DSL Contract Job Trends in England

Digital Subscriber Line (DSL)
UK > England

The table below provides summary statistics and contractor rates for jobs advertised in England requiring DSL skills. It covers vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 15 September 2025, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
15 Sep 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 502 517 569
Rank change year-on-year +15 +52 +183
Contract jobs citing DSL 7 9 23
As % of all contract jobs advertised in England 0.026% 0.028% 0.054%
As % of the Communications & Networking category 0.22% 0.23% 0.41%
Number of daily rates quoted 2 5 12
10th Percentile £491 £468 £515
25th Percentile £526 £475 £544
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £593 £500 £560
Median % change year-on-year +18.50% -10.71% -8.20%
75th Percentile £651 £525 £586
90th Percentile £680 - £611
UK median daily rate £485 £500 £560
% change year-on-year -3.00% -10.71% -8.20%
Number of hourly rates quoted 1 1 2
10th Percentile - - £19.10
25th Percentile £61.25 £18.50 £20.00
Median hourly rate £62.50 £19.00 £22.00
Median % change year-on-year +228.95% -13.64% -
75th Percentile £63.75 £19.50 £24.00
90th Percentile - - £24.90
UK median hourly rate £62.50 £19.00 £22.00
% change year-on-year +228.95% -13.64% -

All Communications and Computer Networking Skills
England

DSL 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 3,242 3,927 5,652
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 11.85% 12.05% 13.22%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,020 2,310 3,639
10th Percentile £235 £248 £225
25th Percentile £363 £400 £375
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £490 £511 £500
Median % change year-on-year -4.03% +2.12% -1.96%
75th Percentile £600 £614 £623
90th Percentile £688 £700 £713
UK median daily rate £478 £505 £500
% change year-on-year -5.43% +1.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 163 223 280
10th Percentile £15.02 £14.33 £16.73
25th Percentile £25.08 £22.58 £23.07
Median hourly rate £41.50 £57.35 £56.49
Median % change year-on-year -27.64% +1.52% +34.26%
75th Percentile £65.00 £65.00 £67.78
90th Percentile £79.00 £75.00 £76.12
UK median hourly rate £43.00 £51.00 £56.49
% change year-on-year -15.69% -9.72% +34.50%

DSL
Job Vacancy Trend in England

Job postings citing DSL as a proportion of all IT jobs advertised in England.

Job vacancy trend for DSL in England

DSL
Daily Rate Trend in England

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

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in England citing DSL

DSL
Daily Rate Histogram in England

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing DSL in England over the 6 months to 15 September 2025.

Daily rate histogram for DSL in England

DSL
Hourly Rate Trend in England

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

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in England citing DSL

DSL
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 DSL within the England region over the 6 months to 15 September 2025. 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 - 3 £593 - 1
South East +21 2 - - 5
Midlands -13 1 - - 2
West Midlands - 1 - - 2
DSL
UK

DSL
Co-occurring Skills and Capabilities in England by Category

The follow tables expand on the table above by listing co-occurrences grouped by category. The same employment type, locality and period is covered with up to 20 co-occurrences shown in each of the following categories:

Application Platforms
1 2 (28.57%) Anypoint
1 2 (28.57%) Mule
Applications
1 2 (28.57%) Microsoft PowerPoint
Business Applications
1 1 (14.29%) Shopify
Cloud Services
1 3 (42.86%) Azure
2 2 (28.57%) Azure DevOps
2 2 (28.57%) GCP
3 1 (14.29%) AWS
3 1 (14.29%) BigCommerce
3 1 (14.29%) Cloud Run
3 1 (14.29%) Datadog
3 1 (14.29%) GitHub
3 1 (14.29%) GitHub Actions
3 1 (14.29%) Google Kubernetes Engine
Communications & Networking
1 2 (28.57%) AMQP
2 1 (14.29%) Network Security
Database & Business Intelligence
1 1 (14.29%) Elasticsearch
Development Applications
1 3 (42.86%) Jenkins
2 2 (28.57%) Git
2 2 (28.57%) GitLab
3 1 (14.29%) CircleCI
3 1 (14.29%) Cucumber
3 1 (14.29%) JMeter
3 1 (14.29%) Terragrunt
General
1 1 (14.29%) Banking
1 1 (14.29%) Public Sector
1 1 (14.29%) Retail
Job Titles
1 3 (42.86%) Architect
2 2 (28.57%) Applications Architect
3 1 (14.29%) Consultant
3 1 (14.29%) Elasticsearch Consultant
3 1 (14.29%) Elasticsearch Engineer
3 1 (14.29%) GCP Architect
3 1 (14.29%) Head of Testing
3 1 (14.29%) Infrastructure Architect
3 1 (14.29%) MuleSoft Architect
3 1 (14.29%) Security Consultant
3 1 (14.29%) Security Engineer
3 1 (14.29%) Security Specialist
3 1 (14.29%) SIEM Consultant
3 1 (14.29%) SIEM Engineer
3 1 (14.29%) SIEM Specialist
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 2 (28.57%) ActiveMQ
1 2 (28.57%) Apache Camel
1 2 (28.57%) JWT
1 2 (28.57%) Kafka
1 2 (28.57%) OAuth
1 2 (28.57%) OAuth2
1 2 (28.57%) RabbitMQ
1 2 (28.57%) RESTful
1 2 (28.57%) SOAP
1 2 (28.57%) XML
2 1 (14.29%) Elastic Stack
2 1 (14.29%) Gherkin
2 1 (14.29%) GraphQL
2 1 (14.29%) VML
Miscellaneous
1 3 (42.86%) Cloud Native
2 2 (28.57%) Distributed Systems
3 1 (14.29%) Product Ownership
3 1 (14.29%) YARA
Processes & Methodologies
1 5 (71.43%) CI/CD
2 3 (42.86%) Containerisation
2 3 (42.86%) DevOps
2 3 (42.86%) Infrastructure as Code
3 2 (28.57%) Agile
3 2 (28.57%) API Design
3 2 (28.57%) Architectural Patterns
3 2 (28.57%) Data Enrichment
3 2 (28.57%) Disaster Recovery
3 2 (28.57%) Event-Driven
3 2 (28.57%) Event-Driven Architecture
3 2 (28.57%) Infrastructure Automation
3 2 (28.57%) Integration Patterns
3 2 (28.57%) Microservices
3 2 (28.57%) Scrum
3 2 (28.57%) Test Automation
4 1 (14.29%) Cost Optimisation
4 1 (14.29%) Customer Acquisition
4 1 (14.29%) Scenario Testing
4 1 (14.29%) Threat Detection
Programming Languages
1 3 (42.86%) Java
2 2 (28.57%) DataWeave
3 1 (14.29%) Bash
3 1 (14.29%) Python
Qualifications
1 2 (28.57%) Degree
1 2 (28.57%) Master's Degree
2 1 (14.29%) Security Cleared
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 1 (14.29%) QA
System Software
1 2 (28.57%) Docker
Systems Management
1 4 (57.14%) Ansible
1 4 (57.14%) Terraform
2 3 (42.86%) Kubernetes
3 1 (14.29%) Kibana
3 1 (14.29%) logstash
3 1 (14.29%) Progress Chef
3 1 (14.29%) Puppet
3 1 (14.29%) QRadar
3 1 (14.29%) Salt
Vendors
1 2 (28.57%) Microsoft
1 2 (28.57%) MuleSoft
2 1 (14.29%) Adobe
2 1 (14.29%) IBM
2 1 (14.29%) New Relic
2 1 (14.29%) Salesforce
2 1 (14.29%) SAP
2 1 (14.29%) Sitecore
2 1 (14.29%) Splunk