Gallium nitride (GaN) is a promising candidate for high‐power and high‐frequency devices. To date, the lack of large area bulk GaN materials of reasonable cost and quality has limited the technology almost completely to lateral devices. However, vertical structures are attractive to obtain a higher current density and a reduced device size. In this work, the electrical behavior of a Ni/Au Schottky barrier on bulk GaN material is studied, using vertical Schottky diodes. The forward current–voltage characteristics of the diodes reveal a temperature dependence of both the ideality factor (n) and of the Schottky barrier height (ΦB). The ideal value of the barrier of 1.72 eV extrapolated at n = 1 is in agreement with the results obtained by capacitance–voltage measurements. A nanoscale electrical analysis performed by conductive atomic force microscopy (C‐AFM) allow to visualize the barrier height inhomogeneity and to …