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

6 months to
7 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 86 165 205
Rank change year-on-year +79 +40 +4
Contract jobs citing Data Engineering 1,571 570 467
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.94% 1.73% 1.20%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.46% 1.92% 1.40%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,084 364 342
10th Percentile £388 £363 £391
25th Percentile £440 £427 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £516 £575
Median % change year-on-year +1.69% -10.22% -8.00%
75th Percentile £638 £638 £688
90th Percentile £750 £775 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £470 £500
% change year-on-year +6.38% -6.00% -14.89%
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 45,370 29,720 33,385
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.93% 90.44% 85.55%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,958 18,627 21,372
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% -4.11%
75th Percentile £625 £625 £638
90th Percentile £725 £729 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,804 1,656 1,869
10th Percentile £14.25 £14.20 £14.00
25th Percentile £19.25 £17.33 £18.13
Median hourly rate £42.68 £25.15 £40.33
Median % change year-on-year +69.69% -37.63% -5.12%
75th Percentile £68.00 £50.00 £64.25
90th Percentile £82.25 £68.00 £74.51
UK excluding London median hourly rate £43.96 £23.30 £40.94
% change year-on-year +88.67% -43.09% +2.35%

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 7 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 7 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 7 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 +68 1,409 £525 - 927
London +55 837 £550 - 587
UK excluding London +86 579 £500 +6.38% 444
Work from Home +79 515 £525 +5.00% 406
North of England +27 181 £463 -2.63% 149
Midlands +40 153 £486 +5.93% 38
West Midlands +34 128 £475 -0.63% 28
South East -19 91 £525 +11.94% 130
Yorkshire +17 85 £475 +2.70% 44
South West +26 78 £505 -12.17% 62
North West -9 59 £500 +5.26% 82
Scotland +15 49 £500 +6.38% 34
North East -8 39 £425 -20.93% 24
East of England -8 29 £575 +35.29% 12
East Midlands -3 22 £525 +14.38% 10
Wales -3 7 £450 +90.68% 7
Northern Ireland +8 4 £334 - 15

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
1 186 (11.84%) Apache Spark
2 176 (11.20%) Apache Airflow
3 124 (7.89%) Apache
4 47 (2.99%) SAS
5 41 (2.61%) Confluence
6 23 (1.46%) Jupyter
7 20 (1.27%) Palantir Foundry
8 11 (0.70%) SharePoint
9 9 (0.57%) Apache Superset
10 5 (0.32%) ArcGIS
11 4 (0.25%) 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%) PowerExchange
Applications
1 21 (1.34%) Microsoft Excel
2 8 (0.51%) Microsoft Office
3 7 (0.45%) Spreadsheet
4 6 (0.38%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 5 (0.32%) Chatbot
6 2 (0.13%) MS Visio
7 1 (0.064%) Microsoft Project
7 1 (0.064%) Notion
Business Applications
1 13 (0.83%) Aladdin
2 6 (0.38%) Dynamics CRM
3 5 (0.32%) BambooHR
4 4 (0.25%) NetSuite
4 4 (0.25%) Sage X3
4 4 (0.25%) Salesforce CRM
4 4 (0.25%) 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%) MIS ActiveH
7 1 (0.064%) R3 Corda
7 1 (0.064%) SAP ECC
Cloud Services
1 659 (41.95%) Azure
2 589 (37.49%) AWS
3 326 (20.75%) Power Platform
4 252 (16.04%) Snowflake
5 213 (13.56%) GCP
6 198 (12.60%) dbt
7 171 (10.88%) Amazon S3
7 171 (10.88%) Azure Data Factory
8 146 (9.29%) Azure Synapse Analytics
9 140 (8.91%) Azure DevOps
10 129 (8.21%) GitHub
11 126 (8.02%) Serverless
12 108 (6.87%) AWS Lambda
13 69 (4.39%) GitHub Actions
14 57 (3.63%) Amazon EMR
15 35 (2.23%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 31 (1.97%) AWS CloudFormation
16 31 (1.97%) Azure AI
17 30 (1.91%) AWS Step Functions
18 29 (1.85%) Amazon Bedrock
Communications & Networking
1 5 (0.32%) Firewall
2 2 (0.13%) Broadband
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%) MIMO
3 1 (0.064%) MQTT
Database & Business Intelligence
1 306 (19.48%) Power BI
2 305 (19.41%) Data Warehouse
3 212 (13.49%) Data Lake
4 155 (9.87%) Metadata
5 107 (6.81%) Amazon Redshift
6 104 (6.62%) BigQuery
7 102 (6.49%) Big Data
8 100 (6.37%) Delta Lake
9 87 (5.54%) Tableau
10 77 (4.90%) Amazon Athena
11 72 (4.58%) SQL Server
12 65 (4.14%) Snowflake Schema
13 63 (4.01%) NoSQL
14 59 (3.76%) Relational Database
15 50 (3.18%) PostgreSQL
16 45 (2.86%) Azure SQL Database
17 39 (2.48%) Looker
18 38 (2.42%) Hadoop
19 36 (2.29%) Star Schema
20 32 (2.04%) SQL Server Integration Services
Development Applications
1 175 (11.14%) Git
2 82 (5.22%) GitLab
3 71 (4.52%) JIRA
4 28 (1.78%) MLflow
5 27 (1.72%) Jenkins
6 7 (0.45%) SonarQube
7 6 (0.38%) Bitbucket
7 6 (0.38%) ERwin
8 4 (0.25%) Selenium
9 3 (0.19%) Artifactory
9 3 (0.19%) ER Studio
9 3 (0.19%) Postman
9 3 (0.19%) Snyk
9 3 (0.19%) Sonatype Nexus
9 3 (0.19%) Terragrunt
10 2 (0.13%) Claude Code
10 2 (0.13%) Yeoman
11 1 (0.064%) Octopus Deploy
11 1 (0.064%) Robot Framework
11 1 (0.064%) RStudio
General
1 391 (24.89%) Social Skills
2 361 (22.98%) Finance
3 255 (16.23%) Analytical Skills
4 165 (10.50%) Public Sector
5 119 (7.57%) Banking
6 45 (2.86%) Marketing
7 37 (2.36%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 35 (2.23%) Retail
9 31 (1.97%) Documentation Skills
10 25 (1.59%) Telecoms
11 24 (1.53%) Front Office
12 23 (1.46%) Investment Banking
13 16 (1.02%) Manufacturing
14 15 (0.95%) Financial Institution
15 14 (0.89%) Pharmaceutical
16 13 (0.83%) Law
17 12 (0.76%) Influencing Skills
18 10 (0.64%) Legal
19 9 (0.57%) Back Office
19 9 (0.57%) Billing
Job Titles
1 729 (46.40%) Data Engineer
2 214 (13.62%) Senior
3 188 (11.97%) Lead
4 180 (11.46%) Architect
5 128 (8.15%) Senior Data Engineer
6 96 (6.11%) Developer
7 95 (6.05%) Data Architect
8 83 (5.28%) AWS Engineer
9 72 (4.58%) Analyst
10 68 (4.33%) AWS Data Engineer
11 65 (4.14%) Lead Data Engineer
12 64 (4.07%) Snowflake Engineer
13 61 (3.88%) Azure Engineer
14 52 (3.31%) Azure Data Engineer
15 49 (3.12%) Python Engineer
15 49 (3.12%) Snowflake Data Engineer
16 48 (3.06%) Solutions Architect
17 44 (2.80%) Consultant
18 43 (2.74%) Data Analyst
19 41 (2.61%) Data Scientist
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 230 (14.64%) PySpark
2 130 (8.27%) Kafka
3 42 (2.67%) REST
4 35 (2.23%) Pandas
5 30 (1.91%) JSON
6 27 (1.72%) React
6 27 (1.72%) scikit-learn
7 24 (1.53%) PyTorch
8 22 (1.40%) Spring
9 21 (1.34%) NumPy
10 20 (1.27%) .NET
10 20 (1.27%) TensorFlow
11 16 (1.02%) RESTful
12 15 (0.95%) Spring Boot
13 12 (0.76%) FastAPI
14 11 (0.70%) Apache Avro
14 11 (0.70%) Microsoft Graph
14 11 (0.70%) OpenTelemetry
14 11 (0.70%) pytest
14 11 (0.70%) Streamlit
Miscellaneous
1 211 (13.43%) Cloud Native
2 74 (4.71%) Data Structures
3 64 (4.07%) Legacy Systems
4 63 (4.01%) Distributed Systems
5 61 (3.88%) Product Ownership
6 45 (2.86%) Onboarding
7 34 (2.16%) AI Agents
8 27 (1.72%) Data Protection Act
9 23 (1.46%) Greenfield Project
10 22 (1.40%) Algorithms
11 20 (1.27%) NHS
12 19 (1.21%) Distributed Computing
13 17 (1.08%) Clustering
13 17 (1.08%) Virtual Team
14 16 (1.02%) Life Science
15 15 (0.95%) Analytical Mindset
16 13 (0.83%) Enterprise Software
16 13 (0.83%) Management Information System
17 12 (0.76%) Fixed Income
17 12 (0.76%) Reference Data
Operating Systems
1 34 (2.16%) Linux
2 30 (1.91%) Unix
3 8 (0.51%) Windows
4 2 (0.13%) VMS
4 2 (0.13%) Windows Server
5 1 (0.064%) Ubuntu
Processes & Methodologies
1 788 (50.16%) Analytics
2 756 (48.12%) Data Pipeline
3 607 (38.64%) Data Modelling
4 550 (35.01%) CI/CD
5 536 (34.12%) ETL
6 441 (28.07%) AI
7 399 (25.40%) Agile
8 393 (25.02%) Business Intelligence
9 381 (24.25%) DevOps
10 358 (22.79%) Data Governance
11 281 (17.89%) Machine Learning
12 265 (16.87%) Problem-Solving
13 251 (15.98%) Data Science
14 237 (15.09%) Migration
15 231 (14.70%) Decision-Making
16 225 (14.32%) Validation
17 221 (14.07%) Data Architecture
18 218 (13.88%) Stakeholder Management
19 214 (13.62%) Data Transformation
20 195 (12.41%) Infrastructure as Code
Programming Languages
1 851 (54.17%) SQL
2 803 (51.11%) Python
3 118 (7.51%) Java
4 44 (2.80%) Data Analysis Expressions
5 43 (2.74%) Bash
6 41 (2.61%) Scala
7 36 (2.29%) C#
8 34 (2.16%) PowerShell
9 26 (1.65%) T-SQL
10 23 (1.46%) JavaScript
11 21 (1.34%) R
12 18 (1.15%) Bicep
13 17 (1.08%) PL/SQL
14 14 (0.89%) Shell Script
15 12 (0.76%) SAS Macro
16 9 (0.57%) TypeScript
17 8 (0.51%) SPARQL
18 7 (0.45%) Cypher
18 7 (0.45%) Kusto Query Language
19 5 (0.32%) Korn
Qualifications
1 308 (19.61%) Security Cleared
2 262 (16.68%) SC Cleared
3 99 (6.30%) Degree
4 51 (3.25%) Computer Science Degree
5 37 (2.36%) BPSS Clearance
6 33 (2.10%) Azure Certification
7 27 (1.72%) DV Cleared
8 26 (1.65%) Master's Degree
9 20 (1.27%) AWS Certification
10 13 (0.83%) DBS Check
11 11 (0.70%) SnowPro
12 9 (0.57%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
13 8 (0.51%) Microsoft Certification
14 6 (0.38%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
15 5 (0.32%) CSPO
15 5 (0.32%) Tableau Certification
16 3 (0.19%) PhD
17 2 (0.13%) CCSP
17 2 (0.13%) Cisco Certification
17 2 (0.13%) CISSP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 464 (29.54%) Data Quality
2 80 (5.09%) GDPR
3 79 (5.03%) QA
4 22 (1.40%) Accessibility
5 13 (0.83%) SLA
6 5 (0.32%) Sarbanes-Oxley
7 4 (0.25%) Solvency II
8 3 (0.19%) Actionable Recommendations
8 3 (0.19%) Disclosure Scotland
8 3 (0.19%) GxP
8 3 (0.19%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 3 (0.19%) ISO/IEC 42001
8 3 (0.19%) MiFID
8 3 (0.19%) NIST
8 3 (0.19%) PMO
9 2 (0.13%) 21 CFR Part 11
9 2 (0.13%) California Consumer Privacy Act
9 2 (0.13%) COPPA
9 2 (0.13%) GRC
9 2 (0.13%) SNOMED CT
System Software
1 136 (8.66%) Docker
2 4 (0.25%) Active Directory
3 3 (0.19%) Virtual Machines
4 1 (0.064%) HDFS
4 1 (0.064%) Oracle RAC
Systems Management
1 204 (12.99%) Terraform
2 116 (7.38%) Kubernetes
3 27 (1.72%) Grafana
4 20 (1.27%) Prometheus
5 19 (1.21%) 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
1 409 (26.03%) Databricks
2 276 (17.57%) Microsoft
3 80 (5.09%) Informatica
4 71 (4.52%) Google
5 65 (4.14%) Oracle
6 36 (2.29%) SAP
7 31 (1.97%) Foundry
7 31 (1.97%) Talend
8 29 (1.85%) Palantir
9 25 (1.59%) Salesforce
10 21 (1.34%) OpenAI
11 20 (1.27%) Splunk
12 18 (1.15%) Cloudera
13 15 (0.95%) ServiceNow
14 12 (0.76%) Trend Micro
15 9 (0.57%) Workday
16 8 (0.51%) Denodo
16 8 (0.51%) Teradata
17 7 (0.45%) Adobe
17 7 (0.45%) InterSystems