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 9 December 2025, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
9 Dec 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 245 182 233
Rank change year-on-year -63 +51 +51
Contract jobs citing Data Lake 396 502 476
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 1.09% 1.41% 1.05%
As % of the Database & Business Intelligence category 6.27% 7.81% 6.23%
Number of daily rates quoted 291 402 359
10th Percentile £375 £400 £413
25th Percentile £450 £484 £475
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £575 £611 £550
Median % change year-on-year -5.89% +11.09% -4.35%
75th Percentile £663 £850 £650
90th Percentile £825 £888 £725
UK excluding London median daily rate £481 £500 £525
% change year-on-year -3.75% -4.76% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 0 2 3
10th Percentile - - £33.70
25th Percentile - - £42.63
Median hourly rate - £65.00 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year - +8.33% +71.43%
75th Percentile - - £61.25
90th Percentile - - £62.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate - - £45.25
% change year-on-year - - +29.29%

All Database and Business Intelligence 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 6,318 6,430 7,643
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 17.41% 18.01% 16.81%
Number of daily rates quoted 4,344 4,251 5,359
10th Percentile £326 £340 £350
25th Percentile £410 £425 £438
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £527 £535
Median % change year-on-year -5.12% -1.50% -2.73%
75th Percentile £600 £650 £650
90th Percentile £713 £775 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £493 £500
% change year-on-year -3.65% -1.40% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 87 86 144
10th Percentile £20.71 £18.25 £16.62
25th Percentile £29.00 £23.10 £21.57
Median hourly rate £43.50 £31.55 £46.18
Median % change year-on-year +37.90% -31.69% -7.64%
75th Percentile £67.13 £55.25 £64.65
90th Percentile £83.95 £65.50 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £49.36 £27.50 £46.18
% change year-on-year +79.49% -40.45% +2.99%

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 9 December 2025.

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 9 December 2025. 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 -84 326 £600 -7.69% 275
London -57 235 £625 -7.41% 89
Work from Home -70 151 £588 -21.67% 183
UK excluding London -44 102 £481 -3.75% 234
North of England -43 31 £500 +11.11% 51
Scotland +7 18 £418 +10.82% 13
North West -11 18 £401 -10.89% 26
South East -27 16 £438 -20.09% 79
Yorkshire -34 13 £575 +6.98% 20
Midlands -36 13 £550 +17.96% 49
East of England -7 9 £550 +10.00% 20
East Midlands -11 7 £465 +30.62% 21
Wales +2 6 £500 - 6
Northern Ireland -2 6 £313 -40.48% 3
West Midlands -36 6 £613 +28.95% 28
South West -13 5 £713 +35.71% 19

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 69 (17.42%) Apache Airflow
2 60 (15.15%) Apache
3 49 (12.37%) Apache Spark
4 5 (1.26%) SharePoint
5 4 (1.01%) Jupyter
6 3 (0.76%) WebLogic
7 2 (0.51%) Confluence
8 1 (0.25%) Apache Synapse
Applications
1 5 (1.26%) Microsoft Excel
2 4 (1.01%) Microsoft PowerPoint
2 4 (1.01%) MS Visio
3 2 (0.51%) Microsoft Project
3 2 (0.51%) Spreadsheet
4 1 (0.25%) Chatbot
4 1 (0.25%) Microsoft Office
Business Applications
1 17 (4.29%) SAP S/4HANA
2 5 (1.26%) Aladdin
3 2 (0.51%) SAP CO
3 2 (0.51%) SAP FI
3 2 (0.51%) SAP FI/CO
3 2 (0.51%) SAP MDG
4 1 (0.25%) Dynamics CRM
4 1 (0.25%) Endur
4 1 (0.25%) JDE EnterpriseOne
4 1 (0.25%) Oracle EBS
4 1 (0.25%) Salesforce CRM
4 1 (0.25%) SAP GRC
4 1 (0.25%) SAP MM
4 1 (0.25%) SAP Oil and Gas
Cloud Services
1 240 (60.61%) Azure
2 141 (35.61%) AWS
3 114 (28.79%) Azure Synapse Analytics
4 103 (26.01%) Power Platform
5 93 (23.48%) Azure Data Factory
6 82 (20.71%) Snowflake
7 53 (13.38%) GCP
8 45 (11.36%) dbt
9 41 (10.35%) Serverless
10 37 (9.34%) Amazon S3
11 36 (9.09%) Azure DevOps
11 36 (9.09%) GitHub
12 25 (6.31%) AWS CloudFormation
13 21 (5.30%) Microsoft Purview
14 20 (5.05%) AWS Lambda
14 20 (5.05%) Azure Key Vault
15 19 (4.80%) Azure Functions
16 17 (4.29%) GitHub Actions
17 16 (4.04%) Azure Machine Learning
17 16 (4.04%) Entra ID
Communications & Networking
1 8 (2.02%) Firewall
1 8 (2.02%) VPN
2 2 (0.51%) Hyperconnected
2 2 (0.51%) Kerberos
2 2 (0.51%) Network Security
3 1 (0.25%) DSL
3 1 (0.25%) InfiniBand
3 1 (0.25%) Internet
Database & Business Intelligence
1 122 (30.81%) Data Warehouse
2 99 (25.00%) Power BI
3 41 (10.35%) Amazon Athena
4 39 (9.85%) Delta Lake
4 39 (9.85%) Metadata
5 37 (9.34%) Azure SQL Database
6 33 (8.33%) Apache Iceberg
6 33 (8.33%) Big Data
7 28 (7.07%) Apache Arrow
7 28 (7.07%) Apache Ignite
7 28 (7.07%) Dremio
8 25 (6.31%) Relational Database
9 22 (5.56%) SQL Server
10 18 (4.55%) BigQuery
11 17 (4.29%) NoSQL
11 17 (4.29%) PostgreSQL
11 17 (4.29%) SQL Server Integration Services
11 17 (4.29%) Tableau
12 16 (4.04%) Data Vault
13 15 (3.79%) Amazon Redshift
Development Applications
1 29 (7.32%) Git
2 26 (6.57%) GitLab
3 9 (2.27%) MLflow
4 8 (2.02%) Jenkins
5 4 (1.01%) ER Studio
5 4 (1.01%) ERwin
5 4 (1.01%) JIRA
6 2 (0.51%) Bitbucket
6 2 (0.51%) GCC
6 2 (0.51%) Gradle
6 2 (0.51%) Maven
6 2 (0.51%) Pylint
6 2 (0.51%) SonarQube
6 2 (0.51%) Terragrunt
7 1 (0.25%) Hudson
7 1 (0.25%) Liquibase
7 1 (0.25%) Poetry
7 1 (0.25%) Spinnaker
7 1 (0.25%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
7 1 (0.25%) Visual Studio
General
1 121 (30.56%) Social Skills
2 117 (29.55%) Finance
3 49 (12.37%) Analytical Skills
4 42 (10.61%) Banking
5 34 (8.59%) Front Office
5 34 (8.59%) Public Sector
6 28 (7.07%) Investment Banking
7 16 (4.04%) Influencing Skills
7 16 (4.04%) Pharmaceutical
8 9 (2.27%) Documentation Skills
9 6 (1.52%) Legal
9 6 (1.52%) Retail
10 4 (1.01%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 4 (1.01%) Manufacturing
11 3 (0.76%) Marketing
11 3 (0.76%) Publishing
12 2 (0.51%) Back Office
12 2 (0.51%) General Ledger
12 2 (0.51%) Law
12 2 (0.51%) Police
Job Titles
1 103 (26.01%) Data Engineer
2 80 (20.20%) Senior
3 74 (18.69%) Architect
4 50 (12.63%) AWS Engineer
5 43 (10.86%) Azure Engineer
6 38 (9.60%) Software Engineer
7 35 (8.84%) Data Architect
7 35 (8.84%) Developer
7 35 (8.84%) Python Engineer
8 31 (7.83%) AWS Software Engineer
9 30 (7.58%) Java Engineer
9 30 (7.58%) Java Software Engineer
10 28 (7.07%) Lead
10 28 (7.07%) Python Software Engineer
10 28 (7.07%) Senior Software Engineer
11 27 (6.82%) Senior Java Engineer
11 27 (6.82%) Senior Java Software Engineer
12 25 (6.31%) Azure Data Engineer
13 20 (5.05%) Azure Architect
14 19 (4.80%) Analyst
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 55 (13.89%) PySpark
2 36 (9.09%) Pandas
3 33 (8.33%) Kafka
4 32 (8.08%) NumPy
5 28 (7.07%) gRPC
5 28 (7.07%) Protocol Buffers
5 28 (7.07%) SciPy
6 11 (2.78%) JSON
6 11 (2.78%) REST
7 10 (2.53%) PyTorch
7 10 (2.53%) scikit-learn
7 10 (2.53%) TensorFlow
8 7 (1.77%) Microsoft Graph
9 6 (1.52%) LangChain
9 6 (1.52%) React
9 6 (1.52%) SOAP
9 6 (1.52%) Spark Streaming
10 5 (1.26%) GraphQL
10 5 (1.26%) Great Expectations
10 5 (1.26%) LangGraph
Miscellaneous
1 30 (7.58%) Equities
2 29 (7.32%) Derivative
2 29 (7.32%) Fixed Income
3 28 (7.07%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
3 28 (7.07%) Hedge funds
3 28 (7.07%) Pricing Data
4 26 (6.57%) Cloud Native
5 13 (3.28%) Product Ownership
6 11 (2.78%) Onboarding
7 10 (2.53%) Data Structures
7 10 (2.53%) Legacy Systems
8 8 (2.02%) Algorithms
8 8 (2.02%) Data Fabric
9 7 (1.77%) Distributed Computing
9 7 (1.77%) Hybrid Cloud
9 7 (1.77%) IoT
10 6 (1.52%) Distributed Systems
10 6 (1.52%) Enterprise Software
10 6 (1.52%) NHS
10 6 (1.52%) Reinsurance
Operating Systems
1 14 (3.54%) Linux
2 11 (2.78%) Unix
3 7 (1.77%) Windows
4 2 (0.51%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 1 (0.25%) VMS
5 1 (0.25%) Windows Server
5 1 (0.25%) Windows Server 2016
5 1 (0.25%) Windows Server 2019
Processes & Methodologies
1 172 (43.43%) Analytics
2 143 (36.11%) Data Pipeline
3 139 (35.10%) ETL
4 115 (29.04%) CI/CD
4 115 (29.04%) Data Modelling
5 108 (27.27%) Business Intelligence
6 102 (25.76%) Data Governance
7 98 (24.75%) Agile
8 97 (24.49%) Data Engineering
9 91 (22.98%) DevOps
10 82 (20.71%) Data Architecture
11 66 (16.67%) Infrastructure as Code
12 64 (16.16%) Machine Learning
13 60 (15.15%) AI
14 54 (13.64%) Software Engineering
15 53 (13.38%) Data Integration
16 50 (12.63%) Data Science
17 48 (12.12%) Migration
18 44 (11.11%) Data Transformation
19 43 (10.86%) Problem-Solving
Programming Languages
1 198 (50.00%) SQL
2 185 (46.72%) Python
3 51 (12.88%) Java
4 34 (8.59%) JavaScript
5 33 (8.33%) TypeScript
6 20 (5.05%) Scala
7 13 (3.28%) T-SQL
8 12 (3.03%) Bash
8 12 (3.03%) C#
8 12 (3.03%) Data Analysis Expressions
8 12 (3.03%) R
9 11 (2.78%) Bicep
9 11 (2.78%) PowerShell
10 8 (2.02%) PL/SQL
11 3 (0.76%) Korn
12 2 (0.51%) C
12 2 (0.51%) Perl
13 1 (0.25%) ANSI SQL
13 1 (0.25%) HiveQL
13 1 (0.25%) Shell Script
Qualifications
1 38 (9.60%) Security Cleared
2 29 (7.32%) SC Cleared
3 26 (6.57%) Degree
4 15 (3.79%) Azure Certification
5 13 (3.28%) Master's Degree
6 8 (2.02%) AWS Certification
6 8 (2.02%) BPSS Clearance
6 8 (2.02%) Computer Science Degree
7 7 (1.77%) Microsoft Certification
8 3 (0.76%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
8 3 (0.76%) PMI Certification
8 3 (0.76%) PMP
9 2 (0.51%) ACCA
9 2 (0.51%) CIMA
9 2 (0.51%) DV Cleared
9 2 (0.51%) MCP
10 1 (0.25%) APMG
10 1 (0.25%) DBS Check
10 1 (0.25%) PRINCE2 Certification
10 1 (0.25%) Tableau Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 67 (16.92%) Data Quality
2 50 (12.63%) GDPR
3 15 (3.79%) HIPAA
4 14 (3.54%) QA
5 9 (2.27%) NIST
6 4 (1.01%) Accessibility
7 3 (0.76%) PCI DSS
7 3 (0.76%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 2 (0.51%) California Consumer Privacy Act
8 2 (0.51%) GRC
9 1 (0.25%) Actionable Recommendations
9 1 (0.25%) IFRS
9 1 (0.25%) Solvency II
System Software
1 29 (7.32%) Docker
2 13 (3.28%) Active Directory
3 8 (2.02%) Virtual Machines
4 5 (1.26%) zsh
5 1 (0.25%) HDFS
5 1 (0.25%) Lustre
5 1 (0.25%) NFS
Systems Management
1 62 (15.66%) Terraform
2 27 (6.82%) Kubernetes
3 8 (2.02%) Grafana
4 7 (1.77%) Ansible
5 3 (0.76%) Prometheus
6 2 (0.51%) Argo
6 2 (0.51%) Fluentd
6 2 (0.51%) Packer
7 1 (0.25%) Kibana
7 1 (0.25%) Kubeflow
7 1 (0.25%) logstash
7 1 (0.25%) Oracle ZFS
7 1 (0.25%) Progress Chef
7 1 (0.25%) Puppet
7 1 (0.25%) Salt
7 1 (0.25%) SELinux
7 1 (0.25%) Single Sign-On
Vendors
1 146 (36.87%) Databricks
2 85 (21.46%) Microsoft
3 27 (6.82%) SAP
4 18 (4.55%) Google
5 14 (3.54%) Informatica
6 13 (3.28%) Oracle
7 12 (3.03%) OpenAI
8 7 (1.77%) Cloudera
8 7 (1.77%) Talend
9 6 (1.52%) Salesforce
10 2 (0.51%) BiZZdesign
10 2 (0.51%) Charles River
10 2 (0.51%) Dataiku
10 2 (0.51%) Greenplum
10 2 (0.51%) Guidewire
10 2 (0.51%) Hyperion
10 2 (0.51%) Qualtrics
10 2 (0.51%) ServiceNow
10 2 (0.51%) SimCorp
10 2 (0.51%) Sparx