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

6 months to
10 Oct 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 235 233 171
Rank change year-on-year -2 -62 +58
Contract jobs citing Data Lake 615 390 558
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 1.13% 1.18% 1.47%
As % of the Database & Business Intelligence category 7.59% 6.48% 8.20%
Number of daily rates quoted 477 283 460
10th Percentile £400 £375 £445
25th Percentile £443 £456 £513
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £575 £688
Median % change year-on-year -8.70% -16.36% +19.57%
75th Percentile £640 £725 £850
90th Percentile £725 £825 £888
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -7.83%
Number of hourly rates quoted 8 0 0
10th Percentile - - -
25th Percentile £32.87 - -
Median hourly rate £42.73 - -
75th Percentile £55.00 - -
90th Percentile £65.13 - -
UK excluding London median hourly rate £42.73 - -

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 8,105 6,015 6,801
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 14.85% 18.16% 17.93%
Number of daily rates quoted 5,393 4,022 4,585
10th Percentile £356 £340 £350
25th Percentile £419 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £503 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +0.60% -4.76% -2.78%
75th Percentile £623 £625 £650
90th Percentile £713 £738 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £475 £485
% change year-on-year - -2.06% -3.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 293 81 91
10th Percentile £16.76 £20.75 £17.50
25th Percentile £21.25 £29.00 £21.25
Median hourly rate £41.00 £38.96 £35.00
Median % change year-on-year +5.24% +11.31% -33.33%
75th Percentile £58.75 £64.50 £61.60
90th Percentile £74.68 £80.00 £71.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £41.71 £35.49 £30.00
% change year-on-year +17.53% +18.30% -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 10 October 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 October 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 October 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 -39 486 £550 -8.33% 471
London -62 273 £560 -12.50% 288
UK excluding London +15 214 £500 +5.26% 206
Work from Home -23 211 £525 -12.50% 217
Midlands +34 91 £579 +28.67% 35
West Midlands +12 63 £608 +1.25% 25
North of England -54 50 £500 +5.26% 62
North West -37 29 £500 +5.26% 29
South East -61 29 £469 +4.17% 25
East Midlands +10 28 £500 +21.95% 10
Scotland -7 24 £410 +7.01% 33
Yorkshire -22 20 £475 -13.64% 20
South West -19 14 £600 +26.32% 23
East of England -40 6 £350 -36.36% 16
Wales -12 3 £500 -16.67% 5
North East -42 1 £425 - 13

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 75 (12.20%) Apache Spark
2 56 (9.11%) Apache
3 50 (8.13%) Apache Airflow
4 36 (5.85%) SAS
5 20 (3.25%) Confluence
6 15 (2.44%) SharePoint
7 3 (0.49%) nginx
8 2 (0.33%) ArcGIS
8 2 (0.33%) Jupyter
8 2 (0.33%) Palantir Foundry
9 1 (0.16%) Apache Superset
9 1 (0.16%) JBoss
9 1 (0.16%) MQSeries
9 1 (0.16%) Oracle Coherence
Applications
1 8 (1.30%) Microsoft Excel
2 3 (0.49%) Spreadsheet
3 1 (0.16%) Microsoft PowerPoint
Business Applications
1 7 (1.14%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
2 4 (0.65%) SAP S/4HANA
3 3 (0.49%) Adobe Campaign
3 3 (0.49%) Infor M3
3 3 (0.49%) Salesforce CRM
4 2 (0.33%) Aladdin
4 2 (0.33%) Endur
4 2 (0.33%) SAP MDG
4 2 (0.33%) Temenos T24
5 1 (0.16%) Actimize
5 1 (0.16%) IBM Planning Analytics
5 1 (0.16%) Loan IQ
5 1 (0.16%) Oracle ERP
5 1 (0.16%) SAP BPC
5 1 (0.16%) SAP Oil and Gas
Cloud Services
1 388 (63.09%) Azure
2 210 (34.15%) AWS
3 185 (30.08%) Power Platform
4 150 (24.39%) Azure Data Factory
5 113 (18.37%) Azure Synapse Analytics
6 99 (16.10%) GCP
7 97 (15.77%) Snowflake
8 90 (14.63%) Azure DevOps
9 65 (10.57%) Amazon S3
10 63 (10.24%) Serverless
11 58 (9.43%) GitHub
12 55 (8.94%) Azure Databricks
13 39 (6.34%) AWS Lambda
13 39 (6.34%) Azure Cosmos DB
14 38 (6.18%) Entra ID
15 35 (5.69%) dbt
16 31 (5.04%) Amazon EMR
17 26 (4.23%) GitHub Actions
17 26 (4.23%) SaaS
18 25 (4.07%) Azure Monitor
Communications & Networking
1 16 (2.60%) Firewall
2 12 (1.95%) DNS
3 11 (1.79%) HTTP
4 5 (0.81%) WAN
5 3 (0.49%) Broadband
5 3 (0.49%) Network Security
5 3 (0.49%) Reverse Proxy
6 2 (0.33%) DSL
7 1 (0.16%) AMQP
7 1 (0.16%) IPsec
7 1 (0.16%) LoRaWAN
7 1 (0.16%) Modbus
7 1 (0.16%) MQTT
7 1 (0.16%) OpenVPN
7 1 (0.16%) Radio Access Network
7 1 (0.16%) VPN
7 1 (0.16%) X.509
Database & Business Intelligence
1 249 (40.49%) Data Warehouse
2 167 (27.15%) Power BI
3 100 (16.26%) Metadata
4 61 (9.92%) Amazon Redshift
5 57 (9.27%) Azure SQL Database
6 50 (8.13%) NoSQL
7 41 (6.67%) Amazon Athena
7 41 (6.67%) Delta Lake
8 39 (6.34%) Big Data
9 35 (5.69%) SQL Server
10 33 (5.37%) BigQuery
11 27 (4.39%) Enterprise Data Warehouse
12 26 (4.23%) PostgreSQL
13 25 (4.07%) Relational Database
13 25 (4.07%) Tableau
14 21 (3.41%) Semantic Layer
15 19 (3.09%) Hadoop
16 18 (2.93%) Amazon RDS
16 18 (2.93%) SQL Server Integration Services
17 17 (2.76%) Star Schema
Development Applications
1 62 (10.08%) Git
2 44 (7.15%) GitLab
3 26 (4.23%) JIRA
4 18 (2.93%) Jenkins
5 9 (1.46%) ERwin
6 7 (1.14%) ER Studio
7 6 (0.98%) PowerDesigner
8 4 (0.65%) JUnit
8 4 (0.65%) MLflow
8 4 (0.65%) SonarQube
8 4 (0.65%) Terragrunt
9 2 (0.33%) Sonatype Nexus
10 1 (0.16%) CircleCI
10 1 (0.16%) Postman
10 1 (0.16%) Robot Framework
10 1 (0.16%) Snyk
10 1 (0.16%) TestRail
10 1 (0.16%) Visual Studio
General
1 164 (26.67%) Social Skills
2 148 (24.07%) Finance
3 78 (12.68%) Analytical Skills
4 62 (10.08%) Public Sector
5 51 (8.29%) Banking
6 34 (5.53%) Retail
7 27 (4.39%) Marketing
8 24 (3.90%) Manufacturing
9 18 (2.93%) Influencing Skills
10 15 (2.44%) Documentation Skills
11 10 (1.63%) Inclusion and Diversity
12 9 (1.46%) Investment Banking
13 8 (1.30%) Military
13 8 (1.30%) Police
14 7 (1.14%) Legal
15 5 (0.81%) Financial Institution
15 5 (0.81%) Publishing
16 4 (0.65%) Corporate Banking
16 4 (0.65%) Front Office
16 4 (0.65%) Retail Banking
Job Titles
1 204 (33.17%) Architect
2 165 (26.83%) Data Engineer
3 137 (22.28%) Data Architect
4 94 (15.28%) Senior
5 65 (10.57%) Azure Engineer
6 57 (9.27%) Analyst
7 48 (7.80%) Senior Data Engineer
8 45 (7.32%) Solutions Architect
9 39 (6.34%) Azure Data Engineer
9 39 (6.34%) Business Analyst
10 38 (6.18%) Data Analyst
11 36 (5.85%) Lead
12 33 (5.37%) Data Business Analyst
12 33 (5.37%) Developer
13 24 (3.90%) Databricks Engineer
14 21 (3.41%) Azure Architect
15 20 (3.25%) Databricks Data Engineer
16 18 (2.93%) Technical Leader
17 17 (2.76%) AWS Engineer
17 17 (2.76%) DevOps Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 100 (16.26%) Terraform
2 76 (12.36%) PySpark
3 48 (7.80%) Kafka
4 34 (5.53%) REST
5 18 (2.93%) .NET
6 15 (2.44%) YAML
7 13 (2.11%) JSON
8 11 (1.79%) Model Context Protocol
9 10 (1.63%) ARM Templates
9 10 (1.63%) Spring Boot
10 9 (1.46%) Apache NiFi
10 9 (1.46%) LangChain
10 9 (1.46%) Spring
11 8 (1.30%) Middleware
11 8 (1.30%) OAuth
12 7 (1.14%) Microsoft Graph
12 7 (1.14%) Node.js
12 7 (1.14%) OAuth2
12 7 (1.14%) XML
13 6 (0.98%) OpenTelemetry
Miscellaneous
1 87 (14.15%) Cloud Native
2 44 (7.15%) Data Structures
3 32 (5.20%) Product Ownership
4 24 (3.90%) Onboarding
5 22 (3.58%) AI Agents
5 22 (3.58%) Distributed Systems
6 20 (3.25%) Data Fabric
7 18 (2.93%) Legacy Systems
8 14 (2.28%) Reference Data
9 13 (2.11%) Enterprise Software
9 13 (2.11%) Marketing Technology
10 11 (1.79%) Low-Code
11 10 (1.63%) Autonomous Agent
11 10 (1.63%) Data Protection Act
12 9 (1.46%) Reinsurance
13 7 (1.14%) Fixed Income
13 7 (1.14%) Hybrid Cloud
13 7 (1.14%) IoT
13 7 (1.14%) Management Information System
13 7 (1.14%) Replication
Operating Systems
1 24 (3.90%) Linux
2 13 (2.11%) Unix
3 7 (1.14%) Windows
4 5 (0.81%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 4 (0.65%) Ubuntu
6 2 (0.33%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 312 (50.73%) Analytics
2 273 (44.39%) Data Modelling
3 255 (41.46%) ETL
4 240 (39.02%) Data Pipeline
5 234 (38.05%) CI/CD
6 207 (33.66%) Data Governance
7 204 (33.17%) Data Engineering
8 201 (32.68%) Business Intelligence
9 192 (31.22%) Agile
10 180 (29.27%) DevOps
11 175 (28.46%) AI
12 167 (27.15%) Data Architecture
13 163 (26.50%) Migration
14 138 (22.44%) Stakeholder Management
15 121 (19.67%) Lakehouse
16 106 (17.24%) Data Integration
17 94 (15.28%) Stakeholder Engagement
18 92 (14.96%) Machine Learning
19 91 (14.80%) Data Transformation
20 85 (13.82%) Validation
Programming Languages
1 328 (53.33%) SQL
2 199 (32.36%) Python
3 42 (6.83%) Java
4 25 (4.07%) PowerShell
5 22 (3.58%) Bash
5 22 (3.58%) C#
6 20 (3.25%) Bicep
7 19 (3.09%) Data Analysis Expressions
8 13 (2.11%) Scala
9 9 (1.46%) JavaScript
10 8 (1.30%) Shell Script
11 6 (0.98%) PL/SQL
12 5 (0.81%) Kusto Query Language
12 5 (0.81%) T-SQL
13 4 (0.65%) R
13 4 (0.65%) TypeScript
14 2 (0.33%) Cypher
14 2 (0.33%) Go
14 2 (0.33%) Korn
14 2 (0.33%) SOQL
Qualifications
1 150 (24.39%) Security Cleared
2 112 (18.21%) SC Cleared
3 25 (4.07%) Azure Certification
4 22 (3.58%) BPSS Clearance
5 19 (3.09%) Degree
5 19 (3.09%) DV Cleared
6 16 (2.60%) AWS Certification
7 11 (1.79%) Microsoft Certified Professional
8 9 (1.46%) Computer Science Degree
8 9 (1.46%) Master's Degree
9 8 (1.30%) Microsoft Certification
10 7 (1.14%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
11 6 (0.98%) TOGAF Certification
12 4 (0.65%) CSPO
13 3 (0.49%) (ISC)2 CCSP
13 3 (0.49%) CCSP
13 3 (0.49%) CISM
13 3 (0.49%) CISSP
13 3 (0.49%) ISO 27001 Lead Auditor
13 3 (0.49%) SnowPro
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 214 (34.80%) Data Quality
2 38 (6.18%) GDPR
3 23 (3.74%) QA
4 10 (1.63%) Accessibility
5 9 (1.46%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 8 (1.30%) GRC
6 8 (1.30%) NIST
7 6 (0.98%) Solvency II
8 5 (0.81%) MiFID
8 5 (0.81%) NCSC
9 3 (0.49%) IFRS
9 3 (0.49%) IFRS 17
9 3 (0.49%) PCI DSS
9 3 (0.49%) PMO
9 3 (0.49%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 3 (0.49%) SLA
10 2 (0.33%) California Consumer Privacy Act
11 1 (0.16%) Cyber Essentials
11 1 (0.16%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
11 1 (0.16%) IFRS 9
System Software
1 40 (6.50%) Docker
2 13 (2.11%) Active Directory
3 8 (1.30%) Virtual Machines
4 5 (0.81%) HDFS
4 5 (0.81%) Virtual Desktop
Systems Management
1 47 (7.64%) Kubernetes
2 17 (2.76%) Grafana
3 13 (2.11%) Ansible
4 9 (1.46%) Prometheus
5 6 (0.98%) Puppet
6 4 (0.65%) Argo
6 4 (0.65%) Single Sign-On
7 2 (0.33%) Control-M
7 2 (0.33%) Progress Chef
8 1 (0.16%) Cilium
8 1 (0.16%) Istio
8 1 (0.16%) linkerd
8 1 (0.16%) QRadar
Vendors
1 246 (40.00%) Databricks
2 148 (24.07%) Microsoft
3 33 (5.37%) Google
4 30 (4.88%) Informatica
5 24 (3.90%) Oracle
6 22 (3.58%) OpenAI
7 17 (2.76%) Denodo
8 16 (2.60%) SAP
9 14 (2.28%) Talend
10 9 (1.46%) Salesforce
11 8 (1.30%) Adobe
11 8 (1.30%) Cloudera
11 8 (1.30%) Teradata
12 7 (1.14%) Sparx
13 6 (0.98%) Dynatrace
13 6 (0.98%) Foundry
13 6 (0.98%) Infor
13 6 (0.98%) MuleSoft
13 6 (0.98%) SnapLogic
14 5 (0.81%) IBM