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 27 August 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
27 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 93 161 201
Rank change year-on-year +68 +40 +7
Contract jobs citing Data Engineering 1,541 569 468
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.87% 1.74% 1.21%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.39% 1.92% 1.41%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,060 356 345
10th Percentile £399 £363 £368
25th Percentile £445 £428 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £520 £575
Median % change year-on-year +0.96% -9.57% -8.00%
75th Percentile £638 £638 £675
90th Percentile £738 £769 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £520
% change year-on-year +5.26% -8.65% -9.57%
Number of hourly rates quoted 23 7 12
10th Percentile £21.25 £37.48 £30.46
25th Percentile £28.13 £45.11 £31.25
Median hourly rate £69.00 £52.50 £47.50
Median % change year-on-year +31.43% +10.53% -39.10%
75th Percentile £76.50 £76.25 £60.00
90th Percentile £87.05 £96.50 -
UK excluding London median hourly rate £52.50 £38.96 £60.00
% change year-on-year +34.75% -35.07% -23.08%

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 45,399 29,629 33,143
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.55% 90.46% 85.37%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,782 18,436 20,950
10th Percentile £325 £300 £310
25th Percentile £425 £402 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -3.67%
75th Percentile £625 £625 £638
90th Percentile £725 £725 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,881 1,773 1,687
10th Percentile £14.22 £14.20 £13.86
25th Percentile £17.87 £17.30 £18.13
Median hourly rate £41.00 £25.15 £40.50
Median % change year-on-year +63.02% -37.90% -4.71%
75th Percentile £67.84 £47.50 £65.00
90th Percentile £80.00 £67.50 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £43.96 £23.00 £42.50
% change year-on-year +91.13% -45.88% +6.25%

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 27 August 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 27 August 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 27 August 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 +72 1,387 £525 - 1,453
London +54 848 £550 - 955
UK excluding London +74 543 £500 +5.26% 729
Work from Home +66 502 £525 +5.00% 656
North of England +33 176 £469 -1.32% 220
Midlands +30 137 £475 +5.44% 64
West Midlands +32 112 £475 -6.31% 51
South East -5 92 £525 +14.38% 193
Yorkshire +12 84 £475 +5.56% 41
South West +13 69 £525 -8.70% 90
North West -15 57 £513 +2.50% 138
Scotland +1 44 £500 +6.38% 85
North East -9 37 £425 -20.93% 42
East of England -7 27 £575 -4.17% 36
East Midlands -4 22 £525 +20.62% 13
Wales - 7 £450 - 12
Northern Ireland +4 4 £334 - 32

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
1 184 (11.94%) Apache Airflow
2 168 (10.90%) Apache Spark
3 126 (8.18%) Apache
4 41 (2.66%) SAS
5 38 (2.47%) Confluence
6 22 (1.43%) Jupyter
7 17 (1.10%) Palantir Foundry
8 13 (0.84%) SharePoint
9 7 (0.45%) Apache Superset
10 5 (0.32%) Apache Solr
10 5 (0.32%) ArcGIS
11 3 (0.19%) PowerExchange
12 2 (0.13%) Microsoft Exchange
12 2 (0.13%) nginx
13 1 (0.065%) Apache Synapse
13 1 (0.065%) CICS
13 1 (0.065%) Ethereum
13 1 (0.065%) GeoServer
13 1 (0.065%) Hyperledger
Applications
1 18 (1.17%) Microsoft Excel
2 7 (0.45%) Spreadsheet
3 6 (0.39%) Microsoft Office
4 5 (0.32%) Chatbot
5 4 (0.26%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 2 (0.13%) MS Visio
7 1 (0.065%) Notion
Business Applications
1 12 (0.78%) Aladdin
2 6 (0.39%) Dynamics CRM
3 5 (0.32%) BambooHR
4 4 (0.26%) NetSuite
4 4 (0.26%) Sage X3
4 4 (0.26%) Salesforce CRM
4 4 (0.26%) SAP S/4HANA
5 3 (0.19%) Workday HCM
6 2 (0.13%) Endur
6 2 (0.13%) Oracle Assets
6 2 (0.13%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
6 2 (0.13%) Temenos T24
7 1 (0.065%) Distributed Ledger
7 1 (0.065%) FIS Private Capital Suite
7 1 (0.065%) MIS ActiveH
7 1 (0.065%) R3 Corda
7 1 (0.065%) SAP ECC
Cloud Services
1 654 (42.44%) Azure
2 573 (37.18%) AWS
3 312 (20.25%) Power Platform
4 258 (16.74%) Snowflake
5 209 (13.56%) GCP
6 208 (13.50%) dbt
7 169 (10.97%) Amazon S3
8 168 (10.90%) Azure Data Factory
9 137 (8.89%) Azure Synapse Analytics
10 135 (8.76%) Azure DevOps
11 133 (8.63%) Serverless
12 125 (8.11%) GitHub
13 110 (7.14%) AWS Lambda
14 63 (4.09%) GitHub Actions
15 51 (3.31%) Amazon EMR
16 34 (2.21%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 31 (2.01%) Amazon Bedrock
18 28 (1.82%) Azure AI
19 27 (1.75%) AWS CloudFormation
19 27 (1.75%) Microsoft Purview
Communications & Networking
1 5 (0.32%) Firewall
2 3 (0.19%) Broadband
2 3 (0.19%) DNS
2 3 (0.19%) Network Security
3 2 (0.13%) RTP
4 1 (0.065%) Internet
4 1 (0.065%) MIMO
4 1 (0.065%) MQTT
4 1 (0.065%) SMS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 316 (20.51%) Data Warehouse
2 298 (19.34%) Power BI
3 210 (13.63%) Data Lake
4 165 (10.71%) Metadata
5 113 (7.33%) Amazon Redshift
6 111 (7.20%) BigQuery
7 102 (6.62%) Delta Lake
8 93 (6.04%) Big Data
9 82 (5.32%) Tableau
10 75 (4.87%) Amazon Athena
11 67 (4.35%) SQL Server
12 62 (4.02%) Snowflake Schema
13 56 (3.63%) Relational Database
14 52 (3.37%) NoSQL
15 51 (3.31%) PostgreSQL
16 46 (2.99%) Azure SQL Database
17 40 (2.60%) Looker
18 35 (2.27%) Data Vault
18 35 (2.27%) Star Schema
19 30 (1.95%) Semantic Layer
Development Applications
1 157 (10.19%) Git
2 86 (5.58%) GitLab
3 70 (4.54%) JIRA
4 26 (1.69%) Jenkins
4 26 (1.69%) MLflow
5 8 (0.52%) ERwin
6 7 (0.45%) RStudio
6 7 (0.45%) Terragrunt
7 6 (0.39%) Bitbucket
8 5 (0.32%) Claude Code
8 5 (0.32%) Selenium
8 5 (0.32%) SonarQube
9 4 (0.26%) ER Studio
10 3 (0.19%) Artifactory
10 3 (0.19%) Snyk
10 3 (0.19%) Sonatype Nexus
11 2 (0.13%) Atlassian Bamboo
11 2 (0.13%) Postman
11 2 (0.13%) Yeoman
12 1 (0.065%) Deequ
General
1 383 (24.85%) Social Skills
2 350 (22.71%) Finance
3 254 (16.48%) Analytical Skills
4 160 (10.38%) Public Sector
5 115 (7.46%) Banking
6 50 (3.24%) Marketing
7 38 (2.47%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 31 (2.01%) Retail
9 26 (1.69%) Documentation Skills
10 23 (1.49%) Investment Banking
11 22 (1.43%) Front Office
11 22 (1.43%) Telecoms
12 16 (1.04%) Law
12 16 (1.04%) Manufacturing
13 14 (0.91%) Pharmaceutical
14 13 (0.84%) Financial Institution
15 12 (0.78%) Billing
15 12 (0.78%) Influencing Skills
16 10 (0.65%) Legal
16 10 (0.65%) Police
Job Titles
1 715 (46.40%) Data Engineer
2 231 (14.99%) Senior
3 176 (11.42%) Architect
4 166 (10.77%) Lead
5 139 (9.02%) Senior Data Engineer
6 97 (6.29%) Data Architect
7 92 (5.97%) Developer
8 77 (5.00%) AWS Engineer
9 67 (4.35%) Analyst
9 67 (4.35%) Snowflake Engineer
10 63 (4.09%) AWS Data Engineer
11 56 (3.63%) Azure Engineer
12 53 (3.44%) Lead Data Engineer
13 49 (3.18%) Snowflake Data Engineer
14 48 (3.11%) Python Engineer
15 47 (3.05%) Consultant
16 43 (2.79%) Azure Data Engineer
17 42 (2.73%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
18 41 (2.66%) Solutions Architect
19 38 (2.47%) Data Analyst
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 231 (14.99%) PySpark
2 208 (13.50%) Terraform
3 124 (8.05%) Kafka
4 54 (3.50%) REST
5 32 (2.08%) JSON
5 32 (2.08%) React
6 27 (1.75%) Pandas
7 24 (1.56%) .NET
8 20 (1.30%) PyTorch
9 18 (1.17%) scikit-learn
9 18 (1.17%) TensorFlow
10 17 (1.10%) Spring
11 16 (1.04%) NumPy
12 12 (0.78%) FastAPI
12 12 (0.78%) pytest
12 12 (0.78%) XML
13 11 (0.71%) LangChain
13 11 (0.71%) Microsoft Graph
13 11 (0.71%) RESTful
13 11 (0.71%) Streamlit
Miscellaneous
1 202 (13.11%) Cloud Native
2 71 (4.61%) Data Structures
3 64 (4.15%) Legacy Systems
4 60 (3.89%) Product Ownership
5 56 (3.63%) Distributed Systems
6 55 (3.57%) Onboarding
7 39 (2.53%) AI Agents
8 25 (1.62%) Data Protection Act
9 22 (1.43%) Greenfield Project
10 18 (1.17%) Distributed Computing
11 17 (1.10%) NHS
12 16 (1.04%) Algorithms
12 16 (1.04%) Clustering
12 16 (1.04%) Virtual Team
13 15 (0.97%) Enterprise Software
13 15 (0.97%) Life Science
14 14 (0.91%) Analytical Mindset
14 14 (0.91%) Management Information System
15 13 (0.84%) Reference Data
16 10 (0.65%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 37 (2.40%) Linux
2 31 (2.01%) Unix
3 8 (0.52%) Windows
4 2 (0.13%) Windows Server
5 1 (0.065%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 1 (0.065%) Robot Operating System
5 1 (0.065%) Ubuntu
5 1 (0.065%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 754 (48.93%) Analytics
2 737 (47.83%) Data Pipeline
3 589 (38.22%) Data Modelling
4 536 (34.78%) ETL
5 534 (34.65%) CI/CD
6 453 (29.40%) AI
7 389 (25.24%) Business Intelligence
8 379 (24.59%) Agile
9 360 (23.36%) DevOps
10 351 (22.78%) Data Governance
11 267 (17.33%) Machine Learning
12 253 (16.42%) Problem-Solving
13 241 (15.64%) Migration
14 237 (15.38%) Data Transformation
15 234 (15.18%) Stakeholder Management
16 229 (14.86%) Validation
17 228 (14.80%) Data Science
18 227 (14.73%) Data Architecture
19 224 (14.54%) Decision-Making
20 208 (13.50%) Infrastructure as Code
Programming Languages
1 835 (54.19%) SQL
2 786 (51.01%) Python
3 112 (7.27%) Java
4 44 (2.86%) Data Analysis Expressions
5 41 (2.66%) Bash
5 41 (2.66%) Scala
6 40 (2.60%) PowerShell
7 32 (2.08%) C#
8 27 (1.75%) JavaScript
9 23 (1.49%) R
10 21 (1.36%) T-SQL
11 20 (1.30%) PL/SQL
12 16 (1.04%) Shell Script
13 15 (0.97%) Bicep
14 11 (0.71%) TypeScript
15 9 (0.58%) Kusto Query Language
15 9 (0.58%) SAS Macro
16 8 (0.52%) SPARQL
17 6 (0.39%) Cypher
17 6 (0.39%) Go
Qualifications
1 295 (19.14%) Security Cleared
2 252 (16.35%) SC Cleared
3 89 (5.78%) Degree
4 46 (2.99%) Computer Science Degree
5 31 (2.01%) Azure Certification
6 28 (1.82%) BPSS Clearance
7 25 (1.62%) DV Cleared
8 22 (1.43%) AWS Certification
8 22 (1.43%) Master's Degree
9 14 (0.91%) DBS Check
10 12 (0.78%) SnowPro
11 11 (0.71%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
12 8 (0.52%) Microsoft Certification
13 6 (0.39%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
14 5 (0.32%) CSPO
14 5 (0.32%) Tableau Certification
15 4 (0.26%) PMI Certification
16 3 (0.19%) PhD
16 3 (0.19%) PMP
17 1 (0.065%) CCSP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 475 (30.82%) Data Quality
2 76 (4.93%) GDPR
3 73 (4.74%) QA
4 26 (1.69%) Accessibility
5 15 (0.97%) SLA
6 4 (0.26%) Disclosure Scotland
6 4 (0.26%) Sarbanes-Oxley
7 3 (0.19%) Actionable Recommendations
7 3 (0.19%) GxP
7 3 (0.19%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 3 (0.19%) ISO/IEC 42001
7 3 (0.19%) MiFID
7 3 (0.19%) NIST
7 3 (0.19%) PMO
7 3 (0.19%) Solvency II
8 2 (0.13%) 21 CFR Part 11
8 2 (0.13%) California Consumer Privacy Act
8 2 (0.13%) COPPA
8 2 (0.13%) GRC
8 2 (0.13%) IFRS
System Software
1 131 (8.50%) Docker
2 5 (0.32%) Active Directory
3 1 (0.065%) Oracle RAC
3 1 (0.065%) Virtual Machines
Systems Management
1 107 (6.94%) Kubernetes
2 29 (1.88%) Grafana
3 23 (1.49%) Ansible
4 10 (0.65%) Prometheus
5 7 (0.45%) Control-M
6 6 (0.39%) Kibana
7 3 (0.19%) logstash
8 2 (0.13%) Argo
8 2 (0.13%) Puppet
8 2 (0.13%) Single Sign-On
8 2 (0.13%) Thomson Reuters DACS
9 1 (0.065%) Cilium
9 1 (0.065%) IBM Guardium
9 1 (0.065%) Kubeflow
9 1 (0.065%) Kustomize
9 1 (0.065%) Nagios
9 1 (0.065%) Oracle Enterprise Manager
9 1 (0.065%) Progress Chef
9 1 (0.065%) QRadar
9 1 (0.065%) Rancher
Vendors
1 418 (27.13%) Databricks
2 273 (17.72%) Microsoft
3 80 (5.19%) Informatica
4 69 (4.48%) Google
5 68 (4.41%) Oracle
6 32 (2.08%) SAP
7 29 (1.88%) Talend
8 28 (1.82%) Salesforce
9 26 (1.69%) Foundry
10 25 (1.62%) Palantir
11 16 (1.04%) Cloudera
11 16 (1.04%) OpenAI
12 14 (0.91%) ServiceNow
12 14 (0.91%) Teradata
13 12 (0.78%) Trend Micro
14 9 (0.58%) Workday
15 8 (0.52%) Adobe
15 8 (0.52%) Splunk
16 7 (0.45%) Hitachi
16 7 (0.45%) InterSystems