Data Engineer Contract Job Trends in England

Data Engineer
UK > England

The median Data Engineer daily rate in England is £513, according to job vacancies posted in the 6 months leading up to 21 November 2025.

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

6 months to
21 Nov 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 125 92 124
Rank change year-on-year -33 +32 +10
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 698 800 803
As % of all contract jobs in England 2.29% 2.58% 2.05%
As % of the Job Titles category 2.51% 2.77% 2.19%
Number of daily rates quoted 499 554 611
10th Percentile £363 £400 £400
25th Percentile £422 £463 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -6.82% - -
75th Percentile £600 £650 £641
90th Percentile £700 £734 £700
UK median daily rate £500 £545 £530
% change year-on-year -8.26% +2.83% -3.64%
Number of hourly rates quoted 12 6 14
10th Percentile £25.25 £33.75 £35.19
25th Percentile £31.81 £43.25 £41.29
Median hourly rate £43.50 £72.75 £61.75
Median % change year-on-year -40.21% +17.81% +14.35%
75th Percentile £64.19 £97.50 £67.25
90th Percentile £105.93 - £78.75
UK median hourly rate £43.50 £34.93 £61.75
% change year-on-year +24.55% -43.44% +14.35%

All Contract IT Job Vacancies
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 27,858 28,874 36,736
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 91.22% 92.96% 93.58%
Number of daily rates quoted 17,854 17,655 25,362
10th Percentile £281 £300 £292
25th Percentile £404 £413 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £508 £525 £534
Median % change year-on-year -3.33% -1.69% -2.91%
75th Percentile £625 £638 £650
90th Percentile £725 £750 £750
UK median daily rate £500 £525 £525
% change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 1,695 1,080 1,421
10th Percentile £14.25 £15.22 £15.32
25th Percentile £17.87 £21.25 £19.50
Median hourly rate £25.15 £40.00 £45.88
Median % change year-on-year -37.13% -12.82% +43.38%
75th Percentile £56.60 £66.00 £65.00
90th Percentile £72.00 £75.00 £77.50
UK median hourly rate £25.15 £36.00 £45.00
% change year-on-year -30.14% -20.00% +50.00%

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 21 November 2025.

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 21 November 2025.

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 21 November 2025. 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 -28 430 £536 -6.74% 416
Midlands -19 80 £515 +5.32% 56
North of England -33 78 £450 -7.22% 70
West Midlands -16 67 £519 +4.90% 48
South West +6 36 £550 - 30
South East -38 36 £475 -13.64% 111
North West -14 35 £403 -15.26% 40
Yorkshire -34 35 £500 +3.09% 22
East Midlands -12 13 £460 +29.21% 8
North East -4 8 £425 -12.82% 8
East of England -22 6 £625 +79.86% 19
Data Engineer
UK

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

For the 6 months to 21 November 2025, 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.

1 441 (63.18%) Python
2 433 (62.03%) SQL
3 331 (47.42%) Data Pipeline
4 296 (42.41%) Azure
5 290 (41.55%) ETL
6 279 (39.97%) Data Engineering
7 250 (35.82%) AWS
8 245 (35.10%) Data Modelling
9 225 (32.23%) CI/CD
10 223 (31.95%) Analytics
11 215 (30.80%) Databricks
12 179 (25.64%) Data Quality
13 169 (24.21%) Business Intelligence
14 166 (23.78%) DevOps
15 156 (22.35%) Data Warehouse
16 151 (21.63%) Security Cleared
17 140 (20.06%) Agile
18 133 (19.05%) Power Platform
19 130 (18.62%) Power BI
20 129 (18.48%) Azure Data Factory
21 127 (18.19%) SC Cleared
22 122 (17.48%) Data Science
23 119 (17.05%) Apache Airflow
24 118 (16.91%) Problem-Solving
25 113 (16.19%) PySpark
26 112 (16.05%) Snowflake
27 100 (14.33%) Git
27 100 (14.33%) Machine Learning
28 93 (13.32%) GCP
29 90 (12.89%) 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
1 119 (17.05%) Apache Airflow
2 84 (12.03%) Apache Spark
3 57 (8.17%) Apache
4 23 (3.30%) Confluence
5 17 (2.44%) SAS
6 8 (1.15%) Oracle Application Server
7 6 (0.86%) Apache Pig
7 6 (0.86%) SharePoint
8 5 (0.72%) IIS
9 4 (0.57%) Jupyter
10 3 (0.43%) Oracle SOA Suite
11 2 (0.29%) ArcGIS
11 2 (0.29%) Documentum
11 2 (0.29%) Luigi
12 1 (0.14%) Apache Synapse
12 1 (0.14%) nginx
Applications
1 9 (1.29%) Microsoft Excel
2 4 (0.57%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 2 (0.29%) Chatbot
3 2 (0.29%) Microsoft Office
3 2 (0.29%) Windchill
4 1 (0.14%) MS Visio
4 1 (0.14%) SPSS
4 1 (0.14%) Stata
Business Applications
1 3 (0.43%) Oracle BPM
2 2 (0.29%) Aladdin
2 2 (0.29%) Maximo
2 2 (0.29%) Payment Gateway
2 2 (0.29%) SAP S/4HANA
3 1 (0.14%) Dynamics CRM
3 1 (0.14%) Salesforce CRM
3 1 (0.14%) SAP ERP
Cloud Services
1 296 (42.41%) Azure
2 250 (35.82%) AWS
3 133 (19.05%) Power Platform
4 129 (18.48%) Azure Data Factory
5 112 (16.05%) Snowflake
6 93 (13.32%) GCP
7 88 (12.61%) dbt
8 83 (11.89%) Amazon S3
9 75 (10.74%) Azure Synapse Analytics
10 72 (10.32%) GitHub
11 62 (8.88%) Serverless
12 46 (6.59%) Azure DevOps
13 41 (5.87%) AWS Lambda
14 38 (5.44%) GitHub Actions
15 23 (3.30%) AWS CloudFormation
16 20 (2.87%) SaaS
17 19 (2.72%) Amazon EMR
18 18 (2.58%) Amazon Kinesis
19 11 (1.58%) AWS Step Functions
20 10 (1.43%) Cloud Computing
Communications & Networking
1 5 (0.72%) Firewall
1 5 (0.72%) TCP/IP
2 3 (0.43%) Internet
2 3 (0.43%) SAN
2 3 (0.43%) SSH
3 2 (0.29%) DNS
3 2 (0.29%) SSL
3 2 (0.29%) Structured Cabling
4 1 (0.14%) 802.11
4 1 (0.14%) Ethernet
4 1 (0.14%) Wi-Fi
4 1 (0.14%) Wireless
Database & Business Intelligence
1 156 (22.35%) Data Warehouse
2 130 (18.62%) Power BI
3 83 (11.89%) Data Lake
4 61 (8.74%) Big Data
5 52 (7.45%) SQL Server
6 51 (7.31%) PostgreSQL
7 49 (7.02%) Hadoop
8 48 (6.88%) Amazon Redshift
9 42 (6.02%) Delta Lake
10 38 (5.44%) NoSQL
11 36 (5.16%) BigQuery
12 34 (4.87%) Tableau
13 33 (4.73%) Azure SQL Database
14 31 (4.44%) Relational Database
15 28 (4.01%) Star Schema
16 26 (3.72%) Pentaho
17 25 (3.58%) Metadata
17 25 (3.58%) SQL Server Integration Services
18 21 (3.01%) Amazon QuickSight
19 20 (2.87%) Elasticsearch
Development Applications
1 100 (14.33%) Git
2 54 (7.74%) Jenkins
3 39 (5.59%) JIRA
4 24 (3.44%) GitLab
5 19 (2.72%) MLflow
6 8 (1.15%) DBeaver
7 5 (0.72%) Visual Studio Code
8 4 (0.57%) Bitbucket
8 4 (0.57%) SonarQube
9 3 (0.43%) Poetry
9 3 (0.43%) PyCharm
9 3 (0.43%) Sonatype Nexus
9 3 (0.43%) Visual Studio
10 2 (0.29%) Selenium
11 1 (0.14%) ERwin
11 1 (0.14%) Gradle
11 1 (0.14%) JUnit
11 1 (0.14%) Maven
11 1 (0.14%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
11 1 (0.14%) Team Foundation Server
General
1 147 (21.06%) Social Skills
2 120 (17.19%) Finance
3 91 (13.04%) Analytical Skills
4 51 (7.31%) Public Sector
5 30 (4.30%) Banking
6 21 (3.01%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 13 (1.86%) Pharmaceutical
8 12 (1.72%) Investment Banking
8 12 (1.72%) Retail
9 10 (1.43%) Front Office
10 9 (1.29%) Marketing
11 7 (1.00%) Telecoms
12 6 (0.86%) Documentation Skills
13 4 (0.57%) Legal
13 4 (0.57%) Manufacturing
13 4 (0.57%) Presentation Skills
14 3 (0.43%) Corporate Banking
14 3 (0.43%) Law
14 3 (0.43%) Military
14 3 (0.43%) Retail Banking
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 113 (16.19%) PySpark
2 73 (10.46%) Kafka
3 17 (2.44%) Apache NiFi
3 17 (2.44%) XML
4 15 (2.15%) Pandas
5 14 (2.01%) RESTful
6 12 (1.72%) HTML
6 12 (1.72%) JSON
7 11 (1.58%) Flask
7 11 (1.58%) NumPy
7 11 (1.58%) RabbitMQ
8 10 (1.43%) REST
8 10 (1.43%) YAML
9 8 (1.15%) Jinja
9 8 (1.15%) Keycloak
9 8 (1.15%) Oracle GoldenGate
9 8 (1.15%) pytest
9 8 (1.15%) PyTorch
10 7 (1.00%) GraphQL
10 7 (1.00%) Node.js
Miscellaneous
1 43 (6.16%) Cloud Native
2 25 (3.58%) Legacy Systems
3 22 (3.15%) Data Structures
3 22 (3.15%) Product Ownership
4 18 (2.58%) Algorithms
5 17 (2.44%) Replication
6 13 (1.86%) Data Protection Act
6 13 (1.86%) Onboarding
7 10 (1.43%) Hybrid Cloud
8 9 (1.29%) Distributed Computing
8 9 (1.29%) Greenfield Project
9 8 (1.15%) Life Science
10 7 (1.00%) IoT
10 7 (1.00%) NHS
10 7 (1.00%) Virtual Team
11 6 (0.86%) Clustering
11 6 (0.86%) Reinsurance
12 5 (0.72%) Genomics
12 5 (0.72%) Linux Command Line
13 4 (0.57%) Credit Risk
Operating Systems
1 22 (3.15%) Linux
2 12 (1.72%) Unix
3 3 (0.43%) Windows
4 2 (0.29%) Windows Server
4 2 (0.29%) Windows Server 2003
Processes & Methodologies
1 331 (47.42%) Data Pipeline
2 290 (41.55%) ETL
3 279 (39.97%) Data Engineering
4 245 (35.10%) Data Modelling
5 225 (32.23%) CI/CD
6 223 (31.95%) Analytics
7 169 (24.21%) Business Intelligence
8 166 (23.78%) DevOps
9 140 (20.06%) Agile
10 122 (17.48%) Data Science
11 118 (16.91%) Problem-Solving
12 100 (14.33%) Machine Learning
13 89 (12.75%) Data Governance
14 87 (12.46%) AI
15 85 (12.18%) Infrastructure as Code
16 79 (11.32%) Data Integration
17 73 (10.46%) Data Transformation
18 72 (10.32%) Migration
19 71 (10.17%) Visualisation
20 66 (9.46%) Data Architecture
Programming Languages
1 441 (63.18%) Python
2 433 (62.03%) SQL
3 70 (10.03%) Java
4 65 (9.31%) Scala
5 24 (3.44%) Bash
6 14 (2.01%) PL/SQL
7 13 (1.86%) Data Analysis Expressions
7 13 (1.86%) R
8 12 (1.72%) JavaScript
9 11 (1.58%) Go
10 10 (1.43%) C#
11 9 (1.29%) PowerShell
11 9 (1.29%) Shell Script
12 7 (1.00%) T-SQL
12 7 (1.00%) TypeScript
13 4 (0.57%) C++
13 4 (0.57%) Groovy
13 4 (0.57%) Korn
14 2 (0.29%) ABAP
15 1 (0.14%) VB.NET
Qualifications
1 151 (21.63%) Security Cleared
2 127 (18.19%) SC Cleared
3 35 (5.01%) Degree
4 23 (3.30%) AWS Certification
5 20 (2.87%) Azure Certification
5 20 (2.87%) DV Cleared
6 14 (2.01%) Computer Science Degree
7 9 (1.29%) Master's Degree
8 7 (1.00%) BPSS Clearance
9 3 (0.43%) SnowPro
10 2 (0.29%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
10 2 (0.29%) CTC Cleared
10 2 (0.29%) DBS Check
10 2 (0.29%) MCP
11 1 (0.14%) HND
11 1 (0.14%) PhD
11 1 (0.14%) Tableau Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 179 (25.64%) Data Quality
2 30 (4.30%) GDPR
3 13 (1.86%) QA
4 7 (1.00%) Accessibility
5 4 (0.57%) NIST
5 4 (0.57%) SLA
6 3 (0.43%) HIPAA
6 3 (0.43%) ISO/IEC 20000
7 2 (0.29%) Dodd-Frank
7 2 (0.29%) EMIR
7 2 (0.29%) EU AI Act
7 2 (0.29%) MiFID
8 1 (0.14%) HL7
8 1 (0.14%) ISO 19650
8 1 (0.14%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 1 (0.14%) NCSC
8 1 (0.14%) PMO
8 1 (0.14%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 1 (0.14%) SOC 2
8 1 (0.14%) WCAG
System Software
1 63 (9.03%) Docker
2 9 (1.29%) Virtual Machines
3 5 (0.72%) zsh
4 2 (0.29%) Active Directory
5 1 (0.14%) HDFS
Systems Management
1 90 (12.89%) Terraform
2 64 (9.17%) Kubernetes
3 11 (1.58%) Ansible
4 9 (1.29%) NetBackup
5 8 (1.15%) Grafana
6 5 (0.72%) Puppet
7 4 (0.57%) Argo
7 4 (0.57%) Kubeflow
7 4 (0.57%) Prometheus
8 3 (0.43%) Ambari
8 3 (0.43%) Istio
8 3 (0.43%) Kibana
8 3 (0.43%) ZABBIX
9 2 (0.29%) Control-M
9 2 (0.29%) EMC NetWorker
9 2 (0.29%) Tivoli Storage Manager
10 1 (0.14%) FortiGate
10 1 (0.14%) logstash
Vendors
1 215 (30.80%) Databricks
2 81 (11.60%) Microsoft
3 59 (8.45%) Oracle
4 32 (4.58%) Talend
5 29 (4.15%) Google
6 28 (4.01%) Foundry
6 28 (4.01%) Palantir
7 20 (2.87%) Denodo
7 20 (2.87%) Informatica
8 16 (2.29%) Cloudera
9 13 (1.86%) IBM
10 12 (1.72%) Red Hat
11 11 (1.58%) SAP
12 9 (1.29%) Commvault
13 8 (1.15%) Splunk
13 8 (1.15%) Veritas
14 7 (1.00%) Confluent
14 7 (1.00%) Virgin Media
15 5 (0.72%) EMC
15 5 (0.72%) Salesforce