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 4 June 2026.

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

6 months to
4 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 560 436 535
Rank change year-on-year -124 +99 -42
Contract jobs requiring a Kubernetes Engineer 39 47 16
As % of all contract jobs in England 0.093% 0.20% 0.044%
As % of the Job Titles category 0.10% 0.21% 0.047%
Number of daily rates quoted 25 39 13
10th Percentile £403 £455 £465
25th Percentile £450 £513 £525
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £571 £600 £600
Median % change year-on-year -4.83% - -17.24%
75th Percentile £663 £750 £638
90th Percentile £690 - £758
UK median daily rate £558 £600 £563
% change year-on-year -7.08% +6.67% -16.17%
Number of hourly rates quoted 1 1 0
Median hourly rate £77.00 £95.00 -
Median % change year-on-year -18.95% - -
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 38,587 22,165 34,087
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.36% 92.40% 92.80%
Number of daily rates quoted 23,812 14,615 22,428
10th Percentile £325 £289 £284
25th Percentile £413 £406 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £518 £517 £525
Median % change year-on-year +0.10% -1.52% -4.55%
75th Percentile £625 £638 £638
90th Percentile £725 £750 £750
UK median daily rate £513 £504 £525
% change year-on-year +1.69% -4.00% -2.78%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,713 946 2,578
10th Percentile £15.75 £14.00 £12.86
25th Percentile £21.25 £18.13 £16.30
Median hourly rate £45.00 £29.27 £38.00
Median % change year-on-year +53.74% -22.97% -15.56%
75th Percentile £67.50 £60.00 £62.00
90th Percentile £80.00 £75.00 £74.00
UK median hourly rate £42.70 £28.00 £37.50
% change year-on-year +52.48% -25.33% -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 4 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
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 4 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 -76 20 £625 -16.67% 18
North of England -70 11 £571 +20.21% 2
Yorkshire - 6 £498 -
North West -31 5 £650 +36.84% 2
West Midlands -57 3 £571 -0.70% 1
Midlands -59 3 £571 -0.70% 1
East of England - 3 £650 -
South West -31 2 £450 -10.00%
South East -63 2 £422 +40.50% 2
Kubernetes Engineer
UK

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

For the 6 months to 4 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 39 (100.00%) Kubernetes
2 28 (71.79%) CI/CD
3 24 (61.54%) DevOps
4 21 (53.85%) Python
5 20 (51.28%) Infrastructure as Code
6 18 (46.15%) Terraform
7 15 (38.46%) Containerisation
7 15 (38.46%) Docker
8 14 (35.90%) Jenkins
9 13 (33.33%) GitHub
10 12 (30.77%) Azure
10 12 (30.77%) Platform Engineering
11 11 (28.21%) Ansible
11 11 (28.21%) AWS
11 11 (28.21%) GCP
11 11 (28.21%) Grafana
11 11 (28.21%) Observability
11 11 (28.21%) Prometheus
12 10 (25.64%) GitHub Actions
13 9 (23.08%) Security Cleared
13 9 (23.08%) Site Reliability Engineering
14 8 (20.51%) Infrastructure Automation
14 8 (20.51%) Java
14 8 (20.51%) OpenShift
14 8 (20.51%) SC Cleared
15 7 (17.95%) Agile
15 7 (17.95%) Continuous Improvement
15 7 (17.95%) Spring Boot
16 6 (15.38%) DevSecOps
16 6 (15.38%) Git

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 13 (33.33%) GitHub
2 12 (30.77%) Azure
3 11 (28.21%) AWS
3 11 (28.21%) GCP
4 10 (25.64%) GitHub Actions
5 8 (20.51%) OpenShift
6 5 (12.82%) Google Kubernetes Engine
7 4 (10.26%) Azure DevOps
8 3 (7.69%) Amazon CloudWatch
9 2 (5.13%) Cloud Computing
10 1 (2.56%) Amazon EKS
10 1 (2.56%) AWS CloudFormation
10 1 (2.56%) Datadog
10 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%) MySQL
3 1 (2.56%) PostgreSQL
3 1 (2.56%) Relational Database
3 1 (2.56%) SQL Server Integration Services
Development Applications
1 14 (35.90%) Jenkins
2 6 (15.38%) Git
3 5 (12.82%) GitLab
4 2 (5.13%) JIRA
5 1 (2.56%) Jaeger
5 1 (2.56%) NUnit
5 1 (2.56%) RStudio
5 1 (2.56%) SonarQube
5 1 (2.56%) Sonatype Nexus
General
1 12 (30.77%) Finance
2 7 (17.95%) Banking
3 3 (7.69%) Social Skills
4 2 (5.13%) Social Science
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 7 (17.95%) Spring Boot
2 5 (12.82%) OpenTelemetry
2 5 (12.82%) Spring
3 4 (10.26%) Kafka
3 4 (10.26%) PySpark
4 2 (5.13%) .NET
4 2 (5.13%) Elastic Stack
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%) Entity Framework
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
5 1 (2.56%) RESTful
Miscellaneous
1 9 (23.08%) Cloud Native
2 5 (12.82%) Private Cloud
3 3 (7.69%) Distributed Systems
3 3 (7.69%) Public Cloud
4 2 (5.13%) Management Information System
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%) 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%) DevOps
3 20 (51.28%) Infrastructure as Code
4 15 (38.46%) Containerisation
5 12 (30.77%) Platform Engineering
6 11 (28.21%) Observability
7 9 (23.08%) Site Reliability Engineering
8 8 (20.51%) Infrastructure Automation
9 7 (17.95%) Agile
9 7 (17.95%) Continuous Improvement
10 6 (15.38%) DevSecOps
10 6 (15.38%) Load Balancing
11 5 (12.82%) High Availability
11 5 (12.82%) Migration
11 5 (12.82%) Root Cause Analysis
11 5 (12.82%) Secrets Management
11 5 (12.82%) Technical Leadership
12 4 (10.26%) Change Control
12 4 (10.26%) Cybersecurity
12 4 (10.26%) Stakeholder Engagement
Programming Languages
1 21 (53.85%) Python
2 8 (20.51%) 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
7 1 (2.56%) Kotlin
Qualifications
1 9 (23.08%) Security Cleared
2 8 (20.51%) SC Cleared
3 2 (5.13%) Azure Certification
4 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 15 (38.46%) Docker
2 2 (5.13%) Virtual Machines
3 1 (2.56%) VMware Infrastructure
Systems Management
1 39 (100.00%) Kubernetes
2 18 (46.15%) Terraform
3 11 (28.21%) Ansible
3 11 (28.21%) Grafana
3 11 (28.21%) Prometheus
4 3 (7.69%) Argo
5 1 (2.56%) Istio
5 1 (2.56%) Kustomize
5 1 (2.56%) Rancher
Vendors
1 4 (10.26%) Google
1 4 (10.26%) Microsoft
2 3 (7.69%) Splunk
3 2 (5.13%) Oracle
4 1 (2.56%) Atlassian
4 1 (2.56%) IBM
4 1 (2.56%) Red Hat
4 1 (2.56%) SAP
4 1 (2.56%) VMware