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 12 May 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
12 May 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 363 239 250
Rank change year-on-year -124 +11 -21
Contract jobs citing Big Data 284 329 406
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.60% 1.13% 0.94%
As % of the Database & Business Intelligence category 3.94% 5.95% 5.57%
Number of daily rates quoted 191 226 301
10th Percentile £355 £407 £388
25th Percentile £414 £463 £468
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £570 £600
Median % change year-on-year -3.51% -5.00% +2.13%
75th Percentile £648 £675 £744
90th Percentile £781 £750 £838
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £550 £550
% change year-on-year -9.09% - -
Number of hourly rates quoted 17 3 12
10th Percentile £58.60 £52.25 £18.20
25th Percentile £64.00 £53.75 £23.30
Median hourly rate £70.00 £57.50 £35.25
Median % change year-on-year +21.74% +63.12% -54.81%
75th Percentile £75.00 £79.38 £44.69
90th Percentile £90.00 £91.75 £52.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £70.00 - £19.38
% change year-on-year - - -75.16%

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 7,210 5,533 7,285
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 15.18% 18.95% 16.94%
Number of daily rates quoted 4,864 3,812 5,210
10th Percentile £350 £358 £350
25th Percentile £413 £420 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -2.78%
75th Percentile £600 £638 £650
90th Percentile £700 £763 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £481 £475
% change year-on-year -1.14% +1.16% -5.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 210 98 145
10th Percentile £16.70 £20.47 £14.00
25th Percentile £26.50 £23.69 £20.98
Median hourly rate £47.54 £33.81 £40.00
Median % change year-on-year +40.63% -15.49% -33.33%
75th Percentile £73.94 £65.62 £61.60
90th Percentile £82.25 £76.63 £74.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £47.54 £31.64 £40.00
% change year-on-year +50.25% -20.90% -29.76%

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 12 May 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 12 May 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 12 May 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 -176 215 £550 -4.35% 105
London -75 141 £572 -0.54% 57
UK excluding London -131 91 £500 -9.09% 55
Work from Home -54 90 £488 -7.14% 46
Scotland +19 23 £389 -10.84% 1
North of England -68 23 £550 -7.17% 19
South East -75 23 £513 -6.82% 10
Midlands -66 11 £500 - 9
North East -12 9 £518 +11.89% 8
East Midlands -37 8 £495 +26.11% 3
North West -43 7 £358 -40.33% 9
Yorkshire -55 7 £588 +6.82% 2
Wales -7 5 £388 +131.94%
South West -34 4 £550 -14.56% 12
East of England -41 3 £540 -16.92% 4
West Midlands -71 3 £640 +24.90% 6

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
1 151 (53.17%) Apache Spark
2 43 (15.14%) Apache Airflow
3 42 (14.79%) Apache
4 13 (4.58%) Confluence
5 5 (1.76%) SAS
6 4 (1.41%) Palantir Foundry
6 4 (1.41%) SharePoint
7 3 (1.06%) Microsoft Exchange
8 1 (0.35%) Apache Pig
8 1 (0.35%) Camunda
8 1 (0.35%) Jupyter
Applications
1 4 (1.41%) Microsoft Project
Cloud Services
1 138 (48.59%) AWS
2 117 (41.20%) Azure
3 80 (28.17%) GCP
4 34 (11.97%) Snowflake
5 31 (10.92%) Power Platform
5 31 (10.92%) Serverless
6 30 (10.56%) GitHub
7 29 (10.21%) Amazon S3
8 27 (9.51%) AWS Lambda
9 19 (6.69%) Amazon EMR
10 18 (6.34%) Azure DevOps
10 18 (6.34%) GitHub Actions
11 13 (4.58%) Azure Data Factory
11 13 (4.58%) dbt
12 11 (3.87%) OpenShift
13 9 (3.17%) Amazon ECS
14 7 (2.46%) Amazon EKS
14 7 (2.46%) Azure Cosmos DB
15 6 (2.11%) Amazon CloudWatch
15 6 (2.11%) AWS CloudFormation
Communications & Networking
1 5 (1.76%) IPv4
1 5 (1.76%) IPv6
2 2 (0.70%) Kerberos
2 2 (0.70%) VPN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 85 (29.93%) Hadoop
2 67 (23.59%) Data Warehouse
3 46 (16.20%) NoSQL
4 33 (11.62%) Data Lake
4 33 (11.62%) PostgreSQL
5 26 (9.15%) Power BI
6 22 (7.75%) Metadata
6 22 (7.75%) Relational Database
7 19 (6.69%) SQL Server
8 18 (6.34%) Amazon Redshift
8 18 (6.34%) MongoDB
9 14 (4.93%) Apache Hive
10 13 (4.58%) BigQuery
10 13 (4.58%) DynamoDB
11 12 (4.23%) Tableau
12 11 (3.87%) MySQL
13 9 (3.17%) Amazon Aurora
14 8 (2.82%) Amazon Athena
14 8 (2.82%) Data Vault
14 8 (2.82%) Delta Lake
Development Applications
1 37 (13.03%) Git
2 28 (9.86%) Jenkins
3 25 (8.80%) GitLab
4 22 (7.75%) JIRA
5 8 (2.82%) Selenium
6 7 (2.46%) Robot Framework
7 4 (1.41%) Postman
7 4 (1.41%) PowerDesigner
8 3 (1.06%) SonarQube
9 2 (0.70%) ERwin
9 2 (0.70%) MLflow
9 2 (0.70%) Team Foundation Server
10 1 (0.35%) NUnit
10 1 (0.35%) Poetry
10 1 (0.35%) SpecFlow
10 1 (0.35%) Visual Studio
10 1 (0.35%) Visual Studio Coded UI
General
1 101 (35.56%) Social Skills
2 78 (27.46%) Finance
3 63 (22.18%) Analytical Skills
4 32 (11.27%) Banking
5 25 (8.80%) Public Sector
6 15 (5.28%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 11 (3.87%) Documentation Skills
8 9 (3.17%) Investment Banking
9 8 (2.82%) Telecoms
10 5 (1.76%) Legal
10 5 (1.76%) Marketing
11 3 (1.06%) Retail
12 2 (0.70%) Aerospace
12 2 (0.70%) Influencing Skills
12 2 (0.70%) Local Government
12 2 (0.70%) Organisational Skills
12 2 (0.70%) Presentation Skills
13 1 (0.35%) Agriculture
13 1 (0.35%) Dutch Language
13 1 (0.35%) French Language
Job Titles
1 93 (32.75%) Data Engineer
2 39 (13.73%) Architect
3 36 (12.68%) Senior
4 32 (11.27%) Lead
5 28 (9.86%) Developer
6 24 (8.45%) Data Scientist
7 20 (7.04%) Analyst
8 18 (6.34%) Data Architect
9 15 (5.28%) Senior Data Engineer
10 12 (4.23%) Data Analyst
10 12 (4.23%) Solutions Architect
11 9 (3.17%) Java Engineer
11 9 (3.17%) Senior Data Scientist
12 8 (2.82%) Business Analyst
12 8 (2.82%) Java Developer
12 8 (2.82%) Lead Data Scientist
12 8 (2.82%) Scala Engineer
13 7 (2.46%) AWS Engineer
13 7 (2.46%) Azure Engineer
13 7 (2.46%) Kafka Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 62 (21.83%) Kafka
2 34 (11.97%) PySpark
3 19 (6.69%) Spring
4 17 (5.99%) Spring Boot
5 13 (4.58%) HTML
5 13 (4.58%) Pandas
5 13 (4.58%) TensorFlow
6 12 (4.23%) REST
7 11 (3.87%) CSS
7 11 (3.87%) PyTorch
8 10 (3.52%) scikit-learn
9 8 (2.82%) NumPy
9 8 (2.82%) Play Framework
10 7 (2.46%) React
10 7 (2.46%) RESTful
11 6 (2.11%) Apache NiFi
11 6 (2.11%) Node.js
12 5 (1.76%) Keras
12 5 (1.76%) pytest
12 5 (1.76%) Spark Streaming
Miscellaneous
1 27 (9.51%) Cloud Native
2 17 (5.99%) Product Ownership
3 16 (5.63%) Algorithms
4 13 (4.58%) Distributed Systems
5 11 (3.87%) Data Structures
6 9 (3.17%) Distributed Computing
6 9 (3.17%) Virtual Team
7 8 (2.82%) Onboarding
8 6 (2.11%) Data Protection Act
9 5 (1.76%) FMCG
9 5 (1.76%) Management Information System
9 5 (1.76%) Reference Data
10 4 (1.41%) Cyber Threat
10 4 (1.41%) Data Centre
10 4 (1.41%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
11 3 (1.06%) AI Agents
11 3 (1.06%) Clustering
11 3 (1.06%) Educational Technology
11 3 (1.06%) Hybrid Cloud
12 2 (0.70%) Distributed Architecture
Operating Systems
1 20 (7.04%) Linux
2 17 (5.99%) Unix
3 2 (0.70%) Windows
3 2 (0.70%) Windows Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 126 (44.37%) Analytics
2 121 (42.61%) Data Pipeline
3 119 (41.90%) CI/CD
4 105 (36.97%) Agile
4 105 (36.97%) ETL
5 104 (36.62%) Data Engineering
6 81 (28.52%) Problem-Solving
7 79 (27.82%) Data Governance
8 76 (26.76%) Machine Learning
9 75 (26.41%) DevOps
10 74 (26.06%) Data Modelling
11 72 (25.35%) Data Science
12 65 (22.89%) AI
13 45 (15.85%) Visualisation
14 43 (15.14%) Scrum
15 41 (14.44%) Business Intelligence
16 39 (13.73%) Data Integration
16 39 (13.73%) Decision-Making
16 39 (13.73%) Technical Leadership
17 38 (13.38%) Data Architecture
Programming Languages
1 164 (57.75%) Python
2 146 (51.41%) SQL
3 62 (21.83%) Java
4 34 (11.97%) R
4 34 (11.97%) Scala
5 16 (5.63%) JavaScript
6 10 (3.52%) Bash
7 6 (2.11%) C#
8 5 (1.76%) SAS Macro
8 5 (1.76%) TypeScript
9 4 (1.41%) PowerShell
9 4 (1.41%) Shell Script
10 3 (1.06%) C++
10 3 (1.06%) Rust
11 2 (0.70%) Ada
12 1 (0.35%) Perl
12 1 (0.35%) PL/SQL
12 1 (0.35%) T-SQL
Qualifications
1 75 (26.41%) Security Cleared
2 61 (21.48%) SC Cleared
3 49 (17.25%) Degree
4 25 (8.80%) Master's Degree
5 23 (8.10%) Computer Science Degree
6 10 (3.52%) BPSS Clearance
7 8 (2.82%) DV Cleared
8 7 (2.46%) Azure Certification
9 4 (1.41%) AWS Certification
10 3 (1.06%) IBM Certification
10 3 (1.06%) Microsoft Certification
10 3 (1.06%) PhD
10 3 (1.06%) SnowPro
11 2 (0.70%) (ISC)2 CCSP
11 2 (0.70%) Cisco Certification
11 2 (0.70%) CISSP
11 2 (0.70%) MCITP
11 2 (0.70%) MCTS
11 2 (0.70%) Numerate Degree
11 2 (0.70%) TOGAF Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 66 (23.24%) Data Quality
2 19 (6.69%) GDPR
3 17 (5.99%) QA
4 7 (2.46%) ISO/IEC 27001
4 7 (2.46%) NIST
5 6 (2.11%) Actionable Recommendations
6 3 (1.06%) PCI DSS
6 3 (1.06%) Sarbanes-Oxley
7 2 (0.70%) Accessibility
8 1 (0.35%) HIPAA
8 1 (0.35%) ISO 13485
System Software
1 49 (17.25%) Docker
2 10 (3.52%) HDFS
3 3 (1.06%) Active Directory
3 3 (1.06%) Virtual Machines
4 1 (0.35%) Apache Flume
Systems Management
1 55 (19.37%) Kubernetes
2 39 (13.73%) Terraform
3 34 (11.97%) Grafana
4 17 (5.99%) Prometheus
5 8 (2.82%) Kibana
6 5 (1.76%) Ansible
7 2 (0.70%) Argo
7 2 (0.70%) HP ALM
7 2 (0.70%) Nagios
7 2 (0.70%) Rancher
8 1 (0.35%) Control-M
8 1 (0.35%) Kubeflow
8 1 (0.35%) Tivoli
Vendors
1 59 (20.77%) Databricks
2 22 (7.75%) Microsoft
3 17 (5.99%) Google
4 12 (4.23%) Splunk
5 9 (3.17%) IBM
5 9 (3.17%) Informatica
6 8 (2.82%) Talend
7 6 (2.11%) Ab Initio
7 6 (2.11%) Foundry
7 6 (2.11%) Oracle
7 6 (2.11%) Salesforce
8 5 (1.76%) Cloudera
8 5 (1.76%) OpenAI
8 5 (1.76%) Teradata
9 4 (1.41%) Palantir
10 3 (1.06%) Guidewire
10 3 (1.06%) Tenable
11 2 (0.70%) HP
11 2 (0.70%) Salesforce Marketing Cloud
12 1 (0.35%) ServiceNow