Azure AKS Contract Job Trends in the North West

Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)
England > North West

The table below provides summary statistics and contractor rates for jobs advertised in the North West requiring Azure AKS skills. It covers contract job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 19 December 2025, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
19 Dec 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 140 116 113
Rank change year-on-year -24 -3 +59
Contract jobs citing Azure AKS 9 7 26
As % of all contract jobs in the North West 0.36% 0.32% 0.99%
As % of the Cloud Services category 1.04% 1.03% 2.69%
Number of daily rates quoted 4 4 25
10th Percentile £338 £568 £410
25th Percentile £378 £669 £475
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £455 £763 £525
Median % change year-on-year -40.33% +45.24% -4.55%
75th Percentile £510 £813 £575
90th Percentile - - £663
England median daily rate £520 £575 £550
% change year-on-year -9.57% +4.55% -10.57%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2 0 0
10th Percentile - - -
25th Percentile £39.53 - -
Median hourly rate £42.69 - -
75th Percentile £45.84 - -
90th Percentile - - -
England median hourly rate £42.69 - -

All Cloud Skills
North West

Azure AKS falls under the Cloud Services category. For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all contract job vacancies requiring cloud computing skills in the North West.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for cloud computing skills 867 677 966
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the North West 34.62% 31.24% 36.73%
Number of daily rates quoted 653 442 723
10th Percentile £222 £250 £265
25th Percentile £360 £375 £386
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £448 £475 £500
Median % change year-on-year -5.79% -5.00% -
75th Percentile £543 £575 £575
90th Percentile £638 £650 £650
England median daily rate £500 £536 £525
% change year-on-year -6.76% +2.14% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 37 14 51
10th Percentile £15.50 £18.52 £15.75
25th Percentile £18.87 £21.83 £17.72
Median hourly rate £40.00 £30.00 £23.61
Median % change year-on-year +33.33% +27.06% -32.54%
75th Percentile £69.25 £55.05 £46.18
90th Percentile £72.37 £75.18 £52.00
England median hourly rate £27.21 £30.00 £23.24
% change year-on-year -9.30% +29.09% +3.29%

Azure AKS
Job Vacancy Trend in the North West

Historical trend showing the proportion of contract IT job postings citing Azure AKS relative to all contract IT jobs advertised in the North West.

Azure AKS job vacancy trend in the North West

Azure AKS
Daily Rate Trend in the North West

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the North West citing Azure AKS.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the North West citing Azure AKS

Azure AKS
Daily Rate Histogram in the North West

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Azure AKS in the North West over the 6 months to 19 December 2025.

Daily rate histogram for Azure AKS in the North West

Azure AKS
Contract Job Locations in the North West

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing Azure AKS within the North West region over the 6 months to 19 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
Merseyside -4 4 £510 +2.00% 1
Manchester -18 3 £361 -53.39% 1
Lancashire - 2 - - 1
Azure AKS
England

Azure AKS
Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities in the North West 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:

Cloud Services
1 7 (77.78%) Azure
2 5 (55.56%) Azure DevOps
3 1 (11.11%) Apigee
3 1 (11.11%) AWS
3 1 (11.11%) Azure Key Vault
3 1 (11.11%) Azure Monitor
3 1 (11.11%) Azure Storage
3 1 (11.11%) Entra ID
3 1 (11.11%) GCP
3 1 (11.11%) GitHub
3 1 (11.11%) GitHub Actions
3 1 (11.11%) Google Kubernetes Engine
3 1 (11.11%) Stackdriver
Database & Business Intelligence
1 1 (11.11%) NoSQL
Development Applications
1 4 (44.44%) JUnit
1 4 (44.44%) Postman
2 2 (22.22%) GitLab
3 1 (11.11%) Jenkins
3 1 (11.11%) Spinnaker
General
1 5 (55.56%) Public Sector
2 1 (11.11%) Finance
Job Titles
1 5 (55.56%) Developer
2 4 (44.44%) Java Developer
2 4 (44.44%) Senior
2 4 (44.44%) Senior Developer
2 4 (44.44%) Senior Java Developer
3 3 (33.33%) DevOps Engineer
4 2 (22.22%) Azure Engineer
5 1 (11.11%) Azure DevOps Engineer
5 1 (11.11%) Azure Platform Engineer
5 1 (11.11%) Cloud Engineer
5 1 (11.11%) Cloud Platform Engineer
5 1 (11.11%) Full-Stack Developer
5 1 (11.11%) GCP Engineer
5 1 (11.11%) Platform Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 5 (55.56%) AngularJS
1 5 (55.56%) React
1 5 (55.56%) Spring
1 5 (55.56%) Spring Boot
2 4 (44.44%) jQuery
2 4 (44.44%) JSON
2 4 (44.44%) POJO
2 4 (44.44%) RESTful
2 4 (44.44%) Thymeleaf
3 1 (11.11%) Hibernate
3 1 (11.11%) JPA
3 1 (11.11%) Kafka
3 1 (11.11%) Node.js
3 1 (11.11%) OpenAPI
3 1 (11.11%) REST
3 1 (11.11%) Swagger
Miscellaneous
1 4 (44.44%) Distributed Systems
2 1 (11.11%) Algorithms
2 1 (11.11%) Cloud Native
2 1 (11.11%) Data Structures
2 1 (11.11%) Onboarding
Processes & Methodologies
1 8 (88.89%) CI/CD
1 8 (88.89%) Containerisation
1 8 (88.89%) DevOps
2 5 (55.56%) Full-Stack Development
2 5 (55.56%) Microservices
3 4 (44.44%) API Development
3 4 (44.44%) MVC
3 4 (44.44%) Unit Testing
3 4 (44.44%) User Research
4 3 (33.33%) Infrastructure as Code
5 2 (22.22%) Observability
6 1 (11.11%) API Management
6 1 (11.11%) Clean Code
6 1 (11.11%) Design Patterns
6 1 (11.11%) Event-Driven
6 1 (11.11%) MLOps
6 1 (11.11%) Platform Engineering
6 1 (11.11%) RBAC
6 1 (11.11%) Roadmaps
6 1 (11.11%) Secrets Management
Programming Languages
1 5 (55.56%) Java
2 2 (22.22%) Bicep
3 1 (11.11%) Bash
3 1 (11.11%) C#
3 1 (11.11%) PowerShell
3 1 (11.11%) Python
3 1 (11.11%) SQL
Qualifications
1 1 (11.11%) Azure Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 4 (44.44%) Accessibility
System Software
1 7 (77.78%) Docker
Systems Management
1 6 (66.67%) Kubernetes
2 3 (33.33%) Terraform
3 1 (11.11%) Grafana
3 1 (11.11%) Istio
3 1 (11.11%) Prometheus
Vendors
1 1 (11.11%) Dynatrace
1 1 (11.11%) Microsoft
1 1 (11.11%) Virgin Media