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 1 May 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
1 May 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 90 163 203
Rank change year-on-year +73 +40 +4
Contract jobs citing Data Engineering 1,307 522 499
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.77% 1.78% 1.15%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.27% 1.96% 1.33%
Number of daily rates quoted 901 370 370
10th Percentile £394 £400 £375
25th Percentile £450 £450 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year - -4.55% -8.33%
75th Percentile £614 £673 £663
90th Percentile £749 £838 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £480 £550
% change year-on-year +4.22% -12.77% +2.23%
Number of hourly rates quoted 21 13 14
10th Percentile £51.25 £21.40 £30.63
25th Percentile £56.75 £22.00 £31.25
Median hourly rate £70.00 £25.43 £35.00
Median % change year-on-year +175.27% -27.34% -35.48%
75th Percentile £78.00 £53.75 £57.56
90th Percentile £90.00 £62.75 £60.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £69.22 £25.43 £60.00
% change year-on-year +172.20% -57.62% +71.43%

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 39,989 26,597 37,605
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.62% 90.89% 86.33%
Number of daily rates quoted 25,206 17,155 24,229
10th Percentile £319 £308 £300
25th Percentile £413 £413 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £520 £525
Median % change year-on-year -3.85% -0.95% -4.55%
75th Percentile £613 £630 £638
90th Percentile £725 £743 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £488 £485 £500
% change year-on-year +0.62% -3.10% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,387 1,068 2,445
10th Percentile £14.99 £14.65 £12.75
25th Percentile £19.96 £18.50 £16.00
Median hourly rate £41.56 £29.00 £35.65
Median % change year-on-year +43.29% -18.65% -4.42%
75th Percentile £66.00 £60.84 £59.95
90th Percentile £78.75 £75.00 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £43.69 £27.76 £37.18
% change year-on-year +57.38% -25.34% +3.28%

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 1 May 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 1 May 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 1 May 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 +61 1,173 £525 -4.55% 363
London +60 731 £550 -4.35% 170
UK excluding London +68 457 £500 +4.22% 257
Work from Home +44 371 £525 -9.09% 181
Midlands +15 126 £500 +2.56% 47
North of England +2 121 £480 -4.00% 78
West Midlands +19 101 £500 - 33
South West +24 76 £516 -15.84% 31
Scotland +28 60 £440 -7.37% 16
South East -27 58 £550 +10.00% 69
Yorkshire -11 56 £480 -12.73% 20
North West -23 47 £500 +2.56% 39
East of England -15 23 £575 +54.08% 8
East Midlands -14 22 £450 -5.26% 14
North East -1 20 £475 - 19
Wales -11 5 £665 +181.78% 5
Northern Ireland - 2 £430 - 5

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
1 199 (15.23%) Apache Spark
2 126 (9.64%) Apache Airflow
3 88 (6.73%) Apache
4 35 (2.68%) SAS
5 20 (1.53%) Confluence
6 17 (1.30%) Palantir Foundry
7 8 (0.61%) Appian
8 7 (0.54%) Apache Superset
9 6 (0.46%) Jupyter
10 4 (0.31%) Microsoft Exchange
11 2 (0.15%) Apache Synapse
11 2 (0.15%) SharePoint
12 1 (0.077%) Adobe Experience Manager
12 1 (0.077%) ArcGIS
12 1 (0.077%) Camunda
12 1 (0.077%) CICS
12 1 (0.077%) CMS
12 1 (0.077%) IBM HTTP Server
Applications
1 28 (2.14%) Microsoft Excel
2 9 (0.69%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 8 (0.61%) Microsoft Office
4 7 (0.54%) Microsoft Project
5 6 (0.46%) Spreadsheet
6 4 (0.31%) Chatbot
7 3 (0.23%) MS Visio
7 3 (0.23%) Trello
Business Applications
1 5 (0.38%) BambooHR
2 4 (0.31%) Aladdin
2 4 (0.31%) Dynamics CRM
3 3 (0.23%) Salesforce CRM
3 3 (0.23%) SAP BPC
4 2 (0.15%) SAP S/4HANA
5 1 (0.077%) Actimize
5 1 (0.077%) Adobe Campaign
5 1 (0.077%) Markit EDM
5 1 (0.077%) Maximo
5 1 (0.077%) Misys Midas
5 1 (0.077%) Oracle Assets
5 1 (0.077%) SAP ECC
Cloud Services
1 587 (44.91%) Azure
2 465 (35.58%) AWS
3 291 (22.26%) Power Platform
4 193 (14.77%) Azure Data Factory
5 187 (14.31%) GCP
6 164 (12.55%) Snowflake
7 147 (11.25%) Amazon S3
7 147 (11.25%) Azure Synapse Analytics
8 131 (10.02%) GitHub
9 115 (8.80%) dbt
10 113 (8.65%) Serverless
11 103 (7.88%) Azure DevOps
12 91 (6.96%) AWS Lambda
13 79 (6.04%) GitHub Actions
14 61 (4.67%) AWS CloudFormation
15 38 (2.91%) AWS Step Functions
16 33 (2.52%) Amazon EMR
17 30 (2.30%) Amazon SageMaker
17 30 (2.30%) Collibra
18 26 (1.99%) Dagster
Communications & Networking
1 5 (0.38%) RTP
2 4 (0.31%) Cisco IPT
2 4 (0.31%) Firewall
2 4 (0.31%) Kerberos
3 3 (0.23%) VPN
4 1 (0.077%) 4G
4 1 (0.077%) 5G
4 1 (0.077%) MIMO
4 1 (0.077%) Network Security
4 1 (0.077%) SAN
4 1 (0.077%) SMS
4 1 (0.077%) TCP/IP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 268 (20.50%) Power BI
2 252 (19.28%) Data Warehouse
3 204 (15.61%) Data Lake
4 125 (9.56%) Metadata
5 102 (7.80%) Big Data
6 90 (6.89%) SQL Server
7 86 (6.58%) Delta Lake
8 81 (6.20%) NoSQL
9 73 (5.59%) Tableau
10 69 (5.28%) Amazon Redshift
11 68 (5.20%) BigQuery
12 67 (5.13%) Amazon Athena
12 67 (5.13%) Azure SQL Database
13 64 (4.90%) Snowflake Schema
14 58 (4.44%) Relational Database
15 56 (4.28%) PostgreSQL
16 52 (3.98%) Hadoop
17 38 (2.91%) SQL Server Integration Services
18 37 (2.83%) Spark SQL
19 26 (1.99%) Star Schema
Development Applications
1 167 (12.78%) Git
2 63 (4.82%) GitLab
3 48 (3.67%) MLflow
4 47 (3.60%) JIRA
5 34 (2.60%) Jenkins
6 6 (0.46%) SonarQube
7 5 (0.38%) Selenium
8 3 (0.23%) Postman
8 3 (0.23%) Robot Framework
8 3 (0.23%) Snyk
9 2 (0.15%) Artifactory
9 2 (0.15%) Bitbucket
9 2 (0.15%) Terragrunt
9 2 (0.15%) Visual Studio
10 1 (0.077%) ERwin
10 1 (0.077%) git-flow
10 1 (0.077%) Maven
10 1 (0.077%) Octopus Deploy
10 1 (0.077%) SoapUI
10 1 (0.077%) Visual Studio Code
General
1 331 (25.33%) Finance
2 310 (23.72%) Social Skills
3 198 (15.15%) Analytical Skills
4 111 (8.49%) Public Sector
5 78 (5.97%) Banking
6 24 (1.84%) Documentation Skills
6 24 (1.84%) Inclusion and Diversity
6 24 (1.84%) Retail
7 22 (1.68%) Marketing
8 17 (1.30%) Front Office
9 15 (1.15%) Telecoms
10 14 (1.07%) Legal
11 13 (0.99%) Influencing Skills
11 13 (0.99%) Investment Banking
12 12 (0.92%) Financial Institution
13 8 (0.61%) Law
14 7 (0.54%) Military
15 6 (0.46%) Back Office
15 6 (0.46%) Pharmaceutical
16 4 (0.31%) Electronics
Job Titles
1 609 (46.60%) Data Engineer
2 178 (13.62%) Senior
3 143 (10.94%) Lead
4 130 (9.95%) Architect
5 112 (8.57%) Senior Data Engineer
6 80 (6.12%) Developer
7 67 (5.13%) Data Architect
8 60 (4.59%) Azure Engineer
9 59 (4.51%) AWS Engineer
10 55 (4.21%) Analyst
11 54 (4.13%) Lead Data Engineer
12 52 (3.98%) Azure Data Engineer
13 45 (3.44%) Data Scientist
13 45 (3.44%) Snowflake Engineer
14 42 (3.21%) AWS Data Engineer
15 41 (3.14%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
15 41 (3.14%) Consultant
16 39 (2.98%) Solutions Architect
17 38 (2.91%) Snowflake Data Engineer
18 31 (2.37%) Data Analyst
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 218 (16.68%) PySpark
2 153 (11.71%) Kafka
3 60 (4.59%) Pandas
4 48 (3.67%) PyTorch
5 43 (3.29%) scikit-learn
6 39 (2.98%) TensorFlow
7 38 (2.91%) NumPy
8 28 (2.14%) REST
9 27 (2.07%) JSON
10 24 (1.84%) Spring
11 23 (1.76%) YAML
12 22 (1.68%) React
13 21 (1.61%) LangChain
13 21 (1.61%) pytest
13 21 (1.61%) RESTful
14 18 (1.38%) FastAPI
14 18 (1.38%) Great Expectations
15 17 (1.30%) Spring Boot
16 15 (1.15%) Flask
17 13 (0.99%) Django
Miscellaneous
1 179 (13.70%) Cloud Native
2 51 (3.90%) Distributed Systems
3 47 (3.60%) Product Ownership
4 40 (3.06%) Data Structures
5 39 (2.98%) Legacy Systems
6 32 (2.45%) Algorithms
7 30 (2.30%) Distributed Computing
8 29 (2.22%) AI Agents
9 26 (1.99%) Onboarding
10 22 (1.68%) Data Protection Act
11 21 (1.61%) Greenfield Project
12 20 (1.53%) Analytical Mindset
13 17 (1.30%) NHS
14 16 (1.22%) Hybrid Cloud
15 14 (1.07%) Fixed Income
15 14 (1.07%) Self-Motivation
16 13 (0.99%) Management Information System
17 12 (0.92%) Clustering
18 10 (0.77%) Equities
18 10 (0.77%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 28 (2.14%) Linux
2 20 (1.53%) Unix
3 7 (0.54%) VMS
4 3 (0.23%) Windows
5 2 (0.15%) Ubuntu
5 2 (0.15%) Windows Server
6 1 (0.077%) CentOS
6 1 (0.077%) Debian
Processes & Methodologies
1 665 (50.88%) Analytics
2 602 (46.06%) Data Pipeline
3 507 (38.79%) Data Modelling
4 501 (38.33%) ETL
5 457 (34.97%) CI/CD
6 374 (28.62%) AI
7 338 (25.86%) Agile
8 334 (25.55%) Business Intelligence
9 322 (24.64%) DevOps
10 319 (24.41%) Data Governance
11 267 (20.43%) Machine Learning
12 245 (18.75%) Problem-Solving
13 232 (17.75%) Data Science
14 193 (14.77%) Data Architecture
15 170 (13.01%) Decision-Making
16 168 (12.85%) Migration
17 156 (11.94%) Validation
18 151 (11.55%) Infrastructure as Code
19 132 (10.10%) Data Integration
20 130 (9.95%) Use Case
Programming Languages
1 711 (54.40%) SQL
2 697 (53.33%) Python
3 107 (8.19%) Java
4 63 (4.82%) Scala
5 45 (3.44%) Data Analysis Expressions
6 36 (2.75%) C#
7 30 (2.30%) Bash
8 25 (1.91%) T-SQL
9 23 (1.76%) PowerShell
10 22 (1.68%) JavaScript
10 22 (1.68%) R
11 16 (1.22%) Bicep
12 12 (0.92%) Shell Script
13 11 (0.84%) Go
14 10 (0.77%) PL/SQL
14 10 (0.77%) TypeScript
15 7 (0.54%) SAS Macro
16 4 (0.31%) Korn
17 2 (0.15%) C++
18 1 (0.077%) Groovy
Qualifications
1 263 (20.12%) Security Cleared
2 227 (17.37%) SC Cleared
3 103 (7.88%) Degree
4 42 (3.21%) Computer Science Degree
5 40 (3.06%) Azure Certification
6 38 (2.91%) Master's Degree
7 20 (1.53%) BPSS Clearance
8 17 (1.30%) AWS Certification
9 15 (1.15%) DV Cleared
10 9 (0.69%) Microsoft Certification
11 6 (0.46%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
11 6 (0.46%) SnowPro
12 5 (0.38%) DBS Check
12 5 (0.38%) PhD
13 4 (0.31%) Microsoft Certified Professional
14 3 (0.23%) IBM Certification
15 2 (0.15%) Tableau Certification
16 1 (0.077%) (ISC)2 CCSP
16 1 (0.077%) AWS Certified SysOps Administrator
16 1 (0.077%) CSPO
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 369 (28.23%) Data Quality
2 94 (7.19%) GDPR
3 51 (3.90%) QA
4 13 (0.99%) Sarbanes-Oxley
5 10 (0.77%) SLA
6 8 (0.61%) Accessibility
7 5 (0.38%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 5 (0.38%) MiFID
8 4 (0.31%) HIPAA
8 4 (0.31%) PERC
8 4 (0.31%) Solvency II
9 3 (0.23%) California Consumer Privacy Act
9 3 (0.23%) GRC
10 2 (0.15%) Actionable Recommendations
10 2 (0.15%) Disclosure Scotland
10 2 (0.15%) EMIR
10 2 (0.15%) HL7
10 2 (0.15%) NIST
10 2 (0.15%) PMO
10 2 (0.15%) SNOMED CT
System Software
1 135 (10.33%) Docker
2 6 (0.46%) HDFS
3 3 (0.23%) Virtual Machines
4 1 (0.077%) Active Directory
4 1 (0.077%) Apache ZooKeeper
Systems Management
1 173 (13.24%) Terraform
2 125 (9.56%) Kubernetes
3 27 (2.07%) Prometheus
4 22 (1.68%) Grafana
5 12 (0.92%) Ansible
6 5 (0.38%) Argo
7 4 (0.31%) Kubeflow
8 3 (0.23%) Kibana
8 3 (0.23%) Nagios
8 3 (0.23%) Rancher
9 2 (0.15%) Hadoop YARN
9 2 (0.15%) logstash
9 2 (0.15%) Thomson Reuters DACS
10 1 (0.077%) Apache Ranger
10 1 (0.077%) Control-M
10 1 (0.077%) HP Fortify
10 1 (0.077%) IBM Guardium
10 1 (0.077%) Oozie
Vendors
1 371 (28.39%) Databricks
2 211 (16.14%) Microsoft
3 66 (5.05%) Informatica
4 64 (4.90%) Google
5 45 (3.44%) Oracle
6 34 (2.60%) Talend
7 24 (1.84%) Foundry
8 22 (1.68%) OpenAI
9 21 (1.61%) SAP
10 19 (1.45%) Palantir
10 19 (1.45%) Splunk
11 16 (1.22%) Cloudera
12 13 (0.99%) ServiceNow
13 12 (0.92%) Salesforce
14 10 (0.77%) IBM
15 9 (0.69%) UiPath
16 8 (0.61%) Automation Anywhere
17 7 (0.54%) InterSystems
18 6 (0.46%) Denodo
19 5 (0.38%) Workday