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 6 December 2025, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
6 Dec 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 31 35 47
Rank change year-on-year +4 +12 -15
Contract jobs citing Kubernetes 1,901 1,627 1,684
As % of all contract jobs in England 6.11% 5.32% 4.39%
As % of the Systems Management category 38.16% 37.21% 31.67%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,316 1,094 1,262
10th Percentile £400 £406 £425
25th Percentile £450 £494 £500
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £600 £580
Median % change year-on-year -12.50% +3.45% -7.20%
75th Percentile £638 £700 £688
90th Percentile £700 £788 £775
UK median daily rate £525 £575 £575
% change year-on-year -8.70% - -7.30%
Number of hourly rates quoted 25 14 49
10th Percentile £45.20 £29.43 -
25th Percentile £55.00 £46.18 £46.18
Median hourly rate £67.00 £51.84 £62.50
Median % change year-on-year +29.24% -17.06% -10.71%
75th Percentile £80.00 £72.54 £76.53
90th Percentile £116.80 £74.00 £78.15
UK median hourly rate £67.00 £51.84 £62.50
% change year-on-year +29.24% -17.06% -10.71%

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 4,982 4,373 5,317
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 16.01% 14.30% 13.87%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,388 2,806 3,859
10th Percentile £307 £313 £302
25th Percentile £413 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £526 £550
Median % change year-on-year -2.57% -4.36% -6.38%
75th Percentile £613 £642 £650
90th Percentile £700 £738 £745
UK median daily rate £512 £525 £545
% change year-on-year -2.52% -3.67% -5.22%
Number of hourly rates quoted 92 60 161
10th Percentile £18.87 £15.05 £17.00
25th Percentile £21.17 £23.80 £21.25
Median hourly rate £39.75 £35.08 £46.18
Median % change year-on-year +13.30% -24.03% +34.83%
75th Percentile £65.80 £60.63 £70.00
90th Percentile £79.88 £74.75 £78.00
UK median hourly rate £34.00 £27.00 £46.18
% change year-on-year +25.93% -41.53% +44.31%

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 6 December 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 6 December 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 6 December 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 -2 935 £560 -7.74% 322
North of England +13 365 £487 -7.19% 247
Midlands +61 218 £530 -9.79% 138
West Midlands +54 199 £537 -11.39% 82
Yorkshire +5 179 £487 -2.60% 100
South East +1 165 £500 -4.76% 306
North West +18 148 £475 -13.64% 129
South West -2 110 £627 +4.42% 144
East of England +2 47 £550 +4.76% 97
North East +4 40 £548 +6.31% 20
East Midlands 0 19 £429 -16.29% 49
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 86 (4.52%) Confluence
2 68 (3.58%) SAS
3 33 (1.74%) Apache Airflow
3 33 (1.74%) Apache Spark
4 32 (1.68%) nginx
5 27 (1.42%) Apache
5 27 (1.42%) OpenStack
6 10 (0.53%) Mule
7 7 (0.37%) Tomcat
8 6 (0.32%) Jupyter
8 6 (0.32%) SharePoint
8 6 (0.32%) WebLogic
9 5 (0.26%) Ethereum
9 5 (0.26%) Hyperledger
9 5 (0.26%) JBoss
10 4 (0.21%) CMS
10 4 (0.21%) Drupal
10 4 (0.21%) MQSeries
10 4 (0.21%) Oracle Workflow
10 4 (0.21%) Traefik
Applications
1 6 (0.32%) Microsoft Excel
1 6 (0.32%) MS Visio
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
Business Applications
1 7 (0.37%) Maximo
2 4 (0.21%) Endur
3 2 (0.11%) SAP S/4HANA
4 1 (0.053%) Actimize
4 1 (0.053%) Cloudability
4 1 (0.053%) Finacle
Cloud Services
1 1,030 (54.18%) AWS
2 686 (36.09%) Azure
3 468 (24.62%) GCP
4 416 (21.88%) GitHub
5 249 (13.10%) GitHub Actions
6 237 (12.47%) OpenShift
7 212 (11.15%) Serverless
8 170 (8.94%) Azure DevOps
9 142 (7.47%) Amazon EKS
10 141 (7.42%) AWS CloudFormation
11 136 (7.15%) Azure AKS
12 115 (6.05%) Amazon S3
13 114 (6.00%) AWS Lambda
14 85 (4.47%) Amazon EC2
15 84 (4.42%) Google Kubernetes Engine
16 82 (4.31%) Amazon ECS
17 79 (4.16%) Amazon CloudWatch
18 70 (3.68%) SaaS
19 63 (3.31%) Entra ID
20 60 (3.16%) Datadog
Communications & Networking
1 77 (4.05%) Firewall
2 52 (2.74%) DNS
3 29 (1.53%) Network Security
4 28 (1.47%) VPN
5 22 (1.16%) TCP/IP
6 20 (1.05%) SSL
7 17 (0.89%) HTTP
8 10 (0.53%) BGP
9 8 (0.42%) DHCP
10 7 (0.37%) HTTPS
10 7 (0.37%) Software-Defined Networking
11 6 (0.32%) Ethernet VPN
11 6 (0.32%) NAS
11 6 (0.32%) SAN
11 6 (0.32%) VLAN
11 6 (0.32%) VXLAN
12 5 (0.26%) Fibre Channel
12 5 (0.26%) iSCSI
12 5 (0.26%) Kerberos
12 5 (0.26%) OpenLDAP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 247 (12.99%) PostgreSQL
2 184 (9.68%) NoSQL
3 127 (6.68%) MongoDB
4 76 (4.00%) Relational Database
5 72 (3.79%) Apache Cassandra
6 66 (3.47%) Amazon RDS
7 59 (3.10%) Elasticsearch
8 55 (2.89%) Redis
9 42 (2.21%) SQL Server
10 40 (2.10%) MySQL
11 35 (1.84%) Big Data
12 34 (1.79%) Pentaho
13 28 (1.47%) DynamoDB
14 27 (1.42%) Data Warehouse
14 27 (1.42%) Oracle Database
15 24 (1.26%) Data Lake
16 23 (1.21%) BigQuery
16 23 (1.21%) Power BI
17 20 (1.05%) Azure SQL Database
18 18 (0.95%) Hadoop
Development Applications
1 510 (26.83%) Jenkins
2 399 (20.99%) Git
3 361 (18.99%) GitLab
4 190 (9.99%) JIRA
5 70 (3.68%) JUnit
6 64 (3.37%) SonarQube
7 55 (2.89%) Sonatype Nexus
8 51 (2.68%) Maven
9 48 (2.52%) Artifactory
10 44 (2.31%) Selenium
11 40 (2.10%) Gradle
12 39 (2.05%) Bitbucket
13 38 (2.00%) Liquibase
14 35 (1.84%) CircleCI
15 34 (1.79%) Cucumber
16 28 (1.47%) MLflow
16 28 (1.47%) Mockito
17 26 (1.37%) Postman
18 21 (1.10%) JMeter
19 19 (1.00%) TeamCity
General
1 509 (26.78%) Social Skills
2 310 (16.31%) Finance
3 224 (11.78%) Public Sector
4 205 (10.78%) Banking
5 144 (7.57%) Analytical Skills
6 40 (2.10%) Financial Institution
7 38 (2.00%) Documentation Skills
8 36 (1.89%) Investment Banking
9 25 (1.32%) Telecoms
10 24 (1.26%) Front Office
11 19 (1.00%) Pharmaceutical
12 17 (0.89%) Inclusion and Diversity
13 12 (0.63%) Influencing Skills
13 12 (0.63%) Retail
14 11 (0.58%) Aerospace
15 10 (0.53%) Presentation Skills
16 8 (0.42%) Military
17 7 (0.37%) Games
17 7 (0.37%) Law
18 6 (0.32%) Manufacturing
Job Titles
1 442 (23.25%) Developer
2 291 (15.31%) DevOps Engineer
3 288 (15.15%) Senior
4 152 (8.00%) Architect
5 145 (7.63%) Java Developer
6 110 (5.79%) Software Engineer
7 109 (5.73%) AWS Engineer
8 99 (5.21%) Lead
8 99 (5.21%) Platform Engineer
9 95 (5.00%) Senior Developer
10 83 (4.37%) Site Reliability Engineer
11 81 (4.26%) Cloud Engineer
12 76 (4.00%) Python Developer
13 75 (3.95%) AWS DevOps
13 75 (3.95%) Full-Stack Developer
14 70 (3.68%) Data Engineer
15 61 (3.21%) Site Engineer
16 57 (3.00%) AWS DevOps Engineer
17 53 (2.79%) Azure Engineer
18 49 (2.58%) Python Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 307 (16.15%) Kafka
2 209 (10.99%) Spring
3 204 (10.73%) RESTful
4 193 (10.15%) REST
5 188 (9.89%) React
6 184 (9.68%) Spring Boot
7 173 (9.10%) Node.js
8 145 (7.63%) Elastic Stack
9 119 (6.26%) AngularJS
10 90 (4.73%) .NET
11 87 (4.58%) gRPC
12 73 (3.84%) GraphQL
13 69 (3.63%) FastAPI
13 69 (3.63%) HTML
14 63 (3.31%) YAML
15 62 (3.26%) PyTorch
16 56 (2.95%) Vue
17 55 (2.89%) RabbitMQ
18 54 (2.84%) CSS
19 53 (2.79%) JSON
Miscellaneous
1 353 (18.57%) Cloud Native
2 176 (9.26%) Distributed Systems
3 66 (3.47%) Public Cloud
4 63 (3.31%) Product Ownership
5 59 (3.10%) Onboarding
6 56 (2.95%) Hybrid Cloud
7 39 (2.05%) Private Cloud
8 33 (1.74%) Algorithms
9 32 (1.68%) Enterprise Software
10 30 (1.58%) Data Protection Act
11 29 (1.53%) Legacy Systems
12 28 (1.47%) PKI
13 26 (1.37%) Replication
14 25 (1.32%) Security Posture
15 23 (1.21%) Data Structures
15 23 (1.21%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
16 22 (1.16%) Greenfield Project
17 21 (1.10%) Data Centre
17 21 (1.10%) Virtual Team
18 19 (1.00%) Hedge funds
Operating Systems
1 392 (20.62%) Linux
2 71 (3.73%) Windows
3 61 (3.21%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 60 (3.16%) Unix
5 26 (1.37%) VMS
6 23 (1.21%) Ubuntu
7 18 (0.95%) CentOS
8 17 (0.89%) 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 (0.053%) Alpine Linux
11 1 (0.053%) Mac OS
11 1 (0.053%) MVS
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,260 (66.28%) CI/CD
2 1,036 (54.50%) DevOps
3 835 (43.92%) Containerisation
4 642 (33.77%) Agile
5 571 (30.04%) Infrastructure as Code
6 536 (28.20%) Microservices
7 447 (23.51%) Problem-Solving
8 337 (17.73%) Software Engineering
9 295 (15.52%) Observability
10 273 (14.36%) Test Automation
11 212 (11.15%) Migration
12 192 (10.10%) AI
13 163 (8.57%) Full-Stack Development
14 161 (8.47%) Analytics
14 161 (8.47%) Platform Engineering
15 159 (8.36%) Scrum
16 158 (8.31%) Machine Learning
17 156 (8.21%) DevSecOps
18 153 (8.05%) Continuous Improvement
19 145 (7.63%) Site Reliability Engineering
Programming Languages
1 888 (46.71%) Python
2 510 (26.83%) Java
3 326 (17.15%) SQL
4 283 (14.89%) Bash
5 252 (13.26%) Go
6 181 (9.52%) JavaScript
7 170 (8.94%) TypeScript
8 113 (5.94%) C#
9 110 (5.79%) PowerShell
10 63 (3.31%) C++
11 55 (2.89%) Bicep
11 55 (2.89%) Shell Script
12 39 (2.05%) Ruby
13 28 (1.47%) PHP
14 27 (1.42%) Groovy
15 25 (1.32%) Perl
15 25 (1.32%) Rust
16 22 (1.16%) Scala
17 20 (1.05%) Kotlin
18 16 (0.84%) C
Qualifications
1 631 (33.19%) Security Cleared
2 520 (27.35%) SC Cleared
3 134 (7.05%) Degree
4 101 (5.31%) Computer Science Degree
4 101 (5.31%) DV Cleared
5 90 (4.73%) AWS Certification
6 74 (3.89%) Azure Certification
7 53 (2.79%) Master's Degree
8 39 (2.05%) CISSP
9 37 (1.95%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
10 30 (1.58%) BPSS Clearance
11 24 (1.26%) CISM
12 23 (1.21%) Microsoft Certification
13 18 (0.95%) Cisco Certification
14 17 (0.89%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
15 12 (0.63%) OCP
15 12 (0.63%) Oracle Certification
16 11 (0.58%) CCSP
17 10 (0.53%) (ISC)2 CCSP
18 9 (0.47%) RHCE
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 98 (5.16%) QA
2 55 (2.89%) ISO/IEC 27001
3 50 (2.63%) Data Quality
4 48 (2.52%) NIST
5 41 (2.16%) GDPR
6 33 (1.74%) NCSC
7 24 (1.26%) Accessibility
8 21 (1.10%) PCI DSS
9 14 (0.74%) PSD2
10 12 (0.63%) EU AI Act
10 12 (0.63%) HIPAA
11 10 (0.53%) WCAG
12 9 (0.47%) ISO 20022
12 9 (0.47%) SEPA
13 7 (0.37%) Cyber Essentials
14 6 (0.32%) NIST 800
14 6 (0.32%) SOC 2
15 5 (0.26%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
15 5 (0.26%) JSP 440
15 5 (0.26%) SLA
System Software
1 1,213 (63.81%) Docker
2 55 (2.89%) Active Directory
3 50 (2.63%) VMware Infrastructure
4 29 (1.53%) Virtual Machines
4 29 (1.53%) vSphere
5 14 (0.74%) VMware NSX
6 11 (0.58%) Hyper-V
7 9 (0.47%) KVM
8 8 (0.42%) Lustre
8 8 (0.42%) Slurm Workload Manager
9 6 (0.32%) GPFS
10 5 (0.26%) NFS
10 5 (0.26%) Snort
10 5 (0.26%) Squid
11 4 (0.21%) Virtual Servers
12 2 (0.11%) Ceph
12 2 (0.11%) NDS
12 2 (0.11%) NetIQ eDirectory
13 1 (0.053%) Firmware
13 1 (0.053%) Xen
Systems Management
1 735 (38.66%) Terraform
2 338 (17.78%) Ansible
3 304 (15.99%) Grafana
4 273 (14.36%) Prometheus
5 104 (5.47%) Argo
6 52 (2.74%) Kibana
7 48 (2.52%) Puppet
8 45 (2.37%) Progress Chef
9 39 (2.05%) Istio
10 38 (2.00%) Packer
11 23 (1.21%) Single Sign-On
12 22 (1.16%) Consul
12 22 (1.16%) logstash
13 21 (1.10%) Nessus
14 17 (0.89%) Podman
15 15 (0.79%) Rancher
16 12 (0.63%) Control-M
16 12 (0.63%) ITRS Geneos
17 11 (0.58%) Docker Swarm
17 11 (0.58%) SCOM
Vendors
1 202 (10.63%) Microsoft
2 175 (9.21%) Splunk
3 149 (7.84%) Google
4 118 (6.21%) Oracle
4 118 (6.21%) Red Hat
5 70 (3.68%) VMware
6 49 (2.58%) Databricks
7 39 (2.05%) Dynatrace
8 34 (1.79%) Denodo
8 34 (1.79%) OpenAI
8 34 (1.79%) Talend
9 25 (1.32%) Atlassian
10 23 (1.21%) AppDynamics
11 22 (1.16%) IBM
12 18 (0.95%) Cisco
13 13 (0.68%) Palo Alto
13 13 (0.68%) Tenable
14 12 (0.63%) Confluent
14 12 (0.63%) NVIDIA
14 12 (0.63%) Solace