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 6 May 2026.

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

6 months to
6 May 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 79 105 140
Rank change year-on-year +26 +35 +17
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 685 299 325
As % of all contract jobs in the UK excluding London 2.83% 2.34% 1.58%
As % of the Job Titles category 3.07% 2.54% 1.71%
Number of daily rates quoted 474 225 241
10th Percentile £375 £218 £163
25th Percentile £413 £381 £206
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £475 £463 £460
Median % change year-on-year +2.70% +0.54% -10.59%
75th Percentile £538 £538 £550
90th Percentile £588 £638 £630
UK median daily rate £500 £500 £500
% change year-on-year - - -9.09%
Number of hourly rates quoted 44 4 33
10th Percentile £19.34 £20.33 £37.50
25th Percentile £41.28 £23.49 £58.75
Median hourly rate £51.25 £26.93 £75.00
Median % change year-on-year +90.34% -64.10% +72.41%
75th Percentile £71.50 £40.96 £80.00
90th Percentile £77.80 £63.60 -
UK median hourly rate £52.50 £58.75 £65.00
% change year-on-year -10.64% -9.62% +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 22,284 11,788 19,029
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 91.96% 92.21% 92.56%
Number of daily rates quoted 12,998 7,554 11,618
10th Percentile £283 £213 £213
25th Percentile £400 £363 £363
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £492 £475 £490
Median % change year-on-year +3.58% -3.06% -2.00%
75th Percentile £588 £575 £598
90th Percentile £681 £651 £688
UK median daily rate £505 £514 £525
% change year-on-year -1.75% -2.10% -2.78%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,487 844 2,244
10th Percentile £14.64 £14.00 £12.50
25th Percentile £19.91 £17.79 £15.75
Median hourly rate £45.46 £28.00 £40.00
Median % change year-on-year +62.36% -30.00% -4.76%
75th Percentile £67.25 £64.50 £61.30
90th Percentile £78.75 £75.00 £73.75
UK median hourly rate £44.00 £29.00 £36.50
% change year-on-year +51.72% -20.55% -18.89%

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 6 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 6 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 6 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 +31 292 £469 +1.68% 70
West Midlands +31 274 £469 -1.26% 48
North of England -9 186 £470 +1.62% 100
North West 0 119 £490 +5.95% 49
South East 0 88 £500 +5.26% 100
South West -4 67 £500 +1.27% 32
Scotland +12 57 £430 -4.44% 15
Yorkshire -32 52 £465 +3.33% 22
Wales 0 20 £475 +130.23% 13
East Midlands -23 18 £498 +21.34% 22
East of England -33 16 £565 +79.37% 22
North East -21 15 £463 +8.82% 30
Northern Ireland +3 3 £410 -18.00% 2
Data Engineer
UK

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

For the 6 months to 6 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.

1 349 (50.95%) SQL
2 272 (39.71%) Data Pipeline
3 269 (39.27%) Analytics
4 268 (39.12%) ETL
5 241 (35.18%) Data Engineering
6 237 (34.60%) Security Cleared
7 228 (33.28%) Data Modelling
8 226 (32.99%) Python
9 202 (29.49%) SC Cleared
10 171 (24.96%) Azure
11 164 (23.94%) Business Intelligence
12 156 (22.77%) Data Quality
13 144 (21.02%) CI/CD
14 140 (20.44%) Agile
15 129 (18.83%) AWS
16 119 (17.37%) Data Integration
17 118 (17.23%) Problem-Solving
18 116 (16.93%) Databricks
19 106 (15.47%) Power Platform
20 101 (14.74%) Power BI
21 100 (14.60%) Oracle
22 99 (14.45%) DevOps
23 98 (14.31%) Talend
24 93 (13.58%) Git
25 89 (12.99%) Data Warehouse
26 85 (12.41%) PySpark
27 82 (11.97%) Migration
28 78 (11.39%) Pentaho
29 77 (11.24%) Azure Data Factory
30 73 (10.66%) 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 64 (9.34%) SAS
2 48 (7.01%) Apache Spark
3 36 (5.26%) Apache Airflow
4 30 (4.38%) Apache
5 18 (2.63%) Confluence
6 3 (0.44%) Jupyter
7 1 (0.15%) Apache Superset
7 1 (0.15%) SharePoint
Applications
1 6 (0.88%) Microsoft Excel
2 5 (0.73%) Notepad++
3 1 (0.15%) Chatbot
3 1 (0.15%) Microsoft Office
3 1 (0.15%) Spreadsheet
Business Applications
1 2 (0.29%) SAP S/4HANA
2 1 (0.15%) Dynamics CRM
2 1 (0.15%) Elite 3E
2 1 (0.15%) NEC Housing
2 1 (0.15%) Oracle 11i
2 1 (0.15%) Oracle ERP
Cloud Services
1 171 (24.96%) Azure
2 129 (18.83%) AWS
3 106 (15.47%) Power Platform
4 77 (11.24%) Azure Data Factory
5 60 (8.76%) Snowflake
6 45 (6.57%) Azure Synapse Analytics
7 38 (5.55%) dbt
8 36 (5.26%) GCP
9 32 (4.67%) Amazon S3
10 25 (3.65%) GitHub
10 25 (3.65%) Serverless
11 24 (3.50%) Azure DevOps
12 19 (2.77%) OpenShift
13 18 (2.63%) AWS Lambda
14 15 (2.19%) Matillion
15 11 (1.61%) AWS CloudFormation
16 9 (1.31%) Amazon EMR
16 9 (1.31%) GitHub Actions
16 9 (1.31%) Power Automate
17 8 (1.17%) AWS Step Functions
Communications & Networking
1 31 (4.53%) DNS
1 31 (4.53%) VPN
2 30 (4.38%) BGP
2 30 (4.38%) DMZ
2 30 (4.38%) Multicast
3 8 (1.17%) Structured Cabling
4 5 (0.73%) PuTTY
4 5 (0.73%) WinSCP
5 3 (0.44%) Firewall
6 2 (0.29%) Wi-Fi
6 2 (0.29%) Wireless
Database & Business Intelligence
1 101 (14.74%) Power BI
2 89 (12.99%) Data Warehouse
3 78 (11.39%) Pentaho
4 45 (6.57%) Data Lake
5 36 (5.26%) Amazon Redshift
6 35 (5.11%) Big Data
7 30 (4.38%) SQL Server
8 28 (4.09%) Hadoop
9 25 (3.65%) Metadata
9 25 (3.65%) MySQL
10 24 (3.50%) Delta Lake
11 22 (3.21%) PostgreSQL
11 22 (3.21%) SQL Server Integration Services
12 21 (3.07%) Relational Database
13 20 (2.92%) NoSQL
14 17 (2.48%) Tableau
15 16 (2.34%) Azure SQL Database
16 15 (2.19%) BusinessObjects
16 15 (2.19%) Snowflake Schema
17 14 (2.04%) Amazon RDS
Development Applications
1 93 (13.58%) Git
2 49 (7.15%) JIRA
3 45 (6.57%) GitLab
4 38 (5.55%) Jenkins
5 4 (0.58%) Bitbucket
6 2 (0.29%) Artifactory
6 2 (0.29%) Visual Studio
7 1 (0.15%) ER Studio
7 1 (0.15%) ERwin
7 1 (0.15%) JUnit
General
1 111 (16.20%) Social Skills
2 72 (10.51%) Analytical Skills
3 65 (9.49%) Finance
3 65 (9.49%) Public Sector
4 38 (5.55%) Banking
5 19 (2.77%) Investment Banking
6 13 (1.90%) Aerospace
6 13 (1.90%) Documentation Skills
7 12 (1.75%) Manufacturing
8 8 (1.17%) Telecoms
9 7 (1.02%) Marketing
9 7 (1.02%) Retail
10 4 (0.58%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 4 (0.58%) Legal
11 3 (0.44%) Front Office
11 3 (0.44%) Law
11 3 (0.44%) Local Government
12 2 (0.29%) Advertising
12 2 (0.29%) Military
12 2 (0.29%) Presentation Skills
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 85 (12.41%) PySpark
2 65 (9.49%) Kafka
3 17 (2.48%) JSON
4 16 (2.34%) REST
5 13 (1.90%) Pandas
6 9 (1.31%) Node.js
7 8 (1.17%) Apache Avro
7 8 (1.17%) Apache Beam
7 8 (1.17%) Protocol Buffers
8 6 (0.88%) Apache NiFi
8 6 (0.88%) Keycloak
8 6 (0.88%) OpenTelemetry
8 6 (0.88%) XML
9 5 (0.73%) YAML
10 4 (0.58%) AngularJS
10 4 (0.58%) AWS CDK
10 4 (0.58%) NumPy
10 4 (0.58%) pytest
10 4 (0.58%) React
10 4 (0.58%) Streamlit
Miscellaneous
1 33 (4.82%) Cloud Native
2 19 (2.77%) Legacy Systems
3 16 (2.34%) Data Structures
4 15 (2.19%) Distributed Systems
5 12 (1.75%) Data Protection Act
6 11 (1.61%) Clustering
6 11 (1.61%) Product Ownership
7 9 (1.31%) Hybrid Cloud
8 7 (1.02%) Driving Licence
8 7 (1.02%) Greenfield Project
8 7 (1.02%) NHS
9 6 (0.88%) Data Centre
9 6 (0.88%) Linux Command Line
9 6 (0.88%) Onboarding
10 4 (0.58%) Data Fabric
10 4 (0.58%) Distributed Computing
10 4 (0.58%) Fibre Optics
10 4 (0.58%) Public Cloud
10 4 (0.58%) Replication
10 4 (0.58%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 35 (5.11%) Unix
2 10 (1.46%) Linux
3 1 (0.15%) Ubuntu
3 1 (0.15%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 272 (39.71%) Data Pipeline
2 269 (39.27%) Analytics
3 268 (39.12%) ETL
4 241 (35.18%) Data Engineering
5 228 (33.28%) Data Modelling
6 164 (23.94%) Business Intelligence
7 144 (21.02%) CI/CD
8 140 (20.44%) Agile
9 119 (17.37%) Data Integration
10 118 (17.23%) Problem-Solving
11 99 (14.45%) DevOps
12 82 (11.97%) Migration
13 71 (10.36%) Scrum
14 68 (9.93%) Data Governance
15 61 (8.91%) Test Automation
16 60 (8.76%) Validation
17 56 (8.18%) Continuous Improvement
18 54 (7.88%) AI
18 54 (7.88%) Decision-Making
19 48 (7.01%) Data Analytics
Programming Languages
1 349 (50.95%) SQL
2 226 (32.99%) Python
3 35 (5.11%) Java
4 25 (3.65%) PL/SQL
5 16 (2.34%) Shell Script
6 13 (1.90%) Bash
7 9 (1.31%) Data Analysis Expressions
7 9 (1.31%) PowerShell
8 8 (1.17%) Go
8 8 (1.17%) T-SQL
9 6 (0.88%) C#
9 6 (0.88%) Scala
10 5 (0.73%) Bicep
11 3 (0.44%) JavaScript
12 2 (0.29%) HiveQL
13 1 (0.15%) C++
13 1 (0.15%) Groovy
13 1 (0.15%) Perl
13 1 (0.15%) R
13 1 (0.15%) TypeScript
Qualifications
1 237 (34.60%) Security Cleared
2 202 (29.49%) SC Cleared
3 16 (2.34%) Degree
4 12 (1.75%) BPSS Clearance
5 8 (1.17%) Azure Certification
5 8 (1.17%) DV Cleared
6 6 (0.88%) City & Guilds
7 4 (0.58%) BICSI Certification
7 4 (0.58%) Computer Science Degree
7 4 (0.58%) Master's Degree
8 3 (0.44%) AWS Certification
8 3 (0.44%) IBM Certification
8 3 (0.44%) SnowPro
9 1 (0.15%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
9 1 (0.15%) CCIE
9 1 (0.15%) CCNP
9 1 (0.15%) CISM
9 1 (0.15%) CISSP
9 1 (0.15%) DBS Check
9 1 (0.15%) Numerate Degree
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 156 (22.77%) Data Quality
2 13 (1.90%) GDPR
3 12 (1.75%) QA
4 8 (1.17%) FATCA
5 7 (1.02%) SLA
6 5 (0.73%) Accessibility
7 2 (0.29%) HIPAA
7 2 (0.29%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 2 (0.29%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 1 (0.15%) Basel III
8 1 (0.15%) California Consumer Privacy Act
8 1 (0.15%) Disclosure Scotland
8 1 (0.15%) GMP
8 1 (0.15%) Government Security Classifications
8 1 (0.15%) NIST
8 1 (0.15%) SNOMED CT
8 1 (0.15%) WCAG
System Software
1 51 (7.45%) Docker
2 2 (0.29%) HDFS
2 2 (0.29%) Virtual Machines
Systems Management
1 54 (7.88%) Kubernetes
2 37 (5.40%) Grafana
3 36 (5.26%) Terraform
4 11 (1.61%) Prometheus
5 9 (1.31%) Ansible
6 3 (0.44%) Rancher
7 2 (0.29%) Apache Ranger
7 2 (0.29%) Kibana
7 2 (0.29%) logstash
8 1 (0.15%) Control-M
Vendors
1 116 (16.93%) Databricks
2 100 (14.60%) Oracle
3 98 (14.31%) Talend
4 73 (10.66%) Microsoft
5 64 (9.34%) Informatica
6 53 (7.74%) Denodo
7 32 (4.67%) Cisco
7 32 (4.67%) F5
8 16 (2.34%) Splunk
9 13 (1.90%) SAP
9 13 (1.90%) ServiceNow
10 11 (1.61%) Google
11 10 (1.46%) Cloudera
12 7 (1.02%) Alteryx
13 6 (0.88%) Dynatrace
13 6 (0.88%) InterSystems
14 5 (0.73%) Sage
15 4 (0.58%) Dataiku
15 4 (0.58%) IBM
16 2 (0.29%) Varonis