Firewall Contract Job Trends

Firewall
UK

The table below provides summary statistics and contractor rates for jobs requiring Firewall skills. It covers contract job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 24 July 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
24 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 93 55 57
Rank change year-on-year -38 +2 -9
Contract jobs citing Firewall 1,442 1,408 1,438
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.73% 4.31% 3.52%
As % of the Communications & Networking category 28.98% 35.37% 28.41%
Number of daily rates quoted 917 837 909
10th Percentile £350 £325 £296
25th Percentile £413 £413 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year - -4.76% -
75th Percentile £598 £600 £608
90th Percentile £650 £688 £688
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £489 £515
% change year-on-year +2.35% -5.15% +8.42%
Number of hourly rates quoted 39 27 40
10th Percentile £28.80 £14.20 £18.41
25th Percentile £38.80 £15.23 £23.92
Median hourly rate £62.50 £30.00 £53.75
Median % change year-on-year +108.33% -44.19% -18.56%
75th Percentile £78.63 £42.61 £85.65
90th Percentile £98.82 £89.63 £87.47
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £30.00 £76.99
% change year-on-year +116.67% -61.03% +19.38%

All Communications and Computer Networking Skills
UK

Firewall 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 4,976 3,981 5,061
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 9.43% 12.18% 12.39%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,993 2,436 3,038
10th Percentile £250 £235 £213
25th Percentile £400 £375 £363
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £489 £500
Median % change year-on-year +2.25% -2.20% -
75th Percentile £588 £588 £602
90th Percentile £675 £675 £688
UK excluding London median daily rate £492 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +3.63% -5.00% +8.81%
Number of hourly rates quoted 330 195 368
10th Percentile £16.00 £14.99 £14.00
25th Percentile £19.34 £25.15 £17.69
Median hourly rate £26.22 £47.50 £45.00
Median % change year-on-year -44.80% +5.56% -10.00%
75th Percentile £65.00 £65.00 £65.00
90th Percentile £74.26 £83.60 £74.13
UK excluding London median hourly rate £26.66 £43.25 £48.56
% change year-on-year -38.36% -10.93% -14.42%

Firewall
Job Vacancy Trend

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

Firewall job vacancy trend in the UK

Firewall
Daily Rate Trend

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing Firewall.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing Firewall

Firewall
Daily Rate Histogram

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Firewall over the 6 months to 24 July 2026.

Daily rate histogram for Firewall in the UK

Firewall
Hourly Rate Trend

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing Firewall.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing Firewall

Firewall
Hourly Rate Histogram

Hourly rate distribution of jobs citing Firewall over the 6 months to 24 July 2026.

Hourly rate histogram for Firewall in the UK

Firewall
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 Firewall within the UK over the 6 months to 24 July 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 -40 1,253 £501 +0.10% 485
UK excluding London -29 819 £500 +2.35% 405
London -59 477 £500 - 136
Work from Home -30 400 £520 +4.00% 172
North of England -13 292 £500 +5.26% 99
South East -27 230 £506 +1.25% 146
North West -1 190 £537 +13.05% 50
Yorkshire -36 86 £450 -7.64% 35
Midlands -64 78 £472 -4.17% 44
East of England -5 74 £525 -4.55% 35
South West -44 71 £550 +10.00% 53
Scotland +8 63 £425 -2.86% 20
West Midlands -69 62 £450 -10.89% 27
North East -14 22 £625 - 15
Wales -19 18 £425 +17.24% 11
East Midlands -22 13 £500 +6.16% 17
Northern Ireland -5 1 - - 6

Firewall
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 42 (2.91%) Microsoft Exchange
2 26 (1.80%) Confluence
2 26 (1.80%) SharePoint
3 13 (0.90%) Apache
4 12 (0.83%) nginx
5 10 (0.69%) CICS
6 6 (0.42%) SAS
7 4 (0.28%) Tomcat
8 3 (0.21%) CloudStack
8 3 (0.21%) FactoryTalk
8 3 (0.21%) IIS
8 3 (0.21%) Skype for Business
9 2 (0.14%) Apache Pulsar
9 2 (0.14%) CMS
9 2 (0.14%) IBM HTTP Server
9 2 (0.14%) Oracle HTTP Server
9 2 (0.14%) Umbraco
9 2 (0.14%) WebSphere
9 2 (0.14%) WebSphere Application Server
9 2 (0.14%) WebSphere Portal
Applications
1 21 (1.46%) MS Visio
2 19 (1.32%) Microsoft Excel
2 19 (1.32%) Microsoft Office
3 8 (0.55%) Microsoft Project
4 4 (0.28%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 3 (0.21%) Spreadsheet
6 1 (0.069%) Windchill
Business Applications
1 3 (0.21%) Dynamics CRM
2 2 (0.14%) Dynamics GP
3 1 (0.069%) Bloomberg TOMS
3 1 (0.069%) Eikon
3 1 (0.069%) Payment Gateway
3 1 (0.069%) Primavera
3 1 (0.069%) Remedy ITSM
3 1 (0.069%) Teamcenter
Cloud Services
1 513 (35.58%) Azure
2 318 (22.05%) AWS
3 153 (10.61%) Entra ID
4 122 (8.46%) GCP
5 119 (8.25%) Microsoft 365
6 73 (5.06%) GitHub
7 65 (4.51%) IaaS
8 57 (3.95%) Azure DevOps
8 57 (3.95%) Virtual Private Cloud
9 56 (3.88%) SaaS
10 47 (3.26%) Azure Monitor
11 44 (3.05%) Azure ExpressRoute
12 42 (2.91%) PaaS
13 39 (2.70%) Azure Sentinel
14 36 (2.50%) OCI
15 34 (2.36%) Serverless
16 32 (2.22%) Google Kubernetes Engine
17 31 (2.15%) GitHub Actions
18 28 (1.94%) AWS CloudFormation
19 26 (1.80%) Power Platform
Communications & Networking
1 418 (28.99%) VPN
2 405 (28.09%) Network Security
3 395 (27.39%) WAN
4 352 (24.41%) DNS
5 297 (20.60%) LAN
6 270 (18.72%) BGP
7 218 (15.12%) OSPF
8 204 (14.15%) TCP/IP
8 204 (14.15%) VLAN
9 200 (13.87%) DHCP
10 171 (11.86%) Wireless
11 147 (10.19%) SD-WAN
12 124 (8.60%) Wi-Fi
13 98 (6.80%) MPLS
14 95 (6.59%) BIG-IP
15 94 (6.52%) IPsec
16 85 (5.89%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
17 83 (5.76%) VXLAN
18 80 (5.55%) SSL
19 79 (5.48%) Cisco ISE
Database & Business Intelligence
1 31 (2.15%) SQL Server
2 18 (1.25%) Power BI
3 17 (1.18%) PostgreSQL
4 13 (0.90%) Amazon RDS
5 12 (0.83%) Elasticsearch
6 10 (0.69%) DataStage
7 9 (0.62%) Azure SQL Database
7 9 (0.62%) Data Lake
7 9 (0.62%) Relational Database
8 8 (0.55%) MySQL
8 8 (0.55%) Oracle Database
9 5 (0.35%) Delta Lake
10 4 (0.28%) Amazon Aurora
10 4 (0.28%) Data Warehouse
10 4 (0.28%) Db2
10 4 (0.28%) NoSQL
11 3 (0.21%) Amazon Athena
11 3 (0.21%) Amazon Redshift
11 3 (0.21%) Big Data
11 3 (0.21%) Metadata
Development Applications
1 91 (6.31%) JIRA
2 54 (3.74%) Jenkins
3 44 (3.05%) Git
4 41 (2.84%) GitLab
5 12 (0.83%) Sonatype Nexus
6 9 (0.62%) Artifactory
7 8 (0.55%) Chocolatey
8 6 (0.42%) Bitbucket
8 6 (0.42%) Browser DevTools
9 4 (0.28%) Burp Suite
9 4 (0.28%) SonarQube
10 3 (0.21%) Atlassian Bamboo
11 2 (0.14%) Cucumber
11 2 (0.14%) Gatling
11 2 (0.14%) Gradle
11 2 (0.14%) Introscope
11 2 (0.14%) LoadRunner
11 2 (0.14%) Metasploit
11 2 (0.14%) MSI
11 2 (0.14%) Team Foundation Server
General
1 300 (20.80%) Social Skills
2 190 (13.18%) Finance
3 129 (8.95%) Analytical Skills
4 122 (8.46%) Public Sector
5 78 (5.41%) Banking
6 71 (4.92%) Documentation Skills
7 51 (3.54%) Telecoms
8 25 (1.73%) Legal
8 25 (1.73%) Manufacturing
9 23 (1.60%) Influencing Skills
10 22 (1.53%) Financial Institution
11 20 (1.39%) Military
12 19 (1.32%) Local Government
13 16 (1.11%) Retail
14 12 (0.83%) Organisational Skills
14 12 (0.83%) Police
15 11 (0.76%) Inclusion and Diversity
16 10 (0.69%) Law
17 9 (0.62%) Investment Banking
18 8 (0.55%) Front Office
Job Titles
1 473 (32.80%) Network Engineer
2 208 (14.42%) Architect
3 207 (14.36%) Senior
4 142 (9.85%) Infrastructure Engineer
5 128 (8.88%) Security Engineer
6 91 (6.31%) Senior Network Engineer
7 73 (5.06%) Cloud Engineer
8 72 (4.99%) Network Architect
9 61 (4.23%) Consultant
10 60 (4.16%) Network Security Engineer
11 58 (4.02%) Azure Engineer
12 50 (3.47%) SC Cleared Network Engineer
13 49 (3.40%) Security Architect
14 45 (3.12%) Senior Infrastructure Engineer
14 45 (3.12%) Technical Architect
15 44 (3.05%) DevOps Engineer
16 39 (2.70%) Cisco Engineer
16 39 (2.70%) Lead
17 37 (2.57%) Cisco Network Engineer
18 34 (2.36%) Solutions Architect
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 72 (4.99%) 802.1X
2 43 (2.98%) Middleware
3 29 (2.01%) LDAP
4 26 (1.80%) SAML
5 20 (1.39%) ARM Templates
6 15 (1.04%) OpenID
7 11 (0.76%) OAuth
8 10 (0.69%) Kafka
9 9 (0.62%) LangChain
9 9 (0.62%) OAuth2
9 9 (0.62%) PyTorch
9 9 (0.62%) REST
9 9 (0.62%) scikit-learn
10 8 (0.55%) .NET
10 8 (0.55%) YAML
11 7 (0.49%) Elastic Stack
11 7 (0.49%) React
11 7 (0.49%) SailPoint
12 5 (0.35%) Jinja
12 5 (0.35%) OpenTelemetry
Miscellaneous
1 330 (22.88%) Data Centre
2 96 (6.66%) Cloud Native
3 86 (5.96%) Hybrid Cloud
4 84 (5.83%) PKI
5 75 (5.20%) Security Posture
6 56 (3.88%) Management Information System
7 53 (3.68%) Onboarding
8 44 (3.05%) Operational Technology
9 42 (2.91%) Clustering
10 31 (2.15%) Distributed Denial-of-Service
11 29 (2.01%) Data Protection Act
11 29 (2.01%) IoT
12 27 (1.87%) Public Cloud
13 24 (1.66%) Enterprise Storage
14 23 (1.60%) SCADA
15 21 (1.46%) Driving Licence
15 21 (1.46%) Self-Motivation
16 19 (1.32%) Linux Command Line
17 18 (1.25%) Cyber Threat
17 18 (1.25%) Replication
Operating Systems
1 336 (23.30%) Windows
2 208 (14.42%) Linux
3 121 (8.39%) Windows Server
4 52 (3.61%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 35 (2.43%) Unix
6 23 (1.60%) VMS
7 19 (1.32%) Ubuntu
8 13 (0.90%) Windows Server 2019
9 11 (0.76%) CentOS
9 11 (0.76%) Solaris
10 10 (0.69%) AIX
11 9 (0.62%) Mac OS
11 9 (0.62%) Windows Server 2016
12 7 (0.49%) Rocky
12 7 (0.49%) Windows 10
13 6 (0.42%) Windows Server 2003
13 6 (0.42%) Windows Server 2012
14 4 (0.28%) Amazon Linux
14 4 (0.28%) Android
14 4 (0.28%) SUSE
Processes & Methodologies
1 237 (16.44%) DevOps
2 221 (15.33%) CI/CD
3 220 (15.26%) Infrastructure as Code
4 202 (14.01%) Load Balancing
5 197 (13.66%) Infrastructure Engineering
6 192 (13.31%) Problem-Solving
7 186 (12.90%) Migration
8 185 (12.83%) Cybersecurity
8 185 (12.83%) ITIL
9 181 (12.55%) High Availability
10 158 (10.96%) Zero Trust
11 153 (10.61%) Agile
12 134 (9.29%) SIEM
13 132 (9.15%) Change Management
14 127 (8.81%) Project Delivery
15 120 (8.32%) Observability
16 118 (8.18%) Validation
17 114 (7.91%) Stakeholder Management
18 107 (7.42%) Cloud Security
19 101 (7.00%) Roadmaps
Programming Languages
1 259 (17.96%) Python
2 184 (12.76%) PowerShell
3 119 (8.25%) Bash
4 49 (3.40%) Bicep
5 42 (2.91%) SQL
6 34 (2.36%) Java
7 11 (0.76%) ActionScript
7 11 (0.76%) Perl
8 10 (0.69%) COBOL
9 7 (0.49%) Groovy
10 6 (0.42%) JavaScript
10 6 (0.42%) Kusto Query Language
11 5 (0.35%) C++
11 5 (0.35%) Go
12 3 (0.21%) PL/SQL
12 3 (0.21%) Shell Script
13 2 (0.14%) C
13 2 (0.14%) Jython
13 2 (0.14%) PHP
14 1 (0.069%) T-SQL
Qualifications
1 484 (33.56%) Security Cleared
2 340 (23.58%) SC Cleared
3 279 (19.35%) Cisco Certification
4 210 (14.56%) CCNP
5 125 (8.67%) DV Cleared
6 114 (7.91%) CCNA
7 112 (7.77%) Degree
8 73 (5.06%) CISSP
9 59 (4.09%) Azure Certification
10 43 (2.98%) AWS Certification
11 41 (2.84%) CCIE
12 34 (2.36%) Microsoft Certification
13 33 (2.29%) CISM
14 23 (1.60%) Computer Science Degree
15 21 (1.46%) JNCIS
15 21 (1.46%) Network+ Certification
16 18 (1.25%) JNCIP
17 17 (1.18%) PMP
17 17 (1.18%) Server+ Certification
18 15 (1.04%) CompTIA Security+
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 73 (5.06%) ISO/IEC 27001
2 59 (4.09%) NIST
3 43 (2.98%) GDPR
4 31 (2.15%) NCSC
5 25 (1.73%) PCI DSS
6 23 (1.60%) SLA
7 22 (1.53%) QA
8 21 (1.46%) Cyber Essentials
9 9 (0.62%) Data Quality
9 9 (0.62%) NIST 800
10 8 (0.55%) Disclosure Scotland
11 7 (0.49%) GxP
11 7 (0.49%) JSP 440
12 6 (0.42%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
12 6 (0.42%) GRC
13 5 (0.35%) Actionable Recommendations
13 5 (0.35%) HIPAA
13 5 (0.35%) ISO/IEC 27002 (supersedes ISO/IEC 17799)
14 4 (0.28%) Sarbanes-Oxley
14 4 (0.28%) SOC 2
System Software
1 229 (15.88%) Active Directory
2 161 (11.17%) VMware Infrastructure
3 61 (4.23%) Docker
4 59 (4.09%) VMware NSX
5 48 (3.33%) Hyper-V
6 41 (2.84%) vSphere
7 39 (2.70%) Virtual Machines
8 38 (2.64%) VMware ESXi
9 26 (1.80%) Firmware
10 17 (1.18%) Virtual Desktop
11 12 (0.83%) BitLocker
12 11 (0.76%) Squid
13 8 (0.55%) Microsoft App-V
14 6 (0.42%) NFS
15 4 (0.28%) Terminal Services
16 3 (0.21%) Dovecot
16 3 (0.21%) EMC RecoverPoint
16 3 (0.21%) Postfix
16 3 (0.21%) Virtual Servers
17 2 (0.14%) VMware Workstation
Systems Management
1 271 (18.79%) Terraform
2 190 (13.18%) Ansible
3 112 (7.77%) Kubernetes
4 109 (7.56%) FortiGate
5 67 (4.65%) Microsoft Intune
6 57 (3.95%) Grafana
7 54 (3.74%) Prometheus
8 39 (2.70%) SCCM
9 30 (2.08%) Single Sign-On
10 24 (1.66%) vCenter Server
11 20 (1.39%) Progress Chef
12 18 (1.25%) Puppet
13 16 (1.11%) CASB
14 15 (1.04%) Cisco Prime
15 14 (0.97%) VxRail
16 10 (0.69%) QRadar
17 9 (0.62%) Packer
18 8 (0.55%) Nagios
18 8 (0.55%) Nessus
18 8 (0.55%) vMotion
Vendors
1 522 (36.20%) Cisco
2 313 (21.71%) Microsoft
3 311 (21.57%) Palo Alto
4 214 (14.84%) VMware
5 208 (14.42%) Fortinet
6 202 (14.01%) F5
7 159 (11.03%) Juniper
8 130 (9.02%) CheckPoint
9 82 (5.69%) Splunk
10 76 (5.27%) Aruba
11 72 (4.99%) Google
12 71 (4.92%) ServiceNow
13 70 (4.85%) Arista
13 70 (4.85%) SolarWinds
14 65 (4.51%) Zscaler
15 45 (3.12%) Citrix
15 45 (3.12%) Meraki
16 44 (3.05%) Red Hat
17 32 (2.22%) Infoblox
18 27 (1.87%) Extreme Networks