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 21 November 2025.

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

6 months to
21 Nov 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 123 89 122
Rank change year-on-year -34 +33 +3
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 830 934 931
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.31% 2.56% 2.01%
As % of the Job Titles category 2.54% 2.76% 2.15%
Number of daily rates quoted 590 640 700
10th Percentile £361 £390 £400
25th Percentile £413 £459 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £545 £530
Median % change year-on-year -8.26% +2.83% -3.64%
75th Percentile £600 £630 £638
90th Percentile £696 £700 £700
UK excluding London median daily rate £488 £500 £525
% change year-on-year -2.50% -4.76% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 13 10 14
10th Percentile £25.34 £25.23 £35.19
25th Percentile £33.75 £26.27 £41.29
Median hourly rate £43.50 £34.93 £61.75
Median % change year-on-year +24.55% -43.44% +14.35%
75th Percentile £69.25 £86.06 £67.25
90th Percentile £105.50 £97.50 £78.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £32.25 £26.50 £57.00
% change year-on-year +21.70% -53.51% +3.64%

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 32,630 33,866 43,334
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 90.96% 92.82% 93.66%
Number of daily rates quoted 20,686 20,426 29,351
10th Percentile £280 £300 £292
25th Percentile £402 £410 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £619 £638 £645
90th Percentile £725 £738 £740
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £493 £500
% change year-on-year -3.65% -1.40% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 1,921 1,265 1,542
10th Percentile £14.25 £15.22 £15.16
25th Percentile £17.87 £20.75 £19.06
Median hourly rate £25.15 £36.00 £45.00
Median % change year-on-year -30.14% -20.00% +50.00%
75th Percentile £55.85 £65.00 £65.00
90th Percentile £71.00 £73.75 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £25.15 £35.00 £45.00
% change year-on-year -28.14% -22.22% +83.67%

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 21 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 21 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 21 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 -33 698 £513 -6.82% 652
London -28 430 £536 -6.74% 424
UK excluding London -33 289 £488 -2.50% 324
Work from Home -30 265 £500 -4.76% 319
Midlands -19 80 £515 +5.32% 58
North of England -33 78 £450 -7.22% 71
West Midlands -16 67 £519 +4.90% 50
Scotland +16 50 £438 -12.50% 26
South West +6 36 £550 - 30
South East -38 36 £475 -13.64% 112
North West -14 35 £403 -15.26% 40
Yorkshire -34 35 £500 +3.09% 22
East Midlands -12 13 £460 +29.21% 8
Wales -12 12 £425 -15.00% 9
North East -4 8 £425 -12.82% 9
East of England -22 6 £625 +79.86% 20
Northern Ireland -8 1 - - 1

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

For the 6 months to 21 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.

1 538 (64.82%) Python
2 508 (61.20%) SQL
3 389 (46.87%) Data Pipeline
4 351 (42.29%) Azure
5 343 (41.33%) ETL
6 320 (38.55%) Data Engineering
7 294 (35.42%) AWS
8 288 (34.70%) Data Modelling
9 263 (31.69%) CI/CD
10 255 (30.72%) Analytics
11 254 (30.60%) Databricks
12 206 (24.82%) Data Quality
13 199 (23.98%) Data Warehouse
14 191 (23.01%) DevOps
15 187 (22.53%) Business Intelligence
16 172 (20.72%) Agile
17 164 (19.76%) Security Cleared
18 155 (18.67%) Azure Data Factory
19 148 (17.83%) Power Platform
20 145 (17.47%) Data Science
21 144 (17.35%) Power BI
21 144 (17.35%) Problem-Solving
22 139 (16.75%) PySpark
23 138 (16.63%) SC Cleared
24 136 (16.39%) Apache Airflow
25 132 (15.90%) Snowflake
26 118 (14.22%) Machine Learning
27 111 (13.37%) GCP
27 111 (13.37%) Git
28 108 (13.01%) Data Governance

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 (16.39%) Apache Airflow
2 97 (11.69%) Apache Spark
3 71 (8.55%) Apache
4 24 (2.89%) Confluence
5 19 (2.29%) SAS
6 8 (0.96%) Oracle Application Server
6 8 (0.96%) SharePoint
7 6 (0.72%) Apache Pig
8 5 (0.60%) IIS
9 4 (0.48%) Jupyter
10 3 (0.36%) ArcGIS
10 3 (0.36%) Oracle SOA Suite
11 2 (0.24%) Documentum
11 2 (0.24%) Luigi
12 1 (0.12%) Apache Superset
12 1 (0.12%) Apache Synapse
12 1 (0.12%) nginx
Applications
1 9 (1.08%) Microsoft Excel
2 4 (0.48%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 2 (0.24%) Chatbot
3 2 (0.24%) Microsoft Office
3 2 (0.24%) Windchill
4 1 (0.12%) MS Visio
4 1 (0.12%) SPSS
4 1 (0.12%) Stata
Business Applications
1 3 (0.36%) Oracle BPM
2 2 (0.24%) Aladdin
2 2 (0.24%) Maximo
2 2 (0.24%) Payment Gateway
2 2 (0.24%) SAP S/4HANA
3 1 (0.12%) Dynamics CRM
3 1 (0.12%) NetSuite
3 1 (0.12%) Salesforce CRM
3 1 (0.12%) SAP ERP
Cloud Services
1 351 (42.29%) Azure
2 294 (35.42%) AWS
3 155 (18.67%) Azure Data Factory
4 148 (17.83%) Power Platform
5 132 (15.90%) Snowflake
6 111 (13.37%) GCP
7 99 (11.93%) dbt
8 96 (11.57%) Amazon S3
9 91 (10.96%) Azure Synapse Analytics
10 76 (9.16%) Serverless
11 75 (9.04%) GitHub
12 54 (6.51%) Azure DevOps
13 48 (5.78%) AWS Lambda
14 39 (4.70%) GitHub Actions
15 28 (3.37%) AWS CloudFormation
16 24 (2.89%) Amazon EMR
17 22 (2.65%) SaaS
18 19 (2.29%) Amazon Kinesis
19 14 (1.69%) AWS Step Functions
20 13 (1.57%) Microsoft Purview
Communications & Networking
1 5 (0.60%) Firewall
1 5 (0.60%) TCP/IP
2 4 (0.48%) Internet
2 4 (0.48%) MQTT
3 3 (0.36%) SAN
3 3 (0.36%) SSH
3 3 (0.36%) Structured Cabling
4 2 (0.24%) DNS
4 2 (0.24%) SSL
4 2 (0.24%) 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
1 199 (23.98%) Data Warehouse
2 144 (17.35%) Power BI
3 104 (12.53%) Data Lake
4 75 (9.04%) Big Data
5 63 (7.59%) PostgreSQL
6 56 (6.75%) SQL Server
7 55 (6.63%) Hadoop
8 53 (6.39%) Amazon Redshift
9 51 (6.14%) NoSQL
10 45 (5.42%) Delta Lake
10 45 (5.42%) Relational Database
11 43 (5.18%) BigQuery
12 40 (4.82%) Azure SQL Database
13 39 (4.70%) Tableau
14 31 (3.73%) Metadata
15 28 (3.37%) Star Schema
16 27 (3.25%) SQL Server Integration Services
17 26 (3.13%) Pentaho
18 25 (3.01%) Elasticsearch
19 22 (2.65%) Amazon Athena
Development Applications
1 111 (13.37%) Git
2 59 (7.11%) Jenkins
3 42 (5.06%) JIRA
4 34 (4.10%) GitLab
5 21 (2.53%) MLflow
6 8 (0.96%) DBeaver
7 6 (0.72%) Bitbucket
8 5 (0.60%) Visual Studio Code
9 4 (0.48%) SonarQube
10 3 (0.36%) Artifactory
10 3 (0.36%) Cucumber
10 3 (0.36%) Poetry
10 3 (0.36%) PyCharm
10 3 (0.36%) Sonatype Nexus
10 3 (0.36%) Visual Studio
11 2 (0.24%) JMeter
11 2 (0.24%) Selenium
11 2 (0.24%) Zephyr
12 1 (0.12%) Deequ
12 1 (0.12%) GoCD
General
1 175 (21.08%) Social Skills
2 145 (17.47%) Finance
3 109 (13.13%) Analytical Skills
4 63 (7.59%) Public Sector
5 40 (4.82%) Banking
6 22 (2.65%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 13 (1.57%) Investment Banking
7 13 (1.57%) Pharmaceutical
8 12 (1.45%) Retail
8 12 (1.45%) Telecoms
9 11 (1.33%) Front Office
10 10 (1.20%) Marketing
11 9 (1.08%) Documentation Skills
12 5 (0.60%) Health Technology
12 5 (0.60%) Influencing Skills
12 5 (0.60%) Legal
12 5 (0.60%) Manufacturing
12 5 (0.60%) Presentation Skills
12 5 (0.60%) Tech for Good
13 4 (0.48%) Retail Banking
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 139 (16.75%) PySpark
2 85 (10.24%) Kafka
3 26 (3.13%) Pandas
4 21 (2.53%) RESTful
5 20 (2.41%) NumPy
6 18 (2.17%) XML
7 17 (2.05%) Apache NiFi
7 17 (2.05%) REST
8 15 (1.81%) JSON
9 14 (1.69%) Flask
10 12 (1.45%) HTML
10 12 (1.45%) RabbitMQ
11 11 (1.33%) PyTorch
12 10 (1.20%) YAML
13 9 (1.08%) OAuth
13 9 (1.08%) TensorFlow
14 8 (0.96%) Jinja
14 8 (0.96%) Keycloak
14 8 (0.96%) Oracle GoldenGate
14 8 (0.96%) pytest
Miscellaneous
1 49 (5.90%) Cloud Native
2 30 (3.61%) Legacy Systems
3 24 (2.89%) Data Structures
4 22 (2.65%) Algorithms
4 22 (2.65%) Product Ownership
5 19 (2.29%) Replication
6 14 (1.69%) Data Protection Act
6 14 (1.69%) Onboarding
7 12 (1.45%) Hybrid Cloud
8 10 (1.20%) Greenfield Project
9 9 (1.08%) Distributed Computing
9 9 (1.08%) IoT
9 9 (1.08%) Life Science
9 9 (1.08%) NHS
10 8 (0.96%) Distributed Systems
10 8 (0.96%) Reinsurance
10 8 (0.96%) Virtual Team
11 6 (0.72%) Clustering
12 5 (0.60%) Linux Command Line
12 5 (0.60%) Management Information System
Operating Systems
1 30 (3.61%) Linux
2 16 (1.93%) Unix
3 3 (0.36%) Windows
4 2 (0.24%) Windows Server
4 2 (0.24%) Windows Server 2003
Processes & Methodologies
1 389 (46.87%) Data Pipeline
2 343 (41.33%) ETL
3 320 (38.55%) Data Engineering
4 288 (34.70%) Data Modelling
5 263 (31.69%) CI/CD
6 255 (30.72%) Analytics
7 191 (23.01%) DevOps
8 187 (22.53%) Business Intelligence
9 172 (20.72%) Agile
10 145 (17.47%) Data Science
11 144 (17.35%) Problem-Solving
12 118 (14.22%) Machine Learning
13 108 (13.01%) Data Governance
14 101 (12.17%) AI
15 97 (11.69%) Data Integration
15 97 (11.69%) Infrastructure as Code
16 94 (11.33%) Visualisation
17 87 (10.48%) Migration
18 86 (10.36%) Data Transformation
19 77 (9.28%) Data Architecture
Programming Languages
1 538 (64.82%) Python
2 508 (61.20%) SQL
3 82 (9.88%) Java
4 67 (8.07%) Scala
5 25 (3.01%) Bash
6 19 (2.29%) PL/SQL
7 15 (1.81%) R
8 14 (1.69%) Data Analysis Expressions
8 14 (1.69%) JavaScript
9 12 (1.45%) T-SQL
10 11 (1.33%) C#
10 11 (1.33%) Go
11 10 (1.20%) Shell Script
12 9 (1.08%) PowerShell
13 8 (0.96%) TypeScript
14 4 (0.48%) C++
14 4 (0.48%) Groovy
14 4 (0.48%) Korn
15 2 (0.24%) ABAP
16 1 (0.12%) VB.NET
Qualifications
1 164 (19.76%) Security Cleared
2 138 (16.63%) SC Cleared
3 43 (5.18%) Degree
4 26 (3.13%) AWS Certification
5 24 (2.89%) Azure Certification
6 22 (2.65%) DV Cleared
7 17 (2.05%) Computer Science Degree
8 13 (1.57%) Master's Degree
9 9 (1.08%) BPSS Clearance
10 3 (0.36%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
10 3 (0.36%) SnowPro
11 2 (0.24%) CTC Cleared
11 2 (0.24%) DBS Check
11 2 (0.24%) MCP
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
1 206 (24.82%) Data Quality
2 32 (3.86%) GDPR
3 20 (2.41%) QA
4 11 (1.33%) Accessibility
5 4 (0.48%) NIST
5 4 (0.48%) SLA
6 3 (0.36%) HIPAA
6 3 (0.36%) ISO/IEC 20000
7 2 (0.24%) Dodd-Frank
7 2 (0.24%) EMIR
7 2 (0.24%) EU AI Act
7 2 (0.24%) MiFID
8 1 (0.12%) Disclosure Scotland
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%) SOC 2
8 1 (0.12%) WCAG
System Software
1 67 (8.07%) Docker
2 9 (1.08%) Virtual Machines
3 5 (0.60%) zsh
4 2 (0.24%) Active Directory
5 1 (0.12%) HDFS
Systems Management
1 100 (12.05%) Terraform
2 71 (8.55%) Kubernetes
3 15 (1.81%) Grafana
4 13 (1.57%) Ansible
5 9 (1.08%) NetBackup
6 7 (0.84%) Prometheus
7 5 (0.60%) Kibana
7 5 (0.60%) Puppet
8 4 (0.48%) Argo
8 4 (0.48%) Kubeflow
9 3 (0.36%) Ambari
9 3 (0.36%) Istio
9 3 (0.36%) Kustomize
9 3 (0.36%) logstash
9 3 (0.36%) ZABBIX
10 2 (0.24%) Control-M
10 2 (0.24%) EMC NetWorker
10 2 (0.24%) Tivoli Storage Manager
11 1 (0.12%) FortiGate
Vendors
1 254 (30.60%) Databricks
2 91 (10.96%) Microsoft
3 62 (7.47%) Oracle
4 32 (3.86%) Google
4 32 (3.86%) Talend
5 29 (3.49%) Foundry
5 29 (3.49%) Palantir
6 24 (2.89%) Informatica
7 20 (2.41%) Denodo
8 19 (2.29%) Cloudera
9 14 (1.69%) IBM
10 12 (1.45%) Red Hat
10 12 (1.45%) SAP
11 9 (1.08%) Commvault
12 8 (0.96%) Confluent
12 8 (0.96%) Salesforce
12 8 (0.96%) ServiceNow
12 8 (0.96%) Splunk
12 8 (0.96%) Veritas
13 7 (0.84%) Virgin Media