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 30 May 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
30 May 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 88 51 54
Rank change year-on-year -37 +3 -2
Contract jobs citing Firewall 1,370 1,229 1,534
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.79% 4.26% 3.57%
As % of the Communications & Networking category 28.64% 33.74% 28.17%
Number of daily rates quoted 892 730 965
10th Percentile £348 £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 £743
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £488 £500
% change year-on-year +2.56% -2.50% +2.56%
Number of hourly rates quoted 31 20 45
10th Percentile £20.75 - £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 £70.41 £41.25 £85.65
90th Percentile £78.75 £47.88 £87.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £48.72 £28.75 £83.50
% change year-on-year +69.46% -65.57% +34.68%

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 4,783 3,643 5,445
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 9.73% 12.62% 12.69%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,935 2,261 3,259
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 £465 £483
% change year-on-year +2.15% -3.63% +1.58%
Number of hourly rates quoted 281 158 416
10th Percentile £16.01 £14.99 £13.50
25th Percentile £21.25 £17.42 £16.30
Median hourly rate £28.88 £39.66 £40.00
Median % change year-on-year -27.18% -0.85% +116.22%
75th Percentile £65.00 £58.75 £63.75
90th Percentile £75.00 £76.50 £70.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £33.86 £30.32 £45.88
% change year-on-year +11.68% -33.91% +151.88%

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 30 May 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 30 May 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 30 May 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 -42 1,147 £500 -1.48% 420
UK excluding London -23 778 £500 +2.56% 391
London -60 416 £513 -2.38% 94
Work from Home -27 409 £520 +4.00% 170
North of England -20 252 £500 +3.09% 103
South East -10 236 £500 - 148
North West -8 161 £540 +13.68% 61
Midlands -58 80 £420 -20.00% 54
Yorkshire -43 75 £425 -13.62% 31
West Midlands -53 68 £413 -20.75% 35
East of England -15 66 £503 +0.60% 29
Scotland +17 63 £450 +2.86% 14
South West -45 59 £525 +5.00% 44
Wales -17 26 £425 +21.43% 9
North East -6 20 £625 +25.00% 13
East Midlands -44 8 £488 -12.16% 19
Northern Ireland 0 2 £385 -

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 (2.55%) Microsoft Exchange
2 33 (2.41%) Confluence
3 21 (1.53%) SharePoint
4 16 (1.17%) nginx
5 11 (0.80%) Apache
6 10 (0.73%) CICS
7 6 (0.44%) IIS
7 6 (0.44%) SAS
8 5 (0.36%) 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 (0.073%) MTS
Applications
1 29 (2.12%) MS Visio
2 27 (1.97%) Microsoft Office
3 21 (1.53%) Microsoft Excel
4 14 (1.02%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 9 (0.66%) Microsoft Project
6 1 (0.073%) Windchill
Business Applications
1 1 (0.073%) Dynamics GP
1 1 (0.073%) Payment Gateway
1 1 (0.073%) Primavera
1 1 (0.073%) Remedy ITSM
1 1 (0.073%) SAP S/4HANA
1 1 (0.073%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
1 1 (0.073%) Teamcenter
Cloud Services
1 456 (33.28%) Azure
2 300 (21.90%) AWS
3 115 (8.39%) GCP
4 110 (8.03%) Entra ID
5 105 (7.66%) Microsoft 365
6 70 (5.11%) GitHub
7 64 (4.67%) Virtual Private Cloud
8 57 (4.16%) IaaS
9 52 (3.80%) Azure DevOps
10 42 (3.07%) PaaS
11 41 (2.99%) SaaS
12 37 (2.70%) GitHub Actions
13 36 (2.63%) Azure ExpressRoute
14 35 (2.55%) Azure Sentinel
15 34 (2.48%) OCI
16 33 (2.41%) Azure Monitor
17 29 (2.12%) Serverless
18 27 (1.97%) Amazon EC2
18 27 (1.97%) Amazon EKS
19 24 (1.75%) Google Kubernetes Engine
Communications & Networking
1 381 (27.81%) Network Security
2 378 (27.59%) WAN
3 354 (25.84%) VPN
4 291 (21.24%) DNS
5 289 (21.09%) LAN
6 239 (17.45%) BGP
7 214 (15.62%) OSPF
8 171 (12.48%) VLAN
9 150 (10.95%) DHCP
10 149 (10.88%) SD-WAN
11 147 (10.73%) TCP/IP
12 141 (10.29%) Wireless
13 109 (7.96%) Wi-Fi
14 95 (6.93%) BIG-IP
15 94 (6.86%) MPLS
15 94 (6.86%) VXLAN
16 93 (6.79%) IPsec
17 79 (5.77%) Ethernet VPN
18 74 (5.40%) SSL
19 73 (5.33%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
Database & Business Intelligence
1 27 (1.97%) SQL Server
2 18 (1.31%) Elasticsearch
3 17 (1.24%) PostgreSQL
4 14 (1.02%) Power BI
5 10 (0.73%) DataStage
5 10 (0.73%) Oracle Database
6 8 (0.58%) Azure SQL Database
6 8 (0.58%) 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 (6.42%) JIRA
2 61 (4.45%) Jenkins
3 47 (3.43%) GitLab
4 45 (3.28%) Git
5 15 (1.09%) Sonatype Nexus
6 13 (0.95%) Burp Suite
7 12 (0.88%) Metasploit
8 9 (0.66%) Artifactory
8 9 (0.66%) Bitbucket
8 9 (0.66%) Chocolatey
8 9 (0.66%) Jaeger
9 8 (0.58%) SonarQube
10 5 (0.36%) 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 (0.073%) Atlassian Bamboo
13 1 (0.073%) LoadRunner
13 1 (0.073%) PVCS
General
1 306 (22.34%) Social Skills
2 169 (12.34%) Finance
3 120 (8.76%) Analytical Skills
4 111 (8.10%) Public Sector
5 85 (6.20%) Documentation Skills
6 55 (4.01%) Banking
7 39 (2.85%) Telecoms
8 31 (2.26%) Legal
9 24 (1.75%) Financial Institution
10 23 (1.68%) Manufacturing
11 21 (1.53%) Military
12 17 (1.24%) Influencing Skills
13 15 (1.09%) Law
14 13 (0.95%) Retail
15 9 (0.66%) Inclusion and Diversity
15 9 (0.66%) Organisational Skills
16 8 (0.58%) Front Office
16 8 (0.58%) Investment Banking
16 8 (0.58%) Local Government
16 8 (0.58%) Presentation Skills
Job Titles
1 431 (31.46%) Network Engineer
2 215 (15.69%) Architect
3 170 (12.41%) Senior
4 115 (8.39%) Infrastructure Engineer
5 110 (8.03%) Security Engineer
6 78 (5.69%) Network Architect
7 71 (5.18%) Senior Network Engineer
8 67 (4.89%) SC Cleared Network Engineer
9 61 (4.45%) Cloud Engineer
10 56 (4.09%) Azure Engineer
11 46 (3.36%) Technical Architect
12 45 (3.28%) Network Security Engineer
13 43 (3.14%) Lead
14 42 (3.07%) Cisco Engineer
15 39 (2.85%) DevOps Engineer
15 39 (2.85%) Security Architect
16 38 (2.77%) Cisco Network Engineer
17 37 (2.70%) Consultant
18 33 (2.41%) Analyst
18 33 (2.41%) Senior Infrastructure Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 70 (5.11%) 802.1X
2 41 (2.99%) Middleware
3 39 (2.85%) LDAP
4 28 (2.04%) SAML
5 23 (1.68%) OpenID
6 18 (1.31%) Kafka
7 12 (0.88%) OAuth
8 11 (0.80%) OAuth2
8 11 (0.80%) OpenTelemetry
9 10 (0.73%) Elastic Stack
9 10 (0.73%) REST
9 10 (0.73%) 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
1 338 (24.67%) Data Centre
2 81 (5.91%) Cloud Native
3 77 (5.62%) Security Posture
4 65 (4.74%) Hybrid Cloud
5 63 (4.60%) PKI
6 51 (3.72%) Onboarding
7 46 (3.36%) Management Information System
8 39 (2.85%) Clustering
9 38 (2.77%) Operational Technology
10 34 (2.48%) Public Cloud
11 26 (1.90%) Data Protection Act
11 26 (1.90%) IoT
12 24 (1.75%) Cyber Threat
13 22 (1.61%) Enterprise Storage
14 19 (1.39%) SCADA
15 18 (1.31%) Self-Motivation
16 16 (1.17%) Distributed Denial-of-Service
16 16 (1.17%) Driving Licence
16 16 (1.17%) Enterprise Software
17 15 (1.09%) BYOD
Operating Systems
1 313 (22.85%) Windows
2 189 (13.80%) Linux
3 119 (8.69%) Windows Server
4 37 (2.70%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 30 (2.19%) Unix
6 26 (1.90%) VMS
7 12 (0.88%) Windows Server 2019
8 11 (0.80%) Solaris
9 10 (0.73%) AIX
9 10 (0.73%) Windows Server 2016
10 8 (0.58%) Ubuntu
10 8 (0.58%) Windows Server 2003
11 7 (0.51%) Windows 10
11 7 (0.51%) Windows Server 2012
12 6 (0.44%) Mac OS
13 5 (0.36%) CatOS
13 5 (0.36%) CentOS
14 4 (0.29%) Android
14 4 (0.29%) SUSE
15 3 (0.22%) Data ONTAP
Processes & Methodologies
1 234 (17.08%) DevOps
2 205 (14.96%) CI/CD
3 188 (13.72%) Load Balancing
4 187 (13.65%) Cybersecurity
4 187 (13.65%) Infrastructure as Code
5 175 (12.77%) High Availability
6 172 (12.55%) Migration
7 168 (12.26%) Problem-Solving
8 157 (11.46%) Infrastructure Engineering
9 153 (11.17%) ITIL
10 147 (10.73%) Zero Trust
11 144 (10.51%) Agile
12 112 (8.18%) SIEM
13 107 (7.81%) Cloud Security
14 106 (7.74%) Change Management
15 105 (7.66%) Project Delivery
16 101 (7.37%) Observability
17 98 (7.15%) Network Segmentation
18 97 (7.08%) Roadmaps
19 95 (6.93%) Technical Leadership
Programming Languages
1 207 (15.11%) Python
2 143 (10.44%) PowerShell
3 82 (5.99%) Bash
4 55 (4.01%) SQL
5 42 (3.07%) Bicep
6 38 (2.77%) Java
7 10 (0.73%) COBOL
7 10 (0.73%) Perl
8 9 (0.66%) JavaScript
9 8 (0.58%) ActionScript
9 8 (0.58%) Rust
10 7 (0.51%) Kusto Query Language
11 6 (0.44%) Groovy
11 6 (0.44%) PL/SQL
12 5 (0.36%) Go
12 5 (0.36%) Shell Script
13 3 (0.22%) C++
14 2 (0.15%) C
14 2 (0.15%) Jython
14 2 (0.15%) PHP
Qualifications
1 491 (35.84%) Security Cleared
2 368 (26.86%) SC Cleared
3 289 (21.09%) Cisco Certification
4 219 (15.99%) CCNP
5 116 (8.47%) CCNA
6 115 (8.39%) Degree
7 105 (7.66%) DV Cleared
8 68 (4.96%) CISSP
9 66 (4.82%) Azure Certification
10 42 (3.07%) AWS Certification
11 39 (2.85%) CCIE
12 34 (2.48%) CISM
13 31 (2.26%) Microsoft Certification
14 25 (1.82%) Network+ Certification
15 23 (1.68%) JNCIS
16 20 (1.46%) Computer Science Degree
16 20 (1.46%) JNCIA
17 18 (1.31%) CompTIA Security+
18 17 (1.24%) JNCIP
18 17 (1.24%) Server+ Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 72 (5.26%) ISO/IEC 27001
2 57 (4.16%) NIST
3 48 (3.50%) GDPR
4 35 (2.55%) PCI DSS
5 32 (2.34%) SLA
6 30 (2.19%) NCSC
7 26 (1.90%) QA
8 21 (1.53%) Cyber Essentials
9 13 (0.95%) PMO
10 8 (0.58%) Disclosure Scotland
11 7 (0.51%) Actionable Recommendations
11 7 (0.51%) Data Quality
12 6 (0.44%) GRC
12 6 (0.44%) JSP 440
12 6 (0.44%) RMADS
13 5 (0.36%) HMG Security Policy Framework
13 5 (0.36%) ISO/IEC 27002 (supersedes ISO/IEC 17799)
13 5 (0.36%) NIST 800
13 5 (0.36%) SOC 2
14 4 (0.29%) GxP
System Software
1 212 (15.47%) Active Directory
2 159 (11.61%) VMware Infrastructure
3 64 (4.67%) VMware NSX
4 60 (4.38%) Docker
5 40 (2.92%) Hyper-V
6 38 (2.77%) vSphere
7 34 (2.48%) Virtual Machines
8 29 (2.12%) VMware ESXi
9 22 (1.61%) Firmware
10 21 (1.53%) Virtual Desktop
11 16 (1.17%) Squid
12 11 (0.80%) BitLocker
13 8 (0.58%) Microsoft App-V
14 3 (0.22%) DFS Replication
14 3 (0.22%) Dovecot
14 3 (0.22%) Oracle RAC
14 3 (0.22%) Postfix
15 2 (0.15%) Citrix Hypervisor
15 2 (0.15%) EMC RecoverPoint
15 2 (0.15%) KVM
Systems Management
1 227 (16.57%) Terraform
2 174 (12.70%) Ansible
3 108 (7.88%) Kubernetes
4 103 (7.52%) FortiGate
5 63 (4.60%) Grafana
6 54 (3.94%) Prometheus
7 53 (3.87%) Microsoft Intune
8 34 (2.48%) Single Sign-On
9 28 (2.04%) SCCM
10 24 (1.75%) vCenter Server
11 17 (1.24%) Active Directory Federation Services
11 17 (1.24%) Progress Chef
12 14 (1.02%) Nmap
12 14 (1.02%) Puppet
13 13 (0.95%) CASB
13 13 (0.95%) Nagios
13 13 (0.95%) QRadar
14 12 (0.88%) Cisco Prime
15 11 (0.80%) Consul
15 11 (0.80%) VxRail
Vendors
1 503 (36.72%) Cisco
2 311 (22.70%) Palo Alto
3 266 (19.42%) Microsoft
4 204 (14.89%) VMware
5 191 (13.94%) F5
5 191 (13.94%) Fortinet
6 153 (11.17%) Juniper
7 134 (9.78%) CheckPoint
8 94 (6.86%) Aruba
9 81 (5.91%) Splunk
10 75 (5.47%) ServiceNow
11 71 (5.18%) SolarWinds
12 66 (4.82%) Arista
13 57 (4.16%) Google
14 42 (3.07%) Zscaler
15 41 (2.99%) Red Hat
16 39 (2.85%) Meraki
17 35 (2.55%) Citrix
18 28 (2.04%) Extreme Networks
18 28 (2.04%) Oracle