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 2 December 2025, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
2 Dec 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 129 178 219
Rank change year-on-year +49 +41 +10
Contract jobs citing Data Engineering 797 514 501
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.22% 1.44% 1.10%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 2.49% 1.65% 1.24%
Number of daily rates quoted 512 363 368
10th Percentile £358 £400 £400
25th Percentile £413 £463 £475
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £520 £550 £575
Median % change year-on-year -5.45% -4.35% -4.17%
75th Percentile £638 £650 £688
90th Percentile £750 £775 £800
UK excluding London median daily rate £470 £500 £550
% change year-on-year -6.00% -9.09% +1.85%
Number of hourly rates quoted 5 11 10
10th Percentile £41.15 £21.25 £35.00
25th Percentile £50.00 £21.63 £36.68
Median hourly rate £74.26 £25.36 £53.65
Median % change year-on-year +192.82% -52.73% +7.31%
75th Percentile £87.50 £26.63 £74.75
90th Percentile £101.00 £65.00 £78.70
UK excluding London median hourly rate £62.13 £25.93 £78.00
% change year-on-year +139.61% -66.76% +56.00%

All Process and 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 32,041 31,135 40,262
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 89.06% 87.25% 88.57%
Number of daily rates quoted 20,133 18,828 26,941
10th Percentile £300 £310 £310
25th Percentile £404 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £533
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% -1.50% -3.09%
75th Percentile £619 £638 £650
90th Percentile £725 £744 £745
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £500 £500
% change year-on-year -5.00% - -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,077 1,103 1,555
10th Percentile £14.58 £15.22 £14.38
25th Percentile £17.50 £20.22 £19.06
Median hourly rate £25.15 £33.00 £43.50
Median % change year-on-year -23.79% -24.14% +24.29%
75th Percentile £45.46 £63.75 £65.00
90th Percentile £67.50 £73.75 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £22.85 £32.50 £43.83
% change year-on-year -29.69% -25.84% +37.15%

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 2 December 2025.

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 2 December 2025.

Hourly rate histogram for Data Engineering in the UK

Data Engineering
Top 18 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 2 December 2025. 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 +51 696 £525 -8.70% 446
London +63 471 £550 -4.35% 238
Work from Home +21 243 £525 -6.25% 345
UK excluding London +18 243 £470 -6.00% 384
North of England -16 75 £430 -14.00% 78
Midlands -6 54 £533 +7.73% 48
Scotland +33 42 £402 +0.82% 34
North West -1 42 £425 -12.37% 50
South East +10 38 £496 -6.59% 183
West Midlands -19 38 £550 +12.24% 34
South West -5 24 £550 -17.60% 25
Yorkshire -28 23 £500 - 20
East of England -3 17 £475 +48.44% 15
East Midlands -2 16 £429 -25.43% 14
North East -1 10 £400 -33.05% 8
Wales -12 2 £495 -1.00% 2
Northern Ireland - 1 - - 1
Channel Islands - 1 £760 -

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
1 124 (15.56%) Apache Airflow
2 111 (13.93%) Apache Spark
3 66 (8.28%) Apache
4 12 (1.51%) Confluence
5 4 (0.50%) SAS
5 4 (0.50%) SharePoint
6 2 (0.25%) Jupyter
6 2 (0.25%) Luigi
7 1 (0.13%) Apache Pig
7 1 (0.13%) ArcGIS
Applications
1 17 (2.13%) Microsoft Excel
2 9 (1.13%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 6 (0.75%) Chatbot
4 2 (0.25%) Maple
5 1 (0.13%) Adobe XD
5 1 (0.13%) Microsoft Office
5 1 (0.13%) Microsoft Project
5 1 (0.13%) MS Visio
5 1 (0.13%) Trello
Business Applications
1 10 (1.25%) Aladdin
2 4 (0.50%) Dynamics CRM
3 2 (0.25%) Eagle PACE
3 2 (0.25%) Markit EDM
4 1 (0.13%) Actimize
4 1 (0.13%) Maximo
4 1 (0.13%) Misys Midas
4 1 (0.13%) Salesforce CRM
4 1 (0.13%) SAP BPC
4 1 (0.13%) SAP ERP
4 1 (0.13%) Workday HCM
Cloud Services
1 346 (43.41%) Azure
2 287 (36.01%) AWS
3 132 (16.56%) Power Platform
4 126 (15.81%) Azure Data Factory
5 124 (15.56%) GCP
6 120 (15.06%) Snowflake
7 92 (11.54%) Amazon S3
8 87 (10.92%) Azure Synapse Analytics
9 85 (10.66%) GitHub
10 81 (10.16%) Azure DevOps
10 81 (10.16%) Serverless
11 78 (9.79%) dbt
12 63 (7.90%) AWS Lambda
13 57 (7.15%) GitHub Actions
14 31 (3.89%) AWS CloudFormation
15 29 (3.64%) Azure Machine Learning
16 28 (3.51%) Amazon SageMaker
17 24 (3.01%) AWS Step Functions
18 23 (2.89%) Cloud Computing
19 22 (2.76%) Amazon EMR
Communications & Networking
1 6 (0.75%) TCP/IP
2 4 (0.50%) Cisco IPT
2 4 (0.50%) Network Security
2 4 (0.50%) SAN
2 4 (0.50%) SSL
3 3 (0.38%) DNS
3 3 (0.38%) Firewall
3 3 (0.38%) SSH
4 2 (0.25%) Kerberos
4 2 (0.25%) VPN
5 1 (0.13%) Intrusion Detection
5 1 (0.13%) MQTT
Database & Business Intelligence
1 156 (19.57%) Data Warehouse
2 126 (15.81%) Power BI
3 93 (11.67%) Data Lake
4 65 (8.16%) Big Data
5 64 (8.03%) Metadata
6 51 (6.40%) Relational Database
7 49 (6.15%) Delta Lake
7 49 (6.15%) NoSQL
8 45 (5.65%) BigQuery
9 41 (5.14%) Tableau
10 39 (4.89%) Amazon Redshift
11 37 (4.64%) Azure SQL Database
12 36 (4.52%) Hadoop
12 36 (4.52%) PostgreSQL
13 33 (4.14%) SQL Server
14 30 (3.76%) Amazon Athena
15 29 (3.64%) Snowflake Schema
16 23 (2.89%) RDBMS
17 18 (2.26%) Amazon RDS
18 17 (2.13%) Elasticsearch
Development Applications
1 127 (15.93%) Git
2 48 (6.02%) Jenkins
3 33 (4.14%) GitLab
3 33 (4.14%) MLflow
4 28 (3.51%) JIRA
5 9 (1.13%) Visual Studio Code
6 7 (0.88%) SonarQube
7 4 (0.50%) Artifactory
7 4 (0.50%) Cucumber
7 4 (0.50%) Poetry
8 3 (0.38%) JMeter
9 2 (0.25%) ERwin
9 2 (0.25%) JUnit
9 2 (0.25%) Maven
9 2 (0.25%) Mockito
9 2 (0.25%) Pylint
9 2 (0.25%) Selenium
9 2 (0.25%) Sonatype Nexus
9 2 (0.25%) TeamCity
9 2 (0.25%) Zephyr
General
1 231 (28.98%) Social Skills
2 176 (22.08%) Finance
3 108 (13.55%) Analytical Skills
4 60 (7.53%) Banking
5 59 (7.40%) Public Sector
6 30 (3.76%) Investment Banking
7 22 (2.76%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 17 (2.13%) Retail
9 15 (1.88%) Pharmaceutical
9 15 (1.88%) Telecoms
10 14 (1.76%) Front Office
10 14 (1.76%) Influencing Skills
11 13 (1.63%) Marketing
12 11 (1.38%) Legal
13 9 (1.13%) Documentation Skills
13 9 (1.13%) Publishing
14 7 (0.88%) Presentation Skills
15 6 (0.75%) Military
16 5 (0.63%) Health Technology
16 5 (0.63%) Tech for Good
Job Titles
1 327 (41.03%) Data Engineer
2 110 (13.80%) Senior
3 73 (9.16%) Lead
4 72 (9.03%) Developer
5 71 (8.91%) Azure Engineer
6 68 (8.53%) Senior Data Engineer
7 67 (8.41%) Architect
8 49 (6.15%) Azure Data Engineer
9 41 (5.14%) Analyst
9 41 (5.14%) Python Engineer
10 39 (4.89%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
11 38 (4.77%) AWS Engineer
12 35 (4.39%) Data Architect
13 32 (4.02%) Snowflake Engineer
14 30 (3.76%) Python Developer
15 29 (3.64%) Data Scientist
16 28 (3.51%) Python Data Engineer
17 26 (3.26%) AWS Data Engineer
18 24 (3.01%) Snowflake Data Engineer
19 23 (2.89%) Platform Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 133 (16.69%) PySpark
2 84 (10.54%) Kafka
3 55 (6.90%) Pandas
4 47 (5.90%) NumPy
5 45 (5.65%) FastAPI
6 44 (5.52%) PyTorch
7 38 (4.77%) Flask
8 37 (4.64%) TensorFlow
9 33 (4.14%) RESTful
10 27 (3.39%) React
10 27 (3.39%) scikit-learn
11 21 (2.63%) LangChain
12 20 (2.51%) JSON
13 17 (2.13%) Polars
13 17 (2.13%) Vue
14 16 (2.01%) AngularJS
14 16 (2.01%) pytest
14 16 (2.01%) SciPy
15 15 (1.88%) Hugging Face
16 14 (1.76%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 75 (9.41%) Cloud Native
2 46 (5.77%) Algorithms
3 24 (3.01%) Data Structures
4 23 (2.89%) Distributed Computing
4 23 (2.89%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
5 20 (2.51%) Data Protection Act
5 20 (2.51%) Hybrid Cloud
6 18 (2.26%) Distributed Systems
6 18 (2.26%) Hedge funds
6 18 (2.26%) Onboarding
7 15 (1.88%) AI Agents
7 15 (1.88%) Product Ownership
8 14 (1.76%) Fixed Income
9 13 (1.63%) Legacy Systems
10 11 (1.38%) Enterprise Software
10 11 (1.38%) Life Science
11 10 (1.25%) Management Information System
12 9 (1.13%) Derivative
12 9 (1.13%) Genomics
13 8 (1.00%) Reinsurance
Operating Systems
1 38 (4.77%) Linux
2 6 (0.75%) Windows
3 4 (0.50%) Debian
3 4 (0.50%) Ubuntu
3 4 (0.50%) Windows Server
3 4 (0.50%) Windows Server 2016
4 3 (0.38%) Android
4 3 (0.38%) Unix
4 3 (0.38%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 339 (42.53%) Data Pipeline
2 307 (38.52%) CI/CD
3 290 (36.39%) ETL
4 281 (35.26%) Data Modelling
5 268 (33.63%) Analytics
6 198 (24.84%) DevOps
7 186 (23.34%) Machine Learning
8 183 (22.96%) Agile
9 181 (22.71%) Data Governance
10 179 (22.46%) AI
11 168 (21.08%) Data Science
11 168 (21.08%) Problem-Solving
12 154 (19.32%) Business Intelligence
13 119 (14.93%) Data Architecture
14 105 (13.17%) Infrastructure as Code
15 98 (12.30%) Containerisation
16 93 (11.67%) Data Integration
17 82 (10.29%) Decision-Making
18 81 (10.16%) Data Transformation
19 79 (9.91%) Visualisation
Programming Languages
1 512 (64.24%) Python
2 395 (49.56%) SQL
3 54 (6.78%) Java
4 52 (6.52%) Scala
5 36 (4.52%) C#
6 35 (4.39%) JavaScript
7 27 (3.39%) C++
7 27 (3.39%) PowerShell
8 21 (2.63%) Bash
9 17 (2.13%) Bicep
9 17 (2.13%) Rust
10 16 (2.01%) R
10 16 (2.01%) TypeScript
11 15 (1.88%) T-SQL
12 14 (1.76%) PL/SQL
13 13 (1.63%) Data Analysis Expressions
14 12 (1.51%) Shell Script
15 11 (1.38%) Go
16 6 (0.75%) Korn
17 5 (0.63%) VBA
Qualifications
1 132 (16.56%) Security Cleared
2 106 (13.30%) SC Cleared
3 74 (9.28%) Degree
4 46 (5.77%) Azure Certification
5 37 (4.64%) Master's Degree
6 30 (3.76%) Computer Science Degree
7 19 (2.38%) AWS Certification
7 19 (2.38%) DV Cleared
8 10 (1.25%) PhD
9 8 (1.00%) Microsoft Certification
10 7 (0.88%) BPSS Clearance
11 5 (0.63%) MCP
12 4 (0.50%) SnowPro
13 3 (0.38%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 3 (0.38%) Tableau Certification
14 2 (0.25%) CBAP
14 2 (0.25%) DBS Check
14 2 (0.25%) ISTQB
15 1 (0.13%) APMG
15 1 (0.13%) PMI Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 184 (23.09%) Data Quality
2 60 (7.53%) GDPR
3 26 (3.26%) QA
4 19 (2.38%) Accessibility
5 9 (1.13%) HIPAA
6 7 (0.88%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 6 (0.75%) NIST
8 5 (0.63%) PERC
9 4 (0.50%) SOC 2
9 4 (0.50%) WCAG
10 3 (0.38%) California Consumer Privacy Act
10 3 (0.38%) Sarbanes-Oxley
11 2 (0.25%) Disclosure Scotland
11 2 (0.25%) HL7
11 2 (0.25%) NCSC
11 2 (0.25%) PMO
12 1 (0.13%) Dodd-Frank
12 1 (0.13%) EMIR
12 1 (0.13%) ISO/IEC 20000
12 1 (0.13%) PCI DSS
System Software
1 128 (16.06%) Docker
2 14 (1.76%) HDFS
3 3 (0.38%) Active Directory
4 1 (0.13%) ISA Server
Systems Management
1 128 (16.06%) Terraform
2 110 (13.80%) Kubernetes
3 16 (2.01%) Grafana
4 13 (1.63%) Ansible
5 11 (1.38%) Prometheus
6 10 (1.25%) Hadoop YARN
7 6 (0.75%) Control-M
8 5 (0.63%) Kibana
8 5 (0.63%) Kustomize
8 5 (0.63%) logstash
8 5 (0.63%) Puppet
9 4 (0.50%) Argo
9 4 (0.50%) vCenter Server
10 3 (0.38%) Istio
10 3 (0.38%) Oozie
11 2 (0.25%) Kubeflow
11 2 (0.25%) Single Sign-On
12 1 (0.13%) Demisto
12 1 (0.13%) Fluentd
12 1 (0.13%) Systems Management Server (SMS)
Vendors
1 220 (27.60%) Databricks
2 104 (13.05%) Microsoft
3 51 (6.40%) Google
4 34 (4.27%) Oracle
5 25 (3.14%) Informatica
6 18 (2.26%) Talend
7 16 (2.01%) Palantir
8 14 (1.76%) Foundry
8 14 (1.76%) OpenAI
9 13 (1.63%) SAP
10 11 (1.38%) Cloudera
11 9 (1.13%) Salesforce
12 8 (1.00%) Virgin Media
12 8 (1.00%) VMware
13 6 (0.75%) Denodo
13 6 (0.75%) Murex
13 6 (0.75%) Red Hat
14 5 (0.63%) Guidewire
15 4 (0.50%) EMC
15 4 (0.50%) StreamSets