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

6 months to
19 Dec 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 49 58 66
Rank change year-on-year +9 +8 +2
Contract jobs citing Kubernetes 179 133 161
As % of all contract jobs in the South East 4.10% 3.54% 3.20%
As % of the Systems Management category 28.59% 26.76% 23.27%
Number of daily rates quoted 130 89 122
10th Percentile £363 £401 £414
25th Percentile £417 £450 £500
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £550 £563
Median % change year-on-year -9.09% -2.22% +2.27%
75th Percentile £556 £638 £625
90th Percentile £638 £675 £700
England median daily rate £525 £600 £575
% change year-on-year -12.50% +4.35% -8.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 8 0 5
10th Percentile £40.00 - £68.19
25th Percentile £44.69 - -
Median hourly rate £65.00 - £76.53
75th Percentile £83.00 - -
90th Percentile £94.25 - -
England median hourly rate £67.00 £57.50 £62.25
% change year-on-year +16.52% -7.63% -7.43%

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 626 497 692
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the South East 14.33% 13.24% 13.75%
Number of daily rates quoted 438 368 472
10th Percentile £255 £260 £205
25th Percentile £387 £375 £350
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £492 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year -1.60% -4.76% -
75th Percentile £569 £608 £615
90th Percentile £638 £675 £688
England median daily rate £512 £526 £550
% change year-on-year -2.71% -4.32% -6.38%
Number of hourly rates quoted 23 5 33
10th Percentile £18.87 £15.19 £24.00
25th Percentile £19.00 £19.97 £30.00
Median hourly rate £40.00 £34.00 £48.40
Median % change year-on-year +17.65% -29.75% +14.87%
75th Percentile £67.50 £36.75 £68.63
90th Percentile £85.40 £37.50 £76.53
England median hourly rate £47.50 £30.50 £46.18
% change year-on-year +55.74% -33.95% +31.94%

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 19 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 19 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 19 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 +12 80 £500 -13.04% 26
Thames Valley -17 74 £500 -4.76% 24
Berkshire -4 69 £500 -2.91% 13
Surrey +11 11 £425 -15.00% 12
East Sussex +8 4 £565 +22.83% 3
Middlesex - 4 £594 - 13
Oxfordshire -13 3 £525 +5.00% 6
West Sussex -15 3 £273 -47.60% 1
Buckinghamshire -5 2 £613 -3.92% 5
Kent - 2 £325 - 9
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 (3.35%) Confluence
2 4 (2.23%) Apache
2 4 (2.23%) Apache Spark
3 3 (1.68%) IIS
4 1 (0.56%) Apache Airflow
4 1 (0.56%) CMS
4 1 (0.56%) Drupal
4 1 (0.56%) Jupyter
4 1 (0.56%) Red Hat Fuse
4 1 (0.56%) SAS
4 1 (0.56%) WordPress
Applications
1 1 (0.56%) Microsoft Excel
1 1 (0.56%) Microsoft Office
Cloud Services
1 89 (49.72%) AWS
2 86 (48.04%) Azure
3 55 (30.73%) OpenShift
4 48 (26.82%) GitHub
5 40 (22.35%) GCP
6 26 (14.53%) GitHub Actions
7 16 (8.94%) Azure AKS
8 15 (8.38%) Azure DevOps
9 13 (7.26%) Amazon EKS
10 12 (6.70%) IaaS
11 9 (5.03%) Amazon S3
11 9 (5.03%) AWS CloudFormation
11 9 (5.03%) Serverless
12 8 (4.47%) Amazon ECR
12 8 (4.47%) Cloud Computing
12 8 (4.47%) Datadog
13 7 (3.91%) PaaS
14 6 (3.35%) Entra ID
15 5 (2.79%) AWS Lambda
15 5 (2.79%) Azure Monitor
Communications & Networking
1 14 (7.82%) DNS
2 12 (6.70%) Firewall
3 9 (5.03%) TCP/IP
4 6 (3.35%) DHCP
5 5 (2.79%) Kerberos
6 3 (1.68%) HTTP
6 3 (1.68%) Network Security
6 3 (1.68%) SSL
7 2 (1.12%) MQTT
7 2 (1.12%) VPN
8 1 (0.56%) HTTPS
8 1 (0.56%) Internet
8 1 (0.56%) SSH
Database & Business Intelligence
1 35 (19.55%) PostgreSQL
2 24 (13.41%) NoSQL
3 15 (8.38%) MongoDB
4 12 (6.70%) Redis
5 8 (4.47%) HBase
6 7 (3.91%) DynamoDB
7 6 (3.35%) Couchbase
8 5 (2.79%) Apache Cassandra
8 5 (2.79%) Azure SQL Database
8 5 (2.79%) Data Lake
9 4 (2.23%) Relational Database
9 4 (2.23%) SQL Server
10 3 (1.68%) Big Data
11 2 (1.12%) BigQuery
11 2 (1.12%) Elasticsearch
12 1 (0.56%) Amazon Aurora
12 1 (0.56%) Amazon RDS
12 1 (0.56%) Delta Lake
12 1 (0.56%) Hadoop
12 1 (0.56%) Parquet
Development Applications
1 57 (31.84%) Jenkins
2 35 (19.55%) GitLab
3 34 (18.99%) Git
4 16 (8.94%) Artifactory
4 16 (8.94%) Cucumber
5 13 (7.26%) JUnit
6 12 (6.70%) Gradle
6 12 (6.70%) Sonatype Nexus
7 10 (5.59%) JIRA
8 7 (3.91%) Maven
9 6 (3.35%) JMeter
10 3 (1.68%) Bitbucket
10 3 (1.68%) MLflow
10 3 (1.68%) SonarQube
11 2 (1.12%) Cypress.io
11 2 (1.12%) Gatling
12 1 (0.56%) LoadRunner
12 1 (0.56%) Mocha
12 1 (0.56%) Selenium
12 1 (0.56%) Visual Studio Code
General
1 53 (29.61%) Social Skills
2 16 (8.94%) Analytical Skills
2 16 (8.94%) Public Sector
3 11 (6.15%) Finance
4 5 (2.79%) Aerospace
5 4 (2.23%) Inclusion and Diversity
6 2 (1.12%) Banking
6 2 (1.12%) Billing
6 2 (1.12%) Telecoms
7 1 (0.56%) Documentation Skills
7 1 (0.56%) Legal
Job Titles
1 34 (18.99%) Developer
2 33 (18.44%) DevOps Engineer
3 27 (15.08%) Architect
4 26 (14.53%) Senior
5 25 (13.97%) Java Developer
6 21 (11.73%) Platform Engineer
7 15 (8.38%) Site Reliability Engineer
8 14 (7.82%) Site Engineer
9 12 (6.70%) Senior Developer
10 10 (5.59%) Infrastructure Engineer
11 9 (5.03%) AWS DevOps
11 9 (5.03%) Azure Engineer
11 9 (5.03%) Security Architect
12 8 (4.47%) Senior Java Developer
13 7 (3.91%) Solutions Architect
14 6 (3.35%) AWS Developer
14 6 (3.35%) Lead
14 6 (3.35%) Software Engineer
15 5 (2.79%) AWS Engineer
15 5 (2.79%) Full-Stack Java Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 34 (18.99%) Kafka
2 23 (12.85%) Spring
2 23 (12.85%) Spring Boot
3 18 (10.06%) REST
4 16 (8.94%) Elastic Stack
5 14 (7.82%) React
6 11 (6.15%) Keycloak
6 11 (6.15%) RabbitMQ
7 10 (5.59%) AngularJS
7 10 (5.59%) PyTorch
7 10 (5.59%) TensorFlow
8 9 (5.03%) Loki
9 8 (4.47%) Middleware
9 8 (4.47%) RESTful
9 8 (4.47%) scikit-learn
10 6 (3.35%) ADO
11 5 (2.79%) .NET
11 5 (2.79%) YAML
12 4 (2.23%) Hibernate
12 4 (2.23%) JSON
Miscellaneous
1 25 (13.97%) Cloud Native
2 13 (7.26%) Distributed Systems
3 10 (5.59%) Private Cloud
4 8 (4.47%) Virtual Team
5 7 (3.91%) Hybrid Cloud
6 5 (2.79%) Security Posture
7 4 (2.23%) Algorithms
7 4 (2.23%) PKI
8 3 (1.68%) Cloud Security Posture
8 3 (1.68%) Enterprise Software
8 3 (1.68%) Product Ownership
8 3 (1.68%) Public Cloud
8 3 (1.68%) Self-Motivation
9 2 (1.12%) Legacy Systems
9 2 (1.12%) Onboarding
9 2 (1.12%) TM Forum
10 1 (0.56%) Data Centre
10 1 (0.56%) Data Structures
10 1 (0.56%) Distributed Architecture
10 1 (0.56%) IoT
Operating Systems
1 61 (34.08%) Linux
2 15 (8.38%) Windows
3 11 (6.15%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 6 (3.35%) Ubuntu
5 5 (2.79%) Windows Server
6 3 (1.68%) CentOS
6 3 (1.68%) VMS
7 2 (1.12%) Unix
8 1 (0.56%) Windows Server 2016
Processes & Methodologies
1 134 (74.86%) CI/CD
2 86 (48.04%) DevOps
3 83 (46.37%) Containerisation
4 54 (30.17%) Infrastructure as Code
5 47 (26.26%) Agile
6 40 (22.35%) Problem-Solving
7 38 (21.23%) Observability
7 38 (21.23%) Platform Engineering
8 36 (20.11%) Microservices
9 31 (17.32%) Site Reliability Engineering
10 26 (14.53%) DevSecOps
11 25 (13.97%) Software Engineering
12 24 (13.41%) High Availability
13 19 (10.61%) Migration
14 18 (10.06%) Configuration Management
14 18 (10.06%) Test Automation
15 14 (7.82%) Continuous Integration
15 14 (7.82%) Deployment Automation
15 14 (7.82%) Infrastructure Engineering
15 14 (7.82%) Machine Learning
Programming Languages
1 89 (49.72%) Python
2 56 (31.28%) Java
3 45 (25.14%) Bash
4 30 (16.76%) SQL
5 26 (14.53%) PowerShell
6 19 (10.61%) JavaScript
7 16 (8.94%) C#
8 15 (8.38%) Go
9 8 (4.47%) R
10 7 (3.91%) Bicep
11 5 (2.79%) C++
12 4 (2.23%) C
12 4 (2.23%) Shell Script
13 3 (1.68%) TypeScript
14 2 (1.12%) Perl
14 2 (1.12%) PHP
14 2 (1.12%) Rust
15 1 (0.56%) Groovy
Qualifications
1 92 (51.40%) Security Cleared
2 80 (44.69%) SC Cleared
3 9 (5.03%) Degree
3 9 (5.03%) DV Cleared
3 9 (5.03%) OCP
3 9 (5.03%) Oracle Certification
4 8 (4.47%) AWS Certification
5 7 (3.91%) Computer Science Degree
5 7 (3.91%) RHCE
6 5 (2.79%) Azure Certification
7 4 (2.23%) Cisco Certification
8 3 (1.68%) (ISC)2 CCSP
8 3 (1.68%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
8 3 (1.68%) CCSP
8 3 (1.68%) CISSP
8 3 (1.68%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
9 2 (1.12%) RHCSA
10 1 (0.56%) BPSS Clearance
10 1 (0.56%) JNCIP
10 1 (0.56%) Network+ Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 10 (5.59%) QA
2 9 (5.03%) ISO/IEC 27001
3 8 (4.47%) GDPR
4 7 (3.91%) NIST
5 6 (3.35%) NCSC
6 5 (2.79%) EU AI Act
7 4 (2.23%) PCI DSS
8 3 (1.68%) Def Stans
8 3 (1.68%) PSD2
9 1 (0.56%) Government Security Classifications
9 1 (0.56%) JSP 440
System Software
1 70 (39.11%) Docker
2 23 (12.85%) VMware Infrastructure
3 15 (8.38%) vSphere
4 7 (3.91%) Active Directory
5 6 (3.35%) VMware NSX
6 4 (2.23%) Hyper-V
7 2 (1.12%) KVM
8 1 (0.56%) NDS
8 1 (0.56%) NetIQ eDirectory
8 1 (0.56%) Virtual Machines
Systems Management
1 70 (39.11%) Ansible
2 69 (38.55%) Terraform
3 47 (26.26%) Grafana
4 40 (22.35%) Prometheus
5 24 (13.41%) Argo
6 8 (4.47%) Kustomize
6 8 (4.47%) Progress Chef
6 8 (4.47%) Puppet
7 7 (3.91%) Istio
7 7 (3.91%) Sysdig
7 7 (3.91%) vCenter Server
8 6 (3.35%) linkerd
9 5 (2.79%) SCOM
10 4 (2.23%) Podman
10 4 (2.23%) Rsyslog
11 3 (1.68%) Cilium
11 3 (1.68%) Packer
12 2 (1.12%) Kibana
12 2 (1.12%) Kubeflow
12 2 (1.12%) Single Sign-On
Vendors
1 46 (25.70%) Red Hat
2 37 (20.67%) VMware
3 16 (8.94%) Microsoft
4 15 (8.38%) Splunk
5 6 (3.35%) Google
5 6 (3.35%) Pure Storage
6 5 (2.79%) Atlassian
7 3 (1.68%) NVIDIA
7 3 (1.68%) Oracle
8 1 (0.56%) Cloudera
8 1 (0.56%) NetIQ
8 1 (0.56%) OpenText
8 1 (0.56%) Salesforce
8 1 (0.56%) ServiceNow
8 1 (0.56%) Tenable
8 1 (0.56%) Virgin Media
8 1 (0.56%) Zscaler