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

6 months to
25 Feb 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 94 151 212
Rank change year-on-year +57 +61 +20
Contract jobs citing Data Engineering 1,121 541 488
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.71% 1.78% 1.11%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.13% 1.98% 1.27%
Number of daily rates quoted 772 373 370
10th Percentile £363 £375 £375
25th Percentile £430 £450 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £524 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -4.77% - -8.33%
75th Percentile £615 £675 £650
90th Percentile £738 £838 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £500 £550
% change year-on-year -5.00% -9.09% +1.85%
Number of hourly rates quoted 13 14 8
10th Percentile £52.00 £21.48 £31.02
25th Percentile £56.75 £22.18 £35.00
Median hourly rate £69.00 £25.97 £35.32
Median % change year-on-year +165.74% -26.48% +0.90%
75th Percentile £75.00 £28.60 £45.19
90th Percentile £82.00 £54.50 £54.68
UK excluding London median hourly rate £69.00 £25.97 £43.37
% change year-on-year +165.74% -40.12% +111.85%

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 35,855 27,377 38,366
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 86.81% 89.88% 87.00%
Number of daily rates quoted 22,757 16,975 25,075
10th Percentile £313 £306 £300
25th Percentile £410 £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 £481 £493 £500
% change year-on-year -2.28% -1.50% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,138 862 2,184
10th Percentile £14.61 £15.62 £13.29
25th Percentile £17.96 £21.25 £16.25
Median hourly rate £25.94 £33.00 £33.07
Median % change year-on-year -21.39% -0.20% -5.53%
75th Percentile £61.18 £63.75 £59.93
90th Percentile £72.50 £75.23 £71.97
UK excluding London median hourly rate £25.15 £32.00 £35.00
% change year-on-year -21.41% -8.57% -

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 25 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 25 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 25 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 +62 992 £525 -4.55% 435
London +54 661 £550 -4.35% 222
UK excluding London +31 347 £475 -5.00% 304
Work from Home +26 326 £550 -4.35% 234
North of England -4 103 £450 -10.00% 101
Midlands +7 89 £513 +2.50% 44
West Midlands 0 69 £520 +4.00% 36
South West +3 55 £550 -15.38% 29
North West -5 55 £445 +0.28% 51
Scotland +31 50 £429 -9.36% 13
South East -19 41 £550 +7.32% 100
Yorkshire -43 29 £500 -16.67% 41
East Midlands -14 20 £447 -12.78% 8
North East 0 19 £450 -23.08% 10
East of England -21 15 £551 +72.45% 15
Wales -14 6 £563 +46.10% 4
Northern Ireland - 2 £430 -

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
1 175 (15.61%) Apache Spark
2 121 (10.79%) Apache Airflow
3 83 (7.40%) Apache
4 20 (1.78%) Palantir Foundry
5 19 (1.69%) SAS
6 17 (1.52%) Confluence
7 8 (0.71%) Appian
8 3 (0.27%) Apache Superset
8 3 (0.27%) Jupyter
8 3 (0.27%) Microsoft Exchange
9 2 (0.18%) SharePoint
10 1 (0.089%) Adobe Experience Manager
10 1 (0.089%) Apache Synapse
10 1 (0.089%) ArcGIS
10 1 (0.089%) Camunda
10 1 (0.089%) CMS
10 1 (0.089%) IBM HTTP Server
10 1 (0.089%) Luigi
Applications
1 23 (2.05%) Microsoft Excel
2 11 (0.98%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 7 (0.62%) Microsoft Project
4 6 (0.54%) Chatbot
4 6 (0.54%) Microsoft Office
5 4 (0.36%) MS Visio
6 3 (0.27%) Trello
7 2 (0.18%) Spreadsheet
8 1 (0.089%) Adobe XD
Business Applications
1 4 (0.36%) Aladdin
2 3 (0.27%) SAP BPC
3 2 (0.18%) Dynamics CRM
3 2 (0.18%) Salesforce CRM
4 1 (0.089%) Actimize
4 1 (0.089%) Adobe Campaign
4 1 (0.089%) Markit EDM
4 1 (0.089%) Maximo
4 1 (0.089%) Misys Midas
4 1 (0.089%) SAP ERP
4 1 (0.089%) SAP S/4HANA
4 1 (0.089%) Workday HCM
Cloud Services
1 529 (47.19%) Azure
2 399 (35.59%) AWS
3 237 (21.14%) Power Platform
4 204 (18.20%) Azure Data Factory
5 161 (14.36%) GCP
6 146 (13.02%) Snowflake
7 128 (11.42%) Amazon S3
8 120 (10.70%) Azure Synapse Analytics
9 116 (10.35%) Serverless
10 112 (9.99%) GitHub
11 95 (8.47%) Azure DevOps
12 94 (8.39%) dbt
13 90 (8.03%) AWS Lambda
14 76 (6.78%) GitHub Actions
15 58 (5.17%) AWS CloudFormation
16 36 (3.21%) AWS Step Functions
17 33 (2.94%) Amazon EMR
18 29 (2.59%) Amazon SageMaker
19 26 (2.32%) Collibra
20 25 (2.23%) Azure Machine Learning
Communications & Networking
1 5 (0.45%) Network Security
2 4 (0.36%) Cisco IPT
2 4 (0.36%) Kerberos
3 3 (0.27%) Firewall
3 3 (0.27%) RTP
3 3 (0.27%) VPN
4 1 (0.089%) 4G
4 1 (0.089%) 5G
4 1 (0.089%) MQTT
4 1 (0.089%) SAN
4 1 (0.089%) SMS
4 1 (0.089%) SSL
4 1 (0.089%) TCP/IP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 225 (20.07%) Data Warehouse
2 216 (19.27%) Power BI
3 154 (13.74%) Data Lake
4 99 (8.83%) Metadata
5 79 (7.05%) Big Data
6 77 (6.87%) SQL Server
7 72 (6.42%) NoSQL
8 68 (6.07%) Delta Lake
9 58 (5.17%) Relational Database
9 58 (5.17%) Snowflake Schema
10 55 (4.91%) Azure SQL Database
11 53 (4.73%) Amazon Athena
12 52 (4.64%) Amazon Redshift
12 52 (4.64%) PostgreSQL
13 51 (4.55%) BigQuery
14 44 (3.93%) Hadoop
15 43 (3.84%) Tableau
16 32 (2.85%) SQL Server Integration Services
17 30 (2.68%) Spark SQL
18 23 (2.05%) RDBMS
Development Applications
1 169 (15.08%) Git
2 62 (5.53%) GitLab
3 46 (4.10%) MLflow
4 44 (3.93%) Jenkins
5 31 (2.77%) JIRA
6 7 (0.62%) Visual Studio Code
7 6 (0.54%) Selenium
8 5 (0.45%) SonarQube
9 4 (0.36%) Cucumber
10 3 (0.27%) ERwin
10 3 (0.27%) JUnit
10 3 (0.27%) Maven
10 3 (0.27%) Postman
10 3 (0.27%) Robot Framework
10 3 (0.27%) Terragrunt
11 2 (0.18%) Gemini Tracker
11 2 (0.18%) JMeter
11 2 (0.18%) Mockito
11 2 (0.18%) TeamCity
11 2 (0.18%) Visual Studio
General
1 312 (27.83%) Social Skills
2 254 (22.66%) Finance
3 151 (13.47%) Analytical Skills
4 91 (8.12%) Public Sector
5 79 (7.05%) Banking
6 24 (2.14%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 19 (1.69%) Investment Banking
7 19 (1.69%) Retail
8 18 (1.61%) Documentation Skills
9 17 (1.52%) Influencing Skills
10 15 (1.34%) Front Office
11 14 (1.25%) Marketing
12 10 (0.89%) Pharmaceutical
12 10 (0.89%) Publishing
13 9 (0.80%) Legal
14 8 (0.71%) Financial Institution
15 6 (0.54%) Back Office
15 6 (0.54%) Military
15 6 (0.54%) Presentation Skills
15 6 (0.54%) Telecoms
Job Titles
1 501 (44.69%) Data Engineer
2 147 (13.11%) Lead
3 140 (12.49%) Senior
4 93 (8.30%) Senior Data Engineer
5 84 (7.49%) Architect
6 82 (7.31%) Azure Engineer
7 74 (6.60%) Developer
8 62 (5.53%) Azure Data Engineer
9 54 (4.82%) Analyst
10 51 (4.55%) AWS Engineer
11 49 (4.37%) Lead Data Engineer
12 48 (4.28%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
13 45 (4.01%) Data Architect
13 45 (4.01%) Snowflake Engineer
14 44 (3.93%) Data Scientist
15 38 (3.39%) Snowflake Data Engineer
16 35 (3.12%) Python Engineer
17 34 (3.03%) AWS Data Engineer
18 32 (2.85%) Data Analyst
19 25 (2.23%) Consultant
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 210 (18.73%) PySpark
2 129 (11.51%) Kafka
3 66 (5.89%) Pandas
4 61 (5.44%) PyTorch
5 50 (4.46%) TensorFlow
6 48 (4.28%) NumPy
7 45 (4.01%) scikit-learn
8 37 (3.30%) FastAPI
9 32 (2.85%) Flask
9 32 (2.85%) RESTful
10 30 (2.68%) JSON
11 28 (2.50%) pytest
12 27 (2.41%) YAML
13 25 (2.23%) React
14 24 (2.14%) LangChain
14 24 (2.14%) REST
15 16 (1.43%) ARM Templates
15 16 (1.43%) Django
16 15 (1.34%) Great Expectations
16 15 (1.34%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 133 (11.86%) Cloud Native
2 48 (4.28%) Algorithms
3 39 (3.48%) Product Ownership
4 36 (3.21%) Distributed Systems
5 31 (2.77%) Distributed Computing
6 25 (2.23%) Onboarding
7 23 (2.05%) Data Structures
8 22 (1.96%) Hybrid Cloud
9 21 (1.87%) Data Protection Act
9 21 (1.87%) Legacy Systems
10 20 (1.78%) AI Agents
11 17 (1.52%) Analytical Mindset
12 13 (1.16%) Clustering
13 12 (1.07%) Greenfield Project
14 11 (0.98%) Fixed Income
14 11 (0.98%) Management Information System
14 11 (0.98%) NHS
15 10 (0.89%) Derivative
15 10 (0.89%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
15 10 (0.89%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 25 (2.23%) Linux
2 7 (0.62%) VMS
3 6 (0.54%) Unix
4 2 (0.18%) Ubuntu
5 1 (0.089%) CentOS
5 1 (0.089%) Debian
5 1 (0.089%) Windows
Processes & Methodologies
1 514 (45.85%) Data Pipeline
2 506 (45.14%) Analytics
3 433 (38.63%) ETL
4 426 (38.00%) Data Modelling
5 422 (37.64%) CI/CD
6 301 (26.85%) AI
7 291 (25.96%) DevOps
8 289 (25.78%) Data Governance
9 286 (25.51%) Agile
10 260 (23.19%) Business Intelligence
11 258 (23.02%) Machine Learning
12 240 (21.41%) Data Science
13 233 (20.79%) Problem-Solving
14 173 (15.43%) Data Architecture
15 151 (13.47%) Infrastructure as Code
16 120 (10.70%) Decision-Making
17 119 (10.62%) Validation
18 113 (10.08%) LLM
19 110 (9.81%) Data Integration
20 109 (9.72%) Containerisation
Programming Languages
1 679 (60.57%) Python
2 587 (52.36%) SQL
3 82 (7.31%) Java
4 65 (5.80%) Scala
5 45 (4.01%) C#
6 33 (2.94%) JavaScript
6 33 (2.94%) PowerShell
7 31 (2.77%) Data Analysis Expressions
8 28 (2.50%) Bash
9 23 (2.05%) Bicep
9 23 (2.05%) T-SQL
10 20 (1.78%) TypeScript
11 16 (1.43%) R
12 15 (1.34%) Go
13 14 (1.25%) C++
13 14 (1.25%) PL/SQL
14 8 (0.71%) Rust
15 7 (0.62%) Shell Script
16 6 (0.54%) Korn
17 3 (0.27%) SAS Macro
Qualifications
1 221 (19.71%) Security Cleared
2 181 (16.15%) SC Cleared
3 106 (9.46%) Degree
4 53 (4.73%) Azure Certification
5 47 (4.19%) Master's Degree
6 39 (3.48%) Computer Science Degree
7 22 (1.96%) DV Cleared
8 18 (1.61%) BPSS Clearance
9 17 (1.52%) AWS Certification
10 14 (1.25%) Microsoft Certification
11 13 (1.16%) PhD
12 4 (0.36%) DBS Check
12 4 (0.36%) Microsoft Certified Professional
13 3 (0.27%) IBM Certification
14 1 (0.089%) ACCA
14 1 (0.089%) CIMA
14 1 (0.089%) CISM
14 1 (0.089%) ISTQB
14 1 (0.089%) OCP
14 1 (0.089%) Oracle Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 317 (28.28%) Data Quality
2 90 (8.03%) GDPR
3 39 (3.48%) QA
4 17 (1.52%) Accessibility
5 12 (1.07%) Sarbanes-Oxley
6 9 (0.80%) HIPAA
7 6 (0.54%) California Consumer Privacy Act
7 6 (0.54%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 5 (0.45%) PERC
8 5 (0.45%) SOC 2
9 4 (0.36%) SLA
10 3 (0.27%) GRC
10 3 (0.27%) WCAG
11 2 (0.18%) HL7
11 2 (0.18%) MiFID
11 2 (0.18%) NIST
11 2 (0.18%) PCI DSS
11 2 (0.18%) Solvency II
12 1 (0.089%) EMIR
12 1 (0.089%) FATCA
System Software
1 156 (13.92%) Docker
2 9 (0.80%) HDFS
3 2 (0.18%) Active Directory
3 2 (0.18%) Virtual Machines
4 1 (0.089%) Apache ZooKeeper
4 1 (0.089%) ISA Server
Systems Management
1 182 (16.24%) Terraform
2 139 (12.40%) Kubernetes
3 27 (2.41%) Prometheus
4 17 (1.52%) Grafana
5 10 (0.89%) Ansible
6 5 (0.45%) Argo
7 4 (0.36%) Hadoop YARN
8 3 (0.27%) Control-M
8 3 (0.27%) Kubeflow
9 2 (0.18%) Kibana
9 2 (0.18%) logstash
9 2 (0.18%) Nagios
9 2 (0.18%) Oozie
9 2 (0.18%) Rancher
9 2 (0.18%) Single Sign-On
10 1 (0.089%) Apache Ranger
10 1 (0.089%) HP Fortify
10 1 (0.089%) Puppet
Vendors
1 339 (30.24%) Databricks
2 158 (14.09%) Microsoft
3 54 (4.82%) Google
4 39 (3.48%) Oracle
5 36 (3.21%) Informatica
6 26 (2.32%) Talend
7 24 (2.14%) Foundry
7 24 (2.14%) Palantir
8 21 (1.87%) OpenAI
9 16 (1.43%) SAP
10 14 (1.25%) Splunk
11 13 (1.16%) Cloudera
12 11 (0.98%) Salesforce
13 8 (0.71%) Automation Anywhere
13 8 (0.71%) Denodo
13 8 (0.71%) IBM
13 8 (0.71%) UiPath
14 7 (0.62%) Virgin Media
15 6 (0.54%) MicroStrategy
15 6 (0.54%) ServiceNow