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

6 months to
13 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 231 240 156
Rank change year-on-year +9 -84 +42
Contract jobs citing Data Lake 596 361 620
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 1.12% 1.10% 1.59%
As % of the Database & Business Intelligence category 7.32% 6.06% 8.82%
Number of daily rates quoted 457 264 517
10th Percentile £405 £400 £425
25th Percentile £458 £463 £510
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £569 £700
Median % change year-on-year -3.34% -18.71% +21.74%
75th Percentile £650 £739 £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 8,147 5,961 7,031
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 15.27% 18.10% 18.05%
Number of daily rates quoted 5,430 4,022 4,961
10th Percentile £358 £344 £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 92 102
10th Percentile £15.94 £20.87 £15.10
25th Percentile £23.00 £25.99 £20.00
Median hourly rate £38.38 £34.99 £34.47
Median % change year-on-year +9.67% +1.52% -34.35%
75th Percentile £61.63 £59.75 £56.88
90th Percentile £76.00 £78.58 £71.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £38.25 £31.64 £30.00
% change year-on-year +20.89% +5.47% -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 13 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 13 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 -18 490 £575 - 239
London -37 300 £575 -10.16% 159
Work from Home -12 209 £532 -18.15% 92
UK excluding London -14 187 £550 +15.79% 121
Midlands +9 75 £600 +39.53% 33
West Midlands +12 60 £600 +41.18% 15
North of England -38 52 £550 +12.82% 20
North West -31 32 £525 +5.00% 11
Yorkshire -29 19 £550 +22.09% 6
Scotland +5 18 £410 -28.94% 15
South East -74 17 £459 -0.22% 40
East Midlands -7 15 £600 +46.34% 18
South West -25 15 £600 +26.32% 3
East of England -26 10 £575 -0.86% 2
Wales -10 3 £500 - 7
North East -42 1 £450 - 3

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 (12.25%) Apache Spark
2 48 (8.05%) Apache
3 41 (6.88%) Apache Airflow
4 36 (6.04%) SAS
5 21 (3.52%) Confluence
6 5 (0.84%) 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 (0.84%) Microsoft Excel
2 1 (0.17%) Microsoft PowerPoint
Business Applications
1 6 (1.01%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
2 5 (0.84%) SAP S/4HANA
3 3 (0.50%) Adobe Campaign
3 3 (0.50%) 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 (61.24%) Azure
2 212 (35.57%) AWS
3 184 (30.87%) Power Platform
4 142 (23.83%) Azure Data Factory
5 112 (18.79%) Azure Synapse Analytics
6 96 (16.11%) GCP
7 83 (13.93%) Azure DevOps
7 83 (13.93%) Snowflake
8 61 (10.23%) Amazon S3
9 60 (10.07%) GitHub
10 56 (9.40%) Serverless
11 38 (6.38%) AWS Lambda
12 32 (5.37%) GitHub Actions
13 27 (4.53%) dbt
14 24 (4.03%) Azure Cosmos DB
15 23 (3.86%) Microsoft Purview
16 21 (3.52%) Azure Key Vault
16 21 (3.52%) Entra ID
17 20 (3.36%) Amazon EMR
18 19 (3.19%) Azure Monitor
Communications & Networking
1 10 (1.68%) HTTP
2 7 (1.17%) Firewall
3 6 (1.01%) DNS
4 5 (0.84%) WAN
5 4 (0.67%) Network Security
6 3 (0.50%) 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%) VPN
8 1 (0.17%) X.509
Database & Business Intelligence
1 234 (39.26%) Data Warehouse
2 167 (28.02%) Power BI
3 84 (14.09%) Metadata
4 67 (11.24%) Amazon Redshift
5 59 (9.90%) Azure SQL Database
6 48 (8.05%) Delta Lake
7 42 (7.05%) Amazon Athena
8 40 (6.71%) SQL Server
9 39 (6.54%) Big Data
10 35 (5.87%) NoSQL
11 31 (5.20%) BigQuery
12 29 (4.87%) Enterprise Data Warehouse
13 26 (4.36%) PostgreSQL
13 26 (4.36%) Relational Database
14 23 (3.86%) SQL Server Integration Services
15 22 (3.69%) Tableau
16 19 (3.19%) Snowflake Schema
16 19 (3.19%) Star Schema
17 16 (2.68%) Amazon RDS
18 15 (2.52%) Base SAS
Development Applications
1 54 (9.06%) Git
2 30 (5.03%) GitLab
3 26 (4.36%) JIRA
4 19 (3.19%) Jenkins
5 9 (1.51%) ERwin
6 8 (1.34%) ER Studio
7 7 (1.17%) PowerDesigner
8 5 (0.84%) MLflow
9 4 (0.67%) 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
1 144 (24.16%) Finance
2 143 (23.99%) Social Skills
3 73 (12.25%) Analytical Skills
4 62 (10.40%) Public Sector
5 40 (6.71%) Banking
6 24 (4.03%) Retail
7 22 (3.69%) Marketing
8 19 (3.19%) Manufacturing
9 15 (2.52%) Documentation Skills
10 12 (2.01%) Influencing Skills
11 8 (1.34%) Inclusion and Diversity
12 6 (1.01%) Financial Institution
12 6 (1.01%) Military
12 6 (1.01%) Police
13 5 (0.84%) Investment Banking
14 4 (0.67%) Publishing
15 3 (0.50%) Legal
15 3 (0.50%) Pharmaceutical
15 3 (0.50%) Telecoms
16 2 (0.34%) Front Office
Job Titles
1 200 (33.56%) Architect
2 175 (29.36%) Data Engineer
3 124 (20.81%) Data Architect
4 87 (14.60%) Senior
5 59 (9.90%) Solutions Architect
6 47 (7.89%) Analyst
7 46 (7.72%) Senior Data Engineer
8 44 (7.38%) Azure Engineer
9 43 (7.21%) Lead
10 35 (5.87%) Azure Data Engineer
11 33 (5.54%) Data Analyst
12 32 (5.37%) Developer
13 29 (4.87%) Business Analyst
14 28 (4.70%) Cloud Architect
14 28 (4.70%) Data Business Analyst
15 24 (4.03%) Azure Architect
16 20 (3.36%) AWS Engineer
17 19 (3.19%) Cloud Solutions Architect
18 16 (2.68%) AWS Architect
18 16 (2.68%) Senior Architect
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 75 (12.58%) PySpark
2 53 (8.89%) Kafka
3 28 (4.70%) REST
4 11 (1.85%) JSON
5 10 (1.68%) Middleware
5 10 (1.68%) Spring Boot
6 9 (1.51%) Spring
6 9 (1.51%) YAML
7 7 (1.17%) ARM Templates
7 7 (1.17%) Great Expectations
7 7 (1.17%) React
8 6 (1.01%) Node.js
9 5 (0.84%) .NET
9 5 (0.84%) FastAPI
9 5 (0.84%) HTML
9 5 (0.84%) Langfuse
9 5 (0.84%) pytest
9 5 (0.84%) scikit-learn
10 4 (0.67%) Apache NiFi
10 4 (0.67%) PyTorch
Miscellaneous
1 89 (14.93%) Cloud Native
2 41 (6.88%) Data Structures
3 32 (5.37%) Product Ownership
4 26 (4.36%) Legacy Systems
5 24 (4.03%) Distributed Systems
6 14 (2.35%) Data Fabric
7 13 (2.18%) Reference Data
8 12 (2.01%) Low-Code
8 12 (2.01%) Onboarding
9 10 (1.68%) AI Agents
9 10 (1.68%) Data Protection Act
9 10 (1.68%) IoT
10 8 (1.34%) Digital Media
10 8 (1.34%) Enterprise Software
10 8 (1.34%) Management Information System
10 8 (1.34%) Marketing Technology
11 7 (1.17%) Autonomous Agent
12 6 (1.01%) Enterprise Cloud
12 6 (1.01%) Reinsurance
12 6 (1.01%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 18 (3.02%) Linux
2 12 (2.01%) Unix
3 4 (0.67%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 3 (0.50%) Ubuntu
5 2 (0.34%) Windows
6 1 (0.17%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 312 (52.35%) Analytics
2 265 (44.46%) ETL
3 253 (42.45%) Data Modelling
4 240 (40.27%) Data Pipeline
5 213 (35.74%) CI/CD
5 213 (35.74%) Data Engineering
6 206 (34.56%) Business Intelligence
7 190 (31.88%) Data Governance
8 171 (28.69%) Data Architecture
9 169 (28.36%) Agile
10 165 (27.68%) DevOps
11 151 (25.34%) Migration
12 150 (25.17%) AI
13 106 (17.79%) Stakeholder Management
14 105 (17.62%) Data Transformation
15 89 (14.93%) Machine Learning
15 89 (14.93%) Validation
16 88 (14.77%) Data Integration
17 84 (14.09%) Problem-Solving
18 82 (13.76%) Stakeholder Engagement
Programming Languages
1 325 (54.53%) SQL
2 193 (32.38%) Python
3 39 (6.54%) Java
4 20 (3.36%) Scala
5 19 (3.19%) Data Analysis Expressions
5 19 (3.19%) PowerShell
6 15 (2.52%) Bash
7 12 (2.01%) Bicep
7 12 (2.01%) C#
8 11 (1.85%) Shell Script
9 10 (1.68%) T-SQL
10 8 (1.34%) JavaScript
10 8 (1.34%) PL/SQL
11 5 (0.84%) R
12 4 (0.67%) 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
1 139 (23.32%) Security Cleared
2 107 (17.95%) SC Cleared
3 25 (4.19%) Azure Certification
4 17 (2.85%) BPSS Clearance
4 17 (2.85%) Degree
5 14 (2.35%) DV Cleared
6 7 (1.17%) AWS Certification
6 7 (1.17%) Computer Science Degree
6 7 (1.17%) Master's Degree
7 6 (1.01%) Microsoft Certification
8 4 (0.67%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
8 4 (0.67%) CISM
8 4 (0.67%) CISSP
8 4 (0.67%) CSPO
8 4 (0.67%) Microsoft Certified Professional
9 3 (0.50%) (ISC)2 CCSP
9 3 (0.50%) CCSP
9 3 (0.50%) Cisco Certification
9 3 (0.50%) ISO 27001 Lead Auditor
10 2 (0.34%) PMP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 195 (32.72%) Data Quality
2 54 (9.06%) GDPR
3 30 (5.03%) QA
4 9 (1.51%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 7 (1.17%) NIST
5 7 (1.17%) Solvency II
6 6 (1.01%) Accessibility
6 6 (1.01%) PCI DSS
7 5 (0.84%) GRC
7 5 (0.84%) MiFID
7 5 (0.84%) PMO
8 4 (0.67%) IFRS
9 3 (0.50%) Actionable Recommendations
9 3 (0.50%) IFRS 17
9 3 (0.50%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 3 (0.50%) SLA
10 2 (0.34%) IFRS 9
11 1 (0.17%) Cyber Essentials
11 1 (0.17%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
11 1 (0.17%) NCSC
System Software
1 37 (6.21%) Docker
2 11 (1.85%) Active Directory
3 8 (1.34%) Virtual Machines
4 5 (0.84%) Virtual Desktop
5 2 (0.34%) HDFS
Systems Management
1 80 (13.42%) Terraform
2 41 (6.88%) Kubernetes
3 13 (2.18%) Grafana
4 8 (1.34%) Ansible
5 5 (0.84%) Prometheus
6 4 (0.67%) Puppet
6 4 (0.67%) Single Sign-On
7 3 (0.50%) 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
1 211 (35.40%) Databricks
2 135 (22.65%) Microsoft
3 38 (6.38%) Informatica
4 28 (4.70%) Google
5 24 (4.03%) Oracle
6 16 (2.68%) OpenAI
6 16 (2.68%) SAP
7 15 (2.52%) Denodo
8 13 (2.18%) Talend
9 11 (1.85%) Salesforce
10 9 (1.51%) Cloudera
11 8 (1.34%) Adobe
12 6 (1.01%) Dynatrace
12 6 (1.01%) Infor
12 6 (1.01%) Sparx
12 6 (1.01%) Teradata
13 5 (0.84%) IBM
13 5 (0.84%) MuleSoft
14 4 (0.67%) Guidewire
14 4 (0.67%) Hortonworks