Kubernetes Contract Job Trends

Kubernetes (k8s)
UK

The table below provides summary statistics and contractor rates for jobs requiring Kubernetes skills. It covers contract job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 7 August 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
7 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 38 31 39
Rank change year-on-year -7 +8 -3
Contract jobs citing Kubernetes 2,720 1,902 1,769
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 5.09% 5.79% 4.53%
As % of the Systems Management category 38.54% 36.75% 34.02%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,830 1,252 1,256
10th Percentile £400 £400 £400
25th Percentile £456 £450 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £535 £533 £550
Median % change year-on-year +0.47% -3.18% -8.33%
75th Percentile £625 £638 £650
90th Percentile £700 £713 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £515 £500 £525
% change year-on-year +2.95% -4.71% -8.70%
Number of hourly rates quoted 77 13 19
10th Percentile £35.00 £61.35 £44.29
25th Percentile £62.50 £65.50 £46.18
Median hourly rate £70.00 £67.00 £67.50
Median % change year-on-year +4.48% -0.74% -6.90%
75th Percentile £75.00 £80.00 £74.44
90th Percentile £85.00 £84.19 £77.60
UK excluding London median hourly rate £70.00 £67.00 £70.00
% change year-on-year +4.48% -4.29% +3.32%

All Systems Management Skills
UK

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.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for systems management skills 7,057 5,175 5,200
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 13.21% 15.75% 13.32%
Number of daily rates quoted 4,795 3,423 3,671
10th Percentile £325 £300 £300
25th Percentile £425 £408 £414
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £520 £505 £522
Median % change year-on-year +2.97% -3.26% -5.09%
75th Percentile £603 £600 £625
90th Percentile £694 £688 £700
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £492 £500
% change year-on-year +1.57% -1.55% -4.76%
Number of hourly rates quoted 193 76 75
10th Percentile £18.25 £13.75 £20.20
25th Percentile £25.75 £19.91 £23.99
Median hourly rate £63.14 £35.14 £34.00
Median % change year-on-year +79.69% +3.34% -41.42%
75th Percentile £70.00 £63.49 £58.75
90th Percentile £79.10 £78.10 £74.26
UK excluding London median hourly rate £63.14 £55.00 £40.00
% change year-on-year +14.79% +37.50% -13.38%

Kubernetes
Job Vacancy Trend

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

Kubernetes job vacancy trend in the UK

Kubernetes
Daily Rate Trend

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

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing Kubernetes

Kubernetes
Daily Rate Histogram

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Kubernetes over the 6 months to 7 August 2026.

Daily rate histogram for Kubernetes in the UK

Kubernetes
Hourly Rate Trend

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

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing Kubernetes

Kubernetes
Hourly Rate Histogram

Hourly rate distribution of jobs citing Kubernetes over the 6 months to 7 August 2026.

Hourly rate histogram for Kubernetes in the UK

Kubernetes
Top 17 Contract Job Locations

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing Kubernetes within the UK over the 6 months to 7 August 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
England -6 2,256 £538 +0.05% 1,782
UK excluding London +5 1,204 £515 +2.95% 794
London -10 1,114 £550 -2.44% 1,130
Work from Home +1 818 £525 - 801
North of England +1 458 £511 +2.25% 230
Yorkshire +5 237 £500 - 64
South East -18 220 £521 +4.25% 210
Midlands -1 206 £515 -1.90% 64
West Midlands +3 177 £515 -4.63% 52
South West +24 171 £575 +4.55% 141
North West -3 152 £570 +14.00% 138
Scotland -4 117 £450 -10.00% 66
North East -5 69 £425 -18.61% 28
East of England -20 36 £550 +12.24% 45
East Midlands -18 28 £575 +33.72% 12
Wales -9 13 £500 +5.26% 15
Northern Ireland +10 8 £446 -5.11% 27

Kubernetes
Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities 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 96 (3.53%) Apache Spark
2 93 (3.42%) Confluence
3 79 (2.90%) Apache
4 68 (2.50%) Apache Airflow
5 49 (1.80%) SAS
6 31 (1.14%) OpenStack
7 17 (0.63%) Jupyter
8 12 (0.44%) WebLogic
9 11 (0.40%) nginx
10 7 (0.26%) Camunda
10 7 (0.26%) Microsoft Exchange
11 4 (0.15%) CMS
11 4 (0.15%) Palantir Foundry
11 4 (0.15%) SharePoint
12 3 (0.11%) Cloud Foundry
12 3 (0.11%) CloudStack
12 3 (0.11%) Mendix
12 3 (0.11%) Oracle SOA Suite
12 3 (0.11%) Oracle Workflow
12 3 (0.11%) WebSphere
Applications
1 9 (0.33%) Chatbot
2 5 (0.18%) CPLEX
3 4 (0.15%) Trello
4 2 (0.074%) MS Visio
5 1 (0.037%) Maya
5 1 (0.037%) Microsoft Excel
5 1 (0.037%) Weka
Business Applications
1 4 (0.15%) Distributed Ledger
1 4 (0.15%) Oracle ERP
2 3 (0.11%) Oracle EBS
3 2 (0.074%) Dynamics CRM
3 2 (0.074%) Oracle Retail
3 2 (0.074%) Payment Gateway
4 1 (0.037%) FIS Private Capital Suite
4 1 (0.037%) R3 Corda
4 1 (0.037%) SAP ERP
4 1 (0.037%) SAP Hybris
4 1 (0.037%) SAP S/4HANA
4 1 (0.037%) Shopify
4 1 (0.037%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
4 1 (0.037%) Temenos T24
Cloud Services
1 1,464 (53.82%) AWS
2 1,258 (46.25%) Azure
3 699 (25.70%) GCP
4 609 (22.39%) GitHub
5 414 (15.22%) GitHub Actions
6 336 (12.35%) Azure DevOps
7 258 (9.49%) Amazon EKS
8 253 (9.30%) OpenShift
9 237 (8.71%) Serverless
10 225 (8.27%) Azure AKS
11 173 (6.36%) AWS CloudFormation
12 149 (5.48%) Google Kubernetes Engine
13 132 (4.85%) AWS Lambda
14 123 (4.52%) Amazon S3
15 119 (4.38%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 96 (3.53%) Virtual Private Cloud
17 92 (3.38%) Amazon ECS
18 82 (3.01%) Azure Monitor
19 81 (2.98%) Amazon EC2
20 79 (2.90%) Datadog
Communications & Networking
1 123 (4.52%) Firewall
2 120 (4.41%) DNS
3 70 (2.57%) Network Security
4 69 (2.54%) VPN
5 45 (1.65%) TCP/IP
6 39 (1.43%) DHCP
7 28 (1.03%) Internet
8 26 (0.96%) SAN
9 25 (0.92%) VSAN
10 21 (0.77%) HTTP
10 21 (0.77%) NAS
11 17 (0.63%) 5G
12 16 (0.59%) SSL
13 15 (0.55%) LTE
14 14 (0.51%) BGP
15 12 (0.44%) Reverse Proxy
16 11 (0.40%) Diameter Protocol
16 11 (0.40%) Wireshark
17 10 (0.37%) 4G
17 10 (0.37%) Radio Access Network
Database & Business Intelligence
1 306 (11.25%) PostgreSQL
2 158 (5.81%) NoSQL
3 155 (5.70%) MongoDB
4 124 (4.56%) Relational Database
5 110 (4.04%) SQL Server
6 82 (3.01%) Redis
7 70 (2.57%) Amazon RDS
8 60 (2.21%) BigQuery
9 58 (2.13%) MySQL
10 54 (1.99%) Big Data
11 50 (1.84%) DynamoDB
12 43 (1.58%) Elasticsearch
13 41 (1.51%) Data Warehouse
14 40 (1.47%) Data Lake
15 34 (1.25%) Flink
16 31 (1.14%) Apache Cassandra
17 26 (0.96%) Amazon Redshift
18 22 (0.81%) Amazon Athena
18 22 (0.81%) Oracle Database
18 22 (0.81%) Pentaho
Development Applications
1 572 (21.03%) Jenkins
2 443 (16.29%) GitLab
3 428 (15.74%) Git
4 196 (7.21%) JIRA
5 106 (3.90%) SonarQube
6 93 (3.42%) JUnit
7 68 (2.50%) Selenium
8 66 (2.43%) Maven
9 57 (2.10%) Cucumber
10 52 (1.91%) JMeter
11 43 (1.58%) Gatling
12 38 (1.40%) Gradle
13 36 (1.32%) Bitbucket
14 35 (1.29%) Mockito
15 30 (1.10%) Postman
16 27 (0.99%) Artifactory
16 27 (0.99%) Sonatype Nexus
17 26 (0.96%) MLflow
18 25 (0.92%) Claude Code
19 23 (0.85%) Snyk
General
1 531 (19.52%) Social Skills
2 435 (15.99%) Finance
3 362 (13.31%) Public Sector
4 191 (7.02%) Banking
5 178 (6.54%) Analytical Skills
6 57 (2.10%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 48 (1.76%) Telecoms
8 44 (1.62%) Documentation Skills
9 38 (1.40%) Retail
10 34 (1.25%) Financial Institution
11 31 (1.14%) Military
12 27 (0.99%) Investment Banking
12 27 (0.99%) Publishing
13 26 (0.96%) Legal
14 22 (0.81%) Law
15 20 (0.74%) Influencing Skills
16 18 (0.66%) Organisational Skills
17 17 (0.63%) Aerospace
18 14 (0.51%) Front Office
19 11 (0.40%) Local Government
Job Titles
1 546 (20.07%) Developer
2 466 (17.13%) DevOps Engineer
3 422 (15.51%) Senior
4 304 (11.18%) Architect
5 245 (9.01%) Java Developer
6 214 (7.87%) Lead
7 181 (6.65%) Platform Engineer
8 175 (6.43%) Cloud Engineer
9 146 (5.37%) AWS Engineer
10 131 (4.82%) Software Engineer
11 130 (4.78%) Azure Engineer
12 106 (3.90%) Senior Developer
13 101 (3.71%) AWS DevOps
14 100 (3.68%) Java Engineer
15 99 (3.64%) Data Engineer
16 97 (3.57%) AWS DevOps Engineer
16 97 (3.57%) Infrastructure Engineer
17 85 (3.13%) GCP Engineer
18 82 (3.01%) Site Reliability Engineer
19 81 (2.98%) Solutions Architect
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 431 (15.85%) Kafka
2 376 (13.82%) Spring
3 345 (12.68%) REST
4 296 (10.88%) Spring Boot
5 251 (9.23%) RESTful
6 216 (7.94%) React
7 171 (6.29%) Node.js
8 136 (5.00%) .NET
9 131 (4.82%) AngularJS
10 107 (3.93%) OAuth
11 106 (3.90%) OpenTelemetry
12 93 (3.42%) RabbitMQ
13 79 (2.90%) Elastic Stack
13 79 (2.90%) FastAPI
14 73 (2.68%) OAuth2
15 65 (2.39%) JSON
16 64 (2.35%) YAML
17 61 (2.24%) GraphQL
17 61 (2.24%) OpenID
18 58 (2.13%) Playwright
Miscellaneous
1 707 (25.99%) Cloud Native
2 295 (10.85%) Distributed Systems
3 95 (3.49%) Product Ownership
4 88 (3.24%) Hybrid Cloud
5 82 (3.01%) Onboarding
6 75 (2.76%) AI Agents
7 72 (2.65%) Security Posture
8 71 (2.61%) Enterprise Software
9 66 (2.43%) PKI
10 63 (2.32%) Enterprise Cloud
11 60 (2.21%) Legacy Systems
12 58 (2.13%) Data Centre
13 57 (2.10%) Public Cloud
14 52 (1.91%) Linux Command Line
15 47 (1.73%) Data Protection Act
16 44 (1.62%) Greenfield Project
17 42 (1.54%) Management Information System
18 40 (1.47%) Private Cloud
19 29 (1.07%) Self-Motivation
20 28 (1.03%) Distributed Architecture
Operating Systems
1 419 (15.40%) Linux
2 173 (6.36%) Windows
3 93 (3.42%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 66 (2.43%) Unix
5 53 (1.95%) Windows Server
6 25 (0.92%) Ubuntu
7 20 (0.74%) VMS
8 7 (0.26%) Data ONTAP
9 6 (0.22%) Android
10 5 (0.18%) Apple iOS
10 5 (0.18%) CoreOS
10 5 (0.18%) Rocky
10 5 (0.18%) Windows Server 2003
11 4 (0.15%) Debian
12 2 (0.074%) CentOS
12 2 (0.074%) SUSE
13 1 (0.037%) AIX
13 1 (0.037%) Amazon Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,839 (67.61%) CI/CD
2 1,466 (53.90%) DevOps
3 1,135 (41.73%) Containerisation
4 1,018 (37.43%) Infrastructure as Code
5 851 (31.29%) Agile
6 693 (25.48%) Microservices
7 620 (22.79%) Observability
8 487 (17.90%) AI
9 483 (17.76%) Software Engineering
10 441 (16.21%) Platform Engineering
11 438 (16.10%) Test Automation
12 414 (15.22%) Problem-Solving
13 364 (13.38%) Continuous Improvement
14 318 (11.69%) Event-Driven
15 287 (10.55%) Scrum
16 282 (10.37%) DevSecOps
17 270 (9.93%) Machine Learning
18 267 (9.82%) Technical Leadership
19 253 (9.30%) Migration
20 250 (9.19%) Mentoring
Programming Languages
1 1,080 (39.71%) Python
2 765 (28.13%) Java
3 435 (15.99%) SQL
4 380 (13.97%) Bash
5 257 (9.45%) PowerShell
6 224 (8.24%) JavaScript
7 222 (8.16%) TypeScript
8 156 (5.74%) Go
9 155 (5.70%) C#
10 111 (4.08%) Bicep
11 72 (2.65%) Shell Script
12 47 (1.73%) Scala
13 41 (1.51%) Groovy
14 25 (0.92%) Kotlin
15 24 (0.88%) Rust
16 19 (0.70%) C++
17 14 (0.51%) Ruby
18 13 (0.48%) Perl
18 13 (0.48%) PL/SQL
19 11 (0.40%) C
Qualifications
1 956 (35.15%) Security Cleared
2 812 (29.85%) SC Cleared
3 181 (6.65%) DV Cleared
4 130 (4.78%) Degree
5 112 (4.12%) Azure Certification
6 108 (3.97%) AWS Certification
7 83 (3.05%) BPSS Clearance
8 76 (2.79%) Computer Science Degree
9 54 (1.99%) CISSP
10 52 (1.91%) Cisco Certification
11 34 (1.25%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
12 29 (1.07%) (ISC)2 CCSP
13 26 (0.96%) CCSP
14 22 (0.81%) Master's Degree
15 21 (0.77%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
16 20 (0.74%) CISM
17 17 (0.63%) Microsoft Certification
18 16 (0.59%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
19 15 (0.55%) CCNA
20 13 (0.48%) VCAP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 194 (7.13%) QA
2 98 (3.60%) Data Quality
3 87 (3.20%) Accessibility
4 50 (1.84%) NIST
5 48 (1.76%) GDPR
6 45 (1.65%) NCSC
7 38 (1.40%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 36 (1.32%) WCAG
9 24 (0.88%) PCI DSS
10 16 (0.59%) SLA
11 14 (0.51%) Cyber Essentials
12 9 (0.33%) PSD2
12 9 (0.33%) Sarbanes-Oxley
13 8 (0.29%) ISO 20022
14 7 (0.26%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
14 7 (0.26%) GRC
14 7 (0.26%) HIPAA
14 7 (0.26%) NIST 800
14 7 (0.26%) SEPA
15 6 (0.22%) California Consumer Privacy Act
System Software
1 1,425 (52.39%) Docker
2 113 (4.15%) VMware Infrastructure
3 67 (2.46%) Active Directory
4 52 (1.91%) vSphere
5 51 (1.88%) Virtual Machines
6 42 (1.54%) VMware NSX
7 41 (1.51%) Hyper-V
8 24 (0.88%) VMware ESXi
9 12 (0.44%) KVM
9 12 (0.44%) NFS
10 8 (0.29%) IAG
10 8 (0.29%) Slurm Workload Manager
10 8 (0.29%) zsh
11 7 (0.26%) BitLocker
11 7 (0.26%) Ceph
11 7 (0.26%) Microsoft App-V
12 6 (0.22%) etcd
12 6 (0.22%) Squid
13 5 (0.18%) HDFS
14 4 (0.15%) Apache ZooKeeper
Systems Management
1 1,097 (40.33%) Terraform
2 406 (14.93%) Ansible
3 398 (14.63%) Prometheus
4 387 (14.23%) Grafana
5 157 (5.77%) Argo
6 61 (2.24%) Istio
7 57 (2.10%) Puppet
8 42 (1.54%) Progress Chef
9 34 (1.25%) vCenter Server
10 27 (0.99%) Single Sign-On
11 26 (0.96%) Podman
12 21 (0.77%) Kibana
13 20 (0.74%) Kustomize
14 17 (0.63%) Packer
15 15 (0.55%) Kubeflow
15 15 (0.55%) Rancher
15 15 (0.55%) VxRail
16 14 (0.51%) Nessus
17 13 (0.48%) Control-M
17 13 (0.48%) IBM Guardium
Vendors
1 307 (11.29%) Microsoft
2 235 (8.64%) Google
3 143 (5.26%) Splunk
4 139 (5.11%) Oracle
5 134 (4.93%) Red Hat
5 134 (4.93%) VMware
6 111 (4.08%) Dynatrace
7 65 (2.39%) Databricks
8 49 (1.80%) OpenAI
9 36 (1.32%) ServiceNow
10 30 (1.10%) Cisco
11 29 (1.07%) AppDynamics
12 28 (1.03%) New Relic
13 27 (0.99%) Okta
13 27 (0.99%) Tenable
14 23 (0.85%) Denodo
14 23 (0.85%) Talend
15 21 (0.77%) ForgeRock
16 20 (0.74%) CyberArk
17 18 (0.66%) Pure Storage