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 24 September 2026.

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

6 months to
24 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 78 174 124
Rank change year-on-year +96 -50 +46
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 868 233 316
As % of all contract jobs in the UK excluding London 3.06% 1.51% 1.79%
As % of the Job Titles category 3.36% 1.68% 1.94%
Number of daily rates quoted 515 162 211
10th Percentile £363 £345 £310
25th Percentile £413 £407 £433
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £475 £475 £500
Median % change year-on-year - -5.00% -4.76%
75th Percentile £545 £538 £575
90th Percentile £600 £625 £625
UK median daily rate £500 £500 £525
% change year-on-year - -4.76% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 59 3 4
10th Percentile £21.25 £19.43 £66.00
25th Percentile £30.96 £21.90 £75.00
Median hourly rate £41.56 £27.00 £80.00
Median % change year-on-year +53.91% -66.25% +40.35%
75th Percentile £68.00 £54.00 -
90th Percentile £70.00 £69.60 -
UK median hourly rate £43.03 £52.50 £80.00
% change year-on-year -18.04% -34.38% +29.55%

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 25,851 13,902 16,319
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 91.23% 89.82% 92.28%
Number of daily rates quoted 14,184 8,550 9,348
10th Percentile £303 £210 £220
25th Percentile £413 £361 £375
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £475 £500
Median % change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
75th Percentile £600 £575 £598
90th Percentile £688 £663 £676
UK median daily rate £525 £500 £525
% change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -0.94%
Number of hourly rates quoted 3,379 1,291 1,371
10th Percentile £14.22 £13.50 £14.50
25th Percentile £19.78 £16.38 £19.74
Median hourly rate £42.50 £25.08 £43.90
Median % change year-on-year +69.49% -42.88% +0.83%
75th Percentile £67.84 £50.88 £66.61
90th Percentile £78.70 £70.00 £75.00
UK median hourly rate £42.00 £25.15 £43.00
% change year-on-year +67.00% -41.51% -3.37%

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 24 September 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 24 September 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 24 September 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 +78 341 £469 +1.41% 127
West Midlands +65 268 £469 -6.20% 85
North of England +32 208 £515 +8.42% 283
South East +27 126 £459 +2.00% 198
North West +18 109 £525 +10.53% 163
South West +25 107 £525 +5.00% 92
Yorkshire +14 80 £500 - 78
East Midlands +31 73 £419 -9.46% 42
Scotland -1 67 £450 -2.70% 72
East of England +4 40 £475 -20.83% 56
North East -31 20 £450 +9.09% 44
Wales -2 17 £513 +3.54% 15
Northern Ireland +3 1 - - 33
Channel Islands - 1 - -
Data Engineer
UK

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

For the 6 months to 24 September 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.

1 390 (44.93%) SQL
2 329 (37.90%) Data Pipeline
3 279 (32.14%) Analytics
4 272 (31.34%) Python
5 270 (31.11%) ETL
6 265 (30.53%) Data Engineering
7 263 (30.30%) Data Modelling
8 242 (27.88%) Security Cleared
9 226 (26.04%) AWS
10 204 (23.50%) Azure
11 202 (23.27%) SC Cleared
12 179 (20.62%) Data Quality
13 151 (17.40%) Data Integration
14 148 (17.05%) CI/CD
15 144 (16.59%) Business Intelligence
15 144 (16.59%) Databricks
16 142 (16.36%) Migration
17 124 (14.29%) Agile
18 118 (13.59%) DevOps
19 111 (12.79%) Problem-Solving
20 109 (12.56%) AI
21 102 (11.75%) Data Warehouse
21 102 (11.75%) Power Platform
22 99 (11.41%) Microsoft
22 99 (11.41%) Validation
23 98 (11.29%) Power BI
24 94 (10.83%) Data Governance
25 93 (10.71%) Oracle
26 82 (9.45%) Data Transformation
27 81 (9.33%) Decision-Making

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 43 (4.95%) Apache Airflow
1 43 (4.95%) Apache Spark
2 41 (4.72%) Apache
3 34 (3.92%) SAS
4 23 (2.65%) Confluence
5 7 (0.81%) Palantir Foundry
6 5 (0.58%) Jupyter
7 3 (0.35%) Apache Superset
7 3 (0.35%) SharePoint
8 1 (0.12%) Microsoft Exchange
8 1 (0.12%) nginx
Applications
1 13 (1.50%) Microsoft Excel
2 7 (0.81%) Spreadsheet
3 5 (0.58%) Notepad++
4 1 (0.12%) Microsoft PowerPoint
Business Applications
1 5 (0.58%) Dynamics CRM
1 5 (0.58%) Infor LN
1 5 (0.58%) SAP S/4HANA
2 4 (0.46%) NetSuite
2 4 (0.46%) Sage X3
3 1 (0.12%) Aladdin
3 1 (0.12%) FIS Private Capital Suite
3 1 (0.12%) MIS ActiveH
3 1 (0.12%) Oracle Assets
Cloud Services
1 226 (26.04%) AWS
2 204 (23.50%) Azure
3 102 (11.75%) Power Platform
4 74 (8.53%) Azure Data Factory
5 71 (8.18%) Snowflake
6 60 (6.91%) GCP
7 54 (6.22%) dbt
8 46 (5.30%) Amazon S3
9 41 (4.72%) Serverless
10 36 (4.15%) Azure Synapse Analytics
11 33 (3.80%) AWS Lambda
12 30 (3.46%) Azure DevOps
13 27 (3.11%) GitHub
14 17 (1.96%) AWS CloudFormation
15 16 (1.84%) Amazon EMR
16 15 (1.73%) Azure Databricks
17 14 (1.61%) Amazon CloudWatch
18 13 (1.50%) AWS Step Functions
18 13 (1.50%) GitHub Actions
19 9 (1.04%) Matillion
Communications & Networking
1 23 (2.65%) BGP
1 23 (2.65%) DMZ
1 23 (2.65%) DNS
1 23 (2.65%) Multicast
1 23 (2.65%) VPN
2 6 (0.69%) Firewall
3 5 (0.58%) PuTTY
3 5 (0.58%) WinSCP
4 4 (0.46%) Structured Cabling
4 4 (0.46%) Wi-Fi
4 4 (0.46%) Wireless
5 3 (0.35%) Intrusion Detection
6 1 (0.12%) HTTP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 102 (11.75%) Data Warehouse
2 98 (11.29%) Power BI
3 58 (6.68%) Pentaho
4 53 (6.11%) Metadata
5 48 (5.53%) Data Lake
6 33 (3.80%) Amazon Redshift
7 32 (3.69%) SQL Server
8 28 (3.23%) Amazon Athena
9 24 (2.76%) Big Data
9 24 (2.76%) Relational Database
10 23 (2.65%) SQL Server Integration Services
11 22 (2.53%) BigQuery
12 20 (2.30%) Delta Lake
13 18 (2.07%) Oracle Database
14 17 (1.96%) Azure SQL Database
15 15 (1.73%) BusinessObjects
15 15 (1.73%) Snowflake Schema
15 15 (1.73%) Tableau
16 13 (1.50%) Hadoop
17 12 (1.38%) PostgreSQL
Development Applications
1 62 (7.14%) Git
2 52 (5.99%) GitLab
3 37 (4.26%) JIRA
4 19 (2.19%) Jenkins
5 7 (0.81%) Postman
6 5 (0.58%) Artifactory
7 3 (0.35%) Newman
8 2 (0.23%) RStudio
8 2 (0.23%) Yeoman
9 1 (0.12%) ER Studio
9 1 (0.12%) ERwin
9 1 (0.12%) MLflow
9 1 (0.12%) SonarQube
9 1 (0.12%) Sonatype Nexus
9 1 (0.12%) Toad
General
1 143 (16.47%) Social Skills
2 95 (10.94%) Analytical Skills
3 94 (10.83%) Public Sector
4 55 (6.34%) Finance
5 42 (4.84%) Banking
6 19 (2.19%) Automotive
7 18 (2.07%) Investment Banking
7 18 (2.07%) Marketing
8 14 (1.61%) Aerospace
8 14 (1.61%) Documentation Skills
9 13 (1.50%) Telecoms
10 10 (1.15%) Manufacturing
10 10 (1.15%) Retail
11 9 (1.04%) Inclusion and Diversity
12 8 (0.92%) Law
13 6 (0.69%) Military
14 5 (0.58%) Front Office
14 5 (0.58%) Police
15 4 (0.46%) Legal
15 4 (0.46%) Publishing
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 79 (9.10%) PySpark
2 59 (6.80%) Terraform
3 40 (4.61%) Kafka
4 17 (1.96%) JSON
5 11 (1.27%) Pandas
6 9 (1.04%) REST
6 9 (1.04%) Streamlit
6 9 (1.04%) XML
7 7 (0.81%) Apache NiFi
7 7 (0.81%) RESTful
8 5 (0.58%) Elastic Stack
8 5 (0.58%) Great Expectations
8 5 (0.58%) pytest
9 4 (0.46%) Apache Avro
10 3 (0.35%) .NET
10 3 (0.35%) Keycloak
10 3 (0.35%) Spring
10 3 (0.35%) Spring Boot
10 3 (0.35%) XML Schema
11 2 (0.23%) Apache Beam
Miscellaneous
1 38 (4.38%) Cloud Native
2 26 (3.00%) Data Structures
3 23 (2.65%) Legacy Systems
4 12 (1.38%) Management Information System
5 11 (1.27%) NHS
5 11 (1.27%) Onboarding
5 11 (1.27%) Reference Data
6 7 (0.81%) Distributed Systems
6 7 (0.81%) Greenfield Project
7 6 (0.69%) Data Fabric
7 6 (0.69%) Driving Licence
7 6 (0.69%) Linux Command Line
7 6 (0.69%) Product Ownership
8 5 (0.58%) Data Protection Act
9 4 (0.46%) Derivative
9 4 (0.46%) Hybrid Cloud
9 4 (0.46%) iPad
9 4 (0.46%) Self-Motivation
10 3 (0.35%) Algorithms
10 3 (0.35%) Enterprise Software
Operating Systems
1 35 (4.03%) Unix
2 16 (1.84%) Linux
3 2 (0.23%) Ubuntu
3 2 (0.23%) Windows
4 1 (0.12%) VMS
4 1 (0.12%) Windows Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 329 (37.90%) Data Pipeline
2 279 (32.14%) Analytics
3 270 (31.11%) ETL
4 265 (30.53%) Data Engineering
5 263 (30.30%) Data Modelling
6 151 (17.40%) Data Integration
7 148 (17.05%) CI/CD
8 144 (16.59%) Business Intelligence
9 142 (16.36%) Migration
10 124 (14.29%) Agile
11 118 (13.59%) DevOps
12 111 (12.79%) Problem-Solving
13 109 (12.56%) AI
14 99 (11.41%) Validation
15 94 (10.83%) Data Governance
16 82 (9.45%) Data Transformation
17 81 (9.33%) Decision-Making
18 73 (8.41%) Data Migration
19 65 (7.49%) Test Automation
20 61 (7.03%) Machine Learning
Programming Languages
1 390 (44.93%) SQL
2 272 (31.34%) Python
3 30 (3.46%) PL/SQL
4 23 (2.65%) Java
5 15 (1.73%) Bash
6 13 (1.50%) Data Analysis Expressions
6 13 (1.50%) Shell Script
6 13 (1.50%) T-SQL
7 9 (1.04%) Scala
8 7 (0.81%) PowerShell
9 3 (0.35%) Bicep
9 3 (0.35%) Go
9 3 (0.35%) R
10 2 (0.23%) JavaScript
10 2 (0.23%) Kusto Query Language
11 1 (0.12%) C++
11 1 (0.12%) COBOL
11 1 (0.12%) Perl
11 1 (0.12%) PHP
Qualifications
1 242 (27.88%) Security Cleared
2 202 (23.27%) SC Cleared
3 21 (2.42%) DV Cleared
4 18 (2.07%) Degree
5 17 (1.96%) BPSS Clearance
6 9 (1.04%) Computer Science Degree
7 7 (0.81%) Azure Certification
8 4 (0.46%) AWS Certification
8 4 (0.46%) City & Guilds
8 4 (0.46%) SnowPro
9 3 (0.35%) CEH
9 3 (0.35%) CISM
9 3 (0.35%) CISSP
9 3 (0.35%) Master's Degree
10 1 (0.12%) TOGAF Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 179 (20.62%) Data Quality
2 38 (4.38%) QA
3 12 (1.38%) GDPR
4 7 (0.81%) SLA
5 6 (0.69%) Accessibility
6 5 (0.58%) Disclosure Scotland
6 5 (0.58%) FATCA
7 4 (0.46%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 3 (0.35%) HIPAA
9 1 (0.12%) California Consumer Privacy Act
9 1 (0.12%) Government Security Classifications
9 1 (0.12%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 1 (0.12%) SNOMED CT
9 1 (0.12%) WCAG
System Software
1 30 (3.46%) Docker
2 1 (0.12%) HDFS
2 1 (0.12%) Virtual Machines
Systems Management
1 27 (3.11%) Kubernetes
2 22 (2.53%) Grafana
3 9 (1.04%) Ansible
4 3 (0.35%) Prometheus
5 2 (0.23%) Control-M
5 2 (0.23%) Kibana
5 2 (0.23%) logstash
6 1 (0.12%) Progress Chef
Vendors
1 144 (16.59%) Databricks
2 99 (11.41%) Microsoft
3 93 (10.71%) Oracle
4 67 (7.72%) Talend
5 48 (5.53%) Informatica
6 32 (3.69%) Denodo
7 28 (3.23%) Google
8 23 (2.65%) Cisco
8 23 (2.65%) F5
9 18 (2.07%) SAP
10 17 (1.96%) Salesforce
11 10 (1.15%) Palantir
12 7 (0.81%) Foundry
12 7 (0.81%) Sage
13 6 (0.69%) Cloudera
13 6 (0.69%) InterSystems
13 6 (0.69%) SYSPRO
14 5 (0.58%) Dynatrace
14 5 (0.58%) Infor
15 4 (0.46%) PagerDuty