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 8 July 2026.

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

6 months to
8 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 61 118 99
Rank change year-on-year +57 -19 +26
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 1,940 769 989
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 3.72% 2.41% 2.29%
As % of the Job Titles category 4.02% 2.62% 2.47%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,326 557 747
10th Percentile £375 £363 £233
25th Percentile £425 £425 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £500
Median % change year-on-year - - -9.09%
75th Percentile £588 £575 £600
90th Percentile £650 £697 £688
UK excluding London median daily rate £469 £463 £450
% change year-on-year +1.45% +2.78% -14.29%
Number of hourly rates quoted 76 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% -7.02%
75th Percentile £68.88 £78.10 £80.00
90th Percentile £75.00 £80.00 -
UK excluding London median hourly rate £50.00 £48.46 £75.00
% change year-on-year +3.18% -35.39% +53.06%

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 48,237 29,379 40,107
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.46% 91.96% 93.00%
Number of daily rates quoted 29,223 18,754 25,817
10th Percentile £325 £287 £285
25th Percentile £417 £400 £409
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 3,243 1,333 2,768
10th Percentile £15.75 £13.75 £12.86
25th Percentile £21.25 £17.44 £16.62
Median hourly rate £43.00 £26.45 £37.50
Median % change year-on-year +62.57% -29.47% -12.79%
75th Percentile £67.50 £55.25 £62.50
90th Percentile £80.00 £73.25 £73.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £45.00 £25.15 £40.00
% change year-on-year +78.93% -37.13% +1.07%

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 8 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 8 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 8 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 +56 1,705 £500 - 395
UK excluding London +76 883 £469 +1.45% 301
London +33 853 £525 - 163
Work from Home +37 570 £500 +3.52% 226
Midlands +53 366 £460 +2.22% 61
West Midlands +49 325 £459 -0.22% 33
North of England +18 225 £475 - 90
North West +18 134 £513 +7.89% 55
South East +17 127 £475 +11.76% 86
South West +13 89 £525 +5.00% 37
Scotland +20 69 £425 -8.11% 6
Yorkshire 0 69 £470 -1.05% 21
East Midlands +14 41 £525 +28.05% 29
East of England -12 26 £543 +70.60% 10
Wales +3 22 £425 -2.30% 8
North East -22 22 £510 +16.57% 17
Northern Ireland +6 3 £410 -18.00% 10

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

For the 6 months to 8 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 1,012 (52.16%) SQL
2 875 (45.10%) Python
3 818 (42.16%) Data Pipeline
4 722 (37.22%) Analytics
5 709 (36.55%) Data Engineering
6 696 (35.88%) ETL
7 647 (33.35%) Data Modelling
8 618 (31.86%) Azure
9 564 (29.07%) AWS
10 530 (27.32%) Security Cleared
11 476 (24.54%) Data Quality
12 467 (24.07%) CI/CD
13 461 (23.76%) SC Cleared
14 408 (21.03%) Databricks
15 374 (19.28%) Business Intelligence
16 349 (17.99%) Agile
17 324 (16.70%) DevOps
18 313 (16.13%) Data Warehouse
19 300 (15.46%) Power Platform
20 285 (14.69%) Power BI
21 282 (14.54%) Migration
21 282 (14.54%) PySpark
22 265 (13.66%) Data Governance
23 241 (12.42%) Problem-Solving
24 236 (12.16%) AI
25 233 (12.01%) Microsoft
26 228 (11.75%) Azure Data Factory
27 218 (11.24%) Validation
28 213 (10.98%) Data Integration
29 204 (10.52%) 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
1 173 (8.92%) Apache Airflow
2 154 (7.94%) Apache Spark
3 110 (5.67%) Apache
4 86 (4.43%) SAS
5 54 (2.78%) Confluence
6 13 (0.67%) Palantir Foundry
6 13 (0.67%) SharePoint
7 8 (0.41%) Jupyter
8 5 (0.26%) Microsoft Exchange
9 2 (0.10%) Apache Superset
10 1 (0.052%) Appian
10 1 (0.052%) ArcGIS
10 1 (0.052%) Camunda
10 1 (0.052%) Liferay
10 1 (0.052%) Luigi
10 1 (0.052%) R Markdown
Applications
1 19 (0.98%) Microsoft Excel
2 7 (0.36%) Notepad++
3 4 (0.21%) Spreadsheet
4 2 (0.10%) Chatbot
5 1 (0.052%) Microsoft Office
5 1 (0.052%) Microsoft PowerPoint
Business Applications
1 11 (0.57%) Aladdin
2 7 (0.36%) Dynamics CRM
3 5 (0.26%) Infor LN
3 5 (0.26%) NetSuite
3 5 (0.26%) Sage X3
4 3 (0.15%) SAP BPC
4 3 (0.15%) SAP S/4HANA
4 3 (0.15%) SimCorp Dimension
5 2 (0.10%) BambooHR
5 2 (0.10%) Maximo
5 2 (0.10%) Oracle EBS
6 1 (0.052%) Elite 3E
6 1 (0.052%) iTrent
6 1 (0.052%) Oracle 11i
6 1 (0.052%) Oracle Assets
6 1 (0.052%) Oracle ERP
6 1 (0.052%) Raiser’s Edge
6 1 (0.052%) SAP Business ByDesign
6 1 (0.052%) SAP CAR
6 1 (0.052%) SAP EWM
Cloud Services
1 618 (31.86%) Azure
2 564 (29.07%) AWS
3 300 (15.46%) Power Platform
4 228 (11.75%) Azure Data Factory
5 204 (10.52%) Snowflake
6 186 (9.59%) dbt
7 180 (9.28%) Amazon S3
8 166 (8.56%) GCP
9 151 (7.78%) Azure Synapse Analytics
10 141 (7.27%) Azure DevOps
11 128 (6.60%) Serverless
12 117 (6.03%) GitHub
13 109 (5.62%) AWS Lambda
14 56 (2.89%) Amazon EMR
15 54 (2.78%) GitHub Actions
16 34 (1.75%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 31 (1.60%) Matillion
18 29 (1.49%) Amazon Kinesis
18 29 (1.49%) AWS CloudFormation
19 24 (1.24%) OpenShift
Communications & Networking
1 35 (1.80%) DNS
1 35 (1.80%) VPN
2 34 (1.75%) BGP
2 34 (1.75%) DMZ
2 34 (1.75%) Multicast
3 10 (0.52%) Structured Cabling
4 7 (0.36%) PuTTY
4 7 (0.36%) WinSCP
5 6 (0.31%) Firewall
6 4 (0.21%) Wi-Fi
6 4 (0.21%) Wireless
7 2 (0.10%) Intrusion Detection
8 1 (0.052%) 4G
8 1 (0.052%) 5G
8 1 (0.052%) MQTT
Database & Business Intelligence
1 313 (16.13%) Data Warehouse
2 285 (14.69%) Power BI
3 179 (9.23%) Data Lake
4 110 (5.67%) Amazon Redshift
5 105 (5.41%) Delta Lake
6 103 (5.31%) SQL Server
7 98 (5.05%) Metadata
8 95 (4.90%) BigQuery
9 90 (4.64%) Big Data
9 90 (4.64%) Pentaho
10 78 (4.02%) Tableau
11 75 (3.87%) Amazon Athena
12 72 (3.71%) Snowflake Schema
13 71 (3.66%) PostgreSQL
14 58 (2.99%) Azure SQL Database
14 58 (2.99%) Relational Database
15 55 (2.84%) NoSQL
15 55 (2.84%) SQL Server Integration Services
16 41 (2.11%) Hadoop
17 38 (1.96%) Data Vault
Development Applications
1 182 (9.38%) Git
2 104 (5.36%) GitLab
3 95 (4.90%) JIRA
4 50 (2.58%) Jenkins
5 9 (0.46%) Artifactory
6 8 (0.41%) MLflow
7 7 (0.36%) Bitbucket
7 7 (0.36%) Postman
8 3 (0.15%) Newman
8 3 (0.15%) SonarQube
9 2 (0.10%) Atlassian Bamboo
9 2 (0.10%) Claude Code
9 2 (0.10%) Sonatype Nexus
9 2 (0.10%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
9 2 (0.10%) Terragrunt
9 2 (0.10%) Visual Studio
9 2 (0.10%) Yeoman
10 1 (0.052%) ERwin
10 1 (0.052%) JUnit
10 1 (0.052%) Selenium
General
1 321 (16.55%) Finance
2 312 (16.08%) Social Skills
3 212 (10.93%) Analytical Skills
4 163 (8.40%) Public Sector
5 107 (5.52%) Banking
6 39 (2.01%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 33 (1.70%) Marketing
8 30 (1.55%) Retail
9 29 (1.49%) Documentation Skills
10 25 (1.29%) Investment Banking
11 24 (1.24%) Telecoms
12 19 (0.98%) Manufacturing
13 18 (0.93%) Pharmaceutical
14 16 (0.82%) Front Office
15 15 (0.77%) Automotive
16 13 (0.67%) Aerospace
17 11 (0.57%) Publishing
18 10 (0.52%) Legal
19 9 (0.46%) Billing
20 7 (0.36%) Military
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 282 (14.54%) PySpark
2 151 (7.78%) Kafka
3 41 (2.11%) Pandas
4 37 (1.91%) JSON
5 28 (1.44%) REST
6 25 (1.29%) Spring
6 25 (1.29%) Spring Boot
7 23 (1.19%) Great Expectations
8 22 (1.13%) XML
9 19 (0.98%) YAML
10 17 (0.88%) Apache Beam
11 13 (0.67%) Apache Avro
12 12 (0.62%) Streamlit
13 11 (0.57%) React
13 11 (0.57%) RESTful
14 10 (0.52%) Microsoft Graph
14 10 (0.52%) pytest
14 10 (0.52%) scikit-learn
15 9 (0.46%) GeoJSON
15 9 (0.46%) Polars
Miscellaneous
1 151 (7.78%) Cloud Native
2 63 (3.25%) Legacy Systems
3 60 (3.09%) Data Structures
4 34 (1.75%) Distributed Systems
5 29 (1.49%) Onboarding
6 27 (1.39%) Greenfield Project
7 26 (1.34%) Reinsurance
8 25 (1.29%) NHS
9 22 (1.13%) Product Ownership
10 21 (1.08%) Data Protection Act
11 20 (1.03%) Clustering
12 12 (0.62%) Virtual Team
13 11 (0.57%) Life Science
13 11 (0.57%) Replication
14 10 (0.52%) Linux Command Line
14 10 (0.52%) Public Cloud
14 10 (0.52%) Reference Data
14 10 (0.52%) Self-Motivation
15 9 (0.46%) Algorithms
15 9 (0.46%) Driving Licence
Operating Systems
1 65 (3.35%) Unix
2 40 (2.06%) Linux
3 5 (0.26%) Windows
4 2 (0.10%) Ubuntu
4 2 (0.10%) Windows Server
5 1 (0.052%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 818 (42.16%) Data Pipeline
2 722 (37.22%) Analytics
3 709 (36.55%) Data Engineering
4 696 (35.88%) ETL
5 647 (33.35%) Data Modelling
6 467 (24.07%) CI/CD
7 374 (19.28%) Business Intelligence
8 349 (17.99%) Agile
9 324 (16.70%) DevOps
10 282 (14.54%) Migration
11 265 (13.66%) Data Governance
12 241 (12.42%) Problem-Solving
13 236 (12.16%) AI
14 218 (11.24%) Validation
15 213 (10.98%) Data Integration
16 193 (9.95%) Data Science
17 182 (9.38%) Data Transformation
18 181 (9.33%) Decision-Making
19 157 (8.09%) Infrastructure as Code
20 155 (7.99%) Test Automation
Programming Languages
1 1,012 (52.16%) SQL
2 875 (45.10%) Python
3 125 (6.44%) Java
4 66 (3.40%) Scala
5 53 (2.73%) PL/SQL
6 38 (1.96%) T-SQL
7 33 (1.70%) Data Analysis Expressions
8 31 (1.60%) Shell Script
9 30 (1.55%) C#
10 28 (1.44%) Bash
11 23 (1.19%) PowerShell
12 15 (0.77%) Bicep
12 15 (0.77%) R
13 13 (0.67%) JavaScript
14 8 (0.41%) TypeScript
15 7 (0.36%) Go
16 2 (0.10%) C++
16 2 (0.10%) Perl
16 2 (0.10%) Ruby
16 2 (0.10%) SPARQL
Qualifications
1 530 (27.32%) Security Cleared
2 461 (23.76%) SC Cleared
3 53 (2.73%) BPSS Clearance
4 46 (2.37%) Degree
5 28 (1.44%) Azure Certification
6 21 (1.08%) DV Cleared
7 19 (0.98%) Computer Science Degree
8 15 (0.77%) AWS Certification
9 9 (0.46%) City & Guilds
9 9 (0.46%) DBS Check
9 9 (0.46%) SnowPro
10 8 (0.41%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
11 7 (0.36%) Master's Degree
12 5 (0.26%) BICSI Certification
12 5 (0.26%) CISSP
13 4 (0.21%) CISM
13 4 (0.21%) Microsoft Certification
14 3 (0.15%) IBM Certification
15 2 (0.10%) CEH
16 1 (0.052%) CISA
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 476 (24.54%) Data Quality
2 61 (3.14%) QA
3 54 (2.78%) GDPR
4 18 (0.93%) Accessibility
5 12 (0.62%) SLA
6 9 (0.46%) FATCA
7 6 (0.31%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 6 (0.31%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 4 (0.21%) MiFID
9 3 (0.15%) GMP
9 3 (0.15%) HIPAA
10 2 (0.10%) California Consumer Privacy Act
10 2 (0.10%) Disclosure Scotland
10 2 (0.10%) EMIR
10 2 (0.10%) GRC
10 2 (0.10%) PMO
10 2 (0.10%) SNOMED CT
10 2 (0.10%) WCAG
11 1 (0.052%) Government Security Classifications
11 1 (0.052%) PCI DSS
System Software
1 109 (5.62%) Docker
2 6 (0.31%) Virtual Machines
3 3 (0.15%) Active Directory
4 2 (0.10%) HDFS
5 1 (0.052%) RACF
Systems Management
1 203 (10.46%) Terraform
2 87 (4.48%) Kubernetes
3 52 (2.68%) Grafana
4 14 (0.72%) Ansible
5 13 (0.67%) Prometheus
6 9 (0.46%) Kibana
7 3 (0.15%) Rancher
8 2 (0.10%) Apache Ranger
8 2 (0.10%) Control-M
8 2 (0.10%) logstash
8 2 (0.10%) Thomson Reuters DACS
9 1 (0.052%) Fluentd
9 1 (0.052%) Kubeflow
9 1 (0.052%) NetBackup
9 1 (0.052%) Puppet
9 1 (0.052%) QRadar
Vendors
1 408 (21.03%) Databricks
2 233 (12.01%) Microsoft
3 172 (8.87%) Oracle
4 143 (7.37%) Informatica
5 130 (6.70%) Talend
6 71 (3.66%) Denodo
7 57 (2.94%) Google
8 36 (1.86%) Cisco
8 36 (1.86%) F5
9 32 (1.65%) SAP
10 28 (1.44%) Salesforce
11 25 (1.29%) Splunk
12 21 (1.08%) Palantir
13 18 (0.93%) Cloudera
14 17 (0.88%) ServiceNow
15 16 (0.82%) Foundry
16 14 (0.72%) Alteryx
16 14 (0.72%) IBM
17 12 (0.62%) Sage
18 9 (0.46%) Bloomberg