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

6 months to
17 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 234 226 156
Rank change year-on-year -8 -70 +48
Contract jobs citing Data Lake 569 372 662
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 1.08% 1.14% 1.57%
As % of the Database & Business Intelligence category 7.04% 6.25% 8.84%
Number of daily rates quoted 421 279 539
10th Percentile £409 £402 £425
25th Percentile £463 £463 £500
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £570 £650
Median % change year-on-year -3.51% -12.31% +13.04%
75th Percentile £650 £763 £850
90th Percentile £750 £825 £888
UK excluding London median daily rate £528 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +11.05% -5.00% -4.76%
Number of hourly rates quoted 6 0 1
10th Percentile £51.25 - -
25th Percentile £57.25 - -
Median hourly rate £64.00 - £40.50
75th Percentile £67.75 - -
90th Percentile £69.22 - -
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 8,083 5,948 7,487
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 15.35% 18.29% 17.74%
Number of daily rates quoted 5,349 4,034 5,341
10th Percentile £352 £350 £350
25th Percentile £415 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £512 £525
Median % change year-on-year -2.39% -2.43% -2.33%
75th Percentile £600 £625 £650
90th Percentile £700 £750 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £475 £475
% change year-on-year - - -5.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 256 100 133
10th Percentile £16.35 £19.56 £14.05
25th Percentile £24.85 £25.94 £20.75
Median hourly rate £41.71 £36.25 £38.50
Median % change year-on-year +15.06% -5.84% -30.00%
75th Percentile £64.00 £64.63 £51.91
90th Percentile £77.25 £77.62 £71.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £39.50 £31.64 £32.75
% change year-on-year +24.84% -3.39% -37.62%

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 July 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 17 July 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 17 July 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 -34 470 £575 -0.86% 120
London -37 295 £581 -10.58% 57
Work from Home -32 210 £540 -16.92% 74
UK excluding London -16 174 £528 +11.05% 90
Midlands -5 65 £600 +39.53% 22
North of England -53 49 £510 +7.37% 21
West Midlands -18 46 £600 +41.18% 15
North West -39 27 £500 - 10
Scotland +9 22 £417 -27.73% 7
East Midlands -2 19 £549 +33.90% 7
Yorkshire -33 19 £550 +22.09% 4
South East -76 17 £463 +1.65% 17
South West -31 14 £600 +26.32% 9
East of England -26 9 £575 -0.86% 5
North East -35 3 £463 - 7
Wales -12 1 £325 -35.00% 5

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 79 (13.88%) Apache Spark
2 48 (8.44%) Apache
3 42 (7.38%) Apache Airflow
4 29 (5.10%) SAS
5 21 (3.69%) Confluence
6 2 (0.35%) Apache Synapse
6 2 (0.35%) nginx
6 2 (0.35%) Palantir Foundry
6 2 (0.35%) SharePoint
7 1 (0.18%) Apache Superset
7 1 (0.18%) ArcGIS
7 1 (0.18%) JBoss
7 1 (0.18%) Jupyter
7 1 (0.18%) Microsoft Exchange
7 1 (0.18%) Oracle Coherence
Applications
1 6 (1.05%) Microsoft Excel
2 1 (0.18%) Microsoft PowerPoint
Business Applications
1 5 (0.88%) SAP S/4HANA
2 3 (0.53%) Adobe Campaign
2 3 (0.53%) Infor M3
2 3 (0.53%) Salesforce CRM
2 3 (0.53%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
3 2 (0.35%) Endur
3 2 (0.35%) Loan IQ
3 2 (0.35%) SAP MDG
3 2 (0.35%) Temenos T24
4 1 (0.18%) Aladdin
4 1 (0.18%) Dynamics CRM
Cloud Services
1 359 (63.09%) Azure
2 202 (35.50%) AWS
3 172 (30.23%) Power Platform
4 139 (24.43%) Azure Data Factory
5 130 (22.85%) Azure Synapse Analytics
6 93 (16.34%) GCP
7 82 (14.41%) Azure DevOps
8 67 (11.78%) Snowflake
9 64 (11.25%) GitHub
10 61 (10.72%) Amazon S3
11 58 (10.19%) Serverless
12 35 (6.15%) AWS Lambda
13 33 (5.80%) GitHub Actions
14 28 (4.92%) Azure Cosmos DB
15 24 (4.22%) dbt
16 23 (4.04%) Azure Key Vault
17 22 (3.87%) Amazon EMR
17 22 (3.87%) Microsoft Purview
18 20 (3.51%) AWS CloudFormation
18 20 (3.51%) Azure Monitor
Communications & Networking
1 10 (1.76%) Firewall
2 9 (1.58%) HTTP
3 6 (1.05%) DNS
4 5 (0.88%) WAN
5 4 (0.70%) Network Security
6 3 (0.53%) Broadband
7 2 (0.35%) DSL
7 2 (0.35%) Modbus
8 1 (0.18%) 4G
8 1 (0.18%) 5G
8 1 (0.18%) AMQP
8 1 (0.18%) IPsec
8 1 (0.18%) LoRaWAN
8 1 (0.18%) MQTT
8 1 (0.18%) OpenVPN
8 1 (0.18%) Radio Access Network
8 1 (0.18%) Reverse Proxy
8 1 (0.18%) SMS
8 1 (0.18%) VPN
8 1 (0.18%) X.509
Database & Business Intelligence
1 206 (36.20%) Data Warehouse
2 154 (27.07%) Power BI
3 79 (13.88%) Metadata
4 60 (10.54%) Amazon Redshift
4 60 (10.54%) Azure SQL Database
5 47 (8.26%) Delta Lake
6 45 (7.91%) SQL Server
7 42 (7.38%) Big Data
8 41 (7.21%) Amazon Athena
9 33 (5.80%) BigQuery
10 29 (5.10%) PostgreSQL
11 28 (4.92%) NoSQL
12 26 (4.57%) Enterprise Data Warehouse
13 23 (4.04%) Relational Database
13 23 (4.04%) SQL Server Integration Services
14 22 (3.87%) Hadoop
15 21 (3.69%) Snowflake Schema
16 20 (3.51%) Tableau
17 17 (2.99%) Star Schema
18 13 (2.28%) SQL Server Analysis Services
Development Applications
1 56 (9.84%) Git
2 25 (4.39%) JIRA
3 24 (4.22%) GitLab
4 19 (3.34%) Jenkins
5 6 (1.05%) ER Studio
5 6 (1.05%) ERwin
6 5 (0.88%) MLflow
6 5 (0.88%) PowerDesigner
7 4 (0.70%) JUnit
8 2 (0.35%) Bitbucket
9 1 (0.18%) Hudson
9 1 (0.18%) Postman
9 1 (0.18%) Robot Framework
9 1 (0.18%) SonarQube
9 1 (0.18%) Visual Studio
General
1 143 (25.13%) Finance
2 123 (21.62%) Social Skills
3 74 (13.01%) Analytical Skills
4 58 (10.19%) Public Sector
5 32 (5.62%) Banking
6 23 (4.04%) Marketing
7 19 (3.34%) Retail
8 18 (3.16%) Documentation Skills
9 12 (2.11%) Manufacturing
10 8 (1.41%) Influencing Skills
11 7 (1.23%) Financial Institution
12 6 (1.05%) Inclusion and Diversity
12 6 (1.05%) Police
13 5 (0.88%) Military
14 4 (0.70%) Investment Banking
14 4 (0.70%) Publishing
15 3 (0.53%) Legal
16 2 (0.35%) Billing
16 2 (0.35%) Front Office
16 2 (0.35%) General Ledger
Job Titles
1 182 (31.99%) Architect
2 176 (30.93%) Data Engineer
3 107 (18.80%) Data Architect
4 89 (15.64%) Senior
5 57 (10.02%) Solutions Architect
6 46 (8.08%) Lead
6 46 (8.08%) Senior Data Engineer
7 44 (7.73%) Azure Engineer
8 37 (6.50%) Analyst
9 34 (5.98%) Azure Data Engineer
9 34 (5.98%) Developer
10 28 (4.92%) Cloud Architect
11 25 (4.39%) Azure Architect
12 24 (4.22%) Data Analyst
13 21 (3.69%) AWS Engineer
14 20 (3.51%) Cloud Solutions Architect
14 20 (3.51%) Principal Engineer
15 18 (3.16%) Business Analyst
15 18 (3.16%) Lead Data Engineer
16 17 (2.99%) Data Business Analyst
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 85 (14.94%) PySpark
2 55 (9.67%) Kafka
3 27 (4.75%) REST
4 12 (2.11%) Great Expectations
4 12 (2.11%) JSON
4 12 (2.11%) YAML
5 11 (1.93%) XML
6 10 (1.76%) Middleware
6 10 (1.76%) Spring Boot
7 9 (1.58%) Model Context Protocol
7 9 (1.58%) Spring
8 8 (1.41%) React
9 7 (1.23%) FastAPI
10 6 (1.05%) .NET
10 6 (1.05%) ARM Templates
10 6 (1.05%) Node.js
11 5 (0.88%) HTML
11 5 (0.88%) LangChain
11 5 (0.88%) PyTorch
11 5 (0.88%) scikit-learn
Miscellaneous
1 85 (14.94%) Cloud Native
2 34 (5.98%) Data Structures
3 28 (4.92%) Distributed Systems
4 25 (4.39%) Legacy Systems
5 24 (4.22%) Product Ownership
6 15 (2.64%) IoT
7 12 (2.11%) Data Fabric
7 12 (2.11%) Data Protection Act
8 11 (1.93%) Low-Code
8 11 (1.93%) Management Information System
9 10 (1.76%) AI Agents
9 10 (1.76%) Onboarding
9 10 (1.76%) Reference Data
10 8 (1.41%) Digital Media
11 7 (1.23%) Marketing Technology
12 6 (1.05%) Analytical Mindset
12 6 (1.05%) Enterprise Cloud
12 6 (1.05%) Reinsurance
12 6 (1.05%) Self-Motivation
13 5 (0.88%) Distributed Architecture
Operating Systems
1 15 (2.64%) Linux
2 10 (1.76%) Unix
3 5 (0.88%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 3 (0.53%) Ubuntu
5 2 (0.35%) Windows
6 1 (0.18%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 300 (52.72%) Analytics
2 260 (45.69%) ETL
3 247 (43.41%) Data Modelling
4 237 (41.65%) Data Pipeline
5 219 (38.49%) Data Engineering
6 202 (35.50%) CI/CD
7 195 (34.27%) Business Intelligence
8 192 (33.74%) Data Governance
9 161 (28.30%) Data Architecture
10 155 (27.24%) DevOps
11 146 (25.66%) AI
12 142 (24.96%) Agile
13 139 (24.43%) Migration
14 100 (17.57%) Machine Learning
15 92 (16.17%) Problem-Solving
16 90 (15.82%) Data Transformation
17 87 (15.29%) Stakeholder Management
18 85 (14.94%) Data Integration
18 85 (14.94%) Validation
19 76 (13.36%) Infrastructure as Code
Programming Languages
1 316 (55.54%) SQL
2 206 (36.20%) Python
3 41 (7.21%) Java
4 22 (3.87%) Scala
5 21 (3.69%) Data Analysis Expressions
6 20 (3.51%) C#
7 17 (2.99%) PowerShell
8 15 (2.64%) T-SQL
9 14 (2.46%) Bicep
10 10 (1.76%) Bash
10 10 (1.76%) JavaScript
11 9 (1.58%) Shell Script
12 8 (1.41%) PL/SQL
13 5 (0.88%) TypeScript
14 4 (0.70%) R
15 2 (0.35%) Cypher
15 2 (0.35%) SHACL
15 2 (0.35%) SOQL
16 1 (0.18%) C
Qualifications
1 133 (23.37%) Security Cleared
2 109 (19.16%) SC Cleared
3 27 (4.75%) Azure Certification
4 23 (4.04%) Degree
5 14 (2.46%) BPSS Clearance
6 11 (1.93%) Master's Degree
7 10 (1.76%) DV Cleared
8 9 (1.58%) AWS Certification
9 7 (1.23%) CISM
9 7 (1.23%) CISSP
9 7 (1.23%) Computer Science Degree
10 6 (1.05%) Microsoft Certification
10 6 (1.05%) TOGAF Certification
11 5 (0.88%) Microsoft Certified Professional
12 4 (0.70%) CSPO
13 3 (0.53%) (ISC)2 CCSP
13 3 (0.53%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 3 (0.53%) CCSP
13 3 (0.53%) Cisco Certification
13 3 (0.53%) ISO 27001 Lead Auditor
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 185 (32.51%) Data Quality
2 60 (10.54%) GDPR
3 28 (4.92%) QA
4 6 (1.05%) Accessibility
4 6 (1.05%) Solvency II
5 5 (0.88%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 5 (0.88%) NIST
5 5 (0.88%) PCI DSS
6 4 (0.70%) GRC
6 4 (0.70%) IFRS
6 4 (0.70%) MiFID
7 3 (0.53%) Actionable Recommendations
7 3 (0.53%) IFRS 17
7 3 (0.53%) SLA
8 2 (0.35%) California Consumer Privacy Act
8 2 (0.35%) IFRS 9
8 2 (0.35%) PMO
9 1 (0.18%) HIPAA
9 1 (0.18%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 1 (0.18%) SOC 2
System Software
1 31 (5.45%) Docker
2 8 (1.41%) Active Directory
2 8 (1.41%) Virtual Machines
3 5 (0.88%) Virtual Desktop
4 3 (0.53%) HDFS
Systems Management
1 86 (15.11%) Terraform
2 39 (6.85%) Kubernetes
3 12 (2.11%) Grafana
4 8 (1.41%) Ansible
5 4 (0.70%) Single Sign-On
6 3 (0.53%) Argo
6 3 (0.53%) Prometheus
7 2 (0.35%) Puppet
8 1 (0.18%) Hadoop YARN
8 1 (0.18%) IBM Guardium
8 1 (0.18%) Oozie
Vendors
1 199 (34.97%) Databricks
2 125 (21.97%) Microsoft
3 42 (7.38%) Informatica
4 32 (5.62%) Oracle
5 30 (5.27%) Google
6 18 (3.16%) OpenAI
6 18 (3.16%) SAP
7 16 (2.81%) Talend
8 10 (1.76%) Denodo
9 9 (1.58%) Cloudera
9 9 (1.58%) Salesforce
10 8 (1.41%) Adobe
11 7 (1.23%) Infor
12 6 (1.05%) Dynatrace
13 5 (0.88%) IBM
14 4 (0.70%) BiZZdesign
14 4 (0.70%) Hortonworks
14 4 (0.70%) Red Hat
15 3 (0.53%) Greenplum
15 3 (0.53%) Sparx