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 vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 18 September 2025, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
18 Sep 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 157 197 206
Rank change year-on-year +40 +9 +45
Contract jobs citing Data Engineering 611 488 608
As % of all contract jobs advertised in the UK 1.85% 1.27% 1.23%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 2.05% 1.48% 1.39%
Number of daily rates quoted 378 360 422
10th Percentile £350 £400 £425
25th Percentile £413 £463 £500
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £573 £600
Median % change year-on-year -10.48% -4.58% -
75th Percentile £638 £675 £734
90th Percentile £741 £775 £825
UK excluding London median daily rate £463 £525 £550
% change year-on-year -11.90% -4.55% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 7 7 22
10th Percentile £37.48 £23.72 £34.33
25th Percentile £45.11 £25.93 £36.68
Median hourly rate £52.50 £60.00 £75.50
Median % change year-on-year -12.50% -20.53% +51.00%
75th Percentile £76.25 - £78.00
90th Percentile £96.50 - £90.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £38.96 £60.00 £78.00
% change year-on-year -35.07% -23.08% +56.00%

All Process and 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 29,826 33,000 43,850
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 90.52% 85.68% 89.07%
Number of daily rates quoted 18,546 20,284 29,794
10th Percentile £300 £308 £313
25th Percentile £404 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £540
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% -2.78% -1.82%
75th Percentile £625 £638 £650
90th Percentile £725 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £500 £500
% change year-on-year -5.00% - -
Number of hourly rates quoted 1,802 1,460 1,537
10th Percentile £14.25 £14.84 £14.25
25th Percentile £17.30 £20.00 £18.70
Median hourly rate £25.15 £43.00 £43.00
Median % change year-on-year -41.51% - +48.28%
75th Percentile £44.78 £65.00 £65.00
90th Percentile £67.00 £75.00 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £22.56 £43.00 £41.90
% change year-on-year -47.53% +2.63% +80.76%

Data Engineering
Job Vacancy Trend

Job postings citing Data Engineering as a proportion of all IT jobs advertised.

Job vacancy trend for Data Engineering 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 18 September 2025.

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 18 September 2025.

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 18 September 2025. 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 +47 543 £520 -9.57% 538
London +59 367 £550 -8.33% 306
UK excluding London +16 192 £463 -11.90% 337
Work from Home +24 180 £500 -9.09% 293
North of England +1 62 £473 -5.50% 70
South East +28 39 £440 -17.18% 182
North West -5 36 £470 -6.00% 43
Midlands -25 35 £451 -21.65% 32
Scotland +22 31 £464 +2.37% 8
Yorkshire -9 22 £475 -3.55% 22
West Midlands -27 22 £507 -11.83% 24
East of England +10 14 £450 -25.00% 18
South West +16 11 £544 -5.43% 30
East Midlands +3 10 £435 +16.07% 8
North East -2 4 £538 -10.04% 5
Northern Ireland - 1 - -
Channel Islands - 1 £760 -

Data Engineering
Co-occurring Skills and Capabilities by Category

The follow tables expand on the table above by listing co-occurrences grouped by category. The same employment type, locality and period is covered with up to 20 co-occurrences shown in each of the following categories:

Application Platforms
1 104 (17.02%) Apache Airflow
2 68 (11.13%) Apache Spark
3 42 (6.87%) Apache
4 10 (1.64%) Confluence
5 4 (0.65%) SharePoint
6 2 (0.33%) ArcGIS
6 2 (0.33%) Jupyter
6 2 (0.33%) Luigi
6 2 (0.33%) SAS
7 1 (0.16%) Apache Pig
7 1 (0.16%) nginx
Applications
1 15 (2.45%) Microsoft Excel
2 3 (0.49%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 2 (0.33%) Chatbot
3 2 (0.33%) Maple
4 1 (0.16%) Adobe XD
4 1 (0.16%) Microsoft Project
Business Applications
1 9 (1.47%) Aladdin
2 4 (0.65%) Dynamics CRM
3 3 (0.49%) Payment Gateway
4 2 (0.33%) Eagle PACE
4 2 (0.33%) Markit EDM
4 2 (0.33%) SAP PM
5 1 (0.16%) Endur
5 1 (0.16%) Salesforce CRM
5 1 (0.16%) SAP ERP
5 1 (0.16%) SAP S/4HANA
Cloud Services
1 279 (45.66%) Azure
2 219 (35.84%) AWS
3 118 (19.31%) GCP
4 114 (18.66%) Power Platform
5 101 (16.53%) Azure Data Factory
6 80 (13.09%) Azure Synapse Analytics
7 75 (12.27%) dbt
8 72 (11.78%) Snowflake
9 66 (10.80%) Azure DevOps
10 55 (9.00%) Amazon S3
11 53 (8.67%) GitHub
12 45 (7.36%) Serverless
13 38 (6.22%) GitHub Actions
14 32 (5.24%) AWS Lambda
15 18 (2.95%) Amazon SageMaker
16 17 (2.78%) Amazon EMR
17 16 (2.62%) Azure Machine Learning
18 15 (2.45%) Microsoft Purview
19 13 (2.13%) Amazon Kinesis
20 12 (1.96%) Collibra
Communications & Networking
1 6 (0.98%) Firewall
1 6 (0.98%) TCP/IP
2 5 (0.82%) VPN
3 4 (0.65%) SAN
4 3 (0.49%) DNS
4 3 (0.49%) SSH
4 3 (0.49%) SSL
5 1 (0.16%) Intrusion Detection
5 1 (0.16%) Network Security
5 1 (0.16%) TETRA
Database & Business Intelligence
1 125 (20.46%) Data Warehouse
2 112 (18.33%) Power BI
3 78 (12.77%) Data Lake
4 62 (10.15%) Big Data
5 51 (8.35%) Metadata
6 44 (7.20%) BigQuery
7 41 (6.71%) NoSQL
8 39 (6.38%) Delta Lake
9 36 (5.89%) Hadoop
10 35 (5.73%) Amazon Redshift
10 35 (5.73%) Tableau
11 33 (5.40%) Relational Database
12 27 (4.42%) SQL Server
13 25 (4.09%) Snowflake Schema
14 22 (3.60%) Azure SQL Database
15 18 (2.95%) Amazon Athena
16 17 (2.78%) Apache Hive
16 17 (2.78%) PostgreSQL
17 14 (2.29%) Looker
17 14 (2.29%) RDBMS
Development Applications
1 81 (13.26%) Git
2 31 (5.07%) Jenkins
3 24 (3.93%) JIRA
4 13 (2.13%) MLflow
5 10 (1.64%) GitLab
6 4 (0.65%) Artifactory
6 4 (0.65%) SonarQube
6 4 (0.65%) Terragrunt
6 4 (0.65%) Visual Studio Code
7 3 (0.49%) Poetry
7 3 (0.49%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
7 3 (0.49%) Visual Studio
8 2 (0.33%) PROIV
8 2 (0.33%) PyCharm
8 2 (0.33%) Sonatype Nexus
8 2 (0.33%) TeamCity
8 2 (0.33%) TestRail
9 1 (0.16%) Cypress.io
9 1 (0.16%) GoCD
9 1 (0.16%) Pylint
General
1 175 (28.64%) Social Skills
2 137 (22.42%) Finance
3 94 (15.38%) Analytical Skills
4 65 (10.64%) Banking
5 39 (6.38%) Public Sector
6 34 (5.56%) Investment Banking
7 17 (2.78%) Marketing
7 17 (2.78%) Retail
8 16 (2.62%) Front Office
8 16 (2.62%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 16 (2.62%) Telecoms
9 9 (1.47%) Presentation Skills
10 8 (1.31%) Legal
10 8 (1.31%) Pharmaceutical
11 5 (0.82%) Corporate Banking
11 5 (0.82%) Documentation Skills
11 5 (0.82%) Influencing Skills
11 5 (0.82%) Police
11 5 (0.82%) Retail Banking
12 4 (0.65%) Local Government
Job Titles
1 273 (44.68%) Data Engineer
2 81 (13.26%) Senior
3 68 (11.13%) Architect
4 66 (10.80%) Developer
5 57 (9.33%) Senior Data Engineer
6 56 (9.17%) Azure Engineer
7 43 (7.04%) Azure Data Engineer
8 37 (6.06%) Analyst
9 36 (5.89%) Lead
10 31 (5.07%) Python Engineer
11 29 (4.75%) Data Architect
11 29 (4.75%) Python Developer
12 22 (3.60%) AWS Engineer
12 22 (3.60%) Data Scientist
12 22 (3.60%) Python Data Engineer
13 21 (3.44%) Data Analyst
14 20 (3.27%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
15 17 (2.78%) AWS Data Engineer
15 17 (2.78%) AWS Developer
15 17 (2.78%) JavaScript Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 77 (12.60%) PySpark
2 66 (10.80%) Kafka
3 39 (6.38%) Pandas
4 38 (6.22%) NumPy
5 36 (5.89%) FastAPI
6 31 (5.07%) Flask
7 26 (4.26%) RESTful
8 24 (3.93%) PyTorch
9 21 (3.44%) React
10 20 (3.27%) TensorFlow
11 18 (2.95%) Vue
12 17 (2.78%) AngularJS
12 17 (2.78%) Polars
12 17 (2.78%) SciPy
13 16 (2.62%) scikit-learn
14 15 (2.45%) JSON
15 13 (2.13%) LangChain
16 12 (1.96%) Hugging Face
17 11 (1.80%) Spark Streaming
18 10 (1.64%) Jinja
Miscellaneous
1 50 (8.18%) Cloud Native
2 27 (4.42%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
3 18 (2.95%) Algorithms
4 17 (2.78%) Hedge funds
5 14 (2.29%) Data Structures
5 14 (2.29%) Distributed Computing
6 13 (2.13%) Data Protection Act
6 13 (2.13%) Fixed Income
7 12 (1.96%) Legacy Systems
8 11 (1.80%) AI Agents
8 11 (1.80%) Onboarding
9 9 (1.47%) Distributed Systems
9 9 (1.47%) Enterprise Software
9 9 (1.47%) Product Ownership
10 8 (1.31%) Equities
10 8 (1.31%) Greenfield Project
10 8 (1.31%) Hybrid Cloud
10 8 (1.31%) IoT
10 8 (1.31%) Management Information System
10 8 (1.31%) Reinsurance
Operating Systems
1 43 (7.04%) Linux
2 7 (1.15%) Windows
3 6 (0.98%) Unix
4 4 (0.65%) Debian
4 4 (0.65%) Ubuntu
4 4 (0.65%) Windows Server
4 4 (0.65%) Windows Server 2016
5 3 (0.49%) Android
Processes & Methodologies
1 261 (42.72%) Data Pipeline
2 238 (38.95%) ETL
3 227 (37.15%) Data Modelling
4 225 (36.82%) CI/CD
5 224 (36.66%) Analytics
6 152 (24.88%) DevOps
7 141 (23.08%) Agile
7 141 (23.08%) Business Intelligence
8 131 (21.44%) Data Science
9 121 (19.80%) Machine Learning
10 120 (19.64%) Data Governance
10 120 (19.64%) Problem-Solving
11 118 (19.31%) Artificial Intelligence
12 87 (14.24%) Data Integration
13 82 (13.42%) Visualisation
14 77 (12.60%) Decision-Making
15 71 (11.62%) Data Architecture
16 70 (11.46%) Data Transformation
17 69 (11.29%) Infrastructure as Code
18 66 (10.80%) Containerisation
Programming Languages
1 372 (60.88%) Python
2 321 (52.54%) SQL
3 51 (8.35%) Java
4 49 (8.02%) Scala
5 31 (5.07%) C#
6 26 (4.26%) C++
7 25 (4.09%) JavaScript
8 18 (2.95%) Rust
9 17 (2.78%) Bicep
9 17 (2.78%) Data Analysis Expressions
10 14 (2.29%) R
11 13 (2.13%) Shell Script
11 13 (2.13%) T-SQL
12 10 (1.64%) PL/SQL
13 9 (1.47%) PowerShell
14 8 (1.31%) TypeScript
15 5 (0.82%) Bash
16 4 (0.65%) VBA
17 3 (0.49%) Groovy
17 3 (0.49%) Korn
Qualifications
1 83 (13.58%) Security Cleared
2 61 (9.98%) SC Cleared
3 55 (9.00%) Degree
4 33 (5.40%) Azure Certification
5 27 (4.42%) Computer Science Degree
6 24 (3.93%) Master's Degree
7 15 (2.45%) AWS Certification
8 13 (2.13%) DV Cleared
9 8 (1.31%) BPSS Clearance
10 6 (0.98%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
10 6 (0.98%) Microsoft Certification
10 6 (0.98%) PMI Certification
11 5 (0.82%) PMP
11 5 (0.82%) SnowPro
12 3 (0.49%) MCP
12 3 (0.49%) Tableau Certification
13 2 (0.33%) CBAP
13 2 (0.33%) ISTQB
14 1 (0.16%) CTC Cleared
14 1 (0.16%) PhD
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 146 (23.90%) Data Quality
2 37 (6.06%) GDPR
3 20 (3.27%) QA
4 19 (3.11%) Accessibility
5 6 (0.98%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 6 (0.98%) NIST
6 5 (0.82%) HIPAA
7 3 (0.49%) PMO
8 2 (0.33%) California Consumer Privacy Act
8 2 (0.33%) Disclosure Scotland
9 1 (0.16%) AIFMD
9 1 (0.16%) GMP
9 1 (0.16%) GRC
9 1 (0.16%) HL7
9 1 (0.16%) ISO 19650
9 1 (0.16%) ISO/IEC 20000
9 1 (0.16%) NCSC
9 1 (0.16%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 1 (0.16%) Solvency II
9 1 (0.16%) WCAG
System Software
1 85 (13.91%) Docker
2 12 (1.96%) HDFS
3 7 (1.15%) Active Directory
Systems Management
1 91 (14.89%) Terraform
2 77 (12.60%) Kubernetes
3 11 (1.80%) Ansible
3 11 (1.80%) Grafana
4 10 (1.64%) Hadoop YARN
5 7 (1.15%) Prometheus
6 6 (0.98%) Control-M
7 5 (0.82%) Kustomize
7 5 (0.82%) logstash
7 5 (0.82%) Puppet
7 5 (0.82%) Single Sign-On
8 4 (0.65%) Argo
8 4 (0.65%) vCenter Server
9 3 (0.49%) Istio
9 3 (0.49%) Kibana
9 3 (0.49%) Kubeflow
9 3 (0.49%) Oozie
10 1 (0.16%) Demisto
10 1 (0.16%) HAProxy
10 1 (0.16%) Systems Management Server (SMS)
Vendors
1 148 (24.22%) Databricks
2 101 (16.53%) Microsoft
3 46 (7.53%) Google
4 29 (4.75%) Oracle
5 21 (3.44%) Informatica
6 13 (2.13%) OpenAI
7 11 (1.80%) SAP
8 10 (1.64%) Cloudera
9 8 (1.31%) Palantir
9 8 (1.31%) VMware
10 7 (1.15%) Talend
11 6 (0.98%) Red Hat
11 6 (0.98%) StreamSets
12 5 (0.82%) Adobe
12 5 (0.82%) Foundry
12 5 (0.82%) IBM
12 5 (0.82%) MicroStrategy
12 5 (0.82%) Splunk
13 4 (0.65%) EMC
13 4 (0.65%) Murex