Kubernetes Contract Job Trends in the North of England

Kubernetes (k8s)
England > North of England

The table below provides summary statistics and contractor rates for jobs advertised in the North of England requiring Kubernetes skills. It covers contract job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 13 December 2025, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
13 Dec 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 23 34 45
Rank change year-on-year +11 +11 -14
Contract jobs citing Kubernetes 365 199 192
As % of all contract jobs in the North of England 7.92% 5.25% 4.05%
As % of the Systems Management category 40.24% 33.28% 28.19%
Number of daily rates quoted 266 128 136
10th Percentile £352 £357 £425
25th Percentile £407 £400 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £487 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -7.19% - -12.50%
75th Percentile £575 £622 £605
90th Percentile £647 £738 £688
England median daily rate £525 £600 £580
% change year-on-year -12.50% +3.45% -7.20%
Number of hourly rates quoted 5 5 25
10th Percentile £47.20 - -
25th Percentile £51.25 - -
Median hourly rate £55.00 £46.18 £46.18
Median % change year-on-year +19.10% - -28.12%
75th Percentile - - -
90th Percentile £66.56 £59.38 £63.05
England median hourly rate £67.00 £51.84 £62.50
% change year-on-year +29.24% -17.06% -10.71%

All Systems Management Skills
North of 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 the North of England.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for systems management skills 907 598 681
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the North of England 19.67% 15.79% 14.38%
Number of daily rates quoted 633 342 488
10th Percentile £298 £250 £270
25th Percentile £385 £400 £400
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £482 £500 £500
Median % change year-on-year -3.60% - -9.09%
75th Percentile £550 £588 £586
90th Percentile £638 £656 £652
England median daily rate £513 £531 £550
% change year-on-year -3.39% -3.55% -6.38%
Number of hourly rates quoted 24 13 48
10th Percentile £15.50 £21.67 £17.74
25th Percentile £16.91 £24.18 £20.94
Median hourly rate £21.30 £46.18 £46.18
Median % change year-on-year -53.88% - +77.62%
75th Percentile £55.00 - £48.59
90th Percentile £74.26 £75.64 £75.46
England median hourly rate £39.50 £32.50 £46.18
% change year-on-year +21.54% -29.62% +34.83%

Kubernetes
Job Vacancy Trend in the North of England

Historical trend showing the proportion of contract IT job postings citing Kubernetes relative to all contract IT jobs advertised in the North of England.

Kubernetes job vacancy trend in the North of England

Kubernetes
Daily Rate Trend in the North of England

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the North of England citing Kubernetes.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the North of England citing Kubernetes

Kubernetes
Daily Rate Histogram in the North of England

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Kubernetes in the North of England over the 6 months to 13 December 2025.

Daily rate histogram for Kubernetes in the North of England

Kubernetes
Hourly Rate Trend in the North of England

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the North of England citing Kubernetes.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the North of England citing Kubernetes

Kubernetes
Hourly Rate Histogram in the North of England

Hourly rate distribution of jobs citing Kubernetes in the North of England over the 6 months to 13 December 2025.

Hourly rate histogram for Kubernetes in the North of England

Kubernetes
Contract Job Locations in the North of 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 North of England region over the 6 months to 13 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
Yorkshire +4 179 £487 -3.80% 76
North West +22 148 £475 -13.64% 101
North East +3 40 £548 +6.31% 17
Kubernetes
England

Kubernetes
Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities in the North of 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 17 (4.66%) Confluence
2 8 (2.19%) Apache Airflow
3 7 (1.92%) Mule
4 6 (1.64%) OpenStack
5 5 (1.37%) Apache Spark
6 4 (1.10%) JBoss
6 4 (1.10%) Tomcat
7 2 (0.55%) Apache
7 2 (0.55%) CICS
7 2 (0.55%) Mule ESB
7 2 (0.55%) WebSphere
8 1 (0.27%) Anypoint
8 1 (0.27%) IIS
8 1 (0.27%) SharePoint
8 1 (0.27%) WebLogic
8 1 (0.27%) WebSphere Application Server
Applications
1 3 (0.82%) Microsoft Project
2 1 (0.27%) Microsoft Excel
Business Applications
1 1 (0.27%) Finacle
Cloud Services
1 216 (59.18%) AWS
2 133 (36.44%) GCP
3 128 (35.07%) Azure
4 76 (20.82%) OpenShift
5 71 (19.45%) Serverless
6 64 (17.53%) GitHub
7 36 (9.86%) AWS Lambda
8 35 (9.59%) AWS CloudFormation
9 33 (9.04%) GitHub Actions
10 30 (8.22%) Amazon CloudWatch
11 29 (7.95%) Amazon ECS
12 28 (7.67%) Azure DevOps
13 24 (6.58%) Azure AKS
13 24 (6.58%) SaaS
14 21 (5.75%) Amazon EKS
15 20 (5.48%) Amazon EC2
16 17 (4.66%) PaaS
17 16 (4.38%) Amazon S3
17 16 (4.38%) Datadog
18 13 (3.56%) Apigee
Communications & Networking
1 26 (7.12%) Firewall
2 6 (1.64%) Network Security
3 5 (1.37%) Fibre Channel
3 5 (1.37%) HTTP
3 5 (1.37%) iSCSI
3 5 (1.37%) NAS
3 5 (1.37%) SAN
3 5 (1.37%) VLAN
3 5 (1.37%) VPN
4 4 (1.10%) HTTPS
5 3 (0.82%) BGP
5 3 (0.82%) DNS
5 3 (0.82%) Software-Defined Networking
5 3 (0.82%) SSL
5 3 (0.82%) TCP/IP
6 2 (0.55%) X.509
7 1 (0.27%) BIG-IP
7 1 (0.27%) Cisco Nexus
7 1 (0.27%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
7 1 (0.27%) Wi-Fi
Database & Business Intelligence
1 62 (16.99%) PostgreSQL
2 58 (15.89%) NoSQL
3 27 (7.40%) Relational Database
4 17 (4.66%) Amazon RDS
5 16 (4.38%) MySQL
6 13 (3.56%) MongoDB
7 12 (3.29%) DynamoDB
8 9 (2.47%) Redis
9 8 (2.19%) BigQuery
9 8 (2.19%) RDBMS
10 6 (1.64%) Amazon Aurora
10 6 (1.64%) Big Data
11 4 (1.10%) Data Lake
11 4 (1.10%) Metadata
12 3 (0.82%) Apache Cassandra
12 3 (0.82%) Elasticsearch
12 3 (0.82%) SQL Server
13 2 (0.55%) Amazon Redshift
13 2 (0.55%) Power BI
13 2 (0.55%) Tableau
Development Applications
1 125 (34.25%) Jenkins
2 94 (25.75%) GitLab
3 70 (19.18%) Git
4 51 (13.97%) JIRA
5 25 (6.85%) Liquibase
6 19 (5.21%) SonarQube
7 16 (4.38%) Sonatype Nexus
8 9 (2.47%) Bitbucket
8 9 (2.47%) Postman
9 7 (1.92%) CircleCI
9 7 (1.92%) Maven
10 6 (1.64%) Gradle
10 6 (1.64%) JUnit
11 5 (1.37%) MLflow
11 5 (1.37%) SonarLint
12 4 (1.10%) Artifactory
12 4 (1.10%) Snyk
13 3 (0.82%) Mocha
13 3 (0.82%) Mockito
13 3 (0.82%) TeamCity
General
1 105 (28.77%) Social Skills
2 82 (22.47%) Finance
3 66 (18.08%) Banking
4 64 (17.53%) Public Sector
5 31 (8.49%) Analytical Skills
6 28 (7.67%) Financial Institution
7 7 (1.92%) Documentation Skills
8 4 (1.10%) Games
9 2 (0.55%) Health Technology
9 2 (0.55%) Presentation Skills
10 1 (0.27%) Aerospace
10 1 (0.27%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 1 (0.27%) Influencing Skills
10 1 (0.27%) Local Government
10 1 (0.27%) Manufacturing
10 1 (0.27%) Military
10 1 (0.27%) Private Banking
10 1 (0.27%) Telecoms
10 1 (0.27%) Wholesale Banking
Job Titles
1 73 (20.00%) Developer
2 51 (13.97%) DevOps Engineer
3 46 (12.60%) Software Engineer
4 41 (11.23%) Senior
5 34 (9.32%) Architect
6 30 (8.22%) AWS Engineer
7 29 (7.95%) Java Developer
8 22 (6.03%) Cloud Engineer
9 21 (5.75%) AWS DevOps
10 19 (5.21%) Platform Engineer
11 17 (4.66%) AWS DevOps Engineer
12 16 (4.38%) GCP Engineer
12 16 (4.38%) Senior Software Engineer
12 16 (4.38%) Technical Architect
13 15 (4.11%) Lead
14 13 (3.56%) Python Developer
15 12 (3.29%) Data Engineer
16 11 (3.01%) Security Engineer
16 11 (3.01%) Senior DevOps
17 10 (2.74%) Senior Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 77 (21.10%) RESTful
2 56 (15.34%) REST
3 52 (14.25%) Spring Boot
4 51 (13.97%) Elastic Stack
5 45 (12.33%) Spring
6 36 (9.86%) Node.js
7 31 (8.49%) AngularJS
8 30 (8.22%) React
9 28 (7.67%) Kafka
10 18 (4.93%) JSON
11 17 (4.66%) FastAPI
12 14 (3.84%) OAuth
13 13 (3.56%) Flask
14 12 (3.29%) GraphQL
14 12 (3.29%) OAuth2
14 12 (3.29%) OpenTelemetry
15 11 (3.01%) Hibernate
15 11 (3.01%) JWT
16 10 (2.74%) HTML
16 10 (2.74%) JMS
Miscellaneous
1 80 (21.92%) Cloud Native
2 38 (10.41%) Distributed Systems
3 34 (9.32%) Public Cloud
4 20 (5.48%) Onboarding
5 19 (5.21%) Product Ownership
6 16 (4.38%) Hybrid Cloud
7 10 (2.74%) Data Protection Act
7 10 (2.74%) NHS
8 9 (2.47%) SWIFT Messaging Network
9 8 (2.19%) Enterprise Software
9 8 (2.19%) PKI
9 8 (2.19%) Replication
10 6 (1.64%) Enterprise Storage
10 6 (1.64%) N-Tier
11 5 (1.37%) Distributed Applications
12 4 (1.10%) Algorithms
12 4 (1.10%) Data Structures
12 4 (1.10%) Private Cloud
13 3 (0.82%) Analytical Mindset
13 3 (0.82%) Data Centre
Operating Systems
1 104 (28.49%) Linux
2 24 (6.58%) Windows
3 12 (3.29%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 6 (1.64%) Unix
5 3 (0.82%) Windows Server
6 2 (0.55%) Solaris
6 2 (0.55%) VMS
6 2 (0.55%) zOS
7 1 (0.27%) CentOS
7 1 (0.27%) MVS
7 1 (0.27%) Ubuntu
Processes & Methodologies
1 254 (69.59%) CI/CD
2 208 (56.99%) DevOps
3 198 (54.25%) Containerisation
4 143 (39.18%) Agile
5 137 (37.53%) Infrastructure as Code
6 110 (30.14%) Microservices
7 74 (20.27%) Problem-Solving
8 72 (19.73%) Software Engineering
9 57 (15.62%) Observability
10 56 (15.34%) Test Automation
11 46 (12.60%) Continuous Integration
12 45 (12.33%) Migration
13 43 (11.78%) High Availability
14 41 (11.23%) Infrastructure Automation
15 40 (10.96%) Change Management
16 39 (10.68%) Computer Science
17 37 (10.14%) Cybersecurity
18 35 (9.59%) Continuous Delivery
19 34 (9.32%) Root Cause Analysis
20 33 (9.04%) API Development
Programming Languages
1 197 (53.97%) Python
2 100 (27.40%) Java
3 71 (19.45%) Bash
4 44 (12.05%) Go
5 38 (10.41%) SQL
6 18 (4.93%) TypeScript
7 15 (4.11%) JavaScript
7 15 (4.11%) PHP
8 12 (3.29%) PowerShell
9 11 (3.01%) C#
10 9 (2.47%) Perl
11 8 (2.19%) C++
12 7 (1.92%) Bicep
13 6 (1.64%) Groovy
14 5 (1.37%) Ruby
14 5 (1.37%) Shell Script
15 4 (1.10%) C
16 3 (0.82%) PL/SQL
17 2 (0.55%) Scala
18 1 (0.27%) Clojure
Qualifications
1 77 (21.10%) Security Cleared
2 55 (15.07%) SC Cleared
3 44 (12.05%) Degree
4 39 (10.68%) Computer Science Degree
5 30 (8.22%) Master's Degree
6 24 (6.58%) AWS Certification
7 16 (4.38%) CISSP
8 13 (3.56%) CISM
9 10 (2.74%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
10 8 (2.19%) Azure Certification
11 7 (1.92%) BPSS Clearance
12 6 (1.64%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
13 3 (0.82%) (ISC)2 CCSP
13 3 (0.82%) AWS Certified Developer
13 3 (0.82%) CHECK Team Member
13 3 (0.82%) Cisco Certification
13 3 (0.82%) CREST Certified
13 3 (0.82%) DV Cleared
13 3 (0.82%) PMI Certification
13 3 (0.82%) PMP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 27 (7.40%) QA
2 11 (3.01%) PSD2
3 9 (2.47%) Accessibility
3 9 (2.47%) ISO 20022
3 9 (2.47%) ISO/IEC 27001
3 9 (2.47%) SEPA
4 8 (2.19%) NIST
5 5 (1.37%) Data Quality
5 5 (1.37%) PCI DSS
6 4 (1.10%) GDPR
7 2 (0.55%) WCAG
8 1 (0.27%) HL7
System Software
1 215 (58.90%) Docker
2 13 (3.56%) Active Directory
2 13 (3.56%) VMware Infrastructure
3 10 (2.74%) vSphere
4 7 (1.92%) Virtual Machines
5 5 (1.37%) KVM
5 5 (1.37%) NFS
6 4 (1.10%) Hyper-V
7 2 (0.55%) Virtual Servers
7 2 (0.55%) VMware NSX
8 1 (0.27%) Ceph
8 1 (0.27%) QEMU
8 1 (0.27%) SRDF
8 1 (0.27%) Veritas Cluster Server
8 1 (0.27%) Xen
Systems Management
1 175 (47.95%) Terraform
2 88 (24.11%) Grafana
3 87 (23.84%) Ansible
4 73 (20.00%) Prometheus
5 16 (4.38%) Argo
6 13 (3.56%) Istio
7 10 (2.74%) Control-M
7 10 (2.74%) IBM Guardium
7 10 (2.74%) Nessus
8 9 (2.47%) Progress Chef
8 9 (2.47%) Single Sign-On
9 6 (1.64%) Puppet
10 5 (1.37%) Fluentd
11 4 (1.10%) Kibana
11 4 (1.10%) Podman
12 3 (0.82%) SELinux
13 1 (0.27%) Docker Swarm
13 1 (0.27%) logstash
13 1 (0.27%) Packer
13 1 (0.27%) vCenter Server
Vendors
1 55 (15.07%) Splunk
2 36 (9.86%) Google
3 35 (9.59%) Microsoft
4 30 (8.22%) Oracle
5 26 (7.12%) Red Hat
6 17 (4.66%) AppDynamics
7 15 (4.11%) VMware
8 10 (2.74%) Tenable
9 9 (2.47%) Dynatrace
10 8 (2.19%) Alibaba
11 7 (1.92%) Cribl.io
11 7 (1.92%) F5
12 6 (1.64%) EMC
12 6 (1.64%) Gigya
12 6 (1.64%) IBM
12 6 (1.64%) NetApp
13 5 (1.37%) Checkmarx
14 4 (1.10%) Confluent
14 4 (1.10%) Databricks
14 4 (1.10%) Palo Alto