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 31 July 2026.

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

6 months to
31 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 62 159 125
Rank change year-on-year +97 -34 +34
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 915 246 333
As % of all contract jobs in the UK excluding London 3.37% 1.63% 1.76%
As % of the Job Titles category 3.66% 1.80% 1.92%
Number of daily rates quoted 574 165 247
10th Percentile £363 £327 £170
25th Percentile £413 £410 £206
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £469 £475 £450
Median % change year-on-year -1.26% +5.56% -14.29%
75th Percentile £538 £538 £544
90th Percentile £600 £635 £612
UK median daily rate £500 £500 £518
% change year-on-year - -3.45% -5.84%
Number of hourly rates quoted 72 5 26
10th Percentile £19.53 £17.96 £39.00
25th Percentile £33.25 £18.22 £67.81
Median hourly rate £45.00 £27.00 £80.00
Median % change year-on-year +66.67% -66.25% +63.27%
75th Percentile £70.00 £78.70 -
90th Percentile £74.88 £79.48 -
UK median hourly rate £50.00 £52.50 £75.00
% change year-on-year -4.76% -30.00% -3.23%

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 25,006 13,642 17,384
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.15% 90.46% 92.02%
Number of daily rates quoted 14,174 8,400 10,629
10th Percentile £306 £220 £217
25th Percentile £410 £363 £375
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £475 £500
Median % change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
75th Percentile £600 £575 £600
90th Percentile £688 £650 £675
UK median daily rate £525 £500 £525
% change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -2.02%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,942 1,187 1,875
10th Percentile £14.96 £13.50 £13.61
25th Percentile £21.00 £16.67 £18.00
Median hourly rate £45.00 £25.15 £43.00
Median % change year-on-year +78.93% -41.51% +8.72%
75th Percentile £68.00 £55.00 £65.00
90th Percentile £80.00 £75.00 £75.00
UK median hourly rate £42.50 £25.15 £42.50
% change year-on-year +68.99% -40.82% -1.16%

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 31 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 31 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 31 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 +63 391 £460 +2.22% 40
West Midlands +55 339 £459 -0.22% 26
North of England +30 231 £475 - 80
North West +20 136 £525 +10.53% 37
South East +19 127 £469 +10.35% 97
South West +9 86 £525 +2.44% 35
Yorkshire -12 73 £475 - 18
Scotland +30 69 £425 -0.70% 10
East Midlands +22 52 £475 +13.10% 14
East of England +5 35 £520 +63.52% 14
North East -26 23 £515 +21.18% 26
Wales -2 17 £488 +9.55% 11
Northern Ireland +1 3 £410 -18.00% 3
Data Engineer
UK

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

For the 6 months to 31 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.

1 421 (46.01%) SQL
2 338 (36.94%) Data Pipeline
3 308 (33.66%) Analytics
4 301 (32.90%) ETL
5 280 (30.60%) Data Engineering
6 276 (30.16%) Python
7 270 (29.51%) Security Cleared
8 267 (29.18%) Data Modelling
9 224 (24.48%) SC Cleared
10 215 (23.50%) Azure
11 200 (21.86%) AWS
12 193 (21.09%) Data Quality
13 174 (19.02%) Business Intelligence
14 173 (18.91%) CI/CD
15 155 (16.94%) Data Integration
16 146 (15.96%) Agile
17 138 (15.08%) Databricks
18 129 (14.10%) Migration
19 124 (13.55%) Problem-Solving
20 116 (12.68%) Data Warehouse
21 113 (12.35%) Oracle
22 111 (12.13%) DevOps
22 111 (12.13%) Power Platform
23 107 (11.69%) Power BI
24 102 (11.15%) Talend
24 102 (11.15%) Validation
25 101 (11.04%) Microsoft
26 95 (10.38%) Data Governance
27 94 (10.27%) PySpark
28 93 (10.16%) Git

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 (6.99%) SAS
2 47 (5.14%) Apache Spark
3 35 (3.83%) Apache
4 34 (3.72%) Apache Airflow
5 23 (2.51%) Confluence
6 6 (0.66%) Jupyter
7 2 (0.22%) Apache Superset
7 2 (0.22%) Palantir Foundry
8 1 (0.11%) SharePoint
Applications
1 9 (0.98%) Microsoft Excel
2 5 (0.55%) Notepad++
3 2 (0.22%) Spreadsheet
4 1 (0.11%) Microsoft PowerPoint
Business Applications
1 6 (0.66%) Dynamics CRM
2 5 (0.55%) Infor LN
3 4 (0.44%) NetSuite
3 4 (0.44%) Sage X3
4 3 (0.33%) SAP S/4HANA
5 1 (0.11%) Aladdin
5 1 (0.11%) FIS Private Capital Suite
5 1 (0.11%) MIS ActiveH
5 1 (0.11%) NEC Housing
5 1 (0.11%) Oracle 11i
5 1 (0.11%) Oracle Assets
5 1 (0.11%) Oracle ERP
Cloud Services
1 215 (23.50%) Azure
2 200 (21.86%) AWS
3 111 (12.13%) Power Platform
4 91 (9.95%) Azure Data Factory
5 77 (8.42%) Snowflake
6 50 (5.46%) Azure Synapse Analytics
7 49 (5.36%) GCP
8 44 (4.81%) dbt
9 43 (4.70%) Amazon S3
10 37 (4.04%) Serverless
11 29 (3.17%) Azure DevOps
12 26 (2.84%) AWS Lambda
12 26 (2.84%) GitHub
13 17 (1.86%) OpenShift
14 16 (1.75%) Matillion
15 14 (1.53%) GitHub Actions
16 13 (1.42%) Amazon EMR
17 12 (1.31%) Amazon CloudWatch
18 11 (1.20%) AWS Step Functions
18 11 (1.20%) Azure Functions
Communications & Networking
1 32 (3.50%) DNS
1 32 (3.50%) VPN
2 31 (3.39%) BGP
2 31 (3.39%) DMZ
2 31 (3.39%) Multicast
3 8 (0.87%) Structured Cabling
4 6 (0.66%) Firewall
5 5 (0.55%) PuTTY
5 5 (0.55%) WinSCP
6 4 (0.44%) Wi-Fi
6 4 (0.44%) Wireless
7 3 (0.33%) Intrusion Detection
Database & Business Intelligence
1 116 (12.68%) Data Warehouse
2 107 (11.69%) Power BI
3 82 (8.96%) Pentaho
4 49 (5.36%) Data Lake
5 43 (4.70%) Amazon Redshift
6 37 (4.04%) SQL Server
7 36 (3.93%) Metadata
8 29 (3.17%) Big Data
9 28 (3.06%) SQL Server Integration Services
10 27 (2.95%) Relational Database
11 24 (2.62%) Hadoop
11 24 (2.62%) MySQL
12 23 (2.51%) Amazon Athena
12 23 (2.51%) Delta Lake
13 21 (2.30%) Azure SQL Database
14 18 (1.97%) BigQuery
15 17 (1.86%) BusinessObjects
15 17 (1.86%) Snowflake Schema
15 17 (1.86%) Tableau
16 15 (1.64%) NoSQL
Development Applications
1 93 (10.16%) Git
2 56 (6.12%) GitLab
3 43 (4.70%) JIRA
4 34 (3.72%) Jenkins
5 7 (0.77%) Postman
6 5 (0.55%) Artifactory
7 4 (0.44%) Bitbucket
8 3 (0.33%) Newman
9 2 (0.22%) Yeoman
10 1 (0.11%) ER Studio
10 1 (0.11%) ERwin
10 1 (0.11%) JUnit
10 1 (0.11%) MLflow
10 1 (0.11%) SonarQube
10 1 (0.11%) Sonatype Nexus
General
1 139 (15.19%) Social Skills
2 93 (10.16%) Analytical Skills
3 88 (9.62%) Public Sector
4 63 (6.89%) Finance
5 42 (4.59%) Banking
6 22 (2.40%) Marketing
7 21 (2.30%) Investment Banking
8 19 (2.08%) Automotive
9 18 (1.97%) Documentation Skills
10 17 (1.86%) Telecoms
11 13 (1.42%) Manufacturing
11 13 (1.42%) Retail
12 12 (1.31%) Aerospace
13 11 (1.20%) Inclusion and Diversity
14 5 (0.55%) Billing
14 5 (0.55%) Front Office
14 5 (0.55%) Local Government
14 5 (0.55%) Police
15 4 (0.44%) Law
15 4 (0.44%) Legal
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 94 (10.27%) PySpark
2 62 (6.78%) Kafka
3 20 (2.19%) JSON
4 13 (1.42%) Pandas
5 12 (1.31%) XML
6 10 (1.09%) Streamlit
7 7 (0.77%) Apache Avro
7 7 (0.77%) Apache Beam
7 7 (0.77%) Protocol Buffers
8 6 (0.66%) Apache NiFi
8 6 (0.66%) Node.js
8 6 (0.66%) REST
8 6 (0.66%) RESTful
9 5 (0.55%) Great Expectations
9 5 (0.55%) OpenTelemetry
9 5 (0.55%) pytest
10 4 (0.44%) AngularJS
10 4 (0.44%) AWS CDK
10 4 (0.44%) React
10 4 (0.44%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 35 (3.83%) Cloud Native
2 27 (2.95%) Data Structures
3 26 (2.84%) Legacy Systems
4 15 (1.64%) Distributed Systems
5 10 (1.09%) Data Protection Act
6 9 (0.98%) Clustering
6 9 (0.98%) Driving Licence
6 9 (0.98%) NHS
7 8 (0.87%) Management Information System
7 8 (0.87%) Product Ownership
8 7 (0.77%) Greenfield Project
8 7 (0.77%) Onboarding
9 6 (0.66%) Linux Command Line
9 6 (0.66%) Reference Data
10 5 (0.55%) Data Centre
11 4 (0.44%) Data Fabric
11 4 (0.44%) Fibre Optics
11 4 (0.44%) Hybrid Cloud
11 4 (0.44%) iPad
11 4 (0.44%) Life Science
Operating Systems
1 38 (4.15%) Unix
2 14 (1.53%) Linux
3 2 (0.22%) Ubuntu
4 1 (0.11%) VMS
4 1 (0.11%) Windows
Processes & Methodologies
1 338 (36.94%) Data Pipeline
2 308 (33.66%) Analytics
3 301 (32.90%) ETL
4 280 (30.60%) Data Engineering
5 267 (29.18%) Data Modelling
6 174 (19.02%) Business Intelligence
7 173 (18.91%) CI/CD
8 155 (16.94%) Data Integration
9 146 (15.96%) Agile
10 129 (14.10%) Migration
11 124 (13.55%) Problem-Solving
12 111 (12.13%) DevOps
13 102 (11.15%) Validation
14 95 (10.38%) Data Governance
15 82 (8.96%) AI
16 78 (8.52%) Decision-Making
17 76 (8.31%) Test Automation
18 72 (7.87%) Data Transformation
19 67 (7.32%) Scrum
20 66 (7.21%) Data Migration
Programming Languages
1 421 (46.01%) SQL
2 276 (30.16%) Python
3 37 (4.04%) PL/SQL
4 34 (3.72%) Java
5 18 (1.97%) Shell Script
6 16 (1.75%) Bash
7 13 (1.42%) Data Analysis Expressions
7 13 (1.42%) T-SQL
8 10 (1.09%) PowerShell
9 6 (0.66%) Scala
10 4 (0.44%) Bicep
10 4 (0.44%) C#
11 2 (0.22%) Go
11 2 (0.22%) HiveQL
11 2 (0.22%) JavaScript
12 1 (0.11%) C++
12 1 (0.11%) COBOL
12 1 (0.11%) Perl
12 1 (0.11%) R
12 1 (0.11%) TypeScript
Qualifications
1 270 (29.51%) Security Cleared
2 224 (24.48%) SC Cleared
3 20 (2.19%) BPSS Clearance
4 17 (1.86%) DV Cleared
5 16 (1.75%) Degree
6 8 (0.87%) City & Guilds
7 6 (0.66%) Computer Science Degree
8 4 (0.44%) BICSI Certification
8 4 (0.44%) CISM
8 4 (0.44%) CISSP
8 4 (0.44%) SnowPro
9 3 (0.33%) Azure Certification
9 3 (0.33%) CEH
9 3 (0.33%) Master's Degree
10 2 (0.22%) AWS Certification
11 1 (0.11%) CCIE
11 1 (0.11%) CCNP
11 1 (0.11%) Cisco Certification
11 1 (0.11%) DBS Check
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 193 (21.09%) Data Quality
2 24 (2.62%) QA
3 15 (1.64%) GDPR
4 10 (1.09%) SLA
5 7 (0.77%) FATCA
6 6 (0.66%) Accessibility
7 4 (0.44%) HIPAA
7 4 (0.44%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 2 (0.22%) California Consumer Privacy Act
8 2 (0.22%) Disclosure Scotland
8 2 (0.22%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 1 (0.11%) GMP
9 1 (0.11%) Government Security Classifications
9 1 (0.11%) NIST
9 1 (0.11%) SNOMED CT
9 1 (0.11%) WCAG
System Software
1 43 (4.70%) Docker
2 2 (0.22%) HDFS
3 1 (0.11%) Virtual Machines
Systems Management
1 54 (5.90%) Terraform
2 46 (5.03%) Kubernetes
3 36 (3.93%) Grafana
4 10 (1.09%) Ansible
4 10 (1.09%) Prometheus
5 3 (0.33%) Control-M
5 3 (0.33%) Rancher
6 2 (0.22%) Apache Ranger
7 1 (0.11%) Kibana
7 1 (0.11%) logstash
Vendors
1 138 (15.08%) Databricks
2 113 (12.35%) Oracle
3 102 (11.15%) Talend
4 101 (11.04%) Microsoft
5 75 (8.20%) Informatica
6 50 (5.46%) Denodo
7 33 (3.61%) Cisco
7 33 (3.61%) F5
8 20 (2.19%) SAP
9 17 (1.86%) Salesforce
10 14 (1.53%) Cloudera
10 14 (1.53%) ServiceNow
11 13 (1.42%) Splunk
12 11 (1.20%) Google
13 10 (1.09%) Sage
14 6 (0.66%) Dynatrace
14 6 (0.66%) Infor
14 6 (0.66%) InterSystems
15 5 (0.55%) SYSPRO
16 4 (0.44%) PagerDuty