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

6 months to
15 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 89 51 57
Rank change year-on-year -38 +6 -9
Contract jobs citing Firewall 1,357 1,265 1,509
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.70% 4.27% 3.45%
As % of the Communications & Networking category 28.40% 34.24% 27.85%
Number of daily rates quoted 879 747 947
10th Percentile £350 £313 £295
25th Percentile £413 £406 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £513
Median % change year-on-year - -2.44% -2.38%
75th Percentile £588 £600 £625
90th Percentile £648 £688 £730
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £485 £500
% change year-on-year +3.09% -3.00% +2.88%
Number of hourly rates quoted 29 22 45
10th Percentile £24.84 £14.20 £17.00
25th Percentile £37.25 £14.43 £23.92
Median hourly rate £56.00 £30.00 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +86.67% -50.00% -4.08%
75th Percentile £70.23 £41.25 £85.65
90th Percentile £78.55 £44.83 £87.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £56.00 £30.00 £83.63
% change year-on-year +86.67% -64.13% +34.30%

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 4,779 3,694 5,418
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 9.53% 12.47% 12.40%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,935 2,271 3,204
10th Percentile £263 £220 £210
25th Percentile £400 £363 £350
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £485 £500
Median % change year-on-year +3.09% -3.00% -1.96%
75th Percentile £588 £588 £600
90th Percentile £675 £675 £688
UK excluding London median daily rate £480 £470 £488
% change year-on-year +2.13% -3.59% +2.63%
Number of hourly rates quoted 290 171 424
10th Percentile £16.01 £14.99 £13.50
25th Percentile £21.25 £18.80 £17.48
Median hourly rate £27.69 £41.50 £40.00
Median % change year-on-year -33.28% +3.75% +111.30%
75th Percentile £65.00 £60.69 £63.75
90th Percentile £74.26 £80.00 £71.07
UK excluding London median hourly rate £30.25 £31.08 £47.50
% change year-on-year -2.67% -34.57% +153.81%

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 15 June 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 15 June 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 15 June 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 1,148 £500 -1.48% 484
UK excluding London -30 765 £500 +3.09% 446
London -58 433 £504 -4.10% 112
Work from Home -36 389 £520 +4.00% 191
North of England -16 265 £500 +5.26% 107
South East -20 212 £500 - 158
North West -2 166 £537 +13.05% 62
Yorkshire -28 84 £434 -11.84% 31
Midlands -60 75 £425 -19.05% 66
East of England -14 70 £505 -0.98% 39
West Midlands -52 64 £420 -20.00% 41
Scotland +6 63 £450 +5.88% 23
South West -42 61 £525 +7.97% 46
Wales -21 25 £425 +25.93% 6
North East -14 21 £625 +25.00% 15
East Midlands -43 8 £500 -4.03% 25
Northern Ireland -5 2 £385 - 9

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 37 (2.73%) Microsoft Exchange
2 30 (2.21%) Confluence
3 22 (1.62%) SharePoint
4 15 (1.11%) nginx
5 11 (0.81%) Apache
6 10 (0.74%) CICS
7 6 (0.44%) IIS
8 5 (0.37%) 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 (0.074%) MTS
Applications
1 23 (1.69%) MS Visio
2 21 (1.55%) Microsoft Office
3 17 (1.25%) Microsoft Excel
4 9 (0.66%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 8 (0.59%) Microsoft Project
6 1 (0.074%) Windchill
Business Applications
1 1 (0.074%) Dynamics GP
1 1 (0.074%) Payment Gateway
1 1 (0.074%) Primavera
1 1 (0.074%) Remedy ITSM
1 1 (0.074%) SAP S/4HANA
1 1 (0.074%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
1 1 (0.074%) Teamcenter
Cloud Services
1 452 (33.31%) Azure
2 291 (21.44%) AWS
3 119 (8.77%) Entra ID
4 115 (8.47%) GCP
5 106 (7.81%) Microsoft 365
6 76 (5.60%) GitHub
7 63 (4.64%) Virtual Private Cloud
8 59 (4.35%) IaaS
9 52 (3.83%) Azure DevOps
10 45 (3.32%) SaaS
11 42 (3.10%) PaaS
12 38 (2.80%) Azure ExpressRoute
13 37 (2.73%) GitHub Actions
13 37 (2.73%) OCI
14 36 (2.65%) Azure Monitor
15 35 (2.58%) Azure Sentinel
16 33 (2.43%) Serverless
17 28 (2.06%) Amazon EC2
18 27 (1.99%) Google Kubernetes Engine
19 25 (1.84%) Amazon EKS
Communications & Networking
1 382 (28.15%) Network Security
2 370 (27.27%) WAN
3 344 (25.35%) VPN
4 286 (21.08%) DNS
5 274 (20.19%) LAN
6 240 (17.69%) BGP
7 206 (15.18%) OSPF
8 176 (12.97%) VLAN
9 153 (11.27%) SD-WAN
10 148 (10.91%) TCP/IP
11 146 (10.76%) DHCP
12 139 (10.24%) Wireless
13 113 (8.33%) Wi-Fi
14 97 (7.15%) BIG-IP
15 94 (6.93%) VXLAN
16 92 (6.78%) MPLS
17 87 (6.41%) IPsec
18 79 (5.82%) Ethernet VPN
18 79 (5.82%) SSL
19 77 (5.67%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
Database & Business Intelligence
1 24 (1.77%) SQL Server
2 18 (1.33%) Elasticsearch
3 17 (1.25%) PostgreSQL
4 16 (1.18%) Power BI
5 11 (0.81%) Amazon RDS
6 10 (0.74%) DataStage
7 9 (0.66%) Oracle Database
8 8 (0.59%) Azure SQL Database
8 8 (0.59%) Data Lake
8 8 (0.59%) MySQL
9 7 (0.52%) Data Warehouse
9 7 (0.52%) Relational Database
10 6 (0.44%) MongoDB
11 4 (0.29%) Amazon Athena
11 4 (0.29%) Amazon QuickSight
11 4 (0.29%) Amazon Redshift
11 4 (0.29%) Delta Lake
11 4 (0.29%) Metadata
11 4 (0.29%) NoSQL
11 4 (0.29%) SQL Server Integration Services
Development Applications
1 91 (6.71%) JIRA
2 62 (4.57%) Jenkins
3 47 (3.46%) GitLab
4 45 (3.32%) Git
5 16 (1.18%) Sonatype Nexus
6 10 (0.74%) Artifactory
6 10 (0.74%) Burp Suite
7 9 (0.66%) Bitbucket
7 9 (0.66%) Chocolatey
7 9 (0.66%) SonarQube
8 8 (0.59%) Metasploit
9 7 (0.52%) Jaeger
10 5 (0.37%) Browser DevTools
11 3 (0.22%) CircleCI
12 2 (0.15%) Cucumber
12 2 (0.15%) Gatling
12 2 (0.15%) Gradle
12 2 (0.15%) Introscope
12 2 (0.15%) LoadRunner
12 2 (0.15%) Team Foundation Server
General
1 297 (21.89%) Social Skills
2 170 (12.53%) Finance
3 117 (8.62%) Analytical Skills
4 108 (7.96%) Public Sector
5 78 (5.75%) Documentation Skills
6 61 (4.50%) Banking
7 36 (2.65%) Legal
8 35 (2.58%) Telecoms
9 23 (1.69%) Financial Institution
10 21 (1.55%) Manufacturing
11 19 (1.40%) Military
12 16 (1.18%) Influencing Skills
13 15 (1.11%) Law
14 12 (0.88%) Retail
15 11 (0.81%) Investment Banking
15 11 (0.81%) Local Government
16 10 (0.74%) Front Office
16 10 (0.74%) Inclusion and Diversity
17 9 (0.66%) Organisational Skills
17 9 (0.66%) Presentation Skills
Job Titles
1 426 (31.39%) Network Engineer
2 208 (15.33%) Architect
3 167 (12.31%) Senior
4 125 (9.21%) Infrastructure Engineer
5 114 (8.40%) Security Engineer
6 71 (5.23%) Network Architect
7 70 (5.16%) Senior Network Engineer
8 64 (4.72%) Cloud Engineer
9 58 (4.27%) SC Cleared Network Engineer
10 53 (3.91%) Azure Engineer
11 50 (3.68%) Network Security Engineer
12 46 (3.39%) Technical Architect
13 44 (3.24%) DevOps Engineer
13 44 (3.24%) Lead
14 42 (3.10%) Cisco Engineer
14 42 (3.10%) Consultant
15 38 (2.80%) Cisco Network Engineer
15 38 (2.80%) Security Architect
16 33 (2.43%) Cloud Architect
16 33 (2.43%) Senior Infrastructure Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 72 (5.31%) 802.1X
2 40 (2.95%) Middleware
3 34 (2.51%) LDAP
4 26 (1.92%) SAML
5 22 (1.62%) OpenID
6 16 (1.18%) Kafka
7 11 (0.81%) OAuth
8 10 (0.74%) OAuth2
8 10 (0.74%) REST
9 9 (0.66%) OpenTelemetry
9 9 (0.66%) Spring Boot
10 8 (0.59%) ARM Templates
11 7 (0.52%) .NET
11 7 (0.52%) YAML
12 6 (0.44%) Elastic Stack
12 6 (0.44%) HTML
12 6 (0.44%) LangChain
12 6 (0.44%) PyTorch
12 6 (0.44%) scikit-learn
13 5 (0.37%) AWS CDK
Miscellaneous
1 331 (24.39%) Data Centre
2 83 (6.12%) Cloud Native
3 75 (5.53%) Security Posture
4 68 (5.01%) Hybrid Cloud
5 61 (4.50%) PKI
6 59 (4.35%) Onboarding
7 42 (3.10%) Clustering
7 42 (3.10%) Management Information System
8 38 (2.80%) Operational Technology
9 31 (2.28%) Public Cloud
10 28 (2.06%) Data Protection Act
11 25 (1.84%) IoT
12 23 (1.69%) Cyber Threat
12 23 (1.69%) Enterprise Storage
13 20 (1.47%) Distributed Denial-of-Service
14 19 (1.40%) Self-Motivation
15 17 (1.25%) SCADA
16 16 (1.18%) Driving Licence
16 16 (1.18%) Enterprise Software
17 15 (1.11%) BYOD
Operating Systems
1 304 (22.40%) Windows
2 189 (13.93%) Linux
3 113 (8.33%) Windows Server
4 39 (2.87%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 31 (2.28%) Unix
6 23 (1.69%) VMS
7 13 (0.96%) Windows Server 2019
8 11 (0.81%) Solaris
9 10 (0.74%) AIX
9 10 (0.74%) Windows Server 2016
10 8 (0.59%) Ubuntu
10 8 (0.59%) Windows Server 2003
11 6 (0.44%) Windows 10
11 6 (0.44%) Windows Server 2012
12 5 (0.37%) CentOS
12 5 (0.37%) Mac OS
13 4 (0.29%) Android
13 4 (0.29%) SUSE
14 3 (0.22%) Amazon Linux
14 3 (0.22%) CatOS
Processes & Methodologies
1 242 (17.83%) DevOps
2 212 (15.62%) CI/CD
3 195 (14.37%) Infrastructure as Code
4 181 (13.34%) Load Balancing
4 181 (13.34%) Migration
5 174 (12.82%) High Availability
6 170 (12.53%) Cybersecurity
7 167 (12.31%) Infrastructure Engineering
8 165 (12.16%) Problem-Solving
9 160 (11.79%) ITIL
10 151 (11.13%) Agile
11 147 (10.83%) Zero Trust
12 108 (7.96%) Change Management
12 108 (7.96%) Project Delivery
12 108 (7.96%) SIEM
13 107 (7.89%) Observability
14 101 (7.44%) Validation
15 100 (7.37%) Cloud Security
16 98 (7.22%) Network Segmentation
17 93 (6.85%) Roadmaps
Programming Languages
1 216 (15.92%) Python
2 136 (10.02%) PowerShell
3 82 (6.04%) Bash
4 50 (3.68%) SQL
5 40 (2.95%) Bicep
6 39 (2.87%) Java
7 10 (0.74%) ActionScript
7 10 (0.74%) COBOL
7 10 (0.74%) Perl
8 7 (0.52%) Go
8 7 (0.52%) JavaScript
9 6 (0.44%) Groovy
9 6 (0.44%) Kusto Query Language
9 6 (0.44%) Rust
9 6 (0.44%) Shell Script
10 5 (0.37%) PL/SQL
11 4 (0.29%) C++
12 2 (0.15%) C
12 2 (0.15%) Jython
12 2 (0.15%) PHP
Qualifications
1 462 (34.05%) Security Cleared
2 342 (25.20%) SC Cleared
3 275 (20.27%) Cisco Certification
4 208 (15.33%) CCNP
5 114 (8.40%) CCNA
6 109 (8.03%) Degree
7 100 (7.37%) DV Cleared
8 63 (4.64%) CISSP
9 58 (4.27%) Azure Certification
10 39 (2.87%) AWS Certification
11 37 (2.73%) CCIE
12 32 (2.36%) CISM
12 32 (2.36%) Microsoft Certification
13 21 (1.55%) Network+ Certification
14 20 (1.47%) JNCIS
15 18 (1.33%) Computer Science Degree
15 18 (1.33%) JNCIA
15 18 (1.33%) PMP
16 17 (1.25%) CompTIA Security+
16 17 (1.25%) Server+ Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 69 (5.08%) ISO/IEC 27001
2 58 (4.27%) NIST
3 46 (3.39%) GDPR
4 32 (2.36%) PCI DSS
4 32 (2.36%) SLA
5 30 (2.21%) NCSC
6 25 (1.84%) QA
7 22 (1.62%) Cyber Essentials
8 9 (0.66%) PMO
9 8 (0.59%) Disclosure Scotland
10 7 (0.52%) Actionable Recommendations
10 7 (0.52%) Data Quality
11 6 (0.44%) GRC
11 6 (0.44%) NIST 800
11 6 (0.44%) RMADS
12 5 (0.37%) ISO/IEC 27002 (supersedes ISO/IEC 17799)
12 5 (0.37%) JSP 440
12 5 (0.37%) SOC 2
13 4 (0.29%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
13 4 (0.29%) GxP
System Software
1 207 (15.25%) Active Directory
2 150 (11.05%) VMware Infrastructure
3 58 (4.27%) Docker
4 54 (3.98%) VMware NSX
5 37 (2.73%) Hyper-V
5 37 (2.73%) vSphere
6 36 (2.65%) Virtual Machines
7 31 (2.28%) VMware ESXi
8 25 (1.84%) Firmware
9 21 (1.55%) Virtual Desktop
10 16 (1.18%) Squid
11 13 (0.96%) BitLocker
12 10 (0.74%) Microsoft App-V
13 4 (0.29%) Terminal Services
14 3 (0.22%) DFS Replication
14 3 (0.22%) Dovecot
14 3 (0.22%) Postfix
15 2 (0.15%) Oracle RAC
15 2 (0.15%) VirtualBox
15 2 (0.15%) VMware Workstation
Systems Management
1 234 (17.24%) Terraform
2 178 (13.12%) Ansible
3 110 (8.11%) Kubernetes
4 107 (7.89%) FortiGate
5 66 (4.86%) Grafana
6 57 (4.20%) Prometheus
7 51 (3.76%) Microsoft Intune
8 31 (2.28%) Single Sign-On
9 30 (2.21%) SCCM
10 23 (1.69%) vCenter Server
11 19 (1.40%) Puppet
12 16 (1.18%) Progress Chef
13 15 (1.11%) Active Directory Federation Services
14 13 (0.96%) CASB
15 12 (0.88%) Cisco Prime
16 11 (0.81%) Consul
16 11 (0.81%) QRadar
17 10 (0.74%) Nmap
17 10 (0.74%) vMotion
17 10 (0.74%) VxRail
Vendors
1 485 (35.74%) Cisco
2 307 (22.62%) Palo Alto
3 269 (19.82%) Microsoft
4 192 (14.15%) Fortinet
5 190 (14.00%) VMware
6 189 (13.93%) F5
7 152 (11.20%) Juniper
8 125 (9.21%) CheckPoint
9 88 (6.48%) Aruba
10 80 (5.90%) Splunk
11 74 (5.45%) ServiceNow
12 70 (5.16%) Arista
13 68 (5.01%) SolarWinds
14 58 (4.27%) Google
15 48 (3.54%) Zscaler
16 41 (3.02%) Red Hat
17 39 (2.87%) Citrix
18 34 (2.51%) Meraki
19 28 (2.06%) Extreme Networks
20 26 (1.92%) Dynatrace