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 21 July 2026.

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

 6 months to
21 Jul 2026		 Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 57 114 100
Rank change year-on-year +57 -14 +19
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 1,708 658 818
As % of all contract jobs in England 3.81% 2.41% 2.31%
As % of the Job Titles category 4.12% 2.63% 2.49%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,167 481 615
10th Percentile £382 £375 £263
25th Percentile £425 £425 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year - -4.76% -4.55%
75th Percentile £588 £588 £630
90th Percentile £650 £700 £700
UK median daily rate £500 £500 £519
% change year-on-year - -3.65% -5.65%
Number of hourly rates quoted 77 10 33
10th Percentile £19.34 £18.18 £37.50
25th Percentile £34.01 £44.50 £49.25
Median hourly rate £45.00 £52.50 £75.00
Median % change year-on-year -14.29% -30.00% -3.23%
75th Percentile £70.00 £73.75 £80.00
90th Percentile £75.00 £78.83 -
UK median hourly rate £50.00 £52.50 £75.00
% change year-on-year -4.76% -30.00% -3.23%

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 41,476 25,032 32,906
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.50% 91.85% 93.00%
Number of daily rates quoted 25,274 16,261 21,669
10th Percentile £325 £290 £300
25th Percentile £425 £404 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £513 £525
Median % change year-on-year +2.44% -2.38% -4.55%
75th Percentile £625 £630 £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 2,987 1,247 2,188
10th Percentile £16.00 £13.75 £13.50
25th Percentile £22.15 £17.87 £18.13
Median hourly rate £45.56 £27.40 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year +66.26% -35.53% -3.53%
75th Percentile £68.00 £56.44 £65.00
90th Percentile £80.52 £75.00 £75.00
UK median hourly rate £44.10 £25.15 £40.00
% change year-on-year +75.33% -37.13% -6.98%

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 21 July 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 21 July 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 21 July 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 +38 826 £525 - 172
Midlands +63 382 £460 - 41
West Midlands +51 336 £459 -0.22% 27
North of England +31 228 £475 - 87
North West +20 133 £525 +10.53% 44
South East +11 127 £470 +10.59% 103
South West +13 94 £525 +5.00% 35
Yorkshire -10 73 £475 - 21
East Midlands +17 46 £500 +19.05% 14
East of England +2 33 £565 +78.52% 15
North East -26 23 £515 +17.71% 22
Data Engineer
UK

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

For the 6 months to 21 July 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.

1 875 (51.23%) SQL
2 724 (42.39%) Python
3 719 (42.10%) Data Pipeline
4 632 (37.00%) Data Engineering
5 627 (36.71%) Analytics
6 607 (35.54%) ETL
7 577 (33.78%) Data Modelling
8 530 (31.03%) Azure
9 488 (28.57%) AWS
10 466 (27.28%) Security Cleared
11 412 (24.12%) Data Quality
12 409 (23.95%) CI/CD
13 408 (23.89%) SC Cleared
14 316 (18.50%) Business Intelligence
15 313 (18.33%) Databricks
16 293 (17.15%) Agile
17 282 (16.51%) Data Warehouse
18 277 (16.22%) DevOps
19 268 (15.69%) Migration
20 251 (14.70%) Power Platform
21 239 (13.99%) Power BI
22 231 (13.52%) Data Governance
23 224 (13.11%) PySpark
24 216 (12.65%) Azure Data Factory
25 212 (12.41%) Microsoft
26 202 (11.83%) Problem-Solving
27 199 (11.65%) Validation
28 198 (11.59%) AI
29 183 (10.71%) Snowflake
30 182 (10.66%) 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
1 159 (9.31%) Apache Airflow
2 134 (7.85%) Apache Spark
3 98 (5.74%) Apache
4 72 (4.22%) SAS
5 39 (2.28%) Confluence
6 10 (0.59%) Palantir Foundry
6 10 (0.59%) SharePoint
7 8 (0.47%) Jupyter
8 2 (0.12%) Apache Superset
8 2 (0.12%) Microsoft Exchange
9 1 (0.059%) ArcGIS
9 1 (0.059%) Camunda
9 1 (0.059%) Liferay
9 1 (0.059%) Luigi
9 1 (0.059%) R Markdown
Applications
1 19 (1.11%) Microsoft Excel
2 5 (0.29%) Notepad++
2 5 (0.29%) Spreadsheet
3 3 (0.18%) Chatbot
4 1 (0.059%) Microsoft PowerPoint
Business Applications
1 11 (0.64%) Aladdin
2 8 (0.47%) Dynamics CRM
3 5 (0.29%) Infor LN
3 5 (0.29%) NetSuite
3 5 (0.29%) Sage X3
4 3 (0.18%) SAP BPC
4 3 (0.18%) SAP S/4HANA
4 3 (0.18%) SimCorp Dimension
5 2 (0.12%) BambooHR
5 2 (0.12%) Maximo
6 1 (0.059%) FIS Private Capital Suite
6 1 (0.059%) iTrent
6 1 (0.059%) MIS ActiveH
6 1 (0.059%) NEC Housing
6 1 (0.059%) Oracle Assets
6 1 (0.059%) Oracle ERP
6 1 (0.059%) Raiser’s Edge
6 1 (0.059%) SAP Business ByDesign
6 1 (0.059%) SAP CAR
6 1 (0.059%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
Cloud Services
1 530 (31.03%) Azure
2 488 (28.57%) AWS
3 251 (14.70%) Power Platform
4 216 (12.65%) Azure Data Factory
5 183 (10.71%) Snowflake
6 176 (10.30%) dbt
7 150 (8.78%) Amazon S3
7 150 (8.78%) GCP
8 143 (8.37%) Azure Synapse Analytics
9 128 (7.49%) Azure DevOps
10 101 (5.91%) GitHub
11 99 (5.80%) Serverless
12 84 (4.92%) AWS Lambda
13 45 (2.63%) GitHub Actions
14 37 (2.17%) Amazon EMR
15 30 (1.76%) Matillion
16 27 (1.58%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 24 (1.41%) OpenShift
18 23 (1.35%) Amazon Kinesis
18 23 (1.35%) AWS CloudFormation
Communications & Networking
1 33 (1.93%) DNS
1 33 (1.93%) VPN
2 32 (1.87%) BGP
2 32 (1.87%) DMZ
2 32 (1.87%) Multicast
3 10 (0.59%) 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 (0.18%) Intrusion Detection
8 1 (0.059%) 4G
8 1 (0.059%) 5G
Database & Business Intelligence
1 282 (16.51%) Data Warehouse
2 239 (13.99%) Power BI
3 154 (9.02%) Data Lake
4 97 (5.68%) Amazon Redshift
5 92 (5.39%) BigQuery
6 88 (5.15%) Metadata
7 87 (5.09%) SQL Server
8 84 (4.92%) Pentaho
9 81 (4.74%) Delta Lake
10 74 (4.33%) Tableau
11 61 (3.57%) PostgreSQL
12 60 (3.51%) Big Data
13 59 (3.45%) Snowflake Schema
14 58 (3.40%) Amazon Athena
15 52 (3.04%) Azure SQL Database
16 50 (2.93%) SQL Server Integration Services
17 44 (2.58%) NoSQL
18 40 (2.34%) Relational Database
19 35 (2.05%) Hadoop
20 33 (1.93%) MySQL
Development Applications
1 156 (9.13%) Git
2 79 (4.63%) GitLab
3 69 (4.04%) JIRA
4 41 (2.40%) Jenkins
5 7 (0.41%) Postman
6 5 (0.29%) Artifactory
6 5 (0.29%) Bitbucket
6 5 (0.29%) MLflow
7 3 (0.18%) Newman
7 3 (0.18%) SonarQube
8 2 (0.12%) Atlassian Bamboo
8 2 (0.12%) Sonatype Nexus
8 2 (0.12%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
8 2 (0.12%) Visual Studio
8 2 (0.12%) Yeoman
9 1 (0.059%) ERwin
9 1 (0.059%) JUnit
9 1 (0.059%) Octopus Deploy
9 1 (0.059%) Selenium
9 1 (0.059%) Terragrunt
General
1 281 (16.45%) Finance
2 261 (15.28%) Social Skills
3 191 (11.18%) Analytical Skills
4 149 (8.72%) Public Sector
5 93 (5.44%) Banking
6 32 (1.87%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 25 (1.46%) Retail
7 25 (1.46%) Telecoms
8 23 (1.35%) Marketing
9 22 (1.29%) Documentation Skills
10 18 (1.05%) Investment Banking
10 18 (1.05%) Manufacturing
11 17 (1.00%) Automotive
12 16 (0.94%) Pharmaceutical
13 13 (0.76%) Aerospace
13 13 (0.76%) Front Office
14 11 (0.64%) Publishing
15 9 (0.53%) Billing
16 8 (0.47%) Legal
17 7 (0.41%) Military
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 224 (13.11%) PySpark
2 123 (7.20%) Kafka
3 36 (2.11%) Pandas
4 32 (1.87%) JSON
5 25 (1.46%) REST
6 21 (1.23%) Great Expectations
6 21 (1.23%) Spring
6 21 (1.23%) Spring Boot
6 21 (1.23%) XML
7 16 (0.94%) Apache Beam
7 16 (0.94%) YAML
8 13 (0.76%) Apache Avro
9 12 (0.70%) React
10 11 (0.64%) scikit-learn
11 10 (0.59%) Microsoft Graph
11 10 (0.59%) RESTful
12 9 (0.53%) GeoJSON
12 9 (0.53%) Matplotlib
12 9 (0.53%) Node.js
12 9 (0.53%) pytest
Miscellaneous
1 127 (7.44%) Cloud Native
2 69 (4.04%) Legacy Systems
3 46 (2.69%) Data Structures
4 32 (1.87%) Onboarding
5 27 (1.58%) Distributed Systems
6 22 (1.29%) Greenfield Project
6 22 (1.29%) NHS
7 20 (1.17%) Product Ownership
8 18 (1.05%) Clustering
8 18 (1.05%) Reinsurance
9 15 (0.88%) Data Protection Act
10 12 (0.70%) Reference Data
11 11 (0.64%) Life Science
11 11 (0.64%) Virtual Team
12 9 (0.53%) Algorithms
12 9 (0.53%) Distributed Computing
12 9 (0.53%) Driving Licence
12 9 (0.53%) Self-Motivation
13 8 (0.47%) Analytical Mindset
13 8 (0.47%) Linux Command Line
Operating Systems
1 57 (3.34%) Unix
2 41 (2.40%) Linux
3 4 (0.23%) Windows
4 2 (0.12%) Ubuntu
4 2 (0.12%) Windows Server
5 1 (0.059%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 719 (42.10%) Data Pipeline
2 632 (37.00%) Data Engineering
3 627 (36.71%) Analytics
4 607 (35.54%) ETL
5 577 (33.78%) Data Modelling
6 409 (23.95%) CI/CD
7 316 (18.50%) Business Intelligence
8 293 (17.15%) Agile
9 277 (16.22%) DevOps
10 268 (15.69%) Migration
11 231 (13.52%) Data Governance
12 202 (11.83%) Problem-Solving
13 199 (11.65%) Validation
14 198 (11.59%) AI
15 182 (10.66%) Data Integration
16 174 (10.19%) Data Transformation
17 165 (9.66%) Decision-Making
18 162 (9.48%) Data Science
19 139 (8.14%) Infrastructure as Code
20 133 (7.79%) Test Automation
Programming Languages
1 875 (51.23%) SQL
2 724 (42.39%) Python
3 105 (6.15%) Java
4 56 (3.28%) Scala
5 51 (2.99%) PL/SQL
6 31 (1.81%) Shell Script
7 30 (1.76%) T-SQL
8 28 (1.64%) Data Analysis Expressions
9 26 (1.52%) Bash
9 26 (1.52%) C#
10 23 (1.35%) PowerShell
11 13 (0.76%) R
12 12 (0.70%) Bicep
12 12 (0.70%) JavaScript
13 7 (0.41%) Go
13 7 (0.41%) TypeScript
14 2 (0.12%) C
14 2 (0.12%) Korn
14 2 (0.12%) Ruby
14 2 (0.12%) SPARQL
Qualifications
1 466 (27.28%) Security Cleared
2 408 (23.89%) SC Cleared
3 41 (2.40%) BPSS Clearance
4 40 (2.34%) Degree
5 24 (1.41%) Azure Certification
6 22 (1.29%) DV Cleared
7 18 (1.05%) Computer Science Degree
8 11 (0.64%) AWS Certification
9 9 (0.53%) City & Guilds
9 9 (0.53%) DBS Check
10 6 (0.35%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
10 6 (0.35%) SnowPro
11 5 (0.29%) BICSI Certification
11 5 (0.29%) CISM
11 5 (0.29%) CISSP
12 4 (0.23%) Master's Degree
13 3 (0.18%) CEH
13 3 (0.18%) Microsoft Certification
14 1 (0.059%) CISA
14 1 (0.059%) Cisco Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 412 (24.12%) Data Quality
2 54 (3.16%) QA
3 46 (2.69%) GDPR
4 20 (1.17%) Accessibility
5 12 (0.70%) SLA
6 9 (0.53%) FATCA
7 5 (0.29%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 5 (0.29%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 4 (0.23%) HIPAA
9 3 (0.18%) GMP
9 3 (0.18%) MiFID
10 2 (0.12%) California Consumer Privacy Act
10 2 (0.12%) EMIR
10 2 (0.12%) PMO
10 2 (0.12%) SNOMED CT
10 2 (0.12%) WCAG
11 1 (0.059%) Government Security Classifications
11 1 (0.059%) IFRS
11 1 (0.059%) IFRS 17
11 1 (0.059%) IFRS 9
System Software
1 93 (5.44%) Docker
2 5 (0.29%) Virtual Machines
3 2 (0.12%) Active Directory
3 2 (0.12%) HDFS
4 1 (0.059%) RACF
Systems Management
1 176 (10.30%) Terraform
2 75 (4.39%) Kubernetes
3 35 (2.05%) Grafana
4 13 (0.76%) Ansible
5 10 (0.59%) Prometheus
6 6 (0.35%) Kibana
7 5 (0.29%) Control-M
8 3 (0.18%) Rancher
9 2 (0.12%) Apache Ranger
9 2 (0.12%) Thomson Reuters DACS
10 1 (0.059%) Kubeflow
10 1 (0.059%) logstash
10 1 (0.059%) NetBackup
10 1 (0.059%) Puppet
Vendors
1 313 (18.33%) Databricks
2 212 (12.41%) Microsoft
3 151 (8.84%) Oracle
4 125 (7.32%) Informatica
5 113 (6.62%) Talend
6 61 (3.57%) Google
7 58 (3.40%) Denodo
8 34 (1.99%) Cisco
8 34 (1.99%) F5
9 32 (1.87%) SAP
10 25 (1.46%) Salesforce
11 22 (1.29%) Splunk
12 20 (1.17%) Palantir
13 18 (1.05%) Cloudera
14 15 (0.88%) ServiceNow
15 14 (0.82%) Foundry
16 12 (0.70%) Sage
17 11 (0.64%) Alteryx
18 9 (0.53%) IBM
19 8 (0.47%) Bloomberg
418 Data Engineer jobs in England