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

6 months to
11 May 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 89 52 54
Rank change year-on-year -37 +2 +2
Contract jobs citing Firewall 1,329 1,216 1,546
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.79% 4.14% 3.60%
As % of the Communications & Networking category 29.18% 32.41% 28.25%
Number of daily rates quoted 864 727 973
10th Percentile £327 £316 £300
25th Percentile £413 £406 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £508 £513
Median % change year-on-year -1.48% -0.98% -2.38%
75th Percentile £588 £600 £625
90th Percentile £650 £688 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £499 £492 £500
% change year-on-year +1.37% -1.60% +2.56%
Number of hourly rates quoted 30 18 42
10th Percentile £19.90 - £16.00
25th Percentile £37.25 £14.20 £23.92
Median hourly rate £52.36 £26.25 £66.75
Median % change year-on-year +99.47% -60.67% +7.66%
75th Percentile £71.64 £41.44 £86.66
90th Percentile £85.10 £53.63 £87.52
UK excluding London median hourly rate £56.00 £25.00 £83.77
% change year-on-year +124.00% -70.15% +35.10%

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 4,555 3,752 5,473
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 9.57% 12.76% 12.73%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,821 2,310 3,274
10th Percentile £250 £213 £205
25th Percentile £400 £363 £350
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £495 £489 £495
Median % change year-on-year +1.28% -1.26% -4.44%
75th Percentile £588 £598 £600
90th Percentile £675 £675 £700
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £466 £475
% change year-on-year +2.04% -2.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 240 169 418
10th Percentile £16.01 £14.99 £13.50
25th Percentile £21.25 £18.13 £16.44
Median hourly rate £41.24 £32.50 £40.00
Median % change year-on-year +26.89% -18.75% +116.22%
75th Percentile £65.91 £58.69 £63.75
90th Percentile £75.00 £75.00 £70.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £48.11 £24.66 £46.14
% change year-on-year +95.09% -46.55% +149.85%

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 11 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 11 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 11 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 -41 1,107 £500 -3.29% 542
UK excluding London -25 739 £499 +1.37% 457
London -54 419 £510 -2.86% 151
Work from Home -28 397 £515 +3.00% 205
South East -6 237 £500 - 148
North of England -23 209 £500 +5.26% 129
North West -14 137 £528 +11.16% 73
Midlands -51 86 £416 -25.67% 65
West Midlands -31 72 £413 -21.43% 37
East of England -9 64 £500 -2.44% 45
Yorkshire -35 61 £425 -12.37% 34
Scotland +25 58 £425 +1.19% 22
South West -56 55 £550 +0.92% 46
Wales -13 30 £425 +16.44% 14
North East -7 13 £625 +13.64% 23
East Midlands -48 10 £488 -14.10% 28
Northern Ireland 0 2 £385 - 1

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 36 (2.71%) Microsoft Exchange
2 32 (2.41%) Confluence
3 16 (1.20%) SharePoint
4 13 (0.98%) nginx
5 10 (0.75%) Apache
5 10 (0.75%) CICS
6 6 (0.45%) SAS
7 5 (0.38%) IIS
8 3 (0.23%) Skype for Business
8 3 (0.23%) WebSphere
9 2 (0.15%) Apache Pulsar
9 2 (0.15%) CMS
9 2 (0.15%) IBM HTTP Server
9 2 (0.15%) Oracle HTTP Server
9 2 (0.15%) Tomcat
9 2 (0.15%) Umbraco
9 2 (0.15%) WebSphere Application Server
9 2 (0.15%) WebSphere Portal
10 1 (0.075%) JBoss
10 1 (0.075%) MTS
Applications
1 30 (2.26%) Microsoft Office
2 23 (1.73%) MS Visio
3 22 (1.66%) Microsoft Excel
4 17 (1.28%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 7 (0.53%) Microsoft Project
6 1 (0.075%) Windchill
Business Applications
1 1 (0.075%) Payment Gateway
1 1 (0.075%) Primavera
1 1 (0.075%) SAP S/4HANA
1 1 (0.075%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
Cloud Services
1 449 (33.78%) Azure
2 277 (20.84%) AWS
3 110 (8.28%) Microsoft 365
4 108 (8.13%) Entra ID
4 108 (8.13%) GCP
5 65 (4.89%) GitHub
6 53 (3.99%) IaaS
6 53 (3.99%) Virtual Private Cloud
7 52 (3.91%) Azure DevOps
8 43 (3.24%) PaaS
9 41 (3.09%) Azure Sentinel
9 41 (3.09%) SaaS
10 40 (3.01%) Azure Monitor
10 40 (3.01%) GitHub Actions
11 33 (2.48%) Serverless
12 32 (2.41%) Azure ExpressRoute
13 27 (2.03%) Amazon EKS
13 27 (2.03%) OCI
14 26 (1.96%) Amazon EC2
15 24 (1.81%) AWS Lambda
Communications & Networking
1 359 (27.01%) Network Security
2 355 (26.71%) WAN
3 325 (24.45%) VPN
4 273 (20.54%) DNS
5 267 (20.09%) LAN
6 226 (17.01%) BGP
7 206 (15.50%) OSPF
8 157 (11.81%) VLAN
9 147 (11.06%) TCP/IP
10 144 (10.84%) DHCP
11 139 (10.46%) SD-WAN
12 128 (9.63%) Wireless
13 103 (7.75%) Wi-Fi
14 90 (6.77%) MPLS
15 88 (6.62%) IPsec
16 81 (6.09%) VXLAN
17 79 (5.94%) BIG-IP
18 71 (5.34%) Cisco ISE
18 71 (5.34%) Ethernet VPN
19 67 (5.04%) Cisco Nexus
Database & Business Intelligence
1 26 (1.96%) SQL Server
2 18 (1.35%) Elasticsearch
3 17 (1.28%) PostgreSQL
4 13 (0.98%) Power BI
5 10 (0.75%) DataStage
5 10 (0.75%) Oracle Database
6 8 (0.60%) Amazon RDS
7 7 (0.53%) Azure SQL Database
7 7 (0.53%) Data Lake
7 7 (0.53%) Data Warehouse
7 7 (0.53%) MongoDB
8 6 (0.45%) MySQL
9 4 (0.30%) Amazon Athena
9 4 (0.30%) Amazon QuickSight
9 4 (0.30%) Amazon Redshift
9 4 (0.30%) Metadata
9 4 (0.30%) NoSQL
9 4 (0.30%) SQL Server Integration Services
10 3 (0.23%) Amazon Aurora
10 3 (0.23%) Delta Lake
Development Applications
1 80 (6.02%) JIRA
2 49 (3.69%) Jenkins
3 42 (3.16%) Git
4 39 (2.93%) GitLab
5 17 (1.28%) Sonatype Nexus
6 16 (1.20%) Burp Suite
6 16 (1.20%) Metasploit
7 12 (0.90%) Bitbucket
8 9 (0.68%) Chocolatey
8 9 (0.68%) Jaeger
9 7 (0.53%) Artifactory
9 7 (0.53%) SonarQube
10 5 (0.38%) Browser DevTools
11 4 (0.30%) CircleCI
12 2 (0.15%) Introscope
12 2 (0.15%) Postman
12 2 (0.15%) Team Foundation Server
13 1 (0.075%) Atlassian Bamboo
13 1 (0.075%) PVCS
13 1 (0.075%) Travis CI
General
1 313 (23.55%) Social Skills
2 158 (11.89%) Finance
3 121 (9.10%) Analytical Skills
4 110 (8.28%) Public Sector
5 88 (6.62%) Documentation Skills
6 52 (3.91%) Banking
7 45 (3.39%) Telecoms
8 29 (2.18%) Legal
9 24 (1.81%) Financial Institution
9 24 (1.81%) Manufacturing
10 20 (1.50%) Military
11 16 (1.20%) Influencing Skills
12 15 (1.13%) Law
12 15 (1.13%) Retail
13 11 (0.83%) Inclusion and Diversity
14 10 (0.75%) Front Office
14 10 (0.75%) Investment Banking
14 10 (0.75%) Local Government
14 10 (0.75%) Presentation Skills
15 9 (0.68%) Organisational Skills
Job Titles
1 405 (30.47%) Network Engineer
2 210 (15.80%) Architect
3 162 (12.19%) Senior
4 106 (7.98%) Infrastructure Engineer
4 106 (7.98%) Security Engineer
5 72 (5.42%) Network Architect
6 63 (4.74%) Senior Network Engineer
7 61 (4.59%) SC Cleared Network Engineer
8 57 (4.29%) Azure Engineer
9 51 (3.84%) Cloud Engineer
10 43 (3.24%) Network Security Engineer
11 42 (3.16%) Lead
12 41 (3.09%) DevOps Engineer
12 41 (3.09%) Technical Architect
13 39 (2.93%) Security Architect
14 38 (2.86%) Cisco Engineer
15 35 (2.63%) Analyst
15 35 (2.63%) Cisco Network Engineer
16 32 (2.41%) Consultant
17 31 (2.33%) Solutions Architect
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 69 (5.19%) 802.1X
2 42 (3.16%) LDAP
3 38 (2.86%) Middleware
4 29 (2.18%) SAML
5 25 (1.88%) OpenID
6 20 (1.50%) Kafka
7 13 (0.98%) OAuth
8 12 (0.90%) OAuth2
8 12 (0.90%) REST
9 11 (0.83%) OpenTelemetry
10 9 (0.68%) Elastic Stack
10 9 (0.68%) Spring Boot
11 8 (0.60%) ARM Templates
11 8 (0.60%) JSON
12 6 (0.45%) .NET
12 6 (0.45%) HTML
12 6 (0.45%) Node.js
12 6 (0.45%) PyTorch
12 6 (0.45%) scikit-learn
12 6 (0.45%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 304 (22.87%) Data Centre
2 77 (5.79%) Cloud Native
3 66 (4.97%) Security Posture
4 63 (4.74%) PKI
5 50 (3.76%) Hybrid Cloud
6 47 (3.54%) Onboarding
7 41 (3.09%) Operational Technology
8 39 (2.93%) Clustering
9 38 (2.86%) Management Information System
10 33 (2.48%) Public Cloud
11 27 (2.03%) Data Protection Act
11 27 (2.03%) IoT
12 22 (1.66%) SCADA
13 21 (1.58%) Cyber Threat
14 20 (1.50%) Enterprise Storage
15 19 (1.43%) Enterprise Software
16 17 (1.28%) Self-Motivation
17 16 (1.20%) Driving Licence
18 15 (1.13%) NHS
18 15 (1.13%) Replication
Operating Systems
1 307 (23.10%) Windows
2 175 (13.17%) Linux
3 119 (8.95%) Windows Server
4 32 (2.41%) Unix
5 28 (2.11%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 25 (1.88%) VMS
7 11 (0.83%) Solaris
8 10 (0.75%) AIX
8 10 (0.75%) Windows Server 2016
8 10 (0.75%) Windows Server 2019
9 7 (0.53%) Windows Server 2003
10 6 (0.45%) Windows 10
11 5 (0.38%) CatOS
11 5 (0.38%) Mac OS
11 5 (0.38%) Windows Server 2012
12 4 (0.30%) SUSE
12 4 (0.30%) Windows 7
13 3 (0.23%) Amazon Linux
13 3 (0.23%) Data ONTAP
13 3 (0.23%) Ubuntu
Processes & Methodologies
1 214 (16.10%) DevOps
2 199 (14.97%) Cybersecurity
3 184 (13.84%) CI/CD
4 179 (13.47%) Infrastructure as Code
5 173 (13.02%) Problem-Solving
6 170 (12.79%) Load Balancing
7 168 (12.64%) Migration
8 161 (12.11%) High Availability
9 159 (11.96%) ITIL
10 145 (10.91%) Infrastructure Engineering
11 131 (9.86%) Zero Trust
12 127 (9.56%) Agile
13 111 (8.35%) SIEM
14 106 (7.98%) Change Management
15 103 (7.75%) Cloud Security
16 91 (6.85%) Technical Leadership
17 89 (6.70%) Project Delivery
18 87 (6.55%) Observability
18 87 (6.55%) Roadmaps
19 86 (6.47%) Network Segmentation
Programming Languages
1 184 (13.84%) Python
2 152 (11.44%) PowerShell
3 76 (5.72%) Bash
4 58 (4.36%) SQL
5 39 (2.93%) Bicep
6 29 (2.18%) Java
7 13 (0.98%) Perl
8 10 (0.75%) COBOL
8 10 (0.75%) JavaScript
8 10 (0.75%) Kusto Query Language
9 8 (0.60%) Rust
10 6 (0.45%) PL/SQL
11 5 (0.38%) Shell Script
12 4 (0.30%) C#
12 4 (0.30%) Go
12 4 (0.30%) Groovy
12 4 (0.30%) Ruby
13 3 (0.23%) C++
14 2 (0.15%) Jython
14 2 (0.15%) PHP
Qualifications
1 480 (36.12%) Security Cleared
2 357 (26.86%) SC Cleared
3 263 (19.79%) Cisco Certification
4 202 (15.20%) CCNP
5 109 (8.20%) Degree
6 106 (7.98%) CCNA
7 105 (7.90%) DV Cleared
8 59 (4.44%) CISSP
9 56 (4.21%) Azure Certification
10 38 (2.86%) CCIE
11 37 (2.78%) AWS Certification
12 34 (2.56%) CISM
13 27 (2.03%) Microsoft Certification
14 23 (1.73%) JNCIS
15 22 (1.66%) CompTIA Security+
16 20 (1.50%) Computer Science Degree
16 20 (1.50%) JNCIP
17 19 (1.43%) JNCIA
18 18 (1.35%) Network+ Certification
19 17 (1.28%) PMP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 81 (6.09%) ISO/IEC 27001
2 55 (4.14%) GDPR
3 54 (4.06%) NIST
4 38 (2.86%) PCI DSS
5 31 (2.33%) SLA
6 30 (2.26%) NCSC
7 24 (1.81%) QA
8 23 (1.73%) Cyber Essentials
9 17 (1.28%) PMO
10 7 (0.53%) Data Quality
10 7 (0.53%) Disclosure Scotland
10 7 (0.53%) JSP 440
11 6 (0.45%) Actionable Recommendations
11 6 (0.45%) GRC
11 6 (0.45%) RMADS
12 5 (0.38%) HMG Security Policy Framework
12 5 (0.38%) ISO/IEC 27002 (supersedes ISO/IEC 17799)
12 5 (0.38%) NIST 800
12 5 (0.38%) SOC 2
13 4 (0.30%) GxP
System Software
1 218 (16.40%) Active Directory
2 162 (12.19%) VMware Infrastructure
3 67 (5.04%) VMware NSX
4 61 (4.59%) Docker
5 42 (3.16%) Hyper-V
6 35 (2.63%) Virtual Machines
7 32 (2.41%) vSphere
8 30 (2.26%) VMware ESXi
9 21 (1.58%) Virtual Desktop
10 20 (1.50%) Firmware
11 13 (0.98%) Squid
12 10 (0.75%) BitLocker
13 8 (0.60%) Microsoft App-V
14 3 (0.23%) DFS Replication
14 3 (0.23%) KVM
14 3 (0.23%) NFS
14 3 (0.23%) Oracle RAC
14 3 (0.23%) Virtual Servers
15 2 (0.15%) EMC RecoverPoint
15 2 (0.15%) iptables
Systems Management
1 213 (16.03%) Terraform
2 164 (12.34%) Ansible
3 104 (7.83%) Kubernetes
4 100 (7.52%) FortiGate
5 56 (4.21%) Grafana
6 52 (3.91%) Microsoft Intune
7 48 (3.61%) Prometheus
8 33 (2.48%) Single Sign-On
9 29 (2.18%) SCCM
10 26 (1.96%) vCenter Server
11 18 (1.35%) Nmap
12 15 (1.13%) Active Directory Federation Services
13 14 (1.05%) QRadar
14 13 (0.98%) CASB
14 13 (0.98%) Nagios
15 12 (0.90%) Cisco Prime
15 12 (0.90%) Puppet
16 11 (0.83%) VxRail
16 11 (0.83%) WSUS
17 10 (0.75%) Progress Chef
Vendors
1 480 (36.12%) Cisco
2 306 (23.02%) Palo Alto
3 276 (20.77%) Microsoft
4 207 (15.58%) VMware
5 174 (13.09%) Fortinet
6 172 (12.94%) F5
7 146 (10.99%) Juniper
8 136 (10.23%) CheckPoint
9 91 (6.85%) Aruba
10 83 (6.25%) Splunk
11 67 (5.04%) SolarWinds
12 62 (4.67%) ServiceNow
13 58 (4.36%) Arista
14 54 (4.06%) Google
15 45 (3.39%) Meraki
15 45 (3.39%) Zscaler
16 40 (3.01%) Citrix
17 32 (2.41%) Oracle
17 32 (2.41%) Red Hat
18 27 (2.03%) Extreme Networks