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

6 months to
10 Mar 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 94 153 220
Rank change year-on-year +59 +67 -3
Contract jobs citing Data Engineering 1,149 537 492
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.71% 1.82% 1.10%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.14% 2.01% 1.27%
Number of daily rates quoted 798 377 369
10th Percentile £375 £375 £375
25th Percentile £440 £450 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £538 £550
Median % change year-on-year -2.33% -2.27% -8.33%
75th Percentile £623 £663 £675
90th Percentile £749 £838 £739
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £550
% change year-on-year - -9.09% +1.85%
Number of hourly rates quoted 14 13 13
10th Percentile £50.38 £21.40 £30.55
25th Percentile £55.44 £22.00 £31.25
Median hourly rate £66.50 £25.43 £35.00
Median % change year-on-year +161.50% -27.34% -
75th Percentile £74.82 £28.75 £43.51
90th Percentile £81.13 £58.00 £62.05
UK excluding London median hourly rate £66.50 £25.43 £47.69
% change year-on-year +161.50% -46.67% +139.50%

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 36,537 26,694 38,745
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 86.12% 90.29% 86.61%
Number of daily rates quoted 23,174 17,018 25,183
10th Percentile £313 £306 £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 £743 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £481 £493 £500
% change year-on-year -2.28% -1.50% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,160 902 2,347
10th Percentile £14.64 £15.51 £13.00
25th Percentile £18.50 £21.00 £16.06
Median hourly rate £29.61 £32.50 £32.50
Median % change year-on-year -8.89% - -7.14%
75th Percentile £63.75 £65.00 £57.50
90th Percentile £74.26 £77.10 £71.80
UK excluding London median hourly rate £26.55 £31.76 £31.80
% change year-on-year -16.40% -0.13% -9.14%

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 10 March 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 10 March 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 10 March 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 +60 1,020 £525 -4.55% 625
London +57 674 £550 -7.25% 212
UK excluding London +38 359 £500 - 453
Work from Home +23 338 £550 -4.35% 278
North of England +1 103 £460 -8.00% 121
Midlands +13 101 £519 +3.85% 60
West Midlands +3 81 £538 +7.50% 42
South West +6 57 £550 -15.38% 52
Scotland +27 49 £440 -6.98% 22
North West -7 48 £450 - 55
South East -27 41 £550 +10.00% 151
Yorkshire -35 34 £480 -20.00% 56
North East +6 21 £450 -17.05% 10
East Midlands -17 20 £447 -12.78% 17
East of England -33 14 £575 +79.69% 40
Wales -12 7 £563 +46.10% 10
Northern Ireland - 2 £430 - 3

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
1 182 (15.84%) Apache Spark
2 113 (9.83%) Apache Airflow
3 84 (7.31%) Apache
4 21 (1.83%) SAS
5 20 (1.74%) Palantir Foundry
6 15 (1.31%) Confluence
7 8 (0.70%) Appian
8 4 (0.35%) Jupyter
8 4 (0.35%) Microsoft Exchange
9 3 (0.26%) Apache Superset
10 2 (0.17%) SharePoint
11 1 (0.087%) Adobe Experience Manager
11 1 (0.087%) Apache Synapse
11 1 (0.087%) ArcGIS
11 1 (0.087%) Camunda
11 1 (0.087%) CMS
11 1 (0.087%) IBM HTTP Server
11 1 (0.087%) Luigi
Applications
1 24 (2.09%) Microsoft Excel
2 11 (0.96%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 7 (0.61%) Microsoft Project
4 6 (0.52%) Microsoft Office
5 5 (0.44%) Chatbot
6 4 (0.35%) MS Visio
7 3 (0.26%) Trello
8 2 (0.17%) Spreadsheet
9 1 (0.087%) Adobe XD
Business Applications
1 7 (0.61%) Aladdin
2 3 (0.26%) BambooHR
2 3 (0.26%) SAP BPC
3 2 (0.17%) Salesforce CRM
4 1 (0.087%) Actimize
4 1 (0.087%) Adobe Campaign
4 1 (0.087%) Markit EDM
4 1 (0.087%) Maximo
4 1 (0.087%) Misys Midas
4 1 (0.087%) SAP S/4HANA
4 1 (0.087%) Workday HCM
Cloud Services
1 541 (47.08%) Azure
2 408 (35.51%) AWS
3 250 (21.76%) Power Platform
4 199 (17.32%) Azure Data Factory
5 161 (14.01%) GCP
6 151 (13.14%) Snowflake
7 136 (11.84%) Amazon S3
8 123 (10.70%) Azure Synapse Analytics
9 119 (10.36%) Serverless
10 116 (10.10%) GitHub
11 98 (8.53%) Azure DevOps
12 95 (8.27%) dbt
13 93 (8.09%) AWS Lambda
14 73 (6.35%) GitHub Actions
15 64 (5.57%) AWS CloudFormation
16 38 (3.31%) AWS Step Functions
17 32 (2.79%) Amazon EMR
18 28 (2.44%) Collibra
19 26 (2.26%) Amazon SageMaker
20 25 (2.18%) Azure Machine Learning
Communications & Networking
1 4 (0.35%) Cisco IPT
1 4 (0.35%) Kerberos
1 4 (0.35%) Network Security
2 3 (0.26%) RTP
2 3 (0.26%) VPN
3 2 (0.17%) Firewall
4 1 (0.087%) 4G
4 1 (0.087%) 5G
4 1 (0.087%) MQTT
4 1 (0.087%) SAN
4 1 (0.087%) SMS
4 1 (0.087%) SSL
4 1 (0.087%) TCP/IP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 228 (19.84%) Power BI
2 227 (19.76%) Data Warehouse
3 165 (14.36%) Data Lake
4 103 (8.96%) Metadata
5 81 (7.05%) Big Data
5 81 (7.05%) SQL Server
6 80 (6.96%) NoSQL
7 73 (6.35%) Delta Lake
8 59 (5.13%) Amazon Athena
8 59 (5.13%) Snowflake Schema
9 58 (5.05%) Amazon Redshift
9 58 (5.05%) Relational Database
10 56 (4.87%) BigQuery
10 56 (4.87%) PostgreSQL
11 55 (4.79%) Azure SQL Database
12 49 (4.26%) Tableau
13 46 (4.00%) Hadoop
14 34 (2.96%) SQL Server Integration Services
15 32 (2.79%) Spark SQL
16 22 (1.91%) Mixpanel
Development Applications
1 168 (14.62%) Git
2 61 (5.31%) GitLab
3 45 (3.92%) Jenkins
3 45 (3.92%) MLflow
4 29 (2.52%) JIRA
5 6 (0.52%) Selenium
6 5 (0.44%) SonarQube
6 5 (0.44%) Visual Studio Code
7 4 (0.35%) Cucumber
8 3 (0.26%) JUnit
8 3 (0.26%) Maven
8 3 (0.26%) Postman
8 3 (0.26%) Robot Framework
8 3 (0.26%) Terragrunt
9 2 (0.17%) ERwin
9 2 (0.17%) Gemini Tracker
9 2 (0.17%) JMeter
9 2 (0.17%) Mockito
9 2 (0.17%) Visual Studio
9 2 (0.17%) Zephyr
General
1 313 (27.24%) Social Skills
2 265 (23.06%) Finance
3 158 (13.75%) Analytical Skills
4 95 (8.27%) Public Sector
5 75 (6.53%) Banking
6 28 (2.44%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 20 (1.74%) Investment Banking
7 20 (1.74%) Retail
8 19 (1.65%) Documentation Skills
9 18 (1.57%) Front Office
9 18 (1.57%) Influencing Skills
10 15 (1.31%) Marketing
11 11 (0.96%) Legal
11 11 (0.96%) Pharmaceutical
12 9 (0.78%) Publishing
13 8 (0.70%) Financial Institution
13 8 (0.70%) Telecoms
14 6 (0.52%) Back Office
14 6 (0.52%) Manufacturing
14 6 (0.52%) Military
Job Titles
1 519 (45.17%) Data Engineer
2 158 (13.75%) Lead
3 149 (12.97%) Senior
4 100 (8.70%) Senior Data Engineer
5 96 (8.36%) Architect
6 81 (7.05%) Azure Engineer
7 74 (6.44%) Developer
8 64 (5.57%) Azure Data Engineer
9 57 (4.96%) Lead Data Engineer
10 55 (4.79%) AWS Engineer
11 52 (4.53%) Analyst
12 50 (4.35%) Data Architect
13 49 (4.26%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
14 44 (3.83%) Snowflake Engineer
15 43 (3.74%) Data Scientist
16 37 (3.22%) Snowflake Data Engineer
17 35 (3.05%) AWS Data Engineer
18 31 (2.70%) Python Engineer
19 30 (2.61%) Consultant
20 29 (2.52%) Data Analyst
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 211 (18.36%) PySpark
2 136 (11.84%) Kafka
3 65 (5.66%) Pandas
4 59 (5.13%) PyTorch
5 48 (4.18%) TensorFlow
6 44 (3.83%) NumPy
6 44 (3.83%) scikit-learn
7 33 (2.87%) FastAPI
8 30 (2.61%) JSON
8 30 (2.61%) RESTful
9 27 (2.35%) Flask
10 26 (2.26%) pytest
10 26 (2.26%) YAML
11 24 (2.09%) LangChain
11 24 (2.09%) REST
12 23 (2.00%) React
13 17 (1.48%) Great Expectations
14 16 (1.39%) ARM Templates
14 16 (1.39%) Spring
15 15 (1.31%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 151 (13.14%) Cloud Native
2 48 (4.18%) Algorithms
3 45 (3.92%) Product Ownership
4 39 (3.39%) Distributed Systems
5 30 (2.61%) Distributed Computing
6 26 (2.26%) Onboarding
7 25 (2.18%) Legacy Systems
8 24 (2.09%) Data Structures
9 22 (1.91%) Hybrid Cloud
10 20 (1.74%) AI Agents
10 20 (1.74%) Data Protection Act
11 18 (1.57%) Analytical Mindset
12 13 (1.13%) Fixed Income
12 13 (1.13%) Greenfield Project
13 12 (1.04%) Derivative
13 12 (1.04%) NHS
14 11 (0.96%) Clustering
14 11 (0.96%) Life Science
14 11 (0.96%) Management Information System
14 11 (0.96%) Reference Data
Operating Systems
1 23 (2.00%) Linux
2 7 (0.61%) Unix
2 7 (0.61%) VMS
3 2 (0.17%) Ubuntu
3 2 (0.17%) Windows
4 1 (0.087%) CentOS
4 1 (0.087%) Debian
4 1 (0.087%) Windows Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 541 (47.08%) Analytics
2 522 (45.43%) Data Pipeline
3 462 (40.21%) ETL
4 437 (38.03%) Data Modelling
5 422 (36.73%) CI/CD
6 311 (27.07%) AI
7 307 (26.72%) Data Governance
8 294 (25.59%) DevOps
9 291 (25.33%) Agile
10 281 (24.46%) Business Intelligence
11 257 (22.37%) Machine Learning
12 234 (20.37%) Problem-Solving
13 231 (20.10%) Data Science
14 177 (15.40%) Data Architecture
15 149 (12.97%) Infrastructure as Code
16 129 (11.23%) Decision-Making
17 125 (10.88%) Validation
18 120 (10.44%) LLM
19 111 (9.66%) Migration
20 109 (9.49%) Data Transformation
Programming Languages
1 683 (59.44%) Python
2 614 (53.44%) SQL
3 89 (7.75%) Java
4 64 (5.57%) Scala
5 45 (3.92%) C#
6 35 (3.05%) PowerShell
7 34 (2.96%) Bash
7 34 (2.96%) Data Analysis Expressions
8 32 (2.79%) JavaScript
9 22 (1.91%) Bicep
10 21 (1.83%) T-SQL
11 17 (1.48%) TypeScript
12 16 (1.39%) Go
13 14 (1.22%) R
14 11 (0.96%) C++
15 9 (0.78%) PL/SQL
16 6 (0.52%) Korn
16 6 (0.52%) Rust
17 5 (0.44%) Shell Script
18 3 (0.26%) SAS Macro
Qualifications
1 229 (19.93%) Security Cleared
2 188 (16.36%) SC Cleared
3 110 (9.57%) Degree
4 50 (4.35%) Azure Certification
5 45 (3.92%) Master's Degree
6 44 (3.83%) Computer Science Degree
7 22 (1.91%) DV Cleared
8 19 (1.65%) AWS Certification
8 19 (1.65%) BPSS Clearance
9 14 (1.22%) Microsoft Certification
10 12 (1.04%) PhD
11 4 (0.35%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
11 4 (0.35%) DBS Check
11 4 (0.35%) Microsoft Certified Professional
12 3 (0.26%) IBM Certification
13 1 (0.087%) ACCA
13 1 (0.087%) CIMA
13 1 (0.087%) CISM
13 1 (0.087%) ISTQB
13 1 (0.087%) OCP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 324 (28.20%) Data Quality
2 91 (7.92%) GDPR
3 39 (3.39%) QA
4 15 (1.31%) Accessibility
5 11 (0.96%) Sarbanes-Oxley
6 8 (0.70%) HIPAA
6 8 (0.70%) SLA
7 6 (0.52%) California Consumer Privacy Act
8 5 (0.44%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 5 (0.44%) PERC
8 5 (0.44%) SOC 2
9 3 (0.26%) GRC
9 3 (0.26%) Solvency II
9 3 (0.26%) WCAG
10 2 (0.17%) Actionable Recommendations
10 2 (0.17%) HL7
10 2 (0.17%) MiFID
10 2 (0.17%) NIST
10 2 (0.17%) PCI DSS
11 1 (0.087%) SNOMED CT
System Software
1 148 (12.88%) Docker
2 6 (0.52%) HDFS
3 3 (0.26%) Virtual Machines
4 1 (0.087%) Apache ZooKeeper
4 1 (0.087%) ISA Server
Systems Management
1 180 (15.67%) Terraform
2 137 (11.92%) Kubernetes
3 28 (2.44%) Prometheus
4 17 (1.48%) Grafana
5 7 (0.61%) Ansible
6 4 (0.35%) Argo
7 3 (0.26%) Kubeflow
7 3 (0.26%) Rancher
8 2 (0.17%) Hadoop YARN
8 2 (0.17%) Kibana
8 2 (0.17%) Nagios
9 1 (0.087%) Apache Ranger
9 1 (0.087%) Control-M
9 1 (0.087%) HP Fortify
9 1 (0.087%) Oozie
9 1 (0.087%) Thomson Reuters DACS
Vendors
1 353 (30.72%) Databricks
2 162 (14.10%) Microsoft
3 57 (4.96%) Google
4 38 (3.31%) Informatica
5 37 (3.22%) Oracle
6 27 (2.35%) Talend
7 26 (2.26%) Foundry
8 24 (2.09%) Palantir
9 22 (1.91%) OpenAI
10 17 (1.48%) Splunk
11 14 (1.22%) SAP
12 11 (0.96%) Cloudera
12 11 (0.96%) Salesforce
13 9 (0.78%) Denodo
14 8 (0.70%) Automation Anywhere
14 8 (0.70%) IBM
14 8 (0.70%) UiPath
15 7 (0.61%) ServiceNow
16 6 (0.52%) Guidewire
16 6 (0.52%) Virgin Media