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

6 months to
16 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 88 52 57
Rank change year-on-year -36 +5 -9
Contract jobs citing Firewall 1,349 1,265 1,504
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.69% 4.27% 3.45%
As % of the Communications & Networking category 28.22% 34.21% 27.89%
Number of daily rates quoted 868 747 942
10th Percentile £350 £313 £300
25th Percentile £413 £406 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £513
Median % change year-on-year - -2.44% -2.38%
75th Percentile £588 £600 £625
90th Percentile £649 £688 £736
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £485 £500
% change year-on-year +3.09% -3.00% +2.88%
Number of hourly rates quoted 29 22 45
10th Percentile £24.84 £14.20 £17.00
25th Percentile £37.25 £14.43 £23.92
Median hourly rate £56.00 £30.00 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +86.67% -50.00% -4.08%
75th Percentile £70.23 £41.25 £85.65
90th Percentile £78.55 £44.83 £87.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £56.00 £30.00 £83.63
% change year-on-year +86.67% -64.13% +34.30%

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 4,780 3,698 5,392
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 9.52% 12.48% 12.38%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,930 2,273 3,186
10th Percentile £263 £220 £210
25th Percentile £400 £363 £350
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £483 £500
Median % change year-on-year +3.52% -3.40% -1.96%
75th Percentile £588 £588 £600
90th Percentile £675 £675 £688
UK excluding London median daily rate £480 £470 £488
% change year-on-year +2.13% -3.59% +2.63%
Number of hourly rates quoted 290 172 422
10th Percentile £16.01 £14.99 £13.50
25th Percentile £21.25 £19.13 £17.69
Median hourly rate £27.69 £41.25 £40.00
Median % change year-on-year -32.87% +3.13% +111.30%
75th Percentile £65.00 £60.41 £63.75
90th Percentile £74.26 £79.50 £71.19
UK excluding London median hourly rate £30.25 £31.08 £47.50
% change year-on-year -2.67% -34.57% +156.76%

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 16 June 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 16 June 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 16 June 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 -43 1,140 £500 -1.48% 556
UK excluding London -33 762 £500 +3.09% 488
London -58 427 £500 -4.71% 136
Work from Home -32 383 £520 +4.00% 218
North of England -12 266 £500 +5.26% 109
South East -23 211 £500 - 177
North West -3 169 £528 +11.16% 64
Yorkshire -32 82 £434 -11.84% 29
Midlands -63 75 £425 -19.05% 70
East of England -15 70 £505 -0.98% 44
West Midlands -50 64 £420 -20.00% 42
Scotland +12 63 £450 +5.88% 24
South West -46 58 £525 +7.97% 60
Wales -20 25 £425 +25.93% 4
North East -14 21 £625 +25.00% 17
East Midlands -44 8 £500 -4.03% 28
Northern Ireland -4 2 £385 - 10

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 35 (2.59%) Microsoft Exchange
2 30 (2.22%) Confluence
3 20 (1.48%) SharePoint
4 15 (1.11%) nginx
5 11 (0.82%) Apache
6 10 (0.74%) CICS
7 6 (0.44%) IIS
8 5 (0.37%) SAS
8 5 (0.37%) Tomcat
9 3 (0.22%) Skype for Business
10 2 (0.15%) Apache Pulsar
10 2 (0.15%) CloudStack
10 2 (0.15%) CMS
10 2 (0.15%) IBM HTTP Server
10 2 (0.15%) Oracle HTTP Server
10 2 (0.15%) Umbraco
10 2 (0.15%) WebSphere
10 2 (0.15%) WebSphere Application Server
10 2 (0.15%) WebSphere Portal
11 1 (0.074%) MTS
Applications
1 23 (1.70%) MS Visio
2 21 (1.56%) Microsoft Office
3 17 (1.26%) Microsoft Excel
4 9 (0.67%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 8 (0.59%) Microsoft Project
6 1 (0.074%) Windchill
Business Applications
1 1 (0.074%) Dynamics GP
1 1 (0.074%) Payment Gateway
1 1 (0.074%) Primavera
1 1 (0.074%) Remedy ITSM
1 1 (0.074%) SAP S/4HANA
1 1 (0.074%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
1 1 (0.074%) Teamcenter
Cloud Services
1 447 (33.14%) Azure
2 288 (21.35%) AWS
3 120 (8.90%) Entra ID
4 113 (8.38%) GCP
5 104 (7.71%) Microsoft 365
6 74 (5.49%) GitHub
7 61 (4.52%) Virtual Private Cloud
8 58 (4.30%) IaaS
9 52 (3.85%) Azure DevOps
10 45 (3.34%) SaaS
11 41 (3.04%) PaaS
12 38 (2.82%) Azure ExpressRoute
13 37 (2.74%) OCI
14 35 (2.59%) Azure Monitor
14 35 (2.59%) GitHub Actions
15 34 (2.52%) Azure Sentinel
16 33 (2.45%) Serverless
17 28 (2.08%) Google Kubernetes Engine
18 27 (2.00%) Amazon EC2
19 25 (1.85%) Amazon EKS
Communications & Networking
1 384 (28.47%) Network Security
2 367 (27.21%) WAN
3 342 (25.35%) VPN
4 284 (21.05%) DNS
5 270 (20.01%) LAN
6 239 (17.72%) BGP
7 204 (15.12%) OSPF
8 176 (13.05%) VLAN
9 153 (11.34%) SD-WAN
10 148 (10.97%) TCP/IP
11 145 (10.75%) DHCP
12 138 (10.23%) Wireless
13 111 (8.23%) Wi-Fi
14 97 (7.19%) BIG-IP
15 93 (6.89%) VXLAN
16 92 (6.82%) MPLS
17 87 (6.45%) IPsec
18 78 (5.78%) Ethernet VPN
18 78 (5.78%) SSL
19 77 (5.71%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
Database & Business Intelligence
1 22 (1.63%) SQL Server
2 18 (1.33%) Elasticsearch
3 16 (1.19%) PostgreSQL
3 16 (1.19%) Power BI
4 10 (0.74%) Amazon RDS
4 10 (0.74%) DataStage
5 9 (0.67%) Oracle Database
6 8 (0.59%) Azure SQL Database
6 8 (0.59%) Data Lake
6 8 (0.59%) MySQL
7 7 (0.52%) Data Warehouse
7 7 (0.52%) Relational Database
8 4 (0.30%) Amazon Athena
8 4 (0.30%) Amazon QuickSight
8 4 (0.30%) Amazon Redshift
8 4 (0.30%) Delta Lake
8 4 (0.30%) Metadata
8 4 (0.30%) MongoDB
8 4 (0.30%) NoSQL
8 4 (0.30%) SQL Server Integration Services
Development Applications
1 87 (6.45%) JIRA
2 59 (4.37%) Jenkins
3 44 (3.26%) GitLab
4 43 (3.19%) Git
5 14 (1.04%) Sonatype Nexus
6 10 (0.74%) Artifactory
6 10 (0.74%) Burp Suite
7 9 (0.67%) Bitbucket
7 9 (0.67%) Chocolatey
7 9 (0.67%) SonarQube
8 8 (0.59%) Metasploit
9 7 (0.52%) Jaeger
10 5 (0.37%) Browser DevTools
11 2 (0.15%) Cucumber
11 2 (0.15%) Gatling
11 2 (0.15%) Gradle
11 2 (0.15%) Introscope
11 2 (0.15%) Postman
11 2 (0.15%) REST Assured
11 2 (0.15%) Team Foundation Server
General
1 297 (22.02%) Social Skills
2 169 (12.53%) Finance
3 114 (8.45%) Analytical Skills
4 107 (7.93%) Public Sector
5 79 (5.86%) Documentation Skills
6 59 (4.37%) Banking
7 36 (2.67%) Legal
8 35 (2.59%) Telecoms
9 23 (1.70%) Financial Institution
10 21 (1.56%) Manufacturing
11 19 (1.41%) Military
12 16 (1.19%) Influencing Skills
13 13 (0.96%) Law
14 12 (0.89%) Retail
15 11 (0.82%) Investment Banking
16 10 (0.74%) Inclusion and Diversity
16 10 (0.74%) Local Government
17 9 (0.67%) Front Office
17 9 (0.67%) Organisational Skills
18 8 (0.59%) Presentation Skills
Job Titles
1 428 (31.73%) Network Engineer
2 204 (15.12%) Architect
3 165 (12.23%) Senior
4 123 (9.12%) Infrastructure Engineer
5 116 (8.60%) Security Engineer
6 70 (5.19%) Network Architect
6 70 (5.19%) Senior Network Engineer
7 66 (4.89%) Cloud Engineer
8 59 (4.37%) SC Cleared Network Engineer
9 54 (4.00%) Azure Engineer
10 52 (3.85%) Network Security Engineer
11 45 (3.34%) Technical Architect
12 43 (3.19%) Consultant
12 43 (3.19%) DevOps Engineer
13 42 (3.11%) Cisco Engineer
13 42 (3.11%) Lead
14 38 (2.82%) Cisco Network Engineer
14 38 (2.82%) Security Architect
15 33 (2.45%) Cloud Architect
16 32 (2.37%) Senior Infrastructure Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 73 (5.41%) 802.1X
2 39 (2.89%) Middleware
3 34 (2.52%) LDAP
4 27 (2.00%) SAML
5 23 (1.70%) OpenID
6 15 (1.11%) Kafka
7 12 (0.89%) OAuth
8 11 (0.82%) OAuth2
9 10 (0.74%) OpenTelemetry
9 10 (0.74%) REST
10 9 (0.67%) Spring Boot
11 8 (0.59%) ARM Templates
12 7 (0.52%) .NET
12 7 (0.52%) YAML
13 6 (0.44%) Elastic Stack
13 6 (0.44%) LangChain
13 6 (0.44%) PyTorch
13 6 (0.44%) React
13 6 (0.44%) scikit-learn
14 5 (0.37%) AWS CDK
Miscellaneous
1 329 (24.39%) Data Centre
2 84 (6.23%) Cloud Native
3 79 (5.86%) Security Posture
4 67 (4.97%) Hybrid Cloud
5 59 (4.37%) Onboarding
5 59 (4.37%) PKI
6 43 (3.19%) Management Information System
7 42 (3.11%) Clustering
8 38 (2.82%) Operational Technology
9 31 (2.30%) Public Cloud
10 28 (2.08%) Data Protection Act
11 25 (1.85%) IoT
12 23 (1.70%) Cyber Threat
12 23 (1.70%) Enterprise Storage
13 20 (1.48%) Distributed Denial-of-Service
14 19 (1.41%) Self-Motivation
15 17 (1.26%) SCADA
16 16 (1.19%) Driving Licence
16 16 (1.19%) Enterprise Software
17 15 (1.11%) BYOD
Operating Systems
1 299 (22.16%) Windows
2 185 (13.71%) Linux
3 109 (8.08%) Windows Server
4 39 (2.89%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 29 (2.15%) Unix
6 23 (1.70%) VMS
7 12 (0.89%) Windows Server 2019
8 11 (0.82%) Solaris
9 10 (0.74%) AIX
10 9 (0.67%) Windows Server 2016
11 8 (0.59%) Ubuntu
11 8 (0.59%) Windows Server 2003
12 6 (0.44%) Windows 10
12 6 (0.44%) Windows Server 2012
13 5 (0.37%) CentOS
13 5 (0.37%) Mac OS
14 4 (0.30%) Android
14 4 (0.30%) SUSE
15 3 (0.22%) Amazon Linux
15 3 (0.22%) CatOS
Processes & Methodologies
1 239 (17.72%) DevOps
2 211 (15.64%) CI/CD
3 193 (14.31%) Infrastructure as Code
4 182 (13.49%) Load Balancing
5 181 (13.42%) Migration
6 173 (12.82%) High Availability
7 166 (12.31%) Cybersecurity
8 165 (12.23%) Infrastructure Engineering
9 163 (12.08%) Problem-Solving
10 158 (11.71%) ITIL
11 151 (11.19%) Agile
12 148 (10.97%) Zero Trust
13 110 (8.15%) SIEM
14 109 (8.08%) Observability
15 108 (8.01%) Change Management
16 106 (7.86%) Project Delivery
17 103 (7.64%) Cloud Security
18 101 (7.49%) Validation
19 98 (7.26%) Network Segmentation
20 94 (6.97%) Roadmaps
Programming Languages
1 215 (15.94%) Python
2 134 (9.93%) PowerShell
3 81 (6.00%) Bash
4 48 (3.56%) SQL
5 39 (2.89%) Bicep
6 36 (2.67%) Java
7 10 (0.74%) ActionScript
7 10 (0.74%) COBOL
8 9 (0.67%) Perl
9 6 (0.44%) Groovy
9 6 (0.44%) JavaScript
9 6 (0.44%) Kusto Query Language
9 6 (0.44%) Rust
10 5 (0.37%) Go
10 5 (0.37%) PL/SQL
11 4 (0.30%) C++
11 4 (0.30%) Shell Script
12 2 (0.15%) C
12 2 (0.15%) Jython
12 2 (0.15%) PHP
Qualifications
1 457 (33.88%) Security Cleared
2 340 (25.20%) SC Cleared
3 277 (20.53%) Cisco Certification
4 208 (15.42%) CCNP
5 115 (8.52%) CCNA
6 109 (8.08%) Degree
7 99 (7.34%) DV Cleared
8 66 (4.89%) CISSP
9 58 (4.30%) Azure Certification
10 40 (2.97%) AWS Certification
11 39 (2.89%) CCIE
12 33 (2.45%) CISM
13 32 (2.37%) Microsoft Certification
14 21 (1.56%) Network+ Certification
15 20 (1.48%) JNCIS
16 19 (1.41%) Computer Science Degree
17 18 (1.33%) JNCIA
17 18 (1.33%) PMP
18 17 (1.26%) CompTIA Security+
18 17 (1.26%) Server+ Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 70 (5.19%) ISO/IEC 27001
2 58 (4.30%) NIST
3 46 (3.41%) GDPR
4 31 (2.30%) PCI DSS
5 30 (2.22%) NCSC
5 30 (2.22%) SLA
6 25 (1.85%) QA
7 22 (1.63%) Cyber Essentials
8 9 (0.67%) PMO
9 8 (0.59%) Disclosure Scotland
10 7 (0.52%) Actionable Recommendations
10 7 (0.52%) Data Quality
11 6 (0.44%) GRC
11 6 (0.44%) NIST 800
11 6 (0.44%) RMADS
12 5 (0.37%) ISO/IEC 27002 (supersedes ISO/IEC 17799)
12 5 (0.37%) JSP 440
12 5 (0.37%) SOC 2
13 4 (0.30%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
13 4 (0.30%) GxP
System Software
1 203 (15.05%) Active Directory
2 145 (10.75%) VMware Infrastructure
3 56 (4.15%) Docker
4 53 (3.93%) VMware NSX
5 37 (2.74%) vSphere
6 35 (2.59%) Hyper-V
7 34 (2.52%) Virtual Machines
8 30 (2.22%) VMware ESXi
9 25 (1.85%) Firmware
10 21 (1.56%) Virtual Desktop
11 16 (1.19%) Squid
12 13 (0.96%) BitLocker
13 10 (0.74%) Microsoft App-V
14 4 (0.30%) Terminal Services
15 3 (0.22%) DFS Replication
15 3 (0.22%) Dovecot
15 3 (0.22%) Postfix
16 2 (0.15%) Oracle RAC
16 2 (0.15%) Virtual Servers
16 2 (0.15%) VirtualBox
Systems Management
1 230 (17.05%) Terraform
2 174 (12.90%) Ansible
3 109 (8.08%) Kubernetes
4 108 (8.01%) FortiGate
5 65 (4.82%) Grafana
6 58 (4.30%) Prometheus
7 50 (3.71%) Microsoft Intune
8 31 (2.30%) Single Sign-On
9 29 (2.15%) SCCM
10 23 (1.70%) vCenter Server
11 19 (1.41%) Puppet
12 17 (1.26%) Progress Chef
13 15 (1.11%) Active Directory Federation Services
14 13 (0.96%) CASB
15 12 (0.89%) Cisco Prime
16 11 (0.82%) Consul
16 11 (0.82%) QRadar
17 10 (0.74%) Nmap
17 10 (0.74%) vMotion
17 10 (0.74%) VxRail
Vendors
1 483 (35.80%) Cisco
2 306 (22.68%) Palo Alto
3 264 (19.57%) Microsoft
4 191 (14.16%) Fortinet
5 188 (13.94%) F5
6 185 (13.71%) VMware
7 152 (11.27%) Juniper
8 121 (8.97%) CheckPoint
9 85 (6.30%) Aruba
10 79 (5.86%) Splunk
11 72 (5.34%) ServiceNow
12 70 (5.19%) Arista
13 67 (4.97%) SolarWinds
14 59 (4.37%) Google
15 48 (3.56%) Zscaler
16 42 (3.11%) Red Hat
17 37 (2.74%) Citrix
18 34 (2.52%) Meraki
19 28 (2.08%) Extreme Networks
20 27 (2.00%) Dynatrace