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 13 June 2026.

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

6 months to
13 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 61 107 99
Rank change year-on-year +46 -8 +25
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 1,828 743 976
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 3.65% 2.52% 2.23%
As % of the Job Titles category 3.95% 2.73% 2.41%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,270 554 744
10th Percentile £375 £363 £205
25th Percentile £415 £425 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £500
Median % change year-on-year - - -9.09%
75th Percentile £582 £588 £600
90th Percentile £650 £700 £688
UK excluding London median daily rate £469 £463 £450
% change year-on-year +1.41% +2.78% -14.29%
Number of hourly rates quoted 64 9 43
10th Percentile £19.34 £18.13 £32.50
25th Percentile £36.25 £51.25 £49.25
Median hourly rate £50.00 £52.50 £67.50
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% -22.22% -10.60%
75th Percentile £71.50 £78.70 £80.00
90th Percentile £75.00 £82.75 -
UK excluding London median hourly rate £50.00 £48.46 £75.00
% change year-on-year +3.18% -35.39% -0.66%

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 46,221 27,241 40,562
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.39% 92.30% 92.87%
Number of daily rates quoted 28,120 17,531 26,073
10th Percentile £325 £290 £280
25th Percentile £413 £402 £408
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £514 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +2.80% -4.76% -2.42%
75th Percentile £623 £625 £638
90th Percentile £725 £738 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £488
% change year-on-year +5.26% -2.56% -2.50%
Number of hourly rates quoted 3,085 1,148 2,936
10th Percentile £15.24 £14.00 £12.86
25th Percentile £20.75 £17.79 £16.30
Median hourly rate £42.69 £27.70 £37.50
Median % change year-on-year +54.10% -26.13% -16.67%
75th Percentile £67.50 £57.50 £61.81
90th Percentile £80.00 £75.00 £73.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £44.50 £25.15 £40.00
% change year-on-year +76.94% -37.13% -4.94%

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 13 June 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 13 June 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 13 June 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 +42 1,606 £500 - 306
London +35 853 £525 - 120
UK excluding London +72 781 £469 +1.41% 243
Work from Home +31 544 £500 +2.56% 139
Midlands +48 312 £469 +4.22% 44
West Midlands +48 293 £466 +1.36% 31
North of England +16 208 £465 -2.11% 70
North West +18 128 £480 +1.05% 34
South East +11 111 £475 +11.76% 72
South West +20 83 £505 +3.59% 26
Scotland +17 63 £425 -5.56% 8
Yorkshire -20 59 £465 +3.33% 20
Wales +6 22 £450 +3.45% 10
North East -21 21 £450 - 16
East of England -20 20 £498 +56.45% 12
East Midlands -14 19 £525 +28.05% 13
Northern Ireland +5 4 £410 -18.00% 5

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

For the 6 months to 13 June 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.

1 996 (54.49%) SQL
2 844 (46.17%) Python
3 762 (41.68%) Data Pipeline
4 682 (37.31%) ETL
5 680 (37.20%) Analytics
6 665 (36.38%) Data Engineering
7 618 (33.81%) Data Modelling
8 586 (32.06%) Azure
9 527 (28.83%) AWS
9 527 (28.83%) Security Cleared
10 468 (25.60%) Data Quality
11 466 (25.49%) SC Cleared
12 439 (24.02%) CI/CD
13 400 (21.88%) Databricks
14 391 (21.39%) Business Intelligence
15 327 (17.89%) Agile
16 316 (17.29%) Power Platform
17 312 (17.07%) DevOps
18 305 (16.68%) Data Warehouse
19 300 (16.41%) Power BI
20 270 (14.77%) PySpark
21 244 (13.35%) Migration
22 241 (13.18%) Data Governance
23 236 (12.91%) Microsoft
24 235 (12.86%) Problem-Solving
25 231 (12.64%) AI
26 230 (12.58%) Azure Data Factory
27 200 (10.94%) Data Integration
28 195 (10.67%) Validation
29 193 (10.56%) Terraform

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
1 169 (9.25%) Apache Airflow
2 151 (8.26%) Apache Spark
3 104 (5.69%) Apache
4 85 (4.65%) SAS
5 50 (2.74%) Confluence
6 11 (0.60%) Palantir Foundry
7 10 (0.55%) Jupyter
8 8 (0.44%) SharePoint
9 5 (0.27%) Microsoft Exchange
10 2 (0.11%) Luigi
11 1 (0.055%) Apache Superset
11 1 (0.055%) Appian
11 1 (0.055%) Camunda
11 1 (0.055%) Liferay
11 1 (0.055%) R Markdown
Applications
1 18 (0.98%) Microsoft Excel
2 7 (0.38%) Notepad++
3 4 (0.22%) Spreadsheet
4 2 (0.11%) Chatbot
5 1 (0.055%) Microsoft Office
5 1 (0.055%) Microsoft PowerPoint
Business Applications
1 7 (0.38%) Aladdin
2 4 (0.22%) Dynamics CRM
3 3 (0.16%) Infor LN
3 3 (0.16%) NetSuite
3 3 (0.16%) Sage X3
3 3 (0.16%) SAP BPC
3 3 (0.16%) SAP S/4HANA
3 3 (0.16%) SimCorp Dimension
4 2 (0.11%) BambooHR
4 2 (0.11%) Maximo
4 2 (0.11%) Oracle EBS
5 1 (0.055%) iTrent
5 1 (0.055%) NEC Housing
5 1 (0.055%) Oracle 11i
5 1 (0.055%) Oracle Assets
5 1 (0.055%) Oracle ERP
5 1 (0.055%) Raiser’s Edge
5 1 (0.055%) SAP Business ByDesign
5 1 (0.055%) SAP CAR
5 1 (0.055%) SAP EWM
Cloud Services
1 586 (32.06%) Azure
2 527 (28.83%) AWS
3 316 (17.29%) Power Platform
4 230 (12.58%) Azure Data Factory
5 190 (10.39%) Snowflake
6 176 (9.63%) Amazon S3
7 166 (9.08%) dbt
8 160 (8.75%) GCP
9 152 (8.32%) Azure Synapse Analytics
10 141 (7.71%) Azure DevOps
11 126 (6.89%) Serverless
12 122 (6.67%) GitHub
13 107 (5.85%) AWS Lambda
14 57 (3.12%) GitHub Actions
15 46 (2.52%) Amazon EMR
16 36 (1.97%) Matillion
17 32 (1.75%) AWS CloudFormation
18 31 (1.70%) Amazon CloudWatch
19 30 (1.64%) Amazon Kinesis
20 26 (1.42%) AWS Step Functions
Communications & Networking
1 33 (1.81%) DNS
1 33 (1.81%) VPN
2 32 (1.75%) BGP
2 32 (1.75%) DMZ
2 32 (1.75%) Multicast
3 10 (0.55%) Structured Cabling
4 7 (0.38%) PuTTY
4 7 (0.38%) WinSCP
5 4 (0.22%) Firewall
5 4 (0.22%) Wi-Fi
5 4 (0.22%) Wireless
6 1 (0.055%) 4G
6 1 (0.055%) 5G
6 1 (0.055%) MQTT
Database & Business Intelligence
1 305 (16.68%) Data Warehouse
2 300 (16.41%) Power BI
3 187 (10.23%) Data Lake
4 127 (6.95%) SQL Server
5 105 (5.74%) Amazon Redshift
6 104 (5.69%) Delta Lake
7 97 (5.31%) Metadata
8 91 (4.98%) BigQuery
9 88 (4.81%) Big Data
9 88 (4.81%) Pentaho
10 76 (4.16%) Amazon Athena
11 73 (3.99%) Azure SQL Database
11 73 (3.99%) Snowflake Schema
11 73 (3.99%) Tableau
12 70 (3.83%) PostgreSQL
13 62 (3.39%) SQL Server Integration Services
14 58 (3.17%) NoSQL
15 53 (2.90%) Relational Database
16 38 (2.08%) Hadoop
17 37 (2.02%) Star Schema
Development Applications
1 190 (10.39%) Git
2 99 (5.42%) GitLab
3 94 (5.14%) JIRA
4 50 (2.74%) Jenkins
5 9 (0.49%) Artifactory
5 9 (0.49%) MLflow
6 7 (0.38%) Postman
7 5 (0.27%) Bitbucket
8 3 (0.16%) Newman
8 3 (0.16%) SonarQube
9 2 (0.11%) Sonatype Nexus
9 2 (0.11%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
9 2 (0.11%) Terragrunt
9 2 (0.11%) Visual Studio
10 1 (0.055%) Atlassian Bamboo
10 1 (0.055%) Claude Code
10 1 (0.055%) ER Studio
10 1 (0.055%) ERwin
10 1 (0.055%) JUnit
10 1 (0.055%) Selenium
General
1 300 (16.41%) Finance
2 290 (15.86%) Social Skills
3 195 (10.67%) Analytical Skills
4 152 (8.32%) Public Sector
5 102 (5.58%) Banking
6 35 (1.91%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 29 (1.59%) Marketing
8 28 (1.53%) Retail
9 27 (1.48%) Documentation Skills
10 25 (1.37%) Investment Banking
11 22 (1.20%) Telecoms
12 18 (0.98%) Pharmaceutical
13 17 (0.93%) Manufacturing
14 14 (0.77%) Front Office
15 13 (0.71%) Aerospace
16 11 (0.60%) Publishing
17 7 (0.38%) Billing
17 7 (0.38%) Legal
17 7 (0.38%) Military
18 6 (0.33%) Automotive
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 270 (14.77%) PySpark
2 154 (8.42%) Kafka
3 50 (2.74%) Pandas
4 36 (1.97%) JSON
5 30 (1.64%) REST
6 25 (1.37%) Great Expectations
7 23 (1.26%) Spring
7 23 (1.26%) Spring Boot
8 21 (1.15%) XML
9 20 (1.09%) YAML
10 17 (0.93%) Apache Beam
11 13 (0.71%) Apache Avro
11 13 (0.71%) scikit-learn
12 11 (0.60%) Matplotlib
12 11 (0.60%) PyTorch
12 11 (0.60%) React
12 11 (0.60%) RESTful
13 10 (0.55%) pytest
14 9 (0.49%) GeoJSON
14 9 (0.49%) Polars
Miscellaneous
1 142 (7.77%) Cloud Native
2 57 (3.12%) Data Structures
3 55 (3.01%) Legacy Systems
4 30 (1.64%) Distributed Systems
5 29 (1.59%) Greenfield Project
6 28 (1.53%) Onboarding
6 28 (1.53%) Product Ownership
7 25 (1.37%) Reinsurance
8 22 (1.20%) Clustering
9 21 (1.15%) Data Protection Act
10 18 (0.98%) NHS
11 10 (0.55%) Distributed Computing
11 10 (0.55%) Life Science
11 10 (0.55%) Public Cloud
11 10 (0.55%) Reference Data
11 10 (0.55%) Self-Motivation
11 10 (0.55%) Virtual Team
12 9 (0.49%) Driving Licence
12 9 (0.49%) Linux Command Line
12 9 (0.49%) Replication
Operating Systems
1 65 (3.56%) Unix
2 40 (2.19%) Linux
3 5 (0.27%) Windows
4 2 (0.11%) Ubuntu
4 2 (0.11%) Windows Server
5 1 (0.055%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 762 (41.68%) Data Pipeline
2 682 (37.31%) ETL
3 680 (37.20%) Analytics
4 665 (36.38%) Data Engineering
5 618 (33.81%) Data Modelling
6 439 (24.02%) CI/CD
7 391 (21.39%) Business Intelligence
8 327 (17.89%) Agile
9 312 (17.07%) DevOps
10 244 (13.35%) Migration
11 241 (13.18%) Data Governance
12 235 (12.86%) Problem-Solving
13 231 (12.64%) AI
14 200 (10.94%) Data Integration
15 195 (10.67%) Validation
16 179 (9.79%) Data Science
17 159 (8.70%) Decision-Making
18 153 (8.37%) Data Transformation
19 143 (7.82%) Infrastructure as Code
20 139 (7.60%) Machine Learning
Programming Languages
1 996 (54.49%) SQL
2 844 (46.17%) Python
3 119 (6.51%) Java
4 69 (3.77%) Scala
5 57 (3.12%) PL/SQL
6 42 (2.30%) T-SQL
7 36 (1.97%) Data Analysis Expressions
8 31 (1.70%) C#
8 31 (1.70%) Shell Script
9 28 (1.53%) Bash
10 20 (1.09%) Bicep
11 19 (1.04%) PowerShell
12 14 (0.77%) R
13 12 (0.66%) JavaScript
14 7 (0.38%) TypeScript
15 6 (0.33%) Go
16 2 (0.11%) HiveQL
16 2 (0.11%) LookML
16 2 (0.11%) Ruby
16 2 (0.11%) VB
Qualifications
1 527 (28.83%) Security Cleared
2 466 (25.49%) SC Cleared
3 47 (2.57%) BPSS Clearance
4 42 (2.30%) Degree
5 27 (1.48%) Azure Certification
6 15 (0.82%) DV Cleared
7 14 (0.77%) AWS Certification
7 14 (0.77%) Computer Science Degree
8 9 (0.49%) City & Guilds
8 9 (0.49%) DBS Check
9 8 (0.44%) Microsoft Certification
9 8 (0.44%) SnowPro
10 7 (0.38%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
11 6 (0.33%) Master's Degree
12 5 (0.27%) BICSI Certification
13 3 (0.16%) CISSP
13 3 (0.16%) IBM Certification
14 2 (0.11%) CISM
15 1 (0.055%) Cisco Certification
15 1 (0.055%) CTC Cleared
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 468 (25.60%) Data Quality
2 60 (3.28%) QA
3 51 (2.79%) GDPR
4 13 (0.71%) Accessibility
5 12 (0.66%) SLA
6 9 (0.49%) FATCA
7 6 (0.33%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 5 (0.27%) ISO/IEC 27001
9 4 (0.22%) MiFID
10 3 (0.16%) GMP
11 2 (0.11%) EMIR
11 2 (0.11%) GRC
11 2 (0.11%) SNOMED CT
11 2 (0.11%) WCAG
12 1 (0.055%) Disclosure Scotland
12 1 (0.055%) Government Security Classifications
12 1 (0.055%) IFRS
12 1 (0.055%) IFRS 9
12 1 (0.055%) ISO 13485
12 1 (0.055%) PMO
System Software
1 102 (5.58%) Docker
2 6 (0.33%) Virtual Machines
3 2 (0.11%) Active Directory
3 2 (0.11%) HDFS
4 1 (0.055%) RACF
Systems Management
1 193 (10.56%) Terraform
2 83 (4.54%) Kubernetes
3 51 (2.79%) Grafana
4 12 (0.66%) Ansible
4 12 (0.66%) Prometheus
5 8 (0.44%) Kibana
6 3 (0.16%) Rancher
7 2 (0.11%) Apache Ranger
7 2 (0.11%) Control-M
7 2 (0.11%) Thomson Reuters DACS
8 1 (0.055%) Fluentd
8 1 (0.055%) Kubeflow
8 1 (0.055%) logstash
8 1 (0.055%) NetBackup
8 1 (0.055%) Puppet
8 1 (0.055%) QRadar
Vendors
1 400 (21.88%) Databricks
2 236 (12.91%) Microsoft
3 168 (9.19%) Oracle
4 131 (7.17%) Informatica
5 128 (7.00%) Talend
6 71 (3.88%) Denodo
7 61 (3.34%) Google
8 34 (1.86%) Cisco
8 34 (1.86%) F5
9 30 (1.64%) SAP
10 25 (1.37%) Splunk
11 23 (1.26%) ServiceNow
12 18 (0.98%) Cloudera
13 17 (0.93%) IBM
13 17 (0.93%) Salesforce
14 16 (0.88%) Palantir
15 15 (0.82%) Alteryx
16 14 (0.77%) Foundry
17 9 (0.49%) Dynatrace
17 9 (0.49%) Sage