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 29 April 2026.

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

6 months to
29 Apr 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 79 105 138
Rank change year-on-year +26 +33 +15
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 674 301 326
As % of all contract jobs in the UK excluding London 2.82% 2.37% 1.58%
As % of the Job Titles category 3.06% 2.57% 1.70%
Number of daily rates quoted 469 227 239
10th Percentile £374 £220 £163
25th Percentile £413 £386 £206
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £475 £463 £453
Median % change year-on-year +2.70% +2.10% -12.04%
75th Percentile £538 £538 £544
90th Percentile £588 £638 £630
UK median daily rate £500 £500 £500
% change year-on-year - - -9.09%
Number of hourly rates quoted 40 4 33
10th Percentile £23.08 £20.33 £37.50
25th Percentile £41.28 £23.49 £58.75
Median hourly rate £52.50 £26.93 £75.00
Median % change year-on-year +94.99% -64.10% +72.41%
75th Percentile £71.50 £40.96 £80.00
90th Percentile £79.48 £63.60 -
UK median hourly rate £52.50 £58.75 £65.00
% change year-on-year -10.64% -9.62% +1.56%

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 22,019 11,712 19,144
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.03% 92.26% 92.65%
Number of daily rates quoted 12,903 7,527 11,706
10th Percentile £280 £213 £213
25th Percentile £400 £363 £363
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £490 £475 £491
Median % change year-on-year +3.16% -3.27% -1.78%
75th Percentile £588 £575 £600
90th Percentile £677 £650 £688
UK median daily rate £500 £515 £525
% change year-on-year -2.91% -1.90% -2.78%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,458 824 2,224
10th Percentile £14.64 £14.08 £12.50
25th Percentile £20.00 £18.13 £15.74
Median hourly rate £45.23 £28.75 £37.75
Median % change year-on-year +57.32% -23.84% -11.18%
75th Percentile £66.00 £65.00 £61.30
90th Percentile £78.75 £75.00 £73.75
UK median hourly rate £43.69 £29.15 £35.96
% change year-on-year +49.88% -18.93% -20.10%

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 29 April 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 29 April 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 29 April 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 +30 292 £469 +0.32% 54
West Midlands +33 273 £469 -3.79% 44
North of England -11 186 £468 +1.08% 76
North West +4 118 £480 +3.78% 47
South East -14 86 £500 +5.26% 76
South West -6 61 £506 +1.10% 39
Yorkshire -33 53 £465 +3.33% 13
Scotland +9 52 £428 -5.00% 11
Wales 0 21 £463 - 14
East Midlands -31 19 £525 +31.66% 10
East of England -34 17 £565 +79.37% 16
North East -15 15 £463 +2.78% 17
Northern Ireland +5 3 £410 -18.00% 4
Data Engineer
UK

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

For the 6 months to 29 April 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.

1 342 (50.74%) SQL
2 265 (39.32%) Data Pipeline
2 265 (39.32%) ETL
3 260 (38.58%) Analytics
4 236 (35.01%) Data Engineering
5 231 (34.27%) Security Cleared
6 228 (33.83%) Python
7 221 (32.79%) Data Modelling
8 200 (29.67%) SC Cleared
9 171 (25.37%) Azure
10 157 (23.29%) Business Intelligence
11 153 (22.70%) Data Quality
12 140 (20.77%) CI/CD
13 136 (20.18%) Agile
14 126 (18.69%) AWS
15 118 (17.51%) Databricks
16 115 (17.06%) Problem-Solving
17 111 (16.47%) Data Integration
18 101 (14.99%) Power Platform
19 98 (14.54%) DevOps
19 98 (14.54%) Oracle
20 97 (14.39%) Talend
21 96 (14.24%) Power BI
22 89 (13.20%) Git
23 87 (12.91%) Data Warehouse
24 85 (12.61%) PySpark
25 81 (12.02%) Migration
26 79 (11.72%) Pentaho
27 76 (11.28%) Azure Data Factory
28 69 (10.24%) Microsoft

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 64 (9.50%) SAS
2 49 (7.27%) Apache Spark
3 38 (5.64%) Apache Airflow
4 30 (4.45%) Apache
5 16 (2.37%) Confluence
6 3 (0.45%) Jupyter
7 1 (0.15%) Apache Superset
7 1 (0.15%) Apache Synapse
7 1 (0.15%) SharePoint
Applications
1 6 (0.89%) Microsoft Excel
2 5 (0.74%) Notepad++
3 1 (0.15%) Chatbot
3 1 (0.15%) Microsoft Office
3 1 (0.15%) Spreadsheet
Business Applications
1 1 (0.15%) Dynamics CRM
1 1 (0.15%) Elite 3E
1 1 (0.15%) NEC Housing
1 1 (0.15%) Oracle 11i
1 1 (0.15%) Oracle ERP
1 1 (0.15%) SAP S/4HANA
Cloud Services
1 171 (25.37%) Azure
2 126 (18.69%) AWS
3 101 (14.99%) Power Platform
4 76 (11.28%) Azure Data Factory
5 58 (8.61%) Snowflake
6 43 (6.38%) Azure Synapse Analytics
7 40 (5.93%) dbt
8 35 (5.19%) GCP
9 33 (4.90%) Amazon S3
10 26 (3.86%) Serverless
11 25 (3.71%) GitHub
12 24 (3.56%) Azure DevOps
13 19 (2.82%) AWS Lambda
13 19 (2.82%) OpenShift
14 14 (2.08%) Matillion
15 12 (1.78%) AWS CloudFormation
16 10 (1.48%) GitHub Actions
17 9 (1.34%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 9 (1.34%) Amazon EMR
17 9 (1.34%) Power Automate
Communications & Networking
1 31 (4.60%) DNS
1 31 (4.60%) VPN
2 30 (4.45%) BGP
2 30 (4.45%) DMZ
2 30 (4.45%) Multicast
3 8 (1.19%) Structured Cabling
4 5 (0.74%) PuTTY
4 5 (0.74%) WinSCP
5 3 (0.45%) Firewall
Database & Business Intelligence
1 96 (14.24%) Power BI
2 87 (12.91%) Data Warehouse
3 79 (11.72%) Pentaho
4 46 (6.82%) Data Lake
5 36 (5.34%) Amazon Redshift
6 34 (5.04%) Big Data
7 29 (4.30%) SQL Server
8 28 (4.15%) Hadoop
9 25 (3.71%) Delta Lake
9 25 (3.71%) MySQL
10 23 (3.41%) Metadata
10 23 (3.41%) PostgreSQL
11 20 (2.97%) Relational Database
11 20 (2.97%) SQL Server Integration Services
12 19 (2.82%) NoSQL
13 16 (2.37%) Azure SQL Database
13 16 (2.37%) Tableau
14 15 (2.23%) Amazon RDS
14 15 (2.23%) BusinessObjects
15 14 (2.08%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 89 (13.20%) Git
2 47 (6.97%) JIRA
3 44 (6.53%) GitLab
4 39 (5.79%) Jenkins
5 4 (0.59%) Bitbucket
6 2 (0.30%) Visual Studio
7 1 (0.15%) ER Studio
7 1 (0.15%) ERwin
7 1 (0.15%) JUnit
General
1 111 (16.47%) Social Skills
2 69 (10.24%) Analytical Skills
3 64 (9.50%) Public Sector
4 63 (9.35%) Finance
5 37 (5.49%) Banking
6 18 (2.67%) Investment Banking
7 14 (2.08%) Documentation Skills
8 12 (1.78%) Aerospace
8 12 (1.78%) Manufacturing
9 8 (1.19%) Telecoms
10 5 (0.74%) Marketing
10 5 (0.74%) Retail
11 4 (0.59%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 4 (0.59%) Legal
11 4 (0.59%) Local Government
12 3 (0.45%) Front Office
12 3 (0.45%) Law
13 2 (0.30%) Advertising
13 2 (0.30%) Military
13 2 (0.30%) Presentation Skills
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 85 (12.61%) PySpark
2 64 (9.50%) Kafka
3 17 (2.52%) JSON
4 16 (2.37%) REST
5 13 (1.93%) Pandas
6 9 (1.34%) Node.js
7 8 (1.19%) Apache Avro
7 8 (1.19%) Apache Beam
7 8 (1.19%) Protocol Buffers
8 7 (1.04%) Keycloak
9 6 (0.89%) Apache NiFi
9 6 (0.89%) OpenTelemetry
9 6 (0.89%) XML
10 5 (0.74%) YAML
11 4 (0.59%) AngularJS
11 4 (0.59%) NumPy
11 4 (0.59%) pytest
11 4 (0.59%) React
11 4 (0.59%) Streamlit
12 3 (0.45%) AWS CDK
Miscellaneous
1 29 (4.30%) Cloud Native
2 19 (2.82%) Legacy Systems
3 16 (2.37%) Data Structures
4 14 (2.08%) Distributed Systems
5 13 (1.93%) Data Protection Act
6 12 (1.78%) Product Ownership
7 11 (1.63%) Clustering
8 10 (1.48%) Hybrid Cloud
9 7 (1.04%) Greenfield Project
10 6 (0.89%) Data Centre
10 6 (0.89%) Linux Command Line
10 6 (0.89%) NHS
10 6 (0.89%) Onboarding
11 5 (0.74%) Driving Licence
12 4 (0.59%) Data Fabric
12 4 (0.59%) Fibre Optics
12 4 (0.59%) Management Information System
12 4 (0.59%) Public Cloud
12 4 (0.59%) Replication
12 4 (0.59%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 32 (4.75%) Unix
2 10 (1.48%) Linux
3 1 (0.15%) Ubuntu
3 1 (0.15%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 265 (39.32%) Data Pipeline
1 265 (39.32%) ETL
2 260 (38.58%) Analytics
3 236 (35.01%) Data Engineering
4 221 (32.79%) Data Modelling
5 157 (23.29%) Business Intelligence
6 140 (20.77%) CI/CD
7 136 (20.18%) Agile
8 115 (17.06%) Problem-Solving
9 111 (16.47%) Data Integration
10 98 (14.54%) DevOps
11 81 (12.02%) Migration
12 69 (10.24%) Scrum
13 67 (9.94%) Data Governance
14 58 (8.61%) Test Automation
15 57 (8.46%) Validation
16 56 (8.31%) Continuous Improvement
17 53 (7.86%) Decision-Making
18 51 (7.57%) AI
19 48 (7.12%) Data Analytics
Programming Languages
1 342 (50.74%) SQL
2 228 (33.83%) Python
3 33 (4.90%) Java
4 22 (3.26%) PL/SQL
5 16 (2.37%) Shell Script
6 12 (1.78%) Bash
7 9 (1.34%) Data Analysis Expressions
7 9 (1.34%) Go
7 9 (1.34%) PowerShell
8 8 (1.19%) T-SQL
9 7 (1.04%) Scala
10 6 (0.89%) C#
11 5 (0.74%) Bicep
12 3 (0.45%) JavaScript
13 2 (0.30%) HiveQL
13 2 (0.30%) R
14 1 (0.15%) C++
14 1 (0.15%) Groovy
14 1 (0.15%) Perl
14 1 (0.15%) TypeScript
Qualifications
1 231 (34.27%) Security Cleared
2 200 (29.67%) SC Cleared
3 16 (2.37%) Degree
4 10 (1.48%) BPSS Clearance
5 9 (1.34%) Azure Certification
6 7 (1.04%) DV Cleared
7 4 (0.59%) BICSI Certification
7 4 (0.59%) City & Guilds
7 4 (0.59%) Computer Science Degree
7 4 (0.59%) Master's Degree
8 3 (0.45%) AWS Certification
8 3 (0.45%) IBM Certification
8 3 (0.45%) SnowPro
9 1 (0.15%) CCIE
9 1 (0.15%) CCNP
9 1 (0.15%) Cisco Certification
9 1 (0.15%) CISM
9 1 (0.15%) CISSP
9 1 (0.15%) DBS Check
9 1 (0.15%) Numerate Degree
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 153 (22.70%) Data Quality
2 13 (1.93%) QA
3 12 (1.78%) GDPR
4 8 (1.19%) FATCA
5 6 (0.89%) SLA
6 5 (0.74%) Accessibility
7 2 (0.30%) HIPAA
7 2 (0.30%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 1 (0.15%) Basel III
8 1 (0.15%) California Consumer Privacy Act
8 1 (0.15%) Disclosure Scotland
8 1 (0.15%) GMP
8 1 (0.15%) Government Security Classifications
8 1 (0.15%) NIST
8 1 (0.15%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 1 (0.15%) SNOMED CT
8 1 (0.15%) WCAG
System Software
1 52 (7.72%) Docker
2 2 (0.30%) HDFS
2 2 (0.30%) Virtual Machines
Systems Management
1 54 (8.01%) Kubernetes
2 38 (5.64%) Terraform
3 37 (5.49%) Grafana
4 12 (1.78%) Prometheus
5 9 (1.34%) Ansible
6 3 (0.45%) Rancher
7 2 (0.30%) Apache Ranger
7 2 (0.30%) Kibana
7 2 (0.30%) logstash
8 1 (0.15%) Control-M
Vendors
1 118 (17.51%) Databricks
2 98 (14.54%) Oracle
3 97 (14.39%) Talend
4 69 (10.24%) Microsoft
5 65 (9.64%) Informatica
6 51 (7.57%) Denodo
7 32 (4.75%) Cisco
7 32 (4.75%) F5
8 16 (2.37%) Splunk
9 13 (1.93%) ServiceNow
10 11 (1.63%) Google
10 11 (1.63%) SAP
11 10 (1.48%) Cloudera
12 7 (1.04%) Alteryx
13 6 (0.89%) Dynatrace
13 6 (0.89%) InterSystems
13 6 (0.89%) Sage
14 4 (0.59%) Dataiku
14 4 (0.59%) IBM
15 2 (0.30%) OpenAI