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

6 months to
22 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 35 60 44
Rank change year-on-year +25 -16 -6
Contract jobs citing Kubernetes 179 61 123
As % of all contract jobs in the South West 4.78% 3.16% 4.72%
As % of the Systems Management category 49.58% 22.76% 34.55%
Number of daily rates quoted 116 54 83
10th Percentile £406 £438 £475
25th Percentile £484 £507 £513
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £575 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year +4.55% - -
75th Percentile £658 £669 £630
90th Percentile £735 £700 £690
England median daily rate £545 £528 £573
% change year-on-year +3.32% -7.86% -4.58%
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% -24.14%

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 361 268 356
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the South West 9.64% 13.86% 13.67%
Number of daily rates quoted 235 202 245
10th Percentile £381 £235 £327
25th Percentile £450 £413 £460
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £556 £540 £538
Median % change year-on-year +2.96% +0.37% -2.18%
75th Percentile £675 £625 £613
90th Percentile £738 £695 £674
England median daily rate £525 £500 £525
% change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 20 6 8
10th Percentile £17.25 £16.15 £12.50
25th Percentile £51.00 £18.06 £14.75
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 £74.11
90th Percentile £100.00 £78.75 £74.44
England median hourly rate £67.24 £34.00 £46.18
% change year-on-year +97.75% -26.38% -12.04%

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 22 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 22 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 22 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% 24
Somerset +9 42 £475 -2.56% 25
Gloucestershire +19 38 £575 -12.38% 90
Wiltshire -6 24 £600 +4.35% 6
Dorset -1 19 £434 -21.14% 15
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 (6.70%) Confluence
2 10 (5.59%) Apache Spark
3 9 (5.03%) SharePoint
4 6 (3.35%) Apache
5 3 (1.68%) nginx
6 1 (0.56%) Apache Airflow
6 1 (0.56%) JBoss
6 1 (0.56%) Oracle Coherence
Business Applications
1 1 (0.56%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
Cloud Services
1 101 (56.42%) AWS
2 99 (55.31%) Azure
3 56 (31.28%) GCP
4 33 (18.44%) Azure DevOps
5 20 (11.17%) GitHub
6 16 (8.94%) Google Kubernetes Engine
7 15 (8.38%) Azure AKS
7 15 (8.38%) OpenShift
8 12 (6.70%) GitHub Actions
8 12 (6.70%) Serverless
9 9 (5.03%) AWS Lambda
10 8 (4.47%) Amazon EKS
10 8 (4.47%) AWS CloudFormation
11 7 (3.91%) Amazon S3
12 6 (3.35%) Azure Key Vault
12 6 (3.35%) Datadog
12 6 (3.35%) SaaS
13 5 (2.79%) Amazon EC2
14 4 (2.23%) Amazon SQS
15 3 (1.68%) Amazon ECS
Communications & Networking
1 37 (20.67%) DNS
2 29 (16.20%) Firewall
3 27 (15.08%) TCP/IP
4 24 (13.41%) DHCP
5 19 (10.61%) VSAN
6 8 (4.47%) VPN
7 5 (2.79%) VLAN
8 3 (1.68%) Network Security
9 2 (1.12%) Reverse Proxy
9 2 (1.12%) tcpdump
10 1 (0.56%) AMQP
10 1 (0.56%) Calico
10 1 (0.56%) IPsec
10 1 (0.56%) Kerberos
10 1 (0.56%) NAS
10 1 (0.56%) SAN
10 1 (0.56%) SSH
10 1 (0.56%) WireGuard
Database & Business Intelligence
1 11 (6.15%) Geospatial Data
2 7 (3.91%) Big Data
2 7 (3.91%) MongoDB
2 7 (3.91%) NoSQL
2 7 (3.91%) PostgreSQL
3 5 (2.79%) Amazon RDS
4 4 (2.23%) Elasticsearch
4 4 (2.23%) Flink
4 4 (2.23%) Relational Database
5 3 (1.68%) Apache Cassandra
5 3 (1.68%) BigQuery
5 3 (1.68%) HBase
5 3 (1.68%) InfluxDB
6 2 (1.12%) Data Lake
6 2 (1.12%) Metadata
6 2 (1.12%) Oracle Database
6 2 (1.12%) SQL Server
7 1 (0.56%) Chroma
7 1 (0.56%) Pinecone
7 1 (0.56%) TimescaleDB
Development Applications
1 45 (25.14%) Jenkins
2 44 (24.58%) Git
3 42 (23.46%) GitLab
4 16 (8.94%) JIRA
5 11 (6.15%) MSI
6 6 (3.35%) Gatling
6 6 (3.35%) JUnit
6 6 (3.35%) LoadRunner
7 5 (2.79%) JMeter
7 5 (2.79%) Selenium
8 3 (1.68%) Claude Code
8 3 (1.68%) SonarQube
9 2 (1.12%) Cucumber
9 2 (1.12%) MLflow
9 2 (1.12%) Sonatype Nexus
9 2 (1.12%) Spinnaker
9 2 (1.12%) Visual Studio Team System
10 1 (0.56%) Bitbucket
10 1 (0.56%) Gradle
10 1 (0.56%) NUnit
General
1 23 (12.85%) Public Sector
2 12 (6.70%) Social Skills
3 11 (6.15%) Finance
4 7 (3.91%) Banking
5 5 (2.79%) Military
6 4 (2.23%) Analytical Skills
6 4 (2.23%) Local Government
7 3 (1.68%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 3 (1.68%) Police
8 2 (1.12%) Aviation
9 1 (0.56%) Influencing Skills
9 1 (0.56%) Legal
9 1 (0.56%) Publishing
Job Titles
1 44 (24.58%) DevOps Engineer
2 37 (20.67%) Developer
3 20 (11.17%) Senior
4 17 (9.50%) Platform Engineer
5 15 (8.38%) Infrastructure Engineer
5 15 (8.38%) Site Reliability Engineer
6 14 (7.82%) GCP Engineer
6 14 (7.82%) Site Engineer
7 12 (6.70%) Architect
7 12 (6.70%) Software Developer
8 11 (6.15%) Cloud Engineer
9 10 (5.59%) Azure DevOps Engineer
9 10 (5.59%) Azure Engineer
10 9 (5.03%) Java Developer
11 8 (4.47%) Principal Engineer
11 8 (4.47%) Software Engineer
12 7 (3.91%) GCP DevOps
12 7 (3.91%) GCP DevOps Engineer
13 6 (3.35%) Cloud Platform Engineer
13 6 (3.35%) Test Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 116 (64.80%) Terraform
2 25 (13.97%) REST
3 21 (11.73%) Spring Boot
4 19 (10.61%) Spring
5 18 (10.06%) RESTful
6 15 (8.38%) Kafka
7 14 (7.82%) React
8 12 (6.70%) CSS
8 12 (6.70%) CSS3
8 12 (6.70%) HTML
8 12 (6.70%) HTML5
9 11 (6.15%) .NET
9 11 (6.15%) .NET Core
9 11 (6.15%) .NET Framework
9 11 (6.15%) ATL
9 11 (6.15%) COM
9 11 (6.15%) GeoJSON
9 11 (6.15%) MFC
9 11 (6.15%) WPF
10 10 (5.59%) ARM Templates
Miscellaneous
1 51 (28.49%) Cloud Native
2 18 (10.06%) PKI
3 16 (8.94%) Data Centre
4 15 (8.38%) Onboarding
5 12 (6.70%) Linux Command Line
5 12 (6.70%) Product Ownership
6 10 (5.59%) Legacy Systems
7 9 (5.03%) Wiki
8 7 (3.91%) Enterprise Software
8 7 (3.91%) Public Cloud
9 6 (3.35%) Hybrid Cloud
10 5 (2.79%) Distributed Systems
11 4 (2.23%) Clustering
12 3 (1.68%) Enterprise Cloud
13 2 (1.12%) AI Agents
13 2 (1.12%) Private Cloud
14 1 (0.56%) Data Fabric
14 1 (0.56%) Learning Management System
14 1 (0.56%) Mobile App
14 1 (0.56%) Security Posture
Operating Systems
1 56 (31.28%) Linux
2 37 (20.67%) Windows
3 7 (3.91%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 6 (3.35%) Unix
5 3 (1.68%) Rocky
5 3 (1.68%) Ubuntu
5 3 (1.68%) Windows Server
6 2 (1.12%) Debian
7 1 (0.56%) Android
7 1 (0.56%) CentOS
7 1 (0.56%) SUSE
Processes & Methodologies
1 139 (77.65%) CI/CD
2 114 (63.69%) DevOps
3 110 (61.45%) Infrastructure as Code
4 95 (53.07%) Containerisation
5 58 (32.40%) DevSecOps
6 55 (30.73%) Agile
7 47 (26.26%) Platform Engineering
8 44 (24.58%) Site Reliability Engineering
9 36 (20.11%) Observability
10 33 (18.44%) Microservices
11 31 (17.32%) Software Engineering
12 30 (16.76%) Problem-Solving
13 29 (16.20%) Technical Leadership
14 28 (15.64%) Deployment Automation
15 27 (15.08%) Continuous Improvement
16 23 (12.85%) Infrastructure Engineering
16 23 (12.85%) Software Delivery
17 22 (12.29%) Mentoring
18 20 (11.17%) Test Automation
19 19 (10.61%) AI
Programming Languages
1 82 (45.81%) Python
2 57 (31.84%) Bash
3 39 (21.79%) Java
4 34 (18.99%) PowerShell
5 21 (11.73%) Bicep
5 21 (11.73%) C#
5 21 (11.73%) JavaScript
6 20 (11.17%) TypeScript
7 19 (10.61%) SQL
8 15 (8.38%) Go
9 7 (3.91%) Shell Script
10 3 (1.68%) Groovy
11 1 (0.56%) Kotlin
11 1 (0.56%) Rust
Qualifications
1 114 (63.69%) Security Cleared
2 66 (36.87%) SC Cleared
3 65 (36.31%) DV Cleared
4 15 (8.38%) AWS Certification
4 15 (8.38%) VCAP
5 7 (3.91%) Cisco Certification
6 6 (3.35%) CCNA
6 6 (3.35%) Degree
7 5 (2.79%) Computer Science Degree
7 5 (2.79%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
8 3 (1.68%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
9 2 (1.12%) CISSP
9 2 (1.12%) Master's Degree
9 2 (1.12%) MCSE
9 2 (1.12%) Microsoft Certification
10 1 (0.56%) CCSP
10 1 (0.56%) CISM
10 1 (0.56%) ISTQB
10 1 (0.56%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
10 1 (0.56%) OSCP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 16 (8.94%) Accessibility
1 16 (8.94%) NCSC
1 16 (8.94%) WCAG
2 12 (6.70%) QA
3 2 (1.12%) ISO/IEC 27001
3 2 (1.12%) NIST
3 2 (1.12%) SLA
4 1 (0.56%) Data Quality
4 1 (0.56%) Government Security Classifications
4 1 (0.56%) HMG Security Policy Framework
4 1 (0.56%) JSP 440
System Software
1 102 (56.98%) Docker
2 30 (16.76%) VMware Infrastructure
3 22 (12.29%) Active Directory
4 20 (11.17%) vSphere
5 19 (10.61%) VMware NSX
6 17 (9.50%) Hyper-V
7 5 (2.79%) VMware ESXi
8 4 (2.23%) Virtual Machines
9 3 (1.68%) VirtualBox
10 2 (1.12%) KVM
11 1 (0.56%) iptables
11 1 (0.56%) NFS
11 1 (0.56%) zsh
Systems Management
1 61 (34.08%) Ansible
2 20 (11.17%) Prometheus
3 19 (10.61%) Grafana
4 15 (8.38%) VxRail
5 12 (6.70%) Argo
6 7 (3.91%) Istio
7 5 (2.79%) OPNET
8 4 (2.23%) PowerCLI
8 4 (2.23%) Proxmox
8 4 (2.23%) vCenter Server
9 3 (1.68%) Docker Swarm
10 2 (1.12%) Cilium
10 2 (1.12%) Kustomize
10 2 (1.12%) linkerd
10 2 (1.12%) Nagios
10 2 (1.12%) Podman
10 2 (1.12%) Progress Chef
10 2 (1.12%) Single Sign-On
11 1 (0.56%) HAProxy
11 1 (0.56%) Kubeflow
Vendors
1 34 (18.99%) VMware
2 30 (16.76%) Google
3 29 (16.20%) Microsoft
4 13 (7.26%) Dynatrace
5 12 (6.70%) Oracle
5 12 (6.70%) Splunk
6 7 (3.91%) Red Hat
7 5 (2.79%) AppDynamics
7 5 (2.79%) Databricks
7 5 (2.79%) New Relic
8 4 (2.23%) CyberArk
8 4 (2.23%) SaltStack
8 4 (2.23%) Thales
9 3 (1.68%) Dell
9 3 (1.68%) webMethods
10 2 (1.12%) Atlassian
10 2 (1.12%) BiZZdesign
10 2 (1.12%) Cisco
10 2 (1.12%) IBM
11 1 (0.56%) Sparx