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 8 January 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
8 Jan 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 380 338 400
Rank change year-on-year -42 +62 +49
Contract jobs citing SSL 216 200 205
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.59% 0.62% 0.48%
As % of the Communications & Networking category 5.51% 4.84% 3.57%
Number of daily rates quoted 128 124 102
10th Percentile £352 £382 £350
25th Percentile £402 £464 £415
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £556 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year +1.09% - -
75th Percentile £680 £641 £626
90th Percentile £700 £675 £699
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
% change year-on-year - - +4.35%

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 3,917 4,129 5,750
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 10.61% 12.80% 13.57%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,561 2,421 3,548
10th Percentile £206 £220 £210
25th Percentile £356 £375 £363
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £475 £500 £500
Median % change year-on-year -5.00% - -1.96%
75th Percentile £588 £600 £600
90th Percentile £675 £680 £700
UK excluding London median daily rate £450 £475 £473
% change year-on-year -5.26% +0.53% +3.85%
Number of hourly rates quoted 177 139 325
10th Percentile £15.50 £14.90 £18.23
25th Percentile £20.00 £20.88 £23.63
Median hourly rate £37.50 £32.50 £56.49
Median % change year-on-year +15.38% -42.47% +125.96%
75th Percentile £66.00 £53.13 £65.98
90th Percentile £80.00 £70.25 £75.15
UK excluding London median hourly rate £42.50 £31.08 £59.75
% change year-on-year +36.74% -47.98% +171.59%

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 8 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 8 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 8 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 -22 189 £566 -1.57% 77
UK excluding London -57 112 £500 -9.09% 71
Work from Home -18 72 £525 -2.33% 22
London +1 71 £588 +9.30% 14
North of England -20 57 £612 +11.27% 18
West Midlands -7 36 £380 -16.94% 4
Midlands -15 36 £380 -16.94% 10
North West -4 35 £589 +53.05% 8
Yorkshire -36 21 £675 +22.73% 8
East of England -11 18 £567 -5.50% 13
South East -44 11 £430 -31.20% 15
Scotland -10 4 £440 -12.00% 1
South West -13 4 £529 +24.35% 12
North East -14 1 £550 -6.78% 2

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 20 (9.26%) Confluence
2 11 (5.09%) 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 8 (3.70%) 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%) Apigee
12 2 (0.93%) Azure Functions
Communications & Networking
1 102 (47.22%) DNS
2 89 (41.20%) TCP/IP
3 82 (37.96%) Firewall
4 64 (29.63%) HTTP
4 64 (29.63%) VPN
5 61 (28.24%) Network Security
6 29 (13.43%) Wireshark
7 28 (12.96%) BIG-IP
8 26 (12.04%) IPsec
9 23 (10.65%) WAN
10 18 (8.33%) F5 BIG-IP GTM
10 18 (8.33%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
11 17 (7.87%) SSH
12 16 (7.41%) HTTPS
12 16 (7.41%) Wireless
13 15 (6.94%) FTP
13 15 (6.94%) SMTP
14 14 (6.48%) SNMP
15 12 (5.56%) BGP
16 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 23 (10.65%) JIRA
4 22 (10.19%) Fiddler
5 20 (9.26%) GitLab
6 3 (1.39%) 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 43 (19.91%) 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 15 (6.94%) Documentation Skills
8 8 (3.70%) Telecoms
9 4 (1.85%) Financial Institution
9 4 (1.85%) Military
10 2 (0.93%) Advertising
10 2 (0.93%) Aerospace
10 2 (0.93%) Presentation Skills
11 1 (0.46%) Influencing Skills
11 1 (0.46%) Italian Language
11 1 (0.46%) Marketing
11 1 (0.46%) Organisational Skills
11 1 (0.46%) Police
11 1 (0.46%) Polish Language
11 1 (0.46%) Spanish Language
Job Titles
1 56 (25.93%) Network Engineer
2 38 (17.59%) Senior
3 29 (13.43%) Developer
4 27 (12.50%) Infrastructure Engineer
5 20 (9.26%) Web Engineer
6 19 (8.80%) Architect
7 16 (7.41%) Analyst
7 16 (7.41%) Security Engineer
8 15 (6.94%) DevOps Engineer
8 15 (6.94%) SOC Analyst
9 13 (6.02%) Blue Coat Engineer
9 13 (6.02%) Consultant
9 13 (6.02%) Cryptography Engineer
10 12 (5.56%) Senior DevOps
10 12 (5.56%) Senior DevOps Engineer
11 11 (5.09%) Full-Stack Developer
11 11 (5.09%) IP Network Engineer
11 11 (5.09%) Network Security Engineer
12 10 (4.63%) Junior
12 10 (4.63%) Junior Network Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 38 (17.59%) LDAP
2 28 (12.96%) REST
3 21 (9.72%) SAML
4 20 (9.26%) SOAP
5 18 (8.33%) JSON
5 18 (8.33%) OAuth
6 17 (7.87%) HTML
7 11 (5.09%) 802.1X
7 11 (5.09%) Kafka
7 11 (5.09%) RESTful
8 10 (4.63%) AngularJS
8 10 (4.63%) Web Services
8 10 (4.63%) XML
9 9 (4.17%) Spring
9 9 (4.17%) Spring Boot
10 8 (3.70%) Apache Camel
10 8 (3.70%) HTML5
10 8 (3.70%) jQuery
10 8 (3.70%) Node.js
10 8 (3.70%) RabbitMQ
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%) Security Posture
9 4 (1.85%) Algorithms
9 4 (1.85%) Distributed Denial-of-Service
9 4 (1.85%) Linux Command Line
9 4 (1.85%) Private Cloud
10 3 (1.39%) Cloud Native
11 2 (0.93%) Hybrid Cloud
12 1 (0.46%) Distributed Applications
12 1 (0.46%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
12 1 (0.46%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 58 (26.85%) Linux
2 35 (16.20%) Windows
3 17 (7.87%) 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 61 (28.24%) DevOps
2 45 (20.83%) CI/CD
3 39 (18.06%) Cybersecurity
4 36 (16.67%) Load Balancing
5 35 (16.20%) 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%) Problem-Solving
9 27 (12.50%) Infrastructure Automation
10 26 (12.04%) Change Management
11 25 (11.57%) Data Loss Prevention
11 25 (11.57%) Test Automation
12 23 (10.65%) Identity Access Management
12 23 (10.65%) Migration
13 22 (10.19%) Cloud Security
13 22 (10.19%) Continuous Improvement
13 22 (10.19%) Key Management
13 22 (10.19%) SIEM
Programming Languages
1 74 (34.26%) Python
2 33 (15.28%) Bash
3 27 (12.50%) JavaScript
4 19 (8.80%) PowerShell
5 15 (6.94%) SQL
6 13 (6.02%) Java
7 9 (4.17%) 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 87 (40.28%) Security Cleared
2 75 (34.72%) SC Cleared
3 17 (7.87%) CISSP
3 17 (7.87%) DV Cleared
4 14 (6.48%) Degree
5 11 (5.09%) FFIEC
5 11 (5.09%) Microsoft Certification
6 9 (4.17%) Cisco Certification
7 7 (3.24%) CISM
8 6 (2.78%) MCSE
9 5 (2.31%) CCNP
9 5 (2.31%) CompTIA Security+
9 5 (2.31%) MCSA
10 4 (1.85%) Computer Science Degree
11 3 (1.39%) (ISC)2 CCSP
11 3 (1.39%) RHCE
12 2 (0.93%) AWS Certification
12 2 (0.93%) CCSP
12 2 (0.93%) JNCIE
12 2 (0.93%) Master's Degree
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 21 (9.72%) GDPR
2 18 (8.33%) PCI DSS
3 13 (6.02%) NIST
4 11 (5.09%) 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 55 (25.46%) Ansible
2 42 (19.44%) Terraform
3 33 (15.28%) Kubernetes
4 19 (8.80%) Single Sign-On
5 7 (3.24%) CASB
6 6 (2.78%) Nessus
7 5 (2.31%) 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%) Failover Clustering
10 1 (0.46%) Grafana
10 1 (0.46%) Host Intrusion Detection System
10 1 (0.46%) Progress Chef
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 30 (13.89%) Cisco
6 27 (12.50%) VMware
7 26 (12.04%) McAfee
7 26 (12.04%) Splunk
8 21 (9.72%) Microsoft
9 18 (8.33%) Juniper
10 16 (7.41%) NetApp
10 16 (7.41%) Thales
11 13 (6.02%) Remedy
11 13 (6.02%) ServiceNow
12 11 (5.09%) Fortinet
13 10 (4.63%) Axway
13 10 (4.63%) Oracle
13 10 (4.63%) Zscaler
14 9 (4.17%) OpenText
15 8 (3.70%) Ivanti