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 9 July 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
9 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 85 160 206
Rank change year-on-year +75 +46 +9
Contract jobs citing Data Engineering 1,534 571 509
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.92% 1.77% 1.17%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.43% 1.95% 1.37%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,069 379 378
10th Percentile £384 £375 £371
25th Percentile £440 £450 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year - -4.55% -12.00%
75th Percentile £627 £654 £675
90th Percentile £740 £800 £763
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -13.04%
Number of hourly rates quoted 24 7 15
10th Percentile £46.53 £24.75 £30.72
25th Percentile £56.31 £28.13 £31.25
Median hourly rate £69.72 £38.96 £35.00
Median % change year-on-year +78.95% +11.31% -52.05%
75th Percentile £75.75 £53.75 £60.00
90th Percentile £89.25 £58.25 -
UK excluding London median hourly rate £69.22 £28.75 £60.00
% change year-on-year +140.77% -52.08% +11.11%

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 44,694 29,246 37,042
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 85.15% 90.54% 85.41%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,812 18,436 23,663
10th Percentile £325 £300 £300
25th Percentile £415 £405 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £518 £505 £525
Median % change year-on-year +2.50% -3.81% -4.55%
75th Percentile £623 £625 £638
90th Percentile £725 £738 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,657 1,477 2,496
10th Percentile £14.94 £14.20 £12.75
25th Percentile £20.09 £17.61 £16.06
Median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £37.50
Median % change year-on-year +74.79% -32.93% -6.25%
75th Percentile £68.00 £53.50 £61.30
90th Percentile £82.25 £70.00 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £44.50 £24.66 £38.12
% change year-on-year +80.45% -35.31% -3.62%

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 9 July 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 9 July 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 9 July 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 +66 1,363 £525 - 619
London +52 797 £550 - 355
UK excluding London +80 584 £500 +5.26% 366
Work from Home +70 496 £525 - 242
North of England +22 175 £475 -5.00% 114
Midlands +33 147 £475 +2.70% 48
West Midlands +29 124 £475 -18.10% 34
South West +27 87 £503 -12.61% 79
South East -14 81 £525 +10.53% 92
Yorkshire +5 78 £490 +5.95% 31
Scotland +27 60 £500 +5.26% 8
North West -8 59 £500 - 64
North East +2 40 £425 -15.00% 20
East of England -9 29 £575 +71.29% 10
East Midlands -4 20 £525 +13.51% 14
Wales -5 11 £450 +82.58% 4
Northern Ireland - 5 £334 - 15

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
1 197 (12.84%) Apache Spark
2 177 (11.54%) Apache Airflow
3 120 (7.82%) Apache
4 47 (3.06%) SAS
5 44 (2.87%) Confluence
6 23 (1.50%) Jupyter
7 19 (1.24%) Palantir Foundry
8 12 (0.78%) SharePoint
9 8 (0.52%) Apache Superset
10 5 (0.33%) Microsoft Exchange
11 4 (0.26%) Appian
12 3 (0.20%) ArcGIS
13 2 (0.13%) Apache Synapse
14 1 (0.065%) Adobe Experience Manager
14 1 (0.065%) Camunda
14 1 (0.065%) CICS
14 1 (0.065%) IBM HTTP Server
14 1 (0.065%) PowerExchange
Applications
1 27 (1.76%) Microsoft Excel
2 9 (0.59%) Microsoft Office
3 8 (0.52%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 8 (0.52%) Spreadsheet
4 4 (0.26%) Microsoft Project
5 3 (0.20%) Chatbot
6 2 (0.13%) MS Visio
7 1 (0.065%) Notion
Business Applications
1 10 (0.65%) Aladdin
2 6 (0.39%) Dynamics CRM
2 6 (0.39%) Salesforce CRM
3 5 (0.33%) BambooHR
3 5 (0.33%) SAP S/4HANA
4 4 (0.26%) NetSuite
4 4 (0.26%) Sage X3
5 2 (0.13%) Endur
5 2 (0.13%) Oracle Assets
5 2 (0.13%) SAP BPC
5 2 (0.13%) Temenos T24
6 1 (0.065%) Adobe Campaign
6 1 (0.065%) FIS Private Capital Suite
6 1 (0.065%) Markit EDM
6 1 (0.065%) SAP ECC
6 1 (0.065%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
Cloud Services
1 658 (42.89%) Azure
2 581 (37.87%) AWS
3 331 (21.58%) Power Platform
4 223 (14.54%) Snowflake
5 203 (13.23%) GCP
6 184 (11.99%) Amazon S3
7 177 (11.54%) dbt
8 171 (11.15%) Azure Data Factory
9 141 (9.19%) Azure Synapse Analytics
10 133 (8.67%) Serverless
11 127 (8.28%) GitHub
12 123 (8.02%) Azure DevOps
13 115 (7.50%) AWS Lambda
14 73 (4.76%) GitHub Actions
15 60 (3.91%) Amazon EMR
16 40 (2.61%) AWS CloudFormation
17 34 (2.22%) Amazon CloudWatch
18 33 (2.15%) Azure AI
19 30 (1.96%) Amazon SageMaker
19 30 (1.96%) AWS Step Functions
Communications & Networking
1 5 (0.33%) Firewall
1 5 (0.33%) RTP
2 2 (0.13%) Network Security
3 1 (0.065%) 4G
3 1 (0.065%) 5G
3 1 (0.065%) MIMO
3 1 (0.065%) MQTT
Database & Business Intelligence
1 304 (19.82%) Power BI
2 287 (18.71%) Data Warehouse
3 215 (14.02%) Data Lake
4 146 (9.52%) Metadata
5 116 (7.56%) Big Data
6 109 (7.11%) Amazon Redshift
7 91 (5.93%) Delta Lake
8 89 (5.80%) BigQuery
9 87 (5.67%) Tableau
10 80 (5.22%) Amazon Athena
10 80 (5.22%) SQL Server
11 71 (4.63%) NoSQL
11 71 (4.63%) Snowflake Schema
12 60 (3.91%) PostgreSQL
12 60 (3.91%) Relational Database
13 50 (3.26%) Hadoop
14 48 (3.13%) Azure SQL Database
15 35 (2.28%) SQL Server Integration Services
15 35 (2.28%) Star Schema
16 30 (1.96%) Looker
Development Applications
1 175 (11.41%) Git
2 79 (5.15%) GitLab
3 75 (4.89%) JIRA
4 35 (2.28%) MLflow
5 21 (1.37%) Jenkins
6 6 (0.39%) SonarQube
7 5 (0.33%) Bitbucket
8 4 (0.26%) Postman
8 4 (0.26%) Selenium
9 3 (0.20%) Artifactory
9 3 (0.20%) Snyk
9 3 (0.20%) Visual Studio
10 2 (0.13%) Claude Code
10 2 (0.13%) ERwin
10 2 (0.13%) Robot Framework
10 2 (0.13%) Yeoman
11 1 (0.065%) Deequ
11 1 (0.065%) git-flow
11 1 (0.065%) REST Assured
11 1 (0.065%) Sonatype Nexus
General
1 383 (24.97%) Social Skills
2 357 (23.27%) Finance
3 246 (16.04%) Analytical Skills
4 166 (10.82%) Public Sector
5 114 (7.43%) Banking
6 41 (2.67%) Marketing
7 38 (2.48%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 36 (2.35%) Documentation Skills
9 33 (2.15%) Retail
10 21 (1.37%) Front Office
10 21 (1.37%) Investment Banking
10 21 (1.37%) Telecoms
11 15 (0.98%) Financial Institution
12 14 (0.91%) Manufacturing
13 13 (0.85%) Law
14 11 (0.72%) Influencing Skills
14 11 (0.72%) Legal
15 10 (0.65%) Pharmaceutical
16 9 (0.59%) Billing
17 5 (0.33%) Police
Job Titles
1 715 (46.61%) Data Engineer
2 222 (14.47%) Senior
3 171 (11.15%) Architect
4 167 (10.89%) Lead
5 131 (8.54%) Senior Data Engineer
6 95 (6.19%) Developer
7 94 (6.13%) Data Architect
8 81 (5.28%) AWS Engineer
9 71 (4.63%) Analyst
10 65 (4.24%) Lead Data Engineer
11 63 (4.11%) AWS Data Engineer
12 59 (3.85%) Azure Engineer
13 58 (3.78%) Snowflake Engineer
14 53 (3.46%) Azure Data Engineer
15 50 (3.26%) Data Scientist
16 47 (3.06%) Solutions Architect
17 46 (3.00%) Python Engineer
17 46 (3.00%) Snowflake Data Engineer
18 44 (2.87%) Consultant
19 42 (2.74%) Data Analyst
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 228 (14.86%) PySpark
2 149 (9.71%) Kafka
3 42 (2.74%) Pandas
4 39 (2.54%) REST
5 33 (2.15%) JSON
6 32 (2.09%) scikit-learn
7 29 (1.89%) PyTorch
8 27 (1.76%) NumPy
9 26 (1.69%) Spring
10 24 (1.56%) React
11 23 (1.50%) TensorFlow
12 19 (1.24%) Spring Boot
13 17 (1.11%) .NET
13 17 (1.11%) RESTful
14 15 (0.98%) OpenTelemetry
15 14 (0.91%) FastAPI
15 14 (0.91%) YAML
16 13 (0.85%) Microsoft Graph
16 13 (0.85%) XML
17 12 (0.78%) Node.js
Miscellaneous
1 210 (13.69%) Cloud Native
2 64 (4.17%) Data Structures
3 59 (3.85%) Legacy Systems
4 58 (3.78%) Distributed Systems
5 51 (3.32%) Product Ownership
6 41 (2.67%) Onboarding
7 36 (2.35%) AI Agents
8 26 (1.69%) Data Protection Act
8 26 (1.69%) Distributed Computing
9 25 (1.63%) Algorithms
10 23 (1.50%) NHS
11 22 (1.43%) Greenfield Project
12 19 (1.24%) Analytical Mindset
13 18 (1.17%) Virtual Team
14 17 (1.11%) Clustering
15 15 (0.98%) Fixed Income
15 15 (0.98%) Management Information System
16 13 (0.85%) Life Science
16 13 (0.85%) Reference Data
16 13 (0.85%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 29 (1.89%) Linux
2 25 (1.63%) Unix
3 5 (0.33%) VMS
4 3 (0.20%) Windows
5 2 (0.13%) Windows Server
6 1 (0.065%) Ubuntu
Processes & Methodologies
1 797 (51.96%) Analytics
2 745 (48.57%) Data Pipeline
3 594 (38.72%) Data Modelling
4 551 (35.92%) CI/CD
5 534 (34.81%) ETL
6 444 (28.94%) AI
7 386 (25.16%) Agile
8 385 (25.10%) Business Intelligence
9 373 (24.32%) DevOps
10 335 (21.84%) Data Governance
11 297 (19.36%) Machine Learning
12 278 (18.12%) Problem-Solving
13 274 (17.86%) Data Science
14 220 (14.34%) Migration
15 218 (14.21%) Validation
16 217 (14.15%) Decision-Making
17 215 (14.02%) Data Architecture
18 192 (12.52%) Infrastructure as Code
19 182 (11.86%) Stakeholder Management
20 177 (11.54%) Use Case
Programming Languages
1 836 (54.50%) SQL
2 813 (53.00%) Python
3 127 (8.28%) Java
4 46 (3.00%) Data Analysis Expressions
5 42 (2.74%) Scala
6 38 (2.48%) C#
7 37 (2.41%) Bash
8 24 (1.56%) T-SQL
9 23 (1.50%) PowerShell
10 22 (1.43%) R
11 21 (1.37%) JavaScript
12 18 (1.17%) Bicep
13 15 (0.98%) PL/SQL
14 13 (0.85%) Shell Script
14 13 (0.85%) TypeScript
15 12 (0.78%) SAS Macro
16 7 (0.46%) SPARQL
17 6 (0.39%) Cypher
18 5 (0.33%) Kusto Query Language
19 4 (0.26%) Korn
Qualifications
1 300 (19.56%) Security Cleared
2 260 (16.95%) SC Cleared
3 117 (7.63%) Degree
4 49 (3.19%) Computer Science Degree
5 38 (2.48%) Master's Degree
6 37 (2.41%) BPSS Clearance
7 31 (2.02%) Azure Certification
8 24 (1.56%) DV Cleared
9 21 (1.37%) AWS Certification
10 13 (0.85%) DBS Check
11 9 (0.59%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
11 9 (0.59%) SnowPro
12 7 (0.46%) Microsoft Certification
13 6 (0.39%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
14 5 (0.33%) CSPO
15 3 (0.20%) IBM Certification
15 3 (0.20%) PhD
15 3 (0.20%) Tableau Certification
16 2 (0.13%) PMI Certification
17 1 (0.065%) ACCA
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 448 (29.20%) Data Quality
2 92 (6.00%) GDPR
3 77 (5.02%) QA
4 19 (1.24%) Accessibility
5 15 (0.98%) SLA
6 6 (0.39%) Sarbanes-Oxley
7 4 (0.26%) Actionable Recommendations
7 4 (0.26%) California Consumer Privacy Act
7 4 (0.26%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 4 (0.26%) MiFID
7 4 (0.26%) Solvency II
8 3 (0.20%) Disclosure Scotland
8 3 (0.20%) GRC
8 3 (0.20%) GxP
8 3 (0.20%) HIPAA
8 3 (0.20%) ISO/IEC 42001
8 3 (0.20%) NIST
8 3 (0.20%) PMO
9 2 (0.13%) COPPA
9 2 (0.13%) SNOMED CT
System Software
1 138 (9.00%) Docker
2 3 (0.20%) Active Directory
2 3 (0.20%) Virtual Machines
3 2 (0.13%) HDFS
Systems Management
1 209 (13.62%) Terraform
2 116 (7.56%) Kubernetes
3 28 (1.83%) Grafana
4 27 (1.76%) Prometheus
5 11 (0.72%) Ansible
6 5 (0.33%) Kibana
7 3 (0.20%) Argo
7 3 (0.20%) logstash
7 3 (0.20%) Nagios
7 3 (0.20%) Rancher
8 2 (0.13%) Kubeflow
8 2 (0.13%) Thomson Reuters DACS
9 1 (0.065%) Control-M
9 1 (0.065%) Hadoop YARN
9 1 (0.065%) HP Fortify
9 1 (0.065%) IBM Guardium
9 1 (0.065%) Kustomize
9 1 (0.065%) Oozie
9 1 (0.065%) Single Sign-On
Vendors
1 399 (26.01%) Databricks
2 262 (17.08%) Microsoft
3 87 (5.67%) Informatica
4 60 (3.91%) Oracle
5 57 (3.72%) Google
6 32 (2.09%) Talend
7 30 (1.96%) Foundry
7 30 (1.96%) SAP
8 27 (1.76%) OpenAI
8 27 (1.76%) Palantir
9 25 (1.63%) Salesforce
10 22 (1.43%) Splunk
11 15 (0.98%) Cloudera
11 15 (0.98%) ServiceNow
12 12 (0.78%) Trend Micro
13 8 (0.52%) Adobe
13 8 (0.52%) Denodo
14 7 (0.46%) InterSystems
15 6 (0.39%) Bloomberg
15 6 (0.39%) Teradata