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 9 June 2026.

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

6 months to
9 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 65 128 138
Rank change year-on-year +63 +10 +23
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 764 256 331
As % of all contract jobs in the UK excluding London 3.02% 1.95% 1.57%
As % of the Job Titles category 3.28% 2.12% 1.70%
Number of daily rates quoted 527 193 247
10th Percentile £368 £313 £167
25th Percentile £413 £400 £199
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £469 £463 £450
Median % change year-on-year +1.50% +2.78% -14.29%
75th Percentile £538 £513 £538
90th Percentile £600 £625 £588
UK median daily rate £500 £500 £500
% change year-on-year - - -9.09%
Number of hourly rates quoted 52 4 33
10th Percentile £19.34 £17.92 £37.50
25th Percentile £36.25 £18.11 £58.75
Median hourly rate £50.00 £48.46 £75.00
Median % change year-on-year +3.18% -35.39% -0.66%
75th Percentile £62.69 £79.03 £80.00
90th Percentile £75.00 £79.61 -
UK median hourly rate £51.25 £52.50 £67.50
% change year-on-year -2.38% -22.22% -10.60%

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 23,260 12,063 19,476
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 91.84% 91.69% 92.43%
Number of daily rates quoted 13,370 7,616 11,646
10th Percentile £300 £213 £213
25th Percentile £405 £363 £363
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £475 £488
Median % change year-on-year +5.26% -2.56% -2.50%
75th Percentile £592 £575 £591
90th Percentile £687 £650 £683
UK median daily rate £513 £500 £525
% change year-on-year +2.50% -4.76% -2.78%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,691 898 2,475
10th Percentile £14.82 £13.50 £12.53
25th Percentile £20.09 £16.95 £15.86
Median hourly rate £45.00 £25.15 £40.00
Median % change year-on-year +78.93% -37.13% -5.88%
75th Percentile £67.50 £60.00 £62.50
90th Percentile £78.75 £75.00 £74.22
UK median hourly rate £43.61 £28.00 £37.50
% change year-on-year +55.73% -25.33% -16.67%

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 9 June 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 9 June 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 9 June 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 +51 309 £469 +4.22% 38
West Midlands +44 290 £469 +1.96% 32
North of England +8 204 £465 -2.11% 69
North West +14 127 £480 +1.05% 37
South East +16 107 £475 +11.76% 92
South West +18 82 £506 +5.14% 28
Scotland +17 61 £430 -5.75% 10
Yorkshire -25 58 £465 +3.33% 14
Wales +8 22 £450 +3.45% 11
North East -15 19 £450 -5.26% 18
East Midlands -23 19 £525 +28.05% 6
East of England -25 19 £520 +63.52% 9
Northern Ireland +6 4 £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 9 June 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.

1 390 (51.05%) SQL
2 291 (38.09%) Data Pipeline
3 282 (36.91%) Analytics
4 276 (36.13%) ETL
5 261 (34.16%) Data Engineering
6 257 (33.64%) Security Cleared
7 243 (31.81%) Python
8 240 (31.41%) Data Modelling
9 215 (28.14%) SC Cleared
10 182 (23.82%) Azure
11 170 (22.25%) Business Intelligence
12 163 (21.34%) Data Quality
13 155 (20.29%) CI/CD
14 154 (20.16%) AWS
15 138 (18.06%) Agile
16 131 (17.15%) Data Integration
17 130 (17.02%) Databricks
18 120 (15.71%) Problem-Solving
19 113 (14.79%) Power Platform
20 111 (14.53%) Oracle
21 108 (14.14%) Power BI
22 105 (13.74%) Talend
23 102 (13.35%) DevOps
24 95 (12.43%) Data Warehouse
24 95 (12.43%) Migration
25 91 (11.91%) Git
25 91 (11.91%) PySpark
26 81 (10.60%) Pentaho
27 79 (10.34%) Microsoft
28 78 (10.21%) Azure Data Factory

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 65 (8.51%) SAS
2 48 (6.28%) Apache Spark
3 40 (5.24%) Apache Airflow
4 35 (4.58%) Apache
5 24 (3.14%) Confluence
6 5 (0.65%) Jupyter
7 2 (0.26%) Palantir Foundry
8 1 (0.13%) Apache Superset
8 1 (0.13%) SharePoint
Applications
1 7 (0.92%) Microsoft Excel
2 5 (0.65%) Notepad++
3 1 (0.13%) Microsoft Office
3 1 (0.13%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 1 (0.13%) Spreadsheet
Business Applications
1 3 (0.39%) Infor LN
2 2 (0.26%) SAP S/4HANA
3 1 (0.13%) Dynamics CRM
3 1 (0.13%) Elite 3E
3 1 (0.13%) FIS Private Capital Suite
3 1 (0.13%) NEC Housing
3 1 (0.13%) NetSuite
3 1 (0.13%) Oracle 11i
3 1 (0.13%) Oracle Assets
3 1 (0.13%) Oracle ERP
3 1 (0.13%) Sage X3
Cloud Services
1 182 (23.82%) Azure
2 154 (20.16%) AWS
3 113 (14.79%) Power Platform
4 78 (10.21%) Azure Data Factory
5 68 (8.90%) Snowflake
6 43 (5.63%) Azure Synapse Analytics
7 41 (5.37%) dbt
8 40 (5.24%) GCP
9 38 (4.97%) Amazon S3
10 30 (3.93%) Azure DevOps
11 28 (3.66%) Serverless
12 26 (3.40%) GitHub
13 21 (2.75%) AWS Lambda
14 18 (2.36%) OpenShift
15 17 (2.23%) Matillion
16 13 (1.70%) Amazon EMR
16 13 (1.70%) GitHub Actions
17 10 (1.31%) Amazon CloudWatch
18 9 (1.18%) Amazon EC2
18 9 (1.18%) Power Automate
Communications & Networking
1 34 (4.45%) DNS
1 34 (4.45%) VPN
2 33 (4.32%) BGP
2 33 (4.32%) DMZ
2 33 (4.32%) Multicast
3 8 (1.05%) Structured Cabling
4 5 (0.65%) PuTTY
4 5 (0.65%) WinSCP
5 4 (0.52%) Wi-Fi
5 4 (0.52%) Wireless
6 3 (0.39%) Firewall
Database & Business Intelligence
1 108 (14.14%) Power BI
2 95 (12.43%) Data Warehouse
3 81 (10.60%) Pentaho
4 45 (5.89%) Data Lake
5 39 (5.10%) Amazon Redshift
6 35 (4.58%) SQL Server
7 34 (4.45%) Big Data
8 27 (3.53%) MySQL
9 25 (3.27%) Delta Lake
9 25 (3.27%) Hadoop
9 25 (3.27%) Metadata
9 25 (3.27%) SQL Server Integration Services
10 23 (3.01%) Azure SQL Database
10 23 (3.01%) Relational Database
11 19 (2.49%) Amazon Athena
11 19 (2.49%) NoSQL
11 19 (2.49%) Snowflake Schema
11 19 (2.49%) Tableau
12 16 (2.09%) PostgreSQL
13 15 (1.96%) BusinessObjects
Development Applications
1 91 (11.91%) Git
2 57 (7.46%) GitLab
3 47 (6.15%) JIRA
4 34 (4.45%) Jenkins
5 7 (0.92%) Postman
6 5 (0.65%) Artifactory
7 4 (0.52%) Bitbucket
8 3 (0.39%) Newman
9 2 (0.26%) Visual Studio
10 1 (0.13%) ER Studio
10 1 (0.13%) ERwin
10 1 (0.13%) JUnit
General
1 123 (16.10%) Social Skills
2 78 (10.21%) Analytical Skills
3 73 (9.55%) Public Sector
4 62 (8.12%) Finance
5 42 (5.50%) Banking
6 23 (3.01%) Investment Banking
7 16 (2.09%) Documentation Skills
8 14 (1.83%) Aerospace
8 14 (1.83%) Marketing
9 12 (1.57%) Manufacturing
9 12 (1.57%) Retail
10 9 (1.18%) Telecoms
11 7 (0.92%) Inclusion and Diversity
12 5 (0.65%) Automotive
13 4 (0.52%) Legal
13 4 (0.52%) Local Government
14 3 (0.39%) Front Office
14 3 (0.39%) Law
15 2 (0.26%) Advertising
15 2 (0.26%) Billing
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 91 (11.91%) PySpark
2 63 (8.25%) Kafka
3 23 (3.01%) JSON
4 13 (1.70%) Pandas
4 13 (1.70%) XML
5 11 (1.44%) REST
6 8 (1.05%) Apache Avro
6 8 (1.05%) Protocol Buffers
7 7 (0.92%) Apache Beam
7 7 (0.92%) Streamlit
8 6 (0.79%) Apache NiFi
8 6 (0.79%) Node.js
8 6 (0.79%) OpenTelemetry
8 6 (0.79%) RESTful
9 5 (0.65%) Great Expectations
9 5 (0.65%) pytest
9 5 (0.65%) YAML
10 4 (0.52%) AngularJS
10 4 (0.52%) React
11 3 (0.39%) Spring Boot
Miscellaneous
1 32 (4.19%) Cloud Native
2 22 (2.88%) Data Structures
3 19 (2.49%) Legacy Systems
4 14 (1.83%) Data Protection Act
4 14 (1.83%) Distributed Systems
5 11 (1.44%) Clustering
6 10 (1.31%) Product Ownership
7 9 (1.18%) Driving Licence
7 9 (1.18%) Greenfield Project
8 8 (1.05%) NHS
9 6 (0.79%) Data Centre
9 6 (0.79%) Linux Command Line
9 6 (0.79%) Onboarding
10 5 (0.65%) Hybrid Cloud
11 4 (0.52%) Data Fabric
11 4 (0.52%) Fibre Optics
11 4 (0.52%) iPad
11 4 (0.52%) Life Science
11 4 (0.52%) Public Cloud
11 4 (0.52%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 41 (5.37%) Unix
2 13 (1.70%) Linux
3 2 (0.26%) Ubuntu
4 1 (0.13%) VMS
4 1 (0.13%) Windows
Processes & Methodologies
1 291 (38.09%) Data Pipeline
2 282 (36.91%) Analytics
3 276 (36.13%) ETL
4 261 (34.16%) Data Engineering
5 240 (31.41%) Data Modelling
6 170 (22.25%) Business Intelligence
7 155 (20.29%) CI/CD
8 138 (18.06%) Agile
9 131 (17.15%) Data Integration
10 120 (15.71%) Problem-Solving
11 102 (13.35%) DevOps
12 95 (12.43%) Migration
13 76 (9.95%) Data Governance
14 73 (9.55%) Validation
15 67 (8.77%) Scrum
16 66 (8.64%) AI
17 64 (8.38%) Test Automation
18 57 (7.46%) Decision-Making
19 54 (7.07%) Data Science
20 53 (6.94%) Continuous Improvement
Programming Languages
1 390 (51.05%) SQL
2 243 (31.81%) Python
3 35 (4.58%) PL/SQL
4 33 (4.32%) Java
5 17 (2.23%) Shell Script
6 16 (2.09%) Bash
7 12 (1.57%) Data Analysis Expressions
8 10 (1.31%) PowerShell
9 9 (1.18%) T-SQL
10 6 (0.79%) C#
10 6 (0.79%) Scala
11 5 (0.65%) Bicep
12 3 (0.39%) Go
13 2 (0.26%) HiveQL
13 2 (0.26%) JavaScript
14 1 (0.13%) C++
14 1 (0.13%) COBOL
14 1 (0.13%) Perl
14 1 (0.13%) TypeScript
Qualifications
1 257 (33.64%) Security Cleared
2 215 (28.14%) SC Cleared
3 18 (2.36%) Degree
4 17 (2.23%) BPSS Clearance
5 12 (1.57%) DV Cleared
6 8 (1.05%) City & Guilds
7 5 (0.65%) Computer Science Degree
7 5 (0.65%) Master's Degree
8 4 (0.52%) BICSI Certification
9 3 (0.39%) Azure Certification
9 3 (0.39%) IBM Certification
9 3 (0.39%) SnowPro
10 1 (0.13%) AWS Certification
10 1 (0.13%) CCIE
10 1 (0.13%) CCNP
10 1 (0.13%) Cisco Certification
10 1 (0.13%) CISM
10 1 (0.13%) CISSP
10 1 (0.13%) DBS Check
10 1 (0.13%) Numerate Degree
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 163 (21.34%) Data Quality
2 18 (2.36%) QA
3 12 (1.57%) GDPR
4 9 (1.18%) SLA
5 8 (1.05%) FATCA
6 3 (0.39%) Accessibility
7 2 (0.26%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 2 (0.26%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 1 (0.13%) Basel III
8 1 (0.13%) California Consumer Privacy Act
8 1 (0.13%) Disclosure Scotland
8 1 (0.13%) GMP
8 1 (0.13%) Government Security Classifications
8 1 (0.13%) HIPAA
8 1 (0.13%) NIST
8 1 (0.13%) SNOMED CT
8 1 (0.13%) WCAG
System Software
1 42 (5.50%) Docker
2 3 (0.39%) Virtual Machines
3 2 (0.26%) HDFS
Systems Management
1 45 (5.89%) Kubernetes
2 44 (5.76%) Terraform
3 38 (4.97%) Grafana
4 11 (1.44%) Prometheus
5 9 (1.18%) Ansible
6 3 (0.39%) Rancher
7 2 (0.26%) Apache Ranger
7 2 (0.26%) Control-M
7 2 (0.26%) Kibana
7 2 (0.26%) logstash
Vendors
1 130 (17.02%) Databricks
2 111 (14.53%) Oracle
3 105 (13.74%) Talend
4 79 (10.34%) Microsoft
5 72 (9.42%) Informatica
6 53 (6.94%) Denodo
7 35 (4.58%) Cisco
7 35 (4.58%) F5
8 16 (2.09%) Splunk
9 15 (1.96%) SAP
9 15 (1.96%) ServiceNow
10 12 (1.57%) Cloudera
10 12 (1.57%) Google
11 8 (1.05%) Alteryx
12 7 (0.92%) Salesforce
13 6 (0.79%) Dynatrace
13 6 (0.79%) InterSystems
13 6 (0.79%) Sage
14 4 (0.52%) IBM
14 4 (0.52%) Infor