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 30 June 2026.

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

6 months to
30 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 58 107 101
Rank change year-on-year +49 -6 +26
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 1,905 758 980
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 3.71% 2.48% 2.27%
As % of the Job Titles category 4.02% 2.69% 2.44%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,301 551 746
10th Percentile £375 £363 £216
25th Percentile £425 £425 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £500
Median % change year-on-year - - -9.09%
75th Percentile £588 £587 £600
90th Percentile £650 £700 £688
UK excluding London median daily rate £469 £463 £450
% change year-on-year +1.45% +2.78% -14.29%
Number of hourly rates quoted 73 11 41
10th Percentile £19.34 £18.22 £31.25
25th Percentile £36.25 £46.75 £49.25
Median hourly rate £50.00 £52.50 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% -19.23% -9.72%
75th Percentile £68.00 £78.10 £80.00
90th Percentile £75.00 £80.00 -
UK excluding London median hourly rate £47.50 £48.46 £75.00
% change year-on-year -1.98% -35.39% -

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 47,423 28,164 40,143
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.41% 92.05% 92.99%
Number of daily rates quoted 28,738 18,025 25,769
10th Percentile £325 £288 £283
25th Percentile £415 £401 £410
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £520 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% -4.76% -2.33%
75th Percentile £625 £625 £638
90th Percentile £725 £738 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £493
% change year-on-year +5.26% -3.65% -1.40%
Number of hourly rates quoted 3,196 1,261 2,867
10th Percentile £15.61 £13.78 £12.86
25th Percentile £21.23 £17.33 £16.50
Median hourly rate £43.00 £27.00 £37.50
Median % change year-on-year +59.26% -28.00% -12.79%
75th Percentile £67.50 £56.25 £62.50
90th Percentile £80.00 £73.75 £74.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £45.00 £25.15 £40.00
% change year-on-year +78.93% -37.13% -

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 30 June 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 30 June 2026.

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 30 June 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 +46 1,674 £500 - 331
London +35 853 £525 - 128
UK excluding London +68 847 £469 +1.45% 270
Work from Home +35 570 £500 +1.01% 154
Midlands +50 344 £466 +2.47% 54
West Midlands +48 308 £460 - 32
North of England +18 213 £475 - 82
North West +19 131 £500 +5.26% 46
South East +18 126 £475 +11.76% 81
South West +20 91 £513 +2.60% 31
Scotland +21 67 £425 -9.33% 7
Yorkshire -15 63 £470 -1.05% 19
East Midlands +6 36 £525 +28.05% 23
East of England -15 24 £543 +70.60% 10
Wales +6 22 £450 +3.45% 8
North East -22 19 £480 +9.71% 19
Northern Ireland +3 3 £410 -18.00% 1

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

For the 6 months to 30 June 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 1,000 (52.49%) SQL
2 865 (45.41%) Python
3 787 (41.31%) Data Pipeline
4 706 (37.06%) Analytics
5 690 (36.22%) Data Engineering
6 684 (35.91%) ETL
7 632 (33.18%) Data Modelling
8 603 (31.65%) Azure
9 554 (29.08%) AWS
10 527 (27.66%) Security Cleared
11 469 (24.62%) Data Quality
12 461 (24.20%) SC Cleared
13 455 (23.88%) CI/CD
14 401 (21.05%) Databricks
15 377 (19.79%) Business Intelligence
16 344 (18.06%) Agile
17 318 (16.69%) DevOps
18 313 (16.43%) Data Warehouse
19 302 (15.85%) Power Platform
20 288 (15.12%) Power BI
21 281 (14.75%) PySpark
22 268 (14.07%) Migration
23 257 (13.49%) Data Governance
24 239 (12.55%) Problem-Solving
25 237 (12.44%) AI
26 234 (12.28%) Microsoft
27 229 (12.02%) Azure Data Factory
28 205 (10.76%) Snowflake
29 204 (10.71%) Data Integration
30 200 (10.50%) Validation

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
1 171 (8.98%) Apache Airflow
2 151 (7.93%) Apache Spark
3 106 (5.56%) Apache
4 85 (4.46%) SAS
5 54 (2.83%) Confluence
6 12 (0.63%) Palantir Foundry
6 12 (0.63%) SharePoint
7 9 (0.47%) Jupyter
8 5 (0.26%) Microsoft Exchange
9 2 (0.10%) Luigi
10 1 (0.052%) Apache Superset
10 1 (0.052%) Appian
10 1 (0.052%) ArcGIS
10 1 (0.052%) Camunda
10 1 (0.052%) Liferay
10 1 (0.052%) R Markdown
Applications
1 18 (0.94%) Microsoft Excel
2 7 (0.37%) Notepad++
3 4 (0.21%) Spreadsheet
4 2 (0.10%) Chatbot
5 1 (0.052%) Microsoft Office
5 1 (0.052%) Microsoft PowerPoint
Business Applications
1 8 (0.42%) Aladdin
2 6 (0.31%) Dynamics CRM
3 5 (0.26%) Infor LN
3 5 (0.26%) NetSuite
3 5 (0.26%) Sage X3
4 3 (0.16%) SAP BPC
4 3 (0.16%) SAP S/4HANA
4 3 (0.16%) SimCorp Dimension
5 2 (0.10%) BambooHR
5 2 (0.10%) Maximo
5 2 (0.10%) Oracle EBS
6 1 (0.052%) Elite 3E
6 1 (0.052%) FIS Private Capital Suite
6 1 (0.052%) iTrent
6 1 (0.052%) NEC Housing
6 1 (0.052%) Oracle 11i
6 1 (0.052%) Oracle ERP
6 1 (0.052%) Raiser’s Edge
6 1 (0.052%) SAP CAR
6 1 (0.052%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
Cloud Services
1 603 (31.65%) Azure
2 554 (29.08%) AWS
3 302 (15.85%) Power Platform
4 229 (12.02%) Azure Data Factory
5 205 (10.76%) Snowflake
6 181 (9.50%) dbt
7 177 (9.29%) Amazon S3
8 167 (8.77%) GCP
9 149 (7.82%) Azure Synapse Analytics
10 139 (7.30%) Azure DevOps
11 124 (6.51%) Serverless
12 118 (6.19%) GitHub
13 106 (5.56%) AWS Lambda
14 55 (2.89%) Amazon EMR
15 54 (2.83%) GitHub Actions
16 34 (1.78%) Matillion
17 33 (1.73%) Amazon CloudWatch
18 29 (1.52%) AWS CloudFormation
19 28 (1.47%) Amazon Kinesis
20 24 (1.26%) OpenShift
Communications & Networking
1 34 (1.78%) DNS
1 34 (1.78%) VPN
2 33 (1.73%) BGP
2 33 (1.73%) DMZ
2 33 (1.73%) Multicast
3 10 (0.52%) Structured Cabling
4 7 (0.37%) PuTTY
4 7 (0.37%) WinSCP
5 6 (0.31%) Firewall
6 4 (0.21%) Wi-Fi
6 4 (0.21%) Wireless
7 2 (0.10%) Intrusion Detection
8 1 (0.052%) 4G
8 1 (0.052%) 5G
8 1 (0.052%) MQTT
Database & Business Intelligence
1 313 (16.43%) Data Warehouse
2 288 (15.12%) Power BI
3 182 (9.55%) Data Lake
4 112 (5.88%) SQL Server
5 110 (5.77%) Amazon Redshift
6 103 (5.41%) Delta Lake
7 98 (5.14%) Metadata
8 95 (4.99%) BigQuery
9 89 (4.67%) Pentaho
10 88 (4.62%) Big Data
11 76 (3.99%) Tableau
12 75 (3.94%) Amazon Athena
13 73 (3.83%) Snowflake Schema
14 71 (3.73%) PostgreSQL
15 64 (3.36%) Azure SQL Database
16 59 (3.10%) Relational Database
17 57 (2.99%) NoSQL
17 57 (2.99%) SQL Server Integration Services
18 39 (2.05%) Hadoop
19 38 (1.99%) Data Vault
Development Applications
1 185 (9.71%) Git
2 103 (5.41%) GitLab
3 96 (5.04%) JIRA
4 48 (2.52%) Jenkins
5 9 (0.47%) Artifactory
6 7 (0.37%) MLflow
6 7 (0.37%) Postman
7 6 (0.31%) Bitbucket
8 3 (0.16%) Newman
8 3 (0.16%) SonarQube
9 2 (0.10%) Atlassian Bamboo
9 2 (0.10%) Claude Code
9 2 (0.10%) Sonatype Nexus
9 2 (0.10%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
9 2 (0.10%) Terragrunt
9 2 (0.10%) Visual Studio
10 1 (0.052%) ERwin
10 1 (0.052%) JUnit
10 1 (0.052%) Selenium
10 1 (0.052%) Yeoman
General
1 315 (16.54%) Finance
2 309 (16.22%) Social Skills
3 204 (10.71%) Analytical Skills
4 161 (8.45%) Public Sector
5 106 (5.56%) Banking
6 38 (1.99%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 32 (1.68%) Marketing
8 29 (1.52%) Documentation Skills
8 29 (1.52%) Retail
9 25 (1.31%) Investment Banking
10 24 (1.26%) Telecoms
11 18 (0.94%) Manufacturing
11 18 (0.94%) Pharmaceutical
12 13 (0.68%) Aerospace
12 13 (0.68%) Automotive
12 13 (0.68%) Front Office
13 11 (0.58%) Publishing
14 9 (0.47%) Billing
14 9 (0.47%) Legal
15 7 (0.37%) Law
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 281 (14.75%) PySpark
2 152 (7.98%) Kafka
3 43 (2.26%) Pandas
4 37 (1.94%) JSON
5 28 (1.47%) REST
6 25 (1.31%) Spring
6 25 (1.31%) Spring Boot
7 23 (1.21%) Great Expectations
8 22 (1.15%) XML
9 19 (1.00%) YAML
10 17 (0.89%) Apache Beam
11 13 (0.68%) Apache Avro
12 12 (0.63%) scikit-learn
12 12 (0.63%) Streamlit
13 11 (0.58%) React
13 11 (0.58%) RESTful
14 10 (0.52%) Matplotlib
14 10 (0.52%) pytest
14 10 (0.52%) PyTorch
15 9 (0.47%) GeoJSON
Miscellaneous
1 141 (7.40%) Cloud Native
2 59 (3.10%) Data Structures
3 58 (3.04%) Legacy Systems
4 34 (1.78%) Distributed Systems
5 29 (1.52%) Onboarding
6 28 (1.47%) Greenfield Project
7 26 (1.36%) Reinsurance
8 23 (1.21%) NHS
8 23 (1.21%) Product Ownership
9 21 (1.10%) Clustering
9 21 (1.10%) Data Protection Act
10 12 (0.63%) Virtual Team
11 11 (0.58%) Life Science
12 10 (0.52%) Linux Command Line
12 10 (0.52%) Public Cloud
12 10 (0.52%) Reference Data
12 10 (0.52%) Replication
12 10 (0.52%) Self-Motivation
13 9 (0.47%) Distributed Computing
13 9 (0.47%) Driving Licence
Operating Systems
1 65 (3.41%) Unix
2 40 (2.10%) Linux
3 5 (0.26%) Windows
4 2 (0.10%) Ubuntu
4 2 (0.10%) Windows Server
5 1 (0.052%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 787 (41.31%) Data Pipeline
2 706 (37.06%) Analytics
3 690 (36.22%) Data Engineering
4 684 (35.91%) ETL
5 632 (33.18%) Data Modelling
6 455 (23.88%) CI/CD
7 377 (19.79%) Business Intelligence
8 344 (18.06%) Agile
9 318 (16.69%) DevOps
10 268 (14.07%) Migration
11 257 (13.49%) Data Governance
12 239 (12.55%) Problem-Solving
13 237 (12.44%) AI
14 204 (10.71%) Data Integration
15 200 (10.50%) Validation
16 189 (9.92%) Data Science
17 174 (9.13%) Decision-Making
18 166 (8.71%) Data Transformation
19 147 (7.72%) Infrastructure as Code
20 145 (7.61%) Machine Learning
Programming Languages
1 1,000 (52.49%) SQL
2 865 (45.41%) Python
3 125 (6.56%) Java
4 65 (3.41%) Scala
5 56 (2.94%) PL/SQL
6 40 (2.10%) T-SQL
7 34 (1.78%) Data Analysis Expressions
8 31 (1.63%) Shell Script
9 29 (1.52%) C#
10 28 (1.47%) Bash
11 22 (1.15%) PowerShell
12 16 (0.84%) Bicep
13 15 (0.79%) R
14 13 (0.68%) JavaScript
15 8 (0.42%) TypeScript
16 7 (0.37%) Go
17 2 (0.10%) Korn
17 2 (0.10%) Perl
17 2 (0.10%) Ruby
17 2 (0.10%) SPARQL
Qualifications
1 527 (27.66%) Security Cleared
2 461 (24.20%) SC Cleared
3 50 (2.62%) BPSS Clearance
4 45 (2.36%) Degree
5 26 (1.36%) Azure Certification
6 19 (1.00%) Computer Science Degree
7 18 (0.94%) DV Cleared
8 14 (0.73%) AWS Certification
9 9 (0.47%) City & Guilds
9 9 (0.47%) DBS Check
9 9 (0.47%) SnowPro
10 8 (0.42%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
11 7 (0.37%) Master's Degree
12 6 (0.31%) Microsoft Certification
13 5 (0.26%) BICSI Certification
13 5 (0.26%) CISSP
14 4 (0.21%) CISM
15 3 (0.16%) IBM Certification
16 2 (0.10%) CEH
17 1 (0.052%) CISA
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 469 (24.62%) Data Quality
2 58 (3.04%) QA
3 54 (2.83%) GDPR
4 15 (0.79%) Accessibility
5 12 (0.63%) SLA
6 9 (0.47%) FATCA
7 7 (0.37%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 6 (0.31%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 4 (0.21%) MiFID
10 3 (0.16%) GMP
10 3 (0.16%) HIPAA
11 2 (0.10%) California Consumer Privacy Act
11 2 (0.10%) Disclosure Scotland
11 2 (0.10%) EMIR
11 2 (0.10%) GRC
11 2 (0.10%) SNOMED CT
11 2 (0.10%) WCAG
12 1 (0.052%) IFRS 17
12 1 (0.052%) ISO 13485
12 1 (0.052%) PCI DSS
System Software
1 106 (5.56%) Docker
2 6 (0.31%) Virtual Machines
3 2 (0.10%) Active Directory
3 2 (0.10%) HDFS
4 1 (0.052%) RACF
Systems Management
1 199 (10.45%) Terraform
2 86 (4.51%) Kubernetes
3 51 (2.68%) Grafana
4 12 (0.63%) Ansible
4 12 (0.63%) Prometheus
5 8 (0.42%) Kibana
6 3 (0.16%) Rancher
7 2 (0.10%) Apache Ranger
7 2 (0.10%) Control-M
7 2 (0.10%) Thomson Reuters DACS
8 1 (0.052%) Fluentd
8 1 (0.052%) Kubeflow
8 1 (0.052%) logstash
8 1 (0.052%) NetBackup
8 1 (0.052%) Puppet
8 1 (0.052%) QRadar
Vendors
1 401 (21.05%) Databricks
2 234 (12.28%) Microsoft
3 172 (9.03%) Oracle
4 142 (7.45%) Informatica
5 129 (6.77%) Talend
6 71 (3.73%) Denodo
7 58 (3.04%) Google
8 35 (1.84%) Cisco
8 35 (1.84%) F5
9 30 (1.57%) SAP
10 28 (1.47%) Salesforce
11 25 (1.31%) Splunk
12 20 (1.05%) Palantir
12 20 (1.05%) ServiceNow
13 18 (0.94%) Cloudera
14 15 (0.79%) Foundry
14 15 (0.79%) IBM
15 14 (0.73%) Alteryx
16 11 (0.58%) Sage
17 9 (0.47%) Dynatrace