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

6 months to
18 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 92 166 207
Rank change year-on-year +74 +41 +2
Contract jobs citing Data Engineering 1,555 558 458
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.90% 1.70% 1.18%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.43% 1.88% 1.38%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,068 347 339
10th Percentile £389 £363 £387
25th Percentile £445 £431 £468
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £520 £575
Median % change year-on-year +0.96% -9.57% -8.00%
75th Percentile £638 £644 £676
90th Percentile £740 £775 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £516
% change year-on-year +5.26% -7.86% -10.35%
Number of hourly rates quoted 25 7 13
10th Percentile £21.25 £32.38 £30.55
25th Percentile £35.00 £45.11 £31.25
Median hourly rate £70.00 £52.50 £35.00
Median % change year-on-year +33.33% +50.00% -55.13%
75th Percentile £78.00 £76.25 £60.00
90th Percentile £89.00 £96.50 -
UK excluding London median hourly rate £60.75 £31.98 £60.00
% change year-on-year +89.96% -46.70% -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 45,374 29,740 33,103
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.72% 90.47% 85.44%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,858 18,514 21,188
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% -3.58%
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 2,851 1,725 1,782
10th Percentile £14.22 £14.20 £14.00
25th Percentile £18.50 £17.30 £18.17
Median hourly rate £42.00 £25.15 £40.94
Median % change year-on-year +67.00% -38.57% +0.86%
75th Percentile £68.00 £48.75 £65.00
90th Percentile £81.25 £68.00 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £43.96 £23.00 £42.50
% change year-on-year +91.13% -45.88% +19.72%

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 18 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 18 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 18 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 +68 1,398 £525 - 391
London +50 830 £550 - 197
UK excluding London +88 570 £500 +5.26% 302
Work from Home +79 505 £520 +4.00% 202
North of England +28 182 £469 -3.85% 87
Midlands +50 147 £486 +7.99% 26
West Midlands +44 122 £475 +10.21% 20
South East -17 95 £525 +12.18% 103
Yorkshire +18 89 £475 +11.76% 24
South West +17 76 £506 -12.09% 43
North West -15 58 £500 - 40
Scotland +7 44 £500 +6.38% 13
North East -9 37 £425 -20.93% 24
East of England -7 28 £575 -4.17% 5
East Midlands -4 22 £525 +16.54% 6
Wales - 7 £450 - 4
Northern Ireland +8 4 £334 - 22

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
1 183 (11.77%) Apache Airflow
2 182 (11.70%) Apache Spark
3 125 (8.04%) Apache
4 44 (2.83%) SAS
5 36 (2.32%) Confluence
6 22 (1.41%) Jupyter
7 19 (1.22%) Palantir Foundry
8 12 (0.77%) 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
13 1 (0.064%) Apache Synapse
13 1 (0.064%) CICS
13 1 (0.064%) Ethereum
13 1 (0.064%) GeoServer
13 1 (0.064%) Hyperledger
13 1 (0.064%) nginx
Applications
1 19 (1.22%) 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 (0.064%) Notion
Business Applications
1 13 (0.84%) 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%) SAP BPC
6 2 (0.13%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
6 2 (0.13%) Temenos T24
7 1 (0.064%) Distributed Ledger
7 1 (0.064%) FIS Private Capital Suite
7 1 (0.064%) MIS ActiveH
7 1 (0.064%) R3 Corda
7 1 (0.064%) SAP ECC
Cloud Services
1 651 (41.86%) Azure
2 580 (37.30%) AWS
3 319 (20.51%) Power Platform
4 251 (16.14%) Snowflake
5 212 (13.63%) GCP
6 201 (12.93%) dbt
7 169 (10.87%) Amazon S3
7 169 (10.87%) Azure Data Factory
8 142 (9.13%) Azure Synapse Analytics
9 140 (9.00%) Azure DevOps
10 131 (8.42%) GitHub
11 123 (7.91%) Serverless
12 105 (6.75%) AWS Lambda
13 69 (4.44%) GitHub Actions
14 54 (3.47%) Amazon EMR
15 33 (2.12%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 31 (1.99%) Amazon Bedrock
17 28 (1.80%) AWS CloudFormation
17 28 (1.80%) Azure AI
18 26 (1.67%) Microsoft Purview
Communications & Networking
1 5 (0.32%) Firewall
2 3 (0.19%) DNS
2 3 (0.19%) Network Security
3 2 (0.13%) Broadband
3 2 (0.13%) RTP
4 1 (0.064%) Internet
4 1 (0.064%) MIMO
4 1 (0.064%) MQTT
Database & Business Intelligence
1 307 (19.74%) Data Warehouse
2 303 (19.49%) Power BI
3 212 (13.63%) Data Lake
4 160 (10.29%) Metadata
5 109 (7.01%) BigQuery
6 107 (6.88%) Amazon Redshift
7 99 (6.37%) Big Data
8 96 (6.17%) Delta Lake
9 85 (5.47%) Tableau
10 76 (4.89%) Amazon Athena
11 68 (4.37%) SQL Server
12 64 (4.12%) Snowflake Schema
13 63 (4.05%) NoSQL
14 57 (3.67%) Relational Database
15 54 (3.47%) PostgreSQL
16 48 (3.09%) Azure SQL Database
17 41 (2.64%) Looker
18 37 (2.38%) Data Vault
18 37 (2.38%) Star Schema
19 36 (2.32%) Hadoop
Development Applications
1 161 (10.35%) Git
2 84 (5.40%) GitLab
3 67 (4.31%) JIRA
4 29 (1.86%) Jenkins
5 26 (1.67%) MLflow
6 7 (0.45%) ERwin
6 7 (0.45%) SonarQube
7 6 (0.39%) Bitbucket
7 6 (0.39%) Terragrunt
8 4 (0.26%) Claude Code
8 4 (0.26%) Selenium
9 3 (0.19%) Artifactory
9 3 (0.19%) ER Studio
9 3 (0.19%) Snyk
9 3 (0.19%) Sonatype Nexus
10 2 (0.13%) Postman
10 2 (0.13%) Yeoman
11 1 (0.064%) Cypress.io
11 1 (0.064%) Octopus Deploy
11 1 (0.064%) RStudio
General
1 380 (24.44%) Social Skills
2 357 (22.96%) Finance
3 246 (15.82%) Analytical Skills
4 160 (10.29%) Public Sector
5 120 (7.72%) Banking
6 47 (3.02%) Marketing
7 39 (2.51%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 35 (2.25%) Retail
9 27 (1.74%) Documentation Skills
10 25 (1.61%) Telecoms
11 23 (1.48%) Front Office
11 23 (1.48%) Investment Banking
12 16 (1.03%) Manufacturing
13 14 (0.90%) Pharmaceutical
14 13 (0.84%) Financial Institution
14 13 (0.84%) Law
15 12 (0.77%) Influencing Skills
16 10 (0.64%) Legal
17 9 (0.58%) Military
17 9 (0.58%) Publishing
Job Titles
1 717 (46.11%) Data Engineer
2 222 (14.28%) Senior
3 181 (11.64%) Lead
4 175 (11.25%) Architect
5 132 (8.49%) Senior Data Engineer
6 98 (6.30%) Data Architect
7 94 (6.05%) Developer
8 81 (5.21%) AWS Engineer
9 69 (4.44%) Analyst
10 67 (4.31%) AWS Data Engineer
11 65 (4.18%) Snowflake Engineer
12 61 (3.92%) Azure Engineer
13 58 (3.73%) Lead Data Engineer
14 50 (3.22%) Python Engineer
15 49 (3.15%) Azure Data Engineer
15 49 (3.15%) Snowflake Data Engineer
16 46 (2.96%) Consultant
17 45 (2.89%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
18 43 (2.77%) Solutions Architect
19 40 (2.57%) Data Analyst
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 231 (14.86%) PySpark
2 125 (8.04%) Kafka
3 48 (3.09%) REST
4 30 (1.93%) JSON
4 30 (1.93%) React
5 28 (1.80%) Pandas
6 24 (1.54%) PyTorch
7 22 (1.41%) .NET
8 21 (1.35%) scikit-learn
9 20 (1.29%) TensorFlow
10 18 (1.16%) Spring
11 16 (1.03%) NumPy
12 13 (0.84%) FastAPI
12 13 (0.84%) pytest
12 13 (0.84%) RESTful
13 12 (0.77%) Spring Boot
14 11 (0.71%) LangChain
14 11 (0.71%) Microsoft Graph
14 11 (0.71%) Streamlit
15 10 (0.64%) Great Expectations
Miscellaneous
1 210 (13.50%) Cloud Native
2 74 (4.76%) Data Structures
3 64 (4.12%) Legacy Systems
4 59 (3.79%) Product Ownership
5 58 (3.73%) Distributed Systems
6 46 (2.96%) Onboarding
7 38 (2.44%) AI Agents
8 25 (1.61%) Data Protection Act
9 23 (1.48%) Greenfield Project
10 19 (1.22%) Algorithms
10 19 (1.22%) Distributed Computing
10 19 (1.22%) NHS
11 17 (1.09%) Clustering
12 16 (1.03%) Life Science
12 16 (1.03%) Virtual Team
13 15 (0.96%) Analytical Mindset
14 14 (0.90%) Management Information System
15 13 (0.84%) Enterprise Software
15 13 (0.84%) Reference Data
16 10 (0.64%) Fixed Income
Operating Systems
1 38 (2.44%) Linux
2 30 (1.93%) Unix
3 8 (0.51%) Windows
4 2 (0.13%) VMS
4 2 (0.13%) Windows Server
5 1 (0.064%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 1 (0.064%) Robot Operating System
5 1 (0.064%) Ubuntu
Processes & Methodologies
1 775 (49.84%) Analytics
2 748 (48.10%) Data Pipeline
3 597 (38.39%) Data Modelling
4 542 (34.86%) CI/CD
5 531 (34.15%) ETL
6 446 (28.68%) AI
7 396 (25.47%) Agile
8 392 (25.21%) Business Intelligence
9 368 (23.67%) DevOps
10 356 (22.89%) Data Governance
11 276 (17.75%) Machine Learning
12 257 (16.53%) Problem-Solving
13 240 (15.43%) Data Science
14 233 (14.98%) Migration
15 228 (14.66%) Decision-Making
16 224 (14.41%) Data Architecture
17 220 (14.15%) Data Transformation
17 220 (14.15%) Stakeholder Management
17 220 (14.15%) Validation
18 198 (12.73%) Infrastructure as Code
Programming Languages
1 841 (54.08%) SQL
2 792 (50.93%) Python
3 114 (7.33%) Java
4 43 (2.77%) Data Analysis Expressions
5 42 (2.70%) Scala
6 40 (2.57%) Bash
7 35 (2.25%) PowerShell
8 33 (2.12%) C#
9 24 (1.54%) JavaScript
10 21 (1.35%) T-SQL
11 20 (1.29%) PL/SQL
11 20 (1.29%) R
12 15 (0.96%) Bicep
13 14 (0.90%) Shell Script
14 12 (0.77%) SAS Macro
15 11 (0.71%) TypeScript
16 8 (0.51%) Kusto Query Language
16 8 (0.51%) SPARQL
17 7 (0.45%) Cypher
18 6 (0.39%) Go
Qualifications
1 294 (18.91%) Security Cleared
2 249 (16.01%) SC Cleared
3 94 (6.05%) Degree
4 48 (3.09%) Computer Science Degree
5 31 (1.99%) Azure Certification
6 28 (1.80%) BPSS Clearance
7 26 (1.67%) DV Cleared
8 23 (1.48%) Master's Degree
9 19 (1.22%) AWS Certification
10 13 (0.84%) DBS Check
11 11 (0.71%) SnowPro
12 9 (0.58%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
13 8 (0.51%) Microsoft Certification
14 6 (0.39%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
15 5 (0.32%) CSPO
15 5 (0.32%) Tableau Certification
16 3 (0.19%) PhD
16 3 (0.19%) PMI Certification
17 2 (0.13%) PMP
18 1 (0.064%) CCSP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 468 (30.10%) Data Quality
2 77 (4.95%) GDPR
3 75 (4.82%) QA
4 25 (1.61%) Accessibility
5 12 (0.77%) SLA
6 4 (0.26%) Disclosure Scotland
6 4 (0.26%) Sarbanes-Oxley
6 4 (0.26%) Solvency II
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
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%) EMIR
8 2 (0.13%) SNOMED CT
System Software
1 135 (8.68%) Docker
2 5 (0.32%) Active Directory
3 2 (0.13%) Virtual Machines
4 1 (0.064%) Oracle RAC
Systems Management
1 203 (13.05%) Terraform
2 111 (7.14%) Kubernetes
3 28 (1.80%) Grafana
4 21 (1.35%) Ansible
5 11 (0.71%) Prometheus
6 7 (0.45%) Control-M
7 5 (0.32%) Kibana
8 3 (0.19%) logstash
9 2 (0.13%) Argo
9 2 (0.13%) Puppet
9 2 (0.13%) Rancher
9 2 (0.13%) Single Sign-On
9 2 (0.13%) Thomson Reuters DACS
10 1 (0.064%) Cilium
10 1 (0.064%) IBM Guardium
10 1 (0.064%) Kubeflow
10 1 (0.064%) Kustomize
10 1 (0.064%) Nagios
10 1 (0.064%) Oracle RMAN
10 1 (0.064%) QRadar
Vendors
1 410 (26.37%) Databricks
2 267 (17.17%) Microsoft
3 80 (5.14%) Informatica
4 74 (4.76%) Google
5 68 (4.37%) Oracle
6 35 (2.25%) SAP
7 30 (1.93%) Foundry
7 30 (1.93%) Talend
8 28 (1.80%) Palantir
9 26 (1.67%) Salesforce
10 17 (1.09%) OpenAI
11 16 (1.03%) Cloudera
12 15 (0.96%) Splunk
13 14 (0.90%) ServiceNow
14 12 (0.77%) Trend Micro
15 11 (0.71%) Teradata
16 9 (0.58%) Denodo
16 9 (0.58%) Workday
17 8 (0.51%) Adobe
18 7 (0.45%) Hitachi