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 22 May 2026.

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

6 months to
22 May 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 76 110 146
Rank change year-on-year +34 +36 +12
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 698 288 316
As % of all contract jobs in the UK excluding London 2.83% 2.26% 1.56%
As % of the Job Titles category 3.08% 2.46% 1.69%
Number of daily rates quoted 480 217 232
10th Percentile £375 £274 £163
25th Percentile £413 £381 £184
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £470 £460 £448
Median % change year-on-year +2.17% +2.79% -14.76%
75th Percentile £538 £525 £538
90th Percentile £588 £625 £588
UK median daily rate £500 £500 £500
% change year-on-year - - -9.09%
Number of hourly rates quoted 48 4 34
10th Percentile £18.34 £17.92 £37.50
25th Percentile £39.71 £18.11 £58.75
Median hourly rate £50.00 £48.46 £75.00
Median % change year-on-year +3.18% -35.39% -0.66%
75th Percentile £71.50 £79.03 £80.00
90th Percentile £76.20 £79.61 -
UK median hourly rate £52.50 £65.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year -19.23% - -13.91%

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 22,657 11,703 18,731
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 91.93% 91.90% 92.50%
Number of daily rates quoted 13,109 7,489 11,452
10th Percentile £300 £213 £213
25th Percentile £402 £363 £363
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £475 £488
Median % change year-on-year +5.26% -2.56% -2.50%
75th Percentile £588 £575 £594
90th Percentile £684 £650 £688
UK median daily rate £513 £510 £525
% change year-on-year +0.49% -2.86% -3.31%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,560 825 2,272
10th Percentile £14.64 £14.00 £12.50
25th Percentile £19.91 £17.30 £15.74
Median hourly rate £45.00 £27.13 £40.00
Median % change year-on-year +65.90% -32.19% -5.88%
75th Percentile £67.25 £63.75 £61.60
90th Percentile £78.75 £75.00 £73.75
UK median hourly rate £42.69 £28.15 £36.50
% change year-on-year +51.63% -22.88% -18.89%

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 22 May 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 22 May 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 22 May 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 +34 290 £469 +1.96% 48
West Midlands +38 273 £468 +0.05% 33
North of England -7 194 £465 +0.54% 93
North West +8 126 £490 +3.16% 37
South East -1 95 £500 +8.11% 91
South West +5 70 £500 - 42
Scotland +7 53 £440 -2.22% 12
Yorkshire -25 52 £465 +3.33% 33
Wales +1 20 £475 +130.23% 20
East Midlands -19 17 £500 +21.95% 15
East of England -24 17 £565 +77.67% 9
North East -26 16 £450 +2.86% 25
Northern Ireland +2 3 £410 -18.00% 9
Data Engineer
UK

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

For the 6 months to 22 May 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.

1 356 (51.00%) SQL
2 269 (38.54%) Data Pipeline
3 267 (38.25%) Analytics
4 262 (37.54%) ETL
5 242 (34.67%) Data Engineering
6 240 (34.38%) Security Cleared
7 229 (32.81%) Data Modelling
8 221 (31.66%) Python
9 203 (29.08%) SC Cleared
10 170 (24.36%) Azure
11 165 (23.64%) Business Intelligence
12 151 (21.63%) Data Quality
13 136 (19.48%) CI/CD
14 130 (18.62%) AWS
15 129 (18.48%) Agile
16 122 (17.48%) Data Integration
17 115 (16.48%) Problem-Solving
18 113 (16.19%) Databricks
19 109 (15.62%) Power Platform
20 105 (15.04%) Power BI
21 98 (14.04%) Oracle
22 95 (13.61%) Talend
23 93 (13.32%) DevOps
24 92 (13.18%) Data Warehouse
25 88 (12.61%) Git
25 88 (12.61%) Migration
26 79 (11.32%) PySpark
27 75 (10.74%) Pentaho
28 74 (10.60%) Azure Data Factory
29 72 (10.32%) Microsoft

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 62 (8.88%) SAS
2 45 (6.45%) Apache Spark
3 39 (5.59%) Apache Airflow
4 31 (4.44%) Apache
5 19 (2.72%) Confluence
6 3 (0.43%) Jupyter
7 1 (0.14%) Apache Superset
7 1 (0.14%) SharePoint
Applications
1 7 (1.00%) Microsoft Excel
2 5 (0.72%) Notepad++
3 1 (0.14%) Microsoft Office
3 1 (0.14%) Spreadsheet
Business Applications
1 2 (0.29%) SAP S/4HANA
2 1 (0.14%) Dynamics CRM
2 1 (0.14%) Elite 3E
2 1 (0.14%) Infor LN
2 1 (0.14%) NEC Housing
2 1 (0.14%) Oracle 11i
2 1 (0.14%) Oracle Assets
2 1 (0.14%) Oracle ERP
Cloud Services
1 170 (24.36%) Azure
2 130 (18.62%) AWS
3 109 (15.62%) Power Platform
4 74 (10.60%) Azure Data Factory
5 64 (9.17%) Snowflake
6 44 (6.30%) Azure Synapse Analytics
7 38 (5.44%) dbt
7 38 (5.44%) GCP
8 27 (3.87%) Amazon S3
9 26 (3.72%) Azure DevOps
10 22 (3.15%) Serverless
11 21 (3.01%) GitHub
12 19 (2.72%) OpenShift
13 16 (2.29%) AWS Lambda
13 16 (2.29%) Matillion
14 9 (1.29%) Amazon EMR
14 9 (1.29%) AWS CloudFormation
15 8 (1.15%) Amazon CloudWatch
15 8 (1.15%) GitHub Actions
15 8 (1.15%) Power Automate
Communications & Networking
1 33 (4.73%) DNS
1 33 (4.73%) VPN
2 32 (4.58%) BGP
2 32 (4.58%) DMZ
2 32 (4.58%) Multicast
3 8 (1.15%) Structured Cabling
4 5 (0.72%) PuTTY
4 5 (0.72%) WinSCP
5 4 (0.57%) Wi-Fi
5 4 (0.57%) Wireless
6 3 (0.43%) Firewall
Database & Business Intelligence
1 105 (15.04%) Power BI
2 92 (13.18%) Data Warehouse
3 75 (10.74%) Pentaho
4 43 (6.16%) Data Lake
5 35 (5.01%) Big Data
6 34 (4.87%) Amazon Redshift
7 31 (4.44%) SQL Server
8 26 (3.72%) Hadoop
8 26 (3.72%) Metadata
9 24 (3.44%) MySQL
10 23 (3.30%) Delta Lake
10 23 (3.30%) SQL Server Integration Services
11 22 (3.15%) Relational Database
12 19 (2.72%) NoSQL
12 19 (2.72%) PostgreSQL
13 18 (2.58%) Azure SQL Database
13 18 (2.58%) Snowflake Schema
13 18 (2.58%) Tableau
14 15 (2.15%) BusinessObjects
15 14 (2.01%) BigQuery
Development Applications
1 88 (12.61%) Git
2 45 (6.45%) GitLab
2 45 (6.45%) JIRA
3 31 (4.44%) Jenkins
4 4 (0.57%) Bitbucket
5 3 (0.43%) Artifactory
6 2 (0.29%) Postman
6 2 (0.29%) Visual Studio
7 1 (0.14%) ER Studio
7 1 (0.14%) ERwin
7 1 (0.14%) JUnit
7 1 (0.14%) Newman
General
1 109 (15.62%) Social Skills
2 75 (10.74%) Analytical Skills
3 64 (9.17%) Public Sector
4 60 (8.60%) Finance
5 40 (5.73%) Banking
6 22 (3.15%) Investment Banking
7 14 (2.01%) Aerospace
7 14 (2.01%) Documentation Skills
8 12 (1.72%) Manufacturing
9 10 (1.43%) Retail
10 8 (1.15%) Telecoms
11 7 (1.00%) Marketing
12 4 (0.57%) Inclusion and Diversity
12 4 (0.57%) Local Government
13 3 (0.43%) Front Office
13 3 (0.43%) Law
14 2 (0.29%) Advertising
14 2 (0.29%) Aviation
14 2 (0.29%) Legal
15 1 (0.14%) Tech for Good
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 79 (11.32%) PySpark
2 63 (9.03%) Kafka
3 18 (2.58%) JSON
4 13 (1.86%) REST
5 11 (1.58%) Pandas
6 8 (1.15%) Apache Avro
6 8 (1.15%) Apache Beam
6 8 (1.15%) Protocol Buffers
6 8 (1.15%) XML
7 6 (0.86%) Apache NiFi
7 6 (0.86%) Node.js
7 6 (0.86%) OpenTelemetry
8 5 (0.72%) YAML
9 4 (0.57%) AngularJS
9 4 (0.57%) AWS CDK
9 4 (0.57%) Great Expectations
9 4 (0.57%) React
9 4 (0.57%) Streamlit
10 3 (0.43%) pytest
10 3 (0.43%) Spring Boot
Miscellaneous
1 27 (3.87%) Cloud Native
2 19 (2.72%) Legacy Systems
3 18 (2.58%) Data Structures
4 13 (1.86%) Distributed Systems
5 12 (1.72%) Data Protection Act
6 11 (1.58%) Clustering
6 11 (1.58%) Product Ownership
7 9 (1.29%) Driving Licence
8 8 (1.15%) Greenfield Project
9 6 (0.86%) Data Centre
9 6 (0.86%) Hybrid Cloud
9 6 (0.86%) Linux Command Line
9 6 (0.86%) NHS
9 6 (0.86%) Onboarding
10 4 (0.57%) Data Fabric
10 4 (0.57%) Distributed Computing
10 4 (0.57%) iPad
10 4 (0.57%) Management Information System
10 4 (0.57%) Public Cloud
10 4 (0.57%) Replication
Operating Systems
1 37 (5.30%) Unix
2 11 (1.58%) Linux
3 2 (0.29%) Ubuntu
4 1 (0.14%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 269 (38.54%) Data Pipeline
2 267 (38.25%) Analytics
3 262 (37.54%) ETL
4 242 (34.67%) Data Engineering
5 229 (32.81%) Data Modelling
6 165 (23.64%) Business Intelligence
7 136 (19.48%) CI/CD
8 129 (18.48%) Agile
9 122 (17.48%) Data Integration
10 115 (16.48%) Problem-Solving
11 93 (13.32%) DevOps
12 88 (12.61%) Migration
13 67 (9.60%) Scrum
14 65 (9.31%) Data Governance
15 63 (9.03%) Validation
16 59 (8.45%) AI
17 57 (8.17%) Test Automation
18 55 (7.88%) Decision-Making
19 51 (7.31%) Continuous Improvement
20 47 (6.73%) Data Transformation
Programming Languages
1 356 (51.00%) SQL
2 221 (31.66%) Python
3 33 (4.73%) Java
4 29 (4.15%) PL/SQL
5 17 (2.44%) Shell Script
6 15 (2.15%) Bash
7 10 (1.43%) Data Analysis Expressions
7 10 (1.43%) PowerShell
8 8 (1.15%) T-SQL
9 6 (0.86%) C#
9 6 (0.86%) Scala
10 5 (0.72%) Bicep
10 5 (0.72%) Go
11 2 (0.29%) HiveQL
11 2 (0.29%) JavaScript
12 1 (0.14%) C++
12 1 (0.14%) COBOL
12 1 (0.14%) Groovy
12 1 (0.14%) Perl
12 1 (0.14%) TypeScript
Qualifications
1 240 (34.38%) Security Cleared
2 203 (29.08%) SC Cleared
3 18 (2.58%) Degree
4 14 (2.01%) BPSS Clearance
5 10 (1.43%) DV Cleared
6 8 (1.15%) City & Guilds
7 5 (0.72%) Azure Certification
7 5 (0.72%) Master's Degree
8 4 (0.57%) BICSI Certification
8 4 (0.57%) Computer Science Degree
9 3 (0.43%) IBM Certification
9 3 (0.43%) SnowPro
10 1 (0.14%) AWS Certification
10 1 (0.14%) CCIE
10 1 (0.14%) CCNP
10 1 (0.14%) Cisco Certification
10 1 (0.14%) CISM
10 1 (0.14%) CISSP
10 1 (0.14%) DBS Check
10 1 (0.14%) Numerate Degree
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 151 (21.63%) Data Quality
2 14 (2.01%) GDPR
3 13 (1.86%) QA
4 8 (1.15%) FATCA
4 8 (1.15%) SLA
5 4 (0.57%) Accessibility
6 3 (0.43%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 2 (0.29%) HIPAA
7 2 (0.29%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 1 (0.14%) Basel III
8 1 (0.14%) California Consumer Privacy Act
8 1 (0.14%) Disclosure Scotland
8 1 (0.14%) GMP
8 1 (0.14%) Government Security Classifications
8 1 (0.14%) NIST
8 1 (0.14%) SNOMED CT
8 1 (0.14%) WCAG
System Software
1 41 (5.87%) Docker
2 3 (0.43%) Virtual Machines
3 2 (0.29%) HDFS
Systems Management
1 44 (6.30%) Kubernetes
2 39 (5.59%) Grafana
3 34 (4.87%) Terraform
4 11 (1.58%) Prometheus
5 9 (1.29%) Ansible
6 3 (0.43%) Rancher
7 2 (0.29%) Apache Ranger
7 2 (0.29%) Control-M
7 2 (0.29%) Kibana
7 2 (0.29%) logstash
Vendors
1 113 (16.19%) Databricks
2 98 (14.04%) Oracle
3 95 (13.61%) Talend
4 72 (10.32%) Microsoft
5 67 (9.60%) Informatica
6 51 (7.31%) Denodo
7 34 (4.87%) Cisco
7 34 (4.87%) F5
8 16 (2.29%) Splunk
9 14 (2.01%) SAP
10 13 (1.86%) ServiceNow
11 11 (1.58%) Cloudera
11 11 (1.58%) Google
12 7 (1.00%) Alteryx
13 6 (0.86%) Dynatrace
13 6 (0.86%) InterSystems
14 5 (0.72%) Sage
15 4 (0.57%) Dataiku
15 4 (0.57%) IBM
16 2 (0.29%) Varonis