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

6 months to
20 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 85 158 201
Rank change year-on-year +73 +43 +19
Contract jobs citing Data Engineering 1,539 573 496
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.92% 1.75% 1.19%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.43% 1.93% 1.39%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,065 377 367
10th Percentile £375 £363 £375
25th Percentile £438 £450 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £525 £560
Median % change year-on-year - -6.25% -6.67%
75th Percentile £627 £650 £688
90th Percentile £738 £800 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £505
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.94% -12.17%
Number of hourly rates quoted 27 7 15
10th Percentile £29.50 £24.75 £30.72
25th Percentile £51.25 £28.13 £31.25
Median hourly rate £69.00 £38.96 £35.00
Median % change year-on-year +77.10% +11.31% -52.05%
75th Percentile £75.00 £53.75 £60.00
90th Percentile £88.50 £58.25 -
UK excluding London median hourly rate £64.00 £28.75 £60.00
% change year-on-year +122.61% -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 44,857 29,633 35,662
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.99% 90.35% 85.43%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,817 18,625 22,863
10th Percentile £325 £300 £306
25th Percentile £419 £405 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £520 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% -4.76% -4.02%
75th Percentile £625 £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 2,658 1,571 2,253
10th Percentile £14.84 £14.20 £13.00
25th Percentile £20.00 £17.44 £16.82
Median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £38.12
Median % change year-on-year +74.79% -34.02% -10.31%
75th Percentile £68.50 £51.05 £62.00
90th Percentile £82.41 £70.00 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £45.00 £24.00 £38.12
% change year-on-year +87.50% -37.04% -6.09%

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 20 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 20 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 20 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 +65 1,364 £525 - 400
London +55 794 £550 - 239
UK excluding London +75 588 £500 +5.26% 227
Work from Home +76 502 £525 - 162
North of England +28 178 £475 -5.00% 77
Midlands +49 154 £475 +2.70% 28
West Midlands +32 130 £469 +8.82% 18
South West +28 86 £500 -8.05% 24
Yorkshire +7 81 £478 +3.24% 21
South East -34 80 £525 +11.70% 82
Scotland +20 59 £450 -5.26% 8
North West -16 59 £525 +7.69% 34
North East -4 40 £425 -15.00% 22
East of England +2 30 £575 +39.39% 8
East Midlands -3 21 £525 +13.51% 10
Wales -9 8 £450 +82.58% 2
Northern Ireland - 5 £334 - 1

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
1 192 (12.48%) Apache Spark
2 177 (11.50%) Apache Airflow
3 125 (8.12%) Apache
4 46 (2.99%) SAS
5 44 (2.86%) Confluence
6 23 (1.49%) Jupyter
7 18 (1.17%) Palantir Foundry
8 11 (0.71%) SharePoint
9 8 (0.52%) Apache Superset
10 3 (0.19%) Appian
10 3 (0.19%) ArcGIS
11 2 (0.13%) Apache Synapse
11 2 (0.13%) Microsoft Exchange
12 1 (0.065%) Apache Solr
12 1 (0.065%) Camunda
12 1 (0.065%) CICS
12 1 (0.065%) Ethereum
12 1 (0.065%) Hyperledger
12 1 (0.065%) IBM HTTP Server
12 1 (0.065%) PowerExchange
Applications
1 25 (1.62%) Microsoft Excel
2 9 (0.58%) Microsoft Office
3 8 (0.52%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 7 (0.45%) Spreadsheet
5 4 (0.26%) Microsoft Project
6 3 (0.19%) Chatbot
7 2 (0.13%) MS Visio
8 1 (0.065%) Notion
Business Applications
1 12 (0.78%) Aladdin
2 6 (0.39%) Dynamics CRM
3 5 (0.32%) BambooHR
3 5 (0.32%) SAP S/4HANA
4 4 (0.26%) NetSuite
4 4 (0.26%) Sage X3
4 4 (0.26%) Salesforce CRM
5 2 (0.13%) Endur
5 2 (0.13%) Oracle Assets
5 2 (0.13%) SAP BPC
5 2 (0.13%) Temenos T24
5 2 (0.13%) Workday HCM
6 1 (0.065%) Adobe Campaign
6 1 (0.065%) Distributed Ledger
6 1 (0.065%) FIS Private Capital Suite
6 1 (0.065%) Markit EDM
6 1 (0.065%) MIS ActiveH
6 1 (0.065%) R3 Corda
6 1 (0.065%) SAP ECC
6 1 (0.065%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
Cloud Services
1 650 (42.24%) Azure
2 587 (38.14%) AWS
3 319 (20.73%) Power Platform
4 234 (15.20%) Snowflake
5 210 (13.65%) GCP
6 185 (12.02%) Amazon S3
7 184 (11.96%) dbt
8 175 (11.37%) Azure Data Factory
9 143 (9.29%) Azure Synapse Analytics
10 136 (8.84%) Serverless
11 128 (8.32%) Azure DevOps
12 122 (7.93%) GitHub
13 116 (7.54%) AWS Lambda
14 69 (4.48%) GitHub Actions
15 63 (4.09%) Amazon EMR
16 36 (2.34%) AWS CloudFormation
17 35 (2.27%) Amazon CloudWatch
18 31 (2.01%) Amazon SageMaker
18 31 (2.01%) Azure AI
19 30 (1.95%) AWS Step Functions
Communications & Networking
1 5 (0.32%) Firewall
1 5 (0.32%) RTP
2 1 (0.065%) 4G
2 1 (0.065%) 5G
2 1 (0.065%) MIMO
2 1 (0.065%) MQTT
2 1 (0.065%) Network Security
Database & Business Intelligence
1 303 (19.69%) Data Warehouse
2 295 (19.17%) Power BI
3 218 (14.17%) Data Lake
4 152 (9.88%) Metadata
5 110 (7.15%) Amazon Redshift
6 109 (7.08%) Big Data
7 94 (6.11%) BigQuery
8 91 (5.91%) Delta Lake
9 87 (5.65%) Tableau
10 79 (5.13%) SQL Server
11 78 (5.07%) Amazon Athena
12 68 (4.42%) NoSQL
13 67 (4.35%) Snowflake Schema
14 60 (3.90%) PostgreSQL
15 59 (3.83%) Relational Database
16 48 (3.12%) Azure SQL Database
17 47 (3.05%) Hadoop
18 36 (2.34%) SQL Server Integration Services
19 34 (2.21%) Star Schema
20 33 (2.14%) Looker
Development Applications
1 177 (11.50%) Git
2 75 (4.87%) JIRA
3 74 (4.81%) GitLab
4 34 (2.21%) MLflow
5 20 (1.30%) Jenkins
6 6 (0.39%) SonarQube
7 5 (0.32%) Bitbucket
8 4 (0.26%) ERwin
9 3 (0.19%) Artifactory
9 3 (0.19%) Postman
9 3 (0.19%) Selenium
9 3 (0.19%) Snyk
9 3 (0.19%) Visual Studio
10 2 (0.13%) Claude Code
10 2 (0.13%) Yeoman
11 1 (0.065%) ER Studio
11 1 (0.065%) git-flow
11 1 (0.065%) Octopus Deploy
11 1 (0.065%) Robot Framework
11 1 (0.065%) Sonatype Nexus
General
1 373 (24.24%) Social Skills
2 351 (22.81%) Finance
3 253 (16.44%) Analytical Skills
4 167 (10.85%) Public Sector
5 115 (7.47%) Banking
6 40 (2.60%) Marketing
7 36 (2.34%) Documentation Skills
7 36 (2.34%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 32 (2.08%) Retail
9 22 (1.43%) Front Office
9 22 (1.43%) Telecoms
10 20 (1.30%) Investment Banking
11 14 (0.91%) Financial Institution
11 14 (0.91%) Law
11 14 (0.91%) Manufacturing
12 11 (0.71%) Influencing Skills
12 11 (0.71%) Legal
12 11 (0.71%) Pharmaceutical
13 9 (0.58%) Billing
14 6 (0.39%) Back Office
Job Titles
1 711 (46.20%) Data Engineer
2 216 (14.04%) Senior
3 178 (11.57%) Architect
4 170 (11.05%) Lead
5 124 (8.06%) Senior Data Engineer
6 97 (6.30%) Data Architect
7 95 (6.17%) Developer
8 82 (5.33%) AWS Engineer
9 70 (4.55%) Analyst
10 66 (4.29%) Lead Data Engineer
11 64 (4.16%) AWS Data Engineer
12 63 (4.09%) Snowflake Engineer
13 59 (3.83%) Azure Engineer
14 53 (3.44%) Azure Data Engineer
15 49 (3.18%) Data Scientist
15 49 (3.18%) Snowflake Data Engineer
16 48 (3.12%) Solutions Architect
17 46 (2.99%) Consultant
17 46 (2.99%) Python Engineer
18 41 (2.66%) Data Analyst
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 222 (14.42%) PySpark
2 142 (9.23%) Kafka
3 40 (2.60%) REST
4 37 (2.40%) Pandas
5 35 (2.27%) JSON
6 30 (1.95%) scikit-learn
7 28 (1.82%) PyTorch
8 27 (1.75%) React
9 23 (1.49%) NumPy
9 23 (1.49%) Spring
10 22 (1.43%) TensorFlow
11 18 (1.17%) .NET
12 17 (1.10%) RESTful
13 16 (1.04%) Spring Boot
14 15 (0.97%) OpenTelemetry
15 13 (0.84%) Apache Avro
15 13 (0.84%) FastAPI
15 13 (0.84%) Microsoft Graph
15 13 (0.84%) YAML
16 12 (0.78%) Node.js
Miscellaneous
1 207 (13.45%) Cloud Native
2 69 (4.48%) Data Structures
3 61 (3.96%) Legacy Systems
4 59 (3.83%) Distributed Systems
5 52 (3.38%) Product Ownership
6 41 (2.66%) Onboarding
7 38 (2.47%) AI Agents
8 28 (1.82%) Data Protection Act
9 26 (1.69%) Distributed Computing
10 25 (1.62%) Algorithms
11 21 (1.36%) Greenfield Project
11 21 (1.36%) NHS
12 18 (1.17%) Analytical Mindset
12 18 (1.17%) Virtual Team
13 17 (1.10%) Clustering
14 15 (0.97%) Management Information System
15 13 (0.84%) Life Science
15 13 (0.84%) Reference Data
16 12 (0.78%) Fixed Income
16 12 (0.78%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 31 (2.01%) Linux
2 25 (1.62%) Unix
3 5 (0.32%) VMS
3 5 (0.32%) Windows
4 2 (0.13%) Windows Server
5 1 (0.065%) Ubuntu
Processes & Methodologies
1 792 (51.46%) Analytics
2 746 (48.47%) Data Pipeline
3 603 (39.18%) Data Modelling
4 548 (35.61%) CI/CD
5 534 (34.70%) ETL
6 437 (28.40%) AI
7 396 (25.73%) Agile
8 380 (24.69%) Business Intelligence
9 367 (23.85%) DevOps
10 342 (22.22%) Data Governance
11 292 (18.97%) Machine Learning
12 273 (17.74%) Data Science
12 273 (17.74%) Problem-Solving
13 232 (15.07%) Migration
14 225 (14.62%) Validation
15 220 (14.29%) Data Architecture
16 211 (13.71%) Decision-Making
17 189 (12.28%) Stakeholder Management
18 187 (12.15%) Infrastructure as Code
19 181 (11.76%) Data Transformation
Programming Languages
1 834 (54.19%) SQL
2 808 (52.50%) Python
3 129 (8.38%) Java
4 45 (2.92%) Data Analysis Expressions
5 41 (2.66%) Scala
6 37 (2.40%) Bash
7 36 (2.34%) C#
8 25 (1.62%) T-SQL
9 24 (1.56%) PowerShell
10 22 (1.43%) R
11 21 (1.36%) JavaScript
12 18 (1.17%) Bicep
13 17 (1.10%) PL/SQL
14 13 (0.84%) Shell Script
14 13 (0.84%) TypeScript
15 12 (0.78%) SAS Macro
16 8 (0.52%) SPARQL
17 7 (0.45%) Cypher
18 5 (0.32%) Kusto Query Language
19 4 (0.26%) Korn
Qualifications
1 302 (19.62%) Security Cleared
2 259 (16.83%) SC Cleared
3 114 (7.41%) Degree
4 49 (3.18%) Computer Science Degree
5 37 (2.40%) BPSS Clearance
5 37 (2.40%) Master's Degree
6 30 (1.95%) Azure Certification
7 27 (1.75%) DV Cleared
8 21 (1.36%) AWS Certification
9 13 (0.84%) DBS Check
10 9 (0.58%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
10 9 (0.58%) SnowPro
11 7 (0.45%) Microsoft Certification
12 6 (0.39%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 5 (0.32%) CSPO
14 3 (0.19%) IBM Certification
14 3 (0.19%) Tableau Certification
15 2 (0.13%) PhD
15 2 (0.13%) PMI Certification
16 1 (0.065%) CCSP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 450 (29.24%) Data Quality
2 89 (5.78%) GDPR
3 79 (5.13%) QA
4 24 (1.56%) Accessibility
5 15 (0.97%) SLA
6 5 (0.32%) Sarbanes-Oxley
7 4 (0.26%) Actionable Recommendations
7 4 (0.26%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 4 (0.26%) NIST
7 4 (0.26%) Solvency II
8 3 (0.19%) California Consumer Privacy Act
8 3 (0.19%) Disclosure Scotland
8 3 (0.19%) GRC
8 3 (0.19%) GxP
8 3 (0.19%) HIPAA
8 3 (0.19%) ISO/IEC 42001
8 3 (0.19%) MiFID
8 3 (0.19%) PMO
9 2 (0.13%) 21 CFR Part 11
9 2 (0.13%) SNOMED CT
System Software
1 135 (8.77%) Docker
2 3 (0.19%) Active Directory
2 3 (0.19%) Virtual Machines
3 2 (0.13%) HDFS
4 1 (0.065%) Oracle RAC
Systems Management
1 197 (12.80%) Terraform
2 114 (7.41%) Kubernetes
3 28 (1.82%) Grafana
4 27 (1.75%) Prometheus
5 12 (0.78%) Ansible
6 5 (0.32%) Kibana
7 3 (0.19%) Argo
7 3 (0.19%) logstash
7 3 (0.19%) Nagios
7 3 (0.19%) Rancher
8 2 (0.13%) Kubeflow
8 2 (0.13%) Thomson Reuters DACS
9 1 (0.065%) Control-M
9 1 (0.065%) Data Guard
9 1 (0.065%) Hadoop YARN
9 1 (0.065%) HP Fortify
9 1 (0.065%) Oozie
9 1 (0.065%) Oracle Enterprise Manager
9 1 (0.065%) Oracle RMAN
9 1 (0.065%) QRadar
Vendors
1 388 (25.21%) Databricks
2 265 (17.22%) Microsoft
3 86 (5.59%) Informatica
4 67 (4.35%) Oracle
5 63 (4.09%) Google
6 35 (2.27%) Talend
7 33 (2.14%) SAP
8 30 (1.95%) Foundry
9 27 (1.75%) Palantir
10 25 (1.62%) OpenAI
11 23 (1.49%) Splunk
12 22 (1.43%) Salesforce
13 15 (0.97%) Cloudera
13 15 (0.97%) ServiceNow
14 12 (0.78%) Trend Micro
15 8 (0.52%) Adobe
15 8 (0.52%) Workday
16 7 (0.45%) Denodo
16 7 (0.45%) InterSystems
17 6 (0.39%) Teradata