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 27 March 2026.

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

6 months to
27 Mar 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 73 79 100
Rank change year-on-year +6 +21 +13
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 1,450 895 970
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 3.29% 3.08% 2.19%
As % of the Job Titles category 3.57% 3.32% 2.36%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,029 659 754
10th Percentile £365 £356 £287
25th Percentile £413 £413 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £500
Median % change year-on-year - - -9.09%
75th Percentile £588 £600 £600
90th Percentile £663 £700 £688
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £460 £450
% change year-on-year +3.26% +2.22% -12.62%
Number of hourly rates quoted 36 14 42
10th Percentile £19.34 £25.14 £31.25
25th Percentile £41.27 £26.27 £47.38
Median hourly rate £58.50 £47.50 £63.75
Median % change year-on-year +23.16% -25.49% -0.39%
75th Percentile £75.00 £74.38 £80.00
90th Percentile £84.50 £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 40,577 26,954 41,100
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.01% 92.86% 92.82%
Number of daily rates quoted 25,287 17,764 26,916
10th Percentile £313 £300 £275
25th Percentile £413 £406 £406
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £520 £525
Median % change year-on-year -3.85% -0.95% -4.18%
75th Percentile £613 £630 £638
90th Percentile £725 £738 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £485 £475 £488
% change year-on-year +2.11% -2.56% -2.50%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,523 918 2,518
10th Percentile £15.00 £15.19 £12.86
25th Percentile £19.41 £21.00 £16.25
Median hourly rate £37.50 £32.50 £32.90
Median % change year-on-year +15.38% -1.20% -24.38%
75th Percentile £65.00 £64.74 £60.00
90th Percentile £76.73 £76.53 £71.90
UK excluding London median hourly rate £38.63 £31.88 £32.90
% change year-on-year +21.17% -3.09% -21.31%

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 27 March 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 27 March 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 27 March 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 +8 1,274 £500 - 402
London +12 734 £525 -2.05% 158
UK excluding London -6 541 £475 +3.26% 308
Work from Home +1 443 £500 - 193
Midlands +13 224 £470 -1.05% 59
West Midlands +13 205 £481 +0.84% 45
North of England -16 161 £459 +1.94% 87
North West +5 99 £450 -2.70% 56
South East -29 64 £500 - 91
South West -3 53 £536 +7.10% 38
Yorkshire -32 47 £465 +3.33% 19
Scotland -8 40 £402 -8.11% 10
East Midlands -26 19 £450 +18.03% 14
Wales -5 17 £410 -22.27% 8
North East -11 15 £488 +2.63% 13
East of England -37 14 £565 +77.67% 17
Northern Ireland - 3 £410 -

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

For the 6 months to 27 March 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.

1 814 (56.14%) SQL
2 741 (51.10%) Python
3 633 (43.66%) Data Pipeline
4 598 (41.24%) ETL
5 577 (39.79%) Data Engineering
6 571 (39.38%) Azure
7 559 (38.55%) Analytics
8 514 (35.45%) Data Modelling
9 416 (28.69%) Databricks
10 414 (28.55%) Data Quality
11 406 (28.00%) Security Cleared
12 401 (27.66%) AWS
13 391 (26.97%) CI/CD
14 364 (25.10%) SC Cleared
15 328 (22.62%) Business Intelligence
16 290 (20.00%) DevOps
17 279 (19.24%) Agile
18 271 (18.69%) Data Warehouse
19 259 (17.86%) Power Platform
20 251 (17.31%) PySpark
21 243 (16.76%) Power BI
22 241 (16.62%) Data Governance
23 229 (15.79%) Azure Data Factory
24 219 (15.10%) Problem-Solving
25 200 (13.79%) Microsoft
26 191 (13.17%) Git
27 181 (12.48%) Data Science
28 169 (11.66%) Data Lake
28 169 (11.66%) Snowflake
29 168 (11.59%) AI

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
1 153 (10.55%) Apache Spark
2 139 (9.59%) Apache Airflow
3 95 (6.55%) Apache
4 58 (4.00%) SAS
5 25 (1.72%) Confluence
6 13 (0.90%) Palantir Foundry
7 6 (0.41%) Jupyter
8 5 (0.34%) Microsoft Exchange
9 4 (0.28%) SharePoint
10 2 (0.14%) Apache Superset
10 2 (0.14%) Luigi
10 2 (0.14%) Oracle Application Server
11 1 (0.069%) Apache Synapse
11 1 (0.069%) Appian
11 1 (0.069%) ArcGIS
11 1 (0.069%) Camunda
11 1 (0.069%) R Markdown
Applications
1 16 (1.10%) Microsoft Excel
2 3 (0.21%) Chatbot
2 3 (0.21%) Spreadsheet
3 2 (0.14%) Microsoft Office
4 1 (0.069%) Microsoft PowerPoint
Business Applications
1 2 (0.14%) Aladdin
1 2 (0.14%) Dynamics CRM
1 2 (0.14%) Maximo
1 2 (0.14%) SAP BPC
2 1 (0.069%) Actimize
2 1 (0.069%) BambooHR
2 1 (0.069%) Elite 3E
2 1 (0.069%) iTrent
2 1 (0.069%) NEC Housing
2 1 (0.069%) Oracle 11i
2 1 (0.069%) Oracle ERP
2 1 (0.069%) SAP Business ByDesign
2 1 (0.069%) SimCorp Dimension
Cloud Services
1 571 (39.38%) Azure
2 401 (27.66%) AWS
3 259 (17.86%) Power Platform
4 229 (15.79%) Azure Data Factory
5 169 (11.66%) Snowflake
6 154 (10.62%) GCP
7 152 (10.48%) Azure Synapse Analytics
8 139 (9.59%) Amazon S3
9 137 (9.45%) dbt
10 123 (8.48%) GitHub
11 111 (7.66%) Serverless
12 107 (7.38%) Azure DevOps
13 78 (5.38%) AWS Lambda
14 51 (3.52%) GitHub Actions
15 43 (2.97%) AWS CloudFormation
16 29 (2.00%) Amazon EMR
16 29 (2.00%) AWS Step Functions
17 28 (1.93%) Matillion
18 24 (1.66%) Amazon Kinesis
18 24 (1.66%) Microsoft Purview
Communications & Networking
1 23 (1.59%) DNS
1 23 (1.59%) VPN
2 22 (1.52%) BGP
2 22 (1.52%) DMZ
2 22 (1.52%) Multicast
3 10 (0.69%) Structured Cabling
4 4 (0.28%) Firewall
5 3 (0.21%) SAN
6 1 (0.069%) 4G
6 1 (0.069%) 5G
6 1 (0.069%) Network Security
6 1 (0.069%) Software-Defined Networking
Database & Business Intelligence
1 271 (18.69%) Data Warehouse
2 243 (16.76%) Power BI
3 169 (11.66%) Data Lake
4 105 (7.24%) SQL Server
5 93 (6.41%) Delta Lake
6 87 (6.00%) BigQuery
7 83 (5.72%) Azure SQL Database
8 80 (5.52%) Amazon Redshift
8 80 (5.52%) Metadata
9 72 (4.97%) Big Data
10 70 (4.83%) PostgreSQL
11 68 (4.69%) Pentaho
12 60 (4.14%) NoSQL
12 60 (4.14%) SQL Server Integration Services
13 53 (3.66%) Snowflake Schema
14 50 (3.45%) Tableau
15 48 (3.31%) Amazon Athena
16 46 (3.17%) Relational Database
17 41 (2.83%) Hadoop
18 36 (2.48%) Star Schema
Development Applications
1 191 (13.17%) Git
2 69 (4.76%) JIRA
3 64 (4.41%) Jenkins
4 62 (4.28%) GitLab
5 21 (1.45%) MLflow
6 4 (0.28%) Bitbucket
7 3 (0.21%) Visual Studio
8 2 (0.14%) DBeaver
8 2 (0.14%) JUnit
8 2 (0.14%) Selenium
8 2 (0.14%) SonarQube
8 2 (0.14%) Sonatype Nexus
9 1 (0.069%) Deequ
9 1 (0.069%) Gradle
9 1 (0.069%) Jaeger
9 1 (0.069%) Maven
9 1 (0.069%) Poetry
9 1 (0.069%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
9 1 (0.069%) Team Foundation Server
9 1 (0.069%) Terragrunt
General
1 233 (16.07%) Social Skills
2 229 (15.79%) Finance
3 161 (11.10%) Analytical Skills
4 122 (8.41%) Public Sector
5 68 (4.69%) Banking
6 39 (2.69%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 20 (1.38%) Investment Banking
8 17 (1.17%) Documentation Skills
9 16 (1.10%) Telecoms
10 15 (1.03%) Front Office
11 14 (0.97%) Pharmaceutical
11 14 (0.97%) Retail
12 13 (0.90%) Marketing
13 11 (0.76%) Publishing
14 10 (0.69%) Manufacturing
15 7 (0.48%) Law
16 6 (0.41%) Military
17 4 (0.28%) Aerospace
17 4 (0.28%) Legal
17 4 (0.28%) Organisational Skills
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 251 (17.31%) PySpark
2 151 (10.41%) Kafka
3 53 (3.66%) Pandas
4 33 (2.28%) JSON
5 30 (2.07%) REST
6 28 (1.93%) YAML
7 21 (1.45%) Great Expectations
8 18 (1.24%) NumPy
9 17 (1.17%) XML
10 16 (1.10%) Node.js
10 16 (1.10%) scikit-learn
11 15 (1.03%) Matplotlib
12 14 (0.97%) PyTorch
13 13 (0.90%) React
14 12 (0.83%) Keycloak
14 12 (0.83%) pytest
15 11 (0.76%) Apache Beam
16 10 (0.69%) Apache NiFi
16 10 (0.69%) TensorFlow
17 9 (0.62%) GeoJSON
Miscellaneous
1 109 (7.52%) Cloud Native
2 46 (3.17%) Legacy Systems
3 36 (2.48%) Data Structures
4 30 (2.07%) Product Ownership
5 21 (1.45%) Clustering
5 21 (1.45%) Distributed Systems
5 21 (1.45%) Onboarding
6 19 (1.31%) Greenfield Project
7 18 (1.24%) Data Protection Act
8 17 (1.17%) Hybrid Cloud
9 16 (1.10%) Reinsurance
9 16 (1.10%) Replication
10 12 (0.83%) Public Cloud
11 10 (0.69%) NHS
11 10 (0.69%) Self-Motivation
12 9 (0.62%) Data Centre
12 9 (0.62%) Distributed Computing
12 9 (0.62%) Life Science
12 9 (0.62%) Virtual Team
13 7 (0.48%) Analytical Mindset
Operating Systems
1 25 (1.72%) Unix
2 23 (1.59%) Linux
3 3 (0.21%) Windows
4 2 (0.14%) Windows Server
5 1 (0.069%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 633 (43.66%) Data Pipeline
2 598 (41.24%) ETL
3 577 (39.79%) Data Engineering
4 559 (38.55%) Analytics
5 514 (35.45%) Data Modelling
6 391 (26.97%) CI/CD
7 328 (22.62%) Business Intelligence
8 290 (20.00%) DevOps
9 279 (19.24%) Agile
10 241 (16.62%) Data Governance
11 219 (15.10%) Problem-Solving
12 181 (12.48%) Data Science
13 168 (11.59%) AI
14 163 (11.24%) Data Integration
15 159 (10.97%) Migration
16 152 (10.48%) Data Architecture
17 138 (9.52%) Data Transformation
17 138 (9.52%) Validation
18 136 (9.38%) Performance Tuning
19 133 (9.17%) Machine Learning
Programming Languages
1 814 (56.14%) SQL
2 741 (51.10%) Python
3 89 (6.14%) Java
4 79 (5.45%) Scala
5 38 (2.62%) Data Analysis Expressions
6 34 (2.34%) C#
7 31 (2.14%) T-SQL
8 28 (1.93%) PL/SQL
9 25 (1.72%) Bash
10 22 (1.52%) Bicep
11 20 (1.38%) Shell Script
12 19 (1.31%) PowerShell
13 18 (1.24%) R
14 15 (1.03%) Go
15 12 (0.83%) JavaScript
16 7 (0.48%) TypeScript
17 3 (0.21%) C
17 3 (0.21%) Korn
18 2 (0.14%) Ruby
18 2 (0.14%) VB
Qualifications
1 406 (28.00%) Security Cleared
2 364 (25.10%) SC Cleared
3 39 (2.69%) Degree
4 36 (2.48%) Azure Certification
5 27 (1.86%) BPSS Clearance
6 19 (1.31%) AWS Certification
7 17 (1.17%) DV Cleared
8 15 (1.03%) Computer Science Degree
9 8 (0.55%) Master's Degree
10 6 (0.41%) Microsoft Certification
11 5 (0.34%) BICSI Certification
11 5 (0.34%) City & Guilds
11 5 (0.34%) DBS Check
12 4 (0.28%) CTC Cleared
12 4 (0.28%) SnowPro
13 3 (0.21%) IBM Certification
14 2 (0.14%) CISSP
15 1 (0.069%) Cisco Certification
15 1 (0.069%) CISM
15 1 (0.069%) ITIL Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 414 (28.55%) Data Quality
2 54 (3.72%) GDPR
3 40 (2.76%) QA
4 18 (1.24%) Accessibility
5 5 (0.34%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 4 (0.28%) HIPAA
6 4 (0.28%) SLA
7 3 (0.21%) FATCA
7 3 (0.21%) GMP
7 3 (0.21%) MiFID
7 3 (0.21%) WCAG
8 2 (0.14%) Dodd-Frank
8 2 (0.14%) EMIR
8 2 (0.14%) GRC
8 2 (0.14%) SOC 2
9 1 (0.069%) Disclosure Scotland
9 1 (0.069%) ISO 13485
9 1 (0.069%) NCSC
9 1 (0.069%) NIST
9 1 (0.069%) PMO
System Software
1 96 (6.62%) Docker
2 8 (0.55%) Virtual Machines
3 2 (0.14%) Active Directory
3 2 (0.14%) HDFS
Systems Management
1 156 (10.76%) Terraform
2 102 (7.03%) Kubernetes
3 28 (1.93%) Grafana
4 15 (1.03%) Prometheus
5 10 (0.69%) Ansible
6 4 (0.28%) Kubeflow
6 4 (0.28%) NetBackup
7 3 (0.21%) Kibana
7 3 (0.21%) logstash
7 3 (0.21%) Rancher
8 2 (0.14%) Apache Ranger
8 2 (0.14%) EMC NetWorker
8 2 (0.14%) Puppet
8 2 (0.14%) Thomson Reuters DACS
8 2 (0.14%) Tivoli Storage Manager
9 1 (0.069%) Control-M
9 1 (0.069%) Fluentd
9 1 (0.069%) QRadar
Vendors
1 416 (28.69%) Databricks
2 200 (13.79%) Microsoft
3 102 (7.03%) Oracle
4 95 (6.55%) Talend
5 88 (6.07%) Informatica
6 63 (4.34%) Google
7 49 (3.38%) Denodo
8 27 (1.86%) Cisco
9 24 (1.66%) F5
9 24 (1.66%) ServiceNow
10 20 (1.38%) SAP
11 18 (1.24%) Splunk
12 17 (1.17%) Cloudera
12 17 (1.17%) IBM
12 17 (1.17%) Palantir
13 15 (1.03%) Foundry
14 10 (0.69%) Alteryx
15 8 (0.55%) MuleSoft
16 6 (0.41%) OpenAI
17 5 (0.34%) Virgin Media