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 9 December 2025, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
9 Dec 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 126 172 217
Rank change year-on-year +46 +45 +9
Contract jobs citing Data Engineering 813 523 507
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.24% 1.46% 1.11%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 2.52% 1.67% 1.26%
Number of daily rates quoted 527 367 375
10th Percentile £361 £400 £403
25th Percentile £413 £463 £475
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £520 £550 £575
Median % change year-on-year -5.45% -4.35% -3.77%
75th Percentile £638 £650 £688
90th Percentile £750 £775 £800
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £500 £550
% change year-on-year -5.00% -9.09% +1.85%
Number of hourly rates quoted 5 12 10
10th Percentile £41.15 £21.25 £35.00
25th Percentile £50.00 £21.81 £36.68
Median hourly rate £74.26 £25.40 £53.65
Median % change year-on-year +192.42% -52.67% +7.31%
75th Percentile £87.50 £27.10 £74.75
90th Percentile £101.00 £61.31 £78.70
UK excluding London median hourly rate £62.13 £25.43 £78.00
% change year-on-year +144.32% -67.40% +56.00%

All Process and 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 32,247 31,236 40,271
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 88.88% 87.47% 88.55%
Number of daily rates quoted 20,285 18,990 26,947
10th Percentile £300 £308 £310
25th Percentile £405 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £533
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% -1.50% -3.09%
75th Percentile £619 £638 £650
90th Percentile £725 £738 £745
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £500 £500
% change year-on-year -5.00% - -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,090 1,084 1,559
10th Percentile £14.50 £15.25 £14.36
25th Percentile £17.50 £20.19 £18.94
Median hourly rate £25.13 £33.00 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year -23.86% -22.35% +21.43%
75th Percentile £45.46 £63.75 £65.00
90th Percentile £67.50 £74.00 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £22.63 £32.50 £42.50
% change year-on-year -30.37% -23.53% +30.77%

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 9 December 2025.

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 9 December 2025.

Hourly rate histogram for Data Engineering in the UK

Data Engineering
Top 18 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 9 December 2025. 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 +53 710 £525 -8.70% 715
London +56 484 £550 -4.35% 266
UK excluding London +18 244 £475 -5.00% 587
Work from Home +14 244 £538 -2.27% 459
North of England -11 73 £440 -12.00% 122
Midlands -8 56 £542 +8.30% 82
Scotland +31 42 £402 -8.11% 49
North West +7 42 £425 -12.37% 68
South East +2 40 £513 -5.09% 205
West Midlands -15 39 £550 +11.11% 44
South West -15 24 £550 -17.60% 60
Yorkshire -36 21 £500 - 44
East Midlands -3 17 £429 -25.43% 35
East of England -3 17 £475 +48.44% 57
North East +2 10 £400 -33.05% 10
Wales -12 2 £495 -1.00% 10
Northern Ireland - 1 - - 10
Channel Islands - 1 £760 -

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
1 122 (15.01%) Apache Airflow
2 115 (14.15%) Apache Spark
3 65 (8.00%) Apache
4 13 (1.60%) Confluence
5 4 (0.49%) SAS
5 4 (0.49%) SharePoint
6 2 (0.25%) Jupyter
6 2 (0.25%) Luigi
7 1 (0.12%) Apache Pig
7 1 (0.12%) ArcGIS
Applications
1 18 (2.21%) Microsoft Excel
2 9 (1.11%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 6 (0.74%) Chatbot
4 3 (0.37%) MS Visio
5 2 (0.25%) Microsoft Office
6 1 (0.12%) Adobe XD
6 1 (0.12%) Microsoft Project
6 1 (0.12%) Trello
Business Applications
1 9 (1.11%) Aladdin
2 4 (0.49%) Dynamics CRM
3 2 (0.25%) Eagle PACE
3 2 (0.25%) Markit EDM
4 1 (0.12%) Actimize
4 1 (0.12%) Maximo
4 1 (0.12%) Misys Midas
4 1 (0.12%) Salesforce CRM
4 1 (0.12%) SAP BPC
4 1 (0.12%) SAP ERP
4 1 (0.12%) Workday HCM
Cloud Services
1 359 (44.16%) Azure
2 289 (35.55%) AWS
3 136 (16.73%) Power Platform
4 131 (16.11%) Azure Data Factory
5 123 (15.13%) GCP
6 121 (14.88%) Snowflake
7 95 (11.69%) Amazon S3
8 88 (10.82%) Azure Synapse Analytics
9 85 (10.46%) GitHub
9 85 (10.46%) Serverless
10 81 (9.96%) Azure DevOps
11 78 (9.59%) dbt
12 64 (7.87%) AWS Lambda
13 57 (7.01%) GitHub Actions
14 31 (3.81%) AWS CloudFormation
15 30 (3.69%) Azure Machine Learning
16 28 (3.44%) Amazon SageMaker
17 25 (3.08%) AWS Step Functions
18 24 (2.95%) Cloud Computing
19 22 (2.71%) Amazon EMR
Communications & Networking
1 7 (0.86%) TCP/IP
2 5 (0.62%) SAN
3 4 (0.49%) Cisco IPT
3 4 (0.49%) Network Security
3 4 (0.49%) SSL
4 3 (0.37%) DNS
4 3 (0.37%) Firewall
4 3 (0.37%) SSH
5 2 (0.25%) Kerberos
5 2 (0.25%) VPN
6 1 (0.12%) Intrusion Detection
6 1 (0.12%) MQTT
Database & Business Intelligence
1 160 (19.68%) Data Warehouse
2 130 (15.99%) Power BI
3 97 (11.93%) Data Lake
4 66 (8.12%) Metadata
5 64 (7.87%) Big Data
6 52 (6.40%) Relational Database
7 51 (6.27%) Delta Lake
7 51 (6.27%) NoSQL
8 43 (5.29%) BigQuery
9 40 (4.92%) Azure SQL Database
9 40 (4.92%) Tableau
10 39 (4.80%) Amazon Redshift
10 39 (4.80%) PostgreSQL
11 34 (4.18%) Hadoop
11 34 (4.18%) SQL Server
12 32 (3.94%) Snowflake Schema
13 31 (3.81%) Amazon Athena
14 23 (2.83%) RDBMS
15 19 (2.34%) Amazon RDS
16 18 (2.21%) Elasticsearch
Development Applications
1 133 (16.36%) Git
2 48 (5.90%) Jenkins
3 36 (4.43%) GitLab
4 33 (4.06%) MLflow
5 29 (3.57%) JIRA
6 9 (1.11%) Visual Studio Code
7 7 (0.86%) SonarQube
8 4 (0.49%) Cucumber
8 4 (0.49%) Poetry
9 3 (0.37%) Artifactory
9 3 (0.37%) JMeter
10 2 (0.25%) ERwin
10 2 (0.25%) JUnit
10 2 (0.25%) Maven
10 2 (0.25%) Mockito
10 2 (0.25%) Pylint
10 2 (0.25%) Selenium
10 2 (0.25%) Sonatype Nexus
10 2 (0.25%) TeamCity
10 2 (0.25%) Zephyr
General
1 234 (28.78%) Social Skills
2 180 (22.14%) Finance
3 109 (13.41%) Analytical Skills
4 59 (7.26%) Banking
5 58 (7.13%) Public Sector
6 29 (3.57%) Investment Banking
7 22 (2.71%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 17 (2.09%) Retail
9 15 (1.85%) Front Office
9 15 (1.85%) Pharmaceutical
9 15 (1.85%) Telecoms
10 14 (1.72%) Influencing Skills
11 13 (1.60%) Marketing
12 11 (1.35%) Legal
13 9 (1.11%) Documentation Skills
13 9 (1.11%) Publishing
14 7 (0.86%) Presentation Skills
15 6 (0.74%) Military
16 5 (0.62%) Electronics
16 5 (0.62%) Tech for Good
Job Titles
1 334 (41.08%) Data Engineer
2 110 (13.53%) Senior
3 75 (9.23%) Lead
4 72 (8.86%) Developer
5 71 (8.73%) Azure Engineer
6 69 (8.49%) Senior Data Engineer
7 68 (8.36%) Architect
8 49 (6.03%) Azure Data Engineer
9 43 (5.29%) Analyst
10 42 (5.17%) Python Engineer
11 40 (4.92%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
12 38 (4.67%) AWS Engineer
13 36 (4.43%) Data Architect
14 32 (3.94%) Data Scientist
14 32 (3.94%) Snowflake Engineer
15 30 (3.69%) Python Developer
16 28 (3.44%) Python Data Engineer
17 26 (3.20%) AWS Data Engineer
18 24 (2.95%) Snowflake Data Engineer
19 22 (2.71%) Platform Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 140 (17.22%) PySpark
2 87 (10.70%) Kafka
3 57 (7.01%) Pandas
4 48 (5.90%) NumPy
5 47 (5.78%) PyTorch
6 43 (5.29%) FastAPI
7 41 (5.04%) TensorFlow
8 36 (4.43%) Flask
9 32 (3.94%) RESTful
10 30 (3.69%) scikit-learn
11 27 (3.32%) React
12 22 (2.71%) LangChain
13 20 (2.46%) JSON
14 16 (1.97%) Hugging Face
14 16 (1.97%) Polars
14 16 (1.97%) pytest
14 16 (1.97%) Vue
15 15 (1.85%) AngularJS
15 15 (1.85%) SciPy
15 15 (1.85%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 75 (9.23%) Cloud Native
2 47 (5.78%) Algorithms
3 25 (3.08%) Data Structures
4 24 (2.95%) Distributed Computing
5 21 (2.58%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
6 20 (2.46%) Data Protection Act
7 19 (2.34%) Hybrid Cloud
7 19 (2.34%) Onboarding
8 17 (2.09%) Distributed Systems
8 17 (2.09%) Hedge funds
8 17 (2.09%) Product Ownership
9 15 (1.85%) AI Agents
10 13 (1.60%) Fixed Income
11 12 (1.48%) Legacy Systems
12 11 (1.35%) Enterprise Software
12 11 (1.35%) Life Science
13 10 (1.23%) Derivative
13 10 (1.23%) Management Information System
14 9 (1.11%) Genomics
15 8 (0.98%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 38 (4.67%) Linux
2 6 (0.74%) Windows
3 5 (0.62%) Debian
3 5 (0.62%) Ubuntu
4 4 (0.49%) Windows Server
4 4 (0.49%) Windows Server 2016
5 3 (0.37%) Android
5 3 (0.37%) Unix
5 3 (0.37%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 348 (42.80%) Data Pipeline
2 308 (37.88%) CI/CD
3 295 (36.29%) ETL
4 288 (35.42%) Data Modelling
5 275 (33.83%) Analytics
6 202 (24.85%) DevOps
7 191 (23.49%) Data Governance
8 189 (23.25%) Machine Learning
9 188 (23.12%) Agile
10 184 (22.63%) AI
11 173 (21.28%) Data Science
12 167 (20.54%) Problem-Solving
13 159 (19.56%) Business Intelligence
14 124 (15.25%) Data Architecture
15 105 (12.92%) Infrastructure as Code
16 99 (12.18%) Containerisation
17 96 (11.81%) Data Integration
18 81 (9.96%) Data Transformation
19 80 (9.84%) Visualisation
20 79 (9.72%) Decision-Making
Programming Languages
1 520 (63.96%) Python
2 401 (49.32%) SQL
3 55 (6.77%) Java
3 55 (6.77%) Scala
4 36 (4.43%) C#
5 34 (4.18%) JavaScript
6 27 (3.32%) PowerShell
7 26 (3.20%) C++
8 21 (2.58%) Bash
9 17 (2.09%) Bicep
9 17 (2.09%) R
10 16 (1.97%) Rust
10 16 (1.97%) T-SQL
10 16 (1.97%) TypeScript
11 14 (1.72%) Data Analysis Expressions
11 14 (1.72%) PL/SQL
12 13 (1.60%) Go
13 12 (1.48%) Shell Script
14 6 (0.74%) Korn
15 5 (0.62%) VBA
Qualifications
1 140 (17.22%) Security Cleared
2 113 (13.90%) SC Cleared
3 75 (9.23%) Degree
4 49 (6.03%) Azure Certification
5 37 (4.55%) Master's Degree
6 29 (3.57%) Computer Science Degree
7 21 (2.58%) DV Cleared
8 19 (2.34%) AWS Certification
9 11 (1.35%) PhD
10 9 (1.11%) Microsoft Certification
11 7 (0.86%) BPSS Clearance
11 7 (0.86%) MCP
12 4 (0.49%) SnowPro
13 3 (0.37%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 3 (0.37%) DBS Check
13 3 (0.37%) Tableau Certification
14 2 (0.25%) CBAP
14 2 (0.25%) ISTQB
15 1 (0.12%) APMG
15 1 (0.12%) PMI Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 190 (23.37%) Data Quality
2 63 (7.75%) GDPR
3 26 (3.20%) QA
4 21 (2.58%) Accessibility
5 9 (1.11%) HIPAA
6 7 (0.86%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 6 (0.74%) NIST
8 5 (0.62%) PERC
9 4 (0.49%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 4 (0.49%) SOC 2
9 4 (0.49%) WCAG
10 3 (0.37%) California Consumer Privacy Act
10 3 (0.37%) Disclosure Scotland
11 2 (0.25%) HL7
11 2 (0.25%) NCSC
11 2 (0.25%) PCI DSS
11 2 (0.25%) PMO
12 1 (0.12%) ISO/IEC 20000
12 1 (0.12%) MiFID
12 1 (0.12%) Solvency II
System Software
1 133 (16.36%) Docker
2 14 (1.72%) HDFS
3 3 (0.37%) Active Directory
4 1 (0.12%) ISA Server
Systems Management
1 129 (15.87%) Terraform
2 110 (13.53%) Kubernetes
3 16 (1.97%) Grafana
4 13 (1.60%) Ansible
5 10 (1.23%) Hadoop YARN
5 10 (1.23%) Prometheus
6 6 (0.74%) Control-M
7 5 (0.62%) Argo
7 5 (0.62%) Kibana
7 5 (0.62%) logstash
7 5 (0.62%) Puppet
8 4 (0.49%) Kustomize
8 4 (0.49%) vCenter Server
9 3 (0.37%) Istio
9 3 (0.37%) Oozie
10 2 (0.25%) Kubeflow
10 2 (0.25%) Single Sign-On
11 1 (0.12%) Demisto
11 1 (0.12%) Fluentd
11 1 (0.12%) Systems Management Server (SMS)
Vendors
1 234 (28.78%) Databricks
2 105 (12.92%) Microsoft
3 52 (6.40%) Google
4 33 (4.06%) Oracle
5 24 (2.95%) Informatica
6 18 (2.21%) Talend
7 16 (1.97%) Palantir
8 14 (1.72%) Foundry
8 14 (1.72%) OpenAI
9 13 (1.60%) SAP
10 11 (1.35%) Cloudera
11 9 (1.11%) Salesforce
11 9 (1.11%) VMware
12 8 (0.98%) Virgin Media
13 7 (0.86%) Red Hat
14 6 (0.74%) Denodo
14 6 (0.74%) Murex
15 5 (0.62%) Guidewire
16 4 (0.49%) EMC
16 4 (0.49%) StreamSets