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 8 April 2026.

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

6 months to
8 Apr 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 66 81 101
Rank change year-on-year +15 +20 +6
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 1,561 884 967
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 3.41% 3.02% 2.20%
As % of the Job Titles category 3.70% 3.26% 2.37%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,107 648 756
10th Percentile £363 £356 £283
25th Percentile £413 £419 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £500
Median % change year-on-year - - -9.09%
75th Percentile £581 £600 £600
90th Percentile £650 £700 £688
UK excluding London median daily rate £470 £463 £460
% change year-on-year +1.62% +0.54% -10.24%
Number of hourly rates quoted 42 14 44
10th Percentile £20.46 £25.14 £31.25
25th Percentile £41.28 £26.27 £48.63
Median hourly rate £53.50 £47.50 £66.25
Median % change year-on-year +12.63% -28.30% +3.52%
75th Percentile £75.00 £74.38 £80.00
90th Percentile £78.60 £89.24 -
UK excluding London median hourly rate £52.50 £26.50 £75.00
% change year-on-year +98.11% -64.67% +72.41%

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 42,201 27,101 40,725
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.25% 92.74% 92.78%
Number of daily rates quoted 26,267 17,830 26,650
10th Percentile £313 £300 £275
25th Percentile £413 £406 £408
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £520 £525
Median % change year-on-year -3.85% -0.95% -2.78%
75th Percentile £613 £630 £638
90th Percentile £725 £738 £743
UK excluding London median daily rate £488 £475 £490
% change year-on-year +2.63% -3.06% -2.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,670 965 2,551
10th Percentile £15.00 £14.99 £12.86
25th Percentile £20.00 £20.26 £16.25
Median hourly rate £40.00 £31.76 £34.21
Median % change year-on-year +25.94% -7.16% -23.98%
75th Percentile £65.00 £64.50 £60.00
90th Percentile £77.50 £76.25 £71.25
UK excluding London median hourly rate £41.68 £30.62 £35.00
% change year-on-year +36.14% -12.53% -17.38%

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 8 April 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 8 April 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 8 April 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 +17 1,377 £500 - 402
London +14 779 £525 -0.94% 158
UK excluding London +7 598 £470 +1.62% 308
Work from Home +12 464 £500 - 193
Midlands +21 258 £468 -1.53% 59
West Midlands +16 239 £469 -1.68% 45
North of England -12 174 £459 +0.55% 87
North West +9 108 £450 -2.70% 56
South East -13 73 £500 -0.50% 91
South West -12 53 £523 +4.50% 38
Yorkshire -25 51 £465 +3.33% 19
Scotland -5 40 £401 -9.63% 10
Wales -1 20 £425 -15.42% 8
East Midlands -23 19 £450 +12.85% 14
North East -16 15 £488 +2.63% 13
East of England -33 15 £565 +79.37% 17
Northern Ireland -1 3 £410 -18.00%

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

For the 6 months to 8 April 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.

1 866 (55.48%) SQL
2 764 (48.94%) Python
3 667 (42.73%) Data Pipeline
4 630 (40.36%) ETL
5 598 (38.31%) Data Engineering
6 590 (37.80%) Analytics
7 584 (37.41%) Azure
8 541 (34.66%) Data Modelling
9 452 (28.96%) Security Cleared
10 436 (27.93%) Data Quality
11 423 (27.10%) Databricks
12 421 (26.97%) AWS
13 405 (25.94%) CI/CD
14 404 (25.88%) SC Cleared
15 352 (22.55%) Business Intelligence
16 300 (19.22%) Agile
17 293 (18.77%) DevOps
18 287 (18.39%) Data Warehouse
19 274 (17.55%) Power Platform
20 258 (16.53%) Power BI
21 255 (16.34%) PySpark
22 249 (15.95%) Data Governance
23 232 (14.86%) Azure Data Factory
24 230 (14.73%) Problem-Solving
25 208 (13.32%) Microsoft
26 200 (12.81%) Git
27 187 (11.98%) Data Science
28 179 (11.47%) Snowflake
29 176 (11.27%) Data Integration
30 175 (11.21%) 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
1 155 (9.93%) Apache Spark
2 148 (9.48%) Apache Airflow
3 98 (6.28%) Apache
4 73 (4.68%) SAS
5 22 (1.41%) Confluence
6 14 (0.90%) Palantir Foundry
7 7 (0.45%) Jupyter
8 5 (0.32%) Microsoft Exchange
9 4 (0.26%) SharePoint
10 2 (0.13%) Apache Superset
10 2 (0.13%) Luigi
10 2 (0.13%) Oracle Application Server
11 1 (0.064%) Apache Synapse
11 1 (0.064%) Appian
11 1 (0.064%) ArcGIS
11 1 (0.064%) Camunda
11 1 (0.064%) R Markdown
Applications
1 18 (1.15%) Microsoft Excel
2 5 (0.32%) Notepad++
3 3 (0.19%) Chatbot
3 3 (0.19%) Spreadsheet
4 2 (0.13%) Microsoft Office
5 1 (0.064%) Microsoft PowerPoint
Business Applications
1 2 (0.13%) Aladdin
1 2 (0.13%) Dynamics CRM
1 2 (0.13%) Maximo
1 2 (0.13%) SAP BPC
2 1 (0.064%) Actimize
2 1 (0.064%) BambooHR
2 1 (0.064%) Elite 3E
2 1 (0.064%) iTrent
2 1 (0.064%) NEC Housing
2 1 (0.064%) Oracle 11i
2 1 (0.064%) Oracle ERP
2 1 (0.064%) SAP Business ByDesign
2 1 (0.064%) SimCorp Dimension
Cloud Services
1 584 (37.41%) Azure
2 421 (26.97%) AWS
3 274 (17.55%) Power Platform
4 232 (14.86%) Azure Data Factory
5 179 (11.47%) Snowflake
6 156 (9.99%) Azure Synapse Analytics
7 155 (9.93%) GCP
8 149 (9.55%) Amazon S3
9 145 (9.29%) dbt
10 121 (7.75%) GitHub
11 112 (7.17%) Azure DevOps
11 112 (7.17%) Serverless
12 82 (5.25%) AWS Lambda
13 53 (3.40%) GitHub Actions
14 43 (2.75%) AWS CloudFormation
15 30 (1.92%) AWS Step Functions
16 29 (1.86%) Matillion
17 25 (1.60%) Amazon EMR
18 24 (1.54%) Amazon Kinesis
18 24 (1.54%) Microsoft Purview
Communications & Networking
1 27 (1.73%) DNS
1 27 (1.73%) VPN
2 26 (1.67%) BGP
2 26 (1.67%) DMZ
2 26 (1.67%) Multicast
3 12 (0.77%) Structured Cabling
4 5 (0.32%) PuTTY
4 5 (0.32%) WinSCP
5 4 (0.26%) Firewall
6 3 (0.19%) SAN
7 1 (0.064%) 4G
7 1 (0.064%) 5G
7 1 (0.064%) Network Security
7 1 (0.064%) Software-Defined Networking
Database & Business Intelligence
1 287 (18.39%) Data Warehouse
2 258 (16.53%) Power BI
3 175 (11.21%) Data Lake
4 114 (7.30%) SQL Server
5 96 (6.15%) Delta Lake
6 92 (5.89%) BigQuery
7 86 (5.51%) Metadata
8 84 (5.38%) Amazon Redshift
9 83 (5.32%) Azure SQL Database
10 75 (4.80%) Big Data
11 73 (4.68%) Pentaho
12 66 (4.23%) PostgreSQL
13 61 (3.91%) SQL Server Integration Services
13 61 (3.91%) Tableau
14 59 (3.78%) NoSQL
15 58 (3.72%) Snowflake Schema
16 56 (3.59%) Amazon Athena
17 47 (3.01%) Relational Database
18 40 (2.56%) Hadoop
19 37 (2.37%) Star Schema
Development Applications
1 200 (12.81%) Git
2 74 (4.74%) JIRA
3 68 (4.36%) GitLab
4 66 (4.23%) Jenkins
5 21 (1.35%) MLflow
6 4 (0.26%) Bitbucket
7 2 (0.13%) DBeaver
7 2 (0.13%) JUnit
7 2 (0.13%) Selenium
7 2 (0.13%) SonarQube
7 2 (0.13%) Sonatype Nexus
7 2 (0.13%) Visual Studio
8 1 (0.064%) Deequ
8 1 (0.064%) ER Studio
8 1 (0.064%) ERwin
8 1 (0.064%) Jaeger
8 1 (0.064%) Maven
8 1 (0.064%) Poetry
8 1 (0.064%) Team Foundation Server
8 1 (0.064%) Terragrunt
General
1 249 (15.95%) Social Skills
2 247 (15.82%) Finance
3 167 (10.70%) Analytical Skills
4 132 (8.46%) Public Sector
5 77 (4.93%) Banking
6 38 (2.43%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 21 (1.35%) Investment Banking
7 21 (1.35%) Telecoms
8 20 (1.28%) Documentation Skills
9 15 (0.96%) Retail
10 13 (0.83%) Front Office
10 13 (0.83%) Marketing
10 13 (0.83%) Pharmaceutical
11 12 (0.77%) Manufacturing
11 12 (0.77%) Publishing
12 9 (0.58%) Law
13 6 (0.38%) Aerospace
13 6 (0.38%) Military
14 5 (0.32%) Legal
15 4 (0.26%) Back Office
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 255 (16.34%) PySpark
2 155 (9.93%) Kafka
3 56 (3.59%) Pandas
4 35 (2.24%) JSON
5 31 (1.99%) REST
6 29 (1.86%) YAML
7 23 (1.47%) Great Expectations
8 17 (1.09%) NumPy
8 17 (1.09%) XML
9 16 (1.02%) scikit-learn
10 15 (0.96%) Matplotlib
10 15 (0.96%) Node.js
11 14 (0.90%) Apache Beam
11 14 (0.90%) PyTorch
11 14 (0.90%) React
12 11 (0.70%) Apache Avro
12 11 (0.70%) pytest
13 10 (0.64%) Spring
13 10 (0.64%) Spring Boot
13 10 (0.64%) TensorFlow
Miscellaneous
1 104 (6.66%) Cloud Native
2 46 (2.95%) Legacy Systems
3 36 (2.31%) Data Structures
4 29 (1.86%) Product Ownership
5 24 (1.54%) Onboarding
6 23 (1.47%) Distributed Systems
7 22 (1.41%) Clustering
8 21 (1.35%) Greenfield Project
9 18 (1.15%) Data Protection Act
10 16 (1.02%) NHS
10 16 (1.02%) Reinsurance
11 15 (0.96%) Replication
12 14 (0.90%) Hybrid Cloud
13 12 (0.77%) Public Cloud
14 11 (0.70%) Self-Motivation
15 9 (0.58%) Data Centre
15 9 (0.58%) Virtual Team
16 8 (0.51%) Analytical Mindset
16 8 (0.51%) Life Science
16 8 (0.51%) Reference Data
Operating Systems
1 38 (2.43%) Unix
2 28 (1.79%) Linux
3 4 (0.26%) Windows
4 2 (0.13%) Windows Server
5 1 (0.064%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 667 (42.73%) Data Pipeline
2 630 (40.36%) ETL
3 598 (38.31%) Data Engineering
4 590 (37.80%) Analytics
5 541 (34.66%) Data Modelling
6 405 (25.94%) CI/CD
7 352 (22.55%) Business Intelligence
8 300 (19.22%) Agile
9 293 (18.77%) DevOps
10 249 (15.95%) Data Governance
11 230 (14.73%) Problem-Solving
12 187 (11.98%) Data Science
13 176 (11.27%) Data Integration
14 175 (11.21%) Migration
15 171 (10.95%) AI
16 155 (9.93%) Data Architecture
17 153 (9.80%) Validation
18 142 (9.10%) Data Transformation
18 142 (9.10%) Performance Tuning
19 135 (8.65%) Machine Learning
Programming Languages
1 866 (55.48%) SQL
2 764 (48.94%) Python
3 98 (6.28%) Java
4 81 (5.19%) Scala
5 39 (2.50%) Data Analysis Expressions
6 38 (2.43%) C#
7 33 (2.11%) T-SQL
8 32 (2.05%) PL/SQL
9 25 (1.60%) Bash
9 25 (1.60%) Shell Script
10 22 (1.41%) Bicep
11 21 (1.35%) PowerShell
12 19 (1.22%) R
13 13 (0.83%) Go
14 11 (0.70%) JavaScript
15 8 (0.51%) TypeScript
16 3 (0.19%) C
16 3 (0.19%) Korn
17 2 (0.13%) Ruby
17 2 (0.13%) VB
Qualifications
1 452 (28.96%) Security Cleared
2 404 (25.88%) SC Cleared
3 41 (2.63%) Degree
4 33 (2.11%) Azure Certification
5 30 (1.92%) BPSS Clearance
6 17 (1.09%) DV Cleared
7 16 (1.02%) AWS Certification
7 16 (1.02%) Computer Science Degree
8 8 (0.51%) Master's Degree
9 6 (0.38%) Microsoft Certification
9 6 (0.38%) SnowPro
10 5 (0.32%) BICSI Certification
10 5 (0.32%) City & Guilds
10 5 (0.32%) DBS Check
11 4 (0.26%) CTC Cleared
12 3 (0.19%) CISSP
12 3 (0.19%) IBM Certification
13 2 (0.13%) CISM
14 1 (0.064%) CompTIA Security+
14 1 (0.064%) Numerate Degree
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 436 (27.93%) Data Quality
2 55 (3.52%) GDPR
3 41 (2.63%) QA
4 18 (1.15%) Accessibility
5 8 (0.51%) SLA
6 5 (0.32%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 4 (0.26%) HIPAA
8 3 (0.19%) FATCA
8 3 (0.19%) GMP
8 3 (0.19%) WCAG
9 2 (0.13%) GRC
9 2 (0.13%) MiFID
9 2 (0.13%) SOC 2
10 1 (0.064%) California Consumer Privacy Act
10 1 (0.064%) EMIR
10 1 (0.064%) GxP
10 1 (0.064%) NCSC
10 1 (0.064%) NIST
10 1 (0.064%) PMO
10 1 (0.064%) Sarbanes-Oxley
System Software
1 105 (6.73%) Docker
2 9 (0.58%) Virtual Machines
3 2 (0.13%) Active Directory
3 2 (0.13%) HDFS
4 1 (0.064%) RACF
Systems Management
1 164 (10.51%) Terraform
2 104 (6.66%) Kubernetes
3 35 (2.24%) Grafana
4 15 (0.96%) Prometheus
5 7 (0.45%) Ansible
6 4 (0.26%) Kubeflow
7 3 (0.19%) Kibana
7 3 (0.19%) logstash
7 3 (0.19%) Rancher
8 2 (0.13%) Apache Ranger
8 2 (0.13%) EMC NetWorker
8 2 (0.13%) NetBackup
8 2 (0.13%) Thomson Reuters DACS
8 2 (0.13%) Tivoli Storage Manager
9 1 (0.064%) Control-M
9 1 (0.064%) Fluentd
9 1 (0.064%) Puppet
9 1 (0.064%) QRadar
Vendors
1 423 (27.10%) Databricks
2 208 (13.32%) Microsoft
3 124 (7.94%) Oracle
4 107 (6.85%) Talend
5 98 (6.28%) Informatica
6 65 (4.16%) Google
7 60 (3.84%) Denodo
8 31 (1.99%) Cisco
9 28 (1.79%) F5
10 25 (1.60%) ServiceNow
11 22 (1.41%) SAP
12 19 (1.22%) Splunk
13 18 (1.15%) IBM
14 17 (1.09%) Cloudera
14 17 (1.09%) Foundry
14 17 (1.09%) Palantir
15 10 (0.64%) Alteryx
16 8 (0.51%) MuleSoft
17 6 (0.38%) OpenAI
18 5 (0.32%) Virgin Media