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 19 November 2025.

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

6 months to
19 Nov 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 164 123 177
Rank change year-on-year -41 +54 -3
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 288 317 268
As % of all contract jobs in the UK excluding London 1.64% 1.93% 1.30%
As % of the Job Titles category 1.83% 2.09% 1.38%
Number of daily rates quoted 204 203 219
10th Percentile £348 £361 £400
25th Percentile £402 £435 £450
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £475 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year -5.00% -4.76% -
75th Percentile £543 £583 £603
90th Percentile £625 £648 £688
UK median daily rate £500 £540 £530
% change year-on-year -7.41% +1.89% -3.64%
Number of hourly rates quoted 5 4 2
10th Percentile £21.07 £25.14 £47.56
25th Percentile £26.00 £25.21 £50.47
Median hourly rate £37.50 £26.50 £57.00
Median % change year-on-year +41.51% -53.51% +14.00%
75th Percentile £69.25 £27.91 £61.84
90th Percentile £75.70 £28.19 £63.74
UK median hourly rate £48.00 £34.93 £61.75
% change year-on-year +37.44% -43.44% +23.50%

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 15,725 15,172 19,359
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 89.80% 92.29% 93.79%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,724 8,689 12,774
10th Percentile £208 £219 £213
25th Percentile £363 £375 £379
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £475 £490 £500
Median % change year-on-year -3.06% -2.00% -
75th Percentile £575 £590 £600
90th Percentile £675 £676 £688
UK median daily rate £500 £525 £525
% change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 1,565 1,039 1,269
10th Percentile £13.80 £15.09 £14.40
25th Percentile £17.30 £20.00 £18.50
Median hourly rate £25.15 £35.00 £45.00
Median % change year-on-year -28.14% -22.22% +86.55%
75th Percentile £55.00 £65.00 £65.00
90th Percentile £70.16 £73.75 £77.10
UK median hourly rate £25.15 £36.00 £45.00
% change year-on-year -30.14% -20.00% +55.71%

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 19 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 19 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 19 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
Midlands -21 81 £515 +5.32% 69
North of England -27 78 £450 -8.63% 71
West Midlands -15 68 £519 +4.75% 58
Scotland +19 47 £425 -15.00% 36
South West +10 37 £550 - 35
South East -36 36 £475 -13.64% 105
North West -22 35 £403 -15.26% 40
Yorkshire -37 35 £500 +1.52% 22
East Midlands -18 13 £460 +29.21% 10
Wales -12 12 £425 -15.00% 10
North East -1 8 £425 -27.35% 9
East of England -29 6 £625 +79.86% 22
Northern Ireland -9 1 - - 1
Data Engineer
UK

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

For the 6 months to 19 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.

1 173 (60.07%) Python
2 164 (56.94%) SQL
3 126 (43.75%) ETL
4 117 (40.63%) Data Pipeline
5 103 (35.76%) Data Engineering
6 101 (35.07%) CI/CD
7 93 (32.29%) Analytics
7 93 (32.29%) Azure
8 91 (31.60%) AWS
9 87 (30.21%) Data Modelling
10 74 (25.69%) DevOps
11 72 (25.00%) Databricks
12 71 (24.65%) Data Warehouse
13 70 (24.31%) Business Intelligence
14 65 (22.57%) Agile
14 65 (22.57%) Data Quality
15 60 (20.83%) Problem-Solving
16 50 (17.36%) Power Platform
17 49 (17.01%) PySpark
17 49 (17.01%) Security Cleared
18 48 (16.67%) Power BI
19 46 (15.97%) Kubernetes
20 45 (15.63%) Jenkins
20 45 (15.63%) Snowflake
21 44 (15.28%) Apache Airflow
21 44 (15.28%) Docker
22 43 (14.93%) SC Cleared
23 41 (14.24%) Azure Data Factory
23 41 (14.24%) Git
23 41 (14.24%) Test Automation

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 (15.28%) Apache Airflow
2 27 (9.38%) Apache
3 25 (8.68%) Apache Spark
4 16 (5.56%) SAS
5 8 (2.78%) Confluence
6 7 (2.43%) Oracle Application Server
7 5 (1.74%) Apache Pig
8 3 (1.04%) IIS
9 2 (0.69%) Documentum
9 2 (0.69%) SharePoint
10 1 (0.35%) Apache Synapse
10 1 (0.35%) Jupyter
Applications
1 2 (0.69%) Windchill
2 1 (0.35%) Chatbot
2 1 (0.35%) SPSS
2 1 (0.35%) Stata
Business Applications
1 2 (0.69%) Payment Gateway
1 2 (0.69%) SAP S/4HANA
2 1 (0.35%) Salesforce CRM
Cloud Services
1 93 (32.29%) Azure
2 91 (31.60%) AWS
3 50 (17.36%) Power Platform
4 45 (15.63%) Snowflake
5 41 (14.24%) Azure Data Factory
6 31 (10.76%) GCP
7 26 (9.03%) Amazon S3
7 26 (9.03%) Serverless
8 24 (8.33%) Azure Synapse Analytics
8 24 (8.33%) GitHub
9 20 (6.94%) dbt
10 19 (6.60%) AWS Lambda
11 11 (3.82%) AWS CloudFormation
11 11 (3.82%) Azure DevOps
12 9 (3.13%) GitHub Actions
13 8 (2.78%) Amazon SageMaker
14 7 (2.43%) Amazon ECS
14 7 (2.43%) Amazon EMR
14 7 (2.43%) Cloud Computing
14 7 (2.43%) CloudBees
Communications & Networking
1 5 (1.74%) TCP/IP
2 3 (1.04%) MQTT
2 3 (1.04%) SSH
2 3 (1.04%) Structured Cabling
3 2 (0.69%) DNS
3 2 (0.69%) SSL
3 2 (0.69%) Wi-Fi
4 1 (0.35%) 802.11
4 1 (0.35%) Ethernet
4 1 (0.35%) Firewall
4 1 (0.35%) Internet
4 1 (0.35%) LAN
4 1 (0.35%) WAN
4 1 (0.35%) Wireless
Database & Business Intelligence
1 71 (24.65%) Data Warehouse
2 48 (16.67%) Power BI
3 31 (10.76%) Data Lake
4 30 (10.42%) NoSQL
5 29 (10.07%) Big Data
5 29 (10.07%) PostgreSQL
6 23 (7.99%) Pentaho
7 22 (7.64%) Hadoop
8 21 (7.29%) Amazon Redshift
8 21 (7.29%) Relational Database
9 18 (6.25%) Delta Lake
10 15 (5.21%) SQL Server
11 13 (4.51%) Amazon RDS
11 13 (4.51%) Data Mining
11 13 (4.51%) Elasticsearch
12 10 (3.47%) Tableau
13 9 (3.13%) Azure SQL Database
14 8 (2.78%) MongoDB
14 8 (2.78%) RDBMS
14 8 (2.78%) Star Schema
Development Applications
1 45 (15.63%) Jenkins
2 41 (14.24%) Git
3 25 (8.68%) JIRA
4 24 (8.33%) GitLab
5 8 (2.78%) MLflow
6 7 (2.43%) DBeaver
7 5 (1.74%) Visual Studio Code
8 4 (1.39%) SonarQube
9 3 (1.04%) Artifactory
9 3 (1.04%) Bitbucket
9 3 (1.04%) Cucumber
9 3 (1.04%) Poetry
9 3 (1.04%) PyCharm
9 3 (1.04%) Sonatype Nexus
10 2 (0.69%) JMeter
10 2 (0.69%) Visual Studio
10 2 (0.69%) Zephyr
11 1 (0.35%) JUnit
11 1 (0.35%) Maven
11 1 (0.35%) Selenium
General
1 66 (22.92%) Social Skills
2 37 (12.85%) Analytical Skills
3 31 (10.76%) Finance
4 19 (6.60%) Public Sector
5 18 (6.25%) Banking
6 6 (2.08%) Documentation Skills
7 4 (1.39%) Influencing Skills
7 4 (1.39%) Telecoms
8 3 (1.04%) Manufacturing
8 3 (1.04%) Presentation Skills
8 3 (1.04%) Retail
8 3 (1.04%) Tech for Good
9 2 (0.69%) Aerospace
9 2 (0.69%) Health Technology
9 2 (0.69%) Inclusion and Diversity
9 2 (0.69%) Legal
9 2 (0.69%) Marketing
9 2 (0.69%) Pharmaceutical
10 1 (0.35%) Advertising
10 1 (0.35%) Law
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 49 (17.01%) PySpark
2 24 (8.33%) Kafka
3 15 (5.21%) RESTful
4 13 (4.51%) Flask
4 13 (4.51%) Pandas
5 12 (4.17%) NumPy
6 10 (3.47%) REST
7 8 (2.78%) Keycloak
8 7 (2.43%) Elastic Stack
8 7 (2.43%) HTML
8 7 (2.43%) OpenTelemetry
8 7 (2.43%) Oracle GoldenGate
9 6 (2.08%) Apache NiFi
10 5 (1.74%) OAuth
10 5 (1.74%) OAuth2
11 4 (1.39%) FastAPI
11 4 (1.39%) JSON
11 4 (1.39%) PyTorch
11 4 (1.39%) TensorFlow
12 3 (1.04%) JDBC
Miscellaneous
1 24 (8.33%) Cloud Native
2 16 (5.56%) Replication
3 14 (4.86%) Product Ownership
4 13 (4.51%) Algorithms
5 12 (4.17%) Hybrid Cloud
6 10 (3.47%) Data Protection Act
7 8 (2.78%) Distributed Systems
8 6 (2.08%) Clustering
8 6 (2.08%) Legacy Systems
8 6 (2.08%) NHS
9 5 (1.74%) Data Structures
9 5 (1.74%) IoT
10 4 (1.39%) Driving Licence
11 3 (1.04%) AI Agents
11 3 (1.04%) Fibre Optics
11 3 (1.04%) Greenfield Project
11 3 (1.04%) Private Cloud
12 2 (0.69%) CCTV
12 2 (0.69%) Data Centre
12 2 (0.69%) SCADA
Operating Systems
1 21 (7.29%) Linux
2 11 (3.82%) Unix
3 2 (0.69%) Windows
3 2 (0.69%) Windows Server
3 2 (0.69%) Windows Server 2003
Processes & Methodologies
1 126 (43.75%) ETL
2 117 (40.63%) Data Pipeline
3 103 (35.76%) Data Engineering
4 101 (35.07%) CI/CD
5 93 (32.29%) Analytics
6 87 (30.21%) Data Modelling
7 74 (25.69%) DevOps
8 70 (24.31%) Business Intelligence
9 65 (22.57%) Agile
10 60 (20.83%) Problem-Solving
11 41 (14.24%) Test Automation
12 40 (13.89%) Data Integration
13 39 (13.54%) Machine Learning
14 38 (13.19%) Visualisation
15 32 (11.11%) Data Science
16 31 (10.76%) Performance Tuning
17 30 (10.42%) Data Governance
17 30 (10.42%) Scrum
18 28 (9.72%) Continuous Improvement
19 27 (9.38%) Data Transformation
Programming Languages
1 173 (60.07%) Python
2 164 (56.94%) SQL
3 30 (10.42%) Java
4 21 (7.29%) Scala
5 12 (4.17%) Bash
5 12 (4.17%) PL/SQL
6 8 (2.78%) Go
7 6 (2.08%) R
8 5 (1.74%) JavaScript
8 5 (1.74%) Shell Script
9 4 (1.39%) Data Analysis Expressions
9 4 (1.39%) Groovy
9 4 (1.39%) T-SQL
10 3 (1.04%) TypeScript
11 2 (0.69%) ABAP
12 1 (0.35%) Bicep
12 1 (0.35%) C#
12 1 (0.35%) Cypher
12 1 (0.35%) VB.NET
Qualifications
1 49 (17.01%) Security Cleared
2 43 (14.93%) SC Cleared
3 14 (4.86%) Degree
4 13 (4.51%) AWS Certification
5 9 (3.13%) Azure Certification
6 8 (2.78%) Master's Degree
7 6 (2.08%) Computer Science Degree
8 3 (1.04%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
9 2 (0.69%) DV Cleared
10 1 (0.35%) HND
10 1 (0.35%) ITIL Certification
10 1 (0.35%) MCP
10 1 (0.35%) SnowPro
10 1 (0.35%) Tableau Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 65 (22.57%) Data Quality
2 8 (2.78%) GDPR
3 6 (2.08%) QA
4 3 (1.04%) Accessibility
5 1 (0.35%) Disclosure Scotland
5 1 (0.35%) EU AI Act
5 1 (0.35%) ISO 19650
5 1 (0.35%) NCSC
5 1 (0.35%) NIST
5 1 (0.35%) PMO
5 1 (0.35%) WCAG
System Software
1 44 (15.28%) Docker
2 3 (1.04%) Virtual Machines
3 2 (0.69%) Active Directory
Systems Management
1 46 (15.97%) Kubernetes
2 26 (9.03%) Terraform
3 11 (3.82%) Ansible
3 11 (3.82%) Grafana
4 8 (2.78%) NetBackup
5 7 (2.43%) Prometheus
6 6 (2.08%) Kibana
7 4 (1.39%) logstash
8 3 (1.04%) Argo
8 3 (1.04%) Istio
8 3 (1.04%) Kustomize
9 2 (0.69%) Control-M
10 1 (0.35%) FortiGate
10 1 (0.35%) Puppet
Vendors
1 72 (25.00%) Databricks
2 40 (13.89%) Oracle
3 32 (11.11%) Microsoft
4 27 (9.38%) Talend
5 15 (5.21%) Denodo
6 14 (4.86%) Informatica
7 11 (3.82%) Red Hat
8 9 (3.13%) Google
9 8 (2.78%) Commvault
9 8 (2.78%) IBM
10 7 (2.43%) Veritas
11 6 (2.08%) Cloudera
11 6 (2.08%) Confluent
12 5 (1.74%) ServiceNow
12 5 (1.74%) Splunk
13 4 (1.39%) Salesforce
14 3 (1.04%) SAP
15 2 (0.69%) Cisco
15 2 (0.69%) EMC
15 2 (0.69%) McAfee