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

6 months to
13 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 87 158 203
Rank change year-on-year +71 +45 +9
Contract jobs citing Data Engineering 1,531 580 500
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.91% 1.77% 1.17%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.41% 1.96% 1.37%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,067 384 371
10th Percentile £378 £363 £363
25th Percentile £440 £450 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year - -4.55% -12.00%
75th Percentile £631 £650 £688
90th Percentile £749 £800 £775
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 44,845 29,559 36,499
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 85.12% 90.45% 85.38%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,888 18,632 23,279
10th Percentile £325 £300 £304
25th Percentile £415 £405 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £520 £501 £525
Median % change year-on-year +3.81% -4.67% -4.55%
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 2,665 1,513 2,446
10th Percentile £14.90 £14.20 £12.79
25th Percentile £20.00 £17.61 £16.25
Median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £38.12
Median % change year-on-year +74.79% -34.02% -4.70%
75th Percentile £68.00 £53.50 £61.30
90th Percentile £82.25 £70.00 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £45.00 £24.66 £38.12
% change year-on-year +82.48% -35.31% +0.51%

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 13 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 13 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 13 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 +68 1,359 £525 - 652
London +56 798 £550 - 407
UK excluding London +77 579 £500 +5.26% 342
Work from Home +70 495 £525 - 262
North of England +23 175 £475 -5.00% 103
Midlands +39 147 £475 +2.70% 46
West Midlands +28 124 £475 +10.21% 30
South West +30 86 £500 -13.04% 68
Yorkshire +2 78 £490 +5.95% 31
South East -36 77 £525 +10.53% 90
Scotland +20 60 £500 +5.26% 8
North West -21 58 £500 +2.56% 53
North East +2 41 £425 -15.00% 19
East of England -8 29 £575 +71.29% 8
East Midlands -5 20 £525 +13.51% 16
Wales -5 11 £450 +82.58% 4
Northern Ireland - 5 £334 - 17

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
1 195 (12.74%) Apache Spark
2 178 (11.63%) Apache Airflow
3 121 (7.90%) Apache
4 47 (3.07%) SAS
5 44 (2.87%) Confluence
6 23 (1.50%) Jupyter
7 19 (1.24%) Palantir Foundry
8 12 (0.78%) SharePoint
9 8 (0.52%) Apache Superset
10 4 (0.26%) Appian
10 4 (0.26%) Microsoft Exchange
11 3 (0.20%) ArcGIS
12 2 (0.13%) Apache Synapse
13 1 (0.065%) Adobe Experience Manager
13 1 (0.065%) Camunda
13 1 (0.065%) CICS
13 1 (0.065%) IBM HTTP Server
13 1 (0.065%) PowerExchange
Applications
1 27 (1.76%) Microsoft Excel
2 9 (0.59%) Microsoft Office
3 8 (0.52%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 8 (0.52%) Spreadsheet
4 4 (0.26%) Microsoft Project
5 3 (0.20%) Chatbot
6 2 (0.13%) MS Visio
7 1 (0.065%) Notion
Business Applications
1 10 (0.65%) Aladdin
2 6 (0.39%) Dynamics CRM
3 5 (0.33%) BambooHR
3 5 (0.33%) 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
6 1 (0.065%) Adobe Campaign
6 1 (0.065%) FIS Private Capital Suite
6 1 (0.065%) Markit EDM
6 1 (0.065%) SAP ECC
6 1 (0.065%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
Cloud Services
1 652 (42.59%) Azure
2 581 (37.95%) AWS
3 332 (21.69%) Power Platform
4 221 (14.44%) Snowflake
5 203 (13.26%) GCP
6 184 (12.02%) Amazon S3
7 176 (11.50%) dbt
8 171 (11.17%) Azure Data Factory
9 141 (9.21%) Azure Synapse Analytics
10 136 (8.88%) Serverless
11 127 (8.30%) GitHub
12 125 (8.16%) Azure DevOps
13 117 (7.64%) AWS Lambda
14 73 (4.77%) GitHub Actions
15 60 (3.92%) Amazon EMR
16 38 (2.48%) AWS CloudFormation
17 35 (2.29%) Amazon CloudWatch
18 33 (2.16%) Azure AI
19 31 (2.02%) AWS Step Functions
20 30 (1.96%) Amazon SageMaker
Communications & Networking
1 5 (0.33%) Firewall
1 5 (0.33%) RTP
2 2 (0.13%) Network Security
3 1 (0.065%) 4G
3 1 (0.065%) 5G
3 1 (0.065%) MIMO
3 1 (0.065%) MQTT
Database & Business Intelligence
1 305 (19.92%) Power BI
2 290 (18.94%) Data Warehouse
3 215 (14.04%) Data Lake
4 148 (9.67%) Metadata
5 115 (7.51%) Big Data
6 110 (7.18%) Amazon Redshift
7 91 (5.94%) BigQuery
7 91 (5.94%) Delta Lake
8 87 (5.68%) Tableau
9 80 (5.23%) Amazon Athena
10 78 (5.09%) SQL Server
11 70 (4.57%) Snowflake Schema
12 69 (4.51%) NoSQL
13 59 (3.85%) PostgreSQL
13 59 (3.85%) Relational Database
14 50 (3.27%) Hadoop
15 48 (3.14%) Azure SQL Database
16 35 (2.29%) SQL Server Integration Services
16 35 (2.29%) Star Schema
17 31 (2.02%) Looker
Development Applications
1 175 (11.43%) Git
2 77 (5.03%) GitLab
3 75 (4.90%) JIRA
4 35 (2.29%) MLflow
5 20 (1.31%) Jenkins
6 6 (0.39%) SonarQube
7 5 (0.33%) Bitbucket
8 3 (0.20%) Artifactory
8 3 (0.20%) Postman
8 3 (0.20%) Selenium
8 3 (0.20%) Snyk
8 3 (0.20%) Visual Studio
9 2 (0.13%) Claude Code
9 2 (0.13%) ERwin
9 2 (0.13%) Yeoman
10 1 (0.065%) Atlassian Bamboo
10 1 (0.065%) Cypress.io
10 1 (0.065%) Maven
10 1 (0.065%) Octopus Deploy
10 1 (0.065%) SoapUI
General
1 381 (24.89%) Social Skills
2 355 (23.19%) Finance
3 247 (16.13%) Analytical Skills
4 165 (10.78%) Public Sector
5 115 (7.51%) Banking
6 40 (2.61%) Marketing
7 38 (2.48%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 37 (2.42%) Documentation Skills
9 33 (2.16%) Retail
10 22 (1.44%) Front Office
10 22 (1.44%) Investment Banking
11 21 (1.37%) Telecoms
12 15 (0.98%) Financial Institution
13 14 (0.91%) Manufacturing
14 13 (0.85%) Law
15 11 (0.72%) Legal
16 10 (0.65%) Influencing Skills
16 10 (0.65%) Pharmaceutical
17 9 (0.59%) Billing
18 6 (0.39%) Back Office
Job Titles
1 716 (46.77%) Data Engineer
2 220 (14.37%) Senior
3 172 (11.23%) Architect
4 168 (10.97%) Lead
5 129 (8.43%) Senior Data Engineer
6 96 (6.27%) Developer
7 94 (6.14%) Data Architect
8 81 (5.29%) AWS Engineer
9 72 (4.70%) Analyst
10 67 (4.38%) Lead Data Engineer
11 62 (4.05%) AWS Data Engineer
12 59 (3.85%) Snowflake Engineer
13 58 (3.79%) Azure Engineer
14 52 (3.40%) Azure Data Engineer
15 49 (3.20%) Data Scientist
16 47 (3.07%) Snowflake Data Engineer
16 47 (3.07%) Solutions Architect
17 45 (2.94%) Python Engineer
18 44 (2.87%) Consultant
19 43 (2.81%) Data Analyst
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 228 (14.89%) PySpark
2 147 (9.60%) Kafka
3 42 (2.74%) Pandas
4 39 (2.55%) REST
5 33 (2.16%) JSON
6 32 (2.09%) scikit-learn
7 29 (1.89%) PyTorch
8 27 (1.76%) NumPy
9 25 (1.63%) React
9 25 (1.63%) Spring
10 23 (1.50%) TensorFlow
11 18 (1.18%) Spring Boot
12 17 (1.11%) .NET
12 17 (1.11%) RESTful
13 15 (0.98%) OpenTelemetry
13 15 (0.98%) YAML
14 14 (0.91%) FastAPI
15 13 (0.85%) Microsoft Graph
15 13 (0.85%) XML
16 12 (0.78%) Node.js
Miscellaneous
1 209 (13.65%) Cloud Native
2 64 (4.18%) Data Structures
3 59 (3.85%) Legacy Systems
4 57 (3.72%) Distributed Systems
5 49 (3.20%) Product Ownership
6 43 (2.81%) Onboarding
7 36 (2.35%) AI Agents
8 27 (1.76%) Data Protection Act
9 26 (1.70%) Distributed Computing
10 25 (1.63%) Algorithms
11 23 (1.50%) NHS
12 21 (1.37%) Greenfield Project
13 19 (1.24%) Analytical Mindset
14 18 (1.18%) Virtual Team
15 17 (1.11%) Clustering
16 15 (0.98%) Management Information System
17 14 (0.91%) Fixed Income
18 13 (0.85%) Life Science
18 13 (0.85%) Reference Data
18 13 (0.85%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 29 (1.89%) Linux
2 25 (1.63%) Unix
3 5 (0.33%) VMS
4 3 (0.20%) Windows
5 2 (0.13%) Windows Server
6 1 (0.065%) Ubuntu
Processes & Methodologies
1 796 (51.99%) Analytics
2 742 (48.47%) Data Pipeline
3 597 (38.99%) Data Modelling
4 553 (36.12%) CI/CD
5 532 (34.75%) ETL
6 440 (28.74%) AI
7 386 (25.21%) Business Intelligence
8 385 (25.15%) Agile
9 374 (24.43%) DevOps
10 337 (22.01%) Data Governance
11 294 (19.20%) Machine Learning
12 277 (18.09%) Problem-Solving
13 274 (17.90%) Data Science
14 221 (14.44%) Migration
15 216 (14.11%) Validation
16 215 (14.04%) Data Architecture
16 215 (14.04%) Decision-Making
17 192 (12.54%) Infrastructure as Code
18 183 (11.95%) Stakeholder Management
19 178 (11.63%) Use Case
Programming Languages
1 836 (54.60%) SQL
2 809 (52.84%) Python
3 128 (8.36%) Java
4 46 (3.00%) Data Analysis Expressions
5 41 (2.68%) Scala
6 37 (2.42%) Bash
7 36 (2.35%) C#
8 24 (1.57%) T-SQL
9 23 (1.50%) PowerShell
10 22 (1.44%) R
11 20 (1.31%) JavaScript
12 18 (1.18%) Bicep
13 15 (0.98%) PL/SQL
14 13 (0.85%) Shell Script
14 13 (0.85%) TypeScript
15 12 (0.78%) SAS Macro
16 7 (0.46%) SPARQL
17 6 (0.39%) Cypher
18 5 (0.33%) Kusto Query Language
19 4 (0.26%) Korn
Qualifications
1 301 (19.66%) Security Cleared
2 260 (16.98%) SC Cleared
3 116 (7.58%) Degree
4 48 (3.14%) Computer Science Degree
5 38 (2.48%) BPSS Clearance
5 38 (2.48%) Master's Degree
6 32 (2.09%) Azure Certification
7 25 (1.63%) DV Cleared
8 21 (1.37%) AWS Certification
9 13 (0.85%) DBS Check
10 9 (0.59%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
10 9 (0.59%) SnowPro
11 7 (0.46%) Microsoft Certification
12 6 (0.39%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 5 (0.33%) CSPO
14 3 (0.20%) IBM Certification
14 3 (0.20%) PhD
14 3 (0.20%) Tableau Certification
15 2 (0.13%) PMI Certification
16 1 (0.065%) ACCA
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 446 (29.13%) Data Quality
2 89 (5.81%) GDPR
3 76 (4.96%) QA
4 19 (1.24%) Accessibility
5 15 (0.98%) SLA
6 5 (0.33%) Sarbanes-Oxley
7 4 (0.26%) Actionable Recommendations
7 4 (0.26%) California Consumer Privacy Act
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 27001
8 3 (0.20%) ISO/IEC 42001
8 3 (0.20%) NIST
8 3 (0.20%) PMO
9 2 (0.13%) 21 CFR Part 11
9 2 (0.13%) SNOMED CT
System Software
1 137 (8.95%) Docker
2 3 (0.20%) Active Directory
2 3 (0.20%) Virtual Machines
3 2 (0.13%) HDFS
Systems Management
1 208 (13.59%) Terraform
2 115 (7.51%) Kubernetes
3 28 (1.83%) Grafana
4 27 (1.76%) Prometheus
5 11 (0.72%) 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 (0.065%) Control-M
9 1 (0.065%) Hadoop YARN
9 1 (0.065%) HP Fortify
9 1 (0.065%) IBM Guardium
9 1 (0.065%) Kustomize
9 1 (0.065%) Oozie
9 1 (0.065%) Single Sign-On
Vendors
1 395 (25.80%) Databricks
2 262 (17.11%) Microsoft
3 86 (5.62%) Informatica
4 60 (3.92%) Oracle
5 59 (3.85%) Google
6 32 (2.09%) Talend
7 30 (1.96%) Foundry
7 30 (1.96%) SAP
8 27 (1.76%) Palantir
9 26 (1.70%) OpenAI
10 22 (1.44%) Salesforce
10 22 (1.44%) Splunk
11 15 (0.98%) Cloudera
11 15 (0.98%) ServiceNow
12 12 (0.78%) Trend Micro
13 8 (0.52%) Adobe
13 8 (0.52%) Denodo
14 7 (0.46%) InterSystems
15 6 (0.39%) Bloomberg
15 6 (0.39%) Teradata