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

6 months to
5 Feb 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 357 236 235
Rank change year-on-year -121 -1 -52
Contract jobs citing Big Data 249 337 445
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.64% 1.08% 1.00%
As % of the Database & Business Intelligence category 3.87% 5.85% 6.17%
Number of daily rates quoted 190 218 303
10th Percentile £321 £364 £400
25th Percentile £393 £450 £475
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -9.09% - -8.33%
75th Percentile £625 £676 £700
90th Percentile £776 £746 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £449 £616 £510
% change year-on-year -27.22% +20.83% -11.30%
Number of hourly rates quoted 5 2 27
10th Percentile £52.75 - £22.28
25th Percentile £55.00 £51.25 £33.88
Median hourly rate £64.00 £52.50 £46.18
Median % change year-on-year +21.90% +13.69% +5.84%
75th Percentile - £53.75 £62.25
90th Percentile £67.26 - £74.70
UK excluding London median hourly rate £64.00 - £46.18

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 6,438 5,765 7,217
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 16.44% 18.51% 16.23%
Number of daily rates quoted 4,433 3,801 5,149
10th Percentile £338 £355 £350
25th Percentile £412 £425 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £600 £650 £650
90th Percentile £700 £763 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £500 £500
% change year-on-year -5.00% - -
Number of hourly rates quoted 120 90 182
10th Percentile £18.25 £22.17 £15.62
25th Percentile £29.00 £25.02 £20.99
Median hourly rate £51.25 £36.56 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year +40.20% -13.99% -25.26%
75th Percentile £74.68 £64.73 £62.50
90th Percentile £85.10 £70.38 £77.40
UK excluding London median hourly rate £56.25 £30.00 £40.00
% change year-on-year +87.50% -25.00% -29.65%

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 5 February 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 5 February 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 5 February 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 -132 201 £505 -11.25% 121
London -75 133 £550 - 61
UK excluding London -85 79 £449 -27.22% 77
Work from Home -25 76 £463 -11.57% 54
Scotland +22 21 £460 +17.95% 6
North of England -62 17 £448 -33.70% 19
South East -44 16 £438 -19.35% 28
North West -20 13 £473 -30.00% 14
Midlands -49 13 £428 +4.52% 4
East Midlands -18 9 £423 +12.67% 2
South West -28 9 £525 -21.35% 4
West Midlands -39 4 £449 -24.24% 2
North East -18 3 £413 +0.86% 4
Wales +1 2 £388 -32.26% 2
East of England -29 2 £505 -22.31% 15
Yorkshire -60 1 - - 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
1 118 (47.39%) Apache Spark
2 42 (16.87%) Apache
3 34 (13.65%) Apache Airflow
4 17 (6.83%) Confluence
5 9 (3.61%) Palantir Foundry
6 4 (1.61%) SharePoint
7 2 (0.80%) Apache Pig
7 2 (0.80%) Jupyter
7 2 (0.80%) Microsoft Exchange
8 1 (0.40%) Apache Superset
8 1 (0.40%) Camunda
8 1 (0.40%) IIS
8 1 (0.40%) nginx
8 1 (0.40%) SAS
Applications
1 3 (1.20%) Microsoft Project
2 1 (0.40%) Microsoft Excel
2 1 (0.40%) Microsoft Office
2 1 (0.40%) Microsoft PowerPoint
2 1 (0.40%) MS Visio
Business Applications
1 2 (0.80%) Salesforce CRM
2 1 (0.40%) Distributed Ledger
Cloud Services
1 108 (43.37%) AWS
2 83 (33.33%) Azure
3 55 (22.09%) GCP
4 30 (12.05%) Power Platform
4 30 (12.05%) Serverless
5 27 (10.84%) Snowflake
6 19 (7.63%) GitHub
7 14 (5.62%) GitHub Actions
8 13 (5.22%) Azure Data Factory
9 11 (4.42%) Amazon S3
9 11 (4.42%) AWS Lambda
10 9 (3.61%) Azure DevOps
11 7 (2.81%) Amazon ECS
12 6 (2.41%) Amazon CloudWatch
12 6 (2.41%) Amazon SageMaker
12 6 (2.41%) OpenShift
13 5 (2.01%) Amazon EKS
13 5 (2.01%) Microsoft Copilot
14 4 (1.61%) Azure Cosmos DB
14 4 (1.61%) Azure Synapse Analytics
Communications & Networking
1 3 (1.20%) Kerberos
1 3 (1.20%) VPN
2 1 (0.40%) HTTP
2 1 (0.40%) TCP/IP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 88 (35.34%) Hadoop
2 63 (25.30%) Data Warehouse
3 37 (14.86%) NoSQL
4 32 (12.85%) Data Lake
5 28 (11.24%) Metadata
5 28 (11.24%) Power BI
6 27 (10.84%) Relational Database
7 25 (10.04%) SQL Server
8 23 (9.24%) PostgreSQL
9 22 (8.84%) Apache Hive
10 21 (8.43%) Elasticsearch
11 16 (6.43%) Tableau
12 14 (5.62%) RDBMS
13 11 (4.42%) Impala
14 10 (4.02%) HBase
15 9 (3.61%) BigQuery
15 9 (3.61%) MySQL
16 8 (3.21%) Amazon Redshift
16 8 (3.21%) MongoDB
17 7 (2.81%) Azure SQL Database
Development Applications
1 33 (13.25%) Git
2 21 (8.43%) JIRA
3 20 (8.03%) GitLab
3 20 (8.03%) Jenkins
4 5 (2.01%) ERwin
4 5 (2.01%) MLflow
5 4 (1.61%) ER Studio
6 3 (1.20%) Postman
6 3 (1.20%) Robot Framework
6 3 (1.20%) Selenium
7 2 (0.80%) Artifactory
7 2 (0.80%) Cypress.io
7 2 (0.80%) Subversion
7 2 (0.80%) Team Foundation Server
8 1 (0.40%) Cucumber
8 1 (0.40%) Gradle
8 1 (0.40%) JMeter
8 1 (0.40%) NUnit
8 1 (0.40%) SonarQube
8 1 (0.40%) SpecFlow
General
1 84 (33.73%) Social Skills
2 66 (26.51%) Finance
3 39 (15.66%) Analytical Skills
4 29 (11.65%) Banking
5 19 (7.63%) Public Sector
6 8 (3.21%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 5 (2.01%) Investment Banking
8 4 (1.61%) Telecoms
9 3 (1.20%) Financial Institution
9 3 (1.20%) Manufacturing
10 2 (0.80%) Documentation Skills
11 1 (0.40%) Agriculture
11 1 (0.40%) Front Office
11 1 (0.40%) Marketing
11 1 (0.40%) Pharmaceutical
11 1 (0.40%) Presentation Skills
Job Titles
1 74 (29.72%) Data Engineer
2 33 (13.25%) Senior
3 28 (11.24%) Lead
4 23 (9.24%) Data Scientist
5 22 (8.84%) Architect
5 22 (8.84%) Developer
6 19 (7.63%) Data Architect
7 15 (6.02%) Analyst
8 12 (4.82%) Data Analyst
9 11 (4.42%) Senior Data Engineer
10 7 (2.81%) AWS Engineer
10 7 (2.81%) Big Data Engineer
10 7 (2.81%) Data Modeller
10 7 (2.81%) Java Engineer
10 7 (2.81%) Machine Learning Engineer
10 7 (2.81%) Platform Engineer
10 7 (2.81%) QA Engineer
10 7 (2.81%) Senior Data Scientist
10 7 (2.81%) Software Engineer
11 6 (2.41%) DevOps Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 47 (18.88%) Kafka
2 31 (12.45%) PySpark
3 16 (6.43%) Apache NiFi
3 16 (6.43%) scikit-learn
4 15 (6.02%) Pandas
5 12 (4.82%) REST
5 12 (4.82%) TensorFlow
6 10 (4.02%) HTML
6 10 (4.02%) React
6 10 (4.02%) RESTful
7 9 (3.61%) Flask
7 9 (3.61%) NumPy
7 9 (3.61%) Spring
8 8 (3.21%) .NET
8 8 (3.21%) Elastic Stack
8 8 (3.21%) JSON
8 8 (3.21%) PyTorch
8 8 (3.21%) RabbitMQ
8 8 (3.21%) Spring Boot
9 7 (2.81%) Spark Streaming
Miscellaneous
1 22 (8.84%) Cloud Native
2 14 (5.62%) Distributed Computing
3 13 (5.22%) Algorithms
4 7 (2.81%) Data Structures
4 7 (2.81%) Product Ownership
4 7 (2.81%) Virtual Team
5 6 (2.41%) Data Protection Act
5 6 (2.41%) Distributed Systems
5 6 (2.41%) Management Information System
5 6 (2.41%) Onboarding
6 5 (2.01%) Reference Data
7 4 (1.61%) Analytical Mindset
7 4 (1.61%) Derivative
7 4 (1.61%) Hybrid Cloud
8 3 (1.20%) AI Agents
8 3 (1.20%) Data Centre
9 2 (0.80%) CMDB
9 2 (0.80%) Educational Technology
9 2 (0.80%) Legacy Systems
9 2 (0.80%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 27 (10.84%) Linux
2 13 (5.22%) Unix
3 1 (0.40%) Windows
Processes & Methodologies
1 93 (37.35%) Analytics
2 92 (36.95%) ETL
3 81 (32.53%) Data Pipeline
4 80 (32.13%) Data Modelling
5 76 (30.52%) CI/CD
5 76 (30.52%) Problem-Solving
6 75 (30.12%) Agile
7 71 (28.51%) Data Governance
8 66 (26.51%) Data Engineering
9 62 (24.90%) Data Science
10 61 (24.50%) Machine Learning
11 51 (20.48%) Visualisation
12 50 (20.08%) AI
12 50 (20.08%) DevOps
13 38 (15.26%) Data Architecture
14 36 (14.46%) Business Intelligence
14 36 (14.46%) Decision-Making
15 35 (14.06%) Computer Science
16 32 (12.85%) Software Engineering
17 31 (12.45%) Data Integration
Programming Languages
1 163 (65.46%) Python
2 132 (53.01%) SQL
3 47 (18.88%) Java
4 27 (10.84%) R
5 25 (10.04%) Scala
6 14 (5.62%) C#
6 14 (5.62%) JavaScript
7 13 (5.22%) Bash
7 13 (5.22%) C++
8 6 (2.41%) Shell Script
9 4 (1.61%) Perl
10 3 (1.20%) TypeScript
11 2 (0.80%) Ada
11 2 (0.80%) PL/SQL
11 2 (0.80%) PowerShell
11 2 (0.80%) T-SQL
12 1 (0.40%) Go
12 1 (0.40%) Korn
12 1 (0.40%) Kusto Query Language
Qualifications
1 62 (24.90%) Security Cleared
2 49 (19.68%) SC Cleared
3 44 (17.67%) Degree
4 23 (9.24%) Computer Science Degree
5 22 (8.84%) Master's Degree
6 18 (7.23%) DV Cleared
7 6 (2.41%) Azure Certification
8 4 (1.61%) AWS Certification
8 4 (1.61%) BPSS Clearance
9 3 (1.20%) IBM Certification
9 3 (1.20%) ITIL Certification
9 3 (1.20%) PhD
10 1 (0.40%) HP APS
10 1 (0.40%) ISTQB
10 1 (0.40%) Microsoft Certification
10 1 (0.40%) Numerate Degree
10 1 (0.40%) OCP
10 1 (0.40%) Oracle Certification
10 1 (0.40%) Postgraduate
10 1 (0.40%) Tableau Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 61 (24.50%) Data Quality
2 16 (6.43%) QA
3 15 (6.02%) GDPR
4 4 (1.61%) Accessibility
4 4 (1.61%) Actionable Recommendations
5 3 (1.20%) California Consumer Privacy Act
6 2 (0.80%) PCI DSS
6 2 (0.80%) Sarbanes-Oxley
7 1 (0.40%) HIPAA
7 1 (0.40%) IFRS
7 1 (0.40%) IFRS 17
7 1 (0.40%) ISO 13485
7 1 (0.40%) Solvency II
System Software
1 42 (16.87%) Docker
2 12 (4.82%) HDFS
3 2 (0.80%) Slurm Workload Manager
4 1 (0.40%) Virtual Machines
Systems Management
1 43 (17.27%) Kubernetes
2 19 (7.63%) Terraform
3 12 (4.82%) Grafana
4 11 (4.42%) Prometheus
5 6 (2.41%) Kibana
6 5 (2.01%) logstash
7 4 (1.61%) Ansible
8 3 (1.20%) Argo
8 3 (1.20%) Nagios
8 3 (1.20%) Rancher
9 2 (0.80%) Hadoop YARN
10 1 (0.40%) HP ALM
10 1 (0.40%) Kustomize
10 1 (0.40%) Oozie
10 1 (0.40%) Tivoli
Vendors
1 45 (18.07%) Databricks
2 18 (7.23%) Microsoft
3 16 (6.43%) Google
4 12 (4.82%) Cloudera
5 11 (4.42%) Oracle
6 9 (3.61%) Foundry
6 9 (3.61%) Palantir
7 8 (3.21%) Informatica
8 6 (2.41%) Ab Initio
8 6 (2.41%) Talend
9 5 (2.01%) IBM
9 5 (2.01%) ServiceNow
10 3 (1.20%) OpenAI
11 2 (0.80%) Salesforce
11 2 (0.80%) Splunk
11 2 (0.80%) Sybase
11 2 (0.80%) Teradata
12 1 (0.40%) Atlassian
12 1 (0.40%) Bloomberg
12 1 (0.40%) HP