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 4 March 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
4 Mar 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 51 50 76
Rank change year-on-year -1 +26 -18
Contract jobs citing Kubernetes 185 122 150
As % of all contract jobs in the South East 3.68% 3.99% 2.71%
As % of the Systems Management category 26.62% 30.35% 21.77%
Number of daily rates quoted 139 77 101
10th Percentile £356 £390 £413
25th Percentile £408 £409 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £485 £550 £545
Median % change year-on-year -11.82% +0.92% -0.91%
75th Percentile £547 £625 £613
90th Percentile £635 £675 £630
England median daily rate £525 £588 £563
% change year-on-year -10.64% +4.44% -10.00%
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 £64.75
% change year-on-year +2.13% -9.27% +1.17%

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 695 402 689
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the South East 13.84% 13.15% 12.47%
Number of daily rates quoted 512 288 478
10th Percentile £255 £296 £205
25th Percentile £380 £400 £276
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £485 £500 £475
Median % change year-on-year -3.00% +5.26% -9.52%
75th Percentile £563 £613 £575
90th Percentile £660 £675 £638
England median daily rate £500 £538 £525
% change year-on-year -7.06% +2.48% -9.48%
Number of hourly rates quoted 24 2 30
10th Percentile £19.00 £12.80 £22.66
25th Percentile £23.50 £13.99 £30.00
Median hourly rate £48.11 £15.99 £47.95
Median % change year-on-year +200.97% -66.66% -20.08%
75th Percentile £67.50 £17.98 £68.63
90th Percentile £81.40 £19.17 £76.53
England median hourly rate £53.25 £26.50 £40.00
% change year-on-year +100.94% -33.75% -25.02%

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 4 March 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 4 March 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 4 March 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 -29 79 £475 -5.00% 124
Hampshire -1 77 £494 -14.13% 49
Berkshire -10 68 £475 -2.56% 82
Surrey -1 14 £525 +50.00% 39
Buckinghamshire -15 9 £575 - 24
West Sussex -13 7 £300 -32.58% 22
East Sussex +6 4 £565 +21.51% 24
Middlesex - 3 £509 - 2
Oxfordshire -14 2 - - 18
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 (3.78%) Apache Spark
1 7 (3.78%) Confluence
2 4 (2.16%) Apache
3 3 (1.62%) IIS
4 2 (1.08%) Apache Pulsar
5 1 (0.54%) Microsoft Exchange
5 1 (0.54%) SAS
Applications
1 1 (0.54%) CPLEX
1 1 (0.54%) Microsoft Excel
1 1 (0.54%) Microsoft Office
Business Applications
1 1 (0.54%) Payment Gateway
Cloud Services
1 101 (54.59%) AWS
2 89 (48.11%) Azure
3 60 (32.43%) OpenShift
4 49 (26.49%) GitHub
5 45 (24.32%) GCP
6 30 (16.22%) GitHub Actions
7 16 (8.65%) Azure AKS
7 16 (8.65%) Azure DevOps
8 12 (6.49%) Amazon S3
8 12 (6.49%) AWS CloudFormation
8 12 (6.49%) Serverless
9 11 (5.95%) Datadog
10 10 (5.41%) IaaS
11 9 (4.86%) Amazon EKS
12 8 (4.32%) Amazon ECR
12 8 (4.32%) AWS Lambda
12 8 (4.32%) Cloud Computing
13 7 (3.78%) Amazon CloudWatch
13 7 (3.78%) Snowflake
14 6 (3.24%) PaaS
Communications & Networking
1 13 (7.03%) DNS
1 13 (7.03%) Firewall
2 8 (4.32%) TCP/IP
3 6 (3.24%) DHCP
4 5 (2.70%) HTTP
4 5 (2.70%) Kerberos
5 1 (0.54%) Internet
5 1 (0.54%) iSCSI
5 1 (0.54%) MQTT
5 1 (0.54%) Remote Desktop
5 1 (0.54%) Reverse Proxy
5 1 (0.54%) SAN
5 1 (0.54%) SNMP
5 1 (0.54%) SSL
5 1 (0.54%) VPN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 40 (21.62%) PostgreSQL
2 25 (13.51%) NoSQL
3 14 (7.57%) MongoDB
4 10 (5.41%) DynamoDB
4 10 (5.41%) Redis
5 8 (4.32%) Big Data
5 8 (4.32%) HBase
6 7 (3.78%) Relational Database
7 6 (3.24%) Couchbase
8 5 (2.70%) Apache Cassandra
8 5 (2.70%) SQL Server
9 4 (2.16%) Elasticsearch
10 3 (1.62%) Data Warehouse
11 2 (1.08%) Azure SQL Database
11 2 (1.08%) BigQuery
11 2 (1.08%) Data Lake
12 1 (0.54%) Amazon Athena
12 1 (0.54%) Amazon Aurora
12 1 (0.54%) Amazon QuickSight
12 1 (0.54%) Amazon Redshift
Development Applications
1 48 (25.95%) Jenkins
2 35 (18.92%) GitLab
3 30 (16.22%) Git
4 17 (9.19%) Artifactory
5 15 (8.11%) Cucumber
6 13 (7.03%) JUnit
6 13 (7.03%) Sonatype Nexus
7 11 (5.95%) Gradle
8 8 (4.32%) JIRA
9 7 (3.78%) SonarQube
10 6 (3.24%) JMeter
10 6 (3.24%) Maven
11 3 (1.62%) Bitbucket
12 2 (1.08%) Gatling
12 2 (1.08%) Jaeger
13 1 (0.54%) LoadRunner
13 1 (0.54%) MLflow
13 1 (0.54%) Postman
13 1 (0.54%) Selenium
General
1 54 (29.19%) Social Skills
2 18 (9.73%) Public Sector
3 16 (8.65%) Analytical Skills
4 15 (8.11%) Finance
5 4 (2.16%) Aerospace
6 3 (1.62%) Banking
6 3 (1.62%) Inclusion and Diversity
6 3 (1.62%) Military
7 2 (1.08%) Billing
7 2 (1.08%) Documentation Skills
8 1 (0.54%) Organisational Skills
8 1 (0.54%) Telecoms
Job Titles
1 42 (22.70%) Developer
2 34 (18.38%) Java Developer
3 30 (16.22%) DevOps Engineer
4 25 (13.51%) Senior
5 19 (10.27%) Architect
6 18 (9.73%) Platform Engineer
7 15 (8.11%) Site Reliability Engineer
8 13 (7.03%) Senior Developer
8 13 (7.03%) Site Engineer
9 11 (5.95%) AWS DevOps
10 10 (5.41%) Azure Engineer
11 9 (4.86%) Infrastructure Engineer
11 9 (4.86%) Senior Java Developer
11 9 (4.86%) Software Engineer
12 7 (3.78%) AWS Developer
12 7 (3.78%) AWS Engineer
12 7 (3.78%) Java Engineer
12 7 (3.78%) Lead
13 6 (3.24%) Cloud Engineer
13 6 (3.24%) Solutions Architect
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 42 (22.70%) Kafka
2 28 (15.14%) Spring
2 28 (15.14%) Spring Boot
3 19 (10.27%) AngularJS
4 16 (8.65%) REST
5 15 (8.11%) Elastic Stack
5 15 (8.11%) Loki
6 13 (7.03%) RabbitMQ
7 11 (5.95%) React
8 10 (5.41%) Keycloak
9 8 (4.32%) RESTful
10 7 (3.78%) Quarkus
11 6 (3.24%) .NET
11 6 (3.24%) JSON
11 6 (3.24%) Middleware
12 5 (2.70%) OpenTelemetry
13 4 (2.16%) Hibernate
13 4 (2.16%) Vue
13 4 (2.16%) YAML
14 3 (1.62%) Node.js
Miscellaneous
1 30 (16.22%) Cloud Native
2 16 (8.65%) Distributed Systems
3 8 (4.32%) Virtual Team
4 7 (3.78%) Hybrid Cloud
5 6 (3.24%) Enterprise Software
6 5 (2.70%) Onboarding
7 4 (2.16%) PKI
8 3 (1.62%) Algorithms
8 3 (1.62%) Data Structures
8 3 (1.62%) Management Information System
9 2 (1.08%) Distributed Architecture
9 2 (1.08%) Product Ownership
9 2 (1.08%) Security Posture
9 2 (1.08%) TM Forum
10 1 (0.54%) Analytical Mindset
10 1 (0.54%) Chip and PIN
10 1 (0.54%) EMV
10 1 (0.54%) Mobile App
10 1 (0.54%) Private Cloud
10 1 (0.54%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 63 (34.05%) Linux
2 16 (8.65%) Windows
3 13 (7.03%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 5 (2.70%) Ubuntu
4 5 (2.70%) Windows Server
5 4 (2.16%) Unix
6 3 (1.62%) CentOS
7 2 (1.08%) VMS
8 1 (0.54%) Windows Server 2016
Processes & Methodologies
1 136 (73.51%) CI/CD
2 87 (47.03%) DevOps
3 81 (43.78%) Containerisation
4 58 (31.35%) Agile
4 58 (31.35%) Infrastructure as Code
5 51 (27.57%) Observability
6 40 (21.62%) Microservices
7 38 (20.54%) Platform Engineering
7 38 (20.54%) Site Reliability Engineering
8 33 (17.84%) Problem-Solving
9 28 (15.14%) DevSecOps
10 27 (14.59%) Software Engineering
11 22 (11.89%) Test Automation
12 21 (11.35%) High Availability
13 19 (10.27%) Scrum
14 17 (9.19%) GitOps
15 15 (8.11%) Infrastructure Engineering
16 13 (7.03%) Analytics
16 13 (7.03%) Continuous Integration
16 13 (7.03%) Software Testing
Programming Languages
1 89 (48.11%) Python
2 58 (31.35%) Bash
3 54 (29.19%) Java
4 25 (13.51%) PowerShell
5 19 (10.27%) Go
6 17 (9.19%) SQL
7 11 (5.95%) JavaScript
8 8 (4.32%) Bicep
9 7 (3.78%) C#
10 4 (2.16%) Shell Script
11 3 (1.62%) TypeScript
12 2 (1.08%) C
12 2 (1.08%) C++
12 2 (1.08%) Perl
12 2 (1.08%) PHP
12 2 (1.08%) R
12 2 (1.08%) Rust
13 1 (0.54%) Korn
13 1 (0.54%) Kotlin
Qualifications
1 101 (54.59%) Security Cleared
2 82 (44.32%) SC Cleared
3 15 (8.11%) Degree
4 13 (7.03%) DV Cleared
5 10 (5.41%) Computer Science Degree
6 9 (4.86%) OCP
6 9 (4.86%) Oracle Certification
6 9 (4.86%) RHCE
7 6 (3.24%) AWS Certification
8 3 (1.62%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
8 3 (1.62%) Azure Certification
8 3 (1.62%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
9 2 (1.08%) BPSS Clearance
9 2 (1.08%) RHCSA
10 1 (0.54%) Cisco Certification
10 1 (0.54%) JNCIP
10 1 (0.54%) Microsoft Certification
10 1 (0.54%) Network+ Certification
10 1 (0.54%) PMI Certification
10 1 (0.54%) PMP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 13 (7.03%) QA
2 7 (3.78%) NCSC
3 6 (3.24%) PCI DSS
4 4 (2.16%) GDPR
5 3 (1.62%) Def Stans
5 3 (1.62%) JSP 440
6 2 (1.08%) GRC
7 1 (0.54%) ISO 20022
7 1 (0.54%) ISO 8583
7 1 (0.54%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 1 (0.54%) NIST
System Software
1 69 (37.30%) Docker
2 22 (11.89%) VMware Infrastructure
3 15 (8.11%) vSphere
4 8 (4.32%) Active Directory
5 6 (3.24%) VMware NSX
6 4 (2.16%) Hyper-V
7 2 (1.08%) KVM
8 1 (0.54%) Citrix Hypervisor
8 1 (0.54%) NDS
8 1 (0.54%) NetIQ eDirectory
8 1 (0.54%) Virtual Machines
Systems Management
1 70 (37.84%) Terraform
2 59 (31.89%) Grafana
3 56 (30.27%) Ansible
4 52 (28.11%) Prometheus
5 33 (17.84%) Argo
6 11 (5.95%) Kustomize
7 10 (5.41%) Istio
8 9 (4.86%) Puppet
9 8 (4.32%) linkerd
9 8 (4.32%) Progress Chef
10 7 (3.78%) Rancher
10 7 (3.78%) Sysdig
10 7 (3.78%) vCenter Server
11 4 (2.16%) Nessus
11 4 (2.16%) Podman
12 2 (1.08%) logstash
12 2 (1.08%) Packer
12 2 (1.08%) Single Sign-On
13 1 (0.54%) Fluentd
13 1 (0.54%) Salt
Vendors
1 45 (24.32%) Red Hat
2 37 (20.00%) VMware
3 19 (10.27%) Splunk
4 10 (5.41%) Microsoft
5 6 (3.24%) Atlassian
5 6 (3.24%) Google
5 6 (3.24%) Pure Storage
6 4 (2.16%) AppDynamics
6 4 (2.16%) Dynatrace
6 4 (2.16%) Oracle
6 4 (2.16%) Tenable
7 3 (1.62%) Ab Initio
7 3 (1.62%) Teradata
8 2 (1.08%) Fortinet
8 2 (1.08%) OpenAI
9 1 (0.54%) Arista
9 1 (0.54%) Dell
9 1 (0.54%) Mavenir
9 1 (0.54%) OpenText
9 1 (0.54%) Virgin Media