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 9 November 2025.

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

6 months to
9 Nov 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 125 92 124
Rank change year-on-year -33 +32 0
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 787 907 927
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.28% 2.50% 1.97%
As % of the Job Titles category 2.50% 2.69% 2.10%
Number of daily rates quoted 564 621 688
10th Percentile £360 £390 £400
25th Percentile £413 £463 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £540 £525
Median % change year-on-year -7.41% +2.86% -4.55%
75th Percentile £600 £625 £638
90th Percentile £695 £690 £700
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £500 £514
% change year-on-year -5.00% -2.68% -2.14%
Number of hourly rates quoted 14 11 13
10th Percentile £25.42 £25.25 £35.13
25th Percentile £34.13 £26.29 £39.85
Median hourly rate £48.00 £42.50 £63.00
Median % change year-on-year +12.94% -32.54% +8.62%
75th Percentile £77.31 £78.75 £68.00
90th Percentile £103.25 £97.50 £78.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £37.50 £26.50 £57.00
% change year-on-year +41.51% -53.51% -5.00%

All Contract IT Job Vacancies
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 31,437 33,659 44,190
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 90.90% 92.87% 93.76%
Number of daily rates quoted 19,931 20,297 30,010
10th Percentile £278 £300 £292
25th Percentile £402 £412 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £625 £638 £650
90th Percentile £725 £738 £743
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £490 £500
% change year-on-year -3.06% -2.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 1,808 1,253 1,556
10th Percentile £14.00 £15.10 £15.14
25th Percentile £17.69 £20.30 £19.06
Median hourly rate £25.15 £35.25 £44.50
Median % change year-on-year -28.65% -20.79% +53.98%
75th Percentile £51.31 £65.00 £65.00
90th Percentile £69.65 £73.75 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £25.15 £35.00 £44.50
% change year-on-year -28.14% -21.35% +85.42%

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 9 November 2025.

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 9 November 2025.

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 9 November 2025. 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 -32 667 £513 -6.82% 1,283
London -15 411 £525 -8.70% 706
UK excluding London -42 272 £475 -5.00% 951
Work from Home -29 244 £500 -4.76% 569
North of England -19 78 £450 -10.00% 133
Midlands -19 70 £514 +5.22% 72
West Midlands -26 56 £522 +6.48% 60
Scotland +15 44 £425 -15.00% 42
South West +18 38 £550 -4.35% 50
North West -9 35 £403 -19.50% 81
Yorkshire -21 35 £500 +1.52% 45
South East -40 34 £475 -13.64% 605
East Midlands -8 13 £460 +29.21% 9
Wales -18 10 £425 -15.00% 16
North East -5 8 £425 -27.35% 7
East of England -26 6 £625 +79.86% 39
Northern Ireland -5 1 - - 5

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

For the 6 months to 9 November 2025, 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.

1 518 (65.82%) Python
2 481 (61.12%) SQL
3 368 (46.76%) Data Pipeline
4 339 (43.07%) Azure
5 320 (40.66%) ETL
6 306 (38.88%) Data Engineering
7 285 (36.21%) AWS
8 273 (34.69%) Data Modelling
9 242 (30.75%) CI/CD
9 242 (30.75%) Databricks
10 236 (29.99%) Analytics
11 200 (25.41%) Data Quality
12 188 (23.89%) Data Warehouse
13 178 (22.62%) Business Intelligence
14 176 (22.36%) DevOps
15 160 (20.33%) Agile
16 158 (20.08%) Security Cleared
17 154 (19.57%) Azure Data Factory
18 143 (18.17%) Power Platform
19 139 (17.66%) Power BI
20 133 (16.90%) Apache Airflow
20 133 (16.90%) Data Science
21 132 (16.77%) Problem-Solving
21 132 (16.77%) SC Cleared
22 131 (16.65%) PySpark
23 119 (15.12%) Snowflake
24 109 (13.85%) GCP
25 108 (13.72%) Data Lake
25 108 (13.72%) Machine Learning
26 104 (13.21%) Data Governance

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
1 133 (16.90%) Apache Airflow
2 95 (12.07%) Apache Spark
3 72 (9.15%) Apache
4 24 (3.05%) Confluence
5 14 (1.78%) SAS
6 8 (1.02%) Oracle Application Server
6 8 (1.02%) SharePoint
7 6 (0.76%) Apache Pig
8 5 (0.64%) IIS
9 4 (0.51%) Jupyter
10 3 (0.38%) ArcGIS
10 3 (0.38%) Oracle SOA Suite
11 2 (0.25%) Documentum
11 2 (0.25%) Luigi
12 1 (0.13%) Apache Superset
12 1 (0.13%) Apache Synapse
12 1 (0.13%) nginx
Applications
1 7 (0.89%) Microsoft Excel
2 4 (0.51%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 2 (0.25%) Microsoft Office
3 2 (0.25%) Windchill
4 1 (0.13%) MS Visio
4 1 (0.13%) SPSS
4 1 (0.13%) Stata
Business Applications
1 3 (0.38%) Oracle BPM
2 2 (0.25%) Aladdin
2 2 (0.25%) Dynamics CRM
2 2 (0.25%) Maximo
2 2 (0.25%) Payment Gateway
2 2 (0.25%) SAP S/4HANA
3 1 (0.13%) Dynamics AX
3 1 (0.13%) Endur
3 1 (0.13%) NetSuite
3 1 (0.13%) Salesforce CRM
3 1 (0.13%) SAP BPC
3 1 (0.13%) SAP ERP
3 1 (0.13%) SAP Oil and Gas
Cloud Services
1 339 (43.07%) Azure
2 285 (36.21%) AWS
3 154 (19.57%) Azure Data Factory
4 143 (18.17%) Power Platform
5 119 (15.12%) Snowflake
6 109 (13.85%) GCP
7 95 (12.07%) dbt
8 93 (11.82%) Azure Synapse Analytics
9 91 (11.56%) Amazon S3
10 73 (9.28%) Serverless
11 72 (9.15%) GitHub
12 50 (6.35%) Azure DevOps
13 45 (5.72%) AWS Lambda
14 38 (4.83%) GitHub Actions
15 25 (3.18%) AWS CloudFormation
16 23 (2.92%) Amazon EMR
17 20 (2.54%) Amazon Kinesis
17 20 (2.54%) SaaS
18 14 (1.78%) Microsoft Purview
19 12 (1.52%) AWS Step Functions
Communications & Networking
1 5 (0.64%) Firewall
1 5 (0.64%) Internet
1 5 (0.64%) TCP/IP
2 4 (0.51%) MQTT
3 3 (0.38%) SAN
3 3 (0.38%) SSH
3 3 (0.38%) Structured Cabling
3 3 (0.38%) Wi-Fi
4 2 (0.25%) DNS
4 2 (0.25%) LAN
4 2 (0.25%) SSL
4 2 (0.25%) WAN
5 1 (0.13%) 802.11
5 1 (0.13%) Ethernet
5 1 (0.13%) Wireless
Database & Business Intelligence
1 188 (23.89%) Data Warehouse
2 139 (17.66%) Power BI
3 108 (13.72%) Data Lake
4 74 (9.40%) Big Data
5 62 (7.88%) PostgreSQL
6 58 (7.37%) SQL Server
7 53 (6.73%) Hadoop
8 51 (6.48%) Amazon Redshift
9 49 (6.23%) NoSQL
10 48 (6.10%) Relational Database
11 45 (5.72%) Delta Lake
12 42 (5.34%) BigQuery
13 38 (4.83%) Azure SQL Database
13 38 (4.83%) Tableau
14 30 (3.81%) Metadata
15 27 (3.43%) SQL Server Integration Services
16 26 (3.30%) Star Schema
17 25 (3.18%) Elasticsearch
18 22 (2.80%) Amazon QuickSight
19 19 (2.41%) Amazon Athena
Development Applications
1 100 (12.71%) Git
2 52 (6.61%) Jenkins
3 37 (4.70%) JIRA
4 31 (3.94%) GitLab
5 17 (2.16%) MLflow
6 8 (1.02%) DBeaver
7 6 (0.76%) Bitbucket
8 5 (0.64%) SonarQube
8 5 (0.64%) Visual Studio Code
9 3 (0.38%) Artifactory
9 3 (0.38%) Cucumber
9 3 (0.38%) Poetry
9 3 (0.38%) PyCharm
9 3 (0.38%) Sonatype Nexus
9 3 (0.38%) Visual Studio
10 2 (0.25%) JMeter
10 2 (0.25%) Selenium
10 2 (0.25%) Zephyr
11 1 (0.13%) Maven
11 1 (0.13%) TeamCity
General
1 168 (21.35%) Social Skills
2 133 (16.90%) Finance
3 99 (12.58%) Analytical Skills
4 60 (7.62%) Public Sector
5 40 (5.08%) Banking
6 16 (2.03%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 13 (1.65%) Telecoms
8 12 (1.52%) Investment Banking
8 12 (1.52%) Pharmaceutical
8 12 (1.52%) Retail
9 11 (1.40%) Front Office
10 10 (1.27%) Marketing
11 9 (1.14%) Documentation Skills
12 5 (0.64%) Health Technology
12 5 (0.64%) Influencing Skills
12 5 (0.64%) Manufacturing
12 5 (0.64%) Presentation Skills
12 5 (0.64%) Tech for Good
13 4 (0.51%) Financial Institution
13 4 (0.51%) Military
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 131 (16.65%) PySpark
2 85 (10.80%) Kafka
3 23 (2.92%) Pandas
4 18 (2.29%) Apache NiFi
4 18 (2.29%) RESTful
4 18 (2.29%) XML
5 17 (2.16%) NumPy
6 15 (1.91%) JSON
7 14 (1.78%) Flask
8 13 (1.65%) REST
9 12 (1.52%) HTML
9 12 (1.52%) RabbitMQ
10 10 (1.27%) PyTorch
11 9 (1.14%) OAuth
12 8 (1.02%) GraphQL
12 8 (1.02%) Jinja
12 8 (1.02%) OpenTelemetry
12 8 (1.02%) Oracle GoldenGate
12 8 (1.02%) pytest
12 8 (1.02%) TensorFlow
Miscellaneous
1 47 (5.97%) Cloud Native
2 28 (3.56%) Legacy Systems
3 24 (3.05%) Data Structures
4 22 (2.80%) Algorithms
5 21 (2.67%) Product Ownership
6 19 (2.41%) Replication
7 14 (1.78%) Data Protection Act
8 13 (1.65%) Onboarding
9 11 (1.40%) Hybrid Cloud
10 10 (1.27%) Distributed Computing
10 10 (1.27%) Greenfield Project
10 10 (1.27%) IoT
11 8 (1.02%) Distributed Systems
11 8 (1.02%) Life Science
11 8 (1.02%) NHS
11 8 (1.02%) Reinsurance
12 7 (0.89%) Virtual Team
13 6 (0.76%) Clustering
14 5 (0.64%) Linux Command Line
14 5 (0.64%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 29 (3.68%) Linux
2 16 (2.03%) Unix
3 3 (0.38%) Windows
4 2 (0.25%) Windows Server
4 2 (0.25%) Windows Server 2003
Processes & Methodologies
1 368 (46.76%) Data Pipeline
2 320 (40.66%) ETL
3 306 (38.88%) Data Engineering
4 273 (34.69%) Data Modelling
5 242 (30.75%) CI/CD
6 236 (29.99%) Analytics
7 178 (22.62%) Business Intelligence
8 176 (22.36%) DevOps
9 160 (20.33%) Agile
10 133 (16.90%) Data Science
11 132 (16.77%) Problem-Solving
12 108 (13.72%) Machine Learning
13 104 (13.21%) Data Governance
14 97 (12.33%) Infrastructure as Code
15 96 (12.20%) AI
16 92 (11.69%) Data Integration
17 89 (11.31%) Migration
17 89 (11.31%) Visualisation
18 86 (10.93%) Data Transformation
19 78 (9.91%) Data Architecture
Programming Languages
1 518 (65.82%) Python
2 481 (61.12%) SQL
3 78 (9.91%) Java
4 65 (8.26%) Scala
5 24 (3.05%) Bash
6 18 (2.29%) PL/SQL
7 13 (1.65%) Data Analysis Expressions
8 12 (1.52%) JavaScript
8 12 (1.52%) R
9 11 (1.40%) C#
9 11 (1.40%) T-SQL
10 10 (1.27%) Go
10 10 (1.27%) Shell Script
11 9 (1.14%) PowerShell
12 8 (1.02%) TypeScript
13 4 (0.51%) C++
13 4 (0.51%) Groovy
14 3 (0.38%) Korn
15 2 (0.25%) ABAP
15 2 (0.25%) Bicep
Qualifications
1 158 (20.08%) Security Cleared
2 132 (16.77%) SC Cleared
3 42 (5.34%) Degree
4 23 (2.92%) AWS Certification
5 22 (2.80%) Azure Certification
5 22 (2.80%) DV Cleared
6 17 (2.16%) Computer Science Degree
7 13 (1.65%) Master's Degree
8 8 (1.02%) BPSS Clearance
9 3 (0.38%) SnowPro
10 2 (0.25%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
10 2 (0.25%) MCP
11 1 (0.13%) CTC Cleared
11 1 (0.13%) DBS Check
11 1 (0.13%) HND
11 1 (0.13%) ITIL Certification
11 1 (0.13%) Microsoft Certification
11 1 (0.13%) PhD
11 1 (0.13%) Tableau Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 200 (25.41%) Data Quality
2 33 (4.19%) GDPR
3 19 (2.41%) QA
4 11 (1.40%) Accessibility
5 4 (0.51%) NIST
5 4 (0.51%) SLA
6 3 (0.38%) HIPAA
6 3 (0.38%) ISO/IEC 20000
7 2 (0.25%) Dodd-Frank
7 2 (0.25%) EMIR
7 2 (0.25%) EU AI Act
7 2 (0.25%) MiFID
8 1 (0.13%) Disclosure Scotland
8 1 (0.13%) HL7
8 1 (0.13%) ISO 19650
8 1 (0.13%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 1 (0.13%) NCSC
8 1 (0.13%) PMO
8 1 (0.13%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 1 (0.13%) WCAG
System Software
1 59 (7.50%) Docker
2 9 (1.14%) Virtual Machines
3 5 (0.64%) zsh
4 2 (0.25%) Active Directory
5 1 (0.13%) HDFS
Systems Management
1 101 (12.83%) Terraform
2 64 (8.13%) Kubernetes
3 16 (2.03%) Grafana
4 13 (1.65%) Ansible
5 9 (1.14%) NetBackup
6 8 (1.02%) Prometheus
7 6 (0.76%) Kibana
8 5 (0.64%) Puppet
9 4 (0.51%) Argo
9 4 (0.51%) logstash
10 3 (0.38%) Ambari
10 3 (0.38%) Istio
10 3 (0.38%) Kubeflow
10 3 (0.38%) Kustomize
10 3 (0.38%) ZABBIX
11 2 (0.25%) Control-M
11 2 (0.25%) EMC NetWorker
11 2 (0.25%) Tivoli Storage Manager
12 1 (0.13%) FortiGate
Vendors
1 242 (30.75%) Databricks
2 86 (10.93%) Microsoft
3 52 (6.61%) Oracle
4 32 (4.07%) Google
5 29 (3.68%) Palantir
6 28 (3.56%) Foundry
7 24 (3.05%) Talend
8 21 (2.67%) Informatica
9 19 (2.41%) Cloudera
10 15 (1.91%) Denodo
11 13 (1.65%) IBM
11 13 (1.65%) SAP
12 12 (1.52%) Red Hat
13 9 (1.14%) Commvault
14 8 (1.02%) Confluent
14 8 (1.02%) Salesforce
14 8 (1.02%) ServiceNow
14 8 (1.02%) Splunk
14 8 (1.02%) Veritas
15 7 (0.89%) Virgin Media