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 8 September 2026.

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

6 months to
8 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 182 279 277
Rank change year-on-year +97 -2 +12
Contract jobs requiring a Data Architect 813 298 316
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 1.50% 0.92% 0.83%
As % of the Job Titles category 1.63% 1.01% 0.89%
Number of daily rates quoted 589 184 218
10th Percentile £463 £457 £488
25th Percentile £533 £513 £532
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £625 £600 £635
Median % change year-on-year +4.17% -5.51% -5.93%
75th Percentile £688 £713 £738
90th Percentile £775 £775 £829
UK excluding London median daily rate £625 £575 £638
% change year-on-year +8.70% -9.80% -1.92%
Number of hourly rates quoted 14 2 10
10th Percentile - £41.31 £59.25
25th Percentile £46.00 £44.85 -
Median hourly rate £58.50 £51.98 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +12.54% -13.37% -1.23%
75th Percentile £70.00 £60.37 -
90th Percentile - £64.65 £65.89
UK excluding London median hourly rate £58.50 £38.96 £60.00
% change year-on-year +50.15% -35.07% -16.67%

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 49,961 29,586 35,470
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.41% 91.15% 93.08%
Number of daily rates quoted 29,786 18,646 22,240
10th Percentile £325 £280 £300
25th Percentile £425 £400 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -1.69%
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 3,633 1,533 1,754
10th Percentile £14.94 £13.69 £14.73
25th Percentile £20.50 £17.08 £20.74
Median hourly rate £42.50 £25.15 £43.90
Median % change year-on-year +68.99% -42.71% +3.29%
75th Percentile £68.00 £53.75 £65.00
90th Percentile £79.00 £70.16 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £42.55 £25.15 £46.18
% change year-on-year +69.19% -45.54% +15.45%

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 8 September 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 8 September 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 8 September 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 +93 694 £625 +4.17% 381
London +69 372 £608 +1.29% 273
UK excluding London +62 316 £625 +8.70% 157
Work from Home +38 224 £625 +4.17% 156
Midlands +14 96 £625 -3.85% 34
West Midlands +10 78 £650 -3.70% 17
North of England -40 66 £645 +19.91% 33
South East -30 51 £613 +2.08% 36
South West -4 46 £710 +45.64% 15
Yorkshire -16 38 £675 +22.73% 13
East of England +4 35 £550 -6.38% 6
North West -47 26 £600 +14.29% 18
Scotland -26 21 £633 +26.50% 24
East Midlands +1 18 £606 +1.04% 17
North East - 5 £550 - 2
Wales - 1 £475 - 1

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

For the 6 months to 8 September 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.

1 408 (50.18%) Data Architecture
2 357 (43.91%) Data Modelling
3 291 (35.79%) Security Cleared
4 274 (33.70%) Azure
5 243 (29.89%) SC Cleared
6 238 (29.27%) Analytics
6 238 (29.27%) Data Governance
7 198 (24.35%) Migration
8 196 (24.11%) AWS
9 184 (22.63%) Databricks
10 167 (20.54%) Data Quality
11 161 (19.80%) AI
12 157 (19.31%) Metadata
13 133 (16.36%) Data Warehouse
13 133 (16.36%) Integration Patterns
14 132 (16.24%) Data Lake
14 132 (16.24%) Stakeholder Management
15 129 (15.87%) ETL
16 128 (15.74%) Business Intelligence
16 128 (15.74%) SQL
17 126 (15.50%) Logical Data Model
18 124 (15.25%) Stakeholder Engagement
19 113 (13.90%) Data Integration
20 110 (13.53%) Data Strategy
21 108 (13.28%) Lakehouse
22 99 (12.18%) Data Engineering
23 95 (11.69%) Roadmaps
24 91 (11.19%) Power Platform
24 91 (11.19%) Technical Leadership
25 90 (11.07%) Physical Data Model

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 (3.08%) SAS
2 24 (2.95%) Apache Spark
3 22 (2.71%) Apache
4 20 (2.46%) Apache Airflow
5 18 (2.21%) Palantir Foundry
6 5 (0.62%) SharePoint
7 4 (0.49%) Confluence
8 2 (0.25%) Alfresco
8 2 (0.25%) PowerExchange
9 1 (0.12%) Apache Superset
9 1 (0.12%) JBoss
9 1 (0.12%) Jupyter
Applications
1 6 (0.74%) Microsoft Excel
2 1 (0.12%) MS Visio
Business Applications
1 6 (0.74%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
2 4 (0.49%) SAP S/4HANA
3 2 (0.25%) SAP ERP
3 2 (0.25%) Workday HCM
4 1 (0.12%) Aladdin
4 1 (0.12%) iTrent
4 1 (0.12%) Maximo
4 1 (0.12%) Oracle ERP
4 1 (0.12%) SAP MDM
4 1 (0.12%) SystmOne
Cloud Services
1 274 (33.70%) Azure
2 196 (24.11%) AWS
3 91 (11.19%) Power Platform
4 88 (10.82%) GCP
5 70 (8.61%) Snowflake
6 56 (6.89%) Azure Synapse Analytics
7 49 (6.03%) Azure Data Factory
8 32 (3.94%) dbt
9 31 (3.81%) Amazon S3
10 28 (3.44%) Serverless
11 25 (3.08%) Microsoft Purview
12 23 (2.83%) AWS Lambda
13 22 (2.71%) SaaS
14 21 (2.58%) Azure Databricks
15 18 (2.21%) Azure DevOps
16 12 (1.48%) Amazon EMR
16 12 (1.48%) Collibra
17 11 (1.35%) Amazon Kinesis
18 10 (1.23%) Azure Cosmos DB
18 10 (1.23%) GitHub
Communications & Networking
1 4 (0.49%) Firewall
2 2 (0.25%) BGP
2 2 (0.25%) DSL
2 2 (0.25%) Network Security
2 2 (0.25%) OSPF
2 2 (0.25%) SAN
2 2 (0.25%) Structured Cabling
2 2 (0.25%) VPN
2 2 (0.25%) VXLAN
3 1 (0.12%) Radio Access Network
3 1 (0.12%) SMS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 157 (19.31%) Metadata
2 133 (16.36%) Data Warehouse
3 132 (16.24%) Data Lake
4 85 (10.46%) Power BI
5 47 (5.78%) NoSQL
6 31 (3.81%) Amazon Redshift
7 27 (3.32%) BigQuery
7 27 (3.32%) Enterprise Data Warehouse
8 21 (2.58%) Azure SQL Database
9 20 (2.46%) PostgreSQL
9 20 (2.46%) Semantic Layer
10 19 (2.34%) Delta Lake
11 16 (1.97%) Base SAS
11 16 (1.97%) Data Vault
11 16 (1.97%) Snowflake Schema
12 15 (1.85%) SQL Server
13 14 (1.72%) Big Data
13 14 (1.72%) Tableau
14 13 (1.60%) Elasticsearch
15 12 (1.48%) Star Schema
Development Applications
1 17 (2.09%) ERwin
2 10 (1.23%) Git
3 6 (0.74%) GitLab
4 5 (0.62%) ER Studio
5 4 (0.49%) JIRA
6 3 (0.37%) MLflow
6 3 (0.37%) Oracle Forms
7 2 (0.25%) Jenkins
7 2 (0.25%) RStudio
8 1 (0.12%) Claude Code
8 1 (0.12%) Visual Studio Code
General
1 166 (20.42%) Social Skills
2 141 (17.34%) Public Sector
3 125 (15.38%) Finance
4 65 (8.00%) Analytical Skills
5 35 (4.31%) Banking
5 35 (4.31%) Retail
6 29 (3.57%) Influencing Skills
7 17 (2.09%) Marketing
8 14 (1.72%) Documentation Skills
8 14 (1.72%) Police
9 10 (1.23%) Legal
10 8 (0.98%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 7 (0.86%) Presentation Skills
12 6 (0.74%) Local Government
13 5 (0.62%) Billing
13 5 (0.62%) Financial Institution
13 5 (0.62%) Manufacturing
14 4 (0.49%) Investment Banking
14 4 (0.49%) Military
15 2 (0.25%) Publishing
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 33 (4.06%) Kafka
1 33 (4.06%) Terraform
2 27 (3.32%) PySpark
3 19 (2.34%) Oracle Fusion
4 10 (1.23%) REST
5 9 (1.11%) FHIR
6 7 (0.86%) JSON
7 5 (0.62%) .NET
7 5 (0.62%) Apache NiFi
8 4 (0.49%) Apache Avro
8 4 (0.49%) Middleware
8 4 (0.49%) SOAP
9 3 (0.37%) LangChain
9 3 (0.37%) LangGraph
9 3 (0.37%) Spark Streaming
9 3 (0.37%) XML
10 2 (0.25%) Model Context Protocol
10 2 (0.25%) pytest
10 2 (0.25%) Snowpark
10 2 (0.25%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 63 (7.75%) Cloud Native
2 41 (5.04%) Data Structures
3 25 (3.08%) Legacy Systems
4 22 (2.71%) Reference Data
5 21 (2.58%) Management Information System
6 19 (2.34%) Onboarding
7 18 (2.21%) Data Centre
8 16 (1.97%) AI Agents
8 16 (1.97%) Data Fabric
9 14 (1.72%) Taxonomies
10 13 (1.60%) Data Protection Act
10 13 (1.60%) Product Ownership
10 13 (1.60%) Reinsurance
11 12 (1.48%) NHS
12 11 (1.35%) IoT
13 10 (1.23%) Replication
13 10 (1.23%) SCADA
14 9 (1.11%) Autonomous Agent
14 9 (1.11%) Clustering
14 9 (1.11%) Enterprise Software
Operating Systems
1 3 (0.37%) Linux
1 3 (0.37%) Windows
2 2 (0.25%) AIX
2 2 (0.25%) HPUX
2 2 (0.25%) Solaris
3 1 (0.12%) zOS
Processes & Methodologies
1 408 (50.18%) Data Architecture
2 357 (43.91%) Data Modelling
3 238 (29.27%) Analytics
3 238 (29.27%) Data Governance
4 198 (24.35%) Migration
5 161 (19.80%) AI
6 133 (16.36%) Integration Patterns
7 132 (16.24%) Stakeholder Management
8 129 (15.87%) ETL
9 128 (15.74%) Business Intelligence
10 126 (15.50%) Logical Data Model
11 124 (15.25%) Stakeholder Engagement
12 113 (13.90%) Data Integration
13 110 (13.53%) Data Strategy
14 108 (13.28%) Lakehouse
15 99 (12.18%) Data Engineering
16 95 (11.69%) Roadmaps
17 91 (11.19%) Technical Leadership
18 90 (11.07%) Physical Data Model
19 88 (10.82%) Decision-Making
Programming Languages
1 128 (15.74%) SQL
2 59 (7.26%) Python
3 16 (1.97%) Java
4 9 (1.11%) Bicep
5 7 (0.86%) Data Analysis Expressions
6 5 (0.62%) R
6 5 (0.62%) Scala
7 3 (0.37%) T-SQL
8 2 (0.25%) Cypher
8 2 (0.25%) PL/SQL
8 2 (0.25%) PowerShell
8 2 (0.25%) SHACL
8 2 (0.25%) Shell Script
8 2 (0.25%) TypeScript
9 1 (0.12%) C++
9 1 (0.12%) COBOL
9 1 (0.12%) Kotlin
9 1 (0.12%) Kusto Query Language
Qualifications
1 291 (35.79%) Security Cleared
2 243 (29.89%) SC Cleared
3 34 (4.18%) DV Cleared
4 33 (4.06%) BPSS Clearance
5 12 (1.48%) AWS Certification
5 12 (1.48%) Azure Certification
6 7 (0.86%) DBS Check
6 7 (0.86%) Degree
7 6 (0.74%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
8 5 (0.62%) TOGAF Certification
9 3 (0.37%) Computer Science Degree
10 2 (0.25%) Master's Degree
10 2 (0.25%) Microsoft Certification
10 2 (0.25%) Microsoft Certified Professional
10 2 (0.25%) VCAP
10 2 (0.25%) VCDX
11 1 (0.12%) CISSP
11 1 (0.12%) Oracle Certification
11 1 (0.12%) SnowPro
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 167 (20.54%) Data Quality
2 40 (4.92%) GDPR
3 14 (1.72%) Accessibility
4 12 (1.48%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 9 (1.11%) SNOMED CT
6 8 (0.98%) NCSC
7 7 (0.86%) NIST
7 7 (0.86%) Solvency II
8 6 (0.74%) HL7
8 6 (0.74%) IFRS
9 5 (0.62%) IFRS 17
9 5 (0.62%) QA
10 4 (0.49%) ISO/IEC 42001
11 3 (0.37%) California Consumer Privacy Act
11 3 (0.37%) ISO 20022
11 3 (0.37%) Sarbanes-Oxley
12 2 (0.25%) GRC
12 2 (0.25%) GxP
12 2 (0.25%) SLA
13 1 (0.12%) IFRS 9
System Software
1 3 (0.37%) Docker
1 3 (0.37%) VMware Infrastructure
2 1 (0.12%) Active Directory
2 1 (0.12%) VMware ESXi
2 1 (0.12%) vSphere
Systems Management
1 9 (1.11%) Kubernetes
2 5 (0.62%) Grafana
3 4 (0.49%) Ansible
3 4 (0.49%) Single Sign-On
4 3 (0.37%) Istio
4 3 (0.37%) Prometheus
5 2 (0.25%) Argo
5 2 (0.25%) NetBackup
6 1 (0.12%) Control-M
Vendors
1 184 (22.63%) Databricks
2 89 (10.95%) Microsoft
3 45 (5.54%) Oracle
4 27 (3.32%) Informatica
5 24 (2.95%) Google
6 22 (2.71%) SAP
7 21 (2.58%) Foundry
8 19 (2.34%) Palantir
9 16 (1.97%) Salesforce
10 13 (1.60%) Talend
11 9 (1.11%) Denodo
12 8 (0.98%) Sparx
13 7 (0.86%) IFS
14 5 (0.62%) OpenAI
14 5 (0.62%) ServiceNow
14 5 (0.62%) Teradata
15 4 (0.49%) IBM
15 4 (0.49%) NVIDIA
16 3 (0.37%) Confluent
16 3 (0.37%) Workday