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 1 August 2026.

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

 6 months to
1 Aug 2026		 Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 55 120 93
Rank change year-on-year +65 -27 +25
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 1,753 642 803
As % of all contract jobs in England 3.85% 2.33% 2.38%
As % of the Job Titles category 4.16% 2.54% 2.56%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,194 467 598
10th Percentile £382 £375 £259
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 £595 £638
90th Percentile £663 £700 £700
UK median daily rate £500 £500 £515
% change year-on-year - -2.91% -6.36%
Number of hourly rates quoted 81 11 30
10th Percentile £19.34 £18.22 £36.88
25th Percentile £30.96 £34.13 £50.06
Median hourly rate £42.50 £52.50 £77.50
Median % change year-on-year -19.05% -32.26% -
75th Percentile £70.00 £70.60 £80.00
90th Percentile £75.00 £80.00 -
UK median hourly rate £47.50 £52.50 £75.00
% change year-on-year -9.52% -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 42,127 25,302 31,377
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.57% 91.67% 92.95%
Number of daily rates quoted 25,620 16,428 20,708
10th Percentile £328 £285 £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 £626 £625 £638
90th Percentile £738 £738 £750
UK median daily rate £525 £500 £525
% change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -2.33%
Number of hourly rates quoted 3,104 1,296 1,911
10th Percentile £15.93 £13.72 £14.13
25th Percentile £22.00 £17.85 £20.50
Median hourly rate £45.00 £26.28 £43.90
Median % change year-on-year +71.23% -40.14% +2.09%
75th Percentile £68.00 £55.31 £65.00
90th Percentile £80.00 £75.00 £75.00
UK median hourly rate £42.50 £25.15 £42.91
% change year-on-year +68.99% -41.39% +0.96%

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 1 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 1 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 1 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 +44 855 £525 - 224
Midlands +65 397 £460 +2.22% 43
West Midlands +56 344 £460 -0.11% 27
North of England +30 231 £475 - 97
North West +24 136 £525 +10.53% 44
South East +21 129 £469 +10.35% 100
South West +15 86 £525 +5.00% 44
Yorkshire -2 73 £475 - 27
East Midlands +19 53 £475 +13.10% 16
East of England +7 35 £520 +63.52% 16
North East -22 23 £515 +21.18% 27
Data Engineer
UK

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

For the 6 months to 1 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.

1 903 (51.51%) SQL
2 744 (42.44%) Data Pipeline
3 740 (42.21%) Python
4 650 (37.08%) Data Engineering
5 632 (36.05%) Analytics
6 615 (35.08%) ETL
7 586 (33.43%) Data Modelling
8 550 (31.37%) Azure
9 501 (28.58%) AWS
10 475 (27.10%) Security Cleared
11 434 (24.76%) Data Quality
12 423 (24.13%) CI/CD
13 416 (23.73%) SC Cleared
14 325 (18.54%) Databricks
15 315 (17.97%) Business Intelligence
16 306 (17.46%) Agile
17 292 (16.66%) Data Warehouse
18 287 (16.37%) DevOps
19 281 (16.03%) Migration
20 246 (14.03%) Power Platform
21 236 (13.46%) Data Governance
22 234 (13.35%) Power BI
23 232 (13.23%) PySpark
24 226 (12.89%) Azure Data Factory
25 221 (12.61%) Microsoft
26 213 (12.15%) AI
27 209 (11.92%) Problem-Solving
27 209 (11.92%) Validation
28 198 (11.29%) Data Integration
29 191 (10.90%) 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
1 171 (9.75%) Apache Airflow
2 140 (7.99%) Apache Spark
3 108 (6.16%) Apache
4 74 (4.22%) SAS
5 39 (2.22%) Confluence
6 13 (0.74%) Palantir Foundry
7 10 (0.57%) Jupyter
7 10 (0.57%) SharePoint
8 2 (0.11%) Apache Superset
8 2 (0.11%) Microsoft Exchange
9 1 (0.057%) ArcGIS
9 1 (0.057%) Liferay
9 1 (0.057%) Luigi
9 1 (0.057%) R Markdown
Applications
1 21 (1.20%) Microsoft Excel
2 5 (0.29%) Notepad++
2 5 (0.29%) Spreadsheet
3 3 (0.17%) Chatbot
4 1 (0.057%) Microsoft PowerPoint
Business Applications
1 12 (0.68%) 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 (0.11%) BambooHR
5 2 (0.11%) Maximo
6 1 (0.057%) iTrent
6 1 (0.057%) MIS ActiveH
6 1 (0.057%) NEC Housing
6 1 (0.057%) Oracle Assets
6 1 (0.057%) Oracle EBS
6 1 (0.057%) Oracle ERP
6 1 (0.057%) Raiser’s Edge
6 1 (0.057%) SAP Business ByDesign
6 1 (0.057%) SAP CAR
6 1 (0.057%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
Cloud Services
1 550 (31.37%) Azure
2 501 (28.58%) AWS
3 246 (14.03%) Power Platform
4 226 (12.89%) Azure Data Factory
5 190 (10.84%) dbt
6 188 (10.72%) Snowflake
7 163 (9.30%) GCP
8 146 (8.33%) Azure Synapse Analytics
9 144 (8.21%) Amazon S3
10 131 (7.47%) Azure DevOps
11 103 (5.88%) GitHub
12 96 (5.48%) Serverless
13 80 (4.56%) AWS Lambda
14 45 (2.57%) GitHub Actions
15 36 (2.05%) Amazon EMR
16 28 (1.60%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 25 (1.43%) Matillion
18 24 (1.37%) Amazon Kinesis
19 23 (1.31%) Fivetran
19 23 (1.31%) OpenShift
Communications & Networking
1 32 (1.83%) DNS
1 32 (1.83%) VPN
2 31 (1.77%) BGP
2 31 (1.77%) DMZ
2 31 (1.77%) Multicast
3 9 (0.51%) 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 (0.057%) 4G
8 1 (0.057%) 5G
Database & Business Intelligence
1 292 (16.66%) Data Warehouse
2 234 (13.35%) Power BI
3 158 (9.01%) Data Lake
4 99 (5.65%) BigQuery
5 97 (5.53%) Amazon Redshift
6 93 (5.31%) Metadata
7 88 (5.02%) Pentaho
8 87 (4.96%) SQL Server
9 83 (4.73%) Delta Lake
10 69 (3.94%) Tableau
11 62 (3.54%) Big Data
12 61 (3.48%) Amazon Athena
12 61 (3.48%) PostgreSQL
13 57 (3.25%) Snowflake Schema
14 50 (2.85%) Azure SQL Database
14 50 (2.85%) SQL Server Integration Services
15 49 (2.80%) NoSQL
16 47 (2.68%) Relational Database
17 35 (2.00%) Hadoop
18 33 (1.88%) Data Vault
Development Applications
1 159 (9.07%) Git
2 80 (4.56%) GitLab
3 68 (3.88%) JIRA
4 45 (2.57%) Jenkins
5 7 (0.40%) MLflow
5 7 (0.40%) Postman
6 5 (0.29%) Artifactory
6 5 (0.29%) Bitbucket
6 5 (0.29%) SonarQube
7 3 (0.17%) Newman
7 3 (0.17%) Sonatype Nexus
8 2 (0.11%) Atlassian Bamboo
8 2 (0.11%) ER Studio
8 2 (0.11%) ERwin
8 2 (0.11%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
8 2 (0.11%) Yeoman
9 1 (0.057%) JUnit
9 1 (0.057%) Octopus Deploy
9 1 (0.057%) Selenium
9 1 (0.057%) Terragrunt
General
1 295 (16.83%) Finance
2 269 (15.35%) Social Skills
3 196 (11.18%) Analytical Skills
4 158 (9.01%) Public Sector
5 100 (5.70%) Banking
6 31 (1.77%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 26 (1.48%) Telecoms
8 23 (1.31%) Marketing
8 23 (1.31%) Retail
9 21 (1.20%) Documentation Skills
9 21 (1.20%) Manufacturing
10 19 (1.08%) Automotive
11 17 (0.97%) Front Office
11 17 (0.97%) Investment Banking
11 17 (0.97%) Pharmaceutical
12 16 (0.91%) Aerospace
13 11 (0.63%) Publishing
14 9 (0.51%) Billing
15 8 (0.46%) Legal
15 8 (0.46%) Military
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 232 (13.23%) PySpark
2 125 (7.13%) Kafka
3 38 (2.17%) Pandas
4 30 (1.71%) JSON
5 25 (1.43%) REST
6 21 (1.20%) Great Expectations
6 21 (1.20%) Spring
6 21 (1.20%) Spring Boot
7 20 (1.14%) XML
8 19 (1.08%) Apache Beam
9 17 (0.97%) YAML
10 14 (0.80%) React
11 12 (0.68%) Apache Avro
11 12 (0.68%) scikit-learn
12 11 (0.63%) pytest
12 11 (0.63%) RESTful
13 10 (0.57%) Microsoft Graph
14 9 (0.51%) GeoJSON
14 9 (0.51%) Node.js
14 9 (0.51%) PyTorch
Miscellaneous
1 128 (7.30%) Cloud Native
2 73 (4.16%) Legacy Systems
3 52 (2.97%) Data Structures
4 32 (1.83%) Onboarding
5 28 (1.60%) Distributed Systems
6 22 (1.25%) Greenfield Project
6 22 (1.25%) NHS
6 22 (1.25%) Product Ownership
7 19 (1.08%) Reinsurance
8 18 (1.03%) Clustering
9 15 (0.86%) Reference Data
10 14 (0.80%) Data Protection Act
11 12 (0.68%) Life Science
12 11 (0.63%) Algorithms
12 11 (0.63%) Management Information System
13 10 (0.57%) Virtual Team
14 9 (0.51%) AI Agents
14 9 (0.51%) Driving Licence
14 9 (0.51%) Self-Motivation
15 8 (0.46%) Linux Command Line
Operating Systems
1 60 (3.42%) Unix
2 44 (2.51%) Linux
3 4 (0.23%) Windows
4 2 (0.11%) Ubuntu
4 2 (0.11%) Windows Server
5 1 (0.057%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 744 (42.44%) Data Pipeline
2 650 (37.08%) Data Engineering
3 632 (36.05%) Analytics
4 615 (35.08%) ETL
5 586 (33.43%) Data Modelling
6 423 (24.13%) CI/CD
7 315 (17.97%) Business Intelligence
8 306 (17.46%) Agile
9 287 (16.37%) DevOps
10 281 (16.03%) Migration
11 236 (13.46%) Data Governance
12 213 (12.15%) AI
13 209 (11.92%) Problem-Solving
13 209 (11.92%) Validation
14 198 (11.29%) Data Integration
15 191 (10.90%) Data Transformation
16 173 (9.87%) Decision-Making
17 166 (9.47%) Data Science
18 140 (7.99%) Infrastructure as Code
19 138 (7.87%) Test Automation
Programming Languages
1 903 (51.51%) SQL
2 740 (42.21%) Python
3 107 (6.10%) Java
4 58 (3.31%) Scala
5 51 (2.91%) PL/SQL
6 35 (2.00%) Shell Script
7 31 (1.77%) T-SQL
8 29 (1.65%) Data Analysis Expressions
9 28 (1.60%) Bash
10 25 (1.43%) C#
11 24 (1.37%) PowerShell
12 14 (0.80%) JavaScript
12 14 (0.80%) R
13 13 (0.74%) Bicep
14 7 (0.40%) Go
14 7 (0.40%) TypeScript
15 3 (0.17%) Korn
16 2 (0.11%) C
16 2 (0.11%) Ruby
16 2 (0.11%) SPARQL
Qualifications
1 475 (27.10%) Security Cleared
2 416 (23.73%) SC Cleared
3 42 (2.40%) BPSS Clearance
3 42 (2.40%) Degree
4 26 (1.48%) Azure Certification
5 22 (1.25%) DV Cleared
6 19 (1.08%) Computer Science Degree
7 11 (0.63%) AWS Certification
8 9 (0.51%) City & Guilds
8 9 (0.51%) DBS Check
9 6 (0.34%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
9 6 (0.34%) SnowPro
10 5 (0.29%) BICSI Certification
10 5 (0.29%) CISM
10 5 (0.29%) CISSP
10 5 (0.29%) Master's Degree
11 3 (0.17%) CEH
11 3 (0.17%) Microsoft Certification
12 1 (0.057%) CISA
12 1 (0.057%) Cisco Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 434 (24.76%) Data Quality
2 58 (3.31%) QA
3 45 (2.57%) GDPR
4 20 (1.14%) Accessibility
5 12 (0.68%) SLA
6 8 (0.46%) 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 (0.11%) California Consumer Privacy Act
10 2 (0.11%) EMIR
10 2 (0.11%) PMO
10 2 (0.11%) SNOMED CT
10 2 (0.11%) WCAG
11 1 (0.057%) Government Security Classifications
11 1 (0.057%) IFRS
11 1 (0.057%) IFRS 17
11 1 (0.057%) IFRS 9
System Software
1 108 (6.16%) Docker
2 4 (0.23%) Virtual Machines
3 2 (0.11%) Active Directory
3 2 (0.11%) HDFS
4 1 (0.057%) RACF
Systems Management
1 173 (9.87%) Terraform
2 89 (5.08%) Kubernetes
3 35 (2.00%) Grafana
4 13 (0.74%) Ansible
5 9 (0.51%) Prometheus
6 7 (0.40%) Control-M
7 6 (0.34%) Kibana
8 3 (0.17%) Rancher
9 2 (0.11%) Apache Ranger
9 2 (0.11%) Thomson Reuters DACS
10 1 (0.057%) Kubeflow
10 1 (0.057%) logstash
10 1 (0.057%) NetBackup
10 1 (0.057%) Puppet
Vendors
1 325 (18.54%) Databricks
2 221 (12.61%) Microsoft
3 152 (8.67%) Oracle
4 124 (7.07%) Informatica
5 115 (6.56%) Talend
6 67 (3.82%) Google
7 61 (3.48%) Denodo
8 33 (1.88%) Cisco
8 33 (1.88%) F5
8 33 (1.88%) SAP
9 26 (1.48%) Salesforce
10 23 (1.31%) Palantir
10 23 (1.31%) Splunk
11 18 (1.03%) Cloudera
12 17 (0.97%) Foundry
13 15 (0.86%) ServiceNow
14 12 (0.68%) Sage
15 10 (0.57%) IBM
16 9 (0.51%) Bloomberg
16 9 (0.51%) MuleSoft
475 Data Engineer jobs in England