Kubernetes Contract Job Trends in the South West

Kubernetes (k8s)
England > South West

The table below provides summary statistics and contractor rates for jobs advertised in the South West requiring Kubernetes skills. It covers contract job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 28 August 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
28 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 32 66 40
Rank change year-on-year +34 -26 -3
Contract jobs citing Kubernetes 181 54 130
As % of all contract jobs in the South West 4.95% 2.81% 4.75%
As % of the Systems Management category 46.41% 20.45% 35.62%
Number of daily rates quoted 118 47 92
10th Percentile £411 £425 £475
25th Percentile £488 £503 £513
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £575 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year +4.55% - -
75th Percentile £655 £656 £625
90th Percentile £741 £700 £652
England median daily rate £540 £525 £558
% change year-on-year +2.86% -5.83% -7.08%
Number of hourly rates quoted 6 3 7
10th Percentile £91.91 £78.96 £60.65
25th Percentile - £79.35 £68.88
Median hourly rate £98.82 £80.00 £74.00
Median % change year-on-year +23.53% +8.11% -5.13%
75th Percentile £99.71 £81.48 £74.22
90th Percentile £100.00 £82.37 £74.44
England median hourly rate £70.00 £67.00 £62.00
% change year-on-year +4.48% +8.06% -17.33%

All Systems Management Skills
South West

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 West.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for systems management skills 390 264 365
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the South West 10.66% 13.75% 13.35%
Number of daily rates quoted 255 196 270
10th Percentile £314 £235 £219
25th Percentile £430 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £550 £536
Median % change year-on-year - +2.56% -2.50%
75th Percentile £659 £625 £600
90th Percentile £738 £694 £658
England median daily rate £525 £501 £525
% change year-on-year +4.90% -4.67% -6.67%
Number of hourly rates quoted 25 8 9
10th Percentile £28.75 £16.80 £14.90
25th Percentile £50.00 £18.60 £56.00
Median hourly rate £75.00 £67.50 £74.00
Median % change year-on-year +11.11% -8.78% -5.13%
75th Percentile £95.00 £79.03 -
90th Percentile £99.53 £80.89 £74.44
England median hourly rate £66.35 £51.00 £36.17
% change year-on-year +30.09% +41.02% -27.67%

Kubernetes
Job Vacancy Trend in the South West

Historical trend showing the proportion of contract IT job postings citing Kubernetes relative to all contract IT jobs advertised in the South West.

Kubernetes job vacancy trend in the South West

Kubernetes
Daily Rate Trend in the South West

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the South West citing Kubernetes.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the South West citing Kubernetes

Kubernetes
Daily Rate Histogram in the South West

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Kubernetes in the South West over the 6 months to 28 August 2026.

Daily rate histogram for Kubernetes in the South West

Kubernetes
Hourly Rate Trend in the South West

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the South West citing Kubernetes.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the South West citing Kubernetes

Kubernetes
Hourly Rate Histogram in the South West

Hourly rate distribution of jobs citing Kubernetes in the South West over the 6 months to 28 August 2026.

Hourly rate histogram for Kubernetes in the South West

Kubernetes
Contract Job Locations in the South West

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 West region over the 6 months to 28 August 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
Bristol +10 47 £575 +10.58% 36
Gloucestershire +12 39 £575 -12.38% 55
Somerset +7 36 £475 -2.56% 11
Wiltshire +8 31 £588 +2.17% 6
Dorset +2 19 £449 -18.36% 14
Kubernetes
England

Kubernetes
Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities in the South West 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 12 (6.63%) Confluence
2 9 (4.97%) Apache Spark
3 4 (2.21%) Apache
4 3 (1.66%) SharePoint
5 2 (1.10%) nginx
6 1 (0.55%) Apache Airflow
6 1 (0.55%) JBoss
6 1 (0.55%) Oracle Coherence
Business Applications
1 1 (0.55%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
Cloud Services
1 100 (55.25%) AWS
2 93 (51.38%) Azure
3 52 (28.73%) GCP
4 29 (16.02%) Azure DevOps
5 23 (12.71%) GitHub
6 17 (9.39%) Google Kubernetes Engine
7 15 (8.29%) GitHub Actions
8 13 (7.18%) OpenShift
9 12 (6.63%) Serverless
10 9 (4.97%) AWS CloudFormation
10 9 (4.97%) Azure AKS
11 8 (4.42%) Azure Key Vault
12 7 (3.87%) AWS Lambda
13 6 (3.31%) Amazon EKS
13 6 (3.31%) Datadog
13 6 (3.31%) SaaS
14 5 (2.76%) Amazon S3
15 3 (1.66%) Amazon EC2
16 2 (1.10%) Amazon SQS
16 2 (1.10%) PaaS
Communications & Networking
1 36 (19.89%) DNS
2 28 (15.47%) Firewall
3 26 (14.36%) TCP/IP
4 23 (12.71%) DHCP
5 19 (10.50%) VSAN
6 8 (4.42%) VPN
7 4 (2.21%) VLAN
8 3 (1.66%) Network Security
8 3 (1.66%) Reverse Proxy
9 2 (1.10%) tcpdump
10 1 (0.55%) AMQP
10 1 (0.55%) Calico
10 1 (0.55%) IPsec
10 1 (0.55%) Kerberos
10 1 (0.55%) NAS
10 1 (0.55%) SAN
10 1 (0.55%) SSH
10 1 (0.55%) WireGuard
Database & Business Intelligence
1 11 (6.08%) Geospatial Data
2 9 (4.97%) NoSQL
2 9 (4.97%) PostgreSQL
3 7 (3.87%) MongoDB
4 6 (3.31%) Big Data
5 4 (2.21%) Elasticsearch
5 4 (2.21%) Relational Database
6 3 (1.66%) Amazon RDS
6 3 (1.66%) Apache Cassandra
6 3 (1.66%) HBase
7 2 (1.10%) BigQuery
7 2 (1.10%) Data Lake
7 2 (1.10%) Flink
7 2 (1.10%) InfluxDB
7 2 (1.10%) Metadata
7 2 (1.10%) Oracle Database
7 2 (1.10%) Redis
8 1 (0.55%) CockroachDB
8 1 (0.55%) Dremio
8 1 (0.55%) TimescaleDB
Development Applications
1 38 (20.99%) GitLab
2 37 (20.44%) Jenkins
3 36 (19.89%) Git
4 15 (8.29%) JIRA
5 13 (7.18%) Gatling
6 12 (6.63%) LoadRunner
7 11 (6.08%) JMeter
7 11 (6.08%) MSI
8 6 (3.31%) JUnit
9 5 (2.76%) Selenium
10 2 (1.10%) Claude Code
10 2 (1.10%) Cucumber
10 2 (1.10%) MLflow
10 2 (1.10%) SonarQube
10 2 (1.10%) Sonatype Nexus
10 2 (1.10%) Spinnaker
11 1 (0.55%) Burp Suite
11 1 (0.55%) Gradle
11 1 (0.55%) Postman
11 1 (0.55%) REST Assured
General
1 26 (14.36%) Public Sector
2 14 (7.73%) Social Skills
3 8 (4.42%) Finance
4 5 (2.76%) Analytical Skills
4 5 (2.76%) Military
5 4 (2.21%) Banking
5 4 (2.21%) Local Government
6 3 (1.66%) Inclusion and Diversity
6 3 (1.66%) Police
7 2 (1.10%) Aviation
7 2 (1.10%) Legal
8 1 (0.55%) Influencing Skills
8 1 (0.55%) Publishing
Job Titles
1 39 (21.55%) DevOps Engineer
2 35 (19.34%) Developer
3 23 (12.71%) Senior
4 16 (8.84%) Infrastructure Engineer
4 16 (8.84%) Platform Engineer
5 15 (8.29%) Site Reliability Engineer
6 14 (7.73%) GCP Engineer
6 14 (7.73%) Site Engineer
7 11 (6.08%) Architect
7 11 (6.08%) Performance Engineer
8 10 (5.52%) Software Engineer
9 9 (4.97%) Cloud Engineer
9 9 (4.97%) Java Developer
9 9 (4.97%) Principal Engineer
9 9 (4.97%) Software Developer
10 7 (3.87%) GCP DevOps
10 7 (3.87%) GCP DevOps Engineer
11 6 (3.31%) Azure DevOps Engineer
11 6 (3.31%) Azure Engineer
11 6 (3.31%) Lead
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 108 (59.67%) Terraform
2 24 (13.26%) REST
3 21 (11.60%) Spring Boot
4 19 (10.50%) Spring
5 17 (9.39%) RESTful
6 16 (8.84%) Kafka
7 12 (6.63%) React
8 11 (6.08%) .NET
8 11 (6.08%) .NET Core
8 11 (6.08%) .NET Framework
8 11 (6.08%) ATL
8 11 (6.08%) COM
8 11 (6.08%) CSS
8 11 (6.08%) CSS3
8 11 (6.08%) GeoJSON
8 11 (6.08%) HTML
8 11 (6.08%) HTML5
8 11 (6.08%) MFC
8 11 (6.08%) WPF
9 9 (4.97%) RabbitMQ
Miscellaneous
1 48 (26.52%) Cloud Native
2 18 (9.94%) Data Centre
2 18 (9.94%) PKI
3 13 (7.18%) Onboarding
4 11 (6.08%) Linux Command Line
5 10 (5.52%) Legacy Systems
6 8 (4.42%) Public Cloud
7 7 (3.87%) Product Ownership
8 6 (3.31%) Distributed Systems
8 6 (3.31%) Enterprise Software
8 6 (3.31%) Hybrid Cloud
9 4 (2.21%) Clustering
10 3 (1.66%) Wiki
11 2 (1.10%) Private Cloud
12 1 (0.55%) Data Fabric
12 1 (0.55%) Enterprise Cloud
12 1 (0.55%) Learning Management System
12 1 (0.55%) Mobile App
12 1 (0.55%) Security Posture
12 1 (0.55%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 56 (30.94%) Linux
2 37 (20.44%) Windows
3 11 (6.08%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 5 (2.76%) Unix
5 4 (2.21%) Rocky
5 4 (2.21%) Ubuntu
6 3 (1.66%) Debian
6 3 (1.66%) Windows Server
7 1 (0.55%) Android
7 1 (0.55%) CentOS
7 1 (0.55%) SUSE
Processes & Methodologies
1 136 (75.14%) CI/CD
2 113 (62.43%) DevOps
3 103 (56.91%) Infrastructure as Code
4 92 (50.83%) Containerisation
5 51 (28.18%) Agile
6 49 (27.07%) DevSecOps
7 44 (24.31%) Platform Engineering
8 42 (23.20%) Site Reliability Engineering
9 36 (19.89%) Microservices
10 33 (18.23%) Technical Leadership
11 32 (17.68%) Problem-Solving
12 29 (16.02%) Observability
12 29 (16.02%) Software Engineering
13 25 (13.81%) Mentoring
14 24 (13.26%) Continuous Improvement
14 24 (13.26%) Deployment Automation
14 24 (13.26%) Test Automation
15 23 (12.71%) Infrastructure Engineering
16 19 (10.50%) Cybersecurity
17 18 (9.94%) Systems Engineering
Programming Languages
1 87 (48.07%) Python
2 52 (28.73%) Bash
3 37 (20.44%) Java
4 29 (16.02%) PowerShell
5 24 (13.26%) SQL
6 21 (11.60%) JavaScript
7 19 (10.50%) TypeScript
8 18 (9.94%) C#
9 17 (9.39%) Go
10 16 (8.84%) Bicep
11 7 (3.87%) Shell Script
12 3 (1.66%) Groovy
13 2 (1.10%) Rust
14 1 (0.55%) Kotlin
Qualifications
1 110 (60.77%) Security Cleared
2 66 (36.46%) SC Cleared
3 61 (33.70%) DV Cleared
4 15 (8.29%) VCAP
5 13 (7.18%) AWS Certification
6 7 (3.87%) Cisco Certification
7 6 (3.31%) CCNA
7 6 (3.31%) Degree
8 5 (2.76%) Computer Science Degree
8 5 (2.76%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
9 3 (1.66%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
9 3 (1.66%) Microsoft Certification
10 2 (1.10%) Azure Certification
10 2 (1.10%) CISSP
10 2 (1.10%) MCSE
11 1 (0.55%) CCSP
11 1 (0.55%) CISM
11 1 (0.55%) ISTQB
11 1 (0.55%) Master's Degree
11 1 (0.55%) OSCP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 17 (9.39%) NCSC
2 16 (8.84%) Accessibility
2 16 (8.84%) WCAG
3 11 (6.08%) QA
4 2 (1.10%) ISO/IEC 27001
4 2 (1.10%) NIST
4 2 (1.10%) SLA
5 1 (0.55%) Data Quality
5 1 (0.55%) Government Security Classifications
5 1 (0.55%) HMG Security Policy Framework
5 1 (0.55%) JSP 440
System Software
1 103 (56.91%) Docker
2 29 (16.02%) VMware Infrastructure
3 22 (12.15%) Active Directory
4 20 (11.05%) vSphere
5 19 (10.50%) VMware NSX
6 17 (9.39%) Hyper-V
7 5 (2.76%) Virtual Machines
7 5 (2.76%) VMware ESXi
8 3 (1.66%) VirtualBox
9 2 (1.10%) KVM
10 1 (0.55%) iptables
10 1 (0.55%) NFS
10 1 (0.55%) zsh
Systems Management
1 58 (32.04%) Ansible
2 22 (12.15%) Prometheus
3 21 (11.60%) Grafana
4 15 (8.29%) VxRail
5 13 (7.18%) Argo
6 7 (3.87%) Istio
7 5 (2.76%) OPNET
8 4 (2.21%) PowerCLI
8 4 (2.21%) Proxmox
8 4 (2.21%) vCenter Server
9 3 (1.66%) Docker Swarm
9 3 (1.66%) Podman
9 3 (1.66%) Progress Chef
9 3 (1.66%) Single Sign-On
10 2 (1.10%) Cilium
10 2 (1.10%) Kustomize
10 2 (1.10%) linkerd
10 2 (1.10%) Nagios
11 1 (0.55%) Puppet
11 1 (0.55%) ZABBIX
Vendors
1 33 (18.23%) VMware
2 26 (14.36%) Google
3 25 (13.81%) Microsoft
4 19 (10.50%) Dynatrace
5 18 (9.94%) Splunk
6 12 (6.63%) Oracle
7 11 (6.08%) AppDynamics
7 11 (6.08%) New Relic
7 11 (6.08%) Red Hat
8 5 (2.76%) Databricks
9 4 (2.21%) CyberArk
9 4 (2.21%) SaltStack
9 4 (2.21%) Thales
10 3 (1.66%) Dell
11 2 (1.10%) Atlassian
11 2 (1.10%) BiZZdesign
11 2 (1.10%) Cisco
11 2 (1.10%) IBM
12 1 (0.55%) BeyondTrust
12 1 (0.55%) Sparx