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

6 months to
9 Apr 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 91 160 210
Rank change year-on-year +69 +50 0
Contract jobs citing Data Engineering 1,291 526 488
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.82% 1.80% 1.11%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.30% 1.99% 1.28%
Number of daily rates quoted 892 369 368
10th Percentile £390 £375 £400
25th Percentile £450 £450 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year - -4.55% -8.33%
75th Percentile £625 £675 £675
90th Percentile £750 £838 £739
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £480 £550
% change year-on-year +4.17% -12.73% +2.23%
Number of hourly rates quoted 22 14 13
10th Percentile £51.25 £21.48 £30.55
25th Percentile £58.56 £22.13 £31.25
Median hourly rate £70.00 £25.97 £35.00
Median % change year-on-year +169.59% -25.81% -1.41%
75th Percentile £77.25 £29.69 £50.25
90th Percentile £89.75 £61.63 £60.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £69.44 £25.43 £60.00
% change year-on-year +173.06% -57.62% +116.33%

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 39,074 26,483 37,997
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 85.36% 90.62% 86.32%
Number of daily rates quoted 24,751 17,195 24,633
10th Percentile £315 £308 £300
25th Percentile £413 £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 £725 £744 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £487 £488 £500
% change year-on-year -0.10% -2.50% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,316 997 2,379
10th Percentile £15.00 £15.00 £12.79
25th Percentile £19.34 £20.00 £16.00
Median hourly rate £36.70 £31.64 £33.07
Median % change year-on-year +15.99% -4.31% -8.15%
75th Percentile £65.00 £63.75 £57.91
90th Percentile £77.50 £75.80 £70.41
UK excluding London median hourly rate £36.71 £30.00 £33.00
% change year-on-year +22.37% -9.09% -8.08%

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 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 9 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 9 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 +63 1,163 £525 -4.55% 542
London +65 742 £550 -4.35% 253
UK excluding London +63 424 £500 +4.17% 383
Work from Home +43 367 £550 -4.76% 229
North of England +1 123 £475 -5.00% 110
Midlands +26 120 £517 +3.35% 51
West Midlands +19 95 £525 -2.78% 36
South West +20 71 £525 -16.00% 49
Yorkshire -16 54 £480 -16.52% 40
North West -10 49 £480 +1.05% 59
Scotland +26 48 £440 -7.37% 21
South East -32 47 £538 +7.50% 111
East of England -24 23 £575 +35.29% 34
North East +4 22 £450 -5.26% 13
East Midlands -17 22 £447 -5.89% 15
Wales -16 5 £665 +181.78% 11
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
1 194 (15.03%) Apache Spark
2 130 (10.07%) Apache Airflow
3 88 (6.82%) Apache
4 32 (2.48%) SAS
5 19 (1.47%) Palantir Foundry
6 18 (1.39%) Confluence
7 8 (0.62%) Appian
8 7 (0.54%) Apache Superset
9 5 (0.39%) 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%) CMS
12 1 (0.077%) IBM HTTP Server
Applications
1 29 (2.25%) Microsoft Excel
2 11 (0.85%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 9 (0.70%) Microsoft Office
4 7 (0.54%) Microsoft Project
5 6 (0.46%) Spreadsheet
6 4 (0.31%) MS Visio
7 3 (0.23%) Trello
8 2 (0.15%) Chatbot
Business Applications
1 5 (0.39%) BambooHR
2 4 (0.31%) Aladdin
3 3 (0.23%) 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%) SAP ECC
Cloud Services
1 597 (46.24%) Azure
2 460 (35.63%) AWS
3 287 (22.23%) Power Platform
4 202 (15.65%) Azure Data Factory
5 173 (13.40%) GCP
6 166 (12.86%) Snowflake
7 154 (11.93%) Amazon S3
8 148 (11.46%) Azure Synapse Analytics
9 135 (10.46%) GitHub
10 116 (8.99%) Serverless
11 114 (8.83%) dbt
12 105 (8.13%) Azure DevOps
13 94 (7.28%) AWS Lambda
14 81 (6.27%) GitHub Actions
15 64 (4.96%) AWS CloudFormation
16 38 (2.94%) AWS Step Functions
17 34 (2.63%) Amazon EMR
18 31 (2.40%) Collibra
19 29 (2.25%) Amazon SageMaker
20 28 (2.17%) Amazon CloudWatch
Communications & Networking
1 5 (0.39%) RTP
2 4 (0.31%) Cisco IPT
2 4 (0.31%) Kerberos
2 4 (0.31%) Network Security
3 3 (0.23%) VPN
4 1 (0.077%) 4G
4 1 (0.077%) 5G
4 1 (0.077%) Firewall
4 1 (0.077%) MQTT
4 1 (0.077%) SAN
4 1 (0.077%) SMS
4 1 (0.077%) SSL
4 1 (0.077%) TCP/IP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 261 (20.22%) Power BI
2 256 (19.83%) Data Warehouse
3 194 (15.03%) Data Lake
4 124 (9.60%) Metadata
5 89 (6.89%) Big Data
5 89 (6.89%) SQL Server
6 83 (6.43%) Delta Lake
6 83 (6.43%) NoSQL
7 70 (5.42%) Amazon Redshift
8 69 (5.34%) Amazon Athena
9 68 (5.27%) Tableau
10 66 (5.11%) Azure SQL Database
10 66 (5.11%) Snowflake Schema
11 62 (4.80%) BigQuery
12 58 (4.49%) Relational Database
13 56 (4.34%) PostgreSQL
14 49 (3.80%) Hadoop
15 38 (2.94%) SQL Server Integration Services
16 35 (2.71%) Spark SQL
17 24 (1.86%) Data Vault
Development Applications
1 173 (13.40%) Git
2 63 (4.88%) GitLab
3 47 (3.64%) MLflow
4 42 (3.25%) JIRA
5 38 (2.94%) Jenkins
6 7 (0.54%) Selenium
6 7 (0.54%) SonarQube
7 3 (0.23%) JUnit
7 3 (0.23%) Maven
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%) Cucumber
8 2 (0.15%) Mockito
8 2 (0.15%) Visual Studio
8 2 (0.15%) Visual Studio Code
9 1 (0.077%) Sonatype Nexus
General
1 325 (25.17%) Social Skills
2 315 (24.40%) Finance
3 193 (14.95%) Analytical Skills
4 108 (8.37%) Public Sector
5 74 (5.73%) Banking
6 28 (2.17%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 24 (1.86%) Documentation Skills
8 21 (1.63%) Retail
9 17 (1.32%) Front Office
9 17 (1.32%) Marketing
10 15 (1.16%) Influencing Skills
10 15 (1.16%) Telecoms
11 14 (1.08%) Investment Banking
11 14 (1.08%) Legal
12 12 (0.93%) Financial Institution
13 9 (0.70%) Pharmaceutical
14 7 (0.54%) Law
15 6 (0.46%) Manufacturing
15 6 (0.46%) Military
15 6 (0.46%) Publishing
Job Titles
1 597 (46.24%) Data Engineer
2 173 (13.40%) Senior
3 144 (11.15%) Lead
4 120 (9.30%) Architect
5 110 (8.52%) Senior Data Engineer
6 82 (6.35%) Developer
7 77 (5.96%) Azure Engineer
8 63 (4.88%) Azure Data Engineer
9 62 (4.80%) Data Architect
10 61 (4.73%) AWS Engineer
11 60 (4.65%) Analyst
12 58 (4.49%) Lead Data Engineer
13 49 (3.80%) Snowflake Engineer
14 45 (3.49%) Data Scientist
15 43 (3.33%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
16 41 (3.18%) Snowflake Data Engineer
17 40 (3.10%) AWS Data Engineer
17 40 (3.10%) Consultant
18 36 (2.79%) Data Analyst
19 32 (2.48%) Solutions Architect
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 219 (16.96%) PySpark
2 153 (11.85%) Kafka
3 65 (5.03%) Pandas
4 52 (4.03%) PyTorch
5 43 (3.33%) scikit-learn
5 43 (3.33%) TensorFlow
6 41 (3.18%) NumPy
7 30 (2.32%) JSON
8 29 (2.25%) REST
9 25 (1.94%) YAML
10 23 (1.78%) Spring
11 22 (1.70%) pytest
11 22 (1.70%) React
12 21 (1.63%) FastAPI
12 21 (1.63%) LangChain
12 21 (1.63%) RESTful
13 18 (1.39%) Flask
13 18 (1.39%) Great Expectations
14 16 (1.24%) OAuth
14 16 (1.24%) Spring Boot
Miscellaneous
1 171 (13.25%) Cloud Native
2 46 (3.56%) Product Ownership
3 45 (3.49%) Distributed Systems
4 40 (3.10%) Algorithms
5 38 (2.94%) Legacy Systems
6 33 (2.56%) Data Structures
7 30 (2.32%) Onboarding
8 29 (2.25%) Distributed Computing
9 23 (1.78%) AI Agents
10 22 (1.70%) Hybrid Cloud
11 21 (1.63%) Greenfield Project
12 19 (1.47%) Data Protection Act
13 18 (1.39%) Analytical Mindset
14 16 (1.24%) NHS
15 15 (1.16%) Clustering
16 13 (1.01%) Management Information System
17 12 (0.93%) Fixed Income
17 12 (0.93%) Virtual Team
18 11 (0.85%) Self-Motivation
19 9 (0.70%) Derivative
Operating Systems
1 29 (2.25%) Linux
2 16 (1.24%) Unix
3 8 (0.62%) 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
1 650 (50.35%) Analytics
2 586 (45.39%) Data Pipeline
3 506 (39.19%) ETL
4 498 (38.57%) Data Modelling
5 462 (35.79%) CI/CD
6 345 (26.72%) AI
7 331 (25.64%) Data Governance
8 327 (25.33%) DevOps
9 325 (25.17%) Business Intelligence
10 321 (24.86%) Agile
11 265 (20.53%) Machine Learning
12 257 (19.91%) Problem-Solving
13 247 (19.13%) Data Science
14 206 (15.96%) Data Architecture
15 158 (12.24%) Decision-Making
15 158 (12.24%) Infrastructure as Code
16 151 (11.70%) Migration
17 149 (11.54%) Validation
18 135 (10.46%) Data Transformation
19 126 (9.76%) Data Ingestion
Programming Languages
1 717 (55.54%) Python
2 689 (53.37%) SQL
3 106 (8.21%) Java
4 68 (5.27%) Scala
5 44 (3.41%) Data Analysis Expressions
6 42 (3.25%) C#
7 34 (2.63%) Bash
8 32 (2.48%) PowerShell
9 24 (1.86%) T-SQL
10 22 (1.70%) JavaScript
11 21 (1.63%) R
12 19 (1.47%) Bicep
13 14 (1.08%) Go
14 11 (0.85%) Shell Script
14 11 (0.85%) TypeScript
15 9 (0.70%) PL/SQL
16 6 (0.46%) Korn
17 5 (0.39%) C++
17 5 (0.39%) SAS Macro
18 3 (0.23%) Rust
Qualifications
1 261 (20.22%) Security Cleared
2 224 (17.35%) SC Cleared
3 104 (8.06%) Degree
4 47 (3.64%) Azure Certification
5 45 (3.49%) Computer Science Degree
6 40 (3.10%) Master's Degree
7 20 (1.55%) BPSS Clearance
8 17 (1.32%) AWS Certification
9 16 (1.24%) DV Cleared
10 11 (0.85%) Microsoft Certification
11 8 (0.62%) PhD
12 5 (0.39%) SnowPro
13 4 (0.31%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 4 (0.31%) DBS Check
13 4 (0.31%) Microsoft Certified Professional
14 3 (0.23%) IBM Certification
15 2 (0.15%) Tableau Certification
16 1 (0.077%) (ISC)2 CCSP
16 1 (0.077%) AWS Certified SysOps Administrator
16 1 (0.077%) CSPO
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 367 (28.43%) Data Quality
2 99 (7.67%) GDPR
3 44 (3.41%) QA
4 13 (1.01%) Sarbanes-Oxley
5 11 (0.85%) Accessibility
6 9 (0.70%) SLA
7 6 (0.46%) HIPAA
8 5 (0.39%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 5 (0.39%) PERC
8 5 (0.39%) SOC 2
9 4 (0.31%) California Consumer Privacy Act
9 4 (0.31%) Solvency II
10 3 (0.23%) GRC
10 3 (0.23%) WCAG
11 2 (0.15%) Actionable Recommendations
11 2 (0.15%) HL7
11 2 (0.15%) MiFID
11 2 (0.15%) NIST
11 2 (0.15%) PCI DSS
11 2 (0.15%) PMO
System Software
1 140 (10.84%) Docker
2 6 (0.46%) HDFS
3 3 (0.23%) Virtual Machines
4 1 (0.077%) Active Directory
4 1 (0.077%) Apache ZooKeeper
4 1 (0.077%) ISA Server
Systems Management
1 183 (14.18%) Terraform
2 128 (9.91%) Kubernetes
3 29 (2.25%) Prometheus
4 20 (1.55%) Grafana
5 9 (0.70%) Ansible
6 5 (0.39%) Argo
7 4 (0.31%) Kubeflow
8 3 (0.23%) Nagios
8 3 (0.23%) Rancher
9 2 (0.15%) Hadoop YARN
9 2 (0.15%) Kibana
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
1 388 (30.05%) Databricks
2 204 (15.80%) Microsoft
3 62 (4.80%) Google
4 60 (4.65%) Informatica
5 42 (3.25%) Oracle
6 33 (2.56%) Talend
7 26 (2.01%) Foundry
8 21 (1.63%) OpenAI
8 21 (1.63%) Palantir
9 19 (1.47%) Splunk
10 18 (1.39%) SAP
11 15 (1.16%) Cloudera
12 14 (1.08%) ServiceNow
13 11 (0.85%) Denodo
14 10 (0.77%) Salesforce
15 9 (0.70%) IBM
15 9 (0.70%) UiPath
16 8 (0.62%) Automation Anywhere
17 7 (0.54%) MicroStrategy
18 5 (0.39%) Virgin Media