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 17 January 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
17 Jan 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 112 164 226
Rank change year-on-year +52 +62 0
Contract jobs citing Data Engineering 901 510 472
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.42% 1.60% 1.09%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 2.75% 1.81% 1.24%
Number of daily rates quoted 603 355 351
10th Percentile £363 £355 £400
25th Percentile £425 £450 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £515 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -6.36% - -8.33%
75th Percentile £625 £650 £656
90th Percentile £750 £800 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £495 £500 £550
% change year-on-year -1.00% -9.09% +1.85%
Number of hourly rates quoted 5 13 8
10th Percentile £41.15 £21.25 £35.00
25th Percentile £50.00 £22.00 £35.47
Median hourly rate £74.26 £25.43 £42.25
Median % change year-on-year +192.02% -39.81% -43.67%
75th Percentile £87.50 £28.15 £68.25
90th Percentile £101.00 £57.63 £78.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £62.13 £25.43 £78.00
% change year-on-year +144.32% -67.40% +281.05%

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 32,749 28,251 37,925
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 87.79% 88.81% 87.63%
Number of daily rates quoted 20,723 17,176 25,071
10th Percentile £304 £306 £304
25th Percentile £406 £413 £415
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £614 £638 £650
90th Percentile £723 £739 £740
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £500 £500
% change year-on-year -5.00% - -
Number of hourly rates quoted 1,987 905 1,714
10th Percentile £14.52 £15.62 £14.16
25th Percentile £17.69 £20.75 £17.72
Median hourly rate £25.15 £32.50 £40.00
Median % change year-on-year -22.62% -18.75% +16.65%
75th Percentile £56.38 £62.50 £64.50
90th Percentile £69.25 £74.82 £76.25
UK excluding London median hourly rate £24.00 £30.78 £41.00
% change year-on-year -22.03% -24.93% +41.38%

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 17 January 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 17 January 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 17 January 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 +57 799 £525 -8.70% 647
London +63 571 £550 -4.35% 213
Work from Home +18 263 £550 - 345
UK excluding London +8 237 £495 -1.00% 558
North of England -23 77 £450 -18.18% 97
Midlands +3 64 £542 +0.74% 66
North West +2 49 £445 -11.00% 46
West Midlands -11 45 £550 +10.00% 33
Scotland +13 36 £402 -14.65% 24
South West -14 29 £550 -17.60% 62
South East -8 28 £513 -5.09% 218
East Midlands -11 19 £433 -30.80% 31
Yorkshire -47 15 £500 -9.09% 35
North East -2 13 £400 -33.05% 16
East of England -19 11 £500 +56.25% 71
Wales -9 5 £631 +26.25% 22
Northern Ireland - 2 £430 - 10

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
1 126 (13.98%) Apache Spark
2 106 (11.76%) Apache Airflow
3 68 (7.55%) Apache
4 13 (1.44%) Confluence
5 5 (0.55%) SAS
6 4 (0.44%) Appian
7 3 (0.33%) Microsoft Exchange
8 2 (0.22%) Jupyter
8 2 (0.22%) SharePoint
9 1 (0.11%) Apache Pig
9 1 (0.11%) ArcGIS
9 1 (0.11%) CMS
9 1 (0.11%) Luigi
Applications
1 18 (2.00%) Microsoft Excel
2 7 (0.78%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 6 (0.67%) Chatbot
4 3 (0.33%) Microsoft Project
4 3 (0.33%) MS Visio
4 3 (0.33%) Trello
5 2 (0.22%) Microsoft Office
6 1 (0.11%) Adobe XD
6 1 (0.11%) Spreadsheet
Business Applications
1 6 (0.67%) Aladdin
2 3 (0.33%) Dynamics CRM
3 2 (0.22%) Eagle PACE
3 2 (0.22%) Markit EDM
3 2 (0.22%) Salesforce CRM
4 1 (0.11%) Actimize
4 1 (0.11%) Maximo
4 1 (0.11%) Misys Midas
4 1 (0.11%) SAP BPC
4 1 (0.11%) SAP ERP
4 1 (0.11%) Workday HCM
Cloud Services
1 419 (46.50%) Azure
2 308 (34.18%) AWS
3 176 (19.53%) Power Platform
4 161 (17.87%) Azure Data Factory
5 126 (13.98%) GCP
5 126 (13.98%) Snowflake
6 103 (11.43%) Azure Synapse Analytics
7 99 (10.99%) Amazon S3
8 94 (10.43%) GitHub
9 91 (10.10%) Serverless
10 80 (8.88%) dbt
11 76 (8.44%) Azure DevOps
12 69 (7.66%) AWS Lambda
13 64 (7.10%) GitHub Actions
14 39 (4.33%) AWS CloudFormation
15 26 (2.89%) AWS Step Functions
16 22 (2.44%) Amazon SageMaker
16 22 (2.44%) Azure Machine Learning
17 20 (2.22%) Cloud Computing
17 20 (2.22%) Microsoft Purview
Communications & Networking
1 5 (0.55%) Network Security
2 4 (0.44%) Cisco IPT
2 4 (0.44%) Kerberos
3 3 (0.33%) Firewall
3 3 (0.33%) VPN
4 1 (0.11%) MQTT
4 1 (0.11%) SAN
4 1 (0.11%) SMS
4 1 (0.11%) SSL
4 1 (0.11%) TCP/IP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 171 (18.98%) Data Warehouse
2 168 (18.65%) Power BI
3 119 (13.21%) Data Lake
4 77 (8.55%) Metadata
5 57 (6.33%) NoSQL
6 55 (6.10%) Big Data
6 55 (6.10%) SQL Server
7 52 (5.77%) Relational Database
8 50 (5.55%) Azure SQL Database
9 48 (5.33%) Delta Lake
10 44 (4.88%) BigQuery
10 44 (4.88%) Snowflake Schema
11 41 (4.55%) Amazon Redshift
12 39 (4.33%) PostgreSQL
13 38 (4.22%) Amazon Athena
14 35 (3.88%) Tableau
15 32 (3.55%) Hadoop
16 26 (2.89%) RDBMS
17 20 (2.22%) Elasticsearch
17 20 (2.22%) SQL Server Integration Services
Development Applications
1 132 (14.65%) Git
2 51 (5.66%) GitLab
3 45 (4.99%) Jenkins
4 32 (3.55%) MLflow
5 25 (2.77%) JIRA
6 7 (0.78%) Visual Studio Code
7 4 (0.44%) Cucumber
7 4 (0.44%) Selenium
7 4 (0.44%) SonarQube
8 3 (0.33%) JMeter
8 3 (0.33%) Terragrunt
9 2 (0.22%) Gemini Tracker
9 2 (0.22%) Maven
9 2 (0.22%) Mockito
9 2 (0.22%) Postman
9 2 (0.22%) Pylint
9 2 (0.22%) Robot Framework
9 2 (0.22%) TeamCity
9 2 (0.22%) TestRail
9 2 (0.22%) Zephyr
General
1 257 (28.52%) Social Skills
2 214 (23.75%) Finance
3 119 (13.21%) Analytical Skills
4 64 (7.10%) Public Sector
5 57 (6.33%) Banking
6 24 (2.66%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 23 (2.55%) Investment Banking
8 16 (1.78%) Front Office
8 16 (1.78%) Retail
9 15 (1.66%) Influencing Skills
9 15 (1.66%) Pharmaceutical
10 14 (1.55%) Marketing
11 11 (1.22%) Legal
12 9 (1.00%) Publishing
13 8 (0.89%) Documentation Skills
13 8 (0.89%) Military
14 6 (0.67%) Back Office
14 6 (0.67%) Presentation Skills
15 5 (0.55%) Health Technology
15 5 (0.55%) Telecoms
Job Titles
1 392 (43.51%) Data Engineer
2 119 (13.21%) Senior
3 99 (10.99%) Lead
4 81 (8.99%) Senior Data Engineer
5 76 (8.44%) Azure Engineer
6 65 (7.21%) Developer
7 61 (6.77%) Architect
8 55 (6.10%) Azure Data Engineer
9 43 (4.77%) Analyst
10 41 (4.55%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
10 41 (4.55%) AWS Engineer
11 39 (4.33%) Python Engineer
11 39 (4.33%) Snowflake Engineer
12 32 (3.55%) Data Architect
12 32 (3.55%) Data Scientist
13 31 (3.44%) Snowflake Data Engineer
14 26 (2.89%) AWS Data Engineer
14 26 (2.89%) Lead Data Engineer
15 24 (2.66%) Consultant
15 24 (2.66%) Python Data Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 173 (19.20%) PySpark
2 95 (10.54%) Kafka
3 59 (6.55%) Pandas
4 49 (5.44%) PyTorch
5 44 (4.88%) TensorFlow
6 43 (4.77%) NumPy
7 37 (4.11%) FastAPI
8 31 (3.44%) scikit-learn
9 29 (3.22%) Flask
10 28 (3.11%) RESTful
11 23 (2.55%) React
12 22 (2.44%) LangChain
12 22 (2.44%) pytest
13 20 (2.22%) JSON
14 18 (2.00%) REST
14 18 (2.00%) YAML
15 15 (1.66%) Spark Streaming
16 14 (1.55%) Hugging Face
17 13 (1.44%) ARM Templates
17 13 (1.44%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 89 (9.88%) Cloud Native
2 41 (4.55%) Algorithms
3 25 (2.77%) Distributed Computing
3 25 (2.77%) Product Ownership
4 23 (2.55%) Distributed Systems
5 22 (2.44%) Onboarding
6 21 (2.33%) Data Structures
7 19 (2.11%) Data Protection Act
8 17 (1.89%) Legacy Systems
9 16 (1.78%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
9 16 (1.78%) Hybrid Cloud
10 13 (1.44%) Hedge funds
11 12 (1.33%) Analytical Mindset
11 12 (1.33%) Life Science
12 11 (1.22%) AI Agents
12 11 (1.22%) Data Fabric
12 11 (1.22%) Fixed Income
13 10 (1.11%) Clustering
13 10 (1.11%) Derivative
13 10 (1.11%) Enterprise Software
Operating Systems
1 26 (2.89%) Linux
2 3 (0.33%) VMS
3 2 (0.22%) Android
3 2 (0.22%) Ubuntu
3 2 (0.22%) Windows
4 1 (0.11%) CentOS
4 1 (0.11%) Debian
4 1 (0.11%) Unix
Processes & Methodologies
1 395 (43.84%) Data Pipeline
2 349 (38.73%) Analytics
3 334 (37.07%) ETL
4 321 (35.63%) CI/CD
5 308 (34.18%) Data Modelling
6 233 (25.86%) AI
7 222 (24.64%) Data Governance
8 209 (23.20%) DevOps
9 206 (22.86%) Agile
10 198 (21.98%) Business Intelligence
10 198 (21.98%) Machine Learning
11 179 (19.87%) Data Science
12 177 (19.64%) Problem-Solving
13 149 (16.54%) Data Architecture
14 110 (12.21%) Infrastructure as Code
15 93 (10.32%) Data Integration
16 91 (10.10%) Containerisation
17 86 (9.54%) Data Transformation
17 86 (9.54%) Decision-Making
17 86 (9.54%) Visualisation
Programming Languages
1 560 (62.15%) Python
2 446 (49.50%) SQL
3 62 (6.88%) Scala
4 55 (6.10%) Java
5 36 (4.00%) C#
6 33 (3.66%) JavaScript
7 27 (3.00%) PowerShell
8 22 (2.44%) C++
9 20 (2.22%) Bash
9 20 (2.22%) Data Analysis Expressions
10 18 (2.00%) Bicep
10 18 (2.00%) T-SQL
11 17 (1.89%) R
12 16 (1.78%) PL/SQL
13 15 (1.66%) Go
13 15 (1.66%) TypeScript
14 13 (1.44%) Shell Script
15 12 (1.33%) Rust
16 7 (0.78%) Korn
17 2 (0.22%) VBA
Qualifications
1 169 (18.76%) Security Cleared
2 142 (15.76%) SC Cleared
3 68 (7.55%) Degree
4 51 (5.66%) Azure Certification
5 30 (3.33%) Computer Science Degree
6 29 (3.22%) Master's Degree
7 18 (2.00%) DV Cleared
8 14 (1.55%) AWS Certification
8 14 (1.55%) Microsoft Certification
9 13 (1.44%) PhD
10 7 (0.78%) MCP
11 6 (0.67%) BPSS Clearance
12 4 (0.44%) DBS Check
13 3 (0.33%) ISTQB
13 3 (0.33%) Tableau Certification
14 2 (0.22%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
14 2 (0.22%) CBAP
14 2 (0.22%) SnowPro
15 1 (0.11%) APMG
15 1 (0.11%) CSPO
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 234 (25.97%) Data Quality
2 71 (7.88%) GDPR
3 29 (3.22%) QA
4 19 (2.11%) Accessibility
5 10 (1.11%) Sarbanes-Oxley
6 8 (0.89%) HIPAA
7 5 (0.55%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 5 (0.55%) PERC
7 5 (0.55%) SOC 2
8 4 (0.44%) California Consumer Privacy Act
8 4 (0.44%) WCAG
9 2 (0.22%) Disclosure Scotland
9 2 (0.22%) GRC
9 2 (0.22%) HL7
9 2 (0.22%) MiFID
9 2 (0.22%) PCI DSS
9 2 (0.22%) PMO
10 1 (0.11%) EMIR
10 1 (0.11%) NCSC
10 1 (0.11%) Solvency II
System Software
1 139 (15.43%) Docker
2 16 (1.78%) HDFS
3 2 (0.22%) Active Directory
4 1 (0.11%) Apache ZooKeeper
4 1 (0.11%) ISA Server
4 1 (0.11%) Virtual Machines
Systems Management
1 146 (16.20%) Terraform
2 116 (12.87%) Kubernetes
3 13 (1.44%) Ansible
3 13 (1.44%) Grafana
4 11 (1.22%) Hadoop YARN
5 7 (0.78%) Prometheus
6 5 (0.55%) Puppet
7 3 (0.33%) Argo
7 3 (0.33%) Control-M
7 3 (0.33%) Kibana
7 3 (0.33%) logstash
7 3 (0.33%) Oozie
8 2 (0.22%) Kubeflow
8 2 (0.22%) Single Sign-On
9 1 (0.11%) Apache Ranger
9 1 (0.11%) Kustomize
9 1 (0.11%) Systems Management Server (SMS)
9 1 (0.11%) vCenter Server
Vendors
1 273 (30.30%) Databricks
2 114 (12.65%) Microsoft
3 45 (4.99%) Google
4 29 (3.22%) Oracle
5 20 (2.22%) Informatica
6 18 (2.00%) Palantir
7 16 (1.78%) Foundry
8 15 (1.66%) Talend
9 14 (1.55%) OpenAI
10 13 (1.44%) SAP
11 12 (1.33%) Salesforce
12 8 (0.89%) Cloudera
12 8 (0.89%) Virgin Media
13 7 (0.78%) Denodo
14 6 (0.67%) Guidewire
15 5 (0.55%) MicroStrategy
15 5 (0.55%) ServiceNow
16 4 (0.44%) Automation Anywhere
16 4 (0.44%) IBM
16 4 (0.44%) UiPath