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 26 May 2026.

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

6 months to
26 May 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 58 88 98
Rank change year-on-year +30 +10 +15
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 1,554 684 812
As % of all contract jobs in England 3.74% 2.87% 2.22%
As % of the Job Titles category 4.05% 3.11% 2.40%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,098 524 622
10th Percentile £375 £357 £226
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 £661 £721 £688
UK median daily rate £500 £495 £500
% change year-on-year +1.01% -1.00% -9.09%
Number of hourly rates quoted 51 9 43
10th Percentile £19.34 £18.13 £37.50
25th Percentile £35.63 £51.25 £49.25
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 £65.00
% change year-on-year - -19.23% -13.91%

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 38,330 21,971 33,900
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.33% 92.30% 92.77%
Number of daily rates quoted 23,743 14,612 22,462
10th Percentile £320 £290 £284
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 2,666 884 2,500
10th Percentile £15.61 £14.00 £12.86
25th Percentile £21.00 £18.47 £16.30
Median hourly rate £45.00 £28.88 £36.92
Median % change year-on-year +55.84% -21.78% -17.97%
75th Percentile £67.50 £60.25 £61.30
90th Percentile £78.75 £75.00 £73.30
UK median hourly rate £42.50 £27.52 £36.50
% change year-on-year +54.46% -24.62% -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 26 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 26 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 26 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 +25 851 £525 - 114
Midlands +42 300 £469 +1.96% 34
West Midlands +38 282 £469 +1.96% 26
North of England -1 199 £465 -0.80% 73
North West +10 125 £480 +1.05% 24
South East -2 98 £500 +17.65% 65
South West +6 72 £500 - 31
Yorkshire -22 57 £465 +3.33% 25
East of England -30 19 £520 +63.52% 4
East Midlands -24 18 £525 +26.51% 8
North East -17 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 26 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.

1 849 (54.63%) SQL
2 693 (44.59%) Python
3 644 (41.44%) Data Pipeline
4 599 (38.55%) ETL
5 590 (37.97%) Analytics
6 585 (37.64%) Data Engineering
7 538 (34.62%) Data Modelling
8 535 (34.43%) Azure
9 453 (29.15%) Security Cleared
10 427 (27.48%) AWS
11 406 (26.13%) SC Cleared
12 390 (25.10%) Data Quality
13 369 (23.75%) CI/CD
14 359 (23.10%) Databricks
15 330 (21.24%) Business Intelligence
16 282 (18.15%) DevOps
17 274 (17.63%) Agile
18 266 (17.12%) Power Platform
19 255 (16.41%) Data Warehouse
20 252 (16.22%) Power BI
21 234 (15.06%) Azure Data Factory
22 228 (14.67%) PySpark
23 218 (14.03%) Data Governance
24 209 (13.45%) Problem-Solving
25 206 (13.26%) Microsoft
26 193 (12.42%) Migration
27 179 (11.52%) AI
28 168 (10.81%) Data Integration
28 168 (10.81%) Data Lake
28 168 (10.81%) 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
1 148 (9.52%) Apache Airflow
2 145 (9.33%) Apache Spark
3 93 (5.98%) Apache
4 72 (4.63%) SAS
5 28 (1.80%) 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 (0.39%) 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 (34.43%) Azure
2 427 (27.48%) AWS
3 266 (17.12%) Power Platform
4 234 (15.06%) Azure Data Factory
5 157 (10.10%) Azure Synapse Analytics
6 150 (9.65%) Snowflake
7 139 (8.94%) Amazon S3
7 139 (8.94%) GCP
8 135 (8.69%) Azure DevOps
8 135 (8.69%) dbt
9 112 (7.21%) GitHub
10 88 (5.66%) Serverless
11 74 (4.76%) AWS Lambda
12 54 (3.47%) GitHub Actions
13 31 (1.99%) AWS CloudFormation
14 28 (1.80%) Matillion
15 26 (1.67%) Amazon Kinesis
16 24 (1.54%) OpenShift
17 22 (1.42%) Amazon EMR
18 21 (1.35%) Dagster
Communications & Networking
1 33 (2.12%) DNS
1 33 (2.12%) VPN
2 32 (2.06%) BGP
2 32 (2.06%) DMZ
2 32 (2.06%) 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
6 1 (0.064%) Software-Defined Networking
Database & Business Intelligence
1 255 (16.41%) Data Warehouse
2 252 (16.22%) Power BI
3 168 (10.81%) Data Lake
4 119 (7.66%) SQL Server
5 97 (6.24%) Delta Lake
6 84 (5.41%) BigQuery
7 83 (5.34%) Metadata
8 82 (5.28%) Amazon Redshift
9 79 (5.08%) Azure SQL Database
10 78 (5.02%) Pentaho
11 68 (4.38%) Tableau
12 65 (4.18%) Snowflake Schema
13 61 (3.93%) PostgreSQL
14 59 (3.80%) Big Data
15 57 (3.67%) SQL Server Integration Services
16 55 (3.54%) NoSQL
17 54 (3.47%) Amazon Athena
18 39 (2.51%) Relational Database
19 37 (2.38%) Data Vault
20 35 (2.25%) Hadoop
Development Applications
1 156 (10.04%) Git
2 72 (4.63%) GitLab
3 71 (4.57%) JIRA
4 47 (3.02%) Jenkins
5 12 (0.77%) MLflow
6 5 (0.32%) Artifactory
6 5 (0.32%) Postman
7 3 (0.19%) Newman
8 2 (0.13%) Bitbucket
8 2 (0.13%) SonarQube
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%) Jaeger
9 1 (0.064%) JUnit
9 1 (0.064%) Selenium
General
1 263 (16.92%) Finance
2 238 (15.32%) Social Skills
3 164 (10.55%) Analytical Skills
4 124 (7.98%) Public Sector
5 82 (5.28%) Banking
6 27 (1.74%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 22 (1.42%) Investment Banking
7 22 (1.42%) Retail
8 20 (1.29%) Marketing
8 20 (1.29%) Telecoms
9 18 (1.16%) Documentation Skills
10 16 (1.03%) Manufacturing
11 15 (0.97%) Pharmaceutical
12 14 (0.90%) Aerospace
13 11 (0.71%) Front Office
13 11 (0.71%) Publishing
14 7 (0.45%) Military
15 5 (0.32%) Games
15 5 (0.32%) Law
15 5 (0.32%) Local Government
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 228 (14.67%) PySpark
2 139 (8.94%) Kafka
3 48 (3.09%) Pandas
4 30 (1.93%) JSON
5 27 (1.74%) Great Expectations
6 24 (1.54%) REST
7 23 (1.48%) YAML
8 21 (1.35%) Spring
8 21 (1.35%) Spring Boot
9 17 (1.09%) XML
10 16 (1.03%) Apache Beam
11 13 (0.84%) 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
1 117 (7.53%) Cloud Native
2 45 (2.90%) Legacy Systems
3 35 (2.25%) Data Structures
4 29 (1.87%) Greenfield Project
4 29 (1.87%) Product Ownership
5 21 (1.35%) Onboarding
6 19 (1.22%) Clustering
6 19 (1.22%) Distributed Systems
7 18 (1.16%) Reinsurance
8 15 (0.97%) Data Protection Act
9 13 (0.84%) NHS
10 12 (0.77%) Distributed Computing
10 12 (0.77%) Replication
11 11 (0.71%) Self-Motivation
12 10 (0.64%) Life Science
13 9 (0.58%) Driving Licence
13 9 (0.58%) Public Cloud
13 9 (0.58%) Reference Data
14 8 (0.51%) AI Agents
14 8 (0.51%) Analytical Mindset
Operating Systems
1 55 (3.54%) Unix
2 33 (2.12%) Linux
3 4 (0.26%) Windows
4 2 (0.13%) Ubuntu
4 2 (0.13%) VMS
4 2 (0.13%) Windows Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 644 (41.44%) Data Pipeline
2 599 (38.55%) ETL
3 590 (37.97%) Analytics
4 585 (37.64%) Data Engineering
5 538 (34.62%) Data Modelling
6 369 (23.75%) CI/CD
7 330 (21.24%) Business Intelligence
8 282 (18.15%) DevOps
9 274 (17.63%) Agile
10 218 (14.03%) Data Governance
11 209 (13.45%) Problem-Solving
12 193 (12.42%) Migration
13 179 (11.52%) AI
14 168 (10.81%) Data Integration
15 163 (10.49%) Validation
16 155 (9.97%) Data Science
17 137 (8.82%) Decision-Making
18 131 (8.43%) Data Transformation
19 126 (8.11%) Data Architecture
20 125 (8.04%) Infrastructure as Code
Programming Languages
1 849 (54.63%) SQL
2 693 (44.59%) Python
3 101 (6.50%) Java
4 81 (5.21%) Scala
5 47 (3.02%) PL/SQL
6 37 (2.38%) Data Analysis Expressions
7 36 (2.32%) C#
8 33 (2.12%) T-SQL
9 27 (1.74%) Bash
9 27 (1.74%) Shell Script
10 18 (1.16%) Bicep
10 18 (1.16%) PowerShell
11 14 (0.90%) R
12 12 (0.77%) JavaScript
13 9 (0.58%) Go
14 6 (0.39%) TypeScript
15 2 (0.13%) C
15 2 (0.13%) LookML
15 2 (0.13%) Ruby
15 2 (0.13%) VB
Qualifications
1 453 (29.15%) Security Cleared
2 406 (26.13%) SC Cleared
3 41 (2.64%) Degree
4 31 (1.99%) BPSS Clearance
5 28 (1.80%) Azure Certification
6 17 (1.09%) Computer Science Degree
7 12 (0.77%) DV Cleared
8 11 (0.71%) DBS Check
9 9 (0.58%) City & Guilds
10 6 (0.39%) AWS Certification
10 6 (0.39%) Master's Degree
10 6 (0.39%) 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%) CCIE
14 1 (0.064%) CCNP
14 1 (0.064%) Cisco Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 390 (25.10%) Data Quality
2 50 (3.22%) QA
3 49 (3.15%) GDPR
4 11 (0.71%) SLA
5 10 (0.64%) Accessibility
6 9 (0.58%) FATCA
7 5 (0.32%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 4 (0.26%) MiFID
8 4 (0.26%) Sarbanes-Oxley
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%) GRC
11 1 (0.064%) GxP
11 1 (0.064%) NIST
11 1 (0.064%) PCI DSS
System Software
1 92 (5.92%) Docker
2 6 (0.39%) Virtual Machines
3 2 (0.13%) HDFS
4 1 (0.064%) Active Directory
4 1 (0.064%) RACF
Systems Management
1 168 (10.81%) Terraform
2 80 (5.15%) Kubernetes
3 37 (2.38%) Grafana
4 12 (0.77%) Ansible
5 11 (0.71%) 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
1 359 (23.10%) Databricks
2 206 (13.26%) Microsoft
3 138 (8.88%) Oracle
4 112 (7.21%) Talend
5 109 (7.01%) Informatica
6 63 (4.05%) Denodo
7 58 (3.73%) Google
8 34 (2.19%) Cisco
8 34 (2.19%) F5
9 26 (1.67%) SAP
10 22 (1.42%) Splunk
11 19 (1.22%) ServiceNow
12 17 (1.09%) Cloudera
13 15 (0.97%) Alteryx
14 12 (0.77%) Foundry
15 10 (0.64%) IBM
15 10 (0.64%) Palantir
16 8 (0.51%) InterSystems
16 8 (0.51%) MuleSoft
16 8 (0.51%) Salesforce