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 vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 15 September 2025, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
15 Sep 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 135 151 135
Rank change year-on-year +16 -16 +15
Contract jobs citing DNS 688 621 983
As % of all contract jobs advertised in the UK 2.12% 1.63% 1.96%
As % of the Communications & Networking category 18.38% 13.73% 14.84%
Number of daily rates quoted 434 403 646
10th Percentile £223 £225 £260
25th Percentile £376 £363 £400
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £500
Median % change year-on-year - - -1.96%
75th Percentile £600 £600 £600
90th Percentile £650 £686 £675
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £475 £488
% change year-on-year - -2.56% +3.72%
Number of hourly rates quoted 30 12 18
10th Percentile £27.72 £20.13 £21.48
25th Percentile £29.00 £22.64 £27.50
Median hourly rate £45.00 £23.99 £47.50
Median % change year-on-year +87.58% -49.49% +115.91%
75th Percentile £79.76 £32.00 £69.25
90th Percentile £89.63 £47.68 £78.60
UK excluding London median hourly rate £45.00 £27.10 £40.00
% change year-on-year +66.05% -32.25% +81.82%

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 3,744 4,522 6,623
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 11.54% 11.86% 13.18%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,307 2,642 4,228
10th Percentile £228 £231 £226
25th Percentile £363 £381 £375
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £478 £505 £500
Median % change year-on-year -5.43% +1.00% -
75th Percentile £588 £610 £613
90th Percentile £676 £688 £700
UK excluding London median daily rate £454 £500 £455
% change year-on-year -9.30% +9.89% +1.11%
Number of hourly rates quoted 196 260 300
10th Percentile £15.50 £14.16 £16.77
25th Percentile £25.15 £21.37 £22.75
Median hourly rate £43.00 £51.00 £56.49
Median % change year-on-year -15.69% -9.72% +34.50%
75th Percentile £64.06 £65.00 £67.50
90th Percentile £74.00 £75.00 £75.70
UK excluding London median hourly rate £42.50 £57.35 £57.50
% change year-on-year -25.89% -0.26% +27.78%

DNS
Job Vacancy Trend

Job postings citing DNS as a proportion of all IT jobs advertised.

Job vacancy trend for DNS 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 15 September 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 15 September 2025.

Hourly rate histogram for DNS in the UK

DNS
Top 18 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 15 September 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 +25 626 £500 - 356
UK excluding London +2 372 £475 - 328
London +43 263 £500 -2.91% 67
Work from Home +7 174 £478 -8.95% 128
Midlands +3 95 £463 +2.78% 57
West Midlands +22 89 £475 -9.52% 32
South East -6 87 £525 +2.44% 107
North of England -3 76 £449 -11.19% 74
East of England +39 60 £550 +144.44% 37
South West +26 44 £550 +1.38% 43
North West -7 44 £450 -10.00% 37
Yorkshire -14 29 £500 -19.61% 27
Scotland -26 15 £454 +89.17% 11
North East +4 9 £340 +142.86% 13
East Midlands -25 6 £450 +20.00% 23
Wales +1 4 £379 +26.42% 4
Northern Ireland -11 2 £150 +1.69% 4
Channel Islands - 1 £440 -

DNS
Co-occurring Skills and Capabilities by Category

The follow tables expand on the table above by listing co-occurrences grouped by category. The same employment type, locality and period is covered with up to 20 co-occurrences shown in each of the following categories:

Application Platforms
1 71 (10.32%) Microsoft Exchange
2 49 (7.12%) Confluence
2 49 (7.12%) SharePoint
3 19 (2.76%) Skype for Business
4 16 (2.33%) OpenStack
5 15 (2.18%) Exchange Server 2010
5 15 (2.18%) SharePoint Server
6 14 (2.03%) Exchange Server 2013
7 13 (1.89%) Exchange Server 2003
7 13 (1.89%) Exchange Server 2007
7 13 (1.89%) IIS
7 13 (1.89%) Office Communications Server
8 11 (1.60%) Apache
9 10 (1.45%) nginx
10 3 (0.44%) Tomcat
11 2 (0.29%) Apache Airflow
11 2 (0.29%) Apache Spark
11 2 (0.29%) Cloud Foundry
11 2 (0.29%) Oracle HTTP Server
11 2 (0.29%) WebLogic
Applications
1 72 (10.47%) Microsoft Office
2 10 (1.45%) Mozilla Thunderbird
3 5 (0.73%) Microsoft Excel
4 2 (0.29%) Microsoft Project
4 2 (0.29%) Spreadsheet
4 2 (0.29%) Windchill
5 1 (0.15%) MS Visio
Business Applications
1 4 (0.58%) Remedy ITSM
2 2 (0.29%) Teamcenter
3 1 (0.15%) Dynamics CRM
3 1 (0.15%) Eikon
3 1 (0.15%) Eze OMS
3 1 (0.15%) Fidessa
3 1 (0.15%) Pegasus Opera
3 1 (0.15%) SAP S/4HANA
Cloud Services
1 196 (28.49%) AWS
2 168 (24.42%) Azure
3 109 (15.84%) Microsoft 365
4 67 (9.74%) Virtual Private Cloud
5 63 (9.16%) Amazon EC2
6 56 (8.14%) Amazon CloudWatch
7 53 (7.70%) Amazon S3
8 50 (7.27%) Entra ID
9 43 (6.25%) GCP
10 42 (6.10%) Amazon ELB
11 32 (4.65%) GitHub
11 32 (4.65%) IaaS
12 31 (4.51%) AWS CloudFormation
13 28 (4.07%) AWS KMS
14 27 (3.92%) SaaS
15 24 (3.49%) PaaS
16 21 (3.05%) Azure Monitor
16 21 (3.05%) Cohesity
17 20 (2.91%) Amazon EKS
17 20 (2.91%) Route 53
Communications & Networking
1 315 (45.78%) DHCP
2 270 (39.24%) Firewall
3 206 (29.94%) TCP/IP
4 195 (28.34%) VPN
5 97 (14.10%) Network Security
6 90 (13.08%) SSL
7 83 (12.06%) WAN
8 80 (11.63%) HTTP
8 80 (11.63%) VLAN
9 75 (10.90%) LAN
10 70 (10.17%) SAN
11 69 (10.03%) SMTP
12 66 (9.59%) Wireless
13 53 (7.70%) BGP
14 43 (6.25%) OSPF
15 42 (6.10%) FTP
16 37 (5.38%) IPsec
17 29 (4.22%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
18 28 (4.07%) SSH
18 28 (4.07%) Wi-Fi
Database & Business Intelligence
1 52 (7.56%) Amazon RDS
2 20 (2.91%) SQL Server
3 19 (2.76%) Amazon Aurora
4 15 (2.18%) Big Data
4 15 (2.18%) PostgreSQL
5 14 (2.03%) Elasticsearch
6 8 (1.16%) MongoDB
7 6 (0.87%) Power BI
8 5 (0.73%) Apache Cassandra
9 4 (0.58%) Hadoop
9 4 (0.58%) MySQL
9 4 (0.58%) NoSQL
10 3 (0.44%) BigQuery
10 3 (0.44%) DynamoDB
10 3 (0.44%) GIS
11 2 (0.29%) Azure SQL Database
11 2 (0.29%) Delta Lake
11 2 (0.29%) Geospatial Data
11 2 (0.29%) Parquet
12 1 (0.15%) Power Query
Development Applications
1 95 (13.81%) Jenkins
2 80 (11.63%) Git
3 79 (11.48%) JIRA
4 49 (7.12%) GitLab
5 22 (3.20%) Vagrant
6 12 (1.74%) TeamCity
7 6 (0.87%) Sonatype Nexus
7 6 (0.87%) Visual Studio Code
8 5 (0.73%) Browser DevTools
8 5 (0.73%) Subversion
8 5 (0.73%) Vite
8 5 (0.73%) webpack
9 4 (0.58%) Atlassian Bamboo
9 4 (0.58%) SonarQube
10 3 (0.44%) Bitbucket
10 3 (0.44%) Fiddler
10 3 (0.44%) Oracle APEX
11 2 (0.29%) MLflow
11 2 (0.29%) Poetry
11 2 (0.29%) PyCharm
General
1 204 (29.65%) Social Skills
2 90 (13.08%) Public Sector
3 79 (11.48%) Analytical Skills
4 75 (10.90%) Finance
5 25 (3.63%) Banking
6 24 (3.49%) Documentation Skills
6 24 (3.49%) Telecoms
7 19 (2.76%) Manufacturing
8 17 (2.47%) Legal
9 15 (2.18%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 14 (2.03%) Presentation Skills
11 13 (1.89%) Investment Banking
11 13 (1.89%) Organisational Skills
12 10 (1.45%) Law
13 9 (1.31%) Marketing
14 8 (1.16%) Military
15 6 (0.87%) French Language
15 6 (0.87%) Local Government
16 4 (0.58%) Electronics
16 4 (0.58%) Retail
Job Titles
1 96 (13.95%) Support Engineer
2 89 (12.94%) Network Engineer
3 79 (11.48%) Infrastructure Engineer
4 66 (9.59%) Senior
5 60 (8.72%) DevOps Engineer
6 56 (8.14%) Analyst
7 51 (7.41%) Architect
8 37 (5.38%) IT Support
9 35 (5.09%) Administrator
10 34 (4.94%) AWS Engineer
11 29 (4.22%) Platform Engineer
12 28 (4.07%) AWS DevOps
13 27 (3.92%) Azure Engineer
14 25 (3.63%) AWS DevOps Engineer
15 24 (3.49%) Security Engineer
16 23 (3.34%) Consultant
16 23 (3.34%) IT Engineer
16 23 (3.34%) Support Analyst
17 22 (3.20%) Desktop Engineer
18 20 (2.91%) Senior Infrastructure Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 31 (4.51%) LDAP
2 18 (2.62%) Elastic Stack
3 15 (2.18%) YAML
4 13 (1.89%) 802.1X
5 12 (1.74%) .NET
5 12 (1.74%) REST
6 11 (1.60%) AngularJS
6 11 (1.60%) CSS
6 11 (1.60%) HTML
6 11 (1.60%) Middleware
7 10 (1.45%) JSON
7 10 (1.45%) SOAP
8 9 (1.31%) React
9 8 (1.16%) NETCONF
9 8 (1.16%) RESTCONF
10 7 (1.02%) ADO
11 6 (0.87%) Kafka
12 5 (0.73%) Flask
12 5 (0.73%) HTML5
12 5 (0.73%) Sass
Miscellaneous
1 58 (8.43%) PKI
2 54 (7.85%) Replication
3 51 (7.41%) Data Centre
4 41 (5.96%) Management Information System
5 18 (2.62%) Analytical Mindset
5 18 (2.62%) Onboarding
6 17 (2.47%) Enterprise Software
6 17 (2.47%) Security Operations Centre
7 16 (2.33%) Clustering
7 16 (2.33%) Hybrid Cloud
8 15 (2.18%) Data Protection Act
9 14 (2.03%) Cloud Native
10 13 (1.89%) Self-Motivation
11 12 (1.74%) Cyberattack
11 12 (1.74%) Distributed Systems
11 12 (1.74%) Virtual Team
12 11 (1.60%) Linux Command Line
12 11 (1.60%) Operational Technology
13 10 (1.45%) SCADA
13 10 (1.45%) Video Conferencing
Operating Systems
1 343 (49.85%) Windows
2 161 (23.40%) Linux
3 129 (18.75%) Windows Server
4 60 (8.72%) Windows 10
5 46 (6.69%) Windows Server 2016
6 43 (6.25%) Windows Server 2019
7 31 (4.51%) Unix
8 30 (4.36%) VMS
9 28 (4.07%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
10 25 (3.63%) Windows Server 2003
11 22 (3.20%) Amazon Linux
11 22 (3.20%) Mac OS
12 21 (3.05%) Ubuntu
12 21 (3.05%) Windows Server 2012
13 19 (2.76%) CentOS
14 13 (1.89%) Android
15 9 (1.31%) Windows 7
16 5 (0.73%) Apple iOS
17 4 (0.58%) Solaris
18 3 (0.44%) Windows XP
Processes & Methodologies
1 142 (20.64%) DevOps
2 120 (17.44%) Problem-Solving
3 110 (15.99%) ITIL
4 109 (15.84%) CI/CD
5 100 (14.53%) Infrastructure Engineering
6 92 (13.37%) Infrastructure as Code
7 87 (12.65%) High Availability
8 77 (11.19%) Migration
9 74 (10.76%) Agile
10 62 (9.01%) Cybersecurity
11 58 (8.43%) Change Management
12 55 (7.99%) SIEM
13 50 (7.27%) Computer Science
14 49 (7.12%) Patch Management
14 49 (7.12%) Service Management
15 47 (6.83%) Containerisation
16 46 (6.69%) Load Balancing
17 44 (6.40%) Infrastructure Automation
17 44 (6.40%) Root Cause Analysis
18 43 (6.25%) Configuration Management
Programming Languages
1 161 (23.40%) Python
2 157 (22.82%) PowerShell
3 77 (11.19%) Bash
4 44 (6.40%) SQL
5 34 (4.94%) Perl
6 27 (3.92%) Shell Script
7 26 (3.78%) Groovy
7 26 (3.78%) Java
8 18 (2.62%) JavaScript
9 12 (1.74%) C#
10 11 (1.60%) Bicep
10 11 (1.60%) Go
11 7 (1.02%) Kusto Query Language
11 7 (1.02%) TypeScript
11 7 (1.02%) VBScript
12 6 (0.87%) C++
13 4 (0.58%) Apex Code
13 4 (0.58%) VB
14 3 (0.44%) Search Processing Language
14 3 (0.44%) SOQL
Qualifications
1 239 (34.74%) Security Cleared
2 168 (24.42%) SC Cleared
3 96 (13.95%) Cisco Certification
3 96 (13.95%) Degree
4 69 (10.03%) DV Cleared
5 65 (9.45%) CCNP
6 44 (6.40%) CCNA
7 36 (5.23%) Microsoft Certification
8 30 (4.36%) Computer Science Degree
9 29 (4.22%) AWS Certification
10 23 (3.34%) Azure Certification
11 17 (2.47%) CCIE
12 16 (2.33%) CISSP
13 12 (1.74%) A+ Certification
14 11 (1.60%) MCSA
14 11 (1.60%) MCSE
15 10 (1.45%) CCSA
15 10 (1.45%) Network+ Certification
16 9 (1.31%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
17 8 (1.16%) Server+ Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 23 (3.34%) SLA
2 20 (2.91%) GDPR
3 11 (1.60%) NIST
3 11 (1.60%) PCI DSS
4 10 (1.45%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 9 (1.31%) NCSC
6 8 (1.16%) Accessibility
7 6 (0.87%) SOC 2
8 5 (0.73%) Cyber Essentials
8 5 (0.73%) Data Quality
8 5 (0.73%) WCAG
9 4 (0.58%) HMG Security Policy Framework
9 4 (0.58%) Sarbanes-Oxley
10 2 (0.29%) Actionable Recommendations
10 2 (0.29%) Disclosure Scotland
10 2 (0.29%) Government Security Classifications
10 2 (0.29%) QA
11 1 (0.15%) COBIT
System Software
1 286 (41.57%) Active Directory
2 160 (23.26%) VMware Infrastructure
3 93 (13.52%) Docker
4 62 (9.01%) Hyper-V
5 39 (5.67%) VMware ESXi
6 32 (4.65%) vSphere
7 27 (3.92%) DFS Replication
7 27 (3.92%) Virtual Servers
8 25 (3.63%) Virtual Machines
9 24 (3.49%) Microsoft Virtual Server
10 22 (3.20%) Terminal Services
11 18 (2.62%) VMware NSX
12 17 (2.47%) Microsoft App-V
13 16 (2.33%) Dovecot
13 16 (2.33%) Postfix
14 13 (1.89%) Brightmail
14 13 (1.89%) ISA Server
15 12 (1.74%) Firmware
16 10 (1.45%) Squid
16 10 (1.45%) Virtual Desktop
Systems Management
1 129 (18.75%) Ansible
2 118 (17.15%) Terraform
3 72 (10.47%) SCCM
4 64 (9.30%) Kubernetes
5 53 (7.70%) Grafana
6 51 (7.41%) Prometheus
7 39 (5.67%) vCenter Server
7 39 (5.67%) WSUS
8 33 (4.80%) Puppet
9 23 (3.34%) Progress Chef
10 22 (3.20%) Microsoft Intune
11 18 (2.62%) Nessus
12 17 (2.47%) Microsoft Clustering
13 16 (2.33%) Single Sign-On
14 15 (2.18%) Nagios
15 14 (2.03%) vMotion
16 10 (1.45%) Active Directory Federation Services
16 10 (1.45%) FortiGate
16 10 (1.45%) Packer
16 10 (1.45%) Proxmox
Vendors
1 237 (34.45%) Microsoft
2 195 (28.34%) VMware
3 147 (21.37%) Cisco
4 77 (11.19%) F5
5 76 (11.05%) ServiceNow
6 59 (8.58%) CheckPoint
7 56 (8.14%) Splunk
8 45 (6.54%) Citrix
9 42 (6.10%) Palo Alto
10 38 (5.52%) Google
11 37 (5.38%) SolarWinds
12 32 (4.65%) Red Hat
13 30 (4.36%) NetApp
14 29 (4.22%) Juniper
15 28 (4.07%) Dell
16 24 (3.49%) Veeam
17 23 (3.34%) Infoblox
18 20 (2.91%) Meraki
19 19 (2.76%) Fortinet
20 18 (2.62%) Oracle