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

6 months to
3 Jan 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 117 166 219
Rank change year-on-year +49 +53 +8
Contract jobs citing Data Engineering 877 495 483
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.37% 1.52% 1.12%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 2.69% 1.72% 1.27%
Number of daily rates quoted 581 346 364
10th Percentile £363 £383 £400
25th Percentile £413 £463 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -6.82% - -8.33%
75th Percentile £625 £650 £675
90th Percentile £738 £788 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £500 £550
% change year-on-year -5.00% -9.09% +1.85%
Number of hourly rates quoted 5 13 10
10th Percentile £41.15 £21.25 £35.00
25th Percentile £50.00 £22.00 £36.68
Median hourly rate £74.26 £25.43 £53.65
Median % change year-on-year +192.02% -52.60% -28.46%
75th Percentile £87.50 £28.15 £74.75
90th Percentile £101.00 £57.63 £78.70
UK excluding London median hourly rate £62.13 £25.43 £78.00
% change year-on-year +144.32% -67.40% +63.50%

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 32,583 28,827 37,913
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 88.04% 88.40% 87.97%
Number of daily rates quoted 20,591 17,520 25,247
10th Percentile £304 £306 £305
25th Percentile £406 £413 £419
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £615 £638 £650
90th Percentile £720 £738 £743
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £500 £500
% change year-on-year -5.00% - -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,019 938 1,537
10th Percentile £14.73 £15.62 £14.25
25th Percentile £17.69 £20.49 £18.93
Median hourly rate £25.15 £32.50 £43.75
Median % change year-on-year -22.62% -25.71% +25.00%
75th Percentile £53.75 £62.50 £65.00
90th Percentile £69.65 £74.79 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £23.83 £30.78 £45.00
% change year-on-year -22.60% -31.60% +50.70%

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 3 January 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 3 January 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 3 January 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 +65 776 £520 -8.77% 362
London +68 544 £550 -4.35% 192
Work from Home +16 260 £550 -3.51% 200
UK excluding London 0 239 £475 -5.00% 234
North of England -23 74 £450 -18.18% 64
Midlands -3 62 £542 +8.30% 26
North West -1 48 £440 -10.66% 39
West Midlands -12 44 £550 +11.11% 20
Scotland +16 37 £402 -6.78% 11
South East -2 34 £480 -11.93% 91
South West -9 28 £550 -17.60% 31
East Midlands -8 18 £429 -25.43% 6
Yorkshire -44 14 £500 -9.09% 12
East of England -13 13 £500 +29.87% 14
North East 0 12 £425 -28.87% 13
Wales -14 2 £495 -1.00% 2
Northern Ireland - 2 £430 -

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
1 129 (14.71%) Apache Spark
2 110 (12.54%) Apache Airflow
3 65 (7.41%) Apache
4 13 (1.48%) Confluence
5 4 (0.46%) SAS
6 3 (0.34%) Appian
7 2 (0.23%) Jupyter
8 1 (0.11%) Apache Pig
8 1 (0.11%) ArcGIS
8 1 (0.11%) CMS
8 1 (0.11%) Luigi
8 1 (0.11%) SharePoint
Applications
1 19 (2.17%) Microsoft Excel
2 8 (0.91%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 6 (0.68%) Chatbot
4 3 (0.34%) MS Visio
5 2 (0.23%) Microsoft Office
5 2 (0.23%) Microsoft Project
5 2 (0.23%) Trello
6 1 (0.11%) Adobe XD
Business Applications
1 7 (0.80%) Aladdin
2 4 (0.46%) Dynamics CRM
3 2 (0.23%) Eagle PACE
3 2 (0.23%) Markit EDM
4 1 (0.11%) Actimize
4 1 (0.11%) Maximo
4 1 (0.11%) Misys Midas
4 1 (0.11%) Salesforce CRM
4 1 (0.11%) SAP BPC
4 1 (0.11%) SAP ERP
4 1 (0.11%) Workday HCM
Cloud Services
1 401 (45.72%) Azure
2 303 (34.55%) AWS
3 160 (18.24%) Power Platform
4 154 (17.56%) Azure Data Factory
5 127 (14.48%) GCP
6 122 (13.91%) Snowflake
7 104 (11.86%) Azure Synapse Analytics
8 102 (11.63%) Amazon S3
9 92 (10.49%) Serverless
10 91 (10.38%) GitHub
11 80 (9.12%) Azure DevOps
12 78 (8.89%) dbt
13 70 (7.98%) AWS Lambda
14 62 (7.07%) GitHub Actions
15 36 (4.10%) AWS CloudFormation
16 30 (3.42%) AWS Step Functions
17 27 (3.08%) Amazon SageMaker
18 25 (2.85%) Azure Machine Learning
19 21 (2.39%) Amazon EMR
19 21 (2.39%) Cloud Computing
Communications & Networking
1 4 (0.46%) Cisco IPT
1 4 (0.46%) Kerberos
1 4 (0.46%) Network Security
1 4 (0.46%) TCP/IP
2 3 (0.34%) Firewall
2 3 (0.34%) SSH
2 3 (0.34%) SSL
2 3 (0.34%) VPN
3 2 (0.23%) DNS
4 1 (0.11%) MQTT
4 1 (0.11%) SAN
4 1 (0.11%) SMS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 170 (19.38%) Data Warehouse
2 155 (17.67%) Power BI
3 119 (13.57%) Data Lake
4 72 (8.21%) Metadata
5 63 (7.18%) Big Data
6 57 (6.50%) NoSQL
7 52 (5.93%) Azure SQL Database
7 52 (5.93%) Relational Database
7 52 (5.93%) SQL Server
8 50 (5.70%) Delta Lake
9 45 (5.13%) BigQuery
10 41 (4.68%) Amazon Athena
10 41 (4.68%) PostgreSQL
10 41 (4.68%) Snowflake Schema
11 40 (4.56%) Amazon Redshift
12 37 (4.22%) Tableau
13 35 (3.99%) Hadoop
14 23 (2.62%) RDBMS
15 19 (2.17%) SQL Server Integration Services
16 18 (2.05%) Amazon RDS
Development Applications
1 137 (15.62%) Git
2 48 (5.47%) Jenkins
3 47 (5.36%) GitLab
4 33 (3.76%) MLflow
5 27 (3.08%) JIRA
6 9 (1.03%) Visual Studio Code
7 7 (0.80%) SonarQube
8 4 (0.46%) Cucumber
8 4 (0.46%) Poetry
9 3 (0.34%) JMeter
9 3 (0.34%) Selenium
10 2 (0.23%) Artifactory
10 2 (0.23%) ERwin
10 2 (0.23%) JUnit
10 2 (0.23%) Maven
10 2 (0.23%) Pylint
10 2 (0.23%) Sonatype Nexus
10 2 (0.23%) TeamCity
10 2 (0.23%) TestRail
10 2 (0.23%) Zephyr
General
1 249 (28.39%) Social Skills
2 202 (23.03%) Finance
3 113 (12.88%) Analytical Skills
4 59 (6.73%) Public Sector
5 57 (6.50%) Banking
6 24 (2.74%) Investment Banking
7 21 (2.39%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 17 (1.94%) Retail
9 16 (1.82%) Front Office
10 15 (1.71%) Marketing
10 15 (1.71%) Pharmaceutical
11 13 (1.48%) Influencing Skills
12 11 (1.25%) Legal
13 9 (1.03%) Publishing
13 9 (1.03%) Telecoms
14 8 (0.91%) Military
15 7 (0.80%) Documentation Skills
15 7 (0.80%) Presentation Skills
16 6 (0.68%) Back Office
17 5 (0.57%) Electronics
Job Titles
1 369 (42.08%) Data Engineer
2 113 (12.88%) Senior
3 89 (10.15%) Lead
4 75 (8.55%) Azure Engineer
5 72 (8.21%) Senior Data Engineer
6 66 (7.53%) Developer
7 63 (7.18%) Architect
8 52 (5.93%) Azure Data Engineer
9 45 (5.13%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
10 44 (5.02%) Analyst
11 40 (4.56%) Python Engineer
12 39 (4.45%) AWS Engineer
13 36 (4.10%) Data Scientist
13 36 (4.10%) Snowflake Engineer
14 31 (3.53%) Data Architect
15 28 (3.19%) Snowflake Data Engineer
16 25 (2.85%) AWS Data Engineer
16 25 (2.85%) Python Data Engineer
17 24 (2.74%) DevOps Engineer
18 23 (2.62%) Lead Data Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 162 (18.47%) PySpark
2 93 (10.60%) Kafka
3 65 (7.41%) Pandas
4 54 (6.16%) PyTorch
5 50 (5.70%) NumPy
6 45 (5.13%) TensorFlow
7 42 (4.79%) FastAPI
8 36 (4.10%) scikit-learn
9 35 (3.99%) Flask
10 32 (3.65%) RESTful
11 25 (2.85%) LangChain
12 24 (2.74%) React
13 21 (2.39%) JSON
14 20 (2.28%) pytest
15 18 (2.05%) Hugging Face
16 17 (1.94%) REST
17 15 (1.71%) OAuth
17 15 (1.71%) Spark Streaming
18 14 (1.60%) YAML
19 13 (1.48%) Polars
Miscellaneous
1 83 (9.46%) Cloud Native
2 45 (5.13%) Algorithms
3 26 (2.96%) Distributed Computing
4 21 (2.39%) Data Structures
4 21 (2.39%) Distributed Systems
4 21 (2.39%) Product Ownership
5 19 (2.17%) Data Protection Act
5 19 (2.17%) Onboarding
6 18 (2.05%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
7 17 (1.94%) Hybrid Cloud
8 15 (1.71%) Legacy Systems
9 14 (1.60%) Hedge funds
10 12 (1.37%) AI Agents
11 11 (1.25%) Analytical Mindset
11 11 (1.25%) Life Science
12 10 (1.14%) Clustering
12 10 (1.14%) Data Fabric
12 10 (1.14%) Derivative
12 10 (1.14%) Enterprise Software
13 9 (1.03%) Genomics
Operating Systems
1 30 (3.42%) Linux
2 3 (0.34%) VMS
3 2 (0.23%) Android
3 2 (0.23%) Ubuntu
3 2 (0.23%) Windows
4 1 (0.11%) CentOS
4 1 (0.11%) Debian
Processes & Methodologies
1 379 (43.22%) Data Pipeline
2 322 (36.72%) ETL
3 319 (36.37%) Analytics
4 316 (36.03%) CI/CD
5 302 (34.44%) Data Modelling
6 217 (24.74%) AI
7 211 (24.06%) DevOps
8 210 (23.95%) Data Governance
9 203 (23.15%) Machine Learning
10 201 (22.92%) Agile
11 187 (21.32%) Business Intelligence
12 178 (20.30%) Data Science
13 175 (19.95%) Problem-Solving
14 148 (16.88%) Data Architecture
15 105 (11.97%) Infrastructure as Code
16 97 (11.06%) Containerisation
17 95 (10.83%) Data Integration
18 86 (9.81%) LLM
19 84 (9.58%) Data Transformation
20 82 (9.35%) Visualisation
Programming Languages
1 552 (62.94%) Python
2 436 (49.71%) SQL
3 59 (6.73%) Scala
4 52 (5.93%) Java
5 37 (4.22%) C#
6 33 (3.76%) JavaScript
7 28 (3.19%) PowerShell
8 23 (2.62%) C++
9 22 (2.51%) Bash
10 19 (2.17%) Bicep
10 19 (2.17%) Data Analysis Expressions
10 19 (2.17%) T-SQL
11 16 (1.82%) PL/SQL
11 16 (1.82%) R
12 15 (1.71%) Go
12 15 (1.71%) TypeScript
13 13 (1.48%) Rust
14 12 (1.37%) Shell Script
15 7 (0.80%) Korn
16 4 (0.46%) Groovy
Qualifications
1 160 (18.24%) Security Cleared
2 131 (14.94%) SC Cleared
3 69 (7.87%) Degree
4 51 (5.82%) Azure Certification
5 32 (3.65%) Master's Degree
6 28 (3.19%) Computer Science Degree
7 18 (2.05%) DV Cleared
8 17 (1.94%) AWS Certification
9 14 (1.60%) Microsoft Certification
10 12 (1.37%) PhD
11 7 (0.80%) BPSS Clearance
11 7 (0.80%) MCP
12 5 (0.57%) DBS Check
13 3 (0.34%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 3 (0.34%) SnowPro
13 3 (0.34%) Tableau Certification
14 2 (0.23%) CBAP
14 2 (0.23%) ISTQB
15 1 (0.11%) OCP
15 1 (0.11%) Oracle Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 222 (25.31%) Data Quality
2 68 (7.75%) GDPR
3 27 (3.08%) QA
4 19 (2.17%) Accessibility
5 9 (1.03%) HIPAA
5 9 (1.03%) Sarbanes-Oxley
6 6 (0.68%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 5 (0.57%) PERC
8 4 (0.46%) SOC 2
8 4 (0.46%) WCAG
9 3 (0.34%) California Consumer Privacy Act
9 3 (0.34%) Disclosure Scotland
10 2 (0.23%) HL7
10 2 (0.23%) NIST
10 2 (0.23%) PCI DSS
10 2 (0.23%) PMO
11 1 (0.11%) AIFMD
11 1 (0.11%) Dodd-Frank
11 1 (0.11%) EMIR
11 1 (0.11%) GMP
System Software
1 138 (15.74%) Docker
2 16 (1.82%) HDFS
3 3 (0.34%) Active Directory
4 1 (0.11%) Apache ZooKeeper
4 1 (0.11%) ISA Server
4 1 (0.11%) Virtual Machines
Systems Management
1 136 (15.51%) Terraform
2 116 (13.23%) Kubernetes
3 16 (1.82%) Grafana
4 14 (1.60%) Ansible
5 11 (1.25%) Hadoop YARN
6 10 (1.14%) Prometheus
7 6 (0.68%) Argo
8 5 (0.57%) Control-M
8 5 (0.57%) Puppet
9 3 (0.34%) Istio
9 3 (0.34%) Kibana
9 3 (0.34%) Kustomize
9 3 (0.34%) logstash
9 3 (0.34%) Oozie
9 3 (0.34%) vCenter Server
10 2 (0.23%) Kubeflow
10 2 (0.23%) Single Sign-On
11 1 (0.11%) Apache Ranger
11 1 (0.11%) Systems Management Server (SMS)
Vendors
1 258 (29.42%) Databricks
2 115 (13.11%) Microsoft
3 48 (5.47%) Google
4 29 (3.31%) Oracle
5 17 (1.94%) Informatica
5 17 (1.94%) Palantir
6 15 (1.71%) Foundry
6 15 (1.71%) OpenAI
7 13 (1.48%) SAP
7 13 (1.48%) Talend
8 12 (1.37%) Cloudera
9 9 (1.03%) Salesforce
10 8 (0.91%) Virgin Media
11 6 (0.68%) Denodo
11 6 (0.68%) Guidewire
12 5 (0.57%) ServiceNow
13 4 (0.46%) IBM
13 4 (0.46%) Red Hat
13 4 (0.46%) Sage
13 4 (0.46%) VMware