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 £500, according to job vacancies posted in the 6 months leading up to 17 December 2025.

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

6 months to
17 Dec 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 158 107 187
Rank change year-on-year -51 +80 -11
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 301 332 250
As % of all contract jobs in the UK excluding London 1.66% 2.21% 1.28%
As % of the Job Titles category 1.84% 2.39% 1.37%
Number of daily rates quoted 208 216 200
10th Percentile £350 £317 £393
25th Percentile £405 £415 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £495 £513
Median % change year-on-year +1.01% -3.41% -2.38%
75th Percentile £565 £575 £608
90th Percentile £616 £644 £688
UK median daily rate £500 £525 £525
% change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 4 4 3
10th Percentile £28.33 £25.14 £31.33
25th Percentile £31.81 £25.21 £36.69
Median hourly rate £51.00 £26.50 £49.00
Median % change year-on-year +92.45% -45.92% -18.33%
75th Percentile £71.69 £27.91 £58.69
90th Percentile £76.08 £28.19 £62.48
UK median hourly rate £53.00 £50.50 £60.50
% change year-on-year +4.95% -16.53% +0.83%

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 16,342 13,889 18,269
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 90.08% 92.35% 93.52%
Number of daily rates quoted 10,051 8,287 11,933
10th Percentile £210 £213 £213
25th Percentile £366 £363 £381
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £475 £490 £500
Median % change year-on-year -3.06% -2.00% -
75th Percentile £575 £594 £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 1,641 813 1,199
10th Percentile £13.85 £15.25 £14.36
25th Percentile £17.48 £20.24 £18.50
Median hourly rate £25.15 £32.50 £45.00
Median % change year-on-year -22.62% -27.78% +80.00%
75th Percentile £57.50 £64.50 £65.00
90th Percentile £70.16 £71.25 £77.50
UK median hourly rate £25.15 £33.52 £45.00
% change year-on-year -24.97% -25.51% +50.00%

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 17 December 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 17 December 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 17 December 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 -11 88 £519 +5.82% 39
North of England -46 85 £466 +3.61% 77
West Midlands -18 74 £525 +5.00% 29
Scotland +21 51 £450 +1.98% 13
South West +10 41 £550 +11.39% 44
North West -33 41 £405 -8.99% 53
Yorkshire -38 36 £500 +3.09% 13
South East -55 33 £480 -12.73% 120
East Midlands -16 14 £455 +27.81% 10
Wales -11 11 £460 -8.00% 3
North East -11 8 £425 +8.97% 11
East of England -23 6 £625 +96.54% 36
Northern Ireland -8 1 - - 1
Data Engineer
UK

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

For the 6 months to 17 December 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.

1 182 (60.47%) Python
2 168 (55.81%) SQL
3 132 (43.85%) ETL
4 125 (41.53%) Data Pipeline
5 113 (37.54%) Data Engineering
6 104 (34.55%) Azure
7 103 (34.22%) Analytics
8 100 (33.22%) CI/CD
9 95 (31.56%) AWS
10 92 (30.56%) Data Modelling
11 76 (25.25%) Databricks
12 74 (24.58%) DevOps
13 70 (23.26%) Data Warehouse
14 68 (22.59%) Agile
14 68 (22.59%) Business Intelligence
15 65 (21.59%) Data Quality
15 65 (21.59%) Problem-Solving
16 55 (18.27%) PySpark
17 50 (16.61%) Power Platform
17 50 (16.61%) Security Cleared
18 48 (15.95%) Apache Airflow
19 47 (15.61%) Azure Data Factory
19 47 (15.61%) Power BI
19 47 (15.61%) Snowflake
20 45 (14.95%) Docker
20 45 (14.95%) Kubernetes
20 45 (14.95%) Test Automation
21 44 (14.62%) Jenkins
22 43 (14.29%) Git
23 42 (13.95%) SC Cleared

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 48 (15.95%) Apache Airflow
2 29 (9.63%) Apache
2 29 (9.63%) Apache Spark
3 15 (4.98%) SAS
4 8 (2.66%) Confluence
5 7 (2.33%) Oracle Application Server
6 5 (1.66%) Apache Pig
7 3 (1.00%) IIS
8 1 (0.33%) Apache Synapse
8 1 (0.33%) Documentum
8 1 (0.33%) Jupyter
Applications
1 1 (0.33%) Chatbot
1 1 (0.33%) SPSS
1 1 (0.33%) Stata
Business Applications
1 2 (0.66%) SAP S/4HANA
2 1 (0.33%) Salesforce CRM
Cloud Services
1 104 (34.55%) Azure
2 95 (31.56%) AWS
3 50 (16.61%) Power Platform
4 47 (15.61%) Azure Data Factory
4 47 (15.61%) Snowflake
5 35 (11.63%) GCP
6 28 (9.30%) GitHub
7 27 (8.97%) Amazon S3
8 25 (8.31%) Serverless
9 24 (7.97%) dbt
10 23 (7.64%) Azure Synapse Analytics
11 18 (5.98%) AWS Lambda
12 13 (4.32%) AWS CloudFormation
13 11 (3.65%) GitHub Actions
14 10 (3.32%) Azure DevOps
15 8 (2.66%) Amazon SageMaker
16 7 (2.33%) Amazon EC2
16 7 (2.33%) Amazon ECS
16 7 (2.33%) AWS Step Functions
16 7 (2.33%) CloudBees
Communications & Networking
1 4 (1.33%) TCP/IP
2 3 (1.00%) DNS
2 3 (1.00%) MQTT
2 3 (1.00%) SSH
2 3 (1.00%) Structured Cabling
3 2 (0.66%) SSL
3 2 (0.66%) Wi-Fi
4 1 (0.33%) BGP
4 1 (0.33%) DMZ
4 1 (0.33%) Internet
4 1 (0.33%) LAN
4 1 (0.33%) Multicast
4 1 (0.33%) VPN
4 1 (0.33%) WAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 70 (23.26%) Data Warehouse
2 47 (15.61%) Power BI
3 34 (11.30%) PostgreSQL
4 32 (10.63%) Data Lake
5 29 (9.63%) Big Data
6 27 (8.97%) NoSQL
7 24 (7.97%) Hadoop
8 23 (7.64%) Pentaho
9 20 (6.64%) Amazon Redshift
9 20 (6.64%) Relational Database
10 18 (5.98%) Elasticsearch
11 17 (5.65%) Delta Lake
12 14 (4.65%) Amazon RDS
13 13 (4.32%) Data Mining
14 11 (3.65%) SQL Server
15 10 (3.32%) Tableau
16 9 (2.99%) Azure SQL Database
17 8 (2.66%) MongoDB
17 8 (2.66%) RDBMS
17 8 (2.66%) Star Schema
Development Applications
1 44 (14.62%) Jenkins
2 43 (14.29%) Git
3 27 (8.97%) GitLab
4 25 (8.31%) JIRA
5 8 (2.66%) MLflow
6 7 (2.33%) DBeaver
7 5 (1.66%) Visual Studio Code
8 4 (1.33%) SonarQube
9 3 (1.00%) Bitbucket
9 3 (1.00%) Cucumber
9 3 (1.00%) Poetry
9 3 (1.00%) PyCharm
9 3 (1.00%) Sonatype Nexus
10 2 (0.66%) Artifactory
10 2 (0.66%) JMeter
10 2 (0.66%) Visual Studio
10 2 (0.66%) Zephyr
11 1 (0.33%) JUnit
11 1 (0.33%) Mockito
11 1 (0.33%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
General
1 66 (21.93%) Social Skills
2 40 (13.29%) Analytical Skills
3 36 (11.96%) Finance
4 21 (6.98%) Public Sector
5 17 (5.65%) Banking
6 6 (1.99%) Documentation Skills
7 4 (1.33%) Telecoms
8 3 (1.00%) Influencing Skills
8 3 (1.00%) Legal
8 3 (1.00%) Manufacturing
8 3 (1.00%) Tech for Good
9 2 (0.66%) Aerospace
9 2 (0.66%) Health Technology
9 2 (0.66%) Investment Banking
9 2 (0.66%) Pharmaceutical
9 2 (0.66%) Presentation Skills
10 1 (0.33%) Law
10 1 (0.33%) Local Government
10 1 (0.33%) Marketing
10 1 (0.33%) Retail
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 55 (18.27%) PySpark
2 29 (9.63%) Kafka
3 14 (4.65%) REST
3 14 (4.65%) RESTful
4 13 (4.32%) Pandas
5 12 (3.99%) Flask
5 12 (3.99%) Keycloak
5 12 (3.99%) NumPy
6 8 (2.66%) Elastic Stack
7 7 (2.33%) Apache NiFi
7 7 (2.33%) Oracle GoldenGate
8 6 (1.99%) HTML
8 6 (1.99%) OpenTelemetry
9 5 (1.66%) Node.js
10 4 (1.33%) JSON
10 4 (1.33%) OAuth
10 4 (1.33%) OAuth2
10 4 (1.33%) pytest
11 3 (1.00%) JDBC
11 3 (1.00%) XML
Miscellaneous
1 24 (7.97%) Cloud Native
2 17 (5.65%) Replication
3 14 (4.65%) Algorithms
3 14 (4.65%) Hybrid Cloud
3 14 (4.65%) Product Ownership
4 10 (3.32%) Distributed Systems
5 9 (2.99%) Data Protection Act
6 7 (2.33%) Data Structures
7 6 (1.99%) Clustering
7 6 (1.99%) Legacy Systems
7 6 (1.99%) NHS
8 5 (1.66%) Greenfield Project
9 4 (1.33%) IoT
10 3 (1.00%) Driving Licence
10 3 (1.00%) Fibre Optics
10 3 (1.00%) Management Information System
11 2 (0.66%) CCTV
11 2 (0.66%) Data Centre
11 2 (0.66%) Life Science
11 2 (0.66%) SCADA
Operating Systems
1 20 (6.64%) Linux
2 11 (3.65%) Unix
3 1 (0.33%) Windows
3 1 (0.33%) Windows Server
3 1 (0.33%) Windows Server 2003
Processes & Methodologies
1 132 (43.85%) ETL
2 125 (41.53%) Data Pipeline
3 113 (37.54%) Data Engineering
4 103 (34.22%) Analytics
5 100 (33.22%) CI/CD
6 92 (30.56%) Data Modelling
7 74 (24.58%) DevOps
8 68 (22.59%) Agile
8 68 (22.59%) Business Intelligence
9 65 (21.59%) Problem-Solving
10 45 (14.95%) Test Automation
11 40 (13.29%) Data Integration
12 38 (12.62%) Machine Learning
12 38 (12.62%) Visualisation
13 33 (10.96%) Performance Tuning
14 31 (10.30%) Data Science
14 31 (10.30%) Scrum
15 29 (9.63%) Data Architecture
16 28 (9.30%) Data Governance
17 27 (8.97%) Continuous Improvement
Programming Languages
1 182 (60.47%) Python
2 168 (55.81%) SQL
3 29 (9.63%) Java
4 18 (5.98%) Scala
5 12 (3.99%) Bash
5 12 (3.99%) Go
5 12 (3.99%) PL/SQL
6 6 (1.99%) R
7 5 (1.66%) Groovy
7 5 (1.66%) Shell Script
8 4 (1.33%) JavaScript
8 4 (1.33%) T-SQL
9 3 (1.00%) Data Analysis Expressions
9 3 (1.00%) TypeScript
10 2 (0.66%) ABAP
11 1 (0.33%) Bicep
11 1 (0.33%) C#
11 1 (0.33%) Cypher
Qualifications
1 50 (16.61%) Security Cleared
2 42 (13.95%) SC Cleared
3 13 (4.32%) Azure Certification
4 11 (3.65%) AWS Certification
4 11 (3.65%) Degree
5 7 (2.33%) Master's Degree
6 3 (1.00%) Computer Science Degree
7 2 (0.66%) DV Cleared
8 1 (0.33%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
8 1 (0.33%) HND
8 1 (0.33%) ITIL Certification
8 1 (0.33%) MCP
8 1 (0.33%) Tableau Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 65 (21.59%) Data Quality
2 9 (2.99%) GDPR
3 7 (2.33%) QA
4 4 (1.33%) Accessibility
5 2 (0.66%) Disclosure Scotland
6 1 (0.33%) EU AI Act
6 1 (0.33%) HIPAA
6 1 (0.33%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 1 (0.33%) NCSC
6 1 (0.33%) NIST
6 1 (0.33%) WCAG
System Software
1 45 (14.95%) Docker
2 3 (1.00%) Virtual Machines
3 2 (0.66%) Active Directory
Systems Management
1 45 (14.95%) Kubernetes
2 28 (9.30%) Terraform
3 12 (3.99%) Ansible
4 11 (3.65%) Grafana
5 8 (2.66%) NetBackup
6 7 (2.33%) Kibana
7 6 (1.99%) Prometheus
8 5 (1.66%) logstash
9 3 (1.00%) Argo
9 3 (1.00%) Istio
10 2 (0.66%) Control-M
10 2 (0.66%) Kustomize
11 1 (0.33%) Puppet
Vendors
1 76 (25.25%) Databricks
2 39 (12.96%) Oracle
3 36 (11.96%) Microsoft
4 27 (8.97%) Talend
5 15 (4.98%) Denodo
5 15 (4.98%) Informatica
6 11 (3.65%) Red Hat
7 10 (3.32%) Google
8 8 (2.66%) Commvault
9 7 (2.33%) IBM
9 7 (2.33%) Veritas
10 6 (1.99%) Cloudera
10 6 (1.99%) Confluent
10 6 (1.99%) ServiceNow
11 5 (1.66%) Splunk
12 4 (1.33%) SAP
13 3 (1.00%) Salesforce
14 2 (0.66%) Brio
14 2 (0.66%) Cisco
14 2 (0.66%) Greenplum