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 vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 17 September 2025, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
17 Sep 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 38 56 44
Rank change year-on-year +18 -12 -8
Contract jobs citing Kubernetes 116 67 118
As % of all contract jobs advertised in the North West 5.29% 2.83% 4.20%
As % of the Systems Management category 35.80% 25.77% 26.16%
Number of daily rates quoted 93 39 74
10th Percentile £319 £356 £433
25th Percentile £385 £404 £492
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £475 £525 £568
Median % change year-on-year -9.52% -7.49% -1.30%
75th Percentile £575 £613 £650
90th Percentile £660 £685 £688
England median daily rate £528 £570 £600
% change year-on-year -7.46% -5.00% -4.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2 2 21
10th Percentile £75.65 - £39.60
25th Percentile £78.88 - -
Median hourly rate £87.00 £46.18 £46.18
Median % change year-on-year +88.39% - -
75th Percentile £92.38 - -
90th Percentile £93.95 - -
England median hourly rate £67.00 £55.00 £73.00
% change year-on-year +21.82% -24.66% -6.56%

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 324 260 451
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the North West 14.78% 10.97% 16.06%
Number of daily rates quoted 221 170 291
10th Percentile £268 £213 £313
25th Percentile £350 £356 £420
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £450 £465 £513
Median % change year-on-year -3.23% -9.27% -2.38%
75th Percentile £541 £576 £585
90th Percentile £650 £651 £663
England median daily rate £501 £525 £550
% change year-on-year -4.60% -4.55% -4.35%
Number of hourly rates quoted 15 6 47
10th Percentile £15.50 £27.88 £16.25
25th Percentile £18.12 £33.67 £20.00
Median hourly rate £20.00 £46.18 £46.18
Median % change year-on-year -56.69% - +112.03%
75th Percentile £63.58 £48.11 £47.35
90th Percentile £77.60 £76.38 £68.75
England median hourly rate £36.75 £40.00 £50.00
% change year-on-year -8.13% -20.00% +109.12%

Kubernetes
Job Vacancy Trend in the North West

Job postings citing Kubernetes as a proportion of all IT jobs advertised in the North West.

Job vacancy trend for Kubernetes 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 17 September 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 17 September 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 17 September 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 +8 62 £500 -9.09% 73
Cheshire +13 48 £475 +6.15% 32
Merseyside +5 4 £510 +70.00% 4
Lancashire -8 1 £525 - 42
Kubernetes
England

Kubernetes
Co-occurring Skills and Capabilities in the North West by Category

The follow tables expand on the table above by listing co-occurrences grouped by category. The same employment type, locality and period is covered with up to 20 co-occurrences shown in each of the following categories:

Application Platforms
1 10 (8.62%) Apache Airflow
2 6 (5.17%) Confluence
2 6 (5.17%) JBoss
3 2 (1.72%) Mule
3 2 (1.72%) Mule ESB
3 2 (1.72%) Tomcat
3 2 (1.72%) WebSphere
3 2 (1.72%) WebSphere Application Server
4 1 (0.86%) Anypoint
4 1 (0.86%) Apache Spark
4 1 (0.86%) IIS
4 1 (0.86%) OpenStack
4 1 (0.86%) WebLogic
Business Applications
1 1 (0.86%) Distributed Ledger
1 1 (0.86%) Finacle
1 1 (0.86%) Remedy ITSM
1 1 (0.86%) SAP S/4HANA
Cloud Services
1 74 (63.79%) AWS
2 36 (31.03%) Azure
3 29 (25.00%) GCP
4 22 (18.97%) OpenShift
5 18 (15.52%) Amazon EC2
6 17 (14.66%) Serverless
7 15 (12.93%) AWS Lambda
7 15 (12.93%) SaaS
8 14 (12.07%) GitHub
8 14 (12.07%) PaaS
9 11 (9.48%) Amazon CloudWatch
9 11 (9.48%) Amazon S3
10 10 (8.62%) Amazon ECS
10 10 (8.62%) Amazon SQS
10 10 (8.62%) Apigee
10 10 (8.62%) Datadog
10 10 (8.62%) IaaS
11 9 (7.76%) Amazon EKS
11 9 (7.76%) GitHub Actions
12 6 (5.17%) Amazon EventBridge
Communications & Networking
1 4 (3.45%) Firewall
2 2 (1.72%) Calico
2 2 (1.72%) TCP/IP
2 2 (1.72%) VPN
2 2 (1.72%) X.509
3 1 (0.86%) VLAN
3 1 (0.86%) VoIP
3 1 (0.86%) Wi-Fi
Database & Business Intelligence
1 23 (19.83%) Relational Database
2 18 (15.52%) PostgreSQL
3 13 (11.21%) NoSQL
4 11 (9.48%) MySQL
5 10 (8.62%) RDBMS
6 9 (7.76%) DynamoDB
7 8 (6.90%) MongoDB
7 8 (6.90%) Redis
8 7 (6.03%) Amazon RDS
9 6 (5.17%) Amazon Aurora
9 6 (5.17%) BigQuery
10 5 (4.31%) SQL Server
11 4 (3.45%) Big Data
11 4 (3.45%) Elasticsearch
11 4 (3.45%) Neo4j
12 3 (2.59%) Apache Cassandra
13 1 (0.86%) Amazon Redshift
13 1 (0.86%) Azure SQL Database
13 1 (0.86%) Data Warehouse
13 1 (0.86%) Tableau
Development Applications
1 37 (31.90%) Jenkins
2 36 (31.03%) Git
3 25 (21.55%) JIRA
4 21 (18.10%) GitLab
5 12 (10.34%) SonarQube
6 7 (6.03%) Maven
7 5 (4.31%) Gradle
7 5 (4.31%) JUnit
7 5 (4.31%) SonarLint
7 5 (4.31%) Sonatype Nexus
7 5 (4.31%) TeamCity
8 4 (3.45%) Bitbucket Server
8 4 (3.45%) CA Release Automation
8 4 (3.45%) CircleCI
8 4 (3.45%) MLflow
8 4 (3.45%) Postman
9 3 (2.59%) Artifactory
9 3 (2.59%) Bitbucket
9 3 (2.59%) Mockito
9 3 (2.59%) Rational DOORS
General
1 22 (18.97%) Finance
1 22 (18.97%) Social Skills
2 18 (15.52%) Banking
3 17 (14.66%) Public Sector
4 14 (12.07%) Analytical Skills
5 6 (5.17%) Legal
5 6 (5.17%) Pharmaceutical
6 5 (4.31%) Manufacturing
7 4 (3.45%) Retail
8 2 (1.72%) Games
9 1 (0.86%) Military
9 1 (0.86%) Wholesale Banking
Job Titles
1 26 (22.41%) Senior
2 20 (17.24%) Developer
3 17 (14.66%) Architect
4 15 (12.93%) DevOps Engineer
5 12 (10.34%) AWS Engineer
5 12 (10.34%) Data Engineer
6 11 (9.48%) Java Developer
6 11 (9.48%) Technical Architect
7 10 (8.62%) AWS DevOps
7 10 (8.62%) Software Engineer
8 8 (6.90%) Java Architect
8 8 (6.90%) Java Technical Architect
8 8 (6.90%) Lead
8 8 (6.90%) Platform Engineer
9 7 (6.03%) AWS DevOps Engineer
9 7 (6.03%) Senior Developer
10 6 (5.17%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
10 6 (5.17%) Kubernetes Engineer
10 6 (5.17%) Senior Java Developer
11 5 (4.31%) AWS Data Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 27 (23.28%) Spring Boot
2 21 (18.10%) RESTful
3 20 (17.24%) AngularJS
4 16 (13.79%) Node.js
4 16 (13.79%) Spring
5 14 (12.07%) Kafka
6 13 (11.21%) React
7 9 (7.76%) Elastic Stack
8 8 (6.90%) J2EE
9 7 (6.03%) GraphQL
10 6 (5.17%) Dropwizard
10 6 (5.17%) JSON
10 6 (5.17%) JWT
10 6 (5.17%) Micronaut
10 6 (5.17%) REST
10 6 (5.17%) Streamlit
11 5 (4.31%) HTML
11 5 (4.31%) JMS
11 5 (4.31%) OAuth
11 5 (4.31%) PyTorch
Miscellaneous
1 22 (18.97%) Cloud Native
2 8 (6.90%) Algorithms
3 7 (6.03%) Distributed Systems
4 6 (5.17%) N-Tier
5 5 (4.31%) Product Ownership
5 5 (4.31%) SWIFT Messaging Network
6 3 (2.59%) Hybrid Cloud
7 2 (1.72%) Data Protection Act
7 2 (1.72%) PKI
7 2 (1.72%) Public Cloud
8 1 (0.86%) Blockchain
8 1 (0.86%) Clustering
8 1 (0.86%) Data Structures
8 1 (0.86%) Enterprise Storage
8 1 (0.86%) IBM XIV
8 1 (0.86%) Management Information System
8 1 (0.86%) Onboarding
8 1 (0.86%) Private Cloud
8 1 (0.86%) Replication
8 1 (0.86%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 28 (24.14%) Linux
2 16 (13.79%) Windows
3 9 (7.76%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 2 (1.72%) Android
4 2 (1.72%) Apple iOS
5 1 (0.86%) Unix
5 1 (0.86%) Windows Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 73 (62.93%) CI/CD
2 68 (58.62%) Containerisation
3 56 (48.28%) DevOps
4 39 (33.62%) Microservices
5 36 (31.03%) Agile
6 29 (25.00%) Problem-Solving
7 27 (23.28%) Observability
8 24 (20.69%) Infrastructure as Code
9 21 (18.10%) Software Engineering
10 18 (15.52%) SDLC
11 17 (14.66%) Artificial Intelligence
12 16 (13.79%) Migration
12 16 (13.79%) TDD
13 14 (12.07%) Event-Driven
13 14 (12.07%) Full-Stack Development
13 14 (12.07%) Machine Learning
13 14 (12.07%) Mentoring
13 14 (12.07%) Test Automation
13 14 (12.07%) Unit Testing
14 13 (11.21%) API Development
Programming Languages
1 65 (56.03%) Python
2 45 (38.79%) Java
3 24 (20.69%) SQL
4 17 (14.66%) Bash
5 11 (9.48%) PHP
6 8 (6.90%) TypeScript
7 6 (5.17%) JavaScript
8 5 (4.31%) Perl
9 4 (3.45%) PowerShell
9 4 (3.45%) Scala
10 3 (2.59%) C++
10 3 (2.59%) PL/SQL
11 2 (1.72%) C#
11 2 (1.72%) Go
11 2 (1.72%) Shell Script
12 1 (0.86%) Bicep
12 1 (0.86%) Clojure
12 1 (0.86%) Korn
12 1 (0.86%) R
12 1 (0.86%) Ruby
Qualifications
1 18 (15.52%) Security Cleared
2 8 (6.90%) SC Cleared
3 5 (4.31%) Degree
4 4 (3.45%) AWS Certification
4 4 (3.45%) BPSS Clearance
5 3 (2.59%) CISM
5 3 (2.59%) CISSP
6 2 (1.72%) Azure Certification
6 2 (1.72%) Computer Science Degree
6 2 (1.72%) DV Cleared
6 2 (1.72%) Master's Degree
6 2 (1.72%) TOGAF Certification
7 1 (0.86%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
7 1 (0.86%) ITIL Certification
7 1 (0.86%) Tableau Certification
7 1 (0.86%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 6 (5.17%) QA
2 5 (4.31%) ISO 20022
2 5 (4.31%) PSD2
2 5 (4.31%) SEPA
3 4 (3.45%) Accessibility
4 3 (2.59%) ISO/IEC 27001
4 3 (2.59%) NIST
5 1 (0.86%) COBIT
5 1 (0.86%) Data Quality
5 1 (0.86%) PCI DSS
System Software
1 84 (72.41%) Docker
2 6 (5.17%) Active Directory
3 1 (0.86%) VMware Infrastructure
3 1 (0.86%) vSphere
Systems Management
1 33 (28.45%) Terraform
2 15 (12.93%) Grafana
3 14 (12.07%) Ansible
4 11 (9.48%) Progress Chef
5 5 (4.31%) Kibana
5 5 (4.31%) Prometheus
6 3 (2.59%) Podman
6 3 (2.59%) SELinux
7 2 (1.72%) Fluentd
7 2 (1.72%) Istio
8 1 (0.86%) Argo
8 1 (0.86%) Docker Swarm
8 1 (0.86%) Puppet
8 1 (0.86%) SCCM
Vendors
1 23 (19.83%) Oracle
2 18 (15.52%) AppDynamics
3 13 (11.21%) Splunk
4 9 (7.76%) Red Hat
5 8 (6.90%) Microsoft
6 6 (5.17%) Cloudera
6 6 (5.17%) Dynatrace
6 6 (5.17%) Gigya
6 6 (5.17%) Google
7 3 (2.59%) IBM
8 2 (1.72%) Atlassian
8 2 (1.72%) Cribl.io
8 2 (1.72%) PagerDuty
8 2 (1.72%) VMware
9 1 (0.86%) BiZZdesign
9 1 (0.86%) Databricks
9 1 (0.86%) MuleSoft
9 1 (0.86%) Remedy
9 1 (0.86%) SendGrid
9 1 (0.86%) ServiceNow