Data Engineer Contract Job Trends in England

Data Engineer
UK > England

The median Data Engineer daily rate in England is £513, according to job vacancies posted in the 6 months leading up to 27 October 2025.

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

6 months to
27 Oct 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 126 94 130
Rank change year-on-year -32 +36 +5
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 649 770 798
As % of all contract jobs in England 2.27% 2.47% 1.97%
As % of the Job Titles category 2.49% 2.66% 2.10%
Number of daily rates quoted 465 532 601
10th Percentile £363 £371 £400
25th Percentile £413 £456 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -6.82% - -
75th Percentile £600 £638 £644
90th Percentile £695 £700 £719
UK median daily rate £500 £530 £550
% change year-on-year -5.66% -3.64% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 12 6 13
10th Percentile £25.25 £37.75 £35.13
25th Percentile £32.94 £51.94 £39.85
Median hourly rate £48.00 £77.50 £63.00
Median % change year-on-year -38.06% +23.02% +8.62%
75th Percentile £71.94 £97.50 £68.00
90th Percentile £107.00 - £78.75
UK median hourly rate £52.50 £55.25 £63.00
% change year-on-year -4.98% -12.30% +8.62%

All Contract IT Job Vacancies
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 26,022 28,980 37,943
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 91.11% 92.99% 93.81%
Number of daily rates quoted 16,702 17,689 26,414
10th Percentile £280 £300 £300
25th Percentile £403 £413 £419
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £510 £525 £539
Median % change year-on-year -2.86% -2.60% -2.00%
75th Percentile £625 £638 £650
90th Percentile £725 £750 £750
UK median daily rate £500 £525 £525
% change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 1,501 1,127 1,418
10th Percentile £14.00 £15.10 £15.21
25th Percentile £17.38 £21.25 £19.06
Median hourly rate £25.15 £42.50 £45.00
Median % change year-on-year -40.82% -5.56% +55.17%
75th Percentile £50.00 £67.01 £65.00
90th Percentile £70.00 £74.92 £77.50
UK median hourly rate £25.15 £39.75 £44.50
% change year-on-year -36.73% -10.67% +61.82%

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 27 October 2025.

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 27 October 2025.

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 27 October 2025. 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 -19 405 £525 -8.70% 361
North of England -23 77 £445 -9.64% 103
Midlands -24 64 £500 +3.68% 67
West Midlands -23 49 £515 +5.10% 52
South West +20 37 £550 +4.76% 25
North West -22 34 £405 -16.92% 62
Yorkshire -26 34 £513 +5.67% 30
South East -38 33 £475 -11.63% 282
East Midlands -8 13 £460 +25.85% 15
North East 0 10 £416 -28.85% 12
East of England -26 5 £625 +79.86% 24
Data Engineer
UK

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

For the 6 months to 27 October 2025, 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.

1 414 (63.79%) Python
2 397 (61.17%) SQL
3 312 (48.07%) Data Pipeline
4 277 (42.68%) Azure
5 267 (41.14%) ETL
6 262 (40.37%) Data Engineering
7 238 (36.67%) AWS
8 226 (34.82%) Data Modelling
9 207 (31.90%) Analytics
10 202 (31.12%) Databricks
11 200 (30.82%) CI/CD
12 173 (26.66%) Data Quality
13 158 (24.35%) Business Intelligence
14 143 (22.03%) Data Warehouse
15 138 (21.26%) DevOps
15 138 (21.26%) Security Cleared
16 124 (19.11%) Azure Data Factory
17 122 (18.80%) Power Platform
18 120 (18.49%) Agile
18 120 (18.49%) Power BI
19 113 (17.41%) Apache Airflow
20 111 (17.10%) SC Cleared
21 109 (16.80%) Data Science
21 109 (16.80%) Problem-Solving
22 108 (16.64%) PySpark
23 95 (14.64%) Snowflake
24 90 (13.87%) GCP
25 88 (13.56%) Machine Learning
26 87 (13.41%) Git
27 83 (12.79%) AI

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
1 113 (17.41%) Apache Airflow
2 74 (11.40%) Apache Spark
3 55 (8.47%) Apache
4 23 (3.54%) Confluence
5 12 (1.85%) SAS
6 8 (1.23%) Oracle Application Server
7 7 (1.08%) SharePoint
8 6 (0.92%) Apache Pig
9 5 (0.77%) IIS
10 4 (0.62%) Jupyter
11 3 (0.46%) Luigi
11 3 (0.46%) Oracle SOA Suite
12 2 (0.31%) ArcGIS
12 2 (0.31%) Documentum
13 1 (0.15%) nginx
Applications
1 5 (0.77%) Microsoft Excel
2 4 (0.62%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 2 (0.31%) Microsoft Office
3 2 (0.31%) Windchill
4 1 (0.15%) MS Visio
4 1 (0.15%) SPSS
4 1 (0.15%) Stata
Business Applications
1 3 (0.46%) Oracle BPM
2 2 (0.31%) Aladdin
2 2 (0.31%) Dynamics CRM
2 2 (0.31%) Payment Gateway
2 2 (0.31%) SAP S/4HANA
3 1 (0.15%) Dynamics AX
3 1 (0.15%) Endur
3 1 (0.15%) NetSuite
3 1 (0.15%) Salesforce CRM
3 1 (0.15%) SAP BPC
3 1 (0.15%) SAP ERP
3 1 (0.15%) SAP Oil and Gas
Cloud Services
1 277 (42.68%) Azure
2 238 (36.67%) AWS
3 124 (19.11%) Azure Data Factory
4 122 (18.80%) Power Platform
5 95 (14.64%) Snowflake
6 90 (13.87%) GCP
7 79 (12.17%) dbt
8 77 (11.86%) Azure Synapse Analytics
9 69 (10.63%) Amazon S3
10 65 (10.02%) GitHub
11 54 (8.32%) Serverless
12 39 (6.01%) Azure DevOps
13 36 (5.55%) GitHub Actions
14 34 (5.24%) AWS Lambda
15 17 (2.62%) AWS CloudFormation
15 17 (2.62%) SaaS
16 16 (2.47%) Amazon EMR
17 15 (2.31%) Amazon Kinesis
18 10 (1.54%) Amazon SageMaker
19 9 (1.39%) Matillion
Communications & Networking
1 5 (0.77%) TCP/IP
2 4 (0.62%) Firewall
3 3 (0.46%) Internet
3 3 (0.46%) SSH
4 2 (0.31%) DNS
4 2 (0.31%) SSL
4 2 (0.31%) Structured Cabling
5 1 (0.15%) 802.11
5 1 (0.15%) Ethernet
5 1 (0.15%) Wi-Fi
5 1 (0.15%) Wireless
Database & Business Intelligence
1 143 (22.03%) Data Warehouse
2 120 (18.49%) Power BI
3 82 (12.63%) Data Lake
4 62 (9.55%) Big Data
5 58 (8.94%) SQL Server
6 50 (7.70%) Hadoop
7 48 (7.40%) PostgreSQL
8 43 (6.63%) Delta Lake
9 40 (6.16%) Amazon Redshift
10 35 (5.39%) BigQuery
10 35 (5.39%) NoSQL
11 31 (4.78%) Relational Database
12 30 (4.62%) Azure SQL Database
13 29 (4.47%) Tableau
14 25 (3.85%) Metadata
15 24 (3.70%) SQL Server Integration Services
15 24 (3.70%) Star Schema
16 19 (2.93%) Snowflake Schema
17 18 (2.77%) Elasticsearch
18 17 (2.62%) Amazon QuickSight
Development Applications
1 87 (13.41%) Git
2 47 (7.24%) Jenkins
3 34 (5.24%) JIRA
4 21 (3.24%) GitLab
5 16 (2.47%) MLflow
6 8 (1.23%) DBeaver
7 5 (0.77%) SonarQube
7 5 (0.77%) Visual Studio Code
8 4 (0.62%) Bitbucket
9 3 (0.46%) Poetry
9 3 (0.46%) PyCharm
9 3 (0.46%) Sonatype Nexus
9 3 (0.46%) Visual Studio
10 2 (0.31%) Selenium
11 1 (0.15%) Cucumber
11 1 (0.15%) ERwin
11 1 (0.15%) JUnit
11 1 (0.15%) Maven
11 1 (0.15%) Mockito
11 1 (0.15%) Team Foundation Server
General
1 133 (20.49%) Social Skills
2 112 (17.26%) Finance
3 85 (13.10%) Analytical Skills
4 48 (7.40%) Public Sector
5 30 (4.62%) Banking
6 15 (2.31%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 13 (2.00%) Retail
8 11 (1.69%) Investment Banking
8 11 (1.69%) Marketing
9 10 (1.54%) Front Office
10 9 (1.39%) Pharmaceutical
10 9 (1.39%) Telecoms
11 5 (0.77%) Documentation Skills
12 4 (0.62%) Organisational Skills
12 4 (0.62%) Presentation Skills
13 3 (0.46%) Influencing Skills
13 3 (0.46%) Legal
13 3 (0.46%) Military
13 3 (0.46%) Retail Banking
13 3 (0.46%) Tech for Good
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 108 (16.64%) PySpark
2 69 (10.63%) Kafka
3 19 (2.93%) Apache NiFi
4 14 (2.16%) XML
5 12 (1.85%) HTML
6 11 (1.69%) Pandas
6 11 (1.69%) RabbitMQ
6 11 (1.69%) RESTful
7 10 (1.54%) Flask
8 8 (1.23%) Jinja
8 8 (1.23%) JSON
8 8 (1.23%) NumPy
8 8 (1.23%) Oracle GoldenGate
9 7 (1.08%) GraphQL
9 7 (1.08%) pytest
9 7 (1.08%) PyTorch
10 6 (0.92%) Middleware
11 5 (0.77%) CSS
11 5 (0.77%) Node.js
11 5 (0.77%) REST
Miscellaneous
1 39 (6.01%) Cloud Native
2 20 (3.08%) Legacy Systems
3 19 (2.93%) Data Structures
4 18 (2.77%) Algorithms
4 18 (2.77%) Product Ownership
5 16 (2.47%) Replication
6 12 (1.85%) Data Protection Act
7 11 (1.69%) Distributed Computing
8 10 (1.54%) Onboarding
9 9 (1.39%) Greenfield Project
10 7 (1.08%) Hybrid Cloud
10 7 (1.08%) IoT
11 6 (0.92%) Life Science
11 6 (0.92%) Reinsurance
12 5 (0.77%) Clustering
12 5 (0.77%) Data Fabric
12 5 (0.77%) Linux Command Line
12 5 (0.77%) Self-Motivation
12 5 (0.77%) Virtual Team
13 4 (0.62%) Derivative
Operating Systems
1 23 (3.54%) Linux
2 13 (2.00%) Unix
3 3 (0.46%) Windows
4 2 (0.31%) Windows Server
4 2 (0.31%) Windows Server 2003
Processes & Methodologies
1 312 (48.07%) Data Pipeline
2 267 (41.14%) ETL
3 262 (40.37%) Data Engineering
4 226 (34.82%) Data Modelling
5 207 (31.90%) Analytics
6 200 (30.82%) CI/CD
7 158 (24.35%) Business Intelligence
8 138 (21.26%) DevOps
9 120 (18.49%) Agile
10 109 (16.80%) Data Science
10 109 (16.80%) Problem-Solving
11 88 (13.56%) Machine Learning
12 83 (12.79%) AI
13 81 (12.48%) Data Governance
14 79 (12.17%) Infrastructure as Code
15 77 (11.86%) Data Integration
16 69 (10.63%) Migration
17 68 (10.48%) Data Transformation
18 67 (10.32%) Visualisation
19 61 (9.40%) Decision-Making
Programming Languages
1 414 (63.79%) Python
2 397 (61.17%) SQL
3 67 (10.32%) Java
4 62 (9.55%) Scala
5 22 (3.39%) Bash
6 12 (1.85%) PL/SQL
7 11 (1.69%) R
8 10 (1.54%) JavaScript
9 9 (1.39%) Data Analysis Expressions
9 9 (1.39%) Shell Script
10 8 (1.23%) C#
10 8 (1.23%) Go
11 7 (1.08%) T-SQL
11 7 (1.08%) TypeScript
12 6 (0.92%) PowerShell
13 4 (0.62%) C++
13 4 (0.62%) Groovy
14 2 (0.31%) ABAP
14 2 (0.31%) Bicep
14 2 (0.31%) Korn
Qualifications
1 138 (21.26%) Security Cleared
2 111 (17.10%) SC Cleared
3 34 (5.24%) Degree
4 23 (3.54%) DV Cleared
5 18 (2.77%) AWS Certification
6 16 (2.47%) Azure Certification
7 14 (2.16%) Computer Science Degree
8 9 (1.39%) Master's Degree
9 6 (0.92%) BPSS Clearance
10 3 (0.46%) SnowPro
11 2 (0.31%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
11 2 (0.31%) CTC Cleared
11 2 (0.31%) MCP
12 1 (0.15%) DBS Check
12 1 (0.15%) HND
12 1 (0.15%) PhD
12 1 (0.15%) Tableau Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 173 (26.66%) Data Quality
2 26 (4.01%) GDPR
3 14 (2.16%) QA
4 6 (0.92%) Accessibility
5 4 (0.62%) NIST
6 3 (0.46%) HIPAA
6 3 (0.46%) ISO/IEC 20000
6 3 (0.46%) SLA
7 2 (0.31%) Dodd-Frank
7 2 (0.31%) EMIR
7 2 (0.31%) EU AI Act
7 2 (0.31%) MiFID
8 1 (0.15%) HL7
8 1 (0.15%) ISO 19650
8 1 (0.15%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 1 (0.15%) NCSC
8 1 (0.15%) PMO
8 1 (0.15%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 1 (0.15%) SOC 2
8 1 (0.15%) WCAG
System Software
1 50 (7.70%) Docker
2 8 (1.23%) Virtual Machines
3 5 (0.77%) zsh
4 2 (0.31%) Active Directory
5 1 (0.15%) HDFS
Systems Management
1 83 (12.79%) Terraform
2 52 (8.01%) Kubernetes
3 11 (1.69%) Ansible
4 9 (1.39%) NetBackup
5 8 (1.23%) Grafana
6 5 (0.77%) Puppet
7 4 (0.62%) Argo
7 4 (0.62%) Kibana
7 4 (0.62%) Prometheus
8 3 (0.46%) Ambari
8 3 (0.46%) Istio
8 3 (0.46%) ZABBIX
9 2 (0.31%) Control-M
9 2 (0.31%) Kubeflow
9 2 (0.31%) logstash
10 1 (0.15%) FortiGate
Vendors
1 202 (31.12%) Databricks
2 77 (11.86%) Microsoft
3 49 (7.55%) Oracle
4 30 (4.62%) Google
5 29 (4.47%) Palantir
6 27 (4.16%) Foundry
7 22 (3.39%) Talend
8 16 (2.47%) Cloudera
8 16 (2.47%) Informatica
9 13 (2.00%) Denodo
10 12 (1.85%) Red Hat
10 12 (1.85%) SAP
11 9 (1.39%) Commvault
12 8 (1.23%) IBM
12 8 (1.23%) Splunk
12 8 (1.23%) Veritas
13 7 (1.08%) Confluent
14 5 (0.77%) Salesforce
14 5 (0.77%) Virgin Media
15 3 (0.46%) MicroStrategy