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 20 November 2025, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
20 Nov 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 355 210 235
Rank change year-on-year -145 +25 -68
Contract jobs citing Big Data 256 426 481
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.72% 1.17% 1.05%
As % of the Database & Business Intelligence category 4.03% 6.66% 6.27%
Number of daily rates quoted 197 266 306
10th Percentile £370 £336 £400
25th Percentile £413 £432 £488
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -4.55% - -8.33%
75th Percentile £613 £700 £700
90th Percentile £736 £800 £825
UK excluding London median daily rate £450 £612 £500
% change year-on-year -26.47% +22.40% -16.67%
Number of hourly rates quoted 0 4 27
10th Percentile - £25.75 £42.82
25th Percentile - £32.50 £46.18
Median hourly rate - £45.00 £72.00
Median % change year-on-year - -37.50% +83.14%
75th Percentile - £53.75 £78.00
90th Percentile - - £87.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate - - £75.00

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 6,347 6,396 7,672
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 17.73% 17.53% 16.68%
Number of daily rates quoted 4,333 4,238 5,367
10th Percentile £333 £338 £350
25th Percentile £411 £425 £435
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £530 £533
Median % change year-on-year -5.66% -0.56% -3.09%
75th Percentile £613 £650 £650
90th Percentile £720 £775 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £490 £500
% change year-on-year -3.06% -2.00% -0.50%
Number of hourly rates quoted 91 85 149
10th Percentile £21.02 £17.70 £16.93
25th Percentile £29.00 £21.25 £22.50
Median hourly rate £43.50 £30.00 £47.50
Median % change year-on-year +45.00% -36.84% +5.56%
75th Percentile £65.00 £48.18 £70.00
90th Percentile £83.25 £64.89 £78.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £49.10 £27.50 £46.18
% change year-on-year +78.55% -40.45% +13.38%

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 20 November 2025.

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
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 20 November 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 -127 224 £525 -7.08% 229
London -96 139 £550 - 138
UK excluding London -82 88 £450 -26.47% 106
Work from Home -33 79 £500 -4.76% 114
South East -13 21 £475 -12.04% 46
Midlands -29 18 £420 -31.37% 13
Scotland +1 16 £500 +29.20% 4
North of England -54 15 £500 - 16
East Midlands -11 13 £420 -1.18% 5
South West -28 13 £525 -21.35% 6
North West -12 12 £500 +22.25% 12
East of England -22 5 £505 -19.20% 16
West Midlands -42 5 £402 -34.31% 7
North East -14 2 - - 2
Northern Ireland -7 1 £513 -6.82% 2
Yorkshire -52 1 - - 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
1 106 (41.41%) Apache Spark
2 46 (17.97%) Apache
3 29 (11.33%) Apache Airflow
4 14 (5.47%) Confluence
5 3 (1.17%) Jupyter
6 2 (0.78%) Apache Pig
6 2 (0.78%) Luigi
6 2 (0.78%) SAS
7 1 (0.39%) Apache Superset
7 1 (0.39%) IIS
7 1 (0.39%) nginx
Applications
1 2 (0.78%) MS Visio
2 1 (0.39%) Microsoft Excel
2 1 (0.39%) Microsoft Office
2 1 (0.39%) Microsoft PowerPoint
Business Applications
1 3 (1.17%) Avolution ABACUS
1 3 (1.17%) Salesforce CRM
2 2 (0.78%) Distributed Ledger
Cloud Services
1 104 (40.63%) AWS
2 83 (32.42%) Azure
3 58 (22.66%) GCP
4 35 (13.67%) Power Platform
5 32 (12.50%) Serverless
6 27 (10.55%) Snowflake
7 21 (8.20%) Amazon S3
8 20 (7.81%) GitHub
9 13 (5.08%) Azure Data Factory
10 11 (4.30%) Amazon SageMaker
10 11 (4.30%) GitHub Actions
11 10 (3.91%) AWS Lambda
11 10 (3.91%) Azure Synapse Analytics
12 9 (3.52%) Azure DevOps
13 8 (3.13%) AWS Step Functions
14 7 (2.73%) Amazon ECS
14 7 (2.73%) OpenShift
15 5 (1.95%) Google Kubernetes Engine
15 5 (1.95%) Microsoft Copilot
16 4 (1.56%) Amazon Bedrock
Communications & Networking
1 4 (1.56%) DNS
1 4 (1.56%) TCP/IP
2 3 (1.17%) SSH
3 2 (0.78%) Kerberos
3 2 (0.78%) SSL
3 2 (0.78%) VPN
4 1 (0.39%) HTTP
4 1 (0.39%) Internet
Database & Business Intelligence
1 96 (37.50%) Hadoop
2 51 (19.92%) Data Warehouse
3 35 (13.67%) NoSQL
3 35 (13.67%) Power BI
4 34 (13.28%) Data Lake
5 26 (10.16%) Elasticsearch
6 24 (9.38%) Relational Database
6 24 (9.38%) SQL Server
6 24 (9.38%) Tableau
7 23 (8.98%) Apache Hive
7 23 (8.98%) Metadata
8 22 (8.59%) PostgreSQL
9 17 (6.64%) BigQuery
10 13 (5.08%) HBase
11 12 (4.69%) RDBMS
12 11 (4.30%) Impala
13 9 (3.52%) Amazon Athena
14 8 (3.13%) MongoDB
15 7 (2.73%) Data Vault
15 7 (2.73%) MySQL
Development Applications
1 38 (14.84%) Git
2 22 (8.59%) JIRA
3 20 (7.81%) Jenkins
4 17 (6.64%) GitLab
5 10 (3.91%) MLflow
6 7 (2.73%) ERwin
7 5 (1.95%) Artifactory
7 5 (1.95%) ER Studio
8 4 (1.56%) Gradle
8 4 (1.56%) SonarQube
9 3 (1.17%) Maven
9 3 (1.17%) Sonatype Nexus
10 2 (0.78%) Cypress.io
10 2 (0.78%) Poetry
10 2 (0.78%) PyCharm
10 2 (0.78%) Subversion
10 2 (0.78%) Visual Studio Code
11 1 (0.39%) Cucumber
11 1 (0.39%) JMeter
11 1 (0.39%) Pylint
General
1 71 (27.73%) Finance
2 70 (27.34%) Social Skills
3 45 (17.58%) Analytical Skills
4 29 (11.33%) Banking
5 13 (5.08%) Public Sector
6 10 (3.91%) Telecoms
7 8 (3.13%) Financial Institution
8 6 (2.34%) Investment Banking
9 5 (1.95%) Retail
10 4 (1.56%) Influencing Skills
10 4 (1.56%) Manufacturing
11 3 (1.17%) General Ledger
12 2 (0.78%) Inclusion and Diversity
12 2 (0.78%) Marketing
12 2 (0.78%) Presentation Skills
13 1 (0.39%) Advertising
13 1 (0.39%) Agriculture
13 1 (0.39%) Corporate Banking
13 1 (0.39%) Organisational Skills
13 1 (0.39%) Retail Banking
Job Titles
1 74 (28.91%) Data Engineer
2 37 (14.45%) Senior
3 31 (12.11%) Architect
4 27 (10.55%) Developer
5 22 (8.59%) Data Scientist
6 18 (7.03%) Lead
7 17 (6.64%) Data Architect
8 14 (5.47%) Software Engineer
9 13 (5.08%) Analyst
9 13 (5.08%) Python Engineer
10 10 (3.91%) Solutions Architect
11 9 (3.52%) Data Analyst
11 9 (3.52%) Python Data Engineer
11 9 (3.52%) Senior Data Engineer
12 8 (3.13%) Azure Engineer
12 8 (3.13%) Big Data Engineer
12 8 (3.13%) Java Engineer
12 8 (3.13%) Scala Developer
12 8 (3.13%) Senior Software Engineer
13 7 (2.73%) Data Modeller
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 61 (23.83%) Kafka
2 30 (11.72%) PySpark
3 27 (10.55%) Apache NiFi
4 22 (8.59%) Pandas
5 20 (7.81%) scikit-learn
6 15 (5.86%) PyTorch
6 15 (5.86%) TensorFlow
7 14 (5.47%) Flask
7 14 (5.47%) NumPy
8 13 (5.08%) .NET
8 13 (5.08%) RESTful
9 12 (4.69%) Elastic Stack
9 12 (4.69%) JSON
10 11 (4.30%) HTML
10 11 (4.30%) OpenTelemetry
10 11 (4.30%) RabbitMQ
10 11 (4.30%) REST
11 10 (3.91%) React
12 9 (3.52%) Hugging Face
12 9 (3.52%) XML
Miscellaneous
1 18 (7.03%) Distributed Computing
2 17 (6.64%) Algorithms
3 16 (6.25%) Cloud Native
4 7 (2.73%) Data Structures
4 7 (2.73%) Distributed Systems
5 5 (1.95%) Analytical Mindset
5 5 (1.95%) Data Protection Act
6 4 (1.56%) AI Agents
6 4 (1.56%) Credit Risk
6 4 (1.56%) Derivative
6 4 (1.56%) Hybrid Cloud
6 4 (1.56%) Management Information System
6 4 (1.56%) Private Cloud
7 3 (1.17%) Data Centre
7 3 (1.17%) Legacy Systems
7 3 (1.17%) Onboarding
7 3 (1.17%) Self-Motivation
7 3 (1.17%) Virtual Team
8 2 (0.78%) Data Fabric
8 2 (0.78%) Hedge funds
Operating Systems
1 29 (11.33%) Linux
2 11 (4.30%) Unix
3 6 (2.34%) Windows
4 3 (1.17%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 81 (31.64%) Data Modelling
2 80 (31.25%) Agile
3 76 (29.69%) ETL
4 74 (28.91%) Analytics
5 73 (28.52%) Data Pipeline
6 67 (26.17%) Machine Learning
7 64 (25.00%) Data Engineering
8 61 (23.83%) CI/CD
9 57 (22.27%) Data Governance
9 57 (22.27%) Data Science
10 54 (21.09%) Problem-Solving
11 48 (18.75%) AI
12 45 (17.58%) Visualisation
13 42 (16.41%) Business Intelligence
13 42 (16.41%) Software Engineering
14 38 (14.84%) Containerisation
14 38 (14.84%) DevOps
14 38 (14.84%) Microservices
15 35 (13.67%) Decision-Making
16 33 (12.89%) Data Integration
Programming Languages
1 174 (67.97%) Python
2 123 (48.05%) SQL
3 45 (17.58%) Java
4 28 (10.94%) Scala
5 18 (7.03%) C++
5 18 (7.03%) R
6 14 (5.47%) C#
7 12 (4.69%) JavaScript
8 11 (4.30%) Bash
9 5 (1.95%) C
9 5 (1.95%) Shell Script
10 3 (1.17%) Groovy
10 3 (1.17%) Perl
10 3 (1.17%) PowerShell
11 2 (0.78%) Kusto Query Language
11 2 (0.78%) PL/SQL
12 1 (0.39%) CodeQL
12 1 (0.39%) Go
12 1 (0.39%) Korn
12 1 (0.39%) T-SQL
Qualifications
1 45 (17.58%) Security Cleared
2 36 (14.06%) SC Cleared
3 33 (12.89%) Degree
4 24 (9.38%) DV Cleared
5 20 (7.81%) Master's Degree
6 18 (7.03%) Computer Science Degree
7 7 (2.73%) Azure Certification
8 6 (2.34%) AWS Certification
9 5 (1.95%) PhD
10 3 (1.17%) ITIL Certification
11 2 (0.78%) BPSS Clearance
11 2 (0.78%) CISSP
12 1 (0.39%) Microsoft Certification
12 1 (0.39%) OCP
12 1 (0.39%) Oracle Certification
12 1 (0.39%) Postgraduate
12 1 (0.39%) Tableau Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 54 (21.09%) Data Quality
2 15 (5.86%) GDPR
3 11 (4.30%) QA
4 4 (1.56%) Accessibility
4 4 (1.56%) California Consumer Privacy Act
5 1 (0.39%) IFRS
5 1 (0.39%) IFRS 17
5 1 (0.39%) PCI DSS
5 1 (0.39%) Solvency II
System Software
1 34 (13.28%) Docker
2 12 (4.69%) HDFS
3 2 (0.78%) Slurm Workload Manager
4 1 (0.39%) Virtual Machines
Systems Management
1 42 (16.41%) Kubernetes
2 20 (7.81%) Terraform
3 15 (5.86%) Grafana
4 9 (3.52%) Ansible
4 9 (3.52%) Argo
4 9 (3.52%) Prometheus
5 7 (2.73%) Kibana
6 6 (2.34%) logstash
7 4 (1.56%) Hadoop YARN
7 4 (1.56%) Kustomize
8 3 (1.17%) Istio
8 3 (1.17%) Oozie
9 2 (0.78%) Progress Chef
10 1 (0.39%) Kubeflow
10 1 (0.39%) Nagios
10 1 (0.39%) Puppet
10 1 (0.39%) Rancher
10 1 (0.39%) Single Sign-On
Vendors
1 42 (16.41%) Databricks
2 26 (10.16%) Google
3 21 (8.20%) Cloudera
4 20 (7.81%) Microsoft
5 15 (5.86%) Foundry
5 15 (5.86%) Palantir
6 9 (3.52%) Oracle
7 7 (2.73%) ServiceNow
8 4 (1.56%) Informatica
8 4 (1.56%) Sage
9 3 (1.17%) Ab Initio
9 3 (1.17%) Salesforce
10 2 (0.78%) Bloomberg
10 2 (0.78%) OpenAI
10 2 (0.78%) Red Hat
10 2 (0.78%) Refinitiv
10 2 (0.78%) Splunk
10 2 (0.78%) Talend
10 2 (0.78%) Vertica
11 1 (0.39%) SnapLogic