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

6 months to
24 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 237 238 163
Rank change year-on-year +1 -75 +41
Contract jobs citing Data Lake 575 366 646
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 1.09% 1.12% 1.58%
As % of the Database & Business Intelligence category 7.08% 6.15% 8.82%
Number of daily rates quoted 424 271 527
10th Percentile £409 £400 £425
25th Percentile £463 £463 £500
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £568 £675
Median % change year-on-year -3.17% -15.85% +17.39%
75th Percentile £656 £756 £850
90th Percentile £750 £825 £888
UK excluding London median daily rate £528 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +11.05% -5.00% -6.54%
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 8,118 5,955 7,321
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 15.38% 18.22% 17.93%
Number of daily rates quoted 5,378 4,041 5,218
10th Percentile £352 £350 £350
25th Percentile £413 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £508 £525
Median % change year-on-year -1.48% -3.33% -2.33%
75th Percentile £600 £625 £650
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 92 111
10th Percentile £16.70 £19.28 £14.25
25th Percentile £25.25 £23.50 £20.38
Median hourly rate £41.71 £36.25 £37.50
Median % change year-on-year +15.06% -3.33% -31.82%
75th Percentile £63.75 £64.06 £58.73
90th Percentile £77.00 £78.58 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £39.50 £31.64 £30.00
% change year-on-year +24.84% +5.47% -42.86%

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 24 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 24 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 24 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 -23 479 £575 - 150
London -32 298 £581 -10.58% 88
Work from Home -26 210 £538 -17.31% 78
UK excluding London -22 180 £528 +11.05% 86
Midlands +3 68 £600 +39.53% 25
West Midlands -15 51 £600 +41.18% 19
North of England -42 50 £510 +7.37% 20
North West -33 28 £500 - 11
Scotland +7 21 £409 -29.12% 4
Yorkshire -35 19 £550 +22.09% 3
South East -75 19 £463 +2.78% 22
East Midlands -1 17 £525 +28.05% 6
South West -30 14 £600 +26.32% 6
East of England -23 10 £575 -0.86% 2
North East -33 3 £463 - 6
Wales -15 1 £325 -35.00% 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 82 (14.26%) Apache Spark
2 50 (8.70%) Apache
3 43 (7.48%) Apache Airflow
4 32 (5.57%) SAS
5 20 (3.48%) Confluence
6 2 (0.35%) Apache Synapse
6 2 (0.35%) ArcGIS
6 2 (0.35%) Jupyter
6 2 (0.35%) nginx
6 2 (0.35%) Palantir Foundry
6 2 (0.35%) SharePoint
7 1 (0.17%) Apache Superset
7 1 (0.17%) JBoss
7 1 (0.17%) Microsoft Exchange
7 1 (0.17%) Oracle Coherence
Applications
1 6 (1.04%) Microsoft Excel
2 1 (0.17%) Microsoft PowerPoint
Business Applications
1 6 (1.04%) SAP S/4HANA
2 4 (0.70%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
3 3 (0.52%) Adobe Campaign
3 3 (0.52%) Salesforce CRM
3 3 (0.52%) SAP MDG
4 2 (0.35%) Aladdin
4 2 (0.35%) Endur
4 2 (0.35%) Infor M3
4 2 (0.35%) Loan IQ
4 2 (0.35%) Temenos T24
5 1 (0.17%) Dynamics CRM
Cloud Services
1 364 (63.30%) Azure
2 207 (36.00%) AWS
3 174 (30.26%) Power Platform
4 139 (24.17%) Azure Data Factory
5 127 (22.09%) Azure Synapse Analytics
6 98 (17.04%) GCP
7 80 (13.91%) Azure DevOps
8 73 (12.70%) Snowflake
9 63 (10.96%) Amazon S3
10 61 (10.61%) GitHub
11 58 (10.09%) Serverless
12 38 (6.61%) AWS Lambda
13 31 (5.39%) GitHub Actions
14 29 (5.04%) Azure Cosmos DB
15 27 (4.70%) dbt
16 23 (4.00%) Microsoft Purview
17 22 (3.83%) Amazon EMR
18 20 (3.48%) AWS CloudFormation
18 20 (3.48%) Azure Key Vault
19 19 (3.30%) Azure Monitor
Communications & Networking
1 9 (1.57%) Firewall
1 9 (1.57%) HTTP
2 6 (1.04%) DNS
3 5 (0.87%) WAN
4 4 (0.70%) Network Security
5 3 (0.52%) Broadband
6 2 (0.35%) DSL
6 2 (0.35%) 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%) VPN
7 1 (0.17%) X.509
Database & Business Intelligence
1 214 (37.22%) Data Warehouse
2 156 (27.13%) Power BI
3 85 (14.78%) Metadata
4 62 (10.78%) Amazon Redshift
5 61 (10.61%) Azure SQL Database
6 47 (8.17%) SQL Server
7 46 (8.00%) Delta Lake
8 44 (7.65%) Big Data
9 42 (7.30%) Amazon Athena
10 33 (5.74%) BigQuery
11 30 (5.22%) NoSQL
11 30 (5.22%) PostgreSQL
12 26 (4.52%) Enterprise Data Warehouse
13 24 (4.17%) Relational Database
14 23 (4.00%) SQL Server Integration Services
15 22 (3.83%) Hadoop
16 20 (3.48%) Snowflake Schema
16 20 (3.48%) Tableau
17 18 (3.13%) Star Schema
18 14 (2.43%) Amazon RDS
Development Applications
1 57 (9.91%) Git
2 25 (4.35%) GitLab
3 24 (4.17%) JIRA
4 19 (3.30%) Jenkins
5 7 (1.22%) ER Studio
5 7 (1.22%) ERwin
6 6 (1.04%) PowerDesigner
7 5 (0.87%) MLflow
8 4 (0.70%) JUnit
9 2 (0.35%) Bitbucket
9 2 (0.35%) Sonatype Nexus
10 1 (0.17%) Hudson
10 1 (0.17%) Postman
10 1 (0.17%) Robot Framework
10 1 (0.17%) SonarQube
10 1 (0.17%) Visual Studio
General
1 142 (24.70%) Finance
2 128 (22.26%) Social Skills
3 71 (12.35%) Analytical Skills
4 61 (10.61%) Public Sector
5 38 (6.61%) Banking
6 24 (4.17%) Marketing
7 20 (3.48%) Retail
8 18 (3.13%) Documentation Skills
9 12 (2.09%) Manufacturing
10 10 (1.74%) Influencing Skills
11 7 (1.22%) Financial Institution
12 6 (1.04%) Inclusion and Diversity
12 6 (1.04%) Military
12 6 (1.04%) Police
13 5 (0.87%) Investment Banking
14 4 (0.70%) Publishing
15 3 (0.52%) Legal
15 3 (0.52%) Pharmaceutical
15 3 (0.52%) Telecoms
16 2 (0.35%) Front Office
Job Titles
1 187 (32.52%) Architect
2 176 (30.61%) Data Engineer
3 113 (19.65%) Data Architect
4 88 (15.30%) Senior
5 56 (9.74%) Solutions Architect
6 46 (8.00%) Senior Data Engineer
7 45 (7.83%) Azure Engineer
8 44 (7.65%) Lead
9 38 (6.61%) Analyst
10 36 (6.26%) Azure Data Engineer
11 35 (6.09%) Developer
12 28 (4.87%) Cloud Architect
13 26 (4.52%) Data Analyst
14 25 (4.35%) Azure Architect
15 21 (3.65%) AWS Engineer
16 20 (3.48%) Business Analyst
16 20 (3.48%) Cloud Solutions Architect
17 19 (3.30%) Data Business Analyst
18 18 (3.13%) Principal Engineer
19 16 (2.78%) Lead Data Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 82 (14.26%) PySpark
2 56 (9.74%) Kafka
3 25 (4.35%) REST
4 12 (2.09%) JSON
5 11 (1.91%) Great Expectations
5 11 (1.91%) YAML
6 10 (1.74%) Middleware
6 10 (1.74%) Spring Boot
6 10 (1.74%) XML
7 9 (1.57%) Model Context Protocol
7 9 (1.57%) Spring
8 8 (1.39%) React
9 7 (1.22%) FastAPI
10 6 (1.04%) .NET
10 6 (1.04%) ARM Templates
10 6 (1.04%) Node.js
11 5 (0.87%) HTML
11 5 (0.87%) Langfuse
11 5 (0.87%) PyTorch
11 5 (0.87%) scikit-learn
Miscellaneous
1 86 (14.96%) Cloud Native
2 40 (6.96%) Data Structures
3 29 (5.04%) Distributed Systems
4 27 (4.70%) Legacy Systems
5 26 (4.52%) Product Ownership
6 15 (2.61%) IoT
7 12 (2.09%) Data Fabric
7 12 (2.09%) Data Protection Act
7 12 (2.09%) Reference Data
8 11 (1.91%) Low-Code
8 11 (1.91%) Onboarding
9 10 (1.74%) AI Agents
9 10 (1.74%) Management Information System
10 8 (1.39%) Digital Media
10 8 (1.39%) Marketing Technology
11 6 (1.04%) Enterprise Cloud
11 6 (1.04%) Enterprise Software
11 6 (1.04%) Fixed Income
11 6 (1.04%) Reinsurance
11 6 (1.04%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 17 (2.96%) Linux
2 12 (2.09%) Unix
3 5 (0.87%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 3 (0.52%) Ubuntu
5 2 (0.35%) Windows
6 1 (0.17%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 304 (52.87%) Analytics
2 262 (45.57%) ETL
3 252 (43.83%) Data Modelling
4 245 (42.61%) Data Pipeline
5 221 (38.43%) Data Engineering
6 202 (35.13%) CI/CD
7 198 (34.43%) Business Intelligence
8 193 (33.57%) Data Governance
9 163 (28.35%) Data Architecture
10 155 (26.96%) DevOps
11 147 (25.57%) AI
12 144 (25.04%) Agile
13 142 (24.70%) Migration
14 96 (16.70%) Machine Learning
15 93 (16.17%) Data Transformation
15 93 (16.17%) Problem-Solving
16 86 (14.96%) Data Integration
16 86 (14.96%) Stakeholder Management
16 86 (14.96%) Validation
17 73 (12.70%) Infrastructure as Code
Programming Languages
1 320 (55.65%) SQL
2 204 (35.48%) Python
3 41 (7.13%) Java
4 21 (3.65%) Data Analysis Expressions
5 20 (3.48%) Scala
6 19 (3.30%) C#
7 17 (2.96%) PowerShell
8 14 (2.43%) Bicep
8 14 (2.43%) T-SQL
9 11 (1.91%) Shell Script
10 10 (1.74%) Bash
10 10 (1.74%) JavaScript
11 8 (1.39%) PL/SQL
12 5 (0.87%) R
12 5 (0.87%) TypeScript
13 2 (0.35%) Cypher
13 2 (0.35%) SHACL
13 2 (0.35%) SOQL
14 1 (0.17%) Ada
14 1 (0.17%) C
Qualifications
1 136 (23.65%) Security Cleared
2 110 (19.13%) SC Cleared
3 26 (4.52%) Azure Certification
4 22 (3.83%) Degree
5 14 (2.43%) BPSS Clearance
6 12 (2.09%) DV Cleared
6 12 (2.09%) Master's Degree
7 8 (1.39%) AWS Certification
8 6 (1.04%) CISM
8 6 (1.04%) CISSP
8 6 (1.04%) Computer Science Degree
8 6 (1.04%) Microsoft Certification
9 5 (0.87%) Microsoft Certified Professional
9 5 (0.87%) TOGAF Certification
10 4 (0.70%) CSPO
11 3 (0.52%) (ISC)2 CCSP
11 3 (0.52%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
11 3 (0.52%) CCSP
11 3 (0.52%) Cisco Certification
11 3 (0.52%) ISO 27001 Lead Auditor
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 191 (33.22%) Data Quality
2 59 (10.26%) GDPR
3 29 (5.04%) QA
4 7 (1.22%) Accessibility
5 6 (1.04%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 6 (1.04%) NIST
5 6 (1.04%) PCI DSS
5 6 (1.04%) Solvency II
6 5 (0.87%) GRC
6 5 (0.87%) MiFID
7 4 (0.70%) IFRS
8 3 (0.52%) Actionable Recommendations
8 3 (0.52%) IFRS 17
8 3 (0.52%) PMO
8 3 (0.52%) SLA
9 2 (0.35%) California Consumer Privacy Act
9 2 (0.35%) IFRS 9
10 1 (0.17%) Cyber Essentials
10 1 (0.17%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
10 1 (0.17%) NCSC
System Software
1 31 (5.39%) Docker
2 9 (1.57%) Active Directory
3 8 (1.39%) Virtual Machines
4 5 (0.87%) Virtual Desktop
5 3 (0.52%) HDFS
Systems Management
1 82 (14.26%) Terraform
2 41 (7.13%) Kubernetes
3 12 (2.09%) Grafana
4 8 (1.39%) Ansible
5 4 (0.70%) Prometheus
5 4 (0.70%) Single Sign-On
6 3 (0.52%) Argo
7 2 (0.35%) Puppet
8 1 (0.17%) Hadoop YARN
8 1 (0.17%) IBM Guardium
8 1 (0.17%) Oozie
8 1 (0.17%) QRadar
Vendors
1 197 (34.26%) Databricks
2 131 (22.78%) Microsoft
3 44 (7.65%) Informatica
4 32 (5.57%) Oracle
5 29 (5.04%) Google
6 19 (3.30%) SAP
7 18 (3.13%) OpenAI
8 17 (2.96%) Talend
9 12 (2.09%) Denodo
10 10 (1.74%) Salesforce
11 9 (1.57%) Cloudera
12 8 (1.39%) Adobe
13 6 (1.04%) Dynatrace
13 6 (1.04%) Infor
14 5 (0.87%) IBM
15 4 (0.70%) Hortonworks
15 4 (0.70%) Red Hat
15 4 (0.70%) Sparx
15 4 (0.70%) Splunk
16 3 (0.52%) BiZZdesign