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 21 September 2026.

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

6 months to
21 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 75 173 125
Rank change year-on-year +98 -48 +45
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 862 226 316
As % of all contract jobs in the UK excluding London 3.07% 1.47% 1.77%
As % of the Job Titles category 3.36% 1.64% 1.92%
Number of daily rates quoted 512 156 213
10th Percentile £363 £347 £310
25th Percentile £413 £407 £430
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £475 £475 £500
Median % change year-on-year - -5.00% -4.76%
75th Percentile £544 £538 £575
90th Percentile £600 £625 £625
UK median daily rate £500 £500 £525
% change year-on-year - -4.76% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 60 3 5
10th Percentile £21.25 £19.43 £68.00
25th Percentile £30.96 £21.90 -
Median hourly rate £41.56 £27.00 £80.00
Median % change year-on-year +53.91% -66.25% +40.35%
75th Percentile £68.00 £54.00 -
90th Percentile £70.00 £69.60 -
UK median hourly rate £42.03 £52.50 £80.00
% change year-on-year -19.95% -34.38% +29.55%

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 25,642 13,783 16,453
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 91.27% 89.85% 92.33%
Number of daily rates quoted 14,107 8,459 9,523
10th Percentile £303 £213 £220
25th Percentile £413 £360 £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 £663 £679
UK median daily rate £525 £500 £525
% change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -0.94%
Number of hourly rates quoted 3,340 1,274 1,412
10th Percentile £14.25 £13.50 £14.27
25th Percentile £20.00 £16.19 £19.50
Median hourly rate £42.50 £25.13 £43.90
Median % change year-on-year +69.14% -42.76% +0.34%
75th Percentile £67.92 £51.65 £66.61
90th Percentile £78.75 £70.16 £75.00
UK median hourly rate £42.50 £25.15 £43.00
% change year-on-year +68.99% -41.51% -3.37%

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 21 September 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 21 September 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 21 September 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 +80 339 £469 +2.79% 128
West Midlands +67 267 £469 +6.59% 79
North of England +34 206 £505 +6.32% 277
South East +31 129 £459 -4.62% 206
North West +20 109 £525 +10.53% 162
South West +20 102 £525 +5.00% 98
Yorkshire +10 78 £500 - 74
East Midlands +34 72 £419 -9.46% 49
Scotland -5 65 £430 -7.03% 79
East of England +8 40 £475 -36.67% 59
North East -27 20 £450 +7.14% 41
Wales -2 17 £513 +8.47% 13
Northern Ireland +4 1 - - 34
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 21 September 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.

1 386 (44.78%) SQL
2 329 (38.17%) Data Pipeline
3 274 (31.79%) Analytics
4 267 (30.97%) ETL
5 266 (30.86%) Data Engineering
5 266 (30.86%) Python
6 260 (30.16%) Data Modelling
7 241 (27.96%) Security Cleared
8 223 (25.87%) AWS
9 203 (23.55%) Azure
10 201 (23.32%) SC Cleared
11 180 (20.88%) Data Quality
12 151 (17.52%) Data Integration
13 150 (17.40%) CI/CD
14 143 (16.59%) Migration
15 141 (16.36%) Business Intelligence
15 141 (16.36%) Databricks
16 124 (14.39%) Agile
17 116 (13.46%) DevOps
18 113 (13.11%) Problem-Solving
19 105 (12.18%) AI
20 103 (11.95%) Data Warehouse
21 100 (11.60%) Power Platform
22 97 (11.25%) Microsoft
23 96 (11.14%) Power BI
24 95 (11.02%) Data Governance
24 95 (11.02%) Validation
25 92 (10.67%) Oracle
26 82 (9.51%) Data Transformation
27 81 (9.40%) PySpark

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 43 (4.99%) Apache Airflow
2 41 (4.76%) Apache Spark
3 38 (4.41%) Apache
4 35 (4.06%) SAS
5 23 (2.67%) Confluence
6 7 (0.81%) Palantir Foundry
7 5 (0.58%) Jupyter
8 3 (0.35%) SharePoint
9 2 (0.23%) Apache Superset
10 1 (0.12%) nginx
Applications
1 13 (1.51%) Microsoft Excel
2 7 (0.81%) Spreadsheet
3 5 (0.58%) Notepad++
4 1 (0.12%) Microsoft PowerPoint
Business Applications
1 5 (0.58%) Dynamics CRM
1 5 (0.58%) Infor LN
1 5 (0.58%) SAP S/4HANA
2 4 (0.46%) NetSuite
2 4 (0.46%) Sage X3
3 1 (0.12%) Aladdin
3 1 (0.12%) FIS Private Capital Suite
3 1 (0.12%) MIS ActiveH
3 1 (0.12%) Oracle Assets
Cloud Services
1 223 (25.87%) AWS
2 203 (23.55%) Azure
3 100 (11.60%) Power Platform
4 72 (8.35%) Azure Data Factory
5 68 (7.89%) Snowflake
6 57 (6.61%) GCP
7 52 (6.03%) dbt
8 44 (5.10%) Amazon S3
9 41 (4.76%) Serverless
10 37 (4.29%) Azure Synapse Analytics
11 33 (3.83%) AWS Lambda
12 29 (3.36%) Azure DevOps
13 28 (3.25%) GitHub
14 17 (1.97%) AWS CloudFormation
15 15 (1.74%) Azure Databricks
16 14 (1.62%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 14 (1.62%) Amazon EMR
16 14 (1.62%) GitHub Actions
17 13 (1.51%) AWS Step Functions
18 9 (1.04%) Matillion
Communications & Networking
1 23 (2.67%) BGP
1 23 (2.67%) DMZ
1 23 (2.67%) DNS
1 23 (2.67%) Multicast
1 23 (2.67%) VPN
2 6 (0.70%) Firewall
3 5 (0.58%) PuTTY
3 5 (0.58%) Structured Cabling
3 5 (0.58%) WinSCP
4 4 (0.46%) Wi-Fi
4 4 (0.46%) Wireless
5 3 (0.35%) Intrusion Detection
6 1 (0.12%) HTTP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 103 (11.95%) Data Warehouse
2 96 (11.14%) Power BI
3 58 (6.73%) Pentaho
4 53 (6.15%) Metadata
5 46 (5.34%) Data Lake
6 33 (3.83%) Amazon Redshift
7 32 (3.71%) SQL Server
8 28 (3.25%) Amazon Athena
9 24 (2.78%) Big Data
9 24 (2.78%) Relational Database
10 23 (2.67%) BigQuery
10 23 (2.67%) SQL Server Integration Services
11 20 (2.32%) Delta Lake
12 18 (2.09%) Oracle Database
13 17 (1.97%) Azure SQL Database
14 15 (1.74%) Snowflake Schema
14 15 (1.74%) Tableau
15 14 (1.62%) BusinessObjects
16 13 (1.51%) Hadoop
17 12 (1.39%) DynamoDB
Development Applications
1 62 (7.19%) Git
2 52 (6.03%) GitLab
3 37 (4.29%) JIRA
4 20 (2.32%) 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
1 141 (16.36%) Social Skills
2 94 (10.90%) Analytical Skills
3 92 (10.67%) Public Sector
4 54 (6.26%) Finance
5 40 (4.64%) Banking
6 19 (2.20%) Automotive
7 18 (2.09%) Investment Banking
7 18 (2.09%) Marketing
8 15 (1.74%) Aerospace
9 14 (1.62%) Documentation Skills
9 14 (1.62%) Telecoms
10 11 (1.28%) Manufacturing
11 10 (1.16%) Retail
12 9 (1.04%) Inclusion and Diversity
13 7 (0.81%) Law
14 6 (0.70%) Military
15 5 (0.58%) Front Office
15 5 (0.58%) Police
16 4 (0.46%) Legal
16 4 (0.46%) Publishing
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 81 (9.40%) PySpark
2 60 (6.96%) Terraform
3 40 (4.64%) Kafka
4 17 (1.97%) JSON
5 11 (1.28%) Pandas
6 10 (1.16%) REST
7 9 (1.04%) Streamlit
7 9 (1.04%) XML
8 7 (0.81%) Apache NiFi
8 7 (0.81%) RESTful
9 5 (0.58%) Elastic Stack
9 5 (0.58%) Great Expectations
9 5 (0.58%) pytest
10 4 (0.46%) Apache Avro
10 4 (0.46%) Spring
10 4 (0.46%) Spring Boot
11 3 (0.35%) .NET
11 3 (0.35%) XML Schema
12 2 (0.23%) SOAP
12 2 (0.23%) XSD
Miscellaneous
1 38 (4.41%) Cloud Native
2 26 (3.02%) Data Structures
3 23 (2.67%) Legacy Systems
4 12 (1.39%) Management Information System
5 11 (1.28%) NHS
5 11 (1.28%) Reference Data
6 10 (1.16%) Onboarding
7 8 (0.93%) Greenfield Project
8 7 (0.81%) Driving Licence
9 6 (0.70%) Data Fabric
9 6 (0.70%) Distributed Systems
9 6 (0.70%) Linux Command Line
9 6 (0.70%) Product Ownership
10 5 (0.58%) Data Protection Act
11 4 (0.46%) Derivative
11 4 (0.46%) iPad
12 3 (0.35%) Algorithms
12 3 (0.35%) Enterprise Software
12 3 (0.35%) Hybrid Cloud
12 3 (0.35%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 35 (4.06%) Unix
2 16 (1.86%) Linux
3 2 (0.23%) Ubuntu
3 2 (0.23%) Windows
4 1 (0.12%) VMS
4 1 (0.12%) Windows Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 329 (38.17%) Data Pipeline
2 274 (31.79%) Analytics
3 267 (30.97%) ETL
4 266 (30.86%) Data Engineering
5 260 (30.16%) Data Modelling
6 151 (17.52%) Data Integration
7 150 (17.40%) CI/CD
8 143 (16.59%) Migration
9 141 (16.36%) Business Intelligence
10 124 (14.39%) Agile
11 116 (13.46%) DevOps
12 113 (13.11%) Problem-Solving
13 105 (12.18%) AI
14 95 (11.02%) Data Governance
14 95 (11.02%) Validation
15 82 (9.51%) Data Transformation
16 78 (9.05%) Decision-Making
17 72 (8.35%) Data Migration
18 65 (7.54%) Test Automation
19 59 (6.84%) Machine Learning
Programming Languages
1 386 (44.78%) SQL
2 266 (30.86%) Python
3 30 (3.48%) PL/SQL
4 22 (2.55%) Java
5 15 (1.74%) Bash
6 13 (1.51%) Data Analysis Expressions
6 13 (1.51%) Shell Script
6 13 (1.51%) T-SQL
7 6 (0.70%) Scala
8 5 (0.58%) PowerShell
9 3 (0.35%) R
10 2 (0.23%) Bicep
10 2 (0.23%) Go
10 2 (0.23%) JavaScript
10 2 (0.23%) Kusto Query Language
11 1 (0.12%) C++
11 1 (0.12%) COBOL
11 1 (0.12%) Perl
11 1 (0.12%) PHP
Qualifications
1 241 (27.96%) Security Cleared
2 201 (23.32%) SC Cleared
3 20 (2.32%) DV Cleared
4 19 (2.20%) Degree
5 17 (1.97%) BPSS Clearance
6 10 (1.16%) Computer Science Degree
7 6 (0.70%) Azure Certification
8 4 (0.46%) AWS Certification
8 4 (0.46%) City & Guilds
8 4 (0.46%) Master's Degree
8 4 (0.46%) SnowPro
9 3 (0.35%) CEH
9 3 (0.35%) CISM
9 3 (0.35%) CISSP
10 1 (0.12%) TOGAF Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 180 (20.88%) Data Quality
2 35 (4.06%) QA
3 12 (1.39%) GDPR
4 7 (0.81%) SLA
5 6 (0.70%) Accessibility
6 5 (0.58%) Disclosure Scotland
6 5 (0.58%) FATCA
7 4 (0.46%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 3 (0.35%) HIPAA
9 1 (0.12%) California Consumer Privacy Act
9 1 (0.12%) Government Security Classifications
9 1 (0.12%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 1 (0.12%) SNOMED CT
9 1 (0.12%) WCAG
System Software
1 32 (3.71%) Docker
2 1 (0.12%) HDFS
2 1 (0.12%) Virtual Machines
Systems Management
1 29 (3.36%) Kubernetes
2 23 (2.67%) Grafana
3 10 (1.16%) Ansible
4 4 (0.46%) Prometheus
5 2 (0.23%) Control-M
5 2 (0.23%) Kibana
5 2 (0.23%) logstash
6 1 (0.12%) Progress Chef
Vendors
1 141 (16.36%) Databricks
2 97 (11.25%) Microsoft
3 92 (10.67%) Oracle
4 67 (7.77%) Talend
5 47 (5.45%) Informatica
6 32 (3.71%) Denodo
7 26 (3.02%) Google
8 23 (2.67%) Cisco
8 23 (2.67%) F5
9 17 (1.97%) Salesforce
9 17 (1.97%) SAP
10 10 (1.16%) Palantir
11 7 (0.81%) Foundry
11 7 (0.81%) Sage
12 6 (0.70%) Cloudera
12 6 (0.70%) InterSystems
12 6 (0.70%) SYSPRO
13 5 (0.58%) Dynatrace
13 5 (0.58%) Infor
14 4 (0.46%) PagerDuty