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

6 months to
18 Feb 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 81 49 47
Rank change year-on-year -32 -2 +12
Contract jobs citing Firewall 1,271 1,249 1,774
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 3.13% 4.07% 4.00%
As % of the Communications & Networking category 30.31% 30.91% 29.88%
Number of daily rates quoted 834 741 1,106
10th Percentile £313 £313 £310
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 £590 £615 £627
90th Percentile £675 £715 £731
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% +26.57%
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 4,193 4,041 5,938
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 10.34% 13.17% 13.38%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,745 2,398 3,534
10th Percentile £204 £210 £205
25th Percentile £356 £361 £350
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £475 £500 £486
Median % change year-on-year -5.00% +2.99% -6.63%
75th Percentile £588 £600 £600
90th Percentile £675 £685 £700
UK excluding London median daily rate £450 £469 £475
% change year-on-year -4.00% -1.32% +1.06%
Number of hourly rates quoted 172 126 401
10th Percentile £15.50 £15.85 £14.36
25th Percentile £18.97 £21.46 £20.00
Median hourly rate £31.44 £32.50 £47.50
Median % change year-on-year -3.26% -31.58% +143.59%
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 18 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 18 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 18 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 -29 1,065 £500 -4.76% 578
UK excluding London -25 702 £492 -1.60% 528
London -49 399 £525 -4.11% 157
Work from Home -16 395 £500 -2.44% 227
North of England -26 212 £500 +5.26% 121
South East +17 198 £500 - 206
North West -23 122 £520 +9.47% 82
Midlands -33 108 £440 -17.80% 54
West Midlands -15 98 £439 -1.96% 40
Yorkshire -9 88 £465 +9.41% 26
South West -38 61 £550 +4.76% 52
Scotland -14 56 £425 -2.86% 31
East of England -27 41 £445 -15.24% 65
Wales -18 20 £425 +16.44% 14
East Midlands -50 8 £500 -23.14% 14
Northern Ireland - 7 £500 - 1
North East -17 5 £548 -0.45% 15

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 (3.23%) Microsoft Exchange
2 40 (3.15%) Confluence
3 23 (1.81%) SharePoint
4 16 (1.26%) nginx
5 13 (1.02%) Apache
6 8 (0.63%) OpenStack
7 7 (0.55%) IIS
8 6 (0.47%) CICS
8 6 (0.47%) SAS
9 3 (0.24%) Tomcat
10 2 (0.16%) Apache Pulsar
10 2 (0.16%) JBoss
10 2 (0.16%) Oracle HTTP Server
10 2 (0.16%) WebLogic
11 1 (0.079%) Anypoint
11 1 (0.079%) CMS
11 1 (0.079%) Traefik
11 1 (0.079%) WebSphere
Applications
1 38 (2.99%) Microsoft Office
2 21 (1.65%) MS Visio
3 19 (1.49%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 18 (1.42%) Microsoft Excel
5 4 (0.31%) 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
1 435 (34.23%) Azure
2 327 (25.73%) AWS
3 143 (11.25%) GCP
4 117 (9.21%) Microsoft 365
5 98 (7.71%) Entra ID
6 70 (5.51%) Virtual Private Cloud
7 56 (4.41%) GitHub
8 50 (3.93%) Amazon EC2
9 47 (3.70%) IaaS
10 45 (3.54%) Azure Sentinel
11 43 (3.38%) PaaS
12 41 (3.23%) Azure DevOps
13 40 (3.15%) Amazon S3
14 38 (2.99%) Azure Monitor
15 37 (2.91%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 36 (2.83%) Serverless
17 34 (2.68%) AWS CloudFormation
18 33 (2.60%) GitHub Actions
19 31 (2.44%) SaaS
20 29 (2.28%) AWS Lambda
Communications & Networking
1 329 (25.89%) Network Security
2 305 (24.00%) VPN
3 267 (21.01%) WAN
4 259 (20.38%) DNS
5 198 (15.58%) LAN
6 179 (14.08%) BGP
7 155 (12.20%) OSPF
8 149 (11.72%) TCP/IP
9 132 (10.39%) VLAN
10 115 (9.05%) DHCP
10 115 (9.05%) Wireless
11 109 (8.58%) SD-WAN
12 86 (6.77%) MPLS
13 84 (6.61%) Wi-Fi
14 69 (5.43%) SSL
15 63 (4.96%) IPsec
16 57 (4.48%) Cisco ASA
16 57 (4.48%) Cisco ISE
17 53 (4.17%) Cisco Nexus
18 46 (3.62%) HTTP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 34 (2.68%) SQL Server
2 25 (1.97%) Amazon RDS
3 23 (1.81%) PostgreSQL
4 14 (1.10%) Elasticsearch
5 9 (0.71%) Data Lake
6 8 (0.63%) Oracle Database
7 7 (0.55%) Data Warehouse
7 7 (0.55%) MongoDB
8 6 (0.47%) DataStage
9 5 (0.39%) Relational Database
10 4 (0.31%) Amazon Aurora
10 4 (0.31%) Redis
10 4 (0.31%) SQL Server Integration Services
11 3 (0.24%) Amazon QuickSight
11 3 (0.24%) DynamoDB
11 3 (0.24%) Oracle Exadata
11 3 (0.24%) Power BI
12 2 (0.16%) Azure SQL Database
12 2 (0.16%) DB2
12 2 (0.16%) MariaDB
Development Applications
1 74 (5.82%) JIRA
2 73 (5.74%) Jenkins
3 62 (4.88%) GitLab
4 61 (4.80%) Git
5 23 (1.81%) Sonatype Nexus
6 20 (1.57%) Bitbucket
7 15 (1.18%) Burp Suite
7 15 (1.18%) Metasploit
8 8 (0.63%) Jaeger
8 8 (0.63%) SonarQube
9 6 (0.47%) Chocolatey
9 6 (0.47%) Vagrant
10 4 (0.31%) 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
1 358 (28.17%) Social Skills
2 142 (11.17%) Finance
3 141 (11.09%) Analytical Skills
4 104 (8.18%) Public Sector
5 93 (7.32%) Documentation Skills
6 55 (4.33%) Banking
7 48 (3.78%) Telecoms
8 35 (2.75%) Legal
9 28 (2.20%) Manufacturing
10 26 (2.05%) Presentation Skills
11 17 (1.34%) Financial Institution
11 17 (1.34%) Military
12 15 (1.18%) Influencing Skills
13 13 (1.02%) Local Government
14 10 (0.79%) Law
14 10 (0.79%) Retail
15 9 (0.71%) Inclusion and Diversity
16 8 (0.63%) Aerospace
17 7 (0.55%) Electronics
17 7 (0.55%) Spanish Language
Job Titles
1 328 (25.81%) Network Engineer
2 213 (16.76%) Architect
3 122 (9.60%) Senior
4 115 (9.05%) Security Engineer
5 81 (6.37%) Infrastructure Engineer
6 73 (5.74%) Network Architect
7 56 (4.41%) Security Architect
8 51 (4.01%) Analyst
8 51 (4.01%) DevOps Engineer
9 50 (3.93%) Azure Engineer
9 50 (3.93%) Consultant
10 44 (3.46%) SC Cleared Network Engineer
11 42 (3.30%) Network Security Engineer
11 42 (3.30%) Platform Engineer
12 41 (3.23%) Solutions Architect
13 37 (2.91%) Lead
14 35 (2.75%) Senior Network Engineer
15 32 (2.52%) Cloud Engineer
16 31 (2.44%) Support Engineer
17 30 (2.36%) IT Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 51 (4.01%) 802.1X
2 43 (3.38%) LDAP
3 33 (2.60%) SAML
4 30 (2.36%) Middleware
5 28 (2.20%) OpenID
6 20 (1.57%) OAuth
7 19 (1.49%) OAuth2
8 16 (1.26%) Kafka
9 15 (1.18%) JSON
10 14 (1.10%) Node.js
10 14 (1.10%) REST
11 10 (0.79%) OpenTelemetry
11 10 (0.79%) XML
12 9 (0.71%) ARM Templates
12 9 (0.71%) Spring Boot
13 8 (0.63%) Elastic Stack
13 8 (0.63%) Microsoft Graph
14 6 (0.47%) RFC 2544
15 5 (0.39%) YAML
16 4 (0.31%) Regular Expression
Miscellaneous
1 246 (19.35%) Data Centre
2 91 (7.16%) Security Posture
3 69 (5.43%) PKI
4 48 (3.78%) Onboarding
5 46 (3.62%) Cloud Native
5 46 (3.62%) Hybrid Cloud
5 46 (3.62%) Operational Technology
6 31 (2.44%) Public Cloud
7 28 (2.20%) Management Information System
7 28 (2.20%) Replication
8 24 (1.89%) Cyber Threat
8 24 (1.89%) Security Operations Centre
9 21 (1.65%) Data Protection Act
10 19 (1.49%) Clustering
11 18 (1.42%) SCADA
12 17 (1.34%) NHS
12 17 (1.34%) Private Cloud
13 15 (1.18%) IoT
13 15 (1.18%) Product Ownership
14 13 (1.02%) Fat Client
Operating Systems
1 319 (25.10%) Windows
2 211 (16.60%) Linux
3 124 (9.76%) Windows Server
4 34 (2.68%) Unix
5 30 (2.36%) VMS
6 28 (2.20%) 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 (0.71%) Amazon Linux
8 9 (0.71%) Ubuntu
9 7 (0.55%) Solaris
10 6 (0.47%) AIX
10 6 (0.47%) Windows Server 2016
11 5 (0.39%) Android
11 5 (0.39%) Mac OS
12 4 (0.31%) CatOS
12 4 (0.31%) CentOS
12 4 (0.31%) Windows Server 2003
12 4 (0.31%) Windows Server 2012
Processes & Methodologies
1 244 (19.20%) Cybersecurity
2 216 (16.99%) Problem-Solving
3 202 (15.89%) DevOps
4 177 (13.93%) CI/CD
4 177 (13.93%) Infrastructure as Code
5 153 (12.04%) Migration
6 139 (10.94%) Cloud Security
7 136 (10.70%) Incident Response
7 136 (10.70%) SIEM
8 128 (10.07%) High Availability
8 128 (10.07%) Infrastructure Engineering
9 126 (9.91%) ITIL
10 123 (9.68%) Agile
10 123 (9.68%) Load Balancing
11 110 (8.65%) Zero Trust
12 101 (7.95%) Stakeholder Management
13 98 (7.71%) Change Management
14 95 (7.47%) Mentoring
15 82 (6.45%) Continuous Improvement
15 82 (6.45%) Security Architecture
Programming Languages
1 217 (17.07%) Python
2 192 (15.11%) PowerShell
3 97 (7.63%) Bash
4 59 (4.64%) SQL
5 39 (3.07%) Java
6 31 (2.44%) Perl
7 26 (2.05%) Bicep
8 12 (0.94%) Kusto Query Language
8 12 (0.94%) Ruby
9 8 (0.63%) JavaScript
9 8 (0.63%) Rust
10 6 (0.47%) COBOL
10 6 (0.47%) Groovy
10 6 (0.47%) Shell Script
11 4 (0.31%) C#
11 4 (0.31%) Go
12 3 (0.24%) PL/SQL
13 1 (0.079%) ActionScript
13 1 (0.079%) Lisp
Qualifications
1 432 (33.99%) Security Cleared
2 285 (22.42%) SC Cleared
3 240 (18.88%) Cisco Certification
4 194 (15.26%) CCNP
5 118 (9.28%) DV Cleared
6 115 (9.05%) Degree
7 95 (7.47%) CCNA
7 95 (7.47%) CISSP
8 57 (4.48%) CISM
9 53 (4.17%) Azure Certification
10 50 (3.93%) CCIE
11 45 (3.54%) AWS Certification
11 45 (3.54%) Microsoft Certification
12 32 (2.52%) CompTIA Security+
13 24 (1.89%) JNCIP
13 24 (1.89%) JNCIS
14 20 (1.57%) CEH
15 19 (1.49%) Computer Science Degree
16 17 (1.34%) CREST Certified
17 16 (1.26%) CHECK Team Member
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 114 (8.97%) ISO/IEC 27001
2 96 (7.55%) NIST
3 64 (5.04%) GDPR
4 45 (3.54%) PCI DSS
5 29 (2.28%) NCSC
6 26 (2.05%) Cyber Essentials
6 26 (2.05%) SLA
7 19 (1.49%) QA
8 15 (1.18%) PMO
9 12 (0.94%) GRC
10 11 (0.87%) Sarbanes-Oxley
11 9 (0.71%) Actionable Recommendations
12 6 (0.47%) HIPAA
12 6 (0.47%) HMG Security Policy Framework
12 6 (0.47%) JSP 440
13 5 (0.39%) SOC 2
14 4 (0.31%) COBIT
14 4 (0.31%) NIST 800
15 3 (0.24%) GxP
15 3 (0.24%) RMADS
System Software
1 232 (18.25%) Active Directory
2 166 (13.06%) VMware Infrastructure
3 113 (8.89%) Docker
4 62 (4.88%) VMware NSX
5 38 (2.99%) Hyper-V
6 35 (2.75%) vSphere
7 29 (2.28%) Virtual Machines
8 21 (1.65%) VMware ESXi
9 17 (1.34%) Virtual Desktop
10 15 (1.18%) Squid
11 11 (0.87%) Firmware
12 9 (0.71%) DFS Replication
12 9 (0.71%) Virtual Servers
13 5 (0.39%) BitLocker
13 5 (0.39%) KVM
13 5 (0.39%) Microsoft App-V
13 5 (0.39%) NDS
13 5 (0.39%) NetIQ eDirectory
14 4 (0.31%) Postfix
14 4 (0.31%) Snort
Systems Management
1 201 (15.81%) Terraform
2 160 (12.59%) Ansible
3 117 (9.21%) Kubernetes
4 87 (6.85%) FortiGate
5 61 (4.80%) Microsoft Intune
6 45 (3.54%) Single Sign-On
7 42 (3.30%) Grafana
8 37 (2.91%) Prometheus
9 36 (2.83%) SCCM
10 27 (2.12%) Active Directory Federation Services
11 26 (2.05%) vCenter Server
12 19 (1.49%) Nmap
13 16 (1.26%) Nessus
14 15 (1.18%) Nagios
14 15 (1.18%) QRadar
15 14 (1.10%) CASB
15 14 (1.10%) Fluentd
16 12 (0.94%) WMI
17 11 (0.87%) CSIRT
18 9 (0.71%) Oracle RMAN
Vendors
1 418 (32.89%) Cisco
2 282 (22.19%) Microsoft
3 276 (21.72%) Palo Alto
4 211 (16.60%) VMware
5 147 (11.57%) F5
6 142 (11.17%) CheckPoint
7 135 (10.62%) Fortinet
8 123 (9.68%) Juniper
9 102 (8.03%) Splunk
10 80 (6.29%) Aruba
11 70 (5.51%) SolarWinds
12 63 (4.96%) Meraki
13 51 (4.01%) Google
14 50 (3.93%) Oracle
14 50 (3.93%) Zscaler
15 48 (3.78%) ServiceNow
16 40 (3.15%) Citrix
17 30 (2.36%) Red Hat
18 25 (1.97%) Dell
18 25 (1.97%) Tenable