Kubernetes Contract Job Trends in England

Kubernetes (k8s)
UK > England

The table below provides summary statistics and contractor rates for jobs advertised in England requiring Kubernetes skills. It covers contract job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 20 May 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
20 May 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 36 32 53
Rank change year-on-year -4 +21 -24
Contract jobs citing Kubernetes 2,099 1,364 1,347
As % of all contract jobs in England 5.11% 5.62% 3.70%
As % of the Systems Management category 38.27% 36.15% 30.66%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,437 946 983
10th Percentile £400 £402 £413
25th Percentile £450 £463 £475
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -4.55% - -12.00%
75th Percentile £625 £675 £650
90th Percentile £700 £788 £725
UK median daily rate £525 £550 £550
% change year-on-year -4.55% - -8.33%
Number of hourly rates quoted 49 7 13
10th Percentile £52.50 £26.00 £46.19
25th Percentile £55.00 £50.00 £52.50
Median hourly rate £65.00 £79.00 £62.00
Median % change year-on-year -17.72% +27.42% -15.07%
75th Percentile £70.00 £83.73 £74.44
90th Percentile £76.30 £88.70 £76.89
UK median hourly rate £65.00 £79.00 £64.50
% change year-on-year -17.72% +22.48% -7.86%

All Systems Management Skills
England

Kubernetes falls under the Systems Management category. For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all contract job vacancies requiring systems management skills in England.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for systems management skills 5,484 3,773 4,393
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 13.34% 15.54% 12.07%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,797 2,594 3,219
10th Percentile £319 £308 £257
25th Percentile £413 £413 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £507 £525 £520
Median % change year-on-year -3.43% +0.96% -9.57%
75th Percentile £600 £625 £625
90th Percentile £688 £715 £700
UK median daily rate £500 £520 £513
% change year-on-year -3.85% +1.46% -8.15%
Number of hourly rates quoted 138 39 105
10th Percentile £20.09 £17.55 £14.00
25th Percentile £39.65 £22.60 £17.72
Median hourly rate £56.50 £29.00 £25.77
Median % change year-on-year +94.83% +12.56% -50.75%
75th Percentile £68.75 £63.40 £48.75
90th Percentile £74.00 £83.27 £71.25
UK median hourly rate £55.00 £27.50 £25.77
% change year-on-year +100.00% +6.73% -52.44%

Kubernetes
Job Vacancy Trend in England

Historical trend showing the proportion of contract IT job postings citing Kubernetes relative to all contract IT jobs advertised in England.

Kubernetes job vacancy trend in England

Kubernetes
Daily Rate Trend in England

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in England citing Kubernetes.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in England citing Kubernetes

Kubernetes
Daily Rate Histogram in England

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Kubernetes in England over the 6 months to 20 May 2026.

Daily rate histogram for Kubernetes in England

Kubernetes
Hourly Rate Trend in England

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in England citing Kubernetes.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in England citing Kubernetes

Kubernetes
Hourly Rate Histogram in England

Hourly rate distribution of jobs citing Kubernetes in England over the 6 months to 20 May 2026.

Hourly rate histogram for Kubernetes in England

Kubernetes
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 within the England region over the 6 months to 20 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 -8 1,016 £550 -5.98% 366
North of England +9 448 £500 -4.76% 133
Yorkshire +20 255 £488 -15.22% 28
Midlands +15 215 £514 -2.10% 45
South East -8 185 £500 -2.44% 132
West Midlands +20 175 £514 -5.61% 26
South West +2 150 £570 -5.00% 77
North West -1 149 £525 +5.03% 80
North East +1 47 £450 -14.29% 25
East Midlands -10 39 £500 +13.77% 19
East of England -20 31 £588 +19.90% 31
Kubernetes
UK

Kubernetes
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 86 (4.10%) Confluence
2 77 (3.67%) Apache Spark
3 55 (2.62%) Apache
4 36 (1.72%) SAS
5 30 (1.43%) Apache Airflow
6 29 (1.38%) OpenStack
7 20 (0.95%) Jupyter
8 16 (0.76%) nginx
9 13 (0.62%) Camunda
10 8 (0.38%) Appian
11 7 (0.33%) SharePoint
11 7 (0.33%) WebLogic
12 6 (0.29%) Microsoft Exchange
13 4 (0.19%) IIS
14 3 (0.14%) Adobe Experience Manager
14 3 (0.14%) Cloud Foundry
14 3 (0.14%) Oracle Workflow
15 2 (0.095%) Apache Pulsar
15 2 (0.095%) MQSeries
15 2 (0.095%) Palantir Foundry
Applications
1 6 (0.29%) Chatbot
2 4 (0.19%) CPLEX
3 3 (0.14%) Microsoft Project
3 3 (0.14%) MS Visio
4 2 (0.095%) Adobe XD
5 1 (0.048%) Maya
5 1 (0.048%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 1 (0.048%) Weka
Business Applications
1 6 (0.29%) Maximo
2 3 (0.14%) Distributed Ledger
2 3 (0.14%) Oracle ERP
2 3 (0.14%) Payment Gateway
3 1 (0.048%) Actimize
3 1 (0.048%) Cloudability
3 1 (0.048%) Oracle EBS
3 1 (0.048%) SAP Hybris
3 1 (0.048%) SAP S/4HANA
3 1 (0.048%) Shopify
Cloud Services
1 1,050 (50.02%) AWS
2 892 (42.50%) Azure
3 503 (23.96%) GCP
4 440 (20.96%) GitHub
5 284 (13.53%) OpenShift
6 279 (13.29%) GitHub Actions
7 225 (10.72%) Azure DevOps
8 206 (9.81%) Serverless
9 170 (8.10%) Azure AKS
10 157 (7.48%) Amazon EKS
11 127 (6.05%) AWS Lambda
12 125 (5.96%) Amazon S3
13 124 (5.91%) AWS CloudFormation
14 112 (5.34%) Google Kubernetes Engine
15 92 (4.38%) Amazon EC2
16 75 (3.57%) Amazon ECS
17 66 (3.14%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 66 (3.14%) Virtual Private Cloud
18 55 (2.62%) Datadog
19 48 (2.29%) Entra ID
Communications & Networking
1 96 (4.57%) Firewall
2 90 (4.29%) DNS
3 58 (2.76%) VPN
4 54 (2.57%) Network Security
5 32 (1.52%) TCP/IP
6 28 (1.33%) SAN
7 20 (0.95%) NAS
8 18 (0.86%) HTTP
8 18 (0.86%) Reverse Proxy
9 15 (0.71%) 5G
9 15 (0.71%) DHCP
10 12 (0.57%) SSL
11 11 (0.52%) LTE
11 11 (0.52%) OpenVPN
12 10 (0.48%) Fibre Channel
12 10 (0.48%) iSCSI
13 9 (0.43%) Diameter Protocol
14 8 (0.38%) 3GPP
14 8 (0.38%) Radio Access Network
15 7 (0.33%) SMTP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 221 (10.53%) PostgreSQL
2 156 (7.43%) NoSQL
3 110 (5.24%) MongoDB
4 104 (4.95%) SQL Server
5 101 (4.81%) Relational Database
6 56 (2.67%) Amazon RDS
6 56 (2.67%) Apache Cassandra
7 54 (2.57%) Elasticsearch
8 53 (2.53%) Redis
9 49 (2.33%) Big Data
10 40 (1.91%) BigQuery
11 34 (1.62%) Power BI
12 32 (1.52%) DynamoDB
13 30 (1.43%) Data Lake
14 26 (1.24%) Flink
15 23 (1.10%) Data Warehouse
15 23 (1.10%) MySQL
16 21 (1.00%) DocumentDB
16 21 (1.00%) Pinecone
17 18 (0.86%) Pentaho
Development Applications
1 465 (22.15%) Jenkins
2 346 (16.48%) GitLab
3 307 (14.63%) Git
4 157 (7.48%) JIRA
5 71 (3.38%) JUnit
6 66 (3.14%) SonarQube
7 50 (2.38%) Selenium
8 44 (2.10%) Cucumber
9 43 (2.05%) JMeter
10 39 (1.86%) Maven
11 36 (1.72%) MLflow
12 35 (1.67%) Gradle
13 32 (1.52%) Artifactory
14 31 (1.48%) Gatling
15 27 (1.29%) Mockito
16 25 (1.19%) Bitbucket
16 25 (1.19%) Postman
17 18 (0.86%) CircleCI
17 18 (0.86%) Sonatype Nexus
18 17 (0.81%) Jaeger
General
1 471 (22.44%) Social Skills
2 353 (16.82%) Finance
3 246 (11.72%) Public Sector
4 170 (8.10%) Banking
5 141 (6.72%) Analytical Skills
6 61 (2.91%) Documentation Skills
7 27 (1.29%) Telecoms
8 26 (1.24%) Influencing Skills
9 24 (1.14%) Financial Institution
10 23 (1.10%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 17 (0.81%) Investment Banking
12 16 (0.76%) Retail
13 14 (0.67%) Legal
13 14 (0.67%) Publishing
14 13 (0.62%) Military
14 13 (0.62%) Organisational Skills
15 12 (0.57%) Front Office
15 12 (0.57%) Presentation Skills
16 9 (0.43%) Law
17 7 (0.33%) Advertising
Job Titles
1 434 (20.68%) Developer
2 341 (16.25%) DevOps Engineer
3 308 (14.67%) Senior
4 201 (9.58%) Architect
5 161 (7.67%) Java Developer
6 128 (6.10%) Lead
6 128 (6.10%) Software Engineer
7 115 (5.48%) Platform Engineer
8 101 (4.81%) Site Reliability Engineer
9 98 (4.67%) Senior Developer
10 95 (4.53%) Azure Engineer
10 95 (4.53%) Cloud Engineer
11 91 (4.34%) Java Engineer
12 89 (4.24%) AWS Engineer
13 84 (4.00%) Data Engineer
14 74 (3.53%) Python Developer
15 73 (3.48%) Site Engineer
16 67 (3.19%) Infrastructure Engineer
17 66 (3.14%) GCP Engineer
18 55 (2.62%) AWS DevOps
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 339 (16.15%) Kafka
2 318 (15.15%) Spring
3 274 (13.05%) Spring Boot
4 191 (9.10%) REST
5 170 (8.10%) RESTful
6 159 (7.58%) React
7 135 (6.43%) OpenTelemetry
8 132 (6.29%) Node.js
9 107 (5.10%) AngularJS
10 104 (4.95%) .NET
11 83 (3.95%) Elastic Stack
12 75 (3.57%) OAuth
13 63 (3.00%) FastAPI
14 60 (2.86%) PyTorch
15 58 (2.76%) OpenID
15 58 (2.76%) RabbitMQ
16 52 (2.48%) gRPC
17 51 (2.43%) JSON
18 47 (2.24%) Swagger
19 46 (2.19%) GraphQL
Miscellaneous
1 455 (21.68%) Cloud Native
2 202 (9.62%) Distributed Systems
3 79 (3.76%) Hybrid Cloud
4 63 (3.00%) Onboarding
5 58 (2.76%) Product Ownership
6 48 (2.29%) Public Cloud
7 41 (1.95%) Data Centre
8 38 (1.81%) Management Information System
9 37 (1.76%) AI Agents
9 37 (1.76%) Security Posture
10 36 (1.72%) Data Protection Act
11 35 (1.67%) Enterprise Software
11 35 (1.67%) Legacy Systems
12 33 (1.57%) Private Cloud
13 32 (1.52%) PKI
14 31 (1.48%) Greenfield Project
15 23 (1.10%) Enterprise Storage
15 23 (1.10%) Replication
16 22 (1.05%) Linux Command Line
17 19 (0.91%) Distributed Architecture
Operating Systems
1 330 (15.72%) Linux
2 117 (5.57%) Windows
3 58 (2.76%) Unix
4 50 (2.38%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 36 (1.72%) Windows Server
6 35 (1.67%) VMS
7 14 (0.67%) Ubuntu
8 7 (0.33%) Windows Server 2003
9 6 (0.29%) Android
9 6 (0.29%) Apple iOS
9 6 (0.29%) CoreOS
9 6 (0.29%) Data ONTAP
9 6 (0.29%) Rocky
10 4 (0.19%) Debian
10 4 (0.19%) Windows Server 2012
10 4 (0.19%) Windows Server 2019
11 3 (0.14%) CentOS
12 1 (0.048%) AIX
12 1 (0.048%) SUSE
12 1 (0.048%) Windows Server 2016
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,372 (65.36%) CI/CD
2 1,122 (53.45%) DevOps
3 888 (42.31%) Containerisation
4 668 (31.82%) Infrastructure as Code
5 598 (28.49%) Agile
6 539 (25.68%) Microservices
7 468 (22.30%) Observability
8 358 (17.06%) Software Engineering
9 345 (16.44%) Problem-Solving
10 291 (13.86%) AI
11 288 (13.72%) Test Automation
12 252 (12.01%) Platform Engineering
13 238 (11.34%) Site Reliability Engineering
14 234 (11.15%) Continuous Improvement
15 205 (9.77%) Migration
16 189 (9.00%) DevSecOps
17 186 (8.86%) Machine Learning
18 178 (8.48%) Data Pipeline
19 177 (8.43%) Event-Driven
20 170 (8.10%) High Availability
Programming Languages
1 799 (38.07%) Python
2 568 (27.06%) Java
3 384 (18.29%) SQL
4 251 (11.96%) Bash
5 164 (7.81%) PowerShell
6 161 (7.67%) Go
7 160 (7.62%) JavaScript
8 128 (6.10%) TypeScript
9 108 (5.15%) C#
10 67 (3.19%) Bicep
11 45 (2.14%) Scala
12 43 (2.05%) Shell Script
13 33 (1.57%) Ruby
14 24 (1.14%) Rust
15 22 (1.05%) Kotlin
16 20 (0.95%) Groovy
17 14 (0.67%) C++
18 13 (0.62%) PHP
19 11 (0.52%) Kusto Query Language
20 9 (0.43%) PL/SQL
Qualifications
1 715 (34.06%) Security Cleared
2 587 (27.97%) SC Cleared
3 132 (6.29%) Degree
4 117 (5.57%) DV Cleared
5 93 (4.43%) Azure Certification
6 85 (4.05%) Computer Science Degree
7 60 (2.86%) AWS Certification
8 46 (2.19%) CISSP
9 45 (2.14%) BPSS Clearance
10 31 (1.48%) Cisco Certification
11 28 (1.33%) CISM
12 27 (1.29%) Master's Degree
13 19 (0.91%) CCSP
14 18 (0.86%) (ISC)2 CCSP
14 18 (0.86%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
15 16 (0.76%) TOGAF Certification
16 15 (0.71%) OCP
16 15 (0.71%) Oracle Certification
17 14 (0.67%) Microsoft Certification
18 10 (0.48%) RHCE
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 125 (5.96%) QA
2 71 (3.38%) Data Quality
3 65 (3.10%) NIST
4 60 (2.86%) GDPR
5 54 (2.57%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 47 (2.24%) Accessibility
7 38 (1.81%) NCSC
8 36 (1.72%) PCI DSS
9 18 (0.86%) WCAG
10 16 (0.76%) ISO 20022
11 15 (0.71%) Sarbanes-Oxley
11 15 (0.71%) SLA
12 13 (0.62%) NIST 800
12 13 (0.62%) PSD2
13 11 (0.52%) Cyber Essentials
13 11 (0.52%) HIPAA
13 11 (0.52%) SEPA
14 9 (0.43%) GRC
15 8 (0.38%) ISO/IEC 27002 (supersedes ISO/IEC 17799)
15 8 (0.38%) SOC 2
System Software
1 1,138 (54.22%) Docker
2 67 (3.19%) VMware Infrastructure
3 48 (2.29%) Virtual Machines
4 42 (2.00%) vSphere
5 31 (1.48%) Active Directory
6 26 (1.24%) VMware NSX
7 20 (0.95%) Hyper-V
8 19 (0.91%) Slurm Workload Manager
9 17 (0.81%) NFS
10 15 (0.71%) VMware ESXi
11 14 (0.67%) Squid
12 7 (0.33%) BitLocker
12 7 (0.33%) Microsoft App-V
12 7 (0.33%) Virtual Desktop
13 5 (0.24%) etcd
13 5 (0.24%) Snort
14 4 (0.19%) Ceph
14 4 (0.19%) Firmware
14 4 (0.19%) Lustre
15 2 (0.095%) GridGain
Systems Management
1 769 (36.64%) Terraform
2 345 (16.44%) Ansible
3 332 (15.82%) Grafana
4 327 (15.58%) Prometheus
5 120 (5.72%) Argo
6 59 (2.81%) Istio
7 53 (2.53%) Puppet
8 33 (1.57%) Kibana
8 33 (1.57%) vCenter Server
9 29 (1.38%) Podman
9 29 (1.38%) Progress Chef
10 26 (1.24%) Single Sign-On
11 24 (1.14%) Nessus
12 18 (0.86%) Packer
12 18 (0.86%) Rancher
13 16 (0.76%) Control-M
13 16 (0.76%) IBM Guardium
14 14 (0.67%) Consul
14 14 (0.67%) Kustomize
15 13 (0.62%) linkerd
Vendors
1 234 (11.15%) Microsoft
2 167 (7.96%) Splunk
3 134 (6.38%) Red Hat
4 132 (6.29%) Google
5 93 (4.43%) VMware
6 91 (4.34%) Oracle
7 78 (3.72%) Dynatrace
8 47 (2.24%) Databricks
9 41 (1.95%) OpenAI
10 31 (1.48%) AppDynamics
11 26 (1.24%) Pure Storage
12 25 (1.19%) Tenable
13 23 (1.10%) IBM
14 22 (1.05%) Okta
15 21 (1.00%) NetApp
15 21 (1.00%) ServiceNow
16 19 (0.91%) CyberArk
16 19 (0.91%) Talend
17 18 (0.86%) Cisco
17 18 (0.86%) New Relic