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 23 April 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
23 Apr 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 579 508 542
Rank change year-on-year -71 +34 +131
Contract jobs citing KVM 36 13 47
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.078% 0.044% 0.11%
As % of the System Software category 0.74% 0.35% 1.00%
Number of daily rates quoted 15 10 27
10th Percentile £356 £363 £313
25th Percentile £371 £440 £316
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £488 £445 £450
Median % change year-on-year +9.55% -1.11% -
75th Percentile £538 £556 £600
90th Percentile £653 £600 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £425 £440 £325
% change year-on-year -3.41% +35.38% -27.78%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2 0 2
10th Percentile £70.70 - -
25th Percentile £71.01 - -
Median hourly rate £71.77 - £60.00
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 4,885 3,737 4,718
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 10.52% 12.65% 10.79%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,309 2,558 3,226
10th Percentile £213 £213 £195
25th Percentile £400 £400 £325
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £488
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% +7.69% -7.14%
75th Percentile £594 £620 £600
90th Percentile £688 £700 £688
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £477 £460
% change year-on-year -0.42% +3.70% -5.15%
Number of hourly rates quoted 176 92 234
10th Percentile £14.95 £14.99 £14.06
25th Percentile £21.25 £19.51 £15.50
Median hourly rate £54.00 £28.21 £22.50
Median % change year-on-year +91.46% +25.36% -56.31%
75th Percentile £74.26 £65.25 £60.00
90th Percentile £90.00 £87.83 £71.07
UK excluding London median hourly rate £52.50 £37.50 £21.50
% change year-on-year +40.00% +74.42% -45.71%

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 23 April 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 11 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 23 April 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 -78 33 £488 +10.80% 8
UK excluding London -86 27 £425 -3.41% 6
North of England -43 22 £365 - 1
Yorkshire - 16 £365 -
Work from Home -18 14 £563 +7.14% 2
North West -32 6 - - 1
London -52 3 £500 +11.11% 2
South West - 3 £600 - 3
West Midlands - 2 £425 -
Midlands - 2 £425 -
South East -54 1 £495 +12.50% 2

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 (5.56%) OpenStack
2 1 (2.78%) Apache
Applications
1 1 (2.78%) MS Visio
Cloud Services
1 9 (25.00%) OpenShift
2 6 (16.67%) AWS
3 5 (13.89%) Azure
4 3 (8.33%) GCP
4 3 (8.33%) Nutanix
5 2 (5.56%) Cohesity
6 1 (2.78%) Amazon CloudWatch
Communications & Networking
1 6 (16.67%) VLAN
2 4 (11.11%) TCP/IP
3 2 (5.56%) EIGRP
3 2 (5.56%) Firewall
3 2 (5.56%) Kerberos
3 2 (5.56%) LAN
3 2 (5.56%) OSPF
3 2 (5.56%) RIP
3 2 (5.56%) SAN
3 2 (5.56%) SSH
3 2 (5.56%) VPN
3 2 (5.56%) WAN
4 1 (2.78%) 3GPP
4 1 (2.78%) DHCP
4 1 (2.78%) iSCSI
4 1 (2.78%) LTE
4 1 (2.78%) NAS
4 1 (2.78%) Network Security
4 1 (2.78%) Radio Access Network
4 1 (2.78%) Wireshark
Database & Business Intelligence
1 6 (16.67%) DB2
1 6 (16.67%) SQL Server
2 3 (8.33%) NoSQL
3 1 (2.78%) MySQL
3 1 (2.78%) PostgreSQL
Development Applications
1 1 (2.78%) Git
1 1 (2.78%) Jenkins
General
1 6 (16.67%) Inclusion and Diversity
2 5 (13.89%) Social Skills
3 4 (11.11%) Finance
4 3 (8.33%) Documentation Skills
5 2 (5.56%) Analytical Skills
5 2 (5.56%) Presentation Skills
6 1 (2.78%) Public Sector
Job Titles
1 6 (16.67%) Technical Specialist
2 4 (11.11%) VMware Engineer
3 3 (8.33%) Applications Tester
3 3 (8.33%) Systems Engineer
3 3 (8.33%) Tester
3 3 (8.33%) Web Applications Tester
3 3 (8.33%) Web Tester
4 2 (5.56%) Automation Engineer
4 2 (5.56%) Data Centre Engineer
4 2 (5.56%) Data Centre Technician
4 2 (5.56%) Data Technician
4 2 (5.56%) Hyper-V Engineer
4 2 (5.56%) Migration Engineer
4 2 (5.56%) Network Engineer
4 2 (5.56%) Senior
4 2 (5.56%) Storage Engineer
4 2 (5.56%) Virtualisation Engineer
5 1 (2.78%) IT Analyst
5 1 (2.78%) Principal Engineer
5 1 (2.78%) Senior Automation Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 1 (2.78%) LAMP
1 1 (2.78%) LAPP Stack
1 1 (2.78%) LDAP
1 1 (2.78%) libvirt
Miscellaneous
1 10 (27.78%) Data Centre
2 6 (16.67%) Data Protection Act
2 6 (16.67%) Linux Command Line
3 3 (8.33%) Hybrid Cloud
3 3 (8.33%) PKI
4 2 (5.56%) Analytical Mindset
4 2 (5.56%) Enterprise Storage
4 2 (5.56%) Virtual Team
5 1 (2.78%) Device Driver
5 1 (2.78%) Distributed Computing
5 1 (2.78%) Lidar
5 1 (2.78%) Management Information System
5 1 (2.78%) Operational Technology
5 1 (2.78%) Private Cloud
5 1 (2.78%) Product Ownership
5 1 (2.78%) Public Cloud
5 1 (2.78%) Robotics
5 1 (2.78%) Smartphone
Operating Systems
1 26 (72.22%) Linux
2 21 (58.33%) Windows
3 11 (30.56%) Windows Server
4 7 (19.44%) Unix
5 6 (16.67%) AIX
6 3 (8.33%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
7 2 (5.56%) Ubuntu
7 2 (5.56%) VMS
8 1 (2.78%) CentOS
8 1 (2.78%) Debian
8 1 (2.78%) Windows Server 2019
Processes & Methodologies
1 11 (30.56%) Performance Tuning
2 8 (22.22%) Virtual Environments
3 7 (19.44%) Migration
4 6 (16.67%) Asset Management
4 6 (16.67%) Configuration Management
4 6 (16.67%) Data Protection
5 5 (13.89%) Change Management
5 5 (13.89%) Containerisation
5 5 (13.89%) Disaster Recovery
5 5 (13.89%) High Availability
6 4 (11.11%) Capacity Planning
6 4 (11.11%) DevOps
6 4 (11.11%) Systems Engineering
7 3 (8.33%) CI/CD
7 3 (8.33%) Infrastructure as Code
7 3 (8.33%) Network Design
7 3 (8.33%) Network Virtualisation
7 3 (8.33%) Open Source
8 2 (5.56%) Computer Science
8 2 (5.56%) Validation
Programming Languages
1 18 (50.00%) PowerShell
2 17 (47.22%) Bash
3 14 (38.89%) Python
4 9 (25.00%) SQL
5 1 (2.78%) Go
5 1 (2.78%) Ladder Logic
5 1 (2.78%) Perl
Qualifications
1 7 (19.44%) Security Cleared
2 6 (16.67%) SC Cleared
3 3 (8.33%) Degree
4 2 (5.56%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
5 1 (2.78%) CCNA
5 1 (2.78%) CCNP
5 1 (2.78%) Cisco Certification
5 1 (2.78%) JNCIA
5 1 (2.78%) JNCIS
5 1 (2.78%) RHCE
5 1 (2.78%) RHCSA
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 1 (2.78%) QA
System Software
1 23 (63.89%) VMware Infrastructure
2 21 (58.33%) Hyper-V
3 18 (50.00%) Virtual Machines
4 9 (25.00%) VMware ESXi
5 5 (13.89%) vSphere
6 4 (11.11%) Docker
6 4 (11.11%) Firmware
7 3 (8.33%) Active Directory
7 3 (8.33%) Ceph
8 2 (5.56%) QEMU
9 1 (2.78%) iptables
9 1 (2.78%) Lustre
9 1 (2.78%) NFS
9 1 (2.78%) RHEV
9 1 (2.78%) Samba
9 1 (2.78%) Slurm Workload Manager
9 1 (2.78%) Xen
Systems Management
1 15 (41.67%) Ansible
2 12 (33.33%) vCenter Server
3 9 (25.00%) Terraform
4 6 (16.67%) IBM BigFix
5 4 (11.11%) PowerCLI
6 3 (8.33%) Kubernetes
7 2 (5.56%) Proxmox
8 1 (2.78%) Dell DRAC
8 1 (2.78%) Grafana
8 1 (2.78%) HAProxy
8 1 (2.78%) Nagios
8 1 (2.78%) Packer
8 1 (2.78%) Prometheus
8 1 (2.78%) SELinux
8 1 (2.78%) Single Sign-On
8 1 (2.78%) WSUS
Vendors
1 25 (69.44%) VMware
2 6 (16.67%) IBM
2 6 (16.67%) Red Hat
3 4 (11.11%) Microsoft
4 3 (8.33%) Cisco
5 2 (5.56%) Brocade
5 2 (5.56%) F5
5 2 (5.56%) Oracle
5 2 (5.56%) Pure Storage
5 2 (5.56%) Veeam
6 1 (2.78%) Dell
6 1 (2.78%) Juniper
6 1 (2.78%) Meraki
6 1 (2.78%) SolarWinds