Data Engineer Contract Job Trends in the UK excluding London

Data Engineer
UK > UK excluding London

The median Data Engineer daily rate in the UK excluding London is £488, according to job vacancies posted in the 6 months leading up to 29 December 2025.

The table below compares current contractor rates and summary statistics with the previous two years.

6 months to
29 Dec 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 156 106 185
Rank change year-on-year -50 +79 -13
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 301 336 243
As % of all contract jobs in the UK excluding London 1.65% 2.30% 1.24%
As % of the Job Titles category 1.82% 2.49% 1.33%
Number of daily rates quoted 218 223 188
10th Percentile £349 £318 £350
25th Percentile £405 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £488 £490 £513
Median % change year-on-year -0.51% -4.39% -2.38%
75th Percentile £552 £575 £600
90th Percentile £613 £650 £688
UK median daily rate £500 £525 £525
% change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 4 4 4
10th Percentile £28.33 £25.14 £33.11
25th Percentile £31.81 £25.21 £41.16
Median hourly rate £51.00 £26.50 £57.00
Median % change year-on-year +92.45% -53.51% -8.80%
75th Percentile £71.69 £27.91 £65.63
90th Percentile £76.08 £28.19 £66.75
UK median hourly rate £54.00 £53.75 £61.43
% change year-on-year +0.47% -12.50% -2.11%

All Contract IT Job Roles
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 16,495 13,472 18,234
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 90.33% 92.34% 93.42%
Number of daily rates quoted 10,135 8,008 11,848
10th Percentile £213 £213 £213
25th Percentile £373 £363 £375
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £475 £487 £500
Median % change year-on-year -2.41% -2.65% -
75th Percentile £575 £588 £600
90th Percentile £675 £676 £688
UK median daily rate £500 £525 £525
% change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 1,657 759 1,280
10th Percentile £13.95 £15.33 £14.16
25th Percentile £17.69 £20.26 £18.50
Median hourly rate £25.15 £32.50 £45.94
Median % change year-on-year -22.62% -29.26% +77.99%
75th Percentile £58.75 £64.30 £65.00
90th Percentile £70.00 £71.38 £76.58
UK median hourly rate £25.47 £32.50 £45.00
% change year-on-year -21.63% -27.78% +41.93%

Data Engineer
Job Vacancy Trend in the UK excluding London

Historical trend showing the proportion of contract IT job postings featuring 'Data Engineer' in the job title relative to all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK excluding London.

Data Engineer job vacancy trend in the UK excluding London

Data Engineer
Daily Rate Trend in the UK excluding London

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for Data Engineer job vacancies in the UK excluding London.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for Data Engineer job vacancies 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 29 December 2025.

Daily rate histogram for Data Engineer in the UK excluding London

Data Engineer
Hourly Rate Trend in the UK excluding London

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for Data Engineer job vacancies in the UK excluding London.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for Data Engineer job vacancies 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 29 December 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 29 December 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 92 £463 +1.37% 280
Midlands -20 86 £520 +5.05% 182
West Midlands -13 72 £525 +5.00% 95
Scotland +9 47 £450 +2.86% 52
North West -22 47 £415 -7.78% 162
South West +6 40 £550 +22.22% 139
South East -46 34 £475 -12.64% 347
Yorkshire -41 33 £500 +4.17% 90
East Midlands -13 14 £455 +27.81% 76
North East -7 12 £450 -1.64% 28
Wales -13 11 £460 -8.00% 30
East of England -29 6 £625 +96.54% 158
Northern Ireland -10 1 £430 -13.57% 19
Data Engineer
UK

Data Engineer Skill Set
Top 30 Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities in the UK excluding London

For the 6 months to 29 December 2025, Data Engineer contract job roles required the following skills and capabilities in order of popularity. The figures indicate the absolute number of co-occurrences and as a proportion of all contract job ads across the UK excluding London region featuring Data Engineer in the job title.

1 175 (58.14%) Python
2 163 (54.15%) SQL
3 130 (43.19%) ETL
4 123 (40.86%) Data Pipeline
5 114 (37.87%) Data Engineering
6 109 (36.21%) Azure
7 101 (33.55%) Analytics
8 96 (31.89%) CI/CD
9 89 (29.57%) Data Modelling
10 87 (28.90%) AWS
11 81 (26.91%) Databricks
12 75 (24.92%) DevOps
13 71 (23.59%) Business Intelligence
14 68 (22.59%) Agile
15 67 (22.26%) Data Warehouse
16 64 (21.26%) Problem-Solving
17 62 (20.60%) Data Quality
18 57 (18.94%) PySpark
19 54 (17.94%) Power Platform
19 54 (17.94%) Security Cleared
20 50 (16.61%) Power BI
21 46 (15.28%) Apache Airflow
21 46 (15.28%) Azure Data Factory
21 46 (15.28%) Git
21 46 (15.28%) SC Cleared
22 45 (14.95%) Docker
23 44 (14.62%) Kubernetes
24 43 (14.29%) Jenkins
25 42 (13.95%) Snowflake
26 40 (13.29%) Test Automation

Data Engineer Skill Set
Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities in the UK excluding London 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 46 (15.28%) Apache Airflow
2 30 (9.97%) Apache Spark
3 29 (9.63%) Apache
4 15 (4.98%) SAS
5 8 (2.66%) Confluence
6 5 (1.66%) Apache Pig
6 5 (1.66%) Oracle Application Server
7 3 (1.00%) IIS
8 1 (0.33%) Apache Synapse
8 1 (0.33%) Jupyter
Applications
1 1 (0.33%) Chatbot
1 1 (0.33%) SPSS
1 1 (0.33%) Stata
Business Applications
1 2 (0.66%) SAP S/4HANA
Cloud Services
1 109 (36.21%) Azure
2 87 (28.90%) AWS
3 54 (17.94%) Power Platform
4 46 (15.28%) Azure Data Factory
5 42 (13.95%) Snowflake
6 31 (10.30%) GCP
7 28 (9.30%) GitHub
8 27 (8.97%) Azure Synapse Analytics
9 25 (8.31%) dbt
9 25 (8.31%) Serverless
10 24 (7.97%) Amazon S3
11 17 (5.65%) AWS Lambda
12 13 (4.32%) AWS CloudFormation
12 13 (4.32%) Azure DevOps
13 12 (3.99%) GitHub Actions
14 8 (2.66%) Amazon SageMaker
15 7 (2.33%) Amazon ECS
15 7 (2.33%) AWS Step Functions
15 7 (2.33%) CloudBees
15 7 (2.33%) Prefect
Communications & Networking
1 4 (1.33%) DNS
1 4 (1.33%) TCP/IP
2 3 (1.00%) SSH
2 3 (1.00%) Structured Cabling
3 2 (0.66%) BGP
3 2 (0.66%) DMZ
3 2 (0.66%) Multicast
3 2 (0.66%) SSL
3 2 (0.66%) VPN
3 2 (0.66%) Wi-Fi
4 1 (0.33%) Internet
4 1 (0.33%) LAN
4 1 (0.33%) MQTT
4 1 (0.33%) WAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 67 (22.26%) Data Warehouse
2 50 (16.61%) Power BI
3 36 (11.96%) Data Lake
4 30 (9.97%) Big Data
5 28 (9.30%) PostgreSQL
6 27 (8.97%) NoSQL
7 25 (8.31%) Hadoop
8 23 (7.64%) Pentaho
9 19 (6.31%) Amazon Redshift
10 17 (5.65%) Elasticsearch
11 16 (5.32%) Delta Lake
12 15 (4.98%) Relational Database
13 13 (4.32%) Data Mining
13 13 (4.32%) SQL Server
14 12 (3.99%) Amazon RDS
14 12 (3.99%) Azure SQL Database
15 9 (2.99%) BigQuery
15 9 (2.99%) Tableau
16 8 (2.66%) RDBMS
16 8 (2.66%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 46 (15.28%) Git
2 43 (14.29%) Jenkins
3 26 (8.64%) GitLab
4 24 (7.97%) JIRA
5 8 (2.66%) MLflow
6 5 (1.66%) DBeaver
6 5 (1.66%) Visual Studio Code
7 4 (1.33%) SonarQube
8 3 (1.00%) Bitbucket
8 3 (1.00%) Cucumber
8 3 (1.00%) Poetry
8 3 (1.00%) PyCharm
8 3 (1.00%) Sonatype Nexus
9 2 (0.66%) Artifactory
9 2 (0.66%) JMeter
9 2 (0.66%) Visual Studio
9 2 (0.66%) Zephyr
10 1 (0.33%) JUnit
10 1 (0.33%) Maven
10 1 (0.33%) Selenium
General
1 61 (20.27%) Social Skills
2 38 (12.62%) Finance
3 34 (11.30%) Analytical Skills
4 22 (7.31%) Public Sector
5 18 (5.98%) Banking
6 6 (1.99%) Documentation Skills
7 3 (1.00%) Influencing Skills
7 3 (1.00%) Investment Banking
7 3 (1.00%) Legal
7 3 (1.00%) Manufacturing
8 2 (0.66%) Aerospace
8 2 (0.66%) Health Technology
8 2 (0.66%) Pharmaceutical
8 2 (0.66%) Presentation Skills
8 2 (0.66%) Retail
8 2 (0.66%) Tech for Good
8 2 (0.66%) Telecoms
9 1 (0.33%) Inclusion and Diversity
9 1 (0.33%) Law
9 1 (0.33%) Publishing
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 57 (18.94%) PySpark
2 30 (9.97%) Kafka
3 16 (5.32%) REST
4 14 (4.65%) RESTful
5 13 (4.32%) Pandas
6 12 (3.99%) Flask
6 12 (3.99%) Keycloak
6 12 (3.99%) NumPy
7 7 (2.33%) Apache NiFi
7 7 (2.33%) Elastic Stack
8 6 (1.99%) HTML
8 6 (1.99%) OpenTelemetry
9 5 (1.66%) JSON
9 5 (1.66%) Node.js
9 5 (1.66%) Oracle GoldenGate
10 4 (1.33%) OAuth
10 4 (1.33%) OAuth2
10 4 (1.33%) pytest
11 3 (1.00%) PyTorch
11 3 (1.00%) TensorFlow
Miscellaneous
1 21 (6.98%) Cloud Native
2 15 (4.98%) Replication
3 14 (4.65%) Algorithms
3 14 (4.65%) Product Ownership
4 13 (4.32%) Hybrid Cloud
5 10 (3.32%) Distributed Systems
6 8 (2.66%) Data Protection Act
7 7 (2.33%) Clustering
8 6 (1.99%) Data Structures
8 6 (1.99%) Greenfield Project
8 6 (1.99%) Legacy Systems
8 6 (1.99%) NHS
9 4 (1.33%) IoT
10 3 (1.00%) Distributed Computing
10 3 (1.00%) Driving Licence
10 3 (1.00%) Fibre Optics
11 2 (0.66%) Data Centre
11 2 (0.66%) Legacy Applications
11 2 (0.66%) Management Information System
11 2 (0.66%) Private Cloud
Operating Systems
1 19 (6.31%) Linux
2 8 (2.66%) Unix
Processes & Methodologies
1 130 (43.19%) ETL
2 123 (40.86%) Data Pipeline
3 114 (37.87%) Data Engineering
4 101 (33.55%) Analytics
5 96 (31.89%) CI/CD
6 89 (29.57%) Data Modelling
7 75 (24.92%) DevOps
8 71 (23.59%) Business Intelligence
9 68 (22.59%) Agile
10 64 (21.26%) Problem-Solving
11 40 (13.29%) Test Automation
12 39 (12.96%) Data Integration
13 38 (12.62%) Machine Learning
14 35 (11.63%) Visualisation
15 33 (10.96%) Performance Tuning
16 31 (10.30%) Scrum
17 29 (9.63%) Continuous Improvement
17 29 (9.63%) Data Governance
17 29 (9.63%) Data Science
18 27 (8.97%) Data Architecture
Programming Languages
1 175 (58.14%) Python
2 163 (54.15%) SQL
3 29 (9.63%) Java
4 16 (5.32%) Scala
5 13 (4.32%) PL/SQL
6 12 (3.99%) Bash
6 12 (3.99%) Go
7 6 (1.99%) R
8 5 (1.66%) Groovy
8 5 (1.66%) Shell Script
8 5 (1.66%) T-SQL
9 4 (1.33%) Data Analysis Expressions
9 4 (1.33%) JavaScript
10 3 (1.00%) TypeScript
11 2 (0.66%) ABAP
11 2 (0.66%) Bicep
12 1 (0.33%) C#
12 1 (0.33%) Cypher
Qualifications
1 54 (17.94%) Security Cleared
2 46 (15.28%) SC Cleared
3 13 (4.32%) Azure Certification
4 10 (3.32%) AWS Certification
5 7 (2.33%) Degree
6 5 (1.66%) Master's Degree
7 3 (1.00%) Computer Science Degree
8 2 (0.66%) DV Cleared
9 1 (0.33%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
9 1 (0.33%) HND
9 1 (0.33%) ITIL Certification
9 1 (0.33%) MCP
9 1 (0.33%) Tableau Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 62 (20.60%) Data Quality
2 9 (2.99%) GDPR
3 6 (1.99%) QA
4 3 (1.00%) Accessibility
5 1 (0.33%) Basel III
5 1 (0.33%) Disclosure Scotland
5 1 (0.33%) EU AI Act
5 1 (0.33%) HIPAA
5 1 (0.33%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 1 (0.33%) NCSC
5 1 (0.33%) NIST
5 1 (0.33%) WCAG
System Software
1 45 (14.95%) Docker
2 3 (1.00%) Virtual Machines
3 2 (0.66%) Active Directory
Systems Management
1 44 (14.62%) Kubernetes
2 29 (9.63%) Terraform
3 12 (3.99%) Ansible
4 9 (2.99%) Grafana
5 8 (2.66%) NetBackup
6 6 (1.99%) Kibana
6 6 (1.99%) Prometheus
7 4 (1.33%) logstash
8 3 (1.00%) Argo
8 3 (1.00%) Istio
9 2 (0.66%) Control-M
9 2 (0.66%) Kustomize
10 1 (0.33%) Puppet
Vendors
1 81 (26.91%) Databricks
2 38 (12.62%) Oracle
3 35 (11.63%) Microsoft
4 25 (8.31%) Talend
5 15 (4.98%) Denodo
6 11 (3.65%) Informatica
6 11 (3.65%) Red Hat
7 9 (2.99%) Google
8 8 (2.66%) Commvault
9 7 (2.33%) IBM
9 7 (2.33%) Veritas
10 6 (1.99%) Cloudera
10 6 (1.99%) Confluent
10 6 (1.99%) ServiceNow
11 5 (1.66%) Splunk
12 4 (1.33%) SAP
13 3 (1.00%) Cisco
13 3 (1.00%) Salesforce
14 2 (0.66%) Brio
14 2 (0.66%) F5