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 22 July 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
22 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 93 54 55
Rank change year-on-year -39 +1 -7
Contract jobs citing Firewall 1,448 1,407 1,451
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.75% 4.31% 3.51%
As % of the Communications & Networking category 29.00% 35.47% 28.22%
Number of daily rates quoted 923 834 913
10th Percentile £350 £325 £282
25th Percentile £413 £413 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £515
Median % change year-on-year - -2.91% -1.90%
75th Percentile £589 £600 £608
90th Percentile £650 £688 £675
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £489 £513
% change year-on-year +2.35% -4.68% +7.89%
Number of hourly rates quoted 38 27 41
10th Percentile £28.70 £14.20 £18.50
25th Percentile £37.53 £15.23 £23.92
Median hourly rate £61.25 £30.00 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +104.17% -50.00% -9.09%
75th Percentile £77.44 £42.61 £85.65
90th Percentile £94.42 £89.63 £87.46
UK excluding London median hourly rate £63.75 £30.00 £76.99
% change year-on-year +112.50% -61.03% +18.45%

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 4,993 3,967 5,141
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 9.47% 12.16% 12.44%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,011 2,422 3,069
10th Percentile £250 £235 £213
25th Percentile £400 £375 £363
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £489 £500
Median % change year-on-year +2.25% -2.20% -
75th Percentile £588 £589 £600
90th Percentile £675 £675 £688
UK excluding London median daily rate £490 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +3.05% -5.00% +9.17%
Number of hourly rates quoted 324 193 383
10th Percentile £16.00 £14.99 £13.90
25th Percentile £19.34 £25.15 £17.66
Median hourly rate £26.00 £46.25 £40.00
Median % change year-on-year -43.78% +15.63% -16.67%
75th Percentile £65.00 £65.00 £63.75
90th Percentile £74.26 £83.80 £73.65
UK excluding London median hourly rate £26.55 £42.50 £47.50
% change year-on-year -37.53% -10.53% -16.91%

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 22 July 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 22 July 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 22 July 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 -40 1,255 £500 - 445
UK excluding London -30 817 £500 +2.35% 379
London -56 483 £500 - 120
Work from Home -31 399 £520 +4.00% 152
North of England -13 292 £500 +5.26% 85
South East -28 232 £513 +2.50% 137
North West -4 189 £537 +13.05% 43
Yorkshire -35 87 £450 -8.07% 30
Midlands -66 78 £450 -9.27% 45
East of England -9 71 £525 -4.55% 34
South West -45 68 £538 +7.50% 48
Scotland +6 65 £438 -1.41% 23
West Midlands -64 62 £434 -15.78% 27
North East -15 22 £625 - 14
Wales -22 18 £425 +17.24% 10
East Midlands -24 13 £500 +6.16% 18
Northern Ireland -5 1 - - 7

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 41 (2.83%) Microsoft Exchange
2 32 (2.21%) Confluence
3 26 (1.80%) SharePoint
4 17 (1.17%) nginx
5 13 (0.90%) Apache
6 10 (0.69%) CICS
7 6 (0.41%) SAS
8 4 (0.28%) Tomcat
9 3 (0.21%) CloudStack
9 3 (0.21%) FactoryTalk
9 3 (0.21%) IIS
9 3 (0.21%) Skype for Business
10 2 (0.14%) Apache Pulsar
10 2 (0.14%) CMS
10 2 (0.14%) IBM HTTP Server
10 2 (0.14%) Oracle HTTP Server
10 2 (0.14%) Umbraco
10 2 (0.14%) WebSphere
10 2 (0.14%) WebSphere Application Server
10 2 (0.14%) WebSphere Portal
Applications
1 22 (1.52%) MS Visio
2 20 (1.38%) Microsoft Office
3 19 (1.31%) Microsoft Excel
4 8 (0.55%) Microsoft Project
5 4 (0.28%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 1 (0.069%) Spreadsheet
6 1 (0.069%) Windchill
Business Applications
1 2 (0.14%) Dynamics GP
2 1 (0.069%) Bloomberg TOMS
2 1 (0.069%) Dynamics CRM
2 1 (0.069%) Eikon
2 1 (0.069%) Payment Gateway
2 1 (0.069%) Primavera
2 1 (0.069%) Remedy ITSM
2 1 (0.069%) Teamcenter
Cloud Services
1 516 (35.64%) Azure
2 322 (22.24%) AWS
3 150 (10.36%) Entra ID
4 123 (8.49%) GCP
5 120 (8.29%) Microsoft 365
6 73 (5.04%) GitHub
7 66 (4.56%) IaaS
8 62 (4.28%) Virtual Private Cloud
9 56 (3.87%) SaaS
10 54 (3.73%) Azure DevOps
11 47 (3.25%) Azure Monitor
12 44 (3.04%) Azure ExpressRoute
12 44 (3.04%) PaaS
13 39 (2.69%) Serverless
14 38 (2.62%) Azure Sentinel
15 36 (2.49%) OCI
16 32 (2.21%) Google Kubernetes Engine
17 31 (2.14%) GitHub Actions
18 29 (2.00%) Amazon EC2
19 28 (1.93%) AWS CloudFormation
Communications & Networking
1 425 (29.35%) VPN
2 410 (28.31%) Network Security
3 394 (27.21%) WAN
4 358 (24.72%) DNS
5 295 (20.37%) LAN
6 272 (18.78%) BGP
7 220 (15.19%) OSPF
8 210 (14.50%) TCP/IP
9 204 (14.09%) VLAN
10 201 (13.88%) DHCP
11 170 (11.74%) Wireless
12 148 (10.22%) SD-WAN
13 123 (8.49%) Wi-Fi
14 100 (6.91%) MPLS
15 94 (6.49%) BIG-IP
16 92 (6.35%) IPsec
17 84 (5.80%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
17 84 (5.80%) VXLAN
18 80 (5.52%) SSL
19 79 (5.46%) Cisco ISE
Database & Business Intelligence
1 31 (2.14%) SQL Server
2 18 (1.24%) Power BI
3 17 (1.17%) Elasticsearch
3 17 (1.17%) PostgreSQL
4 13 (0.90%) Amazon RDS
5 10 (0.69%) Data Lake
5 10 (0.69%) DataStage
6 9 (0.62%) Azure SQL Database
6 9 (0.62%) Relational Database
7 8 (0.55%) MySQL
7 8 (0.55%) Oracle Database
8 5 (0.35%) Delta Lake
9 4 (0.28%) Amazon Aurora
9 4 (0.28%) Data Warehouse
9 4 (0.28%) Db2
9 4 (0.28%) NoSQL
10 3 (0.21%) Amazon Athena
10 3 (0.21%) Amazon Redshift
10 3 (0.21%) Big Data
10 3 (0.21%) Metadata
Development Applications
1 98 (6.77%) JIRA
2 53 (3.66%) Jenkins
3 44 (3.04%) Git
4 41 (2.83%) GitLab
5 14 (0.97%) Sonatype Nexus
6 11 (0.76%) Bitbucket
7 9 (0.62%) Artifactory
7 9 (0.62%) Chocolatey
7 9 (0.62%) SonarQube
8 6 (0.41%) Browser DevTools
9 4 (0.28%) Burp Suite
10 3 (0.21%) Atlassian Bamboo
11 2 (0.14%) Cucumber
11 2 (0.14%) Gradle
11 2 (0.14%) Introscope
11 2 (0.14%) LoadRunner
11 2 (0.14%) Metasploit
11 2 (0.14%) MSI
11 2 (0.14%) REST Assured
11 2 (0.14%) Team Foundation Server
General
1 309 (21.34%) Social Skills
2 193 (13.33%) Finance
3 131 (9.05%) Analytical Skills
4 118 (8.15%) Public Sector
5 77 (5.32%) Banking
5 77 (5.32%) Documentation Skills
6 52 (3.59%) Telecoms
7 25 (1.73%) Legal
7 25 (1.73%) Manufacturing
8 23 (1.59%) Financial Institution
9 21 (1.45%) Influencing Skills
10 20 (1.38%) Military
11 16 (1.10%) Local Government
11 16 (1.10%) Retail
12 12 (0.83%) Organisational Skills
12 12 (0.83%) Police
13 10 (0.69%) Inclusion and Diversity
13 10 (0.69%) Law
14 9 (0.62%) Investment Banking
14 9 (0.62%) Presentation Skills
Job Titles
1 476 (32.87%) Network Engineer
2 212 (14.64%) Architect
3 205 (14.16%) Senior
4 145 (10.01%) Infrastructure Engineer
5 129 (8.91%) Security Engineer
6 90 (6.22%) Senior Network Engineer
7 73 (5.04%) Cloud Engineer
8 70 (4.83%) Network Architect
9 61 (4.21%) Network Security Engineer
10 60 (4.14%) Consultant
11 57 (3.94%) Azure Engineer
12 49 (3.38%) SC Cleared Network Engineer
12 49 (3.38%) Technical Architect
13 47 (3.25%) Security Architect
14 45 (3.11%) Senior Infrastructure Engineer
15 43 (2.97%) DevOps Engineer
16 39 (2.69%) Cisco Engineer
17 38 (2.62%) Lead
18 37 (2.56%) Cisco Network Engineer
19 35 (2.42%) Solutions Architect
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 72 (4.97%) 802.1X
2 42 (2.90%) Middleware
3 35 (2.42%) LDAP
4 26 (1.80%) SAML
5 20 (1.38%) ARM Templates
5 20 (1.38%) OpenID
6 11 (0.76%) OAuth
7 10 (0.69%) Kafka
8 9 (0.62%) LangChain
8 9 (0.62%) OAuth2
8 9 (0.62%) PyTorch
8 9 (0.62%) REST
8 9 (0.62%) scikit-learn
9 8 (0.55%) .NET
9 8 (0.55%) YAML
10 7 (0.48%) SailPoint
11 6 (0.41%) Elastic Stack
11 6 (0.41%) React
12 5 (0.35%) Jinja
12 5 (0.35%) OpenTelemetry
Miscellaneous
1 332 (22.93%) Data Centre
2 94 (6.49%) Cloud Native
3 87 (6.01%) Hybrid Cloud
4 82 (5.66%) PKI
5 75 (5.18%) Security Posture
6 56 (3.87%) Management Information System
7 53 (3.66%) Onboarding
8 43 (2.97%) Operational Technology
9 41 (2.83%) Clustering
10 31 (2.14%) Distributed Denial-of-Service
11 30 (2.07%) Data Protection Act
12 29 (2.00%) IoT
12 29 (2.00%) Public Cloud
13 24 (1.66%) Enterprise Storage
14 23 (1.59%) SCADA
15 21 (1.45%) Driving Licence
15 21 (1.45%) Self-Motivation
16 19 (1.31%) Linux Command Line
17 18 (1.24%) Cyber Threat
17 18 (1.24%) Enterprise Software
Operating Systems
1 334 (23.07%) Windows
2 203 (14.02%) Linux
3 122 (8.43%) Windows Server
4 51 (3.52%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 35 (2.42%) Unix
6 23 (1.59%) VMS
7 19 (1.31%) Ubuntu
8 14 (0.97%) Windows Server 2019
9 11 (0.76%) Solaris
10 10 (0.69%) AIX
10 10 (0.69%) CentOS
11 9 (0.62%) Windows Server 2016
12 7 (0.48%) Mac OS
12 7 (0.48%) Windows 10
12 7 (0.48%) Windows Server 2012
13 6 (0.41%) Rocky
13 6 (0.41%) Windows Server 2003
14 4 (0.28%) Amazon Linux
14 4 (0.28%) Android
14 4 (0.28%) SUSE
Processes & Methodologies
1 241 (16.64%) DevOps
2 218 (15.06%) CI/CD
2 218 (15.06%) Infrastructure as Code
3 203 (14.02%) Load Balancing
4 200 (13.81%) Infrastructure Engineering
5 199 (13.74%) Problem-Solving
6 191 (13.19%) Migration
7 189 (13.05%) ITIL
8 182 (12.57%) Cybersecurity
9 181 (12.50%) High Availability
10 156 (10.77%) Zero Trust
11 155 (10.70%) Agile
12 135 (9.32%) Change Management
13 133 (9.19%) SIEM
14 128 (8.84%) Project Delivery
15 120 (8.29%) Validation
16 119 (8.22%) Observability
17 114 (7.87%) Stakeholder Management
18 106 (7.32%) Cloud Security
19 105 (7.25%) Roadmaps
Programming Languages
1 260 (17.96%) Python
2 182 (12.57%) PowerShell
3 116 (8.01%) Bash
4 49 (3.38%) Bicep
5 43 (2.97%) SQL
6 34 (2.35%) Java
7 11 (0.76%) ActionScript
7 11 (0.76%) Perl
8 10 (0.69%) COBOL
9 7 (0.48%) Groovy
10 6 (0.41%) Kusto Query Language
11 5 (0.35%) C++
11 5 (0.35%) Go
11 5 (0.35%) JavaScript
12 3 (0.21%) PL/SQL
12 3 (0.21%) Shell Script
13 2 (0.14%) C
13 2 (0.14%) Jython
13 2 (0.14%) PHP
14 1 (0.069%) Korn
Qualifications
1 484 (33.43%) Security Cleared
2 340 (23.48%) SC Cleared
3 284 (19.61%) Cisco Certification
4 213 (14.71%) CCNP
5 124 (8.56%) DV Cleared
6 117 (8.08%) CCNA
7 114 (7.87%) Degree
8 75 (5.18%) CISSP
9 59 (4.07%) Azure Certification
10 43 (2.97%) CCIE
11 42 (2.90%) AWS Certification
12 35 (2.42%) CISM
13 34 (2.35%) Microsoft Certification
14 23 (1.59%) Computer Science Degree
14 23 (1.59%) JNCIS
15 21 (1.45%) Network+ Certification
16 19 (1.31%) JNCIP
17 18 (1.24%) PMP
18 17 (1.17%) Server+ Certification
19 16 (1.10%) JNCIA
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 73 (5.04%) ISO/IEC 27001
2 58 (4.01%) NIST
3 43 (2.97%) GDPR
4 32 (2.21%) NCSC
5 25 (1.73%) PCI DSS
6 23 (1.59%) SLA
7 22 (1.52%) QA
8 21 (1.45%) Cyber Essentials
9 9 (0.62%) Data Quality
9 9 (0.62%) NIST 800
10 8 (0.55%) Disclosure Scotland
11 7 (0.48%) GxP
11 7 (0.48%) JSP 440
12 6 (0.41%) Actionable Recommendations
12 6 (0.41%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
12 6 (0.41%) GRC
13 5 (0.35%) HIPAA
13 5 (0.35%) ISO/IEC 27002 (supersedes ISO/IEC 17799)
13 5 (0.35%) PMO
14 4 (0.28%) SOC 2
System Software
1 227 (15.68%) Active Directory
2 162 (11.19%) VMware Infrastructure
3 60 (4.14%) Docker
4 59 (4.07%) VMware NSX
5 47 (3.25%) Hyper-V
6 41 (2.83%) vSphere
7 40 (2.76%) Virtual Machines
8 38 (2.62%) VMware ESXi
9 26 (1.80%) Firmware
10 18 (1.24%) Virtual Desktop
11 16 (1.10%) Squid
12 12 (0.83%) BitLocker
13 8 (0.55%) Microsoft App-V
14 6 (0.41%) NFS
15 4 (0.28%) Terminal Services
16 3 (0.21%) Dovecot
16 3 (0.21%) EMC RecoverPoint
16 3 (0.21%) Postfix
16 3 (0.21%) Virtual Servers
17 2 (0.14%) VirtualBox
Systems Management
1 272 (18.78%) Terraform
2 189 (13.05%) Ansible
3 114 (7.87%) Kubernetes
4 113 (7.80%) FortiGate
5 68 (4.70%) Microsoft Intune
6 62 (4.28%) Grafana
7 59 (4.07%) Prometheus
8 39 (2.69%) SCCM
9 35 (2.42%) Single Sign-On
10 24 (1.66%) vCenter Server
11 20 (1.38%) Progress Chef
12 18 (1.24%) Puppet
13 16 (1.10%) CASB
14 14 (0.97%) Cisco Prime
15 12 (0.83%) VxRail
16 11 (0.76%) Consul
17 10 (0.69%) QRadar
18 9 (0.62%) Active Directory Federation Services
18 9 (0.62%) Packer
19 8 (0.55%) Nagios
Vendors
1 525 (36.26%) Cisco
2 313 (21.62%) Microsoft
2 313 (21.62%) Palo Alto
3 217 (14.99%) VMware
4 210 (14.50%) Fortinet
5 203 (14.02%) F5
6 164 (11.33%) Juniper
7 131 (9.05%) CheckPoint
8 81 (5.59%) Splunk
9 74 (5.11%) Arista
9 74 (5.11%) Aruba
10 72 (4.97%) Google
11 70 (4.83%) ServiceNow
12 69 (4.77%) SolarWinds
13 65 (4.49%) Zscaler
14 50 (3.45%) Red Hat
15 47 (3.25%) Citrix
16 43 (2.97%) Meraki
17 33 (2.28%) Infoblox
18 32 (2.21%) Dynatrace