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 23 July 2026.

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

6 months to
23 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 66 122 97
Rank change year-on-year +56 -25 +21
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 1,931 753 959
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 3.66% 2.31% 2.33%
As % of the Job Titles category 3.96% 2.52% 2.51%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,304 539 716
10th Percentile £375 £369 £216
25th Percentile £425 £425 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £513
Median % change year-on-year - -2.44% -6.82%
75th Percentile £588 £581 £613
90th Percentile £650 £683 £688
UK excluding London median daily rate £469 £475 £450
% change year-on-year -1.26% +5.56% -14.29%
Number of hourly rates quoted 86 11 34
10th Percentile £20.30 £18.22 £31.25
25th Percentile £34.88 £46.75 £49.25
Median hourly rate £50.00 £52.50 £75.00
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% -30.00% -3.23%
75th Percentile £70.00 £78.10 £80.00
90th Percentile £75.00 £80.00 -
UK excluding London median hourly rate £50.00 £48.46 £80.00
% change year-on-year +3.18% -39.43% +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 48,822 29,919 38,227
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.59% 91.60% 93.06%
Number of daily rates quoted 29,449 19,032 24,743
10th Percentile £325 £285 £298
25th Percentile £420 £400 £410
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -2.05%
75th Percentile £625 £623 £638
90th Percentile £725 £730 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 3,293 1,436 2,397
10th Percentile £15.81 £13.75 £13.50
25th Percentile £21.25 £17.30 £18.13
Median hourly rate £43.69 £25.15 £40.33
Median % change year-on-year +73.72% -37.63% -7.70%
75th Percentile £68.00 £55.00 £65.00
90th Percentile £81.00 £73.75 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £45.00 £25.15 £42.50
% change year-on-year +78.93% -40.82% +6.78%

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 23 July 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 23 July 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 23 July 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 +60 1,702 £500 - 405
UK excluding London +93 910 £469 -1.26% 300
London +34 823 £525 - 174
Work from Home +37 573 £500 +5.26% 160
Midlands +60 385 £459 -0.22% 40
West Midlands +53 337 £459 -0.22% 28
North of England +26 227 £475 - 83
North West +22 131 £525 +10.53% 42
South East +12 126 £469 +10.35% 100
South West +14 89 £525 +5.00% 39
Yorkshire -5 74 £475 - 18
Scotland +38 73 £425 -0.70% 12
East Midlands +19 48 £475 +13.10% 12
East of England -1 33 £565 +78.52% 14
North East -22 23 £515 +17.71% 24
Wales -2 18 £475 +6.74% 11
Northern Ireland +7 3 £410 -18.00% 3

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

For the 6 months to 23 July 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.

1 997 (51.63%) SQL
2 847 (43.86%) Python
3 817 (42.31%) Data Pipeline
4 718 (37.18%) Data Engineering
5 698 (36.15%) Analytics
6 679 (35.16%) ETL
7 642 (33.25%) Data Modelling
8 600 (31.07%) Azure
9 549 (28.43%) AWS
10 520 (26.93%) Security Cleared
11 475 (24.60%) Data Quality
12 452 (23.41%) CI/CD
13 450 (23.30%) SC Cleared
14 375 (19.42%) Databricks
15 353 (18.28%) Business Intelligence
16 341 (17.66%) Agile
17 323 (16.73%) Data Warehouse
18 312 (16.16%) DevOps
19 300 (15.54%) Migration
20 285 (14.76%) Power Platform
21 272 (14.09%) Data Governance
22 270 (13.98%) Power BI
23 260 (13.46%) PySpark
24 245 (12.69%) Microsoft
25 232 (12.01%) Azure Data Factory
26 229 (11.86%) AI
27 228 (11.81%) Validation
28 224 (11.60%) Problem-Solving
29 220 (11.39%) Data Integration
30 203 (10.51%) Snowflake

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
1 177 (9.17%) Apache Airflow
2 149 (7.72%) Apache Spark
3 113 (5.85%) Apache
4 84 (4.35%) SAS
5 51 (2.64%) Confluence
6 12 (0.62%) Palantir Foundry
6 12 (0.62%) SharePoint
7 8 (0.41%) Jupyter
8 2 (0.10%) Apache Superset
8 2 (0.10%) ArcGIS
8 2 (0.10%) Microsoft Exchange
9 1 (0.052%) Camunda
9 1 (0.052%) Liferay
9 1 (0.052%) Luigi
9 1 (0.052%) R Markdown
Applications
1 20 (1.04%) Microsoft Excel
2 7 (0.36%) Notepad++
3 5 (0.26%) Spreadsheet
4 3 (0.16%) Chatbot
5 1 (0.052%) Microsoft Office
5 1 (0.052%) Microsoft PowerPoint
Business Applications
1 12 (0.62%) Aladdin
2 8 (0.41%) Dynamics CRM
3 5 (0.26%) Infor LN
3 5 (0.26%) NetSuite
3 5 (0.26%) Sage X3
4 3 (0.16%) SAP BPC
4 3 (0.16%) SAP S/4HANA
4 3 (0.16%) SimCorp Dimension
5 2 (0.10%) BambooHR
5 2 (0.10%) Maximo
5 2 (0.10%) Oracle EBS
5 2 (0.10%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
6 1 (0.052%) iTrent
6 1 (0.052%) MIS ActiveH
6 1 (0.052%) NEC Housing
6 1 (0.052%) Oracle ERP
6 1 (0.052%) Raiser’s Edge
6 1 (0.052%) SAP Business ByDesign
6 1 (0.052%) SAP CAR
6 1 (0.052%) SAP EWM
Cloud Services
1 600 (31.07%) Azure
2 549 (28.43%) AWS
3 285 (14.76%) Power Platform
4 232 (12.01%) Azure Data Factory
5 203 (10.51%) Snowflake
6 193 (9.99%) dbt
7 173 (8.96%) GCP
8 170 (8.80%) Amazon S3
9 151 (7.82%) Azure Synapse Analytics
10 137 (7.09%) Azure DevOps
11 121 (6.27%) Serverless
12 109 (5.64%) GitHub
13 102 (5.28%) AWS Lambda
14 56 (2.90%) Amazon EMR
15 45 (2.33%) GitHub Actions
16 35 (1.81%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 27 (1.40%) AWS CloudFormation
17 27 (1.40%) Matillion
18 26 (1.35%) Amazon Kinesis
19 24 (1.24%) OpenShift
Communications & Networking
1 32 (1.66%) DNS
1 32 (1.66%) VPN
2 31 (1.61%) BGP
2 31 (1.61%) DMZ
2 31 (1.61%) Multicast
3 10 (0.52%) Structured Cabling
4 8 (0.41%) Firewall
5 7 (0.36%) PuTTY
5 7 (0.36%) WinSCP
6 4 (0.21%) Intrusion Detection
6 4 (0.21%) Wi-Fi
6 4 (0.21%) Wireless
7 1 (0.052%) 4G
7 1 (0.052%) 5G
7 1 (0.052%) MQTT
Database & Business Intelligence
1 323 (16.73%) Data Warehouse
2 270 (13.98%) Power BI
3 176 (9.11%) Data Lake
4 104 (5.39%) Amazon Redshift
4 104 (5.39%) Metadata
5 97 (5.02%) BigQuery
6 96 (4.97%) SQL Server
7 92 (4.76%) Delta Lake
8 88 (4.56%) Pentaho
9 86 (4.45%) Big Data
10 74 (3.83%) Tableau
11 69 (3.57%) Amazon Athena
12 66 (3.42%) PostgreSQL
12 66 (3.42%) Snowflake Schema
13 57 (2.95%) Azure SQL Database
14 55 (2.85%) Relational Database
15 54 (2.80%) NoSQL
15 54 (2.80%) SQL Server Integration Services
16 38 (1.97%) Hadoop
17 36 (1.86%) Star Schema
Development Applications
1 185 (9.58%) Git
2 98 (5.08%) GitLab
3 86 (4.45%) JIRA
4 47 (2.43%) Jenkins
5 9 (0.47%) Artifactory
6 8 (0.41%) MLflow
7 7 (0.36%) Bitbucket
7 7 (0.36%) Postman
8 4 (0.21%) SonarQube
9 3 (0.16%) Newman
9 3 (0.16%) Sonatype Nexus
10 2 (0.10%) Atlassian Bamboo
10 2 (0.10%) Claude Code
10 2 (0.10%) ER Studio
10 2 (0.10%) ERwin
10 2 (0.10%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
10 2 (0.10%) Visual Studio
10 2 (0.10%) Yeoman
11 1 (0.052%) JUnit
11 1 (0.052%) Octopus Deploy
General
1 311 (16.11%) Finance
2 302 (15.64%) Social Skills
3 216 (11.19%) Analytical Skills
4 163 (8.44%) Public Sector
5 106 (5.49%) Banking
6 35 (1.81%) Inclusion and Diversity
6 35 (1.81%) Marketing
7 29 (1.50%) Documentation Skills
8 27 (1.40%) Telecoms
9 26 (1.35%) Retail
10 22 (1.14%) Investment Banking
11 20 (1.04%) Manufacturing
12 18 (0.93%) Automotive
13 17 (0.88%) Front Office
13 17 (0.88%) Pharmaceutical
14 15 (0.78%) Aerospace
15 11 (0.57%) Publishing
16 10 (0.52%) Legal
17 9 (0.47%) Billing
18 8 (0.41%) Local Government
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 260 (13.46%) PySpark
2 142 (7.35%) Kafka
3 38 (1.97%) Pandas
4 35 (1.81%) JSON
5 27 (1.40%) REST
6 22 (1.14%) Spring
6 22 (1.14%) Spring Boot
7 21 (1.09%) Great Expectations
7 21 (1.09%) XML
8 18 (0.93%) Apache Beam
9 17 (0.88%) YAML
10 14 (0.73%) React
11 13 (0.67%) Apache Avro
12 12 (0.62%) RESTful
12 12 (0.62%) Streamlit
13 11 (0.57%) scikit-learn
14 10 (0.52%) Microsoft Graph
14 10 (0.52%) pytest
15 9 (0.47%) GeoJSON
15 9 (0.47%) Polars
Miscellaneous
1 139 (7.20%) Cloud Native
2 71 (3.68%) Legacy Systems
3 64 (3.31%) Data Structures
4 35 (1.81%) Onboarding
5 34 (1.76%) Distributed Systems
6 25 (1.29%) NHS
7 24 (1.24%) Greenfield Project
8 21 (1.09%) Product Ownership
9 19 (0.98%) Clustering
10 18 (0.93%) Reinsurance
11 16 (0.83%) Data Protection Act
12 14 (0.73%) Reference Data
13 11 (0.57%) Algorithms
13 11 (0.57%) Life Science
13 11 (0.57%) Virtual Team
14 10 (0.52%) Distributed Computing
14 10 (0.52%) Linux Command Line
14 10 (0.52%) Replication
14 10 (0.52%) Self-Motivation
15 9 (0.47%) Management Information System
Operating Systems
1 67 (3.47%) Unix
2 47 (2.43%) Linux
3 5 (0.26%) Windows
4 2 (0.10%) Ubuntu
4 2 (0.10%) Windows Server
5 1 (0.052%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 817 (42.31%) Data Pipeline
2 718 (37.18%) Data Engineering
3 698 (36.15%) Analytics
4 679 (35.16%) ETL
5 642 (33.25%) Data Modelling
6 452 (23.41%) CI/CD
7 353 (18.28%) Business Intelligence
8 341 (17.66%) Agile
9 312 (16.16%) DevOps
10 300 (15.54%) Migration
11 272 (14.09%) Data Governance
12 229 (11.86%) AI
13 228 (11.81%) Validation
14 224 (11.60%) Problem-Solving
15 220 (11.39%) Data Integration
16 194 (10.05%) Data Science
17 191 (9.89%) Data Transformation
18 176 (9.11%) Decision-Making
19 153 (7.92%) Test Automation
20 149 (7.72%) Infrastructure as Code
Programming Languages
1 997 (51.63%) SQL
2 847 (43.86%) Python
3 124 (6.42%) Java
4 60 (3.11%) Scala
5 58 (3.00%) PL/SQL
6 38 (1.97%) T-SQL
7 37 (1.92%) Shell Script
8 30 (1.55%) Data Analysis Expressions
9 27 (1.40%) Bash
10 26 (1.35%) C#
11 24 (1.24%) PowerShell
12 17 (0.88%) JavaScript
13 14 (0.73%) R
14 13 (0.67%) Bicep
15 8 (0.41%) TypeScript
16 7 (0.36%) Go
17 2 (0.10%) C++
17 2 (0.10%) HiveQL
17 2 (0.10%) LookML
17 2 (0.10%) Perl
Qualifications
1 520 (26.93%) Security Cleared
2 450 (23.30%) SC Cleared
3 51 (2.64%) BPSS Clearance
4 46 (2.38%) Degree
5 26 (1.35%) Azure Certification
6 24 (1.24%) DV Cleared
7 19 (0.98%) Computer Science Degree
8 14 (0.73%) AWS Certification
9 9 (0.47%) City & Guilds
9 9 (0.47%) DBS Check
9 9 (0.47%) Master's Degree
9 9 (0.47%) SnowPro
10 8 (0.41%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
11 7 (0.36%) CISSP
12 6 (0.31%) CISM
13 5 (0.26%) BICSI Certification
14 4 (0.21%) CEH
15 3 (0.16%) IBM Certification
15 3 (0.16%) Microsoft Certification
16 1 (0.052%) CISA
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 475 (24.60%) Data Quality
2 61 (3.16%) QA
3 53 (2.74%) GDPR
4 23 (1.19%) Accessibility
5 12 (0.62%) SLA
6 9 (0.47%) FATCA
7 7 (0.36%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 6 (0.31%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 5 (0.26%) HIPAA
10 3 (0.16%) GMP
10 3 (0.16%) MiFID
11 2 (0.10%) California Consumer Privacy Act
11 2 (0.10%) Disclosure Scotland
11 2 (0.10%) EMIR
11 2 (0.10%) PMO
11 2 (0.10%) SNOMED CT
11 2 (0.10%) WCAG
12 1 (0.052%) GRC
12 1 (0.052%) NIST
12 1 (0.052%) SOC 2
System Software
1 101 (5.23%) Docker
2 5 (0.26%) Virtual Machines
3 3 (0.16%) Active Directory
4 2 (0.10%) HDFS
5 1 (0.052%) RACF
Systems Management
1 188 (9.74%) Terraform
2 83 (4.30%) Kubernetes
3 51 (2.64%) Grafana
4 14 (0.73%) Ansible
5 13 (0.67%) Prometheus
6 9 (0.47%) Kibana
7 6 (0.31%) Control-M
8 3 (0.16%) Rancher
9 2 (0.10%) Apache Ranger
9 2 (0.10%) logstash
9 2 (0.10%) Thomson Reuters DACS
10 1 (0.052%) Fluentd
10 1 (0.052%) Kubeflow
10 1 (0.052%) NetBackup
10 1 (0.052%) Puppet
10 1 (0.052%) QRadar
Vendors
1 375 (19.42%) Databricks
2 245 (12.69%) Microsoft
3 170 (8.80%) Oracle
4 140 (7.25%) Informatica
5 124 (6.42%) Talend
6 68 (3.52%) Google
7 66 (3.42%) Denodo
8 33 (1.71%) Cisco
8 33 (1.71%) F5
8 33 (1.71%) SAP
9 28 (1.45%) Salesforce
10 25 (1.29%) Splunk
11 23 (1.19%) Palantir
12 18 (0.93%) Cloudera
13 16 (0.83%) Foundry
13 16 (0.83%) ServiceNow
14 14 (0.73%) IBM
15 12 (0.62%) Sage
16 10 (0.52%) Alteryx
17 9 (0.47%) MuleSoft