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 17 June 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
17 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 138 124 156
Rank change year-on-year -14 +32 -18
Contract jobs citing DNS 952 673 658
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 1.89% 2.27% 1.51%
As % of the Communications & Networking category 19.91% 18.14% 12.21%
Number of daily rates quoted 577 475 447
10th Percentile £300 £272 £213
25th Percentile £400 £410 £356
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £495 £545 £475
Median % change year-on-year -9.17% +14.74% -9.52%
75th Percentile £575 £613 £588
90th Percentile £638 £675 £675
UK excluding London median daily rate £482 £550 £500
% change year-on-year -12.45% +10.00% -2.68%
Number of hourly rates quoted 41 15 25
10th Percentile £20.50 - £19.10
25th Percentile £25.00 £29.00 £23.80
Median hourly rate £32.50 £54.50 £40.00
Median % change year-on-year -40.37% +36.25% -32.28%
75th Percentile £53.75 £81.18 -
90th Percentile £74.00 £81.80 £50.64
UK excluding London median hourly rate £32.50 £41.50 £40.00
% change year-on-year -21.69% +3.75% -23.27%

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 4,781 3,710 5,390
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 9.50% 12.50% 12.36%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,931 2,279 3,184
10th Percentile £258 £222 £210
25th Percentile £400 £363 £350
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £481 £500
Median % change year-on-year +3.95% -3.80% -1.96%
75th Percentile £588 £588 £600
90th Percentile £675 £675 £688
UK excluding London median daily rate £481 £470 £488
% change year-on-year +2.26% -3.59% +2.63%
Number of hourly rates quoted 291 174 422
10th Percentile £16.01 £14.99 £13.50
25th Percentile £21.25 £19.81 £17.69
Median hourly rate £27.88 £42.75 £40.00
Median % change year-on-year -34.78% +6.88% +110.53%
75th Percentile £65.00 £60.97 £63.75
90th Percentile £74.26 £78.50 £71.19
UK excluding London median hourly rate £29.00 £31.08 £47.50
% change year-on-year -6.69% -34.57% +150.46%

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 17 June 2026.

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 17 June 2026.

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 17 June 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
England -22 840 £490 -10.91% 367
UK excluding London -8 597 £482 -12.45% 352
London -31 282 £495 -1.00% 76
North of England +12 234 £448 -10.40% 72
Work from Home -32 210 £525 -2.60% 181
South East +3 166 £525 -4.55% 118
North West +39 152 £450 - 44
Midlands +4 108 £450 -5.26% 50
West Midlands +10 95 £444 +1.43% 28
Yorkshire -24 76 £447 -18.73% 16
South West -23 62 £500 -18.70% 42
Scotland +27 48 £550 +22.22% 17
East of England -50 34 £450 -18.18% 40
East Midlands -22 12 £431 -22.99% 22
Wales -15 6 £300 -32.74% 15
North East -38 6 £306 -12.50% 14

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 85 (8.93%) Microsoft Exchange
2 57 (5.99%) SharePoint
3 19 (2.00%) Confluence
4 16 (1.68%) IIS
5 15 (1.58%) nginx
6 14 (1.47%) Apache
7 9 (0.95%) Tomcat
8 5 (0.53%) WebSphere
9 4 (0.42%) Skype for Business
10 2 (0.21%) Exchange Server 2013
10 2 (0.21%) IBM HTTP Server
10 2 (0.21%) Oracle HTTP Server
10 2 (0.21%) WebSphere Application Server
10 2 (0.21%) WebSphere Portal
11 1 (0.11%) Exchange Server 2010
11 1 (0.11%) SharePoint Server
11 1 (0.11%) Traefik
Applications
1 20 (2.10%) Microsoft Office
2 14 (1.47%) MS Visio
3 2 (0.21%) Chatbot
4 1 (0.11%) Microsoft Excel
4 1 (0.11%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 1 (0.11%) Microsoft Project
Business Applications
1 6 (0.63%) Remedy ITSM
2 1 (0.11%) Cloudability
Cloud Services
1 338 (35.50%) Azure
2 175 (18.38%) AWS
3 155 (16.28%) Entra ID
4 133 (13.97%) Microsoft 365
5 103 (10.82%) GCP
6 70 (7.35%) GitHub
7 58 (6.09%) IaaS
8 41 (4.31%) PaaS
9 38 (3.99%) SaaS
10 37 (3.89%) OneDrive
11 32 (3.36%) Serverless
12 29 (3.05%) Amazon EC2
13 28 (2.94%) Amazon S3
13 28 (2.94%) Virtual Private Cloud
14 27 (2.84%) Amazon EKS
15 26 (2.73%) Azure DevOps
15 26 (2.73%) GitHub Actions
15 26 (2.73%) OpenShift
15 26 (2.73%) Route 53
16 24 (2.52%) AWS CloudFormation
Communications & Networking
1 419 (44.01%) DHCP
2 288 (30.25%) Firewall
3 230 (24.16%) TCP/IP
4 226 (23.74%) VPN
5 135 (14.18%) WAN
6 114 (11.97%) LAN
7 106 (11.13%) SSL
8 102 (10.71%) Network Security
9 93 (9.77%) BIG-IP
10 92 (9.66%) VLAN
11 85 (8.93%) BGP
12 77 (8.09%) HTTP
13 59 (6.20%) Wi-Fi
14 54 (5.67%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
15 53 (5.57%) Wireless
16 50 (5.25%) SAN
17 46 (4.83%) OSPF
18 42 (4.41%) F5 BIG-IP GTM
19 38 (3.99%) DMZ
20 37 (3.89%) Kerberos
Database & Business Intelligence
1 36 (3.78%) SQL Server
2 19 (2.00%) Elasticsearch
3 18 (1.89%) PostgreSQL
4 12 (1.26%) Amazon RDS
5 11 (1.16%) Azure SQL Database
6 9 (0.95%) Power BI
7 8 (0.84%) MySQL
8 7 (0.74%) MongoDB
9 6 (0.63%) NoSQL
10 5 (0.53%) Data Lake
10 5 (0.53%) DynamoDB
11 4 (0.42%) Amazon Aurora
11 4 (0.42%) DocumentDB
11 4 (0.42%) MariaDB
11 4 (0.42%) Redis
12 3 (0.32%) Big Data
13 2 (0.21%) SQLPlus
14 1 (0.11%) Relational Database
14 1 (0.11%) SQL Server Reporting Services
14 1 (0.11%) TimescaleDB
Development Applications
1 63 (6.62%) JIRA
2 59 (6.20%) Jenkins
3 33 (3.47%) Git
4 25 (2.63%) GitLab
5 23 (2.42%) Fiddler
6 9 (0.95%) Browser DevTools
7 8 (0.84%) Bitbucket
8 7 (0.74%) SonarQube
9 6 (0.63%) Chocolatey
10 3 (0.32%) Sonatype Nexus
11 2 (0.21%) Introscope
11 2 (0.21%) Spinnaker
12 1 (0.11%) Artifactory
12 1 (0.11%) CircleCI
General
1 214 (22.48%) Social Skills
2 83 (8.72%) Analytical Skills
3 76 (7.98%) Finance
4 71 (7.46%) Banking
5 63 (6.62%) Public Sector
6 49 (5.15%) Documentation Skills
7 36 (3.78%) Investment Banking
8 27 (2.84%) Legal
9 18 (1.89%) Military
10 15 (1.58%) Telecoms
11 10 (1.05%) Organisational Skills
12 8 (0.84%) Inclusion and Diversity
13 7 (0.74%) Local Government
14 6 (0.63%) Law
14 6 (0.63%) Police
14 6 (0.63%) Publishing
15 5 (0.53%) Manufacturing
16 4 (0.42%) Advertising
16 4 (0.42%) Italian Language
16 4 (0.42%) Pharmaceutical
Job Titles
1 176 (18.49%) Network Engineer
2 134 (14.08%) Infrastructure Engineer
3 113 (11.87%) Architect
4 71 (7.46%) Senior
5 70 (7.35%) Analyst
6 69 (7.25%) Support Engineer
7 63 (6.62%) Security Engineer
8 50 (5.25%) Cloud Engineer
9 48 (5.04%) IT Support
10 46 (4.83%) Web Engineer
11 43 (4.52%) Network Security Engineer
12 39 (4.10%) IT Engineer
13 37 (3.89%) Cisco Engineer
14 36 (3.78%) DevOps Engineer
15 35 (3.68%) Cisco Network Engineer
16 34 (3.57%) Administrator
17 33 (3.47%) Azure Engineer
17 33 (3.47%) Data Engineer
17 33 (3.47%) Data Network Engineer
18 32 (3.36%) Cisco Security Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 57 (5.99%) LDAP
2 52 (5.46%) SAML
3 42 (4.41%) 802.1X
4 40 (4.20%) OAuth
5 32 (3.36%) OpenID
6 21 (2.21%) OpenTelemetry
7 15 (1.58%) JSON
8 13 (1.37%) ARM Templates
9 10 (1.05%) OAuth2
9 10 (1.05%) REST
10 9 (0.95%) Kafka
11 5 (0.53%) CSS
11 5 (0.53%) gRPC
11 5 (0.53%) Microsoft Graph
11 5 (0.53%) XMPP
12 4 (0.42%) Hibernate
12 4 (0.42%) JPA
12 4 (0.42%) Spring
12 4 (0.42%) Web Services
12 4 (0.42%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 109 (11.45%) Data Centre
2 70 (7.35%) PKI
3 59 (6.20%) Cloud Native
4 51 (5.36%) Onboarding
5 39 (4.10%) Clustering
5 39 (4.10%) Hybrid Cloud
5 39 (4.10%) Replication
6 36 (3.78%) Management Information System
7 33 (3.47%) Public Cloud
8 30 (3.15%) Distributed Denial-of-Service
9 21 (2.21%) Self-Motivation
10 19 (2.00%) Security Operations Centre
11 16 (1.68%) Cyberattack
11 16 (1.68%) Enterprise Cloud
12 14 (1.47%) Cyber Threat
12 14 (1.47%) Security Posture
13 13 (1.37%) Enterprise Software
13 13 (1.37%) Legacy Systems
14 12 (1.26%) Virtual Team
15 11 (1.16%) Product Ownership
Operating Systems
1 400 (42.02%) Windows
2 221 (23.21%) Windows Server
3 141 (14.81%) Linux
4 42 (4.41%) Windows 10
5 37 (3.89%) Windows Server 2019
6 33 (3.47%) Mac OS
6 33 (3.47%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
7 25 (2.63%) Unix
8 20 (2.10%) Apple iOS
8 20 (2.10%) Windows Server 2012
9 15 (1.58%) Android
10 11 (1.16%) Ubuntu
10 11 (1.16%) VMS
10 11 (1.16%) Windows Server 2016
11 9 (0.95%) CentOS
12 7 (0.74%) Windows 7
12 7 (0.74%) Windows Server 2003
13 3 (0.32%) AIX
14 2 (0.21%) CatOS
14 2 (0.21%) Windows Server 2008
Processes & Methodologies
1 198 (20.80%) Problem-Solving
2 174 (18.28%) Load Balancing
3 170 (17.86%) Infrastructure Engineering
4 164 (17.23%) Migration
5 145 (15.23%) High Availability
6 138 (14.50%) DevOps
7 134 (14.08%) ITIL
8 116 (12.18%) CI/CD
8 116 (12.18%) Infrastructure as Code
9 96 (10.08%) ITSM
10 82 (8.61%) Observability
11 79 (8.30%) Disaster Recovery
11 79 (8.30%) Identity Access Management
12 75 (7.88%) Agile
13 71 (7.46%) Cybersecurity
14 70 (7.35%) Project Delivery
15 60 (6.30%) Runbook
16 57 (5.99%) RBAC
17 55 (5.78%) Root Cause Analysis
18 54 (5.67%) SIEM
Programming Languages
1 183 (19.22%) PowerShell
2 148 (15.55%) Python
3 93 (9.77%) Bash
4 56 (5.88%) SQL
5 25 (2.63%) JavaScript
6 23 (2.42%) Bicep
7 14 (1.47%) Java
8 11 (1.16%) Go
9 10 (1.05%) Shell Script
10 9 (0.95%) ActionScript
10 9 (0.95%) VBA
11 8 (0.84%) Perl
12 6 (0.63%) VBScript
13 5 (0.53%) Groovy
13 5 (0.53%) Ruby
14 4 (0.42%) C
14 4 (0.42%) VB
15 3 (0.32%) Lisp
16 2 (0.21%) Jython
16 2 (0.21%) TypeScript
Qualifications
1 306 (32.14%) Security Cleared
2 192 (20.17%) SC Cleared
3 108 (11.34%) DV Cleared
4 93 (9.77%) Cisco Certification
5 75 (7.88%) Degree
6 61 (6.41%) CCNP
7 50 (5.25%) CCNA
8 31 (3.26%) Microsoft Certification
9 27 (2.84%) Azure Certification
10 26 (2.73%) CompTIA Security+
10 26 (2.73%) Network+ Certification
11 17 (1.79%) Computer Science Degree
11 17 (1.79%) Server+ Certification
12 16 (1.68%) BPSS Clearance
13 14 (1.47%) CISSP
14 13 (1.37%) CompTIA CySA+
15 12 (1.26%) AWS Certification
15 12 (1.26%) CCIE
16 11 (1.16%) JNCIA
16 11 (1.16%) MCSE
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 32 (3.36%) SLA
2 29 (3.05%) NIST
3 22 (2.31%) GDPR
4 21 (2.21%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 14 (1.47%) Sarbanes-Oxley
6 11 (1.16%) QA
7 7 (0.74%) NCSC
8 5 (0.53%) PCI DSS
9 4 (0.42%) HMG Security Policy Framework
10 2 (0.21%) Cyber Essentials
10 2 (0.21%) Disclosure Scotland
10 2 (0.21%) Government Security Classifications
10 2 (0.21%) SOC 2
11 1 (0.11%) Actionable Recommendations
11 1 (0.11%) COBIT
11 1 (0.11%) JSP 440
11 1 (0.11%) NIST 800
11 1 (0.11%) PMO
11 1 (0.11%) RMADS
System Software
1 374 (39.29%) Active Directory
2 203 (21.32%) VMware Infrastructure
3 94 (9.87%) Hyper-V
4 57 (5.99%) vSphere
5 55 (5.78%) VMware NSX
6 48 (5.04%) VMware ESXi
7 40 (4.20%) Virtual Machines
8 36 (3.78%) Docker
9 35 (3.68%) Virtual Desktop
10 25 (2.63%) Firmware
11 18 (1.89%) NFS
12 16 (1.68%) BitLocker
13 15 (1.58%) Squid
14 12 (1.26%) Microsoft App-V
15 11 (1.16%) vCloud
16 10 (1.05%) Postfix
17 8 (0.84%) VMware Workstation
18 7 (0.74%) Varnish
19 6 (0.63%) Terminal Services
20 5 (0.53%) Ceph
Systems Management
1 147 (15.44%) Terraform
2 123 (12.92%) Ansible
3 94 (9.87%) Kubernetes
4 76 (7.98%) Microsoft Intune
5 74 (7.77%) Single Sign-On
6 51 (5.36%) FortiGate
6 51 (5.36%) Grafana
7 48 (5.04%) vCenter Server
8 45 (4.73%) SCCM
9 40 (4.20%) Active Directory Federation Services
10 36 (3.78%) Prometheus
11 24 (2.52%) Argo
11 24 (2.52%) WSUS
12 18 (1.89%) SCOM
13 16 (1.68%) Puppet
14 14 (1.47%) HAProxy
15 13 (1.37%) Jamf Pro
15 13 (1.37%) vMotion
16 11 (1.16%) Nessus
17 8 (0.84%) Consul
Vendors
1 304 (31.93%) Microsoft
2 240 (25.21%) VMware
3 173 (18.17%) Cisco
4 153 (16.07%) F5
5 90 (9.45%) ServiceNow
6 82 (8.61%) Splunk
7 58 (6.09%) Infoblox
8 57 (5.99%) Citrix
9 50 (5.25%) Google
10 49 (5.15%) Red Hat
10 49 (5.15%) SolarWinds
11 46 (4.83%) Juniper
12 37 (3.89%) Palo Alto
13 31 (3.26%) Blue Coat
14 30 (3.15%) Dynatrace
14 30 (3.15%) NetApp
15 26 (2.73%) McAfee
16 24 (2.52%) Okta
17 23 (2.42%) Fortinet
18 22 (2.31%) Extreme Networks