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

6 months to
2 Apr 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 32 30 56
Rank change year-on-year -2 +26 -27
Contract jobs citing Kubernetes 2,175 1,481 1,295
As % of all contract jobs in England 5.69% 6.11% 3.44%
As % of the Systems Management category 39.28% 38.39% 28.84%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,474 1,042 954
10th Percentile £400 £406 £413
25th Percentile £450 £475 £475
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £575 £554
Median % change year-on-year -8.70% +3.84% -11.40%
75th Percentile £625 £688 £675
90th Percentile £713 £810 £738
UK median daily rate £525 £560 £550
% change year-on-year -6.25% +1.82% -10.20%
Number of hourly rates quoted 52 7 14
10th Percentile - £26.00 £46.18
25th Percentile £52.50 £41.38 £47.81
Median hourly rate £65.00 £60.00 £59.75
Median % change year-on-year +8.33% +0.42% -14.64%
75th Percentile £70.00 £73.44 £70.44
90th Percentile £85.70 £80.40 £76.58
UK median hourly rate £65.00 £60.00 £59.75
% change year-on-year +8.33% +0.42% -14.64%

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 5,537 3,858 4,490
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 14.47% 15.91% 11.93%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,820 2,642 3,285
10th Percentile £313 £316 £250
25th Percentile £413 £420 £407
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £505 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -3.85% - -8.70%
75th Percentile £600 £638 £627
90th Percentile £700 £738 £710
UK median daily rate £500 £525 £525
% change year-on-year -4.76% - -8.70%
Number of hourly rates quoted 136 39 125
10th Percentile £20.09 £15.22 £14.00
25th Percentile £31.58 £22.32 £17.75
Median hourly rate £55.00 £26.50 £25.77
Median % change year-on-year +107.55% +2.85% -54.20%
75th Percentile £68.75 £61.63 £50.00
90th Percentile £76.88 £77.74 £67.80
UK median hourly rate £55.00 £26.48 £30.00
% change year-on-year +107.74% -11.75% -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 2 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 2 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 2 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 -11 1,001 £550 -8.33% 315
North of England +6 456 £500 -4.76% 157
Midlands +38 285 £525 - 57
West Midlands +35 247 £525 -1.33% 38
Yorkshire +13 240 £487 -16.39% 47
South East -12 188 £500 -9.09% 147
North West +8 174 £537 +7.45% 85
South West +1 157 £550 -8.33% 80
North East 0 46 £475 -7.77% 25
East Midlands -11 37 £450 -5.26% 19
East of England -26 31 £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
1 101 (4.64%) Confluence
2 74 (3.40%) SAS
3 64 (2.94%) Apache Spark
4 50 (2.30%) Apache
5 34 (1.56%) nginx
6 31 (1.43%) OpenStack
7 30 (1.38%) Apache Airflow
8 17 (0.78%) Jupyter
9 9 (0.41%) 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 5 (0.23%) Microsoft Excel
2 4 (0.18%) Microsoft Office
2 4 (0.18%) Weka
3 3 (0.14%) Chatbot
3 3 (0.14%) Microsoft Project
3 3 (0.14%) MS Visio
4 2 (0.092%) Adobe XD
4 2 (0.092%) CPLEX
5 1 (0.046%) Maya
5 1 (0.046%) Microsoft PowerPoint
Business Applications
1 8 (0.37%) Maximo
2 3 (0.14%) Distributed Ledger
3 2 (0.092%) Payment Gateway
4 1 (0.046%) Actimize
4 1 (0.046%) Cloudability
4 1 (0.046%) Oracle EBS
4 1 (0.046%) SAP Hybris
4 1 (0.046%) SAP S/4HANA
4 1 (0.046%) Shopify
Cloud Services
1 1,120 (51.49%) AWS
2 892 (41.01%) Azure
3 517 (23.77%) GCP
4 474 (21.79%) GitHub
5 323 (14.85%) OpenShift
6 277 (12.74%) GitHub Actions
7 233 (10.71%) Serverless
8 210 (9.66%) Azure DevOps
9 164 (7.54%) Amazon EKS
9 164 (7.54%) Azure AKS
10 151 (6.94%) AWS CloudFormation
11 142 (6.53%) Amazon S3
12 135 (6.21%) AWS Lambda
13 106 (4.87%) Amazon EC2
14 102 (4.69%) Google Kubernetes Engine
15 85 (3.91%) Amazon ECS
16 69 (3.17%) Virtual Private Cloud
17 68 (3.13%) Datadog
18 67 (3.08%) Amazon CloudWatch
19 60 (2.76%) Entra ID
Communications & Networking
1 110 (5.06%) Firewall
2 92 (4.23%) DNS
3 51 (2.34%) VPN
4 50 (2.30%) Network Security
5 37 (1.70%) TCP/IP
6 23 (1.06%) SAN
7 20 (0.92%) HTTP
8 17 (0.78%) DHCP
9 15 (0.69%) NAS
9 15 (0.69%) Reverse Proxy
10 11 (0.51%) OpenVPN
10 11 (0.51%) SSL
11 10 (0.46%) Fibre Channel
11 10 (0.46%) iSCSI
12 8 (0.37%) 5G
13 7 (0.32%) 3GPP
13 7 (0.32%) BGP
13 7 (0.32%) SMTP
14 6 (0.28%) 4G
14 6 (0.28%) Kerberos
Database & Business Intelligence
1 257 (11.82%) PostgreSQL
2 189 (8.69%) NoSQL
3 122 (5.61%) MongoDB
4 106 (4.87%) Relational Database
5 86 (3.95%) SQL Server
6 74 (3.40%) Apache Cassandra
7 66 (3.03%) Amazon RDS
8 65 (2.99%) Elasticsearch
9 43 (1.98%) Big Data
9 43 (1.98%) Redis
10 39 (1.79%) Power BI
11 35 (1.61%) MySQL
12 34 (1.56%) Pentaho
13 32 (1.47%) BigQuery
13 32 (1.47%) Data Lake
14 29 (1.33%) DynamoDB
15 26 (1.20%) Data Warehouse
16 25 (1.15%) Flink
17 23 (1.06%) Oracle Database
18 20 (0.92%) Tableau
Development Applications
1 547 (25.15%) Jenkins
2 405 (18.62%) GitLab
3 389 (17.89%) Git
4 182 (8.37%) JIRA
5 102 (4.69%) JUnit
6 65 (2.99%) Selenium
7 57 (2.62%) SonarQube
8 54 (2.48%) Cucumber
9 43 (1.98%) Artifactory
10 39 (1.79%) JMeter
11 38 (1.75%) MLflow
12 37 (1.70%) Maven
13 35 (1.61%) Bitbucket
13 35 (1.61%) Mockito
14 34 (1.56%) Gradle
15 29 (1.33%) Sonatype Nexus
16 26 (1.20%) Gatling
17 23 (1.06%) Postman
18 19 (0.87%) CircleCI
19 15 (0.69%) WebDriver
General
1 568 (26.11%) Social Skills
2 360 (16.55%) Finance
3 272 (12.51%) Public Sector
4 187 (8.60%) Banking
5 151 (6.94%) Analytical Skills
6 58 (2.67%) Documentation Skills
7 31 (1.43%) Financial Institution
8 28 (1.29%) Influencing Skills
9 26 (1.20%) Telecoms
10 21 (0.97%) Front Office
11 19 (0.87%) Presentation Skills
12 18 (0.83%) Investment Banking
13 14 (0.64%) Inclusion and Diversity
13 14 (0.64%) Military
14 13 (0.60%) Retail
15 12 (0.55%) Organisational Skills
16 11 (0.51%) Legal
17 9 (0.41%) Publishing
18 8 (0.37%) Aerospace
19 6 (0.28%) Advertising
Job Titles
1 456 (20.97%) Developer
2 329 (15.13%) Senior
3 296 (13.61%) DevOps Engineer
4 219 (10.07%) Architect
5 156 (7.17%) Java Developer
6 138 (6.34%) Software Engineer
7 118 (5.43%) Lead
8 113 (5.20%) Platform Engineer
9 106 (4.87%) Cloud Engineer
10 103 (4.74%) Senior Developer
11 101 (4.64%) Data Engineer
12 100 (4.60%) Site Reliability Engineer
13 98 (4.51%) AWS Engineer
14 87 (4.00%) Azure Engineer
15 80 (3.68%) Java Engineer
16 78 (3.59%) Python Developer
17 74 (3.40%) Site Engineer
18 70 (3.22%) AWS DevOps
19 67 (3.08%) GCP Engineer
20 65 (2.99%) Full-Stack Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 354 (16.28%) Kafka
2 311 (14.30%) Spring
3 262 (12.05%) Spring Boot
4 224 (10.30%) REST
5 206 (9.47%) RESTful
6 165 (7.59%) React
7 156 (7.17%) Node.js
8 127 (5.84%) OpenTelemetry
9 120 (5.52%) Elastic Stack
10 114 (5.24%) AngularJS
11 100 (4.60%) .NET
12 76 (3.49%) gRPC
13 75 (3.45%) OAuth
14 72 (3.31%) PyTorch
15 60 (2.76%) FastAPI
16 57 (2.62%) RabbitMQ
17 56 (2.57%) OpenID
17 56 (2.57%) TensorFlow
18 54 (2.48%) GraphQL
18 54 (2.48%) Playwright
Miscellaneous
1 443 (20.37%) Cloud Native
2 194 (8.92%) Distributed Systems
3 91 (4.18%) Hybrid Cloud
4 69 (3.17%) Public Cloud
5 61 (2.80%) Product Ownership
6 60 (2.76%) Onboarding
7 37 (1.70%) Data Centre
7 37 (1.70%) Enterprise Software
8 36 (1.66%) Data Protection Act
9 35 (1.61%) AI Agents
9 35 (1.61%) Private Cloud
10 34 (1.56%) Legacy Systems
11 33 (1.52%) Management Information System
12 30 (1.38%) Security Posture
13 28 (1.29%) PKI
14 26 (1.20%) Virtual Team
15 24 (1.10%) Greenfield Project
16 21 (0.97%) Enterprise Storage
17 20 (0.92%) Replication
18 19 (0.87%) Fixed Income
Operating Systems
1 410 (18.85%) Linux
2 118 (5.43%) Windows
3 63 (2.90%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 58 (2.67%) Unix
5 45 (2.07%) VMS
6 28 (1.29%) Windows Server
7 20 (0.92%) Ubuntu
8 7 (0.32%) Windows Server 2003
9 5 (0.23%) CentOS
9 5 (0.23%) CoreOS
9 5 (0.23%) Data ONTAP
10 4 (0.18%) Apple iOS
10 4 (0.18%) Rocky
10 4 (0.18%) Windows Server 2012
10 4 (0.18%) Windows Server 2019
11 3 (0.14%) Android
11 3 (0.14%) Debian
12 1 (0.046%) Alpine Linux
12 1 (0.046%) Windows Server 2016
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,417 (65.15%) CI/CD
2 1,157 (53.20%) DevOps
3 933 (42.90%) Containerisation
4 699 (32.14%) Agile
5 662 (30.44%) Infrastructure as Code
6 571 (26.25%) Microservices
7 441 (20.28%) Observability
8 431 (19.82%) Problem-Solving
9 364 (16.74%) Software Engineering
10 333 (15.31%) Test Automation
11 277 (12.74%) AI
12 232 (10.67%) Continuous Improvement
13 227 (10.44%) Migration
14 224 (10.30%) Analytics
15 223 (10.25%) Platform Engineering
16 221 (10.16%) Site Reliability Engineering
17 207 (9.52%) Data Pipeline
18 197 (9.06%) DevSecOps
19 193 (8.87%) Machine Learning
19 193 (8.87%) Scrum
Programming Languages
1 883 (40.60%) Python
2 548 (25.20%) Java
3 403 (18.53%) SQL
4 272 (12.51%) Bash
5 187 (8.60%) Go
6 151 (6.94%) JavaScript
7 141 (6.48%) PowerShell
8 132 (6.07%) TypeScript
9 96 (4.41%) C#
10 70 (3.22%) Bicep
11 57 (2.62%) Shell Script
12 41 (1.89%) Ruby
13 35 (1.61%) Scala
14 26 (1.20%) Kotlin
15 22 (1.01%) Rust
16 18 (0.83%) C++
16 18 (0.83%) Groovy
17 14 (0.64%) PHP
18 12 (0.55%) C
18 12 (0.55%) Kusto Query Language
Qualifications
1 781 (35.91%) Security Cleared
2 633 (29.10%) SC Cleared
3 146 (6.71%) Degree
4 125 (5.75%) DV Cleared
5 109 (5.01%) Azure Certification
6 101 (4.64%) Computer Science Degree
7 83 (3.82%) AWS Certification
8 51 (2.34%) CISSP
9 48 (2.21%) BPSS Clearance
10 44 (2.02%) Master's Degree
11 31 (1.43%) CISM
12 29 (1.33%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 22 (1.01%) Cisco Certification
14 21 (0.97%) Microsoft Certification
15 20 (0.92%) OCP
15 20 (0.92%) Oracle Certification
16 16 (0.74%) TOGAF Certification
17 14 (0.64%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
17 14 (0.64%) CCSP
18 12 (0.55%) (ISC)2 CCSP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 125 (5.75%) QA
2 80 (3.68%) Data Quality
3 69 (3.17%) NIST
4 66 (3.03%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 60 (2.76%) GDPR
6 48 (2.21%) NCSC
7 44 (2.02%) Accessibility
8 32 (1.47%) PCI DSS
9 20 (0.92%) WCAG
10 17 (0.78%) 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%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
15 11 (0.51%) SEPA
16 9 (0.41%) HIPAA
16 9 (0.41%) SLA
17 8 (0.37%) GRC
17 8 (0.37%) ISO/IEC 27002 (supersedes ISO/IEC 17799)
System Software
1 1,276 (58.67%) Docker
2 75 (3.45%) VMware Infrastructure
3 59 (2.71%) vSphere
4 47 (2.16%) Virtual Machines
5 41 (1.89%) Active Directory
6 32 (1.47%) VMware NSX
7 23 (1.06%) Slurm Workload Manager
8 19 (0.87%) Hyper-V
9 14 (0.64%) NFS
10 12 (0.55%) Squid
11 10 (0.46%) VMware ESXi
12 8 (0.37%) Lustre
13 7 (0.32%) BitLocker
13 7 (0.32%) Microsoft App-V
13 7 (0.32%) Virtual Desktop
14 6 (0.28%) GPFS
14 6 (0.28%) Snort
15 5 (0.23%) etcd
16 4 (0.18%) Ceph
16 4 (0.18%) Firmware
Systems Management
1 817 (37.56%) Terraform
2 363 (16.69%) Grafana
3 361 (16.60%) Ansible
4 333 (15.31%) Prometheus
5 135 (6.21%) Argo
6 58 (2.67%) Istio
7 48 (2.21%) Puppet
8 40 (1.84%) Progress Chef
9 38 (1.75%) Kibana
10 36 (1.66%) vCenter Server
11 28 (1.29%) Packer
11 28 (1.29%) Single Sign-On
12 26 (1.20%) Podman
13 24 (1.10%) Nessus
14 22 (1.01%) Consul
14 22 (1.01%) Rancher
15 14 (0.64%) Kustomize
16 13 (0.60%) Fluentd
16 13 (0.60%) IBM Guardium
16 13 (0.60%) linkerd
Vendors
1 250 (11.49%) Microsoft
2 190 (8.74%) Splunk
3 160 (7.36%) Red Hat
4 153 (7.03%) Google
5 117 (5.38%) Oracle
6 109 (5.01%) VMware
7 65 (2.99%) Databricks
8 60 (2.76%) Dynatrace
9 48 (2.21%) OpenAI
10 35 (1.61%) Talend
11 34 (1.56%) Denodo
12 33 (1.52%) Pure Storage
13 25 (1.15%) IBM
14 21 (0.97%) Atlassian
14 21 (0.97%) Tenable
15 20 (0.92%) AppDynamics
16 19 (0.87%) NetApp
17 18 (0.83%) Foundry
17 18 (0.83%) ServiceNow
18 17 (0.78%) CyberArk