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 2 December 2025.

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

6 months to
2 Dec 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 121 88 117
Rank change year-on-year -33 +29 +17
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 719 810 807
As % of all contract jobs in England 2.34% 2.67% 2.09%
As % of the Job Titles category 2.57% 2.87% 2.24%
Number of daily rates quoted 510 563 615
10th Percentile £363 £375 £400
25th Percentile £425 £453 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -6.82% - -0.05%
75th Percentile £600 £650 £641
90th Percentile £694 £723 £700
UK median daily rate £500 £530 £530
% change year-on-year -5.66% - -3.64%
Number of hourly rates quoted 10 9 16
10th Percentile £25.92 £38.25 £35.00
25th Percentile £34.13 £49.25 £38.79
Median hourly rate £43.50 £65.00 £61.43
Median % change year-on-year -33.08% +5.82% +2.38%
75th Percentile £67.56 £97.50 £65.75
90th Percentile £110.00 - £78.75
UK median hourly rate £43.50 £50.50 £61.43
% change year-on-year -13.86% -17.79% +2.38%

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 27,984 28,207 36,022
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 91.24% 92.96% 93.44%
Number of daily rates quoted 17,940 17,360 24,787
10th Percentile £285 £300 £290
25th Percentile £403 £413 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £504 £525 £534
Median % change year-on-year -4.00% -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 1,688 1,011 1,400
10th Percentile £14.25 £15.25 £15.33
25th Percentile £17.94 £21.00 £20.00
Median hourly rate £25.47 £37.50 £45.00
Median % change year-on-year -32.08% -16.67% +38.46%
75th Percentile £57.50 £65.00 £65.00
90th Percentile £72.50 £74.75 £77.50
UK median hourly rate £25.15 £35.00 £44.00
% change year-on-year -28.14% -20.45% +44.26%

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 2 December 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 2 December 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 2 December 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 -9 444 £525 -8.70% 162
North of England -46 83 £463 - 77
Midlands -16 82 £519 +4.75% 39
West Midlands -22 68 £520 +4.00% 35
North West -20 41 £415 -7.78% 48
South West +7 37 £550 +22.22% 14
South East -44 35 £478 -13.18% 122
Yorkshire -32 34 £513 +5.67% 21
East Midlands -8 14 £455 +27.81% 4
North East -7 8 £425 +13.64% 8
East of England -25 6 £625 +95.31% 14
Data Engineer
UK

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

For the 6 months to 2 December 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.

1 453 (63.00%) Python
2 443 (61.61%) SQL
3 337 (46.87%) Data Pipeline
4 313 (43.53%) Azure
5 299 (41.59%) ETL
6 286 (39.78%) Data Engineering
7 252 (35.05%) Data Modelling
8 249 (34.63%) AWS
9 232 (32.27%) Databricks
10 231 (32.13%) Analytics
10 231 (32.13%) CI/CD
11 188 (26.15%) Data Quality
12 167 (23.23%) Business Intelligence
12 167 (23.23%) DevOps
13 161 (22.39%) Data Warehouse
14 159 (22.11%) Security Cleared
15 146 (20.31%) Agile
16 135 (18.78%) SC Cleared
17 133 (18.50%) Azure Data Factory
17 133 (18.50%) Power Platform
18 130 (18.08%) Power BI
19 123 (17.11%) PySpark
20 121 (16.83%) Problem-Solving
21 120 (16.69%) Apache Airflow
21 120 (16.69%) Data Science
22 112 (15.58%) Snowflake
23 104 (14.46%) Git
24 98 (13.63%) Machine Learning
25 94 (13.07%) Data Governance
25 94 (13.07%) GCP

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
1 120 (16.69%) Apache Airflow
2 93 (12.93%) Apache Spark
3 59 (8.21%) Apache
4 22 (3.06%) Confluence
5 18 (2.50%) SAS
6 8 (1.11%) Oracle Application Server
7 7 (0.97%) SharePoint
8 6 (0.83%) Apache Pig
9 5 (0.70%) IIS
10 4 (0.56%) Jupyter
11 3 (0.42%) Oracle SOA Suite
12 2 (0.28%) ArcGIS
12 2 (0.28%) Documentum
12 2 (0.28%) Luigi
13 1 (0.14%) Apache Synapse
13 1 (0.14%) Microsoft Exchange
13 1 (0.14%) nginx
Applications
1 8 (1.11%) Microsoft Excel
2 4 (0.56%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 2 (0.28%) Chatbot
3 2 (0.28%) Microsoft Office
3 2 (0.28%) Windchill
4 1 (0.14%) MS Visio
4 1 (0.14%) SPSS
4 1 (0.14%) Stata
Business Applications
1 3 (0.42%) Oracle BPM
2 2 (0.28%) Aladdin
2 2 (0.28%) Maximo
2 2 (0.28%) SAP S/4HANA
3 1 (0.14%) Actimize
3 1 (0.14%) Dynamics CRM
3 1 (0.14%) Salesforce CRM
3 1 (0.14%) SAP ERP
Cloud Services
1 313 (43.53%) Azure
2 249 (34.63%) AWS
3 133 (18.50%) Azure Data Factory
3 133 (18.50%) Power Platform
4 112 (15.58%) Snowflake
5 94 (13.07%) GCP
6 89 (12.38%) dbt
7 85 (11.82%) Amazon S3
8 77 (10.71%) Azure Synapse Analytics
8 77 (10.71%) GitHub
9 60 (8.34%) Serverless
10 45 (6.26%) Azure DevOps
11 41 (5.70%) GitHub Actions
12 40 (5.56%) AWS Lambda
13 27 (3.76%) AWS CloudFormation
14 21 (2.92%) SaaS
15 16 (2.23%) Amazon EMR
16 15 (2.09%) Amazon Kinesis
17 11 (1.53%) AWS Step Functions
18 10 (1.39%) Cloud Computing
Communications & Networking
1 4 (0.56%) Firewall
1 4 (0.56%) TCP/IP
2 3 (0.42%) SAN
2 3 (0.42%) SSH
3 2 (0.28%) DNS
3 2 (0.28%) Internet
3 2 (0.28%) SSL
3 2 (0.28%) Structured Cabling
4 1 (0.14%) Software-Defined Networking
4 1 (0.14%) Wi-Fi
Database & Business Intelligence
1 161 (22.39%) Data Warehouse
2 130 (18.08%) Power BI
3 86 (11.96%) Data Lake
4 61 (8.48%) Big Data
5 53 (7.37%) PostgreSQL
6 51 (7.09%) SQL Server
7 47 (6.54%) Amazon Redshift
8 46 (6.40%) Hadoop
9 44 (6.12%) Delta Lake
10 42 (5.84%) NoSQL
11 41 (5.70%) Azure SQL Database
12 39 (5.42%) BigQuery
13 35 (4.87%) Tableau
14 32 (4.45%) Relational Database
15 31 (4.31%) Metadata
16 29 (4.03%) Star Schema
17 25 (3.48%) SQL Server Integration Services
18 24 (3.34%) Pentaho
19 22 (3.06%) Amazon QuickSight
20 21 (2.92%) Elasticsearch
Development Applications
1 104 (14.46%) Git
2 59 (8.21%) Jenkins
3 38 (5.29%) JIRA
4 25 (3.48%) GitLab
5 21 (2.92%) MLflow
6 8 (1.11%) DBeaver
7 5 (0.70%) Visual Studio Code
8 4 (0.56%) Bitbucket
8 4 (0.56%) Poetry
8 4 (0.56%) SonarQube
9 3 (0.42%) PyCharm
9 3 (0.42%) Sonatype Nexus
9 3 (0.42%) Visual Studio
10 2 (0.28%) 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%) TeamCity
General
1 148 (20.58%) Social Skills
2 125 (17.39%) Finance
3 93 (12.93%) Analytical Skills
4 52 (7.23%) Public Sector
5 27 (3.76%) Banking
6 21 (2.92%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 13 (1.81%) Pharmaceutical
8 10 (1.39%) Front Office
8 10 (1.39%) Investment Banking
8 10 (1.39%) Retail
9 9 (1.25%) Marketing
9 9 (1.25%) Telecoms
10 5 (0.70%) Documentation Skills
11 4 (0.56%) Legal
11 4 (0.56%) Manufacturing
12 3 (0.42%) Health Technology
12 3 (0.42%) Law
12 3 (0.42%) Military
12 3 (0.42%) Organisational Skills
12 3 (0.42%) Tech for Good
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 123 (17.11%) PySpark
2 76 (10.57%) Kafka
3 17 (2.36%) Pandas
4 16 (2.23%) Apache NiFi
4 16 (2.23%) XML
5 14 (1.95%) RESTful
6 13 (1.81%) JSON
6 13 (1.81%) YAML
7 12 (1.67%) Flask
7 12 (1.67%) NumPy
8 11 (1.53%) HTML
9 10 (1.39%) Keycloak
9 10 (1.39%) RabbitMQ
9 10 (1.39%) REST
10 9 (1.25%) Node.js
10 9 (1.25%) pytest
10 9 (1.25%) PyTorch
11 8 (1.11%) Jinja
11 8 (1.11%) Oracle GoldenGate
12 7 (0.97%) Middleware
Miscellaneous
1 46 (6.40%) Cloud Native
2 25 (3.48%) Legacy Systems
3 22 (3.06%) Data Structures
4 21 (2.92%) Product Ownership
5 18 (2.50%) Algorithms
5 18 (2.50%) Replication
6 12 (1.67%) Data Protection Act
6 12 (1.67%) Hybrid Cloud
6 12 (1.67%) Onboarding
7 10 (1.39%) Distributed Computing
8 9 (1.25%) Greenfield Project
9 8 (1.11%) Life Science
10 7 (0.97%) IoT
10 7 (0.97%) NHS
10 7 (0.97%) Virtual Team
11 6 (0.83%) Clustering
11 6 (0.83%) Reinsurance
12 5 (0.70%) Distributed Systems
12 5 (0.70%) Genomics
12 5 (0.70%) Linux Command Line
Operating Systems
1 21 (2.92%) Linux
2 11 (1.53%) Unix
3 2 (0.28%) Windows
3 2 (0.28%) Windows Server
3 2 (0.28%) Windows Server 2003
4 1 (0.14%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 337 (46.87%) Data Pipeline
2 299 (41.59%) ETL
3 286 (39.78%) Data Engineering
4 252 (35.05%) Data Modelling
5 231 (32.13%) Analytics
5 231 (32.13%) CI/CD
6 167 (23.23%) Business Intelligence
6 167 (23.23%) DevOps
7 146 (20.31%) Agile
8 121 (16.83%) Problem-Solving
9 120 (16.69%) Data Science
10 98 (13.63%) Machine Learning
11 94 (13.07%) Data Governance
12 89 (12.38%) Infrastructure as Code
13 86 (11.96%) Data Integration
14 85 (11.82%) AI
15 79 (10.99%) Data Architecture
16 74 (10.29%) Migration
17 73 (10.15%) Data Transformation
18 67 (9.32%) Visualisation
Programming Languages
1 453 (63.00%) Python
2 443 (61.61%) SQL
3 71 (9.87%) Scala
4 66 (9.18%) Java
5 25 (3.48%) Bash
6 16 (2.23%) R
7 14 (1.95%) Go
7 14 (1.95%) JavaScript
7 14 (1.95%) PL/SQL
8 13 (1.81%) Data Analysis Expressions
9 9 (1.25%) C#
9 9 (1.25%) PowerShell
9 9 (1.25%) Shell Script
9 9 (1.25%) T-SQL
10 7 (0.97%) TypeScript
11 4 (0.56%) Groovy
11 4 (0.56%) Korn
12 3 (0.42%) C++
13 2 (0.28%) ABAP
14 1 (0.14%) C
Qualifications
1 159 (22.11%) Security Cleared
2 135 (18.78%) SC Cleared
3 31 (4.31%) Degree
4 22 (3.06%) Azure Certification
5 20 (2.78%) AWS Certification
6 19 (2.64%) DV Cleared
7 12 (1.67%) Computer Science Degree
8 9 (1.25%) Master's Degree
9 6 (0.83%) BPSS Clearance
10 3 (0.42%) CTC Cleared
10 3 (0.42%) SnowPro
11 2 (0.28%) DBS Check
11 2 (0.28%) MCP
12 1 (0.14%) HND
12 1 (0.14%) PhD
12 1 (0.14%) Tableau Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 188 (26.15%) Data Quality
2 34 (4.73%) GDPR
3 12 (1.67%) QA
4 6 (0.83%) Accessibility
5 5 (0.70%) HIPAA
6 4 (0.56%) NIST
7 3 (0.42%) ISO/IEC 20000
7 3 (0.42%) MiFID
7 3 (0.42%) SLA
8 2 (0.28%) Dodd-Frank
8 2 (0.28%) EMIR
8 2 (0.28%) EU AI Act
8 2 (0.28%) ISO/IEC 27001
9 1 (0.14%) HL7
9 1 (0.14%) NCSC
9 1 (0.14%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 1 (0.14%) SOC 2
9 1 (0.14%) WCAG
System Software
1 67 (9.32%) Docker
2 9 (1.25%) Virtual Machines
3 5 (0.70%) zsh
4 2 (0.28%) Active Directory
5 1 (0.14%) HDFS
Systems Management
1 90 (12.52%) Terraform
2 71 (9.87%) Kubernetes
3 11 (1.53%) Ansible
4 9 (1.25%) NetBackup
5 8 (1.11%) Grafana
6 5 (0.70%) Prometheus
6 5 (0.70%) Puppet
7 4 (0.56%) Argo
8 3 (0.42%) Ambari
8 3 (0.42%) Istio
8 3 (0.42%) Kibana
8 3 (0.42%) Kubeflow
8 3 (0.42%) ZABBIX
9 2 (0.28%) Control-M
9 2 (0.28%) EMC NetWorker
9 2 (0.28%) Tivoli Storage Manager
10 1 (0.14%) logstash
Vendors
1 232 (32.27%) Databricks
2 85 (11.82%) Microsoft
3 57 (7.93%) Oracle
4 31 (4.31%) Google
4 31 (4.31%) Talend
5 26 (3.62%) Foundry
5 26 (3.62%) Palantir
6 21 (2.92%) Informatica
7 19 (2.64%) Denodo
8 15 (2.09%) Cloudera
9 12 (1.67%) IBM
9 12 (1.67%) Red Hat
10 11 (1.53%) SAP
11 9 (1.25%) Commvault
11 9 (1.25%) Splunk
11 9 (1.25%) Veritas
12 7 (0.97%) Confluent
12 7 (0.97%) Virgin Media
13 5 (0.70%) EMC
14 4 (0.56%) Salesforce