Security Engineer Contract Job Trends

Security Engineer
UK

The median Security Engineer daily rate in the UK is £535, according to job vacancies posted in the 6 months leading up to 28 December 2025.

The table below compares current contractor rates and summary statistics with the previous two years.

6 months to
28 Dec 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 228 242 274
Rank change year-on-year +14 +32 -5
Contract jobs requiring a Security Engineer 451 341 366
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 1.22% 1.02% 0.84%
As % of the Job Titles category 1.34% 1.10% 0.90%
Number of daily rates quoted 263 217 235
10th Percentile £380 £400 £413
25th Percentile £425 £450 £500
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £535 £550 £600
Median % change year-on-year -2.79% -8.33% +7.87%
75th Percentile £625 £625 £700
90th Percentile £700 £700 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £525 £525 £600
% change year-on-year - -12.50% +15.72%
Number of hourly rates quoted 11 3 27
10th Percentile - £42.00 £62.96
25th Percentile - £43.13 £82.79
Median hourly rate £85.40 £45.00 £83.40
Median % change year-on-year +89.78% -46.04% +43.79%
75th Percentile £90.75 £61.68 -
90th Percentile £91.50 £71.69 £83.40
UK excluding London median hourly rate £85.40 £73.31 £83.40
% change year-on-year +16.49% -12.10% +58.86%

All Contract IT Job Roles
UK

For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all contract IT job vacancies. Most job vacancies include a discernible job title that can be normalized. As such, the figures in the second row provide an indication of the number of contract jobs in our overall sample.

Contract vacancies in the UK with a recognized job title 33,673 31,116 40,613
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 91.15% 92.74% 93.33%
Number of daily rates quoted 21,283 19,110 27,220
10th Percentile £295 £300 £285
25th Percentile £405 £409 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £618 £638 £640
90th Percentile £720 £738 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £488 £500
% change year-on-year -2.56% -2.50% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 1,981 971 1,564
10th Percentile £14.25 £15.50 £14.50
25th Percentile £18.25 £21.02 £19.06
Median hourly rate £25.47 £32.50 £45.00
Median % change year-on-year -21.63% -27.78% +44.81%
75th Percentile £58.00 £62.50 £65.00
90th Percentile £70.71 £73.75 £77.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £25.15 £32.50 £45.88
% change year-on-year -22.62% -29.16% +83.52%

Security Engineer
Job Vacancy Trend

Historical trend showing the proportion of contract IT job postings featuring 'Security Engineer' in the job title relative to all contract IT jobs advertised.

Security Engineer job vacancy trend in the UK

Security Engineer
Daily Rate Trend

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for Security Engineer job vacancies in the UK.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for Security Engineer job vacancies in the UK

Security Engineer
Daily Rate Histogram

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Security Engineer over the 6 months to 28 December 2025.

Daily rate histogram for Security Engineer in the UK

Security Engineer
Hourly Rate Trend

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for Security Engineer job vacancies in the UK.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for Security Engineer job vacancies in the UK

Security Engineer
Hourly Rate Histogram

Hourly rate distribution of jobs citing Security Engineer over the 6 months to 28 December 2025.

Hourly rate histogram for Security Engineer in the UK

Security Engineer
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 Security Engineer within the UK over the 6 months to 28 December 2025. 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 +20 392 £538 -2.27% 595
London +36 216 £545 -5.22% 115
UK excluding London -5 179 £525 - 552
Work from Home +11 126 £525 - 239
North of England -31 46 £575 +10.31% 106
South East -19 39 £488 -7.14% 129
North West -15 30 £600 +9.09% 61
South West +17 26 £522 -16.52% 83
Midlands -32 26 £488 +15.38% 95
East of England -8 22 £500 +81.82% 78
West Midlands -22 22 £543 +28.40% 54
Scotland +14 21 £525 -6.67% 35
Yorkshire -45 13 £570 +42.50% 34
Northern Ireland -3 5 - - 13
East Midlands - 4 £413 - 38
North East -5 3 £400 - 11
Wales 0 2 £600 +34.83% 24

Security Engineer Skill Set
Top 30 Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities

For the 6 months to 28 December 2025, Security Engineer contract job roles required the following skills and capabilities in order of popularity. The figures indicate the absolute number of co-occurrences and as a proportion of all contract job ads featuring Security Engineer in the job title.

1 171 (37.92%) Azure
2 170 (37.69%) Cybersecurity
3 132 (29.27%) SIEM
4 125 (27.72%) AWS
4 125 (27.72%) Firewall
5 122 (27.05%) Microsoft
6 112 (24.83%) Cloud Security
7 100 (22.17%) Security Cleared
8 98 (21.73%) Incident Response
9 96 (21.29%) Network Security
10 90 (19.96%) Python
11 85 (18.85%) NIST
12 79 (17.52%) SC Cleared
13 78 (17.29%) Security Operations
14 74 (16.41%) PowerShell
15 73 (16.19%) Windows
16 71 (15.74%) Infrastructure as Code
17 69 (15.30%) CI/CD
18 66 (14.63%) Linux
19 64 (14.19%) CISSP
20 60 (13.30%) GCP
21 59 (13.08%) ISO/IEC 27001
22 58 (12.86%) Active Directory
23 56 (12.42%) DevOps
24 54 (11.97%) Microsoft 365
25 51 (11.31%) Entra ID
26 49 (10.86%) Azure Sentinel
26 49 (10.86%) Degree
26 49 (10.86%) Problem-Solving
27 48 (10.64%) Splunk

Security Engineer Skill Set
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 11 (2.44%) Microsoft Exchange
2 7 (1.55%) SharePoint
3 5 (1.11%) Confluence
4 2 (0.44%) Apache
4 2 (0.44%) Apache Spark
5 1 (0.22%) Apache Airflow
Applications
1 5 (1.11%) Microsoft Office
2 4 (0.89%) Microsoft Excel
2 4 (0.89%) Microsoft PowerPoint
Business Applications
1 2 (0.44%) NetSuite
2 1 (0.22%) Remedy ITSM
Cloud Services
1 171 (37.92%) Azure
2 125 (27.72%) AWS
3 60 (13.30%) GCP
4 54 (11.97%) Microsoft 365
5 51 (11.31%) Entra ID
6 49 (10.86%) Azure Sentinel
7 34 (7.54%) Microsoft Purview
8 27 (5.99%) GitHub
9 18 (3.99%) AWS CloudFormation
10 17 (3.77%) OpenShift
11 15 (3.33%) Azure Monitor
12 11 (2.44%) Amazon GuardDuty
12 11 (2.44%) GitHub Actions
12 11 (2.44%) SaaS
13 9 (2.00%) Azure Key Vault
13 9 (2.00%) Mimecast
14 8 (1.77%) Amazon EKS
15 7 (1.55%) AWS CloudTrail
15 7 (1.55%) Azure DevOps
15 7 (1.55%) Serverless
Communications & Networking
1 125 (27.72%) Firewall
2 96 (21.29%) Network Security
3 39 (8.65%) VPN
4 37 (8.20%) DNS
5 23 (5.10%) WAN
6 19 (4.21%) SSL
7 18 (3.99%) Wireless
8 16 (3.55%) TCP/IP
9 13 (2.88%) BGP
10 11 (2.44%) Intrusion Detection
10 11 (2.44%) OSPF
11 10 (2.22%) IPsec
12 9 (2.00%) DHCP
12 9 (2.00%) DMVPN
13 8 (1.77%) Cisco IPT
14 7 (1.55%) SD-WAN
14 7 (1.55%) Wi-Fi
15 6 (1.33%) Internet
15 6 (1.33%) VLAN
16 5 (1.11%) Wireshark
Database & Business Intelligence
1 11 (2.44%) Data Lake
2 9 (2.00%) BigQuery
3 7 (1.55%) Oracle Database
4 5 (1.11%) Elasticsearch
5 4 (0.89%) Power BI
6 3 (0.67%) Amazon Athena
6 3 (0.67%) Big Data
7 2 (0.44%) Amazon RDS
7 2 (0.44%) Azure SQL Data Warehouse
7 2 (0.44%) Data Warehouse
7 2 (0.44%) Mixpanel
7 2 (0.44%) OLAP
7 2 (0.44%) OLTP
8 1 (0.22%) Amazon Redshift
8 1 (0.22%) DynamoDB
Development Applications
1 15 (3.33%) GitLab
2 12 (2.66%) JIRA
3 8 (1.77%) Jenkins
4 7 (1.55%) SonarQube
5 6 (1.33%) ClearCase
6 5 (1.11%) Snyk
7 4 (0.89%) Bitbucket
8 3 (0.67%) Artifactory
9 2 (0.44%) Git
10 1 (0.22%) Fiddler
10 1 (0.22%) Postman
10 1 (0.22%) Travis CI
General
1 112 (24.83%) Social Skills
2 59 (13.08%) Finance
3 42 (9.31%) Public Sector
4 36 (7.98%) Analytical Skills
5 15 (3.33%) Banking
5 15 (3.33%) Documentation Skills
6 13 (2.88%) Military
7 11 (2.44%) Telecoms
8 10 (2.22%) Legal
9 8 (1.77%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 6 (1.33%) Spanish Language
11 5 (1.11%) Financial Institution
11 5 (1.11%) Manufacturing
12 4 (0.89%) Organisational Skills
12 4 (0.89%) Pharmaceutical
13 3 (0.67%) Investment Banking
14 2 (0.44%) Aerospace
14 2 (0.44%) Cyber-Physical System
14 2 (0.44%) Local Government
14 2 (0.44%) Retail
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 20 (4.43%) REST
2 11 (2.44%) Elastic Stack
2 11 (2.44%) SAML
3 9 (2.00%) 802.1X
4 8 (1.77%) OAuth
5 7 (1.55%) JSON
5 7 (1.55%) Node.js
5 7 (1.55%) SailPoint
6 6 (1.33%) OpenID
7 5 (1.11%) Kafka
7 5 (1.11%) NestJS
8 4 (0.89%) Microsoft Graph
8 4 (0.89%) Regular Expression
8 4 (0.89%) SOAP
9 3 (0.67%) Smart Contracts
9 3 (0.67%) YAML
10 2 (0.44%) ARM Templates
10 2 (0.44%) Great Expectations
10 2 (0.44%) gRPC
10 2 (0.44%) Oracle Fusion
Miscellaneous
1 53 (11.75%) Security Posture
2 29 (6.43%) Data Centre
3 25 (5.54%) Onboarding
4 23 (5.10%) Management Information System
5 20 (4.43%) Cloud Native
6 14 (3.10%) Cyber Threat
6 14 (3.10%) Data Protection Act
7 10 (2.22%) Cyber Defence
7 10 (2.22%) Operational Technology
8 8 (1.77%) Cloud Security Posture
8 8 (1.77%) Hybrid Cloud
9 7 (1.55%) Security Operations Centre
10 6 (1.33%) BYOD
10 6 (1.33%) Cyber Kill Chain
10 6 (1.33%) Cyber Security Posture
11 5 (1.11%) Greenfield Project
11 5 (1.11%) Life Science
11 5 (1.11%) Mobile App
11 5 (1.11%) PKI
11 5 (1.11%) YARA
Operating Systems
1 73 (16.19%) Windows
2 66 (14.63%) Linux
3 14 (3.10%) Windows Server
4 12 (2.66%) Mac OS
5 8 (1.77%) Unix
6 6 (1.33%) Android
6 6 (1.33%) Apple iOS
7 3 (0.67%) VMS
8 2 (0.44%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
8 2 (0.44%) Ubuntu
8 2 (0.44%) Windows 10
9 1 (0.22%) CentOS
9 1 (0.22%) Rocky
9 1 (0.22%) Windows Server 2012
Processes & Methodologies
1 170 (37.69%) Cybersecurity
2 132 (29.27%) SIEM
3 112 (24.83%) Cloud Security
4 98 (21.73%) Incident Response
5 78 (17.29%) Security Operations
6 71 (15.74%) Infrastructure as Code
7 69 (15.30%) CI/CD
8 56 (12.42%) DevOps
9 49 (10.86%) Problem-Solving
10 48 (10.64%) Vulnerability Management
11 45 (9.98%) Threat Detection
12 43 (9.53%) SOAR
13 42 (9.31%) DevSecOps
13 42 (9.31%) Threat Modelling
14 40 (8.87%) Information Security
15 38 (8.43%) Security Monitoring
16 37 (8.20%) Analytics
17 34 (7.54%) Continuous Improvement
17 34 (7.54%) Data Protection
17 34 (7.54%) Vulnerability Scanning
Programming Languages
1 90 (19.96%) Python
2 74 (16.41%) PowerShell
3 31 (6.87%) Kusto Query Language
4 27 (5.99%) Bash
5 17 (3.77%) Java
6 13 (2.88%) SQL
7 6 (1.33%) Bicep
7 6 (1.33%) C
7 6 (1.33%) JavaScript
8 5 (1.11%) Shell Script
9 4 (0.89%) BeanShell
9 4 (0.89%) C#
9 4 (0.89%) Kotlin
10 3 (0.67%) C++
10 3 (0.67%) Perl
10 3 (0.67%) Rust
11 2 (0.44%) Go
11 2 (0.44%) TypeScript
12 1 (0.22%) Scala
12 1 (0.22%) Swift
Qualifications
1 100 (22.17%) Security Cleared
2 79 (17.52%) SC Cleared
3 64 (14.19%) CISSP
4 49 (10.86%) Degree
5 35 (7.76%) CISM
6 27 (5.99%) Cisco Certification
7 23 (5.10%) DV Cleared
8 20 (4.43%) Azure Certification
9 16 (3.55%) CompTIA Security+
10 15 (3.33%) CEH
11 14 (3.10%) CCNP
12 12 (2.66%) Microsoft Certification
13 11 (2.44%) (ISC)2 CCSP
13 11 (2.44%) AWS Certification
14 9 (2.00%) SANS
15 7 (1.55%) GIAC
16 6 (1.33%) CCSP
16 6 (1.33%) CompTIA CySA+
16 6 (1.33%) Network+ Certification
16 6 (1.33%) OSCP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 85 (18.85%) NIST
2 59 (13.08%) ISO/IEC 27001
3 29 (6.43%) GDPR
4 20 (4.43%) NCSC
5 14 (3.10%) NIST 800
6 11 (2.44%) GRC
6 11 (2.44%) HIPAA
7 10 (2.22%) Cyber Essentials
7 10 (2.22%) JSP 440
8 9 (2.00%) PCI DSS
9 6 (1.33%) SOC 2
10 5 (1.11%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
11 4 (0.89%) RMADS
12 3 (0.67%) ISO/IEC 27002 (supersedes ISO/IEC 17799)
12 3 (0.67%) ISO/IEC 42001
13 2 (0.44%) Data Quality
13 2 (0.44%) EU AI Act
13 2 (0.44%) GxP
14 1 (0.22%) Sarbanes-Oxley
14 1 (0.22%) SLA
System Software
1 58 (12.86%) Active Directory
2 18 (3.99%) Virtual Machines
3 14 (3.10%) Docker
4 13 (2.88%) Firmware
5 7 (1.55%) Hyper-V
6 3 (0.67%) VMware Infrastructure
7 2 (0.44%) Snort
8 1 (0.22%) GPFS
8 1 (0.22%) Lustre
8 1 (0.22%) Slurm Workload Manager
8 1 (0.22%) Virtual Desktop
8 1 (0.22%) Virtual Servers
Systems Management
1 47 (10.42%) Terraform
2 31 (6.87%) Kubernetes
3 20 (4.43%) SCCM
4 17 (3.77%) Microsoft Intune
5 13 (2.88%) Fluentd
6 12 (2.66%) Single Sign-On
7 11 (2.44%) Ansible
8 10 (2.22%) CASB
9 7 (1.55%) logstash
9 7 (1.55%) WSUS
10 6 (1.33%) Kibana
10 6 (1.33%) SCOrch
11 5 (1.11%) Nessus
11 5 (1.11%) QRadar
12 4 (0.89%) CSIRT
13 3 (0.67%) Active Directory Federation Services
13 3 (0.67%) Argo
13 3 (0.67%) FortiGate
13 3 (0.67%) Icinga
13 3 (0.67%) Progress Chef
Vendors
1 122 (27.05%) Microsoft
2 48 (10.64%) Splunk
3 46 (10.20%) Cisco
4 37 (8.20%) Palo Alto
5 29 (6.43%) CrowdStrike
6 28 (6.21%) Tenable
7 26 (5.76%) F5
8 23 (5.10%) CheckPoint
9 22 (4.88%) Google
10 20 (4.43%) Juniper
11 19 (4.21%) Fortinet
12 17 (3.77%) Qualys
13 14 (3.10%) ServiceNow
13 14 (3.10%) Zscaler
14 13 (2.88%) Cribl.io
15 10 (2.22%) Oracle
16 9 (2.00%) Blue Coat
16 9 (2.00%) Forcepoint
17 7 (1.55%) CyberArk
18 6 (1.33%) Ping Identity