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 18 February 2026.

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

6 months to
18 Feb 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 84 73 105
Rank change year-on-year -11 +32 +20
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 1,037 789 820
As % of all contract jobs in England 3.00% 3.06% 2.17%
As % of the Job Titles category 3.27% 3.29% 2.34%
Number of daily rates quoted 741 573 643
10th Percentile £360 £358 £363
25th Percentile £413 £431 £428
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £588 £625 £635
90th Percentile £675 £738 £699
UK median daily rate £500 £513 £525
% change year-on-year -2.44% -2.38% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 9 10 26
10th Percentile £29.43 £25.45 £35.32
25th Percentile £33.75 £47.19 £39.81
Median hourly rate £54.50 £70.00 £60.50
Median % change year-on-year -22.14% +15.70% -5.47%
75th Percentile £69.25 £93.75 £67.19
90th Percentile £85.20 £97.50 £76.25
UK median hourly rate £53.50 £53.75 £60.50
% change year-on-year -0.47% -11.16% -5.47%

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 31,731 24,013 35,082
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 91.75% 93.02% 93.02%
Number of daily rates quoted 20,150 15,038 23,479
10th Percentile £303 £296 £273
25th Percentile £409 £409 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £501 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.67% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £625 £638 £640
90th Percentile £725 £750 £745
UK median daily rate £500 £525 £525
% change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,026 700 2,145
10th Percentile £15.00 £16.25 £13.20
25th Percentile £18.87 £21.49 £16.54
Median hourly rate £31.93 £35.00 £35.00
Median % change year-on-year -8.77% - -12.50%
75th Percentile £63.75 £65.00 £60.00
90th Percentile £73.46 £75.03 £72.50
UK median hourly rate £30.00 £34.11 £35.00
% change year-on-year -12.05% -2.54% -9.09%

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 18 February 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 18 February 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 18 February 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 +3 652 £513 -6.82% 170
Midlands -12 131 £500 +4.82% 71
North of England -26 121 £450 - 99
West Midlands -9 117 £510 +3.03% 54
North West -12 71 £425 -2.86% 63
South East -42 52 £513 -2.38% 119
South West -7 47 £538 +7.50% 37
Yorkshire -30 36 £481 +1.32% 30
North East -12 14 £450 -14.29% 7
East Midlands -20 14 £431 +15.00% 17
East of England -41 6 £520 +63.52% 17
Data Engineer
UK

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

For the 6 months to 18 February 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.

1 596 (57.47%) SQL
2 581 (56.03%) Python
3 448 (43.20%) Azure
4 443 (42.72%) ETL
5 440 (42.43%) Data Pipeline
6 436 (42.04%) Data Engineering
7 385 (37.13%) Analytics
8 371 (35.78%) Data Modelling
9 330 (31.82%) Databricks
10 302 (29.12%) AWS
11 294 (28.35%) Data Quality
12 281 (27.10%) CI/CD
13 267 (25.75%) Security Cleared
14 256 (24.69%) Business Intelligence
15 233 (22.47%) SC Cleared
16 216 (20.83%) Power Platform
17 208 (20.06%) DevOps
18 205 (19.77%) Power BI
19 193 (18.61%) Azure Data Factory
20 192 (18.51%) Data Warehouse
21 186 (17.94%) Agile
22 180 (17.36%) PySpark
23 168 (16.20%) Problem-Solving
24 161 (15.53%) Data Science
25 158 (15.24%) Data Governance
26 142 (13.69%) Microsoft
27 140 (13.50%) Terraform
28 136 (13.11%) Git
29 134 (12.92%) Snowflake
30 125 (12.05%) AI

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
1 110 (10.61%) Apache Spark
2 107 (10.32%) Apache Airflow
3 78 (7.52%) Apache
4 27 (2.60%) SAS
5 16 (1.54%) Confluence
6 14 (1.35%) Palantir Foundry
7 5 (0.48%) Apache Pig
7 5 (0.48%) IIS
7 5 (0.48%) Jupyter
7 5 (0.48%) Oracle Application Server
8 4 (0.39%) Microsoft Exchange
9 2 (0.19%) ArcGIS
9 2 (0.19%) SharePoint
10 1 (0.096%) Apache Synapse
10 1 (0.096%) Appian
10 1 (0.096%) Camunda
10 1 (0.096%) Luigi
10 1 (0.096%) nginx
10 1 (0.096%) Oracle SOA Suite
Applications
1 10 (0.96%) Microsoft Excel
2 2 (0.19%) Chatbot
3 1 (0.096%) Microsoft Office
3 1 (0.096%) Microsoft PowerPoint
Business Applications
1 2 (0.19%) Dynamics CRM
1 2 (0.19%) Maximo
2 1 (0.096%) Actimize
2 1 (0.096%) Aladdin
2 1 (0.096%) Elite 3E
2 1 (0.096%) iTrent
2 1 (0.096%) NEC Housing
2 1 (0.096%) Oracle BPM
2 1 (0.096%) SAP Business ByDesign
2 1 (0.096%) SAP ERP
Cloud Services
1 448 (43.20%) Azure
2 302 (29.12%) AWS
3 216 (20.83%) Power Platform
4 193 (18.61%) Azure Data Factory
5 134 (12.92%) Snowflake
6 123 (11.86%) Azure Synapse Analytics
7 108 (10.41%) GCP
8 100 (9.64%) Amazon S3
8 100 (9.64%) dbt
9 93 (8.97%) Serverless
10 88 (8.49%) GitHub
11 79 (7.62%) Azure DevOps
12 68 (6.56%) AWS Lambda
13 43 (4.15%) GitHub Actions
14 37 (3.57%) AWS CloudFormation
15 24 (2.31%) AWS Step Functions
16 22 (2.12%) SaaS
17 21 (2.03%) Matillion
18 19 (1.83%) Amazon Kinesis
19 16 (1.54%) Amazon EMR
Communications & Networking
1 13 (1.25%) DNS
2 12 (1.16%) BGP
2 12 (1.16%) DMZ
2 12 (1.16%) Multicast
2 12 (1.16%) VPN
3 4 (0.39%) Firewall
4 3 (0.29%) SAN
5 2 (0.19%) Structured Cabling
6 1 (0.096%) 4G
6 1 (0.096%) 5G
6 1 (0.096%) Network Security
6 1 (0.096%) Software-Defined Networking
6 1 (0.096%) TCP/IP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 205 (19.77%) Power BI
2 192 (18.51%) Data Warehouse
3 121 (11.67%) Data Lake
4 98 (9.45%) SQL Server
5 70 (6.75%) Delta Lake
6 66 (6.36%) Azure SQL Database
7 62 (5.98%) Amazon Redshift
8 60 (5.79%) BigQuery
9 58 (5.59%) PostgreSQL
10 56 (5.40%) Metadata
11 53 (5.11%) Big Data
11 53 (5.11%) SQL Server Integration Services
12 50 (4.82%) NoSQL
13 41 (3.95%) Tableau
14 38 (3.66%) Snowflake Schema
15 37 (3.57%) Amazon Athena
16 36 (3.47%) Pentaho
17 31 (2.99%) Hadoop
18 30 (2.89%) Relational Database
19 23 (2.22%) Star Schema
Development Applications
1 136 (13.11%) Git
2 54 (5.21%) Jenkins
3 39 (3.76%) JIRA
4 34 (3.28%) GitLab
5 22 (2.12%) MLflow
6 5 (0.48%) DBeaver
7 4 (0.39%) Visual Studio
8 3 (0.29%) Selenium
9 2 (0.19%) Bitbucket
9 2 (0.19%) JUnit
9 2 (0.19%) Visual Studio Code
10 1 (0.096%) Cucumber
10 1 (0.096%) Gradle
10 1 (0.096%) Jaeger
10 1 (0.096%) Maven
10 1 (0.096%) Mockito
10 1 (0.096%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
10 1 (0.096%) Team Foundation Server
10 1 (0.096%) TeamCity
10 1 (0.096%) Terragrunt
General
1 193 (18.61%) Social Skills
2 164 (15.81%) Finance
3 107 (10.32%) Analytical Skills
4 81 (7.81%) Public Sector
5 50 (4.82%) Banking
6 31 (2.99%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 17 (1.64%) Investment Banking
8 14 (1.35%) Retail
9 13 (1.25%) Front Office
10 12 (1.16%) Marketing
11 11 (1.06%) Documentation Skills
11 11 (1.06%) Pharmaceutical
12 10 (0.96%) Telecoms
13 8 (0.77%) Manufacturing
13 8 (0.77%) Publishing
14 6 (0.58%) Military
15 5 (0.48%) Law
16 4 (0.39%) Back Office
16 4 (0.39%) Corporate Banking
17 3 (0.29%) Aerospace
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 180 (17.36%) PySpark
2 113 (10.90%) Kafka
3 37 (3.57%) Pandas
4 26 (2.51%) JSON
5 23 (2.22%) YAML
6 22 (2.12%) REST
7 18 (1.74%) XML
8 15 (1.45%) PyTorch
9 14 (1.35%) Apache NiFi
9 14 (1.35%) NumPy
10 13 (1.25%) Great Expectations
11 12 (1.16%) Keycloak
11 12 (1.16%) Node.js
11 12 (1.16%) OpenTelemetry
11 12 (1.16%) RESTful
11 12 (1.16%) scikit-learn
12 11 (1.06%) TensorFlow
13 10 (0.96%) Matplotlib
14 9 (0.87%) Middleware
14 9 (0.87%) pytest
Miscellaneous
1 77 (7.43%) Cloud Native
2 29 (2.80%) Data Structures
3 26 (2.51%) Product Ownership
4 22 (2.12%) Legacy Systems
5 20 (1.93%) Replication
6 18 (1.74%) Onboarding
7 16 (1.54%) Algorithms
7 16 (1.54%) Clustering
7 16 (1.54%) Hybrid Cloud
8 14 (1.35%) Greenfield Project
8 14 (1.35%) Reinsurance
9 13 (1.25%) Data Protection Act
9 13 (1.25%) Distributed Systems
10 10 (0.96%) Public Cloud
11 9 (0.87%) Distributed Computing
12 7 (0.68%) Life Science
12 7 (0.68%) Management Information System
13 6 (0.58%) NHS
13 6 (0.58%) Wiki
14 5 (0.48%) Linux Command Line
Operating Systems
1 20 (1.93%) Linux
2 14 (1.35%) Unix
3 1 (0.096%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 443 (42.72%) ETL
2 440 (42.43%) Data Pipeline
3 436 (42.04%) Data Engineering
4 385 (37.13%) Analytics
5 371 (35.78%) Data Modelling
6 281 (27.10%) CI/CD
7 256 (24.69%) Business Intelligence
8 208 (20.06%) DevOps
9 186 (17.94%) Agile
10 168 (16.20%) Problem-Solving
11 161 (15.53%) Data Science
12 158 (15.24%) Data Governance
13 125 (12.05%) AI
14 123 (11.86%) Data Architecture
15 120 (11.57%) Data Integration
15 120 (11.57%) Infrastructure as Code
15 120 (11.57%) Machine Learning
16 107 (10.32%) Migration
17 106 (10.22%) Data Transformation
18 101 (9.74%) Performance Tuning
Programming Languages
1 596 (57.47%) SQL
2 581 (56.03%) Python
3 87 (8.39%) Scala
4 73 (7.04%) Java
5 31 (2.99%) Data Analysis Expressions
6 28 (2.70%) C#
7 26 (2.51%) T-SQL
8 22 (2.12%) PL/SQL
9 21 (2.03%) Bash
10 18 (1.74%) Bicep
11 16 (1.54%) R
12 15 (1.45%) PowerShell
13 14 (1.35%) Go
14 13 (1.25%) Shell Script
15 12 (1.16%) JavaScript
16 4 (0.39%) C++
16 4 (0.39%) Korn
16 4 (0.39%) TypeScript
17 2 (0.19%) C
17 2 (0.19%) VB
Qualifications
1 267 (25.75%) Security Cleared
2 233 (22.47%) SC Cleared
3 34 (3.28%) Azure Certification
4 32 (3.09%) Degree
5 20 (1.93%) AWS Certification
6 19 (1.83%) BPSS Clearance
7 17 (1.64%) Computer Science Degree
8 16 (1.54%) DV Cleared
9 5 (0.48%) Master's Degree
9 5 (0.48%) Microsoft Certification
10 4 (0.39%) CTC Cleared
10 4 (0.39%) DBS Check
11 2 (0.19%) Microsoft Certified Professional
11 2 (0.19%) SnowPro
12 1 (0.096%) CCIE
12 1 (0.096%) CCNP
12 1 (0.096%) Cisco Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 294 (28.35%) Data Quality
2 46 (4.44%) GDPR
3 23 (2.22%) QA
4 9 (0.87%) Accessibility
5 4 (0.39%) HIPAA
5 4 (0.39%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 3 (0.29%) FATCA
6 3 (0.29%) MiFID
7 2 (0.19%) Dodd-Frank
7 2 (0.19%) EMIR
7 2 (0.19%) EU AI Act
7 2 (0.19%) GMP
7 2 (0.19%) NIST
8 1 (0.096%) Basel III
8 1 (0.096%) GRC
8 1 (0.096%) NCSC
8 1 (0.096%) PMO
8 1 (0.096%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 1 (0.096%) SLA
8 1 (0.096%) SOC 2
System Software
1 72 (6.94%) Docker
2 11 (1.06%) Virtual Machines
3 5 (0.48%) zsh
4 1 (0.096%) Active Directory
4 1 (0.096%) HDFS
Systems Management
1 140 (13.50%) Terraform
2 80 (7.71%) Kubernetes
3 12 (1.16%) Grafana
3 12 (1.16%) Prometheus
4 6 (0.58%) Ansible
5 5 (0.48%) NetBackup
6 4 (0.39%) Kibana
7 3 (0.29%) Control-M
7 3 (0.29%) Kubeflow
7 3 (0.29%) Puppet
8 2 (0.19%) EMC NetWorker
8 2 (0.19%) logstash
8 2 (0.19%) Tivoli Storage Manager
9 1 (0.096%) Ambari
9 1 (0.096%) Argo
9 1 (0.096%) Rancher
9 1 (0.096%) ZABBIX
Vendors
1 330 (31.82%) Databricks
2 142 (13.69%) Microsoft
3 74 (7.14%) Oracle
4 51 (4.92%) Talend
5 43 (4.15%) Informatica
6 38 (3.66%) Google
7 24 (2.31%) Denodo
8 17 (1.64%) Foundry
8 17 (1.64%) Palantir
8 17 (1.64%) Splunk
9 16 (1.54%) Cisco
10 15 (1.45%) IBM
11 13 (1.25%) F5
11 13 (1.25%) SAP
11 13 (1.25%) ServiceNow
12 12 (1.16%) Cloudera
13 11 (1.06%) Alteryx
14 7 (0.68%) Confluent
14 7 (0.68%) Virgin Media
15 5 (0.48%) Commvault