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

6 months to
27 Mar 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 32 30 57
Rank change year-on-year -2 +27 -26
Contract jobs citing Kubernetes 2,166 1,490 1,301
As % of all contract jobs in England 5.75% 6.15% 3.45%
As % of the Systems Management category 39.31% 38.60% 28.98%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,458 1,053 946
10th Percentile £400 £405 £413
25th Percentile £450 £475 £475
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £575 £550
Median % change year-on-year -8.70% +4.55% -12.00%
75th Percentile £625 £688 £675
90th Percentile £713 £812 £738
UK median daily rate £525 £567 £550
% change year-on-year -7.41% +3.09% -10.20%
Number of hourly rates quoted 52 7 18
10th Percentile - £26.00 £46.18
25th Percentile £52.50 £41.38 £47.81
Median hourly rate £65.00 £60.00 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +8.33% - -12.41%
75th Percentile £70.00 £73.44 £70.44
90th Percentile £85.70 £80.40 £76.82
UK median hourly rate £65.00 £60.00 £60.00
% change year-on-year +8.33% - -12.41%

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 5,510 3,860 4,490
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 14.63% 15.93% 11.91%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,788 2,640 3,275
10th Percentile £313 £315 £250
25th Percentile £413 £420 £408
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £503 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.24% - -8.70%
75th Percentile £600 £638 £631
90th Percentile £700 £750 £713
UK median daily rate £500 £525 £525
% change year-on-year -4.76% - -8.70%
Number of hourly rates quoted 136 42 129
10th Percentile £20.09 £15.51 £14.00
25th Percentile £28.24 £21.68 £17.78
Median hourly rate £55.00 £26.48 £30.00
Median % change year-on-year +107.74% -11.75% -45.45%
75th Percentile £68.75 £59.69 £55.00
90th Percentile £76.88 £76.75 £68.63
UK median hourly rate £55.00 £26.45 £31.75
% change year-on-year +107.94% -16.69% -42.27%

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 27 March 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 27 March 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 27 March 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 -9 999 £550 -8.33% 315
North of England +10 453 £493 -6.19% 157
Midlands +36 284 £525 - 57
West Midlands +33 246 £525 - 38
Yorkshire +15 236 £487 -15.85% 47
South East -6 187 £500 -9.09% 147
North West +13 172 £525 +2.19% 85
South West +2 156 £550 -8.33% 80
North East +3 49 £489 -5.10% 25
East Midlands -8 37 £449 -5.58% 19
East of England -23 34 £606 +23.72% 32
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
1 102 (4.71%) Confluence
2 68 (3.14%) SAS
3 59 (2.72%) Apache Spark
4 49 (2.26%) Apache
5 35 (1.62%) nginx
6 31 (1.43%) OpenStack
7 28 (1.29%) Apache Airflow
8 17 (0.78%) Jupyter
9 11 (0.51%) Camunda
10 8 (0.37%) Appian
10 8 (0.37%) WebLogic
11 7 (0.32%) Microsoft Exchange
11 7 (0.32%) SharePoint
12 5 (0.23%) Ethereum
12 5 (0.23%) Hyperledger
13 4 (0.18%) CMS
13 4 (0.18%) Drupal
14 3 (0.14%) Adobe Experience Manager
14 3 (0.14%) IIS
15 2 (0.092%) Oracle SOA Suite
Applications
1 5 (0.23%) Microsoft Excel
1 5 (0.23%) Microsoft Office
1 5 (0.23%) Weka
2 3 (0.14%) Chatbot
2 3 (0.14%) Microsoft Project
2 3 (0.14%) MS Visio
3 2 (0.092%) Adobe XD
3 2 (0.092%) CPLEX
4 1 (0.046%) Maya
4 1 (0.046%) Microsoft PowerPoint
Business Applications
1 8 (0.37%) Maximo
2 3 (0.14%) Distributed Ledger
3 2 (0.092%) Payment Gateway
4 1 (0.046%) Actimize
4 1 (0.046%) Cloudability
4 1 (0.046%) Endur
4 1 (0.046%) Oracle EBS
4 1 (0.046%) SAP Hybris
4 1 (0.046%) SAP S/4HANA
4 1 (0.046%) Shopify
Cloud Services
1 1,116 (51.52%) AWS
2 893 (41.23%) Azure
3 522 (24.10%) GCP
4 483 (22.30%) GitHub
5 317 (14.64%) OpenShift
6 283 (13.07%) GitHub Actions
7 231 (10.66%) Serverless
8 216 (9.97%) Azure DevOps
9 163 (7.53%) Amazon EKS
10 159 (7.34%) Azure AKS
11 148 (6.83%) AWS CloudFormation
12 137 (6.33%) Amazon S3
13 130 (6.00%) AWS Lambda
14 104 (4.80%) Amazon EC2
15 102 (4.71%) Google Kubernetes Engine
16 84 (3.88%) Amazon ECS
17 70 (3.23%) Datadog
18 69 (3.19%) Virtual Private Cloud
19 63 (2.91%) Amazon CloudWatch
20 57 (2.63%) Entra ID
Communications & Networking
1 109 (5.03%) Firewall
2 88 (4.06%) DNS
3 50 (2.31%) Network Security
4 47 (2.17%) VPN
5 38 (1.75%) TCP/IP
6 20 (0.92%) SAN
7 19 (0.88%) HTTP
8 16 (0.74%) DHCP
9 15 (0.69%) Reverse Proxy
10 12 (0.55%) NAS
11 11 (0.51%) OpenVPN
11 11 (0.51%) SSL
12 8 (0.37%) BGP
12 8 (0.37%) Fibre Channel
12 8 (0.37%) iSCSI
12 8 (0.37%) Kerberos
13 7 (0.32%) 5G
14 6 (0.28%) 3GPP
14 6 (0.28%) 4G
14 6 (0.28%) SMTP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 260 (12.00%) PostgreSQL
2 195 (9.00%) NoSQL
3 127 (5.86%) MongoDB
4 104 (4.80%) Relational Database
5 88 (4.06%) SQL Server
6 79 (3.65%) Apache Cassandra
7 66 (3.05%) Amazon RDS
8 65 (3.00%) Elasticsearch
9 47 (2.17%) Redis
10 42 (1.94%) Big Data
11 40 (1.85%) Power BI
12 35 (1.62%) MySQL
13 32 (1.48%) Pentaho
14 31 (1.43%) BigQuery
14 31 (1.43%) Data Lake
15 29 (1.34%) DynamoDB
16 27 (1.25%) Data Warehouse
17 24 (1.11%) Flink
18 23 (1.06%) Oracle Database
19 19 (0.88%) Hadoop
Development Applications
1 547 (25.25%) Jenkins
2 406 (18.74%) GitLab
3 387 (17.87%) Git
4 181 (8.36%) JIRA
5 101 (4.66%) JUnit
6 62 (2.86%) Selenium
7 58 (2.68%) SonarQube
8 56 (2.59%) Cucumber
9 46 (2.12%) Artifactory
10 42 (1.94%) MLflow
11 40 (1.85%) JMeter
12 37 (1.71%) Maven
13 36 (1.66%) Bitbucket
14 35 (1.62%) Gradle
15 34 (1.57%) Mockito
15 34 (1.57%) Sonatype Nexus
16 28 (1.29%) Gatling
17 22 (1.02%) Postman
18 18 (0.83%) CircleCI
19 15 (0.69%) WebDriver
General
1 568 (26.22%) Social Skills
2 362 (16.71%) Finance
3 270 (12.47%) Public Sector
4 184 (8.49%) Banking
5 156 (7.20%) Analytical Skills
6 56 (2.59%) Documentation Skills
7 34 (1.57%) Financial Institution
8 28 (1.29%) Influencing Skills
9 25 (1.15%) Telecoms
10 21 (0.97%) Front Office
11 19 (0.88%) Investment Banking
11 19 (0.88%) Presentation Skills
12 15 (0.69%) Inclusion and Diversity
12 15 (0.69%) Retail
13 14 (0.65%) Military
14 12 (0.55%) Organisational Skills
15 10 (0.46%) Aerospace
16 8 (0.37%) Legal
16 8 (0.37%) Publishing
17 6 (0.28%) Advertising
Job Titles
1 455 (21.01%) Developer
2 334 (15.42%) Senior
3 303 (13.99%) DevOps Engineer
4 216 (9.97%) Architect
5 149 (6.88%) Java Developer
6 138 (6.37%) Software Engineer
7 121 (5.59%) Lead
8 109 (5.03%) Platform Engineer
9 105 (4.85%) Senior Developer
10 104 (4.80%) Cloud Engineer
11 99 (4.57%) Site Reliability Engineer
12 98 (4.52%) Data Engineer
13 95 (4.39%) AWS Engineer
14 84 (3.88%) Azure Engineer
15 80 (3.69%) Java Engineer
16 78 (3.60%) Python Developer
17 74 (3.42%) Site Engineer
18 70 (3.23%) GCP Engineer
19 69 (3.19%) AWS DevOps
20 64 (2.95%) Full-Stack Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 362 (16.71%) Kafka
2 306 (14.13%) Spring
3 263 (12.14%) Spring Boot
4 228 (10.53%) REST
5 206 (9.51%) RESTful
6 162 (7.48%) React
7 156 (7.20%) Node.js
8 127 (5.86%) Elastic Stack
9 126 (5.82%) OpenTelemetry
10 117 (5.40%) AngularJS
11 102 (4.71%) .NET
12 81 (3.74%) gRPC
13 74 (3.42%) PyTorch
14 71 (3.28%) OAuth
15 64 (2.95%) FastAPI
16 62 (2.86%) RabbitMQ
17 57 (2.63%) GraphQL
17 57 (2.63%) TensorFlow
18 56 (2.59%) Playwright
19 54 (2.49%) OpenID
Miscellaneous
1 428 (19.76%) Cloud Native
2 191 (8.82%) Distributed Systems
3 96 (4.43%) Hybrid Cloud
4 71 (3.28%) Public Cloud
5 59 (2.72%) Onboarding
5 59 (2.72%) Product Ownership
6 38 (1.75%) Data Centre
6 38 (1.75%) Enterprise Software
6 38 (1.75%) Private Cloud
7 37 (1.71%) Data Protection Act
7 37 (1.71%) Legacy Systems
8 32 (1.48%) AI Agents
8 32 (1.48%) Management Information System
9 28 (1.29%) PKI
9 28 (1.29%) Security Posture
10 25 (1.15%) Virtual Team
11 23 (1.06%) Greenfield Project
12 20 (0.92%) Algorithms
12 20 (0.92%) Fixed Income
13 18 (0.83%) Enterprise Storage
Operating Systems
1 418 (19.30%) Linux
2 120 (5.54%) Windows
3 64 (2.95%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 59 (2.72%) Unix
5 45 (2.08%) VMS
6 28 (1.29%) Windows Server
7 21 (0.97%) Ubuntu
8 6 (0.28%) Windows Server 2003
9 5 (0.23%) CentOS
9 5 (0.23%) CoreOS
9 5 (0.23%) Data ONTAP
10 4 (0.18%) Apple iOS
10 4 (0.18%) Rocky
10 4 (0.18%) Windows Server 2012
10 4 (0.18%) Windows Server 2019
11 3 (0.14%) Android
11 3 (0.14%) Debian
12 1 (0.046%) Alpine Linux
12 1 (0.046%) Windows Server 2016
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,409 (65.05%) CI/CD
2 1,158 (53.46%) DevOps
3 924 (42.66%) Containerisation
4 701 (32.36%) Agile
5 650 (30.01%) Infrastructure as Code
6 568 (26.22%) Microservices
7 444 (20.50%) Problem-Solving
8 440 (20.31%) Observability
9 368 (16.99%) Software Engineering
10 327 (15.10%) Test Automation
11 266 (12.28%) AI
12 235 (10.85%) Continuous Improvement
13 219 (10.11%) Analytics
14 217 (10.02%) Migration
14 217 (10.02%) Site Reliability Engineering
15 212 (9.79%) Platform Engineering
16 200 (9.23%) DevSecOps
17 199 (9.19%) Data Pipeline
18 193 (8.91%) Scrum
19 191 (8.82%) Machine Learning
Programming Languages
1 895 (41.32%) Python
2 544 (25.12%) Java
3 405 (18.70%) SQL
4 281 (12.97%) Bash
5 197 (9.10%) Go
6 147 (6.79%) JavaScript
7 141 (6.51%) PowerShell
8 133 (6.14%) TypeScript
9 98 (4.52%) C#
10 67 (3.09%) Bicep
11 58 (2.68%) Shell Script
12 41 (1.89%) Ruby
13 36 (1.66%) Scala
14 25 (1.15%) Kotlin
14 25 (1.15%) Rust
15 21 (0.97%) C++
16 19 (0.88%) Groovy
17 14 (0.65%) PHP
18 12 (0.55%) C
18 12 (0.55%) Kusto Query Language
Qualifications
1 769 (35.50%) Security Cleared
2 622 (28.72%) SC Cleared
3 152 (7.02%) Degree
4 123 (5.68%) DV Cleared
5 108 (4.99%) Azure Certification
6 105 (4.85%) Computer Science Degree
7 85 (3.92%) AWS Certification
8 52 (2.40%) CISSP
9 48 (2.22%) BPSS Clearance
10 47 (2.17%) Master's Degree
11 31 (1.43%) CISM
12 29 (1.34%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 23 (1.06%) Cisco Certification
14 21 (0.97%) Microsoft Certification
14 21 (0.97%) OCP
14 21 (0.97%) Oracle Certification
15 17 (0.78%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
16 16 (0.74%) TOGAF Certification
17 13 (0.60%) CCSP
18 12 (0.55%) (ISC)2 CCSP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 122 (5.63%) QA
2 77 (3.55%) Data Quality
3 67 (3.09%) NIST
4 65 (3.00%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 57 (2.63%) GDPR
6 47 (2.17%) NCSC
7 45 (2.08%) Accessibility
8 32 (1.48%) PCI DSS
9 20 (0.92%) WCAG
10 16 (0.74%) ISO 20022
11 15 (0.69%) PSD2
12 14 (0.65%) NIST 800
13 12 (0.55%) Sarbanes-Oxley
14 10 (0.46%) Cyber Essentials
14 10 (0.46%) SEPA
15 9 (0.42%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
15 9 (0.42%) HIPAA
15 9 (0.42%) SLA
16 8 (0.37%) GRC
17 7 (0.32%) SOC 2
System Software
1 1,285 (59.33%) Docker
2 75 (3.46%) VMware Infrastructure
3 58 (2.68%) vSphere
4 51 (2.35%) Virtual Machines
5 41 (1.89%) Active Directory
6 32 (1.48%) VMware NSX
7 24 (1.11%) Slurm Workload Manager
8 18 (0.83%) Hyper-V
9 12 (0.55%) NFS
9 12 (0.55%) Squid
10 9 (0.42%) Lustre
10 9 (0.42%) VMware ESXi
11 7 (0.32%) GPFS
11 7 (0.32%) Virtual Desktop
12 6 (0.28%) BitLocker
12 6 (0.28%) Microsoft App-V
12 6 (0.28%) Snort
13 5 (0.23%) etcd
14 4 (0.18%) Firmware
14 4 (0.18%) KVM
Systems Management
1 811 (37.44%) Terraform
2 372 (17.17%) Grafana
3 367 (16.94%) Ansible
4 339 (15.65%) Prometheus
5 131 (6.05%) Argo
6 58 (2.68%) Istio
7 50 (2.31%) Puppet
8 41 (1.89%) Kibana
8 41 (1.89%) Progress Chef
9 34 (1.57%) vCenter Server
10 28 (1.29%) Single Sign-On
11 27 (1.25%) Packer
12 26 (1.20%) Podman
13 25 (1.15%) Nessus
14 23 (1.06%) Consul
14 23 (1.06%) Rancher
15 14 (0.65%) Control-M
15 14 (0.65%) IBM Guardium
15 14 (0.65%) Kustomize
16 13 (0.60%) logstash
Vendors
1 242 (11.17%) Microsoft
2 194 (8.96%) Splunk
3 160 (7.39%) Red Hat
4 156 (7.20%) Google
5 112 (5.17%) Oracle
6 110 (5.08%) VMware
7 63 (2.91%) Databricks
8 62 (2.86%) Dynatrace
9 49 (2.26%) OpenAI
10 33 (1.52%) Talend
11 32 (1.48%) Denodo
12 30 (1.39%) Pure Storage
13 23 (1.06%) Atlassian
14 22 (1.02%) IBM
14 22 (1.02%) Tenable
15 21 (0.97%) AppDynamics
16 19 (0.88%) Foundry
17 18 (0.83%) ServiceNow
18 17 (0.78%) CyberArk
18 17 (0.78%) NetApp