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 18 February 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
18 Feb 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 31 31 56
Rank change year-on-year 0 +25 -25
Contract jobs citing Kubernetes 2,096 1,474 1,371
As % of all contract jobs in England 6.06% 5.71% 3.64%
As % of the Systems Management category 39.41% 38.00% 29.59%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,434 1,023 1,007
10th Percentile £394 £409 £425
25th Percentile £450 £500 £475
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £600 £570
Median % change year-on-year -12.50% +5.26% -8.80%
75th Percentile £638 £700 £675
90th Percentile £713 £810 £750
UK median daily rate £525 £575 £563
% change year-on-year -8.70% +2.22% -9.27%
Number of hourly rates quoted 41 6 29
10th Percentile £51.25 £25.88 -
25th Percentile £52.50 £33.94 £46.18
Median hourly rate £60.00 £58.75 £62.00
Median % change year-on-year +2.13% -5.24% -3.13%
75th Percentile £78.75 £66.13 £76.53
90th Percentile £89.00 £71.31 £77.60
UK median hourly rate £60.00 £58.75 £62.00
% change year-on-year +2.13% -5.24% -3.13%

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 5,319 3,879 4,633
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 15.38% 15.03% 12.28%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,676 2,529 3,367
10th Percentile £313 £313 £250
25th Percentile £413 £425 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £538 £525
Median % change year-on-year -6.98% +2.38% -9.87%
75th Percentile £600 £650 £638
90th Percentile £700 £750 £725
UK median daily rate £500 £525 £525
% change year-on-year -4.76% - -8.70%
Number of hourly rates quoted 121 42 150
10th Percentile £17.38 £15.22 £14.00
25th Percentile £20.82 £21.01 £20.31
Median hourly rate £52.50 £26.00 £42.03
Median % change year-on-year +101.92% -38.14% -16.88%
75th Percentile £63.32 £63.06 £60.00
90th Percentile £77.50 £77.19 £76.53
UK median hourly rate £52.50 £25.50 £46.18
% change year-on-year +105.88% -44.78% -4.78%

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 18 February 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 18 February 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 18 February 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 -5 991 £550 -8.33% 298
North of England +11 432 £482 -8.19% 146
Midlands +57 261 £530 +0.95% 56
West Midlands +48 232 £537 -0.09% 38
Yorkshire +16 224 £482 -16.17% 50
South East -1 182 £483 -12.27% 162
North West +17 169 £478 -4.50% 77
South West +4 140 £575 -4.17% 92
North East -3 43 £530 +1.92% 19
East of England -7 40 £600 +9.09% 25
East Midlands -2 28 £438 -4.68% 17
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 88 (4.20%) Confluence
2 58 (2.77%) SAS
3 52 (2.48%) Apache Spark
4 35 (1.67%) Apache
4 35 (1.67%) nginx
5 28 (1.34%) OpenStack
6 26 (1.24%) Apache Airflow
7 17 (0.81%) Jupyter
8 11 (0.52%) Camunda
9 10 (0.48%) WebLogic
10 9 (0.43%) SharePoint
11 8 (0.38%) Appian
12 5 (0.24%) Ethereum
12 5 (0.24%) Hyperledger
12 5 (0.24%) Microsoft Exchange
13 4 (0.19%) Drupal
13 4 (0.19%) IIS
13 4 (0.19%) Traefik
14 3 (0.14%) Adobe Experience Manager
14 3 (0.14%) CMS
Applications
1 5 (0.24%) Chatbot
1 5 (0.24%) Microsoft Excel
1 5 (0.24%) Microsoft Office
1 5 (0.24%) Weka
2 3 (0.14%) Microsoft Project
3 2 (0.095%) Adobe XD
4 1 (0.048%) CPLEX
4 1 (0.048%) Maya
4 1 (0.048%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 1 (0.048%) MS Visio
Business Applications
1 9 (0.43%) Maximo
2 2 (0.095%) Payment Gateway
3 1 (0.048%) Actimize
3 1 (0.048%) Cloudability
3 1 (0.048%) Endur
3 1 (0.048%) Oracle EBS
3 1 (0.048%) SAP S/4HANA
Cloud Services
1 1,089 (51.96%) AWS
2 793 (37.83%) Azure
3 516 (24.62%) GCP
4 468 (22.33%) GitHub
5 291 (13.88%) OpenShift
6 265 (12.64%) GitHub Actions
7 232 (11.07%) Serverless
8 189 (9.02%) Azure DevOps
9 162 (7.73%) Amazon EKS
10 148 (7.06%) Azure AKS
11 143 (6.82%) AWS CloudFormation
12 140 (6.68%) Amazon S3
13 137 (6.54%) AWS Lambda
14 99 (4.72%) Amazon EC2
15 96 (4.58%) Google Kubernetes Engine
16 95 (4.53%) Amazon ECS
17 72 (3.44%) Amazon CloudWatch
18 66 (3.15%) Datadog
19 60 (2.86%) Virtual Private Cloud
20 54 (2.58%) Entra ID
Communications & Networking
1 102 (4.87%) Firewall
2 77 (3.67%) DNS
3 44 (2.10%) Network Security
4 42 (2.00%) VPN
5 38 (1.81%) TCP/IP
6 19 (0.91%) HTTP
6 19 (0.91%) SSL
7 16 (0.76%) DHCP
8 15 (0.72%) SAN
9 12 (0.57%) Reverse Proxy
10 11 (0.52%) NAS
11 8 (0.38%) Kerberos
12 7 (0.33%) Fibre Channel
12 7 (0.33%) OpenVPN
13 6 (0.29%) BGP
13 6 (0.29%) iSCSI
13 6 (0.29%) VLAN
14 5 (0.24%) HTTPS
14 5 (0.24%) InfiniBand
14 5 (0.24%) Software-Defined Networking
Database & Business Intelligence
1 258 (12.31%) PostgreSQL
2 186 (8.87%) NoSQL
3 135 (6.44%) MongoDB
4 89 (4.25%) Relational Database
5 83 (3.96%) Apache Cassandra
6 80 (3.82%) Elasticsearch
7 70 (3.34%) Amazon RDS
8 65 (3.10%) SQL Server
9 49 (2.34%) Redis
10 43 (2.05%) MySQL
11 39 (1.86%) Big Data
12 37 (1.77%) Power BI
13 33 (1.57%) BigQuery
14 30 (1.43%) Data Warehouse
14 30 (1.43%) DynamoDB
15 27 (1.29%) Data Lake
16 26 (1.24%) Oracle Database
16 26 (1.24%) Pentaho
17 21 (1.00%) Hadoop
18 19 (0.91%) Tableau
Development Applications
1 516 (24.62%) Jenkins
2 410 (19.56%) GitLab
3 360 (17.18%) Git
4 173 (8.25%) JIRA
5 76 (3.63%) JUnit
6 52 (2.48%) SonarQube
7 49 (2.34%) Selenium
8 43 (2.05%) Sonatype Nexus
9 42 (2.00%) Gradle
10 41 (1.96%) MLflow
11 39 (1.86%) Cucumber
12 38 (1.81%) Artifactory
12 38 (1.81%) Bitbucket
12 38 (1.81%) Maven
13 32 (1.53%) Mockito
14 27 (1.29%) CircleCI
14 27 (1.29%) JMeter
15 26 (1.24%) Postman
16 23 (1.10%) Liquibase
17 17 (0.81%) Gatling
General
1 571 (27.24%) Social Skills
2 352 (16.79%) Finance
3 257 (12.26%) Public Sector
4 189 (9.02%) Banking
5 165 (7.87%) Analytical Skills
6 57 (2.72%) Documentation Skills
7 37 (1.77%) Financial Institution
8 26 (1.24%) Influencing Skills
9 24 (1.15%) Front Office
10 23 (1.10%) Investment Banking
11 18 (0.86%) Telecoms
12 17 (0.81%) Inclusion and Diversity
12 17 (0.81%) Presentation Skills
13 12 (0.57%) Retail
14 11 (0.52%) Military
14 11 (0.52%) Pharmaceutical
15 8 (0.38%) Aerospace
16 7 (0.33%) Law
17 6 (0.29%) Billing
17 6 (0.29%) Games
Job Titles
1 476 (22.71%) Developer
2 320 (15.27%) Senior
3 310 (14.79%) DevOps Engineer
4 186 (8.87%) Architect
5 144 (6.87%) Java Developer
6 136 (6.49%) Software Engineer
7 108 (5.15%) AWS Engineer
8 106 (5.06%) Senior Developer
9 105 (5.01%) Lead
10 103 (4.91%) Site Reliability Engineer
11 97 (4.63%) Cloud Engineer
12 95 (4.53%) Platform Engineer
13 88 (4.20%) Python Developer
14 81 (3.86%) Full-Stack Developer
15 80 (3.82%) Data Engineer
16 76 (3.63%) Azure Engineer
16 76 (3.63%) Site Engineer
17 73 (3.48%) AWS DevOps
17 73 (3.48%) Java Engineer
18 65 (3.10%) GCP Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 341 (16.27%) Kafka
2 288 (13.74%) Spring
3 256 (12.21%) Spring Boot
4 218 (10.40%) REST
5 210 (10.02%) RESTful
6 189 (9.02%) React
7 168 (8.02%) Node.js
8 137 (6.54%) Elastic Stack
9 113 (5.39%) AngularJS
10 105 (5.01%) OpenTelemetry
11 98 (4.68%) .NET
12 84 (4.01%) PyTorch
13 83 (3.96%) gRPC
14 82 (3.91%) FastAPI
15 69 (3.29%) GraphQL
16 67 (3.20%) OAuth
16 67 (3.20%) TensorFlow
17 66 (3.15%) HTML
18 61 (2.91%) Playwright
19 56 (2.67%) RabbitMQ
Miscellaneous
1 414 (19.75%) Cloud Native
2 170 (8.11%) Distributed Systems
3 80 (3.82%) Hybrid Cloud
4 72 (3.44%) Public Cloud
5 60 (2.86%) Onboarding
5 60 (2.86%) Product Ownership
6 42 (2.00%) Private Cloud
7 39 (1.86%) Enterprise Software
8 34 (1.62%) Data Protection Act
9 33 (1.57%) Legacy Systems
10 31 (1.48%) Management Information System
11 29 (1.38%) PKI
12 26 (1.24%) AI Agents
12 26 (1.24%) Algorithms
13 24 (1.15%) Data Centre
14 23 (1.10%) Greenfield Project
14 23 (1.10%) Virtual Team
15 21 (1.00%) Security Posture
16 20 (0.95%) NHS
17 19 (0.91%) Replication
Operating Systems
1 423 (20.18%) Linux
2 104 (4.96%) Windows
3 71 (3.39%) Unix
4 61 (2.91%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 41 (1.96%) VMS
6 26 (1.24%) Windows Server
7 23 (1.10%) Ubuntu
8 13 (0.62%) CentOS
9 5 (0.24%) Apple iOS
10 4 (0.19%) Android
10 4 (0.19%) Windows Server 2003
10 4 (0.19%) Windows Server 2012
10 4 (0.19%) Windows Server 2019
11 3 (0.14%) Solaris
12 2 (0.095%) CoreOS
12 2 (0.095%) Data ONTAP
12 2 (0.095%) Rocky
13 1 (0.048%) Alpine Linux
13 1 (0.048%) Debian
13 1 (0.048%) Windows Server 2016
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,379 (65.79%) CI/CD
2 1,138 (54.29%) DevOps
3 926 (44.18%) Containerisation
4 669 (31.92%) Agile
5 624 (29.77%) Infrastructure as Code
6 566 (27.00%) Microservices
7 467 (22.28%) Problem-Solving
8 403 (19.23%) Observability
9 369 (17.60%) Software Engineering
10 298 (14.22%) Test Automation
11 247 (11.78%) AI
12 222 (10.59%) Migration
13 210 (10.02%) Site Reliability Engineering
14 205 (9.78%) Analytics
15 198 (9.45%) Continuous Improvement
16 189 (9.02%) DevSecOps
17 184 (8.78%) Machine Learning
18 183 (8.73%) Full-Stack Development
19 177 (8.44%) Platform Engineering
20 164 (7.82%) Data Pipeline
Programming Languages
1 917 (43.75%) Python
2 540 (25.76%) Java
3 372 (17.75%) SQL
4 265 (12.64%) Bash
5 218 (10.40%) Go
6 172 (8.21%) JavaScript
7 167 (7.97%) TypeScript
8 118 (5.63%) PowerShell
9 90 (4.29%) C#
10 65 (3.10%) Bicep
11 61 (2.91%) Shell Script
12 51 (2.43%) Ruby
13 33 (1.57%) C++
13 33 (1.57%) Kotlin
14 31 (1.48%) Scala
15 29 (1.38%) Rust
16 18 (0.86%) PHP
17 17 (0.81%) Groovy
18 16 (0.76%) Kusto Query Language
19 15 (0.72%) Perl
Qualifications
1 724 (34.54%) Security Cleared
2 592 (28.24%) SC Cleared
3 164 (7.82%) Degree
4 128 (6.11%) DV Cleared
5 124 (5.92%) Computer Science Degree
6 96 (4.58%) Azure Certification
7 92 (4.39%) AWS Certification
8 55 (2.62%) Master's Degree
9 50 (2.39%) CISSP
10 45 (2.15%) BPSS Clearance
11 34 (1.62%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
12 31 (1.48%) CISM
13 26 (1.24%) Microsoft Certification
14 21 (1.00%) TOGAF Certification
15 20 (0.95%) Cisco Certification
16 16 (0.76%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
17 15 (0.72%) OCP
17 15 (0.72%) Oracle Certification
18 12 (0.57%) CCSP
19 11 (0.52%) (ISC)2 CCSP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 111 (5.30%) QA
2 65 (3.10%) ISO/IEC 27001
3 64 (3.05%) NIST
4 57 (2.72%) Data Quality
5 50 (2.39%) NCSC
6 44 (2.10%) GDPR
7 39 (1.86%) Accessibility
8 32 (1.53%) PCI DSS
9 18 (0.86%) ISO 20022
9 18 (0.86%) PSD2
10 15 (0.72%) WCAG
11 13 (0.62%) SEPA
12 11 (0.52%) NIST 800
12 11 (0.52%) SLA
13 9 (0.43%) SOC 2
14 8 (0.38%) Sarbanes-Oxley
15 7 (0.33%) EU AI Act
15 7 (0.33%) HIPAA
15 7 (0.33%) JSP 440
16 6 (0.29%) Cyber Essentials
System Software
1 1,300 (62.02%) Docker
2 68 (3.24%) VMware Infrastructure
3 50 (2.39%) vSphere
4 46 (2.19%) Virtual Machines
5 41 (1.96%) Active Directory
6 27 (1.29%) VMware NSX
7 21 (1.00%) Slurm Workload Manager
8 14 (0.67%) Hyper-V
9 11 (0.52%) Squid
10 9 (0.43%) Lustre
11 8 (0.38%) NFS
12 7 (0.33%) GPFS
12 7 (0.33%) KVM
12 7 (0.33%) Snort
13 6 (0.29%) VMware ESXi
14 5 (0.24%) Virtual Desktop
15 4 (0.19%) BitLocker
15 4 (0.19%) Microsoft App-V
15 4 (0.19%) Virtual Servers
16 3 (0.14%) Firmware
Systems Management
1 796 (37.98%) Terraform
2 357 (17.03%) Ansible
3 355 (16.94%) Grafana
4 317 (15.12%) Prometheus
5 117 (5.58%) Argo
6 55 (2.62%) Kibana
7 51 (2.43%) Istio
8 50 (2.39%) Puppet
9 38 (1.81%) Progress Chef
10 33 (1.57%) Nessus
11 28 (1.34%) Single Sign-On
12 27 (1.29%) Podman
13 26 (1.24%) vCenter Server
14 24 (1.15%) Packer
15 21 (1.00%) Consul
15 21 (1.00%) Control-M
15 21 (1.00%) IBM Guardium
15 21 (1.00%) logstash
16 15 (0.72%) Rancher
17 13 (0.62%) Docker Swarm
Vendors
1 218 (10.40%) Microsoft
2 193 (9.21%) Splunk
3 170 (8.11%) Google
4 143 (6.82%) Red Hat
5 115 (5.49%) Oracle
6 102 (4.87%) VMware
7 62 (2.96%) Databricks
8 52 (2.48%) Dynatrace
9 49 (2.34%) OpenAI
10 26 (1.24%) Denodo
10 26 (1.24%) Talend
10 26 (1.24%) Tenable
11 23 (1.10%) Atlassian
11 23 (1.10%) IBM
11 23 (1.10%) Pure Storage
12 19 (0.91%) AppDynamics
13 16 (0.76%) CyberArk
14 15 (0.72%) Foundry
15 14 (0.67%) NVIDIA
16 13 (0.62%) ServiceNow