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 April 2026.

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

6 months to
28 Apr 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 64 83 102
Rank change year-on-year +19 +19 +8
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 1,645 869 956
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 3.50% 2.96% 2.21%
As % of the Job Titles category 3.79% 3.20% 2.38%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,158 648 744
10th Percentile £369 £358 £263
25th Percentile £415 £425 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £500
Median % change year-on-year - - -9.09%
75th Percentile £581 £600 £600
90th Percentile £650 £700 £688
UK excluding London median daily rate £473 £471 £453
% change year-on-year +0.32% +3.97% -12.04%
Number of hourly rates quoted 48 12 45
10th Percentile £22.25 £25.36 £31.25
25th Percentile £41.28 £37.52 £49.25
Median hourly rate £52.50 £58.75 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year -10.64% -9.62% +1.56%
75th Percentile £75.00 £77.80 £80.00
90th Percentile £80.43 £92.25 -
UK excluding London median hourly rate £52.50 £26.93 £75.00
% change year-on-year +94.99% -64.10% +72.41%

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 43,373 27,176 40,178
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.32% 92.58% 92.79%
Number of daily rates quoted 26,766 17,790 26,166
10th Percentile £313 £300 £275
25th Percentile £413 £407 £409
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £515 £525
Median % change year-on-year -3.00% -1.82% -2.78%
75th Percentile £613 £625 £638
90th Percentile £725 £738 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £488 £475 £491
% change year-on-year +2.63% -3.19% -1.87%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,810 1,031 2,642
10th Percentile £15.00 £14.20 £12.86
25th Percentile £20.50 £18.51 £16.30
Median hourly rate £43.39 £29.25 £35.83
Median % change year-on-year +48.35% -18.36% -20.38%
75th Percentile £65.60 £62.75 £60.00
90th Percentile £78.75 £75.00 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £45.00 £28.75 £37.50
% change year-on-year +56.52% -23.33% -11.76%

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 April 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 April 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 28 April 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 +19 1,448 £500 - 401
London +22 791 £525 - 155
UK excluding London +27 665 £473 +0.32% 329
Work from Home +15 483 £500 - 209
Midlands +30 284 £469 +0.32% 57
West Midlands +33 266 £469 -3.79% 45
North of England -9 185 £465 +0.54% 87
North West +7 117 £480 +3.78% 52
South East -18 85 £500 +2.56% 89
South West -14 61 £506 +1.10% 46
Yorkshire -34 53 £465 +3.33% 17
Scotland +2 50 £428 -5.00% 12
Wales +1 21 £463 - 15
East Midlands -30 18 £498 +24.76% 12
East of England -29 17 £565 +79.37% 21
North East -19 15 £463 +2.78% 20
Northern Ireland +7 3 £410 -18.00% 5

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

For the 6 months to 28 April 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.

1 890 (54.10%) SQL
2 780 (47.42%) Python
3 685 (41.64%) Data Pipeline
4 633 (38.48%) ETL
5 622 (37.81%) Analytics
6 598 (36.35%) Data Engineering
7 589 (35.81%) Azure
8 554 (33.68%) Data Modelling
9 485 (29.48%) Security Cleared
10 434 (26.38%) SC Cleared
11 431 (26.20%) Data Quality
12 428 (26.02%) AWS
13 418 (25.41%) Databricks
14 409 (24.86%) CI/CD
15 353 (21.46%) Business Intelligence
16 319 (19.39%) Agile
17 300 (18.24%) DevOps
18 289 (17.57%) Data Warehouse
19 279 (16.96%) Power Platform
20 268 (16.29%) PySpark
21 263 (15.99%) Power BI
22 241 (14.65%) Data Governance
23 239 (14.53%) Azure Data Factory
24 230 (13.98%) Problem-Solving
25 216 (13.13%) Microsoft
26 196 (11.91%) Git
26 196 (11.91%) Migration
27 183 (11.12%) AI
28 182 (11.06%) Data Integration
28 182 (11.06%) Terraform

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
1 166 (10.09%) Apache Spark
2 158 (9.60%) Apache Airflow
3 96 (5.84%) Apache
4 75 (4.56%) SAS
5 28 (1.70%) Confluence
6 11 (0.67%) Palantir Foundry
7 9 (0.55%) Jupyter
8 5 (0.30%) Microsoft Exchange
9 4 (0.24%) SharePoint
10 2 (0.12%) Luigi
11 1 (0.061%) Apache Superset
11 1 (0.061%) Apache Synapse
11 1 (0.061%) Appian
11 1 (0.061%) Camunda
11 1 (0.061%) R Markdown
Applications
1 21 (1.28%) Microsoft Excel
2 7 (0.43%) Notepad++
3 4 (0.24%) Chatbot
3 4 (0.24%) Spreadsheet
4 1 (0.061%) Microsoft Office
Business Applications
1 2 (0.12%) Aladdin
1 2 (0.12%) BambooHR
1 2 (0.12%) Dynamics CRM
1 2 (0.12%) Maximo
1 2 (0.12%) SAP BPC
2 1 (0.061%) Actimize
2 1 (0.061%) Elite 3E
2 1 (0.061%) iTrent
2 1 (0.061%) NEC Housing
2 1 (0.061%) Oracle 11i
2 1 (0.061%) Oracle EBS
2 1 (0.061%) Oracle ERP
2 1 (0.061%) SAP Business ByDesign
2 1 (0.061%) SAP S/4HANA
2 1 (0.061%) SimCorp Dimension
Cloud Services
1 589 (35.81%) Azure
2 428 (26.02%) AWS
3 279 (16.96%) Power Platform
4 239 (14.53%) Azure Data Factory
5 167 (10.15%) Snowflake
6 165 (10.03%) Azure Synapse Analytics
7 151 (9.18%) GCP
8 150 (9.12%) Amazon S3
9 139 (8.45%) dbt
10 124 (7.54%) Azure DevOps
11 116 (7.05%) GitHub
12 110 (6.69%) Serverless
13 87 (5.29%) AWS Lambda
14 52 (3.16%) GitHub Actions
15 43 (2.61%) AWS CloudFormation
16 34 (2.07%) Amazon EMR
17 27 (1.64%) Amazon Kinesis
17 27 (1.64%) AWS Step Functions
17 27 (1.64%) Matillion
18 25 (1.52%) Microsoft Purview
Communications & Networking
1 29 (1.76%) DNS
1 29 (1.76%) VPN
2 28 (1.70%) BGP
2 28 (1.70%) DMZ
2 28 (1.70%) Multicast
3 10 (0.61%) Structured Cabling
4 7 (0.43%) PuTTY
4 7 (0.43%) WinSCP
5 5 (0.30%) Firewall
6 3 (0.18%) SAN
7 1 (0.061%) 4G
7 1 (0.061%) 5G
7 1 (0.061%) Network Security
7 1 (0.061%) Software-Defined Networking
Database & Business Intelligence
1 289 (17.57%) Data Warehouse
2 263 (15.99%) Power BI
3 177 (10.76%) Data Lake
4 118 (7.17%) SQL Server
5 102 (6.20%) Delta Lake
6 92 (5.59%) BigQuery
6 92 (5.59%) Metadata
7 89 (5.41%) Big Data
8 87 (5.29%) Amazon Redshift
9 83 (5.05%) Azure SQL Database
10 82 (4.98%) Pentaho
11 70 (4.26%) Tableau
12 69 (4.19%) PostgreSQL
13 66 (4.01%) NoSQL
14 62 (3.77%) Snowflake Schema
15 58 (3.53%) SQL Server Integration Services
16 56 (3.40%) Amazon Athena
17 46 (2.80%) Relational Database
18 43 (2.61%) Hadoop
19 36 (2.19%) Star Schema
Development Applications
1 196 (11.91%) Git
2 80 (4.86%) JIRA
3 74 (4.50%) GitLab
4 64 (3.89%) Jenkins
5 18 (1.09%) MLflow
6 4 (0.24%) Bitbucket
7 2 (0.12%) SonarQube
7 2 (0.12%) Sonatype Nexus
7 2 (0.12%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
7 2 (0.12%) Visual Studio
8 1 (0.061%) ER Studio
8 1 (0.061%) ERwin
8 1 (0.061%) Jaeger
8 1 (0.061%) JUnit
8 1 (0.061%) Poetry
8 1 (0.061%) Selenium
8 1 (0.061%) Team Foundation Server
8 1 (0.061%) Terragrunt
General
1 264 (16.05%) Finance
2 252 (15.32%) Social Skills
3 183 (11.12%) Analytical Skills
4 134 (8.15%) Public Sector
5 85 (5.17%) Banking
6 32 (1.95%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 23 (1.40%) Investment Banking
8 22 (1.34%) Documentation Skills
9 21 (1.28%) Telecoms
10 15 (0.91%) Manufacturing
10 15 (0.91%) Marketing
10 15 (0.91%) Retail
11 13 (0.79%) Front Office
11 13 (0.79%) Pharmaceutical
12 12 (0.73%) Aerospace
13 11 (0.67%) Publishing
14 7 (0.43%) Law
14 7 (0.43%) Military
15 6 (0.36%) Legal
15 6 (0.36%) Local Government
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 268 (16.29%) PySpark
2 155 (9.42%) Kafka
3 56 (3.40%) Pandas
4 33 (2.01%) JSON
5 32 (1.95%) REST
6 30 (1.82%) YAML
7 25 (1.52%) Great Expectations
8 17 (1.03%) Spring
8 17 (1.03%) Spring Boot
9 16 (0.97%) scikit-learn
10 15 (0.91%) NumPy
10 15 (0.91%) XML
11 14 (0.85%) Matplotlib
11 14 (0.85%) Node.js
11 14 (0.85%) PyTorch
12 13 (0.79%) Apache Beam
13 12 (0.73%) React
14 11 (0.67%) Apache Avro
14 11 (0.67%) pytest
15 10 (0.61%) TensorFlow
Miscellaneous
1 112 (6.81%) Cloud Native
2 45 (2.74%) Legacy Systems
3 41 (2.49%) Data Structures
4 34 (2.07%) Product Ownership
5 26 (1.58%) Distributed Systems
6 25 (1.52%) Greenfield Project
7 22 (1.34%) Clustering
8 21 (1.28%) Onboarding
9 18 (1.09%) Data Protection Act
10 15 (0.91%) NHS
10 15 (0.91%) Reinsurance
11 14 (0.85%) Replication
12 13 (0.79%) Self-Motivation
13 12 (0.73%) Public Cloud
14 11 (0.67%) Hybrid Cloud
15 9 (0.55%) AI Agents
16 8 (0.49%) Analytical Mindset
16 8 (0.49%) Distributed Computing
16 8 (0.49%) Linux Command Line
16 8 (0.49%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 46 (2.80%) Unix
2 36 (2.19%) Linux
3 4 (0.24%) Windows
4 2 (0.12%) VMS
4 2 (0.12%) Windows Server
5 1 (0.061%) Ubuntu
Processes & Methodologies
1 685 (41.64%) Data Pipeline
2 633 (38.48%) ETL
3 622 (37.81%) Analytics
4 598 (36.35%) Data Engineering
5 554 (33.68%) Data Modelling
6 409 (24.86%) CI/CD
7 353 (21.46%) Business Intelligence
8 319 (19.39%) Agile
9 300 (18.24%) DevOps
10 241 (14.65%) Data Governance
11 230 (13.98%) Problem-Solving
12 196 (11.91%) Migration
13 183 (11.12%) AI
14 182 (11.06%) Data Integration
15 179 (10.88%) Data Science
16 161 (9.79%) Validation
17 145 (8.81%) Data Architecture
18 139 (8.45%) Infrastructure as Code
19 137 (8.33%) Data Transformation
20 136 (8.27%) Decision-Making
Programming Languages
1 890 (54.10%) SQL
2 780 (47.42%) Python
3 107 (6.50%) Java
4 85 (5.17%) Scala
5 37 (2.25%) C#
5 37 (2.25%) Data Analysis Expressions
6 34 (2.07%) T-SQL
7 33 (2.01%) PL/SQL
8 29 (1.76%) Shell Script
9 25 (1.52%) Bash
10 21 (1.28%) Bicep
11 19 (1.16%) PowerShell
11 19 (1.16%) R
12 18 (1.09%) JavaScript
13 10 (0.61%) Go
14 7 (0.43%) TypeScript
15 3 (0.18%) C
16 2 (0.12%) C++
16 2 (0.12%) Perl
16 2 (0.12%) Ruby
Qualifications
1 485 (29.48%) Security Cleared
2 434 (26.38%) SC Cleared
3 43 (2.61%) Degree
4 35 (2.13%) BPSS Clearance
5 32 (1.95%) Azure Certification
6 16 (0.97%) Computer Science Degree
7 15 (0.91%) DV Cleared
8 14 (0.85%) AWS Certification
9 8 (0.49%) Master's Degree
10 7 (0.43%) DBS Check
11 6 (0.36%) Microsoft Certification
11 6 (0.36%) SnowPro
12 5 (0.30%) BICSI Certification
12 5 (0.30%) City & Guilds
13 3 (0.18%) CISSP
13 3 (0.18%) CTC Cleared
13 3 (0.18%) IBM Certification
14 2 (0.12%) CISM
15 1 (0.061%) CISA
15 1 (0.061%) Cisco Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 431 (26.20%) Data Quality
2 54 (3.28%) GDPR
3 47 (2.86%) QA
4 17 (1.03%) Accessibility
5 9 (0.55%) FATCA
5 9 (0.55%) SLA
6 5 (0.30%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 4 (0.24%) MiFID
8 3 (0.18%) GMP
8 3 (0.18%) HIPAA
8 3 (0.18%) WCAG
9 2 (0.12%) EMIR
9 2 (0.12%) GRC
9 2 (0.12%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 2 (0.12%) SNOMED CT
10 1 (0.061%) Basel III
10 1 (0.061%) California Consumer Privacy Act
10 1 (0.061%) Disclosure Scotland
10 1 (0.061%) Government Security Classifications
10 1 (0.061%) ISO 13485
System Software
1 116 (7.05%) Docker
2 6 (0.36%) Virtual Machines
3 2 (0.12%) Active Directory
3 2 (0.12%) HDFS
4 1 (0.061%) RACF
Systems Management
1 182 (11.06%) Terraform
2 99 (6.02%) Kubernetes
3 49 (2.98%) Grafana
4 15 (0.91%) Prometheus
5 13 (0.79%) Ansible
6 10 (0.61%) Kibana
7 4 (0.24%) Kubeflow
8 3 (0.18%) logstash
8 3 (0.18%) Rancher
9 2 (0.12%) Apache Ranger
9 2 (0.12%) EMC NetWorker
9 2 (0.12%) Thomson Reuters DACS
9 2 (0.12%) Tivoli Storage Manager
10 1 (0.061%) Control-M
10 1 (0.061%) Fluentd
10 1 (0.061%) NetBackup
10 1 (0.061%) Puppet
10 1 (0.061%) QRadar
Vendors
1 418 (25.41%) Databricks
2 216 (13.13%) Microsoft
3 133 (8.09%) Oracle
4 111 (6.75%) Talend
5 108 (6.57%) Informatica
6 61 (3.71%) Denodo
6 61 (3.71%) Google
7 33 (2.01%) Cisco
8 30 (1.82%) F5
9 26 (1.58%) Splunk
10 23 (1.40%) SAP
11 22 (1.34%) ServiceNow
12 20 (1.22%) IBM
13 16 (0.97%) Cloudera
14 14 (0.85%) Foundry
14 14 (0.85%) Palantir
15 11 (0.67%) Alteryx
16 8 (0.49%) InterSystems
16 8 (0.49%) MuleSoft
17 7 (0.43%) Sage