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 3 June 2026.

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

6 months to
3 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 58 94 102
Rank change year-on-year +36 +8 +18
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 1,570 660 822
As % of all contract jobs in England 3.76% 2.76% 2.23%
As % of the Job Titles category 4.08% 2.98% 2.40%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,114 507 630
10th Percentile £377 £362 £260
25th Percentile £425 £425 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £500
Median % change year-on-year - - -9.09%
75th Percentile £588 £600 £600
90th Percentile £663 £713 £688
UK median daily rate £500 £490 £500
% change year-on-year +1.99% -1.95% -9.09%
Number of hourly rates quoted 54 9 41
10th Percentile £19.34 £18.13 £37.50
25th Percentile £35.31 £51.25 £49.25
Median hourly rate £52.50 £52.50 £67.50
Median % change year-on-year - -22.22% -10.60%
75th Percentile £71.50 £78.70 £80.00
90th Percentile £75.00 £82.75 -
UK median hourly rate £52.50 £52.50 £67.50
% change year-on-year - -22.22% -10.60%

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 38,507 22,115 34,261
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.34% 92.38% 92.78%
Number of daily rates quoted 23,765 14,615 22,560
10th Percentile £325 £290 £285
25th Percentile £413 £406 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £518 £517 £525
Median % change year-on-year +0.10% -1.52% -4.55%
75th Percentile £625 £638 £638
90th Percentile £725 £750 £750
UK median daily rate £513 £504 £525
% change year-on-year +1.69% -4.00% -2.78%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,712 936 2,585
10th Percentile £15.79 £14.00 £12.86
25th Percentile £21.25 £18.13 £16.30
Median hourly rate £45.00 £29.57 £37.75
Median % change year-on-year +52.21% -21.68% -16.11%
75th Percentile £67.50 £60.00 £62.00
90th Percentile £80.00 £75.00 £74.00
UK median hourly rate £42.50 £28.00 £37.50
% change year-on-year +51.79% -25.33% -16.67%

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 3 June 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 3 June 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 3 June 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 +31 851 £525 - 142
Midlands +47 305 £469 +4.22% 39
West Midlands +42 288 £469 +1.96% 26
North of England +2 201 £465 -2.11% 86
North West +12 125 £480 +1.05% 39
South East +7 102 £475 +14.87% 96
South West +10 76 £500 +1.27% 32
Yorkshire -25 58 £465 +3.33% 24
East of England -24 19 £520 +63.52% 6
North East -21 18 £450 -5.26% 24
East Midlands -24 17 £525 +28.05% 13
Data Engineer
UK

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

For the 6 months to 3 June 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.

1 864 (55.03%) SQL
2 694 (44.20%) Python
3 655 (41.72%) Data Pipeline
4 602 (38.34%) ETL
5 596 (37.96%) Analytics
6 583 (37.13%) Data Engineering
7 546 (34.78%) Data Modelling
8 527 (33.57%) Azure
9 459 (29.24%) Security Cleared
10 443 (28.22%) AWS
11 410 (26.11%) SC Cleared
12 394 (25.10%) Data Quality
13 382 (24.33%) CI/CD
14 352 (22.42%) Databricks
15 334 (21.27%) Business Intelligence
16 278 (17.71%) DevOps
17 277 (17.64%) Agile
18 272 (17.32%) Power Platform
19 259 (16.50%) Data Warehouse
20 258 (16.43%) Power BI
21 230 (14.65%) Azure Data Factory
22 226 (14.39%) PySpark
23 215 (13.69%) Data Governance
24 208 (13.25%) Microsoft
25 207 (13.18%) Problem-Solving
26 202 (12.87%) Migration
27 181 (11.53%) AI
28 170 (10.83%) Data Integration
29 168 (10.70%) Data Lake
30 166 (10.57%) Terraform

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
1 151 (9.62%) Apache Airflow
2 144 (9.17%) Apache Spark
3 94 (5.99%) Apache
4 71 (4.52%) SAS
5 33 (2.10%) Confluence
6 9 (0.57%) Jupyter
6 9 (0.57%) Palantir Foundry
7 4 (0.25%) Microsoft Exchange
8 2 (0.13%) SharePoint
9 1 (0.064%) Apache Superset
9 1 (0.064%) Appian
9 1 (0.064%) Camunda
9 1 (0.064%) Luigi
9 1 (0.064%) R Markdown
Applications
1 17 (1.08%) Microsoft Excel
2 5 (0.32%) Notepad++
3 4 (0.25%) Spreadsheet
4 2 (0.13%) Chatbot
5 1 (0.064%) Microsoft PowerPoint
Business Applications
1 6 (0.38%) Aladdin
2 3 (0.19%) Infor LN
2 3 (0.19%) SAP BPC
2 3 (0.19%) SimCorp Dimension
3 2 (0.13%) BambooHR
3 2 (0.13%) Dynamics CRM
3 2 (0.13%) SAP S/4HANA
4 1 (0.064%) Elite 3E
4 1 (0.064%) iTrent
4 1 (0.064%) NEC Housing
4 1 (0.064%) Oracle 11i
4 1 (0.064%) Oracle Assets
4 1 (0.064%) Oracle EBS
4 1 (0.064%) Oracle ERP
4 1 (0.064%) Raiser’s Edge
4 1 (0.064%) SAP Business ByDesign
4 1 (0.064%) SAP CAR
4 1 (0.064%) SAP EWM
Cloud Services
1 527 (33.57%) Azure
2 443 (28.22%) AWS
3 272 (17.32%) Power Platform
4 230 (14.65%) Azure Data Factory
5 159 (10.13%) Snowflake
6 153 (9.75%) Azure Synapse Analytics
7 145 (9.24%) Amazon S3
8 144 (9.17%) dbt
9 138 (8.79%) GCP
10 135 (8.60%) Azure DevOps
11 111 (7.07%) GitHub
12 94 (5.99%) Serverless
13 80 (5.10%) AWS Lambda
14 54 (3.44%) GitHub Actions
15 32 (2.04%) Matillion
16 28 (1.78%) AWS CloudFormation
17 27 (1.72%) Amazon Kinesis
18 26 (1.66%) Amazon EMR
19 24 (1.53%) OpenShift
20 22 (1.40%) AWS Step Functions
Communications & Networking
1 33 (2.10%) DNS
1 33 (2.10%) VPN
2 32 (2.04%) BGP
2 32 (2.04%) DMZ
2 32 (2.04%) Multicast
3 10 (0.64%) Structured Cabling
4 5 (0.32%) PuTTY
4 5 (0.32%) WinSCP
5 4 (0.25%) Firewall
5 4 (0.25%) Wi-Fi
5 4 (0.25%) Wireless
6 1 (0.064%) 4G
6 1 (0.064%) 5G
Database & Business Intelligence
1 259 (16.50%) Data Warehouse
2 258 (16.43%) Power BI
3 168 (10.70%) Data Lake
4 120 (7.64%) SQL Server
5 98 (6.24%) Delta Lake
6 87 (5.54%) Amazon Redshift
7 83 (5.29%) Pentaho
8 81 (5.16%) BigQuery
9 80 (5.10%) Metadata
10 77 (4.90%) Azure SQL Database
11 72 (4.59%) Tableau
12 65 (4.14%) Snowflake Schema
13 61 (3.89%) PostgreSQL
14 58 (3.69%) Big Data
14 58 (3.69%) SQL Server Integration Services
15 56 (3.57%) Amazon Athena
15 56 (3.57%) NoSQL
16 39 (2.48%) Relational Database
17 37 (2.36%) Data Vault
18 35 (2.23%) Hadoop
Development Applications
1 158 (10.06%) Git
2 79 (5.03%) GitLab
3 73 (4.65%) JIRA
4 47 (2.99%) Jenkins
5 8 (0.51%) MLflow
6 6 (0.38%) Postman
7 5 (0.32%) Artifactory
8 3 (0.19%) Bitbucket
8 3 (0.19%) Newman
8 3 (0.19%) SonarQube
9 2 (0.13%) Sonatype Nexus
9 2 (0.13%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
9 2 (0.13%) Terragrunt
9 2 (0.13%) Visual Studio
10 1 (0.064%) Atlassian Bamboo
10 1 (0.064%) Claude Code
10 1 (0.064%) ER Studio
10 1 (0.064%) ERwin
10 1 (0.064%) JUnit
10 1 (0.064%) Selenium
General
1 270 (17.20%) Finance
2 239 (15.22%) Social Skills
3 165 (10.51%) Analytical Skills
4 129 (8.22%) Public Sector
5 83 (5.29%) Banking
6 29 (1.85%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 25 (1.59%) Retail
8 21 (1.34%) Investment Banking
8 21 (1.34%) Marketing
9 19 (1.21%) Telecoms
10 18 (1.15%) Documentation Skills
11 17 (1.08%) Manufacturing
12 16 (1.02%) Pharmaceutical
13 14 (0.89%) Aerospace
14 11 (0.70%) Front Office
14 11 (0.70%) Publishing
15 7 (0.45%) Military
16 5 (0.32%) Law
16 5 (0.32%) Legal
16 5 (0.32%) Local Government
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 226 (14.39%) PySpark
2 134 (8.54%) Kafka
3 48 (3.06%) Pandas
4 30 (1.91%) JSON
5 25 (1.59%) Great Expectations
5 25 (1.59%) REST
6 22 (1.40%) Spring
6 22 (1.40%) Spring Boot
7 21 (1.34%) YAML
8 18 (1.15%) XML
9 15 (0.96%) Apache Beam
10 13 (0.83%) Apache Avro
11 12 (0.76%) scikit-learn
12 11 (0.70%) Matplotlib
12 11 (0.70%) React
13 10 (0.64%) PyTorch
14 9 (0.57%) GeoJSON
14 9 (0.57%) Node.js
14 9 (0.57%) Polars
14 9 (0.57%) pytest
Miscellaneous
1 123 (7.83%) Cloud Native
2 46 (2.93%) Legacy Systems
3 39 (2.48%) Data Structures
4 28 (1.78%) Product Ownership
5 27 (1.72%) Greenfield Project
6 22 (1.40%) Onboarding
7 20 (1.27%) Reinsurance
8 19 (1.21%) Clustering
8 19 (1.21%) Distributed Systems
9 15 (0.96%) Data Protection Act
10 13 (0.83%) NHS
11 12 (0.76%) Replication
12 11 (0.70%) Distributed Computing
13 10 (0.64%) Life Science
13 10 (0.64%) Reference Data
13 10 (0.64%) Self-Motivation
14 9 (0.57%) Driving Licence
14 9 (0.57%) Public Cloud
15 8 (0.51%) Analytical Mindset
16 7 (0.45%) Linux Command Line
Operating Systems
1 56 (3.57%) Unix
2 37 (2.36%) Linux
3 4 (0.25%) Windows
4 2 (0.13%) Ubuntu
4 2 (0.13%) Windows Server
5 1 (0.064%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 655 (41.72%) Data Pipeline
2 602 (38.34%) ETL
3 596 (37.96%) Analytics
4 583 (37.13%) Data Engineering
5 546 (34.78%) Data Modelling
6 382 (24.33%) CI/CD
7 334 (21.27%) Business Intelligence
8 278 (17.71%) DevOps
9 277 (17.64%) Agile
10 215 (13.69%) Data Governance
11 207 (13.18%) Problem-Solving
12 202 (12.87%) Migration
13 181 (11.53%) AI
14 170 (10.83%) Data Integration
15 166 (10.57%) Validation
16 150 (9.55%) Data Science
17 140 (8.92%) Decision-Making
18 131 (8.34%) Data Transformation
19 125 (7.96%) Data Architecture
19 125 (7.96%) Infrastructure as Code
Programming Languages
1 864 (55.03%) SQL
2 694 (44.20%) Python
3 100 (6.37%) Java
4 73 (4.65%) Scala
5 49 (3.12%) PL/SQL
6 36 (2.29%) Data Analysis Expressions
7 34 (2.17%) T-SQL
8 32 (2.04%) C#
9 28 (1.78%) Shell Script
10 27 (1.72%) Bash
11 18 (1.15%) PowerShell
12 17 (1.08%) Bicep
13 12 (0.76%) R
14 9 (0.57%) JavaScript
15 7 (0.45%) Go
16 6 (0.38%) TypeScript
17 2 (0.13%) C
17 2 (0.13%) Korn
17 2 (0.13%) Ruby
17 2 (0.13%) VB
Qualifications
1 459 (29.24%) Security Cleared
2 410 (26.11%) SC Cleared
3 40 (2.55%) Degree
4 32 (2.04%) BPSS Clearance
5 25 (1.59%) Azure Certification
6 16 (1.02%) Computer Science Degree
7 13 (0.83%) DV Cleared
8 11 (0.70%) DBS Check
9 9 (0.57%) City & Guilds
10 8 (0.51%) AWS Certification
11 6 (0.38%) Microsoft Certification
12 5 (0.32%) BICSI Certification
12 5 (0.32%) Master's Degree
13 3 (0.19%) SnowPro
14 2 (0.13%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
14 2 (0.13%) CISM
14 2 (0.13%) CISSP
15 1 (0.064%) CCIE
15 1 (0.064%) CISA
15 1 (0.064%) Cisco Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 394 (25.10%) Data Quality
2 51 (3.25%) QA
3 46 (2.93%) GDPR
4 11 (0.70%) SLA
5 10 (0.64%) Accessibility
6 9 (0.57%) FATCA
7 5 (0.32%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 4 (0.25%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 4 (0.25%) MiFID
9 3 (0.19%) GMP
10 2 (0.13%) EMIR
10 2 (0.13%) SNOMED CT
10 2 (0.13%) WCAG
11 1 (0.064%) Basel III
11 1 (0.064%) GRC
11 1 (0.064%) GxP
11 1 (0.064%) HIPAA
11 1 (0.064%) IFRS 17
11 1 (0.064%) NIST
11 1 (0.064%) PCI DSS
System Software
1 93 (5.92%) Docker
2 6 (0.38%) Virtual Machines
3 2 (0.13%) HDFS
4 1 (0.064%) RACF
Systems Management
1 166 (10.57%) Terraform
2 74 (4.71%) Kubernetes
3 36 (2.29%) Grafana
4 12 (0.76%) Ansible
5 10 (0.64%) Prometheus
6 7 (0.45%) Kibana
7 3 (0.19%) Rancher
8 2 (0.13%) Apache Ranger
8 2 (0.13%) Control-M
8 2 (0.13%) logstash
8 2 (0.13%) Thomson Reuters DACS
9 1 (0.064%) Kubeflow
9 1 (0.064%) NetBackup
9 1 (0.064%) Puppet
Vendors
1 352 (22.42%) Databricks
2 208 (13.25%) Microsoft
3 145 (9.24%) Oracle
4 117 (7.45%) Talend
5 114 (7.26%) Informatica
6 63 (4.01%) Denodo
7 57 (3.63%) Google
8 34 (2.17%) Cisco
8 34 (2.17%) F5
9 29 (1.85%) SAP
10 22 (1.40%) ServiceNow
11 21 (1.34%) Splunk
12 17 (1.08%) Cloudera
13 15 (0.96%) Alteryx
14 12 (0.76%) Foundry
15 10 (0.64%) IBM
15 10 (0.64%) Palantir
16 8 (0.51%) InterSystems
16 8 (0.51%) MuleSoft
16 8 (0.51%) Salesforce