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 2 May 2026.

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

6 months to
2 May 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 63 84 98
Rank change year-on-year +21 +14 +16
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 1,468 745 835
As % of all contract jobs in England 3.63% 3.05% 2.25%
As % of the Job Titles category 3.93% 3.30% 2.42%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,044 569 652
10th Percentile £375 £358 £290
25th Percentile £425 £425 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £510
Median % change year-on-year - -1.96% -7.27%
75th Percentile £588 £600 £608
90th Percentile £650 £725 £688
UK median daily rate £500 £500 £500
% change year-on-year - - -9.09%
Number of hourly rates quoted 45 10 43
10th Percentile £19.34 £38.95 £37.50
25th Percentile £35.00 £51.25 £49.25
Median hourly rate £52.50 £65.00 £67.50
Median % change year-on-year -19.23% -3.70% +5.47%
75th Percentile £75.00 £78.40 £80.00
90th Percentile £77.40 £93.75 -
UK median hourly rate £52.50 £58.75 £65.00
% change year-on-year -10.64% -9.62% +1.56%

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 37,309 22,595 34,454
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.34% 92.59% 92.73%
Number of daily rates quoted 23,342 15,022 22,866
10th Percentile £313 £300 £280
25th Percentile £413 £409 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £510 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -2.86% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £620 £638 £640
90th Percentile £725 £750 £750
UK median daily rate £501 £515 £525
% change year-on-year -2.82% -1.90% -2.78%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,525 898 2,434
10th Percentile £15.73 £14.20 £13.00
25th Percentile £20.79 £18.51 £16.30
Median hourly rate £47.00 £30.79 £36.02
Median % change year-on-year +52.63% -14.52% -19.53%
75th Percentile £67.50 £64.31 £61.25
90th Percentile £78.75 £75.00 £72.50
UK median hourly rate £44.00 £29.00 £36.02
% change year-on-year +51.72% -19.49% -19.95%

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 May 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 May 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 May 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 +20 801 £525 - 175
Midlands +34 291 £469 +1.96% 62
West Midlands +29 272 £469 -1.26% 44
North of England -7 185 £473 +2.16% 87
North West -3 118 £500 +8.11% 55
South East -7 88 £500 +5.26% 89
South West -5 63 £505 +1.00% 33
Yorkshire -23 52 £465 +3.33% 14
East Midlands -27 19 £525 +31.66% 18
East of England -30 17 £565 +79.37% 15
North East -19 15 £463 +2.78% 19
Data Engineer
UK

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

For the 6 months to 2 May 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.

1 807 (54.97%) SQL
2 674 (45.91%) Python
3 611 (41.62%) Data Pipeline
4 583 (39.71%) ETL
5 574 (39.10%) Analytics
6 560 (38.15%) Data Engineering
7 530 (36.10%) Azure
8 522 (35.56%) Data Modelling
9 432 (29.43%) Security Cleared
10 388 (26.43%) AWS
10 388 (26.43%) SC Cleared
11 387 (26.36%) Data Quality
12 367 (25.00%) CI/CD
13 350 (23.84%) Databricks
14 332 (22.62%) Business Intelligence
15 280 (19.07%) DevOps
16 278 (18.94%) Agile
17 264 (17.98%) Power Platform
18 254 (17.30%) Data Warehouse
19 249 (16.96%) Power BI
20 226 (15.40%) Azure Data Factory
21 220 (14.99%) PySpark
22 217 (14.78%) Data Governance
23 211 (14.37%) Problem-Solving
24 200 (13.62%) Microsoft
25 180 (12.26%) Migration
26 170 (11.58%) AI
26 170 (11.58%) Terraform
27 168 (11.44%) Git
28 164 (11.17%) Data Integration

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
1 147 (10.01%) Apache Spark
2 135 (9.20%) Apache Airflow
3 83 (5.65%) Apache
4 71 (4.84%) SAS
5 24 (1.63%) Confluence
6 8 (0.54%) Jupyter
6 8 (0.54%) Palantir Foundry
7 5 (0.34%) Microsoft Exchange
8 3 (0.20%) SharePoint
9 1 (0.068%) Apache Superset
9 1 (0.068%) Apache Synapse
9 1 (0.068%) Appian
9 1 (0.068%) Camunda
9 1 (0.068%) Luigi
9 1 (0.068%) R Markdown
Applications
1 20 (1.36%) Microsoft Excel
2 5 (0.34%) Notepad++
3 4 (0.27%) Chatbot
3 4 (0.27%) Spreadsheet
Business Applications
1 2 (0.14%) Aladdin
1 2 (0.14%) BambooHR
1 2 (0.14%) Dynamics CRM
1 2 (0.14%) Maximo
1 2 (0.14%) SAP BPC
1 2 (0.14%) SAP S/4HANA
2 1 (0.068%) Actimize
2 1 (0.068%) Elite 3E
2 1 (0.068%) iTrent
2 1 (0.068%) NEC Housing
2 1 (0.068%) Oracle 11i
2 1 (0.068%) Oracle ERP
2 1 (0.068%) SAP Business ByDesign
2 1 (0.068%) SimCorp Dimension
Cloud Services
1 530 (36.10%) Azure
2 388 (26.43%) AWS
3 264 (17.98%) Power Platform
4 226 (15.40%) Azure Data Factory
5 159 (10.83%) Azure Synapse Analytics
6 147 (10.01%) Snowflake
7 139 (9.47%) GCP
8 134 (9.13%) Amazon S3
9 129 (8.79%) dbt
10 122 (8.31%) Azure DevOps
11 111 (7.56%) GitHub
12 88 (5.99%) Serverless
13 72 (4.90%) AWS Lambda
14 50 (3.41%) GitHub Actions
15 34 (2.32%) AWS CloudFormation
16 27 (1.84%) Matillion
17 26 (1.77%) Amazon Kinesis
18 22 (1.50%) OpenShift
19 21 (1.43%) Dagster
20 20 (1.36%) AWS Step Functions
Communications & Networking
1 31 (2.11%) DNS
1 31 (2.11%) VPN
2 30 (2.04%) BGP
2 30 (2.04%) DMZ
2 30 (2.04%) Multicast
3 10 (0.68%) Structured Cabling
4 5 (0.34%) Firewall
4 5 (0.34%) PuTTY
4 5 (0.34%) WinSCP
5 3 (0.20%) SAN
6 2 (0.14%) Wi-Fi
6 2 (0.14%) Wireless
7 1 (0.068%) 4G
7 1 (0.068%) 5G
7 1 (0.068%) Network Security
7 1 (0.068%) Software-Defined Networking
Database & Business Intelligence
1 254 (17.30%) Data Warehouse
2 249 (16.96%) Power BI
3 164 (11.17%) Data Lake
4 113 (7.70%) SQL Server
5 89 (6.06%) Delta Lake
6 86 (5.86%) Amazon Redshift
7 85 (5.79%) BigQuery
8 84 (5.72%) Metadata
9 83 (5.65%) Azure SQL Database
10 79 (5.38%) Pentaho
11 70 (4.77%) Tableau
12 61 (4.16%) Big Data
13 60 (4.09%) PostgreSQL
14 59 (4.02%) NoSQL
15 57 (3.88%) Snowflake Schema
16 55 (3.75%) SQL Server Integration Services
17 51 (3.47%) Amazon Athena
18 38 (2.59%) Relational Database
19 37 (2.52%) Hadoop
20 35 (2.38%) Data Vault
Development Applications
1 168 (11.44%) Git
2 71 (4.84%) JIRA
3 62 (4.22%) GitLab
4 59 (4.02%) Jenkins
5 16 (1.09%) MLflow
6 2 (0.14%) Bitbucket
6 2 (0.14%) SonarQube
6 2 (0.14%) Sonatype Nexus
6 2 (0.14%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
6 2 (0.14%) Visual Studio
7 1 (0.068%) ER Studio
7 1 (0.068%) ERwin
7 1 (0.068%) Jaeger
7 1 (0.068%) JUnit
7 1 (0.068%) Poetry
7 1 (0.068%) Selenium
7 1 (0.068%) Team Foundation Server
7 1 (0.068%) Terragrunt
General
1 242 (16.49%) Finance
2 233 (15.87%) Social Skills
3 155 (10.56%) Analytical Skills
4 125 (8.51%) Public Sector
5 79 (5.38%) Banking
6 29 (1.98%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 22 (1.50%) Investment Banking
8 21 (1.43%) Telecoms
9 18 (1.23%) Marketing
9 18 (1.23%) Retail
10 17 (1.16%) Documentation Skills
11 16 (1.09%) Manufacturing
12 13 (0.89%) Aerospace
12 13 (0.89%) Pharmaceutical
13 12 (0.82%) Publishing
14 10 (0.68%) Front Office
15 8 (0.54%) Military
16 6 (0.41%) Law
17 5 (0.34%) Games
17 5 (0.34%) Legal
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 220 (14.99%) PySpark
2 135 (9.20%) Kafka
3 49 (3.34%) Pandas
4 31 (2.11%) JSON
5 28 (1.91%) YAML
6 25 (1.70%) Great Expectations
6 25 (1.70%) REST
7 18 (1.23%) Spring
7 18 (1.23%) Spring Boot
8 15 (1.02%) scikit-learn
8 15 (1.02%) XML
9 14 (0.95%) Node.js
10 13 (0.89%) Apache Avro
10 13 (0.89%) Apache Beam
10 13 (0.89%) PyTorch
11 12 (0.82%) Matplotlib
11 12 (0.82%) React
12 11 (0.75%) NumPy
13 10 (0.68%) pytest
14 9 (0.61%) Polars
Miscellaneous
1 106 (7.22%) Cloud Native
2 42 (2.86%) Legacy Systems
3 32 (2.18%) Data Structures
3 32 (2.18%) Product Ownership
4 24 (1.63%) Greenfield Project
5 21 (1.43%) Distributed Systems
6 19 (1.29%) Clustering
7 18 (1.23%) Onboarding
8 17 (1.16%) Data Protection Act
9 14 (0.95%) NHS
10 13 (0.89%) Replication
11 12 (0.82%) Reinsurance
11 12 (0.82%) Self-Motivation
12 11 (0.75%) Public Cloud
13 10 (0.68%) Hybrid Cloud
14 9 (0.61%) Distributed Computing
15 8 (0.54%) AI Agents
15 8 (0.54%) Analytical Mindset
15 8 (0.54%) Life Science
16 7 (0.48%) Management Information System
Operating Systems
1 45 (3.07%) Unix
2 30 (2.04%) Linux
3 3 (0.20%) Windows
4 2 (0.14%) VMS
4 2 (0.14%) Windows Server
5 1 (0.068%) Ubuntu
Processes & Methodologies
1 611 (41.62%) Data Pipeline
2 583 (39.71%) ETL
3 574 (39.10%) Analytics
4 560 (38.15%) Data Engineering
5 522 (35.56%) Data Modelling
6 367 (25.00%) CI/CD
7 332 (22.62%) Business Intelligence
8 280 (19.07%) DevOps
9 278 (18.94%) Agile
10 217 (14.78%) Data Governance
11 211 (14.37%) Problem-Solving
12 180 (12.26%) Migration
13 170 (11.58%) AI
14 164 (11.17%) Data Integration
15 160 (10.90%) Data Science
16 150 (10.22%) Validation
17 131 (8.92%) Data Architecture
17 131 (8.92%) Decision-Making
18 128 (8.72%) Data Transformation
19 124 (8.45%) Infrastructure as Code
Programming Languages
1 807 (54.97%) SQL
2 674 (45.91%) Python
3 96 (6.54%) Java
4 81 (5.52%) Scala
5 37 (2.52%) C#
5 37 (2.52%) Data Analysis Expressions
6 33 (2.25%) PL/SQL
7 29 (1.98%) T-SQL
8 26 (1.77%) Bash
8 26 (1.77%) Shell Script
9 18 (1.23%) Bicep
9 18 (1.23%) PowerShell
10 17 (1.16%) R
11 15 (1.02%) JavaScript
12 9 (0.61%) Go
13 6 (0.41%) TypeScript
14 3 (0.20%) C
15 2 (0.14%) HiveQL
15 2 (0.14%) LookML
15 2 (0.14%) VB
Qualifications
1 432 (29.43%) Security Cleared
2 388 (26.43%) SC Cleared
3 39 (2.66%) Degree
4 32 (2.18%) Azure Certification
5 28 (1.91%) BPSS Clearance
6 16 (1.09%) Computer Science Degree
7 12 (0.82%) DV Cleared
8 9 (0.61%) AWS Certification
9 7 (0.48%) City & Guilds
10 6 (0.41%) DBS Check
10 6 (0.41%) Microsoft Certification
11 5 (0.34%) BICSI Certification
11 5 (0.34%) Master's Degree
12 3 (0.20%) CTC Cleared
12 3 (0.20%) SnowPro
13 2 (0.14%) CISM
13 2 (0.14%) CISSP
14 1 (0.068%) CCIE
14 1 (0.068%) CISA
14 1 (0.068%) Cisco Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 387 (26.36%) Data Quality
2 49 (3.34%) GDPR
3 42 (2.86%) QA
4 10 (0.68%) Accessibility
5 9 (0.61%) FATCA
5 9 (0.61%) SLA
6 5 (0.34%) MiFID
7 4 (0.27%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 3 (0.20%) GMP
8 3 (0.20%) HIPAA
9 2 (0.14%) EMIR
9 2 (0.14%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 2 (0.14%) SNOMED CT
9 2 (0.14%) WCAG
10 1 (0.068%) Basel III
10 1 (0.068%) Government Security Classifications
10 1 (0.068%) GxP
10 1 (0.068%) IFRS
10 1 (0.068%) ISO 13485
10 1 (0.068%) PCI DSS
System Software
1 104 (7.08%) Docker
2 6 (0.41%) Virtual Machines
3 2 (0.14%) HDFS
4 1 (0.068%) Active Directory
4 1 (0.068%) RACF
Systems Management
1 170 (11.58%) Terraform
2 93 (6.34%) Kubernetes
3 37 (2.52%) Grafana
4 12 (0.82%) Ansible
5 11 (0.75%) Prometheus
6 7 (0.48%) Kibana
7 4 (0.27%) Kubeflow
8 3 (0.20%) Rancher
9 2 (0.14%) Apache Ranger
9 2 (0.14%) EMC NetWorker
9 2 (0.14%) logstash
9 2 (0.14%) Thomson Reuters DACS
9 2 (0.14%) Tivoli Storage Manager
10 1 (0.068%) Control-M
10 1 (0.068%) NetBackup
10 1 (0.068%) Puppet
Vendors
1 350 (23.84%) Databricks
2 200 (13.62%) Microsoft
3 125 (8.51%) Oracle
4 105 (7.15%) Talend
5 104 (7.08%) Informatica
6 59 (4.02%) Denodo
7 58 (3.95%) Google
8 35 (2.38%) Cisco
9 32 (2.18%) F5
10 25 (1.70%) SAP
11 22 (1.50%) Splunk
12 20 (1.36%) ServiceNow
13 16 (1.09%) Cloudera
14 15 (1.02%) IBM
15 11 (0.75%) Alteryx
15 11 (0.75%) Foundry
15 11 (0.75%) Palantir
16 8 (0.54%) Dynatrace
16 8 (0.54%) InterSystems
16 8 (0.54%) MuleSoft