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

6 months to
6 Oct 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 93 146 188
Rank change year-on-year +53 +42 +36
Contract jobs citing Data Engineering 1,594 646 496
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.92% 1.97% 1.32%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.45% 2.17% 1.53%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,104 398 362
10th Percentile £393 £338 £391
25th Percentile £440 £413 £468
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £514 £550
Median % change year-on-year +2.19% -6.59% -8.33%
75th Percentile £640 £634 £663
90th Percentile £738 £738 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £463 £544
% change year-on-year +8.11% -14.94% -3.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 21 6 6
10th Percentile - £37.11 £23.31
25th Percentile £21.25 £42.03 £25.65
Median hourly rate £62.40 £58.75 £43.25
Median % change year-on-year +6.21% +35.84% -40.75%
75th Percentile £71.50 £81.88 £60.00
90th Percentile £83.62 £98.75 -
UK excluding London median hourly rate £62.40 £38.96 £60.00
% change year-on-year +60.16% -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 46,176 29,707 32,376
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.50% 90.53% 85.94%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,774 18,450 19,527
10th Percentile £325 £297 £308
25th Percentile £425 £404 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -2.78%
75th Percentile £638 £623 £638
90th Percentile £738 £725 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 3,315 1,863 1,324
10th Percentile £13.69 £14.38 £15.00
25th Percentile £17.14 £17.30 £20.12
Median hourly rate £38.50 £25.15 £41.08
Median % change year-on-year +53.08% -38.77% -3.91%
75th Percentile £65.41 £43.21 £65.00
90th Percentile £78.40 £65.00 £74.31
UK excluding London median hourly rate £38.72 £22.32 £42.50
% change year-on-year +73.52% -47.49% -

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 6 October 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 6 October 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 6 October 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 +49 1,412 £525 - 1,975
London +46 867 £550 - 1,255
UK excluding London +65 568 £500 +8.11% 902
Work from Home +49 508 £524 +4.75% 871
North of England +26 189 £475 +7.34% 282
Midlands +25 124 £475 +2.70% 110
West Midlands +23 102 £475 -13.64% 82
South East -9 93 £513 +15.17% 233
Yorkshire +29 91 £488 +2.63% 77
South West +35 87 £525 -8.70% 78
North West -20 61 £525 +23.53% 162
Scotland -2 55 £513 +10.81% 87
North East -3 39 £425 -5.56% 45
East Midlands +4 22 £503 +15.57% 28
East of England -19 21 £550 +15.79% 47
Wales -8 8 £450 -9.09% 22
Northern Ireland +10 5 £467 - 45

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
1 195 (12.23%) Apache Airflow
2 174 (10.92%) Apache Spark
3 153 (9.60%) Apache
4 40 (2.51%) Confluence
5 29 (1.82%) SAS
6 21 (1.32%) Jupyter
7 17 (1.07%) Palantir Foundry
8 15 (0.94%) SharePoint
9 5 (0.31%) Apache Solr
9 5 (0.31%) ArcGIS
10 4 (0.25%) nginx
11 3 (0.19%) Apache Superset
11 3 (0.19%) PowerExchange
12 1 (0.063%) Apache Pulsar
12 1 (0.063%) Ethereum
12 1 (0.063%) GeoServer
12 1 (0.063%) Hyperledger
12 1 (0.063%) Microsoft Exchange
12 1 (0.063%) Oracle Workflow
12 1 (0.063%) SugarCRM
Applications
1 12 (0.75%) Microsoft Excel
2 7 (0.44%) Chatbot
2 7 (0.44%) Spreadsheet
3 3 (0.19%) Microsoft Office
4 2 (0.13%) MS Visio
5 1 (0.063%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 1 (0.063%) Notion
Business Applications
1 11 (0.69%) Aladdin
2 8 (0.50%) Dynamics CRM
3 4 (0.25%) NetSuite
3 4 (0.25%) Sage X3
4 3 (0.19%) Salesforce CRM
4 3 (0.19%) SAP S/4HANA
4 3 (0.19%) Workday HCM
5 2 (0.13%) Cloudability
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 (0.063%) BambooHR
6 1 (0.063%) Distributed Ledger
6 1 (0.063%) FIS Private Capital Suite
6 1 (0.063%) Markit EDM
6 1 (0.063%) MIS ActiveH
6 1 (0.063%) Oracle EBS
6 1 (0.063%) R3 Corda
6 1 (0.063%) SAP Oil and Gas
Cloud Services
1 669 (41.97%) Azure
2 582 (36.51%) AWS
3 303 (19.01%) Power Platform
4 274 (17.19%) Snowflake
5 246 (15.43%) GCP
6 240 (15.06%) dbt
7 186 (11.67%) Amazon S3
8 184 (11.54%) Azure Data Factory
9 143 (8.97%) Serverless
10 133 (8.34%) Azure DevOps
11 125 (7.84%) Azure Synapse Analytics
12 123 (7.72%) GitHub
13 118 (7.40%) AWS Lambda
14 82 (5.14%) Azure Databricks
15 62 (3.89%) GitHub Actions
16 53 (3.32%) Amazon EMR
17 41 (2.57%) Amazon CloudWatch
18 40 (2.51%) Amazon Bedrock
19 35 (2.20%) Microsoft Purview
20 33 (2.07%) Azure AI
Communications & Networking
1 8 (0.50%) Network Security
2 7 (0.44%) DNS
3 6 (0.38%) Broadband
4 5 (0.31%) Firewall
5 1 (0.063%) HTTP
5 1 (0.063%) HTTPS
5 1 (0.063%) Internet
5 1 (0.063%) MIMO
5 1 (0.063%) MQTT
5 1 (0.063%) Radio Access Network
5 1 (0.063%) Reverse Proxy
5 1 (0.063%) SMS
5 1 (0.063%) SSL
5 1 (0.063%) TCP/IP
5 1 (0.063%) tcpdump
5 1 (0.063%) Wireshark
Database & Business Intelligence
1 329 (20.64%) Data Warehouse
2 291 (18.26%) Power BI
3 204 (12.80%) Data Lake
4 189 (11.86%) Metadata
5 126 (7.90%) BigQuery
6 112 (7.03%) Amazon Redshift
7 105 (6.59%) Delta Lake
8 84 (5.27%) Big Data
9 77 (4.83%) Amazon Athena
10 70 (4.39%) Tableau
11 61 (3.83%) Snowflake Schema
12 60 (3.76%) SQL Server
13 50 (3.14%) PostgreSQL
14 49 (3.07%) Relational Database
15 44 (2.76%) NoSQL
16 40 (2.51%) Looker
17 37 (2.32%) Azure SQL Database
18 34 (2.13%) Amazon RDS
19 31 (1.94%) Data Vault
20 28 (1.76%) Parquet
Development Applications
1 185 (11.61%) Git
2 101 (6.34%) GitLab
3 68 (4.27%) JIRA
4 28 (1.76%) Jenkins
5 26 (1.63%) MLflow
6 8 (0.50%) Bitbucket
6 8 (0.50%) Claude Code
6 8 (0.50%) ERwin
6 8 (0.50%) RStudio
6 8 (0.50%) Terragrunt
7 7 (0.44%) Selenium
8 4 (0.25%) ER Studio
8 4 (0.25%) Postman
9 3 (0.19%) Artifactory
9 3 (0.19%) Atlassian Bamboo
9 3 (0.19%) Cucumber
9 3 (0.19%) SonarQube
9 3 (0.19%) TeamCity
10 2 (0.13%) Applitools
10 2 (0.13%) JMeter
General
1 416 (26.10%) Social Skills
2 361 (22.65%) Finance
3 250 (15.68%) Analytical Skills
4 167 (10.48%) Public Sector
5 143 (8.97%) Banking
6 53 (3.32%) Marketing
7 37 (2.32%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 33 (2.07%) Retail
9 28 (1.76%) Investment Banking
10 27 (1.69%) Front Office
11 20 (1.25%) Documentation Skills
11 20 (1.25%) Pharmaceutical
12 19 (1.19%) Law
13 18 (1.13%) Manufacturing
14 14 (0.88%) Billing
14 14 (0.88%) Publishing
15 13 (0.82%) Back Office
15 13 (0.82%) Police
15 13 (0.82%) Telecoms
16 12 (0.75%) Financial Institution
Job Titles
1 752 (47.18%) Data Engineer
2 254 (15.93%) Senior
3 182 (11.42%) Lead
4 163 (10.23%) Senior Data Engineer
5 161 (10.10%) Architect
6 97 (6.09%) Developer
7 87 (5.46%) Data Architect
8 76 (4.77%) Databricks Engineer
9 73 (4.58%) AWS Engineer
10 72 (4.52%) Snowflake Engineer
11 71 (4.45%) Analyst
12 69 (4.33%) Azure Engineer
13 62 (3.89%) AWS Data Engineer
14 59 (3.70%) Databricks Data Engineer
15 55 (3.45%) Snowflake Data Engineer
16 53 (3.32%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
17 52 (3.26%) Lead Data Engineer
18 49 (3.07%) Python Engineer
19 47 (2.95%) Azure Data Engineer
20 41 (2.57%) GCP Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 237 (14.87%) Terraform
2 236 (14.81%) PySpark
3 116 (7.28%) Kafka
4 67 (4.20%) REST
5 34 (2.13%) JSON
6 29 (1.82%) React
7 28 (1.76%) .NET
8 23 (1.44%) Pandas
9 22 (1.38%) LangChain
10 18 (1.13%) pytest
11 17 (1.07%) PyTorch
12 16 (1.00%) FastAPI
13 15 (0.94%) LangGraph
14 14 (0.88%) scikit-learn
14 14 (0.88%) TensorFlow
14 14 (0.88%) XML
15 13 (0.82%) NumPy
16 12 (0.75%) Apache NiFi
16 12 (0.75%) Microsoft Graph
16 12 (0.75%) RESTful
Miscellaneous
1 214 (13.43%) Cloud Native
2 85 (5.33%) Data Structures
3 82 (5.14%) Onboarding
4 66 (4.14%) Product Ownership
5 59 (3.70%) AI Agents
6 53 (3.32%) Legacy Systems
7 51 (3.20%) Distributed Systems
8 28 (1.76%) Data Protection Act
9 24 (1.51%) Enterprise Software
10 20 (1.25%) Distributed Computing
11 19 (1.19%) Algorithms
12 18 (1.13%) Life Science
12 18 (1.13%) Virtual Team
13 17 (1.07%) Management Information System
14 16 (1.00%) Data Fabric
15 15 (0.94%) Marketing Technology
15 15 (0.94%) NHS
16 14 (0.88%) Analytical Mindset
16 14 (0.88%) Clustering
16 14 (0.88%) Reference Data
Operating Systems
1 31 (1.94%) Linux
2 23 (1.44%) Unix
3 9 (0.56%) Windows
4 1 (0.063%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 1 (0.063%) Robot Operating System
4 1 (0.063%) Ubuntu
4 1 (0.063%) Windows Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 786 (49.31%) Data Pipeline
2 736 (46.17%) Analytics
3 626 (39.27%) Data Modelling
4 588 (36.89%) CI/CD
5 554 (34.76%) ETL
6 514 (32.25%) AI
7 422 (26.47%) Agile
8 388 (24.34%) DevOps
9 378 (23.71%) Business Intelligence
10 354 (22.21%) Data Governance
11 294 (18.44%) Stakeholder Management
12 291 (18.26%) Machine Learning
13 255 (16.00%) Data Transformation
14 253 (15.87%) Validation
15 250 (15.68%) Infrastructure as Code
16 247 (15.50%) Data Integration
17 246 (15.43%) Migration
18 245 (15.37%) Problem-Solving
19 236 (14.81%) Data Architecture
20 230 (14.43%) Decision-Making
Programming Languages
1 880 (55.21%) SQL
2 852 (53.45%) Python
3 102 (6.40%) Java
4 47 (2.95%) Scala
5 43 (2.70%) Data Analysis Expressions
5 43 (2.70%) PowerShell
6 39 (2.45%) C#
7 35 (2.20%) Bash
8 31 (1.94%) JavaScript
9 26 (1.63%) R
10 20 (1.25%) PL/SQL
10 20 (1.25%) T-SQL
11 16 (1.00%) Bicep
11 16 (1.00%) TypeScript
12 14 (0.88%) Kusto Query Language
13 11 (0.69%) Shell Script
14 10 (0.63%) Go
14 10 (0.63%) SPARQL
15 8 (0.50%) Korn
15 8 (0.50%) SAS Macro
Qualifications
1 298 (18.70%) Security Cleared
2 245 (15.37%) SC Cleared
3 84 (5.27%) Degree
4 39 (2.45%) Computer Science Degree
5 38 (2.38%) AWS Certification
5 38 (2.38%) DV Cleared
6 34 (2.13%) Azure Certification
7 33 (2.07%) BPSS Clearance
8 19 (1.19%) Master's Degree
9 14 (0.88%) DBS Check
10 12 (0.75%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
10 12 (0.75%) SnowPro
11 9 (0.56%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
12 8 (0.50%) Microsoft Certification
13 6 (0.38%) Microsoft Certified Professional
14 5 (0.31%) CSPO
14 5 (0.31%) PMI Certification
14 5 (0.31%) PMP
14 5 (0.31%) TOGAF Certification
15 4 (0.25%) PhD
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 536 (33.63%) Data Quality
2 81 (5.08%) QA
3 60 (3.76%) GDPR
4 32 (2.01%) Accessibility
5 11 (0.69%) SLA
6 7 (0.44%) Disclosure Scotland
7 6 (0.38%) GRC
8 5 (0.31%) NCSC
9 4 (0.25%) California Consumer Privacy Act
9 4 (0.25%) EU AI Act
9 4 (0.25%) NIST
9 4 (0.25%) PMO
10 3 (0.19%) Actionable Recommendations
10 3 (0.19%) IFRS
10 3 (0.19%) IFRS 9
10 3 (0.19%) ISO/IEC 27001
10 3 (0.19%) MiFID
11 2 (0.13%) 21 CFR Part 11
11 2 (0.13%) PCI DSS
11 2 (0.13%) Sarbanes-Oxley
System Software
1 128 (8.03%) Docker
2 5 (0.31%) Active Directory
3 1 (0.063%) Oracle RAC
3 1 (0.063%) Virtual Machines
Systems Management
1 115 (7.21%) Kubernetes
2 32 (2.01%) Grafana
3 29 (1.82%) Ansible
4 14 (0.88%) Prometheus
5 8 (0.50%) Control-M
5 8 (0.50%) Kibana
6 3 (0.19%) logstash
7 2 (0.13%) Progress Chef
7 2 (0.13%) Puppet
7 2 (0.13%) Single Sign-On
8 1 (0.063%) Argo
8 1 (0.063%) Cilium
8 1 (0.063%) Data Guard
8 1 (0.063%) HAProxy
8 1 (0.063%) Kubeflow
8 1 (0.063%) Kustomize
8 1 (0.063%) Oracle Enterprise Manager
8 1 (0.063%) Oracle RMAN
8 1 (0.063%) QRadar
Vendors
1 458 (28.73%) Databricks
2 273 (17.13%) Microsoft
3 98 (6.15%) Google
4 79 (4.96%) Oracle
5 58 (3.64%) Informatica
6 30 (1.88%) Salesforce
6 30 (1.88%) SAP
7 28 (1.76%) Foundry
8 25 (1.57%) Palantir
8 25 (1.57%) Talend
9 22 (1.38%) OpenAI
10 15 (0.94%) Teradata
11 12 (0.75%) Cloudera
11 12 (0.75%) Trend Micro
12 11 (0.69%) Adobe
12 11 (0.69%) ServiceNow
13 8 (0.50%) Denodo
13 8 (0.50%) Splunk
14 7 (0.44%) Hitachi
15 6 (0.38%) Bloomberg