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 1 April 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
1 Apr 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 32 30 57
Rank change year-on-year -2 +27 -28
Contract jobs citing Kubernetes 2,169 1,479 1,307
As % of all contract jobs in England 5.68% 6.10% 3.47%
As % of the Systems Management category 39.19% 38.41% 29.01%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,470 1,042 958
10th Percentile £400 £406 £413
25th Percentile £450 £475 £475
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £575 £550
Median % change year-on-year -8.70% +4.55% -12.00%
75th Percentile £625 £688 £675
90th Percentile £713 £812 £738
UK median daily rate £525 £565 £550
% change year-on-year -7.08% +2.73% -10.20%
Number of hourly rates quoted 52 7 16
10th Percentile - £26.00 £46.18
25th Percentile £52.50 £41.38 £50.94
Median hourly rate £65.00 £60.00 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +8.33% - -14.29%
75th Percentile £70.00 £73.44 £68.81
90th Percentile £85.70 £80.40 £75.97
UK median hourly rate £65.00 £60.00 £60.00
% change year-on-year +8.33% - -14.29%

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 5,534 3,851 4,506
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 14.50% 15.88% 11.96%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,821 2,638 3,290
10th Percentile £313 £315 £250
25th Percentile £413 £420 £409
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -8.70%
75th Percentile £600 £638 £630
90th Percentile £700 £738 £710
UK median daily rate £500 £525 £525
% change year-on-year -4.76% - -8.70%
Number of hourly rates quoted 136 39 128
10th Percentile £20.09 £15.22 £14.00
25th Percentile £31.58 £22.32 £17.77
Median hourly rate £55.00 £26.50 £27.88
Median % change year-on-year +107.55% -4.96% -50.43%
75th Percentile £68.75 £61.63 £54.06
90th Percentile £76.88 £77.74 £67.65
UK median hourly rate £55.00 £26.48 £30.75
% change year-on-year +107.74% -13.90% -46.52%

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 1 April 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 1 April 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 1 April 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 -10 998 £550 -8.33% 315
North of England +6 453 £500 -4.76% 157
Midlands +35 284 £520 -0.95% 57
West Midlands +35 247 £523 -1.80% 38
Yorkshire +13 239 £487 -16.39% 47
South East -4 189 £500 -9.09% 147
North West +7 172 £531 +6.23% 85
South West 0 155 £550 -8.33% 80
North East 0 46 £475 -7.77% 25
East Midlands -10 36 £449 -5.58% 19
East of England -21 32 £613 +25.00% 32
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
1 101 (4.66%) Confluence
2 73 (3.37%) SAS
3 63 (2.90%) Apache Spark
4 51 (2.35%) Apache
5 35 (1.61%) nginx
6 31 (1.43%) Apache Airflow
7 30 (1.38%) OpenStack
8 17 (0.78%) Jupyter
9 10 (0.46%) Camunda
10 8 (0.37%) Appian
10 8 (0.37%) WebLogic
11 7 (0.32%) SharePoint
12 6 (0.28%) Microsoft Exchange
13 4 (0.18%) Drupal
14 3 (0.14%) Adobe Experience Manager
14 3 (0.14%) CMS
14 3 (0.14%) IIS
15 2 (0.092%) Oracle SOA Suite
15 2 (0.092%) Oracle Spatial
15 2 (0.092%) Oracle Workflow
Applications
1 5 (0.23%) Microsoft Excel
2 4 (0.18%) Microsoft Office
2 4 (0.18%) Weka
3 3 (0.14%) Chatbot
3 3 (0.14%) Microsoft Project
3 3 (0.14%) MS Visio
4 2 (0.092%) Adobe XD
4 2 (0.092%) CPLEX
5 1 (0.046%) Maya
5 1 (0.046%) Microsoft PowerPoint
Business Applications
1 8 (0.37%) Maximo
2 3 (0.14%) Distributed Ledger
3 2 (0.092%) Payment Gateway
4 1 (0.046%) Actimize
4 1 (0.046%) Cloudability
4 1 (0.046%) Oracle EBS
4 1 (0.046%) SAP Hybris
4 1 (0.046%) SAP S/4HANA
4 1 (0.046%) Shopify
Cloud Services
1 1,118 (51.54%) AWS
2 890 (41.03%) Azure
3 518 (23.88%) GCP
4 474 (21.85%) GitHub
5 325 (14.98%) OpenShift
6 279 (12.86%) GitHub Actions
7 231 (10.65%) Serverless
8 210 (9.68%) Azure DevOps
9 163 (7.51%) Amazon EKS
10 159 (7.33%) Azure AKS
11 150 (6.92%) AWS CloudFormation
12 138 (6.36%) Amazon S3
13 131 (6.04%) AWS Lambda
14 104 (4.79%) Amazon EC2
15 102 (4.70%) Google Kubernetes Engine
16 84 (3.87%) Amazon ECS
17 69 (3.18%) Virtual Private Cloud
18 68 (3.14%) Datadog
19 63 (2.90%) Amazon CloudWatch
20 57 (2.63%) Entra ID
Communications & Networking
1 110 (5.07%) Firewall
2 91 (4.20%) DNS
3 49 (2.26%) Network Security
3 49 (2.26%) VPN
4 37 (1.71%) TCP/IP
5 23 (1.06%) SAN
6 19 (0.88%) HTTP
7 17 (0.78%) DHCP
8 15 (0.69%) NAS
8 15 (0.69%) Reverse Proxy
9 11 (0.51%) OpenVPN
9 11 (0.51%) SSL
10 10 (0.46%) Fibre Channel
10 10 (0.46%) iSCSI
11 7 (0.32%) 5G
11 7 (0.32%) BGP
11 7 (0.32%) SMTP
12 6 (0.28%) 3GPP
12 6 (0.28%) 4G
12 6 (0.28%) Kerberos
Database & Business Intelligence
1 256 (11.80%) PostgreSQL
2 190 (8.76%) NoSQL
3 123 (5.67%) MongoDB
4 105 (4.84%) Relational Database
5 87 (4.01%) SQL Server
6 73 (3.37%) Apache Cassandra
7 65 (3.00%) Amazon RDS
7 65 (3.00%) Elasticsearch
8 45 (2.07%) Redis
9 42 (1.94%) Big Data
10 40 (1.84%) Power BI
11 36 (1.66%) MySQL
12 34 (1.57%) Data Lake
12 34 (1.57%) Pentaho
13 32 (1.48%) BigQuery
14 28 (1.29%) DynamoDB
15 27 (1.24%) Data Warehouse
16 25 (1.15%) Flink
17 23 (1.06%) Oracle Database
18 19 (0.88%) Hadoop
Development Applications
1 546 (25.17%) Jenkins
2 405 (18.67%) GitLab
3 388 (17.89%) Git
4 180 (8.30%) JIRA
5 101 (4.66%) JUnit
6 65 (3.00%) Selenium
7 57 (2.63%) SonarQube
8 54 (2.49%) Cucumber
9 43 (1.98%) Artifactory
10 40 (1.84%) MLflow
11 39 (1.80%) JMeter
12 37 (1.71%) Maven
13 35 (1.61%) Bitbucket
14 34 (1.57%) Mockito
15 32 (1.48%) Gradle
16 29 (1.34%) Sonatype Nexus
17 26 (1.20%) Gatling
18 23 (1.06%) Postman
19 19 (0.88%) CircleCI
20 15 (0.69%) WebDriver
General
1 570 (26.28%) Social Skills
2 359 (16.55%) Finance
3 271 (12.49%) Public Sector
4 186 (8.58%) Banking
5 152 (7.01%) Analytical Skills
6 58 (2.67%) Documentation Skills
7 32 (1.48%) Financial Institution
8 28 (1.29%) Influencing Skills
9 25 (1.15%) Telecoms
10 21 (0.97%) Front Office
11 19 (0.88%) Presentation Skills
12 18 (0.83%) Investment Banking
13 15 (0.69%) Retail
14 14 (0.65%) Inclusion and Diversity
14 14 (0.65%) Military
15 12 (0.55%) Organisational Skills
16 11 (0.51%) Legal
17 10 (0.46%) Aerospace
18 8 (0.37%) Publishing
19 6 (0.28%) Games
Job Titles
1 454 (20.93%) Developer
2 331 (15.26%) Senior
3 295 (13.60%) DevOps Engineer
4 217 (10.00%) Architect
5 154 (7.10%) Java Developer
6 138 (6.36%) Software Engineer
7 119 (5.49%) Lead
8 112 (5.16%) Platform Engineer
9 105 (4.84%) Cloud Engineer
10 103 (4.75%) Senior Developer
11 101 (4.66%) Site Reliability Engineer
12 100 (4.61%) Data Engineer
13 97 (4.47%) AWS Engineer
14 86 (3.96%) Azure Engineer
15 79 (3.64%) Java Engineer
16 77 (3.55%) Python Developer
17 75 (3.46%) Site Engineer
18 70 (3.23%) AWS DevOps
19 66 (3.04%) GCP Engineer
20 64 (2.95%) Full-Stack Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 354 (16.32%) Kafka
2 308 (14.20%) Spring
3 262 (12.08%) Spring Boot
4 222 (10.24%) REST
5 205 (9.45%) RESTful
6 165 (7.61%) React
7 157 (7.24%) Node.js
8 124 (5.72%) OpenTelemetry
9 123 (5.67%) Elastic Stack
10 115 (5.30%) AngularJS
11 101 (4.66%) .NET
12 75 (3.46%) gRPC
13 74 (3.41%) OAuth
13 74 (3.41%) PyTorch
14 61 (2.81%) FastAPI
15 57 (2.63%) RabbitMQ
15 57 (2.63%) TensorFlow
16 56 (2.58%) GraphQL
17 55 (2.54%) OpenID
17 55 (2.54%) Playwright
Miscellaneous
1 437 (20.15%) Cloud Native
2 192 (8.85%) Distributed Systems
3 91 (4.20%) Hybrid Cloud
4 69 (3.18%) Public Cloud
5 60 (2.77%) Onboarding
5 60 (2.77%) Product Ownership
6 37 (1.71%) Data Centre
6 37 (1.71%) Enterprise Software
7 36 (1.66%) Data Protection Act
8 35 (1.61%) AI Agents
8 35 (1.61%) Legacy Systems
8 35 (1.61%) Private Cloud
9 33 (1.52%) Management Information System
10 28 (1.29%) PKI
10 28 (1.29%) Security Posture
11 26 (1.20%) Virtual Team
12 24 (1.11%) Greenfield Project
13 21 (0.97%) Enterprise Storage
14 20 (0.92%) Replication
15 19 (0.88%) Fixed Income
Operating Systems
1 412 (18.99%) Linux
2 117 (5.39%) Windows
3 64 (2.95%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 59 (2.72%) Unix
5 45 (2.07%) VMS
6 28 (1.29%) Windows Server
7 20 (0.92%) Ubuntu
8 7 (0.32%) Windows Server 2003
9 5 (0.23%) CentOS
9 5 (0.23%) CoreOS
9 5 (0.23%) Data ONTAP
10 4 (0.18%) Apple iOS
10 4 (0.18%) Rocky
10 4 (0.18%) Windows Server 2012
10 4 (0.18%) Windows Server 2019
11 3 (0.14%) Android
11 3 (0.14%) Debian
12 1 (0.046%) Alpine Linux
12 1 (0.046%) Windows Server 2016
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,410 (65.01%) CI/CD
2 1,156 (53.30%) DevOps
3 933 (43.02%) Containerisation
4 698 (32.18%) Agile
5 658 (30.34%) Infrastructure as Code
6 569 (26.23%) Microservices
7 439 (20.24%) Observability
8 436 (20.10%) Problem-Solving
9 362 (16.69%) Software Engineering
10 330 (15.21%) Test Automation
11 278 (12.82%) AI
12 231 (10.65%) Continuous Improvement
13 224 (10.33%) Analytics
13 224 (10.33%) Migration
14 221 (10.19%) Platform Engineering
15 217 (10.00%) Site Reliability Engineering
16 203 (9.36%) Data Pipeline
17 196 (9.04%) DevSecOps
18 195 (8.99%) Machine Learning
19 194 (8.94%) Scrum
Programming Languages
1 882 (40.66%) Python
2 543 (25.03%) Java
3 405 (18.67%) SQL
4 272 (12.54%) Bash
5 186 (8.58%) Go
6 151 (6.96%) JavaScript
7 139 (6.41%) PowerShell
8 134 (6.18%) TypeScript
9 96 (4.43%) C#
10 68 (3.14%) Bicep
11 57 (2.63%) Shell Script
12 41 (1.89%) Ruby
13 35 (1.61%) Scala
14 26 (1.20%) Kotlin
15 21 (0.97%) Rust
16 18 (0.83%) C++
16 18 (0.83%) Groovy
17 14 (0.65%) PHP
18 12 (0.55%) C
18 12 (0.55%) Kusto Query Language
Qualifications
1 774 (35.68%) Security Cleared
2 625 (28.82%) SC Cleared
3 147 (6.78%) Degree
4 125 (5.76%) DV Cleared
5 109 (5.03%) Azure Certification
6 102 (4.70%) Computer Science Degree
7 83 (3.83%) AWS Certification
8 51 (2.35%) CISSP
9 48 (2.21%) BPSS Clearance
10 44 (2.03%) Master's Degree
11 31 (1.43%) CISM
12 29 (1.34%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 22 (1.01%) Cisco Certification
14 21 (0.97%) Microsoft Certification
15 20 (0.92%) OCP
15 20 (0.92%) Oracle Certification
16 16 (0.74%) TOGAF Certification
17 14 (0.65%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
18 13 (0.60%) CCSP
19 12 (0.55%) (ISC)2 CCSP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 124 (5.72%) QA
2 80 (3.69%) Data Quality
3 69 (3.18%) NIST
4 66 (3.04%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 59 (2.72%) GDPR
6 48 (2.21%) NCSC
7 44 (2.03%) Accessibility
8 32 (1.48%) PCI DSS
9 20 (0.92%) WCAG
10 16 (0.74%) ISO 20022
10 16 (0.74%) NIST 800
11 15 (0.69%) PSD2
12 13 (0.60%) Cyber Essentials
13 12 (0.55%) Sarbanes-Oxley
14 11 (0.51%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
15 10 (0.46%) SEPA
16 9 (0.41%) HIPAA
16 9 (0.41%) SLA
17 8 (0.37%) GRC
17 8 (0.37%) ISO/IEC 27002 (supersedes ISO/IEC 17799)
System Software
1 1,278 (58.92%) Docker
2 75 (3.46%) VMware Infrastructure
3 59 (2.72%) vSphere
4 47 (2.17%) Virtual Machines
5 40 (1.84%) Active Directory
6 32 (1.48%) VMware NSX
7 23 (1.06%) Slurm Workload Manager
8 19 (0.88%) Hyper-V
9 14 (0.65%) NFS
10 12 (0.55%) Squid
11 10 (0.46%) VMware ESXi
12 8 (0.37%) Lustre
13 7 (0.32%) BitLocker
13 7 (0.32%) Microsoft App-V
13 7 (0.32%) Virtual Desktop
14 6 (0.28%) GPFS
14 6 (0.28%) Snort
15 5 (0.23%) etcd
16 4 (0.18%) Ceph
16 4 (0.18%) Firmware
Systems Management
1 814 (37.53%) Terraform
2 364 (16.78%) Grafana
3 361 (16.64%) Ansible
4 332 (15.31%) Prometheus
5 134 (6.18%) Argo
6 58 (2.67%) Istio
7 49 (2.26%) Puppet
8 40 (1.84%) Progress Chef
9 39 (1.80%) Kibana
10 36 (1.66%) vCenter Server
11 28 (1.29%) Single Sign-On
12 27 (1.24%) Packer
13 26 (1.20%) Podman
14 24 (1.11%) Nessus
15 22 (1.01%) Consul
15 22 (1.01%) Rancher
16 14 (0.65%) Kustomize
17 13 (0.60%) Fluentd
17 13 (0.60%) IBM Guardium
17 13 (0.60%) linkerd
Vendors
1 248 (11.43%) Microsoft
2 191 (8.81%) Splunk
3 161 (7.42%) Red Hat
4 154 (7.10%) Google
5 116 (5.35%) Oracle
6 111 (5.12%) VMware
7 64 (2.95%) Databricks
8 60 (2.77%) Dynatrace
9 49 (2.26%) OpenAI
10 35 (1.61%) Talend
11 34 (1.57%) Denodo
12 33 (1.52%) Pure Storage
13 25 (1.15%) IBM
14 21 (0.97%) Atlassian
14 21 (0.97%) Tenable
15 20 (0.92%) AppDynamics
16 19 (0.88%) Foundry
16 19 (0.88%) NetApp
17 18 (0.83%) ServiceNow
18 17 (0.78%) CyberArk