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 19 May 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
19 May 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 32 40 67
Rank change year-on-year +8 +27 -30
Contract jobs citing Kubernetes 149 79 93
As % of all contract jobs in the South West 4.44% 4.66% 2.94%
As % of the Systems Management category 37.16% 26.25% 22.85%
Number of daily rates quoted 86 70 69
10th Percentile £400 £463 £473
25th Percentile £450 £518 £513
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £560 £600 £550
Median % change year-on-year -6.67% +9.09% -
75th Percentile £617 £661 £581
90th Percentile £714 £732 £641
England median daily rate £525 £550 £550
% change year-on-year -4.55% - -12.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 3 2 6
10th Percentile £79.80 £79.13 £59.88
25th Percentile £81.00 £79.77 £65.94
Median hourly rate £83.00 £80.83 £74.44
Median % change year-on-year +2.68% +8.58% +1.97%
75th Percentile £86.00 £81.90 £76.74
90th Percentile £87.80 £82.53 £77.75
England median hourly rate £65.00 £78.85 £62.00
% change year-on-year -17.56% +27.18% -15.07%

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 401 301 407
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the South West 11.95% 17.77% 12.88%
Number of daily rates quoted 275 236 318
10th Percentile £306 £258 £205
25th Percentile £440 £425 £407
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £550 £525
Median % change year-on-year - +4.76% -4.55%
75th Percentile £613 £625 £588
90th Percentile £738 £700 £696
England median daily rate £507 £525 £520
% change year-on-year -3.43% +0.96% -9.57%
Number of hourly rates quoted 12 4 15
10th Percentile £46.05 £31.15 -
25th Percentile £49.13 £56.13 -
Median hourly rate £51.00 £74.35 £40.00
Median % change year-on-year -31.41% +85.88% -45.21%
75th Percentile £58.00 £79.77 £72.85
90th Percentile £82.60 £81.68 £76.28
England median hourly rate £56.50 £28.00 £25.77
% change year-on-year +101.79% +8.67% -50.75%

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 19 May 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
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 19 May 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 52 £550 +3.77% 20
Gloucestershire -3 37 £575 -6.50% 44
Wiltshire +5 34 £545 -9.17% 4
Dorset +9 20 £369 -32.91% 1
Somerset - 2 £525 - 4
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 11 (7.38%) Apache Spark
2 9 (6.04%) Apache
3 2 (1.34%) nginx
4 1 (0.67%) Apache Airflow
Business Applications
1 5 (3.36%) Maximo
Cloud Services
1 67 (44.97%) AWS
2 53 (35.57%) Azure
3 33 (22.15%) GCP
4 25 (16.78%) GitHub
5 20 (13.42%) Azure DevOps
6 16 (10.74%) OpenShift
6 16 (10.74%) Serverless
7 14 (9.40%) GitHub Actions
8 13 (8.72%) Google Kubernetes Engine
9 11 (7.38%) Amazon EKS
10 10 (6.71%) Amazon ECS
10 10 (6.71%) AWS CloudFormation
10 10 (6.71%) AWS Lambda
11 9 (6.04%) Amazon S3
11 9 (6.04%) Azure AKS
11 9 (6.04%) Azure Key Vault
12 7 (4.70%) Datadog
13 5 (3.36%) Azure ExpressRoute
13 5 (3.36%) Azure Monitor
13 5 (3.36%) Azure Sentinel
Communications & Networking
1 10 (6.71%) DNS
1 10 (6.71%) VPN
2 6 (4.03%) Reverse Proxy
3 5 (3.36%) Firewall
4 4 (2.68%) TCP/IP
5 2 (1.34%) DHCP
5 2 (1.34%) NAS
5 2 (1.34%) Network Security
5 2 (1.34%) SAN
6 1 (0.67%) AMQP
6 1 (0.67%) HTTP
6 1 (0.67%) IPsec
6 1 (0.67%) Kerberos
6 1 (0.67%) LAN
6 1 (0.67%) SSH
6 1 (0.67%) VLAN
6 1 (0.67%) WAN
6 1 (0.67%) WireGuard
Database & Business Intelligence
1 15 (10.07%) NoSQL
2 10 (6.71%) MongoDB
3 9 (6.04%) PostgreSQL
4 8 (5.37%) Relational Database
5 7 (4.70%) Elasticsearch
6 6 (4.03%) Flink
7 4 (2.68%) Big Data
7 4 (2.68%) Redis
8 2 (1.34%) Amazon RDS
8 2 (1.34%) BigQuery
8 2 (1.34%) CockroachDB
8 2 (1.34%) Oracle Database
9 1 (0.67%) Apache Cassandra
9 1 (0.67%) Hadoop
9 1 (0.67%) HBase
9 1 (0.67%) InfluxDB
9 1 (0.67%) RDBMS
9 1 (0.67%) TimescaleDB
Development Applications
1 39 (26.17%) GitLab
2 27 (18.12%) Jenkins
3 20 (13.42%) Git
4 14 (9.40%) Gatling
5 12 (8.05%) LoadRunner
6 11 (7.38%) JMeter
7 7 (4.70%) Sonatype Nexus
8 4 (2.68%) Artifactory
8 4 (2.68%) SonarQube
9 3 (2.01%) Cucumber
9 3 (2.01%) JUnit
9 3 (2.01%) Selenium
10 2 (1.34%) Bitbucket
10 2 (1.34%) MLflow
11 1 (0.67%) Burp Suite
11 1 (0.67%) Gradle
11 1 (0.67%) Postman
11 1 (0.67%) REST Assured
11 1 (0.67%) Snyk
11 1 (0.67%) Spinnaker
General
1 12 (8.05%) Social Skills
2 10 (6.71%) Analytical Skills
3 7 (4.70%) Public Sector
4 5 (3.36%) Banking
5 4 (2.68%) Finance
6 3 (2.01%) Aerospace
6 3 (2.01%) Legal
7 1 (0.67%) Influencing Skills
7 1 (0.67%) Military
7 1 (0.67%) Presentation Skills
Job Titles
1 53 (35.57%) DevOps Engineer
2 24 (16.11%) Developer
3 16 (10.74%) GCP Engineer
3 16 (10.74%) Java Developer
4 15 (10.07%) Senior
5 12 (8.05%) Infrastructure Engineer
5 12 (8.05%) Site Reliability Engineer
6 11 (7.38%) Performance Engineer
6 11 (7.38%) Site Engineer
7 10 (6.71%) Software Engineer
8 9 (6.04%) Backend Developer
8 9 (6.04%) GCP DevOps
8 9 (6.04%) GCP DevOps Engineer
9 8 (5.37%) Azure DevOps Engineer
9 8 (5.37%) Azure Engineer
10 7 (4.70%) Platform Engineer
11 5 (3.36%) Administrator
11 5 (3.36%) Cloud Engineer
11 5 (3.36%) Python Developer
12 4 (2.68%) Senior DevOps Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 22 (14.77%) Spring
1 22 (14.77%) Spring Boot
2 20 (13.42%) Kafka
3 13 (8.72%) RESTful
4 12 (8.05%) REST
5 9 (6.04%) React
6 8 (5.37%) Elastic Stack
7 7 (4.70%) Apache NiFi
8 6 (4.03%) gRPC
8 6 (4.03%) RabbitMQ
8 6 (4.03%) WebSockets
9 5 (3.36%) ARM Templates
9 5 (3.36%) Flask
9 5 (3.36%) Java Concurrency
9 5 (3.36%) Keycloak
9 5 (3.36%) Node.js
10 4 (2.68%) FastAPI
10 4 (2.68%) GraphQL
11 3 (2.01%) Quarkus
11 3 (2.01%) Vue
Miscellaneous
1 20 (13.42%) Cloud Native
2 10 (6.71%) Enterprise Software
3 7 (4.70%) Hybrid Cloud
4 5 (3.36%) Onboarding
4 5 (3.36%) Product Ownership
5 4 (2.68%) Public Cloud
6 3 (2.01%) Distributed Systems
6 3 (2.01%) Linux Command Line
6 3 (2.01%) Private Cloud
7 2 (1.34%) Data Centre
8 1 (0.67%) Algorithms
8 1 (0.67%) Client/Server
8 1 (0.67%) Cloud Security Posture
8 1 (0.67%) Clustering
8 1 (0.67%) Mobile App
8 1 (0.67%) PKI
8 1 (0.67%) Replication
8 1 (0.67%) Security Posture
8 1 (0.67%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 37 (24.83%) Linux
2 10 (6.71%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
3 9 (6.04%) Windows
4 7 (4.70%) Ubuntu
5 5 (3.36%) Rocky
6 4 (2.68%) Debian
7 3 (2.01%) Unix
8 2 (1.34%) Windows Server
9 1 (0.67%) CentOS
9 1 (0.67%) SUSE
9 1 (0.67%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 102 (68.46%) CI/CD
2 101 (67.79%) DevOps
3 68 (45.64%) Containerisation
4 49 (32.89%) Infrastructure as Code
5 28 (18.79%) Site Reliability Engineering
6 27 (18.12%) Microservices
7 26 (17.45%) Agile
8 24 (16.11%) Infrastructure Engineering
8 24 (16.11%) Problem-Solving
9 22 (14.77%) Observability
9 22 (14.77%) Software Engineering
10 20 (13.42%) Continuous Improvement
11 19 (12.75%) Cloud Security
12 18 (12.08%) Analytics
13 14 (9.40%) Data Engineering
14 13 (8.72%) DevSecOps
15 12 (8.05%) Code Quality
15 12 (8.05%) High Availability
15 12 (8.05%) Technical Leadership
16 11 (7.38%) Test Automation
Programming Languages
1 63 (42.28%) Python
2 33 (22.15%) Java
3 31 (20.81%) SQL
4 27 (18.12%) Bash
5 20 (13.42%) Go
6 13 (8.72%) JavaScript
7 11 (7.38%) PowerShell
8 7 (4.70%) Bicep
9 5 (3.36%) TypeScript
10 2 (1.34%) Groovy
10 2 (1.34%) Ruby
10 2 (1.34%) Rust
10 2 (1.34%) Shell Script
11 1 (0.67%) C#
11 1 (0.67%) PHP
Qualifications
1 68 (45.64%) Security Cleared
2 45 (30.20%) SC Cleared
3 34 (22.82%) DV Cleared
4 10 (6.71%) Degree
5 9 (6.04%) Computer Science Degree
6 8 (5.37%) Azure Certification
7 6 (4.03%) Microsoft Certification
8 5 (3.36%) CISM
8 5 (3.36%) CISSP
8 5 (3.36%) ISO 27001 Lead Implementer
9 3 (2.01%) AWS Certification
10 2 (1.34%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
10 2 (1.34%) BPSS Clearance
10 2 (1.34%) Master's Degree
11 1 (0.67%) ISTQB
11 1 (0.67%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 10 (6.71%) QA
2 5 (3.36%) ISO/IEC 27001
2 5 (3.36%) NIST
2 5 (3.36%) NIST 800
3 2 (1.34%) Accessibility
3 2 (1.34%) Data Quality
3 2 (1.34%) NCSC
3 2 (1.34%) WCAG
System Software
1 75 (50.34%) Docker
2 5 (3.36%) VMware Infrastructure
3 3 (2.01%) Active Directory
3 3 (2.01%) Hyper-V
3 3 (2.01%) Virtual Machines
4 1 (0.67%) iptables
4 1 (0.67%) KVM
4 1 (0.67%) NFS
4 1 (0.67%) VirtualBox
4 1 (0.67%) VMware ESXi
Systems Management
1 66 (44.30%) Terraform
2 31 (20.81%) Prometheus
3 28 (18.79%) Ansible
4 26 (17.45%) Grafana
5 12 (8.05%) Argo
6 5 (3.36%) Istio
7 4 (2.68%) Nagios
7 4 (2.68%) Podman
8 2 (1.34%) Cilium
8 2 (1.34%) Kibana
8 2 (1.34%) logstash
8 2 (1.34%) Nessus
8 2 (1.34%) Packer
8 2 (1.34%) Progress Chef
8 2 (1.34%) Puppet
8 2 (1.34%) Single Sign-On
9 1 (0.67%) Dell DRAC
9 1 (0.67%) Docker Swarm
9 1 (0.67%) linkerd
9 1 (0.67%) VxRail
Vendors
1 21 (14.09%) Red Hat
2 16 (10.74%) Google
2 16 (10.74%) Microsoft
3 15 (10.07%) Dynatrace
3 15 (10.07%) Splunk
4 11 (7.38%) AppDynamics
4 11 (7.38%) New Relic
5 10 (6.71%) VMware
6 8 (5.37%) Databricks
7 5 (3.36%) IBM
8 4 (2.68%) Dell
8 4 (2.68%) Oracle
9 1 (0.67%) BeyondTrust
9 1 (0.67%) Broadcom
9 1 (0.67%) Checkmarx
9 1 (0.67%) Cisco
9 1 (0.67%) Cloudera
9 1 (0.67%) EMC
9 1 (0.67%) Thales
9 1 (0.67%) Veracode