Data Lake Contract Job Trends

Data Lakes
UK

The table below provides summary statistics and contractor rates for jobs requiring Data Lake skills. It covers contract job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 6 August 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
6 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 233 242 148
Rank change year-on-year +9 -94 +55
Contract jobs citing Data Lake 585 369 635
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 1.10% 1.12% 1.62%
As % of the Database & Business Intelligence category 7.16% 6.13% 8.98%
Number of daily rates quoted 445 268 521
10th Percentile £400 £400 £425
25th Percentile £456 £463 £507
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £575 £675
Median % change year-on-year -4.35% -14.81% +17.39%
75th Percentile £656 £756 £850
90th Percentile £750 £825 £888
UK excluding London median daily rate £550 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +15.79% -5.00% -4.76%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2 0 1
10th Percentile £48.25 - -
25th Percentile £49.38 - -
Median hourly rate £52.50 - £40.50
75th Percentile £54.38 - -
90th Percentile £54.75 - -
UK excluding London median hourly rate £52.50 - £40.50
% change year-on-year - - +15.71%

All Database & BI Skills
UK

Data Lake falls under the Databases and Business Intelligence category. For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all contract job vacancies requiring database or business intelligence skills.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for database or business intelligence skills 8,172 6,015 7,073
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 15.33% 18.28% 18.08%
Number of daily rates quoted 5,436 4,071 4,991
10th Percentile £356 £343 £350
25th Percentile £416 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £510 £525
Median % change year-on-year -1.96% -2.86% -2.78%
75th Percentile £600 £625 £651
90th Percentile £700 £750 £800
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £475 £475
% change year-on-year - - -5.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 257 90 102
10th Percentile £16.00 £19.51 £15.10
25th Percentile £24.25 £23.75 £20.19
Median hourly rate £38.50 £34.99 £35.25
Median % change year-on-year +10.03% -0.74% -35.91%
75th Percentile £60.75 £63.31 £56.88
90th Percentile £76.20 £78.83 £71.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £38.25 £31.64 £30.00
% change year-on-year +20.89% +5.47% -41.46%

Data Lake
Job Vacancy Trend

Historical trend showing the proportion of contract IT job postings citing Data Lake relative to all contract IT jobs advertised.

Data Lake job vacancy trend in the UK

Data Lake
Daily Rate Trend

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing Data Lake.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing Data Lake

Data Lake
Daily Rate Histogram

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Data Lake over the 6 months to 6 August 2026.

Daily rate histogram for Data Lake in the UK

Data Lake
Hourly Rate Trend

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing Data Lake.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing Data Lake

Data Lake
Top 16 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 Lake within the UK over the 6 months to 6 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 -20 483 £575 -0.86% 219
London -33 300 £575 -11.54% 139
Work from Home -24 208 £529 -18.62% 99
UK excluding London -26 178 £550 +15.79% 116
Midlands +8 74 £600 +39.53% 33
West Midlands -2 58 £608 +42.94% 17
North of England -46 49 £550 +15.79% 19
North West -38 30 £500 - 7
Yorkshire -37 18 £550 +22.09% 8
Scotland +9 17 £418 -27.64% 10
East Midlands +2 16 £550 +34.15% 16
South East -70 16 £448 -2.55% 38
South West -34 14 £600 +26.32% 2
East of England -25 10 £575 -0.86% 4
Wales -10 1 £325 -35.00% 9
North East -40 1 £450 - 4

Data Lake
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 74 (12.65%) Apache Spark
2 45 (7.69%) Apache
3 38 (6.50%) Apache Airflow
4 35 (5.98%) SAS
5 23 (3.93%) Confluence
6 5 (0.85%) SharePoint
7 2 (0.34%) ArcGIS
7 2 (0.34%) Jupyter
7 2 (0.34%) nginx
7 2 (0.34%) Palantir Foundry
8 1 (0.17%) Apache Superset
8 1 (0.17%) Apache Synapse
8 1 (0.17%) JBoss
8 1 (0.17%) Microsoft Exchange
8 1 (0.17%) Oracle Coherence
Applications
1 5 (0.85%) Microsoft Excel
2 1 (0.17%) Microsoft PowerPoint
Business Applications
1 5 (0.85%) SAP S/4HANA
1 5 (0.85%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
2 3 (0.51%) Adobe Campaign
2 3 (0.51%) Salesforce CRM
3 2 (0.34%) Aladdin
3 2 (0.34%) Endur
3 2 (0.34%) Infor M3
3 2 (0.34%) Loan IQ
3 2 (0.34%) SAP MDG
3 2 (0.34%) Temenos T24
4 1 (0.17%) Dynamics CRM
4 1 (0.17%) Oracle ERP
Cloud Services
1 362 (61.88%) Azure
2 208 (35.56%) AWS
3 175 (29.91%) Power Platform
4 136 (23.25%) Azure Data Factory
5 117 (20.00%) Azure Synapse Analytics
6 93 (15.90%) GCP
7 81 (13.85%) Azure DevOps
8 77 (13.16%) Snowflake
9 60 (10.26%) Amazon S3
10 59 (10.09%) GitHub
11 54 (9.23%) Serverless
12 37 (6.32%) AWS Lambda
13 31 (5.30%) GitHub Actions
14 27 (4.62%) dbt
15 25 (4.27%) Azure Cosmos DB
16 22 (3.76%) Azure Key Vault
16 22 (3.76%) Microsoft Purview
17 21 (3.59%) Amazon EMR
18 20 (3.42%) Entra ID
19 18 (3.08%) Azure Monitor
Communications & Networking
1 9 (1.54%) Firewall
1 9 (1.54%) HTTP
2 6 (1.03%) DNS
3 5 (0.85%) WAN
4 4 (0.68%) Network Security
5 3 (0.51%) Broadband
6 2 (0.34%) DSL
6 2 (0.34%) Modbus
7 1 (0.17%) 4G
7 1 (0.17%) 5G
7 1 (0.17%) AMQP
7 1 (0.17%) Ethernet
7 1 (0.17%) IPsec
7 1 (0.17%) LoRaWAN
7 1 (0.17%) MQTT
7 1 (0.17%) OpenVPN
7 1 (0.17%) Radio Access Network
7 1 (0.17%) Reverse Proxy
7 1 (0.17%) SMS
7 1 (0.17%) X.509
Database & Business Intelligence
1 223 (38.12%) Data Warehouse
2 159 (27.18%) Power BI
3 79 (13.50%) Metadata
4 63 (10.77%) Amazon Redshift
5 54 (9.23%) Azure SQL Database
6 49 (8.38%) Delta Lake
7 42 (7.18%) Amazon Athena
8 40 (6.84%) Big Data
8 40 (6.84%) SQL Server
9 35 (5.98%) NoSQL
10 30 (5.13%) BigQuery
11 27 (4.62%) Enterprise Data Warehouse
12 26 (4.44%) Relational Database
13 24 (4.10%) PostgreSQL
13 24 (4.10%) SQL Server Integration Services
14 22 (3.76%) Tableau
15 19 (3.25%) Snowflake Schema
16 18 (3.08%) Star Schema
17 16 (2.74%) Hadoop
18 15 (2.56%) Amazon RDS
Development Applications
1 56 (9.57%) Git
2 29 (4.96%) GitLab
3 28 (4.79%) JIRA
4 20 (3.42%) Jenkins
5 8 (1.37%) ER Studio
5 8 (1.37%) ERwin
6 7 (1.20%) PowerDesigner
7 5 (0.85%) MLflow
8 4 (0.68%) JUnit
9 2 (0.34%) Bitbucket
9 2 (0.34%) SonarQube
9 2 (0.34%) Sonatype Nexus
10 1 (0.17%) Postman
10 1 (0.17%) Robot Framework
10 1 (0.17%) Terragrunt
10 1 (0.17%) TestRail
10 1 (0.17%) Visual Studio
General
1 144 (24.62%) Finance
2 135 (23.08%) Social Skills
3 72 (12.31%) Analytical Skills
4 60 (10.26%) Public Sector
5 40 (6.84%) Banking
6 22 (3.76%) Marketing
7 21 (3.59%) Retail
8 15 (2.56%) Documentation Skills
9 14 (2.39%) Manufacturing
10 12 (2.05%) Influencing Skills
11 7 (1.20%) Inclusion and Diversity
12 6 (1.03%) Financial Institution
12 6 (1.03%) Military
12 6 (1.03%) Police
13 5 (0.85%) Investment Banking
14 4 (0.68%) Publishing
15 3 (0.51%) Legal
15 3 (0.51%) Pharmaceutical
15 3 (0.51%) Telecoms
16 2 (0.34%) Automotive
Job Titles
1 197 (33.68%) Architect
2 176 (30.09%) Data Engineer
3 117 (20.00%) Data Architect
4 84 (14.36%) Senior
5 64 (10.94%) Solutions Architect
6 45 (7.69%) Analyst
6 45 (7.69%) Azure Engineer
6 45 (7.69%) Senior Data Engineer
7 44 (7.52%) Lead
8 35 (5.98%) Azure Data Engineer
9 31 (5.30%) Data Analyst
10 30 (5.13%) Developer
11 28 (4.79%) Cloud Architect
12 27 (4.62%) Business Analyst
13 26 (4.44%) Data Business Analyst
14 23 (3.93%) Azure Architect
15 21 (3.59%) AWS Engineer
16 20 (3.42%) Cloud Solutions Architect
17 15 (2.56%) AWS Architect
17 15 (2.56%) Principal Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 78 (13.33%) PySpark
2 52 (8.89%) Kafka
3 26 (4.44%) REST
4 10 (1.71%) JSON
4 10 (1.71%) Middleware
4 10 (1.71%) Spring Boot
5 9 (1.54%) Spring
5 9 (1.54%) YAML
6 8 (1.37%) Great Expectations
7 7 (1.20%) ARM Templates
7 7 (1.20%) FastAPI
7 7 (1.20%) React
8 6 (1.03%) Node.js
8 6 (1.03%) XML
9 5 (0.85%) .NET
9 5 (0.85%) HTML
9 5 (0.85%) Langfuse
9 5 (0.85%) pytest
9 5 (0.85%) PyTorch
9 5 (0.85%) scikit-learn
Miscellaneous
1 88 (15.04%) Cloud Native
2 42 (7.18%) Data Structures
3 31 (5.30%) Product Ownership
4 27 (4.62%) Distributed Systems
4 27 (4.62%) Legacy Systems
5 14 (2.39%) Data Fabric
6 13 (2.22%) IoT
7 12 (2.05%) Onboarding
8 11 (1.88%) Low-Code
8 11 (1.88%) Reference Data
9 10 (1.71%) AI Agents
10 9 (1.54%) Data Protection Act
11 8 (1.37%) Digital Media
11 8 (1.37%) Enterprise Software
11 8 (1.37%) Marketing Technology
12 7 (1.20%) Autonomous Agent
12 7 (1.20%) Management Information System
13 6 (1.03%) Fixed Income
13 6 (1.03%) Reinsurance
13 6 (1.03%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 18 (3.08%) Linux
2 13 (2.22%) Unix
3 5 (0.85%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 3 (0.51%) Ubuntu
4 3 (0.51%) Windows
5 1 (0.17%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 311 (53.16%) Analytics
2 261 (44.62%) ETL
3 251 (42.91%) Data Modelling
4 244 (41.71%) Data Pipeline
5 211 (36.07%) CI/CD
6 209 (35.73%) Data Engineering
7 206 (35.21%) Business Intelligence
8 183 (31.28%) Data Governance
9 164 (28.03%) Data Architecture
10 163 (27.86%) Agile
11 162 (27.69%) DevOps
12 148 (25.30%) Migration
13 144 (24.62%) AI
14 102 (17.44%) Data Transformation
15 95 (16.24%) Stakeholder Management
16 89 (15.21%) Validation
17 87 (14.87%) Machine Learning
18 86 (14.70%) Problem-Solving
19 85 (14.53%) Data Integration
20 78 (13.33%) Integration Patterns
Programming Languages
1 312 (53.33%) SQL
2 196 (33.50%) Python
3 39 (6.67%) Java
4 19 (3.25%) Data Analysis Expressions
5 18 (3.08%) PowerShell
6 17 (2.91%) Scala
7 15 (2.56%) C#
8 14 (2.39%) Bicep
9 13 (2.22%) Bash
10 12 (2.05%) T-SQL
11 11 (1.88%) Shell Script
12 10 (1.71%) JavaScript
13 7 (1.20%) PL/SQL
14 5 (0.85%) R
15 4 (0.68%) TypeScript
16 2 (0.34%) Cypher
16 2 (0.34%) SHACL
16 2 (0.34%) SOQL
17 1 (0.17%) Ada
17 1 (0.17%) C
Qualifications
1 138 (23.59%) Security Cleared
2 109 (18.63%) SC Cleared
3 27 (4.62%) Azure Certification
4 16 (2.74%) BPSS Clearance
4 16 (2.74%) Degree
5 14 (2.39%) DV Cleared
6 8 (1.37%) AWS Certification
7 6 (1.03%) CISM
7 6 (1.03%) CISSP
7 6 (1.03%) Computer Science Degree
7 6 (1.03%) Master's Degree
7 6 (1.03%) Microsoft Certification
8 5 (0.85%) TOGAF Certification
9 4 (0.68%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
9 4 (0.68%) CSPO
9 4 (0.68%) Microsoft Certified Professional
10 3 (0.51%) (ISC)2 CCSP
10 3 (0.51%) CCSP
10 3 (0.51%) Cisco Certification
10 3 (0.51%) ISO 27001 Lead Auditor
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 188 (32.14%) Data Quality
2 57 (9.74%) GDPR
3 29 (4.96%) QA
4 8 (1.37%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 7 (1.20%) Solvency II
6 6 (1.03%) Accessibility
6 6 (1.03%) NIST
6 6 (1.03%) PCI DSS
7 5 (0.85%) GRC
7 5 (0.85%) MiFID
7 5 (0.85%) PMO
8 4 (0.68%) IFRS
9 3 (0.51%) Actionable Recommendations
9 3 (0.51%) IFRS 17
9 3 (0.51%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 3 (0.51%) SLA
10 2 (0.34%) IFRS 9
11 1 (0.17%) Basel II
11 1 (0.17%) Cyber Essentials
11 1 (0.17%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
System Software
1 34 (5.81%) Docker
2 10 (1.71%) Active Directory
3 8 (1.37%) Virtual Machines
4 5 (0.85%) Virtual Desktop
5 2 (0.34%) HDFS
Systems Management
1 75 (12.82%) Terraform
2 40 (6.84%) Kubernetes
3 12 (2.05%) Grafana
4 8 (1.37%) Ansible
5 4 (0.68%) Prometheus
5 4 (0.68%) Single Sign-On
6 3 (0.51%) Argo
7 2 (0.34%) Puppet
8 1 (0.17%) IBM Guardium
8 1 (0.17%) Istio
8 1 (0.17%) linkerd
8 1 (0.17%) QRadar
Vendors
1 199 (34.02%) Databricks
2 132 (22.56%) Microsoft
3 36 (6.15%) Informatica
4 25 (4.27%) Google
5 22 (3.76%) Oracle
6 17 (2.91%) SAP
7 16 (2.74%) OpenAI
8 15 (2.56%) Denodo
9 11 (1.88%) Talend
10 9 (1.54%) Cloudera
10 9 (1.54%) Salesforce
11 8 (1.37%) Adobe
12 6 (1.03%) Dynatrace
12 6 (1.03%) Infor
13 5 (0.85%) IBM
13 5 (0.85%) Sparx
14 4 (0.68%) Guidewire
14 4 (0.68%) Hortonworks
14 4 (0.68%) Red Hat
15 3 (0.51%) Greenplum