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

6 months to
12 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 91 163 208
Rank change year-on-year +72 +45 +5
Contract jobs citing Data Engineering 1,544 567 456
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.89% 1.72% 1.17%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.41% 1.90% 1.37%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,060 358 337
10th Percentile £388 £363 £400
25th Percentile £445 £429 £468
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £520 £575
Median % change year-on-year +0.96% -9.57% -8.00%
75th Percentile £638 £638 £676
90th Percentile £746 £775 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -14.89%
Number of hourly rates quoted 25 7 14
10th Percentile £21.25 £32.38 £24.32
25th Percentile £35.00 £45.11 £31.25
Median hourly rate £70.00 £52.50 £35.00
Median % change year-on-year +33.33% +50.00% -52.05%
75th Percentile £78.00 £76.25 £60.00
90th Percentile £89.00 £96.50 -
UK excluding London median hourly rate £60.75 £31.98 £60.00
% change year-on-year +89.96% -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 45,292 29,826 33,298
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.86% 90.48% 85.52%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,883 18,657 21,289
10th Percentile £325 £300 £310
25th Percentile £423 £404 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -3.67%
75th Percentile £625 £625 £638
90th Percentile £725 £725 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,827 1,696 1,836
10th Percentile £14.22 £14.20 £14.05
25th Percentile £18.80 £17.30 £18.35
Median hourly rate £42.50 £25.15 £41.08
Median % change year-on-year +68.99% -38.77% -1.96%
75th Percentile £68.00 £47.66 £65.00
90th Percentile £81.51 £68.00 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £43.96 £22.84 £42.50
% change year-on-year +92.47% -46.26% +17.24%

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 12 August 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 12 August 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 12 August 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 1,391 £525 - 1,489
London +45 826 £550 - 960
UK excluding London +88 567 £500 +5.26% 700
Work from Home +69 504 £525 +5.00% 645
North of England +33 181 £463 -2.63% 226
Midlands +50 153 £486 +6.97% 67
West Midlands +46 128 £475 -0.63% 53
South East -20 89 £525 +11.94% 175
Yorkshire +20 85 £475 +11.76% 56
South West +17 75 £506 -16.62% 84
North West -13 59 £500 +2.56% 139
Scotland +13 44 £500 +6.38% 70
North East -8 39 £425 -20.93% 33
East of England -3 27 £575 -4.17% 38
East Midlands +4 22 £525 +15.45% 14
Wales - 7 £450 - 11
Northern Ireland +10 4 £334 - 30

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 (11.85%) Apache Spark
2 180 (11.66%) Apache Airflow
3 127 (8.23%) Apache
4 47 (3.04%) SAS
5 39 (2.53%) Confluence
6 23 (1.49%) Jupyter
7 19 (1.23%) Palantir Foundry
8 11 (0.71%) SharePoint
9 7 (0.45%) Apache Superset
10 5 (0.32%) ArcGIS
11 4 (0.26%) Apache Solr
12 2 (0.13%) Microsoft Exchange
13 1 (0.065%) Apache Synapse
13 1 (0.065%) CICS
13 1 (0.065%) Ethereum
13 1 (0.065%) Hyperledger
13 1 (0.065%) nginx
13 1 (0.065%) PowerExchange
Applications
1 21 (1.36%) Microsoft Excel
2 8 (0.52%) Microsoft Office
3 7 (0.45%) Spreadsheet
4 6 (0.39%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 5 (0.32%) Chatbot
6 2 (0.13%) MS Visio
7 1 (0.065%) Notion
Business Applications
1 13 (0.84%) Aladdin
2 6 (0.39%) Dynamics CRM
3 5 (0.32%) BambooHR
4 4 (0.26%) NetSuite
4 4 (0.26%) Sage X3
4 4 (0.26%) Salesforce CRM
4 4 (0.26%) 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 (0.065%) Distributed Ledger
7 1 (0.065%) FIS Private Capital Suite
7 1 (0.065%) MIS ActiveH
7 1 (0.065%) R3 Corda
7 1 (0.065%) SAP ECC
Cloud Services
1 646 (41.84%) Azure
2 575 (37.24%) AWS
3 319 (20.66%) Power Platform
4 251 (16.26%) Snowflake
5 204 (13.21%) GCP
6 197 (12.76%) dbt
7 169 (10.95%) Azure Data Factory
8 167 (10.82%) Amazon S3
9 145 (9.39%) Azure Synapse Analytics
10 139 (9.00%) Azure DevOps
11 132 (8.55%) GitHub
12 124 (8.03%) Serverless
13 105 (6.80%) AWS Lambda
14 69 (4.47%) GitHub Actions
15 55 (3.56%) Amazon EMR
16 34 (2.20%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 29 (1.88%) Amazon Bedrock
17 29 (1.88%) AWS CloudFormation
17 29 (1.88%) Azure AI
18 28 (1.81%) AWS Step Functions
Communications & Networking
1 5 (0.32%) Firewall
2 2 (0.13%) Broadband
2 2 (0.13%) Network Security
2 2 (0.13%) RTP
3 1 (0.065%) 4G
3 1 (0.065%) 5G
3 1 (0.065%) DNS
3 1 (0.065%) Internet
3 1 (0.065%) MIMO
3 1 (0.065%) MQTT
Database & Business Intelligence
1 307 (19.88%) Data Warehouse
2 300 (19.43%) Power BI
3 212 (13.73%) Data Lake
4 155 (10.04%) Metadata
5 106 (6.87%) Amazon Redshift
6 104 (6.74%) BigQuery
7 102 (6.61%) Big Data
8 101 (6.54%) Delta Lake
9 83 (5.38%) Tableau
10 75 (4.86%) Amazon Athena
11 70 (4.53%) SQL Server
12 65 (4.21%) Snowflake Schema
13 62 (4.02%) NoSQL
14 57 (3.69%) Relational Database
15 50 (3.24%) PostgreSQL
16 45 (2.91%) Azure SQL Database
17 40 (2.59%) Looker
18 36 (2.33%) Star Schema
19 35 (2.27%) Hadoop
20 32 (2.07%) SQL Server Integration Services
Development Applications
1 170 (11.01%) Git
2 85 (5.51%) GitLab
3 69 (4.47%) JIRA
4 28 (1.81%) Jenkins
5 27 (1.75%) MLflow
6 7 (0.45%) ERwin
6 7 (0.45%) SonarQube
7 6 (0.39%) Bitbucket
8 4 (0.26%) Selenium
8 4 (0.26%) Terragrunt
9 3 (0.19%) Artifactory
9 3 (0.19%) ER Studio
9 3 (0.19%) Postman
9 3 (0.19%) Snyk
9 3 (0.19%) Sonatype Nexus
10 2 (0.13%) Claude Code
10 2 (0.13%) Yeoman
11 1 (0.065%) Deequ
11 1 (0.065%) Octopus Deploy
11 1 (0.065%) RStudio
General
1 382 (24.74%) Social Skills
2 357 (23.12%) Finance
3 250 (16.19%) Analytical Skills
4 160 (10.36%) Public Sector
5 118 (7.64%) Banking
6 45 (2.91%) Marketing
7 37 (2.40%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 35 (2.27%) Retail
9 28 (1.81%) Documentation Skills
10 25 (1.62%) Telecoms
11 23 (1.49%) Investment Banking
12 22 (1.42%) Front Office
13 16 (1.04%) Manufacturing
14 14 (0.91%) Pharmaceutical
15 13 (0.84%) Financial Institution
16 12 (0.78%) Influencing Skills
16 12 (0.78%) Law
17 10 (0.65%) Legal
18 9 (0.58%) Billing
18 9 (0.58%) Military
Job Titles
1 717 (46.44%) Data Engineer
2 211 (13.67%) Senior
3 184 (11.92%) Lead
4 175 (11.33%) Architect
5 127 (8.23%) Senior Data Engineer
6 95 (6.15%) Data Architect
7 92 (5.96%) Developer
8 82 (5.31%) AWS Engineer
9 68 (4.40%) Analyst
9 68 (4.40%) AWS Data Engineer
10 63 (4.08%) Snowflake Engineer
11 61 (3.95%) Azure Engineer
12 60 (3.89%) Lead Data Engineer
13 51 (3.30%) Azure Data Engineer
14 49 (3.17%) Python Engineer
15 47 (3.04%) Snowflake Data Engineer
16 45 (2.91%) Consultant
16 45 (2.91%) Solutions Architect
17 40 (2.59%) Data Analyst
17 40 (2.59%) Data Scientist
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 227 (14.70%) PySpark
2 124 (8.03%) Kafka
3 41 (2.66%) REST
4 31 (2.01%) Pandas
5 27 (1.75%) React
6 26 (1.68%) JSON
7 22 (1.42%) scikit-learn
8 21 (1.36%) .NET
8 21 (1.36%) PyTorch
9 20 (1.30%) Spring
10 19 (1.23%) NumPy
11 17 (1.10%) TensorFlow
12 13 (0.84%) RESTful
12 13 (0.84%) Spring Boot
13 11 (0.71%) Microsoft Graph
14 10 (0.65%) FastAPI
14 10 (0.65%) pytest
14 10 (0.65%) YAML
15 9 (0.58%) AngularJS
15 9 (0.58%) Node.js
Miscellaneous
1 206 (13.34%) Cloud Native
2 74 (4.79%) Data Structures
3 63 (4.08%) Legacy Systems
4 60 (3.89%) Distributed Systems
5 59 (3.82%) Product Ownership
6 45 (2.91%) Onboarding
7 33 (2.14%) AI Agents
8 25 (1.62%) Data Protection Act
9 23 (1.49%) Greenfield Project
10 20 (1.30%) Algorithms
11 19 (1.23%) Distributed Computing
11 19 (1.23%) NHS
12 17 (1.10%) Clustering
13 16 (1.04%) Life Science
13 16 (1.04%) Virtual Team
14 15 (0.97%) Analytical Mindset
15 13 (0.84%) Enterprise Software
15 13 (0.84%) Management Information System
16 12 (0.78%) Self-Motivation
17 11 (0.71%) Reference Data
Operating Systems
1 38 (2.46%) Linux
2 30 (1.94%) Unix
3 7 (0.45%) Windows
4 2 (0.13%) VMS
4 2 (0.13%) Windows Server
5 1 (0.065%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 1 (0.065%) Robot Operating System
5 1 (0.065%) Ubuntu
Processes & Methodologies
1 767 (49.68%) Analytics
2 747 (48.38%) Data Pipeline
3 597 (38.67%) Data Modelling
4 543 (35.17%) CI/CD
5 532 (34.46%) ETL
6 437 (28.30%) AI
7 397 (25.71%) Agile
8 386 (25.00%) Business Intelligence
9 374 (24.22%) DevOps
10 351 (22.73%) Data Governance
11 274 (17.75%) Machine Learning
12 258 (16.71%) Problem-Solving
13 243 (15.74%) Data Science
14 230 (14.90%) Migration
15 227 (14.70%) Decision-Making
16 220 (14.25%) Data Architecture
17 218 (14.12%) Validation
18 215 (13.92%) Stakeholder Management
19 211 (13.67%) Data Transformation
20 194 (12.56%) Infrastructure as Code
Programming Languages
1 837 (54.21%) SQL
2 786 (50.91%) Python
3 117 (7.58%) Java
4 45 (2.91%) Data Analysis Expressions
5 44 (2.85%) Bash
6 41 (2.66%) Scala
7 37 (2.40%) PowerShell
8 32 (2.07%) C#
9 25 (1.62%) T-SQL
10 23 (1.49%) JavaScript
11 20 (1.30%) R
12 17 (1.10%) Bicep
12 17 (1.10%) PL/SQL
13 14 (0.91%) Shell Script
14 12 (0.78%) SAS Macro
15 10 (0.65%) TypeScript
16 8 (0.52%) Kusto Query Language
16 8 (0.52%) SPARQL
17 7 (0.45%) Cypher
18 5 (0.32%) Korn
Qualifications
1 297 (19.24%) Security Cleared
2 255 (16.52%) SC Cleared
3 98 (6.35%) Degree
4 49 (3.17%) Computer Science Degree
5 33 (2.14%) BPSS Clearance
6 31 (2.01%) Azure Certification
7 25 (1.62%) DV Cleared
7 25 (1.62%) Master's Degree
8 19 (1.23%) AWS Certification
9 13 (0.84%) DBS Check
10 11 (0.71%) SnowPro
11 9 (0.58%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
12 8 (0.52%) Microsoft Certification
13 6 (0.39%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
14 5 (0.32%) CSPO
14 5 (0.32%) Tableau Certification
15 3 (0.19%) PhD
15 3 (0.19%) PMI Certification
16 2 (0.13%) PMP
17 1 (0.065%) CCSP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 459 (29.73%) Data Quality
2 80 (5.18%) QA
3 79 (5.12%) GDPR
4 22 (1.42%) Accessibility
5 12 (0.78%) SLA
6 5 (0.32%) Sarbanes-Oxley
7 4 (0.26%) Solvency II
8 3 (0.19%) Actionable Recommendations
8 3 (0.19%) Disclosure Scotland
8 3 (0.19%) GxP
8 3 (0.19%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 3 (0.19%) ISO/IEC 42001
8 3 (0.19%) MiFID
8 3 (0.19%) NIST
8 3 (0.19%) PMO
9 2 (0.13%) 21 CFR Part 11
9 2 (0.13%) California Consumer Privacy Act
9 2 (0.13%) COPPA
9 2 (0.13%) GRC
9 2 (0.13%) IFRS
System Software
1 133 (8.61%) Docker
2 5 (0.32%) Active Directory
3 3 (0.19%) Virtual Machines
4 1 (0.065%) Oracle RAC
Systems Management
1 203 (13.15%) Terraform
2 109 (7.06%) Kubernetes
3 28 (1.81%) Grafana
4 19 (1.23%) Ansible
5 14 (0.91%) Prometheus
6 5 (0.32%) Control-M
6 5 (0.32%) Kibana
7 3 (0.19%) logstash
8 2 (0.13%) Argo
8 2 (0.13%) Puppet
8 2 (0.13%) Rancher
8 2 (0.13%) Thomson Reuters DACS
9 1 (0.065%) Cilium
9 1 (0.065%) IBM Guardium
9 1 (0.065%) Kubeflow
9 1 (0.065%) Kustomize
9 1 (0.065%) Nagios
9 1 (0.065%) Oracle RMAN
9 1 (0.065%) QRadar
9 1 (0.065%) Single Sign-On
Vendors
1 403 (26.10%) Databricks
2 272 (17.62%) Microsoft
3 82 (5.31%) Informatica
4 70 (4.53%) Google
5 65 (4.21%) Oracle
6 35 (2.27%) SAP
7 33 (2.14%) Talend
8 30 (1.94%) Foundry
9 28 (1.81%) Palantir
10 25 (1.62%) Salesforce
11 20 (1.30%) Cloudera
12 18 (1.17%) OpenAI
13 16 (1.04%) Splunk
14 15 (0.97%) ServiceNow
15 12 (0.78%) Trend Micro
16 9 (0.58%) Teradata
16 9 (0.58%) Workday
17 8 (0.52%) Denodo
18 7 (0.45%) Adobe
18 7 (0.45%) InterSystems