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 7 October 2026.

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

6 months to
7 Oct 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 69 124 95
Rank change year-on-year +55 -29 +34
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 1,898 737 898
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 3.46% 2.23% 2.39%
As % of the Job Titles category 3.75% 2.46% 2.57%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,260 527 625
10th Percentile £375 £362 £363
25th Percentile £425 £413 £450
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year - -4.76% -4.55%
75th Percentile £600 £588 £625
90th Percentile £675 £694 £688
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £475 £500
% change year-on-year - -5.00% -4.76%
Number of hourly rates quoted 67 13 8
10th Percentile £21.25 £25.34 £49.25
25th Percentile £30.96 £35.25 £57.31
Median hourly rate £41.56 £52.50 £80.00
Median % change year-on-year -20.85% -34.38% +29.55%
75th Percentile £68.00 £80.00 £97.50
90th Percentile £70.00 £105.50 -
UK excluding London median hourly rate £44.50 £27.00 £80.00
% change year-on-year +64.81% -66.25% +40.35%

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 50,571 29,988 35,006
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.10% 90.83% 92.99%
Number of daily rates quoted 29,735 18,924 21,160
10th Percentile £325 £277 £300
25th Percentile £425 £400 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -0.94%
75th Percentile £638 £621 £638
90th Percentile £736 £725 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £495
% change year-on-year +5.26% -4.04% -1.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 4,035 1,621 1,511
10th Percentile £14.42 £13.75 £14.99
25th Percentile £19.50 £17.30 £20.75
Median hourly rate £41.71 £25.15 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year +65.84% -40.82% -4.49%
75th Percentile £67.50 £50.75 £65.00
90th Percentile £78.75 £68.00 £74.87
UK excluding London median hourly rate £41.71 £25.08 £43.00
% change year-on-year +66.34% -41.69% -2.05%

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 7 October 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 7 October 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 7 October 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 +66 1,649 £500 -0.79% 1,665
UK excluding London +87 852 £475 - 859
London +31 829 £525 - 901
Work from Home +43 553 £500 +5.26% 694
Midlands +73 322 £469 +1.41% 112
West Midlands +57 240 £469 -6.20% 79
North of England +29 201 £525 +10.53% 287
South East +22 123 £459 -0.76% 205
South West +26 118 £525 +5.00% 80
North West +32 108 £525 +22.09% 147
East Midlands +37 82 £388 -16.22% 33
Yorkshire +4 74 £505 -0.25% 83
Scotland +3 72 £519 +13.70% 82
East of England +6 36 £545 +9.00% 49
North East -27 20 £480 +15.32% 58
Wales -1 18 £513 +3.54% 21
Northern Ireland +6 1 - - 24
Channel Islands - 1 - -

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

For the 6 months to 7 October 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.

1 941 (49.58%) SQL
2 838 (44.15%) Python
3 813 (42.83%) Data Pipeline
4 760 (40.04%) Data Engineering
5 659 (34.72%) Data Modelling
6 649 (34.19%) ETL
7 640 (33.72%) Analytics
8 586 (30.87%) Azure
9 581 (30.61%) AWS
10 480 (25.29%) Data Quality
11 473 (24.92%) Security Cleared
12 452 (23.81%) CI/CD
13 408 (21.50%) Databricks
14 402 (21.18%) SC Cleared
15 332 (17.49%) Agile
16 324 (17.07%) AI
17 316 (16.65%) Data Warehouse
18 312 (16.44%) DevOps
19 309 (16.28%) Migration
20 293 (15.44%) Business Intelligence
21 259 (13.65%) Data Transformation
22 258 (13.59%) PySpark
23 255 (13.44%) Validation
24 249 (13.12%) Data Governance
25 247 (13.01%) Data Integration
26 244 (12.86%) Microsoft
27 243 (12.80%) Power Platform
28 238 (12.54%) Snowflake
29 235 (12.38%) dbt
29 235 (12.38%) Power BI

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
1 214 (11.28%) Apache Airflow
2 165 (8.69%) Apache Spark
3 149 (7.85%) Apache
4 47 (2.48%) Confluence
5 42 (2.21%) SAS
6 18 (0.95%) Palantir Foundry
7 15 (0.79%) Jupyter
7 15 (0.79%) SharePoint
8 3 (0.16%) Apache Superset
8 3 (0.16%) Microsoft Exchange
9 2 (0.11%) ArcGIS
9 2 (0.11%) CMS
9 2 (0.11%) PowerExchange
10 1 (0.053%) Apache Pulsar
10 1 (0.053%) Liferay
10 1 (0.053%) Luigi
10 1 (0.053%) nginx
10 1 (0.053%) Oracle Workflow
Applications
1 20 (1.05%) Microsoft Excel
2 8 (0.42%) Spreadsheet
3 4 (0.21%) Chatbot
4 2 (0.11%) Notepad++
5 1 (0.053%) Microsoft Office
5 1 (0.053%) Microsoft PowerPoint
Business Applications
1 13 (0.68%) Aladdin
2 7 (0.37%) Dynamics CRM
3 6 (0.32%) NetSuite
4 5 (0.26%) Infor LN
4 5 (0.26%) Sage X3
4 5 (0.26%) SAP S/4HANA
5 4 (0.21%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
6 3 (0.16%) Oracle EBS
7 2 (0.11%) FIS Private Capital Suite
7 2 (0.11%) Maximo
7 2 (0.11%) SAP BPC
7 2 (0.11%) SAP Oil and Gas
7 2 (0.11%) SimCorp Dimension
8 1 (0.053%) BambooHR
8 1 (0.053%) Markit EDM
8 1 (0.053%) MIS ActiveH
8 1 (0.053%) Oracle Retail
8 1 (0.053%) Raiser’s Edge
8 1 (0.053%) SAP CAR
8 1 (0.053%) SAP EWM
Cloud Services
1 586 (30.87%) Azure
2 581 (30.61%) AWS
3 243 (12.80%) Power Platform
4 238 (12.54%) Snowflake
5 235 (12.38%) dbt
6 216 (11.38%) Azure Data Factory
7 203 (10.70%) GCP
8 169 (8.90%) Amazon S3
9 130 (6.85%) Serverless
10 121 (6.38%) Azure DevOps
11 116 (6.11%) AWS Lambda
12 115 (6.06%) Azure Synapse Analytics
13 110 (5.80%) GitHub
14 69 (3.64%) Azure Databricks
15 59 (3.11%) Amazon EMR
16 46 (2.42%) GitHub Actions
17 39 (2.05%) Amazon CloudWatch
18 31 (1.63%) AWS Step Functions
19 28 (1.48%) Amazon Kinesis
19 28 (1.48%) AWS CloudFormation
Communications & Networking
1 23 (1.21%) DNS
2 22 (1.16%) BGP
2 22 (1.16%) DMZ
2 22 (1.16%) Multicast
2 22 (1.16%) VPN
3 8 (0.42%) Firewall
4 5 (0.26%) Intrusion Detection
5 4 (0.21%) Wi-Fi
5 4 (0.21%) Wireless
6 3 (0.16%) Structured Cabling
7 2 (0.11%) HTTP
7 2 (0.11%) PuTTY
7 2 (0.11%) WinSCP
8 1 (0.053%) Cisco IPT
8 1 (0.053%) LTE
8 1 (0.053%) MQTT
8 1 (0.053%) Network Security
8 1 (0.053%) TCP/IP
8 1 (0.053%) tcpdump
8 1 (0.053%) Wireshark
Database & Business Intelligence
1 316 (16.65%) Data Warehouse
2 235 (12.38%) Power BI
3 163 (8.59%) Data Lake
4 136 (7.17%) Metadata
5 107 (5.64%) BigQuery
6 97 (5.11%) Amazon Redshift
7 86 (4.53%) Delta Lake
8 81 (4.27%) Amazon Athena
9 76 (4.00%) Big Data
10 71 (3.74%) SQL Server
11 66 (3.48%) PostgreSQL
12 62 (3.27%) Pentaho
13 58 (3.06%) Relational Database
14 56 (2.95%) Snowflake Schema
15 50 (2.63%) NoSQL
16 47 (2.48%) Tableau
17 43 (2.27%) Oracle Database
18 41 (2.16%) Azure SQL Database
18 41 (2.16%) SQL Server Integration Services
19 39 (2.05%) Amazon RDS
Development Applications
1 173 (9.11%) Git
2 102 (5.37%) GitLab
3 62 (3.27%) JIRA
4 31 (1.63%) Jenkins
5 20 (1.05%) MLflow
6 10 (0.53%) Artifactory
7 8 (0.42%) Bitbucket
7 8 (0.42%) Postman
8 6 (0.32%) Selenium
8 6 (0.32%) SonarQube
9 4 (0.21%) Claude Code
10 3 (0.16%) Atlassian Bamboo
10 3 (0.16%) ERwin
10 3 (0.16%) Newman
10 3 (0.16%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
11 2 (0.11%) CircleCI
11 2 (0.11%) RStudio
11 2 (0.11%) Terragrunt
11 2 (0.11%) Yeoman
12 1 (0.053%) ER Studio
General
1 311 (16.39%) Social Skills
2 294 (15.49%) Finance
3 218 (11.49%) Analytical Skills
4 170 (8.96%) Public Sector
5 124 (6.53%) Banking
6 33 (1.74%) Marketing
7 32 (1.69%) Retail
8 27 (1.42%) Inclusion and Diversity
9 25 (1.32%) Aerospace
9 25 (1.32%) Investment Banking
10 24 (1.26%) Front Office
11 23 (1.21%) Automotive
12 18 (0.95%) Manufacturing
13 17 (0.90%) Law
13 17 (0.90%) Pharmaceutical
14 16 (0.84%) Documentation Skills
14 16 (0.84%) Telecoms
15 14 (0.74%) Military
15 14 (0.74%) Police
16 13 (0.68%) Legal
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 258 (13.59%) PySpark
2 194 (10.22%) Terraform
3 130 (6.85%) Kafka
4 40 (2.11%) REST
5 30 (1.58%) JSON
6 26 (1.37%) Pandas
7 23 (1.21%) XML
8 18 (0.95%) LangChain
9 17 (0.90%) Spring
9 17 (0.90%) Spring Boot
10 16 (0.84%) Great Expectations
11 14 (0.74%) Apache Beam
11 14 (0.74%) pytest
11 14 (0.74%) RESTful
12 13 (0.68%) Apache NiFi
12 13 (0.68%) PyTorch
13 12 (0.63%) Streamlit
14 11 (0.58%) React
15 10 (0.53%) LangGraph
15 10 (0.53%) Microsoft Graph
Miscellaneous
1 153 (8.06%) Cloud Native
2 66 (3.48%) Data Structures
3 60 (3.16%) Legacy Systems
4 53 (2.79%) Onboarding
5 31 (1.63%) AI Agents
6 26 (1.37%) Product Ownership
7 25 (1.32%) Distributed Systems
8 20 (1.05%) Algorithms
9 19 (1.00%) Management Information System
10 18 (0.95%) Greenfield Project
10 18 (0.95%) Reference Data
11 16 (0.84%) NHS
12 15 (0.79%) Reinsurance
13 12 (0.63%) Enterprise Software
13 12 (0.63%) Virtual Team
14 11 (0.58%) Data Protection Act
14 11 (0.58%) Derivative
15 10 (0.53%) Data Fabric
15 10 (0.53%) Distributed Computing
16 9 (0.47%) Life Science
Operating Systems
1 45 (2.37%) Unix
2 38 (2.00%) Linux
3 3 (0.16%) Windows
4 2 (0.11%) Ubuntu
5 1 (0.053%) Robot Operating System
5 1 (0.053%) VMS
5 1 (0.053%) Windows Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 813 (42.83%) Data Pipeline
2 760 (40.04%) Data Engineering
3 659 (34.72%) Data Modelling
4 649 (34.19%) ETL
5 640 (33.72%) Analytics
6 452 (23.81%) CI/CD
7 332 (17.49%) Agile
8 324 (17.07%) AI
9 312 (16.44%) DevOps
10 309 (16.28%) Migration
11 293 (15.44%) Business Intelligence
12 259 (13.65%) Data Transformation
13 255 (13.44%) Validation
14 249 (13.12%) Data Governance
15 247 (13.01%) Data Integration
16 195 (10.27%) Problem-Solving
17 194 (10.22%) Machine Learning
18 174 (9.17%) Data Science
19 173 (9.11%) Lakehouse
20 168 (8.85%) Infrastructure as Code
Programming Languages
1 941 (49.58%) SQL
2 838 (44.15%) Python
3 99 (5.22%) Java
4 74 (3.90%) Scala
5 44 (2.32%) PL/SQL
6 34 (1.79%) T-SQL
7 33 (1.74%) Data Analysis Expressions
8 30 (1.58%) PowerShell
9 23 (1.21%) Shell Script
10 21 (1.11%) JavaScript
11 20 (1.05%) Bash
12 19 (1.00%) R
13 12 (0.63%) Bicep
14 10 (0.53%) Go
15 7 (0.37%) C#
15 7 (0.37%) TypeScript
16 5 (0.26%) Korn
17 3 (0.16%) COBOL
17 3 (0.16%) Kusto Query Language
18 2 (0.11%) Cypher
Qualifications
1 473 (24.92%) Security Cleared
2 402 (21.18%) SC Cleared
3 60 (3.16%) BPSS Clearance
4 41 (2.16%) Degree
5 39 (2.05%) DV Cleared
6 25 (1.32%) Azure Certification
7 19 (1.00%) Computer Science Degree
8 16 (0.84%) AWS Certification
9 9 (0.47%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
10 8 (0.42%) DBS Check
10 8 (0.42%) Master's Degree
10 8 (0.42%) SnowPro
11 7 (0.37%) CISM
11 7 (0.37%) CISSP
12 5 (0.26%) CEH
13 4 (0.21%) City & Guilds
14 3 (0.16%) Microsoft Certification
15 1 (0.053%) CISA
15 1 (0.053%) PMI Certification
15 1 (0.053%) PMP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 480 (25.29%) Data Quality
2 79 (4.16%) QA
3 34 (1.79%) GDPR
4 16 (0.84%) Accessibility
5 9 (0.47%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 6 (0.32%) Disclosure Scotland
6 6 (0.32%) FATCA
7 5 (0.26%) HIPAA
7 5 (0.26%) Sarbanes-Oxley
7 5 (0.26%) SLA
8 3 (0.16%) MiFID
9 2 (0.11%) California Consumer Privacy Act
9 2 (0.11%) EMIR
9 2 (0.11%) GRC
9 2 (0.11%) SNOMED CT
9 2 (0.11%) SOC 2
10 1 (0.053%) Government Security Classifications
10 1 (0.053%) IFRS
10 1 (0.053%) IFRS 17
10 1 (0.053%) IFRS 9
System Software
1 102 (5.37%) Docker
2 3 (0.16%) Active Directory
3 1 (0.053%) HDFS
3 1 (0.053%) Virtual Machines
Systems Management
1 92 (4.85%) Kubernetes
2 32 (1.69%) Grafana
3 22 (1.16%) Ansible
4 14 (0.74%) Kibana
5 13 (0.68%) Control-M
6 5 (0.26%) Prometheus
7 3 (0.16%) logstash
8 2 (0.11%) Puppet
9 1 (0.053%) Progress Chef
Vendors
1 408 (21.50%) Databricks
2 244 (12.86%) Microsoft
3 151 (7.96%) Oracle
4 94 (4.95%) Informatica
5 91 (4.79%) Google
6 82 (4.32%) Talend
7 37 (1.95%) Denodo
8 36 (1.90%) Salesforce
9 30 (1.58%) Palantir
10 27 (1.42%) SAP
11 26 (1.37%) Foundry
12 22 (1.16%) Cisco
12 22 (1.16%) F5
13 15 (0.79%) Splunk
14 10 (0.53%) OpenAI
15 9 (0.47%) Bloomberg
16 8 (0.42%) Sage
17 7 (0.37%) Alteryx
17 7 (0.37%) IBM
17 7 (0.37%) InterSystems