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 September 2026.

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

6 months to
28 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 68 127 97
Rank change year-on-year +59 -30 +29
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 1,900 721 908
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 3.49% 2.20% 2.38%
As % of the Job Titles category 3.79% 2.41% 2.56%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,273 521 636
10th Percentile £372 £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 £695 £695
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £475 £500
% change year-on-year - -5.00% -4.76%
Number of hourly rates quoted 64 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 £68.00 £80.00 £97.50
90th Percentile £70.00 £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 50,147 29,864 35,507
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.20% 91.01% 92.98%
Number of daily rates quoted 29,583 18,880 21,565
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% -0.94%
75th Percentile £630 £623 £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 3,922 1,610 1,584
10th Percentile £14.50 £13.75 £14.85
25th Percentile £20.00 £17.30 £20.50
Median hourly rate £41.72 £25.15 £43.00
Median % change year-on-year +65.89% -41.51% -3.37%
75th Percentile £67.50 £51.61 £65.00
90th Percentile £78.75 £68.57 £74.96
UK excluding London median hourly rate £42.00 £25.08 £43.00
% change year-on-year +67.50% -41.69% -2.27%

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 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 28 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 28 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 +69 1,659 £500 -1.96% 1,525
UK excluding London +90 857 £475 - 749
London +34 825 £525 - 809
Work from Home +50 551 £500 +5.26% 615
Midlands +79 337 £469 +1.41% 115
West Midlands +65 261 £469 -6.20% 77
North of England +38 205 £520 +9.47% 248
South East +30 125 £459 +2.00% 141
North West +15 110 £525 +17.98% 132
South West +21 107 £525 +5.00% 77
East Midlands +36 76 £388 -16.22% 38
Yorkshire +3 76 £500 - 74
Scotland -5 67 £440 -3.56% 68
East of England +11 37 £488 -18.75% 56
North East -25 20 £450 +9.09% 43
Wales -5 17 £513 +3.54% 13
Northern Ireland +3 1 - - 33
Channel Islands - 1 - -

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

For the 6 months to 28 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.

1 948 (49.89%) SQL
2 827 (43.53%) Python
3 805 (42.37%) Data Pipeline
4 733 (38.58%) Data Engineering
5 653 (34.37%) Data Modelling
5 653 (34.37%) ETL
6 638 (33.58%) Analytics
7 586 (30.84%) AWS
8 581 (30.58%) Azure
9 485 (25.53%) Security Cleared
10 477 (25.11%) Data Quality
11 442 (23.26%) CI/CD
12 419 (22.05%) SC Cleared
13 405 (21.32%) Databricks
14 328 (17.26%) Agile
15 321 (16.89%) Data Warehouse
16 315 (16.58%) Migration
17 310 (16.32%) AI
18 301 (15.84%) DevOps
19 298 (15.68%) Business Intelligence
20 259 (13.63%) PySpark
21 252 (13.26%) Data Transformation
22 249 (13.11%) Validation
23 248 (13.05%) Data Governance
24 244 (12.84%) Power Platform
25 243 (12.79%) Data Integration
25 243 (12.79%) Microsoft
26 236 (12.42%) Power BI
26 236 (12.42%) Snowflake
27 230 (12.11%) 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
1 211 (11.11%) Apache Airflow
2 153 (8.05%) Apache Spark
3 132 (6.95%) Apache
4 55 (2.89%) SAS
5 47 (2.47%) Confluence
6 18 (0.95%) Palantir Foundry
7 15 (0.79%) SharePoint
8 13 (0.68%) Jupyter
9 3 (0.16%) Apache Superset
9 3 (0.16%) Microsoft Exchange
10 2 (0.11%) ArcGIS
10 2 (0.11%) PowerExchange
11 1 (0.053%) Liferay
11 1 (0.053%) Luigi
11 1 (0.053%) nginx
11 1 (0.053%) Oracle Workflow
Applications
1 20 (1.05%) Microsoft Excel
2 7 (0.37%) Notepad++
2 7 (0.37%) Spreadsheet
3 4 (0.21%) Chatbot
4 1 (0.053%) Microsoft Office
4 1 (0.053%) Microsoft PowerPoint
Business Applications
1 13 (0.68%) 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 3 (0.16%) Oracle EBS
7 2 (0.11%) FIS Private Capital Suite
7 2 (0.11%) Maximo
7 2 (0.11%) SAP BPC
7 2 (0.11%) SAP Oil and Gas
7 2 (0.11%) SimCorp Dimension
8 1 (0.053%) Markit EDM
8 1 (0.053%) MIS ActiveH
8 1 (0.053%) Oracle Assets
8 1 (0.053%) Oracle Retail
8 1 (0.053%) Raiser’s Edge
8 1 (0.053%) SAP CAR
8 1 (0.053%) SAP EWM
Cloud Services
1 586 (30.84%) AWS
2 581 (30.58%) Azure
3 244 (12.84%) Power Platform
4 236 (12.42%) Snowflake
5 230 (12.11%) dbt
6 215 (11.32%) Azure Data Factory
7 197 (10.37%) GCP
8 167 (8.79%) Amazon S3
9 133 (7.00%) Serverless
10 122 (6.42%) Azure DevOps
11 119 (6.26%) AWS Lambda
12 118 (6.21%) Azure Synapse Analytics
13 107 (5.63%) GitHub
14 69 (3.63%) Azure Databricks
15 57 (3.00%) Amazon EMR
16 45 (2.37%) GitHub Actions
17 41 (2.16%) Amazon CloudWatch
18 32 (1.68%) AWS Step Functions
19 29 (1.53%) AWS CloudFormation
20 28 (1.47%) Amazon Kinesis
Communications & Networking
1 24 (1.26%) DNS
2 23 (1.21%) BGP
2 23 (1.21%) DMZ
2 23 (1.21%) Multicast
2 23 (1.21%) VPN
3 8 (0.42%) Firewall
4 7 (0.37%) PuTTY
4 7 (0.37%) 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 (0.11%) HTTP
8 1 (0.053%) HTTPS
8 1 (0.053%) LTE
8 1 (0.053%) MQTT
8 1 (0.053%) TCP/IP
8 1 (0.053%) tcpdump
8 1 (0.053%) Wireshark
Database & Business Intelligence
1 321 (16.89%) Data Warehouse
2 236 (12.42%) Power BI
3 165 (8.68%) Data Lake
4 131 (6.89%) Metadata
5 112 (5.89%) BigQuery
6 92 (4.84%) Amazon Redshift
7 86 (4.53%) Delta Lake
8 83 (4.37%) Amazon Athena
9 75 (3.95%) Big Data
10 74 (3.89%) SQL Server
11 67 (3.53%) PostgreSQL
12 62 (3.26%) Pentaho
13 59 (3.11%) Relational Database
13 59 (3.11%) Snowflake Schema
14 56 (2.95%) Tableau
15 51 (2.68%) NoSQL
16 43 (2.26%) Oracle Database
17 40 (2.11%) Azure SQL Database
17 40 (2.11%) SQL Server Integration Services
18 39 (2.05%) Amazon RDS
Development Applications
1 177 (9.32%) Git
2 96 (5.05%) GitLab
3 66 (3.47%) JIRA
4 31 (1.63%) Jenkins
5 21 (1.11%) MLflow
6 9 (0.47%) 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
1 311 (16.37%) Social Skills
2 295 (15.53%) Finance
3 214 (11.26%) Analytical Skills
4 171 (9.00%) Public Sector
5 126 (6.63%) Banking
6 32 (1.68%) Marketing
7 31 (1.63%) Retail
8 29 (1.53%) Inclusion and Diversity
9 23 (1.21%) Front Office
9 23 (1.21%) Investment Banking
10 22 (1.16%) Aerospace
10 22 (1.16%) Automotive
11 19 (1.00%) Law
12 18 (0.95%) Documentation Skills
12 18 (0.95%) Manufacturing
13 17 (0.89%) Telecoms
14 16 (0.84%) Pharmaceutical
15 13 (0.68%) Legal
15 13 (0.68%) Military
15 13 (0.68%) Police
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 259 (13.63%) PySpark
2 194 (10.21%) Terraform
3 125 (6.58%) Kafka
4 33 (1.74%) REST
5 31 (1.63%) JSON
6 29 (1.53%) Pandas
7 23 (1.21%) XML
8 20 (1.05%) Spring
8 20 (1.05%) Spring Boot
9 18 (0.95%) Great Expectations
10 16 (0.84%) Apache Beam
11 15 (0.79%) LangChain
12 14 (0.74%) pytest
12 14 (0.74%) RESTful
13 12 (0.63%) React
13 12 (0.63%) Streamlit
14 11 (0.58%) PyTorch
15 10 (0.53%) .NET
15 10 (0.53%) Microsoft Graph
16 9 (0.47%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 149 (7.84%) Cloud Native
2 65 (3.42%) Data Structures
3 61 (3.21%) Legacy Systems
4 53 (2.79%) Onboarding
5 26 (1.37%) AI Agents
5 26 (1.37%) Product Ownership
6 25 (1.32%) Distributed Systems
7 21 (1.11%) NHS
8 20 (1.05%) Greenfield Project
9 19 (1.00%) Management Information System
10 18 (0.95%) Reference Data
11 15 (0.79%) Algorithms
11 15 (0.79%) Reinsurance
12 12 (0.63%) Enterprise Software
13 11 (0.58%) Virtual Team
14 10 (0.53%) Clustering
14 10 (0.53%) Data Fabric
14 10 (0.53%) Derivative
14 10 (0.53%) Linux Command Line
15 9 (0.47%) Replication
Operating Systems
1 59 (3.11%) Unix
2 43 (2.26%) 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
1 805 (42.37%) Data Pipeline
2 733 (38.58%) Data Engineering
3 653 (34.37%) Data Modelling
3 653 (34.37%) ETL
4 638 (33.58%) Analytics
5 442 (23.26%) CI/CD
6 328 (17.26%) Agile
7 315 (16.58%) Migration
8 310 (16.32%) AI
9 301 (15.84%) DevOps
10 298 (15.68%) Business Intelligence
11 252 (13.26%) Data Transformation
12 249 (13.11%) Validation
13 248 (13.05%) Data Governance
14 243 (12.79%) Data Integration
15 196 (10.32%) Problem-Solving
16 180 (9.47%) Machine Learning
17 173 (9.11%) Lakehouse
18 172 (9.05%) Data Science
19 170 (8.95%) Infrastructure as Code
Programming Languages
1 948 (49.89%) SQL
2 827 (43.53%) Python
3 102 (5.37%) Java
4 74 (3.89%) Scala
5 48 (2.53%) PL/SQL
6 34 (1.79%) T-SQL
7 31 (1.63%) Data Analysis Expressions
8 29 (1.53%) PowerShell
9 27 (1.42%) Shell Script
10 23 (1.21%) Bash
11 21 (1.11%) JavaScript
12 15 (0.79%) R
13 11 (0.58%) Bicep
14 9 (0.47%) Go
15 8 (0.42%) C#
15 8 (0.42%) TypeScript
16 5 (0.26%) Korn
17 3 (0.16%) COBOL
17 3 (0.16%) Kusto Query Language
18 2 (0.11%) Cypher
Qualifications
1 485 (25.53%) Security Cleared
2 419 (22.05%) SC Cleared
3 57 (3.00%) BPSS Clearance
4 39 (2.05%) Degree
5 30 (1.58%) DV Cleared
6 24 (1.26%) Azure Certification
7 20 (1.05%) Computer Science Degree
8 15 (0.79%) AWS Certification
9 9 (0.47%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
10 8 (0.42%) DBS Check
10 8 (0.42%) Master's Degree
10 8 (0.42%) SnowPro
11 7 (0.37%) CISM
11 7 (0.37%) CISSP
12 5 (0.26%) CEH
13 4 (0.21%) City & Guilds
14 3 (0.16%) Microsoft Certification
15 2 (0.11%) CISA
16 1 (0.053%) CRISC
16 1 (0.053%) PMP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 477 (25.11%) Data Quality
2 76 (4.00%) QA
3 35 (1.84%) GDPR
4 17 (0.89%) Accessibility
5 9 (0.47%) SLA
6 8 (0.42%) 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%) GRC
10 2 (0.11%) SNOMED CT
11 1 (0.053%) Government Security Classifications
11 1 (0.053%) IFRS
11 1 (0.053%) IFRS 9
11 1 (0.053%) NIST
11 1 (0.053%) PMO
11 1 (0.053%) SOC 2
System Software
1 106 (5.58%) 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 83 (4.37%) Kubernetes
2 35 (1.84%) Grafana
3 17 (0.89%) Ansible
4 13 (0.68%) Control-M
4 13 (0.68%) Kibana
5 4 (0.21%) Prometheus
6 2 (0.11%) logstash
6 2 (0.11%) Puppet
7 1 (0.053%) Progress Chef
Vendors
1 405 (21.32%) Databricks
2 243 (12.79%) Microsoft
3 163 (8.58%) Oracle
4 98 (5.16%) Informatica
5 88 (4.63%) Talend
6 87 (4.58%) Google
7 46 (2.42%) Denodo
8 35 (1.84%) Salesforce
9 29 (1.53%) Palantir
10 27 (1.42%) Foundry
11 26 (1.37%) SAP
12 23 (1.21%) Cisco
12 23 (1.21%) F5
13 15 (0.79%) 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 (0.37%) InterSystems