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 16 October 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
16 Oct 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 92 140 192
Rank change year-on-year +48 +52 +38
Contract jobs citing Data Engineering 1,647 690 487
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.98% 2.07% 1.29%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.51% 2.29% 1.51%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,133 428 358
10th Percentile £400 £342 £400
25th Percentile £438 £413 £468
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year - -4.55% -8.33%
75th Percentile £650 £650 £663
90th Percentile £738 £753 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £463 £550
% change year-on-year +8.11% -15.91% -3.13%
Number of hourly rates quoted 22 6 6
10th Percentile £21.25 £37.11 £23.31
25th Percentile £24.75 £42.03 £25.65
Median hourly rate £59.95 £58.75 £43.25
Median % change year-on-year +2.04% +35.84% -44.55%
75th Percentile £71.13 £81.88 £60.00
90th Percentile £82.63 £98.75 -
UK excluding London median hourly rate £62.40 £38.96 £60.00
% change year-on-year +60.16% -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 46,911 30,121 32,352
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.81% 90.54% 86.01%
Number of daily rates quoted 28,189 18,721 19,488
10th Percentile £325 £296 £308
25th Percentile £425 £404 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -2.42%
75th Percentile £638 £623 £638
90th Percentile £738 £725 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 3,476 1,911 1,239
10th Percentile £13.51 £14.38 £15.00
25th Percentile £16.75 £17.30 £20.12
Median hourly rate £37.24 £25.15 £40.00
Median % change year-on-year +48.07% -37.13% -10.11%
75th Percentile £65.00 £42.79 £65.00
90th Percentile £78.75 £66.00 £73.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £37.24 £22.27 £40.00
% change year-on-year +67.26% -44.34% -8.88%

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 16 October 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 16 October 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 16 October 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 +48 1,453 £525 - 262
London +40 880 £550 - 131
UK excluding London +75 599 £500 +8.11% 169
Work from Home +42 525 £525 +1.94% 160
North of England +34 199 £475 +6.15% 59
Midlands +24 128 £475 -6.31% 19
West Midlands +27 107 £475 -17.39% 16
South East -5 101 £525 +17.98% 53
South West +38 93 £528 -18.85% 28
Yorkshire +32 93 £500 +5.26% 20
North West -13 70 £488 +12.07% 28
Scotland -1 58 £519 +25.19% 3
North East -9 36 £425 -5.56% 11
East Midlands +5 21 £481 +10.51% 3
East of England -23 19 £550 +15.79% 4
Wales -6 8 £450 -9.09% 1
Northern Ireland +8 5 £467 - 3

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
1 205 (12.45%) Apache Airflow
2 187 (11.35%) Apache Spark
3 166 (10.08%) Apache
4 42 (2.55%) Confluence
5 38 (2.31%) SAS
6 20 (1.21%) Jupyter
7 17 (1.03%) Palantir Foundry
8 15 (0.91%) SharePoint
9 6 (0.36%) ArcGIS
10 5 (0.30%) Apache Solr
11 4 (0.24%) nginx
12 3 (0.18%) Apache Superset
12 3 (0.18%) PowerExchange
13 2 (0.12%) GeoServer
14 1 (0.061%) Apache Pulsar
14 1 (0.061%) Ethereum
14 1 (0.061%) Hyperledger
14 1 (0.061%) Microsoft Exchange
14 1 (0.061%) Oracle Workflow
14 1 (0.061%) SugarCRM
Applications
1 14 (0.85%) Microsoft Excel
2 7 (0.43%) Chatbot
2 7 (0.43%) Spreadsheet
3 3 (0.18%) Microsoft Office
4 2 (0.12%) MS Visio
5 1 (0.061%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 1 (0.061%) Notion
Business Applications
1 11 (0.67%) Aladdin
2 5 (0.30%) Dynamics CRM
2 5 (0.30%) SAP S/4HANA
3 4 (0.24%) NetSuite
3 4 (0.24%) Sage X3
4 3 (0.18%) Cloudability
4 3 (0.18%) Salesforce CRM
4 3 (0.18%) Workday HCM
5 2 (0.12%) Endur
5 2 (0.12%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
5 2 (0.12%) Temenos T24
6 1 (0.061%) Distributed Ledger
6 1 (0.061%) FIS Private Capital Suite
6 1 (0.061%) Markit EDM
6 1 (0.061%) MIS ActiveH
6 1 (0.061%) Oracle Assets
6 1 (0.061%) Oracle EBS
6 1 (0.061%) R3 Corda
6 1 (0.061%) SAP ECC
6 1 (0.061%) SAP Oil and Gas
Cloud Services
1 698 (42.38%) Azure
2 602 (36.55%) AWS
3 310 (18.82%) Power Platform
4 278 (16.88%) Snowflake
5 254 (15.42%) GCP
6 244 (14.81%) dbt
7 192 (11.66%) Amazon S3
8 191 (11.60%) Azure Data Factory
9 147 (8.93%) Azure DevOps
10 144 (8.74%) Serverless
11 132 (8.01%) Azure Synapse Analytics
12 128 (7.77%) GitHub
13 119 (7.23%) AWS Lambda
14 86 (5.22%) Azure Databricks
15 65 (3.95%) GitHub Actions
16 55 (3.34%) Amazon EMR
17 42 (2.55%) Amazon Bedrock
17 42 (2.55%) Amazon CloudWatch
18 35 (2.13%) Microsoft Purview
19 33 (2.00%) Azure AI
Communications & Networking
1 8 (0.49%) Network Security
2 7 (0.43%) Broadband
2 7 (0.43%) DNS
3 5 (0.30%) Firewall
4 1 (0.061%) DSL
4 1 (0.061%) HTTP
4 1 (0.061%) HTTPS
4 1 (0.061%) Internet
4 1 (0.061%) MQTT
4 1 (0.061%) Radio Access Network
4 1 (0.061%) Reverse Proxy
4 1 (0.061%) SMS
4 1 (0.061%) SSL
4 1 (0.061%) TCP/IP
4 1 (0.061%) tcpdump
4 1 (0.061%) Wireshark
Database & Business Intelligence
1 340 (20.64%) Data Warehouse
2 298 (18.09%) Power BI
3 209 (12.69%) Data Lake
4 196 (11.90%) Metadata
5 124 (7.53%) BigQuery
6 114 (6.92%) Amazon Redshift
7 112 (6.80%) Delta Lake
8 83 (5.04%) Big Data
9 78 (4.74%) Amazon Athena
10 65 (3.95%) Tableau
11 61 (3.70%) SQL Server
12 60 (3.64%) Snowflake Schema
13 50 (3.04%) Relational Database
14 49 (2.98%) PostgreSQL
15 47 (2.85%) NoSQL
16 40 (2.43%) Azure SQL Database
16 40 (2.43%) Looker
17 35 (2.13%) Amazon RDS
18 32 (1.94%) Semantic Layer
19 30 (1.82%) Data Vault
Development Applications
1 194 (11.78%) Git
2 107 (6.50%) GitLab
3 65 (3.95%) JIRA
4 40 (2.43%) Jenkins
5 28 (1.70%) MLflow
6 9 (0.55%) Claude Code
7 8 (0.49%) Bitbucket
7 8 (0.49%) ERwin
7 8 (0.49%) RStudio
7 8 (0.49%) Terragrunt
8 7 (0.43%) Selenium
9 5 (0.30%) Postman
10 4 (0.24%) Cucumber
10 4 (0.24%) ER Studio
11 3 (0.18%) Applitools
11 3 (0.18%) Atlassian Bamboo
11 3 (0.18%) JMeter
11 3 (0.18%) Newman
11 3 (0.18%) REST Assured
11 3 (0.18%) TeamCity
General
1 433 (26.29%) Social Skills
2 373 (22.65%) Finance
3 257 (15.60%) Analytical Skills
4 165 (10.02%) Public Sector
5 147 (8.93%) Banking
6 53 (3.22%) Marketing
7 36 (2.19%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 33 (2.00%) Retail
9 29 (1.76%) Investment Banking
10 26 (1.58%) Front Office
11 22 (1.34%) Law
11 22 (1.34%) Pharmaceutical
12 21 (1.28%) Documentation Skills
13 18 (1.09%) Manufacturing
14 15 (0.91%) Aerospace
14 15 (0.91%) Billing
15 14 (0.85%) Police
15 14 (0.85%) Publishing
16 13 (0.79%) Back Office
16 13 (0.79%) Telecoms
Job Titles
1 789 (47.91%) Data Engineer
2 256 (15.54%) Senior
3 187 (11.35%) Lead
4 168 (10.20%) Senior Data Engineer
5 160 (9.71%) Architect
6 97 (5.89%) Developer
7 84 (5.10%) Data Architect
8 82 (4.98%) Databricks Engineer
9 76 (4.61%) Analyst
9 76 (4.61%) Snowflake Engineer
10 74 (4.49%) AWS Engineer
11 69 (4.19%) Azure Engineer
12 63 (3.83%) AWS Data Engineer
12 63 (3.83%) Databricks Data Engineer
13 59 (3.58%) Snowflake Data Engineer
14 58 (3.52%) Lead Data Engineer
15 53 (3.22%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
16 50 (3.04%) Python Engineer
17 47 (2.85%) Azure Data Engineer
18 45 (2.73%) Data Analyst
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 252 (15.30%) PySpark
2 239 (14.51%) Terraform
3 117 (7.10%) Kafka
4 69 (4.19%) REST
5 35 (2.13%) JSON
6 31 (1.88%) .NET
7 29 (1.76%) React
8 25 (1.52%) Pandas
9 24 (1.46%) LangChain
10 20 (1.21%) pytest
11 17 (1.03%) FastAPI
11 17 (1.03%) PyTorch
12 15 (0.91%) LangGraph
12 15 (0.91%) scikit-learn
12 15 (0.91%) Streamlit
13 14 (0.85%) NumPy
13 14 (0.85%) RabbitMQ
13 14 (0.85%) TensorFlow
13 14 (0.85%) XML
14 13 (0.79%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 226 (13.72%) Cloud Native
2 84 (5.10%) Onboarding
3 83 (5.04%) Data Structures
4 72 (4.37%) Product Ownership
5 59 (3.58%) AI Agents
6 53 (3.22%) Distributed Systems
6 53 (3.22%) Legacy Systems
7 30 (1.82%) Data Protection Act
8 24 (1.46%) Enterprise Software
9 23 (1.40%) Management Information System
9 23 (1.40%) Virtual Team
10 22 (1.34%) Algorithms
11 21 (1.28%) Distributed Computing
12 20 (1.21%) Life Science
13 16 (0.97%) Clustering
13 16 (0.97%) Data Fabric
14 15 (0.91%) Marketing Technology
15 14 (0.85%) Reference Data
16 13 (0.79%) NHS
16 13 (0.79%) Taxonomies
Operating Systems
1 34 (2.06%) Linux
2 23 (1.40%) Unix
3 9 (0.55%) Windows
4 1 (0.061%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 1 (0.061%) Robot Operating System
4 1 (0.061%) Ubuntu
4 1 (0.061%) Windows Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 820 (49.79%) Data Pipeline
2 765 (46.45%) Analytics
3 658 (39.95%) Data Modelling
4 622 (37.77%) CI/CD
5 582 (35.34%) ETL
6 524 (31.82%) AI
7 432 (26.23%) Agile
8 421 (25.56%) DevOps
9 388 (23.56%) Business Intelligence
10 378 (22.95%) Data Governance
11 306 (18.58%) Stakeholder Management
12 297 (18.03%) Machine Learning
13 280 (17.00%) Validation
14 268 (16.27%) Data Transformation
15 261 (15.85%) Data Integration
16 259 (15.73%) Migration
16 259 (15.73%) Problem-Solving
17 255 (15.48%) Infrastructure as Code
18 235 (14.27%) Data Architecture
19 232 (14.09%) Decision-Making
Programming Languages
1 916 (55.62%) SQL
2 894 (54.28%) Python
3 104 (6.31%) Java
4 48 (2.91%) Data Analysis Expressions
5 46 (2.79%) Scala
6 45 (2.73%) PowerShell
7 42 (2.55%) C#
8 34 (2.06%) Bash
9 30 (1.82%) JavaScript
10 23 (1.40%) R
11 19 (1.15%) PL/SQL
12 18 (1.09%) T-SQL
12 18 (1.09%) TypeScript
13 17 (1.03%) Bicep
14 15 (0.91%) Kusto Query Language
15 13 (0.79%) Shell Script
16 10 (0.61%) Go
16 10 (0.61%) SPARQL
17 9 (0.55%) Korn
18 8 (0.49%) SAS Macro
Qualifications
1 322 (19.55%) Security Cleared
2 266 (16.15%) SC Cleared
3 91 (5.53%) Degree
4 50 (3.04%) AWS Certification
5 45 (2.73%) Azure Certification
5 45 (2.73%) Computer Science Degree
6 44 (2.67%) DV Cleared
7 36 (2.19%) BPSS Clearance
8 18 (1.09%) Master's Degree
9 14 (0.85%) DBS Check
10 12 (0.73%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
10 12 (0.73%) SnowPro
11 9 (0.55%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
12 8 (0.49%) Microsoft Certification
13 7 (0.43%) TOGAF Certification
14 6 (0.36%) Microsoft Certified Professional
14 6 (0.36%) PMI Certification
14 6 (0.36%) PMP
15 5 (0.30%) CSPO
16 4 (0.24%) PhD
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 578 (35.09%) Data Quality
2 89 (5.40%) QA
3 68 (4.13%) GDPR
4 35 (2.13%) Accessibility
5 11 (0.67%) SLA
6 7 (0.43%) Disclosure Scotland
6 7 (0.43%) GRC
7 5 (0.30%) NCSC
7 5 (0.30%) NIST
8 4 (0.24%) California Consumer Privacy Act
8 4 (0.24%) EU AI Act
8 4 (0.24%) PMO
9 3 (0.18%) Actionable Recommendations
9 3 (0.18%) IFRS
9 3 (0.18%) IFRS 9
9 3 (0.18%) ISO/IEC 27001
9 3 (0.18%) MiFID
9 3 (0.18%) Sarbanes-Oxley
10 2 (0.12%) 21 CFR Part 11
10 2 (0.12%) GxP
System Software
1 141 (8.56%) Docker
2 5 (0.30%) Active Directory
3 1 (0.061%) Oracle RAC
3 1 (0.061%) Virtual Machines
Systems Management
1 129 (7.83%) Kubernetes
2 34 (2.06%) Grafana
3 29 (1.76%) Ansible
4 17 (1.03%) Prometheus
5 9 (0.55%) Control-M
6 6 (0.36%) Kibana
7 2 (0.12%) Progress Chef
7 2 (0.12%) Puppet
7 2 (0.12%) Single Sign-On
8 1 (0.061%) Argo
8 1 (0.061%) Cilium
8 1 (0.061%) Data Guard
8 1 (0.061%) HAProxy
8 1 (0.061%) Kubeflow
8 1 (0.061%) Kustomize
8 1 (0.061%) logstash
8 1 (0.061%) Oracle Enterprise Manager
8 1 (0.061%) Oracle RMAN
8 1 (0.061%) QRadar
Vendors
1 488 (29.63%) Databricks
2 292 (17.73%) Microsoft
3 103 (6.25%) Google
4 80 (4.86%) Oracle
5 58 (3.52%) Informatica
6 34 (2.06%) SAP
7 31 (1.88%) Salesforce
8 30 (1.82%) Talend
9 28 (1.70%) Foundry
10 27 (1.64%) Palantir
11 23 (1.40%) OpenAI
12 17 (1.03%) Denodo
13 16 (0.97%) Teradata
14 15 (0.91%) Cloudera
15 12 (0.73%) Trend Micro
16 11 (0.67%) Adobe
17 10 (0.61%) ServiceNow
18 9 (0.55%) Dynatrace
18 9 (0.55%) Splunk
19 7 (0.43%) Hitachi