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 11 October 2026.

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

6 months to
11 Oct 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 69 126 99
Rank change year-on-year +57 -27 +32
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 1,891 744 892
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 3.47% 2.25% 2.35%
As % of the Job Titles category 3.77% 2.47% 2.53%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,259 533 621
10th Percentile £375 £363 £360
25th Percentile £425 £413 £450
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year - -4.76% -4.55%
75th Percentile £600 £588 £625
90th Percentile £675 £693 £688
UK excluding London median daily rate £482 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +1.37% -5.00% -4.76%
Number of hourly rates quoted 64 13 5
10th Percentile £21.25 £25.34 £53.55
25th Percentile £30.96 £35.25 £60.00
Median hourly rate £44.75 £52.50 £95.00
Median % change year-on-year -14.76% -44.74% +53.85%
75th Percentile £68.00 £80.00 £97.50
90th Percentile £70.00 £105.50 -
UK excluding London median hourly rate £45.00 £27.00 £60.00
% change year-on-year +66.67% -55.00% +5.26%

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 50,214 30,082 35,242
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.03% 90.84% 93.01%
Number of daily rates quoted 29,439 18,998 21,292
10th Percentile £325 £275 £300
25th Percentile £425 £400 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -0.94%
75th Percentile £638 £623 £638
90th Percentile £736 £725 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £493
% change year-on-year +5.26% -3.65% -1.40%
Number of hourly rates quoted 4,075 1,645 1,472
10th Percentile £14.31 £13.75 £14.87
25th Percentile £19.34 £17.30 £20.30
Median hourly rate £41.71 £25.15 £41.50
Median % change year-on-year +65.84% -39.40% -7.78%
75th Percentile £67.50 £50.00 £65.00
90th Percentile £79.60 £68.00 £74.37
UK excluding London median hourly rate £41.71 £25.00 £42.50
% change year-on-year +66.84% -41.18% -4.49%

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 11 October 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 11 October 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 11 October 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 +62 1,643 £500 -2.44% 1,390
UK excluding London +86 851 £482 +1.37% 660
London +33 826 £525 - 756
Work from Home +40 551 £500 +2.04% 598
Midlands +70 318 £469 -6.20% 89
West Midlands +57 235 £469 -6.20% 58
North of England +25 201 £525 +13.51% 241
South East +21 123 £459 -0.76% 123
South West +32 119 £525 +3.70% 66
North West +20 107 £525 +20.69% 123
East Midlands +46 83 £388 -16.22% 31
Yorkshire +13 76 £505 -0.25% 64
Scotland +1 73 £519 +15.28% 60
East of England +6 37 £525 -16.00% 39
North East -28 19 £510 +22.52% 54
Wales -3 17 £531 +7.32% 15
Northern Ireland +3 1 - - 28
Channel Islands - 1 - -

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

For the 6 months to 11 October 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.

1 939 (49.66%) SQL
2 837 (44.26%) Python
3 811 (42.89%) Data Pipeline
4 771 (40.77%) Data Engineering
5 657 (34.74%) Data Modelling
6 652 (34.48%) ETL
7 625 (33.05%) Analytics
8 589 (31.15%) AWS
9 587 (31.04%) Azure
10 485 (25.65%) Data Quality
11 479 (25.33%) Security Cleared
12 454 (24.01%) CI/CD
13 412 (21.79%) Databricks
14 410 (21.68%) SC Cleared
15 338 (17.87%) Agile
16 327 (17.29%) AI
17 313 (16.55%) DevOps
18 311 (16.45%) Data Warehouse
19 308 (16.29%) Migration
20 281 (14.86%) Business Intelligence
21 264 (13.96%) PySpark
22 263 (13.91%) Data Transformation
23 259 (13.70%) Validation
24 253 (13.38%) Data Governance
25 251 (13.27%) Data Integration
26 245 (12.96%) Microsoft
27 236 (12.48%) Snowflake
28 235 (12.43%) dbt
29 234 (12.37%) Power Platform
30 226 (11.95%) Power BI

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 (11.21%) Apache Airflow
2 169 (8.94%) Apache Spark
3 152 (8.04%) Apache
4 47 (2.49%) Confluence
5 42 (2.22%) SAS
6 16 (0.85%) Palantir Foundry
6 16 (0.85%) SharePoint
7 13 (0.69%) Jupyter
8 4 (0.21%) Microsoft Exchange
9 3 (0.16%) Apache Superset
10 2 (0.11%) ArcGIS
10 2 (0.11%) CMS
10 2 (0.11%) PowerExchange
11 1 (0.053%) Apache Pulsar
11 1 (0.053%) Liferay
11 1 (0.053%) Luigi
11 1 (0.053%) nginx
11 1 (0.053%) Oracle Workflow
Applications
1 17 (0.90%) Microsoft Excel
2 8 (0.42%) Spreadsheet
3 3 (0.16%) Chatbot
4 1 (0.053%) Microsoft Office
4 1 (0.053%) Microsoft PowerPoint
Business Applications
1 13 (0.69%) Aladdin
2 8 (0.42%) Dynamics CRM
3 6 (0.32%) NetSuite
4 5 (0.26%) Infor LN
4 5 (0.26%) Sage X3
5 4 (0.21%) SAP S/4HANA
5 4 (0.21%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
6 2 (0.11%) FIS Private Capital Suite
6 2 (0.11%) Maximo
6 2 (0.11%) Oracle EBS
6 2 (0.11%) SAP BPC
6 2 (0.11%) SAP Oil and Gas
6 2 (0.11%) SimCorp Dimension
7 1 (0.053%) Dynamics NAV
7 1 (0.053%) Markit EDM
7 1 (0.053%) MIS ActiveH
7 1 (0.053%) Oracle Assets
7 1 (0.053%) Oracle Retail
7 1 (0.053%) SAP CAR
7 1 (0.053%) SAP EWM
Cloud Services
1 589 (31.15%) AWS
2 587 (31.04%) Azure
3 236 (12.48%) Snowflake
4 235 (12.43%) dbt
5 234 (12.37%) Power Platform
6 213 (11.26%) Azure Data Factory
7 205 (10.84%) GCP
8 168 (8.88%) Amazon S3
9 131 (6.93%) Serverless
10 118 (6.24%) Azure DevOps
11 116 (6.13%) AWS Lambda
12 113 (5.98%) Azure Synapse Analytics
13 108 (5.71%) GitHub
14 71 (3.75%) Azure Databricks
15 61 (3.23%) Amazon EMR
16 44 (2.33%) GitHub Actions
17 39 (2.06%) Amazon CloudWatch
18 33 (1.75%) AWS Step Functions
19 28 (1.48%) Amazon Kinesis
19 28 (1.48%) AWS CloudFormation
Communications & Networking
1 21 (1.11%) DNS
2 20 (1.06%) BGP
2 20 (1.06%) DMZ
2 20 (1.06%) Multicast
2 20 (1.06%) VPN
3 8 (0.42%) Firewall
4 5 (0.26%) Intrusion Detection
5 4 (0.21%) Wi-Fi
5 4 (0.21%) Wireless
6 2 (0.11%) HTTP
6 2 (0.11%) Structured Cabling
7 1 (0.053%) Broadband
7 1 (0.053%) Cisco IPT
7 1 (0.053%) HTTPS
7 1 (0.053%) LTE
7 1 (0.053%) MQTT
7 1 (0.053%) Network Security
7 1 (0.053%) TCP/IP
7 1 (0.053%) tcpdump
7 1 (0.053%) Wireshark
Database & Business Intelligence
1 311 (16.45%) Data Warehouse
2 226 (11.95%) Power BI
3 165 (8.73%) Data Lake
4 135 (7.14%) Metadata
5 103 (5.45%) BigQuery
6 94 (4.97%) Amazon Redshift
7 86 (4.55%) Delta Lake
8 83 (4.39%) Amazon Athena
9 75 (3.97%) Big Data
10 69 (3.65%) SQL Server
11 66 (3.49%) PostgreSQL
12 65 (3.44%) Pentaho
13 55 (2.91%) Relational Database
13 55 (2.91%) Snowflake Schema
14 51 (2.70%) NoSQL
15 46 (2.43%) Oracle Database
16 42 (2.22%) SQL Server Integration Services
17 41 (2.17%) Amazon RDS
17 41 (2.17%) Tableau
18 40 (2.12%) Azure SQL Database
Development Applications
1 172 (9.10%) Git
2 104 (5.50%) GitLab
3 62 (3.28%) JIRA
4 33 (1.75%) Jenkins
5 21 (1.11%) MLflow
6 10 (0.53%) Artifactory
7 9 (0.48%) Bitbucket
7 9 (0.48%) Postman
8 6 (0.32%) Selenium
8 6 (0.32%) SonarQube
9 5 (0.26%) Claude Code
10 3 (0.16%) Atlassian Bamboo
10 3 (0.16%) ERwin
10 3 (0.16%) Newman
10 3 (0.16%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
11 2 (0.11%) CircleCI
11 2 (0.11%) RStudio
11 2 (0.11%) Terragrunt
11 2 (0.11%) Yeoman
12 1 (0.053%) ER Studio
General
1 312 (16.50%) Social Skills
2 289 (15.28%) Finance
3 217 (11.48%) Analytical Skills
4 171 (9.04%) Public Sector
5 126 (6.66%) Banking
6 34 (1.80%) Marketing
7 32 (1.69%) Retail
8 26 (1.37%) Investment Banking
9 25 (1.32%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 24 (1.27%) Front Office
11 23 (1.22%) Aerospace
11 23 (1.22%) Automotive
12 17 (0.90%) Law
12 17 (0.90%) Pharmaceutical
13 16 (0.85%) Telecoms
14 15 (0.79%) Documentation Skills
14 15 (0.79%) Police
15 14 (0.74%) Manufacturing
15 14 (0.74%) Military
16 12 (0.63%) Legal
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 264 (13.96%) PySpark
2 191 (10.10%) Terraform
3 132 (6.98%) Kafka
4 41 (2.17%) REST
5 30 (1.59%) JSON
6 26 (1.37%) Pandas
7 23 (1.22%) XML
8 17 (0.90%) LangChain
8 17 (0.90%) Spring
8 17 (0.90%) Spring Boot
9 16 (0.85%) Great Expectations
10 15 (0.79%) RESTful
11 14 (0.74%) pytest
12 13 (0.69%) Apache Beam
12 13 (0.69%) Apache NiFi
12 13 (0.69%) PyTorch
13 12 (0.63%) Streamlit
14 11 (0.58%) React
15 10 (0.53%) LangGraph
15 10 (0.53%) Microsoft Graph
Miscellaneous
1 155 (8.20%) Cloud Native
2 65 (3.44%) Data Structures
3 61 (3.23%) Legacy Systems
4 54 (2.86%) Onboarding
5 31 (1.64%) AI Agents
6 26 (1.37%) Product Ownership
7 24 (1.27%) Distributed Systems
8 20 (1.06%) Algorithms
9 19 (1.00%) Management Information System
10 18 (0.95%) Greenfield Project
10 18 (0.95%) Reference Data
11 15 (0.79%) NHS
11 15 (0.79%) Reinsurance
12 12 (0.63%) Data Protection Act
12 12 (0.63%) Enterprise Software
12 12 (0.63%) Virtual Team
13 11 (0.58%) Distributed Computing
14 10 (0.53%) Derivative
15 9 (0.48%) Clustering
15 9 (0.48%) Life Science
Operating Systems
1 43 (2.27%) Unix
2 37 (1.96%) Linux
3 3 (0.16%) Windows
4 2 (0.11%) Ubuntu
5 1 (0.053%) Robot Operating System
5 1 (0.053%) VMS
5 1 (0.053%) Windows Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 811 (42.89%) Data Pipeline
2 771 (40.77%) Data Engineering
3 657 (34.74%) Data Modelling
4 652 (34.48%) ETL
5 625 (33.05%) Analytics
6 454 (24.01%) CI/CD
7 338 (17.87%) Agile
8 327 (17.29%) AI
9 313 (16.55%) DevOps
10 308 (16.29%) Migration
11 281 (14.86%) Business Intelligence
12 263 (13.91%) Data Transformation
13 259 (13.70%) Validation
14 253 (13.38%) Data Governance
15 251 (13.27%) Data Integration
16 196 (10.36%) Problem-Solving
17 193 (10.21%) Machine Learning
18 173 (9.15%) Lakehouse
19 170 (8.99%) Data Science
19 170 (8.99%) Test Automation
Programming Languages
1 939 (49.66%) SQL
2 837 (44.26%) Python
3 99 (5.24%) Java
4 72 (3.81%) Scala
5 43 (2.27%) PL/SQL
6 35 (1.85%) T-SQL
7 33 (1.75%) Data Analysis Expressions
8 31 (1.64%) PowerShell
9 21 (1.11%) JavaScript
10 20 (1.06%) Shell Script
11 19 (1.00%) Bash
12 18 (0.95%) R
13 12 (0.63%) Bicep
14 10 (0.53%) Go
15 7 (0.37%) TypeScript
16 6 (0.32%) C#
17 5 (0.26%) Korn
18 3 (0.16%) COBOL
18 3 (0.16%) Kusto Query Language
19 2 (0.11%) Cypher
Qualifications
1 479 (25.33%) Security Cleared
2 410 (21.68%) SC Cleared
3 60 (3.17%) BPSS Clearance
4 42 (2.22%) Degree
5 41 (2.17%) DV Cleared
6 24 (1.27%) Azure Certification
7 19 (1.00%) Computer Science Degree
8 18 (0.95%) AWS Certification
9 9 (0.48%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
10 8 (0.42%) Master's Degree
10 8 (0.42%) SnowPro
11 7 (0.37%) CISM
11 7 (0.37%) CISSP
11 7 (0.37%) DBS Check
12 5 (0.26%) CEH
13 4 (0.21%) City & Guilds
14 3 (0.16%) Microsoft Certification
15 1 (0.053%) CISA
15 1 (0.053%) PMI Certification
15 1 (0.053%) PMP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 485 (25.65%) Data Quality
2 79 (4.18%) QA
3 34 (1.80%) GDPR
4 16 (0.85%) Accessibility
5 9 (0.48%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 6 (0.32%) Disclosure Scotland
6 6 (0.32%) FATCA
7 5 (0.26%) HIPAA
7 5 (0.26%) Sarbanes-Oxley
7 5 (0.26%) SLA
8 3 (0.16%) MiFID
9 2 (0.11%) California Consumer Privacy Act
9 2 (0.11%) EMIR
9 2 (0.11%) GRC
9 2 (0.11%) SNOMED CT
9 2 (0.11%) SOC 2
10 1 (0.053%) IFRS
10 1 (0.053%) IFRS 17
10 1 (0.053%) IFRS 9
10 1 (0.053%) PMO
System Software
1 102 (5.39%) Docker
2 4 (0.21%) Active Directory
3 1 (0.053%) HDFS
3 1 (0.053%) Virtual Machines
Systems Management
1 93 (4.92%) Kubernetes
2 30 (1.59%) Grafana
3 21 (1.11%) Ansible
4 13 (0.69%) Control-M
4 13 (0.69%) Kibana
5 4 (0.21%) Prometheus
6 3 (0.16%) logstash
7 2 (0.11%) Puppet
8 1 (0.053%) Progress Chef
Vendors
1 412 (21.79%) Databricks
2 245 (12.96%) Microsoft
3 153 (8.09%) Oracle
4 94 (4.97%) Informatica
5 92 (4.87%) Google
6 86 (4.55%) Talend
7 38 (2.01%) Denodo
8 37 (1.96%) Salesforce
9 28 (1.48%) Palantir
10 25 (1.32%) SAP
11 24 (1.27%) Foundry
12 20 (1.06%) Cisco
12 20 (1.06%) F5
13 15 (0.79%) Splunk
14 9 (0.48%) Bloomberg
14 9 (0.48%) OpenAI
15 8 (0.42%) Sage
16 7 (0.37%) Alteryx
16 7 (0.37%) IBM
16 7 (0.37%) InterSystems