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

6 months to
10 Mar 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 88 148 213
Rank change year-on-year +60 +65 +1
Contract jobs citing Data Engineering 1,020 456 417
As % of all contract jobs in England 2.82% 1.84% 1.09%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.25% 2.03% 1.26%
Number of daily rates quoted 711 325 313
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 £621 £676 £688
90th Percentile £738 £838 £750
UK median daily rate £525 £538 £550
% change year-on-year -2.33% -2.27% -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 31,340 22,420 33,107
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 86.60% 90.56% 86.93%
Number of daily rates quoted 20,068 14,466 21,877
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 1,932 799 2,164
10th Percentile £15.25 £15.26 £13.02
25th Percentile £18.84 £21.00 £16.06
Median hourly rate £30.00 £34.50 £32.50
Median % change year-on-year -13.04% +6.15% -8.84%
75th Percentile £65.00 £65.00 £58.53
90th Percentile £74.26 £77.25 £71.83
UK median hourly rate £29.61 £32.50 £32.50
% change year-on-year -8.89% - -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 10 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 10 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 10 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 +57 674 £550 -7.25% 211
North of England +1 103 £460 -8.00% 112
Midlands +13 101 £519 +3.85% 56
West Midlands +3 81 £538 +7.50% 42
South West +6 57 £550 -15.38% 46
North West -7 48 £450 - 52
South East -27 41 £550 +10.00% 146
Yorkshire -35 34 £480 -20.00% 52
North East +6 21 £450 -17.05% 8
East Midlands -17 20 £447 -12.78% 14
East of England -33 14 £575 +79.69% 35
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
1 160 (15.69%) Apache Spark
2 98 (9.61%) Apache Airflow
3 69 (6.76%) Apache
4 19 (1.86%) Palantir Foundry
5 18 (1.76%) SAS
6 8 (0.78%) Appian
6 8 (0.78%) Confluence
7 4 (0.39%) Microsoft Exchange
8 3 (0.29%) Apache Superset
8 3 (0.29%) Jupyter
9 2 (0.20%) SharePoint
10 1 (0.098%) Apache Synapse
10 1 (0.098%) ArcGIS
10 1 (0.098%) Camunda
10 1 (0.098%) CMS
10 1 (0.098%) IBM HTTP Server
10 1 (0.098%) Luigi
Applications
1 18 (1.76%) Microsoft Excel
2 10 (0.98%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 5 (0.49%) Chatbot
3 5 (0.49%) Microsoft Office
4 4 (0.39%) MS Visio
5 3 (0.29%) Microsoft Project
5 3 (0.29%) Trello
6 2 (0.20%) Spreadsheet
7 1 (0.098%) Adobe XD
Business Applications
1 7 (0.69%) Aladdin
2 3 (0.29%) BambooHR
2 3 (0.29%) SAP BPC
3 2 (0.20%) Salesforce CRM
4 1 (0.098%) Actimize
4 1 (0.098%) Markit EDM
4 1 (0.098%) Maximo
4 1 (0.098%) Misys Midas
4 1 (0.098%) SAP S/4HANA
4 1 (0.098%) Workday HCM
Cloud Services
1 482 (47.25%) Azure
2 358 (35.10%) AWS
3 234 (22.94%) Power Platform
4 185 (18.14%) Azure Data Factory
5 146 (14.31%) GCP
6 126 (12.35%) Snowflake
7 115 (11.27%) Azure Synapse Analytics
8 109 (10.69%) Amazon S3
9 108 (10.59%) GitHub
10 97 (9.51%) Serverless
11 91 (8.92%) dbt
12 87 (8.53%) Azure DevOps
13 78 (7.65%) AWS Lambda
14 67 (6.57%) GitHub Actions
15 45 (4.41%) AWS CloudFormation
16 27 (2.65%) AWS Step Functions
17 25 (2.45%) Azure Machine Learning
18 23 (2.25%) Collibra
19 22 (2.16%) Azure AI
20 21 (2.06%) Amazon EMR
Communications & Networking
1 4 (0.39%) Cisco IPT
1 4 (0.39%) Kerberos
1 4 (0.39%) Network Security
2 3 (0.29%) RTP
2 3 (0.29%) VPN
3 1 (0.098%) 4G
3 1 (0.098%) 5G
3 1 (0.098%) SAN
3 1 (0.098%) SMS
3 1 (0.098%) TCP/IP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 213 (20.88%) Power BI
2 199 (19.51%) Data Warehouse
3 151 (14.80%) Data Lake
4 88 (8.63%) Metadata
5 73 (7.16%) NoSQL
5 73 (7.16%) SQL Server
6 69 (6.76%) Big Data
7 64 (6.27%) Delta Lake
8 56 (5.49%) Snowflake Schema
9 54 (5.29%) Amazon Redshift
10 53 (5.20%) Azure SQL Database
11 52 (5.10%) Relational Database
12 51 (5.00%) BigQuery
13 46 (4.51%) Tableau
14 45 (4.41%) PostgreSQL
15 44 (4.31%) Amazon Athena
16 37 (3.63%) Hadoop
17 34 (3.33%) SQL Server Integration Services
18 30 (2.94%) Spark SQL
19 22 (2.16%) Mixpanel
Development Applications
1 144 (14.12%) Git
2 45 (4.41%) GitLab
3 41 (4.02%) Jenkins
4 38 (3.73%) MLflow
5 18 (1.76%) JIRA
6 6 (0.59%) Selenium
7 4 (0.39%) SonarQube
7 4 (0.39%) Visual Studio Code
8 3 (0.29%) JUnit
8 3 (0.29%) Maven
8 3 (0.29%) Postman
8 3 (0.29%) Robot Framework
8 3 (0.29%) Terragrunt
9 2 (0.20%) Cucumber
9 2 (0.20%) ERwin
9 2 (0.20%) Mockito
9 2 (0.20%) Visual Studio
10 1 (0.098%) Bitbucket
10 1 (0.098%) SoapUI
10 1 (0.098%) TeamCity
General
1 276 (27.06%) Social Skills
2 247 (24.22%) Finance
3 150 (14.71%) Analytical Skills
4 86 (8.43%) Public Sector
5 64 (6.27%) Banking
6 28 (2.75%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 19 (1.86%) Investment Banking
7 19 (1.86%) Retail
8 17 (1.67%) Front Office
8 17 (1.67%) Influencing Skills
9 14 (1.37%) Marketing
10 13 (1.27%) Documentation Skills
11 11 (1.08%) Legal
12 10 (0.98%) Pharmaceutical
13 9 (0.88%) Publishing
14 8 (0.78%) Financial Institution
14 8 (0.78%) Telecoms
15 6 (0.59%) Back Office
15 6 (0.59%) Military
16 5 (0.49%) Manufacturing
Job Titles
1 477 (46.76%) Data Engineer
2 141 (13.82%) Lead
3 131 (12.84%) Senior
4 94 (9.22%) Senior Data Engineer
5 83 (8.14%) Architect
6 74 (7.25%) Azure Engineer
7 66 (6.47%) Developer
8 60 (5.88%) Azure Data Engineer
9 51 (5.00%) Lead Data Engineer
10 48 (4.71%) Analyst
11 43 (4.22%) Snowflake Engineer
12 42 (4.12%) Data Architect
13 41 (4.02%) Data Scientist
14 40 (3.92%) AWS Engineer
15 36 (3.53%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
15 36 (3.53%) Snowflake Data Engineer
16 29 (2.84%) Principal Engineer
17 27 (2.65%) AWS Data Engineer
17 27 (2.65%) Consultant
18 26 (2.55%) Data Analyst
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 174 (17.06%) PySpark
2 129 (12.65%) Kafka
3 55 (5.39%) Pandas
4 48 (4.71%) PyTorch
5 43 (4.22%) scikit-learn
6 39 (3.82%) NumPy
7 37 (3.63%) TensorFlow
8 30 (2.94%) JSON
9 29 (2.84%) RESTful
10 28 (2.75%) FastAPI
11 25 (2.45%) pytest
12 24 (2.35%) Flask
12 24 (2.35%) YAML
13 22 (2.16%) LangChain
13 22 (2.16%) React
14 19 (1.86%) REST
15 17 (1.67%) Great Expectations
16 16 (1.57%) Spring
17 15 (1.47%) Hugging Face
18 13 (1.27%) Node.js
Miscellaneous
1 129 (12.65%) Cloud Native
2 39 (3.82%) Product Ownership
3 32 (3.14%) Algorithms
3 32 (3.14%) Distributed Systems
4 29 (2.84%) Distributed Computing
5 24 (2.35%) Data Structures
6 23 (2.25%) Legacy Systems
7 21 (2.06%) Hybrid Cloud
8 18 (1.76%) Data Protection Act
8 18 (1.76%) Onboarding
9 17 (1.67%) AI Agents
10 16 (1.57%) Analytical Mindset
11 13 (1.27%) Fixed Income
12 12 (1.18%) Greenfield Project
13 11 (1.08%) Clustering
13 11 (1.08%) Derivative
14 10 (0.98%) Equities
14 10 (0.98%) NHS
15 9 (0.88%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
15 9 (0.88%) Management Information System
Operating Systems
1 22 (2.16%) Linux
2 7 (0.69%) Unix
2 7 (0.69%) VMS
3 2 (0.20%) Ubuntu
3 2 (0.20%) Windows
4 1 (0.098%) CentOS
4 1 (0.098%) Debian
4 1 (0.098%) Windows Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 484 (47.45%) Analytics
2 459 (45.00%) Data Pipeline
3 422 (41.37%) ETL
4 404 (39.61%) Data Modelling
5 353 (34.61%) CI/CD
6 269 (26.37%) AI
7 263 (25.78%) Agile
8 262 (25.69%) Business Intelligence
8 262 (25.69%) DevOps
9 259 (25.39%) Data Governance
10 218 (21.37%) Machine Learning
11 204 (20.00%) Problem-Solving
12 197 (19.31%) Data Science
13 161 (15.78%) Data Architecture
14 122 (11.96%) Infrastructure as Code
15 117 (11.47%) Decision-Making
16 107 (10.49%) Validation
17 102 (10.00%) LLM
18 99 (9.71%) Performance Tuning
19 98 (9.61%) Data Transformation
Programming Languages
1 613 (60.10%) Python
2 556 (54.51%) SQL
3 80 (7.84%) Java
4 63 (6.18%) Scala
5 45 (4.41%) C#
6 31 (3.04%) Data Analysis Expressions
7 29 (2.84%) JavaScript
8 28 (2.75%) PowerShell
9 25 (2.45%) Bash
10 22 (2.16%) Bicep
11 18 (1.76%) T-SQL
12 17 (1.67%) TypeScript
13 16 (1.57%) Go
14 14 (1.37%) R
15 11 (1.08%) C++
16 8 (0.78%) PL/SQL
17 6 (0.59%) Korn
17 6 (0.59%) Rust
18 4 (0.39%) Shell Script
19 3 (0.29%) SAS Macro
Qualifications
1 205 (20.10%) Security Cleared
2 169 (16.57%) SC Cleared
3 85 (8.33%) Degree
4 46 (4.51%) Azure Certification
5 41 (4.02%) Computer Science Degree
6 34 (3.33%) Master's Degree
7 22 (2.16%) DV Cleared
8 15 (1.47%) BPSS Clearance
9 14 (1.37%) AWS Certification
10 11 (1.08%) Microsoft Certification
11 10 (0.98%) PhD
12 4 (0.39%) DBS Check
12 4 (0.39%) Microsoft Certified Professional
13 2 (0.20%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
14 1 (0.098%) (ISC)2 CCSP
14 1 (0.098%) CCSP
14 1 (0.098%) Cisco Certification
14 1 (0.098%) CISSP
14 1 (0.098%) OCP
14 1 (0.098%) Oracle Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 282 (27.65%) Data Quality
2 83 (8.14%) GDPR
3 35 (3.43%) QA
4 11 (1.08%) Accessibility
4 11 (1.08%) Sarbanes-Oxley
5 8 (0.78%) HIPAA
6 6 (0.59%) California Consumer Privacy Act
7 5 (0.49%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 5 (0.49%) PERC
7 5 (0.49%) SOC 2
8 3 (0.29%) GRC
8 3 (0.29%) SLA
8 3 (0.29%) Solvency II
8 3 (0.29%) WCAG
9 2 (0.20%) HL7
9 2 (0.20%) MiFID
9 2 (0.20%) NIST
9 2 (0.20%) PCI DSS
10 1 (0.098%) NCSC
10 1 (0.098%) PMO
System Software
1 129 (12.65%) Docker
2 5 (0.49%) HDFS
3 3 (0.29%) Virtual Machines
4 1 (0.098%) Apache ZooKeeper
Systems Management
1 159 (15.59%) Terraform
2 133 (13.04%) Kubernetes
3 25 (2.45%) Prometheus
4 13 (1.27%) Grafana
5 4 (0.39%) Argo
6 3 (0.29%) Ansible
6 3 (0.29%) Kubeflow
6 3 (0.29%) Rancher
7 2 (0.20%) Hadoop YARN
7 2 (0.20%) Kibana
7 2 (0.20%) Nagios
8 1 (0.098%) Apache Ranger
8 1 (0.098%) Control-M
8 1 (0.098%) HP Fortify
8 1 (0.098%) Oozie
8 1 (0.098%) Thomson Reuters DACS
Vendors
1 300 (29.41%) Databricks
2 140 (13.73%) Microsoft
3 53 (5.20%) Google
4 31 (3.04%) Informatica
5 28 (2.75%) Oracle
6 25 (2.45%) Foundry
7 23 (2.25%) Palantir
7 23 (2.25%) Talend
8 22 (2.16%) OpenAI
9 17 (1.67%) Splunk
10 14 (1.37%) SAP
11 11 (1.08%) Salesforce
12 10 (0.98%) Cloudera
13 9 (0.88%) Denodo
14 8 (0.78%) Automation Anywhere
14 8 (0.78%) UiPath
15 7 (0.69%) ServiceNow
16 6 (0.59%) Guidewire
16 6 (0.59%) MicroStrategy
16 6 (0.59%) Virgin Media