Data Engineering Contracts

Data Engineering
UK

The table below provides summary statistics for contract job vacancies requiring Data Engineering skills. It includes a benchmarking guide to the contractor rates offered in vacancies that cited Data Engineering over the 6 months leading up to 3 July 2025, comparing them to the same period in the previous two years.

6 months to
3 Jul 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 157 205 217
Rank change year-on-year +48 +12 +29
Contract jobs citing Data Engineering 552 506 681
As % of all contract jobs advertised in the UK 1.76% 1.16% 1.22%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 1.94% 1.37% 1.36%
Number of daily rates quoted 369 374 451
10th Percentile £366 £366 £463
25th Percentile £450 £463 £513
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £550 £625
Median % change year-on-year -4.55% -12.00% +6.38%
75th Percentile £663 £675 £738
90th Percentile £803 £763 £825
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £505 £575
% change year-on-year -5.94% -12.17% +4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 7 15 24
10th Percentile £24.75 £30.72 £19.00
25th Percentile £28.13 £31.25 £20.10
Median hourly rate £38.96 £35.00 £73.00
Median % change year-on-year +11.31% -52.05% +46.00%
75th Percentile £53.75 £60.00 £79.13
90th Percentile £58.25 - £90.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £28.75 £60.00 £54.00
% change year-on-year -52.08% +11.11% +8.00%

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 28,438 37,047 49,962
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 90.78% 85.22% 89.53%
Number of daily rates quoted 17,912 23,635 34,414
10th Percentile £300 £300 £325
25th Percentile £405 £413 £438
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £505 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year -3.81% -4.55% +1.38%
75th Percentile £625 £638 £650
90th Percentile £738 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £500 £500
% change year-on-year -5.00% - -
Number of hourly rates quoted 1,399 2,530 1,711
10th Percentile £14.20 £12.75 £11.87
25th Percentile £17.44 £16.06 £16.25
Median hourly rate £25.15 £37.50 £36.00
Median % change year-on-year -32.93% +4.17% +38.46%
75th Percentile £53.75 £61.30 £64.81
90th Percentile £70.00 £72.50 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £24.66 £38.12 £35.00
% change year-on-year -35.31% +8.91% +64.71%

Data Engineering
Job Vacancy Trend

Job postings citing Data Engineering as a proportion of all IT jobs advertised.

Job vacancy trend for Data Engineering in the UK

Data Engineering
Contractor Daily Rate Trend

3-month moving average daily rate quoted in jobs citing Data Engineering.

Daily rate trend for Data Engineering in the UK

Data Engineering
Daily Rate Histogram

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Data Engineering over the 6 months to 3 July 2025.

Daily rate histogram for Data Engineering in the UK

Data Engineering
Contractor Hourly Rate Trend

3-month moving average hourly rates quoted in jobs citing Data Engineering.

Hourly rate trend for Data Engineering in the UK

Data Engineering
Hourly Rate Histogram

Hourly rate distribution of jobs citing Data Engineering over the 6 months to 3 July 2025.

Hourly rate histogram for Data Engineering in the UK

Data Engineering
Top 17 Contract 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 3 July 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 +47 494 £527 -8.39% 3,270
London +53 328 £550 -8.33% 1,900
Work from Home +27 188 £525 - 1,471
UK excluding London +36 177 £475 -5.94% 1,565
North of England +9 52 £500 -1.96% 421
South East +35 33 £500 +1.83% 355
Midlands -1 30 £463 -26.00% 232
Scotland +14 25 £475 +4.86% 133
North West +2 25 £500 -1.96% 226
Yorkshire +7 22 £463 -7.50% 153
South West +40 19 £563 +25.00% 191
West Midlands -15 16 £580 -8.48% 128
East of England +28 15 £336 -44.05% 157
East Midlands +8 11 £463 -15.91% 103
North East - 5 £500 - 42
Wales +8 3 £257 -53.29% 47
Channel Islands - 1 £760 -

Data Engineering
Co-occurring Skills and Capabilities by Category

The follow tables expand on the table above by listing co-occurrences grouped by category. The same employment type, locality and period is covered with up to 20 co-occurrences shown in each of the following categories:

Application Platforms
1 84 (15.22%) Apache Airflow
2 80 (14.49%) Apache Spark
3 61 (11.05%) Apache
4 8 (1.45%) Confluence
5 6 (1.09%) SharePoint
6 3 (0.54%) Jupyter
6 3 (0.54%) Luigi
7 1 (0.18%) Adobe Experience Manager
7 1 (0.18%) ArcGIS
7 1 (0.18%) CMS
7 1 (0.18%) nginx
7 1 (0.18%) SAS
Applications
1 16 (2.90%) Microsoft Excel
2 4 (0.72%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 3 (0.54%) Microsoft Office
4 2 (0.36%) Maple
4 2 (0.36%) Microsoft Project
5 1 (0.18%) CATIA
Business Applications
1 5 (0.91%) Payment Gateway
2 4 (0.72%) Aladdin
3 2 (0.36%) SAP PM
4 1 (0.18%) Adobe Campaign
4 1 (0.18%) Endur
4 1 (0.18%) SAP Oil and Gas
4 1 (0.18%) SAP S/4HANA
Cloud Services
1 248 (44.93%) Azure
2 231 (41.85%) AWS
3 121 (21.92%) GCP
4 111 (20.11%) Power Platform
5 76 (13.77%) Azure Data Factory
6 75 (13.59%) dbt
7 66 (11.96%) Serverless
8 62 (11.23%) Snowflake
9 54 (9.78%) AWS Lambda
9 54 (9.78%) Azure Synapse Analytics
10 46 (8.33%) Azure DevOps
11 44 (7.97%) Amazon S3
12 43 (7.79%) GitHub
13 22 (3.99%) GitHub Actions
14 19 (3.44%) OpenShift
15 17 (3.08%) Amazon ECS
15 17 (3.08%) AWS CloudFormation
16 15 (2.72%) Cloud Computing
17 14 (2.54%) Azure Machine Learning
18 13 (2.36%) Amazon EMR
Communications & Networking
1 6 (1.09%) SAN
2 5 (0.91%) Firewall
2 5 (0.91%) TCP/IP
2 5 (0.91%) VPN
3 1 (0.18%) DNS
3 1 (0.18%) Intrusion Detection
3 1 (0.18%) Kerberos
3 1 (0.18%) Network Security
3 1 (0.18%) SSL
3 1 (0.18%) TETRA
Database & Business Intelligence
1 123 (22.28%) Data Warehouse
2 107 (19.38%) Power BI
3 77 (13.95%) Data Lake
4 70 (12.68%) Big Data
5 47 (8.51%) Metadata
6 45 (8.15%) BigQuery
7 38 (6.88%) Amazon Athena
7 38 (6.88%) Tableau
8 37 (6.70%) NoSQL
9 34 (6.16%) Amazon Redshift
10 32 (5.80%) Relational Database
11 31 (5.62%) Delta Lake
12 29 (5.25%) Hadoop
13 24 (4.35%) SQL Server
14 23 (4.17%) PostgreSQL
15 22 (3.99%) Dremio
16 21 (3.80%) Amazon RDS
17 20 (3.62%) Apache Iceberg
18 19 (3.44%) Azure SQL Database
19 18 (3.26%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 50 (9.06%) Git
2 20 (3.62%) JIRA
3 17 (3.08%) Artifactory
3 17 (3.08%) Jenkins
4 10 (1.81%) MLflow
5 5 (0.91%) GitLab
6 4 (0.72%) Terragrunt
7 3 (0.54%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
7 3 (0.54%) Visual Studio
8 2 (0.36%) Bitbucket
8 2 (0.36%) PROIV
9 1 (0.18%) Atlassian Bamboo
9 1 (0.18%) ERwin
9 1 (0.18%) IBM UrbanCode
9 1 (0.18%) Rational DOORS
9 1 (0.18%) Robot Framework
9 1 (0.18%) SonarQube
General
1 156 (28.26%) Social Skills
2 151 (27.36%) Finance
3 87 (15.76%) Analytical Skills
4 64 (11.59%) Banking
5 43 (7.79%) Public Sector
6 35 (6.34%) Investment Banking
7 32 (5.80%) Front Office
8 15 (2.72%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 15 (2.72%) Retail
9 13 (2.36%) Marketing
10 12 (2.17%) Presentation Skills
10 12 (2.17%) Telecoms
11 9 (1.63%) Retail Banking
12 6 (1.09%) Financial Institution
13 5 (0.91%) Automotive
13 5 (0.91%) Corporate Banking
13 5 (0.91%) Influencing Skills
13 5 (0.91%) Military
13 5 (0.91%) Police
14 4 (0.72%) Documentation Skills
Job Titles
1 273 (49.46%) Data Engineer
2 73 (13.22%) Senior
3 63 (11.41%) Architect
4 57 (10.33%) Developer
5 53 (9.60%) Senior Data Engineer
6 45 (8.15%) Azure Engineer
6 45 (8.15%) Lead
7 41 (7.43%) Azure Data Engineer
8 40 (7.25%) AWS Engineer
9 35 (6.34%) Python Engineer
10 32 (5.80%) Data Architect
11 28 (5.07%) Python Developer
12 24 (4.35%) AWS Data Engineer
13 23 (4.17%) DevOps Engineer
14 22 (3.99%) Analyst
15 20 (3.62%) Lead Data Engineer
16 19 (3.44%) Cloud Engineer
17 18 (3.26%) AWS DevOps
17 18 (3.26%) AWS DevOps Engineer
17 18 (3.26%) Python Data Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 85 (15.40%) PySpark
2 72 (13.04%) Kafka
3 31 (5.62%) Pandas
4 29 (5.25%) NumPy
5 24 (4.35%) React
6 21 (3.80%) SciPy
7 20 (3.62%) AngularJS
7 20 (3.62%) FastAPI
8 18 (3.26%) Flask
9 16 (2.90%) Polars
9 16 (2.90%) Vue
10 15 (2.72%) J2EE
10 15 (2.72%) TensorFlow
11 12 (2.17%) PyTorch
12 8 (1.45%) Jinja
13 7 (1.27%) ARM Templates
13 7 (1.27%) JSON
13 7 (1.27%) LangChain
14 6 (1.09%) Play Framework
14 6 (1.09%) REST
Miscellaneous
1 35 (6.34%) Cloud Native
2 20 (3.62%) Algorithms
3 19 (3.44%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
4 16 (2.90%) Data Structures
5 15 (2.72%) Hedge funds
6 11 (1.99%) Greenfield Project
6 11 (1.99%) Onboarding
7 10 (1.81%) Product Ownership
7 10 (1.81%) Renewable Energy
8 9 (1.63%) Management Information System
9 8 (1.45%) Data Protection Act
9 8 (1.45%) Fixed Income
9 8 (1.45%) Legacy Systems
10 6 (1.09%) Hybrid Cloud
11 5 (0.91%) AI Agents
11 5 (0.91%) Distributed Computing
11 5 (0.91%) Equities
11 5 (0.91%) Replication
12 4 (0.72%) NHS
12 4 (0.72%) Reference Data
Operating Systems
1 37 (6.70%) Linux
2 7 (1.27%) Unix
3 6 (1.09%) Debian
3 6 (1.09%) Ubuntu
3 6 (1.09%) Windows
4 4 (0.72%) Windows Server
4 4 (0.72%) Windows Server 2016
5 1 (0.18%) Android
Processes & Methodologies
1 230 (41.67%) ETL
2 213 (38.59%) Analytics
3 212 (38.41%) Data Pipeline
4 180 (32.61%) Data Modelling
5 170 (30.80%) CI/CD
6 155 (28.08%) Agile
7 139 (25.18%) DevOps
8 138 (25.00%) Business Intelligence
9 116 (21.01%) Data Governance
10 112 (20.29%) Data Science
11 108 (19.57%) Problem-Solving
12 104 (18.84%) Machine Learning
13 90 (16.30%) Artificial Intelligence
14 87 (15.76%) Data Integration
15 83 (15.04%) Visualisation
16 78 (14.13%) Decision-Making
17 64 (11.59%) Software Engineering
18 57 (10.33%) Data Architecture
19 55 (9.96%) Data Visualisation
20 54 (9.78%) Data Analytics
Programming Languages
1 341 (61.78%) Python
2 290 (52.54%) SQL
3 86 (15.58%) Java
4 63 (11.41%) Scala
5 25 (4.53%) JavaScript
6 22 (3.99%) C#
7 19 (3.44%) C++
8 15 (2.72%) Go
9 14 (2.54%) Data Analysis Expressions
9 14 (2.54%) Rust
10 12 (2.17%) R
11 10 (1.81%) Bicep
12 9 (1.63%) TypeScript
13 7 (1.27%) T-SQL
14 4 (0.72%) PL/SQL
14 4 (0.72%) PowerShell
15 3 (0.54%) Shell Script
16 2 (0.36%) Kusto Query Language
17 1 (0.18%) CodeQL
17 1 (0.18%) LookML
Qualifications
1 80 (14.49%) Security Cleared
2 58 (10.51%) Degree
2 58 (10.51%) SC Cleared
3 32 (5.80%) Computer Science Degree
4 25 (4.53%) Azure Certification
5 22 (3.99%) AWS Certification
6 18 (3.26%) Master's Degree
7 16 (2.90%) DV Cleared
8 10 (1.81%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
9 8 (1.45%) Microsoft Certification
10 6 (1.09%) PMI Certification
10 6 (1.09%) PMP
11 3 (0.54%) BPSS Clearance
12 2 (0.36%) SnowPro
12 2 (0.36%) TOGAF Certification
13 1 (0.18%) CTC Cleared
13 1 (0.18%) IBM Certification
13 1 (0.18%) ITIL Certification
13 1 (0.18%) MCP
13 1 (0.18%) PhD
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 125 (22.64%) Data Quality
2 20 (3.62%) GDPR
3 17 (3.08%) QA
4 16 (2.90%) Accessibility
5 4 (0.72%) NIST
6 3 (0.54%) Disclosure Scotland
6 3 (0.54%) HIPAA
6 3 (0.54%) PMO
7 2 (0.36%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 1 (0.18%) GRC
8 1 (0.18%) ISO/IEC 20000
8 1 (0.18%) NCSC
System Software
1 73 (13.22%) Docker
2 4 (0.72%) Active Directory
3 3 (0.54%) HDFS
4 1 (0.18%) Tivoli Workload Scheduler
Systems Management
1 103 (18.66%) Terraform
2 76 (13.77%) Kubernetes
3 7 (1.27%) Grafana
4 4 (0.72%) Ansible
4 4 (0.72%) Prometheus
5 3 (0.54%) Kibana
5 3 (0.54%) Kubeflow
5 3 (0.54%) logstash
5 3 (0.54%) Single Sign-On
6 2 (0.36%) Kustomize
7 1 (0.18%) Apache Ranger
7 1 (0.18%) Control-M
7 1 (0.18%) Demisto
7 1 (0.18%) Fluentd
7 1 (0.18%) Hadoop YARN
7 1 (0.18%) HAProxy
7 1 (0.18%) Tivoli
7 1 (0.18%) vCenter Server
Vendors
1 151 (27.36%) Databricks
2 82 (14.86%) Microsoft
3 52 (9.42%) Google
4 32 (5.80%) Oracle
5 19 (3.44%) Informatica
6 11 (1.99%) Palantir
6 11 (1.99%) SAP
7 8 (1.45%) Talend
8 7 (1.27%) Foundry
8 7 (1.27%) IBM
8 7 (1.27%) VMware
9 6 (1.09%) Cloudera
9 6 (1.09%) Red Hat
9 6 (1.09%) Splunk
10 5 (0.91%) MicroStrategy
10 5 (0.91%) Salesforce
11 4 (0.72%) OpenAI
11 4 (0.72%) StreamSets
11 4 (0.72%) Virgin Media
12 3 (0.54%) Dataiku