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 23 November 2025, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
23 Nov 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 48 50 57
Rank change year-on-year +2 +7 +1
Contract jobs citing Kubernetes 160 151 188
As % of all contract jobs in the South East 3.93% 3.62% 3.53%
As % of the Systems Management category 27.49% 25.51% 25.79%
Number of daily rates quoted 111 110 145
10th Percentile £363 £400 £425
25th Percentile £413 £450 £500
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £475 £533 £575
Median % change year-on-year -10.80% -7.39% +3.37%
75th Percentile £542 £636 £625
90th Percentile £619 £675 £700
England median daily rate £530 £586 £597
% change year-on-year -9.56% -1.84% -4.48%
Number of hourly rates quoted 5 0 5
10th Percentile £46.00 - £68.19
25th Percentile £55.00 - -
Median hourly rate £75.00 - £76.53
75th Percentile £86.00 - -
90th Percentile £102.50 - -
England median hourly rate £67.00 £60.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year +11.67% -7.69% +0.78%

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 582 592 729
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the South East 14.30% 14.20% 13.70%
Number of daily rates quoted 387 439 493
10th Percentile £258 £267 £205
25th Percentile £375 £395 £400
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £485 £500 £538
Median % change year-on-year -3.00% -6.98% +4.88%
75th Percentile £567 £614 £625
90th Percentile £619 £675 £688
England median daily rate £513 £525 £550
% change year-on-year -2.38% -4.55% -5.86%
Number of hourly rates quoted 19 7 30
10th Percentile £18.87 £18.15 £23.96
25th Percentile £19.00 £26.13 £30.00
Median hourly rate £25.00 £34.00 £49.07
Median % change year-on-year -26.47% -30.70% -7.22%
75th Percentile £67.50 £37.37 £69.66
90th Percentile £86.73 £44.00 £76.53
England median hourly rate £36.00 £36.83 £47.83
% change year-on-year -2.26% -22.99% +86.04%

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 23 November 2025.

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 23 November 2025.

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 23 November 2025. 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
Hampshire +22 69 £462 -19.74% 30
Thames Valley -23 69 £500 -3.85% 55
Berkshire -5 65 £500 -2.68% 26
Surrey +1 10 £425 -34.62% 9
East Sussex +5 4 £565 +22.83% 2
Oxfordshire -9 3 £469 -6.25% 24
Middlesex - 3 £615 - 1
West Sussex -19 2 £250 -51.92% 8
Kent - 2 £325 - 1
Buckinghamshire -14 1 £650 +10.64% 7
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 6 (3.75%) Confluence
2 4 (2.50%) Apache Spark
3 3 (1.88%) Apache
3 3 (1.88%) OpenStack
4 1 (0.63%) Apache Airflow
4 1 (0.63%) CMS
4 1 (0.63%) Drupal
4 1 (0.63%) Jupyter
4 1 (0.63%) nginx
4 1 (0.63%) Red Hat Fuse
4 1 (0.63%) SAS
4 1 (0.63%) WordPress
Applications
1 1 (0.63%) Microsoft Excel
1 1 (0.63%) Microsoft Office
Business Applications
1 1 (0.63%) Payment Gateway
Cloud Services
1 73 (45.63%) AWS
2 72 (45.00%) Azure
3 49 (30.63%) OpenShift
4 44 (27.50%) GitHub
5 29 (18.13%) GCP
6 20 (12.50%) GitHub Actions
7 16 (10.00%) Azure AKS
8 15 (9.38%) Azure DevOps
9 14 (8.75%) IaaS
10 12 (7.50%) Amazon S3
11 10 (6.25%) Amazon EKS
12 9 (5.63%) AWS CloudFormation
12 9 (5.63%) PaaS
12 9 (5.63%) Serverless
13 8 (5.00%) Amazon ECR
13 8 (5.00%) Cloud Computing
13 8 (5.00%) Datadog
14 7 (4.38%) AWS Lambda
15 6 (3.75%) Azure Data Factory
15 6 (3.75%) Azure Storage
Communications & Networking
1 13 (8.13%) DNS
2 12 (7.50%) Firewall
3 8 (5.00%) TCP/IP
4 6 (3.75%) DHCP
5 5 (3.13%) Kerberos
6 3 (1.88%) Network Security
6 3 (1.88%) SSL
6 3 (1.88%) VPN
7 2 (1.25%) HTTP
8 1 (0.63%) BGP
8 1 (0.63%) Ethernet VPN
8 1 (0.63%) HTTPS
8 1 (0.63%) MPLS
8 1 (0.63%) MQTT
8 1 (0.63%) SSH
Database & Business Intelligence
1 34 (21.25%) PostgreSQL
2 26 (16.25%) NoSQL
3 17 (10.63%) MongoDB
4 10 (6.25%) Redis
5 7 (4.38%) Azure SQL Database
5 7 (4.38%) DynamoDB
5 7 (4.38%) HBase
6 6 (3.75%) Couchbase
7 5 (3.13%) Apache Cassandra
7 5 (3.13%) Data Lake
8 4 (2.50%) Relational Database
9 3 (1.88%) Big Data
9 3 (1.88%) MySQL
10 2 (1.25%) Amazon RDS
10 2 (1.25%) Elasticsearch
10 2 (1.25%) SQL Server
11 1 (0.63%) Data Warehouse
11 1 (0.63%) GIS
11 1 (0.63%) Hadoop
11 1 (0.63%) Oracle Database
Development Applications
1 50 (31.25%) Jenkins
2 27 (16.88%) GitLab
3 22 (13.75%) Git
4 15 (9.38%) Artifactory
4 15 (9.38%) Cucumber
5 12 (7.50%) JUnit
6 11 (6.88%) Gradle
6 11 (6.88%) JIRA
6 11 (6.88%) Sonatype Nexus
7 7 (4.38%) Maven
8 6 (3.75%) JMeter
9 4 (2.50%) Bitbucket
10 3 (1.88%) MLflow
10 3 (1.88%) SonarQube
11 2 (1.25%) Cypress.io
11 2 (1.25%) Gatling
12 1 (0.63%) LoadRunner
12 1 (0.63%) Mocha
12 1 (0.63%) PyCharm
12 1 (0.63%) Selenium
General
1 58 (36.25%) Social Skills
2 16 (10.00%) Analytical Skills
3 12 (7.50%) Finance
3 12 (7.50%) Public Sector
4 5 (3.13%) Aerospace
4 5 (3.13%) Telecoms
5 3 (1.88%) Banking
5 3 (1.88%) Inclusion and Diversity
6 2 (1.25%) Legal
7 1 (0.63%) Documentation Skills
7 1 (0.63%) Presentation Skills
7 1 (0.63%) Retail
Job Titles
1 36 (22.50%) Developer
2 27 (16.88%) Senior
3 26 (16.25%) DevOps Engineer
4 23 (14.38%) Java Developer
5 19 (11.88%) Architect
6 18 (11.25%) Platform Engineer
7 15 (9.38%) Site Reliability Engineer
8 14 (8.75%) Senior Developer
8 14 (8.75%) Site Engineer
9 9 (5.63%) AWS DevOps
9 9 (5.63%) Azure Engineer
9 9 (5.63%) Infrastructure Engineer
9 9 (5.63%) Security Architect
10 7 (4.38%) Cloud Engineer
10 7 (4.38%) Senior Java Developer
11 5 (3.13%) Artificial Intelligence Architect
11 5 (3.13%) AWS Developer
11 5 (3.13%) Azure DevOps Engineer
11 5 (3.13%) Full-Stack Developer
11 5 (3.13%) Security Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 31 (19.38%) Kafka
2 21 (13.13%) Spring
2 21 (13.13%) Spring Boot
3 17 (10.63%) Elastic Stack
3 17 (10.63%) React
4 15 (9.38%) REST
5 11 (6.88%) RabbitMQ
6 10 (6.25%) AngularJS
6 10 (6.25%) Middleware
6 10 (6.25%) PyTorch
6 10 (6.25%) TensorFlow
7 8 (5.00%) Loki
7 8 (5.00%) RESTful
7 8 (5.00%) scikit-learn
7 8 (5.00%) YAML
8 7 (4.38%) ADO
8 7 (4.38%) Keycloak
9 5 (3.13%) Node.js
10 4 (2.50%) .NET
10 4 (2.50%) Hibernate
Miscellaneous
1 18 (11.25%) Cloud Native
2 12 (7.50%) Distributed Systems
2 12 (7.50%) Private Cloud
3 8 (5.00%) Virtual Team
4 5 (3.13%) Algorithms
4 5 (3.13%) Security Posture
5 4 (2.50%) Hybrid Cloud
5 4 (2.50%) PKI
6 3 (1.88%) Cloud Security Posture
6 3 (1.88%) Enterprise Software
6 3 (1.88%) Product Ownership
6 3 (1.88%) Public Cloud
7 2 (1.25%) IoT
7 2 (1.25%) Legacy Systems
7 2 (1.25%) Self-Motivation
8 1 (0.63%) Data Centre
8 1 (0.63%) Data Structures
8 1 (0.63%) Distributed Architecture
8 1 (0.63%) Mobile App
8 1 (0.63%) Onboarding
Operating Systems
1 57 (35.63%) Linux
2 11 (6.88%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
3 10 (6.25%) Windows
4 4 (2.50%) Ubuntu
5 3 (1.88%) CentOS
5 3 (1.88%) Unix
5 3 (1.88%) VMS
6 2 (1.25%) Windows Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 128 (80.00%) CI/CD
2 76 (47.50%) DevOps
3 71 (44.38%) Containerisation
4 47 (29.38%) Infrastructure as Code
5 43 (26.88%) Agile
6 41 (25.63%) Problem-Solving
7 31 (19.38%) Observability
8 30 (18.75%) Platform Engineering
9 26 (16.25%) Site Reliability Engineering
10 24 (15.00%) High Availability
10 24 (15.00%) Microservices
11 21 (13.13%) Migration
12 19 (11.88%) DevSecOps
13 18 (11.25%) Software Engineering
14 17 (10.63%) Test Automation
15 16 (10.00%) Configuration Management
16 15 (9.38%) Open Source
17 14 (8.75%) Machine Learning
18 13 (8.13%) Immutable Infrastructure
18 13 (8.13%) Scrum
Programming Languages
1 82 (51.25%) Python
2 53 (33.13%) Java
3 40 (25.00%) Bash
4 35 (21.88%) SQL
5 22 (13.75%) PowerShell
6 21 (13.13%) JavaScript
7 15 (9.38%) Go
8 14 (8.75%) C#
9 8 (5.00%) R
10 7 (4.38%) Bicep
11 5 (3.13%) C++
12 4 (2.50%) C
13 3 (1.88%) Shell Script
13 3 (1.88%) TypeScript
14 2 (1.25%) Perl
14 2 (1.25%) PHP
14 2 (1.25%) Ruby
15 1 (0.63%) Groovy
15 1 (0.63%) Scala
Qualifications
1 71 (44.38%) Security Cleared
2 62 (38.75%) SC Cleared
3 9 (5.63%) AWS Certification
4 8 (5.00%) OCP
4 8 (5.00%) Oracle Certification
5 6 (3.75%) Azure Certification
5 6 (3.75%) Degree
6 5 (3.13%) Computer Science Degree
7 4 (2.50%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
7 4 (2.50%) Cisco Certification
7 4 (2.50%) DV Cleared
8 3 (1.88%) (ISC)2 CCSP
8 3 (1.88%) CCSP
8 3 (1.88%) CISSP
8 3 (1.88%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
9 2 (1.25%) RHCE
9 2 (1.25%) RHCSA
10 1 (0.63%) JNCIP
10 1 (0.63%) Microsoft Certification
10 1 (0.63%) Network+ Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 9 (5.63%) GDPR
1 9 (5.63%) ISO/IEC 27001
2 8 (5.00%) QA
3 7 (4.38%) NIST
4 5 (3.13%) EU AI Act
4 5 (3.13%) PCI DSS
5 3 (1.88%) Def Stans
5 3 (1.88%) PSD2
6 2 (1.25%) NCSC
7 1 (0.63%) Data Quality
7 1 (0.63%) Government Security Classifications
7 1 (0.63%) HIPAA
7 1 (0.63%) JSP 440
System Software
1 61 (38.13%) Docker
2 21 (13.13%) VMware Infrastructure
3 17 (10.63%) vSphere
4 7 (4.38%) Active Directory
5 6 (3.75%) VMware NSX
6 4 (2.50%) Hyper-V
7 2 (1.25%) KVM
8 1 (0.63%) NDS
8 1 (0.63%) NetIQ eDirectory
8 1 (0.63%) Virtual Machines
Systems Management
1 58 (36.25%) Ansible
2 51 (31.88%) Terraform
3 38 (23.75%) Grafana
4 31 (19.38%) Prometheus
5 17 (10.63%) Argo
6 8 (5.00%) Kustomize
7 7 (4.38%) Sysdig
8 6 (3.75%) Packer
8 6 (3.75%) Progress Chef
8 6 (3.75%) vCenter Server
9 5 (3.13%) SCOM
10 4 (2.50%) Rsyslog
11 3 (1.88%) Cilium
11 3 (1.88%) Puppet
12 2 (1.25%) Istio
12 2 (1.25%) Kibana
12 2 (1.25%) Kubeflow
12 2 (1.25%) logstash
12 2 (1.25%) Single Sign-On
13 1 (0.63%) Salt
Vendors
1 36 (22.50%) Red Hat
2 30 (18.75%) VMware
3 17 (10.63%) Microsoft
4 11 (6.88%) Splunk
5 7 (4.38%) Atlassian
6 6 (3.75%) Pure Storage
7 4 (2.50%) Google
7 4 (2.50%) Oracle
8 3 (1.88%) NVIDIA
9 1 (0.63%) Cisco
9 1 (0.63%) Cloudera
9 1 (0.63%) Dynatrace
9 1 (0.63%) NetIQ
9 1 (0.63%) OpenText
9 1 (0.63%) ServiceNow
9 1 (0.63%) Zscaler