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 25 April 2026.

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

6 months to
25 Apr 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 78 102 146
Rank change year-on-year +24 +44 +6
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 649 305 320
As % of all contract jobs in the UK excluding London 2.75% 2.38% 1.54%
As % of the Job Titles category 2.98% 2.58% 1.66%
Number of daily rates quoted 455 230 237
10th Percentile £368 £224 £163
25th Percentile £412 £393 £205
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £475 £473 £453
Median % change year-on-year +0.42% +4.42% -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 39 4 33
10th Percentile £22.66 £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% +26.05%
75th Percentile £71.50 £40.96 £80.00
90th Percentile £79.95 £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 21,745 11,824 19,258
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.05% 92.32% 92.67%
Number of daily rates quoted 12,798 7,606 11,835
10th Percentile £275 £213 £213
25th Percentile £400 £363 £363
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £488 £475 £493
Median % change year-on-year +2.63% -3.65% -1.40%
75th Percentile £588 £575 £598
90th Percentile £678 £651 £688
UK median daily rate £500 £517 £525
% change year-on-year -3.29% -1.52% -2.78%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,409 820 2,214
10th Percentile £14.50 £14.20 £12.50
25th Percentile £19.91 £18.13 £15.66
Median hourly rate £45.00 £28.75 £37.50
Median % change year-on-year +56.52% -23.33% -11.76%
75th Percentile £65.60 £65.00 £61.30
90th Percentile £78.75 £75.00 £73.75
UK median hourly rate £42.69 £29.07 £35.50
% change year-on-year +46.84% -18.11% -21.11%

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 25 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 25 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 25 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 +29 276 £469 +0.32% 51
West Midlands +33 258 £469 -3.79% 43
North of England -9 183 £465 +0.54% 85
North West 0 115 £480 +3.78% 49
South East -22 82 £500 +2.56% 96
South West -19 58 £506 +1.20% 43
Yorkshire -32 53 £465 +3.33% 17
Scotland +9 47 £425 -5.56% 12
Wales +3 21 £463 -3.65% 11
East Midlands -27 18 £498 +24.76% 8
East of England -37 17 £565 +79.37% 25
North East -18 15 £463 +2.78% 21
Northern Ireland +5 3 £410 -18.00% 6
Data Engineer
UK

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

For the 6 months to 25 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.

1 331 (51.00%) SQL
2 260 (40.06%) ETL
3 256 (39.45%) Data Pipeline
4 252 (38.83%) Analytics
5 226 (34.82%) Data Engineering
6 220 (33.90%) Security Cleared
7 219 (33.74%) Python
8 211 (32.51%) Data Modelling
9 190 (29.28%) SC Cleared
10 167 (25.73%) Azure
11 152 (23.42%) Data Quality
12 150 (23.11%) Business Intelligence
13 136 (20.96%) CI/CD
14 131 (20.18%) Agile
15 121 (18.64%) AWS
16 116 (17.87%) Databricks
17 114 (17.57%) Problem-Solving
18 104 (16.02%) Data Integration
19 97 (14.95%) Talend
20 96 (14.79%) DevOps
21 95 (14.64%) Power Platform
22 94 (14.48%) Oracle
23 90 (13.87%) Power BI
24 88 (13.56%) Git
25 84 (12.94%) Data Warehouse
25 84 (12.94%) PySpark
26 77 (11.86%) Pentaho
27 75 (11.56%) Migration
28 73 (11.25%) Azure Data Factory
29 68 (10.48%) 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 62 (9.55%) SAS
2 49 (7.55%) Apache Spark
3 39 (6.01%) Apache Airflow
4 30 (4.62%) Apache
5 9 (1.39%) Confluence
6 3 (0.46%) Jupyter
7 1 (0.15%) Apache Superset
7 1 (0.15%) Apache Synapse
7 1 (0.15%) SharePoint
Applications
1 6 (0.92%) Microsoft Excel
2 5 (0.77%) 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
1 167 (25.73%) Azure
2 121 (18.64%) AWS
3 95 (14.64%) Power Platform
4 73 (11.25%) Azure Data Factory
5 55 (8.47%) Snowflake
6 42 (6.47%) Azure Synapse Analytics
7 40 (6.16%) dbt
8 35 (5.39%) GCP
9 31 (4.78%) Amazon S3
10 25 (3.85%) Serverless
11 24 (3.70%) GitHub
12 23 (3.54%) Azure DevOps
13 19 (2.93%) OpenShift
14 18 (2.77%) AWS Lambda
15 14 (2.16%) Matillion
16 11 (1.69%) AWS CloudFormation
17 10 (1.54%) GitHub Actions
18 9 (1.39%) Power Automate
19 8 (1.23%) AWS Step Functions
20 7 (1.08%) PowerApps
Communications & Networking
1 29 (4.47%) DNS
1 29 (4.47%) VPN
2 28 (4.31%) BGP
2 28 (4.31%) DMZ
2 28 (4.31%) Multicast
3 8 (1.23%) Structured Cabling
4 5 (0.77%) PuTTY
4 5 (0.77%) WinSCP
5 3 (0.46%) Firewall
Database & Business Intelligence
1 90 (13.87%) Power BI
2 84 (12.94%) Data Warehouse
3 77 (11.86%) Pentaho
4 43 (6.63%) Data Lake
5 34 (5.24%) Amazon Redshift
6 33 (5.08%) Big Data
7 28 (4.31%) Hadoop
7 28 (4.31%) SQL Server
8 25 (3.85%) Delta Lake
8 25 (3.85%) MySQL
9 23 (3.54%) PostgreSQL
10 21 (3.24%) Metadata
11 20 (3.08%) Relational Database
11 20 (3.08%) SQL Server Integration Services
12 19 (2.93%) NoSQL
13 16 (2.47%) Tableau
14 15 (2.31%) Azure SQL Database
14 15 (2.31%) Snowflake Schema
15 14 (2.16%) BigQuery
16 13 (2.00%) Amazon RDS
Development Applications
1 88 (13.56%) Git
2 42 (6.47%) GitLab
3 40 (6.16%) JIRA
4 39 (6.01%) Jenkins
5 4 (0.62%) Bitbucket
6 2 (0.31%) Visual Studio
7 1 (0.15%) ER Studio
7 1 (0.15%) ERwin
7 1 (0.15%) JUnit
General
1 105 (16.18%) Social Skills
2 68 (10.48%) Analytical Skills
3 61 (9.40%) Finance
3 61 (9.40%) Public Sector
4 36 (5.55%) Banking
5 17 (2.62%) Investment Banking
6 13 (2.00%) Documentation Skills
7 12 (1.85%) Aerospace
7 12 (1.85%) Manufacturing
8 8 (1.23%) Telecoms
9 5 (0.77%) Retail
10 4 (0.62%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 4 (0.62%) Legal
10 4 (0.62%) Local Government
10 4 (0.62%) Marketing
11 3 (0.46%) Law
12 2 (0.31%) Advertising
12 2 (0.31%) Front Office
12 2 (0.31%) Health Technology
12 2 (0.31%) Military
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 84 (12.94%) PySpark
2 63 (9.71%) Kafka
3 17 (2.62%) JSON
4 16 (2.47%) REST
5 12 (1.85%) Pandas
6 9 (1.39%) Node.js
7 8 (1.23%) Apache Avro
7 8 (1.23%) Apache Beam
7 8 (1.23%) Protocol Buffers
8 7 (1.08%) Keycloak
9 6 (0.92%) Apache NiFi
9 6 (0.92%) OpenTelemetry
9 6 (0.92%) XML
10 5 (0.77%) YAML
11 4 (0.62%) AngularJS
11 4 (0.62%) NumPy
11 4 (0.62%) pytest
11 4 (0.62%) React
11 4 (0.62%) Streamlit
12 3 (0.46%) AWS CDK
Miscellaneous
1 26 (4.01%) Cloud Native
2 19 (2.93%) Legacy Systems
3 15 (2.31%) Data Structures
4 14 (2.16%) Distributed Systems
5 13 (2.00%) Data Protection Act
6 12 (1.85%) Clustering
7 11 (1.69%) Product Ownership
8 10 (1.54%) Hybrid Cloud
9 7 (1.08%) Greenfield Project
10 6 (0.92%) Data Centre
10 6 (0.92%) Linux Command Line
10 6 (0.92%) NHS
10 6 (0.92%) Onboarding
11 5 (0.77%) Driving Licence
12 4 (0.62%) Fibre Optics
12 4 (0.62%) Management Information System
12 4 (0.62%) Public Cloud
12 4 (0.62%) Replication
12 4 (0.62%) Self-Motivation
13 3 (0.46%) Data Fabric
Operating Systems
1 29 (4.47%) Unix
2 10 (1.54%) Linux
3 1 (0.15%) Ubuntu
3 1 (0.15%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 260 (40.06%) ETL
2 256 (39.45%) Data Pipeline
3 252 (38.83%) Analytics
4 226 (34.82%) Data Engineering
5 211 (32.51%) Data Modelling
6 150 (23.11%) Business Intelligence
7 136 (20.96%) CI/CD
8 131 (20.18%) Agile
9 114 (17.57%) Problem-Solving
10 104 (16.02%) Data Integration
11 96 (14.79%) DevOps
12 75 (11.56%) Migration
13 67 (10.32%) Scrum
14 65 (10.02%) Data Governance
15 57 (8.78%) Test Automation
16 55 (8.47%) Continuous Improvement
17 54 (8.32%) Validation
18 49 (7.55%) Decision-Making
19 46 (7.09%) Data Analytics
20 45 (6.93%) Performance Tuning
Programming Languages
1 331 (51.00%) SQL
2 219 (33.74%) Python
3 33 (5.08%) Java
4 20 (3.08%) PL/SQL
5 16 (2.47%) Shell Script
6 12 (1.85%) Bash
7 9 (1.39%) Go
7 9 (1.39%) PowerShell
8 8 (1.23%) Data Analysis Expressions
8 8 (1.23%) T-SQL
9 7 (1.08%) Scala
10 6 (0.92%) C#
11 5 (0.77%) Bicep
12 3 (0.46%) JavaScript
13 2 (0.31%) HiveQL
13 2 (0.31%) R
14 1 (0.15%) C++
14 1 (0.15%) Groovy
14 1 (0.15%) Perl
14 1 (0.15%) TypeScript
Qualifications
1 220 (33.90%) Security Cleared
2 190 (29.28%) SC Cleared
3 16 (2.47%) Degree
4 10 (1.54%) BPSS Clearance
5 9 (1.39%) Azure Certification
6 7 (1.08%) DV Cleared
7 4 (0.62%) BICSI Certification
7 4 (0.62%) City & Guilds
7 4 (0.62%) Computer Science Degree
7 4 (0.62%) Master's Degree
8 3 (0.46%) AWS Certification
8 3 (0.46%) IBM Certification
8 3 (0.46%) SnowPro
9 1 (0.15%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
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
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 152 (23.42%) Data Quality
2 13 (2.00%) QA
3 12 (1.85%) GDPR
4 8 (1.23%) FATCA
5 6 (0.92%) SLA
6 5 (0.77%) Accessibility
7 2 (0.31%) HIPAA
7 2 (0.31%) 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 (8.01%) Docker
2 2 (0.31%) HDFS
2 2 (0.31%) Virtual Machines
Systems Management
1 54 (8.32%) Kubernetes
2 35 (5.39%) Terraform
3 34 (5.24%) Grafana
4 12 (1.85%) Prometheus
5 9 (1.39%) Ansible
6 3 (0.46%) Rancher
7 2 (0.31%) Apache Ranger
7 2 (0.31%) Kibana
7 2 (0.31%) logstash
8 1 (0.15%) Control-M
Vendors
1 116 (17.87%) Databricks
2 97 (14.95%) Talend
3 94 (14.48%) Oracle
4 68 (10.48%) Microsoft
5 61 (9.40%) Informatica
6 48 (7.40%) Denodo
7 30 (4.62%) Cisco
7 30 (4.62%) F5
8 16 (2.47%) Splunk
9 13 (2.00%) ServiceNow
10 11 (1.69%) Google
10 11 (1.69%) SAP
11 10 (1.54%) Cloudera
12 7 (1.08%) Alteryx
13 6 (0.92%) Sage
14 5 (0.77%) InterSystems
15 4 (0.62%) Dataiku
15 4 (0.62%) Dynatrace
15 4 (0.62%) IBM
16 2 (0.31%) Varonis