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 6 July 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
6 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 613 541 544
Rank change year-on-year -72 +3 +109
Contract jobs citing KVM 42 10 42
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.081% 0.031% 0.097%
As % of the System Software category 0.82% 0.26% 0.87%
Number of daily rates quoted 14 10 28
10th Percentile £358 £363 £313
25th Percentile £413 £440 £340
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £485 £475 £438
Median % change year-on-year +2.05% +8.57% -2.78%
75th Percentile £623 £575 £600
90th Percentile £644 £608 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £488 £470 £340
% change year-on-year +3.72% +38.24% -24.28%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2 0 0
10th Percentile £70.70 - -
25th Percentile £71.01 - -
Median hourly rate £71.77 - -
75th Percentile £72.28 - -
90th Percentile £72.44 - -
UK excluding London median hourly rate £71.77 - -

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 5,093 3,825 4,838
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 9.83% 12.03% 11.17%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,394 2,487 3,334
10th Percentile £213 £225 £210
25th Percentile £400 £381 £370
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £500
Median % change year-on-year - - -4.76%
75th Percentile £588 £600 £600
90th Percentile £669 £688 £688
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £475 £482
% change year-on-year - -1.45% +0.63%
Number of hourly rates quoted 192 91 216
10th Percentile £14.15 £13.75 £14.06
25th Percentile £21.19 £16.39 £15.50
Median hourly rate £51.00 £28.00 £23.80
Median % change year-on-year +82.14% +17.65% -55.93%
75th Percentile £73.00 £66.00 £58.69
90th Percentile £77.50 £88.75 £70.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £51.00 £54.88 £23.34
% change year-on-year -7.06% +135.11% -15.13%

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 6 July 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 12 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 6 July 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 -91 38 £485 +8.93% 13
UK excluding London -79 36 £488 +3.72% 15
North of England - 27 £454 - 2
Yorkshire - 21 £454 - 1
Work from Home -43 10 £456 -17.05% 4
North West - 6 - - 1
London -74 4 £425 -5.56% 3
South West - 4 £600 - 3
Scotland -13 2 - - 3
South East -51 2 £630 +43.18% 5
Midlands - 2 £425 -
West Midlands - 2 £425 -

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 (4.76%) Apache
1 2 (4.76%) CloudStack
Cloud Services
1 13 (30.95%) OpenShift
2 4 (9.52%) AWS
2 4 (9.52%) Azure
2 4 (9.52%) Nutanix
3 3 (7.14%) GCP
4 1 (2.38%) Amazon CloudWatch
4 1 (2.38%) Amazon EKS
4 1 (2.38%) Azure AKS
4 1 (2.38%) Azure Stack
4 1 (2.38%) Google Kubernetes Engine
4 1 (2.38%) Rubrik
Communications & Networking
1 3 (7.14%) VLAN
2 2 (4.76%) DNS
2 2 (4.76%) EIGRP
2 2 (4.76%) Kerberos
2 2 (4.76%) NAS
2 2 (4.76%) OSPF
2 2 (4.76%) RIP
2 2 (4.76%) SSH
2 2 (4.76%) TCP/IP
2 2 (4.76%) VXLAN
3 1 (2.38%) 3GPP
3 1 (2.38%) Calico
3 1 (2.38%) DHCP
3 1 (2.38%) Firewall
3 1 (2.38%) ICMP
3 1 (2.38%) L2TP
3 1 (2.38%) SAN
3 1 (2.38%) SNMP
3 1 (2.38%) SSL
3 1 (2.38%) TETRA
Database & Business Intelligence
1 6 (14.29%) Db2
1 6 (14.29%) SQL Server
2 4 (9.52%) NoSQL
Development Applications
1 2 (4.76%) Git
2 1 (2.38%) Jenkins
General
1 6 (14.29%) Finance
1 6 (14.29%) Inclusion and Diversity
2 4 (9.52%) Social Skills
3 3 (7.14%) Documentation Skills
Job Titles
1 7 (16.67%) Linux Engineer
2 6 (14.29%) Technical Specialist
3 4 (9.52%) Applications Tester
3 4 (9.52%) Tester
3 4 (9.52%) Web Applications Tester
3 4 (9.52%) Web Tester
4 3 (7.14%) Infrastructure Engineer
4 3 (7.14%) Linux Infrastructure Engineer
4 3 (7.14%) VMware Engineer
5 2 (4.76%) Automation Engineer
5 2 (4.76%) Cloud Engineer
5 2 (4.76%) Data Centre Engineer
5 2 (4.76%) Migration Engineer
5 2 (4.76%) Oracle Infrastructure Engineer
5 2 (4.76%) Senior
5 2 (4.76%) Storage Engineer
5 2 (4.76%) Virtualisation Engineer
6 1 (2.38%) Data Centre Technician
6 1 (2.38%) Senior Automation Engineer
6 1 (2.38%) Storage Manager
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 3 (7.14%) Elastic Stack
2 2 (4.76%) cloud-init
2 2 (4.76%) Redfish
3 1 (2.38%) LDAP
Miscellaneous
1 8 (19.05%) Data Centre
2 6 (14.29%) Data Protection Act
2 6 (14.29%) Linux Command Line
3 3 (7.14%) Hybrid Cloud
3 3 (7.14%) PKI
4 2 (4.76%) Onboarding
4 2 (4.76%) Private Cloud
4 2 (4.76%) Virtual Team
5 1 (2.38%) Cloud Native
5 1 (2.38%) Device Driver
5 1 (2.38%) Distributed Computing
5 1 (2.38%) Enterprise Storage
5 1 (2.38%) Lidar
5 1 (2.38%) Management Information System
5 1 (2.38%) Product Ownership
5 1 (2.38%) Robotics
5 1 (2.38%) Smartphone
Operating Systems
1 32 (76.19%) Linux
2 17 (40.48%) Windows
3 11 (26.19%) Windows Server
4 6 (14.29%) AIX
4 6 (14.29%) Unix
5 4 (9.52%) Ubuntu
6 2 (4.76%) Oracle Linux
6 2 (4.76%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
7 1 (2.38%) CentOS
7 1 (2.38%) Debian
7 1 (2.38%) Rocky
7 1 (2.38%) SUSE
7 1 (2.38%) VMS
7 1 (2.38%) Windows Server 2019
Processes & Methodologies
1 10 (23.81%) Containerisation
1 10 (23.81%) Migration
1 10 (23.81%) Performance Tuning
2 8 (19.05%) Configuration Management
2 8 (19.05%) Virtual Environments
3 7 (16.67%) Disaster Recovery
4 6 (14.29%) Asset Management
4 6 (14.29%) Data Protection
4 6 (14.29%) DevOps
4 6 (14.29%) High Availability
5 5 (11.90%) CI/CD
6 4 (9.52%) Change Management
6 4 (9.52%) Customer Requirements
6 4 (9.52%) Infrastructure as Code
6 4 (9.52%) Infrastructure Engineering
6 4 (9.52%) Platform Engineering
6 4 (9.52%) Systems Engineering
6 4 (9.52%) Validation
7 3 (7.14%) Capacity Planning
7 3 (7.14%) Observability
Programming Languages
1 16 (38.10%) Bash
2 15 (35.71%) PowerShell
2 15 (35.71%) Python
3 10 (23.81%) SQL
4 2 (4.76%) Shell Script
5 1 (2.38%) Ladder Logic
Qualifications
1 7 (16.67%) Security Cleared
2 6 (14.29%) SC Cleared
3 2 (4.76%) DV Cleared
3 2 (4.76%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
4 1 (2.38%) (ISC)2 CCSP
4 1 (2.38%) CCSK
4 1 (2.38%) CCSP
4 1 (2.38%) Cisco Certification
4 1 (2.38%) CISM
4 1 (2.38%) CISSP
4 1 (2.38%) Degree
4 1 (2.38%) RHCE
4 1 (2.38%) RHCSA
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 1 (2.38%) Government Security Classifications
1 1 (2.38%) ISO/IEC 27001
1 1 (2.38%) NCSC
1 1 (2.38%) NIST
1 1 (2.38%) QA
System Software
1 27 (64.29%) VMware Infrastructure
2 22 (52.38%) Hyper-V
3 19 (45.24%) Virtual Machines
4 9 (21.43%) Docker
5 7 (16.67%) vSphere
6 6 (14.29%) VMware ESXi
7 5 (11.90%) Firmware
8 3 (7.14%) NFS
9 2 (4.76%) Active Directory
9 2 (4.76%) Ceph
10 1 (2.38%) QEMU
Systems Management
1 14 (33.33%) Ansible
2 10 (23.81%) vCenter Server
3 9 (21.43%) Terraform
4 8 (19.05%) Kubernetes
5 6 (14.29%) IBM BigFix
6 4 (9.52%) Grafana
6 4 (9.52%) PowerCLI
6 4 (9.52%) Prometheus
7 3 (7.14%) Dell DRAC
8 2 (4.76%) SELinux
9 1 (2.38%) Istio
9 1 (2.38%) Nagios
9 1 (2.38%) Packer
9 1 (2.38%) Proxmox
9 1 (2.38%) Single Sign-On
9 1 (2.38%) ZABBIX
Vendors
1 27 (64.29%) VMware
2 6 (14.29%) IBM
3 5 (11.90%) Oracle
4 3 (7.14%) Red Hat
5 2 (4.76%) Dell
6 1 (2.38%) Cisco
6 1 (2.38%) F5
6 1 (2.38%) Meraki
6 1 (2.38%) Microsoft
6 1 (2.38%) NetApp
6 1 (2.38%) Splunk
6 1 (2.38%) Veritas