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 21 October 2025, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
21 Oct 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 538 523 613
Rank change year-on-year -15 +90 +155
Contract jobs citing KVM 19 34 17
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.057% 0.092% 0.035%
As % of the System Software category 0.46% 0.80% 0.27%
Number of daily rates quoted 8 22 10
10th Percentile £344 - £485
25th Percentile £426 £340 £500
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £501 £398 £525
Median % change year-on-year +26.10% -24.29% +81.03%
75th Percentile £564 £522 £589
90th Percentile £605 £600 £642
UK excluding London median daily rate £501 £375 £500
% change year-on-year +33.67% -25.00% +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 4,117 4,274 6,262
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 12.30% 11.54% 13.08%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,616 2,767 4,246
10th Percentile £213 £213 £198
25th Percentile £380 £373 £363
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £500
Median % change year-on-year - - -4.76%
75th Percentile £588 £608 £625
90th Percentile £675 £700 £713
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £475 £475
% change year-on-year - - +5.56%
Number of hourly rates quoted 131 90 262
10th Percentile £14.99 £16.90 £15.50
25th Percentile £17.56 £21.30 £18.50
Median hourly rate £27.50 £44.00 £49.94
Median % change year-on-year -37.50% -11.89% +127.00%
75th Percentile £67.00 £69.92 £66.00
90th Percentile £88.00 £75.50 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £54.00 £50.00 £40.00
% change year-on-year +8.00% +25.00% +102.53%

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 21 October 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 21 October 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 -8 14 £411 -6.06% 21
UK excluding London -21 10 £501 +33.67% 16
London +12 8 £375 -11.76% 5
Work from Home +13 4 £549 +4.48% 5
Scotland +2 4 £503 +47.79% 2
North of England -24 4 - - 8
Yorkshire -25 4 - - 5
South East -1 2 £447 +19.20%

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 (10.53%) CICS
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%) Skype for Business
2 1 (5.26%) WebSphere Application Server
Cloud Services
1 9 (47.37%) AWS
2 7 (36.84%) OpenShift
3 6 (31.58%) Azure
3 6 (31.58%) GCP
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%) TCP/IP
3 2 (10.53%) VXLAN
4 1 (5.26%) FabricPath
4 1 (5.26%) IPsec
4 1 (5.26%) LAN
4 1 (5.26%) SAN
4 1 (5.26%) Skype
4 1 (5.26%) VLAN
4 1 (5.26%) VoIP
4 1 (5.26%) VRRP
4 1 (5.26%) VSAN
4 1 (5.26%) WAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 4 (21.05%) MongoDB
2 2 (10.53%) Elasticsearch
2 2 (10.53%) InfluxDB
2 2 (10.53%) NoSQL
2 2 (10.53%) PostgreSQL
2 2 (10.53%) SQL Server
3 1 (5.26%) MySQL
3 1 (5.26%) Oracle Database
Development Applications
1 4 (21.05%) Git
2 3 (15.79%) Sonatype Nexus
3 2 (10.53%) Jenkins
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
Job Titles
1 4 (21.05%) Administrator
1 4 (21.05%) Site Engineer
1 4 (21.05%) Site Reliability Engineer
2 3 (15.79%) Architect
2 3 (15.79%) Infrastructure Architect
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%) Technical Specialist
3 2 (10.53%) VMware Engineer
4 1 (5.26%) Cloud Engineer
4 1 (5.26%) Data Centre Engineer
4 1 (5.26%) Data Network Engineer
4 1 (5.26%) DevOps Engineer
4 1 (5.26%) Infrastructure Solutions Architect
4 1 (5.26%) Systems Engineer
4 1 (5.26%) Virtualisation Specialist
4 1 (5.26%) VMware Architect
4 1 (5.26%) Voice Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 3 (15.79%) Elastic Stack
2 2 (10.53%) AWS CDK
2 2 (10.53%) LDAP
2 2 (10.53%) Middleware
3 1 (5.26%) .NET
3 1 (5.26%) CrewAI
3 1 (5.26%) JSON
3 1 (5.26%) LangChain
3 1 (5.26%) web3js
3 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%) Hybrid Cloud
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%) Linux Command Line
3 1 (5.26%) Virtual Reality
3 1 (5.26%) Web3
Operating Systems
1 15 (78.95%) Linux
2 6 (31.58%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
3 5 (26.32%) Unix
4 4 (21.05%) CentOS
5 2 (10.53%) Oracle Linux
5 2 (10.53%) Solaris
5 2 (10.53%) Ubuntu
5 2 (10.53%) Windows
5 2 (10.53%) zOS
6 1 (5.26%) MVS
6 1 (5.26%) Rocky
6 1 (5.26%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 10 (52.63%) CI/CD
2 8 (42.11%) Containerisation
3 7 (36.84%) Disaster Recovery
3 7 (36.84%) Migration
4 6 (31.58%) Agile
4 6 (31.58%) DevOps
4 6 (31.58%) Infrastructure as Code
5 5 (26.32%) Configuration Management
5 5 (26.32%) Observability
5 5 (26.32%) Performance Tuning
5 5 (26.32%) Site Reliability Engineering
6 4 (21.05%) Problem-Solving
7 3 (15.79%) AI
7 3 (15.79%) Network Load Balancing
7 3 (15.79%) Task Automation
8 2 (10.53%) Capacity Planning
8 2 (10.53%) Kanban
8 2 (10.53%) Network Management
8 2 (10.53%) Scrum
8 2 (10.53%) Vulnerability Assessment
Programming Languages
1 13 (68.42%) Python
2 10 (52.63%) Bash
3 7 (36.84%) Perl
3 7 (36.84%) Shell Script
4 3 (15.79%) Java
5 2 (10.53%) 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 1 (5.26%) SLA
System Software
1 11 (57.89%) VMware Infrastructure
2 9 (47.37%) Docker
3 4 (21.05%) Hyper-V
4 3 (15.79%) Virtual Machines
5 2 (10.53%) Active Directory
5 2 (10.53%) VMware ESXi
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%) Virtual Desktop
6 1 (5.26%) vSphere
6 1 (5.26%) Xen
Systems Management
1 13 (68.42%) Ansible
1 13 (68.42%) Kubernetes
2 8 (42.11%) Terraform
3 7 (36.84%) Grafana
3 7 (36.84%) Prometheus
4 5 (26.32%) Puppet
4 5 (26.32%) Red Hat Satellite
5 4 (21.05%) Progress Chef
6 2 (10.53%) Fluentd
6 2 (10.53%) HAProxy
6 2 (10.53%) Nagios
7 1 (5.26%) vCenter Server
Vendors
1 12 (63.16%) VMware
2 8 (42.11%) Red Hat
3 6 (31.58%) Oracle
4 5 (26.32%) Cisco
5 3 (15.79%) Commvault
5 3 (15.79%) NetApp
6 2 (10.53%) Arista
6 2 (10.53%) EMC
6 2 (10.53%) F5
6 2 (10.53%) Google
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%) Palo Alto
7 1 (5.26%) Pure Storage