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 14 September 2026.

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

6 months to
14 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 68 128 98
Rank change year-on-year +60 -30 +21
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 1,886 715 889
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 3.48% 2.19% 2.32%
As % of the Job Titles category 3.77% 2.40% 2.49%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,252 509 631
10th Percentile £375 £363 £360
25th Percentile £425 £413 £450
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year - -4.76% -4.55%
75th Percentile £588 £575 £625
90th Percentile £663 £695 £688
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £475 £500
% change year-on-year - -5.00% -4.76%
Number of hourly rates quoted 77 14 10
10th Percentile £19.34 £25.42 £49.25
25th Percentile £30.96 £37.00 £65.00
Median hourly rate £41.56 £52.50 £80.00
Median % change year-on-year -20.85% -34.38% +25.00%
75th Percentile £68.75 £75.63 -
90th Percentile £72.40 £103.25 £97.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £41.56 £27.00 £80.00
% change year-on-year +53.91% -66.25% +63.27%

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 49,990 29,768 35,726
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.35% 91.07% 93.04%
Number of daily rates quoted 29,655 18,799 22,146
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 £625 £620 £638
90th Percentile £725 £725 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 3,750 1,555 1,711
10th Percentile £14.59 £13.69 £14.73
25th Percentile £20.27 £17.00 £20.50
Median hourly rate £42.00 £25.15 £43.00
Median % change year-on-year +67.00% -41.51% -1.71%
75th Percentile £67.50 £51.72 £65.00
90th Percentile £78.75 £70.00 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £42.50 £25.15 £45.00
% change year-on-year +68.99% -44.11% +8.43%

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 14 September 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 14 September 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 14 September 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 +57 1,658 £500 - 1,644
UK excluding London +96 851 £475 - 894
London +31 830 £525 - 880
Work from Home +43 549 £500 +2.56% 632
Midlands +78 341 £469 +4.22% 133
West Midlands +69 273 £469 +6.59% 87
North of England +20 203 £500 +5.26% 256
South East +35 129 £459 -4.62% 205
North West +13 112 £525 +10.53% 145
South West +9 97 £525 +5.00% 92
Yorkshire +9 74 £475 -6.17% 76
East Midlands +31 68 £450 +1.98% 46
Scotland -1 61 £428 -7.57% 87
East of England +3 38 £450 -40.00% 72
North East -27 18 £510 +20.71% 35
Wales -2 16 £513 +8.47% 15
Northern Ireland +5 3 £410 -18.00% 37
Channel Islands - 1 - -

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

For the 6 months to 14 September 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.

1 944 (50.05%) SQL
2 815 (43.21%) Python
3 811 (43.00%) Data Pipeline
4 732 (38.81%) Data Engineering
5 649 (34.41%) Data Modelling
6 646 (34.25%) Analytics
6 646 (34.25%) ETL
7 585 (31.02%) Azure
8 576 (30.54%) AWS
9 488 (25.87%) Security Cleared
10 475 (25.19%) Data Quality
11 449 (23.81%) CI/CD
12 426 (22.59%) SC Cleared
13 394 (20.89%) Databricks
14 333 (17.66%) Agile
15 318 (16.86%) Data Warehouse
16 313 (16.60%) Business Intelligence
17 309 (16.38%) DevOps
18 302 (16.01%) Migration
19 291 (15.43%) AI
20 265 (14.05%) Data Governance
21 262 (13.89%) PySpark
22 254 (13.47%) Power Platform
23 248 (13.15%) Power BI
24 245 (12.99%) Microsoft
25 240 (12.73%) Data Integration
26 237 (12.57%) Data Transformation
27 234 (12.41%) Validation
28 231 (12.25%) Snowflake
29 220 (11.66%) 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
1 209 (11.08%) Apache Airflow
2 150 (7.95%) Apache Spark
3 129 (6.84%) Apache
4 59 (3.13%) SAS
5 47 (2.49%) Confluence
6 16 (0.85%) Palantir Foundry
7 15 (0.80%) SharePoint
8 10 (0.53%) Jupyter
9 2 (0.11%) Apache Superset
9 2 (0.11%) ArcGIS
9 2 (0.11%) Microsoft Exchange
9 2 (0.11%) PowerExchange
10 1 (0.053%) Liferay
10 1 (0.053%) Luigi
10 1 (0.053%) nginx
10 1 (0.053%) Oracle Workflow
10 1 (0.053%) R Markdown
Applications
1 23 (1.22%) Microsoft Excel
2 7 (0.37%) Notepad++
3 6 (0.32%) Spreadsheet
4 3 (0.16%) Chatbot
5 1 (0.053%) Microsoft PowerPoint
Business Applications
1 11 (0.58%) Aladdin
2 6 (0.32%) Dynamics CRM
3 5 (0.27%) Infor LN
3 5 (0.27%) NetSuite
3 5 (0.27%) Sage X3
3 5 (0.27%) SAP S/4HANA
4 4 (0.21%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
5 2 (0.11%) Maximo
5 2 (0.11%) Oracle EBS
5 2 (0.11%) SAP BPC
5 2 (0.11%) SAP Oil and Gas
5 2 (0.11%) SimCorp Dimension
6 1 (0.053%) BambooHR
6 1 (0.053%) FIS Private Capital Suite
6 1 (0.053%) MIS ActiveH
6 1 (0.053%) Oracle Assets
6 1 (0.053%) Raiser’s Edge
6 1 (0.053%) SAP CAR
6 1 (0.053%) SAP EWM
Cloud Services
1 585 (31.02%) Azure
2 576 (30.54%) AWS
3 254 (13.47%) Power Platform
4 231 (12.25%) Snowflake
5 220 (11.66%) dbt
6 210 (11.13%) Azure Data Factory
7 187 (9.92%) GCP
8 167 (8.85%) Amazon S3
9 129 (6.84%) Serverless
10 126 (6.68%) Azure DevOps
10 126 (6.68%) Azure Synapse Analytics
11 117 (6.20%) AWS Lambda
12 111 (5.89%) GitHub
13 66 (3.50%) Azure Databricks
14 53 (2.81%) Amazon EMR
15 43 (2.28%) GitHub Actions
16 38 (2.01%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 30 (1.59%) AWS Step Functions
18 29 (1.54%) Amazon Kinesis
19 28 (1.48%) AWS CloudFormation
Communications & Networking
1 25 (1.33%) BGP
1 25 (1.33%) DMZ
1 25 (1.33%) DNS
1 25 (1.33%) Multicast
1 25 (1.33%) VPN
2 10 (0.53%) Structured Cabling
3 8 (0.42%) Firewall
4 7 (0.37%) PuTTY
4 7 (0.37%) WinSCP
5 5 (0.27%) Intrusion Detection
6 4 (0.21%) Wi-Fi
6 4 (0.21%) Wireless
7 1 (0.053%) HTTP
7 1 (0.053%) LTE
7 1 (0.053%) MQTT
Database & Business Intelligence
1 318 (16.86%) Data Warehouse
2 248 (13.15%) Power BI
3 164 (8.70%) Data Lake
4 132 (7.00%) Metadata
5 111 (5.89%) BigQuery
6 90 (4.77%) Amazon Redshift
7 84 (4.45%) Delta Lake
8 81 (4.29%) Amazon Athena
9 80 (4.24%) SQL Server
10 74 (3.92%) Big Data
11 67 (3.55%) Pentaho
12 62 (3.29%) PostgreSQL
13 60 (3.18%) Snowflake Schema
13 60 (3.18%) Tableau
14 59 (3.13%) Relational Database
15 49 (2.60%) NoSQL
16 47 (2.49%) Azure SQL Database
17 43 (2.28%) Oracle Database
18 38 (2.01%) Amazon RDS
18 38 (2.01%) SQL Server Integration Services
Development Applications
1 167 (8.85%) Git
2 95 (5.04%) GitLab
3 73 (3.87%) JIRA
4 32 (1.70%) Jenkins
5 20 (1.06%) MLflow
6 9 (0.48%) Artifactory
7 7 (0.37%) Postman
8 6 (0.32%) Bitbucket
8 6 (0.32%) SonarQube
9 4 (0.21%) Claude Code
9 4 (0.21%) ERwin
9 4 (0.21%) Selenium
10 3 (0.16%) Atlassian Bamboo
10 3 (0.16%) Newman
11 2 (0.11%) ER Studio
11 2 (0.11%) RStudio
11 2 (0.11%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
11 2 (0.11%) Terragrunt
11 2 (0.11%) Yeoman
12 1 (0.053%) Octopus Deploy
General
1 309 (16.38%) Social Skills
2 301 (15.96%) Finance
3 210 (11.13%) Analytical Skills
4 158 (8.38%) Public Sector
5 114 (6.04%) Banking
6 34 (1.80%) Marketing
7 30 (1.59%) Retail
8 29 (1.54%) Inclusion and Diversity
9 23 (1.22%) Aerospace
9 23 (1.22%) Telecoms
10 21 (1.11%) Automotive
11 20 (1.06%) Documentation Skills
11 20 (1.06%) Investment Banking
12 19 (1.01%) Front Office
12 19 (1.01%) Law
13 17 (0.90%) Manufacturing
14 16 (0.85%) Pharmaceutical
15 13 (0.69%) Police
16 12 (0.64%) Legal
17 10 (0.53%) Financial Institution
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 262 (13.89%) PySpark
2 186 (9.86%) Terraform
3 128 (6.79%) Kafka
4 33 (1.75%) REST
5 32 (1.70%) JSON
6 26 (1.38%) Pandas
7 23 (1.22%) Spring
7 23 (1.22%) Spring Boot
8 22 (1.17%) XML
9 20 (1.06%) Great Expectations
10 18 (0.95%) Apache Beam
11 15 (0.80%) LangChain
11 15 (0.80%) React
12 14 (0.74%) RESTful
13 12 (0.64%) pytest
14 11 (0.58%) Streamlit
15 10 (0.53%) .NET
15 10 (0.53%) Microsoft Graph
15 10 (0.53%) PyTorch
15 10 (0.53%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 144 (7.64%) Cloud Native
2 66 (3.50%) Data Structures
3 64 (3.39%) Legacy Systems
4 44 (2.33%) Onboarding
5 26 (1.38%) Product Ownership
6 25 (1.33%) AI Agents
7 24 (1.27%) Distributed Systems
8 23 (1.22%) NHS
9 22 (1.17%) Greenfield Project
10 19 (1.01%) Reference Data
11 18 (0.95%) Management Information System
12 16 (0.85%) Reinsurance
13 14 (0.74%) Algorithms
14 12 (0.64%) Clustering
15 11 (0.58%) Enterprise Software
15 11 (0.58%) Virtual Team
16 10 (0.53%) Data Fabric
16 10 (0.53%) Data Protection Act
16 10 (0.53%) Linux Command Line
17 9 (0.48%) Replication
Operating Systems
1 60 (3.18%) Unix
2 42 (2.23%) Linux
3 3 (0.16%) Windows
4 2 (0.11%) Ubuntu
5 1 (0.053%) Robot Operating System
5 1 (0.053%) VMS
5 1 (0.053%) Windows Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 811 (43.00%) Data Pipeline
2 732 (38.81%) Data Engineering
3 649 (34.41%) Data Modelling
4 646 (34.25%) Analytics
4 646 (34.25%) ETL
5 449 (23.81%) CI/CD
6 333 (17.66%) Agile
7 313 (16.60%) Business Intelligence
8 309 (16.38%) DevOps
9 302 (16.01%) Migration
10 291 (15.43%) AI
11 265 (14.05%) Data Governance
12 240 (12.73%) Data Integration
13 237 (12.57%) Data Transformation
14 234 (12.41%) Validation
15 206 (10.92%) Problem-Solving
16 175 (9.28%) Machine Learning
17 171 (9.07%) Lakehouse
18 170 (9.01%) Data Science
19 168 (8.91%) Decision-Making
Programming Languages
1 944 (50.05%) SQL
2 815 (43.21%) Python
3 113 (5.99%) Java
4 67 (3.55%) Scala
5 53 (2.81%) PL/SQL
6 34 (1.80%) T-SQL
7 33 (1.75%) Data Analysis Expressions
8 29 (1.54%) Shell Script
9 22 (1.17%) JavaScript
9 22 (1.17%) PowerShell
10 20 (1.06%) Bash
11 13 (0.69%) R
12 12 (0.64%) C#
13 10 (0.53%) Bicep
14 9 (0.48%) TypeScript
15 6 (0.32%) Go
16 5 (0.27%) Korn
17 3 (0.16%) COBOL
17 3 (0.16%) Kusto Query Language
17 3 (0.16%) LookML
Qualifications
1 488 (25.87%) Security Cleared
2 426 (22.59%) SC Cleared
3 48 (2.55%) BPSS Clearance
4 40 (2.12%) Degree
5 25 (1.33%) DV Cleared
6 23 (1.22%) Azure Certification
7 21 (1.11%) Computer Science Degree
8 14 (0.74%) AWS Certification
9 11 (0.58%) SnowPro
10 9 (0.48%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
10 9 (0.48%) City & Guilds
11 8 (0.42%) DBS Check
12 7 (0.37%) Master's Degree
13 6 (0.32%) CISM
13 6 (0.32%) CISSP
14 5 (0.27%) BICSI Certification
14 5 (0.27%) CEH
15 4 (0.21%) Microsoft Certification
16 1 (0.053%) PMI Certification
16 1 (0.053%) PMP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 475 (25.19%) Data Quality
2 70 (3.71%) QA
3 39 (2.07%) GDPR
4 17 (0.90%) Accessibility
5 9 (0.48%) SLA
6 7 (0.37%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 6 (0.32%) FATCA
8 5 (0.27%) HIPAA
8 5 (0.27%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 4 (0.21%) Disclosure Scotland
10 3 (0.16%) MiFID
11 2 (0.11%) EMIR
11 2 (0.11%) SNOMED CT
11 2 (0.11%) WCAG
12 1 (0.053%) Government Security Classifications
12 1 (0.053%) IFRS
12 1 (0.053%) IFRS 17
12 1 (0.053%) IFRS 9
12 1 (0.053%) PMO
12 1 (0.053%) SOC 2
System Software
1 110 (5.83%) Docker
2 3 (0.16%) Active Directory
2 3 (0.16%) Virtual Machines
3 1 (0.053%) RACF
Systems Management
1 83 (4.40%) Kubernetes
2 39 (2.07%) Grafana
3 16 (0.85%) Ansible
4 13 (0.69%) Control-M
5 10 (0.53%) Kibana
6 6 (0.32%) Prometheus
7 2 (0.11%) Apache Ranger
7 2 (0.11%) logstash
7 2 (0.11%) Puppet
8 1 (0.053%) Progress Chef
Vendors
1 394 (20.89%) Databricks
2 245 (12.99%) Microsoft
3 160 (8.48%) Oracle
4 106 (5.62%) Informatica
5 94 (4.98%) Talend
6 79 (4.19%) Google
7 52 (2.76%) Denodo
8 35 (1.86%) Salesforce
9 26 (1.38%) Palantir
9 26 (1.38%) SAP
10 25 (1.33%) Cisco
10 25 (1.33%) F5
11 24 (1.27%) Foundry
12 15 (0.80%) Splunk
13 9 (0.48%) Bloomberg
13 9 (0.48%) Cloudera
13 9 (0.48%) IBM
14 8 (0.42%) Alteryx
14 8 (0.42%) OpenAI
14 8 (0.42%) Sage