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

6 months to
9 Oct 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 86 138 184
Rank change year-on-year +52 +46 +36
Contract jobs citing Data Engineering 1,423 583 440
As % of all contract jobs in England 3.08% 2.07% 1.36%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.63% 2.28% 1.57%
Number of daily rates quoted 992 363 327
10th Percentile £400 £352 £400
25th Percentile £446 £425 £468
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £525 £575
Median % change year-on-year - -8.70% -4.17%
75th Percentile £650 £650 £676
90th Percentile £738 £760 £775
UK median daily rate £525 £520 £550
% change year-on-year +0.96% -5.45% -8.33%
Number of hourly rates quoted 19 5 5
10th Percentile - £36.73 £23.35
25th Percentile £21.25 £38.96 £26.50
Median hourly rate £62.50 £52.50 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +19.05% -12.50% -23.08%
75th Percentile £72.08 £65.00 -
90th Percentile £83.94 £92.00 -
UK median hourly rate £62.40 £58.75 £43.25
% change year-on-year +6.21% +35.84% -42.72%

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 39,199 25,531 28,009
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 84.82% 90.87% 86.48%
Number of daily rates quoted 23,678 16,181 17,100
10th Percentile £325 £294 £313
25th Percentile £425 £404 £419
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £510 £525
Median % change year-on-year +2.94% -2.86% -4.55%
75th Percentile £638 £625 £638
90th Percentile £738 £725 £750
UK median daily rate £525 £500 £525
% change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -2.78%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,975 1,587 1,157
10th Percentile £13.69 £14.50 £15.00
25th Percentile £17.36 £17.79 £20.19
Median hourly rate £40.00 £25.15 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year +59.05% -40.82% -4.49%
75th Percentile £67.47 £45.00 £66.61
90th Percentile £78.75 £67.25 £74.92
UK median hourly rate £37.50 £25.15 £40.00
% change year-on-year +49.11% -37.13% -8.31%

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 October 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 October 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 October 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 +39 870 £550 - 1,290
North of England +28 190 £475 +6.74% 259
Midlands +27 124 £475 +2.70% 90
West Midlands +25 102 £475 -17.39% 67
South East -9 97 £513 +15.17% 159
South West +42 90 £525 -14.29% 77
Yorkshire +29 88 £500 +5.26% 70
North West -21 65 £500 +16.28% 154
North East -9 37 £425 -5.56% 35
East Midlands -6 22 £503 +15.57% 22
East of England -23 20 £538 +13.16% 43
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
1 179 (12.58%) Apache Airflow
2 162 (11.38%) Apache Spark
3 140 (9.84%) Apache
4 30 (2.11%) Confluence
5 28 (1.97%) SAS
6 19 (1.34%) Jupyter
7 16 (1.12%) Palantir Foundry
8 15 (1.05%) SharePoint
9 5 (0.35%) Apache Solr
10 4 (0.28%) ArcGIS
10 4 (0.28%) nginx
11 3 (0.21%) Apache Superset
12 2 (0.14%) PowerExchange
13 1 (0.070%) Apache Pulsar
13 1 (0.070%) CICS
13 1 (0.070%) Microsoft Exchange
13 1 (0.070%) Oracle Workflow
Applications
1 11 (0.77%) Microsoft Excel
2 7 (0.49%) Chatbot
2 7 (0.49%) Spreadsheet
3 3 (0.21%) Microsoft Office
4 2 (0.14%) MS Visio
5 1 (0.070%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 1 (0.070%) Notion
Business Applications
1 10 (0.70%) Aladdin
2 5 (0.35%) Dynamics CRM
2 5 (0.35%) SAP S/4HANA
3 4 (0.28%) NetSuite
3 4 (0.28%) Sage X3
4 2 (0.14%) Cloudability
4 2 (0.14%) Endur
4 2 (0.14%) Oracle Assets
4 2 (0.14%) Temenos T24
4 2 (0.14%) Workday HCM
5 1 (0.070%) FIS Private Capital Suite
5 1 (0.070%) Markit EDM
5 1 (0.070%) MIS ActiveH
5 1 (0.070%) Oracle EBS
5 1 (0.070%) Salesforce CRM
5 1 (0.070%) SAP ECC
5 1 (0.070%) SAP Oil and Gas
5 1 (0.070%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
Cloud Services
1 592 (41.60%) Azure
2 527 (37.03%) AWS
3 261 (18.34%) Power Platform
4 238 (16.73%) Snowflake
5 224 (15.74%) GCP
6 222 (15.60%) dbt
7 168 (11.81%) Amazon S3
8 163 (11.45%) Azure Data Factory
9 129 (9.07%) Serverless
10 125 (8.78%) Azure DevOps
11 116 (8.15%) Azure Synapse Analytics
12 105 (7.38%) AWS Lambda
12 105 (7.38%) GitHub
13 68 (4.78%) Azure Databricks
14 53 (3.72%) GitHub Actions
15 40 (2.81%) Amazon EMR
16 36 (2.53%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 35 (2.46%) Amazon Bedrock
18 34 (2.39%) Microsoft Purview
19 31 (2.18%) Azure AI
Communications & Networking
1 8 (0.56%) Network Security
2 7 (0.49%) DNS
3 5 (0.35%) Firewall
4 2 (0.14%) Broadband
5 1 (0.070%) HTTP
5 1 (0.070%) HTTPS
5 1 (0.070%) Internet
5 1 (0.070%) MIMO
5 1 (0.070%) MQTT
5 1 (0.070%) Radio Access Network
5 1 (0.070%) Reverse Proxy
5 1 (0.070%) SMS
5 1 (0.070%) SSL
5 1 (0.070%) TCP/IP
5 1 (0.070%) tcpdump
5 1 (0.070%) Wireshark
Database & Business Intelligence
1 289 (20.31%) Data Warehouse
2 249 (17.50%) Power BI
3 172 (12.09%) Metadata
4 168 (11.81%) Data Lake
5 113 (7.94%) BigQuery
6 100 (7.03%) Delta Lake
7 96 (6.75%) Amazon Redshift
8 72 (5.06%) Big Data
9 63 (4.43%) Amazon Athena
10 59 (4.15%) Tableau
11 53 (3.72%) SQL Server
12 48 (3.37%) Snowflake Schema
13 46 (3.23%) NoSQL
14 44 (3.09%) PostgreSQL
15 40 (2.81%) Relational Database
16 36 (2.53%) Looker
17 32 (2.25%) Amazon RDS
18 31 (2.18%) Azure SQL Database
19 29 (2.04%) Data Vault
20 26 (1.83%) Semantic Layer
Development Applications
1 152 (10.68%) Git
2 90 (6.32%) GitLab
3 50 (3.51%) JIRA
4 24 (1.69%) Jenkins
5 22 (1.55%) MLflow
6 8 (0.56%) Bitbucket
6 8 (0.56%) Claude Code
6 8 (0.56%) RStudio
6 8 (0.56%) Terragrunt
7 7 (0.49%) Selenium
8 6 (0.42%) ERwin
9 4 (0.28%) ER Studio
9 4 (0.28%) Postman
10 3 (0.21%) Atlassian Bamboo
10 3 (0.21%) Cucumber
10 3 (0.21%) TeamCity
11 2 (0.14%) Artifactory
11 2 (0.14%) SonarQube
11 2 (0.14%) Sonatype Nexus
11 2 (0.14%) Yeoman
General
1 376 (26.42%) Social Skills
2 318 (22.35%) Finance
3 220 (15.46%) Analytical Skills
4 145 (10.19%) Public Sector
5 132 (9.28%) Banking
6 44 (3.09%) Marketing
7 32 (2.25%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 26 (1.83%) Retail
9 25 (1.76%) Front Office
9 25 (1.76%) Investment Banking
10 19 (1.34%) Pharmaceutical
11 16 (1.12%) Documentation Skills
11 16 (1.12%) Manufacturing
12 13 (0.91%) Aerospace
12 13 (0.91%) Billing
12 13 (0.91%) Telecoms
13 12 (0.84%) Back Office
13 12 (0.84%) Financial Institution
14 11 (0.77%) Law
15 10 (0.70%) Publishing
Job Titles
1 664 (46.66%) Data Engineer
2 219 (15.39%) Senior
3 168 (11.81%) Lead
4 147 (10.33%) Senior Data Engineer
5 146 (10.26%) Architect
6 78 (5.48%) Developer
7 75 (5.27%) Data Architect
8 69 (4.85%) AWS Engineer
9 66 (4.64%) Analyst
10 60 (4.22%) Databricks Engineer
10 60 (4.22%) Snowflake Engineer
11 59 (4.15%) AWS Data Engineer
12 51 (3.58%) Azure Engineer
13 50 (3.51%) Lead Data Engineer
13 50 (3.51%) Snowflake Data Engineer
14 48 (3.37%) Databricks Data Engineer
15 41 (2.88%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
16 39 (2.74%) GCP Engineer
17 37 (2.60%) Data Analyst
18 35 (2.46%) Consultant
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 220 (15.46%) Terraform
2 211 (14.83%) PySpark
3 95 (6.68%) Kafka
4 60 (4.22%) REST
5 29 (2.04%) .NET
5 29 (2.04%) React
6 26 (1.83%) JSON
7 21 (1.48%) Pandas
8 18 (1.26%) LangChain
9 15 (1.05%) PyTorch
10 14 (0.98%) pytest
10 14 (0.98%) RabbitMQ
11 13 (0.91%) FastAPI
12 12 (0.84%) Apache NiFi
12 12 (0.84%) Microsoft Graph
12 12 (0.84%) NumPy
12 12 (0.84%) scikit-learn
12 12 (0.84%) TensorFlow
13 10 (0.70%) LangGraph
13 10 (0.70%) LlamaIndex
Miscellaneous
1 194 (13.63%) Cloud Native
2 78 (5.48%) Onboarding
3 67 (4.71%) Data Structures
4 65 (4.57%) Product Ownership
5 48 (3.37%) AI Agents
5 48 (3.37%) Legacy Systems
6 41 (2.88%) Distributed Systems
7 25 (1.76%) Data Protection Act
8 22 (1.55%) Algorithms
9 21 (1.48%) Enterprise Software
10 20 (1.41%) Distributed Computing
10 20 (1.41%) Management Information System
11 18 (1.26%) Virtual Team
12 16 (1.12%) Life Science
13 14 (0.98%) Clustering
13 14 (0.98%) Data Fabric
14 13 (0.91%) Analytical Mindset
14 13 (0.91%) Greenfield Project
14 13 (0.91%) NHS
14 13 (0.91%) Reference Data
Operating Systems
1 30 (2.11%) Linux
2 22 (1.55%) Unix
3 9 (0.63%) Windows
4 1 (0.070%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 1 (0.070%) Robot Operating System
4 1 (0.070%) Ubuntu
4 1 (0.070%) Windows Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 711 (49.96%) Data Pipeline
2 655 (46.03%) Analytics
3 565 (39.70%) Data Modelling
4 534 (37.53%) CI/CD
5 494 (34.72%) ETL
6 456 (32.04%) AI
7 372 (26.14%) Agile
8 361 (25.37%) DevOps
9 329 (23.12%) Business Intelligence
10 314 (22.07%) Data Governance
11 265 (18.62%) Stakeholder Management
12 253 (17.78%) Machine Learning
13 234 (16.44%) Validation
14 226 (15.88%) Data Transformation
15 224 (15.74%) Problem-Solving
16 222 (15.60%) Infrastructure as Code
17 218 (15.32%) Data Architecture
18 216 (15.18%) Migration
19 212 (14.90%) Data Integration
20 202 (14.20%) Decision-Making
Programming Languages
1 805 (56.57%) SQL
2 755 (53.06%) Python
3 91 (6.39%) Java
4 40 (2.81%) Data Analysis Expressions
4 40 (2.81%) Scala
5 39 (2.74%) PowerShell
6 36 (2.53%) C#
7 32 (2.25%) Bash
8 29 (2.04%) JavaScript
9 19 (1.34%) R
9 19 (1.34%) T-SQL
10 17 (1.19%) PL/SQL
11 16 (1.12%) TypeScript
12 14 (0.98%) Kusto Query Language
13 13 (0.91%) Bicep
14 11 (0.77%) Shell Script
15 9 (0.63%) Korn
16 8 (0.56%) SAS Macro
17 7 (0.49%) Go
17 7 (0.49%) SPARQL
Qualifications
1 269 (18.90%) Security Cleared
2 220 (15.46%) SC Cleared
3 82 (5.76%) Degree
4 42 (2.95%) Computer Science Degree
4 42 (2.95%) DV Cleared
5 37 (2.60%) AWS Certification
6 36 (2.53%) Azure Certification
7 27 (1.90%) BPSS Clearance
8 19 (1.34%) Master's Degree
9 14 (0.98%) DBS Check
10 10 (0.70%) SnowPro
11 9 (0.63%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
12 8 (0.56%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
12 8 (0.56%) Microsoft Certification
13 7 (0.49%) TOGAF Certification
14 5 (0.35%) Microsoft Certified Professional
14 5 (0.35%) PMI Certification
14 5 (0.35%) PMP
15 4 (0.28%) PhD
16 3 (0.21%) CISSP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 488 (34.29%) Data Quality
2 75 (5.27%) QA
3 54 (3.79%) GDPR
4 28 (1.97%) Accessibility
5 11 (0.77%) SLA
6 6 (0.42%) GRC
7 5 (0.35%) NCSC
8 4 (0.28%) California Consumer Privacy Act
8 4 (0.28%) Disclosure Scotland
8 4 (0.28%) EU AI Act
8 4 (0.28%) NIST
8 4 (0.28%) PMO
9 3 (0.21%) Actionable Recommendations
9 3 (0.21%) IFRS
9 3 (0.21%) IFRS 9
9 3 (0.21%) ISO/IEC 27001
9 3 (0.21%) MiFID
9 3 (0.21%) Sarbanes-Oxley
10 2 (0.14%) 21 CFR Part 11
10 2 (0.14%) PCI DSS
System Software
1 114 (8.01%) Docker
2 5 (0.35%) Active Directory
3 1 (0.070%) Virtual Machines
Systems Management
1 106 (7.45%) Kubernetes
2 29 (2.04%) Ansible
3 24 (1.69%) Grafana
4 15 (1.05%) Prometheus
5 8 (0.56%) Kibana
6 7 (0.49%) Control-M
7 3 (0.21%) logstash
8 2 (0.14%) Progress Chef
8 2 (0.14%) Puppet
9 1 (0.070%) Argo
9 1 (0.070%) Cilium
9 1 (0.070%) HAProxy
9 1 (0.070%) Kubeflow
9 1 (0.070%) Kustomize
9 1 (0.070%) QRadar
9 1 (0.070%) Single Sign-On
Vendors
1 392 (27.55%) Databricks
2 254 (17.85%) Microsoft
3 89 (6.25%) Google
4 75 (5.27%) Oracle
5 53 (3.72%) Informatica
6 30 (2.11%) SAP
7 26 (1.83%) Foundry
8 25 (1.76%) Palantir
8 25 (1.76%) Talend
9 23 (1.62%) Salesforce
10 19 (1.34%) OpenAI
11 15 (1.05%) Cloudera
11 15 (1.05%) Teradata
12 12 (0.84%) Trend Micro
13 11 (0.77%) Adobe
14 9 (0.63%) Denodo
15 8 (0.56%) Splunk
16 7 (0.49%) Hitachi
16 7 (0.49%) ServiceNow
17 6 (0.42%) MicroStrategy