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 27 January 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
27 Jan 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 38 48 68
Rank change year-on-year +10 +20 -23
Contract jobs citing Docker 1,997 1,319 1,354
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 5.25% 4.24% 3.05%
As % of the System Software category 43.28% 35.07% 25.94%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,377 896 994
10th Percentile £375 £400 £413
25th Percentile £438 £480 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £571 £550
Median % change year-on-year -8.10% +3.86% -8.33%
75th Percentile £625 £675 £650
90th Percentile £721 £810 £725
UK excluding London median daily rate £510 £510 £525
% change year-on-year - -2.86% -8.70%
Number of hourly rates quoted 16 5 17
10th Percentile £51.50 - £54.70
25th Percentile £61.25 £25.25 £62.00
Median hourly rate £71.13 £27.50 £67.27
Median % change year-on-year +158.65% -59.12% -3.91%
75th Percentile £88.25 £62.50 £76.53
90th Percentile £95.00 £82.00 £77.12
UK excluding London median hourly rate £74.26 - £68.63
% change year-on-year - - +7.65%

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 4,614 3,761 5,220
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 12.12% 12.10% 11.76%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,143 2,426 3,582
10th Percentile £213 £200 £190
25th Percentile £400 £368 £325
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £513 £496
Median % change year-on-year -2.44% +3.27% -5.48%
75th Percentile £595 £625 £600
90th Percentile £695 £713 £700
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £463 £450
% change year-on-year +2.70% +2.78% -3.23%
Number of hourly rates quoted 135 91 237
10th Percentile £15.50 £17.00 £14.40
25th Percentile £20.87 £21.36 £18.28
Median hourly rate £41.94 £29.00 £47.50
Median % change year-on-year +44.62% -38.95% +29.25%
75th Percentile £74.26 £64.50 £65.98
90th Percentile £92.10 £75.00 £78.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £62.50 £37.50 £50.00
% change year-on-year +66.67% -25.00% +127.27%

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 27 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 27 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 27 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 +11 1,725 £525 -8.70% 1,094
London +5 897 £550 -8.33% 294
UK excluding London +17 826 £510 - 945
Work from Home +5 623 £525 -4.55% 502
North of England +17 348 £475 -5.00% 188
Midlands +51 222 £530 +6.00% 119
West Midlands +48 209 £537 +2.29% 49
North West +21 165 £450 -10.00% 101
Yorkshire +8 146 £500 -4.76% 63
South West +1 100 £648 +8.00% 152
South East -20 91 £513 +13.89% 319
Scotland +8 69 £475 +5.56% 30
North East 0 43 £475 -9.74% 24
East of England -5 30 £594 +7.95% 103
East Midlands -17 13 £413 -6.98% 67
Wales -6 10 £511 -9.16% 35
Northern Ireland -3 7 - - 16

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 88 (4.41%) Confluence
2 70 (3.51%) SAS
3 60 (3.00%) Apache Airflow
4 55 (2.75%) Apache Spark
5 50 (2.50%) Apache
6 48 (2.40%) nginx
7 23 (1.15%) OpenStack
8 18 (0.90%) JBoss
9 13 (0.65%) Appian
9 13 (0.65%) IIS
10 12 (0.60%) WebLogic
11 11 (0.55%) Jupyter
12 10 (0.50%) Camunda
13 9 (0.45%) WebSphere
14 8 (0.40%) iPlanet
14 8 (0.40%) Microsoft Exchange
14 8 (0.40%) WebSphere Application Server
15 5 (0.25%) Drupal
15 5 (0.25%) SharePoint
15 5 (0.25%) Tomcat
Applications
1 8 (0.40%) Mozilla Thunderbird
2 6 (0.30%) Microsoft Office
3 5 (0.25%) Weka
4 3 (0.15%) Microsoft Excel
4 3 (0.15%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 3 (0.15%) MS Visio
5 2 (0.10%) Chatbot
6 1 (0.050%) Adobe Illustrator
6 1 (0.050%) Adobe XD
6 1 (0.050%) Photoshop
6 1 (0.050%) Trello
Business Applications
1 5 (0.25%) Payment Gateway
2 1 (0.050%) Actimize
2 1 (0.050%) Dynamics CRM
2 1 (0.050%) Endur
2 1 (0.050%) Oracle Applications
2 1 (0.050%) Shopify
Cloud Services
1 1,161 (58.14%) AWS
2 761 (38.11%) Azure
3 464 (23.23%) GitHub
4 432 (21.63%) GCP
5 307 (15.37%) Serverless
6 288 (14.42%) GitHub Actions
7 232 (11.62%) Amazon S3
8 225 (11.27%) Azure DevOps
9 209 (10.47%) AWS CloudFormation
10 203 (10.17%) AWS Lambda
11 200 (10.02%) Amazon EC2
12 184 (9.21%) Amazon EKS
13 178 (8.91%) Amazon ECS
14 164 (8.21%) Amazon CloudWatch
15 132 (6.61%) OpenShift
16 114 (5.71%) Azure AKS
17 104 (5.21%) Virtual Private Cloud
18 68 (3.41%) Google Kubernetes Engine
19 63 (3.15%) Datadog
20 51 (2.55%) Amazon SQS
Communications & Networking
1 134 (6.71%) Firewall
2 88 (4.41%) DNS
3 51 (2.55%) TCP/IP
4 47 (2.35%) VPN
5 42 (2.10%) SSL
6 35 (1.75%) HTTP
6 35 (1.75%) Network Security
7 16 (0.80%) DHCP
7 16 (0.80%) SMTP
8 15 (0.75%) Kerberos
9 14 (0.70%) SSH
10 13 (0.65%) FTP
11 10 (0.50%) VLAN
12 8 (0.40%) BGP
12 8 (0.40%) IMAP
12 8 (0.40%) OpenLDAP
12 8 (0.40%) SNMP
13 6 (0.30%) HTTPS
13 6 (0.30%) Software-Defined Networking
14 5 (0.25%) AMQP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 278 (13.92%) PostgreSQL
2 207 (10.37%) NoSQL
3 136 (6.81%) MongoDB
4 135 (6.76%) Amazon RDS
5 128 (6.41%) Relational Database
6 105 (5.26%) SQL Server
7 84 (4.21%) Apache Cassandra
8 71 (3.56%) MySQL
9 68 (3.41%) Elasticsearch
10 64 (3.20%) DynamoDB
11 61 (3.05%) Redis
12 46 (2.30%) Amazon Aurora
13 41 (2.05%) Big Data
14 39 (1.95%) BigQuery
14 39 (1.95%) Data Warehouse
14 39 (1.95%) Pentaho
15 35 (1.75%) Data Lake
16 33 (1.65%) Power BI
17 31 (1.55%) Oracle Database
18 28 (1.40%) Azure SQL Database
Development Applications
1 586 (29.34%) Jenkins
2 516 (25.84%) Git
3 414 (20.73%) GitLab
4 214 (10.72%) JIRA
5 84 (4.21%) JUnit
6 73 (3.66%) SonarQube
7 72 (3.61%) Selenium
8 50 (2.50%) Maven
9 49 (2.45%) Bitbucket
10 44 (2.20%) Cypress.io
11 42 (2.10%) Cucumber
12 41 (2.05%) Sonatype Nexus
13 39 (1.95%) Postman
14 37 (1.85%) Gradle
15 35 (1.75%) MLflow
16 33 (1.65%) Liquibase
16 33 (1.65%) Mockito
17 26 (1.30%) CircleCI
18 24 (1.20%) JMeter
19 21 (1.05%) REST Assured
General
1 518 (25.94%) Social Skills
2 330 (16.52%) Finance
3 288 (14.42%) Public Sector
4 204 (10.22%) Banking
5 155 (7.76%) Analytical Skills
6 39 (1.95%) Documentation Skills
7 35 (1.75%) Financial Institution
8 28 (1.40%) Investment Banking
9 26 (1.30%) Presentation Skills
10 25 (1.25%) Pharmaceutical
11 21 (1.05%) Front Office
11 21 (1.05%) Inclusion and Diversity
12 18 (0.90%) Telecoms
13 15 (0.75%) Military
14 14 (0.70%) Influencing Skills
15 12 (0.60%) Retail
16 10 (0.50%) Law
17 6 (0.30%) Games
17 6 (0.30%) Health Technology
17 6 (0.30%) Retail Banking
Job Titles
1 552 (27.64%) Developer
2 349 (17.48%) Senior
3 279 (13.97%) DevOps Engineer
4 152 (7.61%) Java Developer
4 152 (7.61%) Software Engineer
5 133 (6.66%) AWS Engineer
6 124 (6.21%) Senior Developer
7 120 (6.01%) Architect
8 112 (5.61%) Python Developer
9 111 (5.56%) Lead
10 100 (5.01%) Full-Stack Developer
11 85 (4.26%) AWS DevOps
12 81 (4.06%) Data Engineer
12 81 (4.06%) Platform Engineer
13 77 (3.86%) AWS DevOps Engineer
14 71 (3.56%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
15 69 (3.46%) Cloud Engineer
16 62 (3.10%) Site Reliability Engineer
17 56 (2.80%) Full-Stack Engineer
18 52 (2.60%) Python Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 308 (15.42%) Kafka
2 277 (13.87%) Spring
3 275 (13.77%) REST
4 266 (13.32%) RESTful
5 252 (12.62%) Spring Boot
6 248 (12.42%) React
7 244 (12.22%) Node.js
8 134 (6.71%) .NET
9 128 (6.41%) Elastic Stack
10 122 (6.11%) AngularJS
11 113 (5.66%) FastAPI
12 104 (5.21%) HTML
13 95 (4.76%) OAuth
14 88 (4.41%) GraphQL
15 87 (4.36%) gRPC
15 87 (4.36%) PyTorch
16 79 (3.96%) JSON
17 77 (3.86%) CSS
18 71 (3.56%) TensorFlow
19 68 (3.41%) OpenTelemetry
Miscellaneous
1 380 (19.03%) Cloud Native
2 174 (8.71%) Distributed Systems
3 54 (2.70%) Product Ownership
3 54 (2.70%) Public Cloud
4 37 (1.85%) Legacy Systems
5 34 (1.70%) Algorithms
6 33 (1.65%) Hybrid Cloud
7 31 (1.55%) Management Information System
8 30 (1.50%) Replication
9 29 (1.45%) AI Agents
9 29 (1.45%) Enterprise Software
10 27 (1.35%) Greenfield Project
11 25 (1.25%) Data Protection Act
12 24 (1.20%) Onboarding
13 21 (1.05%) Data Centre
14 19 (0.95%) Life Science
14 19 (0.95%) PKI
14 19 (0.95%) Virtual Team
15 18 (0.90%) Genomics
15 18 (0.90%) Hedge funds
Operating Systems
1 411 (20.58%) Linux
2 121 (6.06%) Windows
3 92 (4.61%) Unix
4 40 (2.00%) Windows Server
5 35 (1.75%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 26 (1.30%) VMS
7 21 (1.05%) Ubuntu
8 15 (0.75%) Amazon Linux
9 10 (0.50%) CentOS
10 5 (0.25%) Windows Server 2016
10 5 (0.25%) Windows Server 2019
11 3 (0.15%) Android
11 3 (0.15%) Apple iOS
11 3 (0.15%) Solaris
11 3 (0.15%) Windows Server 2003
11 3 (0.15%) Windows Server 2012
12 2 (0.10%) Oracle Linux
12 2 (0.10%) Rocky
12 2 (0.10%) Windows Server 2008
13 1 (0.050%) Alpine Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,407 (70.46%) CI/CD
2 1,110 (55.58%) DevOps
3 1,055 (52.83%) Containerisation
4 773 (38.71%) Agile
5 656 (32.85%) Microservices
6 603 (30.20%) Infrastructure as Code
7 492 (24.64%) Problem-Solving
8 390 (19.53%) Software Engineering
9 386 (19.33%) Test Automation
10 321 (16.07%) Observability
11 270 (13.52%) AI
12 235 (11.77%) Full-Stack Development
13 208 (10.42%) Continuous Improvement
14 207 (10.37%) Machine Learning
15 206 (10.32%) Mentoring
16 197 (9.86%) Analytics
17 195 (9.76%) Scrum
18 188 (9.41%) Data Pipeline
19 166 (8.31%) DevSecOps
20 165 (8.26%) Event-Driven
Programming Languages
1 965 (48.32%) Python
2 554 (27.74%) Java
3 474 (23.74%) SQL
4 276 (13.82%) Bash
5 230 (11.52%) JavaScript
6 214 (10.72%) TypeScript
7 199 (9.96%) Go
8 152 (7.61%) PowerShell
9 147 (7.36%) C#
10 67 (3.36%) Shell Script
11 58 (2.90%) Bicep
12 48 (2.40%) C++
13 47 (2.35%) Scala
14 45 (2.25%) Groovy
15 44 (2.20%) Ruby
16 35 (1.75%) Rust
17 31 (1.55%) Perl
18 29 (1.45%) PHP
19 17 (0.85%) C
19 17 (0.85%) Kotlin
Qualifications
1 615 (30.80%) Security Cleared
2 498 (24.94%) SC Cleared
3 197 (9.86%) Degree
4 128 (6.41%) Computer Science Degree
5 98 (4.91%) AWS Certification
6 82 (4.11%) DV Cleared
7 71 (3.56%) Azure Certification
8 55 (2.75%) BPSS Clearance
9 49 (2.45%) Master's Degree
10 40 (2.00%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
11 16 (0.80%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
11 16 (0.80%) Microsoft Certification
12 13 (0.65%) Cisco Certification
12 13 (0.65%) ISTQB
13 11 (0.55%) CISSP
14 9 (0.45%) AWS Certified Developer
15 8 (0.40%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
15 8 (0.40%) MCP
15 8 (0.40%) TOGAF Certification
16 7 (0.35%) CCSP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 107 (5.36%) QA
2 67 (3.36%) Data Quality
3 65 (3.25%) Accessibility
4 33 (1.65%) GDPR
5 25 (1.25%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 25 (1.25%) WCAG
6 20 (1.00%) ISO 20022
6 20 (1.00%) NIST
7 19 (0.95%) NCSC
7 19 (0.95%) PCI DSS
8 16 (0.80%) PSD2
9 13 (0.65%) SEPA
10 11 (0.55%) Sarbanes-Oxley
11 9 (0.45%) SLA
12 8 (0.40%) HIPAA
13 7 (0.35%) HL7
14 6 (0.30%) HMG Security Policy Framework
15 4 (0.20%) EU AI Act
15 4 (0.20%) SOC 2
16 3 (0.15%) MiFID
System Software
1 60 (3.00%) Active Directory
2 55 (2.75%) VMware Infrastructure
3 20 (1.00%) Slurm Workload Manager
3 20 (1.00%) vSphere
4 15 (0.75%) Virtual Machines
5 13 (0.65%) Squid
6 12 (0.60%) DFS Replication
7 10 (0.50%) KVM
8 9 (0.45%) Hyper-V
8 9 (0.45%) VMware NSX
9 8 (0.40%) Dovecot
9 8 (0.40%) Lustre
9 8 (0.40%) Postfix
9 8 (0.40%) Tivoli Directory Server
9 8 (0.40%) Virtual Servers
9 8 (0.40%) VMware ESXi
10 6 (0.30%) GPFS
10 6 (0.30%) Virtual Desktop
11 5 (0.25%) HDFS
11 5 (0.25%) NetIQ eDirectory
Systems Management
1 1,462 (73.21%) Kubernetes
2 713 (35.70%) Terraform
3 310 (15.52%) Grafana
4 299 (14.97%) Ansible
5 270 (13.52%) Prometheus
6 69 (3.46%) Puppet
7 63 (3.15%) Argo
8 49 (2.45%) Progress Chef
9 46 (2.30%) Kibana
10 30 (1.50%) Podman
11 27 (1.35%) Nessus
12 23 (1.15%) Packer
13 22 (1.10%) Istio
14 18 (0.90%) Single Sign-On
15 17 (0.85%) Consul
15 17 (0.85%) Control-M
16 16 (0.80%) Docker Swarm
17 15 (0.75%) IBM Guardium
17 15 (0.75%) Proxmox
18 14 (0.70%) logstash
Vendors
1 197 (9.86%) Microsoft
2 155 (7.76%) Google
3 148 (7.41%) Oracle
4 137 (6.86%) Splunk
5 62 (3.10%) Databricks
5 62 (3.10%) VMware
6 49 (2.45%) Red Hat
7 47 (2.35%) OpenAI
8 38 (1.90%) Denodo
8 38 (1.90%) Talend
9 36 (1.80%) Dynatrace
10 33 (1.65%) Palo Alto
11 32 (1.60%) F5
12 29 (1.45%) AppDynamics
13 25 (1.25%) CheckPoint
13 25 (1.25%) ServiceNow
14 18 (0.90%) Atlassian
14 18 (0.90%) Cisco
15 17 (0.85%) IBM
15 17 (0.85%) Tenable