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 £480, according to job vacancies posted in the 6 months leading up to 28 January 2026.

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

6 months to
28 Jan 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 143 102 191
Rank change year-on-year -41 +89 -15
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 337 329 236
As % of all contract jobs in the UK excluding London 1.77% 2.41% 1.15%
As % of the Job Titles category 1.95% 2.61% 1.23%
Number of daily rates quoted 252 218 180
10th Percentile £358 £303 £324
25th Percentile £405 £400 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £480 £484 £500
Median % change year-on-year -0.78% -3.25% -4.21%
75th Percentile £550 £571 £613
90th Percentile £611 £641 £688
UK median daily rate £500 £525 £525
% change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 5 4 7
10th Percentile £27.80 £25.14 £33.60
25th Percentile £30.49 £25.21 £48.13
Median hourly rate £37.50 £26.50 £62.50
Median % change year-on-year +41.51% -57.60% -5.66%
75th Percentile £69.25 £27.91 £66.88
90th Percentile £75.10 £28.19 £67.50
UK median hourly rate £40.50 £65.00 £60.50
% change year-on-year -37.69% +7.44% -3.97%

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 17,306 12,622 19,122
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 90.71% 92.47% 93.40%
Number of daily rates quoted 10,576 7,457 12,114
10th Percentile £213 £210 £213
25th Percentile £375 £363 £373
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £475 £477 £495
Median % change year-on-year -0.42% -3.64% -1.00%
75th Percentile £575 £588 £600
90th Percentile £675 £675 £688
UK median daily rate £500 £525 £525
% change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 1,774 670 1,753
10th Percentile £14.00 £15.25 £13.08
25th Percentile £17.87 £20.30 £16.30
Median hourly rate £27.50 £30.98 £40.00
Median % change year-on-year -11.23% -22.56% +33.33%
75th Percentile £61.18 £64.01 £63.00
90th Percentile £70.00 £73.75 £74.00
UK median hourly rate £29.60 £32.50 £37.50
% change year-on-year -8.92% -13.33% +7.14%

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 January 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 January 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 January 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 -15 105 £519 +5.92% 62
North of England -44 100 £466 +0.81% 85
West Midlands -12 91 £520 +4.00% 41
North West -21 57 £415 -7.78% 51
South West -1 49 £550 +11.39% 62
Scotland +4 42 £450 +1.41% 28
South East -44 41 £478 -9.05% 186
Yorkshire -39 30 £500 -2.44% 24
Wales -11 15 £410 -18.00% 17
East Midlands -25 14 £455 +22.15% 21
North East -14 13 £450 -16.28% 13
East of England -26 5 £563 +76.76% 64
Northern Ireland -4 1 £430 -21.82% 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 January 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.

1 169 (50.15%) SQL
2 168 (49.85%) Python
3 139 (41.25%) ETL
4 128 (37.98%) Data Pipeline
5 124 (36.80%) Analytics
6 123 (36.50%) Data Engineering
7 113 (33.53%) Azure
8 103 (30.56%) Data Modelling
9 99 (29.38%) CI/CD
10 84 (24.93%) AWS
11 81 (24.04%) Databricks
12 80 (23.74%) Security Cleared
13 78 (23.15%) Business Intelligence
14 77 (22.85%) DevOps
15 74 (21.96%) Data Quality
16 72 (21.36%) Agile
16 72 (21.36%) Problem-Solving
17 71 (21.07%) SC Cleared
18 60 (17.80%) PySpark
19 59 (17.51%) Data Warehouse
19 59 (17.51%) Power Platform
20 55 (16.32%) Power BI
21 47 (13.95%) Git
22 46 (13.65%) Snowflake
23 45 (13.35%) Azure Data Factory
23 45 (13.35%) Docker
23 45 (13.35%) Oracle
24 44 (13.06%) Data Integration
25 43 (12.76%) Kubernetes
25 43 (12.76%) 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 41 (12.17%) Apache Airflow
2 26 (7.72%) Apache
3 24 (7.12%) Apache Spark
4 22 (6.53%) SAS
5 9 (2.67%) Confluence
6 5 (1.48%) Apache Pig
6 5 (1.48%) Oracle Application Server
7 3 (0.89%) IIS
8 1 (0.30%) Apache Synapse
8 1 (0.30%) Jupyter
Applications
1 1 (0.30%) Chatbot
1 1 (0.30%) Microsoft Excel
Business Applications
1 1 (0.30%) Elite 3E
1 1 (0.30%) SAP S/4HANA
Cloud Services
1 113 (33.53%) Azure
2 84 (24.93%) AWS
3 59 (17.51%) Power Platform
4 46 (13.65%) Snowflake
5 45 (13.35%) Azure Data Factory
6 28 (8.31%) dbt
7 26 (7.72%) Azure Synapse Analytics
7 26 (7.72%) Serverless
8 24 (7.12%) GCP
8 24 (7.12%) GitHub
9 18 (5.34%) Amazon S3
9 18 (5.34%) AWS Lambda
10 14 (4.15%) AWS CloudFormation
10 14 (4.15%) Azure DevOps
11 8 (2.37%) Amazon SageMaker
11 8 (2.37%) GitHub Actions
11 8 (2.37%) Matillion
11 8 (2.37%) Prefect
12 7 (2.08%) Amazon ECS
12 7 (2.08%) AWS Step Functions
Communications & Networking
1 7 (2.08%) BGP
1 7 (2.08%) DMZ
1 7 (2.08%) DNS
1 7 (2.08%) Multicast
1 7 (2.08%) VPN
2 2 (0.59%) Structured Cabling
3 1 (0.30%) Internet
3 1 (0.30%) LAN
3 1 (0.30%) TCP/IP
3 1 (0.30%) WAN
3 1 (0.30%) Wi-Fi
Database & Business Intelligence
1 59 (17.51%) Data Warehouse
2 55 (16.32%) Power BI
3 35 (10.39%) Data Lake
4 31 (9.20%) Pentaho
5 25 (7.42%) PostgreSQL
6 23 (6.82%) Big Data
7 20 (5.93%) Amazon Redshift
7 20 (5.93%) NoSQL
8 19 (5.64%) Hadoop
9 16 (4.75%) Elasticsearch
10 15 (4.45%) Amazon RDS
11 13 (3.86%) Delta Lake
12 12 (3.56%) Azure SQL Database
12 12 (3.56%) Data Mining
12 12 (3.56%) Relational Database
12 12 (3.56%) SQL Server
13 10 (2.97%) Snowflake Schema
14 9 (2.67%) BigQuery
15 8 (2.37%) Metadata
15 8 (2.37%) Star Schema
Development Applications
1 47 (13.95%) Git
2 42 (12.46%) Jenkins
3 30 (8.90%) GitLab
4 26 (7.72%) JIRA
5 5 (1.48%) DBeaver
5 5 (1.48%) MLflow
6 3 (0.89%) Bitbucket
6 3 (0.89%) Cucumber
7 2 (0.59%) JMeter
7 2 (0.59%) Visual Studio Code
7 2 (0.59%) Zephyr
8 1 (0.30%) Artifactory
8 1 (0.30%) Deequ
8 1 (0.30%) JUnit
8 1 (0.30%) Maven
8 1 (0.30%) Mockito
8 1 (0.30%) Selenium
8 1 (0.30%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
8 1 (0.30%) Visual Studio
General
1 63 (18.69%) Social Skills
2 40 (11.87%) Analytical Skills
3 38 (11.28%) Finance
4 30 (8.90%) Public Sector
5 20 (5.93%) Banking
6 6 (1.78%) Documentation Skills
6 6 (1.78%) Investment Banking
7 4 (1.19%) Manufacturing
8 3 (0.89%) Aerospace
8 3 (0.89%) Influencing Skills
8 3 (0.89%) Legal
9 2 (0.59%) Health Technology
9 2 (0.59%) Inclusion and Diversity
9 2 (0.59%) Law
9 2 (0.59%) Presentation Skills
9 2 (0.59%) Retail
10 1 (0.30%) Local Government
10 1 (0.30%) Marketing
10 1 (0.30%) Police
10 1 (0.30%) Publishing
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 60 (17.80%) PySpark
2 28 (8.31%) Kafka
3 17 (5.04%) REST
4 12 (3.56%) Keycloak
5 11 (3.26%) RESTful
6 9 (2.67%) Pandas
7 8 (2.37%) NumPy
8 7 (2.08%) Flask
9 6 (1.78%) Apache NiFi
9 6 (1.78%) HTML
9 6 (1.78%) JSON
9 6 (1.78%) Oracle GoldenGate
10 5 (1.48%) Node.js
10 5 (1.48%) OpenTelemetry
11 4 (1.19%) pytest
12 3 (0.89%) Elastic Stack
12 3 (0.89%) Middleware
12 3 (0.89%) OAuth2
12 3 (0.89%) PyTorch
12 3 (0.89%) TensorFlow
Miscellaneous
1 23 (6.82%) Cloud Native
2 16 (4.75%) Product Ownership
3 15 (4.45%) Algorithms
3 15 (4.45%) Replication
4 13 (3.86%) Hybrid Cloud
5 12 (3.56%) Data Protection Act
6 10 (2.97%) Distributed Systems
7 8 (2.37%) Clustering
8 7 (2.08%) Data Structures
9 6 (1.78%) Greenfield Project
10 5 (1.48%) Legacy Systems
10 5 (1.48%) NHS
11 4 (1.19%) Distributed Computing
11 4 (1.19%) Public Cloud
12 3 (0.89%) IoT
12 3 (0.89%) Management Information System
12 3 (0.89%) Onboarding
13 2 (0.59%) AI Agents
13 2 (0.59%) CCTV
13 2 (0.59%) Distributed Architecture
Operating Systems
1 13 (3.86%) Linux
2 12 (3.56%) Unix
Processes & Methodologies
1 139 (41.25%) ETL
2 128 (37.98%) Data Pipeline
3 124 (36.80%) Analytics
4 123 (36.50%) Data Engineering
5 103 (30.56%) Data Modelling
6 99 (29.38%) CI/CD
7 78 (23.15%) Business Intelligence
8 77 (22.85%) DevOps
9 72 (21.36%) Agile
9 72 (21.36%) Problem-Solving
10 44 (13.06%) Data Integration
11 43 (12.76%) Test Automation
12 39 (11.57%) Continuous Improvement
13 35 (10.39%) Machine Learning
13 35 (10.39%) Performance Tuning
14 34 (10.09%) Scrum
15 33 (9.79%) Data Science
16 32 (9.50%) Data Governance
17 30 (8.90%) Data Transformation
18 29 (8.61%) Data Analytics
Programming Languages
1 169 (50.15%) SQL
2 168 (49.85%) Python
3 28 (8.31%) Java
4 14 (4.15%) Scala
5 13 (3.86%) PL/SQL
6 12 (3.56%) Go
7 8 (2.37%) Bash
8 6 (1.78%) T-SQL
9 5 (1.48%) Data Analysis Expressions
9 5 (1.48%) R
9 5 (1.48%) Shell Script
10 4 (1.19%) JavaScript
11 2 (0.59%) Bicep
11 2 (0.59%) C#
11 2 (0.59%) TypeScript
12 1 (0.30%) ABAP
12 1 (0.30%) Cypher
12 1 (0.30%) Groovy
Qualifications
1 80 (23.74%) Security Cleared
2 71 (21.07%) SC Cleared
3 13 (3.86%) Azure Certification
4 9 (2.67%) AWS Certification
4 9 (2.67%) Degree
5 3 (0.89%) Computer Science Degree
6 2 (0.59%) Master's Degree
7 1 (0.30%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
7 1 (0.30%) BPSS Clearance
7 1 (0.30%) DV Cleared
7 1 (0.30%) HND
7 1 (0.30%) ITIL Certification
7 1 (0.30%) MCP
7 1 (0.30%) Numerate Degree
7 1 (0.30%) Tableau Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 74 (21.96%) Data Quality
2 8 (2.37%) GDPR
3 6 (1.78%) QA
4 3 (0.89%) Accessibility
5 2 (0.59%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 1 (0.30%) Basel III
6 1 (0.30%) Disclosure Scotland
6 1 (0.30%) EU AI Act
6 1 (0.30%) HIPAA
6 1 (0.30%) NCSC
6 1 (0.30%) NIST
6 1 (0.30%) WCAG
System Software
1 45 (13.35%) Docker
2 4 (1.19%) Virtual Machines
3 2 (0.59%) Active Directory
Systems Management
1 43 (12.76%) Kubernetes
2 27 (8.01%) Terraform
3 11 (3.26%) Ansible
4 8 (2.37%) Grafana
4 8 (2.37%) NetBackup
5 5 (1.48%) Kibana
6 4 (1.19%) Prometheus
7 3 (0.89%) logstash
8 2 (0.59%) Control-M
9 1 (0.30%) Kustomize
9 1 (0.30%) Puppet
Vendors
1 81 (24.04%) Databricks
2 45 (13.35%) Oracle
3 42 (12.46%) Microsoft
4 36 (10.68%) Talend
5 21 (6.23%) Denodo
6 16 (4.75%) Informatica
7 8 (2.37%) Cisco
7 8 (2.37%) Commvault
7 8 (2.37%) Google
7 8 (2.37%) Red Hat
8 7 (2.08%) Alteryx
8 7 (2.08%) F5
8 7 (2.08%) IBM
8 7 (2.08%) Veritas
9 6 (1.78%) Confluent
9 6 (1.78%) Splunk
10 4 (1.19%) Dataiku
10 4 (1.19%) ServiceNow
11 3 (0.89%) Cloudera
11 3 (0.89%) Salesforce