Kubernetes Engineer Contract Job Trends in England

Kubernetes Engineer (K8s Engineer)
UK > England

The median Kubernetes Engineer (K8s Engineer) daily rate in England is £603, according to job vacancies posted in the 6 months leading up to 24 September 2026.

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

6 months to
24 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 592 475 490
Rank change year-on-year -117 +15 +12
Contract jobs requiring a Kubernetes Engineer 50 43 26
As % of all contract jobs in England 0.11% 0.15% 0.080%
As % of the Job Titles category 0.12% 0.17% 0.086%
Number of daily rates quoted 24 35 19
10th Percentile £420 £463 £360
25th Percentile £546 £508 £523
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £603 £550 £625
Median % change year-on-year +9.55% -12.00% -0.79%
75th Percentile £666 £688 £669
90th Percentile £684 £750 £795
UK median daily rate £565 £550 £550
% change year-on-year +2.73% - -12.70%
Number of hourly rates quoted 3 1 0
10th Percentile - - -
25th Percentile - - -
Median hourly rate £77.00 £95.00 -
Median % change year-on-year -18.95% - -
75th Percentile £86.00 - -
90th Percentile £91.40 - -
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 42,964 25,407 30,277
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.24% 91.30% 92.98%
Number of daily rates quoted 25,510 16,379 18,703
10th Percentile £325 £278 £300
25th Percentile £425 £402 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £510 £525
Median % change year-on-year +2.94% -2.86% -4.11%
75th Percentile £638 £625 £638
90th Percentile £738 £735 £750
UK median daily rate £525 £500 £525
% change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -0.94%
Number of hourly rates quoted 3,556 1,389 1,420
10th Percentile £14.82 £13.75 £14.84
25th Percentile £20.75 £17.44 £21.37
Median hourly rate £42.50 £25.15 £46.18
Median % change year-on-year +68.99% -45.54% +2.62%
75th Percentile £68.00 £53.75 £67.50
90th Percentile £79.50 £70.16 £75.00
UK median hourly rate £42.00 £25.15 £43.00
% change year-on-year +67.00% -41.51% -3.37%

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 24 September 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 24 September 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 24 September 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 -77 31 £610 +1.67% 101
North of England -59 12 £610 +28.42% 13
North West -49 8 £612 +28.89% 12
Yorkshire - 4 £610 - 1
South West -37 2 - - 8
West Midlands -43 2 £528 -8.17% 2
Midlands -45 2 £528 -8.17% 4
East of England - 2 - - 12
South East -68 1 £450 - 8
Kubernetes Engineer
UK

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

For the 6 months to 24 September 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 50 (100.00%) Kubernetes
2 28 (56.00%) CI/CD
3 22 (44.00%) Infrastructure as Code
4 21 (42.00%) Terraform
5 20 (40.00%) DevOps
5 20 (40.00%) Platform Engineering
6 19 (38.00%) Infrastructure Automation
7 18 (36.00%) Python
8 17 (34.00%) Observability
9 14 (28.00%) AWS
9 14 (28.00%) Linux
9 14 (28.00%) Security Cleared
10 13 (26.00%) Containerisation
10 13 (26.00%) Docker
11 12 (24.00%) Java
12 10 (20.00%) Azure
12 10 (20.00%) OpenShift
12 10 (20.00%) Spring Boot
13 9 (18.00%) Ansible
13 9 (18.00%) Git
13 9 (18.00%) Infrastructure Engineering
14 8 (16.00%) Azure DevOps
14 8 (16.00%) Bash
14 8 (16.00%) Continuous Improvement
14 8 (16.00%) GitHub
14 8 (16.00%) GitHub Actions
14 8 (16.00%) High Availability
14 8 (16.00%) Jenkins
14 8 (16.00%) Software Engineering
14 8 (16.00%) Spring

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 4 (8.00%) Apache
1 4 (8.00%) Apache Spark
2 1 (2.00%) Apache Airflow
2 1 (2.00%) Oracle SOA Suite
2 1 (2.00%) SharePoint
Cloud Services
1 14 (28.00%) AWS
2 10 (20.00%) Azure
2 10 (20.00%) OpenShift
3 8 (16.00%) Azure DevOps
3 8 (16.00%) GitHub
3 8 (16.00%) GitHub Actions
4 6 (12.00%) GCP
5 5 (10.00%) Azure AKS
6 4 (8.00%) Amazon EKS
7 3 (6.00%) Azure Monitor
7 3 (6.00%) Google Kubernetes Engine
8 2 (4.00%) Azure API Management
9 1 (2.00%) Amazon CloudWatch
9 1 (2.00%) Amazon EC2
9 1 (2.00%) Amazon S3
9 1 (2.00%) AWS Lambda
9 1 (2.00%) Azure Machine Learning
9 1 (2.00%) Kong
9 1 (2.00%) Serverless
9 1 (2.00%) Virtual Private Cloud
Communications & Networking
1 5 (10.00%) VPN
2 3 (6.00%) BGP
2 3 (6.00%) MPLS
2 3 (6.00%) WAN
3 1 (2.00%) Calico
3 1 (2.00%) OpenLDAP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 3 (6.00%) Big Data
1 3 (6.00%) MySQL
1 3 (6.00%) Relational Database
2 2 (4.00%) PostgreSQL
3 1 (2.00%) Amazon RDS
3 1 (2.00%) Redis
Development Applications
1 9 (18.00%) Git
2 8 (16.00%) Jenkins
3 4 (8.00%) GitLab
4 2 (4.00%) CircleCI
5 1 (2.00%) Bitbucket
5 1 (2.00%) NUnit
5 1 (2.00%) PVCS
5 1 (2.00%) SonarQube
5 1 (2.00%) Sonatype Nexus
5 1 (2.00%) Visual Studio Team System
General
1 8 (16.00%) Finance
2 6 (12.00%) Banking
3 5 (10.00%) Social Skills
4 3 (6.00%) Analytical Skills
4 3 (6.00%) Law
4 3 (6.00%) Telecoms
5 1 (2.00%) Presentation Skills
5 1 (2.00%) Public Sector
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 21 (42.00%) Terraform
2 10 (20.00%) Spring Boot
3 8 (16.00%) Spring
4 7 (14.00%) Kafka
5 4 (8.00%) .NET
5 4 (8.00%) PySpark
6 3 (6.00%) Elastic Stack
6 3 (6.00%) RESTful
7 2 (4.00%) YAML
8 1 (2.00%) .NET Core
8 1 (2.00%) .NET Framework
8 1 (2.00%) ARM Templates
8 1 (2.00%) Entity Framework
8 1 (2.00%) JSON
8 1 (2.00%) Keycloak
8 1 (2.00%) LDAP
8 1 (2.00%) LINQ
8 1 (2.00%) Razor View Engine
8 1 (2.00%) React
Miscellaneous
1 17 (34.00%) Cloud Native
2 4 (8.00%) Distributed Systems
3 3 (6.00%) Management Information System
3 3 (6.00%) Private Cloud
4 2 (4.00%) PKI
5 1 (2.00%) AI Agents
5 1 (2.00%) Clustering
5 1 (2.00%) Data Centre
5 1 (2.00%) Legacy Applications
5 1 (2.00%) Product Ownership
5 1 (2.00%) Public Cloud
5 1 (2.00%) Replication
5 1 (2.00%) Self-Motivation
5 1 (2.00%) Wiki
Operating Systems
1 14 (28.00%) Linux
2 1 (2.00%) Unix
Processes & Methodologies
1 28 (56.00%) CI/CD
2 22 (44.00%) Infrastructure as Code
3 20 (40.00%) DevOps
3 20 (40.00%) Platform Engineering
4 19 (38.00%) Infrastructure Automation
5 17 (34.00%) Observability
6 13 (26.00%) Containerisation
7 9 (18.00%) Infrastructure Engineering
8 8 (16.00%) Continuous Improvement
8 8 (16.00%) High Availability
8 8 (16.00%) Software Engineering
9 7 (14.00%) Agile
9 7 (14.00%) GitOps
9 7 (14.00%) Incident Management
9 7 (14.00%) RBAC
9 7 (14.00%) Root Cause Analysis
10 6 (12.00%) Event-Driven
10 6 (12.00%) Problem-Solving
10 6 (12.00%) Site Reliability Engineering
10 6 (12.00%) Technical Leadership
Programming Languages
1 18 (36.00%) Python
2 12 (24.00%) Java
3 8 (16.00%) Bash
4 4 (8.00%) Scala
5 3 (6.00%) Bicep
5 3 (6.00%) Kotlin
6 2 (4.00%) C#
7 1 (2.00%) Groovy
7 1 (2.00%) PowerShell
7 1 (2.00%) SQL
Qualifications
1 14 (28.00%) Security Cleared
2 7 (14.00%) SC Cleared
3 6 (12.00%) DV Cleared
4 2 (4.00%) Azure Certification
4 2 (4.00%) BPSS Clearance
4 2 (4.00%) CISM
4 2 (4.00%) CISSP
4 2 (4.00%) GSEC
4 2 (4.00%) OSCP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 2 (4.00%) QA
2 1 (2.00%) ISO 15022
2 1 (2.00%) ISO 20022
System Software
1 13 (26.00%) Docker
Systems Management
1 50 (100.00%) Kubernetes
2 9 (18.00%) Ansible
3 7 (14.00%) Grafana
3 7 (14.00%) Prometheus
4 6 (12.00%) Istio
5 5 (10.00%) Argo
6 4 (8.00%) Cilium
7 2 (4.00%) linkerd
8 1 (2.00%) Kibana
8 1 (2.00%) Kustomize
Vendors
1 7 (14.00%) Microsoft
2 4 (8.00%) Red Hat
2 4 (8.00%) Splunk
3 2 (4.00%) Arista
3 2 (4.00%) Cisco
4 1 (2.00%) IBM
4 1 (2.00%) Oracle