Digital Engineering Contract Job Trends in the UK excluding London

Digital Engineering
UK > UK excluding London

The table below provides summary statistics and contractor rates for jobs advertised in the UK excluding London requiring Digital Engineering skills. It covers contract job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 20 December 2025, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
20 Dec 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 379 339 353
Rank change year-on-year -40 +14 +139
Contract jobs citing Digital Engineering 10 15 53
As % of all contract jobs in the UK excluding London 0.055% 0.10% 0.27%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 0.064% 0.12% 0.31%
Number of daily rates quoted 5 0 4
10th Percentile £498 - £451
25th Percentile - - £494
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 - £569
Median % change year-on-year - - +3.41%
75th Percentile - - £669
90th Percentile £655 - £793
UK median daily rate £618 £600 £600
% change year-on-year +2.92% - -20.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 1 7 27
Median hourly rate £121.77 £46.18 £46.18
Median % change year-on-year +163.69% - -
UK median hourly rate £121.77 £46.18 £46.18
% change year-on-year +163.69% - -

All Process and Methodology Skills
UK excluding London

Digital Engineering falls under the Processes and Methodologies category. For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all contract job vacancies requiring process or methodology skills in the UK excluding London.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for process or methodology skills 15,635 13,009 17,346
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK excluding London 85.98% 87.13% 88.47%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,537 7,651 11,208
10th Percentile £220 £238 £250
25th Percentile £375 £381 £400
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £476 £500 £500
Median % change year-on-year -4.80% - -
75th Percentile £575 £600 £600
90th Percentile £675 £688 £688
UK median daily rate £500 £525 £530
% change year-on-year -4.76% -0.94% -3.64%
Number of hourly rates quoted 1,774 755 1,215
10th Percentile £14.38 £15.50 £14.25
25th Percentile £17.30 £20.00 £17.72
Median hourly rate £23.02 £31.52 £44.50
Median % change year-on-year -26.98% -29.17% +42.58%
75th Percentile £48.75 £63.75 £65.00
90th Percentile £68.00 £71.25 £77.50
UK median hourly rate £25.15 £32.50 £43.50
% change year-on-year -22.62% -25.29% +24.29%

Digital Engineering
Job Vacancy Trend in the UK excluding London

Historical trend showing the proportion of contract IT job postings citing Digital Engineering relative to all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK excluding London.

Digital Engineering job vacancy trend in the UK excluding London

Digital Engineering
Daily Rate Trend in the UK excluding London

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK excluding London citing Digital Engineering.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK excluding London citing Digital Engineering

Digital Engineering
Daily Rate Histogram in the UK excluding London

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Digital Engineering in the UK excluding London over the 6 months to 20 December 2025.

Daily rate histogram for Digital Engineering in the UK excluding London

Digital Engineering
Hourly Rate Trend in the UK excluding London

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK excluding London citing Digital Engineering.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK excluding London citing Digital Engineering

Digital Engineering
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 Digital Engineering within the UK excluding London region over the 6 months to 20 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
North West -25 6 £550 - 7
North of England -55 6 £550 - 10
South West - 2 £700 - 6
North East -18 1 £550 - 1
Wales - 1 £475 -
South East - 1 - - 10
Digital Engineering
UK

Digital Engineering
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:

Cloud Services
1 4 (40.00%) GCP
2 2 (20.00%) AWS
3 1 (10.00%) Amazon EC2
3 1 (10.00%) Amazon ECS
3 1 (10.00%) Amazon EKS
3 1 (10.00%) Amazon S3
3 1 (10.00%) AWS CloudFormation
3 1 (10.00%) AWS Lambda
3 1 (10.00%) Azure
3 1 (10.00%) CloudFront
3 1 (10.00%) Datadog
3 1 (10.00%) Serverless
Communications & Networking
1 3 (30.00%) BGP
1 3 (30.00%) Firewall
1 3 (30.00%) Software-Defined Networking
1 3 (30.00%) VLAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 3 (30.00%) BigQuery
2 1 (10.00%) Amazon RDS
2 1 (10.00%) DynamoDB
General
1 4 (40.00%) Social Skills
2 3 (30.00%) Analytical Skills
2 3 (30.00%) Finance
3 2 (20.00%) Automotive
3 2 (20.00%) Public Sector
3 2 (20.00%) Telecoms
Job Titles
1 5 (50.00%) Architect
2 3 (30.00%) Data Architect
2 3 (30.00%) GCP Architect
2 3 (30.00%) GCP Data Architect
2 3 (30.00%) Platform Engineer
3 2 (20.00%) BigQuery Architect
3 2 (20.00%) ETL Architect
3 2 (20.00%) Solutions Architect
4 1 (10.00%) AWS Architect
4 1 (10.00%) AWS Solution Architect
4 1 (10.00%) Chief Information Security Officer
4 1 (10.00%) Head of Information
4 1 (10.00%) Head of Information Security
4 1 (10.00%) Head of Security
4 1 (10.00%) Lead
4 1 (10.00%) Site Reliability Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 1 (10.00%) OpenTelemetry
Miscellaneous
1 5 (50.00%) Cloud Native
2 3 (30.00%) Data Centre
2 3 (30.00%) Product Ownership
3 2 (20.00%) Distributed Systems
3 2 (20.00%) Legacy Systems
4 1 (10.00%) Digital Wallet
Operating Systems
1 3 (30.00%) Linux
1 3 (30.00%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
1 3 (30.00%) Windows
1 3 (30.00%) Windows Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 4 (40.00%) Cybersecurity
2 3 (30.00%) AI
2 3 (30.00%) Change Control
2 3 (30.00%) Computer Science
2 3 (30.00%) Containerisation
2 3 (30.00%) Continuous Improvement
2 3 (30.00%) Data Architecture
2 3 (30.00%) ETL
2 3 (30.00%) High Availability
2 3 (30.00%) ITSM
2 3 (30.00%) Knowledge Management
2 3 (30.00%) Platform Engineering
2 3 (30.00%) Problem-Solving
2 3 (30.00%) Service Delivery
2 3 (30.00%) Virtual Infrastructure
3 2 (20.00%) Data Engineering
3 2 (20.00%) Digital Innovation
3 2 (20.00%) Infrastructure as Code
3 2 (20.00%) Infrastructure Engineering
3 2 (20.00%) Roadmaps
Programming Languages
1 4 (40.00%) Python
2 3 (30.00%) Bash
2 3 (30.00%) Perl
2 3 (30.00%) PowerShell
3 1 (10.00%) Go
Qualifications
1 6 (60.00%) Security Cleared
2 4 (40.00%) Degree
2 4 (40.00%) SC Cleared
3 3 (30.00%) CCDP
3 3 (30.00%) CCNA
3 3 (30.00%) CCNP
3 3 (30.00%) Cisco Certification
4 1 (10.00%) CISA
4 1 (10.00%) CISSP
4 1 (10.00%) CompTIA Security+
4 1 (10.00%) DV Cleared
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 1 (10.00%) Accessibility
1 1 (10.00%) PCI DSS
System Software
1 3 (30.00%) Active Directory
1 3 (30.00%) VMware Infrastructure
2 1 (10.00%) Docker
Systems Management
1 2 (20.00%) Terraform
2 1 (10.00%) Ansible
2 1 (10.00%) Grafana
2 1 (10.00%) Kubernetes
2 1 (10.00%) Prometheus
Vendors
1 3 (30.00%) Citrix
1 3 (30.00%) Google
1 3 (30.00%) Hitachi
1 3 (30.00%) Red Hat
1 3 (30.00%) VMware
2 1 (10.00%) MuleSoft
2 1 (10.00%) Talend