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 August 2026.

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

6 months to
28 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 66 128 98
Rank change year-on-year +62 -30 +23
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 1,920 709 899
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 3.57% 2.17% 2.32%
As % of the Job Titles category 3.86% 2.38% 2.49%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,275 505 643
10th Percentile £375 £375 £275
25th Percentile £425 £425 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year - -4.76% -4.55%
75th Percentile £588 £575 £625
90th Percentile £663 £688 £688
UK excluding London median daily rate £469 £475 £475
% change year-on-year -1.22% - -9.52%
Number of hourly rates quoted 85 14 23
10th Percentile £20.10 £25.42 £31.25
25th Percentile £30.96 £37.00 £49.25
Median hourly rate £44.50 £52.50 £75.00
Median % change year-on-year -15.24% -30.00% +5.26%
75th Percentile £70.00 £74.65 £80.00
90th Percentile £75.00 £85.25 -
UK excluding London median hourly rate £44.50 £52.85 £80.00
% change year-on-year -15.80% -33.94% +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 49,702 29,842 36,074
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.46% 91.23% 93.02%
Number of daily rates quoted 29,679 18,834 22,885
10th Percentile £325 £280 £300
25th Percentile £425 £400 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -1.87%
75th Percentile £625 £621 £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 3,561 1,567 1,910
10th Percentile £14.96 £13.72 £14.16
25th Percentile £20.50 £17.08 £19.50
Median hourly rate £41.74 £25.15 £43.00
Median % change year-on-year +65.94% -41.51% -0.73%
75th Percentile £67.84 £53.81 £65.00
90th Percentile £80.00 £71.00 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £42.50 £25.15 £43.00
% change year-on-year +68.99% -41.51% +7.50%

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 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 28 August 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 28 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 +66 1,703 £500 - 772
UK excluding London +102 875 £469 -1.22% 479
London +33 846 £525 - 430
Work from Home +46 563 £500 +5.26% 306
Midlands +75 361 £467 +0.97% 68
West Midlands +61 302 £469 -6.20% 42
North of England +33 222 £490 +3.16% 134
South East +32 130 £459 -3.87% 133
North West +34 126 £525 +10.53% 64
South West +18 89 £525 +5.00% 52
Yorkshire -2 76 £465 -2.11% 30
East Midlands +23 59 £450 +1.98% 26
Scotland +15 58 £440 -2.22% 42
East of England +11 37 £450 - 25
North East -25 21 £515 +21.89% 41
Wales -5 16 £488 +9.55% 13
Northern Ireland +5 3 £410 -18.00% 15
Channel Islands - 1 - -

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

For the 6 months to 28 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.

1 955 (49.74%) SQL
2 815 (42.45%) Data Pipeline
2 815 (42.45%) Python
3 728 (37.92%) Data Engineering
4 667 (34.74%) Analytics
5 660 (34.38%) ETL
6 643 (33.49%) Data Modelling
7 599 (31.20%) Azure
8 573 (29.84%) AWS
9 501 (26.09%) Security Cleared
10 470 (24.48%) Data Quality
11 444 (23.13%) CI/CD
12 439 (22.86%) SC Cleared
13 392 (20.42%) Databricks
14 335 (17.45%) Agile
15 330 (17.19%) Business Intelligence
16 320 (16.67%) Data Warehouse
17 310 (16.15%) DevOps
18 303 (15.78%) Migration
19 269 (14.01%) PySpark
20 264 (13.75%) Power Platform
21 261 (13.59%) AI
22 257 (13.39%) Power BI
23 255 (13.28%) Data Governance
24 246 (12.81%) Microsoft
25 238 (12.40%) Data Integration
25 238 (12.40%) Validation
26 229 (11.93%) Data Transformation
27 225 (11.72%) Snowflake
28 218 (11.35%) Azure Data Factory

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
1 199 (10.36%) Apache Airflow
2 150 (7.81%) Apache Spark
3 122 (6.35%) Apache
4 68 (3.54%) SAS
5 42 (2.19%) Confluence
6 17 (0.89%) Palantir Foundry
7 13 (0.68%) SharePoint
8 9 (0.47%) Jupyter
9 3 (0.16%) Apache Superset
10 2 (0.10%) ArcGIS
10 2 (0.10%) PowerExchange
11 1 (0.052%) Liferay
11 1 (0.052%) Luigi
11 1 (0.052%) Microsoft Exchange
11 1 (0.052%) nginx
11 1 (0.052%) R Markdown
Applications
1 24 (1.25%) Microsoft Excel
2 7 (0.36%) Notepad++
2 7 (0.36%) Spreadsheet
3 4 (0.21%) Chatbot
4 1 (0.052%) Microsoft PowerPoint
Business Applications
1 13 (0.68%) Aladdin
2 6 (0.31%) Dynamics CRM
3 5 (0.26%) Infor LN
3 5 (0.26%) NetSuite
3 5 (0.26%) Sage X3
4 4 (0.21%) SAP S/4HANA
4 4 (0.21%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
5 3 (0.16%) SimCorp Dimension
6 2 (0.10%) BambooHR
6 2 (0.10%) Maximo
6 2 (0.10%) Oracle EBS
7 1 (0.052%) FIS Private Capital Suite
7 1 (0.052%) MIS ActiveH
7 1 (0.052%) Oracle 11i
7 1 (0.052%) Oracle Assets
7 1 (0.052%) Oracle ERP
7 1 (0.052%) Raiser’s Edge
7 1 (0.052%) SAP BPC
7 1 (0.052%) SAP CAR
7 1 (0.052%) SAP EWM
Cloud Services
1 599 (31.20%) Azure
2 573 (29.84%) AWS
3 264 (13.75%) Power Platform
4 225 (11.72%) Snowflake
5 218 (11.35%) Azure Data Factory
6 210 (10.94%) dbt
7 175 (9.11%) GCP
8 170 (8.85%) Amazon S3
9 135 (7.03%) Azure Synapse Analytics
10 131 (6.82%) Azure DevOps
11 126 (6.56%) Serverless
12 113 (5.89%) AWS Lambda
12 113 (5.89%) GitHub
13 52 (2.71%) Amazon EMR
14 43 (2.24%) GitHub Actions
15 37 (1.93%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 28 (1.46%) AWS Step Functions
17 26 (1.35%) AWS CloudFormation
18 25 (1.30%) Amazon Kinesis
19 24 (1.25%) Microsoft Purview
Communications & Networking
1 30 (1.56%) VPN
2 29 (1.51%) BGP
2 29 (1.51%) DMZ
2 29 (1.51%) DNS
2 29 (1.51%) Multicast
3 11 (0.57%) Structured Cabling
4 9 (0.47%) Firewall
5 7 (0.36%) PuTTY
5 7 (0.36%) WinSCP
6 5 (0.26%) Intrusion Detection
7 4 (0.21%) Wi-Fi
7 4 (0.21%) Wireless
8 1 (0.052%) HTTP
8 1 (0.052%) LTE
8 1 (0.052%) MQTT
Database & Business Intelligence
1 320 (16.67%) Data Warehouse
2 257 (13.39%) Power BI
3 172 (8.96%) Data Lake
4 125 (6.51%) Metadata
5 105 (5.47%) Amazon Redshift
6 102 (5.31%) BigQuery
7 91 (4.74%) Delta Lake
8 86 (4.48%) SQL Server
9 82 (4.27%) Amazon Athena
10 78 (4.06%) Big Data
11 74 (3.85%) Pentaho
12 64 (3.33%) Tableau
13 61 (3.18%) Relational Database
13 61 (3.18%) Snowflake Schema
14 59 (3.07%) PostgreSQL
15 55 (2.86%) Azure SQL Database
16 49 (2.55%) NoSQL
17 43 (2.24%) SQL Server Integration Services
18 38 (1.98%) Oracle Database
18 38 (1.98%) Star Schema
Development Applications
1 166 (8.65%) Git
2 97 (5.05%) GitLab
3 69 (3.59%) JIRA
4 38 (1.98%) Jenkins
5 16 (0.83%) MLflow
6 9 (0.47%) Artifactory
7 7 (0.36%) Postman
8 5 (0.26%) Bitbucket
9 4 (0.21%) ERwin
9 4 (0.21%) Selenium
9 4 (0.21%) SonarQube
10 3 (0.16%) Atlassian Bamboo
10 3 (0.16%) Claude Code
10 3 (0.16%) Newman
10 3 (0.16%) Sonatype Nexus
11 2 (0.10%) ER Studio
11 2 (0.10%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
11 2 (0.10%) Terragrunt
11 2 (0.10%) Yeoman
12 1 (0.052%) Octopus Deploy
General
1 308 (16.04%) Finance
2 306 (15.94%) Social Skills
3 219 (11.41%) Analytical Skills
4 163 (8.49%) Public Sector
5 112 (5.83%) Banking
6 33 (1.72%) Inclusion and Diversity
6 33 (1.72%) Marketing
7 25 (1.30%) Retail
7 25 (1.30%) Telecoms
8 22 (1.15%) Aerospace
8 22 (1.15%) Documentation Skills
8 22 (1.15%) Investment Banking
9 21 (1.09%) Front Office
10 19 (0.99%) Automotive
10 19 (0.99%) Manufacturing
11 18 (0.94%) Law
12 16 (0.83%) Pharmaceutical
13 12 (0.63%) Police
14 10 (0.52%) Financial Institution
14 10 (0.52%) Legal
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 269 (14.01%) PySpark
2 185 (9.64%) Terraform
3 139 (7.24%) Kafka
4 33 (1.72%) JSON
5 32 (1.67%) Pandas
6 28 (1.46%) REST
7 23 (1.20%) Great Expectations
7 23 (1.20%) Spring
7 23 (1.20%) Spring Boot
7 23 (1.20%) XML
8 16 (0.83%) Apache Beam
8 16 (0.83%) React
9 14 (0.73%) RESTful
9 14 (0.73%) YAML
10 11 (0.57%) LangChain
10 11 (0.57%) pytest
10 11 (0.57%) Streamlit
11 10 (0.52%) .NET
11 10 (0.52%) Microsoft Graph
12 9 (0.47%) HTML
Miscellaneous
1 141 (7.34%) Cloud Native
2 78 (4.06%) Legacy Systems
3 60 (3.13%) Data Structures
4 41 (2.14%) Onboarding
5 26 (1.35%) Product Ownership
6 24 (1.25%) Distributed Systems
7 23 (1.20%) Greenfield Project
8 22 (1.15%) NHS
8 22 (1.15%) Reference Data
9 17 (0.89%) Reinsurance
10 16 (0.83%) AI Agents
10 16 (0.83%) Management Information System
11 14 (0.73%) Data Protection Act
12 12 (0.63%) Algorithms
12 12 (0.63%) Clustering
13 11 (0.57%) Enterprise Software
13 11 (0.57%) Virtual Team
14 10 (0.52%) Linux Command Line
14 10 (0.52%) Replication
15 9 (0.47%) Life Science
Operating Systems
1 65 (3.39%) Unix
2 50 (2.60%) Linux
3 5 (0.26%) Windows
4 3 (0.16%) Windows Server
5 2 (0.10%) Ubuntu
6 1 (0.052%) Robot Operating System
6 1 (0.052%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 815 (42.45%) Data Pipeline
2 728 (37.92%) Data Engineering
3 667 (34.74%) Analytics
4 660 (34.38%) ETL
5 643 (33.49%) Data Modelling
6 444 (23.13%) CI/CD
7 335 (17.45%) Agile
8 330 (17.19%) Business Intelligence
9 310 (16.15%) DevOps
10 303 (15.78%) Migration
11 261 (13.59%) AI
12 255 (13.28%) Data Governance
13 238 (12.40%) Data Integration
13 238 (12.40%) Validation
14 229 (11.93%) Data Transformation
15 212 (11.04%) Problem-Solving
16 172 (8.96%) Decision-Making
17 163 (8.49%) Data Science
18 162 (8.44%) Machine Learning
19 158 (8.23%) Infrastructure as Code
Programming Languages
1 955 (49.74%) SQL
2 815 (42.45%) Python
3 113 (5.89%) Java
4 67 (3.49%) Scala
5 54 (2.81%) PL/SQL
6 35 (1.82%) Shell Script
7 32 (1.67%) Data Analysis Expressions
7 32 (1.67%) T-SQL
8 23 (1.20%) Bash
9 22 (1.15%) PowerShell
10 21 (1.09%) JavaScript
11 15 (0.78%) C#
12 11 (0.57%) R
13 9 (0.47%) Bicep
14 7 (0.36%) TypeScript
15 5 (0.26%) Go
16 4 (0.21%) Korn
17 3 (0.16%) COBOL
18 2 (0.10%) Perl
18 2 (0.10%) SPARQL
Qualifications
1 501 (26.09%) Security Cleared
2 439 (22.86%) SC Cleared
3 45 (2.34%) BPSS Clearance
4 39 (2.03%) Degree
5 22 (1.15%) DV Cleared
6 21 (1.09%) Azure Certification
7 20 (1.04%) Computer Science Degree
8 14 (0.73%) AWS Certification
9 10 (0.52%) SnowPro
10 9 (0.47%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
10 9 (0.47%) City & Guilds
11 8 (0.42%) DBS Check
12 6 (0.31%) CISM
12 6 (0.31%) CISSP
12 6 (0.31%) Master's Degree
13 5 (0.26%) BICSI Certification
13 5 (0.26%) CEH
14 4 (0.21%) Microsoft Certification
15 1 (0.052%) PMI Certification
15 1 (0.052%) PMP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 470 (24.48%) Data Quality
2 67 (3.49%) QA
3 45 (2.34%) GDPR
4 15 (0.78%) Accessibility
5 11 (0.57%) SLA
6 7 (0.36%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 6 (0.31%) FATCA
7 6 (0.31%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 5 (0.26%) HIPAA
9 3 (0.16%) Disclosure Scotland
9 3 (0.16%) MiFID
10 2 (0.10%) EMIR
10 2 (0.10%) SNOMED CT
10 2 (0.10%) WCAG
11 1 (0.052%) Government Security Classifications
11 1 (0.052%) IFRS
11 1 (0.052%) IFRS 9
11 1 (0.052%) PCI DSS
11 1 (0.052%) PMO
11 1 (0.052%) SOC 2
System Software
1 109 (5.68%) Docker
2 4 (0.21%) Virtual Machines
3 2 (0.10%) Active Directory
4 1 (0.052%) RACF
Systems Management
1 81 (4.22%) Kubernetes
2 46 (2.40%) Grafana
3 17 (0.89%) Ansible
4 12 (0.63%) Control-M
5 10 (0.52%) Kibana
6 5 (0.26%) Prometheus
7 2 (0.10%) Apache Ranger
7 2 (0.10%) logstash
7 2 (0.10%) Puppet
7 2 (0.10%) Thomson Reuters DACS
8 1 (0.052%) Progress Chef
Vendors
1 392 (20.42%) Databricks
2 246 (12.81%) Microsoft
3 158 (8.23%) Oracle
4 114 (5.94%) Informatica
5 103 (5.36%) Talend
6 69 (3.59%) Google
7 60 (3.13%) Denodo
8 32 (1.67%) Salesforce
9 30 (1.56%) Cisco
9 30 (1.56%) F5
10 27 (1.41%) Palantir
11 26 (1.35%) SAP
12 21 (1.09%) Foundry
13 15 (0.78%) Splunk
14 14 (0.73%) Cloudera
15 12 (0.63%) IBM
16 11 (0.57%) Bloomberg
17 10 (0.52%) ServiceNow
18 9 (0.47%) Sage
19 8 (0.42%) InterSystems