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 20 December 2025.

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

6 months to
20 Dec 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 111 86 120
Rank change year-on-year -25 +34 +1
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 913 932 915
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.48% 2.73% 2.08%
As % of the Job Titles category 2.72% 2.95% 2.23%
Number of daily rates quoted 648 649 694
10th Percentile £363 £358 £400
25th Percentile £413 £435 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £588 £625 £638
90th Percentile £688 £688 £700
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £490 £513
% change year-on-year +2.04% -4.39% -2.38%
Number of hourly rates quoted 12 13 17
10th Percentile £26.78 £25.45 £35.00
25th Percentile £34.88 £26.32 £39.85
Median hourly rate £53.00 £50.50 £60.50
Median % change year-on-year +4.95% -16.53% +0.83%
75th Percentile £81.13 £93.75 £65.00
90th Percentile £107.75 £97.50 £78.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £51.00 £26.50 £49.00
% change year-on-year +92.45% -45.92% -18.33%

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 33,545 31,624 41,095
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 91.00% 92.80% 93.40%
Number of daily rates quoted 21,197 19,461 27,642
10th Percentile £293 £300 £288
25th Percentile £404 £409 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £618 £638 £643
90th Percentile £720 £738 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £488 £500
% change year-on-year -2.56% -2.50% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 1,986 989 1,457
10th Percentile £14.25 £15.60 £15.14
25th Percentile £18.08 £21.22 £19.06
Median hourly rate £25.15 £33.50 £45.00
Median % change year-on-year -24.93% -25.56% +50.00%
75th Percentile £57.50 £62.69 £65.00
90th Percentile £70.44 £72.55 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £25.15 £32.50 £45.00
% change year-on-year -22.62% -27.78% +82.48%

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 20 December 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 20 December 2025.

Hourly rate histogram for Data Engineer in the UK

Data Engineer
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 Engineer within the UK over the 6 months to 20 December 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 -31 761 £513 -3.21% 327
London -9 474 £525 -8.70% 130
UK excluding London -37 303 £500 +2.04% 275
Work from Home -23 282 £500 -4.76% 186
North of England -46 90 £470 +4.44% 66
Midlands -22 85 £520 +6.12% 40
West Midlands -16 71 £525 +5.00% 31
Scotland +19 52 £450 +1.98% 11
North West -26 43 £425 -4.49% 42
South West +4 40 £550 +17.33% 36
Yorkshire -44 36 £500 +5.26% 13
South East -61 34 £496 -9.77% 101
East Midlands -12 14 £455 +27.81% 9
North East -9 11 £450 +15.38% 11
Wales -10 11 £460 -8.00% 4
East of England -32 6 £625 +96.54% 20

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

For the 6 months to 20 December 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.

1 572 (62.65%) Python
2 533 (58.38%) SQL
3 425 (46.55%) Data Pipeline
4 410 (44.91%) Azure
5 371 (40.64%) ETL
6 360 (39.43%) Data Engineering
7 320 (35.05%) Databricks
8 307 (33.63%) Data Modelling
9 295 (32.31%) AWS
10 284 (31.11%) CI/CD
11 283 (31.00%) Analytics
12 233 (25.52%) Data Quality
13 214 (23.44%) Data Warehouse
14 212 (23.22%) DevOps
15 204 (22.34%) Business Intelligence
16 202 (22.12%) Security Cleared
17 189 (20.70%) Agile
18 180 (19.72%) Azure Data Factory
19 177 (19.39%) SC Cleared
20 176 (19.28%) PySpark
21 163 (17.85%) Power Platform
22 157 (17.20%) Power BI
23 149 (16.32%) Data Science
24 148 (16.21%) Problem-Solving
25 141 (15.44%) Apache Airflow
26 133 (14.57%) Git
27 130 (14.24%) Snowflake
28 129 (14.13%) Data Governance
29 122 (13.36%) Machine Learning
30 118 (12.92%) 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
1 141 (15.44%) Apache Airflow
2 114 (12.49%) Apache Spark
3 79 (8.65%) Apache
4 24 (2.63%) Confluence
5 19 (2.08%) SAS
6 7 (0.77%) Oracle Application Server
7 6 (0.66%) Apache Pig
7 6 (0.66%) SharePoint
8 5 (0.55%) IIS
9 3 (0.33%) ArcGIS
9 3 (0.33%) Jupyter
9 3 (0.33%) Oracle SOA Suite
10 1 (0.11%) Apache Superset
10 1 (0.11%) Apache Synapse
10 1 (0.11%) Luigi
10 1 (0.11%) Microsoft Exchange
10 1 (0.11%) nginx
Applications
1 8 (0.88%) Microsoft Excel
2 3 (0.33%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 2 (0.22%) Chatbot
4 1 (0.11%) Microsoft Office
4 1 (0.11%) MS Visio
4 1 (0.11%) SPSS
4 1 (0.11%) Stata
Business Applications
1 3 (0.33%) Oracle BPM
2 2 (0.22%) Aladdin
2 2 (0.22%) Maximo
2 2 (0.22%) SAP S/4HANA
3 1 (0.11%) Actimize
3 1 (0.11%) Dynamics CRM
3 1 (0.11%) NetSuite
3 1 (0.11%) Salesforce CRM
3 1 (0.11%) SAP ERP
Cloud Services
1 410 (44.91%) Azure
2 295 (32.31%) AWS
3 180 (19.72%) Azure Data Factory
4 163 (17.85%) Power Platform
5 130 (14.24%) Snowflake
6 117 (12.81%) GCP
7 107 (11.72%) Azure Synapse Analytics
8 104 (11.39%) dbt
9 99 (10.84%) Amazon S3
10 86 (9.42%) GitHub
11 82 (8.98%) Serverless
12 63 (6.90%) Azure DevOps
13 49 (5.37%) AWS Lambda
14 48 (5.26%) GitHub Actions
15 32 (3.50%) AWS CloudFormation
16 27 (2.96%) SaaS
17 20 (2.19%) Amazon EMR
17 20 (2.19%) Microsoft Purview
18 18 (1.97%) Amazon Kinesis
19 17 (1.86%) AWS Step Functions
Communications & Networking
1 4 (0.44%) Firewall
1 4 (0.44%) MQTT
1 4 (0.44%) TCP/IP
2 3 (0.33%) DNS
2 3 (0.33%) Internet
2 3 (0.33%) SAN
2 3 (0.33%) SSH
2 3 (0.33%) Structured Cabling
3 2 (0.22%) SSL
3 2 (0.22%) Wi-Fi
4 1 (0.11%) BGP
4 1 (0.11%) DMZ
4 1 (0.11%) LAN
4 1 (0.11%) Multicast
4 1 (0.11%) Network Security
4 1 (0.11%) Software-Defined Networking
4 1 (0.11%) VPN
4 1 (0.11%) WAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 214 (23.44%) Data Warehouse
2 157 (17.20%) Power BI
3 118 (12.92%) Data Lake
4 80 (8.76%) Big Data
5 68 (7.45%) PostgreSQL
6 58 (6.35%) NoSQL
6 58 (6.35%) SQL Server
7 55 (6.02%) Azure SQL Database
8 54 (5.91%) Delta Lake
9 52 (5.70%) Amazon Redshift
10 50 (5.48%) BigQuery
10 50 (5.48%) Hadoop
11 46 (5.04%) Relational Database
12 39 (4.27%) Metadata
12 39 (4.27%) Tableau
13 30 (3.29%) Elasticsearch
13 30 (3.29%) SQL Server Integration Services
14 28 (3.07%) Star Schema
15 27 (2.96%) Amazon Athena
16 26 (2.85%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 133 (14.57%) Git
2 66 (7.23%) Jenkins
3 42 (4.60%) JIRA
4 36 (3.94%) GitLab
5 26 (2.85%) MLflow
6 7 (0.77%) DBeaver
7 6 (0.66%) Bitbucket
8 5 (0.55%) Visual Studio Code
9 4 (0.44%) Poetry
9 4 (0.44%) SonarQube
10 3 (0.33%) Cucumber
10 3 (0.33%) PyCharm
10 3 (0.33%) Sonatype Nexus
10 3 (0.33%) Visual Studio
11 2 (0.22%) Artifactory
11 2 (0.22%) JMeter
11 2 (0.22%) Selenium
11 2 (0.22%) Zephyr
12 1 (0.11%) Gradle
12 1 (0.11%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
General
1 170 (18.62%) Social Skills
2 146 (15.99%) Finance
3 109 (11.94%) Analytical Skills
4 63 (6.90%) Public Sector
5 38 (4.16%) Banking
6 27 (2.96%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 14 (1.53%) Front Office
8 13 (1.42%) Investment Banking
8 13 (1.42%) Pharmaceutical
9 11 (1.20%) Telecoms
10 10 (1.10%) Marketing
11 9 (0.99%) Retail
12 8 (0.88%) Documentation Skills
13 5 (0.55%) Health Technology
13 5 (0.55%) Legal
13 5 (0.55%) Manufacturing
13 5 (0.55%) Military
13 5 (0.55%) Organisational Skills
14 4 (0.44%) Back Office
14 4 (0.44%) Law
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 176 (19.28%) PySpark
2 93 (10.19%) Kafka
3 34 (3.72%) Pandas
4 23 (2.52%) REST
5 22 (2.41%) NumPy
6 20 (2.19%) RESTful
7 18 (1.97%) Apache NiFi
8 16 (1.75%) YAML
9 15 (1.64%) JSON
9 15 (1.64%) XML
10 14 (1.53%) Flask
11 12 (1.31%) Keycloak
12 11 (1.20%) PyTorch
12 11 (1.20%) RabbitMQ
13 10 (1.10%) Node.js
14 9 (0.99%) pytest
14 9 (0.99%) TensorFlow
15 8 (0.88%) Elastic Stack
15 8 (0.88%) Jinja
15 8 (0.88%) OpenTelemetry
Miscellaneous
1 54 (5.91%) Cloud Native
2 28 (3.07%) Legacy Systems
3 27 (2.96%) Data Structures
4 24 (2.63%) Product Ownership
5 23 (2.52%) Replication
6 20 (2.19%) Algorithms
7 14 (1.53%) Hybrid Cloud
8 13 (1.42%) Onboarding
9 12 (1.31%) Data Protection Act
9 12 (1.31%) Greenfield Project
10 11 (1.20%) Distributed Systems
11 9 (0.99%) IoT
11 9 (0.99%) Life Science
12 8 (0.88%) NHS
12 8 (0.88%) Reinsurance
13 7 (0.77%) Distributed Computing
13 7 (0.77%) Self-Motivation
14 6 (0.66%) AI Agents
14 6 (0.66%) Clustering
14 6 (0.66%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 32 (3.50%) Linux
2 15 (1.64%) Unix
3 1 (0.11%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 425 (46.55%) Data Pipeline
2 371 (40.64%) ETL
3 360 (39.43%) Data Engineering
4 307 (33.63%) Data Modelling
5 284 (31.11%) CI/CD
6 283 (31.00%) Analytics
7 212 (23.22%) DevOps
8 204 (22.34%) Business Intelligence
9 189 (20.70%) Agile
10 149 (16.32%) Data Science
11 148 (16.21%) Problem-Solving
12 129 (14.13%) Data Governance
13 122 (13.36%) Machine Learning
14 112 (12.27%) Data Integration
15 108 (11.83%) AI
15 108 (11.83%) Infrastructure as Code
16 103 (11.28%) Data Architecture
17 93 (10.19%) Migration
18 92 (10.08%) Visualisation
19 90 (9.86%) Data Transformation
Programming Languages
1 572 (62.65%) Python
2 533 (58.38%) SQL
3 82 (8.98%) Scala
4 76 (8.32%) Java
5 26 (2.85%) Bash
6 19 (2.08%) PL/SQL
7 18 (1.97%) Data Analysis Expressions
7 18 (1.97%) R
8 17 (1.86%) T-SQL
9 16 (1.75%) Go
10 14 (1.53%) C#
10 14 (1.53%) JavaScript
11 9 (0.99%) PowerShell
11 9 (0.99%) Shell Script
12 8 (0.88%) TypeScript
13 7 (0.77%) Bicep
14 5 (0.55%) Groovy
15 4 (0.44%) Korn
16 3 (0.33%) C++
17 2 (0.22%) ABAP
Qualifications
1 202 (22.12%) Security Cleared
2 177 (19.39%) SC Cleared
3 34 (3.72%) Degree
4 30 (3.29%) Azure Certification
5 23 (2.52%) AWS Certification
5 23 (2.52%) DV Cleared
6 15 (1.64%) Computer Science Degree
7 12 (1.31%) Master's Degree
8 11 (1.20%) BPSS Clearance
9 5 (0.55%) DBS Check
10 3 (0.33%) CTC Cleared
11 2 (0.22%) MCP
11 2 (0.22%) SnowPro
12 1 (0.11%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
12 1 (0.11%) HND
12 1 (0.11%) ITIL Certification
12 1 (0.11%) Microsoft Certification
12 1 (0.11%) PhD
12 1 (0.11%) Tableau Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 233 (25.52%) Data Quality
2 38 (4.16%) GDPR
3 16 (1.75%) QA
4 15 (1.64%) Accessibility
5 5 (0.55%) HIPAA
6 3 (0.33%) ISO/IEC 20000
6 3 (0.33%) MiFID
6 3 (0.33%) NIST
6 3 (0.33%) SLA
7 2 (0.22%) Disclosure Scotland
7 2 (0.22%) Dodd-Frank
7 2 (0.22%) EMIR
7 2 (0.22%) EU AI Act
7 2 (0.22%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 2 (0.22%) WCAG
8 1 (0.11%) Basel III
8 1 (0.11%) HL7
8 1 (0.11%) NCSC
8 1 (0.11%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 1 (0.11%) SOC 2
System Software
1 76 (8.32%) Docker
2 9 (0.99%) Virtual Machines
3 5 (0.55%) zsh
4 3 (0.33%) Active Directory
5 1 (0.11%) HDFS
Systems Management
1 109 (11.94%) Terraform
2 76 (8.32%) Kubernetes
3 16 (1.75%) Grafana
4 14 (1.53%) Ansible
5 9 (0.99%) NetBackup
6 8 (0.88%) Prometheus
7 7 (0.77%) Kibana
8 5 (0.55%) logstash
8 5 (0.55%) Puppet
9 4 (0.44%) Argo
10 3 (0.33%) Ambari
10 3 (0.33%) Istio
10 3 (0.33%) Kubeflow
10 3 (0.33%) ZABBIX
11 2 (0.22%) Control-M
11 2 (0.22%) EMC NetWorker
11 2 (0.22%) Kustomize
11 2 (0.22%) Tivoli Storage Manager
Vendors
1 320 (35.05%) Databricks
2 107 (11.72%) Microsoft
3 60 (6.57%) Oracle
4 37 (4.05%) Google
5 31 (3.40%) Talend
6 24 (2.63%) Informatica
7 23 (2.52%) Foundry
7 23 (2.52%) Palantir
8 19 (2.08%) Denodo
9 18 (1.97%) Cloudera
10 14 (1.53%) IBM
11 12 (1.31%) Red Hat
11 12 (1.31%) SAP
12 10 (1.10%) ServiceNow
13 9 (0.99%) Commvault
13 9 (0.99%) Splunk
13 9 (0.99%) Veritas
14 8 (0.88%) Confluent
14 8 (0.88%) Salesforce
15 7 (0.77%) Virgin Media