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 9 April 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
9 Apr 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 86 149 212
Rank change year-on-year +63 +63 -11
Contract jobs citing Data Engineering 1,163 456 412
As % of all contract jobs in England 2.97% 1.87% 1.10%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.47% 2.06% 1.27%
Number of daily rates quoted 814 320 309
10th Percentile £400 £400 £413
25th Percentile £450 £462 £475
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £550 £560
Median % change year-on-year -4.55% -1.79% -6.67%
75th Percentile £625 £688 £675
90th Percentile £750 £838 £750
UK median daily rate £525 £525 £550
% change year-on-year - -4.55% -8.33%
Number of hourly rates quoted 15 12 11
10th Percentile £53.45 £22.00 £30.37
25th Percentile £65.00 £22.38 £33.13
Median hourly rate £70.00 £25.97 £35.00
Median % change year-on-year +169.59% -25.81% -53.33%
75th Percentile £80.88 £35.94 £55.13
90th Percentile £89.00 £63.88 £60.00
UK median hourly rate £70.00 £25.97 £35.00
% change year-on-year +169.59% -25.81% -1.41%

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 33,539 22,147 32,451
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 85.75% 90.94% 86.60%
Number of daily rates quoted 21,506 14,596 21,405
10th Percentile £313 £313 £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 £614 £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 2,075 867 2,189
10th Percentile £15.43 £14.99 £12.92
25th Percentile £19.91 £19.00 £16.00
Median hourly rate £40.00 £32.50 £34.00
Median % change year-on-year +23.08% -4.41% -9.33%
75th Percentile £65.74 £65.00 £58.70
90th Percentile £77.80 £76.25 £70.78
UK median hourly rate £36.70 £31.64 £33.07
% change year-on-year +15.99% -4.31% -8.15%

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 9 April 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 9 April 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 9 April 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 +65 742 £550 -4.35% 253
North of England +1 123 £475 -5.00% 110
Midlands +26 120 £517 +3.35% 51
West Midlands +19 95 £525 -2.78% 36
South West +20 71 £525 -16.00% 49
Yorkshire -16 54 £480 -16.52% 40
North West -10 49 £480 +1.05% 59
South East -32 47 £538 +7.50% 111
East of England -24 23 £575 +35.29% 34
North East +4 22 £450 -5.26% 13
East Midlands -17 22 £447 -5.89% 15
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
1 173 (14.88%) Apache Spark
2 116 (9.97%) Apache Airflow
3 76 (6.53%) Apache
4 27 (2.32%) SAS
5 18 (1.55%) Palantir Foundry
6 11 (0.95%) Confluence
7 8 (0.69%) Appian
8 7 (0.60%) Apache Superset
9 5 (0.43%) Jupyter
10 4 (0.34%) Microsoft Exchange
11 2 (0.17%) Apache Synapse
11 2 (0.17%) SharePoint
12 1 (0.086%) ArcGIS
12 1 (0.086%) Camunda
12 1 (0.086%) CMS
12 1 (0.086%) IBM HTTP Server
Applications
1 23 (1.98%) Microsoft Excel
2 10 (0.86%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 8 (0.69%) Microsoft Office
4 6 (0.52%) Spreadsheet
5 4 (0.34%) MS Visio
6 3 (0.26%) Microsoft Project
6 3 (0.26%) Trello
7 2 (0.17%) Chatbot
Business Applications
1 5 (0.43%) BambooHR
2 4 (0.34%) Aladdin
3 3 (0.26%) Dynamics CRM
3 3 (0.26%) Salesforce CRM
3 3 (0.26%) SAP BPC
4 2 (0.17%) SAP S/4HANA
5 1 (0.086%) Actimize
5 1 (0.086%) Markit EDM
5 1 (0.086%) Maximo
5 1 (0.086%) Misys Midas
5 1 (0.086%) SAP ECC
Cloud Services
1 545 (46.86%) Azure
2 411 (35.34%) AWS
3 267 (22.96%) Power Platform
4 190 (16.34%) Azure Data Factory
5 163 (14.02%) GCP
6 141 (12.12%) Azure Synapse Analytics
7 140 (12.04%) Snowflake
8 126 (10.83%) GitHub
9 125 (10.75%) Amazon S3
10 108 (9.29%) dbt
11 97 (8.34%) Azure DevOps
12 96 (8.25%) Serverless
13 78 (6.71%) AWS Lambda
14 76 (6.53%) GitHub Actions
15 47 (4.04%) AWS CloudFormation
16 27 (2.32%) AWS Step Functions
16 27 (2.32%) Dagster
17 26 (2.24%) Collibra
18 25 (2.15%) Amazon Kinesis
19 22 (1.89%) Amazon SageMaker
Communications & Networking
1 5 (0.43%) RTP
2 4 (0.34%) Cisco IPT
2 4 (0.34%) Kerberos
2 4 (0.34%) Network Security
3 3 (0.26%) VPN
4 1 (0.086%) 4G
4 1 (0.086%) 5G
4 1 (0.086%) Firewall
4 1 (0.086%) SAN
4 1 (0.086%) SMS
4 1 (0.086%) TCP/IP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 242 (20.81%) Power BI
2 229 (19.69%) Data Warehouse
3 184 (15.82%) Data Lake
4 106 (9.11%) Metadata
5 79 (6.79%) SQL Server
6 77 (6.62%) NoSQL
7 75 (6.45%) Delta Lake
8 74 (6.36%) Big Data
9 65 (5.59%) Amazon Redshift
9 65 (5.59%) Tableau
10 64 (5.50%) Azure SQL Database
11 62 (5.33%) Snowflake Schema
12 60 (5.16%) BigQuery
13 54 (4.64%) Relational Database
14 52 (4.47%) Amazon Athena
15 45 (3.87%) PostgreSQL
16 38 (3.27%) Hadoop
16 38 (3.27%) SQL Server Integration Services
17 33 (2.84%) Spark SQL
18 23 (1.98%) Data Vault
Development Applications
1 148 (12.73%) Git
2 48 (4.13%) GitLab
3 40 (3.44%) MLflow
4 36 (3.10%) Jenkins
5 33 (2.84%) JIRA
6 7 (0.60%) Selenium
6 7 (0.60%) SonarQube
7 3 (0.26%) JUnit
7 3 (0.26%) Maven
7 3 (0.26%) Postman
7 3 (0.26%) Robot Framework
7 3 (0.26%) Snyk
7 3 (0.26%) Terragrunt
8 2 (0.17%) Artifactory
8 2 (0.17%) Bitbucket
8 2 (0.17%) Cucumber
8 2 (0.17%) Mockito
8 2 (0.17%) Visual Studio
8 2 (0.17%) Visual Studio Code
9 1 (0.086%) Octopus Deploy
General
1 292 (25.11%) Finance
2 285 (24.51%) Social Skills
3 179 (15.39%) Analytical Skills
4 98 (8.43%) Public Sector
5 62 (5.33%) Banking
6 28 (2.41%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 20 (1.72%) Retail
8 17 (1.46%) Documentation Skills
9 16 (1.38%) Front Office
9 16 (1.38%) Marketing
10 15 (1.29%) Influencing Skills
10 15 (1.29%) Telecoms
11 14 (1.20%) Legal
12 13 (1.12%) Investment Banking
13 12 (1.03%) Financial Institution
14 8 (0.69%) Pharmaceutical
15 6 (0.52%) Back Office
15 6 (0.52%) Law
15 6 (0.52%) Military
15 6 (0.52%) Publishing
Job Titles
1 557 (47.89%) Data Engineer
2 156 (13.41%) Senior
3 131 (11.26%) Lead
4 107 (9.20%) Architect
5 106 (9.11%) Senior Data Engineer
6 73 (6.28%) Azure Engineer
7 70 (6.02%) Developer
8 60 (5.16%) Azure Data Engineer
9 55 (4.73%) Analyst
9 55 (4.73%) Data Architect
10 54 (4.64%) Lead Data Engineer
11 47 (4.04%) Snowflake Engineer
12 46 (3.96%) AWS Engineer
13 43 (3.70%) Data Scientist
14 39 (3.35%) Snowflake Data Engineer
15 35 (3.01%) Consultant
16 32 (2.75%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
16 32 (2.75%) AWS Data Engineer
16 32 (2.75%) Data Analyst
17 30 (2.58%) Solutions Architect
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 184 (15.82%) PySpark
2 142 (12.21%) Kafka
3 56 (4.82%) Pandas
4 42 (3.61%) PyTorch
4 42 (3.61%) scikit-learn
5 37 (3.18%) NumPy
6 33 (2.84%) TensorFlow
7 29 (2.49%) JSON
8 24 (2.06%) REST
9 23 (1.98%) Spring
9 23 (1.98%) YAML
10 22 (1.89%) pytest
10 22 (1.89%) React
11 20 (1.72%) LangChain
11 20 (1.72%) RESTful
12 19 (1.63%) FastAPI
13 18 (1.55%) Great Expectations
14 17 (1.46%) Flask
15 16 (1.38%) Spring Boot
16 14 (1.20%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 148 (12.73%) Cloud Native
2 39 (3.35%) Product Ownership
3 38 (3.27%) Distributed Systems
4 36 (3.10%) Legacy Systems
5 31 (2.67%) Data Structures
6 28 (2.41%) Distributed Computing
7 26 (2.24%) Algorithms
8 22 (1.89%) Onboarding
9 21 (1.81%) AI Agents
9 21 (1.81%) Hybrid Cloud
10 20 (1.72%) Greenfield Project
11 17 (1.46%) Data Protection Act
12 16 (1.38%) Analytical Mindset
13 15 (1.29%) Clustering
14 14 (1.20%) NHS
15 12 (1.03%) Fixed Income
16 10 (0.86%) Management Information System
16 10 (0.86%) Self-Motivation
17 8 (0.69%) Replication
17 8 (0.69%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 28 (2.41%) Linux
2 16 (1.38%) Unix
3 8 (0.69%) VMS
4 3 (0.26%) Windows
5 2 (0.17%) Ubuntu
5 2 (0.17%) Windows Server
6 1 (0.086%) CentOS
6 1 (0.086%) Debian
Processes & Methodologies
1 590 (50.73%) Analytics
2 524 (45.06%) Data Pipeline
3 464 (39.90%) ETL
4 457 (39.29%) Data Modelling
5 396 (34.05%) CI/CD
6 303 (26.05%) AI
7 302 (25.97%) Business Intelligence
8 295 (25.37%) DevOps
9 290 (24.94%) Agile
10 281 (24.16%) Data Governance
11 227 (19.52%) Machine Learning
12 222 (19.09%) Problem-Solving
13 217 (18.66%) Data Science
14 189 (16.25%) Data Architecture
15 145 (12.47%) Decision-Making
16 135 (11.61%) Infrastructure as Code
17 132 (11.35%) Validation
18 126 (10.83%) Data Transformation
19 122 (10.49%) Migration
20 111 (9.54%) Performance Tuning
Programming Languages
1 650 (55.89%) Python
2 626 (53.83%) SQL
3 100 (8.60%) Java
4 67 (5.76%) Scala
5 42 (3.61%) C#
6 39 (3.35%) Data Analysis Expressions
7 27 (2.32%) Bash
7 27 (2.32%) PowerShell
8 22 (1.89%) JavaScript
9 21 (1.81%) R
9 21 (1.81%) T-SQL
10 19 (1.63%) Bicep
11 14 (1.20%) Go
12 11 (0.95%) TypeScript
13 10 (0.86%) Shell Script
14 9 (0.77%) PL/SQL
15 6 (0.52%) Korn
16 5 (0.43%) C++
16 5 (0.43%) SAS Macro
17 3 (0.26%) Rust
Qualifications
1 235 (20.21%) Security Cleared
2 203 (17.45%) SC Cleared
3 79 (6.79%) Degree
4 45 (3.87%) Azure Certification
5 38 (3.27%) Computer Science Degree
6 29 (2.49%) Master's Degree
7 16 (1.38%) BPSS Clearance
7 16 (1.38%) DV Cleared
8 12 (1.03%) AWS Certification
9 8 (0.69%) Microsoft Certification
10 7 (0.60%) PhD
11 4 (0.34%) DBS Check
11 4 (0.34%) Microsoft Certified Professional
12 3 (0.26%) SnowPro
13 2 (0.17%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 2 (0.17%) Tableau Certification
14 1 (0.086%) (ISC)2 CCSP
14 1 (0.086%) CCSP
14 1 (0.086%) OCP
14 1 (0.086%) Oracle Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 323 (27.77%) Data Quality
2 92 (7.91%) GDPR
3 43 (3.70%) QA
4 13 (1.12%) Sarbanes-Oxley
5 8 (0.69%) Accessibility
6 6 (0.52%) HIPAA
7 5 (0.43%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 5 (0.43%) PERC
7 5 (0.43%) SOC 2
8 4 (0.34%) California Consumer Privacy Act
8 4 (0.34%) SLA
8 4 (0.34%) Solvency II
9 3 (0.26%) GRC
9 3 (0.26%) WCAG
10 2 (0.17%) HL7
10 2 (0.17%) MiFID
10 2 (0.17%) NIST
10 2 (0.17%) PCI DSS
10 2 (0.17%) PMO
11 1 (0.086%) NCSC
System Software
1 124 (10.66%) Docker
2 5 (0.43%) HDFS
3 3 (0.26%) Virtual Machines
4 1 (0.086%) Active Directory
4 1 (0.086%) Apache ZooKeeper
Systems Management
1 166 (14.27%) Terraform
2 124 (10.66%) Kubernetes
3 26 (2.24%) Prometheus
4 14 (1.20%) Grafana
5 5 (0.43%) Ansible
5 5 (0.43%) Argo
6 4 (0.34%) Kubeflow
7 3 (0.26%) Nagios
7 3 (0.26%) Rancher
8 2 (0.17%) Hadoop YARN
8 2 (0.17%) Kibana
8 2 (0.17%) Thomson Reuters DACS
9 1 (0.086%) Apache Ranger
9 1 (0.086%) Control-M
9 1 (0.086%) HP Fortify
9 1 (0.086%) IBM Guardium
9 1 (0.086%) Oozie
Vendors
1 333 (28.63%) Databricks
2 178 (15.31%) Microsoft
3 59 (5.07%) Google
4 49 (4.21%) Informatica
5 35 (3.01%) Oracle
6 27 (2.32%) Talend
7 25 (2.15%) Foundry
8 21 (1.81%) OpenAI
9 20 (1.72%) Palantir
10 19 (1.63%) Splunk
11 17 (1.46%) SAP
12 15 (1.29%) Cloudera
13 13 (1.12%) ServiceNow
14 11 (0.95%) Denodo
15 9 (0.77%) Salesforce
15 9 (0.77%) UiPath
16 8 (0.69%) Automation Anywhere
17 6 (0.52%) MicroStrategy
18 5 (0.43%) IBM
18 5 (0.43%) Workday