Data Science Engineer Contract Job Trends

Data Science Engineer
UK

The median Data Science Engineer daily rate in the UK is £536, according to job vacancies posted in the 6 months leading up to 14 December 2025.

The table below compares current contractor rates and summary statistics with the previous two years.

6 months to
14 Dec 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 572 563 609
Rank change year-on-year -9 +46 +179
Contract jobs requiring a Data Science Engineer 9 1 3
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.025% 0.003% 0.007%
As % of the Job Titles category 0.027% 0.003% 0.007%
Number of daily rates quoted 3 1 2
10th Percentile £287 - £212
25th Percentile £381 - £255
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £536 £500 £340
Median % change year-on-year +7.20% +47.06% -53.90%
75th Percentile £668 - £430
90th Percentile £748 - £476
UK excluding London median daily rate £250 - -

All Contract IT Job Vacancies
UK

For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all contract IT job vacancies. Most job vacancies include a discernible job title that can be normalized. As such, the figures in the second row provide an indication of the number of contract jobs in our overall sample.

Contract vacancies in the UK with a recognized job title 33,137 32,079 41,606
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 90.94% 92.76% 93.43%
Number of daily rates quoted 20,987 19,722 27,981
10th Percentile £290 £300 £292
25th Percentile £404 £410 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £619 £638 £644
90th Percentile £723 £738 £740
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £490 £500
% change year-on-year -3.06% -2.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 1,959 1,044 1,467
10th Percentile £14.25 £15.48 £15.16
25th Percentile £17.98 £21.05 £19.06
Median hourly rate £25.47 £35.00 £44.50
Median % change year-on-year -27.23% -21.35% +48.33%
75th Percentile £57.50 £63.75 £65.00
90th Percentile £71.46 £73.28 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £25.15 £32.50 £45.00
% change year-on-year -22.62% -27.78% +80.00%

Data Science Engineer
Job Vacancy Trend

Historical trend showing the proportion of contract IT job postings featuring 'Data Science Engineer' in the job title relative to all contract IT jobs advertised.

Data Science Engineer job vacancy trend in the UK

Data Science Engineer
Daily Rate Trend

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for Data Science Engineer job vacancies in the UK.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for Data Science Engineer job vacancies in the UK

Data Science Engineer
Daily Rate Histogram

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Data Science Engineer over the 6 months to 14 December 2025.

Daily rate histogram for Data Science Engineer in the UK

Data Science Engineer
Top 5 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 Science Engineer within the UK over the 6 months to 14 December 2025. 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 - 9 £536 - 3
London - 8 £668 - 2
Work from Home +18 2 £668 +33.65% 1
East of England - 1 £250 -
UK excluding London - 1 £250 - 2

Data Science Engineer Skill Set
Top 30 Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities

For the 6 months to 14 December 2025, Data Science Engineer contract job roles required the following skills and capabilities in order of popularity. The figures indicate the absolute number of co-occurrences and as a proportion of all contract job ads featuring Data Science Engineer in the job title.

1 9 (100.00%) Data Science
2 8 (88.89%) AI
2 8 (88.89%) Machine Learning
2 8 (88.89%) Python
3 7 (77.78%) AWS
3 7 (77.78%) Natural Language Processing
4 6 (66.67%) CI/CD
4 6 (66.67%) DevOps
4 6 (66.67%) Jenkins
4 6 (66.67%) MLOps
4 6 (66.67%) Test Automation
5 5 (55.56%) API Design
5 5 (55.56%) AutoML
5 5 (55.56%) Databricks
5 5 (55.56%) Generative AI
5 5 (55.56%) MLflow
5 5 (55.56%) Unit Testing
5 5 (55.56%) Workflow
6 3 (33.33%) Data Cleansing
6 3 (33.33%) SQL
7 2 (22.22%) Agile
7 2 (22.22%) Azure
7 2 (22.22%) Data Pipeline
7 2 (22.22%) LLM
7 2 (22.22%) PyTorch
7 2 (22.22%) Serverless
7 2 (22.22%) TensorFlow
7 2 (22.22%) Validation
8 1 (11.11%) .NET
8 1 (11.11%) Actionable Insight

Data Science Engineer Skill Set
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 1 (11.11%) Jupyter
Applications
1 1 (11.11%) Microsoft Excel
Cloud Services
1 7 (77.78%) AWS
2 2 (22.22%) Azure
2 2 (22.22%) Serverless
3 1 (11.11%) Amazon Bedrock
3 1 (11.11%) Amazon CloudWatch
3 1 (11.11%) Amazon ECS
3 1 (11.11%) Amazon SageMaker
3 1 (11.11%) Apigee
3 1 (11.11%) AWS Fargate
3 1 (11.11%) AWS Lambda
3 1 (11.11%) Azure AKS
3 1 (11.11%) Azure Functions
3 1 (11.11%) GCP
3 1 (11.11%) GitHub
3 1 (11.11%) GitHub Copilot
3 1 (11.11%) Power Platform
Database & Business Intelligence
1 1 (11.11%) Amazon Athena
1 1 (11.11%) Amazon RDS
1 1 (11.11%) Amazon Redshift
1 1 (11.11%) Power BI
1 1 (11.11%) Tableau
Development Applications
1 6 (66.67%) Jenkins
2 5 (55.56%) MLflow
3 1 (11.11%) Git
3 1 (11.11%) Maven
3 1 (11.11%) RStudio
General
1 1 (11.11%) Social Skills
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 2 (22.22%) PyTorch
1 2 (22.22%) TensorFlow
2 1 (11.11%) .NET
2 1 (11.11%) FastAPI
2 1 (11.11%) Flask
2 1 (11.11%) Hugging Face
2 1 (11.11%) Pandas
2 1 (11.11%) PySpark
2 1 (11.11%) REST
2 1 (11.11%) RESTful
2 1 (11.11%) scikit-learn
2 1 (11.11%) Semantic Kernel
Miscellaneous
1 1 (11.11%) Algorithms
1 1 (11.11%) Cloud Native
1 1 (11.11%) Educational Technology
1 1 (11.11%) Product Ownership
Operating Systems
1 1 (11.11%) Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 9 (100.00%) Data Science
2 8 (88.89%) AI
2 8 (88.89%) Machine Learning
3 7 (77.78%) Natural Language Processing
4 6 (66.67%) CI/CD
4 6 (66.67%) DevOps
4 6 (66.67%) MLOps
4 6 (66.67%) Test Automation
5 5 (55.56%) API Design
5 5 (55.56%) AutoML
5 5 (55.56%) Generative AI
5 5 (55.56%) Unit Testing
5 5 (55.56%) Workflow
6 3 (33.33%) Data Cleansing
7 2 (22.22%) Agile
7 2 (22.22%) Data Pipeline
7 2 (22.22%) LLM
7 2 (22.22%) Validation
8 1 (11.11%) Feature Engineering
8 1 (11.11%) Retrieval-Augmented Generation
Programming Languages
1 8 (88.89%) Python
2 3 (33.33%) SQL
3 1 (11.11%) R
Qualifications
1 1 (11.11%) Computer Science Degree
1 1 (11.11%) Degree
1 1 (11.11%) MCP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 1 (11.11%) Data Quality
1 1 (11.11%) EU AI Act
1 1 (11.11%) NIST
1 1 (11.11%) QA
System Software
1 1 (11.11%) Docker
Systems Management
1 1 (11.11%) Progress Chef
Vendors
1 5 (55.56%) Databricks
2 1 (11.11%) Foundry
2 1 (11.11%) Microsoft