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 2 February 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
2 Feb 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 79 50 48
Rank change year-on-year -29 -2 +15
Contract jobs citing Firewall 1,217 1,232 1,830
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 3.17% 3.97% 4.06%
As % of the Communications & Networking category 30.19% 30.44% 29.59%
Number of daily rates quoted 796 731 1,176
10th Percentile £313 £313 £300
25th Percentile £413 £410 £406
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £521 £520
Median % change year-on-year -3.94% +0.10% -0.95%
75th Percentile £594 £618 £625
90th Percentile £675 £700 £722
UK excluding London median daily rate £492 £500 £500
% change year-on-year -1.60% - +2.56%
Number of hourly rates quoted 28 24 60
10th Percentile £26.53 £20.00 £22.95
25th Percentile £33.00 £20.98 £60.00
Median hourly rate £41.94 £35.82 £65.98
Median % change year-on-year +17.08% -45.71% +60.81%
75th Percentile £71.06 £41.62 £76.53
90th Percentile £85.30 £56.25 £85.65
UK excluding London median hourly rate £45.33 £35.00 £67.27
% change year-on-year +29.51% -47.97% +36.95%

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 4,031 4,047 6,185
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 10.49% 13.03% 13.72%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,663 2,353 3,725
10th Percentile £204 £213 £206
25th Percentile £356 £360 £356
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £475 £500 £493
Median % change year-on-year -5.00% +1.52% -4.37%
75th Percentile £588 £600 £600
90th Percentile £675 £685 £700
UK excluding London median daily rate £450 £468 £475
% change year-on-year -3.74% -1.58% +2.70%
Number of hourly rates quoted 164 138 408
10th Percentile £15.50 £15.44 £15.50
25th Percentile £18.78 £21.46 £21.25
Median hourly rate £30.00 £33.75 £50.00
Median % change year-on-year -11.11% -32.50% +142.69%
75th Percentile £65.00 £53.44 £65.00
90th Percentile £75.00 £69.13 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £40.54 £31.08 £55.00
% change year-on-year +30.44% -43.49% +177.08%

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 2 February 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 2 February 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 2 February 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 -28 1,026 £513 -2.38% 544
UK excluding London -22 685 £492 -1.60% 496
London -39 381 £525 -4.11% 141
Work from Home -9 380 £510 -3.32% 221
North of England -22 202 £500 +5.26% 106
South East +12 180 £500 - 180
North West -21 115 £523 +5.56% 66
Midlands -31 114 £469 -6.25% 66
West Midlands -8 105 £463 +5.71% 49
Yorkshire -18 83 £465 +9.41% 32
South West -28 61 £550 +7.32% 50
Scotland -12 58 £425 -9.33% 34
East of England -21 43 £445 -15.24% 63
Wales -17 19 £380 +4.11% 8
East Midlands -51 8 £500 -23.14% 17
Northern Ireland - 8 £488 -
North East -16 7 £550 - 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 44 (3.62%) Microsoft Exchange
2 41 (3.37%) Confluence
3 25 (2.05%) SharePoint
4 15 (1.23%) nginx
5 13 (1.07%) Apache
6 9 (0.74%) OpenStack
7 7 (0.58%) IIS
8 6 (0.49%) SAS
9 4 (0.33%) Tomcat
10 2 (0.16%) JBoss
10 2 (0.16%) Oracle HTTP Server
10 2 (0.16%) WebLogic
11 1 (0.082%) Anypoint
11 1 (0.082%) Apache Pulsar
11 1 (0.082%) CICS
11 1 (0.082%) CMS
11 1 (0.082%) Traefik
11 1 (0.082%) WebSphere
Applications
1 34 (2.79%) Microsoft Office
2 22 (1.81%) MS Visio
3 19 (1.56%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 18 (1.48%) Microsoft Excel
5 7 (0.58%) Mozilla Thunderbird
6 1 (0.082%) Microsoft Project
Business Applications
1 2 (0.16%) Remedy ITSM
2 1 (0.082%) Finacle
2 1 (0.082%) SAP S/4HANA
2 1 (0.082%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
Cloud Services
1 418 (34.35%) Azure
2 325 (26.71%) AWS
3 143 (11.75%) GCP
4 114 (9.37%) Microsoft 365
5 92 (7.56%) Entra ID
6 70 (5.75%) Virtual Private Cloud
7 53 (4.35%) Amazon EC2
8 50 (4.11%) GitHub
9 44 (3.62%) Azure Sentinel
10 43 (3.53%) Amazon S3
11 42 (3.45%) Azure DevOps
12 41 (3.37%) IaaS
13 40 (3.29%) Amazon CloudWatch
14 39 (3.20%) Azure Monitor
15 34 (2.79%) PaaS
16 33 (2.71%) Serverless
17 32 (2.63%) AWS CloudFormation
17 32 (2.63%) GitHub Actions
18 26 (2.14%) Akamai
18 26 (2.14%) AWS Lambda
Communications & Networking
1 301 (24.73%) Network Security
2 279 (22.93%) VPN
3 245 (20.13%) WAN
4 232 (19.06%) DNS
5 172 (14.13%) LAN
6 153 (12.57%) BGP
7 143 (11.75%) TCP/IP
8 128 (10.52%) OSPF
9 116 (9.53%) VLAN
10 108 (8.87%) Wireless
11 102 (8.38%) SD-WAN
12 95 (7.81%) DHCP
13 83 (6.82%) Wi-Fi
14 79 (6.49%) MPLS
15 65 (5.34%) SSL
16 58 (4.77%) IPsec
17 55 (4.52%) Cisco ASA
18 49 (4.03%) Cisco Nexus
19 48 (3.94%) Cisco ISE
19 48 (3.94%) HTTP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 33 (2.71%) SQL Server
2 29 (2.38%) Amazon RDS
3 24 (1.97%) PostgreSQL
4 11 (0.90%) Elasticsearch
5 8 (0.66%) Oracle Database
6 7 (0.58%) Amazon Aurora
6 7 (0.58%) Data Warehouse
6 7 (0.58%) MongoDB
7 6 (0.49%) Data Lake
8 5 (0.41%) Relational Database
9 4 (0.33%) Redis
9 4 (0.33%) SQL Server Integration Services
10 3 (0.25%) Amazon QuickSight
10 3 (0.25%) DynamoDB
10 3 (0.25%) Oracle Exadata
11 2 (0.16%) Azure SQL Database
11 2 (0.16%) DB2
11 2 (0.16%) MariaDB
11 2 (0.16%) Oracle Reports
11 2 (0.16%) Power BI
Development Applications
1 74 (6.08%) Jenkins
2 73 (6.00%) JIRA
3 65 (5.34%) Git
4 59 (4.85%) GitLab
5 23 (1.89%) Sonatype Nexus
6 19 (1.56%) Bitbucket
7 14 (1.15%) Burp Suite
7 14 (1.15%) Metasploit
8 10 (0.82%) Vagrant
9 9 (0.74%) SonarQube
10 8 (0.66%) Jaeger
11 4 (0.33%) CircleCI
12 3 (0.25%) Chocolatey
13 2 (0.16%) Artifactory
13 2 (0.16%) MSI
14 1 (0.082%) Atlassian Bamboo
14 1 (0.082%) Maven
14 1 (0.082%) Postman
14 1 (0.082%) Subversion
14 1 (0.082%) Travis CI
General
1 342 (28.10%) Social Skills
2 140 (11.50%) Analytical Skills
3 122 (10.02%) Finance
4 113 (9.29%) Public Sector
5 84 (6.90%) Documentation Skills
6 54 (4.44%) Banking
7 46 (3.78%) Telecoms
8 33 (2.71%) Legal
9 30 (2.47%) Manufacturing
10 28 (2.30%) Presentation Skills
11 15 (1.23%) Financial Institution
12 14 (1.15%) Military
13 13 (1.07%) Local Government
14 12 (0.99%) Retail
15 10 (0.82%) Inclusion and Diversity
16 8 (0.66%) Aerospace
16 8 (0.66%) Influencing Skills
16 8 (0.66%) Law
17 7 (0.58%) Electronics
17 7 (0.58%) Spanish Language
Job Titles
1 302 (24.82%) Network Engineer
2 197 (16.19%) Architect
3 112 (9.20%) Senior
4 109 (8.96%) Security Engineer
5 82 (6.74%) Infrastructure Engineer
6 66 (5.42%) Network Architect
7 55 (4.52%) Security Architect
8 52 (4.27%) DevOps Engineer
9 50 (4.11%) Consultant
10 49 (4.03%) Analyst
10 49 (4.03%) Platform Engineer
11 46 (3.78%) Azure Engineer
11 46 (3.78%) SC Cleared Network Engineer
12 38 (3.12%) Solutions Architect
13 37 (3.04%) Lead
14 35 (2.88%) Network Security Engineer
15 33 (2.71%) Cloud Engineer
15 33 (2.71%) Support Engineer
16 30 (2.47%) Senior Network Engineer
17 27 (2.22%) IT Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 39 (3.20%) 802.1X
1 39 (3.20%) LDAP
2 31 (2.55%) SAML
3 26 (2.14%) OpenID
4 25 (2.05%) Middleware
5 18 (1.48%) OAuth
6 17 (1.40%) OAuth2
7 16 (1.31%) JSON
8 15 (1.23%) Kafka
8 15 (1.23%) Node.js
8 15 (1.23%) REST
9 10 (0.82%) XML
10 9 (0.74%) ARM Templates
10 9 (0.74%) Elastic Stack
10 9 (0.74%) OpenTelemetry
10 9 (0.74%) Spring Boot
11 8 (0.66%) Microsoft Graph
12 7 (0.58%) YAML
13 6 (0.49%) RFC 2544
14 4 (0.33%) VML
Miscellaneous
1 225 (18.49%) Data Centre
2 89 (7.31%) Security Posture
3 58 (4.77%) PKI
4 48 (3.94%) Onboarding
5 45 (3.70%) Cloud Native
5 45 (3.70%) Hybrid Cloud
6 42 (3.45%) Operational Technology
7 32 (2.63%) Public Cloud
7 32 (2.63%) Replication
8 27 (2.22%) Management Information System
9 25 (2.05%) Security Operations Centre
10 23 (1.89%) Cyber Threat
11 21 (1.73%) SCADA
12 19 (1.56%) Data Protection Act
12 19 (1.56%) Private Cloud
13 17 (1.40%) NHS
14 14 (1.15%) Product Ownership
15 13 (1.07%) Fat Client
15 13 (1.07%) Thin Client
16 12 (0.99%) IoT
Operating Systems
1 300 (24.65%) Windows
2 206 (16.93%) Linux
3 120 (9.86%) Windows Server
4 31 (2.55%) VMS
5 29 (2.38%) Unix
6 26 (2.14%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
7 15 (1.23%) Windows Server 2019
8 13 (1.07%) Amazon Linux
8 13 (1.07%) Ubuntu
9 12 (0.99%) Windows 10
10 11 (0.90%) Windows 7
11 7 (0.58%) Windows Server 2016
12 5 (0.41%) CentOS
12 5 (0.41%) Mac OS
13 4 (0.33%) Android
13 4 (0.33%) CatOS
13 4 (0.33%) Windows Server 2003
13 4 (0.33%) Windows Server 2012
14 3 (0.25%) Apple iOS
15 2 (0.16%) Solaris
Processes & Methodologies
1 245 (20.13%) Cybersecurity
2 199 (16.35%) Problem-Solving
3 196 (16.11%) DevOps
4 177 (14.54%) CI/CD
5 170 (13.97%) Infrastructure as Code
6 144 (11.83%) Migration
7 139 (11.42%) SIEM
8 138 (11.34%) Incident Response
9 134 (11.01%) Cloud Security
10 129 (10.60%) Infrastructure Engineering
11 128 (10.52%) Agile
12 119 (9.78%) ITIL
13 107 (8.79%) Load Balancing
14 103 (8.46%) Stakeholder Management
15 102 (8.38%) High Availability
16 97 (7.97%) Change Management
17 96 (7.89%) Zero Trust
18 91 (7.48%) Mentoring
19 82 (6.74%) Containerisation
20 80 (6.57%) Continuous Improvement
Programming Languages
1 224 (18.41%) Python
2 198 (16.27%) PowerShell
3 99 (8.13%) Bash
4 64 (5.26%) SQL
5 41 (3.37%) Java
6 34 (2.79%) Perl
7 22 (1.81%) Bicep
8 14 (1.15%) Kusto Query Language
9 12 (0.99%) Ruby
10 10 (0.82%) Groovy
11 9 (0.74%) Rust
12 8 (0.66%) Shell Script
13 5 (0.41%) JavaScript
14 4 (0.33%) C#
14 4 (0.33%) Go
14 4 (0.33%) PL/SQL
15 1 (0.082%) C
15 1 (0.082%) C++
15 1 (0.082%) COBOL
15 1 (0.082%) Lisp
Qualifications
1 410 (33.69%) Security Cleared
2 279 (22.93%) SC Cleared
3 214 (17.58%) Cisco Certification
4 176 (14.46%) CCNP
5 114 (9.37%) Degree
6 103 (8.46%) DV Cleared
7 90 (7.40%) CCNA
8 89 (7.31%) CISSP
9 57 (4.68%) CISM
10 55 (4.52%) Azure Certification
11 46 (3.78%) AWS Certification
11 46 (3.78%) CCIE
12 39 (3.20%) Microsoft Certification
13 25 (2.05%) CompTIA Security+
14 19 (1.56%) CEH
14 19 (1.56%) Computer Science Degree
14 19 (1.56%) JNCIS
15 18 (1.48%) JNCIP
16 16 (1.31%) CREST Certified
17 15 (1.23%) CHECK Team Member
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 112 (9.20%) ISO/IEC 27001
2 95 (7.81%) NIST
3 63 (5.18%) GDPR
4 42 (3.45%) PCI DSS
5 26 (2.14%) NCSC
6 24 (1.97%) Cyber Essentials
6 24 (1.97%) SLA
7 18 (1.48%) QA
8 14 (1.15%) PMO
9 13 (1.07%) GRC
10 12 (0.99%) Sarbanes-Oxley
11 8 (0.66%) Actionable Recommendations
12 7 (0.58%) HIPAA
13 6 (0.49%) COBIT
13 6 (0.49%) HMG Security Policy Framework
13 6 (0.49%) JSP 440
14 5 (0.41%) SOC 2
15 4 (0.33%) ISO/IEC 27002 (supersedes ISO/IEC 17799)
15 4 (0.33%) NIST 800
16 3 (0.25%) RMADS
System Software
1 221 (18.16%) Active Directory
2 160 (13.15%) VMware Infrastructure
3 120 (9.86%) Docker
4 58 (4.77%) VMware NSX
5 39 (3.20%) Hyper-V
6 33 (2.71%) Virtual Machines
6 33 (2.71%) vSphere
7 21 (1.73%) VMware ESXi
8 19 (1.56%) Virtual Desktop
9 17 (1.40%) Squid
10 13 (1.07%) DFS Replication
11 11 (0.90%) Firmware
12 8 (0.66%) Virtual Servers
13 7 (0.58%) Dovecot
13 7 (0.58%) Postfix
14 6 (0.49%) KVM
15 5 (0.41%) Microsoft App-V
15 5 (0.41%) NDS
15 5 (0.41%) NetIQ eDirectory
15 5 (0.41%) Snort
Systems Management
1 194 (15.94%) Terraform
2 155 (12.74%) Ansible
3 113 (9.29%) Kubernetes
4 74 (6.08%) FortiGate
5 60 (4.93%) Microsoft Intune
6 42 (3.45%) Grafana
7 41 (3.37%) Single Sign-On
8 38 (3.12%) Prometheus
9 34 (2.79%) SCCM
10 28 (2.30%) Active Directory Federation Services
11 26 (2.14%) vCenter Server
12 18 (1.48%) Nmap
13 16 (1.31%) CSIRT
14 15 (1.23%) Nessus
15 14 (1.15%) Fluentd
15 14 (1.15%) Nagios
16 12 (0.99%) QRadar
16 12 (0.99%) WMI
17 9 (0.74%) CASB
17 9 (0.74%) Oracle RMAN
Vendors
1 388 (31.88%) Cisco
2 277 (22.76%) Microsoft
3 263 (21.61%) Palo Alto
4 199 (16.35%) VMware
5 139 (11.42%) F5
6 132 (10.85%) CheckPoint
7 121 (9.94%) Fortinet
8 98 (8.05%) Juniper
9 89 (7.31%) Splunk
10 72 (5.92%) Aruba
11 64 (5.26%) Meraki
12 56 (4.60%) SolarWinds
13 55 (4.52%) Oracle
14 51 (4.19%) Google
15 45 (3.70%) Zscaler
16 44 (3.62%) ServiceNow
17 36 (2.96%) Citrix
18 26 (2.14%) Dell
19 25 (2.05%) Red Hat
20 17 (1.40%) Veeam