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 2 June 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
2 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 88 162 210
Rank change year-on-year +74 +48 0
Contract jobs citing Data Engineering 1,354 510 486
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.78% 1.76% 1.13%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.28% 1.94% 1.32%
Number of daily rates quoted 934 354 365
10th Percentile £388 £369 £363
25th Percentile £450 £440 £460
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year - -4.55% -8.33%
75th Percentile £625 £663 £650
90th Percentile £750 £834 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £533
% change year-on-year +5.26% -10.80% -3.18%
Number of hourly rates quoted 20 9 15
10th Percentile £51.25 £22.67 £30.72
25th Percentile £62.19 £22.72 £31.25
Median hourly rate £70.00 £30.00 £35.00
Median % change year-on-year +133.33% -14.29% -52.05%
75th Percentile £79.44 £53.75 £60.00
90th Percentile £90.00 £56.00 -
UK excluding London median hourly rate £69.44 £26.47 £60.00
% change year-on-year +162.38% -55.89% -17.81%

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 41,283 26,327 36,811
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.64% 90.98% 85.49%
Number of daily rates quoted 25,781 16,819 23,635
10th Percentile £325 £300 £300
25th Percentile £413 £408 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £513 £525
Median % change year-on-year - -2.38% -4.55%
75th Percentile £613 £625 £638
90th Percentile £725 £738 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,472 1,115 2,532
10th Percentile £14.64 £14.20 £12.75
25th Percentile £19.91 £17.87 £16.00
Median hourly rate £42.50 £27.99 £36.50
Median % change year-on-year +51.84% -23.32% +0.29%
75th Percentile £67.84 £57.50 £60.75
90th Percentile £81.05 £74.50 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £45.00 £25.15 £38.12
% change year-on-year +78.93% -34.02% +8.91%

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 2 June 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 2 June 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 2 June 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 +60 1,217 £528 -4.09% 665
London +63 751 £550 -4.35% 370
UK excluding London +70 484 £500 +5.26% 412
Work from Home +57 404 £525 - 362
North of England +9 140 £475 -5.00% 118
Midlands +20 125 £500 +8.11% 50
West Midlands +18 103 £500 -1.09% 33
South West +25 73 £500 -11.11% 45
South East -20 66 £525 +10.53% 134
Yorkshire -12 64 £480 -8.57% 26
Scotland +28 56 £460 -3.16% 20
North West -17 50 £506 +1.25% 73
North East -3 28 £438 -12.50% 20
East of England -25 22 £575 +54.08% 29
East Midlands -19 19 £525 +13.51% 17
Wales -9 9 £450 +100.61% 6
Northern Ireland - 3 £430 - 16

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
1 190 (14.03%) Apache Spark
2 149 (11.00%) Apache Airflow
3 98 (7.24%) Apache
4 37 (2.73%) SAS
5 25 (1.85%) Confluence
6 16 (1.18%) Palantir Foundry
7 15 (1.11%) Jupyter
8 8 (0.59%) Appian
9 7 (0.52%) Apache Superset
10 4 (0.30%) Microsoft Exchange
10 4 (0.30%) SharePoint
11 2 (0.15%) Apache Synapse
12 1 (0.074%) Adobe Experience Manager
12 1 (0.074%) ArcGIS
12 1 (0.074%) Camunda
12 1 (0.074%) CICS
12 1 (0.074%) CMS
12 1 (0.074%) IBM HTTP Server
12 1 (0.074%) PowerExchange
Applications
1 29 (2.14%) Microsoft Excel
2 8 (0.59%) Microsoft Office
3 7 (0.52%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 7 (0.52%) Spreadsheet
4 6 (0.44%) Microsoft Project
5 2 (0.15%) Chatbot
5 2 (0.15%) MS Visio
5 2 (0.15%) Trello
Business Applications
1 6 (0.44%) Aladdin
2 5 (0.37%) BambooHR
3 4 (0.30%) Dynamics CRM
4 3 (0.22%) Salesforce CRM
4 3 (0.22%) SAP S/4HANA
5 2 (0.15%) Oracle Assets
5 2 (0.15%) SAP BPC
6 1 (0.074%) Adobe Campaign
6 1 (0.074%) Endur
6 1 (0.074%) Markit EDM
6 1 (0.074%) SAP ECC
Cloud Services
1 594 (43.87%) Azure
2 494 (36.48%) AWS
3 311 (22.97%) Power Platform
4 191 (14.11%) Snowflake
5 186 (13.74%) GCP
6 185 (13.66%) Azure Data Factory
7 147 (10.86%) Amazon S3
8 144 (10.64%) dbt
9 138 (10.19%) Azure Synapse Analytics
10 127 (9.38%) GitHub
11 117 (8.64%) Azure DevOps
12 103 (7.61%) Serverless
13 85 (6.28%) AWS Lambda
14 75 (5.54%) GitHub Actions
15 45 (3.32%) AWS CloudFormation
16 40 (2.95%) Amazon EMR
17 30 (2.22%) AWS Step Functions
18 27 (1.99%) Azure AI
19 26 (1.92%) Collibra
19 26 (1.92%) Dagster
Communications & Networking
1 5 (0.37%) RTP
2 4 (0.30%) Firewall
3 2 (0.15%) Kerberos
4 1 (0.074%) 4G
4 1 (0.074%) 5G
4 1 (0.074%) MIMO
4 1 (0.074%) Network Security
4 1 (0.074%) SAN
4 1 (0.074%) SMS
4 1 (0.074%) TCP/IP
4 1 (0.074%) VPN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 288 (21.27%) Power BI
2 251 (18.54%) Data Warehouse
3 206 (15.21%) Data Lake
4 120 (8.86%) Metadata
5 108 (7.98%) Big Data
6 95 (7.02%) SQL Server
7 85 (6.28%) Delta Lake
8 79 (5.83%) Tableau
9 76 (5.61%) BigQuery
10 75 (5.54%) NoSQL
10 75 (5.54%) Snowflake Schema
11 72 (5.32%) Amazon Redshift
12 62 (4.58%) Azure SQL Database
13 61 (4.51%) Amazon Athena
14 55 (4.06%) Relational Database
15 51 (3.77%) PostgreSQL
16 50 (3.69%) Hadoop
17 39 (2.88%) SQL Server Integration Services
18 35 (2.58%) Spark SQL
19 30 (2.22%) Star Schema
Development Applications
1 170 (12.56%) Git
2 69 (5.10%) GitLab
3 55 (4.06%) JIRA
4 35 (2.58%) MLflow
5 26 (1.92%) Jenkins
6 6 (0.44%) SonarQube
7 5 (0.37%) Postman
7 5 (0.37%) Selenium
8 3 (0.22%) Artifactory
8 3 (0.22%) Robot Framework
8 3 (0.22%) Snyk
8 3 (0.22%) Visual Studio
9 2 (0.15%) Bitbucket
9 2 (0.15%) ERwin
9 2 (0.15%) Terragrunt
10 1 (0.074%) Ant
10 1 (0.074%) JUnit
10 1 (0.074%) Maven
10 1 (0.074%) Octopus Deploy
10 1 (0.074%) SoapUI
General
1 331 (24.45%) Finance
2 321 (23.71%) Social Skills
3 199 (14.70%) Analytical Skills
4 119 (8.79%) Public Sector
5 89 (6.57%) Banking
6 33 (2.44%) Marketing
7 30 (2.22%) Retail
8 28 (2.07%) Inclusion and Diversity
9 27 (1.99%) Documentation Skills
10 20 (1.48%) Front Office
11 17 (1.26%) Investment Banking
12 15 (1.11%) Telecoms
13 14 (1.03%) Financial Institution
14 11 (0.81%) Influencing Skills
15 10 (0.74%) Legal
16 9 (0.66%) Law
17 6 (0.44%) Back Office
17 6 (0.44%) Manufacturing
17 6 (0.44%) Military
17 6 (0.44%) Pharmaceutical
Job Titles
1 646 (47.71%) Data Engineer
2 184 (13.59%) Senior
3 145 (10.71%) Lead
4 140 (10.34%) Architect
5 114 (8.42%) Senior Data Engineer
6 75 (5.54%) Developer
7 73 (5.39%) Data Architect
8 64 (4.73%) AWS Engineer
9 59 (4.36%) Analyst
9 59 (4.36%) Lead Data Engineer
10 55 (4.06%) Snowflake Engineer
11 51 (3.77%) AWS Data Engineer
12 48 (3.55%) Azure Engineer
13 46 (3.40%) Data Scientist
14 44 (3.25%) Snowflake Data Engineer
14 44 (3.25%) Solutions Architect
15 42 (3.10%) Azure Data Engineer
16 41 (3.03%) Consultant
17 36 (2.66%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
18 35 (2.58%) Python Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 200 (14.77%) PySpark
2 143 (10.56%) Kafka
3 56 (4.14%) Pandas
4 39 (2.88%) PyTorch
4 39 (2.88%) scikit-learn
5 37 (2.73%) REST
6 34 (2.51%) NumPy
7 31 (2.29%) TensorFlow
8 28 (2.07%) JSON
9 24 (1.77%) Spring
10 23 (1.70%) React
11 18 (1.33%) RESTful
12 17 (1.26%) Spring Boot
12 17 (1.26%) YAML
13 16 (1.18%) FastAPI
13 16 (1.18%) Great Expectations
13 16 (1.18%) LangChain
14 15 (1.11%) pytest
15 13 (0.96%) Django
15 13 (0.96%) Flask
Miscellaneous
1 180 (13.29%) Cloud Native
2 49 (3.62%) Data Structures
2 49 (3.62%) Distributed Systems
3 48 (3.55%) Product Ownership
4 45 (3.32%) Legacy Systems
5 29 (2.14%) AI Agents
5 29 (2.14%) Onboarding
6 27 (1.99%) Distributed Computing
7 24 (1.77%) Algorithms
8 23 (1.70%) Data Protection Act
9 20 (1.48%) Analytical Mindset
9 20 (1.48%) Greenfield Project
10 13 (0.96%) Fixed Income
10 13 (0.96%) NHS
11 12 (0.89%) Clustering
11 12 (0.89%) Reference Data
11 12 (0.89%) Self-Motivation
12 10 (0.74%) Equities
12 10 (0.74%) Hybrid Cloud
12 10 (0.74%) Management Information System
Operating Systems
1 29 (2.14%) Linux
2 25 (1.85%) Unix
3 5 (0.37%) VMS
4 3 (0.22%) Ubuntu
4 3 (0.22%) Windows
5 2 (0.15%) Windows Server
6 1 (0.074%) CentOS
6 1 (0.074%) Debian
Processes & Methodologies
1 700 (51.70%) Analytics
2 633 (46.75%) Data Pipeline
3 525 (38.77%) Data Modelling
4 493 (36.41%) ETL
5 475 (35.08%) CI/CD
6 401 (29.62%) AI
7 350 (25.85%) Business Intelligence
8 342 (25.26%) Agile
9 338 (24.96%) DevOps
10 303 (22.38%) Data Governance
11 263 (19.42%) Machine Learning
12 233 (17.21%) Problem-Solving
13 228 (16.84%) Data Science
14 188 (13.88%) Data Architecture
15 182 (13.44%) Migration
16 176 (13.00%) Decision-Making
17 170 (12.56%) Validation
18 144 (10.64%) Infrastructure as Code
19 141 (10.41%) Use Case
20 137 (10.12%) Data Transformation
Programming Languages
1 754 (55.69%) SQL
2 708 (52.29%) Python
3 109 (8.05%) Java
4 48 (3.55%) Scala
5 45 (3.32%) Data Analysis Expressions
6 37 (2.73%) C#
7 34 (2.51%) Bash
8 25 (1.85%) T-SQL
9 20 (1.48%) PowerShell
10 18 (1.33%) JavaScript
10 18 (1.33%) R
11 16 (1.18%) PL/SQL
12 15 (1.11%) Bicep
13 12 (0.89%) Shell Script
14 10 (0.74%) TypeScript
15 7 (0.52%) SAS Macro
16 5 (0.37%) Go
16 5 (0.37%) Korn
17 3 (0.22%) Kusto Query Language
18 2 (0.15%) SPARQL
Qualifications
1 256 (18.91%) Security Cleared
2 227 (16.77%) SC Cleared
3 101 (7.46%) Degree
4 41 (3.03%) Computer Science Degree
5 35 (2.58%) Master's Degree
6 33 (2.44%) Azure Certification
7 23 (1.70%) BPSS Clearance
8 14 (1.03%) DBS Check
9 13 (0.96%) AWS Certification
10 11 (0.81%) DV Cleared
11 7 (0.52%) Microsoft Certification
11 7 (0.52%) SnowPro
12 5 (0.37%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 4 (0.30%) PhD
14 3 (0.22%) IBM Certification
14 3 (0.22%) Microsoft Certified Professional
15 2 (0.15%) CSPO
15 2 (0.15%) PMI Certification
15 2 (0.15%) Tableau Certification
16 1 (0.074%) (ISC)2 CCSP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 376 (27.77%) Data Quality
2 86 (6.35%) GDPR
3 67 (4.95%) QA
4 13 (0.96%) SLA
5 12 (0.89%) Sarbanes-Oxley
6 7 (0.52%) Accessibility
7 5 (0.37%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 4 (0.30%) MiFID
8 4 (0.30%) Solvency II
9 3 (0.22%) California Consumer Privacy Act
9 3 (0.22%) Disclosure Scotland
9 3 (0.22%) GRC
9 3 (0.22%) HIPAA
9 3 (0.22%) PMO
10 2 (0.15%) Actionable Recommendations
10 2 (0.15%) EMIR
10 2 (0.15%) GxP
10 2 (0.15%) NIST
10 2 (0.15%) SNOMED CT
11 1 (0.074%) 21 CFR Part 11
System Software
1 127 (9.38%) Docker
2 4 (0.30%) HDFS
2 4 (0.30%) Virtual Machines
3 1 (0.074%) Active Directory
3 1 (0.074%) Apache ZooKeeper
Systems Management
1 163 (12.04%) Terraform
2 107 (7.90%) Kubernetes
3 26 (1.92%) Prometheus
4 24 (1.77%) Grafana
5 9 (0.66%) Ansible
6 5 (0.37%) Argo
7 3 (0.22%) Kibana
7 3 (0.22%) Nagios
7 3 (0.22%) Rancher
8 2 (0.15%) Hadoop YARN
8 2 (0.15%) Kubeflow
8 2 (0.15%) logstash
8 2 (0.15%) Thomson Reuters DACS
9 1 (0.074%) Apache Ranger
9 1 (0.074%) Control-M
9 1 (0.074%) HP Fortify
9 1 (0.074%) IBM Guardium
9 1 (0.074%) Oozie
Vendors
1 363 (26.81%) Databricks
2 223 (16.47%) Microsoft
3 69 (5.10%) Informatica
4 58 (4.28%) Google
5 56 (4.14%) Oracle
6 31 (2.29%) Talend
7 26 (1.92%) OpenAI
8 25 (1.85%) SAP
9 23 (1.70%) Foundry
10 19 (1.40%) Splunk
11 18 (1.33%) Palantir
12 16 (1.18%) Cloudera
13 13 (0.96%) ServiceNow
14 11 (0.81%) Salesforce
15 9 (0.66%) UiPath
16 8 (0.59%) Automation Anywhere
16 8 (0.59%) Denodo
17 7 (0.52%) IBM
17 7 (0.52%) InterSystems
18 5 (0.37%) Teradata