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

6 months to
4 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 85 159 207
Rank change year-on-year +74 +48 -1
Contract jobs citing Data Engineering 1,556 570 471
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.94% 1.73% 1.20%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.47% 1.92% 1.40%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,078 365 346
10th Percentile £388 £362 £400
25th Percentile £440 £427 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £520 £575
Median % change year-on-year +0.96% -9.57% -8.00%
75th Percentile £638 £638 £697
90th Percentile £746 £788 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £470 £495
% change year-on-year +6.38% -5.05% -13.91%
Number of hourly rates quoted 25 6 14
10th Percentile £21.25 £30.73 £24.32
25th Percentile £35.00 £42.03 £31.25
Median hourly rate £70.00 £52.50 £35.00
Median % change year-on-year +33.33% +50.00% -52.05%
75th Percentile £78.00 £62.19 £60.00
90th Percentile £89.00 £87.50 -
UK excluding London median hourly rate £60.75 £31.98 £60.00
% change year-on-year +89.96% -46.70% -17.81%

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 44,879 29,748 33,534
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.93% 90.41% 85.55%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,704 18,653 21,488
10th Percentile £325 £300 £310
25th Percentile £420 £404 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -4.55%
75th Percentile £625 £625 £638
90th Percentile £725 £725 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,741 1,659 1,873
10th Percentile £14.50 £14.20 £14.00
25th Percentile £19.50 £17.30 £18.14
Median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £40.50
Median % change year-on-year +74.79% -37.90% -4.71%
75th Percentile £68.00 £50.00 £65.00
90th Percentile £82.25 £68.00 £74.91
UK excluding London median hourly rate £43.96 £23.05 £40.94
% change year-on-year +90.72% -43.70% +3.38%

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 August 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 August 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 August 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 +67 1,395 £525 - 994
London +57 830 £550 - 635
UK excluding London +85 570 £500 +6.38% 465
Work from Home +71 518 £525 +5.00% 516
North of England +40 181 £463 -2.63% 150
Midlands +42 149 £486 +5.98% 45
West Midlands +33 124 £475 -0.63% 33
South East -22 87 £525 +11.94% 139
Yorkshire +15 85 £475 +2.70% 48
South West +20 80 £505 -7.13% 61
North West -19 59 £500 +5.26% 77
Scotland +11 47 £475 +1.06% 30
North East -6 39 £425 -20.93% 26
East of England -4 28 £575 +35.29% 17
East Midlands +2 22 £525 +14.38% 12
Wales -8 7 £450 +82.58% 6
Northern Ireland +8 4 £334 - 21

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
1 187 (12.02%) Apache Spark
2 173 (11.12%) Apache Airflow
3 125 (8.03%) Apache
4 47 (3.02%) SAS
5 41 (2.63%) Confluence
6 23 (1.48%) Jupyter
7 20 (1.29%) Palantir Foundry
8 11 (0.71%) SharePoint
9 9 (0.58%) Apache Superset
10 4 (0.26%) ArcGIS
11 3 (0.19%) Apache Solr
12 2 (0.13%) Microsoft Exchange
13 1 (0.064%) Apache Synapse
13 1 (0.064%) Appian
13 1 (0.064%) CICS
13 1 (0.064%) Ethereum
13 1 (0.064%) Hyperledger
13 1 (0.064%) IBM HTTP Server
13 1 (0.064%) PowerExchange
Applications
1 22 (1.41%) Microsoft Excel
2 8 (0.51%) Microsoft Office
3 7 (0.45%) Spreadsheet
4 6 (0.39%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 4 (0.26%) Chatbot
6 2 (0.13%) MS Visio
7 1 (0.064%) Microsoft Project
7 1 (0.064%) Notion
Business Applications
1 13 (0.84%) Aladdin
2 6 (0.39%) Dynamics CRM
3 5 (0.32%) BambooHR
4 4 (0.26%) NetSuite
4 4 (0.26%) Sage X3
4 4 (0.26%) Salesforce CRM
4 4 (0.26%) SAP S/4HANA
5 3 (0.19%) Workday HCM
6 2 (0.13%) Endur
6 2 (0.13%) Oracle Assets
6 2 (0.13%) SAP BPC
6 2 (0.13%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
6 2 (0.13%) Temenos T24
7 1 (0.064%) Distributed Ledger
7 1 (0.064%) FIS Private Capital Suite
7 1 (0.064%) Markit EDM
7 1 (0.064%) MIS ActiveH
7 1 (0.064%) R3 Corda
7 1 (0.064%) SAP ECC
Cloud Services
1 653 (41.97%) Azure
2 586 (37.66%) AWS
3 326 (20.95%) Power Platform
4 247 (15.87%) Snowflake
5 207 (13.30%) GCP
6 194 (12.47%) dbt
7 173 (11.12%) Azure Data Factory
8 171 (10.99%) Amazon S3
9 148 (9.51%) Azure Synapse Analytics
10 136 (8.74%) Azure DevOps
11 127 (8.16%) Serverless
12 124 (7.97%) GitHub
13 107 (6.88%) AWS Lambda
14 69 (4.43%) GitHub Actions
15 58 (3.73%) Amazon EMR
16 35 (2.25%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 32 (2.06%) AWS CloudFormation
18 30 (1.93%) AWS Step Functions
19 29 (1.86%) Amazon Bedrock
19 29 (1.86%) Azure AI
Communications & Networking
1 5 (0.32%) Firewall
2 2 (0.13%) Network Security
2 2 (0.13%) RTP
3 1 (0.064%) 4G
3 1 (0.064%) 5G
3 1 (0.064%) Broadband
3 1 (0.064%) MIMO
3 1 (0.064%) MQTT
Database & Business Intelligence
1 305 (19.60%) Power BI
2 302 (19.41%) Data Warehouse
3 210 (13.50%) Data Lake
4 150 (9.64%) Metadata
5 105 (6.75%) Amazon Redshift
6 100 (6.43%) Big Data
6 100 (6.43%) BigQuery
6 100 (6.43%) Delta Lake
7 87 (5.59%) Tableau
8 77 (4.95%) Amazon Athena
9 73 (4.69%) SQL Server
10 65 (4.18%) Snowflake Schema
11 64 (4.11%) NoSQL
12 57 (3.66%) Relational Database
13 51 (3.28%) PostgreSQL
14 47 (3.02%) Azure SQL Database
15 37 (2.38%) Hadoop
15 37 (2.38%) Looker
16 35 (2.25%) Star Schema
17 34 (2.19%) SQL Server Integration Services
Development Applications
1 172 (11.05%) Git
2 81 (5.21%) GitLab
3 71 (4.56%) JIRA
4 28 (1.80%) MLflow
5 26 (1.67%) Jenkins
6 7 (0.45%) SonarQube
7 6 (0.39%) Bitbucket
7 6 (0.39%) ERwin
8 3 (0.19%) Artifactory
8 3 (0.19%) ER Studio
8 3 (0.19%) Postman
8 3 (0.19%) Selenium
8 3 (0.19%) Snyk
8 3 (0.19%) Sonatype Nexus
8 3 (0.19%) Terragrunt
9 2 (0.13%) Claude Code
9 2 (0.13%) Yeoman
10 1 (0.064%) git-flow
10 1 (0.064%) Octopus Deploy
10 1 (0.064%) RStudio
General
1 380 (24.42%) Social Skills
2 361 (23.20%) Finance
3 250 (16.07%) Analytical Skills
4 163 (10.48%) Public Sector
5 121 (7.78%) Banking
6 44 (2.83%) Marketing
7 36 (2.31%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 35 (2.25%) Retail
9 31 (1.99%) Documentation Skills
10 25 (1.61%) Front Office
10 25 (1.61%) Telecoms
11 23 (1.48%) Investment Banking
12 16 (1.03%) Manufacturing
13 15 (0.96%) Financial Institution
14 13 (0.84%) Law
14 13 (0.84%) Pharmaceutical
15 11 (0.71%) Influencing Skills
16 10 (0.64%) Legal
17 9 (0.58%) Billing
18 8 (0.51%) Military
Job Titles
1 726 (46.66%) Data Engineer
2 216 (13.88%) Senior
3 181 (11.63%) Lead
4 177 (11.38%) Architect
5 130 (8.35%) Senior Data Engineer
6 94 (6.04%) Developer
7 92 (5.91%) Data Architect
8 83 (5.33%) AWS Engineer
9 72 (4.63%) Analyst
10 67 (4.31%) AWS Data Engineer
11 64 (4.11%) Snowflake Engineer
12 63 (4.05%) Lead Data Engineer
13 61 (3.92%) Azure Engineer
14 52 (3.34%) Azure Data Engineer
15 49 (3.15%) Python Engineer
15 49 (3.15%) Snowflake Data Engineer
16 47 (3.02%) Solutions Architect
17 44 (2.83%) Consultant
18 43 (2.76%) Data Analyst
19 41 (2.63%) Data Scientist
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 231 (14.85%) PySpark
2 132 (8.48%) Kafka
3 42 (2.70%) REST
4 36 (2.31%) Pandas
5 33 (2.12%) JSON
6 27 (1.74%) scikit-learn
7 24 (1.54%) PyTorch
7 24 (1.54%) React
8 22 (1.41%) Spring
9 21 (1.35%) NumPy
10 20 (1.29%) TensorFlow
11 19 (1.22%) .NET
12 15 (0.96%) Spring Boot
13 14 (0.90%) RESTful
14 13 (0.84%) OpenTelemetry
15 12 (0.77%) Apache Avro
16 11 (0.71%) FastAPI
16 11 (0.71%) Microsoft Graph
16 11 (0.71%) Streamlit
16 11 (0.71%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 208 (13.37%) Cloud Native
2 72 (4.63%) Data Structures
3 64 (4.11%) Legacy Systems
4 62 (3.98%) Distributed Systems
5 58 (3.73%) Product Ownership
6 43 (2.76%) Onboarding
7 34 (2.19%) AI Agents
8 28 (1.80%) Data Protection Act
9 22 (1.41%) Algorithms
9 22 (1.41%) Greenfield Project
10 20 (1.29%) Distributed Computing
10 20 (1.29%) NHS
11 17 (1.09%) Clustering
11 17 (1.09%) Virtual Team
12 16 (1.03%) Analytical Mindset
13 14 (0.90%) Life Science
14 13 (0.84%) Enterprise Software
14 13 (0.84%) Management Information System
15 12 (0.77%) Fixed Income
15 12 (0.77%) Reference Data
Operating Systems
1 32 (2.06%) Linux
2 29 (1.86%) Unix
3 7 (0.45%) Windows
4 3 (0.19%) VMS
5 2 (0.13%) Windows Server
6 1 (0.064%) Ubuntu
Processes & Methodologies
1 782 (50.26%) Analytics
2 753 (48.39%) Data Pipeline
3 602 (38.69%) Data Modelling
4 543 (34.90%) CI/CD
5 530 (34.06%) ETL
6 431 (27.70%) AI
7 397 (25.51%) Agile
8 391 (25.13%) Business Intelligence
9 371 (23.84%) DevOps
10 351 (22.56%) Data Governance
11 278 (17.87%) Machine Learning
12 265 (17.03%) Problem-Solving
13 251 (16.13%) Data Science
14 235 (15.10%) Migration
15 230 (14.78%) Decision-Making
16 225 (14.46%) Validation
17 218 (14.01%) Data Architecture
18 209 (13.43%) Stakeholder Management
19 208 (13.37%) Data Transformation
20 190 (12.21%) Infrastructure as Code
Programming Languages
1 842 (54.11%) SQL
2 797 (51.22%) Python
3 117 (7.52%) Java
4 46 (2.96%) Data Analysis Expressions
5 41 (2.63%) Bash
6 39 (2.51%) Scala
7 35 (2.25%) C#
8 32 (2.06%) PowerShell
9 28 (1.80%) T-SQL
10 21 (1.35%) JavaScript
10 21 (1.35%) R
11 20 (1.29%) Bicep
12 16 (1.03%) PL/SQL
13 14 (0.90%) Shell Script
14 12 (0.77%) SAS Macro
15 9 (0.58%) TypeScript
16 8 (0.51%) SPARQL
17 7 (0.45%) Cypher
18 5 (0.32%) Korn
18 5 (0.32%) Kusto Query Language
Qualifications
1 299 (19.22%) Security Cleared
2 258 (16.58%) SC Cleared
3 101 (6.49%) Degree
4 49 (3.15%) Computer Science Degree
5 36 (2.31%) BPSS Clearance
6 31 (1.99%) Azure Certification
7 27 (1.74%) Master's Degree
8 25 (1.61%) DV Cleared
9 20 (1.29%) AWS Certification
10 13 (0.84%) DBS Check
11 11 (0.71%) SnowPro
12 9 (0.58%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
13 7 (0.45%) Microsoft Certification
14 6 (0.39%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
15 5 (0.32%) CSPO
15 5 (0.32%) Tableau Certification
16 3 (0.19%) PhD
17 2 (0.13%) Microsoft Certified Professional
17 2 (0.13%) PMI Certification
18 1 (0.064%) CISM
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 453 (29.11%) Data Quality
2 80 (5.14%) QA
3 78 (5.01%) GDPR
4 23 (1.48%) Accessibility
5 14 (0.90%) SLA
6 4 (0.26%) NIST
6 4 (0.26%) Sarbanes-Oxley
6 4 (0.26%) Solvency II
7 3 (0.19%) Actionable Recommendations
7 3 (0.19%) Disclosure Scotland
7 3 (0.19%) GxP
7 3 (0.19%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 3 (0.19%) ISO/IEC 42001
7 3 (0.19%) MiFID
7 3 (0.19%) PMO
8 2 (0.13%) 21 CFR Part 11
8 2 (0.13%) California Consumer Privacy Act
8 2 (0.13%) EMIR
8 2 (0.13%) GRC
8 2 (0.13%) SNOMED CT
System Software
1 134 (8.61%) Docker
2 4 (0.26%) Active Directory
3 3 (0.19%) Virtual Machines
4 1 (0.064%) HDFS
4 1 (0.064%) Oracle RAC
Systems Management
1 199 (12.79%) Terraform
2 116 (7.46%) Kubernetes
3 27 (1.74%) Grafana
4 22 (1.41%) Prometheus
5 16 (1.03%) Ansible
6 5 (0.32%) Kibana
7 3 (0.19%) logstash
8 2 (0.13%) Argo
8 2 (0.13%) Control-M
8 2 (0.13%) Kubeflow
8 2 (0.13%) Rancher
8 2 (0.13%) Thomson Reuters DACS
9 1 (0.064%) Cilium
9 1 (0.064%) Data Guard
9 1 (0.064%) IBM Guardium
9 1 (0.064%) Kustomize
9 1 (0.064%) Nagios
9 1 (0.064%) Oracle RMAN
9 1 (0.064%) QRadar
9 1 (0.064%) Single Sign-On
Vendors
1 410 (26.35%) Databricks
2 269 (17.29%) Microsoft
3 80 (5.14%) Informatica
4 66 (4.24%) Google
5 64 (4.11%) Oracle
6 35 (2.25%) SAP
7 30 (1.93%) Foundry
7 30 (1.93%) Talend
8 29 (1.86%) Palantir
9 23 (1.48%) Salesforce
10 21 (1.35%) Splunk
11 20 (1.29%) OpenAI
12 18 (1.16%) Cloudera
13 15 (0.96%) ServiceNow
14 12 (0.77%) Trend Micro
15 9 (0.58%) Workday
16 8 (0.51%) Denodo
16 8 (0.51%) Teradata
17 7 (0.45%) Adobe
17 7 (0.45%) InterSystems