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 14 August 2026.

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

6 months to
14 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 57 127 96
Rank change year-on-year +70 -31 +22
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 1,760 627 780
As % of all contract jobs in England 3.86% 2.27% 2.34%
As % of the Job Titles category 4.17% 2.48% 2.52%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,186 453 574
10th Percentile £382 £377 £263
25th Percentile £425 £427 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year - -4.76% -4.55%
75th Percentile £588 £600 £638
90th Percentile £663 £695 £700
UK median daily rate £500 £500 £524
% change year-on-year - -4.53% -4.77%
Number of hourly rates quoted 84 11 25
10th Percentile £19.91 £26.00 £44.00
25th Percentile £30.96 £42.25 £52.50
Median hourly rate £43.75 £52.50 £75.00
Median % change year-on-year -16.67% -30.00% -3.23%
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 42,174 25,315 30,946
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.49% 91.60% 92.88%
Number of daily rates quoted 25,510 16,372 20,290
10th Percentile £325 £285 £300
25th Percentile £425 £402 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £513 £525
Median % change year-on-year +2.44% -2.38% -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% -1.87%
Number of hourly rates quoted 3,176 1,336 1,796
10th Percentile £15.25 £13.50 £14.21
25th Percentile £21.25 £17.48 £21.25
Median hourly rate £43.10 £25.32 £45.00
Median % change year-on-year +70.23% -43.73% +7.40%
75th Percentile £68.00 £55.00 £65.01
90th Percentile £80.00 £75.00 £75.00
UK median hourly rate £42.00 £25.15 £43.00
% change year-on-year +67.00% -41.51% +2.00%

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 14 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 14 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 14 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 +48 853 £525 - 269
Midlands +74 402 £465 +1.09% 54
West Midlands +63 346 £463 +2.78% 34
North of England +33 230 £500 +5.26% 93
North West +29 132 £525 +10.53% 43
South East +15 129 £465 +3.33% 114
South West 0 88 £525 +6.33% 35
Yorkshire 0 77 £465 -7.00% 21
East Midlands +20 56 £475 +2.70% 20
East of England +11 39 £520 +34.19% 9
North East -27 22 £520 +23.81% 30
Data Engineer
UK

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

For the 6 months to 14 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.

1 892 (50.68%) SQL
2 758 (43.07%) Data Pipeline
3 720 (40.91%) Python
4 650 (36.93%) Data Engineering
5 635 (36.08%) Analytics
6 617 (35.06%) ETL
7 590 (33.52%) Data Modelling
8 540 (30.68%) Azure
9 517 (29.38%) AWS
10 477 (27.10%) Security Cleared
11 439 (24.94%) Data Quality
12 426 (24.20%) CI/CD
13 419 (23.81%) SC Cleared
14 334 (18.98%) Databricks
15 313 (17.78%) Agile
16 309 (17.56%) Business Intelligence
17 293 (16.65%) Data Warehouse
17 293 (16.65%) DevOps
18 280 (15.91%) Migration
19 242 (13.75%) Data Governance
20 234 (13.30%) PySpark
21 232 (13.18%) Power Platform
22 231 (13.13%) AI
23 224 (12.73%) Power BI
24 221 (12.56%) Microsoft
25 216 (12.27%) Azure Data Factory
26 211 (11.99%) Problem-Solving
27 210 (11.93%) Data Integration
28 209 (11.88%) Validation
29 202 (11.48%) 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
1 180 (10.23%) Apache Airflow
2 148 (8.41%) Apache Spark
3 111 (6.31%) Apache
4 77 (4.38%) SAS
5 35 (1.99%) Confluence
6 13 (0.74%) Palantir Foundry
7 12 (0.68%) SharePoint
8 10 (0.57%) Jupyter
9 3 (0.17%) Apache Superset
10 2 (0.11%) Microsoft Exchange
11 1 (0.057%) ArcGIS
11 1 (0.057%) Liferay
11 1 (0.057%) Luigi
11 1 (0.057%) PowerExchange
11 1 (0.057%) R Markdown
Applications
1 24 (1.36%) Microsoft Excel
2 5 (0.28%) Notepad++
2 5 (0.28%) Spreadsheet
3 4 (0.23%) Chatbot
4 1 (0.057%) Microsoft PowerPoint
Business Applications
1 12 (0.68%) Aladdin
2 7 (0.40%) Dynamics CRM
3 5 (0.28%) Infor LN
3 5 (0.28%) NetSuite
3 5 (0.28%) Sage X3
4 3 (0.17%) SAP BPC
4 3 (0.17%) SAP S/4HANA
4 3 (0.17%) SimCorp Dimension
4 3 (0.17%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
5 2 (0.11%) BambooHR
5 2 (0.11%) Maximo
6 1 (0.057%) FIS Private Capital Suite
6 1 (0.057%) iTrent
6 1 (0.057%) MIS ActiveH
6 1 (0.057%) Oracle 11i
6 1 (0.057%) Oracle Assets
6 1 (0.057%) Raiser’s Edge
6 1 (0.057%) SAP Business ByDesign
6 1 (0.057%) SAP CAR
6 1 (0.057%) SAP EWM
Cloud Services
1 540 (30.68%) Azure
2 517 (29.38%) AWS
3 232 (13.18%) Power Platform
4 216 (12.27%) Azure Data Factory
5 192 (10.91%) Snowflake
6 188 (10.68%) dbt
7 163 (9.26%) GCP
8 146 (8.30%) Amazon S3
9 137 (7.78%) Azure Synapse Analytics
10 128 (7.27%) Azure DevOps
11 102 (5.80%) GitHub
11 102 (5.80%) Serverless
12 88 (5.00%) AWS Lambda
13 43 (2.44%) GitHub Actions
14 37 (2.10%) Amazon EMR
15 28 (1.59%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 26 (1.48%) AWS Step Functions
17 24 (1.36%) Amazon Kinesis
17 24 (1.36%) Fivetran
17 24 (1.36%) Matillion
Communications & Networking
1 32 (1.82%) VPN
2 31 (1.76%) BGP
2 31 (1.76%) DMZ
2 31 (1.76%) DNS
2 31 (1.76%) Multicast
3 9 (0.51%) Structured Cabling
4 7 (0.40%) Firewall
5 5 (0.28%) PuTTY
5 5 (0.28%) 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
1 293 (16.65%) Data Warehouse
2 224 (12.73%) Power BI
3 155 (8.81%) Data Lake
4 108 (6.14%) Metadata
5 99 (5.63%) BigQuery
6 95 (5.40%) Amazon Redshift
7 92 (5.23%) Pentaho
8 84 (4.77%) SQL Server
9 79 (4.49%) Delta Lake
10 66 (3.75%) Amazon Athena
11 64 (3.64%) Big Data
11 64 (3.64%) Tableau
12 62 (3.52%) PostgreSQL
13 53 (3.01%) Snowflake Schema
14 50 (2.84%) Azure SQL Database
14 50 (2.84%) NoSQL
15 49 (2.78%) Relational Database
16 47 (2.67%) SQL Server Integration Services
17 35 (1.99%) Amazon RDS
17 35 (1.99%) Hadoop
Development Applications
1 155 (8.81%) Git
2 86 (4.89%) GitLab
3 66 (3.75%) JIRA
4 47 (2.67%) Jenkins
5 10 (0.57%) MLflow
6 7 (0.40%) Postman
7 6 (0.34%) Bitbucket
8 5 (0.28%) Artifactory
8 5 (0.28%) SonarQube
9 4 (0.23%) ERwin
10 3 (0.17%) Newman
10 3 (0.17%) Sonatype Nexus
11 2 (0.11%) Atlassian Bamboo
11 2 (0.11%) Claude Code
11 2 (0.11%) ER Studio
11 2 (0.11%) Selenium
11 2 (0.11%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
11 2 (0.11%) Terragrunt
11 2 (0.11%) Yeoman
12 1 (0.057%) Toad
General
1 289 (16.42%) Finance
2 272 (15.45%) Social Skills
3 198 (11.25%) Analytical Skills
4 157 (8.92%) Public Sector
5 104 (5.91%) Banking
6 30 (1.70%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 25 (1.42%) Telecoms
8 22 (1.25%) Marketing
8 22 (1.25%) Retail
9 19 (1.08%) Automotive
9 19 (1.08%) Manufacturing
10 17 (0.97%) Aerospace
10 17 (0.97%) Front Office
10 17 (0.97%) Investment Banking
11 16 (0.91%) Documentation Skills
12 15 (0.85%) Pharmaceutical
13 10 (0.57%) Financial Institution
14 9 (0.51%) Billing
14 9 (0.51%) Law
15 8 (0.45%) Military
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 234 (13.30%) PySpark
2 122 (6.93%) Kafka
3 31 (1.76%) Pandas
4 25 (1.42%) REST
5 24 (1.36%) JSON
6 22 (1.25%) Spring
6 22 (1.25%) Spring Boot
7 21 (1.19%) Great Expectations
8 16 (0.91%) XML
9 15 (0.85%) Apache Beam
10 14 (0.80%) React
10 14 (0.80%) YAML
11 13 (0.74%) RESTful
12 12 (0.68%) pytest
13 10 (0.57%) Microsoft Graph
14 9 (0.51%) Apache Avro
14 9 (0.51%) PyTorch
15 8 (0.45%) .NET
15 8 (0.45%) scikit-learn
15 8 (0.45%) Spark Streaming
Miscellaneous
1 130 (7.39%) Cloud Native
2 79 (4.49%) Legacy Systems
3 52 (2.95%) Data Structures
4 34 (1.93%) Onboarding
5 24 (1.36%) Distributed Systems
5 24 (1.36%) Product Ownership
6 21 (1.19%) Greenfield Project
6 21 (1.19%) NHS
7 19 (1.08%) Reference Data
8 18 (1.02%) Reinsurance
9 14 (0.80%) Management Information System
10 12 (0.68%) AI Agents
10 12 (0.68%) Data Protection Act
11 11 (0.63%) Algorithms
11 11 (0.63%) Clustering
12 10 (0.57%) Life Science
12 10 (0.57%) Virtual Team
13 9 (0.51%) Self-Motivation
14 8 (0.45%) Driving Licence
14 8 (0.45%) Linux Command Line
Operating Systems
1 61 (3.47%) Unix
2 46 (2.61%) Linux
3 4 (0.23%) Windows
4 2 (0.11%) Ubuntu
4 2 (0.11%) Windows Server
5 1 (0.057%) Robot Operating System
5 1 (0.057%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 758 (43.07%) Data Pipeline
2 650 (36.93%) Data Engineering
3 635 (36.08%) Analytics
4 617 (35.06%) ETL
5 590 (33.52%) Data Modelling
6 426 (24.20%) CI/CD
7 313 (17.78%) Agile
8 309 (17.56%) Business Intelligence
9 293 (16.65%) DevOps
10 280 (15.91%) Migration
11 242 (13.75%) Data Governance
12 231 (13.13%) AI
13 211 (11.99%) Problem-Solving
14 210 (11.93%) Data Integration
15 209 (11.88%) Validation
16 202 (11.48%) Data Transformation
17 173 (9.83%) Decision-Making
18 153 (8.69%) Data Science
19 142 (8.07%) Test Automation
20 140 (7.95%) Machine Learning
Programming Languages
1 892 (50.68%) SQL
2 720 (40.91%) Python
3 104 (5.91%) Java
4 59 (3.35%) Scala
5 50 (2.84%) PL/SQL
6 33 (1.88%) Shell Script
7 28 (1.59%) Bash
8 27 (1.53%) T-SQL
9 26 (1.48%) Data Analysis Expressions
10 22 (1.25%) PowerShell
11 16 (0.91%) C#
11 16 (0.91%) JavaScript
12 12 (0.68%) R
13 8 (0.45%) Bicep
14 6 (0.34%) Go
14 6 (0.34%) TypeScript
15 4 (0.23%) Korn
16 2 (0.11%) COBOL
16 2 (0.11%) Ruby
16 2 (0.11%) SPARQL
Qualifications
1 477 (27.10%) Security Cleared
2 419 (23.81%) SC Cleared
3 42 (2.39%) Degree
4 34 (1.93%) BPSS Clearance
5 22 (1.25%) Azure Certification
6 21 (1.19%) Computer Science Degree
6 21 (1.19%) DV Cleared
7 10 (0.57%) AWS Certification
8 9 (0.51%) City & Guilds
9 8 (0.45%) DBS Check
10 6 (0.34%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
10 6 (0.34%) Master's Degree
10 6 (0.34%) SnowPro
11 5 (0.28%) BICSI Certification
11 5 (0.28%) CISM
11 5 (0.28%) CISSP
12 4 (0.23%) Microsoft Certification
13 3 (0.17%) CEH
14 1 (0.057%) PMI Certification
14 1 (0.057%) PMP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 439 (24.94%) Data Quality
2 58 (3.30%) QA
3 42 (2.39%) GDPR
4 16 (0.91%) Accessibility
5 12 (0.68%) SLA
6 6 (0.34%) FATCA
7 5 (0.28%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 4 (0.23%) HIPAA
8 4 (0.23%) ISO/IEC 27001
9 3 (0.17%) MiFID
10 2 (0.11%) California Consumer Privacy Act
10 2 (0.11%) EMIR
10 2 (0.11%) GMP
10 2 (0.11%) SNOMED CT
10 2 (0.11%) WCAG
11 1 (0.057%) GxP
11 1 (0.057%) IFRS
11 1 (0.057%) IFRS 17
11 1 (0.057%) IFRS 9
11 1 (0.057%) PMO
System Software
1 118 (6.70%) 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
1 164 (9.32%) Terraform
2 91 (5.17%) Kubernetes
3 34 (1.93%) Grafana
4 14 (0.80%) Ansible
5 9 (0.51%) Control-M
6 6 (0.34%) Kibana
7 3 (0.17%) Prometheus
8 2 (0.11%) Apache Ranger
8 2 (0.11%) Puppet
8 2 (0.11%) Rancher
8 2 (0.11%) Thomson Reuters DACS
9 1 (0.057%) Kubeflow
9 1 (0.057%) logstash
Vendors
1 334 (18.98%) Databricks
2 221 (12.56%) Microsoft
3 157 (8.92%) Oracle
4 125 (7.10%) Informatica
5 117 (6.65%) Talend
6 67 (3.81%) Google
7 63 (3.58%) Denodo
8 33 (1.88%) SAP
9 32 (1.82%) Cisco
9 32 (1.82%) F5
10 28 (1.59%) Salesforce
11 23 (1.31%) Palantir
12 19 (1.08%) Cloudera
13 18 (1.02%) Foundry
14 17 (0.97%) Splunk
15 14 (0.80%) ServiceNow
16 11 (0.63%) Sage
17 10 (0.57%) IBM
18 9 (0.51%) Bloomberg
19 8 (0.45%) InterSystems