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 3 October 2026.

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

6 months to
3 Oct 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 69 128 96
Rank change year-on-year +59 -32 +35
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 1,910 737 909
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 3.48% 2.22% 2.39%
As % of the Job Titles category 3.78% 2.45% 2.57%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,278 530 637
10th Percentile £375 £363 £363
25th Percentile £425 £413 £450
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year - -4.76% -4.55%
75th Percentile £600 £588 £625
90th Percentile £675 £694 £691
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £475 £500
% change year-on-year - -5.00% -4.76%
Number of hourly rates quoted 67 13 8
10th Percentile £21.25 £25.34 £49.25
25th Percentile £30.96 £35.25 £57.31
Median hourly rate £41.56 £52.50 £80.00
Median % change year-on-year -20.85% -34.38% +29.55%
75th Percentile £68.00 £80.00 £97.50
90th Percentile £70.00 £105.50 -
UK excluding London median hourly rate £44.50 £27.00 £80.00
% change year-on-year +64.81% -66.25% +40.35%

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 50,556 30,128 35,360
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.16% 90.91% 92.97%
Number of daily rates quoted 29,767 19,028 21,436
10th Percentile £325 £278 £300
25th Percentile £425 £400 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -0.94%
75th Percentile £636 £623 £638
90th Percentile £736 £725 £744
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 3,987 1,619 1,546
10th Percentile £14.45 £13.75 £14.85
25th Percentile £19.78 £17.27 £20.75
Median hourly rate £41.74 £25.15 £42.96
Median % change year-on-year +65.94% -41.45% -3.47%
75th Percentile £67.50 £51.13 £65.00
90th Percentile £78.75 £68.31 £74.93
UK excluding London median hourly rate £42.00 £25.08 £43.00
% change year-on-year +67.50% -41.69% -2.27%

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 3 October 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 3 October 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 3 October 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 +63 1,664 £500 -1.48% 1,770
UK excluding London +85 865 £475 - 1,078
London +34 829 £533 +1.43% 909
Work from Home +42 553 £500 +2.56% 898
Midlands +73 334 £469 +1.41% 132
West Midlands +62 255 £469 -6.20% 85
North of England +30 204 £525 +10.53% 323
South East +25 124 £459 -0.76% 216
South West +28 115 £525 +5.00% 110
North West +25 111 £525 +20.69% 166
East Midlands +36 79 £388 -16.22% 47
Yorkshire +4 75 £500 - 92
Scotland 0 71 £519 +12.16% 138
East of England +7 37 £525 +5.00% 67
North East -33 19 £480 +16.36% 70
Wales -2 18 £513 +3.54% 51
Northern Ireland +4 1 - - 49
Channel Islands - 1 - -

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

For the 6 months to 3 October 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.

1 956 (50.05%) SQL
2 839 (43.93%) Python
3 816 (42.72%) Data Pipeline
4 754 (39.48%) Data Engineering
5 661 (34.61%) ETL
6 659 (34.50%) Data Modelling
7 642 (33.61%) Analytics
8 589 (30.84%) Azure
9 584 (30.58%) AWS
10 483 (25.29%) Data Quality
11 481 (25.18%) Security Cleared
12 458 (23.98%) CI/CD
13 411 (21.52%) Databricks
14 410 (21.47%) SC Cleared
15 337 (17.64%) Agile
16 326 (17.07%) Data Warehouse
17 319 (16.70%) AI
18 314 (16.44%) Migration
19 312 (16.34%) DevOps
20 299 (15.65%) Business Intelligence
21 258 (13.51%) PySpark
22 257 (13.46%) Data Transformation
23 254 (13.30%) Validation
24 248 (12.98%) Data Governance
25 247 (12.93%) Data Integration
26 245 (12.83%) Microsoft
27 244 (12.77%) Power Platform
28 241 (12.62%) Snowflake
29 236 (12.36%) Power BI
30 232 (12.15%) dbt

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
1 215 (11.26%) Apache Airflow
2 162 (8.48%) Apache Spark
3 147 (7.70%) Apache
4 48 (2.51%) SAS
5 47 (2.46%) Confluence
6 17 (0.89%) Palantir Foundry
7 15 (0.79%) SharePoint
8 14 (0.73%) Jupyter
9 3 (0.16%) Apache Superset
9 3 (0.16%) Microsoft Exchange
10 2 (0.10%) ArcGIS
10 2 (0.10%) PowerExchange
11 1 (0.052%) Apache Pulsar
11 1 (0.052%) CMS
11 1 (0.052%) Liferay
11 1 (0.052%) Luigi
11 1 (0.052%) nginx
11 1 (0.052%) Oracle Workflow
Applications
1 20 (1.05%) Microsoft Excel
2 7 (0.37%) Spreadsheet
3 5 (0.26%) Notepad++
4 4 (0.21%) Chatbot
5 1 (0.052%) Microsoft Office
5 1 (0.052%) Microsoft PowerPoint
Business Applications
1 13 (0.68%) Aladdin
2 7 (0.37%) Dynamics CRM
3 6 (0.31%) NetSuite
4 5 (0.26%) Infor LN
4 5 (0.26%) Sage X3
4 5 (0.26%) SAP S/4HANA
5 4 (0.21%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
6 3 (0.16%) Oracle EBS
7 2 (0.10%) FIS Private Capital Suite
7 2 (0.10%) Maximo
7 2 (0.10%) SAP BPC
7 2 (0.10%) SAP Oil and Gas
7 2 (0.10%) SimCorp Dimension
8 1 (0.052%) BambooHR
8 1 (0.052%) Dynamics NAV
8 1 (0.052%) Markit EDM
8 1 (0.052%) Oracle Retail
8 1 (0.052%) Raiser’s Edge
8 1 (0.052%) SAP CAR
8 1 (0.052%) SAP EWM
Cloud Services
1 589 (30.84%) Azure
2 584 (30.58%) AWS
3 244 (12.77%) Power Platform
4 241 (12.62%) Snowflake
5 232 (12.15%) dbt
6 220 (11.52%) Azure Data Factory
7 204 (10.68%) GCP
8 170 (8.90%) Amazon S3
9 132 (6.91%) Serverless
10 122 (6.39%) Azure DevOps
11 118 (6.18%) AWS Lambda
11 118 (6.18%) Azure Synapse Analytics
12 109 (5.71%) GitHub
13 70 (3.66%) Azure Databricks
14 58 (3.04%) Amazon EMR
15 45 (2.36%) GitHub Actions
16 40 (2.09%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 32 (1.68%) AWS Step Functions
18 28 (1.47%) Amazon Kinesis
18 28 (1.47%) AWS CloudFormation
Communications & Networking
1 22 (1.15%) DNS
2 21 (1.10%) BGP
2 21 (1.10%) DMZ
2 21 (1.10%) Multicast
2 21 (1.10%) VPN
3 8 (0.42%) Firewall
4 5 (0.26%) Intrusion Detection
4 5 (0.26%) PuTTY
4 5 (0.26%) WinSCP
5 4 (0.21%) Wi-Fi
5 4 (0.21%) Wireless
6 3 (0.16%) Structured Cabling
7 2 (0.10%) HTTP
8 1 (0.052%) HTTPS
8 1 (0.052%) LTE
8 1 (0.052%) MQTT
8 1 (0.052%) Network Security
8 1 (0.052%) TCP/IP
8 1 (0.052%) tcpdump
8 1 (0.052%) Wireshark
Database & Business Intelligence
1 326 (17.07%) Data Warehouse
2 236 (12.36%) Power BI
3 166 (8.69%) Data Lake
4 138 (7.23%) Metadata
5 112 (5.86%) BigQuery
6 95 (4.97%) Amazon Redshift
7 87 (4.55%) Delta Lake
8 82 (4.29%) Amazon Athena
9 79 (4.14%) Big Data
10 73 (3.82%) SQL Server
11 66 (3.46%) PostgreSQL
12 62 (3.25%) Pentaho
13 60 (3.14%) Relational Database
14 58 (3.04%) Snowflake Schema
15 53 (2.77%) Tableau
16 50 (2.62%) NoSQL
17 43 (2.25%) Oracle Database
18 42 (2.20%) SQL Server Integration Services
19 40 (2.09%) Azure SQL Database
20 39 (2.04%) Amazon RDS
Development Applications
1 176 (9.21%) Git
2 108 (5.65%) GitLab
3 64 (3.35%) JIRA
4 31 (1.62%) Jenkins
5 20 (1.05%) MLflow
6 10 (0.52%) Artifactory
7 8 (0.42%) Bitbucket
7 8 (0.42%) Postman
8 6 (0.31%) Selenium
8 6 (0.31%) SonarQube
9 4 (0.21%) Claude Code
10 3 (0.16%) Atlassian Bamboo
10 3 (0.16%) ERwin
10 3 (0.16%) Newman
10 3 (0.16%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
11 2 (0.10%) RStudio
11 2 (0.10%) Terragrunt
11 2 (0.10%) Yeoman
12 1 (0.052%) GoCD
12 1 (0.052%) Octopus Deploy
General
1 320 (16.75%) Social Skills
2 295 (15.45%) Finance
3 215 (11.26%) Analytical Skills
4 168 (8.80%) Public Sector
5 126 (6.60%) Banking
6 33 (1.73%) Marketing
7 32 (1.68%) Retail
8 28 (1.47%) Inclusion and Diversity
9 25 (1.31%) Aerospace
10 24 (1.26%) Front Office
10 24 (1.26%) Investment Banking
11 23 (1.20%) Automotive
12 18 (0.94%) Documentation Skills
12 18 (0.94%) Manufacturing
13 17 (0.89%) Law
13 17 (0.89%) Pharmaceutical
13 17 (0.89%) Telecoms
14 14 (0.73%) Military
15 13 (0.68%) Police
16 12 (0.63%) Legal
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 258 (13.51%) PySpark
2 195 (10.21%) Terraform
3 131 (6.86%) Kafka
4 40 (2.09%) REST
5 32 (1.68%) JSON
6 26 (1.36%) Pandas
7 23 (1.20%) XML
8 19 (0.99%) Spring
8 19 (0.99%) Spring Boot
9 18 (0.94%) LangChain
10 16 (0.84%) Apache Beam
10 16 (0.84%) Great Expectations
11 14 (0.73%) pytest
11 14 (0.73%) RESTful
12 13 (0.68%) Apache NiFi
13 12 (0.63%) PyTorch
13 12 (0.63%) Streamlit
14 11 (0.58%) React
15 10 (0.52%) .NET
15 10 (0.52%) Microsoft Graph
Miscellaneous
1 152 (7.96%) Cloud Native
2 65 (3.40%) Data Structures
3 60 (3.14%) Legacy Systems
4 53 (2.77%) Onboarding
5 29 (1.52%) AI Agents
6 26 (1.36%) Distributed Systems
6 26 (1.36%) Product Ownership
7 19 (0.99%) Algorithms
7 19 (0.99%) Greenfield Project
7 19 (0.99%) Management Information System
8 18 (0.94%) NHS
9 17 (0.89%) Reference Data
10 15 (0.79%) Reinsurance
11 12 (0.63%) Enterprise Software
12 11 (0.58%) Derivative
12 11 (0.58%) Virtual Team
13 10 (0.52%) Clustering
13 10 (0.52%) Data Fabric
13 10 (0.52%) Data Protection Act
13 10 (0.52%) Distributed Computing
Operating Systems
1 54 (2.83%) Unix
2 42 (2.20%) Linux
3 2 (0.10%) Ubuntu
3 2 (0.10%) Windows
4 1 (0.052%) Robot Operating System
4 1 (0.052%) VMS
4 1 (0.052%) Windows Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 816 (42.72%) Data Pipeline
2 754 (39.48%) Data Engineering
3 661 (34.61%) ETL
4 659 (34.50%) Data Modelling
5 642 (33.61%) Analytics
6 458 (23.98%) CI/CD
7 337 (17.64%) Agile
8 319 (16.70%) AI
9 314 (16.44%) Migration
10 312 (16.34%) DevOps
11 299 (15.65%) Business Intelligence
12 257 (13.46%) Data Transformation
13 254 (13.30%) Validation
14 248 (12.98%) Data Governance
15 247 (12.93%) Data Integration
16 196 (10.26%) Problem-Solving
17 191 (10.00%) Machine Learning
18 178 (9.32%) Data Science
19 174 (9.11%) Lakehouse
20 170 (8.90%) Decision-Making
Programming Languages
1 956 (50.05%) SQL
2 839 (43.93%) Python
3 102 (5.34%) Java
4 76 (3.98%) Scala
5 46 (2.41%) PL/SQL
6 34 (1.78%) T-SQL
7 31 (1.62%) Data Analysis Expressions
8 28 (1.47%) PowerShell
9 26 (1.36%) Shell Script
10 21 (1.10%) JavaScript
11 20 (1.05%) Bash
12 19 (0.99%) R
13 11 (0.58%) Bicep
14 10 (0.52%) Go
15 8 (0.42%) C#
16 7 (0.37%) TypeScript
17 5 (0.26%) Korn
18 3 (0.16%) COBOL
18 3 (0.16%) Kusto Query Language
19 2 (0.10%) Cypher
Qualifications
1 481 (25.18%) Security Cleared
2 410 (21.47%) SC Cleared
3 58 (3.04%) BPSS Clearance
4 41 (2.15%) Degree
5 36 (1.88%) DV Cleared
6 25 (1.31%) Azure Certification
7 19 (0.99%) Computer Science Degree
8 16 (0.84%) AWS Certification
9 9 (0.47%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
10 8 (0.42%) DBS Check
10 8 (0.42%) Master's Degree
10 8 (0.42%) SnowPro
11 6 (0.31%) CISM
11 6 (0.31%) CISSP
12 5 (0.26%) CEH
13 4 (0.21%) City & Guilds
14 3 (0.16%) Microsoft Certification
15 1 (0.052%) CISA
15 1 (0.052%) PMI Certification
15 1 (0.052%) PMP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 483 (25.29%) Data Quality
2 79 (4.14%) QA
3 34 (1.78%) GDPR
4 16 (0.84%) Accessibility
5 8 (0.42%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 6 (0.31%) Disclosure Scotland
6 6 (0.31%) FATCA
6 6 (0.31%) SLA
7 5 (0.26%) HIPAA
7 5 (0.26%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 3 (0.16%) MiFID
9 2 (0.10%) EMIR
9 2 (0.10%) GRC
9 2 (0.10%) SNOMED CT
10 1 (0.052%) IFRS
10 1 (0.052%) IFRS 17
10 1 (0.052%) IFRS 9
10 1 (0.052%) NIST
10 1 (0.052%) PMO
10 1 (0.052%) SOC 2
System Software
1 105 (5.50%) Docker
2 3 (0.16%) Active Directory
3 1 (0.052%) HDFS
3 1 (0.052%) Virtual Machines
Systems Management
1 91 (4.76%) Kubernetes
2 32 (1.68%) Grafana
3 21 (1.10%) Ansible
4 14 (0.73%) Kibana
5 13 (0.68%) Control-M
6 5 (0.26%) Prometheus
7 2 (0.10%) logstash
7 2 (0.10%) Puppet
8 1 (0.052%) Progress Chef
Vendors
1 411 (21.52%) Databricks
2 245 (12.83%) Microsoft
3 161 (8.43%) Oracle
4 98 (5.13%) Informatica
5 89 (4.66%) Google
6 86 (4.50%) Talend
7 41 (2.15%) Denodo
8 36 (1.88%) Salesforce
9 28 (1.47%) Palantir
10 27 (1.41%) SAP
11 25 (1.31%) Foundry
12 21 (1.10%) Cisco
12 21 (1.10%) F5
13 15 (0.79%) Splunk
14 10 (0.52%) OpenAI
15 9 (0.47%) Bloomberg
16 8 (0.42%) IBM
16 8 (0.42%) Sage
17 7 (0.37%) Alteryx
17 7 (0.37%) InterSystems