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 1 July 2026.

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

6 months to
1 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 66 134 133
Rank change year-on-year +68 -1 +25
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 852 258 337
As % of all contract jobs in the UK excluding London 3.23% 1.86% 1.60%
As % of the Job Titles category 3.52% 2.04% 1.73%
Number of daily rates quoted 561 183 250
10th Percentile £363 £315 £170
25th Percentile £413 £402 £199
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £469 £463 £450
Median % change year-on-year +1.41% +2.78% -14.29%
75th Percentile £541 £525 £538
90th Percentile £600 £623 £600
UK median daily rate £500 £500 £500
% change year-on-year - - -9.09%
Number of hourly rates quoted 60 4 31
10th Percentile £19.34 £17.92 £37.50
25th Percentile £36.25 £18.11 £58.75
Median hourly rate £47.50 £48.46 £75.00
Median % change year-on-year -1.98% -35.39% -
75th Percentile £61.81 £79.03 £80.00
90th Percentile £75.00 £79.61 -
UK median hourly rate £50.00 £52.50 £65.00
% change year-on-year -4.76% -19.23% -9.72%

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 24,231 12,618 19,465
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 91.97% 91.12% 92.40%
Number of daily rates quoted 13,811 7,881 11,641
10th Percentile £303 £220 £213
25th Percentile £406 £363 £368
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £475 £493
Median % change year-on-year +5.26% -3.65% -1.40%
75th Percentile £600 £575 £594
90th Percentile £688 £650 £675
UK median daily rate £520 £500 £525
% change year-on-year +4.00% -4.76% -2.33%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,810 1,009 2,454
10th Percentile £15.00 £13.49 £12.70
25th Percentile £20.52 £16.84 £15.99
Median hourly rate £45.00 £25.15 £40.00
Median % change year-on-year +78.93% -37.13% -
75th Percentile £67.50 £57.50 £63.75
90th Percentile £78.75 £75.00 £74.48
UK median hourly rate £43.00 £26.50 £37.50
% change year-on-year +62.26% -29.33% -12.79%

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 1 July 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 1 July 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 1 July 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 +48 347 £463 +1.65% 81
West Midlands +48 310 £459 -0.22% 45
North of England +18 214 £475 - 127
North West +22 132 £500 +5.26% 68
South East +14 126 £475 +11.76% 105
South West +19 91 £520 +4.00% 49
Scotland +28 68 £425 -8.11% 10
Yorkshire -14 63 £470 -1.05% 32
East Midlands +11 37 £525 +28.05% 37
East of England -10 24 £543 +70.60% 15
Wales +6 22 £450 +3.45% 22
North East -20 19 £480 +9.71% 30
Northern Ireland +3 3 £410 -18.00% 8
Data Engineer
UK

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

For the 6 months to 1 July 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.

1 411 (48.24%) SQL
2 315 (36.97%) Data Pipeline
3 304 (35.68%) Analytics
4 295 (34.62%) ETL
5 280 (32.86%) Data Engineering
6 271 (31.81%) Security Cleared
7 269 (31.57%) Python
8 253 (29.69%) Data Modelling
9 222 (26.06%) SC Cleared
10 198 (23.24%) Azure
11 181 (21.24%) AWS
12 176 (20.66%) Data Quality
13 172 (20.19%) Business Intelligence
14 170 (19.95%) CI/CD
15 145 (17.02%) Agile
16 141 (16.55%) Data Integration
17 134 (15.73%) Databricks
18 127 (14.91%) Problem-Solving
19 117 (13.73%) Oracle
20 111 (13.03%) Power Platform
21 110 (12.91%) Migration
22 108 (12.68%) Power BI
22 108 (12.68%) Talend
23 107 (12.56%) Data Warehouse
24 104 (12.21%) DevOps
25 100 (11.74%) PySpark
26 92 (10.80%) Git
27 90 (10.56%) Microsoft
28 87 (10.21%) Data Governance
29 84 (9.86%) Pentaho

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 (7.75%) SAS
2 50 (5.87%) Apache Spark
3 37 (4.34%) Apache Airflow
4 34 (3.99%) Apache
5 24 (2.82%) Confluence
6 5 (0.59%) Jupyter
7 2 (0.23%) Palantir Foundry
8 1 (0.12%) Apache Superset
8 1 (0.12%) SharePoint
Applications
1 7 (0.82%) Microsoft Excel
2 5 (0.59%) Notepad++
3 1 (0.12%) Microsoft Office
3 1 (0.12%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 1 (0.12%) Spreadsheet
Business Applications
1 5 (0.59%) Dynamics CRM
1 5 (0.59%) Infor LN
2 4 (0.47%) NetSuite
2 4 (0.47%) Sage X3
3 3 (0.35%) SAP S/4HANA
4 1 (0.12%) Elite 3E
4 1 (0.12%) FIS Private Capital Suite
4 1 (0.12%) NEC Housing
4 1 (0.12%) Oracle 11i
4 1 (0.12%) Oracle Assets
4 1 (0.12%) Oracle ERP
Cloud Services
1 198 (23.24%) Azure
2 181 (21.24%) AWS
3 111 (13.03%) Power Platform
4 82 (9.62%) Azure Data Factory
5 73 (8.57%) Snowflake
6 48 (5.63%) GCP
7 44 (5.16%) Azure Synapse Analytics
7 44 (5.16%) dbt
8 41 (4.81%) Amazon S3
9 34 (3.99%) Serverless
10 29 (3.40%) Azure DevOps
11 28 (3.29%) GitHub
12 24 (2.82%) AWS Lambda
13 19 (2.23%) Matillion
14 18 (2.11%) OpenShift
15 15 (1.76%) GitHub Actions
16 13 (1.53%) Amazon EMR
17 11 (1.29%) Amazon CloudWatch
18 10 (1.17%) Azure Functions
19 9 (1.06%) Power Automate
Communications & Networking
1 34 (3.99%) DNS
1 34 (3.99%) VPN
2 33 (3.87%) BGP
2 33 (3.87%) DMZ
2 33 (3.87%) Multicast
3 8 (0.94%) Structured Cabling
4 5 (0.59%) Firewall
4 5 (0.59%) PuTTY
4 5 (0.59%) WinSCP
5 4 (0.47%) Wi-Fi
5 4 (0.47%) Wireless
6 2 (0.23%) Intrusion Detection
Database & Business Intelligence
1 108 (12.68%) Power BI
2 107 (12.56%) Data Warehouse
3 84 (9.86%) Pentaho
4 45 (5.28%) Amazon Redshift
5 43 (5.05%) Data Lake
6 33 (3.87%) Big Data
6 33 (3.87%) SQL Server
7 27 (3.17%) MySQL
8 26 (3.05%) SQL Server Integration Services
9 25 (2.93%) Relational Database
10 24 (2.82%) Hadoop
10 24 (2.82%) Metadata
11 23 (2.70%) Delta Lake
12 21 (2.46%) Amazon Athena
13 20 (2.35%) Azure SQL Database
14 19 (2.23%) Snowflake Schema
14 19 (2.23%) Tableau
15 18 (2.11%) NoSQL
16 17 (2.00%) BigQuery
16 17 (2.00%) BusinessObjects
Development Applications
1 92 (10.80%) Git
2 58 (6.81%) GitLab
3 46 (5.40%) JIRA
4 33 (3.87%) Jenkins
5 7 (0.82%) Postman
6 5 (0.59%) Artifactory
7 4 (0.47%) Bitbucket
8 3 (0.35%) Newman
9 2 (0.23%) Visual Studio
9 2 (0.23%) Yeoman
10 1 (0.12%) ER Studio
10 1 (0.12%) ERwin
10 1 (0.12%) JUnit
General
1 142 (16.67%) Social Skills
2 87 (10.21%) Analytical Skills
3 81 (9.51%) Public Sector
4 61 (7.16%) Finance
5 42 (4.93%) Banking
6 22 (2.58%) Investment Banking
7 20 (2.35%) Marketing
8 19 (2.23%) Documentation Skills
9 14 (1.64%) Manufacturing
9 14 (1.64%) Telecoms
10 13 (1.53%) Aerospace
10 13 (1.53%) Automotive
10 13 (1.53%) Retail
11 12 (1.41%) Inclusion and Diversity
12 5 (0.59%) Billing
13 4 (0.47%) Legal
13 4 (0.47%) Local Government
14 3 (0.35%) Front Office
14 3 (0.35%) Law
14 3 (0.35%) Police
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 100 (11.74%) PySpark
2 62 (7.28%) Kafka
3 23 (2.70%) JSON
4 13 (1.53%) XML
5 12 (1.41%) Pandas
6 10 (1.17%) Streamlit
7 8 (0.94%) Apache Avro
7 8 (0.94%) Protocol Buffers
7 8 (0.94%) REST
8 7 (0.82%) Apache Beam
9 6 (0.70%) Node.js
9 6 (0.70%) OpenTelemetry
9 6 (0.70%) RESTful
10 5 (0.59%) Great Expectations
10 5 (0.59%) pytest
10 5 (0.59%) YAML
11 4 (0.47%) AngularJS
11 4 (0.47%) Apache NiFi
11 4 (0.47%) React
12 3 (0.35%) Spring Boot
Miscellaneous
1 31 (3.64%) Cloud Native
2 23 (2.70%) Data Structures
3 19 (2.23%) Legacy Systems
4 16 (1.88%) Distributed Systems
5 15 (1.76%) Data Protection Act
6 10 (1.17%) Clustering
7 9 (1.06%) Driving Licence
7 9 (1.06%) Product Ownership
8 8 (0.94%) Greenfield Project
8 8 (0.94%) NHS
9 6 (0.70%) Data Centre
9 6 (0.70%) Linux Command Line
9 6 (0.70%) Onboarding
10 5 (0.59%) Hybrid Cloud
11 4 (0.47%) Data Fabric
11 4 (0.47%) iPad
11 4 (0.47%) Life Science
11 4 (0.47%) Public Cloud
11 4 (0.47%) Renewable Energy
11 4 (0.47%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 41 (4.81%) Unix
2 12 (1.41%) Linux
3 2 (0.23%) Ubuntu
4 1 (0.12%) VMS
4 1 (0.12%) Windows
Processes & Methodologies
1 315 (36.97%) Data Pipeline
2 304 (35.68%) Analytics
3 295 (34.62%) ETL
4 280 (32.86%) Data Engineering
5 253 (29.69%) Data Modelling
6 172 (20.19%) Business Intelligence
7 170 (19.95%) CI/CD
8 145 (17.02%) Agile
9 141 (16.55%) Data Integration
10 127 (14.91%) Problem-Solving
11 110 (12.91%) Migration
12 104 (12.21%) DevOps
13 87 (10.21%) Data Governance
14 82 (9.62%) Validation
15 80 (9.39%) AI
16 72 (8.45%) Decision-Making
17 70 (8.22%) Test Automation
18 67 (7.86%) Data Transformation
19 65 (7.63%) Scrum
20 63 (7.39%) Data Science
Programming Languages
1 411 (48.24%) SQL
2 269 (31.57%) Python
3 38 (4.46%) Java
4 37 (4.34%) PL/SQL
5 17 (2.00%) Bash
5 17 (2.00%) Shell Script
6 13 (1.53%) Data Analysis Expressions
7 10 (1.17%) PowerShell
8 8 (0.94%) T-SQL
9 6 (0.70%) Scala
10 5 (0.59%) C#
11 4 (0.47%) Bicep
12 2 (0.23%) Go
12 2 (0.23%) HiveQL
12 2 (0.23%) JavaScript
13 1 (0.12%) C++
13 1 (0.12%) COBOL
13 1 (0.12%) Perl
13 1 (0.12%) R
13 1 (0.12%) TypeScript
Qualifications
1 271 (31.81%) Security Cleared
2 222 (26.06%) SC Cleared
3 19 (2.23%) Degree
4 18 (2.11%) BPSS Clearance
5 14 (1.64%) DV Cleared
6 8 (0.94%) City & Guilds
7 7 (0.82%) Computer Science Degree
8 5 (0.59%) Master's Degree
9 4 (0.47%) BICSI Certification
9 4 (0.47%) SnowPro
10 3 (0.35%) CISM
10 3 (0.35%) CISSP
10 3 (0.35%) IBM Certification
11 2 (0.23%) Azure Certification
11 2 (0.23%) CEH
12 1 (0.12%) CCIE
12 1 (0.12%) CCNP
12 1 (0.12%) Cisco Certification
12 1 (0.12%) DBS Check
12 1 (0.12%) Numerate Degree
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 176 (20.66%) Data Quality
2 19 (2.23%) QA
3 15 (1.76%) GDPR
4 10 (1.17%) SLA
5 8 (0.94%) FATCA
6 4 (0.47%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 3 (0.35%) Accessibility
7 3 (0.35%) HIPAA
8 2 (0.23%) California Consumer Privacy Act
8 2 (0.23%) Disclosure Scotland
8 2 (0.23%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 1 (0.12%) GMP
9 1 (0.12%) Government Security Classifications
9 1 (0.12%) NIST
9 1 (0.12%) SNOMED CT
9 1 (0.12%) WCAG
System Software
1 42 (4.93%) Docker
2 3 (0.35%) Virtual Machines
3 2 (0.23%) HDFS
Systems Management
1 50 (5.87%) Terraform
2 45 (5.28%) Kubernetes
3 37 (4.34%) Grafana
4 10 (1.17%) Prometheus
5 8 (0.94%) Ansible
6 3 (0.35%) Rancher
7 2 (0.23%) Apache Ranger
7 2 (0.23%) Control-M
Vendors
1 134 (15.73%) Databricks
2 117 (13.73%) Oracle
3 108 (12.68%) Talend
4 90 (10.56%) Microsoft
5 76 (8.92%) Informatica
6 53 (6.22%) Denodo
7 35 (4.11%) Cisco
7 35 (4.11%) F5
8 18 (2.11%) SAP
9 17 (2.00%) Salesforce
10 16 (1.88%) Splunk
11 15 (1.76%) ServiceNow
12 14 (1.64%) Cloudera
13 11 (1.29%) Google
14 9 (1.06%) Alteryx
14 9 (1.06%) Sage
15 6 (0.70%) Dynatrace
15 6 (0.70%) Infor
15 6 (0.70%) InterSystems
16 4 (0.47%) IBM