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 31 December 2025, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
31 Dec 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 148 112 111
Rank change year-on-year -36 -1 +26
Contract jobs citing DNS 728 734 924
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 1.97% 2.20% 2.15%
As % of the Communications & Networking category 18.37% 17.24% 15.80%
Number of daily rates quoted 456 457 590
10th Percentile £213 £223 £213
25th Percentile £400 £350 £364
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £475 £488
Median % change year-on-year +10.53% -2.56% -7.14%
75th Percentile £600 £595 £600
90th Percentile £680 £738 £675
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £438 £500
% change year-on-year +14.29% -12.50% +5.26%
Number of hourly rates quoted 35 10 18
10th Percentile £15.50 £17.88 £25.70
25th Percentile £25.70 £21.71 £31.44
Median hourly rate £57.50 £23.59 £55.70
Median % change year-on-year +143.75% -57.65% +112.19%
75th Percentile £77.50 £28.83 £65.25
90th Percentile £85.60 £39.20 £72.40
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £23.35 £58.20
% change year-on-year +178.37% -59.88% +51.17%

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 3,963 4,257 5,848
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 10.70% 12.75% 13.62%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,593 2,505 3,604
10th Percentile £206 £220 £209
25th Percentile £356 £365 £362
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £475 £500 £500
Median % change year-on-year -5.00% - -
75th Percentile £588 £600 £600
90th Percentile £675 £675 £700
UK excluding London median daily rate £450 £474 £472
% change year-on-year -5.01% +0.42% +4.83%
Number of hourly rates quoted 179 138 327
10th Percentile £15.50 £14.86 £17.72
25th Percentile £20.00 £20.88 £23.00
Median hourly rate £34.00 £35.00 £56.49
Median % change year-on-year -2.86% -38.04% +61.40%
75th Percentile £65.50 £57.81 £65.98
90th Percentile £80.00 £70.38 £75.42
UK excluding London median hourly rate £42.50 £32.50 £57.99
% change year-on-year +30.77% -43.96% +46.67%

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 31 December 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 31 December 2025.

Hourly rate histogram for DNS in the UK

DNS
Top 16 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 31 December 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 -21 652 £525 +10.53% 995
UK excluding London -24 449 £500 +14.29% 906
London -4 223 £550 +4.76% 168
Work from Home -49 180 £500 - 327
North of England -23 133 £470 +17.50% 194
Midlands +21 117 £400 +3.90% 150
South East -4 115 £500 +8.11% 270
West Midlands +38 113 £401 -5.65% 76
North West 0 89 £500 +5.26% 106
South West -10 61 £575 +12.20% 100
Yorkshire -33 51 £447 +43.04% 73
East of England -21 38 £363 +28.32% 150
Scotland -16 25 £460 +2.11% 40
North East -15 7 £575 +283.33% 17
East Midlands -32 4 £275 -26.67% 67
Wales -13 3 £550 +33.33% 17

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 91 (12.50%) Microsoft Exchange
2 71 (9.75%) SharePoint
3 32 (4.40%) Skype for Business
4 22 (3.02%) Confluence
5 13 (1.79%) nginx
6 12 (1.65%) Exchange Server 2010
7 11 (1.51%) SharePoint Server
8 10 (1.37%) Exchange Server 2013
9 9 (1.24%) IIS
10 7 (0.96%) Exchange Server 2003
10 7 (0.96%) Exchange Server 2007
10 7 (0.96%) Office Communications Server
11 6 (0.82%) OpenStack
12 5 (0.69%) Apache
13 3 (0.41%) Tomcat
14 2 (0.27%) Apache Spark
14 2 (0.27%) Cloud Foundry
14 2 (0.27%) Oracle HTTP Server
14 2 (0.27%) WebLogic
14 2 (0.27%) WordPress
Applications
1 47 (6.46%) Microsoft Office
2 10 (1.37%) Mozilla Thunderbird
2 10 (1.37%) MS Visio
3 4 (0.55%) Microsoft Excel
4 3 (0.41%) Spreadsheet
5 2 (0.27%) Windchill
6 1 (0.14%) Microsoft PowerPoint
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
1 236 (32.42%) Azure
2 183 (25.14%) AWS
3 150 (20.60%) Microsoft 365
4 96 (13.19%) Entra ID
5 72 (9.89%) Virtual Private Cloud
6 59 (8.10%) Amazon CloudWatch
6 59 (8.10%) Amazon S3
7 57 (7.83%) Amazon EC2
8 52 (7.14%) GitHub
9 46 (6.32%) GCP
10 42 (5.77%) Amazon ELB
11 37 (5.08%) IaaS
12 36 (4.95%) AWS CloudFormation
13 33 (4.53%) Amazon ECS
14 32 (4.40%) SaaS
15 29 (3.98%) Serverless
16 27 (3.71%) AWS Lambda
16 27 (3.71%) GitHub Actions
17 24 (3.30%) AWS KMS
18 19 (2.61%) Azure Monitor
Communications & Networking
1 305 (41.90%) DHCP
2 255 (35.03%) Firewall
3 251 (34.48%) TCP/IP
4 175 (24.04%) VPN
5 100 (13.74%) Network Security
5 100 (13.74%) SSL
6 89 (12.23%) HTTP
7 75 (10.30%) WAN
8 65 (8.93%) VLAN
9 61 (8.38%) LAN
10 50 (6.87%) SMTP
11 44 (6.04%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
11 44 (6.04%) Wireless
12 41 (5.63%) F5 BIG-IP GTM
13 38 (5.22%) FTP
14 37 (5.08%) BGP
15 35 (4.81%) Wi-Fi
16 34 (4.67%) DMZ
17 32 (4.40%) Wireshark
18 29 (3.98%) Skype
Database & Business Intelligence
1 34 (4.67%) Amazon RDS
2 27 (3.71%) PostgreSQL
3 23 (3.16%) SQL Server
4 18 (2.47%) Amazon Aurora
5 10 (1.37%) MongoDB
6 8 (1.10%) Elasticsearch
7 6 (0.82%) Data Hub
7 6 (0.82%) DynamoDB
7 6 (0.82%) MySQL
7 6 (0.82%) Redis
8 5 (0.69%) BigQuery
8 5 (0.69%) NoSQL
9 4 (0.55%) Apache Cassandra
9 4 (0.55%) Big Data
9 4 (0.55%) Relational Database
10 3 (0.41%) DocumentDB
11 2 (0.27%) Delta Lake
11 2 (0.27%) Hadoop
11 2 (0.27%) Parquet
11 2 (0.27%) Power BI
Development Applications
1 92 (12.64%) Jenkins
2 79 (10.85%) Git
3 52 (7.14%) GitLab
4 48 (6.59%) JIRA
5 20 (2.75%) Fiddler
6 17 (2.34%) Vagrant
7 8 (1.10%) Terragrunt
8 5 (0.69%) Subversion
9 4 (0.55%) CircleCI
9 4 (0.55%) TeamCity
10 3 (0.41%) Visual Studio Code
11 2 (0.27%) Browser DevTools
11 2 (0.27%) MLflow
11 2 (0.27%) Poetry
11 2 (0.27%) PyCharm
11 2 (0.27%) SonarQube
11 2 (0.27%) Vite
11 2 (0.27%) webpack
12 1 (0.14%) Sonatype Nexus
12 1 (0.14%) Travis CI
General
1 226 (31.04%) Social Skills
2 116 (15.93%) Analytical Skills
3 77 (10.58%) Public Sector
4 54 (7.42%) Banking
5 52 (7.14%) Finance
6 39 (5.36%) Investment Banking
7 38 (5.22%) Documentation Skills
8 24 (3.30%) Telecoms
9 18 (2.47%) Legal
9 18 (2.47%) Presentation Skills
10 10 (1.37%) Law
10 10 (1.37%) Organisational Skills
11 9 (1.24%) Military
12 8 (1.10%) Aerospace
13 7 (0.96%) Influencing Skills
14 5 (0.69%) Marketing
15 4 (0.55%) Inclusion and Diversity
16 3 (0.41%) Local Government
16 3 (0.41%) Manufacturing
16 3 (0.41%) Retail
Job Titles
1 89 (12.23%) Network Engineer
2 77 (10.58%) Support Engineer
3 76 (10.44%) Architect
3 76 (10.44%) Senior
4 74 (10.16%) Analyst
4 74 (10.16%) Infrastructure Engineer
5 50 (6.87%) DevOps Engineer
6 49 (6.73%) Platform Engineer
7 42 (5.77%) IT Support
8 35 (4.81%) AWS Engineer
8 35 (4.81%) Security Engineer
9 31 (4.26%) SOC Analyst
10 28 (3.85%) Senior Infrastructure Engineer
11 27 (3.71%) Lead
12 26 (3.57%) 2nd Line Support
12 26 (3.57%) Cloud Platform Engineer
13 25 (3.43%) Operations Engineer
14 24 (3.30%) AWS DevOps
14 24 (3.30%) AWS DevOps Engineer
15 23 (3.16%) IT Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 53 (7.28%) LDAP
2 24 (3.30%) SAML
3 22 (3.02%) OAuth
4 19 (2.61%) OpenID
5 17 (2.34%) Elastic Stack
5 17 (2.34%) OAuth2
6 15 (2.06%) 802.1X
6 15 (2.06%) REST
7 13 (1.79%) Kafka
8 10 (1.37%) Middleware
8 10 (1.37%) SOAP
9 9 (1.24%) AngularJS
10 7 (0.96%) React
11 6 (0.82%) cloud-init
11 6 (0.82%) Keycloak
11 6 (0.82%) OpenTelemetry
11 6 (0.82%) YAML
12 5 (0.69%) Flask
12 5 (0.69%) JSON
12 5 (0.69%) RESTful
Miscellaneous
1 57 (7.83%) PKI
2 55 (7.55%) Management Information System
3 54 (7.42%) Data Centre
3 54 (7.42%) Replication
4 32 (4.40%) Onboarding
5 30 (4.12%) Analytical Mindset
6 28 (3.85%) Security Operations Centre
7 27 (3.71%) Cyberattack
8 23 (3.16%) Enterprise Software
9 19 (2.61%) Cloud Native
10 18 (2.47%) Cyber Threat
10 18 (2.47%) Hybrid Cloud
11 13 (1.79%) CSOC
12 12 (1.65%) Private Cloud
12 12 (1.65%) Video Conferencing
13 11 (1.51%) Clustering
13 11 (1.51%) Security Posture
13 11 (1.51%) Self-Motivation
14 10 (1.37%) Public Cloud
14 10 (1.37%) SCADA
Operating Systems
1 364 (50.00%) Windows
2 175 (24.04%) Linux
3 161 (22.12%) Windows Server
4 62 (8.52%) Windows 10
5 28 (3.85%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 28 (3.85%) Unix
6 26 (3.57%) VMS
7 25 (3.43%) Windows Server 2016
7 25 (3.43%) Windows Server 2019
8 21 (2.88%) Windows Server 2012
9 20 (2.75%) Amazon Linux
10 18 (2.47%) Android
11 16 (2.20%) Ubuntu
12 14 (1.92%) CentOS
13 13 (1.79%) Mac OS
14 12 (1.65%) Apple iOS
14 12 (1.65%) Windows Server 2003
15 8 (1.10%) Windows 7
16 5 (0.69%) Solaris
17 3 (0.41%) Windows Server 2008
Processes & Methodologies
1 168 (23.08%) Problem-Solving
2 133 (18.27%) ITIL
3 130 (17.86%) CI/CD
4 126 (17.31%) DevOps
5 112 (15.38%) Infrastructure as Code
6 108 (14.84%) Load Balancing
7 101 (13.87%) Infrastructure Engineering
8 87 (11.95%) Cybersecurity
9 77 (10.58%) Change Management
10 76 (10.44%) Incident Response
11 74 (10.16%) High Availability
12 73 (10.03%) Migration
13 67 (9.20%) SIEM
14 63 (8.65%) Root Cause Analysis
14 63 (8.65%) Service Management
15 58 (7.97%) Disaster Recovery
16 57 (7.83%) Platform Engineering
17 56 (7.69%) Agile
18 55 (7.55%) Continuous Improvement
19 51 (7.01%) Containerisation
Programming Languages
1 213 (29.26%) PowerShell
2 180 (24.73%) Python
3 87 (11.95%) Bash
4 52 (7.14%) SQL
5 23 (3.16%) Java
5 23 (3.16%) Perl
6 19 (2.61%) Groovy
7 14 (1.92%) Bicep
7 14 (1.92%) Go
8 13 (1.79%) Shell Script
9 10 (1.37%) Ruby
10 8 (1.10%) Kusto Query Language
11 7 (0.96%) Lisp
11 7 (0.96%) VBScript
12 6 (0.82%) JavaScript
12 6 (0.82%) VB
13 5 (0.69%) C++
14 3 (0.41%) C#
14 3 (0.41%) T-SQL
14 3 (0.41%) TypeScript
Qualifications
1 266 (36.54%) Security Cleared
2 192 (26.37%) SC Cleared
3 87 (11.95%) DV Cleared
4 73 (10.03%) Degree
5 65 (8.93%) Microsoft Certification
6 51 (7.01%) Cisco Certification
7 40 (5.49%) Azure Certification
7 40 (5.49%) CCNP
8 24 (3.30%) AWS Certification
9 22 (3.02%) CompTIA Security+
10 21 (2.88%) CISSP
11 19 (2.61%) Computer Science Degree
12 18 (2.47%) CCNA
13 17 (2.34%) Network+ Certification
14 13 (1.79%) MCSE
15 12 (1.65%) CCIE
15 12 (1.65%) CompTIA CySA+
16 11 (1.51%) Server+ Certification
17 10 (1.37%) MCSA
18 9 (1.24%) BPSS Clearance
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 31 (4.26%) GDPR
2 22 (3.02%) ISO/IEC 27001
3 18 (2.47%) NIST
3 18 (2.47%) SLA
4 10 (1.37%) NCSC
4 10 (1.37%) PCI DSS
5 8 (1.10%) Accessibility
5 8 (1.10%) Cyber Essentials
5 8 (1.10%) Sarbanes-Oxley
6 5 (0.69%) QA
7 4 (0.55%) Data Quality
8 3 (0.41%) HMG Security Policy Framework
9 2 (0.27%) Disclosure Scotland
9 2 (0.27%) JSP 440
9 2 (0.27%) PMO
9 2 (0.27%) WCAG
10 1 (0.14%) COBIT
10 1 (0.14%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
10 1 (0.14%) Government Security Classifications
10 1 (0.14%) SOC 2
System Software
1 321 (44.09%) Active Directory
2 187 (25.69%) VMware Infrastructure
3 98 (13.46%) Docker
4 55 (7.55%) Hyper-V
5 40 (5.49%) VMware NSX
6 30 (4.12%) Virtual Machines
7 29 (3.98%) vSphere
8 20 (2.75%) DFS Replication
9 19 (2.61%) Firmware
9 19 (2.61%) VMware ESXi
10 16 (2.20%) Dovecot
10 16 (2.20%) Postfix
11 15 (2.06%) Terminal Services
12 10 (1.37%) Squid
12 10 (1.37%) Virtual Desktop
13 9 (1.24%) Virtual Servers
14 7 (0.96%) BitLocker
14 7 (0.96%) Brightmail
14 7 (0.96%) ISA Server
15 5 (0.69%) Microsoft App-V
Systems Management
1 145 (19.92%) Terraform
2 121 (16.62%) Ansible
3 77 (10.58%) Microsoft Intune
4 76 (10.44%) SCCM
5 69 (9.48%) Kubernetes
6 49 (6.73%) Single Sign-On
7 45 (6.18%) Grafana
8 42 (5.77%) vCenter Server
9 36 (4.95%) Active Directory Federation Services
10 35 (4.81%) Prometheus
11 21 (2.88%) WSUS
12 17 (2.34%) Nessus
13 16 (2.20%) Argo
14 15 (2.06%) FortiGate
15 13 (1.79%) Packer
15 13 (1.79%) Proxmox
16 12 (1.65%) SCOM
17 11 (1.51%) Microsoft Clustering
17 11 (1.51%) Progress Chef
17 11 (1.51%) Puppet
Vendors
1 268 (36.81%) Microsoft
2 223 (30.63%) VMware
3 110 (15.11%) F5
4 106 (14.56%) Cisco
5 81 (11.13%) ServiceNow
6 60 (8.24%) Palo Alto
6 60 (8.24%) Splunk
7 50 (6.87%) CheckPoint
8 37 (5.08%) Blue Coat
8 37 (5.08%) Citrix
9 34 (4.67%) Red Hat
10 31 (4.26%) SolarWinds
11 26 (3.57%) Veeam
12 25 (3.43%) Juniper
12 25 (3.43%) McAfee
13 24 (3.30%) NetApp
14 21 (2.88%) Fortinet
15 19 (2.61%) Oracle
16 18 (2.47%) Google
16 18 (2.47%) Zscaler