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 £480, according to job vacancies posted in the 6 months leading up to 21 January 2026.

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

6 months to
21 Jan 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 150 93 189
Rank change year-on-year -57 +96 -16
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 318 343 237
As % of all contract jobs in the UK excluding London 1.70% 2.49% 1.19%
As % of the Job Titles category 1.87% 2.70% 1.27%
Number of daily rates quoted 237 230 176
10th Percentile £352 £313 £319
25th Percentile £406 £400 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £480 £476 £500
Median % change year-on-year +0.84% -4.80% -4.76%
75th Percentile £540 £550 £613
90th Percentile £605 £639 £688
UK median daily rate £500 £525 £525
% change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 5 4 7
10th Percentile £27.80 £25.14 £33.60
25th Percentile £30.49 £25.21 £48.13
Median hourly rate £37.50 £26.50 £62.50
Median % change year-on-year +41.51% -57.60% -5.66%
75th Percentile £69.25 £27.91 £66.88
90th Percentile £75.10 £28.19 £67.50
UK median hourly rate £43.50 £65.00 £60.50
% change year-on-year -33.08% +7.44% -3.97%

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 16,966 12,721 18,610
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 90.74% 92.40% 93.34%
Number of daily rates quoted 10,418 7,523 11,842
10th Percentile £213 £213 £213
25th Percentile £375 £363 £375
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £475 £480 £500
Median % change year-on-year -1.04% -4.00% -
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 1,724 688 1,605
10th Percentile £14.00 £15.36 £13.29
25th Percentile £17.87 £20.30 £17.00
Median hourly rate £25.15 £32.50 £40.50
Median % change year-on-year -22.62% -19.75% +36.13%
75th Percentile £60.00 £64.20 £63.75
90th Percentile £70.00 £73.75 £74.75
UK median hourly rate £27.50 £32.50 £40.00
% change year-on-year -15.38% -18.75% +17.65%

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 21 January 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 21 January 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 21 January 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
North of England -42 98 £463 +2.78% 70
Midlands -25 97 £519 +6.19% 47
West Midlands -19 83 £525 +7.14% 31
North West -33 53 £405 -8.99% 39
Scotland +8 43 £450 +1.98% 22
South West -3 42 £550 +17.33% 43
South East -56 37 £475 -11.63% 148
Yorkshire -42 32 £500 +5.26% 19
East Midlands -22 14 £455 +24.91% 16
Wales -11 13 £418 -16.50% 14
North East -13 13 £450 -1.64% 14
East of England -33 6 £625 +96.40% 47
Northern Ireland -3 1 £430 -13.57% 6
Data Engineer
UK

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

For the 6 months to 21 January 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.

1 169 (53.14%) Python
2 167 (52.52%) SQL
3 132 (41.51%) ETL
4 124 (38.99%) Data Pipeline
5 118 (37.11%) Data Engineering
6 113 (35.53%) Analytics
7 112 (35.22%) Azure
8 100 (31.45%) CI/CD
9 94 (29.56%) Data Modelling
10 86 (27.04%) AWS
11 84 (26.42%) Databricks
12 76 (23.90%) DevOps
13 73 (22.96%) Business Intelligence
13 73 (22.96%) Data Quality
14 71 (22.33%) Agile
15 70 (22.01%) Security Cleared
16 69 (21.70%) Problem-Solving
17 61 (19.18%) Data Warehouse
17 61 (19.18%) SC Cleared
18 59 (18.55%) PySpark
19 54 (16.98%) Power Platform
20 50 (15.72%) Power BI
21 47 (14.78%) Git
21 47 (14.78%) Snowflake
22 45 (14.15%) Docker
23 44 (13.84%) Azure Data Factory
23 44 (13.84%) Data Integration
23 44 (13.84%) Oracle
23 44 (13.84%) Test Automation
24 43 (13.52%) Kubernetes

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 40 (12.58%) Apache Airflow
2 26 (8.18%) Apache
3 23 (7.23%) Apache Spark
4 21 (6.60%) SAS
5 9 (2.83%) Confluence
6 5 (1.57%) Apache Pig
6 5 (1.57%) Oracle Application Server
7 3 (0.94%) IIS
8 1 (0.31%) Apache Synapse
8 1 (0.31%) Jupyter
Applications
1 1 (0.31%) Chatbot
1 1 (0.31%) Microsoft Excel
Business Applications
1 1 (0.31%) Elite 3E
1 1 (0.31%) SAP S/4HANA
Cloud Services
1 112 (35.22%) Azure
2 86 (27.04%) AWS
3 54 (16.98%) Power Platform
4 47 (14.78%) Snowflake
5 44 (13.84%) Azure Data Factory
6 27 (8.49%) dbt
7 26 (8.18%) Serverless
8 25 (7.86%) GCP
9 24 (7.55%) Azure Synapse Analytics
10 23 (7.23%) GitHub
11 20 (6.29%) Amazon S3
12 18 (5.66%) AWS Lambda
13 14 (4.40%) Azure DevOps
14 13 (4.09%) AWS CloudFormation
15 8 (2.52%) Amazon SageMaker
15 8 (2.52%) GitHub Actions
15 8 (2.52%) Matillion
15 8 (2.52%) Prefect
16 7 (2.20%) Amazon ECS
16 7 (2.20%) AWS Step Functions
Communications & Networking
1 5 (1.57%) BGP
1 5 (1.57%) DMZ
1 5 (1.57%) DNS
1 5 (1.57%) Multicast
1 5 (1.57%) VPN
2 2 (0.63%) Structured Cabling
3 1 (0.31%) Internet
3 1 (0.31%) LAN
3 1 (0.31%) TCP/IP
3 1 (0.31%) WAN
3 1 (0.31%) Wi-Fi
Database & Business Intelligence
1 61 (19.18%) Data Warehouse
2 50 (15.72%) Power BI
3 35 (11.01%) Data Lake
4 31 (9.75%) Pentaho
5 25 (7.86%) PostgreSQL
6 22 (6.92%) Big Data
6 22 (6.92%) NoSQL
7 20 (6.29%) Hadoop
8 19 (5.97%) Amazon Redshift
9 16 (5.03%) Elasticsearch
10 15 (4.72%) Amazon RDS
11 13 (4.09%) Relational Database
12 12 (3.77%) Azure SQL Database
12 12 (3.77%) Data Mining
12 12 (3.77%) Delta Lake
13 11 (3.46%) SQL Server
14 10 (3.14%) Snowflake Schema
15 9 (2.83%) BigQuery
15 9 (2.83%) RDBMS
16 8 (2.52%) SQL Server Integration Services
Development Applications
1 47 (14.78%) Git
2 42 (13.21%) Jenkins
3 29 (9.12%) GitLab
4 26 (8.18%) JIRA
5 5 (1.57%) DBeaver
5 5 (1.57%) MLflow
6 3 (0.94%) Bitbucket
6 3 (0.94%) Cucumber
7 2 (0.63%) JMeter
7 2 (0.63%) Visual Studio Code
7 2 (0.63%) Zephyr
8 1 (0.31%) Artifactory
8 1 (0.31%) Deequ
8 1 (0.31%) JUnit
8 1 (0.31%) Maven
8 1 (0.31%) Mockito
8 1 (0.31%) Selenium
8 1 (0.31%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
8 1 (0.31%) Visual Studio
General
1 61 (19.18%) Social Skills
2 39 (12.26%) Finance
3 36 (11.32%) Analytical Skills
4 27 (8.49%) Public Sector
5 20 (6.29%) Banking
6 6 (1.89%) Documentation Skills
7 5 (1.57%) Investment Banking
8 4 (1.26%) Legal
8 4 (1.26%) Manufacturing
9 3 (0.94%) Aerospace
9 3 (0.94%) Influencing Skills
10 2 (0.63%) Health Technology
10 2 (0.63%) Law
10 2 (0.63%) Pharmaceutical
10 2 (0.63%) Presentation Skills
10 2 (0.63%) Retail
11 1 (0.31%) Games
11 1 (0.31%) Local Government
11 1 (0.31%) Marketing
11 1 (0.31%) Publishing
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 59 (18.55%) PySpark
2 27 (8.49%) Kafka
3 17 (5.35%) REST
4 12 (3.77%) Keycloak
4 12 (3.77%) RESTful
5 10 (3.14%) Pandas
6 9 (2.83%) NumPy
7 7 (2.20%) Flask
8 6 (1.89%) Apache NiFi
8 6 (1.89%) HTML
8 6 (1.89%) JSON
8 6 (1.89%) Oracle GoldenGate
9 5 (1.57%) Node.js
9 5 (1.57%) OpenTelemetry
10 4 (1.26%) pytest
11 3 (0.94%) Elastic Stack
11 3 (0.94%) JDBC
11 3 (0.94%) OAuth
11 3 (0.94%) OAuth2
11 3 (0.94%) TensorFlow
Miscellaneous
1 23 (7.23%) Cloud Native
2 15 (4.72%) Product Ownership
2 15 (4.72%) Replication
3 14 (4.40%) Algorithms
4 13 (4.09%) Hybrid Cloud
5 10 (3.14%) Distributed Systems
6 9 (2.83%) Data Protection Act
7 8 (2.52%) Clustering
8 6 (1.89%) Data Structures
8 6 (1.89%) Greenfield Project
9 5 (1.57%) NHS
10 4 (1.26%) Legacy Systems
11 3 (0.94%) Distributed Computing
11 3 (0.94%) IoT
11 3 (0.94%) Management Information System
11 3 (0.94%) Onboarding
12 2 (0.63%) Data Centre
12 2 (0.63%) Driving Licence
12 2 (0.63%) Fibre Optics
12 2 (0.63%) Renewable Energy
Operating Systems
1 14 (4.40%) Linux
2 11 (3.46%) Unix
Processes & Methodologies
1 132 (41.51%) ETL
2 124 (38.99%) Data Pipeline
3 118 (37.11%) Data Engineering
4 113 (35.53%) Analytics
5 100 (31.45%) CI/CD
6 94 (29.56%) Data Modelling
7 76 (23.90%) DevOps
8 73 (22.96%) Business Intelligence
9 71 (22.33%) Agile
10 69 (21.70%) Problem-Solving
11 44 (13.84%) Data Integration
11 44 (13.84%) Test Automation
12 38 (11.95%) Machine Learning
13 36 (11.32%) Continuous Improvement
14 34 (10.69%) Performance Tuning
14 34 (10.69%) Scrum
15 31 (9.75%) Data Governance
15 31 (9.75%) Data Science
16 30 (9.43%) Data Analytics
17 28 (8.81%) Visualisation
Programming Languages
1 169 (53.14%) Python
2 167 (52.52%) SQL
3 26 (8.18%) Java
4 14 (4.40%) PL/SQL
4 14 (4.40%) Scala
5 12 (3.77%) Go
6 8 (2.52%) Bash
7 6 (1.89%) T-SQL
8 5 (1.57%) Data Analysis Expressions
8 5 (1.57%) R
8 5 (1.57%) Shell Script
9 4 (1.26%) JavaScript
10 2 (0.63%) Bicep
10 2 (0.63%) C#
10 2 (0.63%) TypeScript
11 1 (0.31%) ABAP
11 1 (0.31%) Cypher
11 1 (0.31%) Groovy
Qualifications
1 70 (22.01%) Security Cleared
2 61 (19.18%) SC Cleared
3 13 (4.09%) Azure Certification
4 9 (2.83%) AWS Certification
5 7 (2.20%) Degree
6 2 (0.63%) Computer Science Degree
6 2 (0.63%) Master's Degree
7 1 (0.31%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
7 1 (0.31%) BPSS Clearance
7 1 (0.31%) DV Cleared
7 1 (0.31%) HND
7 1 (0.31%) ITIL Certification
7 1 (0.31%) MCP
7 1 (0.31%) Tableau Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 73 (22.96%) Data Quality
2 7 (2.20%) GDPR
2 7 (2.20%) QA
3 3 (0.94%) Accessibility
4 1 (0.31%) Basel III
4 1 (0.31%) Disclosure Scotland
4 1 (0.31%) EU AI Act
4 1 (0.31%) HIPAA
4 1 (0.31%) ISO/IEC 27001
4 1 (0.31%) NCSC
4 1 (0.31%) NIST
4 1 (0.31%) WCAG
System Software
1 45 (14.15%) Docker
2 4 (1.26%) Virtual Machines
3 2 (0.63%) Active Directory
Systems Management
1 43 (13.52%) Kubernetes
2 29 (9.12%) Terraform
3 11 (3.46%) Ansible
4 8 (2.52%) Grafana
4 8 (2.52%) NetBackup
5 5 (1.57%) Kibana
6 4 (1.26%) Prometheus
7 3 (0.94%) logstash
8 2 (0.63%) Control-M
9 1 (0.31%) Kustomize
9 1 (0.31%) Puppet
Vendors
1 84 (26.42%) Databricks
2 44 (13.84%) Oracle
3 38 (11.95%) Microsoft
4 35 (11.01%) Talend
5 21 (6.60%) Denodo
6 15 (4.72%) Informatica
7 9 (2.83%) Google
8 8 (2.52%) Commvault
8 8 (2.52%) Red Hat
9 7 (2.20%) IBM
9 7 (2.20%) Veritas
10 6 (1.89%) Cisco
10 6 (1.89%) Confluent
10 6 (1.89%) Splunk
11 5 (1.57%) F5
11 5 (1.57%) ServiceNow
12 4 (1.26%) Alteryx
13 3 (0.94%) Cloudera
13 3 (0.94%) Salesforce
13 3 (0.94%) SAP