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 9 October 2026.

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

6 months to
9 Oct 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 65 131 101
Rank change year-on-year +66 -30 +28
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 1,647 620 769
As % of all contract jobs in England 3.56% 2.21% 2.37%
As % of the Job Titles category 3.87% 2.42% 2.55%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,077 448 534
10th Percentile £380 £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 £638
90th Percentile £675 £697 £700
UK median daily rate £500 £500 £525
% change year-on-year - -4.76% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 63 12 6
10th Percentile £21.25 £25.25 £49.25
25th Percentile £30.96 £32.94 £51.94
Median hourly rate £45.00 £48.00 £77.50
Median % change year-on-year -6.25% -38.06% +25.51%
75th Percentile £68.00 £66.88 £97.50
90th Percentile £70.00 £107.00 -
UK median hourly rate £44.75 £52.50 £77.50
% change year-on-year -14.76% -32.26% +25.51%

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 42,550 25,588 30,150
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.07% 91.07% 93.09%
Number of daily rates quoted 25,050 16,462 18,444
10th Percentile £325 £276 £300
25th Percentile £425 £402 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £510 £525
Median % change year-on-year +2.94% -2.86% -3.67%
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% -0.94%
Number of hourly rates quoted 3,697 1,430 1,300
10th Percentile £14.50 £13.80 £15.00
25th Percentile £20.25 £17.30 £21.25
Median hourly rate £42.50 £25.15 £43.00
Median % change year-on-year +68.99% -41.51% -6.70%
75th Percentile £67.98 £51.55 £67.50
90th Percentile £80.00 £70.00 £75.00
UK median hourly rate £41.71 £25.15 £41.57
% change year-on-year +65.84% -39.49% -6.60%

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 9 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 9 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 9 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 +32 828 £525 - 863
Midlands +75 319 £469 -1.26% 89
West Midlands +57 235 £469 -6.20% 61
North of England +31 202 £525 +13.51% 249
South East +20 121 £459 -0.76% 124
South West +38 120 £525 +2.44% 64
North West +20 107 £525 +22.09% 128
East Midlands +38 84 £388 -16.22% 27
Yorkshire +7 77 £510 -0.49% 72
East of England +4 37 £525 -16.00% 43
North East -29 19 £510 +22.52% 49
Data Engineer
UK

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

For the 6 months to 9 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.

1 838 (50.88%) SQL
2 721 (43.78%) Data Pipeline
3 714 (43.35%) Python
4 664 (40.32%) Data Engineering
5 579 (35.15%) Data Modelling
6 572 (34.73%) ETL
7 552 (33.52%) Analytics
8 525 (31.88%) AWS
9 502 (30.48%) Azure
10 434 (26.35%) Data Quality
11 427 (25.93%) Security Cleared
12 410 (24.89%) CI/CD
13 361 (21.92%) SC Cleared
14 336 (20.40%) Databricks
15 294 (17.85%) Agile
16 278 (16.88%) DevOps
17 275 (16.70%) AI
18 270 (16.39%) Data Warehouse
18 270 (16.39%) Migration
19 242 (14.69%) Business Intelligence
20 232 (14.09%) Data Transformation
21 228 (13.84%) PySpark
22 226 (13.72%) Validation
23 223 (13.54%) Data Governance
24 215 (13.05%) Microsoft
25 212 (12.87%) dbt
26 209 (12.69%) Snowflake
27 208 (12.63%) Data Integration
28 196 (11.90%) Power Platform
29 191 (11.60%) Power BI

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
1 186 (11.29%) Apache Airflow
2 152 (9.23%) Apache Spark
3 133 (8.08%) Apache
4 34 (2.06%) Confluence
5 33 (2.00%) SAS
6 17 (1.03%) Palantir Foundry
7 15 (0.91%) SharePoint
8 12 (0.73%) Jupyter
9 4 (0.24%) Microsoft Exchange
10 3 (0.18%) Apache Superset
11 2 (0.12%) CMS
12 1 (0.061%) Apache Pulsar
12 1 (0.061%) ArcGIS
12 1 (0.061%) Liferay
12 1 (0.061%) Luigi
12 1 (0.061%) nginx
12 1 (0.061%) Oracle Workflow
12 1 (0.061%) PowerExchange
Applications
1 18 (1.09%) Microsoft Excel
2 8 (0.49%) Spreadsheet
3 3 (0.18%) Chatbot
4 1 (0.061%) Microsoft Office
4 1 (0.061%) Microsoft PowerPoint
Business Applications
1 12 (0.73%) Aladdin
2 8 (0.49%) 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 (0.061%) Dynamics NAV
8 1 (0.061%) Markit EDM
8 1 (0.061%) MIS ActiveH
8 1 (0.061%) Oracle Retail
8 1 (0.061%) Raiser’s Edge
8 1 (0.061%) SAP CAR
8 1 (0.061%) SAP EWM
Cloud Services
1 525 (31.88%) AWS
2 502 (30.48%) Azure
3 212 (12.87%) dbt
4 209 (12.69%) Snowflake
5 196 (11.90%) Power Platform
6 187 (11.35%) Azure Data Factory
7 184 (11.17%) GCP
8 149 (9.05%) Amazon S3
9 111 (6.74%) Serverless
10 110 (6.68%) Azure DevOps
11 105 (6.38%) Azure Synapse Analytics
12 96 (5.83%) AWS Lambda
13 95 (5.77%) GitHub
14 59 (3.58%) Azure Databricks
15 50 (3.04%) Amazon EMR
16 42 (2.55%) GitHub Actions
17 34 (2.06%) Amazon CloudWatch
18 29 (1.76%) AWS Step Functions
19 28 (1.70%) Microsoft Purview
20 24 (1.46%) Fivetran
Communications & Networking
1 21 (1.28%) DNS
2 20 (1.21%) BGP
2 20 (1.21%) DMZ
2 20 (1.21%) Multicast
2 20 (1.21%) VPN
3 6 (0.36%) 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 (0.061%) Cisco IPT
7 1 (0.061%) HTTP
7 1 (0.061%) HTTPS
7 1 (0.061%) Network Security
7 1 (0.061%) TCP/IP
7 1 (0.061%) tcpdump
7 1 (0.061%) Wireshark
Database & Business Intelligence
1 270 (16.39%) Data Warehouse
2 191 (11.60%) Power BI
3 133 (8.08%) Data Lake
4 123 (7.47%) Metadata
5 96 (5.83%) BigQuery
6 86 (5.22%) Amazon Redshift
7 77 (4.68%) Delta Lake
8 72 (4.37%) Amazon Athena
9 63 (3.83%) SQL Server
10 61 (3.70%) Big Data
10 61 (3.70%) Pentaho
11 58 (3.52%) PostgreSQL
12 47 (2.85%) NoSQL
12 47 (2.85%) Relational Database
13 44 (2.67%) Tableau
14 43 (2.61%) Snowflake Schema
15 42 (2.55%) Oracle Database
16 39 (2.37%) Amazon RDS
17 34 (2.06%) Azure SQL Database
17 34 (2.06%) SQL Server Integration Services
Development Applications
1 145 (8.80%) Git
2 82 (4.98%) GitLab
3 44 (2.67%) JIRA
4 24 (1.46%) Jenkins
5 14 (0.85%) MLflow
6 9 (0.55%) Bitbucket
6 9 (0.55%) Postman
7 6 (0.36%) Artifactory
7 6 (0.36%) Selenium
8 5 (0.30%) SonarQube
9 4 (0.24%) Claude Code
10 3 (0.18%) Atlassian Bamboo
10 3 (0.18%) ERwin
10 3 (0.18%) Newman
10 3 (0.18%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
11 2 (0.12%) CircleCI
11 2 (0.12%) RStudio
11 2 (0.12%) Terragrunt
11 2 (0.12%) Yeoman
12 1 (0.061%) GoCD
General
1 274 (16.64%) Social Skills
2 252 (15.30%) Finance
3 190 (11.54%) Analytical Skills
4 150 (9.11%) Public Sector
5 106 (6.44%) Banking
6 25 (1.52%) Retail
7 24 (1.46%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 23 (1.40%) Automotive
9 19 (1.15%) Aerospace
9 19 (1.15%) Front Office
9 19 (1.15%) Investment Banking
10 17 (1.03%) Marketing
11 15 (0.91%) Telecoms
12 14 (0.85%) Manufacturing
12 14 (0.85%) Military
12 14 (0.85%) Pharmaceutical
13 11 (0.67%) Back Office
13 11 (0.67%) Documentation Skills
14 9 (0.55%) Financial Institution
14 9 (0.55%) Law
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 228 (13.84%) PySpark
2 177 (10.75%) Terraform
3 107 (6.50%) Kafka
4 32 (1.94%) REST
5 23 (1.40%) JSON
6 22 (1.34%) Pandas
7 17 (1.03%) XML
8 16 (0.97%) Spring
8 16 (0.97%) Spring Boot
9 15 (0.91%) Great Expectations
10 14 (0.85%) pytest
11 13 (0.79%) Apache Beam
11 13 (0.79%) Apache NiFi
11 13 (0.79%) PyTorch
11 13 (0.79%) RESTful
12 11 (0.67%) LangChain
13 10 (0.61%) .NET
13 10 (0.61%) Microsoft Graph
13 10 (0.61%) React
14 7 (0.43%) HTML
Miscellaneous
1 140 (8.50%) Cloud Native
2 56 (3.40%) Legacy Systems
3 51 (3.10%) Data Structures
4 44 (2.67%) Onboarding
5 25 (1.52%) Product Ownership
6 22 (1.34%) AI Agents
7 20 (1.21%) Distributed Systems
8 18 (1.09%) Algorithms
9 17 (1.03%) Management Information System
10 16 (0.97%) Greenfield Project
10 16 (0.97%) Reference Data
11 15 (0.91%) Reinsurance
12 12 (0.73%) NHS
13 11 (0.67%) Virtual Team
14 10 (0.61%) Data Protection Act
15 9 (0.55%) Distributed Computing
16 8 (0.49%) Enterprise Software
17 7 (0.43%) Clustering
17 7 (0.43%) Life Science
17 7 (0.43%) Replication
Operating Systems
1 36 (2.19%) Unix
2 33 (2.00%) Linux
3 2 (0.12%) Ubuntu
3 2 (0.12%) Windows
4 1 (0.061%) Robot Operating System
4 1 (0.061%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 721 (43.78%) Data Pipeline
2 664 (40.32%) Data Engineering
3 579 (35.15%) Data Modelling
4 572 (34.73%) ETL
5 552 (33.52%) Analytics
6 410 (24.89%) CI/CD
7 294 (17.85%) Agile
8 278 (16.88%) DevOps
9 275 (16.70%) AI
10 270 (16.39%) Migration
11 242 (14.69%) Business Intelligence
12 232 (14.09%) Data Transformation
13 226 (13.72%) Validation
14 223 (13.54%) Data Governance
15 208 (12.63%) Data Integration
16 173 (10.50%) Problem-Solving
17 156 (9.47%) Lakehouse
18 154 (9.35%) Machine Learning
19 153 (9.29%) Infrastructure as Code
20 151 (9.17%) Decision-Making
Programming Languages
1 838 (50.88%) SQL
2 714 (43.35%) Python
3 84 (5.10%) Java
4 64 (3.89%) Scala
5 37 (2.25%) PL/SQL
6 29 (1.76%) Data Analysis Expressions
7 27 (1.64%) PowerShell
8 26 (1.58%) T-SQL
9 19 (1.15%) Shell Script
10 18 (1.09%) Bash
10 18 (1.09%) JavaScript
11 12 (0.73%) R
12 10 (0.61%) Bicep
12 10 (0.61%) Go
13 7 (0.43%) TypeScript
14 6 (0.36%) C#
15 5 (0.30%) Korn
16 3 (0.18%) Kusto Query Language
17 2 (0.12%) COBOL
17 2 (0.12%) Cypher
Qualifications
1 427 (25.93%) Security Cleared
2 361 (21.92%) SC Cleared
3 42 (2.55%) BPSS Clearance
3 42 (2.55%) Degree
4 40 (2.43%) DV Cleared
5 23 (1.40%) Azure Certification
6 19 (1.15%) Computer Science Degree
7 14 (0.85%) AWS Certification
8 8 (0.49%) Master's Degree
9 7 (0.43%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
9 7 (0.43%) DBS Check
9 7 (0.43%) 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 (0.061%) CISA
13 1 (0.061%) PMP
13 1 (0.061%) Postgraduate
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 434 (26.35%) Data Quality
2 69 (4.19%) QA
3 29 (1.76%) GDPR
4 13 (0.79%) Accessibility
5 6 (0.36%) FATCA
5 6 (0.36%) ISO/IEC 27001
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 (0.061%) Government Security Classifications
10 1 (0.061%) GRC
10 1 (0.061%) IFRS
10 1 (0.061%) IFRS 9
10 1 (0.061%) PMO
10 1 (0.061%) SOC 2
System Software
1 93 (5.65%) Docker
2 4 (0.24%) Active Directory
3 1 (0.061%) HDFS
3 1 (0.061%) Virtual Machines
Systems Management
1 82 (4.98%) Kubernetes
2 19 (1.15%) Ansible
3 18 (1.09%) Grafana
4 11 (0.67%) Control-M
5 10 (0.61%) Kibana
6 4 (0.24%) Prometheus
7 2 (0.12%) Puppet
8 1 (0.061%) logstash
8 1 (0.061%) Progress Chef
Vendors
1 336 (20.40%) Databricks
2 215 (13.05%) Microsoft
3 134 (8.14%) Oracle
4 86 (5.22%) Google
5 85 (5.16%) Informatica
6 76 (4.61%) Talend
7 33 (2.00%) Denodo
8 31 (1.88%) Salesforce
9 28 (1.70%) Palantir
10 25 (1.52%) SAP
11 24 (1.46%) Foundry
12 20 (1.21%) Cisco
12 20 (1.21%) F5
13 11 (0.67%) Splunk
14 9 (0.55%) Bloomberg
15 8 (0.49%) OpenAI
15 8 (0.49%) Sage
16 7 (0.43%) Alteryx
16 7 (0.43%) Cloudera
16 7 (0.43%) InterSystems