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

6 months to
13 Nov 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 326 200 236
Rank change year-on-year -126 +36 -67
Contract jobs citing Big Data 265 432 487
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.75% 1.18% 1.05%
As % of the Database & Business Intelligence category 4.17% 6.72% 6.28%
Number of daily rates quoted 204 271 313
10th Percentile £375 £354 £400
25th Percentile £413 £450 £488
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -4.55% - -8.33%
75th Percentile £619 £700 £700
90th Percentile £760 £813 £825
UK excluding London median daily rate £450 £594 £501
% change year-on-year -24.24% +18.68% -16.58%
Number of hourly rates quoted 1 5 26
10th Percentile - £27.25 £42.76
25th Percentile - £36.25 £46.18
Median hourly rate £38.96 £47.50 £72.00
Median % change year-on-year -17.98% -34.03% +105.71%
75th Percentile - £53.75 £78.00
90th Percentile - - £87.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £38.96 - £75.00

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 6,352 6,429 7,752
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 17.89% 17.63% 16.77%
Number of daily rates quoted 4,327 4,272 5,413
10th Percentile £333 £341 £350
25th Percentile £413 £425 £438
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £527 £533
Median % change year-on-year -5.17% -1.08% -3.09%
75th Percentile £615 £650 £650
90th Percentile £720 £775 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £490 £500
% change year-on-year -3.06% -2.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 92 88 152
10th Percentile £20.78 £17.85 £17.13
25th Percentile £29.00 £21.81 £23.06
Median hourly rate £43.50 £30.11 £46.18
Median % change year-on-year +44.49% -34.81% +2.62%
75th Percentile £65.00 £49.50 £69.06
90th Percentile £83.08 £64.81 £78.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £41.75 £28.75 £46.18
% change year-on-year +45.22% -37.74% +13.38%

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 13 November 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 13 November 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 -135 233 £525 -5.83% 223
London -84 144 £550 - 123
UK excluding London -95 91 £450 -24.24% 104
Work from Home -35 83 £500 -4.76% 96
South East -12 20 £475 -8.65% 40
Midlands -38 19 £420 -31.37% 12
Scotland +3 16 £500 +29.87% 7
North of England -51 15 £500 -1.38% 18
East Midlands -3 14 £420 -1.18% 5
South West -23 13 £525 -21.35% 5
North West -11 12 £500 +22.25% 13
East of England -15 8 £500 -20.00% 17
West Midlands -38 5 £402 -34.31% 6
North East -13 2 - - 1
Northern Ireland -7 1 £513 -6.82% 2
Yorkshire -56 1 - - 4

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
1 106 (40.00%) Apache Spark
2 47 (17.74%) Apache
3 29 (10.94%) Apache Airflow
4 15 (5.66%) Confluence
5 3 (1.13%) Jupyter
6 2 (0.75%) Apache Pig
6 2 (0.75%) Luigi
6 2 (0.75%) SAS
7 1 (0.38%) Apache Superset
7 1 (0.38%) IIS
7 1 (0.38%) MS Project Server
7 1 (0.38%) nginx
Applications
1 2 (0.75%) Microsoft Office
1 2 (0.75%) MS Visio
2 1 (0.38%) Microsoft Excel
2 1 (0.38%) Microsoft PowerPoint
2 1 (0.38%) Microsoft Project
Business Applications
1 3 (1.13%) Avolution ABACUS
1 3 (1.13%) Salesforce CRM
2 2 (0.75%) Distributed Ledger
Cloud Services
1 104 (39.25%) AWS
2 83 (31.32%) Azure
3 62 (23.40%) GCP
4 34 (12.83%) Power Platform
5 31 (11.70%) Serverless
6 26 (9.81%) Snowflake
7 20 (7.55%) Amazon S3
8 18 (6.79%) GitHub
9 13 (4.91%) Azure Data Factory
10 11 (4.15%) Amazon SageMaker
11 10 (3.77%) Azure Synapse Analytics
12 9 (3.40%) Azure DevOps
12 9 (3.40%) GitHub Actions
13 8 (3.02%) AWS Lambda
13 8 (3.02%) Google Kubernetes Engine
14 7 (2.64%) AWS Step Functions
14 7 (2.64%) OpenShift
15 6 (2.26%) Amazon ECS
16 5 (1.89%) Microsoft Copilot
17 4 (1.51%) Amazon Bedrock
Communications & Networking
1 4 (1.51%) DNS
1 4 (1.51%) TCP/IP
2 3 (1.13%) SSH
3 2 (0.75%) Internet
3 2 (0.75%) SSL
4 1 (0.38%) HTTP
4 1 (0.38%) Kerberos
4 1 (0.38%) VPN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 96 (36.23%) Hadoop
2 52 (19.62%) Data Warehouse
3 38 (14.34%) Data Lake
4 37 (13.96%) NoSQL
5 34 (12.83%) Power BI
6 28 (10.57%) Elasticsearch
7 25 (9.43%) Metadata
7 25 (9.43%) Tableau
8 24 (9.06%) Relational Database
8 24 (9.06%) SQL Server
9 22 (8.30%) PostgreSQL
10 21 (7.92%) Apache Hive
11 19 (7.17%) BigQuery
12 12 (4.53%) HBase
12 12 (4.53%) RDBMS
13 9 (3.40%) Amazon Athena
13 9 (3.40%) Impala
14 8 (3.02%) MongoDB
15 7 (2.64%) Data Vault
15 7 (2.64%) MySQL
Development Applications
1 39 (14.72%) Git
2 22 (8.30%) JIRA
3 18 (6.79%) Jenkins
4 16 (6.04%) GitLab
5 10 (3.77%) MLflow
6 7 (2.64%) ERwin
7 5 (1.89%) Artifactory
7 5 (1.89%) ER Studio
8 4 (1.51%) Gradle
8 4 (1.51%) SonarQube
9 3 (1.13%) Maven
9 3 (1.13%) Sonatype Nexus
10 2 (0.75%) Cypress.io
10 2 (0.75%) Poetry
10 2 (0.75%) PyCharm
10 2 (0.75%) Subversion
10 2 (0.75%) Visual Studio Code
11 1 (0.38%) Cucumber
11 1 (0.38%) Gatling
11 1 (0.38%) JMeter
General
1 72 (27.17%) Finance
2 71 (26.79%) Social Skills
3 46 (17.36%) Analytical Skills
4 28 (10.57%) Banking
5 13 (4.91%) Public Sector
6 11 (4.15%) Telecoms
7 8 (3.02%) Financial Institution
8 5 (1.89%) Investment Banking
8 5 (1.89%) Retail
9 4 (1.51%) Influencing Skills
9 4 (1.51%) Manufacturing
10 3 (1.13%) General Ledger
11 2 (0.75%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 2 (0.75%) Marketing
11 2 (0.75%) Organisational Skills
11 2 (0.75%) Presentation Skills
12 1 (0.38%) Agriculture
12 1 (0.38%) Corporate Banking
12 1 (0.38%) Police
12 1 (0.38%) Retail Banking
Job Titles
1 76 (28.68%) Data Engineer
2 38 (14.34%) Senior
3 34 (12.83%) Architect
4 27 (10.19%) Developer
5 22 (8.30%) Data Scientist
6 20 (7.55%) Data Architect
7 19 (7.17%) Lead
8 15 (5.66%) Analyst
9 14 (5.28%) Software Engineer
10 13 (4.91%) Python Engineer
11 10 (3.77%) Data Analyst
11 10 (3.77%) Solutions Architect
12 9 (3.40%) Big Data Engineer
12 9 (3.40%) Java Engineer
12 9 (3.40%) Python Data Engineer
12 9 (3.40%) Senior Data Engineer
13 8 (3.02%) Azure Engineer
13 8 (3.02%) Scala Developer
13 8 (3.02%) Senior Software Engineer
14 7 (2.64%) Data Modeller
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 61 (23.02%) Kafka
2 32 (12.08%) PySpark
3 28 (10.57%) Apache NiFi
4 22 (8.30%) Pandas
5 20 (7.55%) scikit-learn
6 15 (5.66%) PyTorch
6 15 (5.66%) TensorFlow
7 14 (5.28%) Flask
7 14 (5.28%) NumPy
8 13 (4.91%) .NET
8 13 (4.91%) RESTful
9 12 (4.53%) Elastic Stack
9 12 (4.53%) OpenTelemetry
9 12 (4.53%) RabbitMQ
10 11 (4.15%) HTML
10 11 (4.15%) JSON
10 11 (4.15%) REST
11 10 (3.77%) React
12 9 (3.40%) Hugging Face
12 9 (3.40%) XML
Miscellaneous
1 19 (7.17%) Distributed Computing
2 17 (6.42%) Algorithms
2 17 (6.42%) Cloud Native
3 9 (3.40%) Data Structures
4 6 (2.26%) Distributed Systems
5 5 (1.89%) Analytical Mindset
5 5 (1.89%) Data Protection Act
5 5 (1.89%) Hybrid Cloud
5 5 (1.89%) Onboarding
6 4 (1.51%) AI Agents
6 4 (1.51%) Derivative
6 4 (1.51%) Management Information System
6 4 (1.51%) Private Cloud
6 4 (1.51%) Self-Motivation
7 3 (1.13%) Credit Risk
7 3 (1.13%) Data Centre
7 3 (1.13%) IoT
7 3 (1.13%) Legacy Systems
8 2 (0.75%) Market Risk
8 2 (0.75%) Reference Data
Operating Systems
1 30 (11.32%) Linux
2 11 (4.15%) Unix
3 6 (2.26%) Windows
4 4 (1.51%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 1 (0.38%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 85 (32.08%) Agile
2 84 (31.70%) Data Modelling
3 80 (30.19%) ETL
4 76 (28.68%) Analytics
5 73 (27.55%) Data Pipeline
6 69 (26.04%) Machine Learning
7 65 (24.53%) Data Engineering
8 63 (23.77%) CI/CD
9 59 (22.26%) Data Governance
10 58 (21.89%) Data Science
11 54 (20.38%) Problem-Solving
12 50 (18.87%) AI
13 46 (17.36%) Visualisation
14 42 (15.85%) Business Intelligence
14 42 (15.85%) Microservices
14 42 (15.85%) Software Engineering
15 40 (15.09%) Containerisation
16 38 (14.34%) DevOps
17 37 (13.96%) Data Integration
18 34 (12.83%) Decision-Making
Programming Languages
1 177 (66.79%) Python
2 127 (47.92%) SQL
3 48 (18.11%) Java
4 28 (10.57%) Scala
5 20 (7.55%) C++
6 18 (6.79%) R
7 14 (5.28%) C#
8 13 (4.91%) JavaScript
9 11 (4.15%) Bash
10 6 (2.26%) C
10 6 (2.26%) Shell Script
11 3 (1.13%) Groovy
11 3 (1.13%) Perl
11 3 (1.13%) PowerShell
12 2 (0.75%) Kusto Query Language
12 2 (0.75%) PL/SQL
13 1 (0.38%) CodeQL
13 1 (0.38%) Go
13 1 (0.38%) Korn
13 1 (0.38%) T-SQL
Qualifications
1 46 (17.36%) Security Cleared
2 37 (13.96%) SC Cleared
3 33 (12.45%) Degree
4 25 (9.43%) DV Cleared
5 19 (7.17%) Master's Degree
6 17 (6.42%) Computer Science Degree
7 7 (2.64%) Azure Certification
8 6 (2.26%) AWS Certification
9 5 (1.89%) PhD
10 3 (1.13%) ITIL Certification
11 2 (0.75%) BPSS Clearance
11 2 (0.75%) CISSP
12 1 (0.38%) Microsoft Certification
12 1 (0.38%) OCP
12 1 (0.38%) Oracle Certification
12 1 (0.38%) PMI Certification
12 1 (0.38%) Postgraduate
12 1 (0.38%) Tableau Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 54 (20.38%) Data Quality
2 17 (6.42%) GDPR
3 12 (4.53%) QA
4 4 (1.51%) Accessibility
4 4 (1.51%) California Consumer Privacy Act
5 1 (0.38%) IFRS
5 1 (0.38%) IFRS 17
5 1 (0.38%) PCI DSS
5 1 (0.38%) Solvency II
System Software
1 34 (12.83%) Docker
2 10 (3.77%) HDFS
3 2 (0.75%) Slurm Workload Manager
4 1 (0.38%) Virtual Machines
Systems Management
1 45 (16.98%) Kubernetes
2 21 (7.92%) Terraform
3 16 (6.04%) Grafana
4 10 (3.77%) Ansible
4 10 (3.77%) Argo
5 9 (3.40%) Prometheus
6 7 (2.64%) Kibana
7 6 (2.26%) logstash
8 4 (1.51%) Hadoop YARN
8 4 (1.51%) Kustomize
9 3 (1.13%) Istio
9 3 (1.13%) Oozie
10 2 (0.75%) Progress Chef
11 1 (0.38%) Kubeflow
11 1 (0.38%) Nagios
11 1 (0.38%) Puppet
11 1 (0.38%) Rancher
11 1 (0.38%) Single Sign-On
Vendors
1 41 (15.47%) Databricks
2 28 (10.57%) Google
3 21 (7.92%) Cloudera
3 21 (7.92%) Microsoft
4 16 (6.04%) Foundry
4 16 (6.04%) Palantir
5 9 (3.40%) Oracle
6 7 (2.64%) ServiceNow
7 5 (1.89%) Informatica
8 4 (1.51%) Sage
9 3 (1.13%) Ab Initio
9 3 (1.13%) Salesforce
10 2 (0.75%) Bloomberg
10 2 (0.75%) OpenAI
10 2 (0.75%) Red Hat
10 2 (0.75%) Refinitiv
10 2 (0.75%) Splunk
10 2 (0.75%) Talend
10 2 (0.75%) Vertica
11 1 (0.38%) SnapLogic