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 August 2026.

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

6 months to
27 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 68 129 97
Rank change year-on-year +61 -32 +20
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 1,907 719 900
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 3.55% 2.20% 2.32%
As % of the Job Titles category 3.84% 2.41% 2.49%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,264 514 648
10th Percentile £375 £375 £263
25th Percentile £425 £425 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year - -4.76% -4.55%
75th Percentile £585 £575 £625
90th Percentile £657 £685 £688
UK excluding London median daily rate £469 £475 £475
% change year-on-year -1.26% - -9.52%
Number of hourly rates quoted 85 14 24
10th Percentile £20.10 £25.42 £31.25
25th Percentile £30.96 £37.00 £49.25
Median hourly rate £44.50 £52.50 £75.00
Median % change year-on-year -15.24% -30.00% +5.26%
75th Percentile £70.00 £74.65 £80.00
90th Percentile £75.00 £85.25 -
UK excluding London median hourly rate £44.50 £52.85 £80.00
% change year-on-year -15.80% -33.94% +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 49,647 29,883 36,109
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.47% 91.23% 93.01%
Number of daily rates quoted 29,658 18,862 22,923
10th Percentile £325 £280 £300
25th Percentile £425 £400 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -1.87%
75th Percentile £625 £620 £638
90th Percentile £725 £725 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 3,547 1,583 1,920
10th Percentile £14.99 £13.66 £14.16
25th Percentile £20.51 £17.08 £19.50
Median hourly rate £41.74 £25.15 £43.00
Median % change year-on-year +65.94% -41.51% -1.44%
75th Percentile £67.84 £53.93 £65.00
90th Percentile £80.00 £71.20 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £42.50 £25.15 £43.00
% change year-on-year +68.99% -41.51% +7.50%

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 August 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 August 2026.

Hourly rate histogram for Data Engineer in the UK

Data Engineer
Top 18 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 August 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 +66 1,690 £500 - 251
UK excluding London +97 874 £469 -1.26% 199
London +38 834 £525 - 87
Work from Home +48 563 £500 +5.26% 99
Midlands +66 360 £463 +0.27% 35
West Midlands +61 300 £465 -3.13% 23
North of England +35 220 £478 +0.53% 60
South East +35 130 £459 -3.87% 41
North West +31 125 £525 +10.53% 21
South West +6 89 £525 +5.00% 35
Yorkshire -12 75 £465 -2.11% 18
East Midlands +26 60 £450 +1.98% 12
Scotland +12 58 £440 -2.22% 12
East of England +8 37 £450 - 13
North East -27 21 £515 +21.89% 22
Wales +1 18 £500 +12.36% 5
Northern Ireland +2 3 £410 -18.00% 2
Channel Islands - 1 - -

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

For the 6 months to 27 August 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.

1 942 (49.40%) SQL
2 805 (42.21%) Data Pipeline
3 799 (41.90%) Python
4 715 (37.49%) Data Engineering
5 660 (34.61%) Analytics
6 653 (34.24%) ETL
7 634 (33.25%) Data Modelling
8 595 (31.20%) Azure
9 560 (29.37%) AWS
10 497 (26.06%) Security Cleared
11 465 (24.38%) Data Quality
12 440 (23.07%) CI/CD
13 435 (22.81%) SC Cleared
14 385 (20.19%) Databricks
15 333 (17.46%) Agile
16 324 (16.99%) Business Intelligence
17 320 (16.78%) Data Warehouse
18 309 (16.20%) DevOps
19 302 (15.84%) Migration
20 264 (13.84%) PySpark
21 259 (13.58%) Power Platform
22 258 (13.53%) AI
23 252 (13.21%) Data Governance
23 252 (13.21%) Power BI
24 242 (12.69%) Microsoft
25 234 (12.27%) Data Integration
25 234 (12.27%) Validation
26 224 (11.75%) Data Transformation
27 222 (11.64%) Snowflake
28 215 (11.27%) Azure Data Factory

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
1 197 (10.33%) Apache Airflow
2 151 (7.92%) Apache Spark
3 122 (6.40%) Apache
4 68 (3.57%) SAS
5 42 (2.20%) Confluence
6 16 (0.84%) Palantir Foundry
7 13 (0.68%) SharePoint
8 9 (0.47%) Jupyter
9 3 (0.16%) Apache Superset
10 2 (0.10%) ArcGIS
10 2 (0.10%) Microsoft Exchange
10 2 (0.10%) PowerExchange
11 1 (0.052%) Liferay
11 1 (0.052%) Luigi
11 1 (0.052%) nginx
11 1 (0.052%) R Markdown
Applications
1 24 (1.26%) Microsoft Excel
2 7 (0.37%) Notepad++
2 7 (0.37%) Spreadsheet
3 4 (0.21%) Chatbot
4 1 (0.052%) Microsoft PowerPoint
Business Applications
1 13 (0.68%) Aladdin
2 6 (0.31%) Dynamics CRM
3 5 (0.26%) Infor LN
3 5 (0.26%) NetSuite
3 5 (0.26%) Sage X3
4 4 (0.21%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
5 3 (0.16%) SAP S/4HANA
5 3 (0.16%) SimCorp Dimension
6 2 (0.10%) BambooHR
6 2 (0.10%) Maximo
6 2 (0.10%) Oracle EBS
7 1 (0.052%) FIS Private Capital Suite
7 1 (0.052%) MIS ActiveH
7 1 (0.052%) Oracle 11i
7 1 (0.052%) Oracle Assets
7 1 (0.052%) Oracle ERP
7 1 (0.052%) Raiser’s Edge
7 1 (0.052%) SAP BPC
7 1 (0.052%) SAP CAR
7 1 (0.052%) SAP EWM
Cloud Services
1 595 (31.20%) Azure
2 560 (29.37%) AWS
3 259 (13.58%) Power Platform
4 222 (11.64%) Snowflake
5 215 (11.27%) Azure Data Factory
6 207 (10.85%) dbt
7 173 (9.07%) GCP
8 166 (8.70%) Amazon S3
9 134 (7.03%) Azure Synapse Analytics
10 130 (6.82%) Azure DevOps
11 122 (6.40%) Serverless
12 113 (5.93%) GitHub
13 109 (5.72%) AWS Lambda
14 51 (2.67%) Amazon EMR
15 43 (2.25%) GitHub Actions
16 35 (1.84%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 26 (1.36%) AWS Step Functions
18 25 (1.31%) Amazon Kinesis
18 25 (1.31%) AWS CloudFormation
19 23 (1.21%) Fivetran
Communications & Networking
1 30 (1.57%) VPN
2 29 (1.52%) BGP
2 29 (1.52%) DMZ
2 29 (1.52%) DNS
2 29 (1.52%) Multicast
3 11 (0.58%) Structured Cabling
4 9 (0.47%) Firewall
5 7 (0.37%) PuTTY
5 7 (0.37%) WinSCP
6 5 (0.26%) Intrusion Detection
7 4 (0.21%) Wi-Fi
7 4 (0.21%) Wireless
8 1 (0.052%) HTTP
8 1 (0.052%) LTE
8 1 (0.052%) MQTT
Database & Business Intelligence
1 320 (16.78%) Data Warehouse
2 252 (13.21%) Power BI
3 170 (8.91%) Data Lake
4 121 (6.35%) Metadata
5 104 (5.45%) Amazon Redshift
6 101 (5.30%) BigQuery
7 88 (4.61%) Delta Lake
7 88 (4.61%) SQL Server
8 79 (4.14%) Amazon Athena
8 79 (4.14%) Big Data
9 73 (3.83%) Pentaho
10 64 (3.36%) Tableau
11 62 (3.25%) PostgreSQL
11 62 (3.25%) Relational Database
12 60 (3.15%) Snowflake Schema
13 55 (2.88%) Azure SQL Database
14 49 (2.57%) NoSQL
15 45 (2.36%) SQL Server Integration Services
16 38 (1.99%) Oracle Database
17 36 (1.89%) Star Schema
Development Applications
1 160 (8.39%) Git
2 97 (5.09%) GitLab
3 69 (3.62%) JIRA
4 38 (1.99%) Jenkins
5 16 (0.84%) MLflow
6 9 (0.47%) Artifactory
7 7 (0.37%) Postman
8 5 (0.26%) Bitbucket
9 4 (0.21%) ERwin
9 4 (0.21%) SonarQube
10 3 (0.16%) Atlassian Bamboo
10 3 (0.16%) Claude Code
10 3 (0.16%) Newman
10 3 (0.16%) Selenium
10 3 (0.16%) Sonatype Nexus
11 2 (0.10%) ER Studio
11 2 (0.10%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
11 2 (0.10%) Terragrunt
11 2 (0.10%) Yeoman
12 1 (0.052%) Octopus Deploy
General
1 305 (15.99%) Finance
1 305 (15.99%) Social Skills
2 216 (11.33%) Analytical Skills
3 165 (8.65%) Public Sector
4 111 (5.82%) Banking
5 33 (1.73%) Inclusion and Diversity
6 32 (1.68%) Marketing
7 25 (1.31%) Telecoms
8 23 (1.21%) Retail
9 22 (1.15%) Aerospace
9 22 (1.15%) Documentation Skills
9 22 (1.15%) Investment Banking
10 20 (1.05%) Front Office
11 19 (1.00%) Automotive
11 19 (1.00%) Manufacturing
12 17 (0.89%) Law
13 15 (0.79%) Pharmaceutical
14 11 (0.58%) Police
15 10 (0.52%) Financial Institution
15 10 (0.52%) Legal
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 264 (13.84%) PySpark
2 183 (9.60%) Terraform
3 140 (7.34%) Kafka
4 32 (1.68%) JSON
4 32 (1.68%) Pandas
5 28 (1.47%) REST
6 23 (1.21%) Spring
6 23 (1.21%) Spring Boot
7 22 (1.15%) XML
8 21 (1.10%) Great Expectations
9 16 (0.84%) Apache Beam
9 16 (0.84%) React
10 14 (0.73%) RESTful
10 14 (0.73%) YAML
11 12 (0.63%) Streamlit
12 11 (0.58%) LangChain
13 10 (0.52%) .NET
13 10 (0.52%) Microsoft Graph
13 10 (0.52%) pytest
14 9 (0.47%) HTML
Miscellaneous
1 140 (7.34%) Cloud Native
2 77 (4.04%) Legacy Systems
3 60 (3.15%) Data Structures
4 40 (2.10%) Onboarding
5 26 (1.36%) Product Ownership
6 24 (1.26%) Distributed Systems
7 23 (1.21%) Greenfield Project
8 22 (1.15%) NHS
8 22 (1.15%) Reference Data
9 17 (0.89%) Reinsurance
10 16 (0.84%) AI Agents
10 16 (0.84%) Management Information System
11 14 (0.73%) Data Protection Act
12 12 (0.63%) Algorithms
12 12 (0.63%) Clustering
13 11 (0.58%) Virtual Team
14 10 (0.52%) Enterprise Software
14 10 (0.52%) Linux Command Line
14 10 (0.52%) Replication
15 9 (0.47%) Life Science
Operating Systems
1 65 (3.41%) Unix
2 50 (2.62%) Linux
3 5 (0.26%) Windows
4 3 (0.16%) Windows Server
5 2 (0.10%) Ubuntu
6 1 (0.052%) Robot Operating System
6 1 (0.052%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 805 (42.21%) Data Pipeline
2 715 (37.49%) Data Engineering
3 660 (34.61%) Analytics
4 653 (34.24%) ETL
5 634 (33.25%) Data Modelling
6 440 (23.07%) CI/CD
7 333 (17.46%) Agile
8 324 (16.99%) Business Intelligence
9 309 (16.20%) DevOps
10 302 (15.84%) Migration
11 258 (13.53%) AI
12 252 (13.21%) Data Governance
13 234 (12.27%) Data Integration
13 234 (12.27%) Validation
14 224 (11.75%) Data Transformation
15 211 (11.06%) Problem-Solving
16 172 (9.02%) Decision-Making
17 164 (8.60%) Data Science
18 163 (8.55%) Machine Learning
19 154 (8.08%) Infrastructure as Code
Programming Languages
1 942 (49.40%) SQL
2 799 (41.90%) Python
3 112 (5.87%) Java
4 67 (3.51%) Scala
5 54 (2.83%) PL/SQL
6 35 (1.84%) Shell Script
7 33 (1.73%) T-SQL
8 28 (1.47%) Data Analysis Expressions
9 23 (1.21%) Bash
10 22 (1.15%) PowerShell
11 20 (1.05%) JavaScript
12 15 (0.79%) C#
13 12 (0.63%) R
14 9 (0.47%) Bicep
15 6 (0.31%) Go
15 6 (0.31%) TypeScript
16 4 (0.21%) Korn
17 3 (0.16%) COBOL
18 2 (0.10%) Perl
18 2 (0.10%) SPARQL
Qualifications
1 497 (26.06%) Security Cleared
2 435 (22.81%) SC Cleared
3 45 (2.36%) BPSS Clearance
4 39 (2.05%) Degree
5 22 (1.15%) Azure Certification
6 21 (1.10%) DV Cleared
7 20 (1.05%) Computer Science Degree
8 14 (0.73%) AWS Certification
9 10 (0.52%) SnowPro
10 9 (0.47%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
10 9 (0.47%) City & Guilds
11 8 (0.42%) DBS Check
12 6 (0.31%) CISM
12 6 (0.31%) CISSP
12 6 (0.31%) Master's Degree
13 5 (0.26%) BICSI Certification
13 5 (0.26%) CEH
14 4 (0.21%) Microsoft Certification
15 1 (0.052%) PMI Certification
15 1 (0.052%) PMP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 465 (24.38%) Data Quality
2 66 (3.46%) QA
3 45 (2.36%) GDPR
4 16 (0.84%) Accessibility
5 11 (0.58%) SLA
6 7 (0.37%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 6 (0.31%) FATCA
7 6 (0.31%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 5 (0.26%) HIPAA
9 3 (0.16%) Disclosure Scotland
9 3 (0.16%) MiFID
10 2 (0.10%) EMIR
10 2 (0.10%) SNOMED CT
10 2 (0.10%) WCAG
11 1 (0.052%) California Consumer Privacy Act
11 1 (0.052%) IFRS
11 1 (0.052%) IFRS 17
11 1 (0.052%) IFRS 9
11 1 (0.052%) PCI DSS
11 1 (0.052%) PMO
System Software
1 110 (5.77%) Docker
2 4 (0.21%) Virtual Machines
3 2 (0.10%) Active Directory
4 1 (0.052%) RACF
Systems Management
1 84 (4.40%) Kubernetes
2 46 (2.41%) Grafana
3 16 (0.84%) Ansible
4 12 (0.63%) Control-M
5 10 (0.52%) Kibana
6 5 (0.26%) Prometheus
7 2 (0.10%) Apache Ranger
7 2 (0.10%) logstash
7 2 (0.10%) Puppet
7 2 (0.10%) Thomson Reuters DACS
8 1 (0.052%) Progress Chef
8 1 (0.052%) Rancher
Vendors
1 385 (20.19%) Databricks
2 242 (12.69%) Microsoft
3 157 (8.23%) Oracle
4 116 (6.08%) Informatica
5 102 (5.35%) Talend
6 66 (3.46%) Google
7 60 (3.15%) Denodo
8 32 (1.68%) Salesforce
9 30 (1.57%) Cisco
9 30 (1.57%) F5
10 26 (1.36%) Palantir
11 25 (1.31%) SAP
12 20 (1.05%) Foundry
13 15 (0.79%) Splunk
14 14 (0.73%) Cloudera
15 12 (0.63%) IBM
16 11 (0.58%) ServiceNow
17 10 (0.52%) Bloomberg
18 9 (0.47%) Sage
19 8 (0.42%) InterSystems