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 30 June 2026.

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

6 months to
30 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 54 100 98
Rank change year-on-year +46 -2 +24
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 1,674 664 838
As % of all contract jobs in England 3.83% 2.60% 2.26%
As % of the Job Titles category 4.14% 2.83% 2.43%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,156 497 641
10th Percentile £378 £365 £263
25th Percentile £425 £425 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £513
Median % change year-on-year - -2.44% -6.82%
75th Percentile £588 £597 £625
90th Percentile £661 £700 £688
UK median daily rate £500 £500 £500
% change year-on-year - - -9.09%
Number of hourly rates quoted 64 11 39
10th Percentile £19.34 £18.22 £37.50
25th Percentile £34.96 £46.75 £49.25
Median hourly rate £43.75 £52.50 £67.50
Median % change year-on-year -16.67% -22.22% -6.25%
75th Percentile £68.88 £78.10 £80.00
90th Percentile £75.00 £80.00 -
UK median hourly rate £50.00 £52.50 £65.00
% change year-on-year -4.76% -19.23% -9.72%

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 40,429 23,502 34,503
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.38% 92.15% 92.92%
Number of daily rates quoted 24,779 15,373 22,543
10th Percentile £325 £293 £298
25th Percentile £419 £404 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £513 £525
Median % change year-on-year +2.44% -2.38% -4.55%
75th Percentile £625 £630 £638
90th Percentile £735 £750 £750
UK median daily rate £520 £500 £525
% change year-on-year +4.00% -4.76% -2.33%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,896 1,093 2,589
10th Percentile £15.99 £14.00 £12.86
25th Percentile £21.93 £17.87 £16.74
Median hourly rate £45.00 £28.50 £39.55
Median % change year-on-year +57.89% -27.94% -9.83%
75th Percentile £67.50 £57.50 £63.75
90th Percentile £80.00 £75.00 £74.51
UK median hourly rate £43.00 £27.00 £37.50
% change year-on-year +59.26% -28.00% -12.79%

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 30 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 30 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 30 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 +35 853 £525 - 126
Midlands +50 344 £466 +2.47% 51
West Midlands +48 308 £460 - 31
North of England +18 213 £475 - 80
North West +19 131 £500 +5.26% 45
South East +18 126 £475 +11.76% 80
South West +20 91 £513 +2.60% 29
Yorkshire -15 63 £470 -1.05% 19
East Midlands +6 36 £525 +28.05% 21
East of England -15 24 £543 +70.60% 10
North East -22 19 £480 +9.71% 18
Data Engineer
UK

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

For the 6 months to 30 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.

1 880 (52.57%) SQL
2 741 (44.27%) Python
3 693 (41.40%) Data Pipeline
4 629 (37.57%) Analytics
5 613 (36.62%) ETL
6 610 (36.44%) Data Engineering
7 559 (33.39%) Data Modelling
8 531 (31.72%) Azure
9 491 (29.33%) AWS
10 462 (27.60%) Security Cleared
11 409 (24.43%) Data Quality
12 408 (24.37%) SC Cleared
13 407 (24.31%) CI/CD
14 334 (19.95%) Databricks
15 331 (19.77%) Business Intelligence
16 293 (17.50%) Agile
17 284 (16.97%) DevOps
18 277 (16.55%) Data Warehouse
19 265 (15.83%) Power Platform
20 253 (15.11%) Power BI
21 241 (14.40%) Migration
22 235 (14.04%) PySpark
23 221 (13.20%) Data Governance
24 219 (13.08%) Azure Data Factory
25 213 (12.72%) Problem-Solving
26 210 (12.54%) Microsoft
27 205 (12.25%) AI
28 183 (10.93%) Snowflake
28 183 (10.93%) Terraform
29 177 (10.57%) Validation

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
1 153 (9.14%) Apache Airflow
2 137 (8.18%) Apache Spark
3 93 (5.56%) Apache
4 73 (4.36%) SAS
5 39 (2.33%) Confluence
6 10 (0.60%) SharePoint
7 9 (0.54%) Jupyter
7 9 (0.54%) Palantir Foundry
8 5 (0.30%) Microsoft Exchange
9 2 (0.12%) Luigi
10 1 (0.060%) Apache Superset
10 1 (0.060%) Appian
10 1 (0.060%) Camunda
10 1 (0.060%) Liferay
10 1 (0.060%) R Markdown
Applications
1 16 (0.96%) Microsoft Excel
2 5 (0.30%) Notepad++
3 4 (0.24%) Spreadsheet
4 2 (0.12%) Chatbot
5 1 (0.060%) Microsoft PowerPoint
Business Applications
1 7 (0.42%) Aladdin
2 6 (0.36%) Dynamics CRM
3 5 (0.30%) Infor LN
3 5 (0.30%) NetSuite
3 5 (0.30%) Sage X3
4 3 (0.18%) SAP BPC
4 3 (0.18%) SAP S/4HANA
4 3 (0.18%) SimCorp Dimension
5 2 (0.12%) BambooHR
5 2 (0.12%) Maximo
6 1 (0.060%) Elite 3E
6 1 (0.060%) FIS Private Capital Suite
6 1 (0.060%) iTrent
6 1 (0.060%) NEC Housing
6 1 (0.060%) Oracle Assets
6 1 (0.060%) Oracle EBS
6 1 (0.060%) Oracle ERP
6 1 (0.060%) Raiser’s Edge
6 1 (0.060%) SAP Business ByDesign
6 1 (0.060%) SAP CAR
Cloud Services
1 531 (31.72%) Azure
2 491 (29.33%) AWS
3 265 (15.83%) Power Platform
4 219 (13.08%) Azure Data Factory
5 183 (10.93%) Snowflake
6 168 (10.04%) dbt
7 156 (9.32%) Amazon S3
8 147 (8.78%) GCP
9 143 (8.54%) Azure Synapse Analytics
10 133 (7.95%) Azure DevOps
11 109 (6.51%) GitHub
12 101 (6.03%) Serverless
13 88 (5.26%) AWS Lambda
14 53 (3.17%) GitHub Actions
15 36 (2.15%) Amazon EMR
16 33 (1.97%) Matillion
17 26 (1.55%) AWS CloudFormation
18 25 (1.49%) Amazon CloudWatch
19 24 (1.43%) Amazon Kinesis
19 24 (1.43%) OpenShift
Communications & Networking
1 34 (2.03%) DNS
1 34 (2.03%) VPN
2 33 (1.97%) BGP
2 33 (1.97%) DMZ
2 33 (1.97%) Multicast
3 10 (0.60%) Structured Cabling
4 6 (0.36%) Firewall
5 5 (0.30%) PuTTY
5 5 (0.30%) WinSCP
6 4 (0.24%) Wi-Fi
6 4 (0.24%) Wireless
7 2 (0.12%) Intrusion Detection
8 1 (0.060%) 4G
8 1 (0.060%) 5G
Database & Business Intelligence
1 277 (16.55%) Data Warehouse
2 253 (15.11%) Power BI
3 162 (9.68%) Data Lake
4 104 (6.21%) SQL Server
5 102 (6.09%) Amazon Redshift
6 91 (5.44%) Delta Lake
7 90 (5.38%) BigQuery
8 86 (5.14%) Pentaho
9 83 (4.96%) Metadata
10 75 (4.48%) Tableau
11 65 (3.88%) PostgreSQL
12 64 (3.82%) Amazon Athena
13 62 (3.70%) Snowflake Schema
14 61 (3.64%) Azure SQL Database
15 60 (3.58%) Big Data
16 51 (3.05%) SQL Server Integration Services
17 50 (2.99%) NoSQL
18 45 (2.69%) Relational Database
19 37 (2.21%) Data Vault
20 35 (2.09%) Hadoop
Development Applications
1 154 (9.20%) Git
2 86 (5.14%) GitLab
3 76 (4.54%) JIRA
4 44 (2.63%) Jenkins
5 7 (0.42%) Postman
6 5 (0.30%) 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 (0.060%) ER Studio
10 1 (0.060%) ERwin
10 1 (0.060%) JUnit
10 1 (0.060%) Selenium
10 1 (0.060%) Yeoman
General
1 287 (17.14%) Finance
2 270 (16.13%) Social Skills
3 176 (10.51%) Analytical Skills
4 146 (8.72%) Public Sector
5 94 (5.62%) Banking
6 34 (2.03%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 27 (1.61%) Retail
8 24 (1.43%) Telecoms
9 22 (1.31%) Documentation Skills
10 21 (1.25%) Marketing
11 20 (1.19%) Investment Banking
12 18 (1.08%) Manufacturing
13 17 (1.02%) Pharmaceutical
14 13 (0.78%) Aerospace
14 13 (0.78%) Automotive
15 11 (0.66%) Publishing
16 9 (0.54%) Billing
16 9 (0.54%) Front Office
17 8 (0.48%) Legal
18 6 (0.36%) Military
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 235 (14.04%) PySpark
2 132 (7.89%) Kafka
3 41 (2.45%) Pandas
4 34 (2.03%) JSON
5 26 (1.55%) REST
6 24 (1.43%) Spring
6 24 (1.43%) Spring Boot
7 23 (1.37%) Great Expectations
8 22 (1.31%) XML
9 18 (1.08%) YAML
10 15 (0.90%) Apache Beam
11 13 (0.78%) Apache Avro
12 12 (0.72%) scikit-learn
13 11 (0.66%) React
14 10 (0.60%) Matplotlib
14 10 (0.60%) PyTorch
15 9 (0.54%) GeoJSON
15 9 (0.54%) Node.js
15 9 (0.54%) pytest
15 9 (0.54%) RESTful
Miscellaneous
1 127 (7.59%) Cloud Native
2 57 (3.41%) Legacy Systems
3 43 (2.57%) Data Structures
4 27 (1.61%) Distributed Systems
4 27 (1.61%) Onboarding
5 26 (1.55%) Greenfield Project
6 24 (1.43%) Reinsurance
7 22 (1.31%) Product Ownership
8 21 (1.25%) NHS
9 19 (1.14%) Clustering
10 17 (1.02%) Data Protection Act
11 11 (0.66%) Life Science
11 11 (0.66%) Virtual Team
12 9 (0.54%) Distributed Computing
12 9 (0.54%) Driving Licence
12 9 (0.54%) Public Cloud
12 9 (0.54%) Reference Data
12 9 (0.54%) Self-Motivation
13 8 (0.48%) Linux Command Line
13 8 (0.48%) Replication
Operating Systems
1 57 (3.41%) Unix
2 37 (2.21%) Linux
3 4 (0.24%) Windows
4 2 (0.12%) Ubuntu
4 2 (0.12%) Windows Server
5 1 (0.060%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 693 (41.40%) Data Pipeline
2 629 (37.57%) Analytics
3 613 (36.62%) ETL
4 610 (36.44%) Data Engineering
5 559 (33.39%) Data Modelling
6 407 (24.31%) CI/CD
7 331 (19.77%) Business Intelligence
8 293 (17.50%) Agile
9 284 (16.97%) DevOps
10 241 (14.40%) Migration
11 221 (13.20%) Data Governance
12 213 (12.72%) Problem-Solving
13 205 (12.25%) AI
14 177 (10.57%) Validation
15 175 (10.45%) Data Integration
16 163 (9.74%) Decision-Making
17 159 (9.50%) Data Science
18 153 (9.14%) Data Transformation
19 134 (8.00%) Infrastructure as Code
20 124 (7.41%) Test Automation
Programming Languages
1 880 (52.57%) SQL
2 741 (44.27%) Python
3 106 (6.33%) Java
4 60 (3.58%) Scala
5 50 (2.99%) PL/SQL
6 32 (1.91%) Data Analysis Expressions
6 32 (1.91%) T-SQL
7 29 (1.73%) C#
8 28 (1.67%) Shell Script
9 27 (1.61%) Bash
10 21 (1.25%) PowerShell
11 14 (0.84%) Bicep
11 14 (0.84%) R
12 10 (0.60%) JavaScript
13 7 (0.42%) Go
13 7 (0.42%) TypeScript
14 2 (0.12%) C
14 2 (0.12%) HiveQL
14 2 (0.12%) LookML
14 2 (0.12%) SPARQL
Qualifications
1 462 (27.60%) Security Cleared
2 408 (24.37%) SC Cleared
3 42 (2.51%) BPSS Clearance
4 40 (2.39%) Degree
5 25 (1.49%) Azure Certification
6 19 (1.14%) Computer Science Degree
7 15 (0.90%) DV Cleared
8 10 (0.60%) AWS Certification
9 9 (0.54%) City & Guilds
9 9 (0.54%) DBS Check
10 6 (0.36%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
10 6 (0.36%) Microsoft Certification
10 6 (0.36%) SnowPro
11 5 (0.30%) BICSI Certification
12 4 (0.24%) CISM
12 4 (0.24%) CISSP
12 4 (0.24%) Master's Degree
13 2 (0.12%) CEH
14 1 (0.060%) CISA
14 1 (0.060%) Cisco Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 409 (24.43%) Data Quality
2 52 (3.11%) QA
3 49 (2.93%) GDPR
4 12 (0.72%) Accessibility
4 12 (0.72%) SLA
5 9 (0.54%) FATCA
6 6 (0.36%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 5 (0.30%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 4 (0.24%) MiFID
9 3 (0.18%) GMP
9 3 (0.18%) HIPAA
10 2 (0.12%) California Consumer Privacy Act
10 2 (0.12%) EMIR
10 2 (0.12%) SNOMED CT
10 2 (0.12%) WCAG
11 1 (0.060%) Government Security Classifications
11 1 (0.060%) IFRS
11 1 (0.060%) IFRS 9
11 1 (0.060%) ISO 13485
11 1 (0.060%) PMO
System Software
1 96 (5.73%) Docker
2 6 (0.36%) Virtual Machines
3 2 (0.12%) HDFS
4 1 (0.060%) Active Directory
4 1 (0.060%) RACF
Systems Management
1 183 (10.93%) Terraform
2 80 (4.78%) Kubernetes
3 35 (2.09%) Grafana
4 11 (0.66%) Ansible
5 9 (0.54%) Prometheus
6 5 (0.30%) 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 (0.060%) Kubeflow
9 1 (0.060%) NetBackup
9 1 (0.060%) Puppet
Vendors
1 334 (19.95%) Databricks
2 210 (12.54%) Microsoft
3 157 (9.38%) Oracle
4 129 (7.71%) Informatica
5 120 (7.17%) Talend
6 63 (3.76%) Denodo
7 55 (3.29%) Google
8 35 (2.09%) Cisco
8 35 (2.09%) F5
9 30 (1.79%) SAP
10 26 (1.55%) Salesforce
11 21 (1.25%) Splunk
12 19 (1.14%) ServiceNow
13 18 (1.08%) Cloudera
14 16 (0.96%) Palantir
15 14 (0.84%) Alteryx
16 12 (0.72%) Foundry
17 11 (0.66%) Sage
18 10 (0.60%) IBM
19 8 (0.48%) Bloomberg