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

6 months to
17 Mar 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 242 186 218
Rank change year-on-year -56 +32 +19
Contract jobs citing Data Lake 477 439 464
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 1.10% 1.50% 1.04%
As % of the Database & Business Intelligence category 6.89% 7.86% 6.35%
Number of daily rates quoted 339 349 328
10th Percentile £400 £389 £375
25th Percentile £449 £465 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £540 £580 £525
Median % change year-on-year -6.90% +10.48% -8.70%
75th Percentile £638 £763 £638
90th Percentile £728 £938 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £450 £473 £506
% change year-on-year -4.76% -6.67% -7.95%
Number of hourly rates quoted 4 2 4
10th Percentile - - £31.58
25th Percentile £64.00 - £37.31
Median hourly rate £66.50 £65.00 £50.25
Median % change year-on-year +2.31% +29.35% +43.57%
75th Percentile £69.11 - £60.38
90th Percentile £69.31 - £61.05
UK excluding London median hourly rate £66.50 - £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 6,926 5,584 7,304
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 16.04% 19.02% 16.42%
Number of daily rates quoted 4,755 3,853 5,170
10th Percentile £349 £350 £340
25th Percentile £413 £420 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £600 £650 £650
90th Percentile £700 £763 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £494 £488
% change year-on-year -3.85% +1.33% -2.50%
Number of hourly rates quoted 145 96 172
10th Percentile £18.25 £19.59 £14.36
25th Percentile £28.50 £24.06 £20.77
Median hourly rate £50.00 £30.00 £40.25
Median % change year-on-year +66.67% -25.47% -32.92%
75th Percentile £75.00 £64.56 £58.81
90th Percentile £85.00 £70.00 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £50.00 £27.50 £40.00
% change year-on-year +81.82% -31.25% -29.08%

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 17 March 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 17 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 17 March 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 -87 382 £550 -8.33% 146
London -38 281 £601 -10.93% 70
Work from Home -78 150 £550 -18.52% 69
UK excluding London -79 112 £450 -4.76% 99
North of England -61 35 £475 +5.56% 25
Scotland +22 26 £447 +3.71% 1
Midlands -52 22 £450 +2.86% 10
South East -54 19 £425 -13.44% 26
North West -34 17 £425 -9.33% 15
Yorkshire -45 12 £525 +16.67% 8
East Midlands -23 11 £444 +24.65% 3
West Midlands -69 11 £513 +17.14% 7
North East -12 6 £475 +32.68% 2
East of England -30 4 - - 14
South West -24 3 £900 +38.46% 21
Wales -10 2 £410 -25.45% 4
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 83 (17.40%) Apache Spark
2 55 (11.53%) Apache
3 49 (10.27%) Apache Airflow
4 7 (1.47%) Confluence
5 5 (1.05%) SharePoint
6 3 (0.63%) WebLogic
7 2 (0.42%) Apache Synapse
7 2 (0.42%) Microsoft Exchange
7 2 (0.42%) nginx
7 2 (0.42%) SAS
Applications
1 4 (0.84%) Microsoft Excel
2 3 (0.63%) MS Visio
3 2 (0.42%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 1 (0.21%) Chatbot
4 1 (0.21%) Microsoft Office
4 1 (0.21%) Microsoft Project
4 1 (0.21%) Spreadsheet
Business Applications
1 11 (2.31%) SAP S/4HANA
2 2 (0.42%) SAP MDG
3 1 (0.21%) Infor M3
3 1 (0.21%) Loan IQ
Cloud Services
1 339 (71.07%) Azure
2 167 (35.01%) Azure Synapse Analytics
3 164 (34.38%) AWS
4 159 (33.33%) Power Platform
5 151 (31.66%) Azure Data Factory
6 86 (18.03%) Azure DevOps
7 83 (17.40%) GitHub
8 67 (14.05%) GCP
9 66 (13.84%) Serverless
10 57 (11.95%) Amazon S3
11 44 (9.22%) Snowflake
12 42 (8.81%) AWS CloudFormation
13 40 (8.39%) GitHub Actions
14 35 (7.34%) Microsoft Purview
15 33 (6.92%) Azure Functions
16 29 (6.08%) Azure Key Vault
17 26 (5.45%) Azure Cosmos DB
18 25 (5.24%) AWS Lambda
19 24 (5.03%) Collibra
20 19 (3.98%) Amazon SQS
Communications & Networking
1 10 (2.10%) Firewall
2 4 (0.84%) VPN
3 3 (0.63%) Kerberos
3 3 (0.63%) Network Security
4 2 (0.42%) Hyperconnected
5 1 (0.21%) 4G
5 1 (0.21%) 5G
5 1 (0.21%) DSL
5 1 (0.21%) Ethernet
5 1 (0.21%) InfiniBand
5 1 (0.21%) Modbus
Database & Business Intelligence
1 144 (30.19%) Power BI
2 135 (28.30%) Data Warehouse
3 69 (14.47%) Metadata
4 64 (13.42%) Delta Lake
5 61 (12.79%) Azure SQL Database
5 61 (12.79%) SQL Server
6 37 (7.76%) Amazon Athena
7 33 (6.92%) Big Data
8 31 (6.50%) Amazon Redshift
8 31 (6.50%) SQL Server Integration Services
9 28 (5.87%) PostgreSQL
10 24 (5.03%) Hadoop
10 24 (5.03%) NoSQL
11 22 (4.61%) Mixpanel
11 22 (4.61%) Relational Database
12 21 (4.40%) BigQuery
13 20 (4.19%) Spark SQL
14 19 (3.98%) OLAP
15 17 (3.56%) OLTP
15 17 (3.56%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 48 (10.06%) Git
2 32 (6.71%) GitLab
3 12 (2.52%) Jenkins
3 12 (2.52%) MLflow
4 10 (2.10%) JIRA
5 4 (0.84%) ER Studio
5 4 (0.84%) ERwin
6 3 (0.63%) JMeter
7 2 (0.42%) Bitbucket
8 1 (0.21%) Hudson
8 1 (0.21%) Liquibase
8 1 (0.21%) PowerDesigner
8 1 (0.21%) Pylint
8 1 (0.21%) SonarQube
8 1 (0.21%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
8 1 (0.21%) Terragrunt
8 1 (0.21%) Visual Studio
General
1 122 (25.58%) Social Skills
2 118 (24.74%) Finance
3 61 (12.79%) Analytical Skills
4 52 (10.90%) Public Sector
5 16 (3.35%) Banking
6 15 (3.14%) Documentation Skills
6 15 (3.14%) Influencing Skills
7 9 (1.89%) Pharmaceutical
8 7 (1.47%) Retail
9 5 (1.05%) Marketing
10 4 (0.84%) Front Office
10 4 (0.84%) Manufacturing
10 4 (0.84%) Military
11 3 (0.63%) Inclusion and Diversity
12 2 (0.42%) Back Office
12 2 (0.42%) Billing
12 2 (0.42%) Investment Banking
12 2 (0.42%) Legal
12 2 (0.42%) Local Government
12 2 (0.42%) Telecoms
Job Titles
1 169 (35.43%) Data Engineer
2 101 (21.17%) Architect
3 65 (13.63%) Senior
4 62 (13.00%) Data Architect
5 48 (10.06%) Azure Engineer
6 47 (9.85%) Lead
7 33 (6.92%) Senior Data Engineer
8 32 (6.71%) Developer
9 31 (6.50%) AWS Engineer
10 30 (6.29%) Principal Engineer
11 27 (5.66%) Azure Data Engineer
12 26 (5.45%) Solutions Architect
13 25 (5.24%) Software Engineer
14 20 (4.19%) Principal Software Engineer
15 19 (3.98%) DevOps Engineer
15 19 (3.98%) Lead Data Engineer
15 19 (3.98%) Principal Data Engineer
16 17 (3.56%) Platform Engineer
17 16 (3.35%) Data Analytics Engineer
18 15 (3.14%) Azure Architect
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 104 (21.80%) PySpark
2 59 (12.37%) Kafka
3 23 (4.82%) REST
4 19 (3.98%) Great Expectations
5 17 (3.56%) JSON
6 14 (2.94%) Pandas
7 13 (2.73%) Model Context Protocol
8 12 (2.52%) Microsoft Graph
9 11 (2.31%) LangChain
9 11 (2.31%) PyTorch
9 11 (2.31%) scikit-learn
9 11 (2.31%) Spark Streaming
9 11 (2.31%) XML
10 10 (2.10%) LangGraph
10 10 (2.10%) YAML
11 8 (1.68%) TensorFlow
12 7 (1.47%) A2A Protocol
12 7 (1.47%) FastAPI
12 7 (1.47%) NumPy
13 5 (1.05%) React
Miscellaneous
1 55 (11.53%) Cloud Native
2 18 (3.77%) Data Structures
3 17 (3.56%) Distributed Computing
3 17 (3.56%) IoT
4 15 (3.14%) Legacy Systems
5 12 (2.52%) Distributed Systems
6 11 (2.31%) Management Information System
6 11 (2.31%) Product Ownership
7 10 (2.10%) Data Fabric
8 9 (1.89%) Onboarding
9 7 (1.47%) Algorithms
9 7 (1.47%) Data Protection Act
10 6 (1.26%) Analytical Mindset
10 6 (1.26%) NHS
11 5 (1.05%) AI Agents
11 5 (1.05%) Digital Media
11 5 (1.05%) Replication
12 4 (0.84%) Self-Motivation
13 3 (0.63%) Security Operations Centre
13 3 (0.63%) Taxonomies
Operating Systems
1 17 (3.56%) Linux
2 11 (2.31%) Unix
3 6 (1.26%) Windows
4 2 (0.42%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 1 (0.21%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 266 (55.77%) Analytics
2 235 (49.27%) ETL
3 205 (42.98%) Data Pipeline
4 197 (41.30%) Data Modelling
5 190 (39.83%) CI/CD
6 177 (37.11%) Data Engineering
7 169 (35.43%) DevOps
8 166 (34.80%) Business Intelligence
9 161 (33.75%) Data Governance
10 122 (25.58%) Data Architecture
11 117 (24.53%) AI
12 95 (19.92%) Agile
13 92 (19.29%) Machine Learning
14 90 (18.87%) Infrastructure as Code
15 76 (15.93%) Problem-Solving
16 67 (14.05%) Migration
17 66 (13.84%) Data Science
18 62 (13.00%) Data Integration
19 49 (10.27%) Data Ingestion
20 48 (10.06%) Data Transformation
Programming Languages
1 285 (59.75%) SQL
2 239 (50.10%) Python
3 34 (7.13%) Java
4 32 (6.71%) C#
5 24 (5.03%) Scala
6 20 (4.19%) PowerShell
6 20 (4.19%) T-SQL
7 17 (3.56%) Bicep
8 16 (3.35%) Data Analysis Expressions
9 14 (2.94%) Bash
10 10 (2.10%) PL/SQL
11 8 (1.68%) JavaScript
12 6 (1.26%) R
13 4 (0.84%) Shell Script
14 3 (0.63%) TypeScript
15 2 (0.42%) Ada
15 2 (0.42%) C++
16 1 (0.21%) ANSI SQL
16 1 (0.21%) C
16 1 (0.21%) Perl
Qualifications
1 90 (18.87%) Security Cleared
2 68 (14.26%) SC Cleared
3 31 (6.50%) Degree
4 22 (4.61%) Azure Certification
5 16 (3.35%) Microsoft Certification
6 15 (3.14%) Master's Degree
7 10 (2.10%) BPSS Clearance
8 8 (1.68%) AWS Certification
9 7 (1.47%) Microsoft Certified Professional
9 7 (1.47%) TOGAF Certification
10 6 (1.26%) Computer Science Degree
11 5 (1.05%) CISM
11 5 (1.05%) CISSP
12 3 (0.63%) DV Cleared
12 3 (0.63%) ISTQB
12 3 (0.63%) ISTQB Advanced Certification
12 3 (0.63%) PMI Certification
12 3 (0.63%) PMP
13 2 (0.42%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 2 (0.42%) Postgraduate
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 141 (29.56%) Data Quality
2 75 (15.72%) GDPR
3 24 (5.03%) QA
4 12 (2.52%) HIPAA
4 12 (2.52%) NIST
5 8 (1.68%) Accessibility
6 7 (1.47%) PCI DSS
6 7 (1.47%) Sarbanes-Oxley
7 3 (0.63%) Actionable Recommendations
7 3 (0.63%) California Consumer Privacy Act
8 2 (0.42%) PMO
9 1 (0.21%) IFRS
9 1 (0.21%) IFRS 9
9 1 (0.21%) ISO/IEC 27001
9 1 (0.21%) SOC 2
9 1 (0.21%) Solvency II
System Software
1 34 (7.13%) Docker
2 6 (1.26%) Active Directory
3 5 (1.05%) HDFS
4 3 (0.63%) Virtual Machines
5 2 (0.42%) zsh
6 1 (0.21%) Lustre
6 1 (0.21%) NFS
Systems Management
1 102 (21.38%) Terraform
2 32 (6.71%) Kubernetes
3 8 (1.68%) Grafana
4 6 (1.26%) Ansible
5 5 (1.05%) Prometheus
6 2 (0.42%) Single Sign-On
7 1 (0.21%) Fluentd
7 1 (0.21%) Hadoop YARN
7 1 (0.21%) Kibana
7 1 (0.21%) logstash
7 1 (0.21%) Oozie
7 1 (0.21%) Oracle ZFS
7 1 (0.21%) Packer
7 1 (0.21%) Progress Chef
7 1 (0.21%) Puppet
7 1 (0.21%) Salt
7 1 (0.21%) SELinux
Vendors
1 202 (42.35%) Databricks
2 145 (30.40%) Microsoft
3 28 (5.87%) Google
3 28 (5.87%) Informatica
4 21 (4.40%) Oracle
5 18 (3.77%) OpenAI
6 17 (3.56%) SAP
7 10 (2.10%) Talend
8 8 (1.68%) Cloudera
9 5 (1.05%) ServiceNow
10 4 (0.84%) BiZZdesign
10 4 (0.84%) CheckPoint
10 4 (0.84%) Fortinet
10 4 (0.84%) Greenplum
10 4 (0.84%) Salesforce
11 3 (0.63%) Ab Initio
11 3 (0.63%) Hortonworks
11 3 (0.63%) Red Hat
11 3 (0.63%) Splunk
12 2 (0.42%) Infor