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 26 September 2026.

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

6 months to
26 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 66 128 100
Rank change year-on-year +62 -28 +22
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 1,680 618 778
As % of all contract jobs in England 3.61% 2.21% 2.38%
As % of the Job Titles category 3.91% 2.42% 2.55%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,116 449 542
10th Percentile £375 £363 £375
25th Percentile £425 £425 £456
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £508 £550
Median % change year-on-year -1.48% -7.73% -
75th Percentile £588 £600 £638
90th Percentile £675 £700 £718
UK median daily rate £500 £500 £525
% change year-on-year - -4.76% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 65 12 9
10th Percentile £21.25 £25.25 £49.25
25th Percentile £30.96 £32.94 £60.00
Median hourly rate £41.56 £48.00 £80.00
Median % change year-on-year -13.43% -40.00% +29.55%
75th Percentile £68.00 £66.88 £97.50
90th Percentile £70.00 £107.00 -
UK median hourly rate £41.56 £52.50 £80.00
% change year-on-year -20.85% -34.38% +29.55%

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 42,924 25,502 30,456
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.20% 91.27% 93.00%
Number of daily rates quoted 25,454 16,440 18,762
10th Percentile £325 £278 £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 £734 £750
UK median daily rate £525 £500 £525
% change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -0.62%
Number of hourly rates quoted 3,577 1,399 1,408
10th Percentile £14.82 £13.75 £14.85
25th Percentile £20.69 £17.46 £21.34
Median hourly rate £42.50 £25.15 £45.00
Median % change year-on-year +68.99% -44.11% -
75th Percentile £68.00 £53.75 £67.50
90th Percentile £80.00 £70.03 £75.00
UK median hourly rate £42.00 £25.15 £43.00
% change year-on-year +67.00% -41.51% -2.27%

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 26 September 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 26 September 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 26 September 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 +31 834 £525 - 921
Midlands +82 342 £469 +1.41% 137
West Midlands +66 267 £469 -6.20% 88
North of England +33 208 £520 +9.47% 286
South East +22 127 £459 +2.00% 208
North West +28 110 £525 +17.32% 159
South West +18 107 £525 +5.00% 98
Yorkshire +6 79 £500 - 82
East Midlands +35 75 £388 -16.22% 49
East of England -2 38 £488 -18.75% 66
North East -26 20 £450 +9.09% 47
Data Engineer
UK

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

For the 6 months to 26 September 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.

1 861 (51.25%) SQL
2 738 (43.93%) Data Pipeline
3 718 (42.74%) Python
4 649 (38.63%) Data Engineering
5 588 (35.00%) Data Modelling
6 583 (34.70%) ETL
7 575 (34.23%) Analytics
8 531 (31.61%) AWS
9 511 (30.42%) Azure
10 440 (26.19%) Data Quality
11 435 (25.89%) Security Cleared
12 415 (24.70%) CI/CD
13 375 (22.32%) SC Cleared
14 338 (20.12%) Databricks
15 292 (17.38%) Agile
16 281 (16.73%) Data Warehouse
16 281 (16.73%) Migration
17 276 (16.43%) DevOps
18 267 (15.89%) AI
19 264 (15.71%) Business Intelligence
20 230 (13.69%) Data Governance
20 230 (13.69%) PySpark
21 225 (13.39%) Data Transformation
22 222 (13.21%) Microsoft
23 221 (13.15%) Validation
24 211 (12.56%) dbt
24 211 (12.56%) Power Platform
24 211 (12.56%) Snowflake
25 206 (12.26%) Power BI
26 204 (12.14%) 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
1 185 (11.01%) Apache Airflow
2 145 (8.63%) Apache Spark
3 118 (7.02%) Apache
4 46 (2.74%) SAS
5 34 (2.02%) Confluence
6 18 (1.07%) Palantir Foundry
7 14 (0.83%) SharePoint
8 12 (0.71%) Jupyter
9 3 (0.18%) Apache Superset
9 3 (0.18%) Microsoft Exchange
10 1 (0.060%) ArcGIS
10 1 (0.060%) Liferay
10 1 (0.060%) Luigi
10 1 (0.060%) nginx
10 1 (0.060%) Oracle Workflow
10 1 (0.060%) PowerExchange
Applications
1 20 (1.19%) Microsoft Excel
2 7 (0.42%) Spreadsheet
3 5 (0.30%) Notepad++
4 4 (0.24%) Chatbot
5 1 (0.060%) Microsoft Office
5 1 (0.060%) Microsoft PowerPoint
Business Applications
1 12 (0.71%) Aladdin
2 7 (0.42%) Dynamics CRM
3 6 (0.36%) NetSuite
4 5 (0.30%) Infor LN
4 5 (0.30%) Sage X3
4 5 (0.30%) SAP S/4HANA
5 3 (0.18%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
6 2 (0.12%) FIS Private Capital Suite
6 2 (0.12%) Maximo
6 2 (0.12%) Oracle EBS
6 2 (0.12%) SAP BPC
6 2 (0.12%) SAP Oil and Gas
6 2 (0.12%) SimCorp Dimension
7 1 (0.060%) BambooHR
7 1 (0.060%) Dynamics NAV
7 1 (0.060%) Markit EDM
7 1 (0.060%) Oracle Retail
7 1 (0.060%) Raiser’s Edge
7 1 (0.060%) SAP CAR
7 1 (0.060%) SAP EWM
Cloud Services
1 531 (31.61%) AWS
2 511 (30.42%) Azure
3 211 (12.56%) dbt
3 211 (12.56%) Power Platform
3 211 (12.56%) Snowflake
4 199 (11.85%) Azure Data Factory
5 178 (10.60%) GCP
6 151 (8.99%) Amazon S3
7 117 (6.96%) Azure DevOps
8 115 (6.85%) Serverless
9 113 (6.73%) Azure Synapse Analytics
10 101 (6.01%) AWS Lambda
11 98 (5.83%) GitHub
12 57 (3.39%) Azure Databricks
13 46 (2.74%) Amazon EMR
14 45 (2.68%) GitHub Actions
15 35 (2.08%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 29 (1.73%) AWS Step Functions
17 28 (1.67%) Microsoft Purview
18 24 (1.43%) AWS CloudFormation
Communications & Networking
1 24 (1.43%) DNS
2 23 (1.37%) BGP
2 23 (1.37%) DMZ
2 23 (1.37%) Multicast
2 23 (1.37%) VPN
3 6 (0.36%) Firewall
4 5 (0.30%) PuTTY
4 5 (0.30%) WinSCP
5 4 (0.24%) Structured Cabling
5 4 (0.24%) Wi-Fi
5 4 (0.24%) Wireless
6 3 (0.18%) Intrusion Detection
7 1 (0.060%) HTTP
7 1 (0.060%) HTTPS
7 1 (0.060%) TCP/IP
7 1 (0.060%) tcpdump
7 1 (0.060%) Wireshark
Database & Business Intelligence
1 281 (16.73%) Data Warehouse
2 206 (12.26%) Power BI
3 140 (8.33%) Data Lake
4 118 (7.02%) Metadata
5 103 (6.13%) BigQuery
6 84 (5.00%) Amazon Redshift
7 78 (4.64%) Delta Lake
8 73 (4.35%) Amazon Athena
9 71 (4.23%) SQL Server
10 60 (3.57%) Big Data
10 60 (3.57%) Pentaho
11 59 (3.51%) PostgreSQL
12 55 (3.27%) Tableau
13 49 (2.92%) Relational Database
14 47 (2.80%) NoSQL
14 47 (2.80%) Snowflake Schema
15 40 (2.38%) Oracle Database
16 37 (2.20%) Amazon RDS
17 34 (2.02%) Azure SQL Database
17 34 (2.02%) SQL Server Integration Services
Development Applications
1 154 (9.17%) Git
2 76 (4.52%) GitLab
3 51 (3.04%) JIRA
4 26 (1.55%) Jenkins
5 16 (0.95%) MLflow
6 8 (0.48%) Bitbucket
6 8 (0.48%) Postman
7 6 (0.36%) Selenium
8 5 (0.30%) Artifactory
8 5 (0.30%) SonarQube
9 4 (0.24%) ERwin
10 3 (0.18%) Atlassian Bamboo
10 3 (0.18%) Claude Code
10 3 (0.18%) Newman
10 3 (0.18%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
11 2 (0.12%) ER Studio
11 2 (0.12%) RStudio
11 2 (0.12%) Terragrunt
11 2 (0.12%) Yeoman
12 1 (0.060%) Octopus Deploy
General
1 280 (16.67%) Social Skills
2 264 (15.71%) Finance
3 190 (11.31%) Analytical Skills
4 151 (8.99%) Public Sector
5 108 (6.43%) Banking
6 27 (1.61%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 25 (1.49%) Retail
8 22 (1.31%) Automotive
9 19 (1.13%) Telecoms
10 18 (1.07%) Aerospace
10 18 (1.07%) Front Office
11 17 (1.01%) Investment Banking
11 17 (1.01%) Manufacturing
12 16 (0.95%) Marketing
13 15 (0.89%) Pharmaceutical
14 14 (0.83%) Documentation Skills
15 13 (0.77%) Military
16 11 (0.65%) Back Office
16 11 (0.65%) Law
17 10 (0.60%) Legal
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 230 (13.69%) PySpark
2 183 (10.89%) Terraform
3 102 (6.07%) Kafka
4 25 (1.49%) Pandas
5 24 (1.43%) JSON
5 24 (1.43%) REST
6 21 (1.25%) Spring
6 21 (1.25%) Spring Boot
7 18 (1.07%) Great Expectations
8 17 (1.01%) XML
9 14 (0.83%) Apache Beam
9 14 (0.83%) pytest
10 12 (0.71%) RESTful
11 11 (0.65%) PyTorch
11 11 (0.65%) React
12 10 (0.60%) .NET
12 10 (0.60%) LangChain
12 10 (0.60%) Microsoft Graph
13 8 (0.48%) Apache NiFi
13 8 (0.48%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 139 (8.27%) Cloud Native
2 58 (3.45%) Legacy Systems
3 51 (3.04%) Data Structures
4 44 (2.62%) Onboarding
5 25 (1.49%) Product Ownership
6 21 (1.25%) Distributed Systems
7 20 (1.19%) AI Agents
8 19 (1.13%) NHS
9 18 (1.07%) Greenfield Project
10 17 (1.01%) Management Information System
11 16 (0.95%) Reference Data
12 15 (0.89%) Reinsurance
13 13 (0.77%) Algorithms
14 11 (0.65%) Virtual Team
15 9 (0.54%) Data Fabric
16 8 (0.48%) Data Protection Act
16 8 (0.48%) Distributed Computing
16 8 (0.48%) Enterprise Software
16 8 (0.48%) Life Science
16 8 (0.48%) Linux Command Line
Operating Systems
1 53 (3.15%) Unix
2 39 (2.32%) Linux
3 2 (0.12%) Ubuntu
3 2 (0.12%) Windows
4 1 (0.060%) Robot Operating System
4 1 (0.060%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 738 (43.93%) Data Pipeline
2 649 (38.63%) Data Engineering
3 588 (35.00%) Data Modelling
4 583 (34.70%) ETL
5 575 (34.23%) Analytics
6 415 (24.70%) CI/CD
7 292 (17.38%) Agile
8 281 (16.73%) Migration
9 276 (16.43%) DevOps
10 267 (15.89%) AI
11 264 (15.71%) Business Intelligence
12 230 (13.69%) Data Governance
13 225 (13.39%) Data Transformation
14 221 (13.15%) Validation
15 204 (12.14%) Data Integration
16 181 (10.77%) Problem-Solving
17 159 (9.46%) Infrastructure as Code
17 159 (9.46%) Lakehouse
18 156 (9.29%) Decision-Making
19 149 (8.87%) Machine Learning
Programming Languages
1 861 (51.25%) SQL
2 718 (42.74%) Python
3 87 (5.18%) Java
4 65 (3.87%) Scala
5 43 (2.56%) PL/SQL
6 29 (1.73%) Data Analysis Expressions
7 27 (1.61%) T-SQL
8 26 (1.55%) PowerShell
8 26 (1.55%) Shell Script
9 22 (1.31%) Bash
10 18 (1.07%) JavaScript
11 12 (0.71%) R
12 10 (0.60%) Bicep
12 10 (0.60%) C#
13 9 (0.54%) Go
14 8 (0.48%) TypeScript
15 5 (0.30%) Korn
16 3 (0.18%) Kusto Query Language
17 2 (0.12%) COBOL
17 2 (0.12%) Cypher
Qualifications
1 435 (25.89%) Security Cleared
2 375 (22.32%) SC Cleared
3 40 (2.38%) BPSS Clearance
4 39 (2.32%) Degree
5 29 (1.73%) DV Cleared
6 23 (1.37%) Azure Certification
7 20 (1.19%) Computer Science Degree
8 13 (0.77%) AWS Certification
9 8 (0.48%) DBS Check
9 8 (0.48%) Master's Degree
10 7 (0.42%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
11 6 (0.36%) SnowPro
12 5 (0.30%) CISM
12 5 (0.30%) CISSP
13 4 (0.24%) City & Guilds
13 4 (0.24%) Microsoft Certification
14 3 (0.18%) CEH
15 2 (0.12%) CISA
16 1 (0.060%) PMI Certification
16 1 (0.060%) PMP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 440 (26.19%) Data Quality
2 68 (4.05%) QA
3 32 (1.90%) GDPR
4 14 (0.83%) Accessibility
5 9 (0.54%) SLA
6 6 (0.36%) FATCA
7 5 (0.30%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 5 (0.30%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 4 (0.24%) Disclosure Scotland
9 3 (0.18%) HIPAA
9 3 (0.18%) MiFID
10 2 (0.12%) EMIR
10 2 (0.12%) SNOMED CT
11 1 (0.060%) Government Security Classifications
11 1 (0.060%) GRC
11 1 (0.060%) IFRS
11 1 (0.060%) IFRS 17
11 1 (0.060%) IFRS 9
11 1 (0.060%) NIST
11 1 (0.060%) PMO
System Software
1 101 (6.01%) Docker
2 3 (0.18%) Active Directory
3 2 (0.12%) Virtual Machines
4 1 (0.060%) HDFS
4 1 (0.060%) RACF
Systems Management
1 75 (4.46%) Kubernetes
2 21 (1.25%) Grafana
3 15 (0.89%) Ansible
4 11 (0.65%) Control-M
5 9 (0.54%) Kibana
6 3 (0.18%) Prometheus
7 2 (0.12%) Puppet
8 1 (0.060%) logstash
8 1 (0.060%) Progress Chef
Vendors
1 338 (20.12%) Databricks
2 222 (13.21%) Microsoft
3 144 (8.57%) Oracle
4 87 (5.18%) Informatica
5 82 (4.88%) Google
6 78 (4.64%) Talend
7 41 (2.44%) Denodo
8 29 (1.73%) Salesforce
9 28 (1.67%) Palantir
10 26 (1.55%) Foundry
11 25 (1.49%) SAP
12 23 (1.37%) Cisco
12 23 (1.37%) F5
13 12 (0.71%) Splunk
14 9 (0.54%) Bloomberg
15 8 (0.48%) Cloudera
15 8 (0.48%) OpenAI
15 8 (0.48%) Sage
16 7 (0.42%) Alteryx
16 7 (0.42%) IBM