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

6 months to
29 May 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 88 51 54
Rank change year-on-year -37 +3 -2
Contract jobs citing Firewall 1,362 1,222 1,535
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.78% 4.25% 3.58%
As % of the Communications & Networking category 28.64% 33.72% 28.21%
Number of daily rates quoted 888 723 966
10th Percentile £347 £313 £300
25th Percentile £413 £401 £411
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £510
Median % change year-on-year - -1.96% -2.86%
75th Percentile £588 £600 £625
90th Percentile £650 £688 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £485 £500
% change year-on-year +3.09% -3.00% +2.56%
Number of hourly rates quoted 31 19 45
10th Percentile £20.75 - £16.00
25th Percentile £37.25 £14.20 £23.92
Median hourly rate £56.00 £27.50 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +103.64% -54.17% -3.23%
75th Percentile £70.41 £41.25 £85.65
90th Percentile £78.75 £50.75 £87.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £48.72 £27.50 £83.50
% change year-on-year +77.16% -67.07% +34.68%

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 4,756 3,624 5,441
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 9.72% 12.60% 12.70%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,917 2,243 3,264
10th Percentile £263 £213 £206
25th Percentile £400 £362 £350
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £480 £500
Median % change year-on-year +4.17% -4.00% -2.44%
75th Percentile £588 £588 £600
90th Percentile £675 £675 £688
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £463 £481
% change year-on-year +2.70% -3.90% +1.32%
Number of hourly rates quoted 281 158 418
10th Percentile £16.01 £14.99 £13.50
25th Percentile £21.25 £17.42 £16.30
Median hourly rate £28.88 £39.66 £40.00
Median % change year-on-year -27.18% -0.85% +118.16%
75th Percentile £65.00 £58.75 £63.75
90th Percentile £75.00 £76.50 £70.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £33.86 £30.32 £45.88
% change year-on-year +11.68% -33.91% +162.17%

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 29 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 29 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 29 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 -42 1,141 £500 -1.48% 473
UK excluding London -21 772 £500 +3.09% 427
London -62 415 £513 -2.38% 118
Work from Home -26 402 £520 +4.00% 196
North of England -15 250 £500 +5.26% 112
South East -6 235 £500 - 158
North West -4 159 £540 +13.68% 66
Midlands -55 79 £420 -20.00% 57
Yorkshire -31 75 £425 -13.00% 33
West Midlands -46 67 £413 -20.75% 36
East of England -11 65 £503 +0.60% 30
Scotland +17 62 £450 +2.86% 19
South West -43 59 £525 +5.00% 47
Wales -18 26 £425 +21.43% 12
North East -9 20 £625 +25.00% 15
East Midlands -47 8 £488 -12.16% 21
Northern Ireland -2 2 £385 - 2

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 34 (2.50%) Microsoft Exchange
2 33 (2.42%) Confluence
3 20 (1.47%) SharePoint
4 16 (1.17%) nginx
5 11 (0.81%) Apache
6 10 (0.73%) CICS
7 6 (0.44%) IIS
7 6 (0.44%) SAS
8 5 (0.37%) Tomcat
9 3 (0.22%) Skype for Business
10 2 (0.15%) Apache Pulsar
10 2 (0.15%) CloudStack
10 2 (0.15%) CMS
10 2 (0.15%) IBM HTTP Server
10 2 (0.15%) Oracle HTTP Server
10 2 (0.15%) Umbraco
10 2 (0.15%) WebSphere
10 2 (0.15%) WebSphere Application Server
10 2 (0.15%) WebSphere Portal
11 1 (0.073%) MTS
Applications
1 29 (2.13%) MS Visio
2 26 (1.91%) Microsoft Office
3 19 (1.40%) Microsoft Excel
4 13 (0.95%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 9 (0.66%) Microsoft Project
6 1 (0.073%) Windchill
Business Applications
1 1 (0.073%) Dynamics GP
1 1 (0.073%) Payment Gateway
1 1 (0.073%) Primavera
1 1 (0.073%) Remedy ITSM
1 1 (0.073%) SAP S/4HANA
1 1 (0.073%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
1 1 (0.073%) Teamcenter
Cloud Services
1 453 (33.26%) Azure
2 297 (21.81%) AWS
3 113 (8.30%) GCP
4 108 (7.93%) Entra ID
5 103 (7.56%) Microsoft 365
6 70 (5.14%) GitHub
7 62 (4.55%) Virtual Private Cloud
8 57 (4.19%) IaaS
9 52 (3.82%) Azure DevOps
10 42 (3.08%) PaaS
11 39 (2.86%) SaaS
12 37 (2.72%) GitHub Actions
13 36 (2.64%) Azure ExpressRoute
14 35 (2.57%) Azure Sentinel
15 34 (2.50%) OCI
16 33 (2.42%) Azure Monitor
17 28 (2.06%) Serverless
18 27 (1.98%) Amazon EC2
18 27 (1.98%) Amazon EKS
19 23 (1.69%) Amazon S3
Communications & Networking
1 377 (27.68%) Network Security
2 375 (27.53%) WAN
3 352 (25.84%) VPN
4 290 (21.29%) DNS
5 286 (21.00%) LAN
6 239 (17.55%) BGP
7 214 (15.71%) OSPF
8 171 (12.56%) VLAN
9 149 (10.94%) DHCP
10 148 (10.87%) SD-WAN
11 146 (10.72%) TCP/IP
12 140 (10.28%) Wireless
13 107 (7.86%) Wi-Fi
14 95 (6.98%) BIG-IP
15 94 (6.90%) VXLAN
16 93 (6.83%) IPsec
16 93 (6.83%) MPLS
17 79 (5.80%) Ethernet VPN
18 74 (5.43%) SSL
19 73 (5.36%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
Database & Business Intelligence
1 27 (1.98%) SQL Server
2 18 (1.32%) Elasticsearch
3 17 (1.25%) PostgreSQL
4 14 (1.03%) Power BI
5 10 (0.73%) DataStage
5 10 (0.73%) Oracle Database
6 8 (0.59%) Azure SQL Database
6 8 (0.59%) MySQL
7 7 (0.51%) Data Lake
7 7 (0.51%) Data Warehouse
7 7 (0.51%) MongoDB
8 6 (0.44%) Amazon RDS
8 6 (0.44%) Relational Database
9 4 (0.29%) Amazon Athena
9 4 (0.29%) Amazon QuickSight
9 4 (0.29%) Amazon Redshift
9 4 (0.29%) Metadata
9 4 (0.29%) NoSQL
9 4 (0.29%) SQL Server Integration Services
10 3 (0.22%) Oracle Exadata
Development Applications
1 88 (6.46%) JIRA
2 61 (4.48%) Jenkins
3 47 (3.45%) GitLab
4 45 (3.30%) Git
5 15 (1.10%) Sonatype Nexus
6 13 (0.95%) Burp Suite
7 12 (0.88%) Metasploit
8 9 (0.66%) Artifactory
8 9 (0.66%) Bitbucket
8 9 (0.66%) Chocolatey
8 9 (0.66%) Jaeger
9 8 (0.59%) SonarQube
10 5 (0.37%) Browser DevTools
11 4 (0.29%) CircleCI
12 2 (0.15%) Introscope
12 2 (0.15%) Postman
12 2 (0.15%) Team Foundation Server
13 1 (0.073%) Atlassian Bamboo
13 1 (0.073%) Claude Code
13 1 (0.073%) REST Assured
General
1 303 (22.25%) Social Skills
2 166 (12.19%) Finance
3 120 (8.81%) Analytical Skills
4 111 (8.15%) Public Sector
5 83 (6.09%) Documentation Skills
6 55 (4.04%) Banking
7 39 (2.86%) Telecoms
8 30 (2.20%) Legal
9 24 (1.76%) Financial Institution
10 23 (1.69%) Manufacturing
11 21 (1.54%) Military
12 17 (1.25%) Influencing Skills
13 15 (1.10%) Law
14 13 (0.95%) Retail
15 9 (0.66%) Inclusion and Diversity
15 9 (0.66%) Organisational Skills
16 8 (0.59%) Front Office
16 8 (0.59%) Investment Banking
16 8 (0.59%) Local Government
16 8 (0.59%) Presentation Skills
Job Titles
1 430 (31.57%) Network Engineer
2 215 (15.79%) Architect
3 170 (12.48%) Senior
4 115 (8.44%) Infrastructure Engineer
5 106 (7.78%) Security Engineer
6 78 (5.73%) Network Architect
7 71 (5.21%) Senior Network Engineer
8 67 (4.92%) SC Cleared Network Engineer
9 59 (4.33%) Cloud Engineer
10 56 (4.11%) Azure Engineer
11 46 (3.38%) Technical Architect
12 44 (3.23%) Network Security Engineer
13 43 (3.16%) Lead
14 42 (3.08%) Cisco Engineer
15 39 (2.86%) DevOps Engineer
15 39 (2.86%) Security Architect
16 38 (2.79%) Cisco Network Engineer
17 36 (2.64%) Consultant
18 33 (2.42%) Analyst
18 33 (2.42%) Senior Infrastructure Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 70 (5.14%) 802.1X
2 41 (3.01%) Middleware
3 39 (2.86%) LDAP
4 28 (2.06%) SAML
5 23 (1.69%) OpenID
6 18 (1.32%) Kafka
7 12 (0.88%) OAuth
8 11 (0.81%) OAuth2
8 11 (0.81%) OpenTelemetry
9 10 (0.73%) Elastic Stack
9 10 (0.73%) REST
9 10 (0.73%) Spring Boot
10 9 (0.66%) YAML
11 6 (0.44%) .NET
11 6 (0.44%) ARM Templates
11 6 (0.44%) HTML
11 6 (0.44%) JSON
11 6 (0.44%) LangChain
11 6 (0.44%) PyTorch
11 6 (0.44%) scikit-learn
Miscellaneous
1 338 (24.82%) Data Centre
2 79 (5.80%) Cloud Native
3 75 (5.51%) Security Posture
4 65 (4.77%) Hybrid Cloud
5 63 (4.63%) PKI
6 51 (3.74%) Onboarding
7 44 (3.23%) Management Information System
8 39 (2.86%) Clustering
9 38 (2.79%) Operational Technology
10 34 (2.50%) Public Cloud
11 26 (1.91%) IoT
12 25 (1.84%) Data Protection Act
13 24 (1.76%) Cyber Threat
14 22 (1.62%) Enterprise Storage
15 19 (1.40%) SCADA
16 17 (1.25%) Self-Motivation
17 16 (1.17%) Distributed Denial-of-Service
17 16 (1.17%) Driving Licence
17 16 (1.17%) Enterprise Software
18 15 (1.10%) BYOD
Operating Systems
1 310 (22.76%) Windows
2 186 (13.66%) Linux
3 119 (8.74%) Windows Server
4 35 (2.57%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 30 (2.20%) Unix
6 26 (1.91%) VMS
7 12 (0.88%) Windows Server 2019
8 11 (0.81%) Solaris
9 10 (0.73%) AIX
9 10 (0.73%) Windows Server 2016
10 8 (0.59%) Ubuntu
10 8 (0.59%) Windows Server 2003
11 7 (0.51%) Windows 10
11 7 (0.51%) Windows Server 2012
12 6 (0.44%) Mac OS
13 5 (0.37%) CatOS
13 5 (0.37%) CentOS
14 4 (0.29%) SUSE
15 3 (0.22%) Android
15 3 (0.22%) Data ONTAP
Processes & Methodologies
1 231 (16.96%) DevOps
2 203 (14.90%) CI/CD
3 187 (13.73%) Infrastructure as Code
4 186 (13.66%) Cybersecurity
4 186 (13.66%) Load Balancing
5 175 (12.85%) High Availability
6 172 (12.63%) Migration
7 166 (12.19%) Problem-Solving
8 157 (11.53%) Infrastructure Engineering
9 152 (11.16%) ITIL
10 146 (10.72%) Zero Trust
11 141 (10.35%) Agile
12 110 (8.08%) SIEM
13 105 (7.71%) Cloud Security
14 104 (7.64%) Project Delivery
15 102 (7.49%) Change Management
16 99 (7.27%) Observability
17 98 (7.20%) Network Segmentation
18 95 (6.98%) Technical Leadership
19 93 (6.83%) Roadmaps
Programming Languages
1 205 (15.05%) Python
2 140 (10.28%) PowerShell
3 80 (5.87%) Bash
4 55 (4.04%) SQL
5 42 (3.08%) Bicep
6 36 (2.64%) Java
7 10 (0.73%) COBOL
7 10 (0.73%) Perl
8 9 (0.66%) JavaScript
9 8 (0.59%) ActionScript
9 8 (0.59%) Rust
10 7 (0.51%) Kusto Query Language
11 6 (0.44%) Groovy
11 6 (0.44%) PL/SQL
12 5 (0.37%) Go
12 5 (0.37%) Shell Script
13 3 (0.22%) C++
14 2 (0.15%) C
14 2 (0.15%) Jython
14 2 (0.15%) PHP
Qualifications
1 489 (35.90%) Security Cleared
2 366 (26.87%) SC Cleared
3 287 (21.07%) Cisco Certification
4 218 (16.01%) CCNP
5 116 (8.52%) CCNA
6 113 (8.30%) Degree
7 105 (7.71%) DV Cleared
8 65 (4.77%) CISSP
9 64 (4.70%) Azure Certification
10 40 (2.94%) AWS Certification
11 39 (2.86%) CCIE
12 34 (2.50%) CISM
13 31 (2.28%) Microsoft Certification
14 25 (1.84%) Network+ Certification
15 23 (1.69%) JNCIS
16 20 (1.47%) Computer Science Degree
16 20 (1.47%) JNCIA
17 18 (1.32%) CompTIA Security+
18 17 (1.25%) Server+ Certification
19 16 (1.17%) CCSE
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 72 (5.29%) ISO/IEC 27001
2 57 (4.19%) NIST
3 48 (3.52%) GDPR
4 34 (2.50%) PCI DSS
5 32 (2.35%) SLA
6 30 (2.20%) NCSC
7 26 (1.91%) QA
8 21 (1.54%) Cyber Essentials
9 13 (0.95%) PMO
10 7 (0.51%) Data Quality
10 7 (0.51%) Disclosure Scotland
11 6 (0.44%) Actionable Recommendations
11 6 (0.44%) GRC
11 6 (0.44%) JSP 440
11 6 (0.44%) RMADS
12 5 (0.37%) HMG Security Policy Framework
12 5 (0.37%) ISO/IEC 27002 (supersedes ISO/IEC 17799)
12 5 (0.37%) NIST 800
12 5 (0.37%) SOC 2
13 4 (0.29%) GxP
System Software
1 212 (15.57%) Active Directory
2 159 (11.67%) VMware Infrastructure
3 64 (4.70%) VMware NSX
4 58 (4.26%) Docker
5 40 (2.94%) Hyper-V
6 38 (2.79%) vSphere
7 34 (2.50%) Virtual Machines
8 29 (2.13%) VMware ESXi
9 22 (1.62%) Firmware
10 21 (1.54%) Virtual Desktop
11 16 (1.17%) Squid
12 11 (0.81%) BitLocker
13 8 (0.59%) Microsoft App-V
14 3 (0.22%) DFS Replication
14 3 (0.22%) Dovecot
14 3 (0.22%) Oracle RAC
14 3 (0.22%) Postfix
15 2 (0.15%) Citrix Hypervisor
15 2 (0.15%) KVM
15 2 (0.15%) Virtual Servers
Systems Management
1 225 (16.52%) Terraform
2 174 (12.78%) Ansible
3 106 (7.78%) Kubernetes
4 102 (7.49%) FortiGate
5 63 (4.63%) Grafana
6 54 (3.96%) Prometheus
7 52 (3.82%) Microsoft Intune
8 34 (2.50%) Single Sign-On
9 28 (2.06%) SCCM
10 24 (1.76%) vCenter Server
11 17 (1.25%) Active Directory Federation Services
12 15 (1.10%) Progress Chef
13 14 (1.03%) Nmap
13 14 (1.03%) Puppet
14 13 (0.95%) CASB
14 13 (0.95%) Nagios
14 13 (0.95%) QRadar
15 12 (0.88%) Cisco Prime
16 11 (0.81%) Consul
16 11 (0.81%) VxRail
Vendors
1 502 (36.86%) Cisco
2 311 (22.83%) Palo Alto
3 263 (19.31%) Microsoft
4 204 (14.98%) VMware
5 190 (13.95%) Fortinet
6 189 (13.88%) F5
7 152 (11.16%) Juniper
8 132 (9.69%) CheckPoint
9 94 (6.90%) Aruba
10 81 (5.95%) Splunk
11 74 (5.43%) ServiceNow
12 71 (5.21%) SolarWinds
13 66 (4.85%) Arista
14 54 (3.96%) Google
15 42 (3.08%) Zscaler
16 39 (2.86%) Red Hat
17 38 (2.79%) Meraki
18 35 (2.57%) Citrix
19 28 (2.06%) Oracle
20 27 (1.98%) Extreme Networks