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 31 May 2026.

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

6 months to
31 May 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 72 125 140
Rank change year-on-year +53 +15 +16
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 735 272 323
As % of all contract jobs in the UK excluding London 2.94% 2.10% 1.56%
As % of the Job Titles category 3.20% 2.28% 1.69%
Number of daily rates quoted 508 208 238
10th Percentile £370 £260 £163
25th Percentile £413 £381 £199
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £469 £460 £450
Median % change year-on-year +2.00% +2.22% -14.29%
75th Percentile £538 £513 £538
90th Percentile £600 £616 £588
UK median daily rate £500 £491 £500
% change year-on-year +1.94% -1.90% -9.09%
Number of hourly rates quoted 50 4 33
10th Percentile £19.01 £17.92 £37.50
25th Percentile £37.51 £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 £68.56 £79.03 £80.00
90th Percentile £75.40 £79.61 -
UK median hourly rate £52.50 £52.50 £67.50
% change year-on-year - -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 22,995 11,910 19,149
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 91.87% 91.74% 92.41%
Number of daily rates quoted 13,245 7,593 11,598
10th Percentile £300 £213 £213
25th Percentile £402 £363 £363
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £475 £488
Median % change year-on-year +5.26% -2.56% -2.50%
75th Percentile £588 £575 £594
90th Percentile £680 £650 £688
UK median daily rate £513 £505 £525
% change year-on-year +1.49% -3.81% -2.78%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,650 854 2,392
10th Percentile £14.68 £13.80 £12.50
25th Percentile £20.00 £16.98 £15.75
Median hourly rate £43.69 £26.28 £40.00
Median % change year-on-year +66.25% -34.30% -6.98%
75th Percentile £67.25 £62.24 £62.50
90th Percentile £78.75 £75.00 £74.00
UK median hourly rate £42.50 £28.18 £37.50
% change year-on-year +50.82% -24.85% -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 31 May 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 31 May 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 31 May 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 +49 300 £469 +4.22% 24
West Midlands +45 283 £469 +1.96% 17
North of England -3 201 £465 -2.11% 63
North West +6 125 £480 +1.05% 23
South East +9 101 £488 +17.90% 65
South West +5 72 £500 +1.27% 24
Scotland +14 60 £470 +4.44% 7
Yorkshire -24 58 £465 +3.33% 22
Wales +4 22 £450 +118.11% 8
East of England -25 19 £520 +63.52% 3
North East -16 18 £450 -5.26% 19
East Midlands -21 17 £525 +28.05% 7
Northern Ireland +8 3 £410 -18.00% 9
Data Engineer
UK

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

For the 6 months to 31 May 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.

1 381 (51.84%) SQL
2 284 (38.64%) Data Pipeline
3 276 (37.55%) Analytics
4 273 (37.14%) ETL
5 258 (35.10%) Data Engineering
6 252 (34.29%) Security Cleared
7 239 (32.52%) Data Modelling
8 235 (31.97%) Python
9 211 (28.71%) SC Cleared
10 180 (24.49%) Azure
11 167 (22.72%) Business Intelligence
12 157 (21.36%) Data Quality
13 145 (19.73%) CI/CD
14 142 (19.32%) AWS
15 138 (18.78%) Agile
16 129 (17.55%) Data Integration
17 126 (17.14%) Databricks
18 119 (16.19%) Problem-Solving
19 113 (15.37%) Power Platform
20 108 (14.69%) Power BI
21 106 (14.42%) Oracle
22 101 (13.74%) Talend
23 100 (13.61%) DevOps
24 92 (12.52%) Data Warehouse
25 91 (12.38%) Migration
26 87 (11.84%) Git
26 87 (11.84%) PySpark
27 80 (10.88%) Microsoft
28 79 (10.75%) Azure Data Factory
29 77 (10.48%) Pentaho

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 (8.84%) SAS
2 47 (6.39%) Apache Spark
3 42 (5.71%) Apache Airflow
4 36 (4.90%) Apache
5 21 (2.86%) Confluence
6 5 (0.68%) Jupyter
7 2 (0.27%) Palantir Foundry
8 1 (0.14%) Apache Superset
8 1 (0.14%) SharePoint
Applications
1 7 (0.95%) Microsoft Excel
2 5 (0.68%) Notepad++
3 1 (0.14%) Microsoft Office
3 1 (0.14%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 1 (0.14%) Spreadsheet
Business Applications
1 2 (0.27%) Infor LN
1 2 (0.27%) SAP S/4HANA
2 1 (0.14%) Dynamics CRM
2 1 (0.14%) Elite 3E
2 1 (0.14%) NEC Housing
2 1 (0.14%) Oracle 11i
2 1 (0.14%) Oracle Assets
2 1 (0.14%) Oracle ERP
Cloud Services
1 180 (24.49%) Azure
2 142 (19.32%) AWS
3 113 (15.37%) Power Platform
4 79 (10.75%) Azure Data Factory
5 63 (8.57%) Snowflake
6 44 (5.99%) Azure Synapse Analytics
7 39 (5.31%) GCP
8 35 (4.76%) dbt
9 33 (4.49%) Amazon S3
10 30 (4.08%) Azure DevOps
11 25 (3.40%) GitHub
12 24 (3.27%) Serverless
13 19 (2.59%) OpenShift
14 18 (2.45%) AWS Lambda
15 17 (2.31%) Matillion
16 13 (1.77%) Amazon EMR
17 12 (1.63%) GitHub Actions
18 10 (1.36%) Amazon CloudWatch
19 8 (1.09%) AWS CloudFormation
19 8 (1.09%) Power Automate
Communications & Networking
1 33 (4.49%) DNS
1 33 (4.49%) VPN
2 32 (4.35%) BGP
2 32 (4.35%) DMZ
2 32 (4.35%) Multicast
3 8 (1.09%) Structured Cabling
4 5 (0.68%) PuTTY
4 5 (0.68%) WinSCP
5 4 (0.54%) Wi-Fi
5 4 (0.54%) Wireless
6 3 (0.41%) Firewall
Database & Business Intelligence
1 108 (14.69%) Power BI
2 92 (12.52%) Data Warehouse
3 77 (10.48%) Pentaho
4 46 (6.26%) Data Lake
5 35 (4.76%) Big Data
5 35 (4.76%) SQL Server
6 33 (4.49%) Amazon Redshift
7 26 (3.54%) Hadoop
7 26 (3.54%) Metadata
8 25 (3.40%) Delta Lake
8 25 (3.40%) SQL Server Integration Services
9 24 (3.27%) Azure SQL Database
9 24 (3.27%) MySQL
10 23 (3.13%) Relational Database
11 19 (2.59%) NoSQL
11 19 (2.59%) PostgreSQL
11 19 (2.59%) Tableau
12 18 (2.45%) Snowflake Schema
13 16 (2.18%) Amazon Athena
14 15 (2.04%) BusinessObjects
Development Applications
1 87 (11.84%) Git
2 54 (7.35%) GitLab
3 47 (6.39%) JIRA
4 31 (4.22%) Jenkins
5 6 (0.82%) Postman
6 5 (0.68%) Artifactory
7 4 (0.54%) Bitbucket
8 3 (0.41%) Newman
9 2 (0.27%) Visual Studio
10 1 (0.14%) ER Studio
10 1 (0.14%) ERwin
10 1 (0.14%) JUnit
General
1 116 (15.78%) Social Skills
2 78 (10.61%) Analytical Skills
3 70 (9.52%) Public Sector
4 61 (8.30%) Finance
5 40 (5.44%) Banking
6 22 (2.99%) Investment Banking
7 15 (2.04%) Documentation Skills
8 14 (1.90%) Aerospace
9 12 (1.63%) Manufacturing
10 11 (1.50%) Retail
11 10 (1.36%) Marketing
12 8 (1.09%) Telecoms
13 5 (0.68%) Inclusion and Diversity
14 4 (0.54%) Local Government
15 3 (0.41%) Automotive
15 3 (0.41%) Front Office
15 3 (0.41%) Law
15 3 (0.41%) Legal
16 2 (0.27%) Advertising
16 2 (0.27%) Aviation
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 87 (11.84%) PySpark
2 62 (8.44%) Kafka
3 22 (2.99%) JSON
4 14 (1.90%) REST
5 13 (1.77%) Pandas
6 12 (1.63%) XML
7 8 (1.09%) Apache Avro
7 8 (1.09%) Apache Beam
7 8 (1.09%) Protocol Buffers
8 7 (0.95%) Streamlit
9 6 (0.82%) Apache NiFi
9 6 (0.82%) Node.js
9 6 (0.82%) OpenTelemetry
10 5 (0.68%) Great Expectations
10 5 (0.68%) pytest
10 5 (0.68%) RESTful
10 5 (0.68%) YAML
11 4 (0.54%) AngularJS
11 4 (0.54%) AWS CDK
11 4 (0.54%) React
Miscellaneous
1 31 (4.22%) Cloud Native
2 21 (2.86%) Data Structures
3 18 (2.45%) Legacy Systems
4 13 (1.77%) Data Protection Act
4 13 (1.77%) Distributed Systems
5 11 (1.50%) Clustering
6 10 (1.36%) Product Ownership
7 9 (1.22%) Driving Licence
8 8 (1.09%) Greenfield Project
9 7 (0.95%) NHS
10 6 (0.82%) Data Centre
10 6 (0.82%) Linux Command Line
10 6 (0.82%) Onboarding
11 5 (0.68%) Hybrid Cloud
12 4 (0.54%) Data Fabric
12 4 (0.54%) iPad
12 4 (0.54%) Life Science
12 4 (0.54%) Management Information System
12 4 (0.54%) Public Cloud
12 4 (0.54%) Replication
Operating Systems
1 41 (5.58%) Unix
2 11 (1.50%) Linux
3 2 (0.27%) Ubuntu
4 1 (0.14%) VMS
4 1 (0.14%) Windows
Processes & Methodologies
1 284 (38.64%) Data Pipeline
2 276 (37.55%) Analytics
3 273 (37.14%) ETL
4 258 (35.10%) Data Engineering
5 239 (32.52%) Data Modelling
6 167 (22.72%) Business Intelligence
7 145 (19.73%) CI/CD
8 138 (18.78%) Agile
9 129 (17.55%) Data Integration
10 119 (16.19%) Problem-Solving
11 100 (13.61%) DevOps
12 91 (12.38%) Migration
13 74 (10.07%) Data Governance
14 71 (9.66%) Validation
15 68 (9.25%) Scrum
16 64 (8.71%) AI
17 63 (8.57%) Test Automation
18 55 (7.48%) Decision-Making
19 51 (6.94%) Continuous Improvement
20 48 (6.53%) Data Science
Programming Languages
1 381 (51.84%) SQL
2 235 (31.97%) Python
3 34 (4.63%) Java
3 34 (4.63%) PL/SQL
4 17 (2.31%) Shell Script
5 16 (2.18%) Bash
6 12 (1.63%) Data Analysis Expressions
7 10 (1.36%) PowerShell
8 9 (1.22%) T-SQL
9 6 (0.82%) C#
9 6 (0.82%) Scala
10 5 (0.68%) Bicep
11 4 (0.54%) Go
12 2 (0.27%) HiveQL
12 2 (0.27%) JavaScript
13 1 (0.14%) C++
13 1 (0.14%) COBOL
13 1 (0.14%) Groovy
13 1 (0.14%) Perl
13 1 (0.14%) TypeScript
Qualifications
1 252 (34.29%) Security Cleared
2 211 (28.71%) SC Cleared
3 19 (2.59%) Degree
4 15 (2.04%) BPSS Clearance
5 11 (1.50%) DV Cleared
6 8 (1.09%) City & Guilds
7 5 (0.68%) Computer Science Degree
7 5 (0.68%) Master's Degree
8 4 (0.54%) Azure Certification
8 4 (0.54%) BICSI Certification
9 3 (0.41%) IBM Certification
9 3 (0.41%) SnowPro
10 1 (0.14%) AWS Certification
10 1 (0.14%) CCIE
10 1 (0.14%) CCNP
10 1 (0.14%) Cisco Certification
10 1 (0.14%) CISM
10 1 (0.14%) CISSP
10 1 (0.14%) DBS Check
10 1 (0.14%) Numerate Degree
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 157 (21.36%) Data Quality
2 17 (2.31%) QA
3 13 (1.77%) GDPR
4 9 (1.22%) SLA
5 8 (1.09%) FATCA
6 4 (0.54%) Accessibility
7 2 (0.27%) Disclosure Scotland
7 2 (0.27%) HIPAA
7 2 (0.27%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 2 (0.27%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 1 (0.14%) Basel III
8 1 (0.14%) California Consumer Privacy Act
8 1 (0.14%) GMP
8 1 (0.14%) Government Security Classifications
8 1 (0.14%) NIST
8 1 (0.14%) SNOMED CT
8 1 (0.14%) WCAG
System Software
1 42 (5.71%) Docker
2 3 (0.41%) Virtual Machines
3 2 (0.27%) HDFS
Systems Management
1 43 (5.85%) Kubernetes
2 39 (5.31%) Grafana
3 37 (5.03%) Terraform
4 11 (1.50%) Prometheus
5 9 (1.22%) Ansible
6 3 (0.41%) Rancher
7 2 (0.27%) Apache Ranger
7 2 (0.27%) Control-M
7 2 (0.27%) Kibana
7 2 (0.27%) logstash
Vendors
1 126 (17.14%) Databricks
2 106 (14.42%) Oracle
3 101 (13.74%) Talend
4 80 (10.88%) Microsoft
5 72 (9.80%) Informatica
6 53 (7.21%) Denodo
7 34 (4.63%) Cisco
7 34 (4.63%) F5
8 16 (2.18%) Splunk
9 15 (2.04%) SAP
10 13 (1.77%) ServiceNow
11 12 (1.63%) Cloudera
11 12 (1.63%) Google
12 8 (1.09%) Alteryx
13 6 (0.82%) Dynatrace
13 6 (0.82%) InterSystems
14 5 (0.68%) Sage
15 4 (0.54%) Dataiku
15 4 (0.54%) IBM
16 3 (0.41%) Salesforce