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

6 months to
1 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 87 160 204
Rank change year-on-year +73 +44 +8
Contract jobs citing Data Engineering 1,356 514 486
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.77% 1.76% 1.13%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.27% 1.94% 1.32%
Number of daily rates quoted 936 357 365
10th Percentile £389 £372 £363
25th Percentile £450 £449 £460
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year - -4.55% -12.00%
75th Percentile £625 £675 £650
90th Percentile £749 £838 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £533
% change year-on-year +5.26% -10.80% -3.18%
Number of hourly rates quoted 20 9 15
10th Percentile £51.25 £22.67 £30.72
25th Percentile £62.19 £22.72 £31.25
Median hourly rate £70.00 £30.00 £35.00
Median % change year-on-year +133.33% -14.29% -52.05%
75th Percentile £79.44 £53.75 £60.00
90th Percentile £90.00 £56.00 -
UK excluding London median hourly rate £69.44 £26.47 £60.00
% change year-on-year +162.38% -55.89% -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 41,434 26,510 36,773
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.66% 90.99% 85.55%
Number of daily rates quoted 25,895 16,942 23,625
10th Percentile £325 £300 £300
25th Percentile £413 £408 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £513 £525
Median % change year-on-year - -2.38% -4.55%
75th Percentile £613 £625 £638
90th Percentile £725 £738 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,481 1,120 2,526
10th Percentile £14.64 £14.20 £12.75
25th Percentile £19.85 £17.87 £16.00
Median hourly rate £42.50 £27.97 £36.50
Median % change year-on-year +51.98% -23.38% -0.11%
75th Percentile £67.84 £57.50 £60.71
90th Percentile £81.05 £75.00 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £45.00 £25.15 £38.12
% change year-on-year +78.93% -34.02% +8.91%

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 June 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 June 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 June 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 1,219 £528 -4.09% 687
London +57 751 £550 -4.35% 393
UK excluding London +71 486 £500 +5.26% 402
Work from Home +54 404 £525 - 362
North of England +13 140 £475 -5.00% 119
Midlands +29 126 £500 +8.11% 48
West Midlands +23 104 £500 -1.09% 34
South West +27 74 £500 -11.11% 43
South East -21 67 £538 +13.16% 131
Yorkshire -10 64 £480 -8.57% 25
Scotland +28 56 £460 -3.16% 19
North West -21 50 £506 +1.25% 71
North East -3 28 £438 -12.50% 24
East of England -23 22 £575 +54.08% 28
East Midlands -18 19 £525 +13.51% 14
Wales -8 9 £450 +100.61% 6
Northern Ireland - 3 £430 - 14

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
1 190 (14.01%) Apache Spark
2 148 (10.91%) Apache Airflow
3 98 (7.23%) Apache
4 37 (2.73%) SAS
5 24 (1.77%) Confluence
6 16 (1.18%) Palantir Foundry
7 15 (1.11%) Jupyter
8 8 (0.59%) Appian
9 7 (0.52%) Apache Superset
10 4 (0.29%) Microsoft Exchange
10 4 (0.29%) SharePoint
11 2 (0.15%) Apache Synapse
12 1 (0.074%) Adobe Experience Manager
12 1 (0.074%) ArcGIS
12 1 (0.074%) Camunda
12 1 (0.074%) CICS
12 1 (0.074%) CMS
12 1 (0.074%) IBM HTTP Server
12 1 (0.074%) PowerExchange
Applications
1 29 (2.14%) Microsoft Excel
2 8 (0.59%) Microsoft Office
3 7 (0.52%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 7 (0.52%) Spreadsheet
4 6 (0.44%) Microsoft Project
5 3 (0.22%) MS Visio
6 2 (0.15%) Chatbot
6 2 (0.15%) Trello
Business Applications
1 6 (0.44%) Aladdin
2 5 (0.37%) BambooHR
3 4 (0.29%) Dynamics CRM
4 3 (0.22%) Salesforce CRM
4 3 (0.22%) SAP S/4HANA
5 2 (0.15%) Oracle Assets
5 2 (0.15%) SAP BPC
6 1 (0.074%) Adobe Campaign
6 1 (0.074%) Endur
6 1 (0.074%) Markit EDM
6 1 (0.074%) SAP ECC
Cloud Services
1 597 (44.03%) Azure
2 495 (36.50%) AWS
3 311 (22.94%) Power Platform
4 192 (14.16%) Snowflake
5 187 (13.79%) Azure Data Factory
6 185 (13.64%) GCP
7 147 (10.84%) Amazon S3
8 142 (10.47%) dbt
9 139 (10.25%) Azure Synapse Analytics
10 127 (9.37%) GitHub
11 117 (8.63%) Azure DevOps
12 103 (7.60%) Serverless
13 84 (6.19%) AWS Lambda
14 75 (5.53%) GitHub Actions
15 45 (3.32%) AWS CloudFormation
16 39 (2.88%) Amazon EMR
17 30 (2.21%) AWS Step Functions
18 26 (1.92%) Azure AI
18 26 (1.92%) Collibra
18 26 (1.92%) Dagster
Communications & Networking
1 5 (0.37%) RTP
2 4 (0.29%) Firewall
3 2 (0.15%) Kerberos
4 1 (0.074%) 4G
4 1 (0.074%) 5G
4 1 (0.074%) MIMO
4 1 (0.074%) Network Security
4 1 (0.074%) SAN
4 1 (0.074%) SMS
4 1 (0.074%) TCP/IP
4 1 (0.074%) VPN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 288 (21.24%) Power BI
2 251 (18.51%) Data Warehouse
3 207 (15.27%) Data Lake
4 121 (8.92%) Metadata
5 108 (7.96%) Big Data
6 95 (7.01%) SQL Server
7 85 (6.27%) Delta Lake
8 79 (5.83%) Tableau
9 75 (5.53%) BigQuery
9 75 (5.53%) NoSQL
9 75 (5.53%) Snowflake Schema
10 71 (5.24%) Amazon Redshift
11 62 (4.57%) Azure SQL Database
12 60 (4.42%) Amazon Athena
13 55 (4.06%) Relational Database
14 52 (3.83%) PostgreSQL
15 50 (3.69%) Hadoop
16 39 (2.88%) SQL Server Integration Services
17 35 (2.58%) Spark SQL
18 30 (2.21%) Star Schema
Development Applications
1 168 (12.39%) Git
2 69 (5.09%) GitLab
3 54 (3.98%) JIRA
4 35 (2.58%) MLflow
5 26 (1.92%) Jenkins
6 6 (0.44%) SonarQube
7 5 (0.37%) Postman
7 5 (0.37%) Selenium
8 3 (0.22%) Artifactory
8 3 (0.22%) Robot Framework
8 3 (0.22%) Snyk
8 3 (0.22%) Visual Studio
9 2 (0.15%) Bitbucket
9 2 (0.15%) ERwin
9 2 (0.15%) Terragrunt
10 1 (0.074%) Ant
10 1 (0.074%) Deequ
10 1 (0.074%) JUnit
10 1 (0.074%) Maven
10 1 (0.074%) SoapUI
General
1 333 (24.56%) Finance
2 322 (23.75%) Social Skills
3 199 (14.68%) Analytical Skills
4 119 (8.78%) Public Sector
5 89 (6.56%) Banking
6 33 (2.43%) Marketing
7 30 (2.21%) Retail
8 28 (2.06%) Inclusion and Diversity
9 27 (1.99%) Documentation Skills
10 20 (1.47%) Front Office
11 17 (1.25%) Investment Banking
12 15 (1.11%) Telecoms
13 14 (1.03%) Financial Institution
14 11 (0.81%) Influencing Skills
15 10 (0.74%) Legal
16 9 (0.66%) Law
17 6 (0.44%) Back Office
17 6 (0.44%) Manufacturing
17 6 (0.44%) Military
17 6 (0.44%) Pharmaceutical
Job Titles
1 647 (47.71%) Data Engineer
2 183 (13.50%) Senior
3 144 (10.62%) Lead
4 141 (10.40%) Architect
5 114 (8.41%) Senior Data Engineer
6 75 (5.53%) Developer
7 74 (5.46%) Data Architect
8 65 (4.79%) AWS Engineer
9 60 (4.42%) Analyst
10 59 (4.35%) Lead Data Engineer
11 55 (4.06%) Snowflake Engineer
12 52 (3.83%) AWS Data Engineer
13 48 (3.54%) Azure Engineer
14 47 (3.47%) Data Scientist
15 44 (3.24%) Snowflake Data Engineer
15 44 (3.24%) Solutions Architect
16 42 (3.10%) Azure Data Engineer
17 41 (3.02%) Consultant
18 36 (2.65%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
19 35 (2.58%) Python Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 199 (14.68%) PySpark
2 144 (10.62%) Kafka
3 57 (4.20%) Pandas
4 40 (2.95%) PyTorch
4 40 (2.95%) scikit-learn
5 37 (2.73%) REST
6 35 (2.58%) NumPy
7 32 (2.36%) TensorFlow
8 28 (2.06%) JSON
9 24 (1.77%) Spring
10 23 (1.70%) React
11 18 (1.33%) RESTful
12 17 (1.25%) LangChain
12 17 (1.25%) Spring Boot
12 17 (1.25%) YAML
13 16 (1.18%) FastAPI
13 16 (1.18%) Great Expectations
14 15 (1.11%) pytest
15 13 (0.96%) Django
15 13 (0.96%) Flask
Miscellaneous
1 180 (13.27%) Cloud Native
2 49 (3.61%) Data Structures
2 49 (3.61%) Distributed Systems
3 48 (3.54%) Product Ownership
4 45 (3.32%) Legacy Systems
5 30 (2.21%) AI Agents
6 29 (2.14%) Onboarding
7 27 (1.99%) Distributed Computing
8 24 (1.77%) Algorithms
9 23 (1.70%) Data Protection Act
10 20 (1.47%) Analytical Mindset
10 20 (1.47%) Greenfield Project
11 13 (0.96%) Fixed Income
11 13 (0.96%) NHS
12 12 (0.88%) Clustering
12 12 (0.88%) Reference Data
12 12 (0.88%) Self-Motivation
13 10 (0.74%) Data Fabric
13 10 (0.74%) Equities
13 10 (0.74%) Hybrid Cloud
Operating Systems
1 29 (2.14%) Linux
2 25 (1.84%) Unix
3 5 (0.37%) VMS
4 3 (0.22%) Ubuntu
4 3 (0.22%) Windows
5 2 (0.15%) Windows Server
6 1 (0.074%) CentOS
6 1 (0.074%) Debian
Processes & Methodologies
1 700 (51.62%) Analytics
2 634 (46.76%) Data Pipeline
3 525 (38.72%) Data Modelling
4 496 (36.58%) ETL
5 473 (34.88%) CI/CD
6 401 (29.57%) AI
7 350 (25.81%) Business Intelligence
8 341 (25.15%) Agile
9 339 (25.00%) DevOps
10 304 (22.42%) Data Governance
11 263 (19.40%) Machine Learning
12 233 (17.18%) Problem-Solving
13 229 (16.89%) Data Science
14 189 (13.94%) Data Architecture
15 181 (13.35%) Migration
16 176 (12.98%) Decision-Making
17 170 (12.54%) Validation
18 143 (10.55%) Infrastructure as Code
19 141 (10.40%) Use Case
20 136 (10.03%) Data Integration
Programming Languages
1 753 (55.53%) SQL
2 711 (52.43%) Python
3 109 (8.04%) Java
4 48 (3.54%) Scala
5 45 (3.32%) Data Analysis Expressions
6 37 (2.73%) C#
7 34 (2.51%) Bash
8 25 (1.84%) T-SQL
9 20 (1.47%) PowerShell
10 18 (1.33%) JavaScript
10 18 (1.33%) R
11 16 (1.18%) PL/SQL
12 15 (1.11%) Bicep
13 12 (0.88%) Shell Script
14 10 (0.74%) TypeScript
15 7 (0.52%) SAS Macro
16 6 (0.44%) Go
17 5 (0.37%) Korn
18 3 (0.22%) Kusto Query Language
19 2 (0.15%) SPARQL
Qualifications
1 258 (19.03%) Security Cleared
2 228 (16.81%) SC Cleared
3 101 (7.45%) Degree
4 41 (3.02%) Computer Science Degree
5 35 (2.58%) Azure Certification
5 35 (2.58%) Master's Degree
6 22 (1.62%) BPSS Clearance
7 14 (1.03%) DBS Check
8 12 (0.88%) AWS Certification
8 12 (0.88%) DV Cleared
9 8 (0.59%) Microsoft Certification
10 7 (0.52%) SnowPro
11 5 (0.37%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
12 4 (0.29%) PhD
13 3 (0.22%) IBM Certification
13 3 (0.22%) Microsoft Certified Professional
14 2 (0.15%) CSPO
14 2 (0.15%) PMI Certification
14 2 (0.15%) Tableau Certification
15 1 (0.074%) AWS Certified SysOps Administrator
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 376 (27.73%) Data Quality
2 86 (6.34%) GDPR
3 67 (4.94%) QA
4 13 (0.96%) SLA
5 12 (0.88%) Sarbanes-Oxley
6 7 (0.52%) Accessibility
7 5 (0.37%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 4 (0.29%) MiFID
8 4 (0.29%) Solvency II
9 3 (0.22%) California Consumer Privacy Act
9 3 (0.22%) Disclosure Scotland
9 3 (0.22%) GRC
9 3 (0.22%) HIPAA
9 3 (0.22%) PMO
10 2 (0.15%) Actionable Recommendations
10 2 (0.15%) EMIR
10 2 (0.15%) GxP
10 2 (0.15%) NIST
10 2 (0.15%) SNOMED CT
11 1 (0.074%) HL7
System Software
1 127 (9.37%) Docker
2 4 (0.29%) HDFS
2 4 (0.29%) Virtual Machines
3 1 (0.074%) Active Directory
3 1 (0.074%) Apache ZooKeeper
Systems Management
1 163 (12.02%) Terraform
2 107 (7.89%) Kubernetes
3 26 (1.92%) Prometheus
4 24 (1.77%) Grafana
5 9 (0.66%) Ansible
6 5 (0.37%) Argo
7 3 (0.22%) Kibana
7 3 (0.22%) Nagios
7 3 (0.22%) Rancher
8 2 (0.15%) Hadoop YARN
8 2 (0.15%) Kubeflow
8 2 (0.15%) logstash
8 2 (0.15%) Thomson Reuters DACS
9 1 (0.074%) Apache Ranger
9 1 (0.074%) Control-M
9 1 (0.074%) HP Fortify
9 1 (0.074%) IBM Guardium
9 1 (0.074%) Oozie
Vendors
1 366 (26.99%) Databricks
2 224 (16.52%) Microsoft
3 68 (5.01%) Informatica
4 59 (4.35%) Google
5 56 (4.13%) Oracle
6 31 (2.29%) Talend
7 26 (1.92%) OpenAI
8 25 (1.84%) SAP
9 23 (1.70%) Foundry
10 19 (1.40%) Splunk
11 18 (1.33%) Palantir
12 16 (1.18%) Cloudera
13 13 (0.96%) ServiceNow
14 11 (0.81%) Salesforce
15 9 (0.66%) UiPath
16 8 (0.59%) Automation Anywhere
16 8 (0.59%) Denodo
17 7 (0.52%) IBM
17 7 (0.52%) InterSystems
18 5 (0.37%) Teradata