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 24 August 2026.

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

6 months to
24 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 68 127 98
Rank change year-on-year +59 -29 +23
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 1,912 731 906
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 3.56% 2.22% 2.33%
As % of the Job Titles category 3.86% 2.43% 2.51%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,271 518 656
10th Percentile £375 £375 £263
25th Percentile £425 £425 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year - -4.76% -4.55%
75th Percentile £588 £585 £625
90th Percentile £656 £689 £688
UK excluding London median daily rate £470 £475 £480
% change year-on-year -1.07% -1.04% -8.57%
Number of hourly rates quoted 86 14 24
10th Percentile £20.30 £25.42 £31.25
25th Percentile £30.96 £37.00 £49.25
Median hourly rate £44.75 £52.50 £75.00
Median % change year-on-year -14.76% -30.00% +5.26%
75th Percentile £70.00 £74.65 £80.00
90th Percentile £75.00 £85.25 -
UK excluding London median hourly rate £44.75 £52.85 £80.00
% change year-on-year -15.33% -33.94% +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 49,592 30,105 36,124
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.46% 91.25% 93.00%
Number of daily rates quoted 29,685 19,016 22,990
10th Percentile £325 £280 £300
25th Percentile £425 £400 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -1.87%
75th Percentile £625 £623 £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 3,534 1,573 1,935
10th Percentile £15.00 £13.69 £14.16
25th Percentile £20.67 £17.30 £19.59
Median hourly rate £42.13 £25.15 £43.00
Median % change year-on-year +67.50% -41.51% -1.71%
75th Percentile £67.84 £53.99 £65.00
90th Percentile £80.00 £71.49 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £42.50 £25.15 £43.00
% change year-on-year +68.99% -41.51% +7.50%

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 24 August 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 24 August 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 24 August 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 +66 1,700 £500 - 309
UK excluding London +89 888 £470 -1.07% 265
London +33 830 £525 - 122
Work from Home +43 568 £500 +5.26% 110
Midlands +71 375 £460 -0.38% 37
West Midlands +62 315 £463 -3.65% 27
North of England +30 221 £480 +1.05% 80
South East +27 129 £464 +3.06% 94
North West +33 127 £525 +10.53% 30
South West +2 89 £525 +5.00% 26
Yorkshire -3 74 £465 -4.62% 23
East Midlands +27 60 £450 +1.98% 10
Scotland +10 59 £450 +4.41% 11
East of England +8 40 £475 +5.56% 12
North East -25 21 £515 +21.89% 28
Wales -3 16 £500 +12.36% 8
Northern Ireland +4 3 £410 -18.00% 1

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

For the 6 months to 24 August 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.

1 946 (49.48%) SQL
2 807 (42.21%) Data Pipeline
3 796 (41.63%) Python
4 710 (37.13%) Data Engineering
5 669 (34.99%) Analytics
6 656 (34.31%) ETL
7 630 (32.95%) Data Modelling
8 595 (31.12%) Azure
9 557 (29.13%) AWS
10 502 (26.26%) Security Cleared
11 471 (24.63%) Data Quality
12 441 (23.06%) CI/CD
13 439 (22.96%) SC Cleared
14 388 (20.29%) Databricks
15 333 (17.42%) Agile
15 333 (17.42%) Business Intelligence
16 320 (16.74%) Data Warehouse
17 308 (16.11%) DevOps
18 298 (15.59%) Migration
19 264 (13.81%) Power Platform
19 264 (13.81%) PySpark
20 259 (13.55%) AI
21 258 (13.49%) Power BI
22 257 (13.44%) Data Governance
23 240 (12.55%) Microsoft
24 233 (12.19%) Validation
25 232 (12.13%) Data Integration
26 219 (11.45%) Data Transformation
27 217 (11.35%) Azure Data Factory
27 217 (11.35%) 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
1 195 (10.20%) Apache Airflow
2 151 (7.90%) Apache Spark
3 120 (6.28%) Apache
4 72 (3.77%) SAS
5 45 (2.35%) Confluence
6 15 (0.78%) Palantir Foundry
7 13 (0.68%) SharePoint
8 9 (0.47%) Jupyter
9 3 (0.16%) Apache Superset
10 2 (0.10%) ArcGIS
10 2 (0.10%) Microsoft Exchange
10 2 (0.10%) PowerExchange
11 1 (0.052%) Liferay
11 1 (0.052%) Luigi
11 1 (0.052%) R Markdown
Applications
1 24 (1.26%) Microsoft Excel
2 7 (0.37%) Notepad++
3 6 (0.31%) Spreadsheet
4 4 (0.21%) Chatbot
5 1 (0.052%) Microsoft PowerPoint
Business Applications
1 13 (0.68%) Aladdin
2 6 (0.31%) Dynamics CRM
3 5 (0.26%) Infor LN
3 5 (0.26%) NetSuite
3 5 (0.26%) Sage X3
4 4 (0.21%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
5 3 (0.16%) SAP S/4HANA
5 3 (0.16%) SimCorp Dimension
6 2 (0.10%) BambooHR
6 2 (0.10%) Maximo
6 2 (0.10%) Oracle EBS
7 1 (0.052%) FIS Private Capital Suite
7 1 (0.052%) MIS ActiveH
7 1 (0.052%) Oracle 11i
7 1 (0.052%) Oracle Assets
7 1 (0.052%) Oracle ERP
7 1 (0.052%) Raiser’s Edge
7 1 (0.052%) SAP BPC
7 1 (0.052%) SAP CAR
7 1 (0.052%) SAP EWM
Cloud Services
1 595 (31.12%) Azure
2 557 (29.13%) AWS
3 264 (13.81%) Power Platform
4 217 (11.35%) Azure Data Factory
4 217 (11.35%) Snowflake
5 202 (10.56%) dbt
6 174 (9.10%) GCP
7 161 (8.42%) Amazon S3
8 133 (6.96%) Azure Synapse Analytics
9 131 (6.85%) Azure DevOps
10 117 (6.12%) Serverless
11 109 (5.70%) GitHub
12 105 (5.49%) AWS Lambda
13 50 (2.62%) Amazon EMR
14 42 (2.20%) GitHub Actions
15 34 (1.78%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 25 (1.31%) Amazon Kinesis
16 25 (1.31%) AWS Step Functions
17 23 (1.20%) AWS CloudFormation
17 23 (1.20%) Fivetran
Communications & Networking
1 32 (1.67%) VPN
2 31 (1.62%) BGP
2 31 (1.62%) DMZ
2 31 (1.62%) DNS
2 31 (1.62%) Multicast
3 10 (0.52%) Structured Cabling
4 9 (0.47%) Firewall
5 7 (0.37%) PuTTY
5 7 (0.37%) WinSCP
6 5 (0.26%) Intrusion Detection
7 4 (0.21%) Wi-Fi
7 4 (0.21%) Wireless
8 1 (0.052%) LTE
8 1 (0.052%) MQTT
Database & Business Intelligence
1 320 (16.74%) Data Warehouse
2 258 (13.49%) Power BI
3 168 (8.79%) Data Lake
4 119 (6.22%) Metadata
5 103 (5.39%) Amazon Redshift
6 102 (5.33%) BigQuery
7 87 (4.55%) SQL Server
8 85 (4.45%) Delta Lake
9 82 (4.29%) Big Data
10 77 (4.03%) Amazon Athena
10 77 (4.03%) Pentaho
11 66 (3.45%) PostgreSQL
11 66 (3.45%) Tableau
12 63 (3.29%) Relational Database
13 59 (3.09%) Snowflake Schema
14 53 (2.77%) Azure SQL Database
15 52 (2.72%) NoSQL
16 46 (2.41%) SQL Server Integration Services
17 37 (1.94%) Star Schema
18 36 (1.88%) Amazon RDS
Development Applications
1 166 (8.68%) Git
2 98 (5.13%) GitLab
3 73 (3.82%) JIRA
4 41 (2.14%) Jenkins
5 15 (0.78%) MLflow
6 9 (0.47%) Artifactory
7 7 (0.37%) Bitbucket
7 7 (0.37%) Postman
8 4 (0.21%) ERwin
8 4 (0.21%) SonarQube
9 3 (0.16%) Atlassian Bamboo
9 3 (0.16%) Claude Code
9 3 (0.16%) Newman
9 3 (0.16%) Selenium
9 3 (0.16%) Sonatype Nexus
10 2 (0.10%) ER Studio
10 2 (0.10%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
10 2 (0.10%) Terragrunt
10 2 (0.10%) Yeoman
11 1 (0.052%) Octopus Deploy
General
1 304 (15.90%) Finance
2 302 (15.79%) Social Skills
3 214 (11.19%) Analytical Skills
4 165 (8.63%) Public Sector
5 113 (5.91%) Banking
6 33 (1.73%) Inclusion and Diversity
6 33 (1.73%) Marketing
7 25 (1.31%) Telecoms
8 24 (1.26%) Retail
9 23 (1.20%) Investment Banking
10 22 (1.15%) Documentation Skills
11 21 (1.10%) Aerospace
12 20 (1.05%) Front Office
13 19 (0.99%) Automotive
13 19 (0.99%) Manufacturing
14 15 (0.78%) Pharmaceutical
15 14 (0.73%) Law
16 10 (0.52%) Financial Institution
16 10 (0.52%) Legal
16 10 (0.52%) Police
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 264 (13.81%) PySpark
2 178 (9.31%) Terraform
3 140 (7.32%) Kafka
4 33 (1.73%) Pandas
5 30 (1.57%) JSON
6 28 (1.46%) REST
7 23 (1.20%) Spring
7 23 (1.20%) Spring Boot
8 21 (1.10%) Great Expectations
9 19 (0.99%) XML
10 17 (0.89%) Apache Beam
11 15 (0.78%) React
12 14 (0.73%) RESTful
12 14 (0.73%) YAML
13 11 (0.58%) Streamlit
14 10 (0.52%) LangChain
14 10 (0.52%) Microsoft Graph
14 10 (0.52%) pytest
15 9 (0.47%) Apache Avro
15 9 (0.47%) PyTorch
Miscellaneous
1 140 (7.32%) Cloud Native
2 76 (3.97%) Legacy Systems
3 59 (3.09%) Data Structures
4 39 (2.04%) Onboarding
5 25 (1.31%) Distributed Systems
5 25 (1.31%) Product Ownership
6 23 (1.20%) Greenfield Project
7 22 (1.15%) Reference Data
8 21 (1.10%) NHS
9 17 (0.89%) Reinsurance
10 16 (0.84%) Management Information System
11 15 (0.78%) AI Agents
12 14 (0.73%) Data Protection Act
13 12 (0.63%) Algorithms
13 12 (0.63%) Clustering
14 11 (0.58%) Virtual Team
15 10 (0.52%) Enterprise Software
15 10 (0.52%) Life Science
15 10 (0.52%) Linux Command Line
15 10 (0.52%) Replication
Operating Systems
1 68 (3.56%) Unix
2 49 (2.56%) Linux
3 4 (0.21%) Windows
4 2 (0.10%) Ubuntu
4 2 (0.10%) Windows Server
5 1 (0.052%) Robot Operating System
5 1 (0.052%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 807 (42.21%) Data Pipeline
2 710 (37.13%) Data Engineering
3 669 (34.99%) Analytics
4 656 (34.31%) ETL
5 630 (32.95%) Data Modelling
6 441 (23.06%) CI/CD
7 333 (17.42%) Agile
7 333 (17.42%) Business Intelligence
8 308 (16.11%) DevOps
9 298 (15.59%) Migration
10 259 (13.55%) AI
11 257 (13.44%) Data Governance
12 233 (12.19%) Validation
13 232 (12.13%) Data Integration
14 219 (11.45%) Data Transformation
15 210 (10.98%) Problem-Solving
16 177 (9.26%) Decision-Making
17 166 (8.68%) Data Science
18 165 (8.63%) Machine Learning
19 147 (7.69%) Infrastructure as Code
Programming Languages
1 946 (49.48%) SQL
2 796 (41.63%) Python
3 115 (6.01%) Java
4 65 (3.40%) Scala
5 57 (2.98%) PL/SQL
6 36 (1.88%) Shell Script
7 33 (1.73%) T-SQL
8 28 (1.46%) Data Analysis Expressions
9 22 (1.15%) Bash
10 21 (1.10%) PowerShell
11 20 (1.05%) JavaScript
12 14 (0.73%) C#
13 13 (0.68%) R
14 9 (0.47%) Bicep
15 6 (0.31%) Go
16 5 (0.26%) TypeScript
17 4 (0.21%) Korn
18 3 (0.16%) COBOL
19 2 (0.10%) Perl
19 2 (0.10%) SPARQL
Qualifications
1 502 (26.26%) Security Cleared
2 439 (22.96%) SC Cleared
3 43 (2.25%) BPSS Clearance
4 41 (2.14%) Degree
5 21 (1.10%) Azure Certification
5 21 (1.10%) Computer Science Degree
5 21 (1.10%) DV Cleared
6 13 (0.68%) AWS Certification
7 10 (0.52%) SnowPro
8 9 (0.47%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
8 9 (0.47%) City & Guilds
9 8 (0.42%) DBS Check
10 6 (0.31%) CISM
10 6 (0.31%) CISSP
10 6 (0.31%) Master's Degree
11 5 (0.26%) BICSI Certification
11 5 (0.26%) CEH
12 4 (0.21%) Microsoft Certification
13 1 (0.052%) PMI Certification
13 1 (0.052%) PMP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 471 (24.63%) Data Quality
2 62 (3.24%) QA
3 45 (2.35%) GDPR
4 16 (0.84%) Accessibility
5 11 (0.58%) SLA
6 7 (0.37%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 6 (0.31%) FATCA
7 6 (0.31%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 5 (0.26%) HIPAA
9 3 (0.16%) Disclosure Scotland
9 3 (0.16%) MiFID
10 2 (0.10%) EMIR
10 2 (0.10%) SNOMED CT
10 2 (0.10%) WCAG
11 1 (0.052%) California Consumer Privacy Act
11 1 (0.052%) IFRS
11 1 (0.052%) IFRS 17
11 1 (0.052%) IFRS 9
11 1 (0.052%) PCI DSS
11 1 (0.052%) PMO
System Software
1 113 (5.91%) Docker
2 4 (0.21%) Virtual Machines
3 2 (0.10%) Active Directory
3 2 (0.10%) HDFS
4 1 (0.052%) RACF
Systems Management
1 87 (4.55%) Kubernetes
2 47 (2.46%) Grafana
3 16 (0.84%) Ansible
4 12 (0.63%) Control-M
5 9 (0.47%) Kibana
6 4 (0.21%) Prometheus
7 2 (0.10%) Apache Ranger
7 2 (0.10%) Puppet
7 2 (0.10%) Thomson Reuters DACS
8 1 (0.052%) Kubeflow
8 1 (0.052%) logstash
8 1 (0.052%) Rancher
Vendors
1 388 (20.29%) Databricks
2 240 (12.55%) Microsoft
3 158 (8.26%) Oracle
4 122 (6.38%) Informatica
5 104 (5.44%) Talend
6 68 (3.56%) Google
7 63 (3.29%) Denodo
8 33 (1.73%) Salesforce
9 32 (1.67%) Cisco
9 32 (1.67%) F5
10 27 (1.41%) SAP
11 25 (1.31%) Palantir
12 20 (1.05%) Foundry
13 15 (0.78%) Splunk
14 14 (0.73%) Cloudera
15 13 (0.68%) ServiceNow
16 12 (0.63%) IBM
17 9 (0.47%) Bloomberg
17 9 (0.47%) Sage
18 8 (0.42%) InterSystems