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

6 months to
3 Mar 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 31 30 57
Rank change year-on-year -1 +27 -26
Contract jobs citing Kubernetes 2,126 1,488 1,331
As % of all contract jobs in England 5.97% 5.95% 3.51%
As % of the Systems Management category 39.56% 38.72% 28.97%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,462 1,024 962
10th Percentile £400 £409 £422
25th Percentile £450 £500 £475
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £590 £563
Median % change year-on-year -11.02% +4.89% -10.00%
75th Percentile £630 £700 £675
90th Percentile £713 £813 £738
UK median daily rate £525 £575 £558
% change year-on-year -8.70% +3.14% -9.50%
Number of hourly rates quoted 41 6 26
10th Percentile £51.25 £25.88 £46.18
25th Percentile £52.50 £33.94 £46.20
Median hourly rate £60.00 £58.75 £64.75
Median % change year-on-year +2.13% -9.27% +1.17%
75th Percentile £78.75 £66.13 £76.53
90th Percentile £89.00 £71.31 £77.50
UK median hourly rate £60.00 £58.75 £64.75
% change year-on-year +2.13% -9.27% +1.17%

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 5,374 3,843 4,594
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 15.10% 15.36% 12.12%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,714 2,533 3,330
10th Percentile £313 £313 £250
25th Percentile £413 £425 £406
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £538 £525
Median % change year-on-year -7.06% +2.48% -9.48%
75th Percentile £600 £650 £638
90th Percentile £700 £750 £725
UK median daily rate £500 £525 £525
% change year-on-year -4.76% - -8.70%
Number of hourly rates quoted 123 40 145
10th Percentile £18.72 £14.95 £14.00
25th Percentile £21.06 £21.03 £20.00
Median hourly rate £54.00 £26.00 £40.00
Median % change year-on-year +107.69% -35.00% -23.27%
75th Percentile £63.32 £63.69 £60.00
90th Percentile £77.45 £78.50 £76.53
UK median hourly rate £54.00 £25.50 £40.00
% change year-on-year +111.76% -36.25% -23.27%

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 3 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 3 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 3 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 -4 992 £550 -8.33% 321
North of England +10 441 £500 -4.76% 219
Midlands +46 280 £525 - 93
West Midlands +44 251 £525 -2.33% 50
Yorkshire +8 228 £486 -15.48% 85
South East +3 185 £485 -11.82% 275
North West +12 172 £522 -0.62% 102
South West +3 141 £575 -4.17% 159
North East -3 45 £525 +0.96% 32
East of England -13 37 £606 +15.48% 102
East Midlands -14 28 £438 -8.76% 43
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
1 103 (4.84%) Confluence
2 75 (3.53%) SAS
3 55 (2.59%) Apache Spark
4 39 (1.83%) Apache
5 35 (1.65%) nginx
6 30 (1.41%) Apache Airflow
7 27 (1.27%) OpenStack
8 17 (0.80%) Jupyter
9 11 (0.52%) Camunda
10 10 (0.47%) WebLogic
11 8 (0.38%) Appian
12 7 (0.33%) Microsoft Exchange
12 7 (0.33%) SharePoint
13 5 (0.24%) Ethereum
13 5 (0.24%) Hyperledger
14 4 (0.19%) Drupal
14 4 (0.19%) Traefik
15 3 (0.14%) Adobe Experience Manager
15 3 (0.14%) CMS
15 3 (0.14%) IIS
Applications
1 6 (0.28%) Chatbot
2 5 (0.24%) Microsoft Excel
2 5 (0.24%) Microsoft Office
2 5 (0.24%) Weka
3 3 (0.14%) Microsoft Project
4 2 (0.094%) Adobe XD
4 2 (0.094%) MS Visio
5 1 (0.047%) CPLEX
5 1 (0.047%) Maya
5 1 (0.047%) Microsoft PowerPoint
Business Applications
1 8 (0.38%) Maximo
2 2 (0.094%) Payment Gateway
3 1 (0.047%) Actimize
3 1 (0.047%) Cloudability
3 1 (0.047%) Endur
3 1 (0.047%) Oracle EBS
3 1 (0.047%) SAP S/4HANA
Cloud Services
1 1,109 (52.16%) AWS
2 827 (38.90%) Azure
3 530 (24.93%) GCP
4 480 (22.58%) GitHub
5 302 (14.21%) OpenShift
6 275 (12.94%) GitHub Actions
7 224 (10.54%) Serverless
8 190 (8.94%) Azure DevOps
9 171 (8.04%) Amazon EKS
10 155 (7.29%) Azure AKS
11 142 (6.68%) AWS CloudFormation
12 140 (6.59%) Amazon S3
13 131 (6.16%) AWS Lambda
14 107 (5.03%) Google Kubernetes Engine
15 103 (4.84%) Amazon EC2
16 90 (4.23%) Amazon ECS
17 67 (3.15%) Virtual Private Cloud
18 65 (3.06%) Datadog
19 62 (2.92%) Amazon CloudWatch
20 57 (2.68%) Entra ID
Communications & Networking
1 110 (5.17%) Firewall
2 77 (3.62%) DNS
3 47 (2.21%) Network Security
4 40 (1.88%) VPN
5 39 (1.83%) TCP/IP
6 20 (0.94%) HTTP
7 18 (0.85%) SAN
8 17 (0.80%) SSL
9 16 (0.75%) DHCP
10 14 (0.66%) Reverse Proxy
11 11 (0.52%) NAS
12 8 (0.38%) Kerberos
12 8 (0.38%) OpenVPN
13 7 (0.33%) Fibre Channel
13 7 (0.33%) iSCSI
14 6 (0.28%) BGP
15 5 (0.24%) HTTPS
15 5 (0.24%) InfiniBand
15 5 (0.24%) Software-Defined Networking
15 5 (0.24%) VLAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 274 (12.89%) PostgreSQL
2 191 (8.98%) NoSQL
3 136 (6.40%) MongoDB
4 93 (4.37%) Relational Database
5 81 (3.81%) Apache Cassandra
6 80 (3.76%) Elasticsearch
7 76 (3.57%) SQL Server
8 68 (3.20%) Amazon RDS
9 47 (2.21%) Redis
10 41 (1.93%) MySQL
11 40 (1.88%) Big Data
12 36 (1.69%) Power BI
13 35 (1.65%) BigQuery
13 35 (1.65%) Pentaho
14 32 (1.51%) Data Warehouse
15 31 (1.46%) DynamoDB
16 28 (1.32%) Data Lake
17 27 (1.27%) Oracle Database
18 22 (1.03%) Hadoop
19 19 (0.89%) Tableau
Development Applications
1 535 (25.16%) Jenkins
2 417 (19.61%) GitLab
3 383 (18.02%) Git
4 197 (9.27%) JIRA
5 98 (4.61%) JUnit
6 61 (2.87%) Selenium
7 54 (2.54%) Cucumber
8 49 (2.30%) SonarQube
9 42 (1.98%) MLflow
10 41 (1.93%) Gradle
11 39 (1.83%) Artifactory
11 39 (1.83%) Bitbucket
12 38 (1.79%) Maven
12 38 (1.79%) Sonatype Nexus
13 34 (1.60%) Mockito
14 33 (1.55%) JMeter
15 26 (1.22%) Postman
16 24 (1.13%) CircleCI
17 20 (0.94%) Liquibase
18 18 (0.85%) Gatling
General
1 571 (26.86%) Social Skills
2 362 (17.03%) Finance
3 267 (12.56%) Public Sector
4 188 (8.84%) Banking
5 171 (8.04%) Analytical Skills
6 59 (2.78%) Documentation Skills
7 35 (1.65%) Financial Institution
8 27 (1.27%) Influencing Skills
9 25 (1.18%) Front Office
10 20 (0.94%) Investment Banking
11 18 (0.85%) Presentation Skills
12 17 (0.80%) Telecoms
13 15 (0.71%) Inclusion and Diversity
14 14 (0.66%) Retail
15 13 (0.61%) Military
16 11 (0.52%) Organisational Skills
17 10 (0.47%) Pharmaceutical
18 9 (0.42%) Aerospace
19 7 (0.33%) Law
20 5 (0.24%) Games
Job Titles
1 471 (22.15%) Developer
2 332 (15.62%) Senior
3 299 (14.06%) DevOps Engineer
4 193 (9.08%) Architect
5 145 (6.82%) Java Developer
6 132 (6.21%) Software Engineer
7 112 (5.27%) Lead
8 109 (5.13%) Cloud Engineer
8 109 (5.13%) Senior Developer
9 104 (4.89%) AWS Engineer
10 100 (4.70%) Site Reliability Engineer
11 98 (4.61%) Data Engineer
12 94 (4.42%) Platform Engineer
13 86 (4.05%) Python Developer
14 77 (3.62%) Full-Stack Developer
15 75 (3.53%) Java Engineer
16 74 (3.48%) Site Engineer
17 72 (3.39%) AWS DevOps
17 72 (3.39%) Azure Engineer
18 68 (3.20%) GCP Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 340 (15.99%) Kafka
2 292 (13.73%) Spring
3 255 (11.99%) Spring Boot
4 219 (10.30%) REST
5 205 (9.64%) RESTful
6 189 (8.89%) React
7 162 (7.62%) Node.js
8 133 (6.26%) Elastic Stack
9 114 (5.36%) AngularJS
10 113 (5.32%) OpenTelemetry
11 104 (4.89%) .NET
12 82 (3.86%) PyTorch
13 81 (3.81%) FastAPI
14 79 (3.72%) gRPC
15 68 (3.20%) OAuth
16 66 (3.10%) HTML
17 65 (3.06%) GraphQL
18 64 (3.01%) TensorFlow
19 58 (2.73%) Playwright
20 55 (2.59%) RabbitMQ
Miscellaneous
1 421 (19.80%) Cloud Native
2 165 (7.76%) Distributed Systems
3 86 (4.05%) Hybrid Cloud
4 74 (3.48%) Public Cloud
5 64 (3.01%) Product Ownership
6 58 (2.73%) Onboarding
7 41 (1.93%) Private Cloud
8 37 (1.74%) Data Protection Act
8 37 (1.74%) Legacy Systems
9 36 (1.69%) Enterprise Software
10 35 (1.65%) Management Information System
11 31 (1.46%) Security Posture
12 28 (1.32%) PKI
13 26 (1.22%) Algorithms
14 25 (1.18%) Data Centre
14 25 (1.18%) Virtual Team
15 24 (1.13%) AI Agents
16 22 (1.03%) Greenfield Project
17 21 (0.99%) Linux Command Line
18 20 (0.94%) Data Structures
Operating Systems
1 434 (20.41%) Linux
2 114 (5.36%) Windows
3 69 (3.25%) Unix
4 68 (3.20%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 44 (2.07%) VMS
6 27 (1.27%) Windows Server
7 24 (1.13%) Ubuntu
8 12 (0.56%) CentOS
9 5 (0.24%) Apple iOS
10 4 (0.19%) Android
10 4 (0.19%) CoreOS
10 4 (0.19%) Data ONTAP
10 4 (0.19%) Windows Server 2003
10 4 (0.19%) Windows Server 2012
10 4 (0.19%) Windows Server 2019
11 3 (0.14%) Rocky
11 3 (0.14%) Solaris
12 2 (0.094%) Debian
13 1 (0.047%) Alpine Linux
13 1 (0.047%) Windows Server 2016
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,405 (66.09%) CI/CD
2 1,139 (53.57%) DevOps
3 934 (43.93%) Containerisation
4 701 (32.97%) Agile
5 627 (29.49%) Infrastructure as Code
6 557 (26.20%) Microservices
7 467 (21.97%) Problem-Solving
8 424 (19.94%) Observability
9 357 (16.79%) Software Engineering
10 324 (15.24%) Test Automation
11 250 (11.76%) AI
12 227 (10.68%) Continuous Improvement
13 225 (10.58%) Migration
14 221 (10.40%) Analytics
15 209 (9.83%) Site Reliability Engineering
16 190 (8.94%) DevSecOps
17 187 (8.80%) Data Pipeline
18 186 (8.75%) Machine Learning
18 186 (8.75%) Platform Engineering
19 180 (8.47%) Full-Stack Development
Programming Languages
1 921 (43.32%) Python
2 543 (25.54%) Java
3 399 (18.77%) SQL
4 283 (13.31%) Bash
5 212 (9.97%) Go
6 170 (8.00%) JavaScript
7 166 (7.81%) TypeScript
8 135 (6.35%) PowerShell
9 91 (4.28%) C#
10 65 (3.06%) Bicep
11 58 (2.73%) Shell Script
12 50 (2.35%) Ruby
13 32 (1.51%) Kotlin
14 31 (1.46%) Scala
15 27 (1.27%) Rust
16 26 (1.22%) C++
17 17 (0.80%) Groovy
18 16 (0.75%) PHP
19 15 (0.71%) Perl
20 13 (0.61%) Kusto Query Language
Qualifications
1 748 (35.18%) Security Cleared
2 619 (29.12%) SC Cleared
3 162 (7.62%) Degree
4 125 (5.88%) DV Cleared
5 118 (5.55%) Computer Science Degree
6 104 (4.89%) Azure Certification
7 99 (4.66%) AWS Certification
8 55 (2.59%) CISSP
9 52 (2.45%) Master's Degree
10 44 (2.07%) BPSS Clearance
11 35 (1.65%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
12 33 (1.55%) CISM
13 25 (1.18%) Microsoft Certification
14 23 (1.08%) Cisco Certification
15 21 (0.99%) TOGAF Certification
16 18 (0.85%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
17 17 (0.80%) OCP
17 17 (0.80%) Oracle Certification
18 14 (0.66%) CCSP
19 13 (0.61%) (ISC)2 CCSP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 111 (5.22%) QA
2 71 (3.34%) Data Quality
3 65 (3.06%) NIST
4 62 (2.92%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 48 (2.26%) GDPR
6 47 (2.21%) NCSC
7 41 (1.93%) Accessibility
8 32 (1.51%) PCI DSS
9 16 (0.75%) ISO 20022
9 16 (0.75%) WCAG
10 15 (0.71%) PSD2
11 12 (0.56%) HIPAA
12 11 (0.52%) NIST 800
13 10 (0.47%) SEPA
14 9 (0.42%) SLA
15 8 (0.38%) Sarbanes-Oxley
16 7 (0.33%) GRC
16 7 (0.33%) JSP 440
17 6 (0.28%) Cyber Essentials
17 6 (0.28%) SOC 2
System Software
1 1,309 (61.57%) Docker
2 68 (3.20%) VMware Infrastructure
3 53 (2.49%) vSphere
4 49 (2.30%) Virtual Machines
5 42 (1.98%) Active Directory
6 27 (1.27%) VMware NSX
7 22 (1.03%) Slurm Workload Manager
8 13 (0.61%) Hyper-V
9 12 (0.56%) Squid
10 10 (0.47%) NFS
11 9 (0.42%) Lustre
12 7 (0.33%) GPFS
12 7 (0.33%) Snort
12 7 (0.33%) Virtual Desktop
12 7 (0.33%) VMware ESXi
13 6 (0.28%) KVM
14 4 (0.19%) BitLocker
14 4 (0.19%) Microsoft App-V
14 4 (0.19%) Virtual Servers
15 3 (0.14%) Firmware
Systems Management
1 797 (37.49%) Terraform
2 361 (16.98%) Grafana
3 357 (16.79%) Ansible
4 324 (15.24%) Prometheus
5 121 (5.69%) Argo
6 56 (2.63%) Istio
7 53 (2.49%) Kibana
8 49 (2.30%) Puppet
9 40 (1.88%) Progress Chef
10 34 (1.60%) Nessus
11 28 (1.32%) Packer
12 27 (1.27%) vCenter Server
13 26 (1.22%) Podman
13 26 (1.22%) Single Sign-On
14 23 (1.08%) Consul
15 22 (1.03%) Control-M
15 22 (1.03%) IBM Guardium
16 21 (0.99%) logstash
17 20 (0.94%) Rancher
18 13 (0.61%) Docker Swarm
Vendors
1 230 (10.82%) Microsoft
2 190 (8.94%) Splunk
3 167 (7.86%) Google
4 153 (7.20%) Red Hat
5 120 (5.64%) Oracle
6 104 (4.89%) VMware
7 62 (2.92%) Databricks
8 54 (2.54%) Dynatrace
9 47 (2.21%) OpenAI
10 35 (1.65%) Denodo
10 35 (1.65%) Talend
11 29 (1.36%) Tenable
12 24 (1.13%) Atlassian
12 24 (1.13%) Pure Storage
13 21 (0.99%) IBM
14 19 (0.89%) AppDynamics
15 18 (0.85%) CyberArk
16 17 (0.80%) Foundry
17 16 (0.75%) ServiceNow
18 15 (0.71%) Okta