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 12 June 2026.

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

6 months to
12 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 56 100 97
Rank change year-on-year +44 -3 +24
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 1,607 651 835
As % of all contract jobs in England 3.77% 2.66% 2.23%
As % of the Job Titles category 4.08% 2.87% 2.40%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,131 493 637
10th Percentile £375 £363 £263
25th Percentile £425 £425 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £500
Median % change year-on-year - - -9.09%
75th Percentile £588 £600 £600
90th Percentile £658 £710 £688
UK median daily rate £500 £500 £500
% change year-on-year - - -9.09%
Number of hourly rates quoted 55 9 41
10th Percentile £19.34 £18.13 £37.50
25th Percentile £34.92 £51.25 £49.25
Median hourly rate £45.00 £52.50 £67.50
Median % change year-on-year -14.29% -22.22% -10.60%
75th Percentile £71.50 £78.70 £80.00
90th Percentile £75.00 £82.75 -
UK median hourly rate £50.00 £52.50 £67.50
% change year-on-year -4.76% -22.22% -10.60%

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 39,391 22,646 34,789
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.36% 92.37% 92.84%
Number of daily rates quoted 24,290 14,886 22,782
10th Percentile £325 £293 £288
25th Percentile £414 £405 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £520 £514 £525
Median % change year-on-year +1.17% -2.10% -4.55%
75th Percentile £625 £638 £638
90th Percentile £729 £750 £750
UK median daily rate £513 £500 £525
% change year-on-year +2.68% -4.76% -2.78%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,775 990 2,657
10th Percentile £15.86 £14.00 £12.86
25th Percentile £21.25 £18.13 £16.30
Median hourly rate £45.00 £29.04 £38.50
Median % change year-on-year +54.99% -24.58% -13.54%
75th Percentile £67.50 £60.00 £62.50
90th Percentile £80.00 £75.00 £74.37
UK median hourly rate £43.00 £27.64 £37.50
% change year-on-year +55.57% -26.29% -16.67%

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 12 June 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 12 June 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 12 June 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 +34 857 £525 - 102
Midlands +48 312 £469 +4.22% 38
West Midlands +49 293 £468 +1.63% 30
North of England +17 209 £465 -2.11% 55
North West +23 129 £480 +1.05% 28
South East +2 110 £475 +11.76% 63
South West +17 82 £506 +3.69% 27
Yorkshire -18 59 £465 +3.33% 14
North East -21 21 £450 - 13
East of England -16 19 £520 +63.52% 11
East Midlands -17 19 £525 +28.05% 8
Data Engineer
UK

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

For the 6 months to 12 June 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.

1 875 (54.45%) SQL
2 720 (44.80%) Python
3 669 (41.63%) Data Pipeline
4 608 (37.83%) Analytics
4 608 (37.83%) ETL
5 598 (37.21%) Data Engineering
6 552 (34.35%) Data Modelling
7 521 (32.42%) Azure
8 467 (29.06%) AWS
9 465 (28.94%) Security Cleared
10 415 (25.82%) SC Cleared
11 408 (25.39%) Data Quality
12 392 (24.39%) CI/CD
13 347 (21.59%) Business Intelligence
14 343 (21.34%) Databricks
15 280 (17.42%) DevOps
16 279 (17.36%) Power Platform
17 278 (17.30%) Agile
18 270 (16.80%) Data Warehouse
19 265 (16.49%) Power BI
20 228 (14.19%) PySpark
21 222 (13.81%) Azure Data Factory
22 216 (13.44%) Migration
23 214 (13.32%) Microsoft
24 210 (13.07%) Data Governance
25 209 (13.01%) Problem-Solving
26 198 (12.32%) AI
27 180 (11.20%) Terraform
28 172 (10.70%) Data Integration
28 172 (10.70%) Validation

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
1 149 (9.27%) Apache Airflow
2 139 (8.65%) Apache Spark
3 91 (5.66%) Apache
4 73 (4.54%) SAS
5 35 (2.18%) Confluence
6 9 (0.56%) Jupyter
7 8 (0.50%) Palantir Foundry
8 6 (0.37%) SharePoint
9 5 (0.31%) Microsoft Exchange
10 1 (0.062%) Apache Superset
10 1 (0.062%) Appian
10 1 (0.062%) Camunda
10 1 (0.062%) Luigi
10 1 (0.062%) R Markdown
Applications
1 16 (1.00%) Microsoft Excel
2 5 (0.31%) Notepad++
3 4 (0.25%) Spreadsheet
4 2 (0.12%) Chatbot
5 1 (0.062%) Microsoft PowerPoint
Business Applications
1 6 (0.37%) Aladdin
2 4 (0.25%) Dynamics CRM
3 3 (0.19%) Infor LN
3 3 (0.19%) NetSuite
3 3 (0.19%) Sage X3
3 3 (0.19%) SAP BPC
3 3 (0.19%) SimCorp Dimension
4 2 (0.12%) BambooHR
4 2 (0.12%) Maximo
4 2 (0.12%) SAP S/4HANA
5 1 (0.062%) Elite 3E
5 1 (0.062%) FIS Private Capital Suite
5 1 (0.062%) Oracle 11i
5 1 (0.062%) Oracle Assets
5 1 (0.062%) Oracle EBS
5 1 (0.062%) Oracle ERP
5 1 (0.062%) Raiser’s Edge
5 1 (0.062%) SAP Business ByDesign
5 1 (0.062%) SAP CAR
5 1 (0.062%) SAP EWM
Cloud Services
1 521 (32.42%) Azure
2 467 (29.06%) AWS
3 279 (17.36%) Power Platform
4 222 (13.81%) Azure Data Factory
5 166 (10.33%) Snowflake
6 157 (9.77%) Amazon S3
7 152 (9.46%) dbt
8 147 (9.15%) Azure Synapse Analytics
9 141 (8.77%) GCP
10 133 (8.28%) Azure DevOps
11 113 (7.03%) GitHub
12 105 (6.53%) Serverless
13 91 (5.66%) AWS Lambda
14 56 (3.48%) GitHub Actions
15 35 (2.18%) Matillion
16 29 (1.80%) Amazon EMR
16 29 (1.80%) AWS CloudFormation
17 27 (1.68%) Amazon Kinesis
18 24 (1.49%) Amazon CloudWatch
18 24 (1.49%) AWS Step Functions
Communications & Networking
1 34 (2.12%) DNS
1 34 (2.12%) VPN
2 33 (2.05%) BGP
2 33 (2.05%) DMZ
2 33 (2.05%) Multicast
3 10 (0.62%) Structured Cabling
4 5 (0.31%) PuTTY
4 5 (0.31%) WinSCP
5 4 (0.25%) Firewall
5 4 (0.25%) Wi-Fi
5 4 (0.25%) Wireless
6 1 (0.062%) 4G
6 1 (0.062%) 5G
Database & Business Intelligence
1 270 (16.80%) Data Warehouse
2 265 (16.49%) Power BI
3 170 (10.58%) Data Lake
4 117 (7.28%) SQL Server
5 98 (6.10%) Amazon Redshift
6 94 (5.85%) Delta Lake
7 85 (5.29%) BigQuery
8 84 (5.23%) Pentaho
9 83 (5.16%) Metadata
10 72 (4.48%) Azure SQL Database
10 72 (4.48%) Tableau
11 65 (4.04%) Amazon Athena
12 63 (3.92%) Snowflake Schema
13 62 (3.86%) PostgreSQL
14 58 (3.61%) Big Data
15 56 (3.48%) SQL Server Integration Services
16 52 (3.24%) NoSQL
17 40 (2.49%) Relational Database
18 36 (2.24%) Data Vault
19 34 (2.12%) Hadoop
Development Applications
1 159 (9.89%) Git
2 82 (5.10%) GitLab
3 74 (4.60%) JIRA
4 46 (2.86%) Jenkins
5 7 (0.44%) Postman
6 5 (0.31%) Artifactory
6 5 (0.31%) MLflow
7 3 (0.19%) Bitbucket
7 3 (0.19%) Newman
7 3 (0.19%) SonarQube
8 2 (0.12%) Sonatype Nexus
8 2 (0.12%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
8 2 (0.12%) Terragrunt
8 2 (0.12%) Visual Studio
9 1 (0.062%) Atlassian Bamboo
9 1 (0.062%) Claude Code
9 1 (0.062%) ER Studio
9 1 (0.062%) ERwin
9 1 (0.062%) JUnit
9 1 (0.062%) Selenium
General
1 277 (17.24%) Finance
2 252 (15.68%) Social Skills
3 165 (10.27%) Analytical Skills
4 137 (8.53%) Public Sector
5 92 (5.72%) Banking
6 30 (1.87%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 26 (1.62%) Retail
8 22 (1.37%) Marketing
8 22 (1.37%) Telecoms
9 21 (1.31%) Investment Banking
10 20 (1.24%) Documentation Skills
11 17 (1.06%) Manufacturing
11 17 (1.06%) Pharmaceutical
12 13 (0.81%) Aerospace
13 11 (0.68%) Publishing
14 10 (0.62%) Front Office
15 7 (0.44%) Billing
15 7 (0.44%) Military
16 6 (0.37%) Legal
17 5 (0.31%) Automotive
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 228 (14.19%) PySpark
2 133 (8.28%) Kafka
3 47 (2.92%) Pandas
4 33 (2.05%) JSON
5 27 (1.68%) REST
6 25 (1.56%) Great Expectations
7 22 (1.37%) Spring
7 22 (1.37%) Spring Boot
8 21 (1.31%) XML
9 19 (1.18%) YAML
10 15 (0.93%) Apache Beam
11 13 (0.81%) Apache Avro
12 12 (0.75%) scikit-learn
13 11 (0.68%) React
14 10 (0.62%) Matplotlib
14 10 (0.62%) PyTorch
15 9 (0.56%) GeoJSON
15 9 (0.56%) Node.js
15 9 (0.56%) pytest
15 9 (0.56%) RESTful
Miscellaneous
1 129 (8.03%) Cloud Native
2 53 (3.30%) Legacy Systems
3 42 (2.61%) Data Structures
4 28 (1.74%) Greenfield Project
5 27 (1.68%) Product Ownership
6 26 (1.62%) Onboarding
7 23 (1.43%) Distributed Systems
8 22 (1.37%) Reinsurance
9 20 (1.24%) Clustering
10 17 (1.06%) Data Protection Act
11 15 (0.93%) NHS
12 10 (0.62%) Distributed Computing
12 10 (0.62%) Life Science
13 9 (0.56%) Driving Licence
13 9 (0.56%) Public Cloud
13 9 (0.56%) Reference Data
13 9 (0.56%) Self-Motivation
13 9 (0.56%) Virtual Team
14 8 (0.50%) Analytical Mindset
14 8 (0.50%) Replication
Operating Systems
1 57 (3.55%) Unix
2 36 (2.24%) Linux
3 4 (0.25%) Windows
4 2 (0.12%) Ubuntu
4 2 (0.12%) Windows Server
5 1 (0.062%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 669 (41.63%) Data Pipeline
2 608 (37.83%) Analytics
2 608 (37.83%) ETL
3 598 (37.21%) Data Engineering
4 552 (34.35%) Data Modelling
5 392 (24.39%) CI/CD
6 347 (21.59%) Business Intelligence
7 280 (17.42%) DevOps
8 278 (17.30%) Agile
9 216 (13.44%) Migration
10 210 (13.07%) Data Governance
11 209 (13.01%) Problem-Solving
12 198 (12.32%) AI
13 172 (10.70%) Data Integration
13 172 (10.70%) Validation
14 153 (9.52%) Data Science
15 148 (9.21%) Decision-Making
16 144 (8.96%) Data Transformation
17 131 (8.15%) Infrastructure as Code
18 124 (7.72%) Data Architecture
Programming Languages
1 875 (54.45%) SQL
2 720 (44.80%) Python
3 99 (6.16%) Java
4 66 (4.11%) Scala
5 51 (3.17%) PL/SQL
6 35 (2.18%) Data Analysis Expressions
7 34 (2.12%) T-SQL
8 31 (1.93%) C#
9 28 (1.74%) Shell Script
10 27 (1.68%) Bash
11 18 (1.12%) PowerShell
12 17 (1.06%) Bicep
13 13 (0.81%) R
14 9 (0.56%) JavaScript
15 6 (0.37%) Go
15 6 (0.37%) TypeScript
16 2 (0.12%) C
16 2 (0.12%) Korn
16 2 (0.12%) Ruby
16 2 (0.12%) VB
Qualifications
1 465 (28.94%) Security Cleared
2 415 (25.82%) SC Cleared
3 37 (2.30%) BPSS Clearance
3 37 (2.30%) Degree
4 27 (1.68%) Azure Certification
5 14 (0.87%) Computer Science Degree
6 12 (0.75%) DV Cleared
7 11 (0.68%) AWS Certification
8 9 (0.56%) City & Guilds
8 9 (0.56%) DBS Check
9 8 (0.50%) Microsoft Certification
10 5 (0.31%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
10 5 (0.31%) BICSI Certification
11 4 (0.25%) SnowPro
12 3 (0.19%) Master's Degree
13 2 (0.12%) CISM
13 2 (0.12%) CISSP
14 1 (0.062%) CCIE
14 1 (0.062%) CISA
14 1 (0.062%) Cisco Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 408 (25.39%) Data Quality
2 51 (3.17%) QA
3 47 (2.92%) GDPR
4 12 (0.75%) SLA
5 9 (0.56%) Accessibility
5 9 (0.56%) FATCA
6 5 (0.31%) Sarbanes-Oxley
7 4 (0.25%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 4 (0.25%) MiFID
8 3 (0.19%) GMP
9 2 (0.12%) EMIR
9 2 (0.12%) SNOMED CT
9 2 (0.12%) WCAG
10 1 (0.062%) Basel III
10 1 (0.062%) California Consumer Privacy Act
10 1 (0.062%) GRC
10 1 (0.062%) GxP
10 1 (0.062%) HIPAA
10 1 (0.062%) NIST
10 1 (0.062%) PCI DSS
System Software
1 92 (5.72%) Docker
2 6 (0.37%) Virtual Machines
3 2 (0.12%) HDFS
4 1 (0.062%) Active Directory
4 1 (0.062%) RACF
Systems Management
1 180 (11.20%) Terraform
2 76 (4.73%) Kubernetes
3 35 (2.18%) Grafana
4 11 (0.68%) Ansible
5 9 (0.56%) Prometheus
6 5 (0.31%) Kibana
7 3 (0.19%) Rancher
8 2 (0.12%) Apache Ranger
8 2 (0.12%) Control-M
8 2 (0.12%) Thomson Reuters DACS
9 1 (0.062%) Kubeflow
9 1 (0.062%) NetBackup
9 1 (0.062%) Puppet
Vendors
1 343 (21.34%) Databricks
2 214 (13.32%) Microsoft
3 151 (9.40%) Oracle
4 118 (7.34%) Informatica
4 118 (7.34%) Talend
5 63 (3.92%) Denodo
6 58 (3.61%) Google
7 35 (2.18%) Cisco
7 35 (2.18%) F5
8 29 (1.80%) SAP
9 22 (1.37%) ServiceNow
10 21 (1.31%) Splunk
11 18 (1.12%) Cloudera
12 15 (0.93%) Alteryx
12 15 (0.93%) Salesforce
13 12 (0.75%) IBM
13 12 (0.75%) Palantir
14 11 (0.68%) Foundry
15 9 (0.56%) Sage
16 8 (0.50%) InterSystems