4 7 (14.00%) Kafka
5 5 (10.00%) .NET
6 4 (8.00%) PySpark
7 3 (6.00%) RESTful
7 3 (6.00%) YAML
8 2 (4.00%) Elastic Stack
8 2 (4.00%) Node.js
8 2 (4.00%) OpenTelemetry
9 1 (2.00%) .NET Core
9 1 (2.00%) Entity Framework
9 1 (2.00%) GraphQL
9 1 (2.00%) LDAP
9 1 (2.00%) LINQ
9 1 (2.00%) Loki
9 1 (2.00%) Playwright
9 1 (2.00%) Razor View Engine
9 1 (2.00%) React
Miscellaneous
1 19 (38.00%) Cloud Native
2 5 (10.00%) Distributed Systems
3 3 (6.00%) Private Cloud
4 2 (4.00%) Management Information System
4 2 (4.00%) PKI
5 1 (2.00%) AI Agents
5 1 (2.00%) Clustering
5 1 (2.00%) Data Centre
5 1 (2.00%) Hybrid Cloud
5 1 (2.00%) Legacy Applications
5 1 (2.00%) Onboarding
5 1 (2.00%) Public Cloud
5 1 (2.00%) Replication
5 1 (2.00%) Security Posture
5 1 (2.00%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 13 (26.00%) Linux
2 1 (2.00%) Unix
Processes & Methodologies
1 30 (60.00%) CI/CD
2 25 (50.00%) Infrastructure as Code
3 21 (42.00%) DevOps
4 20 (40.00%) Platform Engineering
5 19 (38.00%) Infrastructure Automation
6 17 (34.00%) Observability
7 14 (28.00%) Containerisation
8 10 (20.00%) High Availability
9 9 (18.00%) Infrastructure Engineering
9 9 (18.00%) Software Engineering
10 8 (16.00%) Root Cause Analysis
11 7 (14.00%) Agile
11 7 (14.00%) GitOps
11 7 (14.00%) RBAC
12 6 (12.00%) Continuous Improvement
12 6 (12.00%) Event-Driven
12 6 (12.00%) Incident Management
12 6 (12.00%) Problem-Solving
12 6 (12.00%) Site Reliability Engineering
12 6 (12.00%) Technical Leadership
Programming Languages
1 21 (42.00%) Python
2 13 (26.00%) Java
3 10 (20.00%) Bash
4 4 (8.00%) Scala
5 3 (6.00%) Kotlin
6 2 (4.00%) Bicep
6 2 (4.00%) C#
6 2 (4.00%) Go
6 2 (4.00%) SQL
6 2 (4.00%) TypeScript
7 1 (2.00%) C
7 1 (2.00%) Groovy
7 1 (2.00%) PowerShell
Qualifications
1 11 (22.00%) Security Cleared
2 5 (10.00%) DV Cleared
2 5 (10.00%) SC Cleared
3 3 (6.00%) BPSS Clearance
4 2 (4.00%) Azure Certification
4 2 (4.00%) CISM
4 2 (4.00%) CISSP
4 2 (4.00%) GSEC
4 2 (4.00%) OSCP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 2 (4.00%) GDPR
1 2 (4.00%) QA
2 1 (2.00%) GRC
2 1 (2.00%) ISO 15022
2 1 (2.00%) ISO 20022
2 1 (2.00%) PCI DSS
2 1 (2.00%) Sarbanes-Oxley
System Software
1 16 (32.00%) Docker
Systems Management
1 50 (100.00%) Kubernetes
2 10 (20.00%) Grafana
2 10 (20.00%) Prometheus
3 9 (18.00%) Ansible
4 7 (14.00%) Istio
5 5 (10.00%) Argo
6 4 (8.00%) Cilium
7 2 (4.00%) linkerd
8 1 (2.00%) Kibana
8 1 (2.00%) Kustomize
Vendors
1 7 (14.00%) Microsoft
2 3 (6.00%) Red Hat
2 3 (6.00%) Splunk
3 1 (2.00%) Arista
3 1 (2.00%) Cisco
3 1 (2.00%) IBM
3 1 (2.00%) Oracle
3 1 (2.00%) SAP