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 26 December 2025.

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

 6 months to
26 Dec 2025		 Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 518 447 516
Rank change year-on-year -71 +69 +49
Contract jobs requiring a Kubernetes Engineer 29 48 43
As % of all contract jobs in England 0.091% 0.17% 0.12%
As % of the Job Titles category 0.100% 0.18% 0.12%
Number of daily rates quoted 23 35 31
10th Percentile £400 £379 £473
25th Percentile £500 £560 £494
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £625 £600
Median % change year-on-year -12.00% +4.17% -
75th Percentile £641 £769 £738
90th Percentile £692 £838 £775
UK median daily rate £600 £625 £613
% change year-on-year -4.00% +2.04% +2.08%
Number of hourly rates quoted 0 1 1
10th Percentile - - -
25th Percentile - £59.39 £61.25
Median hourly rate - £63.79 £62.50
Median % change year-on-year - +2.06% -
75th Percentile - £68.18 £63.75
90th Percentile - - -
UK median hourly rate - £63.79 £62.50
% change year-on-year - +2.06% -

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 29,026 26,600 34,534
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 91.34% 92.93% 93.34%
Number of daily rates quoted 18,504 16,539 23,627
10th Percentile £296 £300 £285
25th Percentile £406 £413 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £507 £525 £528
Median % change year-on-year -3.43% -0.57% -4.00%
75th Percentile £625 £638 £650
90th Percentile £725 £750 £750
UK median daily rate £500 £525 £525
% change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 1,775 836 1,432
10th Percentile £14.38 £15.74 £14.93
25th Percentile £18.47 £21.25 £20.00
Median hourly rate £27.00 £35.00 £45.00
Median % change year-on-year -22.86% -22.22% +38.46%
75th Percentile £60.96 £65.00 £65.00
90th Percentile £72.50 £74.00 £76.95
UK median hourly rate £26.00 £33.00 £45.00
% change year-on-year -21.21% -26.67% +46.39%

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 26 December 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 26 December 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 -14 23 £550 -13.73% 7
North of England -59 3 £600 +66.67% 13
South East -11 2 - - 17
North West -29 1 - - 6
Yorkshire -39 1 - - 7
North East - 1 £600 -
Kubernetes Engineer
UK

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

For the 6 months to 26 December 2025, 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 29 (100.00%) Kubernetes
2 25 (86.21%) CI/CD
3 19 (65.52%) DevOps
4 17 (58.62%) Infrastructure as Code
4 17 (58.62%) Terraform
5 14 (48.28%) Azure
6 13 (44.83%) Python
6 13 (44.83%) SC Cleared
6 13 (44.83%) Security Cleared
7 12 (41.38%) Jenkins
8 11 (37.93%) GitHub
9 10 (34.48%) Ansible
9 10 (34.48%) Docker
10 9 (31.03%) AWS
10 9 (31.03%) GCP
11 8 (27.59%) Agile
11 8 (27.59%) Containerisation
11 8 (27.59%) Java
12 7 (24.14%) GitHub Actions
13 6 (20.69%) Kafka
13 6 (20.69%) Migration
13 6 (20.69%) Platform Engineering
14 5 (17.24%) Bash
14 5 (17.24%) Google Kubernetes Engine
14 5 (17.24%) Observability
14 5 (17.24%) PostgreSQL
14 5 (17.24%) TDD
14 5 (17.24%) Virtual Machines
15 4 (13.79%) Amazon EKS
15 4 (13.79%) Argo

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 1 (3.45%) Apache Spark
1 1 (3.45%) CMS
1 1 (3.45%) Headless CMS
1 1 (3.45%) Oracle SOA Suite
Cloud Services
1 14 (48.28%) Azure
2 11 (37.93%) GitHub
3 9 (31.03%) AWS
3 9 (31.03%) GCP
4 7 (24.14%) GitHub Actions
5 5 (17.24%) Google Kubernetes Engine
6 4 (13.79%) Amazon EKS
6 4 (13.79%) OpenShift
7 2 (6.90%) Amazon ECR
7 2 (6.90%) Power Automate
7 2 (6.90%) Power Platform
7 2 (6.90%) PowerApps
8 1 (3.45%) Amazon S3
8 1 (3.45%) Azure DevOps
8 1 (3.45%) Contentful
8 1 (3.45%) Contentstack
8 1 (3.45%) Storyblok
Communications & Networking
1 3 (10.34%) Firewall
2 1 (3.45%) VPN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 5 (17.24%) PostgreSQL
2 2 (6.90%) Power BI
3 1 (3.45%) Big Data
3 1 (3.45%) Data Lake
3 1 (3.45%) Data Warehouse
3 1 (3.45%) Elasticsearch
3 1 (3.45%) Hadoop
Development Applications
1 12 (41.38%) Jenkins
2 4 (13.79%) Liquibase
3 3 (10.34%) RStudio
4 2 (6.90%) GitLab
5 1 (3.45%) Artifactory
5 1 (3.45%) Git
5 1 (3.45%) Sonatype Nexus
General
1 8 (27.59%) Social Skills
2 5 (17.24%) Finance
3 3 (10.34%) Banking
3 3 (10.34%) Social Science
4 2 (6.90%) Analytical Skills
4 2 (6.90%) Inclusion and Diversity
5 1 (3.45%) Telecoms
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 6 (20.69%) Kafka
2 3 (10.34%) React
3 2 (6.90%) FastAPI
3 2 (6.90%) Middleware
3 2 (6.90%) OpenTelemetry
3 2 (6.90%) Spring Boot
4 1 (3.45%) Elastic Stack
4 1 (3.45%) Fastify
4 1 (3.45%) JSON
4 1 (3.45%) MACH
4 1 (3.45%) Next.js
4 1 (3.45%) Node.js
4 1 (3.45%) RESTful
Miscellaneous
1 7 (24.14%) Private Cloud
2 4 (13.79%) Cloud Native
3 1 (3.45%) Data Centre
3 1 (3.45%) Distributed Applications
3 1 (3.45%) Legacy Applications
3 1 (3.45%) Public Cloud
Operating Systems
1 4 (13.79%) Linux
2 2 (6.90%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
2 2 (6.90%) VMS
3 1 (3.45%) Unix
Processes & Methodologies
1 25 (86.21%) CI/CD
2 19 (65.52%) DevOps
3 17 (58.62%) Infrastructure as Code
4 8 (27.59%) Agile
4 8 (27.59%) Containerisation
5 6 (20.69%) Migration
5 6 (20.69%) Platform Engineering
6 5 (17.24%) Observability
6 5 (17.24%) TDD
7 4 (13.79%) Continuous Deployment
7 4 (13.79%) Continuous Integration
7 4 (13.79%) Microservices
8 3 (10.34%) Problem-Solving
8 3 (10.34%) Test Automation
9 2 (6.90%) AI
9 2 (6.90%) Application Packaging
9 2 (6.90%) Change Control
9 2 (6.90%) Continuous Improvement
9 2 (6.90%) High Availability
9 2 (6.90%) Security Testing
Programming Languages
1 13 (44.83%) Python
2 8 (27.59%) Java
3 5 (17.24%) Bash
4 4 (13.79%) Go
4 4 (13.79%) Perl
5 3 (10.34%) JavaScript
6 2 (6.90%) C#
6 2 (6.90%) PowerShell
6 2 (6.90%) SQL
7 1 (3.45%) Groovy
7 1 (3.45%) TypeScript
Qualifications
1 13 (44.83%) SC Cleared
1 13 (44.83%) Security Cleared
2 2 (6.90%) AWS Certification
2 2 (6.90%) Azure Certification
3 1 (3.45%) CISM
3 1 (3.45%) CISSP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 1 (3.45%) ISO 15022
1 1 (3.45%) ISO 20022
1 1 (3.45%) ISO/IEC 27001
1 1 (3.45%) NIST
System Software
1 10 (34.48%) Docker
2 5 (17.24%) Virtual Machines
3 3 (10.34%) VMware Infrastructure
Systems Management
1 29 (100.00%) Kubernetes
2 17 (58.62%) Terraform
3 10 (34.48%) Ansible
4 4 (13.79%) Argo
4 4 (13.79%) Grafana
5 3 (10.34%) Prometheus
5 3 (10.34%) Rancher
6 1 (3.45%) Fluentd
6 1 (3.45%) Istio
Vendors
1 3 (10.34%) Red Hat
1 3 (10.34%) VMware
2 2 (6.90%) Google
2 2 (6.90%) Splunk
3 1 (3.45%) Cribl.io
3 1 (3.45%) IBM
3 1 (3.45%) Oracle
68 Kubernetes Engineer jobs in England