Senior Data Engineer Contracts

Senior Data Engineer
UK

The median Senior Data Engineer daily rate in the UK is £515, according to job vacancies posted in the 6 months leading up to 2 May 2025.

The table below provides contractor rate benchmarking and summary statistics, comparing them to the same period in the previous two years.

 6 months to
2 May 2025		 Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 397 509 581
Rank change year-on-year +112 +72 +55
Contract jobs requiring a Senior Data Engineer 126 89 131
As % of all contract jobs advertised in the UK 0.43% 0.20% 0.22%
As % of the Job Titles category 0.46% 0.22% 0.23%
Number of daily rates quoted 98 62 86
10th Percentile £409 £421 £463
25th Percentile £456 £511 £513
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £515 £581 £600
Median % change year-on-year -11.40% -3.13% -
75th Percentile £623 £650 £675
90th Percentile £675 £700 £731
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £620 £590
% change year-on-year -23.39% +5.08% -5.60%
Number of hourly rates quoted 3 3 1
10th Percentile £73.74 £22.93 -
25th Percentile £75.60 £24.74 -
Median hourly rate £78.70 £30.50 £43.50
Median % change year-on-year +158.03% -29.89% -44.76%
75th Percentile £86.23 £51.00 -
90th Percentile £90.74 £61.65 -
UK excluding London median hourly rate £78.70 £30.50 £43.50
% change year-on-year +158.03% -29.89% -

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 27,138 40,367 56,304
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.49% 92.78% 94.61%
Number of daily rates quoted 17,714 26,265 39,350
10th Percentile £300 £275 £313
25th Percentile £406 £410 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £515 £525 £540
Median % change year-on-year -1.90% -2.78% +2.86%
75th Percentile £625 £638 £650
90th Percentile £738 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £493 £500
% change year-on-year -3.55% -1.50% +5.26%
Number of hourly rates quoted 1,034 2,668 1,565
10th Percentile £14.06 £12.86 £14.25
25th Percentile £18.50 £16.30 £19.40
Median hourly rate £29.00 £36.02 £45.00
Median % change year-on-year -19.49% -19.95% +91.49%
75th Percentile £62.50 £60.75 £65.75
90th Percentile £75.00 £72.50 £75.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £28.00 £39.50 £42.43
% change year-on-year -29.11% -6.91% +117.60%

Senior Data Engineer
Job Vacancy Trend

Job postings that featured Senior Data Engineer in the job title as a proportion of all IT jobs advertised.

Job vacancy trend for Senior Data Engineer in the UK

Senior Data Engineer
Contractor Daily Rate Trend

3-month moving average daily rate quoted in jobs citing Senior Data Engineer.

Daily rate trend for Senior Data Engineer in the UK

Senior Data Engineer
Daily Rate Histogram

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Senior Data Engineer over the 6 months to 2 May 2025.

Daily rate histogram for Senior Data Engineer in the UK

Senior Data Engineer
Contractor Hourly Rate Trend

3-month moving average hourly rates quoted in jobs citing Senior Data Engineer.

Hourly rate trend for Senior Data Engineer in the UK

Senior Data Engineer
Hourly Rate Histogram

Hourly rate distribution of jobs citing Senior Data Engineer over the 6 months to 2 May 2025.

Hourly rate histogram for Senior Data Engineer in the UK

Senior Data Engineer
Top 15 Contract Locations

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing Senior Data Engineer within the UK over the 6 months to 2 May 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 +97 119 £525 -16.00% 227
London +66 75 £554 -9.55% 110
UK excluding London +79 45 £475 -23.39% 155
Work from Home +45 32 £575 -4.17% 91
North of England +36 19 £463 -11.06% 35
North West +23 13 £475 -8.65% 19
South West - 8 £525 - 18
South East +42 7 £650 -3.70% 55
Midlands +22 7 £550 +30.95% 19
Yorkshire +11 6 £450 - 12
West Midlands +18 5 £600 +42.86% 11
East of England +32 4 £318 -39.34% 19
East Midlands +14 2 £421 - 6
Scotland +10 1 £463 +3.93% 11
Wales - 1 £167 - 3

Senior Data Engineer Skill Set
Top 30 Co-occurring Skills and Capabilities

For the 6 months to 2 May 2025, Senior Data Engineer contract job roles required the following skills and capabilities in order of popularity. The figures indicate the absolute number co-occurrences and as a proportion of all contract job ads featuring Senior Data Engineer in the job title.

1 78 (61.90%) SQL
2 70 (55.56%) Python
3 58 (46.03%) Azure
4 55 (43.65%) ETL
5 52 (41.27%) AWS
6 51 (40.48%) Data Pipeline
7 43 (34.13%) Analytics
8 39 (30.95%) Data Engineering
9 37 (29.37%) Data Warehouse
10 33 (26.19%) Data Modelling
11 32 (25.40%) Social Skills
12 30 (23.81%) Databricks
13 29 (23.02%) Security Cleared
14 28 (22.22%) CI/CD
15 27 (21.43%) Data Quality
16 26 (20.63%) Problem-Solving
17 25 (19.84%) dbt
17 25 (19.84%) Finance
18 23 (18.25%) Agile
18 23 (18.25%) Snowflake
19 22 (17.46%) PySpark
19 22 (17.46%) Azure Data Factory
20 21 (16.67%) Apache Airflow
21 20 (15.87%) Microsoft
21 20 (15.87%) Business Intelligence
22 19 (15.08%) Visualisation
22 19 (15.08%) Kubernetes
23 18 (14.29%) Relational Database
23 18 (14.29%) SC Cleared
24 17 (13.49%) Containerisation

Senior Data Engineer Skill Set
Co-occurring Skills and Capabilities by Category

The follow tables expand on the table above by listing co-occurrences grouped by category. The same employment type, locality and period is covered with up to 20 co-occurrences shown in each of the following categories:

Application Platforms
1 21 (16.67%) Apache Airflow
2 15 (11.90%) Apache Spark
3 14 (11.11%) Apache
4 2 (1.59%) SharePoint
5 1 (0.79%) Cloud Foundry
5 1 (0.79%) Luigi
Applications
1 2 (1.59%) Microsoft Excel
Business Applications
1 1 (0.79%) Payment Gateway
1 1 (0.79%) SAP BPC
1 1 (0.79%) SAP CAR
1 1 (0.79%) SAP EWM
Cloud Services
1 58 (46.03%) Azure
2 52 (41.27%) AWS
3 25 (19.84%) dbt
4 23 (18.25%) Snowflake
5 22 (17.46%) Azure Data Factory
6 16 (12.70%) Power Platform
7 15 (11.90%) GCP
8 11 (8.73%) Amazon S3
9 10 (7.94%) GitHub
10 9 (7.14%) Azure Synapse Analytics
11 8 (6.35%) Serverless
12 5 (3.97%) AWS Lambda
12 5 (3.97%) Azure Service Bus
12 5 (3.97%) Matillion
13 4 (3.17%) Amazon EC2
13 4 (3.17%) Amazon EKS
13 4 (3.17%) Azure DevOps
14 3 (2.38%) Amazon SageMaker
14 3 (2.38%) Azure Storage
14 3 (2.38%) Power Automate
Database & Business Intelligence
1 37 (29.37%) Data Warehouse
2 18 (14.29%) Relational Database
3 16 (12.70%) Power BI
4 12 (9.52%) Big Data
4 12 (9.52%) Data Lake
5 10 (7.94%) Hadoop
6 8 (6.35%) Azure SQL Database
6 8 (6.35%) SQL Server
7 7 (5.56%) Delta Lake
7 7 (5.56%) PostgreSQL
7 7 (5.56%) SQL Server Integration Services
8 6 (4.76%) Airbyte
8 6 (4.76%) Metadata
8 6 (4.76%) Tableau
9 5 (3.97%) Amazon Athena
9 5 (3.97%) Elasticsearch
9 5 (3.97%) Snowflake Schema
10 4 (3.17%) Amazon Redshift
10 4 (3.17%) NoSQL
11 3 (2.38%) BigQuery
Development Applications
1 3 (2.38%) Git
1 3 (2.38%) Terragrunt
2 2 (1.59%) MLflow
2 2 (1.59%) SpecFlow
3 1 (0.79%) Jenkins
3 1 (0.79%) JIRA
3 1 (0.79%) Postman
3 1 (0.79%) Selenium
General
1 32 (25.40%) Social Skills
2 25 (19.84%) Finance
3 13 (10.32%) Public Sector
4 7 (5.56%) Analytical Skills
5 4 (3.17%) Banking
5 4 (3.17%) Marketing
6 3 (2.38%) Retail
6 3 (2.38%) Telecoms
7 2 (1.59%) Automotive
7 2 (1.59%) Digital Healthcare
7 2 (1.59%) Electronics
7 2 (1.59%) Games
7 2 (1.59%) Influencing Skills
7 2 (1.59%) Investment Banking
7 2 (1.59%) Local Government
7 2 (1.59%) Manufacturing
8 1 (0.79%) Billing
8 1 (0.79%) General Ledger
8 1 (0.79%) Legal
8 1 (0.79%) Military
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 22 (17.46%) PySpark
2 14 (11.11%) REST
3 12 (9.52%) Kafka
4 6 (4.76%) Apache NiFi
5 5 (3.97%) .NET
5 5 (3.97%) .NET Core
5 5 (3.97%) .NET Framework
5 5 (3.97%) ASP.NET
5 5 (3.97%) ASP.NET MVC
5 5 (3.97%) ASP.NET Web API
5 5 (3.97%) Autofac
5 5 (3.97%) Dapper ORM
5 5 (3.97%) Entity Framework
5 5 (3.97%) StructureMap
5 5 (3.97%) WCF
5 5 (3.97%) Web Services
6 4 (3.17%) Elastic Stack
7 3 (2.38%) PyTorch
7 3 (2.38%) scikit-learn
7 3 (2.38%) TensorFlow
Miscellaneous
1 5 (3.97%) Cloud Native
1 5 (3.97%) N-Tier
2 4 (3.17%) Data Structures
2 4 (3.17%) Replication
3 3 (2.38%) Algorithms
3 3 (2.38%) Distributed Systems
3 3 (2.38%) Legacy Systems
4 2 (1.59%) Client/Server
4 2 (1.59%) Distributed Computing
4 2 (1.59%) Self-Motivation
5 1 (0.79%) Data Protection Act
5 1 (0.79%) Greenfield Project
5 1 (0.79%) Hybrid Cloud
5 1 (0.79%) Management Information System
5 1 (0.79%) Onboarding
5 1 (0.79%) Product Ownership
5 1 (0.79%) Smart City
5 1 (0.79%) Social Media
Operating Systems
1 1 (0.79%) Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 55 (43.65%) ETL
2 51 (40.48%) Data Pipeline
3 43 (34.13%) Analytics
4 39 (30.95%) Data Engineering
5 33 (26.19%) Data Modelling
6 28 (22.22%) CI/CD
7 26 (20.63%) Problem-Solving
8 23 (18.25%) Agile
9 20 (15.87%) Business Intelligence
10 19 (15.08%) Visualisation
11 17 (13.49%) Containerisation
12 16 (12.70%) Artificial Intelligence
12 16 (12.70%) Data Science
12 16 (12.70%) DevOps
13 13 (10.32%) Data Governance
13 13 (10.32%) Data Ingestion
13 13 (10.32%) Machine Learning
14 11 (8.73%) Mentoring
15 10 (7.94%) Data Integration
15 10 (7.94%) Infrastructure as Code
Programming Languages
1 78 (61.90%) SQL
2 70 (55.56%) Python
3 7 (5.56%) C#
4 6 (4.76%) Java
4 6 (4.76%) SPARQL
5 5 (3.97%) T-SQL
6 4 (3.17%) Scala
7 1 (0.79%) Bash
7 1 (0.79%) JavaScript
7 1 (0.79%) PL/SQL
7 1 (0.79%) Shell Script
Qualifications
1 29 (23.02%) Security Cleared
2 18 (14.29%) SC Cleared
3 10 (7.94%) Degree
4 6 (4.76%) Microsoft Certification
5 5 (3.97%) DV Cleared
5 5 (3.97%) MCPD
5 5 (3.97%) MCSD
6 4 (3.17%) Computer Science Degree
7 2 (1.59%) AWS Certification
7 2 (1.59%) Azure Certification
8 1 (0.79%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
8 1 (0.79%) IBM Certification
8 1 (0.79%) Master's Degree
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 27 (21.43%) Data Quality
2 6 (4.76%) QA
3 2 (1.59%) Accessibility
3 2 (1.59%) GDPR
System Software
1 14 (11.11%) Docker
2 1 (0.79%) HDFS
Systems Management
1 19 (15.08%) Kubernetes
2 9 (7.14%) Terraform
3 4 (3.17%) Kibana
3 4 (3.17%) logstash
4 3 (2.38%) Grafana
4 3 (2.38%) Prometheus
5 2 (1.59%) Kubeflow
6 1 (0.79%) Ansible
Vendors
1 30 (23.81%) Databricks
2 20 (15.87%) Microsoft
3 4 (3.17%) Google
3 4 (3.17%) Oracle
3 4 (3.17%) SAP
4 3 (2.38%) MicroStrategy
5 2 (1.59%) NVIDIA
5 2 (1.59%) Talend
6 1 (0.79%) Alteryx
6 1 (0.79%) Cloudera
6 1 (0.79%) IBM
6 1 (0.79%) Informatica
6 1 (0.79%) Red Hat
6 1 (0.79%) Remedy
6 1 (0.79%) Virgin Media
250 Senior Data Engineer jobs Nationwide