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 7 May 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
7 May 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 92 158 199
Rank change year-on-year +66 +41 +13
Contract jobs citing Data Engineering 1,316 519 509
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.76% 1.77% 1.17%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.27% 1.95% 1.36%
Number of daily rates quoted 907 360 382
10th Percentile £398 £400 £364
25th Percentile £450 £450 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year - -4.55% -8.33%
75th Percentile £616 £675 £652
90th Percentile £749 £838 £749
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £550
% change year-on-year +5.26% -13.64% +2.23%
Number of hourly rates quoted 21 13 14
10th Percentile £51.25 £21.40 £30.63
25th Percentile £56.75 £22.00 £31.25
Median hourly rate £70.00 £25.43 £35.00
Median % change year-on-year +175.27% -27.34% -52.05%
75th Percentile £78.00 £53.75 £57.56
90th Percentile £90.00 £62.75 £60.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £69.22 £25.43 £60.00
% change year-on-year +172.20% -57.62% +71.43%

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 40,275 26,638 37,488
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.44% 90.95% 86.38%
Number of daily rates quoted 25,293 17,157 24,168
10th Percentile £320 £306 £300
25th Percentile £413 £413 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £520 £525
Median % change year-on-year -3.85% -0.95% -4.55%
75th Percentile £613 £630 £638
90th Percentile £725 £745 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £488 £480 £500
% change year-on-year +1.56% -4.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,413 1,083 2,449
10th Percentile £14.84 £14.63 £12.75
25th Percentile £19.75 £18.50 £16.00
Median hourly rate £41.56 £29.00 £35.96
Median % change year-on-year +43.29% -19.35% -0.11%
75th Percentile £67.25 £61.50 £60.00
90th Percentile £79.40 £75.00 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £43.69 £27.94 £37.50
% change year-on-year +56.37% -25.49% +7.14%

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 7 May 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 7 May 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 7 May 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 +68 1,180 £525 -4.55% 508
London +54 735 £550 -4.35% 248
UK excluding London +68 462 £500 +5.26% 328
Work from Home +49 373 £525 -8.70% 277
Midlands +17 126 £500 +5.26% 60
North of England +9 121 £480 -4.00% 107
West Midlands +21 103 £500 -5.21% 44
South West +25 78 £506 -17.47% 30
Scotland +33 61 £440 -7.37% 22
South East -10 59 £550 +10.00% 84
Yorkshire -11 55 £478 -13.18% 26
North West -21 47 £500 +2.56% 49
East of England -22 23 £575 +54.08% 14
North East +2 21 £463 -2.63% 32
East Midlands -18 20 £450 -4.00% 16
Wales -16 5 £665 +196.46% 10
Northern Ireland - 2 £430 - 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
1 198 (15.05%) Apache Spark
2 128 (9.73%) Apache Airflow
3 89 (6.76%) Apache
4 35 (2.66%) SAS
5 20 (1.52%) Confluence
6 16 (1.22%) Palantir Foundry
7 8 (0.61%) Appian
8 7 (0.53%) Apache Superset
8 7 (0.53%) Jupyter
9 4 (0.30%) Microsoft Exchange
10 2 (0.15%) Apache Synapse
10 2 (0.15%) SharePoint
11 1 (0.076%) Adobe Experience Manager
11 1 (0.076%) ArcGIS
11 1 (0.076%) Camunda
11 1 (0.076%) CICS
11 1 (0.076%) CMS
11 1 (0.076%) IBM HTTP Server
Applications
1 28 (2.13%) Microsoft Excel
2 9 (0.68%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 8 (0.61%) Microsoft Office
4 7 (0.53%) Microsoft Project
5 6 (0.46%) Spreadsheet
6 4 (0.30%) Chatbot
7 3 (0.23%) MS Visio
7 3 (0.23%) Trello
Business Applications
1 6 (0.46%) Aladdin
2 5 (0.38%) BambooHR
3 4 (0.30%) Dynamics CRM
4 3 (0.23%) Salesforce CRM
4 3 (0.23%) SAP BPC
5 2 (0.15%) SAP S/4HANA
6 1 (0.076%) Actimize
6 1 (0.076%) Adobe Campaign
6 1 (0.076%) Markit EDM
6 1 (0.076%) Misys Midas
6 1 (0.076%) Oracle Assets
6 1 (0.076%) SAP ECC
Cloud Services
1 584 (44.38%) Azure
2 477 (36.25%) AWS
3 295 (22.42%) Power Platform
4 191 (14.51%) Azure Data Factory
5 186 (14.13%) GCP
6 173 (13.15%) Snowflake
7 153 (11.63%) Amazon S3
8 147 (11.17%) Azure Synapse Analytics
9 135 (10.26%) GitHub
10 121 (9.19%) dbt
11 115 (8.74%) Serverless
12 105 (7.98%) Azure DevOps
13 93 (7.07%) AWS Lambda
14 79 (6.00%) GitHub Actions
15 60 (4.56%) AWS CloudFormation
16 39 (2.96%) AWS Step Functions
17 35 (2.66%) Amazon EMR
18 30 (2.28%) Amazon SageMaker
18 30 (2.28%) Collibra
19 26 (1.98%) Dagster
Communications & Networking
1 5 (0.38%) RTP
2 4 (0.30%) Firewall
3 3 (0.23%) Kerberos
4 2 (0.15%) Cisco IPT
4 2 (0.15%) VPN
5 1 (0.076%) 4G
5 1 (0.076%) 5G
5 1 (0.076%) MIMO
5 1 (0.076%) Network Security
5 1 (0.076%) SAN
5 1 (0.076%) SMS
5 1 (0.076%) TCP/IP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 272 (20.67%) Power BI
2 255 (19.38%) Data Warehouse
3 204 (15.50%) Data Lake
4 127 (9.65%) Metadata
5 105 (7.98%) Big Data
6 89 (6.76%) SQL Server
7 88 (6.69%) Delta Lake
8 79 (6.00%) NoSQL
9 75 (5.70%) Tableau
10 73 (5.55%) Amazon Redshift
11 70 (5.32%) BigQuery
11 70 (5.32%) Snowflake Schema
12 68 (5.17%) Amazon Athena
13 66 (5.02%) Azure SQL Database
14 59 (4.48%) Relational Database
15 56 (4.26%) PostgreSQL
16 51 (3.88%) Hadoop
17 37 (2.81%) Spark SQL
17 37 (2.81%) SQL Server Integration Services
18 26 (1.98%) Star Schema
Development Applications
1 164 (12.46%) Git
2 65 (4.94%) GitLab
3 47 (3.57%) JIRA
3 47 (3.57%) MLflow
4 33 (2.51%) Jenkins
5 6 (0.46%) SonarQube
6 5 (0.38%) Selenium
7 3 (0.23%) Postman
7 3 (0.23%) Robot Framework
7 3 (0.23%) Snyk
8 2 (0.15%) Artifactory
8 2 (0.15%) Bitbucket
8 2 (0.15%) Terragrunt
8 2 (0.15%) Visual Studio
9 1 (0.076%) Ant
9 1 (0.076%) ERwin
9 1 (0.076%) JUnit
9 1 (0.076%) Maven
9 1 (0.076%) REST Assured
9 1 (0.076%) SoapUI
General
1 337 (25.61%) Finance
2 310 (23.56%) Social Skills
3 200 (15.20%) Analytical Skills
4 113 (8.59%) Public Sector
5 77 (5.85%) Banking
6 25 (1.90%) Inclusion and Diversity
6 25 (1.90%) Retail
7 24 (1.82%) Documentation Skills
7 24 (1.82%) Marketing
8 19 (1.44%) Front Office
9 15 (1.14%) Telecoms
10 14 (1.06%) Investment Banking
11 13 (0.99%) Financial Institution
11 13 (0.99%) Influencing Skills
12 12 (0.91%) Legal
13 8 (0.61%) Law
13 8 (0.61%) Military
14 6 (0.46%) Back Office
15 5 (0.38%) Pharmaceutical
16 4 (0.30%) Manufacturing
Job Titles
1 622 (47.26%) Data Engineer
2 177 (13.45%) Senior
3 142 (10.79%) Lead
4 131 (9.95%) Architect
5 114 (8.66%) Senior Data Engineer
6 79 (6.00%) Developer
7 67 (5.09%) Data Architect
8 60 (4.56%) AWS Engineer
9 56 (4.26%) Analyst
9 56 (4.26%) Azure Engineer
10 55 (4.18%) Lead Data Engineer
11 53 (4.03%) Snowflake Engineer
12 50 (3.80%) Azure Data Engineer
13 44 (3.34%) Data Scientist
13 44 (3.34%) Snowflake Data Engineer
14 43 (3.27%) AWS Data Engineer
15 40 (3.04%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
15 40 (3.04%) Solutions Architect
16 39 (2.96%) Consultant
17 33 (2.51%) Python Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 220 (16.72%) PySpark
2 154 (11.70%) Kafka
3 60 (4.56%) Pandas
4 47 (3.57%) PyTorch
5 43 (3.27%) scikit-learn
6 38 (2.89%) TensorFlow
7 37 (2.81%) NumPy
8 28 (2.13%) REST
9 26 (1.98%) JSON
10 24 (1.82%) Spring
11 22 (1.67%) React
11 22 (1.67%) YAML
12 21 (1.60%) LangChain
12 21 (1.60%) RESTful
13 20 (1.52%) pytest
14 18 (1.37%) FastAPI
14 18 (1.37%) Great Expectations
15 17 (1.29%) Spring Boot
16 15 (1.14%) Flask
17 13 (0.99%) Django
Miscellaneous
1 178 (13.53%) Cloud Native
2 52 (3.95%) Distributed Systems
3 46 (3.50%) Product Ownership
4 40 (3.04%) Data Structures
4 40 (3.04%) Legacy Systems
5 33 (2.51%) Distributed Computing
6 31 (2.36%) Algorithms
7 29 (2.20%) AI Agents
8 25 (1.90%) Onboarding
9 22 (1.67%) Data Protection Act
10 20 (1.52%) Analytical Mindset
10 20 (1.52%) Greenfield Project
11 15 (1.14%) Hybrid Cloud
11 15 (1.14%) NHS
12 14 (1.06%) Fixed Income
12 14 (1.06%) Self-Motivation
13 13 (0.99%) Management Information System
14 12 (0.91%) Clustering
15 10 (0.76%) Equities
15 10 (0.76%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 28 (2.13%) Linux
2 21 (1.60%) Unix
3 6 (0.46%) VMS
4 3 (0.23%) Windows
5 2 (0.15%) Ubuntu
5 2 (0.15%) Windows Server
6 1 (0.076%) CentOS
6 1 (0.076%) Debian
Processes & Methodologies
1 675 (51.29%) Analytics
2 609 (46.28%) Data Pipeline
3 513 (38.98%) Data Modelling
4 503 (38.22%) ETL
5 458 (34.80%) CI/CD
6 379 (28.80%) AI
7 336 (25.53%) Business Intelligence
8 331 (25.15%) Agile
9 325 (24.70%) DevOps
10 315 (23.94%) Data Governance
11 262 (19.91%) Machine Learning
12 243 (18.47%) Problem-Solving
13 233 (17.71%) Data Science
14 191 (14.51%) Data Architecture
15 171 (12.99%) Decision-Making
16 170 (12.92%) Migration
17 164 (12.46%) Validation
18 152 (11.55%) Infrastructure as Code
19 135 (10.26%) Data Integration
20 133 (10.11%) Use Case
Programming Languages
1 724 (55.02%) SQL
2 704 (53.50%) Python
3 106 (8.05%) Java
4 62 (4.71%) Scala
5 44 (3.34%) Data Analysis Expressions
6 36 (2.74%) C#
7 30 (2.28%) Bash
8 25 (1.90%) T-SQL
9 23 (1.75%) PowerShell
9 23 (1.75%) R
10 22 (1.67%) JavaScript
11 16 (1.22%) Bicep
12 12 (0.91%) Shell Script
13 10 (0.76%) Go
13 10 (0.76%) PL/SQL
13 10 (0.76%) TypeScript
14 7 (0.53%) SAS Macro
15 4 (0.30%) Korn
16 2 (0.15%) C++
17 1 (0.076%) Cypher
Qualifications
1 262 (19.91%) Security Cleared
2 226 (17.17%) SC Cleared
3 100 (7.60%) Degree
4 41 (3.12%) Computer Science Degree
5 38 (2.89%) Azure Certification
6 37 (2.81%) Master's Degree
7 19 (1.44%) BPSS Clearance
8 17 (1.29%) AWS Certification
9 14 (1.06%) DV Cleared
10 9 (0.68%) Microsoft Certification
11 7 (0.53%) DBS Check
12 6 (0.46%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
12 6 (0.46%) SnowPro
13 5 (0.38%) PhD
14 4 (0.30%) Microsoft Certified Professional
15 3 (0.23%) IBM Certification
16 2 (0.15%) Tableau Certification
17 1 (0.076%) ACCA
17 1 (0.076%) AWS Certified SysOps Administrator
17 1 (0.076%) CSPO
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 374 (28.42%) Data Quality
2 92 (6.99%) GDPR
3 53 (4.03%) QA
4 13 (0.99%) Sarbanes-Oxley
5 10 (0.76%) SLA
6 8 (0.61%) Accessibility
7 5 (0.38%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 5 (0.38%) MiFID
8 4 (0.30%) HIPAA
8 4 (0.30%) Solvency II
9 3 (0.23%) California Consumer Privacy Act
9 3 (0.23%) GRC
9 3 (0.23%) PMO
10 2 (0.15%) Actionable Recommendations
10 2 (0.15%) Disclosure Scotland
10 2 (0.15%) EMIR
10 2 (0.15%) HL7
10 2 (0.15%) NIST
10 2 (0.15%) PERC
10 2 (0.15%) SNOMED CT
System Software
1 130 (9.88%) Docker
2 6 (0.46%) HDFS
3 3 (0.23%) Virtual Machines
4 1 (0.076%) Active Directory
4 1 (0.076%) Apache ZooKeeper
Systems Management
1 171 (12.99%) Terraform
2 120 (9.12%) Kubernetes
3 26 (1.98%) Prometheus
4 22 (1.67%) Grafana
5 12 (0.91%) Ansible
6 5 (0.38%) Argo
7 4 (0.30%) Kubeflow
8 3 (0.23%) Kibana
8 3 (0.23%) Nagios
8 3 (0.23%) Rancher
9 2 (0.15%) Hadoop YARN
9 2 (0.15%) logstash
9 2 (0.15%) Thomson Reuters DACS
10 1 (0.076%) Apache Ranger
10 1 (0.076%) Control-M
10 1 (0.076%) HP Fortify
10 1 (0.076%) IBM Guardium
10 1 (0.076%) Oozie
Vendors
1 368 (27.96%) Databricks
2 215 (16.34%) Microsoft
3 68 (5.17%) Informatica
4 63 (4.79%) Google
5 47 (3.57%) Oracle
6 35 (2.66%) Talend
7 23 (1.75%) Foundry
8 22 (1.67%) OpenAI
8 22 (1.67%) SAP
9 19 (1.44%) Splunk
10 17 (1.29%) Palantir
11 15 (1.14%) Cloudera
12 13 (0.99%) ServiceNow
13 12 (0.91%) Salesforce
14 9 (0.68%) IBM
14 9 (0.68%) UiPath
15 8 (0.61%) Automation Anywhere
16 7 (0.53%) InterSystems
17 6 (0.46%) Denodo
18 5 (0.38%) Workday