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 31 August 2026.

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

6 months to
31 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 70 173 125
Rank change year-on-year +103 -48 +41
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 868 226 313
As % of all contract jobs in the UK excluding London 3.14% 1.47% 1.74%
As % of the Job Titles category 3.42% 1.63% 1.88%
Number of daily rates quoted 520 150 216
10th Percentile £356 £349 £173
25th Percentile £413 £413 £372
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £470 £475 £500
Median % change year-on-year -1.07% -5.00% -4.76%
75th Percentile £538 £536 £575
90th Percentile £600 £614 £625
UK median daily rate £500 £500 £525
% change year-on-year - -4.76% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 72 4 14
10th Percentile £19.53 £20.25 £61.88
25th Percentile £30.96 £23.95 £72.50
Median hourly rate £43.03 £52.85 £80.00
Median % change year-on-year -18.59% -33.94% +63.27%
75th Percentile £70.00 £79.03 -
90th Percentile £71.50 £79.61 -
UK median hourly rate £43.50 £52.50 £75.00
% change year-on-year -17.14% -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 25,361 13,894 16,642
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 91.62% 90.07% 92.40%
Number of daily rates quoted 14,227 8,511 9,919
10th Percentile £304 £213 £220
25th Percentile £413 £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 £685
UK median daily rate £525 £500 £525
% change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -1.69%
Number of hourly rates quoted 3,094 1,261 1,563
10th Percentile £14.50 £13.46 £14.05
25th Percentile £20.31 £16.30 £18.50
Median hourly rate £42.50 £25.15 £44.04
Median % change year-on-year +68.99% -42.89% +13.95%
75th Percentile £68.00 £53.99 £66.16
90th Percentile £78.75 £72.50 £75.00
UK median hourly rate £42.00 £25.15 £43.00
% change year-on-year +67.00% -41.51% +1.96%

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 31 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 31 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 31 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 +71 357 £467 +0.97% 48
West Midlands +70 297 £469 -6.20% 27
North of England +31 217 £500 +5.26% 87
South East +28 129 £459 +2.00% 116
North West +27 123 £525 +10.53% 41
South West +7 91 £525 +5.00% 36
Yorkshire -6 74 £465 -2.11% 19
East Midlands +27 60 £450 +1.98% 21
Scotland +10 59 £440 -4.86% 32
East of England +14 37 £450 - 15
North East -22 21 £515 +21.89% 28
Wales -1 16 £488 +9.55% 12
Northern Ireland +4 3 £410 -18.00% 5
Channel Islands - 1 - -
Data Engineer
UK

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

For the 6 months to 31 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.

1 374 (43.09%) SQL
2 315 (36.29%) Data Pipeline
3 274 (31.57%) Analytics
4 264 (30.41%) ETL
5 262 (30.18%) Data Engineering
6 251 (28.92%) Python
7 248 (28.57%) Security Cleared
8 244 (28.11%) Data Modelling
9 213 (24.54%) Azure
10 208 (23.96%) SC Cleared
11 207 (23.85%) AWS
12 173 (19.93%) Data Quality
13 152 (17.51%) Business Intelligence
13 152 (17.51%) Data Integration
14 145 (16.71%) CI/CD
15 141 (16.24%) Databricks
16 134 (15.44%) Migration
17 123 (14.17%) Agile
18 118 (13.59%) Problem-Solving
19 104 (11.98%) Data Warehouse
19 104 (11.98%) Power Platform
20 102 (11.75%) DevOps
20 102 (11.75%) Microsoft
21 100 (11.52%) Power BI
22 97 (11.18%) Validation
23 94 (10.83%) Oracle
24 91 (10.48%) Data Governance
25 87 (10.02%) AI
26 84 (9.68%) PySpark
27 78 (8.99%) Talend

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 (4.72%) SAS
2 36 (4.15%) Apache Spark
3 34 (3.92%) Apache Airflow
4 32 (3.69%) Apache
5 19 (2.19%) Confluence
6 7 (0.81%) Jupyter
7 4 (0.46%) Palantir Foundry
8 3 (0.35%) Apache Superset
8 3 (0.35%) SharePoint
9 1 (0.12%) nginx
Applications
1 12 (1.38%) Microsoft Excel
2 5 (0.58%) Notepad++
3 4 (0.46%) Spreadsheet
4 1 (0.12%) Microsoft PowerPoint
Business Applications
1 5 (0.58%) Dynamics CRM
1 5 (0.58%) Infor LN
2 4 (0.46%) NetSuite
2 4 (0.46%) Sage X3
2 4 (0.46%) SAP S/4HANA
3 1 (0.12%) Aladdin
3 1 (0.12%) FIS Private Capital Suite
3 1 (0.12%) MIS ActiveH
3 1 (0.12%) Oracle 11i
3 1 (0.12%) Oracle Assets
3 1 (0.12%) Oracle ERP
Cloud Services
1 213 (24.54%) Azure
2 207 (23.85%) AWS
3 104 (11.98%) Power Platform
4 72 (8.29%) Azure Data Factory
5 67 (7.72%) Snowflake
6 46 (5.30%) GCP
7 44 (5.07%) Amazon S3
8 41 (4.72%) Azure Synapse Analytics
9 36 (4.15%) Serverless
10 34 (3.92%) dbt
11 28 (3.23%) AWS Lambda
11 28 (3.23%) Azure DevOps
12 27 (3.11%) GitHub
13 17 (1.96%) Azure Databricks
14 13 (1.50%) Amazon EMR
14 13 (1.50%) AWS CloudFormation
15 12 (1.38%) GitHub Actions
15 12 (1.38%) Matillion
16 11 (1.27%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 10 (1.15%) Power Automate
Communications & Networking
1 30 (3.46%) VPN
2 29 (3.34%) BGP
2 29 (3.34%) DMZ
2 29 (3.34%) DNS
2 29 (3.34%) Multicast
3 10 (1.15%) Structured Cabling
4 6 (0.69%) Firewall
5 5 (0.58%) PuTTY
5 5 (0.58%) WinSCP
6 4 (0.46%) Wi-Fi
6 4 (0.46%) Wireless
7 3 (0.35%) Intrusion Detection
8 1 (0.12%) HTTP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 104 (11.98%) Data Warehouse
2 100 (11.52%) Power BI
3 66 (7.60%) Pentaho
4 48 (5.53%) Data Lake
5 44 (5.07%) Metadata
6 43 (4.95%) Amazon Redshift
7 38 (4.38%) SQL Server
8 27 (3.11%) Relational Database
9 25 (2.88%) Big Data
9 25 (2.88%) SQL Server Integration Services
10 23 (2.65%) Amazon Athena
11 20 (2.30%) MySQL
12 19 (2.19%) Azure SQL Database
12 19 (2.19%) Delta Lake
13 17 (1.96%) Tableau
14 16 (1.84%) Oracle Database
15 15 (1.73%) BigQuery
15 15 (1.73%) BusinessObjects
15 15 (1.73%) Hadoop
15 15 (1.73%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 74 (8.53%) Git
2 50 (5.76%) GitLab
3 35 (4.03%) JIRA
4 23 (2.65%) Jenkins
5 7 (0.81%) Postman
6 5 (0.58%) Artifactory
7 3 (0.35%) Newman
8 2 (0.23%) RStudio
8 2 (0.23%) Yeoman
9 1 (0.12%) ER Studio
9 1 (0.12%) ERwin
9 1 (0.12%) MLflow
9 1 (0.12%) SonarQube
9 1 (0.12%) Sonatype Nexus
9 1 (0.12%) Toad
General
1 140 (16.13%) Social Skills
2 99 (11.41%) Analytical Skills
3 88 (10.14%) Public Sector
4 58 (6.68%) Finance
5 39 (4.49%) Banking
6 20 (2.30%) Investment Banking
7 19 (2.19%) Automotive
7 19 (2.19%) Marketing
8 15 (1.73%) Aerospace
8 15 (1.73%) Telecoms
9 14 (1.61%) Documentation Skills
10 12 (1.38%) Manufacturing
11 10 (1.15%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 10 (1.15%) Retail
12 7 (0.81%) Law
13 5 (0.58%) Billing
13 5 (0.58%) Front Office
13 5 (0.58%) Police
14 4 (0.46%) Local Government
14 4 (0.46%) Military
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 84 (9.68%) PySpark
2 55 (6.34%) Terraform
3 46 (5.30%) Kafka
4 18 (2.07%) JSON
5 11 (1.27%) Pandas
6 10 (1.15%) XML
7 9 (1.04%) Streamlit
8 8 (0.92%) REST
9 7 (0.81%) RESTful
10 5 (0.58%) Apache NiFi
10 5 (0.58%) Great Expectations
11 4 (0.46%) Apache Avro
11 4 (0.46%) AWS CDK
11 4 (0.46%) Spring
11 4 (0.46%) Spring Boot
12 3 (0.35%) .NET
12 3 (0.35%) Elastic Stack
12 3 (0.35%) pytest
12 3 (0.35%) XML Schema
13 2 (0.23%) OpenAPI
Miscellaneous
1 35 (4.03%) Cloud Native
2 32 (3.69%) Legacy Systems
3 28 (3.23%) Data Structures
4 11 (1.27%) Management Information System
4 11 (1.27%) Reference Data
5 10 (1.15%) NHS
6 8 (0.92%) Driving Licence
7 7 (0.81%) Data Protection Act
7 7 (0.81%) Greenfield Project
7 7 (0.81%) Onboarding
8 6 (0.69%) Distributed Systems
8 6 (0.69%) Linux Command Line
9 5 (0.58%) Product Ownership
10 4 (0.46%) Data Centre
10 4 (0.46%) Data Fabric
10 4 (0.46%) Fibre Optics
10 4 (0.46%) iPad
11 3 (0.35%) Enterprise Software
11 3 (0.35%) Life Science
11 3 (0.35%) SCADA
Operating Systems
1 34 (3.92%) Unix
2 15 (1.73%) Linux
3 2 (0.23%) Ubuntu
3 2 (0.23%) Windows
4 1 (0.12%) VMS
4 1 (0.12%) Windows Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 315 (36.29%) Data Pipeline
2 274 (31.57%) Analytics
3 264 (30.41%) ETL
4 262 (30.18%) Data Engineering
5 244 (28.11%) Data Modelling
6 152 (17.51%) Business Intelligence
6 152 (17.51%) Data Integration
7 145 (16.71%) CI/CD
8 134 (15.44%) Migration
9 123 (14.17%) Agile
10 118 (13.59%) Problem-Solving
11 102 (11.75%) DevOps
12 97 (11.18%) Validation
13 91 (10.48%) Data Governance
14 87 (10.02%) AI
15 76 (8.76%) Data Transformation
15 76 (8.76%) Decision-Making
16 70 (8.06%) Data Migration
17 64 (7.37%) Lakehouse
18 62 (7.14%) Test Automation
Programming Languages
1 374 (43.09%) SQL
2 251 (28.92%) Python
3 31 (3.57%) PL/SQL
4 23 (2.65%) Java
5 15 (1.73%) Bash
6 12 (1.38%) Data Analysis Expressions
6 12 (1.38%) Shell Script
6 12 (1.38%) T-SQL
7 9 (1.04%) Scala
8 7 (0.81%) PowerShell
9 2 (0.23%) JavaScript
9 2 (0.23%) R
10 1 (0.12%) Bicep
10 1 (0.12%) C++
10 1 (0.12%) COBOL
10 1 (0.12%) Kusto Query Language
10 1 (0.12%) Perl
Qualifications
1 248 (28.57%) Security Cleared
2 208 (23.96%) SC Cleared
3 17 (1.96%) BPSS Clearance
3 17 (1.96%) Degree
4 16 (1.84%) DV Cleared
5 8 (0.92%) City & Guilds
5 8 (0.92%) Computer Science Degree
6 4 (0.46%) BICSI Certification
6 4 (0.46%) SnowPro
7 3 (0.35%) Azure Certification
7 3 (0.35%) CEH
7 3 (0.35%) CISM
7 3 (0.35%) CISSP
7 3 (0.35%) Master's Degree
8 2 (0.23%) AWS Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 173 (19.93%) Data Quality
2 25 (2.88%) QA
3 14 (1.61%) GDPR
4 8 (0.92%) SLA
5 5 (0.58%) FATCA
6 4 (0.46%) Accessibility
6 4 (0.46%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 3 (0.35%) Disclosure Scotland
7 3 (0.35%) HIPAA
8 2 (0.23%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 1 (0.12%) California Consumer Privacy Act
9 1 (0.12%) Government Security Classifications
9 1 (0.12%) SNOMED CT
9 1 (0.12%) WCAG
System Software
1 31 (3.57%) Docker
2 1 (0.12%) Virtual Machines
Systems Management
1 32 (3.69%) Grafana
2 29 (3.34%) Kubernetes
3 10 (1.15%) Ansible
4 4 (0.46%) Prometheus
5 2 (0.23%) Apache Ranger
5 2 (0.23%) Control-M
5 2 (0.23%) logstash
6 1 (0.12%) Kibana
6 1 (0.12%) Progress Chef
Vendors
1 141 (16.24%) Databricks
2 102 (11.75%) Microsoft
3 94 (10.83%) Oracle
4 78 (8.99%) Talend
5 51 (5.88%) Informatica
6 42 (4.84%) Denodo
7 30 (3.46%) Cisco
7 30 (3.46%) F5
8 18 (2.07%) SAP
9 17 (1.96%) Salesforce
10 15 (1.73%) Google
11 8 (0.92%) Cloudera
11 8 (0.92%) Sage
11 8 (0.92%) ServiceNow
12 6 (0.69%) InterSystems
12 6 (0.69%) Palantir
12 6 (0.69%) SYSPRO
13 5 (0.58%) Dynatrace
13 5 (0.58%) Infor
14 4 (0.46%) Foundry