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

6 months to
1 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 85 51 53
Rank change year-on-year -34 +2 -2
Contract jobs citing Firewall 1,360 1,239 1,531
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.78% 4.25% 3.56%
As % of the Communications & Networking category 28.58% 33.67% 28.24%
Number of daily rates quoted 887 736 960
10th Percentile £347 £313 £300
25th Percentile £413 £405 £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 £650 £688 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £488 £500
% change year-on-year +2.56% -2.50% +2.56%
Number of hourly rates quoted 30 20 46
10th Percentile £19.90 - £16.00
25th Percentile £37.25 £14.20 £23.92
Median hourly rate £56.00 £28.75 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +94.78% -52.08% -4.08%
75th Percentile £70.50 £41.25 £85.65
90th Percentile £78.88 £47.88 £87.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £52.36 £28.75 £83.50
% change year-on-year +82.12% -65.57% +33.49%

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 4,758 3,680 5,422
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 9.72% 12.63% 12.61%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,916 2,282 3,232
10th Percentile £263 £220 £206
25th Percentile £400 £363 £350
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £488 £500
Median % change year-on-year +2.56% -2.50% -2.44%
75th Percentile £588 £588 £600
90th Percentile £675 £675 £688
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £466 £479
% change year-on-year +2.04% -2.82% +0.84%
Number of hourly rates quoted 281 160 417
10th Percentile £16.01 £14.99 £13.50
25th Percentile £21.25 £17.67 £16.30
Median hourly rate £28.88 £40.50 £40.00
Median % change year-on-year -28.69% +1.25% +119.30%
75th Percentile £65.00 £59.09 £63.75
90th Percentile £75.00 £80.10 £70.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £32.50 £30.70 £45.88
% change year-on-year +5.86% -33.09% +154.89%

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 1 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 1 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 1 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 1,139 £500 -1.48% 478
UK excluding London -25 770 £500 +2.56% 432
London -57 416 £513 -2.15% 117
Work from Home -27 408 £520 +4.00% 205
North of England -14 252 £500 +3.09% 112
South East -9 231 £500 - 162
North West -6 161 £540 +13.68% 64
Midlands -54 80 £420 -20.00% 54
Yorkshire -37 75 £425 -13.62% 32
West Midlands -44 68 £413 -20.75% 34
East of England -14 66 £503 +0.60% 30
Scotland +18 62 £450 +2.86% 16
South West -45 57 £525 +5.00% 49
Wales -17 26 £425 +21.43% 11
North East -8 20 £625 +25.00% 17
East Midlands -48 8 £488 -12.16% 20
Northern Ireland -1 2 £385 - 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 35 (2.57%) Microsoft Exchange
2 33 (2.43%) Confluence
3 21 (1.54%) SharePoint
4 16 (1.18%) nginx
5 11 (0.81%) Apache
6 10 (0.74%) CICS
7 6 (0.44%) IIS
7 6 (0.44%) 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 29 (2.13%) MS Visio
2 25 (1.84%) Microsoft Office
3 19 (1.40%) Microsoft Excel
4 12 (0.88%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 9 (0.66%) 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
1 453 (33.31%) Azure
2 299 (21.99%) AWS
3 115 (8.46%) GCP
4 110 (8.09%) Entra ID
5 105 (7.72%) Microsoft 365
6 70 (5.15%) GitHub
7 64 (4.71%) Virtual Private Cloud
8 55 (4.04%) IaaS
9 52 (3.82%) Azure DevOps
10 41 (3.01%) SaaS
11 40 (2.94%) PaaS
12 37 (2.72%) GitHub Actions
13 36 (2.65%) Azure ExpressRoute
14 34 (2.50%) OCI
15 33 (2.43%) Azure Sentinel
16 31 (2.28%) Azure Monitor
17 29 (2.13%) Serverless
18 27 (1.99%) Amazon EC2
18 27 (1.99%) Amazon EKS
19 24 (1.76%) Google Kubernetes Engine
Communications & Networking
1 381 (28.01%) Network Security
2 377 (27.72%) WAN
3 352 (25.88%) VPN
4 288 (21.18%) DNS
4 288 (21.18%) LAN
5 239 (17.57%) BGP
6 214 (15.74%) OSPF
7 170 (12.50%) VLAN
8 149 (10.96%) SD-WAN
9 147 (10.81%) DHCP
9 147 (10.81%) TCP/IP
10 139 (10.22%) Wireless
11 109 (8.01%) Wi-Fi
12 95 (6.99%) BIG-IP
13 94 (6.91%) VXLAN
14 93 (6.84%) IPsec
14 93 (6.84%) MPLS
15 79 (5.81%) Ethernet VPN
16 74 (5.44%) SSL
17 73 (5.37%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
Database & Business Intelligence
1 24 (1.76%) SQL Server
2 18 (1.32%) Elasticsearch
3 17 (1.25%) PostgreSQL
4 14 (1.03%) Power BI
5 10 (0.74%) DataStage
5 10 (0.74%) Oracle Database
6 8 (0.59%) Azure SQL Database
6 8 (0.59%) MySQL
7 7 (0.51%) Data Lake
7 7 (0.51%) Data Warehouse
7 7 (0.51%) MongoDB
8 6 (0.44%) Amazon RDS
8 6 (0.44%) Relational Database
9 4 (0.29%) Amazon Athena
9 4 (0.29%) Amazon QuickSight
9 4 (0.29%) Amazon Redshift
9 4 (0.29%) Metadata
9 4 (0.29%) NoSQL
9 4 (0.29%) SQL Server Integration Services
10 3 (0.22%) Oracle Exadata
Development Applications
1 88 (6.47%) JIRA
2 61 (4.49%) Jenkins
3 47 (3.46%) GitLab
4 45 (3.31%) Git
5 15 (1.10%) Sonatype Nexus
6 11 (0.81%) Burp Suite
7 10 (0.74%) Metasploit
8 9 (0.66%) Artifactory
8 9 (0.66%) Bitbucket
8 9 (0.66%) Chocolatey
8 9 (0.66%) Jaeger
9 8 (0.59%) SonarQube
10 5 (0.37%) Browser DevTools
11 4 (0.29%) CircleCI
12 2 (0.15%) Introscope
12 2 (0.15%) Postman
12 2 (0.15%) Team Foundation Server
13 1 (0.074%) Atlassian Bamboo
13 1 (0.074%) Cucumber
13 1 (0.074%) Gatling
General
1 299 (21.99%) Social Skills
2 169 (12.43%) Finance
3 118 (8.68%) Analytical Skills
4 111 (8.16%) Public Sector
5 85 (6.25%) Documentation Skills
6 55 (4.04%) Banking
7 39 (2.87%) Telecoms
8 31 (2.28%) Legal
9 24 (1.76%) Financial Institution
10 23 (1.69%) Manufacturing
11 20 (1.47%) Military
12 17 (1.25%) Influencing Skills
13 15 (1.10%) Law
14 13 (0.96%) Retail
15 9 (0.66%) Inclusion and Diversity
16 8 (0.59%) Front Office
16 8 (0.59%) Investment Banking
16 8 (0.59%) Local Government
16 8 (0.59%) Organisational Skills
16 8 (0.59%) Presentation Skills
Job Titles
1 425 (31.25%) Network Engineer
2 215 (15.81%) Architect
3 170 (12.50%) Senior
4 114 (8.38%) Infrastructure Engineer
5 110 (8.09%) Security Engineer
6 78 (5.74%) Network Architect
7 71 (5.22%) Senior Network Engineer
8 64 (4.71%) SC Cleared Network Engineer
9 60 (4.41%) Cloud Engineer
10 56 (4.12%) Azure Engineer
11 46 (3.38%) Technical Architect
12 45 (3.31%) Network Security Engineer
13 43 (3.16%) Lead
14 42 (3.09%) Cisco Engineer
15 39 (2.87%) DevOps Engineer
15 39 (2.87%) Security Architect
16 38 (2.79%) Cisco Network Engineer
17 37 (2.72%) Consultant
18 33 (2.43%) Senior Infrastructure Engineer
19 32 (2.35%) Network Specialist
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 70 (5.15%) 802.1X
2 41 (3.01%) Middleware
3 39 (2.87%) LDAP
4 28 (2.06%) SAML
5 23 (1.69%) OpenID
6 18 (1.32%) Kafka
7 12 (0.88%) OAuth
8 11 (0.81%) OAuth2
8 11 (0.81%) OpenTelemetry
9 10 (0.74%) Elastic Stack
9 10 (0.74%) REST
9 10 (0.74%) Spring Boot
10 9 (0.66%) YAML
11 6 (0.44%) .NET
11 6 (0.44%) ARM Templates
11 6 (0.44%) HTML
11 6 (0.44%) JSON
11 6 (0.44%) LangChain
11 6 (0.44%) PyTorch
11 6 (0.44%) scikit-learn
Miscellaneous
1 337 (24.78%) Data Centre
2 81 (5.96%) Cloud Native
3 76 (5.59%) Security Posture
4 65 (4.78%) Hybrid Cloud
5 62 (4.56%) PKI
6 51 (3.75%) Onboarding
7 46 (3.38%) Management Information System
8 39 (2.87%) Clustering
9 38 (2.79%) Operational Technology
10 34 (2.50%) Public Cloud
11 26 (1.91%) Data Protection Act
11 26 (1.91%) IoT
12 24 (1.76%) Cyber Threat
13 22 (1.62%) Enterprise Storage
14 19 (1.40%) SCADA
15 18 (1.32%) Self-Motivation
16 16 (1.18%) Distributed Denial-of-Service
16 16 (1.18%) Driving Licence
16 16 (1.18%) Enterprise Software
17 15 (1.10%) BYOD
Operating Systems
1 308 (22.65%) Windows
2 189 (13.90%) Linux
3 116 (8.53%) Windows Server
4 37 (2.72%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 30 (2.21%) Unix
6 26 (1.91%) VMS
7 12 (0.88%) Windows Server 2019
8 11 (0.81%) Solaris
9 10 (0.74%) AIX
9 10 (0.74%) Windows Server 2016
10 8 (0.59%) Ubuntu
10 8 (0.59%) Windows Server 2003
11 7 (0.51%) Windows 10
11 7 (0.51%) Windows Server 2012
12 6 (0.44%) Mac OS
13 5 (0.37%) CatOS
13 5 (0.37%) CentOS
14 4 (0.29%) Android
14 4 (0.29%) SUSE
15 3 (0.22%) Amazon Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 234 (17.21%) DevOps
2 205 (15.07%) CI/CD
3 188 (13.82%) Load Balancing
4 186 (13.68%) Cybersecurity
5 185 (13.60%) Infrastructure as Code
6 175 (12.87%) High Availability
7 172 (12.65%) Migration
8 165 (12.13%) Problem-Solving
9 156 (11.47%) Infrastructure Engineering
10 150 (11.03%) ITIL
11 145 (10.66%) Zero Trust
12 144 (10.59%) Agile
13 110 (8.09%) SIEM
14 106 (7.79%) Cloud Security
15 105 (7.72%) Project Delivery
16 103 (7.57%) Change Management
17 101 (7.43%) Observability
18 98 (7.21%) Network Segmentation
19 96 (7.06%) Roadmaps
20 95 (6.99%) Technical Leadership
Programming Languages
1 207 (15.22%) Python
2 141 (10.37%) PowerShell
3 82 (6.03%) Bash
4 54 (3.97%) SQL
5 40 (2.94%) Bicep
6 38 (2.79%) Java
7 10 (0.74%) COBOL
7 10 (0.74%) Perl
8 9 (0.66%) JavaScript
9 8 (0.59%) ActionScript
9 8 (0.59%) Rust
10 7 (0.51%) Kusto Query Language
11 6 (0.44%) Groovy
11 6 (0.44%) PL/SQL
12 5 (0.37%) Go
12 5 (0.37%) Shell Script
13 3 (0.22%) C++
14 2 (0.15%) C
14 2 (0.15%) Jython
14 2 (0.15%) PHP
Qualifications
1 483 (35.51%) Security Cleared
2 361 (26.54%) SC Cleared
3 286 (21.03%) Cisco Certification
4 217 (15.96%) CCNP
5 115 (8.46%) CCNA
6 112 (8.24%) Degree
7 102 (7.50%) DV Cleared
8 68 (5.00%) CISSP
9 64 (4.71%) Azure Certification
10 42 (3.09%) AWS Certification
11 39 (2.87%) CCIE
12 34 (2.50%) CISM
13 31 (2.28%) Microsoft Certification
14 25 (1.84%) Network+ Certification
15 23 (1.69%) JNCIS
16 20 (1.47%) Computer Science Degree
16 20 (1.47%) JNCIA
17 18 (1.32%) CompTIA Security+
18 17 (1.25%) JNCIP
18 17 (1.25%) Server+ Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 70 (5.15%) ISO/IEC 27001
2 57 (4.19%) NIST
3 46 (3.38%) GDPR
4 33 (2.43%) PCI DSS
5 32 (2.35%) SLA
6 30 (2.21%) NCSC
7 25 (1.84%) QA
8 21 (1.54%) Cyber Essentials
9 12 (0.88%) PMO
10 8 (0.59%) Disclosure Scotland
11 7 (0.51%) Actionable Recommendations
11 7 (0.51%) Data Quality
12 6 (0.44%) GRC
12 6 (0.44%) RMADS
13 5 (0.37%) HMG Security Policy Framework
13 5 (0.37%) ISO/IEC 27002 (supersedes ISO/IEC 17799)
13 5 (0.37%) JSP 440
13 5 (0.37%) NIST 800
13 5 (0.37%) SOC 2
14 4 (0.29%) GxP
System Software
1 209 (15.37%) Active Directory
2 156 (11.47%) VMware Infrastructure
3 63 (4.63%) VMware NSX
4 60 (4.41%) Docker
5 38 (2.79%) Hyper-V
5 38 (2.79%) vSphere
6 34 (2.50%) Virtual Machines
7 29 (2.13%) VMware ESXi
8 21 (1.54%) Firmware
8 21 (1.54%) Virtual Desktop
9 16 (1.18%) Squid
10 11 (0.81%) BitLocker
11 8 (0.59%) Microsoft App-V
12 3 (0.22%) DFS Replication
12 3 (0.22%) Dovecot
12 3 (0.22%) Oracle RAC
12 3 (0.22%) Postfix
13 2 (0.15%) Citrix Hypervisor
13 2 (0.15%) KVM
13 2 (0.15%) Virtual Servers
Systems Management
1 225 (16.54%) Terraform
2 174 (12.79%) Ansible
3 108 (7.94%) Kubernetes
4 103 (7.57%) FortiGate
5 63 (4.63%) Grafana
6 54 (3.97%) Prometheus
7 53 (3.90%) Microsoft Intune
8 34 (2.50%) Single Sign-On
9 28 (2.06%) SCCM
10 23 (1.69%) vCenter Server
11 17 (1.25%) Active Directory Federation Services
11 17 (1.25%) Progress Chef
12 14 (1.03%) Puppet
13 13 (0.96%) CASB
13 13 (0.96%) QRadar
14 12 (0.88%) Cisco Prime
14 12 (0.88%) Nmap
15 11 (0.81%) Consul
15 11 (0.81%) Nagios
15 11 (0.81%) VxRail
Vendors
1 497 (36.54%) Cisco
2 311 (22.87%) Palo Alto
3 263 (19.34%) Microsoft
4 201 (14.78%) VMware
5 190 (13.97%) F5
5 190 (13.97%) Fortinet
6 152 (11.18%) Juniper
7 134 (9.85%) CheckPoint
8 94 (6.91%) Aruba
9 79 (5.81%) Splunk
10 75 (5.51%) ServiceNow
11 69 (5.07%) SolarWinds
12 66 (4.85%) Arista
13 57 (4.19%) Google
14 42 (3.09%) Zscaler
15 41 (3.01%) Red Hat
16 39 (2.87%) Meraki
17 35 (2.57%) Citrix
18 28 (2.06%) Extreme Networks
18 28 (2.06%) Oracle