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

6 months to
27 Dec 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 123 176 214
Rank change year-on-year +53 +38 +18
Contract jobs citing Data Engineering 862 499 491
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.32% 1.48% 1.12%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 2.63% 1.68% 1.27%
Number of daily rates quoted 571 349 369
10th Percentile £363 £387 £400
25th Percentile £413 £463 £469
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £515 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -6.36% - -8.33%
75th Percentile £625 £650 £688
90th Percentile £748 £788 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £500 £550
% change year-on-year -5.00% -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% -28.46%
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 32,729 29,699 38,511
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 88.02% 88.28% 88.04%
Number of daily rates quoted 20,612 18,123 25,677
10th Percentile £300 £308 £306
25th Percentile £406 £413 £420
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £528
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% -0.47% -4.09%
75th Percentile £615 £638 £650
90th Percentile £723 £738 £744
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £500 £500
% change year-on-year -5.00% - -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,069 965 1,551
10th Percentile £14.73 £15.62 £14.25
25th Percentile £17.69 £20.30 £18.93
Median hourly rate £25.15 £32.50 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year -22.62% -23.53% +21.43%
75th Percentile £51.65 £62.50 £65.00
90th Percentile £68.75 £74.63 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £23.58 £30.88 £44.50
% change year-on-year -23.64% -30.62% +48.33%

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 27 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 27 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 27 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 +60 761 £520 -9.17% 1,526
London +67 528 £550 -4.35% 317
Work from Home +21 261 £550 -3.51% 853
UK excluding London +13 239 £475 -5.00% 1,351
North of England -16 72 £450 -18.18% 327
Midlands -2 61 £542 +8.30% 232
North West +5 46 £440 -10.66% 173
West Midlands -3 43 £550 +11.11% 117
Scotland +24 37 £402 -8.11% 57
South East -2 35 £480 -11.93% 362
South West -1 30 £550 -17.60% 153
East Midlands -6 18 £429 -25.43% 99
Yorkshire -39 15 £500 -9.09% 121
East of England -16 13 £500 +29.87% 189
North East 0 11 £400 -33.05% 33
Wales -15 2 £495 -1.00% 35
Northern Ireland - 2 £430 - 12

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
1 127 (14.73%) Apache Spark
2 113 (13.11%) Apache Airflow
3 68 (7.89%) Apache
4 13 (1.51%) Confluence
5 4 (0.46%) SAS
6 2 (0.23%) Appian
6 2 (0.23%) Jupyter
7 1 (0.12%) Apache Pig
7 1 (0.12%) ArcGIS
7 1 (0.12%) CMS
7 1 (0.12%) Luigi
7 1 (0.12%) SharePoint
Applications
1 19 (2.20%) Microsoft Excel
2 9 (1.04%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 6 (0.70%) Chatbot
4 3 (0.35%) MS Visio
5 2 (0.23%) Microsoft Office
5 2 (0.23%) Microsoft Project
5 2 (0.23%) Trello
6 1 (0.12%) Adobe XD
Business Applications
1 7 (0.81%) Aladdin
2 4 (0.46%) Dynamics CRM
3 2 (0.23%) Eagle PACE
3 2 (0.23%) 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
1 394 (45.71%) Azure
2 298 (34.57%) AWS
3 152 (17.63%) Power Platform
4 149 (17.29%) Azure Data Factory
5 123 (14.27%) GCP
6 121 (14.04%) Snowflake
7 102 (11.83%) Azure Synapse Analytics
8 99 (11.48%) Amazon S3
9 92 (10.67%) GitHub
10 90 (10.44%) Serverless
11 83 (9.63%) Azure DevOps
12 79 (9.16%) dbt
13 68 (7.89%) AWS Lambda
14 64 (7.42%) GitHub Actions
15 35 (4.06%) AWS CloudFormation
16 29 (3.36%) AWS Step Functions
17 27 (3.13%) Amazon SageMaker
17 27 (3.13%) Azure Machine Learning
18 22 (2.55%) Cloud Computing
19 21 (2.44%) Amazon EMR
Communications & Networking
1 4 (0.46%) Cisco IPT
1 4 (0.46%) Kerberos
1 4 (0.46%) Network Security
1 4 (0.46%) SSL
1 4 (0.46%) TCP/IP
2 3 (0.35%) Firewall
2 3 (0.35%) SSH
2 3 (0.35%) VPN
3 2 (0.23%) DNS
4 1 (0.12%) MQTT
4 1 (0.12%) SAN
4 1 (0.12%) SMS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 166 (19.26%) Data Warehouse
2 147 (17.05%) Power BI
3 115 (13.34%) Data Lake
4 70 (8.12%) Metadata
5 62 (7.19%) Big Data
6 56 (6.50%) NoSQL
7 53 (6.15%) Delta Lake
8 51 (5.92%) Relational Database
9 49 (5.68%) Azure SQL Database
10 46 (5.34%) SQL Server
11 44 (5.10%) BigQuery
12 41 (4.76%) PostgreSQL
13 39 (4.52%) Amazon Athena
14 38 (4.41%) Amazon Redshift
14 38 (4.41%) Snowflake Schema
15 37 (4.29%) Tableau
16 34 (3.94%) Hadoop
17 23 (2.67%) RDBMS
18 18 (2.09%) Amazon RDS
19 17 (1.97%) Elasticsearch
Development Applications
1 140 (16.24%) Git
2 49 (5.68%) Jenkins
3 44 (5.10%) GitLab
4 33 (3.83%) MLflow
5 27 (3.13%) JIRA
6 9 (1.04%) Visual Studio Code
7 7 (0.81%) SonarQube
8 4 (0.46%) Cucumber
8 4 (0.46%) Poetry
9 3 (0.35%) JMeter
9 3 (0.35%) Selenium
10 2 (0.23%) ERwin
10 2 (0.23%) JUnit
10 2 (0.23%) Maven
10 2 (0.23%) Mockito
10 2 (0.23%) PyCharm
10 2 (0.23%) Sonatype Nexus
10 2 (0.23%) TeamCity
10 2 (0.23%) TestRail
10 2 (0.23%) Zephyr
General
1 244 (28.31%) Social Skills
2 194 (22.51%) Finance
3 114 (13.23%) Analytical Skills
4 60 (6.96%) Public Sector
5 58 (6.73%) Banking
6 25 (2.90%) Investment Banking
7 21 (2.44%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 16 (1.86%) Front Office
8 16 (1.86%) Retail
9 15 (1.74%) Marketing
9 15 (1.74%) Pharmaceutical
10 13 (1.51%) Influencing Skills
11 12 (1.39%) Legal
12 10 (1.16%) Telecoms
13 9 (1.04%) Publishing
14 7 (0.81%) Documentation Skills
14 7 (0.81%) Military
14 7 (0.81%) Presentation Skills
15 5 (0.58%) Back Office
15 5 (0.58%) Health Technology
Job Titles
1 362 (42.00%) Data Engineer
2 110 (12.76%) Senior
3 85 (9.86%) Lead
4 75 (8.70%) Azure Engineer
5 70 (8.12%) Senior Data Engineer
6 68 (7.89%) Developer
7 64 (7.42%) Architect
8 52 (6.03%) Azure Data Engineer
9 43 (4.99%) Analyst
9 43 (4.99%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
10 41 (4.76%) Python Engineer
11 40 (4.64%) AWS Engineer
12 34 (3.94%) Snowflake Engineer
13 33 (3.83%) Data Scientist
14 31 (3.60%) Data Architect
15 26 (3.02%) AWS Data Engineer
15 26 (3.02%) Python Data Engineer
15 26 (3.02%) Snowflake Data Engineer
16 25 (2.90%) DevOps Engineer
17 23 (2.67%) Python Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 162 (18.79%) PySpark
2 94 (10.90%) Kafka
3 63 (7.31%) Pandas
4 51 (5.92%) PyTorch
5 49 (5.68%) NumPy
6 43 (4.99%) TensorFlow
7 42 (4.87%) FastAPI
8 35 (4.06%) Flask
9 34 (3.94%) scikit-learn
10 31 (3.60%) RESTful
11 26 (3.02%) React
12 23 (2.67%) LangChain
13 21 (2.44%) JSON
14 19 (2.20%) pytest
15 17 (1.97%) Hugging Face
16 16 (1.86%) YAML
17 15 (1.74%) REST
18 14 (1.62%) Polars
18 14 (1.62%) Spark Streaming
18 14 (1.62%) Vue
Miscellaneous
1 80 (9.28%) Cloud Native
2 45 (5.22%) Algorithms
3 25 (2.90%) Distributed Computing
4 21 (2.44%) Data Structures
4 21 (2.44%) Product Ownership
5 19 (2.20%) Data Protection Act
5 19 (2.20%) Distributed Systems
5 19 (2.20%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
5 19 (2.20%) Hybrid Cloud
5 19 (2.20%) Onboarding
6 15 (1.74%) Hedge funds
7 13 (1.51%) Legacy Systems
8 12 (1.39%) AI Agents
9 11 (1.28%) Analytical Mindset
9 11 (1.28%) Life Science
10 10 (1.16%) Derivative
10 10 (1.16%) Enterprise Software
10 10 (1.16%) Greenfield Project
11 9 (1.04%) Data Fabric
11 9 (1.04%) Genomics
Operating Systems
1 31 (3.60%) Linux
2 3 (0.35%) Android
2 3 (0.35%) VMS
3 2 (0.23%) Ubuntu
3 2 (0.23%) Windows
4 1 (0.12%) CentOS
4 1 (0.12%) Debian
Processes & Methodologies
1 371 (43.04%) Data Pipeline
2 319 (37.01%) CI/CD
3 312 (36.19%) ETL
4 305 (35.38%) Analytics
5 293 (33.99%) Data Modelling
6 213 (24.71%) DevOps
7 209 (24.25%) AI
8 205 (23.78%) Data Governance
9 201 (23.32%) Machine Learning
10 198 (22.97%) Agile
11 179 (20.77%) Business Intelligence
12 175 (20.30%) Data Science
13 174 (20.19%) Problem-Solving
14 141 (16.36%) Data Architecture
15 109 (12.65%) Infrastructure as Code
16 96 (11.14%) Containerisation
17 94 (10.90%) Data Integration
18 84 (9.74%) LLM
19 82 (9.51%) Data Transformation
19 82 (9.51%) Visualisation
Programming Languages
1 544 (63.11%) Python
2 425 (49.30%) SQL
3 58 (6.73%) Scala
4 53 (6.15%) Java
5 38 (4.41%) C#
6 34 (3.94%) JavaScript
7 29 (3.36%) PowerShell
8 24 (2.78%) C++
9 22 (2.55%) Bash
10 20 (2.32%) Bicep
11 18 (2.09%) T-SQL
12 17 (1.97%) Data Analysis Expressions
13 16 (1.86%) R
13 16 (1.86%) TypeScript
14 15 (1.74%) Go
14 15 (1.74%) PL/SQL
15 14 (1.62%) Rust
16 12 (1.39%) Shell Script
17 7 (0.81%) Korn
18 4 (0.46%) Groovy
Qualifications
1 158 (18.33%) Security Cleared
2 130 (15.08%) SC Cleared
3 68 (7.89%) Degree
4 54 (6.26%) Azure Certification
5 33 (3.83%) Master's Degree
6 27 (3.13%) Computer Science Degree
7 19 (2.20%) AWS Certification
7 19 (2.20%) DV Cleared
8 13 (1.51%) Microsoft Certification
9 12 (1.39%) PhD
10 7 (0.81%) BPSS Clearance
10 7 (0.81%) MCP
11 5 (0.58%) DBS Check
12 3 (0.35%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
12 3 (0.35%) SnowPro
12 3 (0.35%) Tableau Certification
13 2 (0.23%) CBAP
13 2 (0.23%) ISTQB
14 1 (0.12%) OCP
14 1 (0.12%) Oracle Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 211 (24.48%) Data Quality
2 68 (7.89%) GDPR
3 27 (3.13%) QA
4 19 (2.20%) Accessibility
5 9 (1.04%) HIPAA
6 8 (0.93%) Sarbanes-Oxley
7 7 (0.81%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 5 (0.58%) PERC
9 4 (0.46%) NIST
9 4 (0.46%) SOC 2
9 4 (0.46%) WCAG
10 3 (0.35%) California Consumer Privacy Act
10 3 (0.35%) Disclosure Scotland
11 2 (0.23%) HL7
11 2 (0.23%) PCI DSS
11 2 (0.23%) PMO
12 1 (0.12%) EMIR
12 1 (0.12%) GMP
12 1 (0.12%) MiFID
12 1 (0.12%) Solvency II
System Software
1 136 (15.78%) Docker
2 16 (1.86%) HDFS
3 3 (0.35%) Active Directory
4 1 (0.12%) Apache ZooKeeper
4 1 (0.12%) ISA Server
4 1 (0.12%) Virtual Machines
Systems Management
1 138 (16.01%) Terraform
2 114 (13.23%) Kubernetes
3 16 (1.86%) Grafana
4 14 (1.62%) Ansible
5 11 (1.28%) Hadoop YARN
6 10 (1.16%) Prometheus
7 6 (0.70%) Argo
8 5 (0.58%) Control-M
8 5 (0.58%) Puppet
9 3 (0.35%) Istio
9 3 (0.35%) Kibana
9 3 (0.35%) Kustomize
9 3 (0.35%) logstash
9 3 (0.35%) Oozie
9 3 (0.35%) vCenter Server
10 2 (0.23%) Kubeflow
10 2 (0.23%) Single Sign-On
11 1 (0.12%) Apache Ranger
11 1 (0.12%) Systems Management Server (SMS)
Vendors
1 261 (30.28%) Databricks
2 111 (12.88%) Microsoft
3 49 (5.68%) Google
4 29 (3.36%) Oracle
5 19 (2.20%) Informatica
6 17 (1.97%) OpenAI
6 17 (1.97%) Palantir
7 15 (1.74%) Foundry
7 15 (1.74%) Talend
8 13 (1.51%) SAP
9 12 (1.39%) Cloudera
10 9 (1.04%) Salesforce
11 8 (0.93%) Virgin Media
12 6 (0.70%) Denodo
12 6 (0.70%) Guidewire
13 5 (0.58%) IBM
14 4 (0.46%) Red Hat
14 4 (0.46%) Sage
14 4 (0.46%) ServiceNow
14 4 (0.46%) VMware