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 10 September 2026.

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

6 months to
10 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 69 125 100
Rank change year-on-year +56 -25 +23
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 1,920 731 879
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 3.52% 2.22% 2.30%
As % of the Job Titles category 3.82% 2.43% 2.47%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,279 518 623
10th Percentile £375 £363 £351
25th Percentile £425 £414 £450
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year - -4.76% -4.55%
75th Percentile £588 £575 £625
90th Percentile £663 £694 £688
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £475 £500
% change year-on-year - -5.00% -4.76%
Number of hourly rates quoted 80 15 10
10th Percentile £19.34 £25.50 £49.25
25th Percentile £30.96 £38.75 £65.00
Median hourly rate £42.03 £52.50 £80.00
Median % change year-on-year -19.95% -34.38% +25.00%
75th Percentile £70.00 £79.35 -
90th Percentile £75.00 £101.00 £97.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £41.56 £52.85 £80.00
% change year-on-year -21.37% -33.94% +63.27%

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 50,324 30,039 35,625
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.36% 91.06% 93.05%
Number of daily rates quoted 29,923 18,938 22,148
10th Percentile £325 £281 £300
25th Percentile £425 £400 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -1.32%
75th Percentile £625 £622 £638
90th Percentile £725 £725 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 3,732 1,556 1,742
10th Percentile £14.56 £13.67 £14.73
25th Percentile £20.00 £17.06 £20.50
Median hourly rate £42.00 £25.15 £43.00
Median % change year-on-year +67.00% -41.51% +1.18%
75th Percentile £67.84 £52.81 £65.00
90th Percentile £79.90 £70.16 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £42.50 £25.15 £45.00
% change year-on-year +68.99% -44.11% +12.50%

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 10 September 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 10 September 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 10 September 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 +61 1,696 £500 - 530
UK excluding London +89 857 £475 - 385
London +35 856 £525 - 268
Work from Home +43 568 £500 +5.26% 201
Midlands +77 348 £469 +2.79% 60
West Midlands +68 285 £469 -0.21% 34
North of England +23 209 £500 +5.26% 80
South East +27 131 £459 -4.62% 108
North West +12 116 £525 +10.53% 45
South West +12 94 £525 +5.00% 48
Yorkshire -2 75 £475 -2.56% 19
East Midlands +26 63 £450 +1.98% 26
Scotland -20 59 £440 -6.13% 44
East of England +5 38 £450 -40.00% 19
North East -33 19 £515 +21.89% 16
Wales -2 14 £475 -5.00% 9
Northern Ireland +5 3 £410 -18.00% 19
Channel Islands - 1 - -

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

For the 6 months to 10 September 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.

1 964 (50.21%) SQL
2 835 (43.49%) Python
3 828 (43.13%) Data Pipeline
4 741 (38.59%) Data Engineering
5 661 (34.43%) Data Modelling
6 659 (34.32%) Analytics
7 657 (34.22%) ETL
8 612 (31.88%) Azure
9 591 (30.78%) AWS
10 503 (26.20%) Security Cleared
11 490 (25.52%) Data Quality
12 464 (24.17%) CI/CD
13 441 (22.97%) SC Cleared
14 402 (20.94%) Databricks
15 343 (17.86%) Agile
16 328 (17.08%) Data Warehouse
17 321 (16.72%) DevOps
18 319 (16.61%) Business Intelligence
19 312 (16.25%) Migration
20 283 (14.74%) AI
21 270 (14.06%) PySpark
22 269 (14.01%) Data Governance
23 259 (13.49%) Power Platform
24 251 (13.07%) Power BI
25 250 (13.02%) Microsoft
26 248 (12.92%) Data Integration
27 242 (12.60%) Data Transformation
28 240 (12.50%) Validation
29 235 (12.24%) Snowflake
30 222 (11.56%) Azure Data Factory

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
1 212 (11.04%) Apache Airflow
2 157 (8.18%) Apache Spark
3 130 (6.77%) Apache
4 61 (3.18%) SAS
5 47 (2.45%) Confluence
6 17 (0.89%) Palantir Foundry
7 15 (0.78%) SharePoint
8 11 (0.57%) Jupyter
9 3 (0.16%) Apache Superset
10 2 (0.10%) ArcGIS
10 2 (0.10%) Microsoft Exchange
10 2 (0.10%) PowerExchange
11 1 (0.052%) Liferay
11 1 (0.052%) Luigi
11 1 (0.052%) nginx
11 1 (0.052%) Oracle Workflow
11 1 (0.052%) R Markdown
Applications
1 24 (1.25%) Microsoft Excel
2 7 (0.36%) Notepad++
2 7 (0.36%) Spreadsheet
3 4 (0.21%) Chatbot
4 1 (0.052%) Microsoft PowerPoint
Business Applications
1 11 (0.57%) 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 4 (0.21%) SAP S/4HANA
4 4 (0.21%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
5 2 (0.10%) Maximo
5 2 (0.10%) Oracle EBS
5 2 (0.10%) SAP BPC
5 2 (0.10%) SimCorp Dimension
6 1 (0.052%) BambooHR
6 1 (0.052%) FIS Private Capital Suite
6 1 (0.052%) MIS ActiveH
6 1 (0.052%) Oracle Assets
6 1 (0.052%) Raiser’s Edge
6 1 (0.052%) SAP CAR
6 1 (0.052%) SAP EWM
6 1 (0.052%) SAP Oil and Gas
Cloud Services
1 612 (31.88%) Azure
2 591 (30.78%) AWS
3 259 (13.49%) Power Platform
4 235 (12.24%) Snowflake
5 222 (11.56%) Azure Data Factory
6 220 (11.46%) dbt
7 184 (9.58%) GCP
8 171 (8.91%) Amazon S3
9 134 (6.98%) Azure DevOps
10 131 (6.82%) Serverless
11 130 (6.77%) Azure Synapse Analytics
12 122 (6.35%) GitHub
13 117 (6.09%) AWS Lambda
14 72 (3.75%) Azure Databricks
15 54 (2.81%) Amazon EMR
16 51 (2.66%) GitHub Actions
17 40 (2.08%) Amazon CloudWatch
18 29 (1.51%) AWS Step Functions
19 28 (1.46%) Amazon Kinesis
20 26 (1.35%) AWS CloudFormation
Communications & Networking
1 27 (1.41%) BGP
1 27 (1.41%) DMZ
1 27 (1.41%) DNS
1 27 (1.41%) Multicast
1 27 (1.41%) VPN
2 11 (0.57%) Structured Cabling
3 9 (0.47%) Firewall
4 7 (0.36%) PuTTY
4 7 (0.36%) WinSCP
5 5 (0.26%) Intrusion Detection
6 4 (0.21%) Wi-Fi
6 4 (0.21%) Wireless
7 1 (0.052%) HTTP
7 1 (0.052%) LTE
7 1 (0.052%) MQTT
Database & Business Intelligence
1 328 (17.08%) Data Warehouse
2 251 (13.07%) Power BI
3 169 (8.80%) Data Lake
4 133 (6.93%) Metadata
5 107 (5.57%) BigQuery
6 96 (5.00%) Amazon Redshift
7 86 (4.48%) Delta Lake
7 86 (4.48%) SQL Server
8 81 (4.22%) Big Data
9 80 (4.17%) Amazon Athena
10 71 (3.70%) Pentaho
11 64 (3.33%) Snowflake Schema
12 63 (3.28%) PostgreSQL
13 62 (3.23%) Relational Database
13 62 (3.23%) Tableau
14 52 (2.71%) Azure SQL Database
15 50 (2.60%) NoSQL
16 44 (2.29%) Oracle Database
17 39 (2.03%) SQL Server Integration Services
18 38 (1.98%) Amazon RDS
Development Applications
1 167 (8.70%) Git
2 98 (5.10%) GitLab
3 73 (3.80%) JIRA
4 34 (1.77%) Jenkins
5 19 (0.99%) MLflow
6 9 (0.47%) Artifactory
7 7 (0.36%) Postman
8 6 (0.31%) Bitbucket
8 6 (0.31%) SonarQube
9 4 (0.21%) ERwin
9 4 (0.21%) Selenium
10 3 (0.16%) Atlassian Bamboo
10 3 (0.16%) Claude Code
10 3 (0.16%) Newman
11 2 (0.10%) ER Studio
11 2 (0.10%) RStudio
11 2 (0.10%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
11 2 (0.10%) Terragrunt
11 2 (0.10%) Yeoman
12 1 (0.052%) Octopus Deploy
General
1 308 (16.04%) Finance
1 308 (16.04%) Social Skills
2 220 (11.46%) Analytical Skills
3 165 (8.59%) Public Sector
4 115 (5.99%) Banking
5 36 (1.88%) Marketing
6 30 (1.56%) Inclusion and Diversity
6 30 (1.56%) Retail
7 24 (1.25%) Telecoms
8 23 (1.20%) Aerospace
9 21 (1.09%) Automotive
9 21 (1.09%) Documentation Skills
9 21 (1.09%) Investment Banking
10 20 (1.04%) Front Office
11 19 (0.99%) Law
12 18 (0.94%) Manufacturing
13 16 (0.83%) Pharmaceutical
14 13 (0.68%) Police
15 12 (0.63%) Legal
16 10 (0.52%) Financial Institution
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 270 (14.06%) PySpark
2 190 (9.90%) Terraform
3 137 (7.14%) Kafka
4 36 (1.88%) REST
5 34 (1.77%) JSON
6 30 (1.56%) Pandas
7 24 (1.25%) XML
8 23 (1.20%) Spring
8 23 (1.20%) Spring Boot
9 21 (1.09%) Great Expectations
10 18 (0.94%) Apache Beam
11 16 (0.83%) LangChain
11 16 (0.83%) React
12 14 (0.73%) RESTful
13 12 (0.63%) pytest
13 12 (0.63%) YAML
14 11 (0.57%) .NET
14 11 (0.57%) Streamlit
15 10 (0.52%) Microsoft Graph
15 10 (0.52%) PyTorch
Miscellaneous
1 150 (7.81%) Cloud Native
2 73 (3.80%) Legacy Systems
3 66 (3.44%) Data Structures
4 44 (2.29%) Onboarding
5 25 (1.30%) AI Agents
5 25 (1.30%) Product Ownership
6 24 (1.25%) Distributed Systems
7 23 (1.20%) NHS
8 22 (1.15%) Greenfield Project
9 19 (0.99%) Reference Data
10 18 (0.94%) Management Information System
11 17 (0.89%) Reinsurance
12 14 (0.73%) Algorithms
13 12 (0.63%) Clustering
13 12 (0.63%) Virtual Team
14 11 (0.57%) Enterprise Software
15 10 (0.52%) Data Fabric
15 10 (0.52%) Data Protection Act
15 10 (0.52%) Linux Command Line
15 10 (0.52%) Replication
Operating Systems
1 64 (3.33%) Unix
2 47 (2.45%) Linux
3 4 (0.21%) Windows
4 2 (0.10%) Ubuntu
4 2 (0.10%) Windows Server
5 1 (0.052%) Robot Operating System
5 1 (0.052%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 828 (43.13%) Data Pipeline
2 741 (38.59%) Data Engineering
3 661 (34.43%) Data Modelling
4 659 (34.32%) Analytics
5 657 (34.22%) ETL
6 464 (24.17%) CI/CD
7 343 (17.86%) Agile
8 321 (16.72%) DevOps
9 319 (16.61%) Business Intelligence
10 312 (16.25%) Migration
11 283 (14.74%) AI
12 269 (14.01%) Data Governance
13 248 (12.92%) Data Integration
14 242 (12.60%) Data Transformation
15 240 (12.50%) Validation
16 210 (10.94%) Problem-Solving
17 175 (9.11%) Lakehouse
18 174 (9.06%) Machine Learning
19 173 (9.01%) Data Science
20 169 (8.80%) Decision-Making
Programming Languages
1 964 (50.21%) SQL
2 835 (43.49%) Python
3 115 (5.99%) Java
4 70 (3.65%) Scala
5 53 (2.76%) PL/SQL
6 34 (1.77%) Shell Script
7 33 (1.72%) Data Analysis Expressions
7 33 (1.72%) T-SQL
8 23 (1.20%) PowerShell
9 22 (1.15%) Bash
10 21 (1.09%) JavaScript
11 13 (0.68%) R
12 12 (0.63%) C#
13 10 (0.52%) Bicep
14 9 (0.47%) TypeScript
15 6 (0.31%) Go
16 4 (0.21%) Korn
17 3 (0.16%) COBOL
17 3 (0.16%) Kusto Query Language
17 3 (0.16%) LookML
Qualifications
1 503 (26.20%) Security Cleared
2 441 (22.97%) SC Cleared
3 48 (2.50%) BPSS Clearance
4 41 (2.14%) Degree
5 25 (1.30%) DV Cleared
6 24 (1.25%) Azure Certification
7 23 (1.20%) Computer Science Degree
8 15 (0.78%) AWS Certification
9 11 (0.57%) SnowPro
10 9 (0.47%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
10 9 (0.47%) City & Guilds
11 8 (0.42%) DBS Check
12 7 (0.36%) Master's Degree
13 6 (0.31%) CISM
13 6 (0.31%) CISSP
14 5 (0.26%) BICSI Certification
14 5 (0.26%) CEH
15 4 (0.21%) Microsoft Certification
16 1 (0.052%) PMI Certification
16 1 (0.052%) PMP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 490 (25.52%) Data Quality
2 71 (3.70%) QA
3 41 (2.14%) GDPR
4 15 (0.78%) Accessibility
5 9 (0.47%) SLA
6 7 (0.36%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 6 (0.31%) FATCA
8 5 (0.26%) HIPAA
8 5 (0.26%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 4 (0.21%) Disclosure Scotland
10 3 (0.16%) MiFID
11 2 (0.10%) EMIR
11 2 (0.10%) SNOMED CT
11 2 (0.10%) WCAG
12 1 (0.052%) Government Security Classifications
12 1 (0.052%) IFRS
12 1 (0.052%) IFRS 17
12 1 (0.052%) IFRS 9
12 1 (0.052%) PMO
12 1 (0.052%) SOC 2
System Software
1 112 (5.83%) Docker
2 3 (0.16%) Active Directory
2 3 (0.16%) Virtual Machines
3 1 (0.052%) RACF
Systems Management
1 84 (4.38%) Kubernetes
2 42 (2.19%) Grafana
3 17 (0.89%) Ansible
4 13 (0.68%) Control-M
5 10 (0.52%) Kibana
6 6 (0.31%) Prometheus
7 2 (0.10%) Apache Ranger
7 2 (0.10%) logstash
7 2 (0.10%) Puppet
8 1 (0.052%) Progress Chef
8 1 (0.052%) Thomson Reuters DACS
Vendors
1 402 (20.94%) Databricks
2 250 (13.02%) Microsoft
3 164 (8.54%) Oracle
4 112 (5.83%) Informatica
5 99 (5.16%) Talend
6 74 (3.85%) Google
7 53 (2.76%) Denodo
8 35 (1.82%) Salesforce
9 27 (1.41%) Cisco
9 27 (1.41%) F5
9 27 (1.41%) Palantir
10 25 (1.30%) SAP
11 24 (1.25%) Foundry
12 15 (0.78%) Splunk
13 13 (0.68%) Cloudera
14 10 (0.52%) Bloomberg
14 10 (0.52%) IBM
15 9 (0.47%) OpenAI
15 9 (0.47%) Sage
16 8 (0.42%) InterSystems