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 18 September 2026.

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

6 months to
18 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 69 131 98
Rank change year-on-year +62 -33 +26
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 1,894 715 912
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 3.48% 2.17% 2.37%
As % of the Job Titles category 3.77% 2.38% 2.55%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,263 508 649
10th Percentile £375 £363 £363
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 £697 £688
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £475 £500
% change year-on-year - -5.00% -4.76%
Number of hourly rates quoted 70 14 9
10th Percentile £21.25 £25.42 £49.25
25th Percentile £31.72 £37.00 £60.00
Median hourly rate £42.03 £52.50 £80.00
Median % change year-on-year -19.95% -34.38% +29.55%
75th Percentile £68.56 £75.63 -
90th Percentile £71.50 £103.25 £97.50
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 50,223 30,015 35,830
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.31% 91.09% 92.99%
Number of daily rates quoted 29,737 18,953 22,040
10th Percentile £325 £278 £300
25th Percentile £425 £400 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -0.94%
75th Percentile £626 £623 £638
90th Percentile £730 £725 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 3,829 1,585 1,681
10th Percentile £14.56 £13.75 £14.73
25th Percentile £20.25 £17.30 £20.50
Median hourly rate £42.50 £25.15 £43.00
Median % change year-on-year +68.99% -41.51% -3.37%
75th Percentile £67.84 £52.50 £65.00
90th Percentile £80.00 £70.00 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £42.50 £25.15 £45.00
% change year-on-year +68.99% -44.11% +2.86%

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 18 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 18 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 18 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 +65 1,660 £500 -0.79% 1,688
UK excluding London +93 861 £475 - 845
London +28 822 £525 - 911
Work from Home +50 549 £500 +1.78% 665
Midlands +76 340 £469 +2.79% 124
West Midlands +68 270 £469 +6.59% 79
North of England +33 207 £500 +5.26% 264
South East +28 130 £459 -4.62% 181
North West +15 110 £525 +10.53% 149
South West +24 101 £525 +5.00% 87
Yorkshire +12 78 £488 -4.88% 75
East Midlands +33 70 £419 -9.46% 45
Scotland +1 65 £430 -7.03% 83
East of England +5 39 £463 -38.33% 59
North East -32 20 £450 +6.51% 40
Wales -2 17 £513 +8.47% 15
Northern Ireland +2 1 - - 32
Channel Islands - 1 - -

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

For the 6 months to 18 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.

1 959 (50.63%) SQL
2 827 (43.66%) Data Pipeline
3 824 (43.51%) Python
4 739 (39.02%) Data Engineering
5 664 (35.06%) Data Modelling
6 662 (34.95%) ETL
7 650 (34.32%) Analytics
8 587 (30.99%) AWS
9 582 (30.73%) Azure
10 487 (25.71%) Security Cleared
11 485 (25.61%) Data Quality
12 453 (23.92%) CI/CD
13 423 (22.33%) SC Cleared
14 399 (21.07%) Databricks
15 335 (17.69%) Agile
16 323 (17.05%) Data Warehouse
17 310 (16.37%) DevOps
18 308 (16.26%) Migration
19 307 (16.21%) Business Intelligence
20 298 (15.73%) AI
21 263 (13.89%) PySpark
22 261 (13.78%) Data Governance
23 249 (13.15%) Power Platform
24 246 (12.99%) Data Integration
25 244 (12.88%) Data Transformation
26 243 (12.83%) Power BI
27 241 (12.72%) Microsoft
28 238 (12.57%) Validation
29 234 (12.35%) Snowflake
30 227 (11.99%) 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 (11.19%) Apache Airflow
2 154 (8.13%) Apache Spark
3 131 (6.92%) Apache
4 59 (3.12%) SAS
5 47 (2.48%) Confluence
6 18 (0.95%) Palantir Foundry
7 16 (0.84%) SharePoint
8 10 (0.53%) Jupyter
9 2 (0.11%) Apache Superset
9 2 (0.11%) ArcGIS
9 2 (0.11%) Microsoft Exchange
9 2 (0.11%) PowerExchange
10 1 (0.053%) Liferay
10 1 (0.053%) Luigi
10 1 (0.053%) nginx
10 1 (0.053%) Oracle Workflow
10 1 (0.053%) R Markdown
Applications
1 23 (1.21%) Microsoft Excel
2 9 (0.48%) Spreadsheet
3 7 (0.37%) Notepad++
4 3 (0.16%) Chatbot
5 1 (0.053%) Microsoft Office
5 1 (0.053%) Microsoft PowerPoint
Business Applications
1 13 (0.69%) Aladdin
2 7 (0.37%) Dynamics CRM
3 6 (0.32%) 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 2 (0.11%) FIS Private Capital Suite
6 2 (0.11%) Maximo
6 2 (0.11%) Oracle EBS
6 2 (0.11%) SAP BPC
6 2 (0.11%) SAP Oil and Gas
6 2 (0.11%) SimCorp Dimension
7 1 (0.053%) Dynamics NAV
7 1 (0.053%) Markit EDM
7 1 (0.053%) Oracle Assets
7 1 (0.053%) Oracle Retail
7 1 (0.053%) Raiser’s Edge
7 1 (0.053%) SAP CAR
7 1 (0.053%) SAP EWM
Cloud Services
1 587 (30.99%) AWS
2 582 (30.73%) Azure
3 249 (13.15%) Power Platform
4 234 (12.35%) Snowflake
5 227 (11.99%) dbt
6 210 (11.09%) Azure Data Factory
7 193 (10.19%) GCP
8 173 (9.13%) Amazon S3
9 135 (7.13%) Serverless
10 122 (6.44%) AWS Lambda
11 121 (6.39%) Azure DevOps
12 120 (6.34%) Azure Synapse Analytics
13 111 (5.86%) GitHub
14 66 (3.48%) Azure Databricks
15 55 (2.90%) Amazon EMR
16 46 (2.43%) GitHub Actions
17 42 (2.22%) Amazon CloudWatch
18 33 (1.74%) AWS Step Functions
19 30 (1.58%) Amazon Kinesis
20 28 (1.48%) AWS CloudFormation
Communications & Networking
1 25 (1.32%) BGP
1 25 (1.32%) DMZ
1 25 (1.32%) DNS
1 25 (1.32%) Multicast
1 25 (1.32%) VPN
2 8 (0.42%) Firewall
3 7 (0.37%) PuTTY
3 7 (0.37%) WinSCP
4 5 (0.26%) Intrusion Detection
4 5 (0.26%) Structured Cabling
5 4 (0.21%) Wi-Fi
5 4 (0.21%) Wireless
6 1 (0.053%) HTTP
6 1 (0.053%) LTE
6 1 (0.053%) MQTT
Database & Business Intelligence
1 323 (17.05%) Data Warehouse
2 243 (12.83%) Power BI
3 159 (8.39%) Data Lake
4 133 (7.02%) Metadata
5 114 (6.02%) BigQuery
6 93 (4.91%) Amazon Redshift
7 87 (4.59%) Delta Lake
8 85 (4.49%) Amazon Athena
9 79 (4.17%) SQL Server
10 77 (4.07%) Big Data
11 66 (3.48%) Pentaho
11 66 (3.48%) PostgreSQL
12 61 (3.22%) Snowflake Schema
13 59 (3.12%) Relational Database
14 58 (3.06%) Tableau
15 49 (2.59%) NoSQL
16 43 (2.27%) Oracle Database
17 41 (2.16%) Azure SQL Database
18 40 (2.11%) Amazon RDS
19 39 (2.06%) SQL Server Integration Services
Development Applications
1 171 (9.03%) Git
2 101 (5.33%) GitLab
3 72 (3.80%) JIRA
4 34 (1.80%) Jenkins
5 21 (1.11%) MLflow
6 9 (0.48%) Artifactory
7 8 (0.42%) Bitbucket
7 8 (0.42%) Postman
8 6 (0.32%) Selenium
8 6 (0.32%) 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 (0.11%) ER Studio
11 2 (0.11%) RStudio
11 2 (0.11%) Terragrunt
11 2 (0.11%) Yeoman
12 1 (0.053%) Visual Studio Code
General
1 312 (16.47%) Social Skills
2 302 (15.95%) Finance
3 214 (11.30%) Analytical Skills
4 164 (8.66%) Public Sector
5 122 (6.44%) Banking
6 33 (1.74%) Marketing
7 31 (1.64%) Retail
8 29 (1.53%) Inclusion and Diversity
9 24 (1.27%) Investment Banking
10 23 (1.21%) Aerospace
10 23 (1.21%) Telecoms
11 21 (1.11%) Automotive
11 21 (1.11%) Front Office
12 20 (1.06%) Documentation Skills
13 19 (1.00%) Law
13 19 (1.00%) Manufacturing
14 17 (0.90%) Pharmaceutical
15 13 (0.69%) Police
16 12 (0.63%) Legal
17 11 (0.58%) Military
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 263 (13.89%) PySpark
2 192 (10.14%) Terraform
3 128 (6.76%) Kafka
4 33 (1.74%) REST
5 30 (1.58%) JSON
6 29 (1.53%) Pandas
7 23 (1.21%) Spring
7 23 (1.21%) Spring Boot
7 23 (1.21%) XML
8 18 (0.95%) Apache Beam
8 18 (0.95%) Great Expectations
9 16 (0.84%) LangChain
10 14 (0.74%) RESTful
11 13 (0.69%) pytest
11 13 (0.69%) React
12 11 (0.58%) PyTorch
12 11 (0.58%) Streamlit
13 10 (0.53%) .NET
13 10 (0.53%) Microsoft Graph
14 9 (0.48%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 148 (7.81%) Cloud Native
2 67 (3.54%) Data Structures
3 63 (3.33%) Legacy Systems
4 47 (2.48%) Onboarding
5 26 (1.37%) AI Agents
6 25 (1.32%) Product Ownership
7 23 (1.21%) Distributed Systems
7 23 (1.21%) NHS
8 22 (1.16%) Greenfield Project
9 19 (1.00%) Reference Data
10 18 (0.95%) Management Information System
11 16 (0.84%) Reinsurance
12 15 (0.79%) Algorithms
13 12 (0.63%) Enterprise Software
14 11 (0.58%) Clustering
14 11 (0.58%) Virtual Team
15 10 (0.53%) Data Fabric
15 10 (0.53%) Linux Command Line
15 10 (0.53%) Replication
16 9 (0.48%) Distributed Computing
Operating Systems
1 62 (3.27%) Unix
2 43 (2.27%) Linux
3 3 (0.16%) Windows
4 2 (0.11%) Ubuntu
5 1 (0.053%) Robot Operating System
5 1 (0.053%) VMS
5 1 (0.053%) Windows Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 827 (43.66%) Data Pipeline
2 739 (39.02%) Data Engineering
3 664 (35.06%) Data Modelling
4 662 (34.95%) ETL
5 650 (34.32%) Analytics
6 453 (23.92%) CI/CD
7 335 (17.69%) Agile
8 310 (16.37%) DevOps
9 308 (16.26%) Migration
10 307 (16.21%) Business Intelligence
11 298 (15.73%) AI
12 261 (13.78%) Data Governance
13 246 (12.99%) Data Integration
14 244 (12.88%) Data Transformation
15 238 (12.57%) Validation
16 206 (10.88%) Problem-Solving
17 180 (9.50%) Machine Learning
18 173 (9.13%) Data Science
19 172 (9.08%) Lakehouse
20 168 (8.87%) Infrastructure as Code
Programming Languages
1 959 (50.63%) SQL
2 824 (43.51%) Python
3 109 (5.76%) Java
4 72 (3.80%) Scala
5 51 (2.69%) PL/SQL
6 35 (1.85%) T-SQL
7 32 (1.69%) Data Analysis Expressions
8 30 (1.58%) Shell Script
9 22 (1.16%) Bash
9 22 (1.16%) JavaScript
9 22 (1.16%) PowerShell
10 14 (0.74%) R
11 11 (0.58%) C#
12 10 (0.53%) Bicep
13 9 (0.48%) TypeScript
14 8 (0.42%) Go
15 5 (0.26%) Korn
16 3 (0.16%) COBOL
16 3 (0.16%) Kusto Query Language
16 3 (0.16%) LookML
Qualifications
1 487 (25.71%) Security Cleared
2 423 (22.33%) SC Cleared
3 49 (2.59%) BPSS Clearance
4 39 (2.06%) Degree
5 28 (1.48%) DV Cleared
6 24 (1.27%) Azure Certification
7 20 (1.06%) Computer Science Degree
8 16 (0.84%) AWS Certification
9 10 (0.53%) SnowPro
10 9 (0.48%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
11 8 (0.42%) DBS Check
11 8 (0.42%) Master's Degree
12 6 (0.32%) CISM
12 6 (0.32%) CISSP
13 5 (0.26%) CEH
14 4 (0.21%) City & Guilds
14 4 (0.21%) Microsoft Certification
15 1 (0.053%) Numerate Degree
15 1 (0.053%) Tableau Certification
15 1 (0.053%) TOGAF Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 485 (25.61%) Data Quality
2 73 (3.85%) QA
3 38 (2.01%) GDPR
4 17 (0.90%) Accessibility
5 9 (0.48%) SLA
6 7 (0.37%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 6 (0.32%) Disclosure Scotland
7 6 (0.32%) FATCA
8 5 (0.26%) HIPAA
8 5 (0.26%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 3 (0.16%) MiFID
10 2 (0.11%) EMIR
10 2 (0.11%) SNOMED CT
10 2 (0.11%) WCAG
11 1 (0.053%) California Consumer Privacy Act
11 1 (0.053%) IFRS
11 1 (0.053%) IFRS 17
11 1 (0.053%) IFRS 9
11 1 (0.053%) PMO
11 1 (0.053%) SOC 2
System Software
1 115 (6.07%) Docker
2 3 (0.16%) Active Directory
3 2 (0.11%) Virtual Machines
4 1 (0.053%) HDFS
4 1 (0.053%) RACF
Systems Management
1 87 (4.59%) Kubernetes
2 38 (2.01%) Grafana
3 17 (0.90%) Ansible
4 13 (0.69%) Control-M
5 11 (0.58%) Kibana
6 6 (0.32%) Prometheus
7 2 (0.11%) logstash
7 2 (0.11%) Puppet
8 1 (0.053%) Progress Chef
Vendors
1 399 (21.07%) Databricks
2 241 (12.72%) Microsoft
3 161 (8.50%) Oracle
4 104 (5.49%) Informatica
5 94 (4.96%) Talend
6 82 (4.33%) Google
7 51 (2.69%) Denodo
8 35 (1.85%) Salesforce
9 29 (1.53%) Palantir
10 27 (1.43%) Foundry
11 25 (1.32%) Cisco
11 25 (1.32%) F5
11 25 (1.32%) SAP
12 15 (0.79%) Splunk
13 10 (0.53%) IBM
14 9 (0.48%) Bloomberg
14 9 (0.48%) OpenAI
15 8 (0.42%) Cloudera
15 8 (0.42%) Sage
16 7 (0.37%) InterSystems