Kubernetes Contracts

Kubernetes (k8s)
UK

The table below provides summary statistics for contract job vacancies requiring Kubernetes skills. It includes a benchmarking guide to the contractor rates offered in vacancies that cited Kubernetes over the 6 months leading up to 30 April 2025, comparing them to the same period in the previous two years.

6 months to
30 Apr 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 32 55 30
Rank change year-on-year +23 -25 -2
Contract jobs citing Kubernetes 1,746 1,513 3,636
As % of all contract jobs advertised in the UK 5.97% 3.47% 6.09%
As % of the Systems Management category 37.93% 29.40% 37.81%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,213 1,096 2,630
10th Percentile £406 £409 £463
25th Percentile £466 £464 £515
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £550 £600
Median % change year-on-year - -8.33% -
75th Percentile £675 £650 £700
90th Percentile £788 £725 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £525 £538 £575
% change year-on-year -2.33% -6.52% +4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 5 13 37
10th Percentile £25.75 £46.19 £53.75
25th Percentile £26.50 £52.50 £61.25
Median hourly rate £60.00 £62.00 £70.00
Median % change year-on-year -3.23% -11.43% +32.36%
75th Percentile £78.70 £74.44 £78.00
90th Percentile £81.26 £76.89 £90.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £80.83 £64.75 £64.00
% change year-on-year +24.83% +1.17% +34.74%

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 4,603 5,146 9,616
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 15.74% 11.80% 16.11%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,154 3,676 6,945
10th Percentile £313 £257 £356
25th Percentile £419 £413 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £515 £563
Median % change year-on-year +1.92% -8.43% -0.44%
75th Percentile £625 £625 £675
90th Percentile £725 £700 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £525
% change year-on-year - -4.76% +5.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 51 127 209
10th Percentile £13.75 £14.00 £16.48
25th Percentile £20.13 £17.77 £22.75
Median hourly rate £26.45 £30.00 £57.50
Median % change year-on-year -11.83% -47.83% +155.56%
75th Percentile £51.75 £54.38 £71.50
90th Percentile £70.00 £70.50 £82.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £25.34 £38.50 £43.75
% change year-on-year -34.18% -12.00% +118.75%

Kubernetes
Job Vacancy Trend

Job postings citing Kubernetes as a proportion of all IT jobs advertised.

Job vacancy trend for Kubernetes in the UK

Kubernetes
Contractor Daily Rate Trend

3-month moving average daily rate quoted in jobs citing Kubernetes.

Daily rate trend for Kubernetes in the UK

Kubernetes
Daily Rate Histogram

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Kubernetes over the 6 months to 30 April 2025.

Daily rate histogram for Kubernetes in the UK

Kubernetes
Contractor Hourly Rate Trend

3-month moving average hourly rates quoted in jobs citing Kubernetes.

Hourly rate trend for Kubernetes in the UK

Kubernetes
Hourly Rate Histogram

Hourly rate distribution of jobs citing Kubernetes over the 6 months to 30 April 2025.

Hourly rate histogram for Kubernetes in the UK

Kubernetes
Top 17 Contract 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 30 April 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
England +26 1,436 £575 +4.55% 1,432
London +19 898 £600 +4.80% 776
Work from Home +22 609 £573 -0.43% 1,104
UK excluding London +35 567 £525 -2.33% 737
North of England +30 186 £525 - 255
South East +19 110 £550 -4.35% 141
North West +33 100 £500 -9.09% 177
Scotland +22 91 £500 -1.19% 72
South West +40 87 £600 +9.09% 98
Yorkshire +15 69 £575 +9.52% 58
Midlands +49 63 £537 +7.40% 98
West Midlands +45 49 £545 +8.91% 70
East of England +33 21 £500 -9.09% 51
North East +8 20 £565 +36.97% 20
East Midlands +9 14 £475 -5.00% 27
Northern Ireland 0 10 £325 - 22
Wales +4 8 £586 +17.20% 10

Kubernetes
Co-occurring Skills and Capabilities 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 90 (5.15%) Apache Spark
2 87 (4.98%) Apache
3 60 (3.44%) Confluence
4 54 (3.09%) Apache Airflow
5 46 (2.63%) nginx
6 17 (0.97%) JBoss
6 17 (0.97%) OpenStack
7 12 (0.69%) Jupyter
7 12 (0.69%) Traefik
8 11 (0.63%) Microsoft Exchange
9 10 (0.57%) Camunda
10 8 (0.46%) WebLogic
11 6 (0.34%) BizTalk Server
11 6 (0.34%) WebSphere
12 5 (0.29%) Cloud Foundry
13 4 (0.23%) Alfresco
13 4 (0.23%) IIS
14 3 (0.17%) Tomcat
14 3 (0.17%) WebLogic Portal
14 3 (0.17%) WebSphere Application Server
Applications
1 2 (0.11%) MS Visio
1 2 (0.11%) Notion
1 2 (0.11%) Trello
1 2 (0.11%) Weka
2 1 (0.057%) Chatbot
2 1 (0.057%) InVision
2 1 (0.057%) Microsoft Excel
2 1 (0.057%) Microsoft PowerPoint
2 1 (0.057%) Sketch
Business Applications
1 4 (0.23%) Oracle ERP
2 3 (0.17%) Endur
2 3 (0.17%) Oracle EBS
2 3 (0.17%) SAP S/4HANA
3 2 (0.11%) NetSuite
3 2 (0.11%) Payment Gateway
3 2 (0.11%) SAP IBP
3 2 (0.11%) Shopify
4 1 (0.057%) Cloudability
4 1 (0.057%) Distributed Ledger
4 1 (0.057%) Oracle EBS R12
4 1 (0.057%) Remedy ITSM
4 1 (0.057%) SAP HCM
4 1 (0.057%) Siebel CRM
Cloud Services
1 965 (55.27%) AWS
2 568 (32.53%) Azure
3 252 (14.43%) GCP
4 217 (12.43%) Serverless
5 197 (11.28%) OpenShift
6 195 (11.17%) GitHub
7 148 (8.48%) Azure DevOps
8 143 (8.19%) AWS Lambda
9 132 (7.56%) Azure AKS
10 130 (7.45%) Amazon S3
11 129 (7.39%) Amazon EKS
12 125 (7.16%) AWS CloudFormation
13 110 (6.30%) GitHub Actions
14 103 (5.90%) Amazon ECS
15 98 (5.61%) Amazon EC2
16 62 (3.55%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 58 (3.32%) PaaS
18 52 (2.98%) Cloud Computing
19 49 (2.81%) Entra ID
19 49 (2.81%) SaaS
Communications & Networking
1 95 (5.44%) DNS
2 87 (4.98%) Firewall
3 70 (4.01%) TCP/IP
4 64 (3.67%) HTTP
5 47 (2.69%) VPN
6 33 (1.89%) DHCP
7 25 (1.43%) Network Security
8 18 (1.03%) SAN
9 17 (0.97%) SSL
10 16 (0.92%) NAS
11 12 (0.69%) SMTP
12 9 (0.52%) BGP
13 8 (0.46%) Kerberos
13 8 (0.46%) Wireless
14 7 (0.40%) 3GPP
14 7 (0.40%) 4G
14 7 (0.40%) Internet
14 7 (0.40%) MPLS
15 6 (0.34%) Reverse Proxy
15 6 (0.34%) VLAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 187 (10.71%) PostgreSQL
2 134 (7.67%) MongoDB
3 132 (7.56%) NoSQL
4 95 (5.44%) Amazon RDS
5 93 (5.33%) Relational Database
6 91 (5.21%) Elasticsearch
7 68 (3.89%) SQL Server
8 67 (3.84%) Apache Cassandra
9 63 (3.61%) MySQL
10 51 (2.92%) Big Data
11 46 (2.63%) Hadoop
12 44 (2.52%) Amazon Athena
13 40 (2.29%) Data Warehouse
14 37 (2.12%) Apache Iceberg
14 37 (2.12%) Data Lake
15 36 (2.06%) Redis
16 30 (1.72%) Apache Ignite
17 29 (1.66%) Amazon Redshift
18 28 (1.60%) Apache Arrow
18 28 (1.60%) Dremio
Development Applications
1 380 (21.76%) Jenkins
2 252 (14.43%) GitLab
3 235 (13.46%) Git
4 130 (7.45%) JIRA
5 57 (3.26%) SonarQube
6 52 (2.98%) Artifactory
7 51 (2.92%) JUnit
8 40 (2.29%) Maven
9 38 (2.18%) Cucumber
10 34 (1.95%) Bitbucket
11 28 (1.60%) Sonatype Nexus
12 23 (1.32%) Selenium
13 19 (1.09%) CircleCI
13 19 (1.09%) REST Assured
14 18 (1.03%) Jasmine
14 18 (1.03%) TeamCity
15 16 (0.92%) Gradle
16 15 (0.86%) Bitbucket Server
17 14 (0.80%) Atlassian Bamboo
18 13 (0.74%) JMeter
General
1 342 (19.59%) Social Skills
2 324 (18.56%) Finance
3 184 (10.54%) Public Sector
4 175 (10.02%) Banking
5 148 (8.48%) Analytical Skills
6 76 (4.35%) Investment Banking
7 63 (3.61%) Front Office
8 44 (2.52%) Telecoms
9 26 (1.49%) Organisational Skills
10 23 (1.32%) Financial Institution
11 21 (1.20%) Legal
11 21 (1.20%) Presentation Skills
12 20 (1.15%) Law
13 18 (1.03%) Marketing
13 18 (1.03%) Retail
14 15 (0.86%) Military
15 14 (0.80%) Inclusion and Diversity
16 13 (0.74%) Manufacturing
16 13 (0.74%) Pharmaceutical
17 10 (0.57%) Documentation Skills
Job Titles
1 450 (25.77%) Developer
2 416 (23.83%) DevOps Engineer
3 284 (16.27%) Senior
4 167 (9.56%) AWS Engineer
5 149 (8.53%) Architect
6 135 (7.73%) AWS DevOps
7 134 (7.67%) Java Developer
8 127 (7.27%) AWS DevOps Engineer
9 115 (6.59%) Lead
10 112 (6.41%) Python Developer
11 102 (5.84%) Python Engineer
12 95 (5.44%) Data Engineer
13 88 (5.04%) Senior DevOps
14 87 (4.98%) Senior Developer
15 86 (4.93%) Software Engineer
16 82 (4.70%) Senior DevOps Engineer
17 77 (4.41%) Azure Engineer
18 62 (3.55%) Site Reliability Engineer
19 61 (3.49%) Cloud Engineer
19 61 (3.49%) Kubernetes Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 298 (17.07%) Kafka
2 167 (9.56%) React
3 164 (9.39%) Spring
4 153 (8.76%) .NET
5 150 (8.59%) Spring Boot
6 120 (6.87%) RESTful
7 109 (6.24%) REST
8 92 (5.27%) Node.js
9 80 (4.58%) Elastic Stack
10 66 (3.78%) AngularJS
11 62 (3.55%) FastAPI
12 55 (3.15%) OpenTelemetry
13 49 (2.81%) OAuth
14 48 (2.75%) HTML
15 46 (2.63%) ARM Templates
16 43 (2.46%) Swagger
17 41 (2.35%) .NET Core
18 40 (2.29%) Django
18 40 (2.29%) J2EE
19 39 (2.23%) GraphQL
Miscellaneous
1 144 (8.25%) Cloud Native
2 96 (5.50%) Distributed Systems
3 60 (3.44%) Public Cloud
4 58 (3.32%) Enterprise Software
5 45 (2.58%) Hybrid Cloud
6 43 (2.46%) PKI
7 36 (2.06%) Data Centre
8 31 (1.78%) Product Ownership
9 26 (1.49%) Management Information System
10 25 (1.43%) Algorithms
11 24 (1.37%) Onboarding
12 22 (1.26%) Data Protection Act
13 20 (1.15%) Legacy Systems
14 18 (1.03%) Greenfield Project
15 17 (0.97%) Distributed Denial-of-Service
16 16 (0.92%) Hedge funds
17 15 (0.86%) Private Cloud
18 14 (0.80%) Clustering
19 13 (0.74%) Security Posture
20 11 (0.63%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
Operating Systems
1 443 (25.37%) Linux
2 151 (8.65%) Windows
3 144 (8.25%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 82 (4.70%) Unix
5 63 (3.61%) Windows Server
6 38 (2.18%) CentOS
7 16 (0.92%) Ubuntu
8 11 (0.63%) VMS
9 9 (0.52%) AIX
10 8 (0.46%) Android
10 8 (0.46%) Rocky
10 8 (0.46%) Windows Server 2016
11 7 (0.40%) SUSE
12 5 (0.29%) Mac OS
12 5 (0.29%) Windows Server 2019
13 4 (0.23%) Windows Server 2003
14 3 (0.17%) Apple iOS
14 3 (0.17%) Oracle Linux
14 3 (0.17%) Solaris
15 1 (0.057%) Data ONTAP
Processes & Methodologies
1 926 (53.04%) CI/CD
2 898 (51.43%) DevOps
3 627 (35.91%) Containerisation
4 460 (26.35%) Agile
5 452 (25.89%) Microservices
6 423 (24.23%) Infrastructure as Code
7 298 (17.07%) Problem-Solving
8 295 (16.90%) Software Engineering
9 198 (11.34%) Test Automation
10 175 (10.02%) Continuous Integration
11 150 (8.59%) Full-Stack Development
12 147 (8.42%) Site Reliability Engineering
13 140 (8.02%) Observability
14 136 (7.79%) Artificial Intelligence
15 133 (7.62%) SDLC
16 128 (7.33%) Configuration Management
17 120 (6.87%) Analytics
17 120 (6.87%) High Availability
18 114 (6.53%) Machine Learning
19 113 (6.47%) Open Source
Programming Languages
1 830 (47.54%) Python
2 462 (26.46%) Java
3 294 (16.84%) SQL
4 240 (13.75%) Bash
5 212 (12.14%) JavaScript
6 179 (10.25%) Go
7 161 (9.22%) C#
8 134 (7.67%) PowerShell
9 120 (6.87%) TypeScript
10 53 (3.04%) Shell Script
11 50 (2.86%) Bicep
11 50 (2.86%) C++
12 32 (1.83%) Perl
13 30 (1.72%) Scala
14 24 (1.37%) PL/SQL
15 23 (1.32%) Groovy
16 22 (1.26%) Rust
17 21 (1.20%) Ruby
18 19 (1.09%) Kotlin
18 19 (1.09%) PHP
Qualifications
1 492 (28.18%) Security Cleared
2 375 (21.48%) SC Cleared
3 122 (6.99%) Degree
4 107 (6.13%) DV Cleared
5 78 (4.47%) AWS Certification
6 57 (3.26%) Computer Science Degree
7 40 (2.29%) Azure Certification
8 29 (1.66%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
9 20 (1.15%) Master's Degree
10 18 (1.03%) AWS Certified Developer
11 14 (0.80%) BPSS Clearance
11 14 (0.80%) Microsoft Certification
12 12 (0.69%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
12 12 (0.69%) CISSP
13 10 (0.57%) OCP
13 10 (0.57%) Oracle Certification
14 6 (0.34%) RHCE
15 5 (0.29%) Cisco Certification
15 5 (0.29%) CISM
15 5 (0.29%) ISTQB
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 55 (3.15%) QA
2 32 (1.83%) Accessibility
3 21 (1.20%) NCSC
4 15 (0.86%) Data Quality
5 14 (0.80%) GDPR
5 14 (0.80%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 14 (0.80%) NIST
6 12 (0.69%) PCI DSS
7 11 (0.63%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 7 (0.40%) HIPAA
9 4 (0.23%) SOC 2
10 3 (0.17%) Cyber Essentials
10 3 (0.17%) Disclosure Scotland
10 3 (0.17%) Government Security Classifications
11 2 (0.11%) California Consumer Privacy Act
11 2 (0.11%) FedRAMP
11 2 (0.11%) SLA
12 1 (0.057%) COBIT
12 1 (0.057%) ISO/IEC 27005
12 1 (0.057%) Software Quality Assurance
System Software
1 1,004 (57.50%) Docker
2 81 (4.64%) VMware Infrastructure
3 58 (3.32%) Active Directory
4 33 (1.89%) Hyper-V
5 25 (1.43%) Virtual Machines
6 18 (1.03%) vSphere
7 15 (0.86%) Apache ZooKeeper
8 13 (0.74%) VMware NSX
9 11 (0.63%) VMware ESXi
10 9 (0.52%) BitLocker
10 9 (0.52%) Microsoft App-V
10 9 (0.52%) Terminal Services
11 8 (0.46%) vCloud
12 6 (0.34%) Veritas Cluster Server
13 4 (0.23%) Lustre
13 4 (0.23%) LXC
14 3 (0.17%) Platform Symphony
14 3 (0.17%) VMware Workstation
15 2 (0.11%) NFS
15 2 (0.11%) Slurm Workload Manager
Systems Management
1 719 (41.18%) Terraform
2 404 (23.14%) Ansible
3 197 (11.28%) Grafana
4 173 (9.91%) Prometheus
5 93 (5.33%) Puppet
6 63 (3.61%) Progress Chef
7 56 (3.21%) Argo
8 48 (2.75%) Istio
9 41 (2.35%) Kibana
10 36 (2.06%) Packer
11 29 (1.66%) Rancher
12 27 (1.55%) Consul
13 20 (1.15%) ZABBIX
14 19 (1.09%) Podman
15 18 (1.03%) Nagios
15 18 (1.03%) Single Sign-On
16 17 (0.97%) HAProxy
16 17 (0.97%) linkerd
16 17 (0.97%) vCenter Server
17 15 (0.86%) logstash
Vendors
1 121 (6.93%) Microsoft
2 119 (6.82%) VMware
3 111 (6.36%) Red Hat
4 103 (5.90%) Google
5 99 (5.67%) Splunk
6 89 (5.10%) Oracle
7 39 (2.23%) Databricks
8 33 (1.89%) SAP
9 31 (1.78%) Dynatrace
10 23 (1.32%) AppDynamics
11 22 (1.26%) ServiceNow
12 17 (0.97%) IBM
12 17 (0.97%) Veritas
13 16 (0.92%) Salesforce
14 15 (0.86%) Okta
14 15 (0.86%) Virgin Media
15 13 (0.74%) Cisco
15 13 (0.74%) Symantec
16 12 (0.69%) Apple
16 12 (0.69%) MuleSoft