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 3 August 2026.

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

6 months to
3 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 64 125 93
Rank change year-on-year +61 -32 +27
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 1,975 731 933
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 3.72% 2.21% 2.39%
As % of the Job Titles category 4.01% 2.41% 2.57%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,336 518 694
10th Percentile £375 £369 £241
25th Percentile £425 £425 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £514
Median % change year-on-year - -2.68% -6.59%
75th Percentile £585 £588 £625
90th Percentile £659 £695 £688
UK excluding London median daily rate £470 £475 £450
% change year-on-year -1.08% +5.56% -14.29%
Number of hourly rates quoted 89 11 31
10th Percentile £20.87 £18.22 £31.25
25th Percentile £34.01 £34.13 £49.25
Median hourly rate £50.00 £52.50 £75.00
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% -30.00% +5.26%
75th Percentile £70.00 £70.60 £80.00
90th Percentile £75.00 £80.00 -
UK excluding London median hourly rate £45.00 £27.00 £80.00
% change year-on-year +66.67% -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 49,223 30,273 36,284
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.63% 91.43% 92.95%
Number of daily rates quoted 29,638 19,224 23,532
10th Percentile £331 £281 £300
25th Percentile £425 £400 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -2.33%
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 3,407 1,497 2,061
10th Percentile £15.25 £13.63 £14.16
25th Percentile £21.25 £17.30 £20.12
Median hourly rate £42.50 £25.15 £43.00
Median % change year-on-year +68.99% -41.51% +0.58%
75th Percentile £67.84 £53.99 £65.00
90th Percentile £80.00 £72.95 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £44.50 £25.15 £43.90
% change year-on-year +76.94% -42.71% +11.00%

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 3 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 3 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 3 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 +63 1,750 £500 - 490
UK excluding London +94 918 £470 -1.08% 330
London +45 856 £525 - 231
Work from Home +47 594 £500 +5.26% 200
Midlands +66 391 £463 +2.78% 47
West Midlands +60 338 £460 - 31
North of England +30 231 £475 - 98
North West +22 135 £525 +10.53% 44
South East +14 128 £469 +10.35% 101
South West +14 87 £525 +7.69% 40
Yorkshire -7 74 £475 - 27
Scotland +36 68 £428 -0.12% 10
East Midlands +18 53 £475 +13.10% 16
East of England +10 36 £520 +63.52% 15
North East -21 23 £515 +21.18% 28
Wales -1 17 £488 +9.55% 11
Northern Ireland +4 3 £410 -18.00% 11

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

For the 6 months to 3 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 1,011 (51.19%) SQL
2 850 (43.04%) Python
3 838 (42.43%) Data Pipeline
4 727 (36.81%) Data Engineering
5 704 (35.65%) Analytics
6 684 (34.63%) ETL
7 656 (33.22%) Data Modelling
8 619 (31.34%) Azure
9 564 (28.56%) AWS
10 526 (26.63%) Security Cleared
11 485 (24.56%) Data Quality
12 461 (23.34%) CI/CD
13 459 (23.24%) SC Cleared
14 387 (19.59%) Databricks
15 357 (18.08%) Business Intelligence
16 354 (17.92%) Agile
17 325 (16.46%) Data Warehouse
18 320 (16.20%) DevOps
19 309 (15.65%) Migration
20 281 (14.23%) Power Platform
21 270 (13.67%) PySpark
22 268 (13.57%) Data Governance
23 267 (13.52%) Power BI
24 246 (12.46%) Microsoft
25 240 (12.15%) Azure Data Factory
26 239 (12.10%) AI
27 233 (11.80%) Data Integration
28 232 (11.75%) Validation
29 231 (11.70%) Problem-Solving
30 212 (10.73%) 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
1 186 (9.42%) Apache Airflow
2 151 (7.65%) Apache Spark
3 122 (6.18%) Apache
4 87 (4.41%) SAS
5 50 (2.53%) Confluence
6 14 (0.71%) Palantir Foundry
7 12 (0.61%) SharePoint
8 10 (0.51%) Jupyter
9 2 (0.10%) Apache Superset
9 2 (0.10%) ArcGIS
9 2 (0.10%) Microsoft Exchange
10 1 (0.051%) Liferay
10 1 (0.051%) Luigi
10 1 (0.051%) R Markdown
Applications
1 22 (1.11%) Microsoft Excel
2 7 (0.35%) Notepad++
3 5 (0.25%) Spreadsheet
4 3 (0.15%) Chatbot
5 1 (0.051%) Microsoft PowerPoint
Business Applications
1 13 (0.66%) Aladdin
2 8 (0.41%) Dynamics CRM
3 5 (0.25%) Infor LN
3 5 (0.25%) NetSuite
3 5 (0.25%) 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
5 2 (0.10%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
6 1 (0.051%) FIS Private Capital Suite
6 1 (0.051%) MIS ActiveH
6 1 (0.051%) NEC Housing
6 1 (0.051%) Oracle 11i
6 1 (0.051%) Oracle Assets
6 1 (0.051%) Oracle ERP
6 1 (0.051%) SAP Business ByDesign
6 1 (0.051%) SAP EWM
Cloud Services
1 619 (31.34%) Azure
2 564 (28.56%) AWS
3 281 (14.23%) Power Platform
4 240 (12.15%) Azure Data Factory
5 212 (10.73%) Snowflake
6 204 (10.33%) dbt
7 179 (9.06%) GCP
8 166 (8.41%) Amazon S3
9 148 (7.49%) Azure Synapse Analytics
10 138 (6.99%) Azure DevOps
11 117 (5.92%) Serverless
12 111 (5.62%) GitHub
13 98 (4.96%) AWS Lambda
14 54 (2.73%) Amazon EMR
15 47 (2.38%) GitHub Actions
16 35 (1.77%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 29 (1.47%) Amazon Kinesis
18 26 (1.32%) AWS Step Functions
19 25 (1.27%) AWS CloudFormation
19 25 (1.27%) Matillion
Communications & Networking
1 31 (1.57%) DNS
1 31 (1.57%) VPN
2 30 (1.52%) BGP
2 30 (1.52%) DMZ
2 30 (1.52%) Multicast
3 9 (0.46%) Firewall
3 9 (0.46%) Structured Cabling
4 7 (0.35%) PuTTY
4 7 (0.35%) WinSCP
5 5 (0.25%) Intrusion Detection
6 4 (0.20%) Wi-Fi
6 4 (0.20%) Wireless
7 1 (0.051%) 4G
7 1 (0.051%) 5G
7 1 (0.051%) MQTT
Database & Business Intelligence
1 325 (16.46%) Data Warehouse
2 267 (13.52%) Power BI
3 175 (8.86%) Data Lake
4 110 (5.57%) Metadata
5 103 (5.22%) Amazon Redshift
6 102 (5.16%) BigQuery
7 94 (4.76%) Delta Lake
7 94 (4.76%) SQL Server
8 91 (4.61%) Pentaho
9 83 (4.20%) Big Data
10 73 (3.70%) Amazon Athena
11 70 (3.54%) Tableau
12 67 (3.39%) Snowflake Schema
13 65 (3.29%) PostgreSQL
14 58 (2.94%) Relational Database
15 54 (2.73%) Azure SQL Database
15 54 (2.73%) NoSQL
16 53 (2.68%) SQL Server Integration Services
17 38 (1.92%) Hadoop
18 34 (1.72%) Star Schema
Development Applications
1 186 (9.42%) Git
2 101 (5.11%) GitLab
3 84 (4.25%) JIRA
4 51 (2.58%) Jenkins
5 10 (0.51%) MLflow
6 9 (0.46%) Artifactory
7 8 (0.41%) Bitbucket
8 7 (0.35%) Postman
9 6 (0.30%) SonarQube
10 3 (0.15%) Newman
10 3 (0.15%) Sonatype Nexus
11 2 (0.10%) Atlassian Bamboo
11 2 (0.10%) Claude Code
11 2 (0.10%) ER Studio
11 2 (0.10%) ERwin
11 2 (0.10%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
11 2 (0.10%) Yeoman
12 1 (0.051%) JUnit
12 1 (0.051%) Octopus Deploy
12 1 (0.051%) Selenium
General
1 322 (16.30%) Finance
2 309 (15.65%) Social Skills
3 221 (11.19%) Analytical Skills
4 173 (8.76%) Public Sector
5 111 (5.62%) Banking
6 34 (1.72%) Marketing
7 33 (1.67%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 28 (1.42%) Documentation Skills
9 27 (1.37%) Telecoms
10 25 (1.27%) Retail
11 21 (1.06%) Front Office
11 21 (1.06%) Investment Banking
11 21 (1.06%) Manufacturing
12 19 (0.96%) Automotive
13 18 (0.91%) Pharmaceutical
14 17 (0.86%) Aerospace
15 11 (0.56%) Publishing
16 10 (0.51%) Legal
17 9 (0.46%) Billing
17 9 (0.46%) Law
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 270 (13.67%) PySpark
2 146 (7.39%) Kafka
3 39 (1.97%) Pandas
4 31 (1.57%) JSON
5 27 (1.37%) REST
6 22 (1.11%) Spring
6 22 (1.11%) Spring Boot
7 21 (1.06%) Apache Beam
8 20 (1.01%) Great Expectations
9 18 (0.91%) XML
9 18 (0.91%) YAML
10 14 (0.71%) React
11 13 (0.66%) RESTful
12 12 (0.61%) Apache Avro
12 12 (0.61%) scikit-learn
12 12 (0.61%) Streamlit
13 11 (0.56%) pytest
14 10 (0.51%) Microsoft Graph
15 9 (0.46%) GeoJSON
15 9 (0.46%) Polars
Miscellaneous
1 140 (7.09%) Cloud Native
2 75 (3.80%) Legacy Systems
3 67 (3.39%) Data Structures
4 35 (1.77%) Distributed Systems
5 34 (1.72%) Onboarding
6 24 (1.22%) NHS
6 24 (1.22%) Product Ownership
7 23 (1.16%) Greenfield Project
8 20 (1.01%) Clustering
9 19 (0.96%) Reinsurance
10 17 (0.86%) Reference Data
11 16 (0.81%) Data Protection Act
12 14 (0.71%) Management Information System
13 12 (0.61%) Algorithms
13 12 (0.61%) Life Science
14 11 (0.56%) AI Agents
15 10 (0.51%) Linux Command Line
15 10 (0.51%) Replication
15 10 (0.51%) Virtual Team
16 9 (0.46%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 67 (3.39%) Unix
2 47 (2.38%) Linux
3 5 (0.25%) Windows
4 2 (0.10%) Ubuntu
4 2 (0.10%) Windows Server
5 1 (0.051%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 838 (42.43%) Data Pipeline
2 727 (36.81%) Data Engineering
3 704 (35.65%) Analytics
4 684 (34.63%) ETL
5 656 (33.22%) Data Modelling
6 461 (23.34%) CI/CD
7 357 (18.08%) Business Intelligence
8 354 (17.92%) Agile
9 320 (16.20%) DevOps
10 309 (15.65%) Migration
11 268 (13.57%) Data Governance
12 239 (12.10%) AI
13 233 (11.80%) Data Integration
14 232 (11.75%) Validation
15 231 (11.70%) Problem-Solving
16 205 (10.38%) Data Transformation
17 192 (9.72%) Data Science
18 186 (9.42%) Decision-Making
19 160 (8.10%) Machine Learning
20 158 (8.00%) Test Automation
Programming Languages
1 1,011 (51.19%) SQL
2 850 (43.04%) Python
3 120 (6.08%) Java
4 62 (3.14%) Scala
5 58 (2.94%) PL/SQL
6 39 (1.97%) T-SQL
7 37 (1.87%) Shell Script
8 30 (1.52%) Data Analysis Expressions
9 29 (1.47%) Bash
10 25 (1.27%) PowerShell
11 24 (1.22%) C#
12 18 (0.91%) JavaScript
13 15 (0.76%) R
14 14 (0.71%) Bicep
15 7 (0.35%) TypeScript
16 6 (0.30%) Go
17 3 (0.15%) Korn
18 2 (0.10%) Perl
18 2 (0.10%) Ruby
18 2 (0.10%) SPARQL
Qualifications
1 526 (26.63%) Security Cleared
2 459 (23.24%) SC Cleared
3 52 (2.63%) BPSS Clearance
4 43 (2.18%) Degree
5 26 (1.32%) Azure Certification
6 22 (1.11%) DV Cleared
7 19 (0.96%) Computer Science Degree
8 15 (0.76%) 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
10 8 (0.41%) CISSP
11 7 (0.35%) CISM
12 5 (0.25%) BICSI Certification
12 5 (0.25%) CEH
12 5 (0.25%) Master's Degree
13 3 (0.15%) Microsoft Certification
14 1 (0.051%) CISA
14 1 (0.051%) Cisco Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 485 (24.56%) Data Quality
2 63 (3.19%) QA
3 50 (2.53%) GDPR
4 23 (1.16%) Accessibility
5 12 (0.61%) SLA
6 7 (0.35%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 6 (0.30%) FATCA
7 6 (0.30%) HIPAA
7 6 (0.30%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 3 (0.15%) GMP
8 3 (0.15%) MiFID
9 2 (0.10%) California Consumer Privacy Act
9 2 (0.10%) Disclosure Scotland
9 2 (0.10%) EMIR
9 2 (0.10%) PMO
9 2 (0.10%) SNOMED CT
9 2 (0.10%) WCAG
10 1 (0.051%) GRC
10 1 (0.051%) NIST
10 1 (0.051%) SOC 2
System Software
1 116 (5.87%) Docker
2 4 (0.20%) Virtual Machines
3 3 (0.15%) Active Directory
4 2 (0.10%) HDFS
5 1 (0.051%) RACF
Systems Management
1 186 (9.42%) Terraform
2 97 (4.91%) Kubernetes
3 50 (2.53%) Grafana
4 14 (0.71%) Ansible
5 12 (0.61%) Prometheus
6 9 (0.46%) Kibana
7 7 (0.35%) Control-M
8 2 (0.10%) Apache Ranger
8 2 (0.10%) logstash
8 2 (0.10%) Rancher
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
1 387 (19.59%) Databricks
2 246 (12.46%) Microsoft
3 167 (8.46%) Oracle
4 138 (6.99%) Informatica
5 124 (6.28%) Talend
6 69 (3.49%) Google
7 68 (3.44%) Denodo
8 34 (1.72%) SAP
9 32 (1.62%) Cisco
9 32 (1.62%) F5
10 29 (1.47%) Salesforce
11 25 (1.27%) Palantir
11 25 (1.27%) Splunk
12 18 (0.91%) Cloudera
12 18 (0.91%) Foundry
13 15 (0.76%) ServiceNow
14 12 (0.61%) IBM
15 11 (0.56%) Sage
16 9 (0.46%) Bloomberg
16 9 (0.46%) MuleSoft