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

6 months to
9 Apr 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 33 31 56
Rank change year-on-year -2 +25 -27
Contract jobs citing Kubernetes 2,164 1,481 1,284
As % of all contract jobs in England 5.53% 6.08% 3.43%
As % of the Systems Management category 39.01% 38.85% 28.74%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,466 1,044 943
10th Percentile £400 £406 £413
25th Percentile £450 £475 £475
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £575 £550
Median % change year-on-year -8.70% +4.55% -12.00%
75th Percentile £625 £688 £663
90th Percentile £700 £810 £725
UK median daily rate £525 £567 £550
% change year-on-year -7.41% +3.09% -10.20%
Number of hourly rates quoted 53 7 13
10th Percentile - £26.00 £46.18
25th Percentile £52.50 £41.38 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £60.00 £57.50
Median % change year-on-year +8.33% +4.35% -18.44%
75th Percentile £70.00 £73.44 £71.25
90th Percentile £82.80 £80.40 £76.89
UK median hourly rate £65.00 £60.00 £57.50
% change year-on-year +8.33% +4.35% -17.86%

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 5,548 3,812 4,467
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 14.18% 15.65% 11.92%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,829 2,630 3,264
10th Percentile £313 £319 £250
25th Percentile £413 £425 £406
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -8.70%
75th Percentile £600 £638 £625
90th Percentile £700 £738 £700
UK median daily rate £500 £525 £518
% change year-on-year -4.76% +1.35% -9.91%
Number of hourly rates quoted 140 39 124
10th Percentile £20.09 £15.22 £14.00
25th Percentile £33.83 £22.32 £17.72
Median hourly rate £55.00 £26.50 £25.77
Median % change year-on-year +107.55% +2.85% -55.19%
75th Percentile £68.75 £61.63 £50.06
90th Percentile £75.15 £77.74 £68.44
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 9 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 9 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 9 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 -10 1,005 £550 -8.33% 315
North of England +5 445 £500 -4.76% 157
Midlands +30 279 £515 -4.10% 57
West Midlands +30 237 £515 -6.36% 38
Yorkshire +7 230 £487 -15.85% 47
South East -7 187 £500 -9.09% 147
North West +6 174 £538 +7.50% 85
South West +3 152 £550 -8.33% 80
North East -2 45 £475 -9.52% 25
East Midlands -5 41 £500 +7.07% 19
East of England -26 32 £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
1 103 (4.76%) Confluence
2 75 (3.47%) SAS
3 66 (3.05%) Apache Spark
4 47 (2.17%) Apache
5 34 (1.57%) nginx
6 31 (1.43%) OpenStack
7 30 (1.39%) Apache Airflow
8 17 (0.79%) Jupyter
9 9 (0.42%) 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%) CMS
13 4 (0.18%) Drupal
14 3 (0.14%) Adobe Experience Manager
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 4 (0.18%) Microsoft Excel
1 4 (0.18%) Weka
2 3 (0.14%) Chatbot
2 3 (0.14%) Microsoft Office
2 3 (0.14%) Microsoft Project
2 3 (0.14%) MS Visio
3 2 (0.092%) Adobe XD
3 2 (0.092%) CPLEX
4 1 (0.046%) Maya
4 1 (0.046%) Microsoft PowerPoint
Business Applications
1 8 (0.37%) Maximo
2 3 (0.14%) Distributed Ledger
2 3 (0.14%) Payment Gateway
3 1 (0.046%) Actimize
3 1 (0.046%) Cloudability
3 1 (0.046%) Oracle EBS
3 1 (0.046%) SAP Hybris
3 1 (0.046%) SAP S/4HANA
3 1 (0.046%) Shopify
Cloud Services
1 1,119 (51.71%) AWS
2 900 (41.59%) Azure
3 507 (23.43%) GCP
4 465 (21.49%) GitHub
5 317 (14.65%) OpenShift
6 272 (12.57%) GitHub Actions
7 225 (10.40%) Serverless
8 220 (10.17%) Azure DevOps
9 168 (7.76%) Azure AKS
10 166 (7.67%) Amazon EKS
11 150 (6.93%) AWS CloudFormation
12 147 (6.79%) Amazon S3
13 141 (6.52%) AWS Lambda
14 105 (4.85%) Amazon EC2
15 102 (4.71%) Google Kubernetes Engine
16 83 (3.84%) Amazon ECS
17 69 (3.19%) Amazon CloudWatch
18 67 (3.10%) Virtual Private Cloud
19 64 (2.96%) Datadog
20 59 (2.73%) Entra ID
Communications & Networking
1 112 (5.18%) Firewall
2 91 (4.21%) DNS
3 53 (2.45%) VPN
4 52 (2.40%) Network Security
5 37 (1.71%) TCP/IP
6 24 (1.11%) SAN
7 20 (0.92%) HTTP
8 17 (0.79%) DHCP
8 17 (0.79%) Reverse Proxy
9 16 (0.74%) NAS
10 11 (0.51%) OpenVPN
10 11 (0.51%) SSL
11 10 (0.46%) Fibre Channel
11 10 (0.46%) iSCSI
12 9 (0.42%) 5G
13 8 (0.37%) 3GPP
14 7 (0.32%) BGP
14 7 (0.32%) SMTP
15 6 (0.28%) 4G
16 5 (0.23%) LTE
Database & Business Intelligence
1 249 (11.51%) PostgreSQL
2 176 (8.13%) NoSQL
3 117 (5.41%) MongoDB
4 104 (4.81%) Relational Database
5 86 (3.97%) SQL Server
6 72 (3.33%) Apache Cassandra
7 65 (3.00%) Amazon RDS
8 63 (2.91%) Elasticsearch
9 44 (2.03%) Redis
10 43 (1.99%) Big Data
11 39 (1.80%) Power BI
12 36 (1.66%) MySQL
13 34 (1.57%) Pentaho
14 32 (1.48%) BigQuery
14 32 (1.48%) Data Lake
14 32 (1.48%) DynamoDB
15 25 (1.16%) Data Warehouse
15 25 (1.16%) Flink
16 22 (1.02%) Oracle Database
16 22 (1.02%) Tableau
Development Applications
1 527 (24.35%) Jenkins
2 388 (17.93%) GitLab
3 387 (17.88%) Git
4 186 (8.60%) JIRA
5 100 (4.62%) JUnit
6 65 (3.00%) Selenium
7 56 (2.59%) SonarQube
8 54 (2.50%) Cucumber
9 42 (1.94%) Artifactory
10 39 (1.80%) JMeter
11 37 (1.71%) MLflow
12 36 (1.66%) Maven
13 35 (1.62%) Mockito
14 34 (1.57%) Bitbucket
15 33 (1.52%) Gradle
16 27 (1.25%) Sonatype Nexus
17 26 (1.20%) Gatling
18 23 (1.06%) Postman
19 19 (0.88%) CircleCI
20 15 (0.69%) WebDriver
General
1 558 (25.79%) Social Skills
2 350 (16.17%) Finance
3 271 (12.52%) Public Sector
4 176 (8.13%) Banking
5 155 (7.16%) Analytical Skills
6 59 (2.73%) Documentation Skills
7 29 (1.34%) Telecoms
8 28 (1.29%) Influencing Skills
9 21 (0.97%) Financial Institution
9 21 (0.97%) Front Office
10 19 (0.88%) Presentation Skills
11 18 (0.83%) Investment Banking
12 16 (0.74%) Military
13 15 (0.69%) Inclusion and Diversity
14 13 (0.60%) Organisational Skills
15 12 (0.55%) Retail
16 11 (0.51%) Legal
17 10 (0.46%) Publishing
18 7 (0.32%) Aerospace
18 7 (0.32%) Law
Job Titles
1 465 (21.49%) Developer
2 323 (14.93%) Senior
3 303 (14.00%) DevOps Engineer
4 215 (9.94%) Architect
5 165 (7.62%) Java Developer
6 130 (6.01%) Software Engineer
7 116 (5.36%) Lead
8 114 (5.27%) Platform Engineer
9 104 (4.81%) Senior Developer
10 100 (4.62%) Site Reliability Engineer
11 98 (4.53%) Cloud Engineer
11 98 (4.53%) Data Engineer
12 93 (4.30%) AWS Engineer
13 92 (4.25%) Azure Engineer
14 79 (3.65%) Java Engineer
15 78 (3.60%) Python Developer
16 74 (3.42%) Site Engineer
17 70 (3.23%) AWS DevOps
18 66 (3.05%) Full-Stack Developer
19 61 (2.82%) Infrastructure Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 353 (16.31%) Kafka
2 318 (14.70%) Spring
3 267 (12.34%) Spring Boot
4 209 (9.66%) REST
5 191 (8.83%) RESTful
6 166 (7.67%) React
7 158 (7.30%) Node.js
8 129 (5.96%) OpenTelemetry
9 114 (5.27%) AngularJS
10 101 (4.67%) .NET
11 98 (4.53%) Elastic Stack
12 74 (3.42%) OAuth
13 71 (3.28%) PyTorch
14 69 (3.19%) gRPC
15 59 (2.73%) FastAPI
16 57 (2.63%) OpenID
17 56 (2.59%) RabbitMQ
18 54 (2.50%) GraphQL
19 53 (2.45%) TensorFlow
20 51 (2.36%) JSON
Miscellaneous
1 436 (20.15%) Cloud Native
2 183 (8.46%) Distributed Systems
3 88 (4.07%) Hybrid Cloud
4 62 (2.87%) Product Ownership
5 60 (2.77%) Onboarding
6 57 (2.63%) Public Cloud
7 39 (1.80%) Enterprise Software
8 38 (1.76%) Data Centre
9 37 (1.71%) Data Protection Act
10 36 (1.66%) Private Cloud
11 34 (1.57%) AI Agents
11 34 (1.57%) Management Information System
12 31 (1.43%) Legacy Systems
12 31 (1.43%) Security Posture
13 30 (1.39%) PKI
14 25 (1.16%) Greenfield Project
15 22 (1.02%) Virtual Team
16 21 (0.97%) Enterprise Storage
17 20 (0.92%) Replication
18 19 (0.88%) Fixed Income
Operating Systems
1 385 (17.79%) Linux
2 117 (5.41%) Windows
3 59 (2.73%) Unix
4 55 (2.54%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 45 (2.08%) VMS
6 29 (1.34%) Windows Server
7 16 (0.74%) Ubuntu
8 7 (0.32%) Windows Server 2003
9 6 (0.28%) Data ONTAP
10 5 (0.23%) CoreOS
11 4 (0.18%) Apple iOS
11 4 (0.18%) CentOS
11 4 (0.18%) Rocky
11 4 (0.18%) Windows Server 2012
11 4 (0.18%) Windows Server 2019
12 3 (0.14%) Android
12 3 (0.14%) Debian
13 1 (0.046%) Windows Server 2016
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,416 (65.43%) CI/CD
2 1,156 (53.42%) DevOps
3 914 (42.24%) Containerisation
4 690 (31.89%) Agile
5 657 (30.36%) Infrastructure as Code
6 566 (26.16%) Microservices
7 439 (20.29%) Observability
8 431 (19.92%) Problem-Solving
9 350 (16.17%) Software Engineering
10 326 (15.06%) Test Automation
11 275 (12.71%) AI
12 238 (11.00%) Continuous Improvement
13 231 (10.67%) Platform Engineering
14 227 (10.49%) Migration
15 223 (10.30%) Site Reliability Engineering
16 221 (10.21%) Analytics
17 204 (9.43%) Data Pipeline
18 194 (8.96%) Scrum
19 190 (8.78%) DevSecOps
20 187 (8.64%) Machine Learning
Programming Languages
1 857 (39.60%) Python
2 556 (25.69%) Java
3 408 (18.85%) SQL
4 268 (12.38%) Bash
5 172 (7.95%) Go
6 155 (7.16%) JavaScript
7 145 (6.70%) PowerShell
8 131 (6.05%) TypeScript
9 99 (4.57%) C#
10 73 (3.37%) Bicep
11 54 (2.50%) Shell Script
12 42 (1.94%) Ruby
13 34 (1.57%) Scala
14 26 (1.20%) Kotlin
15 24 (1.11%) Rust
16 18 (0.83%) Groovy
17 16 (0.74%) C++
18 14 (0.65%) PHP
19 11 (0.51%) C
20 9 (0.42%) R
Qualifications
1 780 (36.04%) Security Cleared
2 640 (29.57%) SC Cleared
3 132 (6.10%) Degree
4 119 (5.50%) DV Cleared
5 111 (5.13%) Azure Certification
6 88 (4.07%) Computer Science Degree
7 81 (3.74%) AWS Certification
8 50 (2.31%) CISSP
9 49 (2.26%) BPSS Clearance
10 32 (1.48%) CISM
11 31 (1.43%) Master's Degree
12 28 (1.29%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 23 (1.06%) Cisco Certification
14 22 (1.02%) Microsoft Certification
15 19 (0.88%) OCP
15 19 (0.88%) Oracle Certification
16 16 (0.74%) TOGAF Certification
17 14 (0.65%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
17 14 (0.65%) CCSP
18 13 (0.60%) (ISC)2 CCSP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 121 (5.59%) QA
2 81 (3.74%) Data Quality
3 73 (3.37%) NIST
4 64 (2.96%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 59 (2.73%) GDPR
6 46 (2.13%) Accessibility
7 45 (2.08%) NCSC
8 33 (1.52%) PCI DSS
9 20 (0.92%) WCAG
10 18 (0.83%) ISO 20022
11 16 (0.74%) NIST 800
12 15 (0.69%) PSD2
13 12 (0.55%) Cyber Essentials
13 12 (0.55%) Sarbanes-Oxley
14 11 (0.51%) SEPA
15 9 (0.42%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
15 9 (0.42%) GRC
15 9 (0.42%) HIPAA
15 9 (0.42%) SLA
16 8 (0.37%) ISO/IEC 27002 (supersedes ISO/IEC 17799)
System Software
1 1,259 (58.18%) Docker
2 73 (3.37%) VMware Infrastructure
3 54 (2.50%) vSphere
4 47 (2.17%) Virtual Machines
5 44 (2.03%) Active Directory
6 31 (1.43%) VMware NSX
7 23 (1.06%) Slurm Workload Manager
8 21 (0.97%) Hyper-V
9 15 (0.69%) NFS
10 11 (0.51%) Squid
10 11 (0.51%) VMware ESXi
11 8 (0.37%) Lustre
12 7 (0.32%) BitLocker
12 7 (0.32%) Microsoft App-V
12 7 (0.32%) Virtual Desktop
13 6 (0.28%) GPFS
14 5 (0.23%) etcd
14 5 (0.23%) Snort
15 4 (0.18%) Ceph
15 4 (0.18%) Firmware
Systems Management
1 814 (37.62%) Terraform
2 351 (16.22%) Ansible
3 341 (15.76%) Grafana
4 315 (14.56%) Prometheus
5 133 (6.15%) Argo
6 59 (2.73%) Istio
7 50 (2.31%) Puppet
8 39 (1.80%) Progress Chef
9 38 (1.76%) Kibana
10 36 (1.66%) vCenter Server
11 28 (1.29%) Packer
12 25 (1.16%) Podman
12 25 (1.16%) Single Sign-On
13 23 (1.06%) Consul
13 23 (1.06%) Nessus
13 23 (1.06%) Rancher
14 13 (0.60%) Control-M
14 13 (0.60%) Fluentd
14 13 (0.60%) IBM Guardium
14 13 (0.60%) linkerd
Vendors
1 254 (11.74%) Microsoft
2 176 (8.13%) Splunk
3 155 (7.16%) Red Hat
4 147 (6.79%) Google
5 117 (5.41%) Oracle
6 105 (4.85%) VMware
7 63 (2.91%) Databricks
8 62 (2.87%) Dynatrace
9 48 (2.22%) OpenAI
10 35 (1.62%) Talend
11 34 (1.57%) Denodo
12 33 (1.52%) Pure Storage
13 25 (1.16%) IBM
14 23 (1.06%) AppDynamics
15 22 (1.02%) Atlassian
16 21 (0.97%) Tenable
17 20 (0.92%) NetApp
18 19 (0.88%) Foundry
19 18 (0.83%) ServiceNow
20 17 (0.79%) CyberArk