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

6 months to
21 Mar 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 32 30 57
Rank change year-on-year -2 +27 -26
Contract jobs citing Kubernetes 2,173 1,493 1,313
As % of all contract jobs in England 5.80% 6.10% 3.48%
As % of the Systems Management category 39.50% 38.56% 29.29%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,481 1,048 956
10th Percentile £400 £406 £418
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 £626 £688 £675
90th Percentile £713 £813 £738
UK median daily rate £525 £571 £550
% change year-on-year -8.10% +3.86% -10.20%
Number of hourly rates quoted 44 7 20
10th Percentile £51.63 £26.00 £46.18
25th Percentile £52.50 £41.38 £46.23
Median hourly rate £61.00 £60.00 £62.00
Median % change year-on-year +1.67% -3.23% -5.34%
75th Percentile £75.07 £73.44 £74.96
90th Percentile £88.10 £80.40 £77.50
UK median hourly rate £62.25 £60.00 £62.00
% change year-on-year +3.75% -3.23% -5.34%

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 5,501 3,872 4,482
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 14.69% 15.81% 11.89%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,806 2,622 3,264
10th Percentile £313 £313 £250
25th Percentile £413 £420 £406
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £502 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.48% - -8.70%
75th Percentile £600 £638 £630
90th Percentile £700 £750 £713
UK median daily rate £500 £525 £520
% change year-on-year -4.76% +0.96% -9.57%
Number of hourly rates quoted 127 39 133
10th Percentile £19.65 £15.22 £14.00
25th Percentile £25.00 £21.05 £20.00
Median hourly rate £55.00 £26.50 £31.50
Median % change year-on-year +107.55% -15.87% -41.86%
75th Percentile £68.13 £61.63 £57.50
90th Percentile £77.35 £77.74 £69.73
UK median hourly rate £55.00 £25.50 £32.50
% change year-on-year +115.69% -21.54% -37.66%

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 21 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 21 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 21 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 1,008 £550 -8.33% 322
North of England +11 460 £500 -4.76% 146
Midlands +41 281 £525 - 49
West Midlands +36 247 £525 - 31
Yorkshire +9 237 £487 -15.30% 48
South East -8 187 £488 -11.36% 142
North West +17 178 £525 +0.02% 76
South West +9 153 £575 -4.17% 70
North East -1 49 £501 -2.82% 22
East of England -13 34 £606 +23.72% 30
East Midlands -12 33 £442 -11.55% 18
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
1 105 (4.83%) Confluence
2 67 (3.08%) SAS
3 58 (2.67%) Apache Spark
4 46 (2.12%) Apache
5 35 (1.61%) nginx
6 31 (1.43%) OpenStack
7 27 (1.24%) Apache Airflow
8 17 (0.78%) Jupyter
9 10 (0.46%) Camunda
10 8 (0.37%) Appian
10 8 (0.37%) WebLogic
11 7 (0.32%) Microsoft Exchange
12 6 (0.28%) SharePoint
13 5 (0.23%) Ethereum
13 5 (0.23%) Hyperledger
14 4 (0.18%) CMS
14 4 (0.18%) Drupal
15 3 (0.14%) Adobe Experience Manager
15 3 (0.14%) IIS
16 2 (0.092%) Oracle SOA Suite
Applications
1 5 (0.23%) Chatbot
1 5 (0.23%) Microsoft Excel
1 5 (0.23%) Microsoft Office
1 5 (0.23%) Weka
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 2 (0.092%) Payment Gateway
3 1 (0.046%) Actimize
3 1 (0.046%) Cloudability
3 1 (0.046%) Distributed Ledger
3 1 (0.046%) Endur
3 1 (0.046%) Oracle EBS
3 1 (0.046%) SAP Hybris
3 1 (0.046%) SAP S/4HANA
3 1 (0.046%) Shopify
Cloud Services
1 1,138 (52.37%) AWS
2 887 (40.82%) Azure
3 528 (24.30%) GCP
4 506 (23.29%) GitHub
5 320 (14.73%) OpenShift
6 288 (13.25%) GitHub Actions
7 234 (10.77%) Serverless
8 209 (9.62%) Azure DevOps
9 171 (7.87%) Amazon EKS
10 157 (7.23%) Azure AKS
11 150 (6.90%) AWS CloudFormation
12 142 (6.53%) Amazon S3
13 134 (6.17%) AWS Lambda
14 107 (4.92%) Amazon EC2
15 105 (4.83%) Google Kubernetes Engine
16 88 (4.05%) Amazon ECS
17 72 (3.31%) Virtual Private Cloud
18 71 (3.27%) Datadog
19 61 (2.81%) Amazon CloudWatch
20 57 (2.62%) Azure Monitor
Communications & Networking
1 110 (5.06%) Firewall
2 87 (4.00%) DNS
3 51 (2.35%) Network Security
4 45 (2.07%) VPN
5 37 (1.70%) TCP/IP
6 20 (0.92%) SAN
7 19 (0.87%) HTTP
8 16 (0.74%) DHCP
9 15 (0.69%) Reverse Proxy
10 13 (0.60%) SSL
11 12 (0.55%) NAS
12 11 (0.51%) OpenVPN
13 8 (0.37%) BGP
13 8 (0.37%) Fibre Channel
13 8 (0.37%) iSCSI
13 8 (0.37%) Kerberos
14 7 (0.32%) 5G
15 6 (0.28%) 3GPP
15 6 (0.28%) 4G
15 6 (0.28%) SMTP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 277 (12.75%) PostgreSQL
2 201 (9.25%) NoSQL
3 130 (5.98%) MongoDB
4 104 (4.79%) Relational Database
5 89 (4.10%) SQL Server
6 83 (3.82%) Apache Cassandra
7 70 (3.22%) Amazon RDS
8 66 (3.04%) Elasticsearch
9 48 (2.21%) Redis
10 45 (2.07%) Big Data
11 40 (1.84%) Power BI
12 37 (1.70%) MySQL
13 32 (1.47%) BigQuery
14 31 (1.43%) Data Warehouse
14 31 (1.43%) DynamoDB
14 31 (1.43%) Pentaho
15 30 (1.38%) Data Lake
16 24 (1.10%) Oracle Database
17 22 (1.01%) Flink
18 20 (0.92%) Hadoop
Development Applications
1 557 (25.63%) Jenkins
2 416 (19.14%) GitLab
3 407 (18.73%) Git
4 188 (8.65%) JIRA
5 102 (4.69%) JUnit
6 62 (2.85%) Selenium
7 59 (2.72%) Cucumber
8 50 (2.30%) SonarQube
9 46 (2.12%) Artifactory
10 42 (1.93%) MLflow
11 41 (1.89%) Bitbucket
12 40 (1.84%) JMeter
13 38 (1.75%) Maven
14 37 (1.70%) Gradle
15 36 (1.66%) Sonatype Nexus
16 35 (1.61%) Mockito
17 27 (1.24%) Gatling
18 24 (1.10%) Postman
19 20 (0.92%) CircleCI
20 15 (0.69%) WebDriver
General
1 578 (26.60%) Social Skills
2 366 (16.84%) Finance
3 272 (12.52%) Public Sector
4 186 (8.56%) Banking
5 158 (7.27%) Analytical Skills
6 59 (2.72%) Documentation Skills
7 34 (1.56%) Financial Institution
8 28 (1.29%) Influencing Skills
9 24 (1.10%) Telecoms
10 23 (1.06%) Front Office
11 20 (0.92%) Investment Banking
12 19 (0.87%) Presentation Skills
13 15 (0.69%) Inclusion and Diversity
13 15 (0.69%) Retail
14 14 (0.64%) Military
15 12 (0.55%) Organisational Skills
16 9 (0.41%) Aerospace
17 7 (0.32%) Legal
18 5 (0.23%) Advertising
18 5 (0.23%) Manufacturing
Job Titles
1 470 (21.63%) Developer
2 340 (15.65%) Senior
3 301 (13.85%) DevOps Engineer
4 209 (9.62%) Architect
5 146 (6.72%) Java Developer
6 138 (6.35%) Software Engineer
7 120 (5.52%) Lead
8 109 (5.02%) Platform Engineer
9 108 (4.97%) Cloud Engineer
9 108 (4.97%) Senior Developer
10 102 (4.69%) AWS Engineer
11 96 (4.42%) Data Engineer
11 96 (4.42%) Site Reliability Engineer
12 82 (3.77%) Python Developer
13 81 (3.73%) Java Engineer
14 79 (3.64%) Azure Engineer
15 75 (3.45%) Full-Stack Developer
16 73 (3.36%) AWS DevOps
17 71 (3.27%) Site Engineer
18 70 (3.22%) GCP Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 353 (16.24%) Kafka
2 315 (14.50%) Spring
3 263 (12.10%) Spring Boot
4 233 (10.72%) REST
5 203 (9.34%) RESTful
6 179 (8.24%) React
7 165 (7.59%) Node.js
8 127 (5.84%) Elastic Stack
9 125 (5.75%) OpenTelemetry
10 118 (5.43%) AngularJS
11 101 (4.65%) .NET
12 82 (3.77%) gRPC
13 74 (3.41%) PyTorch
14 72 (3.31%) OAuth
15 71 (3.27%) FastAPI
16 65 (2.99%) HTML
17 60 (2.76%) GraphQL
18 58 (2.67%) Playwright
18 58 (2.67%) RabbitMQ
19 56 (2.58%) OpenID
Miscellaneous
1 435 (20.02%) Cloud Native
2 185 (8.51%) Distributed Systems
3 96 (4.42%) Hybrid Cloud
4 72 (3.31%) Public Cloud
5 62 (2.85%) Product Ownership
6 60 (2.76%) Onboarding
7 39 (1.79%) Legacy Systems
7 39 (1.79%) Private Cloud
8 37 (1.70%) Data Centre
8 37 (1.70%) Data Protection Act
9 34 (1.56%) Enterprise Software
9 34 (1.56%) Management Information System
10 31 (1.43%) PKI
11 30 (1.38%) AI Agents
12 27 (1.24%) Security Posture
13 25 (1.15%) Greenfield Project
13 25 (1.15%) Virtual Team
14 22 (1.01%) Algorithms
15 20 (0.92%) Fixed Income
16 19 (0.87%) NHS
Operating Systems
1 422 (19.42%) Linux
2 120 (5.52%) Windows
3 65 (2.99%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 61 (2.81%) Unix
5 44 (2.02%) VMS
6 28 (1.29%) Windows Server
7 21 (0.97%) Ubuntu
8 6 (0.28%) CentOS
8 6 (0.28%) Windows Server 2003
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 1,426 (65.62%) CI/CD
2 1,162 (53.47%) DevOps
3 940 (43.26%) Containerisation
4 702 (32.31%) Agile
5 644 (29.64%) Infrastructure as Code
6 582 (26.78%) Microservices
7 459 (21.12%) Problem-Solving
8 436 (20.06%) Observability
9 369 (16.98%) Software Engineering
10 329 (15.14%) Test Automation
11 260 (11.97%) AI
12 232 (10.68%) Continuous Improvement
13 229 (10.54%) Migration
14 216 (9.94%) Analytics
15 213 (9.80%) Site Reliability Engineering
16 210 (9.66%) Platform Engineering
17 193 (8.88%) Data Pipeline
17 193 (8.88%) DevSecOps
18 190 (8.74%) Machine Learning
19 182 (8.38%) Scrum
Programming Languages
1 919 (42.29%) Python
2 552 (25.40%) Java
3 411 (18.91%) SQL
4 280 (12.89%) Bash
5 202 (9.30%) Go
6 163 (7.50%) JavaScript
7 149 (6.86%) TypeScript
8 139 (6.40%) PowerShell
9 95 (4.37%) C#
10 66 (3.04%) Bicep
11 58 (2.67%) Shell Script
12 51 (2.35%) Ruby
13 36 (1.66%) Scala
14 29 (1.33%) Kotlin
15 26 (1.20%) Rust
16 24 (1.10%) C++
17 19 (0.87%) Groovy
18 15 (0.69%) PHP
19 12 (0.55%) C
19 12 (0.55%) Perl
Qualifications
1 771 (35.48%) Security Cleared
2 627 (28.85%) SC Cleared
3 161 (7.41%) Degree
4 125 (5.75%) DV Cleared
5 115 (5.29%) Computer Science Degree
6 107 (4.92%) Azure Certification
7 89 (4.10%) AWS Certification
8 54 (2.49%) CISSP
9 48 (2.21%) BPSS Clearance
9 48 (2.21%) Master's Degree
10 31 (1.43%) CISM
11 29 (1.33%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
12 24 (1.10%) Cisco Certification
13 21 (0.97%) Microsoft Certification
13 21 (0.97%) OCP
13 21 (0.97%) Oracle Certification
14 18 (0.83%) TOGAF Certification
15 17 (0.78%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
16 14 (0.64%) CCSP
17 13 (0.60%) (ISC)2 CCSP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 117 (5.38%) QA
2 76 (3.50%) Data Quality
3 66 (3.04%) ISO/IEC 27001
4 65 (2.99%) NIST
5 57 (2.62%) GDPR
6 47 (2.16%) Accessibility
7 46 (2.12%) NCSC
8 34 (1.56%) PCI DSS
9 19 (0.87%) WCAG
10 16 (0.74%) ISO 20022
11 15 (0.69%) PSD2
12 12 (0.55%) NIST 800
12 12 (0.55%) Sarbanes-Oxley
13 11 (0.51%) HIPAA
14 10 (0.46%) SEPA
15 9 (0.41%) SLA
16 8 (0.37%) GRC
17 7 (0.32%) Cyber Essentials
17 7 (0.32%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
17 7 (0.32%) SOC 2
System Software
1 1,315 (60.52%) Docker
2 75 (3.45%) VMware Infrastructure
3 58 (2.67%) vSphere
4 51 (2.35%) Virtual Machines
5 40 (1.84%) Active Directory
6 32 (1.47%) VMware NSX
7 23 (1.06%) Slurm Workload Manager
8 17 (0.78%) Hyper-V
9 12 (0.55%) NFS
9 12 (0.55%) Squid
10 9 (0.41%) Lustre
10 9 (0.41%) 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%) Virtual Servers
Systems Management
1 812 (37.37%) Terraform
2 375 (17.26%) Grafana
3 362 (16.66%) Ansible
4 339 (15.60%) Prometheus
5 129 (5.94%) Argo
6 60 (2.76%) Istio
7 50 (2.30%) Puppet
8 41 (1.89%) Kibana
9 40 (1.84%) Progress Chef
10 34 (1.56%) vCenter Server
11 30 (1.38%) Single Sign-On
12 28 (1.29%) Packer
13 27 (1.24%) Nessus
14 25 (1.15%) Podman
15 23 (1.06%) Consul
15 23 (1.06%) Rancher
16 16 (0.74%) Control-M
16 16 (0.74%) IBM Guardium
17 14 (0.64%) Kustomize
18 13 (0.60%) linkerd
Vendors
1 239 (11.00%) Microsoft
2 194 (8.93%) Splunk
3 163 (7.50%) Google
4 162 (7.46%) Red Hat
5 113 (5.20%) Oracle
6 110 (5.06%) VMware
7 63 (2.90%) Databricks
8 60 (2.76%) Dynatrace
9 49 (2.25%) OpenAI
10 31 (1.43%) Denodo
10 31 (1.43%) Talend
11 30 (1.38%) Pure Storage
12 24 (1.10%) Atlassian
12 24 (1.10%) Tenable
13 20 (0.92%) AppDynamics
13 20 (0.92%) IBM
14 18 (0.83%) CyberArk
15 17 (0.78%) NetApp
15 17 (0.78%) ServiceNow
16 16 (0.74%) Foundry