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 7 December 2025, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
7 Dec 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 57 56 59
Rank change year-on-year -1 +3 +4
Contract jobs citing Kubernetes 164 148 178
As % of all contract jobs in the South East 3.87% 3.74% 3.41%
As % of the Systems Management category 27.33% 27.56% 25.25%
Number of daily rates quoted 119 104 135
10th Percentile £362 £401 £425
25th Percentile £414 £450 £500
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £533 £570
Median % change year-on-year -6.10% -6.58% +1.11%
75th Percentile £547 £638 £625
90th Percentile £620 £675 £700
England median daily rate £525 £600 £580
% change year-on-year -12.50% +3.45% -7.20%
Number of hourly rates quoted 7 0 5
10th Percentile £40.00 - £68.19
25th Percentile £43.13 - -
Median hourly rate £55.00 - £76.53
75th Percentile £83.00 - -
90th Percentile £97.00 - -
England median hourly rate £67.00 £51.84 £62.50
% change year-on-year +29.24% -17.06% -10.71%

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 600 537 705
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the South East 14.14% 13.56% 13.49%
Number of daily rates quoted 407 396 475
10th Percentile £255 £262 £205
25th Percentile £371 £380 £396
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £485 £500 £530
Median % change year-on-year -3.00% -5.66% +0.95%
75th Percentile £573 £613 £620
90th Percentile £629 £675 £688
England median daily rate £513 £531 £550
% change year-on-year -3.39% -3.55% -6.38%
Number of hourly rates quoted 22 7 32
10th Percentile £18.87 £16.78 £24.00
25th Percentile £19.00 £21.11 £30.00
Median hourly rate £36.39 £34.00 £49.07
Median % change year-on-year +7.01% -30.70% -7.22%
75th Percentile £55.00 £37.37 £68.97
90th Percentile £85.70 £44.00 £76.53
England median hourly rate £39.50 £32.50 £46.18
% change year-on-year +21.54% -29.62% +34.83%

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 7 December 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 7 December 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 7 December 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 71 £500 -13.04% 70
Thames Valley -21 70 £500 -3.85% 176
Berkshire -8 67 £500 -1.23% 115
Surrey +1 9 £419 -35.58% 31
East Sussex +5 4 £565 +22.83% 16
Middlesex - 4 £594 - 2
West Sussex -19 3 £273 -47.60% 24
Oxfordshire -13 2 £525 +5.00% 31
Kent - 2 £325 - 36
Buckinghamshire -9 1 £650 +1.96% 32
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 (3.66%) Confluence
2 4 (2.44%) Apache Spark
3 3 (1.83%) Apache
4 1 (0.61%) Apache Airflow
4 1 (0.61%) CMS
4 1 (0.61%) Drupal
4 1 (0.61%) Jupyter
4 1 (0.61%) Red Hat Fuse
4 1 (0.61%) SAS
4 1 (0.61%) WordPress
Applications
1 1 (0.61%) Microsoft Excel
1 1 (0.61%) Microsoft Office
Cloud Services
1 79 (48.17%) AWS
2 74 (45.12%) Azure
3 52 (31.71%) OpenShift
4 44 (26.83%) GitHub
5 35 (21.34%) GCP
6 21 (12.80%) GitHub Actions
7 15 (9.15%) Azure AKS
8 13 (7.93%) Amazon EKS
8 13 (7.93%) Azure DevOps
9 12 (7.32%) IaaS
10 9 (5.49%) Amazon S3
10 9 (5.49%) AWS CloudFormation
10 9 (5.49%) Serverless
11 8 (4.88%) Amazon ECR
11 8 (4.88%) Cloud Computing
11 8 (4.88%) Datadog
12 7 (4.27%) PaaS
13 6 (3.66%) Entra ID
14 5 (3.05%) Amazon EC2
14 5 (3.05%) AWS Lambda
Communications & Networking
1 14 (8.54%) DNS
2 12 (7.32%) Firewall
3 9 (5.49%) TCP/IP
4 6 (3.66%) DHCP
5 5 (3.05%) Kerberos
6 3 (1.83%) HTTP
6 3 (1.83%) Network Security
6 3 (1.83%) SSL
6 3 (1.83%) VPN
7 2 (1.22%) MQTT
8 1 (0.61%) BGP
8 1 (0.61%) Ethernet VPN
8 1 (0.61%) HTTPS
8 1 (0.61%) Internet
8 1 (0.61%) MPLS
8 1 (0.61%) SSH
Database & Business Intelligence
1 32 (19.51%) PostgreSQL
2 26 (15.85%) NoSQL
3 17 (10.37%) MongoDB
4 9 (5.49%) Redis
5 8 (4.88%) HBase
6 7 (4.27%) DynamoDB
7 6 (3.66%) Couchbase
8 5 (3.05%) Apache Cassandra
8 5 (3.05%) Azure SQL Database
8 5 (3.05%) Data Lake
9 3 (1.83%) Big Data
10 2 (1.22%) BigQuery
10 2 (1.22%) Elasticsearch
10 2 (1.22%) Relational Database
10 2 (1.22%) SQL Server
11 1 (0.61%) Amazon Aurora
11 1 (0.61%) Amazon RDS
11 1 (0.61%) Delta Lake
11 1 (0.61%) MySQL
11 1 (0.61%) Parquet
Development Applications
1 55 (33.54%) Jenkins
2 32 (19.51%) Git
3 30 (18.29%) GitLab
4 16 (9.76%) Cucumber
5 15 (9.15%) Artifactory
6 13 (7.93%) JUnit
7 12 (7.32%) Gradle
7 12 (7.32%) Sonatype Nexus
8 11 (6.71%) JIRA
9 7 (4.27%) Maven
10 6 (3.66%) JMeter
11 3 (1.83%) Bitbucket
11 3 (1.83%) MLflow
11 3 (1.83%) SonarQube
12 2 (1.22%) Cypress.io
12 2 (1.22%) Gatling
13 1 (0.61%) LoadRunner
13 1 (0.61%) Mocha
13 1 (0.61%) Selenium
13 1 (0.61%) Visual Studio Code
General
1 51 (31.10%) Social Skills
2 17 (10.37%) Public Sector
3 16 (9.76%) Analytical Skills
4 11 (6.71%) Finance
5 5 (3.05%) Aerospace
6 3 (1.83%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 2 (1.22%) Banking
7 2 (1.22%) Billing
7 2 (1.22%) Legal
7 2 (1.22%) Telecoms
8 1 (0.61%) Documentation Skills
Job Titles
1 35 (21.34%) Developer
2 28 (17.07%) DevOps Engineer
3 27 (16.46%) Senior
4 25 (15.24%) Architect
4 25 (15.24%) Java Developer
5 18 (10.98%) Platform Engineer
6 15 (9.15%) Site Reliability Engineer
7 14 (8.54%) Site Engineer
8 13 (7.93%) Senior Developer
9 9 (5.49%) Infrastructure Engineer
9 9 (5.49%) Security Architect
10 8 (4.88%) AWS DevOps
10 8 (4.88%) Azure Engineer
10 8 (4.88%) Senior Java Developer
11 6 (3.66%) AWS Developer
11 6 (3.66%) Solutions Architect
12 5 (3.05%) Artificial Intelligence Architect
12 5 (3.05%) Full-Stack Developer
12 5 (3.05%) Full-Stack Java Developer
12 5 (3.05%) Java Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 31 (18.90%) Kafka
2 23 (14.02%) Spring
2 23 (14.02%) Spring Boot
3 17 (10.37%) Elastic Stack
4 15 (9.15%) REST
5 12 (7.32%) React
6 11 (6.71%) RabbitMQ
7 10 (6.10%) PyTorch
7 10 (6.10%) TensorFlow
8 9 (5.49%) Middleware
9 8 (4.88%) Keycloak
9 8 (4.88%) Loki
9 8 (4.88%) RESTful
9 8 (4.88%) scikit-learn
10 7 (4.27%) AngularJS
10 7 (4.27%) YAML
11 5 (3.05%) ADO
11 5 (3.05%) JSON
12 4 (2.44%) .NET
12 4 (2.44%) Hibernate
Miscellaneous
1 24 (14.63%) Cloud Native
2 13 (7.93%) Distributed Systems
3 11 (6.71%) Private Cloud
4 8 (4.88%) Virtual Team
5 6 (3.66%) Hybrid Cloud
6 5 (3.05%) Security Posture
7 4 (2.44%) Algorithms
7 4 (2.44%) PKI
8 3 (1.83%) Cloud Security Posture
8 3 (1.83%) Enterprise Software
8 3 (1.83%) Product Ownership
8 3 (1.83%) Public Cloud
9 2 (1.22%) Legacy Systems
9 2 (1.22%) Onboarding
9 2 (1.22%) Self-Motivation
9 2 (1.22%) TM Forum
10 1 (0.61%) Data Centre
10 1 (0.61%) Data Structures
10 1 (0.61%) Distributed Architecture
10 1 (0.61%) IoT
Operating Systems
1 61 (37.20%) Linux
2 11 (6.71%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
2 11 (6.71%) Windows
3 5 (3.05%) Ubuntu
4 3 (1.83%) CentOS
4 3 (1.83%) Unix
4 3 (1.83%) VMS
5 2 (1.22%) Windows Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 125 (76.22%) CI/CD
2 77 (46.95%) Containerisation
3 74 (45.12%) DevOps
4 48 (29.27%) Infrastructure as Code
5 45 (27.44%) Agile
6 40 (24.39%) Problem-Solving
7 33 (20.12%) Microservices
7 33 (20.12%) Platform Engineering
8 31 (18.90%) Observability
9 28 (17.07%) Site Reliability Engineering
10 24 (14.63%) High Availability
11 21 (12.80%) DevSecOps
12 20 (12.20%) Migration
12 20 (12.20%) Software Engineering
13 19 (11.59%) Test Automation
14 17 (10.37%) Configuration Management
15 14 (8.54%) Continuous Integration
15 14 (8.54%) Deployment Automation
15 14 (8.54%) Machine Learning
16 12 (7.32%) Infrastructure Engineering
Programming Languages
1 81 (49.39%) Python
2 54 (32.93%) Java
3 38 (23.17%) Bash
4 31 (18.90%) SQL
5 23 (14.02%) PowerShell
6 17 (10.37%) JavaScript
7 15 (9.15%) Go
8 13 (7.93%) C#
9 8 (4.88%) R
10 6 (3.66%) Bicep
11 5 (3.05%) C++
12 4 (2.44%) C
12 4 (2.44%) Shell Script
13 3 (1.83%) TypeScript
14 2 (1.22%) Perl
14 2 (1.22%) PHP
15 1 (0.61%) Groovy
15 1 (0.61%) Rust
Qualifications
1 81 (49.39%) Security Cleared
2 68 (41.46%) SC Cleared
3 9 (5.49%) OCP
3 9 (5.49%) Oracle Certification
4 8 (4.88%) AWS Certification
4 8 (4.88%) Degree
4 8 (4.88%) DV Cleared
5 6 (3.66%) Computer Science Degree
5 6 (3.66%) RHCE
6 5 (3.05%) Azure Certification
7 4 (2.44%) Cisco Certification
8 3 (1.83%) (ISC)2 CCSP
8 3 (1.83%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
8 3 (1.83%) CCSP
8 3 (1.83%) CISSP
8 3 (1.83%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
9 2 (1.22%) RHCSA
10 1 (0.61%) BPSS Clearance
10 1 (0.61%) JNCIP
10 1 (0.61%) Network+ Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 9 (5.49%) GDPR
1 9 (5.49%) ISO/IEC 27001
2 8 (4.88%) QA
3 7 (4.27%) NIST
4 5 (3.05%) EU AI Act
4 5 (3.05%) PCI DSS
5 3 (1.83%) Def Stans
5 3 (1.83%) NCSC
5 3 (1.83%) PSD2
6 1 (0.61%) Government Security Classifications
6 1 (0.61%) HIPAA
6 1 (0.61%) JSP 440
System Software
1 66 (40.24%) Docker
2 22 (13.41%) VMware Infrastructure
3 14 (8.54%) vSphere
4 7 (4.27%) Active Directory
5 6 (3.66%) VMware NSX
6 4 (2.44%) Hyper-V
7 2 (1.22%) KVM
8 1 (0.61%) NDS
8 1 (0.61%) NetIQ eDirectory
8 1 (0.61%) Virtual Machines
Systems Management
1 61 (37.20%) Ansible
2 57 (34.76%) Terraform
3 41 (25.00%) Grafana
4 34 (20.73%) Prometheus
5 19 (11.59%) Argo
6 8 (4.88%) Kustomize
6 8 (4.88%) Progress Chef
7 7 (4.27%) Puppet
7 7 (4.27%) Sysdig
8 6 (3.66%) vCenter Server
9 5 (3.05%) SCOM
10 4 (2.44%) Packer
10 4 (2.44%) Podman
10 4 (2.44%) Rsyslog
11 3 (1.83%) Cilium
11 3 (1.83%) Istio
12 2 (1.22%) Kubeflow
12 2 (1.22%) linkerd
12 2 (1.22%) logstash
12 2 (1.22%) Single Sign-On
Vendors
1 41 (25.00%) Red Hat
2 32 (19.51%) VMware
3 16 (9.76%) Microsoft
4 12 (7.32%) Splunk
5 6 (3.66%) Pure Storage
6 5 (3.05%) Atlassian
6 5 (3.05%) Google
7 3 (1.83%) NVIDIA
7 3 (1.83%) Oracle
8 1 (0.61%) Cisco
8 1 (0.61%) Cloudera
8 1 (0.61%) NetIQ
8 1 (0.61%) OpenText
8 1 (0.61%) Salesforce
8 1 (0.61%) ServiceNow
8 1 (0.61%) Tenable
8 1 (0.61%) Virgin Media
8 1 (0.61%) Zscaler