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 £475, according to job vacancies posted in the 6 months leading up to 12 March 2026.

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

6 months to
12 Mar 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 103 96 154
Rank change year-on-year -7 +58 +1
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 505 325 310
As % of all contract jobs in the UK excluding London 2.36% 2.55% 1.46%
As % of the Job Titles category 2.58% 2.76% 1.58%
Number of daily rates quoted 370 236 229
10th Percentile £363 £272 £163
25th Percentile £408 £375 £290
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £475 £463 £450
Median % change year-on-year +2.70% +2.78% -14.29%
75th Percentile £544 £538 £550
90th Percentile £600 £641 £663
UK median daily rate £500 £500 £510
% change year-on-year - -1.96% -7.27%
Number of hourly rates quoted 19 5 29
10th Percentile £34.75 £20.97 £36.07
25th Percentile £50.00 £25.09 £52.50
Median hourly rate £64.50 £26.50 £67.50
Median % change year-on-year +143.40% -60.74% +8.00%
75th Percentile £75.00 £27.75 £80.00
90th Percentile £81.20 £28.13 -
UK median hourly rate £64.50 £42.50 £62.50
% change year-on-year +51.76% -32.00% -1.19%

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 19,571 11,787 19,677
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 91.48% 92.50% 92.83%
Number of daily rates quoted 11,606 7,548 12,249
10th Percentile £250 £210 £210
25th Percentile £388 £363 £363
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £480 £475 £488
Median % change year-on-year +1.05% -2.56% -2.50%
75th Percentile £580 £588 £594
90th Percentile £675 £665 £688
UK median daily rate £500 £525 £525
% change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,134 676 2,085
10th Percentile £14.38 £15.18 £12.50
25th Percentile £18.86 £20.26 £15.50
Median hourly rate £35.00 £32.50 £32.50
Median % change year-on-year +7.69% - -18.75%
75th Percentile £65.00 £65.00 £60.00
90th Percentile £75.00 £75.00 £71.25
UK median hourly rate £35.00 £33.45 £32.50
% change year-on-year +4.63% +2.92% -23.29%

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 12 March 2026.

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 12 March 2026.

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 12 March 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
Midlands +12 206 £478 +0.63% 50
West Midlands +6 187 £492 +0.51% 39
North of England -22 150 £459 +1.94% 75
North West -6 90 £450 - 39
South East -38 54 £506 +1.25% 93
South West -2 49 £525 +5.00% 46
Scotland +1 46 £402 -8.11% 17
Yorkshire -42 43 £473 +5.00% 28
Wales -5 20 £410 -22.27% 3
East Midlands -23 19 £450 +20.40% 11
North East -9 17 £463 -7.50% 8
East of England -38 10 £565 +77.67% 16
Northern Ireland - 1 £430 - 1
Data Engineer
UK

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

For the 6 months to 12 March 2026, 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.

1 273 (54.06%) SQL
2 231 (45.74%) ETL
3 208 (41.19%) Data Pipeline
4 206 (40.79%) Python
5 203 (40.20%) Data Engineering
6 202 (40.00%) Analytics
7 174 (34.46%) Data Modelling
8 156 (30.89%) Security Cleared
9 154 (30.50%) Azure
10 133 (26.34%) SC Cleared
11 132 (26.14%) Data Quality
12 127 (25.15%) CI/CD
13 125 (24.75%) Business Intelligence
14 111 (21.98%) AWS
15 108 (21.39%) Agile
16 107 (21.19%) Problem-Solving
17 102 (20.20%) DevOps
18 95 (18.81%) Databricks
19 78 (15.45%) Data Integration
19 78 (15.45%) Data Warehouse
19 78 (15.45%) Power Platform
20 76 (15.05%) Git
21 75 (14.85%) Talend
22 73 (14.46%) Oracle
23 72 (14.26%) Power BI
24 69 (13.66%) Azure Data Factory
24 69 (13.66%) PySpark
25 64 (12.67%) Data Governance
26 63 (12.48%) Pentaho
27 61 (12.08%) Kubernetes

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 51 (10.10%) SAS
2 40 (7.92%) Apache Spark
3 37 (7.33%) Apache Airflow
4 29 (5.74%) Apache
5 9 (1.78%) Confluence
6 3 (0.59%) Jupyter
6 3 (0.59%) Oracle Application Server
7 1 (0.20%) Apache Superset
7 1 (0.20%) Apache Synapse
Applications
1 3 (0.59%) Microsoft Excel
2 1 (0.20%) Chatbot
2 1 (0.20%) Microsoft Office
Business Applications
1 1 (0.20%) Dynamics CRM
1 1 (0.20%) Elite 3E
1 1 (0.20%) NEC Housing
1 1 (0.20%) Oracle 11i
1 1 (0.20%) Oracle ERP
Cloud Services
1 154 (30.50%) Azure
2 111 (21.98%) AWS
3 78 (15.45%) Power Platform
4 69 (13.66%) Azure Data Factory
5 53 (10.50%) Snowflake
6 38 (7.52%) dbt
7 36 (7.13%) Azure Synapse Analytics
8 33 (6.53%) GCP
9 29 (5.74%) Amazon S3
9 29 (5.74%) GitHub
10 26 (5.15%) Serverless
11 21 (4.16%) Azure DevOps
12 16 (3.17%) AWS Lambda
13 15 (2.97%) OpenShift
14 12 (2.38%) Matillion
15 11 (2.18%) AWS CloudFormation
16 9 (1.78%) GitHub Actions
17 7 (1.39%) Amazon ECS
17 7 (1.39%) Amazon SageMaker
17 7 (1.39%) AWS Step Functions
Communications & Networking
1 19 (3.76%) DNS
1 19 (3.76%) VPN
2 18 (3.56%) BGP
2 18 (3.56%) DMZ
2 18 (3.56%) Multicast
3 2 (0.40%) Structured Cabling
4 1 (0.20%) TCP/IP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 78 (15.45%) Data Warehouse
2 72 (14.26%) Power BI
3 63 (12.48%) Pentaho
4 41 (8.12%) Data Lake
5 32 (6.34%) PostgreSQL
6 27 (5.35%) Big Data
7 26 (5.15%) Amazon Redshift
8 25 (4.95%) Hadoop
8 25 (4.95%) SQL Server
9 21 (4.16%) SQL Server Integration Services
10 20 (3.96%) NoSQL
10 20 (3.96%) Relational Database
11 19 (3.76%) Delta Lake
12 17 (3.37%) MySQL
13 15 (2.97%) Azure SQL Database
13 15 (2.97%) BigQuery
13 15 (2.97%) Elasticsearch
14 13 (2.57%) Amazon RDS
15 11 (2.18%) Snowflake Schema
16 10 (1.98%) Star Schema
Development Applications
1 76 (15.05%) Git
2 44 (8.71%) Jenkins
3 34 (6.73%) GitLab
3 34 (6.73%) JIRA
4 4 (0.79%) Bitbucket
5 3 (0.59%) Cucumber
5 3 (0.59%) DBeaver
5 3 (0.59%) Visual Studio
6 2 (0.40%) JMeter
6 2 (0.40%) JUnit
6 2 (0.40%) MLflow
6 2 (0.40%) Zephyr
7 1 (0.20%) Deequ
7 1 (0.20%) Maven
7 1 (0.20%) Mockito
7 1 (0.20%) Selenium
7 1 (0.20%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
General
1 88 (17.43%) Social Skills
2 56 (11.09%) Analytical Skills
3 54 (10.69%) Public Sector
4 53 (10.50%) Finance
5 25 (4.95%) Banking
6 11 (2.18%) Documentation Skills
6 11 (2.18%) Investment Banking
7 7 (1.39%) Manufacturing
8 5 (0.99%) Retail
9 4 (0.79%) Inclusion and Diversity
9 4 (0.79%) Marketing
10 3 (0.59%) Aerospace
10 3 (0.59%) Influencing Skills
10 3 (0.59%) Law
10 3 (0.59%) Legal
10 3 (0.59%) Local Government
11 2 (0.40%) Advertising
11 2 (0.40%) Military
11 2 (0.40%) Presentation Skills
11 2 (0.40%) Telecoms
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 69 (13.66%) PySpark
2 52 (10.30%) Kafka
3 16 (3.17%) JSON
4 14 (2.77%) REST
5 12 (2.38%) Keycloak
6 11 (2.18%) Pandas
7 8 (1.58%) Node.js
8 7 (1.39%) Apache NiFi
8 7 (1.39%) XML
9 6 (1.19%) Apache Avro
9 6 (1.19%) Apache Beam
9 6 (1.19%) OpenTelemetry
9 6 (1.19%) Protocol Buffers
10 5 (0.99%) NumPy
10 5 (0.99%) YAML
11 4 (0.79%) Oracle GoldenGate
11 4 (0.79%) pytest
11 4 (0.79%) React
11 4 (0.79%) RESTful
11 4 (0.79%) Streamlit
Miscellaneous
1 30 (5.94%) Cloud Native
2 18 (3.56%) Hybrid Cloud
3 14 (2.77%) Data Protection Act
3 14 (2.77%) Distributed Systems
3 14 (2.77%) Product Ownership
4 13 (2.57%) Clustering
5 12 (2.38%) Legacy Systems
6 11 (2.18%) Data Structures
7 9 (1.78%) Replication
8 7 (1.39%) Algorithms
9 5 (0.99%) NHS
9 5 (0.99%) Onboarding
10 4 (0.79%) Data Centre
10 4 (0.79%) Greenfield Project
10 4 (0.79%) Management Information System
10 4 (0.79%) Public Cloud
11 3 (0.59%) Distributed Computing
11 3 (0.59%) Driving Licence
11 3 (0.59%) Virtual Team
12 2 (0.40%) IoT
Operating Systems
1 16 (3.17%) Unix
2 8 (1.58%) Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 231 (45.74%) ETL
2 208 (41.19%) Data Pipeline
3 203 (40.20%) Data Engineering
4 202 (40.00%) Analytics
5 174 (34.46%) Data Modelling
6 127 (25.15%) CI/CD
7 125 (24.75%) Business Intelligence
8 108 (21.39%) Agile
9 107 (21.19%) Problem-Solving
10 102 (20.20%) DevOps
11 78 (15.45%) Data Integration
12 64 (12.67%) Data Governance
13 55 (10.89%) Scrum
13 55 (10.89%) Test Automation
14 53 (10.50%) Continuous Improvement
15 49 (9.70%) Migration
16 46 (9.11%) Data Science
17 43 (8.51%) Data Analytics
17 43 (8.51%) Performance Tuning
18 41 (8.12%) Validation
Programming Languages
1 273 (54.06%) SQL
2 206 (40.79%) Python
3 37 (7.33%) Java
4 15 (2.97%) PL/SQL
5 14 (2.77%) Go
6 12 (2.38%) Bash
7 11 (2.18%) Data Analysis Expressions
8 8 (1.58%) PowerShell
8 8 (1.58%) T-SQL
9 7 (1.39%) Scala
9 7 (1.39%) Shell Script
10 6 (1.19%) Bicep
10 6 (1.19%) C#
10 6 (1.19%) JavaScript
11 5 (0.99%) R
12 2 (0.40%) HiveQL
13 1 (0.20%) Groovy
13 1 (0.20%) TypeScript
Qualifications
1 156 (30.89%) Security Cleared
2 133 (26.34%) SC Cleared
3 14 (2.77%) Azure Certification
4 13 (2.57%) Degree
5 8 (1.58%) BPSS Clearance
6 7 (1.39%) AWS Certification
7 4 (0.79%) DV Cleared
8 3 (0.59%) Computer Science Degree
8 3 (0.59%) IBM Certification
8 3 (0.59%) Master's Degree
9 1 (0.20%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
9 1 (0.20%) CCIE
9 1 (0.20%) CCNP
9 1 (0.20%) Cisco Certification
9 1 (0.20%) CISM
9 1 (0.20%) CISSP
9 1 (0.20%) DBS Check
9 1 (0.20%) ITIL Certification
9 1 (0.20%) Microsoft Certified Professional
9 1 (0.20%) Numerate Degree
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 132 (26.14%) Data Quality
2 14 (2.77%) GDPR
3 10 (1.98%) QA
4 5 (0.99%) Accessibility
5 3 (0.59%) FATCA
5 3 (0.59%) SLA
6 2 (0.40%) HIPAA
6 2 (0.40%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 2 (0.40%) NIST
7 1 (0.20%) Basel III
7 1 (0.20%) California Consumer Privacy Act
7 1 (0.20%) Disclosure Scotland
7 1 (0.20%) EU AI Act
7 1 (0.20%) GMP
7 1 (0.20%) NCSC
7 1 (0.20%) Sarbanes-Oxley
7 1 (0.20%) WCAG
System Software
1 53 (10.50%) Docker
2 2 (0.40%) HDFS
2 2 (0.40%) Virtual Machines
Systems Management
1 61 (12.08%) Kubernetes
2 28 (5.54%) Terraform
3 19 (3.76%) Grafana
4 11 (2.18%) Prometheus
5 8 (1.58%) Ansible
6 4 (0.79%) Kibana
7 3 (0.59%) NetBackup
7 3 (0.59%) Rancher
8 2 (0.40%) logstash
9 1 (0.20%) Control-M
9 1 (0.20%) Puppet
Vendors
1 95 (18.81%) Databricks
2 75 (14.85%) Talend
3 73 (14.46%) Oracle
4 57 (11.29%) Microsoft
5 45 (8.91%) Informatica
6 38 (7.52%) Denodo
7 20 (3.96%) Cisco
7 20 (3.96%) F5
8 14 (2.77%) Splunk
9 12 (2.38%) ServiceNow
10 9 (1.78%) Google
11 8 (1.58%) Cloudera
12 7 (1.39%) Alteryx
13 6 (1.19%) SAP
14 5 (0.99%) IBM
15 4 (0.79%) Dataiku
15 4 (0.79%) Sage
16 3 (0.59%) Commvault
16 3 (0.59%) Red Hat
17 2 (0.40%) Cognos