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 1 September 2026.

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

6 months to
1 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 66 133 101
Rank change year-on-year +67 -32 +19
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 1,903 711 896
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 3.55% 2.17% 2.32%
As % of the Job Titles category 3.84% 2.38% 2.49%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,262 504 637
10th Percentile £375 £375 £310
25th Percentile £425 £425 £435
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year - -4.76% -4.55%
75th Percentile £588 £583 £625
90th Percentile £663 £692 £688
UK excluding London median daily rate £470 £475 £500
% change year-on-year -1.05% -5.00% -4.76%
Number of hourly rates quoted 85 15 21
10th Percentile £20.10 £25.50 £31.25
25th Percentile £30.96 £38.75 £49.25
Median hourly rate £44.50 £52.50 £75.00
Median % change year-on-year -15.24% -30.00% +5.26%
75th Percentile £70.00 £79.35 £80.00
90th Percentile £75.00 £101.00 -
UK excluding London median hourly rate £44.50 £52.85 £80.00
% change year-on-year -15.80% -33.94% +63.27%

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 49,606 29,880 35,937
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.46% 91.25% 93.08%
Number of daily rates quoted 29,580 18,873 22,662
10th Percentile £325 £281 £300
25th Percentile £425 £400 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -1.69%
75th Percentile £625 £623 £638
90th Percentile £725 £725 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 3,581 1,559 1,838
10th Percentile £14.96 £13.69 £14.16
25th Percentile £20.53 £17.04 £20.00
Median hourly rate £42.50 £25.15 £43.00
Median % change year-on-year +68.99% -41.51% +1.18%
75th Percentile £67.84 £53.81 £65.00
90th Percentile £80.00 £70.33 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £42.50 £25.15 £43.95
% change year-on-year +68.99% -42.78% +11.13%

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 1 September 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 1 September 2026.

Hourly rate histogram for Data Engineer in the UK

Data Engineer
Top 18 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 1 September 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 +64 1,685 £500 - 827
UK excluding London +110 867 £470 -1.05% 510
London +36 837 £525 - 471
Work from Home +58 561 £500 +2.56% 322
Midlands +69 355 £469 +1.41% 66
West Midlands +62 296 £469 -6.20% 42
North of England +32 217 £500 +5.26% 143
South East +30 130 £459 +2.00% 148
North West +23 123 £525 +10.53% 76
South West +13 91 £525 +5.00% 59
Yorkshire +3 74 £465 -2.11% 30
East Midlands +26 59 £450 +1.98% 24
Scotland +9 59 £440 -4.86% 48
East of England +8 37 £450 - 22
North East -31 21 £515 +21.89% 38
Wales -1 16 £488 +9.55% 13
Northern Ireland +5 3 £410 -18.00% 14
Channel Islands - 1 - -

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

For the 6 months to 1 September 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.

1 952 (50.03%) SQL
2 814 (42.77%) Python
3 807 (42.41%) Data Pipeline
4 728 (38.26%) Data Engineering
5 662 (34.79%) Analytics
6 655 (34.42%) ETL
7 639 (33.58%) Data Modelling
8 593 (31.16%) Azure
9 578 (30.37%) AWS
10 501 (26.33%) Security Cleared
11 467 (24.54%) Data Quality
12 443 (23.28%) CI/CD
13 439 (23.07%) SC Cleared
14 393 (20.65%) Databricks
15 336 (17.66%) Agile
16 324 (17.03%) Business Intelligence
17 318 (16.71%) Data Warehouse
18 306 (16.08%) DevOps
19 300 (15.76%) Migration
20 267 (14.03%) PySpark
21 266 (13.98%) AI
22 259 (13.61%) Power Platform
23 252 (13.24%) Data Governance
23 252 (13.24%) Power BI
24 242 (12.72%) Microsoft
25 238 (12.51%) Data Integration
26 236 (12.40%) Validation
27 231 (12.14%) Data Transformation
28 227 (11.93%) Snowflake
29 213 (11.19%) Problem-Solving

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
1 201 (10.56%) Apache Airflow
2 151 (7.93%) Apache Spark
3 126 (6.62%) Apache
4 65 (3.42%) SAS
5 42 (2.21%) Confluence
6 17 (0.89%) Palantir Foundry
7 13 (0.68%) SharePoint
8 11 (0.58%) Jupyter
9 3 (0.16%) Apache Superset
10 2 (0.11%) ArcGIS
10 2 (0.11%) PowerExchange
11 1 (0.053%) Liferay
11 1 (0.053%) Luigi
11 1 (0.053%) Microsoft Exchange
11 1 (0.053%) nginx
11 1 (0.053%) R Markdown
Applications
1 24 (1.26%) Microsoft Excel
2 7 (0.37%) Notepad++
2 7 (0.37%) Spreadsheet
3 4 (0.21%) Chatbot
4 1 (0.053%) Microsoft PowerPoint
Business Applications
1 13 (0.68%) 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 4 (0.21%) SAP S/4HANA
4 4 (0.21%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
5 3 (0.16%) SimCorp Dimension
6 2 (0.11%) BambooHR
6 2 (0.11%) Maximo
6 2 (0.11%) Oracle EBS
7 1 (0.053%) FIS Private Capital Suite
7 1 (0.053%) MIS ActiveH
7 1 (0.053%) Oracle 11i
7 1 (0.053%) Oracle Assets
7 1 (0.053%) Oracle ERP
7 1 (0.053%) Raiser’s Edge
7 1 (0.053%) SAP BPC
7 1 (0.053%) SAP CAR
7 1 (0.053%) SAP EWM
Cloud Services
1 593 (31.16%) Azure
2 578 (30.37%) AWS
3 259 (13.61%) Power Platform
4 227 (11.93%) Snowflake
5 212 (11.14%) dbt
6 211 (11.09%) Azure Data Factory
7 174 (9.14%) GCP
8 171 (8.99%) Amazon S3
9 131 (6.88%) Azure Synapse Analytics
10 129 (6.78%) Azure DevOps
11 126 (6.62%) Serverless
12 113 (5.94%) AWS Lambda
12 113 (5.94%) GitHub
13 69 (3.63%) Azure Databricks
14 52 (2.73%) Amazon EMR
15 42 (2.21%) GitHub Actions
16 37 (1.94%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 29 (1.52%) AWS Step Functions
18 26 (1.37%) AWS CloudFormation
19 25 (1.31%) Amazon Kinesis
Communications & Networking
1 30 (1.58%) VPN
2 29 (1.52%) BGP
2 29 (1.52%) DMZ
2 29 (1.52%) DNS
2 29 (1.52%) Multicast
3 11 (0.58%) Structured Cabling
4 9 (0.47%) Firewall
5 7 (0.37%) PuTTY
5 7 (0.37%) WinSCP
6 5 (0.26%) Intrusion Detection
7 4 (0.21%) Wi-Fi
7 4 (0.21%) Wireless
8 1 (0.053%) HTTP
8 1 (0.053%) LTE
8 1 (0.053%) MQTT
Database & Business Intelligence
1 318 (16.71%) Data Warehouse
2 252 (13.24%) Power BI
3 169 (8.88%) Data Lake
4 123 (6.46%) Metadata
5 102 (5.36%) Amazon Redshift
6 100 (5.25%) BigQuery
7 89 (4.68%) Delta Lake
8 87 (4.57%) SQL Server
9 81 (4.26%) Amazon Athena
10 79 (4.15%) Big Data
11 72 (3.78%) Pentaho
12 65 (3.42%) Relational Database
13 64 (3.36%) Tableau
14 61 (3.21%) Snowflake Schema
15 60 (3.15%) PostgreSQL
16 52 (2.73%) Azure SQL Database
17 48 (2.52%) NoSQL
18 41 (2.15%) SQL Server Integration Services
19 39 (2.05%) Oracle Database
20 37 (1.94%) Amazon RDS
Development Applications
1 163 (8.57%) Git
2 98 (5.15%) GitLab
3 71 (3.73%) JIRA
4 37 (1.94%) Jenkins
5 17 (0.89%) MLflow
6 9 (0.47%) Artifactory
7 7 (0.37%) Postman
8 5 (0.26%) Bitbucket
9 4 (0.21%) ERwin
9 4 (0.21%) Selenium
9 4 (0.21%) SonarQube
10 3 (0.16%) Atlassian Bamboo
10 3 (0.16%) Claude Code
10 3 (0.16%) Newman
10 3 (0.16%) Sonatype Nexus
11 2 (0.11%) ER Studio
11 2 (0.11%) RStudio
11 2 (0.11%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
11 2 (0.11%) Terragrunt
11 2 (0.11%) Yeoman
General
1 305 (16.03%) Finance
2 304 (15.97%) Social Skills
3 220 (11.56%) Analytical Skills
4 161 (8.46%) Public Sector
5 109 (5.73%) Banking
6 32 (1.68%) Inclusion and Diversity
6 32 (1.68%) Marketing
7 25 (1.31%) Retail
7 25 (1.31%) Telecoms
8 22 (1.16%) Aerospace
8 22 (1.16%) Investment Banking
9 21 (1.10%) Documentation Skills
10 20 (1.05%) Front Office
11 19 (1.00%) Automotive
11 19 (1.00%) Manufacturing
12 18 (0.95%) Law
13 16 (0.84%) Pharmaceutical
14 12 (0.63%) Police
15 10 (0.53%) Financial Institution
15 10 (0.53%) Legal
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 267 (14.03%) PySpark
2 185 (9.72%) Terraform
3 138 (7.25%) Kafka
4 35 (1.84%) JSON
5 31 (1.63%) Pandas
6 27 (1.42%) REST
7 23 (1.21%) Spring
7 23 (1.21%) Spring Boot
7 23 (1.21%) XML
8 22 (1.16%) Great Expectations
9 16 (0.84%) Apache Beam
9 16 (0.84%) React
10 14 (0.74%) RESTful
11 13 (0.68%) YAML
12 12 (0.63%) LangChain
13 11 (0.58%) pytest
13 11 (0.58%) Streamlit
14 10 (0.53%) .NET
14 10 (0.53%) Microsoft Graph
15 9 (0.47%) HTML
Miscellaneous
1 145 (7.62%) Cloud Native
2 76 (3.99%) Legacy Systems
3 62 (3.26%) Data Structures
4 39 (2.05%) Onboarding
5 25 (1.31%) Product Ownership
6 23 (1.21%) Greenfield Project
7 22 (1.16%) Distributed Systems
7 22 (1.16%) NHS
8 20 (1.05%) AI Agents
8 20 (1.05%) Reference Data
9 17 (0.89%) Management Information System
9 17 (0.89%) Reinsurance
10 13 (0.68%) Data Protection Act
11 12 (0.63%) Algorithms
11 12 (0.63%) Clustering
12 11 (0.58%) Enterprise Software
12 11 (0.58%) Virtual Team
13 10 (0.53%) Linux Command Line
14 9 (0.47%) Life Science
14 9 (0.47%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 65 (3.42%) Unix
2 49 (2.57%) Linux
3 5 (0.26%) Windows
4 3 (0.16%) Windows Server
5 2 (0.11%) Ubuntu
6 1 (0.053%) Robot Operating System
6 1 (0.053%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 807 (42.41%) Data Pipeline
2 728 (38.26%) Data Engineering
3 662 (34.79%) Analytics
4 655 (34.42%) ETL
5 639 (33.58%) Data Modelling
6 443 (23.28%) CI/CD
7 336 (17.66%) Agile
8 324 (17.03%) Business Intelligence
9 306 (16.08%) DevOps
10 300 (15.76%) Migration
11 266 (13.98%) AI
12 252 (13.24%) Data Governance
13 238 (12.51%) Data Integration
14 236 (12.40%) Validation
15 231 (12.14%) Data Transformation
16 213 (11.19%) Problem-Solving
17 178 (9.35%) Lakehouse
18 170 (8.93%) Decision-Making
19 165 (8.67%) Data Science
20 162 (8.51%) Machine Learning
Programming Languages
1 952 (50.03%) SQL
2 814 (42.77%) Python
3 113 (5.94%) Java
4 69 (3.63%) Scala
5 54 (2.84%) PL/SQL
6 35 (1.84%) Shell Script
7 32 (1.68%) T-SQL
8 31 (1.63%) Data Analysis Expressions
9 24 (1.26%) PowerShell
10 22 (1.16%) Bash
11 21 (1.10%) JavaScript
12 14 (0.74%) C#
13 12 (0.63%) R
14 9 (0.47%) Bicep
15 7 (0.37%) TypeScript
16 5 (0.26%) Go
17 4 (0.21%) Korn
18 3 (0.16%) COBOL
19 2 (0.11%) Cypher
19 2 (0.11%) Perl
Qualifications
1 501 (26.33%) Security Cleared
2 439 (23.07%) SC Cleared
3 45 (2.36%) BPSS Clearance
4 39 (2.05%) Degree
5 23 (1.21%) DV Cleared
6 21 (1.10%) Azure Certification
6 21 (1.10%) Computer Science Degree
7 14 (0.74%) AWS Certification
8 11 (0.58%) SnowPro
9 9 (0.47%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
9 9 (0.47%) City & Guilds
10 8 (0.42%) DBS Check
11 6 (0.32%) CISM
11 6 (0.32%) CISSP
11 6 (0.32%) Master's Degree
12 5 (0.26%) BICSI Certification
12 5 (0.26%) CEH
13 4 (0.21%) Microsoft Certification
14 1 (0.053%) PMI Certification
14 1 (0.053%) PMP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 467 (24.54%) Data Quality
2 68 (3.57%) QA
3 43 (2.26%) GDPR
4 15 (0.79%) Accessibility
5 10 (0.53%) SLA
6 7 (0.37%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 6 (0.32%) FATCA
7 6 (0.32%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 5 (0.26%) HIPAA
9 3 (0.16%) Disclosure Scotland
9 3 (0.16%) MiFID
10 2 (0.11%) EMIR
10 2 (0.11%) SNOMED CT
10 2 (0.11%) WCAG
11 1 (0.053%) California Consumer Privacy Act
11 1 (0.053%) Government Security Classifications
11 1 (0.053%) GxP
11 1 (0.053%) IFRS
11 1 (0.053%) IFRS 17
11 1 (0.053%) PCI DSS
System Software
1 108 (5.68%) Docker
2 4 (0.21%) Virtual Machines
3 2 (0.11%) Active Directory
4 1 (0.053%) RACF
Systems Management
1 81 (4.26%) Kubernetes
2 45 (2.36%) Grafana
3 17 (0.89%) Ansible
4 12 (0.63%) Control-M
5 10 (0.53%) Kibana
6 5 (0.26%) Prometheus
7 2 (0.11%) Apache Ranger
7 2 (0.11%) logstash
7 2 (0.11%) Puppet
7 2 (0.11%) Thomson Reuters DACS
8 1 (0.053%) Progress Chef
Vendors
1 393 (20.65%) Databricks
2 242 (12.72%) Microsoft
3 159 (8.36%) Oracle
4 113 (5.94%) Informatica
5 102 (5.36%) Talend
6 68 (3.57%) Google
7 58 (3.05%) Denodo
8 32 (1.68%) Salesforce
9 30 (1.58%) Cisco
9 30 (1.58%) F5
10 27 (1.42%) Palantir
11 25 (1.31%) SAP
12 23 (1.21%) Foundry
13 15 (0.79%) Splunk
14 13 (0.68%) Cloudera
15 11 (0.58%) Bloomberg
15 11 (0.58%) IBM
16 9 (0.47%) Sage
16 9 (0.47%) ServiceNow
17 8 (0.42%) Alteryx