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 12 February 2026.

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

6 months to
12 Feb 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 84 78 113
Rank change year-on-year -6 +35 +12
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 1,001 790 803
As % of all contract jobs in England 2.95% 3.03% 2.14%
As % of the Job Titles category 3.21% 3.26% 2.29%
Number of daily rates quoted 717 574 629
10th Percentile £360 £356 £363
25th Percentile £413 £435 £431
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £588 £625 £635
90th Percentile £690 £738 £689
UK median daily rate £500 £517 £525
% change year-on-year -3.33% -1.48% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 8 10 22
10th Percentile £28.89 £39.75 £35.82
25th Percentile £32.94 £65.00 £38.09
Median hourly rate £46.00 £83.75 £56.50
Median % change year-on-year -45.07% +48.23% -14.72%
75th Percentile £71.69 £96.56 £66.25
90th Percentile £88.30 £97.50 £67.50
UK median hourly rate £53.50 £65.00 £56.50
% change year-on-year -17.69% +15.04% -9.60%

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 31,137 24,269 35,007
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 91.66% 93.07% 93.08%
Number of daily rates quoted 19,768 15,138 23,489
10th Percentile £300 £299 £270
25th Percentile £407 £409 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £625 £638 £640
90th Percentile £725 £750 £745
UK median daily rate £500 £525 £525
% change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 1,988 717 2,110
10th Percentile £15.00 £15.92 £13.18
25th Percentile £18.87 £21.46 £16.54
Median hourly rate £31.36 £35.00 £35.00
Median % change year-on-year -10.41% - -6.67%
75th Percentile £63.75 £64.73 £60.00
90th Percentile £72.68 £75.00 £72.46
UK median hourly rate £30.00 £34.00 £35.00
% change year-on-year -11.76% -2.86% -2.23%

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 12 February 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 12 February 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 12 February 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 +6 635 £520 -5.45% 168
Midlands -14 121 £500 +4.82% 64
North of England -37 115 £450 -2.70% 92
West Midlands -16 106 £513 +4.59% 53
North West -12 66 £415 -5.14% 54
South East -41 52 £513 -2.38% 105
South West -10 46 £525 +5.00% 37
Yorkshire -40 36 £488 -4.88% 28
East Midlands -18 15 £450 +20.00% 11
North East -15 13 £463 -11.90% 12
East of England -40 5 £510 +60.38% 15
Data Engineer
UK

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

For the 6 months to 12 February 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.

1 578 (57.74%) SQL
2 565 (56.44%) Python
3 427 (42.66%) Azure
4 419 (41.86%) Data Pipeline
4 419 (41.86%) ETL
5 418 (41.76%) Data Engineering
6 371 (37.06%) Analytics
7 361 (36.06%) Data Modelling
8 320 (31.97%) Databricks
9 303 (30.27%) AWS
10 283 (28.27%) Data Quality
11 280 (27.97%) CI/CD
12 257 (25.67%) Security Cleared
13 246 (24.58%) Business Intelligence
14 226 (22.58%) SC Cleared
15 208 (20.78%) Power Platform
16 201 (20.08%) Power BI
17 200 (19.98%) DevOps
18 184 (18.38%) Azure Data Factory
19 181 (18.08%) Data Warehouse
20 177 (17.68%) Agile
21 173 (17.28%) PySpark
22 157 (15.68%) Problem-Solving
23 151 (15.08%) Data Governance
24 150 (14.99%) Data Science
25 134 (13.39%) Git
25 134 (13.39%) Terraform
26 132 (13.19%) Microsoft
26 132 (13.19%) Snowflake
27 127 (12.69%) AI

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
1 115 (11.49%) Apache Airflow
2 109 (10.89%) Apache Spark
3 77 (7.69%) Apache
4 21 (2.10%) SAS
5 14 (1.40%) Palantir Foundry
6 13 (1.30%) Confluence
7 6 (0.60%) Apache Pig
7 6 (0.60%) Oracle Application Server
8 5 (0.50%) IIS
9 4 (0.40%) Jupyter
9 4 (0.40%) Microsoft Exchange
10 2 (0.20%) ArcGIS
10 2 (0.20%) SharePoint
11 1 (0.100%) Apache Synapse
11 1 (0.100%) Appian
11 1 (0.100%) Camunda
11 1 (0.100%) Luigi
11 1 (0.100%) nginx
11 1 (0.100%) Oracle SOA Suite
Applications
1 10 (1.00%) Microsoft Excel
2 2 (0.20%) Chatbot
3 1 (0.100%) Microsoft Office
3 1 (0.100%) Microsoft PowerPoint
Business Applications
1 2 (0.20%) Dynamics CRM
1 2 (0.20%) Maximo
2 1 (0.100%) Actimize
2 1 (0.100%) Aladdin
2 1 (0.100%) Elite 3E
2 1 (0.100%) NEC Housing
2 1 (0.100%) Oracle BPM
2 1 (0.100%) SAP ERP
Cloud Services
1 427 (42.66%) Azure
2 303 (30.27%) AWS
3 208 (20.78%) Power Platform
4 184 (18.38%) Azure Data Factory
5 132 (13.19%) Snowflake
6 115 (11.49%) Azure Synapse Analytics
7 109 (10.89%) Amazon S3
8 106 (10.59%) dbt
9 104 (10.39%) GCP
10 97 (9.69%) GitHub
11 89 (8.89%) Serverless
12 76 (7.59%) Azure DevOps
13 65 (6.49%) AWS Lambda
14 51 (5.09%) GitHub Actions
15 38 (3.80%) AWS CloudFormation
16 22 (2.20%) SaaS
17 21 (2.10%) Amazon Kinesis
17 21 (2.10%) AWS Step Functions
18 20 (2.00%) Matillion
19 16 (1.60%) Amazon EMR
Communications & Networking
1 12 (1.20%) DNS
2 11 (1.10%) BGP
2 11 (1.10%) DMZ
2 11 (1.10%) Multicast
2 11 (1.10%) VPN
3 4 (0.40%) Firewall
4 3 (0.30%) SAN
5 2 (0.20%) Structured Cabling
6 1 (0.100%) Network Security
6 1 (0.100%) Software-Defined Networking
6 1 (0.100%) TCP/IP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 201 (20.08%) Power BI
2 181 (18.08%) Data Warehouse
3 119 (11.89%) Data Lake
4 94 (9.39%) SQL Server
5 65 (6.49%) Azure SQL Database
6 64 (6.39%) Delta Lake
7 63 (6.29%) Amazon Redshift
8 61 (6.09%) PostgreSQL
9 58 (5.79%) BigQuery
10 53 (5.29%) Big Data
10 53 (5.29%) Metadata
11 52 (5.19%) NoSQL
12 48 (4.80%) SQL Server Integration Services
13 41 (4.10%) Tableau
14 37 (3.70%) Snowflake Schema
15 35 (3.50%) Amazon Athena
16 33 (3.30%) Star Schema
17 32 (3.20%) Hadoop
18 31 (3.10%) Pentaho
19 29 (2.90%) Relational Database
Development Applications
1 134 (13.39%) Git
2 52 (5.19%) Jenkins
3 35 (3.50%) JIRA
4 33 (3.30%) GitLab
5 21 (2.10%) MLflow
6 6 (0.60%) DBeaver
7 4 (0.40%) Visual Studio
8 3 (0.30%) Selenium
9 2 (0.20%) Bitbucket
9 2 (0.20%) JUnit
9 2 (0.20%) Visual Studio Code
10 1 (0.100%) Cucumber
10 1 (0.100%) Deequ
10 1 (0.100%) Gradle
10 1 (0.100%) Jaeger
10 1 (0.100%) Poetry
10 1 (0.100%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
10 1 (0.100%) Team Foundation Server
10 1 (0.100%) TeamCity
10 1 (0.100%) Terragrunt
General
1 183 (18.28%) Social Skills
2 158 (15.78%) Finance
3 103 (10.29%) Analytical Skills
4 71 (7.09%) Public Sector
5 50 (5.00%) Banking
6 31 (3.10%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 17 (1.70%) Investment Banking
8 13 (1.30%) Retail
9 12 (1.20%) Front Office
10 11 (1.10%) Marketing
10 11 (1.10%) Pharmaceutical
11 9 (0.90%) Documentation Skills
11 9 (0.90%) Telecoms
12 7 (0.70%) Manufacturing
13 6 (0.60%) Military
13 6 (0.60%) Publishing
14 5 (0.50%) Law
15 4 (0.40%) Back Office
15 4 (0.40%) Corporate Banking
16 3 (0.30%) Aerospace
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 173 (17.28%) PySpark
2 111 (11.09%) Kafka
3 34 (3.40%) Pandas
4 24 (2.40%) JSON
5 22 (2.20%) REST
6 21 (2.10%) YAML
7 17 (1.70%) XML
8 15 (1.50%) PyTorch
9 14 (1.40%) Apache NiFi
9 14 (1.40%) NumPy
10 12 (1.20%) Great Expectations
10 12 (1.20%) Keycloak
10 12 (1.20%) Node.js
10 12 (1.20%) RESTful
11 11 (1.10%) OpenTelemetry
12 10 (1.00%) scikit-learn
12 10 (1.00%) TensorFlow
13 9 (0.90%) HTML
13 9 (0.90%) Middleware
13 9 (0.90%) pytest
Miscellaneous
1 76 (7.59%) Cloud Native
2 28 (2.80%) Data Structures
3 25 (2.50%) Product Ownership
4 21 (2.10%) Legacy Systems
4 21 (2.10%) Replication
5 18 (1.80%) Onboarding
6 17 (1.70%) Algorithms
7 16 (1.60%) Clustering
8 15 (1.50%) Hybrid Cloud
9 13 (1.30%) Data Protection Act
9 13 (1.30%) Greenfield Project
9 13 (1.30%) Reinsurance
10 12 (1.20%) Distributed Systems
11 10 (1.00%) Public Cloud
12 9 (0.90%) Distributed Computing
13 7 (0.70%) Life Science
13 7 (0.70%) Management Information System
14 5 (0.50%) Analytical Mindset
14 5 (0.50%) Linux Command Line
14 5 (0.50%) NHS
Operating Systems
1 19 (1.90%) Linux
2 15 (1.50%) Unix
3 1 (0.100%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 419 (41.86%) Data Pipeline
1 419 (41.86%) ETL
2 418 (41.76%) Data Engineering
3 371 (37.06%) Analytics
4 361 (36.06%) Data Modelling
5 280 (27.97%) CI/CD
6 246 (24.58%) Business Intelligence
7 200 (19.98%) DevOps
8 177 (17.68%) Agile
9 157 (15.68%) Problem-Solving
10 151 (15.08%) Data Governance
11 150 (14.99%) Data Science
12 127 (12.69%) AI
13 120 (11.99%) Data Architecture
14 117 (11.69%) Infrastructure as Code
15 116 (11.59%) Machine Learning
16 115 (11.49%) Data Integration
17 100 (9.99%) Data Transformation
18 99 (9.89%) Migration
19 96 (9.59%) Performance Tuning
Programming Languages
1 578 (57.74%) SQL
2 565 (56.44%) Python
3 88 (8.79%) Scala
4 71 (7.09%) Java
5 28 (2.80%) Data Analysis Expressions
6 27 (2.70%) C#
7 22 (2.20%) PL/SQL
7 22 (2.20%) T-SQL
8 16 (1.60%) Bash
8 16 (1.60%) Bicep
8 16 (1.60%) Go
9 15 (1.50%) R
10 13 (1.30%) Shell Script
11 12 (1.20%) JavaScript
11 12 (1.20%) PowerShell
12 5 (0.50%) TypeScript
13 4 (0.40%) C++
13 4 (0.40%) Korn
14 2 (0.20%) C
14 2 (0.20%) VB
Qualifications
1 257 (25.67%) Security Cleared
2 226 (22.58%) SC Cleared
3 32 (3.20%) Azure Certification
4 30 (3.00%) Degree
5 20 (2.00%) AWS Certification
6 16 (1.60%) Computer Science Degree
6 16 (1.60%) DV Cleared
7 14 (1.40%) BPSS Clearance
8 5 (0.50%) Master's Degree
8 5 (0.50%) Microsoft Certification
9 4 (0.40%) CTC Cleared
9 4 (0.40%) DBS Check
10 2 (0.20%) Microsoft Certified Professional
10 2 (0.20%) SnowPro
11 1 (0.100%) CCIE
11 1 (0.100%) CCNP
11 1 (0.100%) Cisco Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 283 (28.27%) Data Quality
2 45 (4.50%) GDPR
3 18 (1.80%) QA
4 9 (0.90%) Accessibility
5 4 (0.40%) HIPAA
5 4 (0.40%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 3 (0.30%) FATCA
6 3 (0.30%) MiFID
7 2 (0.20%) Dodd-Frank
7 2 (0.20%) EMIR
7 2 (0.20%) EU AI Act
7 2 (0.20%) NIST
8 1 (0.100%) Basel III
8 1 (0.100%) GRC
8 1 (0.100%) ISO 13485
8 1 (0.100%) NCSC
8 1 (0.100%) PMO
8 1 (0.100%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 1 (0.100%) SOC 2
8 1 (0.100%) WCAG
System Software
1 70 (6.99%) Docker
2 11 (1.10%) Virtual Machines
3 5 (0.50%) zsh
4 1 (0.100%) Active Directory
4 1 (0.100%) HDFS
Systems Management
1 134 (13.39%) Terraform
2 79 (7.89%) Kubernetes
3 12 (1.20%) Grafana
4 11 (1.10%) Prometheus
5 6 (0.60%) Ansible
6 5 (0.50%) NetBackup
7 4 (0.40%) Kibana
8 3 (0.30%) Control-M
8 3 (0.30%) Kubeflow
9 2 (0.20%) EMC NetWorker
9 2 (0.20%) logstash
9 2 (0.20%) Puppet
9 2 (0.20%) Tivoli Storage Manager
10 1 (0.100%) Ambari
10 1 (0.100%) Argo
10 1 (0.100%) Rancher
10 1 (0.100%) ZABBIX
Vendors
1 320 (31.97%) Databricks
2 132 (13.19%) Microsoft
3 71 (7.09%) Oracle
4 45 (4.50%) Talend
5 38 (3.80%) Informatica
6 37 (3.70%) Google
7 23 (2.30%) Denodo
8 17 (1.70%) Foundry
8 17 (1.70%) Palantir
8 17 (1.70%) Splunk
9 15 (1.50%) Cisco
9 15 (1.50%) IBM
10 12 (1.20%) F5
11 11 (1.10%) Alteryx
11 11 (1.10%) SAP
11 11 (1.10%) ServiceNow
12 8 (0.80%) Cloudera
13 7 (0.70%) Confluent
13 7 (0.70%) Virgin Media
14 6 (0.60%) Salesforce