DNS Contract Job Trends in England

Domain Name System (DNS)
UK > England

The table below provides summary statistics and contractor rates for jobs advertised in England requiring DNS skills. It covers contract job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 10 March 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
10 Mar 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 133 113 130
Rank change year-on-year -20 +17 -5
Contract jobs citing DNS 725 595 696
As % of all contract jobs in England 2.00% 2.40% 1.83%
As % of the Communications & Networking category 20.00% 17.84% 12.98%
Number of daily rates quoted 462 405 458
10th Percentile £226 £250 £198
25th Percentile £400 £385 £311
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £515 £525 £456
Median % change year-on-year -2.00% +15.07% -13.10%
75th Percentile £612 £606 £573
90th Percentile £688 £675 £650
UK median daily rate £513 £525 £465
% change year-on-year -2.38% +12.90% -11.43%
Number of hourly rates quoted 32 9 24
10th Percentile £12.74 £17.26 £20.98
25th Percentile £20.56 £23.59 £25.00
Median hourly rate £33.50 £80.68 £40.00
Median % change year-on-year -58.48% +101.69% -4.48%
75th Percentile £74.26 £81.35 £42.19
90th Percentile £75.00 £82.48 £65.25
UK median hourly rate £33.50 £39.05 £40.00
% change year-on-year -14.20% -2.39% -4.48%

All Communications and Computer Networking Skills
England

DNS falls under the Communications and Computer Networking category. For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all contract job vacancies requiring communications or computer networking skills in England.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for communications or computer networking skills 3,625 3,336 5,363
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 10.02% 13.48% 14.08%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,337 2,038 3,222
10th Percentile £204 £210 £205
25th Percentile £363 £370 £338
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £475
Median % change year-on-year - +5.26% -9.52%
75th Percentile £588 £600 £600
90th Percentile £675 £675 £700
UK median daily rate £481 £500 £475
% change year-on-year -3.88% +5.26% -9.09%
Number of hourly rates quoted 161 112 379
10th Percentile £15.50 £15.01 £14.27
25th Percentile £20.50 £21.46 £19.71
Median hourly rate £40.54 £35.00 £40.00
Median % change year-on-year +15.83% -12.50% +110.53%
75th Percentile £65.00 £65.00 £65.00
90th Percentile £75.00 £75.00 £73.05
UK median hourly rate £40.54 £35.00 £40.00
% change year-on-year +15.83% -12.50% +110.53%

DNS
Job Vacancy Trend in England

Historical trend showing the proportion of contract IT job postings citing DNS relative to all contract IT jobs advertised in England.

DNS job vacancy trend in England

DNS
Daily Rate Trend in England

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in England citing DNS.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in England citing DNS

DNS
Daily Rate Histogram in England

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing DNS in England over the 6 months to 10 March 2026.

Daily rate histogram for DNS in England

DNS
Hourly Rate Trend in England

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in England citing DNS.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in England citing DNS

DNS
Hourly Rate Histogram in England

Hourly rate distribution of jobs citing DNS in England over the 6 months to 10 March 2026.

Hourly rate histogram for DNS in England

DNS
Contract Job Locations in England

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing DNS within the England region over the 6 months to 10 March 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
London -28 227 £519 -1.23% 58
North of England -10 201 £450 -5.26% 74
South East +11 148 £525 -3.67% 89
North West +18 131 £569 +20.05% 40
Midlands +10 106 £375 -17.36% 30
West Midlands +11 101 £375 -11.76% 19
Yorkshire -33 72 £447 -14.95% 25
South West -40 54 £684 +25.00% 24
East of England -34 38 £475 +5.56% 35
North East -22 6 £411 +21.70% 11
East Midlands -36 4 £325 -41.96% 11
DNS
UK

DNS
Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities in England 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 92 (12.69%) Microsoft Exchange
2 49 (6.76%) SharePoint
3 25 (3.45%) Skype for Business
4 14 (1.93%) Confluence
5 11 (1.52%) nginx
6 5 (0.69%) Apache
7 4 (0.55%) IIS
8 3 (0.41%) Exchange Server 2010
8 3 (0.41%) SharePoint Server
9 2 (0.28%) Exchange Server 2013
9 2 (0.28%) WordPress
10 1 (0.14%) Traefik
Applications
1 29 (4.00%) Microsoft Office
2 16 (2.21%) MS Visio
3 1 (0.14%) Microsoft Excel
3 1 (0.14%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 1 (0.14%) Spreadsheet
Business Applications
1 2 (0.28%) SystmOne
2 1 (0.14%) Cloudability
2 1 (0.14%) Remedy ITSM
Cloud Services
1 249 (34.34%) Azure
2 131 (18.07%) AWS
3 125 (17.24%) Microsoft 365
4 123 (16.97%) Entra ID
5 68 (9.38%) GCP
6 53 (7.31%) GitHub
7 40 (5.52%) IaaS
8 35 (4.83%) AWS CloudFormation
8 35 (4.83%) Virtual Private Cloud
9 29 (4.00%) Serverless
10 28 (3.86%) Amazon S3
11 27 (3.72%) AWS Lambda
11 27 (3.72%) Route 53
11 27 (3.72%) SaaS
12 26 (3.59%) Amazon EC2
13 25 (3.45%) PaaS
14 24 (3.31%) Amazon CloudWatch
15 22 (3.03%) Amazon EKS
15 22 (3.03%) OpenShift
16 20 (2.76%) Amazon ECS
Communications & Networking
1 322 (44.41%) DHCP
2 215 (29.66%) Firewall
3 204 (28.14%) TCP/IP
4 170 (23.45%) VPN
5 93 (12.83%) WAN
6 85 (11.72%) LAN
7 77 (10.62%) Network Security
8 76 (10.48%) SSL
9 68 (9.38%) BIG-IP
10 66 (9.10%) HTTP
11 64 (8.83%) BGP
11 64 (8.83%) VLAN
12 50 (6.90%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
13 48 (6.62%) Wi-Fi
14 40 (5.52%) F5 BIG-IP GTM
15 39 (5.38%) DMZ
15 39 (5.38%) Wireshark
16 37 (5.10%) OSPF
17 36 (4.97%) Kerberos
18 31 (4.28%) Wireless
Database & Business Intelligence
1 21 (2.90%) SQL Server
2 15 (2.07%) Elasticsearch
3 13 (1.79%) Amazon RDS
4 12 (1.66%) PostgreSQL
5 7 (0.97%) DynamoDB
5 7 (0.97%) MongoDB
6 6 (0.83%) Amazon Aurora
6 6 (0.83%) Redis
7 5 (0.69%) Azure SQL Database
7 5 (0.69%) Data Hub
7 5 (0.69%) MySQL
8 4 (0.55%) DocumentDB
8 4 (0.55%) NoSQL
8 4 (0.55%) Relational Database
9 3 (0.41%) BigQuery
9 3 (0.41%) Power BI
10 1 (0.14%) Apache Cassandra
10 1 (0.14%) CouchDB
10 1 (0.14%) Electronic Patient Records
10 1 (0.14%) Oracle Reports
Development Applications
1 57 (7.86%) Jenkins
2 34 (4.69%) JIRA
3 32 (4.41%) GitLab
4 31 (4.28%) Fiddler
5 29 (4.00%) Git
6 8 (1.10%) Bitbucket
7 7 (0.97%) SonarQube
7 7 (0.97%) Terragrunt
8 6 (0.83%) Browser DevTools
9 5 (0.69%) Chocolatey
10 4 (0.55%) CircleCI
11 2 (0.28%) Sonatype Nexus
11 2 (0.28%) Subversion
12 1 (0.14%) Artifactory
12 1 (0.14%) Atlassian Bamboo
12 1 (0.14%) GCC
12 1 (0.14%) MSI
12 1 (0.14%) Octopus Deploy
12 1 (0.14%) TeamCity
12 1 (0.14%) Travis CI
General
1 189 (26.07%) Social Skills
2 97 (13.38%) Analytical Skills
3 68 (9.38%) Banking
4 56 (7.72%) Finance
5 49 (6.76%) Public Sector
6 47 (6.48%) Investment Banking
7 44 (6.07%) Documentation Skills
8 21 (2.90%) Legal
9 16 (2.21%) Military
10 13 (1.79%) Telecoms
11 9 (1.24%) Organisational Skills
12 7 (0.97%) Influencing Skills
13 6 (0.83%) Financial Institution
13 6 (0.83%) Presentation Skills
14 5 (0.69%) Law
15 3 (0.41%) Aerospace
15 3 (0.41%) Inclusion and Diversity
15 3 (0.41%) Local Government
16 2 (0.28%) Manufacturing
16 2 (0.28%) Marketing
Job Titles
1 122 (16.83%) Network Engineer
2 108 (14.90%) Architect
3 65 (8.97%) Analyst
4 59 (8.14%) Infrastructure Engineer
5 58 (8.00%) Senior
6 56 (7.72%) Support Engineer
7 49 (6.76%) Security Engineer
8 43 (5.93%) Web Engineer
9 40 (5.52%) IT Support
10 30 (4.14%) Platform Engineer
11 29 (4.00%) Network Security Engineer
12 28 (3.86%) Lead
13 26 (3.59%) IT Engineer
14 25 (3.45%) Cisco Engineer
14 25 (3.45%) Cisco Network Engineer
15 23 (3.17%) Azure Engineer
16 20 (2.76%) DevOps Engineer
16 20 (2.76%) IT Support Engineer
17 19 (2.62%) Infrastructure Architect
17 19 (2.62%) Solutions Architect
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 63 (8.69%) LDAP
2 45 (6.21%) SAML
3 38 (5.24%) OAuth
4 30 (4.14%) OpenID
5 28 (3.86%) 802.1X
6 20 (2.76%) OAuth2
7 17 (2.34%) OpenTelemetry
8 10 (1.38%) Kafka
9 9 (1.24%) REST
10 8 (1.10%) Elastic Stack
11 7 (0.97%) XMPP
12 6 (0.83%) JSON
12 6 (0.83%) Microsoft Graph
13 5 (0.69%) ARM Templates
13 5 (0.69%) AWS CDK
13 5 (0.69%) RESTful
14 4 (0.55%) gRPC
14 4 (0.55%) Hibernate
14 4 (0.55%) JPA
14 4 (0.55%) Spring
Miscellaneous
1 64 (8.83%) PKI
2 63 (8.69%) Data Centre
3 49 (6.76%) Replication
4 37 (5.10%) Cloud Native
4 37 (5.10%) Management Information System
5 30 (4.14%) Onboarding
6 27 (3.72%) Clustering
7 26 (3.59%) Public Cloud
8 20 (2.76%) Distributed Denial-of-Service
9 18 (2.48%) Hybrid Cloud
10 17 (2.34%) Enterprise Software
11 16 (2.21%) Self-Motivation
12 15 (2.07%) Analytical Mindset
12 15 (2.07%) Cyber Threat
13 14 (1.93%) Cyberattack
13 14 (1.93%) Security Operations Centre
14 13 (1.79%) Legacy Systems
15 12 (1.66%) NHS
15 12 (1.66%) Product Ownership
16 11 (1.52%) Private Cloud
Operating Systems
1 329 (45.38%) Windows
2 173 (23.86%) Windows Server
3 104 (14.34%) Linux
4 48 (6.62%) Windows 10
5 25 (3.45%) Windows Server 2019
6 18 (2.48%) Android
6 18 (2.48%) Unix
7 14 (1.93%) Windows Server 2012
8 13 (1.79%) Apple iOS
8 13 (1.79%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
8 13 (1.79%) Windows Server 2016
9 11 (1.52%) Windows 7
10 10 (1.38%) Mac OS
11 7 (0.97%) CentOS
12 6 (0.83%) Windows Server 2003
13 5 (0.69%) VMS
14 4 (0.55%) CatOS
15 3 (0.41%) Amazon Linux
15 3 (0.41%) Windows Server 2008
16 2 (0.28%) Ubuntu
Processes & Methodologies
1 170 (23.45%) Problem-Solving
2 161 (22.21%) Load Balancing
3 107 (14.76%) Migration
4 103 (14.21%) ITIL
5 98 (13.52%) CI/CD
6 96 (13.24%) DevOps
7 91 (12.55%) Infrastructure as Code
8 89 (12.28%) High Availability
9 82 (11.31%) Infrastructure Engineering
10 69 (9.52%) Identity Access Management
11 62 (8.55%) Disaster Recovery
12 60 (8.28%) Cybersecurity
13 58 (8.00%) RBAC
14 55 (7.59%) Service Management
15 54 (7.45%) Change Management
15 54 (7.45%) ITSM
15 54 (7.45%) Observability
16 50 (6.90%) Incident Response
17 49 (6.76%) Continuous Improvement
18 47 (6.48%) Roadmaps
Programming Languages
1 202 (27.86%) PowerShell
2 124 (17.10%) Python
3 58 (8.00%) Bash
4 41 (5.66%) SQL
5 13 (1.79%) JavaScript
5 13 (1.79%) VBScript
6 12 (1.66%) Bicep
7 11 (1.52%) Shell Script
8 10 (1.38%) Java
8 10 (1.38%) VB
9 9 (1.24%) Ruby
10 8 (1.10%) Go
11 7 (0.97%) Lisp
12 5 (0.69%) Kusto Query Language
12 5 (0.69%) Perl
13 2 (0.28%) C
13 2 (0.28%) C#
13 2 (0.28%) T-SQL
13 2 (0.28%) VBA
14 1 (0.14%) PHP
Qualifications
1 255 (35.17%) Security Cleared
2 168 (23.17%) SC Cleared
3 89 (12.28%) DV Cleared
4 57 (7.86%) Cisco Certification
5 51 (7.03%) Microsoft Certification
6 46 (6.34%) Degree
7 37 (5.10%) CCNP
8 26 (3.59%) Azure Certification
9 18 (2.48%) CCNA
10 15 (2.07%) AWS Certification
10 15 (2.07%) CompTIA Security+
10 15 (2.07%) Network+ Certification
11 14 (1.93%) CISSP
12 9 (1.24%) BPSS Clearance
12 9 (1.24%) Computer Science Degree
12 9 (1.24%) MCSE
13 8 (1.10%) CCIE
13 8 (1.10%) JNCIA
13 8 (1.10%) MCSA
13 8 (1.10%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 28 (3.86%) GDPR
2 20 (2.76%) SLA
3 19 (2.62%) NIST
4 18 (2.48%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 17 (2.34%) Sarbanes-Oxley
6 9 (1.24%) NCSC
6 9 (1.24%) PCI DSS
7 8 (1.10%) Cyber Essentials
8 6 (0.83%) QA
9 2 (0.28%) Accessibility
9 2 (0.28%) Data Quality
9 2 (0.28%) HMG Security Policy Framework
9 2 (0.28%) JSP 440
10 1 (0.14%) Actionable Recommendations
10 1 (0.14%) COBIT
10 1 (0.14%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
10 1 (0.14%) Government Security Classifications
10 1 (0.14%) RMADS
System Software
1 318 (43.86%) Active Directory
2 164 (22.62%) VMware Infrastructure
3 56 (7.72%) VMware NSX
4 54 (7.45%) Hyper-V
5 52 (7.17%) Docker
6 42 (5.79%) vSphere
7 25 (3.45%) Firmware
7 25 (3.45%) Virtual Machines
8 17 (2.34%) VMware ESXi
9 15 (2.07%) BitLocker
10 14 (1.93%) Virtual Desktop
11 8 (1.10%) Squid
12 7 (0.97%) Microsoft App-V
13 5 (0.69%) NFS
14 4 (0.55%) Terminal Services
14 4 (0.55%) Virtual Servers
15 3 (0.41%) DFS Replication
15 3 (0.41%) Postfix
15 3 (0.41%) Sendmail
15 3 (0.41%) Varnish
Systems Management
1 130 (17.93%) Terraform
2 111 (15.31%) Ansible
3 89 (12.28%) Microsoft Intune
4 78 (10.76%) Kubernetes
5 73 (10.07%) SCCM
6 68 (9.38%) Single Sign-On
7 61 (8.41%) Active Directory Federation Services
8 40 (5.52%) FortiGate
9 39 (5.38%) vCenter Server
10 33 (4.55%) Grafana
11 21 (2.90%) Argo
12 19 (2.62%) Prometheus
13 14 (1.93%) SCOM
14 12 (1.66%) WSUS
15 10 (1.38%) Puppet
16 8 (1.10%) HAProxy
17 7 (0.97%) Consul
18 6 (0.83%) Nagios
18 6 (0.83%) Nessus
18 6 (0.83%) Packer
Vendors
1 271 (37.38%) Microsoft
2 211 (29.10%) VMware
3 137 (18.90%) F5
4 116 (16.00%) Cisco
5 67 (9.24%) ServiceNow
6 62 (8.55%) Splunk
7 45 (6.21%) Blue Coat
8 42 (5.79%) Citrix
8 42 (5.79%) SolarWinds
9 36 (4.97%) McAfee
10 35 (4.83%) Juniper
11 32 (4.41%) Red Hat
12 31 (4.28%) Palo Alto
13 27 (3.72%) NetApp
14 22 (3.03%) Google
15 20 (2.76%) CheckPoint
15 20 (2.76%) Okta
16 19 (2.62%) Infoblox
16 19 (2.62%) Pure Storage
17 18 (2.48%) Fortinet