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

6 months to
29 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 91 155 188
Rank change year-on-year +64 +33 +29
Contract jobs citing Data Engineering 1,580 623 500
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.89% 1.91% 1.32%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.43% 2.11% 1.54%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,104 389 362
10th Percentile £400 £343 £400
25th Percentile £445 £413 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £515 £550
Median % change year-on-year +1.94% -6.36% -8.33%
75th Percentile £638 £638 £663
90th Percentile £725 £740 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £463 £500
% change year-on-year +8.11% -7.50% -9.09%
Number of hourly rates quoted 15 6 7
10th Percentile - £37.11 £23.72
25th Percentile £21.25 £42.03 £25.93
Median hourly rate £44.50 £58.75 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year -24.26% -2.08% -17.81%
75th Percentile £72.08 £81.88 -
90th Percentile £79.67 £98.75 -
UK excluding London median hourly rate £41.00 £38.96 £60.00
% change year-on-year +5.24% -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 46,073 29,551 32,512
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.35% 90.64% 85.83%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,867 18,364 19,652
10th Percentile £325 £294 £308
25th Percentile £425 £403 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -2.78%
75th Percentile £630 £625 £638
90th Percentile £731 £725 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 3,200 1,847 1,359
10th Percentile £13.74 £14.25 £15.00
25th Percentile £17.23 £17.30 £20.06
Median hourly rate £39.75 £25.15 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year +58.05% -40.82% -1.16%
75th Percentile £65.88 £43.75 £65.00
90th Percentile £78.75 £65.00 £74.45
UK excluding London median hourly rate £40.00 £22.32 £43.00
% change year-on-year +79.25% -48.10% +1.18%

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 29 September 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 29 September 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 29 September 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 +51 1,404 £525 - 1,680
London +41 856 £550 - 1,039
UK excluding London +72 563 £500 +8.11% 742
Work from Home +64 511 £524 +4.75% 735
North of England +20 188 £475 +7.34% 243
Midlands +28 122 £475 +2.70% 102
West Midlands +26 100 £475 -13.64% 77
Yorkshire +29 95 £500 +5.26% 65
South East -16 93 £525 +19.32% 138
South West +33 86 £525 -3.45% 79
North West -28 58 £525 +22.09% 140
Scotland -6 50 £500 +7.82% 82
North East -7 37 £425 -17.07% 39
East of England -16 25 £550 +22.22% 43
East Midlands -5 22 £503 +15.57% 25
Wales -7 8 £450 -9.09% 12
Northern Ireland +6 4 £334 - 46

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
1 191 (12.09%) Apache Airflow
2 169 (10.70%) Apache Spark
3 141 (8.92%) Apache
4 41 (2.59%) Confluence
5 32 (2.03%) SAS
6 22 (1.39%) Jupyter
7 16 (1.01%) Palantir Foundry
8 15 (0.95%) SharePoint
9 5 (0.32%) Apache Solr
9 5 (0.32%) Apache Superset
9 5 (0.32%) ArcGIS
10 3 (0.19%) nginx
10 3 (0.19%) PowerExchange
11 1 (0.063%) Apache Pulsar
11 1 (0.063%) Apache Synapse
11 1 (0.063%) Ethereum
11 1 (0.063%) GeoServer
11 1 (0.063%) Hyperledger
11 1 (0.063%) Oracle Workflow
11 1 (0.063%) SugarCRM
Applications
1 11 (0.70%) Microsoft Excel
2 7 (0.44%) Chatbot
3 6 (0.38%) Spreadsheet
4 3 (0.19%) Microsoft Office
5 2 (0.13%) MS Visio
6 1 (0.063%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 1 (0.063%) Notion
Business Applications
1 11 (0.70%) Aladdin
2 7 (0.44%) Dynamics CRM
3 4 (0.25%) NetSuite
3 4 (0.25%) Sage X3
3 4 (0.25%) Salesforce CRM
4 3 (0.19%) SAP S/4HANA
4 3 (0.19%) Workday HCM
5 2 (0.13%) BambooHR
5 2 (0.13%) Endur
5 2 (0.13%) Oracle Assets
5 2 (0.13%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
5 2 (0.13%) Temenos T24
6 1 (0.063%) Cloudability
6 1 (0.063%) Distributed Ledger
6 1 (0.063%) FIS Private Capital Suite
6 1 (0.063%) Markit EDM
6 1 (0.063%) MIS ActiveH
6 1 (0.063%) Oracle EBS
6 1 (0.063%) R3 Corda
6 1 (0.063%) SAP Oil and Gas
Cloud Services
1 655 (41.46%) Azure
2 585 (37.03%) AWS
3 296 (18.73%) Power Platform
4 269 (17.03%) Snowflake
5 240 (15.19%) dbt
6 236 (14.94%) GCP
7 181 (11.46%) Amazon S3
8 177 (11.20%) Azure Data Factory
9 145 (9.18%) Serverless
10 132 (8.35%) Azure DevOps
11 122 (7.72%) Azure Synapse Analytics
11 122 (7.72%) GitHub
12 121 (7.66%) AWS Lambda
13 80 (5.06%) Azure Databricks
14 65 (4.11%) GitHub Actions
15 54 (3.42%) Amazon EMR
16 42 (2.66%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 38 (2.41%) Amazon Bedrock
18 33 (2.09%) Microsoft Purview
19 32 (2.03%) Azure AI
Communications & Networking
1 6 (0.38%) DNS
2 5 (0.32%) Broadband
3 4 (0.25%) Firewall
3 4 (0.25%) Network Security
4 1 (0.063%) HTTP
4 1 (0.063%) HTTPS
4 1 (0.063%) Internet
4 1 (0.063%) MIMO
4 1 (0.063%) MQTT
4 1 (0.063%) Radio Access Network
4 1 (0.063%) SMS
4 1 (0.063%) SSL
4 1 (0.063%) TCP/IP
4 1 (0.063%) tcpdump
4 1 (0.063%) Wireshark
Database & Business Intelligence
1 328 (20.76%) Data Warehouse
2 283 (17.91%) Power BI
3 209 (13.23%) Data Lake
4 180 (11.39%) Metadata
5 126 (7.97%) BigQuery
6 110 (6.96%) Amazon Redshift
7 104 (6.58%) Delta Lake
8 85 (5.38%) Big Data
9 78 (4.94%) Amazon Athena
10 76 (4.81%) Tableau
11 61 (3.86%) Snowflake Schema
12 58 (3.67%) SQL Server
13 51 (3.23%) PostgreSQL
14 50 (3.16%) Relational Database
15 44 (2.78%) NoSQL
16 41 (2.59%) Looker
17 35 (2.22%) Azure SQL Database
18 31 (1.96%) Amazon RDS
18 31 (1.96%) Data Vault
19 25 (1.58%) Semantic Layer
Development Applications
1 180 (11.39%) Git
2 93 (5.89%) GitLab
3 69 (4.37%) JIRA
4 27 (1.71%) Jenkins
5 26 (1.65%) MLflow
6 8 (0.51%) Bitbucket
6 8 (0.51%) Claude Code
6 8 (0.51%) ERwin
6 8 (0.51%) RStudio
6 8 (0.51%) Terragrunt
7 7 (0.44%) Selenium
8 4 (0.25%) ER Studio
9 3 (0.19%) Artifactory
9 3 (0.19%) Atlassian Bamboo
9 3 (0.19%) Postman
9 3 (0.19%) SonarQube
9 3 (0.19%) TeamCity
10 2 (0.13%) Cucumber
10 2 (0.13%) Sonatype Nexus
10 2 (0.13%) Yeoman
General
1 405 (25.63%) Social Skills
2 355 (22.47%) Finance
3 248 (15.70%) Analytical Skills
4 167 (10.57%) Public Sector
5 141 (8.92%) Banking
6 54 (3.42%) Marketing
7 36 (2.28%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 34 (2.15%) Retail
9 25 (1.58%) Investment Banking
10 24 (1.52%) Front Office
11 20 (1.27%) Documentation Skills
12 19 (1.20%) Pharmaceutical
13 18 (1.14%) Law
13 18 (1.14%) Manufacturing
14 14 (0.89%) Publishing
14 14 (0.89%) Telecoms
15 13 (0.82%) Back Office
15 13 (0.82%) Police
16 12 (0.76%) Billing
16 12 (0.76%) Influencing Skills
Job Titles
1 743 (47.03%) Data Engineer
2 251 (15.89%) Senior
3 177 (11.20%) Lead
4 167 (10.57%) Architect
5 160 (10.13%) Senior Data Engineer
6 97 (6.14%) Developer
7 90 (5.70%) Data Architect
8 77 (4.87%) Databricks Engineer
9 75 (4.75%) AWS Engineer
10 69 (4.37%) Azure Engineer
10 69 (4.37%) Snowflake Engineer
11 67 (4.24%) Analyst
12 65 (4.11%) AWS Data Engineer
13 60 (3.80%) Databricks Data Engineer
14 52 (3.29%) Lead Data Engineer
14 52 (3.29%) Snowflake Data Engineer
15 51 (3.23%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
16 47 (2.97%) Azure Data Engineer
16 47 (2.97%) Python Engineer
17 40 (2.53%) Consultant
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 234 (14.81%) PySpark
2 233 (14.75%) Terraform
3 113 (7.15%) Kafka
4 60 (3.80%) REST
5 34 (2.15%) JSON
6 32 (2.03%) React
7 27 (1.71%) .NET
8 23 (1.46%) Pandas
9 19 (1.20%) LangChain
10 17 (1.08%) PyTorch
11 16 (1.01%) FastAPI
11 16 (1.01%) pytest
12 14 (0.89%) TensorFlow
12 14 (0.89%) XML
13 13 (0.82%) LangGraph
13 13 (0.82%) RESTful
13 13 (0.82%) scikit-learn
14 12 (0.76%) NumPy
14 12 (0.76%) Streamlit
15 11 (0.70%) RabbitMQ
Miscellaneous
1 208 (13.16%) Cloud Native
2 83 (5.25%) Data Structures
3 79 (5.00%) Onboarding
4 64 (4.05%) Product Ownership
5 54 (3.42%) AI Agents
5 54 (3.42%) Legacy Systems
6 50 (3.16%) Distributed Systems
7 25 (1.58%) Data Protection Act
8 22 (1.39%) Enterprise Software
9 19 (1.20%) Distributed Computing
10 18 (1.14%) Virtual Team
11 17 (1.08%) Life Science
11 17 (1.08%) Management Information System
11 17 (1.08%) NHS
12 16 (1.01%) Greenfield Project
13 15 (0.95%) Analytical Mindset
13 15 (0.95%) Data Fabric
13 15 (0.95%) Marketing Technology
14 14 (0.89%) Algorithms
14 14 (0.89%) Clustering
Operating Systems
1 30 (1.90%) Linux
2 24 (1.52%) Unix
3 7 (0.44%) Windows
4 1 (0.063%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 1 (0.063%) Robot Operating System
4 1 (0.063%) Ubuntu
4 1 (0.063%) Windows Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 774 (48.99%) Data Pipeline
2 735 (46.52%) Analytics
3 619 (39.18%) Data Modelling
4 567 (35.89%) CI/CD
5 545 (34.49%) ETL
6 501 (31.71%) AI
7 402 (25.44%) Agile
8 373 (23.61%) DevOps
9 367 (23.23%) Business Intelligence
10 347 (21.96%) Data Governance
11 285 (18.04%) Stakeholder Management
12 276 (17.47%) Machine Learning
13 256 (16.20%) Data Transformation
14 248 (15.70%) Infrastructure as Code
15 246 (15.57%) Migration
16 243 (15.38%) Validation
17 242 (15.32%) Data Architecture
18 238 (15.06%) Problem-Solving
19 234 (14.81%) Data Integration
20 228 (14.43%) Decision-Making
Programming Languages
1 862 (54.56%) SQL
2 837 (52.97%) Python
3 107 (6.77%) Java
4 47 (2.97%) Scala
5 41 (2.59%) Data Analysis Expressions
5 41 (2.59%) PowerShell
6 36 (2.28%) C#
7 34 (2.15%) Bash
8 31 (1.96%) JavaScript
9 24 (1.52%) R
10 19 (1.20%) PL/SQL
10 19 (1.20%) T-SQL
11 16 (1.01%) Bicep
12 14 (0.89%) TypeScript
13 12 (0.76%) Kusto Query Language
14 10 (0.63%) Shell Script
14 10 (0.63%) SPARQL
15 9 (0.57%) Go
16 8 (0.51%) Cypher
16 8 (0.51%) SAS Macro
Qualifications
1 292 (18.48%) Security Cleared
2 245 (15.51%) SC Cleared
3 78 (4.94%) Degree
4 36 (2.28%) Computer Science Degree
5 34 (2.15%) Azure Certification
6 33 (2.09%) AWS Certification
6 33 (2.09%) DV Cleared
7 32 (2.03%) BPSS Clearance
8 19 (1.20%) Master's Degree
9 14 (0.89%) DBS Check
10 12 (0.76%) SnowPro
11 11 (0.70%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
12 8 (0.51%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
12 8 (0.51%) Microsoft Certification
13 5 (0.32%) CSPO
13 5 (0.32%) PMI Certification
13 5 (0.32%) PMP
13 5 (0.32%) TOGAF Certification
14 4 (0.25%) Microsoft Certified Professional
14 4 (0.25%) Tableau Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 523 (33.10%) Data Quality
2 80 (5.06%) QA
3 62 (3.92%) GDPR
4 30 (1.90%) Accessibility
5 12 (0.76%) SLA
6 7 (0.44%) Disclosure Scotland
7 5 (0.32%) GRC
8 4 (0.25%) NCSC
8 4 (0.25%) PMO
9 3 (0.19%) Actionable Recommendations
9 3 (0.19%) EU AI Act
9 3 (0.19%) ISO/IEC 27001
9 3 (0.19%) MiFID
9 3 (0.19%) NIST
10 2 (0.13%) California Consumer Privacy Act
10 2 (0.13%) COPPA
10 2 (0.13%) EMIR
10 2 (0.13%) IFRS
10 2 (0.13%) IFRS 9
10 2 (0.13%) Sarbanes-Oxley
System Software
1 131 (8.29%) Docker
2 5 (0.32%) Active Directory
3 1 (0.063%) Oracle RAC
3 1 (0.063%) Virtual Machines
Systems Management
1 108 (6.84%) Kubernetes
2 30 (1.90%) Grafana
3 23 (1.46%) Ansible
4 11 (0.70%) Prometheus
5 8 (0.51%) Control-M
5 8 (0.51%) Kibana
6 3 (0.19%) logstash
7 2 (0.13%) Argo
7 2 (0.13%) Puppet
7 2 (0.13%) Single Sign-On
8 1 (0.063%) Cilium
8 1 (0.063%) Data Guard
8 1 (0.063%) HAProxy
8 1 (0.063%) IBM Guardium
8 1 (0.063%) Kustomize
8 1 (0.063%) Nagios
8 1 (0.063%) Oracle Enterprise Manager
8 1 (0.063%) Oracle RMAN
8 1 (0.063%) Progress Chef
8 1 (0.063%) QRadar
Vendors
1 456 (28.86%) Databricks
2 265 (16.77%) Microsoft
3 94 (5.95%) Google
4 76 (4.81%) Oracle
5 60 (3.80%) Informatica
6 31 (1.96%) Salesforce
7 30 (1.90%) SAP
8 27 (1.71%) Foundry
8 27 (1.71%) Talend
9 24 (1.52%) Palantir
10 21 (1.33%) OpenAI
11 15 (0.95%) Teradata
12 13 (0.82%) Cloudera
13 12 (0.76%) Trend Micro
14 11 (0.70%) Adobe
14 11 (0.70%) ServiceNow
15 8 (0.51%) Denodo
15 8 (0.51%) Splunk
16 7 (0.44%) Hitachi
17 6 (0.38%) MicroStrategy