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 18 December 2025.

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

 6 months to
18 Dec 2025		 Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 116 83 121
Rank change year-on-year -33 +38 +12
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 749 807 786
As % of all contract jobs in England 2.40% 2.79% 2.10%
As % of the Job Titles category 2.63% 3.00% 2.25%
Number of daily rates quoted 529 563 604
10th Percentile £363 £363 £400
25th Percentile £425 £450 £456
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £529 £538
Median % change year-on-year -3.12% -1.58% -2.27%
75th Percentile £600 £638 £638
90th Percentile £700 £700 £700
UK median daily rate £500 £525 £525
% change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 11 9 17
10th Percentile £26.00 £38.25 £35.00
25th Percentile £34.50 £49.25 £39.85
Median hourly rate £43.50 £65.00 £60.50
Median % change year-on-year -33.08% +7.44% +0.83%
75th Percentile £74.13 £97.50 £65.00
90th Percentile £110.00 - £78.75
UK median hourly rate £53.00 £50.50 £60.50
% change year-on-year +4.95% -16.53% +0.83%

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 28,510 26,921 34,873
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 91.24% 92.92% 93.35%
Number of daily rates quoted 18,200 16,785 23,966
10th Percentile £291 £300 £288
25th Percentile £405 £413 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £510 £525 £533
Median % change year-on-year -2.86% -1.50% -3.09%
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 1,749 853 1,358
10th Percentile £14.37 £15.73 £15.25
25th Percentile £18.24 £21.25 £19.50
Median hourly rate £26.50 £36.00 £45.00
Median % change year-on-year -26.39% -20.00% +38.46%
75th Percentile £60.75 £65.00 £65.00
90th Percentile £72.10 £73.75 £77.50
UK median hourly rate £25.47 £34.00 £44.50
% change year-on-year -25.09% -23.60% +48.33%

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 18 December 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 18 December 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 18 December 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 -13 466 £525 -8.70% 172
North of England -49 88 £475 +5.56% 137
Midlands -19 84 £520 +6.12% 76
West Midlands -19 70 £525 +5.00% 52
North West -22 42 £415 -6.74% 89
South West +7 41 £550 +12.82% 77
Yorkshire -36 36 £500 +4.17% 32
South East -63 33 £480 -12.73% 172
East Midlands -9 14 £455 +27.81% 22
North East -8 10 £450 +15.38% 16
East of England -30 6 £625 +96.54% 66
Data Engineer
UK

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

For the 6 months to 18 December 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.

1 458 (61.15%) Python
2 451 (60.21%) SQL
3 348 (46.46%) Data Pipeline
4 331 (44.19%) Azure
5 313 (41.79%) Data Engineering
6 310 (41.39%) ETL
7 257 (34.31%) Data Modelling
8 256 (34.18%) Databricks
9 251 (33.51%) AWS
10 244 (32.58%) Analytics
11 240 (32.04%) CI/CD
12 200 (26.70%) Data Quality
13 180 (24.03%) Business Intelligence
14 179 (23.90%) DevOps
15 175 (23.36%) Security Cleared
16 162 (21.63%) Data Warehouse
17 152 (20.29%) SC Cleared
18 150 (20.03%) Agile
19 145 (19.36%) Azure Data Factory
20 142 (18.96%) Power Platform
21 137 (18.29%) Power BI
21 137 (18.29%) PySpark
22 123 (16.42%) Problem-Solving
23 121 (16.15%) Apache Airflow
24 119 (15.89%) Data Science
25 112 (14.95%) Git
26 109 (14.55%) Data Governance
27 106 (14.15%) Snowflake
28 100 (13.35%) Machine Learning
29 98 (13.08%) Apache Spark

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
1 121 (16.15%) Apache Airflow
2 98 (13.08%) Apache Spark
3 63 (8.41%) Apache
4 22 (2.94%) Confluence
5 18 (2.40%) SAS
6 8 (1.07%) Oracle Application Server
7 6 (0.80%) Apache Pig
8 5 (0.67%) IIS
9 4 (0.53%) SharePoint
10 3 (0.40%) Jupyter
10 3 (0.40%) Oracle SOA Suite
11 2 (0.27%) ArcGIS
11 2 (0.27%) Luigi
12 1 (0.13%) Apache Synapse
12 1 (0.13%) Documentum
12 1 (0.13%) Microsoft Exchange
12 1 (0.13%) nginx
Applications
1 8 (1.07%) Microsoft Excel
2 3 (0.40%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 2 (0.27%) Chatbot
4 1 (0.13%) Microsoft Office
4 1 (0.13%) MS Visio
4 1 (0.13%) SPSS
4 1 (0.13%) Stata
Business Applications
1 3 (0.40%) Oracle BPM
2 2 (0.27%) Aladdin
2 2 (0.27%) Maximo
2 2 (0.27%) SAP S/4HANA
3 1 (0.13%) Actimize
3 1 (0.13%) Dynamics CRM
3 1 (0.13%) Salesforce CRM
3 1 (0.13%) SAP ERP
Cloud Services
1 331 (44.19%) Azure
2 251 (33.51%) AWS
3 145 (19.36%) Azure Data Factory
4 142 (18.96%) Power Platform
5 106 (14.15%) Snowflake
6 98 (13.08%) GCP
7 89 (11.88%) dbt
8 86 (11.48%) Amazon S3
9 84 (11.21%) Azure Synapse Analytics
10 82 (10.95%) GitHub
11 66 (8.81%) Serverless
12 49 (6.54%) Azure DevOps
13 46 (6.14%) GitHub Actions
14 42 (5.61%) AWS Lambda
15 25 (3.34%) AWS CloudFormation
16 22 (2.94%) SaaS
17 17 (2.27%) Amazon Kinesis
18 15 (2.00%) Amazon EMR
19 13 (1.74%) AWS Step Functions
20 10 (1.34%) Microsoft Purview
Communications & Networking
1 4 (0.53%) Firewall
1 4 (0.53%) TCP/IP
2 3 (0.40%) DNS
2 3 (0.40%) SAN
2 3 (0.40%) SSH
3 2 (0.27%) Internet
3 2 (0.27%) SSL
3 2 (0.27%) Structured Cabling
4 1 (0.13%) BGP
4 1 (0.13%) DMZ
4 1 (0.13%) Multicast
4 1 (0.13%) Network Security
4 1 (0.13%) Software-Defined Networking
4 1 (0.13%) VPN
4 1 (0.13%) Wi-Fi
Database & Business Intelligence
1 162 (21.63%) Data Warehouse
2 137 (18.29%) Power BI
3 88 (11.75%) Data Lake
4 64 (8.54%) Big Data
5 55 (7.34%) PostgreSQL
6 53 (7.08%) SQL Server
7 48 (6.41%) Delta Lake
8 47 (6.28%) Amazon Redshift
8 47 (6.28%) Azure SQL Database
8 47 (6.28%) NoSQL
9 43 (5.74%) Hadoop
10 39 (5.21%) BigQuery
11 34 (4.54%) Metadata
12 33 (4.41%) Tableau
13 32 (4.27%) Relational Database
14 29 (3.87%) Star Schema
15 28 (3.74%) SQL Server Integration Services
16 25 (3.34%) Elasticsearch
17 24 (3.20%) Pentaho
18 23 (3.07%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 112 (14.95%) Git
2 62 (8.28%) Jenkins
3 38 (5.07%) JIRA
4 26 (3.47%) GitLab
5 24 (3.20%) MLflow
6 8 (1.07%) DBeaver
7 5 (0.67%) Visual Studio Code
8 4 (0.53%) Bitbucket
8 4 (0.53%) Poetry
8 4 (0.53%) SonarQube
9 3 (0.40%) PyCharm
9 3 (0.40%) Sonatype Nexus
9 3 (0.40%) Visual Studio
10 2 (0.27%) Selenium
11 1 (0.13%) ERwin
11 1 (0.13%) Gradle
11 1 (0.13%) JUnit
11 1 (0.13%) Maven
11 1 (0.13%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
11 1 (0.13%) Team Foundation Server
General
1 143 (19.09%) Social Skills
2 120 (16.02%) Finance
3 91 (12.15%) Analytical Skills
4 51 (6.81%) Public Sector
5 29 (3.87%) Banking
6 25 (3.34%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 13 (1.74%) Pharmaceutical
8 12 (1.60%) Front Office
8 12 (1.60%) Investment Banking
9 9 (1.20%) Marketing
9 9 (1.20%) Retail
10 7 (0.93%) Telecoms
11 4 (0.53%) Documentation Skills
11 4 (0.53%) Law
11 4 (0.53%) Legal
11 4 (0.53%) Manufacturing
11 4 (0.53%) Military
11 4 (0.53%) Organisational Skills
12 3 (0.40%) Health Technology
12 3 (0.40%) Presentation Skills
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 137 (18.29%) PySpark
2 81 (10.81%) Kafka
3 18 (2.40%) Apache NiFi
3 18 (2.40%) Pandas
4 16 (2.14%) YAML
5 15 (2.00%) XML
6 14 (1.87%) RESTful
7 13 (1.74%) JSON
8 12 (1.60%) Flask
8 12 (1.60%) Keycloak
8 12 (1.60%) NumPy
8 12 (1.60%) REST
9 10 (1.34%) Node.js
9 10 (1.34%) RabbitMQ
10 9 (1.20%) pytest
10 9 (1.20%) PyTorch
11 8 (1.07%) HTML
11 8 (1.07%) Jinja
11 8 (1.07%) Oracle GoldenGate
12 7 (0.93%) Middleware
Miscellaneous
1 48 (6.41%) Cloud Native
2 25 (3.34%) Data Structures
3 23 (3.07%) Legacy Systems
4 22 (2.94%) Product Ownership
4 22 (2.94%) Replication
5 17 (2.27%) Algorithms
6 12 (1.60%) Hybrid Cloud
6 12 (1.60%) Onboarding
7 11 (1.47%) Data Protection Act
7 11 (1.47%) Greenfield Project
8 8 (1.07%) Life Science
9 7 (0.93%) Distributed Computing
9 7 (0.93%) IoT
10 6 (0.80%) Clustering
10 6 (0.80%) NHS
11 5 (0.67%) Distributed Systems
11 5 (0.67%) Genomics
11 5 (0.67%) Linux Command Line
11 5 (0.67%) Reinsurance
11 5 (0.67%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 22 (2.94%) Linux
2 11 (1.47%) Unix
3 1 (0.13%) VMS
3 1 (0.13%) Windows
3 1 (0.13%) Windows Server
3 1 (0.13%) Windows Server 2003
Processes & Methodologies
1 348 (46.46%) Data Pipeline
2 313 (41.79%) Data Engineering
3 310 (41.39%) ETL
4 257 (34.31%) Data Modelling
5 244 (32.58%) Analytics
6 240 (32.04%) CI/CD
7 180 (24.03%) Business Intelligence
8 179 (23.90%) DevOps
9 150 (20.03%) Agile
10 123 (16.42%) Problem-Solving
11 119 (15.89%) Data Science
12 109 (14.55%) Data Governance
13 100 (13.35%) Machine Learning
14 93 (12.42%) Data Architecture
15 92 (12.28%) Infrastructure as Code
16 91 (12.15%) Data Integration
17 89 (11.88%) AI
18 74 (9.88%) Migration
19 72 (9.61%) Data Transformation
20 69 (9.21%) Performance Tuning
Programming Languages
1 458 (61.15%) Python
2 451 (60.21%) SQL
3 79 (10.55%) Scala
4 65 (8.68%) Java
5 25 (3.34%) Bash
6 16 (2.14%) Data Analysis Expressions
6 16 (2.14%) Go
6 16 (2.14%) R
7 14 (1.87%) PL/SQL
8 13 (1.74%) C#
9 12 (1.60%) JavaScript
10 10 (1.34%) T-SQL
11 9 (1.20%) PowerShell
11 9 (1.20%) Shell Script
12 7 (0.93%) TypeScript
13 5 (0.67%) Groovy
14 4 (0.53%) Korn
15 3 (0.40%) Bicep
15 3 (0.40%) C++
16 2 (0.27%) ABAP
Qualifications
1 175 (23.36%) Security Cleared
2 152 (20.29%) SC Cleared
3 28 (3.74%) Degree
4 24 (3.20%) Azure Certification
5 20 (2.67%) AWS Certification
5 20 (2.67%) DV Cleared
6 13 (1.74%) Computer Science Degree
7 10 (1.34%) Master's Degree
8 6 (0.80%) BPSS Clearance
9 4 (0.53%) DBS Check
10 3 (0.40%) CTC Cleared
11 2 (0.27%) MCP
11 2 (0.27%) SnowPro
12 1 (0.13%) HND
12 1 (0.13%) PhD
12 1 (0.13%) Tableau Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 200 (26.70%) Data Quality
2 36 (4.81%) GDPR
3 10 (1.34%) QA
4 7 (0.93%) Accessibility
5 5 (0.67%) HIPAA
6 3 (0.40%) ISO/IEC 20000
6 3 (0.40%) MiFID
6 3 (0.40%) NIST
6 3 (0.40%) SLA
7 2 (0.27%) Dodd-Frank
7 2 (0.27%) EMIR
7 2 (0.27%) EU AI Act
7 2 (0.27%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 1 (0.13%) HL7
8 1 (0.13%) NCSC
8 1 (0.13%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 1 (0.13%) SOC 2
8 1 (0.13%) WCAG
System Software
1 70 (9.35%) Docker
2 9 (1.20%) Virtual Machines
3 5 (0.67%) zsh
4 3 (0.40%) Active Directory
5 1 (0.13%) HDFS
Systems Management
1 95 (12.68%) Terraform
2 70 (9.35%) Kubernetes
3 12 (1.60%) Ansible
4 9 (1.20%) Grafana
4 9 (1.20%) NetBackup
5 6 (0.80%) Prometheus
6 5 (0.67%) Kibana
6 5 (0.67%) Puppet
7 4 (0.53%) Argo
8 3 (0.40%) Ambari
8 3 (0.40%) Istio
8 3 (0.40%) Kubeflow
8 3 (0.40%) logstash
8 3 (0.40%) ZABBIX
9 2 (0.27%) Control-M
9 2 (0.27%) EMC NetWorker
9 2 (0.27%) Tivoli Storage Manager
Vendors
1 256 (34.18%) Databricks
2 86 (11.48%) Microsoft
3 58 (7.74%) Oracle
4 32 (4.27%) Google
5 31 (4.14%) Talend
6 22 (2.94%) Foundry
6 22 (2.94%) Palantir
7 20 (2.67%) Informatica
8 19 (2.54%) Denodo
9 15 (2.00%) Cloudera
10 12 (1.60%) IBM
10 12 (1.60%) Red Hat
11 11 (1.47%) SAP
12 9 (1.20%) Commvault
12 9 (1.20%) Splunk
12 9 (1.20%) Veritas
13 7 (0.93%) Confluent
13 7 (0.93%) Virgin Media
14 5 (0.67%) Salesforce
15 4 (0.53%) EMC
625 Data Engineer jobs in England