DNS Contract Job Trends

Domain Name System (DNS)
UK

The table below provides summary statistics and contractor rates for jobs requiring DNS skills. It covers contract job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 10 November 2025, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

 6 months to
10 Nov 2025		 Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 138 135 119
Rank change year-on-year -3 -16 +22
Contract jobs citing DNS 735 682 978
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.12% 1.88% 2.08%
As % of the Communications & Networking category 18.75% 15.63% 14.80%
Number of daily rates quoted 456 406 632
10th Percentile £213 £221 £213
25th Percentile £400 £325 £380
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £519 £460 £500
Median % change year-on-year +12.77% -8.00% -2.44%
75th Percentile £600 £586 £600
90th Percentile £680 £711 £675
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £420 £500
% change year-on-year +19.05% -16.00% +8.25%
Number of hourly rates quoted 36 9 21
10th Percentile £15.50 £19.46 £24.50
25th Percentile £29.00 £23.10 £31.25
Median hourly rate £43.25 £24.20 £40.00
Median % change year-on-year +78.72% -39.50% +73.91%
75th Percentile £74.45 £38.00 £67.00
90th Percentile £87.32 £49.00 £78.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £41.50 £27.10 £47.50
% change year-on-year +53.14% -42.95% +19.35%

All Communications and Computer Networking Skills
UK

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.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for communications or computer networking skills 3,920 4,364 6,608
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 11.31% 12.04% 14.02%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,540 2,517 4,111
10th Percentile £207 £224 £213
25th Percentile £360 £375 £363
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £475 £500 £500
Median % change year-on-year -5.00% - -
75th Percentile £588 £600 £600
90th Percentile £675 £681 £700
UK excluding London median daily rate £454 £475 £475
% change year-on-year -4.42% - +5.56%
Number of hourly rates quoted 196 160 346
10th Percentile £15.50 £17.99 £17.72
25th Percentile £20.00 £26.13 £22.56
Median hourly rate £34.00 £47.50 £55.00
Median % change year-on-year -28.42% -13.64% +30.72%
75th Percentile £65.00 £65.51 £66.25
90th Percentile £75.00 £75.00 £75.89
UK excluding London median hourly rate £42.50 £50.00 £56.49
% change year-on-year -15.00% -11.49% +25.53%

DNS
Job Vacancy Trend

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

DNS job vacancy trend in the UK

DNS
Daily Rate Trend

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing DNS.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing DNS

DNS
Daily Rate Histogram

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing DNS over the 6 months to 10 November 2025.

Daily rate histogram for DNS in the UK

DNS
Hourly Rate Trend

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing DNS.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing DNS

DNS
Hourly Rate Histogram

Hourly rate distribution of jobs citing DNS over the 6 months to 10 November 2025.

Hourly rate histogram for DNS in the UK

DNS
Top 17 Contract Job Locations

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing DNS within the UK over the 6 months to 10 November 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
England +16 678 £525 +13.51% 577
UK excluding London -7 440 £500 +19.05% 483
London +21 241 £525 +0.96% 148
Work from Home -20 185 £500 +1.57% 216
Midlands +20 125 £450 +18.42% 63
West Midlands +33 120 £425 - 38
North of England -9 117 £500 +17.65% 54
South East +3 95 £500 +6.67% 200
North West +5 77 £488 +2.63% 28
South West +13 67 £575 +39.39% 85
East of England +4 54 £550 +100.00% 59
Yorkshire -12 46 £490 +50.77% 20
Scotland -47 14 £454 +3.77% 20
North East -16 7 £538 +258.33% 6
East Midlands -31 5 £450 +20.00% 23
Wales -10 2 £253 -15.83% 8
Channel Islands - 1 £440 -

DNS
Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities 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 84 (11.43%) Microsoft Exchange
2 73 (9.93%) SharePoint
3 46 (6.26%) Confluence
4 35 (4.76%) Skype for Business
5 14 (1.90%) OpenStack
5 14 (1.90%) SharePoint Server
6 12 (1.63%) Exchange Server 2010
7 11 (1.50%) Exchange Server 2013
8 10 (1.36%) Exchange Server 2003
8 10 (1.36%) Exchange Server 2007
8 10 (1.36%) IIS
8 10 (1.36%) nginx
8 10 (1.36%) Office Communications Server
9 7 (0.95%) Apache
10 3 (0.41%) Tomcat
11 2 (0.27%) Apache Airflow
11 2 (0.27%) Apache Spark
11 2 (0.27%) Cloud Foundry
11 2 (0.27%) Oracle HTTP Server
11 2 (0.27%) WebLogic
Applications
1 70 (9.52%) Microsoft Office
2 10 (1.36%) Mozilla Thunderbird
3 7 (0.95%) MS Visio
4 4 (0.54%) Microsoft Excel
5 3 (0.41%) Spreadsheet
6 2 (0.27%) Microsoft Project
6 2 (0.27%) Windchill
Business Applications
1 2 (0.27%) Remedy ITSM
1 2 (0.27%) SystmOne
1 2 (0.27%) Teamcenter
2 1 (0.14%) Eikon
2 1 (0.14%) Eze OMS
2 1 (0.14%) Fidessa
2 1 (0.14%) Pegasus Opera
Cloud Services
1 197 (26.80%) Azure
2 194 (26.39%) AWS
3 140 (19.05%) Microsoft 365
4 78 (10.61%) Virtual Private Cloud
5 65 (8.84%) Entra ID
6 64 (8.71%) Amazon CloudWatch
7 60 (8.16%) Amazon EC2
8 59 (8.03%) Amazon S3
9 44 (5.99%) Amazon ELB
10 41 (5.58%) GitHub
11 40 (5.44%) GCP
12 32 (4.35%) SaaS
13 28 (3.81%) AWS KMS
13 28 (3.81%) IaaS
14 27 (3.67%) Amazon ECS
15 23 (3.13%) Serverless
16 22 (2.99%) AWS CloudFormation
16 22 (2.99%) AWS Lambda
17 21 (2.86%) Route 53
18 19 (2.59%) Azure DevOps
Communications & Networking
1 333 (45.31%) DHCP
2 271 (36.87%) Firewall
3 230 (31.29%) TCP/IP
4 180 (24.49%) VPN
5 103 (14.01%) Network Security
6 99 (13.47%) WAN
7 95 (12.93%) SSL
8 85 (11.56%) LAN
9 83 (11.29%) VLAN
10 80 (10.88%) HTTP
11 66 (8.98%) Wireless
12 55 (7.48%) BGP
13 52 (7.07%) SAN
13 52 (7.07%) SMTP
14 46 (6.26%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
15 42 (5.71%) Wi-Fi
16 37 (5.03%) F5 BIG-IP GTM
16 37 (5.03%) IPsec
16 37 (5.03%) OSPF
16 37 (5.03%) SD-WAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 39 (5.31%) Amazon RDS
2 19 (2.59%) PostgreSQL
3 17 (2.31%) SQL Server
4 14 (1.90%) Amazon Aurora
5 8 (1.09%) MongoDB
6 6 (0.82%) BigQuery
6 6 (0.82%) DynamoDB
7 5 (0.68%) Apache Cassandra
7 5 (0.68%) MySQL
8 4 (0.54%) Big Data
9 3 (0.41%) GIS
9 3 (0.41%) Redis
9 3 (0.41%) Relational Database
10 2 (0.27%) Azure SQL Database
10 2 (0.27%) Delta Lake
10 2 (0.27%) Elasticsearch
10 2 (0.27%) Hadoop
10 2 (0.27%) NoSQL
10 2 (0.27%) Parquet
10 2 (0.27%) Power BI
Development Applications
1 97 (13.20%) Jenkins
2 84 (11.43%) Git
3 76 (10.34%) JIRA
4 51 (6.94%) GitLab
5 22 (2.99%) Vagrant
6 13 (1.77%) Fiddler
7 9 (1.22%) TeamCity
8 6 (0.82%) Visual Studio Code
9 5 (0.68%) Subversion
10 4 (0.54%) Browser DevTools
10 4 (0.54%) Terragrunt
10 4 (0.54%) Vite
10 4 (0.54%) webpack
11 3 (0.41%) Oracle APEX
12 2 (0.27%) MLflow
12 2 (0.27%) Poetry
12 2 (0.27%) PyCharm
12 2 (0.27%) SonarQube
12 2 (0.27%) Sonatype Nexus
13 1 (0.14%) Octopus Deploy
General
1 227 (30.88%) Social Skills
2 104 (14.15%) Analytical Skills
3 80 (10.88%) Public Sector
4 63 (8.57%) Finance
5 43 (5.85%) Banking
6 34 (4.63%) Investment Banking
7 33 (4.49%) Documentation Skills
8 20 (2.72%) Telecoms
9 19 (2.59%) Legal
9 19 (2.59%) Presentation Skills
10 17 (2.31%) Manufacturing
11 13 (1.77%) Inclusion and Diversity
12 8 (1.09%) Influencing Skills
12 8 (1.09%) Military
12 8 (1.09%) Organisational Skills
13 7 (0.95%) Law
14 6 (0.82%) Local Government
14 6 (0.82%) Marketing
15 4 (0.54%) Aerospace
16 3 (0.41%) Retail
Job Titles
1 97 (13.20%) Network Engineer
2 95 (12.93%) Support Engineer
3 67 (9.12%) Architect
4 66 (8.98%) Infrastructure Engineer
5 62 (8.44%) Senior
6 60 (8.16%) DevOps Engineer
7 59 (8.03%) Analyst
8 42 (5.71%) IT Support
9 41 (5.58%) Platform Engineer
10 39 (5.31%) AWS Engineer
11 34 (4.63%) Administrator
12 31 (4.22%) Security Engineer
13 27 (3.67%) IT Engineer
14 26 (3.54%) AWS DevOps
14 26 (3.54%) AWS DevOps Engineer
14 26 (3.54%) Cloud Platform Engineer
14 26 (3.54%) Consultant
15 23 (3.13%) Operations Engineer
16 21 (2.86%) 2nd Line Support
16 21 (2.86%) Solutions Architect
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 38 (5.17%) LDAP
2 17 (2.31%) SAML
3 15 (2.04%) OAuth
4 14 (1.90%) 802.1X
4 14 (1.90%) REST
5 13 (1.77%) OpenID
6 12 (1.63%) AngularJS
6 12 (1.63%) Elastic Stack
6 12 (1.63%) OAuth2
7 11 (1.50%) SOAP
8 10 (1.36%) YAML
9 8 (1.09%) CSS
9 8 (1.09%) HTML
9 8 (1.09%) Kafka
9 8 (1.09%) Middleware
9 8 (1.09%) NETCONF
9 8 (1.09%) React
9 8 (1.09%) RESTCONF
10 7 (0.95%) cloud-init
10 7 (0.95%) Keycloak
Miscellaneous
1 63 (8.57%) Data Centre
2 62 (8.44%) Replication
3 56 (7.62%) PKI
4 49 (6.67%) Management Information System
5 28 (3.81%) Onboarding
6 21 (2.86%) Analytical Mindset
7 18 (2.45%) Enterprise Software
7 18 (2.45%) Hybrid Cloud
8 16 (2.18%) Video Conferencing
9 12 (1.63%) Security Operations Centre
10 11 (1.50%) Cloud Native
10 11 (1.50%) Operational Technology
10 11 (1.50%) Private Cloud
10 11 (1.50%) SCADA
11 10 (1.36%) Cyberattack
11 10 (1.36%) Security Posture
11 10 (1.36%) Virtual Team
12 9 (1.22%) Cyber Threat
13 8 (1.09%) iPhone
13 8 (1.09%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 338 (45.99%) Windows
2 164 (22.31%) Linux
3 132 (17.96%) Windows Server
4 66 (8.98%) Windows 10
5 37 (5.03%) Windows Server 2016
6 35 (4.76%) Windows Server 2019
7 33 (4.49%) VMS
8 32 (4.35%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
9 30 (4.08%) Unix
10 25 (3.40%) Amazon Linux
11 24 (3.27%) Mac OS
12 21 (2.86%) Ubuntu
13 20 (2.72%) CentOS
14 19 (2.59%) Android
15 18 (2.45%) Windows Server 2012
16 16 (2.18%) Windows Server 2003
17 13 (1.77%) Windows 7
18 9 (1.22%) Apple iOS
19 5 (0.68%) Solaris
20 3 (0.41%) Windows Server 2008
Processes & Methodologies
1 139 (18.91%) Problem-Solving
2 134 (18.23%) DevOps
3 124 (16.87%) ITIL
4 120 (16.33%) CI/CD
5 95 (12.93%) Load Balancing
6 92 (12.52%) Infrastructure as Code
7 89 (12.11%) Infrastructure Engineering
8 80 (10.88%) High Availability
9 74 (10.07%) Migration
10 73 (9.93%) Change Management
11 66 (8.98%) Service Management
12 65 (8.84%) Cybersecurity
13 58 (7.89%) Agile
14 54 (7.35%) Incident Response
15 51 (6.94%) SIEM
16 50 (6.80%) Patch Management
16 50 (6.80%) Root Cause Analysis
17 49 (6.67%) Containerisation
17 49 (6.67%) Platform Engineering
18 48 (6.53%) Cloud Security
Programming Languages
1 193 (26.26%) PowerShell
2 182 (24.76%) Python
3 91 (12.38%) Bash
4 42 (5.71%) SQL
5 30 (4.08%) Perl
6 24 (3.27%) Groovy
7 23 (3.13%) Java
8 17 (2.31%) Shell Script
9 15 (2.04%) Go
10 13 (1.77%) JavaScript
11 10 (1.36%) Bicep
12 7 (0.95%) Kusto Query Language
12 7 (0.95%) Lisp
12 7 (0.95%) VBScript
13 6 (0.82%) C++
13 6 (0.82%) VB
14 5 (0.68%) TypeScript
15 4 (0.54%) Apex Code
16 3 (0.41%) Search Processing Language
16 3 (0.41%) SOQL
Qualifications
1 269 (36.60%) Security Cleared
2 188 (25.58%) SC Cleared
3 99 (13.47%) Cisco Certification
4 89 (12.11%) Degree
5 84 (11.43%) DV Cleared
6 69 (9.39%) CCNP
7 57 (7.76%) Microsoft Certification
8 45 (6.12%) CCNA
9 36 (4.90%) Azure Certification
10 29 (3.95%) AWS Certification
11 23 (3.13%) Computer Science Degree
12 22 (2.99%) CISSP
13 19 (2.59%) CCIE
14 14 (1.90%) Network+ Certification
15 13 (1.77%) MCSE
16 12 (1.63%) MCSA
17 11 (1.50%) ITIL Certification
17 11 (1.50%) Server+ Certification
18 9 (1.22%) CompTIA Security+
18 9 (1.22%) MCP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 28 (3.81%) GDPR
2 21 (2.86%) SLA
3 18 (2.45%) ISO/IEC 27001
4 17 (2.31%) NIST
5 12 (1.63%) NCSC
5 12 (1.63%) PCI DSS
6 8 (1.09%) Accessibility
7 7 (0.95%) Cyber Essentials
8 6 (0.82%) SOC 2
9 5 (0.68%) Sarbanes-Oxley
10 4 (0.54%) Data Quality
10 4 (0.54%) HMG Security Policy Framework
10 4 (0.54%) WCAG
11 3 (0.41%) QA
12 2 (0.27%) Actionable Recommendations
12 2 (0.27%) Disclosure Scotland
13 1 (0.14%) COBIT
13 1 (0.14%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
13 1 (0.14%) Government Security Classifications
13 1 (0.14%) JSP 440
System Software
1 298 (40.54%) Active Directory
2 182 (24.76%) VMware Infrastructure
3 90 (12.24%) Docker
4 49 (6.67%) Hyper-V
5 35 (4.76%) vSphere
6 33 (4.49%) VMware NSX
7 29 (3.95%) VMware ESXi
8 25 (3.40%) DFS Replication
9 23 (3.13%) Virtual Machines
10 22 (2.99%) Virtual Servers
11 20 (2.72%) Firmware
12 19 (2.59%) Microsoft Virtual Server
13 16 (2.18%) Dovecot
13 16 (2.18%) Postfix
14 12 (1.63%) Terminal Services
15 10 (1.36%) Brightmail
15 10 (1.36%) ISA Server
15 10 (1.36%) Squid
16 9 (1.22%) Microsoft App-V
16 9 (1.22%) Virtual Desktop
Systems Management
1 137 (18.64%) Ansible
1 137 (18.64%) Terraform
2 81 (11.02%) SCCM
3 53 (7.21%) Kubernetes
4 48 (6.53%) Grafana
5 45 (6.12%) Microsoft Intune
6 44 (5.99%) Prometheus
7 41 (5.58%) vCenter Server
8 35 (4.76%) Single Sign-On
9 33 (4.49%) WSUS
10 29 (3.95%) Active Directory Federation Services
11 18 (2.45%) Nessus
12 17 (2.31%) Argo
13 16 (2.18%) FortiGate
14 15 (2.04%) Packer
15 13 (1.77%) Microsoft Clustering
15 13 (1.77%) Progress Chef
15 13 (1.77%) Proxmox
15 13 (1.77%) Puppet
16 8 (1.09%) Jamf Pro
Vendors
1 270 (36.73%) Microsoft
2 219 (29.80%) VMware
3 140 (19.05%) Cisco
4 106 (14.42%) F5
5 92 (12.52%) ServiceNow
6 60 (8.16%) Splunk
7 56 (7.62%) CheckPoint
8 48 (6.53%) Palo Alto
9 39 (5.31%) Citrix
10 37 (5.03%) Red Hat
11 35 (4.76%) SolarWinds
12 33 (4.49%) NetApp
13 28 (3.81%) Juniper
13 28 (3.81%) Veeam
14 26 (3.54%) Blue Coat
14 26 (3.54%) Dell
15 24 (3.27%) Fortinet
15 24 (3.27%) Google
15 24 (3.27%) Meraki
16 22 (2.99%) Remedy
633 DNS jobs Nationwide