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

6 months to
29 Nov 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 31 36 43
Rank change year-on-year +5 +7 -11
Contract jobs citing Kubernetes 1,864 1,638 1,751
As % of all contract jobs in England 6.07% 5.29% 4.49%
As % of the Systems Management category 37.72% 37.36% 31.98%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,280 1,095 1,314
10th Percentile £394 £406 £425
25th Percentile £450 £493 £500
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £530 £590 £585
Median % change year-on-year -10.17% +0.85% -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% - -7.63%
Number of hourly rates quoted 22 14 52
10th Percentile £51.48 £29.43 -
25th Percentile £61.38 £46.18 £46.18
Median hourly rate £67.00 £51.84 £63.75
Median % change year-on-year +29.24% -18.68% -1.16%
75th Percentile £84.50 £72.54 £77.50
90th Percentile £118.45 £74.00 £78.00
UK median hourly rate £67.00 £51.84 £63.75
% change year-on-year +29.24% -18.68% -

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 4,942 4,384 5,475
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 16.09% 14.15% 14.05%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,343 2,803 3,980
10th Percentile £310 £313 £305
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 £643 £650
90th Percentile £700 £738 £744
UK median daily rate £513 £525 £545
% change year-on-year -2.38% -3.67% -5.22%
Number of hourly rates quoted 87 60 162
10th Percentile £18.87 £15.05 £17.72
25th Percentile £21.06 £23.80 £23.72
Median hourly rate £38.00 £35.08 £46.84
Median % change year-on-year +8.32% -25.10% +75.63%
75th Percentile £66.75 £60.63 £71.42
90th Percentile £81.20 £74.75 £78.00
UK median hourly rate £32.32 £27.00 £48.40
% change year-on-year +19.69% -44.21% +88.25%

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 29 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 29 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 29 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 -2 931 £550 -8.68% 301
North of England +10 338 £500 -1.23% 115
Midlands +58 209 £537 -6.61% 65
West Midlands +51 189 £540 -10.00% 47
South East +3 169 £485 -8.92% 244
Yorkshire -5 151 £500 +1.27% 33
North West +14 149 £475 -13.64% 63
South West -1 107 £627 +4.42% 97
East of England -4 46 £550 +4.76% 17
North East +4 40 £550 +17.33% 19
East Midlands +4 20 £465 -9.37% 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 81 (4.35%) Confluence
2 68 (3.65%) SAS
3 36 (1.93%) Apache Spark
4 34 (1.82%) nginx
5 33 (1.77%) Apache Airflow
6 29 (1.56%) Apache
7 26 (1.39%) OpenStack
8 10 (0.54%) Mule
9 7 (0.38%) Tomcat
10 6 (0.32%) JBoss
10 6 (0.32%) Jupyter
10 6 (0.32%) SharePoint
10 6 (0.32%) WebLogic
10 6 (0.32%) WebSphere
11 5 (0.27%) Ethereum
11 5 (0.27%) Hyperledger
12 4 (0.21%) Camunda
12 4 (0.21%) CMS
12 4 (0.21%) Drupal
12 4 (0.21%) Traefik
Applications
1 6 (0.32%) Microsoft Excel
1 6 (0.32%) MS Visio
2 5 (0.27%) Chatbot
2 5 (0.27%) Microsoft Office
2 5 (0.27%) Weka
3 4 (0.21%) Microsoft PowerPoint
Business Applications
1 7 (0.38%) Maximo
2 4 (0.21%) 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 1,021 (54.77%) AWS
2 683 (36.64%) Azure
3 460 (24.68%) GCP
4 412 (22.10%) GitHub
5 246 (13.20%) GitHub Actions
6 213 (11.43%) OpenShift
7 204 (10.94%) Serverless
8 170 (9.12%) Azure DevOps
9 140 (7.51%) AWS CloudFormation
10 137 (7.35%) Amazon EKS
11 134 (7.19%) Azure AKS
12 112 (6.01%) Amazon S3
13 108 (5.79%) AWS Lambda
14 87 (4.67%) Google Kubernetes Engine
15 81 (4.35%) Amazon EC2
16 77 (4.13%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 77 (4.13%) Amazon ECS
17 70 (3.76%) SaaS
18 61 (3.27%) Entra ID
19 58 (3.11%) Datadog
Communications & Networking
1 76 (4.08%) Firewall
2 49 (2.63%) DNS
3 29 (1.56%) Network Security
4 26 (1.39%) VPN
5 21 (1.13%) TCP/IP
6 17 (0.91%) SSL
7 16 (0.86%) 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 (0.32%) Ethernet VPN
11 6 (0.32%) VLAN
11 6 (0.32%) VXLAN
12 5 (0.27%) Kerberos
12 5 (0.27%) MQTT
12 5 (0.27%) OpenLDAP
13 4 (0.21%) Internet
13 4 (0.21%) SSH
14 3 (0.16%) MPLS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 254 (13.63%) PostgreSQL
2 182 (9.76%) NoSQL
3 122 (6.55%) MongoDB
4 77 (4.13%) Relational Database
5 69 (3.70%) Apache Cassandra
6 68 (3.65%) Amazon RDS
7 57 (3.06%) Elasticsearch
7 57 (3.06%) Redis
8 41 (2.20%) SQL Server
9 40 (2.15%) MySQL
10 36 (1.93%) Big Data
11 34 (1.82%) Pentaho
12 30 (1.61%) Data Warehouse
13 28 (1.50%) DynamoDB
14 27 (1.45%) Data Lake
14 27 (1.45%) Oracle Database
15 24 (1.29%) Hadoop
16 23 (1.23%) BigQuery
17 21 (1.13%) Power BI
18 20 (1.07%) Azure SQL Database
Development Applications
1 500 (26.82%) Jenkins
2 396 (21.24%) Git
3 354 (18.99%) GitLab
4 186 (9.98%) JIRA
5 69 (3.70%) JUnit
6 64 (3.43%) SonarQube
7 54 (2.90%) Sonatype Nexus
8 52 (2.79%) Maven
9 51 (2.74%) Artifactory
10 44 (2.36%) Selenium
11 40 (2.15%) Gradle
12 39 (2.09%) Bitbucket
13 38 (2.04%) Liquibase
14 34 (1.82%) CircleCI
15 33 (1.77%) Cucumber
16 27 (1.45%) MLflow
16 27 (1.45%) Mockito
17 25 (1.34%) Postman
18 21 (1.13%) JMeter
19 19 (1.02%) Cypress.io
General
1 509 (27.31%) Social Skills
2 309 (16.58%) Finance
3 225 (12.07%) Public Sector
4 203 (10.89%) Banking
5 148 (7.94%) Analytical Skills
6 41 (2.20%) Financial Institution
7 37 (1.98%) Documentation Skills
7 37 (1.98%) Investment Banking
8 27 (1.45%) Telecoms
9 22 (1.18%) Front Office
10 19 (1.02%) Pharmaceutical
11 17 (0.91%) Inclusion and Diversity
12 14 (0.75%) Retail
13 12 (0.64%) Influencing Skills
14 11 (0.59%) Aerospace
14 11 (0.59%) Presentation Skills
15 8 (0.43%) Military
16 7 (0.38%) Games
16 7 (0.38%) Law
17 6 (0.32%) Manufacturing
Job Titles
1 441 (23.66%) Developer
2 289 (15.50%) DevOps Engineer
3 282 (15.13%) Senior
4 154 (8.26%) Architect
5 146 (7.83%) Java Developer
6 107 (5.74%) AWS Engineer
7 106 (5.69%) Software Engineer
8 100 (5.36%) Platform Engineer
9 97 (5.20%) Lead
10 93 (4.99%) Senior Developer
11 85 (4.56%) Cloud Engineer
12 79 (4.24%) AWS DevOps
13 77 (4.13%) Python Developer
14 76 (4.08%) Full-Stack Developer
15 74 (3.97%) Site Reliability Engineer
16 70 (3.76%) Data Engineer
17 59 (3.17%) AWS DevOps Engineer
18 53 (2.84%) Azure Engineer
18 53 (2.84%) Site Engineer
19 48 (2.58%) Python Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 304 (16.31%) Kafka
2 205 (11.00%) RESTful
2 205 (11.00%) Spring
3 195 (10.46%) REST
4 191 (10.25%) React
5 177 (9.50%) Spring Boot
6 173 (9.28%) Node.js
7 141 (7.56%) Elastic Stack
8 122 (6.55%) AngularJS
9 89 (4.77%) .NET
10 86 (4.61%) gRPC
11 72 (3.86%) GraphQL
12 70 (3.76%) HTML
13 69 (3.70%) FastAPI
14 64 (3.43%) YAML
15 60 (3.22%) PyTorch
16 59 (3.17%) Vue
17 55 (2.95%) CSS
17 55 (2.95%) RabbitMQ
18 51 (2.74%) JSON
Miscellaneous
1 347 (18.62%) Cloud Native
2 178 (9.55%) Distributed Systems
3 67 (3.59%) Public Cloud
4 59 (3.17%) Onboarding
5 57 (3.06%) Product Ownership
6 52 (2.79%) Hybrid Cloud
7 39 (2.09%) Private Cloud
8 36 (1.93%) Algorithms
9 34 (1.82%) Enterprise Software
10 31 (1.66%) Data Protection Act
11 29 (1.56%) Legacy Systems
12 25 (1.34%) Security Posture
13 24 (1.29%) Data Structures
13 24 (1.29%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
14 23 (1.23%) Virtual Team
15 22 (1.18%) PKI
15 22 (1.18%) Replication
16 20 (1.07%) Greenfield Project
16 20 (1.07%) Hedge funds
17 19 (1.02%) Data Centre
Operating Systems
1 384 (20.60%) Linux
2 72 (3.86%) Windows
3 62 (3.33%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 58 (3.11%) Unix
5 23 (1.23%) VMS
6 21 (1.13%) Ubuntu
7 18 (0.97%) CentOS
8 17 (0.91%) Windows Server
9 6 (0.32%) 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 1,242 (66.63%) CI/CD
2 1,011 (54.24%) DevOps
3 816 (43.78%) Containerisation
4 636 (34.12%) Agile
5 568 (30.47%) Infrastructure as Code
6 527 (28.27%) Microservices
7 441 (23.66%) Problem-Solving
8 333 (17.86%) Software Engineering
9 287 (15.40%) Observability
10 267 (14.32%) Test Automation
11 198 (10.62%) Migration
12 188 (10.09%) AI
13 164 (8.80%) Analytics
14 163 (8.74%) Full-Stack Development
15 162 (8.69%) Scrum
16 159 (8.53%) Platform Engineering
17 156 (8.37%) DevSecOps
17 156 (8.37%) Machine Learning
18 150 (8.05%) Continuous Improvement
19 143 (7.67%) Data Pipeline
Programming Languages
1 879 (47.16%) Python
2 505 (27.09%) Java
3 320 (17.17%) SQL
4 273 (14.65%) Bash
5 249 (13.36%) Go
6 186 (9.98%) JavaScript
7 172 (9.23%) TypeScript
8 118 (6.33%) C#
9 109 (5.85%) PowerShell
10 67 (3.59%) C++
11 54 (2.90%) Bicep
12 53 (2.84%) Shell Script
13 35 (1.88%) Ruby
14 28 (1.50%) PHP
15 27 (1.45%) Groovy
16 26 (1.39%) Rust
17 25 (1.34%) Perl
18 21 (1.13%) Kotlin
19 19 (1.02%) Scala
20 16 (0.86%) C
Qualifications
1 625 (33.53%) Security Cleared
2 516 (27.68%) SC Cleared
3 130 (6.97%) Degree
4 100 (5.36%) DV Cleared
5 99 (5.31%) Computer Science Degree
6 89 (4.77%) AWS Certification
7 74 (3.97%) Azure Certification
8 52 (2.79%) Master's Degree
9 37 (1.98%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
10 32 (1.72%) CISSP
11 30 (1.61%) BPSS Clearance
12 24 (1.29%) Microsoft Certification
13 18 (0.97%) Cisco Certification
14 17 (0.91%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
14 17 (0.91%) CISM
15 11 (0.59%) OCP
15 11 (0.59%) Oracle Certification
16 10 (0.54%) (ISC)2 CCSP
16 10 (0.54%) CCSP
17 8 (0.43%) RHCE
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 99 (5.31%) QA
2 55 (2.95%) ISO/IEC 27001
3 51 (2.74%) Data Quality
4 49 (2.63%) NIST
5 37 (1.98%) GDPR
6 33 (1.77%) NCSC
7 24 (1.29%) Accessibility
8 17 (0.91%) PCI DSS
9 14 (0.75%) PSD2
10 12 (0.64%) EU AI Act
11 11 (0.59%) HIPAA
11 11 (0.59%) WCAG
12 9 (0.48%) ISO 20022
12 9 (0.48%) SEPA
13 7 (0.38%) Cyber Essentials
14 6 (0.32%) NIST 800
14 6 (0.32%) SOC 2
15 5 (0.27%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
15 5 (0.27%) JSP 440
15 5 (0.27%) SLA
System Software
1 1,202 (64.48%) Docker
2 54 (2.90%) Active Directory
3 50 (2.68%) VMware Infrastructure
4 31 (1.66%) vSphere
5 27 (1.45%) Virtual Machines
6 14 (0.75%) 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 (0.32%) GPFS
10 5 (0.27%) Snort
10 5 (0.27%) Squid
11 4 (0.21%) Virtual Servers
12 2 (0.11%) NDS
12 2 (0.11%) NetIQ eDirectory
12 2 (0.11%) VMware ESXi
13 1 (0.054%) GridGain
13 1 (0.054%) QEMU
13 1 (0.054%) Veritas Cluster Server
Systems Management
1 721 (38.68%) Terraform
2 323 (17.33%) Ansible
3 296 (15.88%) Grafana
4 267 (14.32%) Prometheus
5 103 (5.53%) Argo
6 50 (2.68%) Kibana
7 49 (2.63%) Puppet
8 44 (2.36%) Progress Chef
9 41 (2.20%) Istio
10 40 (2.15%) Packer
11 27 (1.45%) Single Sign-On
12 23 (1.23%) Consul
13 20 (1.07%) logstash
13 20 (1.07%) Nessus
14 17 (0.91%) Podman
15 14 (0.75%) Rancher
16 12 (0.64%) Control-M
16 12 (0.64%) ITRS Geneos
17 11 (0.59%) IBM Guardium
17 11 (0.59%) SCOM
Vendors
1 192 (10.30%) Microsoft
2 176 (9.44%) Splunk
3 151 (8.10%) Google
4 120 (6.44%) Red Hat
5 119 (6.38%) Oracle
6 69 (3.70%) VMware
7 47 (2.52%) Databricks
8 42 (2.25%) Dynatrace
9 34 (1.82%) Denodo
9 34 (1.82%) Talend
10 33 (1.77%) OpenAI
11 27 (1.45%) Atlassian
12 23 (1.23%) AppDynamics
13 21 (1.13%) IBM
14 18 (0.97%) Cisco
15 13 (0.70%) Palo Alto
15 13 (0.70%) Tenable
16 12 (0.64%) Confluent
16 12 (0.64%) Foundry
16 12 (0.64%) Solace