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

6 months to
14 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 90 155 200
Rank change year-on-year +65 +45 +9
Contract jobs citing Data Engineering 1,562 594 478
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.89% 1.82% 1.24%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.42% 2.01% 1.45%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,083 366 352
10th Percentile £400 £350 £400
25th Percentile £445 £413 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £510 £575
Median % change year-on-year +2.99% -11.35% -4.17%
75th Percentile £638 £638 £675
90th Percentile £738 £750 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £463 £538
% change year-on-year +8.11% -13.95% -2.27%
Number of hourly rates quoted 20 7 8
10th Percentile - £37.48 £24.13
25th Percentile £21.25 £45.11 £26.22
Median hourly rate £66.25 £52.50 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +26.19% -12.50% -23.08%
75th Percentile £75.75 £76.25 -
90th Percentile £85.48 £96.50 -
UK excluding London median hourly rate £52.50 £38.96 £60.00
% change year-on-year +34.75% -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 45,698 29,594 32,877
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.42% 90.53% 85.62%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,784 18,388 20,318
10th Percentile £325 £300 £310
25th Percentile £425 £403 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -2.78%
75th Percentile £625 £625 £638
90th Percentile £726 £725 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 3,048 1,782 1,485
10th Percentile £13.85 £14.23 £14.84
25th Percentile £17.44 £17.30 £20.00
Median hourly rate £40.00 £25.15 £43.00
Median % change year-on-year +59.05% -41.51% +1.18%
75th Percentile £67.50 £43.75 £65.00
90th Percentile £79.00 £66.95 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £41.00 £22.50 £43.00
% change year-on-year +82.22% -47.67% +7.50%

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 14 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 14 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 14 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 1,391 £525 +0.96% 2,075
London +50 861 £550 - 1,371
UK excluding London +72 548 £500 +8.11% 937
Work from Home +62 509 £525 +5.00% 1,105
North of England +13 178 £475 - 260
Midlands +31 126 £486 +7.93% 97
West Midlands +31 103 £475 -6.31% 72
South East -4 91 £500 +13.64% 223
Yorkshire +29 89 £500 +5.26% 58
South West +18 77 £525 -3.45% 105
North West -31 56 £513 +8.47% 168
Scotland -2 50 £500 +7.82% 116
North East -9 35 £425 -20.93% 35
East of England -17 27 £550 +22.22% 62
East Midlands -5 21 £525 +20.62% 25
Wales - 7 £450 - 23
Northern Ireland +7 4 £334 - 53

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
1 183 (11.72%) Apache Airflow
2 164 (10.50%) Apache Spark
3 130 (8.32%) Apache
4 42 (2.69%) Confluence
5 37 (2.37%) SAS
6 20 (1.28%) Jupyter
7 17 (1.09%) Palantir Foundry
8 15 (0.96%) SharePoint
9 6 (0.38%) Apache Superset
9 6 (0.38%) ArcGIS
10 5 (0.32%) Apache Solr
11 3 (0.19%) nginx
11 3 (0.19%) PowerExchange
12 1 (0.064%) CICS
12 1 (0.064%) Ethereum
12 1 (0.064%) GeoServer
12 1 (0.064%) Hyperledger
12 1 (0.064%) Microsoft Exchange
12 1 (0.064%) Oracle Workflow
12 1 (0.064%) SugarCRM
Applications
1 16 (1.02%) Microsoft Excel
2 6 (0.38%) Spreadsheet
3 5 (0.32%) Chatbot
3 5 (0.32%) Microsoft Office
4 3 (0.19%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 2 (0.13%) MS Visio
6 1 (0.064%) Notion
Business Applications
1 9 (0.58%) Aladdin
2 7 (0.45%) Dynamics CRM
3 4 (0.26%) NetSuite
3 4 (0.26%) Sage X3
3 4 (0.26%) Salesforce CRM
3 4 (0.26%) 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 (0.064%) Distributed Ledger
6 1 (0.064%) FIS Private Capital Suite
6 1 (0.064%) MIS ActiveH
6 1 (0.064%) R3 Corda
6 1 (0.064%) SAP ECC
6 1 (0.064%) SAP Oil and Gas
Cloud Services
1 653 (41.81%) Azure
2 578 (37.00%) AWS
3 303 (19.40%) Power Platform
4 259 (16.58%) Snowflake
5 223 (14.28%) GCP
6 219 (14.02%) dbt
7 170 (10.88%) Amazon S3
8 169 (10.82%) Azure Data Factory
9 138 (8.83%) Serverless
10 134 (8.58%) Azure DevOps
11 129 (8.26%) Azure Synapse Analytics
12 121 (7.75%) GitHub
13 114 (7.30%) AWS Lambda
14 79 (5.06%) Azure Databricks
15 61 (3.91%) GitHub Actions
16 50 (3.20%) Amazon EMR
17 36 (2.30%) Amazon Bedrock
18 34 (2.18%) Amazon CloudWatch
19 32 (2.05%) Azure AI
19 32 (2.05%) Microsoft Purview
Communications & Networking
1 5 (0.32%) Broadband
2 4 (0.26%) DNS
2 4 (0.26%) Firewall
2 4 (0.26%) Network Security
3 1 (0.064%) Internet
3 1 (0.064%) MIMO
3 1 (0.064%) MQTT
3 1 (0.064%) RTP
3 1 (0.064%) SMS
3 1 (0.064%) SSL
Database & Business Intelligence
1 317 (20.29%) Data Warehouse
2 289 (18.50%) Power BI
3 211 (13.51%) Data Lake
4 179 (11.46%) Metadata
5 118 (7.55%) BigQuery
6 103 (6.59%) Delta Lake
7 101 (6.47%) Amazon Redshift
8 89 (5.70%) Big Data
9 75 (4.80%) Amazon Athena
10 73 (4.67%) Tableau
11 63 (4.03%) SQL Server
12 62 (3.97%) Snowflake Schema
13 55 (3.52%) Relational Database
14 47 (3.01%) PostgreSQL
15 44 (2.82%) Azure SQL Database
16 42 (2.69%) NoSQL
17 40 (2.56%) Looker
18 32 (2.05%) Data Vault
19 31 (1.98%) Star Schema
20 29 (1.86%) Semantic Layer
Development Applications
1 167 (10.69%) Git
2 88 (5.63%) GitLab
3 74 (4.74%) JIRA
4 26 (1.66%) Jenkins
4 26 (1.66%) MLflow
5 8 (0.51%) ERwin
5 8 (0.51%) RStudio
5 8 (0.51%) Terragrunt
6 7 (0.45%) Bitbucket
6 7 (0.45%) Claude Code
7 6 (0.38%) Selenium
8 5 (0.32%) SonarQube
9 4 (0.26%) ER Studio
10 3 (0.19%) Artifactory
10 3 (0.19%) Atlassian Bamboo
10 3 (0.19%) Snyk
11 2 (0.13%) Postman
11 2 (0.13%) Sonatype Nexus
11 2 (0.13%) TeamCity
11 2 (0.13%) Yeoman
General
1 389 (24.90%) Social Skills
2 355 (22.73%) Finance
3 250 (16.01%) Analytical Skills
4 161 (10.31%) Public Sector
5 129 (8.26%) Banking
6 52 (3.33%) Marketing
7 36 (2.30%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 35 (2.24%) Retail
9 24 (1.54%) Documentation Skills
10 23 (1.47%) Investment Banking
11 20 (1.28%) Front Office
12 19 (1.22%) Law
13 18 (1.15%) Manufacturing
14 17 (1.09%) Pharmaceutical
15 16 (1.02%) Telecoms
16 14 (0.90%) Publishing
17 13 (0.83%) Police
18 12 (0.77%) Billing
18 12 (0.77%) Influencing Skills
19 11 (0.70%) Financial Institution
Job Titles
1 732 (46.86%) Data Engineer
2 242 (15.49%) Senior
3 173 (11.08%) Lead
4 170 (10.88%) Architect
5 151 (9.67%) Senior Data Engineer
6 96 (6.15%) Data Architect
7 94 (6.02%) Developer
8 74 (4.74%) AWS Engineer
9 72 (4.61%) Databricks Engineer
10 67 (4.29%) Analyst
11 66 (4.23%) Snowflake Engineer
12 65 (4.16%) AWS Data Engineer
13 64 (4.10%) Azure Engineer
14 56 (3.59%) Databricks Data Engineer
15 52 (3.33%) Lead Data Engineer
16 48 (3.07%) Python Engineer
16 48 (3.07%) Snowflake Data Engineer
17 46 (2.94%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
18 45 (2.88%) Azure Data Engineer
19 43 (2.75%) Consultant
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 231 (14.79%) PySpark
2 215 (13.76%) Terraform
3 112 (7.17%) Kafka
4 62 (3.97%) REST
5 36 (2.30%) JSON
6 32 (2.05%) React
7 26 (1.66%) .NET
8 23 (1.47%) Pandas
9 16 (1.02%) XML
10 15 (0.96%) LangChain
10 15 (0.96%) PyTorch
11 14 (0.90%) FastAPI
11 14 (0.90%) pytest
11 14 (0.90%) scikit-learn
12 13 (0.83%) NumPy
12 13 (0.83%) TensorFlow
13 12 (0.77%) RESTful
14 11 (0.70%) Microsoft Graph
14 11 (0.70%) Spring
14 11 (0.70%) Spring Boot
Miscellaneous
1 193 (12.36%) Cloud Native
2 81 (5.19%) Data Structures
3 67 (4.29%) Onboarding
4 63 (4.03%) Product Ownership
5 54 (3.46%) Legacy Systems
6 48 (3.07%) AI Agents
6 48 (3.07%) Distributed Systems
7 20 (1.28%) Data Protection Act
7 20 (1.28%) Enterprise Software
8 19 (1.22%) Distributed Computing
8 19 (1.22%) Greenfield Project
9 18 (1.15%) NHS
10 17 (1.09%) Life Science
10 17 (1.09%) Virtual Team
11 15 (0.96%) Data Fabric
11 15 (0.96%) Management Information System
12 14 (0.90%) Analytical Mindset
12 14 (0.90%) Clustering
13 13 (0.83%) Marketing Technology
14 12 (0.77%) Reference Data
Operating Systems
1 30 (1.92%) Linux
2 25 (1.60%) Unix
3 7 (0.45%) Windows
4 1 (0.064%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 1 (0.064%) Robot Operating System
4 1 (0.064%) Ubuntu
4 1 (0.064%) VMS
4 1 (0.064%) Windows Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 765 (48.98%) Data Pipeline
2 740 (47.38%) Analytics
3 601 (38.48%) Data Modelling
4 546 (34.96%) CI/CD
5 542 (34.70%) ETL
6 481 (30.79%) AI
7 382 (24.46%) Agile
8 375 (24.01%) Business Intelligence
9 369 (23.62%) DevOps
10 357 (22.86%) Data Governance
11 276 (17.67%) Machine Learning
12 262 (16.77%) Stakeholder Management
13 250 (16.01%) Data Transformation
14 249 (15.94%) Problem-Solving
15 248 (15.88%) Migration
16 240 (15.36%) Validation
17 236 (15.11%) Data Architecture
18 228 (14.60%) Infrastructure as Code
19 226 (14.47%) Data Science
20 224 (14.34%) Decision-Making
Programming Languages
1 838 (53.65%) SQL
2 811 (51.92%) Python
3 107 (6.85%) Java
4 45 (2.88%) Data Analysis Expressions
5 41 (2.62%) PowerShell
5 41 (2.62%) Scala
6 34 (2.18%) C#
7 32 (2.05%) Bash
8 30 (1.92%) JavaScript
9 24 (1.54%) R
10 22 (1.41%) T-SQL
11 20 (1.28%) PL/SQL
12 15 (0.96%) Bicep
13 13 (0.83%) TypeScript
14 11 (0.70%) Kusto Query Language
15 10 (0.64%) Shell Script
15 10 (0.64%) SPARQL
16 9 (0.58%) SAS Macro
17 8 (0.51%) Cypher
18 7 (0.45%) LookML
Qualifications
1 307 (19.65%) Security Cleared
2 258 (16.52%) SC Cleared
3 78 (4.99%) Degree
4 37 (2.37%) Computer Science Degree
5 32 (2.05%) Azure Certification
5 32 (2.05%) DV Cleared
6 29 (1.86%) BPSS Clearance
7 25 (1.60%) AWS Certification
8 19 (1.22%) Master's Degree
9 15 (0.96%) SnowPro
10 14 (0.90%) DBS Check
11 11 (0.70%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
12 8 (0.51%) Microsoft Certification
13 6 (0.38%) PMI Certification
14 5 (0.32%) CSPO
14 5 (0.32%) PMP
15 4 (0.26%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
15 4 (0.26%) Tableau Certification
16 3 (0.19%) Microsoft Certified Professional
16 3 (0.19%) TOGAF Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 510 (32.65%) Data Quality
2 78 (4.99%) QA
3 66 (4.23%) GDPR
4 29 (1.86%) Accessibility
5 12 (0.77%) SLA
6 5 (0.32%) Disclosure Scotland
6 5 (0.32%) PMO
7 4 (0.26%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 3 (0.19%) Actionable Recommendations
8 3 (0.19%) GRC
8 3 (0.19%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 3 (0.19%) ISO/IEC 42001
8 3 (0.19%) MiFID
8 3 (0.19%) NIST
9 2 (0.13%) California Consumer Privacy Act
9 2 (0.13%) COPPA
9 2 (0.13%) EMIR
9 2 (0.13%) EU AI Act
9 2 (0.13%) NCSC
9 2 (0.13%) Solvency II
System Software
1 134 (8.58%) Docker
2 5 (0.32%) Active Directory
3 1 (0.064%) Oracle RAC
3 1 (0.064%) Virtual Machines
Systems Management
1 109 (6.98%) Kubernetes
2 30 (1.92%) Grafana
3 24 (1.54%) Ansible
4 11 (0.70%) Prometheus
5 8 (0.51%) Control-M
6 6 (0.38%) Kibana
7 3 (0.19%) logstash
8 2 (0.13%) Argo
8 2 (0.13%) Puppet
8 2 (0.13%) Single Sign-On
9 1 (0.064%) Cilium
9 1 (0.064%) Data Guard
9 1 (0.064%) HAProxy
9 1 (0.064%) IBM Guardium
9 1 (0.064%) Kubeflow
9 1 (0.064%) Kustomize
9 1 (0.064%) Nagios
9 1 (0.064%) Oracle Enterprise Manager
9 1 (0.064%) Oracle RMAN
9 1 (0.064%) Progress Chef
Vendors
1 431 (27.59%) Databricks
2 275 (17.61%) Microsoft
3 81 (5.19%) Google
4 74 (4.74%) Informatica
5 70 (4.48%) Oracle
6 33 (2.11%) SAP
7 30 (1.92%) Salesforce
8 29 (1.86%) Foundry
9 27 (1.73%) Talend
10 25 (1.60%) Palantir
11 19 (1.22%) OpenAI
12 14 (0.90%) Teradata
13 13 (0.83%) Cloudera
13 13 (0.83%) ServiceNow
14 12 (0.77%) Trend Micro
15 10 (0.64%) Adobe
16 8 (0.51%) Splunk
17 7 (0.45%) Hitachi
18 6 (0.38%) InterSystems
18 6 (0.38%) MicroStrategy