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 24 December 2025, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
24 Dec 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 38 50 62
Rank change year-on-year +12 +12 -17
Contract jobs citing Docker 1,991 1,385 1,519
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 5.38% 4.08% 3.51%
As % of the System Software category 43.97% 34.16% 27.86%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,359 928 1,100
10th Percentile £375 £385 £413
25th Percentile £447 £470 £470
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -4.59% +0.05% -8.33%
75th Percentile £638 £675 £675
90th Percentile £713 £788 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £525
% change year-on-year - -4.76% -8.70%
Number of hourly rates quoted 21 3 23
10th Percentile £56.75 £31.70 £59.00
25th Percentile £61.25 £41.38 £61.63
Median hourly rate £67.00 £60.00 £68.63
Median % change year-on-year +11.67% -12.57% +6.82%
75th Percentile £74.26 £78.75 £76.53
90th Percentile £86.00 £88.50 £78.60
UK excluding London median hourly rate £67.00 - £66.88
% change year-on-year - - +14.33%

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 4,528 4,055 5,452
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 12.24% 11.94% 12.60%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,023 2,623 3,716
10th Percentile £213 £205 £195
25th Percentile £400 £363 £350
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £500
Median % change year-on-year - - -4.76%
75th Percentile £600 £615 £610
90th Percentile £688 £710 £700
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £453 £470
% change year-on-year +4.97% -3.72% +1.95%
Number of hourly rates quoted 150 89 220
10th Percentile £15.50 £16.73 £15.75
25th Percentile £20.82 £21.05 £18.50
Median hourly rate £47.50 £27.50 £46.95
Median % change year-on-year +72.73% -41.42% +87.78%
75th Percentile £73.20 £64.50 £67.60
90th Percentile £89.67 £75.00 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £62.50 £29.50 £45.88
% change year-on-year +111.86% -35.70% +113.40%

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 24 December 2025.

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 24 December 2025.

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 24 December 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 +11 1,696 £525 -8.70% 1,432
London +5 884 £550 -8.33% 478
UK excluding London +24 827 £500 - 1,119
Work from Home +8 633 £525 -4.55% 808
North of England +15 326 £475 -5.00% 278
Midlands +54 211 £525 -8.70% 167
West Midlands +52 200 £530 -13.40% 90
North West +15 154 £450 -11.55% 141
Yorkshire +14 144 £500 - 109
South East 0 101 £513 +13.89% 340
South West +9 100 £625 +13.64% 146
Scotland +11 77 £475 +5.56% 41
East of England +6 39 £525 -12.50% 129
North East +4 33 £475 -9.74% 28
Wales +2 15 £475 -11.63% 19
East Midlands -10 11 £450 +1.35% 67
Northern Ireland -6 4 - - 12

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 87 (4.37%) Confluence
2 68 (3.42%) SAS
3 67 (3.37%) Apache Airflow
4 50 (2.51%) Apache Spark
5 49 (2.46%) Apache
6 46 (2.31%) nginx
7 23 (1.16%) OpenStack
8 22 (1.10%) JBoss
9 13 (0.65%) IIS
9 13 (0.65%) WebLogic
10 11 (0.55%) WebSphere
11 9 (0.45%) Microsoft Exchange
11 9 (0.45%) WebSphere Application Server
12 8 (0.40%) Appian
12 8 (0.40%) iPlanet
13 7 (0.35%) Anypoint
13 7 (0.35%) Drupal
13 7 (0.35%) Mule
14 5 (0.25%) Ethereum
14 5 (0.25%) Hyperledger
Applications
1 10 (0.50%) 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 (0.050%) Microsoft Excel
6 1 (0.050%) Trello
Business Applications
1 5 (0.25%) Payment Gateway
2 4 (0.20%) Endur
3 2 (0.10%) Aladdin
3 2 (0.10%) Dynamics CRM
4 1 (0.050%) Actimize
4 1 (0.050%) Oracle Applications
4 1 (0.050%) SAP S/4HANA
Cloud Services
1 1,171 (58.81%) AWS
2 767 (38.52%) Azure
3 466 (23.41%) GitHub
4 438 (22.00%) GCP
5 302 (15.17%) GitHub Actions
6 293 (14.72%) Serverless
7 232 (11.65%) Amazon S3
8 224 (11.25%) Azure DevOps
9 205 (10.30%) Amazon EC2
10 191 (9.59%) AWS Lambda
11 190 (9.54%) AWS CloudFormation
12 182 (9.14%) Amazon EKS
13 168 (8.44%) Amazon ECS
14 163 (8.19%) Amazon CloudWatch
15 130 (6.53%) OpenShift
16 114 (5.73%) Virtual Private Cloud
17 107 (5.37%) Azure AKS
18 65 (3.26%) Datadog
19 58 (2.91%) Google Kubernetes Engine
20 48 (2.41%) SaaS
Communications & Networking
1 148 (7.43%) Firewall
2 97 (4.87%) DNS
3 56 (2.81%) TCP/IP
4 51 (2.56%) VPN
5 46 (2.31%) SSL
6 40 (2.01%) HTTP
7 38 (1.91%) Network Security
8 23 (1.16%) SSH
9 21 (1.05%) SMTP
10 19 (0.95%) FTP
11 14 (0.70%) DHCP
12 12 (0.60%) AMQP
12 12 (0.60%) Kerberos
13 10 (0.50%) IMAP
13 10 (0.50%) OpenLDAP
13 10 (0.50%) VLAN
14 9 (0.45%) BGP
14 9 (0.45%) HTTPS
15 8 (0.40%) SNMP
16 7 (0.35%) DSL
Database & Business Intelligence
1 282 (14.16%) PostgreSQL
2 206 (10.35%) NoSQL
3 139 (6.98%) Amazon RDS
4 138 (6.93%) MongoDB
5 119 (5.98%) Relational Database
6 91 (4.57%) SQL Server
7 80 (4.02%) Apache Cassandra
8 68 (3.42%) Elasticsearch
9 60 (3.01%) MySQL
10 58 (2.91%) DynamoDB
11 57 (2.86%) Redis
12 47 (2.36%) Amazon Aurora
13 40 (2.01%) Data Warehouse
14 38 (1.91%) Big Data
15 35 (1.76%) Pentaho
16 34 (1.71%) BigQuery
17 33 (1.66%) Data Lake
17 33 (1.66%) Oracle Database
18 27 (1.36%) RDBMS
19 25 (1.26%) Azure SQL Database
Development Applications
1 627 (31.49%) Jenkins
2 554 (27.83%) Git
3 413 (20.74%) GitLab
4 224 (11.25%) JIRA
5 95 (4.77%) SonarQube
6 86 (4.32%) JUnit
7 78 (3.92%) Selenium
8 51 (2.56%) Bitbucket
9 50 (2.51%) Maven
10 48 (2.41%) Sonatype Nexus
11 46 (2.31%) Cypress.io
12 43 (2.16%) Cucumber
12 43 (2.16%) Liquibase
13 40 (2.01%) Postman
14 36 (1.81%) CircleCI
14 36 (1.81%) Gradle
14 36 (1.81%) Mockito
15 33 (1.66%) MLflow
16 28 (1.41%) JMeter
17 27 (1.36%) Artifactory
General
1 518 (26.02%) Social Skills
2 324 (16.27%) Finance
3 273 (13.71%) Public Sector
4 214 (10.75%) Banking
5 137 (6.88%) Analytical Skills
6 37 (1.86%) Documentation Skills
7 36 (1.81%) Financial Institution
8 35 (1.76%) Investment Banking
9 28 (1.41%) Pharmaceutical
10 24 (1.21%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 24 (1.21%) Telecoms
11 19 (0.95%) Front Office
11 19 (0.95%) Presentation Skills
12 15 (0.75%) Military
13 14 (0.70%) Influencing Skills
13 14 (0.70%) Retail
14 11 (0.55%) Law
15 9 (0.45%) Publishing
16 8 (0.40%) Aerospace
17 7 (0.35%) Manufacturing
Job Titles
1 535 (26.87%) Developer
2 353 (17.73%) Senior
3 292 (14.67%) DevOps Engineer
4 156 (7.84%) Software Engineer
5 145 (7.28%) Java Developer
6 136 (6.83%) AWS Engineer
7 124 (6.23%) Architect
8 123 (6.18%) Senior Developer
9 118 (5.93%) Lead
10 103 (5.17%) Python Developer
11 93 (4.67%) Full-Stack Developer
12 90 (4.52%) AWS DevOps
13 89 (4.47%) Platform Engineer
14 80 (4.02%) AWS DevOps Engineer
15 76 (3.82%) Data Engineer
16 69 (3.47%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
17 65 (3.26%) Cloud Engineer
18 60 (3.01%) Full-Stack Engineer
19 56 (2.81%) Site Reliability Engineer
20 54 (2.71%) Python Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 317 (15.92%) Kafka
2 276 (13.86%) REST
3 266 (13.36%) RESTful
4 257 (12.91%) Spring
5 253 (12.71%) React
6 251 (12.61%) Node.js
7 231 (11.60%) Spring Boot
8 145 (7.28%) Elastic Stack
9 140 (7.03%) .NET
10 132 (6.63%) AngularJS
11 110 (5.52%) HTML
12 107 (5.37%) FastAPI
13 88 (4.42%) gRPC
14 87 (4.37%) GraphQL
15 86 (4.32%) JSON
15 86 (4.32%) OAuth
16 82 (4.12%) CSS
17 72 (3.62%) PyTorch
18 69 (3.47%) YAML
19 66 (3.31%) Vue
Miscellaneous
1 377 (18.94%) Cloud Native
2 192 (9.64%) Distributed Systems
3 63 (3.16%) Public Cloud
4 57 (2.86%) Product Ownership
5 40 (2.01%) Hybrid Cloud
6 37 (1.86%) Algorithms
7 36 (1.81%) Replication
8 35 (1.76%) Legacy Systems
9 30 (1.51%) Onboarding
10 29 (1.46%) AI Agents
11 28 (1.41%) Data Centre
12 26 (1.31%) Greenfield Project
13 24 (1.21%) Enterprise Software
13 24 (1.21%) Hedge funds
14 23 (1.16%) Data Protection Act
15 22 (1.10%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
15 22 (1.10%) Management Information System
16 21 (1.05%) Data Structures
17 20 (1.00%) Life Science
18 19 (0.95%) PKI
Operating Systems
1 422 (21.20%) Linux
2 124 (6.23%) Windows
3 90 (4.52%) Unix
4 40 (2.01%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 37 (1.86%) Windows Server
6 31 (1.56%) VMS
7 24 (1.21%) Ubuntu
8 21 (1.05%) Amazon Linux
9 11 (0.55%) CentOS
10 4 (0.20%) Android
11 3 (0.15%) Windows Server 2016
12 2 (0.10%) Apple iOS
12 2 (0.10%) Oracle Linux
12 2 (0.10%) Windows Server 2003
12 2 (0.10%) Windows Server 2012
12 2 (0.10%) Windows Server 2019
13 1 (0.050%) Alpine Linux
13 1 (0.050%) Robot Operating System
13 1 (0.050%) Solaris
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,390 (69.81%) CI/CD
2 1,134 (56.96%) DevOps
3 1,040 (52.24%) Containerisation
4 770 (38.67%) Agile
5 650 (32.65%) Microservices
6 631 (31.69%) Infrastructure as Code
7 488 (24.51%) Problem-Solving
8 410 (20.59%) Software Engineering
9 376 (18.88%) Test Automation
10 289 (14.52%) Observability
11 248 (12.46%) AI
12 222 (11.15%) Full-Stack Development
13 212 (10.65%) Mentoring
14 205 (10.30%) Scrum
15 201 (10.10%) Machine Learning
16 195 (9.79%) Continuous Improvement
17 186 (9.34%) Analytics
18 178 (8.94%) TDD
19 177 (8.89%) DevSecOps
20 175 (8.79%) Data Pipeline
Programming Languages
1 971 (48.77%) Python
2 556 (27.93%) Java
3 428 (21.50%) SQL
4 298 (14.97%) Bash
5 240 (12.05%) JavaScript
6 226 (11.35%) TypeScript
7 209 (10.50%) Go
8 165 (8.29%) PowerShell
9 160 (8.04%) C#
10 67 (3.37%) C++
11 64 (3.21%) Shell Script
12 58 (2.91%) Bicep
13 56 (2.81%) Groovy
14 50 (2.51%) Ruby
15 43 (2.16%) Perl
16 40 (2.01%) Scala
17 35 (1.76%) PHP
18 34 (1.71%) Rust
19 21 (1.05%) C
20 19 (0.95%) Kotlin
Qualifications
1 601 (30.19%) Security Cleared
2 487 (24.46%) SC Cleared
3 186 (9.34%) Degree
4 121 (6.08%) Computer Science Degree
5 109 (5.47%) AWS Certification
6 77 (3.87%) DV Cleared
7 71 (3.57%) Azure Certification
8 53 (2.66%) BPSS Clearance
9 49 (2.46%) Master's Degree
10 46 (2.31%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
11 18 (0.90%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
11 18 (0.90%) Microsoft Certification
12 13 (0.65%) Cisco Certification
12 13 (0.65%) ISTQB
13 12 (0.60%) CISSP
14 9 (0.45%) MCP
15 8 (0.40%) (ISC)2 CCSP
15 8 (0.40%) CCSP
15 8 (0.40%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
15 8 (0.40%) TOGAF Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 112 (5.63%) QA
2 66 (3.31%) Accessibility
3 60 (3.01%) Data Quality
4 37 (1.86%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 33 (1.66%) GDPR
6 26 (1.31%) WCAG
7 23 (1.16%) NIST
8 18 (0.90%) NCSC
9 16 (0.80%) ISO 20022
9 16 (0.80%) PCI DSS
10 15 (0.75%) PSD2
11 10 (0.50%) HIPAA
12 9 (0.45%) HL7
12 9 (0.45%) SEPA
13 8 (0.40%) SLA
14 7 (0.35%) Sarbanes-Oxley
15 6 (0.30%) 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 67 (3.37%) Active Directory
2 55 (2.76%) VMware Infrastructure
3 19 (0.95%) vSphere
4 18 (0.90%) DFS Replication
5 17 (0.85%) Virtual Machines
6 16 (0.80%) Squid
7 13 (0.65%) Slurm Workload Manager
8 10 (0.50%) Dovecot
8 10 (0.50%) KVM
8 10 (0.50%) Postfix
9 9 (0.45%) VMware NSX
10 8 (0.40%) Hyper-V
10 8 (0.40%) Lustre
10 8 (0.40%) Tivoli Directory Server
10 8 (0.40%) Virtual Servers
11 5 (0.25%) HDFS
11 5 (0.25%) NDS
11 5 (0.25%) NetIQ eDirectory
11 5 (0.25%) Snort
11 5 (0.25%) Virtual Desktop
Systems Management
1 1,454 (73.03%) Kubernetes
2 743 (37.32%) Terraform
3 331 (16.62%) Ansible
4 312 (15.67%) Grafana
5 273 (13.71%) Prometheus
6 74 (3.72%) Puppet
7 66 (3.31%) Argo
8 57 (2.86%) Progress Chef
9 55 (2.76%) Kibana
10 27 (1.36%) Podman
11 26 (1.31%) Nessus
12 24 (1.21%) Istio
13 23 (1.16%) Packer
14 19 (0.95%) Single Sign-On
15 17 (0.85%) logstash
15 17 (0.85%) Proxmox
16 16 (0.80%) Consul
17 14 (0.70%) Control-M
18 13 (0.65%) Docker Swarm
19 11 (0.55%) IBM Guardium
Vendors
1 193 (9.69%) Microsoft
2 154 (7.73%) Google
3 152 (7.63%) Oracle
4 140 (7.03%) Splunk
5 63 (3.16%) Databricks
6 61 (3.06%) VMware
7 58 (2.91%) Red Hat
8 38 (1.91%) Dynatrace
8 38 (1.91%) OpenAI
9 35 (1.76%) Palo Alto
10 34 (1.71%) Denodo
10 34 (1.71%) Talend
11 32 (1.61%) ServiceNow
12 31 (1.56%) F5
13 30 (1.51%) AppDynamics
14 25 (1.26%) CheckPoint
15 19 (0.95%) Cisco
16 18 (0.90%) Atlassian
16 18 (0.90%) IBM
17 16 (0.80%) Cloudera