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 11 September 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
11 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 85 147 200
Rank change year-on-year +62 +53 -6
Contract jobs citing Data Engineering 1,416 531 423
As % of all contract jobs in England 3.05% 1.91% 1.28%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.60% 2.10% 1.49%
Number of daily rates quoted 988 335 309
10th Percentile £400 £362 £398
25th Percentile £450 £425 £468
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £520 £575
Median % change year-on-year +0.96% -9.57% -8.00%
75th Percentile £638 £644 £688
90th Percentile £740 £758 £776
UK median daily rate £525 £513 £575
% change year-on-year +2.44% -10.87% -4.17%
Number of hourly rates quoted 18 6 7
10th Percentile - £37.11 £24.40
25th Percentile £21.25 £42.03 £43.25
Median hourly rate £68.25 £52.50 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +30.00% -12.50% -23.08%
75th Percentile £75.00 £62.19 -
90th Percentile £84.11 £87.50 -
UK median hourly rate £67.50 £52.50 £60.00
% change year-on-year +28.57% -12.50% -23.08%

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 39,380 25,274 28,344
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 84.88% 90.84% 85.98%
Number of daily rates quoted 24,176 16,039 17,819
10th Percentile £325 £300 £313
25th Percentile £425 £404 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £508 £525
Median % change year-on-year +3.45% -3.33% -4.55%
75th Percentile £634 £625 £650
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 2,707 1,489 1,353
10th Percentile £14.00 £14.33 £14.84
25th Percentile £17.85 £17.79 £20.00
Median hourly rate £42.30 £25.15 £43.00
Median % change year-on-year +68.19% -41.51% +1.18%
75th Percentile £68.00 £50.00 £66.50
90th Percentile £80.00 £68.75 £75.00
UK median hourly rate £40.00 £25.15 £43.00
% change year-on-year +59.05% -41.51% +3.61%

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 11 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 11 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 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 +50 879 £550 - 585
North of England +16 176 £475 - 120
Midlands +31 131 £486 +7.88% 53
West Midlands +32 107 £475 -6.31% 32
South East -7 92 £500 +15.61% 159
Yorkshire +23 88 £500 +5.26% 25
South West +15 77 £525 -8.70% 62
North West -22 55 £500 +5.26% 74
North East -15 35 £425 -20.93% 21
East of England -19 27 £550 +22.22% 39
East Midlands -2 21 £525 +20.62% 21
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
1 174 (12.29%) Apache Airflow
2 156 (11.02%) Apache Spark
3 120 (8.47%) Apache
4 36 (2.54%) SAS
5 33 (2.33%) Confluence
6 21 (1.48%) Jupyter
7 17 (1.20%) Palantir Foundry
8 14 (0.99%) SharePoint
9 7 (0.49%) Apache Superset
10 5 (0.35%) Apache Solr
10 5 (0.35%) ArcGIS
11 3 (0.21%) nginx
12 2 (0.14%) PowerExchange
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 16 (1.13%) Microsoft Excel
2 7 (0.49%) Spreadsheet
3 6 (0.42%) Microsoft Office
4 5 (0.35%) Chatbot
5 4 (0.28%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 2 (0.14%) MS Visio
7 1 (0.071%) Notion
Business Applications
1 8 (0.56%) Aladdin
2 7 (0.49%) Dynamics CRM
3 4 (0.28%) NetSuite
3 4 (0.28%) Sage X3
3 4 (0.28%) SAP S/4HANA
4 2 (0.14%) BambooHR
4 2 (0.14%) Endur
4 2 (0.14%) Oracle Assets
4 2 (0.14%) Salesforce CRM
4 2 (0.14%) Temenos T24
4 2 (0.14%) Workday HCM
5 1 (0.071%) FIS Private Capital Suite
5 1 (0.071%) MIS ActiveH
5 1 (0.071%) SAP ECC
5 1 (0.071%) SAP Oil and Gas
5 1 (0.071%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
Cloud Services
1 598 (42.23%) Azure
2 526 (37.15%) AWS
3 269 (19.00%) Power Platform
4 226 (15.96%) Snowflake
5 198 (13.98%) GCP
6 194 (13.70%) dbt
7 161 (11.37%) Azure Data Factory
8 151 (10.66%) Amazon S3
9 133 (9.39%) Azure DevOps
10 125 (8.83%) Azure Synapse Analytics
11 124 (8.76%) Serverless
12 113 (7.98%) GitHub
13 100 (7.06%) AWS Lambda
14 70 (4.94%) Azure Databricks
15 61 (4.31%) GitHub Actions
16 35 (2.47%) Amazon EMR
17 32 (2.26%) Amazon CloudWatch
18 31 (2.19%) Amazon Bedrock
18 31 (2.19%) Microsoft Purview
19 27 (1.91%) Azure AI
Communications & Networking
1 5 (0.35%) Firewall
2 4 (0.28%) DNS
2 4 (0.28%) Network Security
3 1 (0.071%) Broadband
3 1 (0.071%) Internet
3 1 (0.071%) MIMO
3 1 (0.071%) MQTT
3 1 (0.071%) RTP
3 1 (0.071%) SMS
3 1 (0.071%) SSL
Database & Business Intelligence
1 291 (20.55%) Data Warehouse
2 255 (18.01%) Power BI
3 186 (13.14%) Data Lake
4 166 (11.72%) Metadata
5 108 (7.63%) BigQuery
6 101 (7.13%) Delta Lake
7 90 (6.36%) Amazon Redshift
8 79 (5.58%) Big Data
9 72 (5.08%) Tableau
10 62 (4.38%) Amazon Athena
11 58 (4.10%) SQL Server
12 49 (3.46%) Snowflake Schema
13 48 (3.39%) Relational Database
14 45 (3.18%) PostgreSQL
15 43 (3.04%) NoSQL
16 39 (2.75%) Azure SQL Database
17 36 (2.54%) Looker
18 31 (2.19%) Star Schema
19 30 (2.12%) Data Vault
20 27 (1.91%) Semantic Layer
Development Applications
1 140 (9.89%) Git
2 80 (5.65%) GitLab
3 62 (4.38%) JIRA
4 25 (1.77%) MLflow
5 24 (1.69%) Jenkins
6 8 (0.56%) RStudio
6 8 (0.56%) Terragrunt
7 7 (0.49%) Bitbucket
8 6 (0.42%) ERwin
8 6 (0.42%) Selenium
9 5 (0.35%) SonarQube
10 4 (0.28%) Claude Code
10 4 (0.28%) ER Studio
11 3 (0.21%) Artifactory
11 3 (0.21%) Atlassian Bamboo
11 3 (0.21%) Snyk
12 2 (0.14%) Postman
12 2 (0.14%) Sonatype Nexus
12 2 (0.14%) TeamCity
12 2 (0.14%) Yeoman
General
1 352 (24.86%) Social Skills
2 326 (23.02%) Finance
3 235 (16.60%) Analytical Skills
4 145 (10.24%) Public Sector
5 114 (8.05%) Banking
6 46 (3.25%) Marketing
7 33 (2.33%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 30 (2.12%) Retail
9 21 (1.48%) Front Office
10 20 (1.41%) Documentation Skills
11 19 (1.34%) Investment Banking
12 17 (1.20%) Manufacturing
12 17 (1.20%) Telecoms
13 16 (1.13%) Pharmaceutical
14 12 (0.85%) Billing
14 12 (0.85%) Financial Institution
15 11 (0.78%) Influencing Skills
15 11 (0.78%) Law
15 11 (0.78%) Publishing
16 10 (0.71%) Legal
Job Titles
1 653 (46.12%) Data Engineer
2 212 (14.97%) Senior
3 159 (11.23%) Lead
4 155 (10.95%) Architect
5 134 (9.46%) Senior Data Engineer
6 87 (6.14%) Data Architect
7 76 (5.37%) Developer
8 66 (4.66%) AWS Engineer
9 64 (4.52%) Analyst
10 56 (3.95%) AWS Data Engineer
11 53 (3.74%) Databricks Engineer
12 52 (3.67%) Snowflake Engineer
13 49 (3.46%) Azure Engineer
13 49 (3.46%) Lead Data Engineer
14 41 (2.90%) Databricks Data Engineer
15 40 (2.82%) Consultant
15 40 (2.82%) Snowflake Data Engineer
15 40 (2.82%) Solutions Architect
16 36 (2.54%) Data Analyst
17 33 (2.33%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 208 (14.69%) Terraform
2 207 (14.62%) PySpark
3 92 (6.50%) Kafka
4 55 (3.88%) REST
5 33 (2.33%) React
6 27 (1.91%) .NET
6 27 (1.91%) JSON
7 24 (1.69%) Pandas
8 15 (1.06%) NumPy
8 15 (1.06%) scikit-learn
9 14 (0.99%) PyTorch
10 12 (0.85%) TensorFlow
11 11 (0.78%) FastAPI
11 11 (0.78%) LangChain
11 11 (0.78%) Microsoft Graph
12 10 (0.71%) Apache Avro
12 10 (0.71%) Great Expectations
12 10 (0.71%) pytest
12 10 (0.71%) Spring
13 9 (0.64%) XML
Miscellaneous
1 182 (12.85%) Cloud Native
2 64 (4.52%) Data Structures
3 62 (4.38%) Onboarding
4 57 (4.03%) Product Ownership
5 55 (3.88%) Legacy Systems
6 42 (2.97%) Distributed Systems
7 40 (2.82%) AI Agents
8 20 (1.41%) Greenfield Project
9 19 (1.34%) Data Protection Act
9 19 (1.34%) Distributed Computing
10 18 (1.27%) NHS
10 18 (1.27%) Virtual Team
11 17 (1.20%) Enterprise Software
12 15 (1.06%) Life Science
12 15 (1.06%) Management Information System
13 14 (0.99%) Algorithms
13 14 (0.99%) Analytical Mindset
14 13 (0.92%) Clustering
14 13 (0.92%) Data Fabric
15 12 (0.85%) Taxonomies
Operating Systems
1 33 (2.33%) Linux
2 28 (1.98%) Unix
3 8 (0.56%) Windows
4 2 (0.14%) Windows Server
5 1 (0.071%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 1 (0.071%) Robot Operating System
5 1 (0.071%) Ubuntu
5 1 (0.071%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 695 (49.08%) Data Pipeline
2 676 (47.74%) Analytics
3 546 (38.56%) Data Modelling
4 508 (35.88%) CI/CD
5 489 (34.53%) ETL
6 420 (29.66%) AI
7 348 (24.58%) DevOps
8 347 (24.51%) Agile
9 339 (23.94%) Business Intelligence
10 319 (22.53%) Data Governance
11 243 (17.16%) Machine Learning
12 233 (16.45%) Stakeholder Management
13 232 (16.38%) Problem-Solving
14 229 (16.17%) Data Architecture
14 229 (16.17%) Migration
15 227 (16.03%) Data Transformation
16 217 (15.32%) Validation
17 206 (14.55%) Infrastructure as Code
18 205 (14.48%) Decision-Making
19 202 (14.27%) Data Science
Programming Languages
1 771 (54.45%) SQL
2 720 (50.85%) Python
3 97 (6.85%) Java
4 44 (3.11%) Data Analysis Expressions
5 39 (2.75%) PowerShell
5 39 (2.75%) Scala
6 35 (2.47%) Bash
7 31 (2.19%) C#
8 27 (1.91%) JavaScript
9 23 (1.62%) R
10 21 (1.48%) T-SQL
11 17 (1.20%) PL/SQL
12 15 (1.06%) Shell Script
13 13 (0.92%) Bicep
13 13 (0.92%) TypeScript
14 11 (0.78%) Kusto Query Language
15 9 (0.64%) SAS Macro
16 7 (0.49%) LookML
16 7 (0.49%) SPARQL
17 6 (0.42%) Cypher
Qualifications
1 279 (19.70%) Security Cleared
2 234 (16.53%) SC Cleared
3 75 (5.30%) Degree
4 35 (2.47%) Computer Science Degree
5 32 (2.26%) DV Cleared
6 29 (2.05%) Azure Certification
7 23 (1.62%) BPSS Clearance
8 22 (1.55%) AWS Certification
9 21 (1.48%) Master's Degree
10 14 (0.99%) DBS Check
11 11 (0.78%) SnowPro
12 9 (0.64%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
13 8 (0.56%) Microsoft Certification
14 6 (0.42%) PMI Certification
15 5 (0.35%) PMP
15 5 (0.35%) Tableau Certification
16 4 (0.28%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
17 3 (0.21%) PhD
17 3 (0.21%) TOGAF Certification
18 2 (0.14%) CAPM
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 465 (32.84%) Data Quality
2 74 (5.23%) QA
3 64 (4.52%) GDPR
4 25 (1.77%) Accessibility
5 12 (0.85%) SLA
6 5 (0.35%) PMO
7 4 (0.28%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 3 (0.21%) Actionable Recommendations
8 3 (0.21%) GRC
8 3 (0.21%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 3 (0.21%) ISO/IEC 42001
8 3 (0.21%) MiFID
8 3 (0.21%) NIST
9 2 (0.14%) California Consumer Privacy Act
9 2 (0.14%) Disclosure Scotland
9 2 (0.14%) EMIR
9 2 (0.14%) IFRS
9 2 (0.14%) IFRS 9
9 2 (0.14%) NCSC
9 2 (0.14%) Solvency II
System Software
1 125 (8.83%) Docker
2 5 (0.35%) Active Directory
3 1 (0.071%) Virtual Machines
Systems Management
1 97 (6.85%) Kubernetes
2 25 (1.77%) Ansible
3 19 (1.34%) Grafana
4 10 (0.71%) Prometheus
5 7 (0.49%) Control-M
6 6 (0.42%) Kibana
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%) Kubeflow
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
9 1 (0.071%) Thomson Reuters DACS
Vendors
1 376 (26.55%) Databricks
2 258 (18.22%) Microsoft
3 68 (4.80%) Google
3 68 (4.80%) Informatica
4 67 (4.73%) Oracle
5 29 (2.05%) SAP
6 28 (1.98%) Foundry
7 26 (1.84%) Talend
8 25 (1.77%) Palantir
9 22 (1.55%) Salesforce
10 17 (1.20%) Cloudera
11 14 (0.99%) OpenAI
12 13 (0.92%) ServiceNow
13 12 (0.85%) Teradata
13 12 (0.85%) Trend Micro
14 9 (0.64%) Adobe
15 7 (0.49%) Bloomberg
15 7 (0.49%) Hitachi
15 7 (0.49%) InterSystems
15 7 (0.49%) Splunk