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 £470, according to job vacancies posted in the 6 months leading up to 18 April 2026.

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

6 months to
18 Apr 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 82 102 143
Rank change year-on-year +20 +41 +7
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 622 315 319
As % of all contract jobs in the UK excluding London 2.67% 2.47% 1.53%
As % of the Job Titles category 2.90% 2.67% 1.66%
Number of daily rates quoted 438 234 239
10th Percentile £367 £233 £163
25th Percentile £410 £393 £206
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £470 £467 £460
Median % change year-on-year +0.70% +1.47% -10.24%
75th Percentile £538 £538 £547
90th Percentile £588 £638 £631
UK median daily rate £500 £500 £500
% change year-on-year - - -9.09%
Number of hourly rates quoted 37 5 33
10th Percentile £26.03 £21.03 £37.50
25th Percentile £41.28 £25.25 £58.75
Median hourly rate £52.50 £26.50 £75.00
Median % change year-on-year +98.11% -64.67% +72.41%
75th Percentile £71.50 £28.38 £80.00
90th Percentile £80.90 £58.57 -
UK median hourly rate £53.50 £58.75 £66.25
% change year-on-year -8.94% -11.32% +3.52%

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 21,435 11,791 19,268
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 91.91% 92.32% 92.67%
Number of daily rates quoted 12,658 7,622 11,878
10th Percentile £271 £213 £213
25th Percentile £400 £363 £363
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £488 £475 £493
Median % change year-on-year +2.63% -3.65% -1.40%
75th Percentile £588 £579 £600
90th Percentile £675 £655 £688
UK median daily rate £500 £515 £525
% change year-on-year -2.91% -1.90% -2.78%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,354 790 2,175
10th Percentile £14.39 £14.20 £12.50
25th Percentile £19.66 £18.26 £15.50
Median hourly rate £42.85 £29.24 £35.65
Median % change year-on-year +46.55% -17.98% -15.28%
75th Percentile £65.60 £65.00 £60.00
90th Percentile £78.60 £76.25 £72.90
UK median hourly rate £41.94 £30.43 £35.00
% change year-on-year +37.85% -13.07% -20.55%

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 18 April 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 18 April 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 18 April 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 +21 270 £469 -1.26% 49
West Midlands +21 253 £469 -1.68% 45
North of England -12 180 £465 +0.54% 91
North West -5 112 £450 -2.70% 61
South East -5 78 £500 +2.56% 81
Yorkshire -29 53 £465 +3.33% 22
South West -10 52 £520 +5.32% 37
Scotland -2 41 £402 -10.67% 16
Wales +3 20 £450 -10.45% 6
East Midlands -29 17 £470 +17.87% 4
East of England -32 16 £565 +79.37% 20
North East -13 15 £488 +8.33% 12
Northern Ireland +5 3 £410 -18.00% 1
Data Engineer
UK

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

For the 6 months to 18 April 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.

1 324 (52.09%) SQL
2 254 (40.84%) ETL
3 246 (39.55%) Analytics
4 242 (38.91%) Data Pipeline
5 223 (35.85%) Data Engineering
6 213 (34.24%) Security Cleared
7 211 (33.92%) Python
8 207 (33.28%) Data Modelling
9 184 (29.58%) SC Cleared
10 157 (25.24%) Azure
11 148 (23.79%) Data Quality
12 146 (23.47%) Business Intelligence
13 139 (22.35%) CI/CD
14 129 (20.74%) Agile
15 118 (18.97%) AWS
16 112 (18.01%) Problem-Solving
17 110 (17.68%) Databricks
18 99 (15.92%) Talend
19 98 (15.76%) Data Integration
20 96 (15.43%) DevOps
21 93 (14.95%) Git
21 93 (14.95%) Oracle
22 87 (13.99%) Power Platform
23 82 (13.18%) Data Warehouse
23 82 (13.18%) Power BI
24 79 (12.70%) PySpark
25 77 (12.38%) Pentaho
26 71 (11.41%) Azure Data Factory
27 68 (10.93%) Migration
28 66 (10.61%) Data Governance

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 64 (10.29%) SAS
2 47 (7.56%) Apache Spark
3 40 (6.43%) Apache Airflow
4 30 (4.82%) Apache
5 6 (0.96%) Confluence
6 3 (0.48%) Jupyter
7 1 (0.16%) Apache Superset
7 1 (0.16%) Apache Synapse
7 1 (0.16%) SharePoint
Applications
1 5 (0.80%) Microsoft Excel
1 5 (0.80%) Notepad++
2 1 (0.16%) Chatbot
2 1 (0.16%) Microsoft Office
Business Applications
1 1 (0.16%) Dynamics CRM
1 1 (0.16%) Elite 3E
1 1 (0.16%) NEC Housing
1 1 (0.16%) Oracle 11i
1 1 (0.16%) Oracle ERP
1 1 (0.16%) SAP S/4HANA
Cloud Services
1 157 (25.24%) Azure
2 118 (18.97%) AWS
3 87 (13.99%) Power Platform
4 71 (11.41%) Azure Data Factory
5 53 (8.52%) Snowflake
6 42 (6.75%) dbt
7 40 (6.43%) Azure Synapse Analytics
8 33 (5.31%) GCP
9 31 (4.98%) Amazon S3
10 27 (4.34%) GitHub
11 24 (3.86%) Serverless
12 20 (3.22%) Azure DevOps
13 19 (3.05%) OpenShift
14 17 (2.73%) AWS Lambda
15 14 (2.25%) Matillion
16 11 (1.77%) GitHub Actions
17 10 (1.61%) AWS CloudFormation
18 9 (1.45%) AWS Step Functions
18 9 (1.45%) Power Automate
19 7 (1.13%) PowerApps
Communications & Networking
1 27 (4.34%) DNS
1 27 (4.34%) VPN
2 26 (4.18%) BGP
2 26 (4.18%) DMZ
2 26 (4.18%) Multicast
3 8 (1.29%) Structured Cabling
4 5 (0.80%) PuTTY
4 5 (0.80%) WinSCP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 82 (13.18%) Data Warehouse
1 82 (13.18%) Power BI
2 77 (12.38%) Pentaho
3 41 (6.59%) Data Lake
4 34 (5.47%) Amazon Redshift
5 29 (4.66%) Big Data
6 28 (4.50%) SQL Server
7 26 (4.18%) Hadoop
8 25 (4.02%) Delta Lake
8 25 (4.02%) MySQL
8 25 (4.02%) PostgreSQL
9 21 (3.38%) Relational Database
10 20 (3.22%) Metadata
10 20 (3.22%) SQL Server Integration Services
11 19 (3.05%) NoSQL
12 16 (2.57%) Tableau
13 15 (2.41%) BigQuery
13 15 (2.41%) Snowflake Schema
14 14 (2.25%) Azure SQL Database
15 13 (2.09%) Amazon RDS
Development Applications
1 93 (14.95%) Git
2 44 (7.07%) Jenkins
3 40 (6.43%) GitLab
4 38 (6.11%) JIRA
5 4 (0.64%) Bitbucket
6 2 (0.32%) JUnit
6 2 (0.32%) Visual Studio
7 1 (0.16%) Cucumber
7 1 (0.16%) ER Studio
7 1 (0.16%) ERwin
7 1 (0.16%) Maven
7 1 (0.16%) Mockito
7 1 (0.16%) Selenium
General
1 101 (16.24%) Social Skills
2 63 (10.13%) Public Sector
3 61 (9.81%) Analytical Skills
4 60 (9.65%) Finance
5 33 (5.31%) Banking
6 15 (2.41%) Investment Banking
7 12 (1.93%) Documentation Skills
7 12 (1.93%) Manufacturing
8 10 (1.61%) Aerospace
9 8 (1.29%) Telecoms
10 5 (0.80%) Retail
11 4 (0.64%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 4 (0.64%) Legal
11 4 (0.64%) Local Government
11 4 (0.64%) Marketing
12 3 (0.48%) Law
13 2 (0.32%) Advertising
13 2 (0.32%) Health Technology
13 2 (0.32%) Military
13 2 (0.32%) Presentation Skills
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 79 (12.70%) PySpark
2 60 (9.65%) Kafka
3 19 (3.05%) JSON
4 15 (2.41%) REST
5 11 (1.77%) Pandas
6 9 (1.45%) Keycloak
6 9 (1.45%) Node.js
7 8 (1.29%) Apache Avro
7 8 (1.29%) Apache Beam
7 8 (1.29%) Protocol Buffers
8 7 (1.13%) XML
9 6 (0.96%) OpenTelemetry
10 5 (0.80%) Apache NiFi
10 5 (0.80%) React
10 5 (0.80%) YAML
11 4 (0.64%) AngularJS
11 4 (0.64%) NumPy
11 4 (0.64%) pytest
11 4 (0.64%) Streamlit
12 3 (0.48%) AWS CDK
Miscellaneous
1 24 (3.86%) Cloud Native
2 18 (2.89%) Legacy Systems
3 14 (2.25%) Clustering
4 13 (2.09%) Data Protection Act
4 13 (2.09%) Data Structures
4 13 (2.09%) Distributed Systems
5 12 (1.93%) Hybrid Cloud
6 11 (1.77%) Product Ownership
7 7 (1.13%) Greenfield Project
8 6 (0.96%) Data Centre
8 6 (0.96%) Linux Command Line
8 6 (0.96%) NHS
8 6 (0.96%) Onboarding
9 5 (0.80%) Driving Licence
9 5 (0.80%) Replication
10 4 (0.64%) Fibre Optics
10 4 (0.64%) Management Information System
10 4 (0.64%) Public Cloud
11 3 (0.48%) Data Fabric
11 3 (0.48%) Distributed Computing
Operating Systems
1 29 (4.66%) Unix
2 9 (1.45%) Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 254 (40.84%) ETL
2 246 (39.55%) Analytics
3 242 (38.91%) Data Pipeline
4 223 (35.85%) Data Engineering
5 207 (33.28%) Data Modelling
6 146 (23.47%) Business Intelligence
7 139 (22.35%) CI/CD
8 129 (20.74%) Agile
9 112 (18.01%) Problem-Solving
10 98 (15.76%) Data Integration
11 96 (15.43%) DevOps
12 68 (10.93%) Migration
13 66 (10.61%) Data Governance
13 66 (10.61%) Scrum
14 56 (9.00%) Continuous Improvement
14 56 (9.00%) Test Automation
15 53 (8.52%) Validation
16 47 (7.56%) Performance Tuning
17 45 (7.23%) Data Transformation
18 44 (7.07%) Data Analytics
Programming Languages
1 324 (52.09%) SQL
2 211 (33.92%) Python
3 36 (5.79%) Java
4 23 (3.70%) PL/SQL
5 16 (2.57%) Shell Script
6 12 (1.93%) Bash
7 11 (1.77%) Go
8 9 (1.45%) PowerShell
9 8 (1.29%) Data Analysis Expressions
9 8 (1.29%) T-SQL
10 7 (1.13%) Scala
11 6 (0.96%) C#
12 5 (0.80%) Bicep
13 3 (0.48%) JavaScript
14 2 (0.32%) HiveQL
14 2 (0.32%) R
15 1 (0.16%) C++
15 1 (0.16%) Groovy
15 1 (0.16%) Perl
15 1 (0.16%) TypeScript
Qualifications
1 213 (34.24%) Security Cleared
2 184 (29.58%) SC Cleared
3 15 (2.41%) Degree
4 11 (1.77%) Azure Certification
5 10 (1.61%) BPSS Clearance
6 6 (0.96%) DV Cleared
7 4 (0.64%) BICSI Certification
7 4 (0.64%) City & Guilds
7 4 (0.64%) Computer Science Degree
7 4 (0.64%) Master's Degree
8 3 (0.48%) AWS Certification
8 3 (0.48%) IBM Certification
8 3 (0.48%) SnowPro
9 1 (0.16%) CCIE
9 1 (0.16%) CCNP
9 1 (0.16%) Cisco Certification
9 1 (0.16%) CISM
9 1 (0.16%) CISSP
9 1 (0.16%) ITIL Certification
9 1 (0.16%) Numerate Degree
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 148 (23.79%) Data Quality
2 13 (2.09%) GDPR
3 12 (1.93%) QA
4 6 (0.96%) SLA
5 5 (0.80%) Accessibility
5 5 (0.80%) FATCA
6 2 (0.32%) HIPAA
6 2 (0.32%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 2 (0.32%) WCAG
7 1 (0.16%) Basel III
7 1 (0.16%) California Consumer Privacy Act
7 1 (0.16%) Disclosure Scotland
7 1 (0.16%) GMP
7 1 (0.16%) Government Security Classifications
7 1 (0.16%) NCSC
7 1 (0.16%) NIST
7 1 (0.16%) Sarbanes-Oxley
System Software
1 57 (9.16%) Docker
2 2 (0.32%) HDFS
2 2 (0.32%) Virtual Machines
Systems Management
1 61 (9.81%) Kubernetes
2 31 (4.98%) Grafana
3 29 (4.66%) Terraform
4 13 (2.09%) Prometheus
5 5 (0.80%) Ansible
6 3 (0.48%) Kibana
6 3 (0.48%) Rancher
7 2 (0.32%) Apache Ranger
7 2 (0.32%) logstash
8 1 (0.16%) Control-M
Vendors
1 110 (17.68%) Databricks
2 99 (15.92%) Talend
3 93 (14.95%) Oracle
4 63 (10.13%) Microsoft
5 57 (9.16%) Informatica
6 50 (8.04%) Denodo
7 28 (4.50%) Cisco
7 28 (4.50%) F5
8 16 (2.57%) Splunk
9 14 (2.25%) ServiceNow
10 11 (1.77%) Google
11 10 (1.61%) Cloudera
11 10 (1.61%) SAP
12 7 (1.13%) Alteryx
13 4 (0.64%) Dataiku
13 4 (0.64%) Sage
14 3 (0.48%) IBM
15 2 (0.32%) Brio
15 2 (0.32%) Cognos
15 2 (0.32%) Guidewire