Big Data Contracts

Big Data
UK

The table below provides summary statistics for contract job vacancies requiring Big Data skills. It includes a benchmarking guide to the contractor rates offered in vacancies that cited Big Data over the 6 months leading up to 30 June 2025, comparing them to the same period in the previous two years.

6 months to
30 Jun 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 241 214 252
Rank change year-on-year -27 +38 -94
Contract jobs citing Big Data 330 484 584
As % of all contract jobs advertised in the UK 1.08% 1.12% 1.05%
As % of the Database & Business Intelligence category 5.88% 6.42% 6.09%
Number of daily rates quoted 228 356 373
10th Percentile £408 £361 £450
25th Percentile £468 £450 £500
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £569 £600
Median % change year-on-year -3.30% -5.21% -
75th Percentile £675 £739 £738
90th Percentile £741 £844 £837
UK excluding London median daily rate £513 £510 £575
% change year-on-year +0.55% -11.30% +4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 3 9 24
10th Percentile £42.42 - £36.50
25th Percentile £47.61 £18.20 £68.38
Median hourly rate £57.50 £42.50 £78.00
Median % change year-on-year +35.29% -45.51% +3.38%
75th Percentile £79.38 £47.50 £90.00
90th Percentile £91.75 £53.50 -
UK excluding London median hourly rate £38.96 £19.38 £78.00
% change year-on-year +101.08% -75.16% +30.00%

All Database and Business Intelligence 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 5,608 7,535 9,589
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 18.30% 17.45% 17.21%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,798 5,378 6,738
10th Percentile £358 £350 £370
25th Percentile £413 £425 £450
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £515 £525 £538
Median % change year-on-year -1.90% -2.33% -2.27%
75th Percentile £635 £650 £650
90th Percentile £760 £788 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £475 £500
% change year-on-year - -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 99 150 171
10th Percentile £19.52 £14.00 £21.24
25th Percentile £26.00 £20.82 £32.30
Median hourly rate £35.00 £40.00 £56.40
Median % change year-on-year -12.50% -29.08% +40.47%
75th Percentile £64.13 £53.29 £73.75
90th Percentile £77.50 £72.50 £82.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £31.64 £33.00 £55.00
% change year-on-year -4.12% -40.00% +57.14%

Big Data
Job Vacancy Trend

Job postings citing Big Data as a proportion of all IT jobs advertised.

Job vacancy trend for Big Data in the UK

Big Data
Contractor Daily Rate Trend

3-month moving average daily rate quoted in jobs citing Big Data.

Daily rate trend for Big Data in the UK

Big Data
Daily Rate Histogram

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Big Data over the 6 months to 30 June 2025.

Daily rate histogram for Big Data in the UK

Big Data
Contractor Hourly Rate Trend

3-month moving average hourly rates quoted in jobs citing Big Data.

Hourly rate trend for Big Data in the UK

Big Data
Hourly Rate Histogram

Hourly rate distribution of jobs citing Big Data over the 6 months to 30 June 2025.

Hourly rate histogram for Big Data in the UK

Big Data
Top 16 Contract 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 30 June 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
England -22 299 £550 -5.01% 1,582
London -29 173 £586 -6.24% 1,097
UK excluding London 0 117 £513 +0.55% 539
Work from Home -20 101 £525 -14.29% 589
South East +56 39 £550 +29.41% 109
Midlands -1 25 £500 -21.10% 84
North of England -18 22 £593 +15.05% 144
East of England +42 18 £650 +8.33% 57
East Midlands +7 14 £410 -8.89% 27
North West +10 12 £593 +16.18% 88
West Midlands -9 11 £512 -21.17% 57
Yorkshire -24 7 £600 +12.15% 40
South West +30 6 £644 +3.00% 63
Northern Ireland -3 5 £410 -3.53% 30
Scotland -11 5 £455 -5.51% 47
North East - 3 £463 - 16

Big Data
Co-occurring Skills and Capabilities by Category

The follow tables expand on the table above by listing co-occurrences grouped by category. The same employment type, locality and period is covered with up to 20 co-occurrences shown in each of the following categories:

Application Platforms
1 134 (40.61%) Apache Spark
2 64 (19.39%) Apache
3 20 (6.06%) Apache Airflow
4 19 (5.76%) Confluence
5 9 (2.73%) Microsoft Exchange
6 4 (1.21%) SharePoint
7 3 (0.91%) Jupyter
7 3 (0.91%) nginx
7 3 (0.91%) Oracle Coherence
8 2 (0.61%) Luigi
8 2 (0.61%) MS Project Server
8 2 (0.61%) Oracle SOA Suite
8 2 (0.61%) SAS
9 1 (0.30%) Apache Pulsar
9 1 (0.30%) IBM Domino
9 1 (0.30%) Tomcat
Applications
1 8 (2.42%) MS Visio
2 7 (2.12%) Microsoft Excel
3 2 (0.61%) Microsoft Office
3 2 (0.61%) Microsoft Project
4 1 (0.30%) CATIA
Business Applications
1 5 (1.52%) Avolution ABACUS
2 4 (1.21%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
3 2 (0.61%) SAP BPC
Cloud Services
1 137 (41.52%) AWS
2 115 (34.85%) Azure
3 71 (21.52%) GCP
4 28 (8.48%) Power Platform
5 25 (7.58%) Serverless
6 24 (7.27%) Amazon S3
7 18 (5.45%) Azure DevOps
7 18 (5.45%) GitHub
8 17 (5.15%) Snowflake
9 16 (4.85%) AWS Lambda
10 15 (4.55%) Azure Data Factory
10 15 (4.55%) OpenShift
11 13 (3.94%) PaaS
12 12 (3.64%) Google Kubernetes Engine
13 11 (3.33%) Azure Synapse Analytics
14 9 (2.73%) Amazon EC2
14 9 (2.73%) IaaS
15 7 (2.12%) Amazon CloudWatch
15 7 (2.12%) Cloud Computing
16 6 (1.82%) AWS CloudFormation
Communications & Networking
1 12 (3.64%) DNS
2 9 (2.73%) DHCP
2 9 (2.73%) Firewall
2 9 (2.73%) SMTP
2 9 (2.73%) VPN
3 3 (0.91%) Internet
4 1 (0.30%) HTTP
4 1 (0.30%) Kerberos
4 1 (0.30%) NAS
4 1 (0.30%) SAN
4 1 (0.30%) Structured Cabling
4 1 (0.30%) Wireless
Database & Business Intelligence
1 110 (33.33%) Hadoop
2 54 (16.36%) Data Warehouse
3 53 (16.06%) Data Lake
4 36 (10.91%) NoSQL
5 34 (10.30%) Tableau
6 32 (9.70%) Relational Database
7 30 (9.09%) Elasticsearch
8 23 (6.97%) Apache Hive
8 23 (6.97%) Metadata
8 23 (6.97%) SQL Server
9 22 (6.67%) Power BI
10 21 (6.36%) Amazon RDS
11 19 (5.76%) PostgreSQL
12 16 (4.85%) MongoDB
13 13 (3.94%) Amazon Redshift
14 12 (3.64%) BigQuery
14 12 (3.64%) Impala
15 10 (3.03%) Delta Lake
16 9 (2.73%) MySQL
17 8 (2.42%) HBase
Development Applications
1 39 (11.82%) Git
2 27 (8.18%) Jenkins
3 26 (7.88%) JIRA
4 16 (4.85%) ERwin
5 10 (3.03%) GitLab
6 6 (1.82%) Bitbucket
7 5 (1.52%) ER Studio
8 4 (1.21%) PowerDesigner
8 4 (1.21%) TeamCity
9 3 (0.91%) MLflow
9 3 (0.91%) SonarQube
9 3 (0.91%) Sonatype Nexus
9 3 (0.91%) Visual Studio
10 2 (0.61%) Artifactory
10 2 (0.61%) Gradle
10 2 (0.61%) JUnit
10 2 (0.61%) Maven
11 1 (0.30%) Atlassian Bamboo
11 1 (0.30%) Selenium
11 1 (0.30%) WebDriver
General
1 101 (30.61%) Finance
2 73 (22.12%) Social Skills
3 61 (18.48%) Analytical Skills
4 36 (10.91%) Banking
5 21 (6.36%) Public Sector
6 12 (3.64%) Presentation Skills
6 12 (3.64%) Telecoms
7 10 (3.03%) Financial Institution
8 8 (2.42%) Influencing Skills
8 8 (2.42%) Investment Banking
8 8 (2.42%) Legal
8 8 (2.42%) Organisational Skills
8 8 (2.42%) Retail
9 6 (1.82%) Inclusion and Diversity
9 6 (1.82%) Pharmaceutical
10 5 (1.52%) General Ledger
10 5 (1.52%) Law
10 5 (1.52%) Manufacturing
11 4 (1.21%) Marketing
12 3 (0.91%) Documentation Skills
Job Titles
1 68 (20.61%) Architect
2 60 (18.18%) Data Engineer
3 59 (17.88%) Developer
4 36 (10.91%) Senior
5 34 (10.30%) Data Architect
6 27 (8.18%) Solutions Architect
7 22 (6.67%) Lead
8 20 (6.06%) Java Developer
9 17 (5.15%) Data Scientist
10 15 (4.55%) AWS Engineer
11 14 (4.24%) Analyst
11 14 (4.24%) Azure Engineer
11 14 (4.24%) Big Data Engineer
12 13 (3.94%) Apache Spark Developer
13 12 (3.64%) DevOps Engineer
14 11 (3.33%) Data Modeller
14 11 (3.33%) Java Engineer
14 11 (3.33%) Senior Developer
15 10 (3.03%) Data Analyst
15 10 (3.03%) Senior Data Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 60 (18.18%) Kafka
2 23 (6.97%) PySpark
3 22 (6.67%) TensorFlow
4 20 (6.06%) PyTorch
5 18 (5.45%) Apache NiFi
5 18 (5.45%) scikit-learn
6 16 (4.85%) Pandas
7 15 (4.55%) NumPy
8 13 (3.94%) Matplotlib
9 12 (3.64%) OpenTelemetry
9 12 (3.64%) Seaborn
10 11 (3.33%) RabbitMQ
10 11 (3.33%) Spark Streaming
10 11 (3.33%) Spring
11 9 (2.73%) JSON
11 9 (2.73%) React
12 8 (2.42%) .NET
12 8 (2.42%) HTML
12 8 (2.42%) RESTful
12 8 (2.42%) Web Services
Miscellaneous
1 26 (7.88%) Distributed Computing
2 25 (7.58%) Algorithms
3 16 (4.85%) Market Risk
4 15 (4.55%) Distributed Systems
4 15 (4.55%) Self-Motivation
5 12 (3.64%) Cloud Native
6 10 (3.03%) Data Centre
7 9 (2.73%) Clustering
7 9 (2.73%) Onboarding
7 9 (2.73%) PKI
7 9 (2.73%) Public Cloud
8 8 (2.42%) Analytical Mindset
8 8 (2.42%) Data Fabric
9 7 (2.12%) Credit Risk
9 7 (2.12%) Data Structures
9 7 (2.12%) Legacy Systems
9 7 (2.12%) Private Cloud
10 5 (1.52%) Greenfield Project
10 5 (1.52%) Management Information System
11 4 (1.21%) IoT
Operating Systems
1 45 (13.64%) Linux
2 23 (6.97%) Windows
3 19 (5.76%) Windows Server
4 16 (4.85%) Unix
5 14 (4.24%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 7 (2.12%) Ubuntu
7 4 (1.21%) Windows Server 2003
8 3 (0.91%) CentOS
9 1 (0.30%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 110 (33.33%) Analytics
2 92 (27.88%) Machine Learning
3 79 (23.94%) ETL
4 77 (23.33%) Artificial Intelligence
5 75 (22.73%) Data Pipeline
6 73 (22.12%) Agile
6 73 (22.12%) Data Science
6 73 (22.12%) DevOps
7 72 (21.82%) Data Modelling
8 71 (21.52%) CI/CD
8 71 (21.52%) Data Engineering
9 64 (19.39%) Problem-Solving
10 58 (17.58%) Data Governance
11 46 (13.94%) Data Architecture
12 45 (13.64%) Visualisation
13 39 (11.82%) Computer Science
14 38 (11.52%) Business Intelligence
15 36 (10.91%) Data Analysis
15 36 (10.91%) Stakeholder Management
16 35 (10.61%) Data Integration
Programming Languages
1 161 (48.79%) Python
2 114 (34.55%) SQL
3 75 (22.73%) Java
4 35 (10.61%) Scala
5 34 (10.30%) R
6 22 (6.67%) PowerShell
7 16 (4.85%) JavaScript
8 14 (4.24%) C#
9 13 (3.94%) C++
10 10 (3.03%) Shell Script
11 8 (2.42%) C
12 7 (2.12%) TypeScript
13 4 (1.21%) Perl
14 3 (0.91%) Bash
14 3 (0.91%) T-SQL
15 1 (0.30%) Data Analysis Expressions
15 1 (0.30%) Go
15 1 (0.30%) Groovy
15 1 (0.30%) HiveQL
15 1 (0.30%) VBA
Qualifications
1 59 (17.88%) Degree
2 51 (15.45%) Security Cleared
3 36 (10.91%) SC Cleared
4 26 (7.88%) Master's Degree
5 23 (6.97%) DV Cleared
6 21 (6.36%) Computer Science Degree
7 16 (4.85%) PhD
8 7 (2.12%) AWS Certification
9 4 (1.21%) Azure Certification
10 3 (0.91%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
11 2 (0.61%) BPSS Clearance
11 2 (0.61%) PMI Certification
12 1 (0.30%) ISTQB
12 1 (0.30%) TOGAF Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 56 (16.97%) Data Quality
2 21 (6.36%) GDPR
3 6 (1.82%) Accessibility
4 5 (1.52%) QA
5 3 (0.91%) HIPAA
5 3 (0.91%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 2 (0.61%) Actionable Recommendations
6 2 (0.61%) California Consumer Privacy Act
7 1 (0.30%) ISO 14001
7 1 (0.30%) ISO 20022
7 1 (0.30%) SEPA
System Software
1 25 (7.58%) Docker
2 12 (3.64%) Active Directory
2 12 (3.64%) VMware Infrastructure
3 9 (2.73%) BitLocker
3 9 (2.73%) Hyper-V
3 9 (2.73%) Microsoft App-V
3 9 (2.73%) Terminal Services
3 9 (2.73%) VMware ESXi
4 5 (1.52%) HDFS
5 3 (0.91%) vCloud
5 3 (0.91%) VMware Workstation
5 3 (0.91%) vSphere
6 1 (0.30%) KVM
6 1 (0.30%) Tivoli Workload Scheduler
6 1 (0.30%) Virtual Servers
Systems Management
1 51 (15.45%) Kubernetes
2 44 (13.33%) Terraform
3 30 (9.09%) Ansible
4 17 (5.15%) Grafana
5 10 (3.03%) Argo
6 9 (2.73%) Nagios
6 9 (2.73%) Puppet
6 9 (2.73%) vCenter Server
6 9 (2.73%) vMotion
7 7 (2.12%) Kibana
8 6 (1.82%) Prometheus
9 2 (0.61%) Hadoop YARN
9 2 (0.61%) Kustomize
10 1 (0.30%) HAProxy
10 1 (0.30%) Istio
10 1 (0.30%) Kubeflow
10 1 (0.30%) linkerd
10 1 (0.30%) Single Sign-On
10 1 (0.30%) Tivoli
10 1 (0.30%) Zipkin
Vendors
1 52 (15.76%) Microsoft
2 50 (15.15%) Databricks
3 39 (11.82%) Google
4 25 (7.58%) Oracle
5 23 (6.97%) Cloudera
6 13 (3.94%) VMware
7 11 (3.33%) Informatica
8 9 (2.73%) Citrix
8 9 (2.73%) HP
8 9 (2.73%) Symantec
9 8 (2.42%) SAP
10 7 (2.12%) Foundry
10 7 (2.12%) Palantir
10 7 (2.12%) Splunk
11 6 (1.82%) OpenAI
12 5 (1.52%) Salesforce
12 5 (1.52%) Sparx
13 4 (1.21%) Atlassian
13 4 (1.21%) Sybase
13 4 (1.21%) Talend