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 20 June 2026.

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

6 months to
20 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 57 101 97
Rank change year-on-year +44 -4 +20
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 1,633 646 850
As % of all contract jobs in England 3.78% 2.59% 2.25%
As % of the Job Titles category 4.09% 2.81% 2.43%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,141 492 650
10th Percentile £375 £363 £263
25th Percentile £425 £425 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £510
Median % change year-on-year - -1.96% -7.27%
75th Percentile £588 £600 £613
90th Percentile £663 £700 £688
UK median daily rate £500 £500 £500
% change year-on-year - - -9.09%
Number of hourly rates quoted 57 9 40
10th Percentile £19.34 £18.13 £37.50
25th Percentile £35.00 £51.25 £49.34
Median hourly rate £45.00 £52.50 £67.50
Median % change year-on-year -14.29% -22.22% -10.60%
75th Percentile £71.50 £78.70 £80.00
90th Percentile £75.00 £82.75 -
UK median hourly rate £50.00 £52.50 £67.50
% change year-on-year -4.76% -22.22% -10.60%

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 39,906 22,978 35,050
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.37% 92.28% 92.85%
Number of daily rates quoted 24,562 15,111 22,827
10th Percentile £325 £294 £290
25th Percentile £415 £405 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £523 £513 £525
Median % change year-on-year +1.95% -2.38% -4.55%
75th Percentile £625 £635 £638
90th Percentile £734 £750 £750
UK median daily rate £515 £500 £525
% change year-on-year +3.00% -4.76% -2.33%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,811 1,028 2,703
10th Percentile £15.93 £14.00 £12.86
25th Percentile £21.93 £18.13 £16.58
Median hourly rate £45.56 £29.00 £39.50
Median % change year-on-year +57.09% -26.58% -12.22%
75th Percentile £67.84 £58.75 £63.75
90th Percentile £80.00 £75.00 £74.37
UK median hourly rate £44.94 £27.50 £37.50
% change year-on-year +63.40% -26.67% -16.67%

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 20 June 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 20 June 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 20 June 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 +36 855 £525 - 105
Midlands +48 321 £468 +3.94% 50
West Midlands +44 300 £460 - 32
North of England +7 209 £475 - 61
North West +11 128 £490 +3.16% 34
South East +18 120 £475 +11.76% 80
South West +17 86 £506 +1.20% 28
Yorkshire -20 62 £470 +1.62% 12
East Midlands -10 21 £525 +28.05% 18
East of England -25 21 £498 +56.45% 17
North East -24 19 £500 +11.11% 15
Data Engineer
UK

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

For the 6 months to 20 June 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.

1 887 (54.32%) SQL
2 732 (44.83%) Python
3 677 (41.46%) Data Pipeline
4 619 (37.91%) Analytics
5 607 (37.17%) ETL
6 596 (36.50%) Data Engineering
7 558 (34.17%) Data Modelling
8 521 (31.90%) Azure
9 478 (29.27%) AWS
10 462 (28.29%) Security Cleared
11 414 (25.35%) Data Quality
12 409 (25.05%) SC Cleared
13 399 (24.43%) CI/CD
14 342 (20.94%) Business Intelligence
15 335 (20.51%) Databricks
16 284 (17.39%) Agile
16 284 (17.39%) DevOps
17 276 (16.90%) Power Platform
18 272 (16.66%) Data Warehouse
19 264 (16.17%) Power BI
20 233 (14.27%) PySpark
21 223 (13.66%) Migration
22 216 (13.23%) Azure Data Factory
23 215 (13.17%) Microsoft
24 214 (13.10%) Problem-Solving
25 211 (12.92%) Data Governance
26 202 (12.37%) AI
27 178 (10.90%) Terraform
28 174 (10.66%) Data Integration
28 174 (10.66%) Snowflake

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
1 151 (9.25%) Apache Airflow
2 136 (8.33%) Apache Spark
3 92 (5.63%) Apache
4 73 (4.47%) SAS
5 39 (2.39%) Confluence
6 9 (0.55%) Jupyter
6 9 (0.55%) SharePoint
7 8 (0.49%) Palantir Foundry
8 5 (0.31%) Microsoft Exchange
9 1 (0.061%) Apache Superset
9 1 (0.061%) Appian
9 1 (0.061%) Camunda
9 1 (0.061%) Liferay
9 1 (0.061%) Luigi
9 1 (0.061%) R Markdown
Applications
1 16 (0.98%) Microsoft Excel
2 5 (0.31%) Notepad++
3 4 (0.24%) Spreadsheet
4 2 (0.12%) Chatbot
5 1 (0.061%) Microsoft PowerPoint
Business Applications
1 6 (0.37%) Aladdin
1 6 (0.37%) Dynamics CRM
2 4 (0.24%) Infor LN
3 3 (0.18%) NetSuite
3 3 (0.18%) Sage X3
3 3 (0.18%) SAP BPC
3 3 (0.18%) SAP S/4HANA
3 3 (0.18%) SimCorp Dimension
4 2 (0.12%) BambooHR
4 2 (0.12%) Maximo
5 1 (0.061%) Elite 3E
5 1 (0.061%) FIS Private Capital Suite
5 1 (0.061%) iTrent
5 1 (0.061%) NEC Housing
5 1 (0.061%) Oracle Assets
5 1 (0.061%) Oracle EBS
5 1 (0.061%) Oracle ERP
5 1 (0.061%) Raiser’s Edge
5 1 (0.061%) SAP Business ByDesign
5 1 (0.061%) SAP CAR
Cloud Services
1 521 (31.90%) Azure
2 478 (29.27%) AWS
3 276 (16.90%) Power Platform
4 216 (13.23%) Azure Data Factory
5 174 (10.66%) Snowflake
6 162 (9.92%) Amazon S3
7 160 (9.80%) dbt
8 142 (8.70%) GCP
9 141 (8.63%) Azure Synapse Analytics
10 134 (8.21%) Azure DevOps
11 110 (6.74%) GitHub
12 108 (6.61%) Serverless
13 94 (5.76%) AWS Lambda
14 53 (3.25%) GitHub Actions
15 34 (2.08%) Amazon EMR
15 34 (2.08%) Matillion
16 28 (1.71%) AWS CloudFormation
17 25 (1.53%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 25 (1.53%) Amazon Kinesis
18 24 (1.47%) OpenShift
Communications & Networking
1 33 (2.02%) DNS
1 33 (2.02%) VPN
2 32 (1.96%) BGP
2 32 (1.96%) DMZ
2 32 (1.96%) Multicast
3 10 (0.61%) Structured Cabling
4 5 (0.31%) Firewall
4 5 (0.31%) PuTTY
4 5 (0.31%) WinSCP
5 4 (0.24%) Wi-Fi
5 4 (0.24%) Wireless
6 1 (0.061%) 4G
6 1 (0.061%) 5G
6 1 (0.061%) Intrusion Detection
Database & Business Intelligence
1 272 (16.66%) Data Warehouse
2 264 (16.17%) Power BI
3 165 (10.10%) Data Lake
4 115 (7.04%) SQL Server
5 102 (6.25%) Amazon Redshift
6 91 (5.57%) Delta Lake
7 87 (5.33%) Pentaho
8 85 (5.21%) BigQuery
8 85 (5.21%) Metadata
9 72 (4.41%) Tableau
10 67 (4.10%) Azure SQL Database
11 66 (4.04%) Amazon Athena
12 63 (3.86%) PostgreSQL
12 63 (3.86%) Snowflake Schema
13 57 (3.49%) Big Data
14 55 (3.37%) SQL Server Integration Services
15 50 (3.06%) NoSQL
16 43 (2.63%) Relational Database
17 35 (2.14%) Data Vault
18 34 (2.08%) Hadoop
Development Applications
1 158 (9.68%) Git
2 85 (5.21%) GitLab
3 78 (4.78%) JIRA
4 45 (2.76%) Jenkins
5 7 (0.43%) Postman
6 5 (0.31%) Artifactory
7 4 (0.24%) Bitbucket
7 4 (0.24%) MLflow
8 3 (0.18%) Newman
8 3 (0.18%) SonarQube
9 2 (0.12%) Atlassian Bamboo
9 2 (0.12%) Sonatype Nexus
9 2 (0.12%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
9 2 (0.12%) Terragrunt
9 2 (0.12%) Visual Studio
10 1 (0.061%) ER Studio
10 1 (0.061%) ERwin
10 1 (0.061%) JUnit
10 1 (0.061%) Octopus Deploy
10 1 (0.061%) Selenium
General
1 287 (17.58%) Finance
2 262 (16.04%) Social Skills
3 172 (10.53%) Analytical Skills
4 140 (8.57%) Public Sector
5 93 (5.70%) Banking
6 30 (1.84%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 26 (1.59%) Retail
8 23 (1.41%) Telecoms
9 21 (1.29%) Marketing
10 20 (1.22%) Documentation Skills
10 20 (1.22%) Investment Banking
11 17 (1.04%) Manufacturing
11 17 (1.04%) Pharmaceutical
12 13 (0.80%) Aerospace
13 11 (0.67%) Automotive
13 11 (0.67%) Publishing
14 8 (0.49%) Front Office
15 7 (0.43%) Billing
15 7 (0.43%) Military
16 6 (0.37%) Legal
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 233 (14.27%) PySpark
2 133 (8.14%) Kafka
3 45 (2.76%) Pandas
4 33 (2.02%) JSON
5 28 (1.71%) REST
6 24 (1.47%) Great Expectations
7 23 (1.41%) Spring
7 23 (1.41%) Spring Boot
8 22 (1.35%) XML
9 18 (1.10%) YAML
10 15 (0.92%) Apache Beam
11 13 (0.80%) Apache Avro
12 12 (0.73%) scikit-learn
13 11 (0.67%) React
14 10 (0.61%) Matplotlib
14 10 (0.61%) PyTorch
15 9 (0.55%) GeoJSON
15 9 (0.55%) Node.js
15 9 (0.55%) pytest
15 9 (0.55%) RESTful
Miscellaneous
1 125 (7.65%) Cloud Native
2 54 (3.31%) Legacy Systems
3 44 (2.69%) Data Structures
4 27 (1.65%) Greenfield Project
5 26 (1.59%) Onboarding
6 24 (1.47%) Distributed Systems
6 24 (1.47%) Reinsurance
7 23 (1.41%) Product Ownership
8 20 (1.22%) Clustering
9 17 (1.04%) Data Protection Act
10 16 (0.98%) NHS
11 11 (0.67%) Life Science
12 10 (0.61%) Virtual Team
13 9 (0.55%) Distributed Computing
13 9 (0.55%) Driving Licence
13 9 (0.55%) Public Cloud
13 9 (0.55%) Reference Data
13 9 (0.55%) Self-Motivation
14 8 (0.49%) Linux Command Line
14 8 (0.49%) Replication
Operating Systems
1 57 (3.49%) Unix
2 37 (2.27%) Linux
3 4 (0.24%) Windows
4 2 (0.12%) Ubuntu
4 2 (0.12%) Windows Server
5 1 (0.061%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 677 (41.46%) Data Pipeline
2 619 (37.91%) Analytics
3 607 (37.17%) ETL
4 596 (36.50%) Data Engineering
5 558 (34.17%) Data Modelling
6 399 (24.43%) CI/CD
7 342 (20.94%) Business Intelligence
8 284 (17.39%) Agile
8 284 (17.39%) DevOps
9 223 (13.66%) Migration
10 214 (13.10%) Problem-Solving
11 211 (12.92%) Data Governance
12 202 (12.37%) AI
13 174 (10.66%) Data Integration
14 170 (10.41%) Validation
15 158 (9.68%) Data Science
16 155 (9.49%) Decision-Making
17 147 (9.00%) Data Transformation
18 130 (7.96%) Infrastructure as Code
19 122 (7.47%) Test Automation
Programming Languages
1 887 (54.32%) SQL
2 732 (44.83%) Python
3 101 (6.18%) Java
4 61 (3.74%) Scala
5 52 (3.18%) PL/SQL
6 34 (2.08%) T-SQL
7 33 (2.02%) Data Analysis Expressions
8 30 (1.84%) C#
9 28 (1.71%) Shell Script
10 27 (1.65%) Bash
11 20 (1.22%) PowerShell
12 15 (0.92%) Bicep
13 13 (0.80%) R
14 10 (0.61%) JavaScript
15 7 (0.43%) TypeScript
16 6 (0.37%) Go
17 2 (0.12%) C
17 2 (0.12%) Korn
17 2 (0.12%) SPARQL
17 2 (0.12%) VB
Qualifications
1 462 (28.29%) Security Cleared
2 409 (25.05%) SC Cleared
3 38 (2.33%) BPSS Clearance
3 38 (2.33%) Degree
4 25 (1.53%) Azure Certification
5 16 (0.98%) Computer Science Degree
6 13 (0.80%) DV Cleared
7 10 (0.61%) AWS Certification
8 9 (0.55%) City & Guilds
8 9 (0.55%) DBS Check
9 8 (0.49%) Microsoft Certification
10 6 (0.37%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
11 5 (0.31%) BICSI Certification
11 5 (0.31%) SnowPro
12 4 (0.24%) Master's Degree
13 3 (0.18%) CISM
13 3 (0.18%) CISSP
14 1 (0.061%) CCIE
14 1 (0.061%) CISA
14 1 (0.061%) Cisco Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 414 (25.35%) Data Quality
2 52 (3.18%) QA
3 47 (2.88%) GDPR
4 12 (0.73%) SLA
5 10 (0.61%) Accessibility
6 9 (0.55%) FATCA
7 5 (0.31%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 5 (0.31%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 4 (0.24%) MiFID
9 3 (0.18%) GMP
10 2 (0.12%) EMIR
10 2 (0.12%) HIPAA
10 2 (0.12%) SNOMED CT
10 2 (0.12%) WCAG
11 1 (0.061%) Government Security Classifications
11 1 (0.061%) IFRS
11 1 (0.061%) IFRS 17
11 1 (0.061%) IFRS 9
11 1 (0.061%) ISO 13485
11 1 (0.061%) PMO
System Software
1 94 (5.76%) Docker
2 6 (0.37%) Virtual Machines
3 2 (0.12%) HDFS
4 1 (0.061%) Active Directory
4 1 (0.061%) RACF
Systems Management
1 178 (10.90%) Terraform
2 78 (4.78%) Kubernetes
3 35 (2.14%) Grafana
4 11 (0.67%) Ansible
5 9 (0.55%) Prometheus
6 5 (0.31%) Kibana
7 3 (0.18%) Rancher
8 2 (0.12%) Apache Ranger
8 2 (0.12%) Control-M
8 2 (0.12%) Thomson Reuters DACS
9 1 (0.061%) Kubeflow
9 1 (0.061%) NetBackup
9 1 (0.061%) Puppet
Vendors
1 335 (20.51%) Databricks
2 215 (13.17%) Microsoft
3 158 (9.68%) Oracle
4 124 (7.59%) Informatica
5 121 (7.41%) Talend
6 64 (3.92%) Denodo
7 56 (3.43%) Google
8 34 (2.08%) Cisco
8 34 (2.08%) F5
9 30 (1.84%) SAP
10 22 (1.35%) ServiceNow
11 21 (1.29%) Salesforce
11 21 (1.29%) Splunk
12 18 (1.10%) Cloudera
13 14 (0.86%) Alteryx
14 13 (0.80%) Palantir
15 11 (0.67%) Foundry
15 11 (0.67%) IBM
16 9 (0.55%) Sage
17 8 (0.49%) InterSystems