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 5 December 2025, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
5 Dec 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 30 35 47
Rank change year-on-year +5 +12 -15
Contract jobs citing Kubernetes 1,908 1,631 1,675
As % of all contract jobs in England 6.12% 5.31% 4.39%
As % of the Systems Management category 38.05% 37.11% 31.65%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,319 1,096 1,255
10th Percentile £400 £406 £425
25th Percentile £450 £499 £500
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £600 £580
Median % change year-on-year -12.50% +3.45% -7.20%
75th Percentile £638 £700 £688
90th Percentile £700 £797 £775
UK median daily rate £525 £575 £575
% change year-on-year -8.70% - -7.30%
Number of hourly rates quoted 25 14 49
10th Percentile £45.20 £29.43 -
25th Percentile £55.00 £46.18 £46.18
Median hourly rate £67.00 £51.84 £62.50
Median % change year-on-year +29.24% -17.06% -10.71%
75th Percentile £80.00 £72.54 £76.53
90th Percentile £116.80 £74.00 £78.15
UK median hourly rate £67.00 £51.84 £62.50
% change year-on-year +29.24% -17.06% -10.71%

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 5,015 4,395 5,293
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 16.09% 14.32% 13.88%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,411 2,823 3,839
10th Percentile £308 £313 £302
25th Percentile £413 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £529 £550
Median % change year-on-year -3.12% -3.82% -6.38%
75th Percentile £613 £639 £650
90th Percentile £700 £738 £745
UK median daily rate £510 £525 £545
% change year-on-year -2.86% -3.67% -5.22%
Number of hourly rates quoted 92 60 161
10th Percentile £18.87 £15.05 £17.00
25th Percentile £21.17 £23.80 £21.25
Median hourly rate £39.75 £35.08 £46.18
Median % change year-on-year +13.30% -24.03% +34.83%
75th Percentile £65.80 £60.63 £70.00
90th Percentile £79.88 £74.75 £78.00
UK median hourly rate £34.00 £27.00 £46.18
% change year-on-year +25.93% -41.53% +44.31%

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 5 December 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 5 December 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 5 December 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 -2 942 £550 -9.43% 283
North of England +11 366 £487 -7.19% 283
Midlands +63 216 £530 -9.79% 183
West Midlands +55 197 £537 -11.39% 103
Yorkshire +4 178 £487 -2.60% 109
South East +3 166 £500 -6.10% 379
North West +19 149 £475 -13.64% 145
South West -5 110 £627 +4.42% 158
East of England -2 47 £550 +4.76% 124
North East +4 41 £550 +6.80% 31
East Midlands +2 19 £429 -16.29% 70
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 85 (4.45%) Confluence
2 68 (3.56%) SAS
3 34 (1.78%) Apache Spark
4 33 (1.73%) Apache Airflow
5 32 (1.68%) nginx
6 28 (1.47%) Apache
7 27 (1.42%) OpenStack
8 10 (0.52%) Mule
9 7 (0.37%) Tomcat
10 6 (0.31%) Jupyter
10 6 (0.31%) SharePoint
10 6 (0.31%) WebLogic
11 5 (0.26%) Ethereum
11 5 (0.26%) Hyperledger
11 5 (0.26%) JBoss
12 4 (0.21%) CMS
12 4 (0.21%) Drupal
12 4 (0.21%) MQSeries
12 4 (0.21%) Oracle Workflow
12 4 (0.21%) Traefik
Applications
1 6 (0.31%) Microsoft Excel
1 6 (0.31%) MS Visio
2 5 (0.26%) Chatbot
2 5 (0.26%) Microsoft Office
2 5 (0.26%) Weka
3 4 (0.21%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 3 (0.16%) Microsoft Project
Business Applications
1 7 (0.37%) Maximo
2 4 (0.21%) Endur
3 2 (0.10%) SAP S/4HANA
4 1 (0.052%) Actimize
4 1 (0.052%) Cloudability
4 1 (0.052%) Finacle
Cloud Services
1 1,033 (54.14%) AWS
2 687 (36.01%) Azure
3 470 (24.63%) GCP
4 417 (21.86%) GitHub
5 249 (13.05%) GitHub Actions
6 239 (12.53%) OpenShift
7 210 (11.01%) Serverless
8 170 (8.91%) Azure DevOps
9 141 (7.39%) AWS CloudFormation
10 138 (7.23%) Amazon EKS
11 134 (7.02%) Azure AKS
12 113 (5.92%) Amazon S3
13 112 (5.87%) AWS Lambda
14 84 (4.40%) Amazon EC2
14 84 (4.40%) Google Kubernetes Engine
15 80 (4.19%) Amazon ECS
16 78 (4.09%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 70 (3.67%) SaaS
18 63 (3.30%) Entra ID
19 60 (3.14%) Datadog
Communications & Networking
1 77 (4.04%) Firewall
2 51 (2.67%) DNS
3 29 (1.52%) Network Security
4 27 (1.42%) VPN
5 21 (1.10%) TCP/IP
6 20 (1.05%) SSL
7 16 (0.84%) HTTP
8 10 (0.52%) BGP
9 8 (0.42%) DHCP
10 7 (0.37%) HTTPS
10 7 (0.37%) Software-Defined Networking
11 6 (0.31%) Ethernet VPN
11 6 (0.31%) NAS
11 6 (0.31%) SAN
11 6 (0.31%) VLAN
11 6 (0.31%) VXLAN
12 5 (0.26%) Fibre Channel
12 5 (0.26%) iSCSI
12 5 (0.26%) Kerberos
12 5 (0.26%) OpenLDAP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 250 (13.10%) PostgreSQL
2 187 (9.80%) NoSQL
3 128 (6.71%) MongoDB
4 76 (3.98%) Relational Database
5 74 (3.88%) Apache Cassandra
6 66 (3.46%) Amazon RDS
7 58 (3.04%) Elasticsearch
8 57 (2.99%) Redis
9 42 (2.20%) SQL Server
10 40 (2.10%) MySQL
11 36 (1.89%) Big Data
12 34 (1.78%) Pentaho
13 28 (1.47%) DynamoDB
14 27 (1.42%) Data Warehouse
14 27 (1.42%) Oracle Database
15 24 (1.26%) BigQuery
15 24 (1.26%) Data Lake
16 23 (1.21%) Power BI
17 21 (1.10%) Hadoop
18 20 (1.05%) Azure SQL Database
Development Applications
1 509 (26.68%) Jenkins
2 400 (20.96%) Git
3 361 (18.92%) GitLab
4 189 (9.91%) JIRA
5 70 (3.67%) JUnit
6 64 (3.35%) SonarQube
7 55 (2.88%) Sonatype Nexus
8 51 (2.67%) Maven
9 49 (2.57%) Artifactory
10 44 (2.31%) Selenium
11 40 (2.10%) Gradle
12 39 (2.04%) Bitbucket
13 38 (1.99%) Liquibase
14 34 (1.78%) CircleCI
14 34 (1.78%) Cucumber
15 28 (1.47%) MLflow
15 28 (1.47%) Mockito
16 26 (1.36%) Postman
17 21 (1.10%) JMeter
18 19 (1.00%) TeamCity
General
1 512 (26.83%) Social Skills
2 311 (16.30%) Finance
3 224 (11.74%) Public Sector
4 206 (10.80%) Banking
5 144 (7.55%) Analytical Skills
6 41 (2.15%) Financial Institution
7 37 (1.94%) Documentation Skills
7 37 (1.94%) Investment Banking
8 25 (1.31%) Telecoms
9 22 (1.15%) Front Office
10 19 (1.00%) Pharmaceutical
11 17 (0.89%) Inclusion and Diversity
12 12 (0.63%) Influencing Skills
12 12 (0.63%) Retail
13 11 (0.58%) Aerospace
14 10 (0.52%) Presentation Skills
15 8 (0.42%) Military
16 7 (0.37%) Games
16 7 (0.37%) Law
17 6 (0.31%) Manufacturing
Job Titles
1 449 (23.53%) Developer
2 292 (15.30%) DevOps Engineer
3 290 (15.20%) Senior
4 153 (8.02%) Architect
5 147 (7.70%) Java Developer
6 110 (5.77%) Software Engineer
7 108 (5.66%) AWS Engineer
8 101 (5.29%) Platform Engineer
9 97 (5.08%) Lead
10 95 (4.98%) Senior Developer
11 82 (4.30%) Cloud Engineer
12 80 (4.19%) Site Reliability Engineer
13 77 (4.04%) Full-Stack Developer
13 77 (4.04%) Python Developer
14 76 (3.98%) AWS DevOps
15 70 (3.67%) Data Engineer
16 59 (3.09%) Site Engineer
17 58 (3.04%) AWS DevOps Engineer
18 51 (2.67%) Azure Engineer
19 49 (2.57%) Python Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 308 (16.14%) Kafka
2 207 (10.85%) Spring
3 204 (10.69%) RESTful
4 195 (10.22%) REST
5 189 (9.91%) React
6 183 (9.59%) Spring Boot
7 175 (9.17%) Node.js
8 145 (7.60%) Elastic Stack
9 122 (6.39%) AngularJS
10 91 (4.77%) .NET
11 89 (4.66%) gRPC
12 73 (3.83%) GraphQL
13 70 (3.67%) FastAPI
14 69 (3.62%) HTML
15 63 (3.30%) YAML
16 62 (3.25%) PyTorch
17 58 (3.04%) Vue
18 55 (2.88%) RabbitMQ
19 54 (2.83%) CSS
20 53 (2.78%) Playwright
Miscellaneous
1 350 (18.34%) Cloud Native
2 179 (9.38%) Distributed Systems
3 67 (3.51%) Public Cloud
4 63 (3.30%) Product Ownership
5 59 (3.09%) Onboarding
6 57 (2.99%) Hybrid Cloud
7 39 (2.04%) Private Cloud
8 35 (1.83%) Algorithms
9 34 (1.78%) Enterprise Software
10 31 (1.62%) Data Protection Act
11 29 (1.52%) Legacy Systems
12 28 (1.47%) PKI
13 26 (1.36%) Replication
14 25 (1.31%) Security Posture
15 24 (1.26%) Data Structures
15 24 (1.26%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
16 22 (1.15%) Greenfield Project
17 21 (1.10%) Data Centre
17 21 (1.10%) Virtual Team
18 20 (1.05%) Hedge funds
Operating Systems
1 394 (20.65%) Linux
2 71 (3.72%) Windows
3 61 (3.20%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 60 (3.14%) Unix
5 26 (1.36%) VMS
6 23 (1.21%) Ubuntu
7 18 (0.94%) CentOS
8 17 (0.89%) Windows Server
9 6 (0.31%) Solaris
10 2 (0.10%) Android
10 2 (0.10%) Apple iOS
10 2 (0.10%) zOS
11 1 (0.052%) Alpine Linux
11 1 (0.052%) Mac OS
11 1 (0.052%) MVS
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,263 (66.19%) CI/CD
2 1,035 (54.25%) DevOps
3 837 (43.87%) Containerisation
4 641 (33.60%) Agile
5 573 (30.03%) Infrastructure as Code
6 538 (28.20%) Microservices
7 449 (23.53%) Problem-Solving
8 341 (17.87%) Software Engineering
9 296 (15.51%) Observability
10 274 (14.36%) Test Automation
11 211 (11.06%) Migration
12 192 (10.06%) AI
13 165 (8.65%) Full-Stack Development
14 162 (8.49%) Platform Engineering
15 160 (8.39%) Analytics
16 159 (8.33%) Scrum
17 158 (8.28%) Machine Learning
18 155 (8.12%) DevSecOps
19 153 (8.02%) Continuous Improvement
20 144 (7.55%) Data Pipeline
Programming Languages
1 894 (46.86%) Python
2 511 (26.78%) Java
3 324 (16.98%) SQL
4 285 (14.94%) Bash
5 253 (13.26%) Go
6 184 (9.64%) JavaScript
7 173 (9.07%) TypeScript
8 114 (5.97%) C#
9 109 (5.71%) PowerShell
10 64 (3.35%) C++
11 55 (2.88%) Bicep
11 55 (2.88%) Shell Script
12 39 (2.04%) Ruby
13 28 (1.47%) PHP
14 27 (1.42%) Groovy
15 26 (1.36%) Rust
16 25 (1.31%) Perl
17 23 (1.21%) Scala
18 20 (1.05%) Kotlin
19 16 (0.84%) C
Qualifications
1 631 (33.07%) Security Cleared
2 520 (27.25%) SC Cleared
3 132 (6.92%) Degree
4 102 (5.35%) DV Cleared
5 100 (5.24%) Computer Science Degree
6 90 (4.72%) AWS Certification
7 74 (3.88%) Azure Certification
8 52 (2.73%) Master's Degree
9 39 (2.04%) CISSP
10 37 (1.94%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
11 30 (1.57%) BPSS Clearance
12 24 (1.26%) CISM
13 23 (1.21%) Microsoft Certification
14 19 (1.00%) Cisco Certification
15 17 (0.89%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
16 12 (0.63%) OCP
16 12 (0.63%) Oracle Certification
17 11 (0.58%) CCSP
18 10 (0.52%) (ISC)2 CCSP
19 9 (0.47%) RHCE
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 98 (5.14%) QA
2 55 (2.88%) ISO/IEC 27001
3 50 (2.62%) Data Quality
4 48 (2.52%) NIST
5 41 (2.15%) GDPR
6 33 (1.73%) NCSC
7 24 (1.26%) Accessibility
8 21 (1.10%) PCI DSS
9 14 (0.73%) PSD2
10 12 (0.63%) EU AI Act
10 12 (0.63%) HIPAA
11 10 (0.52%) WCAG
12 9 (0.47%) ISO 20022
12 9 (0.47%) SEPA
13 7 (0.37%) Cyber Essentials
14 6 (0.31%) NIST 800
14 6 (0.31%) SOC 2
15 5 (0.26%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
15 5 (0.26%) JSP 440
15 5 (0.26%) SLA
System Software
1 1,214 (63.63%) Docker
2 55 (2.88%) Active Directory
3 50 (2.62%) VMware Infrastructure
4 29 (1.52%) Virtual Machines
4 29 (1.52%) vSphere
5 14 (0.73%) VMware NSX
6 11 (0.58%) Hyper-V
7 9 (0.47%) KVM
8 8 (0.42%) Lustre
8 8 (0.42%) Slurm Workload Manager
9 6 (0.31%) GPFS
10 5 (0.26%) NFS
10 5 (0.26%) Snort
10 5 (0.26%) Squid
11 4 (0.21%) Virtual Servers
12 2 (0.10%) Ceph
12 2 (0.10%) NDS
12 2 (0.10%) NetIQ eDirectory
13 1 (0.052%) Firmware
13 1 (0.052%) iptables
Systems Management
1 734 (38.47%) Terraform
2 339 (17.77%) Ansible
3 304 (15.93%) Grafana
4 273 (14.31%) Prometheus
5 104 (5.45%) Argo
6 51 (2.67%) Kibana
7 47 (2.46%) Puppet
8 44 (2.31%) Progress Chef
9 39 (2.04%) Istio
9 39 (2.04%) Packer
10 24 (1.26%) Single Sign-On
11 22 (1.15%) Consul
12 21 (1.10%) logstash
12 21 (1.10%) Nessus
13 17 (0.89%) Podman
14 15 (0.79%) Rancher
15 12 (0.63%) Control-M
15 12 (0.63%) ITRS Geneos
16 11 (0.58%) IBM Guardium
16 11 (0.58%) SCOM
Vendors
1 201 (10.53%) Microsoft
2 175 (9.17%) Splunk
3 150 (7.86%) Google
4 119 (6.24%) Red Hat
5 118 (6.18%) Oracle
6 70 (3.67%) VMware
7 49 (2.57%) Databricks
8 39 (2.04%) Dynatrace
9 34 (1.78%) Denodo
9 34 (1.78%) OpenAI
9 34 (1.78%) Talend
10 25 (1.31%) Atlassian
11 23 (1.21%) AppDynamics
12 22 (1.15%) IBM
13 18 (0.94%) Cisco
14 13 (0.68%) Palo Alto
14 13 (0.68%) Tenable
15 12 (0.63%) Confluent
15 12 (0.63%) NVIDIA
15 12 (0.63%) Solace