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 13 August 2026.

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

6 months to
13 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 568 467 504
Rank change year-on-year -101 +37 -9
Contract jobs requiring a Kubernetes Engineer 45 49 21
As % of all contract jobs in England 0.099% 0.18% 0.063%
As % of the Job Titles category 0.11% 0.19% 0.068%
Number of daily rates quoted 22 39 18
10th Percentile £401 £463 £485
25th Percentile £539 £513 £525
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £599 £550 £613
Median % change year-on-year +8.86% -10.20% -15.52%
75th Percentile £672 £725 £658
90th Percentile £686 £750 £799
UK median daily rate £550 £550 £575
% change year-on-year - -4.35% -20.69%
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 42,146 25,333 30,967
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.50% 91.63% 92.87%
Number of daily rates quoted 25,503 16,397 20,301
10th Percentile £325 £283 £300
25th Percentile £425 £402 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £512 £525
Median % change year-on-year +2.54% -2.48% -4.55%
75th Percentile £627 £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 3,173 1,332 1,801
10th Percentile £15.25 £13.51 £14.16
25th Percentile £21.25 £17.48 £21.25
Median hourly rate £43.56 £25.15 £45.00
Median % change year-on-year +73.20% -44.11% +7.66%
75th Percentile £68.00 £55.00 £66.00
90th Percentile £80.00 £74.88 £75.00
UK median hourly rate £42.31 £25.15 £43.00
% change year-on-year +68.21% -41.51% +2.38%

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 13 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 13 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 13 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 -80 27 £625 +4.17% 71
North of England -56 13 £610 +28.42% 11
North West -43 8 £612 +28.89% 5
Yorkshire - 5 £610 - 5
South East -66 2 £422 - 3
East of England - 2 - - 1
West Midlands -43 1 £400 -30.43% 1
Midlands -53 1 £400 -30.43% 3
Kubernetes Engineer
UK

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

For the 6 months to 13 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 45 (100.00%) Kubernetes
2 28 (62.22%) CI/CD
3 22 (48.89%) DevOps
3 22 (48.89%) Infrastructure as Code
4 21 (46.67%) Terraform
5 20 (44.44%) Python
6 17 (37.78%) AWS
6 17 (37.78%) Platform Engineering
7 15 (33.33%) Infrastructure Automation
7 15 (33.33%) Observability
8 14 (31.11%) Docker
9 13 (28.89%) Containerisation
10 11 (24.44%) Java
10 11 (24.44%) Linux
11 10 (22.22%) Azure
11 10 (22.22%) Grafana
11 10 (22.22%) Prometheus
11 10 (22.22%) Spring Boot
12 9 (20.00%) Ansible
12 9 (20.00%) GitHub
12 9 (20.00%) GitHub Actions
12 9 (20.00%) High Availability
12 9 (20.00%) Infrastructure Engineering
12 9 (20.00%) OpenShift
13 8 (17.78%) Azure DevOps
13 8 (17.78%) Bash
13 8 (17.78%) Jenkins
14 7 (15.56%) Agile
14 7 (15.56%) GCP
14 7 (15.56%) Security Cleared

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 (11.11%) Apache
1 5 (11.11%) Apache Spark
2 1 (2.22%) Apache Airflow
2 1 (2.22%) Oracle SOA Suite
Cloud Services
1 17 (37.78%) AWS
2 10 (22.22%) Azure
3 9 (20.00%) GitHub
3 9 (20.00%) GitHub Actions
3 9 (20.00%) OpenShift
4 8 (17.78%) Azure DevOps
5 7 (15.56%) GCP
6 4 (8.89%) Amazon EKS
7 3 (6.67%) Amazon CloudWatch
7 3 (6.67%) Azure AKS
7 3 (6.67%) Google Kubernetes Engine
8 2 (4.44%) Azure API Management
8 2 (4.44%) Azure Monitor
8 2 (4.44%) Serverless
9 1 (2.22%) Amazon EC2
9 1 (2.22%) AWS CloudFormation
9 1 (2.22%) AWS Lambda
9 1 (2.22%) Datadog
9 1 (2.22%) Kong
9 1 (2.22%) Virtual Private Cloud
Communications & Networking
1 3 (6.67%) VPN
2 1 (2.22%) BGP
2 1 (2.22%) Calico
2 1 (2.22%) DNS
2 1 (2.22%) Firewall
2 1 (2.22%) MPLS
2 1 (2.22%) OpenLDAP
2 1 (2.22%) WAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 3 (6.67%) Big Data
1 3 (6.67%) SQL Server
2 2 (4.44%) MySQL
2 2 (4.44%) PostgreSQL
2 2 (4.44%) Relational Database
3 1 (2.22%) Amazon RDS
3 1 (2.22%) MongoDB
3 1 (2.22%) SQL Server Integration Services
Development Applications
1 8 (17.78%) Jenkins
2 6 (13.33%) Git
3 4 (8.89%) GitLab
4 2 (4.44%) CircleCI
5 1 (2.22%) Bitbucket
5 1 (2.22%) Jaeger
5 1 (2.22%) NUnit
5 1 (2.22%) SonarQube
5 1 (2.22%) Sonatype Nexus
General
1 10 (22.22%) Finance
2 6 (13.33%) Banking
3 5 (11.11%) Social Skills
4 3 (6.67%) Law
5 1 (2.22%) Analytical Skills
5 1 (2.22%) Presentation Skills
5 1 (2.22%) Public Sector
5 1 (2.22%) Telecoms
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 10 (22.22%) Spring Boot
2 7 (15.56%) Spring
3 6 (13.33%) Kafka
4 5 (11.11%) .NET
5 4 (8.89%) PySpark
6 3 (6.67%) YAML
7 2 (4.44%) Elastic Stack
7 2 (4.44%) Node.js
7 2 (4.44%) OpenTelemetry
7 2 (4.44%) RESTful
8 1 (2.22%) .NET Core
8 1 (2.22%) AWS CDK
8 1 (2.22%) Entity Framework
8 1 (2.22%) GraphQL
8 1 (2.22%) LDAP
8 1 (2.22%) LINQ
8 1 (2.22%) Loki
8 1 (2.22%) Playwright
8 1 (2.22%) Razor View Engine
8 1 (2.22%) Vitest
Miscellaneous
1 13 (28.89%) Cloud Native
2 4 (8.89%) Distributed Systems
3 3 (6.67%) Private Cloud
4 2 (4.44%) Management Information System
4 2 (4.44%) PKI
5 1 (2.22%) AI Agents
5 1 (2.22%) Clustering
5 1 (2.22%) Data Centre
5 1 (2.22%) Hybrid Cloud
5 1 (2.22%) Legacy Applications
5 1 (2.22%) Onboarding
5 1 (2.22%) Public Cloud
5 1 (2.22%) Replication
5 1 (2.22%) Security Posture
5 1 (2.22%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 11 (24.44%) Linux
2 1 (2.22%) Unix
Processes & Methodologies
1 28 (62.22%) CI/CD
2 22 (48.89%) DevOps
2 22 (48.89%) Infrastructure as Code
3 17 (37.78%) Platform Engineering
4 15 (33.33%) Infrastructure Automation
4 15 (33.33%) Observability
5 13 (28.89%) Containerisation
6 9 (20.00%) High Availability
6 9 (20.00%) Infrastructure Engineering
7 7 (15.56%) Agile
7 7 (15.56%) Software Engineering
8 6 (13.33%) GitOps
8 6 (13.33%) Load Balancing
8 6 (13.33%) Site Reliability Engineering
8 6 (13.33%) Technical Leadership
9 5 (11.11%) Event-Driven
9 5 (11.11%) Incident Management
9 5 (11.11%) Infrastructure Transformation
9 5 (11.11%) RBAC
9 5 (11.11%) Secrets Management
Programming Languages
1 20 (44.44%) Python
2 11 (24.44%) Java
3 8 (17.78%) Bash
4 4 (8.89%) Scala
5 2 (4.44%) C#
5 2 (4.44%) Go
5 2 (4.44%) Kotlin
5 2 (4.44%) SQL
5 2 (4.44%) TypeScript
6 1 (2.22%) Bicep
6 1 (2.22%) C
6 1 (2.22%) Groovy
6 1 (2.22%) PowerShell
Qualifications
1 7 (15.56%) Security Cleared
2 5 (11.11%) SC Cleared
3 2 (4.44%) Azure Certification
3 2 (4.44%) BPSS Clearance
4 1 (2.22%) DV Cleared
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 3 (6.67%) QA
2 2 (4.44%) GDPR
3 1 (2.22%) GRC
3 1 (2.22%) ISO 15022
3 1 (2.22%) ISO 20022
3 1 (2.22%) PCI DSS
3 1 (2.22%) Sarbanes-Oxley
System Software
1 14 (31.11%) Docker
Systems Management
1 45 (100.00%) Kubernetes
2 21 (46.67%) Terraform
3 10 (22.22%) Grafana
3 10 (22.22%) Prometheus
4 9 (20.00%) Ansible
5 5 (11.11%) Argo
6 3 (6.67%) Istio
7 2 (4.44%) Cilium
8 1 (2.22%) Kibana
8 1 (2.22%) Kustomize
Vendors
1 6 (13.33%) Microsoft
2 3 (6.67%) Red Hat
2 3 (6.67%) Splunk
3 1 (2.22%) Arista
3 1 (2.22%) Cisco
3 1 (2.22%) IBM
3 1 (2.22%) Oracle
3 1 (2.22%) SAP