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

6 months to
16 Jan 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 39 48 63
Rank change year-on-year +9 +15 -18
Contract jobs citing Docker 1,984 1,321 1,385
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 5.34% 4.15% 3.25%
As % of the System Software category 43.77% 34.69% 26.88%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,368 890 1,008
10th Percentile £375 £400 £413
25th Percentile £447 £475 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £568 £550
Median % change year-on-year -7.49% +3.18% -8.33%
75th Percentile £634 £675 £650
90th Percentile £724 £801 £731
UK excluding London median daily rate £506 £500 £525
% change year-on-year +1.20% -4.76% -8.70%
Number of hourly rates quoted 15 3 19
10th Percentile £50.45 £31.70 £56.18
25th Percentile £61.25 £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 £79.50 £78.75 £76.53
90th Percentile £91.40 £88.50 £77.60
UK excluding London median hourly rate £66.00 - £67.27
% change year-on-year - - +7.62%

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 4,533 3,808 5,152
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 12.19% 11.95% 12.10%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,080 2,462 3,525
10th Percentile £213 £200 £190
25th Percentile £400 £363 £350
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £500
Median % change year-on-year - - -4.76%
75th Percentile £600 £624 £600
90th Percentile £700 £713 £700
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £455 £458
% change year-on-year +4.40% -0.55% -1.08%
Number of hourly rates quoted 134 90 211
10th Percentile £15.50 £16.86 £14.50
25th Percentile £20.82 £21.10 £19.04
Median hourly rate £45.09 £27.96 £55.00
Median % change year-on-year +61.30% -49.17% +61.76%
75th Percentile £73.20 £62.50 £70.00
90th Percentile £91.05 £75.00 £84.36
UK excluding London median hourly rate £58.50 £35.00 £55.00
% change year-on-year +67.14% -36.36% +175.00%

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 16 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 16 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 16 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 1,709 £525 -8.70% 1,186
London +6 891 £550 -8.33% 269
UK excluding London +20 818 £506 +1.20% 1,051
Work from Home +6 623 £525 -4.55% 543
North of England +17 339 £475 -5.00% 209
Midlands +52 217 £530 +0.95% 139
West Midlands +41 204 £537 -4.53% 56
North West +26 162 £450 -10.00% 97
Yorkshire +6 143 £500 -2.44% 82
South East -6 95 £513 +13.89% 335
South West -6 94 £648 +8.00% 152
Scotland +8 70 £475 +5.56% 36
North East -1 41 £475 -9.74% 30
East of England -3 34 £594 -1.04% 132
East Midlands -18 13 £413 -6.98% 81
Wales +1 12 £520 -5.45% 47
Northern Ireland -2 6 - - 22

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 (4.33%) Confluence
2 71 (3.58%) SAS
3 65 (3.28%) Apache Airflow
4 55 (2.77%) Apache Spark
5 54 (2.72%) Apache
6 45 (2.27%) nginx
7 23 (1.16%) OpenStack
8 18 (0.91%) JBoss
9 13 (0.66%) IIS
10 11 (0.55%) Appian
10 11 (0.55%) WebLogic
11 10 (0.50%) Jupyter
12 9 (0.45%) Microsoft Exchange
12 9 (0.45%) WebSphere
13 8 (0.40%) iPlanet
13 8 (0.40%) WebSphere Application Server
14 7 (0.35%) Drupal
15 5 (0.25%) Ethereum
15 5 (0.25%) Hyperledger
15 5 (0.25%) SharePoint
Applications
1 9 (0.45%) 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%) Adobe Illustrator
6 1 (0.050%) Adobe XD
6 1 (0.050%) Microsoft Excel
6 1 (0.050%) Photoshop
6 1 (0.050%) Trello
Business Applications
1 5 (0.25%) Payment Gateway
2 2 (0.10%) Dynamics CRM
3 1 (0.050%) Actimize
3 1 (0.050%) Aladdin
3 1 (0.050%) Endur
3 1 (0.050%) Oracle Applications
3 1 (0.050%) SAP S/4HANA
3 1 (0.050%) Shopify
Cloud Services
1 1,164 (58.67%) AWS
2 776 (39.11%) Azure
3 463 (23.34%) GitHub
4 432 (21.77%) GCP
5 293 (14.77%) GitHub Actions
6 290 (14.62%) Serverless
7 226 (11.39%) Amazon S3
7 226 (11.39%) Azure DevOps
8 197 (9.93%) AWS CloudFormation
9 193 (9.73%) Amazon EC2
10 192 (9.68%) AWS Lambda
11 178 (8.97%) Amazon EKS
12 171 (8.62%) Amazon ECS
13 161 (8.11%) Amazon CloudWatch
14 127 (6.40%) OpenShift
15 113 (5.70%) Azure AKS
16 105 (5.29%) Virtual Private Cloud
17 66 (3.33%) Datadog
18 63 (3.18%) Google Kubernetes Engine
19 48 (2.42%) Amazon SQS
Communications & Networking
1 138 (6.96%) Firewall
2 90 (4.54%) DNS
3 51 (2.57%) TCP/IP
4 47 (2.37%) VPN
5 43 (2.17%) SSL
6 38 (1.92%) Network Security
7 35 (1.76%) HTTP
8 18 (0.91%) SMTP
9 16 (0.81%) SSH
10 15 (0.76%) DHCP
10 15 (0.76%) FTP
11 14 (0.71%) Kerberos
12 10 (0.50%) VLAN
13 9 (0.45%) BGP
13 9 (0.45%) IMAP
13 9 (0.45%) OpenLDAP
14 8 (0.40%) SNMP
15 7 (0.35%) HTTPS
16 6 (0.30%) Software-Defined Networking
17 5 (0.25%) Radio Access Network
Database & Business Intelligence
1 282 (14.21%) PostgreSQL
2 216 (10.89%) NoSQL
3 139 (7.01%) MongoDB
4 130 (6.55%) Amazon RDS
5 127 (6.40%) Relational Database
6 101 (5.09%) SQL Server
7 82 (4.13%) Apache Cassandra
8 72 (3.63%) MySQL
9 65 (3.28%) Elasticsearch
10 62 (3.13%) DynamoDB
11 60 (3.02%) Redis
12 48 (2.42%) Amazon Aurora
13 41 (2.07%) Data Warehouse
14 39 (1.97%) Big Data
15 38 (1.92%) Pentaho
16 36 (1.81%) BigQuery
17 34 (1.71%) Data Lake
18 32 (1.61%) Power BI
19 31 (1.56%) Oracle Database
20 26 (1.31%) Azure SQL Database
Development Applications
1 584 (29.44%) Jenkins
2 521 (26.26%) Git
3 405 (20.41%) GitLab
4 212 (10.69%) JIRA
5 88 (4.44%) JUnit
6 76 (3.83%) Selenium
6 76 (3.83%) SonarQube
7 49 (2.47%) Cypress.io
8 47 (2.37%) Bitbucket
8 47 (2.37%) Maven
9 43 (2.17%) Cucumber
10 42 (2.12%) Sonatype Nexus
11 38 (1.92%) Postman
12 37 (1.86%) Liquibase
13 35 (1.76%) CircleCI
13 35 (1.76%) Mockito
14 34 (1.71%) Gradle
15 33 (1.66%) MLflow
16 27 (1.36%) Snyk
17 26 (1.31%) JMeter
General
1 514 (25.91%) Social Skills
2 328 (16.53%) Finance
3 287 (14.47%) Public Sector
4 207 (10.43%) Banking
5 147 (7.41%) Analytical Skills
6 40 (2.02%) Documentation Skills
7 36 (1.81%) Financial Institution
8 29 (1.46%) Investment Banking
9 28 (1.41%) Pharmaceutical
10 25 (1.26%) Presentation Skills
11 22 (1.11%) Inclusion and Diversity
12 20 (1.01%) Front Office
13 19 (0.96%) Telecoms
14 17 (0.86%) Military
15 13 (0.66%) Influencing Skills
16 11 (0.55%) Retail
17 10 (0.50%) Law
18 7 (0.35%) Health Technology
19 6 (0.30%) Digital Healthcare
19 6 (0.30%) Publishing
Job Titles
1 537 (27.07%) Developer
2 352 (17.74%) Senior
3 275 (13.86%) DevOps Engineer
4 159 (8.01%) Software Engineer
5 152 (7.66%) Java Developer
6 134 (6.75%) AWS Engineer
7 123 (6.20%) Senior Developer
8 119 (6.00%) Lead
9 118 (5.95%) Architect
10 107 (5.39%) Python Developer
11 93 (4.69%) Full-Stack Developer
12 86 (4.33%) AWS DevOps
13 82 (4.13%) Platform Engineer
14 81 (4.08%) Data Engineer
15 77 (3.88%) AWS DevOps Engineer
16 74 (3.73%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
17 67 (3.38%) Cloud Engineer
18 60 (3.02%) Site Reliability Engineer
19 58 (2.92%) Full-Stack Engineer
20 50 (2.52%) Python Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 311 (15.68%) Kafka
2 273 (13.76%) REST
2 273 (13.76%) Spring
3 265 (13.36%) RESTful
4 246 (12.40%) Spring Boot
5 245 (12.35%) Node.js
6 243 (12.25%) React
7 140 (7.06%) .NET
8 124 (6.25%) Elastic Stack
9 117 (5.90%) AngularJS
10 112 (5.65%) FastAPI
11 106 (5.34%) HTML
12 89 (4.49%) OAuth
13 86 (4.33%) GraphQL
13 86 (4.33%) gRPC
14 81 (4.08%) PyTorch
15 80 (4.03%) JSON
16 79 (3.98%) CSS
17 72 (3.63%) YAML
18 67 (3.38%) TensorFlow
Miscellaneous
1 381 (19.20%) Cloud Native
2 176 (8.87%) Distributed Systems
3 58 (2.92%) Public Cloud
4 57 (2.87%) Product Ownership
5 36 (1.81%) Hybrid Cloud
6 34 (1.71%) Legacy Systems
7 32 (1.61%) Replication
8 31 (1.56%) Algorithms
9 30 (1.51%) AI Agents
9 30 (1.51%) Enterprise Software
10 29 (1.46%) Management Information System
11 28 (1.41%) Greenfield Project
11 28 (1.41%) Onboarding
12 24 (1.21%) Data Centre
13 22 (1.11%) Data Protection Act
14 20 (1.01%) Hedge funds
14 20 (1.01%) Life Science
14 20 (1.01%) PKI
15 19 (0.96%) Genomics
16 18 (0.91%) NHS
Operating Systems
1 400 (20.16%) Linux
2 113 (5.70%) Windows
3 91 (4.59%) Unix
4 36 (1.81%) Windows Server
5 33 (1.66%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 27 (1.36%) VMS
7 22 (1.11%) Ubuntu
8 17 (0.86%) Amazon Linux
9 9 (0.45%) CentOS
10 3 (0.15%) Android
10 3 (0.15%) Windows Server 2003
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 2012
11 2 (0.10%) Windows Server 2019
12 1 (0.050%) Alpine Linux
12 1 (0.050%) Debian
12 1 (0.050%) Rocky
12 1 (0.050%) Solaris
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,393 (70.21%) CI/CD
2 1,116 (56.25%) DevOps
3 1,038 (52.32%) Containerisation
4 763 (38.46%) Agile
5 655 (33.01%) Microservices
6 609 (30.70%) Infrastructure as Code
7 483 (24.34%) Problem-Solving
8 400 (20.16%) Software Engineering
9 378 (19.05%) Test Automation
10 308 (15.52%) Observability
11 268 (13.51%) AI
12 225 (11.34%) Full-Stack Development
13 210 (10.58%) Mentoring
14 205 (10.33%) Continuous Improvement
15 204 (10.28%) Machine Learning
16 196 (9.88%) Analytics
17 195 (9.83%) Scrum
18 184 (9.27%) Data Pipeline
19 180 (9.07%) DevSecOps
20 164 (8.27%) Event-Driven
Programming Languages
1 952 (47.98%) Python
2 559 (28.18%) Java
3 463 (23.34%) SQL
4 282 (14.21%) Bash
5 231 (11.64%) JavaScript
6 213 (10.74%) TypeScript
7 197 (9.93%) Go
8 151 (7.61%) C#
9 149 (7.51%) PowerShell
10 63 (3.18%) Shell Script
11 60 (3.02%) Bicep
12 53 (2.67%) C++
13 45 (2.27%) Groovy
14 44 (2.22%) Ruby
14 44 (2.22%) Scala
15 35 (1.76%) Rust
16 34 (1.71%) Perl
17 33 (1.66%) PHP
18 18 (0.91%) Kotlin
19 17 (0.86%) C
Qualifications
1 613 (30.90%) Security Cleared
2 499 (25.15%) SC Cleared
3 190 (9.58%) Degree
4 122 (6.15%) Computer Science Degree
5 94 (4.74%) AWS Certification
6 77 (3.88%) DV Cleared
7 73 (3.68%) Azure Certification
8 53 (2.67%) BPSS Clearance
9 46 (2.32%) Master's Degree
10 37 (1.86%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
11 16 (0.81%) Microsoft Certification
12 15 (0.76%) Cisco Certification
13 13 (0.66%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
13 13 (0.66%) CISSP
13 13 (0.66%) ISTQB
14 10 (0.50%) (ISC)2 CCSP
14 10 (0.50%) CCSP
14 10 (0.50%) MCP
15 9 (0.45%) AWS Certified Developer
16 8 (0.40%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 117 (5.90%) QA
2 67 (3.38%) Accessibility
3 66 (3.33%) Data Quality
4 39 (1.97%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 38 (1.92%) GDPR
6 29 (1.46%) NIST
7 27 (1.36%) WCAG
8 22 (1.11%) PCI DSS
9 20 (1.01%) ISO 20022
10 19 (0.96%) NCSC
10 19 (0.96%) PSD2
11 13 (0.66%) SEPA
12 11 (0.55%) Sarbanes-Oxley
13 9 (0.45%) HL7
13 9 (0.45%) SLA
14 8 (0.40%) HIPAA
15 5 (0.25%) HMG Security Policy Framework
15 5 (0.25%) SOC 2
16 4 (0.20%) EU AI Act
17 3 (0.15%) MiFID
System Software
1 59 (2.97%) Active Directory
2 52 (2.62%) VMware Infrastructure
3 19 (0.96%) Slurm Workload Manager
3 19 (0.96%) vSphere
4 15 (0.76%) Virtual Machines
5 14 (0.71%) DFS Replication
5 14 (0.71%) Squid
6 10 (0.50%) KVM
7 9 (0.45%) Dovecot
7 9 (0.45%) Hyper-V
7 9 (0.45%) Postfix
7 9 (0.45%) VMware NSX
8 8 (0.40%) Lustre
8 8 (0.40%) Tivoli Directory Server
8 8 (0.40%) Virtual Servers
9 5 (0.25%) GPFS
9 5 (0.25%) HDFS
9 5 (0.25%) NetIQ eDirectory
9 5 (0.25%) Virtual Desktop
9 5 (0.25%) VMware ESXi
Systems Management
1 1,452 (73.19%) Kubernetes
2 714 (35.99%) Terraform
3 306 (15.42%) Ansible
4 302 (15.22%) Grafana
5 267 (13.46%) Prometheus
6 71 (3.58%) Puppet
7 62 (3.13%) Argo
8 49 (2.47%) Progress Chef
9 48 (2.42%) Kibana
10 32 (1.61%) Podman
11 24 (1.21%) Nessus
12 22 (1.11%) Istio
12 22 (1.11%) Packer
13 19 (0.96%) Single Sign-On
14 16 (0.81%) Proxmox
15 15 (0.76%) Consul
16 13 (0.66%) Control-M
16 13 (0.66%) Docker Swarm
16 13 (0.66%) logstash
17 11 (0.55%) Red Hat Satellite
Vendors
1 195 (9.83%) Microsoft
2 154 (7.76%) Google
3 143 (7.21%) Oracle
4 136 (6.85%) Splunk
5 60 (3.02%) Databricks
6 58 (2.92%) VMware
7 50 (2.52%) Red Hat
8 45 (2.27%) OpenAI
9 38 (1.92%) Dynatrace
10 37 (1.86%) Denodo
10 37 (1.86%) Talend
11 34 (1.71%) Palo Alto
12 31 (1.56%) F5
13 29 (1.46%) AppDynamics
14 28 (1.41%) ServiceNow
15 25 (1.26%) CheckPoint
16 19 (0.96%) Atlassian
17 18 (0.91%) Cisco
18 15 (0.76%) IBM
19 14 (0.71%) Confluent