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 5 October 2026.

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

6 months to
5 Oct 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 66 127 97
Rank change year-on-year +61 -30 +27
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 1,630 617 771
As % of all contract jobs in England 3.54% 2.21% 2.38%
As % of the Job Titles category 3.84% 2.43% 2.55%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,066 447 535
10th Percentile £375 £363 £363
25th Percentile £425 £425 £450
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £550
Median % change year-on-year - -9.09% -
75th Percentile £600 £599 £630
90th Percentile £675 £694 £700
UK median daily rate £501 £500 £525
% change year-on-year +0.10% -4.76% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 66 12 8
10th Percentile £21.25 £25.25 £49.25
25th Percentile £30.96 £32.94 £57.31
Median hourly rate £41.56 £48.00 £80.00
Median % change year-on-year -13.43% -40.00% +29.55%
75th Percentile £68.00 £66.88 £97.50
90th Percentile £70.00 £107.00 -
UK median hourly rate £41.56 £52.50 £80.00
% change year-on-year -20.85% -34.38% +29.55%

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 42,458 25,439 30,190
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.08% 91.08% 93.07%
Number of daily rates quoted 25,019 16,376 18,496
10th Percentile £325 £278 £300
25th Percentile £425 £402 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £512 £525
Median % change year-on-year +2.64% -2.57% -4.55%
75th Percentile £638 £625 £638
90th Percentile £738 £725 £750
UK median daily rate £525 £500 £525
% change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -0.94%
Number of hourly rates quoted 3,652 1,417 1,343
10th Percentile £14.56 £13.79 £15.00
25th Percentile £20.48 £17.30 £21.25
Median hourly rate £42.50 £25.15 £43.90
Median % change year-on-year +68.99% -42.71% -4.32%
75th Percentile £67.89 £52.16 £67.50
90th Percentile £79.00 £70.00 £75.00
UK median hourly rate £41.74 £25.15 £42.50
% change year-on-year +65.94% -40.82% -4.49%

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 5 October 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 5 October 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 5 October 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 +27 815 £531 +1.19% 899
Midlands +76 320 £469 +1.41% 117
West Midlands +54 240 £469 -6.20% 78
North of England +31 199 £525 +10.53% 308
South East +23 123 £459 -0.76% 200
South West +32 116 £525 +5.00% 87
North West +26 106 £525 +22.09% 156
East Midlands +43 80 £388 -16.22% 39
Yorkshire +7 74 £505 -0.25% 90
East of England +7 36 £545 +9.00% 55
North East -26 20 £480 +15.32% 63
Data Engineer
UK

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

For the 6 months to 5 October 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.

1 827 (50.74%) SQL
2 710 (43.56%) Data Pipeline
3 701 (43.01%) Python
4 646 (39.63%) Data Engineering
5 572 (35.09%) Data Modelling
6 563 (34.54%) ETL
7 548 (33.62%) Analytics
8 512 (31.41%) AWS
9 497 (30.49%) Azure
10 425 (26.07%) Data Quality
11 415 (25.46%) Security Cleared
12 405 (24.85%) CI/CD
13 348 (21.35%) SC Cleared
14 334 (20.49%) Databricks
15 286 (17.55%) Agile
16 275 (16.87%) DevOps
17 272 (16.69%) Migration
18 269 (16.50%) AI
19 268 (16.44%) Data Warehouse
20 243 (14.91%) Business Intelligence
21 227 (13.93%) Data Transformation
22 220 (13.50%) PySpark
22 220 (13.50%) Validation
23 217 (13.31%) Data Governance
24 212 (13.01%) Microsoft
25 208 (12.76%) Snowflake
26 206 (12.64%) dbt
27 203 (12.45%) Data Integration
28 198 (12.15%) Power Platform
29 193 (11.84%) Power BI

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
1 182 (11.17%) Apache Airflow
2 148 (9.08%) Apache Spark
3 126 (7.73%) Apache
4 34 (2.09%) Confluence
4 34 (2.09%) SAS
5 17 (1.04%) Palantir Foundry
6 14 (0.86%) SharePoint
7 13 (0.80%) Jupyter
8 3 (0.18%) Apache Superset
8 3 (0.18%) Microsoft Exchange
9 1 (0.061%) Apache Pulsar
9 1 (0.061%) ArcGIS
9 1 (0.061%) CMS
9 1 (0.061%) Liferay
9 1 (0.061%) Luigi
9 1 (0.061%) nginx
9 1 (0.061%) Oracle Workflow
9 1 (0.061%) PowerExchange
Applications
1 19 (1.17%) Microsoft Excel
2 7 (0.43%) Spreadsheet
3 4 (0.25%) Chatbot
4 1 (0.061%) Microsoft Office
4 1 (0.061%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 1 (0.061%) Notepad++
Business Applications
1 12 (0.74%) Aladdin
2 7 (0.43%) Dynamics CRM
3 6 (0.37%) NetSuite
4 5 (0.31%) Infor LN
4 5 (0.31%) Sage X3
4 5 (0.31%) SAP S/4HANA
5 3 (0.18%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
6 2 (0.12%) FIS Private Capital Suite
6 2 (0.12%) Maximo
6 2 (0.12%) Oracle EBS
6 2 (0.12%) SAP BPC
6 2 (0.12%) SAP Oil and Gas
6 2 (0.12%) SimCorp Dimension
7 1 (0.061%) BambooHR
7 1 (0.061%) Dynamics NAV
7 1 (0.061%) Markit EDM
7 1 (0.061%) Oracle Assets
7 1 (0.061%) Oracle Retail
7 1 (0.061%) SAP CAR
7 1 (0.061%) SAP EWM
Cloud Services
1 512 (31.41%) AWS
2 497 (30.49%) Azure
3 208 (12.76%) Snowflake
4 206 (12.64%) dbt
5 198 (12.15%) Power Platform
6 190 (11.66%) Azure Data Factory
7 181 (11.10%) GCP
8 147 (9.02%) Amazon S3
9 110 (6.75%) Azure DevOps
10 109 (6.69%) Serverless
11 104 (6.38%) Azure Synapse Analytics
12 97 (5.95%) GitHub
13 95 (5.83%) AWS Lambda
14 58 (3.56%) Azure Databricks
15 47 (2.88%) Amazon EMR
16 44 (2.70%) GitHub Actions
17 33 (2.02%) Amazon CloudWatch
18 28 (1.72%) AWS Step Functions
19 26 (1.60%) Microsoft Purview
20 24 (1.47%) Amazon EC2
Communications & Networking
1 22 (1.35%) DNS
2 21 (1.29%) BGP
2 21 (1.29%) DMZ
2 21 (1.29%) Multicast
2 21 (1.29%) VPN
3 6 (0.37%) Firewall
4 4 (0.25%) Wi-Fi
4 4 (0.25%) Wireless
5 3 (0.18%) Intrusion Detection
5 3 (0.18%) Structured Cabling
6 1 (0.061%) HTTP
6 1 (0.061%) HTTPS
6 1 (0.061%) Network Security
6 1 (0.061%) PuTTY
6 1 (0.061%) TCP/IP
6 1 (0.061%) tcpdump
6 1 (0.061%) WinSCP
6 1 (0.061%) Wireshark
Database & Business Intelligence
1 268 (16.44%) Data Warehouse
2 193 (11.84%) Power BI
3 133 (8.16%) Data Lake
4 121 (7.42%) Metadata
5 100 (6.13%) BigQuery
6 85 (5.21%) Amazon Redshift
7 76 (4.66%) Delta Lake
8 69 (4.23%) Amazon Athena
9 65 (3.99%) SQL Server
10 61 (3.74%) Big Data
11 58 (3.56%) Pentaho
11 58 (3.56%) PostgreSQL
12 49 (3.01%) Relational Database
13 46 (2.82%) Tableau
14 45 (2.76%) NoSQL
15 43 (2.64%) Snowflake Schema
16 39 (2.39%) Oracle Database
17 37 (2.27%) Amazon RDS
18 34 (2.09%) Azure SQL Database
18 34 (2.09%) SQL Server Integration Services
Development Applications
1 144 (8.83%) Git
2 79 (4.85%) GitLab
3 44 (2.70%) JIRA
4 24 (1.47%) Jenkins
5 14 (0.86%) MLflow
6 8 (0.49%) Bitbucket
6 8 (0.49%) Postman
7 6 (0.37%) Artifactory
7 6 (0.37%) Selenium
8 5 (0.31%) SonarQube
9 3 (0.18%) Atlassian Bamboo
9 3 (0.18%) Claude Code
9 3 (0.18%) ERwin
9 3 (0.18%) Newman
9 3 (0.18%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
10 2 (0.12%) RStudio
10 2 (0.12%) Terragrunt
10 2 (0.12%) Yeoman
11 1 (0.061%) Sonatype Nexus
11 1 (0.061%) Visual Studio Code
General
1 273 (16.75%) Social Skills
2 254 (15.58%) Finance
3 184 (11.29%) Analytical Skills
4 145 (8.90%) Public Sector
5 104 (6.38%) Banking
6 25 (1.53%) Inclusion and Diversity
6 25 (1.53%) Retail
7 23 (1.41%) Automotive
8 21 (1.29%) Aerospace
9 19 (1.17%) Front Office
10 18 (1.10%) Investment Banking
11 17 (1.04%) Manufacturing
12 16 (0.98%) Marketing
12 16 (0.98%) Telecoms
13 14 (0.86%) Military
13 14 (0.86%) Pharmaceutical
14 11 (0.67%) Back Office
14 11 (0.67%) Documentation Skills
15 9 (0.55%) Financial Institution
15 9 (0.55%) Law
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 220 (13.50%) PySpark
2 178 (10.92%) Terraform
3 103 (6.32%) Kafka
4 30 (1.84%) REST
5 23 (1.41%) JSON
6 22 (1.35%) Pandas
7 17 (1.04%) Spring
7 17 (1.04%) Spring Boot
7 17 (1.04%) XML
8 15 (0.92%) Great Expectations
9 14 (0.86%) Apache Beam
9 14 (0.86%) pytest
10 13 (0.80%) Apache NiFi
11 12 (0.74%) LangChain
11 12 (0.74%) PyTorch
11 12 (0.74%) RESTful
12 10 (0.61%) .NET
12 10 (0.61%) Microsoft Graph
12 10 (0.61%) React
13 7 (0.43%) LangGraph
Miscellaneous
1 140 (8.59%) Cloud Native
2 55 (3.37%) Legacy Systems
3 50 (3.07%) Data Structures
4 42 (2.58%) Onboarding
5 25 (1.53%) Product Ownership
6 22 (1.35%) AI Agents
7 20 (1.23%) Distributed Systems
8 17 (1.04%) Algorithms
8 17 (1.04%) Management Information System
9 16 (0.98%) Greenfield Project
10 15 (0.92%) NHS
10 15 (0.92%) Reference Data
10 15 (0.92%) Reinsurance
11 11 (0.67%) Virtual Team
12 9 (0.55%) Data Protection Act
12 9 (0.55%) Distributed Computing
13 8 (0.49%) Clustering
13 8 (0.49%) Data Fabric
13 8 (0.49%) Enterprise Software
14 7 (0.43%) Derivative
Operating Systems
1 37 (2.27%) Unix
2 33 (2.02%) Linux
3 2 (0.12%) Ubuntu
4 1 (0.061%) Robot Operating System
4 1 (0.061%) VMS
4 1 (0.061%) Windows
Processes & Methodologies
1 710 (43.56%) Data Pipeline
2 646 (39.63%) Data Engineering
3 572 (35.09%) Data Modelling
4 563 (34.54%) ETL
5 548 (33.62%) Analytics
6 405 (24.85%) CI/CD
7 286 (17.55%) Agile
8 275 (16.87%) DevOps
9 272 (16.69%) Migration
10 269 (16.50%) AI
11 243 (14.91%) Business Intelligence
12 227 (13.93%) Data Transformation
13 220 (13.50%) Validation
14 217 (13.31%) Data Governance
15 203 (12.45%) Data Integration
16 170 (10.43%) Problem-Solving
17 153 (9.39%) Machine Learning
18 151 (9.26%) Decision-Making
19 150 (9.20%) Infrastructure as Code
19 150 (9.20%) Lakehouse
Programming Languages
1 827 (50.74%) SQL
2 701 (43.01%) Python
3 84 (5.15%) Java
4 64 (3.93%) Scala
5 35 (2.15%) PL/SQL
6 28 (1.72%) Data Analysis Expressions
7 25 (1.53%) PowerShell
7 25 (1.53%) T-SQL
8 19 (1.17%) Bash
8 19 (1.17%) Shell Script
9 18 (1.10%) JavaScript
10 13 (0.80%) R
11 10 (0.61%) Go
12 9 (0.55%) Bicep
13 7 (0.43%) C#
13 7 (0.43%) TypeScript
14 5 (0.31%) Korn
15 3 (0.18%) Kusto Query Language
16 2 (0.12%) COBOL
16 2 (0.12%) Cypher
Qualifications
1 415 (25.46%) Security Cleared
2 348 (21.35%) SC Cleared
3 42 (2.58%) BPSS Clearance
4 41 (2.52%) Degree
5 38 (2.33%) DV Cleared
6 24 (1.47%) Azure Certification
7 19 (1.17%) Computer Science Degree
8 13 (0.80%) AWS Certification
9 8 (0.49%) DBS Check
9 8 (0.49%) Master's Degree
10 7 (0.43%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
11 6 (0.37%) SnowPro
12 4 (0.25%) CISM
12 4 (0.25%) CISSP
12 4 (0.25%) City & Guilds
13 3 (0.18%) CEH
13 3 (0.18%) Microsoft Certification
14 1 (0.061%) CRISC
14 1 (0.061%) PMI Certification
14 1 (0.061%) PMP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 425 (26.07%) Data Quality
2 68 (4.17%) QA
3 29 (1.78%) GDPR
4 13 (0.80%) Accessibility
5 6 (0.37%) FATCA
6 5 (0.31%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 5 (0.31%) Sarbanes-Oxley
6 5 (0.31%) SLA
7 4 (0.25%) Disclosure Scotland
8 3 (0.18%) HIPAA
8 3 (0.18%) MiFID
9 2 (0.12%) EMIR
9 2 (0.12%) SNOMED CT
10 1 (0.061%) California Consumer Privacy Act
10 1 (0.061%) Government Security Classifications
10 1 (0.061%) IFRS
10 1 (0.061%) IFRS 17
10 1 (0.061%) IFRS 9
10 1 (0.061%) NIST
10 1 (0.061%) PMO
System Software
1 95 (5.83%) Docker
2 3 (0.18%) Active Directory
3 1 (0.061%) HDFS
3 1 (0.061%) Virtual Machines
Systems Management
1 80 (4.91%) Kubernetes
2 19 (1.17%) Ansible
3 18 (1.10%) Grafana
4 11 (0.67%) Control-M
5 10 (0.61%) Kibana
6 4 (0.25%) Prometheus
7 2 (0.12%) Puppet
8 1 (0.061%) logstash
8 1 (0.061%) Progress Chef
Vendors
1 334 (20.49%) Databricks
2 212 (13.01%) Microsoft
3 129 (7.91%) Oracle
4 83 (5.09%) Google
4 83 (5.09%) Informatica
5 72 (4.42%) Talend
6 32 (1.96%) Denodo
7 30 (1.84%) Salesforce
8 27 (1.66%) Palantir
9 25 (1.53%) SAP
10 24 (1.47%) Foundry
11 21 (1.29%) Cisco
11 21 (1.29%) F5
12 11 (0.67%) Splunk
13 9 (0.55%) Bloomberg
13 9 (0.55%) OpenAI
14 8 (0.49%) Sage
15 7 (0.43%) Alteryx
15 7 (0.43%) Cloudera
15 7 (0.43%) InterSystems