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

6 months to
18 Feb 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 94 152 210
Rank change year-on-year +58 +58 +13
Contract jobs citing Data Engineering 950 457 424
As % of all contract jobs in England 2.75% 1.77% 1.12%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.14% 1.97% 1.29%
Number of daily rates quoted 651 322 318
10th Percentile £363 £400 £413
25th Percentile £431 £463 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -4.55% - -8.33%
75th Percentile £615 £676 £675
90th Percentile £738 £838 £746
UK median daily rate £515 £550 £550
% change year-on-year -6.36% - -8.33%
Number of hourly rates quoted 4 11 9
10th Percentile £41.70 £22.00 £32.35
25th Percentile £51.38 £22.36 £35.00
Median hourly rate £63.97 £26.50 £42.31
Median % change year-on-year +141.40% -37.36% -14.96%
75th Percentile £70.65 £29.38 £65.00
90th Percentile £72.81 £65.00 £78.00
UK median hourly rate £61.25 £25.97 £42.31
% change year-on-year +135.89% -38.62% +20.87%

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 30,243 23,214 32,931
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 87.45% 89.92% 87.32%
Number of daily rates quoted 19,352 14,394 21,863
10th Percentile £311 £308 £300
25th Percentile £413 £413 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £619 £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 1,888 728 2,002
10th Percentile £15.18 £15.62 £13.32
25th Percentile £18.24 £21.20 £16.25
Median hourly rate £25.89 £35.00 £35.00
Median % change year-on-year -26.04% - -
75th Percentile £60.61 £65.00 £61.04
90th Percentile £70.00 £75.33 £72.90
UK median hourly rate £25.15 £32.50 £35.00
% change year-on-year -22.62% -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 18 February 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 18 February 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 18 February 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 +53 639 £550 -4.35% 201
North of England -2 96 £450 -10.00% 101
Midlands +9 88 £510 +2.00% 56
West Midlands +2 68 £519 +3.70% 44
North West 0 52 £445 +0.28% 57
South West -1 48 £550 -15.38% 40
South East -17 39 £525 -2.78% 99
Yorkshire -39 25 £500 -16.67% 34
East Midlands -9 20 £445 -13.10% 12
North East +3 19 £450 -23.08% 11
East of England -25 15 £551 +72.45% 16
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
1 141 (14.84%) Apache Spark
2 103 (10.84%) Apache Airflow
3 69 (7.26%) Apache
4 19 (2.00%) Palantir Foundry
5 11 (1.16%) Confluence
6 9 (0.95%) SAS
7 8 (0.84%) Appian
8 3 (0.32%) Microsoft Exchange
9 2 (0.21%) Apache Superset
9 2 (0.21%) Jupyter
9 2 (0.21%) SharePoint
10 1 (0.11%) Apache Pig
10 1 (0.11%) Apache Synapse
10 1 (0.11%) ArcGIS
10 1 (0.11%) Camunda
10 1 (0.11%) CMS
10 1 (0.11%) IBM HTTP Server
10 1 (0.11%) Luigi
Applications
1 18 (1.89%) Microsoft Excel
2 10 (1.05%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 6 (0.63%) Chatbot
4 5 (0.53%) Microsoft Office
5 4 (0.42%) MS Visio
6 3 (0.32%) Microsoft Project
6 3 (0.32%) Trello
7 1 (0.11%) Adobe XD
7 1 (0.11%) Spreadsheet
Business Applications
1 4 (0.42%) Aladdin
2 2 (0.21%) Dynamics CRM
2 2 (0.21%) Markit EDM
2 2 (0.21%) Salesforce CRM
3 1 (0.11%) Actimize
3 1 (0.11%) Eagle PACE
3 1 (0.11%) Maximo
3 1 (0.11%) Misys Midas
3 1 (0.11%) SAP BPC
3 1 (0.11%) SAP ERP
3 1 (0.11%) SAP S/4HANA
3 1 (0.11%) Workday HCM
Cloud Services
1 450 (47.37%) Azure
2 329 (34.63%) AWS
3 205 (21.58%) Power Platform
4 181 (19.05%) Azure Data Factory
5 137 (14.42%) GCP
6 119 (12.53%) Snowflake
7 107 (11.26%) Azure Synapse Analytics
8 101 (10.63%) Amazon S3
9 96 (10.11%) GitHub
10 91 (9.58%) Serverless
11 83 (8.74%) dbt
12 77 (8.11%) Azure DevOps
13 75 (7.89%) AWS Lambda
14 64 (6.74%) GitHub Actions
15 38 (4.00%) AWS CloudFormation
16 26 (2.74%) AWS Step Functions
17 24 (2.53%) Azure Machine Learning
18 23 (2.42%) Amazon SageMaker
19 22 (2.32%) Microsoft Purview
20 21 (2.21%) Amazon EMR
Communications & Networking
1 5 (0.53%) Network Security
2 4 (0.42%) Cisco IPT
2 4 (0.42%) Kerberos
3 3 (0.32%) RTP
3 3 (0.32%) VPN
4 1 (0.11%) 4G
4 1 (0.11%) 5G
4 1 (0.11%) Firewall
4 1 (0.11%) SAN
4 1 (0.11%) SMS
4 1 (0.11%) TCP/IP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 188 (19.79%) Power BI
2 185 (19.47%) Data Warehouse
3 135 (14.21%) Data Lake
4 82 (8.63%) Metadata
5 67 (7.05%) SQL Server
6 59 (6.21%) Big Data
7 58 (6.11%) NoSQL
8 54 (5.68%) Delta Lake
9 53 (5.58%) Snowflake Schema
10 52 (5.47%) Azure SQL Database
11 50 (5.26%) Amazon Redshift
11 50 (5.26%) Relational Database
12 43 (4.53%) BigQuery
13 38 (4.00%) PostgreSQL
14 37 (3.89%) Tableau
15 35 (3.68%) Amazon Athena
16 32 (3.37%) SQL Server Integration Services
17 31 (3.26%) Hadoop
18 26 (2.74%) Spark SQL
19 24 (2.53%) Elasticsearch
Development Applications
1 136 (14.32%) Git
2 44 (4.63%) GitLab
3 38 (4.00%) Jenkins
4 36 (3.79%) MLflow
5 22 (2.32%) JIRA
6 6 (0.63%) Visual Studio Code
7 5 (0.53%) Selenium
8 3 (0.32%) JUnit
8 3 (0.32%) Maven
8 3 (0.32%) Postman
8 3 (0.32%) Robot Framework
8 3 (0.32%) SonarQube
8 3 (0.32%) Terragrunt
9 2 (0.21%) Cucumber
9 2 (0.21%) ERwin
9 2 (0.21%) Mockito
9 2 (0.21%) Poetry
9 2 (0.21%) TeamCity
9 2 (0.21%) Visual Studio
10 1 (0.11%) SoapUI
General
1 266 (28.00%) Social Skills
2 222 (23.37%) Finance
3 137 (14.42%) Analytical Skills
4 81 (8.53%) Public Sector
5 59 (6.21%) Banking
6 23 (2.42%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 17 (1.79%) Investment Banking
8 15 (1.58%) Influencing Skills
9 14 (1.47%) Front Office
9 14 (1.47%) Retail
10 13 (1.37%) Marketing
11 11 (1.16%) Documentation Skills
12 10 (1.05%) Publishing
13 9 (0.95%) Legal
13 9 (0.95%) Pharmaceutical
14 8 (0.84%) Financial Institution
15 6 (0.63%) Back Office
15 6 (0.63%) Military
15 6 (0.63%) Presentation Skills
16 4 (0.42%) Aviation
Job Titles
1 436 (45.89%) Data Engineer
2 117 (12.32%) Senior
3 114 (12.00%) Lead
4 82 (8.63%) Senior Data Engineer
5 71 (7.47%) Azure Engineer
6 70 (7.37%) Architect
7 64 (6.74%) Developer
8 56 (5.89%) Azure Data Engineer
9 51 (5.37%) Analyst
10 43 (4.53%) Snowflake Engineer
11 40 (4.21%) Data Scientist
12 39 (4.11%) Lead Data Engineer
13 36 (3.79%) AWS Engineer
14 35 (3.68%) Data Architect
14 35 (3.68%) Snowflake Data Engineer
15 32 (3.37%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
16 30 (3.16%) Data Analyst
17 25 (2.63%) Python Engineer
18 24 (2.53%) AWS Data Engineer
18 24 (2.53%) Principal Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 161 (16.95%) PySpark
2 120 (12.63%) Kafka
3 54 (5.68%) Pandas
4 50 (5.26%) PyTorch
5 43 (4.53%) scikit-learn
6 42 (4.42%) NumPy
7 41 (4.32%) TensorFlow
8 32 (3.37%) FastAPI
9 29 (3.05%) Flask
9 29 (3.05%) JSON
9 29 (3.05%) RESTful
10 25 (2.63%) pytest
11 24 (2.53%) React
11 24 (2.53%) YAML
12 22 (2.32%) LangChain
13 19 (2.00%) REST
14 16 (1.68%) Hugging Face
15 15 (1.58%) Django
16 14 (1.47%) Great Expectations
16 14 (1.47%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 103 (10.84%) Cloud Native
2 32 (3.37%) Algorithms
3 30 (3.16%) Product Ownership
4 29 (3.05%) Distributed Computing
5 27 (2.84%) Distributed Systems
6 21 (2.21%) Hybrid Cloud
7 20 (2.11%) Data Structures
8 19 (2.00%) Data Protection Act
8 19 (2.00%) Legacy Systems
9 17 (1.79%) Onboarding
10 16 (1.68%) AI Agents
11 15 (1.58%) Analytical Mindset
12 12 (1.26%) Clustering
13 11 (1.16%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
14 10 (1.05%) Enterprise Software
14 10 (1.05%) Fixed Income
14 10 (1.05%) Greenfield Project
14 10 (1.05%) Hedge funds
15 9 (0.95%) Data Fabric
15 9 (0.95%) NHS
Operating Systems
1 28 (2.95%) Linux
2 6 (0.63%) VMS
3 5 (0.53%) Unix
4 2 (0.21%) Ubuntu
5 1 (0.11%) CentOS
5 1 (0.11%) Debian
5 1 (0.11%) Windows
Processes & Methodologies
1 422 (44.42%) Data Pipeline
2 414 (43.58%) Analytics
3 380 (40.00%) ETL
4 363 (38.21%) Data Modelling
5 324 (34.11%) CI/CD
6 247 (26.00%) AI
7 236 (24.84%) DevOps
8 235 (24.74%) Agile
9 230 (24.21%) Data Governance
10 225 (23.68%) Business Intelligence
11 207 (21.79%) Machine Learning
12 194 (20.42%) Data Science
12 194 (20.42%) Problem-Solving
13 155 (16.32%) Data Architecture
14 116 (12.21%) Infrastructure as Code
15 100 (10.53%) Decision-Making
16 97 (10.21%) Data Integration
16 97 (10.21%) Validation
16 97 (10.21%) Visualisation
17 95 (10.00%) Data Transformation
Programming Languages
1 584 (61.47%) Python
2 507 (53.37%) SQL
3 69 (7.26%) Java
4 61 (6.42%) Scala
5 43 (4.53%) C#
6 31 (3.26%) JavaScript
7 27 (2.84%) Data Analysis Expressions
8 26 (2.74%) PowerShell
9 24 (2.53%) Bicep
10 21 (2.21%) Bash
11 20 (2.11%) T-SQL
12 19 (2.00%) TypeScript
13 17 (1.79%) R
14 16 (1.68%) C++
15 15 (1.58%) Go
16 11 (1.16%) PL/SQL
16 11 (1.16%) Shell Script
17 9 (0.95%) Rust
18 8 (0.84%) Korn
19 1 (0.11%) IronPython
Qualifications
1 196 (20.63%) Security Cleared
2 160 (16.84%) SC Cleared
3 76 (8.00%) Degree
4 50 (5.26%) Azure Certification
5 37 (3.89%) Computer Science Degree
6 35 (3.68%) Master's Degree
7 22 (2.32%) DV Cleared
8 13 (1.37%) AWS Certification
8 13 (1.37%) BPSS Clearance
9 11 (1.16%) Microsoft Certification
9 11 (1.16%) PhD
10 4 (0.42%) DBS Check
10 4 (0.42%) Microsoft Certified Professional
11 2 (0.21%) ISTQB
11 2 (0.21%) SnowPro
12 1 (0.11%) (ISC)2 CCSP
12 1 (0.11%) ACCA
12 1 (0.11%) CBAP
12 1 (0.11%) OCP
12 1 (0.11%) Oracle Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 259 (27.26%) Data Quality
2 81 (8.53%) GDPR
3 33 (3.47%) QA
4 13 (1.37%) Accessibility
5 12 (1.26%) Sarbanes-Oxley
6 9 (0.95%) HIPAA
7 6 (0.63%) California Consumer Privacy Act
7 6 (0.63%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 5 (0.53%) PERC
8 5 (0.53%) SOC 2
9 3 (0.32%) GRC
9 3 (0.32%) WCAG
10 2 (0.21%) HL7
10 2 (0.21%) MiFID
10 2 (0.21%) NIST
10 2 (0.21%) PCI DSS
11 1 (0.11%) Dodd-Frank
11 1 (0.11%) EMIR
11 1 (0.11%) FATCA
11 1 (0.11%) ISO 13485
System Software
1 135 (14.21%) Docker
2 14 (1.47%) HDFS
3 2 (0.21%) Active Directory
3 2 (0.21%) Virtual Machines
4 1 (0.11%) Apache ZooKeeper
Systems Management
1 154 (16.21%) Terraform
2 133 (14.00%) Kubernetes
3 23 (2.42%) Prometheus
4 13 (1.37%) Grafana
5 10 (1.05%) Hadoop YARN
6 8 (0.84%) Ansible
7 5 (0.53%) Argo
7 5 (0.53%) Puppet
8 3 (0.32%) Control-M
8 3 (0.32%) Kibana
8 3 (0.32%) Kubeflow
8 3 (0.32%) logstash
9 2 (0.21%) Nagios
9 2 (0.21%) Oozie
9 2 (0.21%) Single Sign-On
10 1 (0.11%) Apache Ranger
10 1 (0.11%) HP Fortify
10 1 (0.11%) Rancher
Vendors
1 275 (28.95%) Databricks
2 128 (13.47%) Microsoft
3 44 (4.63%) Google
4 29 (3.05%) Informatica
5 28 (2.95%) Oracle
6 22 (2.32%) Foundry
6 22 (2.32%) Palantir
7 21 (2.21%) OpenAI
7 21 (2.21%) Talend
8 13 (1.37%) SAP
9 11 (1.16%) Salesforce
10 9 (0.95%) Cloudera
10 9 (0.95%) Splunk
11 8 (0.84%) Automation Anywhere
11 8 (0.84%) UiPath
11 8 (0.84%) Virgin Media
12 7 (0.74%) Denodo
13 6 (0.63%) MicroStrategy
13 6 (0.63%) ServiceNow
14 5 (0.53%) Guidewire