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Data Engineer Salary UK 2026: Pay, Skills and Employer Cost

By TalentDock Editorial Team · Updated 24 September 2026 · 6 min read

Quick answer

The UK data engineer salary range in 2026 is £56,000 to £77,750, with a national midpoint of £65,250, according to Robert Half's 2026 Salary Guide. Entry-level data engineers start around £56,000 and experienced engineers with specialist cloud skills reach £77,750 or more. With employer NICs and pension, a midpoint data engineer costs an employer about £75,600 a year (£6,300 a month).

2026 ranges

Data engineer salary by experience

UK data engineer salary, 2026 (Robert Half)
Level	Percentile	Salary
Early career	25th	£56,000
Mid-level	50th (midpoint)	£65,250
Experienced / specialist	75th	£77,750

Robert Half also lists data engineer among the UK’s most in-demand tech roles for 2026. Lead and principal roles, and London roles, typically pay above these national figures.

Skills

Skills that push data engineer pay higher

Cloud warehouses

Snowflake, BigQuery, Databricks and Microsoft Fabric experience.

Modern tooling

dbt, Airflow or Dagster, data contracts and testing.

Streaming

Kafka, Kinesis and real-time pipelines.

AI and ML data

Feature pipelines, vector stores and RAG-ready data.

Governance

Data quality, lineage, access control and GDPR-aware design.

Software engineering

Strong Python, CI/CD and infrastructure as code.

Employer cost

What a data engineer costs an employer

Midpoint data engineer: salary to employer cost
Item	Annual
Salary (midpoint)	£65,250
Employer NICs (15% above £5,000)	£9,038
Minimum employer pension (3% of qualifying earnings)	£1,321
Total before recruitment, equipment and office	£75,608 (≈ £6,300 a month)

By comparison, a dedicated offshore data engineer in Sri Lanka through TalentDock costs from £2,295 a month all-in. See hire offshore data engineers and offshore development cost UK.

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

What is the average data engineer salary in the UK?

The Robert Half 2026 national midpoint is £65,250.

What does a junior data engineer earn in the UK?

Around £56,000 at the 25th percentile in Robert Half’s 2026 data.

What does a senior data engineer earn in the UK?

£77,750 at the 75th percentile, with lead roles and London often higher.

How much does a data engineer cost an employer?

About £75,600 a year at the midpoint including employer NICs and minimum pension.

Is there a cheaper way to add data engineering capacity?

A dedicated offshore data engineer costs from £2,295 a month all-in with TalentDock.

Sources and further reading

Robert Half, Data Engineer salary 2026; HMRC employer NICs 2025-26; The Pensions Regulator.

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