Kubernetes Engineer Contract Job Trends in England

Kubernetes Engineer (K8s Engineer)
UK > England

The median Kubernetes Engineer (K8s Engineer) daily rate in England is £550, according to job vacancies posted in the 6 months leading up to 18 September 2025.

The table below provides contractor rate benchmarking and summary statistics, comparing them to the same period in the previous two years.

6 months to
18 Sep 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 469 502 490
Rank change year-on-year +33 -12 +55
Contract jobs requiring a Kubernetes Engineer 43 26 100
As % of all contract jobs advertised in England 0.15% 0.079% 0.24%
As % of the Job Titles category 0.17% 0.085% 0.25%
Number of daily rates quoted 35 19 92
10th Percentile £463 £360 £513
25th Percentile £508 £523 £563
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £625 £650
Median % change year-on-year -12.00% -3.85% -
75th Percentile £688 £669 £863
90th Percentile £750 £795 -
UK median daily rate £550 £550 £630
% change year-on-year - -12.70% -3.08%
Number of hourly rates quoted 1 0 0
Median hourly rate £95.00 - -
UK median hourly rate £95.00 - -

All Contract IT Job Vacancies
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 25,377 30,623 39,527
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 91.32% 92.98% 94.28%
Number of daily rates quoted 16,381 19,128 27,584
10th Percentile £280 £300 £300
25th Percentile £400 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £508 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year -3.33% -4.55% -
75th Percentile £625 £638 £650
90th Percentile £738 £750 £750
UK median daily rate £500 £525 £530
% change year-on-year -4.76% -0.94% -3.64%
Number of hourly rates quoted 1,363 1,485 1,349
10th Percentile £13.75 £14.60 £15.25
25th Percentile £17.31 £21.25 £19.06
Median hourly rate £25.15 £46.18 £45.00
Median % change year-on-year -45.54% +2.62% +73.08%
75th Percentile £54.88 £67.50 £65.00
90th Percentile £71.49 £75.00 £78.00
UK median hourly rate £25.15 £43.00 £44.50
% change year-on-year -41.51% -3.37% +71.15%

Kubernetes Engineer
Job Vacancy Trend in England

Job postings that featured Kubernetes Engineer in the job title as a proportion of all IT jobs advertised in England.

Job vacancy trend for Kubernetes Engineer 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 September 2025.

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 18 September 2025. 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 +27 24 £600 -4.38% 6
South East +25 6 - - 4
North West -11 6 £475 +31.94%
North of England -11 6 £475 +31.94%
South West +26 1 £500 -20.00%
West Midlands -10 1 £575 +219.44%
Midlands -16 1 £575 +219.44%
Kubernetes Engineer
UK

Kubernetes Engineer Skill Set
Top 30 Co-occurring Skills and Capabilities in England

For the 6 months to 18 September 2025, Kubernetes Engineer contract job roles required the following skills and capabilities in order of popularity. The figures indicate the absolute number co-occurrences and as a proportion of all contract job ads across the England region featuring Kubernetes Engineer in the job title.

1 43 (100.00%) Kubernetes
2 28 (65.12%) Python
3 23 (53.49%) Ansible
3 23 (53.49%) CI/CD
4 22 (51.16%) Terraform
5 20 (46.51%) AWS
6 19 (44.19%) DevOps
6 19 (44.19%) Infrastructure as Code
7 17 (39.53%) Platform Engineering
7 17 (39.53%) Java
8 16 (37.21%) Jenkins
9 15 (34.88%) Docker
9 15 (34.88%) Linux
9 15 (34.88%) Agile
10 14 (32.56%) SC Cleared
10 14 (32.56%) Security Cleared
10 14 (32.56%) Azure
10 14 (32.56%) Containerisation
11 13 (30.23%) GCP
11 13 (30.23%) Migration
12 12 (27.91%) PostgreSQL
12 12 (27.91%) Social Skills
13 11 (25.58%) GitOps
13 11 (25.58%) Amazon EKS
14 9 (20.93%) Rancher
14 9 (20.93%) Cloud Native
15 8 (18.60%) Liquibase
15 8 (18.60%) Continuous Deployment
15 8 (18.60%) Google Kubernetes Engine
15 8 (18.60%) TDD

Kubernetes Engineer Skill Set
Co-occurring Skills and Capabilities in England by Category

The follow tables expand on the table above by listing co-occurrences grouped by category. The same employment type, locality and period is covered with up to 20 co-occurrences shown in each of the following categories:

Application Platforms
1 4 (9.30%) Apache Airflow
1 4 (9.30%) Apache Spark
Cloud Services
1 20 (46.51%) AWS
2 14 (32.56%) Azure
3 13 (30.23%) GCP
4 11 (25.58%) Amazon EKS
5 8 (18.60%) Amazon S3
5 8 (18.60%) Google Kubernetes Engine
6 6 (13.95%) OpenShift
7 4 (9.30%) Amazon EC2
8 3 (6.98%) GitHub
9 2 (4.65%) GitHub Actions
10 1 (2.33%) Amazon ECR
10 1 (2.33%) AWS CloudFormation
10 1 (2.33%) IaaS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 12 (27.91%) PostgreSQL
2 4 (9.30%) Big Data
2 4 (9.30%) Data Lake
2 4 (9.30%) Data Warehouse
2 4 (9.30%) Elasticsearch
2 4 (9.30%) Hadoop
Development Applications
1 16 (37.21%) Jenkins
2 8 (18.60%) Liquibase
3 1 (2.33%) Artifactory
3 1 (2.33%) Git
3 1 (2.33%) RStudio
General
1 12 (27.91%) Social Skills
2 4 (9.30%) Analytical Skills
3 2 (4.65%) Finance
3 2 (4.65%) Retail
4 1 (2.33%) Banking
4 1 (2.33%) Inclusion and Diversity
4 1 (2.33%) Investment Banking
4 1 (2.33%) Social Science
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 8 (18.60%) Kafka
2 6 (13.95%) Middleware
2 6 (13.95%) React
3 4 (9.30%) OpenTelemetry
Miscellaneous
1 9 (20.93%) Cloud Native
2 7 (16.28%) Private Cloud
3 1 (2.33%) Data Centre
Operating Systems
1 15 (34.88%) Linux
2 4 (9.30%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
3 2 (4.65%) Ubuntu
3 2 (4.65%) Windows
4 1 (2.33%) Mac OS
Processes & Methodologies
1 23 (53.49%) CI/CD
2 19 (44.19%) DevOps
2 19 (44.19%) Infrastructure as Code
3 17 (39.53%) Platform Engineering
4 15 (34.88%) Agile
5 14 (32.56%) Containerisation
6 13 (30.23%) Migration
7 11 (25.58%) GitOps
8 8 (18.60%) Continuous Deployment
8 8 (18.60%) Continuous Integration
8 8 (18.60%) High Availability
8 8 (18.60%) TDD
9 6 (13.95%) Configuration Management
10 5 (11.63%) Observability
10 5 (11.63%) Test Automation
11 4 (9.30%) Analytics
11 4 (9.30%) Batch Processing
11 4 (9.30%) Microservices
11 4 (9.30%) Stakeholder Management
12 3 (6.98%) Software Engineering
Programming Languages
1 28 (65.12%) Python
2 17 (39.53%) Java
3 8 (18.60%) C#
3 8 (18.60%) Go
3 8 (18.60%) PowerShell
4 7 (16.28%) Bash
4 7 (16.28%) JavaScript
4 7 (16.28%) Perl
5 6 (13.95%) SQL
6 1 (2.33%) C++
6 1 (2.33%) Groovy
Qualifications
1 14 (32.56%) SC Cleared
1 14 (32.56%) Security Cleared
2 2 (4.65%) Computer Science Degree
2 2 (4.65%) Degree
3 1 (2.33%) AWS Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 1 (2.33%) QA
System Software
1 15 (34.88%) Docker
2 1 (2.33%) Active Directory
2 1 (2.33%) Virtual Machines
2 1 (2.33%) VMware Infrastructure
Systems Management
1 43 (100.00%) Kubernetes
2 23 (53.49%) Ansible
3 22 (51.16%) Terraform
4 9 (20.93%) Rancher
5 6 (13.95%) Argo
6 5 (11.63%) Grafana
7 1 (2.33%) Nessus
7 1 (2.33%) Packer
7 1 (2.33%) Prometheus
7 1 (2.33%) Puppet
Vendors
1 6 (13.95%) Red Hat
2 2 (4.65%) VMware
3 1 (2.33%) Google
3 1 (2.33%) Microsoft
3 1 (2.33%) SendGrid
3 1 (2.33%) Zscaler