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 5 March 2026.

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

 6 months to
5 Mar 2026		 Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 79 78 104
Rank change year-on-year -1 +26 +21
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 1,151 792 832
As % of all contract jobs in England 3.17% 3.12% 2.22%
As % of the Job Titles category 3.45% 3.36% 2.39%
Number of daily rates quoted 833 583 657
10th Percentile £363 £358 £345
25th Percentile £413 £425 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £520 £525
Median % change year-on-year -3.85% -0.95% -4.55%
75th Percentile £588 £625 £625
90th Percentile £663 £738 £700
UK median daily rate £500 £500 £513
% change year-on-year - -2.44% -6.82%
Number of hourly rates quoted 10 9 33
10th Percentile £33.42 £24.64 £36.00
25th Percentile £54.88 £41.25 £46.75
Median hourly rate £66.75 £65.00 £62.36
Median % change year-on-year +2.69% +4.24% -2.57%
75th Percentile £75.00 £93.75 £72.50
90th Percentile £80.10 £94.50 £80.00
UK median hourly rate £55.00 £42.50 £62.36
% change year-on-year +29.41% -31.84% -1.42%

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 33,397 23,567 34,774
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 91.96% 92.91% 92.84%
Number of daily rates quoted 21,135 15,150 23,280
10th Percentile £306 £300 £270
25th Percentile £412 £409 £410
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £505 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -3.81% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £624 £638 £638
90th Percentile £725 £750 £748
UK median daily rate £500 £525 £525
% change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,153 742 2,208
10th Percentile £15.18 £16.01 £13.15
25th Percentile £19.00 £21.47 £16.30
Median hourly rate £35.00 £35.45 £33.07
Median % change year-on-year -1.26% +7.20% -19.41%
75th Percentile £65.00 £65.00 £60.00
90th Percentile £75.00 £76.18 £71.88
UK median hourly rate £33.50 £34.00 £34.00
% change year-on-year -1.47% - -16.05%

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 5 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 5 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 5 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 +3 684 £520 -5.45% 189
Midlands +10 189 £492 +3.58% 69
West Midlands +8 170 £499 +1.99% 50
North of England -22 140 £450 -2.70% 98
North West -10 86 £425 -4.23% 55
South East -43 56 £506 +3.85% 117
South West -13 47 £538 +7.50% 46
Yorkshire -41 40 £484 -3.25% 32
East Midlands -20 19 £450 +20.00% 18
North East -10 14 £450 -14.29% 12
East of England -40 9 £565 +77.67% 17
Data Engineer
UK

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

For the 6 months to 5 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.

1 667 (57.95%) SQL
2 600 (52.13%) Python
3 498 (43.27%) Data Pipeline
3 498 (43.27%) ETL
4 477 (41.44%) Data Engineering
5 472 (41.01%) Azure
6 454 (39.44%) Analytics
7 423 (36.75%) Data Modelling
8 342 (29.71%) Databricks
9 331 (28.76%) Data Quality
10 320 (27.80%) AWS
11 319 (27.72%) CI/CD
12 308 (26.76%) Security Cleared
13 292 (25.37%) Business Intelligence
14 273 (23.72%) SC Cleared
15 238 (20.68%) DevOps
16 230 (19.98%) Power Platform
17 224 (19.46%) Agile
18 219 (19.03%) Data Warehouse
19 216 (18.77%) Power BI
20 208 (18.07%) Azure Data Factory
21 188 (16.33%) Problem-Solving
22 186 (16.16%) Data Governance
23 181 (15.73%) PySpark
24 160 (13.90%) Data Science
25 159 (13.81%) Git
26 156 (13.55%) Microsoft
27 144 (12.51%) Snowflake
28 143 (12.42%) Terraform
29 135 (11.73%) 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
1 122 (10.60%) Apache Spark
2 117 (10.17%) Apache Airflow
3 78 (6.78%) Apache
4 49 (4.26%) SAS
5 19 (1.65%) Confluence
6 11 (0.96%) Palantir Foundry
7 5 (0.43%) Jupyter
7 5 (0.43%) Microsoft Exchange
8 4 (0.35%) Oracle Application Server
9 2 (0.17%) ArcGIS
9 2 (0.17%) SharePoint
10 1 (0.087%) Apache Pig
10 1 (0.087%) Apache Synapse
10 1 (0.087%) Appian
10 1 (0.087%) Camunda
10 1 (0.087%) IIS
10 1 (0.087%) Luigi
10 1 (0.087%) Oracle SOA Suite
Applications
1 9 (0.78%) Microsoft Excel
2 2 (0.17%) Chatbot
3 1 (0.087%) Microsoft Office
3 1 (0.087%) Microsoft PowerPoint
Business Applications
1 3 (0.26%) Dynamics CRM
2 2 (0.17%) Maximo
2 2 (0.17%) SAP BPC
3 1 (0.087%) Actimize
3 1 (0.087%) Aladdin
3 1 (0.087%) BambooHR
3 1 (0.087%) Elite 3E
3 1 (0.087%) iTrent
3 1 (0.087%) NEC Housing
3 1 (0.087%) Oracle BPM
3 1 (0.087%) SAP Business ByDesign
Cloud Services
1 472 (41.01%) Azure
2 320 (27.80%) AWS
3 230 (19.98%) Power Platform
4 208 (18.07%) Azure Data Factory
5 144 (12.51%) Snowflake
6 131 (11.38%) Azure Synapse Analytics
7 121 (10.51%) GCP
8 109 (9.47%) dbt
9 101 (8.77%) Amazon S3
10 93 (8.08%) GitHub
11 91 (7.91%) Serverless
12 87 (7.56%) Azure DevOps
13 67 (5.82%) AWS Lambda
14 45 (3.91%) GitHub Actions
15 38 (3.30%) AWS CloudFormation
16 25 (2.17%) Matillion
17 23 (2.00%) AWS Step Functions
18 20 (1.74%) Amazon Kinesis
19 18 (1.56%) SaaS
20 16 (1.39%) Amazon SQS
Communications & Networking
1 17 (1.48%) DNS
1 17 (1.48%) VPN
2 16 (1.39%) BGP
2 16 (1.39%) DMZ
2 16 (1.39%) Multicast
3 4 (0.35%) Firewall
4 3 (0.26%) SAN
5 2 (0.17%) Structured Cabling
6 1 (0.087%) 4G
6 1 (0.087%) 5G
6 1 (0.087%) Network Security
6 1 (0.087%) Software-Defined Networking
6 1 (0.087%) TCP/IP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 219 (19.03%) Data Warehouse
2 216 (18.77%) Power BI
3 128 (11.12%) Data Lake
4 98 (8.51%) SQL Server
5 72 (6.26%) Delta Lake
6 71 (6.17%) Azure SQL Database
6 71 (6.17%) BigQuery
7 65 (5.65%) Amazon Redshift
8 63 (5.47%) PostgreSQL
9 59 (5.13%) Metadata
9 59 (5.13%) Pentaho
9 59 (5.13%) SQL Server Integration Services
10 54 (4.69%) Big Data
11 53 (4.60%) NoSQL
12 46 (4.00%) Tableau
13 45 (3.91%) Snowflake Schema
14 37 (3.21%) Hadoop
15 36 (3.13%) Amazon Athena
16 30 (2.61%) Relational Database
17 26 (2.26%) Star Schema
Development Applications
1 159 (13.81%) Git
2 66 (5.73%) Jenkins
3 52 (4.52%) JIRA
4 45 (3.91%) GitLab
5 21 (1.82%) MLflow
6 4 (0.35%) DBeaver
6 4 (0.35%) Visual Studio
7 3 (0.26%) Bitbucket
7 3 (0.26%) Selenium
8 2 (0.17%) JUnit
8 2 (0.17%) SonarQube
8 2 (0.17%) Visual Studio Code
9 1 (0.087%) Cucumber
9 1 (0.087%) Gradle
9 1 (0.087%) Maven
9 1 (0.087%) Mockito
9 1 (0.087%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
9 1 (0.087%) Team Foundation Server
9 1 (0.087%) TeamCity
9 1 (0.087%) Terragrunt
General
1 207 (17.98%) Social Skills
2 179 (15.55%) Finance
3 112 (9.73%) Analytical Skills
4 102 (8.86%) Public Sector
5 58 (5.04%) Banking
6 33 (2.87%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 18 (1.56%) Investment Banking
8 16 (1.39%) Front Office
9 15 (1.30%) Retail
10 13 (1.13%) Pharmaceutical
11 12 (1.04%) Marketing
12 11 (0.96%) Documentation Skills
12 11 (0.96%) Telecoms
13 9 (0.78%) Manufacturing
14 8 (0.70%) Publishing
15 6 (0.52%) Military
16 5 (0.43%) Law
17 4 (0.35%) Back Office
17 4 (0.35%) Corporate Banking
18 3 (0.26%) Organisational Skills
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 181 (15.73%) PySpark
2 119 (10.34%) Kafka
3 38 (3.30%) Pandas
4 24 (2.09%) JSON
4 24 (2.09%) YAML
5 22 (1.91%) REST
6 16 (1.39%) XML
7 15 (1.30%) Great Expectations
7 15 (1.30%) PyTorch
8 14 (1.22%) Apache NiFi
8 14 (1.22%) Node.js
9 13 (1.13%) NumPy
9 13 (1.13%) scikit-learn
10 12 (1.04%) Keycloak
10 12 (1.04%) pytest
10 12 (1.04%) RESTful
11 11 (0.96%) TensorFlow
12 10 (0.87%) Matplotlib
13 9 (0.78%) Apache Beam
14 8 (0.70%) OpenTelemetry
Miscellaneous
1 86 (7.47%) Cloud Native
2 33 (2.87%) Data Structures
3 27 (2.35%) Product Ownership
4 26 (2.26%) Legacy Systems
5 18 (1.56%) Clustering
5 18 (1.56%) Onboarding
5 18 (1.56%) Replication
6 16 (1.39%) Distributed Systems
6 16 (1.39%) Hybrid Cloud
7 14 (1.22%) Data Protection Act
8 13 (1.13%) Greenfield Project
9 12 (1.04%) Reinsurance
10 11 (0.96%) Public Cloud
11 9 (0.78%) Algorithms
11 9 (0.78%) Distributed Computing
11 9 (0.78%) Life Science
12 7 (0.61%) Management Information System
12 7 (0.61%) NHS
13 6 (0.52%) Analytical Mindset
13 6 (0.52%) Wiki
Operating Systems
1 19 (1.65%) Linux
1 19 (1.65%) Unix
2 1 (0.087%) VMS
2 1 (0.087%) Windows
2 1 (0.087%) Windows Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 498 (43.27%) Data Pipeline
1 498 (43.27%) ETL
2 477 (41.44%) Data Engineering
3 454 (39.44%) Analytics
4 423 (36.75%) Data Modelling
5 319 (27.72%) CI/CD
6 292 (25.37%) Business Intelligence
7 238 (20.68%) DevOps
8 224 (19.46%) Agile
9 188 (16.33%) Problem-Solving
10 186 (16.16%) Data Governance
11 160 (13.90%) Data Science
12 135 (11.73%) Data Integration
13 134 (11.64%) AI
14 130 (11.29%) Data Architecture
15 119 (10.34%) Data Transformation
16 118 (10.25%) Infrastructure as Code
17 117 (10.17%) Machine Learning
17 117 (10.17%) Migration
18 108 (9.38%) Performance Tuning
Programming Languages
1 667 (57.95%) SQL
2 600 (52.13%) Python
3 78 (6.78%) Scala
4 68 (5.91%) Java
5 34 (2.95%) Data Analysis Expressions
6 30 (2.61%) C#
7 28 (2.43%) T-SQL
8 26 (2.26%) PL/SQL
9 22 (1.91%) Bash
10 18 (1.56%) Bicep
11 16 (1.39%) PowerShell
11 16 (1.39%) R
12 15 (1.30%) Go
12 15 (1.30%) Shell Script
13 13 (1.13%) JavaScript
14 4 (0.35%) TypeScript
15 3 (0.26%) C++
15 3 (0.26%) Korn
16 2 (0.17%) Ruby
16 2 (0.17%) VB
Qualifications
1 308 (26.76%) Security Cleared
2 273 (23.72%) SC Cleared
3 36 (3.13%) Degree
4 35 (3.04%) Azure Certification
5 21 (1.82%) BPSS Clearance
6 19 (1.65%) AWS Certification
7 16 (1.39%) Computer Science Degree
8 15 (1.30%) DV Cleared
9 5 (0.43%) Master's Degree
9 5 (0.43%) Microsoft Certification
10 4 (0.35%) CTC Cleared
10 4 (0.35%) DBS Check
11 2 (0.17%) Microsoft Certified Professional
11 2 (0.17%) SnowPro
12 1 (0.087%) CCIE
12 1 (0.087%) CCNP
12 1 (0.087%) Cisco Certification
12 1 (0.087%) CISM
12 1 (0.087%) CISSP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 331 (28.76%) Data Quality
2 49 (4.26%) GDPR
3 24 (2.09%) QA
4 10 (0.87%) Accessibility
5 5 (0.43%) HIPAA
6 4 (0.35%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 3 (0.26%) FATCA
7 3 (0.26%) GMP
7 3 (0.26%) MiFID
7 3 (0.26%) NIST
7 3 (0.26%) SLA
8 2 (0.17%) Dodd-Frank
8 2 (0.17%) EMIR
8 2 (0.17%) EU AI Act
9 1 (0.087%) GRC
9 1 (0.087%) ISO 13485
9 1 (0.087%) NCSC
9 1 (0.087%) PMO
9 1 (0.087%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 1 (0.087%) SOC 2
System Software
1 91 (7.91%) Docker
2 7 (0.61%) Virtual Machines
3 3 (0.26%) HDFS
3 3 (0.26%) zsh
4 1 (0.087%) Active Directory
Systems Management
1 143 (12.42%) Terraform
2 99 (8.60%) Kubernetes
3 14 (1.22%) Grafana
4 11 (0.96%) Prometheus
5 8 (0.70%) Ansible
6 5 (0.43%) NetBackup
7 4 (0.35%) Kibana
7 4 (0.35%) Kubeflow
8 3 (0.26%) Control-M
8 3 (0.26%) Puppet
8 3 (0.26%) Rancher
9 2 (0.17%) EMC NetWorker
9 2 (0.17%) logstash
9 2 (0.17%) Tivoli Storage Manager
10 1 (0.087%) Ambari
10 1 (0.087%) Argo
10 1 (0.087%) Thomson Reuters DACS
10 1 (0.087%) ZABBIX
Vendors
1 342 (29.71%) Databricks
2 156 (13.55%) Microsoft
3 97 (8.43%) Oracle
4 80 (6.95%) Talend
5 66 (5.73%) Informatica
6 48 (4.17%) Google
7 37 (3.21%) Denodo
8 21 (1.82%) Cisco
8 21 (1.82%) SAP
9 18 (1.56%) F5
9 18 (1.56%) ServiceNow
10 16 (1.39%) Foundry
10 16 (1.39%) Splunk
11 15 (1.30%) Palantir
12 13 (1.13%) IBM
13 12 (1.04%) Cloudera
14 11 (0.96%) Alteryx
15 6 (0.52%) MuleSoft
15 6 (0.52%) Virgin Media
16 5 (0.43%) OpenAI
480 Data Engineer jobs in England