TCP/IP Contract Job Trends

Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP)
UK

The table below provides summary statistics and contractor rates for jobs requiring TCP/IP skills. It covers contract job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 4 December 2025, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
4 Dec 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 240 202 195
Rank change year-on-year -38 -7 +52
Contract jobs citing TCP/IP 431 453 577
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 1.18% 1.26% 1.29%
As % of the Communications & Networking category 10.83% 10.25% 9.30%
Number of daily rates quoted 230 259 353
10th Percentile £185 £203 £185
25th Percentile £273 £275 £275
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £470 £475 £450
Median % change year-on-year -1.05% +5.56% -12.62%
75th Percentile £588 £600 £588
90th Percentile £714 £738 £681
UK excluding London median daily rate £425 £413 £400
% change year-on-year +3.03% +3.13% -12.27%
Number of hourly rates quoted 47 20 58
10th Percentile £15.50 £29.13 £23.13
25th Percentile £33.00 £58.44 £33.83
Median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £50.00
Median % change year-on-year - +30.00% -23.08%
75th Percentile - - £56.49
90th Percentile £81.20 £67.50 £69.62
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £50.00
% change year-on-year - +30.00% -23.08%

All Communications and Computer Networking Skills
UK

TCP/IP falls under the Communications and Computer Networking category. For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all contract job vacancies requiring communications or computer networking skills.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for communications or computer networking skills 3,978 4,418 6,206
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 10.90% 12.28% 13.88%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,586 2,547 3,845
10th Percentile £205 £220 £210
25th Percentile £355 £369 £363
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £475 £500 £500
Median % change year-on-year -5.00% - -
75th Percentile £584 £600 £613
90th Percentile £675 £686 £700
UK excluding London median daily rate £450 £475 £475
% change year-on-year -5.26% - +5.56%
Number of hourly rates quoted 189 167 345
10th Percentile £15.50 £16.06 £17.72
25th Percentile £20.18 £22.75 £22.50
Median hourly rate £34.00 £41.00 £55.00
Median % change year-on-year -17.07% -25.45% +26.44%
75th Percentile £65.00 £65.00 £65.98
90th Percentile £75.00 £75.00 £76.19
UK excluding London median hourly rate £42.50 £47.50 £56.49
% change year-on-year -10.53% -15.91% +25.53%

TCP/IP
Job Vacancy Trend

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

TCP/IP job vacancy trend in the UK

TCP/IP
Daily Rate Trend

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing TCP/IP.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing TCP/IP

TCP/IP
Daily Rate Histogram

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing TCP/IP over the 6 months to 4 December 2025.

Daily rate histogram for TCP/IP in the UK

TCP/IP
Hourly Rate Trend

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing TCP/IP.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing TCP/IP

TCP/IP
Hourly Rate Histogram

Hourly rate distribution of jobs citing TCP/IP over the 6 months to 4 December 2025.

Hourly rate histogram for TCP/IP in the UK

TCP/IP
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 TCP/IP within the UK over the 6 months to 4 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 -17 390 £478 +0.63% 328
UK excluding London -30 255 £425 +3.03% 320
London -19 146 £538 +10.26% 62
Work from Home -23 130 £454 -9.20% 172
North of England -35 70 £450 -2.70% 57
South East -4 57 £400 -11.11% 117
East of England +6 55 £413 -29.79% 50
North West -12 38 £535 +10.03% 30
Midlands -26 35 £213 -43.33% 40
West Midlands -8 34 £225 - 24
Yorkshire -37 29 £364 -39.38% 21
South West -13 28 £700 +47.37% 38
Scotland +11 18 £414 +3.44% 19
Wales -9 4 £250 -16.67% 4
North East -13 3 £400 +166.67% 7
Northern Ireland -10 2 - - 4
East Midlands -31 1 £165 -56.00% 15

TCP/IP
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 36 (8.35%) SharePoint
2 27 (6.26%) Microsoft Exchange
3 14 (3.25%) Skype for Business
4 7 (1.62%) OpenStack
5 6 (1.39%) Confluence
6 4 (0.93%) Apache Airflow
7 3 (0.70%) Apache Spark
8 2 (0.46%) Apache
8 2 (0.46%) IIS
8 2 (0.46%) Tomcat
8 2 (0.46%) WordPress
9 1 (0.23%) Exchange Server 2010
9 1 (0.23%) Exchange Server 2013
9 1 (0.23%) Jupyter
Applications
1 41 (9.51%) Microsoft Office
2 6 (1.39%) Weka
3 4 (0.93%) Microsoft Excel
4 2 (0.46%) AutoCAD
4 2 (0.46%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 2 (0.46%) MS Visio
5 1 (0.23%) Acrobat
5 1 (0.23%) Adobe Creative Suite
5 1 (0.23%) Spreadsheet
Business Applications
1 1 (0.23%) Eikon
1 1 (0.23%) Eze OMS
1 1 (0.23%) Fidessa
1 1 (0.23%) Finacle
1 1 (0.23%) Pegasus Opera
1 1 (0.23%) Remedy ITSM
1 1 (0.23%) RMDS
1 1 (0.23%) SystmOne
Cloud Services
1 89 (20.65%) AWS
1 89 (20.65%) Microsoft 365
2 87 (20.19%) Azure
3 27 (6.26%) Amazon EC2
4 26 (6.03%) Amazon S3
5 25 (5.80%) Virtual Private Cloud
6 24 (5.57%) Entra ID
7 22 (5.10%) Amazon CloudWatch
7 22 (5.10%) Amazon ELB
8 20 (4.64%) GCP
9 12 (2.78%) GitHub
10 9 (2.09%) AWS CloudFormation
10 9 (2.09%) OneDrive
11 8 (1.86%) Cloud Computing
11 8 (1.86%) SaaS
12 6 (1.39%) Google Workspace
13 4 (0.93%) Amazon EKS
13 4 (0.93%) Apigee
13 4 (0.93%) Azure DevOps
13 4 (0.93%) IaaS
Communications & Networking
1 230 (53.36%) DNS
2 150 (34.80%) Firewall
3 127 (29.47%) DHCP
4 118 (27.38%) VPN
5 79 (18.33%) SSL
6 64 (14.85%) WAN
7 63 (14.62%) LAN
8 59 (13.69%) HTTP
9 58 (13.46%) Network Security
10 57 (13.23%) VLAN
11 28 (6.50%) Wireshark
12 27 (6.26%) Internet
13 26 (6.03%) BGP
13 26 (6.03%) Ethernet
14 25 (5.80%) SAN
15 23 (5.34%) Wi-Fi
16 22 (5.10%) Wireless
17 18 (4.18%) OSPF
18 17 (3.94%) BIG-IP
19 14 (3.25%) Skype
Database & Business Intelligence
1 25 (5.80%) SQL Server
2 9 (2.09%) PostgreSQL
3 6 (1.39%) NoSQL
4 5 (1.16%) Oracle Database
5 4 (0.93%) Amazon Aurora
5 4 (0.93%) Amazon RDS
5 4 (0.93%) Big Data
5 4 (0.93%) Elasticsearch
6 3 (0.70%) Apache Cassandra
6 3 (0.70%) Delta Lake
6 3 (0.70%) Hadoop
6 3 (0.70%) MySQL
6 3 (0.70%) Parquet
7 2 (0.46%) DB2
7 2 (0.46%) Relational Database
8 1 (0.23%) Apache Hive
8 1 (0.23%) Impala
8 1 (0.23%) Power BI
8 1 (0.23%) Redis
8 1 (0.23%) Tableau
Development Applications
1 44 (10.21%) Git
2 43 (9.98%) Jenkins
3 28 (6.50%) GitLab
4 22 (5.10%) Eclipse
4 22 (5.10%) Visual Studio
5 18 (4.18%) JIRA
6 15 (3.48%) Fiddler
7 8 (1.86%) Subversion
8 7 (1.62%) Postman
9 4 (0.93%) Robot Framework
9 4 (0.93%) TeamCity
10 3 (0.70%) MLflow
10 3 (0.70%) SonarQube
10 3 (0.70%) Sonatype Nexus
11 2 (0.46%) Maven
11 2 (0.46%) Mercurial
11 2 (0.46%) Poetry
11 2 (0.46%) PyCharm
11 2 (0.46%) Visual Studio Code
12 1 (0.23%) IntelliJ
General
1 158 (36.66%) Social Skills
2 76 (17.63%) Analytical Skills
3 47 (10.90%) Finance
4 33 (7.66%) Public Sector
5 29 (6.73%) Military
6 27 (6.26%) Presentation Skills
7 25 (5.80%) Banking
8 18 (4.18%) Investment Banking
9 12 (2.78%) Legal
10 11 (2.55%) Telecoms
11 10 (2.32%) Front Office
11 10 (2.32%) Organisational Skills
12 8 (1.86%) Law
13 7 (1.62%) Local Government
14 6 (1.39%) Financial Institution
15 4 (0.93%) Documentation Skills
15 4 (0.93%) Manufacturing
16 3 (0.70%) Aerospace
16 3 (0.70%) Inclusion and Diversity
17 2 (0.46%) Advertising
Job Titles
1 74 (17.17%) Network Engineer
2 72 (16.71%) Support Engineer
3 54 (12.53%) Senior
4 52 (12.06%) Infrastructure Engineer
5 49 (11.37%) Analyst
6 36 (8.35%) IT Support
7 31 (7.19%) IT Engineer
8 27 (6.26%) Developer
9 26 (6.03%) Support Analyst
10 25 (5.80%) Technical Support
11 21 (4.87%) 2nd Line Support
12 20 (4.64%) C# Software Engineer
12 20 (4.64%) DevOps Engineer
12 20 (4.64%) Software Engineer
13 18 (4.18%) Technical Engineer
14 17 (3.94%) Senior DevOps
15 16 (3.71%) IT Support Engineer
15 16 (3.71%) Junior
15 16 (3.71%) Senior DevOps Engineer
15 16 (3.71%) Senior Infrastructure Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 25 (5.80%) Node.js
1 25 (5.80%) Web Services
2 17 (3.94%) Middleware
3 16 (3.71%) REST
4 12 (2.78%) LDAP
5 11 (2.55%) SOAP
6 9 (2.09%) Elastic Stack
7 8 (1.86%) FIX Protocol
8 7 (1.62%) AngularJS
9 5 (1.16%) Ultra Messaging
10 4 (0.93%) React
10 4 (0.93%) RESTful
10 4 (0.93%) SAML
11 3 (0.70%) .NET
11 3 (0.70%) Apache Avro
11 3 (0.70%) Bootstrap
11 3 (0.70%) Express.js
11 3 (0.70%) NumPy
11 3 (0.70%) WCF
11 3 (0.70%) WPF
Miscellaneous
1 30 (6.96%) Data Centre
2 29 (6.73%) Management Information System
3 21 (4.87%) Onboarding
4 18 (4.18%) Analytical Mindset
5 13 (3.02%) Driving Licence
5 13 (3.02%) NHS
5 13 (3.02%) Private Cloud
6 12 (2.78%) Security Posture
7 11 (2.55%) Replication
8 10 (2.32%) Video Conferencing
9 9 (2.09%) CMDB
9 9 (2.09%) iPhone
9 9 (2.09%) Public Cloud
9 9 (2.09%) Self-Motivation
10 8 (1.86%) PKI
10 8 (1.86%) SCADA
11 7 (1.62%) Clustering
11 7 (1.62%) Enterprise Software
11 7 (1.62%) Hybrid Cloud
12 6 (1.39%) iPad
Operating Systems
1 199 (46.17%) Windows
2 147 (34.11%) Linux
3 55 (12.76%) Windows Server
4 47 (10.90%) Windows 10
5 31 (7.19%) Unix
6 17 (3.94%) Mac OS
7 16 (3.71%) Windows Server 2016
8 14 (3.25%) Android
9 11 (2.55%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
10 10 (2.32%) Ubuntu
11 8 (1.86%) Windows Server 2019
12 7 (1.62%) Apple iOS
12 7 (1.62%) Windows 7
13 6 (1.39%) CentOS
13 6 (1.39%) Debian
13 6 (1.39%) VMS
13 6 (1.39%) Windows Server 2012
14 4 (0.93%) Solaris
15 3 (0.70%) Windows Server 2003
16 2 (0.46%) Mac OS X
Processes & Methodologies
1 108 (25.06%) Problem-Solving
2 78 (18.10%) CI/CD
3 71 (16.47%) Agile
4 69 (16.01%) ITIL
5 61 (14.15%) Infrastructure Engineering
6 59 (13.69%) DevOps
7 51 (11.83%) Infrastructure as Code
8 45 (10.44%) High Availability
9 37 (8.58%) Cybersecurity
9 37 (8.58%) Load Balancing
10 36 (8.35%) Infrastructure Automation
11 35 (8.12%) Validation
12 34 (7.89%) Continuous Integration
12 34 (7.89%) Migration
13 32 (7.42%) Knowledge Transfer
14 31 (7.19%) Incident Response
15 30 (6.96%) Configuration Management
15 30 (6.96%) SIEM
16 28 (6.50%) Customer Service
16 28 (6.50%) Service Management
Programming Languages
1 142 (32.95%) Python
2 78 (18.10%) Bash
3 69 (16.01%) PowerShell
4 31 (7.19%) C++
5 29 (6.73%) Perl
6 28 (6.50%) JavaScript
7 27 (6.26%) C#
8 23 (5.34%) SQL
9 17 (3.94%) Java
10 9 (2.09%) Go
10 9 (2.09%) Shell Script
11 4 (0.93%) C
11 4 (0.93%) Kusto Query Language
12 3 (0.70%) Groovy
12 3 (0.70%) PHP
12 3 (0.70%) Search Processing Language
12 3 (0.70%) T-SQL
13 2 (0.46%) Ruby
14 1 (0.23%) Bicep
14 1 (0.23%) TypeScript
Qualifications
1 110 (25.52%) Security Cleared
2 82 (19.03%) SC Cleared
3 38 (8.82%) Cisco Certification
4 35 (8.12%) Microsoft Certification
5 34 (7.89%) Degree
6 28 (6.50%) DV Cleared
7 25 (5.80%) CCNP
8 22 (5.10%) CCNA
9 18 (4.18%) Network+ Certification
10 14 (3.25%) MCP
11 13 (3.02%) Azure Certification
11 13 (3.02%) MCSE
12 12 (2.78%) CISSP
13 11 (2.55%) CompTIA Security+
13 11 (2.55%) Server+ Certification
14 9 (2.09%) MCSA
15 7 (1.62%) A+ Certification
16 6 (1.39%) CCIE
16 6 (1.39%) ECDL
16 6 (1.39%) HNC
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 23 (5.34%) GDPR
2 8 (1.86%) Sarbanes-Oxley
3 7 (1.62%) ISO/IEC 27001
4 6 (1.39%) Cyber Essentials
4 6 (1.39%) NIST
5 5 (1.16%) SLA
6 4 (0.93%) HIPAA
7 3 (0.70%) PCI DSS
8 2 (0.46%) Disclosure Scotland
8 2 (0.46%) NCSC
8 2 (0.46%) QA
9 1 (0.23%) Government Security Classifications
9 1 (0.23%) SOC 2
System Software
1 102 (23.67%) Active Directory
2 72 (16.71%) VMware Infrastructure
3 48 (11.14%) Docker
4 35 (8.12%) Hyper-V
5 13 (3.02%) VMware ESXi
6 9 (2.09%) Firmware
7 7 (1.62%) Lustre
7 7 (1.62%) Slurm Workload Manager
7 7 (1.62%) Terminal Services
7 7 (1.62%) Virtual Machines
8 6 (1.39%) GPFS
9 5 (1.16%) NDS
9 5 (1.16%) NetIQ eDirectory
9 5 (1.16%) NFS
9 5 (1.16%) vSphere
10 4 (0.93%) Veritas File System
10 4 (0.93%) Veritas Volume Manager
10 4 (0.93%) VMware NSX
11 3 (0.70%) Veritas Cluster Server
11 3 (0.70%) Virtual Desktop
Systems Management
1 87 (20.19%) Ansible
2 61 (14.15%) Terraform
3 35 (8.12%) SCCM
4 26 (6.03%) Kubernetes
5 25 (5.80%) Microsoft Intune
6 19 (4.41%) Puppet
7 16 (3.71%) Grafana
7 16 (3.71%) Prometheus
8 9 (2.09%) FortiGate
8 9 (2.09%) vCenter Server
9 8 (1.86%) Single Sign-On
10 7 (1.62%) Nessus
10 7 (1.62%) WSUS
11 6 (1.39%) Progress Chef
11 6 (1.39%) QRadar
12 5 (1.16%) CASB
12 5 (1.16%) ITRS Geneos
12 5 (1.16%) Red Hat Satellite
13 4 (0.93%) Microsoft Clustering
14 3 (0.70%) Consul
Vendors
1 156 (36.19%) Microsoft
2 94 (21.81%) VMware
3 60 (13.92%) F5
4 54 (12.53%) Cisco
5 50 (11.60%) Palo Alto
6 42 (9.74%) CheckPoint
7 22 (5.10%) Blue Coat
7 22 (5.10%) Red Hat
7 22 (5.10%) ServiceNow
7 22 (5.10%) Splunk
8 21 (4.87%) Citrix
9 19 (4.41%) Fortinet
9 19 (4.41%) Oracle
10 17 (3.94%) McAfee
10 17 (3.94%) NetApp
11 14 (3.25%) SolarWinds
12 11 (2.55%) CyberArk
12 11 (2.55%) Juniper
12 11 (2.55%) MuleSoft
12 11 (2.55%) Zscaler