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 13 August 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
13 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 35 57 35
Rank change year-on-year +22 -22 0
Contract jobs citing Kubernetes 173 56 136
As % of all contract jobs in the South West 4.79% 2.95% 4.87%
As % of the Systems Management category 39.77% 20.97% 34.09%
Number of daily rates quoted 110 48 93
10th Percentile £406 £427 £475
25th Percentile £478 £507 £513
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £575 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year +4.55% - -
75th Percentile £650 £669 £625
90th Percentile £739 £700 £675
England median daily rate £538 £537 £555
% change year-on-year +0.09% -3.24% -9.39%
Number of hourly rates quoted 6 3 9
10th Percentile £91.91 £78.96 £62.20
25th Percentile - £79.35 £72.50
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 £74.44
90th Percentile £100.00 £82.37 £77.60
England median hourly rate £70.00 £67.00 £67.25
% change year-on-year +4.48% -0.37% -7.88%

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 435 267 399
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the South West 12.05% 14.05% 14.28%
Number of daily rates quoted 280 197 305
10th Percentile £324 £244 £245
25th Percentile £430 £435 £450
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £550 £538
Median % change year-on-year - +2.33% -2.27%
75th Percentile £638 £638 £625
90th Percentile £730 £700 £696
England median daily rate £525 £513 £525
% change year-on-year +2.44% -2.38% -6.67%
Number of hourly rates quoted 23 9 9
10th Percentile £23.00 £17.13 £62.20
25th Percentile £48.25 £18.87 £72.50
Median hourly rate £51.00 £60.00 £74.00
Median % change year-on-year -15.00% -18.92% -5.13%
75th Percentile £95.68 £78.70 £74.44
90th Percentile £99.76 £80.59 £77.60
England median hourly rate £66.83 £53.50 £37.50
% change year-on-year +24.92% +42.67% -24.59%

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 13 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 13 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 13 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 +9 47 £575 +9.52% 42
Gloucestershire +6 38 £575 -17.27% 60
Somerset +1 32 £475 -2.56% 6
Wiltshire -5 26 £575 -4.17% 7
Dorset +7 21 £540 -1.82% 17
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 (6.94%) Confluence
2 10 (5.78%) Apache Spark
3 6 (3.47%) Apache
4 2 (1.16%) nginx
5 1 (0.58%) Apache Airflow
5 1 (0.58%) JBoss
5 1 (0.58%) Oracle Coherence
Business Applications
1 1 (0.58%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
Cloud Services
1 96 (55.49%) AWS
2 88 (50.87%) Azure
3 47 (27.17%) GCP
4 26 (15.03%) Azure DevOps
5 23 (13.29%) GitHub
6 15 (8.67%) GitHub Actions
6 15 (8.67%) Google Kubernetes Engine
7 14 (8.09%) Serverless
8 11 (6.36%) OpenShift
9 9 (5.20%) AWS CloudFormation
9 9 (5.20%) Azure Key Vault
10 8 (4.62%) AWS Lambda
11 7 (4.05%) Amazon S3
11 7 (4.05%) Datadog
12 6 (3.47%) Amazon EKS
12 6 (3.47%) Azure AKS
12 6 (3.47%) SaaS
13 3 (1.73%) Amazon EC2
13 3 (1.73%) Amazon ECS
14 2 (1.16%) PaaS
Communications & Networking
1 29 (16.76%) DNS
2 25 (14.45%) Firewall
3 24 (13.87%) TCP/IP
4 22 (12.72%) DHCP
5 14 (8.09%) VSAN
6 6 (3.47%) VPN
7 4 (2.31%) Reverse Proxy
7 4 (2.31%) VLAN
8 3 (1.73%) Network Security
9 1 (0.58%) AMQP
9 1 (0.58%) Calico
9 1 (0.58%) IPsec
9 1 (0.58%) Kerberos
9 1 (0.58%) NAS
9 1 (0.58%) SAN
9 1 (0.58%) SSH
9 1 (0.58%) WireGuard
Database & Business Intelligence
1 11 (6.36%) Geospatial Data
2 10 (5.78%) NoSQL
2 10 (5.78%) PostgreSQL
3 7 (4.05%) MongoDB
4 6 (3.47%) Big Data
4 6 (3.47%) Relational Database
5 4 (2.31%) Elasticsearch
6 3 (1.73%) Amazon RDS
6 3 (1.73%) Apache Cassandra
6 3 (1.73%) Flink
6 3 (1.73%) HBase
6 3 (1.73%) Redis
7 2 (1.16%) BigQuery
7 2 (1.16%) CockroachDB
7 2 (1.16%) Data Lake
7 2 (1.16%) InfluxDB
7 2 (1.16%) Metadata
7 2 (1.16%) Oracle Database
8 1 (0.58%) Dremio
8 1 (0.58%) TimescaleDB
Development Applications
1 37 (21.39%) GitLab
2 35 (20.23%) Jenkins
3 33 (19.08%) Git
4 15 (8.67%) JIRA
5 14 (8.09%) Gatling
6 12 (6.94%) LoadRunner
7 11 (6.36%) JMeter
7 11 (6.36%) MSI
8 6 (3.47%) JUnit
9 5 (2.89%) Selenium
10 3 (1.73%) SonarQube
11 2 (1.16%) Cucumber
11 2 (1.16%) MLflow
11 2 (1.16%) Sonatype Nexus
11 2 (1.16%) Spinnaker
12 1 (0.58%) Bitbucket
12 1 (0.58%) Burp Suite
12 1 (0.58%) NUnit
12 1 (0.58%) Postman
12 1 (0.58%) REST Assured
General
1 26 (15.03%) Public Sector
2 13 (7.51%) Social Skills
3 5 (2.89%) Analytical Skills
3 5 (2.89%) Finance
3 5 (2.89%) Military
4 3 (1.73%) Inclusion and Diversity
4 3 (1.73%) Local Government
4 3 (1.73%) Police
5 2 (1.16%) Aviation
5 2 (1.16%) Banking
5 2 (1.16%) Legal
6 1 (0.58%) Aerospace
6 1 (0.58%) Influencing Skills
6 1 (0.58%) Publishing
Job Titles
1 38 (21.97%) DevOps Engineer
2 35 (20.23%) Developer
3 22 (12.72%) Senior
4 16 (9.25%) Infrastructure Engineer
5 14 (8.09%) Platform Engineer
5 14 (8.09%) Site Reliability Engineer
6 13 (7.51%) GCP Engineer
6 13 (7.51%) Site Engineer
7 12 (6.94%) Software Engineer
8 11 (6.36%) Architect
8 11 (6.36%) Performance Engineer
9 10 (5.78%) Java Developer
10 9 (5.20%) Principal Engineer
11 8 (4.62%) Cloud Engineer
12 7 (4.05%) GCP DevOps
12 7 (4.05%) GCP DevOps Engineer
12 7 (4.05%) Software Developer
13 6 (3.47%) Lead
13 6 (3.47%) Senior Developer
14 5 (2.89%) Test Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 26 (15.03%) REST
2 22 (12.72%) Spring Boot
3 20 (11.56%) RESTful
3 20 (11.56%) Spring
4 18 (10.40%) Kafka
5 12 (6.94%) React
6 11 (6.36%) .NET
6 11 (6.36%) .NET Core
6 11 (6.36%) .NET Framework
6 11 (6.36%) ATL
6 11 (6.36%) COM
6 11 (6.36%) CSS
6 11 (6.36%) CSS3
6 11 (6.36%) GeoJSON
6 11 (6.36%) HTML
6 11 (6.36%) HTML5
6 11 (6.36%) MFC
6 11 (6.36%) WPF
7 9 (5.20%) RabbitMQ
8 7 (4.05%) Quarkus
Miscellaneous
1 45 (26.01%) Cloud Native
2 17 (9.83%) Data Centre
2 17 (9.83%) PKI
3 13 (7.51%) Onboarding
4 10 (5.78%) Legacy Systems
4 10 (5.78%) Linux Command Line
5 7 (4.05%) Distributed Systems
5 7 (4.05%) Public Cloud
6 6 (3.47%) Enterprise Software
7 5 (2.89%) Product Ownership
8 4 (2.31%) Clustering
9 2 (1.16%) Hybrid Cloud
9 2 (1.16%) Private Cloud
10 1 (0.58%) AI Agents
10 1 (0.58%) Data Fabric
10 1 (0.58%) Learning Management System
10 1 (0.58%) Mobile App
10 1 (0.58%) Security Posture
10 1 (0.58%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 55 (31.79%) Linux
2 37 (21.39%) Windows
3 10 (5.78%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 5 (2.89%) Rocky
4 5 (2.89%) Ubuntu
4 5 (2.89%) Unix
5 4 (2.31%) Debian
6 3 (1.73%) Windows Server
7 1 (0.58%) Android
7 1 (0.58%) CentOS
7 1 (0.58%) SUSE
Processes & Methodologies
1 129 (74.57%) CI/CD
2 106 (61.27%) DevOps
3 91 (52.60%) Containerisation
4 90 (52.02%) Infrastructure as Code
5 44 (25.43%) Agile
6 43 (24.86%) DevSecOps
7 41 (23.70%) Microservices
8 38 (21.97%) Site Reliability Engineering
9 37 (21.39%) Platform Engineering
10 33 (19.08%) Technical Leadership
11 31 (17.92%) Problem-Solving
12 30 (17.34%) Software Engineering
13 26 (15.03%) Observability
14 25 (14.45%) Test Automation
15 24 (13.87%) Mentoring
16 23 (13.29%) Infrastructure Engineering
17 19 (10.98%) Cybersecurity
17 19 (10.98%) Deployment Automation
17 19 (10.98%) Full-Stack Development
18 18 (10.40%) Continuous Improvement
Programming Languages
1 85 (49.13%) Python
2 47 (27.17%) Bash
3 38 (21.97%) Java
4 27 (15.61%) SQL
5 25 (14.45%) PowerShell
6 22 (12.72%) JavaScript
7 20 (11.56%) Go
8 19 (10.98%) TypeScript
9 16 (9.25%) C#
10 13 (7.51%) Bicep
11 4 (2.31%) Shell Script
12 3 (1.73%) Groovy
12 3 (1.73%) Rust
13 1 (0.58%) Kotlin
Qualifications
1 102 (58.96%) Security Cleared
2 62 (35.84%) SC Cleared
3 56 (32.37%) DV Cleared
4 11 (6.36%) VCAP
5 10 (5.78%) AWS Certification
6 8 (4.62%) Degree
7 7 (4.05%) Cisco Certification
7 7 (4.05%) Computer Science Degree
8 6 (3.47%) CCNA
9 3 (1.73%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
9 3 (1.73%) Microsoft Certification
10 2 (1.16%) Azure Certification
10 2 (1.16%) CISSP
10 2 (1.16%) MCSE
10 2 (1.16%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
11 1 (0.58%) CCSP
11 1 (0.58%) CISM
11 1 (0.58%) ISTQB
11 1 (0.58%) Master's Degree
11 1 (0.58%) OSCP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 16 (9.25%) Accessibility
1 16 (9.25%) NCSC
1 16 (9.25%) WCAG
2 12 (6.94%) QA
3 2 (1.16%) ISO/IEC 27001
4 1 (0.58%) Data Quality
4 1 (0.58%) Government Security Classifications
4 1 (0.58%) HMG Security Policy Framework
4 1 (0.58%) NIST
System Software
1 103 (59.54%) Docker
2 24 (13.87%) VMware Infrastructure
3 21 (12.14%) Active Directory
4 17 (9.83%) Hyper-V
5 15 (8.67%) vSphere
6 14 (8.09%) VMware NSX
7 5 (2.89%) Virtual Machines
8 3 (1.73%) VirtualBox
9 2 (1.16%) KVM
10 1 (0.58%) iptables
10 1 (0.58%) NFS
10 1 (0.58%) VMware ESXi
10 1 (0.58%) zsh
Systems Management
1 96 (55.49%) Terraform
2 51 (29.48%) Ansible
3 24 (13.87%) Prometheus
4 22 (12.72%) Grafana
5 14 (8.09%) VxRail
6 12 (6.94%) Argo
7 6 (3.47%) Istio
8 4 (2.31%) OPNET
8 4 (2.31%) Podman
8 4 (2.31%) Proxmox
9 3 (1.73%) Docker Swarm
9 3 (1.73%) Progress Chef
9 3 (1.73%) Single Sign-On
10 2 (1.16%) Cilium
10 2 (1.16%) Kustomize
10 2 (1.16%) linkerd
10 2 (1.16%) Nagios
11 1 (0.58%) Kubeflow
11 1 (0.58%) Puppet
11 1 (0.58%) ZABBIX
Vendors
1 28 (16.18%) VMware
2 24 (13.87%) Google
3 23 (13.29%) Microsoft
4 17 (9.83%) Dynatrace
4 17 (9.83%) Splunk
5 12 (6.94%) Oracle
6 11 (6.36%) AppDynamics
6 11 (6.36%) New Relic
6 11 (6.36%) Red Hat
7 6 (3.47%) Databricks
8 4 (2.31%) CyberArk
8 4 (2.31%) Thales
9 3 (1.73%) Dell
10 2 (1.16%) BiZZdesign
10 2 (1.16%) Cisco
10 2 (1.16%) IBM
11 1 (0.58%) BeyondTrust
11 1 (0.58%) Informatica
11 1 (0.58%) Sparx
11 1 (0.58%) TIBCO