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

6 months to
30 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 91 153 193
Rank change year-on-year +62 +40 +35
Contract jobs citing Data Engineering 1,591 629 494
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.90% 1.92% 1.31%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.43% 2.11% 1.53%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,110 393 357
10th Percentile £400 £338 £396
25th Percentile £445 £413 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £515 £550
Median % change year-on-year +1.94% -6.36% -8.33%
75th Percentile £638 £638 £663
90th Percentile £726 £738 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £463 £513
% change year-on-year +8.11% -9.76% -7.70%
Number of hourly rates quoted 15 6 7
10th Percentile - £37.11 £23.72
25th Percentile £21.25 £42.03 £25.93
Median hourly rate £44.50 £58.75 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year -24.26% -2.08% -17.81%
75th Percentile £72.08 £81.88 -
90th Percentile £79.67 £98.75 -
UK excluding London median hourly rate £41.00 £38.96 £60.00
% change year-on-year +5.24% -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 46,343 29,774 32,275
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.43% 90.67% 85.82%
Number of daily rates quoted 28,026 18,502 19,486
10th Percentile £325 £296 £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 £630 £625 £638
90th Percentile £731 £725 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 3,222 1,849 1,345
10th Percentile £13.70 £14.29 £15.00
25th Percentile £17.19 £17.30 £20.12
Median hourly rate £38.86 £25.15 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year +54.51% -40.82% -
75th Percentile £65.60 £43.75 £65.00
90th Percentile £78.75 £65.00 £74.48
UK excluding London median hourly rate £39.27 £22.32 £43.00
% change year-on-year +75.98% -48.10% +1.18%

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 30 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 30 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 30 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 +53 1,413 £525 - 1,642
London +45 864 £550 - 1,015
UK excluding London +63 565 £500 +8.11% 726
Work from Home +60 515 £525 +5.00% 727
North of England +17 188 £475 +7.34% 233
Midlands +31 122 £475 +2.70% 95
West Midlands +26 100 £475 -13.64% 72
Yorkshire +27 95 £500 +5.26% 60
South East -5 94 £525 +19.32% 143
South West +35 86 £525 -3.45% 75
North West -27 58 £525 +22.09% 134
Scotland +1 51 £500 +8.11% 83
North East -6 37 £425 -17.07% 39
East of England -15 25 £550 +22.22% 39
East Midlands -5 22 £503 +15.57% 23
Wales -6 8 £450 -9.09% 14
Northern Ireland +6 4 £334 - 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
1 192 (12.07%) Apache Airflow
2 170 (10.69%) Apache Spark
3 142 (8.93%) Apache
4 41 (2.58%) Confluence
5 32 (2.01%) SAS
6 22 (1.38%) Jupyter
7 16 (1.01%) Palantir Foundry
8 15 (0.94%) SharePoint
9 5 (0.31%) Apache Solr
9 5 (0.31%) Apache Superset
9 5 (0.31%) ArcGIS
10 3 (0.19%) nginx
10 3 (0.19%) PowerExchange
11 1 (0.063%) Apache Pulsar
11 1 (0.063%) Apache Synapse
11 1 (0.063%) Ethereum
11 1 (0.063%) GeoServer
11 1 (0.063%) Hyperledger
11 1 (0.063%) Oracle Workflow
11 1 (0.063%) SugarCRM
Applications
1 11 (0.69%) Microsoft Excel
2 7 (0.44%) Chatbot
3 6 (0.38%) Spreadsheet
4 3 (0.19%) Microsoft Office
5 2 (0.13%) MS Visio
6 1 (0.063%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 1 (0.063%) Notion
Business Applications
1 11 (0.69%) Aladdin
2 7 (0.44%) Dynamics CRM
3 4 (0.25%) NetSuite
3 4 (0.25%) Sage X3
3 4 (0.25%) Salesforce CRM
4 3 (0.19%) 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 (0.063%) Cloudability
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
1 661 (41.55%) Azure
2 590 (37.08%) AWS
3 298 (18.73%) Power Platform
4 270 (16.97%) Snowflake
5 241 (15.15%) dbt
6 237 (14.90%) GCP
7 182 (11.44%) Amazon S3
8 179 (11.25%) Azure Data Factory
9 146 (9.18%) Serverless
10 132 (8.30%) Azure DevOps
11 125 (7.86%) Azure Synapse Analytics
12 122 (7.67%) AWS Lambda
13 121 (7.61%) GitHub
14 81 (5.09%) Azure Databricks
15 64 (4.02%) GitHub Actions
16 54 (3.39%) Amazon EMR
17 43 (2.70%) Amazon CloudWatch
18 39 (2.45%) Amazon Bedrock
19 34 (2.14%) Microsoft Purview
20 33 (2.07%) Azure AI
Communications & Networking
1 6 (0.38%) Broadband
1 6 (0.38%) DNS
1 6 (0.38%) Network Security
2 4 (0.25%) Firewall
3 1 (0.063%) HTTP
3 1 (0.063%) HTTPS
3 1 (0.063%) Internet
3 1 (0.063%) MIMO
3 1 (0.063%) MQTT
3 1 (0.063%) Radio Access Network
3 1 (0.063%) SMS
3 1 (0.063%) SSL
3 1 (0.063%) TCP/IP
3 1 (0.063%) tcpdump
3 1 (0.063%) Wireshark
Database & Business Intelligence
1 331 (20.80%) Data Warehouse
2 285 (17.91%) Power BI
3 211 (13.26%) Data Lake
4 180 (11.31%) Metadata
5 126 (7.92%) BigQuery
6 110 (6.91%) Amazon Redshift
7 106 (6.66%) Delta Lake
8 85 (5.34%) Big Data
9 78 (4.90%) Amazon Athena
10 77 (4.84%) Tableau
11 62 (3.90%) Snowflake Schema
12 58 (3.65%) SQL Server
13 51 (3.21%) PostgreSQL
13 51 (3.21%) Relational Database
14 44 (2.77%) NoSQL
15 41 (2.58%) Looker
16 35 (2.20%) Azure SQL Database
17 32 (2.01%) Amazon RDS
18 31 (1.95%) Data Vault
19 26 (1.63%) Semantic Layer
Development Applications
1 183 (11.50%) Git
2 93 (5.85%) GitLab
3 70 (4.40%) JIRA
4 27 (1.70%) Jenkins
5 25 (1.57%) 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
9 3 (0.19%) Artifactory
9 3 (0.19%) Atlassian Bamboo
9 3 (0.19%) Postman
9 3 (0.19%) SonarQube
9 3 (0.19%) TeamCity
10 2 (0.13%) Cucumber
10 2 (0.13%) Sonatype Nexus
10 2 (0.13%) Yeoman
General
1 408 (25.64%) Social Skills
2 357 (22.44%) Finance
3 248 (15.59%) Analytical Skills
4 168 (10.56%) Public Sector
5 142 (8.93%) Banking
6 54 (3.39%) Marketing
7 36 (2.26%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 34 (2.14%) Retail
9 25 (1.57%) Front Office
9 25 (1.57%) Investment Banking
10 20 (1.26%) Documentation Skills
10 20 (1.26%) Pharmaceutical
11 18 (1.13%) Law
11 18 (1.13%) Manufacturing
12 14 (0.88%) Publishing
12 14 (0.88%) Telecoms
13 13 (0.82%) Back Office
13 13 (0.82%) Police
14 12 (0.75%) Influencing Skills
14 12 (0.75%) Legal
Job Titles
1 745 (46.83%) Data Engineer
2 251 (15.78%) Senior
3 178 (11.19%) Lead
4 169 (10.62%) Architect
5 159 (9.99%) Senior Data Engineer
6 97 (6.10%) Developer
7 91 (5.72%) Data Architect
8 76 (4.78%) Databricks Engineer
9 75 (4.71%) AWS Engineer
10 70 (4.40%) Azure Engineer
11 69 (4.34%) Analyst
11 69 (4.34%) Snowflake Engineer
12 65 (4.09%) AWS Data Engineer
13 59 (3.71%) Databricks Data Engineer
14 52 (3.27%) Lead Data Engineer
14 52 (3.27%) Snowflake Data Engineer
15 51 (3.21%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
16 48 (3.02%) Azure Data Engineer
17 47 (2.95%) Python Engineer
18 40 (2.51%) Consultant
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 234 (14.71%) PySpark
1 234 (14.71%) Terraform
2 115 (7.23%) Kafka
3 61 (3.83%) REST
4 34 (2.14%) JSON
5 32 (2.01%) React
6 27 (1.70%) .NET
7 23 (1.45%) Pandas
8 20 (1.26%) LangChain
9 17 (1.07%) FastAPI
9 17 (1.07%) PyTorch
10 16 (1.01%) pytest
11 14 (0.88%) LangGraph
11 14 (0.88%) TensorFlow
11 14 (0.88%) XML
12 13 (0.82%) RESTful
12 13 (0.82%) scikit-learn
13 12 (0.75%) NumPy
13 12 (0.75%) Streamlit
14 11 (0.69%) RabbitMQ
Miscellaneous
1 210 (13.20%) Cloud Native
2 83 (5.22%) Data Structures
3 82 (5.15%) Onboarding
4 64 (4.02%) Product Ownership
5 57 (3.58%) AI Agents
6 54 (3.39%) Legacy Systems
7 50 (3.14%) Distributed Systems
8 25 (1.57%) Data Protection Act
9 22 (1.38%) Enterprise Software
10 19 (1.19%) Distributed Computing
11 18 (1.13%) Life Science
11 18 (1.13%) Virtual Team
12 17 (1.07%) Management Information System
12 17 (1.07%) NHS
13 16 (1.01%) Data Fabric
13 16 (1.01%) Greenfield Project
14 15 (0.94%) Analytical Mindset
14 15 (0.94%) Marketing Technology
15 14 (0.88%) Algorithms
15 14 (0.88%) Clustering
Operating Systems
1 30 (1.89%) Linux
2 24 (1.51%) Unix
3 7 (0.44%) 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
1 779 (48.96%) Data Pipeline
2 740 (46.51%) Analytics
3 620 (38.97%) Data Modelling
4 570 (35.83%) CI/CD
5 547 (34.38%) ETL
6 505 (31.74%) AI
7 405 (25.46%) Agile
8 375 (23.57%) DevOps
9 369 (23.19%) Business Intelligence
10 351 (22.06%) Data Governance
11 289 (18.16%) Stakeholder Management
12 277 (17.41%) Machine Learning
13 258 (16.22%) Data Transformation
14 251 (15.78%) Infrastructure as Code
15 248 (15.59%) Migration
16 244 (15.34%) Validation
17 243 (15.27%) Data Architecture
18 238 (14.96%) Data Integration
18 238 (14.96%) Problem-Solving
19 230 (14.46%) Decision-Making
Programming Languages
1 868 (54.56%) SQL
2 843 (52.99%) Python
3 108 (6.79%) Java
4 47 (2.95%) Scala
5 41 (2.58%) Data Analysis Expressions
5 41 (2.58%) PowerShell
6 36 (2.26%) C#
7 34 (2.14%) Bash
8 31 (1.95%) JavaScript
9 25 (1.57%) R
10 19 (1.19%) PL/SQL
10 19 (1.19%) T-SQL
11 16 (1.01%) Bicep
12 14 (0.88%) TypeScript
13 13 (0.82%) Kusto Query Language
14 10 (0.63%) Shell Script
14 10 (0.63%) SPARQL
15 9 (0.57%) Go
16 8 (0.50%) Korn
16 8 (0.50%) SAS Macro
Qualifications
1 294 (18.48%) Security Cleared
2 246 (15.46%) SC Cleared
3 79 (4.97%) Degree
4 37 (2.33%) Computer Science Degree
5 35 (2.20%) Azure Certification
6 34 (2.14%) AWS Certification
7 33 (2.07%) DV Cleared
8 32 (2.01%) BPSS Clearance
9 19 (1.19%) Master's Degree
10 14 (0.88%) DBS Check
11 12 (0.75%) SnowPro
12 11 (0.69%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
13 8 (0.50%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 8 (0.50%) Microsoft Certification
14 6 (0.38%) Microsoft Certified Professional
15 5 (0.31%) CSPO
15 5 (0.31%) PMI Certification
15 5 (0.31%) PMP
15 5 (0.31%) TOGAF Certification
16 4 (0.25%) Tableau Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 526 (33.06%) Data Quality
2 80 (5.03%) QA
3 64 (4.02%) GDPR
4 30 (1.89%) Accessibility
5 12 (0.75%) SLA
6 7 (0.44%) Disclosure Scotland
7 6 (0.38%) GRC
8 4 (0.25%) California Consumer Privacy Act
8 4 (0.25%) EU AI Act
8 4 (0.25%) NCSC
8 4 (0.25%) PMO
9 3 (0.19%) Actionable Recommendations
9 3 (0.19%) IFRS
9 3 (0.19%) IFRS 9
9 3 (0.19%) ISO/IEC 27001
9 3 (0.19%) MiFID
9 3 (0.19%) NIST
10 2 (0.13%) Basel III
10 2 (0.13%) EMIR
10 2 (0.13%) Sarbanes-Oxley
System Software
1 132 (8.30%) Docker
2 5 (0.31%) Active Directory
3 1 (0.063%) Oracle RAC
3 1 (0.063%) Virtual Machines
Systems Management
1 109 (6.85%) Kubernetes
2 30 (1.89%) Grafana
3 23 (1.45%) Ansible
4 11 (0.69%) Prometheus
5 8 (0.50%) Control-M
5 8 (0.50%) Kibana
6 3 (0.19%) logstash
7 2 (0.13%) Argo
7 2 (0.13%) Puppet
7 2 (0.13%) Single Sign-On
8 1 (0.063%) Cilium
8 1 (0.063%) Data Guard
8 1 (0.063%) HAProxy
8 1 (0.063%) IBM Guardium
8 1 (0.063%) Kustomize
8 1 (0.063%) Nagios
8 1 (0.063%) Oracle Enterprise Manager
8 1 (0.063%) Oracle RMAN
8 1 (0.063%) Progress Chef
8 1 (0.063%) QRadar
Vendors
1 460 (28.91%) Databricks
2 267 (16.78%) Microsoft
3 96 (6.03%) Google
4 77 (4.84%) Oracle
5 60 (3.77%) Informatica
6 32 (2.01%) Salesforce
7 30 (1.89%) SAP
8 27 (1.70%) Foundry
8 27 (1.70%) Talend
9 24 (1.51%) Palantir
10 22 (1.38%) OpenAI
11 15 (0.94%) Teradata
12 13 (0.82%) Cloudera
13 12 (0.75%) Trend Micro
14 11 (0.69%) Adobe
14 11 (0.69%) ServiceNow
15 8 (0.50%) Denodo
15 8 (0.50%) Splunk
16 7 (0.44%) Hitachi
17 6 (0.38%) MicroStrategy