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 8 April 2026.

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

6 months to
8 Apr 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 66 83 97
Rank change year-on-year +17 +14 +17
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 1,377 756 853
As % of all contract jobs in England 3.52% 3.10% 2.28%
As % of the Job Titles category 3.81% 3.34% 2.46%
Number of daily rates quoted 988 569 666
10th Percentile £367 £357 £300
25th Percentile £415 £425 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £510
Median % change year-on-year - -1.96% -7.27%
75th Percentile £588 £623 £620
90th Percentile £657 £728 £688
UK median daily rate £500 £500 £500
% change year-on-year - - -9.09%
Number of hourly rates quoted 34 10 42
10th Percentile £19.34 £25.45 £37.50
25th Percentile £36.56 £43.75 £49.28
Median hourly rate £58.25 £65.00 £67.50
Median % change year-on-year -10.38% -3.70% +5.47%
75th Percentile £75.00 £78.40 £80.00
90th Percentile £77.80 £93.75 -
UK median hourly rate £53.50 £47.50 £66.25
% change year-on-year +12.63% -28.30% +3.52%

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 36,106 22,607 34,632
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.36% 92.83% 92.68%
Number of daily rates quoted 22,727 15,140 23,115
10th Percentile £313 £300 £275
25th Percentile £413 £409 £410
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £505 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -3.81% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £619 £638 £638
90th Percentile £725 £750 £750
UK median daily rate £500 £520 £525
% change year-on-year -3.85% -0.95% -2.78%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,414 846 2,325
10th Percentile £15.50 £14.84 £12.88
25th Percentile £20.28 £20.45 £16.25
Median hourly rate £42.59 £32.66 £33.07
Median % change year-on-year +30.43% -1.24% -24.42%
75th Percentile £65.97 £65.00 £60.00
90th Percentile £78.60 £76.25 £71.25
UK median hourly rate £40.00 £31.76 £34.21
% change year-on-year +25.94% -7.16% -23.98%

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 8 April 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 8 April 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 8 April 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 +14 779 £525 -0.94% 158
Midlands +21 258 £468 -1.53% 59
West Midlands +16 239 £469 -1.68% 45
North of England -12 174 £459 +0.55% 87
North West +9 108 £450 -2.70% 56
South East -13 73 £500 -0.50% 91
South West -12 53 £523 +4.50% 38
Yorkshire -25 51 £465 +3.33% 19
East Midlands -23 19 £450 +12.85% 14
North East -16 15 £488 +2.63% 13
East of England -33 15 £565 +79.37% 17
Data Engineer
UK

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

For the 6 months to 8 April 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.

1 772 (56.06%) SQL
2 662 (48.08%) Python
3 583 (42.34%) Data Pipeline
4 571 (41.47%) ETL
5 558 (40.52%) Data Engineering
6 539 (39.14%) Analytics
7 517 (37.55%) Azure
8 494 (35.88%) Data Modelling
9 391 (28.40%) Security Cleared
10 387 (28.10%) Data Quality
11 379 (27.52%) AWS
12 363 (26.36%) Databricks
13 358 (26.00%) CI/CD
14 353 (25.64%) SC Cleared
15 325 (23.60%) Business Intelligence
16 265 (19.24%) DevOps
17 255 (18.52%) Data Warehouse
18 253 (18.37%) Agile
18 253 (18.37%) Power Platform
19 238 (17.28%) Power BI
20 223 (16.19%) Data Governance
21 217 (15.76%) Azure Data Factory
22 206 (14.96%) PySpark
23 205 (14.89%) Problem-Solving
24 184 (13.36%) Microsoft
25 174 (12.64%) Git
26 166 (12.06%) Data Science
27 163 (11.84%) Snowflake
28 157 (11.40%) Data Integration
29 155 (11.26%) Data Lake

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
1 138 (10.02%) Apache Spark
2 130 (9.44%) Apache Airflow
3 86 (6.25%) Apache
4 68 (4.94%) SAS
5 15 (1.09%) Confluence
6 11 (0.80%) Palantir Foundry
7 6 (0.44%) Jupyter
8 5 (0.36%) Microsoft Exchange
9 3 (0.22%) SharePoint
10 2 (0.15%) Oracle Application Server
11 1 (0.073%) Apache Superset
11 1 (0.073%) Apache Synapse
11 1 (0.073%) Appian
11 1 (0.073%) ArcGIS
11 1 (0.073%) Camunda
11 1 (0.073%) Luigi
11 1 (0.073%) R Markdown
Applications
1 16 (1.16%) Microsoft Excel
2 4 (0.29%) Notepad++
3 3 (0.22%) Chatbot
3 3 (0.22%) Spreadsheet
4 1 (0.073%) Microsoft Office
4 1 (0.073%) Microsoft PowerPoint
Business Applications
1 2 (0.15%) Aladdin
1 2 (0.15%) Dynamics CRM
1 2 (0.15%) Maximo
1 2 (0.15%) SAP BPC
2 1 (0.073%) Actimize
2 1 (0.073%) BambooHR
2 1 (0.073%) Elite 3E
2 1 (0.073%) iTrent
2 1 (0.073%) NEC Housing
2 1 (0.073%) Oracle 11i
2 1 (0.073%) Oracle ERP
2 1 (0.073%) SAP Business ByDesign
2 1 (0.073%) SimCorp Dimension
Cloud Services
1 517 (37.55%) Azure
2 379 (27.52%) AWS
3 253 (18.37%) Power Platform
4 217 (15.76%) Azure Data Factory
5 163 (11.84%) Snowflake
6 145 (10.53%) Azure Synapse Analytics
7 135 (9.80%) GCP
8 134 (9.73%) Amazon S3
8 134 (9.73%) dbt
9 113 (8.21%) GitHub
10 105 (7.63%) Azure DevOps
11 92 (6.68%) Serverless
12 70 (5.08%) AWS Lambda
13 52 (3.78%) GitHub Actions
14 38 (2.76%) AWS CloudFormation
15 28 (2.03%) Matillion
16 24 (1.74%) Amazon Kinesis
16 24 (1.74%) AWS Step Functions
17 21 (1.53%) Dagster
18 19 (1.38%) Amazon SQS
Communications & Networking
1 27 (1.96%) DNS
1 27 (1.96%) VPN
2 26 (1.89%) BGP
2 26 (1.89%) DMZ
2 26 (1.89%) Multicast
3 11 (0.80%) Structured Cabling
4 4 (0.29%) Firewall
4 4 (0.29%) PuTTY
4 4 (0.29%) WinSCP
5 3 (0.22%) SAN
6 1 (0.073%) 4G
6 1 (0.073%) 5G
6 1 (0.073%) Network Security
6 1 (0.073%) Software-Defined Networking
Database & Business Intelligence
1 255 (18.52%) Data Warehouse
2 238 (17.28%) Power BI
3 155 (11.26%) Data Lake
4 105 (7.63%) SQL Server
5 82 (5.95%) Delta Lake
6 81 (5.88%) Amazon Redshift
6 81 (5.88%) Azure SQL Database
6 81 (5.88%) BigQuery
7 74 (5.37%) Metadata
8 71 (5.16%) Pentaho
9 60 (4.36%) PostgreSQL
9 60 (4.36%) Tableau
10 56 (4.07%) SQL Server Integration Services
11 54 (3.92%) Snowflake Schema
12 53 (3.85%) Big Data
13 52 (3.78%) NoSQL
14 49 (3.56%) Amazon Athena
15 36 (2.61%) Relational Database
16 35 (2.54%) Star Schema
17 34 (2.47%) Hadoop
Development Applications
1 174 (12.64%) Git
2 64 (4.65%) Jenkins
3 62 (4.50%) JIRA
4 57 (4.14%) GitLab
5 19 (1.38%) MLflow
6 2 (0.15%) Bitbucket
6 2 (0.15%) DBeaver
6 2 (0.15%) JUnit
6 2 (0.15%) Selenium
6 2 (0.15%) SonarQube
6 2 (0.15%) Sonatype Nexus
6 2 (0.15%) Visual Studio
7 1 (0.073%) Cucumber
7 1 (0.073%) ER Studio
7 1 (0.073%) ERwin
7 1 (0.073%) Maven
7 1 (0.073%) Mockito
7 1 (0.073%) Poetry
7 1 (0.073%) Team Foundation Server
7 1 (0.073%) Terragrunt
General
1 228 (16.56%) Social Skills
2 225 (16.34%) Finance
3 143 (10.38%) Analytical Skills
4 121 (8.79%) Public Sector
5 72 (5.23%) Banking
6 35 (2.54%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 21 (1.53%) Telecoms
8 20 (1.45%) Investment Banking
9 15 (1.09%) Documentation Skills
9 15 (1.09%) Retail
10 13 (0.94%) Front Office
10 13 (0.94%) Marketing
10 13 (0.94%) Pharmaceutical
11 12 (0.87%) Manufacturing
11 12 (0.87%) Publishing
12 8 (0.58%) Law
13 6 (0.44%) Aerospace
13 6 (0.44%) Military
14 4 (0.29%) Corporate Banking
14 4 (0.29%) Legal
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 206 (14.96%) PySpark
2 143 (10.38%) Kafka
3 47 (3.41%) Pandas
4 32 (2.32%) JSON
5 28 (2.03%) YAML
6 24 (1.74%) REST
7 23 (1.67%) Great Expectations
8 17 (1.23%) XML
9 15 (1.09%) Node.js
9 15 (1.09%) scikit-learn
10 13 (0.94%) Matplotlib
10 13 (0.94%) PyTorch
10 13 (0.94%) React
11 12 (0.87%) Apache Beam
11 12 (0.87%) NumPy
12 11 (0.80%) Apache Avro
13 10 (0.73%) Keycloak
13 10 (0.73%) pytest
13 10 (0.73%) Spring
13 10 (0.73%) Spring Boot
Miscellaneous
1 94 (6.83%) Cloud Native
2 43 (3.12%) Legacy Systems
3 31 (2.25%) Data Structures
4 28 (2.03%) Product Ownership
5 22 (1.60%) Clustering
6 21 (1.53%) Onboarding
7 20 (1.45%) Greenfield Project
8 19 (1.38%) Distributed Systems
9 15 (1.09%) Data Protection Act
9 15 (1.09%) Replication
10 14 (1.02%) Hybrid Cloud
10 14 (1.02%) NHS
11 12 (0.87%) Reinsurance
12 11 (0.80%) Public Cloud
13 9 (0.65%) Self-Motivation
14 8 (0.58%) Analytical Mindset
14 8 (0.58%) Distributed Computing
14 8 (0.58%) Life Science
15 7 (0.51%) Management Information System
15 7 (0.51%) Reference Data
Operating Systems
1 35 (2.54%) Unix
2 23 (1.67%) Linux
3 3 (0.22%) Windows
4 2 (0.15%) Windows Server
5 1 (0.073%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 583 (42.34%) Data Pipeline
2 571 (41.47%) ETL
3 558 (40.52%) Data Engineering
4 539 (39.14%) Analytics
5 494 (35.88%) Data Modelling
6 358 (26.00%) CI/CD
7 325 (23.60%) Business Intelligence
8 265 (19.24%) DevOps
9 253 (18.37%) Agile
10 223 (16.19%) Data Governance
11 205 (14.89%) Problem-Solving
12 166 (12.06%) Data Science
13 157 (11.40%) Data Integration
14 154 (11.18%) AI
15 151 (10.97%) Migration
16 144 (10.46%) Data Architecture
17 137 (9.95%) Validation
18 130 (9.44%) Data Transformation
19 124 (9.01%) Performance Tuning
20 121 (8.79%) Infrastructure as Code
Programming Languages
1 772 (56.06%) SQL
2 662 (48.08%) Python
3 85 (6.17%) Java
4 80 (5.81%) Scala
5 38 (2.76%) C#
6 37 (2.69%) Data Analysis Expressions
7 31 (2.25%) PL/SQL
8 27 (1.96%) T-SQL
9 24 (1.74%) Bash
9 24 (1.74%) Shell Script
10 20 (1.45%) PowerShell
11 19 (1.38%) Bicep
12 16 (1.16%) R
13 13 (0.94%) Go
14 10 (0.73%) JavaScript
15 6 (0.44%) TypeScript
16 3 (0.22%) C
16 3 (0.22%) Korn
17 2 (0.15%) Ruby
17 2 (0.15%) VB
Qualifications
1 391 (28.40%) Security Cleared
2 353 (25.64%) SC Cleared
3 36 (2.61%) Degree
4 32 (2.32%) Azure Certification
5 25 (1.82%) BPSS Clearance
6 16 (1.16%) Computer Science Degree
7 13 (0.94%) AWS Certification
7 13 (0.94%) DV Cleared
8 6 (0.44%) Microsoft Certification
9 5 (0.36%) BICSI Certification
9 5 (0.36%) City & Guilds
9 5 (0.36%) Master's Degree
10 4 (0.29%) CTC Cleared
10 4 (0.29%) DBS Check
10 4 (0.29%) SnowPro
11 2 (0.15%) CISM
11 2 (0.15%) CISSP
12 1 (0.073%) CCIE
12 1 (0.073%) CCNP
12 1 (0.073%) Cisco Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 387 (28.10%) Data Quality
2 51 (3.70%) GDPR
3 34 (2.47%) QA
4 11 (0.80%) Accessibility
5 8 (0.58%) SLA
6 4 (0.29%) HIPAA
6 4 (0.29%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 3 (0.22%) FATCA
7 3 (0.22%) GMP
8 2 (0.15%) MiFID
8 2 (0.15%) WCAG
9 1 (0.073%) Basel III
9 1 (0.073%) Dodd-Frank
9 1 (0.073%) EMIR
9 1 (0.073%) GRC
9 1 (0.073%) GxP
9 1 (0.073%) NCSC
9 1 (0.073%) NIST
9 1 (0.073%) PCI DSS
9 1 (0.073%) SOC 2
System Software
1 96 (6.97%) Docker
2 9 (0.65%) Virtual Machines
3 2 (0.15%) HDFS
4 1 (0.073%) Active Directory
4 1 (0.073%) RACF
Systems Management
1 154 (11.18%) Terraform
2 99 (7.19%) Kubernetes
3 30 (2.18%) Grafana
4 13 (0.94%) Prometheus
5 7 (0.51%) Ansible
6 4 (0.29%) Kubeflow
7 3 (0.22%) Kibana
7 3 (0.22%) Rancher
8 2 (0.15%) Apache Ranger
8 2 (0.15%) EMC NetWorker
8 2 (0.15%) logstash
8 2 (0.15%) NetBackup
8 2 (0.15%) Thomson Reuters DACS
8 2 (0.15%) Tivoli Storage Manager
9 1 (0.073%) Control-M
9 1 (0.073%) Puppet
Vendors
1 363 (26.36%) Databricks
2 184 (13.36%) Microsoft
3 115 (8.35%) Oracle
4 103 (7.48%) Talend
5 91 (6.61%) Informatica
6 59 (4.28%) Google
7 57 (4.14%) Denodo
8 31 (2.25%) Cisco
9 28 (2.03%) F5
10 22 (1.60%) ServiceNow
11 21 (1.53%) SAP
12 17 (1.23%) Cloudera
12 17 (1.23%) Splunk
13 14 (1.02%) Foundry
13 14 (1.02%) IBM
13 14 (1.02%) Palantir
14 10 (0.73%) Alteryx
15 8 (0.58%) MuleSoft
16 6 (0.44%) OpenAI
17 5 (0.36%) Virgin Media