Data Engineering Contract Job Trends

Data Engineering
UK

The table below provides summary statistics and contractor rates for jobs requiring Data Engineering skills. It covers contract job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 22 February 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
22 Feb 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 94 154 215
Rank change year-on-year +60 +61 +7
Contract jobs citing Data Engineering 1,100 544 493
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.70% 1.77% 1.10%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.11% 1.97% 1.27%
Number of daily rates quoted 758 375 376
10th Percentile £363 £364 £375
25th Percentile £430 £450 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £524 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -4.77% - -8.33%
75th Percentile £625 £663 £650
90th Percentile £738 £838 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £500 £550
% change year-on-year -5.00% -9.09% +1.85%
Number of hourly rates quoted 13 14 7
10th Percentile £52.00 £21.48 £29.69
25th Percentile £56.75 £22.18 £35.00
Median hourly rate £69.00 £25.97 £35.63
Median % change year-on-year +165.74% -27.13% +1.80%
75th Percentile £75.00 £28.60 £46.88
90th Percentile £82.00 £54.50 £56.15
UK excluding London median hourly rate £69.00 £25.97 £43.37
% change year-on-year +165.74% -40.12% +111.85%

All Process & Methodology Skills
UK

Data Engineering falls under the Processes and Methodologies category. For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all contract job vacancies requiring process or methodology skills.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for process or methodology skills 35,362 27,619 38,854
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 86.73% 89.84% 87.06%
Number of daily rates quoted 22,416 17,059 25,415
10th Percentile £313 £306 £300
25th Percentile £410 £413 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £613 £638 £638
90th Percentile £720 £738 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £481 £493 £500
% change year-on-year -2.34% -1.50% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,120 859 2,186
10th Percentile £14.64 £15.62 £13.29
25th Percentile £17.96 £21.25 £16.25
Median hourly rate £25.77 £32.81 £35.00
Median % change year-on-year -21.46% -6.26% -
75th Percentile £60.75 £63.75 £60.00
90th Percentile £72.50 £75.30 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £25.15 £31.76 £35.00
% change year-on-year -20.81% -9.26% -

Data Engineering
Job Vacancy Trend

Historical trend showing the proportion of contract IT job postings citing Data Engineering relative to all contract IT jobs advertised.

Data Engineering job vacancy trend in the UK

Data Engineering
Daily Rate Trend

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing Data Engineering.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing Data Engineering

Data Engineering
Daily Rate Histogram

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Data Engineering over the 6 months to 22 February 2026.

Daily rate histogram for Data Engineering in the UK

Data Engineering
Hourly Rate Trend

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing Data Engineering.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing Data Engineering

Data Engineering
Hourly Rate Histogram

Hourly rate distribution of jobs citing Data Engineering over the 6 months to 22 February 2026.

Hourly rate histogram for Data Engineering in the UK

Data Engineering
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 Engineering within the UK over the 6 months to 22 February 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 +59 974 £525 -7.89% 422
London +62 647 £550 -4.35% 209
UK excluding London +25 342 £475 -5.00% 302
Work from Home +28 322 £550 -4.35% 232
North of England -4 103 £450 -10.00% 94
Midlands +12 88 £511 +2.25% 52
West Midlands -9 68 £519 +3.85% 42
North West +5 56 £448 +0.85% 51
South West +3 54 £550 -15.38% 29
Scotland +20 49 £418 -11.73% 17
South East -15 39 £550 +0.92% 94
Yorkshire -45 28 £500 -16.67% 34
East Midlands -13 20 £447 -12.78% 10
North East -5 19 £450 -23.08% 10
East of England -24 15 £551 +72.45% 14
Wales -16 6 £563 +46.10% 4
Northern Ireland - 2 £430 -

Data Engineering
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
1 173 (15.73%) Apache Spark
2 118 (10.73%) Apache Airflow
3 83 (7.55%) Apache
4 19 (1.73%) Palantir Foundry
5 17 (1.55%) SAS
6 16 (1.45%) Confluence
7 8 (0.73%) Appian
8 3 (0.27%) Apache Superset
8 3 (0.27%) Jupyter
8 3 (0.27%) Microsoft Exchange
9 2 (0.18%) SharePoint
10 1 (0.091%) Adobe Experience Manager
10 1 (0.091%) Apache Synapse
10 1 (0.091%) ArcGIS
10 1 (0.091%) Camunda
10 1 (0.091%) CMS
10 1 (0.091%) IBM HTTP Server
10 1 (0.091%) Luigi
Applications
1 23 (2.09%) Microsoft Excel
2 11 (1.00%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 7 (0.64%) Microsoft Project
4 6 (0.55%) Chatbot
4 6 (0.55%) Microsoft Office
5 4 (0.36%) MS Visio
6 3 (0.27%) Trello
7 2 (0.18%) Spreadsheet
8 1 (0.091%) Adobe XD
Business Applications
1 4 (0.36%) Aladdin
2 3 (0.27%) SAP BPC
3 2 (0.18%) Dynamics CRM
3 2 (0.18%) Salesforce CRM
4 1 (0.091%) Actimize
4 1 (0.091%) Adobe Campaign
4 1 (0.091%) Markit EDM
4 1 (0.091%) Maximo
4 1 (0.091%) Misys Midas
4 1 (0.091%) SAP ERP
4 1 (0.091%) SAP S/4HANA
4 1 (0.091%) Workday HCM
Cloud Services
1 527 (47.91%) Azure
2 395 (35.91%) AWS
3 238 (21.64%) Power Platform
4 201 (18.27%) Azure Data Factory
5 160 (14.55%) GCP
6 144 (13.09%) Snowflake
7 128 (11.64%) Amazon S3
8 118 (10.73%) Azure Synapse Analytics
9 115 (10.45%) Serverless
10 111 (10.09%) GitHub
11 94 (8.55%) Azure DevOps
12 93 (8.45%) dbt
13 90 (8.18%) AWS Lambda
14 76 (6.91%) GitHub Actions
15 57 (5.18%) AWS CloudFormation
16 36 (3.27%) AWS Step Functions
17 31 (2.82%) Amazon EMR
18 29 (2.64%) Amazon SageMaker
19 26 (2.36%) Collibra
20 25 (2.27%) Azure Machine Learning
Communications & Networking
1 5 (0.45%) Network Security
2 4 (0.36%) Cisco IPT
2 4 (0.36%) Kerberos
3 3 (0.27%) Firewall
3 3 (0.27%) RTP
3 3 (0.27%) VPN
4 1 (0.091%) 4G
4 1 (0.091%) 5G
4 1 (0.091%) MQTT
4 1 (0.091%) SAN
4 1 (0.091%) SMS
4 1 (0.091%) SSL
4 1 (0.091%) TCP/IP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 222 (20.18%) Data Warehouse
2 217 (19.73%) Power BI
3 153 (13.91%) Data Lake
4 97 (8.82%) Metadata
5 77 (7.00%) Big Data
6 76 (6.91%) SQL Server
7 71 (6.45%) NoSQL
8 68 (6.18%) Delta Lake
9 58 (5.27%) Relational Database
10 56 (5.09%) Azure SQL Database
10 56 (5.09%) Snowflake Schema
11 53 (4.82%) Amazon Redshift
12 51 (4.64%) Amazon Athena
13 50 (4.55%) BigQuery
13 50 (4.55%) PostgreSQL
14 43 (3.91%) Hadoop
15 42 (3.82%) Tableau
16 32 (2.91%) SQL Server Integration Services
17 29 (2.64%) Spark SQL
18 23 (2.09%) Elasticsearch
Development Applications
1 161 (14.64%) Git
2 62 (5.64%) GitLab
3 46 (4.18%) MLflow
4 44 (4.00%) Jenkins
5 30 (2.73%) JIRA
6 7 (0.64%) Visual Studio Code
7 5 (0.45%) Selenium
7 5 (0.45%) SonarQube
8 4 (0.36%) Cucumber
9 3 (0.27%) ERwin
9 3 (0.27%) JUnit
9 3 (0.27%) Maven
9 3 (0.27%) Postman
9 3 (0.27%) Robot Framework
9 3 (0.27%) Terragrunt
10 2 (0.18%) Gemini Tracker
10 2 (0.18%) JMeter
10 2 (0.18%) TeamCity
10 2 (0.18%) Visual Studio
10 2 (0.18%) Zephyr
General
1 308 (28.00%) Social Skills
2 248 (22.55%) Finance
3 152 (13.82%) Analytical Skills
4 91 (8.27%) Public Sector
5 74 (6.73%) Banking
6 23 (2.09%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 18 (1.64%) Investment Banking
7 18 (1.64%) Retail
8 17 (1.55%) Documentation Skills
8 17 (1.55%) Influencing Skills
9 15 (1.36%) Front Office
10 14 (1.27%) Marketing
11 10 (0.91%) Pharmaceutical
11 10 (0.91%) Publishing
12 9 (0.82%) Legal
13 8 (0.73%) Financial Institution
14 7 (0.64%) Presentation Skills
15 6 (0.55%) Back Office
15 6 (0.55%) Military
15 6 (0.55%) Telecoms
Job Titles
1 494 (44.91%) Data Engineer
2 144 (13.09%) Lead
3 139 (12.64%) Senior
4 92 (8.36%) Senior Data Engineer
5 84 (7.64%) Architect
6 82 (7.45%) Azure Engineer
7 71 (6.45%) Developer
8 62 (5.64%) Azure Data Engineer
9 54 (4.91%) Analyst
10 50 (4.55%) AWS Engineer
11 49 (4.45%) Lead Data Engineer
12 46 (4.18%) Snowflake Engineer
13 45 (4.09%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
14 44 (4.00%) Data Architect
15 43 (3.91%) Data Scientist
16 38 (3.45%) Snowflake Data Engineer
17 34 (3.09%) Python Engineer
18 33 (3.00%) AWS Data Engineer
19 32 (2.91%) Data Analyst
20 25 (2.27%) DevOps Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 203 (18.45%) PySpark
2 128 (11.64%) Kafka
3 65 (5.91%) Pandas
4 60 (5.45%) PyTorch
5 49 (4.45%) TensorFlow
6 48 (4.36%) NumPy
7 44 (4.00%) scikit-learn
8 36 (3.27%) FastAPI
9 31 (2.82%) Flask
9 31 (2.82%) RESTful
10 29 (2.64%) JSON
11 28 (2.55%) pytest
12 26 (2.36%) YAML
13 24 (2.18%) LangChain
13 24 (2.18%) React
13 24 (2.18%) REST
14 16 (1.45%) ARM Templates
14 16 (1.45%) Django
14 16 (1.45%) Hugging Face
15 15 (1.36%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 132 (12.00%) Cloud Native
2 47 (4.27%) Algorithms
3 39 (3.55%) Product Ownership
4 34 (3.09%) Distributed Systems
5 31 (2.82%) Distributed Computing
6 25 (2.27%) Onboarding
7 23 (2.09%) Data Structures
8 22 (2.00%) Hybrid Cloud
9 21 (1.91%) Data Protection Act
9 21 (1.91%) Legacy Systems
10 20 (1.82%) AI Agents
11 17 (1.55%) Analytical Mindset
12 13 (1.18%) Clustering
13 11 (1.00%) Enterprise Software
13 11 (1.00%) Fixed Income
13 11 (1.00%) Greenfield Project
13 11 (1.00%) Management Information System
13 11 (1.00%) NHS
14 10 (0.91%) Data Fabric
14 10 (0.91%) Reference Data
Operating Systems
1 24 (2.18%) Linux
2 6 (0.55%) VMS
3 5 (0.45%) Unix
4 2 (0.18%) Ubuntu
5 1 (0.091%) CentOS
5 1 (0.091%) Debian
5 1 (0.091%) Windows
Processes & Methodologies
1 500 (45.45%) Data Pipeline
2 492 (44.73%) Analytics
3 430 (39.09%) ETL
4 418 (38.00%) Data Modelling
5 411 (37.36%) CI/CD
6 291 (26.45%) AI
7 285 (25.91%) Data Governance
7 285 (25.91%) DevOps
8 281 (25.55%) Agile
9 259 (23.55%) Business Intelligence
10 250 (22.73%) Machine Learning
11 236 (21.45%) Data Science
12 232 (21.09%) Problem-Solving
13 172 (15.64%) Data Architecture
14 149 (13.55%) Infrastructure as Code
15 117 (10.64%) Validation
16 115 (10.45%) Decision-Making
17 109 (9.91%) Data Integration
18 108 (9.82%) Containerisation
19 107 (9.73%) LLM
Programming Languages
1 665 (60.45%) Python
2 578 (52.55%) SQL
3 78 (7.09%) Java
4 63 (5.73%) Scala
5 44 (4.00%) C#
6 33 (3.00%) JavaScript
6 33 (3.00%) PowerShell
7 31 (2.82%) Data Analysis Expressions
8 28 (2.55%) Bash
9 23 (2.09%) Bicep
9 23 (2.09%) T-SQL
10 19 (1.73%) TypeScript
11 16 (1.45%) R
12 15 (1.36%) Go
13 14 (1.27%) C++
13 14 (1.27%) PL/SQL
14 8 (0.73%) Korn
14 8 (0.73%) Rust
15 7 (0.64%) Shell Script
16 2 (0.18%) Kusto Query Language
Qualifications
1 221 (20.09%) Security Cleared
2 182 (16.55%) SC Cleared
3 103 (9.36%) Degree
4 53 (4.82%) Azure Certification
5 47 (4.27%) Master's Degree
6 37 (3.36%) Computer Science Degree
7 21 (1.91%) DV Cleared
8 17 (1.55%) AWS Certification
8 17 (1.55%) BPSS Clearance
9 14 (1.27%) Microsoft Certification
10 13 (1.18%) PhD
11 4 (0.36%) DBS Check
11 4 (0.36%) Microsoft Certified Professional
12 3 (0.27%) IBM Certification
13 2 (0.18%) SnowPro
14 1 (0.091%) (ISC)2 CCSP
14 1 (0.091%) APMG
14 1 (0.091%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
14 1 (0.091%) CBAP
14 1 (0.091%) CSPO
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 310 (28.18%) Data Quality
2 89 (8.09%) GDPR
3 39 (3.55%) QA
4 17 (1.55%) Accessibility
5 12 (1.09%) Sarbanes-Oxley
6 9 (0.82%) HIPAA
7 6 (0.55%) California Consumer Privacy Act
7 6 (0.55%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 5 (0.45%) PERC
8 5 (0.45%) SOC 2
9 4 (0.36%) SLA
10 3 (0.27%) GRC
10 3 (0.27%) WCAG
11 2 (0.18%) HL7
11 2 (0.18%) MiFID
11 2 (0.18%) NIST
11 2 (0.18%) PCI DSS
11 2 (0.18%) Solvency II
12 1 (0.091%) NCSC
12 1 (0.091%) PMO
System Software
1 154 (14.00%) Docker
2 9 (0.82%) HDFS
3 2 (0.18%) Active Directory
3 2 (0.18%) Virtual Machines
4 1 (0.091%) Apache ZooKeeper
4 1 (0.091%) ISA Server
Systems Management
1 180 (16.36%) Terraform
2 138 (12.55%) Kubernetes
3 27 (2.45%) Prometheus
4 17 (1.55%) Grafana
5 10 (0.91%) Ansible
6 5 (0.45%) Argo
7 4 (0.36%) Hadoop YARN
8 3 (0.27%) Control-M
8 3 (0.27%) Kubeflow
9 2 (0.18%) Kibana
9 2 (0.18%) logstash
9 2 (0.18%) Nagios
9 2 (0.18%) Oozie
9 2 (0.18%) Single Sign-On
10 1 (0.091%) Apache Ranger
10 1 (0.091%) HP Fortify
10 1 (0.091%) Puppet
10 1 (0.091%) Rancher
Vendors
1 333 (30.27%) Databricks
2 155 (14.09%) Microsoft
3 51 (4.64%) Google
4 37 (3.36%) Oracle
5 36 (3.27%) Informatica
6 26 (2.36%) Talend
7 23 (2.09%) Palantir
8 22 (2.00%) Foundry
9 21 (1.91%) OpenAI
10 15 (1.36%) SAP
11 13 (1.18%) Cloudera
11 13 (1.18%) Splunk
12 11 (1.00%) Salesforce
13 8 (0.73%) Automation Anywhere
13 8 (0.73%) IBM
13 8 (0.73%) UiPath
13 8 (0.73%) Virgin Media
14 7 (0.64%) Denodo
15 6 (0.55%) MicroStrategy
15 6 (0.55%) ServiceNow