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 July 2026.

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

6 months to
13 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 64 115 100
Rank change year-on-year +51 -15 +23
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 1,948 770 984
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 3.70% 2.36% 2.30%
As % of the Job Titles category 4.00% 2.56% 2.47%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,331 557 738
10th Percentile £375 £363 £234
25th Percentile £425 £425 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £500
Median % change year-on-year - - -9.09%
75th Percentile £588 £575 £600
90th Percentile £650 £686 £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 77 11 37
10th Percentile £19.34 £18.22 £31.25
25th Percentile £36.25 £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 £68.00 £78.10 £80.00
90th Percentile £75.00 £80.00 -
UK excluding London median hourly rate £47.50 £48.46 £77.50
% change year-on-year -1.98% -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 48,729 30,023 39,779
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.49% 91.87% 93.05%
Number of daily rates quoted 29,502 19,148 25,568
10th Percentile £325 £287 £288
25th Percentile £419 £400 £410
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -2.33%
75th Percentile £625 £625 £638
90th Percentile £725 £738 £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 3,285 1,392 2,719
10th Percentile £15.90 £13.75 £13.00
25th Percentile £21.25 £17.41 £17.00
Median hourly rate £43.69 £26.50 £40.00
Median % change year-on-year +64.87% -33.75% -5.88%
75th Percentile £67.84 £56.25 £63.20
90th Percentile £80.00 £73.75 £73.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £45.00 £25.15 £40.00
% change year-on-year +78.93% -37.13% +6.67%

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 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 13 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 13 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 +57 1,712 £500 - 481
UK excluding London +79 889 £469 +1.41% 347
London +40 856 £525 +0.96% 216
Work from Home +37 578 £500 +5.26% 200
Midlands +57 369 £460 +2.22% 58
West Midlands +48 327 £459 -0.22% 43
North of England +21 224 £475 - 93
North West +14 135 £500 +5.26% 55
South East +9 126 £475 +11.76% 93
South West +19 92 £525 +5.00% 66
Scotland +24 71 £425 -8.11% 5
Yorkshire -14 67 £465 -2.11% 18
East Midlands +13 42 £525 +26.51% 15
East of England -8 26 £543 +70.60% 17
Wales +4 22 £425 -4.49% 12
North East -19 22 £510 +16.57% 21
Northern Ireland +3 3 £410 -18.00% 8

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

For the 6 months to 13 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 1,016 (52.16%) SQL
2 871 (44.71%) Python
3 825 (42.35%) Data Pipeline
4 722 (37.06%) Analytics
5 716 (36.76%) Data Engineering
6 696 (35.73%) ETL
7 654 (33.57%) Data Modelling
8 616 (31.62%) Azure
9 561 (28.80%) AWS
10 531 (27.26%) Security Cleared
11 478 (24.54%) Data Quality
12 465 (23.87%) CI/CD
13 461 (23.67%) SC Cleared
14 404 (20.74%) Databricks
15 376 (19.30%) Business Intelligence
16 346 (17.76%) Agile
17 327 (16.79%) DevOps
18 317 (16.27%) Data Warehouse
19 301 (15.45%) Power Platform
20 286 (14.68%) Power BI
21 284 (14.58%) Migration
22 279 (14.32%) PySpark
23 271 (13.91%) Data Governance
24 240 (12.32%) Problem-Solving
25 236 (12.11%) Microsoft
26 232 (11.91%) AI
27 231 (11.86%) Azure Data Factory
28 220 (11.29%) Validation
29 216 (11.09%) Data Integration
30 204 (10.47%) 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
1 175 (8.98%) Apache Airflow
2 153 (7.85%) Apache Spark
3 112 (5.75%) Apache
4 86 (4.41%) SAS
5 54 (2.77%) Confluence
6 13 (0.67%) Palantir Foundry
6 13 (0.67%) SharePoint
7 8 (0.41%) Jupyter
8 4 (0.21%) Microsoft Exchange
9 2 (0.10%) Apache Superset
10 1 (0.051%) Appian
10 1 (0.051%) ArcGIS
10 1 (0.051%) Camunda
10 1 (0.051%) Liferay
10 1 (0.051%) Luigi
10 1 (0.051%) R Markdown
Applications
1 17 (0.87%) Microsoft Excel
2 7 (0.36%) Notepad++
3 4 (0.21%) Spreadsheet
4 2 (0.10%) Chatbot
5 1 (0.051%) Microsoft Office
5 1 (0.051%) Microsoft PowerPoint
Business Applications
1 11 (0.56%) 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 (0.15%) SAP BPC
4 3 (0.15%) SAP S/4HANA
4 3 (0.15%) SimCorp Dimension
5 2 (0.10%) BambooHR
5 2 (0.10%) Maximo
5 2 (0.10%) Oracle EBS
6 1 (0.051%) Elite 3E
6 1 (0.051%) FIS Private Capital Suite
6 1 (0.051%) iTrent
6 1 (0.051%) NEC Housing
6 1 (0.051%) Oracle 11i
6 1 (0.051%) Oracle ERP
6 1 (0.051%) Raiser’s Edge
6 1 (0.051%) SAP CAR
6 1 (0.051%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
Cloud Services
1 616 (31.62%) Azure
2 561 (28.80%) AWS
3 301 (15.45%) Power Platform
4 231 (11.86%) Azure Data Factory
5 204 (10.47%) Snowflake
6 191 (9.80%) dbt
7 177 (9.09%) Amazon S3
8 164 (8.42%) GCP
9 152 (7.80%) Azure Synapse Analytics
10 142 (7.29%) Azure DevOps
11 129 (6.62%) Serverless
12 115 (5.90%) GitHub
13 109 (5.60%) AWS Lambda
14 56 (2.87%) Amazon EMR
15 51 (2.62%) GitHub Actions
16 35 (1.80%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 32 (1.64%) Matillion
18 29 (1.49%) Amazon Kinesis
19 28 (1.44%) AWS CloudFormation
20 25 (1.28%) AWS Step Functions
Communications & Networking
1 35 (1.80%) DNS
1 35 (1.80%) VPN
2 34 (1.75%) BGP
2 34 (1.75%) DMZ
2 34 (1.75%) Multicast
3 10 (0.51%) Structured Cabling
4 7 (0.36%) PuTTY
4 7 (0.36%) WinSCP
5 6 (0.31%) Firewall
6 4 (0.21%) Wi-Fi
6 4 (0.21%) Wireless
7 2 (0.10%) Intrusion Detection
8 1 (0.051%) 4G
8 1 (0.051%) 5G
8 1 (0.051%) MQTT
Database & Business Intelligence
1 317 (16.27%) Data Warehouse
2 286 (14.68%) Power BI
3 178 (9.14%) Data Lake
4 110 (5.65%) Amazon Redshift
5 102 (5.24%) Delta Lake
5 102 (5.24%) Metadata
5 102 (5.24%) SQL Server
6 96 (4.93%) BigQuery
7 90 (4.62%) Big Data
7 90 (4.62%) Pentaho
8 78 (4.00%) Tableau
9 74 (3.80%) Amazon Athena
10 72 (3.70%) Snowflake Schema
11 69 (3.54%) PostgreSQL
12 59 (3.03%) Azure SQL Database
13 56 (2.87%) Relational Database
13 56 (2.87%) SQL Server Integration Services
14 54 (2.77%) NoSQL
15 39 (2.00%) Hadoop
16 38 (1.95%) Data Vault
Development Applications
1 183 (9.39%) Git
2 104 (5.34%) GitLab
3 95 (4.88%) JIRA
4 51 (2.62%) Jenkins
5 9 (0.46%) Artifactory
6 8 (0.41%) MLflow
7 7 (0.36%) Bitbucket
7 7 (0.36%) Postman
8 4 (0.21%) SonarQube
9 3 (0.15%) 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%) Terragrunt
10 2 (0.10%) Visual Studio
10 2 (0.10%) Yeoman
11 1 (0.051%) ERwin
11 1 (0.051%) Octopus Deploy
11 1 (0.051%) Selenium
General
1 322 (16.53%) Finance
2 310 (15.91%) Social Skills
3 216 (11.09%) Analytical Skills
4 161 (8.26%) Public Sector
5 107 (5.49%) Banking
6 40 (2.05%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 33 (1.69%) Marketing
8 30 (1.54%) Documentation Skills
8 30 (1.54%) Retail
9 25 (1.28%) Investment Banking
9 25 (1.28%) Telecoms
10 19 (0.98%) Manufacturing
11 18 (0.92%) Pharmaceutical
12 17 (0.87%) Front Office
13 16 (0.82%) Automotive
14 13 (0.67%) Aerospace
15 11 (0.56%) Publishing
16 10 (0.51%) Legal
17 9 (0.46%) Billing
18 8 (0.41%) Military
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 279 (14.32%) PySpark
2 148 (7.60%) Kafka
3 40 (2.05%) Pandas
4 36 (1.85%) JSON
5 27 (1.39%) REST
6 24 (1.23%) Spring
6 24 (1.23%) Spring Boot
7 22 (1.13%) Great Expectations
7 22 (1.13%) XML
8 20 (1.03%) YAML
9 17 (0.87%) Apache Beam
10 13 (0.67%) Apache Avro
11 12 (0.62%) Streamlit
12 11 (0.56%) React
12 11 (0.56%) RESTful
13 10 (0.51%) Microsoft Graph
13 10 (0.51%) pytest
13 10 (0.51%) scikit-learn
14 9 (0.46%) GeoJSON
14 9 (0.46%) Polars
Miscellaneous
1 150 (7.70%) Cloud Native
2 65 (3.34%) Legacy Systems
3 61 (3.13%) Data Structures
4 34 (1.75%) Distributed Systems
5 30 (1.54%) Onboarding
6 26 (1.33%) Greenfield Project
6 26 (1.33%) Reinsurance
7 25 (1.28%) NHS
8 22 (1.13%) Product Ownership
9 20 (1.03%) Clustering
9 20 (1.03%) Data Protection Act
10 12 (0.62%) Virtual Team
11 11 (0.56%) Life Science
11 11 (0.56%) Replication
12 10 (0.51%) Distributed Computing
12 10 (0.51%) Linux Command Line
12 10 (0.51%) Public Cloud
12 10 (0.51%) Reference Data
12 10 (0.51%) Self-Motivation
13 9 (0.46%) Algorithms
Operating Systems
1 65 (3.34%) Unix
2 40 (2.05%) Linux
3 5 (0.26%) Windows
4 2 (0.10%) Ubuntu
4 2 (0.10%) Windows Server
5 1 (0.051%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 825 (42.35%) Data Pipeline
2 722 (37.06%) Analytics
3 716 (36.76%) Data Engineering
4 696 (35.73%) ETL
5 654 (33.57%) Data Modelling
6 465 (23.87%) CI/CD
7 376 (19.30%) Business Intelligence
8 346 (17.76%) Agile
9 327 (16.79%) DevOps
10 284 (14.58%) Migration
11 271 (13.91%) Data Governance
12 240 (12.32%) Problem-Solving
13 232 (11.91%) AI
14 220 (11.29%) Validation
15 216 (11.09%) Data Integration
16 191 (9.80%) Data Science
17 187 (9.60%) Data Transformation
18 180 (9.24%) Decision-Making
19 156 (8.01%) Infrastructure as Code
20 154 (7.91%) Test Automation
Programming Languages
1 1,016 (52.16%) SQL
2 871 (44.71%) Python
3 125 (6.42%) Java
4 64 (3.29%) Scala
5 53 (2.72%) PL/SQL
6 38 (1.95%) T-SQL
7 32 (1.64%) Data Analysis Expressions
8 31 (1.59%) Shell Script
9 28 (1.44%) Bash
9 28 (1.44%) C#
10 23 (1.18%) PowerShell
11 15 (0.77%) R
12 13 (0.67%) Bicep
12 13 (0.67%) JavaScript
13 8 (0.41%) TypeScript
14 7 (0.36%) Go
15 2 (0.10%) Korn
15 2 (0.10%) Perl
15 2 (0.10%) Ruby
15 2 (0.10%) SPARQL
Qualifications
1 531 (27.26%) Security Cleared
2 461 (23.67%) SC Cleared
3 53 (2.72%) BPSS Clearance
4 46 (2.36%) Degree
5 29 (1.49%) Azure Certification
6 23 (1.18%) DV Cleared
7 19 (0.98%) Computer Science Degree
8 15 (0.77%) AWS Certification
9 9 (0.46%) City & Guilds
9 9 (0.46%) DBS Check
9 9 (0.46%) SnowPro
10 8 (0.41%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
11 7 (0.36%) Master's Degree
12 5 (0.26%) BICSI Certification
12 5 (0.26%) CISSP
13 4 (0.21%) CISM
13 4 (0.21%) Microsoft Certification
14 3 (0.15%) IBM Certification
15 2 (0.10%) CEH
16 1 (0.051%) CISA
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 478 (24.54%) Data Quality
2 61 (3.13%) QA
3 53 (2.72%) GDPR
4 19 (0.98%) Accessibility
5 12 (0.62%) SLA
6 9 (0.46%) FATCA
7 6 (0.31%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 5 (0.26%) ISO/IEC 27001
9 4 (0.21%) MiFID
10 3 (0.15%) GMP
10 3 (0.15%) HIPAA
11 2 (0.10%) California Consumer Privacy Act
11 2 (0.10%) Disclosure Scotland
11 2 (0.10%) EMIR
11 2 (0.10%) GRC
11 2 (0.10%) PMO
11 2 (0.10%) SNOMED CT
11 2 (0.10%) WCAG
12 1 (0.051%) IFRS 17
12 1 (0.051%) ISO 13485
System Software
1 107 (5.49%) Docker
2 5 (0.26%) Virtual Machines
3 3 (0.15%) Active Directory
4 2 (0.10%) HDFS
5 1 (0.051%) RACF
Systems Management
1 199 (10.22%) Terraform
2 86 (4.41%) Kubernetes
3 52 (2.67%) Grafana
4 14 (0.72%) Ansible
5 13 (0.67%) Prometheus
6 9 (0.46%) Kibana
7 3 (0.15%) Rancher
8 2 (0.10%) Apache Ranger
8 2 (0.10%) Control-M
8 2 (0.10%) logstash
8 2 (0.10%) Thomson Reuters DACS
9 1 (0.051%) Fluentd
9 1 (0.051%) Kubeflow
9 1 (0.051%) NetBackup
9 1 (0.051%) Puppet
9 1 (0.051%) QRadar
Vendors
1 404 (20.74%) Databricks
2 236 (12.11%) Microsoft
3 173 (8.88%) Oracle
4 142 (7.29%) Informatica
5 130 (6.67%) Talend
6 71 (3.64%) Denodo
7 59 (3.03%) Google
8 36 (1.85%) Cisco
8 36 (1.85%) F5
9 32 (1.64%) SAP
10 27 (1.39%) Salesforce
11 23 (1.18%) Splunk
12 21 (1.08%) Palantir
13 18 (0.92%) Cloudera
14 17 (0.87%) ServiceNow
15 16 (0.82%) Foundry
16 14 (0.72%) Alteryx
16 14 (0.72%) IBM
17 12 (0.62%) Sage
18 9 (0.46%) Bloomberg