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 May 2026.

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

6 months to
28 May 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 59 92 100
Rank change year-on-year +33 +8 +18
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 1,560 669 815
As % of all contract jobs in England 3.74% 2.81% 2.23%
As % of the Job Titles category 4.05% 3.04% 2.40%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,102 513 627
10th Percentile £375 £356 £233
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 £662 £713 £688
UK median daily rate £500 £491 £500
% change year-on-year +1.94% -1.90% -9.09%
Number of hourly rates quoted 51 9 42
10th Percentile £19.34 £18.13 £37.50
25th Percentile £35.63 £51.25 £49.28
Median hourly rate £52.50 £52.50 £67.50
Median % change year-on-year - -22.22% -10.60%
75th Percentile £71.50 £78.70 £80.00
90th Percentile £75.00 £82.75 -
UK median hourly rate £52.50 £52.50 £66.25
% change year-on-year - -20.75% -12.25%

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 38,559 21,998 33,968
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.34% 92.31% 92.74%
Number of daily rates quoted 23,854 14,595 22,515
10th Percentile £322 £293 £285
25th Percentile £413 £406 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £515 £520 £525
Median % change year-on-year -0.96% -0.95% -4.55%
75th Percentile £625 £638 £638
90th Percentile £725 £750 £750
UK median daily rate £513 £508 £525
% change year-on-year +0.99% -3.33% -2.78%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,706 898 2,510
10th Percentile £15.50 £14.00 £12.86
25th Percentile £21.25 £18.20 £16.30
Median hourly rate £45.00 £29.07 £37.18
Median % change year-on-year +54.80% -21.81% -17.38%
75th Percentile £67.50 £61.81 £61.30
90th Percentile £78.75 £75.00 £73.75
UK median hourly rate £42.50 £27.97 £36.50
% change year-on-year +51.98% -23.38% -18.89%

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 May 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 May 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 May 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 +31 854 £525 - 100
Midlands +43 301 £469 +3.08% 36
West Midlands +44 283 £469 +1.96% 23
North of England -1 200 £465 -0.80% 73
North West +10 125 £480 +1.05% 27
South East +8 99 £500 +17.65% 70
South West +10 72 £500 +1.27% 29
Yorkshire -24 58 £465 +3.33% 22
East of England -23 19 £520 +63.52% 3
East Midlands -21 18 £525 +26.51% 13
North East -23 17 £450 -5.26% 25
Data Engineer
UK

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

For the 6 months to 28 May 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.

1 855 (54.81%) SQL
2 691 (44.29%) Python
3 652 (41.79%) Data Pipeline
4 605 (38.78%) ETL
5 593 (38.01%) Analytics
6 587 (37.63%) Data Engineering
7 543 (34.81%) Data Modelling
8 535 (34.29%) Azure
9 454 (29.10%) Security Cleared
10 429 (27.50%) AWS
11 407 (26.09%) SC Cleared
12 392 (25.13%) Data Quality
13 371 (23.78%) CI/CD
14 355 (22.76%) Databricks
15 335 (21.47%) Business Intelligence
16 279 (17.88%) DevOps
17 272 (17.44%) Power Platform
18 271 (17.37%) Agile
19 259 (16.60%) Data Warehouse
20 258 (16.54%) Power BI
21 235 (15.06%) Azure Data Factory
22 224 (14.36%) PySpark
23 215 (13.78%) Data Governance
24 212 (13.59%) Problem-Solving
25 208 (13.33%) Microsoft
26 193 (12.37%) Migration
27 178 (11.41%) AI
28 170 (10.90%) Data Lake
29 169 (10.83%) Data Integration
30 165 (10.58%) Terraform

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
1 150 (9.62%) Apache Airflow
2 143 (9.17%) Apache Spark
3 93 (5.96%) Apache
4 72 (4.62%) SAS
5 28 (1.79%) Confluence
6 9 (0.58%) Palantir Foundry
7 8 (0.51%) Jupyter
8 4 (0.26%) Microsoft Exchange
9 2 (0.13%) SharePoint
10 1 (0.064%) Apache Superset
10 1 (0.064%) Appian
10 1 (0.064%) Camunda
10 1 (0.064%) Luigi
10 1 (0.064%) R Markdown
Applications
1 17 (1.09%) Microsoft Excel
2 5 (0.32%) Notepad++
3 4 (0.26%) Spreadsheet
4 2 (0.13%) Chatbot
5 1 (0.064%) Microsoft PowerPoint
Business Applications
1 6 (0.38%) Aladdin
2 3 (0.19%) SimCorp Dimension
3 2 (0.13%) BambooHR
3 2 (0.13%) Dynamics CRM
3 2 (0.13%) Infor LN
3 2 (0.13%) SAP BPC
3 2 (0.13%) SAP S/4HANA
4 1 (0.064%) Elite 3E
4 1 (0.064%) iTrent
4 1 (0.064%) NEC Housing
4 1 (0.064%) Oracle 11i
4 1 (0.064%) Oracle Assets
4 1 (0.064%) Oracle EBS
4 1 (0.064%) Oracle ERP
4 1 (0.064%) Raiser’s Edge
4 1 (0.064%) SAP Business ByDesign
Cloud Services
1 535 (34.29%) Azure
2 429 (27.50%) AWS
3 272 (17.44%) Power Platform
4 235 (15.06%) Azure Data Factory
5 156 (10.00%) Azure Synapse Analytics
6 155 (9.94%) Snowflake
7 140 (8.97%) dbt
8 139 (8.91%) Amazon S3
8 139 (8.91%) GCP
9 136 (8.72%) Azure DevOps
10 112 (7.18%) GitHub
11 89 (5.71%) Serverless
12 75 (4.81%) AWS Lambda
13 54 (3.46%) GitHub Actions
14 32 (2.05%) Matillion
15 29 (1.86%) AWS CloudFormation
16 26 (1.67%) Amazon Kinesis
17 24 (1.54%) OpenShift
18 23 (1.47%) Amazon EMR
19 21 (1.35%) Dagster
Communications & Networking
1 33 (2.12%) DNS
1 33 (2.12%) VPN
2 32 (2.05%) BGP
2 32 (2.05%) DMZ
2 32 (2.05%) Multicast
3 10 (0.64%) Structured Cabling
4 5 (0.32%) PuTTY
4 5 (0.32%) WinSCP
5 4 (0.26%) Firewall
5 4 (0.26%) Wi-Fi
5 4 (0.26%) Wireless
6 1 (0.064%) 4G
6 1 (0.064%) 5G
6 1 (0.064%) Network Security
Database & Business Intelligence
1 259 (16.60%) Data Warehouse
2 258 (16.54%) Power BI
3 170 (10.90%) Data Lake
4 120 (7.69%) SQL Server
5 97 (6.22%) Delta Lake
6 84 (5.38%) BigQuery
7 82 (5.26%) Metadata
8 81 (5.19%) Amazon Redshift
9 79 (5.06%) Azure SQL Database
10 78 (5.00%) Pentaho
11 73 (4.68%) Tableau
12 65 (4.17%) Snowflake Schema
13 61 (3.91%) PostgreSQL
14 59 (3.78%) SQL Server Integration Services
15 58 (3.72%) Big Data
16 57 (3.65%) NoSQL
17 53 (3.40%) Amazon Athena
18 39 (2.50%) Relational Database
19 38 (2.44%) Data Vault
20 35 (2.24%) Hadoop
Development Applications
1 155 (9.94%) Git
2 73 (4.68%) GitLab
3 71 (4.55%) JIRA
4 46 (2.95%) Jenkins
5 11 (0.71%) MLflow
6 5 (0.32%) Artifactory
6 5 (0.32%) Postman
7 3 (0.19%) Newman
7 3 (0.19%) SonarQube
8 2 (0.13%) Bitbucket
8 2 (0.13%) Sonatype Nexus
8 2 (0.13%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
8 2 (0.13%) Terragrunt
8 2 (0.13%) Visual Studio
9 1 (0.064%) ER Studio
9 1 (0.064%) ERwin
9 1 (0.064%) JUnit
9 1 (0.064%) Selenium
General
1 269 (17.24%) Finance
2 239 (15.32%) Social Skills
3 166 (10.64%) Analytical Skills
4 125 (8.01%) Public Sector
5 82 (5.26%) Banking
6 28 (1.79%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 23 (1.47%) Retail
8 21 (1.35%) Investment Banking
8 21 (1.35%) Marketing
9 20 (1.28%) Telecoms
10 18 (1.15%) Documentation Skills
11 16 (1.03%) Manufacturing
12 15 (0.96%) Pharmaceutical
13 14 (0.90%) Aerospace
14 11 (0.71%) Front Office
14 11 (0.71%) Publishing
15 7 (0.45%) Military
16 5 (0.32%) Back Office
16 5 (0.32%) Law
16 5 (0.32%) Local Government
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 224 (14.36%) PySpark
2 138 (8.85%) Kafka
3 48 (3.08%) Pandas
4 29 (1.86%) JSON
5 26 (1.67%) Great Expectations
6 24 (1.54%) REST
7 22 (1.41%) Spring
7 22 (1.41%) Spring Boot
8 21 (1.35%) YAML
9 17 (1.09%) XML
10 16 (1.03%) Apache Beam
11 13 (0.83%) Apache Avro
12 12 (0.77%) PyTorch
12 12 (0.77%) React
12 12 (0.77%) scikit-learn
13 11 (0.71%) Matplotlib
14 10 (0.64%) Node.js
15 9 (0.58%) GeoJSON
15 9 (0.58%) Polars
15 9 (0.58%) pytest
Miscellaneous
1 119 (7.63%) Cloud Native
2 45 (2.88%) Legacy Systems
3 36 (2.31%) Data Structures
4 30 (1.92%) Greenfield Project
5 28 (1.79%) Product Ownership
6 22 (1.41%) Onboarding
7 20 (1.28%) Reinsurance
8 19 (1.22%) Clustering
8 19 (1.22%) Distributed Systems
9 15 (0.96%) Data Protection Act
10 13 (0.83%) NHS
11 12 (0.77%) Distributed Computing
11 12 (0.77%) Replication
12 11 (0.71%) Self-Motivation
13 10 (0.64%) Life Science
13 10 (0.64%) Reference Data
14 9 (0.58%) Driving Licence
14 9 (0.58%) Public Cloud
15 8 (0.51%) AI Agents
15 8 (0.51%) Analytical Mindset
Operating Systems
1 56 (3.59%) Unix
2 34 (2.18%) Linux
3 4 (0.26%) Windows
4 2 (0.13%) Ubuntu
4 2 (0.13%) VMS
4 2 (0.13%) Windows Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 652 (41.79%) Data Pipeline
2 605 (38.78%) ETL
3 593 (38.01%) Analytics
4 587 (37.63%) Data Engineering
5 543 (34.81%) Data Modelling
6 371 (23.78%) CI/CD
7 335 (21.47%) Business Intelligence
8 279 (17.88%) DevOps
9 271 (17.37%) Agile
10 215 (13.78%) Data Governance
11 212 (13.59%) Problem-Solving
12 193 (12.37%) Migration
13 178 (11.41%) AI
14 169 (10.83%) Data Integration
15 164 (10.51%) Validation
16 152 (9.74%) Data Science
17 137 (8.78%) Decision-Making
18 129 (8.27%) Data Transformation
19 125 (8.01%) Data Architecture
20 122 (7.82%) Infrastructure as Code
Programming Languages
1 855 (54.81%) SQL
2 691 (44.29%) Python
3 102 (6.54%) Java
4 78 (5.00%) Scala
5 48 (3.08%) PL/SQL
6 37 (2.37%) Data Analysis Expressions
7 35 (2.24%) C#
8 34 (2.18%) T-SQL
9 28 (1.79%) Shell Script
10 27 (1.73%) Bash
11 18 (1.15%) Bicep
11 18 (1.15%) PowerShell
12 12 (0.77%) R
13 10 (0.64%) JavaScript
14 8 (0.51%) Go
15 6 (0.38%) TypeScript
16 2 (0.13%) C
16 2 (0.13%) HiveQL
16 2 (0.13%) LookML
16 2 (0.13%) VB
Qualifications
1 454 (29.10%) Security Cleared
2 407 (26.09%) SC Cleared
3 41 (2.63%) Degree
4 31 (1.99%) BPSS Clearance
5 28 (1.79%) Azure Certification
6 17 (1.09%) Computer Science Degree
7 13 (0.83%) DV Cleared
8 11 (0.71%) DBS Check
9 9 (0.58%) City & Guilds
10 6 (0.38%) AWS Certification
10 6 (0.38%) Master's Degree
10 6 (0.38%) Microsoft Certification
11 5 (0.32%) BICSI Certification
12 3 (0.19%) SnowPro
13 2 (0.13%) CISM
13 2 (0.13%) CISSP
13 2 (0.13%) CTC Cleared
14 1 (0.064%) CISA
14 1 (0.064%) Cisco Certification
14 1 (0.064%) Tableau Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 392 (25.13%) Data Quality
2 50 (3.21%) QA
3 48 (3.08%) GDPR
4 11 (0.71%) SLA
5 10 (0.64%) Accessibility
6 9 (0.58%) FATCA
7 5 (0.32%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 4 (0.26%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 4 (0.26%) MiFID
9 3 (0.19%) GMP
10 2 (0.13%) EMIR
10 2 (0.13%) HIPAA
10 2 (0.13%) SNOMED CT
10 2 (0.13%) WCAG
11 1 (0.064%) Basel III
11 1 (0.064%) California Consumer Privacy Act
11 1 (0.064%) Government Security Classifications
11 1 (0.064%) IFRS 17
11 1 (0.064%) ISO 13485
11 1 (0.064%) PCI DSS
System Software
1 94 (6.03%) Docker
2 6 (0.38%) Virtual Machines
3 2 (0.13%) HDFS
4 1 (0.064%) Active Directory
4 1 (0.064%) RACF
Systems Management
1 165 (10.58%) Terraform
2 79 (5.06%) Kubernetes
3 36 (2.31%) Grafana
4 12 (0.77%) Ansible
5 10 (0.64%) Prometheus
6 7 (0.45%) Kibana
7 3 (0.19%) Rancher
8 2 (0.13%) Apache Ranger
8 2 (0.13%) Control-M
8 2 (0.13%) logstash
8 2 (0.13%) Thomson Reuters DACS
9 1 (0.064%) Kubeflow
9 1 (0.064%) NetBackup
9 1 (0.064%) Puppet
Vendors
1 355 (22.76%) Databricks
2 208 (13.33%) Microsoft
3 138 (8.85%) Oracle
4 112 (7.18%) Talend
5 111 (7.12%) Informatica
6 63 (4.04%) Denodo
7 57 (3.65%) Google
8 34 (2.18%) Cisco
8 34 (2.18%) F5
9 28 (1.79%) SAP
10 21 (1.35%) Splunk
11 19 (1.22%) ServiceNow
12 17 (1.09%) Cloudera
13 15 (0.96%) Alteryx
14 12 (0.77%) Foundry
15 10 (0.64%) IBM
15 10 (0.64%) Palantir
16 8 (0.51%) Dynatrace
16 8 (0.51%) InterSystems
16 8 (0.51%) Salesforce