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

6 months to
14 Mar 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 32 30 57
Rank change year-on-year -2 +27 -26
Contract jobs citing Kubernetes 2,156 1,506 1,317
As % of all contract jobs in England 5.86% 6.09% 3.47%
As % of the Systems Management category 39.66% 38.63% 28.96%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,466 1,051 959
10th Percentile £400 £406 £419
25th Percentile £450 £481 £475
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £575 £558
Median % change year-on-year -8.70% +3.14% -10.80%
75th Percentile £628 £697 £675
90th Percentile £714 £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% -3.13%
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% -3.13%

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 5,436 3,899 4,548
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 14.76% 15.78% 11.99%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,743 2,616 3,300
10th Percentile £313 £313 £250
25th Percentile £413 £425 £406
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £526 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.85% +0.10% -9.48%
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 126 42 137
10th Percentile £19.00 £15.22 £14.00
25th Percentile £22.26 £21.05 £20.00
Median hourly rate £55.00 £26.50 £32.50
Median % change year-on-year +107.55% -18.46% -37.66%
75th Percentile £66.75 £67.38 £58.00
90th Percentile £75.76 £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 14 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 14 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 14 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 -9 997 £550 -8.33% 305
North of England +9 454 £498 -7.44% 146
Midlands +43 278 £525 - 47
West Midlands +37 249 £525 - 28
Yorkshire +10 236 £484 -15.91% 60
South East -2 190 £488 -11.36% 147
North West +12 172 £531 +1.17% 66
South West +4 151 £575 -4.17% 73
North East -1 50 £508 -1.41% 20
East of England -18 34 £613 +23.74% 30
East Midlands -14 28 £447 -10.60% 19
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
1 104 (4.82%) Confluence
2 67 (3.11%) SAS
3 60 (2.78%) Apache Spark
4 41 (1.90%) Apache
5 34 (1.58%) nginx
6 32 (1.48%) OpenStack
7 27 (1.25%) Apache Airflow
8 18 (0.83%) Jupyter
9 11 (0.51%) Camunda
10 8 (0.37%) Appian
10 8 (0.37%) WebLogic
11 7 (0.32%) 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 (0.32%) 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
5 1 (0.046%) CPLEX
5 1 (0.046%) Maya
5 1 (0.046%) Microsoft PowerPoint
Business Applications
1 8 (0.37%) Maximo
2 2 (0.093%) Payment Gateway
3 1 (0.046%) Actimize
3 1 (0.046%) Cloudability
3 1 (0.046%) Endur
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 1,122 (52.04%) AWS
2 863 (40.03%) Azure
3 525 (24.35%) GCP
4 498 (23.10%) GitHub
5 313 (14.52%) OpenShift
6 281 (13.03%) GitHub Actions
7 234 (10.85%) Serverless
8 203 (9.42%) Azure DevOps
9 168 (7.79%) Amazon EKS
10 154 (7.14%) Azure AKS
11 146 (6.77%) AWS CloudFormation
12 142 (6.59%) Amazon S3
13 134 (6.22%) AWS Lambda
14 106 (4.92%) Google Kubernetes Engine
15 105 (4.87%) Amazon EC2
16 88 (4.08%) Amazon ECS
17 71 (3.29%) Virtual Private Cloud
18 70 (3.25%) Datadog
19 61 (2.83%) Amazon CloudWatch
20 56 (2.60%) Entra ID
Communications & Networking
1 110 (5.10%) Firewall
2 80 (3.71%) DNS
3 49 (2.27%) Network Security
4 41 (1.90%) VPN
5 39 (1.81%) TCP/IP
6 20 (0.93%) HTTP
7 19 (0.88%) SAN
8 18 (0.83%) DHCP
9 15 (0.70%) Reverse Proxy
9 15 (0.70%) SSL
10 11 (0.51%) NAS
11 10 (0.46%) OpenVPN
12 8 (0.37%) Kerberos
13 7 (0.32%) 5G
13 7 (0.32%) BGP
13 7 (0.32%) Fibre Channel
13 7 (0.32%) iSCSI
14 6 (0.28%) 3GPP
14 6 (0.28%) 4G
14 6 (0.28%) SMTP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 276 (12.80%) PostgreSQL
2 197 (9.14%) NoSQL
3 133 (6.17%) MongoDB
4 97 (4.50%) Relational Database
5 84 (3.90%) Apache Cassandra
6 79 (3.66%) SQL Server
7 71 (3.29%) Elasticsearch
8 69 (3.20%) Amazon RDS
9 49 (2.27%) Redis
10 44 (2.04%) Big Data
11 39 (1.81%) Power BI
12 37 (1.72%) MySQL
13 33 (1.53%) BigQuery
14 31 (1.44%) Data Warehouse
14 31 (1.44%) Pentaho
15 30 (1.39%) Data Lake
15 30 (1.39%) DynamoDB
16 24 (1.11%) Oracle Database
17 21 (0.97%) Hadoop
18 20 (0.93%) Flink
Development Applications
1 535 (24.81%) Jenkins
2 412 (19.11%) GitLab
3 397 (18.41%) Git
4 194 (9.00%) JIRA
5 101 (4.68%) JUnit
6 65 (3.01%) Selenium
7 58 (2.69%) Cucumber
8 51 (2.37%) SonarQube
9 42 (1.95%) MLflow
10 41 (1.90%) Artifactory
11 40 (1.86%) Bitbucket
11 40 (1.86%) JMeter
12 38 (1.76%) Gradle
13 35 (1.62%) Sonatype Nexus
14 34 (1.58%) Mockito
15 33 (1.53%) Maven
16 27 (1.25%) Postman
17 23 (1.07%) Gatling
18 22 (1.02%) CircleCI
19 16 (0.74%) Liquibase
General
1 568 (26.35%) Social Skills
2 361 (16.74%) Finance
3 272 (12.62%) Public Sector
4 185 (8.58%) Banking
5 171 (7.93%) Analytical Skills
6 58 (2.69%) Documentation Skills
7 35 (1.62%) Financial Institution
8 29 (1.35%) Influencing Skills
9 24 (1.11%) Front Office
9 24 (1.11%) Telecoms
10 21 (0.97%) Investment Banking
11 19 (0.88%) Presentation Skills
12 16 (0.74%) Retail
13 15 (0.70%) Inclusion and Diversity
14 14 (0.65%) Military
15 12 (0.56%) Organisational Skills
16 9 (0.42%) Aerospace
17 8 (0.37%) Pharmaceutical
18 7 (0.32%) Legal
19 5 (0.23%) Manufacturing
Job Titles
1 467 (21.66%) Developer
2 331 (15.35%) Senior
3 293 (13.59%) DevOps Engineer
4 208 (9.65%) Architect
5 141 (6.54%) Java Developer
6 133 (6.17%) Software Engineer
7 119 (5.52%) Lead
8 108 (5.01%) Cloud Engineer
9 104 (4.82%) Senior Developer
10 103 (4.78%) AWS Engineer
11 99 (4.59%) Site Reliability Engineer
12 97 (4.50%) Data Engineer
13 96 (4.45%) Platform Engineer
14 87 (4.04%) Python Developer
15 80 (3.71%) Java Engineer
16 78 (3.62%) Azure Engineer
17 75 (3.48%) AWS DevOps
18 74 (3.43%) Full-Stack Developer
19 73 (3.39%) Site Engineer
20 68 (3.15%) GCP Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 348 (16.14%) Kafka
2 309 (14.33%) Spring
3 260 (12.06%) Spring Boot
4 230 (10.67%) REST
5 202 (9.37%) RESTful
6 182 (8.44%) React
7 164 (7.61%) Node.js
8 126 (5.84%) Elastic Stack
8 126 (5.84%) OpenTelemetry
9 119 (5.52%) AngularJS
10 105 (4.87%) .NET
11 85 (3.94%) gRPC
12 80 (3.71%) FastAPI
12 80 (3.71%) PyTorch
13 73 (3.39%) OAuth
14 65 (3.01%) HTML
15 63 (2.92%) GraphQL
16 62 (2.88%) TensorFlow
17 56 (2.60%) OpenID
17 56 (2.60%) Playwright
Miscellaneous
1 424 (19.67%) Cloud Native
2 177 (8.21%) Distributed Systems
3 91 (4.22%) Hybrid Cloud
4 71 (3.29%) Public Cloud
5 64 (2.97%) Product Ownership
6 59 (2.74%) Onboarding
7 39 (1.81%) Private Cloud
8 37 (1.72%) Data Protection Act
8 37 (1.72%) Legacy Systems
9 36 (1.67%) Data Centre
10 34 (1.58%) Enterprise Software
10 34 (1.58%) Management Information System
11 31 (1.44%) PKI
12 30 (1.39%) AI Agents
13 28 (1.30%) Security Posture
14 25 (1.16%) Greenfield Project
14 25 (1.16%) Virtual Team
15 23 (1.07%) Algorithms
16 20 (0.93%) NHS
17 18 (0.83%) Fixed Income
Operating Systems
1 423 (19.62%) Linux
2 121 (5.61%) Windows
3 64 (2.97%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 61 (2.83%) Unix
5 44 (2.04%) VMS
6 28 (1.30%) Windows Server
7 22 (1.02%) Ubuntu
8 8 (0.37%) CentOS
9 6 (0.28%) Windows Server 2003
10 5 (0.23%) Apple iOS
10 5 (0.23%) CoreOS
10 5 (0.23%) Data ONTAP
11 4 (0.19%) Android
11 4 (0.19%) Windows Server 2012
11 4 (0.19%) Windows Server 2019
12 3 (0.14%) Rocky
13 2 (0.093%) Debian
14 1 (0.046%) Alpine Linux
14 1 (0.046%) Solaris
14 1 (0.046%) Windows Server 2016
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,416 (65.68%) CI/CD
2 1,144 (53.06%) DevOps
3 936 (43.41%) Containerisation
4 705 (32.70%) Agile
5 625 (28.99%) Infrastructure as Code
6 576 (26.72%) Microservices
7 459 (21.29%) Problem-Solving
8 433 (20.08%) Observability
9 364 (16.88%) Software Engineering
10 334 (15.49%) Test Automation
11 264 (12.24%) AI
12 233 (10.81%) Continuous Improvement
13 227 (10.53%) Migration
14 218 (10.11%) Analytics
15 211 (9.79%) Site Reliability Engineering
16 195 (9.04%) Machine Learning
17 191 (8.86%) Data Pipeline
17 191 (8.86%) Platform Engineering
18 190 (8.81%) DevSecOps
19 183 (8.49%) Scrum
Programming Languages
1 916 (42.49%) Python
2 546 (25.32%) Java
3 411 (19.06%) SQL
4 270 (12.52%) Bash
5 203 (9.42%) Go
6 168 (7.79%) JavaScript
7 153 (7.10%) TypeScript
8 133 (6.17%) PowerShell
9 93 (4.31%) C#
10 65 (3.01%) Bicep
11 56 (2.60%) Shell Script
12 50 (2.32%) Ruby
13 32 (1.48%) Kotlin
13 32 (1.48%) Scala
14 26 (1.21%) C++
14 26 (1.21%) Rust
15 18 (0.83%) Groovy
16 16 (0.74%) PHP
17 15 (0.70%) Perl
18 12 (0.56%) C
Qualifications
1 753 (34.93%) Security Cleared
2 613 (28.43%) SC Cleared
3 167 (7.75%) Degree
4 125 (5.80%) DV Cleared
5 117 (5.43%) Computer Science Degree
6 108 (5.01%) Azure Certification
7 94 (4.36%) AWS Certification
8 53 (2.46%) CISSP
9 51 (2.37%) Master's Degree
10 46 (2.13%) BPSS Clearance
11 31 (1.44%) CISM
12 30 (1.39%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 24 (1.11%) Cisco Certification
13 24 (1.11%) Microsoft Certification
14 22 (1.02%) TOGAF Certification
15 18 (0.83%) OCP
15 18 (0.83%) Oracle Certification
16 16 (0.74%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
17 14 (0.65%) CCSP
18 13 (0.60%) (ISC)2 CCSP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 115 (5.33%) QA
2 72 (3.34%) Data Quality
3 68 (3.15%) NIST
4 65 (3.01%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 56 (2.60%) GDPR
6 47 (2.18%) Accessibility
6 47 (2.18%) NCSC
7 35 (1.62%) PCI DSS
8 19 (0.88%) WCAG
9 16 (0.74%) ISO 20022
10 15 (0.70%) PSD2
11 12 (0.56%) HIPAA
11 12 (0.56%) NIST 800
12 11 (0.51%) Sarbanes-Oxley
13 10 (0.46%) SEPA
14 9 (0.42%) SLA
15 8 (0.37%) GRC
16 7 (0.32%) Cyber Essentials
16 7 (0.32%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
16 7 (0.32%) SOC 2
System Software
1 1,315 (60.99%) Docker
2 71 (3.29%) VMware Infrastructure
3 54 (2.50%) vSphere
4 50 (2.32%) Virtual Machines
5 40 (1.86%) Active Directory
6 28 (1.30%) 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 (0.32%) GPFS
11 7 (0.32%) Virtual Desktop
12 6 (0.28%) BitLocker
12 6 (0.28%) KVM
12 6 (0.28%) Microsoft App-V
12 6 (0.28%) Snort
13 4 (0.19%) Firmware
13 4 (0.19%) Virtual Servers
Systems Management
1 797 (36.97%) Terraform
2 370 (17.16%) Grafana
3 355 (16.47%) Ansible
4 337 (15.63%) Prometheus
5 123 (5.71%) Argo
6 57 (2.64%) Istio
7 47 (2.18%) Puppet
8 45 (2.09%) Kibana
9 38 (1.76%) Progress Chef
10 35 (1.62%) Nessus
11 30 (1.39%) vCenter Server
12 29 (1.35%) Single Sign-On
13 28 (1.30%) Packer
14 27 (1.25%) Podman
15 24 (1.11%) Control-M
15 24 (1.11%) IBM Guardium
16 23 (1.07%) Consul
17 22 (1.02%) Rancher
18 16 (0.74%) logstash
19 14 (0.65%) Kustomize
Vendors
1 236 (10.95%) Microsoft
2 187 (8.67%) Splunk
3 166 (7.70%) Google
4 155 (7.19%) Red Hat
5 115 (5.33%) Oracle
6 106 (4.92%) VMware
7 63 (2.92%) Databricks
8 56 (2.60%) Dynatrace
9 50 (2.32%) OpenAI
10 32 (1.48%) Tenable
11 31 (1.44%) Denodo
11 31 (1.44%) Talend
12 25 (1.16%) Pure Storage
13 24 (1.11%) Atlassian
14 20 (0.93%) AppDynamics
14 20 (0.93%) IBM
15 18 (0.83%) CyberArk
15 18 (0.83%) Foundry
16 17 (0.79%) NetApp
17 16 (0.74%) ServiceNow