DNS Contracts

Domain Name System (DNS)
UK

The table below provides summary statistics for contract job vacancies requiring DNS skills. It includes a benchmarking guide to the contractor rates offered in vacancies that cited DNS over the 6 months leading up to 19 July 2025, comparing them to the same period in the previous two years.

6 months to
19 Jul 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 126 162 139
Rank change year-on-year +36 -23 +14
Contract jobs citing DNS 726 653 1,027
As % of all contract jobs advertised in the UK 2.21% 1.55% 1.85%
As % of the Communications & Networking category 18.02% 12.44% 14.57%
Number of daily rates quoted 483 441 693
10th Percentile £267 £240 £250
25th Percentile £404 £363 £379
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £484 £513
Median % change year-on-year +8.47% -5.56% +2.50%
75th Percentile £600 £575 £613
90th Percentile £653 £650 £688
UK excluding London median daily rate £525 £500 £488
% change year-on-year +5.00% +2.56% +8.33%
Number of hourly rates quoted 30 24 15
10th Percentile £29.00 £20.00 £18.50
25th Percentile £31.69 £23.80 £23.63
Median hourly rate £61.25 £35.00 £40.00
Median % change year-on-year +75.00% -12.50% +34.45%
75th Percentile £82.78 £40.00 £81.50
90th Percentile £89.63 £50.96 £86.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £40.00 £40.00
% change year-on-year +62.50% - +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 4,028 5,251 7,050
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 12.27% 12.48% 12.70%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,428 3,120 4,588
10th Percentile £235 £213 £231
25th Percentile £375 £357 £378
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £488 £500 £500
Median % change year-on-year -2.50% - -
75th Percentile £594 £600 £625
90th Percentile £675 £688 £719
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £500 £460
% change year-on-year -5.00% +8.70% +2.22%
Number of hourly rates quoted 198 401 322
10th Percentile £14.90 £13.50 £10.63
25th Percentile £20.89 £16.86 £15.75
Median hourly rate £46.25 £40.00 £45.00
Median % change year-on-year +15.63% -11.11% +57.89%
75th Percentile £65.00 £63.75 £65.00
90th Percentile £83.30 £73.75 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £41.48 £47.50 £57.00
% change year-on-year -12.68% -16.67% +147.83%

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
Contractor Daily Rate Trend

3-month moving average daily rate quoted in jobs citing DNS.

Daily rate trend for DNS in the UK

DNS
Daily Rate Histogram

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing DNS over the 6 months to 19 July 2025.

Daily rate histogram for DNS in the UK

DNS
Contractor Hourly Rate Trend

3-month moving average hourly rates quoted in jobs citing DNS.

Hourly rate trend for DNS in the UK

DNS
Hourly Rate Histogram

Hourly rate distribution of jobs citing DNS over the 6 months to 19 July 2025.

Hourly rate histogram for DNS in the UK

DNS
Top 18 Contract 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 19 July 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 +29 653 £525 +5.00% 593
UK excluding London +15 380 £525 +5.00% 466
London +51 276 £510 +13.33% 180
Work from Home +31 195 £525 +7.69% 223
North of England +33 95 £500 +5.26% 104
South East -12 87 £550 +4.76% 149
East of England +66 75 £550 +89.66% 72
Midlands -21 57 £475 -9.52% 54
South West +34 45 £588 +9.30% 52
West Midlands -3 45 £475 -13.64% 31
North West +16 44 £458 +1.67% 51
Yorkshire +15 44 £550 +6.80% 44
Scotland -18 14 £450 +87.50% 31
East Midlands -7 12 £500 +33.33% 23
North East +7 9 £345 -38.67% 11
Wales +10 7 £440 +40.72% 16
Northern Ireland -12 4 £155 +3.33% 2
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 81 (11.16%) Microsoft Exchange
2 48 (6.61%) SharePoint
3 42 (5.79%) Confluence
4 20 (2.75%) IIS
5 18 (2.48%) Skype for Business
6 13 (1.79%) Oracle SOA Suite
7 12 (1.65%) OpenStack
8 11 (1.52%) Apache
9 8 (1.10%) Exchange Server 2003
9 8 (1.10%) Exchange Server 2007
9 8 (1.10%) Exchange Server 2010
9 8 (1.10%) Exchange Server 2013
9 8 (1.10%) Office Communications Server
9 8 (1.10%) SharePoint Server
10 2 (0.28%) Apache Airflow
10 2 (0.28%) Apache Spark
10 2 (0.28%) nginx
11 1 (0.14%) CMS
11 1 (0.14%) SAS
11 1 (0.14%) Tomcat
Applications
1 77 (10.61%) Microsoft Office
2 9 (1.24%) MS Visio
3 7 (0.96%) Microsoft Excel
4 2 (0.28%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 2 (0.28%) Microsoft Project
5 1 (0.14%) Mozilla Thunderbird
5 1 (0.14%) Spreadsheet
Business Applications
1 3 (0.41%) Remedy ITSM
2 1 (0.14%) Dynamics CRM
2 1 (0.14%) Eikon
2 1 (0.14%) Eze OMS
2 1 (0.14%) Fidessa
2 1 (0.14%) Pegasus Opera
2 1 (0.14%) SAP S/4HANA
Cloud Services
1 208 (28.65%) Azure
2 182 (25.07%) AWS
3 99 (13.64%) Microsoft 365
4 66 (9.09%) Entra ID
5 52 (7.16%) GCP
6 47 (6.47%) AWS CloudFormation
6 47 (6.47%) IaaS
7 45 (6.20%) GitHub
8 41 (5.65%) Amazon EC2
9 35 (4.82%) PaaS
10 34 (4.68%) Virtual Private Cloud
11 27 (3.72%) Amazon EKS
12 26 (3.58%) Amazon S3
13 25 (3.44%) Azure ExpressRoute
14 23 (3.17%) Amazon CloudWatch
14 23 (3.17%) Cohesity
14 23 (3.17%) SaaS
15 22 (3.03%) Azure DevOps
15 22 (3.03%) Azure Monitor
15 22 (3.03%) GitHub Actions
Communications & Networking
1 361 (49.72%) DHCP
2 289 (39.81%) Firewall
3 193 (26.58%) VPN
4 191 (26.31%) TCP/IP
5 94 (12.95%) Network Security
6 91 (12.53%) WAN
7 81 (11.16%) HTTP
8 78 (10.74%) LAN
9 72 (9.92%) SSL
9 72 (9.92%) VLAN
10 65 (8.95%) SMTP
11 64 (8.82%) SAN
11 64 (8.82%) Wireless
12 61 (8.40%) BGP
13 51 (7.02%) OSPF
14 38 (5.23%) SD-WAN
15 37 (5.10%) FTP
16 32 (4.41%) Wi-Fi
17 29 (3.99%) IPsec
18 27 (3.72%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
Database & Business Intelligence
1 48 (6.61%) Amazon RDS
2 30 (4.13%) SQL Server
3 16 (2.20%) Big Data
4 14 (1.93%) Oracle Database
5 13 (1.79%) Amazon Aurora
5 13 (1.79%) Elasticsearch
6 7 (0.96%) DynamoDB
7 6 (0.83%) MongoDB
8 5 (0.69%) NoSQL
8 5 (0.69%) Power BI
9 4 (0.55%) Apache Cassandra
9 4 (0.55%) Hadoop
9 4 (0.55%) PostgreSQL
10 3 (0.41%) Azure SQL Database
10 3 (0.41%) BigQuery
11 2 (0.28%) Delta Lake
11 2 (0.28%) GIS
11 2 (0.28%) MySQL
11 2 (0.28%) Parquet
12 1 (0.14%) Power Query
Development Applications
1 69 (9.50%) JIRA
2 68 (9.37%) Jenkins
3 49 (6.75%) Git
4 32 (4.41%) GitLab
5 16 (2.20%) Sonatype Nexus
6 9 (1.24%) TeamCity
7 8 (1.10%) Vagrant
8 7 (0.96%) Bitbucket
9 5 (0.69%) SonarQube
9 5 (0.69%) Visual Studio Code
10 4 (0.55%) Atlassian Bamboo
10 4 (0.55%) Browser DevTools
10 4 (0.55%) Subversion
10 4 (0.55%) Vite
10 4 (0.55%) webpack
11 3 (0.41%) Oracle APEX
12 2 (0.28%) Maven
12 2 (0.28%) MLflow
12 2 (0.28%) Poetry
12 2 (0.28%) PyCharm
General
1 187 (25.76%) Social Skills
2 96 (13.22%) Finance
3 71 (9.78%) Analytical Skills
4 65 (8.95%) Public Sector
5 30 (4.13%) Banking
6 22 (3.03%) Documentation Skills
7 19 (2.62%) Manufacturing
7 19 (2.62%) Telecoms
8 17 (2.34%) Legal
9 16 (2.20%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 13 (1.79%) Law
11 11 (1.52%) Organisational Skills
12 10 (1.38%) Investment Banking
13 8 (1.10%) Aerospace
14 7 (0.96%) French Language
14 7 (0.96%) Local Government
14 7 (0.96%) Marketing
14 7 (0.96%) Presentation Skills
15 5 (0.69%) Electronics
15 5 (0.69%) Retail
Job Titles
1 118 (16.25%) Network Engineer
2 94 (12.95%) Support Engineer
3 93 (12.81%) Infrastructure Engineer
4 64 (8.82%) Architect
5 56 (7.71%) Analyst
6 55 (7.58%) Senior
7 47 (6.47%) Azure Engineer
8 42 (5.79%) DevOps Engineer
9 38 (5.23%) Administrator
10 26 (3.58%) IT Engineer
10 26 (3.58%) IT Support
11 24 (3.31%) 3rd Line Engineer
11 24 (3.31%) Consultant
11 24 (3.31%) Network Support
11 24 (3.31%) Network Support Engineer
12 22 (3.03%) Lead
13 20 (2.75%) Security Engineer
13 20 (2.75%) Support Analyst
14 19 (2.62%) 3rd Line Support
14 19 (2.62%) 3rd Line Support Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 29 (3.99%) LDAP
2 27 (3.72%) Elastic Stack
3 17 (2.34%) .NET
3 17 (2.34%) ADO
4 14 (1.93%) YAML
5 11 (1.52%) HTML
6 10 (1.38%) CSS
7 9 (1.24%) OAuth
7 9 (1.24%) REST
8 8 (1.10%) 802.1X
8 8 (1.10%) JSON
8 8 (1.10%) NETCONF
8 8 (1.10%) Node.js
8 8 (1.10%) OpenTelemetry
8 8 (1.10%) RESTCONF
9 7 (0.96%) AngularJS
9 7 (0.96%) Middleware
9 7 (0.96%) OAuth2
9 7 (0.96%) OpenID
9 7 (0.96%) React
Miscellaneous
1 63 (8.68%) PKI
2 55 (7.58%) Data Centre
3 34 (4.68%) Management Information System
4 30 (4.13%) Replication
5 23 (3.17%) Clustering
5 23 (3.17%) Linux Command Line
6 21 (2.89%) Cloud Native
7 19 (2.62%) Anti-Spyware
7 19 (2.62%) Security Operations Centre
8 18 (2.48%) Cyberattack
9 16 (2.20%) Data Protection Act
10 14 (1.93%) Analytical Mindset
11 13 (1.79%) Cyber Threat
11 13 (1.79%) Onboarding
11 13 (1.79%) Virtual Team
12 12 (1.65%) CSOC
12 12 (1.65%) Distributed Systems
12 12 (1.65%) Hybrid Cloud
12 12 (1.65%) Public Cloud
13 10 (1.38%) Enterprise Software
Operating Systems
1 360 (49.59%) Windows
2 169 (23.28%) Windows Server
3 168 (23.14%) Linux
4 52 (7.16%) Windows 10
5 45 (6.20%) Windows Server 2016
6 44 (6.06%) Windows Server 2019
7 29 (3.99%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
8 25 (3.44%) Windows Server 2003
9 24 (3.31%) Unix
9 24 (3.31%) VMS
10 21 (2.89%) Mac OS
11 19 (2.62%) Windows Server 2012
12 18 (2.48%) CentOS
13 17 (2.34%) Windows 7
14 13 (1.79%) Ubuntu
15 12 (1.65%) Android
16 8 (1.10%) Amazon Linux
17 6 (0.83%) Rocky
18 5 (0.69%) Apple iOS
19 3 (0.41%) Windows 8
Processes & Methodologies
1 131 (18.04%) DevOps
1 131 (18.04%) Infrastructure Engineering
2 123 (16.94%) Problem-Solving
3 108 (14.88%) Infrastructure as Code
4 107 (14.74%) Agile
5 94 (12.95%) ITIL
6 90 (12.40%) Migration
7 84 (11.57%) CI/CD
8 65 (8.95%) High Availability
9 62 (8.54%) Cybersecurity
10 58 (7.99%) Containerisation
11 54 (7.44%) SIEM
12 52 (7.16%) Computer Science
13 51 (7.02%) ITSM
14 48 (6.61%) Load Balancing
15 40 (5.51%) Deployment Automation
16 37 (5.10%) Configuration Management
16 37 (5.10%) Service Management
17 36 (4.96%) Patch Management
18 33 (4.55%) Continuous Improvement
Programming Languages
1 181 (24.93%) PowerShell
2 158 (21.76%) Python
3 76 (10.47%) Bash
4 47 (6.47%) SQL
5 43 (5.92%) Perl
6 33 (4.55%) Shell Script
7 22 (3.03%) Java
8 21 (2.89%) C#
9 20 (2.75%) JavaScript
10 14 (1.93%) PL/SQL
11 13 (1.79%) Bicep
11 13 (1.79%) Groovy
11 13 (1.79%) VBScript
12 8 (1.10%) Go
12 8 (1.10%) Kusto Query Language
12 8 (1.10%) VB
13 6 (0.83%) TypeScript
14 3 (0.41%) Apex Code
15 2 (0.28%) C
15 2 (0.28%) SOQL
Qualifications
1 238 (32.78%) Security Cleared
2 167 (23.00%) SC Cleared
3 127 (17.49%) Cisco Certification
4 97 (13.36%) Degree
5 80 (11.02%) CCNP
6 76 (10.47%) DV Cleared
7 54 (7.44%) CCNA
8 35 (4.82%) Computer Science Degree
9 22 (3.03%) AWS Certification
10 21 (2.89%) Microsoft Certification
11 18 (2.48%) CISSP
12 17 (2.34%) CCIE
13 14 (1.93%) A+ Certification
14 11 (1.52%) MCSA
15 10 (1.38%) CCSA
16 9 (1.24%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
17 8 (1.10%) Azure Certification
17 8 (1.10%) CompTIA Security+
18 7 (0.96%) MCSE
18 7 (0.96%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 25 (3.44%) SLA
2 19 (2.62%) GDPR
3 14 (1.93%) PCI DSS
4 12 (1.65%) NIST
5 10 (1.38%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 7 (0.96%) NCSC
7 6 (0.83%) QA
7 6 (0.83%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 5 (0.69%) Accessibility
8 5 (0.69%) Cyber Essentials
8 5 (0.69%) SOC 2
9 4 (0.55%) Data Quality
9 4 (0.55%) GRC
9 4 (0.55%) WCAG
10 3 (0.41%) HIPAA
10 3 (0.41%) HMG Security Policy Framework
11 2 (0.28%) Actionable Recommendations
11 2 (0.28%) Government Security Classifications
11 2 (0.28%) NIST 800
12 1 (0.14%) COBIT
System Software
1 304 (41.87%) Active Directory
2 137 (18.87%) VMware Infrastructure
3 71 (9.78%) Docker
4 61 (8.40%) Hyper-V
5 47 (6.47%) vSphere
6 43 (5.92%) VMware ESXi
7 30 (4.13%) Virtual Servers
8 25 (3.44%) Microsoft Virtual Server
9 20 (2.75%) Virtual Machines
10 19 (2.62%) Microsoft App-V
10 19 (2.62%) Terminal Services
11 17 (2.34%) DFS Replication
12 16 (2.20%) VMware NSX
13 14 (1.93%) BitLocker
14 10 (1.38%) Firmware
14 10 (1.38%) XenApp
15 8 (1.10%) Brightmail
15 8 (1.10%) ISA Server
16 7 (0.96%) Virtual Desktop
17 6 (0.83%) NFS
Systems Management
1 136 (18.73%) Ansible
2 131 (18.04%) Terraform
3 77 (10.61%) Kubernetes
4 72 (9.92%) SCCM
5 54 (7.44%) WSUS
6 46 (6.34%) Puppet
7 43 (5.92%) Grafana
8 42 (5.79%) Microsoft Intune
9 40 (5.51%) Prometheus
10 32 (4.41%) Progress Chef
11 29 (3.99%) vCenter Server
12 16 (2.20%) Microsoft Clustering
13 14 (1.93%) Nagios
14 12 (1.65%) FortiGate
14 12 (1.65%) vMotion
15 10 (1.38%) Nessus
16 8 (1.10%) vRealize
17 7 (0.96%) Active Directory Federation Services
17 7 (0.96%) Argo
17 7 (0.96%) CA Spectrum
Vendors
1 253 (34.85%) Microsoft
2 194 (26.72%) VMware
3 177 (24.38%) Cisco
4 66 (9.09%) ServiceNow
5 65 (8.95%) CheckPoint
6 62 (8.54%) F5
7 50 (6.89%) Citrix
8 43 (5.92%) Palo Alto
9 42 (5.79%) Google
10 41 (5.65%) Red Hat
10 41 (5.65%) Splunk
11 38 (5.23%) Infoblox
12 37 (5.10%) SolarWinds
13 30 (4.13%) Oracle
14 29 (3.99%) Fortinet
15 27 (3.72%) Juniper
16 25 (3.44%) Dell
17 24 (3.31%) NetApp
18 23 (3.17%) HP
19 21 (2.89%) Meraki