Data Engineering Job Trends

Data Engineering
UK

The table below provides summary statistics and salary benchmarking for jobs requiring Data Engineering skills. It covers permanent job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 17 September 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
17 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 131 149 158
Rank change year-on-year +18 +9 +50
Permanent jobs citing Data Engineering 1,659 1,063 1,309
As % of all permanent jobs in the UK 1.44% 2.15% 1.68%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 1.98% 2.43% 2.07%
Number of salaries quoted 1,169 475 651
10th Percentile £46,217 £46,000 £44,738
25th Percentile £56,000 £55,000 £56,250
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £80,000 £70,000 £71,991
Median % change year-on-year +14.29% -2.77% -4.01%
75th Percentile £100,000 £95,000 £92,500
90th Percentile £115,000 £112,500 £105,000
UK excluding London median annual salary £70,863 £65,000 £62,700
% change year-on-year +9.02% +3.67% -3.54%

All Process & Methodology Skills
UK

Data Engineering falls under the Processes and Methodologies category. For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all permanent job vacancies requiring process or methodology skills.

Permanent vacancies with a requirement for process or methodology skills 83,912 43,812 63,193
As % of all permanent jobs advertised in the UK 73.03% 88.75% 81.16%
Number of salaries quoted 58,112 24,707 35,897
10th Percentile £31,250 £28,500 £32,000
25th Percentile £42,000 £36,250 £42,500
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £60,000 £55,000 £57,500
Median % change year-on-year +9.09% -4.35% -4.17%
75th Percentile £80,000 £75,000 £77,500
90th Percentile £100,000 £96,250 £95,000
UK excluding London median annual salary £55,000 £47,500 £52,500
% change year-on-year +15.79% -9.52% -2.78%

Data Engineering
Job Vacancy Trend

Historical trend showing the proportion of permanent IT job postings citing Data Engineering relative to all permanent IT jobs advertised.

Data Engineering job vacancy trend in the UK

Data Engineering
Salary Trend

Salary distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing Data Engineering.

Salary distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing Data Engineering

Data Engineering
Salary Histogram

Salary distribution for jobs citing Data Engineering over the 6 months to 17 September 2026.

Salary histogram for Data Engineering in the UK

Data Engineering
Top 17 Job Locations

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median salaries quoted in IT jobs citing Data Engineering within the UK over the 6 months to 17 September 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
Permanent
IT Job Ads
Median Salary
Past 6 Months
Median Salary
% Change
on Same Period
Last Year
Live
Jobs
England +17 1,537 £80,000 +14.29% 2,167
UK excluding London -19 817 £70,863 +9.02% 933
London +34 741 £90,000 +5.88% 1,394
Work from Home +12 525 £80,000 +13.48% 891
North of England +3 370 £75,000 +11.11% 268
North West -29 175 £80,000 +39.13% 159
South East -54 154 £70,000 +7.69% 224
Midlands +5 110 £75,000 +11.11% 117
Yorkshire -5 99 £75,000 +7.14% 69
North East +15 96 £66,805 +40.64% 40
South West -19 86 £62,500 +4.17% 101
West Midlands -1 76 £75,000 +25.00% 89
East of England -19 42 £70,000 +40.00% 61
East Midlands -27 34 £77,500 +13.97% 28
Scotland -14 30 £100,000 +37.93% 94
Wales -46 28 £63,500 +26.69% 19
Northern Ireland - 1 - - 49

Data Engineering
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
1 173 (10.43%) Apache Spark
2 143 (8.62%) Apache Airflow
3 127 (7.66%) Apache
4 22 (1.33%) Palantir Foundry
5 20 (1.21%) Jupyter
6 14 (0.84%) SAS
7 10 (0.60%) Confluence
7 10 (0.60%) SharePoint
8 9 (0.54%) Oracle Workflow
9 4 (0.24%) Luigi
10 2 (0.12%) Adobe Experience Manager
10 2 (0.12%) Apache Superset
10 2 (0.12%) Tornado
11 1 (0.060%) ArcGIS
11 1 (0.060%) CMS
11 1 (0.060%) GeoServer
11 1 (0.060%) Moodle
Applications
1 19 (1.15%) Microsoft Excel
2 8 (0.48%) Spreadsheet
3 4 (0.24%) MS Visio
4 2 (0.12%) Microsoft Office
5 1 (0.060%) Chatbot
5 1 (0.060%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 1 (0.060%) Microsoft Project
Business Applications
1 5 (0.30%) IBM Planning Analytics
2 4 (0.24%) Dynamics CRM
3 2 (0.12%) SAP Business One
4 1 (0.060%) Academy Revenues and Benefits
4 1 (0.060%) FastStats
4 1 (0.060%) Infor M3
4 1 (0.060%) NetSuite
4 1 (0.060%) Oracle Assets
4 1 (0.060%) Oracle ERP
4 1 (0.060%) SAP S/4HANA
4 1 (0.060%) SAP SD
Cloud Services
1 689 (41.53%) Azure
2 483 (29.11%) AWS
3 289 (17.42%) Power Platform
4 276 (16.64%) GCP
5 213 (12.84%) Snowflake
6 182 (10.97%) Azure Data Factory
7 151 (9.10%) Azure Synapse Analytics
8 137 (8.26%) dbt
9 99 (5.97%) Amazon S3
9 99 (5.97%) Serverless
10 98 (5.91%) Azure DevOps
11 82 (4.94%) Azure Machine Learning
12 67 (4.04%) Azure AI
13 66 (3.98%) AWS Lambda
14 65 (3.92%) GitHub
15 64 (3.86%) SaaS
16 51 (3.07%) Amazon EMR
17 48 (2.89%) Azure Databricks
18 44 (2.65%) Microsoft Purview
19 41 (2.47%) Amazon EC2
Communications & Networking
1 18 (1.08%) Broadband
2 7 (0.42%) Internet
3 4 (0.24%) 5G
4 2 (0.12%) Firewall
4 2 (0.12%) HTTP
4 2 (0.12%) MQTT
5 1 (0.060%) 4G
5 1 (0.060%) ATM
5 1 (0.060%) DAB
5 1 (0.060%) SMS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 301 (18.14%) Data Warehouse
2 279 (16.82%) Power BI
3 224 (13.50%) Data Lake
4 134 (8.08%) SQL Server
5 118 (7.11%) BigQuery
6 111 (6.69%) Amazon Redshift
7 108 (6.51%) Tableau
8 104 (6.27%) Metadata
9 85 (5.12%) Big Data
10 70 (4.22%) Azure SQL Database
11 65 (3.92%) NoSQL
12 59 (3.56%) Relational Database
12 59 (3.56%) Semantic Layer
13 57 (3.44%) Star Schema
14 56 (3.38%) Delta Lake
15 52 (3.13%) PostgreSQL
16 50 (3.01%) Amazon Athena
17 48 (2.89%) Spark SQL
18 43 (2.59%) Looker
19 39 (2.35%) Elasticsearch
Development Applications
1 122 (7.35%) Git
2 35 (2.11%) Jenkins
3 24 (1.45%) GitLab
4 21 (1.27%) JIRA
5 19 (1.15%) MLflow
6 10 (0.60%) Claude Code
7 5 (0.30%) Poetry
8 4 (0.24%) Selenium
8 4 (0.24%) Visual Studio Code
9 3 (0.18%) Bitbucket
9 3 (0.18%) Octopus Deploy
10 2 (0.12%) ERwin
10 2 (0.12%) RStudio
10 2 (0.12%) VSS/SourceSafe
11 1 (0.060%) kappa
11 1 (0.060%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
11 1 (0.060%) Visual Studio
11 1 (0.060%) Yeoman
General
1 437 (26.34%) Finance
2 411 (24.77%) Social Skills
3 286 (17.24%) Analytical Skills
4 141 (8.50%) Public Sector
5 108 (6.51%) Inclusion and Diversity
6 72 (4.34%) Banking
7 60 (3.62%) Retail
8 55 (3.32%) Marketing
9 46 (2.77%) Legal
10 38 (2.29%) Influencing Skills
11 37 (2.23%) Law
12 31 (1.87%) Financial Institution
13 26 (1.57%) Manufacturing
14 22 (1.33%) Advertising
15 13 (0.78%) Games
15 13 (0.78%) Presentation Skills
16 12 (0.72%) Aerospace
16 12 (0.72%) Organisational Skills
17 10 (0.60%) Police
18 9 (0.54%) Documentation Skills
Job Titles
1 648 (39.06%) Data Engineer
2 368 (22.18%) Senior
3 297 (17.90%) Lead
4 190 (11.45%) Senior Data Engineer
5 141 (8.50%) Architect
6 116 (6.99%) Data Manager
7 100 (6.03%) Data Architect
8 96 (5.79%) Lead Data Engineer
9 73 (4.40%) Analyst
9 73 (4.40%) Engineering Manager
9 73 (4.40%) Principal Engineer
10 70 (4.22%) Developer
11 62 (3.74%) Consultant
12 58 (3.50%) Software Engineer
13 55 (3.32%) Databricks Engineer
14 46 (2.77%) Head of Engineering
15 45 (2.71%) Principal Data Engineer
16 44 (2.65%) Data Scientist
16 44 (2.65%) Databricks Data Engineer
17 43 (2.59%) Data Consultant
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 181 (10.91%) PySpark
2 127 (7.66%) Terraform
3 90 (5.42%) Kafka
4 41 (2.47%) .NET
4 41 (2.47%) LangChain
5 36 (2.17%) REST
6 35 (2.11%) PyTorch
6 35 (2.11%) scikit-learn
6 35 (2.11%) TensorFlow
7 34 (2.05%) LlamaIndex
8 28 (1.69%) Pandas
9 27 (1.63%) Node.js
10 23 (1.39%) SpaCy
11 22 (1.33%) JSON
12 20 (1.21%) pgvector
13 16 (0.96%) Apache NiFi
14 15 (0.90%) RESTful
15 12 (0.72%) React
16 11 (0.66%) FastAPI
16 11 (0.66%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 186 (11.21%) Cloud Native
2 67 (4.04%) Data Structures
3 63 (3.80%) Product Ownership
4 55 (3.32%) Distributed Systems
5 46 (2.77%) Onboarding
6 36 (2.17%) AI Agents
7 25 (1.51%) e-Learning
8 20 (1.21%) Self-Motivation
9 19 (1.15%) Analytical Mindset
9 19 (1.15%) Distributed Computing
10 18 (1.08%) Legacy Systems
10 18 (1.08%) Management Information System
10 18 (1.08%) Public Cloud
11 16 (0.96%) Clustering
11 16 (0.96%) Greenfield Project
11 16 (0.96%) Hedge funds
12 15 (0.90%) Hybrid Cloud
12 15 (0.90%) Low-Code
13 14 (0.84%) Distributed Architecture
13 14 (0.84%) IoT
Operating Systems
1 7 (0.42%) Windows
2 4 (0.24%) Linux
3 1 (0.060%) Apple iOS
Processes & Methodologies
1 785 (47.32%) Analytics
2 617 (37.19%) AI
3 585 (35.26%) Data Pipeline
4 514 (30.98%) Data Modelling
5 477 (28.75%) ETL
6 430 (25.92%) CI/CD
7 427 (25.74%) Business Intelligence
8 413 (24.89%) Data Governance
9 401 (24.17%) Decision-Making
10 400 (24.11%) Agile
11 391 (23.57%) Machine Learning
12 360 (21.70%) Data Architecture
13 311 (18.75%) Mentoring
14 309 (18.63%) DevOps
15 279 (16.82%) Data Science
16 267 (16.09%) Problem-Solving
17 243 (14.65%) Roadmaps
18 207 (12.48%) Lakehouse
19 206 (12.42%) Technical Leadership
20 187 (11.27%) Continuous Improvement
Programming Languages
1 850 (51.24%) SQL
2 821 (49.49%) Python
3 125 (7.53%) Java
4 72 (4.34%) Scala
5 61 (3.68%) JavaScript
6 52 (3.13%) Data Analysis Expressions
7 36 (2.17%) C#
8 31 (1.87%) C++
9 30 (1.81%) TypeScript
10 28 (1.69%) R
11 19 (1.15%) Bash
12 16 (0.96%) T-SQL
13 13 (0.78%) PowerShell
14 11 (0.66%) Go
15 8 (0.48%) Bicep
16 7 (0.42%) Groovy
17 5 (0.30%) PL/SQL
17 5 (0.30%) VBA
18 4 (0.24%) Rust
19 3 (0.18%) Julia
Qualifications
1 173 (10.43%) Security Cleared
2 172 (10.37%) Degree
3 117 (7.05%) SC Cleared
4 55 (3.32%) Master's Degree
5 51 (3.07%) Computer Science Degree
6 44 (2.65%) Azure Certification
7 40 (2.41%) DV Cleared
8 29 (1.75%) DBS Check
9 28 (1.69%) BPSS Clearance
10 25 (1.51%) PhD
11 24 (1.45%) AWS Certification
12 15 (0.90%) ACCA
12 15 (0.90%) CIMA
13 14 (0.84%) Microsoft Certification
14 6 (0.36%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
14 6 (0.36%) Numerate Degree
15 4 (0.24%) CBAP
15 4 (0.24%) CCA
16 3 (0.18%) CISSP
16 3 (0.18%) PMI Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 469 (28.27%) Data Quality
2 77 (4.64%) GDPR
3 58 (3.50%) Accessibility
4 34 (2.05%) QA
5 14 (0.84%) California Consumer Privacy Act
6 11 (0.66%) GRC
7 9 (0.54%) Actionable Recommendations
8 7 (0.42%) NCSC
9 6 (0.36%) PERC
10 4 (0.24%) PMO
10 4 (0.24%) SLA
11 3 (0.18%) EU AI Act
11 3 (0.18%) PCI DSS
11 3 (0.18%) PSD2
12 2 (0.12%) ISO/IEC 42001
12 2 (0.12%) Solvency II
13 1 (0.060%) NIST
System Software
1 96 (5.79%) Docker
2 56 (3.38%) Virtual Machines
3 7 (0.42%) Active Directory
4 3 (0.18%) NDS
4 3 (0.18%) VMware Infrastructure
5 1 (0.060%) Apache Flume
5 1 (0.060%) Embedded Firmware
5 1 (0.060%) Firmware
Systems Management
1 65 (3.92%) Kubernetes
2 13 (0.78%) Grafana
3 5 (0.30%) Prometheus
4 4 (0.24%) Argo
5 3 (0.18%) Ansible
5 3 (0.18%) Kibana
5 3 (0.18%) Microsoft Intune
5 3 (0.18%) SCCM
6 2 (0.12%) Computer Emergency Response Teams
6 2 (0.12%) Computer Incident Response Team
7 1 (0.060%) CASB
Vendors
1 424 (25.56%) Databricks
2 319 (19.23%) Microsoft
3 92 (5.55%) Google
4 40 (2.41%) Oracle
5 33 (1.99%) Palantir
6 31 (1.87%) Informatica
7 30 (1.81%) Foundry
8 29 (1.75%) SAP
9 28 (1.69%) Dell
10 26 (1.57%) Salesforce
11 25 (1.51%) OpenAI
12 18 (1.08%) Cloudera
13 15 (0.90%) Teradata
14 12 (0.72%) Denodo
15 11 (0.66%) Sage
16 9 (0.54%) Alteryx
17 5 (0.30%) IBM
17 5 (0.30%) MicroStrategy
17 5 (0.30%) YouTube
18 4 (0.24%) Cognos