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 6 June 2026.

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

6 months to
6 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 62 95 101
Rank change year-on-year +33 +6 +19
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 1,800 757 948
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 3.64% 2.61% 2.20%
As % of the Job Titles category 3.95% 2.82% 2.37%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,258 563 728
10th Percentile £375 £363 £200
25th Percentile £416 £425 £409
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £500
Median % change year-on-year - - -9.09%
75th Percentile £581 £587 £594
90th Percentile £658 £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 63 9 43
10th Percentile £19.34 £18.13 £32.50
25th Percentile £36.25 £51.25 £49.25
Median hourly rate £52.50 £52.50 £67.50
Median % change year-on-year - -22.22% -10.60%
75th Percentile £71.50 £78.70 £80.00
90th Percentile £75.00 £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 45,608 26,825 40,003
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.34% 92.39% 92.88%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,789 17,300 25,804
10th Percentile £325 £288 £280
25th Percentile £413 £403 £407
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +2.50% -4.76% -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 3,038 1,097 2,862
10th Percentile £15.05 £14.00 £12.86
25th Percentile £20.75 £17.87 £16.30
Median hourly rate £45.00 £28.00 £37.50
Median % change year-on-year +60.71% -25.33% -16.67%
75th Percentile £67.50 £58.75 £61.60
90th Percentile £80.00 £75.00 £73.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £45.00 £25.23 £40.00
% change year-on-year +78.39% -36.94% -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 6 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 6 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 6 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 +35 1,574 £500 - 371
London +31 848 £525 - 140
UK excluding London +57 753 £469 +1.41% 296
Work from Home +35 529 £500 +1.78% 188
Midlands +53 306 £469 +4.22% 38
West Midlands +45 288 £469 +1.96% 32
North of England +5 202 £465 -2.11% 86
North West +11 126 £480 +1.05% 43
South East +9 104 £475 +14.87% 100
South West +17 79 £503 +4.42% 31
Scotland +16 61 £430 -5.75% 10
Yorkshire -29 58 £465 +3.33% 23
Wales +2 22 £450 +1.12% 12
East of England -20 19 £520 +63.52% 7
North East -17 18 £450 -5.26% 21
East Midlands -20 18 £525 +28.05% 6
Northern Ireland +7 3 £410 -18.00% 15

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

For the 6 months to 6 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.

1 982 (54.56%) SQL
2 818 (45.44%) Python
3 748 (41.56%) Data Pipeline
4 672 (37.33%) ETL
5 669 (37.17%) Analytics
6 642 (35.67%) Data Engineering
7 609 (33.83%) Data Modelling
8 592 (32.89%) Azure
9 530 (29.44%) Security Cleared
10 506 (28.11%) AWS
11 470 (26.11%) SC Cleared
12 451 (25.06%) Data Quality
13 426 (23.67%) CI/CD
14 415 (23.06%) Databricks
15 379 (21.06%) Business Intelligence
16 324 (18.00%) Agile
17 310 (17.22%) DevOps
18 308 (17.11%) Power Platform
19 294 (16.33%) Data Warehouse
20 292 (16.22%) Power BI
21 270 (15.00%) PySpark
22 242 (13.44%) Data Governance
23 238 (13.22%) Azure Data Factory
24 234 (13.00%) Migration
25 232 (12.89%) Problem-Solving
26 231 (12.83%) Microsoft
27 211 (11.72%) AI
28 198 (11.00%) Data Integration
29 189 (10.50%) Git
30 187 (10.39%) Validation

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
1 171 (9.50%) Apache Airflow
2 157 (8.72%) Apache Spark
3 108 (6.00%) Apache
4 83 (4.61%) SAS
5 48 (2.67%) Confluence
6 12 (0.67%) Palantir Foundry
7 10 (0.56%) Jupyter
8 4 (0.22%) Microsoft Exchange
8 4 (0.22%) SharePoint
9 2 (0.11%) Luigi
10 1 (0.056%) Apache Superset
10 1 (0.056%) Appian
10 1 (0.056%) Camunda
10 1 (0.056%) R Markdown
Applications
1 18 (1.00%) Microsoft Excel
2 7 (0.39%) Notepad++
3 4 (0.22%) 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%) Infor LN
2 3 (0.17%) SAP BPC
2 3 (0.17%) SimCorp Dimension
3 2 (0.11%) BambooHR
3 2 (0.11%) Dynamics CRM
3 2 (0.11%) Oracle EBS
3 2 (0.11%) SAP S/4HANA
4 1 (0.056%) Elite 3E
4 1 (0.056%) FIS Private Capital Suite
4 1 (0.056%) iTrent
4 1 (0.056%) Maximo
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
4 1 (0.056%) SAP CAR
4 1 (0.056%) SAP EWM
Cloud Services
1 592 (32.89%) Azure
2 506 (28.11%) AWS
3 308 (17.11%) Power Platform
4 238 (13.22%) Azure Data Factory
5 181 (10.06%) Snowflake
6 163 (9.06%) Amazon S3
7 161 (8.94%) dbt
8 159 (8.83%) Azure Synapse Analytics
9 155 (8.61%) GCP
10 140 (7.78%) Azure DevOps
11 118 (6.56%) GitHub
12 116 (6.44%) Serverless
13 97 (5.39%) AWS Lambda
14 54 (3.00%) GitHub Actions
15 43 (2.39%) Amazon EMR
16 33 (1.83%) Matillion
17 31 (1.72%) AWS CloudFormation
18 30 (1.67%) Amazon Kinesis
19 27 (1.50%) Amazon CloudWatch
20 25 (1.39%) AWS Step Functions
Communications & Networking
1 33 (1.83%) DNS
1 33 (1.83%) VPN
2 32 (1.78%) BGP
2 32 (1.78%) DMZ
2 32 (1.78%) Multicast
3 10 (0.56%) Structured Cabling
4 7 (0.39%) PuTTY
4 7 (0.39%) WinSCP
5 4 (0.22%) Firewall
5 4 (0.22%) Wi-Fi
5 4 (0.22%) Wireless
6 1 (0.056%) 4G
6 1 (0.056%) 5G
6 1 (0.056%) MQTT
Database & Business Intelligence
1 294 (16.33%) Data Warehouse
2 292 (16.22%) Power BI
3 186 (10.33%) Data Lake
4 128 (7.11%) SQL Server
5 110 (6.11%) Delta Lake
6 92 (5.11%) Amazon Redshift
6 92 (5.11%) Metadata
7 89 (4.94%) Big Data
8 86 (4.78%) BigQuery
8 86 (4.78%) Pentaho
9 77 (4.28%) Azure SQL Database
10 73 (4.06%) Snowflake Schema
10 73 (4.06%) Tableau
11 68 (3.78%) PostgreSQL
12 67 (3.72%) Amazon Athena
13 62 (3.44%) SQL Server Integration Services
14 61 (3.39%) NoSQL
15 52 (2.89%) Relational Database
16 39 (2.17%) Hadoop
17 38 (2.11%) Spark SQL
Development Applications
1 189 (10.50%) Git
2 95 (5.28%) GitLab
3 93 (5.17%) JIRA
4 51 (2.83%) Jenkins
5 12 (0.67%) MLflow
6 9 (0.50%) Artifactory
7 7 (0.39%) Postman
8 5 (0.28%) 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%) Atlassian Bamboo
11 1 (0.056%) Claude Code
11 1 (0.056%) ER Studio
11 1 (0.056%) ERwin
11 1 (0.056%) JUnit
11 1 (0.056%) Selenium
General
1 293 (16.28%) Finance
2 276 (15.33%) Social Skills
3 195 (10.83%) Analytical Skills
4 147 (8.17%) Public Sector
5 94 (5.22%) Banking
6 31 (1.72%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 28 (1.56%) Retail
8 27 (1.50%) Marketing
9 26 (1.44%) Investment Banking
10 25 (1.39%) Documentation Skills
11 19 (1.06%) Telecoms
12 18 (1.00%) Pharmaceutical
13 17 (0.94%) Manufacturing
14 15 (0.83%) Front Office
15 14 (0.78%) Aerospace
16 11 (0.61%) Publishing
17 7 (0.39%) Law
17 7 (0.39%) Military
18 6 (0.33%) Legal
18 6 (0.33%) Local Government
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 270 (15.00%) PySpark
2 157 (8.72%) Kafka
3 53 (2.94%) Pandas
4 35 (1.94%) JSON
5 28 (1.56%) REST
6 25 (1.39%) Great Expectations
7 23 (1.28%) Spring
7 23 (1.28%) Spring Boot
8 20 (1.11%) XML
8 20 (1.11%) YAML
9 17 (0.94%) Apache Beam
10 13 (0.72%) Apache Avro
10 13 (0.72%) Matplotlib
10 13 (0.72%) scikit-learn
11 11 (0.61%) PyTorch
11 11 (0.61%) React
11 11 (0.61%) RESTful
12 10 (0.56%) pytest
13 9 (0.50%) GeoJSON
13 9 (0.50%) Node.js
Miscellaneous
1 138 (7.67%) Cloud Native
2 54 (3.00%) Data Structures
3 50 (2.78%) Legacy Systems
4 30 (1.67%) Product Ownership
5 28 (1.56%) Greenfield Project
6 27 (1.50%) Distributed Systems
7 24 (1.33%) Onboarding
7 24 (1.33%) Reinsurance
8 21 (1.17%) Clustering
9 20 (1.11%) Data Protection Act
10 16 (0.89%) NHS
11 12 (0.67%) Replication
12 11 (0.61%) Distributed Computing
12 11 (0.61%) Self-Motivation
13 10 (0.56%) Life Science
13 10 (0.56%) Public Cloud
13 10 (0.56%) Reference Data
14 9 (0.50%) Driving Licence
14 9 (0.50%) Linux Command Line
14 9 (0.50%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 64 (3.56%) Unix
2 41 (2.28%) Linux
3 5 (0.28%) Windows
4 2 (0.11%) Ubuntu
4 2 (0.11%) Windows Server
5 1 (0.056%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 748 (41.56%) Data Pipeline
2 672 (37.33%) ETL
3 669 (37.17%) Analytics
4 642 (35.67%) Data Engineering
5 609 (33.83%) Data Modelling
6 426 (23.67%) CI/CD
7 379 (21.06%) Business Intelligence
8 324 (18.00%) Agile
9 310 (17.22%) DevOps
10 242 (13.44%) Data Governance
11 234 (13.00%) Migration
12 232 (12.89%) Problem-Solving
13 211 (11.72%) AI
14 198 (11.00%) Data Integration
15 187 (10.39%) Validation
16 174 (9.67%) Data Science
17 152 (8.44%) Decision-Making
18 144 (8.00%) Data Transformation
19 138 (7.67%) Infrastructure as Code
20 134 (7.44%) Machine Learning
Programming Languages
1 982 (54.56%) SQL
2 818 (45.44%) Python
3 118 (6.56%) Java
4 75 (4.17%) Scala
5 56 (3.11%) PL/SQL
6 41 (2.28%) T-SQL
7 37 (2.06%) Data Analysis Expressions
8 32 (1.78%) C#
9 31 (1.72%) Shell Script
10 27 (1.50%) Bash
11 20 (1.11%) Bicep
12 19 (1.06%) PowerShell
13 15 (0.83%) R
14 12 (0.67%) JavaScript
15 7 (0.39%) Go
15 7 (0.39%) TypeScript
16 2 (0.11%) HiveQL
16 2 (0.11%) LookML
16 2 (0.11%) Perl
16 2 (0.11%) VB
Qualifications
1 530 (29.44%) Security Cleared
2 470 (26.11%) SC Cleared
3 44 (2.44%) Degree
4 43 (2.39%) BPSS Clearance
5 26 (1.44%) Azure Certification
6 18 (1.00%) DV Cleared
7 16 (0.89%) Computer Science Degree
8 12 (0.67%) AWS Certification
9 11 (0.61%) DBS Check
10 9 (0.50%) City & Guilds
11 8 (0.44%) Master's Degree
12 6 (0.33%) Microsoft Certification
12 6 (0.33%) SnowPro
13 5 (0.28%) BICSI Certification
14 4 (0.22%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
15 3 (0.17%) CISSP
15 3 (0.17%) IBM Certification
16 2 (0.11%) CISM
17 1 (0.056%) CISA
17 1 (0.056%) Cisco Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 451 (25.06%) Data Quality
2 59 (3.28%) QA
3 50 (2.78%) GDPR
4 15 (0.83%) Accessibility
5 11 (0.61%) SLA
6 9 (0.50%) FATCA
7 6 (0.33%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 5 (0.28%) ISO/IEC 27001
9 4 (0.22%) MiFID
10 3 (0.17%) GMP
10 3 (0.17%) WCAG
11 2 (0.11%) EMIR
11 2 (0.11%) GRC
11 2 (0.11%) SNOMED CT
12 1 (0.056%) Disclosure Scotland
12 1 (0.056%) Government Security Classifications
12 1 (0.056%) IFRS
12 1 (0.056%) IFRS 9
12 1 (0.056%) ISO 13485
12 1 (0.056%) PMO
System Software
1 103 (5.72%) Docker
2 6 (0.33%) Virtual Machines
3 2 (0.11%) HDFS
4 1 (0.056%) Active Directory
4 1 (0.056%) RACF
Systems Management
1 181 (10.06%) Terraform
2 83 (4.61%) Kubernetes
3 52 (2.89%) Grafana
4 13 (0.72%) Ansible
4 13 (0.72%) 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
1 415 (23.06%) Databricks
2 231 (12.83%) Microsoft
3 161 (8.94%) Oracle
4 126 (7.00%) Talend
5 125 (6.94%) Informatica
6 71 (3.94%) Denodo
7 60 (3.33%) Google
8 34 (1.89%) Cisco
8 34 (1.89%) F5
9 29 (1.61%) SAP
10 25 (1.39%) Splunk
11 23 (1.28%) ServiceNow
12 17 (0.94%) Cloudera
13 16 (0.89%) IBM
14 15 (0.83%) Alteryx
14 15 (0.83%) Foundry
15 14 (0.78%) Palantir
16 10 (0.56%) Salesforce
17 9 (0.50%) Dynatrace
18 8 (0.44%) MuleSoft