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

6 months to
17 Feb 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 81 49 47
Rank change year-on-year -32 -2 +12
Contract jobs citing Firewall 1,258 1,236 1,789
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 3.13% 4.06% 4.01%
As % of the Communications & Networking category 30.17% 30.78% 29.91%
Number of daily rates quoted 825 735 1,118
10th Percentile £313 £313 £300
25th Percentile £413 £413 £406
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £520
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% +0.96% -0.95%
75th Percentile £589 £615 £626
90th Percentile £675 £715 £725
UK excluding London median daily rate £492 £500 £500
% change year-on-year -1.60% - -
Number of hourly rates quoted 28 24 60
10th Percentile £29.33 £20.00 £22.95
25th Percentile £35.94 £20.98 £60.00
Median hourly rate £41.94 £35.82 £65.98
Median % change year-on-year +17.08% -45.71% +43.11%
75th Percentile £74.26 £41.62 £76.53
90th Percentile £85.30 £56.25 £85.78
UK excluding London median hourly rate £45.71 £35.00 £67.38
% change year-on-year +30.61% -48.06% +29.26%

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 4,170 4,015 5,981
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 10.37% 13.18% 13.39%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,729 2,369 3,559
10th Percentile £204 £210 £205
25th Percentile £356 £360 £350
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £475 £500 £480
Median % change year-on-year -5.00% +4.17% -7.69%
75th Percentile £588 £600 £600
90th Percentile £675 £681 £700
UK excluding London median daily rate £450 £470 £475
% change year-on-year -4.26% -1.05% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 171 126 401
10th Percentile £15.50 £15.85 £14.36
25th Percentile £18.94 £21.46 £20.00
Median hourly rate £28.88 £32.50 £47.50
Median % change year-on-year -11.14% -31.58% +141.24%
75th Percentile £65.00 £60.09 £65.00
90th Percentile £75.00 £70.00 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £40.54 £26.00 £51.42
% change year-on-year +55.92% -49.44% +158.65%

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 17 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 17 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 17 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 -30 1,054 £500 -4.76% 580
UK excluding London -24 697 £492 -1.60% 530
London -47 392 £525 -2.55% 163
Work from Home -20 390 £500 -1.96% 238
North of England -25 211 £500 +5.26% 115
South East +16 196 £500 - 205
North West -20 121 £519 +9.32% 76
Midlands -31 108 £440 -17.80% 53
West Midlands -19 98 £439 -1.96% 39
Yorkshire -9 88 £465 +9.41% 27
South West -40 61 £550 +4.76% 56
Scotland -18 55 £425 -2.86% 36
East of England -27 40 £445 -15.24% 65
Wales -20 20 £425 +16.44% 11
East Midlands -50 8 £500 -23.14% 14
Northern Ireland - 7 £500 - 1
North East -17 5 £548 -0.45% 14

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 40 (3.18%) Confluence
1 40 (3.18%) Microsoft Exchange
2 23 (1.83%) SharePoint
3 16 (1.27%) nginx
4 13 (1.03%) Apache
5 8 (0.64%) OpenStack
6 7 (0.56%) IIS
7 6 (0.48%) CICS
7 6 (0.48%) SAS
8 3 (0.24%) Tomcat
9 2 (0.16%) Apache Pulsar
9 2 (0.16%) JBoss
9 2 (0.16%) Oracle HTTP Server
9 2 (0.16%) WebLogic
10 1 (0.079%) Anypoint
10 1 (0.079%) CMS
10 1 (0.079%) Traefik
10 1 (0.079%) WebSphere
Applications
1 38 (3.02%) Microsoft Office
2 21 (1.67%) MS Visio
3 19 (1.51%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 18 (1.43%) Microsoft Excel
5 4 (0.32%) Mozilla Thunderbird
6 1 (0.079%) Microsoft Project
Business Applications
1 2 (0.16%) Remedy ITSM
2 1 (0.079%) Payment Gateway
2 1 (0.079%) SAP S/4HANA
2 1 (0.079%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
Cloud Services
1 427 (33.94%) Azure
2 323 (25.68%) AWS
3 143 (11.37%) GCP
4 113 (8.98%) Microsoft 365
5 94 (7.47%) Entra ID
6 70 (5.56%) Virtual Private Cloud
7 55 (4.37%) GitHub
8 50 (3.97%) Amazon EC2
9 46 (3.66%) IaaS
10 45 (3.58%) Azure Sentinel
11 42 (3.34%) PaaS
12 41 (3.26%) Azure DevOps
13 40 (3.18%) Amazon S3
14 38 (3.02%) Azure Monitor
15 37 (2.94%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 36 (2.86%) Serverless
17 34 (2.70%) AWS CloudFormation
18 33 (2.62%) GitHub Actions
19 30 (2.38%) SaaS
20 29 (2.31%) AWS Lambda
Communications & Networking
1 323 (25.68%) Network Security
2 299 (23.77%) VPN
3 263 (20.91%) WAN
4 257 (20.43%) DNS
5 194 (15.42%) LAN
6 177 (14.07%) BGP
7 153 (12.16%) OSPF
8 147 (11.69%) TCP/IP
9 130 (10.33%) VLAN
10 114 (9.06%) DHCP
11 112 (8.90%) Wireless
12 108 (8.59%) SD-WAN
13 86 (6.84%) MPLS
14 82 (6.52%) Wi-Fi
15 69 (5.48%) SSL
16 63 (5.01%) IPsec
17 57 (4.53%) Cisco ASA
18 56 (4.45%) Cisco ISE
19 53 (4.21%) Cisco Nexus
20 46 (3.66%) HTTP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 34 (2.70%) SQL Server
2 25 (1.99%) Amazon RDS
3 23 (1.83%) PostgreSQL
4 14 (1.11%) Elasticsearch
5 8 (0.64%) Data Lake
5 8 (0.64%) Oracle Database
6 7 (0.56%) Data Warehouse
6 7 (0.56%) MongoDB
7 6 (0.48%) DataStage
8 5 (0.40%) Relational Database
9 4 (0.32%) Amazon Aurora
9 4 (0.32%) Redis
9 4 (0.32%) SQL Server Integration Services
10 3 (0.24%) Amazon QuickSight
10 3 (0.24%) DynamoDB
10 3 (0.24%) Oracle Exadata
11 2 (0.16%) Azure SQL Database
11 2 (0.16%) DB2
11 2 (0.16%) MariaDB
11 2 (0.16%) Power BI
Development Applications
1 74 (5.88%) JIRA
2 73 (5.80%) Jenkins
3 62 (4.93%) GitLab
4 61 (4.85%) Git
5 23 (1.83%) Sonatype Nexus
6 20 (1.59%) Bitbucket
7 15 (1.19%) Burp Suite
7 15 (1.19%) Metasploit
8 8 (0.64%) Jaeger
8 8 (0.64%) SonarQube
9 6 (0.48%) Chocolatey
9 6 (0.48%) Vagrant
10 4 (0.32%) CircleCI
11 3 (0.24%) Artifactory
12 2 (0.16%) MSI
13 1 (0.079%) Atlassian Bamboo
13 1 (0.079%) Maven
13 1 (0.079%) Postman
13 1 (0.079%) Subversion
13 1 (0.079%) Travis CI
General
1 353 (28.06%) Social Skills
2 140 (11.13%) Analytical Skills
3 139 (11.05%) Finance
4 103 (8.19%) Public Sector
5 92 (7.31%) Documentation Skills
6 54 (4.29%) Banking
7 48 (3.82%) Telecoms
8 33 (2.62%) Legal
9 28 (2.23%) Manufacturing
10 25 (1.99%) Presentation Skills
11 17 (1.35%) Financial Institution
11 17 (1.35%) Military
12 15 (1.19%) Influencing Skills
13 13 (1.03%) Local Government
14 10 (0.79%) Retail
15 9 (0.72%) Inclusion and Diversity
15 9 (0.72%) Law
16 8 (0.64%) Aerospace
17 7 (0.56%) Electronics
17 7 (0.56%) Spanish Language
Job Titles
1 321 (25.52%) Network Engineer
2 212 (16.85%) Architect
3 122 (9.70%) Senior
4 115 (9.14%) Security Engineer
5 81 (6.44%) Infrastructure Engineer
6 73 (5.80%) Network Architect
7 56 (4.45%) Security Architect
8 51 (4.05%) Analyst
8 51 (4.05%) DevOps Engineer
9 50 (3.97%) Azure Engineer
10 49 (3.90%) Consultant
11 44 (3.50%) SC Cleared Network Engineer
12 42 (3.34%) Network Security Engineer
12 42 (3.34%) Platform Engineer
13 41 (3.26%) Solutions Architect
14 37 (2.94%) Lead
15 35 (2.78%) Senior Network Engineer
16 32 (2.54%) Cloud Engineer
17 31 (2.46%) Support Engineer
18 30 (2.38%) IT Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 50 (3.97%) 802.1X
2 42 (3.34%) LDAP
3 31 (2.46%) SAML
4 29 (2.31%) Middleware
5 28 (2.23%) OpenID
6 20 (1.59%) OAuth
7 19 (1.51%) OAuth2
8 16 (1.27%) Kafka
9 15 (1.19%) JSON
10 14 (1.11%) Node.js
10 14 (1.11%) REST
11 10 (0.79%) OpenTelemetry
11 10 (0.79%) XML
12 9 (0.72%) ARM Templates
12 9 (0.72%) Spring Boot
13 8 (0.64%) Elastic Stack
13 8 (0.64%) Microsoft Graph
14 6 (0.48%) RFC 2544
15 5 (0.40%) YAML
16 4 (0.32%) Regular Expression
Miscellaneous
1 244 (19.40%) Data Centre
2 88 (7.00%) Security Posture
3 69 (5.48%) PKI
4 48 (3.82%) Onboarding
5 46 (3.66%) Operational Technology
6 45 (3.58%) Cloud Native
6 45 (3.58%) Hybrid Cloud
7 31 (2.46%) Public Cloud
8 28 (2.23%) Management Information System
8 28 (2.23%) Replication
9 24 (1.91%) Cyber Threat
9 24 (1.91%) Security Operations Centre
10 21 (1.67%) Data Protection Act
11 19 (1.51%) Clustering
12 18 (1.43%) SCADA
13 17 (1.35%) NHS
13 17 (1.35%) Private Cloud
14 15 (1.19%) IoT
14 15 (1.19%) Product Ownership
15 13 (1.03%) Fat Client
Operating Systems
1 316 (25.12%) Windows
2 210 (16.69%) Linux
3 123 (9.78%) Windows Server
4 33 (2.62%) Unix
5 30 (2.38%) VMS
6 28 (2.23%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
7 11 (0.87%) Windows 10
7 11 (0.87%) Windows 7
7 11 (0.87%) Windows Server 2019
8 9 (0.72%) Amazon Linux
8 9 (0.72%) Ubuntu
9 7 (0.56%) Solaris
10 6 (0.48%) AIX
10 6 (0.48%) Windows Server 2016
11 5 (0.40%) Android
11 5 (0.40%) Mac OS
12 4 (0.32%) CatOS
12 4 (0.32%) CentOS
12 4 (0.32%) Windows Server 2003
12 4 (0.32%) Windows Server 2012
Processes & Methodologies
1 242 (19.24%) Cybersecurity
2 213 (16.93%) Problem-Solving
3 200 (15.90%) DevOps
4 177 (14.07%) CI/CD
5 176 (13.99%) Infrastructure as Code
6 150 (11.92%) Migration
7 136 (10.81%) Cloud Security
8 135 (10.73%) SIEM
9 134 (10.65%) Incident Response
10 127 (10.10%) Infrastructure Engineering
11 126 (10.02%) High Availability
12 123 (9.78%) Agile
12 123 (9.78%) ITIL
13 122 (9.70%) Load Balancing
14 110 (8.74%) Zero Trust
15 101 (8.03%) Stakeholder Management
16 97 (7.71%) Change Management
17 94 (7.47%) Mentoring
18 82 (6.52%) Continuous Improvement
18 82 (6.52%) Security Architecture
Programming Languages
1 217 (17.25%) Python
2 192 (15.26%) PowerShell
3 97 (7.71%) Bash
4 58 (4.61%) SQL
5 39 (3.10%) Java
6 31 (2.46%) Perl
7 26 (2.07%) Bicep
8 12 (0.95%) Kusto Query Language
8 12 (0.95%) Ruby
9 8 (0.64%) JavaScript
9 8 (0.64%) Rust
10 6 (0.48%) COBOL
10 6 (0.48%) Groovy
10 6 (0.48%) Shell Script
11 4 (0.32%) C#
11 4 (0.32%) Go
12 3 (0.24%) PL/SQL
13 1 (0.079%) ActionScript
13 1 (0.079%) Lisp
Qualifications
1 431 (34.26%) Security Cleared
2 284 (22.58%) SC Cleared
3 236 (18.76%) Cisco Certification
4 191 (15.18%) CCNP
5 118 (9.38%) DV Cleared
6 115 (9.14%) Degree
7 94 (7.47%) CCNA
7 94 (7.47%) CISSP
8 57 (4.53%) CISM
9 52 (4.13%) Azure Certification
10 49 (3.90%) CCIE
11 45 (3.58%) AWS Certification
12 44 (3.50%) Microsoft Certification
13 31 (2.46%) CompTIA Security+
14 24 (1.91%) JNCIP
14 24 (1.91%) JNCIS
15 20 (1.59%) CEH
16 19 (1.51%) Computer Science Degree
17 17 (1.35%) CREST Certified
18 16 (1.27%) CHECK Team Member
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 114 (9.06%) ISO/IEC 27001
2 96 (7.63%) NIST
3 63 (5.01%) GDPR
4 44 (3.50%) PCI DSS
5 29 (2.31%) NCSC
6 26 (2.07%) Cyber Essentials
6 26 (2.07%) SLA
7 19 (1.51%) QA
8 15 (1.19%) PMO
9 12 (0.95%) GRC
10 11 (0.87%) Sarbanes-Oxley
11 8 (0.64%) Actionable Recommendations
12 6 (0.48%) HIPAA
12 6 (0.48%) HMG Security Policy Framework
12 6 (0.48%) JSP 440
13 5 (0.40%) SOC 2
14 4 (0.32%) COBIT
14 4 (0.32%) NIST 800
15 3 (0.24%) GxP
15 3 (0.24%) RMADS
System Software
1 229 (18.20%) Active Directory
2 166 (13.20%) VMware Infrastructure
3 113 (8.98%) Docker
4 62 (4.93%) VMware NSX
5 38 (3.02%) Hyper-V
6 35 (2.78%) vSphere
7 29 (2.31%) Virtual Machines
8 21 (1.67%) VMware ESXi
9 17 (1.35%) Virtual Desktop
10 15 (1.19%) Squid
11 11 (0.87%) Firmware
12 9 (0.72%) DFS Replication
12 9 (0.72%) Virtual Servers
13 5 (0.40%) BitLocker
13 5 (0.40%) KVM
13 5 (0.40%) Microsoft App-V
13 5 (0.40%) NDS
13 5 (0.40%) NetIQ eDirectory
14 4 (0.32%) Postfix
14 4 (0.32%) Snort
Systems Management
1 201 (15.98%) Terraform
2 160 (12.72%) Ansible
3 116 (9.22%) Kubernetes
4 87 (6.92%) FortiGate
5 60 (4.77%) Microsoft Intune
6 44 (3.50%) Single Sign-On
7 42 (3.34%) Grafana
8 37 (2.94%) Prometheus
9 36 (2.86%) SCCM
10 27 (2.15%) Active Directory Federation Services
11 26 (2.07%) vCenter Server
12 19 (1.51%) Nmap
13 15 (1.19%) Nessus
13 15 (1.19%) QRadar
14 14 (1.11%) Fluentd
14 14 (1.11%) Nagios
15 13 (1.03%) CASB
16 12 (0.95%) WMI
17 11 (0.87%) CSIRT
18 9 (0.72%) Oracle RMAN
Vendors
1 412 (32.75%) Cisco
2 278 (22.10%) Microsoft
3 272 (21.62%) Palo Alto
4 211 (16.77%) VMware
5 146 (11.61%) F5
6 142 (11.29%) CheckPoint
7 133 (10.57%) Fortinet
8 119 (9.46%) Juniper
9 102 (8.11%) Splunk
10 78 (6.20%) Aruba
11 69 (5.48%) SolarWinds
12 62 (4.93%) Meraki
13 51 (4.05%) Google
14 50 (3.97%) Oracle
15 49 (3.90%) Zscaler
16 47 (3.74%) ServiceNow
17 39 (3.10%) Citrix
18 30 (2.38%) Red Hat
19 25 (1.99%) Dell
20 24 (1.91%) Tenable