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 £470, according to job vacancies posted in the 6 months leading up to 8 April 2026.

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

6 months to
8 Apr 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 90 97 146
Rank change year-on-year +7 +49 +7
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 598 317 320
As % of all contract jobs in the UK excluding London 2.59% 2.50% 1.53%
As % of the Job Titles category 2.82% 2.71% 1.65%
Number of daily rates quoted 427 231 241
10th Percentile £363 £225 £163
25th Percentile £410 £381 £206
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £470 £463 £460
Median % change year-on-year +1.62% +0.54% -10.24%
75th Percentile £538 £538 £550
90th Percentile £588 £638 £635
UK median daily rate £500 £500 £500
% change year-on-year - - -9.09%
Number of hourly rates quoted 33 6 32
10th Percentile £21.57 £21.66 £37.50
25th Percentile £41.28 £25.13 £57.19
Median hourly rate £52.50 £26.50 £75.00
Median % change year-on-year +98.11% -64.67% +72.41%
75th Percentile £71.50 £28.22 £80.00
90th Percentile £78.20 £53.54 -
UK median hourly rate £53.50 £47.50 £66.25
% change year-on-year +12.63% -28.30% +3.52%

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 21,212 11,713 19,336
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.03% 92.40% 92.69%
Number of daily rates quoted 12,573 7,634 11,970
10th Percentile £263 £213 £213
25th Percentile £400 £363 £363
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £488 £475 £490
Median % change year-on-year +2.63% -3.06% -2.00%
75th Percentile £588 £587 £598
90th Percentile £675 £656 £688
UK median daily rate £500 £520 £525
% change year-on-year -3.85% -0.95% -2.78%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,337 766 2,132
10th Percentile £14.50 £14.46 £12.50
25th Percentile £19.38 £18.51 £15.50
Median hourly rate £41.68 £30.62 £35.00
Median % change year-on-year +36.14% -12.53% -17.38%
75th Percentile £65.00 £65.00 £60.00
90th Percentile £77.50 £75.38 £71.90
UK median hourly rate £40.00 £31.76 £34.21
% change year-on-year +25.94% -7.16% -23.98%

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 8 April 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 8 April 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 8 April 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 +21 258 £468 -1.53% 59
West Midlands +16 239 £469 -1.68% 45
North of England -12 174 £459 +0.55% 87
North West +9 108 £450 -2.70% 56
South East -13 73 £500 -0.50% 91
South West -12 53 £523 +4.50% 38
Yorkshire -25 51 £465 +3.33% 19
Scotland -5 40 £401 -9.63% 10
Wales -1 20 £425 -15.42% 8
East Midlands -23 19 £450 +12.85% 14
North East -16 15 £488 +2.63% 13
East of England -33 15 £565 +79.37% 17
Northern Ireland -1 3 £410 -18.00%
Data Engineer
UK

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

For the 6 months to 8 April 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.

1 306 (51.17%) SQL
2 251 (41.97%) ETL
3 236 (39.46%) Analytics
4 228 (38.13%) Data Pipeline
5 217 (36.29%) Data Engineering
6 207 (34.62%) Python
7 198 (33.11%) Security Cleared
8 195 (32.61%) Data Modelling
9 170 (28.43%) SC Cleared
10 150 (25.08%) Azure
11 147 (24.58%) Data Quality
12 145 (24.25%) Business Intelligence
13 136 (22.74%) CI/CD
14 125 (20.90%) Agile
15 116 (19.40%) AWS
16 112 (18.73%) Problem-Solving
17 103 (17.22%) Databricks
18 95 (15.89%) DevOps
19 94 (15.72%) Data Integration
20 91 (15.22%) Git
21 90 (15.05%) Talend
22 87 (14.55%) Oracle
23 86 (14.38%) Power Platform
24 83 (13.88%) Data Warehouse
25 81 (13.55%) Power BI
26 74 (12.37%) PySpark
27 71 (11.87%) Pentaho
28 68 (11.37%) Azure Data Factory
29 67 (11.20%) Data Governance
30 63 (10.54%) Kubernetes

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 63 (10.54%) SAS
2 45 (7.53%) Apache Spark
3 40 (6.69%) Apache Airflow
4 29 (4.85%) Apache
5 7 (1.17%) Confluence
6 3 (0.50%) Jupyter
7 2 (0.33%) Oracle Application Server
8 1 (0.17%) Apache Superset
8 1 (0.17%) Apache Synapse
8 1 (0.17%) SharePoint
Applications
1 4 (0.67%) Microsoft Excel
1 4 (0.67%) Notepad++
2 1 (0.17%) Chatbot
2 1 (0.17%) Microsoft Office
Business Applications
1 1 (0.17%) Dynamics CRM
1 1 (0.17%) Elite 3E
1 1 (0.17%) NEC Housing
1 1 (0.17%) Oracle 11i
1 1 (0.17%) Oracle ERP
Cloud Services
1 150 (25.08%) Azure
2 116 (19.40%) AWS
3 86 (14.38%) Power Platform
4 68 (11.37%) Azure Data Factory
5 53 (8.86%) Snowflake
6 43 (7.19%) dbt
7 36 (6.02%) Azure Synapse Analytics
8 32 (5.35%) Amazon S3
8 32 (5.35%) GCP
9 28 (4.68%) GitHub
10 24 (4.01%) Serverless
11 19 (3.18%) OpenShift
12 18 (3.01%) Azure DevOps
13 17 (2.84%) AWS Lambda
14 14 (2.34%) Matillion
15 10 (1.67%) AWS CloudFormation
15 10 (1.67%) GitHub Actions
15 10 (1.67%) Power Automate
16 9 (1.51%) AWS Step Functions
17 7 (1.17%) PowerApps
Communications & Networking
1 27 (4.52%) DNS
1 27 (4.52%) VPN
2 26 (4.35%) BGP
2 26 (4.35%) DMZ
2 26 (4.35%) Multicast
3 10 (1.67%) Structured Cabling
4 4 (0.67%) PuTTY
4 4 (0.67%) WinSCP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 83 (13.88%) Data Warehouse
2 81 (13.55%) Power BI
3 71 (11.87%) Pentaho
4 41 (6.86%) Data Lake
5 35 (5.85%) Amazon Redshift
6 29 (4.85%) PostgreSQL
6 29 (4.85%) SQL Server
7 28 (4.68%) Big Data
8 25 (4.18%) Hadoop
8 25 (4.18%) MySQL
9 22 (3.68%) Delta Lake
10 21 (3.51%) Relational Database
11 20 (3.34%) SQL Server Integration Services
12 17 (2.84%) Metadata
12 17 (2.84%) NoSQL
13 15 (2.51%) BigQuery
14 13 (2.17%) Amazon RDS
14 13 (2.17%) Azure SQL Database
14 13 (2.17%) Snowflake Schema
15 12 (2.01%) Tableau
Development Applications
1 91 (15.22%) Git
2 46 (7.69%) Jenkins
3 39 (6.52%) JIRA
4 38 (6.35%) GitLab
5 4 (0.67%) Bitbucket
6 2 (0.33%) DBeaver
6 2 (0.33%) JUnit
6 2 (0.33%) Visual Studio
7 1 (0.17%) Cucumber
7 1 (0.17%) Deequ
7 1 (0.17%) ER Studio
7 1 (0.17%) ERwin
7 1 (0.17%) Maven
7 1 (0.17%) MLflow
7 1 (0.17%) Mockito
7 1 (0.17%) Selenium
General
1 100 (16.72%) Social Skills
2 62 (10.37%) Analytical Skills
3 61 (10.20%) Finance
4 57 (9.53%) Public Sector
5 31 (5.18%) Banking
6 15 (2.51%) Investment Banking
7 12 (2.01%) Documentation Skills
8 10 (1.67%) Manufacturing
9 8 (1.34%) Telecoms
10 6 (1.00%) Aerospace
10 6 (1.00%) Retail
11 4 (0.67%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 4 (0.67%) Law
11 4 (0.67%) Legal
11 4 (0.67%) Local Government
11 4 (0.67%) Marketing
12 2 (0.33%) Advertising
12 2 (0.33%) Health Technology
12 2 (0.33%) Presentation Skills
12 2 (0.33%) Publishing
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 74 (12.37%) PySpark
2 60 (10.03%) Kafka
3 19 (3.18%) JSON
4 15 (2.51%) REST
5 11 (1.84%) Pandas
6 10 (1.67%) Keycloak
7 9 (1.51%) Node.js
8 8 (1.34%) Apache Avro
8 8 (1.34%) Apache Beam
8 8 (1.34%) Protocol Buffers
9 7 (1.17%) XML
10 6 (1.00%) OpenTelemetry
11 5 (0.84%) React
11 5 (0.84%) YAML
12 4 (0.67%) AngularJS
12 4 (0.67%) Apache NiFi
12 4 (0.67%) NumPy
12 4 (0.67%) pytest
12 4 (0.67%) Streamlit
13 3 (0.50%) AWS CDK
Miscellaneous
1 24 (4.01%) Cloud Native
2 19 (3.18%) Legacy Systems
3 14 (2.34%) Clustering
4 13 (2.17%) Data Protection Act
4 13 (2.17%) Distributed Systems
4 13 (2.17%) Hybrid Cloud
5 12 (2.01%) Data Structures
5 12 (2.01%) Product Ownership
6 8 (1.34%) Data Centre
7 7 (1.17%) Driving Licence
7 7 (1.17%) NHS
7 7 (1.17%) Replication
8 6 (1.00%) Fibre Optics
8 6 (1.00%) Greenfield Project
8 6 (1.00%) Onboarding
9 5 (0.84%) Linux Command Line
10 4 (0.67%) Management Information System
10 4 (0.67%) Public Cloud
11 3 (0.50%) Algorithms
11 3 (0.50%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 29 (4.85%) Unix
2 10 (1.67%) Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 251 (41.97%) ETL
2 236 (39.46%) Analytics
3 228 (38.13%) Data Pipeline
4 217 (36.29%) Data Engineering
5 195 (32.61%) Data Modelling
6 145 (24.25%) Business Intelligence
7 136 (22.74%) CI/CD
8 125 (20.90%) Agile
9 112 (18.73%) Problem-Solving
10 95 (15.89%) DevOps
11 94 (15.72%) Data Integration
12 67 (11.20%) Data Governance
13 63 (10.54%) Migration
13 63 (10.54%) Scrum
14 55 (9.20%) Continuous Improvement
14 55 (9.20%) Test Automation
15 54 (9.03%) Validation
16 47 (7.86%) Performance Tuning
17 45 (7.53%) Data Analytics
18 43 (7.19%) Data Transformation
Programming Languages
1 306 (51.17%) SQL
2 207 (34.62%) Python
3 35 (5.85%) Java
4 22 (3.68%) PL/SQL
5 15 (2.51%) Shell Script
6 12 (2.01%) Bash
6 12 (2.01%) Go
7 9 (1.51%) Data Analysis Expressions
7 9 (1.51%) PowerShell
8 8 (1.34%) Scala
8 8 (1.34%) T-SQL
9 6 (1.00%) Bicep
9 6 (1.00%) C#
10 3 (0.50%) JavaScript
10 3 (0.50%) R
11 2 (0.33%) HiveQL
12 1 (0.17%) Groovy
12 1 (0.17%) TypeScript
Qualifications
1 198 (33.11%) Security Cleared
2 170 (28.43%) SC Cleared
3 14 (2.34%) Degree
4 12 (2.01%) Azure Certification
5 10 (1.67%) BPSS Clearance
6 5 (0.84%) DV Cleared
7 4 (0.67%) BICSI Certification
7 4 (0.67%) City & Guilds
7 4 (0.67%) Computer Science Degree
7 4 (0.67%) Master's Degree
8 3 (0.50%) AWS Certification
8 3 (0.50%) IBM Certification
9 2 (0.33%) SnowPro
10 1 (0.17%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
10 1 (0.17%) CCIE
10 1 (0.17%) CCNP
10 1 (0.17%) Cisco Certification
10 1 (0.17%) CISM
10 1 (0.17%) CISSP
10 1 (0.17%) ITIL Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 147 (24.58%) Data Quality
2 13 (2.17%) GDPR
3 10 (1.67%) QA
4 5 (0.84%) SLA
5 4 (0.67%) Accessibility
6 3 (0.50%) FATCA
7 2 (0.33%) HIPAA
7 2 (0.33%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 1 (0.17%) Basel III
8 1 (0.17%) California Consumer Privacy Act
8 1 (0.17%) Disclosure Scotland
8 1 (0.17%) GMP
8 1 (0.17%) NCSC
8 1 (0.17%) NIST
8 1 (0.17%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 1 (0.17%) WCAG
System Software
1 57 (9.53%) Docker
2 2 (0.33%) HDFS
2 2 (0.33%) Virtual Machines
Systems Management
1 63 (10.54%) Kubernetes
2 30 (5.02%) Grafana
3 26 (4.35%) Terraform
4 13 (2.17%) Prometheus
5 5 (0.84%) Ansible
6 3 (0.50%) Kibana
6 3 (0.50%) Rancher
7 2 (0.33%) Apache Ranger
7 2 (0.33%) logstash
8 1 (0.17%) Control-M
8 1 (0.17%) NetBackup
Vendors
1 103 (17.22%) Databricks
2 90 (15.05%) Talend
3 87 (14.55%) Oracle
4 63 (10.54%) Microsoft
5 55 (9.20%) Informatica
6 50 (8.36%) Denodo
7 28 (4.68%) Cisco
7 28 (4.68%) F5
8 16 (2.68%) Splunk
9 14 (2.34%) ServiceNow
10 12 (2.01%) Google
11 10 (1.67%) Cloudera
12 9 (1.51%) SAP
13 7 (1.17%) Alteryx
14 4 (0.67%) Dataiku
14 4 (0.67%) IBM
14 4 (0.67%) Sage
15 2 (0.33%) Brio
15 2 (0.33%) Cognos
15 2 (0.33%) OpenAI