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

6 months to
30 Nov 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 141 131 114
Rank change year-on-year -10 -17 +24
Contract jobs citing DNS 727 714 994
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.03% 1.97% 2.17%
As % of the Communications & Networking category 18.48% 16.17% 15.65%
Number of daily rates quoted 450 429 629
10th Percentile £213 £223 £224
25th Percentile £382 £325 £375
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £503 £463 £500
Median % change year-on-year +8.65% -7.50% -3.85%
75th Percentile £600 £575 £600
90th Percentile £688 £725 £675
UK excluding London median daily rate £490 £420 £500
% change year-on-year +16.67% -16.00% +6.38%
Number of hourly rates quoted 34 12 23
10th Percentile £15.50 £18.78 £24.60
25th Percentile £29.00 £22.64 £31.25
Median hourly rate £45.00 £23.70 £55.00
Median % change year-on-year +89.91% -56.92% +109.52%
75th Percentile £78.75 £32.00 £63.50
90th Percentile £88.54 £47.68 £76.40
UK excluding London median hourly rate £45.00 £24.20 £55.00
% change year-on-year +85.95% -56.00% +42.86%

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 3,935 4,416 6,351
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 10.98% 12.18% 13.87%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,551 2,538 3,939
10th Percentile £205 £220 £210
25th Percentile £351 £368 £363
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £475 £500 £500
Median % change year-on-year -5.00% - -
75th Percentile £588 £600 £610
90th Percentile £675 £685 £700
UK excluding London median daily rate £450 £475 £475
% change year-on-year -5.26% - +5.56%
Number of hourly rates quoted 191 171 344
10th Percentile £15.50 £16.26 £17.72
25th Percentile £20.34 £23.05 £22.75
Median hourly rate £34.00 £41.00 £55.70
Median % change year-on-year -17.07% -26.39% +32.62%
75th Percentile £65.00 £65.00 £65.98
90th Percentile £75.00 £75.00 £76.21
UK excluding London median hourly rate £42.50 £48.03 £56.49
% change year-on-year -11.51% -14.98% +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 30 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 30 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 30 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 +7 659 £518 +11.89% 383
UK excluding London -11 422 £490 +16.67% 376
London +24 247 £525 +5.00% 83
Work from Home -31 183 £488 -1.91% 139
Midlands +19 122 £425 +13.33% 48
North of England -17 117 £490 +15.29% 48
West Midlands +38 116 £425 - 30
South East -2 100 £505 +9.19% 171
North West +1 79 £500 +5.26% 32
South West -1 58 £575 +36.90% 45
Yorkshire -21 46 £464 +48.32% 14
East of England -5 41 £363 +31.82% 47
Scotland -30 16 £450 +1.18% 20
North East -14 6 £575 +283.33% 2
East Midlands -35 6 £450 +20.00% 18
Wales -7 3 £550 +83.33% 6
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 91 (12.52%) Microsoft Exchange
2 74 (10.18%) SharePoint
3 35 (4.81%) Confluence
3 35 (4.81%) Skype for Business
4 15 (2.06%) Exchange Server 2010
5 14 (1.93%) SharePoint Server
6 12 (1.65%) OpenStack
7 11 (1.51%) Exchange Server 2013
7 11 (1.51%) nginx
8 10 (1.38%) Exchange Server 2003
8 10 (1.38%) Exchange Server 2007
8 10 (1.38%) IIS
8 10 (1.38%) Office Communications Server
9 8 (1.10%) Apache
10 3 (0.41%) Tomcat
11 2 (0.28%) Apache Airflow
11 2 (0.28%) Apache Spark
11 2 (0.28%) Cloud Foundry
11 2 (0.28%) Oracle HTTP Server
11 2 (0.28%) WebLogic
Applications
1 61 (8.39%) Microsoft Office
2 10 (1.38%) Mozilla Thunderbird
3 7 (0.96%) MS Visio
4 4 (0.55%) Microsoft Excel
5 3 (0.41%) Spreadsheet
6 2 (0.28%) Windchill
7 1 (0.14%) Microsoft PowerPoint
7 1 (0.14%) Microsoft Project
Business Applications
1 2 (0.28%) Remedy ITSM
1 2 (0.28%) SystmOne
1 2 (0.28%) 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
1 211 (29.02%) Azure
2 192 (26.41%) AWS
3 147 (20.22%) Microsoft 365
4 82 (11.28%) Entra ID
5 75 (10.32%) Virtual Private Cloud
6 60 (8.25%) Amazon CloudWatch
7 59 (8.12%) Amazon EC2
8 58 (7.98%) Amazon S3
9 43 (5.91%) Amazon ELB
10 40 (5.50%) GCP
11 39 (5.36%) GitHub
12 36 (4.95%) SaaS
13 33 (4.54%) IaaS
14 28 (3.85%) Amazon ECS
14 28 (3.85%) AWS CloudFormation
15 25 (3.44%) AWS KMS
16 22 (3.03%) Serverless
17 21 (2.89%) Route 53
18 20 (2.75%) AWS Lambda
19 19 (2.61%) Azure DevOps
Communications & Networking
1 334 (45.94%) DHCP
2 272 (37.41%) Firewall
3 230 (31.64%) TCP/IP
4 174 (23.93%) VPN
5 102 (14.03%) Network Security
6 93 (12.79%) SSL
7 85 (11.69%) WAN
8 80 (11.00%) HTTP
9 79 (10.87%) VLAN
10 70 (9.63%) LAN
11 59 (8.12%) Wireless
12 51 (7.02%) SMTP
13 47 (6.46%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
14 43 (5.91%) BGP
15 38 (5.23%) F5 BIG-IP GTM
15 38 (5.23%) Wi-Fi
16 35 (4.81%) FTP
17 33 (4.54%) SAN
17 33 (4.54%) SD-WAN
18 32 (4.40%) DMZ
Database & Business Intelligence
1 36 (4.95%) Amazon RDS
2 19 (2.61%) PostgreSQL
3 18 (2.48%) SQL Server
4 15 (2.06%) Amazon Aurora
5 8 (1.10%) MongoDB
6 6 (0.83%) BigQuery
7 5 (0.69%) MySQL
8 4 (0.55%) Apache Cassandra
8 4 (0.55%) Big Data
9 3 (0.41%) Data Hub
9 3 (0.41%) DynamoDB
9 3 (0.41%) Elasticsearch
9 3 (0.41%) Redis
9 3 (0.41%) Relational Database
10 2 (0.28%) Delta Lake
10 2 (0.28%) Geospatial Data
10 2 (0.28%) GIS
10 2 (0.28%) NoSQL
10 2 (0.28%) Parquet
10 2 (0.28%) Power BI
Development Applications
1 92 (12.65%) Jenkins
2 80 (11.00%) Git
3 61 (8.39%) JIRA
4 47 (6.46%) GitLab
5 21 (2.89%) Vagrant
6 15 (2.06%) Fiddler
7 7 (0.96%) TeamCity
8 5 (0.69%) Subversion
8 5 (0.69%) Visual Studio Code
9 4 (0.55%) Terragrunt
10 3 (0.41%) Browser DevTools
10 3 (0.41%) Vite
10 3 (0.41%) webpack
11 2 (0.28%) MLflow
11 2 (0.28%) Oracle APEX
11 2 (0.28%) Poetry
11 2 (0.28%) PyCharm
11 2 (0.28%) SonarQube
11 2 (0.28%) Sonatype Nexus
12 1 (0.14%) Octopus Deploy
General
1 225 (30.95%) Social Skills
2 99 (13.62%) Analytical Skills
3 82 (11.28%) Public Sector
4 60 (8.25%) Finance
5 45 (6.19%) Banking
6 37 (5.09%) Documentation Skills
7 36 (4.95%) Investment Banking
8 26 (3.58%) Telecoms
9 20 (2.75%) Legal
10 19 (2.61%) Presentation Skills
11 11 (1.51%) Manufacturing
12 9 (1.24%) Inclusion and Diversity
12 9 (1.24%) Organisational Skills
13 8 (1.10%) Influencing Skills
13 8 (1.10%) Law
13 8 (1.10%) Military
14 7 (0.96%) Aerospace
15 6 (0.83%) Marketing
16 5 (0.69%) Local Government
17 3 (0.41%) Retail
Job Titles
1 89 (12.24%) Support Engineer
2 87 (11.97%) Network Engineer
3 75 (10.32%) Senior
4 69 (9.49%) Infrastructure Engineer
5 68 (9.35%) Architect
6 62 (8.53%) Analyst
7 56 (7.70%) DevOps Engineer
8 44 (6.05%) Platform Engineer
9 40 (5.50%) IT Support
10 36 (4.95%) AWS Engineer
11 35 (4.81%) Administrator
12 33 (4.54%) Security Engineer
13 27 (3.71%) Consultant
14 26 (3.58%) Cloud Platform Engineer
14 26 (3.58%) Senior Infrastructure Engineer
15 25 (3.44%) Operations Engineer
16 24 (3.30%) AWS DevOps
16 24 (3.30%) AWS DevOps Engineer
16 24 (3.30%) IT Engineer
17 21 (2.89%) Solutions Architect
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 40 (5.50%) LDAP
2 18 (2.48%) SAML
3 16 (2.20%) OAuth
4 15 (2.06%) 802.1X
5 14 (1.93%) OpenID
5 14 (1.93%) REST
6 13 (1.79%) OAuth2
7 12 (1.65%) AngularJS
7 12 (1.65%) SOAP
8 11 (1.51%) Elastic Stack
9 9 (1.24%) Middleware
9 9 (1.24%) YAML
10 8 (1.10%) Kafka
10 8 (1.10%) React
11 7 (0.96%) cloud-init
11 7 (0.96%) JSON
11 7 (0.96%) Keycloak
12 6 (0.83%) CSS
12 6 (0.83%) HTML
13 5 (0.69%) RESTful
Miscellaneous
1 63 (8.67%) Data Centre
1 63 (8.67%) Replication
2 57 (7.84%) PKI
3 49 (6.74%) Management Information System
4 28 (3.85%) Onboarding
5 22 (3.03%) Analytical Mindset
6 20 (2.75%) Enterprise Software
7 19 (2.61%) Hybrid Cloud
8 17 (2.34%) Video Conferencing
9 12 (1.65%) Cloud Native
10 11 (1.51%) Operational Technology
10 11 (1.51%) Security Operations Centre
11 10 (1.38%) Cyberattack
11 10 (1.38%) Private Cloud
11 10 (1.38%) SCADA
11 10 (1.38%) Security Posture
11 10 (1.38%) Self-Motivation
12 9 (1.24%) Cyber Threat
12 9 (1.24%) iPhone
12 9 (1.24%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 340 (46.77%) Windows
2 169 (23.25%) Linux
3 138 (18.98%) Windows Server
4 63 (8.67%) Windows 10
5 33 (4.54%) VMS
6 32 (4.40%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
7 29 (3.99%) Unix
8 24 (3.30%) Amazon Linux
8 24 (3.30%) Windows Server 2016
9 23 (3.16%) Windows Server 2019
10 20 (2.75%) Windows Server 2012
11 19 (2.61%) Mac OS
11 19 (2.61%) Ubuntu
12 18 (2.48%) Android
12 18 (2.48%) CentOS
13 13 (1.79%) Windows Server 2003
14 12 (1.65%) Windows 7
15 9 (1.24%) Apple iOS
16 5 (0.69%) Solaris
17 2 (0.28%) Windows Server 2008
Processes & Methodologies
1 148 (20.36%) Problem-Solving
2 129 (17.74%) DevOps
3 127 (17.47%) ITIL
4 125 (17.19%) CI/CD
5 98 (13.48%) Load Balancing
6 97 (13.34%) Infrastructure as Code
7 93 (12.79%) Infrastructure Engineering
8 79 (10.87%) Migration
9 78 (10.73%) Change Management
10 76 (10.45%) High Availability
11 68 (9.35%) Cybersecurity
12 61 (8.39%) Agile
12 61 (8.39%) Service Management
13 55 (7.57%) Platform Engineering
14 54 (7.43%) Incident Response
15 53 (7.29%) Continuous Improvement
16 52 (7.15%) Root Cause Analysis
17 50 (6.88%) Containerisation
18 49 (6.74%) Patch Management
19 46 (6.33%) Infrastructure Automation
Programming Languages
1 201 (27.65%) PowerShell
2 179 (24.62%) Python
3 96 (13.20%) Bash
4 46 (6.33%) SQL
5 30 (4.13%) Perl
6 23 (3.16%) Groovy
7 21 (2.89%) Java
8 15 (2.06%) Go
9 13 (1.79%) Shell Script
10 11 (1.51%) JavaScript
11 10 (1.38%) Bicep
12 8 (1.10%) VBScript
13 7 (0.96%) Kusto Query Language
13 7 (0.96%) Lisp
14 6 (0.83%) C++
14 6 (0.83%) Ruby
14 6 (0.83%) VB
15 4 (0.55%) TypeScript
16 3 (0.41%) Apex Code
16 3 (0.41%) Search Processing Language
Qualifications
1 259 (35.63%) Security Cleared
2 188 (25.86%) SC Cleared
3 77 (10.59%) Cisco Certification
4 74 (10.18%) Degree
4 74 (10.18%) DV Cleared
5 61 (8.39%) Microsoft Certification
6 53 (7.29%) CCNP
7 37 (5.09%) Azure Certification
8 34 (4.68%) CCNA
9 30 (4.13%) AWS Certification
10 22 (3.03%) CISSP
11 19 (2.61%) Computer Science Degree
12 16 (2.20%) CCIE
13 15 (2.06%) Network+ Certification
14 13 (1.79%) MCSE
15 12 (1.65%) CompTIA Security+
16 11 (1.51%) MCSA
16 11 (1.51%) Server+ Certification
16 11 (1.51%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
17 10 (1.38%) BPSS Clearance
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 28 (3.85%) GDPR
2 22 (3.03%) ISO/IEC 27001
3 16 (2.20%) SLA
4 15 (2.06%) NIST
5 12 (1.65%) NCSC
6 10 (1.38%) Cyber Essentials
6 10 (1.38%) PCI DSS
7 7 (0.96%) Accessibility
8 5 (0.69%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 4 (0.55%) HMG Security Policy Framework
9 4 (0.55%) SOC 2
10 3 (0.41%) Data Quality
10 3 (0.41%) WCAG
11 2 (0.28%) Disclosure Scotland
11 2 (0.28%) PMO
11 2 (0.28%) QA
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
1 307 (42.23%) Active Directory
2 175 (24.07%) VMware Infrastructure
3 92 (12.65%) Docker
4 49 (6.74%) Hyper-V
5 35 (4.81%) VMware NSX
6 32 (4.40%) vSphere
7 27 (3.71%) Virtual Machines
8 24 (3.30%) DFS Replication
9 21 (2.89%) Firmware
9 21 (2.89%) VMware ESXi
10 16 (2.20%) Dovecot
10 16 (2.20%) Postfix
11 14 (1.93%) Terminal Services
12 10 (1.38%) Brightmail
12 10 (1.38%) ISA Server
12 10 (1.38%) Squid
12 10 (1.38%) Virtual Servers
13 9 (1.24%) Microsoft App-V
14 8 (1.10%) NFS
15 7 (0.96%) Virtual Desktop
Systems Management
1 143 (19.67%) Terraform
2 118 (16.23%) Ansible
3 71 (9.77%) SCCM
4 60 (8.25%) Microsoft Intune
5 59 (8.12%) Kubernetes
6 45 (6.19%) Grafana
7 43 (5.91%) vCenter Server
8 40 (5.50%) Prometheus
8 40 (5.50%) Single Sign-On
9 30 (4.13%) Active Directory Federation Services
10 19 (2.61%) WSUS
11 17 (2.34%) Argo
11 17 (2.34%) Nessus
12 14 (1.93%) FortiGate
12 14 (1.93%) Packer
12 14 (1.93%) Progress Chef
13 13 (1.79%) Proxmox
14 12 (1.65%) Microsoft Clustering
14 12 (1.65%) Puppet
15 8 (1.10%) Jamf Pro
Vendors
1 263 (36.18%) Microsoft
2 207 (28.47%) VMware
3 121 (16.64%) Cisco
4 108 (14.86%) F5
5 88 (12.10%) ServiceNow
6 56 (7.70%) Palo Alto
7 54 (7.43%) CheckPoint
8 44 (6.05%) Splunk
9 40 (5.50%) Citrix
10 38 (5.23%) Red Hat
11 31 (4.26%) Blue Coat
11 31 (4.26%) SolarWinds
12 28 (3.85%) Juniper
13 26 (3.58%) Veeam
14 24 (3.30%) Dell
15 23 (3.16%) Google
16 22 (3.03%) Fortinet
17 20 (2.75%) Meraki
17 20 (2.75%) NetApp
17 20 (2.75%) Zscaler