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 23 May 2026.

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

6 months to
23 May 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 58 86 103
Rank change year-on-year +28 +17 +10
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 1,543 693 803
As % of all contract jobs in England 3.72% 2.91% 2.21%
As % of the Job Titles category 4.03% 3.15% 2.38%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,096 532 618
10th Percentile £375 £355 £219
25th Percentile £425 £425 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £500
Median % change year-on-year - - -9.09%
75th Percentile £588 £600 £600
90th Percentile £661 £725 £688
UK median daily rate £500 £500 £500
% change year-on-year - - -9.09%
Number of hourly rates quoted 50 10 43
10th Percentile £19.01 £18.18 £37.50
25th Percentile £35.31 £51.25 £49.25
Median hourly rate £52.50 £63.75 £67.50
Median % change year-on-year -17.65% -5.56% -10.60%
75th Percentile £71.50 £79.68 £80.00
90th Percentile £75.40 £93.75 -
UK median hourly rate £52.50 £63.75 £65.00
% change year-on-year -17.65% -1.92% -13.91%

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 38,335 21,999 33,717
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.30% 92.32% 92.79%
Number of daily rates quoted 23,771 14,636 22,380
10th Percentile £320 £290 £283
25th Percentile £413 £406 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £515 £520 £525
Median % change year-on-year -0.96% -0.95% -4.55%
75th Percentile £625 £638 £640
90th Percentile £725 £750 £750
UK median daily rate £513 £508 £525
% change year-on-year +0.99% -3.33% -2.82%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,655 881 2,449
10th Percentile £15.50 £14.00 £12.86
25th Percentile £21.00 £18.50 £16.30
Median hourly rate £45.00 £29.07 £37.18
Median % change year-on-year +54.80% -21.81% -17.38%
75th Percentile £67.50 £61.25 £61.30
90th Percentile £78.75 £75.00 £72.90
UK median hourly rate £42.59 £27.97 £36.50
% change year-on-year +52.31% -23.38% -18.89%

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 23 May 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 23 May 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 23 May 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 +25 849 £524 -0.24% 132
Midlands +35 293 £469 +3.08% 48
West Midlands +35 275 £469 +1.85% 33
North of England -3 198 £465 -0.80% 96
North West +10 127 £490 +3.16% 41
South East -13 95 £500 +14.29% 86
South West +3 72 £500 - 38
Yorkshire -30 54 £465 +3.33% 31
East of England -25 19 £520 +63.52% 4
East Midlands -25 18 £525 +26.51% 15
North East -21 17 £450 -5.26% 26
Data Engineer
UK

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

For the 6 months to 23 May 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.

1 840 (54.44%) SQL
2 694 (44.98%) Python
3 636 (41.22%) Data Pipeline
4 600 (38.89%) ETL
5 589 (38.17%) Analytics
6 584 (37.85%) Data Engineering
7 536 (34.74%) Azure
7 536 (34.74%) Data Modelling
8 451 (29.23%) Security Cleared
9 421 (27.28%) AWS
10 404 (26.18%) SC Cleared
11 391 (25.34%) Data Quality
12 368 (23.85%) CI/CD
13 360 (23.33%) Databricks
14 329 (21.32%) Business Intelligence
15 280 (18.15%) DevOps
16 273 (17.69%) Agile
17 263 (17.04%) Power Platform
18 257 (16.66%) Data Warehouse
19 249 (16.14%) Power BI
20 234 (15.17%) Azure Data Factory
21 229 (14.84%) PySpark
22 220 (14.26%) Data Governance
23 209 (13.55%) Problem-Solving
24 205 (13.29%) Microsoft
25 194 (12.57%) Migration
26 176 (11.41%) AI
27 169 (10.95%) Data Lake
28 168 (10.89%) Terraform
29 167 (10.82%) 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
1 148 (9.59%) Apache Airflow
2 147 (9.53%) Apache Spark
3 92 (5.96%) Apache
4 70 (4.54%) SAS
5 26 (1.69%) Confluence
6 9 (0.58%) Palantir Foundry
7 8 (0.52%) Jupyter
8 5 (0.32%) Microsoft Exchange
9 3 (0.19%) SharePoint
10 1 (0.065%) Apache Superset
10 1 (0.065%) Appian
10 1 (0.065%) Camunda
10 1 (0.065%) Luigi
10 1 (0.065%) R Markdown
Applications
1 17 (1.10%) Microsoft Excel
2 5 (0.32%) Notepad++
3 4 (0.26%) Spreadsheet
4 2 (0.13%) Chatbot
Business Applications
1 6 (0.39%) Aladdin
2 3 (0.19%) SimCorp Dimension
3 2 (0.13%) BambooHR
3 2 (0.13%) Dynamics CRM
3 2 (0.13%) SAP BPC
3 2 (0.13%) SAP S/4HANA
4 1 (0.065%) Actimize
4 1 (0.065%) Elite 3E
4 1 (0.065%) Infor LN
4 1 (0.065%) iTrent
4 1 (0.065%) NEC Housing
4 1 (0.065%) Oracle 11i
4 1 (0.065%) Oracle Assets
4 1 (0.065%) Oracle EBS
4 1 (0.065%) Oracle ERP
4 1 (0.065%) Raiser’s Edge
4 1 (0.065%) SAP Business ByDesign
Cloud Services
1 536 (34.74%) Azure
2 421 (27.28%) AWS
3 263 (17.04%) Power Platform
4 234 (15.17%) Azure Data Factory
5 160 (10.37%) Azure Synapse Analytics
6 148 (9.59%) Snowflake
7 140 (9.07%) Amazon S3
8 139 (9.01%) GCP
9 134 (8.68%) dbt
10 131 (8.49%) Azure DevOps
11 113 (7.32%) GitHub
12 88 (5.70%) Serverless
13 74 (4.80%) AWS Lambda
14 54 (3.50%) GitHub Actions
15 32 (2.07%) AWS CloudFormation
16 28 (1.81%) Matillion
17 26 (1.69%) Amazon Kinesis
18 24 (1.56%) OpenShift
19 22 (1.43%) Amazon EMR
20 21 (1.36%) Dagster
Communications & Networking
1 33 (2.14%) DNS
1 33 (2.14%) VPN
2 32 (2.07%) BGP
2 32 (2.07%) DMZ
2 32 (2.07%) Multicast
3 10 (0.65%) Structured Cabling
4 5 (0.32%) PuTTY
4 5 (0.32%) WinSCP
5 4 (0.26%) Firewall
5 4 (0.26%) Wi-Fi
5 4 (0.26%) Wireless
6 1 (0.065%) 4G
6 1 (0.065%) 5G
6 1 (0.065%) Network Security
6 1 (0.065%) Software-Defined Networking
Database & Business Intelligence
1 257 (16.66%) Data Warehouse
2 249 (16.14%) Power BI
3 169 (10.95%) Data Lake
4 119 (7.71%) SQL Server
5 96 (6.22%) Delta Lake
6 84 (5.44%) BigQuery
6 84 (5.44%) Metadata
7 82 (5.31%) Amazon Redshift
8 79 (5.12%) Azure SQL Database
9 77 (4.99%) Pentaho
10 68 (4.41%) Tableau
11 62 (4.02%) Snowflake Schema
12 61 (3.95%) Big Data
12 61 (3.95%) PostgreSQL
13 57 (3.69%) NoSQL
13 57 (3.69%) SQL Server Integration Services
14 54 (3.50%) Amazon Athena
15 39 (2.53%) Relational Database
16 36 (2.33%) Data Vault
16 36 (2.33%) Hadoop
Development Applications
1 158 (10.24%) Git
2 70 (4.54%) GitLab
3 68 (4.41%) JIRA
4 49 (3.18%) Jenkins
5 12 (0.78%) MLflow
6 4 (0.26%) Postman
7 3 (0.19%) Artifactory
7 3 (0.19%) Newman
8 2 (0.13%) Bitbucket
8 2 (0.13%) SonarQube
8 2 (0.13%) Sonatype Nexus
8 2 (0.13%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
8 2 (0.13%) Visual Studio
9 1 (0.065%) ER Studio
9 1 (0.065%) ERwin
9 1 (0.065%) Jaeger
9 1 (0.065%) JUnit
9 1 (0.065%) Poetry
9 1 (0.065%) Selenium
9 1 (0.065%) Terragrunt
General
1 260 (16.85%) Finance
2 234 (15.17%) Social Skills
3 161 (10.43%) Analytical Skills
4 124 (8.04%) Public Sector
5 82 (5.31%) Banking
6 26 (1.69%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 22 (1.43%) Investment Banking
8 21 (1.36%) Retail
8 21 (1.36%) Telecoms
9 19 (1.23%) Marketing
10 18 (1.17%) Documentation Skills
11 16 (1.04%) Manufacturing
12 14 (0.91%) Aerospace
12 14 (0.91%) Pharmaceutical
13 11 (0.71%) Front Office
13 11 (0.71%) Publishing
14 7 (0.45%) Military
15 5 (0.32%) Games
15 5 (0.32%) Law
15 5 (0.32%) Local Government
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 229 (14.84%) PySpark
2 138 (8.94%) Kafka
3 50 (3.24%) Pandas
4 30 (1.94%) JSON
5 27 (1.75%) Great Expectations
6 24 (1.56%) REST
7 23 (1.49%) YAML
8 21 (1.36%) Spring
8 21 (1.36%) Spring Boot
9 16 (1.04%) XML
10 15 (0.97%) Apache Beam
11 13 (0.84%) Apache Avro
12 12 (0.78%) PyTorch
12 12 (0.78%) React
12 12 (0.78%) scikit-learn
13 11 (0.71%) Matplotlib
14 10 (0.65%) Node.js
15 9 (0.58%) GeoJSON
15 9 (0.58%) Polars
15 9 (0.58%) pytest
Miscellaneous
1 116 (7.52%) Cloud Native
2 45 (2.92%) Legacy Systems
3 35 (2.27%) Data Structures
4 29 (1.88%) Greenfield Project
4 29 (1.88%) Product Ownership
5 20 (1.30%) Distributed Systems
5 20 (1.30%) Onboarding
6 19 (1.23%) Clustering
7 17 (1.10%) Reinsurance
8 14 (0.91%) Data Protection Act
9 13 (0.84%) NHS
9 13 (0.84%) Replication
10 12 (0.78%) Distributed Computing
11 11 (0.71%) Self-Motivation
12 10 (0.65%) Life Science
13 9 (0.58%) Driving Licence
13 9 (0.58%) Public Cloud
13 9 (0.58%) Reference Data
14 8 (0.52%) AI Agents
14 8 (0.52%) Analytical Mindset
Operating Systems
1 52 (3.37%) Unix
2 34 (2.20%) Linux
3 4 (0.26%) Windows
4 2 (0.13%) Ubuntu
4 2 (0.13%) VMS
4 2 (0.13%) Windows Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 636 (41.22%) Data Pipeline
2 600 (38.89%) ETL
3 589 (38.17%) Analytics
4 584 (37.85%) Data Engineering
5 536 (34.74%) Data Modelling
6 368 (23.85%) CI/CD
7 329 (21.32%) Business Intelligence
8 280 (18.15%) DevOps
9 273 (17.69%) Agile
10 220 (14.26%) Data Governance
11 209 (13.55%) Problem-Solving
12 194 (12.57%) Migration
13 176 (11.41%) AI
14 167 (10.82%) Data Integration
15 163 (10.56%) Validation
16 152 (9.85%) Data Science
17 135 (8.75%) Decision-Making
18 130 (8.43%) Data Transformation
19 128 (8.30%) Data Architecture
20 125 (8.10%) Infrastructure as Code
Programming Languages
1 840 (54.44%) SQL
2 694 (44.98%) Python
3 100 (6.48%) Java
4 82 (5.31%) Scala
5 43 (2.79%) PL/SQL
6 36 (2.33%) C#
7 35 (2.27%) Data Analysis Expressions
8 34 (2.20%) T-SQL
9 27 (1.75%) Bash
9 27 (1.75%) Shell Script
10 18 (1.17%) Bicep
11 17 (1.10%) PowerShell
12 14 (0.91%) R
13 12 (0.78%) JavaScript
14 8 (0.52%) Go
15 6 (0.39%) TypeScript
16 3 (0.19%) C
17 2 (0.13%) LookML
17 2 (0.13%) Ruby
17 2 (0.13%) VB
Qualifications
1 451 (29.23%) Security Cleared
2 404 (26.18%) SC Cleared
3 41 (2.66%) Degree
4 30 (1.94%) BPSS Clearance
5 28 (1.81%) Azure Certification
6 17 (1.10%) Computer Science Degree
7 12 (0.78%) DV Cleared
8 10 (0.65%) DBS Check
9 9 (0.58%) City & Guilds
10 6 (0.39%) AWS Certification
10 6 (0.39%) Master's Degree
10 6 (0.39%) Microsoft Certification
11 5 (0.32%) BICSI Certification
12 3 (0.19%) SnowPro
13 2 (0.13%) CISM
13 2 (0.13%) CISSP
13 2 (0.13%) CTC Cleared
14 1 (0.065%) CCIE
14 1 (0.065%) CCNP
14 1 (0.065%) Cisco Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 391 (25.34%) Data Quality
2 50 (3.24%) QA
3 49 (3.18%) GDPR
4 10 (0.65%) Accessibility
4 10 (0.65%) SLA
5 9 (0.58%) FATCA
6 5 (0.32%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 5 (0.32%) MiFID
7 4 (0.26%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 3 (0.19%) GMP
8 3 (0.19%) HIPAA
9 2 (0.13%) EMIR
9 2 (0.13%) SNOMED CT
9 2 (0.13%) WCAG
10 1 (0.065%) Basel III
10 1 (0.065%) California Consumer Privacy Act
10 1 (0.065%) GRC
10 1 (0.065%) GxP
10 1 (0.065%) NIST
10 1 (0.065%) PCI DSS
System Software
1 94 (6.09%) Docker
2 6 (0.39%) Virtual Machines
3 2 (0.13%) HDFS
4 1 (0.065%) Active Directory
4 1 (0.065%) RACF
Systems Management
1 168 (10.89%) Terraform
2 82 (5.31%) Kubernetes
3 37 (2.40%) Grafana
4 12 (0.78%) Ansible
5 11 (0.71%) Prometheus
6 7 (0.45%) Kibana
7 3 (0.19%) Rancher
8 2 (0.13%) Apache Ranger
8 2 (0.13%) Control-M
8 2 (0.13%) logstash
8 2 (0.13%) Thomson Reuters DACS
9 1 (0.065%) Kubeflow
9 1 (0.065%) NetBackup
9 1 (0.065%) Puppet
Vendors
1 360 (23.33%) Databricks
2 205 (13.29%) Microsoft
3 133 (8.62%) Oracle
4 108 (7.00%) Talend
5 107 (6.93%) Informatica
6 61 (3.95%) Denodo
7 57 (3.69%) Google
8 35 (2.27%) Cisco
9 34 (2.20%) F5
10 26 (1.69%) SAP
11 22 (1.43%) Splunk
12 19 (1.23%) ServiceNow
13 16 (1.04%) Cloudera
14 15 (0.97%) Alteryx
15 12 (0.78%) Foundry
16 10 (0.65%) IBM
16 10 (0.65%) Palantir
17 8 (0.52%) Dynatrace
17 8 (0.52%) InterSystems
17 8 (0.52%) MuleSoft