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

6 months to
20 Nov 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 144 133 113
Rank change year-on-year -11 -20 +25
Contract jobs citing DNS 740 697 985
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.07% 1.91% 2.14%
As % of the Communications & Networking category 18.34% 15.79% 15.22%
Number of daily rates quoted 455 418 632
10th Percentile £213 £223 £213
25th Percentile £400 £330 £384
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £510 £460 £500
Median % change year-on-year +10.87% -8.00% -3.38%
75th Percentile £600 £575 £600
90th Percentile £680 £729 £675
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £421 £500
% change year-on-year +18.69% -15.75% +7.53%
Number of hourly rates quoted 38 10 23
10th Percentile £15.50 £20.36 £24.30
25th Percentile £29.00 £23.22 £28.63
Median hourly rate £45.00 £24.00 £40.00
Median % change year-on-year +87.50% -40.00% +66.67%
75th Percentile £75.00 £36.00 £63.50
90th Percentile £87.09 £48.88 £76.40
UK excluding London median hourly rate £45.00 £27.10 £55.00
% change year-on-year +66.05% -50.73% -1.08%

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 4,035 4,413 6,473
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 11.27% 12.09% 14.08%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,603 2,552 4,034
10th Percentile £206 £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 £685 £700
UK excluding London median daily rate £450 £475 £475
% change year-on-year -5.26% - +5.56%
Number of hourly rates quoted 205 165 341
10th Percentile £15.50 £18.22 £17.72
25th Percentile £20.82 £24.18 £22.75
Median hourly rate £36.00 £45.00 £55.00
Median % change year-on-year -20.00% -18.18% +27.91%
75th Percentile £65.00 £65.00 £66.25
90th Percentile £75.00 £75.00 £75.67
UK excluding London median hourly rate £42.50 £49.00 £56.49
% change year-on-year -13.27% -13.26% +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 20 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 20 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 20 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 +8 677 £518 +11.89% 585
UK excluding London -5 438 £500 +18.69% 456
London +2 245 £525 +4.95% 203
Work from Home -31 189 £500 +2.56% 223
Midlands +22 131 £438 +15.13% 56
West Midlands +32 126 £425 - 32
North of England -20 117 £500 +17.65% 61
South East +3 102 £500 +8.11% 191
North West -3 78 £500 +5.26% 41
South West -2 64 £575 +36.90% 64
Yorkshire -23 47 £500 +53.85% 16
East of England -11 42 £363 +31.82% 52
Scotland -38 14 £454 +3.53% 34
North East -16 6 £575 +283.33% 4
East Midlands -38 5 £450 +20.00% 24
Wales -4 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 89 (12.03%) Microsoft Exchange
2 75 (10.14%) SharePoint
3 45 (6.08%) Confluence
4 35 (4.73%) Skype for Business
5 14 (1.89%) Exchange Server 2010
5 14 (1.89%) SharePoint Server
6 12 (1.62%) OpenStack
7 11 (1.49%) Exchange Server 2013
7 11 (1.49%) IIS
8 10 (1.35%) Exchange Server 2003
8 10 (1.35%) Exchange Server 2007
8 10 (1.35%) nginx
8 10 (1.35%) Office Communications Server
9 9 (1.22%) Apache
10 3 (0.41%) Tomcat
11 2 (0.27%) Apache Spark
11 2 (0.27%) Cloud Foundry
11 2 (0.27%) Oracle HTTP Server
11 2 (0.27%) WebLogic
11 2 (0.27%) WordPress
Applications
1 71 (9.59%) Microsoft Office
2 10 (1.35%) Mozilla Thunderbird
3 7 (0.95%) MS Visio
4 5 (0.68%) Microsoft Excel
5 3 (0.41%) Spreadsheet
6 2 (0.27%) Microsoft Project
6 2 (0.27%) Windchill
7 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
1 210 (28.38%) Azure
2 191 (25.81%) AWS
3 145 (19.59%) Microsoft 365
4 77 (10.41%) Entra ID
4 77 (10.41%) Virtual Private Cloud
5 63 (8.51%) Amazon CloudWatch
6 60 (8.11%) Amazon EC2
7 59 (7.97%) Amazon S3
8 44 (5.95%) Amazon ELB
9 39 (5.27%) GCP
9 39 (5.27%) GitHub
10 36 (4.86%) SaaS
11 30 (4.05%) IaaS
12 27 (3.65%) AWS KMS
13 26 (3.51%) Amazon ECS
14 25 (3.38%) AWS CloudFormation
15 21 (2.84%) Route 53
16 20 (2.70%) Azure DevOps
16 20 (2.70%) Serverless
17 19 (2.57%) AWS Lambda
Communications & Networking
1 347 (46.89%) DHCP
2 278 (37.57%) Firewall
3 229 (30.95%) TCP/IP
4 180 (24.32%) VPN
5 102 (13.78%) Network Security
6 92 (12.43%) SSL
7 90 (12.16%) WAN
8 83 (11.22%) VLAN
9 79 (10.68%) HTTP
10 76 (10.27%) LAN
11 65 (8.78%) Wireless
12 55 (7.43%) BGP
13 53 (7.16%) SMTP
14 48 (6.49%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
15 39 (5.27%) F5 BIG-IP GTM
15 39 (5.27%) Wi-Fi
16 37 (5.00%) OSPF
16 37 (5.00%) SD-WAN
17 36 (4.86%) IPsec
17 36 (4.86%) SAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 37 (5.00%) 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
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 95 (12.84%) Jenkins
2 80 (10.81%) Git
3 72 (9.73%) JIRA
4 48 (6.49%) GitLab
5 22 (2.97%) Vagrant
6 14 (1.89%) Fiddler
7 7 (0.95%) TeamCity
8 5 (0.68%) Subversion
8 5 (0.68%) Visual Studio Code
9 4 (0.54%) Terragrunt
10 3 (0.41%) Browser DevTools
10 3 (0.41%) Vite
10 3 (0.41%) webpack
11 2 (0.27%) MLflow
11 2 (0.27%) Oracle APEX
11 2 (0.27%) Poetry
11 2 (0.27%) PyCharm
11 2 (0.27%) SonarQube
11 2 (0.27%) Sonatype Nexus
12 1 (0.14%) Postman
General
1 236 (31.89%) Social Skills
2 105 (14.19%) Analytical Skills
3 80 (10.81%) Public Sector
4 60 (8.11%) Finance
5 44 (5.95%) Banking
6 36 (4.86%) Documentation Skills
6 36 (4.86%) Investment Banking
7 23 (3.11%) Telecoms
8 20 (2.70%) Legal
9 19 (2.57%) Presentation Skills
10 17 (2.30%) Manufacturing
11 10 (1.35%) Inclusion and Diversity
12 9 (1.22%) Organisational Skills
13 8 (1.08%) Influencing Skills
13 8 (1.08%) Law
13 8 (1.08%) Military
14 7 (0.95%) Aerospace
15 6 (0.81%) Local Government
15 6 (0.81%) Marketing
16 3 (0.41%) Retail
Job Titles
1 99 (13.38%) Network Engineer
2 89 (12.03%) Support Engineer
3 73 (9.86%) Infrastructure Engineer
3 73 (9.86%) Senior
4 68 (9.19%) Architect
5 63 (8.51%) Analyst
6 58 (7.84%) DevOps Engineer
7 44 (5.95%) Platform Engineer
8 40 (5.41%) IT Support
9 39 (5.27%) AWS Engineer
10 34 (4.59%) Administrator
11 31 (4.19%) Security Engineer
12 27 (3.65%) Consultant
13 26 (3.51%) AWS DevOps
13 26 (3.51%) AWS DevOps Engineer
13 26 (3.51%) Cloud Platform Engineer
14 24 (3.24%) IT Engineer
14 24 (3.24%) Operations Engineer
14 24 (3.24%) Senior Infrastructure Engineer
15 21 (2.84%) Solutions Architect
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 38 (5.14%) LDAP
2 18 (2.43%) SAML
3 16 (2.16%) OAuth
4 14 (1.89%) 802.1X
4 14 (1.89%) OpenID
4 14 (1.89%) REST
5 13 (1.76%) OAuth2
6 11 (1.49%) AngularJS
6 11 (1.49%) Elastic Stack
6 11 (1.49%) SOAP
7 10 (1.35%) YAML
8 8 (1.08%) Kafka
8 8 (1.08%) Middleware
8 8 (1.08%) NETCONF
8 8 (1.08%) RESTCONF
9 7 (0.95%) cloud-init
9 7 (0.95%) JSON
9 7 (0.95%) Keycloak
9 7 (0.95%) React
10 6 (0.81%) CSS
Miscellaneous
1 64 (8.65%) PKI
1 64 (8.65%) Replication
2 62 (8.38%) Data Centre
3 50 (6.76%) Management Information System
4 28 (3.78%) Onboarding
5 22 (2.97%) Analytical Mindset
6 19 (2.57%) Enterprise Software
6 19 (2.57%) Hybrid Cloud
7 17 (2.30%) Video Conferencing
8 12 (1.62%) Cloud Native
9 11 (1.49%) Operational Technology
9 11 (1.49%) Security Operations Centre
9 11 (1.49%) Virtual Team
10 10 (1.35%) Cyberattack
10 10 (1.35%) Private Cloud
10 10 (1.35%) SCADA
10 10 (1.35%) Security Posture
11 9 (1.22%) Cyber Threat
11 9 (1.22%) iPhone
11 9 (1.22%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 341 (46.08%) Windows
2 167 (22.57%) Linux
3 135 (18.24%) Windows Server
4 64 (8.65%) Windows 10
5 33 (4.46%) VMS
6 32 (4.32%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
7 30 (4.05%) Unix
8 25 (3.38%) Amazon Linux
9 24 (3.24%) Windows Server 2016
10 22 (2.97%) Windows Server 2019
11 20 (2.70%) Mac OS
12 19 (2.57%) Ubuntu
12 19 (2.57%) Windows Server 2012
13 18 (2.43%) Android
13 18 (2.43%) CentOS
14 15 (2.03%) Windows Server 2003
15 12 (1.62%) Windows 7
16 10 (1.35%) Apple iOS
17 5 (0.68%) Solaris
18 2 (0.27%) Windows Server 2008
Processes & Methodologies
1 150 (20.27%) Problem-Solving
2 133 (17.97%) DevOps
3 129 (17.43%) ITIL
4 124 (16.76%) CI/CD
5 99 (13.38%) Load Balancing
6 96 (12.97%) Infrastructure as Code
6 96 (12.97%) Infrastructure Engineering
7 79 (10.68%) High Availability
8 78 (10.54%) Migration
9 76 (10.27%) Change Management
10 71 (9.59%) Service Management
11 69 (9.32%) Cybersecurity
12 60 (8.11%) Agile
13 55 (7.43%) Platform Engineering
14 54 (7.30%) Incident Response
15 53 (7.16%) Root Cause Analysis
16 51 (6.89%) Containerisation
17 50 (6.76%) Continuous Improvement
18 49 (6.62%) Patch Management
19 48 (6.49%) Infrastructure Automation
Programming Languages
1 202 (27.30%) PowerShell
2 183 (24.73%) Python
3 97 (13.11%) Bash
4 45 (6.08%) SQL
5 30 (4.05%) Perl
6 24 (3.24%) Groovy
7 22 (2.97%) Java
8 15 (2.03%) Go
9 14 (1.89%) Shell Script
10 11 (1.49%) JavaScript
11 10 (1.35%) Bicep
12 8 (1.08%) VBScript
13 7 (0.95%) Kusto Query Language
13 7 (0.95%) Lisp
14 6 (0.81%) C++
14 6 (0.81%) VB
15 4 (0.54%) TypeScript
16 3 (0.41%) Apex Code
16 3 (0.41%) Search Processing Language
17 2 (0.27%) SOQL
Qualifications
1 264 (35.68%) Security Cleared
2 192 (25.95%) SC Cleared
3 98 (13.24%) Cisco Certification
4 87 (11.76%) Degree
5 74 (10.00%) DV Cleared
6 68 (9.19%) CCNP
7 61 (8.24%) Microsoft Certification
8 44 (5.95%) CCNA
9 37 (5.00%) Azure Certification
10 32 (4.32%) AWS Certification
11 23 (3.11%) Computer Science Degree
12 22 (2.97%) CISSP
13 19 (2.57%) CCIE
14 14 (1.89%) Network+ Certification
15 13 (1.76%) MCSE
16 12 (1.62%) MCSA
17 11 (1.49%) CompTIA Security+
17 11 (1.49%) ITIL Certification
17 11 (1.49%) Server+ Certification
17 11 (1.49%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 29 (3.92%) GDPR
2 21 (2.84%) ISO/IEC 27001
3 18 (2.43%) SLA
4 16 (2.16%) NIST
5 12 (1.62%) NCSC
6 10 (1.35%) PCI DSS
7 9 (1.22%) Cyber Essentials
8 7 (0.95%) Accessibility
9 5 (0.68%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 5 (0.68%) SOC 2
10 4 (0.54%) HMG Security Policy Framework
11 3 (0.41%) Data Quality
11 3 (0.41%) QA
11 3 (0.41%) WCAG
12 2 (0.27%) Disclosure Scotland
13 1 (0.14%) Actionable Recommendations
13 1 (0.14%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
13 1 (0.14%) Government Security Classifications
13 1 (0.14%) JSP 440
13 1 (0.14%) PMO
System Software
1 306 (41.35%) Active Directory
2 182 (24.59%) VMware Infrastructure
3 93 (12.57%) Docker
4 52 (7.03%) Hyper-V
5 34 (4.59%) VMware NSX
5 34 (4.59%) vSphere
6 28 (3.78%) VMware ESXi
7 25 (3.38%) DFS Replication
8 24 (3.24%) Virtual Machines
9 21 (2.84%) Firmware
10 16 (2.16%) Dovecot
10 16 (2.16%) Postfix
11 14 (1.89%) Terminal Services
12 10 (1.35%) Brightmail
12 10 (1.35%) ISA Server
12 10 (1.35%) Squid
12 10 (1.35%) Virtual Servers
13 9 (1.22%) Microsoft App-V
14 8 (1.08%) NFS
15 7 (0.95%) Virtual Desktop
Systems Management
1 141 (19.05%) Terraform
2 126 (17.03%) Ansible
3 69 (9.32%) SCCM
4 57 (7.70%) Kubernetes
5 55 (7.43%) Microsoft Intune
6 47 (6.35%) Grafana
7 42 (5.68%) Prometheus
7 42 (5.68%) vCenter Server
8 39 (5.27%) Single Sign-On
9 30 (4.05%) Active Directory Federation Services
10 18 (2.43%) Argo
11 17 (2.30%) Nessus
11 17 (2.30%) WSUS
12 15 (2.03%) FortiGate
12 15 (2.03%) Packer
13 13 (1.76%) Progress Chef
13 13 (1.76%) Proxmox
14 12 (1.62%) Microsoft Clustering
14 12 (1.62%) Puppet
15 8 (1.08%) Jamf Pro
Vendors
1 267 (36.08%) Microsoft
2 216 (29.19%) VMware
3 141 (19.05%) Cisco
4 108 (14.59%) F5
5 88 (11.89%) ServiceNow
6 55 (7.43%) CheckPoint
7 51 (6.89%) Palo Alto
8 45 (6.08%) Splunk
9 39 (5.27%) Citrix
10 38 (5.14%) Red Hat
11 35 (4.73%) SolarWinds
12 29 (3.92%) Veeam
13 28 (3.78%) Blue Coat
14 27 (3.65%) Juniper
15 26 (3.51%) Dell
16 25 (3.38%) Fortinet
17 24 (3.24%) Meraki
18 22 (2.97%) Google
18 22 (2.97%) Remedy
19 21 (2.84%) Zscaler