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

6 months to
12 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 428 295 203
Rank change year-on-year -133 -92 +33
Contract jobs citing Big Data 250 295 472
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.46% 0.89% 1.22%
As % of the Database & Business Intelligence category 3.02% 4.95% 6.81%
Number of daily rates quoted 173 211 315
10th Percentile £365 £400 £353
25th Percentile £435 £450 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £550 £600
Median % change year-on-year -4.55% -8.33% -
75th Percentile £625 £664 £725
90th Percentile £718 £750 £845
UK excluding London median daily rate £495 £500 £563
% change year-on-year -1.00% -11.11% +2.27%
Number of hourly rates quoted 8 2 5
10th Percentile £56.28 £45.06 £27.25
25th Percentile £62.13 £54.22 £36.25
Median hourly rate £70.00 £69.48 £47.50
Median % change year-on-year +0.75% +46.27% -39.10%
75th Percentile £75.00 £84.74 £53.75
90th Percentile £79.50 £93.90 -
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 8,280 5,956 6,931
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 15.18% 18.04% 17.96%
Number of daily rates quoted 5,519 3,982 4,798
10th Percentile £358 £338 £350
25th Percentile £419 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £526
Median % change year-on-year - -4.90% -2.86%
75th Percentile £613 £625 £650
90th Percentile £700 £745 £794
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £475 £480
% change year-on-year - -1.04% -4.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 268 93 86
10th Percentile £16.49 £22.85 £17.50
25th Percentile £24.13 £30.96 £20.88
Median hourly rate £39.84 £40.00 £34.47
Median % change year-on-year -0.40% +16.06% -34.35%
75th Percentile £60.75 £65.00 £59.34
90th Percentile £76.00 £80.00 £73.25
UK excluding London median hourly rate £39.00 £35.49 £30.00
% change year-on-year +9.89% +18.30% -42.86%

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 September 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 September 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 September 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 -166 210 £530 -3.64% 307
London -97 132 £590 +2.59% 227
UK excluding London -121 88 £495 -1.00% 144
Work from Home -81 81 £504 -1.56% 356
North of England -58 32 £514 +4.05% 22
Yorkshire -26 21 £518 +3.50% 4
Scotland -23 14 £416 -16.80% 40
Midlands -57 14 £410 -2.50% 9
South East -72 14 £440 -23.48% 27
South West -38 11 £515 +14.44% 18
East Midlands -21 9 £495 +17.86% 1
North East -40 7 £425 - 1
West Midlands -52 5 £405 -14.10% 8
North West -55 4 £600 +26.32% 17
East of England -33 2 £540 +6.93% 13
Wales - 2 £475 - 1

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
1 129 (51.60%) Apache Spark
2 40 (16.00%) Apache
3 38 (15.20%) Apache Airflow
4 9 (3.60%) Confluence
5 6 (2.40%) JBoss
6 5 (2.00%) Jupyter
6 5 (2.00%) SAS
6 5 (2.00%) SharePoint
7 3 (1.20%) CMS
7 3 (1.20%) Microsoft Exchange
7 3 (1.20%) Palantir Foundry
8 2 (0.80%) Apache Pig
8 2 (0.80%) Apache Superset
9 1 (0.40%) Luigi
9 1 (0.40%) MQSeries
9 1 (0.40%) nginx
Applications
1 2 (0.80%) Microsoft Office
Business Applications
1 2 (0.80%) Endur
2 1 (0.40%) Oracle ERP
2 1 (0.40%) SAP ERP
Cloud Services
1 114 (45.60%) AWS
2 94 (37.60%) Azure
3 75 (30.00%) GCP
4 45 (18.00%) Snowflake
5 31 (12.40%) Power Platform
6 30 (12.00%) Amazon S3
7 22 (8.80%) Amazon EMR
7 22 (8.80%) Azure DevOps
7 22 (8.80%) GitHub
8 21 (8.40%) AWS Lambda
9 17 (6.80%) Serverless
10 14 (5.60%) Amazon ECS
11 12 (4.80%) Azure Data Factory
11 12 (4.80%) OpenShift
11 12 (4.80%) PaaS
12 11 (4.40%) Amazon EKS
12 11 (4.40%) GitHub Actions
13 9 (3.60%) dbt
14 8 (3.20%) Azure Databricks
15 7 (2.80%) Amazon EC2
Communications & Networking
1 6 (2.40%) Kerberos
2 4 (1.60%) DNS
3 3 (1.20%) Broadband
3 3 (1.20%) DHCP
3 3 (1.20%) Firewall
3 3 (1.20%) SMTP
3 3 (1.20%) VPN
4 2 (0.80%) Internet
Database & Business Intelligence
1 48 (19.20%) Hadoop
2 47 (18.80%) Data Warehouse
3 38 (15.20%) Data Lake
4 31 (12.40%) NoSQL
5 30 (12.00%) Power BI
6 28 (11.20%) PostgreSQL
7 23 (9.20%) Apache Hive
8 22 (8.80%) Amazon Redshift
9 20 (8.00%) BigQuery
10 16 (6.40%) MongoDB
11 14 (5.60%) Amazon Athena
12 13 (5.20%) Amazon RDS
12 13 (5.20%) Relational Database
12 13 (5.20%) Tableau
13 12 (4.80%) DynamoDB
14 11 (4.40%) Metadata
15 10 (4.00%) Elasticsearch
16 9 (3.60%) Amazon Aurora
16 9 (3.60%) SQL Server
17 7 (2.80%) Presto
Development Applications
1 36 (14.40%) Git
2 33 (13.20%) GitLab
3 29 (11.60%) Jenkins
4 16 (6.40%) JIRA
5 7 (2.80%) Selenium
6 4 (1.60%) SonarQube
7 3 (1.20%) JUnit
7 3 (1.20%) PowerDesigner
7 3 (1.20%) Robot Framework
8 2 (0.80%) JMeter
8 2 (0.80%) LoadRunner
8 2 (0.80%) MLflow
8 2 (0.80%) TeamCity
9 1 (0.40%) Atlassian Bamboo
9 1 (0.40%) Claude Code
9 1 (0.40%) eggPlant
9 1 (0.40%) Gatling
General
1 77 (30.80%) Social Skills
2 60 (24.00%) Analytical Skills
3 51 (20.40%) Finance
4 29 (11.60%) Banking
5 20 (8.00%) Public Sector
6 10 (4.00%) Documentation Skills
7 9 (3.60%) Marketing
8 8 (3.20%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 8 (3.20%) Investment Banking
9 3 (1.20%) Aerospace
9 3 (1.20%) Influencing Skills
9 3 (1.20%) Legal
9 3 (1.20%) Retail
9 3 (1.20%) Telecoms
10 2 (0.80%) Financial Institution
10 2 (0.80%) Local Government
11 1 (0.40%) Corporate Banking
11 1 (0.40%) Dutch Language
11 1 (0.40%) French Language
11 1 (0.40%) Retail Banking
Job Titles
1 77 (30.80%) Data Engineer
2 42 (16.80%) Senior
3 36 (14.40%) Architect
4 23 (9.20%) Developer
5 17 (6.80%) Analyst
6 15 (6.00%) DevOps Engineer
6 15 (6.00%) Solutions Architect
7 13 (5.20%) Data Architect
7 13 (5.20%) Senior Data Engineer
8 11 (4.40%) Big Data Engineer
8 11 (4.40%) Data Analyst
8 11 (4.40%) Lead
9 10 (4.00%) Databricks Data Engineer
9 10 (4.00%) Databricks Engineer
10 9 (3.60%) Azure Engineer
10 9 (3.60%) Python Engineer
10 9 (3.60%) Test Engineer
11 8 (3.20%) Java Developer
11 8 (3.20%) Kafka Engineer
11 8 (3.20%) Scala Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 55 (22.00%) Kafka
2 45 (18.00%) Terraform
3 29 (11.60%) PySpark
4 19 (7.60%) REST
5 16 (6.40%) Spring
6 15 (6.00%) Spring Boot
7 12 (4.80%) Pandas
8 9 (3.60%) Apache NiFi
9 8 (3.20%) CSS
9 8 (3.20%) HTML
9 8 (3.20%) Play Framework
10 7 (2.80%) NumPy
11 6 (2.40%) Elastic Stack
12 5 (2.00%) .NET
12 5 (2.00%) Langfuse
12 5 (2.00%) Microsoft Graph
12 5 (2.00%) PyTorch
12 5 (2.00%) RESTful
12 5 (2.00%) TensorFlow
13 4 (1.60%) Middleware
Miscellaneous
1 36 (14.40%) Cloud Native
2 27 (10.80%) Distributed Systems
3 16 (6.40%) Product Ownership
4 15 (6.00%) Data Structures
5 12 (4.80%) Clustering
5 12 (4.80%) Onboarding
5 12 (4.80%) Virtual Team
6 8 (3.20%) Algorithms
7 6 (2.40%) Cyber Threat
7 6 (2.40%) Distributed Computing
8 5 (2.00%) Data Protection Act
8 5 (2.00%) Distributed Architecture
9 4 (1.60%) FMCG
10 3 (1.20%) AI Agents
10 3 (1.20%) Data Centre
10 3 (1.20%) Linux Command Line
10 3 (1.20%) PKI
10 3 (1.20%) Social Media
11 2 (0.80%) Management Information System
11 2 (0.80%) Taxonomies
Operating Systems
1 27 (10.80%) Linux
2 10 (4.00%) Unix
3 6 (2.40%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 3 (1.20%) Windows
4 3 (1.20%) Windows Server
5 1 (0.40%) Windows Server 2003
Processes & Methodologies
1 117 (46.80%) Data Pipeline
2 101 (40.40%) Analytics
3 91 (36.40%) Data Engineering
4 90 (36.00%) ETL
5 89 (35.60%) CI/CD
6 82 (32.80%) Agile
7 79 (31.60%) AI
8 66 (26.40%) Machine Learning
9 62 (24.80%) DevOps
10 56 (22.40%) Data Modelling
11 51 (20.40%) Problem-Solving
12 45 (18.00%) Containerisation
12 45 (18.00%) Data Science
13 40 (16.00%) Data Governance
14 38 (15.20%) Infrastructure as Code
14 38 (15.20%) Scrum
15 37 (14.80%) Validation
16 36 (14.40%) Business Intelligence
16 36 (14.40%) Data Analysis
17 35 (14.00%) Test Automation
Programming Languages
1 140 (56.00%) Python
2 120 (48.00%) SQL
3 59 (23.60%) Java
4 32 (12.80%) Scala
5 22 (8.80%) PowerShell
6 15 (6.00%) R
7 14 (5.60%) JavaScript
8 11 (4.40%) Bash
9 8 (3.20%) C#
10 3 (1.20%) Kusto Query Language
10 3 (1.20%) Rust
10 3 (1.20%) Shell Script
11 2 (0.80%) Go
11 2 (0.80%) Korn
11 2 (0.80%) SAS Macro
12 1 (0.40%) Bicep
12 1 (0.40%) Data Analysis Expressions
12 1 (0.40%) MATLAB
12 1 (0.40%) PL/SQL
12 1 (0.40%) TypeScript
Qualifications
1 55 (22.00%) Security Cleared
2 41 (16.40%) SC Cleared
3 26 (10.40%) Degree
4 13 (5.20%) Computer Science Degree
5 10 (4.00%) BPSS Clearance
5 10 (4.00%) Master's Degree
6 8 (3.20%) DV Cleared
7 5 (2.00%) AWS Certification
7 5 (2.00%) Azure Certification
8 3 (1.20%) PhD
8 3 (1.20%) SnowPro
9 2 (0.80%) (ISC)2 CCSP
9 2 (0.80%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
9 2 (0.80%) Cisco Certification
9 2 (0.80%) CISSP
10 1 (0.40%) AWS Certified Developer
10 1 (0.40%) Microsoft Certification
10 1 (0.40%) PMI Certification
10 1 (0.40%) PMP
10 1 (0.40%) TOGAF Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 51 (20.40%) Data Quality
2 20 (8.00%) QA
3 10 (4.00%) GDPR
4 3 (1.20%) SLA
5 2 (0.80%) Actionable Recommendations
5 2 (0.80%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 2 (0.80%) NIST
5 2 (0.80%) PCI DSS
6 1 (0.40%) California Consumer Privacy Act
6 1 (0.40%) EMIR
6 1 (0.40%) EU AI Act
6 1 (0.40%) IFRS
6 1 (0.40%) IFRS 9
6 1 (0.40%) MiFID
6 1 (0.40%) NCSC
6 1 (0.40%) PSD2
6 1 (0.40%) SEPA
System Software
1 44 (17.60%) Docker
2 9 (3.60%) VMware Infrastructure
3 6 (2.40%) HDFS
4 5 (2.00%) Active Directory
5 3 (1.20%) BitLocker
5 3 (1.20%) Hyper-V
5 3 (1.20%) Microsoft App-V
5 3 (1.20%) Terminal Services
5 3 (1.20%) Virtual Machines
5 3 (1.20%) VMware ESXi
6 2 (0.80%) Apache Flume
Systems Management
1 49 (19.60%) Kubernetes
2 28 (11.20%) Grafana
3 11 (4.40%) Ansible
3 11 (4.40%) Puppet
4 9 (3.60%) Prometheus
5 8 (3.20%) Kibana
6 6 (2.40%) Red Hat Satellite
7 5 (2.00%) Failover Clustering
8 3 (1.20%) Nagios
8 3 (1.20%) vCenter Server
8 3 (1.20%) vMotion
9 2 (0.80%) Control-M
10 1 (0.40%) HAProxy
10 1 (0.40%) HP ALM
10 1 (0.40%) Kubeflow
Vendors
1 67 (26.80%) Databricks
2 23 (9.20%) Google
3 20 (8.00%) Microsoft
4 18 (7.20%) Splunk
5 14 (5.60%) Cloudera
5 14 (5.60%) Salesforce
6 10 (4.00%) Oracle
7 9 (3.60%) VMware
8 6 (2.40%) Cisco
8 6 (2.40%) Red Hat
9 5 (2.00%) Amplitude
9 5 (2.00%) IBM
9 5 (2.00%) Informatica
10 4 (1.60%) Foundry
10 4 (1.60%) HP
10 4 (1.60%) Talend
10 4 (1.60%) Tenable
11 3 (1.20%) Citrix
11 3 (1.20%) Palantir
11 3 (1.20%) Teradata