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 16 September 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
16 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 34 57 41
Rank change year-on-year +23 -16 -3
Contract jobs citing Kubernetes 181 61 123
As % of all contract jobs in the South West 4.87% 3.09% 4.64%
As % of the Systems Management category 48.79% 22.10% 33.51%
Number of daily rates quoted 115 54 83
10th Percentile £406 £438 £475
25th Percentile £488 £507 £513
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £575 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year +4.55% - -
75th Percentile £659 £669 £628
90th Percentile £736 £700 £685
England median daily rate £540 £528 £570
% change year-on-year +2.37% -7.46% -5.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 6 1 5
10th Percentile £91.91 - -
25th Percentile - - -
Median hourly rate £98.82 £80.00 £74.00
Median % change year-on-year +23.53% +8.11% -5.13%
75th Percentile £99.71 - £74.44
90th Percentile £100.00 - -
England median hourly rate £70.00 £67.00 £55.00
% change year-on-year +4.48% +21.82% -24.66%

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 371 276 367
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the South West 9.99% 13.99% 13.85%
Number of daily rates quoted 241 209 254
10th Percentile £350 £235 £204
25th Percentile £449 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £540 £533
Median % change year-on-year +1.85% +1.31% -3.09%
75th Percentile £671 £625 £600
90th Percentile £738 £695 £669
England median daily rate £525 £500 £525
% change year-on-year +4.95% -4.76% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 21 6 7
10th Percentile £17.25 £16.15 £14.30
25th Percentile £51.00 £18.06 £44.75
Median hourly rate £90.00 £39.44 £74.00
Median % change year-on-year +128.22% -46.71% -5.13%
75th Percentile £98.82 £73.13 £74.22
90th Percentile £100.00 £78.75 £74.44
England median hourly rate £67.24 £34.00 £39.25
% change year-on-year +97.75% -13.38% -23.41%

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 16 September 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 16 September 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 16 September 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 +6 46 £563 +7.14% 54
Somerset +7 42 £475 -2.56% 30
Gloucestershire +17 39 £575 -12.38% 135
Wiltshire -1 26 £600 +4.35% 6
Dorset -1 19 £434 -21.14% 30
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 10 (5.52%) Apache Spark
3 9 (4.97%) SharePoint
4 7 (3.87%) Apache
5 3 (1.66%) 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
1 102 (56.35%) AWS
2 99 (54.70%) Azure
3 54 (29.83%) GCP
4 34 (18.78%) Azure DevOps
5 22 (12.15%) GitHub
6 16 (8.84%) Google Kubernetes Engine
7 15 (8.29%) Azure AKS
7 15 (8.29%) OpenShift
8 13 (7.18%) GitHub Actions
9 12 (6.63%) Serverless
10 9 (4.97%) AWS CloudFormation
10 9 (4.97%) AWS Lambda
11 8 (4.42%) Amazon EKS
12 7 (3.87%) Amazon S3
13 6 (3.31%) Azure Key Vault
13 6 (3.31%) Datadog
13 6 (3.31%) SaaS
14 5 (2.76%) Amazon EC2
15 4 (2.21%) Amazon SQS
16 3 (1.66%) Amazon ECS
Communications & Networking
1 37 (20.44%) DNS
2 29 (16.02%) Firewall
3 27 (14.92%) TCP/IP
4 24 (13.26%) DHCP
5 19 (10.50%) VSAN
6 8 (4.42%) VPN
7 5 (2.76%) VLAN
8 3 (1.66%) Network Security
9 2 (1.10%) 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 7 (3.87%) Big Data
2 7 (3.87%) MongoDB
2 7 (3.87%) NoSQL
2 7 (3.87%) PostgreSQL
3 5 (2.76%) Amazon RDS
4 4 (2.21%) Elasticsearch
4 4 (2.21%) Flink
4 4 (2.21%) Relational Database
5 3 (1.66%) Apache Cassandra
5 3 (1.66%) BigQuery
5 3 (1.66%) HBase
5 3 (1.66%) InfluxDB
6 2 (1.10%) Data Lake
6 2 (1.10%) Metadata
6 2 (1.10%) Oracle Database
6 2 (1.10%) SQL Server
7 1 (0.55%) Dremio
7 1 (0.55%) DynamoDB
7 1 (0.55%) TimescaleDB
Development Applications
1 45 (24.86%) Git
1 45 (24.86%) Jenkins
2 43 (23.76%) GitLab
3 16 (8.84%) JIRA
4 11 (6.08%) MSI
5 7 (3.87%) Gatling
5 7 (3.87%) LoadRunner
6 6 (3.31%) JMeter
6 6 (3.31%) JUnit
7 5 (2.76%) Selenium
8 3 (1.66%) Claude Code
8 3 (1.66%) SonarQube
9 2 (1.10%) Cucumber
9 2 (1.10%) MLflow
9 2 (1.10%) Sonatype Nexus
9 2 (1.10%) Spinnaker
9 2 (1.10%) Visual Studio Team System
10 1 (0.55%) Atlassian Bamboo
10 1 (0.55%) Maven
10 1 (0.55%) NUnit
General
1 24 (13.26%) Public Sector
2 13 (7.18%) Social Skills
3 11 (6.08%) Finance
4 6 (3.31%) Banking
5 5 (2.76%) Military
6 4 (2.21%) Analytical Skills
6 4 (2.21%) Local Government
7 3 (1.66%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 3 (1.66%) Police
8 2 (1.10%) Aviation
9 1 (0.55%) Influencing Skills
9 1 (0.55%) Legal
9 1 (0.55%) Publishing
Job Titles
1 45 (24.86%) DevOps Engineer
2 37 (20.44%) Developer
3 20 (11.05%) Senior
4 17 (9.39%) Platform Engineer
5 15 (8.29%) Infrastructure Engineer
5 15 (8.29%) Site Reliability Engineer
6 14 (7.73%) GCP Engineer
6 14 (7.73%) Site Engineer
7 12 (6.63%) Architect
8 11 (6.08%) Cloud Engineer
8 11 (6.08%) Software Developer
9 10 (5.52%) Azure DevOps Engineer
9 10 (5.52%) Azure Engineer
9 10 (5.52%) Java Developer
10 9 (4.97%) Principal Engineer
10 9 (4.97%) Software Engineer
11 7 (3.87%) GCP DevOps
11 7 (3.87%) GCP DevOps Engineer
12 6 (3.31%) Cloud Platform Engineer
12 6 (3.31%) Senior Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 116 (64.09%) Terraform
2 25 (13.81%) REST
3 22 (12.15%) Spring Boot
4 20 (11.05%) Spring
5 18 (9.94%) RESTful
6 15 (8.29%) Kafka
7 14 (7.73%) React
8 12 (6.63%) CSS
8 12 (6.63%) CSS3
8 12 (6.63%) HTML
8 12 (6.63%) HTML5
9 11 (6.08%) .NET
9 11 (6.08%) .NET Core
9 11 (6.08%) .NET Framework
9 11 (6.08%) ATL
9 11 (6.08%) COM
9 11 (6.08%) GeoJSON
9 11 (6.08%) MFC
9 11 (6.08%) WPF
10 10 (5.52%) ARM Templates
Miscellaneous
1 49 (27.07%) Cloud Native
2 18 (9.94%) PKI
3 16 (8.84%) Data Centre
4 14 (7.73%) Onboarding
5 13 (7.18%) Product Ownership
6 12 (6.63%) Linux Command Line
7 10 (5.52%) Legacy Systems
8 9 (4.97%) Wiki
9 7 (3.87%) Enterprise Software
9 7 (3.87%) Public Cloud
10 6 (3.31%) Distributed Systems
10 6 (3.31%) Hybrid Cloud
11 4 (2.21%) Clustering
12 3 (1.66%) Enterprise Cloud
13 2 (1.10%) Private Cloud
14 1 (0.55%) Data Fabric
14 1 (0.55%) Data Protection Act
14 1 (0.55%) Learning Management System
14 1 (0.55%) Mobile App
14 1 (0.55%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 58 (32.04%) Linux
2 37 (20.44%) Windows
3 9 (4.97%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 6 (3.31%) 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
1 141 (77.90%) CI/CD
2 116 (64.09%) DevOps
3 110 (60.77%) Infrastructure as Code
4 97 (53.59%) Containerisation
5 58 (32.04%) Agile
5 58 (32.04%) DevSecOps
6 47 (25.97%) Platform Engineering
7 44 (24.31%) Site Reliability Engineering
8 36 (19.89%) Observability
9 34 (18.78%) Microservices
10 32 (17.68%) Problem-Solving
11 30 (16.57%) Software Engineering
11 30 (16.57%) Technical Leadership
12 29 (16.02%) Deployment Automation
13 28 (15.47%) Continuous Improvement
14 23 (12.71%) Infrastructure Engineering
15 22 (12.15%) Mentoring
15 22 (12.15%) Software Delivery
16 21 (11.60%) Test Automation
17 18 (9.94%) AI
Programming Languages
1 82 (45.30%) Python
2 58 (32.04%) Bash
3 39 (21.55%) Java
4 35 (19.34%) PowerShell
5 22 (12.15%) Bicep
5 22 (12.15%) JavaScript
6 20 (11.05%) C#
6 20 (11.05%) SQL
6 20 (11.05%) TypeScript
7 16 (8.84%) Go
8 7 (3.87%) Shell Script
9 3 (1.66%) Groovy
10 1 (0.55%) Kotlin
10 1 (0.55%) Rust
Qualifications
1 115 (63.54%) Security Cleared
2 66 (36.46%) DV Cleared
2 66 (36.46%) SC Cleared
3 15 (8.29%) AWS Certification
3 15 (8.29%) VCAP
4 7 (3.87%) Cisco Certification
4 7 (3.87%) Degree
5 6 (3.31%) CCNA
5 6 (3.31%) Computer Science Degree
6 5 (2.76%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
7 3 (1.66%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
8 2 (1.10%) CISSP
8 2 (1.10%) Master's Degree
8 2 (1.10%) MCSE
8 2 (1.10%) Microsoft Certification
9 1 (0.55%) (ISC)2 CCSP
9 1 (0.55%) CCSP
9 1 (0.55%) CISM
9 1 (0.55%) CompTIA Security+
9 1 (0.55%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 16 (8.84%) Accessibility
1 16 (8.84%) NCSC
1 16 (8.84%) WCAG
2 12 (6.63%) QA
3 2 (1.10%) ISO/IEC 27001
3 2 (1.10%) NIST
3 2 (1.10%) SLA
4 1 (0.55%) Data Quality
4 1 (0.55%) Government Security Classifications
4 1 (0.55%) HMG Security Policy Framework
4 1 (0.55%) JSP 440
System Software
1 104 (57.46%) Docker
2 30 (16.57%) 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%) VMware ESXi
8 4 (2.21%) Virtual Machines
9 3 (1.66%) VirtualBox
10 2 (1.10%) KVM
11 1 (0.55%) iptables
11 1 (0.55%) NFS
11 1 (0.55%) zsh
Systems Management
1 61 (33.70%) Ansible
2 21 (11.60%) Prometheus
3 20 (11.05%) 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%) Progress Chef
10 2 (1.10%) Cilium
10 2 (1.10%) Kustomize
10 2 (1.10%) linkerd
10 2 (1.10%) Nagios
10 2 (1.10%) Podman
10 2 (1.10%) Single Sign-On
11 1 (0.55%) Puppet
11 1 (0.55%) ZABBIX
Vendors
1 34 (18.78%) VMware
2 29 (16.02%) Microsoft
3 28 (15.47%) Google
4 14 (7.73%) Dynatrace
5 13 (7.18%) Splunk
6 12 (6.63%) Oracle
7 8 (4.42%) Red Hat
8 6 (3.31%) AppDynamics
8 6 (3.31%) New Relic
9 5 (2.76%) Databricks
10 4 (2.21%) CyberArk
10 4 (2.21%) SaltStack
10 4 (2.21%) Thales
11 3 (1.66%) Dell
11 3 (1.66%) webMethods
12 2 (1.10%) Atlassian
12 2 (1.10%) BiZZdesign
12 2 (1.10%) Cisco
12 2 (1.10%) IBM
13 1 (0.55%) Sparx