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 18 February 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
18 Feb 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 42 46 69
Rank change year-on-year +4 +23 -23
Contract jobs citing Docker 2,009 1,310 1,337
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 4.95% 4.27% 3.01%
As % of the System Software category 42.14% 34.46% 26.59%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,375 896 973
10th Percentile £375 £400 £411
25th Percentile £431 £475 £456
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £566 £538
Median % change year-on-year -7.16% +5.11% -10.33%
75th Percentile £625 £675 £638
90th Percentile £715 £810 £719
UK excluding London median daily rate £505 £510 £506
% change year-on-year -0.98% +0.79% -8.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 17 5 17
10th Percentile £43.56 - £54.70
25th Percentile £56.75 £25.25 £62.00
Median hourly rate £65.00 £27.50 £66.50
Median % change year-on-year +136.36% -58.65% -5.00%
75th Percentile £79.00 £62.50 £76.53
90th Percentile £89.60 £82.00 -
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 - £68.63
% change year-on-year - - +9.81%

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 4,767 3,801 5,029
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 11.75% 12.39% 11.33%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,253 2,476 3,411
10th Percentile £205 £200 £190
25th Percentile £400 £375 £324
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £516 £480
Median % change year-on-year -3.15% +7.55% -8.57%
75th Percentile £590 £625 £600
90th Percentile £688 £723 £700
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £468 £450
% change year-on-year +1.60% +3.89% -5.26%
Number of hourly rates quoted 145 89 246
10th Percentile £15.50 £15.59 £14.06
25th Percentile £20.50 £21.25 £17.70
Median hourly rate £34.00 £29.00 £43.75
Median % change year-on-year +17.24% -33.71% +9.38%
75th Percentile £70.00 £64.50 £65.98
90th Percentile £83.40 £75.50 £77.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £41.94 £37.50 £46.18
% change year-on-year +11.84% -18.80% +90.43%

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 18 February 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 18 February 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 18 February 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 +6 1,735 £525 -8.70% 720
London +2 898 £550 -8.33% 268
UK excluding London +16 819 £505 -0.98% 551
Work from Home -1 624 £525 -4.55% 418
North of England +15 346 £478 -4.50% 143
Midlands +43 219 £530 +6.00% 73
West Midlands +40 201 £537 +2.29% 49
North West +18 156 £453 -9.40% 85
Yorkshire +12 154 £500 -4.76% 42
South West -6 101 £588 -2.08% 108
South East -10 99 £513 +13.89% 164
Scotland -2 55 £420 -4.55% 17
North East 0 43 £475 +3.83% 16
East of England -14 32 £551 +10.10% 31
East Midlands -14 17 £424 -4.59% 23
Wales -5 11 £511 -9.16% 18
Northern Ireland +2 7 - - 6

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 92 (4.58%) Confluence
2 57 (2.84%) Apache Airflow
3 56 (2.79%) Apache Spark
4 55 (2.74%) SAS
5 45 (2.24%) Apache
6 39 (1.94%) nginx
7 21 (1.05%) OpenStack
8 15 (0.75%) JBoss
9 14 (0.70%) Appian
10 13 (0.65%) WebLogic
11 12 (0.60%) Camunda
12 11 (0.55%) Jupyter
13 10 (0.50%) IIS
14 9 (0.45%) WebSphere
15 8 (0.40%) Microsoft Exchange
16 7 (0.35%) Tomcat
17 6 (0.30%) iPlanet
17 6 (0.30%) WebSphere Application Server
18 5 (0.25%) Drupal
18 5 (0.25%) SharePoint
Applications
1 8 (0.40%) Microsoft Office
2 5 (0.25%) Microsoft Excel
2 5 (0.25%) Weka
3 4 (0.20%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 4 (0.20%) Mozilla Thunderbird
4 3 (0.15%) Chatbot
5 2 (0.100%) Adobe XD
6 1 (0.050%) Adobe Illustrator
6 1 (0.050%) CPLEX
6 1 (0.050%) Maya
6 1 (0.050%) MS Visio
6 1 (0.050%) Notion
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%) Endur
2 1 (0.050%) SAP S/4HANA
2 1 (0.050%) Shopify
Cloud Services
1 1,169 (58.19%) AWS
2 784 (39.02%) Azure
3 475 (23.64%) GitHub
4 433 (21.55%) GCP
5 299 (14.88%) GitHub Actions
6 295 (14.68%) Serverless
7 234 (11.65%) Azure DevOps
8 222 (11.05%) Amazon S3
9 206 (10.25%) AWS CloudFormation
10 194 (9.66%) Amazon EKS
11 188 (9.36%) AWS Lambda
12 184 (9.16%) Amazon EC2
13 173 (8.61%) Amazon ECS
14 152 (7.57%) Amazon CloudWatch
15 120 (5.97%) OpenShift
16 113 (5.62%) Azure AKS
17 92 (4.58%) Virtual Private Cloud
18 62 (3.09%) Datadog
19 59 (2.94%) Azure Monitor
20 55 (2.74%) Google Kubernetes Engine
Communications & Networking
1 113 (5.62%) Firewall
2 78 (3.88%) DNS
3 46 (2.29%) TCP/IP
4 40 (1.99%) VPN
5 34 (1.69%) SSL
6 33 (1.64%) Network Security
7 31 (1.54%) HTTP
8 18 (0.90%) DHCP
9 13 (0.65%) Kerberos
10 10 (0.50%) SMTP
10 10 (0.50%) VLAN
11 8 (0.40%) BGP
11 8 (0.40%) SNMP
12 7 (0.35%) FTP
13 6 (0.30%) HTTPS
13 6 (0.30%) Radio Access Network
13 6 (0.30%) SSH
14 5 (0.25%) AMQP
14 5 (0.25%) Software-Defined Networking
14 5 (0.25%) Wireshark
Database & Business Intelligence
1 291 (14.48%) PostgreSQL
2 205 (10.20%) NoSQL
3 142 (7.07%) MongoDB
4 132 (6.57%) Relational Database
5 131 (6.52%) Amazon RDS
6 107 (5.33%) SQL Server
7 87 (4.33%) Apache Cassandra
8 69 (3.43%) MySQL
9 64 (3.19%) Elasticsearch
10 62 (3.09%) DynamoDB
11 55 (2.74%) Redis
12 40 (1.99%) Big Data
13 38 (1.89%) Data Warehouse
14 37 (1.84%) Amazon Aurora
15 35 (1.74%) BigQuery
16 34 (1.69%) Data Lake
17 33 (1.64%) Azure SQL Database
18 31 (1.54%) Power BI
19 29 (1.44%) Oracle Database
20 26 (1.29%) DocumentDB
Development Applications
1 559 (27.82%) Jenkins
2 485 (24.14%) Git
3 424 (21.11%) GitLab
4 206 (10.25%) JIRA
5 90 (4.48%) JUnit
6 79 (3.93%) Selenium
7 58 (2.89%) SonarQube
8 50 (2.49%) Bitbucket
9 47 (2.34%) Maven
10 46 (2.29%) Cucumber
10 46 (2.29%) MLflow
11 37 (1.84%) Cypress.io
11 37 (1.84%) Mockito
12 36 (1.79%) Postman
13 33 (1.64%) Liquibase
14 31 (1.54%) Sonatype Nexus
15 28 (1.39%) Gradle
15 28 (1.39%) REST Assured
16 27 (1.34%) Gatling
16 27 (1.34%) JMeter
General
1 524 (26.08%) Social Skills
2 339 (16.87%) Finance
3 298 (14.83%) Public Sector
4 195 (9.71%) Banking
5 175 (8.71%) Analytical Skills
6 35 (1.74%) Documentation Skills
7 33 (1.64%) Financial Institution
8 26 (1.29%) Investment Banking
9 23 (1.14%) Inclusion and Diversity
9 23 (1.14%) Presentation Skills
10 20 (1.00%) Front Office
11 19 (0.95%) Pharmaceutical
12 15 (0.75%) Influencing Skills
12 15 (0.75%) Military
13 13 (0.65%) Retail
13 13 (0.65%) Telecoms
14 8 (0.40%) Law
14 8 (0.40%) Marketing
15 6 (0.30%) Health Technology
15 6 (0.30%) Retail Banking
Job Titles
1 570 (28.37%) Developer
2 353 (17.57%) Senior
3 275 (13.69%) DevOps Engineer
4 159 (7.91%) Java Developer
5 149 (7.42%) Software Engineer
6 130 (6.47%) AWS Engineer
7 129 (6.42%) Architect
8 127 (6.32%) Lead
9 123 (6.12%) Python Developer
9 123 (6.12%) Senior Developer
10 105 (5.23%) Full-Stack Developer
11 83 (4.13%) Platform Engineer
12 80 (3.98%) AWS DevOps
12 80 (3.98%) Data Engineer
13 72 (3.58%) AWS DevOps Engineer
14 71 (3.53%) Cloud Engineer
15 65 (3.24%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
16 58 (2.89%) Site Reliability Engineer
17 55 (2.74%) Azure Engineer
18 53 (2.64%) Full-Stack Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 317 (15.78%) Kafka
2 289 (14.39%) Spring
3 281 (13.99%) REST
4 260 (12.94%) RESTful
5 256 (12.74%) Spring Boot
6 249 (12.39%) Node.js
7 245 (12.20%) React
8 144 (7.17%) .NET
9 122 (6.07%) FastAPI
10 121 (6.02%) AngularJS
10 121 (6.02%) Elastic Stack
11 95 (4.73%) HTML
12 91 (4.53%) OAuth
12 91 (4.53%) PyTorch
13 86 (4.28%) gRPC
14 82 (4.08%) GraphQL
15 79 (3.93%) OpenTelemetry
16 76 (3.78%) CSS
16 76 (3.78%) Playwright
17 73 (3.63%) Flask
Miscellaneous
1 371 (18.47%) Cloud Native
2 182 (9.06%) Distributed Systems
3 62 (3.09%) Product Ownership
4 53 (2.64%) Public Cloud
5 44 (2.19%) Legacy Systems
6 38 (1.89%) Algorithms
7 37 (1.84%) Hybrid Cloud
8 36 (1.79%) Enterprise Software
9 32 (1.59%) Management Information System
10 27 (1.34%) Data Protection Act
11 26 (1.29%) Greenfield Project
11 26 (1.29%) Onboarding
12 25 (1.24%) AI Agents
13 21 (1.05%) PKI
13 21 (1.05%) Replication
14 20 (1.00%) NHS
15 19 (0.95%) Distributed Computing
16 18 (0.90%) Data Structures
16 18 (0.90%) Self-Motivation
17 17 (0.85%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 407 (20.26%) Linux
2 115 (5.72%) Windows
3 80 (3.98%) Unix
4 38 (1.89%) Windows Server
5 32 (1.59%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 24 (1.19%) VMS
7 17 (0.85%) Ubuntu
8 10 (0.50%) Amazon Linux
8 10 (0.50%) CentOS
9 8 (0.40%) Windows Server 2019
10 7 (0.35%) Windows Server 2016
11 4 (0.20%) Android
11 4 (0.20%) Solaris
11 4 (0.20%) Windows Server 2003
11 4 (0.20%) Windows Server 2008
11 4 (0.20%) Windows Server 2012
12 3 (0.15%) Apple iOS
13 2 (0.100%) Rocky
14 1 (0.050%) Alpine Linux
14 1 (0.050%) Debian
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,436 (71.48%) CI/CD
2 1,105 (55.00%) DevOps
3 1,096 (54.55%) Containerisation
4 764 (38.03%) Agile
5 683 (34.00%) Microservices
6 618 (30.76%) Infrastructure as Code
7 490 (24.39%) Problem-Solving
8 386 (19.21%) Test Automation
9 385 (19.16%) Software Engineering
10 345 (17.17%) Observability
11 274 (13.64%) AI
12 237 (11.80%) Full-Stack Development
13 215 (10.70%) Continuous Improvement
14 211 (10.50%) Machine Learning
15 208 (10.35%) Mentoring
16 203 (10.10%) Analytics
17 198 (9.86%) Scrum
18 188 (9.36%) Data Pipeline
19 164 (8.16%) Computer Science
20 159 (7.91%) TDD
Programming Languages
1 964 (47.98%) Python
2 549 (27.33%) Java
3 479 (23.84%) SQL
4 262 (13.04%) Bash
5 235 (11.70%) JavaScript
6 215 (10.70%) TypeScript
7 206 (10.25%) Go
8 153 (7.62%) C#
9 144 (7.17%) PowerShell
10 62 (3.09%) Bicep
11 61 (3.04%) Shell Script
12 45 (2.24%) C++
12 45 (2.24%) Scala
13 43 (2.14%) Ruby
14 32 (1.59%) Groovy
14 32 (1.59%) Rust
15 28 (1.39%) PHP
16 21 (1.05%) Perl
17 18 (0.90%) Kotlin
18 15 (0.75%) C
Qualifications
1 630 (31.36%) Security Cleared
2 505 (25.14%) SC Cleared
3 197 (9.81%) Degree
4 130 (6.47%) Computer Science Degree
5 103 (5.13%) AWS Certification
6 90 (4.48%) DV Cleared
7 79 (3.93%) Azure Certification
8 62 (3.09%) BPSS Clearance
9 55 (2.74%) Master's Degree
10 42 (2.09%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
11 19 (0.95%) Microsoft Certification
12 15 (0.75%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
13 14 (0.70%) Cisco Certification
13 14 (0.70%) ISTQB
13 14 (0.70%) TOGAF Certification
14 12 (0.60%) CISSP
15 10 (0.50%) AWS Certified Developer
16 8 (0.40%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
17 7 (0.35%) (ISC)2 CCSP
17 7 (0.35%) CCSP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 110 (5.48%) QA
2 76 (3.78%) Accessibility
3 60 (2.99%) Data Quality
4 38 (1.89%) GDPR
5 29 (1.44%) WCAG
6 26 (1.29%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 22 (1.10%) ISO 20022
8 20 (1.00%) NIST
9 19 (0.95%) PCI DSS
10 18 (0.90%) PSD2
11 17 (0.85%) NCSC
12 13 (0.65%) SEPA
13 11 (0.55%) Sarbanes-Oxley
14 9 (0.45%) SLA
15 7 (0.35%) HL7
16 6 (0.30%) HIPAA
16 6 (0.30%) HMG Security Policy Framework
17 5 (0.25%) SOC 2
18 4 (0.20%) EU AI Act
19 3 (0.15%) MiFID
System Software
1 58 (2.89%) Active Directory
1 58 (2.89%) VMware Infrastructure
2 21 (1.05%) vSphere
3 19 (0.95%) Virtual Machines
4 18 (0.90%) Slurm Workload Manager
5 11 (0.55%) VMware ESXi
6 10 (0.50%) Hyper-V
7 9 (0.45%) VMware NSX
8 8 (0.40%) Lustre
8 8 (0.40%) Squid
8 8 (0.40%) Virtual Servers
9 7 (0.35%) Postfix
9 7 (0.35%) Virtual Desktop
10 6 (0.30%) DFS Replication
10 6 (0.30%) GPFS
10 6 (0.30%) KVM
10 6 (0.30%) Tivoli Directory Server
11 5 (0.25%) NDS
11 5 (0.25%) NetIQ eDirectory
12 4 (0.20%) Microsoft App-V
Systems Management
1 1,485 (73.92%) Kubernetes
2 715 (35.59%) Terraform
3 315 (15.68%) Grafana
4 283 (14.09%) Prometheus
5 276 (13.74%) Ansible
6 67 (3.33%) Puppet
7 65 (3.24%) Argo
8 43 (2.14%) Kibana
8 43 (2.14%) Progress Chef
9 33 (1.64%) Podman
10 28 (1.39%) Nessus
11 23 (1.14%) Control-M
12 21 (1.05%) IBM Guardium
12 21 (1.05%) Istio
12 21 (1.05%) Packer
12 21 (1.05%) Single Sign-On
13 17 (0.85%) Consul
14 16 (0.80%) Docker Swarm
15 13 (0.65%) logstash
16 12 (0.60%) vCenter Server
Vendors
1 202 (10.05%) Microsoft
2 137 (6.82%) Google
3 136 (6.77%) Splunk
4 127 (6.32%) Oracle
5 71 (3.53%) Databricks
6 64 (3.19%) VMware
7 47 (2.34%) OpenAI
7 47 (2.34%) Red Hat
8 36 (1.79%) Dynatrace
9 26 (1.29%) Denodo
9 26 (1.29%) Talend
10 25 (1.24%) AppDynamics
10 25 (1.24%) F5
11 24 (1.19%) Palo Alto
12 22 (1.10%) Atlassian
12 22 (1.10%) Tenable
13 20 (1.00%) ServiceNow
14 18 (0.90%) IBM
15 17 (0.85%) CheckPoint
16 16 (0.80%) Cisco