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 12 August 2026.

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

6 months to
12 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 58 125 95
Rank change year-on-year +67 -30 +21
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 1,757 628 787
As % of all contract jobs in England 3.85% 2.27% 2.36%
As % of the Job Titles category 4.17% 2.48% 2.54%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,184 452 579
10th Percentile £384 £375 £263
25th Percentile £425 £425 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year - -4.76% -4.55%
75th Percentile £588 £589 £630
90th Percentile £663 £700 £690
UK median daily rate £500 £500 £521
% change year-on-year - -4.03% -5.27%
Number of hourly rates quoted 85 12 29
10th Percentile £20.10 £19.00 £38.65
25th Percentile £30.96 £38.19 £52.50
Median hourly rate £45.00 £52.50 £80.00
Median % change year-on-year -14.29% -34.38% +23.08%
75th Percentile £70.00 £66.55 -
90th Percentile £75.00 £79.87 -
UK median hourly rate £50.00 £52.50 £75.00
% change year-on-year -4.76% -30.00% +15.38%

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 42,165 25,369 30,950
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.50% 91.65% 92.87%
Number of daily rates quoted 25,544 16,436 20,307
10th Percentile £325 £285 £300
25th Percentile £425 £402 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £512 £525
Median % change year-on-year +2.54% -2.48% -4.55%
75th Percentile £626 £625 £638
90th Percentile £738 £738 £750
UK median daily rate £525 £500 £525
% change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -1.87%
Number of hourly rates quoted 3,170 1,324 1,794
10th Percentile £15.25 £13.52 £14.16
25th Percentile £21.25 £17.47 £21.25
Median hourly rate £43.50 £25.23 £45.00
Median % change year-on-year +72.45% -43.94% +8.04%
75th Percentile £68.00 £55.00 £66.25
90th Percentile £80.00 £74.63 £75.00
UK median hourly rate £42.25 £25.15 £43.00
% change year-on-year +67.99% -41.51% +2.87%

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 12 August 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 12 August 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 12 August 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 +43 850 £525 - 419
Midlands +72 402 £465 +2.20% 71
West Midlands +69 346 £460 -4.17% 46
North of England +36 234 £500 +5.26% 136
North West +31 135 £525 +10.53% 67
South East +14 125 £463 +2.78% 142
South West +8 87 £525 +6.33% 47
Yorkshire -2 77 £465 -4.62% 34
East Midlands +28 56 £475 +13.10% 25
East of England +9 37 £520 +34.19% 23
North East -25 23 £515 +22.62% 37
Data Engineer
UK

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

For the 6 months to 12 August 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.

1 889 (50.60%) SQL
2 758 (43.14%) Data Pipeline
3 721 (41.04%) Python
4 646 (36.77%) Data Engineering
5 632 (35.97%) Analytics
6 615 (35.00%) ETL
7 588 (33.47%) Data Modelling
8 543 (30.90%) Azure
9 508 (28.91%) AWS
10 480 (27.32%) Security Cleared
11 436 (24.82%) Data Quality
12 422 (24.02%) CI/CD
13 421 (23.96%) SC Cleared
14 329 (18.73%) Databricks
15 313 (17.81%) Business Intelligence
16 312 (17.76%) Agile
17 295 (16.79%) DevOps
18 294 (16.73%) Data Warehouse
19 274 (15.59%) Migration
20 239 (13.60%) Data Governance
20 239 (13.60%) Power Platform
21 230 (13.09%) Power BI
21 230 (13.09%) PySpark
22 224 (12.75%) Microsoft
23 223 (12.69%) AI
24 217 (12.35%) Azure Data Factory
25 209 (11.90%) Problem-Solving
26 207 (11.78%) Validation
27 206 (11.72%) Data Integration
28 200 (11.38%) Data Transformation

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
1 178 (10.13%) Apache Airflow
2 145 (8.25%) Apache Spark
3 110 (6.26%) Apache
4 76 (4.33%) SAS
5 38 (2.16%) Confluence
6 13 (0.74%) Palantir Foundry
7 12 (0.68%) SharePoint
8 10 (0.57%) Jupyter
9 3 (0.17%) Apache Superset
10 2 (0.11%) Microsoft Exchange
11 1 (0.057%) ArcGIS
11 1 (0.057%) Liferay
11 1 (0.057%) Luigi
11 1 (0.057%) R Markdown
Applications
1 24 (1.37%) Microsoft Excel
2 5 (0.28%) Notepad++
2 5 (0.28%) Spreadsheet
3 4 (0.23%) Chatbot
4 1 (0.057%) Microsoft PowerPoint
Business Applications
1 12 (0.68%) Aladdin
2 7 (0.40%) Dynamics CRM
3 5 (0.28%) Infor LN
3 5 (0.28%) NetSuite
3 5 (0.28%) Sage X3
4 3 (0.17%) SAP BPC
4 3 (0.17%) SAP S/4HANA
4 3 (0.17%) SimCorp Dimension
5 2 (0.11%) BambooHR
5 2 (0.11%) Maximo
5 2 (0.11%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
6 1 (0.057%) iTrent
6 1 (0.057%) MIS ActiveH
6 1 (0.057%) Oracle 11i
6 1 (0.057%) Oracle Assets
6 1 (0.057%) Oracle EBS
6 1 (0.057%) Oracle ERP
6 1 (0.057%) Raiser’s Edge
6 1 (0.057%) SAP Business ByDesign
6 1 (0.057%) SAP CAR
Cloud Services
1 543 (30.90%) Azure
2 508 (28.91%) AWS
3 239 (13.60%) Power Platform
4 217 (12.35%) Azure Data Factory
5 191 (10.87%) Snowflake
6 187 (10.64%) dbt
7 161 (9.16%) GCP
8 142 (8.08%) Amazon S3
9 140 (7.97%) Azure Synapse Analytics
10 129 (7.34%) Azure DevOps
11 102 (5.81%) GitHub
12 98 (5.58%) Serverless
13 84 (4.78%) AWS Lambda
14 43 (2.45%) GitHub Actions
15 36 (2.05%) Amazon EMR
16 28 (1.59%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 24 (1.37%) Amazon Kinesis
17 24 (1.37%) AWS Step Functions
17 24 (1.37%) Fivetran
17 24 (1.37%) Matillion
Communications & Networking
1 31 (1.76%) VPN
2 30 (1.71%) BGP
2 30 (1.71%) DMZ
2 30 (1.71%) DNS
2 30 (1.71%) Multicast
3 9 (0.51%) Structured Cabling
4 7 (0.40%) Firewall
5 5 (0.28%) PuTTY
5 5 (0.28%) WinSCP
6 4 (0.23%) Wi-Fi
6 4 (0.23%) Wireless
7 3 (0.17%) Intrusion Detection
8 1 (0.057%) 4G
8 1 (0.057%) 5G
Database & Business Intelligence
1 294 (16.73%) Data Warehouse
2 230 (13.09%) Power BI
3 155 (8.82%) Data Lake
4 105 (5.98%) Metadata
5 97 (5.52%) BigQuery
6 94 (5.35%) Amazon Redshift
7 91 (5.18%) Pentaho
8 86 (4.89%) SQL Server
9 81 (4.61%) Delta Lake
10 64 (3.64%) Big Data
10 64 (3.64%) Tableau
11 63 (3.59%) Amazon Athena
12 60 (3.41%) PostgreSQL
13 52 (2.96%) Snowflake Schema
14 50 (2.85%) SQL Server Integration Services
15 49 (2.79%) Azure SQL Database
15 49 (2.79%) NoSQL
16 48 (2.73%) Relational Database
17 35 (1.99%) Hadoop
18 33 (1.88%) Amazon RDS
Development Applications
1 157 (8.94%) Git
2 87 (4.95%) GitLab
3 69 (3.93%) JIRA
4 46 (2.62%) Jenkins
5 10 (0.57%) MLflow
6 7 (0.40%) Postman
7 6 (0.34%) Bitbucket
8 5 (0.28%) Artifactory
8 5 (0.28%) SonarQube
9 3 (0.17%) ERwin
9 3 (0.17%) Newman
9 3 (0.17%) Sonatype Nexus
10 2 (0.11%) Atlassian Bamboo
10 2 (0.11%) ER Studio
10 2 (0.11%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
10 2 (0.11%) Yeoman
11 1 (0.057%) Octopus Deploy
11 1 (0.057%) Selenium
11 1 (0.057%) Terragrunt
11 1 (0.057%) Toad
General
1 289 (16.45%) Finance
2 275 (15.65%) Social Skills
3 202 (11.50%) Analytical Skills
4 161 (9.16%) Public Sector
5 101 (5.75%) Banking
6 30 (1.71%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 25 (1.42%) Telecoms
8 23 (1.31%) Retail
9 22 (1.25%) Marketing
10 19 (1.08%) Automotive
10 19 (1.08%) Manufacturing
11 17 (0.97%) Aerospace
11 17 (0.97%) Documentation Skills
12 16 (0.91%) Front Office
12 16 (0.91%) Investment Banking
13 15 (0.85%) Pharmaceutical
14 10 (0.57%) Financial Institution
15 9 (0.51%) Billing
15 9 (0.51%) Military
16 8 (0.46%) Legal
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 230 (13.09%) PySpark
2 119 (6.77%) Kafka
3 33 (1.88%) Pandas
4 25 (1.42%) JSON
5 24 (1.37%) REST
6 22 (1.25%) Spring
6 22 (1.25%) Spring Boot
7 20 (1.14%) Great Expectations
8 17 (0.97%) XML
9 16 (0.91%) YAML
10 15 (0.85%) Apache Beam
11 13 (0.74%) React
11 13 (0.74%) RESTful
12 11 (0.63%) pytest
13 10 (0.57%) Apache Avro
13 10 (0.57%) Microsoft Graph
14 9 (0.51%) PyTorch
14 9 (0.51%) scikit-learn
15 8 (0.46%) .NET
16 7 (0.40%) HTML
Miscellaneous
1 132 (7.51%) Cloud Native
2 79 (4.50%) Legacy Systems
3 52 (2.96%) Data Structures
4 33 (1.88%) Onboarding
5 24 (1.37%) Distributed Systems
6 23 (1.31%) Product Ownership
7 22 (1.25%) Greenfield Project
8 21 (1.20%) NHS
9 18 (1.02%) Reference Data
9 18 (1.02%) Reinsurance
10 14 (0.80%) Management Information System
11 12 (0.68%) Data Protection Act
12 11 (0.63%) AI Agents
12 11 (0.63%) Clustering
13 10 (0.57%) Algorithms
13 10 (0.57%) Life Science
13 10 (0.57%) Virtual Team
14 9 (0.51%) Self-Motivation
15 8 (0.46%) Driving Licence
15 8 (0.46%) Linux Command Line
Operating Systems
1 61 (3.47%) Unix
2 46 (2.62%) Linux
3 4 (0.23%) Windows
4 2 (0.11%) Ubuntu
4 2 (0.11%) Windows Server
5 1 (0.057%) Robot Operating System
5 1 (0.057%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 758 (43.14%) Data Pipeline
2 646 (36.77%) Data Engineering
3 632 (35.97%) Analytics
4 615 (35.00%) ETL
5 588 (33.47%) Data Modelling
6 422 (24.02%) CI/CD
7 313 (17.81%) Business Intelligence
8 312 (17.76%) Agile
9 295 (16.79%) DevOps
10 274 (15.59%) Migration
11 239 (13.60%) Data Governance
12 223 (12.69%) AI
13 209 (11.90%) Problem-Solving
14 207 (11.78%) Validation
15 206 (11.72%) Data Integration
16 200 (11.38%) Data Transformation
17 176 (10.02%) Decision-Making
18 155 (8.82%) Data Science
19 141 (8.03%) Test Automation
20 135 (7.68%) Machine Learning
Programming Languages
1 889 (50.60%) SQL
2 721 (41.04%) Python
3 104 (5.92%) Java
4 58 (3.30%) Scala
5 48 (2.73%) PL/SQL
6 33 (1.88%) Shell Script
7 30 (1.71%) Bash
7 30 (1.71%) T-SQL
8 28 (1.59%) Data Analysis Expressions
9 25 (1.42%) PowerShell
10 17 (0.97%) C#
11 15 (0.85%) JavaScript
12 13 (0.74%) R
13 10 (0.57%) Bicep
14 6 (0.34%) Go
14 6 (0.34%) TypeScript
15 4 (0.23%) Korn
16 2 (0.11%) HiveQL
16 2 (0.11%) Ruby
16 2 (0.11%) SPARQL
Qualifications
1 480 (27.32%) Security Cleared
2 421 (23.96%) SC Cleared
3 42 (2.39%) Degree
4 38 (2.16%) BPSS Clearance
5 24 (1.37%) Azure Certification
6 21 (1.20%) Computer Science Degree
6 21 (1.20%) DV Cleared
7 10 (0.57%) AWS Certification
8 9 (0.51%) City & Guilds
9 8 (0.46%) DBS Check
10 6 (0.34%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
10 6 (0.34%) Master's Degree
10 6 (0.34%) SnowPro
11 5 (0.28%) BICSI Certification
11 5 (0.28%) CISM
11 5 (0.28%) CISSP
12 4 (0.23%) Microsoft Certification
13 3 (0.17%) CEH
14 1 (0.057%) CISA
14 1 (0.057%) Postgraduate
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 436 (24.82%) Data Quality
2 59 (3.36%) QA
3 44 (2.50%) GDPR
4 16 (0.91%) Accessibility
5 12 (0.68%) SLA
6 6 (0.34%) FATCA
7 5 (0.28%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 4 (0.23%) HIPAA
8 4 (0.23%) ISO/IEC 27001
9 3 (0.17%) MiFID
10 2 (0.11%) California Consumer Privacy Act
10 2 (0.11%) EMIR
10 2 (0.11%) GMP
10 2 (0.11%) SNOMED CT
10 2 (0.11%) WCAG
11 1 (0.057%) Government Security Classifications
11 1 (0.057%) IFRS
11 1 (0.057%) IFRS 17
11 1 (0.057%) IFRS 9
11 1 (0.057%) PMO
System Software
1 116 (6.60%) Docker
2 4 (0.23%) Virtual Machines
3 2 (0.11%) Active Directory
3 2 (0.11%) HDFS
4 1 (0.057%) RACF
Systems Management
1 164 (9.33%) Terraform
2 90 (5.12%) Kubernetes
3 34 (1.94%) Grafana
4 14 (0.80%) Ansible
5 8 (0.46%) Control-M
6 6 (0.34%) Kibana
7 4 (0.23%) Prometheus
8 3 (0.17%) Puppet
9 2 (0.11%) Apache Ranger
9 2 (0.11%) Rancher
9 2 (0.11%) Thomson Reuters DACS
10 1 (0.057%) Kubeflow
10 1 (0.057%) logstash
10 1 (0.057%) NetBackup
Vendors
1 329 (18.73%) Databricks
2 224 (12.75%) Microsoft
3 153 (8.71%) Oracle
4 123 (7.00%) Informatica
5 116 (6.60%) Talend
6 67 (3.81%) Google
7 62 (3.53%) Denodo
8 33 (1.88%) SAP
9 31 (1.76%) Cisco
9 31 (1.76%) F5
10 28 (1.59%) Salesforce
11 23 (1.31%) Palantir
12 19 (1.08%) Cloudera
13 18 (1.02%) Foundry
13 18 (1.02%) Splunk
14 15 (0.85%) ServiceNow
15 11 (0.63%) Sage
16 10 (0.57%) IBM
17 9 (0.51%) Bloomberg
18 8 (0.46%) InterSystems