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 8 April 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
8 Apr 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 32 30 56
Rank change year-on-year -2 +26 -27
Contract jobs citing Kubernetes 2,168 1,484 1,280
As % of all contract jobs in England 5.55% 6.09% 3.43%
As % of the Systems Management category 38.96% 38.82% 28.71%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,472 1,047 941
10th Percentile £400 £406 £413
25th Percentile £450 £475 £475
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £575 £550
Median % change year-on-year -8.70% +4.55% -12.00%
75th Percentile £625 £688 £663
90th Percentile £710 £810 £725
UK median daily rate £525 £565 £550
% change year-on-year -7.08% +2.73% -10.20%
Number of hourly rates quoted 53 7 13
10th Percentile - £26.00 £46.18
25th Percentile £52.50 £41.38 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £60.00 £57.50
Median % change year-on-year +8.33% +4.35% -18.44%
75th Percentile £70.00 £73.44 £71.25
90th Percentile £82.80 £80.40 £76.89
UK median hourly rate £65.00 £60.00 £57.50
% change year-on-year +8.33% +4.35% -17.86%

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 5,565 3,823 4,458
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 14.23% 15.70% 11.93%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,847 2,638 3,257
10th Percentile £313 £314 £250
25th Percentile £413 £420 £406
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -8.70%
75th Percentile £600 £638 £625
90th Percentile £700 £738 £700
UK median daily rate £500 £525 £519
% change year-on-year -4.76% +1.11% -9.70%
Number of hourly rates quoted 140 39 124
10th Percentile £20.09 £15.22 £14.00
25th Percentile £33.83 £22.32 £17.72
Median hourly rate £55.00 £26.50 £25.77
Median % change year-on-year +107.55% +2.85% -55.19%
75th Percentile £68.75 £61.63 £50.06
90th Percentile £75.15 £77.74 £68.44
UK median hourly rate £55.00 £26.45 £30.00
% change year-on-year +107.94% -11.83% -47.83%

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 8 April 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 8 April 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 8 April 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 -10 1,001 £550 -8.33% 315
North of England +6 445 £500 -4.76% 157
Midlands +32 282 £515 -1.90% 57
West Midlands +28 241 £515 -6.36% 38
Yorkshire +10 233 £486 -16.03% 47
South East -2 188 £500 -9.09% 147
North West +7 171 £538 +7.50% 85
South West +2 154 £550 -8.33% 80
North East -3 45 £475 -8.65% 25
East Midlands -4 40 £513 +7.89% 19
East of England -21 33 £600 +22.45% 32
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 (4.75%) Confluence
2 75 (3.46%) SAS
3 66 (3.04%) Apache Spark
4 47 (2.17%) Apache
5 34 (1.57%) nginx
6 31 (1.43%) Apache Airflow
7 30 (1.38%) OpenStack
8 17 (0.78%) Jupyter
9 9 (0.42%) Camunda
10 8 (0.37%) Appian
10 8 (0.37%) WebLogic
11 7 (0.32%) SharePoint
12 6 (0.28%) Microsoft Exchange
13 4 (0.18%) Drupal
14 3 (0.14%) Adobe Experience Manager
14 3 (0.14%) CMS
14 3 (0.14%) IIS
14 3 (0.14%) Oracle Workflow
15 2 (0.092%) ArcGIS
15 2 (0.092%) Oracle SOA Suite
Applications
1 4 (0.18%) Microsoft Excel
1 4 (0.18%) Weka
2 3 (0.14%) Chatbot
2 3 (0.14%) Microsoft Office
2 3 (0.14%) Microsoft Project
2 3 (0.14%) MS Visio
3 2 (0.092%) Adobe XD
3 2 (0.092%) CPLEX
4 1 (0.046%) Maya
4 1 (0.046%) Microsoft PowerPoint
Business Applications
1 8 (0.37%) Maximo
2 3 (0.14%) Distributed Ledger
2 3 (0.14%) Payment Gateway
3 1 (0.046%) Actimize
3 1 (0.046%) Cloudability
3 1 (0.046%) Oracle EBS
3 1 (0.046%) SAP Hybris
3 1 (0.046%) SAP S/4HANA
3 1 (0.046%) Shopify
Cloud Services
1 1,115 (51.43%) AWS
2 895 (41.28%) Azure
3 507 (23.39%) GCP
4 465 (21.45%) GitHub
5 323 (14.90%) OpenShift
6 273 (12.59%) GitHub Actions
7 230 (10.61%) Serverless
8 217 (10.01%) Azure DevOps
9 169 (7.80%) Azure AKS
10 165 (7.61%) Amazon EKS
11 151 (6.96%) AWS CloudFormation
12 145 (6.69%) Amazon S3
13 139 (6.41%) AWS Lambda
14 104 (4.80%) Amazon EC2
15 101 (4.66%) Google Kubernetes Engine
16 85 (3.92%) Amazon ECS
17 70 (3.23%) Amazon CloudWatch
18 66 (3.04%) Datadog
18 66 (3.04%) Virtual Private Cloud
19 59 (2.72%) Entra ID
Communications & Networking
1 110 (5.07%) Firewall
2 91 (4.20%) DNS
3 52 (2.40%) VPN
4 50 (2.31%) Network Security
5 37 (1.71%) TCP/IP
6 24 (1.11%) SAN
7 19 (0.88%) HTTP
8 17 (0.78%) DHCP
9 16 (0.74%) NAS
10 15 (0.69%) Reverse Proxy
11 11 (0.51%) OpenVPN
11 11 (0.51%) SSL
12 10 (0.46%) Fibre Channel
12 10 (0.46%) iSCSI
13 8 (0.37%) 5G
14 7 (0.32%) 3GPP
14 7 (0.32%) BGP
14 7 (0.32%) SMTP
15 6 (0.28%) 4G
16 5 (0.23%) Kerberos
Database & Business Intelligence
1 253 (11.67%) PostgreSQL
2 182 (8.39%) NoSQL
3 120 (5.54%) MongoDB
4 106 (4.89%) Relational Database
5 86 (3.97%) SQL Server
6 75 (3.46%) Apache Cassandra
7 67 (3.09%) Amazon RDS
8 63 (2.91%) Elasticsearch
9 44 (2.03%) Big Data
9 44 (2.03%) Redis
10 39 (1.80%) Power BI
11 36 (1.66%) MySQL
12 34 (1.57%) Pentaho
13 32 (1.48%) BigQuery
13 32 (1.48%) Data Lake
13 32 (1.48%) DynamoDB
14 25 (1.15%) Data Warehouse
14 25 (1.15%) Flink
15 22 (1.01%) Oracle Database
15 22 (1.01%) Tableau
Development Applications
1 536 (24.72%) Jenkins
2 393 (18.13%) GitLab
3 386 (17.80%) Git
4 185 (8.53%) JIRA
5 100 (4.61%) JUnit
6 65 (3.00%) Selenium
7 55 (2.54%) SonarQube
8 54 (2.49%) Cucumber
9 40 (1.85%) Artifactory
10 39 (1.80%) JMeter
11 38 (1.75%) MLflow
12 36 (1.66%) Maven
13 35 (1.61%) Mockito
14 34 (1.57%) Bitbucket
15 33 (1.52%) Gradle
16 27 (1.25%) Sonatype Nexus
17 26 (1.20%) Gatling
18 23 (1.06%) Postman
19 19 (0.88%) CircleCI
20 15 (0.69%) WebDriver
General
1 562 (25.92%) Social Skills
2 354 (16.33%) Finance
3 274 (12.64%) Public Sector
4 180 (8.30%) Banking
5 155 (7.15%) Analytical Skills
6 58 (2.68%) Documentation Skills
7 28 (1.29%) Influencing Skills
8 27 (1.25%) Telecoms
9 24 (1.11%) Financial Institution
10 21 (0.97%) Front Office
11 19 (0.88%) Presentation Skills
12 18 (0.83%) Investment Banking
13 15 (0.69%) Inclusion and Diversity
14 13 (0.60%) Military
14 13 (0.60%) Organisational Skills
15 12 (0.55%) Retail
16 11 (0.51%) Legal
17 9 (0.42%) Publishing
18 7 (0.32%) Aerospace
19 6 (0.28%) Advertising
Job Titles
1 465 (21.45%) Developer
2 327 (15.08%) Senior
3 301 (13.88%) DevOps Engineer
4 216 (9.96%) Architect
5 162 (7.47%) Java Developer
6 131 (6.04%) Software Engineer
7 117 (5.40%) Lead
8 114 (5.26%) Platform Engineer
9 106 (4.89%) Senior Developer
10 100 (4.61%) Cloud Engineer
11 99 (4.57%) Data Engineer
11 99 (4.57%) Site Reliability Engineer
12 96 (4.43%) AWS Engineer
13 91 (4.20%) Azure Engineer
14 79 (3.64%) Java Engineer
15 77 (3.55%) Python Developer
16 73 (3.37%) Site Engineer
17 71 (3.27%) AWS DevOps
18 65 (3.00%) GCP Engineer
19 64 (2.95%) Full-Stack Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 355 (16.37%) Kafka
2 315 (14.53%) Spring
3 266 (12.27%) Spring Boot
4 211 (9.73%) REST
5 199 (9.18%) RESTful
6 164 (7.56%) React
7 156 (7.20%) Node.js
8 129 (5.95%) OpenTelemetry
9 113 (5.21%) AngularJS
10 106 (4.89%) Elastic Stack
11 103 (4.75%) .NET
12 75 (3.46%) OAuth
13 72 (3.32%) gRPC
14 71 (3.27%) PyTorch
15 59 (2.72%) FastAPI
16 57 (2.63%) OpenID
17 55 (2.54%) RabbitMQ
18 53 (2.44%) GraphQL
18 53 (2.44%) TensorFlow
19 51 (2.35%) JSON
Miscellaneous
1 440 (20.30%) Cloud Native
2 188 (8.67%) Distributed Systems
3 88 (4.06%) Hybrid Cloud
4 63 (2.91%) Public Cloud
5 62 (2.86%) Product Ownership
6 59 (2.72%) Onboarding
7 38 (1.75%) Data Centre
8 37 (1.71%) Data Protection Act
8 37 (1.71%) Enterprise Software
9 36 (1.66%) Private Cloud
10 34 (1.57%) AI Agents
11 33 (1.52%) Management Information System
12 31 (1.43%) Legacy Systems
12 31 (1.43%) PKI
13 29 (1.34%) Security Posture
14 26 (1.20%) Virtual Team
15 24 (1.11%) Greenfield Project
16 21 (0.97%) Enterprise Storage
17 20 (0.92%) Replication
18 19 (0.88%) Fixed Income
Operating Systems
1 398 (18.36%) Linux
2 116 (5.35%) Windows
3 62 (2.86%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 60 (2.77%) Unix
5 45 (2.08%) VMS
6 29 (1.34%) Windows Server
7 18 (0.83%) Ubuntu
8 7 (0.32%) Windows Server 2003
9 6 (0.28%) Data ONTAP
10 5 (0.23%) CentOS
10 5 (0.23%) CoreOS
11 4 (0.18%) Apple iOS
11 4 (0.18%) Rocky
11 4 (0.18%) Windows Server 2012
11 4 (0.18%) Windows Server 2019
12 3 (0.14%) Android
12 3 (0.14%) Debian
13 1 (0.046%) Windows Server 2016
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,415 (65.27%) CI/CD
2 1,155 (53.27%) DevOps
3 919 (42.39%) Containerisation
4 702 (32.38%) Agile
5 663 (30.58%) Infrastructure as Code
6 570 (26.29%) Microservices
7 441 (20.34%) Observability
8 433 (19.97%) Problem-Solving
9 354 (16.33%) Software Engineering
10 324 (14.94%) Test Automation
11 278 (12.82%) AI
12 237 (10.93%) Continuous Improvement
13 229 (10.56%) Platform Engineering
14 226 (10.42%) Migration
15 222 (10.24%) Analytics
16 220 (10.15%) Site Reliability Engineering
17 204 (9.41%) Data Pipeline
18 193 (8.90%) DevSecOps
18 193 (8.90%) Scrum
19 191 (8.81%) Machine Learning
Programming Languages
1 869 (40.08%) Python
2 553 (25.51%) Java
3 408 (18.82%) SQL
4 270 (12.45%) Bash
5 177 (8.16%) Go
6 154 (7.10%) JavaScript
7 144 (6.64%) PowerShell
8 129 (5.95%) TypeScript
9 98 (4.52%) C#
10 72 (3.32%) Bicep
11 56 (2.58%) Shell Script
12 42 (1.94%) Ruby
13 34 (1.57%) Scala
14 26 (1.20%) Kotlin
15 23 (1.06%) Rust
16 18 (0.83%) Groovy
17 16 (0.74%) C++
18 14 (0.65%) PHP
19 11 (0.51%) C
20 10 (0.46%) Kusto Query Language
Qualifications
1 783 (36.12%) Security Cleared
2 638 (29.43%) SC Cleared
3 137 (6.32%) Degree
4 120 (5.54%) DV Cleared
5 111 (5.12%) Azure Certification
6 93 (4.29%) Computer Science Degree
7 81 (3.74%) AWS Certification
8 50 (2.31%) CISSP
9 49 (2.26%) BPSS Clearance
10 36 (1.66%) Master's Degree
11 31 (1.43%) CISM
12 28 (1.29%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 22 (1.01%) Cisco Certification
13 22 (1.01%) Microsoft Certification
14 19 (0.88%) OCP
14 19 (0.88%) Oracle Certification
15 16 (0.74%) TOGAF Certification
16 14 (0.65%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
17 13 (0.60%) CCSP
18 12 (0.55%) (ISC)2 CCSP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 120 (5.54%) QA
2 81 (3.74%) Data Quality
3 72 (3.32%) NIST
4 65 (3.00%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 59 (2.72%) GDPR
6 46 (2.12%) NCSC
7 45 (2.08%) Accessibility
8 33 (1.52%) PCI DSS
9 20 (0.92%) WCAG
10 18 (0.83%) ISO 20022
11 16 (0.74%) NIST 800
12 15 (0.69%) PSD2
13 13 (0.60%) Cyber Essentials
14 12 (0.55%) Sarbanes-Oxley
15 11 (0.51%) SEPA
16 10 (0.46%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
17 9 (0.42%) HIPAA
17 9 (0.42%) SLA
18 8 (0.37%) GRC
18 8 (0.37%) ISO/IEC 27002 (supersedes ISO/IEC 17799)
System Software
1 1,263 (58.26%) Docker
2 77 (3.55%) VMware Infrastructure
3 58 (2.68%) vSphere
4 47 (2.17%) Virtual Machines
5 42 (1.94%) Active Directory
6 31 (1.43%) VMware NSX
7 23 (1.06%) Slurm Workload Manager
8 21 (0.97%) Hyper-V
9 15 (0.69%) NFS
10 11 (0.51%) Squid
10 11 (0.51%) VMware ESXi
11 8 (0.37%) Lustre
12 7 (0.32%) BitLocker
12 7 (0.32%) Microsoft App-V
12 7 (0.32%) Virtual Desktop
13 6 (0.28%) GPFS
14 5 (0.23%) etcd
14 5 (0.23%) Snort
15 4 (0.18%) Ceph
15 4 (0.18%) Firmware
Systems Management
1 816 (37.64%) Terraform
2 357 (16.47%) Ansible
3 351 (16.19%) Grafana
4 324 (14.94%) Prometheus
5 138 (6.37%) Argo
6 59 (2.72%) Istio
7 48 (2.21%) Puppet
8 39 (1.80%) Progress Chef
9 37 (1.71%) Kibana
10 36 (1.66%) vCenter Server
11 28 (1.29%) Packer
12 26 (1.20%) Podman
12 26 (1.20%) Single Sign-On
13 23 (1.06%) Consul
13 23 (1.06%) Nessus
13 23 (1.06%) Rancher
14 14 (0.65%) Kustomize
15 13 (0.60%) Fluentd
15 13 (0.60%) IBM Guardium
15 13 (0.60%) linkerd
Vendors
1 254 (11.72%) Microsoft
2 183 (8.44%) Splunk
3 160 (7.38%) Red Hat
4 150 (6.92%) Google
5 117 (5.40%) Oracle
6 109 (5.03%) VMware
7 63 (2.91%) Databricks
8 62 (2.86%) Dynatrace
9 47 (2.17%) OpenAI
10 35 (1.61%) Talend
11 34 (1.57%) Denodo
12 33 (1.52%) Pure Storage
13 25 (1.15%) IBM
14 23 (1.06%) AppDynamics
15 22 (1.01%) Atlassian
16 21 (0.97%) Tenable
17 20 (0.92%) NetApp
18 19 (0.88%) Foundry
19 18 (0.83%) ServiceNow
20 17 (0.78%) CyberArk