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 29 January 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
29 Jan 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 565 511 558
Rank change year-on-year -54 +47 +163
Contract jobs citing KVM 30 23 32
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.078% 0.073% 0.073%
As % of the System Software category 0.64% 0.60% 0.62%
Number of daily rates quoted 14 12 20
10th Percentile £329 £382 £313
25th Percentile £401 £415 £317
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £501 £440 £450
Median % change year-on-year +13.92% -2.22% -8.63%
75th Percentile £554 £488 £550
90th Percentile £661 £600 £637
UK excluding London median daily rate £498 £430 £331
% change year-on-year +15.70% +29.81% -30.26%
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 4,677 3,824 5,154
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 12.15% 12.15% 11.76%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,184 2,472 3,542
10th Percentile £213 £200 £190
25th Percentile £400 £374 £325
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £513 £493
Median % change year-on-year -2.44% +4.06% -6.19%
75th Percentile £594 £625 £600
90th Percentile £694 £713 £700
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £463 £450
% change year-on-year +2.70% +2.78% -4.20%
Number of hourly rates quoted 138 91 233
10th Percentile £15.50 £17.00 £14.30
25th Percentile £20.84 £21.36 £18.25
Median hourly rate £41.94 £29.00 £47.50
Median % change year-on-year +44.62% -38.95% +29.25%
75th Percentile £74.26 £64.50 £67.25
90th Percentile £91.80 £75.00 £78.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £60.50 £37.50 £50.00
% change year-on-year +61.33% -25.00% +127.27%

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 29 January 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 10 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 29 January 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 -65 25 £495 +12.50% 9
UK excluding London -60 18 £498 +15.70% 10
North of England -52 10 £348 - 5
Work from Home -3 9 £600 +57.89% 5
Yorkshire - 9 £348 - 3
London -17 8 £390 -35.00%
Scotland - 4 £503 - 1
South East -36 3 £471 +12.14% 2
North West -24 1 - - 2
South West - 1 £600 -

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 (6.67%) CICS
1 2 (6.67%) OpenStack
1 2 (6.67%) Tomcat
1 2 (6.67%) WebSphere
2 1 (3.33%) Apache
2 1 (3.33%) Confluence
2 1 (3.33%) WebSphere Application Server
Applications
1 1 (3.33%) MS Visio
Cloud Services
1 13 (43.33%) AWS
2 10 (33.33%) Azure
3 9 (30.00%) OpenShift
4 8 (26.67%) GCP
5 3 (10.00%) Amazon EC2
5 3 (10.00%) Amazon EKS
5 3 (10.00%) Amazon S3
5 3 (10.00%) GitHub
5 3 (10.00%) Virtual Private Cloud
6 2 (6.67%) Cohesity
7 1 (3.33%) Amazon CloudWatch
7 1 (3.33%) Amazon OpenSearch
7 1 (3.33%) Azure DevOps
7 1 (3.33%) Cloud Run
7 1 (3.33%) Datadog
7 1 (3.33%) GitHub Actions
Communications & Networking
1 8 (26.67%) Firewall
2 6 (20.00%) VLAN
3 5 (16.67%) TCP/IP
4 3 (10.00%) BGP
4 3 (10.00%) Cisco Nexus
4 3 (10.00%) DHCP
4 3 (10.00%) LAN
4 3 (10.00%) SAN
4 3 (10.00%) VXLAN
4 3 (10.00%) WAN
5 2 (6.67%) DNS
5 2 (6.67%) Ethernet VPN
5 2 (6.67%) iSCSI
5 2 (6.67%) Multicast
5 2 (6.67%) Network Security
5 2 (6.67%) OSPF
6 1 (3.33%) FCoE
6 1 (3.33%) Fibre Channel
6 1 (3.33%) InfiniBand
6 1 (3.33%) NAS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 4 (13.33%) MongoDB
2 3 (10.00%) PostgreSQL
3 2 (6.67%) Elasticsearch
3 2 (6.67%) InfluxDB
3 2 (6.67%) NoSQL
3 2 (6.67%) SQL Server
4 1 (3.33%) DB2
4 1 (3.33%) MySQL
4 1 (3.33%) Oracle Database
Development Applications
1 4 (13.33%) Git
2 3 (10.00%) Sonatype Nexus
3 2 (6.67%) Jenkins
3 2 (6.67%) JIRA
4 1 (3.33%) GitLab
General
1 6 (20.00%) Social Skills
2 5 (16.67%) Analytical Skills
2 5 (16.67%) Public Sector
3 3 (10.00%) Documentation Skills
4 2 (6.67%) Finance
4 2 (6.67%) Financial Institution
4 2 (6.67%) Presentation Skills
5 1 (3.33%) Banking
5 1 (3.33%) Inclusion and Diversity
Job Titles
1 4 (13.33%) Administrator
1 4 (13.33%) Site Engineer
1 4 (13.33%) Site Reliability Engineer
1 4 (13.33%) VMware Engineer
2 3 (10.00%) Network Engineer
2 3 (10.00%) Technical Specialist
3 2 (6.67%) Architect
3 2 (6.67%) Cisco Engineer
3 2 (6.67%) Cisco Network Engineer
3 2 (6.67%) Data Centre Technician
3 2 (6.67%) Data Technician
3 2 (6.67%) Hyper-V Engineer
3 2 (6.67%) Infrastructure Architect
3 2 (6.67%) Linux Specialist
3 2 (6.67%) Migration Engineer
3 2 (6.67%) Systems Engineer
4 1 (3.33%) Data Network Engineer
4 1 (3.33%) DevOps Engineer
4 1 (3.33%) Infrastructure Solutions Architect
4 1 (3.33%) IT Analyst
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 3 (10.00%) Elastic Stack
1 3 (10.00%) LDAP
2 2 (6.67%) AWS CDK
2 2 (6.67%) Middleware
3 1 (3.33%) .NET
3 1 (3.33%) CrewAI
3 1 (3.33%) JSON
3 1 (3.33%) LAMP
3 1 (3.33%) LangChain
3 1 (3.33%) LAPP Stack
3 1 (3.33%) libvirt
3 1 (3.33%) web3js
3 1 (3.33%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 9 (30.00%) Data Centre
2 5 (16.67%) Hybrid Cloud
3 3 (10.00%) Data Protection Act
4 2 (6.67%) Analytical Mindset
4 2 (6.67%) Cloud Native
4 2 (6.67%) Clustering
4 2 (6.67%) Distributed Systems
4 2 (6.67%) Enterprise Storage
4 2 (6.67%) Hedge funds
4 2 (6.67%) Linux Command Line
4 2 (6.67%) Mainframe
4 2 (6.67%) Replication
5 1 (3.33%) AI Agents
5 1 (3.33%) Blockchain
5 1 (3.33%) IBM Mainframe
5 1 (3.33%) Operational Technology
5 1 (3.33%) Private Cloud
5 1 (3.33%) Public Cloud
5 1 (3.33%) Virtual Reality
5 1 (3.33%) Web3
Operating Systems
1 24 (80.00%) Linux
2 10 (33.33%) Windows
3 8 (26.67%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 7 (23.33%) Unix
5 5 (16.67%) CentOS
6 3 (10.00%) Ubuntu
7 2 (6.67%) Oracle Linux
7 2 (6.67%) Solaris
7 2 (6.67%) Windows Server
7 2 (6.67%) zOS
8 1 (3.33%) AIX
8 1 (3.33%) MVS
8 1 (3.33%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 11 (36.67%) CI/CD
2 9 (30.00%) Migration
2 9 (30.00%) Performance Tuning
3 8 (26.67%) Containerisation
3 8 (26.67%) Disaster Recovery
4 7 (23.33%) Configuration Management
4 7 (23.33%) DevOps
5 6 (20.00%) Infrastructure as Code
6 5 (16.67%) Agile
6 5 (16.67%) Capacity Planning
6 5 (16.67%) High Availability
6 5 (16.67%) Observability
6 5 (16.67%) Problem-Solving
6 5 (16.67%) Site Reliability Engineering
7 4 (13.33%) AI
7 4 (13.33%) Continuous Improvement
7 4 (13.33%) Infrastructure Automation
7 4 (13.33%) Task Automation
8 3 (10.00%) Network Load Balancing
8 3 (10.00%) Validation
Programming Languages
1 18 (60.00%) Python
2 16 (53.33%) Bash
3 8 (26.67%) Perl
4 7 (23.33%) Shell Script
5 6 (20.00%) PowerShell
6 3 (10.00%) Java
7 2 (6.67%) SQL
8 1 (3.33%) C
8 1 (3.33%) C++
8 1 (3.33%) Go
8 1 (3.33%) Rust
Qualifications
1 5 (16.67%) RHCE
1 5 (16.67%) RHCSA
2 4 (13.33%) Security Cleared
3 3 (10.00%) SC Cleared
4 2 (6.67%) CCNP
4 2 (6.67%) Cisco Certification
4 2 (6.67%) Degree
5 1 (3.33%) BPSS Clearance
5 1 (3.33%) CCIE
5 1 (3.33%) CCIE Data Center
5 1 (3.33%) CCNA
5 1 (3.33%) JNCIA
5 1 (3.33%) JNCIS
System Software
1 17 (56.67%) VMware Infrastructure
2 10 (33.33%) Docker
3 9 (30.00%) Hyper-V
4 8 (26.67%) Virtual Machines
5 5 (16.67%) VMware ESXi
6 4 (13.33%) Active Directory
7 3 (10.00%) Ceph
8 2 (6.67%) Firmware
8 2 (6.67%) NFS
8 2 (6.67%) VMware NSX
8 2 (6.67%) Xen
9 1 (3.33%) iptables
9 1 (3.33%) Lustre
9 1 (3.33%) QEMU
9 1 (3.33%) RHEV
9 1 (3.33%) Samba
9 1 (3.33%) Slurm Workload Manager
9 1 (3.33%) Squid
9 1 (3.33%) SRDF
9 1 (3.33%) Veritas Cluster Server
Systems Management
1 20 (66.67%) Ansible
2 13 (43.33%) Kubernetes
2 13 (43.33%) Terraform
3 7 (23.33%) Grafana
3 7 (23.33%) Prometheus
4 5 (16.67%) Puppet
4 5 (16.67%) Red Hat Satellite
5 4 (13.33%) Progress Chef
5 4 (13.33%) vCenter Server
6 3 (10.00%) HAProxy
6 3 (10.00%) Nagios
7 2 (6.67%) Fluentd
8 1 (3.33%) IBM BigFix
8 1 (3.33%) PowerCLI
8 1 (3.33%) Proxmox
8 1 (3.33%) SELinux
8 1 (3.33%) WSUS
Vendors
1 19 (63.33%) VMware
2 11 (36.67%) Red Hat
3 8 (26.67%) Oracle
4 6 (20.00%) Cisco
5 4 (13.33%) Microsoft
6 3 (10.00%) Commvault
6 3 (10.00%) F5
6 3 (10.00%) NetApp
6 3 (10.00%) Pure Storage
7 2 (6.67%) Arista
7 2 (6.67%) Brocade
7 2 (6.67%) EMC
7 2 (6.67%) Google
7 2 (6.67%) IBM
7 2 (6.67%) Juniper
7 2 (6.67%) Veeam
8 1 (3.33%) AlgoSec
8 1 (3.33%) NVIDIA
8 1 (3.33%) Palo Alto
8 1 (3.33%) SolarWinds