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 4 August 2026.

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

6 months to
4 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 56 123 95
Rank change year-on-year +67 -28 +23
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 1,755 635 794
As % of all contract jobs in England 3.89% 2.30% 2.37%
As % of the Job Titles category 4.20% 2.51% 2.55%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,191 460 590
10th Percentile £383 £375 £249
25th Percentile £425 £425 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year - -4.76% -4.55%
75th Percentile £588 £595 £636
90th Percentile £663 £700 £700
UK median daily rate £500 £500 £514
% change year-on-year - -2.68% -6.59%
Number of hourly rates quoted 84 11 29
10th Percentile £19.91 £18.22 £38.65
25th Percentile £30.96 £34.13 £52.50
Median hourly rate £43.75 £52.50 £80.00
Median % change year-on-year -16.67% -34.38% +12.28%
75th Percentile £70.00 £70.60 -
90th Percentile £75.00 £80.00 -
UK median hourly rate £50.00 £52.50 £75.00
% change year-on-year -4.76% -30.00% +5.26%

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 41,773 25,317 31,124
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.56% 91.70% 92.90%
Number of daily rates quoted 25,362 16,429 20,502
10th Percentile £329 £286 £300
25th Percentile £425 £402 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £510 £525
Median % change year-on-year +2.94% -2.86% -4.55%
75th Percentile £627 £625 £638
90th Percentile £738 £738 £750
UK median daily rate £525 £500 £525
% change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -2.33%
Number of hourly rates quoted 3,095 1,308 1,828
10th Percentile £15.93 £13.54 £14.16
25th Percentile £22.00 £17.50 £21.25
Median hourly rate £45.00 £25.32 £45.00
Median % change year-on-year +77.73% -43.73% +5.88%
75th Percentile £68.00 £55.00 £65.00
90th Percentile £80.00 £75.00 £75.00
UK median hourly rate £42.50 £25.15 £43.00
% change year-on-year +68.99% -41.51% +1.18%

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 4 August 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 4 August 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 4 August 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 +48 856 £525 - 240
Midlands +67 396 £465 +4.49% 42
West Midlands +59 344 £460 +2.22% 29
North of England +37 234 £500 +5.26% 101
North West +25 136 £525 +10.53% 40
South East +15 127 £467 +3.78% 99
South West +5 85 £525 +10.53% 38
Yorkshire -4 75 £475 - 30
East Midlands +24 52 £500 +19.05% 13
East of England +8 36 £520 +63.52% 14
North East -21 24 £520 +23.08% 32
Data Engineer
UK

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

For the 6 months to 4 August 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.

1 896 (51.05%) SQL
2 746 (42.51%) Data Pipeline
3 734 (41.82%) Python
4 647 (36.87%) Data Engineering
5 629 (35.84%) Analytics
6 618 (35.21%) ETL
7 584 (33.28%) Data Modelling
8 547 (31.17%) Azure
9 503 (28.66%) AWS
10 472 (26.89%) Security Cleared
11 431 (24.56%) Data Quality
12 419 (23.87%) CI/CD
13 414 (23.59%) SC Cleared
14 324 (18.46%) Databricks
15 319 (18.18%) Business Intelligence
16 306 (17.44%) Agile
17 289 (16.47%) Data Warehouse
18 287 (16.35%) DevOps
19 281 (16.01%) Migration
20 248 (14.13%) Power Platform
21 237 (13.50%) Power BI
22 236 (13.45%) Data Governance
23 229 (13.05%) PySpark
24 224 (12.76%) Microsoft
25 223 (12.71%) Azure Data Factory
26 213 (12.14%) Problem-Solving
27 207 (11.79%) AI
27 207 (11.79%) Validation
28 203 (11.57%) Data Integration
29 195 (11.11%) Data Transformation

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
1 170 (9.69%) Apache Airflow
2 138 (7.86%) Apache Spark
3 107 (6.10%) Apache
4 76 (4.33%) SAS
5 39 (2.22%) Confluence
6 13 (0.74%) Palantir Foundry
7 12 (0.68%) SharePoint
8 10 (0.57%) Jupyter
9 2 (0.11%) Apache Superset
9 2 (0.11%) Microsoft Exchange
10 1 (0.057%) ArcGIS
10 1 (0.057%) Liferay
10 1 (0.057%) Luigi
10 1 (0.057%) R Markdown
Applications
1 22 (1.25%) Microsoft Excel
2 5 (0.28%) Notepad++
2 5 (0.28%) Spreadsheet
3 4 (0.23%) Chatbot
4 1 (0.057%) Microsoft PowerPoint
Business Applications
1 12 (0.68%) Aladdin
2 8 (0.46%) Dynamics CRM
3 5 (0.28%) Infor LN
3 5 (0.28%) NetSuite
3 5 (0.28%) Sage X3
4 3 (0.17%) SAP BPC
4 3 (0.17%) SAP S/4HANA
4 3 (0.17%) SimCorp Dimension
5 2 (0.11%) BambooHR
5 2 (0.11%) Maximo
6 1 (0.057%) iTrent
6 1 (0.057%) MIS ActiveH
6 1 (0.057%) NEC Housing
6 1 (0.057%) Oracle Assets
6 1 (0.057%) Oracle EBS
6 1 (0.057%) Oracle ERP
6 1 (0.057%) Raiser’s Edge
6 1 (0.057%) SAP Business ByDesign
6 1 (0.057%) SAP CAR
6 1 (0.057%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
Cloud Services
1 547 (31.17%) Azure
2 503 (28.66%) AWS
3 248 (14.13%) Power Platform
4 223 (12.71%) Azure Data Factory
5 188 (10.71%) dbt
6 187 (10.66%) Snowflake
7 161 (9.17%) GCP
8 145 (8.26%) Azure Synapse Analytics
9 143 (8.15%) Amazon S3
10 130 (7.41%) Azure DevOps
11 99 (5.64%) GitHub
12 97 (5.53%) Serverless
13 81 (4.62%) AWS Lambda
14 43 (2.45%) GitHub Actions
15 37 (2.11%) Amazon EMR
16 27 (1.54%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 25 (1.42%) Amazon Kinesis
17 25 (1.42%) Matillion
18 24 (1.37%) AWS Step Functions
18 24 (1.37%) Dagster
Communications & Networking
1 31 (1.77%) DNS
1 31 (1.77%) VPN
2 30 (1.71%) BGP
2 30 (1.71%) DMZ
2 30 (1.71%) Multicast
3 9 (0.51%) Structured Cabling
4 7 (0.40%) Firewall
5 5 (0.28%) PuTTY
5 5 (0.28%) WinSCP
6 4 (0.23%) Wi-Fi
6 4 (0.23%) Wireless
7 3 (0.17%) Intrusion Detection
8 1 (0.057%) 4G
8 1 (0.057%) 5G
Database & Business Intelligence
1 289 (16.47%) Data Warehouse
2 237 (13.50%) Power BI
3 158 (9.00%) Data Lake
4 97 (5.53%) BigQuery
5 95 (5.41%) Amazon Redshift
5 95 (5.41%) Metadata
6 90 (5.13%) Pentaho
7 89 (5.07%) SQL Server
8 83 (4.73%) Delta Lake
9 67 (3.82%) Tableau
10 63 (3.59%) Amazon Athena
11 62 (3.53%) Big Data
12 59 (3.36%) PostgreSQL
13 55 (3.13%) Snowflake Schema
14 51 (2.91%) Azure SQL Database
14 51 (2.91%) SQL Server Integration Services
15 48 (2.74%) NoSQL
16 46 (2.62%) Relational Database
17 34 (1.94%) Hadoop
18 33 (1.88%) Data Vault
Development Applications
1 159 (9.06%) Git
2 84 (4.79%) GitLab
3 70 (3.99%) JIRA
4 46 (2.62%) Jenkins
5 7 (0.40%) MLflow
5 7 (0.40%) Postman
6 6 (0.34%) Bitbucket
7 5 (0.28%) Artifactory
7 5 (0.28%) SonarQube
8 3 (0.17%) Newman
8 3 (0.17%) Sonatype Nexus
9 2 (0.11%) Atlassian Bamboo
9 2 (0.11%) ER Studio
9 2 (0.11%) ERwin
9 2 (0.11%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
9 2 (0.11%) Yeoman
10 1 (0.057%) Octopus Deploy
10 1 (0.057%) Selenium
10 1 (0.057%) Terragrunt
10 1 (0.057%) Toad
General
1 295 (16.81%) Finance
2 272 (15.50%) Social Skills
3 199 (11.34%) Analytical Skills
4 160 (9.12%) Public Sector
5 101 (5.75%) Banking
6 31 (1.77%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 26 (1.48%) Telecoms
8 23 (1.31%) Retail
9 22 (1.25%) Marketing
10 21 (1.20%) Documentation Skills
11 20 (1.14%) Manufacturing
12 19 (1.08%) Automotive
13 17 (0.97%) Front Office
14 16 (0.91%) Aerospace
14 16 (0.91%) Investment Banking
15 15 (0.85%) Pharmaceutical
16 11 (0.63%) Publishing
17 9 (0.51%) Billing
18 8 (0.46%) Legal
18 8 (0.46%) Military
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 229 (13.05%) PySpark
2 123 (7.01%) Kafka
3 38 (2.17%) Pandas
4 28 (1.60%) JSON
5 25 (1.42%) REST
6 21 (1.20%) Spring
6 21 (1.20%) Spring Boot
7 20 (1.14%) Great Expectations
8 19 (1.08%) Apache Beam
9 18 (1.03%) XML
10 17 (0.97%) YAML
11 12 (0.68%) Apache Avro
11 12 (0.68%) React
11 12 (0.68%) scikit-learn
12 11 (0.63%) RESTful
13 10 (0.57%) Microsoft Graph
13 10 (0.57%) pytest
14 9 (0.51%) GeoJSON
14 9 (0.51%) Matplotlib
14 9 (0.51%) Polars
Miscellaneous
1 126 (7.18%) Cloud Native
2 74 (4.22%) Legacy Systems
3 51 (2.91%) Data Structures
4 31 (1.77%) Onboarding
5 27 (1.54%) Distributed Systems
6 22 (1.25%) Greenfield Project
6 22 (1.25%) NHS
6 22 (1.25%) Product Ownership
7 19 (1.08%) Reinsurance
8 16 (0.91%) Clustering
8 16 (0.91%) Reference Data
9 13 (0.74%) Data Protection Act
10 11 (0.63%) Algorithms
10 11 (0.63%) Management Information System
11 10 (0.57%) Virtual Team
12 9 (0.51%) AI Agents
12 9 (0.51%) Driving Licence
12 9 (0.51%) Life Science
12 9 (0.51%) Self-Motivation
13 8 (0.46%) Replication
Operating Systems
1 60 (3.42%) Unix
2 44 (2.51%) Linux
3 4 (0.23%) Windows
4 2 (0.11%) Ubuntu
4 2 (0.11%) Windows Server
5 1 (0.057%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 746 (42.51%) Data Pipeline
2 647 (36.87%) Data Engineering
3 629 (35.84%) Analytics
4 618 (35.21%) ETL
5 584 (33.28%) Data Modelling
6 419 (23.87%) CI/CD
7 319 (18.18%) Business Intelligence
8 306 (17.44%) Agile
9 287 (16.35%) DevOps
10 281 (16.01%) Migration
11 236 (13.45%) Data Governance
12 213 (12.14%) Problem-Solving
13 207 (11.79%) AI
13 207 (11.79%) Validation
14 203 (11.57%) Data Integration
15 195 (11.11%) Data Transformation
16 177 (10.09%) Decision-Making
17 157 (8.95%) Data Science
18 137 (7.81%) Test Automation
19 136 (7.75%) Infrastructure as Code
Programming Languages
1 896 (51.05%) SQL
2 734 (41.82%) Python
3 105 (5.98%) Java
4 56 (3.19%) Scala
5 49 (2.79%) PL/SQL
6 33 (1.88%) Shell Script
7 32 (1.82%) T-SQL
8 31 (1.77%) Data Analysis Expressions
9 29 (1.65%) Bash
10 25 (1.42%) PowerShell
11 23 (1.31%) C#
12 14 (0.80%) JavaScript
12 14 (0.80%) R
13 13 (0.74%) Bicep
14 6 (0.34%) Go
14 6 (0.34%) TypeScript
15 3 (0.17%) Korn
16 2 (0.11%) HiveQL
16 2 (0.11%) Ruby
16 2 (0.11%) SPARQL
Qualifications
1 472 (26.89%) Security Cleared
2 414 (23.59%) SC Cleared
3 43 (2.45%) BPSS Clearance
4 41 (2.34%) Degree
5 25 (1.42%) Azure Certification
6 21 (1.20%) DV Cleared
7 18 (1.03%) Computer Science Degree
8 11 (0.63%) AWS Certification
9 9 (0.51%) City & Guilds
9 9 (0.51%) DBS Check
10 6 (0.34%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
10 6 (0.34%) SnowPro
11 5 (0.28%) BICSI Certification
11 5 (0.28%) CISM
11 5 (0.28%) CISSP
11 5 (0.28%) Master's Degree
12 4 (0.23%) Microsoft Certification
13 3 (0.17%) CEH
14 1 (0.057%) CISA
14 1 (0.057%) Cisco Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 431 (24.56%) Data Quality
2 57 (3.25%) QA
3 45 (2.56%) GDPR
4 18 (1.03%) Accessibility
5 12 (0.68%) SLA
6 6 (0.34%) FATCA
7 5 (0.28%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 4 (0.23%) HIPAA
8 4 (0.23%) ISO/IEC 27001
9 3 (0.17%) GMP
9 3 (0.17%) MiFID
10 2 (0.11%) California Consumer Privacy Act
10 2 (0.11%) EMIR
10 2 (0.11%) PMO
10 2 (0.11%) SNOMED CT
10 2 (0.11%) WCAG
11 1 (0.057%) Government Security Classifications
11 1 (0.057%) IFRS
11 1 (0.057%) IFRS 17
11 1 (0.057%) IFRS 9
System Software
1 110 (6.27%) Docker
2 4 (0.23%) Virtual Machines
3 2 (0.11%) Active Directory
3 2 (0.11%) HDFS
4 1 (0.057%) RACF
Systems Management
1 170 (9.69%) Terraform
2 91 (5.19%) Kubernetes
3 34 (1.94%) Grafana
4 13 (0.74%) Ansible
5 9 (0.51%) Prometheus
6 6 (0.34%) Control-M
6 6 (0.34%) Kibana
7 2 (0.11%) Apache Ranger
7 2 (0.11%) Rancher
7 2 (0.11%) Thomson Reuters DACS
8 1 (0.057%) Kubeflow
8 1 (0.057%) logstash
8 1 (0.057%) NetBackup
8 1 (0.057%) Puppet
Vendors
1 324 (18.46%) Databricks
2 224 (12.76%) Microsoft
3 152 (8.66%) Oracle
4 122 (6.95%) Informatica
5 115 (6.55%) Talend
6 67 (3.82%) Google
7 62 (3.53%) Denodo
8 33 (1.88%) SAP
9 32 (1.82%) Cisco
9 32 (1.82%) F5
10 26 (1.48%) Salesforce
11 23 (1.31%) Palantir
12 22 (1.25%) Splunk
13 19 (1.08%) Cloudera
14 17 (0.97%) Foundry
15 15 (0.85%) ServiceNow
16 11 (0.63%) Sage
17 10 (0.57%) IBM
18 9 (0.51%) Bloomberg
18 9 (0.51%) MuleSoft