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 25 September 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
25 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 453 293 205
Rank change year-on-year -160 -88 +36
Contract jobs citing Big Data 239 295 462
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.44% 0.89% 1.20%
As % of the Database & Business Intelligence category 2.90% 4.90% 6.73%
Number of daily rates quoted 170 215 307
10th Percentile £358 £381 £367
25th Percentile £438 £426 £456
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £525 £588
Median % change year-on-year - -10.64% -2.08%
75th Percentile £625 £634 £725
90th Percentile £702 £737 £850
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £500 £550
% change year-on-year -5.00% -9.09% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 7 2 5
10th Percentile £54.70 £45.06 £27.25
25th Percentile £61.75 £54.22 £36.25
Median hourly rate £70.00 £69.48 £47.50
Median % change year-on-year +0.75% +46.27% -39.10%
75th Percentile £75.00 £84.74 £53.75
90th Percentile £81.00 £93.90 -
UK excluding London median hourly rate £59.08 £38.96 -
% change year-on-year +51.64% - -

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 8,254 6,022 6,866
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 15.04% 18.25% 17.88%
Number of daily rates quoted 5,512 4,040 4,691
10th Percentile £355 £340 £350
25th Percentile £419 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £532
Median % change year-on-year - -6.02% -1.48%
75th Percentile £615 £625 £650
90th Percentile £710 £738 £800
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £475 £485
% change year-on-year - -2.06% -3.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 272 87 91
10th Percentile £16.70 £21.13 £17.50
25th Percentile £23.00 £29.00 £21.25
Median hourly rate £40.18 £40.49 £35.00
Median % change year-on-year -0.77% +15.69% -36.36%
75th Percentile £57.50 £65.00 £60.78
90th Percentile £74.97 £83.00 £71.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £41.00 £37.48 £30.00
% change year-on-year +9.39% +24.93% -45.21%

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 25 September 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 25 September 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 25 September 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 -168 199 £525 -1.69% 502
London -127 122 £582 +5.77% 360
UK excluding London -118 89 £475 -5.00% 200
Work from Home -84 73 £502 +0.40% 176
North of England -44 34 £500 +1.27% 37
Yorkshire -17 23 £509 +1.75% 11
Scotland -24 16 £402 -19.60% 35
Midlands -52 13 £414 -2.59% 28
South East -85 13 £451 -21.52% 32
South West -35 10 £478 +6.11% 33
East Midlands -14 8 £500 +19.05% 10
North East -38 7 £425 - 3
West Midlands -43 5 £405 -9.40% 18
North West -62 4 £513 +7.89% 24
East of England -45 2 £540 +6.93% 20
Wales - 2 £475 - 2

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
1 133 (55.65%) Apache Spark
2 41 (17.15%) Apache
3 39 (16.32%) Apache Airflow
4 7 (2.93%) Confluence
5 6 (2.51%) JBoss
6 5 (2.09%) Jupyter
6 5 (2.09%) SharePoint
7 4 (1.67%) SAS
8 3 (1.26%) Apache Superset
8 3 (1.26%) CMS
8 3 (1.26%) Microsoft Exchange
8 3 (1.26%) Palantir Foundry
9 2 (0.84%) Apache Pig
10 1 (0.42%) Luigi
10 1 (0.42%) MQSeries
10 1 (0.42%) nginx
Applications
1 3 (1.26%) Microsoft Office
Business Applications
1 2 (0.84%) Endur
2 1 (0.42%) Oracle ERP
2 1 (0.42%) SAP ERP
Cloud Services
1 113 (47.28%) AWS
2 93 (38.91%) Azure
3 65 (27.20%) GCP
4 45 (18.83%) Snowflake
5 32 (13.39%) Amazon S3
6 30 (12.55%) Power Platform
7 23 (9.62%) Amazon EMR
8 21 (8.79%) Azure DevOps
9 20 (8.37%) AWS Lambda
10 19 (7.95%) GitHub
11 17 (7.11%) Serverless
12 14 (5.86%) Amazon ECS
13 13 (5.44%) Azure Data Factory
13 13 (5.44%) OpenShift
14 12 (5.02%) Azure Databricks
14 12 (5.02%) PaaS
15 11 (4.60%) Amazon EKS
16 10 (4.18%) dbt
16 10 (4.18%) GitHub Actions
17 8 (3.35%) Amazon EC2
Communications & Networking
1 6 (2.51%) Kerberos
2 5 (2.09%) DNS
3 3 (1.26%) Broadband
3 3 (1.26%) DHCP
3 3 (1.26%) Firewall
3 3 (1.26%) Internet
3 3 (1.26%) SMTP
3 3 (1.26%) VPN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 47 (19.67%) Hadoop
2 43 (17.99%) Data Warehouse
3 38 (15.90%) Data Lake
4 30 (12.55%) NoSQL
5 29 (12.13%) PostgreSQL
5 29 (12.13%) Power BI
6 23 (9.62%) Apache Hive
7 20 (8.37%) Amazon Redshift
8 18 (7.53%) BigQuery
9 16 (6.69%) MongoDB
10 13 (5.44%) Amazon Athena
10 13 (5.44%) Amazon RDS
11 12 (5.02%) Elasticsearch
11 12 (5.02%) Metadata
11 12 (5.02%) Relational Database
11 12 (5.02%) Tableau
12 10 (4.18%) DynamoDB
13 8 (3.35%) Amazon Aurora
13 8 (3.35%) SQL Server
14 7 (2.93%) Presto
Development Applications
1 37 (15.48%) Git
2 31 (12.97%) GitLab
3 27 (11.30%) Jenkins
4 13 (5.44%) JIRA
5 5 (2.09%) Selenium
6 4 (1.67%) SonarQube
7 3 (1.26%) JMeter
7 3 (1.26%) JUnit
7 3 (1.26%) LoadRunner
8 2 (0.84%) eggPlant
8 2 (0.84%) Gatling
8 2 (0.84%) PowerDesigner
8 2 (0.84%) TeamCity
9 1 (0.42%) Atlassian Bamboo
9 1 (0.42%) Claude Code
9 1 (0.42%) MLflow
General
1 71 (29.71%) Social Skills
2 51 (21.34%) Analytical Skills
3 47 (19.67%) Finance
4 27 (11.30%) Banking
5 19 (7.95%) Public Sector
6 9 (3.77%) Investment Banking
7 8 (3.35%) Documentation Skills
7 8 (3.35%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 6 (2.51%) Marketing
9 4 (1.67%) Aerospace
9 4 (1.67%) Retail
10 3 (1.26%) Legal
10 3 (1.26%) Telecoms
11 2 (0.84%) Financial Institution
11 2 (0.84%) Local Government
12 1 (0.42%) Advertising
12 1 (0.42%) Automotive
12 1 (0.42%) Corporate Banking
12 1 (0.42%) Manufacturing
12 1 (0.42%) Retail Banking
Job Titles
1 81 (33.89%) Data Engineer
2 41 (17.15%) Senior
3 31 (12.97%) Architect
4 19 (7.95%) Developer
5 16 (6.69%) Analyst
6 15 (6.28%) Senior Data Engineer
7 14 (5.86%) DevOps Engineer
7 14 (5.86%) Solutions Architect
8 13 (5.44%) Data Architect
9 12 (5.02%) Big Data Engineer
10 11 (4.60%) Data Analyst
11 10 (4.18%) Databricks Data Engineer
11 10 (4.18%) Databricks Engineer
11 10 (4.18%) Python Engineer
12 9 (3.77%) Azure Engineer
12 9 (3.77%) Lead
13 8 (3.35%) Java Developer
13 8 (3.35%) Kafka Engineer
13 8 (3.35%) Scala Engineer
14 7 (2.93%) Software Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 54 (22.59%) Kafka
2 44 (18.41%) Terraform
3 27 (11.30%) PySpark
4 15 (6.28%) REST
4 15 (6.28%) Spring
5 14 (5.86%) Spring Boot
6 11 (4.60%) Apache NiFi
7 8 (3.35%) CSS
7 8 (3.35%) Elastic Stack
7 8 (3.35%) HTML
7 8 (3.35%) Pandas
7 8 (3.35%) Play Framework
8 6 (2.51%) .NET
8 6 (2.51%) NumPy
9 5 (2.09%) Langfuse
9 5 (2.09%) Microsoft Graph
9 5 (2.09%) Middleware
9 5 (2.09%) RESTful
10 4 (1.67%) Apache Beam
10 4 (1.67%) Node.js
Miscellaneous
1 32 (13.39%) Cloud Native
2 26 (10.88%) Distributed Systems
3 15 (6.28%) Data Structures
3 15 (6.28%) Product Ownership
4 14 (5.86%) Onboarding
5 12 (5.02%) Clustering
5 12 (5.02%) Virtual Team
6 6 (2.51%) Cyber Threat
7 5 (2.09%) Algorithms
7 5 (2.09%) Distributed Architecture
7 5 (2.09%) Distributed Computing
8 4 (1.67%) Data Protection Act
9 3 (1.26%) AI Agents
9 3 (1.26%) Data Centre
9 3 (1.26%) FMCG
9 3 (1.26%) PKI
9 3 (1.26%) Social Media
10 2 (0.84%) Analytical Mindset
10 2 (0.84%) Legacy Systems
10 2 (0.84%) Linux Command Line
Operating Systems
1 27 (11.30%) Linux
2 10 (4.18%) Unix
3 6 (2.51%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 3 (1.26%) Windows
4 3 (1.26%) Windows Server
5 1 (0.42%) Windows Server 2003
Processes & Methodologies
1 117 (48.95%) Data Pipeline
2 102 (42.68%) Analytics
3 93 (38.91%) ETL
4 90 (37.66%) Data Engineering
5 89 (37.24%) CI/CD
6 80 (33.47%) AI
7 75 (31.38%) Agile
8 63 (26.36%) Machine Learning
9 62 (25.94%) DevOps
10 53 (22.18%) Data Modelling
11 45 (18.83%) Containerisation
12 42 (17.57%) Problem-Solving
13 41 (17.15%) Data Science
14 38 (15.90%) Infrastructure as Code
15 37 (15.48%) Data Governance
16 34 (14.23%) Business Intelligence
16 34 (14.23%) Data Analysis
16 34 (14.23%) Data Integration
16 34 (14.23%) Scrum
17 33 (13.81%) Validation
Programming Languages
1 138 (57.74%) Python
2 120 (50.21%) SQL
3 58 (24.27%) Java
4 30 (12.55%) Scala
5 21 (8.79%) PowerShell
6 15 (6.28%) JavaScript
7 12 (5.02%) R
8 11 (4.60%) Bash
9 9 (3.77%) C#
10 3 (1.26%) Kusto Query Language
10 3 (1.26%) Shell Script
11 2 (0.84%) Go
11 2 (0.84%) Korn
11 2 (0.84%) Rust
12 1 (0.42%) Bicep
12 1 (0.42%) C
12 1 (0.42%) C++
12 1 (0.42%) MATLAB
12 1 (0.42%) PL/SQL
12 1 (0.42%) SAS Macro
Qualifications
1 57 (23.85%) Security Cleared
2 42 (17.57%) SC Cleared
3 25 (10.46%) Degree
4 12 (5.02%) Computer Science Degree
5 10 (4.18%) BPSS Clearance
6 9 (3.77%) DV Cleared
6 9 (3.77%) Master's Degree
7 5 (2.09%) Azure Certification
8 4 (1.67%) AWS Certification
9 3 (1.26%) PhD
9 3 (1.26%) SnowPro
10 2 (0.84%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
11 1 (0.42%) ISEB
11 1 (0.42%) MBA
11 1 (0.42%) Microsoft Certification
11 1 (0.42%) PMI Certification
11 1 (0.42%) PMP
11 1 (0.42%) TOGAF Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 47 (19.67%) Data Quality
2 17 (7.11%) QA
3 8 (3.35%) GDPR
4 3 (1.26%) Actionable Recommendations
4 3 (1.26%) SLA
5 1 (0.42%) Accessibility
5 1 (0.42%) California Consumer Privacy Act
5 1 (0.42%) EMIR
5 1 (0.42%) EU AI Act
5 1 (0.42%) IFRS
5 1 (0.42%) IFRS 9
5 1 (0.42%) MiFID
5 1 (0.42%) NCSC
5 1 (0.42%) PSD2
5 1 (0.42%) SEPA
System Software
1 43 (17.99%) Docker
2 9 (3.77%) VMware Infrastructure
3 7 (2.93%) HDFS
4 5 (2.09%) Active Directory
5 3 (1.26%) BitLocker
5 3 (1.26%) Hyper-V
5 3 (1.26%) Microsoft App-V
5 3 (1.26%) Terminal Services
5 3 (1.26%) Virtual Machines
5 3 (1.26%) VMware ESXi
6 2 (0.84%) Apache Flume
Systems Management
1 48 (20.08%) Kubernetes
2 27 (11.30%) Grafana
3 12 (5.02%) Puppet
4 11 (4.60%) Ansible
5 8 (3.35%) Kibana
6 7 (2.93%) Prometheus
7 6 (2.51%) Red Hat Satellite
8 5 (2.09%) Failover Clustering
9 3 (1.26%) Nagios
9 3 (1.26%) vCenter Server
9 3 (1.26%) vMotion
10 1 (0.42%) Control-M
10 1 (0.42%) HAProxy
Vendors
1 66 (27.62%) Databricks
2 21 (8.79%) Google
3 20 (8.37%) Microsoft
4 18 (7.53%) Splunk
5 14 (5.86%) Cloudera
6 10 (4.18%) Oracle
7 9 (3.77%) VMware
8 8 (3.35%) Salesforce
9 6 (2.51%) Red Hat
10 5 (2.09%) Amplitude
10 5 (2.09%) Cisco
10 5 (2.09%) IBM
10 5 (2.09%) Informatica
11 4 (1.67%) Foundry
11 4 (1.67%) Talend
11 4 (1.67%) Tenable
12 3 (1.26%) Dynatrace
12 3 (1.26%) New Relic
12 3 (1.26%) Palantir
12 3 (1.26%) Teradata