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

6 months to
1 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 84 156 197
Rank change year-on-year +72 +41 +5
Contract jobs citing Data Engineering 1,401 508 418
As % of all contract jobs in England 3.07% 1.84% 1.26%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.62% 2.03% 1.47%
Number of daily rates quoted 975 322 303
10th Percentile £400 £363 £375
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 £774 £779
UK median daily rate £525 £520 £575
% change year-on-year +0.96% -9.57% -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 38,738 25,035 28,393
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 84.83% 90.79% 85.89%
Number of daily rates quoted 23,882 15,942 18,107
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% -3.67%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,595 1,467 1,443
10th Percentile £14.22 £14.25 £14.16
25th Percentile £18.50 £17.87 £18.63
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 £41.09 £25.15 £42.50
% change year-on-year +63.39% -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 1 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 1 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 1 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 +55 862 £550 - 1,007
North of England +29 177 £463 -2.63% 216
Midlands +31 137 £478 +6.10% 64
West Midlands +32 113 £475 -6.31% 53
South East -8 92 £500 +11.11% 174
Yorkshire +24 84 £475 +5.56% 41
South West +18 69 £525 -8.70% 95
North West -25 58 £513 +2.50% 139
North East -12 37 £425 -20.93% 37
East of England -7 27 £575 -4.17% 43
East Midlands -4 21 £525 +20.62% 11
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
1 171 (12.21%) Apache Airflow
2 154 (10.99%) Apache Spark
3 114 (8.14%) Apache
4 37 (2.64%) SAS
5 29 (2.07%) Confluence
6 22 (1.57%) Jupyter
7 18 (1.28%) 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 (0.071%) Apache Synapse
13 1 (0.071%) CICS
13 1 (0.071%) 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 (0.071%) Notion
Business Applications
1 11 (0.79%) Aladdin
2 6 (0.43%) Dynamics CRM
3 5 (0.36%) BambooHR
4 4 (0.29%) NetSuite
4 4 (0.29%) Sage X3
4 4 (0.29%) SAP S/4HANA
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 (0.071%) FIS Private Capital Suite
6 1 (0.071%) MIS ActiveH
6 1 (0.071%) SAP ECC
6 1 (0.071%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
Cloud Services
1 591 (42.18%) Azure
2 529 (37.76%) AWS
3 271 (19.34%) Power Platform
4 226 (16.13%) Snowflake
5 192 (13.70%) dbt
6 189 (13.49%) GCP
7 155 (11.06%) Azure Data Factory
8 153 (10.92%) Amazon S3
9 128 (9.14%) Azure DevOps
10 126 (8.99%) Azure Synapse Analytics
11 125 (8.92%) Serverless
12 109 (7.78%) GitHub
13 102 (7.28%) AWS Lambda
14 68 (4.85%) Azure Databricks
15 54 (3.85%) GitHub Actions
16 35 (2.50%) Amazon EMR
17 30 (2.14%) Amazon Bedrock
17 30 (2.14%) Microsoft Purview
18 29 (2.07%) Amazon CloudWatch
19 26 (1.86%) Azure AI
Communications & Networking
1 5 (0.36%) Firewall
2 3 (0.21%) DNS
2 3 (0.21%) Network Security
3 2 (0.14%) RTP
4 1 (0.071%) Broadband
4 1 (0.071%) Internet
4 1 (0.071%) MIMO
4 1 (0.071%) MQTT
4 1 (0.071%) SMS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 289 (20.63%) Data Warehouse
2 258 (18.42%) Power BI
3 186 (13.28%) Data Lake
4 156 (11.13%) Metadata
5 104 (7.42%) BigQuery
6 101 (7.21%) Delta Lake
7 97 (6.92%) Amazon Redshift
8 79 (5.64%) Big Data
9 75 (5.35%) Tableau
10 64 (4.57%) Amazon Athena
11 60 (4.28%) SQL Server
12 52 (3.71%) Snowflake Schema
13 50 (3.57%) Relational Database
14 49 (3.50%) NoSQL
15 44 (3.14%) PostgreSQL
16 38 (2.71%) Looker
17 37 (2.64%) Azure SQL Database
18 34 (2.43%) Star Schema
19 32 (2.28%) Data Vault
20 28 (2.00%) Semantic Layer
Development Applications
1 134 (9.56%) Git
2 77 (5.50%) GitLab
3 60 (4.28%) JIRA
4 25 (1.78%) MLflow
5 22 (1.57%) 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%) Yeoman
13 1 (0.071%) Deequ
General
1 345 (24.63%) Social Skills
2 319 (22.77%) Finance
3 232 (16.56%) Analytical Skills
4 142 (10.14%) Public Sector
5 105 (7.49%) Banking
6 45 (3.21%) Marketing
7 34 (2.43%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 28 (2.00%) Retail
9 22 (1.57%) Front Office
9 22 (1.57%) Telecoms
10 20 (1.43%) Documentation Skills
11 19 (1.36%) Investment Banking
12 16 (1.14%) Manufacturing
13 14 (1.00%) Pharmaceutical
14 13 (0.93%) Financial Institution
15 12 (0.86%) Billing
16 11 (0.79%) Influencing Skills
17 10 (0.71%) Law
18 9 (0.64%) Legal
18 9 (0.64%) Military
Job Titles
1 649 (46.32%) Data Engineer
2 206 (14.70%) Senior
3 160 (11.42%) Architect
4 156 (11.13%) Lead
5 130 (9.28%) Senior Data Engineer
6 88 (6.28%) Data Architect
7 76 (5.42%) Developer
8 67 (4.78%) AWS Engineer
9 62 (4.43%) Analyst
10 56 (4.00%) AWS Data Engineer
11 54 (3.85%) Snowflake Engineer
12 51 (3.64%) Databricks Engineer
12 51 (3.64%) Lead Data Engineer
13 45 (3.21%) Azure Engineer
14 42 (3.00%) Snowflake Data Engineer
15 41 (2.93%) Databricks Data Engineer
16 40 (2.86%) Solutions Architect
17 39 (2.78%) Consultant
18 35 (2.50%) Data Analyst
19 33 (2.36%) Azure Data Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 208 (14.85%) PySpark
2 197 (14.06%) Terraform
3 99 (7.07%) Kafka
4 51 (3.64%) REST
5 32 (2.28%) React
6 25 (1.78%) JSON
6 25 (1.78%) Pandas
7 24 (1.71%) .NET
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 (0.71%) FastAPI
12 10 (0.71%) LangChain
12 10 (0.71%) pytest
13 9 (0.64%) Spring Boot
14 8 (0.57%) RESTful
Miscellaneous
1 184 (13.13%) Cloud Native
2 58 (4.14%) Data Structures
2 58 (4.14%) Legacy Systems
3 56 (4.00%) Onboarding
4 55 (3.93%) Product Ownership
5 46 (3.28%) Distributed Systems
6 38 (2.71%) AI Agents
7 23 (1.64%) Data Protection Act
8 21 (1.50%) Greenfield Project
9 19 (1.36%) Distributed Computing
10 17 (1.21%) NHS
11 16 (1.14%) Virtual Team
12 15 (1.07%) Clustering
13 14 (1.00%) Enterprise Software
13 14 (1.00%) Life Science
13 14 (1.00%) Management Information System
14 13 (0.93%) Algorithms
14 13 (0.93%) Analytical Mindset
15 12 (0.86%) Reference Data
16 11 (0.79%) Marketing Technology
Operating Systems
1 34 (2.43%) Linux
2 30 (2.14%) Unix
3 8 (0.57%) Windows
4 2 (0.14%) Windows Server
5 1 (0.071%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 1 (0.071%) Robot Operating System
5 1 (0.071%) Ubuntu
5 1 (0.071%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 688 (49.11%) Analytics
2 677 (48.32%) Data Pipeline
3 532 (37.97%) Data Modelling
4 487 (34.76%) CI/CD
5 483 (34.48%) ETL
6 415 (29.62%) AI
7 345 (24.63%) Business Intelligence
8 340 (24.27%) Agile
9 331 (23.63%) DevOps
10 311 (22.20%) Data Governance
11 239 (17.06%) Machine Learning
12 233 (16.63%) Problem-Solving
13 221 (15.77%) Data Transformation
14 220 (15.70%) Migration
15 218 (15.56%) Data Architecture
16 217 (15.49%) Stakeholder Management
17 210 (14.99%) Validation
18 206 (14.70%) Decision-Making
19 204 (14.56%) Data Science
20 190 (13.56%) Infrastructure as Code
Programming Languages
1 767 (54.75%) SQL
2 707 (50.46%) Python
3 103 (7.35%) Java
4 43 (3.07%) Data Analysis Expressions
5 38 (2.71%) Scala
6 37 (2.64%) PowerShell
7 35 (2.50%) Bash
8 29 (2.07%) C#
9 27 (1.93%) JavaScript
10 21 (1.50%) R
11 20 (1.43%) T-SQL
12 17 (1.21%) PL/SQL
13 16 (1.14%) Shell Script
14 12 (0.86%) Bicep
15 11 (0.79%) TypeScript
16 10 (0.71%) Kusto Query Language
17 9 (0.64%) SAS Macro
18 7 (0.50%) SPARQL
19 6 (0.43%) Cypher
19 6 (0.43%) LookML
Qualifications
1 267 (19.06%) Security Cleared
2 230 (16.42%) SC Cleared
3 79 (5.64%) Degree
4 41 (2.93%) Computer Science Degree
5 26 (1.86%) Azure Certification
5 26 (1.86%) DV Cleared
6 24 (1.71%) BPSS Clearance
7 21 (1.50%) Master's Degree
8 19 (1.36%) AWS Certification
9 14 (1.00%) DBS Check
10 9 (0.64%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
10 9 (0.64%) SnowPro
11 8 (0.57%) Microsoft Certification
12 5 (0.36%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
12 5 (0.36%) Tableau Certification
13 4 (0.29%) PMI Certification
14 3 (0.21%) PhD
14 3 (0.21%) PMP
15 2 (0.14%) CSPO
16 1 (0.071%) TOGAF Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 440 (31.41%) Data Quality
2 69 (4.93%) GDPR
2 69 (4.93%) QA
3 25 (1.78%) Accessibility
4 13 (0.93%) SLA
5 4 (0.29%) Sarbanes-Oxley
6 3 (0.21%) GxP
6 3 (0.21%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 3 (0.21%) ISO/IEC 42001
6 3 (0.21%) MiFID
6 3 (0.21%) NIST
6 3 (0.21%) PMO
7 2 (0.14%) 21 CFR Part 11
7 2 (0.14%) Actionable Recommendations
7 2 (0.14%) California Consumer Privacy Act
7 2 (0.14%) EMIR
7 2 (0.14%) GRC
7 2 (0.14%) IFRS
7 2 (0.14%) IFRS 9
7 2 (0.14%) Solvency II
System Software
1 118 (8.42%) Docker
2 5 (0.36%) Active Directory
3 1 (0.071%) Virtual Machines
Systems Management
1 95 (6.78%) Kubernetes
2 24 (1.71%) Ansible
3 17 (1.21%) 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
7 2 (0.14%) Thomson Reuters DACS
8 1 (0.071%) Cilium
8 1 (0.071%) IBM Guardium
8 1 (0.071%) Kubeflow
8 1 (0.071%) Kustomize
8 1 (0.071%) Nagios
8 1 (0.071%) Progress Chef
8 1 (0.071%) QRadar
8 1 (0.071%) Single Sign-On
Vendors
1 366 (26.12%) Databricks
2 252 (17.99%) Microsoft
3 70 (5.00%) Informatica
4 64 (4.57%) 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 (1.64%) Salesforce
9 15 (1.07%) 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 8 (0.57%) Bloomberg
13 8 (0.57%) Workday
14 7 (0.50%) Hitachi
14 7 (0.50%) InterSystems