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

6 months to
25 Apr 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 91 155 205
Rank change year-on-year +64 +50 -1
Contract jobs citing Data Engineering 1,296 528 501
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.78% 1.79% 1.15%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.28% 1.97% 1.33%
Number of daily rates quoted 894 375 373
10th Percentile £396 £400 £378
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 £675
90th Percentile £750 £838 £743
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £480 £550
% change year-on-year +4.17% -12.73% +1.85%
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 39,506 26,799 37,659
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.73% 90.79% 86.30%
Number of daily rates quoted 24,946 17,322 24,335
10th Percentile £319 £308 £300
25th Percentile £413 £413 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.72% -0.05% -4.55%
75th Percentile £613 £630 £638
90th Percentile £725 £744 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £485 £487 £500
% change year-on-year -0.36% -2.65% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,360 1,068 2,432
10th Percentile £14.82 £14.84 £12.75
25th Percentile £19.91 £18.51 £16.00
Median hourly rate £40.00 £29.07 £35.00
Median % change year-on-year +37.60% -16.94% -6.67%
75th Percentile £65.60 £62.24 £58.75
90th Percentile £78.75 £75.00 £72.33
UK excluding London median hourly rate £41.86 £28.00 £35.58
% change year-on-year +49.48% -21.29% -4.62%

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 25 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 25 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 25 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 +60 1,168 £525 -4.55% 377
London +57 733 £550 -4.76% 176
UK excluding London +67 447 £500 +4.17% 283
Work from Home +46 368 £539 -7.11% 287
North of England +3 124 £480 -4.00% 88
Midlands +29 120 £500 - 41
West Midlands +19 95 £505 -6.48% 33
South West +11 74 £516 -15.84% 35
South East -36 57 £550 +10.00% 83
Yorkshire -18 56 £480 -12.73% 24
Scotland +34 55 £440 -7.37% 10
North West -17 50 £500 +5.26% 43
East of England -27 23 £575 +54.08% 16
East Midlands -17 22 £450 -5.26% 8
North East 0 20 £475 - 22
Wales -11 5 £665 +181.78% 4
Northern Ireland - 2 £430 - 9

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 (15.05%) Apache Spark
2 130 (10.03%) Apache Airflow
3 87 (6.71%) Apache
4 33 (2.55%) SAS
5 18 (1.39%) Palantir Foundry
6 16 (1.23%) Confluence
7 8 (0.62%) Appian
8 7 (0.54%) Apache Superset
9 5 (0.39%) Jupyter
10 4 (0.31%) Microsoft Exchange
11 2 (0.15%) Apache Synapse
11 2 (0.15%) SharePoint
12 1 (0.077%) Adobe Experience Manager
12 1 (0.077%) ArcGIS
12 1 (0.077%) Camunda
12 1 (0.077%) CICS
12 1 (0.077%) CMS
12 1 (0.077%) IBM HTTP Server
Applications
1 28 (2.16%) Microsoft Excel
2 9 (0.69%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 8 (0.62%) Microsoft Office
4 7 (0.54%) Microsoft Project
5 6 (0.46%) Spreadsheet
6 3 (0.23%) Chatbot
6 3 (0.23%) MS Visio
6 3 (0.23%) Trello
Business Applications
1 5 (0.39%) 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
1 587 (45.29%) Azure
2 471 (36.34%) AWS
3 287 (22.15%) Power Platform
4 194 (14.97%) Azure Data Factory
5 187 (14.43%) GCP
6 167 (12.89%) Snowflake
7 150 (11.57%) Amazon S3
8 146 (11.27%) Azure Synapse Analytics
9 131 (10.11%) GitHub
10 116 (8.95%) dbt
10 116 (8.95%) Serverless
11 101 (7.79%) Azure DevOps
12 94 (7.25%) AWS Lambda
13 80 (6.17%) GitHub Actions
14 65 (5.02%) AWS CloudFormation
15 39 (3.01%) AWS Step Functions
16 32 (2.47%) Amazon EMR
17 31 (2.39%) Collibra
18 30 (2.31%) Amazon SageMaker
19 28 (2.16%) Dagster
Communications & Networking
1 5 (0.39%) 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
1 263 (20.29%) Power BI
2 254 (19.60%) Data Warehouse
3 196 (15.12%) Data Lake
4 126 (9.72%) Metadata
5 98 (7.56%) Big Data
6 91 (7.02%) SQL Server
7 86 (6.64%) Delta Lake
8 81 (6.25%) NoSQL
9 73 (5.63%) Tableau
10 72 (5.56%) Amazon Redshift
11 68 (5.25%) Amazon Athena
11 68 (5.25%) BigQuery
12 67 (5.17%) Snowflake Schema
13 64 (4.94%) Azure SQL Database
14 56 (4.32%) Relational Database
15 54 (4.17%) PostgreSQL
16 51 (3.94%) Hadoop
17 37 (2.85%) SQL Server Integration Services
18 36 (2.78%) Spark SQL
19 25 (1.93%) Star Schema
Development Applications
1 165 (12.73%) Git
2 61 (4.71%) GitLab
3 47 (3.63%) MLflow
4 43 (3.32%) JIRA
5 34 (2.62%) Jenkins
6 7 (0.54%) SonarQube
7 5 (0.39%) 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%) Ant
10 1 (0.077%) ERwin
10 1 (0.077%) JUnit
10 1 (0.077%) Maven
10 1 (0.077%) Octopus Deploy
10 1 (0.077%) SoapUI
General
1 325 (25.08%) Finance
2 314 (24.23%) Social Skills
3 203 (15.66%) Analytical Skills
4 108 (8.33%) Public Sector
5 78 (6.02%) Banking
6 28 (2.16%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 23 (1.77%) Documentation Skills
8 22 (1.70%) Retail
9 20 (1.54%) Marketing
10 17 (1.31%) Front Office
11 15 (1.16%) Telecoms
12 14 (1.08%) Legal
13 13 (1.00%) Influencing Skills
13 13 (1.00%) Investment Banking
14 12 (0.93%) Financial Institution
15 9 (0.69%) Pharmaceutical
16 7 (0.54%) Law
17 6 (0.46%) Back Office
17 6 (0.46%) Military
18 5 (0.39%) Manufacturing
Job Titles
1 593 (45.76%) Data Engineer
2 172 (13.27%) Senior
3 142 (10.96%) Lead
4 132 (10.19%) Architect
5 106 (8.18%) Senior Data Engineer
6 79 (6.10%) Developer
7 69 (5.32%) Data Architect
8 64 (4.94%) Azure Engineer
9 59 (4.55%) AWS Engineer
10 56 (4.32%) Analyst
11 54 (4.17%) Azure Data Engineer
11 54 (4.17%) Lead Data Engineer
12 44 (3.40%) Data Scientist
12 44 (3.40%) Snowflake Engineer
13 42 (3.24%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
13 42 (3.24%) Consultant
14 41 (3.16%) AWS Data Engineer
15 39 (3.01%) Solutions Architect
16 37 (2.85%) Snowflake Data Engineer
17 32 (2.47%) Data Analyst
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 217 (16.74%) PySpark
2 154 (11.88%) Kafka
3 61 (4.71%) Pandas
4 49 (3.78%) PyTorch
5 44 (3.40%) scikit-learn
6 40 (3.09%) TensorFlow
7 39 (3.01%) NumPy
8 28 (2.16%) REST
9 27 (2.08%) JSON
10 23 (1.77%) Spring
10 23 (1.77%) YAML
11 22 (1.70%) pytest
11 22 (1.70%) React
12 21 (1.62%) LangChain
13 20 (1.54%) RESTful
14 19 (1.47%) FastAPI
14 19 (1.47%) Great Expectations
15 16 (1.23%) Flask
15 16 (1.23%) Spring Boot
16 13 (1.00%) Django
Miscellaneous
1 176 (13.58%) Cloud Native
2 49 (3.78%) Distributed Systems
3 46 (3.55%) Product Ownership
4 38 (2.93%) Data Structures
4 38 (2.93%) Legacy Systems
5 33 (2.55%) Algorithms
6 29 (2.24%) Distributed Computing
7 28 (2.16%) AI Agents
8 26 (2.01%) Onboarding
9 22 (1.70%) Greenfield Project
10 20 (1.54%) Data Protection Act
11 19 (1.47%) 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 (0.93%) Virtual Team
16 10 (0.77%) Data Fabric
Operating Systems
1 28 (2.16%) Linux
2 17 (1.31%) Unix
3 8 (0.62%) 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
1 659 (50.85%) Analytics
2 597 (46.06%) Data Pipeline
3 502 (38.73%) Data Modelling
4 498 (38.43%) ETL
5 456 (35.19%) CI/CD
6 367 (28.32%) AI
7 333 (25.69%) Agile
8 330 (25.46%) Business Intelligence
9 321 (24.77%) Data Governance
9 321 (24.77%) DevOps
10 267 (20.60%) Machine Learning
11 250 (19.29%) Problem-Solving
12 237 (18.29%) Data Science
13 201 (15.51%) Data Architecture
14 172 (13.27%) Decision-Making
15 161 (12.42%) Migration
16 156 (12.04%) Infrastructure as Code
17 150 (11.57%) Validation
18 133 (10.26%) Data Transformation
19 129 (9.95%) Data Integration
Programming Languages
1 705 (54.40%) SQL
2 699 (53.94%) Python
3 104 (8.02%) Java
4 64 (4.94%) Scala
5 44 (3.40%) Data Analysis Expressions
6 38 (2.93%) C#
7 31 (2.39%) Bash
8 25 (1.93%) PowerShell
8 25 (1.93%) T-SQL
9 22 (1.70%) JavaScript
9 22 (1.70%) R
10 17 (1.31%) Bicep
11 12 (0.93%) Shell Script
12 11 (0.85%) Go
13 10 (0.77%) TypeScript
14 8 (0.62%) PL/SQL
15 7 (0.54%) SAS Macro
16 5 (0.39%) Korn
17 3 (0.23%) C++
18 1 (0.077%) Groovy
Qualifications
1 259 (19.98%) Security Cleared
2 223 (17.21%) SC Cleared
3 104 (8.02%) Degree
4 43 (3.32%) Computer Science Degree
5 41 (3.16%) Azure Certification
6 39 (3.01%) Master's Degree
7 20 (1.54%) BPSS Clearance
8 18 (1.39%) AWS Certification
9 16 (1.23%) DV Cleared
10 9 (0.69%) Microsoft Certification
11 6 (0.46%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
11 6 (0.46%) PhD
11 6 (0.46%) SnowPro
12 5 (0.39%) DBS Check
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
1 370 (28.55%) Data Quality
2 96 (7.41%) GDPR
3 48 (3.70%) QA
4 13 (1.00%) Sarbanes-Oxley
5 10 (0.77%) SLA
6 9 (0.69%) Accessibility
7 5 (0.39%) 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
1 135 (10.42%) 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
1 180 (13.89%) Terraform
2 127 (9.80%) Kubernetes
3 29 (2.24%) Prometheus
4 22 (1.70%) Grafana
5 12 (0.93%) Ansible
6 5 (0.39%) 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 (29.09%) Databricks
2 206 (15.90%) Microsoft
3 65 (5.02%) Google
4 59 (4.55%) Informatica
5 43 (3.32%) Oracle
6 34 (2.62%) Talend
7 25 (1.93%) Foundry
8 22 (1.70%) OpenAI
9 21 (1.62%) SAP
10 20 (1.54%) Palantir
11 19 (1.47%) Splunk
12 16 (1.23%) Cloudera
13 13 (1.00%) ServiceNow
14 11 (0.85%) Salesforce
15 10 (0.77%) IBM
16 9 (0.69%) UiPath
17 8 (0.62%) Automation Anywhere
18 7 (0.54%) Denodo
19 6 (0.46%) InterSystems
19 6 (0.46%) MicroStrategy