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

6 months to
18 Mar 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 32 30 58
Rank change year-on-year -2 +28 -27
Contract jobs citing Kubernetes 2,148 1,494 1,317
As % of all contract jobs in England 5.82% 6.10% 3.47%
As % of the Systems Management category 39.58% 38.46% 29.02%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,464 1,051 956
10th Percentile £400 £406 £419
25th Percentile £450 £479 £475
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £575 £558
Median % change year-on-year -8.70% +3.14% -10.80%
75th Percentile £630 £697 £675
90th Percentile £713 £825 £738
UK median daily rate £525 £575 £550
% change year-on-year -8.70% +4.55% -10.57%
Number of hourly rates quoted 43 7 21
10th Percentile £51.50 £26.00 £46.18
25th Percentile £52.50 £41.38 £46.25
Median hourly rate £60.00 £60.00 £62.00
Median % change year-on-year - -3.23% -4.62%
75th Percentile £75.88 £73.44 £76.53
90th Percentile £88.40 £80.40 £77.50
UK median hourly rate £62.00 £60.00 £62.00
% change year-on-year +3.33% -3.23% -4.62%

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 5,427 3,885 4,539
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 14.69% 15.85% 11.98%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,750 2,622 3,294
10th Percentile £313 £315 £250
25th Percentile £413 £425 £406
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -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 124 42 137
10th Percentile £20.09 £15.22 £14.00
25th Percentile £25.00 £21.05 £20.00
Median hourly rate £55.00 £26.50 £32.50
Median % change year-on-year +107.55% -18.46% -40.01%
75th Percentile £67.50 £67.38 £58.00
90th Percentile £77.43 £85.02 £70.50
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 18 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 18 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 18 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 -9 996 £550 -8.33% 319
North of England +9 452 £495 -5.71% 147
Midlands +44 276 £525 - 49
West Midlands +39 246 £525 - 32
Yorkshire +10 231 £485 -15.65% 53
South East -6 187 £488 -11.36% 151
North West +11 175 £525 +0.02% 69
South West 0 151 £573 -4.58% 68
North East 0 50 £508 -1.41% 25
East of England -14 34 £613 +23.74% 33
East Midlands -21 29 £442 -11.55% 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
1 102 (4.75%) Confluence
2 67 (3.12%) SAS
3 59 (2.75%) Apache Spark
4 44 (2.05%) Apache
5 34 (1.58%) nginx
6 31 (1.44%) OpenStack
7 27 (1.26%) Apache Airflow
8 18 (0.84%) Jupyter
9 10 (0.47%) Camunda
10 8 (0.37%) Appian
10 8 (0.37%) WebLogic
11 7 (0.33%) Microsoft Exchange
12 6 (0.28%) SharePoint
13 5 (0.23%) Ethereum
13 5 (0.23%) Hyperledger
14 4 (0.19%) CMS
14 4 (0.19%) Drupal
15 3 (0.14%) Adobe Experience Manager
15 3 (0.14%) IIS
16 2 (0.093%) Oracle SOA Suite
Applications
1 7 (0.33%) Chatbot
2 5 (0.23%) Microsoft Excel
2 5 (0.23%) Microsoft Office
2 5 (0.23%) Weka
3 3 (0.14%) Microsoft Project
3 3 (0.14%) MS Visio
4 2 (0.093%) Adobe XD
4 2 (0.093%) CPLEX
5 1 (0.047%) Maya
5 1 (0.047%) Microsoft PowerPoint
Business Applications
1 8 (0.37%) Maximo
2 2 (0.093%) 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 Hybris
3 1 (0.047%) SAP S/4HANA
3 1 (0.047%) Shopify
Cloud Services
1 1,120 (52.14%) AWS
2 863 (40.18%) Azure
3 520 (24.21%) GCP
4 490 (22.81%) GitHub
5 313 (14.57%) OpenShift
6 274 (12.76%) GitHub Actions
7 232 (10.80%) Serverless
8 199 (9.26%) Azure DevOps
9 170 (7.91%) Amazon EKS
10 152 (7.08%) Azure AKS
11 146 (6.80%) AWS CloudFormation
12 141 (6.56%) Amazon S3
13 133 (6.19%) AWS Lambda
14 105 (4.89%) Amazon EC2
15 104 (4.84%) Google Kubernetes Engine
16 88 (4.10%) Amazon ECS
17 71 (3.31%) Virtual Private Cloud
18 69 (3.21%) Datadog
19 61 (2.84%) Amazon CloudWatch
20 56 (2.61%) Entra ID
Communications & Networking
1 107 (4.98%) Firewall
2 80 (3.72%) DNS
3 50 (2.33%) Network Security
4 41 (1.91%) VPN
5 35 (1.63%) TCP/IP
6 19 (0.88%) SAN
7 18 (0.84%) HTTP
8 16 (0.74%) DHCP
9 15 (0.70%) Reverse Proxy
10 13 (0.61%) SSL
11 11 (0.51%) NAS
12 10 (0.47%) OpenVPN
13 8 (0.37%) BGP
13 8 (0.37%) Kerberos
14 7 (0.33%) 5G
14 7 (0.33%) Fibre Channel
14 7 (0.33%) iSCSI
15 6 (0.28%) 3GPP
15 6 (0.28%) 4G
15 6 (0.28%) SMTP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 275 (12.80%) PostgreSQL
2 199 (9.26%) NoSQL
3 131 (6.10%) MongoDB
4 98 (4.56%) Relational Database
5 84 (3.91%) Apache Cassandra
6 77 (3.58%) SQL Server
7 70 (3.26%) Amazon RDS
8 69 (3.21%) Elasticsearch
9 47 (2.19%) Redis
10 45 (2.09%) Big Data
11 40 (1.86%) Power BI
12 37 (1.72%) MySQL
13 33 (1.54%) BigQuery
14 31 (1.44%) Data Warehouse
14 31 (1.44%) Pentaho
15 30 (1.40%) Data Lake
15 30 (1.40%) DynamoDB
16 24 (1.12%) Oracle Database
17 22 (1.02%) Flink
18 21 (0.98%) Hadoop
Development Applications
1 532 (24.77%) Jenkins
2 410 (19.09%) GitLab
3 398 (18.53%) Git
4 191 (8.89%) JIRA
5 101 (4.70%) JUnit
6 64 (2.98%) Selenium
7 58 (2.70%) Cucumber
8 48 (2.23%) SonarQube
9 43 (2.00%) MLflow
10 41 (1.91%) JMeter
11 40 (1.86%) Artifactory
12 39 (1.82%) Bitbucket
13 36 (1.68%) Gradle
14 35 (1.63%) Mockito
15 32 (1.49%) Sonatype Nexus
16 31 (1.44%) Maven
17 26 (1.21%) Postman
18 24 (1.12%) Gatling
19 20 (0.93%) CircleCI
20 15 (0.70%) Liquibase
General
1 566 (26.35%) Social Skills
2 351 (16.34%) Finance
3 274 (12.76%) Public Sector
4 181 (8.43%) Banking
5 163 (7.59%) Analytical Skills
6 59 (2.75%) Documentation Skills
7 34 (1.58%) Financial Institution
8 29 (1.35%) Influencing Skills
9 23 (1.07%) Telecoms
10 21 (0.98%) Front Office
11 20 (0.93%) Investment Banking
12 19 (0.88%) Presentation Skills
13 15 (0.70%) Retail
14 14 (0.65%) Inclusion and Diversity
14 14 (0.65%) Military
15 12 (0.56%) Organisational Skills
16 9 (0.42%) Aerospace
17 7 (0.33%) Legal
18 5 (0.23%) Advertising
18 5 (0.23%) Manufacturing
Job Titles
1 465 (21.65%) Developer
2 333 (15.50%) Senior
3 290 (13.50%) DevOps Engineer
4 203 (9.45%) Architect
5 141 (6.56%) Java Developer
6 133 (6.19%) Software Engineer
7 121 (5.63%) Lead
8 107 (4.98%) Cloud Engineer
8 107 (4.98%) Senior Developer
9 102 (4.75%) AWS Engineer
10 101 (4.70%) Platform Engineer
11 99 (4.61%) Site Reliability Engineer
12 96 (4.47%) Data Engineer
13 85 (3.96%) Python Developer
14 79 (3.68%) Java Engineer
15 78 (3.63%) Azure Engineer
16 74 (3.45%) AWS DevOps
16 74 (3.45%) Full-Stack Developer
17 73 (3.40%) Site Engineer
18 69 (3.21%) GCP Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 351 (16.34%) Kafka
2 311 (14.48%) Spring
3 260 (12.10%) Spring Boot
4 227 (10.57%) REST
5 198 (9.22%) RESTful
6 180 (8.38%) React
7 164 (7.64%) Node.js
8 127 (5.91%) OpenTelemetry
9 125 (5.82%) Elastic Stack
10 117 (5.45%) AngularJS
11 101 (4.70%) .NET
12 84 (3.91%) gRPC
13 77 (3.58%) FastAPI
13 77 (3.58%) PyTorch
14 72 (3.35%) OAuth
15 65 (3.03%) HTML
16 61 (2.84%) GraphQL
17 59 (2.75%) TensorFlow
18 57 (2.65%) RabbitMQ
19 55 (2.56%) OpenID
Miscellaneous
1 425 (19.79%) Cloud Native
2 179 (8.33%) Distributed Systems
3 93 (4.33%) Hybrid Cloud
4 70 (3.26%) Public Cloud
5 65 (3.03%) Product Ownership
6 57 (2.65%) Onboarding
7 38 (1.77%) Private Cloud
8 37 (1.72%) Data Centre
8 37 (1.72%) Legacy Systems
9 36 (1.68%) Data Protection Act
10 34 (1.58%) Enterprise Software
10 34 (1.58%) Management Information System
11 31 (1.44%) PKI
12 30 (1.40%) AI Agents
13 27 (1.26%) Security Posture
14 24 (1.12%) Algorithms
14 24 (1.12%) Greenfield Project
14 24 (1.12%) Virtual Team
15 19 (0.88%) Data Structures
15 19 (0.88%) NHS
Operating Systems
1 415 (19.32%) Linux
2 118 (5.49%) Windows
3 63 (2.93%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 58 (2.70%) Unix
5 44 (2.05%) VMS
6 28 (1.30%) Windows Server
7 21 (0.98%) 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 (0.19%) Apple iOS
10 4 (0.19%) Rocky
10 4 (0.19%) Windows Server 2012
10 4 (0.19%) Windows Server 2019
11 3 (0.14%) Android
11 3 (0.14%) Debian
12 1 (0.047%) Alpine Linux
12 1 (0.047%) Windows Server 2016
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,405 (65.41%) CI/CD
2 1,135 (52.84%) DevOps
3 925 (43.06%) Containerisation
4 701 (32.64%) Agile
5 626 (29.14%) Infrastructure as Code
6 571 (26.58%) Microservices
7 457 (21.28%) Problem-Solving
8 432 (20.11%) Observability
9 365 (16.99%) Software Engineering
10 325 (15.13%) Test Automation
11 263 (12.24%) AI
12 226 (10.52%) Continuous Improvement
13 225 (10.47%) Migration
14 217 (10.10%) Analytics
15 213 (9.92%) Site Reliability Engineering
16 195 (9.08%) Platform Engineering
17 194 (9.03%) Machine Learning
18 191 (8.89%) Data Pipeline
19 189 (8.80%) DevSecOps
20 184 (8.57%) Scrum
Programming Languages
1 907 (42.23%) Python
2 540 (25.14%) Java
3 405 (18.85%) SQL
4 270 (12.57%) Bash
5 203 (9.45%) Go
6 167 (7.77%) JavaScript
7 148 (6.89%) TypeScript
8 131 (6.10%) PowerShell
9 92 (4.28%) C#
10 63 (2.93%) Bicep
11 56 (2.61%) Shell Script
12 50 (2.33%) Ruby
13 32 (1.49%) Scala
14 28 (1.30%) Kotlin
15 26 (1.21%) Rust
16 24 (1.12%) C++
17 18 (0.84%) Groovy
18 15 (0.70%) PHP
19 13 (0.61%) Perl
20 12 (0.56%) C
Qualifications
1 755 (35.15%) Security Cleared
2 616 (28.68%) SC Cleared
3 162 (7.54%) Degree
4 122 (5.68%) DV Cleared
5 115 (5.35%) Computer Science Degree
6 103 (4.80%) Azure Certification
7 90 (4.19%) AWS Certification
8 53 (2.47%) CISSP
9 48 (2.23%) Master's Degree
10 45 (2.09%) BPSS Clearance
11 31 (1.44%) CISM
12 29 (1.35%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 24 (1.12%) Cisco Certification
14 21 (0.98%) Microsoft Certification
15 20 (0.93%) OCP
15 20 (0.93%) Oracle Certification
16 19 (0.88%) TOGAF Certification
17 16 (0.74%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
18 14 (0.65%) CCSP
19 13 (0.61%) (ISC)2 CCSP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 115 (5.35%) QA
2 73 (3.40%) Data Quality
3 69 (3.21%) NIST
4 65 (3.03%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 55 (2.56%) GDPR
6 48 (2.23%) Accessibility
7 46 (2.14%) NCSC
8 35 (1.63%) PCI DSS
9 20 (0.93%) WCAG
10 15 (0.70%) ISO 20022
11 14 (0.65%) PSD2
12 12 (0.56%) NIST 800
13 11 (0.51%) HIPAA
14 10 (0.47%) Sarbanes-Oxley
15 9 (0.42%) SEPA
15 9 (0.42%) SLA
16 8 (0.37%) GRC
17 7 (0.33%) Cyber Essentials
17 7 (0.33%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
17 7 (0.33%) SOC 2
System Software
1 1,298 (60.43%) Docker
2 72 (3.35%) VMware Infrastructure
3 56 (2.61%) vSphere
4 51 (2.37%) Virtual Machines
5 40 (1.86%) Active Directory
6 30 (1.40%) VMware NSX
7 23 (1.07%) Slurm Workload Manager
8 16 (0.74%) Hyper-V
9 11 (0.51%) NFS
9 11 (0.51%) Squid
10 9 (0.42%) Lustre
10 9 (0.42%) VMware ESXi
11 7 (0.33%) GPFS
11 7 (0.33%) Virtual Desktop
12 6 (0.28%) BitLocker
12 6 (0.28%) Microsoft App-V
12 6 (0.28%) Snort
13 4 (0.19%) Firmware
13 4 (0.19%) KVM
13 4 (0.19%) Virtual Servers
Systems Management
1 794 (36.96%) Terraform
2 368 (17.13%) Grafana
3 353 (16.43%) Ansible
4 335 (15.60%) Prometheus
5 125 (5.82%) Argo
6 58 (2.70%) Istio
7 44 (2.05%) Kibana
7 44 (2.05%) Puppet
8 35 (1.63%) Progress Chef
9 33 (1.54%) Nessus
10 32 (1.49%) vCenter Server
11 29 (1.35%) Single Sign-On
12 28 (1.30%) Packer
13 25 (1.16%) Podman
14 23 (1.07%) Consul
15 22 (1.02%) Control-M
15 22 (1.02%) IBM Guardium
15 22 (1.02%) Rancher
16 15 (0.70%) logstash
17 14 (0.65%) Kustomize
Vendors
1 233 (10.85%) Microsoft
2 190 (8.85%) Splunk
3 162 (7.54%) Google
4 155 (7.22%) Red Hat
5 112 (5.21%) Oracle
6 107 (4.98%) VMware
7 59 (2.75%) Databricks
8 58 (2.70%) Dynatrace
9 50 (2.33%) OpenAI
10 31 (1.44%) Denodo
10 31 (1.44%) Talend
11 30 (1.40%) Tenable
12 27 (1.26%) Pure Storage
13 24 (1.12%) Atlassian
14 20 (0.93%) AppDynamics
14 20 (0.93%) IBM
15 18 (0.84%) CyberArk
15 18 (0.84%) Foundry
16 17 (0.79%) NetApp
17 16 (0.74%) ServiceNow