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

6 months to
30 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 612 532 533
Rank change year-on-year -80 +1 +102
Contract jobs citing KVM 44 12 41
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.083% 0.037% 0.10%
As % of the System Software category 0.85% 0.31% 0.91%
Number of daily rates quoted 15 11 26
10th Percentile £413 £363 £316
25th Percentile £446 £463 £340
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £530 £503 £393
Median % change year-on-year +5.47% +28.03% -14.91%
75th Percentile £630 £575 £600
90th Percentile £642 £600 £688
UK excluding London median daily rate £615 £503 £350
% change year-on-year +22.39% +43.57% -22.22%
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 5,205 3,834 4,520
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 9.83% 11.68% 11.35%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,428 2,459 3,138
10th Percentile £225 £225 £213
25th Percentile £400 £383 £380
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £500
Median % change year-on-year - - -2.91%
75th Percentile £592 £600 £603
90th Percentile £675 £683 £688
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £475 £500
% change year-on-year - -5.00% +5.26%
Number of hourly rates quoted 206 103 161
10th Percentile £13.97 £13.99 £14.06
25th Percentile £21.06 £17.33 £15.65
Median hourly rate £51.75 £30.00 £23.80
Median % change year-on-year +72.50% +26.05% -52.40%
75th Percentile £73.94 £75.60 £58.69
90th Percentile £78.25 £91.20 £70.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £51.00 £57.50 £21.50
% change year-on-year -11.30% +167.44% -21.82%

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 30 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 30 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 -80 40 £530 +6.00% 13
UK excluding London -63 36 £615 +22.39% 13
North of England - 23 £485 - 4
Yorkshire - 17 £485 -
Work from Home -50 9 £456 -17.05% 3
London -67 6 £425 -5.56% 3
North West - 6 - - 4
South East - 5 £630 - 4
South West - 5 £565 - 2
Scotland -16 2 - - 3
West Midlands - 2 £425 -
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 (4.55%) Apache
1 2 (4.55%) CloudStack
1 2 (4.55%) OpenStack
Cloud Services
1 11 (25.00%) OpenShift
2 4 (9.09%) AWS
2 4 (9.09%) Azure
2 4 (9.09%) Nutanix
3 3 (6.82%) GCP
4 1 (2.27%) Amazon CloudWatch
4 1 (2.27%) Amazon EKS
4 1 (2.27%) Azure AKS
4 1 (2.27%) Azure Stack
4 1 (2.27%) Google Kubernetes Engine
4 1 (2.27%) Rubrik
Communications & Networking
1 4 (9.09%) VLAN
2 3 (6.82%) LTE
2 3 (6.82%) Wireshark
3 2 (4.55%) 2G
3 2 (4.55%) 3G
3 2 (4.55%) 4G
3 2 (4.55%) 5G
3 2 (4.55%) Diameter Protocol
3 2 (4.55%) DNS
3 2 (4.55%) EIGRP
3 2 (4.55%) Kerberos
3 2 (4.55%) NAS
3 2 (4.55%) OSPF
3 2 (4.55%) RIP
3 2 (4.55%) SCCP
3 2 (4.55%) SS7
3 2 (4.55%) TCAP
3 2 (4.55%) TCP/IP
3 2 (4.55%) tcpdump
3 2 (4.55%) VXLAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 4 (9.09%) Db2
1 4 (9.09%) NoSQL
1 4 (9.09%) SQL Server
Development Applications
1 2 (4.55%) Git
2 1 (2.27%) Jenkins
General
1 6 (13.64%) Finance
1 6 (13.64%) Social Skills
2 4 (9.09%) Inclusion and Diversity
3 2 (4.55%) Documentation Skills
4 1 (2.27%) Telecoms
Job Titles
1 9 (20.45%) Linux Engineer
2 6 (13.64%) Infrastructure Engineer
3 5 (11.36%) Linux Infrastructure Engineer
4 4 (9.09%) Applications Tester
4 4 (9.09%) Oracle Infrastructure Engineer
4 4 (9.09%) Technical Specialist
4 4 (9.09%) Tester
4 4 (9.09%) Web Applications Tester
4 4 (9.09%) Web Tester
5 3 (6.82%) Architect
6 2 (4.55%) Automation Engineer
6 2 (4.55%) Cloud Engineer
6 2 (4.55%) Migration Engineer
6 2 (4.55%) Senior
6 2 (4.55%) Solutions Architect
6 2 (4.55%) Storage Engineer
6 2 (4.55%) Systems Engineer
6 2 (4.55%) Virtualisation Engineer
6 2 (4.55%) VMware Engineer
7 1 (2.27%) Site Reliability Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 3 (6.82%) Elastic Stack
2 2 (4.55%) cloud-init
2 2 (4.55%) Redfish
3 1 (2.27%) HTML
3 1 (2.27%) HTML5
3 1 (2.27%) LDAP
Miscellaneous
1 6 (13.64%) Data Centre
2 4 (9.09%) Data Protection Act
2 4 (9.09%) Linux Command Line
2 4 (9.09%) Private Cloud
3 3 (6.82%) Hybrid Cloud
3 3 (6.82%) PKI
4 2 (4.55%) Onboarding
4 2 (4.55%) Virtual Team
5 1 (2.27%) Cloud Native
5 1 (2.27%) Device Driver
5 1 (2.27%) Distributed Computing
5 1 (2.27%) Enterprise Storage
5 1 (2.27%) Lidar
5 1 (2.27%) Management Information System
5 1 (2.27%) Product Ownership
5 1 (2.27%) Robotics
5 1 (2.27%) Smartphone
5 1 (2.27%) Social Media
Operating Systems
1 31 (70.45%) Linux
2 14 (31.82%) Windows
3 9 (20.45%) Windows Server
4 4 (9.09%) AIX
4 4 (9.09%) Oracle Linux
4 4 (9.09%) Ubuntu
4 4 (9.09%) Unix
5 2 (4.55%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 1 (2.27%) CentOS
6 1 (2.27%) Debian
6 1 (2.27%) Rocky
6 1 (2.27%) SUSE
6 1 (2.27%) VMS
6 1 (2.27%) Windows 10
6 1 (2.27%) Windows Server 2019
Processes & Methodologies
1 10 (22.73%) High Availability
1 10 (22.73%) Performance Tuning
2 9 (20.45%) Containerisation
2 9 (20.45%) Infrastructure Engineering
2 9 (20.45%) Migration
3 8 (18.18%) CI/CD
3 8 (18.18%) Configuration Management
3 8 (18.18%) DevOps
4 7 (15.91%) Disaster Recovery
4 7 (15.91%) Systems Engineering
5 6 (13.64%) Customer Requirements
5 6 (13.64%) Infrastructure as Code
5 6 (13.64%) Virtual Environments
6 5 (11.36%) Capacity Planning
7 4 (9.09%) Asset Management
7 4 (9.09%) Change Management
7 4 (9.09%) Data Protection
7 4 (9.09%) Validation
8 3 (6.82%) Network Virtualisation
8 3 (6.82%) Patch Management
Programming Languages
1 13 (29.55%) Python
2 12 (27.27%) Bash
3 10 (22.73%) PowerShell
4 8 (18.18%) SQL
5 2 (4.55%) Shell Script
6 1 (2.27%) C
6 1 (2.27%) Ladder Logic
Qualifications
1 10 (22.73%) Security Cleared
2 8 (18.18%) SC Cleared
3 3 (6.82%) DV Cleared
4 2 (4.55%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
5 1 (2.27%) (ISC)2 CCSP
5 1 (2.27%) CCSK
5 1 (2.27%) CCSP
5 1 (2.27%) Cisco Certification
5 1 (2.27%) CISM
5 1 (2.27%) CISSP
5 1 (2.27%) Degree
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 2 (4.55%) NCSC
1 2 (4.55%) QA
2 1 (2.27%) Government Security Classifications
2 1 (2.27%) ISO/IEC 27001
2 1 (2.27%) NIST
System Software
1 25 (56.82%) VMware Infrastructure
2 18 (40.91%) Hyper-V
3 14 (31.82%) Virtual Machines
4 9 (20.45%) Docker
5 7 (15.91%) vSphere
6 5 (11.36%) VMware ESXi
7 4 (9.09%) Ceph
8 3 (6.82%) Firmware
8 3 (6.82%) NFS
9 2 (4.55%) Active Directory
10 1 (2.27%) QEMU
Systems Management
1 15 (34.09%) Ansible
2 12 (27.27%) Kubernetes
3 10 (22.73%) Terraform
4 7 (15.91%) vCenter Server
5 4 (9.09%) Grafana
5 4 (9.09%) IBM BigFix
5 4 (9.09%) Prometheus
6 3 (6.82%) Dell DRAC
6 3 (6.82%) PowerCLI
7 2 (4.55%) SELinux
8 1 (2.27%) Istio
8 1 (2.27%) Nagios
8 1 (2.27%) Packer
8 1 (2.27%) Proxmox
8 1 (2.27%) Single Sign-On
8 1 (2.27%) ZABBIX
Vendors
1 25 (56.82%) VMware
2 7 (15.91%) Oracle
3 4 (9.09%) IBM
4 2 (4.55%) Dell
4 2 (4.55%) Red Hat
5 1 (2.27%) Cisco
5 1 (2.27%) F5
5 1 (2.27%) Meraki
5 1 (2.27%) Microsoft
5 1 (2.27%) NetApp
5 1 (2.27%) Peplink
5 1 (2.27%) Splunk
5 1 (2.27%) Starlink
5 1 (2.27%) Veritas