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 25 March 2026.

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

6 months to
25 Mar 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 106 93 148
Rank change year-on-year -13 +55 +5
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 537 323 306
As % of all contract jobs in the UK excluding London 2.44% 2.56% 1.46%
As % of the Job Titles category 2.66% 2.77% 1.57%
Number of daily rates quoted 388 236 228
10th Percentile £363 £272 £163
25th Percentile £409 £373 £206
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £470 £460 £450
Median % change year-on-year +2.17% +2.22% -12.62%
75th Percentile £544 £538 £550
90th Percentile £588 £641 £660
UK median daily rate £500 £500 £500
% change year-on-year - - -9.09%
Number of hourly rates quoted 26 6 30
10th Percentile £19.34 £21.66 £36.79
25th Percentile £36.57 £25.13 £54.06
Median hourly rate £53.75 £26.50 £75.00
Median % change year-on-year +102.83% -64.67% +72.41%
75th Percentile £75.00 £28.22 £80.00
90th Percentile £84.50 £53.54 -
UK median hourly rate £54.75 £52.50 £63.75
% change year-on-year +4.29% -17.65% -0.39%

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 20,206 11,651 19,485
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 91.64% 92.51% 92.75%
Number of daily rates quoted 11,997 7,615 12,084
10th Percentile £258 £213 £210
25th Percentile £400 £363 £363
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £482 £475 £488
Median % change year-on-year +1.47% -2.56% -2.50%
75th Percentile £581 £588 £595
90th Percentile £675 £663 £688
UK median daily rate £500 £520 £525
% change year-on-year -3.85% -0.95% -4.37%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,192 713 2,098
10th Percentile £14.38 £14.99 £12.50
25th Percentile £18.87 £20.00 £15.50
Median hourly rate £36.86 £32.50 £32.50
Median % change year-on-year +13.40% - -20.36%
75th Percentile £65.00 £65.00 £60.00
90th Percentile £76.00 £75.45 £72.03
UK median hourly rate £36.71 £32.50 £32.50
% change year-on-year +12.95% - -24.42%

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 25 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 25 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 25 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 +8 221 £470 -1.16% 59
West Midlands +16 202 £478 +0.21% 45
North of England -16 160 £455 +1.11% 87
North West +2 99 £450 -1.37% 56
South East -26 64 £500 - 91
South West -2 53 £525 +5.00% 38
Yorkshire -38 46 £465 +3.33% 19
Scotland +3 43 £401 -8.34% 10
East Midlands -27 19 £450 +20.00% 14
Wales -5 17 £410 -22.27% 8
North East -10 15 £488 +2.63% 13
East of England -44 11 £565 +77.67% 17
Northern Ireland - 3 £410 -
Data Engineer
UK

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

For the 6 months to 25 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.

1 277 (51.58%) SQL
2 235 (43.76%) ETL
3 216 (40.22%) Analytics
4 214 (39.85%) Data Engineering
5 210 (39.11%) Data Pipeline
6 205 (38.18%) Python
7 180 (33.52%) Data Modelling
8 165 (30.73%) Security Cleared
9 151 (28.12%) Azure
10 144 (26.82%) SC Cleared
11 136 (25.33%) Data Quality
12 128 (23.84%) CI/CD
13 127 (23.65%) Business Intelligence
14 113 (21.04%) AWS
15 109 (20.30%) Agile
16 106 (19.74%) Problem-Solving
17 99 (18.44%) Databricks
18 98 (18.25%) DevOps
19 83 (15.46%) Data Integration
20 82 (15.27%) Git
21 80 (14.90%) Power Platform
21 80 (14.90%) Talend
22 79 (14.71%) Data Warehouse
23 75 (13.97%) Power BI
24 72 (13.41%) Oracle
25 70 (13.04%) PySpark
26 67 (12.48%) Azure Data Factory
26 67 (12.48%) Pentaho
27 63 (11.73%) Data Governance
28 61 (11.36%) 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 53 (9.87%) SAS
2 43 (8.01%) Apache Spark
3 38 (7.08%) Apache Airflow
4 30 (5.59%) Apache
5 9 (1.68%) Confluence
6 3 (0.56%) Jupyter
6 3 (0.56%) Oracle Application Server
7 1 (0.19%) Apache Superset
7 1 (0.19%) Apache Synapse
7 1 (0.19%) SharePoint
Applications
1 3 (0.56%) Microsoft Excel
2 1 (0.19%) Chatbot
2 1 (0.19%) Microsoft Office
Business Applications
1 1 (0.19%) Dynamics CRM
1 1 (0.19%) Elite 3E
1 1 (0.19%) NEC Housing
1 1 (0.19%) Oracle 11i
1 1 (0.19%) Oracle ERP
Cloud Services
1 151 (28.12%) Azure
2 113 (21.04%) AWS
3 80 (14.90%) Power Platform
4 67 (12.48%) Azure Data Factory
5 54 (10.06%) Snowflake
6 39 (7.26%) dbt
7 35 (6.52%) Azure Synapse Analytics
8 33 (6.15%) GCP
9 29 (5.40%) Amazon S3
9 29 (5.40%) GitHub
10 25 (4.66%) Serverless
11 19 (3.54%) OpenShift
12 18 (3.35%) Azure DevOps
13 16 (2.98%) AWS Lambda
14 13 (2.42%) Matillion
15 10 (1.86%) AWS CloudFormation
16 9 (1.68%) GitHub Actions
17 7 (1.30%) Amazon EMR
17 7 (1.30%) AWS Step Functions
17 7 (1.30%) Power Automate
Communications & Networking
1 23 (4.28%) DNS
1 23 (4.28%) VPN
2 22 (4.10%) BGP
2 22 (4.10%) DMZ
2 22 (4.10%) Multicast
3 8 (1.49%) Structured Cabling
Database & Business Intelligence
1 79 (14.71%) Data Warehouse
2 75 (13.97%) Power BI
3 67 (12.48%) Pentaho
4 41 (7.64%) Data Lake
5 33 (6.15%) PostgreSQL
6 30 (5.59%) Amazon Redshift
7 27 (5.03%) Big Data
7 27 (5.03%) Hadoop
8 24 (4.47%) SQL Server
9 22 (4.10%) MySQL
10 20 (3.72%) Delta Lake
10 20 (3.72%) NoSQL
10 20 (3.72%) SQL Server Integration Services
11 19 (3.54%) Relational Database
12 14 (2.61%) BigQuery
12 14 (2.61%) Elasticsearch
13 13 (2.42%) Amazon RDS
13 13 (2.42%) Azure SQL Database
14 11 (2.05%) Snowflake Schema
14 11 (2.05%) Star Schema
Development Applications
1 82 (15.27%) Git
2 43 (8.01%) Jenkins
3 34 (6.33%) GitLab
3 34 (6.33%) JIRA
4 4 (0.74%) Bitbucket
5 3 (0.56%) DBeaver
5 3 (0.56%) Visual Studio
6 2 (0.37%) JUnit
7 1 (0.19%) Cucumber
7 1 (0.19%) Deequ
7 1 (0.19%) Maven
7 1 (0.19%) MLflow
7 1 (0.19%) Mockito
7 1 (0.19%) Selenium
7 1 (0.19%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
General
1 91 (16.95%) Social Skills
2 61 (11.36%) Analytical Skills
3 54 (10.06%) Finance
4 52 (9.68%) Public Sector
5 28 (5.21%) Banking
6 13 (2.42%) Investment Banking
7 9 (1.68%) Documentation Skills
7 9 (1.68%) Manufacturing
8 5 (0.93%) Retail
9 4 (0.74%) Aerospace
9 4 (0.74%) Inclusion and Diversity
9 4 (0.74%) Local Government
9 4 (0.74%) Marketing
9 4 (0.74%) Telecoms
10 3 (0.56%) Law
10 3 (0.56%) Legal
11 2 (0.37%) Advertising
11 2 (0.37%) Influencing Skills
11 2 (0.37%) Military
11 2 (0.37%) Presentation Skills
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 70 (13.04%) PySpark
2 58 (10.80%) Kafka
3 16 (2.98%) JSON
4 14 (2.61%) REST
5 12 (2.23%) Keycloak
6 10 (1.86%) Node.js
6 10 (1.86%) Pandas
7 7 (1.30%) XML
8 6 (1.12%) Apache Avro
8 6 (1.12%) Apache Beam
8 6 (1.12%) Apache NiFi
8 6 (1.12%) OpenTelemetry
8 6 (1.12%) Protocol Buffers
9 5 (0.93%) NumPy
9 5 (0.93%) React
9 5 (0.93%) YAML
10 4 (0.74%) AngularJS
10 4 (0.74%) Oracle GoldenGate
10 4 (0.74%) pytest
10 4 (0.74%) Streamlit
Miscellaneous
1 28 (5.21%) Cloud Native
2 16 (2.98%) Hybrid Cloud
2 16 (2.98%) Legacy Systems
3 14 (2.61%) Clustering
3 14 (2.61%) Data Protection Act
3 14 (2.61%) Product Ownership
4 13 (2.42%) Distributed Systems
5 11 (2.05%) Data Structures
6 9 (1.68%) Replication
7 8 (1.49%) Data Centre
8 6 (1.12%) Fibre Optics
9 5 (0.93%) Driving Licence
9 5 (0.93%) Greenfield Project
9 5 (0.93%) Onboarding
10 4 (0.74%) Algorithms
10 4 (0.74%) Management Information System
10 4 (0.74%) NHS
10 4 (0.74%) Public Cloud
11 3 (0.56%) Distributed Computing
11 3 (0.56%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 16 (2.98%) Unix
2 7 (1.30%) Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 235 (43.76%) ETL
2 216 (40.22%) Analytics
3 214 (39.85%) Data Engineering
4 210 (39.11%) Data Pipeline
5 180 (33.52%) Data Modelling
6 128 (23.84%) CI/CD
7 127 (23.65%) Business Intelligence
8 109 (20.30%) Agile
9 106 (19.74%) Problem-Solving
10 98 (18.25%) DevOps
11 83 (15.46%) Data Integration
12 63 (11.73%) Data Governance
13 58 (10.80%) Scrum
14 53 (9.87%) Test Automation
15 52 (9.68%) Continuous Improvement
15 52 (9.68%) Migration
16 45 (8.38%) Validation
17 44 (8.19%) Data Analytics
17 44 (8.19%) Data Science
18 43 (8.01%) Performance Tuning
Programming Languages
1 277 (51.58%) SQL
2 205 (38.18%) Python
3 37 (6.89%) Java
4 15 (2.79%) PL/SQL
5 14 (2.61%) Go
6 13 (2.42%) Bash
7 10 (1.86%) Data Analysis Expressions
8 9 (1.68%) PowerShell
9 8 (1.49%) Scala
10 7 (1.30%) Shell Script
10 7 (1.30%) T-SQL
11 6 (1.12%) Bicep
11 6 (1.12%) C#
12 4 (0.74%) R
13 3 (0.56%) JavaScript
14 2 (0.37%) HiveQL
15 1 (0.19%) Groovy
15 1 (0.19%) TypeScript
Qualifications
1 165 (30.73%) Security Cleared
2 144 (26.82%) SC Cleared
3 14 (2.61%) Azure Certification
3 14 (2.61%) Degree
4 8 (1.49%) BPSS Clearance
5 6 (1.12%) AWS Certification
6 4 (0.74%) BICSI Certification
6 4 (0.74%) City & Guilds
6 4 (0.74%) Computer Science Degree
6 4 (0.74%) DV Cleared
6 4 (0.74%) Master's Degree
7 3 (0.56%) IBM Certification
8 1 (0.19%) CCIE
8 1 (0.19%) CCNP
8 1 (0.19%) Cisco Certification
8 1 (0.19%) CISM
8 1 (0.19%) CISSP
8 1 (0.19%) DBS Check
8 1 (0.19%) ITIL Certification
8 1 (0.19%) Numerate Degree
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 136 (25.33%) Data Quality
2 12 (2.23%) GDPR
3 9 (1.68%) QA
4 5 (0.93%) Accessibility
5 3 (0.56%) FATCA
5 3 (0.56%) SLA
6 2 (0.37%) HIPAA
6 2 (0.37%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 1 (0.19%) Basel III
7 1 (0.19%) California Consumer Privacy Act
7 1 (0.19%) Disclosure Scotland
7 1 (0.19%) GMP
7 1 (0.19%) NCSC
7 1 (0.19%) NIST
7 1 (0.19%) Sarbanes-Oxley
7 1 (0.19%) WCAG
System Software
1 53 (9.87%) Docker
2 2 (0.37%) HDFS
2 2 (0.37%) Virtual Machines
Systems Management
1 61 (11.36%) Kubernetes
2 25 (4.66%) Terraform
3 24 (4.47%) Grafana
4 12 (2.23%) Prometheus
5 8 (1.49%) Ansible
6 3 (0.56%) Kibana
6 3 (0.56%) NetBackup
6 3 (0.56%) Rancher
7 2 (0.37%) Apache Ranger
7 2 (0.37%) logstash
8 1 (0.19%) Control-M
8 1 (0.19%) Puppet
Vendors
1 99 (18.44%) Databricks
2 80 (14.90%) Talend
3 72 (13.41%) Oracle
4 57 (10.61%) Microsoft
5 46 (8.57%) Informatica
6 42 (7.82%) Denodo
7 24 (4.47%) Cisco
7 24 (4.47%) F5
8 15 (2.79%) Splunk
9 13 (2.42%) ServiceNow
10 10 (1.86%) Cloudera
11 9 (1.68%) Google
12 7 (1.30%) Alteryx
12 7 (1.30%) SAP
13 5 (0.93%) IBM
14 4 (0.74%) Dataiku
14 4 (0.74%) Sage
15 3 (0.56%) Commvault
15 3 (0.56%) Red Hat
16 2 (0.37%) Brio