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 £470, according to job vacancies posted in the 6 months leading up to 3 September 2026.

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

6 months to
3 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 71 170 131
Rank change year-on-year +99 -39 +30
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 854 228 312
As % of all contract jobs in the UK excluding London 3.09% 1.50% 1.75%
As % of the Job Titles category 3.38% 1.66% 1.89%
Number of daily rates quoted 512 153 215
10th Percentile £356 £340 £173
25th Percentile £413 £410 £384
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £470 £475 £500
Median % change year-on-year -1.05% -5.00% -4.76%
75th Percentile £538 £528 £575
90th Percentile £600 £613 £625
UK median daily rate £500 £500 £525
% change year-on-year - -4.76% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 69 4 14
10th Percentile £19.34 £20.25 £61.88
25th Percentile £30.96 £23.95 £72.50
Median hourly rate £41.56 £52.85 £80.00
Median % change year-on-year -21.37% -33.94% +63.27%
75th Percentile £70.00 £79.03 -
90th Percentile £71.50 £79.61 -
UK median hourly rate £42.50 £52.50 £75.00
% change year-on-year -19.05% -30.00% +5.26%

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 25,293 13,731 16,524
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 91.60% 90.05% 92.42%
Number of daily rates quoted 14,187 8,391 9,832
10th Percentile £303 £213 £220
25th Percentile £413 £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 £685
UK median daily rate £525 £500 £525
% change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -1.69%
Number of hourly rates quoted 3,098 1,249 1,554
10th Percentile £14.50 £13.33 £14.05
25th Percentile £20.25 £16.30 £18.50
Median hourly rate £42.50 £25.15 £43.95
Median % change year-on-year +68.99% -42.78% +11.13%
75th Percentile £68.00 £54.01 £66.33
90th Percentile £78.70 £72.50 £75.00
UK median hourly rate £42.25 £25.15 £43.00
% change year-on-year +67.99% -41.51% +1.18%

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 3 September 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 3 September 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 3 September 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 +69 347 £469 +1.41% 60
West Midlands +64 287 £469 -6.20% 35
North of England +37 210 £500 +5.26% 128
South East +25 129 £459 +4.91% 138
North West +23 117 £525 +10.53% 70
South West +15 92 £525 +5.00% 62
Yorkshire -2 73 £470 -1.05% 26
East Midlands +22 60 £450 +1.98% 25
Scotland 0 59 £440 -4.86% 45
East of England +9 37 £450 - 26
North East -27 21 £515 +21.89% 32
Wales -2 16 £488 +9.55% 13
Northern Ireland +4 3 £410 -18.00% 20
Channel Islands - 1 - -
Data Engineer
UK

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

For the 6 months to 3 September 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.

1 366 (42.86%) SQL
2 311 (36.42%) Data Pipeline
3 265 (31.03%) Analytics
4 257 (30.09%) Data Engineering
5 255 (29.86%) ETL
6 249 (29.16%) Python
7 245 (28.69%) Security Cleared
8 240 (28.10%) Data Modelling
9 210 (24.59%) Azure
10 207 (24.24%) AWS
11 206 (24.12%) SC Cleared
12 169 (19.79%) Data Quality
13 150 (17.56%) Data Integration
14 146 (17.10%) Business Intelligence
15 143 (16.74%) CI/CD
16 139 (16.28%) Databricks
17 136 (15.93%) Migration
18 121 (14.17%) Agile
19 114 (13.35%) Problem-Solving
20 102 (11.94%) DevOps
21 101 (11.83%) Power Platform
22 100 (11.71%) Data Warehouse
22 100 (11.71%) Microsoft
23 97 (11.36%) Power BI
24 95 (11.12%) Oracle
25 93 (10.89%) Validation
26 89 (10.42%) Data Governance
27 88 (10.30%) AI
28 81 (9.48%) PySpark
29 75 (8.78%) Data Transformation

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 39 (4.57%) SAS
2 37 (4.33%) Apache Spark
3 36 (4.22%) Apache Airflow
4 34 (3.98%) Apache
5 20 (2.34%) Confluence
6 6 (0.70%) Jupyter
7 4 (0.47%) Palantir Foundry
8 3 (0.35%) Apache Superset
8 3 (0.35%) SharePoint
9 1 (0.12%) nginx
Applications
1 12 (1.41%) Microsoft Excel
2 5 (0.59%) Notepad++
3 4 (0.47%) Spreadsheet
4 1 (0.12%) Microsoft PowerPoint
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
2 4 (0.47%) SAP S/4HANA
3 1 (0.12%) Aladdin
3 1 (0.12%) FIS Private Capital Suite
3 1 (0.12%) MIS ActiveH
3 1 (0.12%) Oracle 11i
3 1 (0.12%) Oracle Assets
3 1 (0.12%) Oracle ERP
Cloud Services
1 210 (24.59%) Azure
2 207 (24.24%) AWS
3 101 (11.83%) Power Platform
4 71 (8.31%) Azure Data Factory
5 65 (7.61%) Snowflake
6 46 (5.39%) GCP
7 42 (4.92%) Amazon S3
8 40 (4.68%) Azure Synapse Analytics
9 37 (4.33%) Serverless
10 35 (4.10%) dbt
11 29 (3.40%) AWS Lambda
12 28 (3.28%) Azure DevOps
13 26 (3.04%) GitHub
14 17 (1.99%) Azure Databricks
15 13 (1.52%) Amazon EMR
15 13 (1.52%) AWS CloudFormation
16 12 (1.41%) GitHub Actions
17 11 (1.29%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 11 (1.29%) Matillion
18 10 (1.17%) AWS Step Functions
Communications & Networking
1 27 (3.16%) BGP
1 27 (3.16%) DMZ
1 27 (3.16%) DNS
1 27 (3.16%) Multicast
1 27 (3.16%) VPN
2 10 (1.17%) Structured Cabling
3 6 (0.70%) Firewall
4 5 (0.59%) PuTTY
4 5 (0.59%) WinSCP
5 4 (0.47%) Wi-Fi
5 4 (0.47%) Wireless
6 3 (0.35%) Intrusion Detection
7 1 (0.12%) HTTP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 100 (11.71%) Data Warehouse
2 97 (11.36%) Power BI
3 65 (7.61%) Pentaho
4 45 (5.27%) Data Lake
4 45 (5.27%) Metadata
5 38 (4.45%) Amazon Redshift
6 37 (4.33%) SQL Server
7 25 (2.93%) Relational Database
8 23 (2.69%) Amazon Athena
8 23 (2.69%) Big Data
8 23 (2.69%) SQL Server Integration Services
9 18 (2.11%) Azure SQL Database
9 18 (2.11%) Delta Lake
10 17 (1.99%) Oracle Database
11 16 (1.87%) MySQL
11 16 (1.87%) Tableau
12 15 (1.76%) BigQuery
12 15 (1.76%) BusinessObjects
12 15 (1.76%) Hadoop
13 14 (1.64%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 70 (8.20%) Git
2 49 (5.74%) GitLab
3 35 (4.10%) JIRA
4 21 (2.46%) Jenkins
5 7 (0.82%) Postman
6 5 (0.59%) Artifactory
7 3 (0.35%) Newman
8 2 (0.23%) RStudio
8 2 (0.23%) Yeoman
9 1 (0.12%) ER Studio
9 1 (0.12%) ERwin
9 1 (0.12%) MLflow
9 1 (0.12%) SonarQube
9 1 (0.12%) Sonatype Nexus
9 1 (0.12%) Toad
General
1 137 (16.04%) Social Skills
2 96 (11.24%) Analytical Skills
3 90 (10.54%) Public Sector
4 55 (6.44%) Finance
5 37 (4.33%) Banking
6 19 (2.22%) Automotive
6 19 (2.22%) Investment Banking
7 18 (2.11%) Marketing
8 15 (1.76%) Aerospace
8 15 (1.76%) Telecoms
9 14 (1.64%) Documentation Skills
10 11 (1.29%) Manufacturing
11 10 (1.17%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 10 (1.17%) Retail
12 7 (0.82%) Law
13 5 (0.59%) Billing
13 5 (0.59%) Front Office
13 5 (0.59%) Military
13 5 (0.59%) Police
14 4 (0.47%) Local Government
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 81 (9.48%) PySpark
2 55 (6.44%) Terraform
3 44 (5.15%) Kafka
4 18 (2.11%) JSON
5 10 (1.17%) Pandas
5 10 (1.17%) XML
6 9 (1.05%) REST
6 9 (1.05%) Streamlit
7 7 (0.82%) RESTful
8 5 (0.59%) Apache NiFi
8 5 (0.59%) Great Expectations
9 4 (0.47%) Apache Avro
9 4 (0.47%) AWS CDK
9 4 (0.47%) Spring
9 4 (0.47%) Spring Boot
10 3 (0.35%) .NET
10 3 (0.35%) Elastic Stack
10 3 (0.35%) pytest
10 3 (0.35%) XML Schema
11 2 (0.23%) XSD
Miscellaneous
1 35 (4.10%) Cloud Native
2 31 (3.63%) Legacy Systems
3 28 (3.28%) Data Structures
4 12 (1.41%) Management Information System
5 11 (1.29%) Reference Data
6 10 (1.17%) NHS
7 8 (0.94%) Driving Licence
8 7 (0.82%) Data Protection Act
8 7 (0.82%) Greenfield Project
8 7 (0.82%) Onboarding
9 6 (0.70%) Distributed Systems
9 6 (0.70%) Linux Command Line
10 5 (0.59%) Product Ownership
11 4 (0.47%) Data Centre
11 4 (0.47%) Data Fabric
11 4 (0.47%) Fibre Optics
11 4 (0.47%) iPad
12 3 (0.35%) Derivative
12 3 (0.35%) Life Science
12 3 (0.35%) SCADA
Operating Systems
1 34 (3.98%) Unix
2 15 (1.76%) Linux
3 2 (0.23%) Ubuntu
3 2 (0.23%) Windows
4 1 (0.12%) VMS
4 1 (0.12%) Windows Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 311 (36.42%) Data Pipeline
2 265 (31.03%) Analytics
3 257 (30.09%) Data Engineering
4 255 (29.86%) ETL
5 240 (28.10%) Data Modelling
6 150 (17.56%) Data Integration
7 146 (17.10%) Business Intelligence
8 143 (16.74%) CI/CD
9 136 (15.93%) Migration
10 121 (14.17%) Agile
11 114 (13.35%) Problem-Solving
12 102 (11.94%) DevOps
13 93 (10.89%) Validation
14 89 (10.42%) Data Governance
15 88 (10.30%) AI
16 75 (8.78%) Data Transformation
17 74 (8.67%) Decision-Making
18 71 (8.31%) Data Migration
19 63 (7.38%) Test Automation
20 62 (7.26%) Lakehouse
Programming Languages
1 366 (42.86%) SQL
2 249 (29.16%) Python
3 31 (3.63%) PL/SQL
4 23 (2.69%) Java
5 15 (1.76%) Bash
6 12 (1.41%) Shell Script
6 12 (1.41%) T-SQL
7 11 (1.29%) Data Analysis Expressions
8 7 (0.82%) Scala
9 6 (0.70%) PowerShell
10 2 (0.23%) JavaScript
10 2 (0.23%) R
11 1 (0.12%) Bicep
11 1 (0.12%) C++
11 1 (0.12%) COBOL
11 1 (0.12%) Kusto Query Language
11 1 (0.12%) Perl
Qualifications
1 245 (28.69%) Security Cleared
2 206 (24.12%) SC Cleared
3 18 (2.11%) Degree
4 16 (1.87%) BPSS Clearance
4 16 (1.87%) DV Cleared
5 9 (1.05%) Computer Science Degree
6 8 (0.94%) City & Guilds
7 4 (0.47%) BICSI Certification
7 4 (0.47%) SnowPro
8 3 (0.35%) Azure Certification
8 3 (0.35%) CEH
8 3 (0.35%) CISM
8 3 (0.35%) CISSP
8 3 (0.35%) Master's Degree
9 2 (0.23%) AWS Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 169 (19.79%) Data Quality
2 25 (2.93%) QA
3 14 (1.64%) GDPR
4 7 (0.82%) SLA
5 5 (0.59%) FATCA
6 4 (0.47%) Accessibility
6 4 (0.47%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 3 (0.35%) Disclosure Scotland
7 3 (0.35%) HIPAA
8 2 (0.23%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 1 (0.12%) California Consumer Privacy Act
9 1 (0.12%) Government Security Classifications
9 1 (0.12%) SNOMED CT
9 1 (0.12%) WCAG
System Software
1 30 (3.51%) Docker
2 1 (0.12%) Virtual Machines
Systems Management
1 29 (3.40%) Grafana
2 28 (3.28%) Kubernetes
3 10 (1.17%) Ansible
4 4 (0.47%) Prometheus
5 2 (0.23%) Apache Ranger
5 2 (0.23%) Control-M
5 2 (0.23%) logstash
6 1 (0.12%) Kibana
6 1 (0.12%) Progress Chef
Vendors
1 139 (16.28%) Databricks
2 100 (11.71%) Microsoft
3 95 (11.12%) Oracle
4 75 (8.78%) Talend
5 49 (5.74%) Informatica
6 38 (4.45%) Denodo
7 27 (3.16%) Cisco
7 27 (3.16%) F5
8 17 (1.99%) Salesforce
8 17 (1.99%) SAP
9 15 (1.76%) Google
10 8 (0.94%) Cloudera
10 8 (0.94%) Sage
11 6 (0.70%) InterSystems
11 6 (0.70%) Palantir
11 6 (0.70%) ServiceNow
11 6 (0.70%) SYSPRO
12 5 (0.59%) Dynatrace
12 5 (0.59%) Infor
13 4 (0.47%) PagerDuty