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 22 February 2026.

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

6 months to
22 Feb 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 82 75 105
Rank change year-on-year -7 +30 +19
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 1,074 792 829
As % of all contract jobs in England 3.09% 3.06% 2.18%
As % of the Job Titles category 3.36% 3.30% 2.35%
Number of daily rates quoted 771 575 649
10th Percentile £360 £357 £352
25th Percentile £413 £428 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £588 £625 £630
90th Percentile £675 £738 £689
UK median daily rate £500 £512 £525
% change year-on-year -2.34% -2.48% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 10 10 29
10th Percentile £33.42 £25.45 £35.50
25th Percentile £54.88 £47.19 £46.75
Median hourly rate £67.25 £70.00 £62.36
Median % change year-on-year -3.93% +12.26% -2.57%
75th Percentile £78.00 £93.75 £68.00
90th Percentile £92.00 £97.50 £80.00
UK median hourly rate £58.50 £53.75 £62.36
% change year-on-year +8.84% -13.80% -2.57%

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 31,956 24,036 35,271
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 91.86% 92.97% 92.95%
Number of daily rates quoted 20,260 15,171 23,637
10th Percentile £305 £300 £273
25th Percentile £410 £408 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £501 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.67% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £624 £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 2,049 723 2,159
10th Percentile £15.07 £16.25 £13.23
25th Percentile £18.87 £22.00 £16.54
Median hourly rate £33.17 £36.00 £35.00
Median % change year-on-year -7.86% +2.86% -12.50%
75th Percentile £65.00 £65.00 £60.00
90th Percentile £74.67 £75.20 £72.46
UK median hourly rate £31.76 £35.00 £35.00
% change year-on-year -9.27% - -10.26%

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 22 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 22 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 22 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 +7 659 £514 -6.59% 158
Midlands +4 153 £500 +5.26% 64
West Midlands -4 138 £500 +2.04% 48
North of England -31 131 £450 -1.37% 86
North West -12 78 £425 -2.86% 51
South East -42 53 £496 -7.67% 116
South West -11 46 £550 +10.00% 34
Yorkshire -32 39 £488 +5.41% 29
East Midlands -22 15 £450 +20.00% 16
North East -20 14 £450 -14.29% 7
East of England -41 6 £520 +63.52% 13
Data Engineer
UK

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

For the 6 months to 22 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.

1 625 (58.19%) SQL
2 578 (53.82%) Python
3 459 (42.74%) Data Pipeline
3 459 (42.74%) ETL
4 450 (41.90%) Azure
5 449 (41.81%) Data Engineering
6 407 (37.90%) Analytics
7 390 (36.31%) Data Modelling
8 328 (30.54%) Databricks
9 312 (29.05%) AWS
10 307 (28.58%) Data Quality
11 295 (27.47%) CI/CD
12 288 (26.82%) Security Cleared
13 269 (25.05%) Business Intelligence
14 254 (23.65%) SC Cleared
15 217 (20.20%) DevOps
16 216 (20.11%) Power Platform
17 202 (18.81%) Agile
17 202 (18.81%) Power BI
18 196 (18.25%) Data Warehouse
19 194 (18.06%) Azure Data Factory
20 182 (16.95%) Problem-Solving
21 180 (16.76%) PySpark
22 170 (15.83%) Data Governance
23 157 (14.62%) Data Science
24 146 (13.59%) Microsoft
25 145 (13.50%) Git
26 139 (12.94%) Terraform
27 134 (12.48%) Snowflake
28 129 (12.01%) 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
1 117 (10.89%) Apache Spark
2 112 (10.43%) Apache Airflow
3 75 (6.98%) Apache
4 40 (3.72%) SAS
5 16 (1.49%) Confluence
6 13 (1.21%) Palantir Foundry
7 4 (0.37%) Jupyter
7 4 (0.37%) Microsoft Exchange
7 4 (0.37%) Oracle Application Server
8 3 (0.28%) Apache Pig
9 2 (0.19%) ArcGIS
9 2 (0.19%) SharePoint
10 1 (0.093%) Apache Synapse
10 1 (0.093%) Appian
10 1 (0.093%) Camunda
10 1 (0.093%) IIS
10 1 (0.093%) Luigi
10 1 (0.093%) Oracle SOA Suite
Applications
1 9 (0.84%) Microsoft Excel
2 2 (0.19%) Chatbot
3 1 (0.093%) Microsoft Office
3 1 (0.093%) Microsoft PowerPoint
Business Applications
1 3 (0.28%) Dynamics CRM
2 2 (0.19%) Maximo
2 2 (0.19%) SAP BPC
3 1 (0.093%) Actimize
3 1 (0.093%) Aladdin
3 1 (0.093%) Elite 3E
3 1 (0.093%) iTrent
3 1 (0.093%) NEC Housing
3 1 (0.093%) Oracle BPM
3 1 (0.093%) SAP Business ByDesign
3 1 (0.093%) SAP ERP
Cloud Services
1 450 (41.90%) Azure
2 312 (29.05%) AWS
3 216 (20.11%) Power Platform
4 194 (18.06%) Azure Data Factory
5 134 (12.48%) Snowflake
6 126 (11.73%) Azure Synapse Analytics
7 114 (10.61%) GCP
8 104 (9.68%) dbt
9 100 (9.31%) Amazon S3
10 91 (8.47%) GitHub
11 90 (8.38%) Serverless
12 78 (7.26%) Azure DevOps
13 67 (6.24%) AWS Lambda
14 45 (4.19%) GitHub Actions
15 38 (3.54%) AWS CloudFormation
16 23 (2.14%) AWS Step Functions
17 21 (1.96%) Matillion
18 19 (1.77%) Amazon Kinesis
19 18 (1.68%) SaaS
20 15 (1.40%) Amazon SQS
Communications & Networking
1 15 (1.40%) DNS
2 14 (1.30%) BGP
2 14 (1.30%) DMZ
2 14 (1.30%) Multicast
2 14 (1.30%) VPN
3 4 (0.37%) Firewall
4 3 (0.28%) SAN
5 2 (0.19%) Structured Cabling
6 1 (0.093%) 4G
6 1 (0.093%) 5G
6 1 (0.093%) Network Security
6 1 (0.093%) Software-Defined Networking
6 1 (0.093%) TCP/IP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 202 (18.81%) Power BI
2 196 (18.25%) Data Warehouse
3 124 (11.55%) Data Lake
4 97 (9.03%) SQL Server
5 70 (6.52%) Delta Lake
6 68 (6.33%) Azure SQL Database
7 64 (5.96%) BigQuery
8 60 (5.59%) Amazon Redshift
9 57 (5.31%) Metadata
10 56 (5.21%) PostgreSQL
11 54 (5.03%) SQL Server Integration Services
12 53 (4.93%) Big Data
13 52 (4.84%) NoSQL
14 49 (4.56%) Pentaho
15 41 (3.82%) Tableau
16 39 (3.63%) Snowflake Schema
17 36 (3.35%) Amazon Athena
17 36 (3.35%) Hadoop
18 29 (2.70%) Relational Database
19 22 (2.05%) Star Schema
Development Applications
1 145 (13.50%) Git
2 63 (5.87%) Jenkins
3 44 (4.10%) JIRA
4 40 (3.72%) GitLab
5 22 (2.05%) MLflow
6 4 (0.37%) DBeaver
6 4 (0.37%) Visual Studio
7 3 (0.28%) Selenium
8 2 (0.19%) JUnit
8 2 (0.19%) SonarQube
8 2 (0.19%) Visual Studio Code
9 1 (0.093%) Bitbucket
9 1 (0.093%) Deequ
9 1 (0.093%) Gradle
9 1 (0.093%) Jaeger
9 1 (0.093%) Poetry
9 1 (0.093%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
9 1 (0.093%) Team Foundation Server
9 1 (0.093%) TeamCity
9 1 (0.093%) Terragrunt
General
1 199 (18.53%) Social Skills
2 167 (15.55%) Finance
3 109 (10.15%) Analytical Skills
4 90 (8.38%) Public Sector
5 52 (4.84%) Banking
6 31 (2.89%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 18 (1.68%) Investment Banking
8 15 (1.40%) Retail
9 13 (1.21%) Front Office
10 12 (1.12%) Pharmaceutical
11 11 (1.02%) Documentation Skills
12 10 (0.93%) Marketing
12 10 (0.93%) Telecoms
13 8 (0.74%) Manufacturing
13 8 (0.74%) Publishing
14 6 (0.56%) Military
15 5 (0.47%) Law
16 4 (0.37%) Back Office
16 4 (0.37%) Corporate Banking
17 3 (0.28%) Aerospace
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 180 (16.76%) PySpark
2 119 (11.08%) Kafka
3 36 (3.35%) Pandas
4 25 (2.33%) JSON
5 23 (2.14%) YAML
6 22 (2.05%) REST
7 17 (1.58%) XML
8 15 (1.40%) PyTorch
9 14 (1.30%) Apache NiFi
9 14 (1.30%) Great Expectations
10 13 (1.21%) Node.js
10 13 (1.21%) NumPy
11 12 (1.12%) Keycloak
11 12 (1.12%) pytest
11 12 (1.12%) RESTful
11 12 (1.12%) scikit-learn
12 11 (1.02%) TensorFlow
13 10 (0.93%) Matplotlib
14 9 (0.84%) HTML
15 8 (0.74%) Apache Beam
Miscellaneous
1 82 (7.64%) Cloud Native
2 34 (3.17%) Data Structures
3 26 (2.42%) Product Ownership
4 25 (2.33%) Legacy Systems
5 19 (1.77%) Replication
6 17 (1.58%) Clustering
7 16 (1.49%) Hybrid Cloud
7 16 (1.49%) Onboarding
8 14 (1.30%) Distributed Systems
8 14 (1.30%) Greenfield Project
9 13 (1.21%) Data Protection Act
9 13 (1.21%) Reinsurance
10 11 (1.02%) Algorithms
11 10 (0.93%) Public Cloud
12 9 (0.84%) Distributed Computing
13 7 (0.65%) Life Science
13 7 (0.65%) Management Information System
13 7 (0.65%) NHS
14 6 (0.56%) Analytical Mindset
14 6 (0.56%) Wiki
Operating Systems
1 19 (1.77%) Linux
2 18 (1.68%) Unix
3 1 (0.093%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 459 (42.74%) Data Pipeline
1 459 (42.74%) ETL
2 449 (41.81%) Data Engineering
3 407 (37.90%) Analytics
4 390 (36.31%) Data Modelling
5 295 (27.47%) CI/CD
6 269 (25.05%) Business Intelligence
7 217 (20.20%) DevOps
8 202 (18.81%) Agile
9 182 (16.95%) Problem-Solving
10 170 (15.83%) Data Governance
11 157 (14.62%) Data Science
12 129 (12.01%) Data Integration
13 128 (11.92%) AI
14 122 (11.36%) Data Architecture
15 117 (10.89%) Infrastructure as Code
16 115 (10.71%) Machine Learning
17 112 (10.43%) Data Transformation
18 111 (10.34%) Migration
19 102 (9.50%) Performance Tuning
Programming Languages
1 625 (58.19%) SQL
2 578 (53.82%) Python
3 81 (7.54%) Scala
4 67 (6.24%) Java
5 31 (2.89%) Data Analysis Expressions
6 29 (2.70%) C#
7 27 (2.51%) T-SQL
8 24 (2.23%) PL/SQL
9 21 (1.96%) Bash
10 18 (1.68%) Bicep
11 15 (1.40%) PowerShell
11 15 (1.40%) R
11 15 (1.40%) Shell Script
12 14 (1.30%) Go
13 13 (1.21%) JavaScript
14 4 (0.37%) C++
14 4 (0.37%) Korn
14 4 (0.37%) TypeScript
15 2 (0.19%) Ruby
15 2 (0.19%) VB
Qualifications
1 288 (26.82%) Security Cleared
2 254 (23.65%) SC Cleared
3 33 (3.07%) Azure Certification
4 32 (2.98%) Degree
5 20 (1.86%) AWS Certification
5 20 (1.86%) BPSS Clearance
6 16 (1.49%) Computer Science Degree
7 15 (1.40%) DV Cleared
8 5 (0.47%) Master's Degree
8 5 (0.47%) Microsoft Certification
9 4 (0.37%) CTC Cleared
9 4 (0.37%) DBS Check
10 2 (0.19%) Microsoft Certified Professional
10 2 (0.19%) SnowPro
11 1 (0.093%) CCIE
11 1 (0.093%) CCNP
11 1 (0.093%) Cisco Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 307 (28.58%) Data Quality
2 45 (4.19%) GDPR
3 26 (2.42%) QA
4 9 (0.84%) Accessibility
5 4 (0.37%) HIPAA
5 4 (0.37%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 3 (0.28%) FATCA
6 3 (0.28%) GMP
6 3 (0.28%) MiFID
7 2 (0.19%) Dodd-Frank
7 2 (0.19%) EMIR
7 2 (0.19%) EU AI Act
7 2 (0.19%) NIST
7 2 (0.19%) SLA
8 1 (0.093%) Basel III
8 1 (0.093%) GRC
8 1 (0.093%) ISO 13485
8 1 (0.093%) NCSC
8 1 (0.093%) PMO
8 1 (0.093%) SOC 2
System Software
1 82 (7.64%) Docker
2 7 (0.65%) Virtual Machines
3 4 (0.37%) zsh
4 1 (0.093%) Active Directory
4 1 (0.093%) HDFS
Systems Management
1 139 (12.94%) Terraform
2 88 (8.19%) Kubernetes
3 12 (1.12%) Grafana
3 12 (1.12%) Prometheus
4 6 (0.56%) Ansible
5 5 (0.47%) NetBackup
6 4 (0.37%) Kibana
7 3 (0.28%) Control-M
7 3 (0.28%) Kubeflow
7 3 (0.28%) Puppet
8 2 (0.19%) EMC NetWorker
8 2 (0.19%) logstash
8 2 (0.19%) Tivoli Storage Manager
9 1 (0.093%) Ambari
9 1 (0.093%) Argo
9 1 (0.093%) Rancher
9 1 (0.093%) ZABBIX
Vendors
1 328 (30.54%) Databricks
2 146 (13.59%) Microsoft
3 89 (8.29%) Oracle
4 69 (6.42%) Talend
5 54 (5.03%) Informatica
6 44 (4.10%) Google
7 30 (2.79%) Denodo
8 19 (1.77%) SAP
9 18 (1.68%) Cisco
9 18 (1.68%) Splunk
10 17 (1.58%) Palantir
11 16 (1.49%) Foundry
12 15 (1.40%) F5
12 15 (1.40%) IBM
13 13 (1.21%) Cloudera
13 13 (1.21%) ServiceNow
14 11 (1.02%) Alteryx
15 7 (0.65%) Confluent
15 7 (0.65%) Virgin Media
16 6 (0.56%) MuleSoft