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

6 months to
6 Apr 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 89 158 217
Rank change year-on-year +69 +59 -2
Contract jobs citing Data Engineering 1,285 522 487
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.84% 1.79% 1.11%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.33% 1.97% 1.29%
Number of daily rates quoted 890 366 367
10th Percentile £394 £375 £400
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 £675 £675
90th Percentile £750 £838 £740
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £480 £550
% change year-on-year +4.28% -12.82% +2.04%
Number of hourly rates quoted 22 14 13
10th Percentile £51.25 £21.48 £30.55
25th Percentile £58.56 £22.13 £31.25
Median hourly rate £70.00 £25.97 £35.00
Median % change year-on-year +169.59% -25.81% -36.36%
75th Percentile £77.25 £29.69 £50.25
90th Percentile £89.75 £61.63 £60.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £69.44 £25.43 £60.00
% change year-on-year +173.06% -57.62% +116.33%

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 38,628 26,479 37,892
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 85.41% 90.55% 86.36%
Number of daily rates quoted 24,477 17,189 24,572
10th Percentile £314 £308 £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 £744 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £487 £488 £500
% change year-on-year -0.10% -2.50% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,295 988 2,354
10th Percentile £15.00 £15.00 £12.75
25th Percentile £19.00 £19.99 £16.00
Median hourly rate £35.91 £31.58 £32.50
Median % change year-on-year +13.71% -2.83% -13.33%
75th Percentile £65.00 £63.75 £57.50
90th Percentile £77.50 £75.73 £70.27
UK excluding London median hourly rate £35.55 £30.00 £32.12
% change year-on-year +18.50% -6.59% -13.90%

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 6 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 6 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 6 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 +63 1,153 £525 -4.55% 542
London +62 741 £550 -5.25% 253
UK excluding London +50 414 £500 +4.28% 383
Work from Home +46 371 £550 -8.33% 229
Midlands +25 117 £519 +3.70% 51
North of England -11 116 £475 -5.00% 110
West Midlands +19 92 £528 -2.31% 36
South West +24 71 £525 -16.00% 49
North West -20 48 £471 -0.79% 59
Yorkshire -20 48 £480 -16.52% 40
Scotland +25 47 £440 -6.98% 21
South East -35 47 £538 +7.50% 111
East of England -19 23 £575 +35.29% 34
East Midlands -17 22 £447 -5.89% 15
North East +4 20 £450 -5.26% 13
Wales -16 5 £665 +181.78% 11
Northern Ireland - 2 £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
1 196 (15.25%) Apache Spark
2 130 (10.12%) Apache Airflow
3 89 (6.93%) Apache
4 31 (2.41%) SAS
5 20 (1.56%) Palantir Foundry
6 18 (1.40%) Confluence
7 8 (0.62%) Appian
8 7 (0.54%) Apache Superset
9 4 (0.31%) Jupyter
9 4 (0.31%) Microsoft Exchange
10 2 (0.16%) Apache Synapse
10 2 (0.16%) SharePoint
11 1 (0.078%) Adobe Experience Manager
11 1 (0.078%) ArcGIS
11 1 (0.078%) Camunda
11 1 (0.078%) CMS
11 1 (0.078%) IBM HTTP Server
Applications
1 29 (2.26%) Microsoft Excel
2 11 (0.86%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 9 (0.70%) Microsoft Office
4 7 (0.54%) Microsoft Project
5 6 (0.47%) Spreadsheet
6 4 (0.31%) MS Visio
7 3 (0.23%) Trello
8 2 (0.16%) Chatbot
Business Applications
1 4 (0.31%) Aladdin
1 4 (0.31%) BambooHR
2 3 (0.23%) Salesforce CRM
2 3 (0.23%) SAP BPC
3 2 (0.16%) SAP S/4HANA
4 1 (0.078%) Actimize
4 1 (0.078%) Adobe Campaign
4 1 (0.078%) Markit EDM
4 1 (0.078%) Maximo
4 1 (0.078%) Misys Midas
4 1 (0.078%) SAP ECC
Cloud Services
1 598 (46.54%) Azure
2 456 (35.49%) AWS
3 284 (22.10%) Power Platform
4 203 (15.80%) Azure Data Factory
5 176 (13.70%) GCP
6 165 (12.84%) Snowflake
7 152 (11.83%) Amazon S3
8 147 (11.44%) Azure Synapse Analytics
9 134 (10.43%) GitHub
10 117 (9.11%) Serverless
11 113 (8.79%) dbt
12 104 (8.09%) Azure DevOps
13 94 (7.32%) AWS Lambda
14 80 (6.23%) GitHub Actions
15 64 (4.98%) AWS CloudFormation
16 38 (2.96%) AWS Step Functions
17 34 (2.65%) Amazon EMR
18 31 (2.41%) Collibra
19 28 (2.18%) Amazon CloudWatch
19 28 (2.18%) Amazon SageMaker
Communications & Networking
1 5 (0.39%) RTP
2 4 (0.31%) Cisco IPT
2 4 (0.31%) Kerberos
2 4 (0.31%) Network Security
3 3 (0.23%) VPN
4 2 (0.16%) Firewall
5 1 (0.078%) 4G
5 1 (0.078%) 5G
5 1 (0.078%) MQTT
5 1 (0.078%) SAN
5 1 (0.078%) SMS
5 1 (0.078%) SSL
5 1 (0.078%) TCP/IP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 258 (20.08%) Power BI
2 253 (19.69%) Data Warehouse
3 191 (14.86%) Data Lake
4 124 (9.65%) Metadata
5 90 (7.00%) Big Data
6 87 (6.77%) SQL Server
7 84 (6.54%) Delta Lake
8 83 (6.46%) NoSQL
9 68 (5.29%) Amazon Athena
9 68 (5.29%) Amazon Redshift
10 66 (5.14%) Tableau
11 65 (5.06%) Azure SQL Database
11 65 (5.06%) Snowflake Schema
12 60 (4.67%) BigQuery
13 56 (4.36%) PostgreSQL
13 56 (4.36%) Relational Database
14 49 (3.81%) Hadoop
15 35 (2.72%) Spark SQL
15 35 (2.72%) SQL Server Integration Services
16 23 (1.79%) Data Vault
Development Applications
1 174 (13.54%) Git
2 64 (4.98%) GitLab
3 48 (3.74%) MLflow
4 42 (3.27%) Jenkins
5 38 (2.96%) JIRA
6 7 (0.54%) Selenium
7 6 (0.47%) SonarQube
8 3 (0.23%) JUnit
8 3 (0.23%) Maven
8 3 (0.23%) Postman
8 3 (0.23%) Robot Framework
8 3 (0.23%) Terragrunt
8 3 (0.23%) Visual Studio Code
9 2 (0.16%) Bitbucket
9 2 (0.16%) Cucumber
9 2 (0.16%) Mockito
9 2 (0.16%) Snyk
9 2 (0.16%) Visual Studio
10 1 (0.078%) Artifactory
10 1 (0.078%) Octopus Deploy
General
1 326 (25.37%) Social Skills
2 307 (23.89%) Finance
3 191 (14.86%) Analytical Skills
4 105 (8.17%) Public Sector
5 73 (5.68%) Banking
6 27 (2.10%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 23 (1.79%) Documentation Skills
8 21 (1.63%) Retail
9 18 (1.40%) Front Office
10 17 (1.32%) Marketing
11 15 (1.17%) Influencing Skills
11 15 (1.17%) Investment Banking
11 15 (1.17%) Telecoms
12 13 (1.01%) Legal
13 12 (0.93%) Financial Institution
14 9 (0.70%) Pharmaceutical
15 7 (0.54%) Law
16 6 (0.47%) Back Office
16 6 (0.47%) Military
16 6 (0.47%) Publishing
Job Titles
1 594 (46.23%) Data Engineer
2 166 (12.92%) Senior
3 148 (11.52%) Lead
4 118 (9.18%) Architect
5 109 (8.48%) Senior Data Engineer
6 81 (6.30%) Developer
7 77 (5.99%) Azure Engineer
8 62 (4.82%) AWS Engineer
8 62 (4.82%) Azure Data Engineer
8 62 (4.82%) Data Architect
9 61 (4.75%) Analyst
10 59 (4.59%) Lead Data Engineer
11 48 (3.74%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
12 47 (3.66%) Snowflake Engineer
13 45 (3.50%) Data Scientist
14 41 (3.19%) AWS Data Engineer
15 40 (3.11%) Consultant
15 40 (3.11%) Snowflake Data Engineer
16 36 (2.80%) Data Analyst
17 31 (2.41%) Python Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 219 (17.04%) PySpark
2 155 (12.06%) Kafka
3 65 (5.06%) Pandas
4 56 (4.36%) PyTorch
5 47 (3.66%) TensorFlow
6 44 (3.42%) scikit-learn
7 41 (3.19%) NumPy
8 30 (2.33%) JSON
9 29 (2.26%) REST
10 25 (1.95%) YAML
11 24 (1.87%) FastAPI
12 23 (1.79%) pytest
12 23 (1.79%) Spring
13 22 (1.71%) LangChain
13 22 (1.71%) React
13 22 (1.71%) RESTful
14 21 (1.63%) Flask
15 18 (1.40%) Great Expectations
16 16 (1.25%) OAuth
16 16 (1.25%) Spring Boot
Miscellaneous
1 169 (13.15%) Cloud Native
2 46 (3.58%) Algorithms
2 46 (3.58%) Product Ownership
3 45 (3.50%) Distributed Systems
4 37 (2.88%) Legacy Systems
5 29 (2.26%) Distributed Computing
5 29 (2.26%) Onboarding
6 28 (2.18%) Data Structures
7 23 (1.79%) Hybrid Cloud
8 22 (1.71%) AI Agents
9 21 (1.63%) Greenfield Project
10 20 (1.56%) Analytical Mindset
11 19 (1.48%) Data Protection Act
12 15 (1.17%) Clustering
13 14 (1.09%) NHS
14 13 (1.01%) Management Information System
15 12 (0.93%) Fixed Income
15 12 (0.93%) Virtual Team
16 11 (0.86%) Self-Motivation
17 10 (0.78%) Derivative
Operating Systems
1 29 (2.26%) Linux
2 16 (1.25%) Unix
3 8 (0.62%) VMS
4 3 (0.23%) Windows
5 2 (0.16%) Ubuntu
5 2 (0.16%) Windows Server
6 1 (0.078%) CentOS
6 1 (0.078%) Debian
Processes & Methodologies
1 646 (50.27%) Analytics
2 586 (45.60%) Data Pipeline
3 503 (39.14%) ETL
4 493 (38.37%) Data Modelling
5 463 (36.03%) CI/CD
6 346 (26.93%) AI
7 333 (25.91%) Data Governance
8 322 (25.06%) DevOps
9 321 (24.98%) Business Intelligence
10 313 (24.36%) Agile
11 270 (21.01%) Machine Learning
12 254 (19.77%) Problem-Solving
13 244 (18.99%) Data Science
14 203 (15.80%) Data Architecture
15 155 (12.06%) Decision-Making
16 154 (11.98%) Infrastructure as Code
17 148 (11.52%) Validation
18 146 (11.36%) Migration
19 130 (10.12%) Data Transformation
20 125 (9.73%) Data Ingestion
Programming Languages
1 722 (56.19%) Python
2 684 (53.23%) SQL
3 103 (8.02%) Java
4 67 (5.21%) Scala
5 43 (3.35%) C#
5 43 (3.35%) Data Analysis Expressions
6 37 (2.88%) Bash
7 35 (2.72%) PowerShell
8 24 (1.87%) JavaScript
8 24 (1.87%) T-SQL
9 19 (1.48%) Bicep
9 19 (1.48%) R
10 15 (1.17%) Go
11 12 (0.93%) TypeScript
12 11 (0.86%) Shell Script
13 9 (0.70%) PL/SQL
14 6 (0.47%) Korn
15 5 (0.39%) C++
15 5 (0.39%) SAS Macro
16 3 (0.23%) Rust
Qualifications
1 263 (20.47%) Security Cleared
2 224 (17.43%) SC Cleared
3 110 (8.56%) Degree
4 48 (3.74%) Azure Certification
5 45 (3.50%) Computer Science Degree
6 43 (3.35%) Master's Degree
7 20 (1.56%) BPSS Clearance
8 18 (1.40%) DV Cleared
9 17 (1.32%) AWS Certification
10 11 (0.86%) Microsoft Certification
10 11 (0.86%) PhD
11 4 (0.31%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
11 4 (0.31%) DBS Check
11 4 (0.31%) Microsoft Certified Professional
11 4 (0.31%) SnowPro
12 3 (0.23%) IBM Certification
13 2 (0.16%) Tableau Certification
14 1 (0.078%) (ISC)2 CCSP
14 1 (0.078%) AWS Certified SysOps Administrator
14 1 (0.078%) CSPO
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 366 (28.48%) Data Quality
2 98 (7.63%) GDPR
3 43 (3.35%) QA
4 13 (1.01%) Sarbanes-Oxley
5 11 (0.86%) Accessibility
6 9 (0.70%) SLA
7 6 (0.47%) HIPAA
8 5 (0.39%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 5 (0.39%) PERC
8 5 (0.39%) SOC 2
9 4 (0.31%) California Consumer Privacy Act
9 4 (0.31%) Solvency II
10 3 (0.23%) GRC
10 3 (0.23%) WCAG
11 2 (0.16%) Actionable Recommendations
11 2 (0.16%) HL7
11 2 (0.16%) MiFID
11 2 (0.16%) NIST
11 2 (0.16%) PCI DSS
11 2 (0.16%) PMO
System Software
1 146 (11.36%) Docker
2 6 (0.47%) HDFS
3 3 (0.23%) Virtual Machines
4 1 (0.078%) Active Directory
4 1 (0.078%) Apache ZooKeeper
4 1 (0.078%) ISA Server
Systems Management
1 182 (14.16%) Terraform
2 132 (10.27%) Kubernetes
3 29 (2.26%) Prometheus
4 19 (1.48%) Grafana
5 9 (0.70%) Ansible
6 5 (0.39%) Argo
7 4 (0.31%) Kubeflow
8 3 (0.23%) Nagios
8 3 (0.23%) Rancher
9 2 (0.16%) Hadoop YARN
9 2 (0.16%) Kibana
9 2 (0.16%) Thomson Reuters DACS
10 1 (0.078%) Apache Ranger
10 1 (0.078%) Control-M
10 1 (0.078%) HP Fortify
10 1 (0.078%) IBM Guardium
10 1 (0.078%) Oozie
Vendors
1 389 (30.27%) Databricks
2 201 (15.64%) Microsoft
3 62 (4.82%) Google
4 58 (4.51%) Informatica
5 40 (3.11%) Oracle
6 33 (2.57%) Talend
7 27 (2.10%) Foundry
8 22 (1.71%) OpenAI
8 22 (1.71%) Palantir
9 19 (1.48%) Splunk
10 18 (1.40%) SAP
11 15 (1.17%) Cloudera
12 11 (0.86%) Denodo
13 10 (0.78%) Salesforce
13 10 (0.78%) ServiceNow
14 9 (0.70%) IBM
14 9 (0.70%) UiPath
15 8 (0.62%) Automation Anywhere
16 7 (0.54%) MicroStrategy
17 5 (0.39%) Virgin Media