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 17 May 2026.

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

6 months to
17 May 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 60 88 102
Rank change year-on-year +28 +14 +11
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 1,740 839 924
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 3.62% 2.86% 2.17%
As % of the Job Titles category 3.92% 3.09% 2.34%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,215 629 714
10th Percentile £375 £358 £199
25th Percentile £420 £423 £411
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £500
Median % change year-on-year - - -9.09%
75th Percentile £585 £588 £598
90th Percentile £662 £700 £675
UK excluding London median daily rate £474 £460 £450
% change year-on-year +2.99% +2.22% -12.32%
Number of hourly rates quoted 54 9 45
10th Percentile £19.34 £44.64 £31.25
25th Percentile £41.28 £51.25 £49.25
Median hourly rate £52.50 £65.00 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year -19.23% - -13.91%
75th Percentile £74.13 £78.70 £80.00
90th Percentile £77.80 £93.75 -
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 44,407 27,141 39,490
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.29% 92.39% 92.79%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,193 17,684 25,687
10th Percentile £321 £293 £280
25th Percentile £413 £406 £410
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £510 £513 £525
Median % change year-on-year -0.49% -2.38% -3.23%
75th Percentile £615 £625 £638
90th Percentile £725 £738 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £490
% change year-on-year +5.26% -3.06% -2.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,901 1,046 2,662
10th Percentile £15.00 £14.00 £12.82
25th Percentile £20.27 £18.15 £16.30
Median hourly rate £42.69 £28.17 £36.58
Median % change year-on-year +51.55% -22.99% -18.72%
75th Percentile £66.25 £61.44 £61.30
90th Percentile £78.75 £75.00 £73.44
UK excluding London median hourly rate £45.00 £27.13 £40.00
% change year-on-year +65.90% -32.19% -5.88%

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 17 May 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 17 May 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 17 May 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 +27 1,527 £500 - 352
London +23 847 £525 - 125
UK excluding London +39 699 £474 +2.99% 280
Work from Home +20 511 £500 - 175
Midlands +36 297 £469 +1.96% 47
West Midlands +36 278 £469 -1.26% 30
North of England -13 190 £465 +0.54% 86
North West +5 124 £480 +3.78% 40
South East -7 93 £500 +8.11% 91
South West 0 68 £500 +1.27% 32
Scotland +13 56 £450 - 8
Yorkshire -32 51 £465 +3.33% 22
Wales +3 20 £475 +130.23% 11
East Midlands -17 19 £475 +15.85% 17
East of England -26 16 £565 +79.37% 4
North East -22 15 £463 +8.82% 27
Northern Ireland +4 3 £410 -18.00% 3

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

For the 6 months to 17 May 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.

1 943 (54.20%) SQL
2 802 (46.09%) Python
3 723 (41.55%) Data Pipeline
4 662 (38.05%) ETL
5 660 (37.93%) Analytics
6 632 (36.32%) Data Engineering
7 603 (34.66%) Azure
8 595 (34.20%) Data Modelling
9 516 (29.66%) Security Cleared
10 462 (26.55%) SC Cleared
11 455 (26.15%) AWS
12 446 (25.63%) Data Quality
13 427 (24.54%) Databricks
14 414 (23.79%) CI/CD
15 378 (21.72%) Business Intelligence
16 325 (18.68%) Agile
17 311 (17.87%) DevOps
18 300 (17.24%) Power Platform
19 297 (17.07%) Data Warehouse
20 285 (16.38%) Power BI
21 272 (15.63%) PySpark
22 245 (14.08%) Azure Data Factory
23 243 (13.97%) Data Governance
24 235 (13.51%) Problem-Solving
25 226 (12.99%) Microsoft
26 212 (12.18%) Migration
27 200 (11.49%) Data Integration
27 200 (11.49%) Git
28 199 (11.44%) AI
29 184 (10.57%) Data Lake

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
1 166 (9.54%) Apache Spark
2 154 (8.85%) Apache Airflow
3 100 (5.75%) Apache
4 81 (4.66%) SAS
5 35 (2.01%) Confluence
6 12 (0.69%) Palantir Foundry
7 8 (0.46%) Jupyter
8 5 (0.29%) Microsoft Exchange
9 4 (0.23%) SharePoint
10 2 (0.11%) Luigi
11 1 (0.057%) Apache Superset
11 1 (0.057%) Appian
11 1 (0.057%) Camunda
11 1 (0.057%) R Markdown
Applications
1 19 (1.09%) Microsoft Excel
2 7 (0.40%) Notepad++
3 4 (0.23%) Spreadsheet
4 2 (0.11%) Chatbot
5 1 (0.057%) Microsoft Office
Business Applications
1 7 (0.40%) Aladdin
2 3 (0.17%) SimCorp Dimension
3 2 (0.11%) BambooHR
3 2 (0.11%) Dynamics CRM
3 2 (0.11%) SAP BPC
3 2 (0.11%) SAP S/4HANA
4 1 (0.057%) Actimize
4 1 (0.057%) Elite 3E
4 1 (0.057%) Infor LN
4 1 (0.057%) iTrent
4 1 (0.057%) NEC Housing
4 1 (0.057%) Oracle 11i
4 1 (0.057%) Oracle Assets
4 1 (0.057%) Oracle EBS
4 1 (0.057%) Oracle ERP
4 1 (0.057%) Raiser’s Edge
4 1 (0.057%) SAP Business ByDesign
Cloud Services
1 603 (34.66%) Azure
2 455 (26.15%) AWS
3 300 (17.24%) Power Platform
4 245 (14.08%) Azure Data Factory
5 171 (9.83%) Snowflake
6 169 (9.71%) Azure Synapse Analytics
7 155 (8.91%) GCP
8 149 (8.56%) Amazon S3
9 143 (8.22%) dbt
10 137 (7.87%) Azure DevOps
11 118 (6.78%) GitHub
12 106 (6.09%) Serverless
13 84 (4.83%) AWS Lambda
14 52 (2.99%) GitHub Actions
15 36 (2.07%) AWS CloudFormation
16 33 (1.90%) Amazon EMR
17 29 (1.67%) Matillion
18 28 (1.61%) Amazon Kinesis
19 25 (1.44%) OpenShift
20 24 (1.38%) Microsoft Purview
Communications & Networking
1 33 (1.90%) DNS
1 33 (1.90%) VPN
2 32 (1.84%) BGP
2 32 (1.84%) DMZ
2 32 (1.84%) Multicast
3 10 (0.57%) Structured Cabling
4 7 (0.40%) PuTTY
4 7 (0.40%) WinSCP
5 4 (0.23%) Firewall
6 2 (0.11%) Wi-Fi
6 2 (0.11%) Wireless
7 1 (0.057%) 4G
7 1 (0.057%) 5G
7 1 (0.057%) MQTT
7 1 (0.057%) Network Security
7 1 (0.057%) Software-Defined Networking
Database & Business Intelligence
1 297 (17.07%) Data Warehouse
2 285 (16.38%) Power BI
3 184 (10.57%) Data Lake
4 125 (7.18%) SQL Server
5 106 (6.09%) Delta Lake
6 97 (5.57%) Metadata
7 94 (5.40%) BigQuery
8 93 (5.34%) Big Data
9 86 (4.94%) Amazon Redshift
10 85 (4.89%) Pentaho
11 82 (4.71%) Azure SQL Database
12 70 (4.02%) PostgreSQL
13 69 (3.97%) Tableau
14 67 (3.85%) NoSQL
14 67 (3.85%) Snowflake Schema
15 62 (3.56%) SQL Server Integration Services
16 58 (3.33%) Amazon Athena
17 52 (2.99%) Relational Database
18 43 (2.47%) Hadoop
19 38 (2.18%) Star Schema
Development Applications
1 200 (11.49%) Git
2 87 (5.00%) JIRA
3 77 (4.43%) GitLab
4 62 (3.56%) Jenkins
5 19 (1.09%) MLflow
6 4 (0.23%) Bitbucket
7 2 (0.11%) Artifactory
7 2 (0.11%) SonarQube
7 2 (0.11%) Sonatype Nexus
7 2 (0.11%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
7 2 (0.11%) Visual Studio
8 1 (0.057%) ER Studio
8 1 (0.057%) ERwin
8 1 (0.057%) Jaeger
8 1 (0.057%) JUnit
8 1 (0.057%) Poetry
8 1 (0.057%) Postman
8 1 (0.057%) Selenium
8 1 (0.057%) Team Foundation Server
8 1 (0.057%) Terragrunt
General
1 282 (16.21%) Finance
2 256 (14.71%) Social Skills
3 192 (11.03%) Analytical Skills
4 140 (8.05%) Public Sector
5 92 (5.29%) Banking
6 33 (1.90%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 28 (1.61%) Investment Banking
8 22 (1.26%) Documentation Skills
9 21 (1.21%) Telecoms
10 20 (1.15%) Marketing
11 18 (1.03%) Retail
12 16 (0.92%) Manufacturing
13 15 (0.86%) Front Office
14 14 (0.80%) Aerospace
14 14 (0.80%) Pharmaceutical
15 11 (0.63%) Publishing
16 8 (0.46%) Military
17 7 (0.40%) Law
18 6 (0.34%) Local Government
19 5 (0.29%) Legal
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 272 (15.63%) PySpark
2 159 (9.14%) Kafka
3 53 (3.05%) Pandas
4 31 (1.78%) JSON
5 29 (1.67%) REST
6 26 (1.49%) YAML
7 25 (1.44%) Great Expectations
8 22 (1.26%) Spring
8 22 (1.26%) Spring Boot
9 16 (0.92%) Apache Beam
10 14 (0.80%) PyTorch
10 14 (0.80%) scikit-learn
11 13 (0.75%) Apache Avro
11 13 (0.75%) Matplotlib
11 13 (0.75%) XML
12 12 (0.69%) Node.js
12 12 (0.69%) React
13 11 (0.63%) NumPy
14 9 (0.52%) HTML
14 9 (0.52%) RESTful
Miscellaneous
1 122 (7.01%) Cloud Native
2 46 (2.64%) Data Structures
3 45 (2.59%) Legacy Systems
4 30 (1.72%) Product Ownership
5 29 (1.67%) Distributed Systems
6 28 (1.61%) Greenfield Project
7 21 (1.21%) Clustering
8 19 (1.09%) Onboarding
9 18 (1.03%) Reinsurance
10 17 (0.98%) Data Protection Act
11 15 (0.86%) Replication
12 14 (0.80%) NHS
13 13 (0.75%) Self-Motivation
14 12 (0.69%) Distributed Computing
15 11 (0.63%) Public Cloud
16 10 (0.57%) Reference Data
17 9 (0.52%) AI Agents
17 9 (0.52%) Derivative
18 8 (0.46%) Data Centre
18 8 (0.46%) Hybrid Cloud
Operating Systems
1 52 (2.99%) Unix
2 36 (2.07%) Linux
3 4 (0.23%) Windows
4 2 (0.11%) VMS
4 2 (0.11%) Windows Server
5 1 (0.057%) Ubuntu
Processes & Methodologies
1 723 (41.55%) Data Pipeline
2 662 (38.05%) ETL
3 660 (37.93%) Analytics
4 632 (36.32%) Data Engineering
5 595 (34.20%) Data Modelling
6 414 (23.79%) CI/CD
7 378 (21.72%) Business Intelligence
8 325 (18.68%) Agile
9 311 (17.87%) DevOps
10 243 (13.97%) Data Governance
11 235 (13.51%) Problem-Solving
12 212 (12.18%) Migration
13 200 (11.49%) Data Integration
14 199 (11.44%) AI
15 177 (10.17%) Validation
16 174 (10.00%) Data Science
17 142 (8.16%) Decision-Making
18 141 (8.10%) Data Architecture
18 141 (8.10%) Data Transformation
19 133 (7.64%) Machine Learning
Programming Languages
1 943 (54.20%) SQL
2 802 (46.09%) Python
3 116 (6.67%) Java
4 87 (5.00%) Scala
5 43 (2.47%) PL/SQL
5 43 (2.47%) T-SQL
6 38 (2.18%) Data Analysis Expressions
7 36 (2.07%) C#
8 29 (1.67%) Shell Script
9 28 (1.61%) Bash
10 21 (1.21%) Bicep
11 19 (1.09%) R
12 16 (0.92%) JavaScript
12 16 (0.92%) PowerShell
13 8 (0.46%) Go
14 7 (0.40%) TypeScript
15 3 (0.17%) C
16 2 (0.11%) C++
16 2 (0.11%) Perl
16 2 (0.11%) VB
Qualifications
1 516 (29.66%) Security Cleared
2 462 (26.55%) SC Cleared
3 45 (2.59%) Degree
4 36 (2.07%) BPSS Clearance
5 31 (1.78%) Azure Certification
6 17 (0.98%) DV Cleared
7 16 (0.92%) Computer Science Degree
8 9 (0.52%) DBS Check
8 9 (0.52%) Master's Degree
9 8 (0.46%) AWS Certification
10 7 (0.40%) City & Guilds
11 6 (0.34%) Microsoft Certification
11 6 (0.34%) SnowPro
12 5 (0.29%) BICSI Certification
13 3 (0.17%) CISSP
13 3 (0.17%) CTC Cleared
13 3 (0.17%) IBM Certification
14 2 (0.11%) CISM
15 1 (0.057%) CISA
15 1 (0.057%) Cisco Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 446 (25.63%) Data Quality
2 54 (3.10%) QA
3 53 (3.05%) GDPR
4 17 (0.98%) Accessibility
5 9 (0.52%) FATCA
5 9 (0.52%) SLA
6 6 (0.34%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 5 (0.29%) MiFID
7 5 (0.29%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 3 (0.17%) GMP
8 3 (0.17%) HIPAA
8 3 (0.17%) WCAG
9 2 (0.11%) EMIR
9 2 (0.11%) GRC
9 2 (0.11%) SNOMED CT
10 1 (0.057%) California Consumer Privacy Act
10 1 (0.057%) Disclosure Scotland
10 1 (0.057%) Government Security Classifications
10 1 (0.057%) IFRS 17
10 1 (0.057%) ISO 13485
System Software
1 112 (6.44%) Docker
2 5 (0.29%) Virtual Machines
3 2 (0.11%) Active Directory
3 2 (0.11%) HDFS
4 1 (0.057%) RACF
Systems Management
1 178 (10.23%) Terraform
2 98 (5.63%) Kubernetes
3 54 (3.10%) Grafana
4 14 (0.80%) Prometheus
5 13 (0.75%) Ansible
6 10 (0.57%) Kibana
7 3 (0.17%) logstash
7 3 (0.17%) Rancher
8 2 (0.11%) Apache Ranger
8 2 (0.11%) Kubeflow
8 2 (0.11%) Thomson Reuters DACS
9 1 (0.057%) Control-M
9 1 (0.057%) Fluentd
9 1 (0.057%) NetBackup
9 1 (0.057%) Puppet
9 1 (0.057%) QRadar
Vendors
1 427 (24.54%) Databricks
2 226 (12.99%) Microsoft
3 146 (8.39%) Oracle
4 115 (6.61%) Informatica
4 115 (6.61%) Talend
5 69 (3.97%) Denodo
6 62 (3.56%) Google
7 35 (2.01%) Cisco
8 34 (1.95%) F5
9 26 (1.49%) SAP
9 26 (1.49%) Splunk
10 22 (1.26%) ServiceNow
11 17 (0.98%) Cloudera
12 15 (0.86%) Foundry
12 15 (0.86%) IBM
13 14 (0.80%) Alteryx
14 13 (0.75%) Palantir
15 9 (0.52%) Dynatrace
16 8 (0.46%) InterSystems
16 8 (0.46%) MuleSoft