Data Engineering Contract Job Trends in England

Data Engineering
UK > England

The table below provides summary statistics and contractor rates for jobs advertised in England requiring Data Engineering skills. It covers contract job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 30 September 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
30 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 88 141 194
Rank change year-on-year +53 +53 +12
Contract jobs citing Data Engineering 1,413 555 432
As % of all contract jobs in England 3.04% 2.00% 1.35%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.58% 2.20% 1.56%
Number of daily rates quoted 991 352 316
10th Percentile £400 £350 £395
25th Percentile £450 £413 £468
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £525 £575
Median % change year-on-year - -8.70% -8.00%
75th Percentile £650 £640 £676
90th Percentile £738 £747 £775
UK median daily rate £525 £515 £550
% change year-on-year +1.94% -6.36% -8.33%
Number of hourly rates quoted 13 5 6
10th Percentile - £36.73 £23.88
25th Percentile £21.25 £38.96 £34.88
Median hourly rate £65.00 £52.50 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +23.81% -12.50% -20.53%
75th Percentile £72.66 £65.00 -
90th Percentile £81.64 £92.00 -
UK median hourly rate £44.50 £58.75 £60.00
% change year-on-year -24.26% -2.08% -17.81%

All Process & Methodology Skills
England

Data Engineering falls under the Processes and Methodologies category. For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all contract job vacancies requiring process or methodology skills in England.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for process or methodology skills 39,415 25,251 27,687
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 84.67% 91.00% 86.24%
Number of daily rates quoted 23,982 16,042 16,911
10th Percentile £325 £300 £313
25th Percentile £425 £405 £420
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £511 £525
Median % change year-on-year +2.71% -2.64% -4.55%
75th Percentile £638 £625 £645
90th Percentile £738 £738 £750
UK median daily rate £525 £500 £525
% change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -2.78%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,873 1,537 1,195
10th Percentile £13.88 £14.39 £15.00
25th Percentile £17.60 £17.87 £20.30
Median hourly rate £41.00 £25.15 £43.00
Median % change year-on-year +63.02% -41.51% -3.37%
75th Percentile £67.47 £47.00 £67.50
90th Percentile £78.75 £67.35 £75.00
UK median hourly rate £38.86 £25.15 £42.50
% change year-on-year +54.51% -40.82% -

Data Engineering
Job Vacancy Trend in England

Historical trend showing the proportion of contract IT job postings citing Data Engineering relative to all contract IT jobs advertised in England.

Data Engineering job vacancy trend in England

Data Engineering
Daily Rate Trend in England

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in England citing Data Engineering.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in England citing Data Engineering

Data Engineering
Daily Rate Histogram in England

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Data Engineering in England over the 6 months to 30 September 2026.

Daily rate histogram for Data Engineering in England

Data Engineering
Hourly Rate Trend in England

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in England citing Data Engineering.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in England citing Data Engineering

Data Engineering
Hourly Rate Histogram in England

Hourly rate distribution of jobs citing Data Engineering in England over the 6 months to 30 September 2026.

Hourly rate histogram for Data Engineering in England

Data Engineering
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 Engineering within the England region over the 6 months to 30 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 +45 864 £550 - 997
North of England +17 188 £475 +7.34% 226
Midlands +31 122 £475 +2.70% 95
West Midlands +26 100 £475 -13.64% 73
Yorkshire +27 95 £500 +5.26% 59
South East -5 94 £525 +19.32% 141
South West +35 86 £525 -3.45% 76
North West -27 58 £525 +22.09% 130
North East -6 37 £425 -17.07% 38
East of England -15 25 £550 +22.22% 39
East Midlands -5 22 £503 +15.57% 22
Data Engineering
UK

Data Engineering
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
1 172 (12.17%) Apache Airflow
2 154 (10.90%) Apache Spark
3 123 (8.70%) Apache
4 32 (2.26%) SAS
5 31 (2.19%) Confluence
6 21 (1.49%) Jupyter
7 16 (1.13%) Palantir Foundry
8 15 (1.06%) SharePoint
9 5 (0.35%) Apache Solr
9 5 (0.35%) Apache Superset
10 4 (0.28%) ArcGIS
11 3 (0.21%) nginx
12 2 (0.14%) PowerExchange
13 1 (0.071%) Apache Pulsar
13 1 (0.071%) Apache Synapse
13 1 (0.071%) CICS
13 1 (0.071%) Microsoft Exchange
13 1 (0.071%) Oracle Workflow
Applications
1 9 (0.64%) Microsoft Excel
2 7 (0.50%) Chatbot
3 6 (0.42%) Spreadsheet
4 3 (0.21%) Microsoft Office
5 2 (0.14%) MS Visio
6 1 (0.071%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 1 (0.071%) Notion
Business Applications
1 10 (0.71%) Aladdin
2 7 (0.50%) Dynamics CRM
3 4 (0.28%) NetSuite
3 4 (0.28%) Sage X3
4 3 (0.21%) SAP S/4HANA
5 2 (0.14%) BambooHR
5 2 (0.14%) Endur
5 2 (0.14%) Oracle Assets
5 2 (0.14%) Salesforce CRM
5 2 (0.14%) Temenos T24
5 2 (0.14%) Workday HCM
6 1 (0.071%) Cloudability
6 1 (0.071%) FIS Private Capital Suite
6 1 (0.071%) Markit EDM
6 1 (0.071%) MIS ActiveH
6 1 (0.071%) Oracle EBS
6 1 (0.071%) SAP Oil and Gas
6 1 (0.071%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
Cloud Services
1 585 (41.40%) Azure
2 529 (37.44%) AWS
3 259 (18.33%) Power Platform
4 236 (16.70%) Snowflake
5 221 (15.64%) dbt
6 212 (15.00%) GCP
7 164 (11.61%) Amazon S3
8 161 (11.39%) Azure Data Factory
9 132 (9.34%) Serverless
10 122 (8.63%) Azure DevOps
11 114 (8.07%) Azure Synapse Analytics
12 109 (7.71%) AWS Lambda
13 104 (7.36%) GitHub
14 67 (4.74%) Azure Databricks
15 55 (3.89%) GitHub Actions
16 41 (2.90%) Amazon EMR
17 38 (2.69%) Amazon CloudWatch
18 36 (2.55%) Amazon Bedrock
19 33 (2.34%) Microsoft Purview
20 30 (2.12%) Azure AI
Communications & Networking
1 6 (0.42%) DNS
1 6 (0.42%) Network Security
2 4 (0.28%) Firewall
3 2 (0.14%) Broadband
4 1 (0.071%) HTTP
4 1 (0.071%) HTTPS
4 1 (0.071%) Internet
4 1 (0.071%) MIMO
4 1 (0.071%) MQTT
4 1 (0.071%) Radio Access Network
4 1 (0.071%) SMS
4 1 (0.071%) SSL
4 1 (0.071%) TCP/IP
4 1 (0.071%) tcpdump
4 1 (0.071%) Wireshark
Database & Business Intelligence
1 292 (20.67%) Data Warehouse
2 246 (17.41%) Power BI
3 175 (12.38%) Data Lake
4 164 (11.61%) Metadata
5 115 (8.14%) BigQuery
6 97 (6.86%) Delta Lake
7 96 (6.79%) Amazon Redshift
8 72 (5.10%) Big Data
9 70 (4.95%) Tableau
10 65 (4.60%) Amazon Athena
11 53 (3.75%) SQL Server
12 50 (3.54%) Snowflake Schema
13 47 (3.33%) PostgreSQL
14 43 (3.04%) NoSQL
15 42 (2.97%) Relational Database
16 37 (2.62%) Looker
17 30 (2.12%) Amazon RDS
18 29 (2.05%) Azure SQL Database
18 29 (2.05%) Data Vault
19 25 (1.77%) Semantic Layer
Development Applications
1 153 (10.83%) Git
2 83 (5.87%) GitLab
3 56 (3.96%) JIRA
4 24 (1.70%) Jenkins
5 21 (1.49%) MLflow
6 8 (0.57%) Bitbucket
6 8 (0.57%) RStudio
6 8 (0.57%) Terragrunt
7 7 (0.50%) Claude Code
7 7 (0.50%) Selenium
8 6 (0.42%) ERwin
9 4 (0.28%) ER Studio
10 3 (0.21%) Artifactory
10 3 (0.21%) Atlassian Bamboo
10 3 (0.21%) Postman
10 3 (0.21%) SonarQube
10 3 (0.21%) TeamCity
11 2 (0.14%) Cucumber
11 2 (0.14%) Sonatype Nexus
11 2 (0.14%) Yeoman
General
1 366 (25.90%) Social Skills
2 319 (22.58%) Finance
3 221 (15.64%) Analytical Skills
4 147 (10.40%) Public Sector
5 130 (9.20%) Banking
6 45 (3.18%) Marketing
7 32 (2.26%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 27 (1.91%) Retail
9 23 (1.63%) Front Office
10 21 (1.49%) Investment Banking
11 18 (1.27%) Pharmaceutical
12 16 (1.13%) Documentation Skills
12 16 (1.13%) Manufacturing
13 14 (0.99%) Telecoms
14 12 (0.85%) Back Office
14 12 (0.85%) Billing
15 11 (0.78%) Financial Institution
15 11 (0.78%) Influencing Skills
15 11 (0.78%) Military
16 10 (0.71%) Publishing
Job Titles
1 648 (45.86%) Data Engineer
2 217 (15.36%) Senior
3 164 (11.61%) Lead
4 153 (10.83%) Architect
5 140 (9.91%) Senior Data Engineer
6 80 (5.66%) Data Architect
7 79 (5.59%) Developer
8 69 (4.88%) AWS Engineer
9 62 (4.39%) Analyst
10 59 (4.18%) AWS Data Engineer
11 57 (4.03%) Snowflake Engineer
12 56 (3.96%) Databricks Engineer
13 53 (3.75%) Azure Engineer
14 48 (3.40%) Lead Data Engineer
15 46 (3.26%) Snowflake Data Engineer
16 44 (3.11%) Databricks Data Engineer
17 39 (2.76%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
18 35 (2.48%) Consultant
19 34 (2.41%) GCP Engineer
20 33 (2.34%) Azure Data Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 220 (15.57%) Terraform
2 202 (14.30%) PySpark
3 90 (6.37%) Kafka
4 53 (3.75%) REST
5 32 (2.26%) React
6 27 (1.91%) .NET
7 26 (1.84%) JSON
8 20 (1.42%) Pandas
9 15 (1.06%) LangChain
9 15 (1.06%) PyTorch
10 13 (0.92%) FastAPI
11 12 (0.85%) pytest
11 12 (0.85%) TensorFlow
12 11 (0.78%) Microsoft Graph
12 11 (0.78%) NumPy
12 11 (0.78%) RabbitMQ
12 11 (0.78%) scikit-learn
13 10 (0.71%) RESTful
14 9 (0.64%) Apache Avro
14 9 (0.64%) Great Expectations
Miscellaneous
1 191 (13.52%) Cloud Native
2 77 (5.45%) Onboarding
3 69 (4.88%) Data Structures
4 59 (4.18%) Product Ownership
5 48 (3.40%) AI Agents
5 48 (3.40%) Legacy Systems
6 40 (2.83%) Distributed Systems
7 22 (1.56%) Data Protection Act
8 19 (1.34%) Distributed Computing
8 19 (1.34%) Enterprise Software
9 18 (1.27%) Virtual Team
10 17 (1.20%) Management Information System
10 17 (1.20%) NHS
11 15 (1.06%) Greenfield Project
11 15 (1.06%) Life Science
12 14 (0.99%) Algorithms
12 14 (0.99%) Analytical Mindset
13 13 (0.92%) Clustering
13 13 (0.92%) Data Fabric
14 11 (0.78%) Taxonomies
Operating Systems
1 28 (1.98%) Linux
2 23 (1.63%) Unix
3 7 (0.50%) Windows
4 1 (0.071%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 1 (0.071%) Robot Operating System
4 1 (0.071%) Ubuntu
4 1 (0.071%) Windows Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 694 (49.12%) Data Pipeline
2 662 (46.85%) Analytics
3 554 (39.21%) Data Modelling
4 515 (36.45%) CI/CD
5 484 (34.25%) ETL
6 448 (31.71%) AI
7 357 (25.27%) Agile
8 342 (24.20%) DevOps
9 324 (22.93%) Business Intelligence
10 311 (22.01%) Data Governance
11 262 (18.54%) Stakeholder Management
12 243 (17.20%) Machine Learning
13 228 (16.14%) Data Architecture
14 227 (16.07%) Data Transformation
15 225 (15.92%) Infrastructure as Code
16 218 (15.43%) Validation
17 217 (15.36%) Migration
18 214 (15.15%) Problem-Solving
19 204 (14.44%) Decision-Making
20 197 (13.94%) Data Integration
Programming Languages
1 782 (55.34%) SQL
2 737 (52.16%) Python
3 96 (6.79%) Java
4 41 (2.90%) Scala
5 38 (2.69%) Data Analysis Expressions
6 37 (2.62%) PowerShell
7 33 (2.34%) C#
8 32 (2.26%) Bash
9 29 (2.05%) JavaScript
10 21 (1.49%) R
11 18 (1.27%) T-SQL
12 16 (1.13%) PL/SQL
13 13 (0.92%) Bicep
13 13 (0.92%) Kusto Query Language
13 13 (0.92%) TypeScript
14 10 (0.71%) Shell Script
15 8 (0.57%) Korn
15 8 (0.57%) SAS Macro
16 7 (0.50%) Go
16 7 (0.50%) SPARQL
Qualifications
1 258 (18.26%) Security Cleared
2 215 (15.22%) SC Cleared
3 73 (5.17%) Degree
4 36 (2.55%) Computer Science Degree
5 33 (2.34%) DV Cleared
6 32 (2.26%) AWS Certification
6 32 (2.26%) Azure Certification
7 26 (1.84%) BPSS Clearance
8 19 (1.34%) Master's Degree
9 14 (0.99%) DBS Check
10 9 (0.64%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
10 9 (0.64%) SnowPro
11 8 (0.57%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
11 8 (0.57%) Microsoft Certification
12 5 (0.35%) Microsoft Certified Professional
12 5 (0.35%) PMI Certification
12 5 (0.35%) PMP
12 5 (0.35%) TOGAF Certification
13 4 (0.28%) PhD
13 4 (0.28%) Tableau Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 474 (33.55%) Data Quality
2 74 (5.24%) QA
3 58 (4.10%) GDPR
4 26 (1.84%) Accessibility
5 12 (0.85%) SLA
6 6 (0.42%) GRC
7 4 (0.28%) California Consumer Privacy Act
7 4 (0.28%) Disclosure Scotland
7 4 (0.28%) EU AI Act
7 4 (0.28%) NCSC
7 4 (0.28%) PMO
8 3 (0.21%) Actionable Recommendations
8 3 (0.21%) IFRS
8 3 (0.21%) IFRS 9
8 3 (0.21%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 3 (0.21%) MiFID
8 3 (0.21%) NIST
9 2 (0.14%) 21 CFR Part 11
9 2 (0.14%) ISO/IEC 42001
9 2 (0.14%) Sarbanes-Oxley
System Software
1 118 (8.35%) Docker
2 5 (0.35%) Active Directory
3 1 (0.071%) Virtual Machines
Systems Management
1 95 (6.72%) Kubernetes
2 23 (1.63%) Ansible
3 20 (1.42%) Grafana
4 10 (0.71%) Prometheus
5 8 (0.57%) Kibana
6 7 (0.50%) Control-M
7 3 (0.21%) logstash
8 2 (0.14%) Argo
8 2 (0.14%) Puppet
9 1 (0.071%) Cilium
9 1 (0.071%) HAProxy
9 1 (0.071%) IBM Guardium
9 1 (0.071%) Kustomize
9 1 (0.071%) Nagios
9 1 (0.071%) Progress Chef
9 1 (0.071%) QRadar
9 1 (0.071%) Single Sign-On
Vendors
1 389 (27.53%) Databricks
2 245 (17.34%) Microsoft
3 84 (5.94%) Google
4 71 (5.02%) Oracle
5 54 (3.82%) Informatica
6 26 (1.84%) Foundry
7 25 (1.77%) Salesforce
7 25 (1.77%) SAP
7 25 (1.77%) Talend
8 24 (1.70%) Palantir
9 19 (1.34%) OpenAI
10 14 (0.99%) Teradata
11 13 (0.92%) Cloudera
12 12 (0.85%) Trend Micro
13 11 (0.78%) Adobe
14 10 (0.71%) ServiceNow
15 8 (0.57%) Denodo
16 7 (0.50%) Hitachi
16 7 (0.50%) Splunk
17 6 (0.42%) MicroStrategy