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

6 months to
1 May 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 231 184 202
Rank change year-on-year -47 +18 +8
Contract jobs citing Data Lake 521 431 500
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 1.10% 1.47% 1.15%
As % of the Database & Business Intelligence category 7.16% 7.77% 6.83%
Number of daily rates quoted 376 352 364
10th Percentile £400 £400 £406
25th Percentile £450 £475 £475
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £540 £600 £553
Median % change year-on-year -10.00% +8.50% -3.41%
75th Percentile £650 £791 £763
90th Percentile £750 £938 £888
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £490
% change year-on-year +5.26% -3.06% -6.67%
Number of hourly rates quoted 6 2 3
10th Percentile £51.25 - £30.30
25th Percentile £57.25 - £34.13
Median hourly rate £64.00 £65.00 £40.50
Median % change year-on-year -1.54% +60.49% +15.71%
75th Percentile £67.75 - £51.00
90th Percentile £69.22 - £57.30
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 7,273 5,550 7,317
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 15.39% 18.97% 16.80%
Number of daily rates quoted 4,956 3,833 5,210
10th Percentile £350 £356 £350
25th Percentile £413 £420 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -2.78%
75th Percentile £600 £640 £650
90th Percentile £700 £763 £763
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £489 £480
% change year-on-year -2.86% +1.88% -4.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 198 104 143
10th Percentile £16.72 £19.97 £14.00
25th Percentile £28.56 £24.06 £20.98
Median hourly rate £50.00 £32.96 £40.00
Median % change year-on-year +51.70% -17.60% -33.33%
75th Percentile £74.00 £65.15 £58.62
90th Percentile £82.25 £75.13 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £48.72 £30.00 £40.00
% change year-on-year +62.40% -25.00% -31.09%

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 1 May 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 1 May 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 1 May 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 -76 424 £550 -12.00% 101
London -32 299 £600 -11.11% 52
Work from Home -73 170 £525 -22.22% 56
UK excluding London -59 126 £500 +5.26% 61
Midlands -53 39 £475 +8.57% 13
North of England -58 37 £500 +8.11% 16
West Midlands -53 23 £513 +17.14% 8
Scotland +8 21 £475 -17.68% 4
South East -66 18 £442 -11.60% 16
East Midlands -16 16 £463 - 5
North West -43 16 £513 +3.04% 10
Yorkshire -42 14 £550 +25.71% 5
North East -19 7 £463 +29.19% 1
East of England -28 7 £575 -0.86% 5
South West -30 4 £500 -11.11% 6
Northern Ireland - 1 £430 -

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 88 (16.89%) Apache Spark
2 49 (9.40%) Apache
3 39 (7.49%) Apache Airflow
4 12 (2.30%) Confluence
4 12 (2.30%) SAS
5 4 (0.77%) SharePoint
6 3 (0.58%) Apache Synapse
7 2 (0.38%) Microsoft Exchange
7 2 (0.38%) nginx
8 1 (0.19%) Jupyter
Applications
1 4 (0.77%) Microsoft Excel
2 2 (0.38%) Microsoft PowerPoint
2 2 (0.38%) MS Visio
3 1 (0.19%) Chatbot
3 1 (0.19%) Spreadsheet
Business Applications
1 9 (1.73%) SAP S/4HANA
2 2 (0.38%) Infor M3
3 1 (0.19%) Dynamics CRM
3 1 (0.19%) Loan IQ
3 1 (0.19%) SAP MDG
Cloud Services
1 371 (71.21%) Azure
2 198 (38.00%) Power Platform
3 174 (33.40%) AWS
4 171 (32.82%) Azure Synapse Analytics
5 167 (32.05%) Azure Data Factory
6 89 (17.08%) Azure DevOps
7 83 (15.93%) GitHub
8 74 (14.20%) GCP
9 64 (12.28%) Serverless
10 57 (10.94%) Amazon S3
11 41 (7.87%) Snowflake
12 39 (7.49%) GitHub Actions
12 39 (7.49%) Microsoft Purview
13 37 (7.10%) AWS CloudFormation
14 32 (6.14%) Azure Functions
15 27 (5.18%) Azure Key Vault
16 26 (4.99%) AWS Lambda
16 26 (4.99%) Azure Cosmos DB
17 24 (4.61%) Collibra
18 20 (3.84%) Amazon EMR
Communications & Networking
1 9 (1.73%) HTTP
2 8 (1.54%) Firewall
3 3 (0.58%) Kerberos
3 3 (0.58%) Network Security
3 3 (0.58%) VPN
4 2 (0.38%) Hyperconnected
5 1 (0.19%) 4G
5 1 (0.19%) 5G
5 1 (0.19%) Ethernet
5 1 (0.19%) InfiniBand
5 1 (0.19%) Modbus
5 1 (0.19%) SMS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 171 (32.82%) Power BI
2 161 (30.90%) Data Warehouse
3 74 (14.20%) Metadata
4 69 (13.24%) SQL Server
5 67 (12.86%) Delta Lake
6 66 (12.67%) Azure SQL Database
7 44 (8.45%) Amazon Redshift
8 39 (7.49%) Amazon Athena
9 35 (6.72%) Big Data
10 31 (5.95%) SQL Server Integration Services
11 27 (5.18%) PostgreSQL
12 25 (4.80%) NoSQL
12 25 (4.80%) Spark SQL
13 23 (4.41%) BigQuery
13 23 (4.41%) Hadoop
14 20 (3.84%) Mixpanel
14 20 (3.84%) Relational Database
15 18 (3.45%) OLAP
15 18 (3.45%) Snowflake Schema
16 16 (3.07%) Star Schema
Development Applications
1 59 (11.32%) Git
2 31 (5.95%) GitLab
3 15 (2.88%) JIRA
4 13 (2.50%) Jenkins
5 10 (1.92%) MLflow
6 3 (0.58%) ER Studio
6 3 (0.58%) ERwin
6 3 (0.58%) JMeter
7 2 (0.38%) Bitbucket
8 1 (0.19%) Hudson
8 1 (0.19%) PowerDesigner
8 1 (0.19%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
General
1 128 (24.57%) Finance
2 113 (21.69%) Social Skills
3 58 (11.13%) Analytical Skills
4 44 (8.45%) Public Sector
5 15 (2.88%) Banking
6 13 (2.50%) Documentation Skills
7 10 (1.92%) Influencing Skills
8 8 (1.54%) Retail
9 6 (1.15%) Manufacturing
9 6 (1.15%) Marketing
9 6 (1.15%) Pharmaceutical
10 4 (0.77%) Military
11 3 (0.58%) Inclusion and Diversity
12 2 (0.38%) Back Office
12 2 (0.38%) Billing
12 2 (0.38%) Financial Institution
12 2 (0.38%) Front Office
12 2 (0.38%) Legal
12 2 (0.38%) Presentation Skills
12 2 (0.38%) Publishing
Job Titles
1 185 (35.51%) Data Engineer
2 133 (25.53%) Architect
3 81 (15.55%) Data Architect
4 76 (14.59%) Senior
5 47 (9.02%) Senior Data Engineer
6 43 (8.25%) Azure Engineer
7 42 (8.06%) Lead
8 40 (7.68%) Solutions Architect
9 37 (7.10%) Developer
10 29 (5.57%) Azure Data Engineer
10 29 (5.57%) Principal Engineer
11 22 (4.22%) AWS Engineer
11 22 (4.22%) Cloud Architect
11 22 (4.22%) Software Engineer
12 21 (4.03%) Cloud Solutions Architect
13 19 (3.65%) Principal Software Engineer
14 18 (3.45%) Analyst
14 18 (3.45%) Azure Architect
15 17 (3.26%) Principal Data Engineer
16 16 (3.07%) AWS Data Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 106 (20.35%) PySpark
2 57 (10.94%) Kafka
3 29 (5.57%) REST
4 18 (3.45%) Great Expectations
5 15 (2.88%) JSON
5 15 (2.88%) Model Context Protocol
6 13 (2.50%) LangChain
7 12 (2.30%) LangGraph
7 12 (2.30%) Microsoft Graph
8 11 (2.11%) Spark Streaming
8 11 (2.11%) XML
9 10 (1.92%) Pandas
9 10 (1.92%) YAML
10 9 (1.73%) A2A Protocol
11 8 (1.54%) PyTorch
11 8 (1.54%) scikit-learn
12 7 (1.34%) TensorFlow
13 5 (0.96%) FastAPI
13 5 (0.96%) Middleware
13 5 (0.96%) Node.js
Miscellaneous
1 75 (14.40%) Cloud Native
2 23 (4.41%) Data Structures
3 19 (3.65%) Legacy Systems
4 18 (3.45%) Distributed Systems
5 15 (2.88%) Distributed Computing
5 15 (2.88%) IoT
5 15 (2.88%) Product Ownership
6 11 (2.11%) Low-Code
7 10 (1.92%) Data Protection Act
7 10 (1.92%) Management Information System
8 9 (1.73%) Data Fabric
9 8 (1.54%) Analytical Mindset
9 8 (1.54%) Digital Media
10 6 (1.15%) Algorithms
11 5 (0.96%) AI Agents
11 5 (0.96%) Replication
11 5 (0.96%) Self-Motivation
12 4 (0.77%) Onboarding
12 4 (0.77%) Security Posture
13 3 (0.58%) Autonomous Agent
Operating Systems
1 14 (2.69%) Linux
2 10 (1.92%) Unix
3 4 (0.77%) Windows
4 2 (0.38%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 290 (55.66%) Analytics
2 266 (51.06%) ETL
3 239 (45.87%) Data Modelling
4 224 (42.99%) Data Pipeline
5 210 (40.31%) CI/CD
6 204 (39.16%) Data Engineering
7 194 (37.24%) Business Intelligence
8 172 (33.01%) DevOps
9 170 (32.63%) Data Governance
10 136 (26.10%) Data Architecture
11 132 (25.34%) AI
12 107 (20.54%) Agile
13 102 (19.58%) Migration
14 94 (18.04%) Machine Learning
15 82 (15.74%) Infrastructure as Code
16 79 (15.16%) Problem-Solving
17 67 (12.86%) Data Integration
17 67 (12.86%) Data Transformation
18 60 (11.52%) Data Science
19 54 (10.36%) Validation
Programming Languages
1 307 (58.93%) SQL
2 243 (46.64%) Python
3 37 (7.10%) Java
4 29 (5.57%) C#
5 22 (4.22%) Scala
5 22 (4.22%) T-SQL
6 19 (3.65%) Data Analysis Expressions
7 18 (3.45%) Bicep
7 18 (3.45%) PowerShell
8 8 (1.54%) Bash
9 6 (1.15%) JavaScript
9 6 (1.15%) PL/SQL
9 6 (1.15%) R
10 5 (0.96%) Shell Script
11 2 (0.38%) Ada
11 2 (0.38%) C++
12 1 (0.19%) ANSI SQL
12 1 (0.19%) C
12 1 (0.19%) Perl
12 1 (0.19%) TypeScript
Qualifications
1 105 (20.15%) Security Cleared
2 81 (15.55%) SC Cleared
3 25 (4.80%) Degree
4 24 (4.61%) Azure Certification
5 15 (2.88%) Microsoft Certification
6 12 (2.30%) Master's Degree
7 10 (1.92%) AWS Certification
7 10 (1.92%) BPSS Clearance
8 9 (1.73%) Microsoft Certified Professional
9 7 (1.34%) TOGAF Certification
10 5 (0.96%) CISM
10 5 (0.96%) CISSP
11 4 (0.77%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
11 4 (0.77%) DV Cleared
12 3 (0.58%) Computer Science Degree
12 3 (0.58%) ISTQB
12 3 (0.58%) ISTQB Advanced Certification
13 2 (0.38%) PMP
13 2 (0.38%) Postgraduate
13 2 (0.38%) SAP Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 163 (31.29%) Data Quality
2 65 (12.48%) GDPR
3 30 (5.76%) QA
4 7 (1.34%) PCI DSS
4 7 (1.34%) Sarbanes-Oxley
5 6 (1.15%) Accessibility
6 4 (0.77%) NIST
7 3 (0.58%) Actionable Recommendations
7 3 (0.58%) California Consumer Privacy Act
7 3 (0.58%) HIPAA
8 2 (0.38%) PMO
9 1 (0.19%) Basel II
9 1 (0.19%) GRC
9 1 (0.19%) IFRS
9 1 (0.19%) IFRS 9
9 1 (0.19%) ISO/IEC 27001
9 1 (0.19%) MiFID
9 1 (0.19%) SOC 2
9 1 (0.19%) Solvency II
System Software
1 35 (6.72%) Docker
2 5 (0.96%) HDFS
3 2 (0.38%) Active Directory
4 1 (0.19%) Lustre
4 1 (0.19%) NFS
4 1 (0.19%) Virtual Machines
Systems Management
1 101 (19.39%) Terraform
2 34 (6.53%) Kubernetes
3 10 (1.92%) Grafana
4 5 (0.96%) Ansible
5 3 (0.58%) Prometheus
6 2 (0.38%) Single Sign-On
7 1 (0.19%) Hadoop YARN
7 1 (0.19%) IBM Guardium
7 1 (0.19%) Oozie
7 1 (0.19%) Oracle ZFS
7 1 (0.19%) Progress Chef
7 1 (0.19%) Puppet
7 1 (0.19%) Salt
7 1 (0.19%) SELinux
Vendors
1 219 (42.03%) Databricks
2 158 (30.33%) Microsoft
3 41 (7.87%) Informatica
4 27 (5.18%) Oracle
5 26 (4.99%) Google
6 20 (3.84%) SAP
7 19 (3.65%) OpenAI
8 14 (2.69%) Talend
9 9 (1.73%) Denodo
10 8 (1.54%) Cloudera
11 6 (1.15%) Dynatrace
11 6 (1.15%) Salesforce
12 5 (0.96%) Infor
12 5 (0.96%) ServiceNow
13 4 (0.77%) BiZZdesign
13 4 (0.77%) CheckPoint
13 4 (0.77%) Fortinet
13 4 (0.77%) Greenplum
13 4 (0.77%) Hortonworks
14 3 (0.58%) Red Hat