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 £469, according to job vacancies posted in the 6 months leading up to 16 June 2026.

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

6 months to
16 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 67 136 130
Rank change year-on-year +69 -6 +34
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 800 250 337
As % of all contract jobs in the UK excluding London 3.12% 1.87% 1.58%
As % of the Job Titles category 3.40% 2.04% 1.71%
Number of daily rates quoted 543 187 249
10th Percentile £363 £314 £169
25th Percentile £412 £400 £199
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £469 £463 £450
Median % change year-on-year +1.41% +2.78% -14.29%
75th Percentile £538 £534 £538
90th Percentile £588 £633 £588
UK median daily rate £500 £500 £500
% change year-on-year - - -9.09%
Number of hourly rates quoted 53 4 33
10th Percentile £19.34 £17.92 £37.50
25th Percentile £36.25 £18.11 £58.75
Median hourly rate £50.00 £48.46 £75.00
Median % change year-on-year +3.18% -35.39% -0.66%
75th Percentile £59.75 £79.03 £80.00
90th Percentile £75.00 £79.61 -
UK median hourly rate £50.00 £52.50 £67.50
% change year-on-year -4.76% -22.22% -10.60%

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 23,561 12,242 19,704
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 91.96% 91.52% 92.47%
Number of daily rates quoted 13,527 7,714 11,706
10th Percentile £303 £216 £213
25th Percentile £406 £363 £363
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £475 £488
Median % change year-on-year +5.26% -2.56% -2.50%
75th Percentile £594 £575 £590
90th Percentile £688 £650 £675
UK median daily rate £515 £500 £525
% change year-on-year +3.00% -4.76% -2.33%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,707 933 2,533
10th Percentile £14.82 £13.50 £12.63
25th Percentile £20.25 £16.84 £15.96
Median hourly rate £45.00 £25.15 £40.00
Median % change year-on-year +78.93% -37.13% -2.55%
75th Percentile £67.50 £58.75 £63.75
90th Percentile £78.75 £75.00 £74.00
UK median hourly rate £43.61 £27.45 £37.50
% change year-on-year +58.85% -26.80% -16.67%

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 June 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 June 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 June 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 +53 318 £469 +4.11% 51
West Midlands +46 298 £465 +1.09% 29
North of England +15 213 £475 - 67
North West +16 131 £480 +1.05% 31
South East +15 113 £475 +11.76% 76
South West +20 87 £506 +3.69% 32
Scotland +19 64 £425 -5.56% 14
Yorkshire -18 61 £465 +3.33% 18
Wales +6 22 £450 +3.45% 13
North East -20 21 £450 - 18
East of England -22 21 £498 +56.45% 12
East Midlands -17 20 £525 +28.05% 22
Northern Ireland +5 4 £410 -18.00% 19
Data Engineer
UK

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

For the 6 months to 16 June 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.

1 408 (51.00%) SQL
2 307 (38.38%) Data Pipeline
3 292 (36.50%) Analytics
4 286 (35.75%) ETL
5 268 (33.50%) Data Engineering
6 261 (32.63%) Security Cleared
7 260 (32.50%) Python
8 247 (30.88%) Data Modelling
9 218 (27.25%) SC Cleared
10 189 (23.63%) Azure
11 176 (22.00%) Business Intelligence
12 170 (21.25%) Data Quality
13 168 (21.00%) AWS
14 166 (20.75%) CI/CD
15 139 (17.38%) Agile
16 136 (17.00%) Databricks
17 135 (16.88%) Data Integration
18 123 (15.38%) Problem-Solving
19 116 (14.50%) Oracle
20 115 (14.38%) Power Platform
21 110 (13.75%) Power BI
22 108 (13.50%) Talend
23 106 (13.25%) Data Warehouse
24 103 (12.88%) DevOps
25 100 (12.50%) Migration
26 95 (11.88%) Git
26 95 (11.88%) PySpark
27 84 (10.50%) Pentaho
28 83 (10.38%) Microsoft
29 79 (9.88%) Azure Data Factory

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 66 (8.25%) SAS
2 49 (6.13%) Apache Spark
3 40 (5.00%) Apache Airflow
4 35 (4.38%) Apache
5 24 (3.00%) Confluence
6 5 (0.63%) Jupyter
7 2 (0.25%) Palantir Foundry
8 1 (0.13%) Apache Superset
8 1 (0.13%) SharePoint
Applications
1 7 (0.88%) Microsoft Excel
2 5 (0.63%) Notepad++
3 1 (0.13%) Microsoft Office
3 1 (0.13%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 1 (0.13%) Spreadsheet
Business Applications
1 5 (0.63%) Dynamics CRM
2 4 (0.50%) Infor LN
3 3 (0.38%) SAP S/4HANA
4 2 (0.25%) NetSuite
4 2 (0.25%) Sage X3
5 1 (0.13%) Elite 3E
5 1 (0.13%) FIS Private Capital Suite
5 1 (0.13%) NEC Housing
5 1 (0.13%) Oracle 11i
5 1 (0.13%) Oracle Assets
5 1 (0.13%) Oracle ERP
Cloud Services
1 189 (23.63%) Azure
2 168 (21.00%) AWS
3 115 (14.38%) Power Platform
4 79 (9.88%) Azure Data Factory
5 71 (8.88%) Snowflake
6 44 (5.50%) GCP
7 43 (5.38%) dbt
8 42 (5.25%) Azure Synapse Analytics
9 41 (5.13%) Amazon S3
10 35 (4.38%) Serverless
11 32 (4.00%) Azure DevOps
12 28 (3.50%) GitHub
13 24 (3.00%) AWS Lambda
14 20 (2.50%) Matillion
15 18 (2.25%) OpenShift
16 14 (1.75%) GitHub Actions
17 13 (1.63%) Amazon EMR
18 11 (1.38%) Amazon CloudWatch
19 10 (1.25%) Azure Functions
20 9 (1.13%) Power Automate
Communications & Networking
1 33 (4.13%) DNS
1 33 (4.13%) VPN
2 32 (4.00%) BGP
2 32 (4.00%) DMZ
2 32 (4.00%) Multicast
3 8 (1.00%) Structured Cabling
4 5 (0.63%) PuTTY
4 5 (0.63%) WinSCP
5 4 (0.50%) Wi-Fi
5 4 (0.50%) Wireless
6 3 (0.38%) Firewall
Database & Business Intelligence
1 110 (13.75%) Power BI
2 106 (13.25%) Data Warehouse
3 84 (10.50%) Pentaho
4 46 (5.75%) Data Lake
5 43 (5.38%) Amazon Redshift
6 35 (4.38%) SQL Server
7 34 (4.25%) Big Data
8 27 (3.38%) MySQL
9 25 (3.13%) Delta Lake
9 25 (3.13%) Hadoop
9 25 (3.13%) Metadata
9 25 (3.13%) SQL Server Integration Services
10 23 (2.88%) Relational Database
11 22 (2.75%) Amazon Athena
11 22 (2.75%) Azure SQL Database
12 20 (2.50%) Snowflake Schema
13 19 (2.38%) NoSQL
13 19 (2.38%) Tableau
14 15 (1.88%) BigQuery
14 15 (1.88%) BusinessObjects
Development Applications
1 95 (11.88%) Git
2 58 (7.25%) GitLab
3 47 (5.88%) JIRA
4 34 (4.25%) Jenkins
5 7 (0.88%) Postman
6 5 (0.63%) Artifactory
7 4 (0.50%) Bitbucket
8 3 (0.38%) Newman
9 2 (0.25%) Visual Studio
10 1 (0.13%) ER Studio
10 1 (0.13%) ERwin
10 1 (0.13%) JUnit
General
1 130 (16.25%) Social Skills
2 84 (10.50%) Analytical Skills
3 77 (9.63%) Public Sector
4 65 (8.13%) Finance
5 42 (5.25%) Banking
6 22 (2.75%) Investment Banking
7 17 (2.13%) Documentation Skills
7 17 (2.13%) Marketing
8 13 (1.63%) Aerospace
9 12 (1.50%) Manufacturing
9 12 (1.50%) Retail
10 10 (1.25%) Telecoms
11 8 (1.00%) Inclusion and Diversity
12 7 (0.88%) Automotive
13 4 (0.50%) Legal
13 4 (0.50%) Local Government
14 3 (0.38%) Billing
14 3 (0.38%) Front Office
14 3 (0.38%) Law
15 2 (0.25%) Pharmaceutical
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 95 (11.88%) PySpark
2 61 (7.63%) Kafka
3 23 (2.88%) JSON
4 13 (1.63%) Pandas
4 13 (1.63%) XML
5 11 (1.38%) REST
6 8 (1.00%) Apache Avro
6 8 (1.00%) Protocol Buffers
7 7 (0.88%) Apache Beam
7 7 (0.88%) Streamlit
8 6 (0.75%) Node.js
8 6 (0.75%) OpenTelemetry
8 6 (0.75%) RESTful
9 5 (0.63%) Great Expectations
9 5 (0.63%) pytest
9 5 (0.63%) YAML
10 4 (0.50%) AngularJS
10 4 (0.50%) Apache NiFi
10 4 (0.50%) React
11 3 (0.38%) Spring Boot
Miscellaneous
1 32 (4.00%) Cloud Native
2 22 (2.75%) Data Structures
3 19 (2.38%) Legacy Systems
4 15 (1.88%) Data Protection Act
5 14 (1.75%) Distributed Systems
6 11 (1.38%) Clustering
7 9 (1.13%) Driving Licence
7 9 (1.13%) Product Ownership
8 8 (1.00%) Greenfield Project
8 8 (1.00%) NHS
9 6 (0.75%) Data Centre
9 6 (0.75%) Linux Command Line
9 6 (0.75%) Onboarding
10 5 (0.63%) Hybrid Cloud
11 4 (0.50%) Data Fabric
11 4 (0.50%) Fibre Optics
11 4 (0.50%) iPad
11 4 (0.50%) Life Science
11 4 (0.50%) Management Information System
11 4 (0.50%) Public Cloud
Operating Systems
1 41 (5.13%) Unix
2 13 (1.63%) Linux
3 2 (0.25%) Ubuntu
4 1 (0.13%) VMS
4 1 (0.13%) Windows
Processes & Methodologies
1 307 (38.38%) Data Pipeline
2 292 (36.50%) Analytics
3 286 (35.75%) ETL
4 268 (33.50%) Data Engineering
5 247 (30.88%) Data Modelling
6 176 (22.00%) Business Intelligence
7 166 (20.75%) CI/CD
8 139 (17.38%) Agile
9 135 (16.88%) Data Integration
10 123 (15.38%) Problem-Solving
11 103 (12.88%) DevOps
12 100 (12.50%) Migration
13 77 (9.63%) Data Governance
13 77 (9.63%) Validation
14 74 (9.25%) AI
15 69 (8.63%) Test Automation
16 66 (8.25%) Scrum
17 60 (7.50%) Data Transformation
17 60 (7.50%) Decision-Making
18 59 (7.38%) Data Science
Programming Languages
1 408 (51.00%) SQL
2 260 (32.50%) Python
3 37 (4.63%) PL/SQL
4 36 (4.50%) Java
5 17 (2.13%) Bash
5 17 (2.13%) Shell Script
6 12 (1.50%) Data Analysis Expressions
7 10 (1.25%) PowerShell
8 9 (1.13%) T-SQL
9 6 (0.75%) Scala
10 5 (0.63%) Bicep
10 5 (0.63%) C#
11 2 (0.25%) Go
11 2 (0.25%) HiveQL
11 2 (0.25%) JavaScript
12 1 (0.13%) C++
12 1 (0.13%) COBOL
12 1 (0.13%) Perl
12 1 (0.13%) TypeScript
Qualifications
1 261 (32.63%) Security Cleared
2 218 (27.25%) SC Cleared
3 18 (2.25%) BPSS Clearance
3 18 (2.25%) Degree
4 11 (1.38%) DV Cleared
5 8 (1.00%) City & Guilds
6 5 (0.63%) Computer Science Degree
6 5 (0.63%) Master's Degree
7 4 (0.50%) BICSI Certification
7 4 (0.50%) SnowPro
8 3 (0.38%) IBM Certification
9 2 (0.25%) Azure Certification
10 1 (0.13%) AWS Certification
10 1 (0.13%) CCIE
10 1 (0.13%) CCNP
10 1 (0.13%) Cisco Certification
10 1 (0.13%) CISM
10 1 (0.13%) CISSP
10 1 (0.13%) DBS Check
10 1 (0.13%) Numerate Degree
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 170 (21.25%) Data Quality
2 19 (2.38%) QA
3 12 (1.50%) GDPR
4 10 (1.25%) SLA
5 8 (1.00%) FATCA
6 3 (0.38%) Accessibility
7 2 (0.25%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 2 (0.25%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 1 (0.13%) Basel III
8 1 (0.13%) California Consumer Privacy Act
8 1 (0.13%) Disclosure Scotland
8 1 (0.13%) GMP
8 1 (0.13%) Government Security Classifications
8 1 (0.13%) HIPAA
8 1 (0.13%) NIST
8 1 (0.13%) SNOMED CT
8 1 (0.13%) WCAG
System Software
1 41 (5.13%) Docker
2 3 (0.38%) Virtual Machines
3 2 (0.25%) HDFS
Systems Management
1 47 (5.88%) Terraform
2 44 (5.50%) Kubernetes
3 37 (4.63%) Grafana
4 10 (1.25%) Prometheus
5 8 (1.00%) Ansible
6 3 (0.38%) Rancher
7 2 (0.25%) Apache Ranger
7 2 (0.25%) Control-M
Vendors
1 136 (17.00%) Databricks
2 116 (14.50%) Oracle
3 108 (13.50%) Talend
4 83 (10.38%) Microsoft
5 74 (9.25%) Informatica
6 54 (6.75%) Denodo
7 34 (4.25%) Cisco
7 34 (4.25%) F5
8 16 (2.00%) SAP
8 16 (2.00%) Splunk
9 15 (1.88%) ServiceNow
10 14 (1.75%) Cloudera
11 12 (1.50%) Google
12 10 (1.25%) Salesforce
13 8 (1.00%) Alteryx
14 7 (0.88%) Sage
15 6 (0.75%) Dynatrace
15 6 (0.75%) InterSystems
16 5 (0.63%) Infor
17 4 (0.50%) IBM