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

6 months to
23 May 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 369 235 242
Rank change year-on-year -134 +7 -11
Contract jobs citing Big Data 284 322 419
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.58% 1.13% 0.99%
As % of the Database & Business Intelligence category 3.87% 5.95% 5.75%
Number of daily rates quoted 191 222 315
10th Percentile £355 £410 £394
25th Percentile £413 £463 £468
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £566 £600
Median % change year-on-year -2.87% -5.55% +2.04%
75th Percentile £645 £675 £747
90th Percentile £781 £738 £850
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £541 £525
% change year-on-year -7.66% +3.14% -8.70%
Number of hourly rates quoted 17 4 12
10th Percentile £58.60 £42.65 £18.20
25th Percentile £64.00 £48.18 £23.30
Median hourly rate £70.00 £55.00 £35.25
Median % change year-on-year +27.27% +56.03% -54.81%
75th Percentile £75.00 £69.06 £44.69
90th Percentile £90.00 £87.63 £48.63
UK excluding London median hourly rate £70.00 £38.96 £19.38
% change year-on-year +79.67% +101.08% -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 7,332 5,413 7,289
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 15.09% 18.92% 17.18%
Number of daily rates quoted 4,932 3,714 5,240
10th Percentile £350 £358 £350
25th Percentile £413 £419 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £520 £525
Median % change year-on-year -3.85% -0.95% -3.67%
75th Percentile £600 £638 £650
90th Percentile £700 £763 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £478 £475
% change year-on-year -0.52% +0.53% -5.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 223 95 147
10th Percentile £15.07 £20.09 £14.00
25th Percentile £23.73 £23.88 £20.88
Median hourly rate £45.00 £33.11 £40.00
Median % change year-on-year +35.91% -17.23% -31.73%
75th Percentile £72.25 £65.81 £61.55
90th Percentile £82.25 £78.22 £73.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £43.00 £31.64 £39.25
% change year-on-year +35.90% -19.39% -29.53%

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 23 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 23 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 23 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 -168 214 £550 -3.51% 125
London -90 138 £559 -2.72% 66
UK excluding London -124 94 £500 -7.66% 68
Work from Home -52 92 £488 -7.14% 58
Scotland +22 24 £389 -16.00% 1
North of England -72 24 £550 -7.17% 26
South East -86 22 £525 -4.11% 9
Midlands -84 11 £500 - 4
North East -18 9 £518 +11.89% 11
Yorkshire -60 9 £588 +6.82% 4
East Midlands -35 8 £495 +26.11% 1
South West -33 6 £550 -14.56% 16
North West -45 6 - - 12
Wales -7 5 £388 +131.94% 1
East of England -47 3 £540 -16.92% 6
West Midlands -71 3 £640 +24.90% 3

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 40 (14.08%) Apache
4 12 (4.23%) Confluence
5 5 (1.76%) SAS
6 4 (1.41%) SharePoint
7 3 (1.06%) Microsoft Exchange
7 3 (1.06%) Palantir Foundry
8 1 (0.35%) Apache Pig
8 1 (0.35%) Camunda
8 1 (0.35%) Jupyter
Applications
1 4 (1.41%) Microsoft Project
Business Applications
1 1 (0.35%) Endur
Cloud Services
1 140 (49.30%) AWS
2 119 (41.90%) Azure
3 82 (28.87%) GCP
4 37 (13.03%) Snowflake
5 31 (10.92%) Power Platform
6 29 (10.21%) GitHub
7 27 (9.51%) Amazon S3
7 27 (9.51%) Serverless
8 25 (8.80%) AWS Lambda
9 19 (6.69%) Amazon EMR
9 19 (6.69%) Azure DevOps
10 17 (5.99%) GitHub Actions
11 13 (4.58%) Azure Data Factory
11 13 (4.58%) dbt
12 11 (3.87%) OpenShift
13 8 (2.82%) Amazon ECS
13 8 (2.82%) Azure Cosmos DB
14 5 (1.76%) Amazon CloudWatch
14 5 (1.76%) Amazon EKS
14 5 (1.76%) Datadog
Communications & Networking
1 5 (1.76%) IPv4
1 5 (1.76%) IPv6
2 1 (0.35%) Kerberos
2 1 (0.35%) VPN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 80 (28.17%) Hadoop
2 68 (23.94%) Data Warehouse
3 47 (16.55%) NoSQL
4 35 (12.32%) Data Lake
5 33 (11.62%) PostgreSQL
6 26 (9.15%) Power BI
7 23 (8.10%) Relational Database
8 21 (7.39%) Metadata
9 20 (7.04%) SQL Server
10 19 (6.69%) Amazon Redshift
11 18 (6.34%) MongoDB
12 14 (4.93%) BigQuery
13 13 (4.58%) DynamoDB
13 13 (4.58%) Tableau
14 12 (4.23%) Apache Hive
15 11 (3.87%) MySQL
16 9 (3.17%) Amazon Aurora
16 9 (3.17%) RDBMS
17 8 (2.82%) Amazon Athena
17 8 (2.82%) Data Vault
Development Applications
1 41 (14.44%) Git
2 28 (9.86%) Jenkins
3 24 (8.45%) GitLab
4 21 (7.39%) JIRA
5 10 (3.52%) 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%) JUnit
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 75 (26.41%) Finance
3 65 (22.89%) Analytical Skills
4 33 (11.62%) Banking
5 25 (8.80%) Public Sector
6 15 (5.28%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 11 (3.87%) Documentation Skills
8 10 (3.52%) 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%) Manufacturing
13 1 (0.35%) Military
13 1 (0.35%) Pharmaceutical
Job Titles
1 91 (32.04%) Data Engineer
2 40 (14.08%) Architect
3 36 (12.68%) Senior
4 31 (10.92%) Lead
5 29 (10.21%) Developer
6 24 (8.45%) Data Scientist
7 22 (7.75%) Analyst
8 18 (6.34%) Data Architect
9 15 (5.28%) Senior Data Engineer
10 14 (4.93%) Data Analyst
11 12 (4.23%) Solutions Architect
12 10 (3.52%) Java Engineer
13 9 (3.17%) Java Developer
13 9 (3.17%) Senior Data Scientist
14 8 (2.82%) Business Analyst
14 8 (2.82%) Kafka Engineer
14 8 (2.82%) Lead Data Scientist
14 8 (2.82%) Scala Engineer
15 7 (2.46%) DevOps Engineer
15 7 (2.46%) QA Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 63 (22.18%) Kafka
2 33 (11.62%) PySpark
3 21 (7.39%) Spring
4 19 (6.69%) Spring Boot
5 14 (4.93%) Pandas
6 13 (4.58%) HTML
6 13 (4.58%) REST
6 13 (4.58%) TensorFlow
7 11 (3.87%) CSS
7 11 (3.87%) PyTorch
8 10 (3.52%) scikit-learn
9 9 (3.17%) NumPy
10 8 (2.82%) Play Framework
11 7 (2.46%) Node.js
11 7 (2.46%) React
12 6 (2.11%) RESTful
13 5 (1.76%) Keras
13 5 (1.76%) Middleware
14 4 (1.41%) Elastic Stack
14 4 (1.41%) Seaborn
Miscellaneous
1 29 (10.21%) Cloud Native
2 20 (7.04%) Product Ownership
3 16 (5.63%) Algorithms
4 14 (4.93%) Distributed Systems
5 12 (4.23%) Data Structures
6 8 (2.82%) Distributed Computing
6 8 (2.82%) Onboarding
6 8 (2.82%) Virtual Team
7 6 (2.11%) Data Protection Act
8 5 (1.76%) Clustering
8 5 (1.76%) FMCG
8 5 (1.76%) Management Information System
8 5 (1.76%) Reference Data
9 4 (1.41%) AI Agents
9 4 (1.41%) Cyber Threat
9 4 (1.41%) Data Centre
10 3 (1.06%) Distributed Architecture
10 3 (1.06%) Educational Technology
10 3 (1.06%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
10 3 (1.06%) Hybrid Cloud
Operating Systems
1 19 (6.69%) Linux
2 16 (5.63%) Unix
3 2 (0.70%) Windows
3 2 (0.70%) Windows Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 128 (45.07%) Analytics
2 123 (43.31%) Data Pipeline
3 121 (42.61%) CI/CD
4 108 (38.03%) ETL
5 105 (36.97%) Agile
5 105 (36.97%) Data Engineering
6 80 (28.17%) Problem-Solving
7 77 (27.11%) Data Governance
8 75 (26.41%) Machine Learning
9 74 (26.06%) Data Science
9 74 (26.06%) DevOps
10 71 (25.00%) Data Modelling
11 68 (23.94%) AI
12 45 (15.85%) Visualisation
13 44 (15.49%) Scrum
14 41 (14.44%) Business Intelligence
14 41 (14.44%) Decision-Making
15 40 (14.08%) Data Integration
15 40 (14.08%) Technical Leadership
16 39 (13.73%) Data Architecture
Programming Languages
1 162 (57.04%) Python
2 152 (53.52%) SQL
3 61 (21.48%) Java
4 33 (11.62%) R
4 33 (11.62%) Scala
5 14 (4.93%) JavaScript
6 9 (3.17%) Bash
7 5 (1.76%) C#
7 5 (1.76%) SAS Macro
7 5 (1.76%) TypeScript
8 4 (1.41%) PowerShell
9 3 (1.06%) C++
9 3 (1.06%) Rust
9 3 (1.06%) Shell Script
10 2 (0.70%) Ada
11 1 (0.35%) C
11 1 (0.35%) Perl
11 1 (0.35%) PL/SQL
11 1 (0.35%) T-SQL
Qualifications
1 71 (25.00%) Security Cleared
2 58 (20.42%) SC Cleared
3 49 (17.25%) Degree
4 24 (8.45%) Master's Degree
5 21 (7.39%) Computer Science Degree
6 10 (3.52%) BPSS Clearance
7 6 (2.11%) Azure Certification
8 5 (1.76%) DV Cleared
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 20 (7.04%) QA
3 19 (6.69%) GDPR
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 50 (17.61%) Docker
2 8 (2.82%) HDFS
3 3 (1.06%) Active Directory
3 3 (1.06%) Virtual Machines
4 1 (0.35%) Apache Flume
Systems Management
1 56 (19.72%) Kubernetes
2 38 (13.38%) Terraform
3 34 (11.97%) Grafana
4 16 (5.63%) Prometheus
5 8 (2.82%) Kibana
6 5 (1.76%) Ansible
7 2 (0.70%) HP ALM
8 1 (0.35%) Argo
8 1 (0.35%) Control-M
8 1 (0.35%) Kubeflow
8 1 (0.35%) Nagios
8 1 (0.35%) Rancher
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
5 9 (3.17%) Oracle
5 9 (3.17%) Talend
6 6 (2.11%) Salesforce
7 5 (1.76%) Ab Initio
7 5 (1.76%) Foundry
7 5 (1.76%) OpenAI
7 5 (1.76%) Teradata
8 4 (1.41%) Cloudera
9 3 (1.06%) Guidewire
9 3 (1.06%) Palantir
9 3 (1.06%) Tenable
10 2 (0.70%) HP
10 2 (0.70%) Salesforce Marketing Cloud
11 1 (0.35%) OpenLink