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

6 months to
22 Mar 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 88 147 220
Rank change year-on-year +59 +73 -6
Contract jobs citing Data Engineering 1,099 459 412
As % of all contract jobs in England 2.93% 1.86% 1.09%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.39% 2.05% 1.26%
Number of daily rates quoted 768 326 311
10th Percentile £398 £398 £413
25th Percentile £450 £450 £475
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -4.55% - -8.33%
75th Percentile £625 £676 £688
90th Percentile £749 £838 £750
UK median daily rate £525 £525 £550
% change year-on-year - -4.55% -8.33%
Number of hourly rates quoted 12 12 10
10th Percentile £57.58 £22.00 £29.51
25th Percentile £65.00 £22.38 £32.19
Median hourly rate £70.00 £25.97 £35.00
Median % change year-on-year +169.59% -25.81% -53.33%
75th Percentile £84.69 £35.94 £48.56
90th Percentile £89.75 £63.88 £60.88
UK median hourly rate £69.72 £25.97 £35.00
% change year-on-year +168.52% -25.81% -

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 32,413 22,389 32,764
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 86.42% 90.76% 86.84%
Number of daily rates quoted 20,785 14,611 21,658
10th Percentile £313 £310 £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 1,991 834 2,145
10th Percentile £15.50 £15.00 £13.00
25th Percentile £18.87 £21.00 £16.00
Median hourly rate £32.50 £34.00 £32.50
Median % change year-on-year -4.41% +4.62% -13.33%
75th Percentile £65.00 £65.00 £58.69
90th Percentile £75.00 £77.41 £71.87
UK median hourly rate £30.50 £32.50 £32.50
% change year-on-year -6.15% - -7.29%

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 22 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 22 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 22 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 +62 717 £550 -4.35% 279
Midlands +28 112 £513 +2.50% 55
North of England -15 109 £461 -7.75% 125
West Midlands +11 89 £523 -3.24% 40
South West +4 65 £550 -12.87% 44
North West -5 50 £456 -3.95% 65
South East -32 45 £550 +10.00% 135
Yorkshire -35 37 £475 -17.39% 48
North East +6 22 £450 -5.26% 13
East Midlands -19 21 £447 -5.89% 15
East of England -21 17 £575 +79.69% 34
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 (15.47%) Apache Spark
2 111 (10.10%) Apache Airflow
3 76 (6.92%) Apache
4 20 (1.82%) SAS
5 19 (1.73%) Palantir Foundry
6 11 (1.00%) Confluence
7 8 (0.73%) Appian
8 5 (0.45%) Apache Superset
9 4 (0.36%) Microsoft Exchange
10 3 (0.27%) Jupyter
11 2 (0.18%) SharePoint
12 1 (0.091%) Apache Synapse
12 1 (0.091%) Camunda
12 1 (0.091%) CMS
12 1 (0.091%) IBM HTTP Server
Applications
1 20 (1.82%) Microsoft Excel
2 11 (1.00%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 8 (0.73%) Microsoft Office
4 4 (0.36%) MS Visio
5 3 (0.27%) Microsoft Project
5 3 (0.27%) Spreadsheet
5 3 (0.27%) Trello
6 2 (0.18%) Chatbot
Business Applications
1 6 (0.55%) Aladdin
2 3 (0.27%) BambooHR
2 3 (0.27%) SAP BPC
3 2 (0.18%) Salesforce CRM
3 2 (0.18%) SAP S/4HANA
4 1 (0.091%) Actimize
4 1 (0.091%) Markit EDM
4 1 (0.091%) Maximo
4 1 (0.091%) Misys Midas
4 1 (0.091%) SAP ECC
4 1 (0.091%) Workday HCM
Cloud Services
1 519 (47.22%) Azure
2 393 (35.76%) AWS
3 253 (23.02%) Power Platform
4 189 (17.20%) Azure Data Factory
5 156 (14.19%) GCP
6 135 (12.28%) Snowflake
7 130 (11.83%) Azure Synapse Analytics
8 124 (11.28%) GitHub
9 117 (10.65%) Amazon S3
10 100 (9.10%) Serverless
11 97 (8.83%) dbt
12 92 (8.37%) Azure DevOps
13 79 (7.19%) AWS Lambda
14 74 (6.73%) GitHub Actions
15 46 (4.19%) AWS CloudFormation
16 28 (2.55%) AWS Step Functions
17 25 (2.27%) Collibra
18 24 (2.18%) Azure Machine Learning
19 23 (2.09%) Amazon Kinesis
20 22 (2.00%) Amazon EMR
Communications & Networking
1 5 (0.45%) RTP
2 4 (0.36%) Cisco IPT
2 4 (0.36%) Kerberos
2 4 (0.36%) Network Security
3 3 (0.27%) VPN
4 1 (0.091%) 4G
4 1 (0.091%) 5G
4 1 (0.091%) Firewall
4 1 (0.091%) SAN
4 1 (0.091%) SMS
4 1 (0.091%) TCP/IP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 231 (21.02%) Power BI
2 219 (19.93%) Data Warehouse
3 165 (15.01%) Data Lake
4 100 (9.10%) Metadata
5 81 (7.37%) SQL Server
6 78 (7.10%) Big Data
7 75 (6.82%) NoSQL
8 71 (6.46%) Delta Lake
9 61 (5.55%) Azure SQL Database
10 60 (5.46%) Amazon Redshift
10 60 (5.46%) Relational Database
10 60 (5.46%) Snowflake Schema
11 57 (5.19%) Tableau
12 49 (4.46%) BigQuery
13 46 (4.19%) Amazon Athena
13 46 (4.19%) PostgreSQL
14 43 (3.91%) Hadoop
15 35 (3.18%) SQL Server Integration Services
16 31 (2.82%) Spark SQL
17 22 (2.00%) Mixpanel
Development Applications
1 152 (13.83%) Git
2 46 (4.19%) GitLab
3 42 (3.82%) MLflow
4 41 (3.73%) Jenkins
5 25 (2.27%) JIRA
6 6 (0.55%) Selenium
7 4 (0.36%) SonarQube
7 4 (0.36%) Visual Studio Code
8 3 (0.27%) JUnit
8 3 (0.27%) Maven
8 3 (0.27%) Postman
8 3 (0.27%) Robot Framework
8 3 (0.27%) Terragrunt
9 2 (0.18%) Bitbucket
9 2 (0.18%) Cucumber
9 2 (0.18%) ERwin
9 2 (0.18%) Mockito
9 2 (0.18%) Visual Studio
10 1 (0.091%) Ant
10 1 (0.091%) SoapUI
General
1 289 (26.30%) Social Skills
2 273 (24.84%) Finance
3 163 (14.83%) Analytical Skills
4 93 (8.46%) Public Sector
5 62 (5.64%) Banking
6 28 (2.55%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 19 (1.73%) Front Office
8 18 (1.64%) Investment Banking
9 17 (1.55%) Retail
10 15 (1.36%) Influencing Skills
10 15 (1.36%) Marketing
11 14 (1.27%) Documentation Skills
12 12 (1.09%) Financial Institution
13 11 (1.00%) Legal
13 11 (1.00%) Telecoms
14 9 (0.82%) Pharmaceutical
15 8 (0.73%) Publishing
16 6 (0.55%) Back Office
16 6 (0.55%) Manufacturing
16 6 (0.55%) Military
Job Titles
1 525 (47.77%) Data Engineer
2 141 (12.83%) Lead
3 138 (12.56%) Senior
4 98 (8.92%) Senior Data Engineer
5 90 (8.19%) Architect
6 70 (6.37%) Azure Engineer
6 70 (6.37%) Developer
7 58 (5.28%) Azure Data Engineer
8 55 (5.00%) Lead Data Engineer
9 54 (4.91%) Analyst
10 47 (4.28%) Data Architect
11 46 (4.19%) Snowflake Engineer
12 45 (4.09%) Data Scientist
13 42 (3.82%) AWS Engineer
14 40 (3.64%) Snowflake Data Engineer
15 35 (3.18%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
16 33 (3.00%) Consultant
17 31 (2.82%) Data Analyst
18 30 (2.73%) Principal Engineer
19 28 (2.55%) AWS Data Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 184 (16.74%) PySpark
2 142 (12.92%) Kafka
3 59 (5.37%) Pandas
4 47 (4.28%) scikit-learn
5 46 (4.19%) PyTorch
6 41 (3.73%) NumPy
7 35 (3.18%) TensorFlow
8 29 (2.64%) JSON
9 26 (2.37%) FastAPI
10 25 (2.27%) YAML
11 24 (2.18%) pytest
12 23 (2.09%) Flask
12 23 (2.09%) RESTful
13 22 (2.00%) React
13 22 (2.00%) REST
14 21 (1.91%) LangChain
15 18 (1.64%) Great Expectations
15 18 (1.64%) Spring
16 14 (1.27%) Hugging Face
17 13 (1.18%) XML
Miscellaneous
1 142 (12.92%) Cloud Native
2 40 (3.64%) Product Ownership
3 37 (3.37%) Distributed Systems
4 35 (3.18%) Algorithms
5 33 (3.00%) Legacy Systems
6 29 (2.64%) Distributed Computing
7 23 (2.09%) Hybrid Cloud
8 22 (2.00%) Data Structures
9 20 (1.82%) Onboarding
10 19 (1.73%) Data Protection Act
11 17 (1.55%) AI Agents
11 17 (1.55%) Greenfield Project
12 16 (1.46%) Analytical Mindset
13 14 (1.27%) Clustering
13 14 (1.27%) Fixed Income
14 11 (1.00%) Derivative
14 11 (1.00%) Management Information System
15 10 (0.91%) Equities
15 10 (0.91%) NHS
15 10 (0.91%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 29 (2.64%) Linux
2 13 (1.18%) Unix
3 7 (0.64%) VMS
4 3 (0.27%) Windows
5 2 (0.18%) Ubuntu
5 2 (0.18%) Windows Server
6 1 (0.091%) CentOS
6 1 (0.091%) Debian
Processes & Methodologies
1 537 (48.86%) Analytics
2 496 (45.13%) Data Pipeline
3 447 (40.67%) ETL
4 438 (39.85%) Data Modelling
5 386 (35.12%) CI/CD
6 286 (26.02%) AI
7 285 (25.93%) Business Intelligence
8 282 (25.66%) Agile
9 281 (25.57%) DevOps
10 276 (25.11%) Data Governance
11 226 (20.56%) Machine Learning
12 216 (19.65%) Problem-Solving
13 206 (18.74%) Data Science
14 177 (16.11%) Data Architecture
15 132 (12.01%) Decision-Making
16 125 (11.37%) Infrastructure as Code
17 124 (11.28%) Validation
18 112 (10.19%) Data Transformation
19 111 (10.10%) Performance Tuning
20 107 (9.74%) Data Integration
Programming Languages
1 649 (59.05%) Python
2 609 (55.41%) SQL
3 86 (7.83%) Java
4 67 (6.10%) Scala
5 45 (4.09%) C#
6 37 (3.37%) Data Analysis Expressions
7 30 (2.73%) Bash
8 29 (2.64%) PowerShell
9 24 (2.18%) JavaScript
10 20 (1.82%) T-SQL
11 19 (1.73%) Bicep
12 16 (1.46%) Go
12 16 (1.46%) R
13 15 (1.36%) TypeScript
14 10 (0.91%) C++
15 9 (0.82%) PL/SQL
15 9 (0.82%) Shell Script
16 6 (0.55%) Korn
17 5 (0.45%) Rust
18 3 (0.27%) SAS Macro
Qualifications
1 220 (20.02%) Security Cleared
2 186 (16.92%) SC Cleared
3 87 (7.92%) Degree
4 45 (4.09%) Azure Certification
5 41 (3.73%) Computer Science Degree
6 35 (3.18%) Master's Degree
7 21 (1.91%) DV Cleared
8 15 (1.36%) BPSS Clearance
9 14 (1.27%) AWS Certification
10 10 (0.91%) PhD
11 8 (0.73%) Microsoft Certification
12 4 (0.36%) DBS Check
12 4 (0.36%) Microsoft Certified Professional
13 3 (0.27%) SnowPro
14 2 (0.18%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
15 1 (0.091%) (ISC)2 CCSP
15 1 (0.091%) CCSP
15 1 (0.091%) OCP
15 1 (0.091%) Oracle Certification
15 1 (0.091%) Tableau Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 309 (28.12%) Data Quality
2 89 (8.10%) GDPR
3 40 (3.64%) QA
4 13 (1.18%) Sarbanes-Oxley
5 9 (0.82%) Accessibility
6 7 (0.64%) HIPAA
7 5 (0.45%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 5 (0.45%) PERC
7 5 (0.45%) SOC 2
8 4 (0.36%) California Consumer Privacy Act
8 4 (0.36%) Solvency II
9 3 (0.27%) GRC
9 3 (0.27%) SLA
9 3 (0.27%) WCAG
10 2 (0.18%) HL7
10 2 (0.18%) MiFID
10 2 (0.18%) NIST
10 2 (0.18%) PCI DSS
10 2 (0.18%) PMO
11 1 (0.091%) FATCA
System Software
1 131 (11.92%) Docker
2 5 (0.45%) HDFS
3 3 (0.27%) Virtual Machines
4 1 (0.091%) Apache ZooKeeper
Systems Management
1 159 (14.47%) Terraform
2 131 (11.92%) Kubernetes
3 25 (2.27%) Prometheus
4 13 (1.18%) Grafana
5 4 (0.36%) Ansible
5 4 (0.36%) Argo
6 3 (0.27%) Kubeflow
6 3 (0.27%) Rancher
7 2 (0.18%) Hadoop YARN
7 2 (0.18%) Kibana
7 2 (0.18%) Nagios
7 2 (0.18%) Thomson Reuters DACS
8 1 (0.091%) Apache Ranger
8 1 (0.091%) Control-M
8 1 (0.091%) HP Fortify
8 1 (0.091%) Oozie
Vendors
1 313 (28.48%) Databricks
2 160 (14.56%) Microsoft
3 58 (5.28%) Google
4 43 (3.91%) Informatica
5 32 (2.91%) Oracle
6 25 (2.27%) Talend
7 24 (2.18%) Foundry
8 23 (2.09%) Palantir
9 22 (2.00%) OpenAI
10 18 (1.64%) Splunk
11 16 (1.46%) SAP
12 14 (1.27%) Cloudera
13 10 (0.91%) Denodo
13 10 (0.91%) ServiceNow
14 9 (0.82%) Salesforce
14 9 (0.82%) UiPath
15 8 (0.73%) Automation Anywhere
16 6 (0.55%) MicroStrategy
17 5 (0.45%) Charles River
17 5 (0.45%) Murex