Key Trends in the 2025 London Cyber Security Job Market – Part 1

Sophie Spencer, Director and Head of Cyber Security, Barclay Simpson

Representing 29% of the UK cyber security job market, according to Barclay Simpson’s 2025 data, London is a major employment hub for cyber security professionals.

In part one of my article on key trends in the 2025 London cyber security job market, I start by describing the big picture, before moving on to discuss:

• The shift towards more specialised cyber security roles in London
• Macro uncertainties impacting the London cyber security job market
• The cyber security recruitment spikes that are now flat-lining
• The ‘value for money’ ethos shaping recruitment activity in London
• A detailed look at cyber security salary trends in London.

Let’s start with the big picture…

How would I describe the London cyber security job market right now?

There’s no shortage of candidates for cyber security jobs in London. But what we are seeing is fewer job openings. We’ll look at the reasons for this in more detail, but factors such as macroeconomic uncertainties and the employer NI increase shouldn’t surprise anyone who follows the news.

To make the situation even harder for candidates, in 2025, cyber security requirements are more specific than ever.

As is the case elsewhere, there’s a paradox in London – a busy cyber security job market loaded with talent struggling to squeeze through the narrow funnels employers have put in place. This comes close to explaining why you’ll hear employers say they’re struggling to find the right people, at a time when so many London-based cyber security professionals are looking for their next job move.

A More Specialised Cyber Security Job Market in London

As leading cyber security recruiters, what particularly strikes our specialist consultants in this area is the decline in what we call ‘bread and butter’ cyber security jobs. Positions in security architecture and GRC (governance, risk and compliance) – recruitment staples over the past two decades – have lost considerable presence in the London job market recently.

Instead, London employers are looking for niche skillsets that are much harder to source. By ‘niche’, I’m not just referring to individual skills, but also unusual mixes of skills and attributes, such as a combination of coding and cloud skills, as the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) has reported.

Macroeconomic Uncertainties – No End in Sight

Of course, the drop in demand for cyber security professionals is part of a global trend across the tech world in 2025. Employers everywhere have become increasingly cost-conscious and reluctant to invest in growth plans”, as our 2025 Cyber Security Salary Survey recently noted.

If we dig down into the detail, the slowdown in transformation projects – until recently a key driver in the cyber security job market – is something we started to see in 2024, as employers nailed down the hatches.

Unfortunately, I fully expect this to continue. Until interest rates are much lower, companies are unlikely to borrow the money needed to invest in major change programmes, with no end in sight to the economic and geopolitical instabilities we’re all living through.

From Cyber Security Spikes to Recruitment Flat Line

What has come to an end is a couple of spikes in recruitment which upheld the security job market until very recently:

• The pandemic effect – The introduction of home-working put cyber security at the top of every board agenda, with multiple risks to mitigate as business infrastructure literally left the building.
• DORA and the new UK operational resilience policy – Compliance work in these areas generated a substantial need for both permanent and interim workers until early 2025, when DORA (Digital Operational Resilience Act) came into force. This was a particularly strong period for operational resilience roles in London.

‘Value for Money’ Makes a Comeback

All the money that businesses threw at the pandemic is long gone, and there’s nothing new in the regulatory pipeline for London employers to work towards.

Instead, we’re looking at a heightened sensitivity to budget and value for money. This explains, in part at least, the exacting requirements for cyber security job candidates in London. Cost-cutting is everywhere and whether you’re looking at skilled professionals, infrastructure or tooling, cyber security doesn’t come cheap.

Businesses are a lot more circumspect about the return they can expect on their investment in cyber security.

Cyber Security Salary Trends in London

This cautious budgetary approach is particularly clear when we look at London cyber security salaries, which are best described as ‘stagnant’.

Five factors that constrain  cyber security pay increases in London in 2025 are:

• More candidates for cyber security jobs than roles available
• Significant numbers of contractors who have moved into permanent positions for improved income security
• Cyber security professionals forced to accept lower salaries following redundancy
• The rise in employer National Insurance contributions – which had an immediate effect on the UK job market from April 2025 onwards, with redundancies and a marked reluctance to hire
• Continued tailing-off from peak salary growth in 2021 and 2022.

But London employers find that cyber security pay demands have not gone away. 65% of organisations identified pay demands as a significant difficulty in cyber security recruitment, according to Barclay Simpson’s 2025 survey.

Meanwhile, 37% of candidates claimed pay was their primary incentive when seeking a new role. Interestingly though, this figure is down from 45% the year before.

What’s really happening here?

I think that the motivation for seeking a pay rise has subtly shifted.

Two years ago, when demand for cyber security professionals still outstripped supply, people knew they could get a pay rise simply by changing jobs.

But today, against a backdrop of rising living costs, candidates changing jobs or looking for a pay rise are taking a broader look at costs – including general costs such as mortgage, childcare and the time and cost of commuting. As an aside, this can make office-work problematic, for example. Think of the cyber security architect facing a Nottingham to London commute, for example.

So it’s all going on in the London cyber security job market, with inflationary pay demands and deflationary stability aspirations combining to flatten cyber security salaries.

Comparing London Cyber Security Pay with the UK and Abroad

Traditionally, London cyber security jobs have offered significantly higher pay than their equivalents in other parts of the UK. However, that gap is closing, as these examples from Barclay Simpson’s 2025 cyber security salary dataset show:

We also expect salary growth to remain low over the coming year. In our 2025 survey, 77% of employers said they intended to offer base salary increases of 1–4%, and only 13% planned to pay higher bonuses than last year.

In my second blog post on the London cyber security job market I discuss in-demand skills, including AI, the contractor market, the battle between the office and home-working, diversity trends, outsourcing of cyber security, and emigration of cyber security professionals to regions such as the Middle East.