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 28 May 2026.

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

6 months to
28 May 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 62 93 98
Rank change year-on-year +31 +5 +20
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 1,774 778 944
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 3.63% 2.72% 2.21%
As % of the Job Titles category 3.94% 2.94% 2.38%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,235 587 729
10th Percentile £375 £356 £199
25th Percentile £415 £425 £410
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £491 £500
Median % change year-on-year +1.94% -1.90% -9.09%
75th Percentile £582 £588 £588
90th Percentile £650 £700 £675
UK excluding London median daily rate £469 £460 £450
% change year-on-year +2.05% +2.22% -14.29%
Number of hourly rates quoted 59 9 44
10th Percentile £19.34 £18.13 £33.13
25th Percentile £41.26 £51.25 £49.25
Median hourly rate £52.50 £52.50 £66.25
Median % change year-on-year - -20.75% -12.25%
75th Percentile £71.50 £78.70 £80.00
90th Percentile £75.80 £82.75 -
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 45,082 26,443 39,660
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.31% 92.30% 92.78%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,504 17,178 25,818
10th Percentile £325 £290 £280
25th Percentile £413 £405 £410
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £508 £525
Median % change year-on-year +0.99% -3.33% -2.78%
75th Percentile £619 £625 £638
90th Percentile £725 £738 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £488
% change year-on-year +5.26% -2.56% -2.50%
Number of hourly rates quoted 3,000 1,028 2,760
10th Percentile £15.00 £14.00 £12.80
25th Percentile £20.50 £18.09 £16.30
Median hourly rate £42.50 £27.97 £36.50
Median % change year-on-year +51.98% -23.38% -18.89%
75th Percentile £66.63 £60.00 £61.30
90th Percentile £78.75 £75.00 £72.54
UK excluding London median hourly rate £43.61 £25.30 £40.00
% change year-on-year +72.35% -36.75% -5.88%

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 28 May 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 28 May 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 28 May 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 +33 1,560 £500 - 320
London +31 854 £525 - 130
UK excluding London +50 730 £469 +2.05% 254
Work from Home +28 511 £500 +4.28% 169
Midlands +43 301 £469 +3.08% 38
West Midlands +44 283 £469 +1.96% 25
North of England -1 200 £465 -0.80% 77
North West +10 125 £480 +1.05% 30
South East +8 99 £500 +17.65% 71
South West +10 72 £500 +1.27% 31
Scotland +13 58 £450 - 7
Yorkshire -24 58 £465 +3.33% 25
Wales +2 22 £450 +118.11% 19
East of England -23 19 £520 +63.52% 4
East Midlands -21 18 £525 +26.51% 13
North East -23 17 £450 -5.26% 23
Northern Ireland +5 3 £410 -18.00% 7

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

For the 6 months to 28 May 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.

1 972 (54.79%) SQL
2 812 (45.77%) Python
3 745 (42.00%) Data Pipeline
4 674 (37.99%) ETL
5 665 (37.49%) Analytics
6 648 (36.53%) Data Engineering
7 604 (34.05%) Azure
8 603 (33.99%) Data Modelling
9 521 (29.37%) Security Cleared
10 479 (27.00%) AWS
11 463 (26.10%) SC Cleared
12 449 (25.31%) Data Quality
13 422 (23.79%) Databricks
14 417 (23.51%) CI/CD
15 379 (21.36%) Business Intelligence
16 319 (17.98%) Agile
17 311 (17.53%) DevOps
18 309 (17.42%) Power Platform
19 294 (16.57%) Data Warehouse
20 293 (16.52%) Power BI
21 271 (15.28%) PySpark
22 250 (14.09%) Azure Data Factory
23 246 (13.87%) Data Governance
24 238 (13.42%) Problem-Solving
25 233 (13.13%) Microsoft
26 221 (12.46%) Migration
27 205 (11.56%) AI
28 199 (11.22%) Data Integration
29 190 (10.71%) Git
30 189 (10.65%) Data Lake

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 (9.53%) Apache Airflow
2 160 (9.02%) Apache Spark
3 108 (6.09%) Apache
4 82 (4.62%) SAS
5 39 (2.20%) Confluence
6 12 (0.68%) Palantir Foundry
7 9 (0.51%) Jupyter
8 4 (0.23%) Microsoft Exchange
9 3 (0.17%) SharePoint
10 2 (0.11%) Luigi
11 1 (0.056%) Apache Superset
11 1 (0.056%) Appian
11 1 (0.056%) Camunda
11 1 (0.056%) R Markdown
Applications
1 19 (1.07%) Microsoft Excel
2 7 (0.39%) Notepad++
3 4 (0.23%) Spreadsheet
4 2 (0.11%) Chatbot
5 1 (0.056%) Microsoft Office
5 1 (0.056%) Microsoft PowerPoint
Business Applications
1 7 (0.39%) Aladdin
2 3 (0.17%) SimCorp Dimension
3 2 (0.11%) BambooHR
3 2 (0.11%) Dynamics CRM
3 2 (0.11%) Infor LN
3 2 (0.11%) Oracle EBS
3 2 (0.11%) SAP BPC
3 2 (0.11%) SAP S/4HANA
4 1 (0.056%) Elite 3E
4 1 (0.056%) iTrent
4 1 (0.056%) NEC Housing
4 1 (0.056%) Oracle 11i
4 1 (0.056%) Oracle Assets
4 1 (0.056%) Oracle ERP
4 1 (0.056%) Raiser’s Edge
4 1 (0.056%) SAP Business ByDesign
Cloud Services
1 604 (34.05%) Azure
2 479 (27.00%) AWS
3 309 (17.42%) Power Platform
4 250 (14.09%) Azure Data Factory
5 178 (10.03%) Snowflake
6 165 (9.30%) Azure Synapse Analytics
7 156 (8.79%) Amazon S3
8 152 (8.57%) GCP
9 151 (8.51%) dbt
10 143 (8.06%) Azure DevOps
11 120 (6.76%) GitHub
12 111 (6.26%) Serverless
13 90 (5.07%) AWS Lambda
14 55 (3.10%) GitHub Actions
15 38 (2.14%) Amazon EMR
16 33 (1.86%) AWS CloudFormation
16 33 (1.86%) Matillion
17 29 (1.63%) Amazon Kinesis
18 25 (1.41%) OpenShift
19 23 (1.30%) AWS Step Functions
Communications & Networking
1 33 (1.86%) DNS
1 33 (1.86%) VPN
2 32 (1.80%) BGP
2 32 (1.80%) DMZ
2 32 (1.80%) Multicast
3 10 (0.56%) Structured Cabling
4 7 (0.39%) PuTTY
4 7 (0.39%) WinSCP
5 4 (0.23%) Firewall
5 4 (0.23%) Wi-Fi
5 4 (0.23%) Wireless
6 1 (0.056%) 4G
6 1 (0.056%) 5G
6 1 (0.056%) MQTT
6 1 (0.056%) Network Security
Database & Business Intelligence
1 294 (16.57%) Data Warehouse
2 293 (16.52%) Power BI
3 189 (10.65%) Data Lake
4 130 (7.33%) SQL Server
5 110 (6.20%) Delta Lake
6 95 (5.36%) Metadata
7 90 (5.07%) BigQuery
8 88 (4.96%) Big Data
9 84 (4.74%) Amazon Redshift
10 82 (4.62%) Azure SQL Database
11 81 (4.57%) Pentaho
12 74 (4.17%) Tableau
13 73 (4.11%) Snowflake Schema
14 70 (3.95%) PostgreSQL
15 65 (3.66%) NoSQL
15 65 (3.66%) SQL Server Integration Services
16 61 (3.44%) Amazon Athena
17 52 (2.93%) Relational Database
18 40 (2.25%) Hadoop
19 39 (2.20%) Data Vault
Development Applications
1 190 (10.71%) Git
2 87 (4.90%) JIRA
3 86 (4.85%) GitLab
4 50 (2.82%) Jenkins
5 14 (0.79%) MLflow
6 7 (0.39%) Artifactory
7 5 (0.28%) Postman
8 4 (0.23%) Bitbucket
9 3 (0.17%) Newman
9 3 (0.17%) SonarQube
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 (0.056%) ER Studio
11 1 (0.056%) ERwin
11 1 (0.056%) JUnit
11 1 (0.056%) Selenium
General
1 291 (16.40%) Finance
2 269 (15.16%) Social Skills
3 197 (11.10%) Analytical Skills
4 138 (7.78%) Public Sector
5 92 (5.19%) Banking
6 32 (1.80%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 26 (1.47%) Investment Banking
8 24 (1.35%) Documentation Skills
8 24 (1.35%) Retail
9 22 (1.24%) Marketing
10 20 (1.13%) Telecoms
11 16 (0.90%) Manufacturing
11 16 (0.90%) Pharmaceutical
12 15 (0.85%) Front Office
13 14 (0.79%) Aerospace
14 11 (0.62%) Publishing
15 7 (0.39%) Law
15 7 (0.39%) Military
16 6 (0.34%) Local Government
17 5 (0.28%) Back Office
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 271 (15.28%) PySpark
2 159 (8.96%) Kafka
3 54 (3.04%) Pandas
4 32 (1.80%) JSON
5 29 (1.63%) REST
6 26 (1.47%) Great Expectations
7 23 (1.30%) Spring
7 23 (1.30%) Spring Boot
8 22 (1.24%) YAML
9 18 (1.01%) Apache Beam
10 17 (0.96%) XML
11 13 (0.73%) Apache Avro
11 13 (0.73%) Matplotlib
11 13 (0.73%) PyTorch
11 13 (0.73%) scikit-learn
12 12 (0.68%) React
13 10 (0.56%) Node.js
13 10 (0.56%) pytest
14 9 (0.51%) NumPy
14 9 (0.51%) RESTful
Miscellaneous
1 131 (7.38%) Cloud Native
2 50 (2.82%) Data Structures
3 47 (2.65%) Legacy Systems
4 31 (1.75%) Greenfield Project
5 30 (1.69%) Product Ownership
6 26 (1.47%) Distributed Systems
7 24 (1.35%) Onboarding
8 23 (1.30%) Reinsurance
9 21 (1.18%) Clustering
10 19 (1.07%) Data Protection Act
11 15 (0.85%) NHS
12 13 (0.73%) Replication
13 12 (0.68%) Distributed Computing
13 12 (0.68%) Self-Motivation
14 11 (0.62%) Reference Data
15 10 (0.56%) Life Science
15 10 (0.56%) Public Cloud
16 9 (0.51%) AI Agents
16 9 (0.51%) Driving Licence
16 9 (0.51%) Linux Command Line
Operating Systems
1 62 (3.49%) Unix
2 39 (2.20%) Linux
3 5 (0.28%) Windows
4 2 (0.11%) Ubuntu
4 2 (0.11%) VMS
4 2 (0.11%) Windows Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 745 (42.00%) Data Pipeline
2 674 (37.99%) ETL
3 665 (37.49%) Analytics
4 648 (36.53%) Data Engineering
5 603 (33.99%) Data Modelling
6 417 (23.51%) CI/CD
7 379 (21.36%) Business Intelligence
8 319 (17.98%) Agile
9 311 (17.53%) DevOps
10 246 (13.87%) Data Governance
11 238 (13.42%) Problem-Solving
12 221 (12.46%) Migration
13 205 (11.56%) AI
14 199 (11.22%) Data Integration
15 185 (10.43%) Validation
16 172 (9.70%) Data Science
17 146 (8.23%) Decision-Making
18 140 (7.89%) Data Transformation
19 136 (7.67%) Data Architecture
20 133 (7.50%) Performance Tuning
Programming Languages
1 972 (54.79%) SQL
2 812 (45.77%) Python
3 121 (6.82%) Java
4 81 (4.57%) Scala
5 52 (2.93%) PL/SQL
6 43 (2.42%) T-SQL
7 40 (2.25%) Data Analysis Expressions
8 35 (1.97%) C#
9 31 (1.75%) Shell Script
10 28 (1.58%) Bash
11 21 (1.18%) Bicep
12 19 (1.07%) PowerShell
13 14 (0.79%) R
14 13 (0.73%) JavaScript
15 8 (0.45%) Go
16 7 (0.39%) TypeScript
17 2 (0.11%) HiveQL
17 2 (0.11%) LookML
17 2 (0.11%) Ruby
17 2 (0.11%) VB
Qualifications
1 521 (29.37%) Security Cleared
2 463 (26.10%) SC Cleared
3 46 (2.59%) Degree
4 38 (2.14%) BPSS Clearance
5 29 (1.63%) Azure Certification
6 17 (0.96%) Computer Science Degree
6 17 (0.96%) DV Cleared
7 12 (0.68%) DBS Check
8 9 (0.51%) City & Guilds
8 9 (0.51%) Master's Degree
9 8 (0.45%) AWS Certification
10 6 (0.34%) Microsoft Certification
10 6 (0.34%) SnowPro
11 5 (0.28%) BICSI Certification
12 3 (0.17%) CISSP
12 3 (0.17%) IBM Certification
13 2 (0.11%) CISM
13 2 (0.11%) CTC Cleared
14 1 (0.056%) CISA
14 1 (0.056%) CompTIA Security+
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 449 (25.31%) Data Quality
2 58 (3.27%) QA
3 52 (2.93%) GDPR
4 17 (0.96%) Accessibility
5 11 (0.62%) SLA
6 9 (0.51%) FATCA
7 6 (0.34%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 5 (0.28%) ISO/IEC 27001
9 4 (0.23%) MiFID
10 3 (0.17%) GMP
10 3 (0.17%) WCAG
11 2 (0.11%) Disclosure Scotland
11 2 (0.11%) EMIR
11 2 (0.11%) GRC
11 2 (0.11%) HIPAA
11 2 (0.11%) SNOMED CT
12 1 (0.056%) Basel III
12 1 (0.056%) Government Security Classifications
12 1 (0.056%) IFRS
12 1 (0.056%) IFRS 9
System Software
1 106 (5.98%) Docker
2 6 (0.34%) Virtual Machines
3 2 (0.11%) Active Directory
3 2 (0.11%) HDFS
4 1 (0.056%) RACF
Systems Management
1 178 (10.03%) Terraform
2 86 (4.85%) Kubernetes
3 53 (2.99%) Grafana
4 13 (0.73%) Ansible
4 13 (0.73%) Prometheus
5 10 (0.56%) Kibana
6 3 (0.17%) logstash
6 3 (0.17%) Rancher
7 2 (0.11%) Apache Ranger
7 2 (0.11%) Control-M
7 2 (0.11%) Thomson Reuters DACS
8 1 (0.056%) Fluentd
8 1 (0.056%) Kubeflow
8 1 (0.056%) NetBackup
8 1 (0.056%) Puppet
8 1 (0.056%) QRadar
Vendors
1 422 (23.79%) Databricks
2 233 (13.13%) Microsoft
3 152 (8.57%) Oracle
4 121 (6.82%) Informatica
5 119 (6.71%) Talend
6 69 (3.89%) Denodo
7 59 (3.33%) Google
8 34 (1.92%) Cisco
8 34 (1.92%) F5
9 28 (1.58%) SAP
10 25 (1.41%) Splunk
11 21 (1.18%) ServiceNow
12 17 (0.96%) Cloudera
13 15 (0.85%) Alteryx
13 15 (0.85%) Foundry
13 15 (0.85%) IBM
14 13 (0.73%) Palantir
15 9 (0.51%) Dynatrace
16 8 (0.45%) MuleSoft
16 8 (0.45%) Salesforce