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 3 September 2026.

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

6 months to
3 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 69 135 101
Rank change year-on-year +66 -34 +21
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 1,901 703 891
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 3.55% 2.16% 2.33%
As % of the Job Titles category 3.84% 2.37% 2.50%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,265 500 634
10th Percentile £375 £369 £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 £575 £625
90th Percentile £663 £688 £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 81 15 21
10th Percentile £19.34 £25.50 £31.25
25th Percentile £30.96 £38.75 £49.25
Median hourly rate £42.50 £52.50 £75.00
Median % change year-on-year -19.05% -30.00% +5.26%
75th Percentile £70.00 £79.35 £80.00
90th Percentile £75.00 £101.00 -
UK excluding London median hourly rate £41.56 £52.85 £80.00
% change year-on-year -21.37% -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 49,563 29,654 35,643
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.43% 91.23% 93.09%
Number of daily rates quoted 29,606 18,697 22,460
10th Percentile £325 £280 £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 1,558 1,825
10th Percentile £14.90 £13.68 £14.16
25th Percentile £20.50 £17.02 £20.00
Median hourly rate £42.25 £25.15 £43.00
Median % change year-on-year +67.99% -41.51% +1.18%
75th Percentile £67.84 £53.83 £65.00
90th Percentile £78.75 £71.00 £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 3 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 3 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 3 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 +66 1,681 £500 - 800
UK excluding London +99 854 £470 -1.05% 488
London +43 846 £525 - 457
Work from Home +57 563 £500 +3.90% 319
Midlands +69 347 £469 +1.41% 59
West Midlands +64 287 £469 -6.20% 35
North of England +37 210 £500 +5.26% 127
South East +25 129 £459 +4.91% 140
North West +23 117 £525 +10.53% 69
South West +15 92 £525 +5.00% 64
Yorkshire -2 73 £470 -1.05% 26
East Midlands +22 60 £450 +1.98% 24
Scotland 0 59 £440 -4.86% 45
East of England +9 37 £450 - 26
North East -27 21 £515 +21.89% 32
Wales -2 16 £488 +9.55% 15
Northern Ireland +4 3 £410 -18.00% 15
Channel Islands - 1 - -

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

For the 6 months to 3 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 (50.08%) SQL
2 823 (43.29%) Python
3 811 (42.66%) Data Pipeline
4 729 (38.35%) Data Engineering
5 656 (34.51%) Analytics
5 656 (34.51%) ETL
6 644 (33.88%) Data Modelling
7 599 (31.51%) Azure
8 581 (30.56%) AWS
9 500 (26.30%) Security Cleared
10 476 (25.04%) Data Quality
11 448 (23.57%) CI/CD
12 440 (23.15%) SC Cleared
13 395 (20.78%) Databricks
14 338 (17.78%) Agile
15 320 (16.83%) Business Intelligence
16 318 (16.73%) Data Warehouse
17 311 (16.36%) DevOps
18 304 (15.99%) Migration
19 275 (14.47%) AI
20 268 (14.10%) PySpark
21 258 (13.57%) Data Governance
22 257 (13.52%) Power Platform
23 250 (13.15%) Power BI
24 245 (12.89%) Microsoft
25 241 (12.68%) Data Integration
26 237 (12.47%) Validation
27 233 (12.26%) Data Transformation
28 228 (11.99%) Snowflake
29 213 (11.20%) Azure Data Factory

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
1 206 (10.84%) Apache Airflow
2 155 (8.15%) Apache Spark
3 130 (6.84%) Apache
4 63 (3.31%) SAS
5 45 (2.37%) Confluence
6 17 (0.89%) Palantir Foundry
7 14 (0.74%) SharePoint
8 10 (0.53%) 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%) Maximo
6 2 (0.11%) Oracle EBS
7 1 (0.053%) BambooHR
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
1 599 (31.51%) Azure
2 581 (30.56%) AWS
3 257 (13.52%) Power Platform
4 228 (11.99%) Snowflake
5 213 (11.20%) Azure Data Factory
5 213 (11.20%) dbt
6 179 (9.42%) GCP
7 169 (8.89%) Amazon S3
8 133 (7.00%) Azure DevOps
9 130 (6.84%) Serverless
10 129 (6.79%) Azure Synapse Analytics
11 116 (6.10%) AWS Lambda
11 116 (6.10%) GitHub
12 72 (3.79%) Azure Databricks
13 52 (2.74%) Amazon EMR
14 44 (2.31%) GitHub Actions
15 38 (2.00%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 29 (1.53%) AWS Step Functions
17 26 (1.37%) AWS CloudFormation
18 25 (1.32%) Amazon Kinesis
Communications & Networking
1 27 (1.42%) BGP
1 27 (1.42%) DMZ
1 27 (1.42%) DNS
1 27 (1.42%) Multicast
1 27 (1.42%) VPN
2 11 (0.58%) Structured Cabling
3 9 (0.47%) Firewall
4 7 (0.37%) PuTTY
4 7 (0.37%) WinSCP
5 5 (0.26%) Intrusion Detection
6 4 (0.21%) Wi-Fi
6 4 (0.21%) Wireless
7 1 (0.053%) HTTP
7 1 (0.053%) LTE
7 1 (0.053%) MQTT
Database & Business Intelligence
1 318 (16.73%) Data Warehouse
2 250 (13.15%) Power BI
3 168 (8.84%) Data Lake
4 128 (6.73%) Metadata
5 103 (5.42%) BigQuery
6 98 (5.16%) Amazon Redshift
7 89 (4.68%) SQL Server
8 87 (4.58%) Delta Lake
9 81 (4.26%) Amazon Athena
10 80 (4.21%) Big Data
11 73 (3.84%) Pentaho
12 63 (3.31%) Relational Database
13 62 (3.26%) Tableau
14 61 (3.21%) PostgreSQL
15 60 (3.16%) Snowflake Schema
16 53 (2.79%) Azure SQL Database
17 50 (2.63%) NoSQL
18 40 (2.10%) Oracle Database
19 39 (2.05%) SQL Server Integration Services
20 37 (1.95%) Amazon RDS
Development Applications
1 168 (8.84%) Git
2 97 (5.10%) GitLab
3 73 (3.84%) JIRA
4 36 (1.89%) Jenkins
5 18 (0.95%) 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
1 307 (16.15%) Finance
2 304 (15.99%) Social Skills
3 221 (11.63%) Analytical Skills
4 163 (8.57%) Public Sector
5 109 (5.73%) Banking
6 33 (1.74%) Marketing
7 31 (1.63%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 26 (1.37%) Retail
9 24 (1.26%) Telecoms
10 22 (1.16%) Aerospace
10 22 (1.16%) Documentation Skills
11 21 (1.10%) Investment Banking
12 19 (1.00%) Automotive
12 19 (1.00%) Law
13 18 (0.95%) Front Office
13 18 (0.95%) Manufacturing
14 15 (0.79%) Pharmaceutical
15 13 (0.68%) Police
16 10 (0.53%) Financial Institution
17 9 (0.47%) Legal
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 268 (14.10%) PySpark
2 186 (9.78%) Terraform
3 136 (7.15%) Kafka
4 36 (1.89%) JSON
5 33 (1.74%) REST
6 31 (1.63%) Pandas
7 24 (1.26%) XML
8 23 (1.21%) Great Expectations
8 23 (1.21%) Spring
8 23 (1.21%) Spring Boot
9 18 (0.95%) Apache Beam
10 17 (0.89%) React
11 14 (0.74%) LangChain
11 14 (0.74%) RESTful
12 13 (0.68%) YAML
13 11 (0.58%) .NET
13 11 (0.58%) pytest
13 11 (0.58%) Streamlit
14 10 (0.53%) Microsoft Graph
15 9 (0.47%) PyTorch
Miscellaneous
1 145 (7.63%) Cloud Native
2 76 (4.00%) Legacy Systems
3 67 (3.52%) Data Structures
4 44 (2.31%) Onboarding
5 24 (1.26%) Product Ownership
6 23 (1.21%) Distributed Systems
6 23 (1.21%) Greenfield Project
7 22 (1.16%) AI Agents
7 22 (1.16%) NHS
8 20 (1.05%) Reference Data
9 18 (0.95%) Management Information System
10 17 (0.89%) Reinsurance
11 14 (0.74%) Algorithms
12 13 (0.68%) Clustering
13 12 (0.63%) Data Protection Act
14 11 (0.58%) Enterprise Software
14 11 (0.58%) Virtual Team
15 10 (0.53%) Linux Command Line
15 10 (0.53%) Replication
16 9 (0.47%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 65 (3.42%) Unix
2 48 (2.52%) Linux
3 4 (0.21%) Windows
4 2 (0.11%) Ubuntu
4 2 (0.11%) Windows Server
5 1 (0.053%) Robot Operating System
5 1 (0.053%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 811 (42.66%) Data Pipeline
2 729 (38.35%) Data Engineering
3 656 (34.51%) Analytics
3 656 (34.51%) ETL
4 644 (33.88%) Data Modelling
5 448 (23.57%) CI/CD
6 338 (17.78%) Agile
7 320 (16.83%) Business Intelligence
8 311 (16.36%) DevOps
9 304 (15.99%) Migration
10 275 (14.47%) AI
11 258 (13.57%) Data Governance
12 241 (12.68%) Data Integration
13 237 (12.47%) Validation
14 233 (12.26%) Data Transformation
15 210 (11.05%) Problem-Solving
16 173 (9.10%) Lakehouse
17 171 (9.00%) Data Science
18 168 (8.84%) Machine Learning
19 165 (8.68%) Decision-Making
Programming Languages
1 952 (50.08%) SQL
2 823 (43.29%) Python
3 115 (6.05%) Java
4 70 (3.68%) Scala
5 54 (2.84%) PL/SQL
6 34 (1.79%) Shell Script
7 33 (1.74%) T-SQL
8 32 (1.68%) Data Analysis Expressions
9 23 (1.21%) 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 8 (0.42%) 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
1 500 (26.30%) Security Cleared
2 440 (23.15%) SC Cleared
3 46 (2.42%) BPSS Clearance
4 40 (2.10%) Degree
5 23 (1.21%) DV Cleared
6 22 (1.16%) Computer Science Degree
7 21 (1.10%) Azure Certification
8 14 (0.74%) AWS Certification
9 11 (0.58%) SnowPro
10 9 (0.47%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
10 9 (0.47%) City & Guilds
11 8 (0.42%) DBS Check
12 6 (0.32%) CISM
12 6 (0.32%) CISSP
12 6 (0.32%) Master's Degree
13 5 (0.26%) BICSI Certification
13 5 (0.26%) CEH
14 4 (0.21%) Microsoft Certification
15 1 (0.053%) PMI Certification
15 1 (0.053%) PMP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 476 (25.04%) Data Quality
2 70 (3.68%) QA
3 44 (2.31%) GDPR
4 15 (0.79%) Accessibility
5 9 (0.47%) 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 4 (0.21%) Disclosure Scotland
10 3 (0.16%) MiFID
11 2 (0.11%) EMIR
11 2 (0.11%) SNOMED CT
11 2 (0.11%) WCAG
12 1 (0.053%) California Consumer Privacy Act
12 1 (0.053%) Government Security Classifications
12 1 (0.053%) IFRS
12 1 (0.053%) IFRS 17
12 1 (0.053%) IFRS 9
12 1 (0.053%) PCI DSS
System Software
1 110 (5.79%) 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 43 (2.26%) 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
8 1 (0.053%) Progress Chef
8 1 (0.053%) Thomson Reuters DACS
Vendors
1 395 (20.78%) Databricks
2 245 (12.89%) Microsoft
3 160 (8.42%) Oracle
4 111 (5.84%) Informatica
5 101 (5.31%) Talend
6 72 (3.79%) Google
7 56 (2.95%) Denodo
8 34 (1.79%) Salesforce
9 27 (1.42%) Cisco
9 27 (1.42%) F5
9 27 (1.42%) Palantir
10 24 (1.26%) Foundry
10 24 (1.26%) SAP
11 15 (0.79%) Splunk
12 13 (0.68%) Cloudera
13 11 (0.58%) IBM
14 10 (0.53%) Bloomberg
15 9 (0.47%) OpenAI
15 9 (0.47%) Sage
16 8 (0.42%) Alteryx