Data Engineer Contract Job Trends in England

Data Engineer
UK > England

The median Data Engineer daily rate in England is £513, according to job vacancies posted in the 6 months leading up to 2 February 2026.

The table below compares current contractor rates and summary statistics with the previous two years.

6 months to
2 Feb 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 89 76 113
Rank change year-on-year -13 +37 +15
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 930 780 795
As % of all contract jobs in England 2.83% 2.97% 2.08%
As % of the Job Titles category 3.09% 3.19% 2.23%
Number of daily rates quoted 665 554 614
10th Percentile £361 £356 £375
25th Percentile £413 £446 £438
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -2.38% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £600 £625 £629
90th Percentile £700 £738 £688
UK median daily rate £500 £525 £525
% change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 8 10 24
10th Percentile £28.89 £39.75 £35.19
25th Percentile £32.94 £65.00 £37.50
Median hourly rate £40.50 £83.75 £56.50
Median % change year-on-year -51.64% +48.23% -14.72%
75th Percentile £71.69 £96.56 £66.25
90th Percentile £88.30 £97.50 £67.50
UK median hourly rate £52.50 £65.00 £56.50
% change year-on-year -19.23% +15.04% -9.60%

All Contract IT Job Roles
England

For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all contract IT job vacancies in England. 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 England with a recognized job title 30,066 24,417 35,598
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 91.62% 93.06% 93.00%
Number of daily rates quoted 19,145 15,033 24,004
10th Percentile £300 £300 £270
25th Percentile £406 £413 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £625 £638 £644
90th Percentile £725 £750 £745
UK median daily rate £500 £525 £525
% change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 1,886 731 2,091
10th Percentile £14.96 £15.92 £13.25
25th Percentile £18.60 £21.25 £17.00
Median hourly rate £30.00 £35.00 £35.95
Median % change year-on-year -14.29% -2.64% +2.71%
75th Percentile £63.75 £64.50 £61.69
90th Percentile £71.00 £75.00 £72.75
UK median hourly rate £29.61 £33.00 £35.95
% change year-on-year -10.27% -8.21% +2.71%

Data Engineer
Job Vacancy Trend in England

Historical trend showing the proportion of contract IT job postings featuring 'Data Engineer' in the job title relative to all contract IT jobs advertised in England.

Data Engineer job vacancy trend in England

Data Engineer
Daily Rate Trend in England

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for Data Engineer job vacancies in England.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for Data Engineer job vacancies in England

Data Engineer
Daily Rate Histogram in England

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Data Engineer in England over the 6 months to 2 February 2026.

Daily rate histogram for Data Engineer in England

Data Engineer
Hourly Rate Trend in England

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for Data Engineer job vacancies in England.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for Data Engineer job vacancies in England

Data Engineer
Hourly Rate Histogram in England

Hourly rate distribution of jobs citing Data Engineer in England over the 6 months to 2 February 2026.

Hourly rate histogram for Data Engineer in England

Data Engineer
Contract Job Locations in England

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing Data Engineer within the England region over the 6 months to 2 February 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
Contract
IT Job Ads
Median
Daily Rate
Past 6 Months
Median Daily Rate
% Change
on Same Period
Last Year
Live
Jobs
London +1 590 £525 -4.55% 204
Midlands -15 111 £515 +5.21% 46
North of England -37 103 £466 +0.81% 75
West Midlands -12 97 £519 +3.70% 37
North West -21 58 £425 -2.86% 47
South West -3 49 £550 +10.00% 40
South East -48 42 £480 -9.65% 122
Yorkshire -44 32 £500 -2.44% 23
East Midlands -16 14 £455 +22.15% 9
North East -13 13 £450 -16.28% 7
East of England -35 5 £563 +76.76% 21
Data Engineer
UK

Data Engineer Skill Set
Top 30 Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities in England

For the 6 months to 2 February 2026, Data Engineer contract job roles required the following skills and capabilities in order of popularity. The figures indicate the absolute number of co-occurrences and as a proportion of all contract job ads across the England region featuring Data Engineer in the job title.

1 531 (57.10%) SQL
2 522 (56.13%) Python
3 398 (42.80%) Azure
4 395 (42.47%) Data Pipeline
4 395 (42.47%) ETL
5 378 (40.65%) Data Engineering
6 340 (36.56%) Analytics
7 336 (36.13%) Data Modelling
8 306 (32.90%) Databricks
9 285 (30.65%) AWS
10 264 (28.39%) CI/CD
11 262 (28.17%) Data Quality
12 245 (26.34%) Security Cleared
13 229 (24.62%) Business Intelligence
14 218 (23.44%) SC Cleared
15 196 (21.08%) DevOps
16 191 (20.54%) Power Platform
17 187 (20.11%) Power BI
18 169 (18.17%) Data Warehouse
19 168 (18.06%) Azure Data Factory
20 167 (17.96%) Agile
21 163 (17.53%) PySpark
22 147 (15.81%) Problem-Solving
23 137 (14.73%) Data Governance
24 136 (14.62%) Data Science
25 126 (13.55%) Snowflake
26 125 (13.44%) Git
27 124 (13.33%) Microsoft
28 120 (12.90%) Terraform
29 118 (12.69%) AI

Data Engineer Skill Set
Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities in England 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
1 111 (11.94%) Apache Airflow
2 103 (11.08%) Apache Spark
3 66 (7.10%) Apache
4 25 (2.69%) SAS
5 14 (1.51%) Confluence
5 14 (1.51%) Palantir Foundry
6 6 (0.65%) Apache Pig
6 6 (0.65%) Oracle Application Server
7 5 (0.54%) IIS
8 4 (0.43%) Jupyter
8 4 (0.43%) Microsoft Exchange
9 2 (0.22%) ArcGIS
9 2 (0.22%) Luigi
9 2 (0.22%) SharePoint
10 1 (0.11%) Apache Synapse
10 1 (0.11%) Appian
10 1 (0.11%) Camunda
10 1 (0.11%) nginx
10 1 (0.11%) Oracle SOA Suite
Applications
1 10 (1.08%) Microsoft Excel
2 2 (0.22%) Chatbot
3 1 (0.11%) Microsoft Office
3 1 (0.11%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 1 (0.11%) MS Visio
Business Applications
1 2 (0.22%) Aladdin
1 2 (0.22%) Maximo
2 1 (0.11%) Actimize
2 1 (0.11%) Dynamics CRM
2 1 (0.11%) Elite 3E
2 1 (0.11%) Oracle BPM
2 1 (0.11%) SAP ERP
Cloud Services
1 398 (42.80%) Azure
2 285 (30.65%) AWS
3 191 (20.54%) Power Platform
4 168 (18.06%) Azure Data Factory
5 126 (13.55%) Snowflake
6 108 (11.61%) Azure Synapse Analytics
7 103 (11.08%) Amazon S3
8 97 (10.43%) dbt
9 96 (10.32%) GCP
10 90 (9.68%) GitHub
11 88 (9.46%) Serverless
12 72 (7.74%) Azure DevOps
13 63 (6.77%) AWS Lambda
14 47 (5.05%) GitHub Actions
15 35 (3.76%) AWS CloudFormation
16 22 (2.37%) SaaS
17 20 (2.15%) Amazon Kinesis
17 20 (2.15%) AWS Step Functions
18 19 (2.04%) Matillion
19 15 (1.61%) Amazon EMR
Communications & Networking
1 8 (0.86%) BGP
1 8 (0.86%) DMZ
1 8 (0.86%) DNS
1 8 (0.86%) Multicast
1 8 (0.86%) VPN
2 4 (0.43%) Firewall
3 3 (0.32%) SAN
4 2 (0.22%) Structured Cabling
5 1 (0.11%) Internet
5 1 (0.11%) Network Security
5 1 (0.11%) Software-Defined Networking
5 1 (0.11%) TCP/IP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 187 (20.11%) Power BI
2 169 (18.17%) Data Warehouse
3 110 (11.83%) Data Lake
4 92 (9.89%) SQL Server
5 61 (6.56%) Azure SQL Database
6 58 (6.24%) Amazon Redshift
7 57 (6.13%) Delta Lake
8 56 (6.02%) PostgreSQL
9 54 (5.81%) Big Data
10 52 (5.59%) NoSQL
11 51 (5.48%) Metadata
12 49 (5.27%) BigQuery
13 44 (4.73%) SQL Server Integration Services
14 37 (3.98%) Tableau
15 34 (3.66%) Amazon Athena
15 34 (3.66%) Pentaho
16 32 (3.44%) Hadoop
16 32 (3.44%) Star Schema
17 30 (3.23%) Snowflake Schema
18 28 (3.01%) Relational Database
Development Applications
1 125 (13.44%) Git
2 56 (6.02%) Jenkins
3 41 (4.41%) JIRA
4 34 (3.66%) GitLab
5 21 (2.26%) MLflow
6 6 (0.65%) DBeaver
7 4 (0.43%) Visual Studio
8 2 (0.22%) Bitbucket
8 2 (0.22%) Selenium
8 2 (0.22%) Visual Studio Code
9 1 (0.11%) Cucumber
9 1 (0.11%) Deequ
9 1 (0.11%) Gradle
9 1 (0.11%) Jaeger
9 1 (0.11%) Mockito
9 1 (0.11%) Poetry
9 1 (0.11%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
9 1 (0.11%) Team Foundation Server
9 1 (0.11%) TeamCity
9 1 (0.11%) Terragrunt
General
1 169 (18.17%) Social Skills
2 141 (15.16%) Finance
3 91 (9.78%) Analytical Skills
4 69 (7.42%) Public Sector
5 44 (4.73%) Banking
6 31 (3.33%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 16 (1.72%) Investment Banking
8 14 (1.51%) Front Office
9 12 (1.29%) Retail
10 10 (1.08%) Pharmaceutical
11 8 (0.86%) Marketing
12 7 (0.75%) Telecoms
13 6 (0.65%) Military
14 5 (0.54%) Documentation Skills
14 5 (0.54%) Law
14 5 (0.54%) Manufacturing
15 4 (0.43%) Back Office
15 4 (0.43%) Corporate Banking
16 3 (0.32%) Legal
16 3 (0.32%) Organisational Skills
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 163 (17.53%) PySpark
2 96 (10.32%) Kafka
3 28 (3.01%) Pandas
4 21 (2.26%) REST
5 18 (1.94%) YAML
6 17 (1.83%) JSON
7 15 (1.61%) PyTorch
8 14 (1.51%) Apache NiFi
9 13 (1.40%) NumPy
9 13 (1.40%) RESTful
9 13 (1.40%) XML
10 12 (1.29%) Keycloak
11 11 (1.18%) TensorFlow
12 10 (1.08%) Great Expectations
12 10 (1.08%) Node.js
13 9 (0.97%) HTML
13 9 (0.97%) Middleware
14 8 (0.86%) Flask
14 8 (0.86%) pytest
15 7 (0.75%) Oracle GoldenGate
Miscellaneous
1 70 (7.53%) Cloud Native
2 26 (2.80%) Data Structures
3 25 (2.69%) Product Ownership
4 21 (2.26%) Replication
5 20 (2.15%) Legacy Systems
6 16 (1.72%) Algorithms
6 16 (1.72%) Onboarding
7 15 (1.61%) Greenfield Project
8 13 (1.40%) Data Protection Act
9 12 (1.29%) Hybrid Cloud
9 12 (1.29%) Reinsurance
10 10 (1.08%) Public Cloud
11 9 (0.97%) Clustering
12 8 (0.86%) Distributed Computing
13 7 (0.75%) Distributed Systems
13 7 (0.75%) Management Information System
14 5 (0.54%) Derivative
14 5 (0.54%) Equities
14 5 (0.54%) Life Science
14 5 (0.54%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 18 (1.94%) Linux
2 13 (1.40%) Unix
3 1 (0.11%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 395 (42.47%) Data Pipeline
1 395 (42.47%) ETL
2 378 (40.65%) Data Engineering
3 340 (36.56%) Analytics
4 336 (36.13%) Data Modelling
5 264 (28.39%) CI/CD
6 229 (24.62%) Business Intelligence
7 196 (21.08%) DevOps
8 167 (17.96%) Agile
9 147 (15.81%) Problem-Solving
10 137 (14.73%) Data Governance
11 136 (14.62%) Data Science
12 118 (12.69%) AI
13 116 (12.47%) Data Architecture
14 111 (11.94%) Data Integration
14 111 (11.94%) Machine Learning
15 103 (11.08%) Infrastructure as Code
16 90 (9.68%) Data Transformation
17 81 (8.71%) Performance Tuning
18 80 (8.60%) Migration
Programming Languages
1 531 (57.10%) SQL
2 522 (56.13%) Python
3 89 (9.57%) Scala
4 65 (6.99%) Java
5 23 (2.47%) Data Analysis Expressions
6 19 (2.04%) C#
6 19 (2.04%) PL/SQL
6 19 (2.04%) T-SQL
7 18 (1.94%) Bash
8 15 (1.61%) Go
9 14 (1.51%) R
10 13 (1.40%) Bicep
11 12 (1.29%) JavaScript
12 11 (1.18%) Shell Script
13 9 (0.97%) PowerShell
14 5 (0.54%) TypeScript
15 4 (0.43%) Korn
16 3 (0.32%) C++
17 2 (0.22%) VB
18 1 (0.11%) Groovy
Qualifications
1 245 (26.34%) Security Cleared
2 218 (23.44%) SC Cleared
3 31 (3.33%) Azure Certification
4 26 (2.80%) Degree
5 19 (2.04%) AWS Certification
6 15 (1.61%) DV Cleared
7 14 (1.51%) Computer Science Degree
8 8 (0.86%) BPSS Clearance
9 6 (0.65%) Master's Degree
10 5 (0.54%) Microsoft Certification
11 4 (0.43%) CTC Cleared
12 3 (0.32%) DBS Check
13 2 (0.22%) Microsoft Certified Professional
13 2 (0.22%) SnowPro
14 1 (0.11%) PhD
14 1 (0.11%) Tableau Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 262 (28.17%) Data Quality
2 42 (4.52%) GDPR
3 13 (1.40%) QA
4 5 (0.54%) Accessibility
5 4 (0.43%) HIPAA
5 4 (0.43%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 3 (0.32%) MiFID
7 2 (0.22%) Dodd-Frank
7 2 (0.22%) EMIR
7 2 (0.22%) EU AI Act
7 2 (0.22%) NIST
7 2 (0.22%) SLA
8 1 (0.11%) Basel III
8 1 (0.11%) FATCA
8 1 (0.11%) GRC
8 1 (0.11%) ISO 13485
8 1 (0.11%) NCSC
8 1 (0.11%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 1 (0.11%) SOC 2
8 1 (0.11%) WCAG
System Software
1 74 (7.96%) Docker
2 11 (1.18%) Virtual Machines
3 5 (0.54%) zsh
4 3 (0.32%) Active Directory
5 1 (0.11%) HDFS
Systems Management
1 120 (12.90%) Terraform
2 78 (8.39%) Kubernetes
3 10 (1.08%) Grafana
4 8 (0.86%) Ansible
5 7 (0.75%) NetBackup
6 6 (0.65%) Prometheus
7 4 (0.43%) Kibana
8 3 (0.32%) Kubeflow
8 3 (0.32%) Puppet
9 2 (0.22%) Control-M
9 2 (0.22%) EMC NetWorker
9 2 (0.22%) logstash
9 2 (0.22%) Tivoli Storage Manager
10 1 (0.11%) Ambari
10 1 (0.11%) Argo
10 1 (0.11%) ZABBIX
Vendors
1 306 (32.90%) Databricks
2 124 (13.33%) Microsoft
3 71 (7.63%) Oracle
4 46 (4.95%) Talend
5 35 (3.76%) Informatica
6 34 (3.66%) Google
7 26 (2.80%) Denodo
8 17 (1.83%) Foundry
8 17 (1.83%) Palantir
9 15 (1.61%) IBM
10 12 (1.29%) Splunk
11 11 (1.18%) Alteryx
11 11 (1.18%) Cisco
11 11 (1.18%) ServiceNow
12 9 (0.97%) SAP
13 8 (0.86%) Cloudera
13 8 (0.86%) F5
14 7 (0.75%) Commvault
14 7 (0.75%) Red Hat
14 7 (0.75%) Veritas