Kubernetes Engineer Contract Job Trends in England

Kubernetes Engineer (K8s Engineer)
UK > England

The median Kubernetes Engineer (K8s Engineer) daily rate in England is £571, according to job vacancies posted in the 6 months leading up to 7 May 2026.

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

6 months to
7 May 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 548 432 535
Rank change year-on-year -116 +103 -27
Contract jobs requiring a Kubernetes Engineer 39 46 13
As % of all contract jobs in England 0.096% 0.19% 0.035%
As % of the Job Titles category 0.10% 0.20% 0.038%
Number of daily rates quoted 26 44 10
10th Percentile £400 £436 £445
25th Percentile £413 £548 £516
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £571 £600 £563
Median % change year-on-year -4.83% +6.67% -16.67%
75th Percentile £654 £750 £628
90th Percentile £681 - £638
UK median daily rate £565 £600 £550
% change year-on-year -5.83% +9.09% -15.38%

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 37,569 22,569 34,368
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.27% 92.59% 92.71%
Number of daily rates quoted 23,407 15,021 22,841
10th Percentile £313 £300 £280
25th Percentile £413 £409 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -2.38% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £619 £638 £644
90th Percentile £725 £750 £750
UK median daily rate £505 £513 £525
% change year-on-year -1.46% -2.38% -2.78%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,564 913 2,442
10th Percentile £15.57 £14.20 £13.00
25th Percentile £20.79 £18.51 £16.30
Median hourly rate £47.00 £31.35 £36.50
Median % change year-on-year +49.94% -14.12% -17.64%
75th Percentile £67.50 £63.75 £61.30
90th Percentile £78.75 £75.00 £72.86
UK median hourly rate £43.69 £29.00 £36.50
% change year-on-year +50.66% -20.55% -18.89%

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 7 May 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 7 May 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 -66 24 £625 -9.91% 7
North of England -55 8 £498 +4.84%
Yorkshire - 6 £498 -
West Midlands -58 3 £571 -0.70%
Midlands -72 3 £571 -0.70%
East of England - 3 £650 -
South West -30 2 £450 -10.00%
North West -41 2 - -
South East -44 1 £393 +31.00%
Kubernetes Engineer
UK

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

For the 6 months to 7 May 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 39 (100.00%) Kubernetes
2 28 (71.79%) CI/CD
3 24 (61.54%) Infrastructure as Code
4 23 (58.97%) DevOps
5 22 (56.41%) Python
6 20 (51.28%) Terraform
7 16 (41.03%) GitHub
8 15 (38.46%) Containerisation
9 14 (35.90%) Docker
9 14 (35.90%) Jenkins
10 13 (33.33%) Azure
11 12 (30.77%) Platform Engineering
12 11 (28.21%) Ansible
12 11 (28.21%) AWS
12 11 (28.21%) GCP
12 11 (28.21%) GitHub Actions
13 9 (23.08%) Grafana
13 9 (23.08%) Observability
13 9 (23.08%) Prometheus
14 8 (20.51%) Agile
14 8 (20.51%) SC Cleared
14 8 (20.51%) Security Cleared
14 8 (20.51%) Site Reliability Engineering
15 7 (17.95%) Continuous Improvement
15 7 (17.95%) Infrastructure Automation
15 7 (17.95%) Java
15 7 (17.95%) OpenShift
16 6 (15.38%) DevSecOps
16 6 (15.38%) Git
16 6 (15.38%) Linux

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 (12.82%) Apache
1 5 (12.82%) Apache Spark
2 1 (2.56%) Apache Airflow
2 1 (2.56%) Confluence
2 1 (2.56%) Oracle SOA Suite
Cloud Services
1 16 (41.03%) GitHub
2 13 (33.33%) Azure
3 11 (28.21%) AWS
3 11 (28.21%) GCP
3 11 (28.21%) GitHub Actions
4 7 (17.95%) OpenShift
5 5 (12.82%) Google Kubernetes Engine
6 4 (10.26%) Azure DevOps
7 3 (7.69%) Amazon CloudWatch
8 2 (5.13%) Amazon EKS
8 2 (5.13%) Cloud Computing
9 1 (2.56%) Amazon ECR
9 1 (2.56%) AWS CloudFormation
9 1 (2.56%) Datadog
9 1 (2.56%) Power Automate
9 1 (2.56%) Power Platform
9 1 (2.56%) PowerApps
9 1 (2.56%) Serverless
Communications & Networking
1 5 (12.82%) Firewall
2 2 (5.13%) Network Security
2 2 (5.13%) VPN
3 1 (2.56%) DNS
3 1 (2.56%) OpenLDAP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 3 (7.69%) Big Data
1 3 (7.69%) SQL Server
2 2 (5.13%) MongoDB
3 1 (2.56%) PostgreSQL
3 1 (2.56%) Power BI
3 1 (2.56%) SQL Server Integration Services
Development Applications
1 14 (35.90%) Jenkins
2 6 (15.38%) Git
3 4 (10.26%) GitLab
4 2 (5.13%) JIRA
4 2 (5.13%) RStudio
5 1 (2.56%) Jaeger
5 1 (2.56%) NUnit
General
1 11 (28.21%) Finance
2 6 (15.38%) Banking
3 3 (7.69%) Social Science
3 3 (7.69%) Social Skills
4 1 (2.56%) Inclusion and Diversity
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 6 (15.38%) Spring Boot
2 5 (12.82%) OpenTelemetry
3 4 (10.26%) PySpark
3 4 (10.26%) Spring
4 2 (5.13%) .NET
4 2 (5.13%) Kafka
4 2 (5.13%) Node.js
4 2 (5.13%) YAML
5 1 (2.56%) .NET Core
5 1 (2.56%) .NET Framework
5 1 (2.56%) Elastic Stack
5 1 (2.56%) Entity Framework
5 1 (2.56%) FastAPI
5 1 (2.56%) GraphQL
5 1 (2.56%) JSON
5 1 (2.56%) LDAP
5 1 (2.56%) LINQ
5 1 (2.56%) Loki
5 1 (2.56%) Playwright
5 1 (2.56%) Razor View Engine
Miscellaneous
1 9 (23.08%) Cloud Native
2 7 (17.95%) Private Cloud
3 3 (7.69%) Public Cloud
4 2 (5.13%) Distributed Systems
5 1 (2.56%) Clustering
5 1 (2.56%) Data Centre
5 1 (2.56%) Hybrid Cloud
5 1 (2.56%) Legacy Applications
5 1 (2.56%) Management Information System
5 1 (2.56%) Onboarding
5 1 (2.56%) Replication
5 1 (2.56%) Security Posture
Operating Systems
1 6 (15.38%) Linux
2 4 (10.26%) VMS
3 1 (2.56%) Unix
3 1 (2.56%) Windows
Processes & Methodologies
1 28 (71.79%) CI/CD
2 24 (61.54%) Infrastructure as Code
3 23 (58.97%) DevOps
4 15 (38.46%) Containerisation
5 12 (30.77%) Platform Engineering
6 9 (23.08%) Observability
7 8 (20.51%) Agile
7 8 (20.51%) Site Reliability Engineering
8 7 (17.95%) Continuous Improvement
8 7 (17.95%) Infrastructure Automation
9 6 (15.38%) DevSecOps
9 6 (15.38%) Load Balancing
10 5 (12.82%) Migration
10 5 (12.82%) Secrets Management
11 4 (10.26%) ETL
11 4 (10.26%) GitOps
11 4 (10.26%) Incident Response
11 4 (10.26%) Project Delivery
11 4 (10.26%) RBAC
11 4 (10.26%) Technical Leadership
Programming Languages
1 22 (56.41%) Python
2 7 (17.95%) Java
3 5 (12.82%) Bash
4 4 (10.26%) Scala
5 3 (7.69%) SQL
6 2 (5.13%) Go
6 2 (5.13%) PowerShell
6 2 (5.13%) TypeScript
7 1 (2.56%) Bicep
7 1 (2.56%) C
7 1 (2.56%) Groovy
Qualifications
1 8 (20.51%) SC Cleared
1 8 (20.51%) Security Cleared
2 2 (5.13%) Azure Certification
3 1 (2.56%) AWS Certification
3 1 (2.56%) BPSS Clearance
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 3 (7.69%) QA
2 2 (5.13%) GDPR
3 1 (2.56%) GRC
3 1 (2.56%) ISO 15022
3 1 (2.56%) ISO 20022
3 1 (2.56%) PCI DSS
3 1 (2.56%) Sarbanes-Oxley
System Software
1 14 (35.90%) Docker
2 4 (10.26%) Virtual Machines
3 2 (5.13%) VMware Infrastructure
Systems Management
1 39 (100.00%) Kubernetes
2 20 (51.28%) Terraform
3 11 (28.21%) Ansible
4 9 (23.08%) Grafana
4 9 (23.08%) Prometheus
5 4 (10.26%) Argo
6 2 (5.13%) Rancher
7 1 (2.56%) Istio
7 1 (2.56%) Kustomize
Vendors
1 4 (10.26%) Google
1 4 (10.26%) Microsoft
2 2 (5.13%) Oracle
2 2 (5.13%) Splunk
2 2 (5.13%) VMware
3 1 (2.56%) Atlassian
3 1 (2.56%) IBM
3 1 (2.56%) SAP