Data Engineer Contract Job Trends in England

Data Engineer
UK > England

The median Data Engineer daily rate in England is £500, according to job vacancies posted in the 6 months leading up to 23 July 2026.

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

6 months to
23 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 58 118 100
Rank change year-on-year +60 -18 +17
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 1,702 659 817
As % of all contract jobs in England 3.79% 2.41% 2.32%
As % of the Job Titles category 4.10% 2.62% 2.50%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,160 483 613
10th Percentile £382 £375 £263
25th Percentile £425 £425 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year - -4.76% -4.55%
75th Percentile £588 £588 £630
90th Percentile £650 £700 £700
UK median daily rate £500 £500 £513
% change year-on-year - -2.44% -6.82%
Number of hourly rates quoted 77 11 32
10th Percentile £19.34 £18.22 £37.50
25th Percentile £34.01 £46.75 £49.25
Median hourly rate £45.00 £52.50 £75.00
Median % change year-on-year -14.29% -30.00% -3.23%
75th Percentile £70.00 £78.10 £80.00
90th Percentile £75.00 £80.00 -
UK median hourly rate £50.00 £52.50 £75.00
% change year-on-year -4.76% -30.00% -3.23%

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 41,522 25,105 32,718
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.52% 91.81% 93.03%
Number of daily rates quoted 25,299 16,309 21,568
10th Percentile £325 £288 £300
25th Percentile £425 £403 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £512 £525
Median % change year-on-year +2.54% -2.48% -4.55%
75th Percentile £625 £625 £638
90th Percentile £738 £738 £750
UK median daily rate £525 £500 £525
% change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -2.05%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,983 1,254 2,147
10th Percentile £16.00 £13.75 £13.51
25th Percentile £22.46 £17.87 £18.30
Median hourly rate £45.56 £27.29 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year +66.91% -35.78% -3.53%
75th Percentile £68.00 £56.44 £65.00
90th Percentile £81.04 £75.00 £75.00
UK median hourly rate £43.69 £25.15 £40.33
% change year-on-year +73.72% -37.63% -7.70%

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 23 July 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 23 July 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 23 July 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 +34 823 £525 - 188
Midlands +60 385 £459 -0.22% 40
West Midlands +53 337 £459 -0.22% 28
North of England +26 227 £475 - 88
North West +22 131 £525 +10.53% 44
South East +12 126 £469 +10.35% 100
South West +14 89 £525 +5.00% 39
Yorkshire -5 74 £475 - 20
East Midlands +19 48 £475 +13.10% 12
East of England -1 33 £565 +78.52% 15
North East -22 23 £515 +17.71% 25
Data Engineer
UK

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

For the 6 months to 23 July 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.

1 879 (51.65%) SQL
2 726 (42.66%) Python
3 723 (42.48%) Data Pipeline
4 635 (37.31%) Data Engineering
5 619 (36.37%) Analytics
6 603 (35.43%) ETL
7 572 (33.61%) Data Modelling
8 531 (31.20%) Azure
9 486 (28.55%) AWS
10 460 (27.03%) Security Cleared
11 416 (24.44%) Data Quality
12 407 (23.91%) CI/CD
13 401 (23.56%) SC Cleared
14 313 (18.39%) Databricks
15 309 (18.16%) Business Intelligence
16 292 (17.16%) Agile
17 287 (16.86%) Data Warehouse
18 276 (16.22%) DevOps
19 273 (16.04%) Migration
20 246 (14.45%) Power Platform
21 234 (13.75%) Data Governance
21 234 (13.75%) Power BI
22 222 (13.04%) PySpark
23 219 (12.87%) Azure Data Factory
24 217 (12.75%) Microsoft
25 203 (11.93%) Validation
26 201 (11.81%) Problem-Solving
27 200 (11.75%) AI
28 186 (10.93%) Data Integration
29 180 (10.58%) dbt

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
1 158 (9.28%) Apache Airflow
2 135 (7.93%) Apache Spark
3 99 (5.82%) Apache
4 71 (4.17%) SAS
5 39 (2.29%) Confluence
6 10 (0.59%) Palantir Foundry
6 10 (0.59%) SharePoint
7 8 (0.47%) Jupyter
8 2 (0.12%) Apache Superset
8 2 (0.12%) Microsoft Exchange
9 1 (0.059%) ArcGIS
9 1 (0.059%) Camunda
9 1 (0.059%) Liferay
9 1 (0.059%) Luigi
9 1 (0.059%) R Markdown
Applications
1 19 (1.12%) Microsoft Excel
2 5 (0.29%) Notepad++
2 5 (0.29%) Spreadsheet
3 3 (0.18%) Chatbot
4 1 (0.059%) Microsoft PowerPoint
Business Applications
1 11 (0.65%) Aladdin
2 8 (0.47%) Dynamics CRM
3 5 (0.29%) Infor LN
3 5 (0.29%) NetSuite
3 5 (0.29%) Sage X3
4 3 (0.18%) SAP BPC
4 3 (0.18%) SAP S/4HANA
4 3 (0.18%) SimCorp Dimension
5 2 (0.12%) BambooHR
5 2 (0.12%) Maximo
6 1 (0.059%) iTrent
6 1 (0.059%) MIS ActiveH
6 1 (0.059%) NEC Housing
6 1 (0.059%) Oracle Assets
6 1 (0.059%) Oracle EBS
6 1 (0.059%) Oracle ERP
6 1 (0.059%) Raiser’s Edge
6 1 (0.059%) SAP Business ByDesign
6 1 (0.059%) SAP CAR
6 1 (0.059%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
Cloud Services
1 531 (31.20%) Azure
2 486 (28.55%) AWS
3 246 (14.45%) Power Platform
4 219 (12.87%) Azure Data Factory
5 180 (10.58%) dbt
5 180 (10.58%) Snowflake
6 154 (9.05%) GCP
7 148 (8.70%) Amazon S3
8 146 (8.58%) Azure Synapse Analytics
9 129 (7.58%) Azure DevOps
10 99 (5.82%) GitHub
11 98 (5.76%) Serverless
12 83 (4.88%) AWS Lambda
13 43 (2.53%) GitHub Actions
14 37 (2.17%) Amazon EMR
15 27 (1.59%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 26 (1.53%) Matillion
17 24 (1.41%) OpenShift
18 23 (1.35%) AWS CloudFormation
18 23 (1.35%) Fivetran
Communications & Networking
1 32 (1.88%) DNS
1 32 (1.88%) VPN
2 31 (1.82%) BGP
2 31 (1.82%) DMZ
2 31 (1.82%) Multicast
3 10 (0.59%) Structured Cabling
4 7 (0.41%) Firewall
5 5 (0.29%) PuTTY
5 5 (0.29%) WinSCP
6 4 (0.24%) Wi-Fi
6 4 (0.24%) Wireless
7 3 (0.18%) Intrusion Detection
8 1 (0.059%) 4G
8 1 (0.059%) 5G
Database & Business Intelligence
1 287 (16.86%) Data Warehouse
2 234 (13.75%) Power BI
3 157 (9.22%) Data Lake
4 96 (5.64%) Amazon Redshift
5 93 (5.46%) BigQuery
6 88 (5.17%) Metadata
7 87 (5.11%) SQL Server
8 84 (4.94%) Pentaho
9 81 (4.76%) Delta Lake
10 73 (4.29%) Tableau
11 61 (3.58%) PostgreSQL
12 60 (3.53%) Big Data
13 58 (3.41%) Amazon Athena
14 56 (3.29%) Snowflake Schema
15 52 (3.06%) Azure SQL Database
16 49 (2.88%) SQL Server Integration Services
17 46 (2.70%) NoSQL
18 41 (2.41%) Relational Database
19 35 (2.06%) Hadoop
20 33 (1.94%) MySQL
Development Applications
1 156 (9.17%) Git
2 79 (4.64%) GitLab
3 69 (4.05%) JIRA
4 41 (2.41%) Jenkins
5 7 (0.41%) Postman
6 5 (0.29%) Artifactory
6 5 (0.29%) Bitbucket
6 5 (0.29%) MLflow
7 3 (0.18%) Newman
7 3 (0.18%) SonarQube
7 3 (0.18%) Sonatype Nexus
8 2 (0.12%) Atlassian Bamboo
8 2 (0.12%) ER Studio
8 2 (0.12%) ERwin
8 2 (0.12%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
8 2 (0.12%) Visual Studio
8 2 (0.12%) Yeoman
9 1 (0.059%) JUnit
9 1 (0.059%) Selenium
9 1 (0.059%) Terragrunt
General
1 282 (16.57%) Finance
2 263 (15.45%) Social Skills
3 191 (11.22%) Analytical Skills
4 150 (8.81%) Public Sector
5 95 (5.58%) Banking
6 32 (1.88%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 26 (1.53%) Telecoms
8 24 (1.41%) Retail
9 23 (1.35%) Marketing
10 22 (1.29%) Documentation Skills
11 19 (1.12%) Manufacturing
12 18 (1.06%) Automotive
13 17 (1.00%) Investment Banking
14 16 (0.94%) Pharmaceutical
15 14 (0.82%) Aerospace
16 13 (0.76%) Front Office
17 11 (0.65%) Publishing
18 9 (0.53%) Billing
19 8 (0.47%) Legal
20 7 (0.41%) Military
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 222 (13.04%) PySpark
2 122 (7.17%) Kafka
3 37 (2.17%) Pandas
4 32 (1.88%) JSON
5 26 (1.53%) REST
6 21 (1.23%) Great Expectations
6 21 (1.23%) Spring
6 21 (1.23%) Spring Boot
6 21 (1.23%) XML
7 16 (0.94%) Apache Beam
8 15 (0.88%) YAML
9 13 (0.76%) Apache Avro
9 13 (0.76%) React
10 11 (0.65%) scikit-learn
11 10 (0.59%) Microsoft Graph
11 10 (0.59%) RESTful
12 9 (0.53%) GeoJSON
12 9 (0.53%) Matplotlib
12 9 (0.53%) Node.js
12 9 (0.53%) pytest
Miscellaneous
1 126 (7.40%) Cloud Native
2 70 (4.11%) Legacy Systems
3 49 (2.88%) Data Structures
4 33 (1.94%) Onboarding
5 27 (1.59%) Distributed Systems
6 22 (1.29%) Greenfield Project
6 22 (1.29%) NHS
7 20 (1.18%) Product Ownership
8 18 (1.06%) Reinsurance
9 17 (1.00%) Clustering
10 14 (0.82%) Data Protection Act
11 13 (0.76%) Reference Data
12 11 (0.65%) Life Science
13 10 (0.59%) Algorithms
13 10 (0.59%) Virtual Team
14 9 (0.53%) Distributed Computing
14 9 (0.53%) Driving Licence
14 9 (0.53%) Self-Motivation
15 8 (0.47%) Linux Command Line
15 8 (0.47%) Replication
Operating Systems
1 58 (3.41%) Unix
2 43 (2.53%) Linux
3 4 (0.24%) Windows
4 2 (0.12%) Ubuntu
4 2 (0.12%) Windows Server
5 1 (0.059%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 723 (42.48%) Data Pipeline
2 635 (37.31%) Data Engineering
3 619 (36.37%) Analytics
4 603 (35.43%) ETL
5 572 (33.61%) Data Modelling
6 407 (23.91%) CI/CD
7 309 (18.16%) Business Intelligence
8 292 (17.16%) Agile
9 276 (16.22%) DevOps
10 273 (16.04%) Migration
11 234 (13.75%) Data Governance
12 203 (11.93%) Validation
13 201 (11.81%) Problem-Solving
14 200 (11.75%) AI
15 186 (10.93%) Data Integration
16 178 (10.46%) Data Transformation
17 164 (9.64%) Decision-Making
18 162 (9.52%) Data Science
19 138 (8.11%) Infrastructure as Code
20 133 (7.81%) Test Automation
Programming Languages
1 879 (51.65%) SQL
2 726 (42.66%) Python
3 106 (6.23%) Java
4 54 (3.17%) Scala
5 51 (3.00%) PL/SQL
6 33 (1.94%) Shell Script
7 30 (1.76%) T-SQL
8 28 (1.65%) Data Analysis Expressions
9 26 (1.53%) Bash
9 26 (1.53%) C#
10 23 (1.35%) PowerShell
11 13 (0.76%) JavaScript
11 13 (0.76%) R
12 12 (0.71%) Bicep
13 7 (0.41%) Go
13 7 (0.41%) TypeScript
14 2 (0.12%) C
14 2 (0.12%) Korn
14 2 (0.12%) Ruby
14 2 (0.12%) SPARQL
Qualifications
1 460 (27.03%) Security Cleared
2 401 (23.56%) SC Cleared
3 42 (2.47%) BPSS Clearance
3 42 (2.47%) Degree
4 25 (1.47%) Azure Certification
5 22 (1.29%) DV Cleared
6 19 (1.12%) Computer Science Degree
7 10 (0.59%) AWS Certification
8 9 (0.53%) City & Guilds
8 9 (0.53%) DBS Check
9 6 (0.35%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
9 6 (0.35%) Master's Degree
9 6 (0.35%) SnowPro
10 5 (0.29%) BICSI Certification
10 5 (0.29%) CISM
10 5 (0.29%) CISSP
11 3 (0.18%) CEH
11 3 (0.18%) Microsoft Certification
12 1 (0.059%) CISA
12 1 (0.059%) Cisco Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 416 (24.44%) Data Quality
2 55 (3.23%) QA
3 47 (2.76%) GDPR
4 20 (1.18%) Accessibility
5 12 (0.71%) SLA
6 9 (0.53%) FATCA
7 5 (0.29%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 5 (0.29%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 4 (0.24%) HIPAA
9 3 (0.18%) GMP
9 3 (0.18%) MiFID
10 2 (0.12%) California Consumer Privacy Act
10 2 (0.12%) EMIR
10 2 (0.12%) PMO
10 2 (0.12%) SNOMED CT
10 2 (0.12%) WCAG
11 1 (0.059%) Government Security Classifications
11 1 (0.059%) IFRS
11 1 (0.059%) IFRS 17
11 1 (0.059%) IFRS 9
System Software
1 93 (5.46%) Docker
2 5 (0.29%) Virtual Machines
3 2 (0.12%) Active Directory
3 2 (0.12%) HDFS
4 1 (0.059%) RACF
Systems Management
1 173 (10.16%) Terraform
2 75 (4.41%) Kubernetes
3 35 (2.06%) Grafana
4 13 (0.76%) Ansible
5 10 (0.59%) Prometheus
6 6 (0.35%) Kibana
7 5 (0.29%) Control-M
8 3 (0.18%) Rancher
9 2 (0.12%) Apache Ranger
9 2 (0.12%) Thomson Reuters DACS
10 1 (0.059%) Kubeflow
10 1 (0.059%) logstash
10 1 (0.059%) NetBackup
10 1 (0.059%) Puppet
Vendors
1 313 (18.39%) Databricks
2 217 (12.75%) Microsoft
3 152 (8.93%) Oracle
4 125 (7.34%) Informatica
5 114 (6.70%) Talend
6 65 (3.82%) Google
7 58 (3.41%) Denodo
8 33 (1.94%) Cisco
8 33 (1.94%) F5
9 32 (1.88%) SAP
10 26 (1.53%) Salesforce
11 22 (1.29%) Splunk
12 20 (1.18%) Palantir
13 18 (1.06%) Cloudera
14 15 (0.88%) ServiceNow
15 14 (0.82%) Foundry
16 12 (0.71%) Sage
17 10 (0.59%) Alteryx
18 9 (0.53%) IBM
18 9 (0.53%) MuleSoft