Kubernetes Job Trends in the UK excluding London

Kubernetes (k8s)
UK > UK excluding London

The table below provides summary statistics and salary benchmarking for jobs advertised in the UK excluding London requiring Kubernetes skills. It covers permanent job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 6 January 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
6 Jan 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 147 64 49
Rank change year-on-year -83 -15 +6
Permanent jobs citing Kubernetes 570 1,348 1,642
As % of all permanent jobs in the UK excluding London 1.35% 3.69% 5.08%
As % of the Systems Management category 24.28% 41.98% 38.59%
Number of salaries quoted 409 720 1,290
10th Percentile £44,750 £47,500 £46,250
25th Percentile £56,250 £55,000 £55,000
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £67,500 £68,000 £67,500
Median % change year-on-year -0.74% +0.74% -
75th Percentile £82,500 £81,250 £82,500
90th Percentile £92,500 £93,778 £92,500
UK median annual salary £75,000 £77,500 £75,000
% change year-on-year -3.23% +3.33% -3.23%

All Systems Management Skills
UK excluding London

Kubernetes falls under the Systems Management category. For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all permanent job vacancies requiring systems management skills in the UK excluding London.

Permanent vacancies with a requirement for systems management skills 2,348 3,211 4,255
As % of all permanent jobs advertised in the UK excluding London 5.58% 8.79% 13.17%
Number of salaries quoted 1,624 1,839 3,405
10th Percentile £30,150 £34,950 £31,250
25th Percentile £36,250 £45,000 £42,000
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £53,033 £59,000 £55,000
Median % change year-on-year -10.11% +7.27% -4.35%
75th Percentile £72,500 £75,000 £72,433
90th Percentile £83,750 £86,500 £85,000
UK median annual salary £62,500 £69,000 £65,000
% change year-on-year -9.42% +6.15% -3.70%

Kubernetes
Job Vacancy Trend in the UK excluding London

Historical trend showing the proportion of permanent IT job postings citing Kubernetes relative to all permanent IT jobs advertised in the UK excluding London.

Kubernetes job vacancy trend in the UK excluding London

Kubernetes
Salary Trend in the UK excluding London

Salary distribution trend for jobs in the UK excluding London citing Kubernetes.

Salary distribution trend for jobs in the UK excluding London citing Kubernetes

Kubernetes
Salary Histogram in the UK excluding London

Salary distribution for jobs citing Kubernetes in the UK excluding London over the 6 months to 6 January 2026.

Salary histogram for Kubernetes in the UK excluding London

Kubernetes
Job Locations in the UK excluding London

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median salaries quoted in IT jobs citing Kubernetes within the UK excluding London region over the 6 months to 6 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
Permanent
IT Job Ads
Median Salary
Past 6 Months
Median Salary
% Change
on Same Period
Last Year
Live
Jobs
North of England -36 182 £72,500 +7.41% 170
South East -105 139 £72,500 +3.57% 321
South West -20 118 £62,500 -13.79% 134
North West -19 100 £70,000 +3.70% 80
Midlands -25 66 £67,500 +3.85% 94
Yorkshire -28 58 £75,000 +11.11% 62
West Midlands -8 49 £70,000 +7.69% 40
Scotland -47 38 £64,500 -7.40% 20
North East +8 24 £69,289 +10.86% 28
East of England -51 24 £67,500 +3.85% 110
Wales -1 17 £67,500 +3.85% 34
East Midlands -15 16 £62,500 +4.17% 51
Northern Ireland -17 1 - - 16
Channel Islands - 1 £90,000 -
Kubernetes
UK

Kubernetes
Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities in the UK excluding London 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 17 (2.98%) OpenStack
2 9 (1.58%) IIS
3 8 (1.40%) Apache
4 7 (1.23%) Apache Spark
4 7 (1.23%) nginx
5 5 (0.88%) Microsoft Exchange
5 5 (0.88%) Oracle SOA Suite
6 3 (0.53%) Confluence
7 2 (0.35%) JBoss
8 1 (0.18%) Anypoint
8 1 (0.18%) Apache Airflow
8 1 (0.18%) Apache Superset
8 1 (0.18%) BizTalk Server
8 1 (0.18%) Camunda
8 1 (0.18%) SAS
8 1 (0.18%) SharePoint
8 1 (0.18%) Tomcat
8 1 (0.18%) WebSphere
Applications
1 2 (0.35%) Weka
2 1 (0.18%) Microsoft Office
Business Applications
1 1 (0.18%) Dynamics CRM
1 1 (0.18%) Loan IQ
1 1 (0.18%) Payment Gateway
1 1 (0.18%) Shopify
Cloud Services
1 319 (55.96%) AWS
2 305 (53.51%) Azure
3 130 (22.81%) GCP
4 95 (16.67%) GitHub
5 76 (13.33%) Serverless
6 75 (13.16%) Azure DevOps
7 65 (11.40%) GitHub Actions
8 48 (8.42%) Amazon ECS
9 47 (8.25%) Amazon EKS
10 41 (7.19%) Amazon S3
11 38 (6.67%) Amazon EC2
12 37 (6.49%) AWS Lambda
13 36 (6.32%) Azure AKS
13 36 (6.32%) OpenShift
14 33 (5.79%) SaaS
15 31 (5.44%) AWS CloudFormation
16 28 (4.91%) Datadog
17 21 (3.68%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 21 (3.68%) PaaS
18 18 (3.16%) Entra ID
Communications & Networking
1 27 (4.74%) Firewall
2 22 (3.86%) VPN
3 18 (3.16%) DNS
4 12 (2.11%) Internet
5 10 (1.75%) AMQP
6 9 (1.58%) DHCP
7 6 (1.05%) VLAN
8 5 (0.88%) TCP/IP
8 5 (0.88%) Wireless
9 4 (0.70%) Cisco IOS
9 4 (0.70%) HTTP
9 4 (0.70%) IPsec
9 4 (0.70%) SAN
9 4 (0.70%) SSL
9 4 (0.70%) VoIP
9 4 (0.70%) WAN
10 2 (0.35%) Broadband
10 2 (0.35%) iSCSI
10 2 (0.35%) LAN
10 2 (0.35%) Network Security
Database & Business Intelligence
1 74 (12.98%) PostgreSQL
2 53 (9.30%) NoSQL
3 43 (7.54%) Relational Database
4 38 (6.67%) SQL Server
5 30 (5.26%) MongoDB
6 25 (4.39%) MySQL
7 23 (4.04%) BigQuery
8 20 (3.51%) Amazon RDS
9 15 (2.63%) Elasticsearch
10 14 (2.46%) RDBMS
11 10 (1.75%) Neo4j
12 9 (1.58%) Big Data
13 8 (1.40%) DynamoDB
13 8 (1.40%) Redis
14 7 (1.23%) Apache Cassandra
14 7 (1.23%) InfluxDB
15 5 (0.88%) Amazon Aurora
15 5 (0.88%) Hadoop
15 5 (0.88%) Metadata
16 4 (0.70%) Oracle Database
Development Applications
1 108 (18.95%) Jenkins
2 98 (17.19%) Git
3 67 (11.75%) GitLab
4 32 (5.61%) JUnit
5 23 (4.04%) Mockito
6 21 (3.68%) JMeter
7 20 (3.51%) JIRA
8 18 (3.16%) Cucumber
9 13 (2.28%) Selenium
10 12 (2.11%) Maven
11 11 (1.93%) Bitbucket
12 10 (1.75%) Cypress.io
13 9 (1.58%) SonarQube
14 6 (1.05%) Artifactory
14 6 (1.05%) CircleCI
14 6 (1.05%) Locust
14 6 (1.05%) TestNG
15 5 (0.88%) Gradle
15 5 (0.88%) MLflow
15 5 (0.88%) TeamCity
General
1 137 (24.04%) Social Skills
2 83 (14.56%) Finance
3 52 (9.12%) Public Sector
4 45 (7.89%) Law
5 41 (7.19%) Marketing
6 24 (4.21%) Analytical Skills
7 14 (2.46%) Advertising
8 13 (2.28%) Aerospace
9 12 (2.11%) Manufacturing
10 9 (1.58%) Telecoms
11 7 (1.23%) Banking
11 7 (1.23%) Electronics
11 7 (1.23%) Retail
12 6 (1.05%) Automotive
13 5 (0.88%) Financial Institution
13 5 (0.88%) Games
13 5 (0.88%) Inclusion and Diversity
13 5 (0.88%) Legal
14 4 (0.70%) Pharmaceutical
14 4 (0.70%) Tech for Good
Job Titles
1 134 (23.51%) Senior
2 115 (20.18%) Developer
3 90 (15.79%) DevOps Engineer
4 80 (14.04%) Lead
5 73 (12.81%) Software Engineer
6 56 (9.82%) Java Developer
7 50 (8.77%) Architect
8 49 (8.60%) Senior Developer
9 48 (8.42%) Full-Stack Developer
10 44 (7.72%) Platform Engineer
11 42 (7.37%) Cloud Engineer
12 32 (5.61%) Azure Engineer
13 29 (5.09%) Infrastructure Engineer
14 26 (4.56%) Full-Stack Java Developer
15 24 (4.21%) Cloud Architect
16 23 (4.04%) Senior Software Engineer
17 21 (3.68%) GCP Architect
17 21 (3.68%) Lead DevOps
17 21 (3.68%) Senior Java Developer
18 20 (3.51%) Platform Architect
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 107 (18.77%) React
2 92 (16.14%) Spring
3 88 (15.44%) Spring Boot
4 79 (13.86%) .NET
5 54 (9.47%) RESTful
6 53 (9.30%) REST
7 46 (8.07%) HTML
7 46 (8.07%) Node.js
8 37 (6.49%) AngularJS
9 35 (6.14%) Elastic Stack
10 33 (5.79%) CSS
11 32 (5.61%) Kafka
12 30 (5.26%) Web Services
13 27 (4.74%) .NET Core
13 27 (4.74%) RabbitMQ
14 22 (3.86%) .NET Framework
14 22 (3.86%) Hibernate
15 19 (3.33%) Django
16 16 (2.81%) Apache Camel
16 16 (2.81%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 139 (24.39%) Cloud Native
2 58 (10.18%) Distributed Systems
3 31 (5.44%) Onboarding
4 29 (5.09%) Product Ownership
5 16 (2.81%) Legacy Systems
6 10 (1.75%) Linux Command Line
6 10 (1.75%) Management Information System
7 7 (1.23%) Clustering
7 7 (1.23%) Distributed Computing
7 7 (1.23%) Hybrid Cloud
7 7 (1.23%) IoT
8 6 (1.05%) Data Centre
9 5 (0.88%) Enterprise Software
9 5 (0.88%) Private Cloud
9 5 (0.88%) Self-Motivation
10 4 (0.70%) Cyber Threat
10 4 (0.70%) Data Protection Act
10 4 (0.70%) Life Science
10 4 (0.70%) Public Cloud
11 3 (0.53%) Legacy Applications
Operating Systems
1 131 (22.98%) Linux
2 55 (9.65%) Windows
3 16 (2.81%) VMS
4 14 (2.46%) Windows Server
5 12 (2.11%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 11 (1.93%) Ubuntu
7 10 (1.75%) Debian
8 7 (1.23%) CentOS
9 6 (1.05%) Unix
9 6 (1.05%) Windows Server 2019
10 4 (0.70%) Mac OS
10 4 (0.70%) Rocky
11 1 (0.18%) Android
11 1 (0.18%) Windows Server 2016
Processes & Methodologies
1 353 (61.93%) CI/CD
2 338 (59.30%) DevOps
3 264 (46.32%) Containerisation
4 205 (35.96%) Agile
5 173 (30.35%) Infrastructure as Code
6 135 (23.68%) Microservices
7 121 (21.23%) Continuous Improvement
8 120 (21.05%) Problem-Solving
9 113 (19.82%) Software Engineering
10 101 (17.72%) Mentoring
11 82 (14.39%) Full-Stack Development
12 81 (14.21%) Observability
13 80 (14.04%) TDD
14 78 (13.68%) Infrastructure Engineering
15 76 (13.33%) Platform Engineering
16 67 (11.75%) Test Automation
17 56 (9.82%) Cloud Security
18 55 (9.65%) Scrum
19 54 (9.47%) AI
19 54 (9.47%) Analytics
Programming Languages
1 257 (45.09%) Python
2 184 (32.28%) Java
3 123 (21.58%) JavaScript
4 102 (17.89%) SQL
5 81 (14.21%) Bash
6 65 (11.40%) TypeScript
7 63 (11.05%) C#
8 61 (10.70%) Go
9 59 (10.35%) PowerShell
10 34 (5.96%) Bicep
11 20 (3.51%) C
12 18 (3.16%) Shell Script
13 10 (1.75%) C++
14 8 (1.40%) PHP
14 8 (1.40%) T-SQL
15 7 (1.23%) PL/SQL
16 6 (1.05%) Delphi
16 6 (1.05%) R
17 5 (0.88%) Kotlin
18 2 (0.35%) Elixir
Qualifications
1 123 (21.58%) Security Cleared
2 67 (11.75%) SC Cleared
3 57 (10.00%) DV Cleared
4 43 (7.54%) Degree
5 31 (5.44%) Computer Science Degree
6 24 (4.21%) Azure Certification
7 22 (3.86%) AWS Certification
8 9 (1.58%) ITIL Certification
9 7 (1.23%) BPSS Clearance
10 6 (1.05%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
10 6 (1.05%) CISSP
10 6 (1.05%) ISTQB
10 6 (1.05%) Master's Degree
11 5 (0.88%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
12 4 (0.70%) ACMT
12 4 (0.70%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
12 4 (0.70%) Microsoft Certification
12 4 (0.70%) Network+ Certification
13 3 (0.53%) CCNA
13 3 (0.53%) Cisco Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 58 (10.18%) QA
2 15 (2.63%) GDPR
3 11 (1.93%) ISO/IEC 27001
4 9 (1.58%) Accessibility
5 7 (1.23%) NIST
6 6 (1.05%) WCAG
7 5 (0.88%) Cyber Essentials
7 5 (0.88%) PCI DSS
8 4 (0.70%) Data Quality
8 4 (0.70%) HIPAA
8 4 (0.70%) NCSC
8 4 (0.70%) SOC 2
9 2 (0.35%) ECSS
9 2 (0.35%) GxP
10 1 (0.18%) CDISC
10 1 (0.18%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
10 1 (0.18%) Government Security Classifications
10 1 (0.18%) HL7
10 1 (0.18%) JSP 440
10 1 (0.18%) SNOMED CT
System Software
1 361 (63.33%) Docker
2 22 (3.86%) Active Directory
3 15 (2.63%) VMware Infrastructure
4 11 (1.93%) Hyper-V
5 10 (1.75%) vSphere
6 7 (1.23%) Virtual Machines
7 6 (1.05%) VMware ESXi
8 5 (0.88%) KVM
8 5 (0.88%) VMware NSX
9 3 (0.53%) QEMU
10 2 (0.35%) Citrix Hypervisor
10 2 (0.35%) vCloud
10 2 (0.35%) Virtual Servers
11 1 (0.18%) Apache ZooKeeper
11 1 (0.18%) Firmware
11 1 (0.18%) Virtual Desktop
Systems Management
1 204 (35.79%) Terraform
2 107 (18.77%) Ansible
3 91 (15.96%) Grafana
4 70 (12.28%) Prometheus
5 19 (3.33%) Argo
6 13 (2.28%) Kibana
7 11 (1.93%) Puppet
8 9 (1.58%) Control-M
9 7 (1.23%) Docker Swarm
9 7 (1.23%) Microsoft Intune
9 7 (1.23%) Progress Chef
10 6 (1.05%) vCenter Server
11 5 (0.88%) Rancher
12 4 (0.70%) Autotask
12 4 (0.70%) Kubeflow
13 3 (0.53%) Istio
13 3 (0.53%) Kustomize
13 3 (0.53%) Nagios
13 3 (0.53%) Single Sign-On
13 3 (0.53%) yum
Vendors
1 50 (8.77%) Google
2 47 (8.25%) Microsoft
3 33 (5.79%) Oracle
4 25 (4.39%) Splunk
5 21 (3.68%) VMware
6 19 (3.33%) Red Hat
7 13 (2.28%) Dynatrace
8 9 (1.58%) Dell
9 8 (1.40%) SAP
10 6 (1.05%) Databricks
10 6 (1.05%) Rackspace
10 6 (1.05%) SaltStack
11 5 (0.88%) Cisco
11 5 (0.88%) Pega
12 4 (0.70%) AppDynamics
12 4 (0.70%) Apple
12 4 (0.70%) Datto
12 4 (0.70%) Sophos
12 4 (0.70%) Veeam
12 4 (0.70%) WSO2