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 2 July 2026.

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

6 months to
2 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 61 108 99
Rank change year-on-year +47 -9 +28
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 1,902 760 986
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 3.70% 2.45% 2.27%
As % of the Job Titles category 4.00% 2.67% 2.44%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,299 551 749
10th Percentile £375 £363 £221
25th Percentile £425 £425 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £500
Median % change year-on-year - - -9.09%
75th Percentile £588 £581 £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 41
10th Percentile £19.34 £18.22 £31.25
25th Percentile £36.25 £46.75 £49.25
Median hourly rate £50.00 £52.50 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% -19.23% -9.72%
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 47,563 28,496 40,366
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.42% 92.02% 93.01%
Number of daily rates quoted 28,794 18,232 25,937
10th Percentile £325 £288 £285
25th Percentile £415 £402 £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 £493
% change year-on-year +5.26% -3.65% -1.40%
Number of hourly rates quoted 3,217 1,276 2,865
10th Percentile £15.72 £13.82 £12.86
25th Percentile £21.25 £17.41 £16.58
Median hourly rate £43.00 £26.75 £37.50
Median % change year-on-year +60.75% -28.67% -12.79%
75th Percentile £67.50 £56.30 £62.50
90th Percentile £80.00 £73.75 £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 2 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 2 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 2 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 1,670 £500 - 528
UK excluding London +61 856 £470 +1.55% 379
London +33 844 £525 - 215
Work from Home +34 568 £500 +1.78% 236
Midlands +52 350 £465 +2.20% 75
West Midlands +47 313 £460 -0.11% 41
North of England +19 215 £475 - 118
North West +16 132 £500 +5.26% 63
South East +18 127 £475 +11.76% 104
South West +17 91 £520 +4.00% 45
Scotland +26 68 £425 -9.33% 10
Yorkshire -8 64 £475 - 29
East Midlands +5 37 £525 +28.05% 35
East of England -9 24 £543 +70.60% 16
Wales +6 22 £450 +3.45% 11
North East -18 19 £480 +9.71% 28
Northern Ireland +2 3 £410 -18.00% 7

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

For the 6 months to 2 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.

1 994 (52.26%) SQL
2 862 (45.32%) Python
3 788 (41.43%) Data Pipeline
4 702 (36.91%) Analytics
5 688 (36.17%) Data Engineering
6 680 (35.75%) ETL
7 630 (33.12%) Data Modelling
8 601 (31.60%) Azure
9 553 (29.07%) AWS
10 518 (27.23%) Security Cleared
11 466 (24.50%) Data Quality
12 456 (23.97%) CI/CD
13 451 (23.71%) SC Cleared
14 400 (21.03%) Databricks
15 373 (19.61%) Business Intelligence
16 342 (17.98%) Agile
17 319 (16.77%) DevOps
18 308 (16.19%) Data Warehouse
19 298 (15.67%) Power Platform
20 284 (14.93%) Power BI
21 283 (14.88%) PySpark
22 269 (14.14%) Migration
23 257 (13.51%) Data Governance
24 238 (12.51%) Problem-Solving
25 237 (12.46%) AI
26 227 (11.93%) Microsoft
27 223 (11.72%) Azure Data Factory
28 210 (11.04%) Data Integration
29 205 (10.78%) Validation
30 204 (10.73%) 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 (8.99%) Apache Airflow
2 150 (7.89%) Apache Spark
3 106 (5.57%) Apache
4 85 (4.47%) SAS
5 54 (2.84%) Confluence
6 12 (0.63%) Palantir Foundry
6 12 (0.63%) SharePoint
7 9 (0.47%) Jupyter
8 5 (0.26%) Microsoft Exchange
9 2 (0.11%) Luigi
10 1 (0.053%) Apache Superset
10 1 (0.053%) Appian
10 1 (0.053%) ArcGIS
10 1 (0.053%) Camunda
10 1 (0.053%) Liferay
10 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 (31.60%) Azure
2 553 (29.07%) AWS
3 298 (15.67%) Power Platform
4 223 (11.72%) Azure Data Factory
5 204 (10.73%) Snowflake
6 181 (9.52%) dbt
7 178 (9.36%) Amazon S3
8 165 (8.68%) GCP
9 144 (7.57%) Azure Synapse Analytics
10 140 (7.36%) Azure DevOps
11 124 (6.52%) Serverless
12 116 (6.10%) GitHub
13 107 (5.63%) AWS Lambda
14 56 (2.94%) Amazon EMR
15 54 (2.84%) GitHub Actions
16 33 (1.74%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 33 (1.74%) 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
1 308 (16.19%) Data Warehouse
2 284 (14.93%) Power BI
3 176 (9.25%) Data Lake
4 110 (5.78%) Amazon Redshift
5 106 (5.57%) SQL Server
6 105 (5.52%) Delta Lake
7 95 (4.99%) BigQuery
8 94 (4.94%) Metadata
9 89 (4.68%) Pentaho
10 88 (4.63%) Big Data
11 78 (4.10%) Tableau
12 75 (3.94%) Amazon Athena
13 72 (3.79%) 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
17 56 (2.94%) SQL Server Integration Services
18 39 (2.05%) Hadoop
19 38 (2.00%) Data Vault
Development Applications
1 183 (9.62%) Git
2 102 (5.36%) GitLab
3 95 (4.99%) JIRA
4 48 (2.52%) Jenkins
5 9 (0.47%) Artifactory
6 8 (0.42%) MLflow
7 7 (0.37%) Postman
8 6 (0.32%) Bitbucket
9 3 (0.16%) Newman
9 3 (0.16%) SonarQube
10 2 (0.11%) Atlassian Bamboo
10 2 (0.11%) Claude Code
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
10 2 (0.11%) Yeoman
11 1 (0.053%) ERwin
11 1 (0.053%) JUnit
11 1 (0.053%) Selenium
General
1 315 (16.56%) Finance
2 308 (16.19%) Social Skills
3 206 (10.83%) Analytical Skills
4 157 (8.25%) Public Sector
5 107 (5.63%) 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 9 (0.47%) Billing
17 9 (0.47%) Legal
18 7 (0.37%) Law
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 283 (14.88%) PySpark
2 152 (7.99%) Kafka
3 42 (2.21%) Pandas
4 37 (1.95%) JSON
5 28 (1.47%) 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
1 143 (7.52%) Cloud Native
2 59 (3.10%) Data Structures
3 56 (2.94%) 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 23 (1.21%) NHS
8 23 (1.21%) Product Ownership
9 21 (1.10%) Data Protection Act
10 20 (1.05%) Clustering
11 12 (0.63%) Virtual Team
12 11 (0.58%) Life Science
13 10 (0.53%) Linux Command Line
13 10 (0.53%) Public Cloud
13 10 (0.53%) Reference Data
13 10 (0.53%) Replication
13 10 (0.53%) Self-Motivation
14 9 (0.47%) Distributed Computing
14 9 (0.47%) Driving Licence
Operating Systems
1 65 (3.42%) 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
1 788 (41.43%) Data Pipeline
2 702 (36.91%) Analytics
3 688 (36.17%) Data Engineering
4 680 (35.75%) ETL
5 630 (33.12%) Data Modelling
6 456 (23.97%) CI/CD
7 373 (19.61%) Business Intelligence
8 342 (17.98%) Agile
9 319 (16.77%) DevOps
10 269 (14.14%) Migration
11 257 (13.51%) Data Governance
12 238 (12.51%) Problem-Solving
13 237 (12.46%) AI
14 210 (11.04%) Data Integration
15 205 (10.78%) Validation
16 186 (9.78%) Data Science
17 176 (9.25%) Decision-Making
18 171 (8.99%) Data Transformation
19 147 (7.73%) Infrastructure as Code
20 146 (7.68%) Test Automation
Programming Languages
1 994 (52.26%) SQL
2 862 (45.32%) Python
3 125 (6.57%) Java
4 65 (3.42%) Scala
5 55 (2.89%) PL/SQL
6 40 (2.10%) 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 16 (0.84%) Bicep
13 15 (0.79%) R
14 13 (0.68%) JavaScript
15 8 (0.42%) TypeScript
16 7 (0.37%) Go
17 2 (0.11%) Korn
17 2 (0.11%) Perl
17 2 (0.11%) Ruby
17 2 (0.11%) SPARQL
Qualifications
1 518 (27.23%) Security Cleared
2 451 (23.71%) 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
1 466 (24.50%) Data Quality
2 58 (3.05%) QA
3 53 (2.79%) 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
1 199 (10.46%) Terraform
2 85 (4.47%) 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
1 400 (21.03%) Databricks
2 227 (11.93%) Microsoft
3 172 (9.04%) Oracle
4 142 (7.47%) 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 20 (1.05%) Palantir
13 18 (0.95%) Cloudera
14 17 (0.89%) ServiceNow
15 15 (0.79%) Alteryx
15 15 (0.79%) Foundry
15 15 (0.79%) IBM
16 11 (0.58%) Sage
17 9 (0.47%) Bloomberg