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

6 months to
10 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 245 229 162
Rank change year-on-year -16 -67 +39
Contract jobs citing Data Lake 561 387 660
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 1.07% 1.20% 1.53%
As % of the Database & Business Intelligence category 6.94% 6.56% 8.66%
Number of daily rates quoted 416 295 537
10th Percentile £401 £402 £425
25th Percentile £463 £463 £500
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £570 £650
Median % change year-on-year -3.51% -12.31% +14.04%
75th Percentile £657 £763 £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 6 0 1
10th Percentile £51.25 - -
25th Percentile £57.25 - -
Median hourly rate £64.00 - £40.50
75th Percentile £67.75 - -
90th Percentile £69.22 - -
UK excluding London median hourly rate £64.00 - £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 8,081 5,895 7,617
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 15.35% 18.22% 17.64%
Number of daily rates quoted 5,353 4,000 5,433
10th Percentile £350 £350 £350
25th Percentile £413 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £513 £525
Median % change year-on-year -2.44% -2.38% -2.33%
75th Percentile £600 £627 £650
90th Percentile £700 £750 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £475 £475
% change year-on-year - - -5.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 259 103 147
10th Percentile £15.99 £19.82 £14.00
25th Percentile £24.00 £25.38 £20.00
Median hourly rate £39.50 £35.00 £37.50
Median % change year-on-year +12.86% -6.67% -35.39%
75th Percentile £64.00 £63.75 £51.75
90th Percentile £77.10 £76.50 £71.90
UK excluding London median hourly rate £38.25 £31.64 £30.00
% change year-on-year +20.89% +5.47% -45.45%

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 10 July 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
Hourly Rate Histogram

Hourly rate distribution of jobs citing Data Lake over the 6 months to 10 July 2026.

Hourly rate histogram for Data Lake in the UK

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 10 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 -27 466 £575 -0.86% 120
London -37 295 £600 -7.69% 73
Work from Home -31 206 £555 -14.62% 50
UK excluding London -41 168 £550 +15.79% 71
Midlands -4 63 £600 +46.34% 12
North of England -61 48 £505 +6.32% 17
West Midlands -27 44 £608 +42.94% 10
North West -34 26 £500 +2.56% 11
Scotland +3 20 £425 -26.34% 4
East Midlands -1 19 £549 +35.56% 2
Yorkshire -38 19 £550 +22.09% 3
South East -71 17 £463 +1.65% 21
South West -22 13 £600 +6.67% 8
East of England -35 9 £575 -0.86% 3
North East -35 3 £463 - 3
Wales -13 1 £325 -35.00% 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 76 (13.55%) Apache Spark
2 43 (7.66%) Apache
3 40 (7.13%) Apache Airflow
4 29 (5.17%) SAS
5 22 (3.92%) Confluence
6 3 (0.53%) SharePoint
7 2 (0.36%) Apache Synapse
7 2 (0.36%) Microsoft Exchange
7 2 (0.36%) nginx
7 2 (0.36%) Palantir Foundry
8 1 (0.18%) Apache Superset
8 1 (0.18%) ArcGIS
8 1 (0.18%) Jupyter
8 1 (0.18%) Oracle Coherence
Applications
1 6 (1.07%) Microsoft Excel
2 1 (0.18%) Microsoft PowerPoint
Business Applications
1 4 (0.71%) SAP S/4HANA
2 3 (0.53%) Adobe Campaign
2 3 (0.53%) Infor M3
2 3 (0.53%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
3 2 (0.36%) Endur
3 2 (0.36%) Loan IQ
3 2 (0.36%) Salesforce CRM
3 2 (0.36%) Temenos T24
4 1 (0.18%) Aladdin
4 1 (0.18%) Dynamics CRM
4 1 (0.18%) SAP MDG
Cloud Services
1 359 (63.99%) Azure
2 196 (34.94%) AWS
3 173 (30.84%) Power Platform
4 142 (25.31%) Azure Data Factory
5 134 (23.89%) Azure Synapse Analytics
6 92 (16.40%) GCP
7 83 (14.80%) Azure DevOps
8 68 (12.12%) GitHub
9 65 (11.59%) Snowflake
10 59 (10.52%) Amazon S3
11 58 (10.34%) Serverless
12 35 (6.24%) GitHub Actions
13 33 (5.88%) AWS Lambda
14 25 (4.46%) Azure Cosmos DB
14 25 (4.46%) dbt
15 22 (3.92%) Microsoft Purview
16 21 (3.74%) AWS CloudFormation
16 21 (3.74%) Azure Key Vault
16 21 (3.74%) Azure Monitor
17 20 (3.57%) Azure Functions
Communications & Networking
1 11 (1.96%) Firewall
2 9 (1.60%) HTTP
3 6 (1.07%) DNS
4 5 (0.89%) WAN
5 4 (0.71%) Network Security
6 2 (0.36%) Broadband
6 2 (0.36%) DSL
6 2 (0.36%) Modbus
7 1 (0.18%) 4G
7 1 (0.18%) 5G
7 1 (0.18%) AMQP
7 1 (0.18%) Ethernet
7 1 (0.18%) IPsec
7 1 (0.18%) LoRaWAN
7 1 (0.18%) MQTT
7 1 (0.18%) OpenVPN
7 1 (0.18%) Radio Access Network
7 1 (0.18%) SMS
7 1 (0.18%) VPN
7 1 (0.18%) X.509
Database & Business Intelligence
1 199 (35.47%) Data Warehouse
2 154 (27.45%) Power BI
3 74 (13.19%) Metadata
4 62 (11.05%) Azure SQL Database
5 58 (10.34%) Amazon Redshift
6 50 (8.91%) Delta Lake
7 45 (8.02%) SQL Server
8 41 (7.31%) Amazon Athena
9 38 (6.77%) Big Data
10 34 (6.06%) BigQuery
11 30 (5.35%) PostgreSQL
12 27 (4.81%) NoSQL
13 25 (4.46%) Enterprise Data Warehouse
14 23 (4.10%) Relational Database
14 23 (4.10%) SQL Server Integration Services
15 21 (3.74%) Hadoop
15 21 (3.74%) Snowflake Schema
16 18 (3.21%) Star Schema
16 18 (3.21%) Tableau
17 14 (2.50%) Spark SQL
Development Applications
1 56 (9.98%) Git
2 26 (4.63%) JIRA
3 23 (4.10%) GitLab
4 18 (3.21%) Jenkins
5 6 (1.07%) ER Studio
5 6 (1.07%) ERwin
5 6 (1.07%) MLflow
6 5 (0.89%) PowerDesigner
7 4 (0.71%) JUnit
8 2 (0.36%) Bitbucket
9 1 (0.18%) Hudson
9 1 (0.18%) Postman
9 1 (0.18%) Robot Framework
9 1 (0.18%) SonarQube
9 1 (0.18%) Visual Studio
General
1 143 (25.49%) Finance
2 120 (21.39%) Social Skills
3 72 (12.83%) Analytical Skills
4 57 (10.16%) Public Sector
5 31 (5.53%) Banking
6 21 (3.74%) Marketing
7 18 (3.21%) Retail
8 14 (2.50%) Documentation Skills
9 12 (2.14%) Manufacturing
10 8 (1.43%) Influencing Skills
11 7 (1.25%) Financial Institution
12 6 (1.07%) Inclusion and Diversity
13 5 (0.89%) Military
14 4 (0.71%) Investment Banking
14 4 (0.71%) Police
14 4 (0.71%) Publishing
15 2 (0.36%) Billing
15 2 (0.36%) Front Office
15 2 (0.36%) General Ledger
15 2 (0.36%) Local Government
Job Titles
1 180 (32.09%) Data Engineer
2 172 (30.66%) Architect
3 100 (17.83%) Data Architect
4 86 (15.33%) Senior
5 56 (9.98%) Solutions Architect
6 46 (8.20%) Azure Engineer
6 46 (8.20%) Senior Data Engineer
7 45 (8.02%) Lead
8 35 (6.24%) Analyst
8 35 (6.24%) Azure Data Engineer
9 34 (6.06%) Developer
10 23 (4.10%) Cloud Architect
11 22 (3.92%) Data Analyst
11 22 (3.92%) Principal Engineer
12 21 (3.74%) AWS Engineer
12 21 (3.74%) Azure Architect
13 20 (3.57%) Cloud Solutions Architect
14 17 (3.03%) Lead Data Engineer
15 16 (2.85%) Business Analyst
16 15 (2.67%) Azure Data Architect
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 88 (15.69%) PySpark
2 54 (9.63%) Kafka
3 25 (4.46%) REST
4 13 (2.32%) Great Expectations
5 12 (2.14%) JSON
6 11 (1.96%) XML
6 11 (1.96%) YAML
7 10 (1.78%) Middleware
7 10 (1.78%) Spring Boot
8 9 (1.60%) Model Context Protocol
8 9 (1.60%) Spring
9 8 (1.43%) React
10 7 (1.25%) FastAPI
11 6 (1.07%) .NET
11 6 (1.07%) ARM Templates
11 6 (1.07%) Node.js
12 5 (0.89%) HTML
12 5 (0.89%) LangChain
12 5 (0.89%) PyTorch
12 5 (0.89%) scikit-learn
Miscellaneous
1 82 (14.62%) Cloud Native
2 31 (5.53%) Data Structures
3 26 (4.63%) Distributed Systems
4 24 (4.28%) Legacy Systems
5 23 (4.10%) Product Ownership
6 15 (2.67%) IoT
7 12 (2.14%) Data Protection Act
8 11 (1.96%) Low-Code
9 10 (1.78%) AI Agents
10 9 (1.60%) Management Information System
10 9 (1.60%) Onboarding
10 9 (1.60%) Reference Data
11 8 (1.43%) Digital Media
12 7 (1.25%) Data Fabric
13 6 (1.07%) Analytical Mindset
13 6 (1.07%) Marketing Technology
13 6 (1.07%) Self-Motivation
14 5 (0.89%) Distributed Architecture
14 5 (0.89%) Distributed Computing
14 5 (0.89%) Reinsurance
Operating Systems
1 14 (2.50%) Linux
2 10 (1.78%) Unix
3 5 (0.89%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 3 (0.53%) Ubuntu
5 2 (0.36%) Windows
6 1 (0.18%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 297 (52.94%) Analytics
2 254 (45.28%) ETL
3 241 (42.96%) Data Modelling
4 230 (41.00%) Data Pipeline
5 216 (38.50%) Data Engineering
6 201 (35.83%) CI/CD
7 196 (34.94%) Business Intelligence
8 184 (32.80%) Data Governance
9 157 (27.99%) Data Architecture
10 156 (27.81%) DevOps
11 148 (26.38%) AI
12 137 (24.42%) Agile
13 128 (22.82%) Migration
14 101 (18.00%) Machine Learning
15 93 (16.58%) Problem-Solving
16 85 (15.15%) Data Transformation
17 80 (14.26%) Validation
18 79 (14.08%) Stakeholder Management
19 77 (13.73%) Data Integration
19 77 (13.73%) Infrastructure as Code
Programming Languages
1 314 (55.97%) SQL
2 209 (37.25%) Python
3 40 (7.13%) Java
4 23 (4.10%) Scala
5 22 (3.92%) Data Analysis Expressions
6 21 (3.74%) C#
7 16 (2.85%) PowerShell
8 15 (2.67%) T-SQL
9 11 (1.96%) Bicep
10 10 (1.78%) JavaScript
11 9 (1.60%) Bash
11 9 (1.60%) Shell Script
12 8 (1.43%) PL/SQL
13 5 (0.89%) TypeScript
14 4 (0.71%) R
15 2 (0.36%) Cypher
15 2 (0.36%) SHACL
15 2 (0.36%) SOQL
16 1 (0.18%) C
Qualifications
1 130 (23.17%) Security Cleared
2 107 (19.07%) SC Cleared
3 24 (4.28%) Azure Certification
4 23 (4.10%) Degree
5 15 (2.67%) BPSS Clearance
6 10 (1.78%) Master's Degree
7 9 (1.60%) AWS Certification
7 9 (1.60%) DV Cleared
8 7 (1.25%) Computer Science Degree
8 7 (1.25%) TOGAF Certification
9 5 (0.89%) CISM
9 5 (0.89%) CISSP
9 5 (0.89%) Microsoft Certified Professional
10 4 (0.71%) Microsoft Certification
11 3 (0.53%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
11 3 (0.53%) CSPO
12 2 (0.36%) Postgraduate
12 2 (0.36%) SnowPro
13 1 (0.18%) AWS Certified SysOps Administrator
13 1 (0.18%) CGEIT
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 179 (31.91%) Data Quality
2 57 (10.16%) GDPR
3 29 (5.17%) QA
4 6 (1.07%) Accessibility
4 6 (1.07%) Solvency II
5 5 (0.89%) PCI DSS
6 4 (0.71%) IFRS
6 4 (0.71%) MiFID
7 3 (0.53%) Actionable Recommendations
7 3 (0.53%) IFRS 17
8 2 (0.36%) California Consumer Privacy Act
8 2 (0.36%) IFRS 9
8 2 (0.36%) PMO
8 2 (0.36%) SLA
9 1 (0.18%) Basel II
9 1 (0.18%) HIPAA
9 1 (0.18%) ISO/IEC 27001
9 1 (0.18%) NIST
9 1 (0.18%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 1 (0.18%) SOC 2
System Software
1 31 (5.53%) Docker
2 8 (1.43%) Virtual Machines
3 5 (0.89%) Virtual Desktop
4 4 (0.71%) Active Directory
5 2 (0.36%) HDFS
Systems Management
1 88 (15.69%) Terraform
2 38 (6.77%) Kubernetes
3 12 (2.14%) Grafana
4 7 (1.25%) Ansible
5 4 (0.71%) Single Sign-On
6 3 (0.53%) Argo
6 3 (0.53%) Prometheus
7 1 (0.18%) Hadoop YARN
7 1 (0.18%) IBM Guardium
7 1 (0.18%) Oozie
7 1 (0.18%) Puppet
Vendors
1 201 (35.83%) Databricks
2 124 (22.10%) Microsoft
3 41 (7.31%) Informatica
4 32 (5.70%) Oracle
5 30 (5.35%) Google
6 18 (3.21%) OpenAI
7 17 (3.03%) SAP
8 16 (2.85%) Talend
9 9 (1.60%) Denodo
10 8 (1.43%) Adobe
10 8 (1.43%) Salesforce
11 7 (1.25%) Infor
12 6 (1.07%) Cloudera
12 6 (1.07%) Dynatrace
13 5 (0.89%) BiZZdesign
14 4 (0.71%) CheckPoint
14 4 (0.71%) Fortinet
14 4 (0.71%) Hortonworks
15 3 (0.53%) Greenplum
15 3 (0.53%) Red Hat