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

6 months to
2 Feb 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 105 151 223
Rank change year-on-year +46 +72 +3
Contract jobs citing Data Engineering 949 533 487
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.47% 1.72% 1.08%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 2.83% 1.92% 1.24%
Number of daily rates quoted 643 371 365
10th Percentile £363 £375 £375
25th Percentile £425 £453 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -4.55% - -8.33%
75th Percentile £625 £650 £638
90th Percentile £750 £813 £725
UK excluding London median daily rate £498 £500 £550
% change year-on-year -0.50% -9.09% +1.85%
Number of hourly rates quoted 8 14 10
10th Percentile £45.58 £21.48 £35.00
25th Percentile £50.94 £22.18 £35.16
Median hourly rate £59.50 £25.97 £42.25
Median % change year-on-year +129.15% -38.54% -43.67%
75th Percentile £70.32 £28.60 £61.31
90th Percentile £78.23 £54.50 £78.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £59.50 £25.97 £78.00
% change year-on-year +129.15% -66.71% +281.05%

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 33,490 27,717 39,322
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 87.15% 89.21% 87.23%
Number of daily rates quoted 21,205 16,795 25,884
10th Percentile £305 £307 £300
25th Percentile £406 £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 £479 £499 £500
% change year-on-year -4.06% -0.15% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,020 865 2,103
10th Percentile £14.50 £15.62 £13.29
25th Percentile £17.69 £21.00 £16.50
Median hourly rate £25.15 £32.50 £35.00
Median % change year-on-year -22.62% -7.14% +7.69%
75th Percentile £58.75 £62.50 £61.25
90th Percentile £70.00 £75.00 £73.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £24.71 £30.98 £35.25
% change year-on-year -20.23% -12.12% +21.55%

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 2 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 2 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 2 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 +48 840 £525 -7.89% 487
London +52 580 £550 -4.35% 281
UK excluding London +7 273 £498 -0.50% 320
Work from Home +14 272 £550 -1.79% 267
North of England -9 82 £450 -19.64% 79
Midlands +2 74 £520 +4.00% 41
West Midlands -2 55 £542 +9.39% 29
North West 0 51 £450 -10.00% 42
Scotland +20 43 £404 -14.69% 27
South West -10 39 £550 -17.60% 24
South East -18 31 £513 -2.38% 129
East Midlands -5 19 £447 -20.53% 12
Yorkshire -52 17 £500 -14.89% 27
North East -4 14 £425 -28.87% 11
East of England -21 11 £525 +64.06% 19
Wales -10 6 £563 +12.50% 2
Northern Ireland - 2 £430 - 2

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
1 139 (14.65%) Apache Spark
2 114 (12.01%) Apache Airflow
3 73 (7.69%) Apache
4 15 (1.58%) Palantir Foundry
5 14 (1.48%) Confluence
6 6 (0.63%) Appian
7 5 (0.53%) SAS
8 3 (0.32%) Microsoft Exchange
9 2 (0.21%) Jupyter
9 2 (0.21%) SharePoint
10 1 (0.11%) Adobe Experience Manager
10 1 (0.11%) Apache Pig
10 1 (0.11%) Apache Synapse
10 1 (0.11%) ArcGIS
10 1 (0.11%) Camunda
10 1 (0.11%) CMS
10 1 (0.11%) Luigi
Applications
1 20 (2.11%) Microsoft Excel
2 9 (0.95%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 6 (0.63%) Chatbot
3 6 (0.63%) Microsoft Project
4 4 (0.42%) Microsoft Office
4 4 (0.42%) MS Visio
5 3 (0.32%) Trello
6 1 (0.11%) Adobe XD
6 1 (0.11%) Spreadsheet
Business Applications
1 5 (0.53%) Aladdin
2 3 (0.32%) Dynamics CRM
3 2 (0.21%) Eagle PACE
3 2 (0.21%) Markit EDM
3 2 (0.21%) Salesforce CRM
4 1 (0.11%) Actimize
4 1 (0.11%) Adobe Campaign
4 1 (0.11%) Maximo
4 1 (0.11%) Misys Midas
4 1 (0.11%) SAP BPC
4 1 (0.11%) SAP ERP
4 1 (0.11%) SAP S/4HANA
4 1 (0.11%) Workday HCM
Cloud Services
1 449 (47.31%) Azure
2 327 (34.46%) AWS
3 195 (20.55%) Power Platform
4 173 (18.23%) Azure Data Factory
5 135 (14.23%) GCP
6 131 (13.80%) Snowflake
7 109 (11.49%) Amazon S3
8 107 (11.28%) Azure Synapse Analytics
9 96 (10.12%) Serverless
10 95 (10.01%) GitHub
11 84 (8.85%) dbt
12 80 (8.43%) Azure DevOps
13 72 (7.59%) AWS Lambda
14 66 (6.95%) GitHub Actions
15 44 (4.64%) AWS CloudFormation
16 28 (2.95%) AWS Step Functions
17 23 (2.42%) Cloud Computing
18 22 (2.32%) Amazon EMR
18 22 (2.32%) Amazon SageMaker
18 22 (2.32%) Azure Machine Learning
Communications & Networking
1 5 (0.53%) Network Security
2 4 (0.42%) Cisco IPT
2 4 (0.42%) Kerberos
3 3 (0.32%) Firewall
3 3 (0.32%) VPN
4 2 (0.21%) RTP
5 1 (0.11%) MQTT
5 1 (0.11%) SAN
5 1 (0.11%) SMS
5 1 (0.11%) SSL
5 1 (0.11%) TCP/IP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 191 (20.13%) Data Warehouse
2 184 (19.39%) Power BI
3 133 (14.01%) Data Lake
4 84 (8.85%) Metadata
5 63 (6.64%) NoSQL
6 62 (6.53%) Big Data
6 62 (6.53%) SQL Server
7 52 (5.48%) Azure SQL Database
8 51 (5.37%) Delta Lake
9 50 (5.27%) Relational Database
10 48 (5.06%) Snowflake Schema
11 47 (4.95%) BigQuery
12 46 (4.85%) Amazon Redshift
13 40 (4.21%) Amazon Athena
13 40 (4.21%) PostgreSQL
14 35 (3.69%) Tableau
15 34 (3.58%) Hadoop
16 24 (2.53%) RDBMS
17 23 (2.42%) Elasticsearch
17 23 (2.42%) SQL Server Integration Services
Development Applications
1 139 (14.65%) Git
2 52 (5.48%) GitLab
3 41 (4.32%) Jenkins
4 37 (3.90%) MLflow
5 29 (3.06%) JIRA
6 7 (0.74%) Visual Studio Code
7 4 (0.42%) Cucumber
7 4 (0.42%) Selenium
7 4 (0.42%) SonarQube
8 3 (0.32%) ERwin
8 3 (0.32%) JMeter
8 3 (0.32%) Terragrunt
9 2 (0.21%) Gemini Tracker
9 2 (0.21%) Maven
9 2 (0.21%) Mockito
9 2 (0.21%) Poetry
9 2 (0.21%) Postman
9 2 (0.21%) Pylint
9 2 (0.21%) TeamCity
9 2 (0.21%) TestRail
General
1 271 (28.56%) Social Skills
2 217 (22.87%) Finance
3 129 (13.59%) Analytical Skills
4 74 (7.80%) Public Sector
5 61 (6.43%) Banking
6 23 (2.42%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 19 (2.00%) Investment Banking
8 17 (1.79%) Front Office
9 16 (1.69%) Influencing Skills
10 14 (1.48%) Marketing
10 14 (1.48%) Retail
11 11 (1.16%) Documentation Skills
11 11 (1.16%) Pharmaceutical
12 10 (1.05%) Legal
13 9 (0.95%) Publishing
14 8 (0.84%) Military
15 7 (0.74%) Presentation Skills
16 6 (0.63%) Back Office
17 5 (0.53%) Financial Institution
18 4 (0.42%) Manufacturing
Job Titles
1 415 (43.73%) Data Engineer
2 123 (12.96%) Senior
3 104 (10.96%) Lead
4 81 (8.54%) Senior Data Engineer
5 74 (7.80%) Azure Engineer
6 72 (7.59%) Architect
7 64 (6.74%) Developer
8 55 (5.80%) Azure Data Engineer
9 49 (5.16%) Analyst
10 42 (4.43%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
10 42 (4.43%) Snowflake Engineer
11 41 (4.32%) AWS Engineer
12 40 (4.21%) Data Architect
13 35 (3.69%) Data Scientist
13 35 (3.69%) Python Engineer
14 34 (3.58%) Snowflake Data Engineer
15 29 (3.06%) Lead Data Engineer
16 27 (2.85%) AWS Data Engineer
16 27 (2.85%) Data Analyst
17 24 (2.53%) Consultant
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 172 (18.12%) PySpark
2 101 (10.64%) Kafka
3 60 (6.32%) Pandas
4 54 (5.69%) PyTorch
5 47 (4.95%) TensorFlow
6 45 (4.74%) NumPy
7 36 (3.79%) FastAPI
7 36 (3.79%) scikit-learn
8 30 (3.16%) Flask
9 26 (2.74%) RESTful
10 24 (2.53%) pytest
10 24 (2.53%) React
11 22 (2.32%) LangChain
12 21 (2.21%) YAML
13 20 (2.11%) REST
14 18 (1.90%) JSON
15 16 (1.69%) Hugging Face
16 15 (1.58%) Spark Streaming
17 14 (1.48%) OAuth
18 13 (1.37%) Django
Miscellaneous
1 102 (10.75%) Cloud Native
2 41 (4.32%) Algorithms
3 30 (3.16%) Product Ownership
4 28 (2.95%) Distributed Computing
5 24 (2.53%) Onboarding
6 23 (2.42%) Distributed Systems
7 20 (2.11%) Data Protection Act
8 19 (2.00%) Data Structures
9 18 (1.90%) Legacy Systems
10 16 (1.69%) AI Agents
10 16 (1.69%) Analytical Mindset
10 16 (1.69%) Hybrid Cloud
11 13 (1.37%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
12 11 (1.16%) Clustering
12 11 (1.16%) Data Fabric
12 11 (1.16%) Enterprise Software
12 11 (1.16%) Greenfield Project
12 11 (1.16%) Hedge funds
12 11 (1.16%) Management Information System
13 10 (1.05%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 26 (2.74%) Linux
2 5 (0.53%) VMS
3 3 (0.32%) Unix
4 2 (0.21%) Ubuntu
5 1 (0.11%) CentOS
5 1 (0.11%) Debian
Processes & Methodologies
1 421 (44.36%) Data Pipeline
2 392 (41.31%) Analytics
3 370 (38.99%) ETL
4 349 (36.78%) Data Modelling
5 343 (36.14%) CI/CD
6 254 (26.77%) AI
7 244 (25.71%) Data Governance
8 227 (23.92%) Agile
9 226 (23.81%) DevOps
10 214 (22.55%) Business Intelligence
10 214 (22.55%) Machine Learning
11 195 (20.55%) Data Science
11 195 (20.55%) Problem-Solving
12 165 (17.39%) Data Architecture
13 117 (12.33%) Infrastructure as Code
14 99 (10.43%) Containerisation
14 99 (10.43%) Data Integration
15 96 (10.12%) Data Transformation
15 96 (10.12%) Decision-Making
16 95 (10.01%) Visualisation
Programming Languages
1 575 (60.59%) Python
2 473 (49.84%) SQL
3 62 (6.53%) Java
4 61 (6.43%) Scala
5 36 (3.79%) C#
6 35 (3.69%) JavaScript
7 28 (2.95%) PowerShell
8 22 (2.32%) Data Analysis Expressions
9 19 (2.00%) Bash
9 19 (2.00%) Bicep
10 17 (1.79%) C++
10 17 (1.79%) R
10 17 (1.79%) T-SQL
10 17 (1.79%) TypeScript
11 14 (1.48%) Go
11 14 (1.48%) PL/SQL
12 11 (1.16%) Shell Script
13 10 (1.05%) Rust
14 8 (0.84%) Korn
15 2 (0.21%) Kusto Query Language
Qualifications
1 187 (19.70%) Security Cleared
2 155 (16.33%) SC Cleared
3 86 (9.06%) Degree
4 52 (5.48%) Azure Certification
5 39 (4.11%) Master's Degree
6 35 (3.69%) Computer Science Degree
7 19 (2.00%) DV Cleared
8 16 (1.69%) AWS Certification
9 14 (1.48%) Microsoft Certification
10 13 (1.37%) PhD
11 7 (0.74%) BPSS Clearance
12 4 (0.42%) DBS Check
13 3 (0.32%) IBM Certification
13 3 (0.32%) ISTQB
13 3 (0.32%) Microsoft Certified Professional
13 3 (0.32%) Tableau Certification
14 2 (0.21%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
14 2 (0.21%) CBAP
14 2 (0.21%) SnowPro
15 1 (0.11%) CSPO
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 258 (27.19%) Data Quality
2 84 (8.85%) GDPR
3 29 (3.06%) QA
4 16 (1.69%) Accessibility
5 11 (1.16%) Sarbanes-Oxley
6 10 (1.05%) HIPAA
7 6 (0.63%) California Consumer Privacy Act
8 5 (0.53%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 5 (0.53%) PERC
8 5 (0.53%) SOC 2
9 4 (0.42%) WCAG
10 3 (0.32%) GRC
11 2 (0.21%) Disclosure Scotland
11 2 (0.21%) HL7
11 2 (0.21%) MiFID
11 2 (0.21%) PCI DSS
11 2 (0.21%) PMO
12 1 (0.11%) AIFMD
12 1 (0.11%) Dodd-Frank
12 1 (0.11%) EMIR
System Software
1 143 (15.07%) Docker
2 14 (1.48%) HDFS
3 2 (0.21%) Active Directory
4 1 (0.11%) Apache ZooKeeper
4 1 (0.11%) ISA Server
4 1 (0.11%) Virtual Machines
Systems Management
1 150 (15.81%) Terraform
2 121 (12.75%) Kubernetes
3 15 (1.58%) Grafana
4 13 (1.37%) Prometheus
5 12 (1.26%) Ansible
6 9 (0.95%) Hadoop YARN
7 5 (0.53%) Argo
7 5 (0.53%) Puppet
8 3 (0.32%) Kibana
8 3 (0.32%) logstash
9 2 (0.21%) Control-M
9 2 (0.21%) Kubeflow
9 2 (0.21%) Nagios
9 2 (0.21%) Single Sign-On
10 1 (0.11%) Apache Ranger
10 1 (0.11%) Kustomize
10 1 (0.11%) Oozie
10 1 (0.11%) Systems Management Server (SMS)
Vendors
1 288 (30.35%) Databricks
2 130 (13.70%) Microsoft
3 45 (4.74%) Google
4 28 (2.95%) Oracle
5 25 (2.63%) Informatica
6 18 (1.90%) Foundry
6 18 (1.90%) Palantir
6 18 (1.90%) Talend
7 14 (1.48%) OpenAI
8 12 (1.26%) Salesforce
8 12 (1.26%) SAP
9 8 (0.84%) Cloudera
9 8 (0.84%) Virgin Media
10 7 (0.74%) Denodo
10 7 (0.74%) IBM
11 6 (0.63%) Automation Anywhere
11 6 (0.63%) Guidewire
11 6 (0.63%) MicroStrategy
11 6 (0.63%) UiPath
12 5 (0.53%) ServiceNow