Security Engineer Contract Job Trends

Security Engineer
UK

The median Security Engineer daily rate in the UK is £539, according to job vacancies posted in the 6 months leading up to 28 July 2026.

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

6 months to
28 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 249 248 221
Rank change year-on-year -1 -27 -1
Contract jobs requiring a Security Engineer 549 345 442
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 1.04% 1.05% 1.10%
As % of the Job Titles category 1.12% 1.15% 1.18%
Number of daily rates quoted 358 223 344
10th Percentile £413 £376 £408
25th Percentile £475 £413 £435
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £539 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year +2.62% -4.55% -2.22%
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 10 2
10th Percentile £70.38 £64.25 £64.25
25th Percentile £73.75 £82.69 £66.88
Median hourly rate £77.50 £87.50 £72.50
Median % change year-on-year -11.43% +20.69% -13.07%
75th Percentile £85.05 £91.50 £76.88
90th Percentile £86.03 - £78.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £84.00 £87.50 £72.50
% change year-on-year -4.00% +20.69% -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 48,972 29,978 37,340
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.64% 91.54% 93.02%
Number of daily rates quoted 29,547 19,070 24,184
10th Percentile £331 £285 £300
25th Percentile £425 £400 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -1.87%
75th Percentile £625 £623 £638
90th Percentile £725 £725 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 3,337 1,464 2,247
10th Percentile £15.75 £13.71 £13.86
25th Percentile £21.25 £17.30 £18.32
Median hourly rate £43.50 £25.15 £42.03
Median % change year-on-year +72.96% -40.16% -2.97%
75th Percentile £68.00 £55.00 £65.00
90th Percentile £80.02 £73.75 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £45.00 £25.15 £43.00
% change year-on-year +78.93% -41.51% +8.59%

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 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 28 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 28 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 0 507 £538 +2.38% 427
UK excluding London +1 268 £540 +8.00% 287
London -10 238 £525 -4.55% 167
Work from Home +4 203 £540 +8.00% 119
North of England +17 145 £583 +17.44% 100
North West +21 122 £569 +14.67% 63
Midlands -6 60 £500 - 39
West Midlands -7 59 £500 - 21
South East -46 51 £500 -2.44% 79
Yorkshire -25 22 £600 +20.00% 27
South West -33 17 £525 +7.69% 36
East of England -33 17 £510 +2.00% 26
Scotland -9 11 £600 +3.45% 10
Wales -14 2 £733 +46.50% 4
East Midlands -12 1 £338 -18.67% 18
North East -44 1 - - 10

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

For the 6 months to 28 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.

1 187 (34.06%) Azure
2 171 (31.15%) Cybersecurity
3 169 (30.78%) Cloud Security
4 147 (26.78%) AWS
5 133 (24.23%) SIEM
6 128 (23.32%) Firewall
6 128 (23.32%) Microsoft
7 118 (21.49%) Python
8 113 (20.58%) Network Security
9 96 (17.49%) CI/CD
10 94 (17.12%) Cisco
11 88 (16.03%) PowerShell
12 85 (15.48%) Security Cleared
13 84 (15.30%) Incident Response
14 76 (13.84%) Security Operations
15 75 (13.66%) SC Cleared
15 75 (13.66%) Terraform
15 75 (13.66%) VPN
16 69 (12.57%) GCP
17 67 (12.20%) CISSP
17 67 (12.20%) Security Architecture
18 64 (11.66%) DNS
19 63 (11.48%) Threat Modelling
20 62 (11.29%) Vulnerability Management
20 62 (11.29%) Windows
21 61 (11.11%) F5
22 60 (10.93%) Data Loss Prevention
23 59 (10.75%) DevSecOps
24 57 (10.38%) Load Balancing
25 55 (10.02%) Bash

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 17 (3.10%) 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 (1.09%) Remedy ITSM
2 2 (0.36%) Maximo
2 2 (0.36%) SAP S/4HANA
3 1 (0.18%) SAP ERP
Cloud Services
1 187 (34.06%) Azure
2 147 (26.78%) AWS
3 69 (12.57%) GCP
4 50 (9.11%) Microsoft Purview
5 48 (8.74%) Microsoft 365
6 37 (6.74%) Entra ID
7 24 (4.37%) AWS CloudFormation
7 24 (4.37%) Azure Sentinel
8 21 (3.83%) SaaS
8 21 (3.83%) Virtual Private Cloud
9 18 (3.28%) Google Kubernetes Engine
10 13 (2.37%) Akamai
10 13 (2.37%) Amazon GuardDuty
11 11 (2.00%) AWS CloudTrail
11 11 (2.00%) Mimecast
11 11 (2.00%) Serverless
12 10 (1.82%) GitHub
13 9 (1.64%) Azure DevOps
14 8 (1.46%) Amazon EC2
14 8 (1.46%) Power Platform
Communications & Networking
1 128 (23.32%) Firewall
2 113 (20.58%) Network Security
3 75 (13.66%) VPN
4 64 (11.66%) DNS
5 46 (8.38%) BGP
6 35 (6.38%) DMZ
7 33 (6.01%) Multicast
8 28 (5.10%) SSL
9 26 (4.74%) TCP/IP
9 26 (4.74%) WAN
10 19 (3.46%) SD-WAN
11 16 (2.91%) HTTP
12 15 (2.73%) Internet
13 14 (2.55%) Cisco ISE
14 13 (2.37%) Wireless
15 11 (2.00%) Intrusion Detection
15 11 (2.00%) VLAN
16 9 (1.64%) IPsec
16 9 (1.64%) OSPF
16 9 (1.64%) TACACS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 8 (1.46%) Power BI
1 8 (1.46%) SQL Server
2 6 (1.09%) PostgreSQL
3 4 (0.73%) MongoDB
4 3 (0.55%) Big Data
4 3 (0.55%) Data Lake
5 2 (0.36%) Amazon RDS
5 2 (0.36%) Apache Cassandra
5 2 (0.36%) Elasticsearch
5 2 (0.36%) Metadata
5 2 (0.36%) NoSQL
5 2 (0.36%) RDBMS
5 2 (0.36%) Relational Database
6 1 (0.18%) Data Warehouse
6 1 (0.18%) Db2
6 1 (0.18%) SAP HANA
Development Applications
1 21 (3.83%) JIRA
2 7 (1.28%) GitLab
3 5 (0.91%) Jenkins
4 4 (0.73%) Burp Suite
5 3 (0.55%) Git
6 2 (0.36%) Browser DevTools
6 2 (0.36%) Claude Code
6 2 (0.36%) Snyk
6 2 (0.36%) Sonatype Nexus
7 1 (0.18%) Atlassian Bamboo
7 1 (0.18%) Bitbucket
7 1 (0.18%) Metasploit
7 1 (0.18%) SonarQube
7 1 (0.18%) sqlmap
7 1 (0.18%) TruffleHog
General
1 109 (19.85%) Social Skills
2 91 (16.58%) Finance
3 45 (8.20%) Analytical Skills
4 41 (7.47%) Banking
5 23 (4.19%) Public Sector
6 22 (4.01%) Investment Banking
7 21 (3.83%) Documentation Skills
8 8 (1.46%) Telecoms
9 7 (1.28%) Legal
9 7 (1.28%) Marketing
10 6 (1.09%) Manufacturing
11 5 (0.91%) Retail
12 4 (0.73%) Health Technology
12 4 (0.73%) Military
12 4 (0.73%) Presentation Skills
13 3 (0.55%) Aerospace
13 3 (0.55%) Financial Institution
14 2 (0.36%) Inclusion and Diversity
14 2 (0.36%) Law
15 1 (0.18%) Digital Health
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 9 (1.64%) SAML
2 8 (1.46%) 802.1X
3 7 (1.28%) LangChain
4 6 (1.09%) Elastic Stack
4 6 (1.09%) PyTorch
4 6 (1.09%) scikit-learn
5 5 (0.91%) LDAP
6 4 (0.73%) Microsoft Graph
6 4 (0.73%) REST
6 4 (0.73%) SLSA
7 3 (0.55%) ARM Templates
8 2 (0.36%) AWS CDK
8 2 (0.36%) Azure Blueprints
8 2 (0.36%) JSON
8 2 (0.36%) OAuth
8 2 (0.36%) SailPoint
9 1 (0.18%) OpenID
9 1 (0.18%) Regular Expression
9 1 (0.18%) RESTful
9 1 (0.18%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 96 (17.49%) Security Posture
2 56 (10.20%) Cloud Native
3 41 (7.47%) Management Information System
4 35 (6.38%) Cloud Security Posture
5 20 (3.64%) Enterprise Cloud
6 18 (3.28%) Distributed Denial-of-Service
7 16 (2.91%) Data Centre
7 16 (2.91%) Onboarding
8 15 (2.73%) AI Agents
8 15 (2.73%) Operational Technology
9 12 (2.19%) Cyber Threat
9 12 (2.19%) Hybrid Cloud
10 11 (2.00%) Data Protection Act
11 9 (1.64%) Public Cloud
11 9 (1.64%) Security Operations Centre
12 8 (1.46%) Cyber Defence
13 6 (1.09%) Linux Command Line
13 6 (1.09%) PKI
13 6 (1.09%) SCADA
14 4 (0.73%) BYOD
Operating Systems
1 62 (11.29%) Windows
2 53 (9.65%) Linux
3 15 (2.73%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 14 (2.55%) Windows Server
5 9 (1.64%) Mac OS
6 7 (1.28%) Apple iOS
7 6 (1.09%) Windows 10
8 5 (0.91%) Ubuntu
9 3 (0.55%) Unix
10 2 (0.36%) Android
10 2 (0.36%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 171 (31.15%) Cybersecurity
2 169 (30.78%) Cloud Security
3 133 (24.23%) SIEM
4 96 (17.49%) CI/CD
5 84 (15.30%) Incident Response
6 76 (13.84%) Security Operations
7 67 (12.20%) Security Architecture
8 63 (11.48%) Threat Modelling
9 62 (11.29%) Vulnerability Management
10 60 (10.93%) Data Loss Prevention
11 59 (10.75%) DevSecOps
12 57 (10.38%) Load Balancing
13 55 (10.02%) DevOps
14 54 (9.84%) Information Security
15 53 (9.65%) Infrastructure as Code
16 51 (9.29%) Agile
17 46 (8.38%) Zero Trust
18 45 (8.20%) Continuous Improvement
19 44 (8.01%) Data Protection
20 43 (7.83%) Threat Detection
Programming Languages
1 118 (21.49%) Python
2 88 (16.03%) PowerShell
3 55 (10.02%) Bash
4 18 (3.28%) Bicep
5 17 (3.10%) Java
6 10 (1.82%) Kusto Query Language
7 9 (1.64%) 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 (0.36%) JavaScript
11 1 (0.18%) C
11 1 (0.18%) C#
11 1 (0.18%) Go
11 1 (0.18%) Korn
11 1 (0.18%) Ruby
11 1 (0.18%) TypeScript
Qualifications
1 85 (15.48%) Security Cleared
2 75 (13.66%) SC Cleared
3 67 (12.20%) CISSP
4 45 (8.20%) Degree
5 35 (6.38%) Cisco Certification
6 30 (5.46%) CISM
7 28 (5.10%) AWS Certification
8 22 (4.01%) Azure Certification
9 17 (3.10%) (ISC)2 CCSP
9 17 (3.10%) CCNP
10 16 (2.91%) CEH
10 16 (2.91%) DV Cleared
11 12 (2.19%) Microsoft Certification
12 11 (2.00%) CompTIA Security+
12 11 (2.00%) Computer Science Degree
12 11 (2.00%) GIAC
13 8 (1.46%) CCIE
14 7 (1.28%) OSCP
15 6 (1.09%) CCSP
15 6 (1.09%) ISO 27001 Lead Auditor
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 55 (10.02%) ISO/IEC 27001
2 51 (9.29%) NIST
3 31 (5.65%) GDPR
4 22 (4.01%) Cyber Essentials
5 18 (3.28%) PCI DSS
6 13 (2.37%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
6 13 (2.37%) NCSC
7 11 (2.00%) HIPAA
8 8 (1.46%) SLA
9 6 (1.09%) California Consumer Privacy Act
9 6 (1.09%) 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 (0.36%) Actionable Recommendations
13 2 (0.36%) COBIT
14 1 (0.18%) QA
System Software
1 32 (5.83%) Active Directory
2 24 (4.37%) Docker
3 9 (1.64%) VMware Infrastructure
4 6 (1.09%) VMware NSX
4 6 (1.09%) vSphere
5 5 (0.91%) Virtual Machines
5 5 (0.91%) VMware ESXi
6 3 (0.55%) Virtual Servers
7 2 (0.36%) Squid
8 1 (0.18%) Hyper-V
8 1 (0.18%) RACF
Systems Management
1 75 (13.66%) Terraform
2 53 (9.65%) Kubernetes
3 17 (3.10%) Ansible
4 13 (2.37%) Progress Chef
5 12 (2.19%) FortiGate
5 12 (2.19%) Microsoft Intune
6 11 (2.00%) Single Sign-On
7 6 (1.09%) CASB
8 4 (0.73%) Grafana
8 4 (0.73%) vCenter Server
9 3 (0.55%) Nessus
10 2 (0.36%) Kibana
10 2 (0.36%) logstash
10 2 (0.36%) QRadar
10 2 (0.36%) SCOM
11 1 (0.18%) Active Directory Federation Services
11 1 (0.18%) CSIRT
11 1 (0.18%) Host Intrusion Detection System
11 1 (0.18%) HP Fortify
Vendors
1 128 (23.32%) Microsoft
2 94 (17.12%) Cisco
3 61 (11.11%) F5
4 46 (8.38%) Palo Alto
5 38 (6.92%) CrowdStrike
6 35 (6.38%) Zscaler
7 33 (6.01%) Fortinet
8 29 (5.28%) CyberArk
9 27 (4.92%) ServiceNow
10 24 (4.37%) CheckPoint
10 24 (4.37%) Google
11 19 (3.46%) Splunk
12 17 (3.10%) VMware
13 16 (2.91%) Red Hat
14 14 (2.55%) BeyondTrust
14 14 (2.55%) Blue Coat
14 14 (2.55%) Netskope
14 14 (2.55%) Tenable
15 11 (2.00%) Oracle
15 11 (2.00%) Qualys