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

6 months to
24 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 91 153 192
Rank change year-on-year +62 +39 +24
Contract jobs citing Data Engineering 1,595 617 491
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.91% 1.87% 1.29%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.44% 2.07% 1.50%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,103 383 358
10th Percentile £400 £345 £400
25th Percentile £446 £413 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £520 £560
Median % change year-on-year +0.96% -7.14% -6.67%
75th Percentile £638 £638 £663
90th Percentile £725 £738 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £463 £513
% change year-on-year +8.11% -9.76% -6.82%
Number of hourly rates quoted 19 6 7
10th Percentile - £37.11 £23.72
25th Percentile £21.25 £42.03 £25.93
Median hourly rate £65.00 £58.75 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +10.64% -2.08% -17.81%
75th Percentile £74.38 £81.88 -
90th Percentile £83.94 £98.75 -
UK excluding London median hourly rate £48.50 £38.96 £60.00
% change year-on-year +24.49% -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 46,342 29,835 32,681
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.41% 90.50% 85.76%
Number of daily rates quoted 28,074 18,533 19,873
10th Percentile £325 £300 £309
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 £626 £625 £638
90th Percentile £730 £725 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 3,192 1,836 1,405
10th Percentile £13.74 £14.31 £15.00
25th Percentile £17.25 £17.32 £20.00
Median hourly rate £40.00 £25.15 £43.00
Median % change year-on-year +59.05% -41.51% -
75th Percentile £67.25 £43.75 £65.00
90th Percentile £78.75 £65.25 £74.65
UK excluding London median hourly rate £40.00 £22.32 £43.00
% change year-on-year +79.25% -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 24 September 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 24 September 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 24 September 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 +61 1,421 £525 - 2,056
London +50 872 £550 - 1,289
UK excluding London +71 566 £500 +8.11% 940
Work from Home +55 514 £525 +5.00% 876
North of England +30 187 £475 +5.56% 284
Midlands +26 126 £475 +2.70% 126
West Midlands +30 103 £475 -9.52% 97
Yorkshire +35 96 £500 +5.26% 71
South East -13 91 £525 +19.32% 220
South West +34 86 £525 -8.70% 107
North West -28 57 £513 +20.59% 172
Scotland -4 51 £500 +7.82% 88
North East -12 36 £425 -17.07% 43
East of England -18 26 £563 +25.00% 59
East Midlands -6 22 £503 +15.57% 29
Wales -5 8 £450 -9.09% 15
Northern Ireland +7 4 £334 - 44

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
1 191 (11.97%) Apache Airflow
2 172 (10.78%) Apache Spark
3 139 (8.71%) Apache
4 41 (2.57%) Confluence
5 34 (2.13%) SAS
6 22 (1.38%) Jupyter
7 16 (1.00%) Palantir Foundry
8 15 (0.94%) SharePoint
9 6 (0.38%) ArcGIS
10 5 (0.31%) Apache Solr
10 5 (0.31%) Apache Superset
11 3 (0.19%) nginx
11 3 (0.19%) PowerExchange
12 1 (0.063%) CICS
12 1 (0.063%) Ethereum
12 1 (0.063%) GeoServer
12 1 (0.063%) Hyperledger
12 1 (0.063%) Microsoft Exchange
12 1 (0.063%) Oracle Workflow
12 1 (0.063%) SugarCRM
Applications
1 14 (0.88%) Microsoft Excel
2 9 (0.56%) Spreadsheet
3 5 (0.31%) Chatbot
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%) 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%) R3 Corda
6 1 (0.063%) SAP Oil and Gas
Cloud Services
1 663 (41.57%) Azure
2 593 (37.18%) AWS
3 304 (19.06%) Power Platform
4 273 (17.12%) Snowflake
5 238 (14.92%) dbt
6 236 (14.80%) GCP
7 182 (11.41%) Amazon S3
8 177 (11.10%) Azure Data Factory
9 144 (9.03%) Serverless
10 134 (8.40%) Azure DevOps
11 125 (7.84%) Azure Synapse Analytics
12 120 (7.52%) AWS Lambda
13 119 (7.46%) GitHub
14 80 (5.02%) Azure Databricks
15 63 (3.95%) GitHub Actions
16 55 (3.45%) Amazon EMR
17 42 (2.63%) Amazon CloudWatch
18 39 (2.45%) Amazon Bedrock
19 33 (2.07%) Azure AI
19 33 (2.07%) Microsoft Purview
Communications & Networking
1 5 (0.31%) Broadband
1 5 (0.31%) DNS
2 4 (0.25%) Firewall
2 4 (0.25%) Network Security
3 1 (0.063%) Internet
3 1 (0.063%) MIMO
3 1 (0.063%) MQTT
3 1 (0.063%) Radio Access Network
3 1 (0.063%) SMS
3 1 (0.063%) SSL
Database & Business Intelligence
1 326 (20.44%) Data Warehouse
2 290 (18.18%) Power BI
3 212 (13.29%) Data Lake
4 182 (11.41%) Metadata
5 127 (7.96%) BigQuery
6 107 (6.71%) Amazon Redshift
7 104 (6.52%) Delta Lake
8 88 (5.52%) Big Data
9 79 (4.95%) Amazon Athena
10 74 (4.64%) Tableau
11 61 (3.82%) Snowflake Schema
12 58 (3.64%) SQL Server
13 52 (3.26%) Relational Database
14 51 (3.20%) PostgreSQL
15 45 (2.82%) NoSQL
16 41 (2.57%) Looker
17 36 (2.26%) Azure SQL Database
18 34 (2.13%) Data Vault
19 31 (1.94%) Amazon RDS
20 27 (1.69%) Semantic Layer
Development Applications
1 177 (11.10%) Git
2 93 (5.83%) GitLab
3 71 (4.45%) JIRA
4 27 (1.69%) Jenkins
5 24 (1.50%) 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 5 (0.31%) SonarQube
9 4 (0.25%) ER Studio
10 3 (0.19%) Artifactory
10 3 (0.19%) Atlassian Bamboo
10 3 (0.19%) Postman
10 3 (0.19%) Snyk
11 2 (0.13%) Sonatype Nexus
11 2 (0.13%) TeamCity
11 2 (0.13%) Yeoman
General
1 405 (25.39%) Social Skills
2 367 (23.01%) Finance
3 254 (15.92%) Analytical Skills
4 163 (10.22%) Public Sector
5 142 (8.90%) Banking
6 53 (3.32%) Marketing
7 38 (2.38%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 38 (2.38%) Retail
8 25 (1.57%) Investment Banking
9 24 (1.50%) Documentation Skills
10 23 (1.44%) Front Office
11 20 (1.25%) Law
12 19 (1.19%) Pharmaceutical
13 18 (1.13%) Manufacturing
14 16 (1.00%) Telecoms
15 14 (0.88%) Publishing
16 13 (0.82%) Influencing Skills
16 13 (0.82%) Police
17 12 (0.75%) Back Office
17 12 (0.75%) Billing
Job Titles
1 740 (46.39%) Data Engineer
2 251 (15.74%) Senior
3 178 (11.16%) Architect
3 178 (11.16%) Lead
4 156 (9.78%) Senior Data Engineer
5 98 (6.14%) Data Architect
5 98 (6.14%) Developer
6 76 (4.76%) AWS Engineer
7 74 (4.64%) Databricks Engineer
8 70 (4.39%) Snowflake Engineer
9 68 (4.26%) Analyst
10 66 (4.14%) AWS Data Engineer
10 66 (4.14%) Azure Engineer
11 58 (3.64%) Databricks Data Engineer
12 52 (3.26%) Snowflake Data Engineer
13 50 (3.13%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
13 50 (3.13%) Lead Data Engineer
14 48 (3.01%) Python Engineer
15 46 (2.88%) Azure Data Engineer
16 41 (2.57%) DevOps Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 234 (14.67%) Terraform
2 229 (14.36%) PySpark
3 113 (7.08%) Kafka
4 60 (3.76%) REST
5 34 (2.13%) JSON
6 32 (2.01%) React
7 28 (1.76%) .NET
8 22 (1.38%) Pandas
9 18 (1.13%) LangChain
10 15 (0.94%) FastAPI
10 15 (0.94%) pytest
10 15 (0.94%) PyTorch
11 14 (0.88%) XML
12 13 (0.82%) LangGraph
12 13 (0.82%) RESTful
13 12 (0.75%) NumPy
13 12 (0.75%) scikit-learn
13 12 (0.75%) TensorFlow
14 11 (0.69%) Microsoft Graph
14 11 (0.69%) RabbitMQ
Miscellaneous
1 210 (13.17%) Cloud Native
2 87 (5.45%) Data Structures
3 76 (4.76%) Onboarding
4 63 (3.95%) Product Ownership
5 55 (3.45%) Legacy Systems
6 53 (3.32%) AI Agents
7 49 (3.07%) Distributed Systems
8 24 (1.50%) Data Protection Act
9 22 (1.38%) Enterprise Software
10 20 (1.25%) Distributed Computing
11 18 (1.13%) Management Information System
11 18 (1.13%) NHS
11 18 (1.13%) Virtual Team
12 17 (1.07%) Greenfield Project
12 17 (1.07%) Life Science
13 16 (1.00%) Analytical Mindset
14 15 (0.94%) Data Fabric
15 14 (0.88%) Clustering
15 14 (0.88%) Marketing Technology
16 13 (0.82%) Algorithms
Operating Systems
1 30 (1.88%) Linux
2 25 (1.57%) 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
1 778 (48.78%) Data Pipeline
2 752 (47.15%) Analytics
3 628 (39.37%) Data Modelling
4 566 (35.49%) CI/CD
5 555 (34.80%) ETL
6 502 (31.47%) AI
7 403 (25.27%) Agile
8 380 (23.82%) DevOps
9 376 (23.57%) Business Intelligence
10 356 (22.32%) Data Governance
11 281 (17.62%) Stakeholder Management
12 280 (17.55%) Machine Learning
13 255 (15.99%) Migration
14 252 (15.80%) Data Transformation
15 248 (15.55%) Infrastructure as Code
16 245 (15.36%) Problem-Solving
17 244 (15.30%) Data Architecture
17 244 (15.30%) Validation
18 232 (14.55%) Data Integration
19 230 (14.42%) Decision-Making
Programming Languages
1 867 (54.36%) SQL
2 834 (52.29%) Python
3 108 (6.77%) Java
4 46 (2.88%) Scala
5 42 (2.63%) Data Analysis Expressions
6 40 (2.51%) PowerShell
7 37 (2.32%) C#
8 33 (2.07%) Bash
9 31 (1.94%) JavaScript
10 24 (1.50%) R
11 20 (1.25%) PL/SQL
11 20 (1.25%) T-SQL
12 15 (0.94%) Bicep
12 15 (0.94%) TypeScript
13 12 (0.75%) Kusto Query Language
14 11 (0.69%) Shell Script
15 10 (0.63%) SPARQL
16 9 (0.56%) Go
16 9 (0.56%) SAS Macro
17 8 (0.50%) Cypher
Qualifications
1 298 (18.68%) Security Cleared
2 249 (15.61%) SC Cleared
3 78 (4.89%) Degree
4 36 (2.26%) Computer Science Degree
5 34 (2.13%) Azure Certification
6 33 (2.07%) DV Cleared
7 31 (1.94%) AWS Certification
8 30 (1.88%) BPSS Clearance
9 19 (1.19%) Master's Degree
10 14 (0.88%) DBS Check
11 13 (0.82%) SnowPro
12 11 (0.69%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
13 8 (0.50%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 8 (0.50%) Microsoft Certification
14 6 (0.38%) PMI Certification
15 5 (0.31%) CSPO
15 5 (0.31%) PMP
15 5 (0.31%) TOGAF Certification
16 4 (0.25%) Microsoft Certified Professional
16 4 (0.25%) Tableau Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 527 (33.04%) Data Quality
2 79 (4.95%) QA
3 63 (3.95%) GDPR
4 29 (1.82%) Accessibility
5 12 (0.75%) SLA
6 7 (0.44%) Disclosure Scotland
7 5 (0.31%) GRC
8 4 (0.25%) PMO
9 3 (0.19%) Actionable Recommendations
9 3 (0.19%) EU AI Act
9 3 (0.19%) ISO/IEC 27001
9 3 (0.19%) ISO/IEC 42001
9 3 (0.19%) MiFID
9 3 (0.19%) NCSC
9 3 (0.19%) NIST
10 2 (0.13%) California Consumer Privacy Act
10 2 (0.13%) COPPA
10 2 (0.13%) EMIR
10 2 (0.13%) IFRS
10 2 (0.13%) IFRS 9
System Software
1 131 (8.21%) Docker
2 5 (0.31%) Active Directory
3 1 (0.063%) Oracle RAC
3 1 (0.063%) Virtual Machines
Systems Management
1 105 (6.58%) Kubernetes
2 31 (1.94%) Grafana
3 23 (1.44%) Ansible
4 11 (0.69%) 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
1 456 (28.59%) Databricks
2 274 (17.18%) Microsoft
3 91 (5.71%) Google
4 74 (4.64%) Oracle
5 62 (3.89%) Informatica
6 31 (1.94%) Salesforce
6 31 (1.94%) SAP
7 28 (1.76%) Foundry
7 28 (1.76%) Talend
8 24 (1.50%) Palantir
9 21 (1.32%) OpenAI
10 16 (1.00%) Teradata
11 13 (0.82%) Cloudera
12 12 (0.75%) Trend Micro
13 11 (0.69%) Adobe
13 11 (0.69%) ServiceNow
14 9 (0.56%) Splunk
15 8 (0.50%) Denodo
16 7 (0.44%) Hitachi
16 7 (0.44%) MicroStrategy