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

6 months to
13 Oct 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 88 140 190
Rank change year-on-year +52 +50 +27
Contract jobs citing Data Engineering 1,441 589 425
As % of all contract jobs in England 3.10% 2.11% 1.33%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.65% 2.32% 1.54%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,004 369 318
10th Percentile £400 £350 £404
25th Percentile £445 £425 £475
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 £765 £775
UK median daily rate £525 £525 £560
% change year-on-year - -6.25% -6.67%
Number of hourly rates quoted 20 5 5
10th Percentile - £36.73 £23.35
25th Percentile £21.25 £38.96 £26.50
Median hourly rate £62.45 £52.50 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +18.95% -12.50% -23.08%
75th Percentile £71.79 £65.00 -
90th Percentile £83.78 £92.00 -
UK median hourly rate £59.95 £58.75 £43.25
% change year-on-year +2.04% +35.84% -44.55%

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 39,523 25,365 27,653
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 84.90% 90.87% 86.49%
Number of daily rates quoted 23,845 16,097 16,849
10th Percentile £325 £293 £313
25th Percentile £425 £405 £413
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 3,022 1,590 1,111
10th Percentile £13.69 £14.50 £15.00
25th Percentile £17.36 £17.87 £20.27
Median hourly rate £40.00 £25.15 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year +59.05% -40.82% -5.56%
75th Percentile £67.44 £44.80 £66.80
90th Percentile £78.75 £67.28 £74.44
UK median hourly rate £37.50 £25.15 £40.00
% change year-on-year +49.11% -37.13% -10.11%

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 13 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 13 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 13 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 +41 875 £550 - 1,035
North of England +33 195 £475 +6.15% 236
Midlands +30 131 £475 -2.01% 69
West Midlands +25 110 £475 -13.64% 47
South East -15 97 £513 +15.17% 124
South West +41 92 £525 -19.23% 60
Yorkshire +32 90 £500 +5.26% 54
North West -18 68 £500 +14.94% 144
North East -9 37 £425 -5.56% 38
East Midlands 0 21 £481 +10.51% 22
East of England -19 20 £538 +13.16% 39
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
1 182 (12.63%) Apache Airflow
2 167 (11.59%) Apache Spark
3 142 (9.85%) Apache
4 35 (2.43%) SAS
5 30 (2.08%) Confluence
6 19 (1.32%) Jupyter
7 16 (1.11%) Palantir Foundry
8 15 (1.04%) 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 (0.069%) Apache Pulsar
13 1 (0.069%) Microsoft Exchange
13 1 (0.069%) Oracle Workflow
Applications
1 11 (0.76%) 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 (0.069%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 1 (0.069%) Notion
Business Applications
1 10 (0.69%) 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 3 (0.21%) Cloudability
5 2 (0.14%) Endur
5 2 (0.14%) Oracle Assets
5 2 (0.14%) Temenos T24
5 2 (0.14%) Workday HCM
6 1 (0.069%) FIS Private Capital Suite
6 1 (0.069%) Markit EDM
6 1 (0.069%) MIS ActiveH
6 1 (0.069%) Oracle EBS
6 1 (0.069%) Salesforce CRM
6 1 (0.069%) SAP ECC
6 1 (0.069%) SAP Oil and Gas
6 1 (0.069%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
Cloud Services
1 599 (41.57%) Azure
2 536 (37.20%) AWS
3 263 (18.25%) Power Platform
4 240 (16.66%) Snowflake
5 227 (15.75%) GCP
6 223 (15.48%) dbt
7 170 (11.80%) Amazon S3
8 166 (11.52%) Azure Data Factory
9 131 (9.09%) Serverless
10 128 (8.88%) Azure DevOps
11 117 (8.12%) Azure Synapse Analytics
12 106 (7.36%) AWS Lambda
13 105 (7.29%) GitHub
14 70 (4.86%) Azure Databricks
15 53 (3.68%) GitHub Actions
16 41 (2.85%) Amazon EMR
17 37 (2.57%) Amazon CloudWatch
18 35 (2.43%) Amazon Bedrock
19 34 (2.36%) Microsoft Purview
20 30 (2.08%) 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 (0.069%) HTTP
5 1 (0.069%) HTTPS
5 1 (0.069%) Internet
5 1 (0.069%) MQTT
5 1 (0.069%) Radio Access Network
5 1 (0.069%) Reverse Proxy
5 1 (0.069%) SMS
5 1 (0.069%) SSL
5 1 (0.069%) TCP/IP
5 1 (0.069%) tcpdump
5 1 (0.069%) Wireshark
Database & Business Intelligence
1 292 (20.26%) Data Warehouse
2 251 (17.42%) Power BI
3 174 (12.07%) Metadata
4 170 (11.80%) Data Lake
5 115 (7.98%) BigQuery
6 103 (7.15%) Delta Lake
7 97 (6.73%) Amazon Redshift
8 72 (5.00%) Big Data
9 64 (4.44%) Amazon Athena
10 59 (4.09%) Tableau
11 53 (3.68%) SQL Server
12 47 (3.26%) Snowflake Schema
13 46 (3.19%) NoSQL
14 44 (3.05%) PostgreSQL
15 40 (2.78%) Relational Database
16 36 (2.50%) Looker
17 33 (2.29%) Pentaho
18 32 (2.22%) Amazon RDS
19 31 (2.15%) Azure SQL Database
20 29 (2.01%) Data Vault
Development Applications
1 161 (11.17%) Git
2 91 (6.32%) GitLab
3 49 (3.40%) JIRA
4 32 (2.22%) Jenkins
5 23 (1.60%) 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
1 383 (26.58%) Social Skills
2 320 (22.21%) Finance
3 223 (15.48%) Analytical Skills
4 145 (10.06%) Public Sector
5 132 (9.16%) Banking
6 44 (3.05%) Marketing
7 32 (2.22%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 25 (1.73%) Investment Banking
8 25 (1.73%) Retail
9 24 (1.67%) Front Office
10 19 (1.32%) Pharmaceutical
11 17 (1.18%) Documentation Skills
12 16 (1.11%) Manufacturing
13 14 (0.97%) Billing
14 13 (0.90%) Aerospace
14 13 (0.90%) Financial Institution
14 13 (0.90%) Law
14 13 (0.90%) Telecoms
15 12 (0.83%) Back Office
16 10 (0.69%) Publishing
Job Titles
1 677 (46.98%) Data Engineer
2 219 (15.20%) Senior
3 169 (11.73%) Lead
4 149 (10.34%) Senior Data Engineer
5 142 (9.85%) Architect
6 78 (5.41%) Developer
7 72 (5.00%) Data Architect
8 68 (4.72%) AWS Engineer
9 67 (4.65%) Analyst
10 63 (4.37%) Databricks Engineer
11 60 (4.16%) Snowflake Engineer
12 58 (4.02%) AWS Data Engineer
13 52 (3.61%) Azure Engineer
14 51 (3.54%) Lead Data Engineer
15 50 (3.47%) Snowflake Data Engineer
16 49 (3.40%) Databricks Data Engineer
17 41 (2.85%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
18 40 (2.78%) GCP Engineer
19 38 (2.64%) Data Analyst
20 36 (2.50%) Consultant
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 221 (15.34%) Terraform
2 215 (14.92%) PySpark
3 96 (6.66%) Kafka
4 60 (4.16%) REST
5 29 (2.01%) .NET
5 29 (2.01%) React
6 26 (1.80%) JSON
7 22 (1.53%) Pandas
8 18 (1.25%) LangChain
9 15 (1.04%) PyTorch
10 14 (0.97%) pytest
10 14 (0.97%) RabbitMQ
11 13 (0.90%) FastAPI
12 12 (0.83%) Apache NiFi
12 12 (0.83%) Microsoft Graph
12 12 (0.83%) NumPy
12 12 (0.83%) scikit-learn
12 12 (0.83%) TensorFlow
13 10 (0.69%) LangGraph
13 10 (0.69%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 200 (13.88%) Cloud Native
2 78 (5.41%) Onboarding
3 68 (4.72%) Data Structures
4 65 (4.51%) Product Ownership
5 49 (3.40%) AI Agents
6 48 (3.33%) Legacy Systems
7 41 (2.85%) Distributed Systems
8 26 (1.80%) Data Protection Act
9 22 (1.53%) Algorithms
10 21 (1.46%) Distributed Computing
10 21 (1.46%) Enterprise Software
11 20 (1.39%) Management Information System
12 18 (1.25%) Virtual Team
13 16 (1.11%) Life Science
14 15 (1.04%) Clustering
15 14 (0.97%) Data Fabric
16 13 (0.90%) NHS
16 13 (0.90%) Reference Data
17 12 (0.83%) Greenfield Project
17 12 (0.83%) Taxonomies
Operating Systems
1 31 (2.15%) Linux
2 22 (1.53%) Unix
3 9 (0.62%) Windows
4 1 (0.069%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 1 (0.069%) Robot Operating System
4 1 (0.069%) Ubuntu
4 1 (0.069%) Windows Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 727 (50.45%) Data Pipeline
2 663 (46.01%) Analytics
3 579 (40.18%) Data Modelling
4 547 (37.96%) CI/CD
5 506 (35.11%) ETL
6 460 (31.92%) AI
7 380 (26.37%) Agile
8 370 (25.68%) DevOps
9 334 (23.18%) Business Intelligence
10 325 (22.55%) Data Governance
11 270 (18.74%) Stakeholder Management
12 257 (17.83%) Machine Learning
13 242 (16.79%) Validation
14 235 (16.31%) Data Transformation
15 228 (15.82%) Problem-Solving
16 224 (15.54%) Migration
17 223 (15.48%) Infrastructure as Code
18 221 (15.34%) Data Integration
19 218 (15.13%) Data Architecture
20 205 (14.23%) Decision-Making
Programming Languages
1 820 (56.90%) SQL
2 769 (53.37%) Python
3 90 (6.25%) Java
4 41 (2.85%) Data Analysis Expressions
5 39 (2.71%) PowerShell
5 39 (2.71%) Scala
6 36 (2.50%) C#
7 32 (2.22%) Bash
8 28 (1.94%) JavaScript
9 19 (1.32%) R
9 19 (1.32%) T-SQL
10 17 (1.18%) PL/SQL
11 16 (1.11%) TypeScript
12 14 (0.97%) Kusto Query Language
13 13 (0.90%) Bicep
13 13 (0.90%) Shell Script
14 9 (0.62%) Korn
15 8 (0.56%) SAS Macro
16 7 (0.49%) Go
16 7 (0.49%) SPARQL
Qualifications
1 278 (19.29%) Security Cleared
2 227 (15.75%) SC Cleared
3 83 (5.76%) Degree
4 44 (3.05%) AWS Certification
4 44 (3.05%) DV Cleared
5 42 (2.91%) Computer Science Degree
6 36 (2.50%) Azure Certification
7 28 (1.94%) BPSS Clearance
8 19 (1.32%) Master's Degree
9 14 (0.97%) DBS Check
10 10 (0.69%) SnowPro
11 9 (0.62%) 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 6 (0.42%) PMI Certification
14 6 (0.42%) PMP
15 5 (0.35%) Microsoft Certified Professional
16 4 (0.28%) PhD
17 3 (0.21%) CISSP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 503 (34.91%) Data Quality
2 77 (5.34%) QA
3 61 (4.23%) GDPR
4 28 (1.94%) Accessibility
5 11 (0.76%) 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
1 122 (8.47%) Docker
2 5 (0.35%) Active Directory
3 1 (0.069%) Virtual Machines
Systems Management
1 114 (7.91%) Kubernetes
2 29 (2.01%) Ansible
3 24 (1.67%) Grafana
4 15 (1.04%) 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 (0.069%) Argo
9 1 (0.069%) Cilium
9 1 (0.069%) HAProxy
9 1 (0.069%) Kubeflow
9 1 (0.069%) Kustomize
9 1 (0.069%) QRadar
9 1 (0.069%) Single Sign-On
Vendors
1 403 (27.97%) Databricks
2 255 (17.70%) Microsoft
3 89 (6.18%) Google
4 76 (5.27%) Oracle
5 53 (3.68%) Informatica
6 32 (2.22%) Talend
7 29 (2.01%) SAP
8 26 (1.80%) Foundry
9 25 (1.73%) Palantir
10 23 (1.60%) Salesforce
11 20 (1.39%) OpenAI
12 15 (1.04%) Cloudera
12 15 (1.04%) Denodo
12 15 (1.04%) Teradata
13 12 (0.83%) Trend Micro
14 11 (0.76%) Adobe
15 8 (0.56%) Splunk
16 7 (0.49%) Hitachi
17 6 (0.42%) Bloomberg
17 6 (0.42%) MicroStrategy