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 15 October 2026.

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

6 months to
15 Oct 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 66 133 101
Rank change year-on-year +67 -32 +30
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 1,661 628 760
As % of all contract jobs in England 3.55% 2.23% 2.37%
As % of the Job Titles category 3.86% 2.45% 2.54%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,085 449 526
10th Percentile £375 £363 £363
25th Percentile £425 £425 £450
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £513 £550
Median % change year-on-year -2.44% -6.82% -
75th Percentile £600 £600 £636
90th Percentile £675 £695 £700
UK median daily rate £500 £500 £530
% change year-on-year - -5.66% -3.64%
Number of hourly rates quoted 61 12 5
10th Percentile £21.25 £25.25 £53.55
25th Percentile £30.96 £32.94 £60.00
Median hourly rate £45.00 £48.00 £95.00
Median % change year-on-year -6.25% -49.47% +53.85%
75th Percentile £68.00 £66.88 £97.50
90th Percentile £70.00 £107.00 -
UK median hourly rate £44.75 £52.50 £95.00
% change year-on-year -14.76% -44.74% +53.85%

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 43,070 25,660 29,897
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 91.95% 91.15% 93.11%
Number of daily rates quoted 25,333 16,528 18,273
10th Percentile £325 £278 £300
25th Percentile £425 £402 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £510 £525
Median % change year-on-year +2.94% -2.86% -2.78%
75th Percentile £638 £625 £638
90th Percentile £738 £725 £750
UK median daily rate £525 £500 £525
% change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 3,798 1,445 1,249
10th Percentile £14.50 £13.80 £15.10
25th Percentile £20.01 £17.33 £21.25
Median hourly rate £41.74 £25.15 £43.00
Median % change year-on-year +65.94% -41.51% -6.89%
75th Percentile £67.85 £50.00 £67.50
90th Percentile £80.00 £70.00 £75.00
UK median hourly rate £41.56 £25.15 £41.27
% change year-on-year +65.23% -39.05% -8.30%

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 15 October 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 15 October 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 15 October 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 +29 828 £525 - 716
Midlands +73 327 £469 -6.20% 93
West Midlands +57 241 £469 -6.90% 68
North of England +27 206 £525 +10.53% 236
South East +17 124 £459 -3.37% 121
South West +28 121 £525 +2.44% 62
North West +23 108 £525 +20.69% 122
East Midlands +43 86 £388 -16.22% 25
Yorkshire +5 80 £519 +1.29% 59
East of England +4 36 £525 -16.00% 33
North East -25 19 £510 +22.52% 55
Data Engineer
UK

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

For the 6 months to 15 October 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.

1 847 (50.99%) SQL
2 735 (44.25%) Data Pipeline
3 731 (44.01%) Python
4 686 (41.30%) Data Engineering
5 591 (35.58%) Data Modelling
6 588 (35.40%) ETL
7 558 (33.59%) Analytics
8 532 (32.03%) AWS
9 509 (30.64%) Azure
10 454 (27.33%) Data Quality
11 434 (26.13%) Security Cleared
12 424 (25.53%) CI/CD
13 369 (22.22%) SC Cleared
14 351 (21.13%) Databricks
15 295 (17.76%) Agile
16 291 (17.52%) DevOps
17 281 (16.92%) AI
17 281 (16.92%) Migration
18 272 (16.38%) Data Warehouse
19 246 (14.81%) Data Transformation
20 241 (14.51%) Validation
21 240 (14.45%) Business Intelligence
22 238 (14.33%) Data Governance
23 233 (14.03%) PySpark
24 220 (13.25%) Data Integration
25 217 (13.06%) Microsoft
26 208 (12.52%) dbt
27 207 (12.46%) Snowflake
28 193 (11.62%) Power Platform
29 190 (11.44%) Azure Data Factory

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 (10.72%) Apache Airflow
2 155 (9.33%) Apache Spark
3 139 (8.37%) Apache
4 43 (2.59%) SAS
5 34 (2.05%) Confluence
6 16 (0.96%) Palantir Foundry
7 15 (0.90%) SharePoint
8 12 (0.72%) Jupyter
9 4 (0.24%) Microsoft Exchange
10 3 (0.18%) Apache Superset
11 2 (0.12%) CMS
12 1 (0.060%) Apache Pulsar
12 1 (0.060%) ArcGIS
12 1 (0.060%) Liferay
12 1 (0.060%) Luigi
12 1 (0.060%) nginx
12 1 (0.060%) Oracle Workflow
12 1 (0.060%) PowerExchange
Applications
1 18 (1.08%) Microsoft Excel
2 8 (0.48%) Spreadsheet
3 3 (0.18%) Chatbot
4 1 (0.060%) Microsoft Office
4 1 (0.060%) Microsoft PowerPoint
Business Applications
1 12 (0.72%) Aladdin
2 8 (0.48%) Dynamics CRM
3 6 (0.36%) NetSuite
4 5 (0.30%) Infor LN
4 5 (0.30%) Sage X3
5 4 (0.24%) SAP S/4HANA
6 3 (0.18%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
7 2 (0.12%) FIS Private Capital Suite
7 2 (0.12%) Maximo
7 2 (0.12%) Oracle EBS
7 2 (0.12%) SAP BPC
7 2 (0.12%) SAP Oil and Gas
7 2 (0.12%) SimCorp Dimension
8 1 (0.060%) Dynamics NAV
8 1 (0.060%) Markit EDM
8 1 (0.060%) Oracle Assets
8 1 (0.060%) Oracle Retail
8 1 (0.060%) Raiser’s Edge
8 1 (0.060%) SAP CAR
8 1 (0.060%) SAP EWM
Cloud Services
1 532 (32.03%) AWS
2 509 (30.64%) Azure
3 208 (12.52%) dbt
4 207 (12.46%) Snowflake
5 193 (11.62%) Power Platform
6 190 (11.44%) Azure Data Factory
7 183 (11.02%) GCP
8 145 (8.73%) Amazon S3
9 112 (6.74%) Azure DevOps
10 111 (6.68%) Serverless
11 106 (6.38%) Azure Synapse Analytics
12 98 (5.90%) GitHub
13 92 (5.54%) AWS Lambda
14 62 (3.73%) Azure Databricks
15 48 (2.89%) Amazon EMR
16 43 (2.59%) GitHub Actions
17 36 (2.17%) Amazon CloudWatch
18 31 (1.87%) AWS Step Functions
19 27 (1.63%) Microsoft Purview
20 23 (1.38%) Amazon EventBridge
Communications & Networking
1 21 (1.26%) DNS
2 20 (1.20%) BGP
2 20 (1.20%) DMZ
2 20 (1.20%) Multicast
2 20 (1.20%) VPN
3 7 (0.42%) Firewall
4 4 (0.24%) Wi-Fi
4 4 (0.24%) Wireless
5 3 (0.18%) Intrusion Detection
6 2 (0.12%) Structured Cabling
7 1 (0.060%) Cisco IPT
7 1 (0.060%) HTTP
7 1 (0.060%) HTTPS
7 1 (0.060%) Network Security
7 1 (0.060%) TCP/IP
7 1 (0.060%) tcpdump
7 1 (0.060%) Wireshark
Database & Business Intelligence
1 272 (16.38%) Data Warehouse
2 188 (11.32%) Power BI
3 140 (8.43%) Data Lake
4 124 (7.47%) Metadata
5 94 (5.66%) BigQuery
6 84 (5.06%) Amazon Redshift
7 80 (4.82%) Delta Lake
8 72 (4.33%) Amazon Athena
9 69 (4.15%) Pentaho
10 63 (3.79%) SQL Server
11 56 (3.37%) Big Data
12 53 (3.19%) PostgreSQL
13 46 (2.77%) Relational Database
14 41 (2.47%) NoSQL
14 41 (2.47%) Oracle Database
14 41 (2.47%) Snowflake Schema
15 38 (2.29%) Tableau
16 37 (2.23%) Amazon RDS
17 34 (2.05%) Azure SQL Database
17 34 (2.05%) SQL Server Integration Services
Development Applications
1 161 (9.69%) Git
2 81 (4.88%) GitLab
3 44 (2.65%) JIRA
4 30 (1.81%) Jenkins
5 15 (0.90%) MLflow
6 9 (0.54%) Bitbucket
6 9 (0.54%) Postman
7 6 (0.36%) Artifactory
7 6 (0.36%) Selenium
8 5 (0.30%) SonarQube
9 4 (0.24%) Claude Code
9 4 (0.24%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
10 3 (0.18%) Atlassian Bamboo
10 3 (0.18%) ERwin
10 3 (0.18%) Newman
11 2 (0.12%) CircleCI
11 2 (0.12%) RStudio
11 2 (0.12%) Terragrunt
11 2 (0.12%) Yeoman
12 1 (0.060%) Octopus Deploy
General
1 276 (16.62%) Social Skills
2 253 (15.23%) Finance
3 185 (11.14%) Analytical Skills
4 153 (9.21%) Public Sector
5 106 (6.38%) Banking
6 26 (1.57%) Retail
7 23 (1.38%) Automotive
7 23 (1.38%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 20 (1.20%) Investment Banking
9 19 (1.14%) Front Office
10 17 (1.02%) Marketing
11 16 (0.96%) Aerospace
12 15 (0.90%) Telecoms
13 14 (0.84%) Military
14 13 (0.78%) Pharmaceutical
15 12 (0.72%) Documentation Skills
15 12 (0.72%) Manufacturing
16 11 (0.66%) Back Office
17 10 (0.60%) Financial Institution
18 9 (0.54%) Law
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 233 (14.03%) PySpark
2 174 (10.48%) Terraform
3 109 (6.56%) Kafka
4 33 (1.99%) REST
5 25 (1.51%) JSON
6 21 (1.26%) Pandas
7 17 (1.02%) XML
8 15 (0.90%) Spring
8 15 (0.90%) Spring Boot
9 14 (0.84%) Great Expectations
9 14 (0.84%) pytest
10 13 (0.78%) Apache Beam
10 13 (0.78%) PyTorch
11 12 (0.72%) Apache NiFi
12 11 (0.66%) LangChain
13 10 (0.60%) .NET
13 10 (0.60%) Microsoft Graph
13 10 (0.60%) React
13 10 (0.60%) RESTful
14 8 (0.48%) NumPy
Miscellaneous
1 152 (9.15%) Cloud Native
2 56 (3.37%) Legacy Systems
3 53 (3.19%) Data Structures
4 46 (2.77%) Onboarding
5 22 (1.32%) AI Agents
6 21 (1.26%) Distributed Systems
7 20 (1.20%) Product Ownership
8 18 (1.08%) Algorithms
9 17 (1.02%) Management Information System
10 16 (0.96%) Reference Data
11 15 (0.90%) Reinsurance
12 14 (0.84%) Greenfield Project
13 12 (0.72%) NHS
13 12 (0.72%) Virtual Team
14 10 (0.60%) Distributed Computing
15 9 (0.54%) Data Protection Act
16 8 (0.48%) Clustering
16 8 (0.48%) Enterprise Software
17 7 (0.42%) Life Science
17 7 (0.42%) Replication
Operating Systems
1 32 (1.93%) Unix
2 30 (1.81%) Linux
3 2 (0.12%) Ubuntu
3 2 (0.12%) Windows
4 1 (0.060%) Robot Operating System
4 1 (0.060%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 735 (44.25%) Data Pipeline
2 686 (41.30%) Data Engineering
3 591 (35.58%) Data Modelling
4 588 (35.40%) ETL
5 558 (33.59%) Analytics
6 424 (25.53%) CI/CD
7 295 (17.76%) Agile
8 291 (17.52%) DevOps
9 281 (16.92%) AI
9 281 (16.92%) Migration
10 246 (14.81%) Data Transformation
11 241 (14.51%) Validation
12 240 (14.45%) Business Intelligence
13 238 (14.33%) Data Governance
14 220 (13.25%) Data Integration
15 176 (10.60%) Problem-Solving
16 160 (9.63%) Machine Learning
17 154 (9.27%) Infrastructure as Code
17 154 (9.27%) Lakehouse
18 148 (8.91%) Decision-Making
Programming Languages
1 847 (50.99%) SQL
2 731 (44.01%) Python
3 80 (4.82%) Java
4 59 (3.55%) Scala
5 37 (2.23%) PL/SQL
6 30 (1.81%) PowerShell
7 29 (1.75%) Data Analysis Expressions
8 25 (1.51%) T-SQL
9 21 (1.26%) Shell Script
10 20 (1.20%) Bash
11 13 (0.78%) JavaScript
12 12 (0.72%) Bicep
13 11 (0.66%) R
14 10 (0.60%) Go
15 8 (0.48%) TypeScript
16 5 (0.30%) C#
16 5 (0.30%) Korn
17 4 (0.24%) Kusto Query Language
18 2 (0.12%) COBOL
18 2 (0.12%) Cypher
Qualifications
1 434 (26.13%) Security Cleared
2 369 (22.22%) SC Cleared
3 43 (2.59%) DV Cleared
4 42 (2.53%) Degree
5 41 (2.47%) BPSS Clearance
6 23 (1.38%) AWS Certification
6 23 (1.38%) Azure Certification
7 18 (1.08%) Computer Science Degree
8 9 (0.54%) Master's Degree
9 7 (0.42%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
9 7 (0.42%) DBS Check
9 7 (0.42%) SnowPro
10 5 (0.30%) CISM
10 5 (0.30%) CISSP
11 4 (0.24%) City & Guilds
12 3 (0.18%) CEH
12 3 (0.18%) Microsoft Certification
13 1 (0.060%) CISA
13 1 (0.060%) PMI Certification
13 1 (0.060%) PMP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 454 (27.33%) Data Quality
2 68 (4.09%) QA
3 38 (2.29%) GDPR
4 14 (0.84%) Accessibility
5 6 (0.36%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 5 (0.30%) FATCA
6 5 (0.30%) Sarbanes-Oxley
6 5 (0.30%) SLA
7 4 (0.24%) Disclosure Scotland
8 3 (0.18%) HIPAA
8 3 (0.18%) MiFID
9 2 (0.12%) California Consumer Privacy Act
9 2 (0.12%) EMIR
9 2 (0.12%) SNOMED CT
10 1 (0.060%) Government Security Classifications
10 1 (0.060%) IFRS
10 1 (0.060%) IFRS 9
10 1 (0.060%) NIST
10 1 (0.060%) PMO
10 1 (0.060%) SOC 2
System Software
1 96 (5.78%) Docker
2 4 (0.24%) Active Directory
3 1 (0.060%) HDFS
3 1 (0.060%) Virtual Machines
Systems Management
1 94 (5.66%) Kubernetes
2 18 (1.08%) Ansible
3 14 (0.84%) Grafana
4 11 (0.66%) Control-M
5 5 (0.30%) Kibana
5 5 (0.30%) Prometheus
6 2 (0.12%) Puppet
7 1 (0.060%) logstash
7 1 (0.060%) Progress Chef
Vendors
1 351 (21.13%) Databricks
2 217 (13.06%) Microsoft
3 132 (7.95%) Oracle
4 87 (5.24%) Google
5 86 (5.18%) Informatica
6 82 (4.94%) Talend
7 41 (2.47%) Denodo
8 31 (1.87%) Salesforce
9 28 (1.69%) Palantir
10 25 (1.51%) SAP
11 23 (1.38%) Foundry
12 20 (1.20%) Cisco
12 20 (1.20%) F5
13 9 (0.54%) Bloomberg
14 8 (0.48%) Dynatrace
14 8 (0.48%) OpenAI
14 8 (0.48%) Sage
15 7 (0.42%) Cloudera
15 7 (0.42%) InterSystems
15 7 (0.42%) Splunk