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

6 months to
1 Oct 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 93 154 191
Rank change year-on-year +61 +37 +31
Contract jobs citing Data Engineering 1,596 635 499
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.91% 1.92% 1.32%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.44% 2.12% 1.54%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,110 397 362
10th Percentile £400 £338 £377
25th Percentile £445 £413 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £515 £550
Median % change year-on-year +1.94% -6.36% -8.33%
75th Percentile £638 £638 £663
90th Percentile £725 £738 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £463 £500
% change year-on-year +8.11% -7.50% -10.80%
Number of hourly rates quoted 17 6 7
10th Percentile - £37.11 £23.72
25th Percentile £21.25 £42.03 £25.93
Median hourly rate £57.50 £58.75 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year -2.13% -2.08% -17.81%
75th Percentile £71.50 £81.88 -
90th Percentile £77.70 £98.75 -
UK excluding London median hourly rate £51.00 £38.96 £60.00
% change year-on-year +30.90% -35.07% -23.08%

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 46,382 29,970 32,481
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.48% 90.66% 85.86%
Number of daily rates quoted 28,008 18,622 19,630
10th Percentile £325 £300 £308
25th Percentile £425 £404 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -2.78%
75th Percentile £630 £625 £638
90th Percentile £733 £725 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 3,245 1,858 1,349
10th Percentile £13.70 £14.32 £15.00
25th Percentile £17.19 £17.30 £20.12
Median hourly rate £39.00 £25.15 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year +55.07% -40.82% -
75th Percentile £65.60 £43.75 £65.00
90th Percentile £78.64 £65.00 £74.44
UK excluding London median hourly rate £39.50 £22.32 £43.00
% change year-on-year +77.01% -48.10% +1.18%

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 1 October 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 1 October 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 1 October 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 +56 1,416 £525 - 1,751
London +49 866 £550 - 1,069
UK excluding London +69 570 £500 +8.11% 798
Work from Home +64 514 £525 +5.00% 777
North of England +27 190 £475 +7.34% 254
Midlands +18 124 £475 +2.70% 108
West Midlands +31 102 £475 -13.64% 84
Yorkshire +29 96 £500 +5.26% 68
South East -11 94 £525 +17.98% 158
South West +36 88 £525 -8.70% 89
North West -25 59 £525 +22.09% 150
Scotland -1 53 £513 +10.81% 84
North East -4 37 £425 -17.07% 37
East of England -17 23 £550 +22.22% 42
East Midlands -3 22 £503 +15.57% 24
Wales -8 8 £450 -9.09% 25
Northern Ireland +10 4 £334 - 41

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 (12.28%) Apache Airflow
2 175 (10.96%) Apache Spark
3 150 (9.40%) Apache
4 41 (2.57%) Confluence
5 30 (1.88%) SAS
6 22 (1.38%) Jupyter
7 15 (0.94%) Palantir Foundry
7 15 (0.94%) SharePoint
8 5 (0.31%) Apache Solr
8 5 (0.31%) ArcGIS
9 3 (0.19%) Apache Superset
9 3 (0.19%) nginx
9 3 (0.19%) PowerExchange
10 1 (0.063%) Apache Pulsar
10 1 (0.063%) Apache Synapse
10 1 (0.063%) Ethereum
10 1 (0.063%) GeoServer
10 1 (0.063%) Hyperledger
10 1 (0.063%) Oracle Workflow
10 1 (0.063%) SugarCRM
Applications
1 11 (0.69%) Microsoft Excel
2 7 (0.44%) Chatbot
3 6 (0.38%) Spreadsheet
4 3 (0.19%) Microsoft Office
5 2 (0.13%) MS Visio
6 1 (0.063%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 1 (0.063%) Notion
Business Applications
1 11 (0.69%) Aladdin
2 7 (0.44%) Dynamics CRM
3 4 (0.25%) NetSuite
3 4 (0.25%) Sage X3
3 4 (0.25%) Salesforce CRM
4 3 (0.19%) SAP S/4HANA
4 3 (0.19%) Workday HCM
5 2 (0.13%) BambooHR
5 2 (0.13%) Endur
5 2 (0.13%) Oracle Assets
5 2 (0.13%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
5 2 (0.13%) Temenos T24
6 1 (0.063%) Cloudability
6 1 (0.063%) Distributed Ledger
6 1 (0.063%) FIS Private Capital Suite
6 1 (0.063%) Markit EDM
6 1 (0.063%) MIS ActiveH
6 1 (0.063%) Oracle EBS
6 1 (0.063%) R3 Corda
6 1 (0.063%) SAP Oil and Gas
Cloud Services
1 667 (41.79%) Azure
2 588 (36.84%) AWS
3 299 (18.73%) Power Platform
4 276 (17.29%) Snowflake
5 246 (15.41%) dbt
6 239 (14.97%) GCP
7 188 (11.78%) Amazon S3
8 185 (11.59%) Azure Data Factory
9 146 (9.15%) Serverless
10 133 (8.33%) Azure DevOps
11 126 (7.89%) Azure Synapse Analytics
12 123 (7.71%) AWS Lambda
13 121 (7.58%) GitHub
14 81 (5.08%) Azure Databricks
15 64 (4.01%) GitHub Actions
16 55 (3.45%) Amazon EMR
17 44 (2.76%) Amazon CloudWatch
18 39 (2.44%) Amazon Bedrock
19 35 (2.19%) Microsoft Purview
20 33 (2.07%) Azure AI
Communications & Networking
1 7 (0.44%) Network Security
2 6 (0.38%) Broadband
2 6 (0.38%) DNS
3 4 (0.25%) Firewall
4 1 (0.063%) HTTP
4 1 (0.063%) HTTPS
4 1 (0.063%) Internet
4 1 (0.063%) MIMO
4 1 (0.063%) MQTT
4 1 (0.063%) Radio Access Network
4 1 (0.063%) SMS
4 1 (0.063%) SSL
4 1 (0.063%) TCP/IP
4 1 (0.063%) tcpdump
4 1 (0.063%) Wireshark
Database & Business Intelligence
1 332 (20.80%) Data Warehouse
2 286 (17.92%) Power BI
3 210 (13.16%) Data Lake
4 186 (11.65%) Metadata
5 127 (7.96%) BigQuery
6 111 (6.95%) Amazon Redshift
7 106 (6.64%) Delta Lake
8 89 (5.58%) Big Data
9 78 (4.89%) Amazon Athena
10 73 (4.57%) Tableau
11 62 (3.88%) Snowflake Schema
12 59 (3.70%) SQL Server
13 52 (3.26%) Relational Database
14 50 (3.13%) PostgreSQL
15 44 (2.76%) NoSQL
16 41 (2.57%) Looker
17 36 (2.26%) Azure SQL Database
18 33 (2.07%) Amazon RDS
19 32 (2.01%) Data Vault
20 27 (1.69%) Parquet
Development Applications
1 184 (11.53%) Git
2 100 (6.27%) GitLab
3 69 (4.32%) JIRA
4 27 (1.69%) Jenkins
5 25 (1.57%) MLflow
6 8 (0.50%) Bitbucket
6 8 (0.50%) Claude Code
6 8 (0.50%) ERwin
6 8 (0.50%) RStudio
6 8 (0.50%) Terragrunt
7 7 (0.44%) Selenium
8 4 (0.25%) ER Studio
9 3 (0.19%) Artifactory
9 3 (0.19%) Atlassian Bamboo
9 3 (0.19%) Postman
9 3 (0.19%) SonarQube
9 3 (0.19%) TeamCity
10 2 (0.13%) Cucumber
10 2 (0.13%) Sonatype Nexus
10 2 (0.13%) Yeoman
General
1 416 (26.07%) Social Skills
2 362 (22.68%) Finance
3 246 (15.41%) Analytical Skills
4 167 (10.46%) Public Sector
5 143 (8.96%) Banking
6 54 (3.38%) Marketing
7 36 (2.26%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 35 (2.19%) Retail
9 26 (1.63%) Front Office
9 26 (1.63%) Investment Banking
10 20 (1.25%) Documentation Skills
10 20 (1.25%) Pharmaceutical
11 18 (1.13%) Manufacturing
12 17 (1.07%) Law
13 14 (0.88%) Publishing
13 14 (0.88%) Telecoms
14 13 (0.81%) Back Office
14 13 (0.81%) Police
15 12 (0.75%) Influencing Skills
15 12 (0.75%) Legal
Job Titles
1 753 (47.18%) Data Engineer
2 257 (16.10%) Senior
3 179 (11.22%) Lead
4 166 (10.40%) Architect
5 164 (10.28%) Senior Data Engineer
6 97 (6.08%) Developer
7 90 (5.64%) Data Architect
8 78 (4.89%) Databricks Engineer
9 76 (4.76%) AWS Engineer
10 73 (4.57%) Snowflake Engineer
11 70 (4.39%) Analyst
12 69 (4.32%) Azure Engineer
13 66 (4.14%) AWS Data Engineer
14 61 (3.82%) Databricks Data Engineer
15 56 (3.51%) Snowflake Data Engineer
16 52 (3.26%) Lead Data Engineer
17 51 (3.20%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
18 48 (3.01%) Python Engineer
19 47 (2.94%) Azure Data Engineer
20 39 (2.44%) GCP Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 241 (15.10%) Terraform
2 234 (14.66%) PySpark
3 116 (7.27%) Kafka
4 66 (4.14%) REST
5 34 (2.13%) JSON
6 32 (2.01%) React
7 27 (1.69%) .NET
8 23 (1.44%) Pandas
9 20 (1.25%) LangChain
10 17 (1.07%) FastAPI
10 17 (1.07%) PyTorch
11 16 (1.00%) pytest
12 14 (0.88%) LangGraph
12 14 (0.88%) scikit-learn
12 14 (0.88%) TensorFlow
12 14 (0.88%) XML
13 13 (0.81%) NumPy
13 13 (0.81%) RESTful
14 12 (0.75%) Streamlit
15 11 (0.69%) Apache NiFi
Miscellaneous
1 213 (13.35%) Cloud Native
2 84 (5.26%) Data Structures
3 82 (5.14%) Onboarding
4 64 (4.01%) Product Ownership
5 56 (3.51%) AI Agents
6 53 (3.32%) Legacy Systems
7 51 (3.20%) Distributed Systems
8 26 (1.63%) Data Protection Act
9 22 (1.38%) Enterprise Software
10 19 (1.19%) Distributed Computing
11 18 (1.13%) Algorithms
11 18 (1.13%) Life Science
11 18 (1.13%) Virtual Team
12 17 (1.07%) Management Information System
13 16 (1.00%) Data Fabric
13 16 (1.00%) Greenfield Project
13 16 (1.00%) NHS
14 15 (0.94%) Marketing Technology
15 14 (0.88%) Analytical Mindset
15 14 (0.88%) Clustering
Operating Systems
1 29 (1.82%) Linux
2 23 (1.44%) Unix
3 7 (0.44%) Windows
4 1 (0.063%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 1 (0.063%) Robot Operating System
4 1 (0.063%) Ubuntu
4 1 (0.063%) Windows Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 787 (49.31%) Data Pipeline
2 738 (46.24%) Analytics
3 629 (39.41%) Data Modelling
4 580 (36.34%) CI/CD
5 553 (34.65%) ETL
6 510 (31.95%) AI
7 413 (25.88%) Agile
8 383 (24.00%) DevOps
9 371 (23.25%) Business Intelligence
10 351 (21.99%) Data Governance
11 293 (18.36%) Stakeholder Management
12 282 (17.67%) Machine Learning
13 258 (16.17%) Data Transformation
14 254 (15.91%) Infrastructure as Code
15 249 (15.60%) Migration
15 249 (15.60%) Validation
16 243 (15.23%) Problem-Solving
17 242 (15.16%) Data Architecture
17 242 (15.16%) Data Integration
18 232 (14.54%) Decision-Making
Programming Languages
1 876 (54.89%) SQL
2 852 (53.38%) Python
3 107 (6.70%) Java
4 48 (3.01%) Scala
5 42 (2.63%) PowerShell
6 40 (2.51%) Data Analysis Expressions
7 36 (2.26%) C#
8 34 (2.13%) Bash
9 31 (1.94%) JavaScript
10 24 (1.50%) R
11 19 (1.19%) PL/SQL
11 19 (1.19%) T-SQL
12 17 (1.07%) Bicep
13 14 (0.88%) TypeScript
14 13 (0.81%) Kusto Query Language
15 10 (0.63%) Shell Script
15 10 (0.63%) SPARQL
16 9 (0.56%) Go
17 8 (0.50%) Cypher
17 8 (0.50%) Korn
Qualifications
1 297 (18.61%) Security Cleared
2 245 (15.35%) SC Cleared
3 82 (5.14%) Degree
4 37 (2.32%) Computer Science Degree
4 37 (2.32%) DV Cleared
5 35 (2.19%) Azure Certification
6 34 (2.13%) AWS Certification
7 31 (1.94%) BPSS Clearance
8 19 (1.19%) Master's Degree
9 14 (0.88%) DBS Check
10 12 (0.75%) SnowPro
11 11 (0.69%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
12 8 (0.50%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
12 8 (0.50%) Microsoft Certification
13 6 (0.38%) Microsoft Certified Professional
14 5 (0.31%) CSPO
14 5 (0.31%) PMI Certification
14 5 (0.31%) PMP
14 5 (0.31%) TOGAF Certification
15 4 (0.25%) Tableau Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 533 (33.40%) Data Quality
2 79 (4.95%) QA
3 63 (3.95%) GDPR
4 30 (1.88%) Accessibility
5 12 (0.75%) SLA
6 7 (0.44%) Disclosure Scotland
7 6 (0.38%) GRC
8 4 (0.25%) California Consumer Privacy Act
8 4 (0.25%) EU AI Act
8 4 (0.25%) NCSC
8 4 (0.25%) PMO
9 3 (0.19%) Actionable Recommendations
9 3 (0.19%) IFRS
9 3 (0.19%) IFRS 9
9 3 (0.19%) ISO/IEC 27001
9 3 (0.19%) MiFID
9 3 (0.19%) NIST
10 2 (0.13%) Basel III
10 2 (0.13%) EMIR
10 2 (0.13%) ISO/IEC 42001
System Software
1 133 (8.33%) Docker
2 5 (0.31%) Active Directory
3 1 (0.063%) Oracle RAC
3 1 (0.063%) Virtual Machines
Systems Management
1 114 (7.14%) Kubernetes
2 30 (1.88%) Grafana
3 27 (1.69%) Ansible
4 12 (0.75%) Prometheus
5 8 (0.50%) Control-M
5 8 (0.50%) Kibana
6 3 (0.19%) logstash
7 2 (0.13%) Argo
7 2 (0.13%) Puppet
7 2 (0.13%) Single Sign-On
8 1 (0.063%) Cilium
8 1 (0.063%) Data Guard
8 1 (0.063%) HAProxy
8 1 (0.063%) IBM Guardium
8 1 (0.063%) Kustomize
8 1 (0.063%) Nagios
8 1 (0.063%) Oracle Enterprise Manager
8 1 (0.063%) Oracle RMAN
8 1 (0.063%) Progress Chef
8 1 (0.063%) QRadar
Vendors
1 463 (29.01%) Databricks
2 266 (16.67%) Microsoft
3 96 (6.02%) Google
4 76 (4.76%) Oracle
5 59 (3.70%) Informatica
6 32 (2.01%) Salesforce
7 30 (1.88%) SAP
8 26 (1.63%) Foundry
8 26 (1.63%) Talend
9 23 (1.44%) Palantir
10 22 (1.38%) OpenAI
11 15 (0.94%) Teradata
12 13 (0.81%) Cloudera
13 12 (0.75%) Trend Micro
14 11 (0.69%) Adobe
14 11 (0.69%) ServiceNow
15 8 (0.50%) Denodo
15 8 (0.50%) Splunk
16 7 (0.44%) Hitachi
17 6 (0.38%) MicroStrategy