Data Architect Contract Job Trends

Data Architect
UK

The median Data Architect daily rate in the UK is £625, according to job vacancies posted in the 6 months leading up to 14 August 2026.

The table below compares current contractor rates and summary statistics with the previous two years.

6 months to
14 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 193 267 261
Rank change year-on-year +74 -6 +19
Contract jobs requiring a Data Architect 764 320 334
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 1.43% 0.97% 0.86%
As % of the Job Titles category 1.55% 1.06% 0.92%
Number of daily rates quoted 548 201 231
10th Percentile £463 £463 £488
25th Percentile £525 £513 £531
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £625 £600 £650
Median % change year-on-year +4.17% -7.69% -3.70%
75th Percentile £688 £700 £753
90th Percentile £775 £780 £875
UK excluding London median daily rate £625 £585 £663
% change year-on-year +6.84% -11.70% +6.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 14 2 11
10th Percentile - £41.31 £52.50
25th Percentile £46.00 £44.85 -
Median hourly rate £58.50 £51.98 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +12.54% -13.37% -6.98%
75th Percentile £70.00 £60.37 -
90th Percentile - £64.65 -
UK excluding London median hourly rate £58.50 £38.96 £60.00
% change year-on-year +50.15% -35.07% -9.09%

All Contract IT Job Roles
UK

For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all contract IT job vacancies. Most job vacancies include a discernible job title that can be normalized. As such, the figures in the second row provide an indication of the number of contract jobs in our overall sample.

Contract vacancies in the UK with a recognized job title 49,408 30,056 36,163
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.54% 91.31% 92.90%
Number of daily rates quoted 29,654 19,017 23,287
10th Percentile £325 £281 £300
25th Percentile £425 £400 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -1.87%
75th Percentile £625 £623 £638
90th Percentile £725 £725 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 3,477 1,528 2,029
10th Percentile £15.00 £13.59 £14.23
25th Percentile £20.69 £17.29 £20.50
Median hourly rate £42.00 £25.15 £43.00
Median % change year-on-year +67.00% -41.51% +2.00%
75th Percentile £67.98 £53.75 £65.00
90th Percentile £80.00 £72.50 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £43.13 £25.15 £45.00
% change year-on-year +71.50% -44.11% +23.29%

Data Architect
Job Vacancy Trend

Historical trend showing the proportion of contract IT job postings featuring 'Data Architect' in the job title relative to all contract IT jobs advertised.

Data Architect job vacancy trend in the UK

Data Architect
Daily Rate Trend

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for Data Architect job vacancies in the UK.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for Data Architect job vacancies in the UK

Data Architect
Daily Rate Histogram

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Data Architect over the 6 months to 14 August 2026.

Daily rate histogram for Data Architect in the UK

Data Architect
Hourly Rate Trend

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for Data Architect job vacancies in the UK.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for Data Architect job vacancies in the UK

Data Architect
Hourly Rate Histogram

Hourly rate distribution of jobs citing Data Architect over the 6 months to 14 August 2026.

Hourly rate histogram for Data Architect in the UK

Data Architect
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 Data Architect within the UK over the 6 months to 14 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 +70 658 £620 +3.33% 301
London +40 349 £600 - 189
UK excluding London +54 302 £625 +6.84% 146
Work from Home +30 209 £619 +3.13% 131
Midlands +14 88 £625 -3.85% 25
West Midlands -2 70 £644 -4.63% 19
North of England -33 63 £639 +16.18% 42
South East -34 50 £609 +8.33% 37
South West -10 46 £651 +17.30% 14
Yorkshire -20 36 £675 -3.57% 16
East of England +8 35 £550 - 6
North West -31 26 £600 +14.29% 20
Scotland -11 20 £690 +34.18% 14
East Midlands -6 18 £606 +1.04% 6
North East - 4 £550 - 6
Wales - 1 £475 -

Data Architect Skill Set
Top 30 Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities

For the 6 months to 14 August 2026, Data Architect contract job roles required the following skills and capabilities in order of popularity. The figures indicate the absolute number of co-occurrences and as a proportion of all contract job ads featuring Data Architect in the job title.

1 379 (49.61%) Data Architecture
2 327 (42.80%) Data Modelling
3 254 (33.25%) Azure
4 245 (32.07%) Security Cleared
5 222 (29.06%) Analytics
6 207 (27.09%) SC Cleared
7 202 (26.44%) Data Governance
8 188 (24.61%) Migration
9 173 (22.64%) AWS
10 161 (21.07%) Databricks
11 143 (18.72%) AI
12 138 (18.06%) Data Quality
13 129 (16.88%) Business Intelligence
13 129 (16.88%) ETL
14 127 (16.62%) Data Warehouse
15 125 (16.36%) Metadata
16 124 (16.23%) Integration Patterns
17 122 (15.97%) Data Lake
18 118 (15.45%) SQL
19 113 (14.79%) Logical Data Model
20 105 (13.74%) Stakeholder Engagement
21 100 (13.09%) Data Integration
22 97 (12.70%) Data Strategy
23 95 (12.43%) Data Engineering
24 94 (12.30%) Stakeholder Management
25 93 (12.17%) Power Platform
26 92 (12.04%) Data Pipeline
27 86 (11.26%) Power BI
28 85 (11.13%) Microsoft
29 82 (10.73%) GCP

Data Architect Skill Set
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 25 (3.27%) SAS
2 24 (3.14%) Apache Spark
3 18 (2.36%) Apache
3 18 (2.36%) Palantir Foundry
4 14 (1.83%) Apache Airflow
5 9 (1.18%) SharePoint
6 6 (0.79%) Confluence
7 2 (0.26%) Alfresco
7 2 (0.26%) PowerExchange
8 1 (0.13%) JBoss
8 1 (0.13%) Jupyter
Applications
1 6 (0.79%) Microsoft Excel
2 1 (0.13%) MS Visio
Business Applications
1 5 (0.65%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
2 4 (0.52%) SAP S/4HANA
3 2 (0.26%) SAP ERP
3 2 (0.26%) Workday HCM
4 1 (0.13%) Aladdin
4 1 (0.13%) iTrent
4 1 (0.13%) Maximo
4 1 (0.13%) Oracle ERP
4 1 (0.13%) SAP MDM
4 1 (0.13%) SystmOne
Cloud Services
1 254 (33.25%) Azure
2 173 (22.64%) AWS
3 93 (12.17%) Power Platform
4 82 (10.73%) GCP
5 65 (8.51%) Snowflake
6 50 (6.54%) Azure Synapse Analytics
7 47 (6.15%) Azure Data Factory
8 31 (4.06%) Amazon S3
9 27 (3.53%) dbt
9 27 (3.53%) Microsoft Purview
10 26 (3.40%) AWS Lambda
10 26 (3.40%) Serverless
11 16 (2.09%) Azure DevOps
12 15 (1.96%) SaaS
13 12 (1.57%) Amazon EMR
14 11 (1.44%) Amazon Kinesis
15 10 (1.31%) Azure Cosmos DB
15 10 (1.31%) Collibra
16 9 (1.18%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 9 (1.18%) Azure Machine Learning
Communications & Networking
1 5 (0.65%) Firewall
2 3 (0.39%) Network Security
2 3 (0.39%) VPN
3 2 (0.26%) BGP
3 2 (0.26%) DSL
3 2 (0.26%) OSPF
3 2 (0.26%) SAN
3 2 (0.26%) Structured Cabling
3 2 (0.26%) VXLAN
4 1 (0.13%) Radio Access Network
4 1 (0.13%) SMS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 127 (16.62%) Data Warehouse
2 125 (16.36%) Metadata
3 122 (15.97%) Data Lake
4 86 (11.26%) Power BI
5 45 (5.89%) NoSQL
6 28 (3.66%) Amazon Redshift
6 28 (3.66%) BigQuery
7 25 (3.27%) Enterprise Data Warehouse
8 21 (2.75%) Azure SQL Database
9 17 (2.23%) Data Vault
9 17 (2.23%) Delta Lake
10 16 (2.09%) Base SAS
11 15 (1.96%) Big Data
11 15 (1.96%) Semantic Layer
11 15 (1.96%) Snowflake Schema
12 13 (1.70%) Amazon Athena
12 13 (1.70%) Elasticsearch
12 13 (1.70%) PostgreSQL
12 13 (1.70%) SQL Server
13 12 (1.57%) Data Mining
Development Applications
1 22 (2.88%) ERwin
2 9 (1.18%) Git
3 6 (0.79%) GitLab
4 4 (0.52%) ER Studio
5 3 (0.39%) JIRA
6 2 (0.26%) Jenkins
6 2 (0.26%) Oracle Forms
7 1 (0.13%) Claude Code
7 1 (0.13%) MLflow
7 1 (0.13%) Visual Studio Code
General
1 141 (18.46%) Social Skills
2 122 (15.97%) Finance
3 114 (14.92%) Public Sector
4 62 (8.12%) Analytical Skills
5 37 (4.84%) Banking
6 34 (4.45%) Retail
7 17 (2.23%) Influencing Skills
7 17 (2.23%) Marketing
8 13 (1.70%) Police
9 10 (1.31%) Documentation Skills
10 9 (1.18%) Legal
11 8 (1.05%) Financial Institution
12 7 (0.92%) Inclusion and Diversity
12 7 (0.92%) Presentation Skills
13 6 (0.79%) Investment Banking
13 6 (0.79%) Local Government
14 5 (0.65%) Manufacturing
15 2 (0.26%) General Ledger
15 2 (0.26%) Private Banking
15 2 (0.26%) Retail Banking
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 33 (4.32%) Kafka
2 24 (3.14%) PySpark
3 17 (2.23%) Oracle Fusion
4 7 (0.92%) .NET
5 6 (0.79%) Middleware
5 6 (0.79%) REST
6 5 (0.65%) FHIR
6 5 (0.65%) JSON
7 3 (0.39%) LangChain
7 3 (0.39%) LangGraph
7 3 (0.39%) Spark Streaming
8 2 (0.26%) AngularJS
8 2 (0.26%) Apache NiFi
8 2 (0.26%) FastAPI
8 2 (0.26%) JWT
8 2 (0.26%) OpenTelemetry
8 2 (0.26%) pytest
8 2 (0.26%) React
8 2 (0.26%) Spring Boot
8 2 (0.26%) WebSockets
Miscellaneous
1 63 (8.25%) Cloud Native
2 38 (4.97%) Data Structures
3 27 (3.53%) Legacy Systems
4 24 (3.14%) Reference Data
5 17 (2.23%) Data Centre
5 17 (2.23%) Management Information System
6 15 (1.96%) AI Agents
7 14 (1.83%) NHS
7 14 (1.83%) Taxonomies
8 13 (1.70%) Data Protection Act
8 13 (1.70%) Onboarding
9 11 (1.44%) IoT
10 10 (1.31%) Product Ownership
10 10 (1.31%) SCADA
11 9 (1.18%) Autonomous Agent
11 9 (1.18%) Greenfield Project
12 8 (1.05%) Data Fabric
12 8 (1.05%) Digital Media
12 8 (1.05%) Distributed Systems
12 8 (1.05%) Mainframe
Operating Systems
1 5 (0.65%) zOS
2 3 (0.39%) Linux
2 3 (0.39%) Windows
3 2 (0.26%) AIX
3 2 (0.26%) HPUX
3 2 (0.26%) Solaris
Processes & Methodologies
1 379 (49.61%) Data Architecture
2 327 (42.80%) Data Modelling
3 222 (29.06%) Analytics
4 202 (26.44%) Data Governance
5 188 (24.61%) Migration
6 143 (18.72%) AI
7 129 (16.88%) Business Intelligence
7 129 (16.88%) ETL
8 124 (16.23%) Integration Patterns
9 113 (14.79%) Logical Data Model
10 105 (13.74%) Stakeholder Engagement
11 100 (13.09%) Data Integration
12 97 (12.70%) Data Strategy
13 95 (12.43%) Data Engineering
14 94 (12.30%) Stakeholder Management
15 92 (12.04%) Data Pipeline
16 78 (10.21%) Roadmaps
17 75 (9.82%) Agile
18 74 (9.69%) CI/CD
18 74 (9.69%) Physical Data Model
Programming Languages
1 118 (15.45%) SQL
2 56 (7.33%) Python
3 18 (2.36%) Java
4 9 (1.18%) Bicep
5 7 (0.92%) Data Analysis Expressions
6 5 (0.65%) R
6 5 (0.65%) Scala
7 3 (0.39%) Kotlin
7 3 (0.39%) T-SQL
8 2 (0.26%) Cypher
8 2 (0.26%) PL/SQL
8 2 (0.26%) PowerShell
8 2 (0.26%) SHACL
8 2 (0.26%) Shell Script
8 2 (0.26%) TypeScript
9 1 (0.13%) C++
9 1 (0.13%) COBOL
9 1 (0.13%) Kusto Query Language
Qualifications
1 245 (32.07%) Security Cleared
2 207 (27.09%) SC Cleared
3 28 (3.66%) DV Cleared
4 26 (3.40%) BPSS Clearance
5 14 (1.83%) Azure Certification
6 12 (1.57%) AWS Certification
7 7 (0.92%) DBS Check
7 7 (0.92%) Degree
8 5 (0.65%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
9 3 (0.39%) Computer Science Degree
9 3 (0.39%) TOGAF Certification
10 2 (0.26%) Master's Degree
10 2 (0.26%) Microsoft Certified Professional
10 2 (0.26%) VCAP
10 2 (0.26%) VCDX
11 1 (0.13%) CISSP
11 1 (0.13%) Microsoft Certification
11 1 (0.13%) Oracle Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 138 (18.06%) Data Quality
2 40 (5.24%) GDPR
3 12 (1.57%) Accessibility
3 12 (1.57%) ISO/IEC 27001
4 10 (1.31%) QA
5 7 (0.92%) NIST
5 7 (0.92%) Solvency II
6 6 (0.79%) HL7
6 6 (0.79%) IFRS
7 5 (0.65%) IFRS 17
7 5 (0.65%) SNOMED CT
8 4 (0.52%) ISO/IEC 42001
8 4 (0.52%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 3 (0.39%) California Consumer Privacy Act
9 3 (0.39%) ISO 20022
10 2 (0.26%) GRC
10 2 (0.26%) GxP
10 2 (0.26%) NCSC
10 2 (0.26%) SLA
11 1 (0.13%) Good Clinical Practice
System Software
1 3 (0.39%) Active Directory
1 3 (0.39%) Docker
1 3 (0.39%) VMware Infrastructure
2 1 (0.13%) VMware ESXi
2 1 (0.13%) vSphere
Systems Management
1 26 (3.40%) Terraform
2 9 (1.18%) Kubernetes
3 5 (0.65%) Grafana
4 4 (0.52%) Ansible
5 3 (0.39%) Istio
5 3 (0.39%) Prometheus
6 2 (0.26%) Argo
6 2 (0.26%) NetBackup
7 1 (0.13%) Control-M
Vendors
1 161 (21.07%) Databricks
2 85 (11.13%) Microsoft
3 41 (5.37%) Oracle
4 21 (2.75%) Foundry
4 21 (2.75%) Google
4 21 (2.75%) Informatica
4 21 (2.75%) SAP
5 19 (2.49%) Palantir
6 18 (2.36%) Salesforce
7 9 (1.18%) Denodo
8 8 (1.05%) Talend
9 7 (0.92%) IFS
9 7 (0.92%) Sparx
10 6 (0.79%) OpenAI
11 4 (0.52%) NVIDIA
12 3 (0.39%) Cloudera
12 3 (0.39%) Confluent
12 3 (0.39%) Guidewire
12 3 (0.39%) IBM
12 3 (0.39%) Workday