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

6 months to
14 Apr 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 240 175 216
Rank change year-on-year -65 +41 +8
Contract jobs citing Data Lake 485 438 474
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 1.06% 1.50% 1.09%
As % of the Database & Business Intelligence category 6.74% 7.87% 6.56%
Number of daily rates quoted 349 354 346
10th Percentile £400 £385 £400
25th Percentile £450 £465 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £600 £550
Median % change year-on-year -8.33% +9.09% -4.35%
75th Percentile £650 £763 £700
90th Percentile £750 £938 £850
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -9.09%
Number of hourly rates quoted 4 2 3
10th Percentile - - £30.30
25th Percentile £64.00 - £34.13
Median hourly rate £66.50 £65.00 £40.50
Median % change year-on-year +2.31% +60.49% +15.71%
75th Percentile £69.11 - £51.00
90th Percentile £69.31 - £57.30
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 7,198 5,566 7,224
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 15.74% 19.01% 16.60%
Number of daily rates quoted 4,937 3,847 5,128
10th Percentile £350 £354 £350
25th Percentile £413 £420 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £594 £645 £650
90th Percentile £700 £763 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £488 £485
% change year-on-year -2.56% +0.52% -3.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 176 108 152
10th Percentile £18.13 £21.10 £14.00
25th Percentile £30.90 £24.25 £20.77
Median hourly rate £51.75 £32.96 £40.00
Median % change year-on-year +57.01% -17.60% -33.33%
75th Percentile £74.68 £65.62 £53.84
90th Percentile £83.50 £73.63 £72.45
UK excluding London median hourly rate £50.50 £31.64 £35.00
% change year-on-year +59.61% -9.60% -39.13%

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 14 April 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 14 April 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 -84 397 £575 -4.17% 115
London -53 289 £600 -11.11% 51
Work from Home -90 153 £563 -16.67% 52
UK excluding London -73 113 £500 +5.26% 79
North of England -68 35 £500 +11.11% 22
Midlands -57 27 £450 +2.86% 16
Scotland +11 20 £475 -4.62% 3
South East -65 17 £425 -13.44% 17
North West -36 15 £500 +0.53% 11
West Midlands -62 14 £513 +15.49% 10
East Midlands -23 13 £447 +25.56% 6
Yorkshire -51 13 £525 +20.00% 9
East of England -28 8 £575 -0.86% 9
North East -18 7 £463 +29.19% 4
South West -28 4 £500 -23.08% 11
Wales -13 1 - - 1
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 85 (17.53%) Apache Spark
2 52 (10.72%) Apache
3 41 (8.45%) Apache Airflow
4 6 (1.24%) Confluence
5 4 (0.82%) SharePoint
6 3 (0.62%) Apache Synapse
6 3 (0.62%) SAS
7 2 (0.41%) Microsoft Exchange
7 2 (0.41%) nginx
8 1 (0.21%) Jupyter
8 1 (0.21%) WebLogic
Applications
1 3 (0.62%) Microsoft Excel
2 2 (0.41%) MS Visio
3 1 (0.21%) Chatbot
3 1 (0.21%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 1 (0.21%) Spreadsheet
Business Applications
1 11 (2.27%) SAP S/4HANA
2 2 (0.41%) SAP MDG
3 1 (0.21%) Dynamics CRM
3 1 (0.21%) Infor M3
3 1 (0.21%) Loan IQ
Cloud Services
1 343 (70.72%) Azure
2 169 (34.85%) Power Platform
3 167 (34.43%) Azure Synapse Analytics
4 165 (34.02%) AWS
5 157 (32.37%) Azure Data Factory
6 87 (17.94%) Azure DevOps
7 82 (16.91%) GitHub
8 68 (14.02%) GCP
9 60 (12.37%) Serverless
10 56 (11.55%) Amazon S3
11 40 (8.25%) GitHub Actions
12 39 (8.04%) AWS CloudFormation
12 39 (8.04%) Snowflake
13 38 (7.84%) Microsoft Purview
14 31 (6.39%) Azure Functions
15 28 (5.77%) Azure Key Vault
16 26 (5.36%) Collibra
17 23 (4.74%) AWS Lambda
17 23 (4.74%) Azure Cosmos DB
18 20 (4.12%) Amazon SQS
Communications & Networking
1 9 (1.86%) Firewall
2 3 (0.62%) Kerberos
2 3 (0.62%) Network Security
2 3 (0.62%) VPN
3 2 (0.41%) Hyperconnected
4 1 (0.21%) 4G
4 1 (0.21%) 5G
4 1 (0.21%) DSL
4 1 (0.21%) Ethernet
4 1 (0.21%) InfiniBand
4 1 (0.21%) Modbus
4 1 (0.21%) SMS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 152 (31.34%) Power BI
2 138 (28.45%) Data Warehouse
3 71 (14.64%) Metadata
4 64 (13.20%) Delta Lake
5 62 (12.78%) Azure SQL Database
6 61 (12.58%) SQL Server
7 36 (7.42%) Amazon Athena
8 35 (7.22%) Amazon Redshift
9 30 (6.19%) Big Data
9 30 (6.19%) SQL Server Integration Services
10 27 (5.57%) PostgreSQL
11 23 (4.74%) Spark SQL
12 22 (4.54%) BigQuery
12 22 (4.54%) Hadoop
12 22 (4.54%) Mixpanel
13 21 (4.33%) NoSQL
14 20 (4.12%) OLAP
14 20 (4.12%) Relational Database
15 18 (3.71%) Snowflake Schema
16 17 (3.51%) OLTP
Development Applications
1 49 (10.10%) Git
2 28 (5.77%) GitLab
3 13 (2.68%) Jenkins
4 9 (1.86%) JIRA
4 9 (1.86%) MLflow
5 3 (0.62%) ER Studio
5 3 (0.62%) ERwin
5 3 (0.62%) JMeter
6 2 (0.41%) Bitbucket
7 1 (0.21%) Hudson
7 1 (0.21%) Liquibase
7 1 (0.21%) PowerDesigner
7 1 (0.21%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
7 1 (0.21%) Terragrunt
7 1 (0.21%) Visual Studio
General
1 121 (24.95%) Finance
2 103 (21.24%) Social Skills
3 54 (11.13%) Analytical Skills
4 41 (8.45%) Public Sector
5 13 (2.68%) Banking
6 11 (2.27%) Documentation Skills
6 11 (2.27%) Influencing Skills
7 8 (1.65%) Pharmaceutical
8 6 (1.24%) Marketing
8 6 (1.24%) Retail
9 4 (0.82%) Manufacturing
10 3 (0.62%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 3 (0.62%) Military
11 2 (0.41%) Back Office
11 2 (0.41%) Billing
11 2 (0.41%) Financial Institution
11 2 (0.41%) Legal
11 2 (0.41%) Local Government
11 2 (0.41%) Presentation Skills
11 2 (0.41%) Telecoms
Job Titles
1 173 (35.67%) Data Engineer
2 118 (24.33%) Architect
3 68 (14.02%) Data Architect
4 59 (12.16%) Senior
5 47 (9.69%) Azure Engineer
6 43 (8.87%) Lead
7 38 (7.84%) Solutions Architect
8 35 (7.22%) Senior Data Engineer
9 33 (6.80%) Principal Engineer
10 30 (6.19%) Developer
11 28 (5.77%) Azure Data Engineer
12 26 (5.36%) Software Engineer
13 23 (4.74%) Principal Software Engineer
14 22 (4.54%) AWS Engineer
15 19 (3.92%) Cloud Architect
15 19 (3.92%) Principal Data Engineer
16 18 (3.71%) Cloud Solutions Architect
17 17 (3.51%) Analyst
18 16 (3.30%) Azure Architect
18 16 (3.30%) Data Analytics Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 105 (21.65%) PySpark
2 61 (12.58%) Kafka
3 20 (4.12%) REST
4 19 (3.92%) Great Expectations
5 16 (3.30%) JSON
6 14 (2.89%) Model Context Protocol
7 12 (2.47%) LangChain
7 12 (2.47%) Microsoft Graph
8 11 (2.27%) LangGraph
8 11 (2.27%) Spark Streaming
8 11 (2.27%) XML
9 10 (2.06%) Pandas
9 10 (2.06%) YAML
10 8 (1.65%) A2A Protocol
10 8 (1.65%) PyTorch
10 8 (1.65%) scikit-learn
11 7 (1.44%) TensorFlow
12 5 (1.03%) FastAPI
12 5 (1.03%) Node.js
12 5 (1.03%) React
Miscellaneous
1 62 (12.78%) Cloud Native
2 19 (3.92%) Data Structures
3 17 (3.51%) Distributed Computing
3 17 (3.51%) Legacy Systems
4 16 (3.30%) IoT
5 14 (2.89%) Distributed Systems
5 14 (2.89%) Product Ownership
6 11 (2.27%) Management Information System
7 8 (1.65%) Data Protection Act
7 8 (1.65%) Digital Media
8 7 (1.44%) Analytical Mindset
8 7 (1.44%) Data Fabric
9 5 (1.03%) AI Agents
9 5 (1.03%) Algorithms
9 5 (1.03%) Replication
10 4 (0.82%) Onboarding
10 4 (0.82%) Security Posture
10 4 (0.82%) Self-Motivation
11 3 (0.62%) FMCG
11 3 (0.62%) Reference Data
Operating Systems
1 14 (2.89%) Linux
2 10 (2.06%) Unix
3 5 (1.03%) Windows
4 2 (0.41%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 279 (57.53%) Analytics
2 244 (50.31%) ETL
3 216 (44.54%) Data Modelling
4 205 (42.27%) Data Pipeline
5 193 (39.79%) CI/CD
6 191 (39.38%) Data Engineering
7 176 (36.29%) Business Intelligence
8 165 (34.02%) Data Governance
9 164 (33.81%) DevOps
10 127 (26.19%) Data Architecture
11 125 (25.77%) AI
12 92 (18.97%) Machine Learning
13 88 (18.14%) Agile
14 82 (16.91%) Infrastructure as Code
15 81 (16.70%) Problem-Solving
16 79 (16.29%) Migration
17 63 (12.99%) Data Integration
18 62 (12.78%) Data Science
18 62 (12.78%) Data Transformation
19 51 (10.52%) Data Ingestion
Programming Languages
1 288 (59.38%) SQL
2 241 (49.69%) Python
3 32 (6.60%) C#
4 31 (6.39%) Java
5 24 (4.95%) Scala
6 21 (4.33%) T-SQL
7 20 (4.12%) PowerShell
8 18 (3.71%) Bicep
9 17 (3.51%) Data Analysis Expressions
10 9 (1.86%) Bash
11 7 (1.44%) JavaScript
11 7 (1.44%) PL/SQL
12 6 (1.24%) R
13 4 (0.82%) Shell Script
14 2 (0.41%) Ada
14 2 (0.41%) C++
15 1 (0.21%) ANSI SQL
15 1 (0.21%) C
15 1 (0.21%) Perl
15 1 (0.21%) TypeScript
Qualifications
1 90 (18.56%) Security Cleared
2 70 (14.43%) SC Cleared
3 27 (5.57%) Degree
4 22 (4.54%) Azure Certification
5 16 (3.30%) Microsoft Certification
6 14 (2.89%) Master's Degree
7 9 (1.86%) BPSS Clearance
8 8 (1.65%) AWS Certification
8 8 (1.65%) Microsoft Certified Professional
9 7 (1.44%) TOGAF Certification
10 5 (1.03%) CISM
10 5 (1.03%) CISSP
11 4 (0.82%) Computer Science Degree
12 3 (0.62%) DV Cleared
12 3 (0.62%) ISTQB
12 3 (0.62%) ISTQB Advanced Certification
13 2 (0.41%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 2 (0.41%) PMI Certification
13 2 (0.41%) PMP
13 2 (0.41%) Postgraduate
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 150 (30.93%) Data Quality
2 67 (13.81%) GDPR
3 23 (4.74%) QA
4 7 (1.44%) Accessibility
4 7 (1.44%) PCI DSS
4 7 (1.44%) Sarbanes-Oxley
5 4 (0.82%) NIST
6 3 (0.62%) Actionable Recommendations
6 3 (0.62%) California Consumer Privacy Act
6 3 (0.62%) HIPAA
7 2 (0.41%) PMO
8 1 (0.21%) IFRS
8 1 (0.21%) IFRS 9
8 1 (0.21%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 1 (0.21%) SOC 2
8 1 (0.21%) Solvency II
System Software
1 34 (7.01%) Docker
2 5 (1.03%) HDFS
3 4 (0.82%) Active Directory
4 3 (0.62%) Virtual Machines
5 1 (0.21%) Lustre
5 1 (0.21%) NFS
Systems Management
1 101 (20.82%) Terraform
2 34 (7.01%) Kubernetes
3 6 (1.24%) Ansible
3 6 (1.24%) Grafana
4 5 (1.03%) Prometheus
5 2 (0.41%) Single Sign-On
6 1 (0.21%) Fluentd
6 1 (0.21%) Hadoop YARN
6 1 (0.21%) IBM Guardium
6 1 (0.21%) Kibana
6 1 (0.21%) logstash
6 1 (0.21%) Oozie
6 1 (0.21%) Oracle ZFS
6 1 (0.21%) Packer
6 1 (0.21%) Progress Chef
6 1 (0.21%) Puppet
6 1 (0.21%) Salt
6 1 (0.21%) SELinux
Vendors
1 198 (40.82%) Databricks
2 153 (31.55%) Microsoft
3 33 (6.80%) Informatica
4 28 (5.77%) Google
5 20 (4.12%) Oracle
6 19 (3.92%) OpenAI
7 18 (3.71%) SAP
8 11 (2.27%) Talend
9 7 (1.44%) Cloudera
10 6 (1.24%) Salesforce
11 5 (1.03%) ServiceNow
12 4 (0.82%) BiZZdesign
12 4 (0.82%) CheckPoint
12 4 (0.82%) Fortinet
12 4 (0.82%) Greenplum
13 3 (0.62%) Ab Initio
13 3 (0.62%) Hortonworks
13 3 (0.62%) Red Hat
13 3 (0.62%) Splunk
14 2 (0.41%) Infor