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

6 months to
5 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 91 54 59
Rank change year-on-year -37 +5 -11
Contract jobs citing Firewall 1,434 1,395 1,367
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.70% 4.24% 3.49%
As % of the Communications & Networking category 28.85% 35.29% 28.70%
Number of daily rates quoted 899 829 864
10th Percentile £350 £325 £313
25th Percentile £413 £410 £417
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year - -4.76% -
75th Percentile £595 £600 £614
90th Percentile £650 £678 £688
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £488 £515
% change year-on-year +2.56% -5.37% +8.46%
Number of hourly rates quoted 47 26 32
10th Percentile £29.00 £14.20 £22.54
25th Percentile £43.11 £15.18 £23.92
Median hourly rate £65.00 £30.00 £27.50
Median % change year-on-year +116.67% +9.09% -58.32%
75th Percentile £78.63 £40.63 £85.35
90th Percentile £98.82 £89.63 £87.46
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.23 £30.00 £60.00
% change year-on-year +117.42% -50.00% -9.06%

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 4,970 3,953 4,763
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 9.34% 12.01% 12.15%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,953 2,417 2,892
10th Percentile £250 £235 £220
25th Percentile £400 £373 £363
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £488 £500
Median % change year-on-year +2.56% -2.50% -
75th Percentile £588 £600 £608
90th Percentile £675 £675 £688
UK excluding London median daily rate £490 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +3.16% -5.00% +9.89%
Number of hourly rates quoted 353 195 327
10th Percentile £16.00 £14.99 £14.16
25th Percentile £19.34 £25.15 £18.27
Median hourly rate £26.66 £50.00 £47.50
Median % change year-on-year -46.68% +5.26% -5.79%
75th Percentile £65.00 £65.00 £65.00
90th Percentile £74.26 £83.60 £73.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £26.66 £45.00 £53.69
% change year-on-year -40.76% -16.18% -6.49%

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 5 August 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 5 August 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 5 August 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 -45 1,244 £505 +1.00% 568
UK excluding London -35 809 £500 +2.56% 450
London -57 479 £500 - 193
Work from Home -35 393 £520 +4.00% 234
North of England -14 284 £500 +5.26% 92
South East -31 226 £520 +4.00% 151
North West -3 185 £525 +10.53% 51
Yorkshire -41 83 £450 -7.22% 31
Midlands -75 77 £468 -1.47% 62
South West -44 75 £550 +11.39% 58
East of England 0 73 £525 -2.78% 35
Scotland +8 65 £413 -13.16% 22
West Midlands -70 60 £450 -5.26% 33
North East -19 22 £625 +4.17% 14
Wales -16 16 £425 +17.24% 14
East Midlands -17 14 £500 +1.63% 29
Northern Ireland -4 1 - - 25

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 46 (3.21%) Microsoft Exchange
2 30 (2.09%) Confluence
3 27 (1.88%) SharePoint
4 15 (1.05%) Apache
5 14 (0.98%) nginx
6 7 (0.49%) CICS
7 6 (0.42%) SAS
8 4 (0.28%) FactoryTalk
8 4 (0.28%) Tomcat
9 3 (0.21%) CloudStack
9 3 (0.21%) IIS
9 3 (0.21%) Skype for Business
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
11 1 (0.070%) MTS
Applications
1 22 (1.53%) Microsoft Office
1 22 (1.53%) MS Visio
2 20 (1.39%) Microsoft Excel
3 8 (0.56%) Microsoft Project
4 4 (0.28%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 4 (0.28%) Spreadsheet
5 1 (0.070%) Windchill
Business Applications
1 4 (0.28%) Dynamics CRM
2 2 (0.14%) Dynamics GP
2 2 (0.14%) Teamcenter
3 1 (0.070%) Bloomberg TOMS
3 1 (0.070%) Eikon
3 1 (0.070%) Primavera
3 1 (0.070%) Remedy ITSM
Cloud Services
1 519 (36.19%) Azure
2 327 (22.80%) AWS
3 153 (10.67%) Entra ID
4 124 (8.65%) Microsoft 365
5 114 (7.95%) GCP
6 75 (5.23%) GitHub
7 65 (4.53%) IaaS
8 62 (4.32%) Azure DevOps
9 60 (4.18%) SaaS
10 55 (3.84%) Virtual Private Cloud
11 48 (3.35%) Azure Monitor
12 47 (3.28%) Azure ExpressRoute
13 42 (2.93%) Azure Sentinel
13 42 (2.93%) PaaS
14 37 (2.58%) OCI
15 36 (2.51%) Serverless
16 33 (2.30%) GitHub Actions
17 30 (2.09%) Google Kubernetes Engine
18 26 (1.81%) AWS CloudFormation
19 25 (1.74%) Amazon EC2
Communications & Networking
1 426 (29.71%) VPN
2 399 (27.82%) WAN
3 392 (27.34%) Network Security
4 370 (25.80%) DNS
5 295 (20.57%) LAN
6 267 (18.62%) BGP
7 213 (14.85%) OSPF
7 213 (14.85%) TCP/IP
8 211 (14.71%) DHCP
9 203 (14.16%) VLAN
10 166 (11.58%) Wireless
11 147 (10.25%) SD-WAN
12 126 (8.79%) Wi-Fi
13 95 (6.62%) MPLS
14 94 (6.56%) BIG-IP
15 93 (6.49%) IPsec
16 85 (5.93%) VXLAN
17 80 (5.58%) SSL
18 79 (5.51%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
19 76 (5.30%) Cisco ASA
Database & Business Intelligence
1 33 (2.30%) SQL Server
2 19 (1.32%) PostgreSQL
3 17 (1.19%) Power BI
4 13 (0.91%) Amazon RDS
5 12 (0.84%) Elasticsearch
6 10 (0.70%) Azure SQL Database
7 9 (0.63%) Data Lake
7 9 (0.63%) Oracle Database
7 9 (0.63%) Relational Database
8 8 (0.56%) MySQL
9 7 (0.49%) DataStage
10 5 (0.35%) Delta Lake
11 4 (0.28%) Amazon Aurora
11 4 (0.28%) Data Warehouse
11 4 (0.28%) Db2
11 4 (0.28%) NoSQL
12 3 (0.21%) Amazon Athena
12 3 (0.21%) Amazon Redshift
12 3 (0.21%) Big Data
12 3 (0.21%) Metadata
Development Applications
1 95 (6.62%) JIRA
2 57 (3.97%) Jenkins
3 46 (3.21%) Git
4 44 (3.07%) GitLab
5 15 (1.05%) Sonatype Nexus
6 10 (0.70%) Bitbucket
7 8 (0.56%) Artifactory
7 8 (0.56%) Chocolatey
8 6 (0.42%) Atlassian Bamboo
8 6 (0.42%) Browser DevTools
9 5 (0.35%) SonarQube
10 4 (0.28%) Burp Suite
11 3 (0.21%) MSI
12 2 (0.14%) Cucumber
12 2 (0.14%) Gatling
12 2 (0.14%) Gradle
12 2 (0.14%) Introscope
12 2 (0.14%) LoadRunner
12 2 (0.14%) Metasploit
12 2 (0.14%) Team Foundation Server
General
1 303 (21.13%) Social Skills
2 182 (12.69%) Finance
3 136 (9.48%) Analytical Skills
4 121 (8.44%) Public Sector
5 76 (5.30%) Banking
6 65 (4.53%) Documentation Skills
7 47 (3.28%) Telecoms
8 26 (1.81%) Legal
9 25 (1.74%) Manufacturing
10 22 (1.53%) Financial Institution
11 21 (1.46%) Military
12 20 (1.39%) Influencing Skills
13 19 (1.32%) Local Government
14 16 (1.12%) Retail
15 14 (0.98%) Organisational Skills
16 13 (0.91%) Law
17 12 (0.84%) Police
18 11 (0.77%) Inclusion and Diversity
19 10 (0.70%) Investment Banking
20 9 (0.63%) Pharmaceutical
Job Titles
1 468 (32.64%) Network Engineer
2 214 (14.92%) Senior
3 201 (14.02%) Architect
4 145 (10.11%) Infrastructure Engineer
5 115 (8.02%) Security Engineer
6 96 (6.69%) Senior Network Engineer
7 77 (5.37%) Cloud Engineer
8 69 (4.81%) Network Architect
9 63 (4.39%) Consultant
10 58 (4.04%) Azure Engineer
11 55 (3.84%) Network Security Engineer
12 50 (3.49%) Senior Infrastructure Engineer
13 48 (3.35%) Technical Architect
14 47 (3.28%) Security Architect
15 46 (3.21%) SC Cleared Network Engineer
16 44 (3.07%) DevOps Engineer
16 44 (3.07%) Lead
17 41 (2.86%) Cisco Engineer
18 39 (2.72%) Cisco Network Engineer
19 37 (2.58%) Analyst
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 70 (4.88%) 802.1X
2 41 (2.86%) Middleware
3 29 (2.02%) SAML
4 23 (1.60%) ARM Templates
5 22 (1.53%) LDAP
6 18 (1.26%) OpenID
7 11 (0.77%) OAuth
8 9 (0.63%) Kafka
8 9 (0.63%) LangChain
8 9 (0.63%) OAuth2
8 9 (0.63%) PyTorch
8 9 (0.63%) React
8 9 (0.63%) REST
8 9 (0.63%) scikit-learn
8 9 (0.63%) YAML
9 8 (0.56%) .NET
10 7 (0.49%) Elastic Stack
10 7 (0.49%) SailPoint
11 6 (0.42%) OpenTelemetry
12 5 (0.35%) Jinja
Miscellaneous
1 327 (22.80%) Data Centre
2 94 (6.56%) Cloud Native
2 94 (6.56%) Hybrid Cloud
3 88 (6.14%) PKI
4 67 (4.67%) Security Posture
5 59 (4.11%) Management Information System
6 53 (3.70%) Onboarding
7 50 (3.49%) Operational Technology
8 42 (2.93%) Clustering
9 29 (2.02%) Data Protection Act
10 28 (1.95%) Distributed Denial-of-Service
11 27 (1.88%) Public Cloud
12 26 (1.81%) IoT
13 24 (1.67%) Enterprise Storage
13 24 (1.67%) SCADA
14 21 (1.46%) Driving Licence
14 21 (1.46%) Self-Motivation
15 20 (1.39%) Enterprise Software
15 20 (1.39%) Linux Command Line
16 19 (1.32%) Replication
Operating Systems
1 356 (24.83%) Windows
2 222 (15.48%) Linux
3 136 (9.48%) Windows Server
4 52 (3.63%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 33 (2.30%) Unix
6 22 (1.53%) VMS
7 20 (1.39%) Ubuntu
8 13 (0.91%) Windows Server 2019
9 11 (0.77%) CentOS
9 11 (0.77%) Mac OS
10 10 (0.70%) Windows Server 2016
11 8 (0.56%) Solaris
11 8 (0.56%) Windows 10
12 7 (0.49%) AIX
12 7 (0.49%) Rocky
13 6 (0.42%) Windows Server 2003
13 6 (0.42%) Windows Server 2012
14 4 (0.28%) Amazon Linux
14 4 (0.28%) Android
14 4 (0.28%) SUSE
Processes & Methodologies
1 242 (16.88%) DevOps
2 227 (15.83%) CI/CD
3 224 (15.62%) Infrastructure as Code
4 204 (14.23%) Infrastructure Engineering
5 203 (14.16%) Load Balancing
6 195 (13.60%) Problem-Solving
7 189 (13.18%) Cybersecurity
8 188 (13.11%) ITIL
9 179 (12.48%) Migration
10 177 (12.34%) High Availability
11 156 (10.88%) Zero Trust
12 155 (10.81%) Agile
13 142 (9.90%) SIEM
14 129 (9.00%) Project Delivery
15 128 (8.93%) Change Management
16 121 (8.44%) Observability
17 114 (7.95%) Validation
18 112 (7.81%) Stakeholder Management
19 108 (7.53%) Cloud Security
20 101 (7.04%) Continuous Improvement
Programming Languages
1 268 (18.69%) Python
2 193 (13.46%) PowerShell
3 128 (8.93%) Bash
4 49 (3.42%) Bicep
5 46 (3.21%) SQL
6 33 (2.30%) Java
7 11 (0.77%) ActionScript
7 11 (0.77%) Perl
8 8 (0.56%) Kusto Query Language
9 7 (0.49%) COBOL
9 7 (0.49%) Groovy
9 7 (0.49%) JavaScript
10 6 (0.42%) Go
11 5 (0.35%) C++
12 3 (0.21%) PL/SQL
12 3 (0.21%) Search Processing Language
12 3 (0.21%) Shell Script
12 3 (0.21%) TypeScript
13 2 (0.14%) Jython
13 2 (0.14%) T-SQL
Qualifications
1 491 (34.24%) Security Cleared
2 342 (23.85%) SC Cleared
3 278 (19.39%) Cisco Certification
4 208 (14.50%) CCNP
5 129 (9.00%) DV Cleared
6 120 (8.37%) Degree
7 117 (8.16%) CCNA
8 76 (5.30%) CISSP
9 63 (4.39%) Azure Certification
10 45 (3.14%) AWS Certification
11 39 (2.72%) CCIE
12 36 (2.51%) Microsoft Certification
13 32 (2.23%) CISM
14 28 (1.95%) Computer Science Degree
15 23 (1.60%) Network+ Certification
16 21 (1.46%) JNCIS
17 18 (1.26%) CompTIA Security+
18 17 (1.19%) JNCIP
18 17 (1.19%) Server+ Certification
19 15 (1.05%) CEH
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 72 (5.02%) ISO/IEC 27001
2 60 (4.18%) NIST
3 45 (3.14%) GDPR
4 31 (2.16%) NCSC
5 24 (1.67%) PCI DSS
5 24 (1.67%) SLA
6 21 (1.46%) QA
7 20 (1.39%) Cyber Essentials
8 9 (0.63%) Data Quality
8 9 (0.63%) NIST 800
9 8 (0.56%) Disclosure Scotland
9 8 (0.56%) GxP
9 8 (0.56%) JSP 440
10 7 (0.49%) Sarbanes-Oxley
11 6 (0.42%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
11 6 (0.42%) HIPAA
12 5 (0.35%) ISO/IEC 27002 (supersedes ISO/IEC 17799)
13 4 (0.28%) 21 CFR Part 11
13 4 (0.28%) PMO
13 4 (0.28%) SOC 2
System Software
1 236 (16.46%) Active Directory
2 171 (11.92%) VMware Infrastructure
3 68 (4.74%) Docker
4 60 (4.18%) Hyper-V
4 60 (4.18%) VMware NSX
5 42 (2.93%) Virtual Machines
5 42 (2.93%) vSphere
6 39 (2.72%) VMware ESXi
7 26 (1.81%) Firmware
8 13 (0.91%) Virtual Desktop
9 11 (0.77%) BitLocker
9 11 (0.77%) Squid
10 8 (0.56%) Microsoft App-V
11 6 (0.42%) NFS
12 4 (0.28%) Terminal Services
13 3 (0.21%) Dovecot
13 3 (0.21%) EMC RecoverPoint
13 3 (0.21%) Postfix
13 3 (0.21%) Virtual Servers
14 2 (0.14%) VMware Workstation
Systems Management
1 277 (19.32%) Terraform
2 200 (13.95%) Ansible
3 120 (8.37%) Kubernetes
4 110 (7.67%) FortiGate
5 66 (4.60%) Microsoft Intune
6 54 (3.77%) Grafana
7 51 (3.56%) Prometheus
8 37 (2.58%) SCCM
9 32 (2.23%) Single Sign-On
10 24 (1.67%) vCenter Server
11 23 (1.60%) Progress Chef
12 19 (1.32%) CASB
13 18 (1.26%) Puppet
14 16 (1.12%) VxRail
15 13 (0.91%) Cisco Prime
16 11 (0.77%) Packer
16 11 (0.77%) QRadar
17 9 (0.63%) Argo
18 8 (0.56%) Active Directory Federation Services
18 8 (0.56%) vMotion
Vendors
1 523 (36.47%) Cisco
2 328 (22.87%) Microsoft
3 307 (21.41%) Palo Alto
4 223 (15.55%) VMware
5 205 (14.30%) Fortinet
6 197 (13.74%) F5
7 161 (11.23%) Juniper
8 123 (8.58%) CheckPoint
9 89 (6.21%) Splunk
10 76 (5.30%) ServiceNow
11 75 (5.23%) Aruba
12 71 (4.95%) Google
13 70 (4.88%) Arista
13 70 (4.88%) SolarWinds
14 67 (4.67%) Zscaler
15 46 (3.21%) Citrix
15 46 (3.21%) Red Hat
16 45 (3.14%) Meraki
17 32 (2.23%) Infoblox
18 31 (2.16%) Dynatrace