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 June 2026.

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

6 months to
26 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 60 112 99
Rank change year-on-year +52 -13 +23
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 1,889 740 985
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 3.71% 2.45% 2.27%
As % of the Job Titles category 4.02% 2.65% 2.44%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,292 545 750
10th Percentile £375 £363 £206
25th Percentile £425 £425 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £500
Median % change year-on-year - - -9.09%
75th Percentile £588 £588 £600
90th Percentile £650 £700 £688
UK excluding London median daily rate £469 £463 £450
% change year-on-year +1.41% +2.78% -14.29%
Number of hourly rates quoted 71 10 42
10th Percentile £19.34 £18.18 £31.88
25th Percentile £36.25 £44.50 £49.25
Median hourly rate £50.00 £52.50 £66.25
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% -20.75% -12.25%
75th Percentile £69.75 £78.40 £80.00
90th Percentile £75.00 £81.38 -
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 47,008 27,876 40,382
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.38% 92.16% 92.92%
Number of daily rates quoted 28,552 17,889 25,942
10th Percentile £325 £288 £281
25th Percentile £415 £402 £410
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £520 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% -4.76% -2.33%
75th Percentile £625 £625 £638
90th Percentile £725 £738 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £493
% change year-on-year +5.26% -3.65% -1.40%
Number of hourly rates quoted 3,155 1,223 2,887
10th Percentile £15.38 £13.76 £12.86
25th Percentile £21.08 £17.31 £16.58
Median hourly rate £43.61 £26.45 £37.50
Median % change year-on-year +64.86% -29.47% -12.79%
75th Percentile £67.50 £55.37 £62.50
90th Percentile £80.00 £73.65 £74.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £45.00 £25.15 £40.00
% change year-on-year +78.93% -37.13% -

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 June 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 June 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 26 June 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 +51 1,659 £500 - 345
London +40 853 £525 - 128
UK excluding London +79 831 £469 +1.41% 295
Work from Home +36 564 £500 +1.78% 164
Midlands +48 334 £468 +3.94% 57
West Midlands +49 303 £460 - 33
North of England +20 213 £475 - 78
North West +15 131 £500 +5.26% 45
South East +23 124 £475 +11.76% 84
South West +16 89 £506 +1.20% 33
Scotland +26 66 £425 -9.33% 8
Yorkshire -11 63 £470 -1.05% 15
East Midlands +8 31 £525 +28.05% 24
East of England -19 23 £520 +63.52% 18
Wales +6 22 £450 +3.45% 11
North East -19 19 £500 +14.29% 18
Northern Ireland +4 3 £410 -18.00% 11

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

For the 6 months to 26 June 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 1,001 (52.99%) SQL
2 864 (45.74%) Python
3 785 (41.56%) Data Pipeline
4 702 (37.16%) Analytics
5 684 (36.21%) Data Engineering
6 674 (35.68%) ETL
7 628 (33.25%) Data Modelling
8 597 (31.60%) Azure
9 548 (29.01%) AWS
10 526 (27.85%) Security Cleared
11 468 (24.78%) Data Quality
12 460 (24.35%) SC Cleared
13 454 (24.03%) CI/CD
14 405 (21.44%) Databricks
15 380 (20.12%) Business Intelligence
16 344 (18.21%) Agile
17 319 (16.89%) DevOps
18 308 (16.30%) Data Warehouse
19 304 (16.09%) Power Platform
20 290 (15.35%) Power BI
21 283 (14.98%) PySpark
22 264 (13.98%) Migration
23 252 (13.34%) Data Governance
24 241 (12.76%) Problem-Solving
25 234 (12.39%) AI
25 234 (12.39%) Microsoft
26 229 (12.12%) Azure Data Factory
27 202 (10.69%) Data Integration
28 201 (10.64%) Snowflake
29 198 (10.48%) Terraform

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
1 169 (8.95%) Apache Airflow
2 149 (7.89%) Apache Spark
3 104 (5.51%) Apache
4 86 (4.55%) SAS
5 54 (2.86%) Confluence
6 12 (0.64%) Palantir Foundry
6 12 (0.64%) SharePoint
7 10 (0.53%) Jupyter
8 5 (0.26%) Microsoft Exchange
9 2 (0.11%) Luigi
10 1 (0.053%) Apache Superset
10 1 (0.053%) Appian
10 1 (0.053%) ArcGIS
10 1 (0.053%) Camunda
10 1 (0.053%) Liferay
10 1 (0.053%) R Markdown
Applications
1 18 (0.95%) Microsoft Excel
2 7 (0.37%) Notepad++
3 4 (0.21%) Spreadsheet
4 2 (0.11%) Chatbot
5 1 (0.053%) Microsoft Office
5 1 (0.053%) Microsoft PowerPoint
Business Applications
1 8 (0.42%) Aladdin
2 6 (0.32%) Dynamics CRM
3 5 (0.26%) Infor LN
4 4 (0.21%) NetSuite
4 4 (0.21%) Sage X3
5 3 (0.16%) SAP BPC
5 3 (0.16%) SAP S/4HANA
5 3 (0.16%) SimCorp Dimension
6 2 (0.11%) BambooHR
6 2 (0.11%) Maximo
6 2 (0.11%) Oracle EBS
7 1 (0.053%) iTrent
7 1 (0.053%) NEC Housing
7 1 (0.053%) Oracle 11i
7 1 (0.053%) Oracle Assets
7 1 (0.053%) Oracle ERP
7 1 (0.053%) Raiser’s Edge
7 1 (0.053%) SAP Business ByDesign
7 1 (0.053%) SAP CAR
7 1 (0.053%) SAP EWM
Cloud Services
1 597 (31.60%) Azure
2 548 (29.01%) AWS
3 304 (16.09%) Power Platform
4 229 (12.12%) Azure Data Factory
5 201 (10.64%) Snowflake
6 178 (9.42%) Amazon S3
7 176 (9.32%) dbt
8 164 (8.68%) GCP
9 149 (7.89%) Azure Synapse Analytics
10 140 (7.41%) Azure DevOps
11 125 (6.62%) Serverless
12 117 (6.19%) GitHub
13 107 (5.66%) AWS Lambda
14 55 (2.91%) Amazon EMR
15 53 (2.81%) GitHub Actions
16 35 (1.85%) Matillion
17 33 (1.75%) Amazon CloudWatch
18 30 (1.59%) AWS CloudFormation
19 28 (1.48%) Amazon Kinesis
20 24 (1.27%) OpenShift
Communications & Networking
1 34 (1.80%) DNS
1 34 (1.80%) VPN
2 33 (1.75%) BGP
2 33 (1.75%) DMZ
2 33 (1.75%) Multicast
3 10 (0.53%) Structured Cabling
4 7 (0.37%) PuTTY
4 7 (0.37%) WinSCP
5 6 (0.32%) Firewall
6 4 (0.21%) Wi-Fi
6 4 (0.21%) Wireless
7 2 (0.11%) Intrusion Detection
8 1 (0.053%) 4G
8 1 (0.053%) 5G
8 1 (0.053%) MQTT
Database & Business Intelligence
1 308 (16.30%) Data Warehouse
2 290 (15.35%) Power BI
3 178 (9.42%) Data Lake
4 111 (5.88%) SQL Server
5 109 (5.77%) Amazon Redshift
6 104 (5.51%) Delta Lake
7 97 (5.13%) Metadata
8 92 (4.87%) BigQuery
9 90 (4.76%) Pentaho
10 87 (4.61%) Big Data
11 75 (3.97%) Amazon Athena
12 74 (3.92%) Tableau
13 73 (3.86%) Snowflake Schema
14 69 (3.65%) PostgreSQL
15 67 (3.55%) Azure SQL Database
16 57 (3.02%) Relational Database
16 57 (3.02%) SQL Server Integration Services
17 56 (2.96%) NoSQL
18 38 (2.01%) Data Vault
18 38 (2.01%) Hadoop
Development Applications
1 187 (9.90%) Git
2 103 (5.45%) GitLab
3 97 (5.13%) JIRA
4 49 (2.59%) Jenkins
5 9 (0.48%) Artifactory
6 8 (0.42%) MLflow
7 7 (0.37%) Postman
8 6 (0.32%) Bitbucket
9 3 (0.16%) Newman
9 3 (0.16%) SonarQube
10 2 (0.11%) Atlassian Bamboo
10 2 (0.11%) Claude Code
10 2 (0.11%) Sonatype Nexus
10 2 (0.11%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
10 2 (0.11%) Terragrunt
10 2 (0.11%) Visual Studio
11 1 (0.053%) ERwin
11 1 (0.053%) JUnit
11 1 (0.053%) Octopus Deploy
11 1 (0.053%) Selenium
General
1 317 (16.78%) Finance
2 308 (16.30%) Social Skills
3 204 (10.80%) Analytical Skills
4 159 (8.42%) Public Sector
5 106 (5.61%) Banking
6 37 (1.96%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 31 (1.64%) Marketing
8 29 (1.54%) Retail
9 28 (1.48%) Documentation Skills
10 25 (1.32%) Investment Banking
11 23 (1.22%) Telecoms
12 18 (0.95%) Manufacturing
12 18 (0.95%) Pharmaceutical
13 13 (0.69%) Aerospace
13 13 (0.69%) Front Office
14 12 (0.64%) Automotive
15 11 (0.58%) Publishing
16 8 (0.42%) Billing
16 8 (0.42%) Legal
17 7 (0.37%) Law
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 283 (14.98%) PySpark
2 149 (7.89%) Kafka
3 45 (2.38%) Pandas
4 37 (1.96%) JSON
5 28 (1.48%) REST
6 24 (1.27%) Spring
6 24 (1.27%) Spring Boot
7 23 (1.22%) Great Expectations
8 22 (1.16%) XML
9 19 (1.01%) YAML
10 17 (0.90%) Apache Beam
11 13 (0.69%) Apache Avro
11 13 (0.69%) scikit-learn
12 12 (0.64%) Streamlit
13 11 (0.58%) Matplotlib
13 11 (0.58%) React
13 11 (0.58%) RESTful
14 10 (0.53%) pytest
14 10 (0.53%) PyTorch
15 9 (0.48%) GeoJSON
Miscellaneous
1 143 (7.57%) Cloud Native
2 58 (3.07%) Data Structures
2 58 (3.07%) Legacy Systems
3 33 (1.75%) Distributed Systems
4 29 (1.54%) Greenfield Project
4 29 (1.54%) Onboarding
5 27 (1.43%) Reinsurance
6 23 (1.22%) NHS
6 23 (1.22%) Product Ownership
7 21 (1.11%) Clustering
7 21 (1.11%) Data Protection Act
8 12 (0.64%) Virtual Team
9 11 (0.58%) Life Science
10 10 (0.53%) Linux Command Line
10 10 (0.53%) Public Cloud
10 10 (0.53%) Reference Data
10 10 (0.53%) Replication
10 10 (0.53%) Self-Motivation
11 9 (0.48%) Distributed Computing
11 9 (0.48%) Driving Licence
Operating Systems
1 65 (3.44%) Unix
2 40 (2.12%) Linux
3 5 (0.26%) Windows
4 2 (0.11%) Ubuntu
4 2 (0.11%) Windows Server
5 1 (0.053%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 785 (41.56%) Data Pipeline
2 702 (37.16%) Analytics
3 684 (36.21%) Data Engineering
4 674 (35.68%) ETL
5 628 (33.25%) Data Modelling
6 454 (24.03%) CI/CD
7 380 (20.12%) Business Intelligence
8 344 (18.21%) Agile
9 319 (16.89%) DevOps
10 264 (13.98%) Migration
11 252 (13.34%) Data Governance
12 241 (12.76%) Problem-Solving
13 234 (12.39%) AI
14 202 (10.69%) Data Integration
15 196 (10.38%) Validation
16 187 (9.90%) Data Science
17 169 (8.95%) Decision-Making
18 163 (8.63%) Data Transformation
19 146 (7.73%) Infrastructure as Code
20 143 (7.57%) Machine Learning
Programming Languages
1 1,001 (52.99%) SQL
2 864 (45.74%) Python
3 122 (6.46%) Java
4 66 (3.49%) Scala
5 55 (2.91%) PL/SQL
6 42 (2.22%) T-SQL
7 36 (1.91%) Data Analysis Expressions
8 31 (1.64%) Shell Script
9 29 (1.54%) C#
10 28 (1.48%) Bash
11 22 (1.16%) PowerShell
12 16 (0.85%) Bicep
13 14 (0.74%) R
14 13 (0.69%) JavaScript
15 8 (0.42%) TypeScript
16 6 (0.32%) Go
17 2 (0.11%) Korn
17 2 (0.11%) Perl
17 2 (0.11%) Ruby
17 2 (0.11%) SPARQL
Qualifications
1 526 (27.85%) Security Cleared
2 460 (24.35%) SC Cleared
3 51 (2.70%) BPSS Clearance
4 43 (2.28%) Degree
5 26 (1.38%) Azure Certification
6 18 (0.95%) DV Cleared
7 16 (0.85%) Computer Science Degree
8 14 (0.74%) AWS Certification
9 9 (0.48%) City & Guilds
9 9 (0.48%) DBS Check
9 9 (0.48%) SnowPro
10 8 (0.42%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
11 7 (0.37%) Master's Degree
12 6 (0.32%) Microsoft Certification
13 5 (0.26%) BICSI Certification
13 5 (0.26%) CISSP
14 4 (0.21%) CISM
15 3 (0.16%) IBM Certification
16 2 (0.11%) CEH
17 1 (0.053%) CISA
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 468 (24.78%) Data Quality
2 59 (3.12%) QA
3 52 (2.75%) GDPR
4 13 (0.69%) Accessibility
5 12 (0.64%) SLA
6 9 (0.48%) FATCA
7 7 (0.37%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 6 (0.32%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 4 (0.21%) MiFID
10 3 (0.16%) GMP
10 3 (0.16%) HIPAA
11 2 (0.11%) Disclosure Scotland
11 2 (0.11%) EMIR
11 2 (0.11%) GRC
11 2 (0.11%) SNOMED CT
11 2 (0.11%) WCAG
12 1 (0.053%) Government Security Classifications
12 1 (0.053%) IFRS 17
12 1 (0.053%) ISO 13485
12 1 (0.053%) PCI DSS
System Software
1 105 (5.56%) Docker
2 6 (0.32%) Virtual Machines
3 2 (0.11%) Active Directory
3 2 (0.11%) HDFS
4 1 (0.053%) RACF
Systems Management
1 198 (10.48%) Terraform
2 86 (4.55%) Kubernetes
3 51 (2.70%) Grafana
4 12 (0.64%) Ansible
4 12 (0.64%) Prometheus
5 8 (0.42%) Kibana
6 3 (0.16%) Rancher
7 2 (0.11%) Apache Ranger
7 2 (0.11%) Control-M
7 2 (0.11%) Thomson Reuters DACS
8 1 (0.053%) Fluentd
8 1 (0.053%) Kubeflow
8 1 (0.053%) logstash
8 1 (0.053%) NetBackup
8 1 (0.053%) Puppet
8 1 (0.053%) QRadar
Vendors
1 405 (21.44%) Databricks
2 234 (12.39%) Microsoft
3 173 (9.16%) Oracle
4 140 (7.41%) Informatica
5 130 (6.88%) Talend
6 72 (3.81%) Denodo
7 57 (3.02%) Google
8 35 (1.85%) Cisco
8 35 (1.85%) F5
9 29 (1.54%) SAP
10 25 (1.32%) Salesforce
10 25 (1.32%) Splunk
11 20 (1.06%) Palantir
11 20 (1.06%) ServiceNow
12 18 (0.95%) Cloudera
13 15 (0.79%) Foundry
13 15 (0.79%) IBM
14 14 (0.74%) Alteryx
15 10 (0.53%) Sage
16 9 (0.48%) Dynatrace