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 20 August 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
20 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 85 149 195
Rank change year-on-year +64 +46 -4
Contract jobs citing Data Engineering 1,391 505 409
As % of all contract jobs in England 3.05% 1.83% 1.23%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.59% 2.02% 1.44%
Number of daily rates quoted 972 321 302
10th Percentile £400 £363 £377
25th Percentile £450 £449 £475
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £525 £575
Median % change year-on-year - -8.70% -8.00%
75th Percentile £638 £650 £700
90th Percentile £750 £775 £775
UK median daily rate £525 £513 £575
% change year-on-year +2.44% -10.87% -8.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 18 6 11
10th Percentile - £30.73 £30.37
25th Percentile £21.25 £42.03 £33.13
Median hourly rate £67.00 £52.50 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +27.62% -12.50% -23.08%
75th Percentile £75.00 £62.19 -
90th Percentile £84.78 £87.50 -
UK median hourly rate £65.00 £52.50 £35.00
% change year-on-year +23.81% +50.00% -55.13%

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 38,776 25,061 28,469
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 84.95% 90.80% 85.83%
Number of daily rates quoted 24,043 15,975 18,472
10th Percentile £325 £300 £313
25th Percentile £425 £404 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £510 £530
Median % change year-on-year +2.94% -3.77% -3.64%
75th Percentile £630 £626 £650
90th Percentile £738 £738 £756
UK median daily rate £525 £500 £525
% change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -3.58%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,543 1,444 1,583
10th Percentile £14.25 £14.22 £14.05
25th Percentile £19.25 £17.88 £18.12
Median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £43.00
Median % change year-on-year +74.79% -41.51% +4.83%
75th Percentile £68.00 £50.75 £65.00
90th Percentile £81.21 £70.00 £75.00
UK median hourly rate £41.63 £25.15 £40.94
% change year-on-year +65.54% -38.57% -0.24%

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 20 August 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 20 August 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 20 August 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 +52 838 £550 - 629
North of England +45 180 £469 -1.32% 167
Midlands +38 142 £486 +7.93% 50
West Midlands +31 117 £475 +1.28% 41
South East -6 92 £525 +11.94% 152
Yorkshire +25 90 £475 +11.76% 36
South West +18 73 £523 -3.91% 68
North West -7 55 £500 - 100
North East -7 37 £425 -20.93% 33
East of England -3 28 £575 -4.17% 36
East Midlands -3 22 £525 +16.54% 9
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
1 169 (12.15%) Apache Airflow
2 166 (11.93%) Apache Spark
3 110 (7.91%) Apache
4 37 (2.66%) SAS
5 27 (1.94%) Confluence
6 22 (1.58%) Jupyter
7 19 (1.37%) Palantir Foundry
8 13 (0.93%) SharePoint
9 7 (0.50%) Apache Superset
10 5 (0.36%) Apache Solr
11 4 (0.29%) ArcGIS
12 2 (0.14%) Microsoft Exchange
12 2 (0.14%) PowerExchange
13 1 (0.072%) Apache Synapse
13 1 (0.072%) CICS
13 1 (0.072%) nginx
Applications
1 16 (1.15%) Microsoft Excel
2 7 (0.50%) Spreadsheet
3 6 (0.43%) Microsoft Office
4 5 (0.36%) Chatbot
5 4 (0.29%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 2 (0.14%) MS Visio
7 1 (0.072%) Notion
Business Applications
1 11 (0.79%) Aladdin
2 6 (0.43%) Dynamics CRM
3 5 (0.36%) BambooHR
4 4 (0.29%) NetSuite
4 4 (0.29%) Sage X3
4 4 (0.29%) SAP S/4HANA
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 (0.072%) FIS Private Capital Suite
6 1 (0.072%) MIS ActiveH
6 1 (0.072%) SAP BPC
6 1 (0.072%) SAP ECC
6 1 (0.072%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
Cloud Services
1 589 (42.34%) Azure
2 517 (37.17%) AWS
3 270 (19.41%) Power Platform
4 216 (15.53%) Snowflake
5 190 (13.66%) GCP
6 176 (12.65%) dbt
7 156 (11.21%) Azure Data Factory
8 145 (10.42%) Amazon S3
9 132 (9.49%) Azure Synapse Analytics
10 131 (9.42%) Azure DevOps
11 114 (8.20%) Serverless
12 109 (7.84%) GitHub
13 93 (6.69%) AWS Lambda
14 57 (4.10%) GitHub Actions
15 33 (2.37%) Amazon EMR
16 30 (2.16%) Amazon Bedrock
17 26 (1.87%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 26 (1.87%) Azure AI
17 26 (1.87%) Microsoft Purview
18 24 (1.73%) Amazon SageMaker
Communications & Networking
1 5 (0.36%) Firewall
2 3 (0.22%) DNS
2 3 (0.22%) Network Security
3 2 (0.14%) RTP
4 1 (0.072%) Internet
4 1 (0.072%) MIMO
4 1 (0.072%) MQTT
Database & Business Intelligence
1 276 (19.84%) Data Warehouse
2 254 (18.26%) Power BI
3 189 (13.59%) Data Lake
4 151 (10.86%) Metadata
5 101 (7.26%) BigQuery
6 94 (6.76%) Amazon Redshift
7 93 (6.69%) Delta Lake
8 80 (5.75%) Big Data
9 76 (5.46%) Tableau
10 62 (4.46%) SQL Server
11 60 (4.31%) Amazon Athena
11 60 (4.31%) NoSQL
12 52 (3.74%) Snowflake Schema
13 50 (3.59%) PostgreSQL
14 48 (3.45%) Relational Database
15 40 (2.88%) Azure SQL Database
16 34 (2.44%) Star Schema
17 33 (2.37%) Looker
18 30 (2.16%) Data Vault
19 28 (2.01%) Semantic Layer
Development Applications
1 134 (9.63%) Git
2 75 (5.39%) GitLab
3 57 (4.10%) JIRA
4 24 (1.73%) Jenkins
5 21 (1.51%) MLflow
6 6 (0.43%) Bitbucket
6 6 (0.43%) SonarQube
6 6 (0.43%) Terragrunt
7 5 (0.36%) ERwin
7 5 (0.36%) RStudio
8 4 (0.29%) Selenium
9 3 (0.22%) Artifactory
9 3 (0.22%) Claude Code
9 3 (0.22%) ER Studio
9 3 (0.22%) Snyk
9 3 (0.22%) Sonatype Nexus
10 2 (0.14%) Atlassian Bamboo
10 2 (0.14%) Postman
10 2 (0.14%) Yeoman
11 1 (0.072%) TeamCity
General
1 340 (24.44%) Social Skills
2 322 (23.15%) Finance
3 225 (16.18%) Analytical Skills
4 144 (10.35%) Public Sector
5 106 (7.62%) Banking
6 43 (3.09%) Marketing
7 37 (2.66%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 30 (2.16%) Retail
9 22 (1.58%) Telecoms
10 21 (1.51%) Documentation Skills
10 21 (1.51%) Front Office
11 19 (1.37%) Investment Banking
12 15 (1.08%) Manufacturing
13 14 (1.01%) Pharmaceutical
14 13 (0.93%) Financial Institution
15 11 (0.79%) Influencing Skills
16 10 (0.72%) Billing
17 9 (0.65%) Law
17 9 (0.65%) Legal
17 9 (0.65%) Military
Job Titles
1 642 (46.15%) Data Engineer
2 198 (14.23%) Senior
3 163 (11.72%) Architect
4 162 (11.65%) Lead
5 122 (8.77%) Senior Data Engineer
6 89 (6.40%) Data Architect
7 75 (5.39%) Developer
8 68 (4.89%) AWS Engineer
9 62 (4.46%) Analyst
10 58 (4.17%) AWS Data Engineer
11 55 (3.95%) Lead Data Engineer
12 53 (3.81%) Snowflake Engineer
13 51 (3.67%) Azure Engineer
14 43 (3.09%) Snowflake Data Engineer
15 42 (3.02%) Solutions Architect
16 41 (2.95%) Consultant
17 39 (2.80%) Azure Data Engineer
18 36 (2.59%) Data Analyst
19 35 (2.52%) Data Scientist
20 34 (2.44%) Python Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 207 (14.88%) PySpark
2 188 (13.52%) Terraform
3 102 (7.33%) Kafka
4 46 (3.31%) REST
5 30 (2.16%) React
6 26 (1.87%) Pandas
7 25 (1.80%) JSON
8 22 (1.58%) .NET
9 17 (1.22%) scikit-learn
10 15 (1.08%) NumPy
10 15 (1.08%) PyTorch
10 15 (1.08%) Spring
11 13 (0.93%) TensorFlow
12 11 (0.79%) Microsoft Graph
13 10 (0.72%) FastAPI
13 10 (0.72%) pytest
14 9 (0.65%) Great Expectations
14 9 (0.65%) LangChain
14 9 (0.65%) Node.js
14 9 (0.65%) Spring Boot
Miscellaneous
1 184 (13.23%) Cloud Native
2 58 (4.17%) Legacy Systems
3 57 (4.10%) Data Structures
4 54 (3.88%) Product Ownership
5 50 (3.59%) Distributed Systems
6 49 (3.52%) Onboarding
7 34 (2.44%) AI Agents
8 23 (1.65%) Data Protection Act
9 22 (1.58%) Greenfield Project
10 21 (1.51%) Distributed Computing
11 17 (1.22%) NHS
11 17 (1.22%) Virtual Team
12 16 (1.15%) Clustering
13 15 (1.08%) Life Science
14 14 (1.01%) Algorithms
14 14 (1.01%) Analytical Mindset
15 13 (0.93%) Enterprise Software
15 13 (0.93%) Management Information System
16 11 (0.79%) Reference Data
17 10 (0.72%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 36 (2.59%) Linux
2 29 (2.08%) Unix
3 8 (0.58%) Windows
4 2 (0.14%) VMS
4 2 (0.14%) Windows Server
5 1 (0.072%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 1 (0.072%) Robot Operating System
5 1 (0.072%) Ubuntu
Processes & Methodologies
1 689 (49.53%) Analytics
2 670 (48.17%) Data Pipeline
3 525 (37.74%) Data Modelling
4 485 (34.87%) CI/CD
5 474 (34.08%) ETL
6 407 (29.26%) AI
7 344 (24.73%) Agile
8 340 (24.44%) Business Intelligence
9 329 (23.65%) DevOps
10 307 (22.07%) Data Governance
11 243 (17.47%) Machine Learning
12 234 (16.82%) Problem-Solving
13 210 (15.10%) Data Science
14 209 (15.03%) Data Architecture
15 207 (14.88%) Migration
16 206 (14.81%) Data Transformation
16 206 (14.81%) Validation
17 205 (14.74%) Decision-Making
18 203 (14.59%) Stakeholder Management
19 178 (12.80%) Infrastructure as Code
Programming Languages
1 752 (54.06%) SQL
2 698 (50.18%) Python
3 106 (7.62%) Java
4 40 (2.88%) Data Analysis Expressions
5 37 (2.66%) Scala
6 35 (2.52%) Bash
7 34 (2.44%) PowerShell
8 30 (2.16%) C#
9 23 (1.65%) JavaScript
10 20 (1.44%) T-SQL
11 19 (1.37%) R
12 17 (1.22%) PL/SQL
13 14 (1.01%) Shell Script
14 13 (0.93%) Bicep
15 11 (0.79%) SAS Macro
15 11 (0.79%) TypeScript
16 8 (0.58%) Kusto Query Language
17 7 (0.50%) SPARQL
18 6 (0.43%) Cypher
19 5 (0.36%) Go
Qualifications
1 265 (19.05%) Security Cleared
2 226 (16.25%) SC Cleared
3 81 (5.82%) Degree
4 41 (2.95%) Computer Science Degree
5 28 (2.01%) Azure Certification
6 26 (1.87%) DV Cleared
7 24 (1.73%) BPSS Clearance
8 21 (1.51%) Master's Degree
9 16 (1.15%) AWS Certification
10 14 (1.01%) DBS Check
11 8 (0.58%) Microsoft Certification
11 8 (0.58%) SnowPro
12 7 (0.50%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
13 5 (0.36%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 5 (0.36%) Tableau Certification
14 3 (0.22%) PhD
14 3 (0.22%) PMI Certification
15 2 (0.14%) CSPO
15 2 (0.14%) PMP
16 1 (0.072%) TOGAF Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 426 (30.63%) Data Quality
2 71 (5.10%) GDPR
3 69 (4.96%) QA
4 25 (1.80%) Accessibility
5 12 (0.86%) SLA
6 4 (0.29%) Sarbanes-Oxley
6 4 (0.29%) Solvency II
7 3 (0.22%) GxP
7 3 (0.22%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 3 (0.22%) ISO/IEC 42001
7 3 (0.22%) MiFID
7 3 (0.22%) NIST
7 3 (0.22%) PMO
8 2 (0.14%) 21 CFR Part 11
8 2 (0.14%) Actionable Recommendations
8 2 (0.14%) California Consumer Privacy Act
8 2 (0.14%) EMIR
8 2 (0.14%) GRC
8 2 (0.14%) IFRS
8 2 (0.14%) IFRS 9
System Software
1 117 (8.41%) Docker
2 5 (0.36%) Active Directory
3 2 (0.14%) Virtual Machines
Systems Management
1 98 (7.05%) Kubernetes
2 20 (1.44%) Ansible
3 16 (1.15%) Grafana
4 8 (0.58%) Prometheus
5 6 (0.43%) Control-M
6 5 (0.36%) Kibana
7 3 (0.22%) logstash
8 2 (0.14%) Argo
8 2 (0.14%) Puppet
8 2 (0.14%) Rancher
8 2 (0.14%) Thomson Reuters DACS
9 1 (0.072%) Cilium
9 1 (0.072%) IBM Guardium
9 1 (0.072%) Kubeflow
9 1 (0.072%) Kustomize
9 1 (0.072%) Nagios
9 1 (0.072%) QRadar
9 1 (0.072%) Single Sign-On
Vendors
1 352 (25.31%) Databricks
2 253 (18.19%) Microsoft
3 69 (4.96%) Informatica
4 62 (4.46%) Google
5 61 (4.39%) Oracle
6 30 (2.16%) Foundry
6 30 (2.16%) SAP
7 27 (1.94%) Palantir
8 26 (1.87%) Talend
9 21 (1.51%) Salesforce
10 16 (1.15%) Cloudera
11 14 (1.01%) OpenAI
11 14 (1.01%) Splunk
12 13 (0.93%) ServiceNow
13 12 (0.86%) Trend Micro
14 9 (0.65%) Denodo
14 9 (0.65%) Teradata
15 8 (0.58%) Adobe
15 8 (0.58%) Workday
16 7 (0.50%) Hitachi