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

6 months to
27 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 94 152 188
Rank change year-on-year +58 +36 +23
Contract jobs citing Data Engineering 1,575 630 500
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.88% 1.91% 1.31%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.42% 2.11% 1.52%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,095 391 362
10th Percentile £400 £344 £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 £738 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £463 £513
% change year-on-year +8.11% -9.76% -6.82%
Number of hourly rates quoted 16 6 7
10th Percentile - £37.11 £23.72
25th Percentile £21.25 £42.03 £25.93
Median hourly rate £54.75 £58.75 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year -6.81% -2.08% -20.53%
75th Percentile £72.93 £81.88 -
90th Percentile £80.81 £98.75 -
UK excluding London median hourly rate £44.50 £38.96 £60.00
% change year-on-year +14.22% -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 46,089 29,922 32,856
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.33% 90.54% 85.86%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,886 18,587 19,900
10th Percentile £325 £295 £308
25th Percentile £425 £404 £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 £730 £725 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 3,201 1,858 1,386
10th Percentile £13.70 £14.29 £15.00
25th Percentile £17.23 £17.30 £20.12
Median hourly rate £39.50 £25.15 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year +57.06% -40.82% -
75th Percentile £65.88 £43.75 £65.00
90th Percentile £78.75 £65.00 £74.44
UK excluding London median hourly rate £40.00 £22.50 £43.00
% change year-on-year +77.78% -47.67% +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 27 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 27 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 27 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 +54 1,399 £525 - 1,789
London +45 853 £550 - 1,090
UK excluding London +78 562 £500 +8.11% 871
Work from Home +67 506 £521 +4.25% 800
North of England +28 186 £475 +7.34% 265
Midlands +32 123 £475 +2.70% 117
West Midlands +23 100 £475 -13.64% 89
Yorkshire +25 95 £500 +5.26% 71
South East -15 91 £525 +19.32% 209
South West +41 87 £525 -3.45% 90
North West -31 57 £513 +19.19% 156
Scotland -5 51 £500 +8.11% 87
North East -5 36 £425 -17.07% 40
East of England -9 25 £550 +22.22% 44
East Midlands -3 22 £503 +15.57% 28
Wales -6 8 £450 -9.09% 15
Northern Ireland +5 4 £334 - 47

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
1 188 (11.94%) Apache Airflow
2 170 (10.79%) Apache Spark
3 140 (8.89%) Apache
4 41 (2.60%) Confluence
5 32 (2.03%) SAS
6 22 (1.40%) Jupyter
7 16 (1.02%) 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%) CICS
11 1 (0.063%) Ethereum
11 1 (0.063%) GeoServer
11 1 (0.063%) Hyperledger
11 1 (0.063%) Microsoft Exchange
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%) 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 (41.59%) Azure
2 584 (37.08%) AWS
3 296 (18.79%) Power Platform
4 266 (16.89%) Snowflake
5 234 (14.86%) dbt
5 234 (14.86%) GCP
6 180 (11.43%) Amazon S3
7 177 (11.24%) Azure Data Factory
8 145 (9.21%) Serverless
9 133 (8.44%) Azure DevOps
10 124 (7.87%) Azure Synapse Analytics
11 121 (7.68%) AWS Lambda
12 120 (7.62%) GitHub
13 80 (5.08%) Azure Databricks
14 64 (4.06%) GitHub Actions
15 54 (3.43%) Amazon EMR
16 42 (2.67%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 38 (2.41%) Amazon Bedrock
18 33 (2.10%) Azure AI
18 33 (2.10%) Microsoft Purview
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
1 324 (20.57%) Data Warehouse
2 282 (17.90%) Power BI
3 210 (13.33%) Data Lake
4 183 (11.62%) Metadata
5 125 (7.94%) BigQuery
6 108 (6.86%) Amazon Redshift
7 106 (6.73%) Delta Lake
8 85 (5.40%) Big Data
9 78 (4.95%) Amazon Athena
10 74 (4.70%) Tableau
11 59 (3.75%) Snowflake Schema
12 57 (3.62%) SQL Server
13 50 (3.17%) PostgreSQL
13 50 (3.17%) Relational Database
14 44 (2.79%) NoSQL
15 41 (2.60%) Looker
16 35 (2.22%) Azure SQL Database
17 31 (1.97%) Amazon RDS
17 31 (1.97%) Data Vault
18 25 (1.59%) Spark SQL
Development Applications
1 179 (11.37%) Git
2 93 (5.90%) GitLab
3 69 (4.38%) 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%) Atlassian Bamboo
9 3 (0.19%) Postman
9 3 (0.19%) SonarQube
10 2 (0.13%) Artifactory
10 2 (0.13%) Cucumber
10 2 (0.13%) Sonatype Nexus
10 2 (0.13%) TeamCity
10 2 (0.13%) Yeoman
General
1 402 (25.52%) Social Skills
2 356 (22.60%) Finance
3 250 (15.87%) Analytical Skills
4 165 (10.48%) Public Sector
5 139 (8.83%) Banking
6 53 (3.37%) Marketing
7 35 (2.22%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 33 (2.10%) Retail
9 25 (1.59%) Investment Banking
10 24 (1.52%) Front Office
11 22 (1.40%) Documentation Skills
12 19 (1.21%) Law
12 19 (1.21%) Pharmaceutical
13 18 (1.14%) Manufacturing
14 14 (0.89%) Publishing
14 14 (0.89%) Telecoms
15 13 (0.83%) Back Office
15 13 (0.83%) Influencing Skills
15 13 (0.83%) Police
16 11 (0.70%) Billing
Job Titles
1 739 (46.92%) Data Engineer
2 249 (15.81%) Senior
3 176 (11.17%) Lead
4 169 (10.73%) Architect
5 157 (9.97%) Senior Data Engineer
6 98 (6.22%) Developer
7 91 (5.78%) Data Architect
8 76 (4.83%) Databricks Engineer
9 74 (4.70%) AWS Engineer
10 69 (4.38%) Snowflake Engineer
11 68 (4.32%) Azure Engineer
12 66 (4.19%) Analyst
13 64 (4.06%) AWS Data Engineer
14 59 (3.75%) Databricks Data Engineer
15 52 (3.30%) Lead Data Engineer
15 52 (3.30%) Snowflake Data Engineer
16 50 (3.17%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
17 47 (2.98%) Azure Data Engineer
17 47 (2.98%) Python Engineer
18 41 (2.60%) Consultant
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 234 (14.86%) Terraform
2 230 (14.60%) PySpark
3 112 (7.11%) Kafka
4 60 (3.81%) REST
5 34 (2.16%) JSON
6 32 (2.03%) React
7 27 (1.71%) .NET
8 22 (1.40%) Pandas
9 17 (1.08%) LangChain
10 16 (1.02%) FastAPI
10 16 (1.02%) pytest
11 15 (0.95%) PyTorch
12 14 (0.89%) XML
13 13 (0.83%) LangGraph
13 13 (0.83%) RESTful
14 12 (0.76%) NumPy
14 12 (0.76%) scikit-learn
14 12 (0.76%) Streamlit
14 12 (0.76%) TensorFlow
15 11 (0.70%) Microsoft Graph
Miscellaneous
1 210 (13.33%) Cloud Native
2 84 (5.33%) Data Structures
3 78 (4.95%) Onboarding
4 64 (4.06%) Product Ownership
5 54 (3.43%) AI Agents
5 54 (3.43%) Legacy Systems
6 50 (3.17%) Distributed Systems
7 24 (1.52%) Data Protection Act
8 22 (1.40%) Enterprise Software
9 19 (1.21%) Distributed Computing
10 18 (1.14%) NHS
10 18 (1.14%) Virtual Team
11 17 (1.08%) Life Science
11 17 (1.08%) Management Information System
12 16 (1.02%) Greenfield Project
13 15 (0.95%) Analytical Mindset
13 15 (0.95%) Data Fabric
14 14 (0.89%) Clustering
14 14 (0.89%) Marketing Technology
15 13 (0.83%) Algorithms
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
1 769 (48.83%) Data Pipeline
2 734 (46.60%) Analytics
3 618 (39.24%) Data Modelling
4 565 (35.87%) CI/CD
5 545 (34.60%) ETL
6 500 (31.75%) AI
7 398 (25.27%) Agile
8 376 (23.87%) DevOps
9 365 (23.17%) Business Intelligence
10 348 (22.10%) Data Governance
11 281 (17.84%) Stakeholder Management
12 275 (17.46%) Machine Learning
13 253 (16.06%) Data Transformation
14 248 (15.75%) Infrastructure as Code
15 246 (15.62%) Migration
16 244 (15.49%) Validation
17 241 (15.30%) Data Architecture
18 240 (15.24%) Problem-Solving
19 232 (14.73%) Data Integration
20 227 (14.41%) Decision-Making
Programming Languages
1 859 (54.54%) SQL
2 832 (52.83%) Python
3 107 (6.79%) Java
4 46 (2.92%) Scala
5 41 (2.60%) PowerShell
6 40 (2.54%) Data Analysis Expressions
7 36 (2.29%) C#
8 34 (2.16%) Bash
9 31 (1.97%) JavaScript
10 22 (1.40%) R
11 19 (1.21%) PL/SQL
11 19 (1.21%) T-SQL
12 16 (1.02%) Bicep
13 14 (0.89%) TypeScript
14 12 (0.76%) Kusto Query Language
15 10 (0.63%) Shell Script
15 10 (0.63%) SPARQL
16 9 (0.57%) Go
17 8 (0.51%) Cypher
17 8 (0.51%) SAS Macro
Qualifications
1 294 (18.67%) Security Cleared
2 247 (15.68%) SC Cleared
3 78 (4.95%) Degree
4 36 (2.29%) Computer Science Degree
5 33 (2.10%) Azure Certification
5 33 (2.10%) DV Cleared
6 31 (1.97%) AWS Certification
7 30 (1.90%) BPSS Clearance
8 19 (1.21%) Master's Degree
9 14 (0.89%) DBS Check
10 13 (0.83%) 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%) PhD
14 4 (0.25%) Tableau Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 521 (33.08%) Data Quality
2 81 (5.14%) QA
3 62 (3.94%) 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%) 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%) ISO/IEC 42001
9 3 (0.19%) MiFID
9 3 (0.19%) NCSC
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
System Software
1 131 (8.32%) Docker
2 5 (0.32%) Active Directory
3 1 (0.063%) Oracle RAC
3 1 (0.063%) Virtual Machines
Systems Management
1 108 (6.86%) Kubernetes
2 31 (1.97%) 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
1 454 (28.83%) Databricks
2 269 (17.08%) Microsoft
3 95 (6.03%) Google
4 75 (4.76%) Oracle
5 61 (3.87%) Informatica
6 31 (1.97%) SAP
7 30 (1.90%) Salesforce
8 28 (1.78%) Foundry
9 27 (1.71%) Talend
10 24 (1.52%) Palantir
11 21 (1.33%) OpenAI
12 15 (0.95%) Teradata
13 13 (0.83%) Cloudera
14 12 (0.76%) Trend Micro
15 11 (0.70%) Adobe
15 11 (0.70%) ServiceNow
16 8 (0.51%) Denodo
16 8 (0.51%) Splunk
17 7 (0.44%) Hitachi
18 6 (0.38%) MicroStrategy