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 29 August 2026.

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

6 months to
29 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 67 129 100
Rank change year-on-year +62 -29 +22
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 1,923 716 897
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 3.57% 2.17% 2.33%
As % of the Job Titles category 3.86% 2.38% 2.50%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,275 508 639
10th Percentile £375 £375 £300
25th Percentile £425 £425 £435
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year - -4.76% -4.55%
75th Percentile £588 £586 £625
90th Percentile £663 £689 £688
UK excluding London median daily rate £470 £475 £500
% change year-on-year -1.07% -5.00% -4.76%
Number of hourly rates quoted 85 15 20
10th Percentile £20.10 £25.50 £31.25
25th Percentile £30.96 £38.75 £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 £79.35 £80.00
90th Percentile £75.00 £101.00 -
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 49,838 30,062 35,859
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.47% 91.24% 93.07%
Number of daily rates quoted 29,768 18,992 22,689
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% -1.69%
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 3,565 1,567 1,847
10th Percentile £14.96 £13.75 £14.16
25th Percentile £20.51 £17.04 £20.00
Median hourly rate £42.00 £25.15 £43.00
Median % change year-on-year +67.00% -41.51% +1.18%
75th Percentile £67.84 £53.81 £65.00
90th Percentile £80.00 £70.50 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £42.50 £25.15 £44.00
% change year-on-year +68.99% -42.84% +10.00%

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 29 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 29 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 29 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 +65 1,705 £500 - 733
UK excluding London +105 878 £470 -1.07% 459
London +34 846 £525 - 414
Work from Home +53 563 £500 +1.78% 294
Midlands +72 363 £467 +0.97% 63
West Midlands +69 302 £469 -6.20% 38
North of England +32 220 £500 +5.26% 126
South East +25 130 £459 +2.00% 135
North West +25 125 £525 +10.53% 63
South West +9 91 £525 +5.00% 47
Yorkshire -5 75 £470 -1.05% 27
East Midlands +28 61 £450 +1.98% 25
Scotland +8 59 £440 -4.86% 40
East of England +7 37 £450 - 22
North East -23 21 £515 +21.89% 37
Wales -2 16 £488 +9.55% 13
Northern Ireland +4 3 £410 -18.00% 16
Channel Islands - 1 - -

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

For the 6 months to 29 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.

1 958 (49.82%) SQL
2 817 (42.49%) Python
3 813 (42.28%) Data Pipeline
4 730 (37.96%) Data Engineering
5 667 (34.69%) Analytics
6 663 (34.48%) ETL
7 644 (33.49%) Data Modelling
8 598 (31.10%) Azure
9 577 (30.01%) AWS
10 504 (26.21%) Security Cleared
11 470 (24.44%) Data Quality
12 444 (23.09%) CI/CD
13 442 (22.98%) SC Cleared
14 392 (20.38%) Databricks
15 340 (17.68%) Agile
16 334 (17.37%) Business Intelligence
17 324 (16.85%) Data Warehouse
18 309 (16.07%) DevOps
19 303 (15.76%) Migration
20 269 (13.99%) PySpark
21 267 (13.88%) Power Platform
22 263 (13.68%) AI
23 260 (13.52%) Power BI
24 255 (13.26%) Data Governance
25 247 (12.84%) Microsoft
26 241 (12.53%) Data Integration
27 239 (12.43%) Validation
28 229 (11.91%) Data Transformation
29 227 (11.80%) Snowflake
30 216 (11.23%) 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
1 201 (10.45%) Apache Airflow
2 150 (7.80%) Apache Spark
3 124 (6.45%) Apache
4 68 (3.54%) SAS
5 42 (2.18%) Confluence
6 17 (0.88%) Palantir Foundry
7 13 (0.68%) SharePoint
8 11 (0.57%) 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
1 598 (31.10%) Azure
2 577 (30.01%) AWS
3 267 (13.88%) Power Platform
4 227 (11.80%) Snowflake
5 216 (11.23%) Azure Data Factory
6 210 (10.92%) dbt
7 175 (9.10%) GCP
8 172 (8.94%) Amazon S3
9 134 (6.97%) Azure Synapse Analytics
10 130 (6.76%) Azure DevOps
11 126 (6.55%) Serverless
12 113 (5.88%) AWS Lambda
13 112 (5.82%) GitHub
14 52 (2.70%) Amazon EMR
15 43 (2.24%) GitHub Actions
16 37 (1.92%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 28 (1.46%) AWS Step Functions
18 26 (1.35%) AWS CloudFormation
19 25 (1.30%) Amazon Kinesis
20 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
1 324 (16.85%) Data Warehouse
2 260 (13.52%) Power BI
3 171 (8.89%) Data Lake
4 125 (6.50%) Metadata
5 105 (5.46%) Amazon Redshift
6 102 (5.30%) BigQuery
7 90 (4.68%) Delta Lake
8 88 (4.58%) SQL Server
9 82 (4.26%) Amazon Athena
10 78 (4.06%) Big Data
11 75 (3.90%) Pentaho
12 66 (3.43%) Tableau
13 63 (3.28%) Relational Database
13 63 (3.28%) Snowflake Schema
14 61 (3.17%) PostgreSQL
15 53 (2.76%) Azure SQL Database
16 49 (2.55%) NoSQL
17 43 (2.24%) SQL Server Integration Services
18 39 (2.03%) Oracle Database
19 38 (1.98%) Star Schema
Development Applications
1 165 (8.58%) Git
2 98 (5.10%) GitLab
3 71 (3.69%) 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%) RStudio
11 2 (0.10%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
11 2 (0.10%) Terragrunt
11 2 (0.10%) Yeoman
General
1 308 (16.02%) Finance
1 308 (16.02%) Social Skills
2 221 (11.49%) Analytical Skills
3 164 (8.53%) Public Sector
4 112 (5.82%) Banking
5 33 (1.72%) Inclusion and Diversity
5 33 (1.72%) Marketing
6 25 (1.30%) Retail
6 25 (1.30%) Telecoms
7 22 (1.14%) Aerospace
7 22 (1.14%) Documentation Skills
7 22 (1.14%) Investment Banking
8 21 (1.09%) Front Office
9 19 (0.99%) Automotive
9 19 (0.99%) Manufacturing
10 18 (0.94%) Law
11 16 (0.83%) Pharmaceutical
12 12 (0.62%) Police
13 10 (0.52%) Financial Institution
13 10 (0.52%) Legal
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 269 (13.99%) PySpark
2 184 (9.57%) Terraform
3 138 (7.18%) Kafka
4 35 (1.82%) JSON
5 31 (1.61%) 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
1 142 (7.38%) Cloud Native
2 78 (4.06%) Legacy Systems
3 62 (3.22%) Data Structures
4 40 (2.08%) Onboarding
5 26 (1.35%) Product Ownership
6 24 (1.25%) Distributed Systems
7 23 (1.20%) Greenfield Project
8 22 (1.14%) NHS
8 22 (1.14%) Reference Data
9 18 (0.94%) AI Agents
10 17 (0.88%) Reinsurance
11 16 (0.83%) Management Information System
12 14 (0.73%) Data Protection Act
13 12 (0.62%) Algorithms
13 12 (0.62%) Clustering
14 11 (0.57%) Enterprise Software
14 11 (0.57%) Virtual Team
15 10 (0.52%) Linux Command Line
15 10 (0.52%) Replication
16 9 (0.47%) Life Science
Operating Systems
1 65 (3.38%) 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
1 813 (42.28%) Data Pipeline
2 730 (37.96%) Data Engineering
3 667 (34.69%) Analytics
4 663 (34.48%) ETL
5 644 (33.49%) Data Modelling
6 444 (23.09%) CI/CD
7 340 (17.68%) Agile
8 334 (17.37%) Business Intelligence
9 309 (16.07%) DevOps
10 303 (15.76%) Migration
11 263 (13.68%) AI
12 255 (13.26%) Data Governance
13 241 (12.53%) Data Integration
14 239 (12.43%) Validation
15 229 (11.91%) Data Transformation
16 215 (11.18%) Problem-Solving
17 171 (8.89%) Decision-Making
18 162 (8.42%) Data Science
18 162 (8.42%) Machine Learning
19 158 (8.22%) Infrastructure as Code
Programming Languages
1 958 (49.82%) SQL
2 817 (42.49%) Python
3 113 (5.88%) Java
4 66 (3.43%) Scala
5 54 (2.81%) PL/SQL
6 35 (1.82%) Shell Script
7 34 (1.77%) Data Analysis Expressions
8 32 (1.66%) T-SQL
9 24 (1.25%) PowerShell
10 23 (1.20%) Bash
11 21 (1.09%) JavaScript
12 15 (0.78%) C#
13 12 (0.62%) R
14 9 (0.47%) Bicep
15 7 (0.36%) TypeScript
16 5 (0.26%) Go
17 4 (0.21%) Korn
18 3 (0.16%) COBOL
19 2 (0.10%) Perl
19 2 (0.10%) SPARQL
Qualifications
1 504 (26.21%) Security Cleared
2 442 (22.98%) SC Cleared
3 45 (2.34%) BPSS Clearance
4 39 (2.03%) Degree
5 22 (1.14%) 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 (24.44%) Data Quality
2 68 (3.54%) 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%) GxP
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 (5.67%) Docker
2 4 (0.21%) Virtual Machines
3 2 (0.10%) Active Directory
4 1 (0.052%) RACF
Systems Management
1 81 (4.21%) Kubernetes
2 46 (2.39%) Grafana
3 17 (0.88%) Ansible
4 12 (0.62%) 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 (20.38%) Databricks
2 247 (12.84%) Microsoft
3 159 (8.27%) Oracle
4 115 (5.98%) Informatica
5 104 (5.41%) Talend
6 69 (3.59%) Google
7 60 (3.12%) Denodo
8 32 (1.66%) Salesforce
9 30 (1.56%) Cisco
9 30 (1.56%) F5
10 27 (1.40%) Palantir
11 26 (1.35%) SAP
12 21 (1.09%) Foundry
13 15 (0.78%) Splunk
14 14 (0.73%) Cloudera
15 12 (0.62%) IBM
16 11 (0.57%) Bloomberg
17 10 (0.52%) ServiceNow
18 9 (0.47%) Sage
19 8 (0.42%) InterSystems