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 7 August 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
7 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 408 272 210
Rank change year-on-year -136 -62 +33
Contract jobs citing Big Data 270 317 456
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.51% 0.96% 1.17%
As % of the Database & Business Intelligence category 3.30% 5.28% 6.46%
Number of daily rates quoted 179 221 321
10th Percentile £358 £405 £363
25th Percentile £440 £456 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £550 £600
Median % change year-on-year - -8.33% -
75th Percentile £663 £650 £750
90th Percentile £739 £738 £850
UK excluding London median daily rate £505 £500 £556
% change year-on-year +1.00% -10.11% +1.14%
Number of hourly rates quoted 14 3 5
10th Percentile £61.45 £42.42 £27.25
25th Percentile £65.00 £47.61 £36.25
Median hourly rate £70.00 £57.50 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year +21.74% +35.29% -45.51%
75th Percentile £75.00 £79.38 £48.75
90th Percentile £90.00 £91.75 £51.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £70.00 £38.96 -
% change year-on-year +79.67% - -

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 8,174 6,000 7,058
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 15.30% 18.26% 18.09%
Number of daily rates quoted 5,438 4,054 4,984
10th Percentile £356 £341 £350
25th Percentile £417 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £510 £525
Median % change year-on-year -1.96% -2.86% -3.67%
75th Percentile £600 £625 £655
90th Percentile £700 £750 £800
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £475 £475
% change year-on-year - - -5.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 255 92 101
10th Percentile £16.00 £19.71 £15.00
25th Percentile £24.00 £24.25 £20.00
Median hourly rate £39.50 £35.00 £35.00
Median % change year-on-year +12.86% - -36.36%
75th Percentile £60.75 £62.44 £57.50
90th Percentile £76.30 £78.58 £71.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £38.25 £31.64 £30.00
% change year-on-year +20.89% +5.47% -41.46%

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 7 August 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 7 August 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 7 August 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 -146 226 £550 - 196
London -102 141 £600 +2.39% 155
UK excluding London -122 92 £505 +1.00% 59
Work from Home -66 86 £500 -3.85% 57
North of England -59 32 £538 +4.88% 9
South East -84 20 £513 -6.82% 17
Yorkshire -30 16 £550 -8.33% 4
Scotland -4 14 £402 -11.60% 9
Midlands -68 14 £410 -3.65% 10
East Midlands -19 9 £495 +20.73%
South West -33 9 £515 +7.01% 7
North East -37 8 £468 +1.08% 1
North West -40 8 £600 +20.00% 4
West Midlands -68 5 £405 -20.90% 10
East of England -34 2 £540 +7.46% 9
Wales - 2 £475 -

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
1 136 (50.37%) Apache Spark
2 38 (14.07%) Apache
3 36 (13.33%) Apache Airflow
4 7 (2.59%) Confluence
5 6 (2.22%) SAS
6 5 (1.85%) Jupyter
6 5 (1.85%) Palantir Foundry
6 5 (1.85%) SharePoint
7 4 (1.48%) Microsoft Exchange
8 3 (1.11%) CMS
8 3 (1.11%) JBoss
9 2 (0.74%) Apache Pig
10 1 (0.37%) Apache Superset
10 1 (0.37%) Luigi
Applications
1 1 (0.37%) Microsoft Project
Business Applications
1 2 (0.74%) Endur
2 1 (0.37%) Oracle ERP
2 1 (0.37%) SAP ERP
Cloud Services
1 132 (48.89%) AWS
2 104 (38.52%) Azure
3 82 (30.37%) GCP
4 43 (15.93%) Snowflake
5 32 (11.85%) Amazon S3
5 32 (11.85%) Power Platform
6 23 (8.52%) GitHub
7 21 (7.78%) Amazon EMR
7 21 (7.78%) Azure DevOps
8 19 (7.04%) AWS Lambda
9 17 (6.30%) Serverless
10 14 (5.19%) Amazon ECS
11 13 (4.81%) dbt
12 11 (4.07%) GitHub Actions
12 11 (4.07%) OpenShift
13 10 (3.70%) Amazon EKS
13 10 (3.70%) PaaS
14 9 (3.33%) Azure Data Factory
15 7 (2.59%) Salesforce Service Cloud
16 6 (2.22%) Amazon EventBridge
Communications & Networking
1 5 (1.85%) IPv4
1 5 (1.85%) IPv6
2 3 (1.11%) Broadband
2 3 (1.11%) DHCP
2 3 (1.11%) DNS
2 3 (1.11%) Firewall
2 3 (1.11%) Kerberos
2 3 (1.11%) SMTP
2 3 (1.11%) VPN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 61 (22.59%) Hadoop
2 48 (17.78%) Data Warehouse
3 40 (14.81%) Data Lake
4 39 (14.44%) NoSQL
5 30 (11.11%) Power BI
6 29 (10.74%) PostgreSQL
7 19 (7.04%) Amazon Redshift
8 18 (6.67%) Apache Hive
9 17 (6.30%) BigQuery
10 16 (5.93%) Relational Database
11 15 (5.56%) MongoDB
12 13 (4.81%) Amazon Athena
12 13 (4.81%) Amazon RDS
12 13 (4.81%) Metadata
12 13 (4.81%) SQL Server
13 12 (4.44%) DynamoDB
14 11 (4.07%) Tableau
15 9 (3.33%) Amazon Aurora
15 9 (3.33%) Data Vault
15 9 (3.33%) Elasticsearch
Development Applications
1 37 (13.70%) Git
2 28 (10.37%) Jenkins
3 27 (10.00%) GitLab
4 15 (5.56%) JIRA
5 8 (2.96%) Selenium
6 6 (2.22%) PowerDesigner
7 4 (1.48%) Robot Framework
8 3 (1.11%) JUnit
8 3 (1.11%) SonarQube
9 2 (0.74%) ERwin
9 2 (0.74%) MLflow
10 1 (0.37%) Claude Code
10 1 (0.37%) Postman
10 1 (0.37%) TeamCity
General
1 94 (34.81%) Social Skills
2 69 (25.56%) Analytical Skills
3 66 (24.44%) Finance
4 33 (12.22%) Banking
5 20 (7.41%) Public Sector
6 10 (3.70%) Documentation Skills
6 10 (3.70%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 9 (3.33%) Investment Banking
8 8 (2.96%) Marketing
8 8 (2.96%) Telecoms
9 7 (2.59%) Legal
10 4 (1.48%) Retail
11 3 (1.11%) Aerospace
11 3 (1.11%) Organisational Skills
12 2 (0.74%) Influencing Skills
12 2 (0.74%) Local Government
13 1 (0.37%) Corporate Banking
13 1 (0.37%) Dutch Language
13 1 (0.37%) French Language
13 1 (0.37%) Retail Banking
Job Titles
1 83 (30.74%) Data Engineer
2 48 (17.78%) Architect
3 43 (15.93%) Senior
4 29 (10.74%) Developer
5 19 (7.04%) Lead
6 17 (6.30%) Data Architect
6 17 (6.30%) Solutions Architect
7 15 (5.56%) Analyst
7 15 (5.56%) Senior Data Engineer
8 12 (4.44%) Big Data Engineer
8 12 (4.44%) Data Scientist
9 10 (3.70%) Java Developer
10 9 (3.33%) Data Analyst
11 8 (2.96%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
11 8 (2.96%) DevOps Engineer
11 8 (2.96%) Kafka Engineer
11 8 (2.96%) Python Engineer
11 8 (2.96%) Scala Engineer
12 7 (2.59%) Data Integration Engineer
12 7 (2.59%) Snowflake Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 62 (22.96%) Kafka
2 32 (11.85%) PySpark
3 19 (7.04%) REST
4 16 (5.93%) Spring
5 15 (5.56%) Spring Boot
6 11 (4.07%) Pandas
7 9 (3.33%) CSS
7 9 (3.33%) HTML
8 8 (2.96%) Apache NiFi
8 8 (2.96%) Play Framework
8 8 (2.96%) PyTorch
8 8 (2.96%) TensorFlow
9 7 (2.59%) NumPy
10 6 (2.22%) Elastic Stack
10 6 (2.22%) Middleware
10 6 (2.22%) React
11 5 (1.85%) Langfuse
11 5 (1.85%) Microsoft Graph
11 5 (1.85%) RESTful
11 5 (1.85%) Spark Streaming
Miscellaneous
1 38 (14.07%) Cloud Native
2 29 (10.74%) Distributed Systems
3 16 (5.93%) Product Ownership
4 15 (5.56%) Data Structures
5 12 (4.44%) Clustering
5 12 (4.44%) Virtual Team
6 11 (4.07%) Algorithms
7 9 (3.33%) Onboarding
8 8 (2.96%) Distributed Computing
9 7 (2.59%) Data Centre
10 6 (2.22%) Cyber Threat
11 5 (1.85%) Data Protection Act
11 5 (1.85%) Distributed Architecture
12 4 (1.48%) AI Agents
12 4 (1.48%) FMCG
13 3 (1.11%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
13 3 (1.11%) Linux Command Line
13 3 (1.11%) PKI
13 3 (1.11%) Social Media
14 2 (0.74%) Management Information System
Operating Systems
1 22 (8.15%) Linux
2 10 (3.70%) Unix
3 5 (1.85%) Windows
3 5 (1.85%) Windows Server
4 3 (1.11%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 1 (0.37%) Windows Server 2003
Processes & Methodologies
1 131 (48.52%) Data Pipeline
2 120 (44.44%) Analytics
3 103 (38.15%) CI/CD
4 102 (37.78%) Data Engineering
5 99 (36.67%) Agile
6 89 (32.96%) ETL
7 78 (28.89%) AI
8 70 (25.93%) Machine Learning
9 68 (25.19%) DevOps
10 64 (23.70%) Data Modelling
11 62 (22.96%) Problem-Solving
12 57 (21.11%) Data Governance
13 51 (18.89%) Data Science
14 44 (16.30%) Containerisation
15 43 (15.93%) Scrum
16 40 (14.81%) Business Intelligence
17 39 (14.44%) Validation
18 37 (13.70%) Software Engineering
19 36 (13.33%) Decision-Making
20 35 (12.96%) Stakeholder Management
Programming Languages
1 151 (55.93%) Python
2 127 (47.04%) SQL
3 62 (22.96%) Java
4 33 (12.22%) Scala
5 19 (7.04%) R
6 18 (6.67%) PowerShell
7 12 (4.44%) JavaScript
8 11 (4.07%) Bash
9 7 (2.59%) C#
10 5 (1.85%) SAS Macro
11 3 (1.11%) Rust
11 3 (1.11%) Shell Script
12 2 (0.74%) Go
12 2 (0.74%) Korn
12 2 (0.74%) Kusto Query Language
12 2 (0.74%) TypeScript
13 1 (0.37%) C
13 1 (0.37%) C++
13 1 (0.37%) Data Analysis Expressions
13 1 (0.37%) MATLAB
Qualifications
1 55 (20.37%) Security Cleared
2 40 (14.81%) SC Cleared
3 30 (11.11%) Degree
4 16 (5.93%) Computer Science Degree
5 13 (4.81%) Master's Degree
6 9 (3.33%) BPSS Clearance
7 7 (2.59%) Azure Certification
7 7 (2.59%) DV Cleared
8 6 (2.22%) AWS Certification
9 3 (1.11%) Microsoft Certification
9 3 (1.11%) PhD
9 3 (1.11%) SnowPro
10 2 (0.74%) (ISC)2 CCSP
10 2 (0.74%) Cisco Certification
10 2 (0.74%) CISSP
10 2 (0.74%) MCITP
10 2 (0.74%) MCTS
10 2 (0.74%) TOGAF Certification
11 1 (0.37%) AWS Certified Developer
11 1 (0.37%) MBA
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 54 (20.00%) Data Quality
2 21 (7.78%) QA
3 16 (5.93%) GDPR
4 7 (2.59%) ISO/IEC 27001
4 7 (2.59%) NIST
5 3 (1.11%) SLA
6 2 (0.74%) PCI DSS
7 1 (0.37%) Actionable Recommendations
7 1 (0.37%) California Consumer Privacy Act
7 1 (0.37%) EU AI Act
7 1 (0.37%) NCSC
7 1 (0.37%) Sarbanes-Oxley
System Software
1 50 (18.52%) Docker
2 8 (2.96%) HDFS
3 7 (2.59%) Active Directory
4 6 (2.22%) VMware Infrastructure
5 3 (1.11%) BitLocker
5 3 (1.11%) Hyper-V
5 3 (1.11%) Microsoft App-V
5 3 (1.11%) Terminal Services
5 3 (1.11%) Virtual Machines
5 3 (1.11%) VMware ESXi
6 2 (0.74%) Apache Flume
Systems Management
1 54 (20.00%) Kubernetes
2 37 (13.70%) Terraform
3 29 (10.74%) Grafana
4 12 (4.44%) Prometheus
5 10 (3.70%) Ansible
6 8 (2.96%) Kibana
6 8 (2.96%) Puppet
7 3 (1.11%) Nagios
7 3 (1.11%) Red Hat Satellite
7 3 (1.11%) vCenter Server
7 3 (1.11%) vMotion
8 2 (0.74%) Failover Clustering
9 1 (0.37%) Control-M
9 1 (0.37%) HP ALM
9 1 (0.37%) Kubeflow
Vendors
1 58 (21.48%) Databricks
2 24 (8.89%) Google
2 24 (8.89%) Microsoft
3 15 (5.56%) Splunk
4 12 (4.44%) Salesforce
5 9 (3.33%) Cloudera
6 8 (2.96%) Foundry
7 6 (2.22%) IBM
7 6 (2.22%) Oracle
7 6 (2.22%) VMware
8 5 (1.85%) Amplitude
8 5 (1.85%) Palantir
9 4 (1.48%) HP
10 3 (1.11%) Cisco
10 3 (1.11%) Citrix
10 3 (1.11%) Informatica
10 3 (1.11%) OpenAI
10 3 (1.11%) Red Hat
10 3 (1.11%) Symantec
10 3 (1.11%) Teradata