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 £498, according to job vacancies posted in the 6 months leading up to 14 January 2026.

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

6 months to
14 Jan 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 144 98 190
Rank change year-on-year -46 +92 -16
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 304 335 230
As % of all contract jobs in the UK excluding London 1.66% 2.43% 1.19%
As % of the Job Titles category 1.83% 2.63% 1.27%
Number of daily rates quoted 222 226 172
10th Percentile £347 £313 £314
25th Percentile £407 £406 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £498 £480 £511
Median % change year-on-year +3.70% -6.16% -2.62%
75th Percentile £550 £569 £613
90th Percentile £613 £650 £688
UK median daily rate £500 £525 £525
% change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 4 4 5
10th Percentile £28.33 £25.14 £40.15
25th Percentile £31.81 £25.21 £58.75
Median hourly rate £51.00 £26.50 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +92.45% -59.23% -1.89%
75th Percentile £71.69 £27.91 £67.50
90th Percentile £76.08 £28.19 -
UK median hourly rate £54.00 £53.75 £60.50
% change year-on-year +0.47% -11.16% -9.02%

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 16,583 12,735 18,051
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 90.50% 92.24% 93.41%
Number of daily rates quoted 10,185 7,557 11,607
10th Percentile £213 £213 £213
25th Percentile £375 £363 £375
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £475 £477 £500
Median % change year-on-year -0.42% -4.60% -
75th Percentile £575 £588 £600
90th Percentile £675 £675 £688
UK median daily rate £500 £525 £525
% change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 1,666 693 1,376
10th Percentile £14.00 £15.22 £14.00
25th Percentile £17.69 £20.26 £17.85
Median hourly rate £25.15 £31.08 £45.00
Median % change year-on-year -19.08% -30.93% +55.17%
75th Percentile £60.00 £63.75 £65.00
90th Percentile £70.00 £73.40 £76.18
UK median hourly rate £26.30 £32.50 £42.50
% change year-on-year -19.08% -23.53% +25.00%

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 14 January 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 14 January 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 14 January 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
North of England -49 96 £463 +2.78% 76
Midlands -19 87 £525 +7.25% 38
West Midlands -18 74 £525 +7.14% 23
North West -30 50 £405 -8.99% 39
Scotland +2 44 £450 +3.45% 20
South West -8 42 £550 +22.22% 53
South East -56 34 £478 -11.16% 156
Yorkshire -38 33 £500 -2.44% 23
North East -11 13 £450 -1.64% 16
East Midlands -16 13 £450 +26.40% 15
Wales -14 12 £425 -15.00% 13
East of England -25 6 £625 +96.54% 53
Northern Ireland -5 1 £430 -13.57% 6
Data Engineer
UK

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

For the 6 months to 14 January 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.

1 175 (57.57%) Python
2 163 (53.62%) SQL
3 125 (41.12%) ETL
4 121 (39.80%) Data Pipeline
5 112 (36.84%) Data Engineering
6 111 (36.51%) Azure
7 107 (35.20%) Analytics
8 98 (32.24%) CI/CD
9 89 (29.28%) Data Modelling
10 83 (27.30%) AWS
11 82 (26.97%) Databricks
12 75 (24.67%) DevOps
13 70 (23.03%) Agile
14 69 (22.70%) Business Intelligence
15 66 (21.71%) Data Quality
16 63 (20.72%) Data Warehouse
16 63 (20.72%) Problem-Solving
17 59 (19.41%) PySpark
18 54 (17.76%) Power Platform
18 54 (17.76%) Security Cleared
19 50 (16.45%) Power BI
20 47 (15.46%) Git
21 46 (15.13%) Azure Data Factory
21 46 (15.13%) SC Cleared
22 45 (14.80%) Snowflake
23 43 (14.14%) Apache Airflow
23 43 (14.14%) Docker
24 42 (13.82%) Kubernetes
25 41 (13.49%) Data Integration
25 41 (13.49%) Jenkins

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 43 (14.14%) Apache Airflow
2 28 (9.21%) Apache
3 27 (8.88%) Apache Spark
4 16 (5.26%) SAS
5 9 (2.96%) Confluence
6 5 (1.64%) Apache Pig
6 5 (1.64%) Oracle Application Server
7 3 (0.99%) IIS
8 1 (0.33%) Apache Synapse
8 1 (0.33%) Jupyter
Applications
1 1 (0.33%) Chatbot
1 1 (0.33%) Microsoft Excel
1 1 (0.33%) SPSS
1 1 (0.33%) Stata
Business Applications
1 2 (0.66%) SAP S/4HANA
Cloud Services
1 111 (36.51%) Azure
2 83 (27.30%) AWS
3 54 (17.76%) Power Platform
4 46 (15.13%) Azure Data Factory
5 45 (14.80%) Snowflake
6 27 (8.88%) dbt
6 27 (8.88%) GCP
7 26 (8.55%) Azure Synapse Analytics
7 26 (8.55%) GitHub
8 25 (8.22%) Serverless
9 21 (6.91%) Amazon S3
10 17 (5.59%) AWS Lambda
11 15 (4.93%) Azure DevOps
12 13 (4.28%) AWS CloudFormation
13 10 (3.29%) GitHub Actions
14 8 (2.63%) Amazon SageMaker
14 8 (2.63%) Prefect
15 7 (2.30%) Amazon ECS
15 7 (2.30%) AWS Step Functions
15 7 (2.30%) CloudBees
Communications & Networking
1 5 (1.64%) DNS
2 4 (1.32%) BGP
2 4 (1.32%) DMZ
2 4 (1.32%) Multicast
2 4 (1.32%) VPN
3 3 (0.99%) Structured Cabling
4 2 (0.66%) TCP/IP
4 2 (0.66%) Wi-Fi
5 1 (0.33%) Internet
5 1 (0.33%) LAN
5 1 (0.33%) SSH
5 1 (0.33%) SSL
5 1 (0.33%) WAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 63 (20.72%) Data Warehouse
2 50 (16.45%) Power BI
3 35 (11.51%) Data Lake
4 26 (8.55%) Big Data
4 26 (8.55%) PostgreSQL
5 24 (7.89%) Pentaho
6 23 (7.57%) Hadoop
6 23 (7.57%) NoSQL
7 18 (5.92%) Amazon Redshift
8 16 (5.26%) Elasticsearch
9 14 (4.61%) Delta Lake
10 13 (4.28%) Azure SQL Database
10 13 (4.28%) Data Mining
10 13 (4.28%) Relational Database
11 12 (3.95%) Amazon RDS
11 12 (3.95%) SQL Server
12 10 (3.29%) BigQuery
13 9 (2.96%) Snowflake Schema
14 8 (2.63%) RDBMS
15 7 (2.30%) Tableau
Development Applications
1 47 (15.46%) Git
2 41 (13.49%) Jenkins
3 26 (8.55%) GitLab
3 26 (8.55%) JIRA
4 6 (1.97%) MLflow
5 5 (1.64%) DBeaver
6 4 (1.32%) Visual Studio Code
7 3 (0.99%) Bitbucket
7 3 (0.99%) Cucumber
8 2 (0.66%) JMeter
8 2 (0.66%) Poetry
8 2 (0.66%) PyCharm
8 2 (0.66%) SonarQube
8 2 (0.66%) Zephyr
9 1 (0.33%) Artifactory
9 1 (0.33%) Deequ
9 1 (0.33%) JUnit
9 1 (0.33%) Sonatype Nexus
9 1 (0.33%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
9 1 (0.33%) Visual Studio
General
1 60 (19.74%) Social Skills
2 40 (13.16%) Finance
3 35 (11.51%) Analytical Skills
4 23 (7.57%) Public Sector
5 21 (6.91%) Banking
6 6 (1.97%) Documentation Skills
7 5 (1.64%) Investment Banking
8 3 (0.99%) Influencing Skills
8 3 (0.99%) Legal
8 3 (0.99%) Manufacturing
9 2 (0.66%) Aerospace
9 2 (0.66%) Health Technology
9 2 (0.66%) Pharmaceutical
9 2 (0.66%) Presentation Skills
9 2 (0.66%) Retail
9 2 (0.66%) Tech for Good
10 1 (0.33%) Games
10 1 (0.33%) Law
10 1 (0.33%) Military
10 1 (0.33%) Publishing
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 59 (19.41%) PySpark
2 28 (9.21%) Kafka
3 17 (5.59%) REST
4 13 (4.28%) RESTful
5 12 (3.95%) Keycloak
5 12 (3.95%) Pandas
6 11 (3.62%) NumPy
7 9 (2.96%) Flask
8 6 (1.97%) Apache NiFi
8 6 (1.97%) HTML
8 6 (1.97%) JSON
9 5 (1.64%) Node.js
9 5 (1.64%) OpenTelemetry
9 5 (1.64%) Oracle GoldenGate
10 4 (1.32%) Elastic Stack
10 4 (1.32%) pytest
11 3 (0.99%) JDBC
11 3 (0.99%) OAuth
11 3 (0.99%) OAuth2
11 3 (0.99%) TensorFlow
Miscellaneous
1 24 (7.89%) Cloud Native
2 15 (4.93%) Product Ownership
3 14 (4.61%) Algorithms
3 14 (4.61%) Replication
4 13 (4.28%) Hybrid Cloud
5 10 (3.29%) Distributed Systems
6 9 (2.96%) Data Protection Act
7 8 (2.63%) Clustering
8 7 (2.30%) Greenfield Project
9 6 (1.97%) Data Structures
9 6 (1.97%) Legacy Systems
9 6 (1.97%) NHS
10 4 (1.32%) IoT
11 3 (0.99%) Distributed Computing
11 3 (0.99%) Driving Licence
11 3 (0.99%) Fibre Optics
11 3 (0.99%) Management Information System
11 3 (0.99%) Onboarding
12 2 (0.66%) Distributed Architecture
12 2 (0.66%) Legacy Applications
Operating Systems
1 17 (5.59%) Linux
2 8 (2.63%) Unix
Processes & Methodologies
1 125 (41.12%) ETL
2 121 (39.80%) Data Pipeline
3 112 (36.84%) Data Engineering
4 107 (35.20%) Analytics
5 98 (32.24%) CI/CD
6 89 (29.28%) Data Modelling
7 75 (24.67%) DevOps
8 70 (23.03%) Agile
9 69 (22.70%) Business Intelligence
10 63 (20.72%) Problem-Solving
11 41 (13.49%) Data Integration
11 41 (13.49%) Test Automation
12 36 (11.84%) Machine Learning
13 33 (10.86%) Performance Tuning
14 31 (10.20%) Continuous Improvement
14 31 (10.20%) Data Science
14 31 (10.20%) Scrum
14 31 (10.20%) Visualisation
15 28 (9.21%) Data Architecture
15 28 (9.21%) Data Governance
Programming Languages
1 175 (57.57%) Python
2 163 (53.62%) SQL
3 29 (9.54%) Java
4 15 (4.93%) Scala
5 14 (4.61%) PL/SQL
6 12 (3.95%) Go
7 9 (2.96%) Bash
8 6 (1.97%) R
8 6 (1.97%) T-SQL
9 5 (1.64%) Data Analysis Expressions
9 5 (1.64%) Shell Script
10 4 (1.32%) JavaScript
11 3 (0.99%) Groovy
11 3 (0.99%) TypeScript
12 2 (0.66%) ABAP
12 2 (0.66%) Bicep
12 2 (0.66%) C#
13 1 (0.33%) Cypher
Qualifications
1 54 (17.76%) Security Cleared
2 46 (15.13%) SC Cleared
3 13 (4.28%) Azure Certification
4 10 (3.29%) AWS Certification
5 5 (1.64%) Degree
6 2 (0.66%) Computer Science Degree
6 2 (0.66%) Master's Degree
7 1 (0.33%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
7 1 (0.33%) DV Cleared
7 1 (0.33%) HND
7 1 (0.33%) ITIL Certification
7 1 (0.33%) MCP
7 1 (0.33%) Tableau Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 66 (21.71%) Data Quality
2 8 (2.63%) GDPR
3 7 (2.30%) QA
4 3 (0.99%) Accessibility
5 1 (0.33%) Basel III
5 1 (0.33%) Disclosure Scotland
5 1 (0.33%) EU AI Act
5 1 (0.33%) HIPAA
5 1 (0.33%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 1 (0.33%) NCSC
5 1 (0.33%) NIST
5 1 (0.33%) WCAG
System Software
1 43 (14.14%) Docker
2 4 (1.32%) Virtual Machines
3 2 (0.66%) Active Directory
Systems Management
1 42 (13.82%) Kubernetes
2 29 (9.54%) Terraform
3 11 (3.62%) Ansible
4 8 (2.63%) NetBackup
5 6 (1.97%) Grafana
6 5 (1.64%) Kibana
7 4 (1.32%) Prometheus
8 3 (0.99%) logstash
9 2 (0.66%) Control-M
10 1 (0.33%) Argo
10 1 (0.33%) Istio
10 1 (0.33%) Kustomize
10 1 (0.33%) Puppet
Vendors
1 82 (26.97%) Databricks
2 38 (12.50%) Oracle
3 36 (11.84%) Microsoft
4 25 (8.22%) Talend
5 16 (5.26%) Denodo
6 10 (3.29%) Google
6 10 (3.29%) Informatica
6 10 (3.29%) Red Hat
7 8 (2.63%) Commvault
8 7 (2.30%) IBM
8 7 (2.30%) Veritas
9 6 (1.97%) Confluent
9 6 (1.97%) ServiceNow
9 6 (1.97%) Splunk
10 5 (1.64%) Cisco
11 4 (1.32%) Cloudera
11 4 (1.32%) F5
11 4 (1.32%) SAP
12 3 (0.99%) Salesforce
13 2 (0.66%) Brio