Data Engineer Contract Job Trends

Data Engineer
UK

The median Data Engineer daily rate in the UK is £500, according to job vacancies posted in the 6 months leading up to 13 October 2026.

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

6 months to
13 Oct 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 69 126 96
Rank change year-on-year +57 -30 +38
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 1,911 738 889
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 3.48% 2.24% 2.37%
As % of the Job Titles category 3.78% 2.47% 2.55%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,275 527 619
10th Percentile £375 £362 £363
25th Percentile £425 £413 £450
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year - -4.76% -4.55%
75th Percentile £600 £588 £625
90th Percentile £675 £694 £688
UK excluding London median daily rate £484 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +1.89% -5.00% -4.76%
Number of hourly rates quoted 65 13 5
10th Percentile £21.25 £25.34 £53.55
25th Percentile £30.96 £35.25 £60.00
Median hourly rate £45.00 £52.50 £95.00
Median % change year-on-year -14.29% -44.74% +53.85%
75th Percentile £68.00 £80.00 £97.50
90th Percentile £70.00 £105.50 -
UK excluding London median hourly rate £45.00 £27.00 £60.00
% change year-on-year +66.67% -55.00% +5.26%

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 50,528 29,913 34,877
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.00% 90.84% 93.01%
Number of daily rates quoted 29,639 18,895 21,041
10th Percentile £325 £275 £300
25th Percentile £425 £400 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -0.47%
75th Percentile £638 £623 £638
90th Percentile £736 £725 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £490
% change year-on-year +5.26% -3.06% -2.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 4,102 1,645 1,439
10th Percentile £14.36 £13.75 £15.00
25th Percentile £19.43 £17.30 £20.30
Median hourly rate £41.71 £25.15 £41.27
Median % change year-on-year +65.84% -39.05% -8.30%
75th Percentile £67.50 £50.00 £65.00
90th Percentile £79.90 £68.15 £73.80
UK excluding London median hourly rate £41.71 £25.00 £42.50
% change year-on-year +66.84% -41.18% -4.49%

Data Engineer
Job Vacancy Trend

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

Data Engineer job vacancy trend in the UK

Data Engineer
Daily Rate Trend

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

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

Data Engineer
Daily Rate Histogram

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Data Engineer over the 6 months to 13 October 2026.

Daily rate histogram for Data Engineer in the UK

Data Engineer
Hourly Rate Trend

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

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

Data Engineer
Hourly Rate Histogram

Hourly rate distribution of jobs citing Data Engineer over the 6 months to 13 October 2026.

Hourly rate histogram for Data Engineer in the UK

Data Engineer
Top 18 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 Engineer within the UK over the 6 months to 13 October 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 +66 1,659 £500 -2.44% 1,303
UK excluding London +86 865 £484 +1.89% 612
London +33 830 £525 - 712
Work from Home +43 559 £500 +3.63% 561
Midlands +74 326 £469 -6.20% 82
West Midlands +56 241 £469 -6.20% 55
North of England +33 203 £525 +10.53% 233
South East +19 124 £459 -0.76% 114
South West +32 121 £525 +3.70% 59
North West +17 107 £525 +20.69% 123
East Midlands +43 85 £388 -16.22% 27
Yorkshire +11 78 £512 +1.06% 57
Scotland +1 74 £525 +16.67% 55
East of England +7 36 £525 -16.00% 34
North East -29 19 £510 +23.64% 53
Wales -5 18 £550 +11.11% 15
Northern Ireland +4 1 - - 21
Channel Islands - 1 - -

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

For the 6 months to 13 October 2026, Data Engineer 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 Engineer in the job title.

1 952 (49.82%) SQL
2 848 (44.37%) Python
3 823 (43.07%) Data Pipeline
4 783 (40.97%) Data Engineering
5 668 (34.96%) Data Modelling
6 663 (34.69%) ETL
7 634 (33.18%) Analytics
8 599 (31.34%) AWS
9 589 (30.82%) Azure
10 496 (25.95%) Data Quality
11 486 (25.43%) Security Cleared
12 465 (24.33%) CI/CD
13 417 (21.82%) Databricks
14 416 (21.77%) SC Cleared
15 343 (17.95%) Agile
16 330 (17.27%) AI
17 321 (16.80%) DevOps
18 315 (16.48%) Migration
19 314 (16.43%) Data Warehouse
20 284 (14.86%) Business Intelligence
21 272 (14.23%) Data Transformation
22 267 (13.97%) Validation
23 264 (13.81%) PySpark
24 261 (13.66%) Data Governance
25 259 (13.55%) Data Integration
26 246 (12.87%) Microsoft
27 237 (12.40%) dbt
28 236 (12.35%) Snowflake
29 235 (12.30%) Power Platform
30 227 (11.88%) Power BI

Data Engineer 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
1 213 (11.15%) Apache Airflow
2 172 (9.00%) Apache Spark
3 153 (8.01%) Apache
4 49 (2.56%) SAS
5 47 (2.46%) Confluence
6 16 (0.84%) Palantir Foundry
6 16 (0.84%) SharePoint
7 13 (0.68%) Jupyter
8 4 (0.21%) Microsoft Exchange
9 3 (0.16%) Apache Superset
10 2 (0.10%) ArcGIS
10 2 (0.10%) CMS
10 2 (0.10%) PowerExchange
11 1 (0.052%) Apache Pulsar
11 1 (0.052%) Liferay
11 1 (0.052%) Luigi
11 1 (0.052%) nginx
11 1 (0.052%) Oracle Workflow
Applications
1 17 (0.89%) Microsoft Excel
2 8 (0.42%) Spreadsheet
3 3 (0.16%) Chatbot
4 1 (0.052%) Microsoft Office
4 1 (0.052%) Microsoft PowerPoint
Business Applications
1 13 (0.68%) Aladdin
2 8 (0.42%) Dynamics CRM
3 6 (0.31%) NetSuite
4 5 (0.26%) Infor LN
4 5 (0.26%) Sage X3
5 4 (0.21%) SAP S/4HANA
5 4 (0.21%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
6 2 (0.10%) FIS Private Capital Suite
6 2 (0.10%) Maximo
6 2 (0.10%) Oracle EBS
6 2 (0.10%) SAP BPC
6 2 (0.10%) SAP Oil and Gas
6 2 (0.10%) SimCorp Dimension
7 1 (0.052%) Dynamics NAV
7 1 (0.052%) Markit EDM
7 1 (0.052%) MIS ActiveH
7 1 (0.052%) Oracle Retail
7 1 (0.052%) Raiser’s Edge
7 1 (0.052%) SAP CAR
7 1 (0.052%) SAP EWM
Cloud Services
1 599 (31.34%) AWS
2 589 (30.82%) Azure
3 237 (12.40%) dbt
4 236 (12.35%) Snowflake
5 235 (12.30%) Power Platform
6 214 (11.20%) Azure Data Factory
7 206 (10.78%) GCP
8 170 (8.90%) Amazon S3
9 133 (6.96%) Serverless
10 118 (6.17%) AWS Lambda
10 118 (6.17%) Azure DevOps
11 113 (5.91%) Azure Synapse Analytics
12 109 (5.70%) GitHub
13 71 (3.72%) Azure Databricks
14 62 (3.24%) Amazon EMR
15 44 (2.30%) GitHub Actions
16 40 (2.09%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 34 (1.78%) AWS Step Functions
18 28 (1.47%) Amazon Kinesis
18 28 (1.47%) Microsoft Purview
Communications & Networking
1 21 (1.10%) DNS
2 20 (1.05%) BGP
2 20 (1.05%) DMZ
2 20 (1.05%) Multicast
2 20 (1.05%) VPN
3 8 (0.42%) Firewall
4 5 (0.26%) Intrusion Detection
5 4 (0.21%) Wi-Fi
5 4 (0.21%) Wireless
6 2 (0.10%) HTTP
6 2 (0.10%) Structured Cabling
7 1 (0.052%) Broadband
7 1 (0.052%) Cisco IPT
7 1 (0.052%) HTTPS
7 1 (0.052%) LTE
7 1 (0.052%) MQTT
7 1 (0.052%) Network Security
7 1 (0.052%) TCP/IP
7 1 (0.052%) tcpdump
7 1 (0.052%) Wireshark
Database & Business Intelligence
1 314 (16.43%) Data Warehouse
2 227 (11.88%) Power BI
3 166 (8.69%) Data Lake
4 138 (7.22%) Metadata
5 104 (5.44%) BigQuery
6 95 (4.97%) Amazon Redshift
7 88 (4.60%) Delta Lake
8 84 (4.40%) Amazon Athena
9 75 (3.92%) Big Data
10 72 (3.77%) Pentaho
11 69 (3.61%) SQL Server
12 66 (3.45%) PostgreSQL
13 56 (2.93%) Snowflake Schema
14 55 (2.88%) Relational Database
15 51 (2.67%) NoSQL
16 46 (2.41%) Oracle Database
17 42 (2.20%) SQL Server Integration Services
18 41 (2.15%) Amazon RDS
18 41 (2.15%) Tableau
19 40 (2.09%) Azure SQL Database
Development Applications
1 182 (9.52%) Git
2 105 (5.49%) GitLab
3 62 (3.24%) JIRA
4 41 (2.15%) Jenkins
5 22 (1.15%) MLflow
6 10 (0.52%) Artifactory
7 9 (0.47%) Bitbucket
7 9 (0.47%) Postman
8 6 (0.31%) Selenium
8 6 (0.31%) SonarQube
9 5 (0.26%) Claude Code
10 3 (0.16%) Atlassian Bamboo
10 3 (0.16%) ERwin
10 3 (0.16%) Newman
10 3 (0.16%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
11 2 (0.10%) CircleCI
11 2 (0.10%) RStudio
11 2 (0.10%) Terragrunt
11 2 (0.10%) Yeoman
12 1 (0.052%) GoCD
General
1 314 (16.43%) Social Skills
2 293 (15.33%) Finance
3 219 (11.46%) Analytical Skills
4 172 (9.00%) Public Sector
5 127 (6.65%) Banking
6 34 (1.78%) Marketing
7 32 (1.67%) Retail
8 26 (1.36%) Investment Banking
9 25 (1.31%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 24 (1.26%) Front Office
11 23 (1.20%) Aerospace
11 23 (1.20%) Automotive
12 17 (0.89%) Law
12 17 (0.89%) Pharmaceutical
13 16 (0.84%) Telecoms
14 15 (0.78%) Documentation Skills
14 15 (0.78%) Police
15 14 (0.73%) Manufacturing
15 14 (0.73%) Military
16 12 (0.63%) Legal
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 264 (13.81%) PySpark
2 193 (10.10%) Terraform
3 132 (6.91%) Kafka
4 41 (2.15%) REST
5 30 (1.57%) JSON
6 25 (1.31%) Pandas
7 23 (1.20%) XML
8 17 (0.89%) LangChain
9 16 (0.84%) Spring
9 16 (0.84%) Spring Boot
10 15 (0.78%) Great Expectations
10 15 (0.78%) RESTful
11 14 (0.73%) pytest
12 13 (0.68%) Apache Beam
12 13 (0.68%) Apache NiFi
12 13 (0.68%) PyTorch
13 12 (0.63%) Streamlit
14 11 (0.58%) React
15 10 (0.52%) .NET
15 10 (0.52%) Microsoft Graph
Miscellaneous
1 162 (8.48%) Cloud Native
2 66 (3.45%) Data Structures
3 61 (3.19%) Legacy Systems
4 55 (2.88%) Onboarding
5 32 (1.67%) AI Agents
6 25 (1.31%) Product Ownership
7 24 (1.26%) Distributed Systems
8 20 (1.05%) Algorithms
9 19 (0.99%) Management Information System
10 18 (0.94%) Greenfield Project
10 18 (0.94%) Reference Data
11 15 (0.78%) NHS
11 15 (0.78%) Reinsurance
12 12 (0.63%) Data Protection Act
12 12 (0.63%) Enterprise Software
12 12 (0.63%) Virtual Team
13 11 (0.58%) Distributed Computing
14 10 (0.52%) Derivative
15 9 (0.47%) Clustering
15 9 (0.47%) Life Science
Operating Systems
1 43 (2.25%) Unix
2 39 (2.04%) Linux
3 3 (0.16%) Windows
4 2 (0.10%) Ubuntu
5 1 (0.052%) Robot Operating System
5 1 (0.052%) VMS
5 1 (0.052%) Windows Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 823 (43.07%) Data Pipeline
2 783 (40.97%) Data Engineering
3 668 (34.96%) Data Modelling
4 663 (34.69%) ETL
5 634 (33.18%) Analytics
6 465 (24.33%) CI/CD
7 343 (17.95%) Agile
8 330 (17.27%) AI
9 321 (16.80%) DevOps
10 315 (16.48%) Migration
11 284 (14.86%) Business Intelligence
12 272 (14.23%) Data Transformation
13 267 (13.97%) Validation
14 261 (13.66%) Data Governance
15 259 (13.55%) Data Integration
16 198 (10.36%) Problem-Solving
17 195 (10.20%) Machine Learning
18 174 (9.11%) Lakehouse
19 171 (8.95%) Data Science
19 171 (8.95%) Infrastructure as Code
Programming Languages
1 952 (49.82%) SQL
2 848 (44.37%) Python
3 98 (5.13%) Java
4 72 (3.77%) Scala
5 44 (2.30%) PL/SQL
6 35 (1.83%) T-SQL
7 33 (1.73%) Data Analysis Expressions
8 32 (1.67%) PowerShell
9 22 (1.15%) Shell Script
10 21 (1.10%) JavaScript
11 20 (1.05%) Bash
12 18 (0.94%) R
13 12 (0.63%) Bicep
14 10 (0.52%) Go
15 7 (0.37%) TypeScript
16 6 (0.31%) C#
17 5 (0.26%) Korn
18 3 (0.16%) COBOL
18 3 (0.16%) Kusto Query Language
19 2 (0.10%) Cypher
Qualifications
1 486 (25.43%) Security Cleared
2 416 (21.77%) SC Cleared
3 61 (3.19%) BPSS Clearance
4 42 (2.20%) DV Cleared
5 41 (2.15%) Degree
6 24 (1.26%) AWS Certification
6 24 (1.26%) Azure Certification
7 18 (0.94%) Computer Science Degree
8 9 (0.47%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
9 8 (0.42%) Master's Degree
9 8 (0.42%) SnowPro
10 7 (0.37%) CISM
10 7 (0.37%) CISSP
10 7 (0.37%) DBS Check
11 5 (0.26%) CEH
12 4 (0.21%) City & Guilds
13 3 (0.16%) Microsoft Certification
14 1 (0.052%) CISA
14 1 (0.052%) PMI Certification
14 1 (0.052%) PMP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 496 (25.95%) Data Quality
2 79 (4.13%) QA
3 41 (2.15%) GDPR
4 16 (0.84%) Accessibility
5 9 (0.47%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 6 (0.31%) Disclosure Scotland
6 6 (0.31%) FATCA
7 5 (0.26%) HIPAA
7 5 (0.26%) Sarbanes-Oxley
7 5 (0.26%) SLA
8 3 (0.16%) MiFID
9 2 (0.10%) California Consumer Privacy Act
9 2 (0.10%) EMIR
9 2 (0.10%) GRC
9 2 (0.10%) SNOMED CT
9 2 (0.10%) SOC 2
10 1 (0.052%) IFRS
10 1 (0.052%) IFRS 17
10 1 (0.052%) IFRS 9
10 1 (0.052%) NIST
System Software
1 108 (5.65%) Docker
2 4 (0.21%) Active Directory
3 1 (0.052%) HDFS
3 1 (0.052%) Virtual Machines
Systems Management
1 101 (5.29%) Kubernetes
2 31 (1.62%) Grafana
3 21 (1.10%) Ansible
4 13 (0.68%) Control-M
4 13 (0.68%) Kibana
5 5 (0.26%) Prometheus
6 3 (0.16%) logstash
7 2 (0.10%) Puppet
8 1 (0.052%) Progress Chef
Vendors
1 417 (21.82%) Databricks
2 246 (12.87%) Microsoft
3 154 (8.06%) Oracle
4 94 (4.92%) Informatica
5 93 (4.87%) Google
5 93 (4.87%) Talend
6 44 (2.30%) Denodo
7 37 (1.94%) Salesforce
8 28 (1.47%) Palantir
9 25 (1.31%) SAP
10 24 (1.26%) Foundry
11 20 (1.05%) Cisco
11 20 (1.05%) F5
12 15 (0.78%) Splunk
13 9 (0.47%) Bloomberg
13 9 (0.47%) OpenAI
14 8 (0.42%) Sage
15 7 (0.37%) Alteryx
15 7 (0.37%) IBM
15 7 (0.37%) InterSystems