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

6 months to
20 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 241 230 156
Rank change year-on-year -11 -74 +55
Contract jobs citing Data Lake 565 369 648
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 1.07% 1.13% 1.55%
As % of the Database & Business Intelligence category 6.97% 6.16% 8.71%
Number of daily rates quoted 417 275 529
10th Percentile £401 £402 £425
25th Percentile £463 £463 £506
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £568 £670
Median % change year-on-year -3.17% -15.22% +16.52%
75th Percentile £656 £756 £850
90th Percentile £750 £825 £888
UK excluding London median daily rate £525 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +10.53% -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 8,111 5,986 7,442
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 15.37% 18.25% 17.83%
Number of daily rates quoted 5,361 4,057 5,307
10th Percentile £352 £350 £350
25th Percentile £415 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £510 £525
Median % change year-on-year -1.96% -2.86% -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 258 100 124
10th Percentile £16.49 £19.56 £14.08
25th Percentile £25.10 £25.94 £20.77
Median hourly rate £42.11 £36.25 £39.25
Median % change year-on-year +16.15% -7.64% -28.64%
75th Percentile £64.00 £64.63 £54.06
90th Percentile £77.15 £77.62 £71.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £39.50 £31.64 £32.50
% change year-on-year +24.84% -2.65% -35.00%

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 20 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 20 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 20 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 -30 467 £575 -0.43% 129
London -32 291 £581 -10.58% 81
Work from Home -18 209 £540 -16.92% 68
UK excluding London -32 175 £525 +10.53% 68
Midlands +9 65 £600 +39.53% 17
North of England -55 49 £510 +7.37% 15
West Midlands -20 46 £600 +41.18% 13
North West -40 27 £500 - 7
Scotland +2 22 £417 -27.73% 6
East Midlands -1 19 £549 +33.90% 4
Yorkshire -42 19 £550 +22.09% 3
South East -80 18 £461 +1.26% 20
South West -25 14 £600 +26.32% 5
East of England -20 9 £575 -0.86% 3
North East -34 3 £463 - 5
Wales -15 1 £325 -35.00% 3

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 77 (13.63%) Apache Spark
2 46 (8.14%) Apache
3 42 (7.43%) Apache Airflow
4 29 (5.13%) SAS
5 21 (3.72%) 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 (1.06%) 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%) Aladdin
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%) Dynamics CRM
Cloud Services
1 358 (63.36%) Azure
2 201 (35.58%) AWS
3 169 (29.91%) Power Platform
4 138 (24.42%) Azure Data Factory
5 128 (22.65%) Azure Synapse Analytics
6 92 (16.28%) GCP
7 81 (14.34%) Azure DevOps
8 68 (12.04%) Snowflake
9 64 (11.33%) GitHub
10 60 (10.62%) Amazon S3
11 58 (10.27%) Serverless
12 35 (6.19%) AWS Lambda
13 33 (5.84%) GitHub Actions
14 28 (4.96%) Azure Cosmos DB
15 25 (4.42%) dbt
16 23 (4.07%) Microsoft Purview
17 22 (3.89%) Amazon EMR
17 22 (3.89%) Azure Key Vault
18 20 (3.54%) Azure Monitor
19 19 (3.36%) Azure Functions
Communications & Networking
1 10 (1.77%) Firewall
2 9 (1.59%) HTTP
3 6 (1.06%) DNS
4 5 (0.88%) WAN
5 4 (0.71%) 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%) Ethernet
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%) X.509
Database & Business Intelligence
1 206 (36.46%) Data Warehouse
2 151 (26.73%) Power BI
3 78 (13.81%) Metadata
4 61 (10.80%) Azure SQL Database
5 60 (10.62%) Amazon Redshift
6 47 (8.32%) Delta Lake
7 45 (7.96%) SQL Server
8 42 (7.43%) Big Data
9 39 (6.90%) Amazon Athena
10 32 (5.66%) BigQuery
11 29 (5.13%) PostgreSQL
12 27 (4.78%) NoSQL
13 26 (4.60%) Enterprise Data Warehouse
14 23 (4.07%) Relational Database
14 23 (4.07%) SQL Server Integration Services
15 22 (3.89%) Hadoop
16 21 (3.72%) Snowflake Schema
17 20 (3.54%) Tableau
18 17 (3.01%) Star Schema
19 13 (2.30%) SQL Server Analysis Services
Development Applications
1 57 (10.09%) Git
2 25 (4.42%) JIRA
3 24 (4.25%) GitLab
4 19 (3.36%) Jenkins
5 6 (1.06%) ER Studio
5 6 (1.06%) ERwin
6 5 (0.88%) MLflow
6 5 (0.88%) PowerDesigner
7 4 (0.71%) 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
1 144 (25.49%) Finance
2 124 (21.95%) Social Skills
3 73 (12.92%) Analytical Skills
4 58 (10.27%) Public Sector
5 33 (5.84%) Banking
6 22 (3.89%) Marketing
7 19 (3.36%) Retail
8 18 (3.19%) Documentation Skills
9 12 (2.12%) Manufacturing
10 8 (1.42%) Influencing Skills
11 7 (1.24%) Financial Institution
12 6 (1.06%) Inclusion and Diversity
12 6 (1.06%) Police
13 5 (0.88%) Military
14 4 (0.71%) Investment Banking
14 4 (0.71%) Publishing
15 3 (0.53%) Legal
15 3 (0.53%) Telecoms
16 2 (0.35%) Automotive
16 2 (0.35%) Law
Job Titles
1 183 (32.39%) Architect
2 174 (30.80%) Data Engineer
3 107 (18.94%) Data Architect
4 89 (15.75%) Senior
5 57 (10.09%) Solutions Architect
6 46 (8.14%) Senior Data Engineer
7 45 (7.96%) Lead
8 44 (7.79%) Azure Engineer
9 36 (6.37%) Analyst
10 35 (6.19%) Azure Data Engineer
10 35 (6.19%) Developer
11 28 (4.96%) Cloud Architect
12 25 (4.42%) Azure Architect
13 23 (4.07%) Data Analyst
14 21 (3.72%) AWS Engineer
15 20 (3.54%) Cloud Solutions Architect
16 18 (3.19%) Principal Engineer
17 17 (3.01%) Business Analyst
17 17 (3.01%) Lead Data Engineer
18 16 (2.83%) Data Business Analyst
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 84 (14.87%) PySpark
2 54 (9.56%) Kafka
3 26 (4.60%) REST
4 12 (2.12%) JSON
5 11 (1.95%) Great Expectations
5 11 (1.95%) YAML
6 10 (1.77%) Middleware
6 10 (1.77%) Spring Boot
6 10 (1.77%) XML
7 9 (1.59%) Model Context Protocol
7 9 (1.59%) Spring
8 8 (1.42%) React
9 7 (1.24%) FastAPI
10 6 (1.06%) .NET
10 6 (1.06%) ARM Templates
10 6 (1.06%) 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 84 (14.87%) Cloud Native
2 34 (6.02%) Data Structures
3 28 (4.96%) Distributed Systems
4 25 (4.42%) Legacy Systems
5 24 (4.25%) Product Ownership
6 15 (2.65%) IoT
7 12 (2.12%) Data Fabric
7 12 (2.12%) Data Protection Act
8 11 (1.95%) Low-Code
8 11 (1.95%) Management Information System
9 10 (1.77%) AI Agents
9 10 (1.77%) Onboarding
9 10 (1.77%) Reference Data
10 8 (1.42%) Digital Media
11 7 (1.24%) Marketing Technology
12 6 (1.06%) Enterprise Cloud
12 6 (1.06%) Enterprise Software
12 6 (1.06%) Reinsurance
12 6 (1.06%) Self-Motivation
13 5 (0.88%) Fixed Income
Operating Systems
1 15 (2.65%) Linux
2 10 (1.77%) 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
1 299 (52.92%) Analytics
2 258 (45.66%) ETL
3 246 (43.54%) Data Modelling
4 238 (42.12%) Data Pipeline
5 218 (38.58%) Data Engineering
6 200 (35.40%) CI/CD
7 193 (34.16%) Business Intelligence
8 190 (33.63%) Data Governance
9 160 (28.32%) Data Architecture
10 154 (27.26%) DevOps
11 145 (25.66%) AI
12 141 (24.96%) Agile
13 137 (24.25%) Migration
14 99 (17.52%) Machine Learning
15 91 (16.11%) Data Transformation
15 91 (16.11%) Problem-Solving
16 86 (15.22%) Stakeholder Management
17 85 (15.04%) Data Integration
17 85 (15.04%) Validation
18 75 (13.27%) Infrastructure as Code
Programming Languages
1 313 (55.40%) SQL
2 204 (36.11%) Python
3 41 (7.26%) Java
4 22 (3.89%) Scala
5 21 (3.72%) Data Analysis Expressions
6 19 (3.36%) C#
7 17 (3.01%) PowerShell
8 14 (2.48%) Bicep
8 14 (2.48%) T-SQL
9 10 (1.77%) Bash
9 10 (1.77%) JavaScript
10 9 (1.59%) Shell Script
11 8 (1.42%) PL/SQL
12 5 (0.88%) TypeScript
13 4 (0.71%) R
14 2 (0.35%) Cypher
14 2 (0.35%) SHACL
14 2 (0.35%) SOQL
15 1 (0.18%) C
Qualifications
1 133 (23.54%) Security Cleared
2 109 (19.29%) SC Cleared
3 26 (4.60%) Azure Certification
4 23 (4.07%) Degree
5 14 (2.48%) BPSS Clearance
6 11 (1.95%) Master's Degree
7 10 (1.77%) DV Cleared
8 9 (1.59%) AWS Certification
9 7 (1.24%) CISM
9 7 (1.24%) CISSP
9 7 (1.24%) Computer Science Degree
10 6 (1.06%) Microsoft Certification
10 6 (1.06%) TOGAF Certification
11 5 (0.88%) Microsoft Certified Professional
12 4 (0.71%) 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
1 184 (32.57%) Data Quality
2 59 (10.44%) GDPR
3 29 (5.13%) QA
4 6 (1.06%) Accessibility
4 6 (1.06%) ISO/IEC 27001
4 6 (1.06%) NIST
4 6 (1.06%) PCI DSS
4 6 (1.06%) Solvency II
5 5 (0.88%) GRC
6 4 (0.71%) IFRS
6 4 (0.71%) MiFID
7 3 (0.53%) Actionable Recommendations
7 3 (0.53%) IFRS 17
7 3 (0.53%) SLA
8 2 (0.35%) IFRS 9
8 2 (0.35%) PMO
9 1 (0.18%) California Consumer Privacy Act
9 1 (0.18%) Cyber Essentials
9 1 (0.18%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
9 1 (0.18%) HIPAA
System Software
1 31 (5.49%) Docker
2 8 (1.42%) Active Directory
2 8 (1.42%) Virtual Machines
3 5 (0.88%) Virtual Desktop
4 3 (0.53%) HDFS
Systems Management
1 85 (15.04%) Terraform
2 40 (7.08%) Kubernetes
3 12 (2.12%) Grafana
4 8 (1.42%) Ansible
5 4 (0.71%) 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
8 1 (0.18%) QRadar
Vendors
1 197 (34.87%) Databricks
2 126 (22.30%) Microsoft
3 42 (7.43%) Informatica
4 32 (5.66%) Oracle
5 29 (5.13%) Google
6 18 (3.19%) OpenAI
6 18 (3.19%) SAP
7 16 (2.83%) Talend
8 10 (1.77%) Denodo
9 9 (1.59%) Cloudera
9 9 (1.59%) Salesforce
10 8 (1.42%) Adobe
11 7 (1.24%) Infor
12 6 (1.06%) Dynatrace
13 5 (0.88%) IBM
14 4 (0.71%) BiZZdesign
14 4 (0.71%) Hortonworks
14 4 (0.71%) Red Hat
14 4 (0.71%) Splunk
15 3 (0.53%) Sparx