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 1 December 2025.

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

6 months to
1 Dec 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 119 90 116
Rank change year-on-year -29 +26 +6
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 847 943 940
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.37% 2.62% 2.06%
As % of the Job Titles category 2.61% 2.82% 2.20%
Number of daily rates quoted 601 647 707
10th Percentile £363 £370 £400
25th Percentile £413 £450 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £530 £526
Median % change year-on-year -5.66% +0.76% -4.36%
75th Percentile £588 £628 £638
90th Percentile £688 £700 £700
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £525
% change year-on-year - -4.76% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 11 13 16
10th Percentile £26.00 £25.45 £35.00
25th Percentile £34.50 £26.32 £38.79
Median hourly rate £43.50 £50.50 £61.43
Median % change year-on-year -13.86% -17.79% +5.91%
75th Percentile £78.38 £93.75 £65.75
90th Percentile £110.00 £97.50 £78.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £37.50 £26.50 £49.00
% change year-on-year +41.51% -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 32,486 33,393 42,696
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 90.92% 92.81% 93.51%
Number of daily rates quoted 20,605 20,273 28,801
10th Percentile £281 £300 £293
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 £647
90th Percentile £723 £738 £743
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £497 £500
% change year-on-year -4.43% -0.60% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 1,896 1,201 1,522
10th Percentile £14.15 £15.25 £15.16
25th Percentile £17.87 £20.75 £19.06
Median hourly rate £25.15 £35.00 £43.90
Median % change year-on-year -28.14% -20.27% +43.93%
75th Percentile £57.50 £65.00 £65.00
90th Percentile £71.50 £73.75 £77.49
UK excluding London median hourly rate £25.15 £32.50 £44.50
% change year-on-year -22.62% -26.97% +78.00%

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 1 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 1 December 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 1 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 -33 711 £513 -6.82% 307
London -19 439 £525 -8.70% 144
UK excluding London -39 292 £500 - 260
Work from Home -29 270 £500 -4.76% 215
Midlands -25 82 £519 +4.75% 37
North of England -39 80 £463 - 71
West Midlands -19 68 £520 +4.00% 33
Scotland +28 51 £450 -4.76% 22
North West -17 39 £415 -7.78% 44
South West +11 37 £550 +22.22% 11
South East -52 35 £478 -13.18% 98
Yorkshire -37 33 £513 +5.67% 18
East Midlands -4 14 £455 +27.81% 4
Wales -15 12 £425 -15.00% 10
North East -8 8 £425 +13.64% 9
East of England -26 6 £625 +95.31% 13
Northern Ireland -6 1 - -

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

For the 6 months to 1 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.

1 544 (64.23%) Python
2 510 (60.21%) SQL
3 394 (46.52%) Data Pipeline
4 368 (43.45%) Azure
5 346 (40.85%) ETL
6 322 (38.02%) Data Engineering
7 292 (34.47%) AWS
8 289 (34.12%) Data Modelling
9 271 (32.00%) Databricks
10 269 (31.76%) CI/CD
11 261 (30.81%) Analytics
12 213 (25.15%) Data Quality
13 204 (24.09%) Data Warehouse
14 191 (22.55%) DevOps
15 185 (21.84%) Business Intelligence
16 179 (21.13%) Agile
17 174 (20.54%) Security Cleared
18 159 (18.77%) Azure Data Factory
19 150 (17.71%) PySpark
20 148 (17.47%) SC Cleared
21 147 (17.36%) Power Platform
22 144 (17.00%) Problem-Solving
23 143 (16.88%) Power BI
24 142 (16.77%) Data Science
25 137 (16.17%) Apache Airflow
26 133 (15.70%) Snowflake
27 116 (13.70%) Git
27 116 (13.70%) Machine Learning
28 111 (13.11%) Data Governance
29 110 (12.99%) GCP

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
1 137 (16.17%) Apache Airflow
2 104 (12.28%) Apache Spark
3 70 (8.26%) Apache
4 23 (2.72%) Confluence
5 19 (2.24%) SAS
6 9 (1.06%) SharePoint
7 8 (0.94%) Oracle Application Server
8 6 (0.71%) Apache Pig
9 5 (0.59%) IIS
10 4 (0.47%) Jupyter
11 3 (0.35%) ArcGIS
11 3 (0.35%) Oracle SOA Suite
12 2 (0.24%) Documentum
12 2 (0.24%) Luigi
13 1 (0.12%) Apache Superset
13 1 (0.12%) Apache Synapse
13 1 (0.12%) Microsoft Exchange
13 1 (0.12%) nginx
Applications
1 8 (0.94%) Microsoft Excel
2 4 (0.47%) 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 (0.35%) Oracle BPM
2 2 (0.24%) Aladdin
2 2 (0.24%) Maximo
2 2 (0.24%) SAP S/4HANA
3 1 (0.12%) Actimize
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
1 368 (43.45%) Azure
2 292 (34.47%) AWS
3 159 (18.77%) Azure Data Factory
4 147 (17.36%) Power Platform
5 133 (15.70%) Snowflake
6 110 (12.99%) GCP
7 101 (11.92%) dbt
8 97 (11.45%) Amazon S3
9 92 (10.86%) Azure Synapse Analytics
10 80 (9.45%) GitHub
11 74 (8.74%) Serverless
12 53 (6.26%) Azure DevOps
13 47 (5.55%) AWS Lambda
14 42 (4.96%) GitHub Actions
15 31 (3.66%) AWS CloudFormation
16 23 (2.72%) SaaS
17 21 (2.48%) Amazon EMR
18 17 (2.01%) Microsoft Purview
19 16 (1.89%) Amazon Kinesis
20 14 (1.65%) AWS Step Functions
Communications & Networking
1 4 (0.47%) Firewall
1 4 (0.47%) MQTT
1 4 (0.47%) TCP/IP
2 3 (0.35%) Internet
2 3 (0.35%) SAN
2 3 (0.35%) SSH
2 3 (0.35%) 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%) Software-Defined Networking
4 1 (0.12%) WAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 204 (24.09%) Data Warehouse
2 143 (16.88%) Power BI
3 104 (12.28%) Data Lake
4 75 (8.85%) Big Data
5 65 (7.67%) PostgreSQL
6 55 (6.49%) NoSQL
6 55 (6.49%) SQL Server
7 52 (6.14%) Amazon Redshift
7 52 (6.14%) Hadoop
8 47 (5.55%) Azure SQL Database
8 47 (5.55%) Delta Lake
9 46 (5.43%) Relational Database
10 44 (5.19%) BigQuery
11 40 (4.72%) Tableau
12 36 (4.25%) Metadata
13 29 (3.42%) Star Schema
14 27 (3.19%) SQL Server Integration Services
15 26 (3.07%) Elasticsearch
16 24 (2.83%) Pentaho
17 23 (2.72%) Amazon QuickSight
Development Applications
1 116 (13.70%) Git
2 64 (7.56%) Jenkins
3 41 (4.84%) JIRA
4 35 (4.13%) GitLab
5 23 (2.72%) MLflow
6 8 (0.94%) DBeaver
7 6 (0.71%) Bitbucket
8 5 (0.59%) Visual Studio Code
9 4 (0.47%) Poetry
9 4 (0.47%) SonarQube
10 3 (0.35%) Artifactory
10 3 (0.35%) Cucumber
10 3 (0.35%) PyCharm
10 3 (0.35%) Sonatype Nexus
10 3 (0.35%) Visual Studio
11 2 (0.24%) JMeter
11 2 (0.24%) Selenium
11 2 (0.24%) Zephyr
12 1 (0.12%) GoCD
12 1 (0.12%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
General
1 174 (20.54%) Social Skills
2 147 (17.36%) Finance
3 108 (12.75%) Analytical Skills
4 64 (7.56%) Public Sector
5 37 (4.37%) Banking
6 22 (2.60%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 13 (1.53%) Pharmaceutical
7 13 (1.53%) Telecoms
8 11 (1.30%) Front Office
8 11 (1.30%) Investment Banking
9 10 (1.18%) Marketing
9 10 (1.18%) Retail
10 8 (0.94%) Documentation Skills
11 5 (0.59%) Health Technology
11 5 (0.59%) Legal
11 5 (0.59%) Manufacturing
11 5 (0.59%) Tech for Good
12 4 (0.47%) Influencing Skills
12 4 (0.47%) Military
12 4 (0.47%) Organisational Skills
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 150 (17.71%) PySpark
2 86 (10.15%) Kafka
3 29 (3.42%) Pandas
4 21 (2.48%) NumPy
4 21 (2.48%) RESTful
5 17 (2.01%) REST
5 17 (2.01%) XML
6 16 (1.89%) Apache NiFi
6 16 (1.89%) JSON
7 15 (1.77%) Flask
8 13 (1.53%) YAML
9 12 (1.42%) PyTorch
10 11 (1.30%) HTML
10 11 (1.30%) RabbitMQ
11 10 (1.18%) Keycloak
12 9 (1.06%) Node.js
12 9 (1.06%) OAuth
12 9 (1.06%) OpenTelemetry
12 9 (1.06%) pytest
12 9 (1.06%) TensorFlow
Miscellaneous
1 51 (6.02%) Cloud Native
2 30 (3.54%) Legacy Systems
3 24 (2.83%) Data Structures
4 21 (2.48%) Algorithms
4 21 (2.48%) Product Ownership
5 20 (2.36%) Replication
6 14 (1.65%) Hybrid Cloud
7 13 (1.53%) Data Protection Act
7 13 (1.53%) Onboarding
8 11 (1.30%) Distributed Systems
9 10 (1.18%) Distributed Computing
10 9 (1.06%) Greenfield Project
10 9 (1.06%) IoT
10 9 (1.06%) Life Science
10 9 (1.06%) NHS
11 8 (0.94%) Reinsurance
11 8 (0.94%) Virtual Team
12 6 (0.71%) AI Agents
12 6 (0.71%) Clustering
12 6 (0.71%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 29 (3.42%) Linux
2 15 (1.77%) Unix
3 2 (0.24%) Windows
3 2 (0.24%) Windows Server
3 2 (0.24%) Windows Server 2003
4 1 (0.12%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 394 (46.52%) Data Pipeline
2 346 (40.85%) ETL
3 322 (38.02%) Data Engineering
4 289 (34.12%) Data Modelling
5 269 (31.76%) CI/CD
6 261 (30.81%) Analytics
7 191 (22.55%) DevOps
8 185 (21.84%) Business Intelligence
9 179 (21.13%) Agile
10 144 (17.00%) Problem-Solving
11 142 (16.77%) Data Science
12 116 (13.70%) Machine Learning
13 111 (13.11%) Data Governance
14 101 (11.92%) Data Integration
15 100 (11.81%) Infrastructure as Code
16 99 (11.69%) AI
17 89 (10.51%) Data Architecture
17 89 (10.51%) Migration
18 87 (10.27%) Visualisation
19 86 (10.15%) Data Transformation
Programming Languages
1 544 (64.23%) Python
2 510 (60.21%) SQL
3 75 (8.85%) Java
4 71 (8.38%) Scala
5 26 (3.07%) Bash
6 19 (2.24%) PL/SQL
7 18 (2.13%) R
8 16 (1.89%) JavaScript
9 15 (1.77%) T-SQL
10 14 (1.65%) Data Analysis Expressions
10 14 (1.65%) Go
11 9 (1.06%) C#
11 9 (1.06%) PowerShell
11 9 (1.06%) Shell Script
12 8 (0.94%) TypeScript
13 4 (0.47%) Groovy
13 4 (0.47%) Korn
14 3 (0.35%) C++
15 2 (0.24%) ABAP
16 1 (0.12%) C
Qualifications
1 174 (20.54%) Security Cleared
2 148 (17.47%) SC Cleared
3 38 (4.49%) Degree
4 26 (3.07%) Azure Certification
5 23 (2.72%) AWS Certification
6 21 (2.48%) DV Cleared
7 15 (1.77%) Computer Science Degree
8 12 (1.42%) Master's Degree
9 8 (0.94%) BPSS Clearance
10 3 (0.35%) CTC Cleared
10 3 (0.35%) SnowPro
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
1 213 (25.15%) Data Quality
2 34 (4.01%) GDPR
3 19 (2.24%) QA
4 10 (1.18%) Accessibility
5 4 (0.47%) HIPAA
5 4 (0.47%) NIST
6 3 (0.35%) ISO/IEC 20000
6 3 (0.35%) MiFID
6 3 (0.35%) SLA
7 2 (0.24%) Dodd-Frank
7 2 (0.24%) EMIR
7 2 (0.24%) EU AI Act
7 2 (0.24%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 1 (0.12%) Disclosure Scotland
8 1 (0.12%) HL7
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 71 (8.38%) Docker
2 9 (1.06%) Virtual Machines
3 5 (0.59%) zsh
4 2 (0.24%) Active Directory
5 1 (0.12%) HDFS
Systems Management
1 99 (11.69%) Terraform
2 76 (8.97%) Kubernetes
3 15 (1.77%) Grafana
4 13 (1.53%) Ansible
5 9 (1.06%) NetBackup
6 8 (0.94%) Prometheus
7 5 (0.59%) Kibana
7 5 (0.59%) Puppet
8 4 (0.47%) Argo
9 3 (0.35%) Ambari
9 3 (0.35%) Istio
9 3 (0.35%) Kubeflow
9 3 (0.35%) Kustomize
9 3 (0.35%) logstash
9 3 (0.35%) ZABBIX
10 2 (0.24%) Control-M
10 2 (0.24%) EMC NetWorker
10 2 (0.24%) Tivoli Storage Manager
Vendors
1 271 (32.00%) Databricks
2 95 (11.22%) Microsoft
3 60 (7.08%) Oracle
4 34 (4.01%) Google
5 31 (3.66%) Talend
6 27 (3.19%) Foundry
6 27 (3.19%) Palantir
7 24 (2.83%) Informatica
8 19 (2.24%) Denodo
9 18 (2.13%) Cloudera
10 13 (1.53%) IBM
11 12 (1.42%) Red Hat
11 12 (1.42%) SAP
12 9 (1.06%) Commvault
12 9 (1.06%) ServiceNow
12 9 (1.06%) Splunk
12 9 (1.06%) Veritas
13 8 (0.94%) Confluent
14 7 (0.83%) Virgin Media
15 6 (0.71%) Salesforce