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

6 months to
28 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 85 160 205
Rank change year-on-year +75 +45 +12
Contract jobs citing Data Engineering 1,571 583 479
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.97% 1.78% 1.19%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.50% 1.97% 1.40%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,086 375 353
10th Percentile £385 £363 £400
25th Percentile £438 £439 £468
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £520 £575
Median % change year-on-year +0.96% -9.57% -8.00%
75th Percentile £638 £644 £688
90th Percentile £738 £800 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -13.98%
Number of hourly rates quoted 28 7 13
10th Percentile £21.25 £27.00 £30.55
25th Percentile £42.19 £34.48 £31.25
Median hourly rate £67.00 £52.50 £35.00
Median % change year-on-year +27.62% +50.00% -52.05%
75th Percentile £75.00 £59.38 £60.00
90th Percentile £88.25 £83.00 -
UK excluding London median hourly rate £59.50 £30.00 £60.00
% change year-on-year +98.33% -50.00% -17.81%

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 44,902 29,618 34,312
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.94% 90.44% 85.47%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,798 18,592 22,057
10th Percentile £325 £300 £308
25th Percentile £420 £404 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £521 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +4.10% -4.76% -3.67%
75th Percentile £625 £625 £638
90th Percentile £725 £738 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,679 1,619 2,026
10th Percentile £14.79 £14.20 £13.56
25th Percentile £20.06 £17.33 £17.55
Median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £40.00
Median % change year-on-year +74.79% -37.13% -5.88%
75th Percentile £68.00 £50.00 £63.75
90th Percentile £82.39 £68.75 £73.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £43.96 £23.50 £40.00
% change year-on-year +87.06% -41.25% -

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 28 July 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 28 July 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 28 July 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 1,396 £525 - 640
London +51 820 £550 - 383
UK excluding London +76 587 £500 +5.26% 340
Work from Home +67 518 £525 - 285
North of England +31 179 £475 -2.56% 124
Midlands +47 153 £475 +3.49% 38
West Midlands +39 128 £469 +8.82% 29
South West +33 86 £505 -7.13% 44
South East -26 85 £525 +11.94% 100
Yorkshire +17 83 £475 +2.70% 38
North West -16 58 £500 +5.26% 60
Scotland +16 56 £488 +2.63% 15
North East -8 40 £425 -15.00% 27
East of England -5 30 £575 +35.29% 9
East Midlands -3 22 £525 +13.94% 9
Wales -9 7 £450 +82.58% 5
Northern Ireland - 4 £334 - 8

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
1 197 (12.54%) Apache Spark
2 177 (11.27%) Apache Airflow
3 127 (8.08%) Apache
4 47 (2.99%) SAS
5 41 (2.61%) Confluence
6 23 (1.46%) Jupyter
7 22 (1.40%) Palantir Foundry
8 11 (0.70%) SharePoint
9 8 (0.51%) Apache Superset
10 4 (0.25%) ArcGIS
11 2 (0.13%) Apache Solr
11 2 (0.13%) Appian
11 2 (0.13%) Microsoft Exchange
12 1 (0.064%) Adobe Experience Manager
12 1 (0.064%) Apache Synapse
12 1 (0.064%) Camunda
12 1 (0.064%) CICS
12 1 (0.064%) Ethereum
12 1 (0.064%) Hyperledger
12 1 (0.064%) IBM HTTP Server
Applications
1 22 (1.40%) Microsoft Excel
2 7 (0.45%) Microsoft Office
2 7 (0.45%) Spreadsheet
3 6 (0.38%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 3 (0.19%) Chatbot
4 3 (0.19%) MS Visio
5 1 (0.064%) Microsoft Project
5 1 (0.064%) Notion
Business Applications
1 13 (0.83%) Aladdin
2 6 (0.38%) Dynamics CRM
3 5 (0.32%) BambooHR
4 4 (0.25%) NetSuite
4 4 (0.25%) Sage X3
4 4 (0.25%) Salesforce CRM
4 4 (0.25%) SAP S/4HANA
5 3 (0.19%) Workday HCM
6 2 (0.13%) Endur
6 2 (0.13%) Oracle Assets
6 2 (0.13%) SAP BPC
6 2 (0.13%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
6 2 (0.13%) Temenos T24
7 1 (0.064%) Adobe Campaign
7 1 (0.064%) Distributed Ledger
7 1 (0.064%) FIS Private Capital Suite
7 1 (0.064%) Markit EDM
7 1 (0.064%) MIS ActiveH
7 1 (0.064%) R3 Corda
7 1 (0.064%) SAP ECC
Cloud Services
1 656 (41.76%) Azure
2 591 (37.62%) AWS
3 327 (20.81%) Power Platform
4 241 (15.34%) Snowflake
5 215 (13.69%) GCP
6 194 (12.35%) dbt
7 183 (11.65%) Amazon S3
8 175 (11.14%) Azure Data Factory
9 147 (9.36%) Azure Synapse Analytics
10 136 (8.66%) Serverless
11 128 (8.15%) Azure DevOps
12 119 (7.57%) GitHub
13 115 (7.32%) AWS Lambda
14 66 (4.20%) GitHub Actions
15 61 (3.88%) Amazon EMR
16 37 (2.36%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 34 (2.16%) AWS CloudFormation
18 31 (1.97%) AWS Step Functions
19 30 (1.91%) Amazon SageMaker
19 30 (1.91%) Azure Cosmos DB
Communications & Networking
1 5 (0.32%) Firewall
2 3 (0.19%) RTP
3 2 (0.13%) Network Security
4 1 (0.064%) 4G
4 1 (0.064%) 5G
4 1 (0.064%) Broadband
4 1 (0.064%) MIMO
4 1 (0.064%) MQTT
Database & Business Intelligence
1 306 (19.48%) Data Warehouse
1 306 (19.48%) Power BI
2 219 (13.94%) Data Lake
3 155 (9.87%) Metadata
4 110 (7.00%) Amazon Redshift
5 107 (6.81%) Big Data
6 99 (6.30%) BigQuery
7 97 (6.17%) Delta Lake
8 93 (5.92%) Tableau
9 80 (5.09%) SQL Server
10 77 (4.90%) Amazon Athena
11 69 (4.39%) NoSQL
12 65 (4.14%) Snowflake Schema
13 61 (3.88%) Relational Database
14 60 (3.82%) PostgreSQL
15 49 (3.12%) Azure SQL Database
16 42 (2.67%) Hadoop
17 37 (2.36%) Star Schema
18 36 (2.29%) Looker
18 36 (2.29%) SQL Server Integration Services
Development Applications
1 173 (11.01%) Git
2 72 (4.58%) GitLab
2 72 (4.58%) JIRA
3 31 (1.97%) MLflow
4 21 (1.34%) Jenkins
5 7 (0.45%) ERwin
6 6 (0.38%) SonarQube
7 5 (0.32%) Bitbucket
8 3 (0.19%) Artifactory
8 3 (0.19%) ER Studio
8 3 (0.19%) Postman
8 3 (0.19%) Selenium
8 3 (0.19%) Snyk
8 3 (0.19%) Sonatype Nexus
8 3 (0.19%) Visual Studio
9 2 (0.13%) Claude Code
9 2 (0.13%) Yeoman
10 1 (0.064%) Cypress.io
10 1 (0.064%) Octopus Deploy
10 1 (0.064%) Robot Framework
General
1 380 (24.19%) Social Skills
2 360 (22.92%) Finance
3 256 (16.30%) Analytical Skills
4 170 (10.82%) Public Sector
5 121 (7.70%) Banking
6 41 (2.61%) Marketing
7 36 (2.29%) Documentation Skills
8 35 (2.23%) Inclusion and Diversity
9 33 (2.10%) Retail
10 25 (1.59%) Front Office
11 24 (1.53%) Telecoms
12 21 (1.34%) Investment Banking
13 15 (0.95%) Manufacturing
14 14 (0.89%) Financial Institution
14 14 (0.89%) Law
15 13 (0.83%) Pharmaceutical
16 12 (0.76%) Influencing Skills
17 11 (0.70%) Legal
18 9 (0.57%) Billing
19 8 (0.51%) Military
Job Titles
1 731 (46.53%) Data Engineer
2 220 (14.00%) Senior
3 179 (11.39%) Architect
4 178 (11.33%) Lead
5 129 (8.21%) Senior Data Engineer
6 98 (6.24%) Data Architect
7 96 (6.11%) Developer
8 81 (5.16%) AWS Engineer
9 73 (4.65%) Analyst
10 65 (4.14%) Lead Data Engineer
11 64 (4.07%) AWS Data Engineer
12 63 (4.01%) Snowflake Engineer
13 62 (3.95%) Azure Engineer
14 55 (3.50%) Azure Data Engineer
15 49 (3.12%) Snowflake Data Engineer
16 48 (3.06%) Python Engineer
17 47 (2.99%) Data Scientist
18 46 (2.93%) Consultant
18 46 (2.93%) Solutions Architect
19 45 (2.86%) Data Analyst
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 233 (14.83%) PySpark
2 141 (8.98%) Kafka
3 42 (2.67%) REST
4 38 (2.42%) Pandas
5 36 (2.29%) JSON
6 28 (1.78%) PyTorch
6 28 (1.78%) scikit-learn
7 26 (1.65%) React
8 23 (1.46%) NumPy
8 23 (1.46%) Spring
9 22 (1.40%) TensorFlow
10 19 (1.21%) .NET
11 17 (1.08%) RESTful
12 16 (1.02%) OpenTelemetry
12 16 (1.02%) Spring Boot
13 14 (0.89%) Apache Avro
13 14 (0.89%) FastAPI
13 14 (0.89%) LangChain
14 12 (0.76%) XML
14 12 (0.76%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 205 (13.05%) Cloud Native
2 71 (4.52%) Data Structures
3 64 (4.07%) Distributed Systems
4 63 (4.01%) Legacy Systems
5 55 (3.50%) Product Ownership
6 42 (2.67%) Onboarding
7 37 (2.36%) AI Agents
8 28 (1.78%) Data Protection Act
9 26 (1.65%) Distributed Computing
10 24 (1.53%) Algorithms
11 22 (1.40%) Greenfield Project
11 22 (1.40%) NHS
12 18 (1.15%) Analytical Mindset
13 17 (1.08%) Clustering
14 16 (1.02%) Virtual Team
15 15 (0.95%) Life Science
16 14 (0.89%) Management Information System
17 13 (0.83%) Enterprise Software
17 13 (0.83%) Reference Data
18 12 (0.76%) Fixed Income
Operating Systems
1 32 (2.04%) Linux
2 25 (1.59%) Unix
3 6 (0.38%) Windows
4 4 (0.25%) VMS
5 2 (0.13%) Windows Server
6 1 (0.064%) Ubuntu
Processes & Methodologies
1 804 (51.18%) Analytics
2 764 (48.63%) Data Pipeline
3 618 (39.34%) Data Modelling
4 546 (34.75%) CI/CD
5 539 (34.31%) ETL
6 434 (27.63%) AI
7 396 (25.21%) Agile
8 393 (25.02%) Business Intelligence
9 360 (22.92%) DevOps
10 352 (22.41%) Data Governance
11 290 (18.46%) Machine Learning
12 270 (17.19%) Data Science
12 270 (17.19%) Problem-Solving
13 232 (14.77%) Migration
14 229 (14.58%) Validation
15 219 (13.94%) Data Architecture
15 219 (13.94%) Decision-Making
16 200 (12.73%) Data Transformation
17 193 (12.29%) Stakeholder Management
18 188 (11.97%) Infrastructure as Code
Programming Languages
1 865 (55.06%) SQL
2 823 (52.39%) Python
3 126 (8.02%) Java
4 46 (2.93%) Data Analysis Expressions
5 40 (2.55%) Scala
6 37 (2.36%) Bash
7 34 (2.16%) C#
8 26 (1.65%) T-SQL
9 25 (1.59%) PowerShell
10 21 (1.34%) R
11 19 (1.21%) Bicep
11 19 (1.21%) JavaScript
12 17 (1.08%) PL/SQL
13 15 (0.95%) Shell Script
14 12 (0.76%) SAS Macro
15 11 (0.70%) TypeScript
16 8 (0.51%) SPARQL
17 7 (0.45%) Cypher
18 5 (0.32%) Go
18 5 (0.32%) Kusto Query Language
Qualifications
1 307 (19.54%) Security Cleared
2 262 (16.68%) SC Cleared
3 110 (7.00%) Degree
4 49 (3.12%) Computer Science Degree
5 38 (2.42%) BPSS Clearance
6 36 (2.29%) Master's Degree
7 32 (2.04%) Azure Certification
8 28 (1.78%) DV Cleared
9 20 (1.27%) AWS Certification
10 13 (0.83%) DBS Check
11 11 (0.70%) SnowPro
12 9 (0.57%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
13 7 (0.45%) Microsoft Certification
14 6 (0.38%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
15 5 (0.32%) CSPO
15 5 (0.32%) Tableau Certification
16 3 (0.19%) IBM Certification
16 3 (0.19%) PhD
17 2 (0.13%) Microsoft Certified Professional
17 2 (0.13%) PMI Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 465 (29.60%) Data Quality
2 82 (5.22%) GDPR
3 80 (5.09%) QA
4 24 (1.53%) Accessibility
5 15 (0.95%) SLA
6 4 (0.25%) Actionable Recommendations
6 4 (0.25%) NIST
6 4 (0.25%) Sarbanes-Oxley
6 4 (0.25%) Solvency II
7 3 (0.19%) California Consumer Privacy Act
7 3 (0.19%) Disclosure Scotland
7 3 (0.19%) GxP
7 3 (0.19%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 3 (0.19%) ISO/IEC 42001
7 3 (0.19%) MiFID
7 3 (0.19%) PMO
8 2 (0.13%) 21 CFR Part 11
8 2 (0.13%) EMIR
8 2 (0.13%) GRC
8 2 (0.13%) SNOMED CT
System Software
1 135 (8.59%) Docker
2 4 (0.25%) Active Directory
3 3 (0.19%) Virtual Machines
4 2 (0.13%) HDFS
5 1 (0.064%) Oracle RAC
Systems Management
1 195 (12.41%) Terraform
2 115 (7.32%) Kubernetes
3 27 (1.72%) Grafana
4 25 (1.59%) Prometheus
5 13 (0.83%) Ansible
6 5 (0.32%) Kibana
7 3 (0.19%) Argo
7 3 (0.19%) logstash
7 3 (0.19%) Rancher
8 2 (0.13%) Kubeflow
8 2 (0.13%) Nagios
8 2 (0.13%) Thomson Reuters DACS
9 1 (0.064%) Control-M
9 1 (0.064%) Data Guard
9 1 (0.064%) Hadoop YARN
9 1 (0.064%) HP Fortify
9 1 (0.064%) Oozie
9 1 (0.064%) Oracle Enterprise Manager
9 1 (0.064%) Oracle RMAN
9 1 (0.064%) QRadar
Vendors
1 407 (25.91%) Databricks
2 267 (17.00%) Microsoft
3 84 (5.35%) Informatica
4 69 (4.39%) Oracle
5 68 (4.33%) Google
6 35 (2.23%) Talend
7 34 (2.16%) SAP
8 32 (2.04%) Foundry
9 31 (1.97%) Palantir
10 24 (1.53%) OpenAI
11 23 (1.46%) Salesforce
11 23 (1.46%) Splunk
12 15 (0.95%) Cloudera
12 15 (0.95%) ServiceNow
13 12 (0.76%) Trend Micro
14 9 (0.57%) Workday
15 8 (0.51%) Adobe
15 8 (0.51%) Denodo
16 7 (0.45%) InterSystems
17 6 (0.38%) Teradata