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

6 months to
10 Nov 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 31 36 42
Rank change year-on-year +5 +6 -9
Contract jobs citing Kubernetes 1,754 1,624 1,867
As % of all contract jobs in England 5.95% 5.26% 4.66%
As % of the Systems Management category 36.89% 36.99% 32.37%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,185 1,090 1,404
10th Percentile £400 £405 £425
25th Percentile £450 £481 £506
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £575 £600
Median % change year-on-year -8.70% -4.17% -4.00%
75th Percentile £633 £685 £700
90th Percentile £700 £783 £788
UK median daily rate £525 £570 £600
% change year-on-year -7.89% -5.00% -3.54%
Number of hourly rates quoted 17 12 57
10th Percentile £58.75 - -
25th Percentile £65.50 £46.18 £46.18
Median hourly rate £67.00 £60.64 £67.27
Median % change year-on-year +10.48% -9.85% +4.29%
75th Percentile £95.00 £74.00 £77.50
90th Percentile £119.00 £74.40 £78.75
UK median hourly rate £67.00 £60.64 £66.13
% change year-on-year +10.48% -8.30% +4.97%

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 4,755 4,390 5,767
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 16.12% 14.23% 14.41%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,169 2,841 4,198
10th Percentile £306 £315 £301
25th Percentile £413 £419 £431
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year -2.38% -4.55% -5.17%
75th Percentile £608 £638 £663
90th Percentile £688 £725 £750
UK median daily rate £513 £525 £550
% change year-on-year -2.38% -4.55% -4.35%
Number of hourly rates quoted 88 51 163
10th Percentile £18.55 £19.95 £18.50
25th Percentile £20.13 £23.80 £28.63
Median hourly rate £34.00 £37.50 £48.40
Median % change year-on-year -9.33% -22.52% +93.60%
75th Percentile £64.69 £63.50 £73.75
90th Percentile £79.13 £75.00 £78.00
UK median hourly rate £27.25 £35.08 £49.73
% change year-on-year -22.33% -29.45% +98.92%

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 10 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 10 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 10 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 0 898 £550 -8.33% 786
North of England +8 313 £500 +1.42% 255
Midlands +62 183 £537 -6.61% 98
West Midlands +49 165 £540 -8.09% 81
South East +6 156 £475 -9.09% 456
Yorkshire -5 149 £500 +5.26% 39
North West +16 129 £484 -11.28% 195
South West -15 89 £650 +8.33% 120
East of England -5 46 £500 -4.76% 36
North East +1 36 £550 +29.41% 21
East Midlands +4 18 £430 -16.20% 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 80 (4.56%) Confluence
2 62 (3.53%) SAS
3 38 (2.17%) nginx
4 33 (1.88%) Apache Airflow
5 32 (1.82%) Apache Spark
6 29 (1.65%) Apache
7 25 (1.43%) OpenStack
8 10 (0.57%) Mule
9 8 (0.46%) JBoss
9 8 (0.46%) WebSphere
10 7 (0.40%) Camunda
10 7 (0.40%) Jupyter
10 7 (0.40%) Tomcat
11 6 (0.34%) WebLogic
11 6 (0.34%) WebSphere Application Server
12 5 (0.29%) Ethereum
12 5 (0.29%) Hyperledger
13 4 (0.23%) MQSeries
13 4 (0.23%) SharePoint
13 4 (0.23%) Traefik
Applications
1 6 (0.34%) MS Visio
2 5 (0.29%) Chatbot
2 5 (0.29%) Microsoft Excel
2 5 (0.29%) Microsoft Office
3 4 (0.23%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 4 (0.23%) Weka
Business Applications
1 7 (0.40%) Maximo
2 4 (0.23%) Endur
3 3 (0.17%) Payment Gateway
3 3 (0.17%) SAP S/4HANA
4 1 (0.057%) Cloudability
4 1 (0.057%) Finacle
Cloud Services
1 983 (56.04%) AWS
2 621 (35.40%) Azure
3 436 (24.86%) GCP
4 360 (20.52%) GitHub
5 219 (12.49%) GitHub Actions
6 200 (11.40%) OpenShift
7 184 (10.49%) Serverless
8 144 (8.21%) Azure DevOps
9 133 (7.58%) AWS CloudFormation
10 122 (6.96%) Azure AKS
11 121 (6.90%) Amazon EKS
12 102 (5.82%) Amazon S3
13 94 (5.36%) AWS Lambda
14 84 (4.79%) Google Kubernetes Engine
15 75 (4.28%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 71 (4.05%) Amazon EC2
17 68 (3.88%) Amazon ECS
17 68 (3.88%) SaaS
18 58 (3.31%) Entra ID
19 53 (3.02%) PaaS
Communications & Networking
1 77 (4.39%) Firewall
2 44 (2.51%) DNS
3 28 (1.60%) VPN
4 27 (1.54%) Network Security
5 19 (1.08%) SSL
6 17 (0.97%) TCP/IP
7 15 (0.86%) HTTP
8 10 (0.57%) BGP
9 7 (0.40%) HTTPS
10 6 (0.34%) Ethernet VPN
10 6 (0.34%) MPLS
10 6 (0.34%) Software-Defined Networking
10 6 (0.34%) VLAN
10 6 (0.34%) VXLAN
11 5 (0.29%) 5G
11 5 (0.29%) OpenLDAP
12 4 (0.23%) Kerberos
12 4 (0.23%) MQTT
12 4 (0.23%) Radio Access Network
12 4 (0.23%) SSH
Database & Business Intelligence
1 238 (13.57%) PostgreSQL
2 164 (9.35%) NoSQL
3 112 (6.39%) MongoDB
4 70 (3.99%) Relational Database
5 69 (3.93%) Apache Cassandra
6 59 (3.36%) Amazon RDS
7 54 (3.08%) Elasticsearch
8 52 (2.96%) Redis
9 39 (2.22%) SQL Server
10 35 (2.00%) Big Data
11 34 (1.94%) MySQL
12 30 (1.71%) Data Warehouse
13 29 (1.65%) Oracle Database
13 29 (1.65%) Pentaho
14 28 (1.60%) Data Lake
14 28 (1.60%) DynamoDB
15 24 (1.37%) Hadoop
16 21 (1.20%) BigQuery
17 20 (1.14%) RDBMS
18 16 (0.91%) Azure SQL Database
Development Applications
1 458 (26.11%) Jenkins
2 354 (20.18%) Git
3 324 (18.47%) GitLab
4 178 (10.15%) JIRA
5 65 (3.71%) SonarQube
6 62 (3.53%) JUnit
7 55 (3.14%) Maven
8 50 (2.85%) Artifactory
8 50 (2.85%) Sonatype Nexus
9 44 (2.51%) Selenium
10 42 (2.39%) Liquibase
11 40 (2.28%) Gradle
12 39 (2.22%) CircleCI
13 36 (2.05%) Bitbucket
14 31 (1.77%) Cucumber
15 26 (1.48%) MLflow
16 23 (1.31%) Mockito
16 23 (1.31%) Postman
17 20 (1.14%) Cypress.io
18 18 (1.03%) TeamCity
General
1 480 (27.37%) Social Skills
2 282 (16.08%) Finance
3 194 (11.06%) Public Sector
4 190 (10.83%) Banking
5 133 (7.58%) Analytical Skills
6 44 (2.51%) Financial Institution
7 39 (2.22%) Investment Banking
8 33 (1.88%) Documentation Skills
9 30 (1.71%) Telecoms
10 19 (1.08%) Pharmaceutical
10 19 (1.08%) Retail
11 15 (0.86%) Front Office
12 14 (0.80%) Inclusion and Diversity
13 11 (0.63%) Military
13 11 (0.63%) Presentation Skills
14 9 (0.51%) Aerospace
15 8 (0.46%) Influencing Skills
16 6 (0.34%) Games
16 6 (0.34%) Law
16 6 (0.34%) Manufacturing
Job Titles
1 400 (22.81%) Developer
2 276 (15.74%) DevOps Engineer
3 272 (15.51%) Senior
4 152 (8.67%) Architect
5 126 (7.18%) Java Developer
6 111 (6.33%) AWS Engineer
7 100 (5.70%) Lead
7 100 (5.70%) Software Engineer
8 95 (5.42%) Platform Engineer
9 88 (5.02%) Senior Developer
10 84 (4.79%) Cloud Engineer
11 81 (4.62%) AWS DevOps
12 73 (4.16%) Python Developer
13 64 (3.65%) Full-Stack Developer
14 62 (3.53%) Site Reliability Engineer
15 58 (3.31%) AWS DevOps Engineer
16 57 (3.25%) Data Engineer
17 49 (2.79%) Azure Engineer
18 46 (2.62%) Consultant
18 46 (2.62%) Site Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 272 (15.51%) Kafka
2 192 (10.95%) React
3 178 (10.15%) RESTful
4 171 (9.75%) REST
5 168 (9.58%) Node.js
5 168 (9.58%) Spring
6 142 (8.10%) Spring Boot
7 133 (7.58%) Elastic Stack
8 114 (6.50%) AngularJS
9 87 (4.96%) gRPC
10 80 (4.56%) .NET
11 69 (3.93%) FastAPI
12 66 (3.76%) HTML
13 65 (3.71%) GraphQL
14 57 (3.25%) YAML
15 56 (3.19%) Vue
16 52 (2.96%) CSS
16 52 (2.96%) PyTorch
17 46 (2.62%) JSON
17 46 (2.62%) TensorFlow
Miscellaneous
1 319 (18.19%) Cloud Native
2 174 (9.92%) Distributed Systems
3 70 (3.99%) Public Cloud
4 55 (3.14%) Product Ownership
5 52 (2.96%) Onboarding
6 44 (2.51%) Hybrid Cloud
7 37 (2.11%) Algorithms
7 37 (2.11%) Private Cloud
8 34 (1.94%) Enterprise Software
9 29 (1.65%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
10 28 (1.60%) Data Protection Act
10 28 (1.60%) Legacy Systems
11 25 (1.43%) Data Structures
12 23 (1.31%) Security Posture
13 22 (1.25%) Hedge funds
13 22 (1.25%) Replication
13 22 (1.25%) Virtual Team
14 19 (1.08%) Data Centre
14 19 (1.08%) PKI
15 18 (1.03%) Greenfield Project
Operating Systems
1 371 (21.15%) Linux
2 65 (3.71%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
3 64 (3.65%) Windows
4 61 (3.48%) Unix
5 18 (1.03%) CentOS
5 18 (1.03%) Ubuntu
6 17 (0.97%) VMS
7 15 (0.86%) Windows Server
8 7 (0.40%) Solaris
9 5 (0.29%) Android
9 5 (0.29%) Apple iOS
10 2 (0.11%) zOS
11 1 (0.057%) Alpine Linux
11 1 (0.057%) Mac OS
11 1 (0.057%) MVS
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,150 (65.56%) CI/CD
2 944 (53.82%) DevOps
3 729 (41.56%) Containerisation
4 584 (33.30%) Agile
5 529 (30.16%) Infrastructure as Code
6 485 (27.65%) Microservices
7 404 (23.03%) Problem-Solving
8 317 (18.07%) Software Engineering
9 275 (15.68%) Observability
10 234 (13.34%) Test Automation
11 196 (11.17%) Migration
12 168 (9.58%) AI
13 153 (8.72%) Analytics
14 151 (8.61%) Scrum
15 145 (8.27%) Full-Stack Development
15 145 (8.27%) Machine Learning
16 140 (7.98%) Continuous Improvement
17 138 (7.87%) DevSecOps
17 138 (7.87%) Platform Engineering
18 130 (7.41%) Mentoring
Programming Languages
1 826 (47.09%) Python
2 469 (26.74%) Java
3 293 (16.70%) SQL
4 263 (14.99%) Bash
5 247 (14.08%) Go
6 178 (10.15%) JavaScript
7 169 (9.64%) TypeScript
8 108 (6.16%) C#
9 99 (5.64%) PowerShell
10 74 (4.22%) C++
11 54 (3.08%) Shell Script
12 47 (2.68%) Bicep
13 31 (1.77%) Perl
13 31 (1.77%) Ruby
14 29 (1.65%) Groovy
14 29 (1.65%) Rust
15 27 (1.54%) Kotlin
16 21 (1.20%) PHP
17 17 (0.97%) C
17 17 (0.97%) Scala
Qualifications
1 564 (32.16%) Security Cleared
2 473 (26.97%) SC Cleared
3 126 (7.18%) Degree
4 94 (5.36%) Computer Science Degree
5 84 (4.79%) AWS Certification
6 81 (4.62%) DV Cleared
7 65 (3.71%) Azure Certification
8 51 (2.91%) Master's Degree
9 34 (1.94%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
10 28 (1.60%) CISSP
11 25 (1.43%) BPSS Clearance
12 22 (1.25%) Microsoft Certification
13 17 (0.97%) Cisco Certification
14 14 (0.80%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
14 14 (0.80%) CISM
15 9 (0.51%) (ISC)2 CCSP
15 9 (0.51%) CCSP
15 9 (0.51%) OCP
15 9 (0.51%) Oracle Certification
15 9 (0.51%) TOGAF Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 94 (5.36%) QA
2 54 (3.08%) ISO/IEC 27001
3 49 (2.79%) Data Quality
4 48 (2.74%) NIST
5 41 (2.34%) GDPR
6 26 (1.48%) NCSC
7 21 (1.20%) Accessibility
8 16 (0.91%) PCI DSS
9 14 (0.80%) HIPAA
10 12 (0.68%) EU AI Act
11 11 (0.63%) PSD2
12 10 (0.57%) WCAG
13 9 (0.51%) SOC 2
14 7 (0.40%) Cyber Essentials
15 6 (0.34%) ISO 20022
15 6 (0.34%) SEPA
15 6 (0.34%) SLA
16 5 (0.29%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
16 5 (0.29%) NIST 800
17 3 (0.17%) Def Stans
System Software
1 1,124 (64.08%) Docker
2 49 (2.79%) Active Directory
3 40 (2.28%) VMware Infrastructure
4 31 (1.77%) vSphere
5 20 (1.14%) Virtual Machines
6 12 (0.68%) VMware NSX
7 10 (0.57%) KVM
8 5 (0.29%) Hyper-V
8 5 (0.29%) Lustre
8 5 (0.29%) Slurm Workload Manager
9 4 (0.23%) GPFS
9 4 (0.23%) Snort
9 4 (0.23%) Squid
9 4 (0.23%) Virtual Servers
10 2 (0.11%) NDS
10 2 (0.11%) NetIQ eDirectory
11 1 (0.057%) Ceph
11 1 (0.057%) GridGain
11 1 (0.057%) NFS
11 1 (0.057%) Xen
Systems Management
1 673 (38.37%) Terraform
2 297 (16.93%) Ansible
3 275 (15.68%) Grafana
4 257 (14.65%) Prometheus
5 93 (5.30%) Argo
6 47 (2.68%) Kibana
7 43 (2.45%) Puppet
8 41 (2.34%) Packer
9 37 (2.11%) Istio
10 36 (2.05%) Progress Chef
11 29 (1.65%) Single Sign-On
12 27 (1.54%) Consul
13 18 (1.03%) logstash
14 17 (0.97%) Nessus
15 16 (0.91%) Podman
16 13 (0.74%) Control-M
17 12 (0.68%) Kustomize
18 11 (0.63%) IBM Guardium
18 11 (0.63%) Rancher
18 11 (0.63%) SCOM
Vendors
1 171 (9.75%) Splunk
2 169 (9.64%) Microsoft
3 144 (8.21%) Google
4 114 (6.50%) Red Hat
5 106 (6.04%) Oracle
6 52 (2.96%) VMware
7 42 (2.39%) Dynatrace
8 35 (2.00%) Databricks
9 29 (1.65%) Denodo
9 29 (1.65%) Talend
10 28 (1.60%) Atlassian
11 26 (1.48%) IBM
12 25 (1.43%) OpenAI
13 24 (1.37%) AppDynamics
14 17 (0.97%) Cisco
15 12 (0.68%) Palo Alto
15 12 (0.68%) Tenable
16 11 (0.63%) Solace
17 10 (0.57%) Cribl.io
17 10 (0.57%) Okta