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 16 November 2025, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
16 Nov 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 140 134 116
Rank change year-on-year -6 -18 +30
Contract jobs citing DNS 734 695 996
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.08% 1.90% 2.11%
As % of the Communications & Networking category 18.33% 15.78% 15.07%
Number of daily rates quoted 453 414 642
10th Percentile £213 £223 £213
25th Percentile £400 £330 £381
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £518 £463 £500
Median % change year-on-year +11.89% -7.50% -2.91%
75th Percentile £600 £577 £600
90th Percentile £679 £734 £675
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £425 £500
% change year-on-year +17.65% -15.00% +7.89%
Number of hourly rates quoted 36 10 22
10th Percentile £15.50 £20.36 £24.28
25th Percentile £29.00 £23.22 £27.31
Median hourly rate £43.25 £24.00 £40.00
Median % change year-on-year +80.21% -40.00% +73.91%
75th Percentile £74.45 £36.00 £65.25
90th Percentile £87.32 £48.88 £77.20
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 4,004 4,404 6,610
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 11.34% 12.04% 14.02%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,593 2,546 4,125
10th Percentile £205 £225 £213
25th Percentile £358 £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 £686 £700
UK excluding London median daily rate £454 £475 £475
% change year-on-year -4.42% - +5.56%
Number of hourly rates quoted 201 165 342
10th Percentile £15.50 £17.79 £17.72
25th Percentile £20.50 £24.50 £22.81
Median hourly rate £35.00 £45.00 £55.00
Median % change year-on-year -22.22% -18.18% +30.95%
75th Percentile £65.00 £65.00 £66.25
90th Percentile £75.00 £75.00 £75.67
UK excluding London median hourly rate £42.50 £49.50 £56.49
% change year-on-year -14.14% -12.37% +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 16 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 16 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 16 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 +6 675 £525 +13.51% 575
UK excluding London -3 436 £500 +17.65% 441
London +13 245 £525 +1.94% 207
Work from Home -19 186 £500 +0.60% 243
Midlands +15 128 £450 +18.42% 58
West Midlands +36 123 £425 - 37
North of England -10 118 £500 +14.29% 51
South East +2 94 £500 +8.11% 176
North West -3 78 £500 +5.26% 29
South West +9 65 £575 +36.90% 66
East of England +1 49 £535 +94.55% 55
Yorkshire -24 47 £500 +42.86% 17
Scotland -46 14 £454 +3.77% 32
North East -16 7 £538 +258.33% 5
East Midlands -30 5 £450 +20.00% 21
Wales -1 3 £550 +83.33% 5
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 87 (11.85%) Microsoft Exchange
2 74 (10.08%) SharePoint
3 45 (6.13%) Confluence
4 35 (4.77%) Skype for Business
5 14 (1.91%) Exchange Server 2010
5 14 (1.91%) OpenStack
5 14 (1.91%) SharePoint Server
6 11 (1.50%) Exchange Server 2013
7 10 (1.36%) Exchange Server 2003
7 10 (1.36%) Exchange Server 2007
7 10 (1.36%) nginx
7 10 (1.36%) Office Communications Server
8 9 (1.23%) IIS
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 71 (9.67%) 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
1 199 (27.11%) Azure
2 190 (25.89%) AWS
3 141 (19.21%) Microsoft 365
4 77 (10.49%) Virtual Private Cloud
5 68 (9.26%) Entra ID
6 63 (8.58%) Amazon CloudWatch
7 60 (8.17%) Amazon EC2
8 59 (8.04%) Amazon S3
9 44 (5.99%) Amazon ELB
10 40 (5.45%) GitHub
11 39 (5.31%) GCP
12 35 (4.77%) SaaS
13 29 (3.95%) IaaS
14 27 (3.68%) AWS KMS
15 26 (3.54%) Amazon ECS
16 21 (2.86%) AWS CloudFormation
16 21 (2.86%) Route 53
17 20 (2.72%) Azure DevOps
17 20 (2.72%) Serverless
18 19 (2.59%) AWS Lambda
Communications & Networking
1 338 (46.05%) DHCP
2 268 (36.51%) Firewall
3 228 (31.06%) TCP/IP
4 180 (24.52%) VPN
5 103 (14.03%) Network Security
6 95 (12.94%) WAN
7 92 (12.53%) SSL
8 83 (11.31%) VLAN
9 80 (10.90%) HTTP
9 80 (10.90%) LAN
10 66 (8.99%) Wireless
11 55 (7.49%) BGP
12 52 (7.08%) SMTP
13 48 (6.54%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
14 44 (5.99%) SAN
15 41 (5.59%) Wi-Fi
16 39 (5.31%) F5 BIG-IP GTM
17 37 (5.04%) OSPF
17 37 (5.04%) SD-WAN
18 36 (4.90%) IPsec
Database & Business Intelligence
1 37 (5.04%) Amazon RDS
2 19 (2.59%) PostgreSQL
3 17 (2.32%) SQL Server
4 14 (1.91%) Amazon Aurora
5 8 (1.09%) MongoDB
6 6 (0.82%) BigQuery
7 5 (0.68%) MySQL
8 4 (0.54%) Apache Cassandra
8 4 (0.54%) Big Data
8 4 (0.54%) DynamoDB
9 3 (0.41%) Redis
9 3 (0.41%) Relational Database
10 2 (0.27%) Data Hub
10 2 (0.27%) Delta Lake
10 2 (0.27%) Elasticsearch
10 2 (0.27%) Geospatial Data
10 2 (0.27%) GIS
10 2 (0.27%) NoSQL
10 2 (0.27%) Parquet
10 2 (0.27%) Power BI
Development Applications
1 96 (13.08%) Jenkins
2 81 (11.04%) Git
3 74 (10.08%) JIRA
4 50 (6.81%) GitLab
5 22 (3.00%) Vagrant
6 14 (1.91%) Fiddler
7 9 (1.23%) TeamCity
8 5 (0.68%) Subversion
8 5 (0.68%) Visual Studio Code
9 4 (0.54%) Browser DevTools
9 4 (0.54%) Terragrunt
9 4 (0.54%) Vite
9 4 (0.54%) webpack
10 2 (0.27%) MLflow
10 2 (0.27%) Oracle APEX
10 2 (0.27%) Poetry
10 2 (0.27%) PyCharm
10 2 (0.27%) SonarQube
10 2 (0.27%) Sonatype Nexus
11 1 (0.14%) Atlassian Bamboo
General
1 230 (31.34%) Social Skills
2 106 (14.44%) Analytical Skills
3 79 (10.76%) Public Sector
4 62 (8.45%) Finance
5 45 (6.13%) Banking
6 36 (4.90%) Investment Banking
7 34 (4.63%) Documentation Skills
8 20 (2.72%) Legal
8 20 (2.72%) Telecoms
9 19 (2.59%) Presentation Skills
10 17 (2.32%) Manufacturing
11 11 (1.50%) Inclusion and Diversity
12 9 (1.23%) Organisational Skills
13 8 (1.09%) Influencing Skills
13 8 (1.09%) Military
14 7 (0.95%) Law
15 6 (0.82%) Aerospace
15 6 (0.82%) Local Government
15 6 (0.82%) Marketing
16 3 (0.41%) Retail
Job Titles
1 99 (13.49%) Network Engineer
2 93 (12.67%) Support Engineer
3 70 (9.54%) Infrastructure Engineer
4 68 (9.26%) Senior
5 67 (9.13%) Architect
6 60 (8.17%) Analyst
7 58 (7.90%) DevOps Engineer
8 42 (5.72%) Platform Engineer
9 40 (5.45%) IT Support
10 39 (5.31%) AWS Engineer
11 34 (4.63%) Administrator
12 31 (4.22%) Security Engineer
13 26 (3.54%) AWS DevOps
13 26 (3.54%) AWS DevOps Engineer
13 26 (3.54%) Cloud Platform Engineer
13 26 (3.54%) Consultant
14 25 (3.41%) IT Engineer
15 24 (3.27%) Operations Engineer
16 21 (2.86%) Senior Infrastructure Engineer
16 21 (2.86%) Solutions Architect
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 38 (5.18%) LDAP
2 17 (2.32%) SAML
3 15 (2.04%) OAuth
4 14 (1.91%) 802.1X
4 14 (1.91%) REST
5 13 (1.77%) OpenID
6 12 (1.63%) AngularJS
6 12 (1.63%) OAuth2
7 11 (1.50%) Elastic Stack
7 11 (1.50%) SOAP
8 10 (1.36%) YAML
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%) CSS
10 7 (0.95%) HTML
10 7 (0.95%) JSON
10 7 (0.95%) Keycloak
Miscellaneous
1 63 (8.58%) Data Centre
1 63 (8.58%) Replication
2 59 (8.04%) PKI
3 51 (6.95%) Management Information System
4 28 (3.81%) Onboarding
5 22 (3.00%) Analytical Mindset
6 19 (2.59%) Hybrid Cloud
7 17 (2.32%) Enterprise Software
8 16 (2.18%) Video Conferencing
9 12 (1.63%) Cloud Native
9 12 (1.63%) Security Operations Centre
10 11 (1.50%) Operational Technology
10 11 (1.50%) Virtual Team
11 10 (1.36%) Cyberattack
11 10 (1.36%) Private Cloud
11 10 (1.36%) SCADA
11 10 (1.36%) Security Posture
12 9 (1.23%) Cyber Threat
13 8 (1.09%) CSOC
13 8 (1.09%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 337 (45.91%) Windows
2 164 (22.34%) Linux
3 131 (17.85%) Windows Server
4 65 (8.86%) Windows 10
5 33 (4.50%) VMS
6 32 (4.36%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
7 30 (4.09%) Unix
7 30 (4.09%) Windows Server 2016
8 28 (3.81%) Windows Server 2019
9 25 (3.41%) Amazon Linux
10 21 (2.86%) Ubuntu
11 20 (2.72%) CentOS
11 20 (2.72%) Mac OS
12 19 (2.59%) Windows Server 2012
13 18 (2.45%) Android
14 15 (2.04%) Windows Server 2003
15 13 (1.77%) Windows 7
16 10 (1.36%) Apple iOS
17 5 (0.68%) Solaris
18 3 (0.41%) Windows Server 2008
Processes & Methodologies
1 144 (19.62%) Problem-Solving
2 133 (18.12%) DevOps
3 123 (16.76%) ITIL
4 120 (16.35%) CI/CD
5 98 (13.35%) Load Balancing
6 93 (12.67%) Infrastructure Engineering
7 92 (12.53%) Infrastructure as Code
8 80 (10.90%) High Availability
9 78 (10.63%) Migration
10 73 (9.95%) Change Management
11 69 (9.40%) Service Management
12 65 (8.86%) Cybersecurity
13 57 (7.77%) Agile
14 53 (7.22%) Incident Response
15 51 (6.95%) Root Cause Analysis
16 50 (6.81%) Platform Engineering
17 49 (6.68%) Containerisation
17 49 (6.68%) Continuous Improvement
17 49 (6.68%) Patch Management
18 48 (6.54%) Computer Science
Programming Languages
1 196 (26.70%) PowerShell
2 181 (24.66%) Python
3 91 (12.40%) Bash
4 41 (5.59%) SQL
5 30 (4.09%) Perl
6 24 (3.27%) Groovy
7 22 (3.00%) Java
8 16 (2.18%) Shell Script
9 15 (2.04%) Go
10 12 (1.63%) JavaScript
11 10 (1.36%) Bicep
12 8 (1.09%) VBScript
13 7 (0.95%) Kusto Query Language
13 7 (0.95%) Lisp
14 6 (0.82%) C++
14 6 (0.82%) VB
15 5 (0.68%) TypeScript
16 3 (0.41%) Apex Code
16 3 (0.41%) Search Processing Language
17 2 (0.27%) Ruby
Qualifications
1 262 (35.69%) Security Cleared
2 188 (25.61%) SC Cleared
3 99 (13.49%) Cisco Certification
4 90 (12.26%) Degree
5 77 (10.49%) DV Cleared
6 69 (9.40%) CCNP
7 59 (8.04%) Microsoft Certification
8 45 (6.13%) CCNA
9 36 (4.90%) Azure Certification
10 28 (3.81%) AWS Certification
11 23 (3.13%) Computer Science Degree
12 22 (3.00%) CISSP
13 19 (2.59%) CCIE
14 14 (1.91%) Network+ Certification
15 13 (1.77%) MCSE
16 12 (1.63%) MCSA
17 11 (1.50%) CompTIA Security+
17 11 (1.50%) ITIL Certification
17 11 (1.50%) Server+ Certification
18 9 (1.23%) MCP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 27 (3.68%) GDPR
2 18 (2.45%) SLA
3 17 (2.32%) ISO/IEC 27001
4 16 (2.18%) NIST
5 12 (1.63%) NCSC
5 12 (1.63%) PCI DSS
6 8 (1.09%) Accessibility
7 7 (0.95%) Cyber Essentials
8 5 (0.68%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 5 (0.68%) SOC 2
9 4 (0.54%) Data Quality
9 4 (0.54%) HMG Security Policy Framework
9 4 (0.54%) WCAG
10 3 (0.41%) QA
11 2 (0.27%) Disclosure Scotland
12 1 (0.14%) Actionable Recommendations
12 1 (0.14%) COBIT
12 1 (0.14%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
12 1 (0.14%) Government Security Classifications
12 1 (0.14%) JSP 440
System Software
1 300 (40.87%) Active Directory
2 181 (24.66%) VMware Infrastructure
3 89 (12.13%) Docker
4 49 (6.68%) Hyper-V
5 35 (4.77%) vSphere
6 34 (4.63%) VMware NSX
7 29 (3.95%) VMware ESXi
8 25 (3.41%) DFS Replication
9 22 (3.00%) Virtual Machines
10 21 (2.86%) Firmware
11 16 (2.18%) Dovecot
11 16 (2.18%) Postfix
12 14 (1.91%) Virtual Servers
13 13 (1.77%) Terminal Services
14 11 (1.50%) Microsoft Virtual Server
15 10 (1.36%) Brightmail
15 10 (1.36%) ISA Server
15 10 (1.36%) Squid
15 10 (1.36%) Virtual Desktop
16 9 (1.23%) Microsoft App-V
Systems Management
1 138 (18.80%) Terraform
2 128 (17.44%) Ansible
3 77 (10.49%) SCCM
4 53 (7.22%) Kubernetes
5 48 (6.54%) Microsoft Intune
6 47 (6.40%) Grafana
7 42 (5.72%) Prometheus
7 42 (5.72%) vCenter Server
8 38 (5.18%) Single Sign-On
9 29 (3.95%) Active Directory Federation Services
10 24 (3.27%) WSUS
11 18 (2.45%) Argo
11 18 (2.45%) Nessus
12 16 (2.18%) FortiGate
13 15 (2.04%) Packer
14 13 (1.77%) Progress Chef
14 13 (1.77%) Proxmox
15 12 (1.63%) Microsoft Clustering
15 12 (1.63%) Puppet
16 8 (1.09%) Jamf Pro
Vendors
1 267 (36.38%) Microsoft
2 218 (29.70%) VMware
3 140 (19.07%) Cisco
4 108 (14.71%) F5
5 89 (12.13%) ServiceNow
6 56 (7.63%) CheckPoint
7 51 (6.95%) Splunk
8 48 (6.54%) Palo Alto
9 40 (5.45%) Citrix
10 38 (5.18%) Red Hat
11 33 (4.50%) SolarWinds
12 29 (3.95%) Veeam
13 28 (3.81%) Blue Coat
14 27 (3.68%) Juniper
15 26 (3.54%) Dell
15 26 (3.54%) NetApp
16 24 (3.27%) Fortinet
16 24 (3.27%) Meraki
17 23 (3.13%) Google
18 22 (3.00%) Remedy