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 August 2026.

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

6 months to
19 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 65 163 129
Rank change year-on-year +98 -34 +49
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 910 247 312
As % of all contract jobs in the UK excluding London 3.30% 1.61% 1.71%
As % of the Job Titles category 3.59% 1.79% 1.86%
Number of daily rates quoted 558 166 226
10th Percentile £366 £344 £170
25th Percentile £413 £413 £295
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £475 £475 £469
Median % change year-on-year - +1.33% -10.71%
75th Percentile £538 £538 £550
90th Percentile £600 £625 £613
UK median daily rate £500 £500 £525
% change year-on-year - -4.76% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 76 4 20
10th Percentile £20.30 £20.25 £58.05
25th Percentile £30.96 £23.95 £72.50
Median hourly rate £45.00 £52.85 £80.00
Median % change year-on-year -14.85% -33.94% +63.27%
75th Percentile £70.00 £79.03 -
90th Percentile £72.63 £79.61 -
UK median hourly rate £45.00 £52.50 £75.00
% change year-on-year -14.29% -30.00% +5.26%

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 25,321 13,777 16,808
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 91.81% 90.08% 92.23%
Number of daily rates quoted 14,293 8,431 10,221
10th Percentile £305 £213 £220
25th Percentile £410 £362 £375
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £475 £500
Median % change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
75th Percentile £600 £575 £600
90th Percentile £688 £650 £688
UK median daily rate £525 £500 £525
% change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -1.87%
Number of hourly rates quoted 3,040 1,248 1,696
10th Percentile £14.56 £13.25 £13.98
25th Percentile £20.42 £16.39 £18.33
Median hourly rate £42.30 £25.15 £43.95
Median % change year-on-year +68.19% -42.78% +17.20%
75th Percentile £68.00 £55.00 £65.00
90th Percentile £80.00 £75.00 £75.00
UK median hourly rate £41.71 £25.15 £43.00
% change year-on-year +65.84% -41.51% +2.87%

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 August 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 19 August 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 19 August 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 +75 388 £467 +1.25% 60
West Midlands +59 329 £465 +1.09% 43
North of England +21 227 £500 +5.26% 118
South East +18 131 £467 +3.78% 110
North West +22 129 £525 +10.53% 53
South West +3 88 £525 +5.00% 39
Yorkshire -3 78 £465 -7.00% 33
Scotland +15 60 £440 +2.09% 23
East Midlands +23 59 £470 +1.62% 17
East of England +4 40 £475 +22.58% 23
North East -24 21 £515 +21.89% 32
Wales -2 16 £500 +12.36% 14
Northern Ireland +8 3 £410 -18.00% 7
Data Engineer
UK

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

For the 6 months to 19 August 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.

1 405 (44.51%) SQL
2 340 (37.36%) Data Pipeline
3 304 (33.41%) Analytics
4 295 (32.42%) ETL
5 272 (29.89%) Data Engineering
6 268 (29.45%) Security Cleared
7 266 (29.23%) Data Modelling
8 259 (28.46%) Python
9 224 (24.62%) SC Cleared
10 218 (23.96%) Azure
11 200 (21.98%) AWS
12 196 (21.54%) Data Quality
13 176 (19.34%) Business Intelligence
14 168 (18.46%) CI/CD
15 160 (17.58%) Data Integration
16 143 (15.71%) Databricks
17 141 (15.49%) Agile
18 133 (14.62%) Migration
19 129 (14.18%) Problem-Solving
20 118 (12.97%) DevOps
21 112 (12.31%) Data Warehouse
22 111 (12.20%) Power Platform
23 108 (11.87%) Power BI
24 105 (11.54%) Oracle
25 103 (11.32%) Microsoft
26 101 (11.10%) Validation
27 98 (10.77%) Data Governance
28 93 (10.22%) Talend
29 91 (10.00%) Git
30 87 (9.56%) AI

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 60 (6.59%) SAS
2 43 (4.73%) Apache Spark
3 33 (3.63%) Apache Airflow
4 32 (3.52%) Apache
5 23 (2.53%) Confluence
6 5 (0.55%) Jupyter
7 4 (0.44%) Palantir Foundry
8 3 (0.33%) Apache Superset
8 3 (0.33%) SharePoint
Applications
1 12 (1.32%) Microsoft Excel
2 5 (0.55%) Notepad++
3 3 (0.33%) Spreadsheet
4 1 (0.11%) Microsoft PowerPoint
Business Applications
1 5 (0.55%) Dynamics CRM
1 5 (0.55%) Infor LN
2 4 (0.44%) NetSuite
2 4 (0.44%) Sage X3
3 3 (0.33%) SAP S/4HANA
4 1 (0.11%) Aladdin
4 1 (0.11%) FIS Private Capital Suite
4 1 (0.11%) MIS ActiveH
4 1 (0.11%) Oracle 11i
4 1 (0.11%) Oracle Assets
4 1 (0.11%) Oracle ERP
Cloud Services
1 218 (23.96%) Azure
2 200 (21.98%) AWS
3 111 (12.20%) Power Platform
4 81 (8.90%) Azure Data Factory
5 72 (7.91%) Snowflake
6 47 (5.16%) GCP
7 43 (4.73%) Azure Synapse Analytics
8 41 (4.51%) Amazon S3
9 36 (3.96%) dbt
10 34 (3.74%) Serverless
11 30 (3.30%) Azure DevOps
12 26 (2.86%) GitHub
13 25 (2.75%) AWS Lambda
14 15 (1.65%) Matillion
15 13 (1.43%) GitHub Actions
16 12 (1.32%) OpenShift
17 11 (1.21%) Amazon EMR
18 10 (1.10%) Amazon CloudWatch
18 10 (1.10%) AWS CloudFormation
18 10 (1.10%) Power Automate
Communications & Networking
1 31 (3.41%) VPN
2 30 (3.30%) BGP
2 30 (3.30%) DMZ
2 30 (3.30%) DNS
2 30 (3.30%) Multicast
3 9 (0.99%) Structured Cabling
4 6 (0.66%) Firewall
5 5 (0.55%) PuTTY
5 5 (0.55%) WinSCP
6 4 (0.44%) Wi-Fi
6 4 (0.44%) Wireless
7 3 (0.33%) Intrusion Detection
Database & Business Intelligence
1 112 (12.31%) Data Warehouse
2 108 (11.87%) Power BI
3 81 (8.90%) Pentaho
4 49 (5.38%) Data Lake
5 43 (4.73%) Amazon Redshift
6 42 (4.62%) Metadata
7 38 (4.18%) SQL Server
8 30 (3.30%) Relational Database
9 27 (2.97%) Big Data
9 27 (2.97%) SQL Server Integration Services
10 23 (2.53%) Hadoop
10 23 (2.53%) MySQL
11 21 (2.31%) Amazon Athena
12 20 (2.20%) Azure SQL Database
12 20 (2.20%) Delta Lake
13 17 (1.87%) BigQuery
13 17 (1.87%) BusinessObjects
13 17 (1.87%) Tableau
14 16 (1.76%) NoSQL
15 15 (1.65%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 91 (10.00%) Git
2 59 (6.48%) GitLab
3 45 (4.95%) JIRA
4 37 (4.07%) Jenkins
5 7 (0.77%) Postman
6 5 (0.55%) Artifactory
7 3 (0.33%) Bitbucket
7 3 (0.33%) Newman
8 2 (0.22%) Yeoman
9 1 (0.11%) ER Studio
9 1 (0.11%) ERwin
9 1 (0.11%) MLflow
9 1 (0.11%) SonarQube
9 1 (0.11%) Sonatype Nexus
9 1 (0.11%) Toad
General
1 143 (15.71%) Social Skills
2 105 (11.54%) Analytical Skills
3 93 (10.22%) Public Sector
4 62 (6.81%) Finance
5 41 (4.51%) Banking
6 20 (2.20%) Investment Banking
6 20 (2.20%) Marketing
7 19 (2.09%) Automotive
8 15 (1.65%) Aerospace
8 15 (1.65%) Telecoms
9 14 (1.54%) Documentation Skills
10 12 (1.32%) Manufacturing
10 12 (1.32%) Retail
11 10 (1.10%) Inclusion and Diversity
12 6 (0.66%) Law
13 5 (0.55%) Billing
13 5 (0.55%) Front Office
13 5 (0.55%) Police
14 4 (0.44%) Legal
14 4 (0.44%) Local Government
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 87 (9.56%) PySpark
2 51 (5.60%) Kafka
3 16 (1.76%) JSON
4 12 (1.32%) Pandas
5 10 (1.10%) XML
6 9 (0.99%) Streamlit
7 8 (0.88%) REST
8 7 (0.77%) RESTful
9 6 (0.66%) Apache NiFi
10 5 (0.55%) Great Expectations
11 4 (0.44%) Apache Avro
11 4 (0.44%) AWS CDK
11 4 (0.44%) Node.js
11 4 (0.44%) pytest
11 4 (0.44%) Spring
11 4 (0.44%) Spring Boot
12 3 (0.33%) .NET
12 3 (0.33%) AngularJS
12 3 (0.33%) Apache Beam
12 3 (0.33%) XML Schema
Miscellaneous
1 35 (3.85%) Cloud Native
2 33 (3.63%) Legacy Systems
3 28 (3.08%) Data Structures
4 11 (1.21%) Management Information System
4 11 (1.21%) Reference Data
5 9 (0.99%) NHS
6 8 (0.88%) Data Protection Act
6 8 (0.88%) Distributed Systems
6 8 (0.88%) Driving Licence
6 8 (0.88%) Onboarding
7 7 (0.77%) Greenfield Project
8 6 (0.66%) Linux Command Line
8 6 (0.66%) Product Ownership
9 4 (0.44%) Data Centre
9 4 (0.44%) Data Fabric
9 4 (0.44%) Fibre Optics
9 4 (0.44%) iPad
10 3 (0.33%) Enterprise Software
10 3 (0.33%) Life Science
10 3 (0.33%) SCADA
Operating Systems
1 37 (4.07%) Unix
2 14 (1.54%) Linux
3 2 (0.22%) Ubuntu
4 1 (0.11%) VMS
4 1 (0.11%) Windows
Processes & Methodologies
1 340 (37.36%) Data Pipeline
2 304 (33.41%) Analytics
3 295 (32.42%) ETL
4 272 (29.89%) Data Engineering
5 266 (29.23%) Data Modelling
6 176 (19.34%) Business Intelligence
7 168 (18.46%) CI/CD
8 160 (17.58%) Data Integration
9 141 (15.49%) Agile
10 133 (14.62%) Migration
11 129 (14.18%) Problem-Solving
12 118 (12.97%) DevOps
13 101 (11.10%) Validation
14 98 (10.77%) Data Governance
15 87 (9.56%) AI
16 82 (9.01%) Test Automation
17 81 (8.90%) Decision-Making
18 76 (8.35%) Data Transformation
19 70 (7.69%) Data Migration
20 68 (7.47%) Scrum
Programming Languages
1 405 (44.51%) SQL
2 259 (28.46%) Python
3 33 (3.63%) PL/SQL
4 28 (3.08%) Java
5 16 (1.76%) Bash
6 14 (1.54%) Shell Script
7 12 (1.32%) T-SQL
8 11 (1.21%) Data Analysis Expressions
9 9 (0.99%) Scala
10 5 (0.55%) PowerShell
11 2 (0.22%) HiveQL
11 2 (0.22%) JavaScript
12 1 (0.11%) Bicep
12 1 (0.11%) C++
12 1 (0.11%) COBOL
12 1 (0.11%) Go
12 1 (0.11%) Perl
12 1 (0.11%) R
Qualifications
1 268 (29.45%) Security Cleared
2 224 (24.62%) SC Cleared
3 19 (2.09%) Degree
4 17 (1.87%) BPSS Clearance
5 16 (1.76%) DV Cleared
6 9 (0.99%) Computer Science Degree
7 8 (0.88%) City & Guilds
8 4 (0.44%) BICSI Certification
8 4 (0.44%) CISM
8 4 (0.44%) CISSP
8 4 (0.44%) SnowPro
9 3 (0.33%) Azure Certification
9 3 (0.33%) CEH
9 3 (0.33%) Master's Degree
10 2 (0.22%) AWS Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 196 (21.54%) Data Quality
2 23 (2.53%) QA
3 14 (1.54%) GDPR
4 9 (0.99%) SLA
5 5 (0.55%) Accessibility
5 5 (0.55%) FATCA
6 4 (0.44%) HIPAA
6 4 (0.44%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 3 (0.33%) Disclosure Scotland
8 2 (0.22%) California Consumer Privacy Act
8 2 (0.22%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 1 (0.11%) Government Security Classifications
9 1 (0.11%) NIST
9 1 (0.11%) SNOMED CT
9 1 (0.11%) WCAG
System Software
1 46 (5.05%) Docker
2 2 (0.22%) HDFS
3 1 (0.11%) Virtual Machines
Systems Management
1 50 (5.49%) Terraform
2 44 (4.84%) Kubernetes
3 34 (3.74%) Grafana
4 10 (1.10%) Ansible
5 3 (0.33%) Prometheus
6 2 (0.22%) Apache Ranger
6 2 (0.22%) Control-M
6 2 (0.22%) Rancher
7 1 (0.11%) Kibana
7 1 (0.11%) logstash
Vendors
1 143 (15.71%) Databricks
2 105 (11.54%) Oracle
3 103 (11.32%) Microsoft
4 93 (10.22%) Talend
5 62 (6.81%) Informatica
6 53 (5.82%) Denodo
7 31 (3.41%) Cisco
7 31 (3.41%) F5
8 19 (2.09%) SAP
9 17 (1.87%) Salesforce
10 14 (1.54%) Google
11 12 (1.32%) ServiceNow
12 9 (0.99%) Cloudera
12 9 (0.99%) Sage
13 7 (0.77%) Splunk
14 6 (0.66%) Dynatrace
14 6 (0.66%) Infor
14 6 (0.66%) InterSystems
14 6 (0.66%) Palantir
14 6 (0.66%) SYSPRO