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 16 February 2026.

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

6 months to
16 Feb 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 87 75 106
Rank change year-on-year -12 +31 +20
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 1,002 792 821
As % of all contract jobs in England 2.95% 3.07% 2.16%
As % of the Job Titles category 3.21% 3.30% 2.32%
Number of daily rates quoted 713 575 643
10th Percentile £359 £357 £363
25th Percentile £413 £431 £431
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £588 £625 £635
90th Percentile £675 £738 £699
UK median daily rate £500 £513 £525
% change year-on-year -2.44% -2.38% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 9 11 25
10th Percentile £29.43 £26.25 £35.25
25th Percentile £33.75 £53.13 £37.50
Median hourly rate £54.50 £75.00 £60.50
Median % change year-on-year -27.33% +23.97% -5.47%
75th Percentile £69.25 £95.63 £67.50
90th Percentile £85.20 £97.50 £77.00
UK median hourly rate £53.50 £65.00 £60.50
% change year-on-year -17.69% +7.44% -5.47%

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 31,201 23,999 35,365
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 91.73% 93.03% 93.05%
Number of daily rates quoted 19,793 14,993 23,712
10th Percentile £300 £296 £275
25th Percentile £409 £409 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £503 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.29% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £625 £638 £643
90th Percentile £725 £750 £748
UK median daily rate £500 £525 £525
% change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,009 697 2,128
10th Percentile £15.00 £16.23 £13.16
25th Percentile £18.87 £21.46 £16.53
Median hourly rate £31.50 £35.00 £35.00
Median % change year-on-year -10.00% - -9.68%
75th Percentile £63.75 £65.00 £60.00
90th Percentile £73.46 £75.00 £72.50
UK median hourly rate £30.00 £33.54 £35.00
% change year-on-year -10.55% -4.17% -5.74%

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 16 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 16 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 16 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 +5 632 £513 -6.82% 163
Midlands -15 122 £508 +6.39% 67
North of England -29 119 £450 - 100
West Midlands -10 108 £513 +3.54% 50
North West -12 71 £425 -2.86% 60
South East -45 52 £513 -2.38% 117
South West -12 45 £538 +7.50% 43
Yorkshire -37 35 £481 -2.53% 34
East Midlands -19 14 £431 +15.00% 17
North East -13 13 £450 -14.29% 8
East of England -38 5 £510 +60.38% 16
Data Engineer
UK

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

For the 6 months to 16 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.

1 571 (56.99%) SQL
2 559 (55.79%) Python
3 434 (43.31%) Azure
4 425 (42.42%) ETL
5 421 (42.02%) Data Engineering
5 421 (42.02%) Data Pipeline
6 376 (37.52%) Analytics
7 354 (35.33%) Data Modelling
8 320 (31.94%) Databricks
9 289 (28.84%) AWS
10 281 (28.04%) Data Quality
11 272 (27.15%) CI/CD
12 256 (25.55%) Security Cleared
13 251 (25.05%) Business Intelligence
14 224 (22.36%) SC Cleared
15 213 (21.26%) Power Platform
16 204 (20.36%) Power BI
17 203 (20.26%) DevOps
18 186 (18.56%) Azure Data Factory
19 184 (18.36%) Data Warehouse
20 178 (17.76%) Agile
21 176 (17.56%) PySpark
22 162 (16.17%) Problem-Solving
23 155 (15.47%) Data Science
24 152 (15.17%) Data Governance
25 137 (13.67%) Microsoft
26 136 (13.57%) Terraform
27 131 (13.07%) Git
28 129 (12.87%) Snowflake
29 121 (12.08%) AI

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
1 106 (10.58%) Apache Spark
2 104 (10.38%) Apache Airflow
3 74 (7.39%) Apache
4 21 (2.10%) SAS
5 15 (1.50%) Confluence
6 14 (1.40%) Palantir Foundry
7 5 (0.50%) Apache Pig
7 5 (0.50%) IIS
7 5 (0.50%) Oracle Application Server
8 4 (0.40%) Jupyter
8 4 (0.40%) Microsoft Exchange
9 2 (0.20%) ArcGIS
9 2 (0.20%) SharePoint
10 1 (0.100%) Apache Synapse
10 1 (0.100%) Appian
10 1 (0.100%) Camunda
10 1 (0.100%) Luigi
10 1 (0.100%) nginx
10 1 (0.100%) Oracle SOA Suite
Applications
1 10 (1.00%) Microsoft Excel
2 2 (0.20%) Chatbot
3 1 (0.100%) Microsoft Office
3 1 (0.100%) Microsoft PowerPoint
Business Applications
1 2 (0.20%) Dynamics CRM
1 2 (0.20%) Maximo
2 1 (0.100%) Actimize
2 1 (0.100%) Aladdin
2 1 (0.100%) Elite 3E
2 1 (0.100%) NEC Housing
2 1 (0.100%) Oracle BPM
2 1 (0.100%) SAP ERP
Cloud Services
1 434 (43.31%) Azure
2 289 (28.84%) AWS
3 213 (21.26%) Power Platform
4 186 (18.56%) Azure Data Factory
5 129 (12.87%) Snowflake
6 119 (11.88%) Azure Synapse Analytics
7 104 (10.38%) GCP
8 98 (9.78%) dbt
9 95 (9.48%) Amazon S3
10 89 (8.88%) Serverless
11 87 (8.68%) GitHub
12 78 (7.78%) Azure DevOps
13 65 (6.49%) AWS Lambda
14 43 (4.29%) GitHub Actions
15 36 (3.59%) AWS CloudFormation
16 22 (2.20%) SaaS
17 21 (2.10%) AWS Step Functions
18 19 (1.90%) Matillion
19 18 (1.80%) Amazon Kinesis
20 15 (1.50%) Amazon EMR
Communications & Networking
1 13 (1.30%) DNS
2 12 (1.20%) BGP
2 12 (1.20%) DMZ
2 12 (1.20%) Multicast
2 12 (1.20%) VPN
3 4 (0.40%) Firewall
4 3 (0.30%) SAN
5 2 (0.20%) Structured Cabling
6 1 (0.100%) Network Security
6 1 (0.100%) Software-Defined Networking
6 1 (0.100%) TCP/IP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 204 (20.36%) Power BI
2 184 (18.36%) Data Warehouse
3 119 (11.88%) Data Lake
4 97 (9.68%) SQL Server
5 65 (6.49%) Azure SQL Database
5 65 (6.49%) Delta Lake
6 61 (6.09%) Amazon Redshift
7 58 (5.79%) BigQuery
8 57 (5.69%) PostgreSQL
9 53 (5.29%) Metadata
10 52 (5.19%) Big Data
11 51 (5.09%) SQL Server Integration Services
12 50 (4.99%) NoSQL
13 41 (4.09%) Tableau
14 36 (3.59%) Snowflake Schema
15 35 (3.49%) Amazon Athena
16 31 (3.09%) Hadoop
16 31 (3.09%) Pentaho
17 30 (2.99%) Relational Database
18 23 (2.30%) Star Schema
Development Applications
1 131 (13.07%) Git
2 52 (5.19%) Jenkins
3 37 (3.69%) JIRA
4 34 (3.39%) GitLab
5 21 (2.10%) MLflow
6 5 (0.50%) DBeaver
7 4 (0.40%) Visual Studio
8 3 (0.30%) Selenium
9 2 (0.20%) Bitbucket
9 2 (0.20%) JUnit
9 2 (0.20%) Visual Studio Code
10 1 (0.100%) Deequ
10 1 (0.100%) Gradle
10 1 (0.100%) Jaeger
10 1 (0.100%) Mockito
10 1 (0.100%) Poetry
10 1 (0.100%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
10 1 (0.100%) Team Foundation Server
10 1 (0.100%) TeamCity
10 1 (0.100%) Terragrunt
General
1 189 (18.86%) Social Skills
2 155 (15.47%) Finance
3 103 (10.28%) Analytical Skills
4 75 (7.49%) Public Sector
5 49 (4.89%) Banking
6 31 (3.09%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 17 (1.70%) Investment Banking
8 14 (1.40%) Retail
9 12 (1.20%) Front Office
10 11 (1.10%) Marketing
10 11 (1.10%) Pharmaceutical
11 10 (1.00%) Documentation Skills
12 9 (0.90%) Telecoms
13 7 (0.70%) Manufacturing
13 7 (0.70%) Publishing
14 6 (0.60%) Military
15 5 (0.50%) Law
16 4 (0.40%) Back Office
16 4 (0.40%) Corporate Banking
17 3 (0.30%) Aerospace
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 176 (17.56%) PySpark
2 109 (10.88%) Kafka
3 36 (3.59%) Pandas
4 26 (2.59%) JSON
5 23 (2.30%) YAML
6 22 (2.20%) REST
7 18 (1.80%) XML
8 15 (1.50%) PyTorch
9 14 (1.40%) Apache NiFi
9 14 (1.40%) NumPy
10 12 (1.20%) Great Expectations
10 12 (1.20%) Keycloak
10 12 (1.20%) Node.js
10 12 (1.20%) OpenTelemetry
10 12 (1.20%) RESTful
11 11 (1.10%) scikit-learn
12 10 (1.00%) TensorFlow
13 9 (0.90%) HTML
13 9 (0.90%) Matplotlib
13 9 (0.90%) pytest
Miscellaneous
1 75 (7.49%) Cloud Native
2 28 (2.79%) Data Structures
3 24 (2.40%) Product Ownership
4 21 (2.10%) Legacy Systems
5 20 (2.00%) Replication
6 18 (1.80%) Onboarding
7 16 (1.60%) Algorithms
7 16 (1.60%) Clustering
7 16 (1.60%) Hybrid Cloud
8 14 (1.40%) Greenfield Project
9 13 (1.30%) Data Protection Act
9 13 (1.30%) Reinsurance
10 12 (1.20%) Distributed Systems
11 10 (1.00%) Public Cloud
12 9 (0.90%) Distributed Computing
13 7 (0.70%) Life Science
13 7 (0.70%) Management Information System
14 5 (0.50%) Linux Command Line
14 5 (0.50%) NHS
14 5 (0.50%) Wiki
Operating Systems
1 19 (1.90%) Linux
2 14 (1.40%) Unix
3 1 (0.100%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 425 (42.42%) ETL
2 421 (42.02%) Data Engineering
2 421 (42.02%) Data Pipeline
3 376 (37.52%) Analytics
4 354 (35.33%) Data Modelling
5 272 (27.15%) CI/CD
6 251 (25.05%) Business Intelligence
7 203 (20.26%) DevOps
8 178 (17.76%) Agile
9 162 (16.17%) Problem-Solving
10 155 (15.47%) Data Science
11 152 (15.17%) Data Governance
12 121 (12.08%) AI
12 121 (12.08%) Data Architecture
13 117 (11.68%) Infrastructure as Code
14 116 (11.58%) Machine Learning
15 112 (11.18%) Data Integration
16 103 (10.28%) Data Transformation
17 102 (10.18%) Migration
18 97 (9.68%) Performance Tuning
Programming Languages
1 571 (56.99%) SQL
2 559 (55.79%) Python
3 86 (8.58%) Scala
4 69 (6.89%) Java
5 30 (2.99%) Data Analysis Expressions
6 28 (2.79%) C#
7 25 (2.50%) T-SQL
8 22 (2.20%) PL/SQL
9 18 (1.80%) Bicep
10 17 (1.70%) Bash
11 16 (1.60%) R
12 14 (1.40%) Go
12 14 (1.40%) PowerShell
13 13 (1.30%) Shell Script
14 12 (1.20%) JavaScript
15 4 (0.40%) C++
15 4 (0.40%) Korn
15 4 (0.40%) TypeScript
16 2 (0.20%) C
16 2 (0.20%) VB
Qualifications
1 256 (25.55%) Security Cleared
2 224 (22.36%) SC Cleared
3 34 (3.39%) Azure Certification
4 30 (2.99%) Degree
5 20 (2.00%) AWS Certification
6 18 (1.80%) BPSS Clearance
7 16 (1.60%) Computer Science Degree
7 16 (1.60%) DV Cleared
8 5 (0.50%) Master's Degree
8 5 (0.50%) Microsoft Certification
9 4 (0.40%) CTC Cleared
9 4 (0.40%) DBS Check
10 2 (0.20%) Microsoft Certified Professional
10 2 (0.20%) SnowPro
11 1 (0.100%) CCIE
11 1 (0.100%) CCNP
11 1 (0.100%) Cisco Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 281 (28.04%) Data Quality
2 46 (4.59%) GDPR
3 21 (2.10%) QA
4 9 (0.90%) Accessibility
5 4 (0.40%) HIPAA
5 4 (0.40%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 3 (0.30%) FATCA
6 3 (0.30%) MiFID
7 2 (0.20%) Dodd-Frank
7 2 (0.20%) EMIR
7 2 (0.20%) EU AI Act
7 2 (0.20%) NIST
8 1 (0.100%) Basel III
8 1 (0.100%) GRC
8 1 (0.100%) ISO 13485
8 1 (0.100%) NCSC
8 1 (0.100%) PMO
8 1 (0.100%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 1 (0.100%) SOC 2
8 1 (0.100%) WCAG
System Software
1 69 (6.89%) Docker
2 11 (1.10%) Virtual Machines
3 5 (0.50%) zsh
4 1 (0.100%) Active Directory
4 1 (0.100%) HDFS
Systems Management
1 136 (13.57%) Terraform
2 77 (7.68%) Kubernetes
3 12 (1.20%) Grafana
3 12 (1.20%) Prometheus
4 6 (0.60%) Ansible
5 5 (0.50%) NetBackup
6 4 (0.40%) Kibana
7 3 (0.30%) Control-M
7 3 (0.30%) Kubeflow
7 3 (0.30%) Puppet
8 2 (0.20%) EMC NetWorker
8 2 (0.20%) logstash
8 2 (0.20%) Tivoli Storage Manager
9 1 (0.100%) Ambari
9 1 (0.100%) Argo
9 1 (0.100%) Rancher
9 1 (0.100%) ZABBIX
Vendors
1 320 (31.94%) Databricks
2 137 (13.67%) Microsoft
3 70 (6.99%) Oracle
4 45 (4.49%) Talend
5 38 (3.79%) Google
5 38 (3.79%) Informatica
6 23 (2.30%) Denodo
7 17 (1.70%) Foundry
7 17 (1.70%) Palantir
7 17 (1.70%) Splunk
8 16 (1.60%) Cisco
9 15 (1.50%) IBM
10 13 (1.30%) F5
11 12 (1.20%) ServiceNow
12 11 (1.10%) Alteryx
12 11 (1.10%) SAP
13 8 (0.80%) Cloudera
14 7 (0.70%) Confluent
14 7 (0.70%) Virgin Media
15 5 (0.50%) Commvault