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 3 July 2026.

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

6 months to
3 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 61 106 101
Rank change year-on-year +45 -5 +25
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 1,904 765 989
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 3.70% 2.45% 2.27%
As % of the Job Titles category 4.00% 2.66% 2.45%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,301 556 752
10th Percentile £375 £363 £226
25th Percentile £425 £425 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £500
Median % change year-on-year - - -9.09%
75th Percentile £588 £576 £600
90th Percentile £650 £700 £688
UK excluding London median daily rate £470 £463 £450
% change year-on-year +1.55% +2.78% -14.29%
Number of hourly rates quoted 75 11 40
10th Percentile £19.34 £18.22 £31.25
25th Percentile £36.25 £46.75 £48.63
Median hourly rate £50.00 £52.50 £66.25
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% -20.75% -7.99%
75th Percentile £68.00 £78.10 £80.00
90th Percentile £75.00 £80.00 -
UK excluding London median hourly rate £47.50 £48.46 £75.00
% change year-on-year -1.98% -35.39% -

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 47,626 28,777 40,436
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.44% 92.02% 93.01%
Number of daily rates quoted 28,832 18,386 25,995
10th Percentile £325 £288 £285
25th Percentile £416 £401 £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 £494
% change year-on-year +5.26% -3.85% -1.20%
Number of hourly rates quoted 3,230 1,296 2,846
10th Percentile £15.70 £13.93 £12.86
25th Percentile £21.14 £17.49 £16.65
Median hourly rate £43.00 £26.50 £37.50
Median % change year-on-year +62.26% -29.33% -12.79%
75th Percentile £67.50 £55.31 £62.50
90th Percentile £80.00 £73.50 £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 3 July 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 3 July 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 3 July 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 +50 1,672 £500 - 490
UK excluding London +72 859 £470 +1.55% 371
London +32 842 £525 - 188
Work from Home +38 570 £500 +2.56% 223
Midlands +50 351 £463 +2.78% 72
West Midlands +46 314 £459 -0.22% 39
North of England +16 216 £475 - 114
North West +19 132 £500 +5.26% 61
South East +22 127 £475 +11.76% 103
South West +23 92 £523 +4.50% 46
Scotland +28 68 £425 -9.33% 10
Yorkshire -15 64 £475 - 29
East Midlands +9 37 £525 +28.05% 34
East of England -11 24 £543 +70.60% 17
Wales +1 22 £450 +3.45% 11
North East -24 20 £480 +9.71% 27
Northern Ireland +4 3 £410 -18.00% 7

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

For the 6 months to 3 July 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.

1 995 (52.26%) SQL
2 860 (45.17%) Python
3 794 (41.70%) Data Pipeline
4 706 (37.08%) Analytics
5 690 (36.24%) Data Engineering
6 680 (35.71%) ETL
7 632 (33.19%) Data Modelling
8 601 (31.57%) Azure
9 554 (29.10%) AWS
10 520 (27.31%) Security Cleared
11 467 (24.53%) Data Quality
12 458 (24.05%) CI/CD
13 452 (23.74%) SC Cleared
14 401 (21.06%) Databricks
15 372 (19.54%) Business Intelligence
16 344 (18.07%) Agile
17 320 (16.81%) DevOps
18 309 (16.23%) Data Warehouse
19 297 (15.60%) Power Platform
20 283 (14.86%) Power BI
21 282 (14.81%) PySpark
22 271 (14.23%) Migration
23 259 (13.60%) Data Governance
24 236 (12.39%) AI
24 236 (12.39%) Problem-Solving
25 225 (11.82%) Microsoft
26 223 (11.71%) Azure Data Factory
27 208 (10.92%) Data Integration
27 208 (10.92%) Validation
28 205 (10.77%) Snowflake

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 (8.98%) Apache Airflow
2 150 (7.88%) Apache Spark
3 106 (5.57%) Apache
4 86 (4.52%) SAS
5 54 (2.84%) Confluence
6 13 (0.68%) Palantir Foundry
7 12 (0.63%) SharePoint
8 9 (0.47%) Jupyter
9 5 (0.26%) Microsoft Exchange
10 2 (0.11%) Luigi
11 1 (0.053%) Apache Superset
11 1 (0.053%) Appian
11 1 (0.053%) ArcGIS
11 1 (0.053%) Camunda
11 1 (0.053%) Liferay
11 1 (0.053%) R Markdown
Applications
1 19 (1.00%) 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
3 5 (0.26%) NetSuite
3 5 (0.26%) Sage X3
4 3 (0.16%) SAP BPC
4 3 (0.16%) SAP S/4HANA
4 3 (0.16%) SimCorp Dimension
5 2 (0.11%) BambooHR
5 2 (0.11%) Maximo
5 2 (0.11%) Oracle EBS
6 1 (0.053%) Elite 3E
6 1 (0.053%) FIS Private Capital Suite
6 1 (0.053%) iTrent
6 1 (0.053%) NEC Housing
6 1 (0.053%) Oracle 11i
6 1 (0.053%) Oracle ERP
6 1 (0.053%) Raiser’s Edge
6 1 (0.053%) SAP CAR
6 1 (0.053%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
Cloud Services
1 601 (31.57%) Azure
2 554 (29.10%) AWS
3 297 (15.60%) Power Platform
4 223 (11.71%) Azure Data Factory
5 205 (10.77%) Snowflake
6 183 (9.61%) dbt
7 177 (9.30%) Amazon S3
8 165 (8.67%) GCP
9 143 (7.51%) Azure Synapse Analytics
10 139 (7.30%) Azure DevOps
11 124 (6.51%) Serverless
12 113 (5.93%) GitHub
13 106 (5.57%) AWS Lambda
14 56 (2.94%) Amazon EMR
15 51 (2.68%) GitHub Actions
16 33 (1.73%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 33 (1.73%) Matillion
17 29 (1.52%) AWS CloudFormation
18 28 (1.47%) Amazon Kinesis
19 24 (1.26%) OpenShift
Communications & Networking
1 35 (1.84%) DNS
1 35 (1.84%) VPN
2 34 (1.79%) BGP
2 34 (1.79%) DMZ
2 34 (1.79%) 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
1 309 (16.23%) Data Warehouse
2 283 (14.86%) Power BI
3 177 (9.30%) Data Lake
4 110 (5.78%) Amazon Redshift
5 105 (5.51%) Delta Lake
6 103 (5.41%) SQL Server
7 95 (4.99%) BigQuery
8 94 (4.94%) Metadata
9 89 (4.67%) Pentaho
10 88 (4.62%) Big Data
11 78 (4.10%) Tableau
12 74 (3.89%) Amazon Athena
13 73 (3.83%) Snowflake Schema
14 71 (3.73%) PostgreSQL
15 59 (3.10%) Azure SQL Database
16 58 (3.05%) Relational Database
17 56 (2.94%) NoSQL
18 55 (2.89%) SQL Server Integration Services
19 39 (2.05%) Hadoop
20 38 (2.00%) Data Vault
Development Applications
1 183 (9.61%) Git
2 102 (5.36%) GitLab
3 95 (4.99%) JIRA
4 48 (2.52%) Jenkins
5 9 (0.47%) Artifactory
5 9 (0.47%) MLflow
6 7 (0.37%) Postman
7 6 (0.32%) Bitbucket
8 3 (0.16%) Newman
8 3 (0.16%) SonarQube
9 2 (0.11%) Atlassian Bamboo
9 2 (0.11%) Claude Code
9 2 (0.11%) Sonatype Nexus
9 2 (0.11%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
9 2 (0.11%) Terragrunt
9 2 (0.11%) Visual Studio
9 2 (0.11%) Yeoman
10 1 (0.053%) ERwin
10 1 (0.053%) JUnit
10 1 (0.053%) Selenium
General
1 314 (16.49%) Finance
2 309 (16.23%) Social Skills
3 205 (10.77%) Analytical Skills
4 159 (8.35%) Public Sector
5 105 (5.51%) Banking
6 39 (2.05%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 32 (1.68%) Marketing
8 30 (1.58%) Retail
9 29 (1.52%) Documentation Skills
10 25 (1.31%) Investment Banking
11 24 (1.26%) Telecoms
12 19 (1.00%) Manufacturing
13 18 (0.95%) Pharmaceutical
14 14 (0.74%) Automotive
15 13 (0.68%) Aerospace
15 13 (0.68%) Front Office
16 11 (0.58%) Publishing
17 10 (0.53%) Legal
18 9 (0.47%) Billing
19 7 (0.37%) Law
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 282 (14.81%) PySpark
2 150 (7.88%) Kafka
3 41 (2.15%) Pandas
4 37 (1.94%) JSON
5 27 (1.42%) REST
6 25 (1.31%) Spring
6 25 (1.31%) Spring Boot
7 23 (1.21%) Great Expectations
8 22 (1.16%) XML
9 20 (1.05%) YAML
10 17 (0.89%) Apache Beam
11 13 (0.68%) Apache Avro
12 12 (0.63%) Streamlit
13 11 (0.58%) React
13 11 (0.58%) RESTful
13 11 (0.58%) scikit-learn
14 10 (0.53%) Matplotlib
14 10 (0.53%) pytest
15 9 (0.47%) GeoJSON
15 9 (0.47%) PyTorch
Miscellaneous
1 145 (7.62%) Cloud Native
2 59 (3.10%) Data Structures
3 58 (3.05%) Legacy Systems
4 34 (1.79%) Distributed Systems
5 29 (1.52%) Onboarding
6 28 (1.47%) Greenfield Project
7 26 (1.37%) Reinsurance
8 24 (1.26%) NHS
9 22 (1.16%) Product Ownership
10 21 (1.10%) Data Protection Act
11 20 (1.05%) Clustering
12 12 (0.63%) Virtual Team
13 11 (0.58%) Life Science
14 10 (0.53%) Linux Command Line
14 10 (0.53%) Public Cloud
14 10 (0.53%) Reference Data
14 10 (0.53%) Replication
14 10 (0.53%) Self-Motivation
15 9 (0.47%) Distributed Computing
15 9 (0.47%) Driving Licence
Operating Systems
1 65 (3.41%) Unix
2 40 (2.10%) Linux
3 5 (0.26%) Windows
4 2 (0.11%) Ubuntu
4 2 (0.11%) Windows Server
5 1 (0.053%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 794 (41.70%) Data Pipeline
2 706 (37.08%) Analytics
3 690 (36.24%) Data Engineering
4 680 (35.71%) ETL
5 632 (33.19%) Data Modelling
6 458 (24.05%) CI/CD
7 372 (19.54%) Business Intelligence
8 344 (18.07%) Agile
9 320 (16.81%) DevOps
10 271 (14.23%) Migration
11 259 (13.60%) Data Governance
12 236 (12.39%) AI
12 236 (12.39%) Problem-Solving
13 208 (10.92%) Data Integration
13 208 (10.92%) Validation
14 188 (9.87%) Data Science
15 176 (9.24%) Decision-Making
16 171 (8.98%) Data Transformation
17 149 (7.83%) Infrastructure as Code
18 147 (7.72%) Test Automation
Programming Languages
1 995 (52.26%) SQL
2 860 (45.17%) Python
3 125 (6.57%) Java
4 65 (3.41%) Scala
5 53 (2.78%) PL/SQL
6 39 (2.05%) T-SQL
7 35 (1.84%) Data Analysis Expressions
8 31 (1.63%) Shell Script
9 29 (1.52%) C#
10 28 (1.47%) Bash
11 23 (1.21%) PowerShell
12 15 (0.79%) Bicep
12 15 (0.79%) R
13 13 (0.68%) JavaScript
14 8 (0.42%) TypeScript
15 7 (0.37%) Go
16 2 (0.11%) Korn
16 2 (0.11%) Perl
16 2 (0.11%) Ruby
16 2 (0.11%) SPARQL
Qualifications
1 520 (27.31%) Security Cleared
2 452 (23.74%) SC Cleared
3 51 (2.68%) BPSS Clearance
4 46 (2.42%) Degree
5 27 (1.42%) Azure Certification
6 19 (1.00%) Computer Science Degree
6 19 (1.00%) DV Cleared
7 15 (0.79%) AWS Certification
8 9 (0.47%) City & Guilds
8 9 (0.47%) DBS Check
8 9 (0.47%) SnowPro
9 8 (0.42%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
10 7 (0.37%) Master's Degree
11 5 (0.26%) BICSI Certification
11 5 (0.26%) CISSP
12 4 (0.21%) CISM
12 4 (0.21%) Microsoft Certification
13 3 (0.16%) IBM Certification
14 2 (0.11%) CEH
15 1 (0.053%) CISA
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 467 (24.53%) Data Quality
2 58 (3.05%) QA
3 53 (2.78%) GDPR
4 15 (0.79%) Accessibility
5 12 (0.63%) SLA
6 9 (0.47%) FATCA
7 6 (0.32%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 6 (0.32%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 4 (0.21%) MiFID
9 3 (0.16%) GMP
9 3 (0.16%) HIPAA
10 2 (0.11%) California Consumer Privacy Act
10 2 (0.11%) Disclosure Scotland
10 2 (0.11%) EMIR
10 2 (0.11%) GRC
10 2 (0.11%) SNOMED CT
10 2 (0.11%) WCAG
11 1 (0.053%) IFRS 17
11 1 (0.053%) ISO 13485
11 1 (0.053%) PCI DSS
System Software
1 106 (5.57%) 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 (10.40%) Terraform
2 85 (4.46%) Kubernetes
3 51 (2.68%) Grafana
4 12 (0.63%) Ansible
4 12 (0.63%) 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
1 401 (21.06%) Databricks
2 225 (11.82%) Microsoft
3 170 (8.93%) Oracle
4 142 (7.46%) Informatica
5 129 (6.78%) Talend
6 71 (3.73%) Denodo
7 58 (3.05%) Google
8 36 (1.89%) Cisco
8 36 (1.89%) F5
9 31 (1.63%) SAP
10 28 (1.47%) Salesforce
11 25 (1.31%) Splunk
12 21 (1.10%) Palantir
13 18 (0.95%) Cloudera
14 17 (0.89%) ServiceNow
15 16 (0.84%) Foundry
16 14 (0.74%) Alteryx
16 14 (0.74%) IBM
17 11 (0.58%) Sage
18 9 (0.47%) Bloomberg