Data Engineer Contracts

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 2 April 2025.

The table below provides contractor rate benchmarking and summary statistics, comparing them to the same period in the previous two years.

6 months to
2 Apr 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 82 102 108
Rank change year-on-year +20 +6 -1
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 885 970 1,447
As % of all contract jobs advertised in the UK 3.04% 2.19% 2.29%
As % of the Job Titles category 3.28% 2.36% 2.43%
Number of daily rates quoted 648 753 1,059
10th Percentile £356 £285 £413
25th Percentile £419 £413 £475
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £550
Median % change year-on-year - -9.09% -
75th Percentile £600 £600 £650
90th Percentile £700 £688 £725
UK excluding London median daily rate £463 £457 £514
% change year-on-year +1.31% -11.19% +2.80%
Number of hourly rates quoted 14 43 10
10th Percentile £25.14 £31.25 £35.00
25th Percentile £26.27 £48.00 £37.88
Median hourly rate £47.50 £65.00 £64.00
Median % change year-on-year -26.92% +1.56% +40.66%
75th Percentile £74.38 £80.00 £80.81
90th Percentile £89.24 - £91.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £26.50 £75.00 £43.50
% change year-on-year -64.67% +72.41% -3.33%

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 26,982 41,031 59,665
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.80% 92.82% 94.63%
Number of daily rates quoted 17,741 26,885 41,699
10th Percentile £300 £275 £310
25th Percentile £406 £408 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £520 £525 £545
Median % change year-on-year -1.05% -3.58% +3.71%
75th Percentile £628 £638 £650
90th Percentile £738 £738 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £488 £500
% change year-on-year -2.56% -2.50% +5.26%
Number of hourly rates quoted 945 2,527 1,683
10th Percentile £15.07 £12.86 £14.30
25th Percentile £20.85 £16.25 £19.06
Median hourly rate £32.50 £32.90 £43.86
Median % change year-on-year -1.20% -25.00% +93.69%
75th Percentile £64.50 £60.00 £65.75
90th Percentile £76.25 £71.87 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £31.76 £33.00 £41.91
% change year-on-year -3.76% -21.25% +115.12%

Data Engineer
Job Vacancy Trend

Job postings that featured Data Engineer in the job title as a proportion of all IT jobs advertised.

Job vacancy trend for Data Engineer in the UK

Data Engineer
Contractor Daily Rate Trend

3-month moving average daily rate quoted in jobs citing Data Engineer.

Daily rate trend for Data Engineer in the UK

Data Engineer
Daily Rate Histogram

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Data Engineer over the 6 months to 2 April 2025.

Daily rate histogram for Data Engineer in the UK

Data Engineer
Contractor Hourly Rate Trend

3-month moving average hourly rates quoted in jobs citing Data Engineer.

Hourly rate trend for Data Engineer in the UK

Data Engineer
Hourly Rate Histogram

Hourly rate distribution of jobs citing Data Engineer over the 6 months to 2 April 2025.

Hourly rate histogram for Data Engineer in the UK

Data Engineer
Top 18 Contract 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 2 April 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 +17 756 £500 -1.96% 663
London +12 462 £528 +0.48% 458
Work from Home +23 321 £500 -4.76% 343
UK excluding London +50 317 £463 +1.31% 263
North of England +46 100 £456 +1.96% 74
Midlands +51 69 £475 -5.00% 31
North West +27 61 £463 +6.32% 53
West Midlands +44 57 £484 -3.30% 22
Scotland +34 49 £438 -4.89% 18
South East +38 43 £503 +0.50% 76
South West +3 33 £500 -2.44% 36
Yorkshire +11 25 £450 - 13
East of England +9 18 £315 +56.52% 21
North East +6 14 £475 -0.42% 8
East Midlands +17 12 £399 -20.25% 9
Wales +12 12 £525 +163.16% 1
Northern Ireland -7 1 £500 +185.71% 8
Channel Islands - 1 - -

Data Engineer Skill Set
Top 30 Co-occurring Skills and Capabilities

For the 6 months to 2 April 2025, Data Engineer contract job roles required the following skills and capabilities in order of popularity. The figures indicate the absolute number co-occurrences and as a proportion of all contract job ads featuring Data Engineer in the job title.

1 535 (60.45%) Python
2 487 (55.03%) SQL
3 331 (37.40%) AWS
4 328 (37.06%) Azure
5 314 (35.48%) ETL
6 297 (33.56%) Data Pipeline
7 275 (31.07%) Data Engineering
8 232 (26.21%) Analytics
9 209 (23.62%) Security Cleared
10 204 (23.05%) Data Modelling
11 200 (22.60%) CI/CD
12 180 (20.34%) Databricks
13 179 (20.23%) PySpark
13 179 (20.23%) Data Warehouse
13 179 (20.23%) Finance
14 176 (19.89%) SC Cleared
15 164 (18.53%) Agile
16 147 (16.61%) Data Quality
17 144 (16.27%) DevOps
18 141 (15.93%) Problem-Solving
19 131 (14.80%) Social Skills
20 122 (13.79%) dbt
21 121 (13.67%) Apache Airflow
22 120 (13.56%) Power Platform
23 119 (13.45%) Business Intelligence
24 118 (13.33%) Power BI
25 117 (13.22%) Azure Data Factory
26 112 (12.66%) Java
27 111 (12.54%) Apache Spark
28 107 (12.09%) Kafka

Data Engineer Skill Set
Co-occurring Skills and Capabilities by Category

The follow tables expand on the table above by listing co-occurrences grouped by category. The same employment type, locality and period is covered with up to 20 co-occurrences shown in each of the following categories:

Application Platforms
1 121 (13.67%) Apache Airflow
2 111 (12.54%) Apache Spark
3 107 (12.09%) Apache
4 15 (1.69%) Confluence
5 13 (1.47%) SAS
6 9 (1.02%) SharePoint
7 7 (0.79%) Jupyter
8 3 (0.34%) ArcGIS
8 3 (0.34%) R Markdown
9 2 (0.23%) Cloud Foundry
9 2 (0.23%) IBM Domino
9 2 (0.23%) Oracle Workflow
10 1 (0.11%) Anypoint
10 1 (0.11%) Drupal
10 1 (0.11%) Luigi
10 1 (0.11%) Mule
Applications
1 11 (1.24%) Microsoft Excel
2 2 (0.23%) Microsoft PowerPoint
2 2 (0.23%) Spreadsheet
3 1 (0.11%) Adobe Captivate
3 1 (0.11%) AutoCAD
3 1 (0.11%) CATIA
3 1 (0.11%) Microsoft Office
Business Applications
1 7 (0.79%) Oracle EBS
2 4 (0.45%) SAP BPC
3 1 (0.11%) Maximo
3 1 (0.11%) Payment Gateway
3 1 (0.11%) SAP CAR
3 1 (0.11%) SAP EWM
3 1 (0.11%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
Cloud Services
1 331 (37.40%) AWS
2 328 (37.06%) Azure
3 122 (13.79%) dbt
4 120 (13.56%) Power Platform
5 117 (13.22%) Azure Data Factory
6 105 (11.86%) Serverless
7 100 (11.30%) Snowflake
8 98 (11.07%) AWS Lambda
9 92 (10.40%) GCP
10 91 (10.28%) Amazon S3
11 63 (7.12%) Azure Synapse Analytics
12 49 (5.54%) GitHub
13 36 (4.07%) OpenShift
14 34 (3.84%) Amazon ECS
15 31 (3.50%) Azure DevOps
16 24 (2.71%) Amazon EC2
16 24 (2.71%) AWS CloudFormation
17 22 (2.49%) AWS Step Functions
18 18 (2.03%) Amazon EMR
19 17 (1.92%) Dagster
Communications & Networking
1 12 (1.36%) Structured Cabling
2 4 (0.45%) SSH
3 3 (0.34%) BGP
3 3 (0.34%) Network Security
3 3 (0.34%) SMS
3 3 (0.34%) Wireless
4 2 (0.23%) Cisco ISE
4 2 (0.23%) Cisco Nexus
4 2 (0.23%) DHCP
4 2 (0.23%) EIGRP
4 2 (0.23%) LAN
4 2 (0.23%) OSPF
4 2 (0.23%) VXLAN
4 2 (0.23%) WAN
4 2 (0.23%) Wi-Fi
5 1 (0.11%) DMZ
5 1 (0.11%) Internet
5 1 (0.11%) NGFW
5 1 (0.11%) SAN
5 1 (0.11%) SD-WAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 179 (20.23%) Data Warehouse
2 118 (13.33%) Power BI
3 107 (12.09%) Data Lake
4 87 (9.83%) Amazon Athena
5 67 (7.57%) Big Data
6 63 (7.12%) Amazon Redshift
7 51 (5.76%) PostgreSQL
8 50 (5.65%) Relational Database
9 49 (5.54%) SQL Server
10 47 (5.31%) Apache Iceberg
11 45 (5.08%) Amazon RDS
11 45 (5.08%) Dremio
12 42 (4.75%) Tableau
13 41 (4.63%) NoSQL
14 39 (4.41%) Azure SQL Database
15 36 (4.07%) BigQuery
16 34 (3.84%) Hadoop
17 29 (3.28%) Metadata
18 28 (3.16%) Apache Arrow
18 28 (3.16%) Apache Ignite
Development Applications
1 55 (6.21%) Git
2 32 (3.62%) JIRA
3 31 (3.50%) GitLab
4 30 (3.39%) Artifactory
5 18 (2.03%) Jenkins
6 10 (1.13%) Bitbucket
7 6 (0.68%) MLflow
7 6 (0.68%) Visual Studio
8 4 (0.45%) RStudio
9 3 (0.34%) Atlassian Bamboo
9 3 (0.34%) SpecFlow
9 3 (0.34%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
10 2 (0.23%) Flyway
10 2 (0.23%) Liquibase
11 1 (0.11%) Cucumber
11 1 (0.11%) Eclipse
11 1 (0.11%) Postman
11 1 (0.11%) SonarQube
11 1 (0.11%) Team Foundation Server
11 1 (0.11%) Vagrant
General
1 179 (20.23%) Finance
2 131 (14.80%) Social Skills
3 100 (11.30%) Analytical Skills
3 100 (11.30%) Public Sector
4 68 (7.68%) Banking
5 52 (5.88%) Front Office
6 21 (2.37%) Investment Banking
6 21 (2.37%) Retail
7 12 (1.36%) Telecoms
8 10 (1.13%) Marketing
9 9 (1.02%) Financial Institution
9 9 (1.02%) Retail Banking
10 8 (0.90%) Local Government
11 7 (0.79%) Documentation Skills
11 7 (0.79%) Manufacturing
11 7 (0.79%) Pharmaceutical
12 6 (0.68%) Inclusion and Diversity
13 5 (0.56%) Automotive
13 5 (0.56%) Organisational Skills
13 5 (0.56%) Tech for Good
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 179 (20.23%) PySpark
2 107 (12.09%) Kafka
3 35 (3.95%) Pandas
4 28 (3.16%) J2EE
5 23 (2.60%) REST
6 20 (2.26%) NumPy
7 16 (1.81%) SciPy
8 15 (1.69%) JSON
8 15 (1.69%) React
9 14 (1.58%) Apache NiFi
10 11 (1.24%) pytest
11 10 (1.13%) Plotly
12 9 (1.02%) AWS CDK
12 9 (1.02%) Jinja
13 7 (0.79%) .NET
13 7 (0.79%) Elastic Stack
13 7 (0.79%) FHIR
13 7 (0.79%) YAML
14 6 (0.68%) FastAPI
14 6 (0.68%) Web Services
Miscellaneous
1 33 (3.73%) Data Structures
2 28 (3.16%) Legacy Systems
3 26 (2.94%) Onboarding
4 21 (2.37%) Cloud Native
5 15 (1.69%) Greenfield Project
6 12 (1.36%) Algorithms
6 12 (1.36%) Fibre Optics
7 10 (1.13%) Data Protection Act
7 10 (1.13%) Distributed Systems
8 8 (0.90%) Management Information System
9 7 (0.79%) Data Centre
9 7 (0.79%) Hybrid Cloud
9 7 (0.79%) NHS
9 7 (0.79%) Product Ownership
9 7 (0.79%) Renewable Energy
10 6 (0.68%) Distributed Computing
10 6 (0.68%) Reference Data
11 5 (0.56%) Self-Motivation
12 4 (0.45%) Hedge funds
12 4 (0.45%) Linux Command Line
Operating Systems
1 22 (2.49%) Linux
2 20 (2.26%) Unix
3 1 (0.11%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
3 1 (0.11%) Windows
3 1 (0.11%) Windows Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 314 (35.48%) ETL
2 297 (33.56%) Data Pipeline
3 275 (31.07%) Data Engineering
4 232 (26.21%) Analytics
5 204 (23.05%) Data Modelling
6 200 (22.60%) CI/CD
7 164 (18.53%) Agile
8 144 (16.27%) DevOps
9 141 (15.93%) Problem-Solving
10 119 (13.45%) Business Intelligence
11 103 (11.64%) Data Integration
12 95 (10.73%) Migration
13 88 (9.94%) Visualisation
14 86 (9.72%) Data Science
15 82 (9.27%) Data Transformation
15 82 (9.27%) Machine Learning
16 79 (8.93%) Data Governance
17 71 (8.02%) Data Migration
18 70 (7.91%) Software Engineering
19 66 (7.46%) Data Ingestion
Programming Languages
1 535 (60.45%) Python
2 487 (55.03%) SQL
3 112 (12.66%) Java
4 42 (4.75%) Scala
5 31 (3.50%) PL/SQL
6 28 (3.16%) Go
7 27 (3.05%) T-SQL
8 16 (1.81%) JavaScript
9 15 (1.69%) R
10 14 (1.58%) Bash
11 11 (1.24%) Shell Script
12 9 (1.02%) C#
12 9 (1.02%) Data Analysis Expressions
12 9 (1.02%) PowerShell
13 6 (0.68%) HiveQL
13 6 (0.68%) SPARQL
14 4 (0.45%) ANSI SQL
14 4 (0.45%) Ruby
14 4 (0.45%) TypeScript
15 3 (0.34%) RPG
Qualifications
1 209 (23.62%) Security Cleared
2 176 (19.89%) SC Cleared
3 42 (4.75%) Degree
4 30 (3.39%) DV Cleared
5 24 (2.71%) Computer Science Degree
6 15 (1.69%) AWS Certification
7 10 (1.13%) Azure Certification
8 8 (0.90%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
8 8 (0.90%) Microsoft Certification
9 7 (0.79%) BPSS Clearance
10 5 (0.56%) Master's Degree
11 2 (0.23%) CTC Cleared
11 2 (0.23%) MCPD
11 2 (0.23%) MCSD
12 1 (0.11%) Cisco Certification
12 1 (0.11%) DBS Check
12 1 (0.11%) IBM Certification
12 1 (0.11%) ITIL Certification
12 1 (0.11%) SnowPro
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 147 (16.61%) Data Quality
2 23 (2.60%) Accessibility
2 23 (2.60%) QA
3 22 (2.49%) GDPR
4 5 (0.56%) HIPAA
4 5 (0.56%) SLA
5 4 (0.45%) Disclosure Scotland
6 3 (0.34%) WCAG
7 1 (0.11%) HL7
7 1 (0.11%) ISO/IEC 27001
System Software
1 84 (9.49%) Docker
2 10 (1.13%) HDFS
3 2 (0.23%) Virtual Machines
4 1 (0.11%) Veritas Cluster Server
4 1 (0.11%) VirtualBox
Systems Management
1 94 (10.62%) Terraform
2 89 (10.06%) Kubernetes
3 18 (2.03%) Grafana
4 15 (1.69%) Ansible
5 7 (0.79%) Kibana
5 7 (0.79%) logstash
6 5 (0.56%) Prometheus
7 2 (0.23%) Kubeflow
7 2 (0.23%) NetBackup
7 2 (0.23%) Puppet
8 1 (0.11%) Argo
8 1 (0.11%) Oozie
8 1 (0.11%) Oracle RMAN
Vendors
1 180 (20.34%) Databricks
2 74 (8.36%) Microsoft
3 57 (6.44%) Oracle
4 38 (4.29%) Google
5 30 (3.39%) Informatica
6 17 (1.92%) SAP
7 16 (1.81%) Talend
8 15 (1.69%) Palantir
9 11 (1.24%) Denodo
9 11 (1.24%) Virgin Media
10 9 (1.02%) Commvault
10 9 (1.02%) IBM
11 7 (0.79%) Atlassian
11 7 (0.79%) Cloudera
12 6 (0.68%) Alteryx
12 6 (0.68%) Foundry
13 5 (0.56%) ServiceNow
14 4 (0.45%) Splunk
15 3 (0.34%) New Relic
15 3 (0.34%) Teradata