Kubernetes Engineer Contract Job Trends in England

Kubernetes Engineer (K8s Engineer)
UK > England

The median Kubernetes Engineer (K8s Engineer) daily rate in England is £475, according to job vacancies posted in the 6 months leading up to 31 March 2026.

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

6 months to
31 Mar 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 553 426 529
Rank change year-on-year -127 +103 +1
Contract jobs requiring a Kubernetes Engineer 35 51 21
As % of all contract jobs in England 0.092% 0.21% 0.056%
As % of the Job Titles category 0.100% 0.23% 0.060%
Number of daily rates quoted 22 42 15
10th Percentile £394 £429 £435
25th Percentile £402 £560 £488
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £475 £625 £550
Median % change year-on-year -24.00% +13.64% -15.38%
75th Percentile £631 £750 £594
90th Percentile £653 £838 £638
UK median daily rate £540 £625 £559
% change year-on-year -13.60% +11.86% -14.04%
Number of hourly rates quoted 0 1 1
10th Percentile - - -
25th Percentile - £59.39 £61.25
Median hourly rate - £63.79 £62.50
Median % change year-on-year - +2.06% -
75th Percentile - £68.18 £63.75
90th Percentile - - -
UK median hourly rate - £63.79 £62.50
% change year-on-year - +2.06% -

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 35,066 22,560 34,942
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.17% 92.94% 92.73%
Number of daily rates quoted 22,087 15,093 23,351
10th Percentile £313 £300 £275
25th Percentile £413 £409 £410
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £505 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -3.81% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £621 £638 £638
90th Percentile £725 £750 £750
UK median daily rate £500 £520 £525
% change year-on-year -3.85% -0.95% -3.67%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,320 837 2,307
10th Percentile £15.50 £14.99 £13.00
25th Percentile £19.91 £21.00 £16.25
Median hourly rate £41.77 £34.50 £32.50
Median % change year-on-year +21.07% +6.15% -24.14%
75th Percentile £65.00 £65.00 £59.95
90th Percentile £77.50 £77.31 £71.75
UK median hourly rate £38.63 £32.50 £32.90
% change year-on-year +18.86% -1.20% -25.00%

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 31 March 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
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 31 March 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 -76 21 £500 -21.57% 3
North of England -63 10 £571 +20.21% 2
Yorkshire - 6 £498 - 2
North West -33 3 - -
West Midlands -54 2 £571 -0.70%
Midlands -64 2 £571 -0.70%
South West - 2 £450 -
North East -12 1 £600 -3.23%
South East -54 1 £393 +31.00% 1
East of England - 1 £650 -
Kubernetes Engineer
UK

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

For the 6 months to 31 March 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 35 (100.00%) Kubernetes
2 29 (82.86%) CI/CD
3 22 (62.86%) DevOps
3 22 (62.86%) Infrastructure as Code
4 18 (51.43%) Python
4 18 (51.43%) Terraform
5 16 (45.71%) Azure
6 15 (42.86%) GitHub
7 14 (40.00%) Jenkins
8 13 (37.14%) Docker
9 11 (31.43%) AWS
9 11 (31.43%) GCP
9 11 (31.43%) Observability
10 10 (28.57%) Ansible
10 10 (28.57%) Containerisation
10 10 (28.57%) GitHub Actions
11 9 (25.71%) Grafana
11 9 (25.71%) Platform Engineering
11 9 (25.71%) Prometheus
11 9 (25.71%) SC Cleared
11 9 (25.71%) Security Cleared
12 7 (20.00%) Continuous Improvement
12 7 (20.00%) Linux
13 6 (17.14%) DevSecOps
13 6 (17.14%) Firewall
13 6 (17.14%) Site Reliability Engineering
14 5 (14.29%) Agile
14 5 (14.29%) Bash
14 5 (14.29%) Git
14 5 (14.29%) GitLab

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 1 (2.86%) Apache
1 1 (2.86%) Apache Spark
1 1 (2.86%) CMS
1 1 (2.86%) Confluence
1 1 (2.86%) Headless CMS
1 1 (2.86%) Oracle SOA Suite
Cloud Services
1 16 (45.71%) Azure
2 15 (42.86%) GitHub
3 11 (31.43%) AWS
3 11 (31.43%) GCP
4 10 (28.57%) GitHub Actions
5 5 (14.29%) OpenShift
6 4 (11.43%) Azure DevOps
6 4 (11.43%) Google Kubernetes Engine
7 2 (5.71%) Amazon CloudWatch
7 2 (5.71%) Cloud Computing
7 2 (5.71%) Power Automate
7 2 (5.71%) Power Platform
7 2 (5.71%) PowerApps
8 1 (2.86%) Amazon ECR
8 1 (2.86%) Amazon EKS
8 1 (2.86%) AWS CloudFormation
8 1 (2.86%) Contentful
8 1 (2.86%) Datadog
8 1 (2.86%) Serverless
8 1 (2.86%) Storyblok
Communications & Networking
1 6 (17.14%) Firewall
2 2 (5.71%) Network Security
3 1 (2.86%) DNS
3 1 (2.86%) VPN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 3 (8.57%) SQL Server
2 2 (5.71%) MongoDB
2 2 (5.71%) Power BI
3 1 (2.86%) PostgreSQL
3 1 (2.86%) SQL Server Integration Services
Development Applications
1 14 (40.00%) Jenkins
2 5 (14.29%) Git
2 5 (14.29%) GitLab
3 2 (5.71%) JIRA
3 2 (5.71%) RStudio
4 1 (2.86%) Artifactory
4 1 (2.86%) Jaeger
4 1 (2.86%) Sonatype Nexus
General
1 7 (20.00%) Finance
2 4 (11.43%) Banking
3 3 (8.57%) Social Science
3 3 (8.57%) Social Skills
4 1 (2.86%) Analytical Skills
4 1 (2.86%) Inclusion and Diversity
4 1 (2.86%) Telecoms
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 5 (14.29%) OpenTelemetry
2 3 (8.57%) Node.js
2 3 (8.57%) Spring Boot
3 2 (5.71%) Elastic Stack
3 2 (5.71%) FastAPI
3 2 (5.71%) Kafka
4 1 (2.86%) .NET
4 1 (2.86%) AWS CDK
4 1 (2.86%) Fastify
4 1 (2.86%) GraphQL
4 1 (2.86%) JSON
4 1 (2.86%) Loki
4 1 (2.86%) MACH
4 1 (2.86%) Next.js
4 1 (2.86%) Playwright
4 1 (2.86%) React
4 1 (2.86%) RESTful
4 1 (2.86%) Spring
4 1 (2.86%) Vitest
4 1 (2.86%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 7 (20.00%) Cloud Native
2 5 (14.29%) Private Cloud
3 3 (8.57%) Public Cloud
4 2 (5.71%) Distributed Systems
5 1 (2.86%) Clustering
5 1 (2.86%) Data Centre
5 1 (2.86%) Distributed Applications
5 1 (2.86%) Hybrid Cloud
5 1 (2.86%) Legacy Applications
5 1 (2.86%) Management Information System
5 1 (2.86%) Onboarding
5 1 (2.86%) Security Posture
Operating Systems
1 7 (20.00%) Linux
2 4 (11.43%) VMS
3 1 (2.86%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
3 1 (2.86%) Unix
3 1 (2.86%) Windows
Processes & Methodologies
1 29 (82.86%) CI/CD
2 22 (62.86%) DevOps
2 22 (62.86%) Infrastructure as Code
3 11 (31.43%) Observability
4 10 (28.57%) Containerisation
5 9 (25.71%) Platform Engineering
6 7 (20.00%) Continuous Improvement
7 6 (17.14%) DevSecOps
7 6 (17.14%) Site Reliability Engineering
8 5 (14.29%) Agile
8 5 (14.29%) Incident Response
8 5 (14.29%) Load Balancing
8 5 (14.29%) Migration
9 4 (11.43%) Change Control
9 4 (11.43%) Cybersecurity
9 4 (11.43%) Microservices
9 4 (11.43%) Problem-Solving
9 4 (11.43%) Project Delivery
9 4 (11.43%) Root Cause Analysis
9 4 (11.43%) Security Testing
Programming Languages
1 18 (51.43%) Python
2 5 (14.29%) Bash
3 3 (8.57%) Java
3 3 (8.57%) TypeScript
4 2 (5.71%) Go
4 2 (5.71%) PowerShell
4 2 (5.71%) SQL
5 1 (2.86%) C
5 1 (2.86%) Groovy
5 1 (2.86%) JavaScript
Qualifications
1 9 (25.71%) SC Cleared
1 9 (25.71%) Security Cleared
2 2 (5.71%) Azure Certification
3 1 (2.86%) AWS Certification
3 1 (2.86%) BPSS Clearance
3 1 (2.86%) CISM
3 1 (2.86%) CISSP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 3 (8.57%) QA
2 2 (5.71%) GDPR
3 1 (2.86%) GRC
3 1 (2.86%) ISO 15022
3 1 (2.86%) ISO 20022
3 1 (2.86%) ISO/IEC 27001
3 1 (2.86%) NIST
3 1 (2.86%) PCI DSS
3 1 (2.86%) Sarbanes-Oxley
System Software
1 13 (37.14%) Docker
2 4 (11.43%) Virtual Machines
3 2 (5.71%) VMware Infrastructure
Systems Management
1 35 (100.00%) Kubernetes
2 18 (51.43%) Terraform
3 10 (28.57%) Ansible
4 9 (25.71%) Grafana
4 9 (25.71%) Prometheus
5 3 (8.57%) Argo
6 2 (5.71%) Istio
6 2 (5.71%) Rancher
7 1 (2.86%) Fluentd
Vendors
1 4 (11.43%) Google
2 3 (8.57%) Microsoft
2 3 (8.57%) Splunk
3 2 (5.71%) Oracle
3 2 (5.71%) VMware
4 1 (2.86%) Atlassian
4 1 (2.86%) Cribl.io
4 1 (2.86%) IBM
4 1 (2.86%) Red Hat
4 1 (2.86%) SAP