Security Engineer Contract Job Trends

Security Engineer
UK

The median Security Engineer daily rate in the UK is £538, according to job vacancies posted in the 6 months leading up to 22 July 2026.

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

6 months to
22 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 243 255 232
Rank change year-on-year +12 -23 -11
Contract jobs requiring a Security Engineer 547 341 419
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 1.04% 1.05% 1.01%
As % of the Job Titles category 1.12% 1.14% 1.09%
Number of daily rates quoted 357 223 322
10th Percentile £413 £376 £407
25th Percentile £475 £413 £450
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £538 £525 £555
Median % change year-on-year +2.38% -5.41% -0.89%
75th Percentile £610 £650 £638
90th Percentile £688 £738 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £540 £500 £550
% change year-on-year +8.00% -9.09% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 18 9 2
10th Percentile £70.38 £63.50 £64.25
25th Percentile £73.75 £82.50 £66.88
Median hourly rate £77.50 £85.00 £72.50
Median % change year-on-year -8.82% +17.24% -13.07%
75th Percentile £85.05 £91.50 £76.88
90th Percentile £86.03 - £78.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £84.00 £85.00 £72.50
% change year-on-year -1.18% +17.24% -13.07%

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 48,829 29,898 38,441
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.59% 91.63% 93.05%
Number of daily rates quoted 29,477 19,026 24,867
10th Percentile £325 £283 £295
25th Percentile £420 £400 £410
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -2.02%
75th Percentile £625 £623 £638
90th Percentile £725 £730 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 3,287 1,429 2,436
10th Percentile £15.75 £13.75 £13.49
25th Percentile £21.25 £17.30 £18.00
Median hourly rate £43.69 £25.15 £40.00
Median % change year-on-year +73.72% -37.13% -8.57%
75th Percentile £67.84 £55.00 £64.25
90th Percentile £80.52 £73.75 £74.47
UK excluding London median hourly rate £45.00 £25.15 £41.81
% change year-on-year +78.93% -39.85% +4.53%

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 22 July 2026.

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 22 July 2026.

Hourly rate histogram for Security Engineer in the UK

Security Engineer
Top 16 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 22 July 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 +3 504 £525 - 415
UK excluding London -9 263 £540 +8.00% 274
London 0 243 £525 -4.55% 165
Work from Home +12 206 £540 +8.00% 131
North of England +5 137 £579 +15.75% 82
North West +17 114 £563 +12.39% 50
Midlands -13 58 £500 - 42
West Midlands -14 57 £500 -8.05% 23
South East -38 51 £500 +5.26% 80
Yorkshire -32 22 £600 +20.00% 25
South West -34 18 £525 +7.69% 30
East of England -32 17 £510 +2.00% 28
Scotland -6 14 £610 - 11
Wales -16 2 £733 +46.50% 4
East Midlands -12 1 £338 -18.67% 19
North East -39 1 - - 7

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

For the 6 months to 22 July 2026, 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.

1 186 (34.00%) Azure
2 169 (30.90%) Cybersecurity
3 165 (30.16%) Cloud Security
4 148 (27.06%) AWS
5 130 (23.77%) SIEM
6 129 (23.58%) Firewall
7 124 (22.67%) Microsoft
8 121 (22.12%) Python
9 115 (21.02%) Network Security
10 99 (18.10%) CI/CD
11 95 (17.37%) Cisco
12 88 (16.09%) PowerShell
13 86 (15.72%) Security Cleared
14 84 (15.36%) Incident Response
15 75 (13.71%) SC Cleared
15 75 (13.71%) Security Operations
15 75 (13.71%) VPN
16 73 (13.35%) Terraform
17 70 (12.80%) GCP
18 68 (12.43%) CISSP
19 67 (12.25%) Security Architecture
20 63 (11.52%) DNS
21 62 (11.33%) DevSecOps
21 62 (11.33%) Threat Modelling
21 62 (11.33%) Vulnerability Management
21 62 (11.33%) Windows
22 60 (10.97%) Data Loss Prevention
22 60 (10.97%) F5
23 57 (10.42%) DevOps
24 56 (10.24%) Load Balancing

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 19 (3.47%) Confluence
2 3 (0.55%) Apache Spark
3 1 (0.18%) Microsoft Exchange
Applications
1 3 (0.55%) Microsoft Office
2 1 (0.18%) Chatbot
2 1 (0.18%) Microsoft Excel
2 1 (0.18%) Microsoft PowerPoint
2 1 (0.18%) Microsoft Project
Business Applications
1 6 (1.10%) Remedy ITSM
2 2 (0.37%) Maximo
2 2 (0.37%) SAP S/4HANA
3 1 (0.18%) SAP ERP
Cloud Services
1 186 (34.00%) Azure
2 148 (27.06%) AWS
3 70 (12.80%) GCP
4 51 (9.32%) Microsoft Purview
5 48 (8.78%) Microsoft 365
6 35 (6.40%) Entra ID
7 24 (4.39%) AWS CloudFormation
8 22 (4.02%) Azure Sentinel
8 22 (4.02%) Virtual Private Cloud
9 21 (3.84%) SaaS
10 18 (3.29%) Google Kubernetes Engine
11 15 (2.74%) Amazon GuardDuty
12 13 (2.38%) Akamai
12 13 (2.38%) GitHub
13 12 (2.19%) AWS CloudTrail
14 11 (2.01%) Mimecast
14 11 (2.01%) Serverless
15 9 (1.65%) AWS KMS
15 9 (1.65%) Azure DevOps
16 8 (1.46%) Amazon ECS
Communications & Networking
1 129 (23.58%) Firewall
2 115 (21.02%) Network Security
3 75 (13.71%) VPN
4 63 (11.52%) DNS
5 45 (8.23%) BGP
6 34 (6.22%) DMZ
7 32 (5.85%) Multicast
8 28 (5.12%) SSL
9 27 (4.94%) WAN
10 26 (4.75%) TCP/IP
11 20 (3.66%) SD-WAN
12 16 (2.93%) HTTP
13 15 (2.74%) Internet
14 14 (2.56%) Cisco ISE
15 13 (2.38%) Wireless
16 11 (2.01%) VLAN
17 10 (1.83%) Intrusion Detection
18 9 (1.65%) IPsec
18 9 (1.65%) OSPF
18 9 (1.65%) TACACS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 8 (1.46%) Power BI
1 8 (1.46%) SQL Server
2 6 (1.10%) PostgreSQL
3 4 (0.73%) Data Lake
3 4 (0.73%) MongoDB
4 3 (0.55%) Big Data
5 2 (0.37%) Amazon RDS
5 2 (0.37%) Apache Cassandra
5 2 (0.37%) Elasticsearch
5 2 (0.37%) Metadata
5 2 (0.37%) NoSQL
5 2 (0.37%) RDBMS
5 2 (0.37%) Relational Database
6 1 (0.18%) Data Warehouse
6 1 (0.18%) Db2
6 1 (0.18%) SAP HANA
Development Applications
1 23 (4.20%) JIRA
2 8 (1.46%) GitLab
3 6 (1.10%) Jenkins
4 4 (0.73%) Burp Suite
4 4 (0.73%) Git
4 4 (0.73%) Snyk
5 2 (0.37%) Browser DevTools
5 2 (0.37%) Claude Code
5 2 (0.37%) Sonatype Nexus
6 1 (0.18%) Atlassian Bamboo
6 1 (0.18%) Bitbucket
6 1 (0.18%) Metasploit
6 1 (0.18%) SonarQube
6 1 (0.18%) sqlmap
6 1 (0.18%) TruffleHog
General
1 106 (19.38%) Social Skills
2 87 (15.90%) Finance
3 46 (8.41%) Analytical Skills
4 39 (7.13%) Banking
5 24 (4.39%) Public Sector
6 22 (4.02%) Investment Banking
7 21 (3.84%) Documentation Skills
8 8 (1.46%) Telecoms
9 7 (1.28%) Legal
9 7 (1.28%) Marketing
10 5 (0.91%) Presentation Skills
11 4 (0.73%) Health Technology
11 4 (0.73%) Manufacturing
11 4 (0.73%) Military
12 3 (0.55%) Aerospace
12 3 (0.55%) Financial Institution
12 3 (0.55%) Retail
13 2 (0.37%) Inclusion and Diversity
13 2 (0.37%) Law
14 1 (0.18%) Italian Language
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 9 (1.65%) SAML
2 8 (1.46%) 802.1X
3 7 (1.28%) LangChain
4 6 (1.10%) Elastic Stack
4 6 (1.10%) PyTorch
4 6 (1.10%) scikit-learn
5 5 (0.91%) LDAP
5 5 (0.91%) SLSA
6 4 (0.73%) Microsoft Graph
6 4 (0.73%) REST
7 3 (0.55%) ARM Templates
7 3 (0.55%) AWS CDK
8 2 (0.37%) Azure Blueprints
8 2 (0.37%) JSON
8 2 (0.37%) OAuth
8 2 (0.37%) SailPoint
9 1 (0.18%) JWT
9 1 (0.18%) NestJS
9 1 (0.18%) SAP Fiori
9 1 (0.18%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 94 (17.18%) Security Posture
2 58 (10.60%) Cloud Native
3 39 (7.13%) Management Information System
4 35 (6.40%) Cloud Security Posture
5 18 (3.29%) Distributed Denial-of-Service
6 17 (3.11%) Data Centre
7 15 (2.74%) AI Agents
7 15 (2.74%) Enterprise Cloud
7 15 (2.74%) Onboarding
7 15 (2.74%) Operational Technology
8 12 (2.19%) Cyber Threat
8 12 (2.19%) Hybrid Cloud
9 11 (2.01%) Data Protection Act
10 10 (1.83%) Public Cloud
11 9 (1.65%) Security Operations Centre
12 8 (1.46%) Cyber Defence
13 6 (1.10%) Linux Command Line
13 6 (1.10%) PKI
13 6 (1.10%) SCADA
14 4 (0.73%) BYOD
Operating Systems
1 62 (11.33%) Windows
2 52 (9.51%) Linux
3 15 (2.74%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 14 (2.56%) Windows Server
5 9 (1.65%) Mac OS
6 7 (1.28%) Apple iOS
7 6 (1.10%) Windows 10
8 5 (0.91%) Ubuntu
9 3 (0.55%) Unix
10 2 (0.37%) Android
10 2 (0.37%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 169 (30.90%) Cybersecurity
2 165 (30.16%) Cloud Security
3 130 (23.77%) SIEM
4 99 (18.10%) CI/CD
5 84 (15.36%) Incident Response
6 75 (13.71%) Security Operations
7 67 (12.25%) Security Architecture
8 62 (11.33%) DevSecOps
8 62 (11.33%) Threat Modelling
8 62 (11.33%) Vulnerability Management
9 60 (10.97%) Data Loss Prevention
10 57 (10.42%) DevOps
11 56 (10.24%) Load Balancing
12 52 (9.51%) Infrastructure as Code
13 51 (9.32%) Information Security
14 50 (9.14%) Agile
15 46 (8.41%) Zero Trust
16 45 (8.23%) Continuous Improvement
17 43 (7.86%) Data Protection
18 42 (7.68%) Threat Detection
Programming Languages
1 121 (22.12%) Python
2 88 (16.09%) PowerShell
3 54 (9.87%) Bash
4 18 (3.29%) Java
5 16 (2.93%) Bicep
6 10 (1.83%) Kusto Query Language
7 9 (1.65%) SQL
8 4 (0.73%) PHP
8 4 (0.73%) Search Processing Language
9 3 (0.55%) Perl
9 3 (0.55%) Shell Script
10 2 (0.37%) JavaScript
10 2 (0.37%) Ruby
11 1 (0.18%) C
11 1 (0.18%) C#
11 1 (0.18%) Go
11 1 (0.18%) Korn
11 1 (0.18%) TypeScript
Qualifications
1 86 (15.72%) Security Cleared
2 75 (13.71%) SC Cleared
3 68 (12.43%) CISSP
4 45 (8.23%) Degree
5 35 (6.40%) Cisco Certification
6 31 (5.67%) CISM
7 29 (5.30%) AWS Certification
8 22 (4.02%) Azure Certification
9 17 (3.11%) (ISC)2 CCSP
9 17 (3.11%) CCNP
9 17 (3.11%) DV Cleared
10 15 (2.74%) CEH
11 12 (2.19%) Microsoft Certification
12 11 (2.01%) CompTIA Security+
12 11 (2.01%) Computer Science Degree
12 11 (2.01%) GIAC
13 8 (1.46%) CCIE
14 7 (1.28%) OSCP
15 6 (1.10%) CISA
15 6 (1.10%) ISO 27001 Lead Auditor
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 54 (9.87%) ISO/IEC 27001
1 54 (9.87%) NIST
2 30 (5.48%) GDPR
3 22 (4.02%) Cyber Essentials
4 19 (3.47%) PCI DSS
5 13 (2.38%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
6 12 (2.19%) NCSC
7 10 (1.83%) HIPAA
8 8 (1.46%) SLA
9 6 (1.10%) California Consumer Privacy Act
9 6 (1.10%) NIST 800
10 5 (0.91%) ISO/IEC 27002 (supersedes ISO/IEC 17799)
11 4 (0.73%) Government Security Classifications
11 4 (0.73%) GRC
11 4 (0.73%) SOC 2
12 3 (0.55%) ISA99
12 3 (0.55%) JSP 440
13 2 (0.37%) Actionable Recommendations
13 2 (0.37%) COBIT
14 1 (0.18%) PMO
System Software
1 32 (5.85%) Active Directory
2 24 (4.39%) Docker
3 9 (1.65%) VMware Infrastructure
4 6 (1.10%) VMware NSX
4 6 (1.10%) vSphere
5 5 (0.91%) Virtual Machines
5 5 (0.91%) VMware ESXi
6 3 (0.55%) Virtual Servers
7 2 (0.37%) Squid
8 1 (0.18%) Firmware
8 1 (0.18%) Hyper-V
8 1 (0.18%) RACF
Systems Management
1 73 (13.35%) Terraform
2 53 (9.69%) Kubernetes
3 18 (3.29%) Ansible
4 13 (2.38%) Progress Chef
5 12 (2.19%) FortiGate
6 11 (2.01%) Microsoft Intune
6 11 (2.01%) Single Sign-On
7 6 (1.10%) CASB
8 4 (0.73%) Grafana
8 4 (0.73%) Nessus
8 4 (0.73%) vCenter Server
9 2 (0.37%) Kibana
9 2 (0.37%) logstash
9 2 (0.37%) QRadar
9 2 (0.37%) SCOM
10 1 (0.18%) Active Directory Federation Services
10 1 (0.18%) CSIRT
10 1 (0.18%) Host Intrusion Detection System
10 1 (0.18%) HP Fortify
Vendors
1 124 (22.67%) Microsoft
2 95 (17.37%) Cisco
3 60 (10.97%) F5
4 47 (8.59%) Palo Alto
5 37 (6.76%) CrowdStrike
6 35 (6.40%) Fortinet
6 35 (6.40%) Zscaler
7 28 (5.12%) CyberArk
8 27 (4.94%) ServiceNow
9 26 (4.75%) CheckPoint
10 25 (4.57%) Google
11 19 (3.47%) Splunk
12 17 (3.11%) VMware
13 16 (2.93%) Red Hat
14 14 (2.56%) BeyondTrust
14 14 (2.56%) Blue Coat
14 14 (2.56%) Netskope
15 13 (2.38%) Tenable
16 11 (2.01%) Oracle
17 10 (1.83%) Juniper