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 28 January 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
28 Jan 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 31 31 54
Rank change year-on-year 0 +23 -22
Contract jobs citing Kubernetes 2,013 1,468 1,402
As % of all contract jobs in England 6.14% 5.55% 3.74%
As % of the Systems Management category 39.17% 37.72% 29.52%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,390 1,007 1,048
10th Percentile £400 £413 £425
25th Percentile £450 £500 £488
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £600 £575
Median % change year-on-year -12.50% +4.35% -8.00%
75th Percentile £638 £700 £675
90th Percentile £713 £810 £750
UK median daily rate £525 £575 £575
% change year-on-year -8.70% - -8.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 36 8 34
10th Percentile £48.75 £26.13 -
25th Percentile £52.50 £41.26 £46.18
Median hourly rate £58.75 £58.75 £56.25
Median % change year-on-year - +4.44% -17.88%
75th Percentile £79.25 £69.63 £76.53
90th Percentile £101.25 £74.13 £77.85
UK median hourly rate £60.00 £58.75 £56.25
% change year-on-year +2.13% +4.44% -16.04%

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 5,139 3,892 4,750
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 15.67% 14.71% 12.66%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,571 2,521 3,475
10th Percentile £313 £313 £252
25th Percentile £413 £425 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £501 £533 £525
Median % change year-on-year -5.88% +1.43% -10.64%
75th Percentile £600 £645 £644
90th Percentile £700 £738 £728
UK median daily rate £500 £525 £525
% change year-on-year -4.76% - -8.70%
Number of hourly rates quoted 111 48 155
10th Percentile £18.87 £14.40 £15.35
25th Percentile £21.06 £20.74 £21.25
Median hourly rate £48.72 £26.00 £46.18
Median % change year-on-year +87.38% -43.70% +8.66%
75th Percentile £62.78 £63.00 £60.00
90th Percentile £78.75 £75.36 £77.11
UK median hourly rate £52.50 £25.50 £46.18
% change year-on-year +105.88% -44.78% +19.95%

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 28 January 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 28 January 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 28 January 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 -3 961 £550 -8.33% 310
North of England +11 409 £487 -7.24% 202
Midlands +60 246 £530 -1.40% 118
West Midlands +52 225 £537 -2.36% 48
Yorkshire +4 190 £484 -15.91% 85
North West +18 175 £479 -7.72% 93
South East +1 173 £485 -11.82% 325
South West +2 133 £613 +2.08% 150
North East -2 48 £520 -0.95% 24
East of England +5 36 £594 +7.95% 103
East Midlands -13 21 £438 -12.50% 66
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 80 (3.97%) Confluence
2 73 (3.63%) SAS
3 42 (2.09%) Apache Spark
4 36 (1.79%) Apache
5 31 (1.54%) nginx
6 30 (1.49%) Apache Airflow
6 30 (1.49%) OpenStack
7 13 (0.65%) Jupyter
8 10 (0.50%) Camunda
9 8 (0.40%) SharePoint
10 7 (0.35%) WebLogic
11 6 (0.30%) Appian
11 6 (0.30%) Tomcat
12 5 (0.25%) Ethereum
12 5 (0.25%) Hyperledger
12 5 (0.25%) Microsoft Exchange
12 5 (0.25%) Mule
13 4 (0.20%) CMS
13 4 (0.20%) Drupal
13 4 (0.20%) Oracle Workflow
Applications
1 5 (0.25%) Chatbot
1 5 (0.25%) Microsoft Excel
1 5 (0.25%) Microsoft Office
1 5 (0.25%) Weka
2 3 (0.15%) Microsoft Project
3 2 (0.099%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 2 (0.099%) MS Visio
4 1 (0.050%) Adobe XD
Business Applications
1 12 (0.60%) Maximo
2 1 (0.050%) Actimize
2 1 (0.050%) Endur
2 1 (0.050%) Finacle
2 1 (0.050%) SAP S/4HANA
Cloud Services
1 1,056 (52.46%) AWS
2 759 (37.70%) Azure
3 510 (25.34%) GCP
4 451 (22.40%) GitHub
5 276 (13.71%) OpenShift
6 265 (13.16%) GitHub Actions
7 228 (11.33%) Serverless
8 186 (9.24%) Azure DevOps
9 143 (7.10%) Amazon EKS
9 143 (7.10%) AWS CloudFormation
10 142 (7.05%) Azure AKS
11 134 (6.66%) AWS Lambda
12 132 (6.56%) Amazon S3
13 99 (4.92%) Amazon ECS
14 96 (4.77%) Amazon EC2
14 96 (4.77%) Google Kubernetes Engine
15 80 (3.97%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 68 (3.38%) Datadog
17 56 (2.78%) SaaS
18 54 (2.68%) IaaS
Communications & Networking
1 98 (4.87%) Firewall
2 60 (2.98%) DNS
3 38 (1.89%) Network Security
4 34 (1.69%) VPN
5 32 (1.59%) TCP/IP
6 19 (0.94%) SSL
7 17 (0.84%) HTTP
8 13 (0.65%) DHCP
8 13 (0.65%) SAN
9 11 (0.55%) NAS
9 11 (0.55%) Reverse Proxy
10 8 (0.40%) Fibre Channel
10 8 (0.40%) Kerberos
11 7 (0.35%) iSCSI
12 6 (0.30%) BGP
12 6 (0.30%) Software-Defined Networking
12 6 (0.30%) VLAN
13 5 (0.25%) HTTPS
13 5 (0.25%) InfiniBand
13 5 (0.25%) OpenVPN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 255 (12.67%) PostgreSQL
2 191 (9.49%) NoSQL
3 125 (6.21%) MongoDB
4 88 (4.37%) Relational Database
5 79 (3.92%) Apache Cassandra
6 77 (3.83%) Amazon RDS
7 73 (3.63%) Elasticsearch
8 60 (2.98%) SQL Server
9 56 (2.78%) Redis
10 48 (2.38%) MySQL
11 38 (1.89%) Big Data
11 38 (1.89%) Pentaho
12 37 (1.84%) BigQuery
12 37 (1.84%) Power BI
13 35 (1.74%) DynamoDB
14 28 (1.39%) Data Warehouse
15 26 (1.29%) Data Lake
16 24 (1.19%) Oracle Database
17 21 (1.04%) Tableau
18 19 (0.94%) Azure SQL Database
Development Applications
1 515 (25.58%) Jenkins
2 404 (20.07%) GitLab
3 378 (18.78%) Git
4 171 (8.49%) JIRA
5 75 (3.73%) JUnit
6 57 (2.83%) SonarQube
7 51 (2.53%) Gradle
8 50 (2.48%) Maven
9 49 (2.43%) Sonatype Nexus
10 46 (2.29%) Selenium
11 39 (1.94%) Bitbucket
12 38 (1.89%) Artifactory
13 37 (1.84%) Cucumber
14 32 (1.59%) Mockito
15 30 (1.49%) CircleCI
15 30 (1.49%) MLflow
16 29 (1.44%) Postman
17 26 (1.29%) Liquibase
18 23 (1.14%) JMeter
19 18 (0.89%) Cypress.io
General
1 546 (27.12%) Social Skills
2 336 (16.69%) Finance
3 248 (12.32%) Public Sector
4 194 (9.64%) Banking
5 157 (7.80%) Analytical Skills
6 56 (2.78%) Documentation Skills
7 41 (2.04%) Financial Institution
8 25 (1.24%) Front Office
8 25 (1.24%) Influencing Skills
8 25 (1.24%) Investment Banking
9 19 (0.94%) Telecoms
10 17 (0.84%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 17 (0.84%) Presentation Skills
11 15 (0.75%) Pharmaceutical
12 12 (0.60%) Retail
13 11 (0.55%) Military
14 9 (0.45%) Aerospace
14 9 (0.45%) Law
15 7 (0.35%) Games
16 6 (0.30%) Billing
Job Titles
1 455 (22.60%) Developer
2 313 (15.55%) Senior
3 305 (15.15%) DevOps Engineer
4 172 (8.54%) Architect
5 136 (6.76%) Java Developer
6 134 (6.66%) Software Engineer
7 109 (5.41%) AWS Engineer
8 106 (5.27%) Senior Developer
9 100 (4.97%) Site Reliability Engineer
10 95 (4.72%) Cloud Engineer
11 93 (4.62%) Lead
12 86 (4.27%) Platform Engineer
13 83 (4.12%) Python Developer
14 78 (3.87%) Full-Stack Developer
15 75 (3.73%) AWS DevOps
15 75 (3.73%) Data Engineer
15 75 (3.73%) Site Engineer
16 72 (3.58%) Azure Engineer
17 64 (3.18%) Java Engineer
18 62 (3.08%) AWS DevOps Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 319 (15.85%) Kafka
2 265 (13.16%) Spring
3 247 (12.27%) Spring Boot
4 216 (10.73%) RESTful
5 209 (10.38%) REST
6 184 (9.14%) React
7 171 (8.49%) Node.js
8 140 (6.95%) Elastic Stack
9 113 (5.61%) AngularJS
10 92 (4.57%) .NET
11 84 (4.17%) gRPC
12 77 (3.83%) OpenTelemetry
13 76 (3.78%) FastAPI
13 76 (3.78%) PyTorch
14 75 (3.73%) GraphQL
15 65 (3.23%) HTML
16 62 (3.08%) TensorFlow
17 61 (3.03%) OAuth
18 58 (2.88%) Playwright
19 55 (2.73%) RabbitMQ
Miscellaneous
1 396 (19.67%) Cloud Native
2 171 (8.49%) Distributed Systems
3 72 (3.58%) Public Cloud
4 62 (3.08%) Hybrid Cloud
5 60 (2.98%) Onboarding
5 60 (2.98%) Product Ownership
6 40 (1.99%) Private Cloud
7 34 (1.69%) Enterprise Software
8 29 (1.44%) Management Information System
9 28 (1.39%) Legacy Systems
10 27 (1.34%) Data Protection Act
11 26 (1.29%) Replication
12 25 (1.24%) PKI
13 24 (1.19%) Greenfield Project
14 23 (1.14%) Algorithms
15 22 (1.09%) AI Agents
15 22 (1.09%) Virtual Team
16 20 (0.99%) Security Posture
17 19 (0.94%) Data Centre
18 18 (0.89%) NHS
Operating Systems
1 404 (20.07%) Linux
2 90 (4.47%) Windows
3 69 (3.43%) Unix
4 53 (2.63%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 37 (1.84%) VMS
6 25 (1.24%) Windows Server
7 23 (1.14%) Ubuntu
8 13 (0.65%) CentOS
9 5 (0.25%) Solaris
10 3 (0.15%) Apple iOS
10 3 (0.15%) Windows Server 2003
10 3 (0.15%) Windows Server 2012
10 3 (0.15%) Windows Server 2019
11 2 (0.099%) Android
11 2 (0.099%) Rocky
11 2 (0.099%) zOS
12 1 (0.050%) Alpine Linux
12 1 (0.050%) Debian
12 1 (0.050%) MVS
12 1 (0.050%) Windows Server 2016
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,336 (66.37%) CI/CD
2 1,102 (54.74%) DevOps
3 888 (44.11%) Containerisation
4 668 (33.18%) Agile
5 596 (29.61%) Infrastructure as Code
6 544 (27.02%) Microservices
7 460 (22.85%) Problem-Solving
8 358 (17.78%) Software Engineering
9 350 (17.39%) Observability
10 298 (14.80%) Test Automation
11 228 (11.33%) AI
12 211 (10.48%) Migration
13 191 (9.49%) DevSecOps
14 190 (9.44%) Analytics
14 190 (9.44%) Site Reliability Engineering
15 186 (9.24%) Continuous Improvement
16 179 (8.89%) Full-Stack Development
17 172 (8.54%) Machine Learning
18 164 (8.15%) Platform Engineering
19 157 (7.80%) Data Pipeline
Programming Languages
1 875 (43.47%) Python
2 535 (26.58%) Java
3 380 (18.88%) SQL
4 268 (13.31%) Bash
5 223 (11.08%) Go
6 169 (8.40%) JavaScript
7 165 (8.20%) TypeScript
8 116 (5.76%) PowerShell
9 88 (4.37%) C#
10 61 (3.03%) Shell Script
11 60 (2.98%) Bicep
12 50 (2.48%) Ruby
13 33 (1.64%) C++
14 32 (1.59%) Scala
15 31 (1.54%) Kotlin
15 31 (1.54%) Rust
16 19 (0.94%) PHP
17 18 (0.89%) Groovy
18 15 (0.75%) Perl
19 12 (0.60%) Kusto Query Language
Qualifications
1 708 (35.17%) Security Cleared
2 583 (28.96%) SC Cleared
3 156 (7.75%) Degree
4 117 (5.81%) DV Cleared
5 114 (5.66%) Computer Science Degree
6 88 (4.37%) Azure Certification
7 80 (3.97%) AWS Certification
8 51 (2.53%) Master's Degree
9 47 (2.33%) CISSP
10 38 (1.89%) BPSS Clearance
11 31 (1.54%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
11 31 (1.54%) CISM
12 23 (1.14%) Microsoft Certification
13 17 (0.84%) Cisco Certification
14 15 (0.75%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
15 14 (0.70%) TOGAF Certification
16 11 (0.55%) OCP
16 11 (0.55%) Oracle Certification
17 10 (0.50%) CCSP
18 9 (0.45%) RHCE
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 96 (4.77%) QA
2 67 (3.33%) ISO/IEC 27001
3 64 (3.18%) Data Quality
3 64 (3.18%) NIST
4 52 (2.58%) NCSC
5 39 (1.94%) GDPR
6 34 (1.69%) Accessibility
7 28 (1.39%) PCI DSS
8 16 (0.79%) PSD2
9 15 (0.75%) ISO 20022
10 13 (0.65%) SEPA
10 13 (0.65%) WCAG
11 11 (0.55%) SLA
12 10 (0.50%) NIST 800
13 9 (0.45%) SOC 2
14 8 (0.40%) HIPAA
14 8 (0.40%) Sarbanes-Oxley
15 7 (0.35%) Cyber Essentials
15 7 (0.35%) EU AI Act
16 6 (0.30%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
System Software
1 1,284 (63.79%) Docker
2 61 (3.03%) VMware Infrastructure
3 44 (2.19%) Active Directory
4 35 (1.74%) Virtual Machines
5 34 (1.69%) vSphere
6 17 (0.84%) Slurm Workload Manager
7 16 (0.79%) VMware NSX
8 15 (0.75%) Hyper-V
9 10 (0.50%) Squid
10 9 (0.45%) KVM
10 9 (0.45%) Lustre
11 7 (0.35%) GPFS
11 7 (0.35%) NFS
12 5 (0.25%) VMware ESXi
13 4 (0.20%) Snort
13 4 (0.20%) Virtual Servers
14 3 (0.15%) BitLocker
14 3 (0.15%) Ceph
14 3 (0.15%) Firmware
14 3 (0.15%) Virtual Desktop
Systems Management
1 761 (37.80%) Terraform
2 348 (17.29%) Ansible
3 336 (16.69%) Grafana
4 291 (14.46%) Prometheus
5 110 (5.46%) Argo
6 54 (2.68%) Kibana
6 54 (2.68%) Puppet
7 51 (2.53%) Istio
8 41 (2.04%) Progress Chef
9 28 (1.39%) Nessus
10 25 (1.24%) Single Sign-On
11 24 (1.19%) Packer
11 24 (1.19%) Podman
12 21 (1.04%) logstash
13 20 (0.99%) Consul
14 16 (0.79%) Control-M
14 16 (0.79%) IBM Guardium
14 16 (0.79%) Rancher
15 14 (0.70%) Kustomize
15 14 (0.70%) vCenter Server
Vendors
1 213 (10.58%) Microsoft
2 184 (9.14%) Splunk
3 176 (8.74%) Google
4 134 (6.66%) Oracle
5 128 (6.36%) Red Hat
6 90 (4.47%) VMware
7 50 (2.48%) Databricks
7 50 (2.48%) Dynatrace
8 46 (2.29%) OpenAI
9 38 (1.89%) Denodo
9 38 (1.89%) Talend
10 25 (1.24%) AppDynamics
10 25 (1.24%) IBM
11 21 (1.04%) Atlassian
11 21 (1.04%) Tenable
12 17 (0.84%) CyberArk
13 16 (0.79%) Cisco
14 15 (0.75%) Foundry
15 14 (0.70%) NVIDIA
16 12 (0.60%) Pure Storage