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 15 November 2025.

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

6 months to
15 Nov 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 122 91 121
Rank change year-on-year -31 +30 +3
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 807 920 950
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.27% 2.51% 2.03%
As % of the Job Titles category 2.50% 2.70% 2.17%
Number of daily rates quoted 577 633 709
10th Percentile £360 £391 £400
25th Percentile £413 £460 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £540 £540
Median % change year-on-year -7.41% - -1.82%
75th Percentile £600 £630 £638
90th Percentile £694 £699 £700
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £500 £525
% change year-on-year -5.00% -4.76% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 14 10 14
10th Percentile £25.42 £25.23 £35.19
25th Percentile £34.13 £26.27 £41.29
Median hourly rate £48.00 £34.93 £61.75
Median % change year-on-year +37.44% -43.44% +5.11%
75th Percentile £77.31 £86.06 £67.25
90th Percentile £103.25 £97.50 £78.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £37.50 £26.50 £57.00
% change year-on-year +41.51% -53.51% -5.00%

All Contract IT Job Vacancies
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 32,290 34,016 43,872
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 90.93% 92.86% 93.68%
Number of daily rates quoted 20,492 20,527 29,813
10th Percentile £278 £300 £294
25th Percentile £402 £413 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £620 £638 £650
90th Percentile £725 £738 £743
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £490 £500
% change year-on-year -3.06% -2.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 1,873 1,272 1,545
10th Percentile £14.14 £15.11 £15.00
25th Percentile £17.87 £20.45 £19.06
Median hourly rate £25.15 £36.00 £44.50
Median % change year-on-year -30.14% -19.10% +58.28%
75th Percentile £53.99 £65.00 £65.00
90th Percentile £70.00 £73.75 £77.47
UK excluding London median hourly rate £25.15 £35.00 £44.50
% change year-on-year -28.14% -21.35% +85.26%

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 15 November 2025.

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 15 November 2025.

Hourly rate histogram for Data Engineer in the UK

Data Engineer
Top 17 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 15 November 2025. 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 -36 682 £513 -6.82% 616
London -20 415 £530 -7.83% 393
UK excluding London -41 283 £475 -5.00% 315
Work from Home -34 255 £500 -4.76% 291
North of England -26 78 £450 -8.63% 61
Midlands -19 77 £515 +5.48% 66
West Midlands -21 63 £519 +5.82% 55
Scotland +16 47 £425 -15.00% 30
South West +9 39 £550 -4.35% 26
North West -17 35 £403 -17.44% 34
Yorkshire -26 35 £500 +3.09% 20
South East -38 35 £475 -13.64% 106
East Midlands -11 13 £460 +29.21% 10
Wales -15 10 £425 -15.00% 11
North East -5 8 £425 -27.35% 7
East of England -31 6 £625 +79.86% 22
Northern Ireland -4 1 - -

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

For the 6 months to 15 November 2025, 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.

1 530 (65.68%) Python
2 494 (61.21%) SQL
3 378 (46.84%) Data Pipeline
4 348 (43.12%) Azure
5 339 (42.01%) ETL
6 316 (39.16%) Data Engineering
7 290 (35.94%) AWS
8 278 (34.45%) Data Modelling
9 253 (31.35%) CI/CD
10 249 (30.86%) Databricks
11 242 (29.99%) Analytics
12 202 (25.03%) Data Quality
13 196 (24.29%) Data Warehouse
14 182 (22.55%) DevOps
15 181 (22.43%) Business Intelligence
16 166 (20.57%) Agile
17 159 (19.70%) Security Cleared
18 158 (19.58%) Azure Data Factory
19 146 (18.09%) Power Platform
20 142 (17.60%) Power BI
21 141 (17.47%) Data Science
22 137 (16.98%) Problem-Solving
22 137 (16.98%) PySpark
23 136 (16.85%) Apache Airflow
24 132 (16.36%) SC Cleared
25 127 (15.74%) Snowflake
26 112 (13.88%) Machine Learning
27 110 (13.63%) Data Governance
28 109 (13.51%) GCP
29 106 (13.14%) Data Lake

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
1 136 (16.85%) Apache Airflow
2 97 (12.02%) Apache Spark
3 71 (8.80%) Apache
4 23 (2.85%) Confluence
5 14 (1.73%) SAS
6 8 (0.99%) Oracle Application Server
6 8 (0.99%) SharePoint
7 6 (0.74%) Apache Pig
8 5 (0.62%) IIS
9 4 (0.50%) Jupyter
10 3 (0.37%) ArcGIS
10 3 (0.37%) Oracle SOA Suite
11 2 (0.25%) Documentum
11 2 (0.25%) Luigi
12 1 (0.12%) Apache Superset
12 1 (0.12%) Apache Synapse
12 1 (0.12%) nginx
Applications
1 8 (0.99%) Microsoft Excel
2 4 (0.50%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 2 (0.25%) Chatbot
3 2 (0.25%) Microsoft Office
3 2 (0.25%) Windchill
4 1 (0.12%) MS Visio
4 1 (0.12%) SPSS
4 1 (0.12%) Stata
Business Applications
1 3 (0.37%) Oracle BPM
2 2 (0.25%) Aladdin
2 2 (0.25%) Dynamics CRM
2 2 (0.25%) Maximo
2 2 (0.25%) Payment Gateway
2 2 (0.25%) SAP S/4HANA
3 1 (0.12%) Dynamics AX
3 1 (0.12%) Endur
3 1 (0.12%) NetSuite
3 1 (0.12%) Salesforce CRM
3 1 (0.12%) SAP BPC
3 1 (0.12%) SAP ERP
3 1 (0.12%) SAP Oil and Gas
Cloud Services
1 348 (43.12%) Azure
2 290 (35.94%) AWS
3 158 (19.58%) Azure Data Factory
4 146 (18.09%) Power Platform
5 127 (15.74%) Snowflake
6 109 (13.51%) GCP
7 97 (12.02%) dbt
8 95 (11.77%) Amazon S3
8 95 (11.77%) Azure Synapse Analytics
9 74 (9.17%) GitHub
9 74 (9.17%) Serverless
10 52 (6.44%) Azure DevOps
11 47 (5.82%) AWS Lambda
12 38 (4.71%) GitHub Actions
13 28 (3.47%) AWS CloudFormation
14 24 (2.97%) Amazon EMR
15 21 (2.60%) SaaS
16 20 (2.48%) Amazon Kinesis
17 14 (1.73%) AWS Step Functions
17 14 (1.73%) Microsoft Purview
Communications & Networking
1 5 (0.62%) Firewall
1 5 (0.62%) TCP/IP
2 4 (0.50%) Internet
2 4 (0.50%) MQTT
3 3 (0.37%) SAN
3 3 (0.37%) SSH
3 3 (0.37%) Structured Cabling
4 2 (0.25%) DNS
4 2 (0.25%) SSL
4 2 (0.25%) Wi-Fi
5 1 (0.12%) 802.11
5 1 (0.12%) Ethernet
5 1 (0.12%) LAN
5 1 (0.12%) WAN
5 1 (0.12%) Wireless
Database & Business Intelligence
1 196 (24.29%) Data Warehouse
2 142 (17.60%) Power BI
3 106 (13.14%) Data Lake
4 73 (9.05%) Big Data
5 64 (7.93%) PostgreSQL
6 59 (7.31%) SQL Server
7 53 (6.57%) Amazon Redshift
7 53 (6.57%) Hadoop
8 51 (6.32%) NoSQL
9 48 (5.95%) Relational Database
10 45 (5.58%) Delta Lake
11 41 (5.08%) Azure SQL Database
12 40 (4.96%) BigQuery
13 39 (4.83%) Tableau
14 32 (3.97%) Metadata
15 28 (3.47%) SQL Server Integration Services
16 27 (3.35%) Star Schema
17 25 (3.10%) Elasticsearch
18 22 (2.73%) Amazon QuickSight
19 21 (2.60%) Amazon Athena
Development Applications
1 105 (13.01%) Git
2 53 (6.57%) Jenkins
3 36 (4.46%) JIRA
4 34 (4.21%) GitLab
5 17 (2.11%) MLflow
6 8 (0.99%) DBeaver
7 6 (0.74%) Bitbucket
8 5 (0.62%) SonarQube
8 5 (0.62%) Visual Studio Code
9 3 (0.37%) Artifactory
9 3 (0.37%) Cucumber
9 3 (0.37%) Poetry
9 3 (0.37%) PyCharm
9 3 (0.37%) Sonatype Nexus
9 3 (0.37%) Visual Studio
10 2 (0.25%) JMeter
10 2 (0.25%) Selenium
10 2 (0.25%) Zephyr
11 1 (0.12%) Maven
11 1 (0.12%) TeamCity
General
1 172 (21.31%) Social Skills
2 140 (17.35%) Finance
3 103 (12.76%) Analytical Skills
4 61 (7.56%) Public Sector
5 39 (4.83%) Banking
6 18 (2.23%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 13 (1.61%) Pharmaceutical
8 12 (1.49%) Investment Banking
8 12 (1.49%) Retail
8 12 (1.49%) Telecoms
9 11 (1.36%) Front Office
10 10 (1.24%) Marketing
11 9 (1.12%) Documentation Skills
12 6 (0.74%) Presentation Skills
13 5 (0.62%) Health Technology
13 5 (0.62%) Influencing Skills
13 5 (0.62%) Manufacturing
13 5 (0.62%) Tech for Good
14 4 (0.50%) Legal
14 4 (0.50%) Military
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 137 (16.98%) PySpark
2 85 (10.53%) Kafka
3 25 (3.10%) Pandas
4 20 (2.48%) RESTful
5 19 (2.35%) NumPy
6 18 (2.23%) XML
7 17 (2.11%) Apache NiFi
8 15 (1.86%) JSON
8 15 (1.86%) REST
9 14 (1.73%) Flask
10 12 (1.49%) HTML
11 11 (1.36%) RabbitMQ
12 10 (1.24%) PyTorch
13 9 (1.12%) OAuth
13 9 (1.12%) pytest
13 9 (1.12%) YAML
14 8 (0.99%) GraphQL
14 8 (0.99%) Jinja
14 8 (0.99%) Oracle GoldenGate
14 8 (0.99%) TensorFlow
Miscellaneous
1 47 (5.82%) Cloud Native
2 29 (3.59%) Legacy Systems
3 24 (2.97%) Data Structures
4 22 (2.73%) Algorithms
4 22 (2.73%) Product Ownership
5 19 (2.35%) Replication
6 14 (1.73%) Data Protection Act
6 14 (1.73%) Onboarding
7 12 (1.49%) Hybrid Cloud
8 10 (1.24%) Greenfield Project
8 10 (1.24%) IoT
9 9 (1.12%) Distributed Computing
9 9 (1.12%) Life Science
9 9 (1.12%) NHS
10 8 (0.99%) Distributed Systems
10 8 (0.99%) Reinsurance
10 8 (0.99%) Virtual Team
11 6 (0.74%) Clustering
12 5 (0.62%) Genomics
12 5 (0.62%) Linux Command Line
Operating Systems
1 30 (3.72%) Linux
2 16 (1.98%) Unix
3 3 (0.37%) Windows
4 2 (0.25%) Windows Server
4 2 (0.25%) Windows Server 2003
Processes & Methodologies
1 378 (46.84%) Data Pipeline
2 339 (42.01%) ETL
3 316 (39.16%) Data Engineering
4 278 (34.45%) Data Modelling
5 253 (31.35%) CI/CD
6 242 (29.99%) Analytics
7 182 (22.55%) DevOps
8 181 (22.43%) Business Intelligence
9 166 (20.57%) Agile
10 141 (17.47%) Data Science
11 137 (16.98%) Problem-Solving
12 112 (13.88%) Machine Learning
13 110 (13.63%) Data Governance
14 99 (12.27%) AI
15 97 (12.02%) Infrastructure as Code
16 95 (11.77%) Data Integration
17 92 (11.40%) Visualisation
18 88 (10.90%) Migration
19 86 (10.66%) Data Transformation
20 78 (9.67%) Data Architecture
Programming Languages
1 530 (65.68%) Python
2 494 (61.21%) SQL
3 84 (10.41%) Java
4 67 (8.30%) Scala
5 24 (2.97%) Bash
6 19 (2.35%) PL/SQL
7 14 (1.73%) Data Analysis Expressions
7 14 (1.73%) JavaScript
8 13 (1.61%) R
9 12 (1.49%) T-SQL
10 11 (1.36%) C#
10 11 (1.36%) Go
11 10 (1.24%) Shell Script
12 9 (1.12%) PowerShell
13 8 (0.99%) TypeScript
14 4 (0.50%) C++
14 4 (0.50%) Groovy
14 4 (0.50%) Korn
15 2 (0.25%) ABAP
15 2 (0.25%) Bicep
Qualifications
1 159 (19.70%) Security Cleared
2 132 (16.36%) SC Cleared
3 43 (5.33%) Degree
4 26 (3.22%) AWS Certification
5 25 (3.10%) Azure Certification
6 21 (2.60%) DV Cleared
7 17 (2.11%) Computer Science Degree
8 13 (1.61%) Master's Degree
9 9 (1.12%) BPSS Clearance
10 3 (0.37%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
10 3 (0.37%) SnowPro
11 2 (0.25%) MCP
12 1 (0.12%) CTC Cleared
12 1 (0.12%) DBS Check
12 1 (0.12%) HND
12 1 (0.12%) ITIL Certification
12 1 (0.12%) Microsoft Certification
12 1 (0.12%) PhD
12 1 (0.12%) Tableau Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 202 (25.03%) Data Quality
2 33 (4.09%) GDPR
3 19 (2.35%) QA
4 11 (1.36%) Accessibility
5 4 (0.50%) NIST
5 4 (0.50%) SLA
6 3 (0.37%) HIPAA
6 3 (0.37%) ISO/IEC 20000
7 2 (0.25%) Dodd-Frank
7 2 (0.25%) EMIR
7 2 (0.25%) EU AI Act
7 2 (0.25%) MiFID
8 1 (0.12%) Disclosure Scotland
8 1 (0.12%) HL7
8 1 (0.12%) ISO 19650
8 1 (0.12%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 1 (0.12%) NCSC
8 1 (0.12%) PMO
8 1 (0.12%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 1 (0.12%) WCAG
System Software
1 62 (7.68%) Docker
2 9 (1.12%) Virtual Machines
3 5 (0.62%) zsh
4 2 (0.25%) Active Directory
5 1 (0.12%) HDFS
Systems Management
1 99 (12.27%) Terraform
2 65 (8.05%) Kubernetes
3 16 (1.98%) Grafana
4 13 (1.61%) Ansible
5 9 (1.12%) NetBackup
6 8 (0.99%) Prometheus
7 6 (0.74%) Kibana
8 5 (0.62%) Puppet
9 4 (0.50%) Argo
9 4 (0.50%) logstash
10 3 (0.37%) Ambari
10 3 (0.37%) Istio
10 3 (0.37%) Kubeflow
10 3 (0.37%) Kustomize
10 3 (0.37%) ZABBIX
11 2 (0.25%) Control-M
11 2 (0.25%) EMC NetWorker
11 2 (0.25%) Tivoli Storage Manager
12 1 (0.12%) FortiGate
Vendors
1 249 (30.86%) Databricks
2 91 (11.28%) Microsoft
3 58 (7.19%) Oracle
4 30 (3.72%) Google
5 29 (3.59%) Talend
6 27 (3.35%) Foundry
6 27 (3.35%) Palantir
7 25 (3.10%) Informatica
8 18 (2.23%) Cloudera
9 15 (1.86%) Denodo
10 14 (1.73%) IBM
11 13 (1.61%) SAP
12 12 (1.49%) Red Hat
13 9 (1.12%) Commvault
14 8 (0.99%) Confluent
14 8 (0.99%) Salesforce
14 8 (0.99%) ServiceNow
14 8 (0.99%) Splunk
14 8 (0.99%) Veritas
15 7 (0.87%) Virgin Media