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

6 months to
3 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 33 62 42
Rank change year-on-year +29 -20 -6
Contract jobs citing Kubernetes 181 56 126
As % of all contract jobs in the South West 4.95% 2.92% 4.68%
As % of the Systems Management category 47.38% 20.90% 34.71%
Number of daily rates quoted 117 48 89
10th Percentile £410 £427 £475
25th Percentile £488 £505 £519
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £575 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year +4.55% - -
75th Percentile £650 £655 £625
90th Percentile £738 £700 £657
England median daily rate £540 £525 £565
% change year-on-year +2.86% -7.08% -5.83%
Number of hourly rates quoted 6 3 6
10th Percentile £91.91 £78.96 £59.88
25th Percentile - £79.35 £66.31
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 -
90th Percentile £100.00 £82.37 £74.22
England median hourly rate £70.00 £67.00 £58.50
% change year-on-year +4.48% +14.53% -19.86%

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 382 268 363
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the South West 10.45% 13.97% 13.49%
Number of daily rates quoted 252 199 263
10th Percentile £332 £235 £214
25th Percentile £431 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £550 £538
Median % change year-on-year - +2.33% -2.27%
75th Percentile £664 £625 £600
90th Percentile £737 £693 £657
England median daily rate £525 £500 £525
% change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 25 8 8
10th Percentile £28.75 £16.80 £14.60
25th Percentile £50.00 £18.60 £45.88
Median hourly rate £75.00 £67.50 £70.75
Median % change year-on-year +11.11% -4.59% -9.29%
75th Percentile £95.00 £79.03 £74.00
90th Percentile £99.53 £80.89 £74.13
England median hourly rate £67.00 £44.48 £37.50
% change year-on-year +50.65% +18.60% -24.43%

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 3 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 3 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 3 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 +7 47 £575 +10.58% 46
Gloucestershire +14 38 £575 -11.54% 85
Somerset +5 37 £488 - 25
Wiltshire +4 31 £588 +2.17% 6
Dorset +5 19 £489 -11.14% 22
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
1 103 (56.91%) AWS
2 94 (51.93%) Azure
3 56 (30.94%) GCP
4 27 (14.92%) Azure DevOps
5 23 (12.71%) GitHub
6 17 (9.39%) Google Kubernetes Engine
7 14 (7.73%) GitHub Actions
8 13 (7.18%) OpenShift
9 11 (6.08%) Serverless
10 9 (4.97%) AWS CloudFormation
10 9 (4.97%) Azure AKS
11 7 (3.87%) AWS Lambda
11 7 (3.87%) Azure Key Vault
12 6 (3.31%) Amazon EKS
12 6 (3.31%) Datadog
12 6 (3.31%) SaaS
13 5 (2.76%) Amazon S3
14 3 (1.66%) Amazon EC2
15 2 (1.10%) Amazon SQS
15 2 (1.10%) PaaS
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
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
3 8 (4.42%) PostgreSQL
4 7 (3.87%) MongoDB
5 6 (3.31%) Big Data
6 4 (2.21%) Elasticsearch
6 4 (2.21%) Relational Database
7 3 (1.66%) Amazon RDS
7 3 (1.66%) Apache Cassandra
7 3 (1.66%) BigQuery
7 3 (1.66%) HBase
8 2 (1.10%) Data Lake
8 2 (1.10%) Flink
8 2 (1.10%) InfluxDB
8 2 (1.10%) Metadata
8 2 (1.10%) Oracle Database
9 1 (0.55%) CockroachDB
9 1 (0.55%) Dremio
9 1 (0.55%) DynamoDB
9 1 (0.55%) TimescaleDB
Development Applications
1 40 (22.10%) GitLab
2 39 (21.55%) 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 3 (1.66%) Claude Code
11 2 (1.10%) Cucumber
11 2 (1.10%) MLflow
11 2 (1.10%) SonarQube
11 2 (1.10%) Sonatype Nexus
11 2 (1.10%) Spinnaker
12 1 (0.55%) Burp Suite
12 1 (0.55%) Gradle
12 1 (0.55%) Postman
12 1 (0.55%) REST Assured
General
1 26 (14.36%) Public Sector
2 14 (7.73%) Social Skills
3 9 (4.97%) 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
8 1 (0.55%) Influencing Skills
8 1 (0.55%) Legal
8 1 (0.55%) Publishing
Job Titles
1 38 (20.99%) DevOps Engineer
2 36 (19.89%) Developer
3 23 (12.71%) Senior
4 17 (9.39%) Platform Engineer
5 15 (8.29%) GCP Engineer
5 15 (8.29%) Infrastructure Engineer
5 15 (8.29%) Site Reliability Engineer
6 14 (7.73%) Site Engineer
7 11 (6.08%) Architect
7 11 (6.08%) Performance Engineer
8 10 (5.52%) Cloud Engineer
8 10 (5.52%) Software Developer
8 10 (5.52%) Software Engineer
9 9 (4.97%) Java Developer
9 9 (4.97%) Principal Engineer
10 7 (3.87%) GCP DevOps
10 7 (3.87%) GCP DevOps Engineer
11 6 (3.31%) Lead
11 6 (3.31%) Senior Developer
11 6 (3.31%) Test Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 111 (61.33%) Terraform
2 23 (12.71%) 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 49 (27.07%) Cloud Native
2 18 (9.94%) PKI
3 16 (8.84%) Data Centre
4 13 (7.18%) Onboarding
5 12 (6.63%) Linux Command Line
6 10 (5.52%) Legacy Systems
7 8 (4.42%) Public Cloud
8 7 (3.87%) Product Ownership
9 6 (3.31%) Distributed Systems
9 6 (3.31%) Enterprise Software
9 6 (3.31%) Hybrid Cloud
10 4 (2.21%) Clustering
11 3 (1.66%) Wiki
12 2 (1.10%) Enterprise Cloud
12 2 (1.10%) Private Cloud
13 1 (0.55%) Data Protection Act
13 1 (0.55%) Learning Management System
13 1 (0.55%) Mobile App
13 1 (0.55%) Security Posture
13 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 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
1 137 (75.69%) CI/CD
2 113 (62.43%) DevOps
3 106 (58.56%) Infrastructure as Code
4 93 (51.38%) Containerisation
5 51 (28.18%) Agile
5 51 (28.18%) DevSecOps
6 46 (25.41%) Platform Engineering
7 43 (23.76%) Site Reliability Engineering
8 35 (19.34%) Microservices
9 32 (17.68%) Problem-Solving
10 31 (17.13%) Software Engineering
10 31 (17.13%) Technical Leadership
11 29 (16.02%) Observability
12 24 (13.26%) Continuous Improvement
12 24 (13.26%) Deployment Automation
12 24 (13.26%) Test Automation
13 23 (12.71%) Infrastructure Engineering
13 23 (12.71%) Mentoring
14 19 (10.50%) AI
14 19 (10.50%) Cybersecurity
Programming Languages
1 86 (47.51%) Python
2 52 (28.73%) Bash
3 38 (20.99%) Java
4 29 (16.02%) PowerShell
5 23 (12.71%) SQL
6 21 (11.60%) JavaScript
7 19 (10.50%) C#
7 19 (10.50%) TypeScript
8 17 (9.39%) Go
9 16 (8.84%) Bicep
10 7 (3.87%) Shell Script
11 3 (1.66%) Groovy
12 2 (1.10%) Rust
13 1 (0.55%) Kotlin
Qualifications
1 110 (60.77%) Security Cleared
2 64 (35.36%) SC Cleared
3 62 (34.25%) 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
10 2 (1.10%) CISSP
10 2 (1.10%) MCSE
10 2 (1.10%) Microsoft Certification
11 1 (0.55%) CCSP
11 1 (0.55%) CISM
11 1 (0.55%) ISTQB
11 1 (0.55%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
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 10 (5.52%) 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 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 60 (33.15%) 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%) 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 34 (18.78%) VMware
2 29 (16.02%) Google
3 24 (13.26%) 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