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 £480, according to job vacancies posted in the 6 months leading up to 1 February 2026.

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

6 months to
1 Feb 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 125 98 183
Rank change year-on-year -27 +85 -7
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 352 338 243
As % of all contract jobs in the UK excluding London 1.83% 2.46% 1.16%
As % of the Job Titles category 2.02% 2.66% 1.24%
Number of daily rates quoted 261 226 185
10th Percentile £358 £298 £318
25th Percentile £405 £392 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £480 £480 £500
Median % change year-on-year +0.05% -4.05% -2.58%
75th Percentile £550 £558 £600
90th Percentile £600 £644 £688
UK median daily rate £500 £525 £525
% change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 6 4 9
10th Percentile £32.12 £25.14 £35.55
25th Percentile £38.13 £25.21 £37.50
Median hourly rate £53.75 £26.50 £62.50
Median % change year-on-year +102.83% -57.60% -
75th Percentile £65.69 £27.91 £66.25
90th Percentile £74.13 £28.19 £67.50
UK median hourly rate £52.50 £65.00 £60.50
% change year-on-year -19.23% +7.44% -3.20%

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 17,439 12,689 19,551
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 90.74% 92.48% 93.39%
Number of daily rates quoted 10,638 7,532 12,371
10th Percentile £213 £210 £213
25th Percentile £375 £363 £370
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £475 £479 £495
Median % change year-on-year -0.73% -3.33% -1.00%
75th Percentile £575 £588 £598
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 1,806 666 1,830
10th Percentile £14.00 £15.22 £13.00
25th Percentile £17.87 £20.30 £16.25
Median hourly rate £27.50 £31.64 £37.34
Median % change year-on-year -13.08% -15.27% +22.95%
75th Percentile £61.18 £63.75 £62.50
90th Percentile £70.00 £73.75 £73.75
UK median hourly rate £29.60 £32.66 £36.05
% change year-on-year -9.36% -9.40% +2.99%

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 February 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 February 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 February 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 -18 111 £515 +5.21% 44
North of England -44 103 £466 +0.81% 72
West Midlands -13 97 £519 +3.70% 36
North West -21 58 £425 -2.86% 47
South West -5 50 £550 +10.00% 43
Scotland +6 46 £450 +1.41% 24
South East -40 42 £480 -9.65% 123
Yorkshire -39 32 £500 -2.44% 20
Wales -9 16 £410 -18.00% 3
East Midlands -17 14 £455 +22.15% 8
North East -15 13 £450 -16.28% 8
East of England -33 5 £563 +76.76% 20
Northern Ireland 0 1 £430 -21.82% 1
Data Engineer
UK

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

For the 6 months to 1 February 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.

1 180 (51.14%) SQL
2 175 (49.72%) Python
3 150 (42.61%) ETL
4 136 (38.64%) Data Pipeline
5 133 (37.78%) Data Engineering
6 131 (37.22%) Analytics
7 117 (33.24%) Azure
8 111 (31.53%) Data Modelling
9 104 (29.55%) CI/CD
10 86 (24.43%) AWS
10 86 (24.43%) Security Cleared
11 82 (23.30%) Databricks
12 80 (22.73%) Data Quality
13 79 (22.44%) Business Intelligence
14 78 (22.16%) DevOps
15 77 (21.88%) Problem-Solving
16 75 (21.31%) SC Cleared
17 73 (20.74%) Agile
18 63 (17.90%) Data Warehouse
19 62 (17.61%) PySpark
20 59 (16.76%) Power Platform
21 55 (15.63%) Power BI
22 48 (13.64%) Git
22 48 (13.64%) Oracle
23 46 (13.07%) Apache Airflow
24 45 (12.78%) Azure Data Factory
24 45 (12.78%) Docker
24 45 (12.78%) Kubernetes
24 45 (12.78%) Snowflake
25 44 (12.50%) 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 46 (13.07%) Apache Airflow
2 29 (8.24%) Apache Spark
3 26 (7.39%) Apache
4 22 (6.25%) SAS
5 8 (2.27%) Confluence
6 5 (1.42%) Apache Pig
6 5 (1.42%) Oracle Application Server
7 3 (0.85%) IIS
8 1 (0.28%) Apache Synapse
8 1 (0.28%) Jupyter
8 1 (0.28%) Palantir Foundry
Applications
1 3 (0.85%) Microsoft Excel
2 1 (0.28%) Chatbot
2 1 (0.28%) Microsoft Office
Business Applications
1 1 (0.28%) Elite 3E
1 1 (0.28%) SAP S/4HANA
Cloud Services
1 117 (33.24%) Azure
2 86 (24.43%) AWS
3 59 (16.76%) Power Platform
4 45 (12.78%) Azure Data Factory
4 45 (12.78%) Snowflake
5 30 (8.52%) dbt
6 28 (7.95%) Serverless
7 26 (7.39%) Azure Synapse Analytics
8 25 (7.10%) GitHub
9 24 (6.82%) GCP
10 20 (5.68%) Amazon S3
10 20 (5.68%) AWS Lambda
11 16 (4.55%) Azure DevOps
12 14 (3.98%) AWS CloudFormation
13 9 (2.56%) GitHub Actions
14 8 (2.27%) Amazon SageMaker
14 8 (2.27%) Prefect
15 7 (1.99%) Amazon ECS
15 7 (1.99%) AWS Step Functions
15 7 (1.99%) Matillion
Communications & Networking
1 8 (2.27%) BGP
1 8 (2.27%) DMZ
1 8 (2.27%) DNS
1 8 (2.27%) Multicast
1 8 (2.27%) VPN
2 2 (0.57%) Structured Cabling
3 1 (0.28%) Internet
3 1 (0.28%) LAN
3 1 (0.28%) TCP/IP
3 1 (0.28%) WAN
3 1 (0.28%) Wi-Fi
Database & Business Intelligence
1 63 (17.90%) Data Warehouse
2 55 (15.63%) Power BI
3 35 (9.94%) Data Lake
4 33 (9.38%) Pentaho
5 26 (7.39%) Big Data
5 26 (7.39%) PostgreSQL
6 23 (6.53%) NoSQL
7 22 (6.25%) Amazon Redshift
8 20 (5.68%) Hadoop
9 16 (4.55%) Elasticsearch
10 15 (4.26%) Amazon RDS
10 15 (4.26%) SQL Server
11 14 (3.98%) Delta Lake
12 12 (3.41%) Azure SQL Database
12 12 (3.41%) Data Mining
12 12 (3.41%) Relational Database
13 10 (2.84%) Snowflake Schema
14 9 (2.56%) BigQuery
14 9 (2.56%) SQL Server Integration Services
14 9 (2.56%) Star Schema
Development Applications
1 48 (13.64%) Git
2 41 (11.65%) Jenkins
3 29 (8.24%) GitLab
4 27 (7.67%) JIRA
5 5 (1.42%) DBeaver
5 5 (1.42%) MLflow
6 3 (0.85%) Bitbucket
6 3 (0.85%) Cucumber
6 3 (0.85%) Visual Studio
7 2 (0.57%) JMeter
7 2 (0.57%) Visual Studio Code
7 2 (0.57%) Zephyr
8 1 (0.28%) Artifactory
8 1 (0.28%) Deequ
8 1 (0.28%) JUnit
8 1 (0.28%) Maven
8 1 (0.28%) Mockito
8 1 (0.28%) Selenium
8 1 (0.28%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
General
1 68 (19.32%) Social Skills
2 42 (11.93%) Analytical Skills
3 39 (11.08%) Finance
4 31 (8.81%) Public Sector
5 21 (5.97%) Banking
6 7 (1.99%) Documentation Skills
7 6 (1.70%) Investment Banking
8 4 (1.14%) Manufacturing
9 3 (0.85%) Aerospace
9 3 (0.85%) Influencing Skills
9 3 (0.85%) Legal
10 2 (0.57%) Health Technology
10 2 (0.57%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 2 (0.57%) Law
10 2 (0.57%) Presentation Skills
10 2 (0.57%) Retail
11 1 (0.28%) Games
11 1 (0.28%) Local Government
11 1 (0.28%) Marketing
11 1 (0.28%) Publishing
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 62 (17.61%) PySpark
2 30 (8.52%) Kafka
3 17 (4.83%) REST
4 12 (3.41%) Keycloak
5 11 (3.13%) RESTful
6 9 (2.56%) Pandas
7 8 (2.27%) JSON
7 8 (2.27%) NumPy
8 7 (1.99%) Flask
9 6 (1.70%) Apache NiFi
9 6 (1.70%) HTML
9 6 (1.70%) OpenTelemetry
9 6 (1.70%) Oracle GoldenGate
10 5 (1.42%) Node.js
11 4 (1.14%) pytest
11 4 (1.14%) PyTorch
11 4 (1.14%) TensorFlow
12 3 (0.85%) Elastic Stack
12 3 (0.85%) Hugging Face
12 3 (0.85%) SpaCy
Miscellaneous
1 23 (6.53%) Cloud Native
2 15 (4.26%) Algorithms
2 15 (4.26%) Product Ownership
2 15 (4.26%) Replication
3 14 (3.98%) Hybrid Cloud
4 13 (3.69%) Data Protection Act
5 11 (3.13%) Distributed Systems
6 8 (2.27%) Clustering
7 7 (1.99%) Data Structures
8 6 (1.70%) Greenfield Project
9 5 (1.42%) Legacy Systems
9 5 (1.42%) NHS
10 4 (1.14%) Distributed Computing
10 4 (1.14%) Onboarding
10 4 (1.14%) Public Cloud
11 3 (0.85%) Data Centre
11 3 (0.85%) IoT
11 3 (0.85%) Management Information System
12 2 (0.57%) CCTV
12 2 (0.57%) CMDB
Operating Systems
1 13 (3.69%) Linux
1 13 (3.69%) Unix
Processes & Methodologies
1 150 (42.61%) ETL
2 136 (38.64%) Data Pipeline
3 133 (37.78%) Data Engineering
4 131 (37.22%) Analytics
5 111 (31.53%) Data Modelling
6 104 (29.55%) CI/CD
7 79 (22.44%) Business Intelligence
8 78 (22.16%) DevOps
9 77 (21.88%) Problem-Solving
10 73 (20.74%) Agile
11 43 (12.22%) Data Integration
12 42 (11.93%) Test Automation
13 39 (11.08%) Continuous Improvement
14 38 (10.80%) Data Science
15 37 (10.51%) Machine Learning
15 37 (10.51%) Performance Tuning
16 36 (10.23%) Data Governance
17 33 (9.38%) Scrum
18 32 (9.09%) Data Transformation
19 30 (8.52%) Data Architecture
Programming Languages
1 180 (51.14%) SQL
2 175 (49.72%) Python
3 32 (9.09%) Java
4 14 (3.98%) Scala
5 13 (3.69%) PL/SQL
6 12 (3.41%) Go
7 7 (1.99%) Bash
8 6 (1.70%) Shell Script
8 6 (1.70%) T-SQL
9 5 (1.42%) Data Analysis Expressions
9 5 (1.42%) R
10 4 (1.14%) JavaScript
11 3 (0.85%) Bicep
12 2 (0.57%) C#
12 2 (0.57%) TypeScript
13 1 (0.28%) ABAP
13 1 (0.28%) Cypher
13 1 (0.28%) Groovy
Qualifications
1 86 (24.43%) Security Cleared
2 75 (21.31%) SC Cleared
3 13 (3.69%) Azure Certification
4 11 (3.13%) Degree
5 9 (2.56%) AWS Certification
6 5 (1.42%) Master's Degree
7 3 (0.85%) Computer Science Degree
7 3 (0.85%) IBM Certification
8 1 (0.28%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
8 1 (0.28%) BPSS Clearance
8 1 (0.28%) DV Cleared
8 1 (0.28%) ITIL Certification
8 1 (0.28%) Microsoft Certified Professional
8 1 (0.28%) Numerate Degree
8 1 (0.28%) Tableau Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 80 (22.73%) Data Quality
2 8 (2.27%) GDPR
3 6 (1.70%) QA
4 3 (0.85%) Accessibility
5 2 (0.57%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 1 (0.28%) Basel III
6 1 (0.28%) Disclosure Scotland
6 1 (0.28%) EU AI Act
6 1 (0.28%) FATCA
6 1 (0.28%) HIPAA
6 1 (0.28%) NCSC
6 1 (0.28%) NIST
6 1 (0.28%) WCAG
System Software
1 45 (12.78%) Docker
2 5 (1.42%) Virtual Machines
3 2 (0.57%) Active Directory
Systems Management
1 45 (12.78%) Kubernetes
2 28 (7.95%) Terraform
3 10 (2.84%) Ansible
4 8 (2.27%) Grafana
5 7 (1.99%) NetBackup
6 5 (1.42%) Kibana
6 5 (1.42%) Prometheus
7 3 (0.85%) logstash
8 2 (0.57%) Control-M
9 1 (0.28%) Kustomize
9 1 (0.28%) Puppet
Vendors
1 82 (23.30%) Databricks
2 48 (13.64%) Oracle
3 44 (12.50%) Microsoft
4 38 (10.80%) Talend
5 22 (6.25%) Denodo
6 16 (4.55%) Informatica
7 10 (2.84%) IBM
8 9 (2.56%) Cisco
9 8 (2.27%) F5
9 8 (2.27%) Google
9 8 (2.27%) Splunk
10 7 (1.99%) Alteryx
10 7 (1.99%) Commvault
10 7 (1.99%) Red Hat
11 6 (1.70%) Confluent
11 6 (1.70%) Veritas
12 5 (1.42%) ServiceNow
13 4 (1.14%) Dataiku
14 3 (0.85%) Cloudera
14 3 (0.85%) Salesforce