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 19 August 2026.

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

6 months to
19 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 60 126 91
Rank change year-on-year +66 -35 +28
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 1,728 626 778
As % of all contract jobs in England 3.78% 2.27% 2.34%
As % of the Job Titles category 4.09% 2.48% 2.52%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,160 452 566
10th Percentile £382 £376 £263
25th Percentile £425 £427 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year - -4.76% -4.55%
75th Percentile £588 £600 £638
90th Percentile £663 £695 £700
UK median daily rate £500 £500 £525
% change year-on-year - -4.76% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 83 11 25
10th Percentile £19.72 £26.00 £44.00
25th Percentile £30.96 £42.25 £60.00
Median hourly rate £42.50 £52.50 £80.00
Median % change year-on-year -19.05% -34.38% +12.28%
75th Percentile £70.00 £70.60 -
90th Percentile £75.00 £80.00 -
UK median hourly rate £45.00 £52.50 £75.00
% change year-on-year -14.29% -30.00% +5.26%

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 42,268 25,250 30,900
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.45% 91.54% 92.94%
Number of daily rates quoted 25,556 16,282 20,186
10th Percentile £325 £281 £300
25th Percentile £425 £400 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £510 £525
Median % change year-on-year +2.94% -2.86% -4.55%
75th Percentile £630 £625 £638
90th Percentile £738 £738 £750
UK median daily rate £525 £500 £525
% change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -1.87%
Number of hourly rates quoted 3,197 1,355 1,747
10th Percentile £15.24 £13.50 £14.16
25th Percentile £21.25 £17.48 £21.00
Median hourly rate £42.50 £25.15 £45.00
Median % change year-on-year +68.99% -44.11% +7.40%
75th Percentile £68.00 £55.00 £66.33
90th Percentile £80.00 £73.75 £75.00
UK median hourly rate £41.71 £25.15 £43.00
% change year-on-year +65.84% -41.51% +2.87%

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 19 August 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 19 August 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 19 August 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 +43 834 £529 +0.71% 268
Midlands +75 388 £467 +1.25% 64
West Midlands +59 329 £465 +1.09% 47
North of England +21 227 £500 +5.26% 125
South East +18 131 £467 +3.78% 122
North West +22 129 £525 +10.53% 59
South West +3 88 £525 +5.00% 44
Yorkshire -3 78 £465 -7.00% 34
East Midlands +23 59 £470 +1.62% 17
East of England +4 40 £475 +22.58% 22
North East -24 21 £515 +21.89% 32
Data Engineer
UK

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

For the 6 months to 19 August 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.

1 867 (50.17%) SQL
2 746 (43.17%) Data Pipeline
3 706 (40.86%) Python
4 645 (37.33%) Data Engineering
5 627 (36.28%) Analytics
6 596 (34.49%) ETL
7 578 (33.45%) Data Modelling
8 533 (30.84%) Azure
9 508 (29.40%) AWS
10 463 (26.79%) Security Cleared
11 434 (25.12%) Data Quality
12 421 (24.36%) CI/CD
13 408 (23.61%) SC Cleared
14 329 (19.04%) Databricks
15 308 (17.82%) Agile
16 303 (17.53%) Business Intelligence
17 294 (17.01%) DevOps
18 290 (16.78%) Data Warehouse
19 271 (15.68%) Migration
20 236 (13.66%) Data Governance
21 235 (13.60%) PySpark
22 230 (13.31%) Power Platform
23 228 (13.19%) AI
24 224 (12.96%) Power BI
25 216 (12.50%) Microsoft
26 210 (12.15%) Azure Data Factory
27 206 (11.92%) Validation
28 203 (11.75%) Data Integration
28 203 (11.75%) Problem-Solving
29 199 (11.52%) Data Transformation

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
1 181 (10.47%) Apache Airflow
2 145 (8.39%) Apache Spark
3 108 (6.25%) Apache
4 69 (3.99%) SAS
5 35 (2.03%) Confluence
6 15 (0.87%) Palantir Foundry
7 12 (0.69%) SharePoint
8 9 (0.52%) Jupyter
9 3 (0.17%) Apache Superset
10 2 (0.12%) Microsoft Exchange
11 1 (0.058%) ArcGIS
11 1 (0.058%) Liferay
11 1 (0.058%) Luigi
11 1 (0.058%) PowerExchange
11 1 (0.058%) R Markdown
Applications
1 24 (1.39%) Microsoft Excel
2 6 (0.35%) Spreadsheet
3 5 (0.29%) Notepad++
4 4 (0.23%) Chatbot
5 1 (0.058%) Microsoft PowerPoint
Business Applications
1 12 (0.69%) Aladdin
2 6 (0.35%) Dynamics CRM
3 5 (0.29%) Infor LN
3 5 (0.29%) NetSuite
3 5 (0.29%) Sage X3
4 3 (0.17%) SAP BPC
4 3 (0.17%) SAP S/4HANA
4 3 (0.17%) SimCorp Dimension
4 3 (0.17%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
5 2 (0.12%) BambooHR
5 2 (0.12%) Maximo
6 1 (0.058%) FIS Private Capital Suite
6 1 (0.058%) MIS ActiveH
6 1 (0.058%) Oracle 11i
6 1 (0.058%) Oracle Assets
6 1 (0.058%) Oracle EBS
6 1 (0.058%) Oracle ERP
6 1 (0.058%) Raiser’s Edge
6 1 (0.058%) SAP CAR
6 1 (0.058%) SAP EWM
Cloud Services
1 533 (30.84%) Azure
2 508 (29.40%) AWS
3 230 (13.31%) Power Platform
4 210 (12.15%) Azure Data Factory
5 194 (11.23%) Snowflake
6 187 (10.82%) dbt
7 160 (9.26%) GCP
8 143 (8.28%) Amazon S3
9 134 (7.75%) Azure Synapse Analytics
10 128 (7.41%) Azure DevOps
11 104 (6.02%) GitHub
12 100 (5.79%) Serverless
13 87 (5.03%) AWS Lambda
14 44 (2.55%) GitHub Actions
15 36 (2.08%) Amazon EMR
16 28 (1.62%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 23 (1.33%) Amazon Kinesis
17 23 (1.33%) AWS Step Functions
17 23 (1.33%) Fivetran
18 22 (1.27%) Matillion
Communications & Networking
1 31 (1.79%) VPN
2 30 (1.74%) BGP
2 30 (1.74%) DMZ
2 30 (1.74%) DNS
2 30 (1.74%) Multicast
3 10 (0.58%) Structured Cabling
4 7 (0.41%) Firewall
5 5 (0.29%) PuTTY
5 5 (0.29%) WinSCP
6 4 (0.23%) Wi-Fi
6 4 (0.23%) Wireless
7 3 (0.17%) Intrusion Detection
Database & Business Intelligence
1 290 (16.78%) Data Warehouse
2 224 (12.96%) Power BI
3 153 (8.85%) Data Lake
4 107 (6.19%) Metadata
5 99 (5.73%) BigQuery
6 96 (5.56%) Amazon Redshift
7 84 (4.86%) Pentaho
8 82 (4.75%) SQL Server
9 74 (4.28%) Delta Lake
10 66 (3.82%) Amazon Athena
11 65 (3.76%) Tableau
12 63 (3.65%) PostgreSQL
13 62 (3.59%) Big Data
14 52 (3.01%) Relational Database
15 51 (2.95%) Snowflake Schema
16 50 (2.89%) NoSQL
17 49 (2.84%) Azure SQL Database
18 41 (2.37%) SQL Server Integration Services
19 34 (1.97%) Amazon RDS
20 33 (1.91%) Hadoop
Development Applications
1 151 (8.74%) Git
2 84 (4.86%) GitLab
3 65 (3.76%) JIRA
4 46 (2.66%) Jenkins
5 9 (0.52%) MLflow
6 7 (0.41%) Bitbucket
6 7 (0.41%) Postman
7 5 (0.29%) Artifactory
7 5 (0.29%) SonarQube
8 4 (0.23%) ERwin
9 3 (0.17%) Atlassian Bamboo
9 3 (0.17%) Newman
9 3 (0.17%) Sonatype Nexus
10 2 (0.12%) Claude Code
10 2 (0.12%) ER Studio
10 2 (0.12%) Selenium
10 2 (0.12%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
10 2 (0.12%) Terragrunt
10 2 (0.12%) Yeoman
11 1 (0.058%) Toad
General
1 281 (16.26%) Finance
2 268 (15.51%) Social Skills
3 195 (11.28%) Analytical Skills
4 154 (8.91%) Public Sector
5 102 (5.90%) Banking
6 31 (1.79%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 24 (1.39%) Telecoms
8 22 (1.27%) Retail
9 21 (1.22%) Marketing
10 19 (1.10%) Automotive
11 18 (1.04%) Aerospace
11 18 (1.04%) Manufacturing
12 16 (0.93%) Front Office
12 16 (0.93%) Investment Banking
13 15 (0.87%) Documentation Skills
14 14 (0.81%) Pharmaceutical
15 10 (0.58%) Financial Institution
15 10 (0.58%) Law
16 8 (0.46%) Legal
16 8 (0.46%) Military
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 235 (13.60%) PySpark
2 120 (6.94%) Kafka
3 31 (1.79%) Pandas
4 25 (1.45%) REST
5 24 (1.39%) JSON
6 22 (1.27%) Spring
6 22 (1.27%) Spring Boot
7 21 (1.22%) Great Expectations
8 16 (0.93%) XML
9 15 (0.87%) Apache Beam
10 14 (0.81%) React
10 14 (0.81%) YAML
11 13 (0.75%) RESTful
12 12 (0.69%) pytest
13 10 (0.58%) Microsoft Graph
14 9 (0.52%) Apache Avro
14 9 (0.52%) PyTorch
15 8 (0.46%) .NET
15 8 (0.46%) Spark Streaming
16 7 (0.41%) scikit-learn
Miscellaneous
1 132 (7.64%) Cloud Native
2 75 (4.34%) Legacy Systems
3 48 (2.78%) Data Structures
4 34 (1.97%) Onboarding
5 24 (1.39%) Product Ownership
6 23 (1.33%) Distributed Systems
7 21 (1.22%) Greenfield Project
8 20 (1.16%) NHS
9 19 (1.10%) Reference Data
10 17 (0.98%) Reinsurance
11 14 (0.81%) Management Information System
12 12 (0.69%) AI Agents
12 12 (0.69%) Data Protection Act
13 11 (0.64%) Algorithms
13 11 (0.64%) Clustering
14 10 (0.58%) Life Science
14 10 (0.58%) Virtual Team
15 9 (0.52%) Self-Motivation
16 8 (0.46%) Driving Licence
16 8 (0.46%) Linux Command Line
Operating Systems
1 57 (3.30%) Unix
2 45 (2.60%) Linux
3 4 (0.23%) Windows
4 2 (0.12%) Ubuntu
4 2 (0.12%) Windows Server
5 1 (0.058%) Robot Operating System
5 1 (0.058%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 746 (43.17%) Data Pipeline
2 645 (37.33%) Data Engineering
3 627 (36.28%) Analytics
4 596 (34.49%) ETL
5 578 (33.45%) Data Modelling
6 421 (24.36%) CI/CD
7 308 (17.82%) Agile
8 303 (17.53%) Business Intelligence
9 294 (17.01%) DevOps
10 271 (15.68%) Migration
11 236 (13.66%) Data Governance
12 228 (13.19%) AI
13 206 (11.92%) Validation
14 203 (11.75%) Data Integration
14 203 (11.75%) Problem-Solving
15 199 (11.52%) Data Transformation
16 170 (9.84%) Decision-Making
17 147 (8.51%) Data Science
18 143 (8.28%) Test Automation
19 139 (8.04%) Machine Learning
Programming Languages
1 867 (50.17%) SQL
2 706 (40.86%) Python
3 101 (5.84%) Java
4 59 (3.41%) Scala
5 48 (2.78%) PL/SQL
6 31 (1.79%) Shell Script
7 25 (1.45%) Data Analysis Expressions
7 25 (1.45%) T-SQL
8 23 (1.33%) Bash
9 21 (1.22%) PowerShell
10 16 (0.93%) C#
10 16 (0.93%) JavaScript
11 12 (0.69%) R
12 8 (0.46%) Bicep
13 6 (0.35%) Go
13 6 (0.35%) TypeScript
14 4 (0.23%) Korn
15 2 (0.12%) COBOL
15 2 (0.12%) Ruby
15 2 (0.12%) SPARQL
Qualifications
1 463 (26.79%) Security Cleared
2 408 (23.61%) SC Cleared
3 41 (2.37%) Degree
4 33 (1.91%) BPSS Clearance
5 22 (1.27%) Azure Certification
6 21 (1.22%) Computer Science Degree
6 21 (1.22%) DV Cleared
7 10 (0.58%) AWS Certification
8 9 (0.52%) City & Guilds
9 8 (0.46%) DBS Check
10 7 (0.41%) SnowPro
11 6 (0.35%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
11 6 (0.35%) Master's Degree
12 5 (0.29%) BICSI Certification
12 5 (0.29%) CISM
12 5 (0.29%) CISSP
13 4 (0.23%) Microsoft Certification
14 3 (0.17%) CEH
15 1 (0.058%) CISA
15 1 (0.058%) Postgraduate
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 434 (25.12%) Data Quality
2 56 (3.24%) QA
3 42 (2.43%) GDPR
4 16 (0.93%) Accessibility
5 11 (0.64%) SLA
6 6 (0.35%) FATCA
7 5 (0.29%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 4 (0.23%) HIPAA
8 4 (0.23%) ISO/IEC 27001
9 3 (0.17%) MiFID
10 2 (0.12%) California Consumer Privacy Act
10 2 (0.12%) EMIR
10 2 (0.12%) SNOMED CT
10 2 (0.12%) WCAG
11 1 (0.058%) Disclosure Scotland
11 1 (0.058%) Government Security Classifications
11 1 (0.058%) IFRS
11 1 (0.058%) IFRS 17
11 1 (0.058%) IFRS 9
11 1 (0.058%) PMO
System Software
1 118 (6.83%) Docker
2 4 (0.23%) Virtual Machines
3 2 (0.12%) Active Directory
3 2 (0.12%) HDFS
4 1 (0.058%) RACF
Systems Management
1 165 (9.55%) Terraform
2 91 (5.27%) Kubernetes
3 34 (1.97%) Grafana
4 14 (0.81%) Ansible
5 9 (0.52%) Control-M
6 6 (0.35%) Kibana
7 3 (0.17%) Prometheus
8 2 (0.12%) Apache Ranger
8 2 (0.12%) Puppet
8 2 (0.12%) Rancher
8 2 (0.12%) Thomson Reuters DACS
9 1 (0.058%) Kubeflow
9 1 (0.058%) logstash
Vendors
1 329 (19.04%) Databricks
2 216 (12.50%) Microsoft
3 143 (8.28%) Oracle
4 111 (6.42%) Informatica
5 103 (5.96%) Talend
6 67 (3.88%) Google
7 63 (3.65%) Denodo
8 31 (1.79%) Cisco
8 31 (1.79%) F5
9 28 (1.62%) Salesforce
10 27 (1.56%) SAP
11 25 (1.45%) Palantir
12 20 (1.16%) Foundry
13 17 (0.98%) Splunk
14 14 (0.81%) Cloudera
15 13 (0.75%) ServiceNow
16 10 (0.58%) IBM
16 10 (0.58%) Sage
17 9 (0.52%) Bloomberg
18 8 (0.46%) InterSystems