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

6 months to
8 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 89 164 209
Rank change year-on-year +75 +45 +4
Contract jobs citing Data Engineering 1,516 564 505
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.91% 1.77% 1.17%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.41% 1.95% 1.37%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,052 376 374
10th Percentile £380 £375 £366
25th Percentile £439 £450 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year - -4.55% -12.00%
75th Percentile £627 £652 £675
90th Percentile £738 £800 £763
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -13.04%
Number of hourly rates quoted 24 7 15
10th Percentile £46.53 £24.75 £30.72
25th Percentile £56.31 £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 £75.75 £53.75 £60.00
90th Percentile £89.25 £58.25 -
UK excluding London median hourly rate £69.22 £28.75 £60.00
% change year-on-year +140.77% -52.08% +11.11%

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 44,398 28,953 36,844
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 85.10% 90.63% 85.43%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,615 18,257 23,517
10th Percentile £325 £300 £300
25th Percentile £415 £405 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £517 £505 £525
Median % change year-on-year +2.28% -3.81% -4.55%
75th Percentile £623 £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 2,640 1,439 2,494
10th Percentile £14.80 £14.20 £12.74
25th Percentile £20.00 £17.70 £16.06
Median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £37.50
Median % change year-on-year +74.79% -32.93% -6.25%
75th Percentile £68.00 £53.75 £61.30
90th Percentile £82.25 £70.00 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £44.50 £24.66 £38.12
% change year-on-year +80.45% -35.31% +1.65%

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 8 July 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 8 July 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 8 July 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 +74 1,346 £525 - 548
London +57 791 £550 - 315
UK excluding London +72 573 £500 +5.26% 319
Work from Home +73 487 £525 - 298
North of England +20 174 £475 -5.00% 93
Midlands +32 145 £475 +2.70% 46
West Midlands +30 122 £475 -18.10% 25
South West +22 81 £500 -13.04% 35
South East -23 81 £525 +10.53% 104
Yorkshire +14 78 £490 +5.95% 22
Scotland +20 59 £488 +2.63% 10
North West -16 58 £500 - 56
North East -2 40 £425 -15.00% 16
East of England -12 28 £575 +71.29% 17
East Midlands -4 20 £525 +13.51% 21
Wales -7 11 £450 +82.58% 6
Northern Ireland - 5 £334 - 13

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
1 197 (12.99%) Apache Spark
2 176 (11.61%) Apache Airflow
3 119 (7.85%) Apache
4 46 (3.03%) SAS
5 39 (2.57%) Confluence
6 23 (1.52%) Jupyter
7 19 (1.25%) Palantir Foundry
8 12 (0.79%) SharePoint
9 8 (0.53%) Apache Superset
10 5 (0.33%) Appian
10 5 (0.33%) Microsoft Exchange
11 3 (0.20%) ArcGIS
12 2 (0.13%) Apache Synapse
13 1 (0.066%) Adobe Experience Manager
13 1 (0.066%) Camunda
13 1 (0.066%) CICS
13 1 (0.066%) IBM HTTP Server
13 1 (0.066%) PowerExchange
Applications
1 27 (1.78%) Microsoft Excel
2 9 (0.59%) Microsoft Office
3 8 (0.53%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 8 (0.53%) Spreadsheet
4 4 (0.26%) Microsoft Project
5 3 (0.20%) Chatbot
6 2 (0.13%) MS Visio
7 1 (0.066%) Notion
Business Applications
1 10 (0.66%) Aladdin
2 6 (0.40%) Salesforce CRM
3 5 (0.33%) BambooHR
3 5 (0.33%) Dynamics CRM
3 5 (0.33%) SAP S/4HANA
4 4 (0.26%) NetSuite
4 4 (0.26%) Sage X3
5 2 (0.13%) Endur
5 2 (0.13%) Oracle Assets
5 2 (0.13%) SAP BPC
5 2 (0.13%) Temenos T24
6 1 (0.066%) Adobe Campaign
6 1 (0.066%) FIS Private Capital Suite
6 1 (0.066%) Markit EDM
6 1 (0.066%) SAP ECC
6 1 (0.066%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
Cloud Services
1 653 (43.07%) Azure
2 580 (38.26%) AWS
3 332 (21.90%) Power Platform
4 222 (14.64%) Snowflake
5 203 (13.39%) GCP
6 184 (12.14%) Amazon S3
7 175 (11.54%) dbt
8 170 (11.21%) Azure Data Factory
9 138 (9.10%) Azure Synapse Analytics
10 133 (8.77%) Serverless
11 128 (8.44%) GitHub
12 123 (8.11%) Azure DevOps
13 115 (7.59%) AWS Lambda
14 74 (4.88%) GitHub Actions
15 60 (3.96%) Amazon EMR
16 40 (2.64%) AWS CloudFormation
17 34 (2.24%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 34 (2.24%) Azure AI
18 30 (1.98%) Amazon SageMaker
18 30 (1.98%) AWS Step Functions
Communications & Networking
1 5 (0.33%) Firewall
1 5 (0.33%) RTP
2 2 (0.13%) Network Security
3 1 (0.066%) 4G
3 1 (0.066%) 5G
3 1 (0.066%) MIMO
3 1 (0.066%) MQTT
Database & Business Intelligence
1 305 (20.12%) Power BI
2 284 (18.73%) Data Warehouse
3 215 (14.18%) Data Lake
4 144 (9.50%) Metadata
5 116 (7.65%) Big Data
6 109 (7.19%) Amazon Redshift
7 93 (6.13%) Delta Lake
8 89 (5.87%) BigQuery
9 87 (5.74%) Tableau
10 83 (5.47%) SQL Server
11 81 (5.34%) Amazon Athena
12 71 (4.68%) NoSQL
13 70 (4.62%) Snowflake Schema
14 59 (3.89%) PostgreSQL
14 59 (3.89%) Relational Database
15 50 (3.30%) Hadoop
16 47 (3.10%) Azure SQL Database
17 35 (2.31%) SQL Server Integration Services
17 35 (2.31%) Star Schema
18 30 (1.98%) Looker
Development Applications
1 174 (11.48%) Git
2 79 (5.21%) GitLab
3 69 (4.55%) JIRA
4 36 (2.37%) MLflow
5 21 (1.39%) Jenkins
6 6 (0.40%) SonarQube
7 5 (0.33%) Bitbucket
8 4 (0.26%) Postman
8 4 (0.26%) Selenium
9 3 (0.20%) Artifactory
9 3 (0.20%) Snyk
9 3 (0.20%) Visual Studio
10 2 (0.13%) Claude Code
10 2 (0.13%) ERwin
10 2 (0.13%) Robot Framework
10 2 (0.13%) Yeoman
11 1 (0.066%) Ant
11 1 (0.066%) Deequ
11 1 (0.066%) Maven
11 1 (0.066%) REST Assured
General
1 378 (24.93%) Social Skills
2 354 (23.35%) Finance
3 234 (15.44%) Analytical Skills
4 165 (10.88%) Public Sector
5 114 (7.52%) Banking
6 41 (2.70%) Marketing
7 38 (2.51%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 36 (2.37%) Documentation Skills
9 33 (2.18%) Retail
10 21 (1.39%) Front Office
10 21 (1.39%) Investment Banking
10 21 (1.39%) Telecoms
11 15 (0.99%) Financial Institution
12 14 (0.92%) Manufacturing
13 12 (0.79%) Law
14 11 (0.73%) Influencing Skills
14 11 (0.73%) Legal
15 9 (0.59%) Billing
15 9 (0.59%) Pharmaceutical
16 5 (0.33%) Publishing
Job Titles
1 709 (46.77%) Data Engineer
2 222 (14.64%) Senior
3 172 (11.35%) Architect
4 160 (10.55%) Lead
5 131 (8.64%) Senior Data Engineer
6 95 (6.27%) Data Architect
7 92 (6.07%) Developer
8 81 (5.34%) AWS Engineer
9 69 (4.55%) Analyst
10 63 (4.16%) AWS Data Engineer
10 63 (4.16%) Lead Data Engineer
11 58 (3.83%) Snowflake Engineer
12 57 (3.76%) Azure Engineer
13 51 (3.36%) Azure Data Engineer
14 48 (3.17%) Data Scientist
15 47 (3.10%) Solutions Architect
16 46 (3.03%) Python Engineer
16 46 (3.03%) Snowflake Data Engineer
17 43 (2.84%) Consultant
18 40 (2.64%) Data Analyst
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 228 (15.04%) PySpark
2 148 (9.76%) Kafka
3 44 (2.90%) Pandas
4 41 (2.70%) REST
5 33 (2.18%) scikit-learn
6 32 (2.11%) JSON
7 29 (1.91%) PyTorch
8 28 (1.85%) NumPy
9 26 (1.72%) Spring
10 24 (1.58%) React
11 23 (1.52%) TensorFlow
12 19 (1.25%) Spring Boot
13 17 (1.12%) .NET
13 17 (1.12%) RESTful
14 15 (0.99%) FastAPI
14 15 (0.99%) OpenTelemetry
15 14 (0.92%) YAML
16 13 (0.86%) Microsoft Graph
16 13 (0.86%) XML
17 12 (0.79%) pytest
Miscellaneous
1 209 (13.79%) Cloud Native
2 63 (4.16%) Data Structures
3 59 (3.89%) Legacy Systems
4 58 (3.83%) Distributed Systems
5 50 (3.30%) Product Ownership
6 40 (2.64%) Onboarding
7 36 (2.37%) AI Agents
8 26 (1.72%) Data Protection Act
8 26 (1.72%) Distributed Computing
9 25 (1.65%) Algorithms
10 23 (1.52%) NHS
11 22 (1.45%) Greenfield Project
12 19 (1.25%) Analytical Mindset
13 18 (1.19%) Virtual Team
14 17 (1.12%) Clustering
15 15 (0.99%) Fixed Income
15 15 (0.99%) Management Information System
16 13 (0.86%) Reference Data
16 13 (0.86%) Self-Motivation
17 12 (0.79%) Life Science
Operating Systems
1 29 (1.91%) Linux
2 25 (1.65%) Unix
3 5 (0.33%) VMS
4 3 (0.20%) Windows
5 2 (0.13%) Windows Server
6 1 (0.066%) Ubuntu
Processes & Methodologies
1 792 (52.24%) Analytics
2 731 (48.22%) Data Pipeline
3 587 (38.72%) Data Modelling
4 550 (36.28%) CI/CD
5 533 (35.16%) ETL
6 445 (29.35%) AI
7 384 (25.33%) Agile
8 383 (25.26%) Business Intelligence
9 370 (24.41%) DevOps
10 327 (21.57%) Data Governance
11 294 (19.39%) Machine Learning
12 272 (17.94%) Problem-Solving
13 266 (17.55%) Data Science
14 219 (14.45%) Migration
15 215 (14.18%) Decision-Making
15 215 (14.18%) Validation
16 212 (13.98%) Data Architecture
17 191 (12.60%) Infrastructure as Code
18 180 (11.87%) Stakeholder Management
19 175 (11.54%) Use Case
Programming Languages
1 830 (54.75%) SQL
2 805 (53.10%) Python
3 124 (8.18%) Java
4 46 (3.03%) Data Analysis Expressions
5 41 (2.70%) Scala
6 38 (2.51%) C#
7 37 (2.44%) Bash
8 25 (1.65%) T-SQL
9 24 (1.58%) PowerShell
10 22 (1.45%) R
11 21 (1.39%) JavaScript
12 19 (1.25%) Bicep
13 15 (0.99%) PL/SQL
14 13 (0.86%) Shell Script
14 13 (0.86%) TypeScript
15 12 (0.79%) SAS Macro
16 7 (0.46%) SPARQL
17 6 (0.40%) Cypher
18 5 (0.33%) Kusto Query Language
19 4 (0.26%) Korn
Qualifications
1 291 (19.20%) Security Cleared
2 255 (16.82%) SC Cleared
3 116 (7.65%) Degree
4 49 (3.23%) Computer Science Degree
5 38 (2.51%) Master's Degree
6 37 (2.44%) BPSS Clearance
7 32 (2.11%) Azure Certification
8 21 (1.39%) AWS Certification
9 16 (1.06%) DV Cleared
10 13 (0.86%) DBS Check
11 9 (0.59%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
11 9 (0.59%) SnowPro
12 8 (0.53%) Microsoft Certification
13 6 (0.40%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
14 5 (0.33%) CSPO
15 3 (0.20%) IBM Certification
15 3 (0.20%) PhD
15 3 (0.20%) Tableau Certification
16 2 (0.13%) PMI Certification
17 1 (0.066%) (ISC)2 CCSP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 439 (28.96%) Data Quality
2 92 (6.07%) GDPR
3 70 (4.62%) QA
4 17 (1.12%) Accessibility
5 15 (0.99%) SLA
6 6 (0.40%) Sarbanes-Oxley
7 4 (0.26%) Actionable Recommendations
7 4 (0.26%) California Consumer Privacy Act
7 4 (0.26%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 4 (0.26%) MiFID
7 4 (0.26%) Solvency II
8 3 (0.20%) Disclosure Scotland
8 3 (0.20%) GRC
8 3 (0.20%) GxP
8 3 (0.20%) HIPAA
8 3 (0.20%) ISO/IEC 42001
8 3 (0.20%) NIST
8 3 (0.20%) PMO
9 2 (0.13%) COPPA
9 2 (0.13%) EMIR
System Software
1 138 (9.10%) Docker
2 3 (0.20%) Active Directory
2 3 (0.20%) Virtual Machines
3 2 (0.13%) HDFS
Systems Management
1 208 (13.72%) Terraform
2 115 (7.59%) Kubernetes
3 28 (1.85%) Grafana
4 27 (1.78%) Prometheus
5 11 (0.73%) Ansible
6 5 (0.33%) Kibana
7 3 (0.20%) Argo
7 3 (0.20%) logstash
7 3 (0.20%) Nagios
7 3 (0.20%) Rancher
8 2 (0.13%) Kubeflow
8 2 (0.13%) Thomson Reuters DACS
9 1 (0.066%) Control-M
9 1 (0.066%) Hadoop YARN
9 1 (0.066%) HP Fortify
9 1 (0.066%) IBM Guardium
9 1 (0.066%) Kustomize
9 1 (0.066%) Oozie
9 1 (0.066%) Single Sign-On
Vendors
1 400 (26.39%) Databricks
2 260 (17.15%) Microsoft
3 86 (5.67%) Informatica
4 60 (3.96%) Oracle
5 57 (3.76%) Google
6 32 (2.11%) Talend
7 30 (1.98%) Foundry
7 30 (1.98%) SAP
8 27 (1.78%) OpenAI
8 27 (1.78%) Palantir
9 25 (1.65%) Salesforce
10 22 (1.45%) Splunk
11 15 (0.99%) Cloudera
11 15 (0.99%) ServiceNow
12 12 (0.79%) Trend Micro
13 8 (0.53%) Adobe
13 8 (0.53%) Denodo
14 7 (0.46%) InterSystems
15 6 (0.40%) Bloomberg
15 6 (0.40%) Teradata