Kubernetes Contract Job Trends in the South East

Kubernetes (k8s)
England > South East

The table below provides summary statistics and contractor rates for jobs advertised in the South East requiring Kubernetes skills. It covers contract job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 18 February 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
18 Feb 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 50 49 74
Rank change year-on-year -1 +25 -8
Contract jobs citing Kubernetes 182 124 149
As % of all contract jobs in the South East 3.83% 3.95% 2.72%
As % of the Systems Management category 27.00% 29.38% 22.37%
Number of daily rates quoted 136 81 103
10th Percentile £354 £390 £413
25th Percentile £412 £409 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £483 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -12.27% - +1.43%
75th Percentile £538 £638 £615
90th Percentile £630 £675 £638
England median daily rate £525 £600 £570
% change year-on-year -12.50% +5.26% -8.80%
Number of hourly rates quoted 13 0 6
10th Percentile £41.25 - £54.44
25th Percentile £55.00 - £66.11
Median hourly rate £60.00 - £76.53
75th Percentile £80.00 - -
90th Percentile £85.20 - -
England median hourly rate £60.00 £58.75 £62.00
% change year-on-year +2.13% -5.24% -3.13%

All Systems Management Skills
South East

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

Contract vacancies with a requirement for systems management skills 674 422 666
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the South East 14.17% 13.44% 12.17%
Number of daily rates quoted 496 306 455
10th Percentile £255 £300 £205
25th Percentile £380 £395 £266
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £483 £500 £493
Median % change year-on-year -3.50% +1.42% -6.10%
75th Percentile £563 £613 £588
90th Percentile £650 £675 £642
England median daily rate £500 £538 £525
% change year-on-year -6.98% +2.38% -9.87%
Number of hourly rates quoted 24 2 33
10th Percentile £19.00 £12.80 £23.70
25th Percentile £23.50 £13.99 £30.00
Median hourly rate £48.11 £15.99 £48.40
Median % change year-on-year +200.97% -66.97% -12.00%
75th Percentile £67.50 £17.98 £68.63
90th Percentile £81.40 £19.17 £76.53
England median hourly rate £52.50 £26.00 £42.03
% change year-on-year +101.92% -38.14% -16.88%

Kubernetes
Job Vacancy Trend in the South East

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

Kubernetes job vacancy trend in the South East

Kubernetes
Daily Rate Trend in the South East

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the South East citing Kubernetes.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the South East citing Kubernetes

Kubernetes
Daily Rate Histogram in the South East

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Kubernetes in the South East over the 6 months to 18 February 2026.

Daily rate histogram for Kubernetes in the South East

Kubernetes
Hourly Rate Trend in the South East

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the South East citing Kubernetes.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the South East citing Kubernetes

Kubernetes
Hourly Rate Histogram in the South East

Hourly rate distribution of jobs citing Kubernetes in the South East over the 6 months to 18 February 2026.

Hourly rate histogram for Kubernetes in the South East

Kubernetes
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 within the South East region over the 6 months to 18 February 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
Thames Valley -23 78 £475 -6.17% 26
Hampshire +9 76 £488 -15.22% 27
Berkshire -7 73 £475 -2.56% 8
Surrey -5 13 £525 +50.00% 16
West Sussex -11 7 £300 -32.58% 10
East Sussex +7 4 £565 +21.51% 3
Buckinghamshire -15 3 £613 +2.08% 8
Middlesex - 3 £509 - 1
Oxfordshire -12 2 - - 10
Home Counties - 1 - -
Kubernetes
England

Kubernetes
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:

Application Platforms
1 7 (3.85%) Apache Spark
1 7 (3.85%) Confluence
2 4 (2.20%) Apache
3 3 (1.65%) IIS
4 2 (1.10%) Apache Pulsar
5 1 (0.55%) SAS
Applications
1 1 (0.55%) CPLEX
1 1 (0.55%) Microsoft Excel
1 1 (0.55%) Microsoft Office
Business Applications
1 1 (0.55%) Payment Gateway
Cloud Services
1 95 (52.20%) AWS
2 90 (49.45%) Azure
3 56 (30.77%) OpenShift
4 46 (25.27%) GitHub
5 43 (23.63%) GCP
6 27 (14.84%) GitHub Actions
7 21 (11.54%) Azure AKS
8 18 (9.89%) Azure DevOps
9 12 (6.59%) Amazon S3
9 12 (6.59%) AWS CloudFormation
9 12 (6.59%) IaaS
9 12 (6.59%) Serverless
10 11 (6.04%) Datadog
11 9 (4.95%) Amazon EKS
12 8 (4.40%) Amazon ECR
12 8 (4.40%) AWS Lambda
12 8 (4.40%) Cloud Computing
12 8 (4.40%) PaaS
13 7 (3.85%) Snowflake
14 6 (3.30%) Azure Key Vault
Communications & Networking
1 13 (7.14%) DNS
2 12 (6.59%) Firewall
3 8 (4.40%) TCP/IP
4 6 (3.30%) DHCP
5 5 (2.75%) HTTP
5 5 (2.75%) Kerberos
6 1 (0.55%) Internet
6 1 (0.55%) MQTT
6 1 (0.55%) Reverse Proxy
6 1 (0.55%) SNMP
6 1 (0.55%) SSL
6 1 (0.55%) VPN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 38 (20.88%) PostgreSQL
2 25 (13.74%) NoSQL
3 14 (7.69%) MongoDB
4 10 (5.49%) DynamoDB
4 10 (5.49%) Redis
5 8 (4.40%) HBase
6 7 (3.85%) Big Data
6 7 (3.85%) Relational Database
7 6 (3.30%) Couchbase
8 5 (2.75%) Apache Cassandra
9 4 (2.20%) Azure SQL Database
9 4 (2.20%) Data Lake
9 4 (2.20%) Elasticsearch
9 4 (2.20%) SQL Server
10 3 (1.65%) Data Warehouse
11 2 (1.10%) BigQuery
12 1 (0.55%) Amazon Athena
12 1 (0.55%) Amazon Aurora
12 1 (0.55%) Amazon QuickSight
12 1 (0.55%) Amazon Redshift
Development Applications
1 46 (25.27%) Jenkins
2 34 (18.68%) GitLab
3 30 (16.48%) Git
4 17 (9.34%) Artifactory
5 15 (8.24%) Cucumber
6 13 (7.14%) JUnit
6 13 (7.14%) Sonatype Nexus
7 11 (6.04%) Gradle
8 8 (4.40%) JIRA
9 6 (3.30%) JMeter
9 6 (3.30%) Maven
9 6 (3.30%) SonarQube
10 3 (1.65%) Bitbucket
11 2 (1.10%) Gatling
12 1 (0.55%) LoadRunner
12 1 (0.55%) MLflow
12 1 (0.55%) Postman
12 1 (0.55%) Selenium
General
1 53 (29.12%) Social Skills
2 15 (8.24%) Analytical Skills
2 15 (8.24%) Finance
2 15 (8.24%) Public Sector
3 4 (2.20%) Aerospace
4 3 (1.65%) Banking
4 3 (1.65%) Inclusion and Diversity
5 2 (1.10%) Billing
5 2 (1.10%) Documentation Skills
6 1 (0.55%) Military
6 1 (0.55%) Telecoms
Job Titles
1 42 (23.08%) Developer
2 34 (18.68%) Java Developer
3 32 (17.58%) DevOps Engineer
4 24 (13.19%) Senior
5 17 (9.34%) Architect
6 15 (8.24%) Platform Engineer
7 14 (7.69%) Azure Engineer
7 14 (7.69%) Site Reliability Engineer
8 13 (7.14%) Senior Developer
8 13 (7.14%) Site Engineer
9 12 (6.59%) Infrastructure Engineer
10 10 (5.49%) AWS DevOps
11 9 (4.95%) Senior Java Developer
12 8 (4.40%) Software Engineer
13 7 (3.85%) AWS Developer
13 7 (3.85%) Azure Infrastructure Engineer
13 7 (3.85%) Java Engineer
13 7 (3.85%) Lead
14 6 (3.30%) AWS Engineer
14 6 (3.30%) Cloud Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 42 (23.08%) Kafka
2 28 (15.38%) Spring
2 28 (15.38%) Spring Boot
3 17 (9.34%) AngularJS
4 16 (8.79%) REST
5 15 (8.24%) Elastic Stack
6 13 (7.14%) Loki
6 13 (7.14%) RabbitMQ
7 10 (5.49%) Keycloak
7 10 (5.49%) React
8 8 (4.40%) RESTful
9 6 (3.30%) ADO
9 6 (3.30%) JSON
9 6 (3.30%) Middleware
9 6 (3.30%) Quarkus
10 5 (2.75%) PyTorch
10 5 (2.75%) scikit-learn
10 5 (2.75%) TensorFlow
11 4 (2.20%) .NET
11 4 (2.20%) Hibernate
Miscellaneous
1 29 (15.93%) Cloud Native
2 14 (7.69%) Distributed Systems
3 8 (4.40%) Virtual Team
4 6 (3.30%) Enterprise Software
5 4 (2.20%) Hybrid Cloud
5 4 (2.20%) Onboarding
5 4 (2.20%) PKI
6 3 (1.65%) Algorithms
6 3 (1.65%) Data Structures
6 3 (1.65%) Self-Motivation
7 2 (1.10%) Distributed Architecture
7 2 (1.10%) Management Information System
7 2 (1.10%) Product Ownership
7 2 (1.10%) TM Forum
8 1 (0.55%) Chip and PIN
8 1 (0.55%) Data Protection Act
8 1 (0.55%) EMV
8 1 (0.55%) Mobile App
8 1 (0.55%) Private Cloud
Operating Systems
1 58 (31.87%) Linux
2 16 (8.79%) Windows
3 10 (5.49%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 5 (2.75%) Ubuntu
4 5 (2.75%) Windows Server
5 4 (2.20%) Unix
6 3 (1.65%) CentOS
7 2 (1.10%) VMS
8 1 (0.55%) Windows Server 2016
Processes & Methodologies
1 133 (73.08%) CI/CD
2 87 (47.80%) DevOps
3 83 (45.60%) Containerisation
4 57 (31.32%) Agile
5 52 (28.57%) Infrastructure as Code
6 46 (25.27%) Observability
7 40 (21.98%) Microservices
8 34 (18.68%) Platform Engineering
8 34 (18.68%) Site Reliability Engineering
9 32 (17.58%) Problem-Solving
10 26 (14.29%) Software Engineering
11 25 (13.74%) DevSecOps
12 20 (10.99%) Test Automation
13 19 (10.44%) High Availability
14 18 (9.89%) Infrastructure Engineering
14 18 (9.89%) Scrum
15 15 (8.24%) Continuous Integration
16 13 (7.14%) Analytics
16 13 (7.14%) GitOps
16 13 (7.14%) Software Testing
Programming Languages
1 84 (46.15%) Python
2 53 (29.12%) Java
3 51 (28.02%) Bash
4 21 (11.54%) SQL
5 20 (10.99%) PowerShell
6 15 (8.24%) Go
7 11 (6.04%) Bicep
7 11 (6.04%) JavaScript
8 7 (3.85%) C#
9 4 (2.20%) R
9 4 (2.20%) Shell Script
10 3 (1.65%) TypeScript
11 2 (1.10%) C
11 2 (1.10%) C++
11 2 (1.10%) Perl
11 2 (1.10%) PHP
11 2 (1.10%) Rust
12 1 (0.55%) Kotlin
Qualifications
1 95 (52.20%) Security Cleared
2 78 (42.86%) SC Cleared
3 14 (7.69%) Degree
4 10 (5.49%) Computer Science Degree
5 9 (4.95%) DV Cleared
5 9 (4.95%) OCP
5 9 (4.95%) Oracle Certification
6 7 (3.85%) RHCE
7 6 (3.30%) AWS Certification
8 3 (1.65%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
8 3 (1.65%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
9 2 (1.10%) Azure Certification
9 2 (1.10%) BPSS Clearance
9 2 (1.10%) RHCSA
10 1 (0.55%) CCNA
10 1 (0.55%) CCNP
10 1 (0.55%) JNCIP
10 1 (0.55%) Network+ Certification
10 1 (0.55%) PMI Certification
10 1 (0.55%) PMP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 13 (7.14%) QA
2 7 (3.85%) NCSC
3 3 (1.65%) Def Stans
3 3 (1.65%) JSP 440
3 3 (1.65%) PCI DSS
4 1 (0.55%) GDPR
4 1 (0.55%) ISO 20022
4 1 (0.55%) ISO 8583
4 1 (0.55%) ISO/IEC 27001
4 1 (0.55%) NIST
System Software
1 71 (39.01%) Docker
2 22 (12.09%) VMware Infrastructure
3 15 (8.24%) vSphere
4 7 (3.85%) Active Directory
5 6 (3.30%) VMware NSX
6 4 (2.20%) Hyper-V
7 2 (1.10%) KVM
8 1 (0.55%) NDS
8 1 (0.55%) NetIQ eDirectory
8 1 (0.55%) Virtual Machines
Systems Management
1 69 (37.91%) Terraform
2 56 (30.77%) Ansible
2 56 (30.77%) Grafana
3 49 (26.92%) Prometheus
4 32 (17.58%) Argo
5 11 (6.04%) Kustomize
6 9 (4.95%) Puppet
7 8 (4.40%) Istio
7 8 (4.40%) linkerd
7 8 (4.40%) Progress Chef
8 7 (3.85%) Sysdig
8 7 (3.85%) vCenter Server
9 4 (2.20%) Nessus
9 4 (2.20%) Podman
10 2 (1.10%) logstash
10 2 (1.10%) Packer
10 2 (1.10%) Rancher
10 2 (1.10%) Single Sign-On
11 1 (0.55%) Docker Swarm
11 1 (0.55%) Fluentd
Vendors
1 41 (22.53%) Red Hat
2 37 (20.33%) VMware
3 19 (10.44%) Splunk
4 9 (4.95%) Microsoft
5 6 (3.30%) Atlassian
5 6 (3.30%) Google
5 6 (3.30%) Pure Storage
6 4 (2.20%) AppDynamics
6 4 (2.20%) Dynatrace
6 4 (2.20%) Oracle
6 4 (2.20%) Tenable
7 3 (1.65%) Ab Initio
7 3 (1.65%) Teradata
8 2 (1.10%) Fortinet
9 1 (0.55%) Ericsson
9 1 (0.55%) Mavenir
9 1 (0.55%) NetIQ
9 1 (0.55%) OpenText
9 1 (0.55%) Salesforce
9 1 (0.55%) Virgin Media