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 8 November 2025.

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

6 months to
8 Nov 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 167 123 189
Rank change year-on-year -44 +66 -18
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 277 320 261
As % of all contract jobs in the UK excluding London 1.62% 1.91% 1.25%
As % of the Job Titles category 1.81% 2.08% 1.33%
Number of daily rates quoted 195 208 211
10th Percentile £340 £349 £400
25th Percentile £400 £430 £441
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £475 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year -5.00% -4.76% -
75th Percentile £550 £576 £600
90th Percentile £625 £638 £675
UK median daily rate £500 £538 £530
% change year-on-year -6.98% +1.42% -3.64%
Number of hourly rates quoted 5 3 2
10th Percentile £21.07 £25.37 £47.56
25th Percentile £26.00 £25.80 £50.47
Median hourly rate £37.50 £26.50 £57.00
Median % change year-on-year +41.51% -53.51% -5.00%
75th Percentile £69.25 £43.25 £61.84
90th Percentile £75.70 £53.30 £63.74
UK median hourly rate £48.00 £55.25 £63.00
% change year-on-year -13.12% -12.30% +8.62%

All Contract IT Job Vacancies
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 15,294 15,420 19,586
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 89.66% 92.19% 93.95%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,471 8,872 12,986
10th Percentile £206 £220 £213
25th Percentile £363 £375 £381
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £475 £490 £500
Median % change year-on-year -3.06% -2.00% -
75th Percentile £575 £588 £600
90th Percentile £675 £675 £688
UK median daily rate £500 £525 £525
% change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 1,488 1,063 1,273
10th Percentile £13.75 £14.84 £14.25
25th Percentile £17.00 £19.55 £18.25
Median hourly rate £25.15 £35.25 £44.50
Median % change year-on-year -28.65% -20.79% +85.42%
75th Percentile £50.00 £65.00 £65.00
90th Percentile £69.75 £73.71 £77.00
UK median hourly rate £25.15 £36.50 £44.50
% change year-on-year -31.10% -17.98% +53.98%

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 8 November 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 8 November 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 8 November 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 -19 79 £450 -8.63% 123
Midlands -21 72 £510 +4.62% 71
West Midlands -28 58 £517 +5.46% 57
Scotland +29 45 £425 -15.00% 30
South West +7 38 £550 -4.35% 42
Yorkshire -26 36 £500 +3.09% 41
South East -41 36 £463 -14.94% 578
North West -17 35 £403 -17.44% 76
East Midlands -14 13 £460 +29.21% 11
Wales -18 10 £425 -15.00% 16
North East -4 8 £425 -27.35% 6
East of England -22 6 £625 +79.86% 38
Northern Ireland -7 1 - - 5
Data Engineer
UK

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

For the 6 months to 8 November 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.

1 168 (60.65%) Python
2 159 (57.40%) SQL
3 116 (41.88%) ETL
4 111 (40.07%) Data Pipeline
5 99 (35.74%) Data Engineering
6 93 (33.57%) Azure
6 93 (33.57%) CI/CD
7 90 (32.49%) AWS
8 86 (31.05%) Analytics
9 83 (29.96%) Data Modelling
10 72 (25.99%) Data Warehouse
11 70 (25.27%) DevOps
12 69 (24.91%) Databricks
13 67 (24.19%) Data Quality
14 66 (23.83%) Business Intelligence
15 56 (20.22%) Agile
15 56 (20.22%) Problem-Solving
16 49 (17.69%) Power Platform
17 47 (16.97%) Power BI
18 46 (16.61%) Security Cleared
19 45 (16.25%) PySpark
20 44 (15.88%) Apache Airflow
20 44 (15.88%) Snowflake
21 42 (15.16%) Azure Data Factory
22 41 (14.80%) Jenkins
22 41 (14.80%) Kubernetes
23 39 (14.08%) Docker
23 39 (14.08%) Machine Learning
24 37 (13.36%) Git
24 37 (13.36%) SC Cleared

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 44 (15.88%) Apache Airflow
2 26 (9.39%) Apache
2 26 (9.39%) Apache Spark
3 12 (4.33%) SAS
4 8 (2.89%) Confluence
5 7 (2.53%) Oracle Application Server
6 5 (1.81%) Apache Pig
7 3 (1.08%) IIS
8 2 (0.72%) Documentum
8 2 (0.72%) SharePoint
9 1 (0.36%) Apache Synapse
9 1 (0.36%) Jupyter
Applications
1 2 (0.72%) Windchill
2 1 (0.36%) SPSS
2 1 (0.36%) Stata
Business Applications
1 2 (0.72%) Payment Gateway
1 2 (0.72%) SAP S/4HANA
2 1 (0.36%) Salesforce CRM
Cloud Services
1 93 (33.57%) Azure
2 90 (32.49%) AWS
3 49 (17.69%) Power Platform
4 44 (15.88%) Snowflake
5 42 (15.16%) Azure Data Factory
6 32 (11.55%) GCP
7 25 (9.03%) Azure Synapse Analytics
8 24 (8.66%) Serverless
9 23 (8.30%) Amazon S3
9 23 (8.30%) GitHub
10 20 (7.22%) dbt
11 17 (6.14%) AWS Lambda
12 11 (3.97%) Azure DevOps
13 9 (3.25%) AWS CloudFormation
13 9 (3.25%) GitHub Actions
14 7 (2.53%) Amazon EC2
14 7 (2.53%) Amazon EMR
14 7 (2.53%) Cloud Computing
14 7 (2.53%) CloudBees
15 6 (2.17%) Amazon SageMaker
Communications & Networking
1 5 (1.81%) TCP/IP
2 3 (1.08%) MQTT
2 3 (1.08%) SSH
2 3 (1.08%) Structured Cabling
2 3 (1.08%) Wi-Fi
3 2 (0.72%) DNS
3 2 (0.72%) Internet
3 2 (0.72%) LAN
3 2 (0.72%) SSL
3 2 (0.72%) WAN
4 1 (0.36%) 802.11
4 1 (0.36%) Ethernet
4 1 (0.36%) Firewall
4 1 (0.36%) Wireless
Database & Business Intelligence
1 72 (25.99%) Data Warehouse
2 47 (16.97%) Power BI
3 31 (11.19%) Data Lake
4 30 (10.83%) NoSQL
5 27 (9.75%) Big Data
5 27 (9.75%) PostgreSQL
6 23 (8.30%) Relational Database
7 20 (7.22%) Amazon Redshift
7 20 (7.22%) Hadoop
8 19 (6.86%) SQL Server
9 18 (6.50%) Delta Lake
10 14 (5.05%) Pentaho
11 12 (4.33%) Amazon RDS
11 12 (4.33%) Data Mining
11 12 (4.33%) Elasticsearch
12 10 (3.61%) Azure SQL Database
12 10 (3.61%) Tableau
13 8 (2.89%) MongoDB
13 8 (2.89%) RDBMS
13 8 (2.89%) Star Schema
Development Applications
1 41 (14.80%) Jenkins
2 37 (13.36%) Git
3 22 (7.94%) GitLab
4 20 (7.22%) JIRA
5 8 (2.89%) MLflow
6 7 (2.53%) DBeaver
7 5 (1.81%) Visual Studio Code
8 4 (1.44%) SonarQube
9 3 (1.08%) Artifactory
9 3 (1.08%) Bitbucket
9 3 (1.08%) Cucumber
9 3 (1.08%) Poetry
9 3 (1.08%) PyCharm
9 3 (1.08%) Sonatype Nexus
10 2 (0.72%) JMeter
10 2 (0.72%) Visual Studio
10 2 (0.72%) Zephyr
11 1 (0.36%) JUnit
11 1 (0.36%) Mockito
11 1 (0.36%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
General
1 64 (23.10%) Social Skills
2 36 (13.00%) Analytical Skills
3 29 (10.47%) Finance
4 18 (6.50%) Banking
4 18 (6.50%) Public Sector
5 6 (2.17%) Documentation Skills
6 4 (1.44%) Influencing Skills
6 4 (1.44%) Telecoms
7 3 (1.08%) Manufacturing
7 3 (1.08%) Retail
7 3 (1.08%) Tech for Good
8 2 (0.72%) Aerospace
8 2 (0.72%) Health Technology
8 2 (0.72%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 2 (0.72%) Marketing
8 2 (0.72%) Pharmaceutical
8 2 (0.72%) Presentation Skills
8 2 (0.72%) Retail Banking
9 1 (0.36%) Law
9 1 (0.36%) Legal
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 45 (16.25%) PySpark
2 24 (8.66%) Kafka
3 14 (5.05%) RESTful
4 13 (4.69%) Flask
5 11 (3.97%) Pandas
6 10 (3.61%) NumPy
7 7 (2.53%) Elastic Stack
7 7 (2.53%) HTML
7 7 (2.53%) Keycloak
7 7 (2.53%) OpenTelemetry
7 7 (2.53%) Oracle GoldenGate
7 7 (2.53%) REST
8 6 (2.17%) Apache NiFi
9 5 (1.81%) OAuth
9 5 (1.81%) OAuth2
10 4 (1.44%) FastAPI
10 4 (1.44%) JSON
10 4 (1.44%) PyTorch
10 4 (1.44%) TensorFlow
11 3 (1.08%) LangChain
Miscellaneous
1 21 (7.58%) Cloud Native
2 16 (5.78%) Replication
3 14 (5.05%) Product Ownership
4 13 (4.69%) Algorithms
5 11 (3.97%) Hybrid Cloud
6 10 (3.61%) Data Protection Act
7 8 (2.89%) Distributed Systems
8 6 (2.17%) Clustering
8 6 (2.17%) Data Structures
8 6 (2.17%) Legacy Systems
8 6 (2.17%) NHS
9 5 (1.81%) IoT
10 4 (1.44%) Driving Licence
11 3 (1.08%) AI Agents
11 3 (1.08%) Data Fabric
11 3 (1.08%) Fibre Optics
11 3 (1.08%) Greenfield Project
11 3 (1.08%) Private Cloud
12 2 (0.72%) Distributed Architecture
12 2 (0.72%) Onboarding
Operating Systems
1 20 (7.22%) Linux
2 11 (3.97%) Unix
3 2 (0.72%) Windows
3 2 (0.72%) Windows Server
3 2 (0.72%) Windows Server 2003
Processes & Methodologies
1 116 (41.88%) ETL
2 111 (40.07%) Data Pipeline
3 99 (35.74%) Data Engineering
4 93 (33.57%) CI/CD
5 86 (31.05%) Analytics
6 83 (29.96%) Data Modelling
7 70 (25.27%) DevOps
8 66 (23.83%) Business Intelligence
9 56 (20.22%) Agile
9 56 (20.22%) Problem-Solving
10 39 (14.08%) Machine Learning
11 36 (13.00%) Data Integration
11 36 (13.00%) Test Automation
11 36 (13.00%) Visualisation
12 32 (11.55%) Performance Tuning
13 31 (11.19%) Data Science
14 30 (10.83%) Data Governance
15 27 (9.75%) Data Transformation
16 26 (9.39%) AI
17 25 (9.03%) Continuous Improvement
Programming Languages
1 168 (60.65%) Python
2 159 (57.40%) SQL
3 30 (10.83%) Java
4 21 (7.58%) Scala
5 12 (4.33%) Bash
5 12 (4.33%) PL/SQL
6 7 (2.53%) Go
7 5 (1.81%) R
7 5 (1.81%) Shell Script
7 5 (1.81%) T-SQL
8 4 (1.44%) Data Analysis Expressions
8 4 (1.44%) Groovy
8 4 (1.44%) JavaScript
9 3 (1.08%) TypeScript
10 2 (0.72%) ABAP
11 1 (0.36%) Bicep
11 1 (0.36%) C#
11 1 (0.36%) Cypher
11 1 (0.36%) VB.NET
Qualifications
1 46 (16.61%) Security Cleared
2 37 (13.36%) SC Cleared
3 14 (5.05%) Degree
4 11 (3.97%) AWS Certification
5 8 (2.89%) Azure Certification
5 8 (2.89%) Master's Degree
6 6 (2.17%) Computer Science Degree
7 2 (0.72%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
7 2 (0.72%) DV Cleared
8 1 (0.36%) BPSS Clearance
8 1 (0.36%) CTC Cleared
8 1 (0.36%) HND
8 1 (0.36%) ITIL Certification
8 1 (0.36%) MCP
8 1 (0.36%) SnowPro
8 1 (0.36%) Tableau Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 67 (24.19%) Data Quality
2 8 (2.89%) GDPR
3 5 (1.81%) QA
4 3 (1.08%) Accessibility
5 1 (0.36%) Disclosure Scotland
5 1 (0.36%) EU AI Act
5 1 (0.36%) ISO 19650
5 1 (0.36%) NCSC
5 1 (0.36%) NIST
5 1 (0.36%) PMO
5 1 (0.36%) WCAG
System Software
1 39 (14.08%) Docker
2 3 (1.08%) Virtual Machines
3 2 (0.72%) Active Directory
Systems Management
1 41 (14.80%) Kubernetes
2 27 (9.75%) Terraform
3 11 (3.97%) Ansible
3 11 (3.97%) Grafana
4 8 (2.89%) NetBackup
5 7 (2.53%) Prometheus
6 6 (2.17%) Kibana
7 4 (1.44%) logstash
8 3 (1.08%) Argo
8 3 (1.08%) Istio
8 3 (1.08%) Kustomize
9 2 (0.72%) Control-M
10 1 (0.36%) FortiGate
10 1 (0.36%) Puppet
Vendors
1 69 (24.91%) Databricks
2 32 (11.55%) Microsoft
3 31 (11.19%) Oracle
4 19 (6.86%) Talend
5 11 (3.97%) Red Hat
6 10 (3.61%) Denodo
6 10 (3.61%) Google
6 10 (3.61%) Informatica
7 8 (2.89%) Commvault
7 8 (2.89%) IBM
8 7 (2.53%) Veritas
9 6 (2.17%) Cloudera
9 6 (2.17%) Confluent
10 5 (1.81%) ServiceNow
10 5 (1.81%) Splunk
11 4 (1.44%) Salesforce
12 3 (1.08%) Cisco
12 3 (1.08%) SAP
13 2 (0.72%) EMC
13 2 (0.72%) McAfee