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 16 May 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
16 May 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 91 160 198
Rank change year-on-year +69 +38 +6
Contract jobs citing Data Engineering 1,315 522 491
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.74% 1.79% 1.15%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.24% 1.97% 1.34%
Number of daily rates quoted 903 358 366
10th Percentile £400 £375 £369
25th Percentile £450 £440 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year - -4.55% -8.33%
75th Percentile £625 £673 £652
90th Percentile £747 £838 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £550
% change year-on-year +5.26% -13.64% +2.23%
Number of hourly rates quoted 21 15 13
10th Percentile £51.25 £21.55 £30.55
25th Percentile £56.75 £22.25 £31.25
Median hourly rate £70.00 £27.50 £35.00
Median % change year-on-year +154.55% -21.43% -52.05%
75th Percentile £78.00 £53.75 £60.00
90th Percentile £90.00 £65.00 -
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 40,526 26,506 36,695
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.38% 90.99% 86.24%
Number of daily rates quoted 25,448 17,044 23,613
10th Percentile £325 £305 £300
25th Percentile £413 £410 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £505 £515 £525
Median % change year-on-year -1.94% -1.90% -4.55%
75th Percentile £613 £626 £638
90th Percentile £725 £738 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £492 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +3.58% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,394 1,081 2,430
10th Percentile £14.82 £14.30 £12.75
25th Percentile £19.85 £18.20 £16.00
Median hourly rate £42.50 £28.41 £36.02
Median % change year-on-year +49.60% -21.13% +0.06%
75th Percentile £67.49 £60.00 £60.00
90th Percentile £80.00 £75.00 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £45.00 £25.43 £37.50
% change year-on-year +76.96% -32.19% +7.14%

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 16 May 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 16 May 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 16 May 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 +60 1,181 £525 -4.55% 476
London +52 736 £550 -4.35% 242
UK excluding London +72 464 £500 +5.26% 281
Work from Home +50 376 £540 -1.82% 302
North of England +2 123 £480 -4.00% 97
Midlands +17 122 £500 +8.11% 40
West Midlands +15 101 £500 +16.01% 31
South West +19 78 £506 -15.75% 33
South East -32 62 £550 +12.02% 83
Scotland +28 59 £448 -5.68% 11
Yorkshire -14 55 £478 -13.18% 25
North West -15 49 £500 +2.56% 45
East of England -22 22 £575 +54.08% 11
North East -3 21 £463 -2.63% 28
East Midlands -15 18 £475 +1.33% 9
Wales -12 6 £563 +150.76% 8
Northern Ireland - 3 £430 - 1

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 (14.60%) Apache Spark
2 129 (9.81%) Apache Airflow
3 87 (6.62%) Apache
4 36 (2.74%) SAS
5 21 (1.60%) Confluence
6 16 (1.22%) Palantir Foundry
7 8 (0.61%) Appian
7 8 (0.61%) Jupyter
8 7 (0.53%) Apache Superset
9 4 (0.30%) Microsoft Exchange
10 2 (0.15%) Apache Synapse
10 2 (0.15%) SharePoint
11 1 (0.076%) Adobe Experience Manager
11 1 (0.076%) ArcGIS
11 1 (0.076%) Camunda
11 1 (0.076%) CICS
11 1 (0.076%) CMS
11 1 (0.076%) IBM HTTP Server
Applications
1 29 (2.21%) Microsoft Excel
2 8 (0.61%) Microsoft Office
2 8 (0.61%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 7 (0.53%) Microsoft Project
4 6 (0.46%) Spreadsheet
5 3 (0.23%) Chatbot
5 3 (0.23%) MS Visio
5 3 (0.23%) Trello
Business Applications
1 6 (0.46%) Aladdin
2 5 (0.38%) BambooHR
3 4 (0.30%) Dynamics CRM
4 3 (0.23%) Salesforce CRM
4 3 (0.23%) SAP BPC
5 2 (0.15%) Oracle Assets
5 2 (0.15%) SAP S/4HANA
6 1 (0.076%) Actimize
6 1 (0.076%) Adobe Campaign
6 1 (0.076%) Markit EDM
6 1 (0.076%) Misys Midas
6 1 (0.076%) SAP ECC
Cloud Services
1 583 (44.33%) Azure
2 476 (36.20%) AWS
3 300 (22.81%) Power Platform
4 187 (14.22%) Azure Data Factory
4 187 (14.22%) GCP
5 173 (13.16%) Snowflake
6 148 (11.25%) Azure Synapse Analytics
7 147 (11.18%) Amazon S3
8 131 (9.96%) GitHub
9 127 (9.66%) dbt
10 109 (8.29%) Serverless
11 104 (7.91%) Azure DevOps
12 87 (6.62%) AWS Lambda
13 79 (6.01%) GitHub Actions
14 54 (4.11%) AWS CloudFormation
15 36 (2.74%) AWS Step Functions
16 33 (2.51%) Amazon EMR
17 30 (2.28%) Collibra
18 27 (2.05%) Amazon SageMaker
19 26 (1.98%) Dagster
Communications & Networking
1 5 (0.38%) RTP
2 4 (0.30%) Firewall
3 3 (0.23%) Kerberos
4 2 (0.15%) VPN
5 1 (0.076%) 4G
5 1 (0.076%) 5G
5 1 (0.076%) MIMO
5 1 (0.076%) Network Security
5 1 (0.076%) SAN
5 1 (0.076%) SMS
5 1 (0.076%) TCP/IP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 277 (21.06%) Power BI
2 255 (19.39%) Data Warehouse
3 203 (15.44%) Data Lake
4 124 (9.43%) Metadata
5 104 (7.91%) Big Data
6 90 (6.84%) SQL Server
7 86 (6.54%) Delta Lake
8 76 (5.78%) NoSQL
9 74 (5.63%) Tableau
10 73 (5.55%) BigQuery
11 72 (5.48%) Amazon Redshift
12 71 (5.40%) Snowflake Schema
13 65 (4.94%) Azure SQL Database
14 64 (4.87%) Amazon Athena
15 57 (4.33%) Relational Database
16 55 (4.18%) PostgreSQL
17 50 (3.80%) Hadoop
18 36 (2.74%) Spark SQL
18 36 (2.74%) SQL Server Integration Services
19 29 (2.21%) Star Schema
Development Applications
1 164 (12.47%) Git
2 61 (4.64%) GitLab
3 49 (3.73%) JIRA
4 45 (3.42%) MLflow
5 32 (2.43%) Jenkins
6 6 (0.46%) SonarQube
7 5 (0.38%) Selenium
8 3 (0.23%) Postman
8 3 (0.23%) Robot Framework
8 3 (0.23%) Snyk
9 2 (0.15%) Artifactory
9 2 (0.15%) Bitbucket
9 2 (0.15%) Terragrunt
9 2 (0.15%) Visual Studio
10 1 (0.076%) Ant
10 1 (0.076%) ERwin
10 1 (0.076%) JUnit
10 1 (0.076%) Maven
10 1 (0.076%) Octopus Deploy
10 1 (0.076%) SoapUI
General
1 330 (25.10%) Finance
2 300 (22.81%) Social Skills
3 196 (14.90%) Analytical Skills
4 113 (8.59%) Public Sector
5 81 (6.16%) Banking
6 26 (1.98%) Retail
7 25 (1.90%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 24 (1.83%) Documentation Skills
9 23 (1.75%) Marketing
10 19 (1.44%) Front Office
11 16 (1.22%) Investment Banking
12 15 (1.14%) Financial Institution
12 15 (1.14%) Telecoms
13 13 (0.99%) Influencing Skills
14 10 (0.76%) Legal
15 8 (0.61%) Law
15 8 (0.61%) Military
16 6 (0.46%) Back Office
17 5 (0.38%) Pharmaceutical
18 4 (0.30%) Manufacturing
Job Titles
1 631 (47.98%) Data Engineer
2 174 (13.23%) Senior
3 141 (10.72%) Lead
4 132 (10.04%) Architect
5 115 (8.75%) Senior Data Engineer
6 79 (6.01%) Developer
7 68 (5.17%) Data Architect
8 60 (4.56%) AWS Engineer
8 60 (4.56%) Azure Engineer
9 57 (4.33%) Analyst
10 55 (4.18%) Lead Data Engineer
10 55 (4.18%) Snowflake Engineer
11 53 (4.03%) Azure Data Engineer
12 44 (3.35%) AWS Data Engineer
12 44 (3.35%) Snowflake Data Engineer
13 43 (3.27%) Data Scientist
14 42 (3.19%) Solutions Architect
15 39 (2.97%) Consultant
16 38 (2.89%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
17 35 (2.66%) Python Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 213 (16.20%) PySpark
2 150 (11.41%) Kafka
3 59 (4.49%) Pandas
4 42 (3.19%) PyTorch
5 39 (2.97%) scikit-learn
6 36 (2.74%) NumPy
7 32 (2.43%) TensorFlow
8 28 (2.13%) REST
9 25 (1.90%) JSON
10 24 (1.83%) Spring
11 22 (1.67%) React
12 20 (1.52%) LangChain
12 20 (1.52%) RESTful
12 20 (1.52%) YAML
13 19 (1.44%) pytest
14 18 (1.37%) FastAPI
14 18 (1.37%) Great Expectations
15 17 (1.29%) Spring Boot
16 15 (1.14%) Flask
17 13 (0.99%) Django
Miscellaneous
1 173 (13.16%) Cloud Native
2 51 (3.88%) Distributed Systems
3 44 (3.35%) Product Ownership
4 43 (3.27%) Data Structures
5 42 (3.19%) Legacy Systems
6 31 (2.36%) Distributed Computing
7 30 (2.28%) Algorithms
8 29 (2.21%) AI Agents
9 27 (2.05%) Onboarding
10 22 (1.67%) Data Protection Act
11 21 (1.60%) Greenfield Project
12 19 (1.44%) Analytical Mindset
13 14 (1.06%) Fixed Income
13 14 (1.06%) NHS
14 13 (0.99%) Hybrid Cloud
14 13 (0.99%) Self-Motivation
15 12 (0.91%) Clustering
16 11 (0.84%) Reference Data
17 10 (0.76%) Equities
17 10 (0.76%) Management Information System
Operating Systems
1 29 (2.21%) Linux
2 22 (1.67%) Unix
3 6 (0.46%) VMS
4 3 (0.23%) Windows
5 2 (0.15%) Ubuntu
5 2 (0.15%) Windows Server
6 1 (0.076%) CentOS
6 1 (0.076%) Debian
Processes & Methodologies
1 675 (51.33%) Analytics
2 606 (46.08%) Data Pipeline
3 519 (39.47%) Data Modelling
4 497 (37.79%) ETL
5 450 (34.22%) CI/CD
6 383 (29.13%) AI
7 339 (25.78%) Business Intelligence
8 327 (24.87%) Agile
9 319 (24.26%) DevOps
10 305 (23.19%) Data Governance
11 261 (19.85%) Machine Learning
12 234 (17.79%) Problem-Solving
13 228 (17.34%) Data Science
14 187 (14.22%) Data Architecture
15 174 (13.23%) Migration
16 170 (12.93%) Decision-Making
17 160 (12.17%) Validation
18 146 (11.10%) Infrastructure as Code
19 138 (10.49%) Data Integration
20 131 (9.96%) Use Case
Programming Languages
1 728 (55.36%) SQL
2 700 (53.23%) Python
3 104 (7.91%) Java
4 60 (4.56%) Scala
5 45 (3.42%) Data Analysis Expressions
6 37 (2.81%) C#
7 33 (2.51%) Bash
8 27 (2.05%) T-SQL
9 23 (1.75%) PowerShell
10 22 (1.67%) JavaScript
11 21 (1.60%) R
12 15 (1.14%) Bicep
13 13 (0.99%) PL/SQL
14 12 (0.91%) Shell Script
15 11 (0.84%) TypeScript
16 8 (0.61%) Go
17 7 (0.53%) SAS Macro
18 4 (0.30%) Korn
19 2 (0.15%) SPARQL
20 1 (0.076%) Groovy
Qualifications
1 255 (19.39%) Security Cleared
2 220 (16.73%) SC Cleared
3 99 (7.53%) Degree
4 41 (3.12%) Computer Science Degree
5 38 (2.89%) Master's Degree
6 34 (2.59%) Azure Certification
7 20 (1.52%) BPSS Clearance
8 14 (1.06%) DV Cleared
9 13 (0.99%) AWS Certification
10 9 (0.68%) DBS Check
10 9 (0.68%) Microsoft Certification
11 7 (0.53%) SnowPro
12 5 (0.38%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
12 5 (0.38%) PhD
13 4 (0.30%) Microsoft Certified Professional
14 3 (0.23%) IBM Certification
15 2 (0.15%) Tableau Certification
16 1 (0.076%) ACCA
16 1 (0.076%) AWS Certified SysOps Administrator
16 1 (0.076%) CSPO
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 373 (28.37%) Data Quality
2 89 (6.77%) GDPR
3 57 (4.33%) QA
4 12 (0.91%) Sarbanes-Oxley
5 10 (0.76%) SLA
6 8 (0.61%) Accessibility
7 6 (0.46%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 5 (0.38%) MiFID
9 4 (0.30%) HIPAA
9 4 (0.30%) Solvency II
10 3 (0.23%) California Consumer Privacy Act
10 3 (0.23%) GRC
10 3 (0.23%) PMO
11 2 (0.15%) Actionable Recommendations
11 2 (0.15%) Disclosure Scotland
11 2 (0.15%) EMIR
11 2 (0.15%) NIST
11 2 (0.15%) PCI DSS
11 2 (0.15%) SNOMED CT
12 1 (0.076%) HL7
System Software
1 128 (9.73%) Docker
2 6 (0.46%) HDFS
3 3 (0.23%) Virtual Machines
4 1 (0.076%) Active Directory
4 1 (0.076%) Apache ZooKeeper
Systems Management
1 168 (12.78%) Terraform
2 118 (8.97%) Kubernetes
3 26 (1.98%) Prometheus
4 24 (1.83%) Grafana
5 12 (0.91%) Ansible
6 5 (0.38%) Argo
7 4 (0.30%) 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 (0.076%) Apache Ranger
10 1 (0.076%) Control-M
10 1 (0.076%) HP Fortify
10 1 (0.076%) IBM Guardium
10 1 (0.076%) Oozie
Vendors
1 366 (27.83%) Databricks
2 215 (16.35%) Microsoft
3 64 (4.87%) Informatica
4 63 (4.79%) Google
5 45 (3.42%) Oracle
6 29 (2.21%) Talend
7 23 (1.75%) Foundry
7 23 (1.75%) SAP
8 22 (1.67%) OpenAI
9 19 (1.44%) Splunk
10 17 (1.29%) Palantir
11 16 (1.22%) Cloudera
12 13 (0.99%) ServiceNow
13 11 (0.84%) Salesforce
14 9 (0.68%) UiPath
15 8 (0.61%) Automation Anywhere
15 8 (0.61%) IBM
16 7 (0.53%) InterSystems
17 6 (0.46%) Denodo
18 5 (0.38%) Workday