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

6 months to
7 Nov 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 139 135 122
Rank change year-on-year -4 -13 +24
Contract jobs citing DNS 739 682 966
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.11% 1.86% 2.07%
As % of the Communications & Networking category 18.66% 15.44% 14.77%
Number of daily rates quoted 460 409 625
10th Percentile £213 £220 £213
25th Percentile £400 £325 £375
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £518 £458 £500
Median % change year-on-year +13.11% -8.50% -1.96%
75th Percentile £600 £575 £600
90th Percentile £676 £700 £675
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £425 £488
% change year-on-year +17.65% -12.82% +8.33%
Number of hourly rates quoted 35 9 21
10th Percentile £15.50 £19.46 £24.50
25th Percentile £29.00 £23.10 £31.25
Median hourly rate £41.50 £24.20 £40.00
Median % change year-on-year +71.49% -39.50% +73.91%
75th Percentile £74.63 £38.00 £67.00
90th Percentile £87.78 £49.00 £78.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £41.48 £27.10 £47.50
% change year-on-year +53.04% -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 3,961 4,417 6,542
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 11.33% 12.03% 14.00%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,569 2,545 4,073
10th Percentile £207 £222 £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 £450 £475 £475
% change year-on-year -5.26% - +5.56%
Number of hourly rates quoted 195 160 343
10th Percentile £15.50 £17.99 £17.72
25th Percentile £20.00 £26.25 £22.50
Median hourly rate £34.00 £47.50 £53.00
Median % change year-on-year -28.42% -10.38% +29.17%
75th Percentile £65.00 £67.14 £66.25
90th Percentile £75.00 £75.00 £76.01
UK excluding London median hourly rate £42.50 £51.25 £56.49
% change year-on-year -17.07% -9.28% +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 7 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 7 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 7 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 +13 682 £525 +13.21% 770
UK excluding London -5 442 £500 +17.65% 653
London +18 243 £525 +1.94% 273
Work from Home -11 186 £500 +1.57% 294
Midlands +20 127 £425 +11.84% 77
West Midlands +30 122 £402 -5.41% 40
North of England -1 117 £500 +11.11% 67
South East -3 92 £500 +5.26% 294
North West -5 76 £488 - 43
South West +11 67 £575 +38.14% 99
East of England +11 57 £550 +100.00% 76
Yorkshire -10 46 £490 +45.19% 14
Scotland -35 14 £454 +10.06% 29
North East -12 8 £500 +233.33% 10
East Midlands -39 5 £450 +20.00% 34
Wales -1 2 £253 -8.18% 11
Channel Islands - 1 £440 - 6

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 82 (11.10%) Microsoft Exchange
2 73 (9.88%) SharePoint
3 46 (6.22%) Confluence
4 35 (4.74%) Skype for Business
5 14 (1.89%) OpenStack
5 14 (1.89%) SharePoint Server
6 12 (1.62%) Exchange Server 2010
7 11 (1.49%) Exchange Server 2013
8 10 (1.35%) Exchange Server 2003
8 10 (1.35%) Exchange Server 2007
8 10 (1.35%) IIS
8 10 (1.35%) nginx
8 10 (1.35%) 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 71 (9.61%) Microsoft Office
2 10 (1.35%) 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 3 (0.41%) Remedy ITSM
2 2 (0.27%) SystmOne
2 2 (0.27%) Teamcenter
3 1 (0.14%) Eikon
3 1 (0.14%) Eze OMS
3 1 (0.14%) Fidessa
3 1 (0.14%) Pegasus Opera
Cloud Services
1 199 (26.93%) Azure
2 194 (26.25%) AWS
3 143 (19.35%) Microsoft 365
4 78 (10.55%) Virtual Private Cloud
5 67 (9.07%) Entra ID
6 64 (8.66%) Amazon CloudWatch
7 60 (8.12%) Amazon EC2
8 59 (7.98%) Amazon S3
9 44 (5.95%) Amazon ELB
10 41 (5.55%) GitHub
11 40 (5.41%) GCP
12 31 (4.19%) SaaS
13 29 (3.92%) IaaS
14 28 (3.79%) AWS KMS
15 27 (3.65%) Amazon ECS
16 23 (3.11%) Serverless
17 22 (2.98%) AWS CloudFormation
17 22 (2.98%) AWS Lambda
18 21 (2.84%) Route 53
19 19 (2.57%) Azure DevOps
Communications & Networking
1 336 (45.47%) DHCP
2 271 (36.67%) Firewall
3 232 (31.39%) TCP/IP
4 182 (24.63%) VPN
5 103 (13.94%) Network Security
6 100 (13.53%) WAN
7 95 (12.86%) SSL
8 87 (11.77%) LAN
9 85 (11.50%) VLAN
10 80 (10.83%) HTTP
11 68 (9.20%) Wireless
12 55 (7.44%) BGP
12 55 (7.44%) SAN
13 52 (7.04%) SMTP
14 46 (6.22%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
15 43 (5.82%) Wi-Fi
16 37 (5.01%) F5 BIG-IP GTM
16 37 (5.01%) IPsec
16 37 (5.01%) OSPF
16 37 (5.01%) SD-WAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 39 (5.28%) Amazon RDS
2 19 (2.57%) PostgreSQL
3 17 (2.30%) SQL Server
4 14 (1.89%) Amazon Aurora
5 8 (1.08%) MongoDB
6 6 (0.81%) BigQuery
6 6 (0.81%) 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 (13.13%) Jenkins
2 84 (11.37%) Git
3 76 (10.28%) JIRA
4 51 (6.90%) GitLab
5 22 (2.98%) Vagrant
6 13 (1.76%) Fiddler
7 9 (1.22%) TeamCity
8 6 (0.81%) 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
11 3 (0.41%) Sonatype Nexus
12 2 (0.27%) MLflow
12 2 (0.27%) Poetry
12 2 (0.27%) PyCharm
12 2 (0.27%) SonarQube
13 1 (0.14%) Postman
General
1 227 (30.72%) Social Skills
2 103 (13.94%) Analytical Skills
3 80 (10.83%) Public Sector
4 63 (8.53%) Finance
5 42 (5.68%) Banking
6 34 (4.60%) Investment Banking
7 31 (4.19%) Documentation Skills
8 20 (2.71%) Telecoms
9 19 (2.57%) Presentation Skills
10 18 (2.44%) Legal
11 17 (2.30%) Manufacturing
12 13 (1.76%) Inclusion and Diversity
13 9 (1.22%) Organisational Skills
14 8 (1.08%) Influencing Skills
15 7 (0.95%) Law
15 7 (0.95%) Local Government
15 7 (0.95%) Military
16 6 (0.81%) Marketing
17 4 (0.54%) Aerospace
18 3 (0.41%) Retail
Job Titles
1 99 (13.40%) Network Engineer
2 96 (12.99%) Support Engineer
3 68 (9.20%) Infrastructure Engineer
4 66 (8.93%) Architect
5 62 (8.39%) Senior
6 60 (8.12%) DevOps Engineer
7 59 (7.98%) Analyst
8 42 (5.68%) IT Support
9 40 (5.41%) Platform Engineer
10 39 (5.28%) AWS Engineer
11 33 (4.47%) Administrator
12 31 (4.19%) Security Engineer
13 28 (3.79%) IT Engineer
14 26 (3.52%) AWS DevOps
14 26 (3.52%) AWS DevOps Engineer
14 26 (3.52%) Cloud Platform Engineer
14 26 (3.52%) Consultant
15 23 (3.11%) Operations Engineer
16 21 (2.84%) Azure Engineer
16 21 (2.84%) Solutions Architect
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 38 (5.14%) LDAP
2 16 (2.17%) SAML
3 14 (1.89%) 802.1X
3 14 (1.89%) OAuth
3 14 (1.89%) REST
4 12 (1.62%) AngularJS
4 12 (1.62%) Elastic Stack
4 12 (1.62%) OpenID
5 11 (1.49%) OAuth2
5 11 (1.49%) SOAP
6 10 (1.35%) YAML
7 8 (1.08%) CSS
7 8 (1.08%) HTML
7 8 (1.08%) Kafka
7 8 (1.08%) Middleware
7 8 (1.08%) NETCONF
7 8 (1.08%) React
7 8 (1.08%) RESTCONF
8 7 (0.95%) JSON
8 7 (0.95%) Keycloak
Miscellaneous
1 62 (8.39%) Data Centre
2 61 (8.25%) Replication
3 55 (7.44%) PKI
4 49 (6.63%) Management Information System
5 27 (3.65%) Onboarding
6 20 (2.71%) Analytical Mindset
7 19 (2.57%) Enterprise Software
8 18 (2.44%) Hybrid Cloud
9 16 (2.17%) Video Conferencing
10 12 (1.62%) Security Operations Centre
11 11 (1.49%) Cloud Native
11 11 (1.49%) Operational Technology
11 11 (1.49%) Private Cloud
11 11 (1.49%) SCADA
12 10 (1.35%) Cyberattack
12 10 (1.35%) Security Posture
12 10 (1.35%) Virtual Team
13 9 (1.22%) Cyber Threat
14 8 (1.08%) CSOC
14 8 (1.08%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 341 (46.14%) Windows
2 164 (22.19%) Linux
3 132 (17.86%) Windows Server
4 67 (9.07%) Windows 10
5 40 (5.41%) Windows Server 2016
6 38 (5.14%) Windows Server 2019
7 33 (4.47%) VMS
8 32 (4.33%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
9 30 (4.06%) Unix
10 25 (3.38%) Amazon Linux
10 25 (3.38%) Mac OS
11 21 (2.84%) Ubuntu
12 20 (2.71%) Android
12 20 (2.71%) CentOS
13 17 (2.30%) Windows Server 2012
14 16 (2.17%) Windows Server 2003
15 13 (1.76%) Windows 7
16 9 (1.22%) Apple iOS
17 5 (0.68%) Solaris
18 3 (0.41%) Windows Server 2008
Processes & Methodologies
1 139 (18.81%) Problem-Solving
2 134 (18.13%) DevOps
3 125 (16.91%) ITIL
4 120 (16.24%) CI/CD
5 93 (12.58%) Load Balancing
6 92 (12.45%) Infrastructure as Code
7 91 (12.31%) Infrastructure Engineering
8 80 (10.83%) High Availability
9 74 (10.01%) Migration
10 71 (9.61%) Change Management
11 65 (8.80%) Cybersecurity
12 64 (8.66%) Service Management
13 56 (7.58%) Agile
14 54 (7.31%) Incident Response
14 54 (7.31%) SIEM
15 51 (6.90%) Root Cause Analysis
16 50 (6.77%) Patch Management
17 49 (6.63%) Containerisation
18 48 (6.50%) Cloud Security
18 48 (6.50%) Platform Engineering
Programming Languages
1 192 (25.98%) PowerShell
2 182 (24.63%) Python
3 91 (12.31%) Bash
4 41 (5.55%) SQL
5 30 (4.06%) Perl
6 24 (3.25%) Groovy
7 23 (3.11%) Java
8 17 (2.30%) Shell Script
9 15 (2.03%) Go
10 13 (1.76%) JavaScript
11 10 (1.35%) Bicep
12 7 (0.95%) Kusto Query Language
12 7 (0.95%) Lisp
12 7 (0.95%) VBScript
13 6 (0.81%) C++
13 6 (0.81%) 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
1 268 (36.27%) Security Cleared
2 186 (25.17%) SC Cleared
3 101 (13.67%) Cisco Certification
4 88 (11.91%) Degree
5 85 (11.50%) DV Cleared
6 70 (9.47%) CCNP
7 55 (7.44%) Microsoft Certification
8 45 (6.09%) CCNA
9 36 (4.87%) Azure Certification
10 29 (3.92%) AWS Certification
11 23 (3.11%) Computer Science Degree
12 22 (2.98%) CISSP
13 19 (2.57%) CCIE
14 14 (1.89%) Network+ Certification
15 12 (1.62%) MCSE
16 11 (1.49%) ITIL Certification
16 11 (1.49%) MCSA
16 11 (1.49%) Server+ Certification
17 9 (1.22%) CompTIA Security+
17 9 (1.22%) MCP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 28 (3.79%) GDPR
2 22 (2.98%) SLA
3 18 (2.44%) ISO/IEC 27001
4 17 (2.30%) NIST
5 12 (1.62%) NCSC
5 12 (1.62%) PCI DSS
6 8 (1.08%) Accessibility
7 7 (0.95%) Cyber Essentials
8 6 (0.81%) 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
1 299 (40.46%) Active Directory
2 184 (24.90%) VMware Infrastructure
3 90 (12.18%) Docker
4 49 (6.63%) Hyper-V
5 35 (4.74%) vSphere
6 33 (4.47%) VMware NSX
7 29 (3.92%) VMware ESXi
8 25 (3.38%) DFS Replication
8 25 (3.38%) Virtual Servers
9 23 (3.11%) Virtual Machines
10 22 (2.98%) Microsoft Virtual Server
11 20 (2.71%) Firmware
12 16 (2.17%) Dovecot
12 16 (2.17%) Postfix
13 12 (1.62%) Terminal Services
14 10 (1.35%) Brightmail
14 10 (1.35%) ISA Server
14 10 (1.35%) Squid
14 10 (1.35%) Virtual Desktop
15 9 (1.22%) Microsoft App-V
Systems Management
1 141 (19.08%) Ansible
2 137 (18.54%) Terraform
3 82 (11.10%) SCCM
4 53 (7.17%) Kubernetes
5 48 (6.50%) Grafana
6 46 (6.22%) Microsoft Intune
7 44 (5.95%) Prometheus
8 40 (5.41%) vCenter Server
9 36 (4.87%) WSUS
10 34 (4.60%) Single Sign-On
11 28 (3.79%) Active Directory Federation Services
12 18 (2.44%) Nessus
13 17 (2.30%) Argo
14 16 (2.17%) FortiGate
15 15 (2.03%) Packer
16 13 (1.76%) Microsoft Clustering
16 13 (1.76%) Progress Chef
16 13 (1.76%) Proxmox
16 13 (1.76%) Puppet
17 8 (1.08%) Jamf Pro
Vendors
1 271 (36.67%) Microsoft
2 221 (29.91%) VMware
3 141 (19.08%) Cisco
4 107 (14.48%) F5
5 93 (12.58%) ServiceNow
6 63 (8.53%) Splunk
7 57 (7.71%) CheckPoint
8 48 (6.50%) Palo Alto
9 38 (5.14%) Citrix
10 37 (5.01%) Red Hat
11 36 (4.87%) NetApp
11 36 (4.87%) SolarWinds
12 28 (3.79%) Juniper
12 28 (3.79%) Veeam
13 27 (3.65%) Dell
14 26 (3.52%) Blue Coat
15 24 (3.25%) Fortinet
15 24 (3.25%) Google
15 24 (3.25%) Meraki
16 23 (3.11%) Remedy