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

6 months to
19 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 84 165 202
Rank change year-on-year +81 +37 +6
Contract jobs citing Data Engineering 1,441 510 514
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.85% 1.71% 1.17%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.36% 1.88% 1.38%
Number of daily rates quoted 993 349 386
10th Percentile £386 £375 £369
25th Percentile £442 £450 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year - -4.55% -12.00%
75th Percentile £631 £669 £663
90th Percentile £749 £825 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £511
% change year-on-year +5.26% -7.05% -7.09%
Number of hourly rates quoted 22 7 15
10th Percentile £45.18 £24.75 £30.72
25th Percentile £55.44 £28.13 £31.25
Median hourly rate £69.72 £38.96 £35.00
Median % change year-on-year +78.95% +11.31% -52.05%
75th Percentile £77.25 £53.75 £60.00
90th Percentile £89.75 £58.25 -
UK excluding London median hourly rate £69.00 £28.75 £60.00
% change year-on-year +140.00% -52.08% -17.81%

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 42,883 27,154 37,300
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.85% 91.05% 85.01%
Number of daily rates quoted 26,719 17,238 23,736
10th Percentile £325 £300 £300
25th Percentile £413 £406 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £505 £525
Median % change year-on-year +1.49% -3.81% -4.55%
75th Percentile £620 £625 £638
90th Percentile £725 £738 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,572 1,254 2,607
10th Percentile £14.70 £14.20 £12.70
25th Percentile £20.07 £17.79 £16.04
Median hourly rate £43.96 £25.40 £37.50
Median % change year-on-year +73.07% -32.27% +7.05%
75th Percentile £68.00 £55.19 £61.30
90th Percentile £82.25 £73.75 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £45.00 £25.08 £38.12
% change year-on-year +79.46% -34.22% +17.29%

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 19 June 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 19 June 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 19 June 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 +73 1,278 £525 -2.33% 419
London +60 770 £550 -2.22% 239
UK excluding London +80 532 £500 +5.26% 304
Work from Home +72 460 £525 - 194
North of England +29 163 £475 -5.00% 79
Midlands +25 128 £500 +8.11% 37
West Midlands +23 108 £486 -16.16% 28
South West +37 82 £500 -4.76% 30
South East -25 72 £525 +8.92% 122
Yorkshire -9 70 £480 +3.78% 12
Scotland +23 58 £475 - 6
North West -3 58 £500 - 56
North East -3 37 £425 -15.00% 11
East of England -15 24 £575 +79.74% 11
East Midlands -11 17 £525 +13.51% 9
Wales -8 10 £450 +75.14% 10
Northern Ireland - 6 £382 - 15

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
1 189 (13.12%) Apache Spark
2 167 (11.59%) Apache Airflow
3 107 (7.43%) Apache
4 43 (2.98%) SAS
5 37 (2.57%) Confluence
6 23 (1.60%) Jupyter
7 17 (1.18%) Palantir Foundry
8 10 (0.69%) SharePoint
9 7 (0.49%) Apache Superset
9 7 (0.49%) Appian
10 5 (0.35%) Microsoft Exchange
11 3 (0.21%) ArcGIS
12 2 (0.14%) Apache Synapse
13 1 (0.069%) Adobe Experience Manager
13 1 (0.069%) Camunda
13 1 (0.069%) CICS
13 1 (0.069%) IBM HTTP Server
13 1 (0.069%) PowerExchange
Applications
1 26 (1.80%) Microsoft Excel
2 8 (0.56%) Microsoft Office
2 8 (0.56%) Spreadsheet
3 7 (0.49%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 5 (0.35%) Microsoft Project
5 3 (0.21%) Chatbot
6 1 (0.069%) MS Visio
6 1 (0.069%) Notion
6 1 (0.069%) Trello
Business Applications
1 7 (0.49%) Aladdin
2 5 (0.35%) BambooHR
2 5 (0.35%) Dynamics CRM
2 5 (0.35%) Salesforce CRM
3 4 (0.28%) SAP S/4HANA
4 2 (0.14%) Endur
4 2 (0.14%) NetSuite
4 2 (0.14%) Oracle Assets
4 2 (0.14%) Sage X3
4 2 (0.14%) SAP BPC
4 2 (0.14%) Temenos T24
5 1 (0.069%) Adobe Campaign
5 1 (0.069%) FIS Private Capital Suite
5 1 (0.069%) Markit EDM
5 1 (0.069%) SAP ECC
5 1 (0.069%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
Cloud Services
1 612 (42.47%) Azure
2 546 (37.89%) AWS
3 327 (22.69%) Power Platform
4 208 (14.43%) Snowflake
5 190 (13.19%) GCP
6 174 (12.07%) Amazon S3
7 171 (11.87%) Azure Data Factory
8 162 (11.24%) dbt
9 130 (9.02%) Azure Synapse Analytics
10 128 (8.88%) GitHub
11 123 (8.54%) Serverless
12 119 (8.26%) Azure DevOps
13 107 (7.43%) AWS Lambda
14 73 (5.07%) GitHub Actions
15 55 (3.82%) Amazon EMR
16 44 (3.05%) AWS CloudFormation
17 32 (2.22%) Azure AI
18 31 (2.15%) Amazon CloudWatch
19 28 (1.94%) AWS Step Functions
19 28 (1.94%) Azure Cosmos DB
Communications & Networking
1 5 (0.35%) Firewall
1 5 (0.35%) RTP
2 2 (0.14%) Network Security
3 1 (0.069%) 4G
3 1 (0.069%) 5G
3 1 (0.069%) MIMO
3 1 (0.069%) MQTT
Database & Business Intelligence
1 303 (21.03%) Power BI
2 271 (18.81%) Data Warehouse
3 217 (15.06%) Data Lake
4 137 (9.51%) Metadata
5 111 (7.70%) Big Data
6 103 (7.15%) Amazon Redshift
7 90 (6.25%) SQL Server
8 86 (5.97%) Delta Lake
9 81 (5.62%) Tableau
10 80 (5.55%) Amazon Athena
11 79 (5.48%) BigQuery
12 75 (5.20%) Snowflake Schema
13 71 (4.93%) NoSQL
14 56 (3.89%) Relational Database
15 55 (3.82%) PostgreSQL
16 53 (3.68%) Azure SQL Database
17 49 (3.40%) Hadoop
18 36 (2.50%) SQL Server Integration Services
19 32 (2.22%) Star Schema
20 31 (2.15%) Spark SQL
Development Applications
1 172 (11.94%) Git
2 80 (5.55%) GitLab
3 67 (4.65%) JIRA
4 35 (2.43%) MLflow
5 20 (1.39%) Jenkins
6 6 (0.42%) SonarQube
7 4 (0.28%) Postman
7 4 (0.28%) Selenium
8 3 (0.21%) Artifactory
8 3 (0.21%) Bitbucket
8 3 (0.21%) Snyk
8 3 (0.21%) Visual Studio
9 2 (0.14%) Claude Code
9 2 (0.14%) ERwin
9 2 (0.14%) Robot Framework
9 2 (0.14%) Terragrunt
10 1 (0.069%) Ant
10 1 (0.069%) JUnit
10 1 (0.069%) Maven
10 1 (0.069%) Octopus Deploy
General
1 355 (24.64%) Social Skills
2 344 (23.87%) Finance
3 218 (15.13%) Analytical Skills
4 150 (10.41%) Public Sector
5 107 (7.43%) Banking
6 35 (2.43%) Marketing
7 33 (2.29%) Documentation Skills
8 32 (2.22%) Inclusion and Diversity
9 31 (2.15%) Retail
10 18 (1.25%) Front Office
10 18 (1.25%) Investment Banking
10 18 (1.25%) Telecoms
11 14 (0.97%) Financial Institution
12 11 (0.76%) Influencing Skills
12 11 (0.76%) Law
13 10 (0.69%) Legal
14 8 (0.56%) Manufacturing
15 7 (0.49%) Pharmaceutical
16 6 (0.42%) Billing
16 6 (0.42%) Military
Job Titles
1 674 (46.77%) Data Engineer
2 211 (14.64%) Senior
3 158 (10.96%) Architect
4 157 (10.90%) Lead
5 127 (8.81%) Senior Data Engineer
6 81 (5.62%) Data Architect
7 78 (5.41%) Developer
8 74 (5.14%) AWS Engineer
9 64 (4.44%) Analyst
10 63 (4.37%) Lead Data Engineer
11 57 (3.96%) AWS Data Engineer
12 56 (3.89%) Snowflake Engineer
13 48 (3.33%) Azure Engineer
14 47 (3.26%) Data Scientist
14 47 (3.26%) Solutions Architect
15 45 (3.12%) Snowflake Data Engineer
16 42 (2.91%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
16 42 (2.91%) Azure Data Engineer
16 42 (2.91%) Consultant
16 42 (2.91%) Python Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 213 (14.78%) PySpark
2 137 (9.51%) Kafka
3 47 (3.26%) Pandas
4 42 (2.91%) REST
5 36 (2.50%) scikit-learn
6 35 (2.43%) PyTorch
7 30 (2.08%) NumPy
8 29 (2.01%) JSON
9 27 (1.87%) TensorFlow
10 24 (1.67%) Spring
11 23 (1.60%) React
12 18 (1.25%) RESTful
13 17 (1.18%) FastAPI
13 17 (1.18%) Spring Boot
14 15 (1.04%) YAML
15 14 (0.97%) LangChain
15 14 (0.97%) pytest
15 14 (0.97%) XML
16 13 (0.90%) .NET
16 13 (0.90%) Great Expectations
Miscellaneous
1 195 (13.53%) Cloud Native
2 57 (3.96%) Data Structures
2 57 (3.96%) Distributed Systems
3 53 (3.68%) Legacy Systems
4 48 (3.33%) Product Ownership
5 34 (2.36%) AI Agents
6 33 (2.29%) Onboarding
7 26 (1.80%) Distributed Computing
8 24 (1.67%) Data Protection Act
9 23 (1.60%) Greenfield Project
10 21 (1.46%) Algorithms
11 19 (1.32%) Analytical Mindset
12 18 (1.25%) NHS
13 15 (1.04%) Clustering
14 14 (0.97%) Fixed Income
15 13 (0.90%) Management Information System
15 13 (0.90%) Self-Motivation
15 13 (0.90%) Virtual Team
16 12 (0.83%) Reference Data
17 11 (0.76%) Hybrid Cloud
Operating Systems
1 28 (1.94%) Linux
2 25 (1.73%) Unix
3 5 (0.35%) VMS
4 3 (0.21%) Windows
5 2 (0.14%) Windows Server
6 1 (0.069%) Ubuntu
Processes & Methodologies
1 751 (52.12%) Analytics
2 680 (47.19%) Data Pipeline
3 558 (38.72%) Data Modelling
4 520 (36.09%) CI/CD
5 511 (35.46%) ETL
6 437 (30.33%) AI
7 378 (26.23%) Business Intelligence
8 360 (24.98%) Agile
9 356 (24.71%) DevOps
10 310 (21.51%) Data Governance
11 283 (19.64%) Machine Learning
12 258 (17.90%) Problem-Solving
13 253 (17.56%) Data Science
14 201 (13.95%) Migration
15 199 (13.81%) Decision-Making
16 194 (13.46%) Data Architecture
17 191 (13.25%) Validation
18 168 (11.66%) Infrastructure as Code
19 167 (11.59%) Use Case
20 158 (10.96%) Stakeholder Management
Programming Languages
1 791 (54.89%) SQL
2 771 (53.50%) Python
3 114 (7.91%) Java
4 44 (3.05%) Data Analysis Expressions
5 41 (2.85%) Scala
6 36 (2.50%) C#
7 35 (2.43%) Bash
8 25 (1.73%) T-SQL
9 22 (1.53%) PowerShell
10 20 (1.39%) JavaScript
10 20 (1.39%) R
11 17 (1.18%) PL/SQL
12 16 (1.11%) Bicep
13 13 (0.90%) TypeScript
14 12 (0.83%) Shell Script
15 10 (0.69%) SAS Macro
16 5 (0.35%) Korn
16 5 (0.35%) Kusto Query Language
17 4 (0.28%) SPARQL
18 3 (0.21%) Cypher
Qualifications
1 274 (19.01%) Security Cleared
2 241 (16.72%) SC Cleared
3 104 (7.22%) Degree
4 43 (2.98%) Computer Science Degree
5 35 (2.43%) BPSS Clearance
5 35 (2.43%) Master's Degree
6 32 (2.22%) Azure Certification
7 21 (1.46%) AWS Certification
8 13 (0.90%) DBS Check
8 13 (0.90%) DV Cleared
9 10 (0.69%) Microsoft Certification
10 9 (0.62%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
11 8 (0.56%) SnowPro
12 6 (0.42%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 3 (0.21%) CSPO
13 3 (0.21%) IBM Certification
14 2 (0.14%) PhD
14 2 (0.14%) PMI Certification
14 2 (0.14%) Tableau Certification
15 1 (0.069%) CCSP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 418 (29.01%) Data Quality
2 88 (6.11%) GDPR
3 65 (4.51%) QA
4 15 (1.04%) SLA
5 9 (0.62%) Accessibility
6 8 (0.56%) Sarbanes-Oxley
7 5 (0.35%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 4 (0.28%) MiFID
8 4 (0.28%) Solvency II
9 3 (0.21%) Actionable Recommendations
9 3 (0.21%) California Consumer Privacy Act
9 3 (0.21%) Disclosure Scotland
9 3 (0.21%) GRC
9 3 (0.21%) HIPAA
9 3 (0.21%) NIST
10 2 (0.14%) COPPA
10 2 (0.14%) EMIR
10 2 (0.14%) GxP
10 2 (0.14%) ISO/IEC 42001
10 2 (0.14%) SNOMED CT
System Software
1 130 (9.02%) Docker
2 3 (0.21%) Active Directory
2 3 (0.21%) Virtual Machines
3 2 (0.14%) HDFS
Systems Management
1 193 (13.39%) Terraform
2 107 (7.43%) Kubernetes
3 25 (1.73%) Grafana
3 25 (1.73%) Prometheus
4 9 (0.62%) Ansible
5 3 (0.21%) Argo
5 3 (0.21%) Kibana
5 3 (0.21%) Nagios
5 3 (0.21%) Rancher
6 2 (0.14%) Kubeflow
6 2 (0.14%) logstash
6 2 (0.14%) Thomson Reuters DACS
7 1 (0.069%) Control-M
7 1 (0.069%) Hadoop YARN
7 1 (0.069%) HP Fortify
7 1 (0.069%) IBM Guardium
7 1 (0.069%) Oozie
Vendors
1 372 (25.82%) Databricks
2 244 (16.93%) Microsoft
3 81 (5.62%) Informatica
4 60 (4.16%) Oracle
5 57 (3.96%) Google
6 32 (2.22%) Talend
7 27 (1.87%) OpenAI
8 25 (1.73%) Foundry
8 25 (1.73%) SAP
9 22 (1.53%) Palantir
10 21 (1.46%) Salesforce
10 21 (1.46%) Splunk
11 16 (1.11%) ServiceNow
12 15 (1.04%) Cloudera
13 12 (0.83%) Trend Micro
14 8 (0.56%) Denodo
14 8 (0.56%) UiPath
15 7 (0.49%) Automation Anywhere
15 7 (0.49%) IBM
15 7 (0.49%) InterSystems