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 25 May 2026.

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

6 months to
25 May 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 60 89 101
Rank change year-on-year +29 +12 +13
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 1,753 805 938
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 3.62% 2.80% 2.20%
As % of the Job Titles category 3.92% 3.03% 2.37%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,220 607 723
10th Percentile £375 £356 £199
25th Percentile £420 £425 £408
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £500
Median % change year-on-year - - -9.09%
75th Percentile £583 £588 £594
90th Percentile £651 £700 £675
UK excluding London median daily rate £469 £463 £450
% change year-on-year +1.41% +2.78% -14.29%
Number of hourly rates quoted 59 10 45
10th Percentile £19.34 £18.18 £31.25
25th Percentile £41.26 £51.25 £49.25
Median hourly rate £52.50 £63.75 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year -17.65% -1.92% -13.91%
75th Percentile £71.50 £79.68 £80.00
90th Percentile £75.80 £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 44,687 26,578 39,544
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.30% 92.29% 92.82%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,302 17,300 25,745
10th Percentile £325 £289 £280
25th Percentile £413 £405 £410
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £508 £525
Median % change year-on-year +0.99% -3.33% -2.78%
75th Percentile £618 £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 2,943 1,012 2,737
10th Percentile £15.00 £14.00 £12.82
25th Percentile £20.35 £18.13 £16.30
Median hourly rate £42.50 £27.97 £36.50
Median % change year-on-year +51.98% -23.38% -18.89%
75th Percentile £66.13 £60.00 £61.30
90th Percentile £78.75 £75.00 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £43.69 £26.34 £40.00
% change year-on-year +65.90% -34.16% -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 25 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 25 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 25 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 +29 1,540 £500 - 284
London +29 847 £525 - 98
UK excluding London +40 713 £469 +1.41% 251
Work from Home +25 509 £500 - 153
Midlands +42 294 £469 +3.08% 38
West Midlands +36 276 £469 +1.85% 28
North of England -1 198 £465 -0.80% 74
North West +3 125 £480 +1.05% 25
South East -3 95 £500 +14.29% 71
South West +4 72 £500 - 32
Yorkshire -28 56 £465 +3.33% 29
Scotland +14 55 £428 -5.00% 11
Wales +6 21 £463 +124.17% 16
East of England -26 19 £520 +63.52% 3
East Midlands -19 18 £525 +26.51% 10
North East -20 17 £450 -5.26% 21
Northern Ireland +4 3 £410 -18.00% 6

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

For the 6 months to 25 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.

1 949 (54.14%) SQL
2 808 (46.09%) Python
3 726 (41.41%) Data Pipeline
4 666 (37.99%) ETL
5 657 (37.48%) Analytics
6 637 (36.34%) Data Engineering
7 598 (34.11%) Azure
8 589 (33.60%) Data Modelling
9 519 (29.61%) Security Cleared
10 468 (26.70%) AWS
11 462 (26.35%) SC Cleared
12 443 (25.27%) Data Quality
13 422 (24.07%) Databricks
14 413 (23.56%) CI/CD
15 373 (21.28%) Business Intelligence
16 315 (17.97%) Agile
17 308 (17.57%) DevOps
18 301 (17.17%) Power Platform
19 290 (16.54%) Data Warehouse
20 285 (16.26%) Power BI
21 271 (15.46%) PySpark
22 246 (14.03%) Data Governance
23 245 (13.98%) Azure Data Factory
24 231 (13.18%) Problem-Solving
25 226 (12.89%) Microsoft
26 219 (12.49%) Migration
27 204 (11.64%) AI
28 194 (11.07%) Data Integration
29 192 (10.95%) Git
30 187 (10.67%) 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 (9.47%) Apache Airflow
2 161 (9.18%) Apache Spark
3 107 (6.10%) Apache
4 80 (4.56%) SAS
5 37 (2.11%) Confluence
6 12 (0.68%) Palantir Foundry
7 9 (0.51%) 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 (1.08%) 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%) Infor LN
3 2 (0.11%) Oracle EBS
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%) iTrent
4 1 (0.057%) NEC Housing
4 1 (0.057%) Oracle 11i
4 1 (0.057%) Oracle Assets
4 1 (0.057%) Oracle ERP
4 1 (0.057%) Raiser’s Edge
4 1 (0.057%) SAP Business ByDesign
Cloud Services
1 598 (34.11%) Azure
2 468 (26.70%) AWS
3 301 (17.17%) Power Platform
4 245 (13.98%) Azure Data Factory
5 171 (9.75%) Snowflake
6 167 (9.53%) Azure Synapse Analytics
7 157 (8.96%) Amazon S3
8 150 (8.56%) GCP
9 145 (8.27%) dbt
10 138 (7.87%) Azure DevOps
11 118 (6.73%) GitHub
12 110 (6.27%) Serverless
13 89 (5.08%) AWS Lambda
14 54 (3.08%) GitHub Actions
15 37 (2.11%) Amazon EMR
16 36 (2.05%) AWS CloudFormation
17 29 (1.65%) Amazon Kinesis
17 29 (1.65%) Matillion
18 25 (1.43%) OpenShift
19 23 (1.31%) Amazon CloudWatch
Communications & Networking
1 33 (1.88%) DNS
1 33 (1.88%) VPN
2 32 (1.83%) BGP
2 32 (1.83%) DMZ
2 32 (1.83%) Multicast
3 10 (0.57%) Structured Cabling
4 7 (0.40%) PuTTY
4 7 (0.40%) WinSCP
5 4 (0.23%) Firewall
5 4 (0.23%) Wi-Fi
5 4 (0.23%) Wireless
6 1 (0.057%) 4G
6 1 (0.057%) 5G
6 1 (0.057%) MQTT
6 1 (0.057%) Network Security
6 1 (0.057%) Software-Defined Networking
Database & Business Intelligence
1 290 (16.54%) Data Warehouse
2 285 (16.26%) Power BI
3 187 (10.67%) Data Lake
4 129 (7.36%) SQL Server
5 109 (6.22%) Delta Lake
6 97 (5.53%) Metadata
7 90 (5.13%) BigQuery
8 89 (5.08%) Big Data
9 85 (4.85%) Amazon Redshift
10 80 (4.56%) Pentaho
11 79 (4.51%) Azure SQL Database
12 71 (4.05%) Snowflake Schema
13 70 (3.99%) PostgreSQL
14 69 (3.94%) Tableau
15 63 (3.59%) NoSQL
15 63 (3.59%) SQL Server Integration Services
16 62 (3.54%) Amazon Athena
17 52 (2.97%) Relational Database
18 40 (2.28%) Hadoop
19 37 (2.11%) Star Schema
Development Applications
1 192 (10.95%) Git
2 84 (4.79%) JIRA
3 83 (4.73%) GitLab
4 52 (2.97%) Jenkins
5 15 (0.86%) MLflow
6 5 (0.29%) Artifactory
7 4 (0.23%) Bitbucket
7 4 (0.23%) Postman
8 3 (0.17%) Newman
9 2 (0.11%) SonarQube
9 2 (0.11%) Sonatype Nexus
9 2 (0.11%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
9 2 (0.11%) Visual Studio
10 1 (0.057%) ER Studio
10 1 (0.057%) ERwin
10 1 (0.057%) Jaeger
10 1 (0.057%) JUnit
10 1 (0.057%) Selenium
10 1 (0.057%) Terragrunt
General
1 284 (16.20%) Finance
2 261 (14.89%) Social Skills
3 193 (11.01%) Analytical Skills
4 136 (7.76%) Public Sector
5 93 (5.31%) Banking
6 31 (1.77%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 27 (1.54%) Investment Banking
8 24 (1.37%) Documentation Skills
9 22 (1.25%) Retail
10 20 (1.14%) Marketing
10 20 (1.14%) Telecoms
11 16 (0.91%) Manufacturing
12 15 (0.86%) Front Office
12 15 (0.86%) Pharmaceutical
13 14 (0.80%) Aerospace
14 11 (0.63%) Publishing
15 7 (0.40%) Law
15 7 (0.40%) Military
16 6 (0.34%) Local Government
17 5 (0.29%) Games
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 271 (15.46%) PySpark
2 159 (9.07%) Kafka
3 55 (3.14%) Pandas
4 33 (1.88%) JSON
5 29 (1.65%) REST
6 27 (1.54%) Great Expectations
7 24 (1.37%) YAML
8 22 (1.25%) Spring
8 22 (1.25%) Spring Boot
9 17 (0.97%) Apache Beam
10 16 (0.91%) XML
11 13 (0.74%) Apache Avro
11 13 (0.74%) Matplotlib
11 13 (0.74%) PyTorch
11 13 (0.74%) scikit-learn
12 12 (0.68%) React
13 10 (0.57%) Node.js
13 10 (0.57%) pytest
14 9 (0.51%) HTML
14 9 (0.51%) NumPy
Miscellaneous
1 128 (7.30%) Cloud Native
2 48 (2.74%) Data Structures
3 46 (2.62%) Legacy Systems
4 31 (1.77%) Product Ownership
5 30 (1.71%) Greenfield Project
6 26 (1.48%) Distributed Systems
7 22 (1.25%) Onboarding
8 21 (1.20%) Clustering
8 21 (1.20%) Reinsurance
9 17 (0.97%) Data Protection Act
10 15 (0.86%) NHS
11 13 (0.74%) Replication
12 12 (0.68%) Distributed Computing
12 12 (0.68%) Self-Motivation
13 10 (0.57%) Life Science
13 10 (0.57%) Public Cloud
13 10 (0.57%) Reference Data
14 9 (0.51%) Derivative
14 9 (0.51%) Driving Licence
14 9 (0.51%) Linux Command Line
Operating Systems
1 58 (3.31%) Unix
2 38 (2.17%) Linux
3 5 (0.29%) Windows
4 2 (0.11%) Ubuntu
4 2 (0.11%) VMS
4 2 (0.11%) Windows Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 726 (41.41%) Data Pipeline
2 666 (37.99%) ETL
3 657 (37.48%) Analytics
4 637 (36.34%) Data Engineering
5 589 (33.60%) Data Modelling
6 413 (23.56%) CI/CD
7 373 (21.28%) Business Intelligence
8 315 (17.97%) Agile
9 308 (17.57%) DevOps
10 246 (14.03%) Data Governance
11 231 (13.18%) Problem-Solving
12 219 (12.49%) Migration
13 204 (11.64%) AI
14 194 (11.07%) Data Integration
15 186 (10.61%) Validation
16 171 (9.75%) Data Science
17 144 (8.21%) Decision-Making
18 141 (8.04%) Data Transformation
19 136 (7.76%) Data Architecture
19 136 (7.76%) Infrastructure as Code
Programming Languages
1 949 (54.14%) SQL
2 808 (46.09%) Python
3 119 (6.79%) Java
4 85 (4.85%) Scala
5 47 (2.68%) PL/SQL
6 42 (2.40%) T-SQL
7 38 (2.17%) Data Analysis Expressions
8 36 (2.05%) C#
9 30 (1.71%) Shell Script
10 27 (1.54%) Bash
11 21 (1.20%) Bicep
12 18 (1.03%) PowerShell
13 16 (0.91%) R
14 15 (0.86%) JavaScript
15 8 (0.46%) Go
16 7 (0.40%) TypeScript
17 3 (0.17%) C
18 2 (0.11%) C++
18 2 (0.11%) Perl
18 2 (0.11%) Ruby
Qualifications
1 519 (29.61%) Security Cleared
2 462 (26.35%) SC Cleared
3 46 (2.62%) Degree
4 37 (2.11%) BPSS Clearance
5 29 (1.65%) Azure Certification
6 17 (0.97%) Computer Science Degree
7 16 (0.91%) DV Cleared
8 12 (0.68%) DBS Check
9 9 (0.51%) City & Guilds
9 9 (0.51%) Master's Degree
10 8 (0.46%) AWS Certification
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%) IBM Certification
14 2 (0.11%) CISM
14 2 (0.11%) CTC Cleared
15 1 (0.057%) Numerate Degree
15 1 (0.057%) Tableau Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 443 (25.27%) Data Quality
2 57 (3.25%) QA
3 52 (2.97%) GDPR
4 17 (0.97%) Accessibility
5 10 (0.57%) SLA
6 9 (0.51%) FATCA
7 6 (0.34%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 5 (0.29%) MiFID
8 5 (0.29%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 3 (0.17%) GMP
9 3 (0.17%) WCAG
10 2 (0.11%) EMIR
10 2 (0.11%) GRC
10 2 (0.11%) HIPAA
10 2 (0.11%) SNOMED CT
11 1 (0.057%) Basel III
11 1 (0.057%) California Consumer Privacy Act
11 1 (0.057%) Disclosure Scotland
11 1 (0.057%) IFRS 17
11 1 (0.057%) ISO 13485
System Software
1 105 (5.99%) Docker
2 6 (0.34%) Virtual Machines
3 2 (0.11%) Active Directory
3 2 (0.11%) HDFS
4 1 (0.057%) RACF
Systems Management
1 181 (10.33%) Terraform
2 88 (5.02%) Kubernetes
3 54 (3.08%) Grafana
4 14 (0.80%) Prometheus
5 13 (0.74%) 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%) Control-M
8 2 (0.11%) Thomson Reuters DACS
9 1 (0.057%) Fluentd
9 1 (0.057%) Kubeflow
9 1 (0.057%) NetBackup
9 1 (0.057%) Puppet
9 1 (0.057%) QRadar
Vendors
1 422 (24.07%) Databricks
2 226 (12.89%) Microsoft
3 147 (8.39%) Oracle
4 117 (6.67%) Informatica
5 115 (6.56%) Talend
6 67 (3.82%) Denodo
7 59 (3.37%) Google
8 35 (2.00%) Cisco
9 34 (1.94%) F5
10 26 (1.48%) SAP
10 26 (1.48%) Splunk
11 21 (1.20%) ServiceNow
12 16 (0.91%) Cloudera
13 15 (0.86%) Alteryx
13 15 (0.86%) Foundry
13 15 (0.86%) IBM
14 13 (0.74%) Palantir
15 9 (0.51%) Dynatrace
16 8 (0.46%) InterSystems
16 8 (0.46%) MuleSoft