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

6 months to
27 May 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 88 52 54
Rank change year-on-year -36 +2 -1
Contract jobs citing Firewall 1,350 1,193 1,516
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.77% 4.18% 3.55%
As % of the Communications & Networking category 28.63% 32.97% 28.06%
Number of daily rates quoted 882 713 956
10th Percentile £341 £319 £299
25th Percentile £413 £406 £410
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £509
Median % change year-on-year - -1.72% -3.10%
75th Percentile £588 £600 £625
90th Percentile £650 £688 £744
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £490 £500
% change year-on-year +2.04% -2.00% +2.56%
Number of hourly rates quoted 30 17 44
10th Percentile £19.90 - £16.00
25th Percentile £37.25 £14.20 £23.92
Median hourly rate £52.36 £25.00 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +109.44% -58.33% -3.23%
75th Percentile £71.64 £41.25 £85.99
90th Percentile £80.11 £56.50 £87.51
UK excluding London median hourly rate £48.72 £25.00 £83.63
% change year-on-year +94.88% -70.11% +34.89%

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 4,715 3,618 5,402
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 9.67% 12.66% 12.66%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,897 2,244 3,234
10th Percentile £263 £213 £206
25th Percentile £400 £363 £350
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £486 £490
Median % change year-on-year +2.83% -0.77% -4.39%
75th Percentile £588 £588 £600
90th Percentile £675 £675 £688
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £465 £475
% change year-on-year +2.15% -2.11% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 274 153 414
10th Percentile £16.01 £14.99 £13.50
25th Percentile £20.93 £17.30 £16.30
Median hourly rate £28.96 £40.00 £40.00
Median % change year-on-year -27.60% - +116.22%
75th Percentile £65.66 £60.13 £63.75
90th Percentile £75.00 £79.00 £70.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £35.22 £30.70 £46.14
% change year-on-year +14.72% -33.46% +156.31%

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 27 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 27 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 27 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 -41 1,131 £500 -2.44% 486
UK excluding London -25 770 £500 +2.04% 445
London -68 408 £513 -2.38% 123
Work from Home -28 394 £520 +4.00% 216
North of England -15 242 £515 +8.42% 113
South East 0 238 £500 - 161
North West -7 155 £540 +13.68% 69
Midlands -63 81 £423 -23.18% 59
Yorkshire -27 71 £424 -12.50% 31
West Midlands -43 69 £413 -21.43% 38
East of England -7 65 £503 -4.19% 30
Scotland +17 61 £450 +2.86% 24
South West -42 60 £523 +4.50% 49
Wales -19 27 £425 +21.43% 16
North East -6 20 £625 +25.00% 15
East Midlands -49 8 £488 -12.16% 21
Northern Ireland -2 2 £385 - 3

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 (2.52%) Confluence
1 34 (2.52%) Microsoft Exchange
2 19 (1.41%) SharePoint
3 16 (1.19%) nginx
4 11 (0.81%) Apache
5 10 (0.74%) CICS
6 6 (0.44%) IIS
6 6 (0.44%) SAS
7 5 (0.37%) Tomcat
8 3 (0.22%) Skype for Business
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 (0.074%) MTS
Applications
1 27 (2.00%) MS Visio
2 25 (1.85%) Microsoft Office
3 18 (1.33%) Microsoft Excel
4 13 (0.96%) 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
1 447 (33.11%) Azure
2 286 (21.19%) AWS
3 109 (8.07%) GCP
4 108 (8.00%) Entra ID
5 102 (7.56%) Microsoft 365
6 66 (4.89%) GitHub
7 58 (4.30%) Virtual Private Cloud
8 55 (4.07%) IaaS
9 50 (3.70%) Azure DevOps
10 42 (3.11%) PaaS
11 39 (2.89%) SaaS
12 35 (2.59%) Azure ExpressRoute
12 35 (2.59%) Azure Sentinel
12 35 (2.59%) GitHub Actions
13 33 (2.44%) Azure Monitor
13 33 (2.44%) OCI
14 28 (2.07%) Serverless
15 27 (2.00%) Amazon EC2
16 26 (1.93%) Amazon EKS
17 23 (1.70%) Amazon S3
Communications & Networking
1 373 (27.63%) WAN
2 371 (27.48%) Network Security
3 344 (25.48%) VPN
4 285 (21.11%) LAN
5 282 (20.89%) DNS
6 240 (17.78%) BGP
7 217 (16.07%) OSPF
8 169 (12.52%) VLAN
9 146 (10.81%) SD-WAN
10 145 (10.74%) DHCP
11 142 (10.52%) TCP/IP
12 136 (10.07%) Wireless
13 106 (7.85%) Wi-Fi
14 95 (7.04%) VXLAN
15 94 (6.96%) BIG-IP
15 94 (6.96%) IPsec
16 91 (6.74%) MPLS
17 80 (5.93%) Ethernet VPN
18 72 (5.33%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
19 71 (5.26%) SSL
Database & Business Intelligence
1 28 (2.07%) SQL Server
2 18 (1.33%) Elasticsearch
3 17 (1.26%) PostgreSQL
4 14 (1.04%) Power BI
5 10 (0.74%) DataStage
5 10 (0.74%) Oracle Database
6 8 (0.59%) MySQL
7 7 (0.52%) Azure SQL Database
7 7 (0.52%) Data Lake
7 7 (0.52%) Data Warehouse
7 7 (0.52%) MongoDB
8 6 (0.44%) Amazon RDS
8 6 (0.44%) Relational Database
9 4 (0.30%) Amazon Athena
9 4 (0.30%) Amazon QuickSight
9 4 (0.30%) Amazon Redshift
9 4 (0.30%) Metadata
9 4 (0.30%) NoSQL
9 4 (0.30%) SQL Server Integration Services
10 3 (0.22%) Oracle Exadata
Development Applications
1 86 (6.37%) JIRA
2 58 (4.30%) Jenkins
3 46 (3.41%) GitLab
4 45 (3.33%) Git
5 15 (1.11%) Sonatype Nexus
6 13 (0.96%) Burp Suite
7 12 (0.89%) Metasploit
8 9 (0.67%) Artifactory
8 9 (0.67%) Bitbucket
8 9 (0.67%) Chocolatey
8 9 (0.67%) Jaeger
9 8 (0.59%) SonarQube
10 5 (0.37%) Browser DevTools
11 4 (0.30%) CircleCI
12 2 (0.15%) Introscope
12 2 (0.15%) Postman
12 2 (0.15%) Team Foundation Server
13 1 (0.074%) Atlassian Bamboo
13 1 (0.074%) LoadRunner
13 1 (0.074%) PVCS
General
1 303 (22.44%) Social Skills
2 159 (11.78%) Finance
3 121 (8.96%) Analytical Skills
4 112 (8.30%) Public Sector
5 87 (6.44%) Documentation Skills
6 55 (4.07%) Banking
7 39 (2.89%) Telecoms
8 29 (2.15%) Legal
9 26 (1.93%) Manufacturing
10 24 (1.78%) Financial Institution
11 21 (1.56%) Military
12 17 (1.26%) Influencing Skills
13 15 (1.11%) Law
14 14 (1.04%) Retail
15 10 (0.74%) Inclusion and Diversity
16 9 (0.67%) Organisational Skills
17 8 (0.59%) Front Office
17 8 (0.59%) Investment Banking
17 8 (0.59%) Local Government
17 8 (0.59%) Presentation Skills
Job Titles
1 422 (31.26%) Network Engineer
2 211 (15.63%) Architect
3 167 (12.37%) Senior
4 112 (8.30%) Infrastructure Engineer
5 103 (7.63%) Security Engineer
6 76 (5.63%) Network Architect
7 68 (5.04%) SC Cleared Network Engineer
8 67 (4.96%) Senior Network Engineer
9 56 (4.15%) Azure Engineer
9 56 (4.15%) Cloud Engineer
10 45 (3.33%) Technical Architect
11 44 (3.26%) Network Security Engineer
12 43 (3.19%) Cisco Engineer
13 42 (3.11%) Lead
14 39 (2.89%) Cisco Network Engineer
15 38 (2.81%) DevOps Engineer
15 38 (2.81%) Security Architect
16 36 (2.67%) Consultant
17 34 (2.52%) Senior Infrastructure Engineer
18 33 (2.44%) Analyst
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 69 (5.11%) 802.1X
2 40 (2.96%) Middleware
3 39 (2.89%) LDAP
4 28 (2.07%) SAML
5 23 (1.70%) OpenID
6 18 (1.33%) Kafka
7 12 (0.89%) OAuth
8 11 (0.81%) OAuth2
8 11 (0.81%) OpenTelemetry
9 10 (0.74%) Elastic Stack
9 10 (0.74%) REST
9 10 (0.74%) Spring Boot
10 9 (0.67%) 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
1 335 (24.81%) Data Centre
2 72 (5.33%) Security Posture
3 71 (5.26%) Cloud Native
4 62 (4.59%) Hybrid Cloud
5 61 (4.52%) PKI
6 49 (3.63%) Onboarding
7 39 (2.89%) Clustering
7 39 (2.89%) Management Information System
8 38 (2.81%) Operational Technology
9 34 (2.52%) Public Cloud
10 26 (1.93%) IoT
11 25 (1.85%) Data Protection Act
12 23 (1.70%) Cyber Threat
13 21 (1.56%) Enterprise Storage
14 19 (1.41%) SCADA
15 17 (1.26%) Self-Motivation
16 16 (1.19%) Driving Licence
16 16 (1.19%) Enterprise Software
17 15 (1.11%) BYOD
18 14 (1.04%) Distributed Denial-of-Service
Operating Systems
1 304 (22.52%) Windows
2 178 (13.19%) Linux
3 119 (8.81%) Windows Server
4 30 (2.22%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 30 (2.22%) Unix
5 26 (1.93%) VMS
6 12 (0.89%) Windows Server 2019
7 11 (0.81%) Solaris
8 10 (0.74%) AIX
8 10 (0.74%) Windows Server 2016
9 8 (0.59%) Ubuntu
9 8 (0.59%) Windows Server 2003
10 7 (0.52%) Windows 10
10 7 (0.52%) Windows Server 2012
11 6 (0.44%) Mac OS
12 5 (0.37%) CatOS
12 5 (0.37%) CentOS
13 4 (0.30%) SUSE
14 3 (0.22%) Amazon Linux
14 3 (0.22%) Android
Processes & Methodologies
1 220 (16.30%) DevOps
2 195 (14.44%) CI/CD
3 185 (13.70%) Cybersecurity
3 185 (13.70%) Infrastructure as Code
4 180 (13.33%) Load Balancing
5 171 (12.67%) High Availability
6 169 (12.52%) Migration
7 168 (12.44%) Problem-Solving
8 155 (11.48%) Infrastructure Engineering
9 151 (11.19%) ITIL
10 144 (10.67%) Zero Trust
11 133 (9.85%) Agile
12 106 (7.85%) SIEM
13 100 (7.41%) Project Delivery
14 99 (7.33%) Cloud Security
15 97 (7.19%) Change Management
16 96 (7.11%) Network Segmentation
17 93 (6.89%) Observability
18 92 (6.81%) Technical Leadership
19 88 (6.52%) Roadmaps
Programming Languages
1 197 (14.59%) Python
2 137 (10.15%) PowerShell
3 76 (5.63%) Bash
4 54 (4.00%) SQL
5 42 (3.11%) Bicep
6 31 (2.30%) Java
7 10 (0.74%) COBOL
8 9 (0.67%) JavaScript
8 9 (0.67%) Perl
9 8 (0.59%) Rust
10 7 (0.52%) Kusto Query Language
11 6 (0.44%) ActionScript
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
1 490 (36.30%) Security Cleared
2 369 (27.33%) SC Cleared
3 287 (21.26%) Cisco Certification
4 219 (16.22%) CCNP
5 116 (8.59%) CCNA
6 108 (8.00%) Degree
7 105 (7.78%) DV Cleared
8 61 (4.52%) CISSP
9 59 (4.37%) Azure Certification
10 39 (2.89%) CCIE
11 35 (2.59%) AWS Certification
11 35 (2.59%) CISM
12 31 (2.30%) Microsoft Certification
13 24 (1.78%) Network+ Certification
14 23 (1.70%) JNCIS
15 20 (1.48%) Computer Science Degree
16 19 (1.41%) CompTIA Security+
16 19 (1.41%) JNCIA
17 17 (1.26%) Server+ Certification
18 16 (1.19%) CCSE
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 70 (5.19%) ISO/IEC 27001
2 54 (4.00%) NIST
3 48 (3.56%) GDPR
4 35 (2.59%) PCI DSS
5 32 (2.37%) SLA
6 31 (2.30%) NCSC
7 26 (1.93%) QA
8 20 (1.48%) Cyber Essentials
9 13 (0.96%) PMO
10 7 (0.52%) Data Quality
10 7 (0.52%) 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%) SOC 2
13 4 (0.30%) GxP
13 4 (0.30%) NIST 800
System Software
1 211 (15.63%) Active Directory
2 156 (11.56%) VMware Infrastructure
3 62 (4.59%) VMware NSX
4 53 (3.93%) Docker
5 40 (2.96%) Hyper-V
6 38 (2.81%) vSphere
7 33 (2.44%) Virtual Machines
8 28 (2.07%) VMware ESXi
9 22 (1.63%) Firmware
10 21 (1.56%) Virtual Desktop
11 16 (1.19%) 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%) KVM
15 2 (0.15%) Virtual Servers
15 2 (0.15%) VMware Workstation
Systems Management
1 220 (16.30%) Terraform
2 173 (12.81%) Ansible
3 102 (7.56%) FortiGate
4 101 (7.48%) Kubernetes
5 62 (4.59%) Grafana
6 53 (3.93%) Prometheus
7 52 (3.85%) Microsoft Intune
8 34 (2.52%) Single Sign-On
9 28 (2.07%) SCCM
10 24 (1.78%) vCenter Server
11 17 (1.26%) Active Directory Federation Services
12 14 (1.04%) Nmap
12 14 (1.04%) Puppet
13 13 (0.96%) CASB
13 13 (0.96%) Nagios
14 12 (0.89%) Cisco Prime
14 12 (0.89%) QRadar
15 11 (0.81%) Consul
15 11 (0.81%) VxRail
16 10 (0.74%) Progress Chef
Vendors
1 500 (37.04%) Cisco
2 310 (22.96%) Palo Alto
3 260 (19.26%) Microsoft
4 201 (14.89%) VMware
5 190 (14.07%) F5
6 187 (13.85%) Fortinet
7 151 (11.19%) Juniper
8 137 (10.15%) CheckPoint
9 99 (7.33%) Aruba
10 81 (6.00%) Splunk
11 72 (5.33%) ServiceNow
12 69 (5.11%) SolarWinds
13 66 (4.89%) Arista
14 49 (3.63%) Google
15 43 (3.19%) Zscaler
16 38 (2.81%) Meraki
17 36 (2.67%) Red Hat
18 35 (2.59%) Citrix
19 28 (2.07%) Oracle
20 27 (2.00%) Extreme Networks