Big Data Contract Job Trends

Big Data
UK

The table below provides summary statistics and contractor rates for jobs requiring Big Data skills. It covers contract job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 17 February 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
17 Feb 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 353 244 235
Rank change year-on-year -109 -9 -51
Contract jobs citing Big Data 251 321 464
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.62% 1.05% 1.04%
As % of the Database & Business Intelligence category 3.82% 5.69% 6.36%
Number of daily rates quoted 188 205 318
10th Percentile £322 £363 £400
25th Percentile £381 £436 £475
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% -4.55% -8.33%
75th Percentile £630 £675 £700
90th Percentile £758 £738 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £440 £594 £525
% change year-on-year -25.93% +13.14% -8.70%
Number of hourly rates quoted 5 2 27
10th Percentile £52.75 £51.75 £22.28
25th Percentile £55.00 £52.50 £33.88
Median hourly rate £64.00 £55.00 £46.18
Median % change year-on-year +16.36% +19.10% +17.46%
75th Percentile - £57.50 £62.25
90th Percentile £67.26 £58.25 £74.70
UK excluding London median hourly rate £64.00 - £46.18
% change year-on-year - - +31.94%

All Database & BI Skills
UK

Big Data falls under the Databases and Business Intelligence category. For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all contract job vacancies requiring database or business intelligence skills.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for database or business intelligence skills 6,569 5,640 7,292
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 16.34% 18.51% 16.33%
Number of daily rates quoted 4,508 3,755 5,174
10th Percentile £339 £350 £350
25th Percentile £413 £423 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £600 £650 £650
90th Percentile £700 £763 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £500 £500
% change year-on-year -5.00% - -
Number of hourly rates quoted 123 90 177
10th Percentile £18.25 £19.81 £16.07
25th Percentile £28.86 £24.81 £21.64
Median hourly rate £52.50 £38.31 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year +37.06% -9.87% -25.26%
75th Percentile £74.68 £64.93 £63.00
90th Percentile £85.20 £70.38 £76.92
UK excluding London median hourly rate £53.60 £30.00 £41.38
% change year-on-year +78.67% -27.49% -26.02%

Big Data
Job Vacancy Trend

Historical trend showing the proportion of contract IT job postings citing Big Data relative to all contract IT jobs advertised.

Big Data job vacancy trend in the UK

Big Data
Daily Rate Trend

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing Big Data.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing Big Data

Big Data
Daily Rate Histogram

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Big Data over the 6 months to 17 February 2026.

Daily rate histogram for Big Data in the UK

Big Data
Hourly Rate Trend

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing Big Data.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing Big Data

Big Data
Hourly Rate Histogram

Hourly rate distribution of jobs citing Big Data over the 6 months to 17 February 2026.

Hourly rate histogram for Big Data in the UK

Big Data
Top 16 Contract Job Locations

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing Big Data within the UK over the 6 months to 17 February 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
England -130 199 £519 -5.64% 83
London -63 132 £550 +7.32% 39
UK excluding London -104 79 £440 -25.93% 57
Work from Home -47 72 £435 -16.83% 44
Scotland +13 21 £410 +5.13% 5
South East -42 17 £438 -12.50% 18
North of England -64 16 £448 -33.70% 20
Midlands -52 13 £428 +4.27% 5
North West -24 11 £445 -34.07% 13
East Midlands -21 9 £423 +3.05% 1
South West -29 8 £525 -21.35% 3
North East -17 4 £450 +10.02% 5
West Midlands -47 4 £449 -24.24% 4
Wales -5 3 £375 -34.44% 1
East of England -33 2 £505 -22.31% 6
Yorkshire -56 1 - - 3

Big Data
Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities 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
1 120 (47.81%) Apache Spark
2 42 (16.73%) Apache
3 32 (12.75%) Apache Airflow
4 18 (7.17%) Confluence
5 10 (3.98%) Palantir Foundry
6 4 (1.59%) SharePoint
7 2 (0.80%) Apache Pig
7 2 (0.80%) Jupyter
7 2 (0.80%) Microsoft Exchange
8 1 (0.40%) Camunda
8 1 (0.40%) IIS
8 1 (0.40%) nginx
8 1 (0.40%) SAS
Applications
1 4 (1.59%) Microsoft Project
2 1 (0.40%) Microsoft Excel
2 1 (0.40%) Microsoft Office
2 1 (0.40%) Microsoft PowerPoint
2 1 (0.40%) MS Visio
Business Applications
1 2 (0.80%) Salesforce CRM
Cloud Services
1 108 (43.03%) AWS
2 87 (34.66%) Azure
3 57 (22.71%) GCP
4 30 (11.95%) Power Platform
5 28 (11.16%) Serverless
6 26 (10.36%) Snowflake
7 20 (7.97%) GitHub
8 15 (5.98%) GitHub Actions
9 13 (5.18%) Azure Data Factory
10 12 (4.78%) AWS Lambda
11 10 (3.98%) Amazon S3
11 10 (3.98%) Azure DevOps
12 7 (2.79%) Amazon ECS
13 6 (2.39%) Amazon CloudWatch
13 6 (2.39%) Amazon SageMaker
13 6 (2.39%) OpenShift
14 5 (1.99%) Amazon EKS
14 5 (1.99%) Azure Cosmos DB
14 5 (1.99%) Microsoft Copilot
15 4 (1.59%) Collibra
Communications & Networking
1 3 (1.20%) Kerberos
1 3 (1.20%) VPN
2 1 (0.40%) TCP/IP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 91 (36.25%) Hadoop
2 65 (25.90%) Data Warehouse
3 39 (15.54%) NoSQL
4 31 (12.35%) Data Lake
4 31 (12.35%) Metadata
5 27 (10.76%) Power BI
5 27 (10.76%) Relational Database
6 25 (9.96%) SQL Server
7 24 (9.56%) PostgreSQL
8 21 (8.37%) Apache Hive
9 19 (7.57%) Elasticsearch
10 15 (5.98%) Tableau
11 13 (5.18%) RDBMS
12 11 (4.38%) Impala
13 9 (3.59%) BigQuery
13 9 (3.59%) HBase
13 9 (3.59%) MongoDB
14 8 (3.19%) MySQL
15 7 (2.79%) Star Schema
16 6 (2.39%) Data Mining
Development Applications
1 33 (13.15%) Git
2 22 (8.76%) JIRA
3 21 (8.37%) Jenkins
4 20 (7.97%) GitLab
5 5 (1.99%) ERwin
5 5 (1.99%) MLflow
6 3 (1.20%) ER Studio
6 3 (1.20%) Postman
6 3 (1.20%) Robot Framework
6 3 (1.20%) Selenium
7 2 (0.80%) Artifactory
7 2 (0.80%) Subversion
7 2 (0.80%) Team Foundation Server
8 1 (0.40%) Cucumber
8 1 (0.40%) Cypress.io
8 1 (0.40%) Gradle
8 1 (0.40%) Poetry
8 1 (0.40%) SonarQube
8 1 (0.40%) SpecFlow
8 1 (0.40%) Visual Studio Coded UI
General
1 92 (36.65%) Social Skills
2 69 (27.49%) Finance
3 39 (15.54%) Analytical Skills
4 32 (12.75%) Banking
5 19 (7.57%) Public Sector
6 9 (3.59%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 6 (2.39%) Investment Banking
8 4 (1.59%) Telecoms
9 3 (1.20%) Financial Institution
10 2 (0.80%) Documentation Skills
10 2 (0.80%) Front Office
10 2 (0.80%) Manufacturing
10 2 (0.80%) Presentation Skills
11 1 (0.40%) Agriculture
11 1 (0.40%) Corporate Banking
11 1 (0.40%) Marketing
11 1 (0.40%) Pharmaceutical
11 1 (0.40%) Retail
11 1 (0.40%) Retail Banking
Job Titles
1 70 (27.89%) Data Engineer
2 32 (12.75%) Senior
3 28 (11.16%) Lead
4 26 (10.36%) Architect
5 25 (9.96%) Data Scientist
6 23 (9.16%) Data Architect
7 22 (8.76%) Developer
8 15 (5.98%) Analyst
9 12 (4.78%) Data Analyst
10 9 (3.59%) Senior Data Engineer
11 8 (3.19%) Java Engineer
12 7 (2.79%) AWS Engineer
12 7 (2.79%) Big Data Engineer
12 7 (2.79%) Machine Learning Engineer
12 7 (2.79%) Platform Engineer
12 7 (2.79%) QA Engineer
12 7 (2.79%) Senior Data Scientist
12 7 (2.79%) Software Engineer
13 6 (2.39%) Data Modeller
13 6 (2.39%) DevOps Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 46 (18.33%) Kafka
2 32 (12.75%) PySpark
3 17 (6.77%) scikit-learn
4 16 (6.37%) Apache NiFi
5 15 (5.98%) Pandas
6 13 (5.18%) TensorFlow
7 11 (4.38%) REST
8 10 (3.98%) React
8 10 (3.98%) Spring
9 9 (3.59%) Flask
9 9 (3.59%) HTML
9 9 (3.59%) NumPy
9 9 (3.59%) PyTorch
9 9 (3.59%) RESTful
9 9 (3.59%) Spring Boot
10 8 (3.19%) RabbitMQ
11 7 (2.79%) Elastic Stack
11 7 (2.79%) JSON
12 6 (2.39%) pytest
12 6 (2.39%) Spark Streaming
Miscellaneous
1 21 (8.37%) Cloud Native
2 16 (6.37%) Algorithms
3 13 (5.18%) Distributed Computing
4 9 (3.59%) Data Structures
4 9 (3.59%) Virtual Team
5 7 (2.79%) Data Protection Act
5 7 (2.79%) Distributed Systems
5 7 (2.79%) Onboarding
5 7 (2.79%) Product Ownership
6 6 (2.39%) Management Information System
6 6 (2.39%) Reference Data
7 4 (1.59%) Analytical Mindset
7 4 (1.59%) Derivative
7 4 (1.59%) Hybrid Cloud
8 3 (1.20%) AI Agents
8 3 (1.20%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
9 2 (0.80%) CMDB
9 2 (0.80%) Data Centre
9 2 (0.80%) FMCG
9 2 (0.80%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 24 (9.56%) Linux
2 14 (5.58%) Unix
3 1 (0.40%) Windows
Processes & Methodologies
1 100 (39.84%) Analytics
2 92 (36.65%) ETL
3 85 (33.86%) Data Modelling
4 82 (32.67%) Data Pipeline
5 78 (31.08%) Problem-Solving
6 77 (30.68%) CI/CD
7 75 (29.88%) Agile
8 74 (29.48%) Data Governance
9 70 (27.89%) Data Engineering
10 65 (25.90%) Data Science
11 63 (25.10%) Machine Learning
12 53 (21.12%) AI
13 50 (19.92%) DevOps
13 50 (19.92%) Visualisation
14 39 (15.54%) Data Architecture
15 38 (15.14%) Business Intelligence
15 38 (15.14%) Computer Science
16 37 (14.74%) Decision-Making
17 36 (14.34%) Software Engineering
18 34 (13.55%) Data Integration
Programming Languages
1 158 (62.95%) Python
2 132 (52.59%) SQL
3 48 (19.12%) Java
4 27 (10.76%) R
5 25 (9.96%) Scala
6 13 (5.18%) C++
7 12 (4.78%) Bash
7 12 (4.78%) JavaScript
8 11 (4.38%) C#
9 7 (2.79%) Shell Script
10 3 (1.20%) TypeScript
11 2 (0.80%) Ada
11 2 (0.80%) Perl
11 2 (0.80%) PowerShell
11 2 (0.80%) T-SQL
12 1 (0.40%) Go
12 1 (0.40%) Korn
12 1 (0.40%) Kusto Query Language
12 1 (0.40%) PL/SQL
Qualifications
1 64 (25.50%) Security Cleared
2 51 (20.32%) SC Cleared
3 50 (19.92%) Degree
4 25 (9.96%) Computer Science Degree
4 25 (9.96%) Master's Degree
5 18 (7.17%) DV Cleared
6 5 (1.99%) Azure Certification
7 4 (1.59%) AWS Certification
7 4 (1.59%) BPSS Clearance
8 3 (1.20%) IBM Certification
8 3 (1.20%) ITIL Certification
8 3 (1.20%) PhD
9 2 (0.80%) Numerate Degree
9 2 (0.80%) TOGAF Certification
10 1 (0.40%) HP APS
10 1 (0.40%) ISTQB
10 1 (0.40%) Microsoft Certification
10 1 (0.40%) OCP
10 1 (0.40%) Oracle Certification
10 1 (0.40%) Postgraduate
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 63 (25.10%) Data Quality
2 17 (6.77%) QA
3 16 (6.37%) GDPR
4 5 (1.99%) Actionable Recommendations
5 4 (1.59%) Accessibility
6 3 (1.20%) California Consumer Privacy Act
7 2 (0.80%) PCI DSS
7 2 (0.80%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 1 (0.40%) HIPAA
8 1 (0.40%) IFRS
8 1 (0.40%) IFRS 17
8 1 (0.40%) ISO 13485
8 1 (0.40%) Solvency II
System Software
1 40 (15.94%) Docker
2 13 (5.18%) HDFS
3 2 (0.80%) Slurm Workload Manager
4 1 (0.40%) Virtual Machines
Systems Management
1 42 (16.73%) Kubernetes
2 19 (7.57%) Terraform
3 12 (4.78%) Grafana
4 11 (4.38%) Prometheus
5 6 (2.39%) Kibana
6 5 (1.99%) logstash
7 4 (1.59%) Ansible
8 3 (1.20%) Argo
8 3 (1.20%) Nagios
8 3 (1.20%) Rancher
9 2 (0.80%) Hadoop YARN
10 1 (0.40%) HP ALM
10 1 (0.40%) Kustomize
10 1 (0.40%) Oozie
10 1 (0.40%) Tivoli
Vendors
1 43 (17.13%) Databricks
2 16 (6.37%) Google
2 16 (6.37%) Microsoft
3 11 (4.38%) Cloudera
4 10 (3.98%) Foundry
4 10 (3.98%) Oracle
4 10 (3.98%) Palantir
5 8 (3.19%) Informatica
6 7 (2.79%) Ab Initio
6 7 (2.79%) Talend
7 5 (1.99%) IBM
8 4 (1.59%) OpenAI
8 4 (1.59%) ServiceNow
9 3 (1.20%) Teradata
10 2 (0.80%) Salesforce
10 2 (0.80%) Splunk
10 2 (0.80%) Sybase
11 1 (0.40%) Atlassian
11 1 (0.40%) Guidewire
11 1 (0.40%) HP