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 15 July 2026.

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

6 months to
15 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 56 108 98
Rank change year-on-year +52 -10 +20
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 1,702 667 840
As % of all contract jobs in England 3.80% 2.46% 2.29%
As % of the Job Titles category 4.11% 2.67% 2.46%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,173 495 633
10th Percentile £380 £363 £263
25th Percentile £425 £425 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £523
Median % change year-on-year - -4.31% -5.00%
75th Percentile £588 £588 £625
90th Percentile £650 £700 £688
UK median daily rate £500 £500 £500
% change year-on-year - - -9.09%
Number of hourly rates quoted 68 11 35
10th Percentile £19.34 £18.22 £37.50
25th Percentile £34.84 £46.75 £49.25
Median hourly rate £43.75 £52.50 £75.00
Median % change year-on-year -16.67% -30.00% -3.23%
75th Percentile £68.88 £78.10 £80.00
90th Percentile £75.00 £80.00 -
UK median hourly rate £50.00 £52.50 £75.00
% change year-on-year -4.76% -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 41,375 24,958 34,084
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.48% 91.99% 92.95%
Number of daily rates quoted 25,305 16,240 22,316
10th Percentile £325 £293 £300
25th Percentile £423 £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 £738 £738 £750
UK median daily rate £525 £500 £525
% change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -2.33%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,977 1,223 2,453
10th Percentile £16.03 £13.79 £13.00
25th Percentile £22.50 £17.99 £17.25
Median hourly rate £47.00 £28.18 £40.00
Median % change year-on-year +66.78% -29.55% -6.98%
75th Percentile £68.00 £57.50 £63.75
90th Percentile £80.02 £75.00 £74.91
UK median hourly rate £45.00 £26.45 £40.00
% change year-on-year +70.13% -33.88% -5.88%

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 15 July 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 15 July 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 15 July 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 +37 842 £525 +0.96% 140
Midlands +57 366 £468 +2.80% 66
West Midlands +48 323 £463 +0.54% 44
North of England +29 228 £475 - 118
North West +21 135 £525 +10.53% 62
South East +14 125 £475 +11.76% 106
South West +20 93 £525 +5.00% 39
Yorkshire -12 71 £465 -2.11% 32
East Midlands +15 43 £500 +20.48% 22
East of England -6 28 £565 +77.67% 31
North East -24 22 £510 +16.57% 24
Data Engineer
UK

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

For the 6 months to 15 July 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.

1 879 (51.65%) SQL
2 736 (43.24%) Python
3 724 (42.54%) Data Pipeline
4 636 (37.37%) Analytics
5 627 (36.84%) Data Engineering
6 615 (36.13%) ETL
7 575 (33.78%) Data Modelling
8 530 (31.14%) Azure
9 493 (28.97%) AWS
10 457 (26.85%) Security Cleared
11 417 (24.50%) Data Quality
12 410 (24.09%) CI/CD
13 399 (23.44%) SC Cleared
14 325 (19.10%) Databricks
15 323 (18.98%) Business Intelligence
16 296 (17.39%) Agile
17 281 (16.51%) Data Warehouse
17 281 (16.51%) DevOps
18 263 (15.45%) Migration
19 257 (15.10%) Power Platform
20 245 (14.39%) Power BI
21 233 (13.69%) Data Governance
22 226 (13.28%) PySpark
23 215 (12.63%) Azure Data Factory
24 206 (12.10%) Problem-Solving
25 204 (11.99%) Microsoft
26 200 (11.75%) AI
27 197 (11.57%) Validation
28 187 (10.99%) Snowflake
29 186 (10.93%) 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
1 159 (9.34%) Apache Airflow
2 136 (7.99%) Apache Spark
3 100 (5.88%) Apache
4 72 (4.23%) SAS
5 39 (2.29%) Confluence
6 10 (0.59%) Palantir Foundry
6 10 (0.59%) SharePoint
7 8 (0.47%) Jupyter
8 3 (0.18%) Microsoft Exchange
9 2 (0.12%) Apache Superset
10 1 (0.059%) Camunda
10 1 (0.059%) Liferay
10 1 (0.059%) Luigi
10 1 (0.059%) R Markdown
Applications
1 15 (0.88%) Microsoft Excel
2 5 (0.29%) Notepad++
3 4 (0.24%) Spreadsheet
4 2 (0.12%) Chatbot
5 1 (0.059%) Microsoft PowerPoint
Business Applications
1 10 (0.59%) Aladdin
2 8 (0.47%) Dynamics CRM
3 5 (0.29%) Infor LN
3 5 (0.29%) NetSuite
3 5 (0.29%) 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 (0.059%) Elite 3E
6 1 (0.059%) FIS Private Capital Suite
6 1 (0.059%) iTrent
6 1 (0.059%) NEC Housing
6 1 (0.059%) Oracle 11i
6 1 (0.059%) Oracle Assets
6 1 (0.059%) Raiser’s Edge
6 1 (0.059%) SAP Business ByDesign
6 1 (0.059%) SAP CAR
6 1 (0.059%) SAP EWM
Cloud Services
1 530 (31.14%) Azure
2 493 (28.97%) AWS
3 257 (15.10%) Power Platform
4 215 (12.63%) Azure Data Factory
5 187 (10.99%) Snowflake
6 178 (10.46%) dbt
7 153 (8.99%) Amazon S3
8 148 (8.70%) GCP
9 139 (8.17%) Azure Synapse Analytics
10 128 (7.52%) Azure DevOps
11 101 (5.93%) GitHub
11 101 (5.93%) Serverless
12 87 (5.11%) AWS Lambda
13 47 (2.76%) GitHub Actions
14 37 (2.17%) Amazon EMR
15 32 (1.88%) Matillion
16 26 (1.53%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 24 (1.41%) Amazon Kinesis
17 24 (1.41%) AWS CloudFormation
17 24 (1.41%) OpenShift
Communications & Networking
1 33 (1.94%) DNS
1 33 (1.94%) VPN
2 32 (1.88%) BGP
2 32 (1.88%) DMZ
2 32 (1.88%) Multicast
3 10 (0.59%) Structured Cabling
4 6 (0.35%) Firewall
5 5 (0.29%) PuTTY
5 5 (0.29%) WinSCP
6 4 (0.24%) Wi-Fi
6 4 (0.24%) Wireless
7 2 (0.12%) Intrusion Detection
8 1 (0.059%) 4G
8 1 (0.059%) 5G
Database & Business Intelligence
1 281 (16.51%) Data Warehouse
2 245 (14.39%) Power BI
3 155 (9.11%) Data Lake
4 98 (5.76%) Amazon Redshift
5 94 (5.52%) BigQuery
6 93 (5.46%) SQL Server
7 85 (4.99%) Delta Lake
7 85 (4.99%) Metadata
8 83 (4.88%) Pentaho
9 75 (4.41%) Tableau
10 62 (3.64%) Amazon Athena
10 62 (3.64%) PostgreSQL
11 61 (3.58%) Big Data
12 60 (3.53%) Snowflake Schema
13 51 (3.00%) Azure SQL Database
14 50 (2.94%) SQL Server Integration Services
15 43 (2.53%) NoSQL
16 42 (2.47%) Relational Database
17 36 (2.12%) Hadoop
18 35 (2.06%) Data Vault
Development Applications
1 153 (8.99%) Git
2 83 (4.88%) GitLab
3 73 (4.29%) JIRA
4 43 (2.53%) Jenkins
5 7 (0.41%) Postman
6 5 (0.29%) Artifactory
6 5 (0.29%) Bitbucket
6 5 (0.29%) MLflow
7 3 (0.18%) Newman
7 3 (0.18%) SonarQube
8 2 (0.12%) Atlassian Bamboo
8 2 (0.12%) Sonatype Nexus
8 2 (0.12%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
8 2 (0.12%) Terragrunt
8 2 (0.12%) Visual Studio
8 2 (0.12%) Yeoman
9 1 (0.059%) ERwin
9 1 (0.059%) JUnit
9 1 (0.059%) Octopus Deploy
9 1 (0.059%) Selenium
General
1 286 (16.80%) Finance
2 265 (15.57%) Social Skills
3 187 (10.99%) Analytical Skills
4 144 (8.46%) Public Sector
5 95 (5.58%) Banking
6 33 (1.94%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 28 (1.65%) Retail
8 24 (1.41%) Telecoms
9 22 (1.29%) Documentation Skills
10 21 (1.23%) Marketing
11 19 (1.12%) Investment Banking
11 19 (1.12%) Manufacturing
12 16 (0.94%) Automotive
12 16 (0.94%) Pharmaceutical
13 13 (0.76%) Aerospace
13 13 (0.76%) Front Office
14 11 (0.65%) Publishing
15 9 (0.53%) Billing
15 9 (0.53%) Legal
16 7 (0.41%) Military
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 226 (13.28%) PySpark
2 127 (7.46%) Kafka
3 38 (2.23%) Pandas
4 33 (1.94%) JSON
5 26 (1.53%) REST
6 22 (1.29%) Great Expectations
6 22 (1.29%) Spring
6 22 (1.29%) Spring Boot
7 21 (1.23%) XML
8 17 (1.00%) YAML
9 16 (0.94%) Apache Beam
10 13 (0.76%) Apache Avro
11 11 (0.65%) React
12 10 (0.59%) Microsoft Graph
12 10 (0.59%) RESTful
12 10 (0.59%) scikit-learn
13 9 (0.53%) GeoJSON
13 9 (0.53%) Node.js
13 9 (0.53%) Polars
13 9 (0.53%) pytest
Miscellaneous
1 132 (7.76%) Cloud Native
2 65 (3.82%) Legacy Systems
3 45 (2.64%) Data Structures
4 29 (1.70%) Onboarding
5 27 (1.59%) Distributed Systems
6 23 (1.35%) Greenfield Project
7 22 (1.29%) NHS
7 22 (1.29%) Reinsurance
8 21 (1.23%) Product Ownership
9 18 (1.06%) Clustering
10 16 (0.94%) Data Protection Act
11 11 (0.65%) Life Science
11 11 (0.65%) Virtual Team
12 9 (0.53%) Distributed Computing
12 9 (0.53%) Driving Licence
12 9 (0.53%) Reference Data
12 9 (0.53%) Replication
12 9 (0.53%) Self-Motivation
13 8 (0.47%) Analytical Mindset
13 8 (0.47%) Derivative
Operating Systems
1 56 (3.29%) Unix
2 38 (2.23%) Linux
3 4 (0.24%) Windows
4 2 (0.12%) Ubuntu
4 2 (0.12%) Windows Server
5 1 (0.059%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 724 (42.54%) Data Pipeline
2 636 (37.37%) Analytics
3 627 (36.84%) Data Engineering
4 615 (36.13%) ETL
5 575 (33.78%) Data Modelling
6 410 (24.09%) CI/CD
7 323 (18.98%) Business Intelligence
8 296 (17.39%) Agile
9 281 (16.51%) DevOps
10 263 (15.45%) Migration
11 233 (13.69%) Data Governance
12 206 (12.10%) Problem-Solving
13 200 (11.75%) AI
14 197 (11.57%) Validation
15 186 (10.93%) Data Integration
16 172 (10.11%) Data Transformation
17 168 (9.87%) Decision-Making
18 157 (9.22%) Data Science
19 142 (8.34%) Infrastructure as Code
20 135 (7.93%) Test Automation
Programming Languages
1 879 (51.65%) SQL
2 736 (43.24%) Python
3 106 (6.23%) Java
4 56 (3.29%) Scala
5 48 (2.82%) PL/SQL
6 30 (1.76%) Shell Script
6 30 (1.76%) T-SQL
7 29 (1.70%) C#
8 28 (1.65%) Data Analysis Expressions
9 27 (1.59%) Bash
10 23 (1.35%) PowerShell
11 13 (0.76%) R
12 12 (0.71%) Bicep
13 10 (0.59%) JavaScript
14 7 (0.41%) Go
14 7 (0.41%) TypeScript
15 2 (0.12%) HiveQL
15 2 (0.12%) Korn
15 2 (0.12%) Ruby
15 2 (0.12%) SPARQL
Qualifications
1 457 (26.85%) Security Cleared
2 399 (23.44%) SC Cleared
3 42 (2.47%) BPSS Clearance
4 41 (2.41%) Degree
5 26 (1.53%) Azure Certification
6 21 (1.23%) DV Cleared
7 19 (1.12%) Computer Science Degree
8 11 (0.65%) AWS Certification
9 9 (0.53%) City & Guilds
9 9 (0.53%) DBS Check
10 6 (0.35%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
10 6 (0.35%) SnowPro
11 5 (0.29%) BICSI Certification
12 4 (0.24%) CISM
12 4 (0.24%) CISSP
12 4 (0.24%) Master's Degree
13 3 (0.18%) Microsoft Certification
14 2 (0.12%) CEH
15 1 (0.059%) CISA
15 1 (0.059%) Cisco Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 417 (24.50%) Data Quality
2 55 (3.23%) QA
3 46 (2.70%) GDPR
4 18 (1.06%) Accessibility
5 12 (0.71%) SLA
6 9 (0.53%) FATCA
7 5 (0.29%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 4 (0.24%) ISO/IEC 27001
9 3 (0.18%) GMP
9 3 (0.18%) HIPAA
9 3 (0.18%) MiFID
10 2 (0.12%) California Consumer Privacy Act
10 2 (0.12%) EMIR
10 2 (0.12%) PMO
10 2 (0.12%) SNOMED CT
10 2 (0.12%) WCAG
11 1 (0.059%) GxP
11 1 (0.059%) IFRS 17
11 1 (0.059%) NIST
11 1 (0.059%) PCI DSS
System Software
1 94 (5.52%) Docker
2 5 (0.29%) Virtual Machines
3 2 (0.12%) Active Directory
3 2 (0.12%) HDFS
4 1 (0.059%) RACF
Systems Management
1 179 (10.52%) Terraform
2 77 (4.52%) Kubernetes
3 35 (2.06%) Grafana
4 13 (0.76%) Ansible
5 10 (0.59%) Prometheus
6 6 (0.35%) Kibana
7 3 (0.18%) Control-M
7 3 (0.18%) Rancher
8 2 (0.12%) Apache Ranger
8 2 (0.12%) Thomson Reuters DACS
9 1 (0.059%) Kubeflow
9 1 (0.059%) logstash
9 1 (0.059%) NetBackup
9 1 (0.059%) Puppet
Vendors
1 325 (19.10%) Databricks
2 204 (11.99%) Microsoft
3 151 (8.87%) Oracle
4 124 (7.29%) Informatica
5 114 (6.70%) Talend
6 60 (3.53%) Denodo
6 60 (3.53%) Google
7 34 (2.00%) Cisco
7 34 (2.00%) F5
8 31 (1.82%) SAP
9 25 (1.47%) Salesforce
10 21 (1.23%) Splunk
11 18 (1.06%) Cloudera
12 17 (1.00%) Palantir
13 15 (0.88%) ServiceNow
14 14 (0.82%) Alteryx
15 13 (0.76%) Foundry
16 12 (0.71%) Sage
17 9 (0.53%) Bloomberg
17 9 (0.53%) IBM