Kubernetes Contract Job Trends in the North West

Kubernetes (k8s)
England > North West

The table below provides summary statistics and contractor rates for jobs advertised in the North West requiring Kubernetes skills. It covers contract job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 23 September 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
23 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 50 39 54
Rank change year-on-year -11 +15 -8
Contract jobs citing Kubernetes 152 111 71
As % of all contract jobs in the North West 3.90% 5.15% 3.04%
As % of the Systems Management category 32.14% 37.88% 32.42%
Number of daily rates quoted 99 90 40
10th Percentile £413 £315 £354
25th Percentile £480 £382 £400
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £560 £475 £550
Median % change year-on-year +17.89% -13.64% -
75th Percentile £626 £575 £607
90th Percentile £710 £650 £680
England median daily rate £549 £530 £575
% change year-on-year +3.58% -7.83% -4.17%
Number of hourly rates quoted 6 2 2
10th Percentile £75.50 £75.65 -
25th Percentile £76.25 £78.88 -
Median hourly rate £77.00 £87.00 £46.18
Median % change year-on-year -11.49% +88.39% -
75th Percentile - £92.38 -
90th Percentile £86.00 £93.95 -
England median hourly rate £70.00 £67.00 £55.00
% change year-on-year +4.48% +21.82% -24.14%

All Systems Management Skills
North West

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 West.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for systems management skills 473 293 219
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the North West 12.13% 13.58% 9.36%
Number of daily rates quoted 340 204 137
10th Percentile £255 £251 £200
25th Percentile £380 £335 £313
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £481 £450 £450
Median % change year-on-year +6.89% - -7.02%
75th Percentile £575 £538 £565
90th Percentile £640 £645 £622
England median daily rate £525 £500 £525
% change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 11 15 7
10th Percentile £34.49 £15.50 £28.20
25th Percentile £56.69 £18.12 £37.84
Median hourly rate £75.00 £20.00 £46.18
Median % change year-on-year +275.00% -56.69% -
75th Percentile £77.00 £63.58 £68.13
90th Percentile - £77.60 £94.10
England median hourly rate £67.00 £33.39 £43.09
% change year-on-year +100.69% -22.52% -17.92%

Kubernetes
Job Vacancy Trend in the North West

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

Kubernetes job vacancy trend in the North West

Kubernetes
Daily Rate Trend in the North West

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

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

Kubernetes
Daily Rate Histogram in the North West

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Kubernetes in the North West over the 6 months to 23 September 2026.

Daily rate histogram for Kubernetes in the North West

Kubernetes
Hourly Rate Trend in the North West

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

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

Kubernetes
Hourly Rate Histogram in the North West

Hourly rate distribution of jobs citing Kubernetes in the North West over the 6 months to 23 September 2026.

Hourly rate histogram for Kubernetes in the North West

Kubernetes
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 Kubernetes within the North West region over the 6 months to 23 September 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
Manchester -5 110 £560 +12.00% 173
Cheshire -18 26 £600 +37.14% 17
Lancashire - 9 £712 - 20
Cumbria - 3 £525 - 1
Merseyside -20 1 £575 +12.75% 7
Kubernetes
England

Kubernetes
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:

Application Platforms
1 4 (2.63%) Tomcat
2 3 (1.97%) Apache Airflow
2 3 (1.97%) OpenStack
3 2 (1.32%) Apache
3 2 (1.32%) Apache Spark
4 1 (0.66%) Confluence
4 1 (0.66%) nginx
4 1 (0.66%) Traefik
Business Applications
1 1 (0.66%) FIS Private Capital Suite
1 1 (0.66%) SAP S/4HANA
Cloud Services
1 100 (65.79%) AWS
2 75 (49.34%) Azure
3 44 (28.95%) GCP
4 23 (15.13%) AWS CloudFormation
5 21 (13.82%) Azure DevOps
6 20 (13.16%) Azure AKS
7 18 (11.84%) GitHub
8 16 (10.53%) Google Kubernetes Engine
8 16 (10.53%) Serverless
9 15 (9.87%) Amazon EKS
9 15 (9.87%) GitHub Actions
10 12 (7.89%) Amazon ECS
11 10 (6.58%) Amazon CloudWatch
11 10 (6.58%) AWS Lambda
12 9 (5.92%) OpenShift
12 9 (5.92%) Virtual Private Cloud
13 8 (5.26%) Azure Sentinel
14 7 (4.61%) Entra ID
15 6 (3.95%) Anthropic Claude
15 6 (3.95%) Google Gemini
Communications & Networking
1 15 (9.87%) Firewall
2 8 (5.26%) Network Security
3 5 (3.29%) HTTP
4 3 (1.97%) DNS
5 2 (1.32%) SSL
5 2 (1.32%) TCP/IP
5 2 (1.32%) VPN
6 1 (0.66%) BGP
6 1 (0.66%) Cisco Nexus
6 1 (0.66%) DHCP
6 1 (0.66%) Ethernet VPN
6 1 (0.66%) MPLS
6 1 (0.66%) OSPF
6 1 (0.66%) SD-WAN
6 1 (0.66%) Software-Defined Networking
6 1 (0.66%) VXLAN
6 1 (0.66%) WAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 10 (6.58%) NoSQL
1 10 (6.58%) PostgreSQL
2 8 (5.26%) MySQL
3 7 (4.61%) Relational Database
4 6 (3.95%) SQL Server
5 4 (2.63%) DynamoDB
6 3 (1.97%) MongoDB
7 2 (1.32%) Data Lake
7 2 (1.32%) DocumentDB
8 1 (0.66%) Amazon Redshift
8 1 (0.66%) Apache Cassandra
8 1 (0.66%) BigQuery
8 1 (0.66%) Data Warehouse
8 1 (0.66%) Flink
8 1 (0.66%) RDBMS
8 1 (0.66%) SAP HANA
8 1 (0.66%) Semantic Layer
8 1 (0.66%) Snowflake Schema
8 1 (0.66%) SQL Server Integration Services
Development Applications
1 26 (17.11%) Git
2 22 (14.47%) GitLab
3 18 (11.84%) Jenkins
4 8 (5.26%) JUnit
5 7 (4.61%) SonarQube
6 6 (3.95%) Claude Code
6 6 (3.95%) Sonatype Nexus
7 5 (3.29%) Cucumber
7 5 (3.29%) Mockito
8 4 (2.63%) Bitbucket
8 4 (2.63%) Gradle
8 4 (2.63%) Postman
8 4 (2.63%) Selenium
9 2 (1.32%) Burp Suite
9 2 (1.32%) Gatling
9 2 (1.32%) JIRA
9 2 (1.32%) LoadRunner
9 2 (1.32%) Maven
9 2 (1.32%) REST Assured
10 1 (0.66%) Cypress.io
General
1 36 (23.68%) Finance
2 25 (16.45%) Social Skills
3 13 (8.55%) Public Sector
4 9 (5.92%) Banking
5 8 (5.26%) Analytical Skills
6 7 (4.61%) Retail
7 4 (2.63%) Military
8 3 (1.97%) Health Technology
9 1 (0.66%) Billing
9 1 (0.66%) Police
9 1 (0.66%) Publishing
Job Titles
1 33 (21.71%) DevOps Engineer
2 27 (17.76%) Security Engineer
3 26 (17.11%) Senior
4 24 (15.79%) Software Engineer
5 22 (14.47%) Cloud Engineer
6 19 (12.50%) Lead
7 18 (11.84%) Java Engineer
8 16 (10.53%) Developer
8 16 (10.53%) Java Software Engineer
9 15 (9.87%) Cloud Security Engineer
10 14 (9.21%) Architect
11 11 (7.24%) AWS Engineer
12 9 (5.92%) Azure Engineer
13 8 (5.26%) Full-Stack Developer
13 8 (5.26%) Kubernetes Engineer
13 8 (5.26%) Lead Developer
13 8 (5.26%) Solutions Architect
14 7 (4.61%) Azure DevOps Engineer
14 7 (4.61%) Senior DevOps
14 7 (4.61%) Senior DevOps Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 73 (48.03%) Terraform
2 34 (22.37%) Spring
3 29 (19.08%) REST
4 28 (18.42%) Kafka
4 28 (18.42%) Spring Boot
5 20 (13.16%) Node.js
5 20 (13.16%) React
6 10 (6.58%) Next.js
7 9 (5.92%) RESTful
8 8 (5.26%) Spring MVC
9 5 (3.29%) ARM Templates
9 5 (3.29%) Azure Blueprints
10 4 (2.63%) AngularJS
10 4 (2.63%) GraphQL
10 4 (2.63%) Hibernate
10 4 (2.63%) Nunjucks
10 4 (2.63%) Spring Security
11 3 (1.97%) Express.js
11 3 (1.97%) Vue
11 3 (1.97%) Web Services
Miscellaneous
1 65 (42.76%) Cloud Native
2 23 (15.13%) Security Posture
3 22 (14.47%) Distributed Systems
4 11 (7.24%) Enterprise Cloud
4 11 (7.24%) Management Information System
5 7 (4.61%) Cloud Security Posture
5 7 (4.61%) Data Protection Act
6 6 (3.95%) AI Agents
6 6 (3.95%) Onboarding
6 6 (3.95%) Public Cloud
7 5 (3.29%) Private Cloud
8 4 (2.63%) Legacy Systems
8 4 (2.63%) Linux Command Line
8 4 (2.63%) PKI
9 3 (1.97%) Enterprise Software
9 3 (1.97%) Greenfield Project
9 3 (1.97%) Hybrid Cloud
9 3 (1.97%) NHS
9 3 (1.97%) Replication
9 3 (1.97%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 34 (22.37%) Linux
2 19 (12.50%) Windows
3 18 (11.84%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 3 (1.97%) Windows Server
5 2 (1.32%) Unix
6 1 (0.66%) CentOS
Processes & Methodologies
1 117 (76.97%) CI/CD
2 90 (59.21%) DevOps
3 66 (43.42%) Infrastructure as Code
4 59 (38.82%) Agile
5 58 (38.16%) Observability
6 44 (28.95%) Software Engineering
7 43 (28.29%) Containerisation
7 43 (28.29%) Microservices
8 37 (24.34%) Cloud Security
9 32 (21.05%) Event-Driven
10 31 (20.39%) Test Automation
11 30 (19.74%) Event-Driven Architecture
11 30 (19.74%) Infrastructure Automation
12 28 (18.42%) AI
13 26 (17.11%) Scrum
14 21 (13.82%) Change Management
14 21 (13.82%) Continuous Improvement
14 21 (13.82%) Platform Engineering
15 18 (11.84%) DevSecOps
15 18 (11.84%) Technical Leadership
Programming Languages
1 72 (47.37%) Java
2 53 (34.87%) Python
3 32 (21.05%) Bash
4 29 (19.08%) PowerShell
5 22 (14.47%) Bicep
6 16 (10.53%) SQL
6 16 (10.53%) TypeScript
7 12 (7.89%) JavaScript
8 9 (5.92%) Kotlin
9 3 (1.97%) Go
10 2 (1.32%) Shell Script
Qualifications
1 32 (21.05%) Security Cleared
2 29 (19.08%) SC Cleared
3 20 (13.16%) Azure Certification
4 18 (11.84%) AWS Certification
4 18 (11.84%) Degree
5 15 (9.87%) CISSP
6 5 (3.29%) BPSS Clearance
6 5 (3.29%) Microsoft Certification
7 2 (1.32%) Microsoft Certified Professional
8 1 (0.66%) CCIE
8 1 (0.66%) CCNP
8 1 (0.66%) Cisco Certification
8 1 (0.66%) DV Cleared
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 7 (4.61%) QA
2 6 (3.95%) GDPR
3 4 (2.63%) Data Quality
4 3 (1.97%) Accessibility
5 2 (1.32%) Sarbanes-Oxley
6 1 (0.66%) California Consumer Privacy Act
6 1 (0.66%) HIPAA
6 1 (0.66%) NCSC
6 1 (0.66%) NIST
6 1 (0.66%) SLA
6 1 (0.66%) Software Quality Assurance
System Software
1 87 (57.24%) Docker
2 6 (3.95%) Active Directory
3 3 (1.97%) Ceph
3 3 (1.97%) KVM
4 2 (1.32%) Apache ZooKeeper
5 1 (0.66%) VMware Infrastructure
5 1 (0.66%) VMware NSX
Systems Management
1 18 (11.84%) Ansible
2 15 (9.87%) Progress Chef
3 14 (9.21%) Grafana
4 11 (7.24%) Prometheus
5 6 (3.95%) Istio
6 4 (2.63%) Argo
7 2 (1.32%) Packer
8 1 (0.66%) Consul
8 1 (0.66%) HAProxy
8 1 (0.66%) Jamf Pro
8 1 (0.66%) Kibana
8 1 (0.66%) linkerd
8 1 (0.66%) Puppet
8 1 (0.66%) Rancher
8 1 (0.66%) Single Sign-On
8 1 (0.66%) ZABBIX
Vendors
1 18 (11.84%) Google
1 18 (11.84%) Microsoft
1 18 (11.84%) Red Hat
2 6 (3.95%) Dynatrace
3 4 (2.63%) Oracle
3 4 (2.63%) ServiceNow
4 3 (1.97%) Splunk
5 2 (1.32%) Cisco
5 2 (1.32%) Confluent
5 2 (1.32%) OpenAI
5 2 (1.32%) Palo Alto
5 2 (1.32%) SAP
6 1 (0.66%) CyberArk
6 1 (0.66%) Databricks
6 1 (0.66%) ESET
6 1 (0.66%) Fortinet
6 1 (0.66%) Okta
6 1 (0.66%) Tanium
6 1 (0.66%) Tenable
6 1 (0.66%) Varonis