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 £474, according to job vacancies posted in the 6 months leading up to 16 May 2026.

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

6 months to
16 May 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 75 111 139
Rank change year-on-year +36 +28 +16
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 698 291 314
As % of all contract jobs in the UK excluding London 2.86% 2.27% 1.55%
As % of the Job Titles category 3.11% 2.47% 1.68%
Number of daily rates quoted 480 220 231
10th Percentile £375 £249 £163
25th Percentile £413 £381 £183
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £474 £460 £450
Median % change year-on-year +2.99% +2.22% -12.62%
75th Percentile £538 £525 £538
90th Percentile £588 £625 £588
UK median daily rate £500 £500 £500
% change year-on-year - - -9.09%
Number of hourly rates quoted 44 2 34
10th Percentile £19.34 £24.27 £37.50
25th Percentile £41.28 £33.34 £58.75
Median hourly rate £51.25 £48.46 £75.00
Median % change year-on-year +5.76% -35.39% -0.66%
75th Percentile £71.50 £63.58 £80.00
90th Percentile £77.80 £72.65 -
UK median hourly rate £52.50 £65.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year -19.23% - -13.91%

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 22,479 11,791 18,742
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 91.95% 91.99% 92.49%
Number of daily rates quoted 13,034 7,536 11,429
10th Percentile £300 £213 £213
25th Percentile £400 £363 £363
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £498 £475 £490
Median % change year-on-year +4.74% -3.06% -2.00%
75th Percentile £588 £575 £595
90th Percentile £686 £650 £688
UK median daily rate £510 £513 £525
% change year-on-year -0.49% -2.38% -2.78%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,533 841 2,251
10th Percentile £14.64 £13.85 £12.50
25th Percentile £19.72 £17.30 £15.75
Median hourly rate £45.00 £27.35 £40.00
Median % change year-on-year +64.53% -31.63% -5.88%
75th Percentile £67.25 £63.75 £61.60
90th Percentile £78.75 £75.00 £74.00
UK median hourly rate £42.69 £28.18 £36.50
% change year-on-year +51.47% -22.79% -18.89%

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 May 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 May 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 May 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 +37 297 £469 +1.96% 46
West Midlands +33 278 £469 -1.26% 31
North of England -15 189 £465 +0.54% 89
North West +5 124 £480 +3.78% 39
South East -16 93 £500 +8.11% 93
South West -6 67 £500 +1.27% 35
Scotland +10 56 £450 - 9
Yorkshire -31 50 £465 +3.33% 22
Wales +5 21 £475 +130.23% 13
East Midlands -18 19 £475 +15.85% 15
East of England -30 16 £565 +79.37% 4
North East -23 15 £463 +8.82% 30
Northern Ireland +4 3 £410 -18.00% 3
Data Engineer
UK

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

For the 6 months to 16 May 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.

1 358 (51.29%) SQL
2 274 (39.26%) Analytics
2 274 (39.26%) Data Pipeline
3 266 (38.11%) ETL
4 243 (34.81%) Data Engineering
5 241 (34.53%) Security Cleared
6 235 (33.67%) Data Modelling
7 222 (31.81%) Python
8 205 (29.37%) SC Cleared
9 171 (24.50%) Azure
10 169 (24.21%) Business Intelligence
11 156 (22.35%) Data Quality
12 138 (19.77%) CI/CD
13 135 (19.34%) Agile
14 131 (18.77%) AWS
15 125 (17.91%) Data Integration
16 118 (16.91%) Problem-Solving
17 116 (16.62%) Databricks
18 109 (15.62%) Power Platform
19 105 (15.04%) Power BI
20 102 (14.61%) Oracle
21 99 (14.18%) Talend
22 98 (14.04%) DevOps
23 93 (13.32%) Git
24 90 (12.89%) Data Warehouse
25 86 (12.32%) Migration
26 83 (11.89%) PySpark
27 80 (11.46%) Pentaho
28 74 (10.60%) Azure Data Factory
29 72 (10.32%) Scrum

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 67 (9.60%) SAS
2 47 (6.73%) Apache Spark
3 36 (5.16%) Apache Airflow
4 30 (4.30%) Apache
5 18 (2.58%) Confluence
6 3 (0.43%) Jupyter
7 1 (0.14%) Apache Superset
7 1 (0.14%) SharePoint
Applications
1 6 (0.86%) Microsoft Excel
2 5 (0.72%) Notepad++
3 1 (0.14%) Microsoft Office
3 1 (0.14%) Spreadsheet
Business Applications
1 2 (0.29%) SAP S/4HANA
2 1 (0.14%) Dynamics CRM
2 1 (0.14%) Elite 3E
2 1 (0.14%) NEC Housing
2 1 (0.14%) Oracle 11i
2 1 (0.14%) Oracle Assets
2 1 (0.14%) Oracle ERP
Cloud Services
1 171 (24.50%) Azure
2 131 (18.77%) AWS
3 109 (15.62%) Power Platform
4 74 (10.60%) Azure Data Factory
5 63 (9.03%) Snowflake
6 44 (6.30%) Azure Synapse Analytics
7 38 (5.44%) dbt
7 38 (5.44%) GCP
8 28 (4.01%) Amazon S3
9 26 (3.72%) Azure DevOps
10 23 (3.30%) GitHub
11 21 (3.01%) Serverless
12 19 (2.72%) OpenShift
13 16 (2.29%) Matillion
14 15 (2.15%) AWS Lambda
15 9 (1.29%) Amazon EMR
15 9 (1.29%) AWS CloudFormation
15 9 (1.29%) GitHub Actions
16 8 (1.15%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 8 (1.15%) Power Automate
Communications & Networking
1 33 (4.73%) DNS
1 33 (4.73%) VPN
2 32 (4.58%) BGP
2 32 (4.58%) DMZ
2 32 (4.58%) Multicast
3 8 (1.15%) Structured Cabling
4 5 (0.72%) PuTTY
4 5 (0.72%) WinSCP
5 3 (0.43%) Firewall
6 2 (0.29%) Wi-Fi
6 2 (0.29%) Wireless
Database & Business Intelligence
1 105 (15.04%) Power BI
2 90 (12.89%) Data Warehouse
3 80 (11.46%) Pentaho
4 43 (6.16%) Data Lake
5 36 (5.16%) Big Data
6 34 (4.87%) Amazon Redshift
7 31 (4.44%) SQL Server
8 27 (3.87%) Hadoop
9 26 (3.72%) Metadata
10 24 (3.44%) Delta Lake
10 24 (3.44%) MySQL
11 23 (3.30%) SQL Server Integration Services
12 22 (3.15%) Relational Database
13 20 (2.87%) PostgreSQL
14 19 (2.72%) NoSQL
15 18 (2.58%) Tableau
16 17 (2.44%) Azure SQL Database
16 17 (2.44%) Snowflake Schema
17 15 (2.15%) BusinessObjects
18 14 (2.01%) BigQuery
Development Applications
1 93 (13.32%) Git
2 49 (7.02%) JIRA
3 46 (6.59%) GitLab
4 38 (5.44%) Jenkins
5 4 (0.57%) Bitbucket
6 2 (0.29%) Artifactory
6 2 (0.29%) Visual Studio
7 1 (0.14%) ER Studio
7 1 (0.14%) ERwin
7 1 (0.14%) JUnit
7 1 (0.14%) Postman
General
1 111 (15.90%) Social Skills
2 74 (10.60%) Analytical Skills
3 67 (9.60%) Public Sector
4 64 (9.17%) Finance
5 41 (5.87%) Banking
6 22 (3.15%) Investment Banking
7 13 (1.86%) Aerospace
7 13 (1.86%) Documentation Skills
8 12 (1.72%) Manufacturing
9 8 (1.15%) Telecoms
10 7 (1.00%) Marketing
10 7 (1.00%) Retail
11 4 (0.57%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 4 (0.57%) Local Government
12 3 (0.43%) Front Office
12 3 (0.43%) Law
12 3 (0.43%) Legal
13 2 (0.29%) Advertising
13 2 (0.29%) Military
14 1 (0.14%) Billing
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 83 (11.89%) PySpark
2 66 (9.46%) Kafka
3 18 (2.58%) JSON
4 14 (2.01%) REST
5 10 (1.43%) Pandas
6 8 (1.15%) Apache Avro
6 8 (1.15%) Apache Beam
6 8 (1.15%) Node.js
6 8 (1.15%) Protocol Buffers
7 7 (1.00%) XML
8 6 (0.86%) Apache NiFi
8 6 (0.86%) OpenTelemetry
9 5 (0.72%) YAML
10 4 (0.57%) AngularJS
10 4 (0.57%) AWS CDK
10 4 (0.57%) Keycloak
10 4 (0.57%) pytest
10 4 (0.57%) React
10 4 (0.57%) Streamlit
11 3 (0.43%) Spring Boot
Miscellaneous
1 30 (4.30%) Cloud Native
2 19 (2.72%) Legacy Systems
3 18 (2.58%) Data Structures
4 15 (2.15%) Distributed Systems
5 12 (1.72%) Data Protection Act
6 11 (1.58%) Clustering
7 10 (1.43%) Product Ownership
8 7 (1.00%) Driving Licence
8 7 (1.00%) Greenfield Project
8 7 (1.00%) Hybrid Cloud
9 6 (0.86%) Data Centre
9 6 (0.86%) Linux Command Line
9 6 (0.86%) NHS
9 6 (0.86%) Onboarding
10 4 (0.57%) Data Fabric
10 4 (0.57%) Distributed Computing
10 4 (0.57%) Fibre Optics
10 4 (0.57%) Management Information System
10 4 (0.57%) Replication
10 4 (0.57%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 35 (5.01%) Unix
2 9 (1.29%) Linux
3 1 (0.14%) Ubuntu
3 1 (0.14%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 274 (39.26%) Analytics
1 274 (39.26%) Data Pipeline
2 266 (38.11%) ETL
3 243 (34.81%) Data Engineering
4 235 (33.67%) Data Modelling
5 169 (24.21%) Business Intelligence
6 138 (19.77%) CI/CD
7 135 (19.34%) Agile
8 125 (17.91%) Data Integration
9 118 (16.91%) Problem-Solving
10 98 (14.04%) DevOps
11 86 (12.32%) Migration
12 72 (10.32%) Scrum
13 66 (9.46%) Data Governance
14 63 (9.03%) Validation
15 61 (8.74%) Test Automation
16 58 (8.31%) AI
17 55 (7.88%) Decision-Making
18 53 (7.59%) Continuous Improvement
19 49 (7.02%) Data Analytics
Programming Languages
1 358 (51.29%) SQL
2 222 (31.81%) Python
3 33 (4.73%) Java
4 28 (4.01%) PL/SQL
5 16 (2.29%) Shell Script
6 15 (2.15%) Bash
7 10 (1.43%) Data Analysis Expressions
8 9 (1.29%) PowerShell
9 8 (1.15%) T-SQL
10 6 (0.86%) C#
10 6 (0.86%) Go
10 6 (0.86%) Scala
11 5 (0.72%) Bicep
12 2 (0.29%) HiveQL
12 2 (0.29%) JavaScript
13 1 (0.14%) C++
13 1 (0.14%) Groovy
13 1 (0.14%) Perl
13 1 (0.14%) R
13 1 (0.14%) TypeScript
Qualifications
1 241 (34.53%) Security Cleared
2 205 (29.37%) SC Cleared
3 18 (2.58%) Degree
4 13 (1.86%) BPSS Clearance
5 9 (1.29%) DV Cleared
6 6 (0.86%) Azure Certification
6 6 (0.86%) City & Guilds
7 5 (0.72%) Master's Degree
8 4 (0.57%) BICSI Certification
8 4 (0.57%) Computer Science Degree
9 3 (0.43%) IBM Certification
9 3 (0.43%) SnowPro
10 1 (0.14%) AWS Certification
10 1 (0.14%) CCIE
10 1 (0.14%) CCNP
10 1 (0.14%) Cisco Certification
10 1 (0.14%) CISM
10 1 (0.14%) CISSP
10 1 (0.14%) DBS Check
10 1 (0.14%) Numerate Degree
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 156 (22.35%) Data Quality
2 14 (2.01%) GDPR
3 13 (1.86%) QA
4 8 (1.15%) FATCA
5 7 (1.00%) SLA
6 4 (0.57%) Accessibility
7 3 (0.43%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 2 (0.29%) HIPAA
8 2 (0.29%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 1 (0.14%) Basel III
9 1 (0.14%) California Consumer Privacy Act
9 1 (0.14%) Disclosure Scotland
9 1 (0.14%) GMP
9 1 (0.14%) Government Security Classifications
9 1 (0.14%) NIST
9 1 (0.14%) SNOMED CT
9 1 (0.14%) WCAG
System Software
1 47 (6.73%) Docker
2 2 (0.29%) HDFS
2 2 (0.29%) Virtual Machines
Systems Management
1 50 (7.16%) Kubernetes
2 39 (5.59%) Grafana
3 34 (4.87%) Terraform
4 11 (1.58%) Prometheus
5 9 (1.29%) Ansible
6 3 (0.43%) Rancher
7 2 (0.29%) Apache Ranger
7 2 (0.29%) Kibana
7 2 (0.29%) logstash
8 1 (0.14%) Control-M
Vendors
1 116 (16.62%) Databricks
2 102 (14.61%) Oracle
3 99 (14.18%) Talend
4 71 (10.17%) Microsoft
5 67 (9.60%) Informatica
6 55 (7.88%) Denodo
7 34 (4.87%) Cisco
7 34 (4.87%) F5
8 16 (2.29%) Splunk
9 14 (2.01%) SAP
10 13 (1.86%) ServiceNow
11 11 (1.58%) Cloudera
11 11 (1.58%) Google
12 7 (1.00%) Alteryx
13 6 (0.86%) Dynatrace
13 6 (0.86%) InterSystems
14 5 (0.72%) Sage
15 4 (0.57%) Dataiku
15 4 (0.57%) IBM
16 2 (0.29%) OpenAI