Docker Contract Job Trends

Docker
UK

The table below provides summary statistics and contractor rates for jobs requiring Docker skills. It covers contract job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 8 January 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
8 Jan 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 39 49 64
Rank change year-on-year +10 +15 -19
Contract jobs citing Docker 1,966 1,316 1,396
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 5.33% 4.08% 3.29%
As % of the System Software category 43.85% 34.47% 27.00%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,341 887 1,015
10th Percentile £375 £400 £413
25th Percentile £447 £475 £470
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £565 £550
Median % change year-on-year -7.08% +2.73% -8.33%
75th Percentile £638 £675 £650
90th Percentile £716 £788 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £510 £500 £525
% change year-on-year +2.00% -4.76% -8.70%
Number of hourly rates quoted 20 3 19
10th Percentile £55.70 £31.70 £56.18
25th Percentile £61.63 £41.38 £61.63
Median hourly rate £67.00 £60.00 £67.27
Median % change year-on-year +11.67% -10.80% -3.91%
75th Percentile £75.45 £78.75 £76.53
90th Percentile £86.90 £88.50 £77.60
UK excluding London median hourly rate £67.00 - £67.27
% change year-on-year - - +4.69%

All System Software Skills
UK

Docker falls under the System Software category. For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all contract job vacancies requiring system software skills.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for system software skills 4,483 3,818 5,171
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 12.15% 11.83% 12.20%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,015 2,478 3,535
10th Percentile £214 £200 £191
25th Percentile £400 £363 £350
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £500
Median % change year-on-year - - -4.76%
75th Percentile £600 £623 £600
90th Percentile £700 £711 £700
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £455 £463
% change year-on-year +4.40% -1.62% +0.54%
Number of hourly rates quoted 145 91 214
10th Percentile £15.50 £17.00 £15.50
25th Percentile £20.82 £21.15 £18.99
Median hourly rate £47.50 £28.41 £51.25
Median % change year-on-year +67.19% -44.57% +91.59%
75th Percentile £70.00 £64.50 £69.91
90th Percentile £89.85 £75.00 £80.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £62.50 £32.50 £52.50
% change year-on-year +92.31% -38.10% +162.50%

Docker
Job Vacancy Trend

Historical trend showing the proportion of contract IT job postings citing Docker relative to all contract IT jobs advertised.

Docker job vacancy trend in the UK

Docker
Daily Rate Trend

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing Docker.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing Docker

Docker
Daily Rate Histogram

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Docker over the 6 months to 8 January 2026.

Daily rate histogram for Docker in the UK

Docker
Hourly Rate Trend

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing Docker.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing Docker

Docker
Hourly Rate Histogram

Hourly rate distribution of jobs citing Docker over the 6 months to 8 January 2026.

Hourly rate histogram for Docker in the UK

Docker
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 Docker within the UK over the 6 months to 8 January 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 +12 1,677 £525 -8.70% 1,521
London +6 861 £550 -8.33% 344
UK excluding London +21 822 £510 +2.00% 1,367
Work from Home +8 623 £525 -4.55% 787
North of England +18 326 £475 -5.00% 268
Midlands +55 215 £525 -8.70% 167
West Midlands +42 203 £530 -13.40% 64
North West +23 155 £450 -10.00% 115
Yorkshire +11 140 £500 -2.44% 111
South East -7 100 £513 +13.89% 423
South West +5 99 £625 +4.17% 198
Scotland +8 74 £475 +5.56% 43
East of England +1 40 £575 -4.17% 202
North East +4 36 £475 -9.74% 42
East Midlands -19 12 £432 -2.82% 96
Wales -2 11 £520 -5.45% 62
Northern Ireland -7 6 - - 35

Docker
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 86 (4.37%) Confluence
2 69 (3.51%) SAS
3 66 (3.36%) Apache Airflow
4 53 (2.70%) Apache Spark
5 49 (2.49%) Apache
6 46 (2.34%) nginx
7 23 (1.17%) OpenStack
8 19 (0.97%) JBoss
9 13 (0.66%) IIS
10 11 (0.56%) WebLogic
11 10 (0.51%) Appian
12 9 (0.46%) WebSphere
13 8 (0.41%) iPlanet
13 8 (0.41%) Microsoft Exchange
13 8 (0.41%) WebSphere Application Server
14 7 (0.36%) Drupal
15 6 (0.31%) Jupyter
16 5 (0.25%) Camunda
16 5 (0.25%) Ethereum
16 5 (0.25%) Hyperledger
Applications
1 10 (0.51%) Mozilla Thunderbird
2 5 (0.25%) Weka
3 4 (0.20%) Microsoft Office
3 4 (0.20%) MS Visio
4 3 (0.15%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 2 (0.10%) Chatbot
6 1 (0.051%) Microsoft Excel
6 1 (0.051%) Trello
Business Applications
1 5 (0.25%) Payment Gateway
2 2 (0.10%) Aladdin
2 2 (0.10%) Dynamics CRM
3 1 (0.051%) Actimize
3 1 (0.051%) Endur
3 1 (0.051%) Oracle Applications
3 1 (0.051%) SAP S/4HANA
Cloud Services
1 1,143 (58.14%) AWS
2 773 (39.32%) Azure
3 462 (23.50%) GitHub
4 428 (21.77%) GCP
5 298 (15.16%) GitHub Actions
6 292 (14.85%) Serverless
7 227 (11.55%) Amazon S3
7 227 (11.55%) Azure DevOps
8 197 (10.02%) Amazon EC2
9 190 (9.66%) AWS Lambda
10 186 (9.46%) AWS CloudFormation
11 184 (9.36%) Amazon EKS
12 165 (8.39%) Amazon ECS
13 162 (8.24%) Amazon CloudWatch
14 129 (6.56%) OpenShift
15 116 (5.90%) Azure AKS
16 109 (5.54%) Virtual Private Cloud
17 65 (3.31%) Datadog
18 60 (3.05%) Google Kubernetes Engine
19 49 (2.49%) Amazon SQS
Communications & Networking
1 139 (7.07%) Firewall
2 95 (4.83%) DNS
3 56 (2.85%) TCP/IP
4 48 (2.44%) VPN
5 45 (2.29%) SSL
6 38 (1.93%) Network Security
7 37 (1.88%) HTTP
8 21 (1.07%) SSH
9 19 (0.97%) SMTP
10 17 (0.86%) FTP
11 14 (0.71%) DHCP
12 13 (0.66%) Kerberos
13 10 (0.51%) IMAP
13 10 (0.51%) OpenLDAP
13 10 (0.51%) VLAN
14 9 (0.46%) AMQP
14 9 (0.46%) BGP
15 8 (0.41%) HTTPS
15 8 (0.41%) SNMP
16 6 (0.31%) Software-Defined Networking
Database & Business Intelligence
1 279 (14.19%) PostgreSQL
2 214 (10.89%) NoSQL
3 136 (6.92%) Amazon RDS
4 133 (6.77%) MongoDB
5 120 (6.10%) Relational Database
6 95 (4.83%) SQL Server
7 83 (4.22%) Apache Cassandra
8 67 (3.41%) Elasticsearch
9 64 (3.26%) MySQL
10 60 (3.05%) DynamoDB
10 60 (3.05%) Redis
11 50 (2.54%) Amazon Aurora
12 40 (2.03%) Big Data
13 39 (1.98%) Data Warehouse
14 36 (1.83%) Pentaho
15 35 (1.78%) BigQuery
15 35 (1.78%) Data Lake
16 31 (1.58%) Oracle Database
17 29 (1.48%) Power BI
18 26 (1.32%) Azure SQL Database
Development Applications
1 598 (30.42%) Jenkins
2 533 (27.11%) Git
3 407 (20.70%) GitLab
4 221 (11.24%) JIRA
5 88 (4.48%) SonarQube
6 87 (4.43%) JUnit
7 76 (3.87%) Selenium
8 50 (2.54%) Bitbucket
8 50 (2.54%) Maven
9 49 (2.49%) Cypress.io
10 45 (2.29%) Sonatype Nexus
11 44 (2.24%) Cucumber
12 39 (1.98%) Liquibase
12 39 (1.98%) Postman
13 37 (1.88%) Gradle
14 36 (1.83%) Mockito
15 34 (1.73%) CircleCI
15 34 (1.73%) MLflow
16 29 (1.48%) Snyk
17 28 (1.42%) JMeter
General
1 516 (26.25%) Social Skills
2 322 (16.38%) Finance
3 278 (14.14%) Public Sector
4 204 (10.38%) Banking
5 140 (7.12%) Analytical Skills
6 37 (1.88%) Documentation Skills
7 36 (1.83%) Financial Institution
8 30 (1.53%) Investment Banking
9 28 (1.42%) Pharmaceutical
10 24 (1.22%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 21 (1.07%) Presentation Skills
12 20 (1.02%) Telecoms
13 19 (0.97%) Front Office
14 16 (0.81%) Military
15 13 (0.66%) Influencing Skills
16 11 (0.56%) Law
16 11 (0.56%) Retail
17 8 (0.41%) Aerospace
18 7 (0.36%) Health Technology
19 6 (0.31%) Digital Healthcare
Job Titles
1 533 (27.11%) Developer
2 354 (18.01%) Senior
3 278 (14.14%) DevOps Engineer
4 161 (8.19%) Software Engineer
5 147 (7.48%) Java Developer
6 131 (6.66%) AWS Engineer
7 124 (6.31%) Senior Developer
8 117 (5.95%) Architect
9 114 (5.80%) Lead
10 101 (5.14%) Python Developer
11 93 (4.73%) Full-Stack Developer
12 86 (4.37%) Platform Engineer
13 85 (4.32%) AWS DevOps
14 78 (3.97%) Data Engineer
15 76 (3.87%) AWS DevOps Engineer
16 73 (3.71%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
17 61 (3.10%) Cloud Engineer
17 61 (3.10%) Full-Stack Engineer
18 55 (2.80%) Site Reliability Engineer
19 52 (2.64%) Python Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 312 (15.87%) Kafka
2 273 (13.89%) REST
3 259 (13.17%) RESTful
4 253 (12.87%) Spring
5 250 (12.72%) React
6 247 (12.56%) Node.js
7 231 (11.75%) Spring Boot
8 145 (7.38%) .NET
9 136 (6.92%) Elastic Stack
10 126 (6.41%) AngularJS
11 113 (5.75%) FastAPI
12 110 (5.60%) HTML
13 90 (4.58%) OAuth
14 89 (4.53%) gRPC
15 84 (4.27%) CSS
15 84 (4.27%) GraphQL
15 84 (4.27%) JSON
16 77 (3.92%) PyTorch
17 71 (3.61%) YAML
18 68 (3.46%) Flask
Miscellaneous
1 371 (18.87%) Cloud Native
2 186 (9.46%) Distributed Systems
3 59 (3.00%) Public Cloud
4 55 (2.80%) Product Ownership
5 38 (1.93%) Algorithms
5 38 (1.93%) Hybrid Cloud
6 34 (1.73%) Legacy Systems
6 34 (1.73%) Replication
7 30 (1.53%) AI Agents
8 28 (1.42%) Enterprise Software
9 27 (1.37%) Onboarding
10 26 (1.32%) Data Centre
10 26 (1.32%) Greenfield Project
11 25 (1.27%) Management Information System
12 22 (1.12%) Data Structures
12 22 (1.12%) Hedge funds
13 21 (1.07%) Data Protection Act
14 20 (1.02%) Life Science
15 19 (0.97%) Genomics
15 19 (0.97%) PKI
Operating Systems
1 405 (20.60%) Linux
2 116 (5.90%) Windows
3 88 (4.48%) Unix
4 36 (1.83%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 36 (1.83%) Windows Server
5 29 (1.48%) VMS
6 23 (1.17%) Ubuntu
7 19 (0.97%) Amazon Linux
8 10 (0.51%) CentOS
9 4 (0.20%) Android
10 3 (0.15%) Windows Server 2016
11 2 (0.10%) Apple iOS
11 2 (0.10%) Oracle Linux
11 2 (0.10%) Windows Server 2003
11 2 (0.10%) Windows Server 2012
11 2 (0.10%) Windows Server 2019
12 1 (0.051%) Alpine Linux
12 1 (0.051%) Robot Operating System
12 1 (0.051%) Solaris
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,378 (70.09%) CI/CD
2 1,118 (56.87%) DevOps
3 1,027 (52.24%) Containerisation
4 772 (39.27%) Agile
5 649 (33.01%) Microservices
6 615 (31.28%) Infrastructure as Code
7 476 (24.21%) Problem-Solving
8 408 (20.75%) Software Engineering
9 373 (18.97%) Test Automation
10 303 (15.41%) Observability
11 257 (13.07%) AI
12 224 (11.39%) Full-Stack Development
13 206 (10.48%) Mentoring
14 201 (10.22%) Machine Learning
15 198 (10.07%) Scrum
16 196 (9.97%) Continuous Improvement
17 187 (9.51%) Analytics
18 180 (9.16%) Data Pipeline
19 177 (9.00%) DevSecOps
20 168 (8.55%) TDD
Programming Languages
1 950 (48.32%) Python
2 542 (27.57%) Java
3 447 (22.74%) SQL
4 289 (14.70%) Bash
5 233 (11.85%) JavaScript
6 222 (11.29%) TypeScript
7 201 (10.22%) Go
8 160 (8.14%) C#
9 153 (7.78%) PowerShell
10 62 (3.15%) C++
10 62 (3.15%) Shell Script
11 59 (3.00%) Bicep
12 51 (2.59%) Groovy
13 42 (2.14%) Ruby
14 41 (2.09%) Scala
15 36 (1.83%) Perl
16 34 (1.73%) PHP
16 34 (1.73%) Rust
17 19 (0.97%) C
17 19 (0.97%) Kotlin
Qualifications
1 605 (30.77%) Security Cleared
2 491 (24.97%) SC Cleared
3 186 (9.46%) Degree
4 119 (6.05%) Computer Science Degree
5 100 (5.09%) AWS Certification
6 77 (3.92%) DV Cleared
7 72 (3.66%) Azure Certification
8 53 (2.70%) BPSS Clearance
9 47 (2.39%) Master's Degree
10 41 (2.09%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
11 16 (0.81%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
12 15 (0.76%) Microsoft Certification
13 13 (0.66%) Cisco Certification
13 13 (0.66%) ISTQB
14 12 (0.61%) CISSP
15 10 (0.51%) MCP
16 8 (0.41%) AWS Certified Developer
16 8 (0.41%) CCSP
16 8 (0.41%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
16 8 (0.41%) TOGAF Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 115 (5.85%) QA
2 68 (3.46%) Accessibility
3 63 (3.20%) Data Quality
4 40 (2.03%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 35 (1.78%) GDPR
6 27 (1.37%) WCAG
7 26 (1.32%) NIST
8 20 (1.02%) NCSC
9 19 (0.97%) PCI DSS
10 18 (0.92%) ISO 20022
11 17 (0.86%) PSD2
12 11 (0.56%) Sarbanes-Oxley
12 11 (0.56%) SEPA
13 9 (0.46%) HL7
14 8 (0.41%) HIPAA
14 8 (0.41%) SLA
15 6 (0.31%) SOC 2
16 5 (0.25%) HMG Security Policy Framework
17 4 (0.20%) EU AI Act
18 3 (0.15%) MiFID
System Software
1 60 (3.05%) Active Directory
2 51 (2.59%) VMware Infrastructure
3 19 (0.97%) vSphere
4 17 (0.86%) Virtual Machines
5 16 (0.81%) DFS Replication
6 15 (0.76%) Slurm Workload Manager
6 15 (0.76%) Squid
7 10 (0.51%) Dovecot
7 10 (0.51%) KVM
7 10 (0.51%) Postfix
8 9 (0.46%) VMware NSX
9 8 (0.41%) Hyper-V
9 8 (0.41%) Lustre
9 8 (0.41%) Tivoli Directory Server
9 8 (0.41%) Virtual Servers
10 5 (0.25%) GPFS
10 5 (0.25%) HDFS
10 5 (0.25%) NDS
10 5 (0.25%) NetIQ eDirectory
10 5 (0.25%) Virtual Desktop
Systems Management
1 1,430 (72.74%) Kubernetes
2 718 (36.52%) Terraform
3 315 (16.02%) Grafana
4 313 (15.92%) Ansible
5 275 (13.99%) Prometheus
6 69 (3.51%) Puppet
7 67 (3.41%) Argo
8 51 (2.59%) Kibana
9 48 (2.44%) Progress Chef
10 28 (1.42%) Podman
11 25 (1.27%) Istio
11 25 (1.27%) Nessus
12 23 (1.17%) Packer
13 19 (0.97%) Single Sign-On
14 17 (0.86%) Proxmox
15 16 (0.81%) Consul
16 15 (0.76%) logstash
17 14 (0.71%) Control-M
18 13 (0.66%) Docker Swarm
19 11 (0.56%) IBM Guardium
Vendors
1 190 (9.66%) Microsoft
2 151 (7.68%) Google
3 147 (7.48%) Oracle
4 137 (6.97%) Splunk
5 62 (3.15%) Databricks
6 57 (2.90%) Red Hat
6 57 (2.90%) VMware
7 42 (2.14%) OpenAI
8 41 (2.09%) Dynatrace
9 35 (1.78%) Denodo
9 35 (1.78%) Talend
10 34 (1.73%) Palo Alto
11 31 (1.58%) F5
12 30 (1.53%) AppDynamics
12 30 (1.53%) ServiceNow
13 25 (1.27%) CheckPoint
14 18 (0.92%) Atlassian
14 18 (0.92%) Cisco
15 15 (0.76%) IBM
16 14 (0.71%) Confluent