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 4 March 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
4 Mar 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 93 145 220
Rank change year-on-year +52 +75 +7
Contract jobs citing Data Engineering 1,142 542 487
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.71% 1.80% 1.10%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.13% 2.00% 1.27%
Number of daily rates quoted 790 379 366
10th Percentile £363 £373 £400
25th Percentile £436 £450 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £540 £550
Median % change year-on-year -2.78% -1.82% -8.33%
75th Percentile £617 £656 £663
90th Percentile £739 £838 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £495 £500 £550
% change year-on-year -1.00% -9.09% +1.85%
Number of hourly rates quoted 13 15 8
10th Percentile £52.00 £21.55 £31.02
25th Percentile £56.75 £22.25 £35.00
Median hourly rate £69.00 £25.43 £35.32
Median % change year-on-year +171.33% -27.99% +0.90%
75th Percentile £75.00 £28.45 £45.19
90th Percentile £82.00 £51.00 £54.68
UK excluding London median hourly rate £69.00 £25.43 £43.37
% change year-on-year +171.33% -41.36% +114.78%

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 36,453 27,072 38,415
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 86.50% 90.11% 86.78%
Number of daily rates quoted 23,124 16,979 25,034
10th Percentile £313 £305 £300
25th Percentile £413 £413 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £613 £638 £638
90th Percentile £725 £738 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £483 £493 £500
% change year-on-year -2.13% -1.40% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,168 886 2,250
10th Percentile £14.64 £15.62 £13.25
25th Percentile £18.25 £21.05 £16.13
Median hourly rate £27.94 £32.50 £32.85
Median % change year-on-year -14.03% -1.05% -6.16%
75th Percentile £63.75 £64.31 £58.75
90th Percentile £73.46 £75.13 £71.90
UK excluding London median hourly rate £25.15 £31.76 £33.50
% change year-on-year -20.81% -5.19% -4.29%

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 4 March 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 4 March 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 4 March 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 +58 1,011 £525 -4.55% 795
London +48 665 £550 -4.35% 258
UK excluding London +37 362 £495 -1.00% 631
Work from Home +31 340 £550 -3.93% 301
North of England -2 105 £450 -14.29% 164
Midlands +9 95 £519 +3.70% 92
West Midlands +4 75 £534 +6.75% 49
South West +4 57 £550 -15.38% 82
North West -7 54 £450 - 76
Scotland +27 51 £440 -6.98% 22
South East -12 44 £550 +8.11% 195
Yorkshire -42 32 £500 -16.67% 74
East Midlands -16 20 £447 -12.78% 41
North East +2 19 £450 -23.08% 15
East of England -23 16 £563 +76.29% 59
Wales -16 6 £563 +46.10% 18
Northern Ireland - 2 £430 - 8

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
1 178 (15.59%) Apache Spark
2 120 (10.51%) Apache Airflow
3 82 (7.18%) Apache
4 20 (1.75%) Palantir Foundry
4 20 (1.75%) SAS
5 16 (1.40%) Confluence
6 8 (0.70%) Appian
7 4 (0.35%) Microsoft Exchange
8 3 (0.26%) Apache Superset
8 3 (0.26%) Jupyter
9 2 (0.18%) SharePoint
10 1 (0.088%) Adobe Experience Manager
10 1 (0.088%) Apache Synapse
10 1 (0.088%) ArcGIS
10 1 (0.088%) Camunda
10 1 (0.088%) CMS
10 1 (0.088%) IBM HTTP Server
10 1 (0.088%) Luigi
Applications
1 24 (2.10%) Microsoft Excel
2 11 (0.96%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 7 (0.61%) Microsoft Project
4 6 (0.53%) Microsoft Office
5 5 (0.44%) Chatbot
6 4 (0.35%) MS Visio
7 3 (0.26%) Trello
8 2 (0.18%) Spreadsheet
9 1 (0.088%) Adobe XD
Business Applications
1 4 (0.35%) Aladdin
2 3 (0.26%) SAP BPC
3 2 (0.18%) Dynamics CRM
3 2 (0.18%) Salesforce CRM
4 1 (0.088%) Actimize
4 1 (0.088%) Adobe Campaign
4 1 (0.088%) Markit EDM
4 1 (0.088%) Maximo
4 1 (0.088%) Misys Midas
4 1 (0.088%) SAP S/4HANA
4 1 (0.088%) Workday HCM
Cloud Services
1 542 (47.46%) Azure
2 403 (35.29%) AWS
3 248 (21.72%) Power Platform
4 208 (18.21%) Azure Data Factory
5 164 (14.36%) GCP
6 151 (13.22%) Snowflake
7 131 (11.47%) Amazon S3
8 126 (11.03%) Azure Synapse Analytics
9 117 (10.25%) Serverless
10 113 (9.89%) GitHub
11 97 (8.49%) Azure DevOps
12 95 (8.32%) dbt
13 90 (7.88%) AWS Lambda
14 75 (6.57%) GitHub Actions
15 61 (5.34%) AWS CloudFormation
16 36 (3.15%) AWS Step Functions
17 33 (2.89%) Amazon EMR
18 28 (2.45%) Amazon SageMaker
19 27 (2.36%) Collibra
20 26 (2.28%) Azure Machine Learning
Communications & Networking
1 4 (0.35%) Cisco IPT
1 4 (0.35%) Kerberos
1 4 (0.35%) Network Security
2 3 (0.26%) RTP
2 3 (0.26%) VPN
3 2 (0.18%) Firewall
4 1 (0.088%) 4G
4 1 (0.088%) 5G
4 1 (0.088%) MQTT
4 1 (0.088%) SAN
4 1 (0.088%) SMS
4 1 (0.088%) SSL
4 1 (0.088%) TCP/IP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 228 (19.96%) Data Warehouse
2 226 (19.79%) Power BI
3 159 (13.92%) Data Lake
4 101 (8.84%) Metadata
5 80 (7.01%) Big Data
6 78 (6.83%) SQL Server
7 75 (6.57%) NoSQL
8 68 (5.95%) Delta Lake
9 59 (5.17%) Snowflake Schema
10 58 (5.08%) Relational Database
11 57 (4.99%) Azure SQL Database
12 55 (4.82%) PostgreSQL
13 54 (4.73%) Amazon Athena
13 54 (4.73%) Amazon Redshift
14 52 (4.55%) BigQuery
15 46 (4.03%) Hadoop
16 45 (3.94%) Tableau
17 33 (2.89%) SQL Server Integration Services
18 32 (2.80%) Spark SQL
19 22 (1.93%) Elasticsearch
Development Applications
1 168 (14.71%) Git
2 60 (5.25%) GitLab
3 45 (3.94%) MLflow
4 43 (3.77%) Jenkins
5 29 (2.54%) JIRA
6 7 (0.61%) Visual Studio Code
7 6 (0.53%) Selenium
8 5 (0.44%) SonarQube
9 4 (0.35%) Cucumber
10 3 (0.26%) JUnit
10 3 (0.26%) Maven
10 3 (0.26%) Postman
10 3 (0.26%) Robot Framework
10 3 (0.26%) Terragrunt
11 2 (0.18%) ERwin
11 2 (0.18%) Gemini Tracker
11 2 (0.18%) JMeter
11 2 (0.18%) Mockito
11 2 (0.18%) Visual Studio
11 2 (0.18%) Zephyr
General
1 313 (27.41%) Social Skills
2 262 (22.94%) Finance
3 152 (13.31%) Analytical Skills
4 93 (8.14%) Public Sector
5 78 (6.83%) Banking
6 27 (2.36%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 21 (1.84%) Retail
8 18 (1.58%) Investment Banking
9 17 (1.49%) Documentation Skills
9 17 (1.49%) Influencing Skills
10 15 (1.31%) Front Office
10 15 (1.31%) Marketing
11 10 (0.88%) Pharmaceutical
11 10 (0.88%) Publishing
12 8 (0.70%) Financial Institution
12 8 (0.70%) Legal
13 6 (0.53%) Back Office
13 6 (0.53%) Military
14 5 (0.44%) Manufacturing
14 5 (0.44%) Telecoms
Job Titles
1 513 (44.92%) Data Engineer
2 153 (13.40%) Lead
3 148 (12.96%) Senior
4 97 (8.49%) Senior Data Engineer
5 91 (7.97%) Architect
6 83 (7.27%) Azure Engineer
7 71 (6.22%) Developer
8 65 (5.69%) Azure Data Engineer
9 54 (4.73%) Analyst
9 54 (4.73%) AWS Engineer
9 54 (4.73%) Lead Data Engineer
10 50 (4.38%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
11 48 (4.20%) Data Architect
12 46 (4.03%) Snowflake Engineer
13 44 (3.85%) Data Scientist
14 39 (3.42%) Snowflake Data Engineer
15 35 (3.06%) AWS Data Engineer
16 33 (2.89%) Python Engineer
17 31 (2.71%) Data Analyst
18 29 (2.54%) Consultant
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 209 (18.30%) PySpark
2 131 (11.47%) Kafka
3 64 (5.60%) Pandas
4 61 (5.34%) PyTorch
5 50 (4.38%) TensorFlow
6 46 (4.03%) NumPy
7 45 (3.94%) scikit-learn
8 35 (3.06%) FastAPI
9 31 (2.71%) RESTful
10 30 (2.63%) JSON
11 29 (2.54%) Flask
12 28 (2.45%) pytest
13 27 (2.36%) YAML
14 24 (2.10%) LangChain
14 24 (2.10%) React
14 24 (2.10%) REST
15 17 (1.49%) ARM Templates
16 16 (1.40%) Great Expectations
17 15 (1.31%) Hugging Face
17 15 (1.31%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 140 (12.26%) Cloud Native
2 49 (4.29%) Algorithms
3 40 (3.50%) Product Ownership
4 37 (3.24%) Distributed Systems
5 29 (2.54%) Distributed Computing
6 25 (2.19%) Onboarding
7 24 (2.10%) Data Structures
8 22 (1.93%) Hybrid Cloud
8 22 (1.93%) Legacy Systems
9 21 (1.84%) AI Agents
9 21 (1.84%) Data Protection Act
10 17 (1.49%) Analytical Mindset
11 13 (1.14%) Clustering
12 12 (1.05%) Greenfield Project
12 12 (1.05%) NHS
13 11 (0.96%) Fixed Income
13 11 (0.96%) Management Information System
14 10 (0.88%) Derivative
14 10 (0.88%) Life Science
14 10 (0.88%) Reference Data
Operating Systems
1 24 (2.10%) Linux
2 7 (0.61%) VMS
3 6 (0.53%) Unix
4 2 (0.18%) Ubuntu
5 1 (0.088%) CentOS
5 1 (0.088%) Debian
5 1 (0.088%) Windows
Processes & Methodologies
1 523 (45.80%) Analytics
2 522 (45.71%) Data Pipeline
3 445 (38.97%) ETL
4 435 (38.09%) Data Modelling
5 428 (37.48%) CI/CD
6 304 (26.62%) AI
7 297 (26.01%) Data Governance
7 297 (26.01%) DevOps
8 292 (25.57%) Agile
9 274 (23.99%) Business Intelligence
10 260 (22.77%) Machine Learning
11 240 (21.02%) Data Science
12 234 (20.49%) Problem-Solving
13 177 (15.50%) Data Architecture
14 152 (13.31%) Infrastructure as Code
15 124 (10.86%) Decision-Making
16 122 (10.68%) Validation
17 118 (10.33%) LLM
18 112 (9.81%) Data Integration
19 109 (9.54%) Containerisation
Programming Languages
1 683 (59.81%) Python
2 598 (52.36%) SQL
3 83 (7.27%) Java
4 65 (5.69%) Scala
5 45 (3.94%) C#
6 34 (2.98%) PowerShell
7 33 (2.89%) Data Analysis Expressions
8 32 (2.80%) Bash
8 32 (2.80%) JavaScript
9 23 (2.01%) Bicep
10 22 (1.93%) T-SQL
11 19 (1.66%) TypeScript
12 16 (1.40%) Go
12 16 (1.40%) R
13 13 (1.14%) PL/SQL
14 12 (1.05%) C++
15 7 (0.61%) Rust
16 6 (0.53%) Korn
16 6 (0.53%) Shell Script
17 3 (0.26%) SAS Macro
Qualifications
1 226 (19.79%) Security Cleared
2 187 (16.37%) SC Cleared
3 107 (9.37%) Degree
4 54 (4.73%) Azure Certification
5 47 (4.12%) Master's Degree
6 40 (3.50%) Computer Science Degree
7 22 (1.93%) DV Cleared
8 18 (1.58%) BPSS Clearance
9 17 (1.49%) AWS Certification
10 14 (1.23%) Microsoft Certification
11 13 (1.14%) PhD
12 4 (0.35%) DBS Check
12 4 (0.35%) Microsoft Certified Professional
13 3 (0.26%) IBM Certification
14 1 (0.088%) ACCA
14 1 (0.088%) CCSP
14 1 (0.088%) CIMA
14 1 (0.088%) CISM
14 1 (0.088%) CISSP
14 1 (0.088%) ISTQB
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 320 (28.02%) Data Quality
2 91 (7.97%) GDPR
3 38 (3.33%) QA
4 17 (1.49%) Accessibility
5 12 (1.05%) Sarbanes-Oxley
6 9 (0.79%) HIPAA
7 7 (0.61%) SLA
8 6 (0.53%) California Consumer Privacy Act
9 5 (0.44%) ISO/IEC 27001
9 5 (0.44%) PERC
9 5 (0.44%) SOC 2
10 3 (0.26%) GRC
10 3 (0.26%) Solvency II
10 3 (0.26%) WCAG
11 2 (0.18%) HL7
11 2 (0.18%) MiFID
11 2 (0.18%) NIST
11 2 (0.18%) PCI DSS
12 1 (0.088%) FATCA
12 1 (0.088%) SNOMED CT
System Software
1 155 (13.57%) Docker
2 7 (0.61%) HDFS
3 3 (0.26%) Virtual Machines
4 2 (0.18%) Active Directory
5 1 (0.088%) Apache ZooKeeper
5 1 (0.088%) ISA Server
Systems Management
1 184 (16.11%) Terraform
2 139 (12.17%) Kubernetes
3 27 (2.36%) Prometheus
4 16 (1.40%) Grafana
5 9 (0.79%) Ansible
6 5 (0.44%) Argo
7 3 (0.26%) Control-M
7 3 (0.26%) Kubeflow
7 3 (0.26%) Rancher
8 2 (0.18%) Hadoop YARN
8 2 (0.18%) Kibana
8 2 (0.18%) logstash
8 2 (0.18%) Nagios
8 2 (0.18%) Single Sign-On
9 1 (0.088%) Apache Ranger
9 1 (0.088%) HP Fortify
9 1 (0.088%) Oozie
Vendors
1 346 (30.30%) Databricks
2 163 (14.27%) Microsoft
3 55 (4.82%) Google
4 41 (3.59%) Oracle
5 38 (3.33%) Informatica
6 27 (2.36%) Talend
7 26 (2.28%) Foundry
8 24 (2.10%) Palantir
9 22 (1.93%) OpenAI
10 17 (1.49%) Splunk
11 15 (1.31%) SAP
12 12 (1.05%) Cloudera
13 11 (0.96%) Salesforce
14 9 (0.79%) Denodo
15 8 (0.70%) Automation Anywhere
15 8 (0.70%) IBM
15 8 (0.70%) UiPath
16 7 (0.61%) Virgin Media
17 6 (0.53%) MicroStrategy
17 6 (0.53%) ServiceNow