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 9 March 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
9 Mar 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 92 148 215
Rank change year-on-year +56 +67 -2
Contract jobs citing Data Engineering 1,005 461 417
As % of all contract jobs in England 2.79% 1.85% 1.10%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.22% 2.04% 1.26%
Number of daily rates quoted 696 328 313
10th Percentile £387 £400 £413
25th Percentile £447 £463 £469
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -4.55% - -8.33%
75th Percentile £616 £676 £688
90th Percentile £738 £838 £750
UK median daily rate £525 £539 £550
% change year-on-year -2.55% -2.05% -8.33%
Number of hourly rates quoted 8 11 11
10th Percentile £50.23 £22.00 £30.37
25th Percentile £62.94 £22.25 £33.13
Median hourly rate £70.00 £25.43 £35.00
Median % change year-on-year +175.27% -27.34% -
75th Percentile £77.19 £29.38 £46.88
90th Percentile £85.63 £65.00 £65.00
UK median hourly rate £66.50 £25.43 £35.00
% change year-on-year +161.50% -27.34% -

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 31,205 22,550 33,099
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 86.68% 90.54% 86.94%
Number of daily rates quoted 19,990 14,548 21,873
10th Percentile £313 £308 £300
25th Percentile £413 £413 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £505 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -3.81% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £615 £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 1,928 809 2,164
10th Percentile £15.25 £15.26 £13.02
25th Percentile £18.80 £21.00 £16.06
Median hourly rate £30.00 £34.50 £32.50
Median % change year-on-year -13.04% +6.15% -7.22%
75th Percentile £65.00 £65.00 £58.53
90th Percentile £74.26 £76.44 £71.83
UK median hourly rate £29.00 £32.50 £32.50
% change year-on-year -10.77% - -7.14%

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 9 March 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 9 March 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 9 March 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 +55 663 £550 -5.25% 224
North of England +1 100 £460 -12.38% 112
Midlands +15 99 £519 +3.70% 56
West Midlands +10 79 £534 +6.75% 44
South West +4 57 £550 -15.38% 50
North West -2 47 £450 - 48
South East -29 42 £550 +10.00% 162
Yorkshire -37 33 £490 -18.33% 52
North East +6 20 £450 -23.08% 12
East Midlands -19 20 £447 -12.78% 12
East of England -34 14 £563 +75.86% 38
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
1 159 (15.82%) Apache Spark
2 98 (9.75%) Apache Airflow
3 68 (6.77%) Apache
4 19 (1.89%) Palantir Foundry
5 17 (1.69%) SAS
6 8 (0.80%) Appian
6 8 (0.80%) Confluence
7 4 (0.40%) Microsoft Exchange
8 3 (0.30%) Apache Superset
8 3 (0.30%) Jupyter
9 2 (0.20%) SharePoint
10 1 (0.100%) Apache Synapse
10 1 (0.100%) ArcGIS
10 1 (0.100%) Camunda
10 1 (0.100%) CMS
10 1 (0.100%) IBM HTTP Server
10 1 (0.100%) Luigi
Applications
1 18 (1.79%) Microsoft Excel
2 10 (1.00%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 5 (0.50%) Chatbot
3 5 (0.50%) Microsoft Office
4 4 (0.40%) MS Visio
5 3 (0.30%) Microsoft Project
5 3 (0.30%) Trello
6 2 (0.20%) Spreadsheet
7 1 (0.100%) Adobe XD
Business Applications
1 7 (0.70%) Aladdin
2 3 (0.30%) BambooHR
2 3 (0.30%) SAP BPC
3 2 (0.20%) Salesforce CRM
4 1 (0.100%) Actimize
4 1 (0.100%) Dynamics CRM
4 1 (0.100%) Markit EDM
4 1 (0.100%) Maximo
4 1 (0.100%) Misys Midas
4 1 (0.100%) SAP S/4HANA
4 1 (0.100%) Workday HCM
Cloud Services
1 477 (47.46%) Azure
2 352 (35.02%) AWS
3 230 (22.89%) Power Platform
4 186 (18.51%) Azure Data Factory
5 144 (14.33%) GCP
6 126 (12.54%) Snowflake
7 114 (11.34%) Azure Synapse Analytics
8 107 (10.65%) Amazon S3
9 105 (10.45%) GitHub
10 96 (9.55%) Serverless
11 90 (8.96%) dbt
12 84 (8.36%) Azure DevOps
13 77 (7.66%) AWS Lambda
14 67 (6.67%) GitHub Actions
15 44 (4.38%) AWS CloudFormation
16 25 (2.49%) AWS Step Functions
16 25 (2.49%) Azure Machine Learning
17 22 (2.19%) Azure AI
17 22 (2.19%) Collibra
18 21 (2.09%) Amazon EMR
Communications & Networking
1 4 (0.40%) Cisco IPT
1 4 (0.40%) Kerberos
1 4 (0.40%) Network Security
2 3 (0.30%) RTP
2 3 (0.30%) VPN
3 1 (0.100%) 4G
3 1 (0.100%) 5G
3 1 (0.100%) SAN
3 1 (0.100%) SMS
3 1 (0.100%) TCP/IP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 209 (20.80%) Power BI
2 200 (19.90%) Data Warehouse
3 149 (14.83%) Data Lake
4 86 (8.56%) Metadata
5 71 (7.06%) SQL Server
6 69 (6.87%) Big Data
6 69 (6.87%) NoSQL
7 63 (6.27%) Delta Lake
8 57 (5.67%) Snowflake Schema
9 54 (5.37%) Amazon Redshift
10 53 (5.27%) Azure SQL Database
11 52 (5.17%) Relational Database
12 50 (4.98%) BigQuery
13 46 (4.58%) Tableau
14 45 (4.48%) PostgreSQL
15 42 (4.18%) Amazon Athena
16 37 (3.68%) Hadoop
17 34 (3.38%) SQL Server Integration Services
18 30 (2.99%) Spark SQL
19 21 (2.09%) Mixpanel
Development Applications
1 141 (14.03%) Git
2 44 (4.38%) GitLab
3 40 (3.98%) Jenkins
4 37 (3.68%) MLflow
5 17 (1.69%) JIRA
6 6 (0.60%) Selenium
7 4 (0.40%) SonarQube
7 4 (0.40%) Visual Studio Code
8 3 (0.30%) JUnit
8 3 (0.30%) Maven
8 3 (0.30%) Postman
8 3 (0.30%) Robot Framework
8 3 (0.30%) Terragrunt
9 2 (0.20%) Cucumber
9 2 (0.20%) ERwin
9 2 (0.20%) Mockito
9 2 (0.20%) Visual Studio
10 1 (0.100%) Bitbucket
10 1 (0.100%) SoapUI
10 1 (0.100%) TeamCity
General
1 273 (27.16%) Social Skills
2 248 (24.68%) Finance
3 148 (14.73%) Analytical Skills
4 84 (8.36%) Public Sector
5 64 (6.37%) Banking
6 27 (2.69%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 19 (1.89%) Investment Banking
7 19 (1.89%) Retail
8 17 (1.69%) Front Office
8 17 (1.69%) Influencing Skills
9 14 (1.39%) Marketing
10 12 (1.19%) Documentation Skills
11 11 (1.09%) Legal
12 10 (1.00%) Pharmaceutical
13 9 (0.90%) Publishing
14 8 (0.80%) Financial Institution
14 8 (0.80%) Telecoms
15 6 (0.60%) Back Office
15 6 (0.60%) Military
16 5 (0.50%) Manufacturing
Job Titles
1 471 (46.87%) Data Engineer
2 137 (13.63%) Lead
3 130 (12.94%) Senior
4 93 (9.25%) Senior Data Engineer
5 79 (7.86%) Architect
6 73 (7.26%) Azure Engineer
7 66 (6.57%) Developer
8 59 (5.87%) Azure Data Engineer
9 49 (4.88%) Analyst
10 48 (4.78%) Lead Data Engineer
11 43 (4.28%) Snowflake Engineer
12 42 (4.18%) Data Architect
13 40 (3.98%) Data Scientist
14 39 (3.88%) AWS Engineer
15 36 (3.58%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
15 36 (3.58%) Snowflake Data Engineer
16 28 (2.79%) Principal Engineer
17 27 (2.69%) Data Analyst
18 26 (2.59%) AWS Data Engineer
18 26 (2.59%) Consultant
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 173 (17.21%) PySpark
2 127 (12.64%) Kafka
3 54 (5.37%) Pandas
4 47 (4.68%) PyTorch
5 42 (4.18%) scikit-learn
6 38 (3.78%) NumPy
7 36 (3.58%) TensorFlow
8 30 (2.99%) JSON
9 29 (2.89%) RESTful
10 28 (2.79%) FastAPI
11 25 (2.49%) pytest
12 24 (2.39%) Flask
12 24 (2.39%) YAML
13 22 (2.19%) LangChain
13 22 (2.19%) React
14 19 (1.89%) REST
15 16 (1.59%) Great Expectations
16 15 (1.49%) Hugging Face
17 13 (1.29%) Node.js
17 13 (1.29%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 122 (12.14%) Cloud Native
2 38 (3.78%) Product Ownership
3 32 (3.18%) Algorithms
4 29 (2.89%) Distributed Computing
4 29 (2.89%) Distributed Systems
5 23 (2.29%) Data Structures
6 21 (2.09%) Hybrid Cloud
6 21 (2.09%) Legacy Systems
7 18 (1.79%) Data Protection Act
8 17 (1.69%) AI Agents
8 17 (1.69%) Onboarding
9 16 (1.59%) Analytical Mindset
10 13 (1.29%) Fixed Income
11 12 (1.19%) Greenfield Project
12 11 (1.09%) Clustering
12 11 (1.09%) Derivative
13 10 (1.00%) Equities
13 10 (1.00%) NHS
14 9 (0.90%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
14 9 (0.90%) Management Information System
Operating Systems
1 22 (2.19%) Linux
2 7 (0.70%) VMS
3 6 (0.60%) Unix
4 2 (0.20%) Ubuntu
4 2 (0.20%) Windows
5 1 (0.100%) CentOS
5 1 (0.100%) Debian
5 1 (0.100%) Windows Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 474 (47.16%) Analytics
2 459 (45.67%) Data Pipeline
3 419 (41.69%) ETL
4 401 (39.90%) Data Modelling
5 347 (34.53%) CI/CD
6 263 (26.17%) AI
7 259 (25.77%) Agile
8 258 (25.67%) DevOps
9 257 (25.57%) Business Intelligence
10 252 (25.07%) Data Governance
11 214 (21.29%) Machine Learning
12 200 (19.90%) Problem-Solving
13 195 (19.40%) Data Science
14 161 (16.02%) Data Architecture
15 120 (11.94%) Infrastructure as Code
16 118 (11.74%) Decision-Making
17 106 (10.55%) Validation
18 101 (10.05%) Data Integration
18 101 (10.05%) LLM
19 97 (9.65%) Data Transformation
Programming Languages
1 609 (60.60%) Python
2 549 (54.63%) SQL
3 76 (7.56%) Java
4 63 (6.27%) Scala
5 44 (4.38%) C#
6 31 (3.08%) Data Analysis Expressions
7 30 (2.99%) JavaScript
8 28 (2.79%) PowerShell
9 25 (2.49%) Bash
10 22 (2.19%) Bicep
11 18 (1.79%) T-SQL
11 18 (1.79%) TypeScript
12 16 (1.59%) Go
13 14 (1.39%) R
14 11 (1.09%) C++
15 8 (0.80%) PL/SQL
16 6 (0.60%) Korn
16 6 (0.60%) Rust
17 4 (0.40%) Shell Script
18 3 (0.30%) SAS Macro
Qualifications
1 201 (20.00%) Security Cleared
2 165 (16.42%) SC Cleared
3 84 (8.36%) Degree
4 46 (4.58%) Azure Certification
5 39 (3.88%) Computer Science Degree
6 34 (3.38%) Master's Degree
7 22 (2.19%) DV Cleared
8 15 (1.49%) BPSS Clearance
9 13 (1.29%) AWS Certification
10 11 (1.09%) Microsoft Certification
11 10 (1.00%) PhD
12 4 (0.40%) DBS Check
12 4 (0.40%) Microsoft Certified Professional
13 1 (0.100%) (ISC)2 CCSP
13 1 (0.100%) ACCA
13 1 (0.100%) CCSP
13 1 (0.100%) Cisco Certification
13 1 (0.100%) CISSP
13 1 (0.100%) OCP
13 1 (0.100%) Oracle Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 281 (27.96%) Data Quality
2 82 (8.16%) GDPR
3 35 (3.48%) QA
4 12 (1.19%) Sarbanes-Oxley
5 11 (1.09%) Accessibility
6 9 (0.90%) HIPAA
7 6 (0.60%) California Consumer Privacy Act
8 5 (0.50%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 5 (0.50%) PERC
8 5 (0.50%) SOC 2
9 3 (0.30%) GRC
9 3 (0.30%) SLA
9 3 (0.30%) Solvency II
9 3 (0.30%) WCAG
10 2 (0.20%) HL7
10 2 (0.20%) MiFID
10 2 (0.20%) NIST
10 2 (0.20%) PCI DSS
11 1 (0.100%) NCSC
11 1 (0.100%) PMO
System Software
1 129 (12.84%) Docker
2 5 (0.50%) HDFS
3 3 (0.30%) Virtual Machines
4 1 (0.100%) Apache ZooKeeper
Systems Management
1 157 (15.62%) Terraform
2 130 (12.94%) Kubernetes
3 25 (2.49%) Prometheus
4 13 (1.29%) Grafana
5 4 (0.40%) Argo
6 3 (0.30%) Ansible
6 3 (0.30%) Kubeflow
6 3 (0.30%) Rancher
7 2 (0.20%) Hadoop YARN
7 2 (0.20%) Kibana
7 2 (0.20%) Nagios
8 1 (0.100%) Apache Ranger
8 1 (0.100%) Control-M
8 1 (0.100%) HP Fortify
8 1 (0.100%) Oozie
8 1 (0.100%) Thomson Reuters DACS
Vendors
1 298 (29.65%) Databricks
2 136 (13.53%) Microsoft
3 51 (5.07%) Google
4 31 (3.08%) Informatica
5 30 (2.99%) Oracle
6 25 (2.49%) Foundry
7 23 (2.29%) Palantir
7 23 (2.29%) Talend
8 22 (2.19%) OpenAI
9 17 (1.69%) Splunk
10 14 (1.39%) SAP
11 12 (1.19%) Salesforce
12 10 (1.00%) Cloudera
13 9 (0.90%) Denodo
14 8 (0.80%) Automation Anywhere
14 8 (0.80%) ServiceNow
14 8 (0.80%) UiPath
15 6 (0.60%) Guidewire
15 6 (0.60%) MicroStrategy
15 6 (0.60%) Virgin Media