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 8 October 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
8 Oct 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 135 148 148
Rank change year-on-year +13 0 +69
Permanent jobs citing Data Engineering 1,591 1,033 1,301
As % of all permanent jobs in the UK 1.35% 2.08% 1.78%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 1.85% 2.34% 2.17%
Number of salaries quoted 1,081 475 634
10th Percentile £45,743 £46,000 £42,500
25th Percentile £55,000 £55,000 £55,000
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £75,000 £70,000 £72,500
Median % change year-on-year +7.14% -3.45% -3.33%
75th Percentile £95,000 £93,750 £92,500
90th Percentile £105,000 £112,500 £110,000
UK excluding London median annual salary £70,000 £65,000 £60,000
% change year-on-year +7.69% +8.33% -11.11%

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 86,155 44,192 60,081
As % of all permanent jobs advertised in the UK 73.18% 88.99% 81.99%
Number of salaries quoted 59,150 24,458 32,463
10th Percentile £31,250 £28,325 £32,500
25th Percentile £41,250 £36,250 £42,608
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £60,000 £55,000 £60,000
Median % change year-on-year +9.09% -8.33% -
75th Percentile £78,750 £75,000 £77,500
90th Percentile £100,000 £95,000 £96,750
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 8 October 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 8 October 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 +18 1,452 £75,000 +7.14% 1,992
UK excluding London -12 779 £70,000 +7.69% 930
London +21 710 £85,000 - 1,245
Work from Home -15 461 £75,000 +6.38% 870
North of England -4 356 £75,000 +11.11% 285
North West -39 159 £75,000 +30.43% 163
South East -53 135 £63,750 -1.92% 254
North East +27 106 £65,903 +38.74% 44
Midlands +3 102 £80,000 +18.52% 110
Yorkshire -2 91 £75,000 +7.14% 80
South West -9 88 £62,500 +4.17% 87
West Midlands -10 70 £82,500 +37.50% 77
Scotland -1 44 £90,000 +5.88% 83
East Midlands -18 32 £80,000 +17.65% 33
East of England -27 29 £70,000 +33.33% 47
Wales -48 28 £63,500 +26.69% 22
Northern Ireland - 1 - - 44

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
1 168 (10.56%) Apache Spark
2 132 (8.30%) Apache
3 131 (8.23%) Apache Airflow
4 24 (1.51%) Jupyter
5 19 (1.19%) Palantir Foundry
6 12 (0.75%) Confluence
7 10 (0.63%) SAS
8 9 (0.57%) Oracle Workflow
8 9 (0.57%) SharePoint
9 4 (0.25%) Luigi
10 2 (0.13%) Adobe Experience Manager
10 2 (0.13%) Apache Superset
10 2 (0.13%) Tornado
11 1 (0.063%) ArcGIS
11 1 (0.063%) CMS
Applications
1 21 (1.32%) Microsoft Excel
2 8 (0.50%) MS Visio
2 8 (0.50%) Spreadsheet
3 3 (0.19%) Notion
4 2 (0.13%) Microsoft Office
5 1 (0.063%) Chatbot
5 1 (0.063%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 1 (0.063%) Microsoft Project
Business Applications
1 5 (0.31%) Dynamics CRM
1 5 (0.31%) IBM Planning Analytics
2 2 (0.13%) SAP Business One
3 1 (0.063%) Academy Revenues and Benefits
3 1 (0.063%) Actimize
3 1 (0.063%) FastStats
3 1 (0.063%) NetSuite
3 1 (0.063%) Oracle ERP
3 1 (0.063%) SAP S/4HANA
Cloud Services
1 611 (38.40%) Azure
2 468 (29.42%) AWS
3 277 (17.41%) Power Platform
4 268 (16.84%) GCP
5 180 (11.31%) Azure Data Factory
6 137 (8.61%) Snowflake
7 132 (8.30%) dbt
8 104 (6.54%) Amazon S3
8 104 (6.54%) Azure DevOps
9 96 (6.03%) Serverless
10 83 (5.22%) Azure Synapse Analytics
11 70 (4.40%) GitHub
12 69 (4.34%) AWS Lambda
13 66 (4.15%) SaaS
14 55 (3.46%) Amazon EMR
15 48 (3.02%) Azure Databricks
16 46 (2.89%) Microsoft Purview
17 42 (2.64%) Amazon EC2
18 27 (1.70%) Azure Machine Learning
18 27 (1.70%) GitHub Actions
Communications & Networking
1 17 (1.07%) Broadband
2 7 (0.44%) Internet
3 4 (0.25%) 5G
4 3 (0.19%) HTTP
5 2 (0.13%) Firewall
6 1 (0.063%) 4G
6 1 (0.063%) ATM
6 1 (0.063%) DAB
6 1 (0.063%) DNS
6 1 (0.063%) HTTPS
6 1 (0.063%) SMS
6 1 (0.063%) TCP/IP
6 1 (0.063%) tcpdump
6 1 (0.063%) Wireshark
Database & Business Intelligence
1 271 (17.03%) Data Warehouse
2 269 (16.91%) Power BI
3 190 (11.94%) Data Lake
4 116 (7.29%) Metadata
5 101 (6.35%) BigQuery
6 98 (6.16%) Amazon Redshift
7 87 (5.47%) Tableau
8 78 (4.90%) Big Data
9 69 (4.34%) SQL Server
10 63 (3.96%) NoSQL
11 62 (3.90%) Semantic Layer
12 60 (3.77%) Azure SQL Database
13 54 (3.39%) Amazon Athena
13 54 (3.39%) Delta Lake
13 54 (3.39%) Relational Database
14 52 (3.27%) PostgreSQL
14 52 (3.27%) Star Schema
15 44 (2.77%) Spark SQL
16 35 (2.20%) Data Vault
17 33 (2.07%) DynamoDB
Development Applications
1 138 (8.67%) Git
2 35 (2.20%) GitLab
2 35 (2.20%) Jenkins
3 22 (1.38%) JIRA
4 10 (0.63%) Claude Code
5 5 (0.31%) MLflow
5 5 (0.31%) Poetry
6 4 (0.25%) Octopus Deploy
6 4 (0.25%) Visual Studio Code
7 3 (0.19%) Bitbucket
8 2 (0.13%) ERwin
8 2 (0.13%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
8 2 (0.13%) VSS/SourceSafe
9 1 (0.063%) Cypress.io
9 1 (0.063%) kappa
9 1 (0.063%) RStudio
9 1 (0.063%) Selenium
9 1 (0.063%) Visual Studio
9 1 (0.063%) Yeoman
General
1 430 (27.03%) Social Skills
2 397 (24.95%) Finance
3 260 (16.34%) Analytical Skills
4 151 (9.49%) Public Sector
5 110 (6.91%) Inclusion and Diversity
6 68 (4.27%) Banking
7 58 (3.65%) Retail
8 52 (3.27%) Marketing
9 48 (3.02%) Legal
10 38 (2.39%) Financial Institution
11 36 (2.26%) Influencing Skills
12 34 (2.14%) Law
13 26 (1.63%) Manufacturing
14 21 (1.32%) Advertising
15 18 (1.13%) Games
16 15 (0.94%) Presentation Skills
17 12 (0.75%) Documentation Skills
18 11 (0.69%) Organisational Skills
19 10 (0.63%) Aerospace
19 10 (0.63%) Police
Job Titles
1 646 (40.60%) Data Engineer
2 360 (22.63%) Senior
3 297 (18.67%) Lead
4 185 (11.63%) Senior Data Engineer
5 136 (8.55%) Architect
6 96 (6.03%) Lead Data Engineer
7 94 (5.91%) Data Architect
8 82 (5.15%) Data Manager
9 80 (5.03%) Analyst
10 79 (4.97%) Software Engineer
11 77 (4.84%) Principal Engineer
12 76 (4.78%) Developer
13 66 (4.15%) Consultant
14 48 (3.02%) Principal Data Engineer
15 44 (2.77%) Databricks Engineer
16 43 (2.70%) Data Consultant
16 43 (2.70%) Data Scientist
17 42 (2.64%) Python Engineer
18 41 (2.58%) Head of Engineering
19 37 (2.33%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 177 (11.13%) PySpark
2 134 (8.42%) Terraform
3 72 (4.53%) Kafka
4 44 (2.77%) .NET
5 37 (2.33%) REST
6 32 (2.01%) LangChain
7 31 (1.95%) Pandas
8 27 (1.70%) Node.js
9 26 (1.63%) SpaCy
10 23 (1.45%) JSON
10 23 (1.45%) LlamaIndex
11 22 (1.38%) scikit-learn
12 21 (1.32%) PyTorch
12 21 (1.32%) TensorFlow
13 17 (1.07%) React
13 17 (1.07%) RESTful
14 15 (0.94%) Apache NiFi
15 13 (0.82%) FastAPI
16 12 (0.75%) NumPy
16 12 (0.75%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 175 (11.00%) Cloud Native
2 69 (4.34%) Data Structures
3 53 (3.33%) Product Ownership
4 52 (3.27%) Distributed Systems
5 49 (3.08%) Onboarding
6 45 (2.83%) AI Agents
7 26 (1.63%) e-Learning
8 21 (1.32%) Self-Motivation
9 18 (1.13%) Distributed Computing
10 17 (1.07%) Hedge funds
10 17 (1.07%) Legacy Systems
11 16 (1.01%) Hybrid Cloud
12 15 (0.94%) Analytical Mindset
13 14 (0.88%) Distributed Architecture
14 13 (0.82%) Greenfield Project
14 13 (0.82%) Low-Code
15 12 (0.75%) Blog
15 12 (0.75%) Management Information System
16 11 (0.69%) IoT
16 11 (0.69%) Reference Data
Operating Systems
1 8 (0.50%) Windows
2 5 (0.31%) Linux
3 1 (0.063%) Apple iOS
Processes & Methodologies
1 756 (47.52%) Analytics
2 576 (36.20%) Data Pipeline
3 540 (33.94%) AI
4 517 (32.50%) Data Modelling
5 458 (28.79%) CI/CD
6 455 (28.60%) ETL
7 395 (24.83%) Business Intelligence
8 378 (23.76%) Decision-Making
9 355 (22.31%) Agile
10 340 (21.37%) Data Governance
11 323 (20.30%) Machine Learning
12 312 (19.61%) DevOps
13 301 (18.92%) Mentoring
14 287 (18.04%) Data Architecture
15 276 (17.35%) Problem-Solving
16 253 (15.90%) Data Science
17 230 (14.46%) Technical Leadership
18 208 (13.07%) Software Engineering
19 189 (11.88%) Continuous Improvement
20 173 (10.87%) Lakehouse
Programming Languages
1 813 (51.10%) Python
2 787 (49.47%) SQL
3 114 (7.17%) Java
4 73 (4.59%) Scala
5 58 (3.65%) JavaScript
6 52 (3.27%) Data Analysis Expressions
7 37 (2.33%) C#
7 37 (2.33%) TypeScript
8 34 (2.14%) C++
9 26 (1.63%) R
10 20 (1.26%) Bash
11 15 (0.94%) PowerShell
11 15 (0.94%) T-SQL
12 10 (0.63%) Go
13 9 (0.57%) Bicep
14 6 (0.38%) Groovy
15 5 (0.31%) PL/SQL
16 4 (0.25%) Rust
16 4 (0.25%) VBA
17 2 (0.13%) Ruby
Qualifications
1 195 (12.26%) Security Cleared
2 156 (9.81%) Degree
3 136 (8.55%) SC Cleared
4 58 (3.65%) Master's Degree
5 45 (2.83%) Azure Certification
6 43 (2.70%) DV Cleared
7 42 (2.64%) Computer Science Degree
8 33 (2.07%) AWS Certification
9 32 (2.01%) BPSS Clearance
10 31 (1.95%) PhD
11 25 (1.57%) DBS Check
12 16 (1.01%) Microsoft Certification
13 15 (0.94%) ACCA
13 15 (0.94%) CIMA
14 6 (0.38%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
14 6 (0.38%) Numerate Degree
15 5 (0.31%) CBAP
16 4 (0.25%) CCA
17 3 (0.19%) CISSP
17 3 (0.19%) PMP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 474 (29.79%) Data Quality
2 63 (3.96%) Accessibility
3 53 (3.33%) GDPR
4 40 (2.51%) QA
5 11 (0.69%) Actionable Recommendations
6 9 (0.57%) NCSC
7 5 (0.31%) GRC
8 4 (0.25%) SLA
9 3 (0.19%) EU AI Act
9 3 (0.19%) PCI DSS
9 3 (0.19%) PMO
9 3 (0.19%) PSD2
10 2 (0.13%) ISO/IEC 42001
11 1 (0.063%) Cyber Essentials
11 1 (0.063%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
11 1 (0.063%) IASME
11 1 (0.063%) ISO 9001
11 1 (0.063%) ISO/IEC 27001
11 1 (0.063%) NIST
System Software
1 107 (6.73%) Docker
2 10 (0.63%) Active Directory
3 3 (0.19%) NDS
3 3 (0.19%) VMware Infrastructure
4 1 (0.063%) Embedded Firmware
4 1 (0.063%) Firmware
4 1 (0.063%) Virtual Machines
Systems Management
1 72 (4.53%) Kubernetes
2 12 (0.75%) Grafana
3 4 (0.25%) Kibana
3 4 (0.25%) Prometheus
4 3 (0.19%) Ansible
4 3 (0.19%) Argo
4 3 (0.19%) Microsoft Intune
4 3 (0.19%) SCCM
5 2 (0.13%) Computer Emergency Response Teams
5 2 (0.13%) Computer Incident Response Team
6 1 (0.063%) CASB
6 1 (0.063%) Packer
Vendors
1 327 (20.55%) Databricks
2 274 (17.22%) Microsoft
3 98 (6.16%) Google
4 37 (2.33%) Oracle
5 35 (2.20%) Salesforce
6 30 (1.89%) Palantir
7 27 (1.70%) Foundry
7 27 (1.70%) SAP
8 24 (1.51%) OpenAI
9 18 (1.13%) Informatica
10 11 (0.69%) Sage
11 8 (0.50%) Alteryx
11 8 (0.50%) YouTube
12 5 (0.31%) IBM
12 5 (0.31%) MicroStrategy
12 5 (0.31%) Talend
13 4 (0.25%) Cloudera
13 4 (0.25%) Cognos
14 3 (0.19%) CyberArk
14 3 (0.19%) ForgeRock