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 16 December 2025, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
16 Dec 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 125 175 216
Rank change year-on-year +50 +41 +8
Contract jobs citing Data Engineering 844 507 488
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.30% 1.48% 1.10%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 2.60% 1.68% 1.25%
Number of daily rates quoted 557 354 363
10th Percentile £363 £395 £400
25th Percentile £413 £463 £475
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £520 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -5.45% - -8.33%
75th Percentile £638 £659 £688
90th Percentile £750 £788 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £470 £500 £550
% change year-on-year -6.00% -9.09% +1.85%
Number of hourly rates quoted 5 13 10
10th Percentile £41.15 £21.25 £35.00
25th Percentile £50.00 £22.00 £36.68
Median hourly rate £74.26 £25.43 £53.65
Median % change year-on-year +192.02% -52.60% -6.28%
75th Percentile £87.50 £28.15 £74.75
90th Percentile £101.00 £57.63 £78.70
UK excluding London median hourly rate £62.13 £25.43 £78.00
% change year-on-year +144.32% -67.40% +56.00%

All Process and 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 32,471 30,121 39,108
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 88.45% 87.99% 88.49%
Number of daily rates quoted 20,452 18,385 26,091
10th Percentile £300 £306 £308
25th Percentile £406 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £530
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% -0.94% -3.64%
75th Percentile £619 £638 £650
90th Percentile £725 £745 £745
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £500 £500
% change year-on-year -5.00% - -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,090 1,000 1,510
10th Percentile £14.50 £15.61 £14.49
25th Percentile £17.50 £20.30 £19.02
Median hourly rate £25.15 £32.50 £43.85
Median % change year-on-year -22.62% -25.88% +25.29%
75th Percentile £48.75 £62.50 £65.00
90th Percentile £68.00 £74.00 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £23.04 £32.39 £44.50
% change year-on-year -28.87% -27.21% +39.06%

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 16 December 2025.

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 16 December 2025.

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 16 December 2025. 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 +45 740 £525 -8.70% 499
London +57 508 £550 -4.35% 235
Work from Home +22 256 £550 -4.35% 367
UK excluding London +15 242 £470 -6.00% 367
North of England -12 70 £445 -11.00% 93
Midlands -3 61 £533 +6.65% 51
West Midlands -12 42 £550 +11.11% 34
North West -12 42 £425 -12.37% 60
Scotland +26 40 £402 -10.67% 22
South East +1 37 £480 -16.52% 125
South West -7 27 £550 -17.60% 44
East Midlands +1 19 £429 -25.43% 16
Yorkshire -37 19 £500 -6.98% 22
East of England -12 17 £475 +48.90% 29
North East -5 9 £400 -33.05% 11
Wales -13 2 £495 -1.00% 5
Northern Ireland - 1 - - 4

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
1 122 (14.45%) Apache Airflow
2 121 (14.34%) Apache Spark
3 66 (7.82%) Apache
4 13 (1.54%) Confluence
5 4 (0.47%) SAS
5 4 (0.47%) SharePoint
6 2 (0.24%) Jupyter
6 2 (0.24%) Luigi
7 1 (0.12%) Apache Pig
7 1 (0.12%) ArcGIS
7 1 (0.12%) CMS
Applications
1 20 (2.37%) Microsoft Excel
2 9 (1.07%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 6 (0.71%) Chatbot
4 3 (0.36%) MS Visio
5 2 (0.24%) Microsoft Office
5 2 (0.24%) Microsoft Project
5 2 (0.24%) Trello
6 1 (0.12%) Adobe XD
Business Applications
1 8 (0.95%) Aladdin
2 4 (0.47%) Dynamics CRM
3 2 (0.24%) Eagle PACE
3 2 (0.24%) Markit EDM
4 1 (0.12%) Actimize
4 1 (0.12%) Maximo
4 1 (0.12%) Misys Midas
4 1 (0.12%) Salesforce CRM
4 1 (0.12%) SAP BPC
4 1 (0.12%) SAP ERP
4 1 (0.12%) Workday HCM
Cloud Services
1 380 (45.02%) Azure
2 298 (35.31%) AWS
3 143 (16.94%) Power Platform
4 142 (16.82%) Azure Data Factory
5 129 (15.28%) GCP
6 124 (14.69%) Snowflake
7 97 (11.49%) Amazon S3
8 95 (11.26%) Azure Synapse Analytics
9 88 (10.43%) GitHub
10 86 (10.19%) Serverless
11 82 (9.72%) Azure DevOps
12 81 (9.60%) dbt
13 65 (7.70%) AWS Lambda
14 60 (7.11%) GitHub Actions
15 32 (3.79%) AWS CloudFormation
16 30 (3.55%) Azure Machine Learning
17 28 (3.32%) Amazon SageMaker
18 26 (3.08%) AWS Step Functions
19 24 (2.84%) Cloud Computing
20 22 (2.61%) Amazon EMR
Communications & Networking
1 4 (0.47%) Cisco IPT
1 4 (0.47%) Kerberos
1 4 (0.47%) Network Security
1 4 (0.47%) SSL
1 4 (0.47%) TCP/IP
2 3 (0.36%) DNS
2 3 (0.36%) Firewall
2 3 (0.36%) SSH
2 3 (0.36%) VPN
3 1 (0.12%) Intrusion Detection
3 1 (0.12%) MQTT
3 1 (0.12%) SAN
3 1 (0.12%) SMS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 167 (19.79%) Data Warehouse
2 137 (16.23%) Power BI
3 103 (12.20%) Data Lake
4 67 (7.94%) Metadata
5 65 (7.70%) Big Data
6 55 (6.52%) Relational Database
7 54 (6.40%) NoSQL
8 52 (6.16%) Delta Lake
9 45 (5.33%) Azure SQL Database
9 45 (5.33%) BigQuery
10 42 (4.98%) PostgreSQL
11 41 (4.86%) Tableau
12 39 (4.62%) Amazon Redshift
13 36 (4.27%) Hadoop
13 36 (4.27%) SQL Server
14 33 (3.91%) Snowflake Schema
15 31 (3.67%) Amazon Athena
16 25 (2.96%) RDBMS
17 20 (2.37%) Amazon RDS
18 19 (2.25%) Elasticsearch
Development Applications
1 138 (16.35%) Git
2 50 (5.92%) Jenkins
3 41 (4.86%) GitLab
4 32 (3.79%) MLflow
5 30 (3.55%) JIRA
6 9 (1.07%) Visual Studio Code
7 7 (0.83%) SonarQube
8 4 (0.47%) Cucumber
8 4 (0.47%) Poetry
9 3 (0.36%) JMeter
9 3 (0.36%) Selenium
10 2 (0.24%) Artifactory
10 2 (0.24%) Maven
10 2 (0.24%) Mockito
10 2 (0.24%) PyCharm
10 2 (0.24%) Pylint
10 2 (0.24%) Sonatype Nexus
10 2 (0.24%) TeamCity
10 2 (0.24%) TestRail
10 2 (0.24%) Zephyr
General
1 247 (29.27%) Social Skills
2 192 (22.75%) Finance
3 118 (13.98%) Analytical Skills
4 62 (7.35%) Banking
5 60 (7.11%) Public Sector
6 29 (3.44%) Investment Banking
7 23 (2.73%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 18 (2.13%) Front Office
9 17 (2.01%) Retail
10 15 (1.78%) Influencing Skills
10 15 (1.78%) Marketing
10 15 (1.78%) Pharmaceutical
11 13 (1.54%) Telecoms
12 12 (1.42%) Legal
13 9 (1.07%) Publishing
14 8 (0.95%) Documentation Skills
14 8 (0.95%) Presentation Skills
15 7 (0.83%) Military
16 5 (0.59%) Health Technology
16 5 (0.59%) Tech for Good
Job Titles
1 347 (41.11%) Data Engineer
2 111 (13.15%) Senior
3 79 (9.36%) Lead
4 76 (9.00%) Azure Engineer
5 73 (8.65%) Developer
6 71 (8.41%) Senior Data Engineer
7 64 (7.58%) Architect
8 53 (6.28%) Azure Data Engineer
9 45 (5.33%) Analyst
10 41 (4.86%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
10 41 (4.86%) AWS Engineer
10 41 (4.86%) Python Engineer
11 33 (3.91%) Data Scientist
12 32 (3.79%) Data Architect
13 31 (3.67%) Snowflake Engineer
14 27 (3.20%) AWS Data Engineer
15 26 (3.08%) Python Data Engineer
15 26 (3.08%) Python Developer
16 24 (2.84%) DevOps Engineer
17 23 (2.73%) Snowflake Data Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 152 (18.01%) PySpark
2 92 (10.90%) Kafka
3 61 (7.23%) Pandas
4 49 (5.81%) NumPy
4 49 (5.81%) PyTorch
5 42 (4.98%) TensorFlow
6 41 (4.86%) FastAPI
7 34 (4.03%) Flask
8 32 (3.79%) scikit-learn
9 31 (3.67%) RESTful
10 27 (3.20%) React
11 23 (2.73%) LangChain
12 22 (2.61%) JSON
13 17 (2.01%) pytest
14 16 (1.90%) Hugging Face
14 16 (1.90%) YAML
15 15 (1.78%) Polars
15 15 (1.78%) Vue
16 14 (1.66%) AngularJS
16 14 (1.66%) SciPy
Miscellaneous
1 76 (9.00%) Cloud Native
2 48 (5.69%) Algorithms
3 25 (2.96%) Data Structures
3 25 (2.96%) Distributed Computing
4 21 (2.49%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
5 20 (2.37%) Data Protection Act
5 20 (2.37%) Onboarding
5 20 (2.37%) Product Ownership
6 19 (2.25%) Distributed Systems
6 19 (2.25%) Hybrid Cloud
7 16 (1.90%) Hedge funds
8 14 (1.66%) AI Agents
9 12 (1.42%) Derivative
9 12 (1.42%) Fixed Income
10 11 (1.30%) Analytical Mindset
10 11 (1.30%) Legacy Systems
10 11 (1.30%) Life Science
11 10 (1.18%) Enterprise Software
11 10 (1.18%) Management Information System
12 9 (1.07%) Equities
Operating Systems
1 35 (4.15%) Linux
2 3 (0.36%) Android
2 3 (0.36%) VMS
3 2 (0.24%) Ubuntu
3 2 (0.24%) Unix
3 2 (0.24%) Windows
4 1 (0.12%) CentOS
4 1 (0.12%) Debian
Processes & Methodologies
1 366 (43.36%) Data Pipeline
2 318 (37.68%) CI/CD
3 306 (36.26%) ETL
4 294 (34.83%) Analytics
5 293 (34.72%) Data Modelling
6 209 (24.76%) DevOps
7 199 (23.58%) Data Governance
8 196 (23.22%) Machine Learning
9 195 (23.10%) Agile
10 191 (22.63%) AI
11 175 (20.73%) Data Science
12 174 (20.62%) Problem-Solving
13 170 (20.14%) Business Intelligence
14 135 (16.00%) Data Architecture
15 105 (12.44%) Infrastructure as Code
16 100 (11.85%) Containerisation
16 100 (11.85%) Data Integration
17 86 (10.19%) Visualisation
18 83 (9.83%) Decision-Making
19 82 (9.72%) Data Transformation
Programming Languages
1 539 (63.86%) Python
2 421 (49.88%) SQL
3 58 (6.87%) Scala
4 57 (6.75%) Java
5 38 (4.50%) C#
6 35 (4.15%) JavaScript
7 27 (3.20%) PowerShell
8 26 (3.08%) C++
9 22 (2.61%) Bash
10 17 (2.01%) Bicep
10 17 (2.01%) R
11 16 (1.90%) Data Analysis Expressions
11 16 (1.90%) T-SQL
11 16 (1.90%) TypeScript
12 15 (1.78%) Go
12 15 (1.78%) Rust
13 14 (1.66%) PL/SQL
14 13 (1.54%) Shell Script
15 6 (0.71%) Korn
16 5 (0.59%) VBA
Qualifications
1 145 (17.18%) Security Cleared
2 118 (13.98%) SC Cleared
3 76 (9.00%) Degree
4 50 (5.92%) Azure Certification
5 37 (4.38%) Master's Degree
6 29 (3.44%) Computer Science Degree
7 19 (2.25%) DV Cleared
8 18 (2.13%) AWS Certification
9 12 (1.42%) PhD
10 9 (1.07%) Microsoft Certification
11 8 (0.95%) MCP
12 7 (0.83%) BPSS Clearance
13 5 (0.59%) DBS Check
14 3 (0.36%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
14 3 (0.36%) SnowPro
14 3 (0.36%) Tableau Certification
15 2 (0.24%) CBAP
15 2 (0.24%) ISTQB
16 1 (0.12%) OCP
16 1 (0.12%) Oracle Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 202 (23.93%) Data Quality
2 64 (7.58%) GDPR
3 26 (3.08%) QA
4 21 (2.49%) Accessibility
5 9 (1.07%) HIPAA
6 7 (0.83%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 6 (0.71%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 5 (0.59%) NIST
8 5 (0.59%) PERC
9 4 (0.47%) SOC 2
9 4 (0.47%) WCAG
10 3 (0.36%) California Consumer Privacy Act
10 3 (0.36%) Disclosure Scotland
10 3 (0.36%) PMO
11 2 (0.24%) HL7
11 2 (0.24%) PCI DSS
12 1 (0.12%) AIFMD
12 1 (0.12%) Dodd-Frank
12 1 (0.12%) EMIR
12 1 (0.12%) ISO/IEC 20000
System Software
1 136 (16.11%) Docker
2 16 (1.90%) HDFS
3 3 (0.36%) Active Directory
4 1 (0.12%) Apache ZooKeeper
4 1 (0.12%) ISA Server
4 1 (0.12%) Virtual Machines
Systems Management
1 131 (15.52%) Terraform
2 111 (13.15%) Kubernetes
3 16 (1.90%) Grafana
4 14 (1.66%) Ansible
5 11 (1.30%) Hadoop YARN
6 10 (1.18%) Prometheus
7 6 (0.71%) Argo
7 6 (0.71%) Control-M
8 5 (0.59%) Kibana
8 5 (0.59%) logstash
8 5 (0.59%) Puppet
9 4 (0.47%) vCenter Server
10 3 (0.36%) Istio
10 3 (0.36%) Kustomize
10 3 (0.36%) Oozie
11 2 (0.24%) Kubeflow
11 2 (0.24%) Single Sign-On
12 1 (0.12%) Apache Ranger
12 1 (0.12%) Demisto
12 1 (0.12%) Systems Management Server (SMS)
Vendors
1 252 (29.86%) Databricks
2 108 (12.80%) Microsoft
3 51 (6.04%) Google
4 33 (3.91%) Oracle
5 24 (2.84%) Informatica
6 18 (2.13%) Talend
7 17 (2.01%) Palantir
8 15 (1.78%) Foundry
8 15 (1.78%) OpenAI
9 13 (1.54%) Cloudera
9 13 (1.54%) SAP
10 9 (1.07%) Salesforce
11 8 (0.95%) Virgin Media
12 6 (0.71%) Denodo
13 5 (0.59%) Guidewire
13 5 (0.59%) Murex
13 5 (0.59%) VMware
14 4 (0.47%) Adobe
14 4 (0.47%) EMC
14 4 (0.47%) IBM