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 22 April 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
22 Apr 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 55 52 74
Rank change year-on-year -3 +22 -20
Contract jobs citing Kubernetes 189 113 142
As % of all contract jobs in the South East 3.29% 3.76% 2.55%
As % of the Systems Management category 27.31% 30.38% 20.03%
Number of daily rates quoted 140 71 94
10th Percentile £356 £394 £413
25th Percentile £402 £419 £473
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £550 £575
Median % change year-on-year -9.09% -4.35% -0.86%
75th Percentile £553 £604 £625
90th Percentile £637 £663 £675
England median daily rate £525 £575 £550
% change year-on-year -8.70% +4.55% -12.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 16 0 2
10th Percentile £43.13 - £37.70
25th Percentile £58.75 - £39.13
Median hourly rate £65.00 - £43.00
75th Percentile £70.00 - £46.63
90th Percentile £81.00 - £47.90
England median hourly rate £65.00 £60.00 £62.00
% change year-on-year +8.33% -3.23% -13.89%

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 692 372 709
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the South East 12.06% 12.38% 12.74%
Number of daily rates quoted 519 273 510
10th Percentile £263 £314 £207
25th Percentile £400 £418 £356
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £475
Median % change year-on-year - +5.26% -11.83%
75th Percentile £588 £590 £600
90th Percentile £700 £662 £650
England median daily rate £503 £525 £525
% change year-on-year -4.29% - -8.70%
Number of hourly rates quoted 22 2 17
10th Percentile £40.00 £20.77 £14.00
25th Percentile £44.86 £21.98 £23.63
Median hourly rate £60.00 £23.99 £38.50
Median % change year-on-year +150.16% -37.70% -34.47%
75th Percentile £70.00 £25.99 £48.75
90th Percentile £79.20 £27.20 £66.00
England median hourly rate £56.50 £27.25 £30.00
% change year-on-year +107.34% -9.17% -47.83%

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 22 April 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 22 April 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 22 April 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
Hampshire -3 80 £525 -8.70% 26
Thames Valley -23 77 £425 -15.08% 46
Berkshire -28 59 £425 -15.08% 22
Surrey -1 21 £513 -5.09% 9
Buckinghamshire -15 14 £450 +44.93% 8
West Sussex -10 6 £400 +33.33% 2
Oxfordshire -16 4 £600 +9.09% 16
Middlesex -1 3 £509 - 1
East Sussex +3 1 - - 3
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 11 (5.82%) Apache Spark
2 4 (2.12%) Apache
3 3 (1.59%) Confluence
3 3 (1.59%) IIS
3 3 (1.59%) OpenStack
4 2 (1.06%) Apache Pulsar
5 1 (0.53%) Microsoft Exchange
5 1 (0.53%) Palantir Foundry
Applications
1 3 (1.59%) CPLEX
Business Applications
1 1 (0.53%) Payment Gateway
Cloud Services
1 105 (55.56%) AWS
2 98 (51.85%) Azure
3 51 (26.98%) GCP
3 51 (26.98%) OpenShift
4 36 (19.05%) GitHub
5 25 (13.23%) GitHub Actions
6 21 (11.11%) Azure DevOps
7 16 (8.47%) Serverless
8 15 (7.94%) AWS CloudFormation
9 14 (7.41%) Azure AKS
10 12 (6.35%) Amazon EKS
10 12 (6.35%) Amazon S3
11 11 (5.82%) AWS Lambda
12 8 (4.23%) Amazon CloudWatch
13 7 (3.70%) Datadog
13 7 (3.70%) Snowflake
14 6 (3.17%) Entra ID
15 5 (2.65%) Amazon EC2
15 5 (2.65%) Cloud Computing
16 4 (2.12%) PaaS
Communications & Networking
1 11 (5.82%) Firewall
2 8 (4.23%) DNS
3 5 (2.65%) DHCP
3 5 (2.65%) TCP/IP
4 4 (2.12%) VPN
5 3 (1.59%) HTTP
6 2 (1.06%) 5G
6 2 (1.06%) Diameter Protocol
6 2 (1.06%) LTE
6 2 (1.06%) Radio Access Network
6 2 (1.06%) VoLTE
6 2 (1.06%) VoWiFi
6 2 (1.06%) Wireshark
7 1 (0.53%) iSCSI
7 1 (0.53%) Kerberos
7 1 (0.53%) MQTT
7 1 (0.53%) Remote Desktop
7 1 (0.53%) Reverse Proxy
7 1 (0.53%) SAN
7 1 (0.53%) SNMP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 34 (17.99%) PostgreSQL
2 22 (11.64%) NoSQL
3 12 (6.35%) Relational Database
4 11 (5.82%) Big Data
4 11 (5.82%) Redis
5 9 (4.76%) DynamoDB
6 8 (4.23%) MongoDB
7 6 (3.17%) Data Warehouse
8 4 (2.12%) HBase
8 4 (2.12%) SQL Server
9 2 (1.06%) BigQuery
9 2 (1.06%) Elasticsearch
10 1 (0.53%) Amazon Athena
10 1 (0.53%) Amazon Aurora
10 1 (0.53%) Amazon QuickSight
10 1 (0.53%) Amazon RDS
10 1 (0.53%) Amazon Redshift
10 1 (0.53%) Apache Cassandra
10 1 (0.53%) Couchbase
10 1 (0.53%) Hadoop
Development Applications
1 35 (18.52%) Jenkins
2 32 (16.93%) Git
3 27 (14.29%) GitLab
4 13 (6.88%) SonarQube
5 10 (5.29%) Artifactory
5 10 (5.29%) JUnit
6 9 (4.76%) Sonatype Nexus
7 8 (4.23%) Cucumber
8 7 (3.70%) Gradle
9 6 (3.17%) JMeter
10 3 (1.59%) Bitbucket
10 3 (1.59%) Jaeger
10 3 (1.59%) JIRA
10 3 (1.59%) Maven
11 2 (1.06%) Gatling
11 2 (1.06%) NUnit
11 2 (1.06%) Selenium
12 1 (0.53%) LoadRunner
12 1 (0.53%) MLflow
12 1 (0.53%) Postman
General
1 53 (28.04%) Social Skills
2 21 (11.11%) Finance
3 20 (10.58%) Public Sector
4 12 (6.35%) Analytical Skills
5 4 (2.12%) Inclusion and Diversity
6 3 (1.59%) Banking
6 3 (1.59%) Documentation Skills
6 3 (1.59%) Military
7 2 (1.06%) Billing
7 2 (1.06%) Financial Institution
7 2 (1.06%) Organisational Skills
7 2 (1.06%) Telecoms
8 1 (0.53%) Advertising
8 1 (0.53%) Aerospace
8 1 (0.53%) Automotive
8 1 (0.53%) Health Technology
8 1 (0.53%) Presentation Skills
Job Titles
1 42 (22.22%) Developer
2 33 (17.46%) Java Developer
3 28 (14.81%) DevOps Engineer
4 21 (11.11%) Platform Engineer
5 19 (10.05%) Senior
6 15 (7.94%) Architect
7 13 (6.88%) Site Reliability Engineer
7 13 (6.88%) Software Engineer
8 12 (6.35%) Site Engineer
9 10 (5.29%) Analyst
9 10 (5.29%) Azure Engineer
9 10 (5.29%) Infrastructure Engineer
9 10 (5.29%) Security Analyst
10 9 (4.76%) Java Engineer
11 8 (4.23%) Senior Developer
12 7 (3.70%) AWS DevOps
13 6 (3.17%) AWS Engineer
13 6 (3.17%) Senior Java Developer
13 6 (3.17%) Solutions Architect
14 5 (2.65%) Security Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 38 (20.11%) Kafka
2 26 (13.76%) AngularJS
2 26 (13.76%) Spring
3 22 (11.64%) Spring Boot
4 13 (6.88%) Quarkus
4 13 (6.88%) REST
5 12 (6.35%) Keycloak
5 12 (6.35%) React
6 10 (5.29%) .NET
6 10 (5.29%) Elastic Stack
6 10 (5.29%) Loki
6 10 (5.29%) RESTful
7 7 (3.70%) RabbitMQ
8 6 (3.17%) OpenTelemetry
9 5 (2.65%) JSON
9 5 (2.65%) Node.js
9 5 (2.65%) OpenAPI
9 5 (2.65%) Swagger
9 5 (2.65%) Vue
9 5 (2.65%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 32 (16.93%) Cloud Native
2 26 (13.76%) Distributed Systems
3 8 (4.23%) Hybrid Cloud
4 7 (3.70%) Enterprise Software
4 7 (3.70%) Onboarding
5 5 (2.65%) Algorithms
5 5 (2.65%) Data Structures
6 4 (2.12%) PKI
7 3 (1.59%) Management Information System
7 3 (1.59%) Public Cloud
7 3 (1.59%) Security Posture
8 2 (1.06%) Distributed Architecture
8 2 (1.06%) Self-Motivation
8 2 (1.06%) TM Forum
8 2 (1.06%) Virtual Team
9 1 (0.53%) Analytical Mindset
9 1 (0.53%) Chip and PIN
9 1 (0.53%) Data Protection Act
9 1 (0.53%) EMV
9 1 (0.53%) Legacy Applications
Operating Systems
1 45 (23.81%) Linux
2 14 (7.41%) Windows
3 6 (3.17%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
3 6 (3.17%) Unix
4 4 (2.12%) Windows Server
5 2 (1.06%) Ubuntu
5 2 (1.06%) VMS
6 1 (0.53%) CentOS
6 1 (0.53%) Windows Server 2016
Processes & Methodologies
1 137 (72.49%) CI/CD
2 88 (46.56%) DevOps
3 82 (43.39%) Containerisation
4 65 (34.39%) Infrastructure as Code
5 63 (33.33%) Agile
6 46 (24.34%) Platform Engineering
7 44 (23.28%) Observability
8 39 (20.63%) Site Reliability Engineering
9 36 (19.05%) Microservices
10 34 (17.99%) Problem-Solving
10 34 (17.99%) Software Engineering
11 33 (17.46%) DevSecOps
12 26 (13.76%) High Availability
12 26 (13.76%) Scrum
13 23 (12.17%) Test Automation
14 19 (10.05%) GitOps
15 17 (8.99%) Infrastructure Engineering
16 16 (8.47%) SDLC
16 16 (8.47%) Unit Testing
17 15 (7.94%) Front End Development
Programming Languages
1 80 (42.33%) Python
2 58 (30.69%) Java
3 48 (25.40%) Bash
4 30 (15.87%) PowerShell
5 21 (11.11%) Go
6 17 (8.99%) SQL
7 13 (6.88%) JavaScript
8 11 (5.82%) Bicep
9 9 (4.76%) C#
10 3 (1.59%) TypeScript
11 2 (1.06%) PHP
11 2 (1.06%) Rust
12 1 (0.53%) C
12 1 (0.53%) C++
12 1 (0.53%) Korn
12 1 (0.53%) Kotlin
12 1 (0.53%) Shell Script
Qualifications
1 94 (49.74%) Security Cleared
2 75 (39.68%) SC Cleared
3 14 (7.41%) DV Cleared
4 12 (6.35%) Degree
5 8 (4.23%) Computer Science Degree
5 8 (4.23%) RHCE
6 5 (2.65%) AWS Certification
6 5 (2.65%) Azure Certification
6 5 (2.65%) OCP
6 5 (2.65%) Oracle Certification
7 4 (2.12%) BPSS Clearance
8 3 (1.59%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
8 3 (1.59%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
9 1 (0.53%) ISTQB
9 1 (0.53%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
9 1 (0.53%) Microsoft Certification
9 1 (0.53%) PMI Certification
9 1 (0.53%) PMP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 18 (9.52%) QA
2 12 (6.35%) NCSC
3 6 (3.17%) PCI DSS
4 5 (2.65%) Cyber Essentials
4 5 (2.65%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
4 5 (2.65%) IASME
4 5 (2.65%) ISO/IEC 27002 (supersedes ISO/IEC 17799)
4 5 (2.65%) NIST
4 5 (2.65%) NIST 800
5 4 (2.12%) GDPR
6 3 (1.59%) GRC
6 3 (1.59%) JSP 440
7 2 (1.06%) SLA
8 1 (0.53%) Data Quality
8 1 (0.53%) ISO 20022
8 1 (0.53%) ISO 8583
8 1 (0.53%) ISO/IEC 27001
System Software
1 70 (37.04%) Docker
2 12 (6.35%) VMware Infrastructure
3 7 (3.70%) Active Directory
4 6 (3.17%) Hyper-V
5 3 (1.59%) vSphere
6 1 (0.53%) Citrix Hypervisor
Systems Management
1 69 (36.51%) Terraform
2 48 (25.40%) Ansible
3 47 (24.87%) Grafana
4 44 (23.28%) Prometheus
5 29 (15.34%) Argo
6 11 (5.82%) Istio
7 9 (4.76%) Rancher
8 8 (4.23%) linkerd
9 7 (3.70%) Puppet
10 6 (3.17%) Progress Chef
11 5 (2.65%) Kustomize
12 4 (2.12%) Nessus
12 4 (2.12%) Podman
12 4 (2.12%) Sysdig
13 2 (1.06%) Packer
13 2 (1.06%) Single Sign-On
14 1 (0.53%) Fluentd
14 1 (0.53%) Kubeflow
14 1 (0.53%) Salt
14 1 (0.53%) vCenter Server
Vendors
1 36 (19.05%) Red Hat
2 23 (12.17%) VMware
3 20 (10.58%) Splunk
4 13 (6.88%) Microsoft
5 7 (3.70%) Google
6 5 (2.65%) Ab Initio
6 5 (2.65%) Dynatrace
6 5 (2.65%) Teradata
7 4 (2.12%) AppDynamics
7 4 (2.12%) Tenable
8 3 (1.59%) Ericsson
9 2 (1.06%) Atlassian
9 2 (1.06%) BT
9 2 (1.06%) Fortinet
9 2 (1.06%) Foundry
9 2 (1.06%) Huawei
9 2 (1.06%) Nokia
9 2 (1.06%) OpenAI
9 2 (1.06%) Oracle
10 1 (0.53%) Virgin Media