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

6 months to
31 Mar 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 83 146 218
Rank change year-on-year +63 +72 -16
Contract jobs citing Data Engineering 1,135 457 411
As % of all contract jobs in England 2.98% 1.88% 1.09%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.47% 2.07% 1.26%
Number of daily rates quoted 791 321 311
10th Percentile £400 £400 £413
25th Percentile £450 £459 £475
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £550 £560
Median % change year-on-year -4.55% -1.79% -6.67%
75th Percentile £625 £688 £688
90th Percentile £750 £838 £750
UK median daily rate £525 £525 £550
% change year-on-year - -4.55% -8.33%
Number of hourly rates quoted 15 12 10
10th Percentile £53.45 £22.00 £29.51
25th Percentile £65.00 £22.38 £32.19
Median hourly rate £70.00 £25.97 £35.00
Median % change year-on-year +169.59% -25.81% -53.33%
75th Percentile £80.88 £35.94 £48.56
90th Percentile £89.00 £63.88 £60.88
UK median hourly rate £70.00 £25.97 £35.00
% change year-on-year +169.59% -25.81% -

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 32,752 22,033 32,691
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 86.09% 90.76% 86.75%
Number of daily rates quoted 20,983 14,520 21,608
10th Percentile £313 £312 £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 2,011 860 2,165
10th Percentile £15.34 £15.00 £13.00
25th Percentile £19.25 £20.00 £16.00
Median hourly rate £37.00 £32.50 £32.50
Median % change year-on-year +13.85% - -13.33%
75th Percentile £65.00 £65.00 £58.00
90th Percentile £77.50 £76.34 £71.25
UK median hourly rate £35.50 £31.88 £32.50
% change year-on-year +11.36% -1.91% -10.48%

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 31 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 31 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 31 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 +58 740 £550 -4.35% 253
Midlands +25 114 £515 +3.00% 51
North of England -5 109 £473 -5.50% 110
West Midlands +19 90 £525 -2.78% 36
South West +16 69 £538 -14.00% 49
North West -10 49 £471 -0.79% 59
South East -35 45 £550 +10.00% 111
Yorkshire -30 39 £475 -17.39% 40
North East +7 21 £450 -5.26% 13
East Midlands -22 21 £447 -5.89% 15
East of England -27 20 £575 +35.29% 34
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
1 170 (14.98%) Apache Spark
2 115 (10.13%) Apache Airflow
3 75 (6.61%) Apache
4 24 (2.11%) SAS
5 19 (1.67%) Palantir Foundry
6 11 (0.97%) Confluence
7 8 (0.70%) Appian
8 7 (0.62%) Apache Superset
9 4 (0.35%) Microsoft Exchange
10 3 (0.26%) Jupyter
11 2 (0.18%) SharePoint
12 1 (0.088%) Apache Synapse
12 1 (0.088%) ArcGIS
12 1 (0.088%) Camunda
12 1 (0.088%) CMS
12 1 (0.088%) IBM HTTP Server
Applications
1 22 (1.94%) Microsoft Excel
2 10 (0.88%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 8 (0.70%) Microsoft Office
4 6 (0.53%) Spreadsheet
5 4 (0.35%) MS Visio
6 3 (0.26%) Microsoft Project
6 3 (0.26%) Trello
7 2 (0.18%) Chatbot
Business Applications
1 4 (0.35%) Aladdin
2 3 (0.26%) BambooHR
2 3 (0.26%) SAP BPC
3 2 (0.18%) Salesforce CRM
3 2 (0.18%) SAP S/4HANA
4 1 (0.088%) Actimize
4 1 (0.088%) Markit EDM
4 1 (0.088%) Maximo
4 1 (0.088%) Misys Midas
4 1 (0.088%) SAP ECC
Cloud Services
1 534 (47.05%) Azure
2 405 (35.68%) AWS
3 260 (22.91%) Power Platform
4 189 (16.65%) Azure Data Factory
5 160 (14.10%) GCP
6 139 (12.25%) Snowflake
7 136 (11.98%) Azure Synapse Analytics
8 126 (11.10%) GitHub
9 121 (10.66%) Amazon S3
10 101 (8.90%) dbt
11 99 (8.72%) Serverless
12 95 (8.37%) Azure DevOps
13 77 (6.78%) AWS Lambda
14 75 (6.61%) GitHub Actions
15 46 (4.05%) AWS CloudFormation
16 27 (2.38%) AWS Step Functions
17 24 (2.11%) Amazon EMR
17 24 (2.11%) Azure Machine Learning
17 24 (2.11%) Collibra
17 24 (2.11%) Dagster
Communications & Networking
1 5 (0.44%) RTP
2 4 (0.35%) Cisco IPT
2 4 (0.35%) Kerberos
2 4 (0.35%) Network Security
3 3 (0.26%) VPN
4 1 (0.088%) 4G
4 1 (0.088%) 5G
4 1 (0.088%) Firewall
4 1 (0.088%) SAN
4 1 (0.088%) SMS
4 1 (0.088%) TCP/IP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 237 (20.88%) Power BI
2 223 (19.65%) Data Warehouse
3 176 (15.51%) Data Lake
4 102 (8.99%) Metadata
5 79 (6.96%) SQL Server
6 75 (6.61%) Delta Lake
6 75 (6.61%) NoSQL
7 74 (6.52%) Big Data
8 63 (5.55%) Azure SQL Database
9 60 (5.29%) Amazon Redshift
9 60 (5.29%) Snowflake Schema
9 60 (5.29%) Tableau
10 57 (5.02%) Relational Database
11 56 (4.93%) BigQuery
12 48 (4.23%) Amazon Athena
12 48 (4.23%) PostgreSQL
13 38 (3.35%) Hadoop
14 35 (3.08%) SQL Server Integration Services
15 32 (2.82%) Spark SQL
16 22 (1.94%) Mixpanel
Development Applications
1 150 (13.22%) Git
2 47 (4.14%) GitLab
3 43 (3.79%) MLflow
4 40 (3.52%) Jenkins
5 28 (2.47%) JIRA
6 7 (0.62%) Selenium
7 6 (0.53%) SonarQube
8 3 (0.26%) JUnit
8 3 (0.26%) Maven
8 3 (0.26%) Postman
8 3 (0.26%) Robot Framework
8 3 (0.26%) Terragrunt
8 3 (0.26%) Visual Studio Code
9 2 (0.18%) Bitbucket
9 2 (0.18%) Cucumber
9 2 (0.18%) Mockito
9 2 (0.18%) Snyk
9 2 (0.18%) Visual Studio
10 1 (0.088%) REST Assured
10 1 (0.088%) Sonatype Nexus
General
1 283 (24.93%) Social Skills
2 280 (24.67%) Finance
3 175 (15.42%) Analytical Skills
4 93 (8.19%) Public Sector
5 60 (5.29%) Banking
6 31 (2.73%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 20 (1.76%) Retail
8 17 (1.50%) Documentation Skills
8 17 (1.50%) Front Office
9 15 (1.32%) Investment Banking
9 15 (1.32%) Marketing
10 14 (1.23%) Influencing Skills
10 14 (1.23%) Telecoms
11 12 (1.06%) Financial Institution
11 12 (1.06%) Legal
12 9 (0.79%) Pharmaceutical
13 7 (0.62%) Publishing
14 6 (0.53%) Back Office
14 6 (0.53%) Law
14 6 (0.53%) Military
Job Titles
1 546 (48.11%) Data Engineer
2 145 (12.78%) Senior
3 135 (11.89%) Lead
4 102 (8.99%) Architect
5 101 (8.90%) Senior Data Engineer
6 72 (6.34%) Azure Engineer
7 68 (5.99%) Developer
8 60 (5.29%) Azure Data Engineer
9 55 (4.85%) Analyst
10 54 (4.76%) Data Architect
11 53 (4.67%) Lead Data Engineer
12 46 (4.05%) Snowflake Engineer
13 44 (3.88%) AWS Engineer
13 44 (3.88%) Data Scientist
14 39 (3.44%) Snowflake Data Engineer
15 37 (3.26%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
16 35 (3.08%) Consultant
17 32 (2.82%) Data Analyst
18 30 (2.64%) AWS Data Engineer
18 30 (2.64%) Principal Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 184 (16.21%) PySpark
2 143 (12.60%) Kafka
3 56 (4.93%) Pandas
4 46 (4.05%) PyTorch
5 45 (3.96%) scikit-learn
6 38 (3.35%) NumPy
7 35 (3.08%) TensorFlow
8 29 (2.56%) JSON
9 24 (2.11%) pytest
9 24 (2.11%) YAML
10 23 (2.03%) FastAPI
10 23 (2.03%) REST
11 21 (1.85%) LangChain
11 21 (1.85%) RESTful
12 20 (1.76%) React
12 20 (1.76%) Spring
13 19 (1.67%) Flask
14 18 (1.59%) Great Expectations
15 14 (1.23%) XML
16 13 (1.15%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 143 (12.60%) Cloud Native
2 39 (3.44%) Product Ownership
3 38 (3.35%) Distributed Systems
4 34 (3.00%) Legacy Systems
5 31 (2.73%) Algorithms
6 28 (2.47%) Distributed Computing
7 25 (2.20%) Data Structures
8 22 (1.94%) Hybrid Cloud
9 20 (1.76%) Onboarding
10 19 (1.67%) Greenfield Project
11 18 (1.59%) Analytical Mindset
11 18 (1.59%) Data Protection Act
12 17 (1.50%) AI Agents
13 14 (1.23%) Clustering
14 12 (1.06%) Fixed Income
15 11 (0.97%) NHS
16 10 (0.88%) Management Information System
16 10 (0.88%) Self-Motivation
17 9 (0.79%) Derivative
17 9 (0.79%) Replication
Operating Systems
1 29 (2.56%) Linux
2 16 (1.41%) Unix
3 8 (0.70%) VMS
4 3 (0.26%) Windows
5 2 (0.18%) Ubuntu
5 2 (0.18%) Windows Server
6 1 (0.088%) CentOS
6 1 (0.088%) Debian
Processes & Methodologies
1 572 (50.40%) Analytics
2 515 (45.37%) Data Pipeline
3 457 (40.26%) ETL
4 448 (39.47%) Data Modelling
5 391 (34.45%) CI/CD
6 298 (26.26%) Business Intelligence
7 295 (25.99%) AI
8 287 (25.29%) DevOps
9 281 (24.76%) Data Governance
10 280 (24.67%) Agile
11 230 (20.26%) Machine Learning
12 220 (19.38%) Problem-Solving
13 213 (18.77%) Data Science
14 182 (16.04%) Data Architecture
15 137 (12.07%) Decision-Making
16 131 (11.54%) Validation
17 127 (11.19%) Infrastructure as Code
18 119 (10.48%) Data Transformation
19 117 (10.31%) Migration
20 111 (9.78%) Performance Tuning
Programming Languages
1 649 (57.18%) Python
2 617 (54.36%) SQL
3 91 (8.02%) Java
4 66 (5.81%) Scala
5 44 (3.88%) C#
6 39 (3.44%) Data Analysis Expressions
7 30 (2.64%) Bash
8 29 (2.56%) PowerShell
9 23 (2.03%) JavaScript
10 20 (1.76%) T-SQL
11 19 (1.67%) R
12 18 (1.59%) Bicep
13 15 (1.32%) Go
14 12 (1.06%) TypeScript
15 10 (0.88%) Shell Script
16 9 (0.79%) PL/SQL
17 6 (0.53%) C++
17 6 (0.53%) Korn
18 5 (0.44%) SAS Macro
19 4 (0.35%) Rust
Qualifications
1 232 (20.44%) Security Cleared
2 197 (17.36%) SC Cleared
3 84 (7.40%) Degree
4 44 (3.88%) Azure Certification
5 39 (3.44%) Computer Science Degree
6 32 (2.82%) Master's Degree
7 19 (1.67%) DV Cleared
8 16 (1.41%) BPSS Clearance
9 13 (1.15%) AWS Certification
10 10 (0.88%) PhD
11 8 (0.70%) Microsoft Certification
12 4 (0.35%) DBS Check
12 4 (0.35%) Microsoft Certified Professional
13 3 (0.26%) SnowPro
14 2 (0.18%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
15 1 (0.088%) (ISC)2 CCSP
15 1 (0.088%) CCSP
15 1 (0.088%) Cisco Certification
15 1 (0.088%) CISSP
15 1 (0.088%) Tableau Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 316 (27.84%) Data Quality
2 88 (7.75%) GDPR
3 43 (3.79%) QA
4 13 (1.15%) Sarbanes-Oxley
5 9 (0.79%) Accessibility
6 6 (0.53%) HIPAA
7 5 (0.44%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 5 (0.44%) PERC
7 5 (0.44%) SOC 2
8 4 (0.35%) California Consumer Privacy Act
8 4 (0.35%) Solvency II
9 3 (0.26%) GRC
9 3 (0.26%) SLA
9 3 (0.26%) WCAG
10 2 (0.18%) HL7
10 2 (0.18%) MiFID
10 2 (0.18%) NIST
10 2 (0.18%) PCI DSS
10 2 (0.18%) PMO
11 1 (0.088%) ISO/IEC 42001
System Software
1 130 (11.45%) Docker
2 5 (0.44%) HDFS
3 3 (0.26%) Virtual Machines
4 1 (0.088%) Apache ZooKeeper
Systems Management
1 161 (14.19%) Terraform
2 127 (11.19%) Kubernetes
3 25 (2.20%) Prometheus
4 15 (1.32%) Grafana
5 5 (0.44%) Ansible
6 4 (0.35%) Argo
6 4 (0.35%) Kubeflow
7 3 (0.26%) Rancher
8 2 (0.18%) Hadoop YARN
8 2 (0.18%) Kibana
8 2 (0.18%) Nagios
8 2 (0.18%) Thomson Reuters DACS
9 1 (0.088%) Apache Ranger
9 1 (0.088%) Control-M
9 1 (0.088%) HP Fortify
9 1 (0.088%) Oozie
Vendors
1 323 (28.46%) Databricks
2 171 (15.07%) Microsoft
3 57 (5.02%) Google
4 46 (4.05%) Informatica
5 32 (2.82%) Oracle
6 26 (2.29%) Foundry
6 26 (2.29%) Talend
7 21 (1.85%) OpenAI
7 21 (1.85%) Palantir
8 19 (1.67%) Splunk
9 16 (1.41%) SAP
10 14 (1.23%) Cloudera
11 11 (0.97%) Denodo
12 10 (0.88%) ServiceNow
13 9 (0.79%) UiPath
14 8 (0.70%) Automation Anywhere
14 8 (0.70%) Salesforce
15 6 (0.53%) MicroStrategy
16 5 (0.44%) Virgin Media
17 4 (0.35%) Guidewire