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 11 April 2026.

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

6 months to
11 Apr 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 66 82 98
Rank change year-on-year +16 +16 +10
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 1,389 757 864
As % of all contract jobs in England 3.55% 3.11% 2.31%
As % of the Job Titles category 3.84% 3.35% 2.49%
Number of daily rates quoted 997 571 677
10th Percentile £368 £356 £300
25th Percentile £415 £425 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £513
Median % change year-on-year - -2.44% -6.82%
75th Percentile £588 £625 £619
90th Percentile £653 £725 £688
UK median daily rate £500 £500 £500
% change year-on-year - - -9.09%
Number of hourly rates quoted 34 10 44
10th Percentile £19.34 £25.45 £37.50
25th Percentile £36.56 £43.75 £49.25
Median hourly rate £58.25 £65.00 £67.50
Median % change year-on-year -10.38% -3.70% +5.47%
75th Percentile £75.00 £78.40 £80.00
90th Percentile £77.80 £93.75 -
UK median hourly rate £53.50 £47.50 £66.25
% change year-on-year +12.63% -28.30% +3.52%

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 36,130 22,574 34,661
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.34% 92.74% 92.67%
Number of daily rates quoted 22,725 15,118 23,117
10th Percentile £313 £300 £275
25th Percentile £413 £409 £412
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £508 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -3.33% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £619 £638 £638
90th Percentile £725 £750 £750
UK median daily rate £500 £520 £525
% change year-on-year -3.85% -0.95% -2.78%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,403 844 2,345
10th Percentile £15.50 £14.69 £12.88
25th Percentile £20.50 £20.26 £16.25
Median hourly rate £44.00 £32.50 £34.00
Median % change year-on-year +35.38% -4.41% -22.07%
75th Percentile £67.25 £65.00 £60.00
90th Percentile £78.75 £76.25 £71.89
UK median hourly rate £41.06 £31.64 £35.00
% change year-on-year +29.76% -9.60% -21.40%

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 11 April 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 11 April 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 11 April 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 +17 785 £525 -0.94% 158
Midlands +19 259 £469 -1.37% 59
West Midlands +18 239 £469 -1.63% 45
North of England -8 177 £463 - 87
North West +8 109 £450 -2.70% 56
South East -24 73 £500 -0.50% 91
South West -10 53 £523 +4.50% 38
Yorkshire -24 52 £465 +3.33% 19
East Midlands -32 20 £455 +14.11% 14
North East -14 16 £475 - 13
East of England -31 15 £565 +79.37% 17
Data Engineer
UK

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

For the 6 months to 11 April 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.

1 780 (56.16%) SQL
2 671 (48.31%) Python
3 590 (42.48%) Data Pipeline
4 574 (41.32%) ETL
5 555 (39.96%) Analytics
6 553 (39.81%) Data Engineering
7 526 (37.87%) Azure
8 500 (36.00%) Data Modelling
9 392 (28.22%) Security Cleared
10 388 (27.93%) Data Quality
11 378 (27.21%) AWS
12 370 (26.64%) Databricks
13 359 (25.85%) CI/CD
14 353 (25.41%) SC Cleared
15 329 (23.69%) Business Intelligence
16 270 (19.44%) DevOps
17 257 (18.50%) Data Warehouse
18 256 (18.43%) Power Platform
19 252 (18.14%) Agile
20 241 (17.35%) Power BI
21 223 (16.05%) Azure Data Factory
21 223 (16.05%) Data Governance
22 209 (15.05%) PySpark
23 206 (14.83%) Problem-Solving
24 187 (13.46%) Microsoft
25 175 (12.60%) Git
26 169 (12.17%) Data Science
27 161 (11.59%) Snowflake
28 155 (11.16%) AI
28 155 (11.16%) Data Lake

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
1 137 (9.86%) Apache Spark
2 131 (9.43%) Apache Airflow
3 82 (5.90%) Apache
4 68 (4.90%) SAS
5 14 (1.01%) Confluence
6 10 (0.72%) Palantir Foundry
7 7 (0.50%) Jupyter
8 5 (0.36%) Microsoft Exchange
9 3 (0.22%) SharePoint
10 1 (0.072%) Apache Superset
10 1 (0.072%) Apache Synapse
10 1 (0.072%) Appian
10 1 (0.072%) ArcGIS
10 1 (0.072%) Camunda
10 1 (0.072%) Luigi
10 1 (0.072%) Oracle Application Server
10 1 (0.072%) R Markdown
Applications
1 17 (1.22%) Microsoft Excel
2 5 (0.36%) Notepad++
3 4 (0.29%) Chatbot
4 3 (0.22%) 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
2 1 (0.072%) Actimize
2 1 (0.072%) Elite 3E
2 1 (0.072%) iTrent
2 1 (0.072%) NEC Housing
2 1 (0.072%) Oracle 11i
2 1 (0.072%) Oracle ERP
2 1 (0.072%) SAP Business ByDesign
2 1 (0.072%) SAP S/4HANA
2 1 (0.072%) SimCorp Dimension
Cloud Services
1 526 (37.87%) Azure
2 378 (27.21%) AWS
3 256 (18.43%) Power Platform
4 223 (16.05%) Azure Data Factory
5 161 (11.59%) Snowflake
6 149 (10.73%) Azure Synapse Analytics
7 136 (9.79%) Amazon S3
8 134 (9.65%) dbt
9 133 (9.58%) GCP
10 115 (8.28%) GitHub
11 110 (7.92%) Azure DevOps
12 90 (6.48%) Serverless
13 69 (4.97%) AWS Lambda
14 53 (3.82%) GitHub Actions
15 37 (2.66%) AWS CloudFormation
16 27 (1.94%) Matillion
17 24 (1.73%) Amazon Kinesis
18 23 (1.66%) AWS Step Functions
18 23 (1.66%) Dagster
19 19 (1.37%) Amazon SQS
Communications & Networking
1 27 (1.94%) DNS
1 27 (1.94%) VPN
2 26 (1.87%) BGP
2 26 (1.87%) DMZ
2 26 (1.87%) Multicast
3 11 (0.79%) Structured Cabling
4 5 (0.36%) PuTTY
4 5 (0.36%) WinSCP
5 4 (0.29%) Firewall
6 3 (0.22%) SAN
7 1 (0.072%) 4G
7 1 (0.072%) 5G
7 1 (0.072%) Network Security
7 1 (0.072%) Software-Defined Networking
Database & Business Intelligence
1 257 (18.50%) Data Warehouse
2 241 (17.35%) Power BI
3 155 (11.16%) Data Lake
4 106 (7.63%) SQL Server
5 87 (6.26%) Delta Lake
6 85 (6.12%) Amazon Redshift
7 83 (5.98%) Azure SQL Database
8 82 (5.90%) BigQuery
9 76 (5.47%) Metadata
10 70 (5.04%) Pentaho
11 63 (4.54%) Tableau
12 58 (4.18%) PostgreSQL
13 56 (4.03%) SQL Server Integration Services
14 55 (3.96%) Snowflake Schema
15 52 (3.74%) NoSQL
16 51 (3.67%) Big Data
17 50 (3.60%) Amazon Athena
18 36 (2.59%) Relational Database
19 34 (2.45%) Data Vault
19 34 (2.45%) Star Schema
Development Applications
1 175 (12.60%) Git
2 62 (4.46%) Jenkins
3 61 (4.39%) JIRA
4 56 (4.03%) GitLab
5 18 (1.30%) MLflow
6 2 (0.14%) Bitbucket
6 2 (0.14%) JUnit
6 2 (0.14%) Selenium
6 2 (0.14%) SonarQube
6 2 (0.14%) Sonatype Nexus
6 2 (0.14%) Visual Studio
7 1 (0.072%) Cucumber
7 1 (0.072%) DBeaver
7 1 (0.072%) ER Studio
7 1 (0.072%) ERwin
7 1 (0.072%) Maven
7 1 (0.072%) Mockito
7 1 (0.072%) Poetry
7 1 (0.072%) Team Foundation Server
7 1 (0.072%) Terragrunt
General
1 230 (16.56%) Finance
2 227 (16.34%) Social Skills
3 144 (10.37%) Analytical Skills
4 121 (8.71%) Public Sector
5 72 (5.18%) Banking
6 36 (2.59%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 21 (1.51%) Telecoms
8 20 (1.44%) Investment Banking
9 15 (1.08%) Retail
10 14 (1.01%) Documentation Skills
10 14 (1.01%) Manufacturing
11 13 (0.94%) Marketing
11 13 (0.94%) Pharmaceutical
12 12 (0.86%) Front Office
12 12 (0.86%) Publishing
13 8 (0.58%) Law
14 6 (0.43%) Aerospace
14 6 (0.43%) Military
15 5 (0.36%) Legal
16 4 (0.29%) Corporate Banking
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 209 (15.05%) PySpark
2 140 (10.08%) Kafka
3 47 (3.38%) Pandas
4 33 (2.38%) JSON
5 29 (2.09%) YAML
6 24 (1.73%) REST
7 23 (1.66%) Great Expectations
8 18 (1.30%) XML
9 15 (1.08%) scikit-learn
10 14 (1.01%) Node.js
11 13 (0.94%) Matplotlib
11 13 (0.94%) PyTorch
12 12 (0.86%) Apache Beam
12 12 (0.86%) NumPy
12 12 (0.86%) React
13 11 (0.79%) Apache Avro
14 10 (0.72%) Keycloak
14 10 (0.72%) pytest
14 10 (0.72%) Spring
14 10 (0.72%) Spring Boot
Miscellaneous
1 93 (6.70%) Cloud Native
2 43 (3.10%) Legacy Systems
3 31 (2.23%) Data Structures
4 27 (1.94%) Product Ownership
5 22 (1.58%) Clustering
6 21 (1.51%) Onboarding
7 20 (1.44%) Greenfield Project
8 19 (1.37%) Distributed Systems
9 14 (1.01%) Data Protection Act
9 14 (1.01%) Hybrid Cloud
9 14 (1.01%) NHS
9 14 (1.01%) Replication
10 12 (0.86%) Reinsurance
11 11 (0.79%) Public Cloud
12 9 (0.65%) Self-Motivation
13 8 (0.58%) Analytical Mindset
13 8 (0.58%) Distributed Computing
13 8 (0.58%) Life Science
14 7 (0.50%) Management Information System
14 7 (0.50%) Reference Data
Operating Systems
1 36 (2.59%) Unix
2 23 (1.66%) Linux
3 3 (0.22%) Windows
4 2 (0.14%) Windows Server
5 1 (0.072%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 590 (42.48%) Data Pipeline
2 574 (41.32%) ETL
3 555 (39.96%) Analytics
4 553 (39.81%) Data Engineering
5 500 (36.00%) Data Modelling
6 359 (25.85%) CI/CD
7 329 (23.69%) Business Intelligence
8 270 (19.44%) DevOps
9 252 (18.14%) Agile
10 223 (16.05%) Data Governance
11 206 (14.83%) Problem-Solving
12 169 (12.17%) Data Science
13 155 (11.16%) AI
14 154 (11.09%) Data Integration
15 153 (11.02%) Migration
16 146 (10.51%) Data Architecture
17 138 (9.94%) Validation
18 128 (9.22%) Data Transformation
19 123 (8.86%) Performance Tuning
20 122 (8.78%) Infrastructure as Code
Programming Languages
1 780 (56.16%) SQL
2 671 (48.31%) Python
3 86 (6.19%) Java
4 80 (5.76%) Scala
5 38 (2.74%) C#
6 37 (2.66%) Data Analysis Expressions
7 32 (2.30%) PL/SQL
8 27 (1.94%) T-SQL
9 25 (1.80%) Bash
9 25 (1.80%) Shell Script
10 20 (1.44%) PowerShell
11 19 (1.37%) Bicep
12 16 (1.15%) R
13 13 (0.94%) Go
14 10 (0.72%) JavaScript
15 5 (0.36%) TypeScript
16 3 (0.22%) C
16 3 (0.22%) Korn
17 2 (0.14%) Ruby
17 2 (0.14%) VB
Qualifications
1 392 (28.22%) Security Cleared
2 353 (25.41%) SC Cleared
3 36 (2.59%) Degree
4 33 (2.38%) Azure Certification
5 25 (1.80%) BPSS Clearance
6 16 (1.15%) Computer Science Degree
7 13 (0.94%) AWS Certification
8 11 (0.79%) DV Cleared
9 6 (0.43%) Microsoft Certification
10 5 (0.36%) BICSI Certification
10 5 (0.36%) City & Guilds
10 5 (0.36%) DBS Check
10 5 (0.36%) Master's Degree
11 4 (0.29%) CTC Cleared
11 4 (0.29%) SnowPro
12 2 (0.14%) CISM
12 2 (0.14%) CISSP
13 1 (0.072%) CCIE
13 1 (0.072%) CCNP
13 1 (0.072%) Cisco Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 388 (27.93%) Data Quality
2 51 (3.67%) GDPR
3 34 (2.45%) QA
4 11 (0.79%) Accessibility
5 8 (0.58%) SLA
6 4 (0.29%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 3 (0.22%) FATCA
7 3 (0.22%) GMP
7 3 (0.22%) HIPAA
8 2 (0.14%) MiFID
8 2 (0.14%) WCAG
9 1 (0.072%) Basel III
9 1 (0.072%) California Consumer Privacy Act
9 1 (0.072%) Dodd-Frank
9 1 (0.072%) EMIR
9 1 (0.072%) GRC
9 1 (0.072%) GxP
9 1 (0.072%) NCSC
9 1 (0.072%) NIST
9 1 (0.072%) PCI DSS
System Software
1 95 (6.84%) Docker
2 9 (0.65%) Virtual Machines
3 2 (0.14%) HDFS
4 1 (0.072%) Active Directory
4 1 (0.072%) RACF
Systems Management
1 155 (11.16%) Terraform
2 98 (7.06%) Kubernetes
3 30 (2.16%) Grafana
4 13 (0.94%) Prometheus
5 7 (0.50%) Ansible
6 4 (0.29%) Kubeflow
7 3 (0.22%) Kibana
7 3 (0.22%) Rancher
8 2 (0.14%) Apache Ranger
8 2 (0.14%) EMC NetWorker
8 2 (0.14%) logstash
8 2 (0.14%) NetBackup
8 2 (0.14%) Thomson Reuters DACS
8 2 (0.14%) Tivoli Storage Manager
9 1 (0.072%) Control-M
9 1 (0.072%) Puppet
Vendors
1 370 (26.64%) Databricks
2 187 (13.46%) Microsoft
3 113 (8.14%) Oracle
4 100 (7.20%) Talend
5 90 (6.48%) Informatica
6 58 (4.18%) Denodo
7 57 (4.10%) Google
8 31 (2.23%) Cisco
9 28 (2.02%) F5
10 22 (1.58%) SAP
10 22 (1.58%) ServiceNow
11 17 (1.22%) Splunk
12 16 (1.15%) Cloudera
13 14 (1.01%) IBM
14 13 (0.94%) Foundry
14 13 (0.94%) Palantir
15 10 (0.72%) Alteryx
16 8 (0.58%) MuleSoft
17 7 (0.50%) OpenAI
18 5 (0.36%) Virgin Media