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 17 March 2026.

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

 6 months to
17 Mar 2026		 Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 71 79 96
Rank change year-on-year +8 +17 +19
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 1,227 760 860
As % of all contract jobs in England 3.33% 3.09% 2.27%
As % of the Job Titles category 3.62% 3.32% 2.45%
Number of daily rates quoted 881 565 677
10th Percentile £363 £350 £313
25th Percentile £413 £425 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £510
Median % change year-on-year - -1.96% -7.27%
75th Percentile £588 £625 £625
90th Percentile £663 £738 £690
UK median daily rate £500 £500 £500
% change year-on-year - - -9.09%
Number of hourly rates quoted 19 10 39
10th Percentile £34.75 £25.45 £36.25
25th Percentile £60.38 £47.19 £49.25
Median hourly rate £70.00 £70.00 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year - +7.69% +1.56%
75th Percentile £75.00 £89.99 £80.00
90th Percentile £90.00 £94.13 -
UK median hourly rate £69.00 £53.75 £62.50
% change year-on-year +28.37% -14.00% -2.34%

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 33,895 22,860 35,145
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.01% 93.04% 92.74%
Number of daily rates quoted 21,384 15,072 23,528
10th Percentile £310 £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 £525 £525
% change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.11%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,236 779 2,277
10th Percentile £15.50 £15.22 £13.00
25th Percentile £19.38 £21.25 £16.25
Median hourly rate £37.44 £35.00 £32.50
Median % change year-on-year +6.97% +7.69% -23.53%
75th Percentile £65.00 £65.00 £59.44
90th Percentile £76.58 £77.50 £71.25
UK median hourly rate £35.71 £33.00 £32.90
% change year-on-year +8.21% +0.32% -22.60%

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 17 March 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 17 March 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 17 March 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 +10 713 £520 -5.45% 152
Midlands +15 215 £470 -1.05% 50
West Midlands +9 197 £481 -1.84% 40
North of England -14 159 £450 - 75
North West +3 95 £450 - 36
South East -32 57 £500 - 101
South West -6 50 £525 +5.00% 46
Yorkshire -30 47 £465 +3.33% 27
East Midlands -25 18 £450 +20.40% 10
North East -7 17 £463 -7.50% 14
East of England -41 10 £565 +77.67% 13
Data Engineer
UK

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

For the 6 months to 17 March 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.

1 708 (57.70%) SQL
2 621 (50.61%) Python
3 529 (43.11%) Data Pipeline
4 528 (43.03%) ETL
5 514 (41.89%) Data Engineering
6 499 (40.67%) Azure
7 486 (39.61%) Analytics
8 443 (36.10%) Data Modelling
9 356 (29.01%) Databricks
10 354 (28.85%) Data Quality
11 343 (27.95%) AWS
12 341 (27.79%) Security Cleared
13 332 (27.06%) CI/CD
14 306 (24.94%) SC Cleared
15 296 (24.12%) Business Intelligence
16 255 (20.78%) DevOps
17 239 (19.48%) Agile
18 233 (18.99%) Power Platform
19 232 (18.91%) Data Warehouse
20 217 (17.69%) Power BI
21 214 (17.44%) Azure Data Factory
22 199 (16.22%) Data Governance
23 194 (15.81%) Problem-Solving
24 191 (15.57%) PySpark
25 168 (13.69%) Microsoft
26 165 (13.45%) Git
27 160 (13.04%) Data Science
28 148 (12.06%) Snowflake
29 146 (11.90%) AI
29 146 (11.90%) Data Integration

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
1 136 (11.08%) Apache Spark
2 115 (9.37%) Apache Airflow
3 83 (6.76%) Apache
4 55 (4.48%) SAS
5 19 (1.55%) Confluence
6 11 (0.90%) Palantir Foundry
7 6 (0.49%) Jupyter
8 5 (0.41%) Microsoft Exchange
9 4 (0.33%) Oracle Application Server
10 2 (0.16%) SharePoint
11 1 (0.081%) Apache Superset
11 1 (0.081%) Apache Synapse
11 1 (0.081%) Appian
11 1 (0.081%) ArcGIS
11 1 (0.081%) Camunda
11 1 (0.081%) IIS
11 1 (0.081%) Luigi
11 1 (0.081%) Oracle SOA Suite
Applications
1 10 (0.81%) Microsoft Excel
2 3 (0.24%) Chatbot
3 1 (0.081%) Microsoft Office
3 1 (0.081%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 1 (0.081%) Spreadsheet
Business Applications
1 3 (0.24%) Aladdin
2 2 (0.16%) Dynamics CRM
2 2 (0.16%) Maximo
2 2 (0.16%) SAP BPC
3 1 (0.081%) Actimize
3 1 (0.081%) BambooHR
3 1 (0.081%) Elite 3E
3 1 (0.081%) iTrent
3 1 (0.081%) NEC Housing
3 1 (0.081%) Oracle 11i
3 1 (0.081%) Oracle BPM
3 1 (0.081%) Oracle ERP
3 1 (0.081%) SAP Business ByDesign
3 1 (0.081%) SimCorp Dimension
Cloud Services
1 499 (40.67%) Azure
2 343 (27.95%) AWS
3 233 (18.99%) Power Platform
4 214 (17.44%) Azure Data Factory
5 148 (12.06%) Snowflake
6 139 (11.33%) Azure Synapse Analytics
7 131 (10.68%) GCP
8 117 (9.54%) dbt
9 114 (9.29%) Amazon S3
10 108 (8.80%) GitHub
11 97 (7.91%) Azure DevOps
12 90 (7.33%) Serverless
13 64 (5.22%) AWS Lambda
14 50 (4.07%) GitHub Actions
15 37 (3.02%) AWS CloudFormation
16 28 (2.28%) Matillion
17 23 (1.87%) AWS Step Functions
18 22 (1.79%) Amazon Kinesis
19 19 (1.55%) Amazon SQS
20 18 (1.47%) Collibra
Communications & Networking
1 21 (1.71%) DNS
1 21 (1.71%) VPN
2 20 (1.63%) BGP
2 20 (1.63%) DMZ
2 20 (1.63%) Multicast
3 4 (0.33%) Firewall
4 3 (0.24%) SAN
4 3 (0.24%) Structured Cabling
5 1 (0.081%) 4G
5 1 (0.081%) 5G
5 1 (0.081%) Network Security
5 1 (0.081%) Software-Defined Networking
5 1 (0.081%) TCP/IP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 232 (18.91%) Data Warehouse
2 217 (17.69%) Power BI
3 145 (11.82%) Data Lake
4 102 (8.31%) SQL Server
5 80 (6.52%) Azure SQL Database
6 78 (6.36%) Delta Lake
7 75 (6.11%) Amazon Redshift
8 73 (5.95%) BigQuery
9 66 (5.38%) Pentaho
10 65 (5.30%) Metadata
11 64 (5.22%) PostgreSQL
12 60 (4.89%) SQL Server Integration Services
13 59 (4.81%) Big Data
14 51 (4.16%) NoSQL
15 49 (3.99%) Tableau
16 46 (3.75%) Snowflake Schema
17 41 (3.34%) Hadoop
18 40 (3.26%) Amazon Athena
19 36 (2.93%) Relational Database
20 31 (2.53%) Star Schema
Development Applications
1 165 (13.45%) Git
2 64 (5.22%) Jenkins
3 57 (4.65%) JIRA
4 48 (3.91%) GitLab
5 19 (1.55%) MLflow
6 4 (0.33%) DBeaver
6 4 (0.33%) Visual Studio
7 3 (0.24%) Bitbucket
8 2 (0.16%) JUnit
8 2 (0.16%) Selenium
8 2 (0.16%) SonarQube
8 2 (0.16%) Sonatype Nexus
9 1 (0.081%) Cucumber
9 1 (0.081%) Deequ
9 1 (0.081%) Jaeger
9 1 (0.081%) Maven
9 1 (0.081%) Mockito
9 1 (0.081%) Poetry
9 1 (0.081%) Team Foundation Server
9 1 (0.081%) Terragrunt
General
1 205 (16.71%) Social Skills
2 192 (15.65%) Finance
3 130 (10.59%) Analytical Skills
4 111 (9.05%) Public Sector
5 61 (4.97%) Banking
6 35 (2.85%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 20 (1.63%) Investment Banking
8 17 (1.39%) Front Office
9 14 (1.14%) Pharmaceutical
10 13 (1.06%) Documentation Skills
10 13 (1.06%) Retail
11 12 (0.98%) Telecoms
12 11 (0.90%) Marketing
12 11 (0.90%) Publishing
13 10 (0.81%) Manufacturing
14 6 (0.49%) Military
15 5 (0.41%) Law
16 4 (0.33%) Back Office
16 4 (0.33%) Corporate Banking
16 4 (0.33%) Local Government
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 191 (15.57%) PySpark
2 134 (10.92%) Kafka
3 44 (3.59%) Pandas
4 27 (2.20%) JSON
5 26 (2.12%) YAML
6 22 (1.79%) REST
7 19 (1.55%) Great Expectations
8 17 (1.39%) XML
9 16 (1.30%) scikit-learn
10 15 (1.22%) PyTorch
11 13 (1.06%) Apache NiFi
11 13 (1.06%) Matplotlib
11 13 (1.06%) Node.js
11 13 (1.06%) NumPy
12 12 (0.98%) Keycloak
13 11 (0.90%) pytest
13 11 (0.90%) TensorFlow
14 9 (0.73%) Apache Beam
14 9 (0.73%) GeoJSON
14 9 (0.73%) React
Miscellaneous
1 95 (7.74%) Cloud Native
2 40 (3.26%) Legacy Systems
3 33 (2.69%) Data Structures
4 28 (2.28%) Product Ownership
5 18 (1.47%) Clustering
5 18 (1.47%) Onboarding
6 17 (1.39%) Hybrid Cloud
6 17 (1.39%) Replication
7 15 (1.22%) Data Protection Act
7 15 (1.22%) Distributed Systems
7 15 (1.22%) Greenfield Project
8 13 (1.06%) Reinsurance
9 11 (0.90%) Public Cloud
10 9 (0.73%) Distributed Computing
10 9 (0.73%) Life Science
11 8 (0.65%) Algorithms
11 8 (0.65%) Self-Motivation
12 7 (0.57%) Management Information System
12 7 (0.57%) NHS
13 6 (0.49%) Wiki
Operating Systems
1 21 (1.71%) Unix
2 20 (1.63%) Linux
3 2 (0.16%) Windows
3 2 (0.16%) Windows Server
4 1 (0.081%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 529 (43.11%) Data Pipeline
2 528 (43.03%) ETL
3 514 (41.89%) Data Engineering
4 486 (39.61%) Analytics
5 443 (36.10%) Data Modelling
6 332 (27.06%) CI/CD
7 296 (24.12%) Business Intelligence
8 255 (20.78%) DevOps
9 239 (19.48%) Agile
10 199 (16.22%) Data Governance
11 194 (15.81%) Problem-Solving
12 160 (13.04%) Data Science
13 146 (11.90%) AI
13 146 (11.90%) Data Integration
14 137 (11.17%) Data Architecture
15 129 (10.51%) Migration
16 123 (10.02%) Data Transformation
17 120 (9.78%) Machine Learning
18 116 (9.45%) Infrastructure as Code
19 113 (9.21%) Validation
Programming Languages
1 708 (57.70%) SQL
2 621 (50.61%) Python
3 81 (6.60%) Scala
4 69 (5.62%) Java
5 34 (2.77%) Data Analysis Expressions
6 33 (2.69%) C#
7 26 (2.12%) T-SQL
8 25 (2.04%) Bash
8 25 (2.04%) PL/SQL
9 18 (1.47%) Bicep
9 18 (1.47%) PowerShell
10 17 (1.39%) Shell Script
11 15 (1.22%) Go
11 15 (1.22%) R
12 12 (0.98%) JavaScript
13 3 (0.24%) Korn
13 3 (0.24%) TypeScript
14 2 (0.16%) C++
14 2 (0.16%) Ruby
14 2 (0.16%) VB
Qualifications
1 341 (27.79%) Security Cleared
2 306 (24.94%) SC Cleared
3 34 (2.77%) Azure Certification
4 33 (2.69%) Degree
5 22 (1.79%) BPSS Clearance
6 17 (1.39%) AWS Certification
7 14 (1.14%) DV Cleared
8 13 (1.06%) Computer Science Degree
9 5 (0.41%) Microsoft Certification
10 4 (0.33%) CTC Cleared
10 4 (0.33%) DBS Check
10 4 (0.33%) Master's Degree
11 3 (0.24%) SnowPro
12 2 (0.16%) Microsoft Certified Professional
13 1 (0.081%) CCIE
13 1 (0.081%) CCNP
13 1 (0.081%) Cisco Certification
13 1 (0.081%) CISM
13 1 (0.081%) CISSP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 354 (28.85%) Data Quality
2 50 (4.07%) GDPR
3 29 (2.36%) QA
4 10 (0.81%) Accessibility
5 4 (0.33%) HIPAA
5 4 (0.33%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 4 (0.33%) SLA
6 3 (0.24%) FATCA
6 3 (0.24%) GMP
6 3 (0.24%) MiFID
6 3 (0.24%) NIST
7 2 (0.16%) Dodd-Frank
7 2 (0.16%) EMIR
7 2 (0.16%) EU AI Act
8 1 (0.081%) Basel III
8 1 (0.081%) California Consumer Privacy Act
8 1 (0.081%) GxP
8 1 (0.081%) NCSC
8 1 (0.081%) PCI DSS
8 1 (0.081%) WCAG
System Software
1 86 (7.01%) Docker
2 7 (0.57%) Virtual Machines
3 2 (0.16%) HDFS
3 2 (0.16%) zsh
4 1 (0.081%) Active Directory
Systems Management
1 141 (11.49%) Terraform
2 96 (7.82%) Kubernetes
3 22 (1.79%) Grafana
4 11 (0.90%) Prometheus
5 8 (0.65%) Ansible
6 4 (0.33%) Kibana
6 4 (0.33%) Kubeflow
6 4 (0.33%) NetBackup
7 3 (0.24%) Puppet
7 3 (0.24%) Rancher
8 2 (0.16%) Apache Ranger
8 2 (0.16%) EMC NetWorker
8 2 (0.16%) logstash
8 2 (0.16%) Thomson Reuters DACS
8 2 (0.16%) Tivoli Storage Manager
9 1 (0.081%) Ambari
9 1 (0.081%) Control-M
9 1 (0.081%) ZABBIX
Vendors
1 356 (29.01%) Databricks
2 168 (13.69%) Microsoft
3 101 (8.23%) Oracle
4 91 (7.42%) Talend
5 78 (6.36%) Informatica
6 54 (4.40%) Google
7 44 (3.59%) Denodo
8 25 (2.04%) Cisco
9 22 (1.79%) F5
10 20 (1.63%) SAP
10 20 (1.63%) ServiceNow
11 17 (1.39%) Cloudera
12 16 (1.30%) Splunk
13 15 (1.22%) Foundry
13 15 (1.22%) Palantir
14 12 (0.98%) IBM
15 10 (0.81%) Alteryx
16 7 (0.57%) MuleSoft
17 6 (0.49%) OpenAI
18 5 (0.41%) Virgin Media
384 Data Engineer jobs in England