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 26 September 2026.

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

6 months to
26 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 69 125 95
Rank change year-on-year +56 -30 +29
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 1,926 730 913
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 3.51% 2.21% 2.38%
As % of the Job Titles category 3.81% 2.42% 2.56%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,288 523 640
10th Percentile £374 £363 £369
25th Percentile £425 £413 £450
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year - -4.76% -4.55%
75th Percentile £588 £588 £625
90th Percentile £675 £699 £700
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £475 £500
% change year-on-year - -5.00% -4.76%
Number of hourly rates quoted 67 13 9
10th Percentile £21.25 £25.34 £49.25
25th Percentile £30.96 £35.25 £60.00
Median hourly rate £41.56 £52.50 £80.00
Median % change year-on-year -20.85% -34.38% +29.55%
75th Percentile £68.38 £80.00 £97.50
90th Percentile £70.60 £105.50 -
UK excluding London median hourly rate £41.56 £27.00 £80.00
% change year-on-year +53.91% -66.25% +40.35%

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 50,596 30,108 35,619
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.21% 91.02% 92.95%
Number of daily rates quoted 29,877 19,013 21,671
10th Percentile £325 £275 £300
25th Percentile £425 £400 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -0.62%
75th Percentile £630 £625 £638
90th Percentile £731 £725 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 3,928 1,616 1,603
10th Percentile £14.50 £13.75 £14.84
25th Percentile £20.00 £17.30 £20.75
Median hourly rate £42.00 £25.15 £43.00
Median % change year-on-year +67.00% -41.51% -2.27%
75th Percentile £67.50 £51.68 £65.00
90th Percentile £79.00 £69.20 £74.97
UK excluding London median hourly rate £42.50 £25.15 £43.00
% change year-on-year +68.99% -41.51% -0.38%

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 26 September 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 26 September 2026.

Hourly rate histogram for Data Engineer in the UK

Data Engineer
Top 18 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 26 September 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 +62 1,680 £500 -1.48% 1,740
UK excluding London +98 869 £475 - 926
London +31 834 £525 - 920
Work from Home +44 560 £500 +5.26% 712
Midlands +82 342 £469 +1.41% 137
West Midlands +66 267 £469 -6.20% 88
North of England +33 208 £520 +9.47% 286
South East +22 127 £459 +2.00% 208
North West +28 110 £525 +17.32% 159
South West +18 107 £525 +5.00% 98
Yorkshire +6 79 £500 - 82
East Midlands +35 75 £388 -16.22% 49
Scotland -2 68 £440 -3.56% 74
East of England -2 38 £488 -18.75% 66
North East -26 20 £450 +9.09% 47
Wales -1 17 £513 +3.54% 16
Northern Ireland -1 1 - - 43
Channel Islands - 1 - -

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

For the 6 months to 26 September 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.

1 968 (50.26%) SQL
2 841 (43.67%) Python
3 829 (43.04%) Data Pipeline
4 746 (38.73%) Data Engineering
5 668 (34.68%) Data Modelling
6 667 (34.63%) ETL
7 657 (34.11%) Analytics
8 594 (30.84%) AWS
9 593 (30.79%) Azure
10 493 (25.60%) Security Cleared
11 490 (25.44%) Data Quality
12 455 (23.62%) CI/CD
13 428 (22.22%) SC Cleared
14 411 (21.34%) Databricks
15 336 (17.45%) Agile
16 325 (16.87%) Data Warehouse
17 317 (16.46%) Migration
18 312 (16.20%) AI
19 311 (16.15%) Business Intelligence
20 310 (16.10%) DevOps
21 264 (13.71%) PySpark
22 257 (13.34%) Data Governance
23 254 (13.19%) Data Transformation
23 254 (13.19%) Validation
24 251 (13.03%) Power Platform
25 249 (12.93%) Microsoft
26 248 (12.88%) Data Integration
27 243 (12.62%) Power BI
28 241 (12.51%) Snowflake
29 232 (12.05%) dbt

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
1 212 (11.01%) Apache Airflow
2 159 (8.26%) Apache Spark
3 136 (7.06%) Apache
4 58 (3.01%) SAS
5 47 (2.44%) Confluence
6 18 (0.93%) Palantir Foundry
7 15 (0.78%) SharePoint
8 13 (0.67%) Jupyter
9 3 (0.16%) Apache Superset
9 3 (0.16%) Microsoft Exchange
10 2 (0.10%) ArcGIS
10 2 (0.10%) PowerExchange
11 1 (0.052%) Liferay
11 1 (0.052%) Luigi
11 1 (0.052%) nginx
11 1 (0.052%) Oracle Workflow
Applications
1 20 (1.04%) Microsoft Excel
2 7 (0.36%) Notepad++
2 7 (0.36%) Spreadsheet
3 4 (0.21%) Chatbot
4 1 (0.052%) Microsoft Office
4 1 (0.052%) Microsoft PowerPoint
Business Applications
1 13 (0.67%) Aladdin
2 7 (0.36%) Dynamics CRM
3 6 (0.31%) NetSuite
4 5 (0.26%) Infor LN
4 5 (0.26%) Sage X3
4 5 (0.26%) SAP S/4HANA
5 4 (0.21%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
6 3 (0.16%) Oracle EBS
7 2 (0.10%) FIS Private Capital Suite
7 2 (0.10%) Maximo
7 2 (0.10%) SAP BPC
7 2 (0.10%) SAP Oil and Gas
7 2 (0.10%) SimCorp Dimension
8 1 (0.052%) BambooHR
8 1 (0.052%) Dynamics NAV
8 1 (0.052%) Markit EDM
8 1 (0.052%) Oracle Assets
8 1 (0.052%) Oracle Retail
8 1 (0.052%) SAP CAR
8 1 (0.052%) SAP EWM
Cloud Services
1 594 (30.84%) AWS
2 593 (30.79%) Azure
3 251 (13.03%) Power Platform
4 241 (12.51%) Snowflake
5 232 (12.05%) dbt
6 219 (11.37%) Azure Data Factory
7 199 (10.33%) GCP
8 169 (8.77%) Amazon S3
9 134 (6.96%) Serverless
10 125 (6.49%) Azure DevOps
11 121 (6.28%) Azure Synapse Analytics
12 120 (6.23%) AWS Lambda
13 109 (5.66%) GitHub
14 69 (3.58%) Azure Databricks
15 57 (2.96%) Amazon EMR
16 46 (2.39%) GitHub Actions
17 41 (2.13%) Amazon CloudWatch
18 33 (1.71%) AWS Step Functions
19 29 (1.51%) AWS CloudFormation
20 28 (1.45%) Amazon Kinesis
Communications & Networking
1 24 (1.25%) DNS
2 23 (1.19%) BGP
2 23 (1.19%) DMZ
2 23 (1.19%) Multicast
2 23 (1.19%) VPN
3 8 (0.42%) Firewall
4 7 (0.36%) PuTTY
4 7 (0.36%) WinSCP
5 5 (0.26%) Intrusion Detection
6 4 (0.21%) Structured Cabling
6 4 (0.21%) Wi-Fi
6 4 (0.21%) Wireless
7 2 (0.10%) HTTP
8 1 (0.052%) HTTPS
8 1 (0.052%) LTE
8 1 (0.052%) MQTT
8 1 (0.052%) TCP/IP
8 1 (0.052%) tcpdump
8 1 (0.052%) Wireshark
Database & Business Intelligence
1 325 (16.87%) Data Warehouse
2 243 (12.62%) Power BI
3 167 (8.67%) Data Lake
4 131 (6.80%) Metadata
5 112 (5.82%) BigQuery
6 93 (4.83%) Amazon Redshift
7 88 (4.57%) Delta Lake
8 84 (4.36%) Amazon Athena
9 80 (4.15%) Big Data
10 78 (4.05%) SQL Server
11 67 (3.48%) PostgreSQL
12 65 (3.37%) Pentaho
13 59 (3.06%) Relational Database
13 59 (3.06%) Snowflake Schema
14 56 (2.91%) Tableau
15 51 (2.65%) NoSQL
16 43 (2.23%) Oracle Database
17 40 (2.08%) Azure SQL Database
17 40 (2.08%) SQL Server Integration Services
18 39 (2.02%) Amazon RDS
Development Applications
1 183 (9.50%) Git
2 96 (4.98%) GitLab
3 71 (3.69%) JIRA
4 34 (1.77%) Jenkins
5 22 (1.14%) MLflow
6 9 (0.47%) Artifactory
7 8 (0.42%) Bitbucket
7 8 (0.42%) Postman
8 6 (0.31%) Selenium
8 6 (0.31%) SonarQube
9 4 (0.21%) Claude Code
9 4 (0.21%) ERwin
10 3 (0.16%) Atlassian Bamboo
10 3 (0.16%) Newman
10 3 (0.16%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
11 2 (0.10%) ER Studio
11 2 (0.10%) RStudio
11 2 (0.10%) Terragrunt
11 2 (0.10%) Yeoman
12 1 (0.052%) Octopus Deploy
General
1 319 (16.56%) Social Skills
2 300 (15.58%) Finance
3 220 (11.42%) Analytical Skills
4 172 (8.93%) Public Sector
5 127 (6.59%) Banking
6 32 (1.66%) Marketing
7 31 (1.61%) Retail
8 29 (1.51%) Inclusion and Diversity
9 23 (1.19%) Front Office
9 23 (1.19%) Investment Banking
10 22 (1.14%) Aerospace
10 22 (1.14%) Automotive
11 20 (1.04%) Documentation Skills
11 20 (1.04%) Telecoms
12 19 (0.99%) Law
13 18 (0.93%) Manufacturing
14 17 (0.88%) Pharmaceutical
15 13 (0.67%) Legal
15 13 (0.67%) Military
15 13 (0.67%) Police
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 264 (13.71%) PySpark
2 198 (10.28%) Terraform
3 129 (6.70%) Kafka
4 33 (1.71%) REST
5 31 (1.61%) JSON
6 29 (1.51%) Pandas
7 23 (1.19%) XML
8 22 (1.14%) Spring
8 22 (1.14%) Spring Boot
9 19 (0.99%) Great Expectations
10 16 (0.83%) Apache Beam
11 15 (0.78%) LangChain
12 14 (0.73%) pytest
12 14 (0.73%) RESTful
13 12 (0.62%) React
13 12 (0.62%) Streamlit
14 11 (0.57%) PyTorch
15 10 (0.52%) .NET
15 10 (0.52%) Microsoft Graph
16 9 (0.47%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 151 (7.84%) Cloud Native
2 67 (3.48%) Data Structures
3 61 (3.17%) Legacy Systems
4 53 (2.75%) Onboarding
5 26 (1.35%) AI Agents
5 26 (1.35%) Distributed Systems
5 26 (1.35%) Product Ownership
6 22 (1.14%) NHS
7 20 (1.04%) Greenfield Project
8 19 (0.99%) Management Information System
9 18 (0.93%) Reference Data
10 15 (0.78%) Algorithms
10 15 (0.78%) Reinsurance
11 12 (0.62%) Enterprise Software
12 11 (0.57%) Virtual Team
13 10 (0.52%) Clustering
13 10 (0.52%) Data Fabric
13 10 (0.52%) Derivative
13 10 (0.52%) Linux Command Line
14 9 (0.47%) Data Protection Act
Operating Systems
1 62 (3.22%) Unix
2 43 (2.23%) Linux
3 3 (0.16%) Windows
4 2 (0.10%) Ubuntu
5 1 (0.052%) Robot Operating System
5 1 (0.052%) VMS
5 1 (0.052%) Windows Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 829 (43.04%) Data Pipeline
2 746 (38.73%) Data Engineering
3 668 (34.68%) Data Modelling
4 667 (34.63%) ETL
5 657 (34.11%) Analytics
6 455 (23.62%) CI/CD
7 336 (17.45%) Agile
8 317 (16.46%) Migration
9 312 (16.20%) AI
10 311 (16.15%) Business Intelligence
11 310 (16.10%) DevOps
12 257 (13.34%) Data Governance
13 254 (13.19%) Data Transformation
13 254 (13.19%) Validation
14 248 (12.88%) Data Integration
15 207 (10.75%) Problem-Solving
16 187 (9.71%) Machine Learning
17 177 (9.19%) Lakehouse
18 175 (9.09%) Data Science
19 174 (9.03%) Infrastructure as Code
Programming Languages
1 968 (50.26%) SQL
2 841 (43.67%) Python
3 104 (5.40%) Java
4 74 (3.84%) Scala
5 51 (2.65%) PL/SQL
6 35 (1.82%) T-SQL
7 31 (1.61%) Data Analysis Expressions
8 30 (1.56%) Shell Script
9 29 (1.51%) PowerShell
10 23 (1.19%) Bash
11 21 (1.09%) JavaScript
12 17 (0.88%) R
13 12 (0.62%) Bicep
14 10 (0.52%) C#
15 9 (0.47%) Go
16 8 (0.42%) TypeScript
17 5 (0.26%) Korn
18 3 (0.16%) COBOL
18 3 (0.16%) Kusto Query Language
19 2 (0.10%) Cypher
Qualifications
1 493 (25.60%) Security Cleared
2 428 (22.22%) SC Cleared
3 56 (2.91%) BPSS Clearance
4 39 (2.02%) Degree
5 30 (1.56%) DV Cleared
6 24 (1.25%) Azure Certification
7 20 (1.04%) Computer Science Degree
8 15 (0.78%) AWS Certification
9 9 (0.47%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
9 9 (0.47%) SnowPro
10 8 (0.42%) DBS Check
10 8 (0.42%) Master's Degree
11 7 (0.36%) CISM
11 7 (0.36%) CISSP
12 5 (0.26%) CEH
13 4 (0.21%) City & Guilds
13 4 (0.21%) Microsoft Certification
14 2 (0.10%) CISA
15 1 (0.052%) PMI Certification
15 1 (0.052%) PMP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 490 (25.44%) Data Quality
2 77 (4.00%) QA
3 36 (1.87%) GDPR
4 17 (0.88%) Accessibility
5 9 (0.47%) SLA
6 8 (0.42%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 6 (0.31%) Disclosure Scotland
7 6 (0.31%) FATCA
8 5 (0.26%) HIPAA
8 5 (0.26%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 3 (0.16%) MiFID
10 2 (0.10%) EMIR
10 2 (0.10%) GRC
10 2 (0.10%) SNOMED CT
11 1 (0.052%) California Consumer Privacy Act
11 1 (0.052%) Government Security Classifications
11 1 (0.052%) IFRS
11 1 (0.052%) IFRS 17
11 1 (0.052%) IFRS 9
11 1 (0.052%) PMO
System Software
1 111 (5.76%) Docker
2 3 (0.16%) Active Directory
3 2 (0.10%) Virtual Machines
4 1 (0.052%) HDFS
4 1 (0.052%) RACF
Systems Management
1 87 (4.52%) Kubernetes
2 36 (1.87%) Grafana
3 17 (0.88%) Ansible
4 13 (0.67%) Control-M
4 13 (0.67%) Kibana
5 4 (0.21%) Prometheus
6 2 (0.10%) logstash
6 2 (0.10%) Puppet
7 1 (0.052%) Progress Chef
Vendors
1 411 (21.34%) Databricks
2 249 (12.93%) Microsoft
3 166 (8.62%) Oracle
4 98 (5.09%) Informatica
5 91 (4.72%) Talend
6 89 (4.62%) Google
7 49 (2.54%) Denodo
8 35 (1.82%) Salesforce
9 29 (1.51%) Palantir
10 27 (1.40%) Foundry
11 26 (1.35%) SAP
12 23 (1.19%) Cisco
12 23 (1.19%) F5
13 15 (0.78%) Splunk
14 9 (0.47%) Bloomberg
14 9 (0.47%) IBM
14 9 (0.47%) OpenAI
15 8 (0.42%) Cloudera
15 8 (0.42%) Sage
16 7 (0.36%) InterSystems