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 29 July 2026.

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

6 months to
29 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 56 121 92
Rank change year-on-year +65 -29 +26
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 1,729 646 810
As % of all contract jobs in England 3.86% 2.35% 2.38%
As % of the Job Titles category 4.16% 2.56% 2.56%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,179 468 605
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 £598 £630
90th Percentile £658 £700 £700
UK median daily rate £500 £500 £513
% change year-on-year - -2.44% -6.82%
Number of hourly rates quoted 80 10 30
10th Percentile £19.34 £18.18 £36.88
25th Percentile £30.96 £44.50 £50.06
Median hourly rate £43.75 £52.50 £77.50
Median % change year-on-year -16.67% -32.26% -
75th Percentile £70.00 £74.65 £80.00
90th Percentile £75.00 £83.00 -
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 41,522 25,227 31,663
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.61% 91.72% 92.93%
Number of daily rates quoted 25,267 16,394 20,893
10th Percentile £329 £288 £300
25th Percentile £425 £402 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £510 £525
Median % change year-on-year +2.94% -2.86% -4.55%
75th Percentile £625 £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 3,038 1,280 1,957
10th Percentile £15.99 £13.74 £14.05
25th Percentile £22.13 £17.79 £20.00
Median hourly rate £45.56 £26.02 £43.00
Median % change year-on-year +75.08% -39.49% -1.58%
75th Percentile £68.00 £55.62 £65.00
90th Percentile £81.02 £75.00 £75.00
UK median hourly rate £43.61 £25.15 £42.50
% change year-on-year +73.38% -40.82% -1.88%

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 29 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 29 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 29 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 +44 838 £525 - 215
Midlands +61 392 £459 +2.00% 52
West Midlands +56 340 £459 -0.22% 36
North of England +25 231 £475 - 93
North West +21 135 £525 +10.53% 45
South East +17 127 £469 +10.35% 89
South West +11 87 £525 +2.44% 36
Yorkshire -3 74 £475 - 21
East Midlands +21 52 £475 +13.10% 16
East of England +6 35 £520 +63.52% 12
North East -29 23 £515 +21.18% 28
Data Engineer
UK

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

For the 6 months to 29 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.

1 885 (51.19%) SQL
2 728 (42.11%) Data Pipeline
3 724 (41.87%) Python
4 641 (37.07%) Data Engineering
5 624 (36.09%) Analytics
6 603 (34.88%) ETL
7 575 (33.26%) Data Modelling
8 542 (31.35%) Azure
9 489 (28.28%) AWS
10 470 (27.18%) Security Cleared
11 425 (24.58%) Data Quality
12 412 (23.83%) CI/CD
13 411 (23.77%) SC Cleared
14 318 (18.39%) Databricks
15 314 (18.16%) Business Intelligence
16 299 (17.29%) Agile
17 285 (16.48%) Data Warehouse
18 281 (16.25%) DevOps
19 274 (15.85%) Migration
20 246 (14.23%) Power Platform
21 235 (13.59%) Data Governance
22 234 (13.53%) Power BI
23 226 (13.07%) PySpark
24 220 (12.72%) Azure Data Factory
25 219 (12.67%) Microsoft
26 206 (11.91%) Validation
27 204 (11.80%) Problem-Solving
28 203 (11.74%) AI
29 191 (11.05%) Data Integration
30 188 (10.87%) Data Transformation

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
1 160 (9.25%) Apache Airflow
2 138 (7.98%) Apache Spark
3 102 (5.90%) Apache
4 73 (4.22%) SAS
5 39 (2.26%) Confluence
6 13 (0.75%) Palantir Foundry
7 10 (0.58%) SharePoint
8 8 (0.46%) Jupyter
9 2 (0.12%) Apache Superset
9 2 (0.12%) Microsoft Exchange
10 1 (0.058%) ArcGIS
10 1 (0.058%) Liferay
10 1 (0.058%) Luigi
10 1 (0.058%) R Markdown
Applications
1 20 (1.16%) Microsoft Excel
2 5 (0.29%) Notepad++
2 5 (0.29%) Spreadsheet
3 3 (0.17%) Chatbot
4 1 (0.058%) Microsoft PowerPoint
Business Applications
1 12 (0.69%) Aladdin
2 8 (0.46%) Dynamics CRM
3 5 (0.29%) Infor LN
3 5 (0.29%) NetSuite
3 5 (0.29%) Sage X3
4 3 (0.17%) SAP BPC
4 3 (0.17%) SAP S/4HANA
4 3 (0.17%) SimCorp Dimension
5 2 (0.12%) BambooHR
5 2 (0.12%) Maximo
6 1 (0.058%) iTrent
6 1 (0.058%) MIS ActiveH
6 1 (0.058%) NEC Housing
6 1 (0.058%) Oracle Assets
6 1 (0.058%) Oracle EBS
6 1 (0.058%) Oracle ERP
6 1 (0.058%) Raiser’s Edge
6 1 (0.058%) SAP Business ByDesign
6 1 (0.058%) SAP CAR
6 1 (0.058%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
Cloud Services
1 542 (31.35%) Azure
2 489 (28.28%) AWS
3 246 (14.23%) Power Platform
4 220 (12.72%) Azure Data Factory
5 183 (10.58%) dbt
5 183 (10.58%) Snowflake
6 156 (9.02%) GCP
7 144 (8.33%) Amazon S3
8 143 (8.27%) Azure Synapse Analytics
9 130 (7.52%) Azure DevOps
10 99 (5.73%) GitHub
11 97 (5.61%) Serverless
12 81 (4.68%) AWS Lambda
13 44 (2.54%) GitHub Actions
14 37 (2.14%) Amazon EMR
15 28 (1.62%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 25 (1.45%) Matillion
17 23 (1.33%) AWS Step Functions
17 23 (1.33%) Fivetran
17 23 (1.33%) OpenShift
Communications & Networking
1 32 (1.85%) DNS
1 32 (1.85%) VPN
2 31 (1.79%) BGP
2 31 (1.79%) DMZ
2 31 (1.79%) Multicast
3 10 (0.58%) Structured Cabling
4 7 (0.40%) Firewall
5 5 (0.29%) PuTTY
5 5 (0.29%) WinSCP
6 4 (0.23%) Wi-Fi
6 4 (0.23%) Wireless
7 3 (0.17%) Intrusion Detection
8 1 (0.058%) 4G
8 1 (0.058%) 5G
Database & Business Intelligence
1 285 (16.48%) Data Warehouse
2 234 (13.53%) Power BI
3 155 (8.96%) Data Lake
4 93 (5.38%) Amazon Redshift
5 92 (5.32%) BigQuery
6 91 (5.26%) Metadata
7 87 (5.03%) Pentaho
8 85 (4.92%) SQL Server
9 81 (4.68%) Delta Lake
10 68 (3.93%) Tableau
11 63 (3.64%) PostgreSQL
12 62 (3.59%) Big Data
13 59 (3.41%) Amazon Athena
14 57 (3.30%) Snowflake Schema
15 51 (2.95%) Azure SQL Database
16 50 (2.89%) SQL Server Integration Services
17 48 (2.78%) NoSQL
18 45 (2.60%) Relational Database
19 34 (1.97%) Hadoop
20 33 (1.91%) MySQL
Development Applications
1 158 (9.14%) Git
2 78 (4.51%) GitLab
3 67 (3.88%) JIRA
4 44 (2.54%) Jenkins
5 7 (0.40%) Postman
6 6 (0.35%) MLflow
7 5 (0.29%) Artifactory
7 5 (0.29%) Bitbucket
8 3 (0.17%) Newman
8 3 (0.17%) SonarQube
8 3 (0.17%) Sonatype Nexus
9 2 (0.12%) Atlassian Bamboo
9 2 (0.12%) ER Studio
9 2 (0.12%) ERwin
9 2 (0.12%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
9 2 (0.12%) Yeoman
10 1 (0.058%) JUnit
10 1 (0.058%) Octopus Deploy
10 1 (0.058%) Selenium
10 1 (0.058%) Terragrunt
General
1 287 (16.60%) Finance
2 261 (15.10%) Social Skills
3 194 (11.22%) Analytical Skills
4 153 (8.85%) Public Sector
5 97 (5.61%) Banking
6 31 (1.79%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 26 (1.50%) Telecoms
8 23 (1.33%) Marketing
8 23 (1.33%) Retail
9 21 (1.21%) Documentation Skills
10 20 (1.16%) Manufacturing
11 19 (1.10%) Automotive
12 17 (0.98%) Investment Banking
12 17 (0.98%) Pharmaceutical
13 16 (0.93%) Front Office
14 15 (0.87%) Aerospace
15 11 (0.64%) Publishing
16 9 (0.52%) Billing
17 8 (0.46%) Legal
17 8 (0.46%) Military
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 226 (13.07%) PySpark
2 123 (7.11%) Kafka
3 38 (2.20%) Pandas
4 31 (1.79%) JSON
5 25 (1.45%) REST
6 21 (1.21%) Spring
6 21 (1.21%) Spring Boot
6 21 (1.21%) XML
7 20 (1.16%) Great Expectations
8 17 (0.98%) Apache Beam
9 16 (0.93%) YAML
10 14 (0.81%) React
11 12 (0.69%) Apache Avro
12 11 (0.64%) RESTful
12 11 (0.64%) scikit-learn
13 10 (0.58%) Microsoft Graph
14 9 (0.52%) GeoJSON
14 9 (0.52%) Matplotlib
14 9 (0.52%) Node.js
14 9 (0.52%) pytest
Miscellaneous
1 125 (7.23%) Cloud Native
2 70 (4.05%) Legacy Systems
3 51 (2.95%) Data Structures
4 33 (1.91%) Onboarding
5 29 (1.68%) Distributed Systems
6 22 (1.27%) Greenfield Project
6 22 (1.27%) NHS
7 21 (1.21%) Product Ownership
8 19 (1.10%) Reinsurance
9 18 (1.04%) Clustering
10 15 (0.87%) Reference Data
11 14 (0.81%) Data Protection Act
12 12 (0.69%) Life Science
13 11 (0.64%) Algorithms
14 10 (0.58%) Virtual Team
15 9 (0.52%) Driving Licence
15 9 (0.52%) Management Information System
15 9 (0.52%) Self-Motivation
16 8 (0.46%) Linux Command Line
16 8 (0.46%) Replication
Operating Systems
1 57 (3.30%) Unix
2 44 (2.54%) Linux
3 4 (0.23%) Windows
4 2 (0.12%) Ubuntu
4 2 (0.12%) Windows Server
5 1 (0.058%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 728 (42.11%) Data Pipeline
2 641 (37.07%) Data Engineering
3 624 (36.09%) Analytics
4 603 (34.88%) ETL
5 575 (33.26%) Data Modelling
6 412 (23.83%) CI/CD
7 314 (18.16%) Business Intelligence
8 299 (17.29%) Agile
9 281 (16.25%) DevOps
10 274 (15.85%) Migration
11 235 (13.59%) Data Governance
12 206 (11.91%) Validation
13 204 (11.80%) Problem-Solving
14 203 (11.74%) AI
15 191 (11.05%) Data Integration
16 188 (10.87%) Data Transformation
17 169 (9.77%) Decision-Making
18 162 (9.37%) Data Science
19 138 (7.98%) Infrastructure as Code
20 135 (7.81%) Test Automation
Programming Languages
1 885 (51.19%) SQL
2 724 (41.87%) Python
3 106 (6.13%) Java
4 53 (3.07%) Scala
5 51 (2.95%) PL/SQL
6 33 (1.91%) Shell Script
7 31 (1.79%) T-SQL
8 29 (1.68%) Data Analysis Expressions
9 26 (1.50%) Bash
10 25 (1.45%) C#
11 23 (1.33%) PowerShell
12 14 (0.81%) JavaScript
13 13 (0.75%) Bicep
13 13 (0.75%) R
14 7 (0.40%) Go
14 7 (0.40%) TypeScript
15 2 (0.12%) C
15 2 (0.12%) Korn
15 2 (0.12%) Ruby
15 2 (0.12%) SPARQL
Qualifications
1 470 (27.18%) Security Cleared
2 411 (23.77%) SC Cleared
3 42 (2.43%) BPSS Clearance
4 40 (2.31%) Degree
5 25 (1.45%) Azure Certification
6 22 (1.27%) DV Cleared
7 17 (0.98%) Computer Science Degree
8 10 (0.58%) AWS Certification
9 9 (0.52%) City & Guilds
9 9 (0.52%) 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
11 5 (0.29%) Master's Degree
12 3 (0.17%) CEH
12 3 (0.17%) Microsoft Certification
13 1 (0.058%) CISA
13 1 (0.058%) Cisco Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 425 (24.58%) Data Quality
2 58 (3.35%) QA
3 45 (2.60%) GDPR
4 20 (1.16%) Accessibility
5 12 (0.69%) SLA
6 9 (0.52%) FATCA
7 5 (0.29%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 4 (0.23%) HIPAA
8 4 (0.23%) ISO/IEC 27001
9 3 (0.17%) GMP
9 3 (0.17%) 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 (0.058%) Government Security Classifications
11 1 (0.058%) IFRS
11 1 (0.058%) IFRS 17
11 1 (0.058%) IFRS 9
System Software
1 102 (5.90%) Docker
2 5 (0.29%) Virtual Machines
3 2 (0.12%) Active Directory
3 2 (0.12%) HDFS
4 1 (0.058%) RACF
Systems Management
1 172 (9.95%) Terraform
2 83 (4.80%) Kubernetes
3 35 (2.02%) Grafana
4 13 (0.75%) Ansible
5 9 (0.52%) Prometheus
6 6 (0.35%) Kibana
7 5 (0.29%) Control-M
8 3 (0.17%) Rancher
9 2 (0.12%) Apache Ranger
9 2 (0.12%) Thomson Reuters DACS
10 1 (0.058%) Kubeflow
10 1 (0.058%) logstash
10 1 (0.058%) NetBackup
10 1 (0.058%) Puppet
Vendors
1 318 (18.39%) Databricks
2 219 (12.67%) Microsoft
3 152 (8.79%) Oracle
4 123 (7.11%) Informatica
5 115 (6.65%) Talend
6 64 (3.70%) Google
7 61 (3.53%) Denodo
8 33 (1.91%) Cisco
8 33 (1.91%) F5
8 33 (1.91%) SAP
9 26 (1.50%) Salesforce
10 23 (1.33%) Palantir
11 21 (1.21%) Splunk
12 18 (1.04%) Cloudera
13 17 (0.98%) Foundry
14 15 (0.87%) ServiceNow
15 12 (0.69%) Sage
16 10 (0.58%) IBM
17 9 (0.52%) Bloomberg
17 9 (0.52%) MuleSoft