Kubernetes Engineer Contract Job Trends in the South East

Kubernetes Engineer (K8s Engineer)
England > South East

The median Kubernetes Engineer (K8s Engineer) daily rate in the South East is £393, according to job vacancies posted in the 6 months leading up to 18 April 2026.

The table below compares current contractor rates and summary statistics with the previous two years.

6 months to
18 Apr 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 205 162 205
Rank change year-on-year -43 +43 +21
Contract jobs requiring a Kubernetes Engineer 1 1 1
As % of all contract jobs in the South East 0.018% 0.033% 0.018%
As % of the Job Titles category 0.019% 0.036% 0.019%
Number of daily rates quoted 1 1 1
10th Percentile - - -
25th Percentile - - £513
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £393 £300 £525
Median % change year-on-year +31.00% -42.86% -4.55%
75th Percentile - - £538
90th Percentile - - -
England median daily rate £450 £623 £550
% change year-on-year -27.71% +13.18% -15.38%

All Contract IT Job Roles
South East

For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all contract IT job vacancies in the South East. Most job vacancies include a discernible job title that can be normalized. As such, the figures in the second row provide an indication of the number of contract jobs in our overall sample.

Contract vacancies in the South East with a recognized job title 5,224 2,768 5,197
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 91.87% 92.36% 92.52%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,265 1,823 3,123
10th Percentile £300 £244 £213
25th Percentile £413 £400 £400
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £515 £500 £500
Median % change year-on-year +3.00% - -
75th Percentile £613 £600 £613
90th Percentile £712 £663 £688
England median daily rate £508 £525 £525
% change year-on-year -3.33% - -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 485 155 475
10th Percentile £15.15 £14.20 £12.80
25th Percentile £21.00 £20.21 £18.32
Median hourly rate £49.00 £32.50 £47.50
Median % change year-on-year +50.77% -31.58% +5.56%
75th Percentile £81.05 £63.75 £62.50
90th Percentile £88.00 £75.30 £76.86
England median hourly rate £45.00 £32.50 £35.00
% change year-on-year +38.46% -7.14% -18.60%

Kubernetes Engineer
Job Vacancy Trend in the South East

Historical trend showing the proportion of contract IT job postings featuring 'Kubernetes Engineer' in the job title relative to all contract IT jobs advertised in the South East.

Kubernetes Engineer job vacancy trend in the South East

Kubernetes Engineer
Daily Rate Trend in the South East

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for Kubernetes Engineer job vacancies in the South East.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for Kubernetes Engineer job vacancies in the South East

Kubernetes Engineer
Contract Job Locations in the South East

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing Kubernetes Engineer within the South East region over the 6 months to 18 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
Buckinghamshire - 1 £393 -
Thames Valley - 1 £393 -
Kubernetes Engineer
England

Kubernetes Engineer Skill Set
Top 30 Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities in the South East

For the 6 months to 18 April 2026, Kubernetes Engineer contract job roles required the following skills and capabilities in order of popularity. The figures indicate the absolute number of co-occurrences and as a proportion of all contract job ads across the South East region featuring Kubernetes Engineer in the job title.

1 1 (100.00%) .NET
1 1 (100.00%) Amazon CloudWatch
1 1 (100.00%) AWS
1 1 (100.00%) Azure
1 1 (100.00%) Azure DevOps
1 1 (100.00%) Bash
1 1 (100.00%) BPSS Clearance
1 1 (100.00%) CI/CD
1 1 (100.00%) DevOps
1 1 (100.00%) Event-Driven
1 1 (100.00%) Event-Driven Architecture
1 1 (100.00%) GDPR
1 1 (100.00%) GitHub
1 1 (100.00%) GitHub Actions
1 1 (100.00%) Go
1 1 (100.00%) Grafana
1 1 (100.00%) GRC
1 1 (100.00%) Incident Response
1 1 (100.00%) Infrastructure as Code
1 1 (100.00%) Istio
1 1 (100.00%) Jaeger
1 1 (100.00%) Kubernetes
1 1 (100.00%) Linux
1 1 (100.00%) Loki
1 1 (100.00%) Observability
1 1 (100.00%) OpenTelemetry
1 1 (100.00%) PCI DSS
1 1 (100.00%) Platform Engineering
1 1 (100.00%) PowerShell
1 1 (100.00%) Problem Management

Kubernetes Engineer Skill Set
Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities in the South East 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:

Cloud Services
1 1 (100.00%) Amazon CloudWatch
1 1 (100.00%) AWS
1 1 (100.00%) Azure
1 1 (100.00%) Azure DevOps
1 1 (100.00%) GitHub
1 1 (100.00%) GitHub Actions
Development Applications
1 1 (100.00%) Jaeger
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 1 (100.00%) .NET
1 1 (100.00%) Loki
1 1 (100.00%) OpenTelemetry
Miscellaneous
1 1 (100.00%) Distributed Systems
1 1 (100.00%) Hybrid Cloud
1 1 (100.00%) Onboarding
1 1 (100.00%) Security Posture
Operating Systems
1 1 (100.00%) Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 1 (100.00%) CI/CD
1 1 (100.00%) DevOps
1 1 (100.00%) Event-Driven
1 1 (100.00%) Event-Driven Architecture
1 1 (100.00%) Incident Response
1 1 (100.00%) Infrastructure as Code
1 1 (100.00%) Observability
1 1 (100.00%) Platform Engineering
1 1 (100.00%) Problem Management
1 1 (100.00%) Root Cause Analysis
Programming Languages
1 1 (100.00%) Bash
1 1 (100.00%) Go
1 1 (100.00%) PowerShell
1 1 (100.00%) Python
Qualifications
1 1 (100.00%) BPSS Clearance
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 1 (100.00%) GDPR
1 1 (100.00%) GRC
1 1 (100.00%) PCI DSS
Systems Management
1 1 (100.00%) Grafana
1 1 (100.00%) Istio
1 1 (100.00%) Kubernetes
1 1 (100.00%) Prometheus
1 1 (100.00%) Terraform