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

6 months to
23 Nov 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 31 36 45
Rank change year-on-year +5 +9 -12
Contract jobs citing Kubernetes 1,835 1,664 1,786
As % of all contract jobs in England 6.04% 5.30% 4.53%
As % of the Systems Management category 37.52% 37.23% 31.98%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,251 1,111 1,332
10th Percentile £400 £406 £425
25th Percentile £450 £492 £500
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £530 £586 £597
Median % change year-on-year -9.56% -1.84% -4.48%
75th Percentile £638 £688 £688
90th Percentile £700 £788 £775
UK median daily rate £531 £575 £580
% change year-on-year -7.61% -0.86% -6.75%
Number of hourly rates quoted 22 13 55
10th Percentile £51.48 - -
25th Percentile £61.38 £46.18 £46.18
Median hourly rate £67.00 £60.00 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +11.67% -7.69% +0.78%
75th Percentile £84.50 £74.00 £77.50
90th Percentile £118.45 £74.35 £78.00
UK median hourly rate £67.00 £60.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year +11.67% -7.69% +3.17%

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 4,891 4,469 5,585
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 16.09% 14.22% 14.17%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,291 2,862 4,052
10th Percentile £310 £313 £306
25th Percentile £413 £420 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year -2.38% -4.55% -5.86%
75th Percentile £613 £638 £650
90th Percentile £695 £732 £745
UK median daily rate £513 £525 £545
% change year-on-year -2.38% -3.67% -5.22%
Number of hourly rates quoted 91 58 163
10th Percentile £18.87 £14.71 £17.73
25th Percentile £21.06 £23.80 £24.00
Median hourly rate £36.00 £36.83 £47.83
Median % change year-on-year -2.26% -22.99% +86.04%
75th Percentile £66.04 £64.00 £73.13
90th Percentile £80.00 £75.75 £78.00
UK median hourly rate £30.00 £28.63 £49.00
% change year-on-year +4.80% -41.58% +90.59%

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 23 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 23 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 23 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 -2 921 £550 -8.33% 249
North of England +8 334 £500 - 94
Midlands +58 206 £537 -6.61% 60
West Midlands +50 185 £540 -10.00% 46
South East +2 160 £475 -10.80% 203
Yorkshire -6 150 £500 +1.27% 15
North West +17 148 £475 -13.64% 70
South West -5 100 £626 +4.29% 79
East of England -2 46 £525 - 18
North East +3 37 £550 +22.22% 9
East Midlands +7 21 £423 -17.41% 13
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 78 (4.25%) Confluence
2 67 (3.65%) SAS
3 36 (1.96%) nginx
4 34 (1.85%) Apache Spark
5 32 (1.74%) Apache Airflow
6 29 (1.58%) Apache
7 26 (1.42%) OpenStack
8 10 (0.54%) Mule
9 8 (0.44%) WebSphere
10 7 (0.38%) JBoss
10 7 (0.38%) Tomcat
11 6 (0.33%) Jupyter
11 6 (0.33%) WebLogic
11 6 (0.33%) WebSphere Application Server
12 5 (0.27%) Camunda
12 5 (0.27%) Ethereum
12 5 (0.27%) Hyperledger
12 5 (0.27%) SharePoint
13 4 (0.22%) Drupal
13 4 (0.22%) MQSeries
Applications
1 6 (0.33%) Microsoft Excel
1 6 (0.33%) MS Visio
2 5 (0.27%) Chatbot
2 5 (0.27%) Microsoft Office
2 5 (0.27%) Weka
3 4 (0.22%) Microsoft PowerPoint
Business Applications
1 7 (0.38%) Maximo
2 4 (0.22%) Endur
3 3 (0.16%) SAP S/4HANA
4 1 (0.054%) Cloudability
4 1 (0.054%) Finacle
4 1 (0.054%) Payment Gateway
Cloud Services
1 1,011 (55.10%) AWS
2 664 (36.19%) Azure
3 452 (24.63%) GCP
4 400 (21.80%) GitHub
5 241 (13.13%) GitHub Actions
6 207 (11.28%) OpenShift
7 196 (10.68%) Serverless
8 162 (8.83%) Azure DevOps
9 137 (7.47%) AWS CloudFormation
10 133 (7.25%) Azure AKS
11 128 (6.98%) Amazon EKS
12 108 (5.89%) Amazon S3
13 103 (5.61%) AWS Lambda
14 87 (4.74%) Google Kubernetes Engine
15 80 (4.36%) Amazon EC2
16 77 (4.20%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 71 (3.87%) Amazon ECS
18 70 (3.81%) SaaS
19 60 (3.27%) Entra ID
20 57 (3.11%) Datadog
Communications & Networking
1 77 (4.20%) Firewall
2 47 (2.56%) DNS
3 29 (1.58%) Network Security
4 25 (1.36%) VPN
5 20 (1.09%) TCP/IP
6 16 (0.87%) SSL
7 14 (0.76%) HTTP
8 10 (0.54%) BGP
9 8 (0.44%) DHCP
10 7 (0.38%) HTTPS
11 6 (0.33%) Ethernet VPN
11 6 (0.33%) Software-Defined Networking
11 6 (0.33%) VLAN
11 6 (0.33%) VXLAN
12 5 (0.27%) Kerberos
12 5 (0.27%) OpenLDAP
13 4 (0.22%) Calico
13 4 (0.22%) MQTT
13 4 (0.22%) SSH
14 3 (0.16%) Cisco Nexus
Database & Business Intelligence
1 252 (13.73%) PostgreSQL
2 174 (9.48%) NoSQL
3 121 (6.59%) MongoDB
4 78 (4.25%) Relational Database
5 69 (3.76%) Apache Cassandra
6 67 (3.65%) Amazon RDS
7 57 (3.11%) Elasticsearch
8 53 (2.89%) Redis
9 41 (2.23%) MySQL
9 41 (2.23%) SQL Server
10 34 (1.85%) Big Data
10 34 (1.85%) Pentaho
11 30 (1.63%) Data Warehouse
12 28 (1.53%) DynamoDB
12 28 (1.53%) Oracle Database
13 26 (1.42%) Data Lake
14 24 (1.31%) Hadoop
15 23 (1.25%) BigQuery
16 21 (1.14%) Azure SQL Database
17 19 (1.04%) Power BI
Development Applications
1 493 (26.87%) Jenkins
2 381 (20.76%) Git
3 344 (18.75%) GitLab
4 184 (10.03%) JIRA
5 69 (3.76%) JUnit
6 65 (3.54%) SonarQube
7 56 (3.05%) Maven
8 55 (3.00%) Sonatype Nexus
9 54 (2.94%) Artifactory
10 44 (2.40%) Selenium
11 42 (2.29%) Gradle
12 41 (2.23%) CircleCI
13 40 (2.18%) Bitbucket
13 40 (2.18%) Liquibase
14 33 (1.80%) Cucumber
15 26 (1.42%) Mockito
16 24 (1.31%) MLflow
16 24 (1.31%) Postman
17 20 (1.09%) JMeter
18 19 (1.04%) TeamCity
General
1 504 (27.47%) Social Skills
2 306 (16.68%) Finance
3 216 (11.77%) Public Sector
4 203 (11.06%) Banking
5 143 (7.79%) Analytical Skills
6 41 (2.23%) Financial Institution
7 39 (2.13%) Investment Banking
8 37 (2.02%) Documentation Skills
9 28 (1.53%) Telecoms
10 20 (1.09%) Front Office
11 19 (1.04%) Pharmaceutical
12 17 (0.93%) Inclusion and Diversity
12 17 (0.93%) Retail
13 11 (0.60%) Aerospace
13 11 (0.60%) Influencing Skills
13 11 (0.60%) Presentation Skills
14 9 (0.49%) Military
15 7 (0.38%) Law
16 6 (0.33%) Games
16 6 (0.33%) Manufacturing
Job Titles
1 425 (23.16%) Developer
2 286 (15.59%) Senior
3 284 (15.48%) DevOps Engineer
4 154 (8.39%) Architect
5 141 (7.68%) Java Developer
6 109 (5.94%) AWS Engineer
7 105 (5.72%) Software Engineer
8 101 (5.50%) Platform Engineer
9 97 (5.29%) Lead
10 91 (4.96%) Senior Developer
11 90 (4.90%) Cloud Engineer
12 80 (4.36%) AWS DevOps
13 77 (4.20%) Python Developer
14 72 (3.92%) Full-Stack Developer
15 71 (3.87%) Site Reliability Engineer
16 64 (3.49%) Data Engineer
17 60 (3.27%) AWS DevOps Engineer
18 53 (2.89%) Azure Engineer
19 52 (2.83%) Site Engineer
20 47 (2.56%) Python Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 295 (16.08%) Kafka
2 195 (10.63%) React
3 193 (10.52%) RESTful
3 193 (10.52%) Spring
4 189 (10.30%) REST
5 174 (9.48%) Node.js
6 167 (9.10%) Spring Boot
7 138 (7.52%) Elastic Stack
8 126 (6.87%) AngularJS
9 88 (4.80%) .NET
10 85 (4.63%) gRPC
11 70 (3.81%) GraphQL
12 69 (3.76%) FastAPI
12 69 (3.76%) HTML
13 63 (3.43%) YAML
14 60 (3.27%) Vue
15 56 (3.05%) PyTorch
16 55 (3.00%) CSS
17 52 (2.83%) RabbitMQ
18 50 (2.72%) Playwright
Miscellaneous
1 329 (17.93%) Cloud Native
2 176 (9.59%) Distributed Systems
3 72 (3.92%) Public Cloud
4 56 (3.05%) Onboarding
4 56 (3.05%) Product Ownership
5 48 (2.62%) Hybrid Cloud
6 38 (2.07%) Private Cloud
7 37 (2.02%) Algorithms
8 35 (1.91%) Enterprise Software
9 29 (1.58%) Legacy Systems
10 28 (1.53%) Data Protection Act
11 26 (1.42%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
12 25 (1.36%) Data Structures
13 24 (1.31%) Security Posture
14 23 (1.25%) PKI
14 23 (1.25%) Virtual Team
15 22 (1.20%) Replication
16 21 (1.14%) Hedge funds
17 20 (1.09%) Greenfield Project
18 18 (0.98%) Data Centre
Operating Systems
1 379 (20.65%) Linux
2 72 (3.92%) Windows
3 64 (3.49%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 60 (3.27%) Unix
5 20 (1.09%) Ubuntu
5 20 (1.09%) VMS
6 18 (0.98%) CentOS
7 17 (0.93%) Windows Server
8 7 (0.38%) Solaris
9 4 (0.22%) Android
9 4 (0.22%) Apple iOS
10 2 (0.11%) zOS
11 1 (0.054%) Alpine Linux
11 1 (0.054%) Mac OS
11 1 (0.054%) MVS
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,223 (66.65%) CI/CD
2 992 (54.06%) DevOps
3 779 (42.45%) Containerisation
4 625 (34.06%) Agile
5 566 (30.84%) Infrastructure as Code
6 511 (27.85%) Microservices
7 434 (23.65%) Problem-Solving
8 327 (17.82%) Software Engineering
9 291 (15.86%) Observability
10 264 (14.39%) Test Automation
11 199 (10.84%) Migration
12 179 (9.75%) AI
13 165 (8.99%) Analytics
14 162 (8.83%) Scrum
15 159 (8.66%) Full-Stack Development
16 154 (8.39%) Platform Engineering
17 153 (8.34%) DevSecOps
18 151 (8.23%) Machine Learning
19 150 (8.17%) Continuous Improvement
20 139 (7.57%) Data Pipeline
Programming Languages
1 872 (47.52%) Python
2 501 (27.30%) Java
3 316 (17.22%) SQL
4 274 (14.93%) Bash
5 249 (13.57%) Go
6 186 (10.14%) JavaScript
7 178 (9.70%) TypeScript
8 118 (6.43%) C#
9 107 (5.83%) PowerShell
10 69 (3.76%) C++
11 55 (3.00%) Shell Script
12 54 (2.94%) Bicep
13 33 (1.80%) Ruby
14 28 (1.53%) Kotlin
14 28 (1.53%) Perl
15 27 (1.47%) Groovy
15 27 (1.47%) PHP
16 26 (1.42%) Rust
17 18 (0.98%) Scala
18 16 (0.87%) C
Qualifications
1 609 (33.19%) Security Cleared
2 506 (27.57%) SC Cleared
3 125 (6.81%) Degree
4 96 (5.23%) Computer Science Degree
5 94 (5.12%) DV Cleared
6 91 (4.96%) AWS Certification
7 74 (4.03%) Azure Certification
8 50 (2.72%) Master's Degree
9 38 (2.07%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
10 32 (1.74%) CISSP
11 26 (1.42%) BPSS Clearance
12 25 (1.36%) Microsoft Certification
13 18 (0.98%) Cisco Certification
14 17 (0.93%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
14 17 (0.93%) CISM
15 11 (0.60%) OCP
15 11 (0.60%) Oracle Certification
16 10 (0.54%) (ISC)2 CCSP
16 10 (0.54%) CCSP
17 7 (0.38%) TOGAF Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 96 (5.23%) QA
2 54 (2.94%) ISO/IEC 27001
3 52 (2.83%) Data Quality
4 48 (2.62%) NIST
5 40 (2.18%) GDPR
6 30 (1.63%) NCSC
7 23 (1.25%) Accessibility
8 17 (0.93%) PCI DSS
9 14 (0.76%) HIPAA
10 13 (0.71%) PSD2
11 12 (0.65%) EU AI Act
12 10 (0.54%) WCAG
13 8 (0.44%) ISO 20022
13 8 (0.44%) SEPA
14 7 (0.38%) Cyber Essentials
15 6 (0.33%) NIST 800
15 6 (0.33%) SOC 2
16 5 (0.27%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
16 5 (0.27%) JSP 440
16 5 (0.27%) SLA
System Software
1 1,175 (64.03%) Docker
2 55 (3.00%) Active Directory
3 49 (2.67%) VMware Infrastructure
4 32 (1.74%) vSphere
5 24 (1.31%) Virtual Machines
6 14 (0.76%) VMware NSX
7 10 (0.54%) Hyper-V
7 10 (0.54%) KVM
8 7 (0.38%) Lustre
8 7 (0.38%) Slurm Workload Manager
9 6 (0.33%) GPFS
10 4 (0.22%) Snort
10 4 (0.22%) Squid
10 4 (0.22%) Virtual Servers
11 2 (0.11%) NDS
11 2 (0.11%) NetIQ eDirectory
11 2 (0.11%) VMware ESXi
12 1 (0.054%) Ceph
12 1 (0.054%) GridGain
12 1 (0.054%) QEMU
Systems Management
1 719 (39.18%) Terraform
2 313 (17.06%) Ansible
3 298 (16.24%) Grafana
4 269 (14.66%) Prometheus
5 103 (5.61%) Argo
6 51 (2.78%) Kibana
7 42 (2.29%) Progress Chef
8 41 (2.23%) Istio
8 41 (2.23%) Packer
8 41 (2.23%) Puppet
9 27 (1.47%) Single Sign-On
10 25 (1.36%) Consul
11 20 (1.09%) logstash
12 19 (1.04%) Nessus
13 15 (0.82%) Podman
14 13 (0.71%) Rancher
15 12 (0.65%) Control-M
15 12 (0.65%) ITRS Geneos
16 11 (0.60%) IBM Guardium
16 11 (0.60%) SCOM
Vendors
1 190 (10.35%) Microsoft
2 174 (9.48%) Splunk
3 146 (7.96%) Google
4 119 (6.49%) Oracle
5 116 (6.32%) Red Hat
6 65 (3.54%) VMware
7 46 (2.51%) Dynatrace
8 42 (2.29%) Databricks
9 34 (1.85%) Denodo
9 34 (1.85%) Talend
10 30 (1.63%) OpenAI
11 29 (1.58%) Atlassian
12 27 (1.47%) IBM
13 24 (1.31%) AppDynamics
14 16 (0.87%) Cisco
15 12 (0.65%) Palo Alto
15 12 (0.65%) Solace
15 12 (0.65%) Tenable
16 11 (0.60%) Confluent
16 11 (0.60%) NVIDIA