Data Architect Contract Job Trends

Data Architect
UK

The median Data Architect daily rate in the UK is £611, according to job vacancies posted in the 6 months leading up to 12 July 2026.

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

6 months to
12 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 208 268 272
Rank change year-on-year +60 +4 +14
Contract jobs requiring a Data Architect 687 318 381
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 1.30% 0.97% 0.89%
As % of the Job Titles category 1.40% 1.06% 0.95%
Number of daily rates quoted 478 213 269
10th Percentile £463 £457 £500
25th Percentile £525 £513 £540
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £611 £600 £670
Median % change year-on-year +1.88% -10.45% -0.74%
75th Percentile £688 £713 £758
90th Percentile £775 £786 £913
UK excluding London median daily rate £613 £586 £650
% change year-on-year +4.48% -9.81% +4.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 11 2 11
10th Percentile - £41.31 £52.50
25th Percentile £46.00 £44.85 -
Median hourly rate £47.00 £51.98 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year -9.58% -13.37% -6.98%
75th Percentile £64.00 £60.37 -
90th Percentile £69.00 £64.65 -
UK excluding London median hourly rate £47.00 £38.96 £60.00
% change year-on-year +20.64% -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 48,976 30,008 39,912
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.49% 91.87% 93.03%
Number of daily rates quoted 29,674 19,142 25,677
10th Percentile £325 £287 £288
25th Percentile £418 £400 £410
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £523 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +4.50% -4.76% -2.33%
75th Percentile £625 £625 £638
90th Percentile £725 £738 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £495
% change year-on-year +5.26% -4.04% -1.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 3,289 1,390 2,727
10th Percentile £15.83 £13.75 £13.00
25th Percentile £21.25 £17.33 £17.00
Median hourly rate £43.50 £26.50 £39.55
Median % change year-on-year +64.15% -33.00% -8.02%
75th Percentile £67.50 £56.25 £62.98
90th Percentile £80.00 £73.75 £73.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £45.00 £25.15 £40.00
% change year-on-year +78.93% -37.13% +1.14%

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 12 July 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 12 July 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 12 July 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 +49 587 £608 +1.29% 170
London +35 313 £595 -0.83% 91
UK excluding London +30 274 £613 +4.48% 104
Work from Home +18 195 £610 +1.67% 77
Midlands +7 78 £622 -4.31% 13
West Midlands -21 61 £638 +6.25% 7
North of England -51 60 £610 -2.40% 23
South West -4 39 £651 +24.00% 21
South East -44 39 £513 -6.82% 33
Yorkshire -28 37 £675 +8.00% 9
Scotland -6 31 £645 +19.78% 10
East of England -2 29 £550 -8.33% 4
North West -43 19 £588 +11.90% 13
East Midlands -1 17 £606 - 6
North East -30 7 £550 -26.67% 1
Wales -13 3 £768 +225.21%

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

For the 6 months to 12 July 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.

1 351 (51.09%) Data Architecture
2 308 (44.83%) Data Modelling
3 234 (34.06%) Azure
4 216 (31.44%) Analytics
5 205 (29.84%) Security Cleared
6 178 (25.91%) SC Cleared
7 172 (25.04%) Data Governance
8 165 (24.02%) Migration
9 150 (21.83%) AWS
10 145 (21.11%) Databricks
11 131 (19.07%) ETL
12 126 (18.34%) AI
12 126 (18.34%) Business Intelligence
13 124 (18.05%) Metadata
14 118 (17.18%) Data Warehouse
15 112 (16.30%) Integration Patterns
16 111 (16.16%) Data Quality
17 109 (15.87%) SQL
18 103 (14.99%) Data Lake
19 102 (14.85%) Data Integration
20 95 (13.83%) Data Pipeline
21 94 (13.68%) Data Engineering
22 92 (13.39%) Logical Data Model
23 87 (12.66%) Power Platform
24 83 (12.08%) Microsoft
25 81 (11.79%) Stakeholder Engagement
26 79 (11.50%) Power BI
27 78 (11.35%) Data Management
28 75 (10.92%) Machine Learning
29 74 (10.77%) Data Migration

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 23 (3.35%) SAS
2 18 (2.62%) Apache Spark
3 17 (2.47%) Palantir Foundry
4 14 (2.04%) Apache
4 14 (2.04%) Apache Airflow
5 12 (1.75%) SharePoint
6 5 (0.73%) Confluence
7 2 (0.29%) Alfresco
8 1 (0.15%) Appian
8 1 (0.15%) Jupyter
Applications
1 2 (0.29%) MS Visio
Business Applications
1 5 (0.73%) SAP S/4HANA
1 5 (0.73%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
2 2 (0.29%) SAP ERP
3 1 (0.15%) Aladdin
3 1 (0.15%) iTrent
3 1 (0.15%) Maximo
3 1 (0.15%) SAP MDM
3 1 (0.15%) SystmOne
3 1 (0.15%) Workday HCM
Cloud Services
1 234 (34.06%) Azure
2 150 (21.83%) AWS
3 87 (12.66%) Power Platform
4 71 (10.33%) GCP
5 57 (8.30%) Snowflake
6 46 (6.70%) Azure Synapse Analytics
7 39 (5.68%) Azure Data Factory
8 24 (3.49%) dbt
9 23 (3.35%) Microsoft Purview
10 22 (3.20%) Amazon S3
10 22 (3.20%) Serverless
11 21 (3.06%) AWS Lambda
12 18 (2.62%) SaaS
13 14 (2.04%) Azure DevOps
14 12 (1.75%) Azure Cosmos DB
14 12 (1.75%) GitHub
15 9 (1.31%) Amazon Kinesis
15 9 (1.31%) Azure Machine Learning
16 8 (1.16%) Amazon EMR
16 8 (1.16%) Collibra
Communications & Networking
1 5 (0.73%) Firewall
2 4 (0.58%) DSL
3 2 (0.29%) BGP
3 2 (0.29%) DNS
3 2 (0.29%) Network Security
3 2 (0.29%) OSPF
3 2 (0.29%) Structured Cabling
3 2 (0.29%) VPN
3 2 (0.29%) VXLAN
4 1 (0.15%) Radio Access Network
4 1 (0.15%) SMS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 124 (18.05%) Metadata
2 118 (17.18%) Data Warehouse
3 103 (14.99%) Data Lake
4 79 (11.50%) Power BI
5 37 (5.39%) NoSQL
6 21 (3.06%) Azure SQL Database
6 21 (3.06%) Big Data
6 21 (3.06%) PostgreSQL
7 20 (2.91%) BigQuery
7 20 (2.91%) Enterprise Data Warehouse
8 19 (2.77%) Amazon Redshift
9 16 (2.33%) Semantic Layer
9 16 (2.33%) SQL Server
10 15 (2.18%) Snowflake Schema
11 14 (2.04%) Base SAS
11 14 (2.04%) Metadata Repository
12 13 (1.89%) Delta Lake
12 13 (1.89%) Tableau
13 12 (1.75%) Data Vault
13 12 (1.75%) Star Schema
Development Applications
1 24 (3.49%) ERwin
2 8 (1.16%) Git
3 6 (0.87%) GitLab
4 5 (0.73%) Jenkins
5 4 (0.58%) ER Studio
6 3 (0.44%) JIRA
7 1 (0.15%) Claude Code
7 1 (0.15%) MLflow
7 1 (0.15%) Visual Studio Code
General
1 113 (16.45%) Finance
2 111 (16.16%) Social Skills
3 91 (13.25%) Public Sector
4 52 (7.57%) Analytical Skills
5 33 (4.80%) Banking
5 33 (4.80%) Retail
6 14 (2.04%) Marketing
7 12 (1.75%) Influencing Skills
8 11 (1.60%) Documentation Skills
9 10 (1.46%) Financial Institution
10 9 (1.31%) Legal
11 7 (1.02%) Police
12 6 (0.87%) Inclusion and Diversity
12 6 (0.87%) Investment Banking
13 4 (0.58%) Manufacturing
14 3 (0.44%) Local Government
14 3 (0.44%) Military
14 3 (0.44%) Presentation Skills
15 2 (0.29%) Retail Banking
15 2 (0.29%) Social Housing
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 31 (4.51%) Kafka
2 16 (2.33%) PySpark
3 15 (2.18%) Oracle Fusion
4 7 (1.02%) .NET
4 7 (1.02%) Middleware
5 6 (0.87%) FHIR
6 5 (0.73%) REST
7 4 (0.58%) JSON
7 4 (0.58%) OpenTelemetry
8 3 (0.44%) Apache Avro
8 3 (0.44%) LangChain
8 3 (0.44%) LangGraph
8 3 (0.44%) Lightning Web Components
8 3 (0.44%) Protocol Buffers
9 2 (0.29%) AngularJS
9 2 (0.29%) Bootstrap
9 2 (0.29%) FastAPI
9 2 (0.29%) JWT
9 2 (0.29%) pytest
9 2 (0.29%) WebSockets
Miscellaneous
1 50 (7.28%) Cloud Native
2 31 (4.51%) Data Structures
3 20 (2.91%) Legacy Systems
4 19 (2.77%) Reference Data
5 16 (2.33%) Data Centre
5 16 (2.33%) NHS
6 14 (2.04%) IoT
7 12 (1.75%) AI Agents
7 12 (1.75%) Onboarding
7 12 (1.75%) Taxonomies
8 11 (1.60%) Management Information System
9 10 (1.46%) Data Protection Act
9 10 (1.46%) Mainframe
10 9 (1.31%) Greenfield Project
11 8 (1.16%) SCADA
12 7 (1.02%) Distributed Computing
12 7 (1.02%) Distributed Systems
12 7 (1.02%) Product Ownership
13 6 (0.87%) Digital Media
14 5 (0.73%) Hybrid Cloud
Operating Systems
1 8 (1.16%) zOS
2 1 (0.15%) Windows
Processes & Methodologies
1 351 (51.09%) Data Architecture
2 308 (44.83%) Data Modelling
3 216 (31.44%) Analytics
4 172 (25.04%) Data Governance
5 165 (24.02%) Migration
6 131 (19.07%) ETL
7 126 (18.34%) AI
7 126 (18.34%) Business Intelligence
8 112 (16.30%) Integration Patterns
9 102 (14.85%) Data Integration
10 95 (13.83%) Data Pipeline
11 94 (13.68%) Data Engineering
12 92 (13.39%) Logical Data Model
13 81 (11.79%) Stakeholder Engagement
14 78 (11.35%) Data Management
15 75 (10.92%) Machine Learning
16 74 (10.77%) Data Migration
16 74 (10.77%) Data Strategy
17 71 (10.33%) Agile
18 70 (10.19%) Stakeholder Management
Programming Languages
1 109 (15.87%) SQL
2 57 (8.30%) Python
3 14 (2.04%) Java
4 7 (1.02%) Bicep
4 7 (1.02%) Data Analysis Expressions
5 6 (0.87%) Scala
6 5 (0.73%) R
7 3 (0.44%) Apex Code
7 3 (0.44%) T-SQL
8 2 (0.29%) Bash
8 2 (0.29%) COBOL
8 2 (0.29%) Cypher
8 2 (0.29%) Kotlin
8 2 (0.29%) SHACL
8 2 (0.29%) SPARQL
8 2 (0.29%) TypeScript
9 1 (0.15%) C++
9 1 (0.15%) Kusto Query Language
9 1 (0.15%) PowerShell
Qualifications
1 205 (29.84%) Security Cleared
2 178 (25.91%) SC Cleared
3 24 (3.49%) BPSS Clearance
3 24 (3.49%) DV Cleared
4 17 (2.47%) Degree
5 15 (2.18%) Azure Certification
6 12 (1.75%) Master's Degree
7 11 (1.60%) AWS Certification
8 7 (1.02%) DBS Check
9 6 (0.87%) TOGAF Certification
10 5 (0.73%) Computer Science Degree
11 4 (0.58%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
12 2 (0.29%) Microsoft Certified Professional
12 2 (0.29%) VCAP
12 2 (0.29%) VCDX
13 1 (0.15%) Microsoft Certification
13 1 (0.15%) Tableau Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 111 (16.16%) Data Quality
2 38 (5.53%) GDPR
3 15 (2.18%) QA
4 10 (1.46%) Accessibility
5 6 (0.87%) HL7
5 6 (0.87%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 5 (0.73%) IFRS
6 5 (0.73%) IFRS 17
6 5 (0.73%) Sarbanes-Oxley
6 5 (0.73%) SNOMED CT
6 5 (0.73%) Solvency II
7 4 (0.58%) ISO 20022
8 3 (0.44%) California Consumer Privacy Act
9 2 (0.29%) NIST
9 2 (0.29%) SLA
10 1 (0.15%) Disclosure Scotland
10 1 (0.15%) GRC
10 1 (0.15%) HIPAA
10 1 (0.15%) NCSC
10 1 (0.15%) PCI DSS
System Software
1 4 (0.58%) VMware Infrastructure
2 3 (0.44%) Docker
3 2 (0.29%) Active Directory
3 2 (0.29%) VMware NSX
3 2 (0.29%) vSphere
4 1 (0.15%) HDFS
Systems Management
1 23 (3.35%) Terraform
2 9 (1.31%) Kubernetes
3 7 (1.02%) Grafana
4 5 (0.73%) Ansible
4 5 (0.73%) Prometheus
5 4 (0.58%) Argo
6 3 (0.44%) Istio
7 2 (0.29%) vCenter Server
8 1 (0.15%) Kubeflow
Vendors
1 145 (21.11%) Databricks
2 83 (12.08%) Microsoft
3 43 (6.26%) Oracle
4 22 (3.20%) SAP
5 20 (2.91%) Foundry
5 20 (2.91%) Salesforce
6 19 (2.77%) Informatica
7 18 (2.62%) Palantir
8 15 (2.18%) Google
8 15 (2.18%) Talend
9 7 (1.02%) IFS
9 7 (1.02%) Sparx
10 5 (0.73%) Confluent
10 5 (0.73%) OpenAI
11 4 (0.58%) NVIDIA
11 4 (0.58%) VMware
12 3 (0.44%) Denodo
12 3 (0.44%) IBM
12 3 (0.44%) Remedy
13 2 (0.29%) Pure Storage