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 27 May 2026.

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

6 months to
27 May 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 59 91 102
Rank change year-on-year +32 +11 +17
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 1,769 787 938
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 3.63% 2.75% 2.20%
As % of the Job Titles category 3.93% 2.98% 2.37%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,232 593 723
10th Percentile £375 £356 £199
25th Percentile £415 £425 £408
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £491 £500
Median % change year-on-year +1.94% -1.90% -9.09%
75th Percentile £588 £588 £594
90th Percentile £650 £700 £675
UK excluding London median daily rate £469 £460 £450
% change year-on-year +2.05% +2.22% -14.29%
Number of hourly rates quoted 59 9 44
10th Percentile £19.34 £18.13 £33.13
25th Percentile £41.26 £51.25 £49.25
Median hourly rate £52.50 £52.50 £66.25
Median % change year-on-year - -20.75% -12.25%
75th Percentile £71.50 £78.70 £80.00
90th Percentile £75.80 £82.75 -
UK excluding London median hourly rate £50.00 £48.46 £75.00
% change year-on-year +3.18% -35.39% -0.66%

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 44,984 26,371 39,600
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.30% 92.30% 92.81%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,456 17,159 25,763
10th Percentile £325 £290 £280
25th Percentile £413 £405 £410
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £510 £525
Median % change year-on-year +0.49% -2.86% -2.78%
75th Percentile £619 £625 £638
90th Percentile £725 £738 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £488
% change year-on-year +5.26% -2.56% -2.50%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,981 1,009 2,752
10th Percentile £15.00 £14.00 £12.79
25th Percentile £20.35 £18.04 £16.30
Median hourly rate £42.50 £27.53 £36.50
Median % change year-on-year +54.38% -24.58% -18.89%
75th Percentile £66.50 £60.00 £61.30
90th Percentile £78.75 £75.00 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £43.00 £25.15 £40.00
% change year-on-year +70.97% -37.13% -5.88%

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 27 May 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 27 May 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 27 May 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 +30 1,555 £500 - 295
London +29 850 £525 - 113
UK excluding London +39 729 £469 +2.05% 236
Work from Home +27 513 £500 +2.56% 156
Midlands +38 301 £469 +1.96% 34
West Midlands +38 283 £469 +1.96% 25
North of England -4 199 £465 +0.54% 74
North West +7 125 £480 +1.05% 25
South East +3 99 £500 +17.65% 63
South West +5 72 £500 +1.27% 35
Scotland +14 58 £450 - 6
Yorkshire -21 57 £465 +3.33% 26
Wales +1 22 £450 +118.11% 12
East of England -23 19 £520 +63.52% 5
East Midlands -26 18 £525 +26.51% 9
North East -19 17 £450 -5.26% 24
Northern Ireland +4 3 £410 -18.00% 7

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

For the 6 months to 27 May 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.

1 971 (54.89%) SQL
2 815 (46.07%) Python
3 741 (41.89%) Data Pipeline
4 672 (37.99%) ETL
5 666 (37.65%) Analytics
6 647 (36.57%) Data Engineering
7 604 (34.14%) Azure
8 601 (33.97%) Data Modelling
9 521 (29.45%) Security Cleared
10 475 (26.85%) AWS
11 463 (26.17%) SC Cleared
12 449 (25.38%) Data Quality
13 424 (23.97%) Databricks
14 416 (23.52%) CI/CD
15 376 (21.25%) Business Intelligence
16 323 (18.26%) Agile
17 314 (17.75%) DevOps
18 305 (17.24%) Power Platform
19 292 (16.51%) Data Warehouse
20 289 (16.34%) Power BI
21 274 (15.49%) PySpark
22 250 (14.13%) Azure Data Factory
23 248 (14.02%) Data Governance
24 237 (13.40%) Problem-Solving
25 232 (13.11%) Microsoft
26 221 (12.49%) Migration
27 205 (11.59%) AI
28 200 (11.31%) Data Integration
29 192 (10.85%) Git
30 189 (10.68%) 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
1 168 (9.50%) Apache Airflow
2 162 (9.16%) Apache Spark
3 108 (6.11%) Apache
4 82 (4.64%) SAS
5 39 (2.20%) Confluence
6 12 (0.68%) Palantir Foundry
7 9 (0.51%) Jupyter
8 4 (0.23%) Microsoft Exchange
9 3 (0.17%) SharePoint
10 2 (0.11%) Luigi
11 1 (0.057%) Apache Superset
11 1 (0.057%) Appian
11 1 (0.057%) Camunda
11 1 (0.057%) R Markdown
Applications
1 19 (1.07%) Microsoft Excel
2 7 (0.40%) Notepad++
3 4 (0.23%) Spreadsheet
4 2 (0.11%) Chatbot
5 1 (0.057%) Microsoft Office
5 1 (0.057%) Microsoft PowerPoint
Business Applications
1 7 (0.40%) Aladdin
2 3 (0.17%) SimCorp Dimension
3 2 (0.11%) BambooHR
3 2 (0.11%) Dynamics CRM
3 2 (0.11%) Infor LN
3 2 (0.11%) Oracle EBS
3 2 (0.11%) SAP BPC
3 2 (0.11%) SAP S/4HANA
4 1 (0.057%) Elite 3E
4 1 (0.057%) iTrent
4 1 (0.057%) NEC Housing
4 1 (0.057%) Oracle 11i
4 1 (0.057%) Oracle Assets
4 1 (0.057%) Oracle ERP
4 1 (0.057%) Raiser’s Edge
4 1 (0.057%) SAP Business ByDesign
Cloud Services
1 604 (34.14%) Azure
2 475 (26.85%) AWS
3 305 (17.24%) Power Platform
4 250 (14.13%) Azure Data Factory
5 175 (9.89%) Snowflake
6 165 (9.33%) Azure Synapse Analytics
7 156 (8.82%) Amazon S3
8 152 (8.59%) GCP
9 147 (8.31%) dbt
10 143 (8.08%) Azure DevOps
11 120 (6.78%) GitHub
12 111 (6.27%) Serverless
13 90 (5.09%) AWS Lambda
14 55 (3.11%) GitHub Actions
15 38 (2.15%) Amazon EMR
16 34 (1.92%) AWS CloudFormation
17 31 (1.75%) Matillion
18 29 (1.64%) Amazon Kinesis
19 25 (1.41%) OpenShift
20 23 (1.30%) Amazon CloudWatch
Communications & Networking
1 33 (1.87%) DNS
1 33 (1.87%) VPN
2 32 (1.81%) BGP
2 32 (1.81%) DMZ
2 32 (1.81%) Multicast
3 10 (0.57%) Structured Cabling
4 7 (0.40%) PuTTY
4 7 (0.40%) WinSCP
5 4 (0.23%) Firewall
5 4 (0.23%) Wi-Fi
5 4 (0.23%) Wireless
6 1 (0.057%) 4G
6 1 (0.057%) 5G
6 1 (0.057%) MQTT
6 1 (0.057%) Network Security
6 1 (0.057%) Software-Defined Networking
Database & Business Intelligence
1 292 (16.51%) Data Warehouse
2 289 (16.34%) Power BI
3 189 (10.68%) Data Lake
4 129 (7.29%) SQL Server
5 112 (6.33%) Delta Lake
6 96 (5.43%) Metadata
7 90 (5.09%) BigQuery
8 89 (5.03%) Big Data
9 85 (4.80%) Amazon Redshift
10 82 (4.64%) Azure SQL Database
11 81 (4.58%) Pentaho
12 73 (4.13%) Snowflake Schema
13 71 (4.01%) Tableau
14 70 (3.96%) PostgreSQL
15 64 (3.62%) SQL Server Integration Services
16 63 (3.56%) NoSQL
17 61 (3.45%) Amazon Athena
18 53 (3.00%) Relational Database
19 40 (2.26%) Hadoop
20 38 (2.15%) Spark SQL
Development Applications
1 192 (10.85%) Git
2 87 (4.92%) JIRA
3 86 (4.86%) GitLab
4 50 (2.83%) Jenkins
5 14 (0.79%) MLflow
6 7 (0.40%) Artifactory
7 5 (0.28%) Postman
8 4 (0.23%) Bitbucket
9 3 (0.17%) Newman
9 3 (0.17%) SonarQube
10 2 (0.11%) Sonatype Nexus
10 2 (0.11%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
10 2 (0.11%) Terragrunt
10 2 (0.11%) Visual Studio
11 1 (0.057%) ER Studio
11 1 (0.057%) ERwin
11 1 (0.057%) Jaeger
11 1 (0.057%) JUnit
11 1 (0.057%) Selenium
General
1 288 (16.28%) Finance
2 269 (15.21%) Social Skills
3 197 (11.14%) Analytical Skills
4 137 (7.74%) Public Sector
5 92 (5.20%) Banking
6 32 (1.81%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 27 (1.53%) Investment Banking
8 24 (1.36%) Documentation Skills
8 24 (1.36%) Retail
9 22 (1.24%) Marketing
10 20 (1.13%) Telecoms
11 16 (0.90%) Manufacturing
11 16 (0.90%) Pharmaceutical
12 15 (0.85%) Front Office
13 14 (0.79%) Aerospace
14 11 (0.62%) Publishing
15 7 (0.40%) Law
15 7 (0.40%) Military
16 6 (0.34%) Local Government
17 5 (0.28%) Games
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 274 (15.49%) PySpark
2 159 (8.99%) Kafka
3 54 (3.05%) Pandas
4 33 (1.87%) JSON
5 29 (1.64%) REST
6 26 (1.47%) Great Expectations
7 24 (1.36%) YAML
8 22 (1.24%) Spring
8 22 (1.24%) Spring Boot
9 18 (1.02%) Apache Beam
10 17 (0.96%) XML
11 13 (0.73%) Apache Avro
11 13 (0.73%) Matplotlib
11 13 (0.73%) PyTorch
11 13 (0.73%) scikit-learn
12 12 (0.68%) React
13 10 (0.57%) Node.js
13 10 (0.57%) pytest
14 9 (0.51%) NumPy
14 9 (0.51%) RESTful
Miscellaneous
1 130 (7.35%) Cloud Native
2 49 (2.77%) Data Structures
3 47 (2.66%) Legacy Systems
4 31 (1.75%) Product Ownership
5 30 (1.70%) Greenfield Project
6 26 (1.47%) Distributed Systems
7 24 (1.36%) Onboarding
8 21 (1.19%) Clustering
8 21 (1.19%) Reinsurance
9 19 (1.07%) Data Protection Act
10 15 (0.85%) NHS
11 13 (0.73%) Distributed Computing
11 13 (0.73%) Replication
12 12 (0.68%) Self-Motivation
13 11 (0.62%) Reference Data
14 10 (0.57%) Life Science
14 10 (0.57%) Public Cloud
15 9 (0.51%) Derivative
15 9 (0.51%) Driving Licence
15 9 (0.51%) Linux Command Line
Operating Systems
1 61 (3.45%) Unix
2 38 (2.15%) Linux
3 5 (0.28%) Windows
4 2 (0.11%) Ubuntu
4 2 (0.11%) VMS
4 2 (0.11%) Windows Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 741 (41.89%) Data Pipeline
2 672 (37.99%) ETL
3 666 (37.65%) Analytics
4 647 (36.57%) Data Engineering
5 601 (33.97%) Data Modelling
6 416 (23.52%) CI/CD
7 376 (21.25%) Business Intelligence
8 323 (18.26%) Agile
9 314 (17.75%) DevOps
10 248 (14.02%) Data Governance
11 237 (13.40%) Problem-Solving
12 221 (12.49%) Migration
13 205 (11.59%) AI
14 200 (11.31%) Data Integration
15 186 (10.51%) Validation
16 175 (9.89%) Data Science
17 146 (8.25%) Decision-Making
18 142 (8.03%) Data Transformation
19 137 (7.74%) Data Architecture
20 135 (7.63%) Infrastructure as Code
Programming Languages
1 971 (54.89%) SQL
2 815 (46.07%) Python
3 121 (6.84%) Java
4 83 (4.69%) Scala
5 51 (2.88%) PL/SQL
6 42 (2.37%) T-SQL
7 40 (2.26%) Data Analysis Expressions
8 35 (1.98%) C#
9 30 (1.70%) Shell Script
10 28 (1.58%) Bash
11 21 (1.19%) Bicep
12 19 (1.07%) PowerShell
13 16 (0.90%) R
14 15 (0.85%) JavaScript
15 9 (0.51%) Go
16 7 (0.40%) TypeScript
17 2 (0.11%) HiveQL
17 2 (0.11%) LookML
17 2 (0.11%) Ruby
17 2 (0.11%) VB
Qualifications
1 521 (29.45%) Security Cleared
2 463 (26.17%) SC Cleared
3 46 (2.60%) Degree
4 38 (2.15%) BPSS Clearance
5 29 (1.64%) Azure Certification
6 17 (0.96%) Computer Science Degree
7 16 (0.90%) DV Cleared
8 12 (0.68%) DBS Check
9 9 (0.51%) City & Guilds
9 9 (0.51%) Master's Degree
10 8 (0.45%) AWS Certification
11 6 (0.34%) Microsoft Certification
11 6 (0.34%) SnowPro
12 5 (0.28%) BICSI Certification
13 3 (0.17%) CISSP
13 3 (0.17%) IBM Certification
14 2 (0.11%) CISM
14 2 (0.11%) CTC Cleared
15 1 (0.057%) CISA
15 1 (0.057%) Numerate Degree
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 449 (25.38%) Data Quality
2 58 (3.28%) QA
3 53 (3.00%) GDPR
4 17 (0.96%) Accessibility
5 11 (0.62%) SLA
6 9 (0.51%) FATCA
7 6 (0.34%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 6 (0.34%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 4 (0.23%) MiFID
9 3 (0.17%) GMP
9 3 (0.17%) WCAG
10 2 (0.11%) Disclosure Scotland
10 2 (0.11%) EMIR
10 2 (0.11%) GRC
10 2 (0.11%) HIPAA
10 2 (0.11%) SNOMED CT
11 1 (0.057%) Basel III
11 1 (0.057%) Government Security Classifications
11 1 (0.057%) IFRS
11 1 (0.057%) IFRS 9
System Software
1 104 (5.88%) Docker
2 6 (0.34%) Virtual Machines
3 2 (0.11%) Active Directory
3 2 (0.11%) HDFS
4 1 (0.057%) RACF
Systems Management
1 180 (10.18%) Terraform
2 87 (4.92%) Kubernetes
3 54 (3.05%) Grafana
4 14 (0.79%) Prometheus
5 13 (0.73%) Ansible
6 10 (0.57%) Kibana
7 3 (0.17%) logstash
7 3 (0.17%) Rancher
8 2 (0.11%) Apache Ranger
8 2 (0.11%) Control-M
8 2 (0.11%) Thomson Reuters DACS
9 1 (0.057%) Fluentd
9 1 (0.057%) Kubeflow
9 1 (0.057%) NetBackup
9 1 (0.057%) Puppet
9 1 (0.057%) QRadar
Vendors
1 424 (23.97%) Databricks
2 232 (13.11%) Microsoft
3 152 (8.59%) Oracle
4 120 (6.78%) Informatica
5 119 (6.73%) Talend
6 69 (3.90%) Denodo
7 59 (3.34%) Google
8 34 (1.92%) Cisco
8 34 (1.92%) F5
9 27 (1.53%) SAP
10 26 (1.47%) Splunk
11 21 (1.19%) ServiceNow
12 17 (0.96%) Cloudera
13 15 (0.85%) Alteryx
13 15 (0.85%) Foundry
13 15 (0.85%) IBM
14 13 (0.73%) Palantir
15 9 (0.51%) Dynatrace
16 8 (0.45%) MuleSoft
16 8 (0.45%) Salesforce