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 12 August 2026.

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

6 months to
12 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 63 128 95
Rank change year-on-year +65 -33 +25
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 1,968 712 918
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 3.69% 2.16% 2.36%
As % of the Job Titles category 3.98% 2.36% 2.54%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,317 502 674
10th Percentile £381 £367 £254
25th Percentile £425 £425 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £521
Median % change year-on-year - -4.03% -5.27%
75th Percentile £588 £587 £625
90th Percentile £650 £687 £688
UK excluding London median daily rate £470 £475 £450
% change year-on-year -1.05% +5.56% -14.29%
Number of hourly rates quoted 92 13 31
10th Percentile £21.25 £19.78 £31.25
25th Percentile £33.25 £42.25 £49.25
Median hourly rate £50.00 £52.50 £75.00
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% -30.00% +15.38%
75th Percentile £70.00 £78.70 £80.00
90th Percentile £75.00 £86.00 -
UK excluding London median hourly rate £47.50 £27.00 £80.00
% change year-on-year +75.93% -66.25% +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 49,398 30,125 36,175
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.56% 91.38% 92.91%
Number of daily rates quoted 29,694 19,103 23,309
10th Percentile £328 £282 £300
25th Percentile £425 £400 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -1.87%
75th Percentile £625 £625 £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 3,473 1,514 2,025
10th Percentile £15.00 £13.60 £14.16
25th Percentile £20.75 £17.12 £20.50
Median hourly rate £42.25 £25.15 £43.00
Median % change year-on-year +67.99% -41.51% +2.87%
75th Percentile £67.84 £53.75 £65.00
90th Percentile £80.00 £72.50 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £42.68 £25.08 £45.00
% change year-on-year +70.20% -44.28% +27.66%

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 12 August 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 12 August 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 12 August 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 +67 1,757 £500 - 814
UK excluding London +102 924 £470 -1.05% 472
London +43 850 £525 - 429
Work from Home +51 584 £500 +5.26% 301
Midlands +72 402 £465 +2.20% 74
West Midlands +69 346 £460 -4.17% 48
North of England +36 234 £500 +5.26% 139
North West +31 135 £525 +10.53% 69
South East +14 125 £463 +2.78% 143
South West +8 87 £525 +6.33% 47
Yorkshire -2 77 £465 -4.62% 34
Scotland +28 62 £428 -0.12% 26
East Midlands +28 56 £475 +13.10% 26
East of England +9 37 £520 +34.19% 25
North East -25 23 £515 +22.62% 38
Wales +3 17 £500 +12.36% 13
Northern Ireland +8 3 £410 -18.00% 8

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

For the 6 months to 12 August 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.

1 991 (50.36%) SQL
2 842 (42.78%) Data Pipeline
3 820 (41.67%) Python
4 717 (36.43%) Data Engineering
5 702 (35.67%) Analytics
6 685 (34.81%) ETL
7 655 (33.28%) Data Modelling
8 612 (31.10%) Azure
9 563 (28.61%) AWS
10 534 (27.13%) Security Cleared
11 485 (24.64%) Data Quality
12 466 (23.68%) SC Cleared
13 458 (23.27%) CI/CD
14 388 (19.72%) Databricks
15 355 (18.04%) Business Intelligence
16 352 (17.89%) Agile
17 329 (16.72%) Data Warehouse
17 329 (16.72%) DevOps
18 301 (15.29%) Migration
19 274 (13.92%) Power Platform
20 266 (13.52%) Data Governance
21 263 (13.36%) Power BI
22 261 (13.26%) PySpark
23 251 (12.75%) AI
24 248 (12.60%) Microsoft
25 244 (12.40%) Data Integration
26 231 (11.74%) Azure Data Factory
26 231 (11.74%) Validation
27 227 (11.53%) Problem-Solving
28 214 (10.87%) Data Transformation

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
1 193 (9.81%) Apache Airflow
2 157 (7.98%) Apache Spark
3 124 (6.30%) Apache
4 89 (4.52%) SAS
5 49 (2.49%) Confluence
6 13 (0.66%) Palantir Foundry
6 13 (0.66%) SharePoint
7 10 (0.51%) Jupyter
8 3 (0.15%) Apache Superset
9 2 (0.10%) ArcGIS
9 2 (0.10%) Microsoft Exchange
10 1 (0.051%) Liferay
10 1 (0.051%) Luigi
10 1 (0.051%) R Markdown
Applications
1 24 (1.22%) Microsoft Excel
2 7 (0.36%) Notepad++
3 5 (0.25%) Spreadsheet
4 4 (0.20%) Chatbot
5 1 (0.051%) Microsoft PowerPoint
Business Applications
1 13 (0.66%) Aladdin
2 7 (0.36%) Dynamics CRM
3 5 (0.25%) Infor LN
3 5 (0.25%) NetSuite
3 5 (0.25%) Sage X3
4 3 (0.15%) SAP BPC
4 3 (0.15%) SAP S/4HANA
4 3 (0.15%) SimCorp Dimension
4 3 (0.15%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
5 2 (0.10%) BambooHR
5 2 (0.10%) Maximo
5 2 (0.10%) Oracle EBS
6 1 (0.051%) MIS ActiveH
6 1 (0.051%) Oracle 11i
6 1 (0.051%) Oracle Assets
6 1 (0.051%) Oracle ERP
6 1 (0.051%) Raiser’s Edge
6 1 (0.051%) SAP Business ByDesign
6 1 (0.051%) SAP CAR
6 1 (0.051%) SAP EWM
Cloud Services
1 612 (31.10%) Azure
2 563 (28.61%) AWS
3 274 (13.92%) Power Platform
4 231 (11.74%) Azure Data Factory
5 214 (10.87%) Snowflake
6 199 (10.11%) dbt
7 177 (8.99%) GCP
8 160 (8.13%) Amazon S3
9 145 (7.37%) Azure Synapse Analytics
10 137 (6.96%) Azure DevOps
11 115 (5.84%) Serverless
12 109 (5.54%) GitHub
13 100 (5.08%) AWS Lambda
14 50 (2.54%) Amazon EMR
15 44 (2.24%) GitHub Actions
16 35 (1.78%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 28 (1.42%) Amazon Kinesis
18 26 (1.32%) AWS Step Functions
19 24 (1.22%) Fivetran
19 24 (1.22%) Matillion
Communications & Networking
1 31 (1.58%) VPN
2 30 (1.52%) BGP
2 30 (1.52%) DMZ
2 30 (1.52%) DNS
2 30 (1.52%) Multicast
3 9 (0.46%) Firewall
3 9 (0.46%) Structured Cabling
4 7 (0.36%) PuTTY
4 7 (0.36%) WinSCP
5 5 (0.25%) Intrusion Detection
6 4 (0.20%) Wi-Fi
6 4 (0.20%) Wireless
7 1 (0.051%) 4G
7 1 (0.051%) 5G
7 1 (0.051%) LTE
7 1 (0.051%) MQTT
Database & Business Intelligence
1 329 (16.72%) Data Warehouse
2 263 (13.36%) Power BI
3 174 (8.84%) Data Lake
4 117 (5.95%) Metadata
5 101 (5.13%) Amazon Redshift
5 101 (5.13%) BigQuery
6 96 (4.88%) Pentaho
7 94 (4.78%) SQL Server
8 92 (4.67%) Delta Lake
9 84 (4.27%) Big Data
10 72 (3.66%) Amazon Athena
11 65 (3.30%) PostgreSQL
11 65 (3.30%) Tableau
12 62 (3.15%) Snowflake Schema
13 61 (3.10%) Relational Database
14 56 (2.85%) SQL Server Integration Services
15 55 (2.79%) Azure SQL Database
16 54 (2.74%) NoSQL
17 38 (1.93%) Hadoop
18 35 (1.78%) Star Schema
Development Applications
1 184 (9.35%) Git
2 106 (5.39%) GitLab
3 84 (4.27%) JIRA
4 52 (2.64%) Jenkins
5 13 (0.66%) MLflow
6 9 (0.46%) Artifactory
7 8 (0.41%) Bitbucket
8 7 (0.36%) Postman
9 6 (0.30%) SonarQube
10 3 (0.15%) ERwin
10 3 (0.15%) Newman
10 3 (0.15%) Sonatype Nexus
11 2 (0.10%) Atlassian Bamboo
11 2 (0.10%) Claude Code
11 2 (0.10%) ER Studio
11 2 (0.10%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
11 2 (0.10%) Yeoman
12 1 (0.051%) Octopus Deploy
12 1 (0.051%) Selenium
12 1 (0.051%) Terragrunt
General
1 315 (16.01%) Finance
2 310 (15.75%) Social Skills
3 227 (11.53%) Analytical Skills
4 177 (8.99%) Public Sector
5 112 (5.69%) Banking
6 34 (1.73%) Marketing
7 32 (1.63%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 26 (1.32%) Telecoms
9 25 (1.27%) Retail
10 24 (1.22%) Documentation Skills
11 21 (1.07%) Investment Banking
12 20 (1.02%) Front Office
12 20 (1.02%) Manufacturing
13 19 (0.97%) Automotive
14 18 (0.91%) Aerospace
15 16 (0.81%) Pharmaceutical
16 10 (0.51%) Financial Institution
16 10 (0.51%) Legal
17 9 (0.46%) Billing
17 9 (0.46%) Military
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 261 (13.26%) PySpark
2 139 (7.06%) Kafka
3 34 (1.73%) Pandas
4 27 (1.37%) JSON
5 25 (1.27%) REST
6 23 (1.17%) Spring
6 23 (1.17%) Spring Boot
7 20 (1.02%) Great Expectations
8 17 (0.86%) Apache Beam
8 17 (0.86%) XML
8 17 (0.86%) YAML
9 15 (0.76%) RESTful
10 14 (0.71%) React
11 11 (0.56%) pytest
12 10 (0.51%) Apache Avro
12 10 (0.51%) Microsoft Graph
13 9 (0.46%) HTML
13 9 (0.46%) PyTorch
13 9 (0.46%) scikit-learn
14 8 (0.41%) Spark Streaming
Miscellaneous
1 143 (7.27%) Cloud Native
2 81 (4.12%) Legacy Systems
3 67 (3.40%) Data Structures
4 35 (1.78%) Onboarding
5 30 (1.52%) Distributed Systems
6 24 (1.22%) Greenfield Project
6 24 (1.22%) Product Ownership
7 23 (1.17%) NHS
8 19 (0.97%) Reference Data
9 18 (0.91%) Reinsurance
10 16 (0.81%) Management Information System
11 14 (0.71%) Data Protection Act
12 13 (0.66%) AI Agents
12 13 (0.66%) Clustering
13 11 (0.56%) Algorithms
14 10 (0.51%) Enterprise Software
14 10 (0.51%) Life Science
14 10 (0.51%) Linux Command Line
14 10 (0.51%) Replication
14 10 (0.51%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 70 (3.56%) Unix
2 49 (2.49%) Linux
3 4 (0.20%) Windows
4 2 (0.10%) Ubuntu
4 2 (0.10%) Windows Server
5 1 (0.051%) Robot Operating System
5 1 (0.051%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 842 (42.78%) Data Pipeline
2 717 (36.43%) Data Engineering
3 702 (35.67%) Analytics
4 685 (34.81%) ETL
5 655 (33.28%) Data Modelling
6 458 (23.27%) CI/CD
7 355 (18.04%) Business Intelligence
8 352 (17.89%) Agile
9 329 (16.72%) DevOps
10 301 (15.29%) Migration
11 266 (13.52%) Data Governance
12 251 (12.75%) AI
13 244 (12.40%) Data Integration
14 231 (11.74%) Validation
15 227 (11.53%) Problem-Solving
16 214 (10.87%) Data Transformation
17 186 (9.45%) Decision-Making
18 181 (9.20%) Data Science
19 163 (8.28%) Machine Learning
20 159 (8.08%) Test Automation
Programming Languages
1 991 (50.36%) SQL
2 820 (41.67%) Python
3 118 (6.00%) Java
4 64 (3.25%) Scala
5 55 (2.79%) PL/SQL
6 38 (1.93%) T-SQL
7 37 (1.88%) Shell Script
8 30 (1.52%) Bash
9 29 (1.47%) Data Analysis Expressions
10 25 (1.27%) PowerShell
11 19 (0.97%) JavaScript
12 17 (0.86%) C#
13 14 (0.71%) R
14 11 (0.56%) Bicep
15 6 (0.30%) Go
15 6 (0.30%) TypeScript
16 4 (0.20%) Korn
17 2 (0.10%) Perl
17 2 (0.10%) Ruby
17 2 (0.10%) SPARQL
Qualifications
1 534 (27.13%) Security Cleared
2 466 (23.68%) SC Cleared
3 49 (2.49%) BPSS Clearance
4 42 (2.13%) Degree
5 24 (1.22%) Azure Certification
6 22 (1.12%) DV Cleared
7 21 (1.07%) Computer Science Degree
8 12 (0.61%) AWS Certification
9 9 (0.46%) City & Guilds
9 9 (0.46%) SnowPro
10 8 (0.41%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
10 8 (0.41%) DBS Check
11 7 (0.36%) CISM
11 7 (0.36%) CISSP
12 6 (0.30%) Master's Degree
13 5 (0.25%) BICSI Certification
13 5 (0.25%) CEH
14 4 (0.20%) Microsoft Certification
15 1 (0.051%) PMI Certification
15 1 (0.051%) PMP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 485 (24.64%) Data Quality
2 64 (3.25%) QA
3 49 (2.49%) GDPR
4 17 (0.86%) Accessibility
5 12 (0.61%) SLA
6 6 (0.30%) FATCA
6 6 (0.30%) HIPAA
6 6 (0.30%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 6 (0.30%) Sarbanes-Oxley
7 3 (0.15%) MiFID
8 2 (0.10%) California Consumer Privacy Act
8 2 (0.10%) Disclosure Scotland
8 2 (0.10%) EMIR
8 2 (0.10%) GMP
8 2 (0.10%) SNOMED CT
8 2 (0.10%) WCAG
9 1 (0.051%) Government Security Classifications
9 1 (0.051%) GxP
9 1 (0.051%) IFRS
9 1 (0.051%) PCI DSS
System Software
1 123 (6.25%) Docker
2 4 (0.20%) Virtual Machines
3 2 (0.10%) Active Directory
3 2 (0.10%) HDFS
4 1 (0.051%) RACF
Systems Management
1 177 (8.99%) Terraform
2 97 (4.93%) Kubernetes
3 49 (2.49%) Grafana
4 15 (0.76%) Ansible
5 9 (0.46%) Control-M
5 9 (0.46%) Kibana
6 6 (0.30%) Prometheus
7 3 (0.15%) Puppet
8 2 (0.10%) Apache Ranger
8 2 (0.10%) Rancher
8 2 (0.10%) Thomson Reuters DACS
9 1 (0.051%) Kubeflow
9 1 (0.051%) logstash
9 1 (0.051%) NetBackup
Vendors
1 388 (19.72%) Databricks
2 248 (12.60%) Microsoft
3 171 (8.69%) Oracle
4 136 (6.91%) Informatica
5 127 (6.45%) Talend
6 70 (3.56%) Denodo
6 70 (3.56%) Google
7 34 (1.73%) SAP
8 32 (1.63%) Salesforce
9 31 (1.58%) Cisco
9 31 (1.58%) F5
10 24 (1.22%) Palantir
11 20 (1.02%) Splunk
12 19 (0.97%) Cloudera
13 18 (0.91%) Foundry
14 15 (0.76%) ServiceNow
15 12 (0.61%) IBM
16 11 (0.56%) Sage
17 9 (0.46%) Bloomberg
17 9 (0.46%) Dynatrace