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

6 months to
1 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 80 148 197
Rank change year-on-year +68 +49 -7
Contract jobs citing Data Engineering 1,416 515 422
As % of all contract jobs in England 3.11% 1.87% 1.25%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.65% 2.06% 1.46%
Number of daily rates quoted 999 333 310
10th Percentile £390 £363 £399
25th Percentile £449 £450 £475
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £525 £586
Median % change year-on-year - -10.45% -6.20%
75th Percentile £638 £650 £709
90th Percentile £750 £800 £776
UK median daily rate £525 £520 £575
% change year-on-year +0.96% -9.57% -8.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 21 6 11
10th Percentile £21.25 £30.73 £30.37
25th Percentile £35.00 £42.03 £33.13
Median hourly rate £70.00 £52.50 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +33.33% -12.50% -23.08%
75th Percentile £75.00 £62.19 -
90th Percentile £87.50 £87.50 -
UK median hourly rate £69.44 £52.50 £35.00
% change year-on-year +32.27% +50.00% -52.05%

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 38,823 25,045 28,976
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 85.31% 90.74% 85.84%
Number of daily rates quoted 24,257 16,045 18,963
10th Percentile £325 £300 £313
25th Percentile £425 £405 £419
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £513 £525
Median % change year-on-year +2.44% -2.38% -4.55%
75th Percentile £625 £630 £650
90th Percentile £738 £738 £756
UK median daily rate £523 £500 £525
% change year-on-year +4.60% -4.76% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,475 1,380 1,752
10th Percentile £15.00 £14.20 £14.00
25th Percentile £20.75 £17.87 £17.80
Median hourly rate £45.00 £25.15 £42.03
Median % change year-on-year +78.93% -40.16% -1.11%
75th Percentile £68.75 £51.65 £65.00
90th Percentile £83.00 £70.16 £75.00
UK median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £40.00
% change year-on-year +74.79% -37.13% -5.88%

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 August 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 August 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 August 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 +57 844 £550 - 495
North of England +33 180 £463 -5.13% 126
Midlands +42 150 £481 +4.79% 36
West Midlands +30 125 £475 -0.63% 26
South East -19 87 £525 +11.94% 125
Yorkshire +18 84 £475 +2.70% 41
South West +31 83 £505 -7.13% 58
North West -21 58 £500 +5.26% 63
North East -4 40 £425 -15.00% 23
East of England -2 30 £575 +35.29% 18
East Midlands -5 22 £525 +14.38% 10
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
1 180 (12.71%) Apache Spark
2 164 (11.58%) Apache Airflow
3 114 (8.05%) Apache
4 42 (2.97%) SAS
5 29 (2.05%) Confluence
6 23 (1.62%) Jupyter
7 21 (1.48%) Palantir Foundry
8 11 (0.78%) SharePoint
9 8 (0.56%) Apache Superset
10 3 (0.21%) Apache Solr
10 3 (0.21%) ArcGIS
11 2 (0.14%) Appian
11 2 (0.14%) Microsoft Exchange
12 1 (0.071%) Apache Synapse
12 1 (0.071%) CICS
12 1 (0.071%) IBM HTTP Server
12 1 (0.071%) PowerExchange
Applications
1 18 (1.27%) Microsoft Excel
2 7 (0.49%) Microsoft Office
2 7 (0.49%) Spreadsheet
3 5 (0.35%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 4 (0.28%) Chatbot
5 2 (0.14%) MS Visio
6 1 (0.071%) Notion
Business Applications
1 12 (0.85%) Aladdin
2 6 (0.42%) Dynamics CRM
3 5 (0.35%) BambooHR
4 4 (0.28%) NetSuite
4 4 (0.28%) Sage X3
4 4 (0.28%) SAP S/4HANA
5 2 (0.14%) Endur
5 2 (0.14%) Oracle Assets
5 2 (0.14%) Salesforce CRM
5 2 (0.14%) SAP BPC
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%) SAP ECC
6 1 (0.071%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
Cloud Services
1 598 (42.23%) Azure
2 539 (38.06%) AWS
3 286 (20.20%) Power Platform
4 213 (15.04%) Snowflake
5 197 (13.91%) GCP
6 181 (12.78%) dbt
7 165 (11.65%) Azure Data Factory
8 147 (10.38%) Amazon S3
9 142 (10.03%) Azure Synapse Analytics
10 128 (9.04%) Azure DevOps
11 114 (8.05%) Serverless
12 110 (7.77%) GitHub
13 95 (6.71%) AWS Lambda
14 64 (4.52%) GitHub Actions
15 36 (2.54%) Amazon EMR
16 29 (2.05%) Azure AI
17 28 (1.98%) Amazon Bedrock
18 27 (1.91%) Amazon SageMaker
18 27 (1.91%) Azure Cosmos DB
19 26 (1.84%) AWS Step Functions
Communications & Networking
1 5 (0.35%) Firewall
2 3 (0.21%) RTP
3 2 (0.14%) Network Security
4 1 (0.071%) 4G
4 1 (0.071%) 5G
4 1 (0.071%) MIMO
4 1 (0.071%) MQTT
Database & Business Intelligence
1 279 (19.70%) Data Warehouse
2 266 (18.79%) Power BI
3 196 (13.84%) Data Lake
4 137 (9.68%) Metadata
5 96 (6.78%) BigQuery
6 94 (6.64%) Amazon Redshift
7 93 (6.57%) Delta Lake
8 86 (6.07%) Big Data
9 83 (5.86%) Tableau
10 70 (4.94%) SQL Server
11 62 (4.38%) NoSQL
12 60 (4.24%) Amazon Athena
13 57 (4.03%) Snowflake Schema
14 52 (3.67%) Relational Database
15 49 (3.46%) PostgreSQL
16 39 (2.75%) Azure SQL Database
17 35 (2.47%) Hadoop
18 33 (2.33%) Looker
18 33 (2.33%) Star Schema
19 32 (2.26%) SQL Server Integration Services
Development Applications
1 141 (9.96%) Git
2 68 (4.80%) GitLab
3 57 (4.03%) JIRA
4 27 (1.91%) MLflow
5 24 (1.69%) Jenkins
6 7 (0.49%) SonarQube
7 5 (0.35%) Bitbucket
7 5 (0.35%) ERwin
8 3 (0.21%) Artifactory
8 3 (0.21%) ER Studio
8 3 (0.21%) Postman
8 3 (0.21%) Selenium
8 3 (0.21%) Snyk
8 3 (0.21%) Sonatype Nexus
8 3 (0.21%) Terragrunt
9 2 (0.14%) Yeoman
10 1 (0.071%) Octopus Deploy
10 1 (0.071%) Robot Framework
10 1 (0.071%) RStudio
10 1 (0.071%) SoapUI
General
1 340 (24.01%) Social Skills
2 330 (23.31%) Finance
3 231 (16.31%) Analytical Skills
4 155 (10.95%) Public Sector
5 105 (7.42%) Banking
6 40 (2.82%) Marketing
7 34 (2.40%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 33 (2.33%) Retail
9 27 (1.91%) Documentation Skills
10 25 (1.77%) Telecoms
11 24 (1.69%) Front Office
12 19 (1.34%) Investment Banking
13 16 (1.13%) Financial Institution
13 16 (1.13%) Manufacturing
14 14 (0.99%) Pharmaceutical
15 11 (0.78%) Law
16 10 (0.71%) Influencing Skills
17 9 (0.64%) Legal
18 8 (0.56%) Billing
18 8 (0.56%) Military
Job Titles
1 650 (45.90%) Data Engineer
2 197 (13.91%) Senior
3 170 (12.01%) Lead
4 165 (11.65%) Architect
5 118 (8.33%) Senior Data Engineer
6 87 (6.14%) Data Architect
7 81 (5.72%) Developer
8 66 (4.66%) Analyst
8 66 (4.66%) AWS Engineer
9 60 (4.24%) Lead Data Engineer
10 55 (3.88%) AWS Data Engineer
10 55 (3.88%) Azure Engineer
11 52 (3.67%) Snowflake Engineer
12 47 (3.32%) Azure Data Engineer
13 45 (3.18%) Solutions Architect
14 43 (3.04%) Snowflake Data Engineer
15 42 (2.97%) Data Scientist
16 40 (2.82%) Consultant
17 39 (2.75%) Data Analyst
18 32 (2.26%) Python Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 197 (13.91%) PySpark
2 119 (8.40%) Kafka
3 43 (3.04%) REST
4 34 (2.40%) Pandas
5 33 (2.33%) JSON
6 26 (1.84%) React
7 25 (1.77%) scikit-learn
8 21 (1.48%) PyTorch
8 21 (1.48%) Spring
9 20 (1.41%) .NET
9 20 (1.41%) NumPy
10 16 (1.13%) TensorFlow
11 15 (1.06%) OpenTelemetry
12 14 (0.99%) RESTful
12 14 (0.99%) Spring Boot
13 13 (0.92%) Apache Avro
14 11 (0.78%) FastAPI
14 11 (0.78%) LangChain
14 11 (0.78%) Microsoft Graph
14 11 (0.78%) Node.js
Miscellaneous
1 189 (13.35%) Cloud Native
2 60 (4.24%) Legacy Systems
3 59 (4.17%) Data Structures
4 56 (3.95%) Distributed Systems
5 53 (3.74%) Product Ownership
6 41 (2.90%) Onboarding
7 32 (2.26%) AI Agents
8 25 (1.77%) Data Protection Act
9 22 (1.55%) Distributed Computing
10 21 (1.48%) Greenfield Project
11 19 (1.34%) NHS
12 17 (1.20%) Algorithms
12 17 (1.20%) Clustering
13 16 (1.13%) Virtual Team
14 15 (1.06%) Analytical Mindset
15 14 (0.99%) Life Science
16 13 (0.92%) Management Information System
17 12 (0.85%) Fixed Income
18 11 (0.78%) Reference Data
18 11 (0.78%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 31 (2.19%) Linux
2 28 (1.98%) Unix
3 7 (0.49%) Windows
4 3 (0.21%) VMS
5 2 (0.14%) Windows Server
6 1 (0.071%) Ubuntu
Processes & Methodologies
1 717 (50.64%) Analytics
2 683 (48.23%) Data Pipeline
3 547 (38.63%) Data Modelling
4 494 (34.89%) CI/CD
5 484 (34.18%) ETL
6 396 (27.97%) AI
7 361 (25.49%) Agile
8 346 (24.44%) Business Intelligence
9 332 (23.45%) DevOps
10 305 (21.54%) Data Governance
11 258 (18.22%) Machine Learning
12 242 (17.09%) Problem-Solving
13 231 (16.31%) Data Science
14 208 (14.69%) Validation
15 206 (14.55%) Decision-Making
16 205 (14.48%) Migration
17 203 (14.34%) Data Architecture
18 190 (13.42%) Data Transformation
19 185 (13.06%) Stakeholder Management
20 176 (12.43%) Infrastructure as Code
Programming Languages
1 769 (54.31%) SQL
2 722 (50.99%) Python
3 117 (8.26%) Java
4 42 (2.97%) Data Analysis Expressions
5 37 (2.61%) Scala
6 35 (2.47%) C#
7 33 (2.33%) Bash
8 28 (1.98%) PowerShell
9 25 (1.77%) T-SQL
10 20 (1.41%) JavaScript
11 19 (1.34%) R
12 18 (1.27%) Bicep
13 16 (1.13%) PL/SQL
14 15 (1.06%) Shell Script
15 12 (0.85%) SAS Macro
16 11 (0.78%) TypeScript
17 7 (0.49%) SPARQL
18 6 (0.42%) Cypher
19 5 (0.35%) Korn
19 5 (0.35%) Kusto Query Language
Qualifications
1 282 (19.92%) Security Cleared
2 241 (17.02%) SC Cleared
3 88 (6.21%) Degree
4 41 (2.90%) Computer Science Degree
5 31 (2.19%) BPSS Clearance
6 29 (2.05%) Azure Certification
7 27 (1.91%) DV Cleared
8 26 (1.84%) Master's Degree
9 18 (1.27%) AWS Certification
10 13 (0.92%) DBS Check
11 7 (0.49%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
11 7 (0.49%) Microsoft Certification
11 7 (0.49%) SnowPro
12 5 (0.35%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
12 5 (0.35%) Tableau Certification
13 3 (0.21%) PhD
14 2 (0.14%) CSPO
14 2 (0.14%) Microsoft Certified Professional
14 2 (0.14%) PMI Certification
15 1 (0.071%) PMP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 415 (29.31%) Data Quality
2 76 (5.37%) QA
3 72 (5.08%) GDPR
4 22 (1.55%) Accessibility
5 10 (0.71%) SLA
6 4 (0.28%) NIST
6 4 (0.28%) Sarbanes-Oxley
6 4 (0.28%) Solvency II
7 3 (0.21%) Actionable Recommendations
7 3 (0.21%) GxP
7 3 (0.21%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 3 (0.21%) ISO/IEC 42001
7 3 (0.21%) MiFID
7 3 (0.21%) PMO
8 2 (0.14%) 21 CFR Part 11
8 2 (0.14%) California Consumer Privacy Act
8 2 (0.14%) EMIR
8 2 (0.14%) GRC
9 1 (0.071%) COPPA
9 1 (0.071%) IFRS 17
System Software
1 123 (8.69%) Docker
2 4 (0.28%) Active Directory
3 3 (0.21%) Virtual Machines
4 2 (0.14%) HDFS
Systems Management
1 185 (13.06%) Terraform
2 111 (7.84%) Kubernetes
3 19 (1.34%) Prometheus
4 15 (1.06%) Ansible
5 13 (0.92%) Grafana
6 5 (0.35%) Kibana
7 3 (0.21%) Control-M
7 3 (0.21%) logstash
7 3 (0.21%) Rancher
8 2 (0.14%) Argo
8 2 (0.14%) Kubeflow
8 2 (0.14%) Thomson Reuters DACS
9 1 (0.071%) Cilium
9 1 (0.071%) Hadoop YARN
9 1 (0.071%) HP Fortify
9 1 (0.071%) IBM Guardium
9 1 (0.071%) Kustomize
9 1 (0.071%) Nagios
9 1 (0.071%) Oozie
9 1 (0.071%) QRadar
Vendors
1 349 (24.65%) Databricks
2 242 (17.09%) Microsoft
3 74 (5.23%) Informatica
4 62 (4.38%) Google
4 62 (4.38%) Oracle
5 31 (2.19%) Foundry
5 31 (2.19%) SAP
6 30 (2.12%) Palantir
6 30 (2.12%) Talend
7 22 (1.55%) Splunk
8 21 (1.48%) OpenAI
9 18 (1.27%) Salesforce
10 17 (1.20%) Cloudera
11 14 (0.99%) ServiceNow
12 12 (0.85%) Trend Micro
13 8 (0.56%) Denodo
13 8 (0.56%) Workday
14 7 (0.49%) Adobe
14 7 (0.49%) InterSystems
15 6 (0.42%) Teradata