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 10 June 2026.

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

6 months to
10 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 56 94 99
Rank change year-on-year +38 +5 +21
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 1,591 655 827
As % of all contract jobs in England 3.77% 2.68% 2.21%
As % of the Job Titles category 4.08% 2.90% 2.38%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,121 498 633
10th Percentile £375 £363 £263
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 £663 £704 £688
UK median daily rate £500 £500 £500
% change year-on-year - - -9.09%
Number of hourly rates quoted 55 9 41
10th Percentile £19.34 £18.13 £37.50
25th Percentile £34.92 £51.25 £49.25
Median hourly rate £45.00 £52.50 £67.50
Median % change year-on-year -14.29% -22.22% -10.60%
75th Percentile £71.50 £78.70 £80.00
90th Percentile £75.00 £82.75 -
UK median hourly rate £50.00 £52.50 £67.50
% change year-on-year -4.76% -22.22% -10.60%

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 39,011 22,600 34,789
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.35% 92.37% 92.83%
Number of daily rates quoted 24,059 14,872 22,778
10th Percentile £325 £290 £288
25th Percentile £413 £405 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £520 £514 £525
Median % change year-on-year +1.17% -2.10% -4.55%
75th Percentile £625 £638 £638
90th Percentile £725 £750 £750
UK median daily rate £513 £500 £525
% change year-on-year +2.68% -4.76% -2.60%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,743 986 2,652
10th Percentile £15.79 £14.00 £12.86
25th Percentile £21.25 £18.13 £16.30
Median hourly rate £45.00 £29.07 £38.50
Median % change year-on-year +54.80% -24.49% -14.44%
75th Percentile £67.50 £60.00 £62.50
90th Percentile £80.00 £75.00 £74.00
UK median hourly rate £42.50 £27.70 £37.50
% change year-on-year +53.43% -26.13% -16.67%

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 10 June 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 10 June 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 10 June 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 +29 852 £525 - 115
Midlands +46 308 £469 +4.22% 39
West Midlands +49 289 £468 +1.74% 32
North of England +4 206 £465 -2.11% 69
North West +12 128 £465 -2.11% 36
South East +4 107 £475 +11.76% 84
South West +24 83 £506 +6.42% 28
Yorkshire -21 58 £465 +3.33% 15
North East -12 20 £450 -5.26% 18
East of England -18 19 £520 +63.52% 10
East Midlands -22 19 £525 +28.05% 7
Data Engineer
UK

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

For the 6 months to 10 June 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.

1 865 (54.37%) SQL
2 710 (44.63%) Python
3 660 (41.48%) Data Pipeline
4 602 (37.84%) Analytics
4 602 (37.84%) ETL
5 589 (37.02%) Data Engineering
6 546 (34.32%) Data Modelling
7 515 (32.37%) Azure
8 461 (28.98%) AWS
9 460 (28.91%) Security Cleared
10 411 (25.83%) SC Cleared
11 397 (24.95%) Data Quality
12 381 (23.95%) CI/CD
13 342 (21.50%) Databricks
14 340 (21.37%) Business Intelligence
15 275 (17.28%) DevOps
16 274 (17.22%) Agile
17 273 (17.16%) Power Platform
18 261 (16.40%) Data Warehouse
19 259 (16.28%) Power BI
20 223 (14.02%) PySpark
21 219 (13.76%) Azure Data Factory
22 213 (13.39%) Microsoft
23 209 (13.14%) Problem-Solving
24 208 (13.07%) Migration
25 207 (13.01%) Data Governance
26 191 (12.01%) AI
27 177 (11.13%) Terraform
28 171 (10.75%) Data Integration
29 169 (10.62%) Data Lake

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 (9.30%) Apache Airflow
2 140 (8.80%) Apache Spark
3 90 (5.66%) Apache
4 72 (4.53%) SAS
5 32 (2.01%) Confluence
6 9 (0.57%) Jupyter
7 8 (0.50%) Palantir Foundry
8 5 (0.31%) SharePoint
9 4 (0.25%) Microsoft Exchange
10 1 (0.063%) Apache Superset
10 1 (0.063%) Appian
10 1 (0.063%) Camunda
10 1 (0.063%) Luigi
10 1 (0.063%) R Markdown
Applications
1 16 (1.01%) Microsoft Excel
2 5 (0.31%) Notepad++
3 4 (0.25%) Spreadsheet
4 2 (0.13%) Chatbot
5 1 (0.063%) Microsoft PowerPoint
Business Applications
1 6 (0.38%) Aladdin
2 3 (0.19%) Dynamics CRM
2 3 (0.19%) Infor LN
2 3 (0.19%) SAP BPC
2 3 (0.19%) SimCorp Dimension
3 2 (0.13%) BambooHR
3 2 (0.13%) Maximo
3 2 (0.13%) NetSuite
3 2 (0.13%) Sage X3
3 2 (0.13%) SAP S/4HANA
4 1 (0.063%) Elite 3E
4 1 (0.063%) FIS Private Capital Suite
4 1 (0.063%) iTrent
4 1 (0.063%) NEC Housing
4 1 (0.063%) Oracle 11i
4 1 (0.063%) Oracle Assets
4 1 (0.063%) Oracle EBS
4 1 (0.063%) Oracle ERP
4 1 (0.063%) Raiser’s Edge
4 1 (0.063%) SAP CAR
Cloud Services
1 515 (32.37%) Azure
2 461 (28.98%) AWS
3 273 (17.16%) Power Platform
4 219 (13.76%) Azure Data Factory
5 164 (10.31%) Snowflake
6 154 (9.68%) Amazon S3
7 150 (9.43%) dbt
8 147 (9.24%) Azure Synapse Analytics
9 140 (8.80%) GCP
10 133 (8.36%) Azure DevOps
11 112 (7.04%) GitHub
12 99 (6.22%) Serverless
13 88 (5.53%) AWS Lambda
14 55 (3.46%) GitHub Actions
15 32 (2.01%) Matillion
16 29 (1.82%) AWS CloudFormation
17 27 (1.70%) Amazon Kinesis
18 26 (1.63%) Amazon EMR
19 24 (1.51%) AWS Step Functions
19 24 (1.51%) OpenShift
Communications & Networking
1 34 (2.14%) DNS
1 34 (2.14%) VPN
2 33 (2.07%) BGP
2 33 (2.07%) DMZ
2 33 (2.07%) Multicast
3 10 (0.63%) Structured Cabling
4 5 (0.31%) PuTTY
4 5 (0.31%) WinSCP
5 4 (0.25%) Firewall
5 4 (0.25%) Wi-Fi
5 4 (0.25%) Wireless
6 1 (0.063%) 4G
6 1 (0.063%) 5G
Database & Business Intelligence
1 261 (16.40%) Data Warehouse
2 259 (16.28%) Power BI
3 169 (10.62%) Data Lake
4 116 (7.29%) SQL Server
5 94 (5.91%) Amazon Redshift
5 94 (5.91%) Delta Lake
6 84 (5.28%) BigQuery
6 84 (5.28%) Pentaho
7 81 (5.09%) Metadata
8 72 (4.53%) Azure SQL Database
8 72 (4.53%) Tableau
9 63 (3.96%) Snowflake Schema
10 62 (3.90%) Amazon Athena
10 62 (3.90%) PostgreSQL
11 60 (3.77%) Big Data
12 55 (3.46%) SQL Server Integration Services
13 52 (3.27%) NoSQL
14 40 (2.51%) Relational Database
15 36 (2.26%) Data Vault
16 33 (2.07%) Spark SQL
Development Applications
1 152 (9.55%) Git
2 79 (4.97%) GitLab
3 71 (4.46%) JIRA
4 46 (2.89%) Jenkins
5 7 (0.44%) Postman
6 6 (0.38%) MLflow
7 5 (0.31%) Artifactory
8 3 (0.19%) Bitbucket
8 3 (0.19%) Newman
8 3 (0.19%) SonarQube
9 2 (0.13%) Sonatype Nexus
9 2 (0.13%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
9 2 (0.13%) Terragrunt
9 2 (0.13%) Visual Studio
10 1 (0.063%) Atlassian Bamboo
10 1 (0.063%) Claude Code
10 1 (0.063%) ER Studio
10 1 (0.063%) ERwin
10 1 (0.063%) JUnit
10 1 (0.063%) Selenium
General
1 273 (17.16%) Finance
2 250 (15.71%) Social Skills
3 163 (10.25%) Analytical Skills
4 135 (8.49%) Public Sector
5 90 (5.66%) Banking
6 29 (1.82%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 26 (1.63%) Retail
8 22 (1.38%) Investment Banking
8 22 (1.38%) Marketing
9 21 (1.32%) Telecoms
10 19 (1.19%) Documentation Skills
11 17 (1.07%) Manufacturing
11 17 (1.07%) Pharmaceutical
12 13 (0.82%) Aerospace
13 11 (0.69%) Front Office
13 11 (0.69%) Publishing
14 6 (0.38%) Billing
14 6 (0.38%) Legal
14 6 (0.38%) Military
15 5 (0.31%) Local Government
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 223 (14.02%) PySpark
2 133 (8.36%) Kafka
3 47 (2.95%) Pandas
4 33 (2.07%) JSON
5 27 (1.70%) REST
6 25 (1.57%) Great Expectations
7 22 (1.38%) Spring
7 22 (1.38%) Spring Boot
8 21 (1.32%) XML
9 19 (1.19%) YAML
10 15 (0.94%) Apache Beam
11 13 (0.82%) Apache Avro
12 12 (0.75%) scikit-learn
13 11 (0.69%) React
14 10 (0.63%) Matplotlib
14 10 (0.63%) PyTorch
15 9 (0.57%) Node.js
15 9 (0.57%) Polars
15 9 (0.57%) pytest
15 9 (0.57%) RESTful
Miscellaneous
1 127 (7.98%) Cloud Native
2 52 (3.27%) Legacy Systems
3 40 (2.51%) Data Structures
4 29 (1.82%) Greenfield Project
5 28 (1.76%) Product Ownership
6 24 (1.51%) Onboarding
7 23 (1.45%) Distributed Systems
8 22 (1.38%) Reinsurance
9 19 (1.19%) Clustering
10 16 (1.01%) Data Protection Act
11 14 (0.88%) NHS
12 10 (0.63%) Distributed Computing
12 10 (0.63%) Life Science
13 9 (0.57%) Driving Licence
13 9 (0.57%) Public Cloud
13 9 (0.57%) Reference Data
13 9 (0.57%) Self-Motivation
13 9 (0.57%) Virtual Team
14 8 (0.50%) Analytical Mindset
14 8 (0.50%) Replication
Operating Systems
1 56 (3.52%) Unix
2 36 (2.26%) Linux
3 4 (0.25%) Windows
4 2 (0.13%) Ubuntu
4 2 (0.13%) Windows Server
5 1 (0.063%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 660 (41.48%) Data Pipeline
2 602 (37.84%) Analytics
2 602 (37.84%) ETL
3 589 (37.02%) Data Engineering
4 546 (34.32%) Data Modelling
5 381 (23.95%) CI/CD
6 340 (21.37%) Business Intelligence
7 275 (17.28%) DevOps
8 274 (17.22%) Agile
9 209 (13.14%) Problem-Solving
10 208 (13.07%) Migration
11 207 (13.01%) Data Governance
12 191 (12.01%) AI
13 171 (10.75%) Data Integration
14 166 (10.43%) Validation
15 152 (9.55%) Data Science
16 144 (9.05%) Decision-Making
17 140 (8.80%) Data Transformation
18 128 (8.05%) Infrastructure as Code
19 121 (7.61%) Data Architecture
Programming Languages
1 865 (54.37%) SQL
2 710 (44.63%) Python
3 100 (6.29%) Java
4 68 (4.27%) Scala
5 50 (3.14%) PL/SQL
6 35 (2.20%) Data Analysis Expressions
7 33 (2.07%) T-SQL
8 32 (2.01%) C#
9 28 (1.76%) Shell Script
10 27 (1.70%) Bash
11 17 (1.07%) Bicep
11 17 (1.07%) PowerShell
12 13 (0.82%) R
13 9 (0.57%) JavaScript
14 6 (0.38%) Go
14 6 (0.38%) TypeScript
15 2 (0.13%) C
15 2 (0.13%) Korn
15 2 (0.13%) Ruby
15 2 (0.13%) VB
Qualifications
1 460 (28.91%) Security Cleared
2 411 (25.83%) SC Cleared
3 39 (2.45%) Degree
4 36 (2.26%) BPSS Clearance
5 25 (1.57%) Azure Certification
6 16 (1.01%) Computer Science Degree
7 12 (0.75%) DV Cleared
8 9 (0.57%) City & Guilds
8 9 (0.57%) DBS Check
9 8 (0.50%) AWS Certification
10 7 (0.44%) Microsoft Certification
11 5 (0.31%) BICSI Certification
11 5 (0.31%) Master's Degree
12 3 (0.19%) SnowPro
13 2 (0.13%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
13 2 (0.13%) CISM
13 2 (0.13%) CISSP
14 1 (0.063%) CCIE
14 1 (0.063%) CISA
14 1 (0.063%) Cisco Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 397 (24.95%) Data Quality
2 51 (3.21%) QA
3 47 (2.95%) GDPR
4 12 (0.75%) SLA
5 9 (0.57%) Accessibility
5 9 (0.57%) FATCA
6 5 (0.31%) Sarbanes-Oxley
7 4 (0.25%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 4 (0.25%) MiFID
8 3 (0.19%) GMP
9 2 (0.13%) EMIR
9 2 (0.13%) SNOMED CT
9 2 (0.13%) WCAG
10 1 (0.063%) Basel III
10 1 (0.063%) GRC
10 1 (0.063%) GxP
10 1 (0.063%) HIPAA
10 1 (0.063%) IFRS 17
10 1 (0.063%) NIST
10 1 (0.063%) PCI DSS
System Software
1 92 (5.78%) Docker
2 6 (0.38%) Virtual Machines
3 2 (0.13%) HDFS
4 1 (0.063%) RACF
Systems Management
1 177 (11.13%) Terraform
2 76 (4.78%) Kubernetes
3 35 (2.20%) Grafana
4 11 (0.69%) Ansible
5 9 (0.57%) Prometheus
6 5 (0.31%) Kibana
7 3 (0.19%) Rancher
8 2 (0.13%) Apache Ranger
8 2 (0.13%) Control-M
8 2 (0.13%) Thomson Reuters DACS
9 1 (0.063%) Kubeflow
9 1 (0.063%) NetBackup
9 1 (0.063%) Puppet
Vendors
1 342 (21.50%) Databricks
2 213 (13.39%) Microsoft
3 147 (9.24%) Oracle
4 118 (7.42%) Talend
5 114 (7.17%) Informatica
6 63 (3.96%) Denodo
7 58 (3.65%) Google
8 35 (2.20%) Cisco
8 35 (2.20%) F5
9 29 (1.82%) SAP
10 22 (1.38%) ServiceNow
11 21 (1.32%) Splunk
12 17 (1.07%) Cloudera
13 15 (0.94%) Alteryx
14 14 (0.88%) Salesforce
15 12 (0.75%) IBM
16 11 (0.69%) Foundry
16 11 (0.69%) Palantir
17 8 (0.50%) InterSystems
17 8 (0.50%) Sage