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 1 October 2026.

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

6 months to
1 Oct 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 65 131 99
Rank change year-on-year +66 -32 +27
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 1,675 617 768
As % of all contract jobs in England 3.60% 2.21% 2.38%
As % of the Job Titles category 3.90% 2.42% 2.56%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,110 450 535
10th Percentile £375 £363 £366
25th Percentile £425 £425 £450
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £510 £550
Median % change year-on-year -1.96% -7.27% -
75th Percentile £600 £600 £638
90th Percentile £675 £700 £708
UK median daily rate £500 £500 £525
% change year-on-year - -4.76% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 65 12 8
10th Percentile £21.25 £25.25 £49.25
25th Percentile £30.96 £32.94 £57.31
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 42,912 25,497 30,028
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.18% 91.25% 93.00%
Number of daily rates quoted 25,400 16,457 18,407
10th Percentile £325 £278 £300
25th Percentile £425 £402 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £512 £525
Median % change year-on-year +2.54% -2.48% -4.11%
75th Percentile £638 £625 £638
90th Percentile £738 £727 £750
UK median daily rate £525 £500 £525
% change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -0.94%
Number of hourly rates quoted 3,611 1,389 1,358
10th Percentile £14.65 £13.80 £15.00
25th Percentile £20.50 £17.33 £21.37
Median hourly rate £42.50 £25.15 £45.00
Median % change year-on-year +68.99% -44.11% -0.46%
75th Percentile £67.84 £52.50 £67.50
90th Percentile £79.00 £70.00 £75.00
UK median hourly rate £41.74 £25.15 £43.00
% change year-on-year +65.94% -41.51% -2.82%

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 1 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 1 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 1 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 +35 834 £525 - 871
Midlands +71 336 £469 +1.41% 120
West Midlands +65 258 £469 -6.20% 84
North of England +31 207 £520 +9.47% 284
South East +28 126 £459 +2.00% 210
South West +27 113 £525 +5.00% 89
North West +21 111 £525 +17.98% 157
East Midlands +35 78 £388 -16.22% 36
Yorkshire +4 77 £500 - 79
East of England +6 37 £488 -18.75% 58
North East -24 20 £450 +9.09% 49
Data Engineer
UK

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

For the 6 months to 1 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.

1 861 (51.40%) SQL
2 731 (43.64%) Data Pipeline
3 720 (42.99%) Python
4 653 (38.99%) Data Engineering
5 585 (34.93%) Data Modelling
6 580 (34.63%) ETL
7 566 (33.79%) Analytics
8 527 (31.46%) AWS
9 509 (30.39%) Azure
10 439 (26.21%) Data Quality
11 436 (26.03%) Security Cleared
12 412 (24.60%) CI/CD
13 370 (22.09%) SC Cleared
14 341 (20.36%) Databricks
15 296 (17.67%) Agile
16 281 (16.78%) Migration
17 280 (16.72%) Data Warehouse
18 274 (16.36%) DevOps
19 270 (16.12%) AI
20 255 (15.22%) Business Intelligence
21 229 (13.67%) Data Transformation
22 227 (13.55%) PySpark
23 224 (13.37%) Validation
24 223 (13.31%) Data Governance
25 216 (12.90%) dbt
25 216 (12.90%) Microsoft
26 215 (12.84%) Snowflake
27 207 (12.36%) Data Integration
27 207 (12.36%) Power Platform
28 202 (12.06%) 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
1 187 (11.16%) Apache Airflow
2 147 (8.78%) Apache Spark
3 123 (7.34%) Apache
4 42 (2.51%) SAS
5 34 (2.03%) Confluence
6 17 (1.01%) Palantir Foundry
7 14 (0.84%) SharePoint
8 13 (0.78%) Jupyter
9 3 (0.18%) Apache Superset
9 3 (0.18%) Microsoft Exchange
10 1 (0.060%) Apache Pulsar
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 (0.72%) 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%) Dynamics NAV
7 1 (0.060%) Markit EDM
7 1 (0.060%) MIS ActiveH
7 1 (0.060%) Oracle Assets
7 1 (0.060%) Oracle Retail
7 1 (0.060%) SAP CAR
7 1 (0.060%) SAP EWM
Cloud Services
1 527 (31.46%) AWS
2 509 (30.39%) Azure
3 216 (12.90%) dbt
4 215 (12.84%) Snowflake
5 207 (12.36%) Power Platform
6 198 (11.82%) Azure Data Factory
7 178 (10.63%) GCP
8 155 (9.25%) Amazon S3
9 114 (6.81%) Serverless
10 112 (6.69%) Azure DevOps
11 111 (6.63%) Azure Synapse Analytics
12 100 (5.97%) AWS Lambda
13 97 (5.79%) GitHub
14 60 (3.58%) Azure Databricks
15 47 (2.81%) Amazon EMR
16 44 (2.63%) GitHub Actions
17 36 (2.15%) Amazon CloudWatch
18 28 (1.67%) AWS Step Functions
19 26 (1.55%) Microsoft Purview
20 25 (1.49%) AWS CloudFormation
Communications & Networking
1 22 (1.31%) DNS
2 21 (1.25%) BGP
2 21 (1.25%) DMZ
2 21 (1.25%) Multicast
2 21 (1.25%) VPN
3 6 (0.36%) Firewall
4 5 (0.30%) PuTTY
4 5 (0.30%) WinSCP
5 4 (0.24%) Wi-Fi
5 4 (0.24%) Wireless
6 3 (0.18%) Intrusion Detection
6 3 (0.18%) Structured Cabling
7 1 (0.060%) HTTP
7 1 (0.060%) HTTPS
7 1 (0.060%) Network Security
7 1 (0.060%) TCP/IP
7 1 (0.060%) tcpdump
7 1 (0.060%) Wireshark
Database & Business Intelligence
1 280 (16.72%) Data Warehouse
2 202 (12.06%) Power BI
3 139 (8.30%) Data Lake
4 124 (7.40%) Metadata
5 103 (6.15%) BigQuery
6 86 (5.13%) Amazon Redshift
7 76 (4.54%) Delta Lake
8 73 (4.36%) Amazon Athena
9 69 (4.12%) SQL Server
10 62 (3.70%) Big Data
11 60 (3.58%) PostgreSQL
12 56 (3.34%) Pentaho
13 54 (3.22%) Tableau
14 50 (2.99%) Relational Database
15 48 (2.87%) Snowflake Schema
16 47 (2.81%) NoSQL
17 40 (2.39%) Oracle Database
18 37 (2.21%) Amazon RDS
19 34 (2.03%) Azure SQL Database
19 34 (2.03%) SQL Server Integration Services
Development Applications
1 149 (8.90%) Git
2 81 (4.84%) GitLab
3 45 (2.69%) JIRA
4 24 (1.43%) Jenkins
5 14 (0.84%) MLflow
6 8 (0.48%) Bitbucket
6 8 (0.48%) Postman
7 6 (0.36%) Artifactory
7 6 (0.36%) Selenium
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
1 286 (17.07%) Social Skills
2 263 (15.70%) Finance
3 187 (11.16%) Analytical Skills
4 151 (9.01%) Public Sector
5 108 (6.45%) Banking
6 27 (1.61%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 26 (1.55%) Retail
8 23 (1.37%) Automotive
9 21 (1.25%) Aerospace
10 19 (1.13%) Front Office
11 17 (1.01%) Investment Banking
11 17 (1.01%) Manufacturing
12 16 (0.96%) Marketing
13 15 (0.90%) Telecoms
14 14 (0.84%) Military
14 14 (0.84%) Pharmaceutical
15 13 (0.78%) Documentation Skills
16 11 (0.66%) Back Office
17 10 (0.60%) Law
17 10 (0.60%) Legal
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 227 (13.55%) PySpark
2 185 (11.04%) Terraform
3 104 (6.21%) Kafka
4 30 (1.79%) REST
5 24 (1.43%) JSON
5 24 (1.43%) Pandas
6 19 (1.13%) Spring
6 19 (1.13%) Spring Boot
7 17 (1.01%) Great Expectations
7 17 (1.01%) XML
8 14 (0.84%) Apache Beam
8 14 (0.84%) pytest
9 12 (0.72%) Apache NiFi
9 12 (0.72%) PyTorch
9 12 (0.72%) RESTful
10 11 (0.66%) LangChain
11 10 (0.60%) .NET
11 10 (0.60%) Microsoft Graph
11 10 (0.60%) React
12 7 (0.42%) HTML
Miscellaneous
1 140 (8.36%) Cloud Native
2 58 (3.46%) Legacy Systems
3 50 (2.99%) Data Structures
4 44 (2.63%) Onboarding
5 26 (1.55%) Product Ownership
6 21 (1.25%) AI Agents
6 21 (1.25%) Distributed Systems
7 18 (1.07%) Greenfield Project
8 17 (1.01%) Algorithms
8 17 (1.01%) Management Information System
8 17 (1.01%) NHS
8 17 (1.01%) Reference Data
9 15 (0.90%) Reinsurance
10 11 (0.66%) Virtual Team
11 9 (0.54%) Data Fabric
11 9 (0.54%) Data Protection Act
12 8 (0.48%) Clustering
12 8 (0.48%) Distributed Computing
12 8 (0.48%) Enterprise Software
12 8 (0.48%) Linux Command Line
Operating Systems
1 49 (2.93%) Unix
2 38 (2.27%) 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
1 731 (43.64%) Data Pipeline
2 653 (38.99%) Data Engineering
3 585 (34.93%) Data Modelling
4 580 (34.63%) ETL
5 566 (33.79%) Analytics
6 412 (24.60%) CI/CD
7 296 (17.67%) Agile
8 281 (16.78%) Migration
9 274 (16.36%) DevOps
10 270 (16.12%) AI
11 255 (15.22%) Business Intelligence
12 229 (13.67%) Data Transformation
13 224 (13.37%) Validation
14 223 (13.31%) Data Governance
15 207 (12.36%) Data Integration
16 176 (10.51%) Problem-Solving
17 157 (9.37%) Decision-Making
17 157 (9.37%) Infrastructure as Code
17 157 (9.37%) Lakehouse
18 151 (9.01%) Machine Learning
Programming Languages
1 861 (51.40%) SQL
2 720 (42.99%) Python
3 87 (5.19%) Java
4 68 (4.06%) Scala
5 40 (2.39%) PL/SQL
6 29 (1.73%) Data Analysis Expressions
7 26 (1.55%) PowerShell
7 26 (1.55%) T-SQL
8 24 (1.43%) Shell Script
9 22 (1.31%) Bash
10 18 (1.07%) JavaScript
11 12 (0.72%) R
12 10 (0.60%) Go
13 9 (0.54%) Bicep
14 8 (0.48%) C#
15 7 (0.42%) TypeScript
16 5 (0.30%) Korn
17 3 (0.18%) Kusto Query Language
18 2 (0.12%) COBOL
18 2 (0.12%) Cypher
Qualifications
1 436 (26.03%) Security Cleared
2 370 (22.09%) SC Cleared
3 42 (2.51%) Degree
4 40 (2.39%) BPSS Clearance
5 35 (2.09%) DV Cleared
6 24 (1.43%) Azure Certification
7 20 (1.19%) Computer Science Degree
8 13 (0.78%) 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
14 3 (0.18%) CEH
14 3 (0.18%) Microsoft Certification
15 2 (0.12%) CISA
16 1 (0.060%) CRISC
16 1 (0.060%) Postgraduate
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 439 (26.21%) Data Quality
2 67 (4.00%) QA
3 30 (1.79%) GDPR
4 13 (0.78%) 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%) California Consumer Privacy Act
11 1 (0.060%) COBIT
11 1 (0.060%) Government Security Classifications
11 1 (0.060%) IFRS
11 1 (0.060%) IFRS 17
11 1 (0.060%) IFRS 9
11 1 (0.060%) WCAG
System Software
1 97 (5.79%) Docker
2 3 (0.18%) Active Directory
3 1 (0.060%) HDFS
3 1 (0.060%) RACF
3 1 (0.060%) Virtual Machines
Systems Management
1 77 (4.60%) Kubernetes
2 22 (1.31%) Grafana
3 19 (1.13%) Ansible
4 11 (0.66%) Control-M
5 10 (0.60%) Kibana
6 4 (0.24%) Prometheus
7 2 (0.12%) Puppet
8 1 (0.060%) logstash
8 1 (0.060%) Progress Chef
Vendors
1 341 (20.36%) Databricks
2 216 (12.90%) Microsoft
3 141 (8.42%) Oracle
4 86 (5.13%) Informatica
5 80 (4.78%) Google
6 74 (4.42%) Talend
7 38 (2.27%) Denodo
8 30 (1.79%) Salesforce
9 27 (1.61%) Palantir
10 25 (1.49%) Foundry
10 25 (1.49%) SAP
11 21 (1.25%) Cisco
11 21 (1.25%) F5
12 12 (0.72%) Splunk
13 9 (0.54%) Bloomberg
14 8 (0.48%) Cloudera
14 8 (0.48%) OpenAI
14 8 (0.48%) Sage
15 7 (0.42%) Alteryx
15 7 (0.42%) InterSystems