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 30 November 2025, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
30 Nov 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 31 36 44
Rank change year-on-year +5 +8 -12
Contract jobs citing Kubernetes 1,843 1,630 1,741
As % of all contract jobs in England 6.03% 5.29% 4.48%
As % of the Systems Management category 37.60% 37.35% 31.98%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,268 1,090 1,305
10th Percentile £398 £406 £425
25th Percentile £450 £493 £500
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £530 £595 £585
Median % change year-on-year -10.92% +1.71% -6.40%
75th Percentile £638 £700 £688
90th Percentile £700 £788 £775
UK median daily rate £530 £575 £575
% change year-on-year -7.83% - -7.26%
Number of hourly rates quoted 22 14 49
10th Percentile £51.48 £29.43 -
25th Percentile £61.38 £46.18 £46.18
Median hourly rate £67.00 £51.84 £62.50
Median % change year-on-year +29.24% -17.06% -3.10%
75th Percentile £84.50 £72.54 £76.53
90th Percentile £118.45 £74.00 £78.15
UK median hourly rate £67.00 £51.84 £62.50
% change year-on-year +29.24% -17.06% -1.96%

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 4,901 4,364 5,444
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 16.04% 14.15% 14.01%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,315 2,791 3,956
10th Percentile £310 £313 £304
25th Percentile £413 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year -2.38% -4.55% -6.38%
75th Percentile £612 £642 £650
90th Percentile £700 £738 £745
UK median daily rate £513 £525 £545
% change year-on-year -2.38% -3.67% -5.22%
Number of hourly rates quoted 88 60 156
10th Percentile £18.42 £15.05 £17.36
25th Percentile £20.66 £23.80 £22.56
Median hourly rate £37.00 £35.08 £46.18
Median % change year-on-year +5.47% -24.03% +77.62%
75th Percentile £66.63 £60.63 £70.00
90th Percentile £80.90 £74.75 £78.00
UK median hourly rate £31.86 £27.00 £47.95
% change year-on-year +18.00% -43.69% +86.50%

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 30 November 2025.

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 30 November 2025.

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 30 November 2025. 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 -3 918 £550 -9.43% 271
North of England +7 337 £500 -2.44% 105
Midlands +65 207 £537 -6.61% 62
West Midlands +51 188 £540 -10.00% 44
South East +3 165 £493 -8.80% 232
Yorkshire -7 150 £500 +1.27% 31
North West +15 149 £475 -13.64% 58
South West -2 106 £637 +6.21% 93
East of England 0 46 £550 +4.76% 15
North East +2 40 £550 +12.82% 16
East Midlands -2 19 £429 -16.29% 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 80 (4.34%) Confluence
2 68 (3.69%) SAS
3 34 (1.84%) Apache Spark
4 32 (1.74%) Apache Airflow
4 32 (1.74%) nginx
5 27 (1.47%) Apache
6 26 (1.41%) OpenStack
7 10 (0.54%) Mule
8 7 (0.38%) Tomcat
9 6 (0.33%) Jupyter
9 6 (0.33%) SharePoint
9 6 (0.33%) WebLogic
10 5 (0.27%) Ethereum
10 5 (0.27%) Hyperledger
10 5 (0.27%) JBoss
10 5 (0.27%) WebSphere
11 4 (0.22%) Camunda
11 4 (0.22%) Drupal
11 4 (0.22%) MQSeries
11 4 (0.22%) Traefik
Applications
1 6 (0.33%) Microsoft Excel
1 6 (0.33%) MS Visio
2 5 (0.27%) Chatbot
2 5 (0.27%) Microsoft Office
2 5 (0.27%) Weka
3 4 (0.22%) Microsoft PowerPoint
Business Applications
1 7 (0.38%) Maximo
2 4 (0.22%) Endur
3 2 (0.11%) SAP S/4HANA
4 1 (0.054%) Actimize
4 1 (0.054%) Cloudability
4 1 (0.054%) Finacle
Cloud Services
1 1,009 (54.75%) AWS
2 670 (36.35%) Azure
3 455 (24.69%) GCP
4 408 (22.14%) GitHub
5 243 (13.19%) GitHub Actions
6 210 (11.39%) OpenShift
7 203 (11.01%) Serverless
8 166 (9.01%) Azure DevOps
9 136 (7.38%) Amazon EKS
9 136 (7.38%) AWS CloudFormation
10 132 (7.16%) Azure AKS
11 111 (6.02%) Amazon S3
12 107 (5.81%) AWS Lambda
13 85 (4.61%) Google Kubernetes Engine
14 80 (4.34%) Amazon EC2
15 77 (4.18%) Amazon CloudWatch
15 77 (4.18%) Amazon ECS
16 69 (3.74%) SaaS
17 61 (3.31%) Entra ID
18 58 (3.15%) Datadog
Communications & Networking
1 76 (4.12%) Firewall
2 49 (2.66%) DNS
3 28 (1.52%) Network Security
4 26 (1.41%) VPN
5 21 (1.14%) TCP/IP
6 17 (0.92%) SSL
7 16 (0.87%) HTTP
8 10 (0.54%) BGP
9 8 (0.43%) DHCP
10 7 (0.38%) HTTPS
10 7 (0.38%) Software-Defined Networking
11 6 (0.33%) Ethernet VPN
11 6 (0.33%) VLAN
11 6 (0.33%) VXLAN
12 5 (0.27%) Kerberos
12 5 (0.27%) OpenLDAP
13 4 (0.22%) Internet
13 4 (0.22%) MQTT
13 4 (0.22%) SSH
14 3 (0.16%) Reverse Proxy
Database & Business Intelligence
1 250 (13.56%) PostgreSQL
2 182 (9.88%) NoSQL
3 122 (6.62%) MongoDB
4 76 (4.12%) Relational Database
5 69 (3.74%) Apache Cassandra
6 66 (3.58%) Amazon RDS
7 57 (3.09%) Elasticsearch
8 56 (3.04%) Redis
9 41 (2.22%) SQL Server
10 39 (2.12%) MySQL
11 35 (1.90%) Big Data
12 34 (1.84%) Pentaho
13 29 (1.57%) Data Warehouse
14 28 (1.52%) DynamoDB
15 27 (1.47%) Oracle Database
16 26 (1.41%) Data Lake
17 23 (1.25%) Hadoop
18 22 (1.19%) BigQuery
19 20 (1.09%) Power BI
20 19 (1.03%) Azure SQL Database
Development Applications
1 494 (26.80%) Jenkins
2 390 (21.16%) Git
3 351 (19.05%) GitLab
4 183 (9.93%) JIRA
5 69 (3.74%) JUnit
6 63 (3.42%) SonarQube
7 53 (2.88%) Sonatype Nexus
8 50 (2.71%) Maven
9 48 (2.60%) Artifactory
10 44 (2.39%) Selenium
11 39 (2.12%) Bitbucket
11 39 (2.12%) Gradle
12 38 (2.06%) Liquibase
13 33 (1.79%) CircleCI
13 33 (1.79%) Cucumber
14 27 (1.47%) Mockito
15 26 (1.41%) MLflow
16 25 (1.36%) Postman
17 21 (1.14%) JMeter
18 19 (1.03%) Cypress.io
General
1 504 (27.35%) Social Skills
2 306 (16.60%) Finance
3 219 (11.88%) Public Sector
4 201 (10.91%) Banking
5 147 (7.98%) Analytical Skills
6 41 (2.22%) Financial Institution
7 37 (2.01%) Documentation Skills
7 37 (2.01%) Investment Banking
8 26 (1.41%) Telecoms
9 22 (1.19%) Front Office
10 19 (1.03%) Pharmaceutical
11 17 (0.92%) Inclusion and Diversity
12 13 (0.71%) Retail
13 12 (0.65%) Influencing Skills
14 11 (0.60%) Aerospace
15 10 (0.54%) Presentation Skills
16 8 (0.43%) Military
17 7 (0.38%) Games
17 7 (0.38%) Law
18 6 (0.33%) Manufacturing
Job Titles
1 435 (23.60%) Developer
2 285 (15.46%) DevOps Engineer
3 278 (15.08%) Senior
4 151 (8.19%) Architect
5 144 (7.81%) Java Developer
6 106 (5.75%) AWS Engineer
6 106 (5.75%) Software Engineer
7 99 (5.37%) Platform Engineer
8 95 (5.15%) Lead
9 91 (4.94%) Senior Developer
10 83 (4.50%) Cloud Engineer
11 78 (4.23%) AWS DevOps
12 76 (4.12%) Full-Stack Developer
12 76 (4.12%) Python Developer
13 73 (3.96%) Site Reliability Engineer
14 69 (3.74%) Data Engineer
15 58 (3.15%) AWS DevOps Engineer
16 52 (2.82%) Site Engineer
17 50 (2.71%) Azure Engineer
18 47 (2.55%) Consultant
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 302 (16.39%) Kafka
2 203 (11.01%) RESTful
3 202 (10.96%) Spring
4 194 (10.53%) REST
5 187 (10.15%) React
6 175 (9.50%) Spring Boot
7 169 (9.17%) Node.js
8 140 (7.60%) Elastic Stack
9 120 (6.51%) AngularJS
10 88 (4.77%) .NET
11 86 (4.67%) gRPC
12 70 (3.80%) GraphQL
12 70 (3.80%) HTML
13 69 (3.74%) FastAPI
14 62 (3.36%) YAML
15 60 (3.26%) PyTorch
16 58 (3.15%) Vue
17 55 (2.98%) CSS
17 55 (2.98%) RabbitMQ
18 51 (2.77%) JSON
Miscellaneous
1 346 (18.77%) Cloud Native
2 178 (9.66%) Distributed Systems
3 66 (3.58%) Public Cloud
4 58 (3.15%) Onboarding
5 57 (3.09%) Product Ownership
6 52 (2.82%) Hybrid Cloud
7 38 (2.06%) Private Cloud
8 35 (1.90%) Algorithms
9 34 (1.84%) Enterprise Software
10 31 (1.68%) Data Protection Act
11 29 (1.57%) Legacy Systems
12 25 (1.36%) Security Posture
13 24 (1.30%) Data Structures
13 24 (1.30%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
14 23 (1.25%) Virtual Team
15 22 (1.19%) Replication
16 21 (1.14%) PKI
17 20 (1.09%) Greenfield Project
17 20 (1.09%) Hedge funds
18 19 (1.03%) Data Centre
Operating Systems
1 382 (20.73%) Linux
2 71 (3.85%) Windows
3 61 (3.31%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 58 (3.15%) Unix
5 23 (1.25%) VMS
6 21 (1.14%) Ubuntu
7 18 (0.98%) CentOS
8 17 (0.92%) Windows Server
9 6 (0.33%) Solaris
10 2 (0.11%) Android
10 2 (0.11%) Apple iOS
10 2 (0.11%) zOS
11 1 (0.054%) Alpine Linux
11 1 (0.054%) Mac OS
11 1 (0.054%) MVS
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,229 (66.68%) CI/CD
2 998 (54.15%) DevOps
3 808 (43.84%) Containerisation
4 628 (34.07%) Agile
5 560 (30.39%) Infrastructure as Code
6 522 (28.32%) Microservices
7 439 (23.82%) Problem-Solving
8 330 (17.91%) Software Engineering
9 286 (15.52%) Observability
10 267 (14.49%) Test Automation
11 195 (10.58%) Migration
12 185 (10.04%) AI
13 161 (8.74%) Full-Stack Development
14 159 (8.63%) Analytics
15 158 (8.57%) Platform Engineering
15 158 (8.57%) Scrum
16 155 (8.41%) DevSecOps
17 153 (8.30%) Machine Learning
18 149 (8.08%) Continuous Improvement
19 141 (7.65%) Data Pipeline
Programming Languages
1 870 (47.21%) Python
2 499 (27.08%) Java
3 317 (17.20%) SQL
4 270 (14.65%) Bash
5 246 (13.35%) Go
6 181 (9.82%) JavaScript
7 170 (9.22%) TypeScript
8 113 (6.13%) C#
9 106 (5.75%) PowerShell
10 64 (3.47%) C++
11 53 (2.88%) Bicep
11 53 (2.88%) Shell Script
12 34 (1.84%) Ruby
13 28 (1.52%) PHP
14 26 (1.41%) Rust
15 25 (1.36%) Perl
16 24 (1.30%) Groovy
17 20 (1.09%) Kotlin
18 18 (0.98%) Scala
19 16 (0.87%) C
Qualifications
1 618 (33.53%) Security Cleared
2 510 (27.67%) SC Cleared
3 129 (7.00%) Degree
4 99 (5.37%) DV Cleared
5 98 (5.32%) Computer Science Degree
6 89 (4.83%) AWS Certification
7 73 (3.96%) Azure Certification
8 51 (2.77%) Master's Degree
9 37 (2.01%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
10 32 (1.74%) CISSP
11 30 (1.63%) BPSS Clearance
12 23 (1.25%) Microsoft Certification
13 18 (0.98%) Cisco Certification
14 17 (0.92%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
14 17 (0.92%) CISM
15 11 (0.60%) OCP
15 11 (0.60%) Oracle Certification
16 10 (0.54%) (ISC)2 CCSP
16 10 (0.54%) CCSP
17 8 (0.43%) RHCE
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 97 (5.26%) QA
2 54 (2.93%) ISO/IEC 27001
3 49 (2.66%) Data Quality
3 49 (2.66%) NIST
4 37 (2.01%) GDPR
5 33 (1.79%) NCSC
6 22 (1.19%) Accessibility
7 17 (0.92%) PCI DSS
8 14 (0.76%) PSD2
9 12 (0.65%) EU AI Act
10 11 (0.60%) HIPAA
11 10 (0.54%) WCAG
12 9 (0.49%) ISO 20022
12 9 (0.49%) SEPA
13 7 (0.38%) Cyber Essentials
14 6 (0.33%) NIST 800
14 6 (0.33%) SOC 2
15 5 (0.27%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
15 5 (0.27%) JSP 440
15 5 (0.27%) SLA
System Software
1 1,192 (64.68%) Docker
2 54 (2.93%) Active Directory
3 50 (2.71%) VMware Infrastructure
4 31 (1.68%) vSphere
5 27 (1.47%) Virtual Machines
6 14 (0.76%) VMware NSX
7 10 (0.54%) Hyper-V
7 10 (0.54%) KVM
8 7 (0.38%) Lustre
8 7 (0.38%) Slurm Workload Manager
9 6 (0.33%) GPFS
10 5 (0.27%) Snort
10 5 (0.27%) Squid
11 4 (0.22%) Virtual Servers
12 2 (0.11%) NDS
12 2 (0.11%) NetIQ eDirectory
12 2 (0.11%) VMware ESXi
13 1 (0.054%) QEMU
13 1 (0.054%) SRDF
13 1 (0.054%) Veritas Cluster Server
Systems Management
1 710 (38.52%) Terraform
2 318 (17.25%) Ansible
3 294 (15.95%) Grafana
4 264 (14.32%) Prometheus
5 102 (5.53%) Argo
6 49 (2.66%) Kibana
7 45 (2.44%) Puppet
8 44 (2.39%) Progress Chef
9 39 (2.12%) Istio
9 39 (2.12%) Packer
10 27 (1.47%) Single Sign-On
11 22 (1.19%) Consul
12 20 (1.09%) logstash
12 20 (1.09%) Nessus
13 16 (0.87%) Podman
14 14 (0.76%) Rancher
15 12 (0.65%) Control-M
15 12 (0.65%) ITRS Geneos
16 11 (0.60%) SCOM
16 11 (0.60%) vCenter Server
Vendors
1 189 (10.26%) Microsoft
2 175 (9.50%) Splunk
3 149 (8.08%) Google
4 118 (6.40%) Oracle
4 118 (6.40%) Red Hat
5 69 (3.74%) VMware
6 46 (2.50%) Databricks
7 41 (2.22%) Dynatrace
8 34 (1.84%) Denodo
8 34 (1.84%) Talend
9 32 (1.74%) OpenAI
10 26 (1.41%) Atlassian
11 23 (1.25%) AppDynamics
12 21 (1.14%) IBM
13 18 (0.98%) Cisco
14 13 (0.71%) Palo Alto
14 13 (0.71%) Tenable
15 12 (0.65%) Confluent
15 12 (0.65%) Foundry
15 12 (0.65%) Solace