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 20 July 2026.

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

6 months to
20 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 65 119 99
Rank change year-on-year +54 -20 +23
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 1,934 762 969
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 3.66% 2.32% 2.32%
As % of the Job Titles category 3.96% 2.53% 2.50%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,312 545 726
10th Percentile £375 £368 £216
25th Percentile £425 £425 £415
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £514
Median % change year-on-year - -2.68% -6.59%
75th Percentile £588 £580 £613
90th Percentile £650 £678 £688
UK excluding London median daily rate £470 £475 £450
% change year-on-year -1.08% +5.56% -14.29%
Number of hourly rates quoted 85 11 37
10th Percentile £20.10 £18.22 £31.25
25th Percentile £35.00 £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 £70.00 £78.10 £80.00
90th Percentile £75.00 £80.00 -
UK excluding London median hourly rate £50.00 £48.46 £77.50
% change year-on-year +3.18% -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 48,848 30,065 38,836
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.55% 91.66% 93.04%
Number of daily rates quoted 29,490 19,139 25,111
10th Percentile £325 £285 £291
25th Percentile £420 £400 £410
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -1.87%
75th Percentile £625 £625 £638
90th Percentile £725 £737 £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 3,297 1,430 2,509
10th Percentile £15.79 £13.75 £13.25
25th Percentile £21.25 £17.30 £17.80
Median hourly rate £43.69 £25.15 £40.00
Median % change year-on-year +73.72% -37.13% -6.98%
75th Percentile £67.84 £55.00 £63.75
90th Percentile £80.00 £73.75 £74.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £45.00 £25.15 £40.94
% change year-on-year +78.93% -38.57% +3.51%

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 20 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 20 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 20 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 +54 1,705 £500 - 328
UK excluding London +80 912 £470 -1.08% 265
London +35 827 £525 - 119
Work from Home +39 575 £500 +5.26% 126
Midlands +60 380 £460 +1.10% 32
West Midlands +46 333 £459 -0.22% 23
North of England +24 229 £478 +0.53% 85
North West +21 134 £525 +10.53% 41
South East +13 126 £470 +10.59% 91
South West +14 94 £525 +5.00% 28
Yorkshire -10 73 £475 - 22
Scotland +24 72 £425 -1.39% 7
East Midlands +16 47 £500 +19.05% 9
East of England +8 33 £565 +77.67% 13
North East -20 23 £515 +17.71% 22
Wales +1 20 £475 +6.74% 11
Northern Ireland +4 3 £410 -18.00%

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

For the 6 months to 20 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.

1 991 (51.24%) SQL
2 845 (43.69%) Python
3 812 (41.99%) Data Pipeline
4 711 (36.76%) Data Engineering
5 703 (36.35%) Analytics
6 683 (35.32%) ETL
7 649 (33.56%) Data Modelling
8 597 (30.87%) Azure
9 554 (28.65%) AWS
10 526 (27.20%) Security Cleared
11 469 (24.25%) Data Quality
12 457 (23.63%) SC Cleared
13 456 (23.58%) CI/CD
14 376 (19.44%) Databricks
15 361 (18.67%) Business Intelligence
16 341 (17.63%) Agile
17 319 (16.49%) Data Warehouse
18 315 (16.29%) DevOps
19 297 (15.36%) Migration
20 290 (14.99%) Power Platform
21 275 (14.22%) Power BI
22 270 (13.96%) Data Governance
23 264 (13.65%) PySpark
24 238 (12.31%) Microsoft
25 229 (11.84%) Azure Data Factory
26 227 (11.74%) AI
27 226 (11.69%) Problem-Solving
28 224 (11.58%) Validation
29 215 (11.12%) Data Integration
30 206 (10.65%) 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
2 148 (7.65%) Apache Spark
3 111 (5.74%) Apache
4 85 (4.40%) SAS
5 51 (2.64%) Confluence
6 12 (0.62%) Palantir Foundry
6 12 (0.62%) SharePoint
7 8 (0.41%) Jupyter
8 2 (0.10%) Apache Superset
8 2 (0.10%) Microsoft Exchange
9 1 (0.052%) ArcGIS
9 1 (0.052%) Camunda
9 1 (0.052%) Liferay
9 1 (0.052%) Luigi
9 1 (0.052%) R Markdown
Applications
1 20 (1.03%) Microsoft Excel
2 7 (0.36%) Notepad++
3 5 (0.26%) Spreadsheet
4 3 (0.16%) Chatbot
5 1 (0.052%) Microsoft Office
5 1 (0.052%) Microsoft PowerPoint
Business Applications
1 12 (0.62%) 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%) MIS ActiveH
6 1 (0.052%) NEC Housing
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
6 1 (0.052%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
Cloud Services
1 597 (30.87%) Azure
2 554 (28.65%) AWS
3 290 (14.99%) Power Platform
4 229 (11.84%) Azure Data Factory
5 206 (10.65%) Snowflake
6 190 (9.82%) dbt
7 175 (9.05%) Amazon S3
8 169 (8.74%) GCP
9 149 (7.70%) Azure Synapse Analytics
10 137 (7.08%) Azure DevOps
11 126 (6.51%) Serverless
12 113 (5.84%) GitHub
13 106 (5.48%) AWS Lambda
14 57 (2.95%) Amazon EMR
15 48 (2.48%) GitHub Actions
16 35 (1.81%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 31 (1.60%) Matillion
18 28 (1.45%) Amazon Kinesis
19 27 (1.40%) AWS CloudFormation
20 25 (1.29%) AWS Step Functions
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%) Firewall
4 7 (0.36%) PuTTY
4 7 (0.36%) WinSCP
5 4 (0.21%) Wi-Fi
5 4 (0.21%) Wireless
6 3 (0.16%) Intrusion Detection
7 1 (0.052%) 4G
7 1 (0.052%) 5G
7 1 (0.052%) MQTT
Database & Business Intelligence
1 319 (16.49%) Data Warehouse
2 275 (14.22%) Power BI
3 174 (9.00%) Data Lake
4 106 (5.48%) Amazon Redshift
5 103 (5.33%) Metadata
6 96 (4.96%) BigQuery
6 96 (4.96%) SQL Server
7 93 (4.81%) Delta Lake
8 87 (4.50%) Big Data
8 87 (4.50%) Pentaho
9 75 (3.88%) Tableau
10 70 (3.62%) Amazon Athena
11 69 (3.57%) Snowflake Schema
12 66 (3.41%) PostgreSQL
13 57 (2.95%) Azure SQL Database
14 56 (2.90%) SQL Server Integration Services
15 54 (2.79%) Relational Database
16 52 (2.69%) NoSQL
17 38 (1.96%) Hadoop
17 38 (1.96%) Star Schema
Development Applications
1 185 (9.57%) Git
2 98 (5.07%) GitLab
3 86 (4.45%) JIRA
4 47 (2.43%) 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%) Visual Studio
10 2 (0.10%) Yeoman
11 1 (0.052%) ERwin
11 1 (0.052%) JUnit
11 1 (0.052%) Octopus Deploy
11 1 (0.052%) Selenium
General
1 311 (16.08%) Finance
2 301 (15.56%) Social Skills
3 217 (11.22%) Analytical Skills
4 162 (8.38%) Public Sector
5 104 (5.38%) Banking
6 35 (1.81%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 34 (1.76%) Marketing
8 29 (1.50%) Documentation Skills
9 27 (1.40%) Retail
10 26 (1.34%) Telecoms
11 23 (1.19%) Investment Banking
12 19 (0.98%) Manufacturing
13 17 (0.88%) Automotive
13 17 (0.88%) Front Office
13 17 (0.88%) Pharmaceutical
14 14 (0.72%) Aerospace
15 11 (0.57%) Publishing
16 10 (0.52%) Legal
17 9 (0.47%) Billing
18 8 (0.41%) Local Government
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 264 (13.65%) PySpark
2 144 (7.45%) Kafka
3 37 (1.91%) Pandas
4 35 (1.81%) JSON
5 26 (1.34%) REST
6 22 (1.14%) Spring
6 22 (1.14%) Spring Boot
7 21 (1.09%) Great Expectations
7 21 (1.09%) XML
8 18 (0.93%) Apache Beam
8 18 (0.93%) YAML
9 13 (0.67%) Apache Avro
9 13 (0.67%) React
10 12 (0.62%) RESTful
10 12 (0.62%) Streamlit
11 11 (0.57%) scikit-learn
12 10 (0.52%) Microsoft Graph
12 10 (0.52%) pytest
13 9 (0.47%) GeoJSON
13 9 (0.47%) Polars
Miscellaneous
1 142 (7.34%) Cloud Native
2 70 (3.62%) Legacy Systems
3 62 (3.21%) Data Structures
4 34 (1.76%) Distributed Systems
4 34 (1.76%) Onboarding
5 25 (1.29%) NHS
6 24 (1.24%) Greenfield Project
7 21 (1.09%) Product Ownership
8 20 (1.03%) Clustering
9 19 (0.98%) Data Protection Act
9 19 (0.98%) Reinsurance
10 13 (0.67%) Reference Data
11 12 (0.62%) Virtual Team
12 11 (0.57%) Algorithms
12 11 (0.57%) Life Science
13 10 (0.52%) Distributed Computing
13 10 (0.52%) Linux Command Line
13 10 (0.52%) Replication
13 10 (0.52%) Self-Motivation
14 9 (0.47%) Driving Licence
Operating Systems
1 66 (3.41%) Unix
2 45 (2.33%) Linux
3 5 (0.26%) Windows
4 2 (0.10%) Ubuntu
4 2 (0.10%) Windows Server
5 1 (0.052%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 812 (41.99%) Data Pipeline
2 711 (36.76%) Data Engineering
3 703 (36.35%) Analytics
4 683 (35.32%) ETL
5 649 (33.56%) Data Modelling
6 456 (23.58%) CI/CD
7 361 (18.67%) Business Intelligence
8 341 (17.63%) Agile
9 315 (16.29%) DevOps
10 297 (15.36%) Migration
11 270 (13.96%) Data Governance
12 227 (11.74%) AI
13 226 (11.69%) Problem-Solving
14 224 (11.58%) Validation
15 215 (11.12%) Data Integration
16 191 (9.88%) Data Science
17 187 (9.67%) Data Transformation
18 175 (9.05%) Decision-Making
19 152 (7.86%) Infrastructure as Code
19 152 (7.86%) Test Automation
Programming Languages
1 991 (51.24%) SQL
2 845 (43.69%) Python
3 125 (6.46%) Java
4 61 (3.15%) Scala
5 58 (3.00%) PL/SQL
6 38 (1.96%) T-SQL
7 35 (1.81%) Shell Script
8 30 (1.55%) Data Analysis Expressions
9 27 (1.40%) Bash
10 26 (1.34%) C#
11 24 (1.24%) PowerShell
12 16 (0.83%) JavaScript
13 14 (0.72%) R
14 13 (0.67%) Bicep
15 8 (0.41%) TypeScript
16 7 (0.36%) Go
17 2 (0.10%) C++
17 2 (0.10%) HiveQL
17 2 (0.10%) LookML
17 2 (0.10%) Perl
Qualifications
1 526 (27.20%) Security Cleared
2 457 (23.63%) SC Cleared
3 50 (2.59%) BPSS Clearance
4 46 (2.38%) Degree
5 25 (1.29%) Azure Certification
6 24 (1.24%) DV Cleared
7 18 (0.93%) 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 6 (0.31%) CISSP
13 5 (0.26%) BICSI Certification
13 5 (0.26%) CISM
14 3 (0.16%) CEH
14 3 (0.16%) IBM Certification
14 3 (0.16%) Microsoft Certification
15 1 (0.052%) CISA
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 469 (24.25%) Data Quality
2 60 (3.10%) QA
3 51 (2.64%) GDPR
4 23 (1.19%) Accessibility
5 12 (0.62%) SLA
6 9 (0.47%) FATCA
7 6 (0.31%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 6 (0.31%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 4 (0.21%) HIPAA
9 3 (0.16%) GMP
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%) GRC
11 1 (0.052%) NIST
11 1 (0.052%) SOC 2
System Software
1 103 (5.33%) 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
1 193 (9.98%) Terraform
2 83 (4.29%) Kubernetes
3 51 (2.64%) Grafana
4 14 (0.72%) Ansible
5 13 (0.67%) Prometheus
6 9 (0.47%) Kibana
7 6 (0.31%) 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
1 376 (19.44%) Databricks
2 238 (12.31%) Microsoft
3 167 (8.63%) Oracle
4 139 (7.19%) Informatica
5 122 (6.31%) Talend
6 66 (3.41%) Denodo
7 63 (3.26%) Google
8 34 (1.76%) Cisco
8 34 (1.76%) F5
9 33 (1.71%) SAP
10 27 (1.40%) Salesforce
11 25 (1.29%) Splunk
12 23 (1.19%) Palantir
13 18 (0.93%) Cloudera
14 16 (0.83%) Foundry
14 16 (0.83%) ServiceNow
15 14 (0.72%) IBM
16 12 (0.62%) Sage
17 11 (0.57%) Alteryx
18 9 (0.47%) Dynatrace