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 December 2025, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
17 Dec 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 120 176 220
Rank change year-on-year +56 +44 +7
Contract jobs citing Data Engineering 851 511 484
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.31% 1.49% 1.10%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 2.62% 1.69% 1.25%
Number of daily rates quoted 559 358 360
10th Percentile £362 £396 £400
25th Percentile £413 £463 £474
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £519 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -5.73% - -8.33%
75th Percentile £625 £659 £688
90th Percentile £750 £791 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £470 £500 £550
% change year-on-year -6.00% -9.09% +1.85%
Number of hourly rates quoted 5 13 10
10th Percentile £41.15 £21.25 £35.00
25th Percentile £50.00 £22.00 £36.68
Median hourly rate £74.26 £25.43 £53.65
Median % change year-on-year +192.02% -52.60% -16.82%
75th Percentile £87.50 £28.15 £74.75
90th Percentile £101.00 £57.63 £78.70
UK excluding London median hourly rate £62.13 £25.43 £78.00
% change year-on-year +144.32% -67.40% +56.00%

All Process and 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 32,541 30,291 38,815
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 88.45% 88.04% 88.49%
Number of daily rates quoted 20,482 18,505 25,899
10th Percentile £300 £306 £308
25th Percentile £406 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £530
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% -0.94% -3.64%
75th Percentile £618 £638 £650
90th Percentile £723 £744 £745
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £500 £500
% change year-on-year -5.00% - -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,089 1,000 1,504
10th Percentile £14.53 £15.61 £14.38
25th Percentile £17.50 £20.30 £18.95
Median hourly rate £25.15 £32.50 £43.84
Median % change year-on-year -22.62% -25.86% +25.25%
75th Percentile £48.75 £62.50 £65.00
90th Percentile £68.00 £73.78 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £23.00 £32.28 £44.50
% change year-on-year -28.75% -27.46% +39.06%

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 December 2025.

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 December 2025.

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 December 2025. 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 +59 746 £525 -8.70% 412
London +63 512 £550 -4.35% 178
Work from Home +17 258 £550 -4.35% 299
UK excluding London +13 243 £470 -6.00% 329
North of England -17 70 £445 -11.00% 80
Midlands +4 62 £533 +6.65% 45
West Midlands -14 43 £550 +11.11% 28
North West -8 42 £425 -12.37% 50
Scotland +28 40 £402 -10.67% 15
South East +4 37 £480 -16.52% 140
South West -1 27 £550 -17.60% 37
East Midlands -7 19 £429 -25.43% 16
Yorkshire -37 19 £500 -6.98% 19
East of England -3 17 £475 +48.44% 17
North East -3 9 £400 -33.05% 11
Wales -12 2 £495 -1.00% 2
Northern Ireland - 1 - -

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
1 123 (14.45%) Apache Airflow
2 121 (14.22%) Apache Spark
3 66 (7.76%) Apache
4 13 (1.53%) Confluence
5 4 (0.47%) SAS
5 4 (0.47%) SharePoint
6 2 (0.24%) Jupyter
6 2 (0.24%) Luigi
7 1 (0.12%) Apache Pig
7 1 (0.12%) ArcGIS
7 1 (0.12%) CMS
Applications
1 20 (2.35%) Microsoft Excel
2 9 (1.06%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 6 (0.71%) Chatbot
4 3 (0.35%) MS Visio
5 2 (0.24%) Microsoft Office
5 2 (0.24%) Microsoft Project
5 2 (0.24%) Trello
6 1 (0.12%) Adobe XD
Business Applications
1 8 (0.94%) Aladdin
2 4 (0.47%) Dynamics CRM
3 2 (0.24%) Eagle PACE
3 2 (0.24%) Markit EDM
4 1 (0.12%) Actimize
4 1 (0.12%) Maximo
4 1 (0.12%) Misys Midas
4 1 (0.12%) Salesforce CRM
4 1 (0.12%) SAP BPC
4 1 (0.12%) SAP ERP
4 1 (0.12%) Workday HCM
Cloud Services
1 378 (44.42%) Azure
2 303 (35.61%) AWS
3 142 (16.69%) Azure Data Factory
3 142 (16.69%) Power Platform
4 131 (15.39%) GCP
5 124 (14.57%) Snowflake
6 99 (11.63%) Amazon S3
7 95 (11.16%) Azure Synapse Analytics
8 89 (10.46%) GitHub
8 89 (10.46%) Serverless
9 82 (9.64%) Azure DevOps
10 81 (9.52%) dbt
11 68 (7.99%) AWS Lambda
12 61 (7.17%) GitHub Actions
13 32 (3.76%) AWS CloudFormation
14 30 (3.53%) Azure Machine Learning
15 28 (3.29%) Amazon SageMaker
15 28 (3.29%) AWS Step Functions
16 24 (2.82%) Cloud Computing
17 22 (2.59%) Amazon EMR
Communications & Networking
1 4 (0.47%) Cisco IPT
1 4 (0.47%) Kerberos
1 4 (0.47%) Network Security
1 4 (0.47%) SSL
1 4 (0.47%) TCP/IP
2 3 (0.35%) DNS
2 3 (0.35%) Firewall
2 3 (0.35%) SSH
2 3 (0.35%) VPN
3 1 (0.12%) Intrusion Detection
3 1 (0.12%) MQTT
3 1 (0.12%) SAN
3 1 (0.12%) SMS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 167 (19.62%) Data Warehouse
2 136 (15.98%) Power BI
3 105 (12.34%) Data Lake
4 69 (8.11%) Metadata
5 66 (7.76%) Big Data
6 55 (6.46%) Relational Database
7 54 (6.35%) NoSQL
8 52 (6.11%) Delta Lake
9 46 (5.41%) BigQuery
10 45 (5.29%) Azure SQL Database
11 42 (4.94%) PostgreSQL
12 40 (4.70%) Amazon Redshift
12 40 (4.70%) Tableau
13 36 (4.23%) Hadoop
14 35 (4.11%) SQL Server
15 34 (4.00%) Amazon Athena
16 33 (3.88%) Snowflake Schema
17 25 (2.94%) RDBMS
18 20 (2.35%) Amazon RDS
19 19 (2.23%) Elasticsearch
Development Applications
1 137 (16.10%) Git
2 50 (5.88%) Jenkins
3 42 (4.94%) GitLab
4 32 (3.76%) MLflow
5 30 (3.53%) JIRA
6 9 (1.06%) Visual Studio Code
7 7 (0.82%) SonarQube
8 4 (0.47%) Cucumber
8 4 (0.47%) Poetry
9 3 (0.35%) JMeter
9 3 (0.35%) Selenium
10 2 (0.24%) ERwin
10 2 (0.24%) JUnit
10 2 (0.24%) Maven
10 2 (0.24%) Mockito
10 2 (0.24%) PyCharm
10 2 (0.24%) Sonatype Nexus
10 2 (0.24%) TeamCity
10 2 (0.24%) TestRail
10 2 (0.24%) Zephyr
General
1 250 (29.38%) Social Skills
2 195 (22.91%) Finance
3 118 (13.87%) Analytical Skills
4 60 (7.05%) Public Sector
5 59 (6.93%) Banking
6 26 (3.06%) Investment Banking
7 23 (2.70%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 17 (2.00%) Retail
9 16 (1.88%) Front Office
10 15 (1.76%) Influencing Skills
10 15 (1.76%) Marketing
10 15 (1.76%) Pharmaceutical
11 12 (1.41%) Legal
11 12 (1.41%) Telecoms
12 9 (1.06%) Publishing
13 8 (0.94%) Documentation Skills
13 8 (0.94%) Presentation Skills
14 7 (0.82%) Military
15 5 (0.59%) Health Technology
15 5 (0.59%) Tech for Good
Job Titles
1 351 (41.25%) Data Engineer
2 111 (13.04%) Senior
3 80 (9.40%) Lead
4 76 (8.93%) Azure Engineer
5 72 (8.46%) Senior Data Engineer
6 71 (8.34%) Developer
7 64 (7.52%) Architect
8 53 (6.23%) Azure Data Engineer
9 45 (5.29%) Analyst
10 41 (4.82%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
10 41 (4.82%) AWS Engineer
11 40 (4.70%) Python Engineer
12 33 (3.88%) Data Scientist
13 32 (3.76%) Data Architect
14 31 (3.64%) Snowflake Engineer
15 27 (3.17%) AWS Data Engineer
16 25 (2.94%) Python Data Engineer
16 25 (2.94%) Python Developer
17 24 (2.82%) DevOps Engineer
18 23 (2.70%) Snowflake Data Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 153 (17.98%) PySpark
2 93 (10.93%) Kafka
3 61 (7.17%) Pandas
4 49 (5.76%) NumPy
4 49 (5.76%) PyTorch
5 42 (4.94%) TensorFlow
6 41 (4.82%) FastAPI
7 34 (4.00%) Flask
8 32 (3.76%) scikit-learn
9 31 (3.64%) RESTful
10 27 (3.17%) React
11 23 (2.70%) LangChain
12 22 (2.59%) JSON
13 17 (2.00%) pytest
14 16 (1.88%) Hugging Face
14 16 (1.88%) YAML
15 15 (1.76%) Polars
15 15 (1.76%) Vue
16 14 (1.65%) AngularJS
16 14 (1.65%) SciPy
Miscellaneous
1 81 (9.52%) Cloud Native
2 47 (5.52%) Algorithms
3 25 (2.94%) Data Structures
4 24 (2.82%) Distributed Computing
5 21 (2.47%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
6 20 (2.35%) Data Protection Act
6 20 (2.35%) Onboarding
6 20 (2.35%) Product Ownership
7 19 (2.23%) Distributed Systems
7 19 (2.23%) Hybrid Cloud
8 16 (1.88%) Hedge funds
9 14 (1.65%) AI Agents
10 11 (1.29%) Analytical Mindset
10 11 (1.29%) Legacy Systems
10 11 (1.29%) Life Science
11 10 (1.18%) Derivative
11 10 (1.18%) Enterprise Software
11 10 (1.18%) Fixed Income
11 10 (1.18%) Management Information System
12 9 (1.06%) Data Fabric
Operating Systems
1 35 (4.11%) Linux
2 3 (0.35%) Android
2 3 (0.35%) VMS
3 2 (0.24%) Ubuntu
3 2 (0.24%) Unix
3 2 (0.24%) Windows
4 1 (0.12%) CentOS
4 1 (0.12%) Debian
Processes & Methodologies
1 369 (43.36%) Data Pipeline
2 322 (37.84%) CI/CD
3 310 (36.43%) ETL
4 296 (34.78%) Analytics
5 291 (34.20%) Data Modelling
6 211 (24.79%) DevOps
7 201 (23.62%) Data Governance
8 198 (23.27%) Agile
9 197 (23.15%) Machine Learning
10 195 (22.91%) AI
11 178 (20.92%) Problem-Solving
12 175 (20.56%) Data Science
13 170 (19.98%) Business Intelligence
14 136 (15.98%) Data Architecture
15 108 (12.69%) Infrastructure as Code
16 100 (11.75%) Containerisation
16 100 (11.75%) Data Integration
17 85 (9.99%) Data Transformation
17 85 (9.99%) Visualisation
18 84 (9.87%) Decision-Making
Programming Languages
1 541 (63.57%) Python
2 423 (49.71%) SQL
3 59 (6.93%) Scala
4 57 (6.70%) Java
5 38 (4.47%) C#
6 35 (4.11%) JavaScript
7 26 (3.06%) C++
7 26 (3.06%) PowerShell
8 22 (2.59%) Bash
9 17 (2.00%) Bicep
9 17 (2.00%) R
10 16 (1.88%) Data Analysis Expressions
10 16 (1.88%) TypeScript
11 15 (1.76%) Go
11 15 (1.76%) Rust
11 15 (1.76%) T-SQL
12 14 (1.65%) PL/SQL
13 13 (1.53%) Shell Script
14 6 (0.71%) Korn
15 5 (0.59%) VBA
Qualifications
1 148 (17.39%) Security Cleared
2 121 (14.22%) SC Cleared
3 76 (8.93%) Degree
4 50 (5.88%) Azure Certification
5 37 (4.35%) Master's Degree
6 29 (3.41%) Computer Science Degree
7 19 (2.23%) DV Cleared
8 18 (2.12%) AWS Certification
9 12 (1.41%) PhD
10 9 (1.06%) Microsoft Certification
11 8 (0.94%) MCP
12 7 (0.82%) BPSS Clearance
13 5 (0.59%) DBS Check
14 3 (0.35%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
14 3 (0.35%) SnowPro
14 3 (0.35%) Tableau Certification
15 2 (0.24%) CBAP
15 2 (0.24%) ISTQB
16 1 (0.12%) OCP
16 1 (0.12%) Oracle Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 204 (23.97%) Data Quality
2 65 (7.64%) GDPR
3 27 (3.17%) QA
4 21 (2.47%) Accessibility
5 9 (1.06%) HIPAA
6 7 (0.82%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 7 (0.82%) Sarbanes-Oxley
7 5 (0.59%) NIST
7 5 (0.59%) PERC
8 4 (0.47%) SOC 2
8 4 (0.47%) WCAG
9 3 (0.35%) California Consumer Privacy Act
9 3 (0.35%) Disclosure Scotland
9 3 (0.35%) PMO
10 2 (0.24%) HL7
10 2 (0.24%) PCI DSS
11 1 (0.12%) Dodd-Frank
11 1 (0.12%) EMIR
11 1 (0.12%) GMP
11 1 (0.12%) ISO/IEC 20000
System Software
1 136 (15.98%) Docker
2 16 (1.88%) HDFS
3 3 (0.35%) Active Directory
4 1 (0.12%) Apache ZooKeeper
4 1 (0.12%) ISA Server
4 1 (0.12%) Virtual Machines
Systems Management
1 134 (15.75%) Terraform
2 111 (13.04%) Kubernetes
3 16 (1.88%) Grafana
4 14 (1.65%) Ansible
5 11 (1.29%) Hadoop YARN
6 10 (1.18%) Prometheus
7 6 (0.71%) Argo
7 6 (0.71%) Control-M
8 5 (0.59%) Kibana
8 5 (0.59%) logstash
8 5 (0.59%) Puppet
9 4 (0.47%) vCenter Server
10 3 (0.35%) Istio
10 3 (0.35%) Kustomize
10 3 (0.35%) Oozie
11 2 (0.24%) Kubeflow
11 2 (0.24%) Single Sign-On
12 1 (0.12%) Demisto
12 1 (0.12%) Fluentd
12 1 (0.12%) Systems Management Server (SMS)
Vendors
1 252 (29.61%) Databricks
2 107 (12.57%) Microsoft
3 52 (6.11%) Google
4 33 (3.88%) Oracle
5 24 (2.82%) Informatica
6 18 (2.12%) Talend
7 17 (2.00%) Palantir
8 15 (1.76%) Foundry
8 15 (1.76%) OpenAI
9 14 (1.65%) SAP
10 13 (1.53%) Cloudera
11 9 (1.06%) Salesforce
12 8 (0.94%) Virgin Media
13 6 (0.71%) Denodo
14 5 (0.59%) Guidewire
14 5 (0.59%) Murex
14 5 (0.59%) VMware
15 4 (0.47%) Adobe
15 4 (0.47%) EMC
15 4 (0.47%) IBM