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

6 months to
1 Mar 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 236 183 229
Rank change year-on-year -53 +46 +19
Contract jobs citing Data Lake 475 432 450
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 1.14% 1.42% 1.01%
As % of the Database & Business Intelligence category 7.07% 7.54% 6.22%
Number of daily rates quoted 344 345 313
10th Percentile £393 £386 £400
25th Percentile £442 £465 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £545 £575 £525
Median % change year-on-year -5.22% +9.52% -8.70%
75th Percentile £638 £763 £635
90th Percentile £725 £938 £725
UK excluding London median daily rate £463 £475 £513
% change year-on-year -2.63% -7.32% -6.82%
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 6,719 5,731 7,235
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 16.18% 18.83% 16.20%
Number of daily rates quoted 4,639 3,883 5,118
10th Percentile £343 £350 £350
25th Percentile £413 £425 £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 £744
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £500 £498
% change year-on-year -5.00% +0.50% -0.50%
Number of hourly rates quoted 131 95 168
10th Percentile £18.25 £20.66 £15.97
25th Percentile £29.13 £24.50 £20.98
Median hourly rate £52.50 £35.00 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year +50.00% -17.65% -22.73%
75th Percentile £75.00 £64.86 £62.62
90th Percentile £85.25 £70.00 £76.53
UK excluding London median hourly rate £51.25 £27.63 £40.00
% change year-on-year +85.49% -30.93% -27.27%

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 1 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 1 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 -68 375 £550 -8.33% 141
London -39 269 £600 -11.11% 66
Work from Home -68 152 £533 -21.11% 74
UK excluding London -48 123 £463 -2.63% 102
North of England -46 36 £492 +11.82% 25
Scotland +29 31 £436 +4.93% 8
Midlands -47 21 £481 +10.00% 6
South East -44 19 £431 -13.75% 38
North West -32 18 £425 -3.41% 12
Yorkshire -56 12 £575 +27.78% 8
East Midlands -15 11 £444 +24.65% 2
West Midlands -54 10 £513 +17.14% 4
North East -15 6 £475 +21.79% 5
East of England -23 6 £534 +1.67% 5
Wales -7 5 £555 +11.00% 3
South West -23 5 £713 +9.62% 17
Northern Ireland -1 2 £430 -18.10%

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 68 (14.32%) Apache Spark
2 49 (10.32%) Apache Airflow
3 46 (9.68%) Apache
4 7 (1.47%) Confluence
5 6 (1.26%) SharePoint
6 3 (0.63%) WebLogic
7 2 (0.42%) Apache Synapse
7 2 (0.42%) Microsoft Exchange
7 2 (0.42%) nginx
8 1 (0.21%) Jupyter
Applications
1 5 (1.05%) 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 13 (2.74%) SAP S/4HANA
2 2 (0.42%) Aladdin
2 2 (0.42%) SAP MDG
3 1 (0.21%) Dynamics CRM
3 1 (0.21%) Infor M3
3 1 (0.21%) JDE EnterpriseOne
3 1 (0.21%) Loan IQ
3 1 (0.21%) Oracle EBS
3 1 (0.21%) SAP CO
3 1 (0.21%) SAP FI
3 1 (0.21%) SAP FI/CO
3 1 (0.21%) SAP MM
Cloud Services
1 339 (71.37%) Azure
2 165 (34.74%) Azure Synapse Analytics
3 155 (32.63%) Power Platform
4 153 (32.21%) AWS
5 144 (30.32%) Azure Data Factory
6 76 (16.00%) Azure DevOps
7 67 (14.11%) GitHub
8 66 (13.89%) Serverless
9 65 (13.68%) GCP
10 52 (10.95%) Snowflake
11 47 (9.89%) Amazon S3
12 39 (8.21%) AWS CloudFormation
13 37 (7.79%) Microsoft Purview
14 34 (7.16%) Azure Functions
15 33 (6.95%) GitHub Actions
16 26 (5.47%) Azure Cosmos DB
17 25 (5.26%) Azure Key Vault
18 24 (5.05%) AWS Lambda
19 19 (4.00%) dbt
20 18 (3.79%) Collibra
Communications & Networking
1 9 (1.89%) Firewall
2 4 (0.84%) VPN
3 3 (0.63%) Kerberos
4 2 (0.42%) Hyperconnected
4 2 (0.42%) Network Security
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 (30.32%) Data Warehouse
2 141 (29.68%) Power BI
3 63 (13.26%) Metadata
3 63 (13.26%) SQL Server
4 60 (12.63%) Delta Lake
5 57 (12.00%) Azure SQL Database
6 33 (6.95%) SQL Server Integration Services
7 32 (6.74%) Amazon Athena
8 30 (6.32%) Big Data
9 28 (5.89%) PostgreSQL
10 25 (5.26%) Relational Database
11 23 (4.84%) NoSQL
12 22 (4.63%) Amazon Redshift
12 22 (4.63%) BigQuery
12 22 (4.63%) Hadoop
13 19 (4.00%) Spark SQL
14 18 (3.79%) Mixpanel
15 15 (3.16%) OLAP
15 15 (3.16%) Tableau
16 14 (2.95%) OLTP
Development Applications
1 48 (10.11%) Git
2 31 (6.53%) GitLab
3 11 (2.32%) MLflow
4 10 (2.11%) JIRA
5 9 (1.89%) Jenkins
6 4 (0.84%) Bitbucket
6 4 (0.84%) ER Studio
6 4 (0.84%) ERwin
7 3 (0.63%) JMeter
8 2 (0.42%) Hudson
9 1 (0.21%) Liquibase
9 1 (0.21%) PowerDesigner
9 1 (0.21%) Pylint
9 1 (0.21%) SonarQube
9 1 (0.21%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
9 1 (0.21%) Terragrunt
9 1 (0.21%) Visual Studio
General
1 129 (27.16%) Social Skills
2 116 (24.42%) Finance
3 60 (12.63%) Analytical Skills
4 49 (10.32%) Public Sector
5 19 (4.00%) Banking
6 17 (3.58%) Influencing Skills
7 14 (2.95%) Documentation Skills
8 11 (2.32%) Pharmaceutical
9 10 (2.11%) Retail
10 8 (1.68%) Marketing
11 6 (1.26%) Front Office
12 5 (1.05%) Manufacturing
13 4 (0.84%) Inclusion and Diversity
13 4 (0.84%) Investment Banking
13 4 (0.84%) Military
14 3 (0.63%) Legal
15 2 (0.42%) Back Office
15 2 (0.42%) Local Government
15 2 (0.42%) Presentation Skills
15 2 (0.42%) Publishing
Job Titles
1 156 (32.84%) Data Engineer
2 99 (20.84%) Architect
3 69 (14.53%) Senior
4 59 (12.42%) Data Architect
5 50 (10.53%) Azure Engineer
6 45 (9.47%) Lead
7 39 (8.21%) Developer
8 31 (6.53%) Senior Data Engineer
9 28 (5.89%) AWS Engineer
9 28 (5.89%) Azure Data Engineer
10 26 (5.47%) Solutions Architect
11 22 (4.63%) Software Engineer
12 20 (4.21%) Principal Engineer
13 19 (4.00%) DevOps Engineer
14 18 (3.79%) Lead Data Engineer
15 17 (3.58%) Analyst
15 17 (3.58%) Python Engineer
16 16 (3.37%) Azure Architect
17 15 (3.16%) Platform Engineer
17 15 (3.16%) Principal Software Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 97 (20.42%) PySpark
2 47 (9.89%) Kafka
3 22 (4.63%) REST
4 17 (3.58%) JSON
4 17 (3.58%) Pandas
5 15 (3.16%) Great Expectations
6 13 (2.74%) Microsoft Graph
6 13 (2.74%) Model Context Protocol
6 13 (2.74%) PyTorch
6 13 (2.74%) scikit-learn
7 12 (2.53%) LangChain
7 12 (2.53%) XML
8 11 (2.32%) LangGraph
9 10 (2.11%) NumPy
9 10 (2.11%) Spark Streaming
9 10 (2.11%) TensorFlow
9 10 (2.11%) YAML
10 7 (1.47%) A2A Protocol
10 7 (1.47%) FastAPI
10 7 (1.47%) React
Miscellaneous
1 45 (9.47%) Cloud Native
2 19 (4.00%) Data Structures
3 17 (3.58%) Distributed Computing
4 15 (3.16%) IoT
5 12 (2.53%) Distributed Systems
6 11 (2.32%) Legacy Systems
7 10 (2.11%) Management Information System
7 10 (2.11%) Onboarding
7 10 (2.11%) Product Ownership
8 8 (1.68%) Data Fabric
9 7 (1.47%) Algorithms
9 7 (1.47%) Data Protection Act
9 7 (1.47%) NHS
10 6 (1.26%) Analytical Mindset
11 5 (1.05%) Fixed Income
12 4 (0.84%) Derivative
12 4 (0.84%) Equities
12 4 (0.84%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
12 4 (0.84%) Replication
12 4 (0.84%) Taxonomies
Operating Systems
1 15 (3.16%) Linux
2 8 (1.68%) Unix
3 6 (1.26%) Windows
4 2 (0.42%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 1 (0.21%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 255 (53.68%) Analytics
2 228 (48.00%) ETL
3 194 (40.84%) Data Pipeline
4 188 (39.58%) Data Modelling
5 175 (36.84%) CI/CD
6 165 (34.74%) Business Intelligence
7 156 (32.84%) Data Engineering
8 152 (32.00%) DevOps
9 150 (31.58%) Data Governance
10 113 (23.79%) AI
11 112 (23.58%) Data Architecture
12 97 (20.42%) Agile
13 91 (19.16%) Machine Learning
14 87 (18.32%) Infrastructure as Code
15 73 (15.37%) Problem-Solving
16 71 (14.95%) Data Science
17 62 (13.05%) Data Integration
18 59 (12.42%) Migration
19 53 (11.16%) Decision-Making
20 46 (9.68%) Data Ingestion
Programming Languages
1 278 (58.53%) SQL
2 231 (48.63%) Python
3 35 (7.37%) Java
4 30 (6.32%) C#
5 23 (4.84%) T-SQL
6 18 (3.79%) Scala
7 16 (3.37%) Bicep
7 16 (3.37%) PowerShell
8 14 (2.95%) Data Analysis Expressions
9 12 (2.53%) Bash
9 12 (2.53%) JavaScript
9 12 (2.53%) PL/SQL
10 7 (1.47%) R
10 7 (1.47%) TypeScript
11 2 (0.42%) Ada
11 2 (0.42%) C++
12 1 (0.21%) ANSI SQL
12 1 (0.21%) C
12 1 (0.21%) Korn
12 1 (0.21%) Perl
Qualifications
1 77 (16.21%) Security Cleared
2 56 (11.79%) SC Cleared
3 32 (6.74%) Degree
4 22 (4.63%) Azure Certification
5 16 (3.37%) Microsoft Certification
6 15 (3.16%) Master's Degree
7 10 (2.11%) BPSS Clearance
8 7 (1.47%) AWS Certification
8 7 (1.47%) Microsoft Certified Professional
8 7 (1.47%) TOGAF Certification
9 6 (1.26%) Computer Science Degree
10 5 (1.05%) CISM
10 5 (1.05%) CISSP
11 3 (0.63%) ISTQB
11 3 (0.63%) ISTQB Advanced Certification
11 3 (0.63%) PMI Certification
11 3 (0.63%) PMP
12 2 (0.42%) DV Cleared
12 2 (0.42%) Postgraduate
13 1 (0.21%) CGEIT
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 130 (27.37%) Data Quality
2 67 (14.11%) GDPR
3 20 (4.21%) QA
4 14 (2.95%) HIPAA
5 13 (2.74%) NIST
6 9 (1.89%) Accessibility
7 8 (1.68%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 4 (0.84%) PCI DSS
9 3 (0.63%) California Consumer Privacy Act
10 2 (0.42%) PMO
10 2 (0.42%) Solvency II
11 1 (0.21%) Actionable Recommendations
11 1 (0.21%) IFRS
11 1 (0.21%) IFRS 9
11 1 (0.21%) ISO/IEC 27001
11 1 (0.21%) SOC 2
System Software
1 34 (7.16%) Docker
2 7 (1.47%) Active Directory
3 5 (1.05%) HDFS
4 4 (0.84%) zsh
5 3 (0.63%) Virtual Machines
6 1 (0.21%) Lustre
6 1 (0.21%) NFS
Systems Management
1 96 (20.21%) Terraform
2 31 (6.53%) Kubernetes
3 6 (1.26%) Ansible
4 5 (1.05%) Grafana
5 3 (0.63%) Prometheus
6 1 (0.21%) Fluentd
6 1 (0.21%) Hadoop YARN
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
6 1 (0.21%) Single Sign-On
Vendors
1 200 (42.11%) Databricks
2 141 (29.68%) Microsoft
3 25 (5.26%) Oracle
4 24 (5.05%) Google
5 22 (4.63%) Informatica
6 21 (4.42%) SAP
7 18 (3.79%) OpenAI
8 10 (2.11%) Talend
9 6 (1.26%) Salesforce
9 6 (1.26%) ServiceNow
10 5 (1.05%) Cloudera
11 4 (0.84%) BiZZdesign
11 4 (0.84%) CheckPoint
11 4 (0.84%) Fortinet
11 4 (0.84%) Greenplum
12 3 (0.63%) Ab Initio
12 3 (0.63%) Red Hat
13 2 (0.42%) IFS
13 2 (0.42%) Infor
13 2 (0.42%) Splunk