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 £488, according to job vacancies posted in the 6 months leading up to 31 December 2025.

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

6 months to
31 Dec 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 159 105 187
Rank change year-on-year -54 +82 -13
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 300 336 242
As % of all contract jobs in the UK excluding London 1.64% 2.30% 1.25%
As % of the Job Titles category 1.81% 2.49% 1.34%
Number of daily rates quoted 219 223 186
10th Percentile £349 £318 £350
25th Percentile £405 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £488 £490 £513
Median % change year-on-year -0.51% -4.39% -2.38%
75th Percentile £551 £575 £600
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 £34.90
25th Percentile £31.81 £25.21 £45.63
Median hourly rate £51.00 £26.50 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +92.45% -59.23% +4.00%
75th Percentile £71.69 £27.91 £67.50
90th Percentile £76.08 £28.19 -
UK median hourly rate £54.00 £53.75 £62.36
% change year-on-year +0.47% -13.80% -0.63%

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 16,535 13,499 18,107
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 90.38% 92.35% 93.43%
Number of daily rates quoted 10,172 8,023 11,756
10th Percentile £213 £213 £213
25th Percentile £375 £363 £375
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £475 £485 £500
Median % change year-on-year -2.06% -3.00% -
75th Percentile £575 £588 £600
90th Percentile £675 £676 £688
UK median daily rate £500 £525 £525
% change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 1,650 757 1,273
10th Percentile £13.95 £15.22 £14.16
25th Percentile £17.69 £20.24 £18.67
Median hourly rate £25.15 £31.76 £46.18
Median % change year-on-year -20.81% -31.23% +77.62%
75th Percentile £58.63 £63.75 £65.00
90th Percentile £70.00 £71.51 £77.00
UK median hourly rate £26.00 £32.50 £45.00
% change year-on-year -20.00% -27.78% +38.46%

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 December 2025.

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 December 2025.

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 December 2025. 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 -44 92 £466 +2.19% 327
Midlands -12 87 £523 +5.56% 229
West Midlands -14 73 £525 +5.00% 131
North West -20 47 £415 -7.78% 177
Scotland +14 46 £450 +2.86% 59
South West +9 41 £550 +22.22% 171
Yorkshire -44 32 £500 +4.17% 120
South East -58 32 £475 -12.64% 416
East Midlands -7 14 £455 +27.81% 87
North East -8 13 £450 -1.64% 30
Wales -16 11 £460 -8.00% 34
East of England -28 6 £625 +96.54% 208
Northern Ireland -8 1 £430 -13.57% 23
Data Engineer
UK

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

For the 6 months to 31 December 2025, 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.

1 174 (58.00%) Python
2 163 (54.33%) SQL
3 129 (43.00%) ETL
4 123 (41.00%) Data Pipeline
5 113 (37.67%) Data Engineering
6 109 (36.33%) Azure
7 103 (34.33%) Analytics
8 97 (32.33%) CI/CD
9 88 (29.33%) Data Modelling
10 86 (28.67%) AWS
11 80 (26.67%) Databricks
12 76 (25.33%) DevOps
13 72 (24.00%) Business Intelligence
14 69 (23.00%) Agile
15 66 (22.00%) Data Warehouse
16 64 (21.33%) Problem-Solving
17 62 (20.67%) Data Quality
18 56 (18.67%) PySpark
19 54 (18.00%) Power Platform
20 53 (17.67%) Security Cleared
21 50 (16.67%) Power BI
22 47 (15.67%) Git
23 46 (15.33%) Docker
24 45 (15.00%) Apache Airflow
24 45 (15.00%) Azure Data Factory
24 45 (15.00%) Kubernetes
24 45 (15.00%) SC Cleared
25 44 (14.67%) Jenkins
26 43 (14.33%) Snowflake
27 41 (13.67%) Test Automation

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 45 (15.00%) Apache Airflow
2 30 (10.00%) Apache Spark
3 29 (9.67%) Apache
4 16 (5.33%) SAS
5 8 (2.67%) Confluence
6 5 (1.67%) Apache Pig
6 5 (1.67%) Oracle Application Server
7 3 (1.00%) IIS
8 1 (0.33%) Apache Synapse
8 1 (0.33%) Jupyter
Applications
1 1 (0.33%) Chatbot
1 1 (0.33%) SPSS
1 1 (0.33%) Stata
Business Applications
1 2 (0.67%) SAP S/4HANA
Cloud Services
1 109 (36.33%) Azure
2 86 (28.67%) AWS
3 54 (18.00%) Power Platform
4 45 (15.00%) Azure Data Factory
5 43 (14.33%) Snowflake
6 31 (10.33%) GCP
7 28 (9.33%) GitHub
8 26 (8.67%) Azure Synapse Analytics
9 25 (8.33%) dbt
9 25 (8.33%) Serverless
10 24 (8.00%) Amazon S3
11 17 (5.67%) AWS Lambda
12 13 (4.33%) AWS CloudFormation
12 13 (4.33%) Azure DevOps
13 12 (4.00%) GitHub Actions
14 8 (2.67%) Amazon SageMaker
15 7 (2.33%) Amazon ECS
15 7 (2.33%) AWS Step Functions
15 7 (2.33%) CloudBees
15 7 (2.33%) Prefect
Communications & Networking
1 4 (1.33%) DNS
1 4 (1.33%) TCP/IP
2 3 (1.00%) SSH
2 3 (1.00%) Structured Cabling
3 2 (0.67%) BGP
3 2 (0.67%) DMZ
3 2 (0.67%) Multicast
3 2 (0.67%) SSL
3 2 (0.67%) VPN
3 2 (0.67%) Wi-Fi
4 1 (0.33%) Internet
4 1 (0.33%) LAN
4 1 (0.33%) WAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 66 (22.00%) Data Warehouse
2 50 (16.67%) Power BI
3 35 (11.67%) Data Lake
4 30 (10.00%) Big Data
5 27 (9.00%) NoSQL
5 27 (9.00%) PostgreSQL
6 25 (8.33%) Hadoop
7 24 (8.00%) Pentaho
8 19 (6.33%) Amazon Redshift
9 17 (5.67%) Elasticsearch
10 16 (5.33%) Delta Lake
11 13 (4.33%) Data Mining
11 13 (4.33%) Relational Database
11 13 (4.33%) SQL Server
12 12 (4.00%) Amazon RDS
12 12 (4.00%) Azure SQL Database
13 10 (3.33%) BigQuery
14 8 (2.67%) RDBMS
14 8 (2.67%) Snowflake Schema
14 8 (2.67%) Tableau
Development Applications
1 47 (15.67%) Git
2 44 (14.67%) Jenkins
3 26 (8.67%) GitLab
4 25 (8.33%) JIRA
5 8 (2.67%) MLflow
6 5 (1.67%) DBeaver
6 5 (1.67%) Visual Studio Code
7 4 (1.33%) SonarQube
8 3 (1.00%) Bitbucket
8 3 (1.00%) Cucumber
8 3 (1.00%) Poetry
8 3 (1.00%) PyCharm
8 3 (1.00%) Sonatype Nexus
9 2 (0.67%) Artifactory
9 2 (0.67%) JMeter
9 2 (0.67%) Visual Studio
9 2 (0.67%) Zephyr
10 1 (0.33%) JUnit
10 1 (0.33%) Maven
10 1 (0.33%) Selenium
General
1 59 (19.67%) Social Skills
2 40 (13.33%) Finance
3 34 (11.33%) Analytical Skills
4 21 (7.00%) Public Sector
5 18 (6.00%) Banking
6 6 (2.00%) Documentation Skills
7 3 (1.00%) Influencing Skills
7 3 (1.00%) Investment Banking
7 3 (1.00%) Legal
7 3 (1.00%) Manufacturing
8 2 (0.67%) Aerospace
8 2 (0.67%) Health Technology
8 2 (0.67%) Pharmaceutical
8 2 (0.67%) Presentation Skills
8 2 (0.67%) Retail
8 2 (0.67%) Tech for Good
9 1 (0.33%) Inclusion and Diversity
9 1 (0.33%) Local Government
9 1 (0.33%) Marketing
9 1 (0.33%) Telecoms
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 56 (18.67%) PySpark
2 30 (10.00%) Kafka
3 17 (5.67%) REST
4 14 (4.67%) Pandas
4 14 (4.67%) RESTful
5 13 (4.33%) NumPy
6 12 (4.00%) Flask
6 12 (4.00%) Keycloak
7 7 (2.33%) Apache NiFi
7 7 (2.33%) Elastic Stack
8 6 (2.00%) HTML
8 6 (2.00%) OpenTelemetry
9 5 (1.67%) JSON
9 5 (1.67%) Node.js
9 5 (1.67%) Oracle GoldenGate
10 4 (1.33%) OAuth
10 4 (1.33%) OAuth2
10 4 (1.33%) pytest
11 3 (1.00%) PyTorch
11 3 (1.00%) TensorFlow
Miscellaneous
1 22 (7.33%) Cloud Native
2 15 (5.00%) Replication
3 14 (4.67%) Algorithms
3 14 (4.67%) Product Ownership
4 13 (4.33%) Hybrid Cloud
5 10 (3.33%) Distributed Systems
6 8 (2.67%) Data Protection Act
7 7 (2.33%) Clustering
8 6 (2.00%) Data Structures
8 6 (2.00%) Greenfield Project
8 6 (2.00%) Legacy Systems
8 6 (2.00%) NHS
9 4 (1.33%) IoT
10 3 (1.00%) Distributed Computing
10 3 (1.00%) Driving Licence
10 3 (1.00%) Fibre Optics
11 2 (0.67%) AI Agents
11 2 (0.67%) Distributed Architecture
11 2 (0.67%) Legacy Applications
11 2 (0.67%) Onboarding
Operating Systems
1 19 (6.33%) Linux
2 8 (2.67%) Unix
Processes & Methodologies
1 129 (43.00%) ETL
2 123 (41.00%) Data Pipeline
3 113 (37.67%) Data Engineering
4 103 (34.33%) Analytics
5 97 (32.33%) CI/CD
6 88 (29.33%) Data Modelling
7 76 (25.33%) DevOps
8 72 (24.00%) Business Intelligence
9 69 (23.00%) Agile
10 64 (21.33%) Problem-Solving
11 41 (13.67%) Test Automation
12 40 (13.33%) Data Integration
13 38 (12.67%) Machine Learning
14 33 (11.00%) Performance Tuning
14 33 (11.00%) Visualisation
15 32 (10.67%) Scrum
16 30 (10.00%) Continuous Improvement
17 29 (9.67%) Data Governance
17 29 (9.67%) Data Science
18 27 (9.00%) Data Architecture
Programming Languages
1 174 (58.00%) Python
2 163 (54.33%) SQL
3 29 (9.67%) Java
4 15 (5.00%) Scala
5 13 (4.33%) PL/SQL
6 12 (4.00%) Bash
6 12 (4.00%) Go
7 6 (2.00%) R
8 5 (1.67%) Groovy
8 5 (1.67%) Shell Script
8 5 (1.67%) T-SQL
9 4 (1.33%) Data Analysis Expressions
9 4 (1.33%) JavaScript
10 3 (1.00%) TypeScript
11 2 (0.67%) ABAP
11 2 (0.67%) Bicep
12 1 (0.33%) C#
12 1 (0.33%) Cypher
Qualifications
1 53 (17.67%) Security Cleared
2 45 (15.00%) SC Cleared
3 13 (4.33%) Azure Certification
4 10 (3.33%) AWS Certification
5 7 (2.33%) Degree
6 4 (1.33%) Master's Degree
7 3 (1.00%) Computer Science Degree
8 2 (0.67%) DV Cleared
9 1 (0.33%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
9 1 (0.33%) HND
9 1 (0.33%) ITIL Certification
9 1 (0.33%) MCP
9 1 (0.33%) Tableau Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 62 (20.67%) Data Quality
2 9 (3.00%) GDPR
3 6 (2.00%) QA
4 3 (1.00%) 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 46 (15.33%) Docker
2 3 (1.00%) Virtual Machines
3 2 (0.67%) Active Directory
Systems Management
1 45 (15.00%) Kubernetes
2 29 (9.67%) Terraform
3 12 (4.00%) Ansible
4 8 (2.67%) Grafana
4 8 (2.67%) NetBackup
5 6 (2.00%) Kibana
5 6 (2.00%) Prometheus
6 4 (1.33%) logstash
7 3 (1.00%) Argo
7 3 (1.00%) Istio
8 2 (0.67%) Control-M
8 2 (0.67%) Kustomize
9 1 (0.33%) Puppet
Vendors
1 80 (26.67%) Databricks
2 38 (12.67%) Oracle
3 35 (11.67%) Microsoft
4 25 (8.33%) Talend
5 16 (5.33%) Denodo
6 11 (3.67%) Red Hat
7 10 (3.33%) Informatica
8 9 (3.00%) Google
9 8 (2.67%) Commvault
10 7 (2.33%) IBM
10 7 (2.33%) Veritas
11 6 (2.00%) Cloudera
11 6 (2.00%) Confluent
11 6 (2.00%) ServiceNow
12 5 (1.67%) Splunk
13 4 (1.33%) SAP
14 3 (1.00%) Cisco
14 3 (1.00%) Salesforce
15 2 (0.67%) Brio
15 2 (0.67%) F5