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 21 June 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
21 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 75 54 61
Rank change year-on-year -21 +7 -3
Contract jobs citing Kubernetes 176 109 179
As % of all contract jobs in the South East 2.85% 3.59% 3.09%
As % of the Systems Management category 25.81% 25.89% 22.86%
Number of daily rates quoted 127 69 128
10th Percentile £354 £334 £413
25th Percentile £400 £413 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £475 £550
Median % change year-on-year +5.26% -13.64% -8.33%
75th Percentile £575 £588 £625
90th Percentile £698 £612 £675
England median daily rate £527 £550 £550
% change year-on-year -4.27% - -11.29%
Number of hourly rates quoted 15 0 2
10th Percentile £60.00 - £37.70
25th Percentile £62.50 - £39.13
Median hourly rate £70.00 - £43.00
75th Percentile - - £46.63
90th Percentile - - £47.90
England median hourly rate £70.00 £80.00 £64.50
% change year-on-year -12.50% +24.03% -14.00%

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 682 421 783
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the South East 11.02% 13.86% 13.51%
Number of daily rates quoted 483 295 565
10th Percentile £306 £263 £250
25th Percentile £405 £401 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £510 £500 £500
Median % change year-on-year +2.00% - -9.09%
75th Percentile £600 £588 £608
90th Percentile £725 £650 £675
England median daily rate £513 £513 £525
% change year-on-year - -2.38% -8.70%
Number of hourly rates quoted 37 3 14
10th Percentile £16.90 £28.95 £14.00
25th Percentile £31.25 £30.39 £17.56
Median hourly rate £52.50 £32.77 £37.33
Median % change year-on-year +60.21% -12.22% -39.17%
75th Percentile £70.00 £43.89 £48.75
90th Percentile - £50.55 £52.10
England median hourly rate £60.00 £52.50 £31.25
% change year-on-year +14.29% +68.00% -43.18%

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 21 June 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
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 21 June 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 -32 73 £400 -9.09% 17
Hampshire -6 62 £550 +4.81% 25
Berkshire -26 51 £393 -13.63% 12
Surrey 0 32 £505 -7.34% 6
Buckinghamshire -23 17 £392 +26.09% 2
West Sussex -14 5 £500 +66.67% 3
Oxfordshire -27 5 £825 +71.43% 3
Middlesex -3 2 £475 - 2
East Sussex -5 1 - - 2
Home Counties - 1 - - 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 8 (4.55%) Apache Spark
2 7 (3.98%) OpenStack
3 3 (1.70%) Apache Airflow
3 3 (1.70%) Confluence
3 3 (1.70%) Palantir Foundry
4 2 (1.14%) Apache Pulsar
5 1 (0.57%) IIS
5 1 (0.57%) Microsoft Exchange
Applications
1 6 (3.41%) CPLEX
Business Applications
1 1 (0.57%) Payment Gateway
Cloud Services
1 86 (48.86%) AWS
2 85 (48.30%) Azure
3 44 (25.00%) OpenShift
4 42 (23.86%) GCP
5 22 (12.50%) Azure DevOps
6 19 (10.80%) GitHub
7 15 (8.52%) GitHub Actions
8 14 (7.95%) Serverless
9 13 (7.39%) Amazon EKS
10 12 (6.82%) Amazon CloudWatch
11 10 (5.68%) Azure AKS
11 10 (5.68%) Entra ID
12 9 (5.11%) Amazon S3
12 9 (5.11%) AWS Lambda
13 7 (3.98%) Snowflake
14 6 (3.41%) AWS CloudFormation
15 5 (2.84%) Datadog
15 5 (2.84%) Virtual Private Cloud
16 4 (2.27%) Amazon ECS
17 3 (1.70%) Power Platform
Communications & Networking
1 7 (3.98%) Firewall
2 6 (3.41%) 5G
2 6 (3.41%) Diameter Protocol
2 6 (3.41%) LTE
2 6 (3.41%) Radio Access Network
2 6 (3.41%) VoLTE
2 6 (3.41%) VoWiFi
2 6 (3.41%) Wireshark
3 4 (2.27%) MQTT
3 4 (2.27%) Network Security
3 4 (2.27%) VPN
4 3 (1.70%) DNS
4 3 (1.70%) HTTP
5 1 (0.57%) DHCP
5 1 (0.57%) HTTPS
5 1 (0.57%) iSCSI
5 1 (0.57%) Remote Desktop
5 1 (0.57%) Reverse Proxy
5 1 (0.57%) SAN
5 1 (0.57%) SNMP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 26 (14.77%) PostgreSQL
2 17 (9.66%) NoSQL
3 10 (5.68%) Big Data
3 10 (5.68%) Relational Database
4 8 (4.55%) MongoDB
5 6 (3.41%) Data Warehouse
5 6 (3.41%) DynamoDB
5 6 (3.41%) Elasticsearch
6 4 (2.27%) Redis
7 3 (1.70%) DocumentDB
8 2 (1.14%) Amazon Aurora
8 2 (1.14%) Amazon RDS
8 2 (1.14%) SQL Server
9 1 (0.57%) Amazon Athena
9 1 (0.57%) Amazon QuickSight
9 1 (0.57%) Amazon Redshift
9 1 (0.57%) Hadoop
9 1 (0.57%) MySQL
Development Applications
1 26 (14.77%) SonarQube
2 24 (13.64%) Git
3 23 (13.07%) GitLab
4 18 (10.23%) Jenkins
5 6 (3.41%) MLflow
6 5 (2.84%) NUnit
7 4 (2.27%) Jaeger
7 4 (2.27%) Sonatype Nexus
8 3 (1.70%) JIRA
9 1 (0.57%) Artifactory
9 1 (0.57%) JMeter
9 1 (0.57%) JUnit
9 1 (0.57%) LoadRunner
9 1 (0.57%) NeoLoad
9 1 (0.57%) Selenium
General
1 44 (25.00%) Social Skills
2 18 (10.23%) Finance
2 18 (10.23%) Public Sector
3 11 (6.25%) Analytical Skills
4 6 (3.41%) Inclusion and Diversity
5 4 (2.27%) Documentation Skills
5 4 (2.27%) Telecoms
6 3 (1.70%) Manufacturing
6 3 (1.70%) Military
7 2 (1.14%) Aerospace
7 2 (1.14%) Automotive
7 2 (1.14%) Financial Institution
7 2 (1.14%) Organisational Skills
7 2 (1.14%) Retail
8 1 (0.57%) Advertising
8 1 (0.57%) Banking
8 1 (0.57%) Health Technology
8 1 (0.57%) Pharmaceutical
8 1 (0.57%) Presentation Skills
Job Titles
1 37 (21.02%) Developer
2 20 (11.36%) Java Developer
3 18 (10.23%) Platform Engineer
4 17 (9.66%) DevOps Engineer
5 13 (7.39%) Architect
5 13 (7.39%) Site Reliability Engineer
6 12 (6.82%) Azure Engineer
7 11 (6.25%) Java Engineer
7 11 (6.25%) Senior
7 11 (6.25%) Software Engineer
8 10 (5.68%) Analyst
8 10 (5.68%) Security Analyst
8 10 (5.68%) Site Engineer
9 8 (4.55%) DevSecOps Engineer
10 7 (3.98%) Python Developer
11 6 (3.41%) Azure DevOps Engineer
11 6 (3.41%) Cloud Engineer
12 5 (2.84%) .NET Developer
12 5 (2.84%) AWS Engineer
12 5 (2.84%) Java Software Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 28 (15.91%) AngularJS
1 28 (15.91%) Kafka
2 19 (10.80%) Quarkus
2 19 (10.80%) RESTful
3 14 (7.95%) .NET
4 13 (7.39%) React
4 13 (7.39%) Spring
5 12 (6.82%) Spring Boot
6 11 (6.25%) REST
7 10 (5.68%) Loki
8 8 (4.55%) Django
8 8 (4.55%) pytest
9 7 (3.98%) .NET Framework
9 7 (3.98%) Flask
9 7 (3.98%) Keycloak
9 7 (3.98%) Node.js
9 7 (3.98%) NumPy
9 7 (3.98%) OpenTelemetry
9 7 (3.98%) Pandas
9 7 (3.98%) RabbitMQ
Miscellaneous
1 27 (15.34%) Distributed Systems
2 26 (14.77%) Cloud Native
3 10 (5.68%) Data Structures
4 9 (5.11%) Onboarding
5 8 (4.55%) Algorithms
6 7 (3.98%) Enterprise Software
6 7 (3.98%) Hybrid Cloud
7 5 (2.84%) Product Ownership
8 4 (2.27%) Security Posture
9 3 (1.70%) Management Information System
9 3 (1.70%) Public Cloud
10 2 (1.14%) AI Agents
10 2 (1.14%) Distributed Computing
10 2 (1.14%) FMCG
11 1 (0.57%) Chip and PIN
11 1 (0.57%) CMDB
11 1 (0.57%) Data Protection Act
11 1 (0.57%) Distributed Architecture
11 1 (0.57%) EMV
11 1 (0.57%) Legacy Applications
Operating Systems
1 34 (19.32%) Linux
2 10 (5.68%) Unix
3 9 (5.11%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 3 (1.70%) Windows
5 2 (1.14%) VMS
6 1 (0.57%) Android
6 1 (0.57%) Apple iOS
6 1 (0.57%) Windows Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 121 (68.75%) CI/CD
2 73 (41.48%) Containerisation
3 69 (39.20%) DevOps
4 64 (36.36%) Agile
5 50 (28.41%) Infrastructure as Code
6 39 (22.16%) Site Reliability Engineering
6 39 (22.16%) Software Engineering
7 35 (19.89%) Scrum
8 34 (19.32%) Problem-Solving
9 33 (18.75%) DevSecOps
10 31 (17.61%) Platform Engineering
11 28 (15.91%) High Availability
12 26 (14.77%) Observability
13 25 (14.20%) Microservices
14 23 (13.07%) Test Automation
15 22 (12.50%) SDLC
15 22 (12.50%) Unit Testing
16 21 (11.93%) Front End Development
17 18 (10.23%) Continuous Improvement
17 18 (10.23%) Sprint Planning
Programming Languages
1 81 (46.02%) Python
2 53 (30.11%) Java
3 32 (18.18%) Bash
4 22 (12.50%) PowerShell
5 21 (11.93%) Go
6 16 (9.09%) SQL
7 15 (8.52%) JavaScript
8 10 (5.68%) Bicep
8 10 (5.68%) TypeScript
9 9 (5.11%) C#
10 4 (2.27%) Rust
10 4 (2.27%) Shell Script
11 2 (1.14%) Scala
12 1 (0.57%) C
12 1 (0.57%) C++
12 1 (0.57%) Groovy
12 1 (0.57%) Korn
12 1 (0.57%) Kotlin
Qualifications
1 89 (50.57%) Security Cleared
2 76 (43.18%) SC Cleared
3 14 (7.95%) Degree
4 11 (6.25%) DV Cleared
5 8 (4.55%) Azure Certification
6 7 (3.98%) Computer Science Degree
7 6 (3.41%) BPSS Clearance
7 6 (3.41%) RHCE
8 2 (1.14%) Master's Degree
9 1 (0.57%) AWS Certification
9 1 (0.57%) CISSP
9 1 (0.57%) CSPO
9 1 (0.57%) ISTQB
9 1 (0.57%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
9 1 (0.57%) ITIL Certification
9 1 (0.57%) Microsoft Certification
9 1 (0.57%) OCP
9 1 (0.57%) Oracle Certification
9 1 (0.57%) PMI Certification
9 1 (0.57%) PMP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 22 (12.50%) QA
2 7 (3.98%) NCSC
2 7 (3.98%) PCI DSS
3 6 (3.41%) SLA
4 5 (2.84%) Cyber Essentials
4 5 (2.84%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
4 5 (2.84%) GDPR
4 5 (2.84%) IASME
4 5 (2.84%) ISO/IEC 27002 (supersedes ISO/IEC 17799)
4 5 (2.84%) NIST
4 5 (2.84%) NIST 800
5 4 (2.27%) GRC
6 3 (1.70%) JSP 440
7 1 (0.57%) Accessibility
7 1 (0.57%) Data Quality
7 1 (0.57%) ISO 20022
7 1 (0.57%) ISO 8583
7 1 (0.57%) ISO/IEC 27001
System Software
1 64 (36.36%) Docker
2 5 (2.84%) VMware Infrastructure
3 4 (2.27%) Active Directory
4 2 (1.14%) Hyper-V
4 2 (1.14%) Slurm Workload Manager
5 1 (0.57%) Citrix Hypervisor
5 1 (0.57%) IAG
Systems Management
1 49 (27.84%) Terraform
2 35 (19.89%) Grafana
3 34 (19.32%) Prometheus
4 26 (14.77%) Argo
5 22 (12.50%) Ansible
6 9 (5.11%) Rancher
7 8 (4.55%) Puppet
8 6 (3.41%) Istio
9 5 (2.84%) Podman
10 3 (1.70%) Kustomize
10 3 (1.70%) Nessus
11 2 (1.14%) linkerd
11 2 (1.14%) Single Sign-On
12 1 (0.57%) Fluentd
12 1 (0.57%) Kubeflow
12 1 (0.57%) Packer
12 1 (0.57%) Salt
Vendors
1 31 (17.61%) Red Hat
2 11 (6.25%) Microsoft
3 8 (4.55%) Splunk
4 7 (3.98%) Ericsson
4 7 (3.98%) Google
4 7 (3.98%) Tenable
5 6 (3.41%) BT
5 6 (3.41%) Dynatrace
5 6 (3.41%) Huawei
5 6 (3.41%) Nokia
5 6 (3.41%) VMware
6 5 (2.84%) Ab Initio
6 5 (2.84%) Oracle
6 5 (2.84%) Teradata
7 4 (2.27%) Foundry
7 4 (2.27%) NVIDIA
7 4 (2.27%) OpenAI
8 3 (1.70%) AppDynamics
8 3 (1.70%) Palantir
9 2 (1.14%) Fortinet