KVM Contract Job Trends

Kernel-Based Virtual Machine (KVM)
UK

The table below provides summary statistics and contractor rates for jobs requiring KVM skills. It covers contract job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 1 February 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
1 Feb 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 561 507 563
Rank change year-on-year -54 +56 +162
Contract jobs citing KVM 29 23 33
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.075% 0.073% 0.073%
As % of the System Software category 0.62% 0.60% 0.63%
Number of daily rates quoted 13 12 21
10th Percentile £325 £382 -
25th Percentile £358 £415 £313
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £482 £440 £450
Median % change year-on-year +9.55% -2.22% -4.76%
75th Percentile £538 £488 £550
90th Percentile £670 £600 £630
UK excluding London median daily rate £447 £430 £325
% change year-on-year +3.95% +32.31% -27.78%
Number of hourly rates quoted 0 0 2
Median hourly rate - - £60.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate - - -

All System Software Skills
UK

KVM falls under the System Software category. For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all contract job vacancies requiring system software skills.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for system software skills 4,642 3,818 5,259
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 12.05% 12.16% 11.71%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,163 2,468 3,596
10th Percentile £207 £200 £190
25th Percentile £400 £375 £325
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £513 £493
Median % change year-on-year -2.49% +4.11% -6.19%
75th Percentile £594 £625 £600
90th Percentile £695 £723 £700
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £465 £450
% change year-on-year +2.15% +3.33% -5.26%
Number of hourly rates quoted 139 92 245
10th Percentile £15.50 £15.51 £14.06
25th Percentile £20.82 £21.20 £17.78
Median hourly rate £41.94 £30.75 £46.18
Median % change year-on-year +36.39% -33.41% +25.66%
75th Percentile £74.26 £64.50 £65.98
90th Percentile £91.70 £75.00 £78.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £58.50 £37.50 £47.50
% change year-on-year +56.00% -21.05% +115.91%

KVM
Job Vacancy Trend

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

KVM job vacancy trend in the UK

KVM
Daily Rate Trend

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

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

KVM
Daily Rate Histogram

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing KVM over the 6 months to 1 February 2026.

Daily rate histogram for KVM in the UK

KVM
Hourly Rate Trend

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

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

KVM
Top 9 Contract Job Locations

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing KVM within the UK over the 6 months to 1 February 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 -44 28 £482 +9.55% 9
UK excluding London -56 17 £447 +3.95% 10
North of England -47 13 £363 - 3
Work from Home -2 10 £600 +57.89% 5
Yorkshire - 10 £363 - 1
London -26 8 £390 -35.00%
South East -24 3 £471 +12.14% 2
North West -25 3 - - 2
South West - 1 £600 - 3

KVM
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 2 (6.90%) OpenStack
2 1 (3.45%) Apache
2 1 (3.45%) CICS
2 1 (3.45%) Tomcat
2 1 (3.45%) WebSphere
Applications
1 1 (3.45%) MS Visio
Cloud Services
1 9 (31.03%) Azure
2 8 (27.59%) AWS
3 7 (24.14%) GCP
4 6 (20.69%) OpenShift
5 2 (6.90%) Cohesity
6 1 (3.45%) Azure DevOps
6 1 (3.45%) Cloud Run
6 1 (3.45%) Datadog
6 1 (3.45%) GitHub
6 1 (3.45%) Nutanix
Communications & Networking
1 7 (24.14%) Firewall
2 6 (20.69%) VLAN
3 5 (17.24%) TCP/IP
4 3 (10.34%) BGP
4 3 (10.34%) DHCP
4 3 (10.34%) VXLAN
5 2 (6.90%) Cisco Nexus
5 2 (6.90%) DNS
5 2 (6.90%) Ethernet VPN
5 2 (6.90%) LAN
5 2 (6.90%) Network Security
5 2 (6.90%) OSPF
5 2 (6.90%) SAN
5 2 (6.90%) WAN
6 1 (3.45%) IPsec
6 1 (3.45%) IPv4
6 1 (3.45%) IPv6
6 1 (3.45%) Kerberos
6 1 (3.45%) SSH
6 1 (3.45%) VPN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 3 (10.34%) DB2
1 3 (10.34%) SQL Server
2 2 (6.90%) PostgreSQL
3 1 (3.45%) MySQL
3 1 (3.45%) NoSQL
Development Applications
1 2 (6.90%) Sonatype Nexus
2 1 (3.45%) Git
2 1 (3.45%) Jenkins
2 1 (3.45%) JIRA
General
1 6 (20.69%) Social Skills
2 5 (17.24%) Analytical Skills
3 3 (10.34%) Documentation Skills
3 3 (10.34%) Finance
3 3 (10.34%) Inclusion and Diversity
4 2 (6.90%) Financial Institution
4 2 (6.90%) Presentation Skills
5 1 (3.45%) Banking
5 1 (3.45%) Public Sector
Job Titles
1 5 (17.24%) Technical Specialist
2 4 (13.79%) Administrator
2 4 (13.79%) VMware Engineer
3 3 (10.34%) Network Engineer
4 2 (6.90%) Cisco Engineer
4 2 (6.90%) Cisco Network Engineer
4 2 (6.90%) Data Centre Engineer
4 2 (6.90%) Data Centre Technician
4 2 (6.90%) Data Technician
4 2 (6.90%) Hyper-V Engineer
4 2 (6.90%) Linux Specialist
4 2 (6.90%) Migration Engineer
4 2 (6.90%) Systems Engineer
5 1 (3.45%) Cloud Engineer
5 1 (3.45%) Data Network Engineer
5 1 (3.45%) DevOps Engineer
5 1 (3.45%) Infrastructure Consultant
5 1 (3.45%) IT Analyst
5 1 (3.45%) Network Design Engineer
5 1 (3.45%) Virtualisation Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 3 (10.34%) Elastic Stack
2 2 (6.90%) LDAP
3 1 (3.45%) .NET
3 1 (3.45%) CrewAI
3 1 (3.45%) JSON
3 1 (3.45%) LAMP
3 1 (3.45%) LangChain
3 1 (3.45%) LAPP Stack
3 1 (3.45%) libvirt
3 1 (3.45%) Middleware
3 1 (3.45%) web3js
3 1 (3.45%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 10 (34.48%) Data Centre
2 5 (17.24%) Hybrid Cloud
3 4 (13.79%) Linux Command Line
4 3 (10.34%) Data Protection Act
5 2 (6.90%) Analytical Mindset
5 2 (6.90%) Distributed Systems
5 2 (6.90%) Enterprise Storage
5 2 (6.90%) Hedge funds
6 1 (3.45%) AI Agents
6 1 (3.45%) Blockchain
6 1 (3.45%) Clustering
6 1 (3.45%) Mainframe
6 1 (3.45%) Operational Technology
6 1 (3.45%) Private Cloud
6 1 (3.45%) Public Cloud
6 1 (3.45%) Replication
6 1 (3.45%) Virtual Reality
6 1 (3.45%) Web3
Operating Systems
1 22 (75.86%) Linux
2 12 (41.38%) Windows
3 6 (20.69%) Unix
4 5 (17.24%) CentOS
5 4 (13.79%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 4 (13.79%) Windows Server
6 3 (10.34%) AIX
6 3 (10.34%) Ubuntu
7 2 (6.90%) VMS
8 1 (3.45%) Solaris
8 1 (3.45%) zOS
Processes & Methodologies
1 10 (34.48%) Performance Tuning
2 7 (24.14%) Migration
3 6 (20.69%) CI/CD
3 6 (20.69%) Configuration Management
3 6 (20.69%) Containerisation
3 6 (20.69%) DevOps
4 5 (17.24%) Capacity Planning
4 5 (17.24%) Disaster Recovery
4 5 (17.24%) Problem-Solving
5 4 (13.79%) AI
5 4 (13.79%) Continuous Improvement
5 4 (13.79%) High Availability
5 4 (13.79%) Task Automation
6 3 (10.34%) Asset Management
6 3 (10.34%) Change Management
6 3 (10.34%) Data Protection
6 3 (10.34%) Network Management
6 3 (10.34%) Open Source
6 3 (10.34%) Validation
6 3 (10.34%) Virtual Environments
Programming Languages
1 16 (55.17%) Python
2 15 (51.72%) Bash
3 10 (34.48%) PowerShell
4 5 (17.24%) Shell Script
5 4 (13.79%) Perl
6 3 (10.34%) SQL
7 2 (6.90%) Java
8 1 (3.45%) C
8 1 (3.45%) C++
8 1 (3.45%) Go
8 1 (3.45%) Rust
Qualifications
1 5 (17.24%) RHCE
1 5 (17.24%) RHCSA
2 4 (13.79%) Security Cleared
3 3 (10.34%) SC Cleared
4 2 (6.90%) CCNP
4 2 (6.90%) Cisco Certification
4 2 (6.90%) Degree
5 1 (3.45%) CCIE
5 1 (3.45%) CCIE Data Center
5 1 (3.45%) CCNA
5 1 (3.45%) JNCIA
5 1 (3.45%) JNCIS
System Software
1 18 (62.07%) VMware Infrastructure
2 12 (41.38%) Hyper-V
2 12 (41.38%) Virtual Machines
3 6 (20.69%) Docker
3 6 (20.69%) VMware ESXi
4 3 (10.34%) Active Directory
4 3 (10.34%) Ceph
4 3 (10.34%) Firmware
5 2 (6.90%) VMware NSX
6 1 (3.45%) iptables
6 1 (3.45%) Lustre
6 1 (3.45%) NFS
6 1 (3.45%) QEMU
6 1 (3.45%) RHEV
6 1 (3.45%) Samba
6 1 (3.45%) Slurm Workload Manager
6 1 (3.45%) Squid
6 1 (3.45%) vSphere
6 1 (3.45%) Xen
Systems Management
1 16 (55.17%) Ansible
2 9 (31.03%) Terraform
3 8 (27.59%) Kubernetes
4 7 (24.14%) vCenter Server
5 4 (13.79%) Progress Chef
5 4 (13.79%) Puppet
6 3 (10.34%) Grafana
6 3 (10.34%) IBM BigFix
6 3 (10.34%) Prometheus
7 2 (6.90%) PowerCLI
7 2 (6.90%) Red Hat Satellite
8 1 (3.45%) HAProxy
8 1 (3.45%) Nagios
8 1 (3.45%) Proxmox
8 1 (3.45%) SELinux
8 1 (3.45%) WSUS
Vendors
1 20 (68.97%) VMware
2 8 (27.59%) Red Hat
3 5 (17.24%) Cisco
4 4 (13.79%) Microsoft
5 3 (10.34%) IBM
5 3 (10.34%) Oracle
6 2 (6.90%) Arista
6 2 (6.90%) Brocade
6 2 (6.90%) F5
6 2 (6.90%) Juniper
6 2 (6.90%) NetApp
6 2 (6.90%) Pure Storage
6 2 (6.90%) Veeam
7 1 (3.45%) AlgoSec
7 1 (3.45%) EMC
7 1 (3.45%) Google
7 1 (3.45%) NVIDIA
7 1 (3.45%) Palo Alto
7 1 (3.45%) SolarWinds