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 £483, according to job vacancies posted in the 6 months leading up to 15 October 2026.

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

6 months to
15 Oct 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 78 166 131
Rank change year-on-year +88 -35 +49
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 869 249 304
As % of all contract jobs in the UK excluding London 3.05% 1.56% 1.76%
As % of the Job Titles category 3.35% 1.74% 1.90%
Number of daily rates quoted 507 173 200
10th Percentile £363 £350 £318
25th Percentile £415 £405 £417
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £483 £475 £500
Median % change year-on-year +1.68% -5.00% -4.76%
75th Percentile £558 £540 £576
90th Percentile £638 £625 £630
UK median daily rate £500 £500 £530
% change year-on-year - -5.66% -3.64%
Number of hourly rates quoted 56 3 1
10th Percentile £21.25 £19.43 -
25th Percentile £30.96 £21.90 -
Median hourly rate £45.00 £27.00 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +66.67% -55.00% +5.26%
75th Percentile £68.00 £54.00 -
90th Percentile £70.00 £69.60 -
UK median hourly rate £44.75 £52.50 £95.00
% change year-on-year -14.76% -44.74% +53.85%

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 25,908 14,300 15,977
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 90.90% 89.63% 92.30%
Number of daily rates quoted 13,943 8,801 9,090
10th Percentile £300 £206 £220
25th Percentile £412 £363 £370
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £475 £490
Median % change year-on-year +5.26% -3.06% -2.00%
75th Percentile £600 £575 £588
90th Percentile £688 £669 £675
UK median daily rate £525 £500 £525
% change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 3,599 1,345 1,204
10th Percentile £14.22 £13.56 £14.73
25th Percentile £18.50 £16.50 £19.57
Median hourly rate £41.06 £25.00 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year +64.24% -41.18% -4.49%
75th Percentile £67.84 £50.00 £66.33
90th Percentile £78.75 £69.65 £73.75
UK median hourly rate £41.56 £25.15 £41.27
% change year-on-year +65.23% -39.05% -8.30%

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 15 October 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 15 October 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 15 October 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 +73 327 £469 -6.20% 39
West Midlands +57 241 £469 -6.90% 30
North of England +27 206 £525 +10.53% 69
South East +17 124 £459 -3.37% 56
South West +28 121 £525 +2.44% 38
North West +23 108 £525 +20.69% 32
East Midlands +43 86 £388 -16.22% 9
Yorkshire +5 80 £519 +1.29% 21
Scotland +4 73 £525 +16.67% 5
East of England +4 36 £525 -16.00% 6
North East -25 19 £510 +22.52% 16
Wales -3 18 £550 +17.02% 2
Northern Ireland +3 1 - - 5
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 15 October 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.

1 391 (44.99%) SQL
2 334 (38.43%) Data Pipeline
3 301 (34.64%) Data Engineering
4 297 (34.18%) Python
5 281 (32.34%) Analytics
5 281 (32.34%) ETL
6 279 (32.11%) Data Modelling
7 245 (28.19%) AWS
8 226 (26.01%) Security Cleared
9 214 (24.63%) Azure
10 186 (21.40%) Data Quality
10 186 (21.40%) SC Cleared
11 158 (18.18%) CI/CD
12 154 (17.72%) Data Integration
12 154 (17.72%) Databricks
13 141 (16.23%) Migration
14 137 (15.77%) DevOps
15 133 (15.30%) Business Intelligence
16 131 (15.07%) Agile
17 117 (13.46%) Validation
18 116 (13.35%) AI
19 111 (12.77%) Problem-Solving
20 104 (11.97%) Data Governance
21 103 (11.85%) Power Platform
22 99 (11.39%) Data Transformation
22 99 (11.39%) Microsoft
22 99 (11.39%) Power BI
23 97 (11.16%) Data Warehouse
24 81 (9.32%) PySpark
24 81 (9.32%) Snowflake

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 59 (6.79%) Apache
2 52 (5.98%) Apache Spark
3 45 (5.18%) Apache Airflow
4 31 (3.57%) SAS
5 23 (2.65%) Confluence
6 7 (0.81%) Palantir Foundry
7 5 (0.58%) Jupyter
8 3 (0.35%) Apache Superset
8 3 (0.35%) SharePoint
9 1 (0.12%) Apache Pulsar
9 1 (0.12%) Microsoft Exchange
9 1 (0.12%) nginx
Applications
1 12 (1.38%) Microsoft Excel
2 7 (0.81%) Spreadsheet
3 1 (0.12%) Chatbot
3 1 (0.12%) Microsoft PowerPoint
Business Applications
1 6 (0.69%) Dynamics CRM
2 5 (0.58%) Infor LN
3 4 (0.46%) NetSuite
3 4 (0.46%) Sage X3
3 4 (0.46%) SAP S/4HANA
4 1 (0.12%) Aladdin
4 1 (0.12%) FIS Private Capital Suite
4 1 (0.12%) MIS ActiveH
4 1 (0.12%) Oracle Assets
Cloud Services
1 245 (28.19%) AWS
2 214 (24.63%) Azure
3 103 (11.85%) Power Platform
4 81 (9.32%) Snowflake
5 74 (8.52%) Azure Data Factory
6 66 (7.59%) GCP
7 65 (7.48%) dbt
8 54 (6.21%) Amazon S3
9 44 (5.06%) Serverless
10 36 (4.14%) AWS Lambda
11 31 (3.57%) Azure DevOps
11 31 (3.57%) Azure Synapse Analytics
12 29 (3.34%) GitHub
13 21 (2.42%) Amazon EMR
14 18 (2.07%) Amazon CloudWatch
15 17 (1.96%) AWS CloudFormation
16 15 (1.73%) AWS Step Functions
16 15 (1.73%) Azure Databricks
17 13 (1.50%) GitHub Actions
18 10 (1.15%) Amazon Kinesis
Communications & Networking
1 20 (2.30%) BGP
1 20 (2.30%) DMZ
1 20 (2.30%) DNS
1 20 (2.30%) Multicast
1 20 (2.30%) VPN
2 6 (0.69%) Firewall
3 4 (0.46%) Wi-Fi
3 4 (0.46%) Wireless
4 3 (0.35%) Intrusion Detection
5 2 (0.23%) Structured Cabling
6 1 (0.12%) Broadband
6 1 (0.12%) HTTP
6 1 (0.12%) Network Security
Database & Business Intelligence
1 99 (11.39%) Power BI
2 97 (11.16%) Data Warehouse
3 63 (7.25%) Pentaho
4 53 (6.10%) Metadata
5 51 (5.87%) Data Lake
6 30 (3.45%) Amazon Redshift
6 30 (3.45%) SQL Server
7 29 (3.34%) Amazon Athena
8 26 (2.99%) SQL Server Integration Services
9 25 (2.88%) Big Data
10 22 (2.53%) BigQuery
11 21 (2.42%) Relational Database
12 20 (2.30%) Delta Lake
13 17 (1.96%) Oracle Database
14 16 (1.84%) Azure SQL Database
15 14 (1.61%) Snowflake Schema
16 13 (1.50%) Amazon RDS
16 13 (1.50%) DynamoDB
16 13 (1.50%) Hadoop
17 12 (1.38%) Elasticsearch
Development Applications
1 65 (7.48%) Git
2 59 (6.79%) GitLab
3 33 (3.80%) JIRA
4 26 (2.99%) Jenkins
5 8 (0.92%) Postman
6 6 (0.69%) Artifactory
7 3 (0.35%) Newman
8 2 (0.23%) RStudio
8 2 (0.23%) Yeoman
9 1 (0.12%) MLflow
9 1 (0.12%) SonarQube
9 1 (0.12%) Sonatype Nexus
9 1 (0.12%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
9 1 (0.12%) TeamCity
9 1 (0.12%) Toad
General
1 142 (16.34%) Social Skills
2 95 (10.93%) Analytical Skills
3 94 (10.82%) Public Sector
4 56 (6.44%) Finance
5 38 (4.37%) Banking
6 19 (2.19%) Automotive
7 18 (2.07%) Investment Banking
7 18 (2.07%) Marketing
8 11 (1.27%) Aerospace
8 11 (1.27%) Retail
8 11 (1.27%) Telecoms
9 10 (1.15%) Documentation Skills
10 8 (0.92%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 7 (0.81%) Law
11 7 (0.81%) Manufacturing
11 7 (0.81%) Military
12 5 (0.58%) Police
13 4 (0.46%) Billing
13 4 (0.46%) Front Office
14 3 (0.35%) Advertising
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 81 (9.32%) PySpark
2 66 (7.59%) Terraform
3 41 (4.72%) Kafka
4 18 (2.07%) JSON
5 16 (1.84%) REST
6 11 (1.27%) Apache NiFi
6 11 (1.27%) Streamlit
7 10 (1.15%) Pandas
7 10 (1.15%) XML
8 8 (0.92%) RESTful
9 5 (0.58%) Elastic Stack
9 5 (0.58%) pytest
10 4 (0.46%) Great Expectations
10 4 (0.46%) Keycloak
11 3 (0.35%) .NET
11 3 (0.35%) AWS CDK
11 3 (0.35%) Spring
11 3 (0.35%) Spring Boot
11 3 (0.35%) XML Schema
12 2 (0.23%) SOAP
Miscellaneous
1 50 (5.75%) Cloud Native
2 27 (3.11%) Data Structures
3 20 (2.30%) Legacy Systems
4 12 (1.38%) Management Information System
5 11 (1.27%) Onboarding
5 11 (1.27%) Reference Data
6 9 (1.04%) Distributed Systems
7 7 (0.81%) NHS
8 6 (0.69%) Algorithms
8 6 (0.69%) Data Fabric
8 6 (0.69%) Data Protection Act
8 6 (0.69%) Product Ownership
9 5 (0.58%) Greenfield Project
9 5 (0.58%) Hybrid Cloud
10 4 (0.46%) Driving Licence
10 4 (0.46%) iPad
11 3 (0.35%) Enterprise Software
11 3 (0.35%) IoT
11 3 (0.35%) Life Science
11 3 (0.35%) SCADA
Operating Systems
1 20 (2.30%) Unix
2 15 (1.73%) Linux
3 2 (0.23%) Ubuntu
3 2 (0.23%) Windows
4 1 (0.12%) VMS
4 1 (0.12%) Windows Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 334 (38.43%) Data Pipeline
2 301 (34.64%) Data Engineering
3 281 (32.34%) Analytics
3 281 (32.34%) ETL
4 279 (32.11%) Data Modelling
5 158 (18.18%) CI/CD
6 154 (17.72%) Data Integration
7 141 (16.23%) Migration
8 137 (15.77%) DevOps
9 133 (15.30%) Business Intelligence
10 131 (15.07%) Agile
11 117 (13.46%) Validation
12 116 (13.35%) AI
13 111 (12.77%) Problem-Solving
14 104 (11.97%) Data Governance
15 99 (11.39%) Data Transformation
16 80 (9.21%) Decision-Making
17 77 (8.86%) Data Migration
18 70 (8.06%) Test Automation
19 64 (7.36%) Machine Learning
Programming Languages
1 391 (44.99%) SQL
2 297 (34.18%) Python
3 23 (2.65%) Java
4 22 (2.53%) PL/SQL
5 16 (1.84%) Bash
6 15 (1.73%) Data Analysis Expressions
7 13 (1.50%) T-SQL
8 12 (1.38%) PowerShell
8 12 (1.38%) Scala
9 6 (0.69%) Bicep
9 6 (0.69%) Shell Script
10 4 (0.46%) Go
10 4 (0.46%) R
11 3 (0.35%) Kusto Query Language
12 2 (0.23%) JavaScript
13 1 (0.12%) COBOL
13 1 (0.12%) PHP
Qualifications
1 226 (26.01%) Security Cleared
2 186 (21.40%) SC Cleared
3 29 (3.34%) DV Cleared
4 22 (2.53%) Degree
5 18 (2.07%) BPSS Clearance
6 11 (1.27%) AWS Certification
7 9 (1.04%) Computer Science Degree
8 8 (0.92%) Azure Certification
9 4 (0.46%) CISM
9 4 (0.46%) CISSP
9 4 (0.46%) City & Guilds
10 3 (0.35%) CEH
10 3 (0.35%) Master's Degree
10 3 (0.35%) SnowPro
11 1 (0.12%) CISA
11 1 (0.12%) CRISC
11 1 (0.12%) ISO 27001 Lead Auditor
11 1 (0.12%) ISO 27001 Lead Implementer
11 1 (0.12%) TOGAF Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 186 (21.40%) Data Quality
2 40 (4.60%) QA
3 17 (1.96%) GDPR
4 7 (0.81%) Accessibility
5 5 (0.58%) Disclosure Scotland
5 5 (0.58%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 5 (0.58%) SLA
6 4 (0.46%) FATCA
7 3 (0.35%) HIPAA
8 1 (0.12%) California Consumer Privacy Act
8 1 (0.12%) COBIT
8 1 (0.12%) Government Security Classifications
8 1 (0.12%) GRC
8 1 (0.12%) NIST
8 1 (0.12%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 1 (0.12%) SNOMED CT
8 1 (0.12%) WCAG
System Software
1 33 (3.80%) Docker
2 1 (0.12%) HDFS
2 1 (0.12%) Virtual Machines
Systems Management
1 38 (4.37%) Kubernetes
2 17 (1.96%) Grafana
3 13 (1.50%) Ansible
4 4 (0.46%) Prometheus
5 3 (0.35%) logstash
6 2 (0.23%) Control-M
6 2 (0.23%) Kibana
7 1 (0.12%) Progress Chef
Vendors
1 154 (17.72%) Databricks
2 99 (11.39%) Microsoft
3 77 (8.86%) Oracle
4 66 (7.59%) Talend
5 45 (5.18%) Informatica
6 30 (3.45%) Google
7 29 (3.34%) Denodo
8 20 (2.30%) Cisco
8 20 (2.30%) F5
9 18 (2.07%) Salesforce
10 16 (1.84%) SAP
11 10 (1.15%) Palantir
12 7 (0.81%) Foundry
12 7 (0.81%) Sage
13 6 (0.69%) Dynatrace
13 6 (0.69%) InterSystems
13 6 (0.69%) SYSPRO
14 5 (0.58%) Cloudera
14 5 (0.58%) Infor
14 5 (0.58%) ServiceNow