Data Engineer Contracts in the UK excluding London

Data Engineer
UK > UK excluding London

The median Data Engineer daily rate in the UK excluding London is £463, according to job vacancies posted in the 6 months leading up to 1 May 2025.

The table below provides contractor rate benchmarking and summary statistics, comparing them to the same period in the previous two years.

6 months to
1 May 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 106 139 157
Rank change year-on-year +33 +18 +7
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 301 325 397
As % of all contract jobs advertised in the UK excluding London 2.36% 1.56% 1.65%
As % of the Job Titles category 2.56% 1.69% 1.75%
Number of daily rates quoted 227 239 304
10th Percentile £220 £163 £405
25th Percentile £386 £206 £452
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £463 £460 £515
Median % change year-on-year +0.54% -10.68% +3.00%
75th Percentile £538 £547 £616
90th Percentile £638 £630 £675
UK median daily rate £500 £500 £550
% change year-on-year - -9.09% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 4 33 3
10th Percentile £20.33 £37.50 £37.50
25th Percentile £23.49 £58.75 £39.75
Median hourly rate £26.93 £75.00 £43.50
Median % change year-on-year -64.10% +72.41% -3.33%
75th Percentile £40.96 £80.00 £59.63
90th Percentile £63.60 - £69.30
UK median hourly rate £58.75 £65.00 £64.00
% change year-on-year -9.62% +1.56% +41.91%

All Contract IT Job Vacancies
UK excluding London

For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all contract IT job vacancies in the UK excluding London. 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 excluding London with a recognized job title 11,767 19,240 22,667
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.17% 92.63% 94.18%
Number of daily rates quoted 7,552 11,748 15,893
10th Percentile £213 £213 £225
25th Percentile £363 £363 £395
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £475 £492 £500
Median % change year-on-year -3.46% -1.60% +5.26%
75th Percentile £575 £598 £595
90th Percentile £650 £688 £688
UK median daily rate £515 £525 £540
% change year-on-year -1.90% -2.78% +2.86%
Number of hourly rates quoted 829 2,243 1,165
10th Percentile £14.00 £12.50 £13.45
25th Percentile £17.61 £15.75 £18.09
Median hourly rate £28.00 £39.55 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year -29.20% -6.94% +117.95%
75th Percentile £64.50 £61.30 £65.00
90th Percentile £75.00 £73.75 £75.00
UK median hourly rate £29.00 £36.42 £45.00
% change year-on-year -20.37% -19.07% +91.49%

Data Engineer
Job Vacancy Trend in the UK excluding London

Job postings that featured Data Engineer in the job title as a proportion of all IT jobs advertised in the UK excluding London.

Job vacancy trend for Data Engineer in the UK excluding London

Data Engineer
Contractor Daily Rate Trend in the UK excluding London

3-month moving average daily rate quoted in jobs citing Data Engineer in the UK excluding London.

Daily rate trend for Data Engineer in the UK excluding London

Data Engineer
Daily Rate Histogram in the UK excluding London

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Data Engineer in the UK excluding London over the 6 months to 1 May 2025.

Daily rate histogram for Data Engineer in the UK excluding London

Data Engineer
Contractor Hourly Rate Trend in the UK excluding London

3-month moving average hourly rates quoted in jobs citing Data Engineer in the UK excluding London.

Hourly rate trend for Data Engineer in the UK excluding London

Data Engineer
Hourly Rate Histogram in the UK excluding London

Hourly rate distribution of jobs citing Data Engineer in the UK excluding London over the 6 months to 1 May 2025.

Hourly rate histogram for Data Engineer in the UK excluding London

Data Engineer
Contract Job Locations in the UK excluding London

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing Data Engineer within the UK excluding London region over the 6 months to 1 May 2025. 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
North of England +44 109 £463 +2.78% 113
North West +38 68 £463 +8.82% 59
Midlands +33 57 £468 -2.86% 39
West Midlands +29 45 £488 -7.14% 25
Scotland +25 45 £450 -0.66% 29
South East +27 38 £475 -7.32% 180
South West +17 36 £500 -4.76% 66
Yorkshire +4 26 £450 -5.26% 37
North East +14 15 £450 -5.66% 20
East of England +6 15 £315 +70.27% 30
East Midlands +8 12 £399 -11.39% 11
Wales +4 9 £463 +131.83% 7
Northern Ireland -13 1 £500 +185.71% 8
Data Engineer
UK

Data Engineer Skill Set
Top 30 Co-occurring Skills and Capabilities in the UK excluding London

For the 6 months to 1 May 2025, Data Engineer contract job roles required the following skills and capabilities in order of popularity. The figures indicate the absolute number co-occurrences and as a proportion of all contract job ads across the UK excluding London region featuring Data Engineer in the job title.

1 161 (53.49%) SQL
2 140 (46.51%) Python
3 105 (34.88%) ETL
4 100 (33.22%) Azure
5 93 (30.90%) Data Pipeline
6 85 (28.24%) AWS
7 76 (25.25%) Analytics
8 74 (24.58%) Problem-Solving
8 74 (24.58%) Data Modelling
9 72 (23.92%) Data Engineering
10 69 (22.92%) Databricks
11 67 (22.26%) Data Warehouse
12 63 (20.93%) Security Cleared
13 56 (18.60%) Social Skills
14 51 (16.94%) Snowflake
14 51 (16.94%) CI/CD
15 50 (16.61%) PySpark
16 46 (15.28%) SC Cleared
16 46 (15.28%) Data Quality
17 44 (14.62%) Data Integration
17 44 (14.62%) Finance
17 44 (14.62%) Agile
18 41 (13.62%) Azure Data Factory
19 39 (12.96%) Business Intelligence
20 38 (12.62%) Migration
20 38 (12.62%) Power Platform
21 37 (12.29%) Data Transformation
22 36 (11.96%) Power BI
23 33 (10.96%) Apache
24 32 (10.63%) Visualisation

Data Engineer Skill Set
Co-occurring Skills and Capabilities in the UK excluding London by Category

The follow tables expand on the table above by listing co-occurrences grouped by category. The same employment type, locality and period is covered with up to 20 co-occurrences shown in each of the following categories:

Application Platforms
1 33 (10.96%) Apache
2 30 (9.97%) Apache Airflow
3 25 (8.31%) Apache Spark
4 6 (1.99%) Confluence
4 6 (1.99%) SharePoint
5 3 (1.00%) R Markdown
6 2 (0.66%) Jupyter
7 1 (0.33%) IBM Notes
7 1 (0.33%) Luigi
7 1 (0.33%) Oracle Application Server
7 1 (0.33%) SAS
Applications
1 7 (2.33%) Microsoft Excel
2 2 (0.66%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 1 (0.33%) Adobe Captivate
3 1 (0.33%) AutoCAD
3 1 (0.33%) CATIA
3 1 (0.33%) Spreadsheet
Business Applications
1 7 (2.33%) Oracle EBS
2 1 (0.33%) Oracle ERP
2 1 (0.33%) Payment Gateway
Cloud Services
1 100 (33.22%) Azure
2 85 (28.24%) AWS
3 51 (16.94%) Snowflake
4 41 (13.62%) Azure Data Factory
5 38 (12.62%) Power Platform
6 29 (9.63%) GCP
7 28 (9.30%) Amazon S3
8 22 (7.31%) Azure Synapse Analytics
9 16 (5.32%) dbt
10 15 (4.98%) Serverless
11 14 (4.65%) GitHub
12 13 (4.32%) AWS Lambda
13 12 (3.99%) Matillion
14 9 (2.99%) Amazon EC2
15 8 (2.66%) Amazon EKS
15 8 (2.66%) AWS CloudFormation
15 8 (2.66%) AWS CodePipeline
15 8 (2.66%) Cloud Computing
16 7 (2.33%) AWS Step Functions
17 6 (1.99%) Azure DevOps
Communications & Networking
1 11 (3.65%) Structured Cabling
2 2 (0.66%) BGP
2 2 (0.66%) SMS
2 2 (0.66%) Wireless
3 1 (0.33%) Cisco ISE
3 1 (0.33%) Cisco Nexus
3 1 (0.33%) DHCP
3 1 (0.33%) DMZ
3 1 (0.33%) DNS
3 1 (0.33%) EIGRP
3 1 (0.33%) LAN
3 1 (0.33%) Multicast
3 1 (0.33%) NAS
3 1 (0.33%) Network Security
3 1 (0.33%) OSPF
3 1 (0.33%) SAN
3 1 (0.33%) VPN
3 1 (0.33%) VXLAN
3 1 (0.33%) WAN
3 1 (0.33%) Wi-Fi
Database & Business Intelligence
1 67 (22.26%) Data Warehouse
2 36 (11.96%) Power BI
3 26 (8.64%) PostgreSQL
4 22 (7.31%) Data Lake
5 20 (6.64%) Amazon Redshift
5 20 (6.64%) SQL Server
6 19 (6.31%) Big Data
7 16 (5.32%) Metadata
8 14 (4.65%) Hadoop
8 14 (4.65%) Relational Database
9 13 (4.32%) SQL Server Integration Services
10 11 (3.65%) Azure SQL Database
10 11 (3.65%) BigQuery
11 10 (3.32%) Oracle Database
12 9 (2.99%) Amazon RDS
12 9 (2.99%) NoSQL
13 8 (2.66%) Tableau
14 7 (2.33%) Delta Lake
14 7 (2.33%) Elasticsearch
14 7 (2.33%) MySQL
Development Applications
1 21 (6.98%) Git
2 17 (5.65%) GitLab
3 9 (2.99%) JIRA
4 7 (2.33%) Jenkins
5 5 (1.66%) Visual Studio
6 4 (1.33%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
7 3 (1.00%) Atlassian Bamboo
7 3 (1.00%) Bitbucket
7 3 (1.00%) SpecFlow
8 2 (0.66%) Flyway
9 1 (0.33%) Cucumber
9 1 (0.33%) Liquibase
9 1 (0.33%) Vagrant
General
1 56 (18.60%) Social Skills
2 44 (14.62%) Finance
3 32 (10.63%) Analytical Skills
4 28 (9.30%) Public Sector
5 19 (6.31%) Banking
6 7 (2.33%) Financial Institution
7 6 (1.99%) Investment Banking
7 6 (1.99%) Telecoms
8 5 (1.66%) Documentation Skills
8 5 (1.66%) Manufacturing
8 5 (1.66%) Marketing
8 5 (1.66%) Organisational Skills
8 5 (1.66%) Tech for Good
9 4 (1.33%) Automotive
10 3 (1.00%) Electronics
10 3 (1.00%) Local Government
10 3 (1.00%) Retail
11 2 (0.66%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 2 (0.66%) Influencing Skills
11 2 (0.66%) Legal
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 50 (16.61%) PySpark
2 21 (6.98%) Kafka
3 14 (4.65%) REST
4 13 (4.32%) Apache NiFi
5 7 (2.33%) AWS CDK
6 6 (1.99%) Pandas
7 4 (1.33%) Elastic Stack
7 4 (1.33%) Shiny
8 3 (1.00%) AngularJS
8 3 (1.00%) Gherkin
8 3 (1.00%) JDBC
8 3 (1.00%) Keycloak
8 3 (1.00%) NumPy
8 3 (1.00%) PostGIS
8 3 (1.00%) React
9 2 (0.66%) .NET
9 2 (0.66%) ADO
9 2 (0.66%) Spring
9 2 (0.66%) Spring Boot
10 1 (0.33%) Spark Streaming
Miscellaneous
1 15 (4.98%) Onboarding
2 14 (4.65%) Legacy Systems
3 12 (3.99%) Fibre Optics
4 9 (2.99%) Data Protection Act
4 9 (2.99%) Data Structures
5 6 (1.99%) Data Centre
5 6 (1.99%) Management Information System
6 5 (1.66%) Cloud Native
6 5 (1.66%) Greenfield Project
6 5 (1.66%) Hybrid Cloud
6 5 (1.66%) Renewable Energy
7 4 (1.33%) Replication
8 2 (0.66%) Algorithms
8 2 (0.66%) Client/Server
8 2 (0.66%) Distributed Computing
8 2 (0.66%) Mobile App
8 2 (0.66%) Product Ownership
8 2 (0.66%) Self-Motivation
9 1 (0.33%) Enterprise Software
9 1 (0.33%) IoT
Operating Systems
1 5 (1.66%) Linux
2 4 (1.33%) Unix
3 1 (0.33%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
3 1 (0.33%) Windows
3 1 (0.33%) Windows Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 105 (34.88%) ETL
2 93 (30.90%) Data Pipeline
3 76 (25.25%) Analytics
4 74 (24.58%) Data Modelling
4 74 (24.58%) Problem-Solving
5 72 (23.92%) Data Engineering
6 51 (16.94%) CI/CD
7 44 (14.62%) Agile
7 44 (14.62%) Data Integration
8 39 (12.96%) Business Intelligence
9 38 (12.62%) Migration
10 37 (12.29%) Data Transformation
11 32 (10.63%) DevOps
11 32 (10.63%) Visualisation
12 30 (9.97%) Data Migration
12 30 (9.97%) Decision-Making
13 29 (9.63%) Data Protection
14 28 (9.30%) Data Security
15 27 (8.97%) Data Governance
16 26 (8.64%) Data Management
Programming Languages
1 161 (53.49%) SQL
2 140 (46.51%) Python
3 17 (5.65%) PL/SQL
4 16 (5.32%) Java
5 10 (3.32%) T-SQL
6 7 (2.33%) Shell Script
7 6 (1.99%) R
8 5 (1.66%) Scala
9 4 (1.33%) Bash
9 4 (1.33%) JavaScript
9 4 (1.33%) SPARQL
10 3 (1.00%) Data Analysis Expressions
10 3 (1.00%) TypeScript
11 2 (0.66%) C#
11 2 (0.66%) PowerShell
11 2 (0.66%) Ruby
12 1 (0.33%) ANSI SQL
12 1 (0.33%) C++
12 1 (0.33%) VBA
Qualifications
1 63 (20.93%) Security Cleared
2 46 (15.28%) SC Cleared
3 20 (6.64%) DV Cleared
4 18 (5.98%) Degree
5 9 (2.99%) Computer Science Degree
6 8 (2.66%) Azure Certification
7 6 (1.99%) AWS Certification
7 6 (1.99%) BPSS Clearance
8 3 (1.00%) Microsoft Certification
9 2 (0.66%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
9 2 (0.66%) CTC Cleared
9 2 (0.66%) Master's Degree
9 2 (0.66%) SnowPro
10 1 (0.33%) Cisco Certification
10 1 (0.33%) ITIL Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 46 (15.28%) Data Quality
2 14 (4.65%) Accessibility
2 14 (4.65%) GDPR
3 7 (2.33%) QA
4 5 (1.66%) Disclosure Scotland
5 3 (1.00%) HIPAA
5 3 (1.00%) WCAG
6 1 (0.33%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 1 (0.33%) SLA
System Software
1 31 (10.30%) Docker
2 1 (0.33%) Veritas Cluster Server
2 1 (0.33%) Virtual Machines
2 1 (0.33%) VirtualBox
Systems Management
1 25 (8.31%) Kubernetes
2 13 (4.32%) Terraform
3 6 (1.99%) Ansible
4 4 (1.33%) Grafana
4 4 (1.33%) Kibana
4 4 (1.33%) logstash
5 2 (0.66%) NetBackup
5 2 (0.66%) Puppet
6 1 (0.33%) Oracle RMAN
6 1 (0.33%) Prometheus
Vendors
1 69 (22.92%) Databricks
2 29 (9.63%) Microsoft
3 24 (7.97%) Oracle
4 13 (4.32%) Google
5 9 (2.99%) Commvault
5 9 (2.99%) Informatica
6 7 (2.33%) Virgin Media
7 5 (1.66%) SAP
7 5 (1.66%) Talend
8 4 (1.33%) Cloudera
8 4 (1.33%) IBM
9 3 (1.00%) Atlassian
9 3 (1.00%) Denodo
9 3 (1.00%) Foundry
9 3 (1.00%) Palantir
10 2 (0.66%) Cisco
10 2 (0.66%) Epicor
10 2 (0.66%) ServiceNow
10 2 (0.66%) Teradata
10 2 (0.66%) Veritas