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 £471, according to job vacancies posted in the 6 months leading up to 13 May 2026.

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

6 months to
13 May 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 75 106 137
Rank change year-on-year +31 +31 +11
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 689 291 321
As % of all contract jobs in the UK excluding London 2.87% 2.29% 1.58%
As % of the Job Titles category 3.12% 2.48% 1.70%
Number of daily rates quoted 474 220 238
10th Percentile £375 £249 £163
25th Percentile £413 £381 £199
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £471 £460 £450
Median % change year-on-year +2.45% +2.22% -12.32%
75th Percentile £538 £527 £538
90th Percentile £588 £626 £600
UK median daily rate £500 £500 £500
% change year-on-year - - -9.09%
Number of hourly rates quoted 44 2 34
10th Percentile £19.34 £24.27 £37.50
25th Percentile £41.28 £33.34 £58.75
Median hourly rate £51.25 £48.46 £75.00
Median % change year-on-year +5.76% -35.39% +72.41%
75th Percentile £71.50 £63.58 £80.00
90th Percentile £77.80 £72.65 -
UK median hourly rate £52.50 £65.00 £63.75
% change year-on-year -19.23% +1.96% -0.39%

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 22,106 11,721 18,839
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 91.96% 92.08% 92.51%
Number of daily rates quoted 12,826 7,486 11,466
10th Percentile £290 £213 £213
25th Percentile £400 £363 £363
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £495 £475 £490
Median % change year-on-year +4.21% -3.06% -2.00%
75th Percentile £588 £575 £595
90th Percentile £686 £650 £688
UK median daily rate £510 £513 £525
% change year-on-year -0.49% -2.38% -2.78%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,495 834 2,255
10th Percentile £14.64 £13.90 £12.50
25th Percentile £19.91 £17.30 £15.75
Median hourly rate £45.00 £27.24 £40.00
Median % change year-on-year +65.21% -31.91% -4.94%
75th Percentile £67.25 £63.75 £61.60
90th Percentile £78.75 £75.00 £74.00
UK median hourly rate £43.85 £28.18 £37.50
% change year-on-year +55.59% -24.85% -16.67%

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 13 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 13 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 13 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 +40 295 £469 +1.96% 44
West Midlands +33 277 £469 -1.37% 29
North of England -11 188 £465 +0.54% 75
North West +8 123 £480 +3.78% 36
South East -2 89 £500 +8.11% 85
South West 0 67 £500 +1.27% 30
Scotland +18 55 £450 - 10
Yorkshire -28 50 £465 +3.33% 21
Wales +5 21 £475 +130.23% 8
East Midlands -22 18 £498 +21.34% 15
East of England -28 16 £565 +79.37% 7
North East -21 15 £463 +8.82% 21
Northern Ireland +5 3 £410 -18.00% 2
Data Engineer
UK

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

For the 6 months to 13 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.

1 352 (51.09%) SQL
2 271 (39.33%) Data Pipeline
3 269 (39.04%) Analytics
4 264 (38.32%) ETL
5 240 (34.83%) Security Cleared
6 239 (34.69%) Data Engineering
7 231 (33.53%) Data Modelling
8 220 (31.93%) Python
9 205 (29.75%) SC Cleared
10 169 (24.53%) Azure
11 167 (24.24%) Business Intelligence
12 155 (22.50%) Data Quality
13 137 (19.88%) CI/CD
14 133 (19.30%) Agile
15 128 (18.58%) AWS
16 120 (17.42%) Data Integration
17 118 (17.13%) Problem-Solving
18 113 (16.40%) Databricks
19 107 (15.53%) Power Platform
20 103 (14.95%) Power BI
21 99 (14.37%) Oracle
22 98 (14.22%) DevOps
22 98 (14.22%) Talend
23 92 (13.35%) Git
24 89 (12.92%) Data Warehouse
25 85 (12.34%) Migration
26 82 (11.90%) PySpark
27 79 (11.47%) Pentaho
28 73 (10.60%) Azure Data Factory
29 72 (10.45%) Scrum

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 67 (9.72%) SAS
2 45 (6.53%) Apache Spark
3 35 (5.08%) Apache Airflow
4 29 (4.21%) Apache
5 18 (2.61%) Confluence
6 3 (0.44%) Jupyter
7 1 (0.15%) Apache Superset
7 1 (0.15%) SharePoint
Applications
1 6 (0.87%) Microsoft Excel
2 5 (0.73%) Notepad++
3 1 (0.15%) Microsoft Office
3 1 (0.15%) Spreadsheet
Business Applications
1 2 (0.29%) SAP S/4HANA
2 1 (0.15%) Dynamics CRM
2 1 (0.15%) Elite 3E
2 1 (0.15%) NEC Housing
2 1 (0.15%) Oracle 11i
2 1 (0.15%) Oracle Assets
2 1 (0.15%) Oracle ERP
Cloud Services
1 169 (24.53%) Azure
2 128 (18.58%) AWS
3 107 (15.53%) Power Platform
4 73 (10.60%) Azure Data Factory
5 62 (9.00%) Snowflake
6 44 (6.39%) Azure Synapse Analytics
7 38 (5.52%) dbt
8 37 (5.37%) GCP
9 28 (4.06%) Amazon S3
10 26 (3.77%) Azure DevOps
11 24 (3.48%) GitHub
12 21 (3.05%) Serverless
13 19 (2.76%) OpenShift
14 16 (2.32%) Matillion
15 15 (2.18%) AWS Lambda
16 9 (1.31%) Amazon EMR
16 9 (1.31%) AWS CloudFormation
16 9 (1.31%) GitHub Actions
17 8 (1.16%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 8 (1.16%) Power Automate
Communications & Networking
1 33 (4.79%) DNS
1 33 (4.79%) VPN
2 32 (4.64%) BGP
2 32 (4.64%) DMZ
2 32 (4.64%) Multicast
3 8 (1.16%) Structured Cabling
4 5 (0.73%) PuTTY
4 5 (0.73%) WinSCP
5 3 (0.44%) Firewall
6 2 (0.29%) Wi-Fi
6 2 (0.29%) Wireless
Database & Business Intelligence
1 103 (14.95%) Power BI
2 89 (12.92%) Data Warehouse
3 79 (11.47%) Pentaho
4 43 (6.24%) Data Lake
5 35 (5.08%) Big Data
6 34 (4.93%) Amazon Redshift
7 30 (4.35%) SQL Server
8 27 (3.92%) Hadoop
9 26 (3.77%) Metadata
10 24 (3.48%) Delta Lake
10 24 (3.48%) MySQL
11 23 (3.34%) SQL Server Integration Services
12 22 (3.19%) Relational Database
13 20 (2.90%) PostgreSQL
14 18 (2.61%) NoSQL
14 18 (2.61%) Tableau
15 17 (2.47%) Azure SQL Database
16 16 (2.32%) Snowflake Schema
17 15 (2.18%) BusinessObjects
18 14 (2.03%) BigQuery
Development Applications
1 92 (13.35%) Git
2 49 (7.11%) JIRA
3 45 (6.53%) GitLab
4 38 (5.52%) Jenkins
5 4 (0.58%) Bitbucket
6 2 (0.29%) Artifactory
6 2 (0.29%) Visual Studio
7 1 (0.15%) ER Studio
7 1 (0.15%) ERwin
7 1 (0.15%) JUnit
General
1 110 (15.97%) Social Skills
2 72 (10.45%) Analytical Skills
3 65 (9.43%) Public Sector
4 64 (9.29%) Finance
5 40 (5.81%) Banking
6 21 (3.05%) Investment Banking
7 13 (1.89%) Aerospace
7 13 (1.89%) Documentation Skills
8 12 (1.74%) Manufacturing
9 8 (1.16%) Telecoms
10 7 (1.02%) Marketing
10 7 (1.02%) Retail
11 4 (0.58%) Inclusion and Diversity
12 3 (0.44%) Front Office
12 3 (0.44%) Law
12 3 (0.44%) Legal
12 3 (0.44%) Local Government
13 2 (0.29%) Advertising
13 2 (0.29%) Military
14 1 (0.15%) Billing
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 82 (11.90%) PySpark
2 65 (9.43%) Kafka
3 17 (2.47%) JSON
4 13 (1.89%) REST
5 10 (1.45%) Pandas
6 8 (1.16%) Apache Avro
6 8 (1.16%) Apache Beam
6 8 (1.16%) Node.js
6 8 (1.16%) Protocol Buffers
7 6 (0.87%) Apache NiFi
7 6 (0.87%) OpenTelemetry
7 6 (0.87%) XML
8 5 (0.73%) Keycloak
8 5 (0.73%) YAML
9 4 (0.58%) AngularJS
9 4 (0.58%) AWS CDK
9 4 (0.58%) pytest
9 4 (0.58%) React
9 4 (0.58%) Streamlit
10 3 (0.44%) Spring Boot
Miscellaneous
1 30 (4.35%) Cloud Native
2 19 (2.76%) Legacy Systems
3 17 (2.47%) Data Structures
4 15 (2.18%) Distributed Systems
5 12 (1.74%) Data Protection Act
6 11 (1.60%) Clustering
7 10 (1.45%) Product Ownership
8 8 (1.16%) Hybrid Cloud
9 7 (1.02%) Driving Licence
9 7 (1.02%) Greenfield Project
10 6 (0.87%) Data Centre
10 6 (0.87%) Linux Command Line
10 6 (0.87%) NHS
10 6 (0.87%) Onboarding
11 4 (0.58%) Data Fabric
11 4 (0.58%) Distributed Computing
11 4 (0.58%) Fibre Optics
11 4 (0.58%) Management Information System
11 4 (0.58%) Replication
11 4 (0.58%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 35 (5.08%) Unix
2 9 (1.31%) Linux
3 1 (0.15%) Ubuntu
3 1 (0.15%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 271 (39.33%) Data Pipeline
2 269 (39.04%) Analytics
3 264 (38.32%) ETL
4 239 (34.69%) Data Engineering
5 231 (33.53%) Data Modelling
6 167 (24.24%) Business Intelligence
7 137 (19.88%) CI/CD
8 133 (19.30%) Agile
9 120 (17.42%) Data Integration
10 118 (17.13%) Problem-Solving
11 98 (14.22%) DevOps
12 85 (12.34%) Migration
13 72 (10.45%) Scrum
14 64 (9.29%) Data Governance
15 62 (9.00%) Validation
16 61 (8.85%) Test Automation
17 56 (8.13%) AI
18 53 (7.69%) Decision-Making
19 52 (7.55%) Continuous Improvement
20 48 (6.97%) Data Analytics
Programming Languages
1 352 (51.09%) SQL
2 220 (31.93%) Python
3 33 (4.79%) Java
4 26 (3.77%) PL/SQL
5 16 (2.32%) Shell Script
6 15 (2.18%) Bash
7 9 (1.31%) Data Analysis Expressions
7 9 (1.31%) PowerShell
8 8 (1.16%) T-SQL
9 7 (1.02%) Go
10 6 (0.87%) C#
10 6 (0.87%) Scala
11 5 (0.73%) Bicep
12 2 (0.29%) HiveQL
12 2 (0.29%) JavaScript
13 1 (0.15%) C++
13 1 (0.15%) Groovy
13 1 (0.15%) Perl
13 1 (0.15%) R
13 1 (0.15%) TypeScript
Qualifications
1 240 (34.83%) Security Cleared
2 205 (29.75%) SC Cleared
3 16 (2.32%) Degree
4 12 (1.74%) BPSS Clearance
5 9 (1.31%) DV Cleared
6 7 (1.02%) Azure Certification
7 6 (0.87%) City & Guilds
8 4 (0.58%) BICSI Certification
8 4 (0.58%) Computer Science Degree
8 4 (0.58%) Master's Degree
9 3 (0.44%) IBM Certification
9 3 (0.44%) SnowPro
10 1 (0.15%) AWS Certification
10 1 (0.15%) CCIE
10 1 (0.15%) CCNP
10 1 (0.15%) Cisco Certification
10 1 (0.15%) CISM
10 1 (0.15%) CISSP
10 1 (0.15%) DBS Check
10 1 (0.15%) Numerate Degree
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 155 (22.50%) Data Quality
2 13 (1.89%) GDPR
3 12 (1.74%) QA
4 8 (1.16%) FATCA
5 7 (1.02%) SLA
6 4 (0.58%) Accessibility
7 2 (0.29%) HIPAA
7 2 (0.29%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 2 (0.29%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 1 (0.15%) Basel III
8 1 (0.15%) California Consumer Privacy Act
8 1 (0.15%) Disclosure Scotland
8 1 (0.15%) GMP
8 1 (0.15%) Government Security Classifications
8 1 (0.15%) NIST
8 1 (0.15%) SNOMED CT
8 1 (0.15%) WCAG
System Software
1 48 (6.97%) Docker
2 2 (0.29%) HDFS
2 2 (0.29%) Virtual Machines
Systems Management
1 51 (7.40%) Kubernetes
2 38 (5.52%) Grafana
3 34 (4.93%) Terraform
4 11 (1.60%) Prometheus
5 9 (1.31%) Ansible
6 3 (0.44%) Rancher
7 2 (0.29%) Apache Ranger
7 2 (0.29%) Kibana
7 2 (0.29%) logstash
8 1 (0.15%) Control-M
Vendors
1 113 (16.40%) Databricks
2 99 (14.37%) Oracle
3 98 (14.22%) Talend
4 71 (10.30%) Microsoft
5 66 (9.58%) Informatica
6 55 (7.98%) Denodo
7 34 (4.93%) Cisco
7 34 (4.93%) F5
8 16 (2.32%) Splunk
9 14 (2.03%) SAP
10 13 (1.89%) ServiceNow
11 11 (1.60%) Cloudera
11 11 (1.60%) Google
12 7 (1.02%) Alteryx
13 6 (0.87%) Dynatrace
13 6 (0.87%) InterSystems
14 5 (0.73%) Sage
15 4 (0.58%) Dataiku
15 4 (0.58%) IBM
16 2 (0.29%) Guidewire