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

6 months to
31 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 88 163 208
Rank change year-on-year +75 +45 +7
Contract jobs citing Data Engineering 1,573 577 474
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.96% 1.76% 1.19%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.49% 1.94% 1.40%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,091 370 349
10th Percentile £388 £363 £400
25th Percentile £439 £433 £468
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £520 £575
Median % change year-on-year +0.96% -9.57% -8.00%
75th Percentile £638 £644 £700
90th Percentile £738 £800 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £473 £500
% change year-on-year +5.82% -5.50% -13.98%
Number of hourly rates quoted 25 6 13
10th Percentile £21.25 £30.73 £30.55
25th Percentile £35.25 £42.03 £31.25
Median hourly rate £69.44 £52.50 £35.00
Median % change year-on-year +32.27% +50.00% -52.05%
75th Percentile £75.00 £62.19 £60.00
90th Percentile £89.00 £87.50 -
UK excluding London median hourly rate £64.00 £31.98 £60.00
% change year-on-year +100.13% -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 45,107 29,668 33,959
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.95% 90.46% 85.47%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,893 18,635 21,816
10th Percentile £325 £300 £308
25th Percentile £420 £404 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -4.55%
75th Percentile £625 £625 £638
90th Percentile £725 £736 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,744 1,629 1,969
10th Percentile £14.50 £14.20 £13.69
25th Percentile £19.66 £17.35 £17.72
Median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £40.00
Median % change year-on-year +74.79% -37.13% -5.88%
75th Percentile £68.00 £50.00 £63.75
90th Percentile £82.25 £68.75 £74.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £43.96 £24.00 £40.33
% change year-on-year +83.17% -40.48% +0.81%

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 31 July 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 31 July 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 31 July 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 1,406 £525 - 646
London +57 838 £550 - 402
UK excluding London +86 574 £500 +5.82% 340
Work from Home +72 519 £525 - 295
North of England +32 180 £463 -5.13% 113
Midlands +40 148 £481 +4.40% 33
West Midlands +30 123 £475 -0.63% 24
South East -22 85 £525 +11.94% 106
Yorkshire +7 84 £475 +2.70% 33
South West +26 83 £505 -12.17% 47
North West -22 58 £500 +5.26% 56
Scotland +16 50 £450 -4.26% 19
North East -9 40 £425 -15.00% 25
East of England -4 30 £575 +35.29% 11
East Midlands -3 22 £525 +13.94% 9
Wales -10 7 £450 +82.58% 5
Northern Ireland +3 4 £334 - 9

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
1 193 (12.27%) Apache Spark
2 177 (11.25%) Apache Airflow
3 127 (8.07%) Apache
4 47 (2.99%) SAS
5 41 (2.61%) Confluence
6 23 (1.46%) Jupyter
7 22 (1.40%) Palantir Foundry
8 11 (0.70%) SharePoint
9 8 (0.51%) Apache Superset
10 4 (0.25%) ArcGIS
11 3 (0.19%) Apache Solr
12 2 (0.13%) Appian
12 2 (0.13%) Microsoft Exchange
13 1 (0.064%) Apache Synapse
13 1 (0.064%) CICS
13 1 (0.064%) Ethereum
13 1 (0.064%) Hyperledger
13 1 (0.064%) IBM HTTP Server
13 1 (0.064%) PowerExchange
Applications
1 22 (1.40%) Microsoft Excel
2 8 (0.51%) Microsoft Office
3 7 (0.45%) Spreadsheet
4 6 (0.38%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 4 (0.25%) 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%) Markit EDM
7 1 (0.064%) MIS ActiveH
7 1 (0.064%) R3 Corda
7 1 (0.064%) SAP ECC
Cloud Services
1 662 (42.09%) Azure
2 594 (37.76%) AWS
3 327 (20.79%) Power Platform
4 249 (15.83%) Snowflake
5 214 (13.60%) GCP
6 201 (12.78%) dbt
7 178 (11.32%) Amazon S3
8 177 (11.25%) Azure Data Factory
9 148 (9.41%) Azure Synapse Analytics
10 132 (8.39%) Azure DevOps
11 131 (8.33%) Serverless
12 124 (7.88%) GitHub
13 111 (7.06%) AWS Lambda
14 69 (4.39%) GitHub Actions
15 60 (3.81%) Amazon EMR
16 37 (2.35%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 35 (2.23%) AWS CloudFormation
18 31 (1.97%) Azure AI
19 30 (1.91%) Amazon SageMaker
19 30 (1.91%) AWS Step Functions
Communications & Networking
1 5 (0.32%) Firewall
2 3 (0.19%) RTP
3 2 (0.13%) Network Security
4 1 (0.064%) 4G
4 1 (0.064%) 5G
4 1 (0.064%) Broadband
4 1 (0.064%) MIMO
4 1 (0.064%) MQTT
Database & Business Intelligence
1 307 (19.52%) Data Warehouse
2 306 (19.45%) Power BI
3 216 (13.73%) Data Lake
4 153 (9.73%) Metadata
5 107 (6.80%) Amazon Redshift
6 103 (6.55%) Big Data
7 100 (6.36%) BigQuery
8 97 (6.17%) Delta Lake
9 89 (5.66%) Tableau
10 78 (4.96%) Amazon Athena
11 76 (4.83%) SQL Server
12 67 (4.26%) Snowflake Schema
13 63 (4.01%) NoSQL
14 60 (3.81%) Relational Database
15 57 (3.62%) PostgreSQL
16 47 (2.99%) Azure SQL Database
17 41 (2.61%) Hadoop
18 36 (2.29%) Looker
19 35 (2.23%) Star Schema
20 34 (2.16%) SQL Server Integration Services
Development Applications
1 172 (10.93%) Git
2 76 (4.83%) GitLab
3 70 (4.45%) JIRA
4 30 (1.91%) MLflow
5 26 (1.65%) Jenkins
6 6 (0.38%) ERwin
6 6 (0.38%) SonarQube
7 5 (0.32%) Bitbucket
8 3 (0.19%) Artifactory
8 3 (0.19%) ER Studio
8 3 (0.19%) Postman
8 3 (0.19%) Selenium
8 3 (0.19%) Snyk
8 3 (0.19%) Sonatype Nexus
8 3 (0.19%) Terragrunt
9 2 (0.13%) Claude Code
9 2 (0.13%) Yeoman
10 1 (0.064%) git-flow
10 1 (0.064%) Octopus Deploy
10 1 (0.064%) RStudio
General
1 380 (24.16%) Social Skills
2 361 (22.95%) Finance
3 253 (16.08%) Analytical Skills
4 167 (10.62%) Public Sector
5 120 (7.63%) Banking
6 44 (2.80%) Marketing
7 36 (2.29%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 35 (2.23%) Retail
9 33 (2.10%) Documentation Skills
10 25 (1.59%) Telecoms
11 24 (1.53%) Front Office
12 22 (1.40%) Investment Banking
13 16 (1.02%) Manufacturing
14 15 (0.95%) Financial Institution
15 14 (0.89%) Law
15 14 (0.89%) Pharmaceutical
16 11 (0.70%) Influencing Skills
17 10 (0.64%) Legal
18 9 (0.57%) Billing
19 8 (0.51%) Military
Job Titles
1 727 (46.22%) Data Engineer
2 217 (13.80%) Senior
3 185 (11.76%) Lead
4 181 (11.51%) Architect
5 129 (8.20%) Senior Data Engineer
6 95 (6.04%) Data Architect
7 94 (5.98%) Developer
8 81 (5.15%) AWS Engineer
9 71 (4.51%) Analyst
10 65 (4.13%) Azure Engineer
11 64 (4.07%) AWS Data Engineer
11 64 (4.07%) Lead Data Engineer
11 64 (4.07%) Snowflake Engineer
12 56 (3.56%) Azure Data Engineer
13 49 (3.12%) Python Engineer
13 49 (3.12%) Snowflake Data Engineer
14 47 (2.99%) Solutions Architect
15 46 (2.92%) Consultant
16 44 (2.80%) Data Scientist
17 42 (2.67%) Data Analyst
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 232 (14.75%) PySpark
2 137 (8.71%) Kafka
3 44 (2.80%) REST
4 37 (2.35%) Pandas
5 35 (2.23%) JSON
6 28 (1.78%) scikit-learn
7 27 (1.72%) PyTorch
8 26 (1.65%) React
9 22 (1.40%) NumPy
9 22 (1.40%) Spring
9 22 (1.40%) TensorFlow
10 20 (1.27%) .NET
11 16 (1.02%) RESTful
12 15 (0.95%) OpenTelemetry
12 15 (0.95%) Spring Boot
13 14 (0.89%) FastAPI
14 13 (0.83%) Apache Avro
15 12 (0.76%) LangChain
16 11 (0.70%) Microsoft Graph
16 11 (0.70%) Streamlit
Miscellaneous
1 212 (13.48%) Cloud Native
2 72 (4.58%) Data Structures
3 65 (4.13%) Legacy Systems
4 64 (4.07%) Distributed Systems
5 57 (3.62%) Product Ownership
6 42 (2.67%) Onboarding
7 36 (2.29%) AI Agents
8 27 (1.72%) Data Protection Act
9 23 (1.46%) Algorithms
10 22 (1.40%) Distributed Computing
10 22 (1.40%) Greenfield Project
11 21 (1.34%) NHS
12 18 (1.14%) Clustering
13 17 (1.08%) Virtual Team
14 16 (1.02%) Analytical Mindset
15 15 (0.95%) Life Science
16 13 (0.83%) Management Information System
17 12 (0.76%) Enterprise Software
17 12 (0.76%) Fixed Income
17 12 (0.76%) Reference Data
Operating Systems
1 32 (2.03%) Linux
2 27 (1.72%) Unix
3 7 (0.45%) Windows
4 3 (0.19%) VMS
5 2 (0.13%) Windows Server
6 1 (0.064%) Ubuntu
Processes & Methodologies
1 800 (50.86%) Analytics
2 761 (48.38%) Data Pipeline
3 613 (38.97%) Data Modelling
4 550 (34.97%) CI/CD
5 537 (34.14%) ETL
6 440 (27.97%) AI
7 400 (25.43%) Agile
8 393 (24.98%) Business Intelligence
9 369 (23.46%) DevOps
10 353 (22.44%) Data Governance
11 286 (18.18%) Machine Learning
12 266 (16.91%) Problem-Solving
13 264 (16.78%) Data Science
14 234 (14.88%) Migration
15 228 (14.49%) Validation
16 227 (14.43%) Decision-Making
17 219 (13.92%) Data Architecture
18 204 (12.97%) Data Transformation
18 204 (12.97%) Stakeholder Management
19 194 (12.33%) Infrastructure as Code
Programming Languages
1 858 (54.55%) SQL
2 813 (51.68%) Python
3 122 (7.76%) Java
4 46 (2.92%) Data Analysis Expressions
5 41 (2.61%) Scala
6 38 (2.42%) Bash
7 36 (2.29%) C#
8 28 (1.78%) PowerShell
9 26 (1.65%) T-SQL
10 22 (1.40%) R
11 21 (1.34%) JavaScript
12 18 (1.14%) Bicep
13 17 (1.08%) PL/SQL
14 15 (0.95%) Shell Script
15 12 (0.76%) SAS Macro
16 11 (0.70%) TypeScript
17 8 (0.51%) SPARQL
18 7 (0.45%) Cypher
19 5 (0.32%) Go
19 5 (0.32%) Kusto Query Language
Qualifications
1 303 (19.26%) Security Cleared
2 259 (16.47%) SC Cleared
3 102 (6.48%) Degree
4 48 (3.05%) Computer Science Degree
5 38 (2.42%) BPSS Clearance
6 31 (1.97%) Azure Certification
7 30 (1.91%) Master's Degree
8 27 (1.72%) DV Cleared
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 7 (0.45%) 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%) Microsoft Certified Professional
17 2 (0.13%) PMI Certification
18 1 (0.064%) CISM
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 463 (29.43%) Data Quality
2 80 (5.09%) QA
3 79 (5.02%) GDPR
4 24 (1.53%) Accessibility
5 15 (0.95%) SLA
6 4 (0.25%) Actionable Recommendations
6 4 (0.25%) NIST
6 4 (0.25%) Sarbanes-Oxley
6 4 (0.25%) Solvency II
7 3 (0.19%) Disclosure Scotland
7 3 (0.19%) GxP
7 3 (0.19%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 3 (0.19%) ISO/IEC 42001
7 3 (0.19%) MiFID
7 3 (0.19%) PMO
8 2 (0.13%) 21 CFR Part 11
8 2 (0.13%) California Consumer Privacy Act
8 2 (0.13%) COPPA
8 2 (0.13%) GRC
8 2 (0.13%) SNOMED CT
System Software
1 134 (8.52%) Docker
2 4 (0.25%) Active Directory
3 3 (0.19%) Virtual Machines
4 2 (0.13%) HDFS
5 1 (0.064%) Oracle RAC
Systems Management
1 200 (12.71%) Terraform
2 117 (7.44%) Kubernetes
3 26 (1.65%) Grafana
4 22 (1.40%) Prometheus
5 14 (0.89%) Ansible
6 5 (0.32%) Kibana
7 3 (0.19%) Control-M
7 3 (0.19%) logstash
7 3 (0.19%) Rancher
8 2 (0.13%) Argo
8 2 (0.13%) Kubeflow
8 2 (0.13%) Thomson Reuters DACS
9 1 (0.064%) Cilium
9 1 (0.064%) Data Guard
9 1 (0.064%) HP Fortify
9 1 (0.064%) Kustomize
9 1 (0.064%) Nagios
9 1 (0.064%) Oozie
9 1 (0.064%) Oracle RMAN
9 1 (0.064%) QRadar
Vendors
1 413 (26.26%) Databricks
2 267 (16.97%) Microsoft
3 84 (5.34%) Informatica
4 69 (4.39%) Oracle
5 68 (4.32%) Google
6 35 (2.23%) SAP
7 33 (2.10%) Talend
8 32 (2.03%) Foundry
9 31 (1.97%) Palantir
10 24 (1.53%) OpenAI
11 23 (1.46%) Salesforce
12 22 (1.40%) Splunk
13 17 (1.08%) Cloudera
14 15 (0.95%) ServiceNow
15 12 (0.76%) Trend Micro
16 9 (0.57%) Workday
17 8 (0.51%) Denodo
17 8 (0.51%) Teradata
18 7 (0.45%) Adobe
18 7 (0.45%) InterSystems