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

6 months to
15 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 87 157 205
Rank change year-on-year +70 +48 +12
Contract jobs citing Data Engineering 1,527 575 500
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.90% 1.77% 1.17%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.41% 1.96% 1.37%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,066 380 371
10th Percentile £378 £363 £363
25th Percentile £440 £450 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year - -4.55% -12.00%
75th Percentile £627 £650 £688
90th Percentile £738 £800 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -13.04%
Number of hourly rates quoted 24 7 15
10th Percentile £46.53 £24.75 £30.72
25th Percentile £56.31 £28.13 £31.25
Median hourly rate £69.72 £38.96 £35.00
Median % change year-on-year +78.95% +11.31% -52.05%
75th Percentile £75.75 £53.75 £60.00
90th Percentile £89.25 £58.25 -
UK excluding London median hourly rate £69.22 £28.75 £60.00
% change year-on-year +140.77% -52.08% -17.81%

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 44,765 29,340 36,482
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 85.08% 90.42% 85.34%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,853 18,476 23,295
10th Percentile £325 £300 £304
25th Percentile £418 £405 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £520 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% -4.76% -4.55%
75th Percentile £624 £625 £638
90th Percentile £725 £738 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,647 1,521 2,449
10th Percentile £14.94 £14.20 £12.79
25th Percentile £20.09 £17.61 £16.25
Median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £38.12
Median % change year-on-year +74.79% -34.02% -4.70%
75th Percentile £68.50 £52.50 £61.30
90th Percentile £82.70 £70.00 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £45.25 £24.64 £38.12
% change year-on-year +83.64% -35.36% -0.99%

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 15 July 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 15 July 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 15 July 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 +62 1,355 £525 - 588
London +57 793 £550 - 290
UK excluding London +71 579 £500 +5.26% 410
Work from Home +62 497 £525 - 373
North of England +27 179 £475 -5.00% 115
Midlands +41 147 £475 +2.70% 60
West Midlands +28 124 £475 +10.21% 36
South West +31 86 £500 -4.76% 35
Yorkshire +3 81 £490 +5.95% 39
South East -29 75 £538 +13.16% 102
Scotland +23 59 £450 -5.26% 32
North West -12 59 £500 +2.56% 56
North East -3 41 £425 -15.00% 20
East of England -8 29 £575 +71.29% 32
East Midlands -3 20 £500 +8.11% 24
Wales -5 8 £450 +82.58% 17
Northern Ireland - 5 £334 - 20

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
1 192 (12.57%) Apache Spark
2 179 (11.72%) Apache Airflow
3 125 (8.19%) Apache
4 47 (3.08%) SAS
5 44 (2.88%) Confluence
6 23 (1.51%) Jupyter
7 19 (1.24%) Palantir Foundry
8 11 (0.72%) SharePoint
9 8 (0.52%) Apache Superset
10 4 (0.26%) Appian
11 3 (0.20%) ArcGIS
11 3 (0.20%) Microsoft Exchange
12 2 (0.13%) Apache Synapse
13 1 (0.065%) Apache Solr
13 1 (0.065%) Camunda
13 1 (0.065%) CICS
13 1 (0.065%) Ethereum
13 1 (0.065%) Hyperledger
13 1 (0.065%) IBM HTTP Server
13 1 (0.065%) PowerExchange
Applications
1 25 (1.64%) Microsoft Excel
2 9 (0.59%) Microsoft Office
3 8 (0.52%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 7 (0.46%) Spreadsheet
5 4 (0.26%) Microsoft Project
6 3 (0.20%) Chatbot
7 2 (0.13%) MS Visio
8 1 (0.065%) Notion
Business Applications
1 10 (0.65%) Aladdin
2 6 (0.39%) Dynamics CRM
3 5 (0.33%) BambooHR
3 5 (0.33%) SAP S/4HANA
4 4 (0.26%) NetSuite
4 4 (0.26%) Sage X3
4 4 (0.26%) Salesforce CRM
5 2 (0.13%) Endur
5 2 (0.13%) Oracle Assets
5 2 (0.13%) SAP BPC
5 2 (0.13%) Temenos T24
6 1 (0.065%) Adobe Campaign
6 1 (0.065%) Distributed Ledger
6 1 (0.065%) FIS Private Capital Suite
6 1 (0.065%) Markit EDM
6 1 (0.065%) R3 Corda
6 1 (0.065%) SAP ECC
6 1 (0.065%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
Cloud Services
1 643 (42.11%) Azure
2 584 (38.24%) AWS
3 325 (21.28%) Power Platform
4 230 (15.06%) Snowflake
5 207 (13.56%) GCP
6 186 (12.18%) Amazon S3
7 180 (11.79%) dbt
8 169 (11.07%) Azure Data Factory
9 137 (8.97%) Azure Synapse Analytics
10 136 (8.91%) Serverless
11 124 (8.12%) GitHub
12 122 (7.99%) Azure DevOps
13 117 (7.66%) AWS Lambda
14 70 (4.58%) GitHub Actions
15 62 (4.06%) Amazon EMR
16 37 (2.42%) AWS CloudFormation
17 35 (2.29%) Amazon CloudWatch
18 33 (2.16%) Azure AI
19 30 (1.96%) Amazon SageMaker
19 30 (1.96%) AWS Step Functions
Communications & Networking
1 5 (0.33%) Firewall
1 5 (0.33%) RTP
2 1 (0.065%) 4G
2 1 (0.065%) 5G
2 1 (0.065%) MIMO
2 1 (0.065%) MQTT
2 1 (0.065%) Network Security
Database & Business Intelligence
1 300 (19.65%) Power BI
2 294 (19.25%) Data Warehouse
3 218 (14.28%) Data Lake
4 150 (9.82%) Metadata
5 112 (7.33%) Big Data
6 110 (7.20%) Amazon Redshift
7 95 (6.22%) BigQuery
8 89 (5.83%) Delta Lake
9 85 (5.57%) Tableau
10 81 (5.30%) Amazon Athena
11 80 (5.24%) SQL Server
12 69 (4.52%) Snowflake Schema
13 67 (4.39%) NoSQL
14 60 (3.93%) PostgreSQL
15 59 (3.86%) Relational Database
16 48 (3.14%) Hadoop
17 47 (3.08%) Azure SQL Database
18 35 (2.29%) SQL Server Integration Services
18 35 (2.29%) Star Schema
19 31 (2.03%) Looker
Development Applications
1 176 (11.53%) Git
2 76 (4.98%) GitLab
3 74 (4.85%) JIRA
4 34 (2.23%) MLflow
5 21 (1.38%) Jenkins
6 6 (0.39%) SonarQube
7 5 (0.33%) Bitbucket
8 3 (0.20%) Artifactory
8 3 (0.20%) Postman
8 3 (0.20%) Selenium
8 3 (0.20%) Snyk
8 3 (0.20%) Visual Studio
9 2 (0.13%) Claude Code
9 2 (0.13%) ERwin
9 2 (0.13%) Yeoman
10 1 (0.065%) Cypress.io
10 1 (0.065%) Maven
10 1 (0.065%) Octopus Deploy
10 1 (0.065%) Robot Framework
10 1 (0.065%) SoapUI
General
1 372 (24.36%) Social Skills
2 349 (22.86%) Finance
3 248 (16.24%) Analytical Skills
4 164 (10.74%) Public Sector
5 116 (7.60%) Banking
6 40 (2.62%) Marketing
7 36 (2.36%) Documentation Skills
7 36 (2.36%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 33 (2.16%) Retail
9 22 (1.44%) Front Office
9 22 (1.44%) Investment Banking
10 21 (1.38%) Telecoms
11 15 (0.98%) Financial Institution
12 14 (0.92%) Manufacturing
13 13 (0.85%) Law
14 11 (0.72%) Influencing Skills
14 11 (0.72%) Legal
15 10 (0.65%) Pharmaceutical
16 9 (0.59%) Billing
17 6 (0.39%) Police
Job Titles
1 710 (46.50%) Data Engineer
2 217 (14.21%) Senior
3 173 (11.33%) Architect
4 167 (10.94%) Lead
5 126 (8.25%) Senior Data Engineer
6 97 (6.35%) Developer
7 94 (6.16%) Data Architect
8 82 (5.37%) AWS Engineer
9 71 (4.65%) Analyst
10 67 (4.39%) Lead Data Engineer
11 63 (4.13%) AWS Data Engineer
11 63 (4.13%) Snowflake Engineer
12 57 (3.73%) Azure Engineer
13 51 (3.34%) Azure Data Engineer
14 49 (3.21%) Snowflake Data Engineer
15 48 (3.14%) Data Scientist
16 47 (3.08%) Solutions Architect
17 45 (2.95%) Python Engineer
18 42 (2.75%) Consultant
18 42 (2.75%) Data Analyst
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 223 (14.60%) PySpark
2 144 (9.43%) Kafka
3 42 (2.75%) Pandas
4 40 (2.62%) REST
5 34 (2.23%) JSON
6 31 (2.03%) scikit-learn
7 28 (1.83%) PyTorch
8 27 (1.77%) NumPy
9 26 (1.70%) React
10 24 (1.57%) Spring
11 22 (1.44%) TensorFlow
12 18 (1.18%) .NET
13 17 (1.11%) RESTful
13 17 (1.11%) Spring Boot
14 15 (0.98%) OpenTelemetry
14 15 (0.98%) YAML
15 14 (0.92%) FastAPI
16 13 (0.85%) Microsoft Graph
16 13 (0.85%) XML
17 12 (0.79%) Apache Avro
Miscellaneous
1 208 (13.62%) Cloud Native
2 66 (4.32%) Data Structures
3 60 (3.93%) Legacy Systems
4 58 (3.80%) Distributed Systems
5 48 (3.14%) Product Ownership
6 40 (2.62%) Onboarding
7 36 (2.36%) AI Agents
8 27 (1.77%) Data Protection Act
9 25 (1.64%) Distributed Computing
10 24 (1.57%) Algorithms
11 23 (1.51%) NHS
12 21 (1.38%) Greenfield Project
13 19 (1.24%) Analytical Mindset
14 18 (1.18%) Virtual Team
15 17 (1.11%) Clustering
16 14 (0.92%) Fixed Income
16 14 (0.92%) Management Information System
17 13 (0.85%) Life Science
17 13 (0.85%) Reference Data
17 13 (0.85%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 30 (1.96%) Linux
2 26 (1.70%) Unix
3 5 (0.33%) VMS
4 4 (0.26%) Windows
5 2 (0.13%) Windows Server
6 1 (0.065%) Ubuntu
Processes & Methodologies
1 788 (51.60%) Analytics
2 740 (48.46%) Data Pipeline
3 596 (39.03%) Data Modelling
4 549 (35.95%) CI/CD
5 531 (34.77%) ETL
6 437 (28.62%) AI
7 386 (25.28%) Agile
8 380 (24.89%) Business Intelligence
9 367 (24.03%) DevOps
10 338 (22.13%) Data Governance
11 292 (19.12%) Machine Learning
12 272 (17.81%) Problem-Solving
13 271 (17.75%) Data Science
14 230 (15.06%) Migration
15 219 (14.34%) Data Architecture
15 219 (14.34%) Validation
16 213 (13.95%) Decision-Making
17 187 (12.25%) Infrastructure as Code
18 183 (11.98%) Stakeholder Management
19 177 (11.59%) Data Transformation
Programming Languages
1 831 (54.42%) SQL
2 807 (52.85%) Python
3 129 (8.45%) Java
4 45 (2.95%) Data Analysis Expressions
5 39 (2.55%) Scala
6 37 (2.42%) Bash
6 37 (2.42%) C#
7 24 (1.57%) PowerShell
7 24 (1.57%) T-SQL
8 21 (1.38%) R
9 20 (1.31%) JavaScript
10 17 (1.11%) Bicep
11 16 (1.05%) PL/SQL
12 13 (0.85%) Shell Script
12 13 (0.85%) TypeScript
13 12 (0.79%) SAS Macro
14 7 (0.46%) SPARQL
15 6 (0.39%) Cypher
16 5 (0.33%) Kusto Query Language
17 4 (0.26%) Go
Qualifications
1 299 (19.58%) Security Cleared
2 258 (16.90%) SC Cleared
3 114 (7.47%) Degree
4 47 (3.08%) Computer Science Degree
5 38 (2.49%) BPSS Clearance
5 38 (2.49%) Master's Degree
6 30 (1.96%) Azure Certification
7 25 (1.64%) DV Cleared
8 21 (1.38%) AWS Certification
9 13 (0.85%) DBS Check
10 9 (0.59%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
10 9 (0.59%) SnowPro
11 7 (0.46%) Microsoft Certification
12 6 (0.39%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 5 (0.33%) CSPO
14 3 (0.20%) IBM Certification
14 3 (0.20%) PhD
14 3 (0.20%) Tableau Certification
15 2 (0.13%) PMI Certification
16 1 (0.065%) (ISC)2 CCSP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 448 (29.34%) Data Quality
2 88 (5.76%) GDPR
3 76 (4.98%) QA
4 21 (1.38%) Accessibility
5 15 (0.98%) SLA
6 5 (0.33%) Sarbanes-Oxley
7 4 (0.26%) Actionable Recommendations
7 4 (0.26%) California Consumer Privacy Act
7 4 (0.26%) Solvency II
8 3 (0.20%) Disclosure Scotland
8 3 (0.20%) GxP
8 3 (0.20%) HIPAA
8 3 (0.20%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 3 (0.20%) ISO/IEC 42001
8 3 (0.20%) MiFID
8 3 (0.20%) NIST
8 3 (0.20%) PMO
9 2 (0.13%) 21 CFR Part 11
9 2 (0.13%) COPPA
9 2 (0.13%) GRC
System Software
1 135 (8.84%) Docker
2 3 (0.20%) Active Directory
2 3 (0.20%) Virtual Machines
3 2 (0.13%) HDFS
4 1 (0.065%) Oracle RAC
Systems Management
1 200 (13.10%) Terraform
2 114 (7.47%) Kubernetes
3 28 (1.83%) Grafana
4 27 (1.77%) Prometheus
5 12 (0.79%) Ansible
6 5 (0.33%) Kibana
7 3 (0.20%) Argo
7 3 (0.20%) logstash
7 3 (0.20%) Nagios
7 3 (0.20%) Rancher
8 2 (0.13%) Kubeflow
8 2 (0.13%) Thomson Reuters DACS
9 1 (0.065%) Control-M
9 1 (0.065%) Data Guard
9 1 (0.065%) Hadoop YARN
9 1 (0.065%) HP Fortify
9 1 (0.065%) Kustomize
9 1 (0.065%) Oozie
9 1 (0.065%) Oracle Enterprise Manager
9 1 (0.065%) Oracle RMAN
Vendors
1 386 (25.28%) Databricks
2 260 (17.03%) Microsoft
3 87 (5.70%) Informatica
4 63 (4.13%) Google
5 61 (3.99%) Oracle
6 33 (2.16%) Talend
7 31 (2.03%) SAP
8 30 (1.96%) Foundry
9 27 (1.77%) Palantir
10 26 (1.70%) OpenAI
11 22 (1.44%) Salesforce
11 22 (1.44%) Splunk
12 15 (0.98%) Cloudera
12 15 (0.98%) ServiceNow
13 12 (0.79%) Trend Micro
14 8 (0.52%) Adobe
14 8 (0.52%) Denodo
15 7 (0.46%) InterSystems
16 6 (0.39%) Bloomberg
16 6 (0.39%) Teradata