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

6 months to
22 May 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 86 51 54
Rank change year-on-year -35 +3 0
Contract jobs citing Firewall 1,340 1,190 1,521
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.77% 4.13% 3.58%
As % of the Communications & Networking category 28.91% 32.79% 28.22%
Number of daily rates quoted 873 705 958
10th Percentile £341 £325 £296
25th Percentile £413 £406 £410
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £508
Median % change year-on-year - -1.48% -3.33%
75th Percentile £588 £600 £624
90th Percentile £650 £688 £747
UK excluding London median daily rate £499 £488 £500
% change year-on-year +2.31% -2.50% +2.72%
Number of hourly rates quoted 28 18 43
10th Percentile £18.19 - £16.00
25th Percentile £37.25 £14.20 £23.92
Median hourly rate £48.72 £22.00 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +121.45% -63.33% -3.23%
75th Percentile £70.15 £41.25 £86.32
90th Percentile £82.24 £53.63 £87.52
UK excluding London median hourly rate £48.72 £22.00 £83.77
% change year-on-year +121.45% -73.74% +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 4,635 3,629 5,389
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 9.59% 12.60% 12.69%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,852 2,246 3,216
10th Percentile £263 £213 £205
25th Percentile £400 £358 £350
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £481 £488
Median % change year-on-year +4.06% -1.44% -5.93%
75th Percentile £588 £588 £600
90th Percentile £675 £675 £688
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £458 £475
% change year-on-year +3.83% -3.68% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 260 153 417
10th Percentile £16.01 £14.99 £13.50
25th Percentile £21.14 £17.30 £16.30
Median hourly rate £32.50 £37.50 £40.00
Median % change year-on-year -13.33% -6.25% +116.22%
75th Percentile £65.88 £60.13 £63.75
90th Percentile £75.00 £75.00 £70.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £40.54 £28.00 £45.88
% change year-on-year +44.79% -38.97% +154.89%

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 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 22 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 22 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 -36 1,120 £500 -2.20% 503
UK excluding London -22 761 £499 +2.31% 461
London -59 406 £513 -2.38% 138
Work from Home -30 393 £520 +4.00% 227
South East -2 238 £500 - 159
North of England -16 232 £508 +6.84% 115
North West -3 152 £540 +13.68% 70
Midlands -58 81 £423 -23.87% 67
West Midlands -34 69 £413 -21.43% 44
East of England -4 67 £502 -4.48% 28
Yorkshire -29 66 £422 -12.11% 31
South West -43 59 £525 +5.00% 46
Scotland +13 58 £450 +2.86% 27
Wales -17 28 £425 +16.44% 15
North East -14 16 £625 +25.00% 16
East Midlands -41 8 £488 -14.10% 23
Northern Ireland -4 2 £385 - 12

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 (2.69%) Microsoft Exchange
2 33 (2.46%) Confluence
3 18 (1.34%) SharePoint
4 14 (1.04%) nginx
5 10 (0.75%) Apache
5 10 (0.75%) CICS
6 6 (0.45%) SAS
7 4 (0.30%) IIS
8 3 (0.22%) Skype for Business
8 3 (0.22%) Tomcat
9 2 (0.15%) Apache Pulsar
9 2 (0.15%) CloudStack
9 2 (0.15%) CMS
9 2 (0.15%) IBM HTTP Server
9 2 (0.15%) Oracle HTTP Server
9 2 (0.15%) Umbraco
9 2 (0.15%) WebSphere
9 2 (0.15%) WebSphere Application Server
9 2 (0.15%) WebSphere Portal
10 1 (0.075%) MTS
Applications
1 30 (2.24%) Microsoft Office
2 24 (1.79%) MS Visio
3 22 (1.64%) Microsoft Excel
4 17 (1.27%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 8 (0.60%) Microsoft Project
6 1 (0.075%) Windchill
Business Applications
1 1 (0.075%) Dynamics GP
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
1 1 (0.075%) Teamcenter
Cloud Services
1 443 (33.06%) Azure
2 279 (20.82%) AWS
3 110 (8.21%) GCP
4 109 (8.13%) Entra ID
5 103 (7.69%) Microsoft 365
6 65 (4.85%) GitHub
7 56 (4.18%) IaaS
7 56 (4.18%) Virtual Private Cloud
8 51 (3.81%) Azure DevOps
9 43 (3.21%) PaaS
10 37 (2.76%) Azure Sentinel
10 37 (2.76%) SaaS
11 35 (2.61%) GitHub Actions
12 34 (2.54%) Azure ExpressRoute
12 34 (2.54%) Azure Monitor
13 29 (2.16%) OCI
14 28 (2.09%) Serverless
15 26 (1.94%) Amazon EC2
15 26 (1.94%) Amazon EKS
16 22 (1.64%) Amazon S3
Communications & Networking
1 370 (27.61%) WAN
2 369 (27.54%) Network Security
3 343 (25.60%) VPN
4 281 (20.97%) LAN
5 276 (20.60%) DNS
6 233 (17.39%) BGP
7 212 (15.82%) OSPF
8 166 (12.39%) VLAN
9 144 (10.75%) SD-WAN
10 143 (10.67%) TCP/IP
11 142 (10.60%) DHCP
12 135 (10.07%) Wireless
13 106 (7.91%) Wi-Fi
14 91 (6.79%) IPsec
15 90 (6.72%) MPLS
15 90 (6.72%) VXLAN
16 88 (6.57%) BIG-IP
17 78 (5.82%) Ethernet VPN
18 70 (5.22%) Cisco ISE
19 68 (5.07%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
Database & Business Intelligence
1 26 (1.94%) SQL Server
2 18 (1.34%) Elasticsearch
2 18 (1.34%) PostgreSQL
3 13 (0.97%) Power BI
4 10 (0.75%) DataStage
4 10 (0.75%) Oracle Database
5 7 (0.52%) Azure SQL Database
5 7 (0.52%) Data Lake
5 7 (0.52%) Data Warehouse
5 7 (0.52%) MongoDB
5 7 (0.52%) MySQL
6 6 (0.45%) Relational Database
7 5 (0.37%) Amazon RDS
8 4 (0.30%) Amazon Athena
8 4 (0.30%) Amazon QuickSight
8 4 (0.30%) Amazon Redshift
8 4 (0.30%) Metadata
8 4 (0.30%) NoSQL
8 4 (0.30%) SQL Server Integration Services
9 3 (0.22%) Oracle Reports
Development Applications
1 84 (6.27%) JIRA
2 54 (4.03%) Jenkins
3 44 (3.28%) Git
3 44 (3.28%) GitLab
4 17 (1.27%) Burp Suite
5 16 (1.19%) Metasploit
6 15 (1.12%) Sonatype Nexus
7 9 (0.67%) Artifactory
7 9 (0.67%) Bitbucket
7 9 (0.67%) Chocolatey
7 9 (0.67%) Jaeger
8 8 (0.60%) SonarQube
9 5 (0.37%) Browser DevTools
10 4 (0.30%) CircleCI
11 2 (0.15%) Introscope
11 2 (0.15%) Postman
11 2 (0.15%) Team Foundation Server
12 1 (0.075%) Atlassian Bamboo
12 1 (0.075%) Cucumber
12 1 (0.075%) Gradle
General
1 307 (22.91%) Social Skills
2 157 (11.72%) Finance
3 119 (8.88%) Analytical Skills
4 109 (8.13%) Public Sector
5 87 (6.49%) Documentation Skills
6 54 (4.03%) Banking
7 40 (2.99%) Telecoms
8 29 (2.16%) Legal
9 25 (1.87%) Manufacturing
10 24 (1.79%) Financial Institution
11 21 (1.57%) Military
12 17 (1.27%) Influencing Skills
13 15 (1.12%) Law
14 14 (1.04%) Retail
15 10 (0.75%) Inclusion and Diversity
16 9 (0.67%) Organisational Skills
17 8 (0.60%) Front Office
17 8 (0.60%) Investment Banking
17 8 (0.60%) Presentation Skills
18 7 (0.52%) Local Government
Job Titles
1 414 (30.90%) Network Engineer
2 208 (15.52%) Architect
3 161 (12.01%) Senior
4 111 (8.28%) Infrastructure Engineer
5 105 (7.84%) Security Engineer
6 71 (5.30%) Network Architect
7 68 (5.07%) SC Cleared Network Engineer
8 64 (4.78%) Senior Network Engineer
9 57 (4.25%) Azure Engineer
10 54 (4.03%) Cloud Engineer
11 45 (3.36%) Network Security Engineer
12 44 (3.28%) Technical Architect
13 43 (3.21%) Cisco Engineer
13 43 (3.21%) Lead
14 39 (2.91%) Cisco Network Engineer
15 38 (2.84%) Security Architect
16 37 (2.76%) DevOps Engineer
17 34 (2.54%) Analyst
17 34 (2.54%) Consultant
18 31 (2.31%) Solutions Architect
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 71 (5.30%) 802.1X
2 41 (3.06%) LDAP
3 40 (2.99%) Middleware
4 28 (2.09%) SAML
5 23 (1.72%) OpenID
6 18 (1.34%) Kafka
7 12 (0.90%) OAuth
8 11 (0.82%) Elastic Stack
8 11 (0.82%) OAuth2
8 11 (0.82%) OpenTelemetry
9 10 (0.75%) REST
9 10 (0.75%) Spring Boot
10 7 (0.52%) YAML
11 6 (0.45%) .NET
11 6 (0.45%) ARM Templates
11 6 (0.45%) HTML
11 6 (0.45%) JSON
11 6 (0.45%) LangChain
11 6 (0.45%) PyTorch
11 6 (0.45%) scikit-learn
Miscellaneous
1 328 (24.48%) Data Centre
2 73 (5.45%) Security Posture
3 67 (5.00%) Cloud Native
4 60 (4.48%) PKI
5 58 (4.33%) Hybrid Cloud
6 48 (3.58%) Onboarding
7 39 (2.91%) Clustering
8 38 (2.84%) Management Information System
8 38 (2.84%) Operational Technology
9 33 (2.46%) Public Cloud
10 26 (1.94%) IoT
11 25 (1.87%) Data Protection Act
12 23 (1.72%) Cyber Threat
13 21 (1.57%) Enterprise Storage
14 19 (1.42%) SCADA
15 17 (1.27%) Self-Motivation
16 16 (1.19%) Driving Licence
16 16 (1.19%) Enterprise Software
17 14 (1.04%) BYOD
18 13 (0.97%) Distributed Denial-of-Service
Operating Systems
1 306 (22.84%) Windows
2 178 (13.28%) Linux
3 120 (8.96%) Windows Server
4 31 (2.31%) Unix
5 30 (2.24%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 26 (1.94%) VMS
7 11 (0.82%) Solaris
8 10 (0.75%) AIX
8 10 (0.75%) Windows Server 2016
8 10 (0.75%) Windows Server 2019
9 8 (0.60%) Windows Server 2003
10 6 (0.45%) Ubuntu
10 6 (0.45%) Windows 10
11 5 (0.37%) CatOS
11 5 (0.37%) Mac OS
11 5 (0.37%) Windows Server 2012
12 4 (0.30%) SUSE
13 3 (0.22%) Amazon Linux
13 3 (0.22%) CentOS
13 3 (0.22%) Windows 7
Processes & Methodologies
1 220 (16.42%) DevOps
2 190 (14.18%) CI/CD
3 189 (14.10%) Cybersecurity
4 181 (13.51%) Infrastructure as Code
5 180 (13.43%) Load Balancing
6 169 (12.61%) Migration
7 166 (12.39%) High Availability
7 166 (12.39%) Problem-Solving
8 154 (11.49%) Infrastructure Engineering
9 153 (11.42%) ITIL
10 140 (10.45%) Zero Trust
11 131 (9.78%) Agile
12 106 (7.91%) SIEM
13 103 (7.69%) Cloud Security
14 100 (7.46%) Change Management
14 100 (7.46%) Project Delivery
15 92 (6.87%) Network Segmentation
15 92 (6.87%) Observability
16 91 (6.79%) Technical Leadership
17 88 (6.57%) Validation
Programming Languages
1 190 (14.18%) Python
2 139 (10.37%) PowerShell
3 76 (5.67%) Bash
4 55 (4.10%) SQL
5 41 (3.06%) Bicep
6 31 (2.31%) Java
7 10 (0.75%) COBOL
7 10 (0.75%) JavaScript
7 10 (0.75%) Perl
8 8 (0.60%) Kusto Query Language
8 8 (0.60%) Rust
9 6 (0.45%) PL/SQL
10 5 (0.37%) Go
10 5 (0.37%) Groovy
10 5 (0.37%) Shell Script
11 4 (0.30%) ActionScript
12 3 (0.22%) C++
13 2 (0.15%) C#
13 2 (0.15%) Jython
13 2 (0.15%) PHP
Qualifications
1 486 (36.27%) Security Cleared
2 364 (27.16%) SC Cleared
3 278 (20.75%) Cisco Certification
4 211 (15.75%) CCNP
5 112 (8.36%) CCNA
6 108 (8.06%) Degree
7 106 (7.91%) DV Cleared
8 60 (4.48%) CISSP
9 59 (4.40%) Azure Certification
10 39 (2.91%) CCIE
11 34 (2.54%) AWS Certification
11 34 (2.54%) CISM
12 31 (2.31%) Microsoft Certification
13 23 (1.72%) JNCIS
14 21 (1.57%) CompTIA Security+
14 21 (1.57%) Network+ Certification
15 20 (1.49%) Computer Science Degree
16 19 (1.42%) JNCIA
17 17 (1.27%) CREST Certified
18 16 (1.19%) CHECK Team Member
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 74 (5.52%) ISO/IEC 27001
2 53 (3.96%) NIST
3 52 (3.88%) GDPR
4 36 (2.69%) PCI DSS
5 31 (2.31%) SLA
6 29 (2.16%) NCSC
7 27 (2.01%) QA
8 20 (1.49%) Cyber Essentials
9 16 (1.19%) PMO
10 7 (0.52%) Data Quality
10 7 (0.52%) Disclosure Scotland
11 6 (0.45%) Actionable Recommendations
11 6 (0.45%) GRC
11 6 (0.45%) JSP 440
11 6 (0.45%) RMADS
12 5 (0.37%) HMG Security Policy Framework
12 5 (0.37%) ISO/IEC 27002 (supersedes ISO/IEC 17799)
12 5 (0.37%) SOC 2
13 4 (0.30%) GxP
13 4 (0.30%) NIST 800
System Software
1 211 (15.75%) Active Directory
2 156 (11.64%) VMware Infrastructure
3 61 (4.55%) VMware NSX
4 54 (4.03%) Docker
5 40 (2.99%) Hyper-V
6 38 (2.84%) vSphere
7 34 (2.54%) Virtual Machines
8 29 (2.16%) VMware ESXi
9 22 (1.64%) Firmware
10 20 (1.49%) Virtual Desktop
11 16 (1.19%) Squid
12 10 (0.75%) BitLocker
13 8 (0.60%) Microsoft App-V
14 3 (0.22%) DFS Replication
14 3 (0.22%) KVM
14 3 (0.22%) NFS
14 3 (0.22%) Oracle RAC
15 2 (0.15%) Citrix Hypervisor
15 2 (0.15%) iptables
15 2 (0.15%) Virtual Servers
Systems Management
1 218 (16.27%) Terraform
2 167 (12.46%) Ansible
3 103 (7.69%) FortiGate
4 101 (7.54%) Kubernetes
5 62 (4.63%) Grafana
6 52 (3.88%) Microsoft Intune
6 52 (3.88%) Prometheus
7 33 (2.46%) Single Sign-On
8 29 (2.16%) SCCM
9 25 (1.87%) vCenter Server
10 18 (1.34%) Nmap
11 15 (1.12%) Active Directory Federation Services
12 14 (1.04%) CASB
13 13 (0.97%) Nagios
13 13 (0.97%) Puppet
14 12 (0.90%) Cisco Prime
14 12 (0.90%) QRadar
15 11 (0.82%) VxRail
16 10 (0.75%) Consul
16 10 (0.75%) Progress Chef
Vendors
1 491 (36.64%) Cisco
2 308 (22.99%) Palo Alto
3 261 (19.48%) Microsoft
4 203 (15.15%) VMware
5 182 (13.58%) F5
6 181 (13.51%) Fortinet
7 147 (10.97%) Juniper
8 135 (10.07%) CheckPoint
9 94 (7.01%) Aruba
10 83 (6.19%) Splunk
11 69 (5.15%) ServiceNow
12 67 (5.00%) SolarWinds
13 62 (4.63%) Arista
14 50 (3.73%) Google
15 44 (3.28%) Zscaler
16 43 (3.21%) Meraki
17 35 (2.61%) Citrix
18 34 (2.54%) Red Hat
19 28 (2.09%) Oracle
20 27 (2.01%) Extreme Networks