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 April 2026.

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

6 months to
11 Apr 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 65 82 101
Rank change year-on-year +17 +19 +7
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 1,576 883 983
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 3.44% 3.02% 2.24%
As % of the Job Titles category 3.73% 3.26% 2.41%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,115 647 772
10th Percentile £364 £356 £285
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 £457
% change year-on-year +1.62% +1.31% -10.71%
Number of hourly rates quoted 42 14 46
10th Percentile £20.46 £25.14 £31.25
25th Percentile £41.28 £26.27 £49.25
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 42,225 27,079 40,770
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.26% 92.67% 92.77%
Number of daily rates quoted 26,249 17,802 26,661
10th Percentile £313 £300 £275
25th Percentile £413 £407 £409
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 £745
UK excluding London median daily rate £488 £475 £490
% change year-on-year +2.63% -3.06% -2.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,659 969 2,573
10th Percentile £15.00 £14.84 £12.86
25th Percentile £20.09 £20.00 £16.25
Median hourly rate £41.06 £31.64 £35.00
Median % change year-on-year +29.76% -9.60% -21.40%
75th Percentile £65.00 £63.75 £60.00
90th Percentile £77.50 £76.25 £71.89
UK excluding London median hourly rate £42.13 £30.20 £35.00
% change year-on-year +39.49% -13.71% -16.82%

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 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 11 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 11 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 +16 1,389 £500 - 402
London +17 785 £525 -0.94% 158
UK excluding London +17 602 £470 +1.62% 308
Work from Home +8 465 £500 - 193
Midlands +19 259 £469 -1.37% 59
West Midlands +18 239 £469 -1.63% 45
North of England -8 177 £463 - 87
North West +8 109 £450 -2.70% 56
South East -24 73 £500 -0.50% 91
South West -10 53 £523 +4.50% 38
Yorkshire -24 52 £465 +3.33% 19
Scotland -2 40 £401 -10.89% 10
Wales +1 20 £425 -15.42% 8
East Midlands -32 20 £455 +14.11% 14
North East -14 16 £475 - 13
East of England -31 15 £565 +79.37% 17
Northern Ireland 0 3 £410 -18.00%

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

For the 6 months to 11 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.

1 875 (55.52%) SQL
2 772 (48.98%) Python
3 673 (42.70%) Data Pipeline
4 633 (40.16%) ETL
5 610 (38.71%) Analytics
6 593 (37.63%) Data Engineering
7 592 (37.56%) Azure
8 548 (34.77%) Data Modelling
9 454 (28.81%) Security Cleared
10 436 (27.66%) Data Quality
11 429 (27.22%) Databricks
12 420 (26.65%) AWS
13 407 (25.82%) CI/CD
14 405 (25.70%) SC Cleared
15 358 (22.72%) Business Intelligence
16 298 (18.91%) Agile
17 297 (18.85%) DevOps
18 292 (18.53%) Data Warehouse
19 277 (17.58%) Power Platform
20 261 (16.56%) Power BI
21 258 (16.37%) PySpark
22 249 (15.80%) Data Governance
23 238 (15.10%) Azure Data Factory
24 231 (14.66%) Problem-Solving
25 211 (13.39%) Microsoft
26 202 (12.82%) Git
27 190 (12.06%) Data Science
28 177 (11.23%) Migration
29 176 (11.17%) Snowflake
30 175 (11.10%) 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
1 153 (9.71%) Apache Spark
2 148 (9.39%) Apache Airflow
3 95 (6.03%) Apache
4 73 (4.63%) SAS
5 21 (1.33%) Confluence
6 13 (0.82%) Palantir Foundry
7 8 (0.51%) Jupyter
8 5 (0.32%) Microsoft Exchange
9 4 (0.25%) SharePoint
10 2 (0.13%) Apache Superset
10 2 (0.13%) Luigi
11 1 (0.063%) Apache Synapse
11 1 (0.063%) Appian
11 1 (0.063%) ArcGIS
11 1 (0.063%) Camunda
11 1 (0.063%) Oracle Application Server
11 1 (0.063%) R Markdown
Applications
1 19 (1.21%) Microsoft Excel
2 7 (0.44%) Notepad++
3 4 (0.25%) Chatbot
4 3 (0.19%) Spreadsheet
5 1 (0.063%) Microsoft Office
Business Applications
1 2 (0.13%) Aladdin
1 2 (0.13%) BambooHR
1 2 (0.13%) Dynamics CRM
1 2 (0.13%) Maximo
1 2 (0.13%) SAP BPC
2 1 (0.063%) Actimize
2 1 (0.063%) Elite 3E
2 1 (0.063%) iTrent
2 1 (0.063%) NEC Housing
2 1 (0.063%) Oracle 11i
2 1 (0.063%) Oracle EBS
2 1 (0.063%) Oracle ERP
2 1 (0.063%) SAP Business ByDesign
2 1 (0.063%) SAP S/4HANA
2 1 (0.063%) SimCorp Dimension
Cloud Services
1 592 (37.56%) Azure
2 420 (26.65%) AWS
3 277 (17.58%) Power Platform
4 238 (15.10%) Azure Data Factory
5 176 (11.17%) Snowflake
6 160 (10.15%) Azure Synapse Analytics
7 153 (9.71%) GCP
8 151 (9.58%) Amazon S3
9 144 (9.14%) dbt
10 123 (7.80%) GitHub
11 117 (7.42%) Azure DevOps
12 110 (6.98%) Serverless
13 81 (5.14%) AWS Lambda
14 54 (3.43%) GitHub Actions
15 42 (2.66%) AWS CloudFormation
16 29 (1.84%) AWS Step Functions
17 28 (1.78%) Matillion
18 25 (1.59%) Amazon EMR
19 24 (1.52%) Amazon Kinesis
20 23 (1.46%) Dagster
Communications & Networking
1 27 (1.71%) DNS
1 27 (1.71%) VPN
2 26 (1.65%) BGP
2 26 (1.65%) DMZ
2 26 (1.65%) Multicast
3 12 (0.76%) Structured Cabling
4 7 (0.44%) PuTTY
4 7 (0.44%) WinSCP
5 4 (0.25%) Firewall
6 3 (0.19%) SAN
7 1 (0.063%) 4G
7 1 (0.063%) 5G
7 1 (0.063%) Network Security
7 1 (0.063%) Software-Defined Networking
Database & Business Intelligence
1 292 (18.53%) Data Warehouse
2 261 (16.56%) Power BI
3 175 (11.10%) Data Lake
4 116 (7.36%) SQL Server
5 101 (6.41%) Delta Lake
6 92 (5.84%) BigQuery
7 89 (5.65%) Metadata
8 87 (5.52%) Amazon Redshift
9 85 (5.39%) Azure SQL Database
10 73 (4.63%) Big Data
11 72 (4.57%) Pentaho
12 65 (4.12%) Tableau
13 64 (4.06%) PostgreSQL
14 61 (3.87%) SQL Server Integration Services
15 59 (3.74%) Snowflake Schema
16 58 (3.68%) NoSQL
17 57 (3.62%) Amazon Athena
18 48 (3.05%) Relational Database
19 39 (2.47%) Hadoop
20 36 (2.28%) Star Schema
Development Applications
1 202 (12.82%) Git
2 73 (4.63%) JIRA
3 67 (4.25%) GitLab
4 64 (4.06%) Jenkins
5 20 (1.27%) MLflow
6 4 (0.25%) Bitbucket
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 (0.063%) Cucumber
8 1 (0.063%) DBeaver
8 1 (0.063%) ER Studio
8 1 (0.063%) ERwin
8 1 (0.063%) Jaeger
8 1 (0.063%) Maven
8 1 (0.063%) Mockito
8 1 (0.063%) Team Foundation Server
8 1 (0.063%) Terragrunt
General
1 253 (16.05%) Finance
2 248 (15.74%) Social Skills
3 167 (10.60%) Analytical Skills
4 133 (8.44%) Public Sector
5 76 (4.82%) Banking
6 39 (2.47%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 21 (1.33%) Investment Banking
7 21 (1.33%) Telecoms
8 19 (1.21%) Documentation Skills
9 15 (0.95%) Retail
10 14 (0.89%) Manufacturing
11 13 (0.82%) Marketing
11 13 (0.82%) Pharmaceutical
12 12 (0.76%) Front Office
12 12 (0.76%) Publishing
13 9 (0.57%) Law
14 6 (0.38%) Aerospace
14 6 (0.38%) Legal
14 6 (0.38%) Military
15 4 (0.25%) Local Government
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 258 (16.37%) PySpark
2 152 (9.64%) Kafka
3 56 (3.55%) Pandas
4 36 (2.28%) JSON
5 31 (1.97%) REST
6 30 (1.90%) YAML
7 23 (1.46%) Great Expectations
8 18 (1.14%) XML
9 17 (1.08%) NumPy
10 16 (1.02%) scikit-learn
11 15 (0.95%) Matplotlib
12 14 (0.89%) Apache Beam
12 14 (0.89%) Node.js
12 14 (0.89%) PyTorch
13 13 (0.82%) React
14 11 (0.70%) Apache Avro
14 11 (0.70%) pytest
15 10 (0.63%) Spring
15 10 (0.63%) Spring Boot
15 10 (0.63%) TensorFlow
Miscellaneous
1 103 (6.54%) Cloud Native
2 45 (2.86%) Legacy Systems
3 37 (2.35%) Data Structures
4 28 (1.78%) Product Ownership
5 24 (1.52%) Distributed Systems
5 24 (1.52%) Onboarding
6 22 (1.40%) Clustering
7 21 (1.33%) Greenfield Project
8 17 (1.08%) Data Protection Act
9 16 (1.02%) NHS
9 16 (1.02%) Reinsurance
10 15 (0.95%) Replication
11 14 (0.89%) Hybrid Cloud
12 12 (0.76%) Public Cloud
13 11 (0.70%) Self-Motivation
14 9 (0.57%) Data Centre
14 9 (0.57%) Virtual Team
15 8 (0.51%) Life Science
15 8 (0.51%) Linux Command Line
15 8 (0.51%) Reference Data
Operating Systems
1 40 (2.54%) Unix
2 29 (1.84%) Linux
3 4 (0.25%) Windows
4 2 (0.13%) Windows Server
5 1 (0.063%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 673 (42.70%) Data Pipeline
2 633 (40.16%) ETL
3 610 (38.71%) Analytics
4 593 (37.63%) Data Engineering
5 548 (34.77%) Data Modelling
6 407 (25.82%) CI/CD
7 358 (22.72%) Business Intelligence
8 298 (18.91%) Agile
9 297 (18.85%) DevOps
10 249 (15.80%) Data Governance
11 231 (14.66%) Problem-Solving
12 190 (12.06%) Data Science
13 177 (11.23%) Migration
14 173 (10.98%) Data Integration
15 172 (10.91%) AI
16 157 (9.96%) Data Architecture
17 154 (9.77%) Validation
18 142 (9.01%) Performance Tuning
19 140 (8.88%) Data Transformation
20 135 (8.57%) Machine Learning
Programming Languages
1 875 (55.52%) SQL
2 772 (48.98%) Python
3 98 (6.22%) Java
4 81 (5.14%) Scala
5 39 (2.47%) Data Analysis Expressions
6 38 (2.41%) C#
7 34 (2.16%) PL/SQL
8 33 (2.09%) T-SQL
9 28 (1.78%) Shell Script
10 26 (1.65%) Bash
11 22 (1.40%) Bicep
12 21 (1.33%) PowerShell
13 19 (1.21%) R
14 13 (0.82%) Go
15 11 (0.70%) JavaScript
16 7 (0.44%) TypeScript
17 3 (0.19%) C
17 3 (0.19%) Korn
18 2 (0.13%) Ruby
18 2 (0.13%) VB
Qualifications
1 454 (28.81%) Security Cleared
2 405 (25.70%) SC Cleared
3 41 (2.60%) Degree
4 34 (2.16%) Azure Certification
5 30 (1.90%) BPSS Clearance
6 16 (1.02%) AWS Certification
6 16 (1.02%) Computer Science Degree
7 15 (0.95%) DV Cleared
8 8 (0.51%) Master's Degree
9 6 (0.38%) DBS Check
9 6 (0.38%) Microsoft Certification
9 6 (0.38%) SnowPro
10 5 (0.32%) BICSI Certification
10 5 (0.32%) City & Guilds
11 4 (0.25%) CTC Cleared
12 3 (0.19%) CISSP
12 3 (0.19%) IBM Certification
13 2 (0.13%) CISM
14 1 (0.063%) CompTIA Security+
14 1 (0.063%) Numerate Degree
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 436 (27.66%) Data Quality
2 55 (3.49%) GDPR
3 41 (2.60%) QA
4 18 (1.14%) Accessibility
5 8 (0.51%) SLA
6 5 (0.32%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 3 (0.19%) FATCA
7 3 (0.19%) GMP
7 3 (0.19%) HIPAA
7 3 (0.19%) WCAG
8 2 (0.13%) GRC
8 2 (0.13%) MiFID
9 1 (0.063%) Disclosure Scotland
9 1 (0.063%) Dodd-Frank
9 1 (0.063%) EMIR
9 1 (0.063%) ISO 13485
9 1 (0.063%) NCSC
9 1 (0.063%) PCI DSS
9 1 (0.063%) PMO
9 1 (0.063%) Sarbanes-Oxley
System Software
1 104 (6.60%) Docker
2 9 (0.57%) Virtual Machines
3 2 (0.13%) Active Directory
3 2 (0.13%) HDFS
4 1 (0.063%) RACF
Systems Management
1 166 (10.53%) Terraform
2 103 (6.54%) Kubernetes
3 36 (2.28%) Grafana
4 16 (1.02%) Prometheus
5 8 (0.51%) Ansible
6 4 (0.25%) Kibana
6 4 (0.25%) Kubeflow
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 (0.063%) Control-M
9 1 (0.063%) Fluentd
9 1 (0.063%) Puppet
9 1 (0.063%) QRadar
Vendors
1 429 (27.22%) Databricks
2 211 (13.39%) Microsoft
3 123 (7.80%) Oracle
4 104 (6.60%) Talend
5 98 (6.22%) Informatica
6 63 (4.00%) Google
7 61 (3.87%) Denodo
8 31 (1.97%) Cisco
9 28 (1.78%) F5
10 25 (1.59%) ServiceNow
11 22 (1.40%) SAP
12 19 (1.21%) Splunk
13 18 (1.14%) IBM
14 16 (1.02%) Cloudera
14 16 (1.02%) Foundry
14 16 (1.02%) Palantir
15 10 (0.63%) Alteryx
16 8 (0.51%) MuleSoft
17 7 (0.44%) OpenAI
18 5 (0.32%) Virgin Media