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 5 April 2026.

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

6 months to
5 Apr 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 91 99 141
Rank change year-on-year +8 +42 +14
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 590 315 319
As % of all contract jobs in the UK excluding London 2.59% 2.49% 1.52%
As % of the Job Titles category 2.81% 2.69% 1.64%
Number of daily rates quoted 423 229 241
10th Percentile £363 £255 £163
25th Percentile £410 £381 £206
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £470 £463 £453
Median % change year-on-year +1.62% +2.10% -11.61%
75th Percentile £538 £540 £550
90th Percentile £588 £646 £635
UK median daily rate £500 £500 £500
% change year-on-year - - -9.09%
Number of hourly rates quoted 30 6 31
10th Percentile £19.34 £21.66 £37.50
25th Percentile £43.46 £25.13 £55.63
Median hourly rate £52.50 £26.50 £75.00
Median % change year-on-year +98.11% -64.67% +72.41%
75th Percentile £74.13 £28.22 £80.00
90th Percentile £80.10 £53.54 -
UK median hourly rate £55.00 £47.50 £65.00
% change year-on-year +15.79% -26.92% +1.56%

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 20,996 11,708 19,417
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.02% 92.41% 92.69%
Number of daily rates quoted 12,459 7,637 12,043
10th Percentile £263 £213 £213
25th Percentile £400 £363 £363
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £488 £475 £488
Median % change year-on-year +2.63% -2.56% -2.50%
75th Percentile £585 £585 £595
90th Percentile £675 £656 £688
UK median daily rate £500 £520 £525
% change year-on-year -3.85% -0.95% -3.31%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,287 758 2,116
10th Percentile £14.47 £14.48 £12.50
25th Percentile £19.34 £18.51 £15.50
Median hourly rate £41.06 £31.29 £34.61
Median % change year-on-year +31.21% -9.58% -18.32%
75th Percentile £65.00 £65.00 £60.00
90th Percentile £77.50 £75.73 £71.90
UK median hourly rate £40.00 £32.00 £33.78
% change year-on-year +25.00% -5.26% -24.15%

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 5 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 5 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 5 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 +17 255 £469 -1.37% 59
West Midlands +21 235 £469 -2.91% 45
North of England -19 174 £463 - 87
North West -3 108 £450 -2.70% 56
South East -23 68 £500 -0.50% 91
South West -5 53 £525 +5.00% 38
Yorkshire -31 51 £465 +3.33% 19
Scotland -1 40 £402 -8.11% 10
East Midlands -25 20 £450 +12.85% 14
Wales -6 19 £418 -20.48% 8
North East -12 15 £488 +2.63% 13
East of England -31 15 £565 +79.37% 17
Northern Ireland -2 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 5 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.

1 305 (51.69%) SQL
2 252 (42.71%) ETL
3 234 (39.66%) Analytics
4 228 (38.64%) Data Pipeline
5 216 (36.61%) Data Engineering
6 209 (35.42%) Python
7 198 (33.56%) Security Cleared
8 193 (32.71%) Data Modelling
9 171 (28.98%) SC Cleared
10 153 (25.93%) Azure
11 147 (24.92%) Data Quality
12 144 (24.41%) Business Intelligence
13 138 (23.39%) CI/CD
14 124 (21.02%) Agile
15 118 (20.00%) AWS
16 113 (19.15%) Problem-Solving
17 103 (17.46%) Databricks
18 99 (16.78%) DevOps
19 92 (15.59%) Git
20 91 (15.42%) Data Integration
20 91 (15.42%) Talend
21 88 (14.92%) Oracle
22 86 (14.58%) Power Platform
23 82 (13.90%) Data Warehouse
24 81 (13.73%) Power BI
25 73 (12.37%) Pentaho
25 73 (12.37%) PySpark
26 69 (11.69%) Azure Data Factory
27 68 (11.53%) Data Governance
28 64 (10.85%) 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 (10.68%) SAS
2 43 (7.29%) Apache Spark
3 39 (6.61%) Apache Airflow
4 29 (4.92%) Apache
5 8 (1.36%) Confluence
6 3 (0.51%) Jupyter
7 2 (0.34%) Oracle Application Server
8 1 (0.17%) Apache Superset
8 1 (0.17%) Apache Synapse
8 1 (0.17%) SharePoint
Applications
1 4 (0.68%) Microsoft Excel
1 4 (0.68%) 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
1 153 (25.93%) Azure
2 118 (20.00%) AWS
3 86 (14.58%) Power Platform
4 69 (11.69%) Azure Data Factory
5 52 (8.81%) Snowflake
6 43 (7.29%) dbt
7 36 (6.10%) Azure Synapse Analytics
8 33 (5.59%) GCP
9 31 (5.25%) Amazon S3
10 29 (4.92%) GitHub
11 26 (4.41%) Serverless
12 19 (3.22%) Azure DevOps
12 19 (3.22%) OpenShift
13 17 (2.88%) AWS Lambda
14 13 (2.20%) Matillion
15 10 (1.69%) AWS CloudFormation
16 9 (1.53%) AWS Step Functions
16 9 (1.53%) GitHub Actions
16 9 (1.53%) Power Automate
17 6 (1.02%) Azure Functions
Communications & Networking
1 25 (4.24%) DNS
1 25 (4.24%) VPN
2 24 (4.07%) BGP
2 24 (4.07%) DMZ
2 24 (4.07%) Multicast
3 9 (1.53%) Structured Cabling
4 4 (0.68%) PuTTY
4 4 (0.68%) WinSCP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 82 (13.90%) Data Warehouse
2 81 (13.73%) Power BI
3 73 (12.37%) Pentaho
4 39 (6.61%) Data Lake
5 34 (5.76%) Amazon Redshift
6 31 (5.25%) PostgreSQL
7 28 (4.75%) Big Data
7 28 (4.75%) SQL Server
8 26 (4.41%) Hadoop
9 25 (4.24%) MySQL
10 23 (3.90%) Delta Lake
11 20 (3.39%) Relational Database
12 19 (3.22%) SQL Server Integration Services
13 17 (2.88%) Metadata
13 17 (2.88%) NoSQL
14 15 (2.54%) BigQuery
15 13 (2.20%) Amazon RDS
15 13 (2.20%) Azure SQL Database
15 13 (2.20%) Elasticsearch
15 13 (2.20%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 92 (15.59%) Git
2 46 (7.80%) Jenkins
3 40 (6.78%) JIRA
4 38 (6.44%) GitLab
5 4 (0.68%) Bitbucket
6 2 (0.34%) DBeaver
6 2 (0.34%) JUnit
6 2 (0.34%) 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
1 102 (17.29%) Social Skills
2 62 (10.51%) Analytical Skills
3 58 (9.83%) Finance
4 57 (9.66%) Public Sector
5 30 (5.08%) Banking
6 14 (2.37%) Investment Banking
7 11 (1.86%) Documentation Skills
8 8 (1.36%) Manufacturing
9 7 (1.19%) Telecoms
10 5 (0.85%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 5 (0.85%) Retail
11 4 (0.68%) Aerospace
11 4 (0.68%) Law
11 4 (0.68%) Legal
11 4 (0.68%) Local Government
11 4 (0.68%) Marketing
12 2 (0.34%) Advertising
12 2 (0.34%) Health Technology
12 2 (0.34%) Military
12 2 (0.34%) Presentation Skills
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 73 (12.37%) PySpark
2 60 (10.17%) Kafka
3 19 (3.22%) JSON
4 15 (2.54%) REST
5 11 (1.86%) Keycloak
5 11 (1.86%) Pandas
6 10 (1.69%) Node.js
7 8 (1.36%) Apache Avro
7 8 (1.36%) Apache Beam
7 8 (1.36%) Protocol Buffers
8 7 (1.19%) XML
9 6 (1.02%) OpenTelemetry
10 5 (0.85%) React
10 5 (0.85%) YAML
11 4 (0.68%) AngularJS
11 4 (0.68%) Apache NiFi
11 4 (0.68%) NumPy
11 4 (0.68%) pytest
11 4 (0.68%) Streamlit
12 3 (0.51%) AWS CDK
Miscellaneous
1 28 (4.75%) Cloud Native
2 19 (3.22%) Legacy Systems
3 15 (2.54%) Hybrid Cloud
4 14 (2.37%) Clustering
4 14 (2.37%) Distributed Systems
4 14 (2.37%) Product Ownership
5 13 (2.20%) Data Protection Act
6 11 (1.86%) Data Structures
7 8 (1.36%) Data Centre
8 7 (1.19%) Replication
9 6 (1.02%) Driving Licence
9 6 (1.02%) Fibre Optics
9 6 (1.02%) Greenfield Project
9 6 (1.02%) NHS
9 6 (1.02%) Onboarding
10 5 (0.85%) Linux Command Line
11 4 (0.68%) Management Information System
11 4 (0.68%) Public Cloud
12 3 (0.51%) Self-Motivation
12 3 (0.51%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 29 (4.92%) Unix
2 10 (1.69%) Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 252 (42.71%) ETL
2 234 (39.66%) Analytics
3 228 (38.64%) Data Pipeline
4 216 (36.61%) Data Engineering
5 193 (32.71%) Data Modelling
6 144 (24.41%) Business Intelligence
7 138 (23.39%) CI/CD
8 124 (21.02%) Agile
9 113 (19.15%) Problem-Solving
10 99 (16.78%) DevOps
11 91 (15.42%) Data Integration
12 68 (11.53%) Data Governance
13 64 (10.85%) Scrum
14 59 (10.00%) Migration
15 57 (9.66%) Test Automation
16 55 (9.32%) Continuous Improvement
17 52 (8.81%) Validation
18 47 (7.97%) Performance Tuning
19 44 (7.46%) Data Analytics
20 42 (7.12%) Data Transformation
Programming Languages
1 305 (51.69%) SQL
2 209 (35.42%) Python
3 36 (6.10%) Java
4 22 (3.73%) PL/SQL
5 15 (2.54%) Shell Script
6 13 (2.20%) Bash
6 13 (2.20%) Go
7 10 (1.69%) Data Analysis Expressions
8 9 (1.53%) PowerShell
9 8 (1.36%) Scala
9 8 (1.36%) T-SQL
10 6 (1.02%) Bicep
10 6 (1.02%) C#
11 4 (0.68%) R
12 3 (0.51%) JavaScript
13 2 (0.34%) HiveQL
14 1 (0.17%) Groovy
14 1 (0.17%) TypeScript
Qualifications
1 198 (33.56%) Security Cleared
2 171 (28.98%) SC Cleared
3 14 (2.37%) Degree
4 13 (2.20%) Azure Certification
5 9 (1.53%) BPSS Clearance
6 5 (0.85%) DV Cleared
7 4 (0.68%) BICSI Certification
7 4 (0.68%) City & Guilds
7 4 (0.68%) Computer Science Degree
7 4 (0.68%) Master's Degree
8 3 (0.51%) AWS Certification
8 3 (0.51%) IBM Certification
9 1 (0.17%) CCIE
9 1 (0.17%) CCNP
9 1 (0.17%) Cisco Certification
9 1 (0.17%) CISM
9 1 (0.17%) CISSP
9 1 (0.17%) DBS Check
9 1 (0.17%) ITIL Certification
9 1 (0.17%) Numerate Degree
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 147 (24.92%) Data Quality
2 13 (2.20%) GDPR
3 10 (1.69%) QA
4 5 (0.85%) SLA
5 4 (0.68%) Accessibility
6 3 (0.51%) FATCA
7 2 (0.34%) HIPAA
7 2 (0.34%) 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 (9.66%) Docker
2 2 (0.34%) HDFS
2 2 (0.34%) Virtual Machines
Systems Management
1 64 (10.85%) Kubernetes
2 29 (4.92%) Grafana
3 26 (4.41%) Terraform
4 13 (2.20%) Prometheus
5 7 (1.19%) Ansible
6 3 (0.51%) Kibana
6 3 (0.51%) Rancher
7 2 (0.34%) Apache Ranger
7 2 (0.34%) logstash
7 2 (0.34%) NetBackup
8 1 (0.17%) Control-M
8 1 (0.17%) Puppet
Vendors
1 103 (17.46%) Databricks
2 91 (15.42%) Talend
3 88 (14.92%) Oracle
4 61 (10.34%) Microsoft
5 54 (9.15%) Informatica
6 51 (8.64%) Denodo
7 26 (4.41%) Cisco
7 26 (4.41%) F5
8 16 (2.71%) Splunk
9 14 (2.37%) ServiceNow
10 12 (2.03%) Google
11 10 (1.69%) Cloudera
12 8 (1.36%) SAP
13 7 (1.19%) Alteryx
14 4 (0.68%) Dataiku
14 4 (0.68%) IBM
14 4 (0.68%) Sage
15 2 (0.34%) Brio
15 2 (0.34%) Dynatrace
15 2 (0.34%) OpenAI