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

6 months to
9 Oct 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 93 147 191
Rank change year-on-year +54 +44 +33
Contract jobs citing Data Engineering 1,608 665 499
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.95% 2.01% 1.31%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.49% 2.22% 1.53%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,114 409 365
10th Percentile £400 £338 £393
25th Percentile £440 £413 £468
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £520 £550
Median % change year-on-year +0.96% -5.45% -8.33%
75th Percentile £644 £644 £663
90th Percentile £738 £752 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £463 £538
% change year-on-year +8.11% -13.95% -4.11%
Number of hourly rates quoted 21 6 6
10th Percentile - £37.11 £23.31
25th Percentile £21.25 £42.03 £25.65
Median hourly rate £62.40 £58.75 £43.25
Median % change year-on-year +6.21% +35.84% -42.72%
75th Percentile £71.50 £81.88 £60.00
90th Percentile £83.62 £98.75 -
UK excluding London median hourly rate £62.40 £38.96 £60.00
% change year-on-year +60.16% -35.07% -23.08%

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 46,102 30,004 32,672
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.59% 90.46% 86.03%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,718 18,629 19,703
10th Percentile £325 £294 £308
25th Percentile £425 £404 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -2.78%
75th Percentile £638 £623 £638
90th Percentile £738 £725 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 3,326 1,885 1,303
10th Percentile £13.58 £14.33 £15.00
25th Percentile £17.00 £17.30 £20.00
Median hourly rate £37.50 £25.15 £40.00
Median % change year-on-year +49.11% -37.13% -8.31%
75th Percentile £65.00 £43.00 £65.00
90th Percentile £78.52 £65.00 £73.95
UK excluding London median hourly rate £37.50 £22.27 £41.25
% change year-on-year +68.43% -46.02% -2.94%

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 October 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 October 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 October 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 +52 1,423 £525 - 2,015
London +39 870 £550 - 1,314
UK excluding London +78 578 £500 +8.11% 789
Work from Home +48 514 £525 +1.94% 850
North of England +28 190 £475 +6.74% 266
Midlands +27 124 £475 +2.70% 94
West Midlands +25 102 £475 -17.39% 67
South East -9 97 £513 +15.17% 160
South West +42 90 £525 -14.29% 77
Yorkshire +29 88 £500 +5.26% 73
North West -21 65 £500 +16.28% 156
Scotland +1 57 £513 +23.68% 90
North East -9 37 £425 -5.56% 37
East Midlands -6 22 £503 +15.57% 26
East of England -23 20 £538 +13.16% 43
Wales -4 8 £450 -9.09% 18
Northern Ireland +10 5 £467 - 43

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
1 202 (12.56%) Apache Airflow
2 179 (11.13%) Apache Spark
3 162 (10.07%) Apache
4 40 (2.49%) Confluence
5 28 (1.74%) SAS
6 20 (1.24%) Jupyter
7 16 (1.00%) Palantir Foundry
8 15 (0.93%) SharePoint
9 5 (0.31%) Apache Solr
9 5 (0.31%) ArcGIS
10 4 (0.25%) nginx
11 3 (0.19%) Apache Superset
11 3 (0.19%) PowerExchange
12 1 (0.062%) Apache Pulsar
12 1 (0.062%) Ethereum
12 1 (0.062%) GeoServer
12 1 (0.062%) Hyperledger
12 1 (0.062%) Microsoft Exchange
12 1 (0.062%) Oracle Workflow
12 1 (0.062%) SugarCRM
Applications
1 13 (0.81%) Microsoft Excel
2 7 (0.44%) Chatbot
2 7 (0.44%) Spreadsheet
3 3 (0.19%) Microsoft Office
4 2 (0.12%) MS Visio
5 1 (0.062%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 1 (0.062%) Notion
Business Applications
1 11 (0.68%) Aladdin
2 5 (0.31%) Dynamics CRM
2 5 (0.31%) SAP S/4HANA
3 4 (0.25%) NetSuite
3 4 (0.25%) Sage X3
4 3 (0.19%) Salesforce CRM
4 3 (0.19%) Workday HCM
5 2 (0.12%) Cloudability
5 2 (0.12%) Endur
5 2 (0.12%) Oracle Assets
5 2 (0.12%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
5 2 (0.12%) Temenos T24
6 1 (0.062%) Distributed Ledger
6 1 (0.062%) FIS Private Capital Suite
6 1 (0.062%) Markit EDM
6 1 (0.062%) MIS ActiveH
6 1 (0.062%) Oracle EBS
6 1 (0.062%) R3 Corda
6 1 (0.062%) SAP ECC
6 1 (0.062%) SAP Oil and Gas
Cloud Services
1 672 (41.79%) Azure
2 591 (36.75%) AWS
3 304 (18.91%) Power Platform
4 274 (17.04%) Snowflake
5 250 (15.55%) GCP
6 245 (15.24%) dbt
7 190 (11.82%) Amazon S3
8 184 (11.44%) Azure Data Factory
9 146 (9.08%) Serverless
10 135 (8.40%) Azure DevOps
11 127 (7.90%) Azure Synapse Analytics
12 124 (7.71%) GitHub
13 121 (7.52%) AWS Lambda
14 82 (5.10%) Azure Databricks
15 63 (3.92%) GitHub Actions
16 53 (3.30%) Amazon EMR
17 42 (2.61%) Amazon CloudWatch
18 41 (2.55%) Amazon Bedrock
19 35 (2.18%) Microsoft Purview
20 34 (2.11%) Azure AI
Communications & Networking
1 8 (0.50%) Network Security
2 7 (0.44%) Broadband
2 7 (0.44%) DNS
3 5 (0.31%) Firewall
4 1 (0.062%) HTTP
4 1 (0.062%) HTTPS
4 1 (0.062%) Internet
4 1 (0.062%) MIMO
4 1 (0.062%) MQTT
4 1 (0.062%) Radio Access Network
4 1 (0.062%) Reverse Proxy
4 1 (0.062%) SMS
4 1 (0.062%) SSL
4 1 (0.062%) TCP/IP
4 1 (0.062%) tcpdump
4 1 (0.062%) Wireshark
Database & Business Intelligence
1 331 (20.58%) Data Warehouse
2 292 (18.16%) Power BI
3 204 (12.69%) Data Lake
4 191 (11.88%) Metadata
5 125 (7.77%) BigQuery
6 112 (6.97%) Amazon Redshift
7 109 (6.78%) Delta Lake
8 83 (5.16%) Big Data
9 78 (4.85%) Amazon Athena
10 68 (4.23%) Tableau
11 61 (3.79%) Snowflake Schema
12 58 (3.61%) SQL Server
13 49 (3.05%) Relational Database
14 48 (2.99%) PostgreSQL
15 47 (2.92%) NoSQL
16 40 (2.49%) Looker
17 37 (2.30%) Azure SQL Database
18 35 (2.18%) Amazon RDS
19 31 (1.93%) Data Vault
20 28 (1.74%) Semantic Layer
Development Applications
1 182 (11.32%) Git
2 104 (6.47%) GitLab
3 64 (3.98%) JIRA
4 29 (1.80%) Jenkins
5 26 (1.62%) MLflow
6 9 (0.56%) Claude Code
7 8 (0.50%) Bitbucket
7 8 (0.50%) ERwin
7 8 (0.50%) RStudio
7 8 (0.50%) Terragrunt
8 7 (0.44%) Selenium
9 4 (0.25%) ER Studio
9 4 (0.25%) Postman
10 3 (0.19%) Atlassian Bamboo
10 3 (0.19%) Cucumber
10 3 (0.19%) TeamCity
11 2 (0.12%) Applitools
11 2 (0.12%) JMeter
11 2 (0.12%) Newman
11 2 (0.12%) REST Assured
General
1 421 (26.18%) Social Skills
2 359 (22.33%) Finance
3 247 (15.36%) Analytical Skills
4 165 (10.26%) Public Sector
5 144 (8.96%) Banking
6 53 (3.30%) Marketing
7 36 (2.24%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 33 (2.05%) Retail
9 29 (1.80%) Investment Banking
10 27 (1.68%) Front Office
11 21 (1.31%) Pharmaceutical
12 19 (1.18%) Documentation Skills
12 19 (1.18%) Law
13 18 (1.12%) Manufacturing
14 14 (0.87%) Billing
14 14 (0.87%) Police
14 14 (0.87%) Publishing
15 13 (0.81%) Aerospace
15 13 (0.81%) Back Office
15 13 (0.81%) Telecoms
Job Titles
1 769 (47.82%) Data Engineer
2 253 (15.73%) Senior
3 186 (11.57%) Lead
4 167 (10.39%) Senior Data Engineer
5 161 (10.01%) Architect
6 95 (5.91%) Developer
7 86 (5.35%) Data Architect
8 79 (4.91%) Databricks Engineer
9 77 (4.79%) AWS Engineer
10 75 (4.66%) Snowflake Engineer
11 73 (4.54%) Analyst
12 68 (4.23%) Azure Engineer
13 66 (4.10%) AWS Data Engineer
14 62 (3.86%) Databricks Data Engineer
15 59 (3.67%) Snowflake Data Engineer
16 56 (3.48%) Lead Data Engineer
17 53 (3.30%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
18 51 (3.17%) Python Engineer
19 47 (2.92%) Azure Data Engineer
20 43 (2.67%) GCP Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 244 (15.17%) PySpark
2 237 (14.74%) Terraform
3 118 (7.34%) Kafka
4 68 (4.23%) REST
5 34 (2.11%) JSON
6 29 (1.80%) .NET
6 29 (1.80%) React
7 23 (1.43%) LangChain
7 23 (1.43%) Pandas
8 18 (1.12%) pytest
9 17 (1.06%) FastAPI
9 17 (1.06%) PyTorch
10 15 (0.93%) LangGraph
11 14 (0.87%) RabbitMQ
11 14 (0.87%) scikit-learn
11 14 (0.87%) TensorFlow
11 14 (0.87%) XML
12 13 (0.81%) NumPy
13 12 (0.75%) Apache NiFi
13 12 (0.75%) RESTful
Miscellaneous
1 215 (13.37%) Cloud Native
2 83 (5.16%) Onboarding
3 81 (5.04%) Data Structures
4 70 (4.35%) Product Ownership
5 58 (3.61%) AI Agents
6 53 (3.30%) Legacy Systems
7 51 (3.17%) Distributed Systems
8 29 (1.80%) Data Protection Act
9 24 (1.49%) Enterprise Software
10 22 (1.37%) Algorithms
11 20 (1.24%) Distributed Computing
11 20 (1.24%) Management Information System
12 19 (1.18%) Life Science
12 19 (1.18%) Virtual Team
13 17 (1.06%) Data Fabric
14 15 (0.93%) Clustering
14 15 (0.93%) Marketing Technology
15 14 (0.87%) Analytical Mindset
15 14 (0.87%) Greenfield Project
15 14 (0.87%) Reference Data
Operating Systems
1 32 (1.99%) Linux
2 23 (1.43%) Unix
3 9 (0.56%) Windows
4 1 (0.062%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 1 (0.062%) Robot Operating System
4 1 (0.062%) Ubuntu
4 1 (0.062%) Windows Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 803 (49.94%) Data Pipeline
2 735 (45.71%) Analytics
3 634 (39.43%) Data Modelling
4 595 (37.00%) CI/CD
5 559 (34.76%) ETL
6 517 (32.15%) AI
7 424 (26.37%) Agile
8 395 (24.56%) DevOps
9 378 (23.51%) Business Intelligence
10 356 (22.14%) Data Governance
11 293 (18.22%) Stakeholder Management
12 287 (17.85%) Machine Learning
13 262 (16.29%) Validation
14 258 (16.04%) Data Transformation
15 252 (15.67%) Data Integration
16 250 (15.55%) Infrastructure as Code
17 247 (15.36%) Migration
17 247 (15.36%) Problem-Solving
18 233 (14.49%) Data Architecture
19 228 (14.18%) Decision-Making
Programming Languages
1 890 (55.35%) SQL
2 867 (53.92%) Python
3 103 (6.41%) Java
4 46 (2.86%) Scala
5 44 (2.74%) PowerShell
6 43 (2.67%) Data Analysis Expressions
7 39 (2.43%) C#
8 35 (2.18%) Bash
9 31 (1.93%) JavaScript
10 24 (1.49%) R
11 20 (1.24%) PL/SQL
11 20 (1.24%) T-SQL
12 17 (1.06%) TypeScript
13 16 (1.00%) Bicep
14 14 (0.87%) Kusto Query Language
15 11 (0.68%) Shell Script
16 10 (0.62%) Go
16 10 (0.62%) SPARQL
17 9 (0.56%) Korn
18 8 (0.50%) SAS Macro
Qualifications
1 307 (19.09%) Security Cleared
2 253 (15.73%) SC Cleared
3 88 (5.47%) Degree
4 43 (2.67%) Computer Science Degree
5 42 (2.61%) DV Cleared
6 41 (2.55%) AWS Certification
7 39 (2.43%) Azure Certification
8 33 (2.05%) BPSS Clearance
9 19 (1.18%) Master's Degree
10 14 (0.87%) DBS Check
11 12 (0.75%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
11 12 (0.75%) SnowPro
12 9 (0.56%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 8 (0.50%) Microsoft Certification
14 7 (0.44%) TOGAF Certification
15 6 (0.37%) Microsoft Certified Professional
16 5 (0.31%) CSPO
16 5 (0.31%) PMI Certification
16 5 (0.31%) PMP
17 4 (0.25%) PhD
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 544 (33.83%) Data Quality
2 82 (5.10%) QA
3 60 (3.73%) GDPR
4 32 (1.99%) Accessibility
5 11 (0.68%) SLA
6 7 (0.44%) Disclosure Scotland
7 6 (0.37%) GRC
8 5 (0.31%) NCSC
9 4 (0.25%) California Consumer Privacy Act
9 4 (0.25%) EU AI Act
9 4 (0.25%) NIST
9 4 (0.25%) PMO
10 3 (0.19%) Actionable Recommendations
10 3 (0.19%) IFRS
10 3 (0.19%) IFRS 9
10 3 (0.19%) ISO/IEC 27001
10 3 (0.19%) MiFID
10 3 (0.19%) Sarbanes-Oxley
11 2 (0.12%) 21 CFR Part 11
11 2 (0.12%) GxP
System Software
1 128 (7.96%) Docker
2 5 (0.31%) Active Directory
3 1 (0.062%) Oracle RAC
3 1 (0.062%) Virtual Machines
Systems Management
1 120 (7.46%) Kubernetes
2 34 (2.11%) Grafana
3 29 (1.80%) Ansible
4 17 (1.06%) Prometheus
5 8 (0.50%) Control-M
5 8 (0.50%) Kibana
6 3 (0.19%) logstash
7 2 (0.12%) Progress Chef
7 2 (0.12%) Puppet
7 2 (0.12%) Single Sign-On
8 1 (0.062%) Argo
8 1 (0.062%) Cilium
8 1 (0.062%) Data Guard
8 1 (0.062%) HAProxy
8 1 (0.062%) Kubeflow
8 1 (0.062%) Kustomize
8 1 (0.062%) Oracle Enterprise Manager
8 1 (0.062%) Oracle RMAN
8 1 (0.062%) QRadar
Vendors
1 462 (28.73%) Databricks
2 277 (17.23%) Microsoft
3 101 (6.28%) Google
4 81 (5.04%) Oracle
5 58 (3.61%) Informatica
6 34 (2.11%) SAP
7 30 (1.87%) Salesforce
8 27 (1.68%) Foundry
9 26 (1.62%) Talend
10 25 (1.55%) Palantir
11 22 (1.37%) OpenAI
12 16 (1.00%) Teradata
13 15 (0.93%) Cloudera
14 12 (0.75%) Trend Micro
15 11 (0.68%) Adobe
16 9 (0.56%) Denodo
16 9 (0.56%) Splunk
17 7 (0.44%) Hitachi
17 7 (0.44%) ServiceNow
18 6 (0.37%) Bloomberg