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 6 April 2026.

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

6 months to
6 Apr 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 67 81 103
Rank change year-on-year +14 +22 +8
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 1,550 885 968
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 3.43% 3.03% 2.21%
As % of the Job Titles category 3.72% 3.26% 2.38%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,102 651 756
10th Percentile £363 £358 £283
25th Percentile £413 £419 £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 £470 £463 £460
% change year-on-year +1.62% +0.54% -10.24%
Number of hourly rates quoted 39 14 43
10th Percentile £19.34 £25.14 £31.25
25th Percentile £45.64 £26.27 £48.00
Median hourly rate £55.00 £47.50 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +15.79% -26.92% +1.56%
75th Percentile £75.00 £74.38 £80.00
90th Percentile £81.20 £89.24 -
UK excluding London median hourly rate £52.50 £26.50 £75.00
% change year-on-year +98.11% -64.67% +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 41,708 27,129 40,710
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.22% 92.77% 92.78%
Number of daily rates quoted 25,972 17,847 26,649
10th Percentile £313 £300 £275
25th Percentile £413 £406 £408
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £520 £525
Median % change year-on-year -3.85% -0.95% -3.31%
75th Percentile £613 £630 £638
90th Percentile £725 £738 £743
UK excluding London median daily rate £488 £475 £490
% change year-on-year +2.63% -3.06% -2.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,626 961 2,538
10th Percentile £15.00 £14.99 £12.86
25th Percentile £19.91 £20.24 £16.25
Median hourly rate £40.00 £31.76 £33.07
Median % change year-on-year +25.94% -3.95% -26.52%
75th Percentile £65.00 £64.50 £60.00
90th Percentile £77.50 £76.25 £71.25
UK excluding London median hourly rate £41.53 £30.93 £34.21
% change year-on-year +34.26% -9.59% -19.25%

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 6 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 6 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 6 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 +13 1,367 £500 - 402
London +15 777 £525 -1.41% 158
UK excluding London +4 589 £470 +1.62% 308
Work from Home +12 462 £500 - 193
Midlands +16 254 £469 -1.37% 59
West Midlands +22 235 £469 -2.91% 45
North of England -22 174 £459 -0.81% 87
North West -1 107 £450 -2.70% 56
South East -29 68 £500 -0.50% 91
South West -3 53 £525 +5.00% 38
Yorkshire -26 52 £465 +3.33% 19
Scotland -3 40 £402 -8.11% 10
Wales -5 19 £418 -20.48% 8
East Midlands -26 19 £450 +12.85% 14
North East -13 15 £488 +2.63% 13
East of England -31 15 £565 +79.37% 17
Northern Ireland -2 3 £410 -18.00%

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

For the 6 months to 6 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.

1 863 (55.68%) SQL
2 764 (49.29%) Python
3 665 (42.90%) Data Pipeline
4 629 (40.58%) ETL
5 594 (38.32%) Data Engineering
6 587 (37.87%) Analytics
6 587 (37.87%) Azure
7 535 (34.52%) Data Modelling
8 451 (29.10%) Security Cleared
9 436 (28.13%) Data Quality
10 423 (27.29%) Databricks
11 421 (27.16%) AWS
12 405 (26.13%) CI/CD
13 404 (26.06%) SC Cleared
14 349 (22.52%) Business Intelligence
15 297 (19.16%) Agile
16 295 (19.03%) DevOps
17 286 (18.45%) Data Warehouse
18 272 (17.55%) Power Platform
19 256 (16.52%) Power BI
20 255 (16.45%) PySpark
21 248 (16.00%) Data Governance
22 234 (15.10%) Azure Data Factory
23 229 (14.77%) Problem-Solving
24 206 (13.29%) Microsoft
25 200 (12.90%) Git
26 186 (12.00%) Data Science
27 178 (11.48%) Snowflake
28 173 (11.16%) Data Integration
28 173 (11.16%) Migration

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
1 152 (9.81%) Apache Spark
2 148 (9.55%) Apache Airflow
3 98 (6.32%) Apache
4 73 (4.71%) SAS
5 23 (1.48%) Confluence
6 13 (0.84%) Palantir Foundry
7 6 (0.39%) Jupyter
8 5 (0.32%) Microsoft Exchange
9 4 (0.26%) SharePoint
10 2 (0.13%) Apache Superset
10 2 (0.13%) Luigi
10 2 (0.13%) Oracle Application Server
11 1 (0.065%) Apache Synapse
11 1 (0.065%) Appian
11 1 (0.065%) ArcGIS
11 1 (0.065%) Camunda
11 1 (0.065%) R Markdown
Applications
1 17 (1.10%) Microsoft Excel
2 5 (0.32%) Notepad++
3 3 (0.19%) Chatbot
3 3 (0.19%) Spreadsheet
4 2 (0.13%) Microsoft Office
5 1 (0.065%) Microsoft PowerPoint
Business Applications
1 2 (0.13%) Aladdin
1 2 (0.13%) Dynamics CRM
1 2 (0.13%) Maximo
1 2 (0.13%) SAP BPC
2 1 (0.065%) Actimize
2 1 (0.065%) BambooHR
2 1 (0.065%) Elite 3E
2 1 (0.065%) iTrent
2 1 (0.065%) NEC Housing
2 1 (0.065%) Oracle 11i
2 1 (0.065%) Oracle ERP
2 1 (0.065%) SAP Business ByDesign
2 1 (0.065%) SimCorp Dimension
Cloud Services
1 587 (37.87%) Azure
2 421 (27.16%) AWS
3 272 (17.55%) Power Platform
4 234 (15.10%) Azure Data Factory
5 178 (11.48%) Snowflake
6 156 (10.06%) Azure Synapse Analytics
7 155 (10.00%) GCP
8 147 (9.48%) Amazon S3
9 145 (9.35%) dbt
10 122 (7.87%) GitHub
11 112 (7.23%) Azure DevOps
11 112 (7.23%) Serverless
12 81 (5.23%) AWS Lambda
13 52 (3.35%) GitHub Actions
14 43 (2.77%) AWS CloudFormation
15 30 (1.94%) AWS Step Functions
16 28 (1.81%) Matillion
17 25 (1.61%) Amazon EMR
18 24 (1.55%) Amazon Kinesis
18 24 (1.55%) Microsoft Purview
Communications & Networking
1 25 (1.61%) DNS
1 25 (1.61%) VPN
2 24 (1.55%) BGP
2 24 (1.55%) DMZ
2 24 (1.55%) Multicast
3 11 (0.71%) Structured Cabling
4 5 (0.32%) PuTTY
4 5 (0.32%) WinSCP
5 4 (0.26%) Firewall
6 3 (0.19%) SAN
7 1 (0.065%) 4G
7 1 (0.065%) 5G
7 1 (0.065%) Network Security
7 1 (0.065%) Software-Defined Networking
Database & Business Intelligence
1 286 (18.45%) Data Warehouse
2 256 (16.52%) Power BI
3 172 (11.10%) Data Lake
4 112 (7.23%) SQL Server
5 97 (6.26%) Delta Lake
6 90 (5.81%) BigQuery
7 86 (5.55%) Metadata
8 83 (5.35%) Amazon Redshift
8 83 (5.35%) Azure SQL Database
9 74 (4.77%) Big Data
9 74 (4.77%) Pentaho
10 67 (4.32%) PostgreSQL
11 60 (3.87%) SQL Server Integration Services
11 60 (3.87%) Tableau
12 58 (3.74%) NoSQL
12 58 (3.74%) Snowflake Schema
13 56 (3.61%) Amazon Athena
14 45 (2.90%) Relational Database
15 40 (2.58%) Hadoop
16 37 (2.39%) Star Schema
Development Applications
1 200 (12.90%) Git
2 75 (4.84%) JIRA
3 68 (4.39%) GitLab
4 66 (4.26%) Jenkins
5 21 (1.35%) MLflow
6 4 (0.26%) Bitbucket
7 2 (0.13%) DBeaver
7 2 (0.13%) JUnit
7 2 (0.13%) Selenium
7 2 (0.13%) SonarQube
7 2 (0.13%) Sonatype Nexus
7 2 (0.13%) Visual Studio
8 1 (0.065%) Deequ
8 1 (0.065%) ER Studio
8 1 (0.065%) ERwin
8 1 (0.065%) Jaeger
8 1 (0.065%) Maven
8 1 (0.065%) Poetry
8 1 (0.065%) Team Foundation Server
8 1 (0.065%) Terragrunt
General
1 248 (16.00%) Social Skills
2 241 (15.55%) Finance
3 166 (10.71%) Analytical Skills
4 131 (8.45%) Public Sector
5 77 (4.97%) Banking
6 38 (2.45%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 21 (1.35%) Investment Banking
8 20 (1.29%) Telecoms
9 19 (1.23%) Documentation Skills
10 14 (0.90%) Front Office
10 14 (0.90%) Retail
11 13 (0.84%) Marketing
11 13 (0.84%) Pharmaceutical
12 11 (0.71%) Publishing
13 10 (0.65%) Manufacturing
14 9 (0.58%) Law
15 6 (0.39%) Military
16 5 (0.32%) Legal
17 4 (0.26%) Aerospace
17 4 (0.26%) Corporate Banking
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 255 (16.45%) PySpark
2 155 (10.00%) Kafka
3 56 (3.61%) Pandas
4 35 (2.26%) JSON
5 31 (2.00%) REST
6 29 (1.87%) YAML
7 23 (1.48%) Great Expectations
8 17 (1.10%) NumPy
8 17 (1.10%) XML
9 16 (1.03%) Node.js
9 16 (1.03%) scikit-learn
10 15 (0.97%) Matplotlib
11 14 (0.90%) PyTorch
11 14 (0.90%) React
12 13 (0.84%) Apache Beam
13 11 (0.71%) Keycloak
13 11 (0.71%) pytest
14 10 (0.65%) Apache Avro
14 10 (0.65%) Spring Boot
14 10 (0.65%) TensorFlow
Miscellaneous
1 107 (6.90%) Cloud Native
2 47 (3.03%) Legacy Systems
3 36 (2.32%) Data Structures
4 31 (2.00%) Product Ownership
5 24 (1.55%) Distributed Systems
5 24 (1.55%) Onboarding
6 22 (1.42%) Clustering
7 21 (1.35%) Greenfield Project
8 18 (1.16%) Data Protection Act
9 16 (1.03%) Hybrid Cloud
9 16 (1.03%) Reinsurance
10 15 (0.97%) NHS
10 15 (0.97%) Replication
11 12 (0.77%) Public Cloud
12 11 (0.71%) Self-Motivation
13 9 (0.58%) Data Centre
13 9 (0.58%) Virtual Team
14 8 (0.52%) Analytical Mindset
14 8 (0.52%) Life Science
14 8 (0.52%) Reference Data
Operating Systems
1 38 (2.45%) Unix
2 28 (1.81%) Linux
3 4 (0.26%) Windows
4 2 (0.13%) Windows Server
5 1 (0.065%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 665 (42.90%) Data Pipeline
2 629 (40.58%) ETL
3 594 (38.32%) Data Engineering
4 587 (37.87%) Analytics
5 535 (34.52%) Data Modelling
6 405 (26.13%) CI/CD
7 349 (22.52%) Business Intelligence
8 297 (19.16%) Agile
9 295 (19.03%) DevOps
10 248 (16.00%) Data Governance
11 229 (14.77%) Problem-Solving
12 186 (12.00%) Data Science
13 173 (11.16%) Data Integration
13 173 (11.16%) Migration
14 168 (10.84%) AI
15 154 (9.94%) Data Architecture
16 150 (9.68%) Validation
17 142 (9.16%) Performance Tuning
18 140 (9.03%) Data Transformation
19 134 (8.65%) Infrastructure as Code
Programming Languages
1 863 (55.68%) SQL
2 764 (49.29%) Python
3 98 (6.32%) Java
4 80 (5.16%) Scala
5 38 (2.45%) Data Analysis Expressions
6 37 (2.39%) C#
7 33 (2.13%) T-SQL
8 32 (2.06%) PL/SQL
9 26 (1.68%) Bash
10 25 (1.61%) Shell Script
11 22 (1.42%) Bicep
12 21 (1.35%) PowerShell
13 18 (1.16%) R
14 14 (0.90%) Go
15 11 (0.71%) JavaScript
16 8 (0.52%) TypeScript
17 3 (0.19%) C
17 3 (0.19%) Korn
18 2 (0.13%) Ruby
18 2 (0.13%) VB
Qualifications
1 451 (29.10%) Security Cleared
2 404 (26.06%) SC Cleared
3 41 (2.65%) Degree
4 34 (2.19%) Azure Certification
5 29 (1.87%) BPSS Clearance
6 17 (1.10%) DV Cleared
7 16 (1.03%) AWS Certification
7 16 (1.03%) Computer Science Degree
8 8 (0.52%) Master's Degree
9 6 (0.39%) Microsoft Certification
10 5 (0.32%) BICSI Certification
10 5 (0.32%) City & Guilds
10 5 (0.32%) DBS Check
10 5 (0.32%) SnowPro
11 4 (0.26%) CTC Cleared
12 3 (0.19%) CISSP
12 3 (0.19%) IBM Certification
13 2 (0.13%) CISM
14 1 (0.065%) CompTIA Security+
14 1 (0.065%) Numerate Degree
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 436 (28.13%) Data Quality
2 55 (3.55%) GDPR
3 40 (2.58%) QA
4 18 (1.16%) Accessibility
5 8 (0.52%) SLA
6 5 (0.32%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 4 (0.26%) HIPAA
8 3 (0.19%) FATCA
8 3 (0.19%) GMP
8 3 (0.19%) WCAG
9 2 (0.13%) Dodd-Frank
9 2 (0.13%) EMIR
9 2 (0.13%) GRC
9 2 (0.13%) MiFID
9 2 (0.13%) SOC 2
10 1 (0.065%) California Consumer Privacy Act
10 1 (0.065%) ISO 13485
10 1 (0.065%) NCSC
10 1 (0.065%) NIST
10 1 (0.065%) PMO
System Software
1 105 (6.77%) Docker
2 9 (0.58%) Virtual Machines
3 2 (0.13%) Active Directory
3 2 (0.13%) HDFS
4 1 (0.065%) RACF
Systems Management
1 163 (10.52%) Terraform
2 105 (6.77%) Kubernetes
3 34 (2.19%) Grafana
4 15 (0.97%) Prometheus
5 9 (0.58%) Ansible
6 4 (0.26%) Kubeflow
7 3 (0.19%) Kibana
7 3 (0.19%) logstash
7 3 (0.19%) NetBackup
7 3 (0.19%) Rancher
8 2 (0.13%) Apache Ranger
8 2 (0.13%) EMC NetWorker
8 2 (0.13%) Puppet
8 2 (0.13%) Thomson Reuters DACS
8 2 (0.13%) Tivoli Storage Manager
9 1 (0.065%) Control-M
9 1 (0.065%) Fluentd
9 1 (0.065%) QRadar
Vendors
1 423 (27.29%) Databricks
2 206 (13.29%) Microsoft
3 123 (7.94%) Oracle
4 107 (6.90%) Talend
5 96 (6.19%) Informatica
6 64 (4.13%) Google
7 61 (3.94%) Denodo
8 29 (1.87%) Cisco
9 26 (1.68%) F5
10 25 (1.61%) ServiceNow
11 21 (1.35%) SAP
12 19 (1.23%) Splunk
13 18 (1.16%) IBM
14 17 (1.10%) Cloudera
15 16 (1.03%) Foundry
15 16 (1.03%) Palantir
16 10 (0.65%) Alteryx
17 8 (0.52%) MuleSoft
18 6 (0.39%) OpenAI
19 5 (0.32%) Virgin Media