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 17 March 2026.

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

6 months to
17 Mar 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 100 100 151
Rank change year-on-year 0 +51 -1
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 524 325 305
As % of all contract jobs in the UK excluding London 2.42% 2.56% 1.45%
As % of the Job Titles category 2.64% 2.76% 1.56%
Number of daily rates quoted 383 236 228
10th Percentile £363 £272 £163
25th Percentile £408 £373 £289
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £470 £463 £450
Median % change year-on-year +1.62% +2.78% -12.62%
75th Percentile £544 £541 £550
90th Percentile £600 £641 £660
UK median daily rate £500 £500 £500
% change year-on-year - - -9.09%
Number of hourly rates quoted 21 6 29
10th Percentile £35.00 £21.66 £36.07
25th Percentile £50.00 £25.13 £52.50
Median hourly rate £69.00 £26.50 £75.00
Median % change year-on-year +160.38% -64.67% +20.00%
75th Percentile £75.00 £28.22 £80.00
90th Percentile £90.00 £53.54 -
UK median hourly rate £69.00 £53.75 £62.50
% change year-on-year +28.37% -14.00% -2.34%

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 19,812 11,755 19,558
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 91.58% 92.52% 92.77%
Number of daily rates quoted 11,751 7,557 12,164
10th Percentile £254 £213 £213
25th Percentile £393 £363 £363
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £480 £475 £485
Median % change year-on-year +1.05% -2.06% -3.00%
75th Percentile £580 £588 £591
90th Percentile £675 £665 £688
UK median daily rate £500 £525 £525
% change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.11%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,157 696 2,086
10th Percentile £14.38 £15.00 £12.50
25th Percentile £18.82 £20.12 £15.54
Median hourly rate £35.00 £32.50 £32.70
Median % change year-on-year +7.69% -0.60% -19.44%
75th Percentile £65.00 £65.00 £60.00
90th Percentile £75.00 £75.38 £71.25
UK median hourly rate £35.71 £33.00 £32.90
% change year-on-year +8.21% +0.32% -22.60%

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 17 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 17 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 17 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 +15 215 £470 -1.05% 48
West Midlands +9 197 £481 -1.84% 38
North of England -14 159 £450 - 72
North West +3 95 £450 - 34
South East -32 57 £500 - 101
South West -6 50 £525 +5.00% 44
Yorkshire -30 47 £465 +3.33% 28
Scotland +5 45 £402 -8.11% 12
Wales -6 19 £418 -21.23% 4
East Midlands -25 18 £450 +20.40% 10
North East -7 17 £463 -7.50% 12
East of England -41 10 £565 +77.67% 13
Northern Ireland - 2 £420 -
Data Engineer
UK

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

For the 6 months to 17 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.

1 274 (52.29%) SQL
2 233 (44.47%) ETL
3 212 (40.46%) Data Pipeline
4 210 (40.08%) Analytics
4 210 (40.08%) Data Engineering
5 206 (39.31%) Python
6 175 (33.40%) Data Modelling
7 161 (30.73%) Security Cleared
8 155 (29.58%) Azure
9 138 (26.34%) SC Cleared
10 134 (25.57%) Data Quality
11 130 (24.81%) CI/CD
12 128 (24.43%) Business Intelligence
13 114 (21.76%) AWS
14 110 (20.99%) Agile
15 108 (20.61%) Problem-Solving
16 100 (19.08%) DevOps
17 97 (18.51%) Databricks
18 82 (15.65%) Data Integration
19 81 (15.46%) Git
20 80 (15.27%) Data Warehouse
20 80 (15.27%) Power Platform
21 78 (14.89%) Talend
22 74 (14.12%) Oracle
22 74 (14.12%) Power BI
23 71 (13.55%) PySpark
24 68 (12.98%) Azure Data Factory
25 66 (12.60%) Pentaho
26 64 (12.21%) Data Governance
27 61 (11.64%) 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 52 (9.92%) SAS
2 42 (8.02%) Apache Spark
3 39 (7.44%) Apache Airflow
4 30 (5.73%) Apache
5 9 (1.72%) Confluence
6 4 (0.76%) Jupyter
7 3 (0.57%) Oracle Application Server
8 1 (0.19%) Apache Superset
8 1 (0.19%) Apache Synapse
Applications
1 3 (0.57%) 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
1 155 (29.58%) Azure
2 114 (21.76%) AWS
3 80 (15.27%) Power Platform
4 68 (12.98%) Azure Data Factory
5 54 (10.31%) Snowflake
6 38 (7.25%) dbt
7 36 (6.87%) Azure Synapse Analytics
8 34 (6.49%) GCP
9 30 (5.73%) Amazon S3
10 29 (5.53%) GitHub
11 25 (4.77%) Serverless
12 20 (3.82%) Azure DevOps
13 17 (3.24%) OpenShift
14 16 (3.05%) AWS Lambda
15 13 (2.48%) Matillion
16 11 (2.10%) AWS CloudFormation
17 9 (1.72%) GitHub Actions
18 7 (1.34%) Amazon ECS
18 7 (1.34%) Amazon SageMaker
18 7 (1.34%) AWS Step Functions
Communications & Networking
1 21 (4.01%) DNS
1 21 (4.01%) VPN
2 20 (3.82%) BGP
2 20 (3.82%) DMZ
2 20 (3.82%) Multicast
3 3 (0.57%) Structured Cabling
4 1 (0.19%) TCP/IP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 80 (15.27%) Data Warehouse
2 74 (14.12%) Power BI
3 66 (12.60%) Pentaho
4 41 (7.82%) Data Lake
5 32 (6.11%) PostgreSQL
6 29 (5.53%) Amazon Redshift
7 28 (5.34%) Big Data
8 27 (5.15%) Hadoop
9 25 (4.77%) SQL Server
10 21 (4.01%) NoSQL
10 21 (4.01%) Relational Database
11 20 (3.82%) Delta Lake
11 20 (3.82%) SQL Server Integration Services
12 19 (3.63%) MySQL
13 15 (2.86%) BigQuery
13 15 (2.86%) Elasticsearch
14 14 (2.67%) Azure SQL Database
15 13 (2.48%) Amazon RDS
16 11 (2.10%) Snowflake Schema
17 10 (1.91%) Star Schema
Development Applications
1 81 (15.46%) Git
2 45 (8.59%) Jenkins
3 36 (6.87%) JIRA
4 35 (6.68%) GitLab
5 4 (0.76%) Bitbucket
6 3 (0.57%) Cucumber
6 3 (0.57%) DBeaver
6 3 (0.57%) Visual Studio
7 2 (0.38%) JMeter
7 2 (0.38%) JUnit
7 2 (0.38%) MLflow
7 2 (0.38%) Zephyr
8 1 (0.19%) Deequ
8 1 (0.19%) Maven
8 1 (0.19%) Mockito
8 1 (0.19%) Selenium
8 1 (0.19%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
General
1 89 (16.98%) Social Skills
2 59 (11.26%) Analytical Skills
3 54 (10.31%) Public Sector
4 53 (10.11%) Finance
5 26 (4.96%) Banking
6 12 (2.29%) Investment Banking
7 10 (1.91%) Documentation Skills
8 8 (1.53%) Manufacturing
9 5 (0.95%) Retail
10 4 (0.76%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 4 (0.76%) Local Government
10 4 (0.76%) Marketing
11 3 (0.57%) Aerospace
11 3 (0.57%) Influencing Skills
11 3 (0.57%) Law
11 3 (0.57%) Legal
11 3 (0.57%) Telecoms
12 2 (0.38%) Advertising
12 2 (0.38%) Military
12 2 (0.38%) Presentation Skills
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 71 (13.55%) PySpark
2 55 (10.50%) Kafka
3 16 (3.05%) JSON
4 14 (2.67%) REST
5 12 (2.29%) Keycloak
6 11 (2.10%) Pandas
7 8 (1.53%) Node.js
8 7 (1.34%) Apache NiFi
8 7 (1.34%) XML
9 6 (1.15%) Apache Avro
9 6 (1.15%) Apache Beam
9 6 (1.15%) OpenTelemetry
9 6 (1.15%) Protocol Buffers
10 5 (0.95%) NumPy
10 5 (0.95%) YAML
11 4 (0.76%) Oracle GoldenGate
11 4 (0.76%) pytest
11 4 (0.76%) React
11 4 (0.76%) RESTful
11 4 (0.76%) Streamlit
Miscellaneous
1 28 (5.34%) Cloud Native
2 17 (3.24%) Hybrid Cloud
3 14 (2.67%) Data Protection Act
3 14 (2.67%) Legacy Systems
3 14 (2.67%) Product Ownership
4 13 (2.48%) Clustering
4 13 (2.48%) Distributed Systems
5 11 (2.10%) Data Structures
6 9 (1.72%) Replication
7 7 (1.34%) Algorithms
8 5 (0.95%) Onboarding
9 4 (0.76%) Data Centre
9 4 (0.76%) Driving Licence
9 4 (0.76%) Greenfield Project
9 4 (0.76%) Management Information System
9 4 (0.76%) NHS
9 4 (0.76%) Public Cloud
10 3 (0.57%) Distributed Computing
10 3 (0.57%) Virtual Team
11 2 (0.38%) Security Posture
Operating Systems
1 16 (3.05%) Unix
2 8 (1.53%) Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 233 (44.47%) ETL
2 212 (40.46%) Data Pipeline
3 210 (40.08%) Analytics
3 210 (40.08%) Data Engineering
4 175 (33.40%) Data Modelling
5 130 (24.81%) CI/CD
6 128 (24.43%) Business Intelligence
7 110 (20.99%) Agile
8 108 (20.61%) Problem-Solving
9 100 (19.08%) DevOps
10 82 (15.65%) Data Integration
11 64 (12.21%) Data Governance
12 58 (11.07%) Scrum
13 55 (10.50%) Test Automation
14 54 (10.31%) Continuous Improvement
15 48 (9.16%) Migration
16 46 (8.78%) Data Science
17 44 (8.40%) Data Analytics
17 44 (8.40%) Validation
18 43 (8.21%) Performance Tuning
Programming Languages
1 274 (52.29%) SQL
2 206 (39.31%) Python
3 38 (7.25%) Java
4 15 (2.86%) PL/SQL
5 14 (2.67%) Go
6 13 (2.48%) Bash
7 11 (2.10%) Data Analysis Expressions
8 9 (1.72%) PowerShell
9 8 (1.53%) Scala
10 7 (1.34%) Shell Script
10 7 (1.34%) T-SQL
11 6 (1.15%) Bicep
11 6 (1.15%) C#
11 6 (1.15%) JavaScript
12 4 (0.76%) R
13 2 (0.38%) HiveQL
14 1 (0.19%) Groovy
14 1 (0.19%) TypeScript
Qualifications
1 161 (30.73%) Security Cleared
2 138 (26.34%) SC Cleared
3 14 (2.67%) Azure Certification
4 13 (2.48%) Degree
5 8 (1.53%) BPSS Clearance
6 7 (1.34%) AWS Certification
7 4 (0.76%) DV Cleared
8 3 (0.57%) Computer Science Degree
8 3 (0.57%) IBM Certification
8 3 (0.57%) Master's Degree
9 1 (0.19%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
9 1 (0.19%) CCIE
9 1 (0.19%) CCNP
9 1 (0.19%) Cisco Certification
9 1 (0.19%) CISM
9 1 (0.19%) CISSP
9 1 (0.19%) DBS Check
9 1 (0.19%) ITIL Certification
9 1 (0.19%) Microsoft Certified Professional
9 1 (0.19%) Numerate Degree
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 134 (25.57%) Data Quality
2 14 (2.67%) GDPR
3 10 (1.91%) QA
4 5 (0.95%) Accessibility
5 3 (0.57%) FATCA
5 3 (0.57%) SLA
6 2 (0.38%) HIPAA
6 2 (0.38%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 2 (0.38%) NIST
7 1 (0.19%) Basel III
7 1 (0.19%) California Consumer Privacy Act
7 1 (0.19%) Disclosure Scotland
7 1 (0.19%) EU AI Act
7 1 (0.19%) GMP
7 1 (0.19%) NCSC
7 1 (0.19%) Sarbanes-Oxley
7 1 (0.19%) WCAG
System Software
1 53 (10.11%) Docker
2 2 (0.38%) HDFS
2 2 (0.38%) Virtual Machines
Systems Management
1 61 (11.64%) Kubernetes
2 27 (5.15%) Terraform
3 21 (4.01%) Grafana
4 11 (2.10%) Prometheus
5 7 (1.34%) Ansible
6 4 (0.76%) Kibana
7 3 (0.57%) NetBackup
7 3 (0.57%) Rancher
8 2 (0.38%) Apache Ranger
8 2 (0.38%) logstash
9 1 (0.19%) Control-M
9 1 (0.19%) Puppet
Vendors
1 97 (18.51%) Databricks
2 78 (14.89%) Talend
3 74 (14.12%) Oracle
4 57 (10.88%) Microsoft
5 46 (8.78%) Informatica
6 40 (7.63%) Denodo
7 22 (4.20%) Cisco
7 22 (4.20%) F5
8 15 (2.86%) Splunk
9 13 (2.48%) ServiceNow
10 10 (1.91%) Cloudera
11 8 (1.53%) Google
12 7 (1.34%) Alteryx
13 6 (1.15%) SAP
14 5 (0.95%) IBM
15 4 (0.76%) Dataiku
15 4 (0.76%) Sage
16 3 (0.57%) Commvault
16 3 (0.57%) Red Hat
17 2 (0.38%) Veritas