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 27 August 2026.

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

 6 months to
27 Aug 2026		 Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 61 127 103
Rank change year-on-year +66 -24 +19
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 1,690 625 771
As % of all contract jobs in England 3.70% 2.26% 2.32%
As % of the Job Titles category 4.00% 2.47% 2.50%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,125 456 556
10th Percentile £381 £381 £280
25th Percentile £425 £428 £431
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year - -4.76% -4.55%
75th Percentile £588 £588 £638
90th Percentile £663 £691 £700
UK median daily rate £500 £500 £525
% change year-on-year - -4.76% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 81 13 22
10th Percentile £19.34 £25.34 £41.38
25th Percentile £30.96 £35.25 £51.94
Median hourly rate £41.56 £52.50 £75.00
Median % change year-on-year -20.85% -30.00% +5.26%
75th Percentile £70.00 £62.50 £80.00
90th Percentile £73.75 £79.74 -
UK median hourly rate £44.50 £52.50 £75.00
% change year-on-year -15.24% -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 42,263 25,262 30,879
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.44% 91.54% 93.00%
Number of daily rates quoted 25,421 16,297 19,929
10th Percentile £325 £281 £300
25th Percentile £425 £400 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £508 £525
Median % change year-on-year +3.45% -3.33% -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 3,239 1,381 1,691
10th Percentile £15.13 £13.65 £14.16
25th Percentile £21.20 £17.38 £20.50
Median hourly rate £42.50 £25.15 £45.00
Median % change year-on-year +68.99% -44.11% +2.63%
75th Percentile £68.00 £55.00 £66.61
90th Percentile £80.00 £72.75 £75.00
UK median hourly rate £41.74 £25.15 £43.00
% change year-on-year +65.94% -41.51% -1.44%

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 27 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 27 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 27 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 +38 834 £525 - 429
Midlands +66 360 £463 +0.27% 78
West Midlands +61 300 £465 -3.13% 50
North of England +35 220 £478 +0.53% 145
South East +35 130 £459 -3.87% 142
North West +31 125 £525 +10.53% 72
South West +6 89 £525 +5.00% 53
Yorkshire -12 75 £465 -2.11% 31
East Midlands +26 60 £450 +1.98% 28
East of England +8 37 £450 - 27
North East -27 21 £515 +21.89% 43
Data Engineer
UK

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

For the 6 months to 27 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.

1 838 (49.59%) SQL
2 723 (42.78%) Data Pipeline
3 696 (41.18%) Python
4 640 (37.87%) Data Engineering
5 588 (34.79%) Analytics
6 576 (34.08%) ETL
7 563 (33.31%) Data Modelling
8 525 (31.07%) Azure
9 507 (30.00%) AWS
10 443 (26.21%) Security Cleared
11 420 (24.85%) Data Quality
12 405 (23.96%) CI/CD
13 388 (22.96%) SC Cleared
14 323 (19.11%) Databricks
15 291 (17.22%) Agile
16 285 (16.86%) Data Warehouse
17 280 (16.57%) Business Intelligence
18 278 (16.45%) DevOps
19 272 (16.09%) Migration
20 237 (14.02%) PySpark
21 226 (13.37%) AI
22 225 (13.31%) Data Governance
23 221 (13.08%) Power Platform
24 217 (12.84%) Power BI
25 216 (12.78%) Microsoft
26 206 (12.19%) Validation
27 204 (12.07%) Data Transformation
28 202 (11.95%) Azure Data Factory
29 196 (11.60%) Snowflake
30 195 (11.54%) Data Integration

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 (10.53%) Apache Airflow
2 138 (8.17%) Apache Spark
3 107 (6.33%) Apache
4 55 (3.25%) SAS
5 32 (1.89%) Confluence
6 16 (0.95%) Palantir Foundry
7 12 (0.71%) SharePoint
8 9 (0.53%) Jupyter
9 3 (0.18%) Apache Superset
10 2 (0.12%) Microsoft Exchange
11 1 (0.059%) ArcGIS
11 1 (0.059%) Liferay
11 1 (0.059%) Luigi
11 1 (0.059%) nginx
11 1 (0.059%) PowerExchange
11 1 (0.059%) R Markdown
Applications
1 24 (1.42%) Microsoft Excel
2 7 (0.41%) Spreadsheet
3 5 (0.30%) Notepad++
4 4 (0.24%) Chatbot
5 1 (0.059%) Microsoft PowerPoint
Business Applications
1 12 (0.71%) Aladdin
2 6 (0.36%) Dynamics CRM
3 5 (0.30%) Infor LN
3 5 (0.30%) NetSuite
3 5 (0.30%) Sage X3
4 3 (0.18%) SAP S/4HANA
4 3 (0.18%) SimCorp Dimension
4 3 (0.18%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
5 2 (0.12%) BambooHR
5 2 (0.12%) Maximo
6 1 (0.059%) FIS Private Capital Suite
6 1 (0.059%) MIS ActiveH
6 1 (0.059%) Oracle 11i
6 1 (0.059%) Oracle Assets
6 1 (0.059%) Oracle EBS
6 1 (0.059%) Oracle ERP
6 1 (0.059%) Raiser’s Edge
6 1 (0.059%) SAP BPC
6 1 (0.059%) SAP CAR
6 1 (0.059%) SAP EWM
Cloud Services
1 525 (31.07%) Azure
2 507 (30.00%) AWS
3 221 (13.08%) Power Platform
4 202 (11.95%) Azure Data Factory
5 196 (11.60%) Snowflake
6 192 (11.36%) dbt
7 155 (9.17%) GCP
8 149 (8.82%) Amazon S3
9 129 (7.63%) Azure Synapse Analytics
10 122 (7.22%) Azure DevOps
11 107 (6.33%) Serverless
12 106 (6.27%) GitHub
13 94 (5.56%) AWS Lambda
14 42 (2.49%) GitHub Actions
15 38 (2.25%) Amazon EMR
16 29 (1.72%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 24 (1.42%) AWS Step Functions
18 23 (1.36%) AWS CloudFormation
18 23 (1.36%) Fivetran
19 21 (1.24%) Amazon Kinesis
Communications & Networking
1 30 (1.78%) VPN
2 29 (1.72%) BGP
2 29 (1.72%) DMZ
2 29 (1.72%) DNS
2 29 (1.72%) Multicast
3 11 (0.65%) Structured Cabling
4 7 (0.41%) Firewall
5 5 (0.30%) PuTTY
5 5 (0.30%) WinSCP
6 4 (0.24%) Wi-Fi
6 4 (0.24%) Wireless
7 3 (0.18%) Intrusion Detection
Database & Business Intelligence
1 285 (16.86%) Data Warehouse
2 217 (12.84%) Power BI
3 152 (8.99%) Data Lake
4 111 (6.57%) Metadata
5 96 (5.68%) Amazon Redshift
6 94 (5.56%) BigQuery
7 78 (4.62%) SQL Server
8 77 (4.56%) Delta Lake
9 70 (4.14%) Amazon Athena
10 68 (4.02%) Pentaho
11 63 (3.73%) Tableau
12 60 (3.55%) Big Data
13 56 (3.31%) PostgreSQL
14 52 (3.08%) Relational Database
15 49 (2.90%) Snowflake Schema
16 48 (2.84%) Azure SQL Database
17 45 (2.66%) NoSQL
18 38 (2.25%) SQL Server Integration Services
19 36 (2.13%) Oracle Database
20 33 (1.95%) Amazon RDS
Development Applications
1 135 (7.99%) Git
2 80 (4.73%) GitLab
3 54 (3.20%) JIRA
4 31 (1.83%) Jenkins
5 11 (0.65%) MLflow
6 7 (0.41%) Postman
7 5 (0.30%) Artifactory
7 5 (0.30%) Bitbucket
8 4 (0.24%) ERwin
9 3 (0.18%) Atlassian Bamboo
9 3 (0.18%) Newman
9 3 (0.18%) Selenium
9 3 (0.18%) SonarQube
9 3 (0.18%) Sonatype Nexus
10 2 (0.12%) Claude Code
10 2 (0.12%) ER Studio
10 2 (0.12%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
10 2 (0.12%) Terragrunt
10 2 (0.12%) Yeoman
11 1 (0.059%) Octopus Deploy
General
1 275 (16.27%) Finance
2 269 (15.92%) Social Skills
3 192 (11.36%) Analytical Skills
4 146 (8.64%) Public Sector
5 101 (5.98%) Banking
6 31 (1.83%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 24 (1.42%) Telecoms
8 21 (1.24%) Retail
9 20 (1.18%) Marketing
10 19 (1.12%) Automotive
11 18 (1.07%) Aerospace
11 18 (1.07%) Manufacturing
12 17 (1.01%) Investment Banking
13 16 (0.95%) Front Office
14 15 (0.89%) Documentation Skills
15 14 (0.83%) Pharmaceutical
16 11 (0.65%) Law
17 10 (0.59%) Financial Institution
18 8 (0.47%) Legal
18 8 (0.47%) Military
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 237 (14.02%) PySpark
2 170 (10.06%) Terraform
3 118 (6.98%) Kafka
4 30 (1.78%) Pandas
5 25 (1.48%) JSON
5 25 (1.48%) REST
6 22 (1.30%) Spring
6 22 (1.30%) Spring Boot
7 21 (1.24%) Great Expectations
8 18 (1.07%) XML
9 15 (0.89%) React
10 14 (0.83%) Apache Beam
11 13 (0.77%) YAML
12 12 (0.71%) RESTful
13 10 (0.59%) .NET
13 10 (0.59%) Microsoft Graph
13 10 (0.59%) pytest
14 9 (0.53%) Apache Avro
15 8 (0.47%) LangChain
15 8 (0.47%) PyTorch
Miscellaneous
1 130 (7.69%) Cloud Native
2 74 (4.38%) Legacy Systems
3 44 (2.60%) Data Structures
4 36 (2.13%) Onboarding
5 25 (1.48%) Product Ownership
6 21 (1.24%) Distributed Systems
6 21 (1.24%) Greenfield Project
7 19 (1.12%) NHS
7 19 (1.12%) Reference Data
8 17 (1.01%) Reinsurance
9 14 (0.83%) Management Information System
10 13 (0.77%) AI Agents
11 12 (0.71%) Data Protection Act
12 11 (0.65%) Algorithms
12 11 (0.65%) Virtual Team
13 10 (0.59%) Clustering
14 9 (0.53%) Life Science
14 9 (0.53%) Self-Motivation
15 8 (0.47%) Driving Licence
15 8 (0.47%) Linux Command Line
Operating Systems
1 56 (3.31%) Unix
2 46 (2.72%) Linux
3 4 (0.24%) Windows
4 2 (0.12%) Ubuntu
4 2 (0.12%) Windows Server
5 1 (0.059%) Robot Operating System
5 1 (0.059%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 723 (42.78%) Data Pipeline
2 640 (37.87%) Data Engineering
3 588 (34.79%) Analytics
4 576 (34.08%) ETL
5 563 (33.31%) Data Modelling
6 405 (23.96%) CI/CD
7 291 (17.22%) Agile
8 280 (16.57%) Business Intelligence
9 278 (16.45%) DevOps
10 272 (16.09%) Migration
11 226 (13.37%) AI
12 225 (13.31%) Data Governance
13 206 (12.19%) Validation
14 204 (12.07%) Data Transformation
15 195 (11.54%) Data Integration
16 188 (11.12%) Problem-Solving
17 160 (9.47%) Decision-Making
18 142 (8.40%) Infrastructure as Code
19 138 (8.17%) Data Science
20 136 (8.05%) Machine Learning
Programming Languages
1 838 (49.59%) SQL
2 696 (41.18%) Python
3 97 (5.74%) Java
4 60 (3.55%) Scala
5 46 (2.72%) PL/SQL
6 31 (1.83%) Shell Script
7 27 (1.60%) Data Analysis Expressions
8 24 (1.42%) T-SQL
9 23 (1.36%) Bash
10 21 (1.24%) PowerShell
11 16 (0.95%) JavaScript
12 15 (0.89%) C#
13 11 (0.65%) R
14 8 (0.47%) Bicep
15 6 (0.36%) Go
15 6 (0.36%) TypeScript
16 4 (0.24%) Korn
17 2 (0.12%) COBOL
17 2 (0.12%) Cypher
17 2 (0.12%) SPARQL
Qualifications
1 443 (26.21%) Security Cleared
2 388 (22.96%) SC Cleared
3 39 (2.31%) Degree
4 35 (2.07%) BPSS Clearance
5 21 (1.24%) Azure Certification
6 20 (1.18%) Computer Science Degree
6 20 (1.18%) DV Cleared
7 12 (0.71%) AWS Certification
8 9 (0.53%) City & Guilds
9 8 (0.47%) DBS Check
10 7 (0.41%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
10 7 (0.41%) SnowPro
11 6 (0.36%) Master's Degree
12 5 (0.30%) BICSI Certification
13 4 (0.24%) CISM
13 4 (0.24%) CISSP
13 4 (0.24%) Microsoft Certification
14 3 (0.18%) CEH
15 1 (0.059%) CISA
15 1 (0.059%) Postgraduate
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 420 (24.85%) Data Quality
2 60 (3.55%) QA
3 40 (2.37%) GDPR
4 16 (0.95%) Accessibility
5 11 (0.65%) SLA
6 6 (0.36%) FATCA
7 5 (0.30%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 4 (0.24%) ISO/IEC 27001
9 3 (0.18%) HIPAA
9 3 (0.18%) MiFID
10 2 (0.12%) EMIR
10 2 (0.12%) SNOMED CT
10 2 (0.12%) WCAG
11 1 (0.059%) Disclosure Scotland
11 1 (0.059%) Government Security Classifications
11 1 (0.059%) GxP
11 1 (0.059%) IFRS
11 1 (0.059%) IFRS 17
11 1 (0.059%) IFRS 9
11 1 (0.059%) PMO
System Software
1 103 (6.09%) Docker
2 4 (0.24%) Virtual Machines
3 2 (0.12%) Active Directory
4 1 (0.059%) RACF
Systems Management
1 76 (4.50%) Kubernetes
2 32 (1.89%) Grafana
3 14 (0.83%) Ansible
4 10 (0.59%) Control-M
5 7 (0.41%) Kibana
6 4 (0.24%) Prometheus
7 2 (0.12%) Apache Ranger
7 2 (0.12%) Puppet
7 2 (0.12%) Thomson Reuters DACS
8 1 (0.059%) logstash
8 1 (0.059%) Progress Chef
8 1 (0.059%) Rancher
Vendors
1 323 (19.11%) Databricks
2 216 (12.78%) Microsoft
3 136 (8.05%) Oracle
4 103 (6.09%) Informatica
5 90 (5.33%) Talend
6 61 (3.61%) Google
7 52 (3.08%) Denodo
8 30 (1.78%) Cisco
8 30 (1.78%) F5
9 27 (1.60%) Salesforce
10 25 (1.48%) Palantir
11 24 (1.42%) SAP
12 20 (1.18%) Foundry
13 14 (0.83%) Cloudera
14 12 (0.71%) Splunk
15 11 (0.65%) ServiceNow
16 10 (0.59%) Bloomberg
16 10 (0.59%) IBM
17 9 (0.53%) Sage
18 8 (0.47%) InterSystems
807 Data Engineer jobs in England