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

6 months to
22 Apr 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 230 189 215
Rank change year-on-year -41 +26 -4
Contract jobs citing Data Lake 501 440 478
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 1.08% 1.49% 1.10%
As % of the Database & Business Intelligence category 6.93% 7.82% 6.62%
Number of daily rates quoted 361 360 348
10th Percentile £400 £389 £404
25th Percentile £450 £463 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £600 £550
Median % change year-on-year -8.33% +9.09% -3.93%
75th Percentile £650 £763 £750
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 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 7,225 5,628 7,218
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 15.58% 19.10% 16.62%
Number of daily rates quoted 4,929 3,887 5,129
10th Percentile £350 £356 £350
25th Percentile £413 £419 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.07%
75th Percentile £598 £638 £650
90th Percentile £700 £763 £758
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £488 £480
% change year-on-year -2.71% +1.72% -4.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 189 107 146
10th Percentile £17.05 £20.35 £14.00
25th Percentile £30.50 £24.25 £20.98
Median hourly rate £51.00 £34.50 £40.00
Median % change year-on-year +47.83% -13.75% -34.69%
75th Percentile £74.00 £65.62 £54.78
90th Percentile £82.45 £74.00 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £50.00 £31.64 £40.00
% change year-on-year +58.03% -20.90% -33.33%

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 22 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
Hourly Rate Histogram

Hourly rate distribution of jobs citing Data Lake over the 6 months to 22 April 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 22 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 -87 411 £575 -4.17% 117
London -42 296 £600 -11.11% 58
Work from Home -81 156 £550 -18.52% 53
UK excluding London -68 118 £500 +5.26% 75
North of England -59 39 £500 +9.59% 17
Midlands -53 30 £475 +8.57% 18
Scotland +9 21 £475 -4.62% 2
North West -43 18 £500 +5.26% 9
West Midlands -56 16 £513 +15.49% 11
South East -65 16 £475 -5.00% 20
East Midlands -24 14 £449 +25.98% 7
Yorkshire -45 14 £550 +25.71% 6
North East -19 7 £463 +29.19% 3
East of England -32 7 £575 -0.86% 6
South West -37 4 £500 -11.11% 11
Northern Ireland - 1 £430 - 1

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 89 (17.76%) Apache Spark
2 52 (10.38%) Apache
3 41 (8.18%) Apache Airflow
4 6 (1.20%) Confluence
4 6 (1.20%) SAS
5 4 (0.80%) SharePoint
6 3 (0.60%) Apache Synapse
7 2 (0.40%) Microsoft Exchange
7 2 (0.40%) nginx
8 1 (0.20%) Jupyter
Applications
1 3 (0.60%) Microsoft Excel
2 2 (0.40%) MS Visio
3 1 (0.20%) Chatbot
3 1 (0.20%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 1 (0.20%) Spreadsheet
Business Applications
1 10 (2.00%) SAP S/4HANA
2 1 (0.20%) Dynamics CRM
2 1 (0.20%) Infor M3
2 1 (0.20%) Loan IQ
2 1 (0.20%) SAP MDG
Cloud Services
1 352 (70.26%) Azure
2 177 (35.33%) Power Platform
3 172 (34.33%) AWS
3 172 (34.33%) Azure Synapse Analytics
4 162 (32.34%) Azure Data Factory
5 88 (17.56%) Azure DevOps
6 83 (16.57%) GitHub
7 73 (14.57%) GCP
8 61 (12.18%) Serverless
9 55 (10.98%) Amazon S3
10 41 (8.18%) AWS CloudFormation
11 40 (7.98%) GitHub Actions
11 40 (7.98%) Snowflake
12 38 (7.58%) Microsoft Purview
13 32 (6.39%) Azure Functions
14 28 (5.59%) Azure Key Vault
15 26 (5.19%) Collibra
16 24 (4.79%) Azure Cosmos DB
17 23 (4.59%) AWS Lambda
18 20 (3.99%) Amazon SQS
Communications & Networking
1 8 (1.60%) Firewall
2 3 (0.60%) Kerberos
2 3 (0.60%) Network Security
2 3 (0.60%) VPN
3 2 (0.40%) Hyperconnected
4 1 (0.20%) 4G
4 1 (0.20%) 5G
4 1 (0.20%) Ethernet
4 1 (0.20%) InfiniBand
4 1 (0.20%) Modbus
4 1 (0.20%) SMS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 159 (31.74%) Power BI
2 151 (30.14%) Data Warehouse
3 78 (15.57%) Metadata
4 68 (13.57%) Delta Lake
5 66 (13.17%) SQL Server
6 63 (12.57%) Azure SQL Database
7 37 (7.39%) Amazon Redshift
8 36 (7.19%) Amazon Athena
9 34 (6.79%) Big Data
10 31 (6.19%) SQL Server Integration Services
11 27 (5.39%) PostgreSQL
12 25 (4.99%) NoSQL
13 24 (4.79%) Hadoop
14 23 (4.59%) BigQuery
14 23 (4.59%) Spark SQL
15 22 (4.39%) Mixpanel
16 20 (3.99%) OLAP
16 20 (3.99%) Relational Database
17 19 (3.79%) Snowflake Schema
18 17 (3.39%) Star Schema
Development Applications
1 53 (10.58%) Git
2 28 (5.59%) GitLab
3 13 (2.59%) Jenkins
4 11 (2.20%) MLflow
5 9 (1.80%) JIRA
6 3 (0.60%) ER Studio
6 3 (0.60%) ERwin
6 3 (0.60%) JMeter
7 2 (0.40%) Bitbucket
8 1 (0.20%) Hudson
8 1 (0.20%) PowerDesigner
8 1 (0.20%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
8 1 (0.20%) Terragrunt
8 1 (0.20%) Visual Studio
General
1 123 (24.55%) Finance
2 111 (22.16%) Social Skills
3 56 (11.18%) Analytical Skills
4 44 (8.78%) Public Sector
5 15 (2.99%) Banking
6 13 (2.59%) Influencing Skills
7 11 (2.20%) Documentation Skills
8 8 (1.60%) Retail
9 7 (1.40%) Pharmaceutical
10 6 (1.20%) Manufacturing
10 6 (1.20%) Marketing
11 3 (0.60%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 3 (0.60%) Military
12 2 (0.40%) Back Office
12 2 (0.40%) Billing
12 2 (0.40%) Financial Institution
12 2 (0.40%) Front Office
12 2 (0.40%) Local Government
12 2 (0.40%) Presentation Skills
12 2 (0.40%) Telecoms
Job Titles
1 175 (34.93%) Data Engineer
2 128 (25.55%) Architect
3 75 (14.97%) Data Architect
4 67 (13.37%) Senior
5 45 (8.98%) Azure Engineer
6 42 (8.38%) Lead
7 40 (7.98%) Solutions Architect
8 39 (7.78%) Senior Data Engineer
9 33 (6.59%) Principal Engineer
10 30 (5.99%) Developer
11 27 (5.39%) Azure Data Engineer
12 26 (5.19%) Software Engineer
13 23 (4.59%) Principal Software Engineer
14 22 (4.39%) Cloud Architect
15 21 (4.19%) Cloud Solutions Architect
16 20 (3.99%) AWS Engineer
17 19 (3.79%) Principal Data Engineer
18 17 (3.39%) Analyst
18 17 (3.39%) Azure Architect
19 16 (3.19%) Data Analytics Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 107 (21.36%) PySpark
2 62 (12.38%) Kafka
3 20 (3.99%) Great Expectations
3 20 (3.99%) REST
4 16 (3.19%) JSON
5 15 (2.99%) Model Context Protocol
6 13 (2.59%) LangChain
6 13 (2.59%) Microsoft Graph
7 12 (2.40%) LangGraph
8 11 (2.20%) Spark Streaming
8 11 (2.20%) XML
9 10 (2.00%) Pandas
9 10 (2.00%) YAML
10 9 (1.80%) A2A Protocol
11 8 (1.60%) PyTorch
11 8 (1.60%) scikit-learn
12 7 (1.40%) TensorFlow
13 5 (1.00%) FastAPI
13 5 (1.00%) Middleware
13 5 (1.00%) React
Miscellaneous
1 69 (13.77%) Cloud Native
2 20 (3.99%) Legacy Systems
3 19 (3.79%) Data Structures
4 17 (3.39%) Distributed Computing
5 16 (3.19%) Distributed Systems
5 16 (3.19%) IoT
6 14 (2.79%) Product Ownership
7 11 (2.20%) Management Information System
8 9 (1.80%) Data Fabric
8 9 (1.80%) Data Protection Act
9 8 (1.60%) Analytical Mindset
9 8 (1.60%) Digital Media
10 5 (1.00%) AI Agents
10 5 (1.00%) Algorithms
10 5 (1.00%) Replication
10 5 (1.00%) Self-Motivation
11 4 (0.80%) Onboarding
11 4 (0.80%) Security Posture
12 3 (0.60%) FMCG
12 3 (0.60%) Reference Data
Operating Systems
1 15 (2.99%) Linux
2 11 (2.20%) Unix
3 5 (1.00%) Windows
4 2 (0.40%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 284 (56.69%) Analytics
2 252 (50.30%) ETL
3 228 (45.51%) Data Modelling
4 216 (43.11%) Data Pipeline
5 206 (41.12%) CI/CD
6 198 (39.52%) Data Engineering
7 183 (36.53%) Business Intelligence
8 171 (34.13%) Data Governance
9 170 (33.93%) DevOps
10 136 (27.15%) Data Architecture
11 131 (26.15%) AI
12 99 (19.76%) Agile
13 93 (18.56%) Machine Learning
14 91 (18.16%) Migration
15 84 (16.77%) Infrastructure as Code
16 82 (16.37%) Problem-Solving
17 65 (12.97%) Data Integration
18 63 (12.57%) Data Transformation
19 60 (11.98%) Data Science
20 50 (9.98%) Validation
Programming Languages
1 296 (59.08%) SQL
2 243 (48.50%) Python
3 35 (6.99%) Java
4 32 (6.39%) C#
5 23 (4.59%) Scala
5 23 (4.59%) T-SQL
6 20 (3.99%) Data Analysis Expressions
7 19 (3.79%) Bicep
8 18 (3.59%) PowerShell
9 7 (1.40%) Bash
9 7 (1.40%) JavaScript
10 6 (1.20%) PL/SQL
10 6 (1.20%) R
11 5 (1.00%) Shell Script
12 2 (0.40%) Ada
12 2 (0.40%) C++
13 1 (0.20%) ANSI SQL
13 1 (0.20%) C
13 1 (0.20%) Perl
13 1 (0.20%) TypeScript
Qualifications
1 95 (18.96%) Security Cleared
2 73 (14.57%) SC Cleared
3 26 (5.19%) Degree
4 24 (4.79%) Azure Certification
5 16 (3.19%) Microsoft Certification
6 13 (2.59%) Master's Degree
7 11 (2.20%) BPSS Clearance
8 10 (2.00%) AWS Certification
9 9 (1.80%) Microsoft Certified Professional
10 7 (1.40%) TOGAF Certification
11 5 (1.00%) CISM
11 5 (1.00%) CISSP
12 4 (0.80%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
12 4 (0.80%) Computer Science Degree
12 4 (0.80%) DV Cleared
13 3 (0.60%) ISTQB
13 3 (0.60%) ISTQB Advanced Certification
14 2 (0.40%) PMP
14 2 (0.40%) Postgraduate
14 2 (0.40%) SAP Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 162 (32.34%) Data Quality
2 67 (13.37%) GDPR
3 25 (4.99%) QA
4 7 (1.40%) Accessibility
4 7 (1.40%) PCI DSS
4 7 (1.40%) Sarbanes-Oxley
5 4 (0.80%) NIST
6 3 (0.60%) Actionable Recommendations
6 3 (0.60%) California Consumer Privacy Act
6 3 (0.60%) HIPAA
7 2 (0.40%) PMO
8 1 (0.20%) Basel II
8 1 (0.20%) GRC
8 1 (0.20%) IFRS
8 1 (0.20%) IFRS 9
8 1 (0.20%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 1 (0.20%) SOC 2
8 1 (0.20%) Solvency II
System Software
1 34 (6.79%) Docker
2 5 (1.00%) HDFS
3 4 (0.80%) Active Directory
4 2 (0.40%) Virtual Machines
5 1 (0.20%) Lustre
5 1 (0.20%) NFS
Systems Management
1 102 (20.36%) Terraform
2 34 (6.79%) Kubernetes
3 6 (1.20%) Ansible
4 5 (1.00%) Grafana
5 4 (0.80%) Prometheus
6 2 (0.40%) Single Sign-On
7 1 (0.20%) Fluentd
7 1 (0.20%) Hadoop YARN
7 1 (0.20%) IBM Guardium
7 1 (0.20%) Oozie
7 1 (0.20%) Oracle ZFS
7 1 (0.20%) Packer
7 1 (0.20%) Progress Chef
7 1 (0.20%) Puppet
7 1 (0.20%) Salt
7 1 (0.20%) SELinux
Vendors
1 207 (41.32%) Databricks
2 155 (30.94%) Microsoft
3 33 (6.59%) Informatica
4 28 (5.59%) Google
5 20 (3.99%) OpenAI
5 20 (3.99%) Oracle
6 19 (3.79%) SAP
7 11 (2.20%) Talend
8 8 (1.60%) Cloudera
9 6 (1.20%) Salesforce
10 5 (1.00%) ServiceNow
11 4 (0.80%) BiZZdesign
11 4 (0.80%) CheckPoint
11 4 (0.80%) Fortinet
11 4 (0.80%) Greenplum
11 4 (0.80%) Hortonworks
11 4 (0.80%) Infor
12 3 (0.60%) Ab Initio
12 3 (0.60%) Red Hat
12 3 (0.60%) Splunk