Data Engineer Salary

Start with BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook: Database Architects and Software Developers. Each occupation page in the BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook links to state and metro pay data, so you can compare your own area with the national picture.

A US base salary is only part of the package. Health insurance, retirement matching, equity, bonuses and paid leave can change the comparison between two offers significantly. For W-2 employment, the employer withholds tax and typically provides benefits; for 1099 contract work, you pay self-employment tax and fund your own benefits, so the rate needs to cover more.

Remote US roles may set pay by location bands or use a single national band. Ask which approach the employer uses and which band applies to you.

Large-scale platform experience, streaming, strong cloud credentials on AWS, Azure or Google Cloud, and on-call ownership of revenue-critical pipelines all command attention. Regulated industries such as finance and healthcare often value compliance experience. Security clearance can matter for government-adjacent work.

Look at Programmers and software development professionals, and IT business analysts, architects and systems designers, in ASHE Table 14. For regional differences, ONS publishes region by occupation tables, which show how London compares with other regions. Smaller cells are often suppressed or carry wide uncertainty.

ASHE measures gross pay for employee jobs from employer records. It is reliable for what it covers, but it lags the market and excludes self-employed contractors.

The UK has a large data engineering contract market priced by day rates. Your take-home on a contract depends heavily on IR35 status: outside IR35 through a limited company, inside IR35 usually through an umbrella company with employment taxes deducted. Compare a contract with a full-time salary after tax, pension, leave, insurance and likely gaps.

Financial services in London, including banks, trading firms and insurers, tend to compete hardest for experienced data engineers. Public sector roles often pay differently but may offer stronger pensions and stability. Skills in Databricks, Snowflake, Azure and streaming, plus security clearance for government work, broaden your options.

Platform depth is the biggest factor: engineers who can run Spark, a cloud warehouse, orchestration and infrastructure as code in production are paid differently from those who mostly write SQL transformations. Streaming experience, cost optimisation on large platforms and on-call ownership of critical pipelines also push pay up.

Sector matters. Financial services, trading and large technology companies typically pay more than the public sector or non-profits for similar work. Location still matters for employee roles, though remote hiring has narrowed some gaps.

Contract data engineers are usually paid a day or hourly rate rather than a salary. A rate is not directly comparable with a salary: contractors fund their own leave, pension, equipment, insurance and gaps between contracts, and in the UK their take-home depends on IR35 status. Compare a contract and a full-time offer by working out what each leaves you with over a year, not by comparing headline numbers. carbon.talent takes no cut of a contractor's rate.

Outside the United States and the United Kingdom, carbon.talent does not publish pay figures yet. We will add other countries only when we have reliable data of our own, and we do not publish estimates in the meantime. If you are outside these two countries, national statistics offices, salary surveys run by professional bodies and conversations with recruiters and peers in your market are better guides than converting US or UK figures.