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

6 months to
10 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 36 56 36
Rank change year-on-year +20 -20 -1
Contract jobs citing Kubernetes 171 58 134
As % of all contract jobs in the South West 4.76% 3.04% 4.81%
As % of the Systems Management category 39.40% 21.32% 34.10%
Number of daily rates quoted 107 50 92
10th Percentile £406 £431 £475
25th Percentile £469 £509 £513
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £575 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year +4.55% - -
75th Percentile £650 £663 £625
90th Percentile £738 £700 £675
England median daily rate £538 £537 £550
% change year-on-year +0.09% -2.41% -10.16%
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 434 272 393
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the South West 12.09% 14.28% 14.10%
Number of daily rates quoted 278 202 302
10th Percentile £322 £252 £226
25th Percentile £429 £438 £450
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £550 £538
Median % change year-on-year - +2.33% -2.27%
75th Percentile £634 £626 £625
90th Percentile £730 £700 £699
England median daily rate £525 £513 £525
% change year-on-year +2.44% -2.38% -6.67%
Number of hourly rates quoted 22 9 9
10th Percentile £20.13 £17.13 £62.20
25th Percentile £47.38 £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 £97.25 £78.70 £74.44
90th Percentile £99.88 £80.59 £77.60
England median hourly rate £65.45 £54.50 £37.50
% change year-on-year +20.09% +45.33% -25.00%

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 10 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 10 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 10 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 +6 46 £563 +7.14% 46
Gloucestershire +6 36 £575 -15.29% 69
Somerset +2 32 £475 -2.56% 8
Wiltshire 0 26 £575 -4.17% 3
Dorset +6 22 £540 -1.82% 13
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 (7.02%) Confluence
2 11 (6.43%) Apache Spark
3 6 (3.51%) Apache
4 2 (1.17%) 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 95 (55.56%) AWS
2 86 (50.29%) Azure
3 44 (25.73%) GCP
4 27 (15.79%) Azure DevOps
5 23 (13.45%) GitHub
6 15 (8.77%) GitHub Actions
6 15 (8.77%) Google Kubernetes Engine
6 15 (8.77%) Serverless
7 10 (5.85%) OpenShift
8 9 (5.26%) AWS Lambda
8 9 (5.26%) Azure Key Vault
9 8 (4.68%) Amazon S3
9 8 (4.68%) AWS CloudFormation
9 8 (4.68%) Datadog
10 7 (4.09%) Amazon EKS
11 6 (3.51%) Azure AKS
11 6 (3.51%) SaaS
12 4 (2.34%) Amazon ECS
13 3 (1.75%) Amazon EC2
14 2 (1.17%) PaaS
Communications & Networking
1 28 (16.37%) DNS
2 24 (14.04%) Firewall
3 23 (13.45%) TCP/IP
4 21 (12.28%) DHCP
5 14 (8.19%) VSAN
6 6 (3.51%) VPN
7 4 (2.34%) Reverse Proxy
8 3 (1.75%) VLAN
9 2 (1.17%) Network Security
10 1 (0.58%) AMQP
10 1 (0.58%) Calico
10 1 (0.58%) IPsec
10 1 (0.58%) Kerberos
10 1 (0.58%) NAS
10 1 (0.58%) SAN
10 1 (0.58%) SSH
10 1 (0.58%) WireGuard
Database & Business Intelligence
1 12 (7.02%) NoSQL
2 11 (6.43%) Geospatial Data
3 10 (5.85%) PostgreSQL
4 7 (4.09%) MongoDB
4 7 (4.09%) Relational Database
5 6 (3.51%) Big Data
6 4 (2.34%) Elasticsearch
6 4 (2.34%) Flink
7 3 (1.75%) Amazon RDS
7 3 (1.75%) Apache Cassandra
7 3 (1.75%) HBase
7 3 (1.75%) Redis
8 2 (1.17%) BigQuery
8 2 (1.17%) CockroachDB
8 2 (1.17%) Data Lake
8 2 (1.17%) InfluxDB
8 2 (1.17%) Metadata
8 2 (1.17%) Oracle Database
9 1 (0.58%) Dremio
9 1 (0.58%) TimescaleDB
Development Applications
1 35 (20.47%) GitLab
2 34 (19.88%) Git
3 33 (19.30%) Jenkins
4 15 (8.77%) JIRA
5 14 (8.19%) Gatling
6 12 (7.02%) LoadRunner
7 11 (6.43%) JMeter
7 11 (6.43%) MSI
8 6 (3.51%) JUnit
9 5 (2.92%) Selenium
10 3 (1.75%) SonarQube
11 2 (1.17%) Cucumber
11 2 (1.17%) MLflow
11 2 (1.17%) Sonatype Nexus
11 2 (1.17%) Spinnaker
12 1 (0.58%) Artifactory
12 1 (0.58%) Bitbucket
12 1 (0.58%) Claude Code
12 1 (0.58%) Gradle
12 1 (0.58%) REST Assured
General
1 25 (14.62%) Public Sector
2 13 (7.60%) Social Skills
3 5 (2.92%) Analytical Skills
3 5 (2.92%) Finance
3 5 (2.92%) Military
4 3 (1.75%) Inclusion and Diversity
4 3 (1.75%) Legal
4 3 (1.75%) Local Government
4 3 (1.75%) Police
5 2 (1.17%) Aviation
5 2 (1.17%) Banking
6 1 (0.58%) Aerospace
6 1 (0.58%) Influencing Skills
6 1 (0.58%) Publishing
Job Titles
1 38 (22.22%) DevOps Engineer
2 35 (20.47%) Developer
3 21 (12.28%) Senior
4 15 (8.77%) Infrastructure Engineer
5 14 (8.19%) Platform Engineer
5 14 (8.19%) Site Reliability Engineer
6 13 (7.60%) GCP Engineer
6 13 (7.60%) Site Engineer
7 12 (7.02%) Software Engineer
8 11 (6.43%) Architect
8 11 (6.43%) Java Developer
8 11 (6.43%) Performance Engineer
9 9 (5.26%) Principal Engineer
10 8 (4.68%) Cloud Engineer
11 7 (4.09%) Backend Developer
11 7 (4.09%) GCP DevOps
11 7 (4.09%) GCP DevOps Engineer
12 6 (3.51%) Lead
12 6 (3.51%) Senior Developer
12 6 (3.51%) Software Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 26 (15.20%) REST
2 23 (13.45%) Spring Boot
3 21 (12.28%) RESTful
3 21 (12.28%) Spring
4 19 (11.11%) Kafka
5 12 (7.02%) React
6 11 (6.43%) .NET
6 11 (6.43%) .NET Core
6 11 (6.43%) .NET Framework
6 11 (6.43%) ATL
6 11 (6.43%) COM
6 11 (6.43%) CSS
6 11 (6.43%) CSS3
6 11 (6.43%) GeoJSON
6 11 (6.43%) HTML
6 11 (6.43%) HTML5
6 11 (6.43%) MFC
6 11 (6.43%) WPF
7 9 (5.26%) RabbitMQ
8 7 (4.09%) Quarkus
Miscellaneous
1 43 (25.15%) Cloud Native
2 17 (9.94%) Data Centre
2 17 (9.94%) PKI
3 13 (7.60%) Onboarding
4 10 (5.85%) Legacy Systems
4 10 (5.85%) Linux Command Line
5 7 (4.09%) Distributed Systems
5 7 (4.09%) Public Cloud
6 6 (3.51%) Enterprise Software
7 5 (2.92%) Product Ownership
8 4 (2.34%) Clustering
9 2 (1.17%) Hybrid Cloud
9 2 (1.17%) 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%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 55 (32.16%) Linux
2 37 (21.64%) Windows
3 10 (5.85%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 5 (2.92%) Rocky
4 5 (2.92%) Ubuntu
5 4 (2.34%) Debian
5 4 (2.34%) Unix
6 3 (1.75%) Windows Server
7 1 (0.58%) Android
7 1 (0.58%) CentOS
7 1 (0.58%) SUSE
Processes & Methodologies
1 128 (74.85%) CI/CD
2 107 (62.57%) DevOps
3 90 (52.63%) Containerisation
4 88 (51.46%) Infrastructure as Code
5 44 (25.73%) Agile
6 42 (24.56%) Microservices
7 41 (23.98%) DevSecOps
8 37 (21.64%) Site Reliability Engineering
9 36 (21.05%) Platform Engineering
10 33 (19.30%) Technical Leadership
11 31 (18.13%) Problem-Solving
12 29 (16.96%) Software Engineering
13 26 (15.20%) Observability
14 24 (14.04%) Test Automation
15 23 (13.45%) Mentoring
16 22 (12.87%) Infrastructure Engineering
17 20 (11.70%) Deployment Automation
18 19 (11.11%) Cybersecurity
18 19 (11.11%) Full-Stack Development
19 18 (10.53%) Continuous Improvement
Programming Languages
1 85 (49.71%) Python
2 47 (27.49%) Bash
3 38 (22.22%) Java
4 28 (16.37%) SQL
5 25 (14.62%) PowerShell
6 22 (12.87%) JavaScript
7 19 (11.11%) Go
7 19 (11.11%) TypeScript
8 15 (8.77%) C#
9 13 (7.60%) Bicep
10 4 (2.34%) Shell Script
11 3 (1.75%) Groovy
11 3 (1.75%) Rust
12 1 (0.58%) Kotlin
Qualifications
1 98 (57.31%) Security Cleared
2 60 (35.09%) SC Cleared
3 54 (31.58%) DV Cleared
4 11 (6.43%) VCAP
5 10 (5.85%) AWS Certification
6 8 (4.68%) Degree
7 7 (4.09%) Cisco Certification
7 7 (4.09%) Computer Science Degree
8 6 (3.51%) CCNA
9 3 (1.75%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
9 3 (1.75%) Microsoft Certification
10 2 (1.17%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
10 2 (1.17%) CISSP
10 2 (1.17%) MCSE
10 2 (1.17%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
11 1 (0.58%) AWS Certified Developer
11 1 (0.58%) Azure Certification
11 1 (0.58%) CCSP
11 1 (0.58%) CISM
11 1 (0.58%) ISTQB
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 16 (9.36%) Accessibility
1 16 (9.36%) WCAG
2 15 (8.77%) NCSC
3 11 (6.43%) QA
4 2 (1.17%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 1 (0.58%) Data Quality
5 1 (0.58%) Government Security Classifications
5 1 (0.58%) NIST
System Software
1 103 (60.23%) Docker
2 23 (13.45%) VMware Infrastructure
3 21 (12.28%) Active Directory
4 17 (9.94%) Hyper-V
5 15 (8.77%) vSphere
6 14 (8.19%) VMware NSX
7 5 (2.92%) Virtual Machines
8 3 (1.75%) VirtualBox
9 2 (1.17%) 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 94 (54.97%) Terraform
2 48 (28.07%) Ansible
3 26 (15.20%) Prometheus
4 22 (12.87%) Grafana
5 14 (8.19%) VxRail
6 12 (7.02%) Argo
7 6 (3.51%) Istio
8 4 (2.34%) OPNET
8 4 (2.34%) Podman
8 4 (2.34%) Proxmox
9 3 (1.75%) Docker Swarm
9 3 (1.75%) Progress Chef
9 3 (1.75%) Single Sign-On
10 2 (1.17%) Cilium
10 2 (1.17%) Kustomize
10 2 (1.17%) linkerd
10 2 (1.17%) Nagios
11 1 (0.58%) Kubeflow
11 1 (0.58%) Puppet
11 1 (0.58%) ZABBIX
Vendors
1 27 (15.79%) VMware
2 23 (13.45%) Google
2 23 (13.45%) Microsoft
3 17 (9.94%) Dynatrace
4 16 (9.36%) Splunk
5 12 (7.02%) Oracle
6 11 (6.43%) AppDynamics
6 11 (6.43%) New Relic
6 11 (6.43%) Red Hat
7 7 (4.09%) Databricks
8 4 (2.34%) CyberArk
8 4 (2.34%) Thales
9 3 (1.75%) Dell
10 2 (1.17%) BiZZdesign
10 2 (1.17%) Cisco
10 2 (1.17%) IBM
11 1 (0.58%) Cloudera
11 1 (0.58%) Denodo
11 1 (0.58%) Informatica
11 1 (0.58%) Sparx