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

6 months to
4 Feb 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 82 52 47
Rank change year-on-year -30 -5 +13
Contract jobs citing Firewall 1,236 1,223 1,820
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 3.16% 3.95% 4.07%
As % of the Communications & Networking category 30.15% 30.34% 29.72%
Number of daily rates quoted 807 726 1,169
10th Percentile £313 £313 £305
25th Percentile £413 £410 £406
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £521 £520
Median % change year-on-year -4.08% +0.24% -0.95%
75th Percentile £594 £618 £625
90th Percentile £675 £701 £725
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 £26.53 £20.00 £22.95
25th Percentile £33.00 £20.98 £60.00
Median hourly rate £41.94 £35.82 £65.98
Median % change year-on-year +17.08% -45.71% +57.04%
75th Percentile £71.06 £41.62 £76.53
90th Percentile £85.30 £56.25 £85.65
UK excluding London median hourly rate £45.33 £35.00 £67.27
% change year-on-year +29.51% -47.97% +29.03%

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 4,099 4,031 6,123
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 10.50% 13.03% 13.68%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,707 2,356 3,691
10th Percentile £204 £213 £206
25th Percentile £356 £360 £356
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £475 £500 £493
Median % change year-on-year -5.00% +1.52% -4.83%
75th Percentile £588 £600 £600
90th Percentile £675 £685 £700
UK excluding London median daily rate £450 £470 £475
% change year-on-year -4.26% -1.05% +2.15%
Number of hourly rates quoted 166 137 408
10th Percentile £15.50 £15.93 £15.45
25th Percentile £18.90 £21.46 £21.25
Median hourly rate £32.00 £35.00 £50.00
Median % change year-on-year -8.57% -30.00% +143.90%
75th Percentile £65.00 £53.75 £65.00
90th Percentile £75.00 £69.25 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £41.94 £31.79 £55.00
% change year-on-year +31.93% -42.20% +179.54%

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 4 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 4 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 4 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 1,041 £513 -2.38% 517
UK excluding London -24 696 £492 -1.60% 477
Work from Home -11 387 £508 -3.33% 207
London -43 387 £525 -3.23% 131
North of England -23 205 £500 +5.26% 106
South East +14 184 £500 - 178
North West -23 116 £520 +5.05% 64
Midlands -32 114 £469 -6.25% 54
West Midlands -8 105 £463 +5.71% 38
Yorkshire -11 85 £465 +9.41% 32
South West -27 62 £550 +7.32% 47
Scotland -8 59 £425 -9.33% 31
East of England -26 44 £460 -12.38% 64
Wales -12 20 £425 +16.44% 8
East Midlands -56 8 £500 -23.14% 16
Northern Ireland - 8 £488 - 1
North East -16 7 £550 - 12

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 44 (3.56%) Microsoft Exchange
2 41 (3.32%) Confluence
3 26 (2.10%) SharePoint
4 15 (1.21%) nginx
5 13 (1.05%) Apache
6 9 (0.73%) OpenStack
7 7 (0.57%) IIS
8 6 (0.49%) SAS
9 4 (0.32%) Tomcat
10 3 (0.24%) CICS
11 2 (0.16%) Apache Pulsar
11 2 (0.16%) JBoss
11 2 (0.16%) Oracle HTTP Server
11 2 (0.16%) WebLogic
12 1 (0.081%) Anypoint
12 1 (0.081%) CMS
12 1 (0.081%) Traefik
12 1 (0.081%) WebSphere
Applications
1 34 (2.75%) Microsoft Office
2 22 (1.78%) MS Visio
3 19 (1.54%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 18 (1.46%) Microsoft Excel
5 7 (0.57%) Mozilla Thunderbird
6 1 (0.081%) Microsoft Project
Business Applications
1 2 (0.16%) Remedy ITSM
2 1 (0.081%) Finacle
2 1 (0.081%) Payment Gateway
2 1 (0.081%) SAP S/4HANA
2 1 (0.081%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
Cloud Services
1 423 (34.22%) Azure
2 327 (26.46%) AWS
3 147 (11.89%) GCP
4 116 (9.39%) Microsoft 365
5 93 (7.52%) Entra ID
6 72 (5.83%) Virtual Private Cloud
7 53 (4.29%) Amazon EC2
8 51 (4.13%) GitHub
9 44 (3.56%) Azure Sentinel
10 43 (3.48%) Amazon S3
10 43 (3.48%) IaaS
11 42 (3.40%) Azure DevOps
12 41 (3.32%) Amazon CloudWatch
13 39 (3.16%) Azure Monitor
14 36 (2.91%) PaaS
15 33 (2.67%) AWS CloudFormation
15 33 (2.67%) Serverless
16 32 (2.59%) GitHub Actions
17 27 (2.18%) SaaS
18 26 (2.10%) Akamai
Communications & Networking
1 305 (24.68%) Network Security
2 285 (23.06%) VPN
3 246 (19.90%) WAN
4 234 (18.93%) DNS
5 174 (14.08%) LAN
6 156 (12.62%) BGP
7 144 (11.65%) TCP/IP
8 131 (10.60%) OSPF
9 119 (9.63%) VLAN
10 109 (8.82%) Wireless
11 103 (8.33%) SD-WAN
12 97 (7.85%) DHCP
13 84 (6.80%) Wi-Fi
14 80 (6.47%) MPLS
15 65 (5.26%) SSL
16 58 (4.69%) IPsec
17 56 (4.53%) Cisco ASA
18 50 (4.05%) Cisco Nexus
19 49 (3.96%) Cisco ISE
20 48 (3.88%) HTTP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 34 (2.75%) SQL Server
2 29 (2.35%) Amazon RDS
3 24 (1.94%) PostgreSQL
4 11 (0.89%) Elasticsearch
5 8 (0.65%) Oracle Database
6 7 (0.57%) Amazon Aurora
6 7 (0.57%) Data Warehouse
6 7 (0.57%) MongoDB
7 6 (0.49%) Data Lake
8 5 (0.40%) Relational Database
9 4 (0.32%) Redis
9 4 (0.32%) SQL Server Integration Services
10 3 (0.24%) Amazon QuickSight
10 3 (0.24%) DataStage
10 3 (0.24%) DynamoDB
10 3 (0.24%) Oracle Exadata
11 2 (0.16%) Data Vault
11 2 (0.16%) DB2
11 2 (0.16%) MySQL
11 2 (0.16%) Oracle Reports
Development Applications
1 75 (6.07%) Jenkins
2 73 (5.91%) JIRA
3 65 (5.26%) Git
4 60 (4.85%) GitLab
5 23 (1.86%) Sonatype Nexus
6 19 (1.54%) Bitbucket
7 14 (1.13%) Burp Suite
7 14 (1.13%) Metasploit
8 10 (0.81%) Vagrant
9 9 (0.73%) SonarQube
10 8 (0.65%) Jaeger
11 4 (0.32%) Chocolatey
11 4 (0.32%) CircleCI
12 2 (0.16%) Artifactory
12 2 (0.16%) MSI
13 1 (0.081%) Atlassian Bamboo
13 1 (0.081%) Maven
13 1 (0.081%) Postman
13 1 (0.081%) Subversion
13 1 (0.081%) Travis CI
General
1 348 (28.16%) Social Skills
2 140 (11.33%) Analytical Skills
3 127 (10.28%) Finance
4 115 (9.30%) Public Sector
5 88 (7.12%) Documentation Skills
6 59 (4.77%) Banking
7 47 (3.80%) Telecoms
8 33 (2.67%) Legal
9 30 (2.43%) Manufacturing
10 28 (2.27%) Presentation Skills
11 15 (1.21%) Financial Institution
12 14 (1.13%) Local Government
12 14 (1.13%) Military
13 12 (0.97%) Retail
14 10 (0.81%) Inclusion and Diversity
14 10 (0.81%) Influencing Skills
15 8 (0.65%) Aerospace
15 8 (0.65%) Law
16 7 (0.57%) Electronics
16 7 (0.57%) Spanish Language
Job Titles
1 307 (24.84%) Network Engineer
2 201 (16.26%) Architect
3 114 (9.22%) Senior
4 110 (8.90%) Security Engineer
5 84 (6.80%) Infrastructure Engineer
6 67 (5.42%) Network Architect
7 56 (4.53%) Security Architect
8 53 (4.29%) DevOps Engineer
9 50 (4.05%) Consultant
10 49 (3.96%) Analyst
10 49 (3.96%) Platform Engineer
11 47 (3.80%) Azure Engineer
11 47 (3.80%) SC Cleared Network Engineer
12 39 (3.16%) Solutions Architect
13 37 (2.99%) Lead
14 36 (2.91%) Network Security Engineer
15 33 (2.67%) Cloud Engineer
15 33 (2.67%) Support Engineer
16 30 (2.43%) Senior Network Engineer
17 28 (2.27%) IT Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 40 (3.24%) 802.1X
2 39 (3.16%) LDAP
3 31 (2.51%) SAML
4 27 (2.18%) Middleware
5 26 (2.10%) OpenID
6 19 (1.54%) OAuth
7 18 (1.46%) OAuth2
8 16 (1.29%) JSON
8 16 (1.29%) Kafka
9 15 (1.21%) Node.js
9 15 (1.21%) REST
10 10 (0.81%) OpenTelemetry
10 10 (0.81%) XML
11 9 (0.73%) ARM Templates
11 9 (0.73%) Elastic Stack
11 9 (0.73%) Spring Boot
12 8 (0.65%) Microsoft Graph
13 7 (0.57%) YAML
14 6 (0.49%) RFC 2544
15 4 (0.32%) Regular Expression
Miscellaneous
1 230 (18.61%) Data Centre
2 88 (7.12%) Security Posture
3 59 (4.77%) PKI
4 49 (3.96%) Onboarding
5 46 (3.72%) Cloud Native
6 45 (3.64%) Hybrid Cloud
7 42 (3.40%) Operational Technology
8 32 (2.59%) Public Cloud
8 32 (2.59%) Replication
9 27 (2.18%) Management Information System
10 25 (2.02%) Security Operations Centre
11 24 (1.94%) Cyber Threat
12 21 (1.70%) SCADA
13 20 (1.62%) Data Protection Act
14 19 (1.54%) Private Cloud
15 17 (1.38%) NHS
16 14 (1.13%) Product Ownership
17 13 (1.05%) Fat Client
17 13 (1.05%) IoT
17 13 (1.05%) Thin Client
Operating Systems
1 304 (24.60%) Windows
2 208 (16.83%) Linux
3 121 (9.79%) Windows Server
4 32 (2.59%) VMS
5 31 (2.51%) Unix
6 26 (2.10%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
7 15 (1.21%) Windows Server 2019
8 13 (1.05%) Amazon Linux
8 13 (1.05%) Ubuntu
9 12 (0.97%) Windows 10
10 11 (0.89%) Windows 7
11 7 (0.57%) Windows Server 2016
12 5 (0.40%) Android
12 5 (0.40%) CentOS
12 5 (0.40%) Mac OS
13 4 (0.32%) CatOS
13 4 (0.32%) Solaris
13 4 (0.32%) Windows Server 2003
13 4 (0.32%) Windows Server 2012
14 3 (0.24%) Apple iOS
Processes & Methodologies
1 245 (19.82%) Cybersecurity
2 201 (16.26%) Problem-Solving
3 200 (16.18%) DevOps
4 181 (14.64%) CI/CD
5 174 (14.08%) Infrastructure as Code
6 151 (12.22%) Migration
7 138 (11.17%) SIEM
8 137 (11.08%) Incident Response
9 136 (11.00%) Cloud Security
10 132 (10.68%) Infrastructure Engineering
11 129 (10.44%) Agile
12 120 (9.71%) ITIL
13 109 (8.82%) Load Balancing
14 107 (8.66%) Stakeholder Management
15 105 (8.50%) High Availability
16 99 (8.01%) Zero Trust
17 97 (7.85%) Change Management
18 91 (7.36%) Mentoring
19 83 (6.72%) Containerisation
20 81 (6.55%) Continuous Improvement
Programming Languages
1 226 (18.28%) Python
2 198 (16.02%) PowerShell
3 100 (8.09%) Bash
4 64 (5.18%) SQL
5 41 (3.32%) Java
6 34 (2.75%) Perl
7 23 (1.86%) Bicep
8 14 (1.13%) Kusto Query Language
9 12 (0.97%) Ruby
10 10 (0.81%) Groovy
11 9 (0.73%) Rust
12 8 (0.65%) Shell Script
13 5 (0.40%) JavaScript
14 4 (0.32%) C#
14 4 (0.32%) Go
14 4 (0.32%) PL/SQL
15 3 (0.24%) COBOL
16 1 (0.081%) C
16 1 (0.081%) C++
16 1 (0.081%) Lisp
Qualifications
1 416 (33.66%) Security Cleared
2 283 (22.90%) SC Cleared
3 216 (17.48%) Cisco Certification
4 178 (14.40%) CCNP
5 114 (9.22%) Degree
6 105 (8.50%) DV Cleared
7 90 (7.28%) CCNA
8 88 (7.12%) CISSP
9 57 (4.61%) CISM
10 55 (4.45%) Azure Certification
11 48 (3.88%) CCIE
12 47 (3.80%) AWS Certification
13 39 (3.16%) Microsoft Certification
14 24 (1.94%) CompTIA Security+
15 19 (1.54%) CEH
15 19 (1.54%) Computer Science Degree
15 19 (1.54%) JNCIS
16 18 (1.46%) JNCIP
17 16 (1.29%) CREST Certified
18 15 (1.21%) CHECK Team Member
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 112 (9.06%) ISO/IEC 27001
2 95 (7.69%) NIST
3 63 (5.10%) GDPR
4 43 (3.48%) PCI DSS
5 27 (2.18%) NCSC
6 25 (2.02%) SLA
7 24 (1.94%) Cyber Essentials
8 18 (1.46%) QA
9 14 (1.13%) PMO
10 13 (1.05%) GRC
11 12 (0.97%) Sarbanes-Oxley
12 8 (0.65%) Actionable Recommendations
13 7 (0.57%) HIPAA
14 6 (0.49%) COBIT
14 6 (0.49%) HMG Security Policy Framework
14 6 (0.49%) JSP 440
15 5 (0.40%) SOC 2
16 4 (0.32%) ISO/IEC 27002 (supersedes ISO/IEC 17799)
16 4 (0.32%) NIST 800
17 3 (0.24%) ISO/IEC 42001
System Software
1 224 (18.12%) Active Directory
2 162 (13.11%) VMware Infrastructure
3 120 (9.71%) Docker
4 59 (4.77%) VMware NSX
5 39 (3.16%) Hyper-V
6 34 (2.75%) vSphere
7 33 (2.67%) Virtual Machines
8 22 (1.78%) VMware ESXi
9 20 (1.62%) Virtual Desktop
10 17 (1.38%) Squid
11 13 (1.05%) DFS Replication
12 11 (0.89%) Firmware
13 8 (0.65%) Virtual Servers
14 7 (0.57%) Dovecot
14 7 (0.57%) Postfix
15 6 (0.49%) KVM
16 5 (0.40%) Microsoft App-V
16 5 (0.40%) NDS
16 5 (0.40%) NetIQ eDirectory
16 5 (0.40%) Snort
Systems Management
1 199 (16.10%) Terraform
2 156 (12.62%) Ansible
3 114 (9.22%) Kubernetes
4 76 (6.15%) FortiGate
5 62 (5.02%) Microsoft Intune
6 43 (3.48%) Grafana
7 41 (3.32%) Single Sign-On
8 39 (3.16%) Prometheus
9 37 (2.99%) SCCM
10 28 (2.27%) Active Directory Federation Services
11 27 (2.18%) vCenter Server
12 19 (1.54%) Nmap
13 16 (1.29%) CSIRT
14 15 (1.21%) Nessus
15 14 (1.13%) Fluentd
15 14 (1.13%) Nagios
16 12 (0.97%) QRadar
16 12 (0.97%) WMI
17 9 (0.73%) Oracle RMAN
17 9 (0.73%) SCOM
Vendors
1 392 (31.72%) Cisco
2 281 (22.73%) Microsoft
3 266 (21.52%) Palo Alto
4 205 (16.59%) VMware
5 142 (11.49%) F5
6 133 (10.76%) CheckPoint
7 125 (10.11%) Fortinet
8 99 (8.01%) Juniper
9 90 (7.28%) Splunk
10 72 (5.83%) Aruba
11 64 (5.18%) Meraki
12 57 (4.61%) SolarWinds
13 55 (4.45%) Oracle
14 53 (4.29%) Google
15 45 (3.64%) ServiceNow
15 45 (3.64%) Zscaler
16 37 (2.99%) Citrix
17 27 (2.18%) Dell
18 25 (2.02%) Red Hat
19 18 (1.46%) Veeam