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

6 months to
22 Nov 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 31 36 45
Rank change year-on-year +5 +9 -12
Contract jobs citing Kubernetes 1,848 1,664 1,796
As % of all contract jobs in England 6.04% 5.32% 4.54%
As % of the Systems Management category 37.48% 37.38% 32.04%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,261 1,113 1,340
10th Percentile £400 £406 £425
25th Percentile £450 £491 £500
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £530 £586 £600
Median % change year-on-year -9.56% -2.33% -4.00%
75th Percentile £638 £688 £688
90th Percentile £700 £788 £775
UK median daily rate £530 £575 £585
% change year-on-year -7.83% -1.71% -5.65%
Number of hourly rates quoted 22 13 56
10th Percentile £51.48 - -
25th Percentile £61.38 £46.18 £46.18
Median hourly rate £67.00 £60.00 £68.63
Median % change year-on-year +11.67% -12.58% +6.41%
75th Percentile £84.50 £74.00 £77.50
90th Percentile £118.45 £74.35 £78.75
UK median hourly rate £67.00 £60.00 £68.63
% change year-on-year +11.67% -12.58% +8.94%

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 4,930 4,451 5,606
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 16.12% 14.24% 14.18%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,320 2,856 4,065
10th Percentile £310 £315 £308
25th Percentile £413 £419 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year -2.38% -4.55% -5.58%
75th Percentile £613 £638 £655
90th Percentile £694 £734 £745
UK median daily rate £513 £525 £547
% change year-on-year -2.38% -4.02% -4.87%
Number of hourly rates quoted 91 58 162
10th Percentile £18.87 £14.71 £17.75
25th Percentile £21.06 £23.80 £26.06
Median hourly rate £36.00 £36.83 £48.40
Median % change year-on-year -2.26% -23.90% +88.25%
75th Percentile £66.04 £64.00 £73.75
90th Percentile £80.00 £75.75 £78.00
UK median hourly rate £30.00 £28.63 £50.00
% change year-on-year +4.80% -42.75% +94.48%

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 22 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 22 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 22 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 -2 928 £550 -8.33% 857
North of England +11 334 £500 - 225
Midlands +54 206 £537 -6.61% 90
West Midlands +51 185 £540 -6.09% 66
South East +2 165 £475 -9.52% 256
Yorkshire -8 150 £500 - 32
North West +16 148 £475 -13.64% 177
South West -5 101 £625 +4.17% 120
East of England -2 46 £525 - 42
North East +4 37 £550 +22.22% 16
East Midlands +5 21 £423 -17.41% 23
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 79 (4.27%) Confluence
2 67 (3.63%) SAS
3 37 (2.00%) nginx
4 34 (1.84%) Apache Spark
5 33 (1.79%) Apache Airflow
6 29 (1.57%) Apache
7 26 (1.41%) OpenStack
8 10 (0.54%) Mule
9 8 (0.43%) WebSphere
10 7 (0.38%) JBoss
10 7 (0.38%) Tomcat
11 6 (0.32%) Jupyter
11 6 (0.32%) WebLogic
11 6 (0.32%) 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 (0.32%) Microsoft Excel
1 6 (0.32%) 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%) Payment Gateway
3 3 (0.16%) SAP S/4HANA
4 1 (0.054%) Cloudability
4 1 (0.054%) Finacle
Cloud Services
1 1,017 (55.03%) AWS
2 670 (36.26%) Azure
3 453 (24.51%) GCP
4 401 (21.70%) GitHub
5 242 (13.10%) GitHub Actions
6 208 (11.26%) OpenShift
7 198 (10.71%) Serverless
8 163 (8.82%) Azure DevOps
9 138 (7.47%) AWS CloudFormation
10 137 (7.41%) Azure AKS
11 130 (7.03%) Amazon EKS
12 110 (5.95%) Amazon S3
13 105 (5.68%) AWS Lambda
14 87 (4.71%) Google Kubernetes Engine
15 80 (4.33%) Amazon EC2
16 77 (4.17%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 71 (3.84%) Amazon ECS
18 70 (3.79%) SaaS
19 60 (3.25%) Entra ID
20 57 (3.08%) Datadog
Communications & Networking
1 77 (4.17%) Firewall
2 48 (2.60%) DNS
3 29 (1.57%) Network Security
4 25 (1.35%) VPN
5 20 (1.08%) TCP/IP
6 16 (0.87%) SSL
7 14 (0.76%) HTTP
8 10 (0.54%) BGP
9 8 (0.43%) DHCP
10 7 (0.38%) HTTPS
11 6 (0.32%) Ethernet VPN
11 6 (0.32%) Software-Defined Networking
11 6 (0.32%) VLAN
11 6 (0.32%) 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 (13.64%) PostgreSQL
2 176 (9.52%) NoSQL
3 121 (6.55%) MongoDB
4 78 (4.22%) Relational Database
5 69 (3.73%) Apache Cassandra
6 67 (3.63%) Amazon RDS
7 57 (3.08%) Elasticsearch
8 53 (2.87%) Redis
9 41 (2.22%) MySQL
9 41 (2.22%) SQL Server
10 34 (1.84%) Big Data
10 34 (1.84%) Pentaho
11 32 (1.73%) Data Warehouse
12 28 (1.52%) DynamoDB
12 28 (1.52%) Oracle Database
13 27 (1.46%) Data Lake
14 24 (1.30%) Hadoop
15 23 (1.24%) BigQuery
16 22 (1.19%) Azure SQL Database
17 19 (1.03%) Power BI
Development Applications
1 497 (26.89%) Jenkins
2 382 (20.67%) Git
3 345 (18.67%) GitLab
4 185 (10.01%) JIRA
5 69 (3.73%) JUnit
6 65 (3.52%) SonarQube
7 56 (3.03%) Maven
8 55 (2.98%) Sonatype Nexus
9 54 (2.92%) Artifactory
10 44 (2.38%) Selenium
11 42 (2.27%) Gradle
12 41 (2.22%) CircleCI
13 40 (2.16%) Bitbucket
13 40 (2.16%) Liquibase
14 33 (1.79%) Cucumber
15 26 (1.41%) Mockito
16 25 (1.35%) MLflow
17 24 (1.30%) Postman
18 20 (1.08%) JMeter
19 19 (1.03%) TeamCity
General
1 507 (27.44%) Social Skills
2 306 (16.56%) Finance
3 217 (11.74%) Public Sector
4 204 (11.04%) Banking
5 145 (7.85%) Analytical Skills
6 41 (2.22%) Financial Institution
7 39 (2.11%) Investment Banking
8 37 (2.00%) Documentation Skills
9 28 (1.52%) Telecoms
10 20 (1.08%) Front Office
11 19 (1.03%) Pharmaceutical
12 17 (0.92%) Inclusion and Diversity
12 17 (0.92%) Retail
13 14 (0.76%) Presentation Skills
14 11 (0.60%) Aerospace
14 11 (0.60%) Influencing Skills
15 9 (0.49%) Military
16 7 (0.38%) Law
17 6 (0.32%) Games
17 6 (0.32%) Manufacturing
Job Titles
1 426 (23.05%) Developer
2 290 (15.69%) Senior
3 286 (15.48%) DevOps Engineer
4 156 (8.44%) Architect
5 142 (7.68%) Java Developer
6 111 (6.01%) AWS Engineer
7 105 (5.68%) Software Engineer
8 104 (5.63%) Platform Engineer
9 98 (5.30%) Lead
10 92 (4.98%) Cloud Engineer
11 91 (4.92%) Senior Developer
12 81 (4.38%) AWS DevOps
13 77 (4.17%) Python Developer
14 72 (3.90%) Full-Stack Developer
14 72 (3.90%) Site Reliability Engineer
15 66 (3.57%) Data Engineer
16 60 (3.25%) AWS DevOps Engineer
17 55 (2.98%) Azure Engineer
18 53 (2.87%) Site Engineer
19 48 (2.60%) Consultant
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 297 (16.07%) Kafka
2 196 (10.61%) React
3 195 (10.55%) Spring
4 194 (10.50%) RESTful
5 189 (10.23%) REST
6 175 (9.47%) Node.js
7 167 (9.04%) Spring Boot
8 138 (7.47%) Elastic Stack
9 126 (6.82%) AngularJS
10 88 (4.76%) .NET
11 85 (4.60%) gRPC
12 71 (3.84%) GraphQL
13 69 (3.73%) FastAPI
13 69 (3.73%) HTML
14 64 (3.46%) YAML
15 60 (3.25%) Vue
16 57 (3.08%) PyTorch
17 55 (2.98%) CSS
18 52 (2.81%) RabbitMQ
19 50 (2.71%) Playwright
Miscellaneous
1 332 (17.97%) Cloud Native
2 176 (9.52%) Distributed Systems
3 72 (3.90%) Public Cloud
4 58 (3.14%) Product Ownership
5 57 (3.08%) Onboarding
6 48 (2.60%) Hybrid Cloud
7 39 (2.11%) Private Cloud
8 37 (2.00%) Algorithms
9 35 (1.89%) Enterprise Software
10 29 (1.57%) Legacy Systems
11 28 (1.52%) Data Protection Act
12 26 (1.41%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
13 25 (1.35%) Data Structures
14 24 (1.30%) Security Posture
15 23 (1.24%) PKI
15 23 (1.24%) Virtual Team
16 22 (1.19%) Replication
17 21 (1.14%) Hedge funds
18 20 (1.08%) Greenfield Project
19 18 (0.97%) Data Centre
Operating Systems
1 382 (20.67%) Linux
2 73 (3.95%) Windows
3 64 (3.46%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 60 (3.25%) Unix
5 20 (1.08%) Ubuntu
5 20 (1.08%) VMS
6 18 (0.97%) CentOS
7 17 (0.92%) 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 1,232 (66.67%) CI/CD
2 998 (54.00%) DevOps
3 785 (42.48%) Containerisation
4 628 (33.98%) Agile
5 568 (30.74%) Infrastructure as Code
6 512 (27.71%) Microservices
7 437 (23.65%) Problem-Solving
8 327 (17.69%) Software Engineering
9 291 (15.75%) Observability
10 264 (14.29%) Test Automation
11 200 (10.82%) Migration
12 181 (9.79%) AI
13 167 (9.04%) Analytics
14 162 (8.77%) Scrum
15 160 (8.66%) Full-Stack Development
16 155 (8.39%) Platform Engineering
17 153 (8.28%) DevSecOps
17 153 (8.28%) Machine Learning
18 150 (8.12%) Continuous Improvement
19 141 (7.63%) Data Pipeline
Programming Languages
1 877 (47.46%) Python
2 506 (27.38%) Java
3 321 (17.37%) SQL
4 275 (14.88%) Bash
5 249 (13.47%) Go
6 187 (10.12%) JavaScript
7 178 (9.63%) TypeScript
8 119 (6.44%) C#
9 109 (5.90%) PowerShell
10 69 (3.73%) C++
11 55 (2.98%) Shell Script
12 54 (2.92%) Bicep
13 33 (1.79%) Ruby
14 28 (1.52%) Kotlin
14 28 (1.52%) Perl
15 27 (1.46%) Groovy
15 27 (1.46%) PHP
16 26 (1.41%) Rust
17 20 (1.08%) Scala
18 16 (0.87%) C
Qualifications
1 613 (33.17%) Security Cleared
2 510 (27.60%) SC Cleared
3 127 (6.87%) Degree
4 98 (5.30%) Computer Science Degree
5 94 (5.09%) DV Cleared
6 93 (5.03%) AWS Certification
7 74 (4.00%) Azure Certification
8 50 (2.71%) Master's Degree
9 40 (2.16%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
10 32 (1.73%) CISSP
11 26 (1.41%) BPSS Clearance
12 25 (1.35%) Microsoft Certification
13 18 (0.97%) Cisco Certification
14 17 (0.92%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
14 17 (0.92%) 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 97 (5.25%) QA
2 54 (2.92%) Data Quality
2 54 (2.92%) ISO/IEC 27001
3 48 (2.60%) NIST
4 40 (2.16%) GDPR
5 30 (1.62%) NCSC
6 23 (1.24%) Accessibility
7 17 (0.92%) PCI DSS
8 14 (0.76%) HIPAA
9 13 (0.70%) PSD2
10 12 (0.65%) EU AI Act
11 10 (0.54%) WCAG
12 8 (0.43%) ISO 20022
12 8 (0.43%) SEPA
13 7 (0.38%) Cyber Essentials
14 6 (0.32%) NIST 800
14 6 (0.32%) SOC 2
15 5 (0.27%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
15 5 (0.27%) JSP 440
15 5 (0.27%) SLA
System Software
1 1,184 (64.07%) Docker
2 55 (2.98%) Active Directory
3 49 (2.65%) VMware Infrastructure
4 32 (1.73%) vSphere
5 24 (1.30%) 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 (0.32%) 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%) GridGain
12 1 (0.054%) QEMU
12 1 (0.054%) Veritas Cluster Server
Systems Management
1 722 (39.07%) Terraform
2 314 (16.99%) Ansible
3 298 (16.13%) Grafana
4 270 (14.61%) Prometheus
5 105 (5.68%) Argo
6 51 (2.76%) Kibana
7 42 (2.27%) Packer
7 42 (2.27%) Progress Chef
8 41 (2.22%) Istio
8 41 (2.22%) Puppet
9 27 (1.46%) Single Sign-On
10 26 (1.41%) Consul
11 20 (1.08%) logstash
12 19 (1.03%) Nessus
13 15 (0.81%) Podman
14 13 (0.70%) 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 (10.28%) Microsoft
2 174 (9.42%) Splunk
3 146 (7.90%) Google
4 119 (6.44%) Oracle
5 117 (6.33%) Red Hat
6 65 (3.52%) VMware
7 46 (2.49%) Dynatrace
8 42 (2.27%) Databricks
9 34 (1.84%) Denodo
9 34 (1.84%) Talend
10 30 (1.62%) OpenAI
11 29 (1.57%) Atlassian
12 27 (1.46%) IBM
13 24 (1.30%) 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