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 28 May 2026.

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

6 months to
28 May 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 72 122 140
Rank change year-on-year +50 +18 +18
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 730 273 319
As % of all contract jobs in the UK excluding London 2.93% 2.14% 1.55%
As % of the Job Titles category 3.19% 2.33% 1.68%
Number of daily rates quoted 503 209 236
10th Percentile £372 £261 £163
25th Percentile £413 £381 £196
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £469 £460 £450
Median % change year-on-year +2.05% +2.22% -14.29%
75th Percentile £538 £513 £538
90th Percentile £598 £625 £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 £66.25
% change year-on-year - -20.75% -12.25%

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 22,881 11,697 18,990
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 91.89% 91.71% 92.39%
Number of daily rates quoted 13,187 7,479 11,558
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 £508 £525
% change year-on-year +0.99% -3.33% -2.78%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,637 829 2,352
10th Percentile £14.65 £13.77 £12.50
25th Percentile £20.00 £16.95 £15.75
Median hourly rate £43.61 £25.30 £40.00
Median % change year-on-year +72.35% -36.75% -5.88%
75th Percentile £67.25 £62.50 £61.64
90th Percentile £78.75 £75.00 £73.75
UK median hourly rate £42.50 £27.97 £36.50
% change year-on-year +51.98% -23.38% -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 28 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 28 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 28 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 +43 301 £469 +3.08% 36
West Midlands +44 283 £469 +1.96% 23
North of England -1 200 £465 -0.80% 73
North West +10 125 £480 +1.05% 27
South East +8 99 £500 +17.65% 70
South West +10 72 £500 +1.27% 29
Scotland +13 58 £450 - 7
Yorkshire -24 58 £465 +3.33% 22
Wales +2 22 £450 +118.11% 19
East of England -23 19 £520 +63.52% 3
East Midlands -21 18 £525 +26.51% 13
North East -23 17 £450 -5.26% 25
Northern Ireland +5 3 £410 -18.00% 8
Data Engineer
UK

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

For the 6 months to 28 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.

1 379 (51.92%) SQL
2 284 (38.90%) Data Pipeline
3 274 (37.53%) Analytics
3 274 (37.53%) ETL
4 257 (35.21%) Data Engineering
5 249 (34.11%) Security Cleared
6 237 (32.47%) Data Modelling
7 233 (31.92%) Python
8 209 (28.63%) SC Cleared
9 181 (24.79%) Azure
10 166 (22.74%) Business Intelligence
11 157 (21.51%) Data Quality
12 143 (19.59%) CI/CD
13 139 (19.04%) AWS
14 136 (18.63%) Agile
15 128 (17.53%) Data Integration
16 125 (17.12%) Databricks
17 120 (16.44%) Problem-Solving
18 113 (15.48%) Power Platform
19 108 (14.79%) Power BI
20 104 (14.25%) Oracle
21 100 (13.70%) DevOps
21 100 (13.70%) Talend
22 92 (12.60%) Data Warehouse
23 90 (12.33%) Migration
24 87 (11.92%) Git
25 86 (11.78%) PySpark
26 80 (10.96%) Azure Data Factory
27 79 (10.82%) Microsoft
28 76 (10.41%) 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 (8.90%) SAS
2 45 (6.16%) Apache Spark
3 41 (5.62%) Apache Airflow
4 34 (4.66%) Apache
5 21 (2.88%) Confluence
6 4 (0.55%) Jupyter
7 2 (0.27%) Palantir Foundry
8 1 (0.14%) Apache Superset
8 1 (0.14%) SharePoint
Applications
1 7 (0.96%) 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
1 181 (24.79%) Azure
2 139 (19.04%) AWS
3 113 (15.48%) Power Platform
4 80 (10.96%) Azure Data Factory
5 63 (8.63%) Snowflake
6 44 (6.03%) Azure Synapse Analytics
7 37 (5.07%) GCP
8 36 (4.93%) dbt
9 32 (4.38%) Amazon S3
10 30 (4.11%) Azure DevOps
11 26 (3.56%) GitHub
12 24 (3.29%) Serverless
13 19 (2.60%) OpenShift
14 18 (2.47%) AWS Lambda
15 17 (2.33%) Matillion
16 12 (1.64%) Amazon EMR
16 12 (1.64%) GitHub Actions
17 9 (1.23%) Amazon CloudWatch
18 8 (1.10%) AWS CloudFormation
18 8 (1.10%) Power Automate
Communications & Networking
1 33 (4.52%) DNS
1 33 (4.52%) VPN
2 32 (4.38%) BGP
2 32 (4.38%) DMZ
2 32 (4.38%) Multicast
3 8 (1.10%) Structured Cabling
4 5 (0.68%) PuTTY
4 5 (0.68%) WinSCP
5 4 (0.55%) Wi-Fi
5 4 (0.55%) Wireless
6 3 (0.41%) Firewall
Database & Business Intelligence
1 108 (14.79%) Power BI
2 92 (12.60%) Data Warehouse
3 76 (10.41%) Pentaho
4 46 (6.30%) Data Lake
5 35 (4.79%) Big Data
5 35 (4.79%) SQL Server
6 33 (4.52%) Amazon Redshift
7 26 (3.56%) Hadoop
7 26 (3.56%) Metadata
8 25 (3.42%) Delta Lake
8 25 (3.42%) SQL Server Integration Services
9 24 (3.29%) Azure SQL Database
9 24 (3.29%) MySQL
10 23 (3.15%) Relational Database
11 19 (2.60%) NoSQL
11 19 (2.60%) PostgreSQL
11 19 (2.60%) Tableau
12 18 (2.47%) Snowflake Schema
13 15 (2.05%) Amazon Athena
13 15 (2.05%) BusinessObjects
Development Applications
1 87 (11.92%) Git
2 52 (7.12%) GitLab
3 47 (6.44%) JIRA
4 31 (4.25%) Jenkins
5 5 (0.68%) Artifactory
5 5 (0.68%) Postman
6 4 (0.55%) Bitbucket
7 3 (0.41%) Newman
8 2 (0.27%) Visual Studio
9 1 (0.14%) ER Studio
9 1 (0.14%) ERwin
9 1 (0.14%) JUnit
General
1 115 (15.75%) Social Skills
2 77 (10.55%) Analytical Skills
3 67 (9.18%) Public Sector
4 61 (8.36%) Finance
5 40 (5.48%) Banking
6 22 (3.01%) Investment Banking
7 15 (2.05%) Documentation Skills
8 14 (1.92%) Aerospace
9 12 (1.64%) Manufacturing
10 10 (1.37%) Retail
11 8 (1.10%) Marketing
11 8 (1.10%) Telecoms
12 4 (0.55%) Inclusion and Diversity
12 4 (0.55%) Local Government
13 3 (0.41%) Automotive
13 3 (0.41%) Front Office
13 3 (0.41%) Law
14 2 (0.27%) Advertising
14 2 (0.27%) Aviation
14 2 (0.27%) Legal
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 86 (11.78%) PySpark
2 63 (8.63%) Kafka
3 21 (2.88%) JSON
4 14 (1.92%) REST
5 13 (1.78%) Pandas
6 11 (1.51%) XML
7 8 (1.10%) Apache Avro
7 8 (1.10%) Apache Beam
7 8 (1.10%) Protocol Buffers
8 7 (0.96%) 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%) YAML
11 4 (0.55%) AngularJS
11 4 (0.55%) AWS CDK
11 4 (0.55%) React
11 4 (0.55%) RESTful
Miscellaneous
1 30 (4.11%) Cloud Native
2 20 (2.74%) Data Structures
3 18 (2.47%) Legacy Systems
4 13 (1.78%) Data Protection Act
4 13 (1.78%) Distributed Systems
5 11 (1.51%) Clustering
6 10 (1.37%) Product Ownership
7 9 (1.23%) Driving Licence
7 9 (1.23%) Greenfield Project
8 7 (0.96%) NHS
9 6 (0.82%) Data Centre
9 6 (0.82%) Hybrid Cloud
9 6 (0.82%) Linux Command Line
9 6 (0.82%) Onboarding
10 4 (0.55%) Data Fabric
10 4 (0.55%) Fibre Optics
10 4 (0.55%) iPad
10 4 (0.55%) Life Science
10 4 (0.55%) Public Cloud
10 4 (0.55%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 41 (5.62%) Unix
2 11 (1.51%) Linux
3 2 (0.27%) Ubuntu
4 1 (0.14%) VMS
4 1 (0.14%) Windows
Processes & Methodologies
1 284 (38.90%) Data Pipeline
2 274 (37.53%) Analytics
2 274 (37.53%) ETL
3 257 (35.21%) Data Engineering
4 237 (32.47%) Data Modelling
5 166 (22.74%) Business Intelligence
6 143 (19.59%) CI/CD
7 136 (18.63%) Agile
8 128 (17.53%) Data Integration
9 120 (16.44%) Problem-Solving
10 100 (13.70%) DevOps
11 90 (12.33%) Migration
12 73 (10.00%) Data Governance
13 70 (9.59%) Validation
14 67 (9.18%) Scrum
15 62 (8.49%) AI
15 62 (8.49%) Test Automation
16 55 (7.53%) Decision-Making
17 50 (6.85%) Continuous Improvement
18 46 (6.30%) Data Analytics
Programming Languages
1 379 (51.92%) SQL
2 233 (31.92%) Python
3 34 (4.66%) Java
4 33 (4.52%) PL/SQL
5 17 (2.33%) Shell Script
6 16 (2.19%) Bash
7 12 (1.64%) Data Analysis Expressions
8 10 (1.37%) PowerShell
9 9 (1.23%) T-SQL
10 6 (0.82%) C#
10 6 (0.82%) Scala
11 5 (0.68%) Bicep
11 5 (0.68%) 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
1 249 (34.11%) Security Cleared
2 209 (28.63%) SC Cleared
3 19 (2.60%) Degree
4 15 (2.05%) BPSS Clearance
5 11 (1.51%) DV Cleared
6 8 (1.10%) City & Guilds
7 5 (0.68%) Azure Certification
7 5 (0.68%) Computer Science Degree
7 5 (0.68%) Master's Degree
8 4 (0.55%) 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 (21.51%) Data Quality
2 17 (2.33%) QA
3 13 (1.78%) GDPR
4 9 (1.23%) SLA
5 8 (1.10%) FATCA
6 4 (0.55%) 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 (5.75%) Docker
2 3 (0.41%) Virtual Machines
3 2 (0.27%) HDFS
Systems Management
1 44 (6.03%) Kubernetes
2 39 (5.34%) Grafana
3 36 (4.93%) Terraform
4 11 (1.51%) Prometheus
5 9 (1.23%) 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
1 125 (17.12%) Databricks
2 104 (14.25%) Oracle
3 100 (13.70%) Talend
4 79 (10.82%) Microsoft
5 71 (9.73%) Informatica
6 53 (7.26%) Denodo
7 34 (4.66%) Cisco
7 34 (4.66%) F5
8 16 (2.19%) Splunk
9 15 (2.05%) SAP
10 13 (1.78%) ServiceNow
11 12 (1.64%) Cloudera
11 12 (1.64%) Google
12 8 (1.10%) Alteryx
13 6 (0.82%) Dynatrace
13 6 (0.82%) InterSystems
14 5 (0.68%) Sage
15 4 (0.55%) Dataiku
15 4 (0.55%) IBM
16 3 (0.41%) Infor