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 5 September 2026.

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

 6 months to
5 Sep 2026		 Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 63 125 102
Rank change year-on-year +62 -23 +19
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 1,696 613 738
As % of all contract jobs in England 3.70% 2.24% 2.27%
As % of the Job Titles category 4.00% 2.45% 2.44%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,128 444 526
10th Percentile £380 £380 £350
25th Percentile £425 £425 £450
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £530
Median % change year-on-year - -5.66% -3.64%
75th Percentile £588 £588 £638
90th Percentile £666 £695 £700
UK median daily rate £500 £500 £525
% change year-on-year - -4.76% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 78 14 12
10th Percentile £19.34 £25.42 £50.33
25th Percentile £30.96 £37.00 £69.38
Median hourly rate £41.56 £52.50 £80.00
Median % change year-on-year -20.85% -34.38% +12.28%
75th Percentile £70.00 £74.65 -
90th Percentile £73.75 £101.00 £95.75
UK median hourly rate £42.50 £52.50 £80.00
% change year-on-year -19.05% -34.38% +12.28%

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 42,401 25,041 30,219
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.39% 91.40% 93.10%
Number of daily rates quoted 25,455 16,149 19,296
10th Percentile £326 £281 £304
25th Percentile £425 £400 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £506 £525
Median % change year-on-year +3.75% -3.62% -4.55%
75th Percentile £638 £625 £638
90th Percentile £738 £738 £750
UK median daily rate £525 £500 £525
% change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -1.69%
Number of hourly rates quoted 3,293 1,339 1,564
10th Percentile £15.05 £13.54 £14.41
25th Percentile £21.14 £17.30 £21.25
Median hourly rate £43.56 £25.15 £46.87
Median % change year-on-year +73.20% -46.34% +6.85%
75th Percentile £68.00 £55.00 £67.50
90th Percentile £80.00 £72.50 £75.00
UK median hourly rate £42.50 £25.15 £43.00
% change year-on-year +68.99% -41.51% +1.18%

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 5 September 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 5 September 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 5 September 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 +35 854 £525 - 421
Midlands +75 350 £469 +2.79% 68
West Midlands +64 287 £469 -0.21% 40
North of England +28 210 £500 +5.26% 120
South East +26 131 £459 -4.62% 131
North West +17 118 £525 +10.53% 65
South West +13 92 £525 +5.00% 63
Yorkshire -5 73 £475 - 27
East Midlands +26 63 £450 +1.98% 28
East of England +11 38 £450 -40.00% 23
North East -25 20 £515 +21.89% 28
Data Engineer
UK

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

For the 6 months to 5 September 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.

1 856 (50.47%) SQL
2 737 (43.46%) Data Pipeline
3 717 (42.28%) Python
4 653 (38.50%) Data Engineering
5 591 (34.85%) Analytics
6 579 (34.14%) ETL
7 578 (34.08%) Data Modelling
8 535 (31.54%) Azure
9 532 (31.37%) AWS
10 448 (26.42%) Security Cleared
11 437 (25.77%) Data Quality
12 420 (24.76%) CI/CD
13 393 (23.17%) SC Cleared
14 337 (19.87%) Databricks
15 295 (17.39%) Agile
16 285 (16.80%) Data Warehouse
17 284 (16.75%) DevOps
18 280 (16.51%) Migration
19 277 (16.33%) Business Intelligence
20 241 (14.21%) AI
20 241 (14.21%) Data Governance
20 241 (14.21%) PySpark
21 222 (13.09%) Microsoft
22 221 (13.03%) Power Platform
23 217 (12.79%) Power BI
24 215 (12.68%) Data Transformation
25 205 (12.09%) Azure Data Factory
25 205 (12.09%) Data Integration
25 205 (12.09%) Validation
26 204 (12.03%) Snowflake

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
1 190 (11.20%) Apache Airflow
2 143 (8.43%) Apache Spark
3 115 (6.78%) Apache
4 51 (3.01%) SAS
5 33 (1.95%) Confluence
6 17 (1.00%) Palantir Foundry
7 13 (0.77%) SharePoint
8 10 (0.59%) Jupyter
9 3 (0.18%) Apache Superset
10 1 (0.059%) ArcGIS
10 1 (0.059%) Liferay
10 1 (0.059%) Luigi
10 1 (0.059%) Microsoft Exchange
10 1 (0.059%) nginx
10 1 (0.059%) PowerExchange
10 1 (0.059%) R Markdown
Applications
1 24 (1.42%) Microsoft Excel
2 7 (0.41%) Spreadsheet
3 5 (0.29%) Notepad++
4 4 (0.24%) Chatbot
5 1 (0.059%) Microsoft PowerPoint
Business Applications
1 10 (0.59%) 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 4 (0.24%) SAP S/4HANA
5 3 (0.18%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
6 2 (0.12%) Maximo
6 2 (0.12%) SAP BPC
6 2 (0.12%) SimCorp Dimension
7 1 (0.059%) BambooHR
7 1 (0.059%) FIS Private Capital Suite
7 1 (0.059%) MIS ActiveH
7 1 (0.059%) Oracle Assets
7 1 (0.059%) Oracle EBS
7 1 (0.059%) Raiser’s Edge
7 1 (0.059%) SAP CAR
7 1 (0.059%) SAP EWM
7 1 (0.059%) SAP Oil and Gas
Cloud Services
1 535 (31.54%) Azure
2 532 (31.37%) AWS
3 221 (13.03%) Power Platform
4 205 (12.09%) Azure Data Factory
5 204 (12.03%) Snowflake
6 199 (11.73%) dbt
7 164 (9.67%) GCP
8 152 (8.96%) Amazon S3
9 128 (7.55%) Azure DevOps
10 127 (7.49%) Azure Synapse Analytics
11 111 (6.54%) GitHub
11 111 (6.54%) Serverless
12 97 (5.72%) AWS Lambda
13 59 (3.48%) Azure Databricks
14 46 (2.71%) GitHub Actions
15 39 (2.30%) Amazon EMR
16 32 (1.89%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 27 (1.59%) AWS Step Functions
18 25 (1.47%) Fivetran
18 25 (1.47%) Microsoft Purview
Communications & Networking
1 27 (1.59%) BGP
1 27 (1.59%) DMZ
1 27 (1.59%) DNS
1 27 (1.59%) Multicast
1 27 (1.59%) VPN
2 11 (0.65%) Structured Cabling
3 7 (0.41%) Firewall
4 5 (0.29%) PuTTY
4 5 (0.29%) WinSCP
5 4 (0.24%) Wi-Fi
5 4 (0.24%) Wireless
6 3 (0.18%) Intrusion Detection
Database & Business Intelligence
1 285 (16.80%) Data Warehouse
2 217 (12.79%) Power BI
3 149 (8.79%) Data Lake
4 119 (7.02%) Metadata
5 99 (5.84%) BigQuery
6 90 (5.31%) Amazon Redshift
7 80 (4.72%) SQL Server
8 79 (4.66%) Delta Lake
9 72 (4.25%) Amazon Athena
10 67 (3.95%) Pentaho
11 61 (3.60%) Big Data
11 61 (3.60%) Tableau
12 55 (3.24%) PostgreSQL
13 52 (3.07%) Relational Database
14 49 (2.89%) Snowflake Schema
15 47 (2.77%) NoSQL
16 46 (2.71%) Azure SQL Database
17 40 (2.36%) Oracle Database
18 36 (2.12%) Amazon RDS
19 33 (1.95%) SQL Server Integration Services
Development Applications
1 143 (8.43%) Git
2 80 (4.72%) GitLab
3 53 (3.13%) JIRA
4 28 (1.65%) Jenkins
5 13 (0.77%) MLflow
6 7 (0.41%) Postman
7 5 (0.29%) Artifactory
7 5 (0.29%) Bitbucket
7 5 (0.29%) SonarQube
8 4 (0.24%) ERwin
8 4 (0.24%) Selenium
9 3 (0.18%) Atlassian Bamboo
9 3 (0.18%) Newman
10 2 (0.12%) Claude Code
10 2 (0.12%) ER Studio
10 2 (0.12%) RStudio
10 2 (0.12%) Sonatype Nexus
10 2 (0.12%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
10 2 (0.12%) Terragrunt
10 2 (0.12%) Yeoman
General
1 272 (16.04%) Finance
1 272 (16.04%) Social Skills
2 194 (11.44%) Analytical Skills
3 146 (8.61%) Public Sector
4 100 (5.90%) Banking
5 29 (1.71%) Inclusion and Diversity
6 24 (1.42%) Retail
7 23 (1.36%) Telecoms
8 21 (1.24%) Marketing
9 20 (1.18%) Automotive
10 19 (1.12%) Aerospace
11 17 (1.00%) Manufacturing
12 16 (0.94%) Investment Banking
13 15 (0.88%) Documentation Skills
13 15 (0.88%) Front Office
14 14 (0.83%) Pharmaceutical
15 11 (0.65%) Law
16 10 (0.59%) Financial Institution
16 10 (0.59%) Legal
17 9 (0.53%) Military
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 241 (14.21%) PySpark
2 174 (10.26%) Terraform
3 113 (6.66%) Kafka
4 27 (1.59%) JSON
4 27 (1.59%) Pandas
4 27 (1.59%) REST
5 23 (1.36%) Great Expectations
6 22 (1.30%) Spring
6 22 (1.30%) Spring Boot
7 18 (1.06%) XML
8 16 (0.94%) Apache Beam
8 16 (0.94%) React
9 13 (0.77%) pytest
10 12 (0.71%) RESTful
10 12 (0.71%) YAML
11 11 (0.65%) .NET
11 11 (0.65%) LangChain
12 10 (0.59%) Microsoft Graph
13 9 (0.53%) Apache Avro
13 9 (0.53%) PyTorch
Miscellaneous
1 139 (8.20%) Cloud Native
2 72 (4.25%) Legacy Systems
3 50 (2.95%) Data Structures
4 36 (2.12%) Onboarding
5 24 (1.42%) Product Ownership
6 21 (1.24%) Distributed Systems
7 20 (1.18%) Greenfield Project
8 19 (1.12%) NHS
9 17 (1.00%) AI Agents
9 17 (1.00%) Reference Data
9 17 (1.00%) Reinsurance
10 16 (0.94%) Management Information System
11 13 (0.77%) Algorithms
12 11 (0.65%) Virtual Team
13 10 (0.59%) Clustering
14 9 (0.53%) Data Protection Act
14 9 (0.53%) Self-Motivation
15 8 (0.47%) Driving Licence
15 8 (0.47%) Life Science
15 8 (0.47%) Linux Command Line
Operating Systems
1 56 (3.30%) Unix
2 43 (2.54%) Linux
3 3 (0.18%) Windows
4 2 (0.12%) Ubuntu
5 1 (0.059%) Robot Operating System
5 1 (0.059%) VMS
5 1 (0.059%) Windows Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 737 (43.46%) Data Pipeline
2 653 (38.50%) Data Engineering
3 591 (34.85%) Analytics
4 579 (34.14%) ETL
5 578 (34.08%) Data Modelling
6 420 (24.76%) CI/CD
7 295 (17.39%) Agile
8 284 (16.75%) DevOps
9 280 (16.51%) Migration
10 277 (16.33%) Business Intelligence
11 241 (14.21%) AI
11 241 (14.21%) Data Governance
12 215 (12.68%) Data Transformation
13 205 (12.09%) Data Integration
13 205 (12.09%) Validation
14 187 (11.03%) Problem-Solving
15 157 (9.26%) Lakehouse
16 156 (9.20%) Decision-Making
17 149 (8.79%) Infrastructure as Code
18 144 (8.49%) Data Science
Programming Languages
1 856 (50.47%) SQL
2 717 (42.28%) Python
3 99 (5.84%) Java
4 63 (3.71%) Scala
5 45 (2.65%) PL/SQL
6 31 (1.83%) Data Analysis Expressions
7 30 (1.77%) Shell Script
8 25 (1.47%) T-SQL
9 22 (1.30%) Bash
10 20 (1.18%) PowerShell
11 16 (0.94%) JavaScript
12 13 (0.77%) C#
13 11 (0.65%) R
14 9 (0.53%) Bicep
15 8 (0.47%) TypeScript
16 5 (0.29%) Go
17 4 (0.24%) Korn
18 3 (0.18%) Kusto Query Language
18 3 (0.18%) LookML
19 2 (0.12%) Cypher
Qualifications
1 448 (26.42%) Security Cleared
2 393 (23.17%) SC Cleared
3 41 (2.42%) Degree
4 35 (2.06%) BPSS Clearance
5 23 (1.36%) Computer Science Degree
6 22 (1.30%) Azure Certification
6 22 (1.30%) DV Cleared
7 13 (0.77%) AWS Certification
8 9 (0.53%) City & Guilds
9 8 (0.47%) DBS Check
9 8 (0.47%) SnowPro
10 7 (0.41%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
10 7 (0.41%) Master's Degree
11 5 (0.29%) BICSI Certification
12 4 (0.24%) CISM
12 4 (0.24%) CISSP
12 4 (0.24%) Microsoft Certification
13 3 (0.18%) CEH
14 1 (0.059%) PMI Certification
14 1 (0.059%) PMP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 437 (25.77%) Data Quality
2 64 (3.77%) QA
3 39 (2.30%) GDPR
4 15 (0.88%) Accessibility
5 9 (0.53%) SLA
6 6 (0.35%) FATCA
7 5 (0.29%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 4 (0.24%) ISO/IEC 27001
9 3 (0.18%) HIPAA
9 3 (0.18%) MiFID
10 2 (0.12%) Disclosure Scotland
10 2 (0.12%) EMIR
10 2 (0.12%) SNOMED CT
10 2 (0.12%) WCAG
11 1 (0.059%) California Consumer Privacy Act
11 1 (0.059%) Government Security Classifications
11 1 (0.059%) IFRS
11 1 (0.059%) IFRS 17
11 1 (0.059%) IFRS 9
11 1 (0.059%) PMO
System Software
1 104 (6.13%) Docker
2 4 (0.24%) Virtual Machines
3 2 (0.12%) Active Directory
4 1 (0.059%) RACF
Systems Management
1 73 (4.30%) Kubernetes
2 28 (1.65%) Grafana
3 15 (0.88%) Ansible
4 11 (0.65%) Control-M
5 7 (0.41%) Kibana
6 4 (0.24%) Prometheus
7 2 (0.12%) Apache Ranger
7 2 (0.12%) Puppet
8 1 (0.059%) logstash
8 1 (0.059%) Progress Chef
8 1 (0.059%) Thomson Reuters DACS
Vendors
1 337 (19.87%) Databricks
2 222 (13.09%) Microsoft
3 140 (8.25%) Oracle
4 99 (5.84%) Informatica
5 87 (5.13%) Talend
6 69 (4.07%) Google
7 46 (2.71%) Denodo
8 29 (1.71%) Salesforce
9 27 (1.59%) Cisco
9 27 (1.59%) F5
10 26 (1.53%) Palantir
11 24 (1.42%) SAP
12 23 (1.36%) Foundry
13 13 (0.77%) Cloudera
14 12 (0.71%) Splunk
15 10 (0.59%) Bloomberg
16 9 (0.53%) IBM
16 9 (0.53%) Sage
17 8 (0.47%) Alteryx
17 8 (0.47%) InterSystems
755 Data Engineer jobs in England