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 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 555 465 529
Rank change year-on-year -90 +64 +114
Contract jobs citing DSL 5 7 19
As % of all contract jobs in England 0.014% 0.028% 0.050%
As % of the Communications & Networking category 0.14% 0.21% 0.35%
Number of daily rates quoted 4 4 12
10th Percentile - £290 £516
25th Percentile £217 £396 £558
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £249 £465 £582
Median % change year-on-year -46.39% -20.19% -5.37%
75th Percentile £301 £488 £587
90th Percentile £353 - £622
UK median daily rate £270 £465 £582
% change year-on-year -41.87% -20.19% -6.13%
Number of hourly rates quoted 0 1 3
10th Percentile - - £24.40
25th Percentile - £18.50 £24.63
Median hourly rate - £19.00 £25.00
Median % change year-on-year - -24.00% +6.38%
75th Percentile - £19.50 £46.25
90th Percentile - - £59.00
UK median hourly rate - £19.00 £25.00
% change year-on-year - -24.00% +6.38%

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 3,625 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%

DSL
Job Vacancy Trend in England

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

DSL job vacancy trend 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 10 March 2026.

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 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 -39 2 £320 -32.63% 2
East of England -31 1 - -
DSL
UK

DSL
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 1 (20.00%) Confluence
Cloud Services
1 3 (60.00%) GitHub
1 3 (60.00%) GitHub Actions
2 1 (20.00%) Tricentis Tosca
Database & Business Intelligence
1 1 (20.00%) BigQuery
1 1 (20.00%) Data Lake
1 1 (20.00%) Elasticsearch
Development Applications
1 2 (40.00%) fastlane
1 2 (40.00%) Git
1 2 (40.00%) Gradle
2 1 (20.00%) Bitbucket
2 1 (20.00%) Jenkins
2 1 (20.00%) JIRA
2 1 (20.00%) JUnit
2 1 (20.00%) Postman
2 1 (20.00%) REST Assured
2 1 (20.00%) Selenium
2 1 (20.00%) XCUITest
General
1 1 (20.00%) Finance
1 1 (20.00%) Public Sector
1 1 (20.00%) Social Skills
Job Titles
1 3 (60.00%) Developer
2 2 (40.00%) Android Developer
3 1 (20.00%) Automation Test Lead
3 1 (20.00%) Lead
3 1 (20.00%) Mobile Engineer
3 1 (20.00%) Test Leader
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 3 (60.00%) Android Jetpack
1 3 (60.00%) Jetpack Compose
2 2 (40.00%) GraphQL
3 1 (20.00%) Elastic Stack
3 1 (20.00%) JSON
3 1 (20.00%) Playwright
Miscellaneous
1 1 (20.00%) Distributed Systems
1 1 (20.00%) Mobile App
1 1 (20.00%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 3 (60.00%) Android
2 1 (20.00%) Apple iOS
Processes & Methodologies
1 4 (80.00%) CI/CD
2 2 (40.00%) Android Development
2 2 (40.00%) Architectural Patterns
2 2 (40.00%) ETL
2 2 (40.00%) MVVM
2 2 (40.00%) Regression Testing
2 2 (40.00%) Test Automation
2 2 (40.00%) Unit Testing
3 1 (20.00%) Agile
3 1 (20.00%) Analytics
3 1 (20.00%) B2B
3 1 (20.00%) BDD
3 1 (20.00%) Data Analytics
3 1 (20.00%) Full Text Search
3 1 (20.00%) High Availability
3 1 (20.00%) Kalman Filter
3 1 (20.00%) Test Strategy
3 1 (20.00%) User Acceptance Testing
3 1 (20.00%) Validation
3 1 (20.00%) Visualisation
Programming Languages
1 2 (40.00%) Kotlin
2 1 (20.00%) Java
2 1 (20.00%) SQL
Qualifications
1 1 (20.00%) Security Cleared
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 2 (40.00%) QA
2 1 (20.00%) Accessibility
2 1 (20.00%) GDPR
2 1 (20.00%) MiFID
Systems Management
1 1 (20.00%) Kibana
1 1 (20.00%) logstash
Vendors
1 1 (20.00%) ServiceNow