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 25 June 2025, comparing them to the same period in the previous two years.

6 months to
25 Jun 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 33 46 32
Rank change year-on-year +13 -14 -4
Contract jobs citing Kubernetes 1,710 1,731 3,163
As % of all contract jobs advertised in the UK 5.67% 3.97% 5.70%
As % of the Systems Management category 35.97% 32.43% 36.89%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,141 1,268 2,251
10th Percentile £400 £406 £450
25th Percentile £456 £463 £513
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £537 £550 £600
Median % change year-on-year -2.36% -8.33% -2.44%
75th Percentile £638 £650 £713
90th Percentile £738 £725 £800
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £525 £588
% change year-on-year -4.71% -10.64% +6.82%
Number of hourly rates quoted 6 16 52
10th Percentile £63.00 £41.47 £50.08
25th Percentile £74.80 £46.23 £61.25
Median hourly rate £79.50 £67.25 £72.50
Median % change year-on-year +18.22% -7.24% +49.93%
75th Percentile £84.12 £74.58 £78.00
90th Percentile £89.75 £77.75 £90.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £79.50 £68.75 £72.50
% change year-on-year +15.64% -5.17% +52.63%

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 4,754 5,337 8,574
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 15.76% 12.25% 15.44%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,179 3,836 6,106
10th Percentile £300 £300 £350
25th Percentile £413 £413 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £516 £550
Median % change year-on-year -0.74% -6.12% -2.65%
75th Percentile £603 £625 £675
90th Percentile £700 £700 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £525
% change year-on-year - -4.76% +5.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 51 103 184
10th Percentile £13.75 £15.72 £18.65
25th Percentile £21.39 £20.50 £25.71
Median hourly rate £37.50 £31.50 £57.50
Median % change year-on-year +19.05% -45.22% +155.56%
75th Percentile £63.40 £49.38 £73.75
90th Percentile £78.70 £71.25 £84.63
UK excluding London median hourly rate £57.00 £40.00 £43.75
% change year-on-year +42.50% -8.57% +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 25 June 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 25 June 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 25 June 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 +13 1,409 £550 - 3,025
London +10 858 £550 -4.35% 1,394
Work from Home +10 587 £537 -6.61% 2,424
UK excluding London +9 556 £500 -4.71% 1,887
North of England +12 186 £500 -2.44% 513
South East +2 110 £475 -13.64% 494
North West +29 101 £488 -9.30% 303
Midlands +62 85 £525 +16.67% 251
Yorkshire +1 76 £538 +8.59% 182
Scotland +14 75 £498 +6.52% 123
South West +11 72 £600 +9.09% 236
West Midlands +45 59 £550 +12.82% 148
East Midlands +22 26 £435 +7.02% 91
East of England +17 24 £490 -12.89% 191
North East -3 12 £523 +26.67% 28
Wales +3 8 £500 - 49
Northern Ireland -6 3 £470 - 53

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 72 (4.21%) Apache
2 66 (3.86%) Apache Spark
3 60 (3.51%) Confluence
4 45 (2.63%) Apache Airflow
5 33 (1.93%) nginx
6 20 (1.17%) JBoss
7 16 (0.94%) OpenStack
8 14 (0.82%) Camunda
8 14 (0.82%) WebSphere
9 10 (0.58%) Microsoft Exchange
9 10 (0.58%) WebLogic
10 9 (0.53%) WebSphere Application Server
11 8 (0.47%) Alfresco
12 7 (0.41%) Jupyter
13 5 (0.29%) Drupal
13 5 (0.29%) WordPress
14 4 (0.23%) IIS
14 4 (0.23%) MQSeries
14 4 (0.23%) Tomcat
15 3 (0.18%) IBM Domino
Applications
1 5 (0.29%) MS Visio
2 2 (0.12%) Chatbot
2 2 (0.12%) Notion
2 2 (0.12%) Trello
3 1 (0.058%) InVision
3 1 (0.058%) Microsoft Excel
3 1 (0.058%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 1 (0.058%) Sketch
Business Applications
1 5 (0.29%) Payment Gateway
2 4 (0.23%) Oracle ERP
2 4 (0.23%) SAP S/4HANA
3 3 (0.18%) Endur
3 3 (0.18%) Oracle EBS
4 2 (0.12%) NetSuite
4 2 (0.12%) SAP IBP
4 2 (0.12%) Shopify
5 1 (0.058%) Cloudability
5 1 (0.058%) Distributed Ledger
5 1 (0.058%) Oracle EBS R12
5 1 (0.058%) Remedy ITSM
5 1 (0.058%) SAP HCM
Cloud Services
1 1,000 (58.48%) AWS
2 560 (32.75%) Azure
3 295 (17.25%) GCP
4 236 (13.80%) GitHub
5 191 (11.17%) Serverless
6 173 (10.12%) OpenShift
7 145 (8.48%) GitHub Actions
8 140 (8.19%) Amazon EKS
9 136 (7.95%) Azure DevOps
10 128 (7.49%) Azure AKS
11 125 (7.31%) AWS CloudFormation
12 117 (6.84%) AWS Lambda
13 104 (6.08%) Amazon S3
14 75 (4.39%) Amazon EC2
15 68 (3.98%) PaaS
16 62 (3.63%) SaaS
17 60 (3.51%) IaaS
18 57 (3.33%) Amazon ECS
19 54 (3.16%) Google Kubernetes Engine
20 52 (3.04%) Amazon CloudWatch
Communications & Networking
1 83 (4.85%) Firewall
2 78 (4.56%) DNS
3 54 (3.16%) HTTP
4 48 (2.81%) VPN
5 42 (2.46%) TCP/IP
6 34 (1.99%) DHCP
7 28 (1.64%) Network Security
8 21 (1.23%) SSL
9 15 (0.88%) SAN
10 12 (0.70%) NAS
10 12 (0.70%) SMTP
11 11 (0.64%) Kerberos
12 10 (0.58%) Internet
13 9 (0.53%) HTTPS
14 7 (0.41%) Wireless
15 6 (0.35%) 4G
15 6 (0.35%) 5G
15 6 (0.35%) Software-Defined Networking
16 5 (0.29%) MPLS
16 5 (0.29%) VSAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 181 (10.58%) PostgreSQL
2 121 (7.08%) NoSQL
3 108 (6.32%) MongoDB
4 98 (5.73%) Relational Database
5 87 (5.09%) Amazon RDS
6 74 (4.33%) Elasticsearch
7 59 (3.45%) SQL Server
8 58 (3.39%) Apache Cassandra
9 52 (3.04%) MySQL
10 51 (2.98%) Big Data
11 38 (2.22%) Redis
12 36 (2.11%) Data Lake
13 34 (1.99%) Data Warehouse
14 33 (1.93%) Hadoop
15 27 (1.58%) Amazon Athena
16 26 (1.52%) Amazon Aurora
17 23 (1.35%) Azure SQL Database
17 23 (1.35%) Oracle Database
18 21 (1.23%) DynamoDB
19 20 (1.17%) BigQuery
Development Applications
1 382 (22.34%) Jenkins
2 268 (15.67%) Git
3 224 (13.10%) GitLab
4 134 (7.84%) JIRA
5 68 (3.98%) SonarQube
6 47 (2.75%) Artifactory
7 46 (2.69%) Maven
8 44 (2.57%) JUnit
9 35 (2.05%) Bitbucket
10 30 (1.75%) Sonatype Nexus
11 27 (1.58%) CircleCI
12 26 (1.52%) Cucumber
12 26 (1.52%) Selenium
13 25 (1.46%) Gradle
14 21 (1.23%) REST Assured
15 20 (1.17%) Cypress.io
16 18 (1.05%) Mockito
16 18 (1.05%) TeamCity
17 16 (0.94%) Bitbucket Server
18 14 (0.82%) Atlassian Bamboo
General
1 398 (23.27%) Social Skills
2 286 (16.73%) Finance
3 169 (9.88%) Public Sector
4 146 (8.54%) Banking
5 136 (7.95%) Analytical Skills
6 60 (3.51%) Investment Banking
7 37 (2.16%) Telecoms
8 26 (1.52%) Front Office
9 25 (1.46%) Retail
10 24 (1.40%) Presentation Skills
11 19 (1.11%) Financial Institution
12 18 (1.05%) Legal
13 17 (0.99%) Organisational Skills
14 15 (0.88%) Law
15 14 (0.82%) Marketing
16 12 (0.70%) Documentation Skills
17 11 (0.64%) Inclusion and Diversity
17 11 (0.64%) Military
18 8 (0.47%) Pharmaceutical
19 6 (0.35%) Manufacturing
Job Titles
1 438 (25.61%) Developer
2 344 (20.12%) DevOps Engineer
3 266 (15.56%) Senior
4 173 (10.12%) Architect
5 130 (7.60%) AWS Engineer
6 122 (7.13%) Java Developer
7 114 (6.67%) Lead
8 100 (5.85%) AWS DevOps
9 93 (5.44%) Senior Developer
10 90 (5.26%) Python Developer
11 85 (4.97%) AWS DevOps Engineer
12 80 (4.68%) Data Engineer
13 78 (4.56%) Cloud Engineer
13 78 (4.56%) Software Engineer
14 74 (4.33%) Python Engineer
15 65 (3.80%) Azure Engineer
16 62 (3.63%) Platform Engineer
17 60 (3.51%) Kubernetes Engineer
18 54 (3.16%) Full-Stack Developer
19 53 (3.10%) Senior DevOps
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 271 (15.85%) Kafka
2 159 (9.30%) Spring
3 157 (9.18%) React
4 133 (7.78%) .NET
5 125 (7.31%) Spring Boot
6 123 (7.19%) REST
7 121 (7.08%) Node.js
8 118 (6.90%) RESTful
9 92 (5.38%) AngularJS
10 80 (4.68%) Elastic Stack
10 80 (4.68%) OAuth
11 59 (3.45%) FastAPI
11 59 (3.45%) HTML
12 56 (3.27%) OpenTelemetry
13 55 (3.22%) gRPC
14 51 (2.98%) ARM Templates
15 48 (2.81%) OpenID
16 43 (2.51%) SAML
17 41 (2.40%) GraphQL
18 40 (2.34%) CSS
Miscellaneous
1 172 (10.06%) Cloud Native
2 114 (6.67%) Distributed Systems
3 60 (3.51%) Public Cloud
4 41 (2.40%) Hybrid Cloud
5 40 (2.34%) Product Ownership
6 39 (2.28%) Data Centre
6 39 (2.28%) Enterprise Software
7 37 (2.16%) PKI
8 31 (1.81%) Onboarding
9 27 (1.58%) Algorithms
10 24 (1.40%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
10 24 (1.40%) Management Information System
11 23 (1.35%) Data Protection Act
12 22 (1.29%) Hedge funds
13 21 (1.23%) Private Cloud
14 20 (1.17%) Virtual Team
15 17 (0.99%) Greenfield Project
16 16 (0.94%) Legacy Systems
17 14 (0.82%) Clustering
18 13 (0.76%) Security Posture
Operating Systems
1 412 (24.09%) Linux
2 136 (7.95%) Windows
3 87 (5.09%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 64 (3.74%) Unix
5 51 (2.98%) Windows Server
6 15 (0.88%) CentOS
7 13 (0.76%) VMS
8 12 (0.70%) Android
9 7 (0.41%) Apple iOS
9 7 (0.41%) Rocky
10 6 (0.35%) SUSE
10 6 (0.35%) Ubuntu
11 5 (0.29%) Solaris
12 4 (0.23%) AIX
12 4 (0.23%) Mac OS
12 4 (0.23%) Windows Server 2003
12 4 (0.23%) Windows Server 2019
13 3 (0.18%) Oracle Linux
14 2 (0.12%) Debian
15 1 (0.058%) Windows Server 2016
Processes & Methodologies
1 913 (53.39%) CI/CD
2 859 (50.23%) DevOps
3 650 (38.01%) Containerisation
4 464 (27.13%) Infrastructure as Code
4 464 (27.13%) Microservices
5 451 (26.37%) Agile
6 314 (18.36%) Problem-Solving
7 266 (15.56%) Software Engineering
8 185 (10.82%) Test Automation
9 162 (9.47%) Observability
10 144 (8.42%) Continuous Integration
11 142 (8.30%) Artificial Intelligence
12 134 (7.84%) Configuration Management
13 132 (7.72%) TDD
14 131 (7.66%) Mentoring
15 129 (7.54%) Migration
16 128 (7.49%) Full-Stack Development
16 128 (7.49%) Open Source
17 126 (7.37%) Analytics
18 119 (6.96%) Site Reliability Engineering
Programming Languages
1 807 (47.19%) Python
2 454 (26.55%) Java
3 250 (14.62%) Bash
4 244 (14.27%) SQL
5 219 (12.81%) JavaScript
6 177 (10.35%) Go
7 160 (9.36%) C#
8 147 (8.60%) PowerShell
9 125 (7.31%) TypeScript
10 74 (4.33%) C++
11 59 (3.45%) Shell Script
12 55 (3.22%) Bicep
13 35 (2.05%) Perl
14 27 (1.58%) Scala
15 26 (1.52%) Kotlin
15 26 (1.52%) Ruby
16 25 (1.46%) Groovy
17 24 (1.40%) Rust
18 23 (1.35%) PL/SQL
19 19 (1.11%) PHP
Qualifications
1 461 (26.96%) Security Cleared
2 352 (20.58%) SC Cleared
3 118 (6.90%) Degree
4 92 (5.38%) DV Cleared
5 72 (4.21%) AWS Certification
6 57 (3.33%) Computer Science Degree
7 47 (2.75%) Azure Certification
8 32 (1.87%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
9 22 (1.29%) Master's Degree
10 19 (1.11%) Microsoft Certification
11 15 (0.88%) BPSS Clearance
12 14 (0.82%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
12 14 (0.82%) CISSP
13 12 (0.70%) AWS Certified Developer
13 12 (0.70%) OCP
13 12 (0.70%) Oracle Certification
14 7 (0.41%) CISM
15 6 (0.35%) AWS Certified SysOps Administrator
15 6 (0.35%) Cisco Certification
15 6 (0.35%) ISTQB
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 71 (4.15%) QA
2 37 (2.16%) Accessibility
3 36 (2.11%) GDPR
4 25 (1.46%) Data Quality
4 25 (1.46%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 21 (1.23%) PCI DSS
6 19 (1.11%) HIPAA
7 15 (0.88%) NIST
8 12 (0.70%) SOC 2
9 10 (0.58%) Sarbanes-Oxley
10 8 (0.47%) NCSC
11 5 (0.29%) SLA
12 3 (0.18%) Disclosure Scotland
12 3 (0.18%) GRC
12 3 (0.18%) WCAG
13 2 (0.12%) Actionable Recommendations
13 2 (0.12%) California Consumer Privacy Act
13 2 (0.12%) FedRAMP
13 2 (0.12%) NIST 800
13 2 (0.12%) OASIS TOSCA
System Software
1 989 (57.84%) Docker
2 63 (3.68%) Active Directory
3 57 (3.33%) VMware Infrastructure
4 25 (1.46%) Hyper-V
5 21 (1.23%) Virtual Machines
6 19 (1.11%) vSphere
7 17 (0.99%) Apache ZooKeeper
8 14 (0.82%) VMware ESXi
9 9 (0.53%) BitLocker
9 9 (0.53%) Microsoft App-V
9 9 (0.53%) Terminal Services
10 8 (0.47%) VMware NSX
11 6 (0.35%) Veritas Cluster Server
12 3 (0.18%) Lustre
12 3 (0.18%) LXC
12 3 (0.18%) Platform Symphony
12 3 (0.18%) vCloud
12 3 (0.18%) VMware Workstation
13 2 (0.12%) NFS
13 2 (0.12%) Virtual Desktop
Systems Management
1 706 (41.29%) Terraform
2 382 (22.34%) Ansible
3 207 (12.11%) Grafana
4 181 (10.58%) Prometheus
5 91 (5.32%) Puppet
6 59 (3.45%) Progress Chef
7 52 (3.04%) Argo
8 43 (2.51%) Kibana
9 38 (2.22%) Istio
10 34 (1.99%) Single Sign-On
11 31 (1.81%) Packer
12 24 (1.40%) Consul
13 21 (1.23%) Podman
14 16 (0.94%) Nagios
15 14 (0.82%) Rancher
16 13 (0.76%) Docker Swarm
16 13 (0.76%) logstash
17 12 (0.70%) Kustomize
18 11 (0.64%) vCenter Server
19 9 (0.53%) vMotion
Vendors
1 125 (7.31%) Microsoft
2 119 (6.96%) Google
3 115 (6.73%) Splunk
4 105 (6.14%) Red Hat
5 96 (5.61%) Oracle
6 78 (4.56%) VMware
7 39 (2.28%) Dynatrace
8 33 (1.93%) IBM
9 27 (1.58%) AppDynamics
10 25 (1.46%) Databricks
11 23 (1.35%) SAP
11 23 (1.35%) ServiceNow
12 17 (0.99%) Salesforce
13 14 (0.82%) Cisco
14 13 (0.76%) TIBCO
14 13 (0.76%) Veritas
15 12 (0.70%) Symantec
15 12 (0.70%) Virgin Media
16 11 (0.64%) Confluent
16 11 (0.64%) MuleSoft