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

6 months to
28 Apr 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 92 160 211
Rank change year-on-year +68 +51 -6
Contract jobs citing Data Engineering 1,301 522 495
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.77% 1.78% 1.14%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.27% 1.96% 1.32%
Number of daily rates quoted 901 370 369
10th Percentile £400 £400 £375
25th Percentile £450 £450 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year - -4.55% -8.33%
75th Percentile £615 £675 £663
90th Percentile £749 £838 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £480 £550
% change year-on-year +4.17% -12.73% +2.04%
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% -35.48%
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 39,735 26,655 37,382
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.58% 90.81% 86.33%
Number of daily rates quoted 25,044 17,231 24,097
10th Percentile £319 £306 £300
25th Percentile £413 £413 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £523 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.40% -0.38% -4.55%
75th Percentile £613 £631 £638
90th Percentile £725 £744 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £485 £485 £500
% change year-on-year - -3.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,400 1,068 2,424
10th Percentile £14.96 £14.84 £12.75
25th Percentile £19.98 £18.51 £16.00
Median hourly rate £40.25 £29.15 £35.00
Median % change year-on-year +38.08% -16.71% -6.27%
75th Percentile £65.60 £62.24 £59.44
90th Percentile £78.75 £75.00 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £42.00 £28.00 £35.98
% change year-on-year +50.00% -22.17% -0.07%

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 28 April 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 28 April 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 28 April 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 +67 1,171 £525 -4.55% 380
London +63 729 £550 -4.35% 180
UK excluding London +72 455 £500 +4.17% 280
Work from Home +45 367 £539 -8.69% 195
North of England -3 124 £480 -4.00% 78
Midlands +24 123 £500 - 51
West Midlands +19 98 £500 -7.41% 38
South West +19 77 £525 -14.29% 34
Scotland +28 57 £440 -7.37% 16
South East -35 57 £550 +10.00% 76
Yorkshire -20 56 £480 -12.73% 20
North West -11 50 £500 +5.26% 40
East of England -19 23 £575 +54.08% 14
East Midlands -20 22 £450 -5.26% 13
North East -1 20 £475 - 18
Wales -14 5 £665 +181.78% 7
Northern Ireland - 2 £430 - 7

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
1 195 (14.99%) Apache Spark
2 129 (9.92%) Apache Airflow
3 87 (6.69%) Apache
4 34 (2.61%) SAS
5 17 (1.31%) Confluence
5 17 (1.31%) Palantir Foundry
6 8 (0.61%) Appian
7 7 (0.54%) Apache Superset
8 5 (0.38%) Jupyter
9 4 (0.31%) Microsoft Exchange
10 2 (0.15%) Apache Synapse
10 2 (0.15%) SharePoint
11 1 (0.077%) Adobe Experience Manager
11 1 (0.077%) ArcGIS
11 1 (0.077%) Camunda
11 1 (0.077%) CICS
11 1 (0.077%) CMS
11 1 (0.077%) IBM HTTP Server
Applications
1 27 (2.08%) Microsoft Excel
2 9 (0.69%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 8 (0.61%) Microsoft Office
4 7 (0.54%) Microsoft Project
5 6 (0.46%) Spreadsheet
6 4 (0.31%) Chatbot
7 3 (0.23%) MS Visio
7 3 (0.23%) Trello
Business Applications
1 5 (0.38%) BambooHR
2 4 (0.31%) Aladdin
2 4 (0.31%) Dynamics CRM
3 3 (0.23%) Salesforce CRM
3 3 (0.23%) SAP BPC
4 2 (0.15%) SAP S/4HANA
5 1 (0.077%) Actimize
5 1 (0.077%) Adobe Campaign
5 1 (0.077%) Markit EDM
5 1 (0.077%) Maximo
5 1 (0.077%) Misys Midas
5 1 (0.077%) Oracle Assets
5 1 (0.077%) SAP ECC
Cloud Services
1 585 (44.97%) Azure
2 467 (35.90%) AWS
3 284 (21.83%) Power Platform
4 195 (14.99%) Azure Data Factory
5 184 (14.14%) GCP
6 164 (12.61%) Snowflake
7 148 (11.38%) Amazon S3
7 148 (11.38%) Azure Synapse Analytics
8 133 (10.22%) GitHub
9 116 (8.92%) dbt
9 116 (8.92%) Serverless
10 102 (7.84%) Azure DevOps
11 94 (7.23%) AWS Lambda
12 80 (6.15%) GitHub Actions
13 64 (4.92%) AWS CloudFormation
14 39 (3.00%) AWS Step Functions
15 32 (2.46%) Amazon EMR
16 30 (2.31%) Amazon SageMaker
16 30 (2.31%) Collibra
17 27 (2.08%) Amazon CloudWatch
Communications & Networking
1 5 (0.38%) RTP
2 4 (0.31%) Cisco IPT
2 4 (0.31%) Firewall
2 4 (0.31%) Kerberos
3 3 (0.23%) VPN
4 2 (0.15%) Network Security
5 1 (0.077%) 4G
5 1 (0.077%) 5G
5 1 (0.077%) MIMO
5 1 (0.077%) SAN
5 1 (0.077%) SMS
5 1 (0.077%) TCP/IP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 260 (19.98%) Power BI
2 254 (19.52%) Data Warehouse
3 197 (15.14%) Data Lake
4 127 (9.76%) Metadata
5 99 (7.61%) Big Data
6 90 (6.92%) SQL Server
7 86 (6.61%) Delta Lake
8 82 (6.30%) NoSQL
9 72 (5.53%) Amazon Redshift
9 72 (5.53%) Tableau
10 67 (5.15%) Amazon Athena
10 67 (5.15%) BigQuery
11 66 (5.07%) Snowflake Schema
12 65 (5.00%) Azure SQL Database
13 57 (4.38%) Relational Database
14 55 (4.23%) PostgreSQL
15 52 (4.00%) Hadoop
16 37 (2.84%) SQL Server Integration Services
17 36 (2.77%) Spark SQL
18 25 (1.92%) Star Schema
Development Applications
1 165 (12.68%) Git
2 61 (4.69%) GitLab
3 47 (3.61%) MLflow
4 44 (3.38%) JIRA
5 34 (2.61%) Jenkins
6 7 (0.54%) SonarQube
7 5 (0.38%) Selenium
8 3 (0.23%) Postman
8 3 (0.23%) Robot Framework
8 3 (0.23%) Snyk
8 3 (0.23%) Terragrunt
9 2 (0.15%) Artifactory
9 2 (0.15%) Bitbucket
9 2 (0.15%) Visual Studio
10 1 (0.077%) ERwin
10 1 (0.077%) git-flow
10 1 (0.077%) Maven
10 1 (0.077%) Octopus Deploy
10 1 (0.077%) SoapUI
10 1 (0.077%) Visual Studio Code
General
1 326 (25.06%) Finance
2 311 (23.90%) Social Skills
3 201 (15.45%) Analytical Skills
4 110 (8.46%) Public Sector
5 78 (6.00%) Banking
6 24 (1.84%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 23 (1.77%) Documentation Skills
7 23 (1.77%) Retail
8 21 (1.61%) Marketing
9 17 (1.31%) Front Office
10 15 (1.15%) Telecoms
11 14 (1.08%) Legal
12 13 (1.00%) Influencing Skills
12 13 (1.00%) Investment Banking
13 12 (0.92%) Financial Institution
14 7 (0.54%) Law
14 7 (0.54%) Military
15 6 (0.46%) Back Office
15 6 (0.46%) Pharmaceutical
16 4 (0.31%) Electronics
Job Titles
1 598 (45.96%) Data Engineer
2 173 (13.30%) Senior
3 142 (10.91%) Lead
4 132 (10.15%) Architect
5 107 (8.22%) Senior Data Engineer
6 80 (6.15%) Developer
7 69 (5.30%) Data Architect
8 64 (4.92%) Azure Engineer
9 60 (4.61%) AWS Engineer
10 56 (4.30%) Analyst
11 54 (4.15%) Azure Data Engineer
11 54 (4.15%) Lead Data Engineer
12 45 (3.46%) Data Scientist
13 44 (3.38%) Snowflake Engineer
14 42 (3.23%) AWS Data Engineer
15 41 (3.15%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
15 41 (3.15%) Consultant
16 39 (3.00%) Solutions Architect
17 38 (2.92%) Snowflake Data Engineer
18 32 (2.46%) Data Analyst
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 218 (16.76%) PySpark
2 153 (11.76%) Kafka
3 61 (4.69%) Pandas
4 48 (3.69%) PyTorch
5 43 (3.31%) scikit-learn
6 39 (3.00%) NumPy
6 39 (3.00%) TensorFlow
7 28 (2.15%) REST
8 27 (2.08%) JSON
9 23 (1.77%) React
9 23 (1.77%) Spring
9 23 (1.77%) YAML
10 22 (1.69%) pytest
11 21 (1.61%) LangChain
12 20 (1.54%) RESTful
13 19 (1.46%) FastAPI
14 18 (1.38%) Great Expectations
15 16 (1.23%) Flask
15 16 (1.23%) Spring Boot
16 13 (1.00%) Django
Miscellaneous
1 177 (13.60%) Cloud Native
2 49 (3.77%) Distributed Systems
3 46 (3.54%) Product Ownership
4 39 (3.00%) Data Structures
5 38 (2.92%) Legacy Systems
6 32 (2.46%) Algorithms
7 29 (2.23%) AI Agents
7 29 (2.23%) Distributed Computing
8 26 (2.00%) Onboarding
9 21 (1.61%) Greenfield Project
10 20 (1.54%) Data Protection Act
11 19 (1.46%) Analytical Mindset
12 17 (1.31%) Hybrid Cloud
12 17 (1.31%) NHS
13 14 (1.08%) Self-Motivation
14 13 (1.00%) Clustering
14 13 (1.00%) Fixed Income
14 13 (1.00%) Management Information System
15 12 (0.92%) Virtual Team
16 10 (0.77%) Data Fabric
Operating Systems
1 29 (2.23%) Linux
2 18 (1.38%) Unix
3 8 (0.61%) VMS
4 3 (0.23%) Windows
5 2 (0.15%) Ubuntu
5 2 (0.15%) Windows Server
6 1 (0.077%) CentOS
6 1 (0.077%) Debian
Processes & Methodologies
1 660 (50.73%) Analytics
2 597 (45.89%) Data Pipeline
3 501 (38.51%) Data Modelling
4 496 (38.12%) ETL
5 457 (35.13%) CI/CD
6 368 (28.29%) AI
7 338 (25.98%) Agile
8 327 (25.13%) Business Intelligence
9 321 (24.67%) DevOps
10 319 (24.52%) Data Governance
11 265 (20.37%) Machine Learning
12 247 (18.99%) Problem-Solving
13 233 (17.91%) Data Science
14 198 (15.22%) Data Architecture
15 174 (13.37%) Decision-Making
16 164 (12.61%) Migration
17 154 (11.84%) Infrastructure as Code
18 151 (11.61%) Validation
19 131 (10.07%) Data Transformation
20 130 (9.99%) Data Integration
Programming Languages
1 706 (54.27%) SQL
2 698 (53.65%) Python
3 103 (7.92%) Java
4 64 (4.92%) Scala
5 43 (3.31%) Data Analysis Expressions
6 37 (2.84%) C#
7 30 (2.31%) Bash
8 25 (1.92%) T-SQL
9 24 (1.84%) PowerShell
10 23 (1.77%) JavaScript
11 22 (1.69%) R
12 17 (1.31%) Bicep
13 12 (0.92%) Shell Script
14 11 (0.85%) Go
15 10 (0.77%) TypeScript
16 9 (0.69%) PL/SQL
17 7 (0.54%) SAS Macro
18 5 (0.38%) Korn
19 3 (0.23%) C++
20 1 (0.077%) Groovy
Qualifications
1 262 (20.14%) Security Cleared
2 226 (17.37%) SC Cleared
3 102 (7.84%) Degree
4 42 (3.23%) Computer Science Degree
5 41 (3.15%) Azure Certification
6 38 (2.92%) Master's Degree
7 20 (1.54%) BPSS Clearance
8 18 (1.38%) AWS Certification
9 15 (1.15%) DV Cleared
10 9 (0.69%) Microsoft Certification
11 6 (0.46%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
11 6 (0.46%) SnowPro
12 5 (0.38%) DBS Check
12 5 (0.38%) PhD
13 4 (0.31%) Microsoft Certified Professional
14 3 (0.23%) IBM Certification
15 2 (0.15%) Tableau Certification
16 1 (0.077%) (ISC)2 CCSP
16 1 (0.077%) AWS Certified SysOps Administrator
16 1 (0.077%) CSPO
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 369 (28.36%) Data Quality
2 95 (7.30%) GDPR
3 50 (3.84%) QA
4 13 (1.00%) Sarbanes-Oxley
5 10 (0.77%) SLA
6 8 (0.61%) Accessibility
7 5 (0.38%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 4 (0.31%) HIPAA
8 4 (0.31%) MiFID
8 4 (0.31%) PERC
8 4 (0.31%) Solvency II
9 3 (0.23%) California Consumer Privacy Act
9 3 (0.23%) GRC
10 2 (0.15%) Actionable Recommendations
10 2 (0.15%) Disclosure Scotland
10 2 (0.15%) EMIR
10 2 (0.15%) NIST
10 2 (0.15%) PMO
10 2 (0.15%) SNOMED CT
10 2 (0.15%) SOC 2
System Software
1 136 (10.45%) Docker
2 6 (0.46%) HDFS
3 3 (0.23%) Virtual Machines
4 1 (0.077%) Active Directory
4 1 (0.077%) Apache ZooKeeper
Systems Management
1 177 (13.60%) Terraform
2 128 (9.84%) Kubernetes
3 29 (2.23%) Prometheus
4 22 (1.69%) Grafana
5 12 (0.92%) Ansible
6 5 (0.38%) Argo
7 4 (0.31%) 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 (0.077%) Apache Ranger
10 1 (0.077%) Control-M
10 1 (0.077%) HP Fortify
10 1 (0.077%) IBM Guardium
10 1 (0.077%) Oozie
Vendors
1 377 (28.98%) Databricks
2 207 (15.91%) Microsoft
3 64 (4.92%) Google
4 61 (4.69%) Informatica
5 43 (3.31%) Oracle
6 34 (2.61%) Talend
7 24 (1.84%) Foundry
8 22 (1.69%) OpenAI
9 21 (1.61%) SAP
10 19 (1.46%) Palantir
10 19 (1.46%) Splunk
11 16 (1.23%) Cloudera
12 13 (1.00%) ServiceNow
13 11 (0.85%) Salesforce
14 10 (0.77%) IBM
15 9 (0.69%) UiPath
16 8 (0.61%) Automation Anywhere
17 7 (0.54%) InterSystems
18 6 (0.46%) Denodo
18 6 (0.46%) MicroStrategy