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 28 June 2026.

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

6 months to
28 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 57 105 99
Rank change year-on-year +48 -6 +24
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 1,894 757 985
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 3.71% 2.48% 2.27%
As % of the Job Titles category 4.02% 2.69% 2.44%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,297 550 749
10th Percentile £375 £363 £221
25th Percentile £425 £425 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £500
Median % change year-on-year - - -9.09%
75th Percentile £588 £587 £600
90th Percentile £653 £700 £688
UK excluding London median daily rate £469 £463 £450
% change year-on-year +1.41% +2.78% -14.29%
Number of hourly rates quoted 73 11 42
10th Percentile £19.34 £18.22 £31.88
25th Percentile £36.25 £46.75 £49.25
Median hourly rate £50.00 £52.50 £66.25
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% -20.75% -7.99%
75th Percentile £68.00 £78.10 £80.00
90th Percentile £75.00 £80.00 -
UK excluding London median hourly rate £47.50 £48.46 £75.00
% change year-on-year -1.98% -35.39% -

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 47,123 28,128 40,377
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.40% 92.07% 92.96%
Number of daily rates quoted 28,580 18,010 25,933
10th Percentile £325 £288 £281
25th Percentile £415 £401 £410
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £520 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% -4.76% -2.33%
75th Percentile £625 £625 £638
90th Percentile £725 £738 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £493
% change year-on-year +5.26% -3.65% -1.40%
Number of hourly rates quoted 3,165 1,254 2,874
10th Percentile £15.50 £13.76 £12.86
25th Percentile £21.14 £17.31 £16.50
Median hourly rate £43.61 £27.00 £37.50
Median % change year-on-year +61.50% -28.00% -14.50%
75th Percentile £67.50 £56.25 £62.50
90th Percentile £80.00 £73.75 £74.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £45.00 £25.15 £40.00
% change year-on-year +78.93% -37.13% -

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 28 June 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 28 June 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 28 June 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 +47 1,662 £500 - 341
London +34 852 £525 - 127
UK excluding London +72 837 £469 +1.41% 289
Work from Home +34 564 £500 +1.01% 161
Midlands +51 339 £468 +2.80% 58
West Midlands +47 307 £460 - 32
North of England +22 213 £475 - 74
North West +19 131 £500 +5.26% 44
South East +20 124 £475 +11.76% 85
South West +13 89 £506 +1.10% 33
Scotland +28 67 £425 -9.33% 8
Yorkshire -11 63 £470 -1.05% 13
East Midlands +5 32 £525 +28.05% 26
East of England -16 23 £520 +63.52% 18
Wales +2 22 £450 +3.45% 10
North East -24 19 £500 +14.29% 17
Northern Ireland +2 3 £410 -18.00% 8

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

For the 6 months to 28 June 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.

1 999 (52.75%) SQL
2 864 (45.62%) Python
3 786 (41.50%) Data Pipeline
4 706 (37.28%) Analytics
5 686 (36.22%) Data Engineering
6 678 (35.80%) ETL
7 630 (33.26%) Data Modelling
8 597 (31.52%) Azure
9 549 (28.99%) AWS
10 523 (27.61%) Security Cleared
11 467 (24.66%) Data Quality
12 458 (24.18%) SC Cleared
13 453 (23.92%) CI/CD
14 401 (21.17%) Databricks
15 378 (19.96%) Business Intelligence
16 343 (18.11%) Agile
17 317 (16.74%) DevOps
18 309 (16.31%) Data Warehouse
19 302 (15.95%) Power Platform
20 288 (15.21%) Power BI
21 280 (14.78%) PySpark
22 267 (14.10%) Migration
23 256 (13.52%) Data Governance
24 241 (12.72%) Problem-Solving
25 235 (12.41%) AI
26 233 (12.30%) Microsoft
27 226 (11.93%) Azure Data Factory
28 203 (10.72%) Data Integration
29 202 (10.67%) Snowflake
30 199 (10.51%) Validation

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
1 171 (9.03%) Apache Airflow
2 149 (7.87%) Apache Spark
3 105 (5.54%) Apache
4 86 (4.54%) SAS
5 54 (2.85%) Confluence
6 12 (0.63%) Palantir Foundry
6 12 (0.63%) SharePoint
7 10 (0.53%) Jupyter
8 5 (0.26%) Microsoft Exchange
9 2 (0.11%) Luigi
10 1 (0.053%) Apache Superset
10 1 (0.053%) Appian
10 1 (0.053%) ArcGIS
10 1 (0.053%) Camunda
10 1 (0.053%) Liferay
10 1 (0.053%) R Markdown
Applications
1 18 (0.95%) Microsoft Excel
2 7 (0.37%) Notepad++
3 4 (0.21%) Spreadsheet
4 2 (0.11%) Chatbot
5 1 (0.053%) Microsoft Office
5 1 (0.053%) Microsoft PowerPoint
Business Applications
1 8 (0.42%) Aladdin
2 6 (0.32%) Dynamics CRM
3 5 (0.26%) Infor LN
4 4 (0.21%) NetSuite
4 4 (0.21%) Sage X3
5 3 (0.16%) SAP BPC
5 3 (0.16%) SAP S/4HANA
5 3 (0.16%) SimCorp Dimension
6 2 (0.11%) BambooHR
6 2 (0.11%) Maximo
6 2 (0.11%) Oracle EBS
7 1 (0.053%) Elite 3E
7 1 (0.053%) FIS Private Capital Suite
7 1 (0.053%) iTrent
7 1 (0.053%) NEC Housing
7 1 (0.053%) Oracle 11i
7 1 (0.053%) Oracle ERP
7 1 (0.053%) Raiser’s Edge
7 1 (0.053%) SAP CAR
7 1 (0.053%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
Cloud Services
1 597 (31.52%) Azure
2 549 (28.99%) AWS
3 302 (15.95%) Power Platform
4 226 (11.93%) Azure Data Factory
5 202 (10.67%) Snowflake
6 178 (9.40%) Amazon S3
6 178 (9.40%) dbt
7 165 (8.71%) GCP
8 147 (7.76%) Azure Synapse Analytics
9 138 (7.29%) Azure DevOps
10 125 (6.60%) Serverless
11 117 (6.18%) GitHub
12 107 (5.65%) AWS Lambda
13 55 (2.90%) Amazon EMR
14 53 (2.80%) GitHub Actions
15 35 (1.85%) Matillion
16 33 (1.74%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 30 (1.58%) AWS CloudFormation
18 28 (1.48%) Amazon Kinesis
19 24 (1.27%) OpenShift
Communications & Networking
1 34 (1.80%) DNS
1 34 (1.80%) VPN
2 33 (1.74%) BGP
2 33 (1.74%) DMZ
2 33 (1.74%) Multicast
3 10 (0.53%) Structured Cabling
4 7 (0.37%) PuTTY
4 7 (0.37%) WinSCP
5 6 (0.32%) Firewall
6 4 (0.21%) Wi-Fi
6 4 (0.21%) Wireless
7 2 (0.11%) Intrusion Detection
8 1 (0.053%) 4G
8 1 (0.053%) 5G
8 1 (0.053%) MQTT
Database & Business Intelligence
1 309 (16.31%) Data Warehouse
2 288 (15.21%) Power BI
3 180 (9.50%) Data Lake
4 112 (5.91%) SQL Server
5 109 (5.76%) Amazon Redshift
6 104 (5.49%) Delta Lake
7 98 (5.17%) Metadata
8 92 (4.86%) BigQuery
9 90 (4.75%) Pentaho
10 87 (4.59%) Big Data
11 76 (4.01%) Tableau
12 75 (3.96%) Amazon Athena
13 73 (3.85%) Snowflake Schema
14 70 (3.70%) PostgreSQL
15 64 (3.38%) Azure SQL Database
16 58 (3.06%) Relational Database
17 57 (3.01%) SQL Server Integration Services
18 56 (2.96%) NoSQL
19 38 (2.01%) Data Vault
19 38 (2.01%) Hadoop
Development Applications
1 186 (9.82%) Git
2 103 (5.44%) GitLab
3 97 (5.12%) JIRA
4 49 (2.59%) Jenkins
5 9 (0.48%) Artifactory
6 8 (0.42%) MLflow
7 7 (0.37%) Postman
8 6 (0.32%) Bitbucket
9 3 (0.16%) Newman
9 3 (0.16%) SonarQube
10 2 (0.11%) Atlassian Bamboo
10 2 (0.11%) Claude Code
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 (0.053%) ER Studio
11 1 (0.053%) ERwin
11 1 (0.053%) JUnit
11 1 (0.053%) Selenium
General
1 318 (16.79%) Finance
2 307 (16.21%) Social Skills
3 205 (10.82%) Analytical Skills
4 158 (8.34%) Public Sector
5 106 (5.60%) Banking
6 37 (1.95%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 32 (1.69%) Marketing
8 29 (1.53%) Retail
9 28 (1.48%) Documentation Skills
10 25 (1.32%) Investment Banking
11 23 (1.21%) Telecoms
12 18 (0.95%) Manufacturing
12 18 (0.95%) Pharmaceutical
13 13 (0.69%) Aerospace
13 13 (0.69%) Front Office
14 12 (0.63%) Automotive
15 11 (0.58%) Publishing
16 8 (0.42%) Billing
16 8 (0.42%) Legal
17 7 (0.37%) Law
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 280 (14.78%) PySpark
2 150 (7.92%) Kafka
3 45 (2.38%) Pandas
4 37 (1.95%) JSON
5 28 (1.48%) REST
6 25 (1.32%) Spring
6 25 (1.32%) Spring Boot
7 23 (1.21%) Great Expectations
8 22 (1.16%) XML
9 19 (1.00%) YAML
10 17 (0.90%) Apache Beam
11 13 (0.69%) Apache Avro
11 13 (0.69%) scikit-learn
12 12 (0.63%) Streamlit
13 11 (0.58%) Matplotlib
13 11 (0.58%) React
13 11 (0.58%) RESTful
14 10 (0.53%) pytest
14 10 (0.53%) PyTorch
15 9 (0.48%) GeoJSON
Miscellaneous
1 143 (7.55%) Cloud Native
2 58 (3.06%) Data Structures
2 58 (3.06%) Legacy Systems
3 33 (1.74%) Distributed Systems
4 29 (1.53%) Greenfield Project
4 29 (1.53%) Onboarding
5 27 (1.43%) Reinsurance
6 23 (1.21%) NHS
6 23 (1.21%) Product Ownership
7 21 (1.11%) Clustering
7 21 (1.11%) Data Protection Act
8 12 (0.63%) Virtual Team
9 11 (0.58%) Life Science
10 10 (0.53%) Linux Command Line
10 10 (0.53%) Public Cloud
10 10 (0.53%) Reference Data
10 10 (0.53%) Replication
10 10 (0.53%) Self-Motivation
11 9 (0.48%) Distributed Computing
11 9 (0.48%) Driving Licence
Operating Systems
1 65 (3.43%) Unix
2 40 (2.11%) Linux
3 5 (0.26%) Windows
4 2 (0.11%) Ubuntu
4 2 (0.11%) Windows Server
5 1 (0.053%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 786 (41.50%) Data Pipeline
2 706 (37.28%) Analytics
3 686 (36.22%) Data Engineering
4 678 (35.80%) ETL
5 630 (33.26%) Data Modelling
6 453 (23.92%) CI/CD
7 378 (19.96%) Business Intelligence
8 343 (18.11%) Agile
9 317 (16.74%) DevOps
10 267 (14.10%) Migration
11 256 (13.52%) Data Governance
12 241 (12.72%) Problem-Solving
13 235 (12.41%) AI
14 203 (10.72%) Data Integration
15 199 (10.51%) Validation
16 188 (9.93%) Data Science
17 171 (9.03%) Decision-Making
18 164 (8.66%) Data Transformation
19 146 (7.71%) Infrastructure as Code
20 144 (7.60%) Machine Learning
Programming Languages
1 999 (52.75%) SQL
2 864 (45.62%) Python
3 123 (6.49%) Java
4 65 (3.43%) Scala
5 56 (2.96%) PL/SQL
6 40 (2.11%) T-SQL
7 34 (1.80%) Data Analysis Expressions
8 31 (1.64%) Shell Script
9 29 (1.53%) C#
10 28 (1.48%) Bash
11 22 (1.16%) PowerShell
12 16 (0.84%) Bicep
13 14 (0.74%) R
14 13 (0.69%) JavaScript
15 8 (0.42%) TypeScript
16 6 (0.32%) Go
17 2 (0.11%) Korn
17 2 (0.11%) Perl
17 2 (0.11%) Ruby
17 2 (0.11%) SPARQL
Qualifications
1 523 (27.61%) Security Cleared
2 458 (24.18%) SC Cleared
3 50 (2.64%) BPSS Clearance
4 44 (2.32%) Degree
5 26 (1.37%) Azure Certification
6 18 (0.95%) DV Cleared
7 17 (0.90%) Computer Science Degree
8 14 (0.74%) AWS Certification
9 9 (0.48%) City & Guilds
9 9 (0.48%) DBS Check
9 9 (0.48%) SnowPro
10 8 (0.42%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
11 7 (0.37%) Master's Degree
12 6 (0.32%) Microsoft Certification
13 5 (0.26%) BICSI Certification
13 5 (0.26%) CISSP
14 4 (0.21%) CISM
15 3 (0.16%) IBM Certification
16 2 (0.11%) CEH
17 1 (0.053%) CISA
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 467 (24.66%) Data Quality
2 59 (3.12%) QA
3 52 (2.75%) GDPR
4 14 (0.74%) Accessibility
5 12 (0.63%) SLA
6 9 (0.48%) FATCA
7 7 (0.37%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 6 (0.32%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 4 (0.21%) MiFID
10 3 (0.16%) GMP
10 3 (0.16%) HIPAA
11 2 (0.11%) Disclosure Scotland
11 2 (0.11%) EMIR
11 2 (0.11%) GRC
11 2 (0.11%) SNOMED CT
11 2 (0.11%) WCAG
12 1 (0.053%) Government Security Classifications
12 1 (0.053%) IFRS 17
12 1 (0.053%) ISO 13485
12 1 (0.053%) PCI DSS
System Software
1 106 (5.60%) Docker
2 6 (0.32%) Virtual Machines
3 2 (0.11%) Active Directory
3 2 (0.11%) HDFS
4 1 (0.053%) RACF
Systems Management
1 198 (10.45%) Terraform
2 87 (4.59%) Kubernetes
3 51 (2.69%) Grafana
4 12 (0.63%) Ansible
4 12 (0.63%) Prometheus
5 8 (0.42%) Kibana
6 3 (0.16%) Rancher
7 2 (0.11%) Apache Ranger
7 2 (0.11%) Control-M
7 2 (0.11%) Thomson Reuters DACS
8 1 (0.053%) Fluentd
8 1 (0.053%) Kubeflow
8 1 (0.053%) logstash
8 1 (0.053%) NetBackup
8 1 (0.053%) Puppet
8 1 (0.053%) QRadar
Vendors
1 401 (21.17%) Databricks
2 233 (12.30%) Microsoft
3 173 (9.13%) Oracle
4 142 (7.50%) Informatica
5 130 (6.86%) Talend
6 72 (3.80%) Denodo
7 57 (3.01%) Google
8 35 (1.85%) Cisco
8 35 (1.85%) F5
9 30 (1.58%) SAP
10 26 (1.37%) Salesforce
11 25 (1.32%) Splunk
12 20 (1.06%) Palantir
12 20 (1.06%) ServiceNow
13 18 (0.95%) Cloudera
14 15 (0.79%) Foundry
14 15 (0.79%) IBM
15 14 (0.74%) Alteryx
16 10 (0.53%) Sage
17 9 (0.48%) Dynatrace