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

6 months to
2 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 84 158 197
Rank change year-on-year +74 +39 -3
Contract jobs citing Data Engineering 1,398 501 420
As % of all contract jobs in England 3.07% 1.83% 1.27%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.61% 2.02% 1.48%
Number of daily rates quoted 974 318 305
10th Percentile £400 £363 £368
25th Percentile £450 £450 £468
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £525 £575
Median % change year-on-year - -8.70% -8.00%
75th Percentile £638 £650 £688
90th Percentile £750 £775 £778
UK median daily rate £525 £513 £575
% change year-on-year +2.44% -10.87% -4.17%
Number of hourly rates quoted 21 6 10
10th Percentile - £37.11 £29.46
25th Percentile £21.25 £42.03 £32.19
Median hourly rate £69.00 £52.50 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +31.43% -12.50% -23.08%
75th Percentile £75.00 £62.19 -
90th Percentile £85.25 £87.50 £60.88
UK median hourly rate £68.25 £52.50 £47.50
% change year-on-year +30.00% +10.53% -39.10%

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 38,700 24,856 28,392
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 84.86% 90.77% 85.87%
Number of daily rates quoted 23,864 15,818 18,112
10th Percentile £325 £300 £313
25th Percentile £425 £404 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £510 £525
Median % change year-on-year +2.94% -2.86% -4.55%
75th Percentile £631 £625 £650
90th Percentile £738 £738 £753
UK median daily rate £525 £500 £525
% change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -3.54%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,605 1,463 1,438
10th Percentile £14.22 £14.25 £14.16
25th Percentile £18.50 £17.87 £18.56
Median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £43.00
Median % change year-on-year +74.79% -41.51% +1.18%
75th Percentile £68.00 £50.00 £65.00
90th Percentile £80.00 £68.75 £75.00
UK median hourly rate £41.00 £25.15 £42.50
% change year-on-year +63.02% -40.82% +2.41%

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 2 September 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 2 September 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 2 September 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 +58 862 £550 - 1,070
North of England +24 177 £463 -2.63% 215
Midlands +34 135 £478 +6.10% 67
West Midlands +33 111 £475 -6.31% 50
South East -13 92 £500 +11.11% 181
Yorkshire +21 84 £475 +5.56% 39
South West +17 70 £525 -8.70% 100
North West -19 58 £513 +2.50% 146
North East -12 37 £425 -20.93% 31
East of England -8 27 £575 -4.17% 53
East Midlands -5 21 £525 +20.62% 17
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
1 170 (12.16%) Apache Airflow
2 154 (11.02%) Apache Spark
3 113 (8.08%) Apache
4 37 (2.65%) SAS
5 29 (2.07%) Confluence
6 21 (1.50%) Jupyter
7 18 (1.29%) 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%) nginx
12 2 (0.14%) PowerExchange
13 1 (0.072%) Apache Synapse
13 1 (0.072%) CICS
13 1 (0.072%) Microsoft Exchange
Applications
1 16 (1.14%) 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 4 (0.29%) NetSuite
3 4 (0.29%) Sage X3
3 4 (0.29%) SAP S/4HANA
4 3 (0.21%) BambooHR
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 ECC
6 1 (0.072%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
Cloud Services
1 590 (42.20%) Azure
2 525 (37.55%) AWS
3 267 (19.10%) Power Platform
4 225 (16.09%) Snowflake
5 190 (13.59%) dbt
5 190 (13.59%) GCP
6 157 (11.23%) Azure Data Factory
7 153 (10.94%) Amazon S3
8 133 (9.51%) Azure DevOps
9 125 (8.94%) Azure Synapse Analytics
10 123 (8.80%) Serverless
11 111 (7.94%) GitHub
12 99 (7.08%) AWS Lambda
13 67 (4.79%) Azure Databricks
14 55 (3.93%) GitHub Actions
15 35 (2.50%) Amazon EMR
16 30 (2.15%) Amazon Bedrock
16 30 (2.15%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 30 (2.15%) Microsoft Purview
17 26 (1.86%) Azure AI
Communications & Networking
1 5 (0.36%) Firewall
2 4 (0.29%) Network Security
3 3 (0.21%) DNS
4 2 (0.14%) RTP
5 1 (0.072%) Broadband
5 1 (0.072%) Internet
5 1 (0.072%) MIMO
5 1 (0.072%) MQTT
5 1 (0.072%) SMS
5 1 (0.072%) SSL
Database & Business Intelligence
1 287 (20.53%) Data Warehouse
2 254 (18.17%) Power BI
3 185 (13.23%) Data Lake
4 156 (11.16%) Metadata
5 102 (7.30%) BigQuery
6 99 (7.08%) Delta Lake
7 93 (6.65%) Amazon Redshift
8 80 (5.72%) Big Data
9 73 (5.22%) Tableau
10 62 (4.43%) Amazon Athena
11 61 (4.36%) SQL Server
12 50 (3.58%) Relational Database
12 50 (3.58%) Snowflake Schema
13 49 (3.51%) NoSQL
14 45 (3.22%) PostgreSQL
15 37 (2.65%) Azure SQL Database
16 36 (2.58%) Looker
17 32 (2.29%) Star Schema
18 31 (2.22%) Data Vault
19 28 (2.00%) Semantic Layer
Development Applications
1 137 (9.80%) Git
2 78 (5.58%) GitLab
3 60 (4.29%) JIRA
4 25 (1.79%) MLflow
5 23 (1.65%) Jenkins
6 8 (0.57%) RStudio
7 7 (0.50%) Terragrunt
8 6 (0.43%) Bitbucket
8 6 (0.43%) ERwin
8 6 (0.43%) Selenium
9 5 (0.36%) SonarQube
10 4 (0.29%) Claude Code
10 4 (0.29%) ER Studio
11 3 (0.21%) Artifactory
11 3 (0.21%) Snyk
11 3 (0.21%) Sonatype Nexus
12 2 (0.14%) Atlassian Bamboo
12 2 (0.14%) Postman
12 2 (0.14%) TeamCity
12 2 (0.14%) Yeoman
General
1 346 (24.75%) Social Skills
2 321 (22.96%) Finance
3 233 (16.67%) Analytical Skills
4 145 (10.37%) Public Sector
5 108 (7.73%) Banking
6 45 (3.22%) Marketing
7 34 (2.43%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 28 (2.00%) Retail
9 22 (1.57%) Front Office
10 21 (1.50%) Documentation Skills
10 21 (1.50%) Investment Banking
11 20 (1.43%) Telecoms
12 15 (1.07%) Manufacturing
13 13 (0.93%) Financial Institution
13 13 (0.93%) Pharmaceutical
14 12 (0.86%) Billing
14 12 (0.86%) Influencing Skills
15 10 (0.72%) Law
16 9 (0.64%) Military
17 8 (0.57%) Aerospace
Job Titles
1 647 (46.28%) Data Engineer
2 208 (14.88%) Senior
3 157 (11.23%) Architect
3 157 (11.23%) Lead
4 130 (9.30%) Senior Data Engineer
5 85 (6.08%) Data Architect
6 76 (5.44%) Developer
7 65 (4.65%) AWS Engineer
8 63 (4.51%) Analyst
9 55 (3.93%) AWS Data Engineer
10 52 (3.72%) Snowflake Engineer
11 51 (3.65%) Databricks Engineer
11 51 (3.65%) Lead Data Engineer
12 45 (3.22%) Azure Engineer
13 41 (2.93%) Databricks Data Engineer
14 40 (2.86%) Snowflake Data Engineer
14 40 (2.86%) Solutions Architect
15 38 (2.72%) Consultant
16 36 (2.58%) Data Analyst
17 34 (2.43%) Data Scientist
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 206 (14.74%) PySpark
2 197 (14.09%) Terraform
3 100 (7.15%) Kafka
4 52 (3.72%) REST
5 33 (2.36%) React
6 26 (1.86%) .NET
6 26 (1.86%) Pandas
7 25 (1.79%) JSON
8 16 (1.14%) scikit-learn
9 15 (1.07%) NumPy
9 15 (1.07%) PyTorch
9 15 (1.07%) Spring
10 13 (0.93%) TensorFlow
11 11 (0.79%) Great Expectations
11 11 (0.79%) Microsoft Graph
12 10 (0.72%) FastAPI
12 10 (0.72%) LangChain
12 10 (0.72%) pytest
13 9 (0.64%) Spring Boot
14 8 (0.57%) Apache Avro
Miscellaneous
1 184 (13.16%) Cloud Native
2 60 (4.29%) Data Structures
3 59 (4.22%) Onboarding
4 57 (4.08%) Legacy Systems
5 56 (4.01%) Product Ownership
6 46 (3.29%) Distributed Systems
7 38 (2.72%) AI Agents
8 23 (1.65%) Data Protection Act
9 21 (1.50%) Greenfield Project
10 18 (1.29%) Distributed Computing
11 17 (1.22%) NHS
12 16 (1.14%) Virtual Team
13 15 (1.07%) Clustering
13 15 (1.07%) Enterprise Software
14 14 (1.00%) Algorithms
14 14 (1.00%) Analytical Mindset
14 14 (1.00%) Management Information System
15 13 (0.93%) Life Science
16 12 (0.86%) Reference Data
17 10 (0.72%) Marketing Technology
Operating Systems
1 33 (2.36%) Linux
2 30 (2.15%) Unix
3 8 (0.57%) Windows
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
5 1 (0.072%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 681 (48.71%) Analytics
2 678 (48.50%) Data Pipeline
3 531 (37.98%) Data Modelling
4 494 (35.34%) CI/CD
5 482 (34.48%) ETL
6 416 (29.76%) AI
7 342 (24.46%) Agile
8 340 (24.32%) Business Intelligence
9 338 (24.18%) DevOps
10 312 (22.32%) Data Governance
11 241 (17.24%) Machine Learning
12 233 (16.67%) Problem-Solving
13 222 (15.88%) Migration
14 219 (15.67%) Data Transformation
15 218 (15.59%) Stakeholder Management
16 216 (15.45%) Data Architecture
17 212 (15.16%) Validation
18 205 (14.66%) Data Science
19 202 (14.45%) Decision-Making
20 190 (13.59%) Infrastructure as Code
Programming Languages
1 761 (54.43%) SQL
2 707 (50.57%) Python
3 103 (7.37%) Java
4 43 (3.08%) Data Analysis Expressions
5 38 (2.72%) PowerShell
5 38 (2.72%) Scala
6 35 (2.50%) Bash
7 32 (2.29%) C#
8 28 (2.00%) JavaScript
9 21 (1.50%) R
10 20 (1.43%) T-SQL
11 17 (1.22%) PL/SQL
12 15 (1.07%) Shell Script
13 12 (0.86%) Bicep
13 12 (0.86%) TypeScript
14 10 (0.72%) Kusto Query Language
15 9 (0.64%) SAS Macro
16 7 (0.50%) SPARQL
17 6 (0.43%) Cypher
17 6 (0.43%) LookML
Qualifications
1 270 (19.31%) Security Cleared
2 233 (16.67%) SC Cleared
3 79 (5.65%) Degree
4 42 (3.00%) Computer Science Degree
5 27 (1.93%) Azure Certification
6 26 (1.86%) DV Cleared
7 24 (1.72%) BPSS Clearance
8 21 (1.50%) Master's Degree
9 18 (1.29%) AWS Certification
10 14 (1.00%) DBS Check
11 9 (0.64%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
11 9 (0.64%) SnowPro
12 8 (0.57%) Microsoft Certification
13 5 (0.36%) Tableau Certification
14 4 (0.29%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
14 4 (0.29%) PMI Certification
15 3 (0.21%) PhD
15 3 (0.21%) PMP
16 2 (0.14%) CSPO
17 1 (0.072%) TOGAF Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 441 (31.55%) Data Quality
2 70 (5.01%) QA
3 67 (4.79%) GDPR
4 25 (1.79%) Accessibility
5 13 (0.93%) SLA
6 4 (0.29%) Sarbanes-Oxley
7 3 (0.21%) GRC
7 3 (0.21%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 3 (0.21%) ISO/IEC 42001
7 3 (0.21%) MiFID
7 3 (0.21%) NIST
7 3 (0.21%) 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%) GxP
8 2 (0.14%) IFRS
8 2 (0.14%) IFRS 9
8 2 (0.14%) Solvency II
System Software
1 119 (8.51%) Docker
2 5 (0.36%) Active Directory
3 1 (0.072%) Virtual Machines
Systems Management
1 97 (6.94%) Kubernetes
2 24 (1.72%) Ansible
3 17 (1.22%) Grafana
4 8 (0.57%) Prometheus
5 6 (0.43%) Control-M
5 6 (0.43%) Kibana
6 3 (0.21%) logstash
7 2 (0.14%) Argo
7 2 (0.14%) Puppet
8 1 (0.072%) Cilium
8 1 (0.072%) IBM Guardium
8 1 (0.072%) Kubeflow
8 1 (0.072%) Kustomize
8 1 (0.072%) Nagios
8 1 (0.072%) Progress Chef
8 1 (0.072%) QRadar
8 1 (0.072%) Single Sign-On
8 1 (0.072%) Thomson Reuters DACS
Vendors
1 364 (26.04%) Databricks
2 254 (18.17%) Microsoft
3 70 (5.01%) Informatica
4 64 (4.58%) Google
5 62 (4.43%) Oracle
6 28 (2.00%) Foundry
6 28 (2.00%) SAP
7 26 (1.86%) Palantir
7 26 (1.86%) Talend
8 23 (1.65%) Salesforce
9 16 (1.14%) Cloudera
10 13 (0.93%) OpenAI
10 13 (0.93%) ServiceNow
11 12 (0.86%) Teradata
11 12 (0.86%) Trend Micro
12 9 (0.64%) Adobe
13 7 (0.50%) Bloomberg
13 7 (0.50%) Denodo
13 7 (0.50%) Hitachi
13 7 (0.50%) InterSystems