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 22 January 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
22 Jan 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 113 162 217
Rank change year-on-year +49 +55 +12
Contract jobs citing Data Engineering 914 518 470
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.42% 1.63% 1.09%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 2.76% 1.84% 1.25%
Number of daily rates quoted 617 361 350
10th Percentile £363 £363 £399
25th Percentile £425 £450 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £515 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -6.36% - -8.33%
75th Percentile £625 £650 £650
90th Percentile £750 £813 £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 5 14 8
10th Percentile £41.15 £21.25 £35.00
25th Percentile £50.00 £22.00 £35.47
Median hourly rate £74.26 £25.43 £42.25
Median % change year-on-year +192.02% -39.81% -43.67%
75th Percentile £87.50 £28.15 £68.25
90th Percentile £101.00 £54.13 £78.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £62.13 £25.43 £78.00
% change year-on-year +144.32% -67.40% +281.05%

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 33,128 28,199 37,720
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 87.64% 88.95% 87.50%
Number of daily rates quoted 21,004 17,123 24,892
10th Percentile £305 £306 £300
25th Percentile £406 £413 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £613 £638 £645
90th Percentile £720 £743 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £500 £500
% change year-on-year -5.00% - -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,016 901 1,818
10th Percentile £14.50 £15.62 £14.00
25th Percentile £17.69 £21.00 £17.08
Median hourly rate £25.15 £32.50 £37.50
Median % change year-on-year -22.62% -13.33% +17.19%
75th Percentile £57.50 £62.50 £62.50
90th Percentile £69.65 £75.00 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £24.00 £30.78 £40.00
% change year-on-year -22.03% -23.05% +53.85%

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 22 January 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 22 January 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 22 January 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 +63 814 £525 -7.89% 590
London +53 575 £550 -4.35% 214
Work from Home +22 266 £550 -3.51% 313
UK excluding London -14 246 £495 -1.00% 504
North of England -19 82 £450 -18.18% 100
Midlands -4 66 £528 +5.50% 56
North West 0 52 £450 -10.00% 51
West Midlands -18 45 £550 +10.00% 31
Scotland +10 35 £402 -14.65% 27
South West -10 32 £550 -17.60% 46
South East -27 28 £513 +2.50% 200
East Midlands -2 21 £444 -22.83% 24
Yorkshire -47 16 £500 -9.09% 33
North East -3 14 £425 -28.87% 16
East of England -18 11 £500 +56.25% 57
Wales -15 5 £631 +26.25% 19
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
1 129 (14.11%) Apache Spark
2 108 (11.82%) Apache Airflow
3 69 (7.55%) Apache
4 13 (1.42%) Confluence
5 5 (0.55%) Appian
5 5 (0.55%) SAS
6 3 (0.33%) Microsoft Exchange
7 2 (0.22%) Jupyter
7 2 (0.22%) SharePoint
8 1 (0.11%) Apache Pig
8 1 (0.11%) ArcGIS
8 1 (0.11%) CMS
8 1 (0.11%) Luigi
Applications
1 17 (1.86%) Microsoft Excel
2 8 (0.88%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 6 (0.66%) Chatbot
4 3 (0.33%) Microsoft Office
4 3 (0.33%) Microsoft Project
4 3 (0.33%) MS Visio
4 3 (0.33%) Trello
5 1 (0.11%) Adobe XD
5 1 (0.11%) Spreadsheet
Business Applications
1 5 (0.55%) Aladdin
2 3 (0.33%) Dynamics CRM
3 2 (0.22%) Eagle PACE
3 2 (0.22%) Markit EDM
3 2 (0.22%) Salesforce CRM
4 1 (0.11%) Actimize
4 1 (0.11%) Maximo
4 1 (0.11%) Misys Midas
4 1 (0.11%) SAP BPC
4 1 (0.11%) SAP ERP
4 1 (0.11%) Workday HCM
Cloud Services
1 430 (47.05%) Azure
2 324 (35.45%) AWS
3 183 (20.02%) Power Platform
4 164 (17.94%) Azure Data Factory
5 131 (14.33%) GCP
6 124 (13.57%) Snowflake
7 105 (11.49%) Amazon S3
8 103 (11.27%) Azure Synapse Analytics
9 97 (10.61%) GitHub
10 94 (10.28%) Serverless
11 80 (8.75%) dbt
12 76 (8.32%) Azure DevOps
13 72 (7.88%) AWS Lambda
14 67 (7.33%) GitHub Actions
15 41 (4.49%) AWS CloudFormation
16 28 (3.06%) AWS Step Functions
17 23 (2.52%) Amazon SageMaker
18 22 (2.41%) Azure Machine Learning
18 22 (2.41%) Cloud Computing
19 21 (2.30%) Amazon Kinesis
Communications & Networking
1 5 (0.55%) Network Security
2 4 (0.44%) Cisco IPT
2 4 (0.44%) Kerberos
3 3 (0.33%) Firewall
3 3 (0.33%) VPN
4 1 (0.11%) MQTT
4 1 (0.11%) SAN
4 1 (0.11%) SMS
4 1 (0.11%) SSL
4 1 (0.11%) TCP/IP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 175 (19.15%) Data Warehouse
2 173 (18.93%) Power BI
3 126 (13.79%) Data Lake
4 78 (8.53%) Metadata
5 60 (6.56%) NoSQL
6 56 (6.13%) Big Data
7 54 (5.91%) SQL Server
8 51 (5.58%) Relational Database
9 49 (5.36%) Delta Lake
10 48 (5.25%) Azure SQL Database
11 46 (5.03%) Snowflake Schema
12 45 (4.92%) BigQuery
13 43 (4.70%) Amazon Redshift
14 41 (4.49%) Amazon Athena
15 39 (4.27%) PostgreSQL
16 33 (3.61%) Hadoop
17 32 (3.50%) Tableau
18 26 (2.84%) RDBMS
19 22 (2.41%) Elasticsearch
20 21 (2.30%) SQL Server Integration Services
Development Applications
1 134 (14.66%) Git
2 53 (5.80%) GitLab
3 44 (4.81%) Jenkins
4 35 (3.83%) MLflow
5 25 (2.74%) JIRA
6 7 (0.77%) Visual Studio Code
7 4 (0.44%) Cucumber
7 4 (0.44%) Selenium
7 4 (0.44%) SonarQube
8 3 (0.33%) JMeter
8 3 (0.33%) Terragrunt
9 2 (0.22%) ERwin
9 2 (0.22%) Gemini Tracker
9 2 (0.22%) JUnit
9 2 (0.22%) Maven
9 2 (0.22%) Poetry
9 2 (0.22%) Postman
9 2 (0.22%) Pylint
9 2 (0.22%) TeamCity
9 2 (0.22%) TestRail
General
1 259 (28.34%) Social Skills
2 212 (23.19%) Finance
3 124 (13.57%) Analytical Skills
4 69 (7.55%) Public Sector
5 55 (6.02%) Banking
6 22 (2.41%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 21 (2.30%) Investment Banking
8 16 (1.75%) Front Office
9 15 (1.64%) Influencing Skills
9 15 (1.64%) Retail
10 14 (1.53%) Pharmaceutical
11 13 (1.42%) Marketing
12 11 (1.20%) Legal
13 9 (0.98%) Publishing
14 8 (0.88%) Documentation Skills
14 8 (0.88%) Military
15 6 (0.66%) Back Office
15 6 (0.66%) Presentation Skills
16 5 (0.55%) Health Technology
17 4 (0.44%) Organisational Skills
Job Titles
1 399 (43.65%) Data Engineer
2 119 (13.02%) Senior
3 102 (11.16%) Lead
4 81 (8.86%) Senior Data Engineer
5 75 (8.21%) Azure Engineer
6 65 (7.11%) Architect
7 64 (7.00%) Developer
8 55 (6.02%) Azure Data Engineer
9 46 (5.03%) Analyst
10 42 (4.60%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
10 42 (4.60%) AWS Engineer
11 38 (4.16%) Python Engineer
11 38 (4.16%) Snowflake Engineer
12 34 (3.72%) Data Architect
13 33 (3.61%) Data Scientist
14 30 (3.28%) Snowflake Data Engineer
15 28 (3.06%) Lead Data Engineer
16 27 (2.95%) AWS Data Engineer
17 24 (2.63%) Data Analyst
18 23 (2.52%) Consultant
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 175 (19.15%) PySpark
2 97 (10.61%) Kafka
3 60 (6.56%) Pandas
4 52 (5.69%) PyTorch
5 46 (5.03%) TensorFlow
6 44 (4.81%) NumPy
7 37 (4.05%) FastAPI
8 34 (3.72%) scikit-learn
9 30 (3.28%) Flask
10 28 (3.06%) RESTful
11 24 (2.63%) React
12 23 (2.52%) LangChain
12 23 (2.52%) pytest
13 19 (2.08%) YAML
14 18 (1.97%) JSON
14 18 (1.97%) REST
15 15 (1.64%) Hugging Face
15 15 (1.64%) Spark Streaming
16 14 (1.53%) OAuth
17 13 (1.42%) ARM Templates
Miscellaneous
1 95 (10.39%) Cloud Native
2 41 (4.49%) Algorithms
3 26 (2.84%) Distributed Computing
3 26 (2.84%) Product Ownership
4 22 (2.41%) Distributed Systems
4 22 (2.41%) Onboarding
5 20 (2.19%) Data Structures
6 18 (1.97%) Data Protection Act
7 17 (1.86%) Legacy Systems
8 16 (1.75%) Hybrid Cloud
9 14 (1.53%) AI Agents
9 14 (1.53%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
10 13 (1.42%) Analytical Mindset
11 12 (1.31%) Hedge funds
12 11 (1.20%) Data Fabric
12 11 (1.20%) Enterprise Software
12 11 (1.20%) Greenfield Project
12 11 (1.20%) Life Science
13 10 (1.09%) Derivative
13 10 (1.09%) Fixed Income
Operating Systems
1 25 (2.74%) Linux
2 4 (0.44%) VMS
3 2 (0.22%) Android
3 2 (0.22%) Ubuntu
4 1 (0.11%) CentOS
4 1 (0.11%) Debian
4 1 (0.11%) Unix
4 1 (0.11%) Windows
Processes & Methodologies
1 405 (44.31%) Data Pipeline
2 361 (39.50%) Analytics
3 345 (37.75%) ETL
4 330 (36.11%) CI/CD
5 319 (34.90%) Data Modelling
6 241 (26.37%) AI
7 228 (24.95%) Data Governance
8 217 (23.74%) DevOps
9 213 (23.30%) Agile
10 208 (22.76%) Machine Learning
11 204 (22.32%) Business Intelligence
12 181 (19.80%) Problem-Solving
13 180 (19.69%) Data Science
14 153 (16.74%) Data Architecture
15 114 (12.47%) Infrastructure as Code
16 97 (10.61%) Data Integration
17 95 (10.39%) Containerisation
18 90 (9.85%) Data Transformation
19 89 (9.74%) Decision-Making
20 88 (9.63%) Visualisation
Programming Languages
1 565 (61.82%) Python
2 450 (49.23%) SQL
3 63 (6.89%) Scala
4 59 (6.46%) Java
5 36 (3.94%) C#
6 35 (3.83%) JavaScript
7 28 (3.06%) PowerShell
8 20 (2.19%) Bash
8 20 (2.19%) C++
8 20 (2.19%) Data Analysis Expressions
9 18 (1.97%) Bicep
10 17 (1.86%) R
10 17 (1.86%) T-SQL
10 17 (1.86%) TypeScript
11 16 (1.75%) PL/SQL
12 15 (1.64%) Go
13 13 (1.42%) Shell Script
14 11 (1.20%) Rust
15 7 (0.77%) Korn
16 2 (0.22%) Kusto Query Language
Qualifications
1 177 (19.37%) Security Cleared
2 148 (16.19%) SC Cleared
3 72 (7.88%) Degree
4 51 (5.58%) Azure Certification
5 33 (3.61%) Computer Science Degree
6 31 (3.39%) Master's Degree
7 18 (1.97%) DV Cleared
8 16 (1.75%) AWS Certification
9 14 (1.53%) Microsoft Certification
10 13 (1.42%) PhD
11 7 (0.77%) MCP
12 6 (0.66%) BPSS Clearance
13 4 (0.44%) DBS Check
14 3 (0.33%) ISTQB
14 3 (0.33%) Tableau Certification
15 2 (0.22%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
15 2 (0.22%) CBAP
15 2 (0.22%) SnowPro
16 1 (0.11%) APMG
16 1 (0.11%) CSPO
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 239 (26.15%) Data Quality
2 75 (8.21%) GDPR
3 28 (3.06%) QA
4 18 (1.97%) Accessibility
5 10 (1.09%) HIPAA
5 10 (1.09%) Sarbanes-Oxley
6 5 (0.55%) California Consumer Privacy Act
6 5 (0.55%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 5 (0.55%) PERC
6 5 (0.55%) SOC 2
7 4 (0.44%) WCAG
8 3 (0.33%) HL7
9 2 (0.22%) Disclosure Scotland
9 2 (0.22%) GRC
9 2 (0.22%) MiFID
9 2 (0.22%) PCI DSS
9 2 (0.22%) PMO
10 1 (0.11%) GMP
10 1 (0.11%) NCSC
10 1 (0.11%) Solvency II
System Software
1 143 (15.65%) Docker
2 16 (1.75%) HDFS
3 2 (0.22%) Active Directory
4 1 (0.11%) Apache ZooKeeper
4 1 (0.11%) ISA Server
4 1 (0.11%) Virtual Machines
Systems Management
1 150 (16.41%) Terraform
2 119 (13.02%) Kubernetes
3 14 (1.53%) Grafana
4 13 (1.42%) Ansible
5 11 (1.20%) Hadoop YARN
6 8 (0.88%) Prometheus
7 5 (0.55%) Puppet
8 4 (0.44%) Argo
9 3 (0.33%) Kibana
9 3 (0.33%) logstash
9 3 (0.33%) Oozie
10 2 (0.22%) Control-M
10 2 (0.22%) Kubeflow
10 2 (0.22%) Single Sign-On
11 1 (0.11%) Apache Ranger
11 1 (0.11%) Kustomize
11 1 (0.11%) Nagios
11 1 (0.11%) Systems Management Server (SMS)
Vendors
1 279 (30.53%) Databricks
2 116 (12.69%) Microsoft
3 45 (4.92%) Google
4 29 (3.17%) Oracle
5 21 (2.30%) Informatica
6 18 (1.97%) Foundry
6 18 (1.97%) Palantir
7 15 (1.64%) OpenAI
7 15 (1.64%) Talend
8 13 (1.42%) SAP
9 12 (1.31%) Salesforce
10 8 (0.88%) Cloudera
10 8 (0.88%) Virgin Media
11 7 (0.77%) Denodo
12 6 (0.66%) Guidewire
13 5 (0.55%) Automation Anywhere
13 5 (0.55%) MicroStrategy
13 5 (0.55%) ServiceNow
13 5 (0.55%) UiPath
14 4 (0.44%) IBM