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 7 May 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
7 May 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 143 116 140
Rank change year-on-year -27 +24 -11
Contract jobs citing DNS 912 681 726
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 1.91% 2.33% 1.67%
As % of the Communications & Networking category 19.90% 18.19% 13.06%
Number of daily rates quoted 568 488 476
10th Percentile £268 £254 £213
25th Percentile £400 £400 £368
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £483 £538 £485
Median % change year-on-year -10.23% +10.94% -7.71%
75th Percentile £588 £613 £600
90th Percentile £650 £690 £688
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £540 £507
% change year-on-year -12.04% +6.56% -1.36%
Number of hourly rates quoted 36 11 27
10th Percentile £16.84 £23.59 £19.40
25th Percentile £24.18 £25.80 £23.80
Median hourly rate £54.00 £80.68 £40.00
Median % change year-on-year -33.06% +101.69% -23.27%
75th Percentile £74.26 £81.35 £44.38
90th Percentile £75.75 £82.10 £63.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £60.25 £81.01 £40.00
% change year-on-year -25.63% +102.53% -13.24%

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 4,583 3,743 5,560
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 9.61% 12.78% 12.81%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,847 2,305 3,330
10th Percentile £250 £213 £205
25th Percentile £400 £363 £350
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £495 £488 £500
Median % change year-on-year +1.54% -2.50% -3.85%
75th Percentile £588 £600 £601
90th Percentile £675 £675 £700
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £463 £475
% change year-on-year +2.70% -2.63% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 233 174 423
10th Percentile £16.01 £14.99 £13.50
25th Percentile £21.25 £18.22 £16.93
Median hourly rate £40.54 £36.57 £40.00
Median % change year-on-year +10.85% -8.57% +111.92%
75th Percentile £66.00 £58.39 £63.75
90th Percentile £75.00 £75.00 £70.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £48.72 £24.71 £45.88
% change year-on-year +97.17% -46.14% +148.00%

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 7 May 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 7 May 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 7 May 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 -18 798 £485 -11.33% 315
UK excluding London -5 579 £475 -12.04% 269
London -39 260 £500 -4.14% 85
North of England +6 219 £425 -10.53% 63
Work from Home -36 195 £505 -5.61% 106
South East +5 160 £525 -4.55% 93
North West +33 149 £425 - 31
Midlands +15 117 £390 -30.36% 37
West Midlands +30 103 £380 -28.97% 25
Yorkshire -34 66 £447 -18.82% 27
South West -43 52 £516 -11.18% 34
Scotland +36 48 £550 +22.22% 14
East of England -36 42 £450 -10.00% 28
East Midlands -31 13 £394 -30.62% 12
Wales -19 7 £488 +8.33% 10
North East -22 6 £306 -11.23% 6

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 95 (10.42%) Microsoft Exchange
2 46 (5.04%) SharePoint
3 15 (1.64%) nginx
4 14 (1.54%) Confluence
5 13 (1.43%) IIS
6 11 (1.21%) Apache
7 5 (0.55%) Tomcat
8 4 (0.44%) Exchange Server 2010
8 4 (0.44%) Skype for Business
8 4 (0.44%) WebSphere
9 2 (0.22%) Exchange Server 2013
9 2 (0.22%) IBM HTTP Server
9 2 (0.22%) Oracle HTTP Server
9 2 (0.22%) WebSphere Application Server
9 2 (0.22%) WebSphere Portal
9 2 (0.22%) WordPress
10 1 (0.11%) Traefik
Applications
1 20 (2.19%) Microsoft Office
2 12 (1.32%) MS Visio
3 2 (0.22%) Chatbot
4 1 (0.11%) Microsoft Excel
4 1 (0.11%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 1 (0.11%) Microsoft Project
Business Applications
1 2 (0.22%) Remedy ITSM
2 1 (0.11%) Cloudability
Cloud Services
1 310 (33.99%) Azure
2 152 (16.67%) AWS
3 150 (16.45%) Entra ID
4 133 (14.58%) Microsoft 365
5 92 (10.09%) GCP
6 67 (7.35%) GitHub
7 54 (5.92%) IaaS
8 42 (4.61%) PaaS
8 42 (4.61%) SaaS
9 34 (3.73%) AWS CloudFormation
9 34 (3.73%) Serverless
10 32 (3.51%) Amazon EC2
10 32 (3.51%) Virtual Private Cloud
11 31 (3.40%) Amazon S3
11 31 (3.40%) GitHub Actions
12 30 (3.29%) AWS Lambda
13 28 (3.07%) Amazon EKS
13 28 (3.07%) Route 53
14 25 (2.74%) OneDrive
15 24 (2.63%) Azure DevOps
Communications & Networking
1 388 (42.54%) DHCP
2 277 (30.37%) Firewall
3 231 (25.33%) TCP/IP
4 223 (24.45%) VPN
5 115 (12.61%) WAN
6 108 (11.84%) LAN
7 94 (10.31%) SSL
8 92 (10.09%) Network Security
9 86 (9.43%) BIG-IP
10 83 (9.10%) HTTP
11 81 (8.88%) BGP
12 79 (8.66%) VLAN
13 56 (6.14%) Wi-Fi
14 50 (5.48%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
15 45 (4.93%) OSPF
16 44 (4.82%) Wireless
17 41 (4.50%) Kerberos
17 41 (4.50%) Wireshark
18 39 (4.28%) DMZ
19 36 (3.95%) F5 BIG-IP GTM
Database & Business Intelligence
1 28 (3.07%) SQL Server
2 21 (2.30%) Elasticsearch
3 14 (1.54%) PostgreSQL
4 8 (0.88%) Amazon RDS
4 8 (0.88%) MongoDB
4 8 (0.88%) Power BI
5 5 (0.55%) Amazon Aurora
5 5 (0.55%) Azure SQL Database
5 5 (0.55%) DynamoDB
5 5 (0.55%) MySQL
6 4 (0.44%) Data Hub
6 4 (0.44%) DocumentDB
6 4 (0.44%) NoSQL
6 4 (0.44%) Redis
7 3 (0.33%) MariaDB
8 1 (0.11%) Oracle Reports
8 1 (0.11%) Relational Database
8 1 (0.11%) SQL Server Reporting Services
8 1 (0.11%) SQLPlus
8 1 (0.11%) TimescaleDB
Development Applications
1 51 (5.59%) Jenkins
2 47 (5.15%) JIRA
3 33 (3.62%) Git
4 29 (3.18%) Fiddler
5 27 (2.96%) GitLab
6 9 (0.99%) Browser DevTools
7 7 (0.77%) Bitbucket
7 7 (0.77%) SonarQube
8 6 (0.66%) Chocolatey
9 4 (0.44%) CircleCI
9 4 (0.44%) Terragrunt
10 3 (0.33%) Sonatype Nexus
11 2 (0.22%) Introscope
12 1 (0.11%) Artifactory
12 1 (0.11%) Atlassian Bamboo
12 1 (0.11%) Travis CI
General
1 196 (21.49%) Social Skills
2 87 (9.54%) Analytical Skills
3 77 (8.44%) Banking
4 71 (7.79%) Finance
5 60 (6.58%) Public Sector
6 43 (4.71%) Documentation Skills
7 42 (4.61%) Investment Banking
8 29 (3.18%) Legal
9 23 (2.52%) Telecoms
10 18 (1.97%) Military
11 10 (1.10%) Law
11 10 (1.10%) Organisational Skills
12 6 (0.66%) Aerospace
12 6 (0.66%) Financial Institution
12 6 (0.66%) Inclusion and Diversity
13 5 (0.55%) Local Government
13 5 (0.55%) Manufacturing
13 5 (0.55%) Police
14 4 (0.44%) Italian Language
15 3 (0.33%) Advertising
Job Titles
1 163 (17.87%) Network Engineer
2 112 (12.28%) Architect
3 111 (12.17%) Infrastructure Engineer
4 88 (9.65%) Analyst
5 78 (8.55%) Senior
6 65 (7.13%) Security Engineer
7 52 (5.70%) Web Engineer
8 46 (5.04%) Support Engineer
9 43 (4.71%) Network Security Engineer
10 40 (4.39%) IT Support
11 37 (4.06%) IT Engineer
12 35 (3.84%) Cisco Engineer
12 35 (3.84%) Cisco Network Engineer
12 35 (3.84%) Lead
13 33 (3.62%) Data Engineer
13 33 (3.62%) Data Network Engineer
14 32 (3.51%) Administrator
14 32 (3.51%) Cisco Security Engineer
15 29 (3.18%) Azure Engineer
16 26 (2.85%) DevOps Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 72 (7.89%) LDAP
2 52 (5.70%) SAML
3 41 (4.50%) OAuth
4 35 (3.84%) 802.1X
5 31 (3.40%) OpenID
6 22 (2.41%) OpenTelemetry
7 13 (1.43%) JSON
8 11 (1.21%) OAuth2
9 10 (1.10%) ARM Templates
9 10 (1.10%) Elastic Stack
9 10 (1.10%) REST
10 9 (0.99%) Kafka
11 6 (0.66%) XMPP
12 5 (0.55%) Microsoft Graph
12 5 (0.55%) Web Services
13 4 (0.44%) AWS CDK
13 4 (0.44%) gRPC
13 4 (0.44%) RESTful
13 4 (0.44%) Spring Boot
13 4 (0.44%) Spring Cloud
Miscellaneous
1 74 (8.11%) Data Centre
1 74 (8.11%) PKI
2 53 (5.81%) Cloud Native
3 41 (4.50%) Management Information System
3 41 (4.50%) Replication
4 39 (4.28%) Clustering
4 39 (4.28%) Onboarding
5 34 (3.73%) Public Cloud
6 28 (3.07%) Security Operations Centre
7 27 (2.96%) Hybrid Cloud
8 26 (2.85%) Cyberattack
9 24 (2.63%) Distributed Denial-of-Service
10 21 (2.30%) Self-Motivation
11 18 (1.97%) Enterprise Software
12 17 (1.86%) Cyber Threat
13 16 (1.75%) Legacy Systems
14 14 (1.54%) Analytical Mindset
14 14 (1.54%) Enterprise Cloud
14 14 (1.54%) Virtual Team
15 12 (1.32%) Product Ownership
Operating Systems
1 396 (43.42%) Windows
2 221 (24.23%) Windows Server
3 128 (14.04%) Linux
4 42 (4.61%) Windows 10
5 37 (4.06%) Windows Server 2019
6 22 (2.41%) Unix
7 19 (2.08%) Mac OS
7 19 (2.08%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
7 19 (2.08%) Windows Server 2012
8 17 (1.86%) Android
8 17 (1.86%) Windows Server 2016
9 13 (1.43%) Apple iOS
10 11 (1.21%) VMS
11 8 (0.88%) Windows Server 2003
12 6 (0.66%) CentOS
12 6 (0.66%) Ubuntu
12 6 (0.66%) Windows 7
13 4 (0.44%) CatOS
14 2 (0.22%) Oracle Linux
14 2 (0.22%) SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 191 (20.94%) Problem-Solving
2 174 (19.08%) Load Balancing
3 142 (15.57%) Migration
4 138 (15.13%) High Availability
5 137 (15.02%) Infrastructure Engineering
6 125 (13.71%) ITIL
7 121 (13.27%) DevOps
8 114 (12.50%) CI/CD
9 111 (12.17%) Infrastructure as Code
10 87 (9.54%) Cybersecurity
11 83 (9.10%) Disaster Recovery
12 78 (8.55%) Identity Access Management
13 76 (8.33%) ITSM
13 76 (8.33%) Observability
14 70 (7.68%) Agile
15 63 (6.91%) Change Management
16 61 (6.69%) SIEM
17 58 (6.36%) Incident Response
18 57 (6.25%) Project Delivery
19 56 (6.14%) Containerisation
Programming Languages
1 194 (21.27%) PowerShell
2 132 (14.47%) Python
3 80 (8.77%) Bash
4 45 (4.93%) SQL
5 21 (2.30%) JavaScript
6 18 (1.97%) Bicep
7 14 (1.54%) Java
8 11 (1.21%) Go
8 11 (1.21%) Ruby
8 11 (1.21%) Shell Script
9 7 (0.77%) VBA
9 7 (0.77%) VBScript
10 4 (0.44%) Perl
10 4 (0.44%) VB
11 3 (0.33%) C
11 3 (0.33%) Groovy
12 2 (0.22%) Jython
12 2 (0.22%) Kusto Query Language
12 2 (0.22%) Lisp
13 1 (0.11%) T-SQL
Qualifications
1 297 (32.57%) Security Cleared
2 203 (22.26%) SC Cleared
3 98 (10.75%) DV Cleared
4 75 (8.22%) Cisco Certification
5 58 (6.36%) Degree
6 44 (4.82%) CCNP
7 34 (3.73%) CCNA
7 34 (3.73%) CompTIA Security+
7 34 (3.73%) Microsoft Certification
8 30 (3.29%) Azure Certification
9 21 (2.30%) Computer Science Degree
10 19 (2.08%) Network+ Certification
11 17 (1.86%) CompTIA CySA+
12 16 (1.75%) AWS Certification
12 16 (1.75%) BPSS Clearance
13 11 (1.21%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 11 (1.21%) CISSP
14 10 (1.10%) JNCIA
14 10 (1.10%) JNCIS
15 8 (0.88%) JNCIP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 30 (3.29%) SLA
2 26 (2.85%) GDPR
2 26 (2.85%) ISO/IEC 27001
3 25 (2.74%) NIST
4 16 (1.75%) Sarbanes-Oxley
5 8 (0.88%) Cyber Essentials
6 7 (0.77%) NCSC
7 6 (0.66%) QA
8 4 (0.44%) PCI DSS
9 3 (0.33%) HMG Security Policy Framework
9 3 (0.33%) PMO
10 2 (0.22%) Accessibility
10 2 (0.22%) Data Quality
10 2 (0.22%) Disclosure Scotland
10 2 (0.22%) JSP 440
11 1 (0.11%) Actionable Recommendations
11 1 (0.11%) COBIT
11 1 (0.11%) NIST 800
11 1 (0.11%) RMADS
System Software
1 372 (40.79%) Active Directory
2 199 (21.82%) VMware Infrastructure
3 93 (10.20%) Hyper-V
4 52 (5.70%) VMware NSX
5 48 (5.26%) vSphere
6 45 (4.93%) Docker
7 33 (3.62%) Virtual Machines
8 28 (3.07%) VMware ESXi
9 26 (2.85%) Firmware
10 19 (2.08%) Virtual Desktop
11 14 (1.54%) BitLocker
12 12 (1.32%) Squid
13 11 (1.21%) NFS
14 10 (1.10%) Microsoft App-V
15 7 (0.77%) Sendmail
16 6 (0.66%) Postfix
16 6 (0.66%) Varnish
17 5 (0.55%) Terminal Services
17 5 (0.55%) VMware Workstation
18 4 (0.44%) Ceph
Systems Management
1 144 (15.79%) Terraform
2 114 (12.50%) Ansible
3 97 (10.64%) Kubernetes
4 86 (9.43%) Microsoft Intune
5 75 (8.22%) Single Sign-On
6 59 (6.47%) SCCM
7 50 (5.48%) FortiGate
8 45 (4.93%) Active Directory Federation Services
8 45 (4.93%) Grafana
9 41 (4.50%) vCenter Server
10 29 (3.18%) Prometheus
10 29 (3.18%) WSUS
11 23 (2.52%) Argo
12 15 (1.64%) SCOM
13 11 (1.21%) Nessus
14 10 (1.10%) HAProxy
14 10 (1.10%) Puppet
15 9 (0.99%) vMotion
16 8 (0.88%) Consul
17 7 (0.77%) Nagios
Vendors
1 289 (31.69%) Microsoft
2 243 (26.64%) VMware
3 155 (17.00%) Cisco
4 150 (16.45%) F5
5 85 (9.32%) Splunk
6 73 (8.00%) ServiceNow
7 58 (6.36%) Citrix
8 52 (5.70%) Infoblox
9 46 (5.04%) SolarWinds
10 41 (4.50%) Google
11 40 (4.39%) Juniper
12 38 (4.17%) Blue Coat
13 37 (4.06%) Palo Alto
13 37 (4.06%) Red Hat
14 32 (3.51%) McAfee
14 32 (3.51%) NetApp
15 25 (2.74%) Dynatrace
16 22 (2.41%) Extreme Networks
17 21 (2.30%) Fortinet
17 21 (2.30%) Okta