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 16 July 2026.

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

6 months to
16 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 65 148 130
Rank change year-on-year +83 -18 +31
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 902 250 340
As % of all contract jobs in the UK excluding London 3.35% 1.69% 1.64%
As % of the Job Titles category 3.64% 1.87% 1.78%
Number of daily rates quoted 583 176 251
10th Percentile £363 £329 £170
25th Percentile £413 £406 £206
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £470 £475 £450
Median % change year-on-year -1.05% +5.56% -14.29%
75th Percentile £544 £538 £542
90th Percentile £600 £625 £600
UK median daily rate £500 £500 £500
% change year-on-year - -0.05% -9.05%
Number of hourly rates quoted 64 4 30
10th Percentile £19.34 £17.92 £37.50
25th Percentile £35.94 £18.11 £58.75
Median hourly rate £45.00 £48.46 £77.50
Median % change year-on-year -7.14% -37.47% +58.16%
75th Percentile £61.81 £79.03 £80.00
90th Percentile £75.00 £79.61 -
UK median hourly rate £50.00 £52.50 £75.00
% change year-on-year -4.76% -30.00% -3.23%

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 24,782 13,388 19,075
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.14% 90.65% 92.25%
Number of daily rates quoted 14,152 8,263 11,515
10th Percentile £305 £220 £213
25th Percentile £408 £363 £375
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £475 £495
Median % change year-on-year +5.26% -4.04% -1.00%
75th Percentile £600 £575 £595
90th Percentile £688 £650 £675
UK median daily rate £525 £500 £525
% change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -2.33%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,854 1,128 2,318
10th Percentile £15.24 £13.50 £12.86
25th Percentile £21.04 £16.84 £16.25
Median hourly rate £45.56 £25.15 £40.00
Median % change year-on-year +81.13% -37.13% +6.67%
75th Percentile £68.00 £57.50 £63.75
90th Percentile £80.00 £75.00 £74.44
UK median hourly rate £45.00 £26.21 £40.00
% change year-on-year +71.69% -34.48% -5.88%

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 16 July 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 16 July 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 16 July 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 +54 370 £465 +3.33% 42
West Midlands +50 328 £460 - 30
North of England +26 230 £475 - 78
North West +22 136 £525 +10.53% 41
South East +18 128 £470 +10.59% 76
South West +25 96 £525 +5.00% 27
Scotland +29 72 £425 -3.52% 8
Yorkshire -8 72 £470 -1.05% 20
East Midlands +13 42 £500 +19.05% 12
East of England -3 28 £565 +77.67% 14
North East -22 23 £515 +17.71% 17
Wales +8 20 £475 +6.74% 11
Northern Ireland +2 3 £410 -18.00% 5
Data Engineer
UK

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

For the 6 months to 16 July 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.

1 424 (47.01%) SQL
2 341 (37.80%) Data Pipeline
3 319 (35.37%) Analytics
4 317 (35.14%) ETL
5 294 (32.59%) Data Engineering
6 278 (30.82%) Security Cleared
7 277 (30.71%) Python
8 275 (30.49%) Data Modelling
9 228 (25.28%) SC Cleared
10 212 (23.50%) Azure
11 196 (21.73%) AWS
12 193 (21.40%) Data Quality
13 181 (20.07%) Business Intelligence
14 176 (19.51%) CI/CD
15 153 (16.96%) Data Integration
16 149 (16.52%) Agile
17 141 (15.63%) Databricks
18 127 (14.08%) Migration
19 125 (13.86%) Problem-Solving
20 120 (13.30%) Power Platform
21 119 (13.19%) Data Warehouse
22 117 (12.97%) Oracle
23 116 (12.86%) Power BI
24 112 (12.42%) DevOps
25 103 (11.42%) Talend
26 101 (11.20%) Microsoft
27 99 (10.98%) Data Governance
27 99 (10.98%) Validation
28 98 (10.86%) PySpark
29 92 (10.20%) Git

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 63 (6.98%) SAS
2 54 (5.99%) Apache Spark
3 40 (4.43%) Apache Airflow
4 37 (4.10%) Apache
5 23 (2.55%) Confluence
6 5 (0.55%) Jupyter
7 2 (0.22%) Apache Superset
7 2 (0.22%) Palantir Foundry
8 1 (0.11%) SharePoint
Applications
1 6 (0.67%) Microsoft Excel
2 5 (0.55%) Notepad++
3 1 (0.11%) Microsoft Office
3 1 (0.11%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 1 (0.11%) Spreadsheet
Business Applications
1 6 (0.67%) Dynamics CRM
2 5 (0.55%) Infor LN
3 4 (0.44%) NetSuite
3 4 (0.44%) Sage X3
4 3 (0.33%) SAP S/4HANA
5 1 (0.11%) Aladdin
5 1 (0.11%) Elite 3E
5 1 (0.11%) FIS Private Capital Suite
5 1 (0.11%) MIS ActiveH
5 1 (0.11%) NEC Housing
5 1 (0.11%) Oracle 11i
5 1 (0.11%) Oracle Assets
5 1 (0.11%) Oracle ERP
Cloud Services
1 212 (23.50%) Azure
2 196 (21.73%) AWS
3 120 (13.30%) Power Platform
4 89 (9.87%) Azure Data Factory
5 78 (8.65%) Snowflake
6 49 (5.43%) Azure Synapse Analytics
6 49 (5.43%) GCP
7 46 (5.10%) dbt
8 44 (4.88%) Amazon S3
9 38 (4.21%) Serverless
10 30 (3.33%) Azure DevOps
11 28 (3.10%) GitHub
12 27 (2.99%) AWS Lambda
13 18 (2.00%) Matillion
13 18 (2.00%) OpenShift
14 15 (1.66%) GitHub Actions
15 14 (1.55%) Amazon EMR
16 11 (1.22%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 11 (1.22%) Azure Functions
17 9 (1.00%) Power Automate
Communications & Networking
1 33 (3.66%) DNS
1 33 (3.66%) VPN
2 32 (3.55%) BGP
2 32 (3.55%) DMZ
2 32 (3.55%) Multicast
3 8 (0.89%) Structured Cabling
4 6 (0.67%) Firewall
5 5 (0.55%) PuTTY
5 5 (0.55%) WinSCP
6 4 (0.44%) Wi-Fi
6 4 (0.44%) Wireless
7 3 (0.33%) Intrusion Detection
Database & Business Intelligence
1 119 (13.19%) Data Warehouse
2 116 (12.86%) Power BI
3 82 (9.09%) Pentaho
4 48 (5.32%) Data Lake
5 44 (4.88%) Amazon Redshift
6 40 (4.43%) SQL Server
7 34 (3.77%) Big Data
8 32 (3.55%) Metadata
9 31 (3.44%) SQL Server Integration Services
10 25 (2.77%) Delta Lake
10 25 (2.77%) Hadoop
10 25 (2.77%) MySQL
10 25 (2.77%) Relational Database
11 22 (2.44%) Amazon Athena
12 21 (2.33%) Azure SQL Database
13 19 (2.11%) Tableau
14 18 (2.00%) BigQuery
14 18 (2.00%) NoSQL
15 17 (1.88%) BusinessObjects
15 17 (1.88%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 92 (10.20%) Git
2 57 (6.32%) GitLab
3 45 (4.99%) JIRA
4 32 (3.55%) Jenkins
5 7 (0.78%) Postman
6 5 (0.55%) Artifactory
7 4 (0.44%) Bitbucket
8 3 (0.33%) Newman
9 2 (0.22%) Visual Studio
9 2 (0.22%) Yeoman
10 1 (0.11%) ER Studio
10 1 (0.11%) ERwin
10 1 (0.11%) JUnit
10 1 (0.11%) MLflow
10 1 (0.11%) SonarQube
General
1 143 (15.85%) Social Skills
2 92 (10.20%) Analytical Skills
3 83 (9.20%) Public Sector
4 65 (7.21%) Finance
5 41 (4.55%) Banking
6 21 (2.33%) Investment Banking
6 21 (2.33%) Marketing
7 19 (2.11%) Documentation Skills
8 16 (1.77%) Automotive
8 16 (1.77%) Telecoms
9 14 (1.55%) Manufacturing
10 13 (1.44%) Aerospace
10 13 (1.44%) Retail
11 12 (1.33%) Inclusion and Diversity
12 5 (0.55%) Billing
12 5 (0.55%) Front Office
12 5 (0.55%) Legal
12 5 (0.55%) Local Government
12 5 (0.55%) Police
13 3 (0.33%) Advertising
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 98 (10.86%) PySpark
2 64 (7.10%) Kafka
3 22 (2.44%) JSON
4 13 (1.44%) XML
5 12 (1.33%) Pandas
6 10 (1.11%) Streamlit
7 8 (0.89%) Apache Avro
7 8 (0.89%) Protocol Buffers
7 8 (0.89%) REST
8 7 (0.78%) Apache Beam
9 6 (0.67%) Apache NiFi
9 6 (0.67%) Node.js
9 6 (0.67%) OpenTelemetry
9 6 (0.67%) RESTful
10 5 (0.55%) Great Expectations
10 5 (0.55%) pytest
10 5 (0.55%) YAML
11 4 (0.44%) AngularJS
11 4 (0.44%) React
12 3 (0.33%) Spring Boot
Miscellaneous
1 34 (3.77%) Cloud Native
2 24 (2.66%) Data Structures
3 22 (2.44%) Legacy Systems
4 16 (1.77%) Distributed Systems
5 14 (1.55%) Data Protection Act
6 9 (1.00%) Clustering
6 9 (1.00%) Driving Licence
6 9 (1.00%) NHS
7 8 (0.89%) Onboarding
7 8 (0.89%) Product Ownership
8 7 (0.78%) Greenfield Project
9 6 (0.67%) Data Centre
9 6 (0.67%) Linux Command Line
10 5 (0.55%) Hybrid Cloud
11 4 (0.44%) Data Fabric
11 4 (0.44%) Fibre Optics
11 4 (0.44%) iPad
11 4 (0.44%) Life Science
11 4 (0.44%) Public Cloud
11 4 (0.44%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 39 (4.32%) Unix
2 13 (1.44%) Linux
3 2 (0.22%) Ubuntu
4 1 (0.11%) VMS
4 1 (0.11%) Windows
Processes & Methodologies
1 341 (37.80%) Data Pipeline
2 319 (35.37%) Analytics
3 317 (35.14%) ETL
4 294 (32.59%) Data Engineering
5 275 (30.49%) Data Modelling
6 181 (20.07%) Business Intelligence
7 176 (19.51%) CI/CD
8 153 (16.96%) Data Integration
9 149 (16.52%) Agile
10 127 (14.08%) Migration
11 125 (13.86%) Problem-Solving
12 112 (12.42%) DevOps
13 99 (10.98%) Data Governance
13 99 (10.98%) Validation
14 83 (9.20%) AI
15 77 (8.54%) Data Transformation
16 76 (8.43%) Decision-Making
17 75 (8.31%) Test Automation
18 67 (7.43%) Data Science
19 66 (7.32%) Scrum
Programming Languages
1 424 (47.01%) SQL
2 277 (30.71%) Python
3 39 (4.32%) Java
4 37 (4.10%) PL/SQL
5 18 (2.00%) Shell Script
6 16 (1.77%) Bash
7 12 (1.33%) Data Analysis Expressions
7 12 (1.33%) T-SQL
8 10 (1.11%) PowerShell
9 6 (0.67%) Scala
10 5 (0.55%) Bicep
11 4 (0.44%) C#
12 2 (0.22%) Go
12 2 (0.22%) HiveQL
12 2 (0.22%) JavaScript
13 1 (0.11%) C++
13 1 (0.11%) COBOL
13 1 (0.11%) Perl
13 1 (0.11%) R
13 1 (0.11%) TypeScript
Qualifications
1 278 (30.82%) Security Cleared
2 228 (25.28%) SC Cleared
3 20 (2.22%) BPSS Clearance
4 19 (2.11%) Degree
5 17 (1.88%) DV Cleared
6 8 (0.89%) City & Guilds
7 7 (0.78%) Computer Science Degree
8 5 (0.55%) Master's Degree
9 4 (0.44%) BICSI Certification
9 4 (0.44%) CISM
9 4 (0.44%) CISSP
9 4 (0.44%) SnowPro
10 3 (0.33%) Azure Certification
10 3 (0.33%) CEH
10 3 (0.33%) IBM Certification
11 2 (0.22%) AWS Certification
12 1 (0.11%) CCIE
12 1 (0.11%) Cisco Certification
12 1 (0.11%) DBS Check
12 1 (0.11%) Numerate Degree
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 193 (21.40%) Data Quality
2 21 (2.33%) QA
3 16 (1.77%) GDPR
4 10 (1.11%) SLA
5 8 (0.89%) FATCA
6 6 (0.67%) Accessibility
7 5 (0.55%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 4 (0.44%) HIPAA
9 2 (0.22%) California Consumer Privacy Act
9 2 (0.22%) Disclosure Scotland
9 2 (0.22%) Sarbanes-Oxley
10 1 (0.11%) GMP
10 1 (0.11%) Government Security Classifications
10 1 (0.11%) NIST
10 1 (0.11%) SNOMED CT
10 1 (0.11%) WCAG
System Software
1 42 (4.66%) Docker
2 2 (0.22%) HDFS
2 2 (0.22%) Virtual Machines
Systems Management
1 54 (5.99%) Terraform
2 46 (5.10%) Kubernetes
3 36 (3.99%) Grafana
4 11 (1.22%) Prometheus
5 10 (1.11%) Ansible
6 3 (0.33%) Control-M
6 3 (0.33%) Rancher
7 2 (0.22%) Apache Ranger
8 1 (0.11%) Kibana
8 1 (0.11%) logstash
Vendors
1 141 (15.63%) Databricks
2 117 (12.97%) Oracle
3 103 (11.42%) Talend
4 101 (11.20%) Microsoft
5 77 (8.54%) Informatica
6 49 (5.43%) Denodo
7 34 (3.77%) Cisco
7 34 (3.77%) F5
8 18 (2.00%) SAP
9 17 (1.88%) Salesforce
10 15 (1.66%) ServiceNow
10 15 (1.66%) Splunk
11 14 (1.55%) Cloudera
12 10 (1.11%) Google
12 10 (1.11%) Sage
13 9 (1.00%) Alteryx
14 6 (0.67%) Dynatrace
14 6 (0.67%) Infor
14 6 (0.67%) InterSystems
15 4 (0.44%) PagerDuty