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 16 October 2025, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
16 Oct 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 135 141 130
Rank change year-on-year +6 -11 +19
Contract jobs citing DNS 707 672 931
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.13% 1.79% 1.95%
As % of the Communications & Networking category 18.74% 14.78% 14.39%
Number of daily rates quoted 441 408 594
10th Percentile £219 £219 £250
25th Percentile £380 £325 £388
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £480 £500
Median % change year-on-year +4.17% -4.00% -1.96%
75th Percentile £588 £588 £594
90th Percentile £660 £700 £668
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £425 £488
% change year-on-year +11.76% -12.82% +3.39%
Number of hourly rates quoted 34 12 18
10th Percentile £15.50 £18.78 £21.48
25th Percentile £29.00 £22.64 £25.25
Median hourly rate £43.25 £23.99 £40.00
Median % change year-on-year +80.28% -40.03% +81.82%
75th Percentile £75.00 £32.00 £64.35
90th Percentile £88.24 £47.68 £78.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £41.48 £24.20 £40.00
% change year-on-year +71.38% -39.50% +79.78%

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 3,772 4,548 6,469
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 11.34% 12.09% 13.56%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,408 2,620 4,055
10th Percentile £214 £225 £225
25th Percentile £358 £369 £375
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £475 £500 £500
Median % change year-on-year -5.00% - -
75th Percentile £588 £600 £600
90th Percentile £678 £688 £700
UK excluding London median daily rate £450 £485 £465
% change year-on-year -7.21% +4.30% +3.33%
Number of hourly rates quoted 189 178 323
10th Percentile £15.50 £15.02 £17.22
25th Percentile £20.00 £24.39 £22.75
Median hourly rate £34.00 £48.56 £56.49
Median % change year-on-year -29.98% -14.04% +39.22%
75th Percentile £65.00 £65.00 £67.50
90th Percentile £75.00 £75.00 £76.25
UK excluding London median hourly rate £41.94 £52.50 £57.42
% change year-on-year -20.11% -8.56% +27.59%

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 16 October 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 16 October 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 16 October 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 +29 648 £510 +4.62% 412
UK excluding London -2 406 £475 +11.76% 374
London +29 249 £525 - 89
Work from Home -9 178 £500 -4.76% 188
Midlands +15 112 £450 +20.00% 45
West Midlands +34 107 £425 +11.84% 27
North of England -9 95 £463 -2.63% 69
South East -6 88 £500 - 138
East of England +29 62 £550 +100.00% 42
North West -6 62 £450 -10.00% 36
South West +20 55 £575 +17.95% 68
Yorkshire -29 31 £500 +11.11% 25
Scotland -37 15 £454 +89.17% 9
North East -6 12 £420 +189.66% 12
East Midlands -31 5 £450 +20.00% 18
Wales 0 4 £379 +37.91% 7
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 75 (10.61%) Microsoft Exchange
2 65 (9.19%) SharePoint
3 49 (6.93%) Confluence
4 27 (3.82%) Skype for Business
5 16 (2.26%) OpenStack
6 14 (1.98%) SharePoint Server
7 12 (1.70%) Exchange Server 2010
8 11 (1.56%) Exchange Server 2013
8 11 (1.56%) IIS
9 10 (1.41%) Apache
9 10 (1.41%) Exchange Server 2003
9 10 (1.41%) Exchange Server 2007
9 10 (1.41%) nginx
9 10 (1.41%) Office Communications Server
10 3 (0.42%) 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 66 (9.34%) Microsoft Office
2 10 (1.41%) Mozilla Thunderbird
3 5 (0.71%) Microsoft Excel
4 4 (0.57%) MS Visio
5 3 (0.42%) Spreadsheet
6 2 (0.28%) Microsoft Project
6 2 (0.28%) Windchill
Business Applications
1 4 (0.57%) Remedy ITSM
2 2 (0.28%) Teamcenter
3 1 (0.14%) Dynamics CRM
3 1 (0.14%) Eikon
3 1 (0.14%) Eze OMS
3 1 (0.14%) Fidessa
3 1 (0.14%) Pegasus Opera
3 1 (0.14%) SAP S/4HANA
3 1 (0.14%) SystmOne
Cloud Services
1 190 (26.87%) AWS
2 180 (25.46%) Azure
3 129 (18.25%) Microsoft 365
4 73 (10.33%) Virtual Private Cloud
5 59 (8.35%) Amazon CloudWatch
6 57 (8.06%) Amazon EC2
7 56 (7.92%) Entra ID
8 55 (7.78%) Amazon S3
9 44 (6.22%) Amazon ELB
10 40 (5.66%) GCP
11 36 (5.09%) GitHub
12 29 (4.10%) SaaS
13 28 (3.96%) AWS KMS
14 26 (3.68%) AWS CloudFormation
15 24 (3.39%) IaaS
16 22 (3.11%) Amazon ECS
17 21 (2.97%) Cohesity
18 18 (2.55%) GitHub Actions
18 18 (2.55%) Route 53
19 17 (2.40%) Serverless
Communications & Networking
1 321 (45.40%) DHCP
2 255 (36.07%) Firewall
3 226 (31.97%) TCP/IP
4 180 (25.46%) VPN
5 105 (14.85%) Network Security
6 95 (13.44%) SSL
7 87 (12.31%) WAN
8 80 (11.32%) HTTP
9 77 (10.89%) VLAN
10 75 (10.61%) LAN
11 66 (9.34%) Wireless
12 60 (8.49%) SAN
13 57 (8.06%) SMTP
14 49 (6.93%) BGP
15 38 (5.37%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
15 38 (5.37%) IPsec
16 35 (4.95%) FTP
16 35 (4.95%) OSPF
17 32 (4.53%) SSH
17 32 (4.53%) Wi-Fi
Database & Business Intelligence
1 40 (5.66%) Amazon RDS
2 18 (2.55%) SQL Server
3 15 (2.12%) Amazon Aurora
3 15 (2.12%) PostgreSQL
4 9 (1.27%) MongoDB
5 8 (1.13%) Big Data
6 6 (0.85%) BigQuery
6 6 (0.85%) Elasticsearch
7 5 (0.71%) Apache Cassandra
7 5 (0.71%) MySQL
8 3 (0.42%) DynamoDB
8 3 (0.42%) GIS
8 3 (0.42%) Hadoop
8 3 (0.42%) NoSQL
8 3 (0.42%) Power BI
9 2 (0.28%) Azure SQL Database
9 2 (0.28%) Delta Lake
9 2 (0.28%) Geospatial Data
9 2 (0.28%) Parquet
9 2 (0.28%) Redis
Development Applications
1 92 (13.01%) Jenkins
2 84 (11.88%) JIRA
3 80 (11.32%) Git
4 51 (7.21%) GitLab
5 22 (3.11%) Vagrant
6 12 (1.70%) TeamCity
7 10 (1.41%) Fiddler
8 6 (0.85%) Visual Studio Code
9 5 (0.71%) Sonatype Nexus
10 4 (0.57%) Atlassian Bamboo
10 4 (0.57%) Browser DevTools
10 4 (0.57%) Subversion
10 4 (0.57%) Terragrunt
10 4 (0.57%) Vite
10 4 (0.57%) webpack
11 3 (0.42%) Oracle APEX
11 3 (0.42%) SonarQube
12 2 (0.28%) Bitbucket
12 2 (0.28%) Poetry
12 2 (0.28%) PyCharm
General
1 219 (30.98%) Social Skills
2 95 (13.44%) Analytical Skills
3 81 (11.46%) Public Sector
4 72 (10.18%) Finance
5 32 (4.53%) Banking
6 25 (3.54%) Investment Banking
7 23 (3.25%) Documentation Skills
8 21 (2.97%) Telecoms
9 18 (2.55%) Manufacturing
10 17 (2.40%) Legal
11 16 (2.26%) Presentation Skills
12 14 (1.98%) Inclusion and Diversity
13 12 (1.70%) Organisational Skills
14 9 (1.27%) Law
15 8 (1.13%) Military
16 7 (0.99%) Marketing
17 6 (0.85%) Local Government
18 4 (0.57%) Aerospace
18 4 (0.57%) Financial Institution
18 4 (0.57%) Retail
Job Titles
1 96 (13.58%) Network Engineer
2 89 (12.59%) Support Engineer
3 73 (10.33%) Infrastructure Engineer
4 62 (8.77%) DevOps Engineer
5 60 (8.49%) Senior
6 59 (8.35%) Analyst
7 48 (6.79%) Architect
8 36 (5.09%) AWS Engineer
8 36 (5.09%) IT Support
9 33 (4.67%) Administrator
9 33 (4.67%) Platform Engineer
10 30 (4.24%) Security Engineer
11 29 (4.10%) AWS DevOps
12 28 (3.96%) Consultant
13 26 (3.68%) AWS DevOps Engineer
14 21 (2.97%) Cloud Platform Engineer
14 21 (2.97%) Support Analyst
15 20 (2.83%) IT Engineer
15 20 (2.83%) Operations Engineer
16 19 (2.69%) Azure Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 38 (5.37%) LDAP
2 13 (1.84%) 802.1X
2 13 (1.84%) Elastic Stack
3 12 (1.70%) REST
4 11 (1.56%) AngularJS
4 11 (1.56%) YAML
5 10 (1.41%) SOAP
6 9 (1.27%) CSS
6 9 (1.27%) HTML
7 8 (1.13%) Kafka
7 8 (1.13%) NETCONF
7 8 (1.13%) React
7 8 (1.13%) RESTCONF
8 7 (0.99%) cloud-init
8 7 (0.99%) Keycloak
8 7 (0.99%) Middleware
9 6 (0.85%) JSON
9 6 (0.85%) SAML
10 5 (0.71%) Flask
10 5 (0.71%) RESTful
Miscellaneous
1 57 (8.06%) Data Centre
2 55 (7.78%) PKI
3 54 (7.64%) Replication
4 43 (6.08%) Management Information System
5 25 (3.54%) Onboarding
6 21 (2.97%) Analytical Mindset
7 17 (2.40%) Enterprise Software
8 16 (2.26%) Security Operations Centre
8 16 (2.26%) Video Conferencing
9 15 (2.12%) Hybrid Cloud
10 13 (1.84%) Cloud Native
10 13 (1.84%) Self-Motivation
11 12 (1.70%) Cyberattack
11 12 (1.70%) Virtual Team
12 11 (1.56%) Operational Technology
12 11 (1.56%) SCADA
13 9 (1.27%) Clustering
13 9 (1.27%) Data Protection Act
13 9 (1.27%) Linux Command Line
14 8 (1.13%) Distributed Denial-of-Service
Operating Systems
1 332 (46.96%) Windows
2 157 (22.21%) Linux
3 119 (16.83%) Windows Server
4 61 (8.63%) Windows 10
5 44 (6.22%) Windows Server 2016
6 41 (5.80%) Windows Server 2019
7 32 (4.53%) Unix
8 31 (4.38%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
9 30 (4.24%) VMS
10 25 (3.54%) Mac OS
11 23 (3.25%) CentOS
11 23 (3.25%) Ubuntu
12 22 (3.11%) Amazon Linux
13 18 (2.55%) Windows Server 2003
14 17 (2.40%) Windows Server 2012
15 14 (1.98%) Android
16 8 (1.13%) Windows 7
17 6 (0.85%) Apple iOS
18 4 (0.57%) Solaris
19 3 (0.42%) Windows XP
Processes & Methodologies
1 133 (18.81%) DevOps
2 129 (18.25%) Problem-Solving
3 118 (16.69%) ITIL
4 114 (16.12%) CI/CD
5 92 (13.01%) Infrastructure Engineering
6 89 (12.59%) High Availability
7 88 (12.45%) Infrastructure as Code
8 71 (10.04%) Migration
9 66 (9.34%) Load Balancing
10 64 (9.05%) Change Management
11 60 (8.49%) Cybersecurity
12 59 (8.35%) Agile
13 55 (7.78%) Service Management
13 55 (7.78%) SIEM
14 51 (7.21%) Incident Response
15 50 (7.07%) Root Cause Analysis
16 49 (6.93%) Containerisation
16 49 (6.93%) Patch Management
17 48 (6.79%) Computer Science
18 47 (6.65%) Infrastructure Automation
Programming Languages
1 174 (24.61%) Python
2 161 (22.77%) PowerShell
3 82 (11.60%) Bash
4 45 (6.36%) SQL
5 32 (4.53%) Perl
6 26 (3.68%) Java
7 25 (3.54%) Shell Script
8 24 (3.39%) Groovy
9 15 (2.12%) Go
9 15 (2.12%) JavaScript
10 9 (1.27%) Bicep
11 6 (0.85%) C++
12 5 (0.71%) Kusto Query Language
12 5 (0.71%) TypeScript
13 4 (0.57%) Apex Code
13 4 (0.57%) Lisp
13 4 (0.57%) VBScript
14 3 (0.42%) C#
14 3 (0.42%) Search Processing Language
14 3 (0.42%) SOQL
Qualifications
1 244 (34.51%) Security Cleared
2 172 (24.33%) SC Cleared
3 95 (13.44%) Cisco Certification
4 91 (12.87%) Degree
5 71 (10.04%) DV Cleared
6 65 (9.19%) CCNP
7 46 (6.51%) CCNA
8 45 (6.36%) Microsoft Certification
9 30 (4.24%) AWS Certification
10 29 (4.10%) Azure Certification
10 29 (4.10%) Computer Science Degree
11 18 (2.55%) CISSP
12 15 (2.12%) CCIE
13 14 (1.98%) Network+ Certification
14 13 (1.84%) MCSE
15 12 (1.70%) MCSA
16 11 (1.56%) Server+ Certification
17 10 (1.41%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
17 10 (1.41%) ITIL Certification
18 9 (1.27%) MCP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 22 (3.11%) GDPR
2 21 (2.97%) SLA
3 12 (1.70%) NIST
3 12 (1.70%) PCI DSS
4 11 (1.56%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 9 (1.27%) NCSC
6 8 (1.13%) Accessibility
7 6 (0.85%) SOC 2
8 5 (0.71%) Cyber Essentials
8 5 (0.71%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 4 (0.57%) Data Quality
9 4 (0.57%) HMG Security Policy Framework
9 4 (0.57%) WCAG
10 2 (0.28%) Actionable Recommendations
10 2 (0.28%) Disclosure Scotland
10 2 (0.28%) Government Security Classifications
10 2 (0.28%) QA
11 1 (0.14%) COBIT
System Software
1 286 (40.45%) Active Directory
2 167 (23.62%) VMware Infrastructure
3 87 (12.31%) Docker
4 56 (7.92%) Hyper-V
5 30 (4.24%) VMware ESXi
6 28 (3.96%) Virtual Servers
6 28 (3.96%) vSphere
7 25 (3.54%) DFS Replication
7 25 (3.54%) Microsoft Virtual Server
8 22 (3.11%) Virtual Machines
9 20 (2.83%) VMware NSX
10 16 (2.26%) Dovecot
10 16 (2.26%) Firmware
10 16 (2.26%) Postfix
11 15 (2.12%) Terminal Services
12 12 (1.70%) Microsoft App-V
13 10 (1.41%) Brightmail
13 10 (1.41%) ISA Server
13 10 (1.41%) Squid
13 10 (1.41%) Virtual Desktop
Systems Management
1 139 (19.66%) Ansible
2 117 (16.55%) Terraform
3 79 (11.17%) SCCM
4 49 (6.93%) Kubernetes
5 46 (6.51%) Grafana
6 43 (6.08%) Prometheus
7 39 (5.52%) WSUS
8 35 (4.95%) Microsoft Intune
9 32 (4.53%) vCenter Server
10 22 (3.11%) Puppet
11 21 (2.97%) Single Sign-On
12 19 (2.69%) Progress Chef
13 18 (2.55%) Nessus
14 16 (2.26%) FortiGate
15 13 (1.84%) Active Directory Federation Services
15 13 (1.84%) Microsoft Clustering
15 13 (1.84%) Proxmox
16 12 (1.70%) Packer
17 10 (1.41%) Nagios
18 8 (1.13%) Jamf Pro
Vendors
1 254 (35.93%) Microsoft
2 204 (28.85%) VMware
3 144 (20.37%) Cisco
4 96 (13.58%) F5
5 92 (13.01%) ServiceNow
6 62 (8.77%) Splunk
7 58 (8.20%) CheckPoint
8 42 (5.94%) Citrix
8 42 (5.94%) Palo Alto
9 38 (5.37%) SolarWinds
10 35 (4.95%) NetApp
11 30 (4.24%) Juniper
12 29 (4.10%) Red Hat
13 28 (3.96%) Dell
13 28 (3.96%) Google
14 27 (3.82%) Veeam
15 22 (3.11%) Blue Coat
16 21 (2.97%) Fortinet
16 21 (2.97%) Remedy
16 21 (2.97%) Zscaler