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

6 months to
11 Jan 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 32 31 49
Rank change year-on-year -1 +18 -17
Contract jobs citing Kubernetes 1,902 1,479 1,482
As % of all contract jobs in England 6.11% 5.49% 4.07%
As % of the Systems Management category 38.98% 37.85% 30.80%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,307 1,004 1,108
10th Percentile £400 £411 £425
25th Percentile £450 £500 £500
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £600 £575
Median % change year-on-year -12.50% +4.35% -8.00%
75th Percentile £638 £700 £677
90th Percentile £700 £810 £751
UK median daily rate £525 £575 £575
% change year-on-year -8.70% - -7.26%
Number of hourly rates quoted 35 10 39
10th Percentile £48.25 £26.38 -
25th Percentile £52.50 £46.18 £46.18
Median hourly rate £60.00 £51.84 £55.00
Median % change year-on-year +15.74% -5.75% -18.22%
75th Percentile £79.50 £66.13 £76.53
90th Percentile £103.70 £74.04 £78.00
UK median hourly rate £63.50 £51.84 £55.00
% change year-on-year +22.49% -5.75% -14.73%

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 4,879 3,908 4,812
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 15.67% 14.51% 13.22%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,369 2,537 3,508
10th Percentile £313 £313 £269
25th Percentile £413 £413 £419
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £525 £540
Median % change year-on-year -2.38% -2.78% -8.09%
75th Percentile £609 £638 £650
90th Percentile £700 £738 £738
UK median daily rate £510 £525 £538
% change year-on-year -2.86% -2.33% -6.52%
Number of hourly rates quoted 108 51 148
10th Percentile £18.42 £15.22 £16.25
25th Percentile £21.17 £21.02 £21.00
Median hourly rate £50.61 £26.50 £46.18
Median % change year-on-year +90.98% -42.62% +24.07%
75th Percentile £63.32 £61.25 £65.31
90th Percentile £79.30 £77.50 £77.65
UK median hourly rate £52.50 £24.84 £46.18
% change year-on-year +111.35% -46.21% +31.94%

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 11 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 11 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 11 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 -6 905 £560 -6.67% 344
North of England +10 381 £487 -7.24% 187
Midlands +57 225 £525 -10.64% 122
West Midlands +50 205 £530 -13.40% 52
Yorkshire +6 178 £487 -17.63% 78
South East +14 176 £496 -7.67% 357
North West +18 164 £492 -1.60% 81
South West -3 117 £625 +4.17% 156
North East -3 41 £550 +4.76% 28
East of England -1 39 £550 +23.94% 114
East Midlands -5 20 £418 -16.50% 67
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 77 (4.05%) Confluence
2 70 (3.68%) SAS
3 35 (1.84%) Apache Spark
4 32 (1.68%) Apache Airflow
5 31 (1.63%) Apache
6 29 (1.52%) OpenStack
7 24 (1.26%) nginx
8 12 (0.63%) Jupyter
9 8 (0.42%) Mule
10 7 (0.37%) SharePoint
11 6 (0.32%) Tomcat
11 6 (0.32%) WebLogic
12 5 (0.26%) Camunda
12 5 (0.26%) Ethereum
12 5 (0.26%) Hyperledger
13 4 (0.21%) Appian
13 4 (0.21%) CMS
13 4 (0.21%) Drupal
13 4 (0.21%) IIS
13 4 (0.21%) Oracle Workflow
Applications
1 6 (0.32%) Microsoft Excel
2 5 (0.26%) Chatbot
2 5 (0.26%) Microsoft Office
2 5 (0.26%) Weka
3 4 (0.21%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 3 (0.16%) Microsoft Project
4 3 (0.16%) MS Visio
Business Applications
1 12 (0.63%) Maximo
2 2 (0.11%) SAP S/4HANA
3 1 (0.053%) Actimize
3 1 (0.053%) Cloudability
3 1 (0.053%) Endur
3 1 (0.053%) Finacle
Cloud Services
1 995 (52.31%) AWS
2 726 (38.17%) Azure
3 475 (24.97%) GCP
4 441 (23.19%) GitHub
5 269 (14.14%) GitHub Actions
6 248 (13.04%) OpenShift
7 215 (11.30%) Serverless
8 188 (9.88%) Azure DevOps
9 138 (7.26%) Azure AKS
10 135 (7.10%) Amazon EKS
11 123 (6.47%) AWS CloudFormation
11 123 (6.47%) AWS Lambda
12 121 (6.36%) Amazon S3
13 88 (4.63%) Amazon EC2
14 87 (4.57%) Amazon ECS
15 84 (4.42%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 79 (4.15%) Google Kubernetes Engine
17 68 (3.58%) Datadog
18 52 (2.73%) Entra ID
19 49 (2.58%) SaaS
Communications & Networking
1 90 (4.73%) Firewall
2 57 (3.00%) DNS
3 34 (1.79%) Network Security
4 29 (1.52%) VPN
5 27 (1.42%) TCP/IP
6 19 (1.00%) SSL
7 15 (0.79%) HTTP
8 12 (0.63%) DHCP
9 9 (0.47%) SAN
10 8 (0.42%) Fibre Channel
10 8 (0.42%) NAS
11 7 (0.37%) BGP
11 7 (0.37%) iSCSI
12 6 (0.32%) Kerberos
12 6 (0.32%) Software-Defined Networking
12 6 (0.32%) VLAN
13 5 (0.26%) HTTPS
13 5 (0.26%) OpenLDAP
13 5 (0.26%) Reverse Proxy
13 5 (0.26%) VXLAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 251 (13.20%) PostgreSQL
2 186 (9.78%) NoSQL
3 120 (6.31%) MongoDB
4 83 (4.36%) Relational Database
5 78 (4.10%) Apache Cassandra
6 72 (3.79%) Amazon RDS
7 66 (3.47%) Elasticsearch
8 59 (3.10%) Redis
9 58 (3.05%) SQL Server
10 47 (2.47%) MySQL
11 35 (1.84%) Pentaho
12 33 (1.74%) Big Data
12 33 (1.74%) Power BI
13 31 (1.63%) BigQuery
14 30 (1.58%) DynamoDB
15 27 (1.42%) Data Lake
16 26 (1.37%) Data Warehouse
17 24 (1.26%) Oracle Database
18 20 (1.05%) Amazon Aurora
19 19 (1.00%) Azure SQL Database
Development Applications
1 490 (25.76%) Jenkins
2 378 (19.87%) Git
3 376 (19.77%) GitLab
4 173 (9.10%) JIRA
5 72 (3.79%) JUnit
6 56 (2.94%) SonarQube
7 51 (2.68%) Gradle
7 51 (2.68%) Sonatype Nexus
8 48 (2.52%) Maven
9 47 (2.47%) Selenium
10 40 (2.10%) Artifactory
11 38 (2.00%) CircleCI
12 37 (1.95%) Cucumber
13 36 (1.89%) Bitbucket
14 31 (1.63%) Liquibase
15 30 (1.58%) MLflow
16 29 (1.52%) Mockito
17 26 (1.37%) Postman
18 21 (1.10%) JMeter
19 20 (1.05%) Cypress.io
General
1 513 (26.97%) Social Skills
2 313 (16.46%) Finance
3 226 (11.88%) Public Sector
4 196 (10.30%) Banking
5 147 (7.73%) Analytical Skills
6 40 (2.10%) Documentation Skills
6 40 (2.10%) Financial Institution
7 28 (1.47%) Investment Banking
8 25 (1.31%) Front Office
9 19 (1.00%) Telecoms
10 18 (0.95%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 18 (0.95%) Pharmaceutical
11 13 (0.68%) Influencing Skills
12 11 (0.58%) Military
12 11 (0.58%) Retail
13 10 (0.53%) Presentation Skills
14 9 (0.47%) Aerospace
14 9 (0.47%) Law
15 7 (0.37%) Billing
15 7 (0.37%) Games
Job Titles
1 436 (22.92%) Developer
2 311 (16.35%) Senior
3 280 (14.72%) DevOps Engineer
4 143 (7.52%) Architect
5 134 (7.05%) Java Developer
6 133 (6.99%) Software Engineer
7 106 (5.57%) Senior Developer
8 101 (5.31%) AWS Engineer
9 94 (4.94%) Site Reliability Engineer
10 93 (4.89%) Lead
11 88 (4.63%) Cloud Engineer
12 87 (4.57%) Platform Engineer
13 75 (3.94%) Python Developer
14 73 (3.84%) Azure Engineer
15 72 (3.79%) Full-Stack Developer
16 69 (3.63%) AWS DevOps
16 69 (3.63%) Data Engineer
17 67 (3.52%) Site Engineer
18 54 (2.84%) Java Engineer
19 53 (2.79%) AWS DevOps Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 305 (16.04%) Kafka
2 228 (11.99%) Spring
3 215 (11.30%) Spring Boot
4 207 (10.88%) REST
5 200 (10.52%) RESTful
6 185 (9.73%) React
7 166 (8.73%) Node.js
8 137 (7.20%) Elastic Stack
9 114 (5.99%) AngularJS
10 93 (4.89%) .NET
11 87 (4.57%) gRPC
12 74 (3.89%) GraphQL
13 70 (3.68%) FastAPI
14 65 (3.42%) OpenTelemetry
15 64 (3.36%) HTML
15 64 (3.36%) PyTorch
16 59 (3.10%) YAML
17 57 (3.00%) Playwright
18 53 (2.79%) TensorFlow
19 52 (2.73%) Vue
Miscellaneous
1 363 (19.09%) Cloud Native
2 162 (8.52%) Distributed Systems
3 70 (3.68%) Public Cloud
4 63 (3.31%) Hybrid Cloud
5 55 (2.89%) Product Ownership
6 52 (2.73%) Onboarding
7 39 (2.05%) Enterprise Software
8 38 (2.00%) Private Cloud
9 30 (1.58%) Legacy Systems
10 27 (1.42%) PKI
11 26 (1.37%) Management Information System
12 25 (1.31%) Algorithms
12 25 (1.31%) Data Protection Act
12 25 (1.31%) Replication
13 22 (1.16%) Greenfield Project
13 22 (1.16%) Security Posture
14 19 (1.00%) AI Agents
14 19 (1.00%) Virtual Team
15 18 (0.95%) Data Structures
16 17 (0.89%) Data Centre
Operating Systems
1 381 (20.03%) Linux
2 78 (4.10%) Windows
3 60 (3.15%) Unix
4 51 (2.68%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 38 (2.00%) VMS
6 22 (1.16%) Windows Server
7 21 (1.10%) Ubuntu
8 13 (0.68%) CentOS
9 5 (0.26%) Solaris
10 3 (0.16%) Android
10 3 (0.16%) Apple iOS
10 3 (0.16%) Windows Server 2003
11 2 (0.11%) Windows Server 2012
11 2 (0.11%) Windows Server 2019
11 2 (0.11%) zOS
12 1 (0.053%) Alpine Linux
12 1 (0.053%) MVS
12 1 (0.053%) Windows Server 2016
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,259 (66.19%) CI/CD
2 1,054 (55.42%) DevOps
3 825 (43.38%) Containerisation
4 636 (33.44%) Agile
5 561 (29.50%) Infrastructure as Code
6 535 (28.13%) Microservices
7 439 (23.08%) Problem-Solving
8 357 (18.77%) Software Engineering
9 323 (16.98%) Observability
10 277 (14.56%) Test Automation
11 217 (11.41%) Migration
12 210 (11.04%) AI
13 182 (9.57%) Site Reliability Engineering
14 179 (9.41%) DevSecOps
15 175 (9.20%) Analytics
16 166 (8.73%) Full-Stack Development
17 165 (8.68%) Continuous Improvement
18 158 (8.31%) Machine Learning
19 153 (8.04%) Platform Engineering
20 149 (7.83%) Data Pipeline
Programming Languages
1 850 (44.69%) Python
2 505 (26.55%) Java
3 350 (18.40%) SQL
4 275 (14.46%) Bash
5 227 (11.93%) Go
6 169 (8.89%) JavaScript
7 166 (8.73%) TypeScript
8 114 (5.99%) PowerShell
9 98 (5.15%) C#
10 62 (3.26%) Bicep
11 53 (2.79%) Shell Script
12 45 (2.37%) Ruby
13 39 (2.05%) C++
14 32 (1.68%) Kotlin
15 30 (1.58%) Rust
16 26 (1.37%) Scala
17 23 (1.21%) PHP
18 19 (1.00%) Groovy
18 19 (1.00%) Perl
19 12 (0.63%) C
Qualifications
1 646 (33.96%) Security Cleared
2 534 (28.08%) SC Cleared
3 148 (7.78%) Degree
4 107 (5.63%) Computer Science Degree
5 106 (5.57%) DV Cleared
6 87 (4.57%) Azure Certification
7 75 (3.94%) AWS Certification
8 50 (2.63%) Master's Degree
9 44 (2.31%) CISSP
10 32 (1.68%) BPSS Clearance
11 30 (1.58%) CISM
12 29 (1.52%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 23 (1.21%) Microsoft Certification
14 17 (0.89%) Cisco Certification
15 14 (0.74%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
16 11 (0.58%) CCSP
16 11 (0.58%) OCP
16 11 (0.58%) Oracle Certification
17 10 (0.53%) (ISC)2 CCSP
17 10 (0.53%) TOGAF Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 108 (5.68%) QA
2 58 (3.05%) Data Quality
3 56 (2.94%) ISO/IEC 27001
4 54 (2.84%) NIST
5 39 (2.05%) NCSC
6 35 (1.84%) GDPR
7 32 (1.68%) Accessibility
8 24 (1.26%) PCI DSS
9 17 (0.89%) PSD2
10 13 (0.68%) ISO 20022
11 12 (0.63%) WCAG
12 11 (0.58%) SEPA
13 10 (0.53%) NIST 800
13 10 (0.53%) SLA
14 8 (0.42%) EU AI Act
14 8 (0.42%) Sarbanes-Oxley
15 6 (0.32%) HIPAA
15 6 (0.32%) JSP 440
16 5 (0.26%) Cyber Essentials
17 4 (0.21%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
System Software
1 1,214 (63.83%) Docker
2 57 (3.00%) VMware Infrastructure
3 47 (2.47%) Active Directory
4 33 (1.74%) vSphere
5 30 (1.58%) Virtual Machines
6 16 (0.84%) VMware NSX
7 14 (0.74%) Hyper-V
7 14 (0.74%) Slurm Workload Manager
8 9 (0.47%) KVM
8 9 (0.47%) Lustre
9 7 (0.37%) NFS
10 6 (0.32%) GPFS
11 5 (0.26%) Squid
12 4 (0.21%) Snort
12 4 (0.21%) Virtual Servers
12 4 (0.21%) VMware ESXi
13 3 (0.16%) BitLocker
13 3 (0.16%) Ceph
13 3 (0.16%) Firmware
13 3 (0.16%) Microsoft App-V
Systems Management
1 719 (37.80%) Terraform
2 339 (17.82%) Ansible
3 319 (16.77%) Grafana
4 274 (14.41%) Prometheus
5 108 (5.68%) Argo
6 52 (2.73%) Kibana
6 52 (2.73%) Puppet
7 49 (2.58%) Istio
8 38 (2.00%) Progress Chef
9 24 (1.26%) Packer
9 24 (1.26%) Podman
10 22 (1.16%) Nessus
11 18 (0.95%) logstash
12 15 (0.79%) Rancher
13 14 (0.74%) Single Sign-On
13 14 (0.74%) vCenter Server
14 13 (0.68%) Consul
15 12 (0.63%) Control-M
15 12 (0.63%) Docker Swarm
16 11 (0.58%) IBM Guardium
Vendors
1 208 (10.94%) Microsoft
2 172 (9.04%) Splunk
3 162 (8.52%) Google
4 125 (6.57%) Red Hat
5 124 (6.52%) Oracle
6 84 (4.42%) VMware
7 49 (2.58%) Databricks
8 45 (2.37%) Dynatrace
9 41 (2.16%) OpenAI
10 35 (1.84%) Denodo
10 35 (1.84%) Talend
11 26 (1.37%) IBM
12 25 (1.31%) AppDynamics
13 22 (1.16%) Atlassian
14 16 (0.84%) NVIDIA
14 16 (0.84%) Tenable
15 15 (0.79%) Cisco
16 13 (0.68%) Foundry
17 12 (0.63%) Palo Alto
17 12 (0.63%) ServiceNow