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 28 September 2026.

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

6 months to
28 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 66 135 97
Rank change year-on-year +69 -38 +28
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 1,659 610 773
As % of all contract jobs in England 3.60% 2.20% 2.37%
As % of the Job Titles category 3.90% 2.41% 2.55%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,102 446 538
10th Percentile £375 £363 £368
25th Percentile £425 £425 £450
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £510 £550
Median % change year-on-year -1.96% -7.27% -
75th Percentile £588 £600 £638
90th Percentile £675 £698 £704
UK median daily rate £500 £500 £525
% change year-on-year - -4.76% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 63 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 42,532 25,317 30,338
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.19% 91.27% 93.01%
Number of daily rates quoted 25,192 16,337 18,640
10th Percentile £325 £275 £300
25th Percentile £425 £401 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £510 £525
Median % change year-on-year +2.94% -2.86% -4.46%
75th Percentile £638 £625 £638
90th Percentile £738 £730 £750
UK median daily rate £525 £500 £525
% change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -0.94%
Number of hourly rates quoted 3,576 1,391 1,390
10th Percentile £14.82 £13.75 £15.00
25th Percentile £20.53 £17.31 £21.25
Median hourly rate £42.50 £25.15 £45.00
Median % change year-on-year +68.99% -44.11% -1.13%
75th Percentile £67.84 £53.13 £67.50
90th Percentile £79.00 £70.00 £75.00
UK median hourly rate £41.72 £25.15 £43.00
% change year-on-year +65.89% -41.51% -3.37%

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 28 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 28 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 28 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 +34 825 £525 - 809
Midlands +79 337 £469 +1.41% 114
West Midlands +65 261 £469 -6.20% 77
North of England +38 205 £520 +9.47% 252
South East +30 125 £459 +2.00% 140
North West +15 110 £525 +17.98% 136
South West +21 107 £525 +5.00% 76
East Midlands +36 76 £388 -16.22% 37
Yorkshire +3 76 £500 - 73
East of England +11 37 £488 -18.75% 57
North East -25 20 £450 +9.09% 43
Data Engineer
UK

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

For the 6 months to 28 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.

1 844 (50.87%) SQL
2 718 (43.28%) Data Pipeline
3 707 (42.62%) Python
4 639 (38.52%) Data Engineering
5 577 (34.78%) Data Modelling
6 572 (34.48%) ETL
7 558 (33.63%) Analytics
8 524 (31.59%) AWS
9 502 (30.26%) Azure
10 430 (25.92%) Data Quality
11 429 (25.86%) Security Cleared
12 405 (24.41%) CI/CD
13 368 (22.18%) SC Cleared
14 334 (20.13%) Databricks
15 286 (17.24%) Agile
16 279 (16.82%) Migration
17 278 (16.76%) Data Warehouse
18 269 (16.21%) DevOps
19 265 (15.97%) AI
20 253 (15.25%) Business Intelligence
21 225 (13.56%) PySpark
22 223 (13.44%) Data Transformation
23 222 (13.38%) Data Governance
24 216 (13.02%) Microsoft
24 216 (13.02%) Validation
25 210 (12.66%) dbt
26 208 (12.54%) Snowflake
27 205 (12.36%) Power Platform
28 201 (12.12%) Data Integration
29 200 (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
1 184 (11.09%) Apache Airflow
2 141 (8.50%) Apache Spark
3 115 (6.93%) Apache
4 44 (2.65%) SAS
5 34 (2.05%) Confluence
6 18 (1.08%) Palantir Foundry
7 14 (0.84%) SharePoint
8 12 (0.72%) 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 (1.21%) 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%) BambooHR
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 EWM
Cloud Services
1 524 (31.59%) AWS
2 502 (30.26%) Azure
3 210 (12.66%) dbt
4 208 (12.54%) Snowflake
5 205 (12.36%) Power Platform
6 195 (11.75%) Azure Data Factory
7 176 (10.61%) GCP
8 149 (8.98%) Amazon S3
9 114 (6.87%) Azure DevOps
9 114 (6.87%) Serverless
10 110 (6.63%) Azure Synapse Analytics
11 100 (6.03%) AWS Lambda
12 96 (5.79%) GitHub
13 57 (3.44%) Azure Databricks
14 46 (2.77%) Amazon EMR
15 44 (2.65%) GitHub Actions
16 35 (2.11%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 28 (1.69%) AWS Step Functions
18 26 (1.57%) Microsoft Purview
19 24 (1.45%) AWS CloudFormation
Communications & Networking
1 24 (1.45%) DNS
2 23 (1.39%) BGP
2 23 (1.39%) DMZ
2 23 (1.39%) Multicast
2 23 (1.39%) 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
1 278 (16.76%) Data Warehouse
2 200 (12.06%) Power BI
3 138 (8.32%) Data Lake
4 118 (7.11%) Metadata
5 103 (6.21%) BigQuery
6 83 (5.00%) Amazon Redshift
7 77 (4.64%) Delta Lake
8 72 (4.34%) Amazon Athena
9 68 (4.10%) SQL Server
10 59 (3.56%) PostgreSQL
11 58 (3.50%) Pentaho
12 57 (3.44%) Big Data
13 55 (3.32%) Tableau
14 49 (2.95%) Relational Database
15 47 (2.83%) NoSQL
15 47 (2.83%) Snowflake Schema
16 40 (2.41%) Oracle Database
17 37 (2.23%) Amazon RDS
18 34 (2.05%) Azure SQL Database
18 34 (2.05%) SQL Server Integration Services
Development Applications
1 150 (9.04%) Git
2 76 (4.58%) GitLab
3 47 (2.83%) JIRA
4 24 (1.45%) Jenkins
5 15 (0.90%) 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
1 275 (16.58%) Social Skills
2 260 (15.67%) Finance
3 185 (11.15%) Analytical Skills
4 150 (9.04%) Public Sector
5 107 (6.45%) Banking
6 27 (1.63%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 25 (1.51%) Retail
8 22 (1.33%) Automotive
9 18 (1.08%) Aerospace
9 18 (1.08%) Front Office
10 17 (1.02%) Investment Banking
10 17 (1.02%) Manufacturing
11 16 (0.96%) Marketing
11 16 (0.96%) Telecoms
12 14 (0.84%) Pharmaceutical
13 13 (0.78%) Documentation Skills
13 13 (0.78%) Military
14 11 (0.66%) Back Office
14 11 (0.66%) Law
15 10 (0.60%) Legal
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 225 (13.56%) PySpark
2 179 (10.79%) Terraform
3 99 (5.97%) Kafka
4 25 (1.51%) Pandas
5 24 (1.45%) JSON
5 24 (1.45%) REST
6 19 (1.15%) Spring
6 19 (1.15%) Spring Boot
7 17 (1.02%) Great Expectations
7 17 (1.02%) XML
8 14 (0.84%) Apache Beam
8 14 (0.84%) pytest
9 12 (0.72%) RESTful
10 11 (0.66%) PyTorch
10 11 (0.66%) React
11 10 (0.60%) .NET
11 10 (0.60%) LangChain
11 10 (0.60%) Microsoft Graph
12 8 (0.48%) Apache NiFi
12 8 (0.48%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 137 (8.26%) Cloud Native
2 58 (3.50%) Legacy Systems
3 50 (3.01%) Data Structures
4 44 (2.65%) Onboarding
5 25 (1.51%) Product Ownership
6 20 (1.21%) AI Agents
6 20 (1.21%) Distributed Systems
7 18 (1.08%) Greenfield Project
7 18 (1.08%) NHS
8 17 (1.02%) Management Information System
9 16 (0.96%) Reference Data
10 15 (0.90%) Reinsurance
11 13 (0.78%) Algorithms
12 11 (0.66%) Virtual Team
13 9 (0.54%) Data Fabric
14 8 (0.48%) Clustering
14 8 (0.48%) Data Protection Act
14 8 (0.48%) Distributed Computing
14 8 (0.48%) Enterprise Software
14 8 (0.48%) Linux Command Line
Operating Systems
1 50 (3.01%) Unix
2 39 (2.35%) 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
1 718 (43.28%) Data Pipeline
2 639 (38.52%) Data Engineering
3 577 (34.78%) Data Modelling
4 572 (34.48%) ETL
5 558 (33.63%) Analytics
6 405 (24.41%) CI/CD
7 286 (17.24%) Agile
8 279 (16.82%) Migration
9 269 (16.21%) DevOps
10 265 (15.97%) AI
11 253 (15.25%) Business Intelligence
12 223 (13.44%) Data Transformation
13 222 (13.38%) Data Governance
14 216 (13.02%) Validation
15 201 (12.12%) Data Integration
16 172 (10.37%) Problem-Solving
17 156 (9.40%) Lakehouse
18 155 (9.34%) Infrastructure as Code
19 154 (9.28%) Decision-Making
20 144 (8.68%) Machine Learning
Programming Languages
1 844 (50.87%) SQL
2 707 (42.62%) Python
3 85 (5.12%) Java
4 65 (3.92%) Scala
5 40 (2.41%) PL/SQL
6 29 (1.75%) Data Analysis Expressions
7 26 (1.57%) PowerShell
7 26 (1.57%) T-SQL
8 23 (1.39%) Shell Script
9 22 (1.33%) Bash
10 18 (1.08%) JavaScript
11 10 (0.60%) R
12 9 (0.54%) Bicep
12 9 (0.54%) Go
13 8 (0.48%) C#
13 8 (0.48%) TypeScript
14 5 (0.30%) Korn
15 3 (0.18%) Kusto Query Language
16 2 (0.12%) COBOL
16 2 (0.12%) Cypher
Qualifications
1 429 (25.86%) Security Cleared
2 368 (22.18%) SC Cleared
3 41 (2.47%) BPSS Clearance
4 39 (2.35%) Degree
5 29 (1.75%) DV Cleared
6 23 (1.39%) Azure Certification
7 20 (1.21%) 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
1 430 (25.92%) Data Quality
2 67 (4.04%) QA
3 31 (1.87%) GDPR
4 14 (0.84%) 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 (5.85%) 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 72 (4.34%) Kubernetes
2 21 (1.27%) Grafana
3 15 (0.90%) Ansible
4 11 (0.66%) 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
1 334 (20.13%) Databricks
2 216 (13.02%) Microsoft
3 142 (8.56%) Oracle
4 87 (5.24%) Informatica
5 80 (4.82%) Google
6 76 (4.58%) Talend
7 39 (2.35%) Denodo
8 29 (1.75%) Salesforce
9 28 (1.69%) Palantir
10 26 (1.57%) Foundry
11 25 (1.51%) SAP
12 23 (1.39%) Cisco
12 23 (1.39%) F5
13 12 (0.72%) 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%) InterSystems