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

6 months to
7 Dec 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 334 226 229
Rank change year-on-year -108 +3 -57
Contract jobs citing Big Data 258 399 486
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.71% 1.12% 1.07%
As % of the Database & Business Intelligence category 4.08% 6.21% 6.36%
Number of daily rates quoted 199 238 314
10th Percentile £356 £358 £400
25th Percentile £408 £438 £488
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -4.55% - -8.33%
75th Percentile £614 £685 £700
90th Percentile £733 £775 £800
UK excluding London median daily rate £450 £612 £500
% change year-on-year -26.47% +22.40% -13.04%
Number of hourly rates quoted 0 5 23
10th Percentile - £27.25 £30.70
25th Percentile - £36.25 £44.60
Median hourly rate - £52.50 £50.00
Median % change year-on-year - +5.00% +14.60%
75th Percentile - £53.75 £75.00
90th Percentile - - £78.60
UK excluding London median hourly rate - - £46.18

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 6,318 6,430 7,643
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 17.41% 18.01% 16.81%
Number of daily rates quoted 4,344 4,251 5,359
10th Percentile £326 £340 £350
25th Percentile £410 £425 £438
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £527 £535
Median % change year-on-year -5.12% -1.50% -2.73%
75th Percentile £600 £650 £650
90th Percentile £713 £775 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £493 £500
% change year-on-year -3.65% -1.40% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 87 86 144
10th Percentile £20.71 £18.25 £16.62
25th Percentile £29.00 £23.10 £21.57
Median hourly rate £43.50 £31.55 £46.18
Median % change year-on-year +37.90% -31.69% -7.64%
75th Percentile £67.13 £55.25 £64.65
90th Percentile £83.95 £65.50 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £49.36 £27.50 £46.18
% change year-on-year +79.49% -40.45% +2.99%

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 December 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 7 December 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 -122 226 £525 -7.57% 174
London -70 145 £550 - 57
UK excluding London -86 83 £450 -26.47% 155
Work from Home -36 81 £500 -4.40% 217
South East -29 17 £450 -34.55% 50
Midlands -34 17 £420 -31.37% 23
North of England -47 16 £473 -0.53% 32
Scotland +7 15 £500 +28.21% 13
North West -3 13 £473 +15.53% 17
East Midlands -11 13 £420 -1.18% 8
South West -34 13 £525 -21.35% 14
East of England -15 5 £505 -20.78% 20
West Midlands -34 4 £402 -34.31% 14
North East -10 2 - - 4
Northern Ireland -6 1 £513 -6.82% 3
Yorkshire -54 1 - - 11

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
1 112 (43.41%) Apache Spark
2 47 (18.22%) Apache
3 30 (11.63%) Apache Airflow
4 14 (5.43%) Confluence
5 3 (1.16%) 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 (1.16%) Salesforce CRM
2 2 (0.78%) Distributed Ledger
3 1 (0.39%) Avolution ABACUS
Cloud Services
1 101 (39.15%) AWS
2 76 (29.46%) Azure
3 55 (21.32%) GCP
4 35 (13.57%) Power Platform
5 33 (12.79%) Serverless
6 26 (10.08%) Snowflake
7 20 (7.75%) Amazon S3
8 18 (6.98%) GitHub
9 13 (5.04%) Azure Data Factory
10 11 (4.26%) Amazon SageMaker
10 11 (4.26%) Azure DevOps
10 11 (4.26%) GitHub Actions
11 10 (3.88%) AWS Lambda
12 9 (3.49%) Azure Synapse Analytics
13 8 (3.10%) AWS Step Functions
14 7 (2.71%) Amazon ECS
15 5 (1.94%) Microsoft Copilot
15 5 (1.94%) OpenShift
16 4 (1.55%) Amazon Bedrock
16 4 (1.55%) dbt
Communications & Networking
1 4 (1.55%) DNS
1 4 (1.55%) TCP/IP
2 3 (1.16%) SSH
3 2 (0.78%) Kerberos
3 2 (0.78%) SSL
3 2 (0.78%) VPN
4 1 (0.39%) HTTP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 98 (37.98%) Hadoop
2 54 (20.93%) Data Warehouse
3 36 (13.95%) NoSQL
4 35 (13.57%) Power BI
5 33 (12.79%) Data Lake
6 25 (9.69%) Elasticsearch
7 24 (9.30%) Relational Database
8 23 (8.91%) Apache Hive
8 23 (8.91%) Metadata
8 23 (8.91%) SQL Server
9 22 (8.53%) Tableau
10 21 (8.14%) PostgreSQL
11 16 (6.20%) BigQuery
12 13 (5.04%) HBase
13 12 (4.65%) RDBMS
14 11 (4.26%) Impala
15 9 (3.49%) Amazon Athena
16 8 (3.10%) Delta Lake
16 8 (3.10%) MongoDB
17 7 (2.71%) Azure SQL Database
Development Applications
1 35 (13.57%) Git
2 25 (9.69%) JIRA
3 21 (8.14%) Jenkins
4 16 (6.20%) GitLab
5 9 (3.49%) MLflow
6 7 (2.71%) ERwin
7 5 (1.94%) ER Studio
8 4 (1.55%) Artifactory
8 4 (1.55%) SonarQube
9 3 (1.16%) Gradle
9 3 (1.16%) Poetry
9 3 (1.16%) Sonatype Nexus
10 2 (0.78%) Cypress.io
10 2 (0.78%) Maven
10 2 (0.78%) PyCharm
10 2 (0.78%) Subversion
10 2 (0.78%) Team Foundation Server
10 2 (0.78%) Visual Studio Code
11 1 (0.39%) Cucumber
11 1 (0.39%) SpecFlow
General
1 74 (28.68%) Social Skills
2 69 (26.74%) Finance
3 44 (17.05%) Analytical Skills
4 25 (9.69%) Banking
5 17 (6.59%) Public Sector
6 8 (3.10%) Telecoms
7 6 (2.33%) Investment Banking
8 5 (1.94%) Financial Institution
8 5 (1.94%) Manufacturing
9 4 (1.55%) Inclusion and Diversity
9 4 (1.55%) Influencing Skills
10 3 (1.16%) Retail
11 2 (0.78%) Marketing
12 1 (0.39%) Advertising
12 1 (0.39%) Agriculture
12 1 (0.39%) Corporate Banking
12 1 (0.39%) Front Office
12 1 (0.39%) General Ledger
12 1 (0.39%) Presentation Skills
12 1 (0.39%) Retail Banking
Job Titles
1 76 (29.46%) Data Engineer
2 42 (16.28%) Senior
3 30 (11.63%) Developer
4 26 (10.08%) Data Scientist
5 24 (9.30%) Architect
6 19 (7.36%) Lead
7 15 (5.81%) Data Architect
8 13 (5.04%) Python Engineer
8 13 (5.04%) Software Engineer
9 11 (4.26%) Analyst
10 9 (3.49%) Python Data Engineer
10 9 (3.49%) Senior Data Engineer
10 9 (3.49%) Senior Software Engineer
11 8 (3.10%) Data Analyst
11 8 (3.10%) Scala Developer
12 7 (2.71%) AWS Engineer
12 7 (2.71%) Azure Engineer
12 7 (2.71%) Big Data Engineer
12 7 (2.71%) Data Modeller
13 6 (2.33%) Machine Learning Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 59 (22.87%) Kafka
2 31 (12.02%) PySpark
3 28 (10.85%) Apache NiFi
4 24 (9.30%) Pandas
5 21 (8.14%) scikit-learn
6 15 (5.81%) NumPy
6 15 (5.81%) TensorFlow
7 14 (5.43%) .NET
7 14 (5.43%) Flask
7 14 (5.43%) PyTorch
7 14 (5.43%) RESTful
8 13 (5.04%) REST
9 12 (4.65%) Elastic Stack
10 11 (4.26%) RabbitMQ
10 11 (4.26%) React
11 9 (3.49%) JSON
11 9 (3.49%) OpenTelemetry
12 8 (3.10%) Hugging Face
12 8 (3.10%) Spark Streaming
12 8 (3.10%) XML
Miscellaneous
1 18 (6.98%) Distributed Computing
2 17 (6.59%) Algorithms
3 16 (6.20%) Cloud Native
4 7 (2.71%) Data Structures
5 6 (2.33%) Data Protection Act
5 6 (2.33%) Distributed Systems
5 6 (2.33%) Management Information System
6 5 (1.94%) Analytical Mindset
6 5 (1.94%) Hybrid Cloud
7 4 (1.55%) Derivative
7 4 (1.55%) Onboarding
8 3 (1.16%) AI Agents
8 3 (1.16%) Data Centre
8 3 (1.16%) Legacy Systems
8 3 (1.16%) Private Cloud
8 3 (1.16%) Product Ownership
8 3 (1.16%) Virtual Team
9 2 (0.78%) CMDB
9 2 (0.78%) Fixed Income
9 2 (0.78%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 30 (11.63%) Linux
2 9 (3.49%) Unix
3 3 (1.16%) Windows
4 2 (0.78%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 87 (33.72%) Agile
2 79 (30.62%) Data Pipeline
2 79 (30.62%) ETL
3 78 (30.23%) Data Modelling
4 73 (28.29%) Analytics
5 66 (25.58%) Machine Learning
6 64 (24.81%) Data Engineering
7 63 (24.42%) Problem-Solving
8 61 (23.64%) CI/CD
9 60 (23.26%) Data Science
10 57 (22.09%) Data Governance
11 47 (18.22%) Visualisation
12 44 (17.05%) AI
12 44 (17.05%) Business Intelligence
13 43 (16.67%) DevOps
14 41 (15.89%) Software Engineering
15 38 (14.73%) Decision-Making
15 38 (14.73%) Microservices
16 37 (14.34%) Containerisation
17 34 (13.18%) Data Integration
Programming Languages
1 176 (68.22%) Python
2 125 (48.45%) SQL
3 46 (17.83%) Java
4 28 (10.85%) Scala
5 22 (8.53%) R
6 16 (6.20%) C++
7 15 (5.81%) C#
7 15 (5.81%) JavaScript
8 14 (5.43%) Bash
9 6 (2.33%) Shell Script
10 4 (1.55%) PowerShell
11 3 (1.16%) Groovy
11 3 (1.16%) Perl
11 3 (1.16%) PL/SQL
12 2 (0.78%) C
12 2 (0.78%) Kusto Query Language
12 2 (0.78%) T-SQL
13 1 (0.39%) Go
13 1 (0.39%) Korn
Qualifications
1 52 (20.16%) Security Cleared
2 40 (15.50%) SC Cleared
3 33 (12.79%) Degree
4 27 (10.47%) DV Cleared
5 18 (6.98%) Computer Science Degree
5 18 (6.98%) Master's Degree
6 7 (2.71%) Azure Certification
7 6 (2.33%) AWS Certification
7 6 (2.33%) PhD
8 4 (1.55%) BPSS Clearance
9 3 (1.16%) ITIL Certification
10 2 (0.78%) CISSP
11 1 (0.39%) HP APS
11 1 (0.39%) Microsoft Certification
11 1 (0.39%) OCP
11 1 (0.39%) Oracle Certification
11 1 (0.39%) Postgraduate
11 1 (0.39%) Tableau Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 53 (20.54%) Data Quality
2 17 (6.59%) GDPR
3 11 (4.26%) QA
4 4 (1.55%) California Consumer Privacy Act
5 3 (1.16%) Accessibility
6 2 (0.78%) PCI DSS
7 1 (0.39%) HIPAA
7 1 (0.39%) IFRS
7 1 (0.39%) IFRS 17
7 1 (0.39%) Solvency II
System Software
1 36 (13.95%) Docker
2 12 (4.65%) HDFS
3 2 (0.78%) Slurm Workload Manager
4 1 (0.39%) Virtual Machines
Systems Management
1 43 (16.67%) Kubernetes
2 18 (6.98%) Terraform
3 15 (5.81%) Grafana
4 10 (3.88%) Ansible
4 10 (3.88%) Argo
4 10 (3.88%) Prometheus
5 7 (2.71%) Kibana
6 6 (2.33%) logstash
7 4 (1.55%) Hadoop YARN
8 3 (1.16%) Istio
8 3 (1.16%) Kustomize
8 3 (1.16%) Nagios
8 3 (1.16%) Oozie
8 3 (1.16%) Rancher
9 2 (0.78%) Progress Chef
10 1 (0.39%) HP ALM
10 1 (0.39%) Puppet
10 1 (0.39%) Tivoli
Vendors
1 43 (16.67%) Databricks
2 25 (9.69%) Google
3 21 (8.14%) Cloudera
4 16 (6.20%) Microsoft
5 14 (5.43%) Foundry
5 14 (5.43%) Palantir
6 9 (3.49%) Oracle
7 8 (3.10%) ServiceNow
8 5 (1.94%) Informatica
9 4 (1.55%) Ab Initio
9 4 (1.55%) Sage
10 3 (1.16%) Salesforce
11 2 (0.78%) Bloomberg
11 2 (0.78%) IBM
11 2 (0.78%) OpenAI
11 2 (0.78%) Red Hat
11 2 (0.78%) Refinitiv
11 2 (0.78%) Splunk
11 2 (0.78%) Talend
11 2 (0.78%) Vertica