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

6 months to
16 Jan 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 116 168 219
Rank change year-on-year +52 +51 +14
Contract jobs citing Data Engineering 896 512 467
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.41% 1.61% 1.10%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 2.74% 1.81% 1.25%
Number of daily rates quoted 597 357 346
10th Percentile £363 £358 £400
25th Percentile £425 £450 £464
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £515 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -6.36% - -8.33%
75th Percentile £625 £650 £663
90th Percentile £750 £805 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £488 £500 £550
% change year-on-year -2.50% -9.09% +1.85%
Number of hourly rates quoted 5 13 8
10th Percentile £41.15 £21.25 £35.00
25th Percentile £50.00 £22.00 £35.47
Median hourly rate £74.26 £25.43 £42.25
Median % change year-on-year +192.02% -39.81% -43.67%
75th Percentile £87.50 £28.15 £68.25
90th Percentile £101.00 £57.63 £78.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £62.13 £25.43 £78.00
% change year-on-year +144.32% -67.40% +281.05%

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 32,654 28,287 37,362
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 87.81% 88.79% 87.72%
Number of daily rates quoted 20,662 17,217 24,715
10th Percentile £304 £306 £304
25th Percentile £406 £413 £415
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £614 £638 £650
90th Percentile £723 £738 £743
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £500 £500
% change year-on-year -5.00% - -
Number of hourly rates quoted 1,980 898 1,602
10th Percentile £14.50 £15.62 £14.16
25th Percentile £17.50 £20.75 £18.00
Median hourly rate £25.15 £32.50 £40.50
Median % change year-on-year -22.62% -19.75% +16.41%
75th Percentile £56.06 £62.24 £65.00
90th Percentile £68.80 £74.91 £76.53
UK excluding London median hourly rate £23.83 £30.45 £43.83
% change year-on-year -21.76% -30.52% +51.12%

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 January 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 16 January 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 16 January 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 +56 795 £525 -7.89% 668
London +70 569 £550 -4.35% 218
Work from Home +9 264 £550 - 321
UK excluding London +5 234 £488 -2.50% 575
North of England -10 75 £450 -18.18% 108
Midlands -4 63 £542 +0.74% 68
North West +8 48 £440 -12.00% 51
West Midlands -13 44 £550 +10.00% 32
Scotland +14 36 £402 -13.87% 23
South West -15 29 £550 -17.60% 65
South East -14 28 £513 -5.09% 220
East Midlands -9 19 £433 -30.80% 34
Yorkshire -48 14 £500 -9.09% 39
North East -5 13 £400 -33.05% 18
East of England -18 11 £500 +56.25% 70
Wales -10 5 £631 +26.25% 23
Northern Ireland - 2 £430 - 10

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 (14.17%) Apache Spark
2 107 (11.94%) Apache Airflow
3 67 (7.48%) Apache
4 13 (1.45%) Confluence
5 4 (0.45%) Appian
5 4 (0.45%) SAS
6 3 (0.33%) Microsoft Exchange
7 2 (0.22%) Jupyter
7 2 (0.22%) SharePoint
8 1 (0.11%) Apache Pig
8 1 (0.11%) ArcGIS
8 1 (0.11%) CMS
8 1 (0.11%) Luigi
Applications
1 18 (2.01%) Microsoft Excel
2 8 (0.89%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 6 (0.67%) Chatbot
4 3 (0.33%) Microsoft Project
4 3 (0.33%) MS Visio
4 3 (0.33%) Trello
5 2 (0.22%) Microsoft Office
6 1 (0.11%) Adobe XD
6 1 (0.11%) Spreadsheet
Business Applications
1 6 (0.67%) Aladdin
2 3 (0.33%) Dynamics CRM
3 2 (0.22%) Eagle PACE
3 2 (0.22%) Markit EDM
3 2 (0.22%) Salesforce CRM
4 1 (0.11%) Actimize
4 1 (0.11%) Maximo
4 1 (0.11%) Misys Midas
4 1 (0.11%) SAP BPC
4 1 (0.11%) SAP ERP
4 1 (0.11%) Workday HCM
Cloud Services
1 418 (46.65%) Azure
2 306 (34.15%) AWS
3 174 (19.42%) Power Platform
4 162 (18.08%) Azure Data Factory
5 126 (14.06%) GCP
5 126 (14.06%) Snowflake
6 103 (11.50%) Azure Synapse Analytics
7 97 (10.83%) Amazon S3
8 91 (10.16%) GitHub
9 88 (9.82%) Serverless
10 81 (9.04%) dbt
11 75 (8.37%) Azure DevOps
12 67 (7.48%) AWS Lambda
13 62 (6.92%) GitHub Actions
14 39 (4.35%) AWS CloudFormation
15 26 (2.90%) AWS Step Functions
16 22 (2.46%) Amazon SageMaker
16 22 (2.46%) Azure Machine Learning
17 20 (2.23%) Cloud Computing
17 20 (2.23%) Microsoft Purview
Communications & Networking
1 5 (0.56%) Network Security
2 4 (0.45%) Cisco IPT
2 4 (0.45%) Kerberos
3 3 (0.33%) Firewall
3 3 (0.33%) VPN
4 1 (0.11%) MQTT
4 1 (0.11%) SAN
4 1 (0.11%) SMS
4 1 (0.11%) SSL
4 1 (0.11%) TCP/IP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 171 (19.08%) Data Warehouse
2 166 (18.53%) Power BI
3 120 (13.39%) Data Lake
4 77 (8.59%) Metadata
5 57 (6.36%) NoSQL
6 55 (6.14%) SQL Server
7 54 (6.03%) Big Data
8 52 (5.80%) Relational Database
9 51 (5.69%) Azure SQL Database
10 48 (5.36%) Delta Lake
11 44 (4.91%) BigQuery
11 44 (4.91%) Snowflake Schema
12 41 (4.58%) Amazon Redshift
13 38 (4.24%) Amazon Athena
13 38 (4.24%) PostgreSQL
14 35 (3.91%) Tableau
15 32 (3.57%) Hadoop
16 26 (2.90%) RDBMS
17 20 (2.23%) Elasticsearch
17 20 (2.23%) SQL Server Integration Services
Development Applications
1 131 (14.62%) Git
2 50 (5.58%) GitLab
3 43 (4.80%) Jenkins
4 32 (3.57%) MLflow
5 25 (2.79%) JIRA
6 7 (0.78%) Visual Studio Code
7 4 (0.45%) Cucumber
7 4 (0.45%) Selenium
7 4 (0.45%) SonarQube
8 3 (0.33%) JMeter
8 3 (0.33%) Terragrunt
9 2 (0.22%) ERwin
9 2 (0.22%) Gemini Tracker
9 2 (0.22%) JUnit
9 2 (0.22%) Maven
9 2 (0.22%) Mockito
9 2 (0.22%) Postman
9 2 (0.22%) Robot Framework
9 2 (0.22%) TeamCity
9 2 (0.22%) Zephyr
General
1 256 (28.57%) Social Skills
2 213 (23.77%) Finance
3 117 (13.06%) Analytical Skills
4 62 (6.92%) Public Sector
5 58 (6.47%) Banking
6 24 (2.68%) Inclusion and Diversity
6 24 (2.68%) Investment Banking
7 17 (1.90%) Retail
8 16 (1.79%) Front Office
9 15 (1.67%) Influencing Skills
9 15 (1.67%) Pharmaceutical
10 14 (1.56%) Marketing
11 11 (1.23%) Legal
12 9 (1.00%) Publishing
13 8 (0.89%) Documentation Skills
13 8 (0.89%) Military
14 6 (0.67%) Back Office
14 6 (0.67%) Presentation Skills
15 5 (0.56%) Health Technology
15 5 (0.56%) Telecoms
Job Titles
1 391 (43.64%) Data Engineer
2 119 (13.28%) Senior
3 98 (10.94%) Lead
4 81 (9.04%) Senior Data Engineer
5 76 (8.48%) Azure Engineer
6 63 (7.03%) Developer
7 61 (6.81%) Architect
8 55 (6.14%) Azure Data Engineer
9 43 (4.80%) Analyst
10 42 (4.69%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
11 40 (4.46%) AWS Engineer
12 39 (4.35%) Python Engineer
12 39 (4.35%) Snowflake Engineer
13 32 (3.57%) Data Architect
13 32 (3.57%) Data Scientist
14 31 (3.46%) Snowflake Data Engineer
15 26 (2.90%) AWS Data Engineer
16 25 (2.79%) Lead Data Engineer
17 24 (2.68%) Consultant
17 24 (2.68%) Python Data Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 172 (19.20%) PySpark
2 94 (10.49%) Kafka
3 57 (6.36%) Pandas
4 49 (5.47%) PyTorch
5 44 (4.91%) TensorFlow
6 42 (4.69%) NumPy
7 37 (4.13%) FastAPI
8 30 (3.35%) scikit-learn
9 29 (3.24%) Flask
10 28 (3.13%) RESTful
11 23 (2.57%) React
12 22 (2.46%) LangChain
13 21 (2.34%) pytest
14 20 (2.23%) JSON
15 18 (2.01%) YAML
16 17 (1.90%) REST
17 15 (1.67%) Spark Streaming
18 14 (1.56%) Hugging Face
19 13 (1.45%) ARM Templates
19 13 (1.45%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 89 (9.93%) Cloud Native
2 41 (4.58%) Algorithms
3 25 (2.79%) Distributed Computing
3 25 (2.79%) Product Ownership
4 23 (2.57%) Distributed Systems
5 22 (2.46%) Onboarding
6 21 (2.34%) Data Structures
7 19 (2.12%) Data Protection Act
8 17 (1.90%) Legacy Systems
9 16 (1.79%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
9 16 (1.79%) Hybrid Cloud
10 13 (1.45%) Hedge funds
11 12 (1.34%) Analytical Mindset
12 11 (1.23%) AI Agents
12 11 (1.23%) Data Fabric
12 11 (1.23%) Life Science
13 10 (1.12%) Clustering
13 10 (1.12%) Derivative
13 10 (1.12%) Enterprise Software
13 10 (1.12%) Fixed Income
Operating Systems
1 26 (2.90%) Linux
2 3 (0.33%) VMS
3 2 (0.22%) Android
3 2 (0.22%) Ubuntu
3 2 (0.22%) Windows
4 1 (0.11%) CentOS
4 1 (0.11%) Debian
4 1 (0.11%) Unix
Processes & Methodologies
1 394 (43.97%) Data Pipeline
2 347 (38.73%) Analytics
3 334 (37.28%) ETL
4 320 (35.71%) CI/CD
5 309 (34.49%) Data Modelling
6 234 (26.12%) AI
7 221 (24.67%) Data Governance
8 207 (23.10%) DevOps
9 205 (22.88%) Agile
10 199 (22.21%) Machine Learning
11 197 (21.99%) Business Intelligence
12 179 (19.98%) Data Science
13 176 (19.64%) Problem-Solving
14 148 (16.52%) Data Architecture
15 109 (12.17%) Infrastructure as Code
16 92 (10.27%) Data Integration
17 91 (10.16%) Containerisation
18 86 (9.60%) Data Transformation
18 86 (9.60%) Visualisation
19 84 (9.38%) Validation
Programming Languages
1 558 (62.28%) Python
2 445 (49.67%) SQL
3 62 (6.92%) Scala
4 55 (6.14%) Java
5 36 (4.02%) C#
6 33 (3.68%) JavaScript
7 27 (3.01%) PowerShell
8 22 (2.46%) C++
9 20 (2.23%) Bash
9 20 (2.23%) Data Analysis Expressions
10 18 (2.01%) Bicep
11 17 (1.90%) R
11 17 (1.90%) T-SQL
12 16 (1.79%) PL/SQL
13 15 (1.67%) Go
13 15 (1.67%) TypeScript
14 13 (1.45%) Shell Script
15 12 (1.34%) Rust
16 7 (0.78%) Korn
17 2 (0.22%) VBA
Qualifications
1 165 (18.42%) Security Cleared
2 138 (15.40%) SC Cleared
3 68 (7.59%) Degree
4 51 (5.69%) Azure Certification
5 30 (3.35%) Computer Science Degree
6 29 (3.24%) Master's Degree
7 18 (2.01%) DV Cleared
8 14 (1.56%) AWS Certification
8 14 (1.56%) Microsoft Certification
9 13 (1.45%) PhD
10 7 (0.78%) MCP
11 5 (0.56%) BPSS Clearance
12 4 (0.45%) DBS Check
13 3 (0.33%) ISTQB
13 3 (0.33%) Tableau Certification
14 2 (0.22%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
14 2 (0.22%) CBAP
14 2 (0.22%) SnowPro
15 1 (0.11%) APMG
15 1 (0.11%) CSPO
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 234 (26.12%) Data Quality
2 71 (7.92%) GDPR
3 29 (3.24%) QA
4 19 (2.12%) Accessibility
5 10 (1.12%) Sarbanes-Oxley
6 8 (0.89%) HIPAA
7 5 (0.56%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 5 (0.56%) PERC
7 5 (0.56%) SOC 2
8 4 (0.45%) California Consumer Privacy Act
8 4 (0.45%) WCAG
9 2 (0.22%) Disclosure Scotland
9 2 (0.22%) GRC
9 2 (0.22%) HL7
9 2 (0.22%) MiFID
9 2 (0.22%) PCI DSS
9 2 (0.22%) PMO
10 1 (0.11%) EMIR
10 1 (0.11%) NCSC
10 1 (0.11%) Solvency II
System Software
1 138 (15.40%) Docker
2 16 (1.79%) HDFS
3 2 (0.22%) Active Directory
4 1 (0.11%) Apache ZooKeeper
4 1 (0.11%) ISA Server
4 1 (0.11%) Virtual Machines
Systems Management
1 143 (15.96%) Terraform
2 114 (12.72%) Kubernetes
3 13 (1.45%) Ansible
3 13 (1.45%) Grafana
4 11 (1.23%) Hadoop YARN
5 7 (0.78%) Prometheus
6 5 (0.56%) Puppet
7 3 (0.33%) Argo
7 3 (0.33%) Control-M
7 3 (0.33%) Kibana
7 3 (0.33%) logstash
7 3 (0.33%) Oozie
8 2 (0.22%) Kubeflow
8 2 (0.22%) Single Sign-On
9 1 (0.11%) Apache Ranger
9 1 (0.11%) Kustomize
9 1 (0.11%) Systems Management Server (SMS)
9 1 (0.11%) vCenter Server
Vendors
1 273 (30.47%) Databricks
2 113 (12.61%) Microsoft
3 45 (5.02%) Google
4 29 (3.24%) Oracle
5 20 (2.23%) Informatica
6 17 (1.90%) Palantir
7 15 (1.67%) Foundry
8 14 (1.56%) OpenAI
8 14 (1.56%) Talend
9 13 (1.45%) SAP
10 12 (1.34%) Salesforce
11 8 (0.89%) Cloudera
11 8 (0.89%) Virgin Media
12 6 (0.67%) Denodo
12 6 (0.67%) Guidewire
13 5 (0.56%) MicroStrategy
13 5 (0.56%) ServiceNow
14 4 (0.45%) Automation Anywhere
14 4 (0.45%) IBM
14 4 (0.45%) UiPath