Kubernetes Engineer Contract Job Trends in England

Kubernetes Engineer (K8s Engineer)
UK > England

The median Kubernetes Engineer (K8s Engineer) daily rate in England is £579, according to job vacancies posted in the 6 months leading up to 18 June 2026.

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

6 months to
18 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 559 432 532
Rank change year-on-year -127 +100 -44
Contract jobs requiring a Kubernetes Engineer 38 44 17
As % of all contract jobs in England 0.088% 0.18% 0.045%
As % of the Job Titles category 0.096% 0.19% 0.049%
Number of daily rates quoted 22 36 14
10th Percentile £401 £463 £465
25th Percentile £422 £509 £525
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £579 £600 £588
Median % change year-on-year -3.46% +2.13% -18.97%
75th Percentile £663 £750 £638
90th Percentile £675 - £743
UK median daily rate £558 £600 £550
% change year-on-year -7.08% +9.09% -24.14%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2 1 0
10th Percentile £78.80 - -
25th Percentile £81.50 - -
Median hourly rate £86.00 £95.00 -
Median % change year-on-year -9.47% - -
75th Percentile £90.50 - -
90th Percentile £93.20 - -
UK median hourly rate £86.00 £95.00 -
% change year-on-year -9.47% - -

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 39,699 22,906 35,015
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.35% 92.33% 92.86%
Number of daily rates quoted 24,420 15,063 22,824
10th Percentile £325 £293 £288
25th Percentile £415 £405 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £520 £513 £525
Median % change year-on-year +1.46% -2.38% -4.55%
75th Percentile £625 £635 £638
90th Percentile £733 £750 £750
UK median daily rate £515 £500 £525
% change year-on-year +3.00% -4.76% -2.33%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,798 1,026 2,684
10th Percentile £15.92 £14.00 £12.86
25th Percentile £21.28 £18.13 £16.58
Median hourly rate £45.00 £28.75 £39.53
Median % change year-on-year +56.52% -27.26% -12.17%
75th Percentile £67.50 £58.75 £62.50
90th Percentile £80.00 £75.00 £74.00
UK median hourly rate £43.61 £27.50 £37.50
% change year-on-year +58.56% -26.67% -16.67%

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 18 June 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 18 June 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 18 June 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 -57 19 £625 -16.67% 1
North of England -68 11 £571 +20.21% 1
North West -37 6 £650 +36.84% 1
Yorkshire - 5 £498 -
West Midlands -49 3 £571 -0.70%
Midlands -52 3 £571 -0.70%
East of England - 3 £650 -
South West -23 2 £450 -10.00% 3
South East -59 2 £422 +40.50%
Kubernetes Engineer
UK

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

For the 6 months to 18 June 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 38 (100.00%) Kubernetes
2 26 (68.42%) CI/CD
3 22 (57.89%) DevOps
4 20 (52.63%) Python
5 18 (47.37%) Infrastructure as Code
6 16 (42.11%) Terraform
7 14 (36.84%) Containerisation
7 14 (36.84%) Docker
8 12 (31.58%) Observability
8 12 (31.58%) Platform Engineering
9 11 (28.95%) AWS
9 11 (28.95%) GitHub
9 11 (28.95%) Jenkins
10 10 (26.32%) Grafana
10 10 (26.32%) Prometheus
11 9 (23.68%) Ansible
11 9 (23.68%) Azure
11 9 (23.68%) Infrastructure Automation
11 9 (23.68%) Java
12 8 (21.05%) Continuous Improvement
12 8 (21.05%) GCP
12 8 (21.05%) GitHub Actions
12 8 (21.05%) OpenShift
12 8 (21.05%) Site Reliability Engineering
12 8 (21.05%) Spring Boot
13 7 (18.42%) Agile
13 7 (18.42%) Security Cleared
14 6 (15.79%) Linux
14 6 (15.79%) SC Cleared
14 6 (15.79%) Spring

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 (13.16%) Apache
1 5 (13.16%) Apache Spark
2 1 (2.63%) Apache Airflow
2 1 (2.63%) Confluence
2 1 (2.63%) Oracle SOA Suite
Cloud Services
1 11 (28.95%) AWS
1 11 (28.95%) GitHub
2 9 (23.68%) Azure
3 8 (21.05%) GCP
3 8 (21.05%) GitHub Actions
3 8 (21.05%) OpenShift
4 4 (10.53%) Azure DevOps
4 4 (10.53%) Google Kubernetes Engine
5 3 (7.89%) Amazon CloudWatch
6 2 (5.26%) Amazon EKS
6 2 (5.26%) Cloud Computing
7 1 (2.63%) Amazon EC2
7 1 (2.63%) AWS CloudFormation
7 1 (2.63%) Datadog
7 1 (2.63%) Serverless
7 1 (2.63%) Virtual Private Cloud
Communications & Networking
1 3 (7.89%) Firewall
2 2 (5.26%) Network Security
2 2 (5.26%) VPN
3 1 (2.63%) Calico
3 1 (2.63%) DNS
3 1 (2.63%) OpenLDAP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 3 (7.89%) Big Data
1 3 (7.89%) SQL Server
2 2 (5.26%) MongoDB
2 2 (5.26%) MySQL
2 2 (5.26%) Relational Database
3 1 (2.63%) PostgreSQL
3 1 (2.63%) SQL Server Integration Services
Development Applications
1 11 (28.95%) Jenkins
2 5 (13.16%) Git
2 5 (13.16%) GitLab
3 2 (5.26%) JIRA
4 1 (2.63%) Jaeger
4 1 (2.63%) NUnit
4 1 (2.63%) RStudio
4 1 (2.63%) SonarQube
4 1 (2.63%) Sonatype Nexus
General
1 10 (26.32%) Finance
2 6 (15.79%) Banking
3 4 (10.53%) Social Skills
4 2 (5.26%) Social Science
5 1 (2.63%) Presentation Skills
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 8 (21.05%) Spring Boot
2 6 (15.79%) Spring
3 5 (13.16%) Kafka
4 4 (10.53%) OpenTelemetry
4 4 (10.53%) PySpark
5 2 (5.26%) .NET
5 2 (5.26%) Elastic Stack
5 2 (5.26%) Node.js
5 2 (5.26%) RESTful
5 2 (5.26%) YAML
6 1 (2.63%) .NET Core
6 1 (2.63%) .NET Framework
6 1 (2.63%) Entity Framework
6 1 (2.63%) GraphQL
6 1 (2.63%) JSON
6 1 (2.63%) LDAP
6 1 (2.63%) LINQ
6 1 (2.63%) Loki
6 1 (2.63%) Playwright
6 1 (2.63%) Razor View Engine
Miscellaneous
1 10 (26.32%) Cloud Native
2 5 (13.16%) Private Cloud
3 4 (10.53%) Distributed Systems
4 3 (7.89%) Public Cloud
5 2 (5.26%) Management Information System
6 1 (2.63%) Clustering
6 1 (2.63%) Data Centre
6 1 (2.63%) Hybrid Cloud
6 1 (2.63%) Legacy Applications
6 1 (2.63%) Onboarding
6 1 (2.63%) Replication
6 1 (2.63%) Security Posture
6 1 (2.63%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 6 (15.79%) Linux
2 2 (5.26%) VMS
3 1 (2.63%) Unix
3 1 (2.63%) Windows
Processes & Methodologies
1 26 (68.42%) CI/CD
2 22 (57.89%) DevOps
3 18 (47.37%) Infrastructure as Code
4 14 (36.84%) Containerisation
5 12 (31.58%) Observability
5 12 (31.58%) Platform Engineering
6 9 (23.68%) Infrastructure Automation
7 8 (21.05%) Continuous Improvement
7 8 (21.05%) Site Reliability Engineering
8 7 (18.42%) Agile
9 5 (13.16%) DevSecOps
9 5 (13.16%) Root Cause Analysis
9 5 (13.16%) Technical Leadership
10 4 (10.53%) Cloud Security
10 4 (10.53%) Event-Driven
10 4 (10.53%) GitOps
10 4 (10.53%) High Availability
10 4 (10.53%) Infrastructure Engineering
10 4 (10.53%) RBAC
10 4 (10.53%) Secrets Management
Programming Languages
1 20 (52.63%) Python
2 9 (23.68%) Java
3 5 (13.16%) Bash
4 4 (10.53%) Scala
5 3 (7.89%) SQL
6 2 (5.26%) Go
6 2 (5.26%) Kotlin
6 2 (5.26%) PowerShell
6 2 (5.26%) TypeScript
7 1 (2.63%) Bicep
7 1 (2.63%) C
7 1 (2.63%) Groovy
Qualifications
1 7 (18.42%) Security Cleared
2 6 (15.79%) SC Cleared
3 1 (2.63%) BPSS Clearance
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 3 (7.89%) QA
2 2 (5.26%) GDPR
3 1 (2.63%) GRC
3 1 (2.63%) ISO 15022
3 1 (2.63%) ISO 20022
3 1 (2.63%) PCI DSS
3 1 (2.63%) Sarbanes-Oxley
System Software
1 14 (36.84%) Docker
2 2 (5.26%) Virtual Machines
3 1 (2.63%) VMware Infrastructure
Systems Management
1 38 (100.00%) Kubernetes
2 16 (42.11%) Terraform
3 10 (26.32%) Grafana
3 10 (26.32%) Prometheus
4 9 (23.68%) Ansible
5 4 (10.53%) Argo
6 1 (2.63%) Cilium
6 1 (2.63%) Istio
6 1 (2.63%) Kustomize
6 1 (2.63%) Rancher
Vendors
1 4 (10.53%) Microsoft
2 3 (7.89%) Splunk
3 2 (5.26%) Google
3 2 (5.26%) Oracle
4 1 (2.63%) Atlassian
4 1 (2.63%) IBM
4 1 (2.63%) Red Hat
4 1 (2.63%) SAP
4 1 (2.63%) VMware