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 22 April 2026.

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

6 months to
22 Apr 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 79 105 138
Rank change year-on-year +26 +33 +15
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 633 315 318
As % of all contract jobs in the UK excluding London 2.70% 2.46% 1.54%
As % of the Job Titles category 2.94% 2.67% 1.66%
Number of daily rates quoted 443 235 237
10th Percentile £368 £236 £163
25th Percentile £411 £395 £205
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £475 £471 £460
Median % change year-on-year +0.85% +2.39% -10.68%
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 38 4 33
10th Percentile £27.15 £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% +72.41%
75th Percentile £71.50 £40.96 £80.00
90th Percentile £80.43 £63.60 -
UK median hourly rate £52.50 £65.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year -19.23% - +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 21,546 11,812 19,161
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 91.99% 92.37% 92.69%
Number of daily rates quoted 12,690 7,618 11,799
10th Percentile £274 £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 £675 £651 £688
UK median daily rate £500 £515 £525
% change year-on-year -2.91% -1.90% -2.78%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,396 803 2,190
10th Percentile £14.50 £14.20 £12.50
25th Percentile £19.91 £18.13 £15.53
Median hourly rate £43.85 £29.23 £36.50
Median % change year-on-year +50.00% -19.92% -15.12%
75th Percentile £65.88 £65.00 £60.75
90th Percentile £78.75 £76.10 £73.75
UK median hourly rate £42.25 £30.20 £35.00
% change year-on-year +39.90% -13.71% -22.22%

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 22 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 22 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 22 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 +23 270 £469 -1.26% 50
West Midlands +23 252 £469 -1.68% 44
North of England -12 183 £468 +1.08% 95
North West -1 115 £465 +0.54% 57
South East -10 82 £500 +2.56% 85
South West -18 55 £513 +2.60% 38
Yorkshire -28 54 £465 +3.33% 22
Scotland -2 43 £411 -8.67% 18
Wales +4 20 £450 -10.45% 9
East Midlands -29 18 £498 +24.76% 6
East of England -31 16 £565 +79.37% 19
North East -20 14 £475 +5.56% 20
Northern Ireland +2 3 £410 -18.00% 8
Data Engineer
UK

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

For the 6 months to 22 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.

1 323 (51.03%) SQL
2 252 (39.81%) ETL
3 247 (39.02%) Analytics
4 246 (38.86%) Data Pipeline
5 223 (35.23%) Data Engineering
6 215 (33.97%) Security Cleared
7 210 (33.18%) Python
8 208 (32.86%) Data Modelling
9 185 (29.23%) SC Cleared
10 163 (25.75%) Azure
11 151 (23.85%) Data Quality
12 144 (22.75%) Business Intelligence
13 135 (21.33%) CI/CD
14 131 (20.70%) Agile
15 120 (18.96%) AWS
16 114 (18.01%) Problem-Solving
17 111 (17.54%) Databricks
18 98 (15.48%) Data Integration
19 96 (15.17%) Talend
20 95 (15.01%) DevOps
21 91 (14.38%) Oracle
22 88 (13.90%) Git
22 88 (13.90%) Power Platform
23 83 (13.11%) Power BI
23 83 (13.11%) PySpark
24 81 (12.80%) Data Warehouse
25 74 (11.69%) Pentaho
26 73 (11.53%) Migration
27 72 (11.37%) Azure Data Factory
28 67 (10.58%) 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 61 (9.64%) SAS
2 48 (7.58%) Apache Spark
3 39 (6.16%) Apache Airflow
4 30 (4.74%) Apache
5 6 (0.95%) Confluence
6 3 (0.47%) Jupyter
7 1 (0.16%) Apache Superset
7 1 (0.16%) Apache Synapse
7 1 (0.16%) SharePoint
Applications
1 6 (0.95%) Microsoft Excel
2 5 (0.79%) Notepad++
3 1 (0.16%) Chatbot
3 1 (0.16%) Microsoft Office
Business Applications
1 1 (0.16%) Dynamics CRM
1 1 (0.16%) Elite 3E
1 1 (0.16%) NEC Housing
1 1 (0.16%) Oracle 11i
1 1 (0.16%) Oracle ERP
1 1 (0.16%) SAP S/4HANA
Cloud Services
1 163 (25.75%) Azure
2 120 (18.96%) AWS
3 88 (13.90%) Power Platform
4 72 (11.37%) Azure Data Factory
5 53 (8.37%) Snowflake
6 42 (6.64%) dbt
7 41 (6.48%) Azure Synapse Analytics
8 34 (5.37%) GCP
9 29 (4.58%) Amazon S3
10 25 (3.95%) GitHub
11 23 (3.63%) Azure DevOps
11 23 (3.63%) Serverless
12 19 (3.00%) OpenShift
13 16 (2.53%) AWS Lambda
14 14 (2.21%) Matillion
15 11 (1.74%) AWS CloudFormation
16 10 (1.58%) GitHub Actions
17 9 (1.42%) Power Automate
18 8 (1.26%) AWS Step Functions
19 7 (1.11%) PowerApps
Communications & Networking
1 29 (4.58%) DNS
1 29 (4.58%) VPN
2 28 (4.42%) BGP
2 28 (4.42%) DMZ
2 28 (4.42%) Multicast
3 8 (1.26%) Structured Cabling
4 5 (0.79%) PuTTY
4 5 (0.79%) WinSCP
5 3 (0.47%) Firewall
Database & Business Intelligence
1 83 (13.11%) Power BI
2 81 (12.80%) Data Warehouse
3 74 (11.69%) Pentaho
4 41 (6.48%) Data Lake
5 33 (5.21%) Amazon Redshift
6 30 (4.74%) Big Data
7 28 (4.42%) SQL Server
8 27 (4.27%) Hadoop
9 25 (3.95%) Delta Lake
9 25 (3.95%) MySQL
10 24 (3.79%) PostgreSQL
11 21 (3.32%) Relational Database
12 20 (3.16%) Metadata
12 20 (3.16%) NoSQL
12 20 (3.16%) SQL Server Integration Services
13 16 (2.53%) Tableau
14 15 (2.37%) BigQuery
15 14 (2.21%) Azure SQL Database
15 14 (2.21%) Snowflake Schema
16 12 (1.90%) Amazon RDS
Development Applications
1 88 (13.90%) Git
2 40 (6.32%) Jenkins
3 39 (6.16%) GitLab
4 38 (6.00%) JIRA
5 4 (0.63%) Bitbucket
6 2 (0.32%) JUnit
6 2 (0.32%) Visual Studio
7 1 (0.16%) Cucumber
7 1 (0.16%) ER Studio
7 1 (0.16%) ERwin
7 1 (0.16%) Maven
7 1 (0.16%) Mockito
7 1 (0.16%) Selenium
General
1 102 (16.11%) Social Skills
2 65 (10.27%) Analytical Skills
3 62 (9.79%) Public Sector
4 60 (9.48%) Finance
5 34 (5.37%) Banking
6 16 (2.53%) Investment Banking
7 12 (1.90%) Aerospace
7 12 (1.90%) Documentation Skills
7 12 (1.90%) Manufacturing
8 8 (1.26%) Telecoms
9 5 (0.79%) Retail
10 4 (0.63%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 4 (0.63%) Legal
10 4 (0.63%) Local Government
10 4 (0.63%) Marketing
11 3 (0.47%) Law
12 2 (0.32%) Advertising
12 2 (0.32%) Front Office
12 2 (0.32%) Military
12 2 (0.32%) Presentation Skills
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 83 (13.11%) PySpark
2 59 (9.32%) Kafka
3 19 (3.00%) JSON
4 15 (2.37%) REST
5 12 (1.90%) Pandas
6 9 (1.42%) Node.js
7 8 (1.26%) Apache Avro
7 8 (1.26%) Apache Beam
7 8 (1.26%) Keycloak
7 8 (1.26%) Protocol Buffers
8 7 (1.11%) XML
9 6 (0.95%) Apache NiFi
9 6 (0.95%) OpenTelemetry
10 5 (0.79%) React
10 5 (0.79%) YAML
11 4 (0.63%) AngularJS
11 4 (0.63%) NumPy
11 4 (0.63%) pytest
11 4 (0.63%) Streamlit
12 3 (0.47%) AWS CDK
Miscellaneous
1 24 (3.79%) Cloud Native
2 18 (2.84%) Legacy Systems
3 14 (2.21%) Distributed Systems
4 13 (2.05%) Clustering
4 13 (2.05%) Data Protection Act
4 13 (2.05%) Data Structures
5 11 (1.74%) Hybrid Cloud
5 11 (1.74%) Product Ownership
6 7 (1.11%) Greenfield Project
7 6 (0.95%) Data Centre
7 6 (0.95%) Linux Command Line
7 6 (0.95%) NHS
7 6 (0.95%) Onboarding
8 5 (0.79%) Driving Licence
8 5 (0.79%) Replication
8 5 (0.79%) Self-Motivation
9 4 (0.63%) Fibre Optics
9 4 (0.63%) Management Information System
9 4 (0.63%) Public Cloud
10 3 (0.47%) Data Fabric
Operating Systems
1 29 (4.58%) Unix
2 9 (1.42%) Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 252 (39.81%) ETL
2 247 (39.02%) Analytics
3 246 (38.86%) Data Pipeline
4 223 (35.23%) Data Engineering
5 208 (32.86%) Data Modelling
6 144 (22.75%) Business Intelligence
7 135 (21.33%) CI/CD
8 131 (20.70%) Agile
9 114 (18.01%) Problem-Solving
10 98 (15.48%) Data Integration
11 95 (15.01%) DevOps
12 73 (11.53%) Migration
13 65 (10.27%) Data Governance
14 64 (10.11%) Scrum
15 55 (8.69%) Continuous Improvement
15 55 (8.69%) Test Automation
16 53 (8.37%) Validation
17 47 (7.42%) Decision-Making
18 46 (7.27%) Performance Tuning
19 45 (7.11%) Data Transformation
Programming Languages
1 323 (51.03%) SQL
2 210 (33.18%) Python
3 35 (5.53%) Java
4 22 (3.48%) PL/SQL
5 16 (2.53%) Shell Script
6 12 (1.90%) Bash
7 10 (1.58%) Go
8 9 (1.42%) PowerShell
9 8 (1.26%) Data Analysis Expressions
9 8 (1.26%) T-SQL
10 7 (1.11%) Scala
11 6 (0.95%) C#
12 5 (0.79%) Bicep
13 3 (0.47%) JavaScript
14 2 (0.32%) HiveQL
14 2 (0.32%) R
15 1 (0.16%) C++
15 1 (0.16%) Groovy
15 1 (0.16%) Perl
15 1 (0.16%) TypeScript
Qualifications
1 215 (33.97%) Security Cleared
2 185 (29.23%) SC Cleared
3 15 (2.37%) Degree
4 10 (1.58%) Azure Certification
4 10 (1.58%) BPSS Clearance
5 6 (0.95%) DV Cleared
6 4 (0.63%) BICSI Certification
6 4 (0.63%) City & Guilds
6 4 (0.63%) Computer Science Degree
6 4 (0.63%) Master's Degree
7 3 (0.47%) AWS Certification
7 3 (0.47%) IBM Certification
7 3 (0.47%) SnowPro
8 1 (0.16%) CCIE
8 1 (0.16%) CCNP
8 1 (0.16%) Cisco Certification
8 1 (0.16%) CISM
8 1 (0.16%) CISSP
8 1 (0.16%) ITIL Certification
8 1 (0.16%) Numerate Degree
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 151 (23.85%) Data Quality
2 12 (1.90%) GDPR
2 12 (1.90%) QA
3 6 (0.95%) SLA
4 5 (0.79%) Accessibility
4 5 (0.79%) FATCA
5 2 (0.32%) HIPAA
5 2 (0.32%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 2 (0.32%) WCAG
6 1 (0.16%) Basel III
6 1 (0.16%) California Consumer Privacy Act
6 1 (0.16%) Disclosure Scotland
6 1 (0.16%) GMP
6 1 (0.16%) Government Security Classifications
6 1 (0.16%) NIST
6 1 (0.16%) Sarbanes-Oxley
6 1 (0.16%) SNOMED CT
System Software
1 54 (8.53%) Docker
2 2 (0.32%) HDFS
2 2 (0.32%) Virtual Machines
Systems Management
1 57 (9.00%) Kubernetes
2 33 (5.21%) Terraform
3 30 (4.74%) Grafana
4 12 (1.90%) Prometheus
5 9 (1.42%) Ansible
6 3 (0.47%) Kibana
6 3 (0.47%) Rancher
7 2 (0.32%) Apache Ranger
7 2 (0.32%) logstash
8 1 (0.16%) Control-M
Vendors
1 111 (17.54%) Databricks
2 96 (15.17%) Talend
3 91 (14.38%) Oracle
4 67 (10.58%) Microsoft
5 57 (9.00%) Informatica
6 46 (7.27%) Denodo
7 30 (4.74%) Cisco
7 30 (4.74%) F5
8 16 (2.53%) Splunk
9 14 (2.21%) ServiceNow
10 11 (1.74%) Google
10 11 (1.74%) SAP
11 10 (1.58%) Cloudera
12 7 (1.11%) Alteryx
13 4 (0.63%) Dataiku
13 4 (0.63%) InterSystems
13 4 (0.63%) Sage
14 3 (0.47%) IBM
15 2 (0.32%) Brio
15 2 (0.32%) Cognos