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 11 September 2026.

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

 6 months to
11 Sep 2026		 Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 64 125 102
Rank change year-on-year +61 -23 +16
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 1,690 630 762
As % of all contract jobs in England 3.64% 2.26% 2.31%
As % of the Job Titles category 3.95% 2.48% 2.48%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,124 456 540
10th Percentile £381 £375 £363
25th Percentile £425 £425 £450
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £538
Median % change year-on-year - -6.98% -2.27%
75th Percentile £588 £586 £638
90th Percentile £675 £694 £700
UK median daily rate £500 £500 £525
% change year-on-year - -4.76% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 75 14 10
10th Percentile £19.34 £25.42 £49.25
25th Percentile £30.96 £37.00 £65.00
Median hourly rate £41.56 £52.50 £80.00
Median % change year-on-year -20.85% -34.38% +25.00%
75th Percentile £68.38 £74.65 -
90th Percentile £71.50 £101.00 £97.50
UK median hourly rate £41.56 £52.50 £80.00
% change year-on-year -20.85% -34.38% +25.00%

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 42,799 25,409 30,683
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.25% 91.33% 93.07%
Number of daily rates quoted 25,597 16,371 19,349
10th Percentile £325 £281 £305
25th Percentile £425 £400 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £506 £525
Median % change year-on-year +3.75% -3.62% -4.55%
75th Percentile £638 £625 £638
90th Percentile £738 £738 £750
UK median daily rate £525 £500 £525
% change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -0.94%
Number of hourly rates quoted 3,391 1,355 1,537
10th Percentile £14.96 £13.67 £14.56
25th Percentile £20.88 £17.30 £21.25
Median hourly rate £42.50 £25.15 £47.50
Median % change year-on-year +68.99% -47.05% +8.20%
75th Percentile £68.00 £54.38 £67.50
90th Percentile £80.00 £72.50 £75.00
UK median hourly rate £42.00 £25.15 £43.00
% change year-on-year +67.00% -41.51% +1.18%

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 11 September 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 11 September 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 11 September 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 +33 849 £525 - 297
Midlands +74 348 £469 +2.79% 68
West Midlands +70 283 £469 -0.21% 37
North of England +20 208 £500 +5.26% 96
South East +32 131 £459 -4.62% 124
North West +23 116 £525 +10.53% 52
South West +6 96 £525 +5.00% 57
Yorkshire +1 75 £475 -5.00% 25
East Midlands +32 65 £450 +1.98% 31
East of England +1 38 £450 -40.00% 27
North East -34 18 £510 +20.71% 19
Data Engineer
UK

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

For the 6 months to 11 September 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.

1 863 (51.07%) SQL
2 736 (43.55%) Data Pipeline
3 716 (42.37%) Python
4 653 (38.64%) Data Engineering
5 588 (34.79%) Analytics
6 581 (34.38%) Data Modelling
7 580 (34.32%) ETL
8 529 (31.30%) AWS
8 529 (31.30%) Azure
9 445 (26.33%) Data Quality
10 444 (26.27%) Security Cleared
11 425 (25.15%) CI/CD
12 387 (22.90%) SC Cleared
13 332 (19.64%) Databricks
14 300 (17.75%) Agile
15 286 (16.92%) Data Warehouse
15 286 (16.92%) DevOps
16 282 (16.69%) Migration
17 272 (16.09%) Business Intelligence
18 247 (14.62%) AI
19 238 (14.08%) Data Governance
19 238 (14.08%) PySpark
20 222 (13.14%) Microsoft
21 218 (12.90%) Data Transformation
21 218 (12.90%) Power Platform
22 213 (12.60%) Power BI
23 208 (12.31%) Validation
24 207 (12.25%) Snowflake
25 206 (12.19%) Data Integration
26 202 (11.95%) Azure Data Factory

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
1 190 (11.24%) Apache Airflow
2 140 (8.28%) Apache Spark
3 115 (6.80%) Apache
4 49 (2.90%) SAS
5 35 (2.07%) Confluence
6 16 (0.95%) Palantir Foundry
7 14 (0.83%) SharePoint
8 11 (0.65%) Jupyter
9 3 (0.18%) Apache Superset
10 2 (0.12%) Microsoft Exchange
11 1 (0.059%) ArcGIS
11 1 (0.059%) Liferay
11 1 (0.059%) Luigi
11 1 (0.059%) nginx
11 1 (0.059%) Oracle Workflow
11 1 (0.059%) PowerExchange
11 1 (0.059%) R Markdown
Applications
1 24 (1.42%) Microsoft Excel
2 7 (0.41%) Spreadsheet
3 5 (0.30%) Notepad++
4 3 (0.18%) Chatbot
5 1 (0.059%) Microsoft PowerPoint
Business Applications
1 10 (0.59%) Aladdin
2 6 (0.36%) Dynamics CRM
3 5 (0.30%) Infor LN
3 5 (0.30%) NetSuite
3 5 (0.30%) Sage X3
3 5 (0.30%) SAP S/4HANA
4 3 (0.18%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
5 2 (0.12%) Maximo
5 2 (0.12%) SAP BPC
5 2 (0.12%) SAP Oil and Gas
5 2 (0.12%) SimCorp Dimension
6 1 (0.059%) BambooHR
6 1 (0.059%) FIS Private Capital Suite
6 1 (0.059%) MIS ActiveH
6 1 (0.059%) Oracle Assets
6 1 (0.059%) Oracle EBS
6 1 (0.059%) Raiser’s Edge
6 1 (0.059%) SAP CAR
6 1 (0.059%) SAP EWM
Cloud Services
1 529 (31.30%) AWS
1 529 (31.30%) Azure
2 218 (12.90%) Power Platform
3 207 (12.25%) Snowflake
4 202 (11.95%) Azure Data Factory
5 201 (11.89%) dbt
6 165 (9.76%) GCP
7 152 (8.99%) Amazon S3
8 125 (7.40%) Azure DevOps
9 123 (7.28%) Azure Synapse Analytics
10 112 (6.63%) Serverless
11 111 (6.57%) GitHub
12 98 (5.80%) AWS Lambda
13 58 (3.43%) Azure Databricks
14 48 (2.84%) GitHub Actions
15 42 (2.49%) Amazon EMR
16 34 (2.01%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 27 (1.60%) AWS Step Functions
18 26 (1.54%) Microsoft Purview
19 24 (1.42%) Fivetran
Communications & Networking
1 27 (1.60%) BGP
1 27 (1.60%) DMZ
1 27 (1.60%) DNS
1 27 (1.60%) Multicast
1 27 (1.60%) VPN
2 11 (0.65%) Structured Cabling
3 7 (0.41%) Firewall
4 5 (0.30%) PuTTY
4 5 (0.30%) WinSCP
5 4 (0.24%) Wi-Fi
5 4 (0.24%) Wireless
6 3 (0.18%) Intrusion Detection
Database & Business Intelligence
1 286 (16.92%) Data Warehouse
2 213 (12.60%) Power BI
3 145 (8.58%) Data Lake
4 121 (7.16%) Metadata
5 102 (6.04%) BigQuery
6 88 (5.21%) Amazon Redshift
7 78 (4.62%) Delta Lake
8 75 (4.44%) SQL Server
9 71 (4.20%) Amazon Athena
10 65 (3.85%) Pentaho
11 61 (3.61%) Tableau
12 59 (3.49%) Big Data
13 58 (3.43%) PostgreSQL
14 51 (3.02%) Relational Database
15 48 (2.84%) Snowflake Schema
16 46 (2.72%) NoSQL
17 43 (2.54%) Azure SQL Database
18 41 (2.43%) Oracle Database
19 37 (2.19%) Amazon RDS
20 33 (1.95%) SQL Server Integration Services
Development Applications
1 143 (8.46%) Git
2 78 (4.62%) GitLab
3 55 (3.25%) JIRA
4 26 (1.54%) Jenkins
5 14 (0.83%) MLflow
6 7 (0.41%) Postman
7 6 (0.36%) Bitbucket
8 5 (0.30%) Artifactory
8 5 (0.30%) SonarQube
9 4 (0.24%) ERwin
9 4 (0.24%) Selenium
10 3 (0.18%) Atlassian Bamboo
10 3 (0.18%) Newman
11 2 (0.12%) Claude Code
11 2 (0.12%) ER Studio
11 2 (0.12%) RStudio
11 2 (0.12%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
11 2 (0.12%) Terragrunt
11 2 (0.12%) Yeoman
12 1 (0.059%) Toad
General
1 276 (16.33%) Finance
1 276 (16.33%) Social Skills
2 198 (11.72%) Analytical Skills
3 142 (8.40%) Public Sector
4 103 (6.09%) Banking
5 27 (1.60%) Inclusion and Diversity
6 25 (1.48%) Retail
7 23 (1.36%) Telecoms
8 21 (1.24%) Automotive
8 21 (1.24%) Marketing
9 19 (1.12%) Aerospace
10 17 (1.01%) Manufacturing
11 16 (0.95%) Front Office
11 16 (0.95%) Investment Banking
12 15 (0.89%) Documentation Skills
13 14 (0.83%) Pharmaceutical
14 11 (0.65%) Law
15 10 (0.59%) Financial Institution
15 10 (0.59%) Legal
16 9 (0.53%) Publishing
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 238 (14.08%) PySpark
2 177 (10.47%) Terraform
3 108 (6.39%) Kafka
4 28 (1.66%) Pandas
5 26 (1.54%) REST
6 25 (1.48%) JSON
7 22 (1.30%) Spring
7 22 (1.30%) Spring Boot
8 20 (1.18%) Great Expectations
9 17 (1.01%) XML
10 16 (0.95%) Apache Beam
11 15 (0.89%) React
12 12 (0.71%) pytest
12 12 (0.71%) RESTful
13 11 (0.65%) .NET
14 10 (0.59%) LangChain
14 10 (0.59%) Microsoft Graph
14 10 (0.59%) PyTorch
14 10 (0.59%) YAML
15 9 (0.53%) Apache Avro
Miscellaneous
1 139 (8.22%) Cloud Native
2 70 (4.14%) Legacy Systems
3 52 (3.08%) Data Structures
4 35 (2.07%) Onboarding
5 26 (1.54%) Product Ownership
6 21 (1.24%) Distributed Systems
7 20 (1.18%) Greenfield Project
7 20 (1.18%) NHS
8 18 (1.07%) AI Agents
9 17 (1.01%) Reference Data
9 17 (1.01%) Reinsurance
10 16 (0.95%) Management Information System
11 13 (0.77%) Algorithms
11 13 (0.77%) Virtual Team
12 10 (0.59%) Clustering
13 9 (0.53%) Data Fabric
13 9 (0.53%) Data Protection Act
13 9 (0.53%) Replication
13 9 (0.53%) Self-Motivation
14 8 (0.47%) Linux Command Line
Operating Systems
1 55 (3.25%) Unix
2 43 (2.54%) Linux
3 3 (0.18%) Windows
4 2 (0.12%) Ubuntu
5 1 (0.059%) Robot Operating System
5 1 (0.059%) VMS
5 1 (0.059%) Windows Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 736 (43.55%) Data Pipeline
2 653 (38.64%) Data Engineering
3 588 (34.79%) Analytics
4 581 (34.38%) Data Modelling
5 580 (34.32%) ETL
6 425 (25.15%) CI/CD
7 300 (17.75%) Agile
8 286 (16.92%) DevOps
9 282 (16.69%) Migration
10 272 (16.09%) Business Intelligence
11 247 (14.62%) AI
12 238 (14.08%) Data Governance
13 218 (12.90%) Data Transformation
14 208 (12.31%) Validation
15 206 (12.19%) Data Integration
16 188 (11.12%) Problem-Solving
17 159 (9.41%) Decision-Making
18 156 (9.23%) Lakehouse
19 151 (8.93%) Infrastructure as Code
20 145 (8.58%) Data Architecture
Programming Languages
1 863 (51.07%) SQL
2 716 (42.37%) Python
3 99 (5.86%) Java
4 63 (3.73%) Scala
5 45 (2.66%) PL/SQL
6 31 (1.83%) Data Analysis Expressions
7 30 (1.78%) Shell Script
8 26 (1.54%) T-SQL
9 22 (1.30%) Bash
10 21 (1.24%) PowerShell
11 17 (1.01%) JavaScript
12 12 (0.71%) C#
12 12 (0.71%) R
13 9 (0.53%) Bicep
13 9 (0.53%) TypeScript
14 6 (0.36%) Go
15 4 (0.24%) Korn
16 3 (0.18%) Kusto Query Language
16 3 (0.18%) LookML
17 2 (0.12%) Cypher
Qualifications
1 444 (26.27%) Security Cleared
2 387 (22.90%) SC Cleared
3 42 (2.49%) Degree
4 35 (2.07%) BPSS Clearance
5 24 (1.42%) DV Cleared
6 23 (1.36%) Azure Certification
6 23 (1.36%) Computer Science Degree
7 13 (0.77%) AWS Certification
8 9 (0.53%) City & Guilds
9 8 (0.47%) DBS Check
9 8 (0.47%) SnowPro
10 7 (0.41%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
10 7 (0.41%) Master's Degree
11 5 (0.30%) BICSI Certification
12 4 (0.24%) CISM
12 4 (0.24%) CISSP
12 4 (0.24%) Microsoft Certification
13 3 (0.18%) CEH
14 1 (0.059%) PMI Certification
14 1 (0.059%) PMP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 445 (26.33%) Data Quality
2 66 (3.91%) QA
3 38 (2.25%) GDPR
4 15 (0.89%) Accessibility
5 9 (0.53%) SLA
6 6 (0.36%) FATCA
7 5 (0.30%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 4 (0.24%) ISO/IEC 27001
9 3 (0.18%) HIPAA
9 3 (0.18%) MiFID
10 2 (0.12%) Disclosure Scotland
10 2 (0.12%) EMIR
10 2 (0.12%) SNOMED CT
10 2 (0.12%) WCAG
11 1 (0.059%) California Consumer Privacy Act
11 1 (0.059%) Government Security Classifications
11 1 (0.059%) IFRS
11 1 (0.059%) IFRS 17
11 1 (0.059%) IFRS 9
11 1 (0.059%) PMO
System Software
1 104 (6.15%) Docker
2 3 (0.18%) Active Directory
2 3 (0.18%) Virtual Machines
3 1 (0.059%) RACF
Systems Management
1 74 (4.38%) Kubernetes
2 27 (1.60%) Grafana
3 15 (0.89%) Ansible
4 11 (0.65%) Control-M
5 7 (0.41%) Kibana
6 5 (0.30%) Prometheus
7 2 (0.12%) Apache Ranger
7 2 (0.12%) Puppet
8 1 (0.059%) logstash
8 1 (0.059%) Progress Chef
8 1 (0.059%) Thomson Reuters DACS
Vendors
1 332 (19.64%) Databricks
2 222 (13.14%) Microsoft
3 142 (8.40%) Oracle
4 97 (5.74%) Informatica
5 85 (5.03%) Talend
6 70 (4.14%) Google
7 45 (2.66%) Denodo
8 29 (1.72%) Salesforce
9 27 (1.60%) Cisco
9 27 (1.60%) F5
10 26 (1.54%) SAP
11 25 (1.48%) Palantir
12 23 (1.36%) Foundry
13 13 (0.77%) Cloudera
14 12 (0.71%) Splunk
15 10 (0.59%) Bloomberg
16 8 (0.47%) Alteryx
16 8 (0.47%) IBM
16 8 (0.47%) InterSystems
16 8 (0.47%) Sage
612 Data Engineer jobs in England