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

6 months to
10 Oct 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 94 140 190
Rank change year-on-year +46 +50 +35
Contract jobs citing Data Engineering 1,609 670 497
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.95% 2.02% 1.31%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.48% 2.24% 1.52%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,114 412 365
10th Percentile £400 £338 £398
25th Percentile £440 £413 £468
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £520 £550
Median % change year-on-year +0.96% -5.45% -8.33%
75th Percentile £644 £640 £663
90th Percentile £738 £750 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £463 £550
% change year-on-year +8.11% -15.91% -3.13%
Number of hourly rates quoted 22 6 6
10th Percentile £21.25 £37.11 £23.31
25th Percentile £24.75 £42.03 £25.65
Median hourly rate £59.95 £58.75 £43.25
Median % change year-on-year +2.04% +35.84% -42.72%
75th Percentile £71.13 £81.88 £60.00
90th Percentile £82.63 £98.75 -
UK excluding London median hourly rate £62.40 £38.96 £60.00
% change year-on-year +60.16% -35.07% -23.08%

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 46,195 29,974 32,629
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.63% 90.49% 86.03%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,749 18,609 19,667
10th Percentile £325 £294 £308
25th Percentile £425 £404 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -2.78%
75th Percentile £638 £623 £638
90th Percentile £738 £725 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 3,350 1,884 1,294
10th Percentile £13.54 £14.35 £15.00
25th Percentile £17.00 £17.30 £20.03
Median hourly rate £37.50 £25.15 £40.16
Median % change year-on-year +49.11% -37.38% -8.38%
75th Percentile £65.00 £43.00 £65.00
90th Percentile £78.75 £65.00 £73.93
UK excluding London median hourly rate £37.50 £22.27 £41.50
% change year-on-year +68.43% -46.35% -2.35%

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 10 October 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 10 October 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 10 October 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 +44 1,424 £525 - 1,983
London +39 870 £550 - 1,282
UK excluding London +76 580 £500 +8.11% 795
Work from Home +51 513 £525 +1.94% 864
North of England +23 190 £475 +6.15% 280
Midlands +29 126 £475 +2.70% 96
West Midlands +26 104 £475 -17.39% 71
South East -15 96 £500 +12.36% 152
South West +41 91 £525 -14.29% 74
Yorkshire +33 88 £500 +5.26% 73
North West -23 65 £500 +14.94% 167
Scotland +7 57 £513 +23.68% 88
North East -11 37 £425 -5.56% 40
East Midlands -1 22 £503 +15.57% 25
East of England -29 20 £538 +13.16% 45
Wales -5 8 £450 -9.09% 20
Northern Ireland +10 5 £467 - 42

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
1 204 (12.68%) Apache Airflow
2 182 (11.31%) Apache Spark
3 164 (10.19%) Apache
4 40 (2.49%) Confluence
5 29 (1.80%) SAS
6 20 (1.24%) Jupyter
7 16 (0.99%) Palantir Foundry
8 15 (0.93%) SharePoint
9 5 (0.31%) Apache Solr
9 5 (0.31%) ArcGIS
10 4 (0.25%) nginx
11 3 (0.19%) Apache Superset
11 3 (0.19%) PowerExchange
12 1 (0.062%) Apache Pulsar
12 1 (0.062%) Ethereum
12 1 (0.062%) GeoServer
12 1 (0.062%) Hyperledger
12 1 (0.062%) Microsoft Exchange
12 1 (0.062%) Oracle Workflow
12 1 (0.062%) SugarCRM
Applications
1 14 (0.87%) Microsoft Excel
2 7 (0.44%) Chatbot
2 7 (0.44%) Spreadsheet
3 3 (0.19%) Microsoft Office
4 2 (0.12%) MS Visio
5 1 (0.062%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 1 (0.062%) Notion
Business Applications
1 11 (0.68%) Aladdin
2 5 (0.31%) Dynamics CRM
2 5 (0.31%) SAP S/4HANA
3 4 (0.25%) NetSuite
3 4 (0.25%) Sage X3
4 3 (0.19%) Cloudability
4 3 (0.19%) Salesforce CRM
4 3 (0.19%) Workday HCM
5 2 (0.12%) Endur
5 2 (0.12%) Oracle Assets
5 2 (0.12%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
5 2 (0.12%) Temenos T24
6 1 (0.062%) Distributed Ledger
6 1 (0.062%) FIS Private Capital Suite
6 1 (0.062%) Markit EDM
6 1 (0.062%) MIS ActiveH
6 1 (0.062%) Oracle EBS
6 1 (0.062%) R3 Corda
6 1 (0.062%) SAP ECC
6 1 (0.062%) SAP Oil and Gas
Cloud Services
1 674 (41.89%) Azure
2 592 (36.79%) AWS
3 304 (18.89%) Power Platform
4 276 (17.15%) Snowflake
5 252 (15.66%) GCP
6 246 (15.29%) dbt
7 190 (11.81%) Amazon S3
8 185 (11.50%) Azure Data Factory
9 145 (9.01%) Serverless
10 136 (8.45%) Azure DevOps
11 127 (7.89%) Azure Synapse Analytics
12 124 (7.71%) GitHub
13 120 (7.46%) AWS Lambda
14 82 (5.10%) Azure Databricks
15 63 (3.92%) GitHub Actions
16 53 (3.29%) Amazon EMR
17 42 (2.61%) Amazon CloudWatch
18 41 (2.55%) Amazon Bedrock
19 35 (2.18%) Microsoft Purview
20 33 (2.05%) Azure AI
Communications & Networking
1 8 (0.50%) Network Security
2 7 (0.44%) Broadband
2 7 (0.44%) DNS
3 5 (0.31%) Firewall
4 1 (0.062%) HTTP
4 1 (0.062%) HTTPS
4 1 (0.062%) Internet
4 1 (0.062%) MQTT
4 1 (0.062%) Radio Access Network
4 1 (0.062%) Reverse Proxy
4 1 (0.062%) SMS
4 1 (0.062%) SSL
4 1 (0.062%) TCP/IP
4 1 (0.062%) tcpdump
4 1 (0.062%) Wireshark
Database & Business Intelligence
1 331 (20.57%) Data Warehouse
2 292 (18.15%) Power BI
3 204 (12.68%) Data Lake
4 191 (11.87%) Metadata
5 126 (7.83%) BigQuery
6 112 (6.96%) Amazon Redshift
7 109 (6.77%) Delta Lake
8 83 (5.16%) Big Data
9 78 (4.85%) Amazon Athena
10 68 (4.23%) Tableau
11 61 (3.79%) Snowflake Schema
12 58 (3.60%) SQL Server
13 49 (3.05%) Relational Database
14 48 (2.98%) PostgreSQL
15 47 (2.92%) NoSQL
16 40 (2.49%) Looker
17 37 (2.30%) Azure SQL Database
18 35 (2.18%) Amazon RDS
19 31 (1.93%) Data Vault
20 28 (1.74%) Semantic Layer
Development Applications
1 183 (11.37%) Git
2 104 (6.46%) GitLab
3 63 (3.92%) JIRA
4 30 (1.86%) Jenkins
5 26 (1.62%) MLflow
6 9 (0.56%) Claude Code
7 8 (0.50%) Bitbucket
7 8 (0.50%) ERwin
7 8 (0.50%) RStudio
7 8 (0.50%) Terragrunt
8 7 (0.44%) Selenium
9 4 (0.25%) ER Studio
9 4 (0.25%) Postman
10 3 (0.19%) Atlassian Bamboo
10 3 (0.19%) Cucumber
10 3 (0.19%) TeamCity
11 2 (0.12%) Applitools
11 2 (0.12%) Artifactory
11 2 (0.12%) JMeter
11 2 (0.12%) SonarQube
General
1 422 (26.23%) Social Skills
2 360 (22.37%) Finance
3 247 (15.35%) Analytical Skills
4 164 (10.19%) Public Sector
5 144 (8.95%) Banking
6 53 (3.29%) Marketing
7 36 (2.24%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 32 (1.99%) Retail
9 29 (1.80%) Investment Banking
10 27 (1.68%) Front Office
11 21 (1.31%) Pharmaceutical
12 20 (1.24%) Law
13 19 (1.18%) Documentation Skills
14 18 (1.12%) Manufacturing
15 15 (0.93%) Billing
16 14 (0.87%) Police
16 14 (0.87%) Publishing
17 13 (0.81%) Back Office
17 13 (0.81%) Financial Institution
17 13 (0.81%) Telecoms
Job Titles
1 772 (47.98%) Data Engineer
2 254 (15.79%) Senior
3 185 (11.50%) Lead
4 169 (10.50%) Senior Data Engineer
5 157 (9.76%) Architect
6 95 (5.90%) Developer
7 83 (5.16%) Data Architect
8 79 (4.91%) Databricks Engineer
9 76 (4.72%) AWS Engineer
10 75 (4.66%) Snowflake Engineer
11 74 (4.60%) Analyst
12 68 (4.23%) Azure Engineer
13 65 (4.04%) AWS Data Engineer
14 62 (3.85%) Databricks Data Engineer
15 59 (3.67%) Snowflake Data Engineer
16 56 (3.48%) Lead Data Engineer
17 53 (3.29%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
18 51 (3.17%) Python Engineer
19 47 (2.92%) Azure Data Engineer
20 43 (2.67%) GCP Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 246 (15.29%) PySpark
2 236 (14.67%) Terraform
3 119 (7.40%) Kafka
4 68 (4.23%) REST
5 34 (2.11%) JSON
6 29 (1.80%) .NET
6 29 (1.80%) React
7 24 (1.49%) Pandas
8 23 (1.43%) LangChain
9 18 (1.12%) pytest
10 17 (1.06%) FastAPI
10 17 (1.06%) PyTorch
11 15 (0.93%) LangGraph
12 14 (0.87%) RabbitMQ
12 14 (0.87%) scikit-learn
12 14 (0.87%) TensorFlow
12 14 (0.87%) XML
13 13 (0.81%) NumPy
14 12 (0.75%) Apache NiFi
14 12 (0.75%) RESTful
Miscellaneous
1 214 (13.30%) Cloud Native
2 82 (5.10%) Data Structures
2 82 (5.10%) Onboarding
3 70 (4.35%) Product Ownership
4 58 (3.60%) AI Agents
5 53 (3.29%) Legacy Systems
6 51 (3.17%) Distributed Systems
7 29 (1.80%) Data Protection Act
8 24 (1.49%) Enterprise Software
9 22 (1.37%) Algorithms
10 21 (1.31%) Distributed Computing
11 20 (1.24%) Management Information System
12 19 (1.18%) Life Science
12 19 (1.18%) Virtual Team
13 17 (1.06%) Data Fabric
14 15 (0.93%) Clustering
14 15 (0.93%) Marketing Technology
15 14 (0.87%) Greenfield Project
15 14 (0.87%) Reference Data
16 13 (0.81%) Analytical Mindset
Operating Systems
1 32 (1.99%) Linux
2 23 (1.43%) Unix
3 9 (0.56%) Windows
4 1 (0.062%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 1 (0.062%) Robot Operating System
4 1 (0.062%) Ubuntu
4 1 (0.062%) Windows Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 804 (49.97%) Data Pipeline
2 737 (45.80%) Analytics
3 636 (39.53%) Data Modelling
4 598 (37.17%) CI/CD
5 561 (34.87%) ETL
6 517 (32.13%) AI
7 424 (26.35%) Agile
8 396 (24.61%) DevOps
9 379 (23.56%) Business Intelligence
10 358 (22.25%) Data Governance
11 292 (18.15%) Stakeholder Management
12 288 (17.90%) Machine Learning
13 263 (16.35%) Validation
14 259 (16.10%) Data Transformation
15 253 (15.72%) Data Integration
16 248 (15.41%) Infrastructure as Code
16 248 (15.41%) Migration
16 248 (15.41%) Problem-Solving
17 231 (14.36%) Data Architecture
18 229 (14.23%) Decision-Making
Programming Languages
1 893 (55.50%) SQL
2 870 (54.07%) Python
3 102 (6.34%) Java
4 45 (2.80%) Scala
5 44 (2.73%) Data Analysis Expressions
5 44 (2.73%) PowerShell
6 39 (2.42%) C#
7 35 (2.18%) Bash
8 31 (1.93%) JavaScript
9 24 (1.49%) R
10 20 (1.24%) PL/SQL
10 20 (1.24%) T-SQL
11 17 (1.06%) TypeScript
12 16 (0.99%) Bicep
13 14 (0.87%) Kusto Query Language
14 11 (0.68%) Shell Script
15 10 (0.62%) Go
15 10 (0.62%) SPARQL
16 9 (0.56%) Korn
17 8 (0.50%) SAS Macro
Qualifications
1 308 (19.14%) Security Cleared
2 253 (15.72%) SC Cleared
3 88 (5.47%) Degree
4 43 (2.67%) AWS Certification
4 43 (2.67%) Computer Science Degree
4 43 (2.67%) DV Cleared
5 39 (2.42%) Azure Certification
6 33 (2.05%) BPSS Clearance
7 19 (1.18%) Master's Degree
8 14 (0.87%) DBS Check
9 12 (0.75%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
9 12 (0.75%) SnowPro
10 9 (0.56%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
11 8 (0.50%) Microsoft Certification
12 7 (0.44%) TOGAF Certification
13 6 (0.37%) Microsoft Certified Professional
14 5 (0.31%) CSPO
14 5 (0.31%) PMI Certification
14 5 (0.31%) PMP
15 4 (0.25%) PhD
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 547 (34.00%) Data Quality
2 83 (5.16%) QA
3 61 (3.79%) GDPR
4 32 (1.99%) Accessibility
5 11 (0.68%) SLA
6 7 (0.44%) Disclosure Scotland
7 6 (0.37%) GRC
8 5 (0.31%) NCSC
9 4 (0.25%) California Consumer Privacy Act
9 4 (0.25%) EU AI Act
9 4 (0.25%) NIST
9 4 (0.25%) PMO
10 3 (0.19%) Actionable Recommendations
10 3 (0.19%) IFRS
10 3 (0.19%) IFRS 9
10 3 (0.19%) ISO/IEC 27001
10 3 (0.19%) MiFID
10 3 (0.19%) Sarbanes-Oxley
11 2 (0.12%) 21 CFR Part 11
11 2 (0.12%) PCI DSS
System Software
1 130 (8.08%) Docker
2 5 (0.31%) Active Directory
3 1 (0.062%) Oracle RAC
3 1 (0.062%) Virtual Machines
Systems Management
1 122 (7.58%) Kubernetes
2 34 (2.11%) Grafana
3 29 (1.80%) Ansible
4 17 (1.06%) Prometheus
5 8 (0.50%) Control-M
5 8 (0.50%) Kibana
6 3 (0.19%) logstash
7 2 (0.12%) Progress Chef
7 2 (0.12%) Puppet
7 2 (0.12%) Single Sign-On
8 1 (0.062%) Argo
8 1 (0.062%) Cilium
8 1 (0.062%) Data Guard
8 1 (0.062%) HAProxy
8 1 (0.062%) Kubeflow
8 1 (0.062%) Kustomize
8 1 (0.062%) Oracle Enterprise Manager
8 1 (0.062%) Oracle RMAN
8 1 (0.062%) QRadar
Vendors
1 466 (28.96%) Databricks
2 277 (17.22%) Microsoft
3 100 (6.22%) Google
4 81 (5.03%) Oracle
5 58 (3.60%) Informatica
6 34 (2.11%) SAP
7 30 (1.86%) Salesforce
8 27 (1.68%) Foundry
8 27 (1.68%) Talend
9 25 (1.55%) Palantir
10 22 (1.37%) OpenAI
11 16 (0.99%) Teradata
12 15 (0.93%) Cloudera
13 12 (0.75%) Trend Micro
14 11 (0.68%) Adobe
15 10 (0.62%) Denodo
16 9 (0.56%) Splunk
17 7 (0.44%) Hitachi
18 6 (0.37%) Bloomberg
18 6 (0.37%) InterSystems