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 29 April 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
29 Apr 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 90 155 207
Rank change year-on-year +65 +52 +2
Contract jobs citing Data Engineering 1,307 521 495
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.78% 1.79% 1.14%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.28% 1.97% 1.32%
Number of daily rates quoted 905 369 369
10th Percentile £400 £399 £375
25th Percentile £450 £450 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year - -4.55% -8.33%
75th Percentile £614 £675 £663
90th Percentile £749 £838 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £480 £550
% change year-on-year +4.22% -12.77% +2.23%
Number of hourly rates quoted 21 13 14
10th Percentile £51.25 £21.40 £30.63
25th Percentile £56.75 £22.00 £31.25
Median hourly rate £70.00 £25.43 £35.00
Median % change year-on-year +175.27% -27.34% -35.48%
75th Percentile £78.00 £53.75 £57.56
90th Percentile £90.00 £62.75 £60.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £69.22 £25.43 £60.00
% change year-on-year +172.20% -57.62% +71.43%

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 39,818 26,498 37,391
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.58% 90.82% 86.33%
Number of daily rates quoted 25,090 17,105 24,099
10th Percentile £319 £306 £300
25th Percentile £413 £413 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £523 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.31% -0.48% -4.55%
75th Percentile £613 £630 £638
90th Percentile £725 £744 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £488 £485 £500
% change year-on-year +0.52% -3.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,400 1,069 2,428
10th Percentile £14.96 £14.82 £12.75
25th Percentile £19.91 £18.51 £16.00
Median hourly rate £40.66 £29.07 £35.00
Median % change year-on-year +39.87% -16.94% -6.17%
75th Percentile £65.88 £62.24 £59.44
90th Percentile £78.75 £75.00 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £42.25 £28.00 £36.02
% change year-on-year +50.89% -22.27% +0.06%

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 29 April 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 29 April 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 29 April 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 +71 1,175 £525 -4.55% 375
London +54 729 £550 -4.35% 173
UK excluding London +72 459 £500 +4.22% 276
Work from Home +46 370 £525 -11.02% 187
Midlands +27 127 £500 - 53
North of England -1 123 £480 -4.00% 80
West Midlands +22 101 £500 -7.41% 39
South West +25 77 £525 -14.29% 32
Scotland +33 58 £440 -7.37% 16
South East -29 58 £538 +7.50% 72
Yorkshire -19 56 £480 -12.73% 20
North West -12 49 £500 +5.26% 42
East Midlands -21 23 £460 -3.16% 14
East of England -24 23 £575 +54.08% 12
North East +3 20 £475 - 18
Wales -15 5 £665 +181.78% 7
Northern Ireland - 2 £430 - 6

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
1 196 (15.00%) Apache Spark
2 128 (9.79%) Apache Airflow
3 86 (6.58%) Apache
4 35 (2.68%) SAS
5 20 (1.53%) Confluence
6 17 (1.30%) Palantir Foundry
7 8 (0.61%) Appian
8 7 (0.54%) Apache Superset
9 5 (0.38%) Jupyter
10 4 (0.31%) Microsoft Exchange
11 2 (0.15%) Apache Synapse
11 2 (0.15%) SharePoint
12 1 (0.077%) Adobe Experience Manager
12 1 (0.077%) ArcGIS
12 1 (0.077%) Camunda
12 1 (0.077%) CICS
12 1 (0.077%) CMS
12 1 (0.077%) IBM HTTP Server
Applications
1 27 (2.07%) Microsoft Excel
2 9 (0.69%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 8 (0.61%) Microsoft Office
4 7 (0.54%) Microsoft Project
5 6 (0.46%) Spreadsheet
6 4 (0.31%) Chatbot
7 3 (0.23%) MS Visio
7 3 (0.23%) Trello
Business Applications
1 5 (0.38%) BambooHR
2 4 (0.31%) Aladdin
2 4 (0.31%) Dynamics CRM
3 3 (0.23%) Salesforce CRM
3 3 (0.23%) SAP BPC
4 2 (0.15%) SAP S/4HANA
5 1 (0.077%) Actimize
5 1 (0.077%) Adobe Campaign
5 1 (0.077%) Markit EDM
5 1 (0.077%) Maximo
5 1 (0.077%) Misys Midas
5 1 (0.077%) Oracle Assets
5 1 (0.077%) SAP ECC
Cloud Services
1 590 (45.14%) Azure
2 467 (35.73%) AWS
3 290 (22.19%) Power Platform
4 197 (15.07%) Azure Data Factory
5 187 (14.31%) GCP
6 164 (12.55%) Snowflake
7 148 (11.32%) Amazon S3
8 146 (11.17%) Azure Synapse Analytics
9 133 (10.18%) GitHub
10 117 (8.95%) dbt
11 116 (8.88%) Serverless
12 105 (8.03%) Azure DevOps
13 94 (7.19%) AWS Lambda
14 81 (6.20%) GitHub Actions
15 62 (4.74%) AWS CloudFormation
16 38 (2.91%) AWS Step Functions
17 33 (2.52%) Amazon EMR
18 30 (2.30%) Amazon SageMaker
18 30 (2.30%) Collibra
19 28 (2.14%) Amazon CloudWatch
Communications & Networking
1 5 (0.38%) RTP
2 4 (0.31%) Cisco IPT
2 4 (0.31%) Firewall
2 4 (0.31%) Kerberos
3 3 (0.23%) VPN
4 2 (0.15%) Network Security
5 1 (0.077%) 4G
5 1 (0.077%) 5G
5 1 (0.077%) MIMO
5 1 (0.077%) SAN
5 1 (0.077%) SMS
5 1 (0.077%) TCP/IP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 266 (20.35%) Power BI
2 254 (19.43%) Data Warehouse
3 200 (15.30%) Data Lake
4 125 (9.56%) Metadata
5 100 (7.65%) Big Data
6 91 (6.96%) SQL Server
7 86 (6.58%) Delta Lake
8 81 (6.20%) NoSQL
9 71 (5.43%) Tableau
10 70 (5.36%) Amazon Redshift
11 68 (5.20%) BigQuery
12 67 (5.13%) Amazon Athena
12 67 (5.13%) Azure SQL Database
13 65 (4.97%) Snowflake Schema
14 59 (4.51%) Relational Database
15 56 (4.28%) PostgreSQL
16 52 (3.98%) Hadoop
17 37 (2.83%) SQL Server Integration Services
18 36 (2.75%) Spark SQL
19 26 (1.99%) Star Schema
Development Applications
1 165 (12.62%) Git
2 63 (4.82%) GitLab
3 47 (3.60%) JIRA
3 47 (3.60%) MLflow
4 34 (2.60%) Jenkins
5 7 (0.54%) SonarQube
6 5 (0.38%) Selenium
7 3 (0.23%) Postman
7 3 (0.23%) Robot Framework
7 3 (0.23%) Snyk
7 3 (0.23%) Terragrunt
8 2 (0.15%) Artifactory
8 2 (0.15%) Bitbucket
8 2 (0.15%) Visual Studio
9 1 (0.077%) Ant
9 1 (0.077%) ERwin
9 1 (0.077%) JUnit
9 1 (0.077%) Maven
9 1 (0.077%) Octopus Deploy
9 1 (0.077%) SoapUI
General
1 326 (24.94%) Finance
2 312 (23.87%) Social Skills
3 199 (15.23%) Analytical Skills
4 112 (8.57%) Public Sector
5 77 (5.89%) Banking
6 24 (1.84%) Documentation Skills
6 24 (1.84%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 23 (1.76%) Retail
8 20 (1.53%) Marketing
9 17 (1.30%) Front Office
10 15 (1.15%) Telecoms
11 14 (1.07%) Legal
12 13 (0.99%) Influencing Skills
13 12 (0.92%) Financial Institution
13 12 (0.92%) Investment Banking
14 8 (0.61%) Law
15 7 (0.54%) Military
16 6 (0.46%) Back Office
16 6 (0.46%) Pharmaceutical
17 4 (0.31%) Electronics
Job Titles
1 607 (46.44%) Data Engineer
2 177 (13.54%) Senior
3 143 (10.94%) Lead
4 130 (9.95%) Architect
5 111 (8.49%) Senior Data Engineer
6 80 (6.12%) Developer
7 67 (5.13%) Data Architect
8 64 (4.90%) Azure Engineer
9 61 (4.67%) AWS Engineer
10 55 (4.21%) Analyst
10 55 (4.21%) Lead Data Engineer
11 54 (4.13%) Azure Data Engineer
12 45 (3.44%) Data Scientist
12 45 (3.44%) Snowflake Engineer
13 43 (3.29%) AWS Data Engineer
14 41 (3.14%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
14 41 (3.14%) Consultant
15 39 (2.98%) Solutions Architect
16 38 (2.91%) Snowflake Data Engineer
17 31 (2.37%) Data Analyst
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 219 (16.76%) PySpark
2 154 (11.78%) Kafka
3 60 (4.59%) Pandas
4 48 (3.67%) PyTorch
5 43 (3.29%) scikit-learn
6 39 (2.98%) TensorFlow
7 38 (2.91%) NumPy
8 28 (2.14%) REST
9 27 (2.07%) JSON
10 23 (1.76%) Spring
10 23 (1.76%) YAML
11 22 (1.68%) pytest
11 22 (1.68%) React
12 21 (1.61%) LangChain
13 20 (1.53%) RESTful
14 18 (1.38%) FastAPI
14 18 (1.38%) Great Expectations
15 16 (1.22%) Spring Boot
16 15 (1.15%) Flask
17 13 (0.99%) Django
Miscellaneous
1 179 (13.70%) Cloud Native
2 49 (3.75%) Distributed Systems
3 46 (3.52%) Product Ownership
4 39 (2.98%) Data Structures
4 39 (2.98%) Legacy Systems
5 32 (2.45%) Algorithms
6 29 (2.22%) AI Agents
6 29 (2.22%) Distributed Computing
7 26 (1.99%) Onboarding
8 21 (1.61%) Greenfield Project
9 20 (1.53%) Data Protection Act
10 19 (1.45%) Analytical Mindset
11 17 (1.30%) Hybrid Cloud
11 17 (1.30%) NHS
12 14 (1.07%) Self-Motivation
13 13 (0.99%) Fixed Income
13 13 (0.99%) Management Information System
14 12 (0.92%) Clustering
15 11 (0.84%) Virtual Team
16 9 (0.69%) Data Fabric
Operating Systems
1 28 (2.14%) Linux
2 20 (1.53%) Unix
3 8 (0.61%) VMS
4 3 (0.23%) Windows
5 2 (0.15%) Ubuntu
5 2 (0.15%) Windows Server
6 1 (0.077%) CentOS
6 1 (0.077%) Debian
Processes & Methodologies
1 663 (50.73%) Analytics
2 602 (46.06%) Data Pipeline
3 507 (38.79%) Data Modelling
4 499 (38.18%) ETL
5 460 (35.20%) CI/CD
6 371 (28.39%) AI
7 342 (26.17%) Agile
8 332 (25.40%) Business Intelligence
9 325 (24.87%) DevOps
10 320 (24.48%) Data Governance
11 265 (20.28%) Machine Learning
12 246 (18.82%) Problem-Solving
13 234 (17.90%) Data Science
14 196 (15.00%) Data Architecture
15 172 (13.16%) Decision-Making
16 167 (12.78%) Migration
17 154 (11.78%) Infrastructure as Code
18 153 (11.71%) Validation
19 132 (10.10%) Data Transformation
20 131 (10.02%) Data Integration
Programming Languages
1 711 (54.40%) SQL
2 700 (53.56%) Python
3 105 (8.03%) Java
4 64 (4.90%) Scala
5 45 (3.44%) Data Analysis Expressions
6 36 (2.75%) C#
7 31 (2.37%) Bash
8 25 (1.91%) T-SQL
9 24 (1.84%) PowerShell
10 22 (1.68%) JavaScript
10 22 (1.68%) R
11 17 (1.30%) Bicep
12 12 (0.92%) Shell Script
13 11 (0.84%) Go
14 10 (0.77%) PL/SQL
14 10 (0.77%) TypeScript
15 7 (0.54%) SAS Macro
16 5 (0.38%) Korn
17 2 (0.15%) C++
18 1 (0.077%) Groovy
Qualifications
1 265 (20.28%) Security Cleared
2 229 (17.52%) SC Cleared
3 103 (7.88%) Degree
4 42 (3.21%) Azure Certification
4 42 (3.21%) Computer Science Degree
5 38 (2.91%) Master's Degree
6 20 (1.53%) BPSS Clearance
7 17 (1.30%) AWS Certification
8 15 (1.15%) DV Cleared
9 9 (0.69%) Microsoft Certification
10 6 (0.46%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
10 6 (0.46%) SnowPro
11 5 (0.38%) DBS Check
11 5 (0.38%) PhD
12 4 (0.31%) Microsoft Certified Professional
13 3 (0.23%) IBM Certification
14 2 (0.15%) Tableau Certification
15 1 (0.077%) (ISC)2 CCSP
15 1 (0.077%) AWS Certified SysOps Administrator
15 1 (0.077%) CSPO
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 370 (28.31%) Data Quality
2 95 (7.27%) GDPR
3 50 (3.83%) QA
4 13 (0.99%) Sarbanes-Oxley
5 10 (0.77%) SLA
6 8 (0.61%) Accessibility
7 5 (0.38%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 4 (0.31%) HIPAA
8 4 (0.31%) MiFID
8 4 (0.31%) PERC
8 4 (0.31%) Solvency II
9 3 (0.23%) California Consumer Privacy Act
9 3 (0.23%) GRC
10 2 (0.15%) Actionable Recommendations
10 2 (0.15%) Disclosure Scotland
10 2 (0.15%) HL7
10 2 (0.15%) NIST
10 2 (0.15%) PCI DSS
10 2 (0.15%) PMO
10 2 (0.15%) SNOMED CT
System Software
1 133 (10.18%) Docker
2 6 (0.46%) HDFS
3 3 (0.23%) Virtual Machines
4 1 (0.077%) Active Directory
4 1 (0.077%) Apache ZooKeeper
Systems Management
1 179 (13.70%) Terraform
2 125 (9.56%) Kubernetes
3 29 (2.22%) Prometheus
4 24 (1.84%) Grafana
5 12 (0.92%) Ansible
6 5 (0.38%) Argo
7 4 (0.31%) Kubeflow
8 3 (0.23%) Kibana
8 3 (0.23%) Nagios
8 3 (0.23%) Rancher
9 2 (0.15%) Hadoop YARN
9 2 (0.15%) logstash
9 2 (0.15%) Thomson Reuters DACS
10 1 (0.077%) Apache Ranger
10 1 (0.077%) Control-M
10 1 (0.077%) HP Fortify
10 1 (0.077%) IBM Guardium
10 1 (0.077%) Oozie
Vendors
1 376 (28.77%) Databricks
2 209 (15.99%) Microsoft
3 64 (4.90%) Google
3 64 (4.90%) Informatica
4 46 (3.52%) Oracle
5 34 (2.60%) Talend
6 24 (1.84%) Foundry
7 22 (1.68%) OpenAI
8 21 (1.61%) SAP
9 19 (1.45%) Palantir
9 19 (1.45%) Splunk
10 16 (1.22%) Cloudera
11 13 (0.99%) ServiceNow
12 11 (0.84%) Salesforce
13 10 (0.77%) IBM
14 9 (0.69%) UiPath
15 8 (0.61%) Automation Anywhere
16 7 (0.54%) Denodo
16 7 (0.54%) InterSystems
17 6 (0.46%) MicroStrategy