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 10 November 2025.

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

6 months to
10 Nov 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 128 96 127
Rank change year-on-year -32 +31 +7
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 669 770 802
As % of all contract jobs in England 2.27% 2.50% 2.00%
As % of the Job Titles category 2.49% 2.68% 2.14%
Number of daily rates quoted 480 529 603
10th Percentile £363 £399 £400
25th Percentile £413 £463 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -6.82% - -
75th Percentile £600 £638 £638
90th Percentile £700 £700 £700
UK median daily rate £500 £540 £525
% change year-on-year -7.41% +2.86% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 13 7 13
10th Percentile £25.34 £35.25 £35.13
25th Percentile £33.75 £45.25 £39.85
Median hourly rate £43.50 £60.00 £63.00
Median % change year-on-year -27.50% -4.76% +8.62%
75th Percentile £69.25 £97.50 £68.00
90th Percentile £104.00 - £78.75
UK median hourly rate £48.00 £42.50 £63.00
% change year-on-year +12.94% -32.54% +8.62%

All Contract IT Job Vacancies
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 26,886 28,684 37,503
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 91.17% 92.99% 93.69%
Number of daily rates quoted 17,258 17,524 25,976
10th Percentile £281 £300 £293
25th Percentile £404 £413 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £510 £525 £535
Median % change year-on-year -2.86% -1.87% -2.73%
75th Percentile £625 £638 £650
90th Percentile £725 £750 £750
UK median daily rate £500 £525 £525
% change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 1,601 1,072 1,433
10th Percentile £14.00 £15.22 £15.32
25th Percentile £17.69 £21.19 £19.25
Median hourly rate £25.15 £40.00 £45.00
Median % change year-on-year -37.13% -11.11% +50.00%
75th Percentile £51.90 £66.00 £65.00
90th Percentile £70.16 £74.86 £77.50
UK median hourly rate £25.15 £35.25 £44.50
% change year-on-year -28.65% -20.79% +53.98%

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 10 November 2025.

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 10 November 2025.

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 10 November 2025. 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 -13 413 £525 -8.70% 343
North of England -19 78 £450 -10.00% 79
Midlands -19 70 £514 +5.22% 57
West Midlands -24 56 £522 +6.48% 50
South West +15 38 £550 -4.35% 33
North West -8 35 £403 -19.50% 44
Yorkshire -23 35 £500 +1.52% 30
South East -40 34 £475 -13.64% 113
East Midlands -9 13 £460 +29.21% 7
North East -5 8 £425 -27.35% 5
East of England -28 6 £625 +79.86% 18
Data Engineer
UK

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

For the 6 months to 10 November 2025, 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.

1 429 (64.13%) Python
2 410 (61.29%) SQL
3 319 (47.68%) Data Pipeline
4 286 (42.75%) Azure
5 274 (40.96%) ETL
6 271 (40.51%) Data Engineering
7 245 (36.62%) AWS
8 232 (34.68%) Data Modelling
9 209 (31.24%) CI/CD
9 209 (31.24%) Databricks
10 208 (31.09%) Analytics
11 176 (26.31%) Data Quality
12 161 (24.07%) Business Intelligence
13 152 (22.72%) DevOps
14 148 (22.12%) Data Warehouse
15 146 (21.82%) Security Cleared
16 131 (19.58%) Agile
17 129 (19.28%) Power Platform
18 128 (19.13%) Azure Data Factory
19 126 (18.83%) Power BI
20 122 (18.24%) SC Cleared
21 119 (17.79%) Apache Airflow
22 113 (16.89%) Data Science
23 110 (16.44%) PySpark
24 108 (16.14%) Problem-Solving
25 102 (15.25%) Snowflake
26 93 (13.90%) GCP
27 92 (13.75%) Terraform
28 91 (13.60%) Git
28 91 (13.60%) Machine Learning

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
1 119 (17.79%) Apache Airflow
2 85 (12.71%) Apache Spark
3 59 (8.82%) Apache
4 23 (3.44%) Confluence
5 12 (1.79%) SAS
6 8 (1.20%) Oracle Application Server
7 6 (0.90%) Apache Pig
7 6 (0.90%) SharePoint
8 5 (0.75%) IIS
9 4 (0.60%) Jupyter
10 3 (0.45%) Oracle SOA Suite
11 2 (0.30%) ArcGIS
11 2 (0.30%) Documentum
11 2 (0.30%) Luigi
12 1 (0.15%) Apache Synapse
12 1 (0.15%) nginx
Applications
1 7 (1.05%) Microsoft Excel
2 4 (0.60%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 2 (0.30%) Microsoft Office
3 2 (0.30%) Windchill
4 1 (0.15%) MS Visio
4 1 (0.15%) SPSS
4 1 (0.15%) Stata
Business Applications
1 3 (0.45%) Oracle BPM
2 2 (0.30%) Aladdin
2 2 (0.30%) Dynamics CRM
2 2 (0.30%) Maximo
2 2 (0.30%) Payment Gateway
2 2 (0.30%) SAP S/4HANA
3 1 (0.15%) Dynamics AX
3 1 (0.15%) Endur
3 1 (0.15%) Salesforce CRM
3 1 (0.15%) SAP BPC
3 1 (0.15%) SAP ERP
3 1 (0.15%) SAP Oil and Gas
Cloud Services
1 286 (42.75%) Azure
2 245 (36.62%) AWS
3 129 (19.28%) Power Platform
4 128 (19.13%) Azure Data Factory
5 102 (15.25%) Snowflake
6 93 (13.90%) GCP
7 84 (12.56%) dbt
8 81 (12.11%) Amazon S3
9 77 (11.51%) Azure Synapse Analytics
10 70 (10.46%) GitHub
11 61 (9.12%) Serverless
12 42 (6.28%) Azure DevOps
13 40 (5.98%) AWS Lambda
14 37 (5.53%) GitHub Actions
15 23 (3.44%) AWS CloudFormation
16 19 (2.84%) Amazon EMR
16 19 (2.84%) Amazon Kinesis
16 19 (2.84%) SaaS
17 11 (1.64%) AWS Step Functions
18 9 (1.35%) Azure Logic Apps
Communications & Networking
1 5 (0.75%) Firewall
1 5 (0.75%) TCP/IP
2 3 (0.45%) Internet
2 3 (0.45%) SAN
2 3 (0.45%) SSH
3 2 (0.30%) DNS
3 2 (0.30%) SSL
3 2 (0.30%) Structured Cabling
4 1 (0.15%) 802.11
4 1 (0.15%) Ethernet
4 1 (0.15%) Wi-Fi
4 1 (0.15%) Wireless
Database & Business Intelligence
1 148 (22.12%) Data Warehouse
2 126 (18.83%) Power BI
3 88 (13.15%) Data Lake
4 61 (9.12%) Big Data
5 54 (8.07%) SQL Server
6 50 (7.47%) PostgreSQL
7 48 (7.17%) Hadoop
8 47 (7.03%) Amazon Redshift
9 43 (6.43%) Delta Lake
10 37 (5.53%) BigQuery
10 37 (5.53%) NoSQL
11 34 (5.08%) Relational Database
12 33 (4.93%) Tableau
13 31 (4.63%) Azure SQL Database
14 26 (3.89%) Star Schema
15 25 (3.74%) SQL Server Integration Services
16 24 (3.59%) Metadata
17 21 (3.14%) Amazon QuickSight
18 20 (2.99%) Elasticsearch
19 18 (2.69%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 91 (13.60%) Git
2 47 (7.03%) Jenkins
3 34 (5.08%) JIRA
4 23 (3.44%) GitLab
5 15 (2.24%) MLflow
6 8 (1.20%) DBeaver
7 5 (0.75%) SonarQube
7 5 (0.75%) Visual Studio Code
8 4 (0.60%) Bitbucket
9 3 (0.45%) Poetry
9 3 (0.45%) PyCharm
9 3 (0.45%) Sonatype Nexus
9 3 (0.45%) Visual Studio
10 2 (0.30%) Selenium
11 1 (0.15%) ERwin
11 1 (0.15%) Gradle
11 1 (0.15%) JUnit
11 1 (0.15%) Maven
11 1 (0.15%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
11 1 (0.15%) TeamCity
General
1 142 (21.23%) Social Skills
2 112 (16.74%) Finance
3 84 (12.56%) Analytical Skills
4 48 (7.17%) Public Sector
5 30 (4.48%) Banking
6 15 (2.24%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 13 (1.94%) Pharmaceutical
8 12 (1.79%) Retail
9 11 (1.64%) Investment Banking
10 10 (1.49%) Front Office
11 9 (1.35%) Marketing
12 8 (1.20%) Telecoms
13 6 (0.90%) Documentation Skills
14 4 (0.60%) Manufacturing
14 4 (0.60%) Presentation Skills
15 3 (0.45%) Corporate Banking
15 3 (0.45%) Financial Institution
15 3 (0.45%) Legal
15 3 (0.45%) Military
15 3 (0.45%) Retail Banking
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 110 (16.44%) PySpark
2 74 (11.06%) Kafka
3 18 (2.69%) Apache NiFi
4 17 (2.54%) XML
5 14 (2.09%) Pandas
6 12 (1.79%) HTML
6 12 (1.79%) JSON
7 11 (1.64%) Flask
7 11 (1.64%) RabbitMQ
7 11 (1.64%) RESTful
8 10 (1.49%) NumPy
9 9 (1.35%) pytest
10 8 (1.20%) Jinja
10 8 (1.20%) Oracle GoldenGate
10 8 (1.20%) REST
11 7 (1.05%) GraphQL
11 7 (1.05%) Keycloak
11 7 (1.05%) Middleware
11 7 (1.05%) PyTorch
12 6 (0.90%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 43 (6.43%) Cloud Native
2 23 (3.44%) Legacy Systems
3 22 (3.29%) Data Structures
3 22 (3.29%) Product Ownership
4 18 (2.69%) Algorithms
5 17 (2.54%) Replication
6 13 (1.94%) Data Protection Act
6 13 (1.94%) Onboarding
7 10 (1.49%) Distributed Computing
8 9 (1.35%) Greenfield Project
8 9 (1.35%) Hybrid Cloud
9 8 (1.20%) IoT
9 8 (1.20%) Life Science
10 6 (0.90%) Clustering
10 6 (0.90%) NHS
10 6 (0.90%) Reinsurance
10 6 (0.90%) Virtual Team
11 5 (0.75%) Genomics
11 5 (0.75%) Linux Command Line
12 4 (0.60%) Data Fabric
Operating Systems
1 22 (3.29%) Linux
2 12 (1.79%) Unix
3 3 (0.45%) Windows
4 2 (0.30%) Windows Server
4 2 (0.30%) Windows Server 2003
Processes & Methodologies
1 319 (47.68%) Data Pipeline
2 274 (40.96%) ETL
3 271 (40.51%) Data Engineering
4 232 (34.68%) Data Modelling
5 209 (31.24%) CI/CD
6 208 (31.09%) Analytics
7 161 (24.07%) Business Intelligence
8 152 (22.72%) DevOps
9 131 (19.58%) Agile
10 113 (16.89%) Data Science
11 108 (16.14%) Problem-Solving
12 91 (13.60%) Machine Learning
13 88 (13.15%) Data Governance
13 88 (13.15%) Infrastructure as Code
14 84 (12.56%) AI
15 75 (11.21%) Data Integration
16 74 (11.06%) Data Transformation
17 73 (10.91%) Migration
18 68 (10.16%) Visualisation
19 67 (10.01%) Data Architecture
Programming Languages
1 429 (64.13%) Python
2 410 (61.29%) SQL
3 68 (10.16%) Java
4 65 (9.72%) Scala
5 23 (3.44%) Bash
6 13 (1.94%) PL/SQL
7 12 (1.79%) Data Analysis Expressions
8 10 (1.49%) C#
8 10 (1.49%) Go
8 10 (1.49%) JavaScript
8 10 (1.49%) R
9 9 (1.35%) PowerShell
9 9 (1.35%) Shell Script
10 7 (1.05%) TypeScript
11 6 (0.90%) T-SQL
12 4 (0.60%) C++
12 4 (0.60%) Groovy
13 3 (0.45%) Korn
14 2 (0.30%) ABAP
14 2 (0.30%) Bicep
Qualifications
1 146 (21.82%) Security Cleared
2 122 (18.24%) SC Cleared
3 35 (5.23%) Degree
4 22 (3.29%) AWS Certification
5 20 (2.99%) DV Cleared
6 19 (2.84%) Azure Certification
7 14 (2.09%) Computer Science Degree
8 9 (1.35%) Master's Degree
9 6 (0.90%) BPSS Clearance
10 3 (0.45%) SnowPro
11 2 (0.30%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
11 2 (0.30%) MCP
12 1 (0.15%) CTC Cleared
12 1 (0.15%) DBS Check
12 1 (0.15%) HND
12 1 (0.15%) PhD
12 1 (0.15%) Tableau Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 176 (26.31%) Data Quality
2 31 (4.63%) GDPR
3 14 (2.09%) QA
4 7 (1.05%) Accessibility
5 4 (0.60%) NIST
5 4 (0.60%) SLA
6 3 (0.45%) HIPAA
6 3 (0.45%) ISO/IEC 20000
7 2 (0.30%) Dodd-Frank
7 2 (0.30%) EMIR
7 2 (0.30%) EU AI Act
7 2 (0.30%) MiFID
8 1 (0.15%) HL7
8 1 (0.15%) ISO 19650
8 1 (0.15%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 1 (0.15%) NCSC
8 1 (0.15%) PMO
8 1 (0.15%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 1 (0.15%) SOC 2
8 1 (0.15%) WCAG
System Software
1 56 (8.37%) Docker
2 9 (1.35%) Virtual Machines
3 5 (0.75%) zsh
4 2 (0.30%) Active Directory
5 1 (0.15%) HDFS
Systems Management
1 92 (13.75%) Terraform
2 57 (8.52%) Kubernetes
3 11 (1.64%) Ansible
4 9 (1.35%) Grafana
4 9 (1.35%) NetBackup
5 5 (0.75%) Prometheus
5 5 (0.75%) Puppet
6 4 (0.60%) Argo
6 4 (0.60%) Kibana
7 3 (0.45%) Ambari
7 3 (0.45%) Istio
7 3 (0.45%) Kubeflow
7 3 (0.45%) ZABBIX
8 2 (0.30%) Control-M
8 2 (0.30%) EMC NetWorker
8 2 (0.30%) logstash
8 2 (0.30%) Tivoli Storage Manager
9 1 (0.15%) FortiGate
Vendors
1 209 (31.24%) Databricks
2 78 (11.66%) Microsoft
3 49 (7.32%) Oracle
4 31 (4.63%) Google
5 28 (4.19%) Palantir
6 27 (4.04%) Foundry
7 24 (3.59%) Talend
8 17 (2.54%) Informatica
9 16 (2.39%) Cloudera
10 15 (2.24%) Denodo
11 13 (1.94%) IBM
12 12 (1.79%) Red Hat
12 12 (1.79%) SAP
13 9 (1.35%) Commvault
14 8 (1.20%) Splunk
14 8 (1.20%) Veritas
15 7 (1.05%) Confluent
15 7 (1.05%) Virgin Media
16 5 (0.75%) EMC
16 5 (0.75%) Salesforce