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

6 months to
3 Oct 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 87 137 186
Rank change year-on-year +50 +49 +23
Contract jobs citing Data Engineering 1,413 568 438
As % of all contract jobs in England 3.04% 2.03% 1.35%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.58% 2.23% 1.56%
Number of daily rates quoted 986 359 322
10th Percentile £395 £350 £377
25th Percentile £449 £413 £468
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £525 £575
Median % change year-on-year - -8.70% -8.00%
75th Percentile £650 £644 £676
90th Percentile £738 £740 £775
UK median daily rate £525 £515 £550
% change year-on-year +1.94% -6.36% -8.33%
Number of hourly rates quoted 18 5 6
10th Percentile - £36.73 £23.88
25th Percentile £21.25 £38.96 £34.88
Median hourly rate £62.45 £52.50 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +18.95% -12.50% -20.53%
75th Percentile £71.13 £65.00 -
90th Percentile £76.71 £92.00 -
UK median hourly rate £59.95 £58.75 £60.00
% change year-on-year +2.04% -2.08% -17.81%

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 39,417 25,490 28,010
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 84.73% 90.96% 86.33%
Number of daily rates quoted 23,890 16,169 17,141
10th Percentile £325 £300 £313
25th Percentile £425 £405 £420
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £513 £525
Median % change year-on-year +2.44% -2.38% -4.55%
75th Percentile £638 £625 £645
90th Percentile £738 £738 £750
UK median daily rate £525 £500 £525
% change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -2.78%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,936 1,564 1,197
10th Percentile £13.85 £14.44 £15.00
25th Percentile £17.59 £17.87 £20.25
Median hourly rate £40.08 £25.15 £43.00
Median % change year-on-year +59.36% -41.51% -3.37%
75th Percentile £67.50 £47.00 £67.00
90th Percentile £78.75 £67.43 £75.00
UK median hourly rate £38.72 £25.15 £42.27
% change year-on-year +53.96% -40.49% -0.55%

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 3 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 3 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 3 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 +45 866 £550 - 1,338
North of England +25 190 £475 +9.20% 342
Midlands +21 124 £475 +2.70% 147
West Midlands +25 101 £475 -13.64% 106
Yorkshire +30 95 £500 +5.26% 96
South East -14 92 £513 +15.17% 269
South West +36 88 £525 -8.70% 120
North West -24 60 £525 +23.53% 189
North East -12 37 £425 -17.07% 61
East Midlands -4 23 £525 +20.62% 41
East of England -17 22 £550 +15.79% 68
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
1 174 (12.31%) Apache Airflow
2 158 (11.18%) Apache Spark
3 131 (9.27%) Apache
4 31 (2.19%) Confluence
5 29 (2.05%) SAS
6 21 (1.49%) Jupyter
7 15 (1.06%) Palantir Foundry
7 15 (1.06%) SharePoint
8 5 (0.35%) Apache Solr
9 4 (0.28%) ArcGIS
9 4 (0.28%) nginx
10 3 (0.21%) Apache Superset
11 2 (0.14%) PowerExchange
12 1 (0.071%) Apache Pulsar
12 1 (0.071%) CICS
12 1 (0.071%) Microsoft Exchange
12 1 (0.071%) Oracle Workflow
Applications
1 10 (0.71%) Microsoft Excel
2 7 (0.50%) Chatbot
3 6 (0.42%) Spreadsheet
4 3 (0.21%) Microsoft Office
5 2 (0.14%) MS Visio
6 1 (0.071%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 1 (0.071%) Notion
Business Applications
1 10 (0.71%) Aladdin
2 8 (0.57%) Dynamics CRM
3 4 (0.28%) NetSuite
3 4 (0.28%) Sage X3
4 3 (0.21%) SAP S/4HANA
5 2 (0.14%) BambooHR
5 2 (0.14%) 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 (0.071%) FIS Private Capital Suite
6 1 (0.071%) Markit EDM
6 1 (0.071%) MIS ActiveH
6 1 (0.071%) Oracle EBS
6 1 (0.071%) Salesforce CRM
6 1 (0.071%) SAP Oil and Gas
6 1 (0.071%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
Cloud Services
1 592 (41.90%) Azure
2 523 (37.01%) AWS
3 259 (18.33%) Power Platform
4 240 (16.99%) Snowflake
5 220 (15.57%) dbt
6 219 (15.50%) GCP
7 168 (11.89%) Amazon S3
8 165 (11.68%) Azure Data Factory
9 130 (9.20%) Serverless
10 124 (8.78%) Azure DevOps
11 116 (8.21%) Azure Synapse Analytics
12 106 (7.50%) AWS Lambda
12 106 (7.50%) GitHub
13 67 (4.74%) Azure Databricks
14 54 (3.82%) GitHub Actions
15 41 (2.90%) Amazon EMR
16 36 (2.55%) Amazon Bedrock
16 36 (2.55%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 35 (2.48%) Microsoft Purview
18 30 (2.12%) Azure AI
Communications & Networking
1 8 (0.57%) Network Security
2 7 (0.50%) DNS
3 5 (0.35%) Firewall
4 2 (0.14%) Broadband
5 1 (0.071%) HTTP
5 1 (0.071%) HTTPS
5 1 (0.071%) Internet
5 1 (0.071%) MIMO
5 1 (0.071%) MQTT
5 1 (0.071%) Radio Access Network
5 1 (0.071%) Reverse Proxy
5 1 (0.071%) SMS
5 1 (0.071%) SSL
5 1 (0.071%) TCP/IP
5 1 (0.071%) tcpdump
5 1 (0.071%) Wireshark
Database & Business Intelligence
1 290 (20.52%) Data Warehouse
2 247 (17.48%) Power BI
3 172 (12.17%) Metadata
4 171 (12.10%) Data Lake
5 116 (8.21%) BigQuery
6 98 (6.94%) Amazon Redshift
7 96 (6.79%) Delta Lake
8 73 (5.17%) Big Data
9 63 (4.46%) Amazon Athena
9 63 (4.46%) Tableau
10 54 (3.82%) SQL Server
11 49 (3.47%) Snowflake Schema
12 46 (3.26%) PostgreSQL
13 43 (3.04%) NoSQL
14 42 (2.97%) Relational Database
15 37 (2.62%) Looker
16 31 (2.19%) Amazon RDS
17 30 (2.12%) Azure SQL Database
17 30 (2.12%) Data Vault
18 26 (1.84%) Parquet
Development Applications
1 153 (10.83%) Git
2 87 (6.16%) GitLab
3 56 (3.96%) JIRA
4 24 (1.70%) Jenkins
5 22 (1.56%) MLflow
6 8 (0.57%) Bitbucket
6 8 (0.57%) RStudio
6 8 (0.57%) Terragrunt
7 7 (0.50%) Claude Code
7 7 (0.50%) Selenium
8 6 (0.42%) ERwin
9 4 (0.28%) ER Studio
9 4 (0.28%) Postman
10 3 (0.21%) Artifactory
10 3 (0.21%) Atlassian Bamboo
10 3 (0.21%) Cucumber
10 3 (0.21%) SonarQube
10 3 (0.21%) TeamCity
11 2 (0.14%) Sonatype Nexus
11 2 (0.14%) Yeoman
General
1 376 (26.61%) Social Skills
2 327 (23.14%) Finance
3 223 (15.78%) Analytical Skills
4 146 (10.33%) Public Sector
5 133 (9.41%) Banking
6 44 (3.11%) Marketing
7 32 (2.26%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 26 (1.84%) Retail
9 24 (1.70%) Front Office
10 23 (1.63%) Investment Banking
11 18 (1.27%) Pharmaceutical
12 16 (1.13%) Documentation Skills
12 16 (1.13%) Manufacturing
13 14 (0.99%) Telecoms
14 13 (0.92%) Billing
15 12 (0.85%) Back Office
15 12 (0.85%) Financial Institution
16 11 (0.78%) Military
17 10 (0.71%) Aerospace
17 10 (0.71%) Publishing
Job Titles
1 652 (46.14%) Data Engineer
2 223 (15.78%) Senior
3 167 (11.82%) Lead
4 148 (10.47%) Architect
5 145 (10.26%) Senior Data Engineer
6 80 (5.66%) Developer
7 77 (5.45%) Data Architect
8 67 (4.74%) AWS Engineer
9 63 (4.46%) Analyst
10 58 (4.10%) Snowflake Engineer
11 57 (4.03%) AWS Data Engineer
12 56 (3.96%) Databricks Engineer
13 52 (3.68%) Azure Engineer
14 49 (3.47%) Lead Data Engineer
15 47 (3.33%) Snowflake Data Engineer
16 45 (3.18%) Databricks Data Engineer
17 38 (2.69%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
18 35 (2.48%) Consultant
18 35 (2.48%) Data Analyst
18 35 (2.48%) GCP Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 225 (15.92%) Terraform
2 203 (14.37%) PySpark
3 92 (6.51%) Kafka
4 60 (4.25%) REST
5 29 (2.05%) React
6 28 (1.98%) .NET
7 26 (1.84%) JSON
8 22 (1.56%) Pandas
9 15 (1.06%) LangChain
9 15 (1.06%) PyTorch
10 14 (0.99%) pytest
11 13 (0.92%) FastAPI
12 12 (0.85%) Apache NiFi
12 12 (0.85%) NumPy
12 12 (0.85%) scikit-learn
12 12 (0.85%) TensorFlow
13 11 (0.78%) Microsoft Graph
13 11 (0.78%) RabbitMQ
14 10 (0.71%) RESTful
15 9 (0.64%) Apache Avro
Miscellaneous
1 195 (13.80%) Cloud Native
2 77 (5.45%) Onboarding
3 71 (5.02%) Data Structures
4 60 (4.25%) Product Ownership
5 48 (3.40%) AI Agents
5 48 (3.40%) Legacy Systems
6 41 (2.90%) Distributed Systems
7 25 (1.77%) Data Protection Act
8 20 (1.42%) Distributed Computing
8 20 (1.42%) Enterprise Software
9 18 (1.27%) Algorithms
9 18 (1.27%) Virtual Team
10 17 (1.20%) Management Information System
11 15 (1.06%) Life Science
11 15 (1.06%) NHS
12 14 (0.99%) Greenfield Project
13 13 (0.92%) Analytical Mindset
13 13 (0.92%) Data Fabric
14 12 (0.85%) Reference Data
14 12 (0.85%) Taxonomies
Operating Systems
1 29 (2.05%) Linux
2 22 (1.56%) Unix
3 8 (0.57%) Windows
4 1 (0.071%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 1 (0.071%) Robot Operating System
4 1 (0.071%) Ubuntu
4 1 (0.071%) Windows Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 698 (49.40%) Data Pipeline
2 660 (46.71%) Analytics
3 559 (39.56%) Data Modelling
4 528 (37.37%) CI/CD
5 487 (34.47%) ETL
6 456 (32.27%) AI
7 367 (25.97%) Agile
8 357 (25.27%) DevOps
9 327 (23.14%) Business Intelligence
10 312 (22.08%) Data Governance
11 267 (18.90%) Stakeholder Management
12 253 (17.91%) Machine Learning
13 228 (16.14%) Validation
14 226 (15.99%) Data Architecture
14 226 (15.99%) Infrastructure as Code
15 224 (15.85%) Data Transformation
16 219 (15.50%) Problem-Solving
17 214 (15.15%) Migration
18 207 (14.65%) Decision-Making
19 202 (14.30%) Data Integration
Programming Languages
1 793 (56.12%) SQL
2 744 (52.65%) Python
3 92 (6.51%) Java
4 41 (2.90%) Scala
5 40 (2.83%) Data Analysis Expressions
6 39 (2.76%) PowerShell
7 36 (2.55%) C#
8 32 (2.26%) Bash
9 30 (2.12%) JavaScript
10 21 (1.49%) R
11 19 (1.34%) T-SQL
12 16 (1.13%) PL/SQL
13 15 (1.06%) TypeScript
14 14 (0.99%) Bicep
14 14 (0.99%) Kusto Query Language
15 10 (0.71%) Shell Script
16 8 (0.57%) Korn
16 8 (0.57%) SAS Macro
17 7 (0.50%) Go
17 7 (0.50%) SPARQL
Qualifications
1 258 (18.26%) Security Cleared
2 210 (14.86%) SC Cleared
3 77 (5.45%) Degree
4 38 (2.69%) DV Cleared
5 37 (2.62%) Computer Science Degree
6 33 (2.34%) AWS Certification
7 30 (2.12%) Azure Certification
8 25 (1.77%) BPSS Clearance
9 19 (1.34%) Master's Degree
10 14 (0.99%) DBS Check
11 9 (0.64%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
11 9 (0.64%) SnowPro
12 8 (0.57%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
12 8 (0.57%) Microsoft Certification
13 5 (0.35%) Microsoft Certified Professional
13 5 (0.35%) PMI Certification
13 5 (0.35%) PMP
13 5 (0.35%) TOGAF Certification
14 4 (0.28%) PhD
15 3 (0.21%) Tableau Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 484 (34.25%) Data Quality
2 73 (5.17%) QA
3 57 (4.03%) GDPR
4 28 (1.98%) Accessibility
5 11 (0.78%) SLA
6 6 (0.42%) GRC
7 4 (0.28%) California Consumer Privacy Act
7 4 (0.28%) Disclosure Scotland
7 4 (0.28%) EU AI Act
7 4 (0.28%) NCSC
7 4 (0.28%) NIST
7 4 (0.28%) PMO
8 3 (0.21%) Actionable Recommendations
8 3 (0.21%) IFRS
8 3 (0.21%) IFRS 9
8 3 (0.21%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 3 (0.21%) MiFID
9 2 (0.14%) 21 CFR Part 11
9 2 (0.14%) PCI DSS
9 2 (0.14%) Sarbanes-Oxley
System Software
1 117 (8.28%) Docker
2 5 (0.35%) Active Directory
3 1 (0.071%) Virtual Machines
Systems Management
1 101 (7.15%) Kubernetes
2 29 (2.05%) Ansible
3 21 (1.49%) Grafana
4 12 (0.85%) Prometheus
5 8 (0.57%) Kibana
6 7 (0.50%) Control-M
7 3 (0.21%) logstash
8 2 (0.14%) Progress Chef
8 2 (0.14%) Puppet
9 1 (0.071%) Argo
9 1 (0.071%) Cilium
9 1 (0.071%) HAProxy
9 1 (0.071%) IBM Guardium
9 1 (0.071%) Kubeflow
9 1 (0.071%) Kustomize
9 1 (0.071%) QRadar
9 1 (0.071%) Single Sign-On
Vendors
1 391 (27.67%) Databricks
2 248 (17.55%) Microsoft
3 84 (5.94%) Google
4 70 (4.95%) Oracle
5 52 (3.68%) Informatica
6 26 (1.84%) SAP
7 25 (1.77%) Foundry
8 23 (1.63%) Palantir
8 23 (1.63%) Salesforce
8 23 (1.63%) Talend
9 19 (1.34%) OpenAI
10 14 (0.99%) Teradata
11 12 (0.85%) Cloudera
11 12 (0.85%) Trend Micro
12 11 (0.78%) Adobe
13 10 (0.71%) ServiceNow
14 8 (0.57%) Denodo
15 7 (0.50%) Hitachi
15 7 (0.50%) Splunk
16 6 (0.42%) MicroStrategy