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 8 August 2026.

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

6 months to
8 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 56 124 93
Rank change year-on-year +68 -31 +23
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 1,766 636 790
As % of all contract jobs in England 3.86% 2.30% 2.37%
As % of the Job Titles category 4.17% 2.51% 2.55%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,192 458 586
10th Percentile £386 £373 £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 £592 £630
90th Percentile £663 £697 £688
UK median daily rate £500 £500 £520
% change year-on-year - -3.85% -5.45%
Number of hourly rates quoted 84 12 29
10th Percentile £19.91 £19.00 £38.65
25th Percentile £30.96 £38.19 £52.50
Median hourly rate £43.75 £52.50 £80.00
Median % change year-on-year -16.67% -34.38% +12.28%
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% +5.26%

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 42,356 25,309 30,966
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.53% 91.68% 92.89%
Number of daily rates quoted 25,686 16,403 20,377
10th Percentile £326 £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 £630 £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 3,156 1,311 1,814
10th Percentile £15.25 £13.65 £14.16
25th Percentile £21.25 £17.65 £21.25
Median hourly rate £43.10 £26.00 £45.00
Median % change year-on-year +65.78% -42.22% +5.88%
75th Percentile £68.00 £55.00 £65.00
90th Percentile £80.00 £75.00 £75.00
UK median hourly rate £42.00 £25.15 £43.00
% change year-on-year +67.00% -41.51% +0.58%

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 8 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 8 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 8 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 +41 862 £525 - 296
Midlands +73 400 £465 +1.09% 58
West Midlands +67 347 £460 -4.17% 33
North of England +31 236 £490 +3.16% 97
North West +34 139 £525 +10.53% 41
South East +22 129 £467 +3.78% 121
South West 0 85 £525 +10.53% 37
Yorkshire -2 75 £465 -2.11% 27
East Midlands +26 53 £500 +19.05% 25
East of England +7 35 £520 +61.74% 16
North East -25 23 £515 +21.89% 30
Data Engineer
UK

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

For the 6 months to 8 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.

1 896 (50.74%) SQL
2 751 (42.53%) Data Pipeline
3 728 (41.22%) Python
4 654 (37.03%) Data Engineering
5 631 (35.73%) Analytics
6 616 (34.88%) ETL
7 592 (33.52%) Data Modelling
8 545 (30.86%) Azure
9 508 (28.77%) AWS
10 484 (27.41%) Security Cleared
11 437 (24.75%) Data Quality
12 424 (24.01%) SC Cleared
13 419 (23.73%) CI/CD
14 325 (18.40%) Databricks
15 316 (17.89%) Business Intelligence
16 311 (17.61%) Agile
17 294 (16.65%) Data Warehouse
17 294 (16.65%) DevOps
18 279 (15.80%) Migration
19 243 (13.76%) Power Platform
20 239 (13.53%) Data Governance
21 233 (13.19%) Power BI
22 227 (12.85%) PySpark
23 226 (12.80%) Microsoft
24 223 (12.63%) Azure Data Factory
25 219 (12.40%) AI
26 212 (12.00%) Problem-Solving
27 209 (11.83%) Data Integration
28 208 (11.78%) Validation
29 200 (11.33%) 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
1 176 (9.97%) Apache Airflow
2 141 (7.98%) Apache Spark
3 103 (5.83%) Apache
4 76 (4.30%) SAS
5 39 (2.21%) 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 22 (1.25%) 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
6 1 (0.057%) iTrent
6 1 (0.057%) MIS ActiveH
6 1 (0.057%) NEC Housing
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
6 1 (0.057%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
Cloud Services
1 545 (30.86%) Azure
2 508 (28.77%) AWS
3 243 (13.76%) Power Platform
4 223 (12.63%) Azure Data Factory
5 192 (10.87%) Snowflake
6 191 (10.82%) dbt
7 161 (9.12%) GCP
8 143 (8.10%) Amazon S3
8 143 (8.10%) Azure Synapse Analytics
9 129 (7.30%) Azure DevOps
10 101 (5.72%) GitHub
11 97 (5.49%) Serverless
12 83 (4.70%) AWS Lambda
13 42 (2.38%) GitHub Actions
14 37 (2.10%) Amazon EMR
15 27 (1.53%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 25 (1.42%) Dagster
16 25 (1.42%) Matillion
17 24 (1.36%) AWS Step Functions
17 24 (1.36%) Fivetran
Communications & Networking
1 32 (1.81%) DNS
1 32 (1.81%) VPN
2 31 (1.76%) BGP
2 31 (1.76%) DMZ
2 31 (1.76%) 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 (16.65%) Data Warehouse
2 233 (13.19%) Power BI
3 157 (8.89%) Data Lake
4 99 (5.61%) Metadata
5 96 (5.44%) Amazon Redshift
5 96 (5.44%) BigQuery
6 91 (5.15%) Pentaho
7 88 (4.98%) SQL Server
8 83 (4.70%) Delta Lake
9 66 (3.74%) Tableau
10 64 (3.62%) Amazon Athena
11 62 (3.51%) Big Data
12 58 (3.28%) PostgreSQL
13 53 (3.00%) Snowflake Schema
14 50 (2.83%) Azure SQL Database
14 50 (2.83%) SQL Server Integration Services
15 48 (2.72%) Relational Database
16 47 (2.66%) NoSQL
17 35 (1.98%) Hadoop
18 33 (1.87%) Spark SQL
Development Applications
1 161 (9.12%) Git
2 86 (4.87%) GitLab
3 70 (3.96%) JIRA
4 45 (2.55%) Jenkins
5 9 (0.51%) 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%) Newman
9 3 (0.17%) Sonatype Nexus
10 2 (0.11%) Atlassian Bamboo
10 2 (0.11%) ER Studio
10 2 (0.11%) ERwin
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
1 294 (16.65%) Finance
2 281 (15.91%) Social Skills
3 203 (11.49%) Analytical Skills
4 163 (9.23%) Public Sector
5 102 (5.78%) Banking
6 30 (1.70%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 25 (1.42%) Telecoms
8 24 (1.36%) Retail
9 22 (1.25%) Marketing
10 20 (1.13%) Documentation Skills
10 20 (1.13%) Manufacturing
11 19 (1.08%) Automotive
12 17 (0.96%) Aerospace
12 17 (0.96%) Front Office
12 17 (0.96%) Investment Banking
13 15 (0.85%) Pharmaceutical
14 11 (0.62%) Publishing
15 9 (0.51%) Billing
15 9 (0.51%) Military
16 8 (0.45%) Local Government
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 227 (12.85%) PySpark
2 120 (6.80%) Kafka
3 36 (2.04%) Pandas
4 26 (1.47%) JSON
5 24 (1.36%) REST
6 21 (1.19%) Great Expectations
6 21 (1.19%) Spring
6 21 (1.19%) Spring Boot
7 16 (0.91%) XML
7 16 (0.91%) YAML
8 15 (0.85%) Apache Beam
9 13 (0.74%) React
9 13 (0.74%) scikit-learn
10 12 (0.68%) Apache Avro
10 12 (0.68%) RESTful
11 11 (0.62%) pytest
12 10 (0.57%) Microsoft Graph
12 10 (0.57%) PyTorch
13 9 (0.51%) GeoJSON
13 9 (0.51%) Matplotlib
Miscellaneous
1 129 (7.30%) Cloud Native
2 73 (4.13%) Legacy Systems
3 53 (3.00%) Data Structures
4 33 (1.87%) Onboarding
5 24 (1.36%) Distributed Systems
6 23 (1.30%) Product Ownership
7 22 (1.25%) Greenfield Project
7 22 (1.25%) NHS
8 19 (1.08%) Reinsurance
9 16 (0.91%) Reference Data
10 12 (0.68%) Clustering
10 12 (0.68%) Data Protection Act
11 11 (0.62%) AI Agents
11 11 (0.62%) Management Information System
12 10 (0.57%) Algorithms
12 10 (0.57%) Life Science
12 10 (0.57%) Virtual Team
13 9 (0.51%) Driving Licence
13 9 (0.51%) Self-Motivation
14 8 (0.45%) Data Centre
Operating Systems
1 61 (3.45%) Unix
2 44 (2.49%) Linux
3 4 (0.23%) Windows
4 2 (0.11%) Ubuntu
4 2 (0.11%) Windows Server
5 1 (0.057%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 751 (42.53%) Data Pipeline
2 654 (37.03%) Data Engineering
3 631 (35.73%) Analytics
4 616 (34.88%) ETL
5 592 (33.52%) Data Modelling
6 419 (23.73%) CI/CD
7 316 (17.89%) Business Intelligence
8 311 (17.61%) Agile
9 294 (16.65%) DevOps
10 279 (15.80%) Migration
11 239 (13.53%) Data Governance
12 219 (12.40%) AI
13 212 (12.00%) Problem-Solving
14 209 (11.83%) Data Integration
15 208 (11.78%) Validation
16 200 (11.33%) Data Transformation
17 176 (9.97%) Decision-Making
18 156 (8.83%) Data Science
19 141 (7.98%) Test Automation
20 137 (7.76%) Infrastructure as Code
Programming Languages
1 896 (50.74%) SQL
2 728 (41.22%) Python
3 101 (5.72%) Java
4 59 (3.34%) Scala
5 49 (2.77%) PL/SQL
6 33 (1.87%) Shell Script
7 31 (1.76%) T-SQL
8 30 (1.70%) Bash
9 27 (1.53%) Data Analysis Expressions
10 25 (1.42%) PowerShell
11 21 (1.19%) C#
12 15 (0.85%) JavaScript
13 14 (0.79%) R
14 11 (0.62%) Bicep
15 6 (0.34%) Go
15 6 (0.34%) TypeScript
16 3 (0.17%) Korn
17 2 (0.11%) HiveQL
17 2 (0.11%) Ruby
17 2 (0.11%) SPARQL
Qualifications
1 484 (27.41%) Security Cleared
2 424 (24.01%) SC Cleared
3 43 (2.43%) BPSS Clearance
4 41 (2.32%) Degree
5 25 (1.42%) Azure Certification
6 21 (1.19%) DV Cleared
7 20 (1.13%) Computer Science Degree
8 11 (0.62%) AWS Certification
9 9 (0.51%) City & Guilds
9 9 (0.51%) DBS Check
10 6 (0.34%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
10 6 (0.34%) SnowPro
11 5 (0.28%) BICSI Certification
11 5 (0.28%) CISM
11 5 (0.28%) CISSP
11 5 (0.28%) Master's Degree
12 4 (0.23%) Microsoft Certification
13 3 (0.17%) CEH
14 1 (0.057%) CISA
14 1 (0.057%) Cisco Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 437 (24.75%) Data Quality
2 59 (3.34%) QA
3 44 (2.49%) GDPR
4 17 (0.96%) 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
1 113 (6.40%) 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
1 167 (9.46%) Terraform
2 92 (5.21%) Kubernetes
3 33 (1.87%) Grafana
4 14 (0.79%) Ansible
5 8 (0.45%) Prometheus
6 7 (0.40%) Control-M
7 6 (0.34%) Kibana
8 2 (0.11%) Apache Ranger
8 2 (0.11%) Puppet
8 2 (0.11%) Rancher
8 2 (0.11%) Thomson Reuters DACS
9 1 (0.057%) Kubeflow
9 1 (0.057%) logstash
9 1 (0.057%) NetBackup
Vendors
1 325 (18.40%) Databricks
2 226 (12.80%) Microsoft
3 151 (8.55%) Oracle
4 122 (6.91%) Informatica
5 115 (6.51%) Talend
6 67 (3.79%) Google
7 62 (3.51%) Denodo
8 33 (1.87%) Cisco
8 33 (1.87%) F5
8 33 (1.87%) SAP
9 28 (1.59%) Salesforce
10 23 (1.30%) Palantir
11 22 (1.25%) Splunk
12 19 (1.08%) Cloudera
13 18 (1.02%) Foundry
14 15 (0.85%) ServiceNow
15 11 (0.62%) Sage
16 10 (0.57%) IBM
17 9 (0.51%) Bloomberg
18 8 (0.45%) InterSystems