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

6 months to
12 Feb 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 98 154 213
Rank change year-on-year +56 +59 +14
Contract jobs citing Data Engineering 1,047 544 496
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.63% 1.76% 1.12%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.02% 1.96% 1.29%
Number of daily rates quoted 712 380 372
10th Percentile £363 £361 £375
25th Percentile £428 £450 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -4.55% - -8.33%
75th Percentile £625 £650 £644
90th Percentile £749 £826 £736
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £500 £550
% change year-on-year -5.00% -9.09% +1.85%
Number of hourly rates quoted 10 14 9
10th Percentile £48.53 £21.48 £35.00
25th Percentile £52.19 £22.18 £35.63
Median hourly rate £61.25 £25.97 £42.31
Median % change year-on-year +135.89% -38.62% -39.35%
75th Percentile £67.75 £28.60 £65.00
90th Percentile £69.92 £54.50 £78.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £64.00 £25.97 £78.00
% change year-on-year +146.49% -66.71% +286.33%

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 34,652 27,713 38,573
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 87.01% 89.46% 87.07%
Number of daily rates quoted 21,939 16,970 25,283
10th Percentile £306 £306 £300
25th Percentile £408 £413 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £613 £638 £638
90th Percentile £720 £738 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £478 £498 £500
% change year-on-year -4.06% -0.35% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,087 853 2,111
10th Percentile £14.50 £15.62 £13.28
25th Percentile £17.69 £21.05 £16.25
Median hourly rate £25.15 £32.50 £33.07
Median % change year-on-year -22.62% -1.71% +1.74%
75th Percentile £60.00 £63.75 £60.00
90th Percentile £70.00 £75.00 £72.90
UK excluding London median hourly rate £25.15 £31.51 £35.00
% change year-on-year -20.18% -9.97% +9.38%

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 February 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 February 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 February 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 +66 924 £525 -7.89% 427
London +62 627 £550 -4.35% 208
UK excluding London +22 317 £475 -5.00% 314
Work from Home +23 306 £550 -4.35% 257
North of England -14 93 £450 -18.18% 82
Midlands +6 80 £513 +2.50% 54
West Midlands -5 60 £525 +6.06% 42
Scotland +32 52 £418 -11.73% 22
North West +3 52 £450 -10.00% 48
South West -3 46 £550 -15.38% 35
South East -15 39 £525 -1.41% 103
Yorkshire -48 24 £500 -20.00% 25
East Midlands -6 20 £445 -19.02% 12
North East -3 17 £450 -23.08% 10
East of England -25 14 £550 +71.95% 17
Wales -12 6 £563 +46.10% 4
Northern Ireland - 2 £430 - 1

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
1 159 (15.19%) Apache Spark
2 123 (11.75%) Apache Airflow
3 82 (7.83%) Apache
4 18 (1.72%) Palantir Foundry
5 13 (1.24%) Confluence
6 8 (0.76%) Appian
7 5 (0.48%) SAS
8 3 (0.29%) Microsoft Exchange
9 2 (0.19%) Apache Superset
9 2 (0.19%) Jupyter
9 2 (0.19%) SharePoint
10 1 (0.096%) Adobe Experience Manager
10 1 (0.096%) Apache Pig
10 1 (0.096%) Apache Synapse
10 1 (0.096%) ArcGIS
10 1 (0.096%) Camunda
10 1 (0.096%) CMS
10 1 (0.096%) IBM HTTP Server
10 1 (0.096%) Luigi
Applications
1 21 (2.01%) Microsoft Excel
2 9 (0.86%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 7 (0.67%) Microsoft Project
4 6 (0.57%) Chatbot
5 4 (0.38%) Microsoft Office
5 4 (0.38%) MS Visio
6 3 (0.29%) Trello
7 1 (0.096%) Adobe XD
7 1 (0.096%) Spreadsheet
Business Applications
1 5 (0.48%) Aladdin
2 3 (0.29%) Markit EDM
3 2 (0.19%) Dynamics CRM
3 2 (0.19%) Eagle PACE
3 2 (0.19%) Salesforce CRM
4 1 (0.096%) Actimize
4 1 (0.096%) Adobe Campaign
4 1 (0.096%) Maximo
4 1 (0.096%) Misys Midas
4 1 (0.096%) SAP BPC
4 1 (0.096%) SAP ERP
4 1 (0.096%) SAP S/4HANA
4 1 (0.096%) Workday HCM
Cloud Services
1 499 (47.66%) Azure
2 368 (35.15%) AWS
3 213 (20.34%) Power Platform
4 193 (18.43%) Azure Data Factory
5 151 (14.42%) GCP
6 142 (13.56%) Snowflake
7 124 (11.84%) Amazon S3
8 113 (10.79%) Azure Synapse Analytics
9 106 (10.12%) Serverless
10 102 (9.74%) GitHub
11 94 (8.98%) dbt
12 85 (8.12%) Azure DevOps
13 82 (7.83%) AWS Lambda
14 72 (6.88%) GitHub Actions
15 51 (4.87%) AWS CloudFormation
16 31 (2.96%) AWS Step Functions
17 26 (2.48%) Amazon EMR
17 26 (2.48%) Amazon SageMaker
18 25 (2.39%) Collibra
19 24 (2.29%) Azure Machine Learning
Communications & Networking
1 5 (0.48%) Network Security
2 4 (0.38%) Cisco IPT
2 4 (0.38%) Kerberos
3 3 (0.29%) Firewall
3 3 (0.29%) RTP
3 3 (0.29%) VPN
4 1 (0.096%) MQTT
4 1 (0.096%) SAN
4 1 (0.096%) SMS
4 1 (0.096%) SSL
4 1 (0.096%) TCP/IP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 205 (19.58%) Data Warehouse
2 200 (19.10%) Power BI
3 147 (14.04%) Data Lake
4 95 (9.07%) Metadata
5 71 (6.78%) SQL Server
6 69 (6.59%) Big Data
7 67 (6.40%) NoSQL
8 56 (5.35%) Delta Lake
8 56 (5.35%) Relational Database
9 55 (5.25%) Azure SQL Database
10 54 (5.16%) Snowflake Schema
11 51 (4.87%) Amazon Redshift
12 49 (4.68%) PostgreSQL
13 48 (4.58%) BigQuery
14 44 (4.20%) Amazon Athena
15 41 (3.92%) Hadoop
16 39 (3.72%) Tableau
17 28 (2.67%) SQL Server Integration Services
18 24 (2.29%) Elasticsearch
18 24 (2.29%) Spark SQL
Development Applications
1 151 (14.42%) Git
2 55 (5.25%) GitLab
3 42 (4.01%) Jenkins
4 40 (3.82%) MLflow
5 29 (2.77%) JIRA
6 7 (0.67%) Visual Studio Code
7 4 (0.38%) Cucumber
7 4 (0.38%) Selenium
7 4 (0.38%) SonarQube
8 3 (0.29%) ERwin
8 3 (0.29%) JUnit
8 3 (0.29%) Maven
8 3 (0.29%) Terragrunt
9 2 (0.19%) JMeter
9 2 (0.19%) Mockito
9 2 (0.19%) Poetry
9 2 (0.19%) Postman
9 2 (0.19%) Pylint
9 2 (0.19%) TeamCity
9 2 (0.19%) Visual Studio
General
1 296 (28.27%) Social Skills
2 236 (22.54%) Finance
3 143 (13.66%) Analytical Skills
4 86 (8.21%) Public Sector
5 69 (6.59%) Banking
6 23 (2.20%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 18 (1.72%) Investment Banking
8 16 (1.53%) Documentation Skills
8 16 (1.53%) Front Office
8 16 (1.53%) Influencing Skills
9 15 (1.43%) Marketing
10 14 (1.34%) Retail
11 10 (0.96%) Pharmaceutical
11 10 (0.96%) Publishing
12 9 (0.86%) Legal
13 8 (0.76%) Financial Institution
14 7 (0.67%) Military
14 7 (0.67%) Presentation Skills
15 6 (0.57%) Back Office
16 5 (0.48%) Manufacturing
Job Titles
1 463 (44.22%) Data Engineer
2 137 (13.09%) Senior
3 124 (11.84%) Lead
4 91 (8.69%) Senior Data Engineer
5 81 (7.74%) Architect
6 77 (7.35%) Azure Engineer
7 67 (6.40%) Developer
8 59 (5.64%) Azure Data Engineer
9 54 (5.16%) Analyst
10 46 (4.39%) AWS Engineer
11 45 (4.30%) Snowflake Engineer
12 44 (4.20%) Data Architect
13 43 (4.11%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
14 40 (3.82%) Lead Data Engineer
15 39 (3.72%) Data Scientist
16 37 (3.53%) Snowflake Data Engineer
17 35 (3.34%) Python Engineer
18 33 (3.15%) Data Analyst
19 29 (2.77%) AWS Data Engineer
20 26 (2.48%) Consultant
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 188 (17.96%) PySpark
2 122 (11.65%) Kafka
3 64 (6.11%) Pandas
4 60 (5.73%) PyTorch
5 51 (4.87%) TensorFlow
6 47 (4.49%) NumPy
7 41 (3.92%) scikit-learn
8 39 (3.72%) FastAPI
9 33 (3.15%) Flask
10 30 (2.87%) RESTful
11 27 (2.58%) JSON
12 25 (2.39%) LangChain
12 25 (2.39%) pytest
13 24 (2.29%) React
13 24 (2.29%) REST
13 24 (2.29%) YAML
14 17 (1.62%) Hugging Face
15 16 (1.53%) Django
15 16 (1.53%) OAuth
16 15 (1.43%) ARM Templates
Miscellaneous
1 116 (11.08%) Cloud Native
2 44 (4.20%) Algorithms
3 33 (3.15%) Product Ownership
4 30 (2.87%) Distributed Computing
4 30 (2.87%) Distributed Systems
5 25 (2.39%) Onboarding
6 22 (2.10%) Data Protection Act
7 21 (2.01%) Hybrid Cloud
7 21 (2.01%) Legacy Systems
8 20 (1.91%) AI Agents
8 20 (1.91%) Data Structures
9 16 (1.53%) Analytical Mindset
10 13 (1.24%) Enterprise Software
11 12 (1.15%) Clustering
12 11 (1.05%) Data Fabric
12 11 (1.05%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
12 11 (1.05%) Greenfield Project
12 11 (1.05%) Management Information System
13 10 (0.96%) Fixed Income
13 10 (0.96%) Hedge funds
Operating Systems
1 28 (2.67%) Linux
2 6 (0.57%) VMS
3 5 (0.48%) Unix
4 2 (0.19%) Ubuntu
5 1 (0.096%) CentOS
5 1 (0.096%) Debian
5 1 (0.096%) Windows
Processes & Methodologies
1 468 (44.70%) Data Pipeline
2 456 (43.55%) Analytics
3 403 (38.49%) ETL
4 390 (37.25%) Data Modelling
5 379 (36.20%) CI/CD
6 282 (26.93%) AI
7 268 (25.60%) Data Governance
8 253 (24.16%) DevOps
9 246 (23.50%) Agile
10 237 (22.64%) Machine Learning
11 234 (22.35%) Business Intelligence
12 218 (20.82%) Data Science
13 217 (20.73%) Problem-Solving
14 172 (16.43%) Data Architecture
15 133 (12.70%) Infrastructure as Code
16 109 (10.41%) Decision-Making
16 109 (10.41%) Validation
17 107 (10.22%) Data Transformation
18 106 (10.12%) Data Integration
19 104 (9.93%) Visualisation
Programming Languages
1 638 (60.94%) Python
2 540 (51.58%) SQL
3 71 (6.78%) Java
4 61 (5.83%) Scala
5 42 (4.01%) C#
6 33 (3.15%) JavaScript
7 31 (2.96%) PowerShell
8 28 (2.67%) Data Analysis Expressions
9 22 (2.10%) Bash
9 22 (2.10%) Bicep
10 20 (1.91%) T-SQL
11 18 (1.72%) TypeScript
12 17 (1.62%) R
13 16 (1.53%) C++
14 15 (1.43%) Go
14 15 (1.43%) PL/SQL
15 12 (1.15%) Shell Script
16 9 (0.86%) Rust
17 8 (0.76%) Korn
18 2 (0.19%) Kusto Query Language
Qualifications
1 212 (20.25%) Security Cleared
2 173 (16.52%) SC Cleared
3 97 (9.26%) Degree
4 53 (5.06%) Azure Certification
5 45 (4.30%) Master's Degree
6 38 (3.63%) Computer Science Degree
7 23 (2.20%) DV Cleared
8 17 (1.62%) AWS Certification
9 14 (1.34%) Microsoft Certification
10 13 (1.24%) BPSS Clearance
10 13 (1.24%) PhD
11 4 (0.38%) DBS Check
11 4 (0.38%) Microsoft Certified Professional
12 3 (0.29%) IBM Certification
12 3 (0.29%) ISTQB
13 2 (0.19%) SnowPro
14 1 (0.096%) (ISC)2 CCSP
14 1 (0.096%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
14 1 (0.096%) CBAP
14 1 (0.096%) CSPO
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 294 (28.08%) Data Quality
2 88 (8.40%) GDPR
3 32 (3.06%) QA
4 17 (1.62%) Accessibility
5 11 (1.05%) Sarbanes-Oxley
6 9 (0.86%) HIPAA
7 6 (0.57%) California Consumer Privacy Act
7 6 (0.57%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 5 (0.48%) PERC
8 5 (0.48%) SOC 2
9 3 (0.29%) GRC
9 3 (0.29%) SLA
9 3 (0.29%) WCAG
10 2 (0.19%) Disclosure Scotland
10 2 (0.19%) HL7
10 2 (0.19%) MiFID
10 2 (0.19%) NIST
10 2 (0.19%) PCI DSS
11 1 (0.096%) Actionable Recommendations
11 1 (0.096%) PMO
System Software
1 150 (14.33%) Docker
2 16 (1.53%) HDFS
3 2 (0.19%) Active Directory
4 1 (0.096%) Apache ZooKeeper
4 1 (0.096%) ISA Server
4 1 (0.096%) Virtual Machines
Systems Management
1 163 (15.57%) Terraform
2 136 (12.99%) Kubernetes
3 23 (2.20%) Prometheus
4 17 (1.62%) Grafana
5 12 (1.15%) Ansible
6 10 (0.96%) Hadoop YARN
7 5 (0.48%) Argo
7 5 (0.48%) Puppet
8 3 (0.29%) Control-M
8 3 (0.29%) Kibana
8 3 (0.29%) Kubeflow
8 3 (0.29%) logstash
9 2 (0.19%) Nagios
9 2 (0.19%) Oozie
9 2 (0.19%) Single Sign-On
10 1 (0.096%) Apache Ranger
10 1 (0.096%) HP Fortify
10 1 (0.096%) Kustomize
10 1 (0.096%) Rancher
Vendors
1 316 (30.18%) Databricks
2 141 (13.47%) Microsoft
3 48 (4.58%) Google
4 33 (3.15%) Oracle
5 31 (2.96%) Informatica
6 21 (2.01%) Foundry
6 21 (2.01%) Palantir
6 21 (2.01%) Talend
7 20 (1.91%) OpenAI
8 13 (1.24%) SAP
9 11 (1.05%) Salesforce
10 8 (0.76%) Automation Anywhere
10 8 (0.76%) Cloudera
10 8 (0.76%) IBM
10 8 (0.76%) Splunk
10 8 (0.76%) UiPath
10 8 (0.76%) Virgin Media
11 7 (0.67%) Denodo
12 6 (0.57%) MicroStrategy
13 5 (0.48%) Guidewire