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 15 July 2026.

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

6 months to
15 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 63 117 98
Rank change year-on-year +54 -19 +28
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 1,935 765 984
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 3.68% 2.36% 2.30%
As % of the Job Titles category 3.97% 2.57% 2.47%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,323 553 738
10th Percentile £375 £363 £234
25th Percentile £425 £425 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £500
Median % change year-on-year - - -9.09%
75th Percentile £588 £575 £600
90th Percentile £650 £675 £688
UK excluding London median daily rate £470 £475 £450
% change year-on-year -1.05% +5.56% -14.29%
Number of hourly rates quoted 77 11 37
10th Percentile £19.34 £18.22 £31.25
25th Percentile £36.25 £46.75 £46.75
Median hourly rate £50.00 £52.50 £75.00
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% -30.00% -3.23%
75th Percentile £68.00 £78.10 £80.00
90th Percentile £75.00 £80.00 -
UK excluding London median hourly rate £47.50 £48.46 £77.50
% change year-on-year -1.98% -37.47% +58.16%

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 48,692 29,793 39,772
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.54% 91.81% 93.04%
Number of daily rates quoted 29,483 18,982 25,593
10th Percentile £325 £288 £288
25th Percentile £419 £400 £410
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -2.33%
75th Percentile £625 £625 £638
90th Percentile £725 £738 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £495
% change year-on-year +5.26% -4.04% -1.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 3,276 1,398 2,720
10th Percentile £15.93 £13.75 £13.00
25th Percentile £21.35 £17.44 £17.00
Median hourly rate £45.00 £26.45 £40.00
Median % change year-on-year +70.13% -33.88% -5.88%
75th Percentile £67.84 £56.19 £63.41
90th Percentile £80.07 £73.75 £73.78
UK excluding London median hourly rate £45.56 £25.15 £40.00
% change year-on-year +81.13% -37.13% +6.67%

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 15 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 15 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 15 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 +52 1,702 £500 - 460
UK excluding London +79 893 £470 -1.05% 407
London +37 842 £525 +0.96% 140
Work from Home +32 567 £500 +5.26% 284
Midlands +57 366 £468 +2.80% 66
West Midlands +48 323 £463 +0.54% 44
North of England +29 228 £475 - 118
North West +21 135 £525 +10.53% 62
South East +14 125 £475 +11.76% 106
South West +20 93 £525 +5.00% 39
Scotland +28 72 £425 -5.56% 24
Yorkshire -12 71 £465 -2.11% 32
East Midlands +15 43 £500 +20.48% 22
East of England -6 28 £565 +77.67% 31
North East -24 22 £510 +16.57% 24
Wales +5 20 £475 +6.74% 17
Northern Ireland +3 3 £410 -18.00% 10

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

For the 6 months to 15 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.

1 999 (51.63%) SQL
2 858 (44.34%) Python
3 820 (42.38%) Data Pipeline
4 715 (36.95%) Analytics
5 710 (36.69%) Data Engineering
6 690 (35.66%) ETL
7 649 (33.54%) Data Modelling
8 602 (31.11%) Azure
9 555 (28.68%) AWS
10 519 (26.82%) Security Cleared
11 475 (24.55%) Data Quality
12 458 (23.67%) CI/CD
13 449 (23.20%) SC Cleared
14 390 (20.16%) Databricks
15 369 (19.07%) Business Intelligence
16 345 (17.83%) Agile
17 320 (16.54%) Data Warehouse
18 318 (16.43%) DevOps
19 297 (15.35%) Power Platform
20 292 (15.09%) Migration
21 282 (14.57%) Power BI
22 273 (14.11%) Data Governance
23 269 (13.90%) PySpark
24 232 (11.99%) Microsoft
24 232 (11.99%) Problem-Solving
25 231 (11.94%) AI
26 227 (11.73%) Azure Data Factory
27 222 (11.47%) Validation
28 219 (11.32%) Data Integration
29 210 (10.85%) 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
1 178 (9.20%) Apache Airflow
2 151 (7.80%) Apache Spark
3 114 (5.89%) Apache
4 85 (4.39%) SAS
5 52 (2.69%) Confluence
6 12 (0.62%) Palantir Foundry
6 12 (0.62%) SharePoint
7 8 (0.41%) Jupyter
8 3 (0.16%) Microsoft Exchange
9 2 (0.10%) Apache Superset
10 1 (0.052%) ArcGIS
10 1 (0.052%) Camunda
10 1 (0.052%) Liferay
10 1 (0.052%) Luigi
10 1 (0.052%) R Markdown
Applications
1 16 (0.83%) Microsoft Excel
2 7 (0.36%) Notepad++
3 4 (0.21%) Spreadsheet
4 2 (0.10%) Chatbot
5 1 (0.052%) Microsoft Office
5 1 (0.052%) Microsoft PowerPoint
Business Applications
1 11 (0.57%) 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
6 1 (0.052%) iTrent
6 1 (0.052%) NEC Housing
6 1 (0.052%) Oracle 11i
6 1 (0.052%) Oracle Assets
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
1 602 (31.11%) Azure
2 555 (28.68%) AWS
3 297 (15.35%) Power Platform
4 227 (11.73%) Azure Data Factory
5 210 (10.85%) Snowflake
6 193 (9.97%) dbt
7 175 (9.04%) Amazon S3
8 167 (8.63%) GCP
9 146 (7.55%) Azure Synapse Analytics
10 137 (7.08%) Azure DevOps
11 126 (6.51%) Serverless
12 111 (5.74%) GitHub
13 106 (5.48%) AWS Lambda
14 56 (2.89%) Amazon EMR
15 49 (2.53%) GitHub Actions
16 34 (1.76%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 33 (1.71%) Matillion
18 28 (1.45%) Amazon Kinesis
18 28 (1.45%) AWS CloudFormation
19 24 (1.24%) OpenShift
Communications & Networking
1 33 (1.71%) DNS
1 33 (1.71%) VPN
2 32 (1.65%) BGP
2 32 (1.65%) DMZ
2 32 (1.65%) Multicast
3 10 (0.52%) Structured Cabling
4 7 (0.36%) PuTTY
4 7 (0.36%) WinSCP
5 6 (0.31%) Firewall
6 4 (0.21%) Wi-Fi
6 4 (0.21%) Wireless
7 2 (0.10%) Intrusion Detection
8 1 (0.052%) 4G
8 1 (0.052%) 5G
8 1 (0.052%) MQTT
Database & Business Intelligence
1 320 (16.54%) Data Warehouse
2 282 (14.57%) Power BI
3 176 (9.10%) Data Lake
4 106 (5.48%) Amazon Redshift
5 102 (5.27%) SQL Server
6 101 (5.22%) Metadata
7 99 (5.12%) BigQuery
8 98 (5.06%) Delta Lake
9 89 (4.60%) Big Data
10 86 (4.44%) Pentaho
11 76 (3.93%) Tableau
12 73 (3.77%) Amazon Athena
13 71 (3.67%) Snowflake Schema
14 67 (3.46%) PostgreSQL
15 56 (2.89%) Azure SQL Database
15 56 (2.89%) Relational Database
16 55 (2.84%) SQL Server Integration Services
17 50 (2.58%) NoSQL
18 39 (2.02%) Hadoop
19 37 (1.91%) Star Schema
Development Applications
1 183 (9.46%) Git
2 101 (5.22%) GitLab
3 91 (4.70%) JIRA
4 49 (2.53%) 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
10 2 (0.10%) Atlassian Bamboo
10 2 (0.10%) Claude Code
10 2 (0.10%) Sonatype Nexus
10 2 (0.10%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
10 2 (0.10%) Terragrunt
10 2 (0.10%) Visual Studio
10 2 (0.10%) Yeoman
11 1 (0.052%) ERwin
11 1 (0.052%) JUnit
11 1 (0.052%) Selenium
General
1 315 (16.28%) Finance
2 304 (15.71%) Social Skills
3 214 (11.06%) Analytical Skills
4 156 (8.06%) Public Sector
5 106 (5.48%) Banking
6 37 (1.91%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 33 (1.71%) Marketing
8 30 (1.55%) Retail
9 29 (1.50%) Documentation Skills
10 24 (1.24%) Investment Banking
10 24 (1.24%) Telecoms
11 19 (0.98%) Manufacturing
12 17 (0.88%) Front Office
12 17 (0.88%) Pharmaceutical
13 16 (0.83%) Automotive
14 13 (0.67%) Aerospace
15 11 (0.57%) Legal
15 11 (0.57%) Publishing
16 9 (0.47%) Billing
17 8 (0.41%) Law
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 269 (13.90%) PySpark
2 147 (7.60%) Kafka
3 40 (2.07%) Pandas
4 36 (1.86%) JSON
5 28 (1.45%) REST
6 23 (1.19%) Spring
6 23 (1.19%) Spring Boot
7 22 (1.14%) Great Expectations
8 21 (1.09%) XML
9 19 (0.98%) YAML
10 18 (0.93%) Apache Beam
11 13 (0.67%) Apache Avro
12 12 (0.62%) RESTful
12 12 (0.62%) Streamlit
13 11 (0.57%) React
14 10 (0.52%) Microsoft Graph
14 10 (0.52%) pytest
14 10 (0.52%) scikit-learn
15 9 (0.47%) GeoJSON
15 9 (0.47%) Polars
Miscellaneous
1 147 (7.60%) Cloud Native
2 66 (3.41%) Legacy Systems
3 60 (3.10%) Data Structures
4 34 (1.76%) Distributed Systems
5 31 (1.60%) Onboarding
6 25 (1.29%) Greenfield Project
6 25 (1.29%) NHS
7 24 (1.24%) Reinsurance
8 22 (1.14%) Product Ownership
9 20 (1.03%) Clustering
9 20 (1.03%) Data Protection Act
10 12 (0.62%) Virtual Team
11 11 (0.57%) Life Science
11 11 (0.57%) Replication
12 10 (0.52%) Distributed Computing
12 10 (0.52%) Linux Command Line
12 10 (0.52%) Reference Data
12 10 (0.52%) Self-Motivation
13 9 (0.47%) Algorithms
13 9 (0.47%) Driving Licence
Operating Systems
1 65 (3.36%) Unix
2 42 (2.17%) Linux
3 5 (0.26%) Windows
4 2 (0.10%) Ubuntu
4 2 (0.10%) Windows Server
5 1 (0.052%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 820 (42.38%) Data Pipeline
2 715 (36.95%) Analytics
3 710 (36.69%) Data Engineering
4 690 (35.66%) ETL
5 649 (33.54%) Data Modelling
6 458 (23.67%) CI/CD
7 369 (19.07%) Business Intelligence
8 345 (17.83%) Agile
9 318 (16.43%) DevOps
10 292 (15.09%) Migration
11 273 (14.11%) Data Governance
12 232 (11.99%) Problem-Solving
13 231 (11.94%) AI
14 222 (11.47%) Validation
15 219 (11.32%) Data Integration
16 188 (9.72%) Data Science
17 184 (9.51%) Data Transformation
18 180 (9.30%) Decision-Making
19 155 (8.01%) Infrastructure as Code
20 154 (7.96%) Test Automation
Programming Languages
1 999 (51.63%) SQL
2 858 (44.34%) Python
3 125 (6.46%) Java
4 62 (3.20%) Scala
5 55 (2.84%) PL/SQL
6 39 (2.02%) T-SQL
7 34 (1.76%) Shell Script
8 30 (1.55%) Data Analysis Expressions
9 29 (1.50%) C#
10 28 (1.45%) Bash
11 24 (1.24%) PowerShell
12 14 (0.72%) R
13 13 (0.67%) Bicep
13 13 (0.67%) JavaScript
14 8 (0.41%) TypeScript
15 7 (0.36%) Go
16 2 (0.10%) Korn
16 2 (0.10%) Perl
16 2 (0.10%) Ruby
16 2 (0.10%) SPARQL
Qualifications
1 519 (26.82%) Security Cleared
2 449 (23.20%) SC Cleared
3 51 (2.64%) BPSS Clearance
4 46 (2.38%) Degree
5 27 (1.40%) Azure Certification
6 24 (1.24%) DV Cleared
7 19 (0.98%) Computer Science Degree
8 15 (0.78%) AWS Certification
9 9 (0.47%) City & Guilds
9 9 (0.47%) DBS Check
9 9 (0.47%) SnowPro
10 8 (0.41%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
11 7 (0.36%) Master's Degree
12 5 (0.26%) BICSI Certification
12 5 (0.26%) CISSP
13 4 (0.21%) CISM
14 3 (0.16%) IBM Certification
14 3 (0.16%) Microsoft Certification
15 2 (0.10%) CEH
16 1 (0.052%) CISA
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 475 (24.55%) Data Quality
2 62 (3.20%) QA
3 51 (2.64%) GDPR
4 21 (1.09%) Accessibility
5 12 (0.62%) SLA
6 9 (0.47%) FATCA
7 6 (0.31%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 5 (0.26%) ISO/IEC 27001
9 3 (0.16%) GMP
9 3 (0.16%) HIPAA
9 3 (0.16%) MiFID
10 2 (0.10%) California Consumer Privacy Act
10 2 (0.10%) Disclosure Scotland
10 2 (0.10%) EMIR
10 2 (0.10%) PMO
10 2 (0.10%) SNOMED CT
10 2 (0.10%) WCAG
11 1 (0.052%) IFRS
11 1 (0.052%) IFRS 17
11 1 (0.052%) IFRS 9
System Software
1 105 (5.43%) 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
1 194 (10.03%) Terraform
2 85 (4.39%) Kubernetes
3 51 (2.64%) Grafana
4 14 (0.72%) Ansible
5 13 (0.67%) Prometheus
6 9 (0.47%) Kibana
7 4 (0.21%) 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
1 390 (20.16%) Databricks
2 232 (11.99%) Microsoft
3 167 (8.63%) Oracle
4 138 (7.13%) Informatica
5 123 (6.36%) Talend
6 68 (3.51%) Denodo
7 62 (3.20%) Google
8 34 (1.76%) Cisco
8 34 (1.76%) F5
9 32 (1.65%) SAP
10 27 (1.40%) Salesforce
11 24 (1.24%) Splunk
12 20 (1.03%) Palantir
13 18 (0.93%) Cloudera
14 16 (0.83%) ServiceNow
15 15 (0.78%) Foundry
16 14 (0.72%) Alteryx
16 14 (0.72%) IBM
17 12 (0.62%) Sage
18 9 (0.47%) Bloomberg