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 24 November 2025.

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

6 months to
24 Nov 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 129 91 122
Rank change year-on-year -38 +31 +2
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 821 935 939
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.31% 2.56% 2.03%
As % of the Job Titles category 2.54% 2.75% 2.17%
Number of daily rates quoted 581 641 705
10th Percentile £361 £375 £400
25th Percentile £413 £450 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £530 £525
Median % change year-on-year -5.66% +0.95% -4.55%
75th Percentile £600 £625 £638
90th Percentile £694 £690 £700
UK excluding London median daily rate £491 £500 £525
% change year-on-year -1.75% -4.76% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 11 12 14
10th Percentile £26.00 £25.35 £35.19
25th Percentile £34.50 £26.30 £41.29
Median hourly rate £43.50 £46.50 £61.75
Median % change year-on-year -6.45% -24.70% +14.35%
75th Percentile £78.38 £73.13 £67.25
90th Percentile £110.00 £97.50 £78.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £37.50 £26.50 £57.00
% change year-on-year +41.51% -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 32,350 33,960 43,317
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 90.99% 92.81% 93.62%
Number of daily rates quoted 20,481 20,515 29,296
10th Percentile £280 £300 £290
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 £650
90th Percentile £725 £738 £743
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £495 £500
% change year-on-year -4.04% -1.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 1,914 1,266 1,538
10th Percentile £14.25 £15.22 £15.16
25th Percentile £17.87 £20.50 £19.06
Median hourly rate £25.15 £35.00 £44.75
Median % change year-on-year -28.14% -21.79% +49.17%
75th Percentile £56.25 £65.00 £65.00
90th Percentile £71.00 £74.00 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £25.15 £35.00 £45.00
% change year-on-year -28.14% -22.22% +80.00%

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 24 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 24 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 24 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 -37 689 £513 -6.82% 275
London -23 423 £535 -6.96% 136
UK excluding London -36 288 £491 -1.75% 233
Work from Home -18 260 £500 -4.76% 181
Midlands -20 81 £515 +5.10% 42
North of England -33 78 £450 -5.26% 34
West Midlands -12 67 £519 +3.85% 37
Scotland +26 51 £450 -4.76% 20
South West +14 36 £550 +22.22% 19
North West -19 35 £403 -10.56% 20
Yorkshire -30 35 £500 +3.09% 8
South East -44 34 £475 -13.64% 101
East Midlands -6 14 £450 +26.40% 5
Wales -12 12 £425 -15.00% 7
North East -7 8 £425 +13.64% 6
East of England -25 6 £625 +95.31% 12
Northern Ireland -5 1 - -

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

For the 6 months to 24 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 (64.56%) Python
2 501 (61.02%) SQL
3 388 (47.26%) Data Pipeline
4 351 (42.75%) Azure
5 340 (41.41%) ETL
6 316 (38.49%) Data Engineering
7 291 (35.44%) AWS
8 286 (34.84%) Data Modelling
9 262 (31.91%) CI/CD
10 255 (31.06%) Databricks
11 252 (30.69%) Analytics
12 202 (24.60%) Data Quality
13 196 (23.87%) Data Warehouse
14 185 (22.53%) DevOps
15 184 (22.41%) Business Intelligence
16 173 (21.07%) Agile
17 165 (20.10%) Security Cleared
18 158 (19.24%) Azure Data Factory
19 148 (18.03%) Power Platform
20 144 (17.54%) Power BI
21 143 (17.42%) Problem-Solving
21 143 (17.42%) PySpark
22 141 (17.17%) Data Science
23 140 (17.05%) SC Cleared
24 135 (16.44%) Apache Airflow
25 131 (15.96%) Snowflake
26 116 (14.13%) Machine Learning
27 111 (13.52%) Git
28 109 (13.28%) GCP
29 105 (12.79%) 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
1 135 (16.44%) Apache Airflow
2 99 (12.06%) Apache Spark
3 70 (8.53%) Apache
4 23 (2.80%) Confluence
5 19 (2.31%) SAS
6 8 (0.97%) Oracle Application Server
6 8 (0.97%) SharePoint
7 6 (0.73%) Apache Pig
8 5 (0.61%) IIS
9 4 (0.49%) Jupyter
10 3 (0.37%) ArcGIS
10 3 (0.37%) 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 (1.10%) Microsoft Excel
2 4 (0.49%) 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 (0.37%) Oracle BPM
2 2 (0.24%) Aladdin
2 2 (0.24%) Maximo
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 (42.75%) Azure
2 291 (35.44%) AWS
3 158 (19.24%) Azure Data Factory
4 148 (18.03%) Power Platform
5 131 (15.96%) Snowflake
6 109 (13.28%) GCP
7 97 (11.81%) dbt
8 95 (11.57%) Amazon S3
9 91 (11.08%) Azure Synapse Analytics
10 78 (9.50%) GitHub
11 74 (9.01%) Serverless
12 54 (6.58%) Azure DevOps
13 47 (5.72%) AWS Lambda
14 41 (4.99%) GitHub Actions
15 28 (3.41%) AWS CloudFormation
16 22 (2.68%) Amazon EMR
16 22 (2.68%) SaaS
17 17 (2.07%) Amazon Kinesis
18 14 (1.71%) AWS Step Functions
18 14 (1.71%) Microsoft Purview
Communications & Networking
1 4 (0.49%) Firewall
1 4 (0.49%) MQTT
1 4 (0.49%) TCP/IP
2 3 (0.37%) Internet
2 3 (0.37%) SAN
2 3 (0.37%) SSH
2 3 (0.37%) Structured Cabling
3 2 (0.24%) DNS
3 2 (0.24%) SSL
3 2 (0.24%) Wi-Fi
4 1 (0.12%) LAN
4 1 (0.12%) WAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 196 (23.87%) Data Warehouse
2 144 (17.54%) Power BI
3 103 (12.55%) Data Lake
4 73 (8.89%) Big Data
5 64 (7.80%) PostgreSQL
6 54 (6.58%) SQL Server
7 53 (6.46%) Hadoop
8 51 (6.21%) Amazon Redshift
8 51 (6.21%) NoSQL
9 45 (5.48%) Delta Lake
9 45 (5.48%) Relational Database
10 43 (5.24%) Azure SQL Database
10 43 (5.24%) BigQuery
11 39 (4.75%) Tableau
12 33 (4.02%) Metadata
13 28 (3.41%) Star Schema
14 27 (3.29%) SQL Server Integration Services
15 25 (3.05%) Elasticsearch
15 25 (3.05%) Pentaho
16 23 (2.80%) Amazon QuickSight
Development Applications
1 111 (13.52%) Git
2 60 (7.31%) Jenkins
3 41 (4.99%) JIRA
4 35 (4.26%) GitLab
5 21 (2.56%) MLflow
6 8 (0.97%) DBeaver
7 6 (0.73%) Bitbucket
8 5 (0.61%) Visual Studio Code
9 4 (0.49%) SonarQube
10 3 (0.37%) Artifactory
10 3 (0.37%) Cucumber
10 3 (0.37%) Poetry
10 3 (0.37%) PyCharm
10 3 (0.37%) Sonatype Nexus
10 3 (0.37%) Visual Studio
11 2 (0.24%) JMeter
11 2 (0.24%) Selenium
11 2 (0.24%) Zephyr
12 1 (0.12%) Team Foundation Server
12 1 (0.12%) TeamCity
General
1 172 (20.95%) Social Skills
2 146 (17.78%) Finance
3 109 (13.28%) Analytical Skills
4 63 (7.67%) Public Sector
5 38 (4.63%) Banking
6 21 (2.56%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 13 (1.58%) Pharmaceutical
8 12 (1.46%) Investment Banking
8 12 (1.46%) Retail
9 11 (1.34%) Front Office
9 11 (1.34%) Telecoms
10 10 (1.22%) Marketing
11 8 (0.97%) Documentation Skills
12 5 (0.61%) Health Technology
12 5 (0.61%) Influencing Skills
12 5 (0.61%) Legal
12 5 (0.61%) Manufacturing
12 5 (0.61%) Tech for Good
13 4 (0.49%) Military
13 4 (0.49%) Retail Banking
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 143 (17.42%) PySpark
2 84 (10.23%) Kafka
3 27 (3.29%) Pandas
4 21 (2.56%) RESTful
5 20 (2.44%) NumPy
6 18 (2.19%) XML
7 17 (2.07%) REST
8 16 (1.95%) Apache NiFi
9 15 (1.83%) JSON
10 14 (1.71%) Flask
11 12 (1.46%) HTML
12 11 (1.34%) PyTorch
12 11 (1.34%) RabbitMQ
12 11 (1.34%) YAML
13 9 (1.10%) Keycloak
13 9 (1.10%) Node.js
13 9 (1.10%) OAuth
13 9 (1.10%) pytest
13 9 (1.10%) TensorFlow
14 8 (0.97%) GraphQL
Miscellaneous
1 49 (5.97%) Cloud Native
2 30 (3.65%) Legacy Systems
3 24 (2.92%) Data Structures
4 22 (2.68%) Algorithms
5 20 (2.44%) Product Ownership
6 19 (2.31%) Replication
7 14 (1.71%) Data Protection Act
8 13 (1.58%) Hybrid Cloud
8 13 (1.58%) Onboarding
9 10 (1.22%) Distributed Systems
10 9 (1.10%) Distributed Computing
10 9 (1.10%) IoT
10 9 (1.10%) Life Science
10 9 (1.10%) NHS
11 8 (0.97%) Greenfield Project
11 8 (0.97%) Reinsurance
11 8 (0.97%) Virtual Team
12 6 (0.73%) Clustering
13 5 (0.61%) Management Information System
13 5 (0.61%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 28 (3.41%) Linux
2 16 (1.95%) Unix
3 3 (0.37%) Windows
4 2 (0.24%) Windows Server
4 2 (0.24%) Windows Server 2003
Processes & Methodologies
1 388 (47.26%) Data Pipeline
2 340 (41.41%) ETL
3 316 (38.49%) Data Engineering
4 286 (34.84%) Data Modelling
5 262 (31.91%) CI/CD
6 252 (30.69%) Analytics
7 185 (22.53%) DevOps
8 184 (22.41%) Business Intelligence
9 173 (21.07%) Agile
10 143 (17.42%) Problem-Solving
11 141 (17.17%) Data Science
12 116 (14.13%) Machine Learning
13 105 (12.79%) Data Governance
14 97 (11.81%) AI
14 97 (11.81%) Data Integration
14 97 (11.81%) Infrastructure as Code
15 90 (10.96%) Visualisation
16 86 (10.48%) Data Transformation
16 86 (10.48%) Migration
17 81 (9.87%) Data Architecture
Programming Languages
1 530 (64.56%) Python
2 501 (61.02%) SQL
3 78 (9.50%) Java
4 65 (7.92%) Scala
5 25 (3.05%) Bash
6 19 (2.31%) PL/SQL
7 16 (1.95%) R
8 15 (1.83%) JavaScript
9 13 (1.58%) Data Analysis Expressions
9 13 (1.58%) T-SQL
10 12 (1.46%) Go
11 9 (1.10%) C#
11 9 (1.10%) PowerShell
11 9 (1.10%) Shell Script
12 8 (0.97%) TypeScript
13 4 (0.49%) C++
13 4 (0.49%) Groovy
13 4 (0.49%) Korn
14 2 (0.24%) ABAP
15 1 (0.12%) HiveQL
Qualifications
1 165 (20.10%) Security Cleared
2 140 (17.05%) SC Cleared
3 40 (4.87%) Degree
4 25 (3.05%) Azure Certification
5 24 (2.92%) AWS Certification
6 21 (2.56%) DV Cleared
7 15 (1.83%) Computer Science Degree
8 13 (1.58%) Master's Degree
9 8 (0.97%) BPSS Clearance
10 3 (0.37%) SnowPro
11 2 (0.24%) CTC Cleared
11 2 (0.24%) DBS Check
11 2 (0.24%) MCP
12 1 (0.12%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
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 (24.60%) Data Quality
2 32 (3.90%) GDPR
3 19 (2.31%) QA
4 11 (1.34%) Accessibility
5 4 (0.49%) NIST
6 3 (0.37%) HIPAA
6 3 (0.37%) ISO/IEC 20000
6 3 (0.37%) SLA
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%) HL7
8 1 (0.12%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 1 (0.12%) NCSC
8 1 (0.12%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 1 (0.12%) SOC 2
8 1 (0.12%) WCAG
System Software
1 67 (8.16%) Docker
2 9 (1.10%) Virtual Machines
3 5 (0.61%) zsh
4 2 (0.24%) Active Directory
5 1 (0.12%) HDFS
Systems Management
1 98 (11.94%) Terraform
2 71 (8.65%) Kubernetes
3 14 (1.71%) Grafana
4 13 (1.58%) Ansible
5 9 (1.10%) NetBackup
6 7 (0.85%) Prometheus
7 5 (0.61%) Kibana
7 5 (0.61%) Puppet
8 4 (0.49%) Argo
8 4 (0.49%) Kubeflow
9 3 (0.37%) Ambari
9 3 (0.37%) Istio
9 3 (0.37%) Kustomize
9 3 (0.37%) logstash
9 3 (0.37%) ZABBIX
10 2 (0.24%) Control-M
10 2 (0.24%) EMC NetWorker
10 2 (0.24%) Tivoli Storage Manager
Vendors
1 255 (31.06%) Databricks
2 91 (11.08%) Microsoft
3 61 (7.43%) Oracle
4 32 (3.90%) Google
5 31 (3.78%) Talend
6 28 (3.41%) Foundry
6 28 (3.41%) Palantir
7 24 (2.92%) Informatica
8 19 (2.31%) Denodo
9 18 (2.19%) Cloudera
10 13 (1.58%) IBM
11 12 (1.46%) Red Hat
11 12 (1.46%) SAP
12 9 (1.10%) Commvault
12 9 (1.10%) ServiceNow
13 8 (0.97%) Confluent
13 8 (0.97%) Splunk
13 8 (0.97%) Veritas
14 7 (0.85%) Salesforce
14 7 (0.85%) Virgin Media