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

6 months to
18 Jan 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 32 32 49
Rank change year-on-year 0 +17 -17
Contract jobs citing Kubernetes 1,960 1,486 1,460
As % of all contract jobs in England 6.16% 5.53% 3.97%
As % of the Systems Management category 39.22% 37.85% 30.62%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,357 1,012 1,088
10th Percentile £400 £413 £425
25th Percentile £450 £500 £488
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £600 £575
Median % change year-on-year -12.50% +4.35% -8.00%
75th Percentile £638 £700 £675
90th Percentile £700 £810 £750
UK median daily rate £525 £575 £575
% change year-on-year -8.70% - -8.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 36 10 37
10th Percentile £48.75 £26.38 -
25th Percentile £52.50 £46.18 £46.18
Median hourly rate £58.75 £51.84 £55.00
Median % change year-on-year +13.33% -5.75% -17.91%
75th Percentile £79.25 £66.13 £76.53
90th Percentile £101.25 £74.04 £77.70
UK median hourly rate £60.00 £51.84 £55.00
% change year-on-year +15.74% -5.75% -16.35%

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 4,998 3,926 4,768
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 15.71% 14.61% 12.98%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,474 2,548 3,473
10th Percentile £310 £313 £260
25th Percentile £413 £414 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £507 £525 £538
Median % change year-on-year -3.48% -2.33% -8.51%
75th Percentile £600 £638 £650
90th Percentile £700 £738 £738
UK median daily rate £500 £525 £525
% change year-on-year -4.76% - -9.48%
Number of hourly rates quoted 109 53 152
10th Percentile £18.57 £15.22 £14.90
25th Percentile £20.82 £21.05 £21.25
Median hourly rate £52.50 £26.50 £46.18
Median % change year-on-year +98.11% -42.62% +19.95%
75th Percentile £63.32 £60.00 £65.00
90th Percentile £78.80 £76.89 £77.50
UK median hourly rate £53.25 £25.50 £46.18
% change year-on-year +108.82% -44.78% +23.61%

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 January 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 January 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 January 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 -3 934 £550 -8.33% 299
North of England +11 398 £486 -7.43% 249
Midlands +54 234 £530 -7.83% 161
West Midlands +47 215 £537 -6.61% 53
Yorkshire +9 185 £486 -16.03% 104
South East +9 173 £488 -11.36% 378
North West +16 170 £475 -6.31% 109
South West +1 125 £625 +4.17% 205
North East -2 46 £518 -1.43% 36
East of England +7 39 £563 +12.50% 150
East Midlands -5 19 £418 -16.50% 104
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 79 (4.03%) Confluence
2 73 (3.72%) SAS
3 40 (2.04%) Apache Spark
4 38 (1.94%) Apache
5 30 (1.53%) Apache Airflow
5 30 (1.53%) OpenStack
6 24 (1.22%) nginx
7 13 (0.66%) Jupyter
8 8 (0.41%) Mule
8 8 (0.41%) SharePoint
9 7 (0.36%) WebLogic
10 6 (0.31%) Tomcat
11 5 (0.26%) Camunda
11 5 (0.26%) Ethereum
11 5 (0.26%) Hyperledger
11 5 (0.26%) Microsoft Exchange
12 4 (0.20%) Appian
12 4 (0.20%) CMS
12 4 (0.20%) IIS
12 4 (0.20%) Oracle Workflow
Applications
1 5 (0.26%) Chatbot
1 5 (0.26%) Microsoft Excel
1 5 (0.26%) Microsoft Office
1 5 (0.26%) Weka
2 3 (0.15%) Microsoft PowerPoint
2 3 (0.15%) Microsoft Project
2 3 (0.15%) MS Visio
3 1 (0.051%) Adobe XD
Business Applications
1 12 (0.61%) Maximo
2 2 (0.10%) SAP S/4HANA
3 1 (0.051%) Actimize
3 1 (0.051%) Endur
3 1 (0.051%) Finacle
Cloud Services
1 1,035 (52.81%) AWS
2 744 (37.96%) Azure
3 501 (25.56%) GCP
4 449 (22.91%) GitHub
5 269 (13.72%) GitHub Actions
6 253 (12.91%) OpenShift
7 224 (11.43%) Serverless
8 188 (9.59%) Azure DevOps
9 140 (7.14%) AWS CloudFormation
9 140 (7.14%) Azure AKS
10 138 (7.04%) Amazon EKS
11 130 (6.63%) AWS Lambda
12 129 (6.58%) Amazon S3
13 99 (5.05%) Amazon ECS
14 92 (4.69%) Amazon EC2
15 88 (4.49%) Google Kubernetes Engine
16 87 (4.44%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 71 (3.62%) Datadog
18 54 (2.76%) Entra ID
18 54 (2.76%) SaaS
Communications & Networking
1 92 (4.69%) Firewall
2 55 (2.81%) DNS
3 37 (1.89%) Network Security
4 29 (1.48%) VPN
5 25 (1.28%) TCP/IP
6 19 (0.97%) SSL
7 16 (0.82%) HTTP
8 12 (0.61%) DHCP
9 9 (0.46%) SAN
10 8 (0.41%) Fibre Channel
10 8 (0.41%) NAS
10 8 (0.41%) Reverse Proxy
11 7 (0.36%) BGP
11 7 (0.36%) iSCSI
11 7 (0.36%) Kerberos
12 6 (0.31%) Software-Defined Networking
12 6 (0.31%) VLAN
13 5 (0.26%) HTTPS
13 5 (0.26%) OpenLDAP
13 5 (0.26%) VXLAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 253 (12.91%) PostgreSQL
2 191 (9.74%) NoSQL
3 123 (6.28%) MongoDB
4 86 (4.39%) Relational Database
5 77 (3.93%) Apache Cassandra
6 74 (3.78%) Amazon RDS
7 66 (3.37%) Elasticsearch
8 60 (3.06%) SQL Server
9 56 (2.86%) Redis
10 47 (2.40%) MySQL
11 38 (1.94%) Pentaho
12 36 (1.84%) Power BI
13 35 (1.79%) Big Data
13 35 (1.79%) DynamoDB
14 33 (1.68%) BigQuery
15 28 (1.43%) Data Warehouse
16 26 (1.33%) Data Lake
17 22 (1.12%) Oracle Database
18 20 (1.02%) Tableau
19 19 (0.97%) Amazon Aurora
Development Applications
1 505 (25.77%) Jenkins
2 404 (20.61%) GitLab
3 382 (19.49%) Git
4 169 (8.62%) JIRA
5 78 (3.98%) JUnit
6 54 (2.76%) SonarQube
7 52 (2.65%) Gradle
7 52 (2.65%) Sonatype Nexus
8 51 (2.60%) Maven
9 47 (2.40%) Selenium
10 39 (1.99%) Artifactory
11 36 (1.84%) Cucumber
12 34 (1.73%) Bitbucket
13 33 (1.68%) CircleCI
14 32 (1.63%) Mockito
15 29 (1.48%) MLflow
16 28 (1.43%) Liquibase
17 25 (1.28%) Postman
18 21 (1.07%) Cypress.io
18 21 (1.07%) JMeter
General
1 520 (26.53%) Social Skills
2 325 (16.58%) Finance
3 242 (12.35%) Public Sector
4 201 (10.26%) Banking
5 151 (7.70%) Analytical Skills
6 42 (2.14%) Documentation Skills
7 41 (2.09%) Financial Institution
8 27 (1.38%) Investment Banking
9 24 (1.22%) Front Office
10 18 (0.92%) Telecoms
11 17 (0.87%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 17 (0.87%) Pharmaceutical
12 16 (0.82%) Presentation Skills
13 15 (0.77%) Influencing Skills
14 11 (0.56%) Military
14 11 (0.56%) Retail
15 9 (0.46%) Aerospace
15 9 (0.46%) Law
16 7 (0.36%) Games
17 6 (0.31%) Billing
Job Titles
1 452 (23.06%) Developer
2 315 (16.07%) Senior
3 294 (15.00%) DevOps Engineer
4 152 (7.76%) Architect
5 145 (7.40%) Java Developer
6 130 (6.63%) Software Engineer
7 106 (5.41%) AWS Engineer
8 103 (5.26%) Senior Developer
9 97 (4.95%) Site Reliability Engineer
10 93 (4.74%) Cloud Engineer
11 91 (4.64%) Lead
12 84 (4.29%) Platform Engineer
13 78 (3.98%) Full-Stack Developer
14 77 (3.93%) Data Engineer
15 76 (3.88%) Python Developer
16 72 (3.67%) Azure Engineer
17 71 (3.62%) Site Engineer
18 70 (3.57%) AWS DevOps
19 61 (3.11%) Java Engineer
20 56 (2.86%) AWS DevOps Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 312 (15.92%) Kafka
2 258 (13.16%) Spring
3 237 (12.09%) Spring Boot
4 212 (10.82%) RESTful
5 210 (10.71%) REST
6 181 (9.23%) React
7 170 (8.67%) Node.js
8 140 (7.14%) Elastic Stack
9 112 (5.71%) AngularJS
10 90 (4.59%) .NET
11 81 (4.13%) gRPC
12 73 (3.72%) GraphQL
13 70 (3.57%) FastAPI
14 69 (3.52%) PyTorch
15 68 (3.47%) OpenTelemetry
16 65 (3.32%) HTML
17 59 (3.01%) Playwright
18 57 (2.91%) TensorFlow
19 56 (2.86%) YAML
20 52 (2.65%) RabbitMQ
Miscellaneous
1 384 (19.59%) Cloud Native
2 163 (8.32%) Distributed Systems
3 72 (3.67%) Public Cloud
4 65 (3.32%) Hybrid Cloud
5 57 (2.91%) Product Ownership
6 56 (2.86%) Onboarding
7 40 (2.04%) Private Cloud
8 39 (1.99%) Enterprise Software
9 28 (1.43%) Management Information System
10 27 (1.38%) PKI
11 26 (1.33%) Legacy Systems
12 25 (1.28%) Data Protection Act
12 25 (1.28%) Replication
13 23 (1.17%) Greenfield Project
14 22 (1.12%) Algorithms
14 22 (1.12%) Security Posture
15 21 (1.07%) Virtual Team
16 20 (1.02%) AI Agents
17 19 (0.97%) Data Centre
18 18 (0.92%) NHS
Operating Systems
1 392 (20.00%) Linux
2 86 (4.39%) Windows
3 67 (3.42%) Unix
4 52 (2.65%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 36 (1.84%) VMS
6 23 (1.17%) Windows Server
7 22 (1.12%) Ubuntu
8 13 (0.66%) CentOS
9 5 (0.26%) Solaris
10 3 (0.15%) Android
10 3 (0.15%) Apple iOS
10 3 (0.15%) Windows Server 2003
11 2 (0.10%) Windows Server 2012
11 2 (0.10%) Windows Server 2019
11 2 (0.10%) zOS
12 1 (0.051%) Alpine Linux
12 1 (0.051%) Debian
12 1 (0.051%) MVS
12 1 (0.051%) Rocky
12 1 (0.051%) Windows Server 2016
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,306 (66.63%) CI/CD
2 1,082 (55.20%) DevOps
3 865 (44.13%) Containerisation
4 645 (32.91%) Agile
5 581 (29.64%) Infrastructure as Code
6 550 (28.06%) Microservices
7 448 (22.86%) Problem-Solving
8 356 (18.16%) Software Engineering
9 334 (17.04%) Observability
10 291 (14.85%) Test Automation
11 218 (11.12%) AI
12 216 (11.02%) Migration
13 188 (9.59%) Analytics
14 185 (9.44%) DevSecOps
14 185 (9.44%) Site Reliability Engineering
15 178 (9.08%) Continuous Improvement
16 173 (8.83%) Full-Stack Development
17 164 (8.37%) Machine Learning
18 156 (7.96%) Data Pipeline
18 156 (7.96%) Platform Engineering
Programming Languages
1 864 (44.08%) Python
2 535 (27.30%) Java
3 365 (18.62%) SQL
4 270 (13.78%) Bash
5 224 (11.43%) Go
6 170 (8.67%) JavaScript
7 159 (8.11%) TypeScript
8 115 (5.87%) PowerShell
9 90 (4.59%) C#
10 61 (3.11%) Bicep
11 55 (2.81%) Shell Script
12 48 (2.45%) Ruby
13 36 (1.84%) C++
14 33 (1.68%) Kotlin
15 31 (1.58%) Rust
16 29 (1.48%) Scala
17 19 (0.97%) PHP
18 18 (0.92%) Groovy
19 16 (0.82%) Perl
20 12 (0.61%) C
Qualifications
1 682 (34.80%) Security Cleared
2 561 (28.62%) SC Cleared
3 153 (7.81%) Degree
4 112 (5.71%) Computer Science Degree
5 111 (5.66%) DV Cleared
6 88 (4.49%) Azure Certification
7 76 (3.88%) AWS Certification
8 50 (2.55%) Master's Degree
9 46 (2.35%) CISSP
10 38 (1.94%) BPSS Clearance
11 30 (1.53%) CISM
12 29 (1.48%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 23 (1.17%) Microsoft Certification
14 19 (0.97%) Cisco Certification
15 13 (0.66%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
15 13 (0.66%) CCSP
15 13 (0.66%) TOGAF Certification
16 12 (0.61%) (ISC)2 CCSP
17 11 (0.56%) OCP
17 11 (0.56%) Oracle Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 111 (5.66%) QA
2 63 (3.21%) Data Quality
3 56 (2.86%) ISO/IEC 27001
4 54 (2.76%) NIST
5 42 (2.14%) NCSC
6 39 (1.99%) GDPR
7 33 (1.68%) Accessibility
8 28 (1.43%) PCI DSS
9 19 (0.97%) PSD2
10 15 (0.77%) ISO 20022
11 13 (0.66%) SEPA
12 12 (0.61%) WCAG
13 11 (0.56%) SLA
14 10 (0.51%) NIST 800
15 8 (0.41%) Sarbanes-Oxley
16 7 (0.36%) EU AI Act
16 7 (0.36%) HIPAA
17 6 (0.31%) JSP 440
17 6 (0.31%) SOC 2
18 5 (0.26%) Cyber Essentials
System Software
1 1,253 (63.93%) Docker
2 58 (2.96%) VMware Infrastructure
3 47 (2.40%) Active Directory
4 33 (1.68%) Virtual Machines
4 33 (1.68%) vSphere
5 16 (0.82%) Slurm Workload Manager
5 16 (0.82%) VMware NSX
6 15 (0.77%) Hyper-V
7 9 (0.46%) KVM
7 9 (0.46%) Lustre
8 7 (0.36%) NFS
9 6 (0.31%) GPFS
10 5 (0.26%) Squid
11 4 (0.20%) Snort
11 4 (0.20%) Virtual Servers
11 4 (0.20%) VMware ESXi
12 3 (0.15%) BitLocker
12 3 (0.15%) Ceph
12 3 (0.15%) Firmware
12 3 (0.15%) Microsoft App-V
Systems Management
1 738 (37.65%) Terraform
2 346 (17.65%) Ansible
3 315 (16.07%) Grafana
4 270 (13.78%) Prometheus
5 107 (5.46%) Argo
6 55 (2.81%) Puppet
7 53 (2.70%) Kibana
8 51 (2.60%) Istio
9 40 (2.04%) Progress Chef
10 24 (1.22%) Packer
10 24 (1.22%) Podman
11 22 (1.12%) Nessus
12 19 (0.97%) logstash
13 16 (0.82%) Rancher
14 15 (0.77%) Single Sign-On
15 14 (0.71%) vCenter Server
16 13 (0.66%) Consul
17 12 (0.61%) Docker Swarm
18 11 (0.56%) IBM Guardium
18 11 (0.56%) Kustomize
Vendors
1 211 (10.77%) Microsoft
2 174 (8.88%) Google
3 173 (8.83%) Splunk
4 124 (6.33%) Oracle
5 123 (6.28%) Red Hat
6 86 (4.39%) VMware
7 48 (2.45%) Databricks
8 47 (2.40%) Dynatrace
9 44 (2.24%) OpenAI
10 38 (1.94%) Denodo
10 38 (1.94%) Talend
11 25 (1.28%) IBM
12 24 (1.22%) AppDynamics
13 23 (1.17%) Atlassian
14 16 (0.82%) Tenable
15 15 (0.77%) Cisco
15 15 (0.77%) Foundry
15 15 (0.77%) NVIDIA
16 12 (0.61%) Palo Alto
17 11 (0.56%) ServiceNow