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 12 August 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
12 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 233 237 152
Rank change year-on-year +4 -85 +52
Contract jobs citing Data Lake 589 364 622
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 1.10% 1.10% 1.60%
As % of the Database & Business Intelligence category 7.23% 6.09% 8.82%
Number of daily rates quoted 449 266 517
10th Percentile £408 £400 £425
25th Percentile £458 £463 £510
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £573 £700
Median % change year-on-year -3.93% -18.21% +21.74%
75th Percentile £650 £743 £850
90th Percentile £750 £825 £888
UK excluding London median daily rate £550 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +15.79% -5.00% -9.09%
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 8,149 5,974 7,056
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 15.27% 18.12% 18.12%
Number of daily rates quoted 5,434 4,031 4,977
10th Percentile £357 £343 £350
25th Percentile £419 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £510 £525
Median % change year-on-year -1.96% -2.86% -3.67%
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 252 93 102
10th Percentile £15.94 £20.88 £15.10
25th Percentile £23.00 £26.32 £20.00
Median hourly rate £39.00 £35.00 £34.47
Median % change year-on-year +11.43% +1.55% -34.35%
75th Percentile £60.94 £62.00 £56.88
90th Percentile £76.00 £78.46 £71.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £38.25 £31.85 £30.00
% change year-on-year +20.11% +6.15% -38.77%

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 12 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 12 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 -23 486 £570 -1.30% 382
London -32 299 £575 -10.85% 261
Work from Home -23 209 £535 -17.69% 166
UK excluding London -20 183 £550 +15.79% 176
Midlands +10 75 £600 +39.53% 46
West Midlands +9 60 £600 +41.18% 27
North of England -50 50 £550 +12.82% 32
North West -34 31 £500 - 19
Yorkshire -33 18 £550 +22.09% 8
Scotland +6 17 £410 -28.94% 25
South East -79 17 £459 -0.22% 45
East Midlands +1 15 £600 +46.34% 19
South West -29 14 £600 +26.32% 11
East of England -24 10 £575 -0.86% 5
Wales -9 3 £500 - 8
North East -42 1 £450 - 5

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 73 (12.39%) Apache Spark
2 48 (8.15%) Apache
3 41 (6.96%) Apache Airflow
4 36 (6.11%) SAS
5 21 (3.57%) Confluence
6 5 (0.85%) SharePoint
7 2 (0.34%) ArcGIS
7 2 (0.34%) Jupyter
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%) nginx
8 1 (0.17%) Oracle Coherence
Applications
1 5 (0.85%) Microsoft Excel
2 1 (0.17%) Microsoft PowerPoint
Business Applications
1 6 (1.02%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
2 5 (0.85%) SAP S/4HANA
3 3 (0.51%) Adobe Campaign
3 3 (0.51%) Salesforce CRM
4 2 (0.34%) Aladdin
4 2 (0.34%) Endur
4 2 (0.34%) Infor M3
4 2 (0.34%) Loan IQ
4 2 (0.34%) SAP MDG
4 2 (0.34%) Temenos T24
5 1 (0.17%) Dynamics CRM
5 1 (0.17%) Oracle ERP
Cloud Services
1 365 (61.97%) Azure
2 207 (35.14%) AWS
3 179 (30.39%) Power Platform
4 143 (24.28%) Azure Data Factory
5 114 (19.35%) Azure Synapse Analytics
6 92 (15.62%) GCP
7 84 (14.26%) Azure DevOps
8 79 (13.41%) Snowflake
9 60 (10.19%) Amazon S3
9 60 (10.19%) GitHub
10 55 (9.34%) Serverless
11 37 (6.28%) AWS Lambda
12 32 (5.43%) GitHub Actions
13 27 (4.58%) dbt
14 25 (4.24%) Azure Cosmos DB
15 23 (3.90%) Microsoft Purview
16 21 (3.57%) Azure Key Vault
16 21 (3.57%) Entra ID
17 20 (3.40%) Amazon EMR
18 19 (3.23%) Azure Monitor
Communications & Networking
1 10 (1.70%) HTTP
2 7 (1.19%) Firewall
3 6 (1.02%) DNS
4 5 (0.85%) WAN
5 4 (0.68%) Network Security
6 3 (0.51%) Broadband
7 2 (0.34%) DSL
7 2 (0.34%) Modbus
8 1 (0.17%) 4G
8 1 (0.17%) 5G
8 1 (0.17%) AMQP
8 1 (0.17%) Ethernet
8 1 (0.17%) IPsec
8 1 (0.17%) LoRaWAN
8 1 (0.17%) MQTT
8 1 (0.17%) OpenVPN
8 1 (0.17%) Radio Access Network
8 1 (0.17%) Reverse Proxy
8 1 (0.17%) SMS
8 1 (0.17%) X.509
Database & Business Intelligence
1 226 (38.37%) Data Warehouse
2 162 (27.50%) Power BI
3 82 (13.92%) Metadata
4 63 (10.70%) Amazon Redshift
5 59 (10.02%) Azure SQL Database
6 48 (8.15%) Delta Lake
7 41 (6.96%) Amazon Athena
8 39 (6.62%) Big Data
8 39 (6.62%) SQL Server
9 34 (5.77%) NoSQL
10 29 (4.92%) BigQuery
10 29 (4.92%) Enterprise Data Warehouse
11 26 (4.41%) Relational Database
12 25 (4.24%) PostgreSQL
13 24 (4.07%) SQL Server Integration Services
14 22 (3.74%) Tableau
15 19 (3.23%) Snowflake Schema
15 19 (3.23%) Star Schema
16 15 (2.55%) Amazon RDS
16 15 (2.55%) Base SAS
Development Applications
1 55 (9.34%) Git
2 30 (5.09%) GitLab
3 26 (4.41%) JIRA
4 19 (3.23%) Jenkins
5 9 (1.53%) ERwin
6 8 (1.36%) ER Studio
7 7 (1.19%) PowerDesigner
8 5 (0.85%) MLflow
9 4 (0.68%) JUnit
10 2 (0.34%) Bitbucket
10 2 (0.34%) SonarQube
10 2 (0.34%) Sonatype Nexus
10 2 (0.34%) Terragrunt
11 1 (0.17%) Postman
11 1 (0.17%) Robot Framework
11 1 (0.17%) TestRail
11 1 (0.17%) Visual Studio
General
1 143 (24.28%) Finance
2 139 (23.60%) Social Skills
3 73 (12.39%) Analytical Skills
4 62 (10.53%) Public Sector
5 40 (6.79%) Banking
6 23 (3.90%) Retail
7 22 (3.74%) Marketing
8 17 (2.89%) Manufacturing
9 15 (2.55%) Documentation Skills
10 12 (2.04%) Influencing Skills
11 8 (1.36%) Inclusion and Diversity
12 6 (1.02%) Financial Institution
12 6 (1.02%) Military
12 6 (1.02%) 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%) Front Office
Job Titles
1 196 (33.28%) Architect
2 174 (29.54%) Data Engineer
3 120 (20.37%) Data Architect
4 84 (14.26%) Senior
5 59 (10.02%) Solutions Architect
6 47 (7.98%) Analyst
7 45 (7.64%) Azure Engineer
8 44 (7.47%) Lead
8 44 (7.47%) Senior Data Engineer
9 36 (6.11%) Azure Data Engineer
10 33 (5.60%) Data Analyst
11 32 (5.43%) Developer
12 29 (4.92%) Business Analyst
13 28 (4.75%) Cloud Architect
13 28 (4.75%) Data Business Analyst
14 24 (4.07%) Azure Architect
15 20 (3.40%) AWS Engineer
16 19 (3.23%) Cloud Solutions Architect
17 16 (2.72%) AWS Architect
17 16 (2.72%) Technical Leader
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 76 (12.90%) PySpark
2 51 (8.66%) Kafka
3 26 (4.41%) REST
4 10 (1.70%) JSON
4 10 (1.70%) Middleware
4 10 (1.70%) Spring Boot
4 10 (1.70%) YAML
5 9 (1.53%) Spring
6 7 (1.19%) ARM Templates
6 7 (1.19%) Great Expectations
6 7 (1.19%) React
7 6 (1.02%) Node.js
8 5 (0.85%) .NET
8 5 (0.85%) FastAPI
8 5 (0.85%) HTML
8 5 (0.85%) Langfuse
8 5 (0.85%) pytest
8 5 (0.85%) scikit-learn
8 5 (0.85%) XML
9 4 (0.68%) Model Context Protocol
Miscellaneous
1 89 (15.11%) Cloud Native
2 41 (6.96%) Data Structures
3 32 (5.43%) Product Ownership
4 26 (4.41%) Legacy Systems
5 24 (4.07%) Distributed Systems
6 14 (2.38%) Data Fabric
7 12 (2.04%) Low-Code
7 12 (2.04%) Onboarding
8 11 (1.87%) Reference Data
9 10 (1.70%) AI Agents
9 10 (1.70%) Data Protection Act
9 10 (1.70%) IoT
10 8 (1.36%) Digital Media
10 8 (1.36%) Enterprise Software
10 8 (1.36%) Management Information System
10 8 (1.36%) Marketing Technology
11 7 (1.19%) Autonomous Agent
12 6 (1.02%) Enterprise Cloud
12 6 (1.02%) Reinsurance
12 6 (1.02%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 18 (3.06%) Linux
2 12 (2.04%) Unix
3 4 (0.68%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 3 (0.51%) Ubuntu
5 2 (0.34%) Windows
6 1 (0.17%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 310 (52.63%) Analytics
2 260 (44.14%) ETL
3 251 (42.61%) Data Modelling
4 241 (40.92%) Data Pipeline
5 212 (35.99%) Data Engineering
6 211 (35.82%) CI/CD
7 200 (33.96%) Business Intelligence
8 187 (31.75%) Data Governance
9 166 (28.18%) Agile
9 166 (28.18%) Data Architecture
9 166 (28.18%) DevOps
10 151 (25.64%) Migration
11 147 (24.96%) AI
12 105 (17.83%) Data Transformation
13 101 (17.15%) Stakeholder Management
14 89 (15.11%) Validation
15 86 (14.60%) Machine Learning
16 84 (14.26%) Data Integration
16 84 (14.26%) Problem-Solving
17 82 (13.92%) Stakeholder Engagement
Programming Languages
1 318 (53.99%) SQL
2 192 (32.60%) Python
3 39 (6.62%) Java
4 20 (3.40%) Data Analysis Expressions
4 20 (3.40%) PowerShell
5 18 (3.06%) Scala
6 15 (2.55%) Bash
7 13 (2.21%) Bicep
7 13 (2.21%) C#
8 11 (1.87%) Shell Script
8 11 (1.87%) T-SQL
9 8 (1.36%) JavaScript
10 7 (1.19%) PL/SQL
11 5 (0.85%) R
12 4 (0.68%) TypeScript
13 2 (0.34%) Cypher
13 2 (0.34%) SHACL
13 2 (0.34%) SOQL
14 1 (0.17%) Ada
14 1 (0.17%) Kusto Query Language
Qualifications
1 138 (23.43%) Security Cleared
2 107 (18.17%) SC Cleared
3 26 (4.41%) Azure Certification
4 17 (2.89%) Degree
5 16 (2.72%) BPSS Clearance
6 14 (2.38%) DV Cleared
7 7 (1.19%) AWS Certification
7 7 (1.19%) Computer Science Degree
7 7 (1.19%) Master's Degree
8 6 (1.02%) Microsoft Certification
9 4 (0.68%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
9 4 (0.68%) CISM
9 4 (0.68%) CISSP
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
11 2 (0.34%) Postgraduate
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 191 (32.43%) Data Quality
2 55 (9.34%) GDPR
3 31 (5.26%) QA
4 9 (1.53%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 7 (1.19%) NIST
5 7 (1.19%) Solvency II
6 6 (1.02%) Accessibility
6 6 (1.02%) 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 37 (6.28%) Docker
2 11 (1.87%) Active Directory
3 8 (1.36%) Virtual Machines
4 5 (0.85%) Virtual Desktop
5 2 (0.34%) HDFS
Systems Management
1 79 (13.41%) Terraform
2 41 (6.96%) Kubernetes
3 13 (2.21%) Grafana
4 8 (1.36%) Ansible
5 5 (0.85%) Prometheus
6 4 (0.68%) Puppet
6 4 (0.68%) Single Sign-On
7 3 (0.51%) Argo
8 2 (0.34%) Control-M
9 1 (0.17%) IBM Guardium
9 1 (0.17%) Istio
9 1 (0.17%) linkerd
9 1 (0.17%) QRadar
Vendors
1 208 (35.31%) Databricks
2 135 (22.92%) Microsoft
3 38 (6.45%) Informatica
4 25 (4.24%) Google
5 23 (3.90%) Oracle
6 16 (2.72%) OpenAI
6 16 (2.72%) SAP
7 15 (2.55%) Denodo
8 13 (2.21%) Talend
9 11 (1.87%) Salesforce
10 9 (1.53%) Cloudera
11 8 (1.36%) Adobe
12 6 (1.02%) Dynatrace
12 6 (1.02%) Infor
12 6 (1.02%) Sparx
13 5 (0.85%) IBM
13 5 (0.85%) MuleSoft
14 4 (0.68%) Guidewire
14 4 (0.68%) Hortonworks
15 3 (0.51%) Greenplum