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 25 August 2026.

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

 6 months to
25 Aug 2026		 Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 61 124 100
Rank change year-on-year +63 -24 +22
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 1,693 627 775
As % of all contract jobs in England 3.71% 2.28% 2.33%
As % of the Job Titles category 4.01% 2.49% 2.51%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,128 456 562
10th Percentile £381 £381 £276
25th Percentile £425 £432 £430
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year - -4.76% -4.55%
75th Percentile £588 £588 £638
90th Percentile £663 £691 £700
UK median daily rate £500 £500 £525
% change year-on-year - -4.76% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 81 13 22
10th Percentile £19.34 £25.34 £41.38
25th Percentile £30.96 £35.25 £51.94
Median hourly rate £41.56 £52.50 £75.00
Median % change year-on-year -20.85% -30.00% +5.26%
75th Percentile £70.00 £62.50 £80.00
90th Percentile £73.75 £79.74 -
UK median hourly rate £44.75 £52.50 £75.00
% change year-on-year -14.76% -30.00% +5.26%

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 42,233 25,214 30,900
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.44% 91.54% 92.99%
Number of daily rates quoted 25,442 16,270 19,985
10th Percentile £325 £280 £300
25th Percentile £425 £400 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £510 £525
Median % change year-on-year +2.94% -2.86% -4.55%
75th Percentile £630 £625 £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 3,231 1,370 1,701
10th Percentile £15.20 £13.64 £14.16
25th Percentile £21.25 £17.45 £20.50
Median hourly rate £42.50 £25.23 £45.00
Median % change year-on-year +68.48% -43.94% +2.60%
75th Percentile £68.00 £55.00 £66.61
90th Percentile £80.00 £73.25 £75.00
UK median hourly rate £41.92 £25.15 £43.00
% change year-on-year +66.68% -41.51% -1.58%

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 25 August 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 25 August 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 25 August 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 +34 831 £533 +1.43% 231
Midlands +64 368 £465 +0.81% 48
West Midlands +63 308 £465 -3.13% 34
North of England +31 220 £478 +0.53% 90
South East +25 130 £463 +2.78% 57
North West +34 126 £525 +10.53% 40
South West +6 88 £525 +5.00% 50
Yorkshire -5 74 £465 -4.62% 24
East Midlands +23 60 £450 +1.98% 14
East of England +12 40 £475 +5.56% 20
North East -25 21 £515 +21.89% 27
Data Engineer
UK

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

For the 6 months to 25 August 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.

1 839 (49.56%) SQL
2 726 (42.88%) Data Pipeline
3 694 (40.99%) Python
4 634 (37.45%) Data Engineering
5 593 (35.03%) Analytics
6 576 (34.02%) ETL
7 560 (33.08%) Data Modelling
8 526 (31.07%) Azure
9 504 (29.77%) AWS
10 444 (26.23%) Security Cleared
11 423 (24.99%) Data Quality
12 404 (23.86%) CI/CD
13 389 (22.98%) SC Cleared
14 324 (19.14%) Databricks
15 291 (17.19%) Agile
16 285 (16.83%) Business Intelligence
16 285 (16.83%) Data Warehouse
17 276 (16.30%) DevOps
18 271 (16.01%) Migration
19 237 (14.00%) PySpark
20 228 (13.47%) Data Governance
21 226 (13.35%) AI
22 225 (13.29%) Power Platform
23 221 (13.05%) Power BI
24 215 (12.70%) Microsoft
25 207 (12.23%) Validation
26 202 (11.93%) Azure Data Factory
27 200 (11.81%) Data Transformation
28 194 (11.46%) Snowflake
29 192 (11.34%) 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
1 178 (10.51%) Apache Airflow
2 139 (8.21%) Apache Spark
3 105 (6.20%) Apache
4 55 (3.25%) SAS
5 32 (1.89%) Confluence
6 15 (0.89%) Palantir Foundry
7 12 (0.71%) SharePoint
8 9 (0.53%) Jupyter
9 3 (0.18%) Apache Superset
10 2 (0.12%) Microsoft Exchange
11 1 (0.059%) ArcGIS
11 1 (0.059%) Liferay
11 1 (0.059%) Luigi
11 1 (0.059%) PowerExchange
11 1 (0.059%) R Markdown
Applications
1 24 (1.42%) Microsoft Excel
2 6 (0.35%) Spreadsheet
3 5 (0.30%) Notepad++
4 4 (0.24%) Chatbot
5 1 (0.059%) Microsoft PowerPoint
Business Applications
1 12 (0.71%) Aladdin
2 6 (0.35%) Dynamics CRM
3 5 (0.30%) Infor LN
3 5 (0.30%) NetSuite
3 5 (0.30%) Sage X3
4 3 (0.18%) SAP S/4HANA
4 3 (0.18%) SimCorp Dimension
4 3 (0.18%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
5 2 (0.12%) BambooHR
5 2 (0.12%) Maximo
6 1 (0.059%) FIS Private Capital Suite
6 1 (0.059%) MIS ActiveH
6 1 (0.059%) Oracle 11i
6 1 (0.059%) Oracle Assets
6 1 (0.059%) Oracle EBS
6 1 (0.059%) Oracle ERP
6 1 (0.059%) Raiser’s Edge
6 1 (0.059%) SAP BPC
6 1 (0.059%) SAP CAR
6 1 (0.059%) SAP EWM
Cloud Services
1 526 (31.07%) Azure
2 504 (29.77%) AWS
3 225 (13.29%) Power Platform
4 202 (11.93%) Azure Data Factory
5 194 (11.46%) Snowflake
6 190 (11.22%) dbt
7 157 (9.27%) GCP
8 144 (8.51%) Amazon S3
9 128 (7.56%) Azure Synapse Analytics
10 123 (7.27%) Azure DevOps
11 102 (6.02%) GitHub
11 102 (6.02%) Serverless
12 90 (5.32%) AWS Lambda
13 41 (2.42%) GitHub Actions
14 37 (2.19%) Amazon EMR
15 28 (1.65%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 23 (1.36%) AWS Step Functions
16 23 (1.36%) Fivetran
17 22 (1.30%) Matillion
18 21 (1.24%) AWS CloudFormation
Communications & Networking
1 32 (1.89%) VPN
2 31 (1.83%) BGP
2 31 (1.83%) DMZ
2 31 (1.83%) DNS
2 31 (1.83%) Multicast
3 11 (0.65%) Structured Cabling
4 7 (0.41%) Firewall
5 5 (0.30%) PuTTY
5 5 (0.30%) WinSCP
6 4 (0.24%) Wi-Fi
6 4 (0.24%) Wireless
7 3 (0.18%) Intrusion Detection
Database & Business Intelligence
1 285 (16.83%) Data Warehouse
2 221 (13.05%) Power BI
3 151 (8.92%) Data Lake
4 108 (6.38%) Metadata
5 96 (5.67%) BigQuery
6 94 (5.55%) Amazon Redshift
7 78 (4.61%) SQL Server
8 74 (4.37%) Delta Lake
9 69 (4.08%) Pentaho
10 68 (4.02%) Amazon Athena
11 65 (3.84%) Tableau
12 63 (3.72%) Big Data
13 56 (3.31%) PostgreSQL
14 52 (3.07%) Relational Database
15 48 (2.84%) Azure SQL Database
15 48 (2.84%) Snowflake Schema
16 47 (2.78%) NoSQL
17 40 (2.36%) SQL Server Integration Services
18 35 (2.07%) Oracle Database
19 34 (2.01%) Amazon RDS
Development Applications
1 139 (8.21%) Git
2 79 (4.67%) GitLab
3 56 (3.31%) JIRA
4 31 (1.83%) Jenkins
5 10 (0.59%) MLflow
6 7 (0.41%) Postman
7 5 (0.30%) Artifactory
7 5 (0.30%) Bitbucket
8 4 (0.24%) ERwin
9 3 (0.18%) Atlassian Bamboo
9 3 (0.18%) Newman
9 3 (0.18%) Selenium
9 3 (0.18%) SonarQube
9 3 (0.18%) Sonatype Nexus
10 2 (0.12%) Claude Code
10 2 (0.12%) ER Studio
10 2 (0.12%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
10 2 (0.12%) Terragrunt
10 2 (0.12%) Yeoman
11 1 (0.059%) Toad
General
1 274 (16.18%) Finance
2 269 (15.89%) Social Skills
3 192 (11.34%) Analytical Skills
4 145 (8.56%) Public Sector
5 101 (5.97%) Banking
6 31 (1.83%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 24 (1.42%) Telecoms
8 22 (1.30%) Retail
9 21 (1.24%) Marketing
10 19 (1.12%) Automotive
11 18 (1.06%) Aerospace
11 18 (1.06%) Investment Banking
11 18 (1.06%) Manufacturing
12 16 (0.95%) Front Office
13 15 (0.89%) Documentation Skills
14 14 (0.83%) Pharmaceutical
15 10 (0.59%) Financial Institution
15 10 (0.59%) Law
16 8 (0.47%) Legal
16 8 (0.47%) Military
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 237 (14.00%) PySpark
2 166 (9.81%) Terraform
3 117 (6.91%) Kafka
4 31 (1.83%) Pandas
5 25 (1.48%) REST
6 24 (1.42%) JSON
7 22 (1.30%) Spring
7 22 (1.30%) Spring Boot
8 21 (1.24%) Great Expectations
9 16 (0.95%) XML
10 15 (0.89%) Apache Beam
11 14 (0.83%) React
12 13 (0.77%) YAML
13 12 (0.71%) RESTful
14 10 (0.59%) Microsoft Graph
14 10 (0.59%) pytest
15 9 (0.53%) Apache Avro
15 9 (0.53%) PyTorch
16 8 (0.47%) .NET
16 8 (0.47%) Spark Streaming
Miscellaneous
1 129 (7.62%) Cloud Native
2 74 (4.37%) Legacy Systems
3 44 (2.60%) Data Structures
4 36 (2.13%) Onboarding
5 24 (1.42%) Product Ownership
6 21 (1.24%) Distributed Systems
6 21 (1.24%) Greenfield Project
7 19 (1.12%) NHS
7 19 (1.12%) Reference Data
8 17 (1.00%) Reinsurance
9 14 (0.83%) Management Information System
10 12 (0.71%) AI Agents
10 12 (0.71%) Data Protection Act
11 11 (0.65%) Algorithms
11 11 (0.65%) Clustering
11 11 (0.65%) Virtual Team
12 9 (0.53%) Life Science
12 9 (0.53%) Self-Motivation
13 8 (0.47%) Driving Licence
13 8 (0.47%) Replication
Operating Systems
1 57 (3.37%) Unix
2 44 (2.60%) Linux
3 4 (0.24%) Windows
4 2 (0.12%) Ubuntu
4 2 (0.12%) Windows Server
5 1 (0.059%) Robot Operating System
5 1 (0.059%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 726 (42.88%) Data Pipeline
2 634 (37.45%) Data Engineering
3 593 (35.03%) Analytics
4 576 (34.02%) ETL
5 560 (33.08%) Data Modelling
6 404 (23.86%) CI/CD
7 291 (17.19%) Agile
8 285 (16.83%) Business Intelligence
9 276 (16.30%) DevOps
10 271 (16.01%) Migration
11 228 (13.47%) Data Governance
12 226 (13.35%) AI
13 207 (12.23%) Validation
14 200 (11.81%) Data Transformation
15 192 (11.34%) Data Integration
16 188 (11.10%) Problem-Solving
17 165 (9.75%) Decision-Making
18 139 (8.21%) Data Science
19 138 (8.15%) Infrastructure as Code
20 137 (8.09%) Machine Learning
Programming Languages
1 839 (49.56%) SQL
2 694 (40.99%) Python
3 97 (5.73%) Java
4 59 (3.48%) Scala
5 46 (2.72%) PL/SQL
6 32 (1.89%) Shell Script
7 27 (1.59%) Data Analysis Expressions
8 24 (1.42%) T-SQL
9 22 (1.30%) Bash
10 20 (1.18%) PowerShell
11 16 (0.95%) JavaScript
12 14 (0.83%) C#
13 12 (0.71%) R
14 8 (0.47%) Bicep
15 6 (0.35%) Go
16 5 (0.30%) TypeScript
17 4 (0.24%) Korn
18 2 (0.12%) COBOL
18 2 (0.12%) Cypher
18 2 (0.12%) SPARQL
Qualifications
1 444 (26.23%) Security Cleared
2 389 (22.98%) SC Cleared
3 39 (2.30%) Degree
4 34 (2.01%) BPSS Clearance
5 21 (1.24%) Azure Certification
6 20 (1.18%) Computer Science Degree
6 20 (1.18%) DV Cleared
7 11 (0.65%) AWS Certification
8 9 (0.53%) City & Guilds
9 8 (0.47%) DBS Check
10 7 (0.41%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
10 7 (0.41%) SnowPro
11 6 (0.35%) Master's Degree
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 (0.059%) CISA
15 1 (0.059%) Postgraduate
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 423 (24.99%) Data Quality
2 59 (3.48%) QA
3 40 (2.36%) GDPR
4 16 (0.95%) Accessibility
5 11 (0.65%) SLA
6 6 (0.35%) FATCA
7 5 (0.30%) Sarbanes-Oxley
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 (0.059%) Disclosure Scotland
11 1 (0.059%) Government Security Classifications
11 1 (0.059%) GxP
11 1 (0.059%) IFRS
11 1 (0.059%) IFRS 17
11 1 (0.059%) IFRS 9
11 1 (0.059%) PMO
System Software
1 103 (6.08%) Docker
2 4 (0.24%) Virtual Machines
3 2 (0.12%) Active Directory
4 1 (0.059%) RACF
Systems Management
1 77 (4.55%) Kubernetes
2 31 (1.83%) Grafana
3 13 (0.77%) Ansible
4 10 (0.59%) Control-M
5 6 (0.35%) Kibana
6 3 (0.18%) Prometheus
7 2 (0.12%) Apache Ranger
7 2 (0.12%) Puppet
7 2 (0.12%) Thomson Reuters DACS
8 1 (0.059%) Kubeflow
8 1 (0.059%) logstash
8 1 (0.059%) Rancher
Vendors
1 324 (19.14%) Databricks
2 215 (12.70%) Microsoft
3 136 (8.03%) Oracle
4 107 (6.32%) Informatica
5 91 (5.38%) Talend
6 63 (3.72%) Google
7 52 (3.07%) Denodo
8 32 (1.89%) Cisco
8 32 (1.89%) F5
9 27 (1.59%) Salesforce
10 26 (1.54%) SAP
11 24 (1.42%) Palantir
12 20 (1.18%) Foundry
13 14 (0.83%) Cloudera
14 13 (0.77%) ServiceNow
14 13 (0.77%) Splunk
15 10 (0.59%) IBM
16 9 (0.53%) Bloomberg
16 9 (0.53%) Sage
17 8 (0.47%) InterSystems
475 Data Engineer jobs in England