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

6 months to
28 Oct 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 33 35 40
Rank change year-on-year +2 +5 -7
Contract jobs citing Kubernetes 1,696 1,606 1,950
As % of all contract jobs in England 5.89% 5.15% 4.84%
As % of the Systems Management category 36.39% 36.51% 33.12%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,137 1,091 1,472
10th Percentile £393 £405 £439
25th Percentile £442 £475 £506
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £575 £600
Median % change year-on-year -8.70% -4.17% -4.00%
75th Percentile £625 £675 £700
90th Percentile £700 £775 £788
UK median daily rate £525 £560 £600
% change year-on-year -6.25% -6.67% -2.83%
Number of hourly rates quoted 16 12 59
10th Percentile £61.50 - -
25th Percentile £66.63 £46.18 £46.18
Median hourly rate £70.25 £60.64 £70.00
Median % change year-on-year +15.84% -13.37% +8.53%
75th Percentile £87.13 £74.00 £77.75
90th Percentile £116.25 £74.40 £85.31
UK median hourly rate £67.00 £63.79 £67.27
% change year-on-year +5.04% -5.17% +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 4,660 4,399 5,888
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 16.19% 14.12% 14.60%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,076 2,877 4,279
10th Percentile £300 £317 £313
25th Percentile £412 £425 £450
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £510 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year -2.86% -4.55% -4.35%
75th Percentile £600 £638 £675
90th Percentile £688 £725 £750
UK median daily rate £503 £525 £550
% change year-on-year -4.29% -4.55% -4.35%
Number of hourly rates quoted 89 50 158
10th Percentile £18.65 £19.50 £18.50
25th Percentile £20.18 £23.80 £25.71
Median hourly rate £34.00 £37.75 £48.70
Median % change year-on-year -9.93% -22.48% +94.80%
75th Percentile £64.50 £61.88 £74.84
90th Percentile £79.00 £75.25 £78.23
UK median hourly rate £28.50 £36.83 £49.87
% change year-on-year -22.62% -26.14% +99.46%

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 28 October 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 28 October 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 28 October 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 -1 873 £550 -8.33% 785
North of England +10 297 £500 +1.21% 226
Midlands +63 182 £530 -7.83% 81
West Midlands +55 160 £537 -8.60% 64
South East +5 156 £473 -9.04% 589
Yorkshire -2 142 £500 +5.26% 36
North West +6 120 £463 -15.14% 165
South West -14 79 £650 +8.33% 111
East of England -5 43 £491 -10.68% 27
North East +8 36 £550 +27.17% 25
East Midlands +7 22 £422 -17.66% 16
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 61 (3.60%) SAS
2 60 (3.54%) Confluence
3 32 (1.89%) Apache Airflow
4 31 (1.83%) Apache Spark
5 29 (1.71%) Apache
6 25 (1.47%) OpenStack
7 23 (1.36%) nginx
8 10 (0.59%) Mule
9 9 (0.53%) JBoss
10 8 (0.47%) WebSphere
11 7 (0.41%) Camunda
11 7 (0.41%) Jupyter
11 7 (0.41%) Tomcat
12 6 (0.35%) WebSphere Application Server
13 5 (0.29%) Ethereum
13 5 (0.29%) Hyperledger
13 5 (0.29%) WebLogic
14 4 (0.24%) MQSeries
14 4 (0.24%) SharePoint
14 4 (0.24%) Traefik
Applications
1 6 (0.35%) Chatbot
1 6 (0.35%) MS Visio
2 4 (0.24%) Microsoft Excel
2 4 (0.24%) Microsoft Office
2 4 (0.24%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 2 (0.12%) Weka
Business Applications
1 6 (0.35%) Maximo
2 4 (0.24%) Endur
3 3 (0.18%) Payment Gateway
4 2 (0.12%) SAP S/4HANA
5 1 (0.059%) Cloudability
5 1 (0.059%) Finacle
Cloud Services
1 933 (55.01%) AWS
2 592 (34.91%) Azure
3 417 (24.59%) GCP
4 340 (20.05%) GitHub
5 212 (12.50%) GitHub Actions
6 187 (11.03%) OpenShift
7 180 (10.61%) Serverless
8 145 (8.55%) Azure DevOps
9 121 (7.13%) Azure AKS
10 120 (7.08%) AWS CloudFormation
11 117 (6.90%) Amazon EKS
12 99 (5.84%) Amazon S3
13 89 (5.25%) AWS Lambda
14 82 (4.83%) Google Kubernetes Engine
15 70 (4.13%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 65 (3.83%) Amazon EC2
17 64 (3.77%) SaaS
18 61 (3.60%) Amazon ECS
19 58 (3.42%) Entra ID
20 57 (3.36%) PaaS
Communications & Networking
1 73 (4.30%) Firewall
2 42 (2.48%) DNS
3 25 (1.47%) Network Security
3 25 (1.47%) VPN
4 23 (1.36%) SSL
5 20 (1.18%) HTTP
6 15 (0.88%) TCP/IP
7 10 (0.59%) BGP
8 9 (0.53%) HTTPS
9 6 (0.35%) Ethernet VPN
9 6 (0.35%) MPLS
9 6 (0.35%) Software-Defined Networking
10 5 (0.29%) 5G
10 5 (0.29%) Internet
10 5 (0.29%) OpenLDAP
10 5 (0.29%) VLAN
10 5 (0.29%) VXLAN
11 4 (0.24%) Kerberos
11 4 (0.24%) SSH
11 4 (0.24%) VoIP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 232 (13.68%) PostgreSQL
2 151 (8.90%) NoSQL
3 105 (6.19%) MongoDB
4 70 (4.13%) Relational Database
5 67 (3.95%) Apache Cassandra
6 59 (3.48%) Amazon RDS
7 53 (3.13%) Elasticsearch
8 52 (3.07%) Redis
9 41 (2.42%) SQL Server
10 36 (2.12%) Big Data
11 34 (2.00%) MySQL
12 31 (1.83%) Data Warehouse
12 31 (1.83%) Oracle Database
13 29 (1.71%) Pentaho
14 28 (1.65%) DynamoDB
15 27 (1.59%) Data Lake
16 23 (1.36%) Hadoop
17 20 (1.18%) BigQuery
17 20 (1.18%) RDBMS
18 18 (1.06%) Azure SQL Database
Development Applications
1 450 (26.53%) Jenkins
2 332 (19.58%) Git
3 307 (18.10%) GitLab
4 158 (9.32%) JIRA
5 68 (4.01%) SonarQube
6 56 (3.30%) JUnit
7 54 (3.18%) Maven
8 48 (2.83%) Artifactory
8 48 (2.83%) Sonatype Nexus
9 44 (2.59%) Selenium
10 40 (2.36%) CircleCI
10 40 (2.36%) Gradle
10 40 (2.36%) Liquibase
11 30 (1.77%) Cucumber
12 26 (1.53%) Bitbucket
13 25 (1.47%) MLflow
14 21 (1.24%) Cypress.io
14 21 (1.24%) Mockito
15 20 (1.18%) Postman
16 17 (1.00%) TeamCity
General
1 456 (26.89%) Social Skills
2 272 (16.04%) Finance
3 184 (10.85%) Banking
4 176 (10.38%) Public Sector
5 120 (7.08%) Analytical Skills
6 43 (2.54%) Financial Institution
7 39 (2.30%) Investment Banking
8 32 (1.89%) Telecoms
9 30 (1.77%) Documentation Skills
10 21 (1.24%) Retail
11 19 (1.12%) Pharmaceutical
12 14 (0.83%) Inclusion and Diversity
13 12 (0.71%) Front Office
14 11 (0.65%) Presentation Skills
15 10 (0.59%) Military
16 9 (0.53%) Aerospace
17 6 (0.35%) Games
17 6 (0.35%) Law
17 6 (0.35%) Marketing
18 4 (0.24%) Legal
Job Titles
1 393 (23.17%) Developer
2 278 (16.39%) DevOps Engineer
3 258 (15.21%) Senior
4 159 (9.38%) Architect
5 121 (7.13%) Java Developer
6 109 (6.43%) AWS Engineer
7 98 (5.78%) Lead
8 97 (5.72%) Software Engineer
9 95 (5.60%) Platform Engineer
10 80 (4.72%) Senior Developer
11 79 (4.66%) Cloud Engineer
12 77 (4.54%) AWS DevOps
13 70 (4.13%) Python Developer
14 60 (3.54%) Full-Stack Developer
15 59 (3.48%) Site Reliability Engineer
16 57 (3.36%) AWS DevOps Engineer
17 53 (3.13%) Data Engineer
18 49 (2.89%) Azure Engineer
19 45 (2.65%) GCP Engineer
19 45 (2.65%) Site Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 259 (15.27%) Kafka
2 194 (11.44%) React
3 177 (10.44%) RESTful
4 172 (10.14%) REST
5 163 (9.61%) Spring
6 159 (9.38%) Node.js
7 140 (8.25%) Spring Boot
8 133 (7.84%) Elastic Stack
9 113 (6.66%) AngularJS
10 85 (5.01%) gRPC
11 83 (4.89%) .NET
12 72 (4.25%) HTML
13 69 (4.07%) FastAPI
14 62 (3.66%) GraphQL
15 56 (3.30%) CSS
16 55 (3.24%) YAML
17 53 (3.13%) Vue
18 49 (2.89%) OAuth
19 47 (2.77%) PyTorch
20 44 (2.59%) JSON
Miscellaneous
1 312 (18.40%) Cloud Native
2 178 (10.50%) Distributed Systems
3 67 (3.95%) Public Cloud
4 52 (3.07%) Onboarding
4 52 (3.07%) Product Ownership
5 38 (2.24%) Algorithms
5 38 (2.24%) Hybrid Cloud
6 35 (2.06%) Enterprise Software
6 35 (2.06%) Private Cloud
7 30 (1.77%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
8 27 (1.59%) Data Protection Act
8 27 (1.59%) Legacy Systems
9 26 (1.53%) Data Structures
10 22 (1.30%) Hedge funds
10 22 (1.30%) Security Posture
11 21 (1.24%) Replication
12 20 (1.18%) Data Centre
12 20 (1.18%) Virtual Team
13 19 (1.12%) PKI
14 18 (1.06%) Greenfield Project
Operating Systems
1 349 (20.58%) Linux
2 69 (4.07%) Windows
3 60 (3.54%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
3 60 (3.54%) Unix
4 17 (1.00%) CentOS
5 16 (0.94%) Ubuntu
6 15 (0.88%) Windows Server
7 12 (0.71%) VMS
8 7 (0.41%) Solaris
9 5 (0.29%) Android
9 5 (0.29%) Apple iOS
10 2 (0.12%) Debian
10 2 (0.12%) zOS
11 1 (0.059%) AIX
11 1 (0.059%) Alpine Linux
11 1 (0.059%) Mac OS
11 1 (0.059%) MVS
11 1 (0.059%) SUSE
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,108 (65.33%) CI/CD
2 910 (53.66%) DevOps
3 722 (42.57%) Containerisation
4 532 (31.37%) Agile
5 525 (30.96%) Infrastructure as Code
6 474 (27.95%) Microservices
7 391 (23.05%) Problem-Solving
8 307 (18.10%) Software Engineering
9 266 (15.68%) Observability
10 232 (13.68%) Test Automation
11 196 (11.56%) Migration
12 169 (9.96%) AI
13 146 (8.61%) Analytics
14 144 (8.49%) Machine Learning
15 138 (8.14%) Full-Stack Development
15 138 (8.14%) Platform Engineering
16 136 (8.02%) DevSecOps
17 133 (7.84%) Continuous Improvement
18 132 (7.78%) Scrum
19 124 (7.31%) Data Pipeline
Programming Languages
1 803 (47.35%) Python
2 459 (27.06%) Java
3 281 (16.57%) SQL
4 254 (14.98%) Bash
5 248 (14.62%) Go
6 184 (10.85%) JavaScript
7 162 (9.55%) TypeScript
8 111 (6.54%) C#
9 105 (6.19%) PowerShell
10 75 (4.42%) C++
11 53 (3.13%) Shell Script
12 48 (2.83%) Bicep
13 30 (1.77%) Groovy
14 29 (1.71%) Rust
15 28 (1.65%) Perl
16 26 (1.53%) Kotlin
17 23 (1.36%) Ruby
18 21 (1.24%) PHP
19 16 (0.94%) C
19 16 (0.94%) Scala
Qualifications
1 522 (30.78%) Security Cleared
2 432 (25.47%) SC Cleared
3 123 (7.25%) Degree
4 91 (5.37%) Computer Science Degree
5 81 (4.78%) AWS Certification
6 76 (4.48%) DV Cleared
7 56 (3.30%) Azure Certification
8 49 (2.89%) Master's Degree
9 33 (1.95%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
10 20 (1.18%) Microsoft Certification
11 19 (1.12%) CISSP
12 16 (0.94%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
12 16 (0.94%) Cisco Certification
13 15 (0.88%) BPSS Clearance
14 9 (0.53%) OCP
14 9 (0.53%) Oracle Certification
14 9 (0.53%) TOGAF Certification
15 8 (0.47%) (ISC)2 CCSP
15 8 (0.47%) CCSP
16 7 (0.41%) CISM
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 90 (5.31%) QA
2 48 (2.83%) Data Quality
3 46 (2.71%) ISO/IEC 27001
4 44 (2.59%) GDPR
5 40 (2.36%) NIST
6 25 (1.47%) NCSC
7 19 (1.12%) Accessibility
8 18 (1.06%) HIPAA
8 18 (1.06%) PCI DSS
9 12 (0.71%) EU AI Act
10 10 (0.59%) PSD2
11 9 (0.53%) SOC 2
11 9 (0.53%) WCAG
12 7 (0.41%) Cyber Essentials
12 7 (0.41%) SLA
13 6 (0.35%) ISO 20022
13 6 (0.35%) SEPA
14 5 (0.29%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
15 4 (0.24%) NIST 800
16 3 (0.18%) Def Stans
System Software
1 1,068 (62.97%) Docker
2 47 (2.77%) Active Directory
3 37 (2.18%) VMware Infrastructure
4 29 (1.71%) vSphere
5 20 (1.18%) Virtual Machines
6 10 (0.59%) VMware NSX
7 9 (0.53%) KVM
8 5 (0.29%) Hyper-V
9 4 (0.24%) Snort
9 4 (0.24%) Squid
10 3 (0.18%) Lustre
10 3 (0.18%) Slurm Workload Manager
11 2 (0.12%) GPFS
11 2 (0.12%) NDS
11 2 (0.12%) NetIQ eDirectory
11 2 (0.12%) Virtual Servers
12 1 (0.059%) GridGain
12 1 (0.059%) iptables
12 1 (0.059%) NFS
12 1 (0.059%) Xen
Systems Management
1 647 (38.15%) Terraform
2 298 (17.57%) Ansible
3 272 (16.04%) Grafana
4 251 (14.80%) Prometheus
5 87 (5.13%) Argo
6 51 (3.01%) Kibana
7 45 (2.65%) Puppet
8 36 (2.12%) Istio
8 36 (2.12%) Progress Chef
9 30 (1.77%) Packer
9 30 (1.77%) Single Sign-On
10 19 (1.12%) logstash
10 19 (1.12%) Nessus
11 16 (0.94%) Consul
11 16 (0.94%) Podman
12 13 (0.77%) Control-M
13 11 (0.65%) Docker Swarm
13 11 (0.65%) IBM Guardium
13 11 (0.65%) Kustomize
14 10 (0.59%) Rancher
Vendors
1 172 (10.14%) Microsoft
2 159 (9.38%) Splunk
3 140 (8.25%) Google
4 109 (6.43%) Red Hat
5 105 (6.19%) Oracle
6 46 (2.71%) VMware
7 42 (2.48%) Dynatrace
8 29 (1.71%) Denodo
8 29 (1.71%) Talend
9 28 (1.65%) IBM
10 27 (1.59%) Databricks
11 24 (1.42%) AppDynamics
12 22 (1.30%) Atlassian
12 22 (1.30%) OpenAI
13 17 (1.00%) Cisco
14 13 (0.77%) Solace
15 12 (0.71%) Palo Alto
15 12 (0.71%) Tenable
16 10 (0.59%) Salesforce
17 9 (0.53%) Qualys