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

6 months to
13 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 407 272 215
Rank change year-on-year -135 -57 +31
Contract jobs citing Big Data 267 309 452
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.50% 0.94% 1.16%
As % of the Database & Business Intelligence category 3.28% 5.18% 6.43%
Number of daily rates quoted 181 220 318
10th Percentile £358 £405 £368
25th Percentile £440 £461 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £550 £600
Median % change year-on-year - -8.33% -
75th Percentile £660 £662 £747
90th Percentile £738 £739 £841
UK excluding London median daily rate £505 £500 £550
% change year-on-year +1.00% -9.09% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 14 2 6
10th Percentile £61.45 £45.06 £28.75
25th Percentile £65.00 £54.22 £37.50
Median hourly rate £70.00 £69.48 £45.00
Median % change year-on-year +0.75% +54.40% -42.31%
75th Percentile £75.00 £84.74 £52.50
90th Percentile £90.00 £93.90 £53.75
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 8,147 5,961 7,031
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 15.27% 18.10% 18.05%
Number of daily rates quoted 5,430 4,022 4,961
10th Percentile £358 £344 £350
25th Percentile £419 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £510 £525
Median % change year-on-year -1.96% -2.86% -3.67%
75th Percentile £600 £625 £651
90th Percentile £700 £750 £800
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £475 £475
% change year-on-year - - -5.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 252 92 102
10th Percentile £15.94 £20.87 £15.10
25th Percentile £23.00 £25.99 £20.00
Median hourly rate £38.38 £34.99 £34.47
Median % change year-on-year +9.67% +1.52% -34.35%
75th Percentile £61.63 £59.75 £56.88
90th Percentile £76.00 £78.58 £71.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £38.25 £31.64 £30.00
% change year-on-year +20.89% +5.47% -38.77%

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 August 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 13 August 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 13 August 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 -137 226 £550 - 188
London -100 140 £600 +1.61% 151
UK excluding London -125 91 £505 +1.00% 57
Work from Home -66 85 £502 -4.38% 63
North of England -46 33 £525 +5.00% 9
South East -79 19 £513 -6.82% 18
Yorkshire -28 17 £550 -8.33% 4
Midlands -64 14 £410 -3.65% 7
Scotland -4 13 £416 -8.52% 11
East Midlands -21 9 £495 +20.73%
South West -37 9 £515 +7.01% 6
North East -37 8 £468 +1.08% 1
North West -45 8 £600 +20.00% 4
West Midlands -49 5 £405 -20.90% 7
East of England -33 2 £540 +7.46% 5
Wales - 2 £475 -

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
1 131 (49.06%) Apache Spark
2 37 (13.86%) Apache
3 36 (13.48%) Apache Airflow
4 6 (2.25%) Confluence
4 6 (2.25%) SAS
5 5 (1.87%) JBoss
5 5 (1.87%) Jupyter
5 5 (1.87%) SharePoint
6 4 (1.50%) Microsoft Exchange
6 4 (1.50%) Palantir Foundry
7 3 (1.12%) CMS
8 2 (0.75%) Apache Pig
9 1 (0.37%) Apache Superset
9 1 (0.37%) Luigi
Business Applications
1 2 (0.75%) Endur
2 1 (0.37%) Oracle ERP
2 1 (0.37%) SAP ERP
Cloud Services
1 128 (47.94%) AWS
2 101 (37.83%) Azure
3 80 (29.96%) GCP
4 42 (15.73%) Snowflake
5 32 (11.99%) Power Platform
6 31 (11.61%) Amazon S3
7 23 (8.61%) GitHub
8 21 (7.87%) Amazon EMR
9 20 (7.49%) Azure DevOps
10 18 (6.74%) AWS Lambda
11 15 (5.62%) Serverless
12 14 (5.24%) Amazon ECS
13 13 (4.87%) dbt
14 12 (4.49%) GitHub Actions
15 10 (3.75%) Amazon EKS
15 10 (3.75%) OpenShift
15 10 (3.75%) PaaS
16 9 (3.37%) Azure Data Factory
17 7 (2.62%) Salesforce Service Cloud
18 6 (2.25%) Amazon EventBridge
Communications & Networking
1 5 (1.87%) IPv4
1 5 (1.87%) IPv6
1 5 (1.87%) Kerberos
2 3 (1.12%) Broadband
2 3 (1.12%) DHCP
2 3 (1.12%) DNS
2 3 (1.12%) Firewall
2 3 (1.12%) SMTP
2 3 (1.12%) VPN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 57 (21.35%) Hadoop
2 46 (17.23%) Data Warehouse
3 39 (14.61%) Data Lake
4 34 (12.73%) NoSQL
5 30 (11.24%) Power BI
6 28 (10.49%) PostgreSQL
7 19 (7.12%) Amazon Redshift
8 18 (6.74%) Apache Hive
9 17 (6.37%) BigQuery
10 15 (5.62%) MongoDB
10 15 (5.62%) Relational Database
11 13 (4.87%) Amazon Athena
11 13 (4.87%) Amazon RDS
11 13 (4.87%) SQL Server
11 13 (4.87%) Tableau
12 12 (4.49%) Metadata
13 11 (4.12%) DynamoDB
14 9 (3.37%) Amazon Aurora
14 9 (3.37%) Data Vault
14 9 (3.37%) Elasticsearch
Development Applications
1 37 (13.86%) Git
2 29 (10.86%) Jenkins
3 28 (10.49%) GitLab
4 14 (5.24%) JIRA
5 8 (3.00%) Selenium
6 6 (2.25%) PowerDesigner
7 4 (1.50%) Robot Framework
8 3 (1.12%) JUnit
8 3 (1.12%) SonarQube
9 2 (0.75%) ERwin
9 2 (0.75%) JMeter
9 2 (0.75%) LoadRunner
9 2 (0.75%) MLflow
10 1 (0.37%) Claude Code
10 1 (0.37%) eggPlant
10 1 (0.37%) Gatling
10 1 (0.37%) Postman
10 1 (0.37%) TeamCity
General
1 90 (33.71%) Social Skills
2 71 (26.59%) Analytical Skills
3 64 (23.97%) Finance
4 32 (11.99%) Banking
5 20 (7.49%) Public Sector
6 10 (3.75%) Documentation Skills
6 10 (3.75%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 8 (3.00%) Investment Banking
7 8 (3.00%) Marketing
7 8 (3.00%) Telecoms
8 7 (2.62%) Legal
9 3 (1.12%) Aerospace
9 3 (1.12%) Organisational Skills
9 3 (1.12%) Retail
10 2 (0.75%) Influencing Skills
10 2 (0.75%) Local Government
11 1 (0.37%) Agriculture
11 1 (0.37%) Dutch Language
11 1 (0.37%) French Language
11 1 (0.37%) Police
Job Titles
1 84 (31.46%) Data Engineer
2 45 (16.85%) Architect
3 41 (15.36%) Senior
4 25 (9.36%) Developer
5 19 (7.12%) Lead
6 17 (6.37%) Solutions Architect
7 15 (5.62%) Analyst
7 15 (5.62%) Data Architect
8 14 (5.24%) Senior Data Engineer
9 12 (4.49%) Big Data Engineer
10 11 (4.12%) Data Scientist
11 9 (3.37%) Data Analyst
11 9 (3.37%) DevOps Engineer
11 9 (3.37%) Java Developer
11 9 (3.37%) Python Engineer
12 8 (3.00%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
12 8 (3.00%) Kafka Engineer
12 8 (3.00%) Scala Engineer
12 8 (3.00%) Test Engineer
13 7 (2.62%) Senior Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 63 (23.60%) Kafka
2 31 (11.61%) PySpark
3 19 (7.12%) REST
4 15 (5.62%) Spring
5 14 (5.24%) Spring Boot
6 12 (4.49%) Pandas
7 9 (3.37%) CSS
7 9 (3.37%) HTML
8 8 (3.00%) Apache NiFi
8 8 (3.00%) Elastic Stack
8 8 (3.00%) Middleware
8 8 (3.00%) Play Framework
9 7 (2.62%) NumPy
9 7 (2.62%) PyTorch
9 7 (2.62%) TensorFlow
10 5 (1.87%) Langfuse
10 5 (1.87%) Microsoft Graph
10 5 (1.87%) React
10 5 (1.87%) RESTful
11 4 (1.50%) Spark Streaming
Miscellaneous
1 38 (14.23%) Cloud Native
2 28 (10.49%) Distributed Systems
3 15 (5.62%) Product Ownership
4 14 (5.24%) Clustering
4 14 (5.24%) Data Structures
5 11 (4.12%) Virtual Team
6 9 (3.37%) Algorithms
7 8 (3.00%) Distributed Computing
7 8 (3.00%) Onboarding
8 7 (2.62%) Data Centre
9 6 (2.25%) Cyber Threat
10 5 (1.87%) Data Protection Act
10 5 (1.87%) Distributed Architecture
11 4 (1.50%) AI Agents
11 4 (1.50%) FMCG
12 3 (1.12%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
12 3 (1.12%) Linux Command Line
12 3 (1.12%) Management Information System
12 3 (1.12%) PKI
12 3 (1.12%) Social Media
Operating Systems
1 24 (8.99%) Linux
2 8 (3.00%) Unix
3 5 (1.87%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
3 5 (1.87%) Windows
3 5 (1.87%) Windows Server
4 1 (0.37%) Windows Server 2003
Processes & Methodologies
1 131 (49.06%) Data Pipeline
2 116 (43.45%) Analytics
3 101 (37.83%) Data Engineering
4 100 (37.45%) CI/CD
5 95 (35.58%) Agile
6 86 (32.21%) ETL
7 76 (28.46%) AI
8 68 (25.47%) Machine Learning
9 65 (24.34%) DevOps
10 61 (22.85%) Problem-Solving
11 60 (22.47%) Data Modelling
12 55 (20.60%) Data Governance
13 49 (18.35%) Data Science
14 45 (16.85%) Containerisation
15 43 (16.10%) Scrum
16 39 (14.61%) Validation
17 37 (13.86%) Business Intelligence
18 35 (13.11%) Data Analysis
18 35 (13.11%) Software Engineering
18 35 (13.11%) Stakeholder Management
Programming Languages
1 151 (56.55%) Python
2 125 (46.82%) SQL
3 61 (22.85%) Java
4 31 (11.61%) Scala
5 19 (7.12%) PowerShell
5 19 (7.12%) R
6 14 (5.24%) JavaScript
7 11 (4.12%) Bash
8 7 (2.62%) C#
9 5 (1.87%) SAS Macro
10 3 (1.12%) Rust
11 2 (0.75%) Go
11 2 (0.75%) Korn
11 2 (0.75%) Kusto Query Language
11 2 (0.75%) Shell Script
11 2 (0.75%) TypeScript
12 1 (0.37%) C
12 1 (0.37%) C++
12 1 (0.37%) Data Analysis Expressions
12 1 (0.37%) MATLAB
Qualifications
1 57 (21.35%) Security Cleared
2 42 (15.73%) SC Cleared
3 28 (10.49%) Degree
4 15 (5.62%) Computer Science Degree
5 12 (4.49%) Master's Degree
6 9 (3.37%) BPSS Clearance
7 7 (2.62%) Azure Certification
7 7 (2.62%) DV Cleared
8 6 (2.25%) AWS Certification
9 3 (1.12%) Microsoft Certification
9 3 (1.12%) PhD
9 3 (1.12%) SnowPro
10 2 (0.75%) (ISC)2 CCSP
10 2 (0.75%) Cisco Certification
10 2 (0.75%) CISSP
10 2 (0.75%) MCITP
10 2 (0.75%) MCTS
11 1 (0.37%) AWS Certified Developer
11 1 (0.37%) PMI Certification
11 1 (0.37%) PMP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 54 (20.22%) Data Quality
2 21 (7.87%) QA
3 15 (5.62%) GDPR
4 7 (2.62%) ISO/IEC 27001
4 7 (2.62%) NIST
5 3 (1.12%) Actionable Recommendations
5 3 (1.12%) SLA
6 2 (0.75%) PCI DSS
7 1 (0.37%) California Consumer Privacy Act
7 1 (0.37%) EU AI Act
7 1 (0.37%) IFRS
7 1 (0.37%) IFRS 9
7 1 (0.37%) NCSC
7 1 (0.37%) Sarbanes-Oxley
System Software
1 51 (19.10%) Docker
2 8 (3.00%) VMware Infrastructure
3 7 (2.62%) Active Directory
4 6 (2.25%) HDFS
5 3 (1.12%) BitLocker
5 3 (1.12%) Hyper-V
5 3 (1.12%) Microsoft App-V
5 3 (1.12%) Terminal Services
5 3 (1.12%) Virtual Machines
5 3 (1.12%) VMware ESXi
6 2 (0.75%) Apache Flume
Systems Management
1 54 (20.22%) Kubernetes
2 38 (14.23%) Terraform
3 31 (11.61%) Grafana
4 12 (4.49%) Prometheus
5 10 (3.75%) Ansible
5 10 (3.75%) Puppet
6 8 (3.00%) Kibana
7 5 (1.87%) Red Hat Satellite
8 4 (1.50%) Failover Clustering
9 3 (1.12%) Nagios
9 3 (1.12%) vCenter Server
9 3 (1.12%) vMotion
10 2 (0.75%) Control-M
11 1 (0.37%) HP ALM
11 1 (0.37%) Kubeflow
Vendors
1 60 (22.47%) Databricks
2 25 (9.36%) Google
3 24 (8.99%) Microsoft
4 17 (6.37%) Splunk
5 12 (4.49%) Salesforce
6 11 (4.12%) Cloudera
7 8 (3.00%) IBM
7 8 (3.00%) VMware
8 7 (2.62%) Foundry
9 6 (2.25%) Oracle
10 5 (1.87%) Amplitude
10 5 (1.87%) Cisco
10 5 (1.87%) Red Hat
11 4 (1.50%) HP
11 4 (1.50%) Informatica
11 4 (1.50%) Palantir
12 3 (1.12%) Citrix
12 3 (1.12%) Symantec
12 3 (1.12%) Talend
12 3 (1.12%) Teradata