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

6 months to
18 Nov 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 31 35 45
Rank change year-on-year +4 +10 -12
Contract jobs citing Kubernetes 1,807 1,628 1,801
As % of all contract jobs in England 6.00% 5.31% 4.54%
As % of the Systems Management category 37.18% 37.19% 32.06%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,233 1,089 1,348
10th Percentile £400 £400 £425
25th Percentile £450 £488 £500
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £578 £600
Median % change year-on-year -9.09% -3.75% -4.00%
75th Percentile £635 £688 £691
90th Percentile £700 £788 £775
UK median daily rate £530 £575 £586
% change year-on-year -7.83% -1.92% -6.20%
Number of hourly rates quoted 20 13 56
10th Percentile £50.58 - -
25th Percentile £59.69 £46.18 £46.18
Median hourly rate £67.00 £60.00 £68.63
Median % change year-on-year +11.67% -12.58% +6.41%
75th Percentile £79.06 £74.00 £77.50
90th Percentile £119.00 £74.35 £78.75
UK median hourly rate £67.00 £60.00 £67.27
% change year-on-year +11.67% -10.80% +6.77%

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 4,860 4,377 5,618
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 16.13% 14.27% 14.16%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,260 2,815 4,082
10th Percentile £310 £313 £308
25th Percentile £413 £413 £430
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year -2.38% -4.55% -5.66%
75th Percentile £610 £638 £656
90th Percentile £693 £727 £745
UK median daily rate £513 £525 £547
% change year-on-year -2.38% -4.07% -4.83%
Number of hourly rates quoted 91 54 158
10th Percentile £18.87 £16.83 £18.50
25th Percentile £20.50 £23.80 £30.00
Median hourly rate £34.00 £37.75 £49.00
Median % change year-on-year -9.93% -22.96% +90.59%
75th Percentile £64.88 £64.00 £73.75
90th Percentile £77.50 £74.83 £78.00
UK median hourly rate £30.00 £32.50 £52.50
% change year-on-year -7.69% -38.10% +104.20%

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 November 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 18 November 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 18 November 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 -1 918 £550 -8.33% 878
North of England +6 324 £500 - 224
Midlands +56 195 £537 -6.61% 96
West Midlands +48 174 £540 -8.09% 75
South East +5 157 £474 -9.71% 223
Yorkshire -7 148 £500 - 33
North West +15 139 £463 -15.91% 172
South West -2 101 £627 +4.42% 118
East of England -6 45 £500 - 41
North East +3 38 £550 +25.00% 19
East Midlands +1 21 £423 -17.41% 21
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 83 (4.59%) Confluence
2 65 (3.60%) SAS
3 40 (2.21%) nginx
4 32 (1.77%) Apache Airflow
5 31 (1.72%) Apache Spark
6 28 (1.55%) Apache
7 25 (1.38%) OpenStack
8 10 (0.55%) Mule
9 8 (0.44%) WebSphere
10 7 (0.39%) JBoss
10 7 (0.39%) Tomcat
11 6 (0.33%) Jupyter
11 6 (0.33%) WebLogic
11 6 (0.33%) WebSphere Application Server
12 5 (0.28%) Camunda
12 5 (0.28%) Ethereum
12 5 (0.28%) Hyperledger
12 5 (0.28%) SharePoint
13 4 (0.22%) MQSeries
13 4 (0.22%) Traefik
Applications
1 6 (0.33%) MS Visio
2 5 (0.28%) Chatbot
2 5 (0.28%) Microsoft Excel
2 5 (0.28%) Microsoft Office
2 5 (0.28%) Weka
3 4 (0.22%) Microsoft PowerPoint
Business Applications
1 7 (0.39%) Maximo
2 4 (0.22%) Endur
3 3 (0.17%) Payment Gateway
3 3 (0.17%) SAP S/4HANA
4 1 (0.055%) Cloudability
4 1 (0.055%) Finacle
Cloud Services
1 994 (55.01%) AWS
2 649 (35.92%) Azure
3 444 (24.57%) GCP
4 390 (21.58%) GitHub
5 235 (13.00%) GitHub Actions
6 205 (11.34%) OpenShift
7 191 (10.57%) Serverless
8 157 (8.69%) Azure DevOps
9 137 (7.58%) AWS CloudFormation
10 134 (7.42%) Azure AKS
11 124 (6.86%) Amazon EKS
12 105 (5.81%) Amazon S3
13 100 (5.53%) AWS Lambda
14 83 (4.59%) Google Kubernetes Engine
15 78 (4.32%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 76 (4.21%) Amazon EC2
17 71 (3.93%) SaaS
18 70 (3.87%) Amazon ECS
19 62 (3.43%) Entra ID
20 55 (3.04%) Datadog
Communications & Networking
1 78 (4.32%) Firewall
2 44 (2.43%) DNS
3 28 (1.55%) Network Security
4 27 (1.49%) VPN
5 18 (1.00%) SSL
6 17 (0.94%) TCP/IP
7 16 (0.89%) HTTP
8 10 (0.55%) BGP
9 8 (0.44%) HTTPS
10 6 (0.33%) Ethernet VPN
10 6 (0.33%) Software-Defined Networking
10 6 (0.33%) VLAN
10 6 (0.33%) VXLAN
11 5 (0.28%) Kerberos
11 5 (0.28%) OpenLDAP
12 4 (0.22%) Calico
12 4 (0.22%) DHCP
12 4 (0.22%) MQTT
12 4 (0.22%) SSH
13 3 (0.17%) VSAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 250 (13.84%) PostgreSQL
2 172 (9.52%) NoSQL
3 121 (6.70%) MongoDB
4 74 (4.10%) Relational Database
5 69 (3.82%) Apache Cassandra
6 64 (3.54%) Amazon RDS
7 57 (3.15%) Elasticsearch
8 53 (2.93%) Redis
9 40 (2.21%) MySQL
9 40 (2.21%) SQL Server
10 33 (1.83%) Big Data
11 32 (1.77%) Pentaho
12 30 (1.66%) Data Warehouse
13 29 (1.60%) DynamoDB
14 27 (1.49%) Data Lake
14 27 (1.49%) Oracle Database
15 23 (1.27%) Hadoop
16 21 (1.16%) Azure SQL Database
16 21 (1.16%) BigQuery
17 19 (1.05%) RDBMS
Development Applications
1 477 (26.40%) Jenkins
2 370 (20.48%) Git
3 337 (18.65%) GitLab
4 184 (10.18%) JIRA
5 68 (3.76%) JUnit
6 66 (3.65%) SonarQube
7 54 (2.99%) Maven
7 54 (2.99%) Sonatype Nexus
8 52 (2.88%) Artifactory
9 44 (2.43%) Selenium
10 41 (2.27%) Gradle
10 41 (2.27%) Liquibase
11 40 (2.21%) CircleCI
12 39 (2.16%) Bitbucket
13 34 (1.88%) Cucumber
14 25 (1.38%) Mockito
15 24 (1.33%) MLflow
16 23 (1.27%) Postman
17 20 (1.11%) Cypress.io
17 20 (1.11%) JMeter
General
1 504 (27.89%) Social Skills
2 296 (16.38%) Finance
3 209 (11.57%) Public Sector
4 194 (10.74%) Banking
5 140 (7.75%) Analytical Skills
6 43 (2.38%) Financial Institution
7 39 (2.16%) Investment Banking
8 35 (1.94%) Documentation Skills
9 26 (1.44%) Telecoms
10 19 (1.05%) Pharmaceutical
10 19 (1.05%) Retail
11 18 (1.00%) Front Office
12 16 (0.89%) Inclusion and Diversity
13 14 (0.77%) Presentation Skills
14 11 (0.61%) Influencing Skills
15 10 (0.55%) Aerospace
16 9 (0.50%) Military
17 7 (0.39%) Law
18 6 (0.33%) Games
18 6 (0.33%) Manufacturing
Job Titles
1 415 (22.97%) Developer
2 284 (15.72%) DevOps Engineer
3 280 (15.50%) Senior
4 155 (8.58%) Architect
5 136 (7.53%) Java Developer
6 110 (6.09%) AWS Engineer
7 105 (5.81%) Software Engineer
8 97 (5.37%) Lead
9 95 (5.26%) Platform Engineer
10 89 (4.93%) Cloud Engineer
10 89 (4.93%) Senior Developer
11 82 (4.54%) AWS DevOps
12 74 (4.10%) Python Developer
13 69 (3.82%) Full-Stack Developer
14 67 (3.71%) Site Reliability Engineer
15 61 (3.38%) Data Engineer
16 60 (3.32%) AWS DevOps Engineer
17 53 (2.93%) Azure Engineer
18 49 (2.71%) Site Engineer
19 48 (2.66%) Consultant
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 287 (15.88%) Kafka
2 195 (10.79%) React
3 189 (10.46%) RESTful
3 189 (10.46%) Spring
4 178 (9.85%) REST
5 172 (9.52%) Node.js
6 160 (8.85%) Spring Boot
7 138 (7.64%) Elastic Stack
8 124 (6.86%) AngularJS
9 86 (4.76%) .NET
9 86 (4.76%) gRPC
10 69 (3.82%) HTML
11 67 (3.71%) FastAPI
11 67 (3.71%) GraphQL
12 61 (3.38%) YAML
13 59 (3.27%) Vue
14 55 (3.04%) CSS
15 54 (2.99%) PyTorch
16 50 (2.77%) OAuth
17 49 (2.71%) RabbitMQ
Miscellaneous
1 324 (17.93%) Cloud Native
2 174 (9.63%) Distributed Systems
3 69 (3.82%) Public Cloud
4 57 (3.15%) Onboarding
5 56 (3.10%) Product Ownership
6 47 (2.60%) Hybrid Cloud
7 39 (2.16%) Private Cloud
8 37 (2.05%) Algorithms
9 35 (1.94%) Enterprise Software
10 28 (1.55%) Data Protection Act
10 28 (1.55%) Legacy Systems
11 26 (1.44%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
12 25 (1.38%) Data Structures
13 24 (1.33%) Security Posture
14 23 (1.27%) Virtual Team
15 22 (1.22%) Replication
16 21 (1.16%) Hedge funds
17 19 (1.05%) Greenfield Project
17 19 (1.05%) PKI
18 18 (1.00%) Data Centre
Operating Systems
1 374 (20.70%) Linux
2 64 (3.54%) Windows
3 63 (3.49%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 60 (3.32%) Unix
5 20 (1.11%) Ubuntu
6 19 (1.05%) VMS
7 18 (1.00%) CentOS
8 14 (0.77%) Windows Server
9 7 (0.39%) Solaris
10 5 (0.28%) Android
10 5 (0.28%) Apple iOS
11 2 (0.11%) zOS
12 1 (0.055%) Alpine Linux
12 1 (0.055%) Mac OS
12 1 (0.055%) MVS
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,198 (66.30%) CI/CD
2 977 (54.07%) DevOps
3 765 (42.34%) Containerisation
4 606 (33.54%) Agile
5 556 (30.77%) Infrastructure as Code
6 505 (27.95%) Microservices
7 421 (23.30%) Problem-Solving
8 321 (17.76%) Software Engineering
9 286 (15.83%) Observability
10 254 (14.06%) Test Automation
11 200 (11.07%) Migration
12 176 (9.74%) AI
13 163 (9.02%) Analytics
14 156 (8.63%) Full-Stack Development
14 156 (8.63%) Scrum
15 149 (8.25%) Machine Learning
16 148 (8.19%) Continuous Improvement
17 147 (8.14%) DevSecOps
18 141 (7.80%) Platform Engineering
19 134 (7.42%) Data Pipeline
Programming Languages
1 844 (46.71%) Python
2 494 (27.34%) Java
3 306 (16.93%) SQL
4 268 (14.83%) Bash
5 247 (13.67%) Go
6 183 (10.13%) JavaScript
7 176 (9.74%) TypeScript
8 112 (6.20%) C#
9 103 (5.70%) PowerShell
10 69 (3.82%) C++
11 52 (2.88%) Shell Script
12 51 (2.82%) Bicep
13 32 (1.77%) Ruby
14 30 (1.66%) Perl
15 28 (1.55%) Kotlin
16 26 (1.44%) Groovy
16 26 (1.44%) Rust
17 25 (1.38%) PHP
18 18 (1.00%) Scala
19 17 (0.94%) C
Qualifications
1 592 (32.76%) Security Cleared
2 497 (27.50%) SC Cleared
3 124 (6.86%) Degree
4 95 (5.26%) Computer Science Degree
5 89 (4.93%) DV Cleared
6 87 (4.81%) AWS Certification
7 69 (3.82%) Azure Certification
8 49 (2.71%) Master's Degree
9 35 (1.94%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
10 32 (1.77%) CISSP
11 26 (1.44%) BPSS Clearance
12 23 (1.27%) Microsoft Certification
13 18 (1.00%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
13 18 (1.00%) Cisco Certification
14 17 (0.94%) CISM
15 11 (0.61%) OCP
15 11 (0.61%) Oracle Certification
16 10 (0.55%) (ISC)2 CCSP
16 10 (0.55%) CCSP
17 7 (0.39%) TOGAF Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 97 (5.37%) QA
2 55 (3.04%) ISO/IEC 27001
3 52 (2.88%) Data Quality
4 49 (2.71%) NIST
5 41 (2.27%) GDPR
6 30 (1.66%) NCSC
7 23 (1.27%) Accessibility
8 17 (0.94%) PCI DSS
9 14 (0.77%) HIPAA
10 12 (0.66%) EU AI Act
11 11 (0.61%) PSD2
12 10 (0.55%) WCAG
13 7 (0.39%) Cyber Essentials
13 7 (0.39%) SOC 2
14 6 (0.33%) ISO 20022
14 6 (0.33%) NIST 800
14 6 (0.33%) SEPA
15 5 (0.28%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
15 5 (0.28%) JSP 440
15 5 (0.28%) SLA
System Software
1 1,152 (63.75%) Docker
2 51 (2.82%) Active Directory
3 44 (2.43%) VMware Infrastructure
4 32 (1.77%) vSphere
5 25 (1.38%) Virtual Machines
6 14 (0.77%) VMware NSX
7 10 (0.55%) KVM
8 7 (0.39%) Lustre
8 7 (0.39%) Slurm Workload Manager
9 6 (0.33%) GPFS
10 5 (0.28%) Hyper-V
11 4 (0.22%) Snort
11 4 (0.22%) Squid
11 4 (0.22%) Virtual Servers
12 2 (0.11%) NDS
12 2 (0.11%) NetIQ eDirectory
12 2 (0.11%) VMware ESXi
13 1 (0.055%) QEMU
13 1 (0.055%) SRDF
13 1 (0.055%) Veritas Cluster Server
Systems Management
1 705 (39.01%) Terraform
2 303 (16.77%) Ansible
3 291 (16.10%) Grafana
4 264 (14.61%) Prometheus
5 102 (5.64%) Argo
6 51 (2.82%) Kibana
7 44 (2.43%) Packer
8 41 (2.27%) Puppet
9 39 (2.16%) Progress Chef
10 37 (2.05%) Istio
11 29 (1.60%) Single Sign-On
12 28 (1.55%) Consul
13 21 (1.16%) logstash
14 19 (1.05%) Nessus
15 15 (0.83%) Podman
16 12 (0.66%) Control-M
16 12 (0.66%) ITRS Geneos
17 11 (0.61%) IBM Guardium
17 11 (0.61%) Kustomize
17 11 (0.61%) SCOM
Vendors
1 180 (9.96%) Microsoft
2 175 (9.68%) Splunk
3 144 (7.97%) Google
4 116 (6.42%) Red Hat
5 113 (6.25%) Oracle
6 60 (3.32%) VMware
7 43 (2.38%) Dynatrace
8 38 (2.10%) Databricks
9 32 (1.77%) Denodo
9 32 (1.77%) Talend
10 29 (1.60%) Atlassian
11 28 (1.55%) OpenAI
12 27 (1.49%) IBM
13 24 (1.33%) AppDynamics
14 16 (0.89%) Cisco
15 12 (0.66%) Palo Alto
15 12 (0.66%) Solace
15 12 (0.66%) Tenable
16 10 (0.55%) Cribl.io
16 10 (0.55%) Pure Storage