SSL Contract Job Trends

Secure Socket Layer (SSL)
UK

The table below provides summary statistics and contractor rates for jobs requiring SSL skills. It covers contract job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 1 January 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
1 Jan 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 378 346 389
Rank change year-on-year -32 +43 +75
Contract jobs citing SSL 216 200 210
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.58% 0.60% 0.49%
As % of the Communications & Networking category 5.44% 4.73% 3.59%
Number of daily rates quoted 128 124 104
10th Percentile £352 £382 £350
25th Percentile £402 £464 £422
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £566 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year +2.91% - +2.33%
75th Percentile £680 £641 £626
90th Percentile £700 £675 £696
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £550 £486
% change year-on-year -9.09% +13.17% +9.95%
Number of hourly rates quoted 12 0 14
10th Percentile £45.00 - £55.35
25th Percentile £48.94 - £60.56
Median hourly rate £65.00 - £65.98
75th Percentile £77.19 - £66.18
90th Percentile £84.88 - £67.35
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 - £65.98

All Communications and Computer Networking Skills
UK

SSL 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 3,970 4,228 5,851
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 10.70% 12.75% 13.62%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,600 2,480 3,605
10th Percentile £206 £220 £209
25th Percentile £356 £368 £363
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £475 £500 £500
Median % change year-on-year -5.00% - -
75th Percentile £588 £600 £600
90th Percentile £675 £675 £700
UK excluding London median daily rate £450 £475 £473
% change year-on-year -5.26% +0.53% +5.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 179 138 329
10th Percentile £15.50 £14.86 £17.72
25th Percentile £20.00 £20.88 £23.00
Median hourly rate £34.00 £35.00 £56.49
Median % change year-on-year -2.86% -38.04% +68.63%
75th Percentile £65.50 £57.81 £65.98
90th Percentile £80.00 £70.38 £75.33
UK excluding London median hourly rate £42.50 £32.50 £57.99
% change year-on-year +30.77% -43.96% +50.62%

SSL
Job Vacancy Trend

Historical trend showing the proportion of contract IT job postings citing SSL relative to all contract IT jobs advertised.

SSL job vacancy trend in the UK

SSL
Daily Rate Trend

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing SSL.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing SSL

SSL
Daily Rate Histogram

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing SSL over the 6 months to 1 January 2026.

Daily rate histogram for SSL in the UK

SSL
Hourly Rate Trend

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing SSL.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing SSL

SSL
Hourly Rate Histogram

Hourly rate distribution of jobs citing SSL over the 6 months to 1 January 2026.

Hourly rate histogram for SSL in the UK

SSL
Top 14 Contract Job Locations

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing SSL within the UK over the 6 months to 1 January 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 -9 190 £575 - 71
UK excluding London -43 111 £500 -9.09% 57
London -3 73 £600 +11.63% 22
Work from Home -13 71 £525 -2.33% 35
North of England -25 56 £608 +10.50% 17
West Midlands +1 36 £380 -16.94% 7
Midlands -13 36 £380 -16.94% 10
North West -9 35 £589 +53.05% 12
Yorkshire -44 20 £675 +22.73% 4
East of England -8 18 £567 -5.50% 14
South East -33 11 £430 -31.20% 9
Scotland -3 4 £440 -12.00% 1
South West -13 4 £529 +24.35% 6
North East -11 1 £550 -6.78% 1

SSL
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 21 (9.72%) Confluence
2 10 (4.63%) TPMS
3 3 (1.39%) Apache
4 2 (0.93%) Apache Airflow
4 2 (0.93%) Apache Spark
4 2 (0.93%) Oracle HTTP Server
4 2 (0.93%) Tomcat
4 2 (0.93%) WebLogic
5 1 (0.46%) Anypoint
5 1 (0.46%) CMS
5 1 (0.46%) Drupal
5 1 (0.46%) IIS
5 1 (0.46%) JBoss
5 1 (0.46%) SharePoint
5 1 (0.46%) Umbraco
Applications
1 3 (1.39%) MS Visio
2 2 (0.93%) Microsoft Excel
3 1 (0.46%) Microsoft Office
Business Applications
1 9 (4.17%) Remedy ITSM
2 1 (0.46%) RMDS
Cloud Services
1 59 (27.31%) AWS
2 27 (12.50%) Azure
3 26 (12.04%) Virtual Private Cloud
4 24 (11.11%) Amazon S3
5 22 (10.19%) Amazon CloudWatch
5 22 (10.19%) Amazon EC2
5 22 (10.19%) Amazon ELB
6 17 (7.87%) GCP
6 17 (7.87%) GitHub
7 10 (4.63%) Amazon EKS
8 8 (3.70%) Serverless
9 5 (2.31%) Amazon ECS
9 5 (2.31%) AWS CloudFormation
9 5 (2.31%) AWS Lambda
9 5 (2.31%) GitHub Actions
9 5 (2.31%) OpenShift
10 4 (1.85%) Entra ID
11 3 (1.39%) Kong
12 2 (0.93%) Azure API Management
12 2 (0.93%) Azure Monitor
Communications & Networking
1 101 (46.76%) DNS
2 89 (41.20%) TCP/IP
3 81 (37.50%) Firewall
4 64 (29.63%) HTTP
4 64 (29.63%) VPN
5 61 (28.24%) Network Security
6 29 (13.43%) Wireshark
7 27 (12.50%) BIG-IP
8 26 (12.04%) IPsec
9 23 (10.65%) WAN
10 17 (7.87%) F5 BIG-IP GTM
10 17 (7.87%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
11 16 (7.41%) HTTPS
11 16 (7.41%) SSH
11 16 (7.41%) Wireless
12 15 (6.94%) FTP
12 15 (6.94%) SMTP
13 13 (6.02%) SNMP
14 12 (5.56%) BGP
15 11 (5.09%) OSPF
Database & Business Intelligence
1 11 (5.09%) NoSQL
2 9 (4.17%) DocumentDB
2 9 (4.17%) MongoDB
3 8 (3.70%) Apache Cassandra
3 8 (3.70%) SQL Server
4 7 (3.24%) PostgreSQL
5 3 (1.39%) Redis
6 2 (0.93%) Big Data
6 2 (0.93%) Delta Lake
6 2 (0.93%) Hadoop
6 2 (0.93%) Parquet
7 1 (0.46%) Amazon QuickSight
7 1 (0.46%) SQLite
Development Applications
1 34 (15.74%) Git
2 29 (13.43%) Jenkins
3 24 (11.11%) JIRA
4 22 (10.19%) Fiddler
5 20 (9.26%) GitLab
6 4 (1.85%) Robot Framework
7 2 (0.93%) Bitbucket
7 2 (0.93%) git-flow
7 2 (0.93%) MLflow
7 2 (0.93%) Poetry
7 2 (0.93%) PyCharm
7 2 (0.93%) SonarQube
7 2 (0.93%) Visual Studio Code
8 1 (0.46%) fastlane
8 1 (0.46%) JUnit
8 1 (0.46%) Sonatype Nexus
8 1 (0.46%) Subversion
8 1 (0.46%) Xcode
8 1 (0.46%) XCTest
8 1 (0.46%) XCUITest
General
1 44 (20.37%) Social Skills
2 37 (17.13%) Analytical Skills
3 31 (14.35%) Finance
4 23 (10.65%) Public Sector
5 22 (10.19%) Banking
6 16 (7.41%) Investment Banking
7 14 (6.48%) Documentation Skills
8 8 (3.70%) Telecoms
9 5 (2.31%) Financial Institution
10 4 (1.85%) Military
11 2 (0.93%) Advertising
11 2 (0.93%) Aerospace
11 2 (0.93%) Presentation Skills
12 1 (0.46%) Billing
12 1 (0.46%) Influencing Skills
12 1 (0.46%) Italian Language
12 1 (0.46%) Marketing
12 1 (0.46%) Police
12 1 (0.46%) Polish Language
12 1 (0.46%) Spanish Language
Job Titles
1 56 (25.93%) Network Engineer
2 39 (18.06%) Senior
3 29 (13.43%) Developer
4 27 (12.50%) Infrastructure Engineer
5 20 (9.26%) Architect
5 20 (9.26%) Web Engineer
6 16 (7.41%) Analyst
6 16 (7.41%) Security Engineer
7 15 (6.94%) DevOps Engineer
7 15 (6.94%) SOC Analyst
8 13 (6.02%) Blue Coat Engineer
8 13 (6.02%) Consultant
9 12 (5.56%) Cryptography Engineer
9 12 (5.56%) Senior DevOps
9 12 (5.56%) Senior DevOps Engineer
10 11 (5.09%) Full-Stack Developer
10 11 (5.09%) IP Network Engineer
10 11 (5.09%) Network Security Engineer
11 10 (4.63%) Junior
11 10 (4.63%) Junior Network Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 39 (18.06%) LDAP
2 29 (13.43%) REST
3 22 (10.19%) SAML
4 21 (9.72%) SOAP
5 19 (8.80%) JSON
6 18 (8.33%) HTML
6 18 (8.33%) OAuth
7 11 (5.09%) 802.1X
7 11 (5.09%) AngularJS
7 11 (5.09%) Kafka
7 11 (5.09%) RESTful
7 11 (5.09%) Web Services
8 10 (4.63%) XML
9 9 (4.17%) Apache Camel
9 9 (4.17%) HTML5
9 9 (4.17%) JDBC
9 9 (4.17%) jQuery
9 9 (4.17%) ODBC
9 9 (4.17%) Spring
9 9 (4.17%) Spring Boot
Miscellaneous
1 32 (14.81%) Management Information System
2 24 (11.11%) PKI
3 17 (7.87%) Analytical Mindset
4 15 (6.94%) Cyberattack
5 14 (6.48%) Cyber Threat
5 14 (6.48%) Data Centre
6 13 (6.02%) CSOC
6 13 (6.02%) Security Operations Centre
7 8 (3.70%) Onboarding
8 5 (2.31%) Cloud Security Posture
8 5 (2.31%) Private Cloud
8 5 (2.31%) Security Posture
9 4 (1.85%) Algorithms
9 4 (1.85%) Distributed Denial-of-Service
9 4 (1.85%) Linux Command Line
10 3 (1.39%) Cloud Native
11 2 (0.93%) Hybrid Cloud
12 1 (0.46%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
12 1 (0.46%) Self-Motivation
12 1 (0.46%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 58 (26.85%) Linux
2 34 (15.74%) Windows
3 18 (8.33%) Unix
4 7 (3.24%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 7 (3.24%) Windows Server
5 4 (1.85%) Ubuntu
6 2 (0.93%) Apple iOS
6 2 (0.93%) CatOS
6 2 (0.93%) CentOS
7 1 (0.46%) Mac OS
7 1 (0.46%) Solaris
7 1 (0.46%) VMS
7 1 (0.46%) Windows Server 2016
7 1 (0.46%) Windows Server 2019
Processes & Methodologies
1 62 (28.70%) DevOps
2 45 (20.83%) CI/CD
3 38 (17.59%) Cybersecurity
4 37 (17.13%) Load Balancing
5 36 (16.67%) High Availability
6 33 (15.28%) Incident Response
6 33 (15.28%) Infrastructure as Code
7 31 (14.35%) Infrastructure Engineering
7 31 (14.35%) Root Cause Analysis
8 28 (12.96%) Infrastructure Automation
8 28 (12.96%) Problem-Solving
9 26 (12.04%) Test Automation
10 25 (11.57%) Change Management
10 25 (11.57%) Data Loss Prevention
11 23 (10.65%) Identity Access Management
12 22 (10.19%) Cloud Security
12 22 (10.19%) Containerisation
12 22 (10.19%) Continuous Improvement
12 22 (10.19%) Key Management
12 22 (10.19%) SIEM
Programming Languages
1 75 (34.72%) Python
2 33 (15.28%) Bash
3 28 (12.96%) JavaScript
4 19 (8.80%) PowerShell
5 15 (6.94%) SQL
6 13 (6.02%) Java
7 10 (4.63%) Perl
8 3 (1.39%) C#
9 2 (0.93%) C
9 2 (0.93%) Groovy
9 2 (0.93%) PHP
9 2 (0.93%) Shell Script
9 2 (0.93%) Swift
10 1 (0.46%) C++
10 1 (0.46%) Objective-C
Qualifications
1 88 (40.74%) Security Cleared
2 76 (35.19%) SC Cleared
3 17 (7.87%) CISSP
3 17 (7.87%) DV Cleared
4 14 (6.48%) Degree
5 11 (5.09%) Microsoft Certification
6 10 (4.63%) FFIEC
7 9 (4.17%) Cisco Certification
8 7 (3.24%) CISM
9 6 (2.78%) MCSE
10 5 (2.31%) CCNP
10 5 (2.31%) CompTIA Security+
10 5 (2.31%) MCSA
11 4 (1.85%) Computer Science Degree
12 3 (1.39%) (ISC)2 CCSP
12 3 (1.39%) RHCE
13 2 (0.93%) AWS Certification
13 2 (0.93%) CCSP
13 2 (0.93%) JNCIE
13 2 (0.93%) Master's Degree
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 20 (9.26%) GDPR
2 17 (7.87%) PCI DSS
3 12 (5.56%) NIST
4 10 (4.63%) GLBA
5 6 (2.78%) HIPAA
6 4 (1.85%) Sarbanes-Oxley
7 3 (1.39%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 2 (0.93%) Accessibility
8 2 (0.93%) Data Quality
8 2 (0.93%) FIPS 140-2
8 2 (0.93%) QA
9 1 (0.46%) SOC 2
System Software
1 45 (20.83%) Docker
2 24 (11.11%) Active Directory
3 17 (7.87%) VMware Infrastructure
4 13 (6.02%) Firmware
5 10 (4.63%) VMware NSX
6 5 (2.31%) NDS
6 5 (2.31%) NetIQ eDirectory
7 4 (1.85%) ProxySG
8 1 (0.46%) Embedded Firmware
8 1 (0.46%) RACF
8 1 (0.46%) Slurm Workload Manager
8 1 (0.46%) Squid
8 1 (0.46%) VMware ESXi
8 1 (0.46%) vSphere
8 1 (0.46%) XenApp
8 1 (0.46%) XenDesktop
Systems Management
1 56 (25.93%) Ansible
2 43 (19.91%) Terraform
3 33 (15.28%) Kubernetes
4 20 (9.26%) Single Sign-On
5 7 (3.24%) CASB
6 6 (2.78%) Nessus
7 4 (1.85%) FortiGate
8 3 (1.39%) Nagios
8 3 (1.39%) Prometheus
8 3 (1.39%) SCOM
9 2 (0.93%) Argo
9 2 (0.93%) Istio
9 2 (0.93%) Microsoft Intune
9 2 (0.93%) Rsyslog
9 2 (0.93%) SCCM
10 1 (0.46%) BladeLogic
10 1 (0.46%) HP Operations Orchestration
10 1 (0.46%) Progress Chef
10 1 (0.46%) Red Hat Satellite
10 1 (0.46%) SCOrch
Vendors
1 77 (35.65%) F5
2 42 (19.44%) Blue Coat
3 41 (18.98%) CheckPoint
4 34 (15.74%) Palo Alto
5 29 (13.43%) Cisco
6 27 (12.50%) VMware
7 26 (12.04%) McAfee
8 25 (11.57%) Splunk
9 21 (9.72%) Microsoft
10 18 (8.33%) Juniper
11 16 (7.41%) NetApp
12 15 (6.94%) Thales
13 14 (6.48%) Remedy
13 14 (6.48%) ServiceNow
14 11 (5.09%) Fortinet
15 10 (4.63%) Axway
15 10 (4.63%) Oracle
15 10 (4.63%) Zscaler
16 9 (4.17%) BMC
16 9 (4.17%) HP