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 18 November 2025.

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

6 months to
18 Nov 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 157 130 176
Rank change year-on-year -27 +46 -3
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 286 314 272
As % of all contract jobs in the UK excluding London 1.65% 1.92% 1.31%
As % of the Job Titles category 1.84% 2.08% 1.39%
Number of daily rates quoted 202 201 222
10th Percentile £347 £360 £400
25th Percentile £402 £435 £450
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £475 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year -5.00% -4.76% -
75th Percentile £548 £585 £605
90th Percentile £625 £650 £688
UK median daily rate £500 £539 £530
% change year-on-year -7.19% +1.65% -3.64%
Number of hourly rates quoted 5 4 2
10th Percentile £21.07 £25.14 £47.56
25th Percentile £26.00 £25.21 £50.47
Median hourly rate £37.50 £26.50 £57.00
Median % change year-on-year +41.51% -53.51% +14.00%
75th Percentile £69.25 £27.91 £61.84
90th Percentile £75.70 £28.19 £63.74
UK median hourly rate £48.00 £34.93 £61.75
% change year-on-year +37.44% -43.44% +23.50%

All Contract IT Job Vacancies
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 15,583 15,113 19,511
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 89.79% 92.28% 93.79%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,651 8,651 12,895
10th Percentile £206 £219 £213
25th Percentile £363 £375 £380
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £475 £490 £500
Median % change year-on-year -3.06% -2.00% -
75th Percentile £575 £590 £600
90th Percentile £675 £676 £688
UK median daily rate £500 £525 £525
% change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 1,540 1,034 1,273
10th Percentile £13.75 £15.05 £14.37
25th Percentile £17.25 £20.00 £18.50
Median hourly rate £25.15 £35.00 £45.00
Median % change year-on-year -28.14% -22.22% +87.50%
75th Percentile £53.81 £65.00 £65.00
90th Percentile £70.00 £73.75 £77.00
UK median hourly rate £25.15 £36.08 £45.00
% change year-on-year -30.30% -19.82% +60.06%

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 18 November 2025.

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 18 November 2025.

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 18 November 2025. 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 -26 79 £515 +5.32% 60
North of England -25 78 £450 -10.00% 68
West Midlands -20 66 £519 +4.75% 51
Scotland +23 47 £425 -15.00% 32
South West +7 37 £550 -2.22% 33
South East -37 36 £475 -13.64% 100
North West -18 35 £403 -17.44% 39
Yorkshire -33 35 £500 +1.52% 20
East Midlands -15 13 £460 +29.21% 8
Wales -12 12 £425 -15.00% 9
North East -1 8 £425 -27.35% 9
East of England -28 6 £625 +79.86% 21
Northern Ireland -10 1 - -
Data Engineer
UK

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

For the 6 months to 18 November 2025, 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.

1 173 (60.49%) Python
2 162 (56.64%) SQL
3 124 (43.36%) ETL
4 115 (40.21%) Data Pipeline
5 103 (36.01%) Data Engineering
6 99 (34.62%) CI/CD
7 93 (32.52%) Azure
8 91 (31.82%) Analytics
8 91 (31.82%) AWS
9 85 (29.72%) Data Modelling
10 72 (25.17%) Databricks
10 72 (25.17%) DevOps
11 71 (24.83%) Data Warehouse
12 68 (23.78%) Business Intelligence
13 63 (22.03%) Agile
13 63 (22.03%) Data Quality
14 58 (20.28%) Problem-Solving
15 50 (17.48%) Power Platform
16 49 (17.13%) PySpark
17 48 (16.78%) Power BI
18 47 (16.43%) Security Cleared
19 45 (15.73%) Snowflake
20 44 (15.38%) Apache Airflow
20 44 (15.38%) Kubernetes
21 43 (15.03%) Jenkins
22 42 (14.69%) Docker
23 41 (14.34%) Azure Data Factory
23 41 (14.34%) SC Cleared
24 39 (13.64%) Git
24 39 (13.64%) Machine Learning

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 44 (15.38%) Apache Airflow
2 27 (9.44%) Apache
3 25 (8.74%) Apache Spark
4 14 (4.90%) SAS
5 8 (2.80%) Confluence
6 7 (2.45%) Oracle Application Server
7 5 (1.75%) Apache Pig
8 3 (1.05%) IIS
9 2 (0.70%) Documentum
9 2 (0.70%) SharePoint
10 1 (0.35%) Apache Synapse
10 1 (0.35%) Jupyter
Applications
1 2 (0.70%) Windchill
2 1 (0.35%) Chatbot
2 1 (0.35%) SPSS
2 1 (0.35%) Stata
Business Applications
1 2 (0.70%) Payment Gateway
1 2 (0.70%) SAP S/4HANA
2 1 (0.35%) Salesforce CRM
Cloud Services
1 93 (32.52%) Azure
2 91 (31.82%) AWS
3 50 (17.48%) Power Platform
4 45 (15.73%) Snowflake
5 41 (14.34%) Azure Data Factory
6 31 (10.84%) GCP
7 26 (9.09%) Amazon S3
7 26 (9.09%) Serverless
8 24 (8.39%) Azure Synapse Analytics
8 24 (8.39%) GitHub
9 20 (6.99%) dbt
10 19 (6.64%) AWS Lambda
11 11 (3.85%) AWS CloudFormation
11 11 (3.85%) Azure DevOps
12 9 (3.15%) GitHub Actions
13 8 (2.80%) Amazon SageMaker
14 7 (2.45%) Amazon EC2
14 7 (2.45%) Amazon EMR
14 7 (2.45%) Cloud Computing
14 7 (2.45%) CloudBees
Communications & Networking
1 5 (1.75%) TCP/IP
2 3 (1.05%) MQTT
2 3 (1.05%) SSH
2 3 (1.05%) Structured Cabling
3 2 (0.70%) DNS
3 2 (0.70%) SSL
3 2 (0.70%) Wi-Fi
4 1 (0.35%) 802.11
4 1 (0.35%) Ethernet
4 1 (0.35%) Firewall
4 1 (0.35%) Internet
4 1 (0.35%) LAN
4 1 (0.35%) WAN
4 1 (0.35%) Wireless
Database & Business Intelligence
1 71 (24.83%) Data Warehouse
2 48 (16.78%) Power BI
3 31 (10.84%) Data Lake
4 30 (10.49%) NoSQL
5 29 (10.14%) Big Data
5 29 (10.14%) PostgreSQL
6 22 (7.69%) Hadoop
7 21 (7.34%) Amazon Redshift
7 21 (7.34%) Pentaho
7 21 (7.34%) Relational Database
8 18 (6.29%) Delta Lake
9 15 (5.24%) SQL Server
10 13 (4.55%) Amazon RDS
10 13 (4.55%) Data Mining
10 13 (4.55%) Elasticsearch
11 10 (3.50%) Tableau
12 9 (3.15%) Azure SQL Database
13 8 (2.80%) MongoDB
13 8 (2.80%) RDBMS
13 8 (2.80%) Star Schema
Development Applications
1 43 (15.03%) Jenkins
2 39 (13.64%) Git
3 24 (8.39%) GitLab
4 23 (8.04%) JIRA
5 8 (2.80%) MLflow
6 7 (2.45%) DBeaver
7 5 (1.75%) Visual Studio Code
8 4 (1.40%) SonarQube
9 3 (1.05%) Artifactory
9 3 (1.05%) Bitbucket
9 3 (1.05%) Cucumber
9 3 (1.05%) Poetry
9 3 (1.05%) PyCharm
9 3 (1.05%) Sonatype Nexus
10 2 (0.70%) JMeter
10 2 (0.70%) Visual Studio
10 2 (0.70%) Zephyr
11 1 (0.35%) JUnit
11 1 (0.35%) Mockito
11 1 (0.35%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
General
1 65 (22.73%) Social Skills
2 37 (12.94%) Analytical Skills
3 31 (10.84%) Finance
4 19 (6.64%) Public Sector
5 18 (6.29%) Banking
6 6 (2.10%) Documentation Skills
7 4 (1.40%) Influencing Skills
7 4 (1.40%) Telecoms
8 3 (1.05%) Manufacturing
8 3 (1.05%) Presentation Skills
8 3 (1.05%) Retail
8 3 (1.05%) Tech for Good
9 2 (0.70%) Aerospace
9 2 (0.70%) Health Technology
9 2 (0.70%) Inclusion and Diversity
9 2 (0.70%) Legal
9 2 (0.70%) Marketing
9 2 (0.70%) Pharmaceutical
10 1 (0.35%) Advertising
10 1 (0.35%) Law
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 49 (17.13%) PySpark
2 24 (8.39%) Kafka
3 15 (5.24%) RESTful
4 13 (4.55%) Flask
4 13 (4.55%) Pandas
5 12 (4.20%) NumPy
6 9 (3.15%) REST
7 8 (2.80%) Keycloak
8 7 (2.45%) Elastic Stack
8 7 (2.45%) HTML
8 7 (2.45%) OpenTelemetry
8 7 (2.45%) Oracle GoldenGate
9 6 (2.10%) Apache NiFi
10 5 (1.75%) OAuth
10 5 (1.75%) OAuth2
11 4 (1.40%) FastAPI
11 4 (1.40%) JSON
11 4 (1.40%) PyTorch
11 4 (1.40%) TensorFlow
12 3 (1.05%) LangChain
Miscellaneous
1 24 (8.39%) Cloud Native
2 16 (5.59%) Replication
3 14 (4.90%) Product Ownership
4 13 (4.55%) Algorithms
5 12 (4.20%) Hybrid Cloud
6 10 (3.50%) Data Protection Act
7 8 (2.80%) Distributed Systems
8 6 (2.10%) Clustering
8 6 (2.10%) Legacy Systems
8 6 (2.10%) NHS
9 5 (1.75%) Data Structures
9 5 (1.75%) IoT
10 4 (1.40%) Driving Licence
11 3 (1.05%) AI Agents
11 3 (1.05%) Fibre Optics
11 3 (1.05%) Greenfield Project
11 3 (1.05%) Private Cloud
12 2 (0.70%) Distributed Architecture
12 2 (0.70%) Legacy Applications
12 2 (0.70%) Onboarding
Operating Systems
1 21 (7.34%) Linux
2 11 (3.85%) Unix
3 2 (0.70%) Windows
3 2 (0.70%) Windows Server
3 2 (0.70%) Windows Server 2003
Processes & Methodologies
1 124 (43.36%) ETL
2 115 (40.21%) Data Pipeline
3 103 (36.01%) Data Engineering
4 99 (34.62%) CI/CD
5 91 (31.82%) Analytics
6 85 (29.72%) Data Modelling
7 72 (25.17%) DevOps
8 68 (23.78%) Business Intelligence
9 63 (22.03%) Agile
10 58 (20.28%) Problem-Solving
11 39 (13.64%) Machine Learning
11 39 (13.64%) Test Automation
12 38 (13.29%) Data Integration
12 38 (13.29%) Visualisation
13 32 (11.19%) Data Science
14 31 (10.84%) Performance Tuning
15 30 (10.49%) Data Governance
16 28 (9.79%) Scrum
17 27 (9.44%) Continuous Improvement
17 27 (9.44%) Data Transformation
Programming Languages
1 173 (60.49%) Python
2 162 (56.64%) SQL
3 30 (10.49%) Java
4 21 (7.34%) Scala
5 12 (4.20%) Bash
5 12 (4.20%) PL/SQL
6 8 (2.80%) Go
7 6 (2.10%) R
8 5 (1.75%) JavaScript
8 5 (1.75%) Shell Script
9 4 (1.40%) Data Analysis Expressions
9 4 (1.40%) Groovy
9 4 (1.40%) T-SQL
10 3 (1.05%) TypeScript
11 2 (0.70%) ABAP
12 1 (0.35%) Bicep
12 1 (0.35%) C#
12 1 (0.35%) Cypher
12 1 (0.35%) VB.NET
Qualifications
1 47 (16.43%) Security Cleared
2 41 (14.34%) SC Cleared
3 14 (4.90%) Degree
4 13 (4.55%) AWS Certification
5 9 (3.15%) Azure Certification
6 8 (2.80%) Master's Degree
7 6 (2.10%) Computer Science Degree
8 3 (1.05%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
9 2 (0.70%) DV Cleared
10 1 (0.35%) HND
10 1 (0.35%) ITIL Certification
10 1 (0.35%) MCP
10 1 (0.35%) SnowPro
10 1 (0.35%) Tableau Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 63 (22.03%) Data Quality
2 8 (2.80%) GDPR
3 6 (2.10%) QA
4 3 (1.05%) Accessibility
5 1 (0.35%) Disclosure Scotland
5 1 (0.35%) EU AI Act
5 1 (0.35%) ISO 19650
5 1 (0.35%) NCSC
5 1 (0.35%) NIST
5 1 (0.35%) PMO
5 1 (0.35%) WCAG
System Software
1 42 (14.69%) Docker
2 3 (1.05%) Virtual Machines
3 2 (0.70%) Active Directory
Systems Management
1 44 (15.38%) Kubernetes
2 26 (9.09%) Terraform
3 11 (3.85%) Ansible
3 11 (3.85%) Grafana
4 8 (2.80%) NetBackup
5 7 (2.45%) Prometheus
6 6 (2.10%) Kibana
7 4 (1.40%) logstash
8 3 (1.05%) Argo
8 3 (1.05%) Istio
8 3 (1.05%) Kustomize
9 2 (0.70%) Control-M
10 1 (0.35%) FortiGate
10 1 (0.35%) Puppet
Vendors
1 72 (25.17%) Databricks
2 38 (13.29%) Oracle
3 32 (11.19%) Microsoft
4 25 (8.74%) Talend
5 14 (4.90%) Informatica
6 13 (4.55%) Denodo
7 11 (3.85%) Red Hat
8 9 (3.15%) Google
9 8 (2.80%) Commvault
9 8 (2.80%) IBM
10 7 (2.45%) Veritas
11 6 (2.10%) Cloudera
11 6 (2.10%) Confluent
12 5 (1.75%) ServiceNow
12 5 (1.75%) Splunk
13 4 (1.40%) Salesforce
14 3 (1.05%) SAP
15 2 (0.70%) Cisco
15 2 (0.70%) EMC
15 2 (0.70%) McAfee