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 £475, according to job vacancies posted in the 6 months leading up to 15 September 2025.

The table below provides contractor rate benchmarking and summary statistics, comparing them to the same period in the previous two years.

6 months to
15 Sep 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 170 127 175
Rank change year-on-year -43 +48 +5
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 229 309 306
As % of all contract jobs advertised in the UK excluding London 1.50% 1.74% 1.41%
As % of the Job Titles category 1.67% 1.88% 1.50%
Number of daily rates quoted 156 208 255
10th Percentile £351 £296 £413
25th Percentile £410 £425 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £475 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year -5.00% -4.76% -
75th Percentile £538 £575 £600
90th Percentile £625 £625 £675
UK median daily rate £500 £525 £550
% change year-on-year -4.76% -4.55% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 3 5 2
10th Percentile £19.43 £68.00 £47.56
25th Percentile £21.90 - £50.47
Median hourly rate £27.00 £80.00 £57.00
Median % change year-on-year -66.25% +40.35% +14.00%
75th Percentile £54.00 - £61.84
90th Percentile £69.60 - £63.74
UK median hourly rate £52.50 £80.00 £64.00
% change year-on-year -34.38% +25.00% +28.00%

All Contract IT Job Vacancies
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 13,685 16,394 20,459
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 89.84% 92.29% 94.30%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,409 9,572 13,662
10th Percentile £213 £220 £225
25th Percentile £361 £376 £388
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £475 £500 £500
Median % change year-on-year -5.00% - +0.35%
75th Percentile £575 £600 £600
90th Percentile £653 £681 £688
UK median daily rate £500 £525 £530
% change year-on-year -4.76% -0.94% -3.64%
Number of hourly rates quoted 1,240 1,451 1,194
10th Percentile £13.27 £14.41 £14.00
25th Percentile £16.17 £19.50 £17.76
Median hourly rate £25.15 £45.00 £42.08
Median % change year-on-year -44.11% +6.95% +91.26%
75th Percentile £51.65 £66.61 £65.00
90th Percentile £70.24 £75.00 £77.50
UK median hourly rate £25.15 £43.00 £43.86
% change year-on-year -41.51% -1.96% +68.69%

Data Engineer
Job Vacancy Trend in the UK excluding London

Job postings that featured Data Engineer in the job title as a proportion of all IT jobs advertised in the UK excluding London.

Job vacancy trend for Data Engineer 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 15 September 2025.

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 15 September 2025.

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 15 September 2025. 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
North of England -16 71 £475 -5.00% 64
Midlands -23 43 £450 +0.56% 43
Scotland +11 40 £463 -1.07% 12
North West -12 37 £475 -2.56% 37
South West +16 36 £500 -4.76% 23
West Midlands -21 30 £440 -12.00% 20
Yorkshire -15 29 £506 +1.25% 20
South East -21 29 £481 -8.33% 126
East Midlands -5 11 £441 +10.31% 23
North East +1 6 £423 -27.78% 7
Wales -8 6 £473 -5.50% 2
East of England -8 5 £750 +110.53% 15
Northern Ireland -6 2 £500 +0.50%
Data Engineer
UK

Data Engineer Skill Set
Top 30 Co-occurring Skills and Capabilities in the UK excluding London

For the 6 months to 15 September 2025, Data Engineer contract job roles required the following skills and capabilities in order of popularity. The figures indicate the absolute number co-occurrences and as a proportion of all contract job ads across the UK excluding London region featuring Data Engineer in the job title.

1 138 (60.26%) Python
2 124 (54.15%) SQL
3 94 (41.05%) ETL
4 90 (39.30%) Data Pipeline
5 84 (36.68%) AWS
6 75 (32.75%) Data Engineering
7 74 (32.31%) Data Modelling
8 69 (30.13%) Analytics
9 67 (29.26%) Azure
10 66 (28.82%) CI/CD
11 64 (27.95%) Data Warehouse
12 58 (25.33%) Databricks
13 57 (24.89%) Data Quality
14 54 (23.58%) Social Skills
15 51 (22.27%) Business Intelligence
16 46 (20.09%) Problem-Solving
17 45 (19.65%) Snowflake
18 42 (18.34%) Power Platform
18 42 (18.34%) Apache Airflow
18 42 (18.34%) Power BI
18 42 (18.34%) Agile
19 39 (17.03%) DevOps
20 35 (15.28%) Visualisation
21 34 (14.85%) GCP
21 34 (14.85%) PySpark
22 32 (13.97%) Docker
22 32 (13.97%) Performance Tuning
23 31 (13.54%) Kubernetes
23 31 (13.54%) Security Cleared
24 29 (12.66%) Data Integration

Data Engineer Skill Set
Co-occurring Skills and Capabilities in the UK excluding London by Category

The follow tables expand on the table above by listing co-occurrences grouped by category. The same employment type, locality and period is covered with up to 20 co-occurrences shown in each of the following categories:

Application Platforms
1 42 (18.34%) Apache Airflow
2 25 (10.92%) Apache
2 25 (10.92%) Apache Spark
3 6 (2.62%) SAS
4 5 (2.18%) Apache Pig
4 5 (2.18%) Confluence
4 5 (2.18%) Oracle Application Server
5 4 (1.75%) SharePoint
6 3 (1.31%) IIS
7 2 (0.87%) Documentum
8 1 (0.44%) IBM Notes
Applications
1 2 (0.87%) Windchill
2 1 (0.44%) Microsoft Excel
2 1 (0.44%) Spreadsheet
2 1 (0.44%) SPSS
2 1 (0.44%) Stata
Business Applications
1 2 (0.87%) Payment Gateway
1 2 (0.87%) SAP S/4HANA
2 1 (0.44%) NetSuite
2 1 (0.44%) Oracle ERP
2 1 (0.44%) Salesforce CRM
Cloud Services
1 84 (36.68%) AWS
2 67 (29.26%) Azure
3 45 (19.65%) Snowflake
4 42 (18.34%) Power Platform
5 34 (14.85%) GCP
6 29 (12.66%) Azure Data Factory
7 24 (10.48%) Amazon S3
8 18 (7.86%) dbt
9 16 (6.99%) Serverless
10 14 (6.11%) Azure Synapse Analytics
11 13 (5.68%) AWS Lambda
12 12 (5.24%) Amazon EC2
13 10 (4.37%) Amazon EKS
13 10 (4.37%) GitHub
14 7 (3.06%) Cloud Computing
14 7 (3.06%) OCI
15 6 (2.62%) AWS CloudFormation
15 6 (2.62%) GitHub Actions
15 6 (2.62%) Matillion
16 5 (2.18%) CloudBees
Communications & Networking
1 4 (1.75%) TCP/IP
2 3 (1.31%) MQTT
2 3 (1.31%) SSH
2 3 (1.31%) Wi-Fi
3 2 (0.87%) DNS
3 2 (0.87%) Internet
3 2 (0.87%) LAN
3 2 (0.87%) SSL
3 2 (0.87%) WAN
4 1 (0.44%) 802.11
4 1 (0.44%) Ethernet
4 1 (0.44%) Firewall
4 1 (0.44%) Structured Cabling
4 1 (0.44%) Wireless
Database & Business Intelligence
1 64 (27.95%) Data Warehouse
2 42 (18.34%) Power BI
3 26 (11.35%) Big Data
4 25 (10.92%) NoSQL
5 23 (10.04%) Relational Database
6 21 (9.17%) SQL Server
7 20 (8.73%) Amazon Redshift
7 20 (8.73%) Data Lake
7 20 (8.73%) Hadoop
8 17 (7.42%) PostgreSQL
9 16 (6.99%) Delta Lake
10 12 (5.24%) Data Mining
11 9 (3.93%) Azure SQL Database
12 8 (3.49%) Elasticsearch
12 8 (3.49%) SQL Server Integration Services
12 8 (3.49%) Tableau
13 7 (3.06%) Amazon RDS
13 7 (3.06%) Metadata
13 7 (3.06%) MySQL
14 5 (2.18%) Oracle Reports
Development Applications
1 28 (12.23%) Jenkins
2 25 (10.92%) Git
3 14 (6.11%) GitLab
4 11 (4.80%) JIRA
5 6 (2.62%) MLflow
6 5 (2.18%) Visual Studio Code
7 4 (1.75%) DBeaver
7 4 (1.75%) SonarQube
7 4 (1.75%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
7 4 (1.75%) Visual Studio
8 3 (1.31%) Artifactory
8 3 (1.31%) Bitbucket
8 3 (1.31%) Poetry
8 3 (1.31%) PyCharm
8 3 (1.31%) Sonatype Nexus
9 1 (0.44%) Team Foundation Server
General
1 54 (23.58%) Social Skills
2 28 (12.23%) Analytical Skills
3 24 (10.48%) Finance
4 14 (6.11%) Banking
4 14 (6.11%) Public Sector
5 4 (1.75%) Inclusion and Diversity
5 4 (1.75%) Marketing
5 4 (1.75%) Telecoms
6 3 (1.31%) Influencing Skills
6 3 (1.31%) Retail
6 3 (1.31%) Tech for Good
7 2 (0.87%) Documentation Skills
7 2 (0.87%) Financial Institution
7 2 (0.87%) Legal
7 2 (0.87%) Pharmaceutical
7 2 (0.87%) Presentation Skills
7 2 (0.87%) Retail Banking
8 1 (0.44%) Aerospace
8 1 (0.44%) Investment Banking
8 1 (0.44%) Manufacturing
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 34 (14.85%) PySpark
2 21 (9.17%) Kafka
3 11 (4.80%) RESTful
4 10 (4.37%) Flask
4 10 (4.37%) Pandas
5 9 (3.93%) Elastic Stack
6 8 (3.49%) NumPy
7 7 (3.06%) OpenTelemetry
8 6 (2.62%) Apache NiFi
9 5 (2.18%) REST
10 4 (1.75%) HTML
10 4 (1.75%) OAuth
10 4 (1.75%) OAuth2
10 4 (1.75%) Oracle GoldenGate
11 3 (1.31%) Apache Avro
11 3 (1.31%) JDBC
11 3 (1.31%) Loki
11 3 (1.31%) PyTorch
11 3 (1.31%) Spark Streaming
11 3 (1.31%) TensorFlow
Miscellaneous
1 13 (5.68%) Replication
2 10 (4.37%) Cloud Native
2 10 (4.37%) Data Protection Act
3 8 (3.49%) Algorithms
4 7 (3.06%) Distributed Systems
4 7 (3.06%) Product Ownership
5 5 (2.18%) Legacy Systems
5 5 (2.18%) Onboarding
6 4 (1.75%) Management Information System
7 3 (1.31%) AI Agents
7 3 (1.31%) Clustering
7 3 (1.31%) Greenfield Project
7 3 (1.31%) Hybrid Cloud
7 3 (1.31%) IoT
7 3 (1.31%) Private Cloud
8 2 (0.87%) Data Fabric
8 2 (0.87%) Data Structures
8 2 (0.87%) Distributed Architecture
8 2 (0.87%) Driving Licence
8 2 (0.87%) NHS
Operating Systems
1 17 (7.42%) Linux
2 10 (4.37%) Unix
3 2 (0.87%) Windows
3 2 (0.87%) Windows Server
3 2 (0.87%) Windows Server 2003
Processes & Methodologies
1 94 (41.05%) ETL
2 90 (39.30%) Data Pipeline
3 75 (32.75%) Data Engineering
4 74 (32.31%) Data Modelling
5 69 (30.13%) Analytics
6 66 (28.82%) CI/CD
7 51 (22.27%) Business Intelligence
8 46 (20.09%) Problem-Solving
9 42 (18.34%) Agile
10 39 (17.03%) DevOps
11 35 (15.28%) Visualisation
12 32 (13.97%) Performance Tuning
13 29 (12.66%) Data Integration
14 27 (11.79%) Machine Learning
15 26 (11.35%) Data Transformation
16 24 (10.48%) Containerisation
16 24 (10.48%) Data Governance
17 23 (10.04%) Decision-Making
17 23 (10.04%) Test Automation
18 20 (8.73%) Migration
Programming Languages
1 138 (60.26%) Python
2 124 (54.15%) SQL
3 20 (8.73%) Java
4 18 (7.86%) Scala
5 10 (4.37%) Bash
6 8 (3.49%) PL/SQL
7 7 (3.06%) Shell Script
7 7 (3.06%) T-SQL
8 4 (1.75%) Groovy
9 3 (1.31%) R
9 3 (1.31%) TypeScript
10 2 (0.87%) ABAP
11 1 (0.44%) C#
11 1 (0.44%) Cypher
11 1 (0.44%) Data Analysis Expressions
11 1 (0.44%) JavaScript
11 1 (0.44%) VB.NET
Qualifications
1 31 (13.54%) Security Cleared
2 20 (8.73%) SC Cleared
3 17 (7.42%) Degree
4 9 (3.93%) AWS Certification
5 8 (3.49%) Master's Degree
6 6 (2.62%) Computer Science Degree
7 5 (2.18%) DV Cleared
8 3 (1.31%) Azure Certification
8 3 (1.31%) SnowPro
9 2 (0.87%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
10 1 (0.44%) BPSS Clearance
10 1 (0.44%) CTC Cleared
10 1 (0.44%) HND
10 1 (0.44%) Tableau Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 57 (24.89%) Data Quality
2 5 (2.18%) GDPR
2 5 (2.18%) QA
3 4 (1.75%) Accessibility
4 2 (0.87%) Disclosure Scotland
5 1 (0.44%) ISO 19650
5 1 (0.44%) PMO
System Software
1 32 (13.97%) Docker
2 3 (1.31%) Virtual Machines
3 2 (0.87%) Active Directory
Systems Management
1 31 (13.54%) Kubernetes
2 16 (6.99%) Terraform
3 8 (3.49%) Ansible
3 8 (3.49%) Grafana
4 6 (2.62%) Kibana
4 6 (2.62%) logstash
5 5 (2.18%) NetBackup
5 5 (2.18%) Prometheus
6 3 (1.31%) Argo
6 3 (1.31%) Istio
6 3 (1.31%) Kustomize
7 2 (0.87%) Control-M
8 1 (0.44%) FortiGate
Vendors
1 58 (25.33%) Databricks
2 26 (11.35%) Microsoft
3 18 (7.86%) Oracle
4 12 (5.24%) Google
5 9 (3.93%) Talend
6 8 (3.49%) Red Hat
7 6 (2.62%) Commvault
7 6 (2.62%) IBM
7 6 (2.62%) Informatica
8 5 (2.18%) Cloudera
8 5 (2.18%) Confluent
8 5 (2.18%) Splunk
8 5 (2.18%) Veritas
9 4 (1.75%) Denodo
9 4 (1.75%) Salesforce
9 4 (1.75%) ServiceNow
10 3 (1.31%) Cisco
10 3 (1.31%) SAP
10 3 (1.31%) Virgin Media
11 2 (0.87%) Meraki