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 15 December 2025, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
15 Dec 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 29 46 49
Rank change year-on-year +17 +3 -20
Contract jobs citing Kubernetes 156 78 102
As % of all contract jobs in the North West 6.35% 3.64% 3.87%
As % of the Systems Management category 39.20% 28.16% 24.76%
Number of daily rates quoted 120 43 64
10th Percentile £338 £356 £425
25th Percentile £378 £406 £472
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £484 £550 £525
Median % change year-on-year -12.09% +4.76% -10.52%
75th Percentile £611 £588 £645
90th Percentile £651 £675 £696
England median daily rate £525 £600 £575
% change year-on-year -12.50% +4.35% -8.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 6 3 22
10th Percentile - - -
25th Percentile £52.50 - -
Median hourly rate £56.25 £46.18 £46.18
Median % change year-on-year +21.81% - -12.87%
75th Percentile £67.81 £57.18 -
90th Percentile £72.13 £63.78 £61.99
England median hourly rate £67.00 £46.18 £62.25
% change year-on-year +45.08% -25.82% -11.07%

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 398 277 412
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the North West 16.19% 12.94% 15.62%
Number of daily rates quoted 273 145 281
10th Percentile £300 £250 £300
25th Percentile £355 £375 £406
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £450 £500 £500
Median % change year-on-year -10.00% - -4.76%
75th Percentile £575 £588 £582
90th Percentile £650 £656 £650
England median daily rate £513 £538 £550
% change year-on-year -4.65% -2.27% -6.38%
Number of hourly rates quoted 21 11 44
10th Percentile £15.50 £21.05 £17.73
25th Percentile £17.38 £24.18 £19.81
Median hourly rate £42.69 £43.00 £46.18
Median % change year-on-year -0.73% -6.89% -2.78%
75th Percentile £67.25 £57.18 £53.75
90th Percentile £74.26 £77.50 £78.00
England median hourly rate £47.50 £30.50 £46.18
% change year-on-year +55.74% -33.95% +31.94%

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 15 December 2025.

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 15 December 2025.

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 15 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
Manchester +9 86 £528 -4.09% 90
Cheshire +24 57 £404 +13.34% 55
Merseyside +3 6 £510 +70.00% 27
Lancashire -13 4 £550 +4.76% 33
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 8 (5.13%) Apache Airflow
2 5 (3.21%) OpenStack
3 4 (2.56%) JBoss
4 3 (1.92%) Confluence
5 2 (1.28%) Mule
5 2 (1.28%) Mule ESB
5 2 (1.28%) Tomcat
6 1 (0.64%) Anypoint
6 1 (0.64%) Apache Spark
6 1 (0.64%) IIS
6 1 (0.64%) WebLogic
Business Applications
1 1 (0.64%) Finacle
Cloud Services
1 98 (62.82%) AWS
2 53 (33.97%) Azure
3 41 (26.28%) GCP
4 30 (19.23%) GitHub
5 26 (16.67%) OpenShift
6 19 (12.18%) Amazon ECS
6 19 (12.18%) Serverless
7 18 (11.54%) AWS Lambda
8 16 (10.26%) Amazon CloudWatch
8 16 (10.26%) AWS CloudFormation
9 14 (8.97%) Amazon EC2
9 14 (8.97%) GitHub Actions
10 13 (8.33%) Datadog
11 11 (7.05%) Amazon SQS
11 11 (7.05%) Apigee
11 11 (7.05%) SaaS
12 10 (6.41%) PaaS
13 8 (5.13%) Amazon EKS
13 8 (5.13%) Azure DevOps
14 6 (3.85%) Azure AKS
Communications & Networking
1 19 (12.18%) Firewall
2 4 (2.56%) HTTP
2 4 (2.56%) HTTPS
2 4 (2.56%) VLAN
2 4 (2.56%) VPN
3 3 (1.92%) BGP
3 3 (1.92%) Network Security
3 3 (1.92%) Software-Defined Networking
3 3 (1.92%) TCP/IP
4 1 (0.64%) DHCP
4 1 (0.64%) DNS
4 1 (0.64%) NetScaler
4 1 (0.64%) VoIP
4 1 (0.64%) Wi-Fi
4 1 (0.64%) X.509
Database & Business Intelligence
1 20 (12.82%) Relational Database
2 18 (11.54%) PostgreSQL
3 15 (9.62%) MySQL
4 11 (7.05%) Amazon RDS
5 9 (5.77%) DynamoDB
5 9 (5.77%) NoSQL
6 8 (5.13%) BigQuery
6 8 (5.13%) RDBMS
6 8 (5.13%) Redis
7 6 (3.85%) Amazon Aurora
7 6 (3.85%) Big Data
8 4 (2.56%) MongoDB
9 3 (1.92%) Apache Cassandra
9 3 (1.92%) Data Lake
10 2 (1.28%) Elasticsearch
11 1 (0.64%) Azure SQL Database
11 1 (0.64%) Metadata
11 1 (0.64%) ObjectStore
11 1 (0.64%) Power BI
11 1 (0.64%) Tableau
Development Applications
1 43 (27.56%) Jenkins
2 42 (26.92%) GitLab
3 41 (26.28%) Git
4 19 (12.18%) JIRA
5 14 (8.97%) SonarQube
6 11 (7.05%) Gradle
7 8 (5.13%) Bitbucket
7 8 (5.13%) Postman
8 6 (3.85%) IntelliJ
9 5 (3.21%) JUnit
9 5 (3.21%) Maven
9 5 (3.21%) MLflow
9 5 (3.21%) Snyk
9 5 (3.21%) SonarLint
9 5 (3.21%) Sonatype Nexus
10 3 (1.92%) Mockito
10 3 (1.92%) Rational DOORS
10 3 (1.92%) TeamCity
11 2 (1.28%) Bitbucket Server
11 2 (1.28%) CA Release Automation
General
1 35 (22.44%) Finance
2 30 (19.23%) Public Sector
3 28 (17.95%) Social Skills
4 27 (17.31%) Banking
5 14 (8.97%) Analytical Skills
6 4 (2.56%) Games
7 2 (1.28%) Documentation Skills
8 1 (0.64%) Financial Institution
8 1 (0.64%) Manufacturing
8 1 (0.64%) Military
8 1 (0.64%) Wholesale Banking
Job Titles
1 35 (22.44%) Developer
2 21 (13.46%) Architect
2 21 (13.46%) Java Developer
3 20 (12.82%) DevOps Engineer
4 18 (11.54%) Platform Engineer
5 17 (10.90%) Software Engineer
6 15 (9.62%) Senior
7 14 (8.97%) AWS Engineer
8 12 (7.69%) DevSecOps Engineer
9 11 (7.05%) Security Engineer
9 11 (7.05%) Technical Architect
10 8 (5.13%) AWS DevOps
10 8 (5.13%) Cloud Engineer
10 8 (5.13%) Data Engineer
10 8 (5.13%) Java Architect
10 8 (5.13%) Java Technical Architect
10 8 (5.13%) Senior Developer
11 7 (4.49%) AWS DevOps Engineer
11 7 (4.49%) Java Engineer
11 7 (4.49%) Java Software Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 51 (32.69%) Spring Boot
2 42 (26.92%) Spring
3 30 (19.23%) RESTful
4 19 (12.18%) Kafka
4 19 (12.18%) REST
5 14 (8.97%) AngularJS
5 14 (8.97%) Node.js
6 12 (7.69%) JSON
7 11 (7.05%) JWT
7 11 (7.05%) React
8 10 (6.41%) Hibernate
9 9 (5.77%) JMS
10 8 (5.13%) Elastic Stack
10 8 (5.13%) J2EE
11 7 (4.49%) HTML
11 7 (4.49%) JAX-RS
11 7 (4.49%) Spring Security
12 6 (3.85%) GraphQL
12 6 (3.85%) OAuth
12 6 (3.85%) XML
Miscellaneous
1 24 (15.38%) Cloud Native
2 9 (5.77%) Distributed Systems
2 9 (5.77%) Product Ownership
2 9 (5.77%) SWIFT Messaging Network
3 6 (3.85%) N-Tier
4 4 (2.56%) Data Protection Act
5 3 (1.92%) Analytical Mindset
5 3 (1.92%) Private Cloud
6 2 (1.28%) Algorithms
6 2 (1.28%) Data Structures
6 2 (1.28%) Onboarding
7 1 (0.64%) Cloud Security Posture
7 1 (0.64%) CUDA
7 1 (0.64%) Distributed Computing
7 1 (0.64%) Enterprise Software
7 1 (0.64%) Greenfield Project
7 1 (0.64%) Hybrid Cloud
7 1 (0.64%) IBM XIV
7 1 (0.64%) Public Cloud
7 1 (0.64%) Security Posture
Operating Systems
1 44 (28.21%) Linux
2 17 (10.90%) Windows
3 10 (6.41%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 5 (3.21%) Unix
5 4 (2.56%) Windows Server
6 1 (0.64%) Android
6 1 (0.64%) Apple iOS
6 1 (0.64%) Windows Server 2012
6 1 (0.64%) Windows Server 2019
Processes & Methodologies
1 100 (64.10%) CI/CD
2 83 (53.21%) Containerisation
3 73 (46.79%) DevOps
4 45 (28.85%) Agile
4 45 (28.85%) Microservices
5 41 (26.28%) Infrastructure as Code
6 39 (25.00%) Problem-Solving
7 31 (19.87%) Observability
8 27 (17.31%) Software Engineering
9 21 (13.46%) TDD
9 21 (13.46%) Test Automation
10 19 (12.18%) SDLC
11 18 (11.54%) API Design
11 18 (11.54%) DevSecOps
11 18 (11.54%) Unit Testing
12 16 (10.26%) AI
12 16 (10.26%) Cloud Security
12 16 (10.26%) Event-Driven
13 15 (9.62%) Infrastructure Automation
13 15 (9.62%) Platform Engineering
Programming Languages
1 69 (44.23%) Java
2 68 (43.59%) Python
3 28 (17.95%) Bash
4 24 (15.38%) SQL
5 11 (7.05%) PHP
6 8 (5.13%) PowerShell
6 8 (5.13%) TypeScript
7 6 (3.85%) Go
7 6 (3.85%) Kotlin
8 5 (3.21%) JavaScript
8 5 (3.21%) Perl
8 5 (3.21%) Ruby
9 4 (2.56%) C++
10 3 (1.92%) C#
10 3 (1.92%) PL/SQL
11 1 (0.64%) C
11 1 (0.64%) Clojure
11 1 (0.64%) Korn
11 1 (0.64%) Objective-C
11 1 (0.64%) Scala
Qualifications
1 35 (22.44%) Security Cleared
2 19 (12.18%) SC Cleared
3 11 (7.05%) Degree
4 9 (5.77%) Computer Science Degree
5 7 (4.49%) AWS Certification
6 6 (3.85%) CISSP
7 5 (3.21%) CISM
8 4 (2.56%) BPSS Clearance
9 3 (1.92%) Azure Certification
10 2 (1.28%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
10 2 (1.28%) DV Cleared
10 2 (1.28%) TOGAF Certification
11 1 (0.64%) OSCP
11 1 (0.64%) Tableau Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 13 (8.33%) QA
2 10 (6.41%) Accessibility
3 9 (5.77%) ISO 20022
3 9 (5.77%) PSD2
3 9 (5.77%) SEPA
4 5 (3.21%) ISO/IEC 27001
4 5 (3.21%) NIST
5 3 (1.92%) Data Quality
6 1 (0.64%) PCI DSS
6 1 (0.64%) WCAG
System Software
1 109 (69.87%) Docker
2 9 (5.77%) VMware Infrastructure
2 9 (5.77%) vSphere
3 5 (3.21%) Active Directory
4 2 (1.28%) Virtual Servers
5 1 (0.64%) Virtual Desktop
5 1 (0.64%) Virtual Machines
Systems Management
1 52 (33.33%) Terraform
2 25 (16.03%) Grafana
3 9 (5.77%) Prometheus
4 6 (3.85%) Ansible
4 6 (3.85%) Progress Chef
5 5 (3.21%) Fluentd
6 3 (1.92%) Kibana
6 3 (1.92%) Podman
6 3 (1.92%) SELinux
7 2 (1.28%) SCCM
8 1 (0.64%) Active Directory Federation Services
8 1 (0.64%) Argo
8 1 (0.64%) Istio
8 1 (0.64%) Microsoft Intune
8 1 (0.64%) Puppet
Vendors
1 24 (15.38%) Oracle
2 19 (12.18%) Splunk
3 12 (7.69%) AppDynamics
3 12 (7.69%) Microsoft
4 10 (6.41%) VMware
5 9 (5.77%) Red Hat
6 7 (4.49%) Cribl.io
7 6 (3.85%) Dynatrace
7 6 (3.85%) Gigya
8 5 (3.21%) Checkmarx
8 5 (3.21%) F5
8 5 (3.21%) Veracode
9 4 (2.56%) Cloudera
9 4 (2.56%) Confluent
9 4 (2.56%) Google
9 4 (2.56%) Palo Alto
10 2 (1.28%) Ping Identity
11 1 (0.64%) Databricks
11 1 (0.64%) OpenAI
11 1 (0.64%) SnapLogic