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 25 August 2026.

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

6 months to
25 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 67 126 96
Rank change year-on-year +59 -30 +21
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 1,907 722 906
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 3.55% 2.21% 2.33%
As % of the Job Titles category 3.84% 2.42% 2.51%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,265 513 656
10th Percentile £375 £375 £263
25th Percentile £425 £425 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year - -4.76% -4.55%
75th Percentile £584 £580 £625
90th Percentile £657 £686 £688
UK excluding London median daily rate £470 £475 £480
% change year-on-year -1.08% -1.04% -8.57%
Number of hourly rates quoted 86 14 24
10th Percentile £20.30 £25.42 £31.25
25th Percentile £30.96 £37.00 £49.25
Median hourly rate £44.75 £52.50 £75.00
Median % change year-on-year -14.76% -30.00% +5.26%
75th Percentile £70.00 £74.65 £80.00
90th Percentile £75.00 £85.25 -
UK excluding London median hourly rate £44.75 £52.85 £80.00
% change year-on-year -15.33% -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 49,605 29,863 36,126
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.47% 91.22% 93.00%
Number of daily rates quoted 29,683 18,859 22,977
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% -1.87%
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 3,539 1,568 1,933
10th Percentile £14.99 £13.64 £14.16
25th Percentile £20.53 £17.21 £19.50
Median hourly rate £41.92 £25.15 £43.00
Median % change year-on-year +66.68% -41.51% -1.58%
75th Percentile £67.84 £53.99 £65.00
90th Percentile £80.00 £71.50 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £42.50 £25.15 £43.00
% change year-on-year +68.99% -41.51% +7.50%

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 25 August 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 25 August 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 25 August 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 +63 1,693 £500 - 313
UK excluding London +91 882 £470 -1.08% 271
London +34 831 £533 +1.43% 128
Work from Home +48 561 £500 +5.26% 110
Midlands +64 368 £465 +0.81% 36
West Midlands +63 308 £465 -3.13% 26
North of England +31 220 £478 +0.53% 80
South East +25 130 £463 +2.78% 93
North West +34 126 £525 +10.53% 30
South West +6 88 £525 +5.00% 32
Yorkshire -5 74 £465 -4.62% 23
East Midlands +23 60 £450 +1.98% 10
Scotland +16 60 £450 +4.41% 13
East of England +12 40 £475 +5.56% 12
North East -25 21 £515 +21.89% 28
Wales 0 17 £488 +9.55% 7
Northern Ireland +3 3 £410 -18.00% 2

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

For the 6 months to 25 August 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.

1 942 (49.40%) SQL
2 809 (42.42%) Data Pipeline
3 795 (41.69%) Python
4 709 (37.18%) Data Engineering
5 665 (34.87%) Analytics
6 652 (34.19%) ETL
7 630 (33.04%) Data Modelling
8 594 (31.15%) Azure
9 558 (29.26%) AWS
10 496 (26.01%) Security Cleared
11 469 (24.59%) Data Quality
12 438 (22.97%) CI/CD
13 433 (22.71%) SC Cleared
14 385 (20.19%) Databricks
15 331 (17.36%) Agile
16 329 (17.25%) Business Intelligence
17 320 (16.78%) Data Warehouse
18 307 (16.10%) DevOps
19 301 (15.78%) Migration
20 264 (13.84%) PySpark
21 263 (13.79%) Power Platform
22 258 (13.53%) AI
23 256 (13.42%) Power BI
24 255 (13.37%) Data Governance
25 240 (12.59%) Microsoft
26 234 (12.27%) Validation
27 232 (12.17%) Data Integration
28 220 (11.54%) Snowflake
29 218 (11.43%) Data Transformation
30 215 (11.27%) 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
1 197 (10.33%) Apache Airflow
2 152 (7.97%) Apache Spark
3 120 (6.29%) Apache
4 68 (3.57%) SAS
5 42 (2.20%) Confluence
6 15 (0.79%) Palantir Foundry
7 13 (0.68%) SharePoint
8 9 (0.47%) Jupyter
9 3 (0.16%) Apache Superset
10 2 (0.10%) ArcGIS
10 2 (0.10%) Microsoft Exchange
10 2 (0.10%) PowerExchange
11 1 (0.052%) Liferay
11 1 (0.052%) Luigi
11 1 (0.052%) R Markdown
Applications
1 24 (1.26%) Microsoft Excel
2 7 (0.37%) Notepad++
3 6 (0.31%) Spreadsheet
4 4 (0.21%) Chatbot
5 1 (0.052%) Microsoft PowerPoint
Business Applications
1 13 (0.68%) Aladdin
2 6 (0.31%) Dynamics CRM
3 5 (0.26%) Infor LN
3 5 (0.26%) NetSuite
3 5 (0.26%) Sage X3
4 4 (0.21%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
5 3 (0.16%) SAP S/4HANA
5 3 (0.16%) SimCorp Dimension
6 2 (0.10%) BambooHR
6 2 (0.10%) Maximo
6 2 (0.10%) Oracle EBS
7 1 (0.052%) FIS Private Capital Suite
7 1 (0.052%) MIS ActiveH
7 1 (0.052%) Oracle 11i
7 1 (0.052%) Oracle Assets
7 1 (0.052%) Oracle ERP
7 1 (0.052%) Raiser’s Edge
7 1 (0.052%) SAP BPC
7 1 (0.052%) SAP CAR
7 1 (0.052%) SAP EWM
Cloud Services
1 594 (31.15%) Azure
2 558 (29.26%) AWS
3 263 (13.79%) Power Platform
4 220 (11.54%) Snowflake
5 215 (11.27%) Azure Data Factory
6 205 (10.75%) dbt
7 175 (9.18%) GCP
8 161 (8.44%) Amazon S3
9 133 (6.97%) Azure Synapse Analytics
10 131 (6.87%) Azure DevOps
11 117 (6.14%) Serverless
12 109 (5.72%) GitHub
13 105 (5.51%) AWS Lambda
14 50 (2.62%) Amazon EMR
15 42 (2.20%) GitHub Actions
16 34 (1.78%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 25 (1.31%) Amazon Kinesis
17 25 (1.31%) AWS Step Functions
18 23 (1.21%) AWS CloudFormation
18 23 (1.21%) Fivetran
Communications & Networking
1 32 (1.68%) VPN
2 31 (1.63%) BGP
2 31 (1.63%) DMZ
2 31 (1.63%) DNS
2 31 (1.63%) 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 (0.052%) HTTP
8 1 (0.052%) LTE
8 1 (0.052%) MQTT
Database & Business Intelligence
1 320 (16.78%) Data Warehouse
2 256 (13.42%) Power BI
3 169 (8.86%) Data Lake
4 118 (6.19%) Metadata
5 103 (5.40%) BigQuery
6 102 (5.35%) Amazon Redshift
7 88 (4.61%) SQL Server
8 85 (4.46%) Delta Lake
9 82 (4.30%) Big Data
10 77 (4.04%) Amazon Athena
11 74 (3.88%) Pentaho
12 66 (3.46%) Tableau
13 63 (3.30%) Relational Database
14 62 (3.25%) PostgreSQL
15 59 (3.09%) Snowflake Schema
16 55 (2.88%) Azure SQL Database
17 52 (2.73%) NoSQL
18 46 (2.41%) SQL Server Integration Services
19 36 (1.89%) Oracle Database
19 36 (1.89%) Star Schema
Development Applications
1 164 (8.60%) Git
2 95 (4.98%) GitLab
3 71 (3.72%) JIRA
4 38 (1.99%) Jenkins
5 15 (0.79%) 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%) SonarQube
10 3 (0.16%) Atlassian Bamboo
10 3 (0.16%) Claude Code
10 3 (0.16%) Newman
10 3 (0.16%) Selenium
10 3 (0.16%) Sonatype Nexus
11 2 (0.10%) ER Studio
11 2 (0.10%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
11 2 (0.10%) Terragrunt
11 2 (0.10%) Yeoman
12 1 (0.052%) Octopus Deploy
General
1 305 (15.99%) Social Skills
2 304 (15.94%) Finance
3 216 (11.33%) Analytical Skills
4 163 (8.55%) Public Sector
5 112 (5.87%) Banking
6 33 (1.73%) Inclusion and Diversity
6 33 (1.73%) Marketing
7 25 (1.31%) Telecoms
8 24 (1.26%) Retail
9 23 (1.21%) Investment Banking
10 22 (1.15%) Documentation Skills
11 21 (1.10%) Aerospace
12 20 (1.05%) Front Office
13 19 (1.00%) Automotive
13 19 (1.00%) Manufacturing
14 15 (0.79%) Pharmaceutical
15 14 (0.73%) Law
16 10 (0.52%) Financial Institution
16 10 (0.52%) Legal
16 10 (0.52%) Police
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 264 (13.84%) PySpark
2 179 (9.39%) Terraform
3 140 (7.34%) Kafka
4 33 (1.73%) Pandas
5 30 (1.57%) JSON
6 28 (1.47%) REST
7 23 (1.21%) Spring
7 23 (1.21%) Spring Boot
8 21 (1.10%) Great Expectations
9 19 (1.00%) XML
10 17 (0.89%) Apache Beam
11 15 (0.79%) React
12 14 (0.73%) RESTful
12 14 (0.73%) YAML
13 12 (0.63%) Streamlit
14 10 (0.52%) LangChain
14 10 (0.52%) Microsoft Graph
14 10 (0.52%) pytest
15 9 (0.47%) Apache Avro
15 9 (0.47%) Spark Streaming
Miscellaneous
1 140 (7.34%) Cloud Native
2 76 (3.99%) Legacy Systems
3 59 (3.09%) Data Structures
4 40 (2.10%) Onboarding
5 25 (1.31%) Product Ownership
6 24 (1.26%) Distributed Systems
7 23 (1.21%) Greenfield Project
8 22 (1.15%) NHS
8 22 (1.15%) Reference Data
9 17 (0.89%) Reinsurance
10 16 (0.84%) Management Information System
11 15 (0.79%) AI Agents
12 14 (0.73%) Data Protection Act
13 13 (0.68%) Clustering
14 12 (0.63%) Algorithms
15 11 (0.58%) Virtual Team
16 10 (0.52%) Enterprise Software
16 10 (0.52%) Replication
17 9 (0.47%) Life Science
17 9 (0.47%) Linux Command Line
Operating Systems
1 66 (3.46%) Unix
2 48 (2.52%) Linux
3 4 (0.21%) Windows
4 2 (0.10%) Ubuntu
4 2 (0.10%) Windows Server
5 1 (0.052%) Robot Operating System
5 1 (0.052%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 809 (42.42%) Data Pipeline
2 709 (37.18%) Data Engineering
3 665 (34.87%) Analytics
4 652 (34.19%) ETL
5 630 (33.04%) Data Modelling
6 438 (22.97%) CI/CD
7 331 (17.36%) Agile
8 329 (17.25%) Business Intelligence
9 307 (16.10%) DevOps
10 301 (15.78%) Migration
11 258 (13.53%) AI
12 255 (13.37%) Data Governance
13 234 (12.27%) Validation
14 232 (12.17%) Data Integration
15 218 (11.43%) Data Transformation
16 209 (10.96%) Problem-Solving
17 177 (9.28%) Decision-Making
18 166 (8.70%) Data Science
19 165 (8.65%) Machine Learning
20 149 (7.81%) Infrastructure as Code
Programming Languages
1 942 (49.40%) SQL
2 795 (41.69%) Python
3 112 (5.87%) Java
4 66 (3.46%) Scala
5 54 (2.83%) PL/SQL
6 36 (1.89%) Shell Script
7 33 (1.73%) T-SQL
8 28 (1.47%) Data Analysis Expressions
9 22 (1.15%) Bash
10 21 (1.10%) PowerShell
11 20 (1.05%) JavaScript
12 14 (0.73%) C#
13 13 (0.68%) R
14 9 (0.47%) Bicep
15 6 (0.31%) Go
16 5 (0.26%) TypeScript
17 4 (0.21%) Korn
18 3 (0.16%) COBOL
19 2 (0.10%) Perl
19 2 (0.10%) SPARQL
Qualifications
1 496 (26.01%) Security Cleared
2 433 (22.71%) SC Cleared
3 44 (2.31%) BPSS Clearance
4 39 (2.05%) Degree
5 21 (1.10%) Azure Certification
5 21 (1.10%) DV Cleared
6 20 (1.05%) Computer Science Degree
7 13 (0.68%) AWS Certification
8 10 (0.52%) SnowPro
9 9 (0.47%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
9 9 (0.47%) City & Guilds
10 8 (0.42%) DBS Check
11 6 (0.31%) CISM
11 6 (0.31%) CISSP
11 6 (0.31%) Master's Degree
12 5 (0.26%) BICSI Certification
12 5 (0.26%) CEH
13 4 (0.21%) Microsoft Certification
14 1 (0.052%) PMI Certification
14 1 (0.052%) PMP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 469 (24.59%) Data Quality
2 64 (3.36%) QA
3 45 (2.36%) GDPR
4 16 (0.84%) Accessibility
5 11 (0.58%) SLA
6 7 (0.37%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 6 (0.31%) FATCA
7 6 (0.31%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 5 (0.26%) HIPAA
9 3 (0.16%) Disclosure Scotland
9 3 (0.16%) MiFID
10 2 (0.10%) EMIR
10 2 (0.10%) SNOMED CT
10 2 (0.10%) WCAG
11 1 (0.052%) California Consumer Privacy Act
11 1 (0.052%) IFRS
11 1 (0.052%) IFRS 17
11 1 (0.052%) IFRS 9
11 1 (0.052%) PCI DSS
11 1 (0.052%) PMO
System Software
1 110 (5.77%) Docker
2 4 (0.21%) Virtual Machines
3 2 (0.10%) Active Directory
4 1 (0.052%) RACF
Systems Management
1 85 (4.46%) Kubernetes
2 45 (2.36%) Grafana
3 15 (0.79%) Ansible
4 12 (0.63%) Control-M
5 9 (0.47%) Kibana
6 4 (0.21%) Prometheus
7 2 (0.10%) Apache Ranger
7 2 (0.10%) logstash
7 2 (0.10%) Puppet
7 2 (0.10%) Thomson Reuters DACS
8 1 (0.052%) Kubeflow
8 1 (0.052%) Rancher
Vendors
1 385 (20.19%) Databricks
2 240 (12.59%) Microsoft
3 156 (8.18%) Oracle
4 120 (6.29%) Informatica
5 102 (5.35%) Talend
6 68 (3.57%) Google
7 60 (3.15%) Denodo
8 32 (1.68%) Cisco
8 32 (1.68%) F5
8 32 (1.68%) Salesforce
9 27 (1.42%) SAP
10 25 (1.31%) Palantir
11 20 (1.05%) Foundry
12 16 (0.84%) Splunk
13 14 (0.73%) Cloudera
14 13 (0.68%) ServiceNow
15 12 (0.63%) IBM
16 9 (0.47%) Bloomberg
16 9 (0.47%) Sage
17 8 (0.42%) InterSystems