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 vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 18 September 2025, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
18 Sep 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 549 520 633
Rank change year-on-year -29 +113 +141
Contract jobs citing KVM 19 39 18
As % of all contract jobs advertised in the UK 0.058% 0.10% 0.037%
As % of the System Software category 0.49% 0.88% 0.28%
Number of daily rates quoted 10 24 11
10th Percentile £356 - £425
25th Percentile £384 £340 -
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £423 £500
Median % change year-on-year +18.34% -15.50% +23.46%
75th Percentile £551 £600 £603
90th Percentile £585 - £745
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £390 £500
% change year-on-year +28.21% -22.00% +177.78%

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 3,885 4,408 6,429
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 11.79% 11.45% 13.06%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,454 2,959 4,355
10th Percentile £218 £213 £200
25th Percentile £375 £375 £371
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £501
Median % change year-on-year - -0.10% -4.67%
75th Percentile £588 £606 £625
90th Percentile £670 £688 £723
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £475 £472
% change year-on-year - +0.71% +4.81%
Number of hourly rates quoted 114 113 269
10th Percentile £13.75 £14.16 £15.50
25th Percentile £19.02 £17.44 £19.25
Median hourly rate £34.00 £24.50 £50.00
Median % change year-on-year +38.78% -51.00% +127.27%
75th Percentile £80.00 £59.88 £66.00
90th Percentile £91.05 £74.65 £78.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £27.50 £40.00
% change year-on-year +136.36% -31.25% +100.00%

KVM
Job Vacancy Trend

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

Job vacancy trend for KVM 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 18 September 2025.

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 8 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 18 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
England -2 13 £375 -16.67% 29
London +21 9 £375 -37.50% 8
UK excluding London -24 9 £500 +28.21% 23
Work from Home +25 5 £500 -4.76% 8
Scotland -3 5 £501 +47.43%
South East +13 2 £447 +14.62% 6
North of England -13 2 - - 5
Yorkshire -14 2 - - 1

KVM
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 2 (10.53%) CICS
1 2 (10.53%) Skype for Business
1 2 (10.53%) Tomcat
1 2 (10.53%) WebSphere
2 1 (5.26%) Apache
2 1 (5.26%) CloudStack
2 1 (5.26%) Confluence
2 1 (5.26%) WebSphere Application Server
Cloud Services
1 9 (47.37%) AWS
2 6 (31.58%) Azure
2 6 (31.58%) GCP
3 5 (26.32%) OpenShift
4 3 (15.79%) Amazon EC2
4 3 (15.79%) Amazon EKS
4 3 (15.79%) Amazon S3
4 3 (15.79%) GitHub
4 3 (15.79%) Virtual Private Cloud
5 1 (5.26%) Amazon CloudWatch
5 1 (5.26%) Amazon OpenSearch
5 1 (5.26%) Azure DevOps
5 1 (5.26%) Cloud Run
5 1 (5.26%) Datadog
5 1 (5.26%) GitHub Actions
Communications & Networking
1 6 (31.58%) Firewall
2 3 (15.79%) BGP
2 3 (15.79%) Cisco Nexus
3 2 (10.53%) DHCP
3 2 (10.53%) DNS
3 2 (10.53%) Ethernet VPN
3 2 (10.53%) Multicast
3 2 (10.53%) OSPF
3 2 (10.53%) Skype
3 2 (10.53%) TCP/IP
3 2 (10.53%) VoIP
3 2 (10.53%) VXLAN
4 1 (5.26%) FCoE
4 1 (5.26%) Fibre Channel
4 1 (5.26%) IPsec
4 1 (5.26%) LAN
4 1 (5.26%) NAS
4 1 (5.26%) SAN
4 1 (5.26%) VRRP
4 1 (5.26%) WAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 5 (26.32%) MongoDB
2 3 (15.79%) InfluxDB
2 3 (15.79%) SQL Server
3 2 (10.53%) Elasticsearch
3 2 (10.53%) MySQL
3 2 (10.53%) NoSQL
3 2 (10.53%) PostgreSQL
4 1 (5.26%) Oracle Database
Development Applications
1 4 (21.05%) Git
2 3 (15.79%) Jenkins
2 3 (15.79%) Sonatype Nexus
3 2 (10.53%) JIRA
4 1 (5.26%) GitLab
General
1 4 (21.05%) Public Sector
2 3 (15.79%) Analytical Skills
3 2 (10.53%) Finance
3 2 (10.53%) Financial Institution
3 2 (10.53%) Social Skills
4 1 (5.26%) Banking
4 1 (5.26%) Documentation Skills
Job Titles
1 4 (21.05%) Site Engineer
1 4 (21.05%) Site Reliability Engineer
2 3 (15.79%) Architect
2 3 (15.79%) Infrastructure Architect
2 3 (15.79%) VMware Engineer
3 2 (10.53%) Administrator
3 2 (10.53%) Cisco Engineer
3 2 (10.53%) Cisco Network Engineer
3 2 (10.53%) Linux Specialist
3 2 (10.53%) Network Engineer
3 2 (10.53%) Systems Engineer
3 2 (10.53%) Technical Specialist
3 2 (10.53%) Voice Engineer
4 1 (5.26%) Data Centre Engineer
4 1 (5.26%) Data Network Engineer
4 1 (5.26%) Infrastructure Solutions Architect
4 1 (5.26%) Solutions Architect
4 1 (5.26%) Unix Engineer
4 1 (5.26%) Virtualisation Specialist
4 1 (5.26%) VMware Architect
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 2 (10.53%) AWS CDK
1 2 (10.53%) LDAP
1 2 (10.53%) Middleware
2 1 (5.26%) .NET
2 1 (5.26%) CrewAI
2 1 (5.26%) Elastic Stack
2 1 (5.26%) JSON
2 1 (5.26%) LangChain
2 1 (5.26%) REST
2 1 (5.26%) web3js
2 1 (5.26%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 4 (21.05%) Data Centre
2 2 (10.53%) Cloud Native
2 2 (10.53%) Clustering
2 2 (10.53%) Distributed Systems
2 2 (10.53%) Hedge funds
2 2 (10.53%) Linux Command Line
2 2 (10.53%) Mainframe
2 2 (10.53%) Replication
3 1 (5.26%) AI Agents
3 1 (5.26%) Blockchain
3 1 (5.26%) Data Protection Act
3 1 (5.26%) IBM Mainframe
3 1 (5.26%) Virtual Reality
3 1 (5.26%) Web3
Operating Systems
1 14 (73.68%) Linux
2 7 (36.84%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
3 6 (31.58%) Unix
4 4 (21.05%) CentOS
5 3 (15.79%) Windows
6 2 (10.53%) Oracle Linux
6 2 (10.53%) Solaris
6 2 (10.53%) Ubuntu
6 2 (10.53%) VMS
6 2 (10.53%) zOS
7 1 (5.26%) Data ONTAP
7 1 (5.26%) MVS
7 1 (5.26%) Rocky
Processes & Methodologies
1 8 (42.11%) Agile
1 8 (42.11%) CI/CD
1 8 (42.11%) Disaster Recovery
2 7 (36.84%) Migration
3 6 (31.58%) Containerisation
3 6 (31.58%) Infrastructure as Code
4 5 (26.32%) Configuration Management
4 5 (26.32%) DevOps
4 5 (26.32%) Observability
4 5 (26.32%) Site Reliability Engineering
5 4 (21.05%) Performance Tuning
5 4 (21.05%) Problem-Solving
6 3 (15.79%) Artificial Intelligence
6 3 (15.79%) Infrastructure Automation
6 3 (15.79%) Kanban
6 3 (15.79%) Network Load Balancing
6 3 (15.79%) Scrum
6 3 (15.79%) Storage Management
6 3 (15.79%) Task Automation
7 2 (10.53%) Vulnerability Assessment
Programming Languages
1 13 (68.42%) Python
2 10 (52.63%) Bash
3 8 (42.11%) Perl
4 6 (31.58%) Shell Script
5 3 (15.79%) Java
5 3 (15.79%) SQL
6 1 (5.26%) C
6 1 (5.26%) C++
6 1 (5.26%) Rust
Qualifications
1 4 (21.05%) RHCE
1 4 (21.05%) RHCSA
2 1 (5.26%) BPSS Clearance
2 1 (5.26%) CCIE
2 1 (5.26%) CCIE Data Center
2 1 (5.26%) CCNP
2 1 (5.26%) Cisco Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 2 (10.53%) SLA
2 1 (5.26%) Cyber Essentials
2 1 (5.26%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
2 1 (5.26%) Disclosure Scotland
System Software
1 12 (63.16%) VMware Infrastructure
2 7 (36.84%) Docker
3 4 (21.05%) Hyper-V
3 4 (21.05%) Virtual Machines
4 3 (15.79%) VMware ESXi
5 2 (10.53%) Active Directory
5 2 (10.53%) Virtual Desktop
5 2 (10.53%) VMware NSX
6 1 (5.26%) NFS
6 1 (5.26%) Squid
6 1 (5.26%) SRDF
6 1 (5.26%) Veritas Cluster Server
6 1 (5.26%) vSphere
6 1 (5.26%) Xen
Systems Management
1 14 (73.68%) Ansible
2 11 (57.89%) Kubernetes
3 8 (42.11%) Terraform
4 6 (31.58%) Grafana
4 6 (31.58%) Red Hat Satellite
5 5 (26.32%) Prometheus
5 5 (26.32%) Puppet
6 4 (21.05%) Progress Chef
7 3 (15.79%) HAProxy
7 3 (15.79%) Nagios
8 2 (10.53%) Fluentd
9 1 (5.26%) vCenter Server
Vendors
1 13 (68.42%) VMware
2 9 (47.37%) Red Hat
3 7 (36.84%) Oracle
4 6 (31.58%) Cisco
5 4 (21.05%) Commvault
5 4 (21.05%) NetApp
6 2 (10.53%) Arista
6 2 (10.53%) EMC
6 2 (10.53%) F5
6 2 (10.53%) Google
6 2 (10.53%) Palo Alto
7 1 (5.26%) AlgoSec
7 1 (5.26%) IBM
7 1 (5.26%) Juniper
7 1 (5.26%) Microsoft
7 1 (5.26%) NVIDIA
7 1 (5.26%) Pure Storage