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 17 September 2026.

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

6 months to
17 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 66 126 101
Rank change year-on-year +60 -25 +24
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 1,678 620 764
As % of all contract jobs in England 3.61% 2.23% 2.34%
As % of the Job Titles category 3.91% 2.44% 2.51%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,115 449 538
10th Percentile £381 £379 £368
25th Percentile £425 £425 £450
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £550
Median % change year-on-year - -9.09% -
75th Percentile £588 £588 £638
90th Percentile £675 £695 £700
UK median daily rate £500 £500 £525
% change year-on-year - -4.76% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 72 13 9
10th Percentile £19.34 £25.34 £49.25
25th Percentile £30.72 £35.25 £60.00
Median hourly rate £41.56 £52.50 £80.00
Median % change year-on-year -20.85% -34.38% +29.55%
75th Percentile £68.00 £62.50 -
90th Percentile £70.00 £104.00 £97.50
UK median hourly rate £41.56 £52.50 £80.00
% change year-on-year -20.85% -34.38% +29.55%

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 42,868 25,363 30,417
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.34% 91.35% 93.04%
Number of daily rates quoted 25,561 16,372 19,015
10th Percentile £329 £280 £300
25th Percentile £425 £400 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £508 £525
Median % change year-on-year +3.45% -3.33% -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% -0.94%
Number of hourly rates quoted 3,457 1,358 1,485
10th Percentile £14.96 £13.75 £14.60
25th Percentile £21.14 £17.33 £21.25
Median hourly rate £44.46 £25.15 £46.18
Median % change year-on-year +76.76% -45.54% +3.20%
75th Percentile £68.00 £54.00 £67.50
90th Percentile £80.00 £71.50 £75.00
UK median hourly rate £42.50 £25.15 £43.00
% change year-on-year +68.99% -41.51% -2.01%

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 17 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 17 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 17 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 +26 836 £525 - 911
Midlands +77 343 £469 +4.22% 124
West Midlands +63 272 £469 +6.59% 79
North of England +22 205 £500 +5.26% 262
South East +26 132 £459 -4.62% 181
North West +22 110 £525 +10.53% 148
South West +17 101 £525 +5.00% 88
Yorkshire +1 76 £475 -6.17% 75
East Midlands +39 71 £450 +1.98% 45
East of England +6 40 £463 -38.33% 59
North East -27 20 £450 +6.51% 39
Data Engineer
UK

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

For the 6 months to 17 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.

1 858 (51.13%) SQL
2 741 (44.16%) Data Pipeline
3 715 (42.61%) Python
4 651 (38.80%) Data Engineering
5 592 (35.28%) Data Modelling
6 587 (34.98%) ETL
7 580 (34.56%) Analytics
8 530 (31.59%) AWS
9 514 (30.63%) Azure
10 438 (26.10%) Data Quality
11 431 (25.69%) Security Cleared
12 416 (24.79%) CI/CD
13 373 (22.23%) SC Cleared
14 331 (19.73%) Databricks
15 288 (17.16%) Agile
16 282 (16.81%) Data Warehouse
17 277 (16.51%) Migration
18 274 (16.33%) DevOps
19 270 (16.09%) Business Intelligence
20 255 (15.20%) AI
21 238 (14.18%) Data Governance
22 234 (13.95%) PySpark
23 219 (13.05%) Data Transformation
24 217 (12.93%) Microsoft
24 217 (12.93%) Power Platform
25 214 (12.75%) Power BI
26 209 (12.46%) Validation
27 207 (12.34%) dbt
27 207 (12.34%) Snowflake
28 203 (12.10%) 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
1 187 (11.14%) Apache Airflow
2 137 (8.16%) Apache Spark
3 112 (6.67%) Apache
4 47 (2.80%) SAS
5 34 (2.03%) Confluence
6 19 (1.13%) Palantir Foundry
7 15 (0.89%) SharePoint
8 10 (0.60%) Jupyter
9 2 (0.12%) Apache Superset
9 2 (0.12%) Microsoft Exchange
10 1 (0.060%) ArcGIS
10 1 (0.060%) Liferay
10 1 (0.060%) Luigi
10 1 (0.060%) nginx
10 1 (0.060%) Oracle Workflow
10 1 (0.060%) PowerExchange
10 1 (0.060%) R Markdown
Applications
1 24 (1.43%) Microsoft Excel
2 9 (0.54%) Spreadsheet
3 5 (0.30%) Notepad++
4 3 (0.18%) Chatbot
5 1 (0.060%) Microsoft Office
5 1 (0.060%) Microsoft PowerPoint
Business Applications
1 11 (0.66%) Aladdin
2 7 (0.42%) Dynamics CRM
3 6 (0.36%) NetSuite
4 5 (0.30%) Infor LN
4 5 (0.30%) Sage X3
4 5 (0.30%) SAP S/4HANA
5 3 (0.18%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
6 2 (0.12%) FIS Private Capital Suite
6 2 (0.12%) Maximo
6 2 (0.12%) SAP BPC
6 2 (0.12%) SAP Oil and Gas
6 2 (0.12%) SimCorp Dimension
7 1 (0.060%) BambooHR
7 1 (0.060%) Dynamics NAV
7 1 (0.060%) Oracle Assets
7 1 (0.060%) Oracle EBS
7 1 (0.060%) Oracle Retail
7 1 (0.060%) Raiser’s Edge
7 1 (0.060%) SAP CAR
7 1 (0.060%) SAP EWM
Cloud Services
1 530 (31.59%) AWS
2 514 (30.63%) Azure
3 217 (12.93%) Power Platform
4 207 (12.34%) dbt
4 207 (12.34%) Snowflake
5 197 (11.74%) Azure Data Factory
6 172 (10.25%) GCP
7 155 (9.24%) Amazon S3
8 115 (6.85%) Azure DevOps
8 115 (6.85%) Azure Synapse Analytics
9 114 (6.79%) Serverless
10 104 (6.20%) GitHub
11 101 (6.02%) AWS Lambda
12 55 (3.28%) Azure Databricks
13 45 (2.68%) GitHub Actions
14 43 (2.56%) Amazon EMR
15 36 (2.15%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 29 (1.73%) AWS Step Functions
17 26 (1.55%) Microsoft Purview
18 25 (1.49%) AWS CloudFormation
Communications & Networking
1 25 (1.49%) BGP
1 25 (1.49%) DMZ
1 25 (1.49%) DNS
1 25 (1.49%) Multicast
1 25 (1.49%) VPN
2 10 (0.60%) Structured Cabling
3 6 (0.36%) Firewall
4 5 (0.30%) PuTTY
4 5 (0.30%) WinSCP
5 4 (0.24%) Wi-Fi
5 4 (0.24%) Wireless
6 3 (0.18%) Intrusion Detection
Database & Business Intelligence
1 282 (16.81%) Data Warehouse
2 214 (12.75%) Power BI
3 136 (8.10%) Data Lake
4 121 (7.21%) Metadata
5 106 (6.32%) BigQuery
6 85 (5.07%) Amazon Redshift
7 78 (4.65%) Delta Lake
8 75 (4.47%) SQL Server
9 74 (4.41%) Amazon Athena
10 61 (3.64%) Pentaho
11 59 (3.52%) Tableau
12 58 (3.46%) PostgreSQL
13 55 (3.28%) Big Data
14 50 (2.98%) Snowflake Schema
15 49 (2.92%) Relational Database
16 45 (2.68%) NoSQL
17 40 (2.38%) Oracle Database
18 39 (2.32%) Amazon RDS
19 36 (2.15%) Azure SQL Database
20 33 (1.97%) SQL Server Integration Services
Development Applications
1 148 (8.82%) Git
2 79 (4.71%) GitLab
3 52 (3.10%) JIRA
4 27 (1.61%) Jenkins
5 15 (0.89%) MLflow
6 8 (0.48%) Bitbucket
6 8 (0.48%) Postman
7 5 (0.30%) Artifactory
7 5 (0.30%) Selenium
7 5 (0.30%) SonarQube
8 4 (0.24%) ERwin
9 3 (0.18%) Atlassian Bamboo
9 3 (0.18%) Claude Code
9 3 (0.18%) Newman
9 3 (0.18%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
10 2 (0.12%) ER Studio
10 2 (0.12%) RStudio
10 2 (0.12%) Terragrunt
10 2 (0.12%) Yeoman
11 1 (0.060%) Octopus Deploy
General
1 280 (16.69%) Social Skills
2 273 (16.27%) Finance
3 189 (11.26%) Analytical Skills
4 144 (8.58%) Public Sector
5 106 (6.32%) Banking
6 27 (1.61%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 26 (1.55%) Retail
8 22 (1.31%) Telecoms
9 21 (1.25%) Automotive
10 19 (1.13%) Aerospace
10 19 (1.13%) Marketing
11 18 (1.07%) Investment Banking
11 18 (1.07%) Manufacturing
12 17 (1.01%) Front Office
13 15 (0.89%) Pharmaceutical
14 14 (0.83%) Documentation Skills
15 11 (0.66%) Law
15 11 (0.66%) Military
16 10 (0.60%) Financial Institution
16 10 (0.60%) Legal
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 234 (13.95%) PySpark
2 181 (10.79%) Terraform
3 104 (6.20%) Kafka
4 25 (1.49%) JSON
4 25 (1.49%) Pandas
5 24 (1.43%) REST
6 22 (1.31%) Spring
6 22 (1.31%) Spring Boot
7 19 (1.13%) Great Expectations
8 17 (1.01%) XML
9 16 (0.95%) Apache Beam
10 14 (0.83%) pytest
10 14 (0.83%) React
11 12 (0.72%) RESTful
12 11 (0.66%) LangChain
12 11 (0.66%) PyTorch
13 10 (0.60%) .NET
13 10 (0.60%) Microsoft Graph
14 9 (0.54%) Apache Avro
14 9 (0.54%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 136 (8.10%) Cloud Native
2 61 (3.64%) Legacy Systems
3 52 (3.10%) Data Structures
4 37 (2.21%) Onboarding
5 25 (1.49%) Product Ownership
6 22 (1.31%) Greenfield Project
7 21 (1.25%) AI Agents
7 21 (1.25%) Distributed Systems
8 20 (1.19%) NHS
9 17 (1.01%) Reference Data
10 16 (0.95%) Management Information System
10 16 (0.95%) Reinsurance
11 13 (0.77%) Algorithms
12 11 (0.66%) Virtual Team
13 9 (0.54%) Clustering
13 9 (0.54%) Data Fabric
13 9 (0.54%) Data Protection Act
14 8 (0.48%) Distributed Computing
14 8 (0.48%) Life Science
14 8 (0.48%) Replication
Operating Systems
1 53 (3.16%) Unix
2 40 (2.38%) Linux
3 2 (0.12%) Ubuntu
3 2 (0.12%) Windows
4 1 (0.060%) Robot Operating System
4 1 (0.060%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 741 (44.16%) Data Pipeline
2 651 (38.80%) Data Engineering
3 592 (35.28%) Data Modelling
4 587 (34.98%) ETL
5 580 (34.56%) Analytics
6 416 (24.79%) CI/CD
7 288 (17.16%) Agile
8 277 (16.51%) Migration
9 274 (16.33%) DevOps
10 270 (16.09%) Business Intelligence
11 255 (15.20%) AI
12 238 (14.18%) Data Governance
13 219 (13.05%) Data Transformation
14 209 (12.46%) Validation
15 203 (12.10%) Data Integration
16 182 (10.85%) Problem-Solving
17 162 (9.65%) Decision-Making
18 157 (9.36%) Lakehouse
19 153 (9.12%) Infrastructure as Code
20 144 (8.58%) Machine Learning
Programming Languages
1 858 (51.13%) SQL
2 715 (42.61%) Python
3 97 (5.78%) Java
4 63 (3.75%) Scala
5 43 (2.56%) PL/SQL
6 32 (1.91%) Data Analysis Expressions
7 27 (1.61%) T-SQL
8 26 (1.55%) Shell Script
9 22 (1.31%) Bash
10 20 (1.19%) PowerShell
11 18 (1.07%) JavaScript
12 12 (0.72%) R
13 11 (0.66%) C#
14 9 (0.54%) Bicep
14 9 (0.54%) TypeScript
15 8 (0.48%) Go
16 5 (0.30%) Korn
17 3 (0.18%) Kusto Query Language
17 3 (0.18%) LookML
18 2 (0.12%) Cypher
Qualifications
1 431 (25.69%) Security Cleared
2 373 (22.23%) SC Cleared
3 41 (2.44%) Degree
4 36 (2.15%) BPSS Clearance
5 26 (1.55%) DV Cleared
6 23 (1.37%) Azure Certification
7 21 (1.25%) Computer Science Degree
8 14 (0.83%) AWS Certification
9 9 (0.54%) City & Guilds
10 8 (0.48%) DBS Check
10 8 (0.48%) Master's Degree
11 7 (0.42%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
11 7 (0.42%) SnowPro
12 5 (0.30%) BICSI Certification
13 4 (0.24%) CISM
13 4 (0.24%) CISSP
13 4 (0.24%) Microsoft Certification
14 3 (0.18%) CEH
15 1 (0.060%) PMI Certification
15 1 (0.060%) PMP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 438 (26.10%) Data Quality
2 66 (3.93%) QA
3 35 (2.09%) GDPR
4 15 (0.89%) Accessibility
5 9 (0.54%) SLA
6 6 (0.36%) FATCA
7 5 (0.30%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 4 (0.24%) Disclosure Scotland
8 4 (0.24%) ISO/IEC 27001
9 3 (0.18%) HIPAA
9 3 (0.18%) MiFID
10 2 (0.12%) EMIR
10 2 (0.12%) SNOMED CT
10 2 (0.12%) WCAG
11 1 (0.060%) California Consumer Privacy Act
11 1 (0.060%) Government Security Classifications
11 1 (0.060%) IFRS
11 1 (0.060%) IFRS 17
11 1 (0.060%) IFRS 9
11 1 (0.060%) PMO
System Software
1 105 (6.26%) Docker
2 3 (0.18%) Active Directory
2 3 (0.18%) Virtual Machines
3 1 (0.060%) HDFS
3 1 (0.060%) RACF
Systems Management
1 76 (4.53%) Kubernetes
2 24 (1.43%) Grafana
3 15 (0.89%) Ansible
4 11 (0.66%) Control-M
5 8 (0.48%) Kibana
6 5 (0.30%) Prometheus
7 2 (0.12%) Puppet
8 1 (0.060%) logstash
8 1 (0.060%) Progress Chef
Vendors
1 331 (19.73%) Databricks
2 217 (12.93%) Microsoft
3 139 (8.28%) Oracle
4 90 (5.36%) Informatica
5 81 (4.83%) Talend
6 75 (4.47%) Google
7 44 (2.62%) Denodo
8 29 (1.73%) Salesforce
9 28 (1.67%) Palantir
10 27 (1.61%) Foundry
11 25 (1.49%) Cisco
11 25 (1.49%) F5
11 25 (1.49%) SAP
12 12 (0.72%) Splunk
13 9 (0.54%) Bloomberg
14 8 (0.48%) Alteryx
14 8 (0.48%) Cloudera
14 8 (0.48%) IBM
14 8 (0.48%) OpenAI
14 8 (0.48%) Sage