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

6 months to
29 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 88 139 186
Rank change year-on-year +51 +47 +22
Contract jobs citing Data Engineering 1,404 551 438
As % of all contract jobs in England 3.03% 2.00% 1.35%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.58% 2.20% 1.57%
Number of daily rates quoted 986 350 321
10th Percentile £400 £350 £400
25th Percentile £450 £413 £468
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £525 £575
Median % change year-on-year - -8.70% -4.17%
75th Percentile £644 £642 £676
90th Percentile £738 £748 £775
UK median daily rate £525 £515 £550
% change year-on-year +1.94% -6.36% -8.33%
Number of hourly rates quoted 13 5 6
10th Percentile - £36.73 £23.88
25th Percentile £21.25 £38.96 £34.88
Median hourly rate £65.00 £52.50 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +23.81% -12.50% -20.53%
75th Percentile £72.66 £65.00 -
90th Percentile £81.64 £92.00 -
UK median hourly rate £44.50 £58.75 £60.00
% change year-on-year -24.26% -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 39,188 25,068 27,886
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 84.60% 90.98% 86.24%
Number of daily rates quoted 23,853 15,921 17,051
10th Percentile £325 £298 £313
25th Percentile £425 £404 £420
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £510 £525
Median % change year-on-year +2.94% -2.86% -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 2,855 1,537 1,209
10th Percentile £13.91 £14.38 £15.00
25th Percentile £17.60 £17.87 £20.19
Median hourly rate £41.00 £25.15 £43.00
Median % change year-on-year +63.02% -41.51% -3.37%
75th Percentile £67.50 £47.00 £67.00
90th Percentile £78.75 £67.35 £75.00
UK median hourly rate £39.75 £25.15 £42.50
% change year-on-year +58.05% -40.82% -1.16%

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 29 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 29 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 29 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 +41 856 £550 - 1,002
North of England +20 188 £475 +7.34% 234
Midlands +28 122 £475 +2.70% 94
West Midlands +26 100 £475 -13.64% 73
Yorkshire +29 95 £500 +5.26% 63
South East -16 93 £525 +19.32% 135
South West +33 86 £525 -3.45% 78
North West -28 58 £525 +22.09% 133
North East -7 37 £425 -17.07% 39
East of England -16 25 £550 +22.22% 40
East Midlands -5 22 £503 +15.57% 21
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 (12.18%) Apache Airflow
2 154 (10.97%) Apache Spark
3 123 (8.76%) Apache
4 32 (2.28%) SAS
5 31 (2.21%) Confluence
6 21 (1.50%) Jupyter
7 16 (1.14%) Palantir Foundry
8 15 (1.07%) SharePoint
9 5 (0.36%) Apache Solr
9 5 (0.36%) Apache Superset
10 4 (0.28%) ArcGIS
11 3 (0.21%) nginx
12 2 (0.14%) PowerExchange
13 1 (0.071%) Apache Pulsar
13 1 (0.071%) Apache Synapse
13 1 (0.071%) CICS
13 1 (0.071%) Microsoft Exchange
13 1 (0.071%) Oracle Workflow
Applications
1 9 (0.64%) Microsoft Excel
2 7 (0.50%) Chatbot
3 6 (0.43%) 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 7 (0.50%) 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%) 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%) Cloudability
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%) SAP Oil and Gas
6 1 (0.071%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
Cloud Services
1 581 (41.38%) Azure
2 525 (37.39%) AWS
3 257 (18.30%) Power Platform
4 235 (16.74%) Snowflake
5 220 (15.67%) dbt
6 212 (15.10%) GCP
7 163 (11.61%) Amazon S3
8 160 (11.40%) Azure Data Factory
9 131 (9.33%) Serverless
10 123 (8.76%) Azure DevOps
11 112 (7.98%) Azure Synapse Analytics
12 108 (7.69%) AWS Lambda
13 105 (7.48%) GitHub
14 66 (4.70%) Azure Databricks
15 56 (3.99%) GitHub Actions
16 41 (2.92%) Amazon EMR
17 37 (2.64%) Amazon CloudWatch
18 35 (2.49%) Amazon Bedrock
19 32 (2.28%) Microsoft Purview
20 29 (2.07%) Azure AI
Communications & Networking
1 6 (0.43%) DNS
2 4 (0.28%) Firewall
2 4 (0.28%) Network Security
3 2 (0.14%) Broadband
4 1 (0.071%) HTTP
4 1 (0.071%) HTTPS
4 1 (0.071%) Internet
4 1 (0.071%) MIMO
4 1 (0.071%) MQTT
4 1 (0.071%) Radio Access Network
4 1 (0.071%) SMS
4 1 (0.071%) SSL
4 1 (0.071%) TCP/IP
4 1 (0.071%) tcpdump
4 1 (0.071%) Wireshark
Database & Business Intelligence
1 291 (20.73%) Data Warehouse
2 244 (17.38%) Power BI
3 174 (12.39%) Data Lake
4 164 (11.68%) Metadata
5 115 (8.19%) BigQuery
6 96 (6.84%) Amazon Redshift
7 95 (6.77%) Delta Lake
8 72 (5.13%) Big Data
9 69 (4.91%) Tableau
10 65 (4.63%) Amazon Athena
11 53 (3.77%) SQL Server
12 49 (3.49%) Snowflake Schema
13 47 (3.35%) PostgreSQL
14 43 (3.06%) NoSQL
15 42 (2.99%) Relational Database
16 37 (2.64%) Looker
17 29 (2.07%) Amazon RDS
17 29 (2.07%) Azure SQL Database
17 29 (2.07%) Data Vault
18 25 (1.78%) Spark SQL
Development Applications
1 151 (10.75%) Git
2 83 (5.91%) GitLab
3 55 (3.92%) JIRA
4 24 (1.71%) Jenkins
5 22 (1.57%) 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 (0.43%) ERwin
9 4 (0.28%) ER Studio
10 3 (0.21%) Artifactory
10 3 (0.21%) Atlassian Bamboo
10 3 (0.21%) Postman
10 3 (0.21%) SonarQube
10 3 (0.21%) TeamCity
11 2 (0.14%) Cucumber
11 2 (0.14%) Sonatype Nexus
11 2 (0.14%) Yeoman
General
1 364 (25.93%) Social Skills
2 317 (22.58%) Finance
3 221 (15.74%) Analytical Skills
4 146 (10.40%) Public Sector
5 129 (9.19%) Banking
6 45 (3.21%) Marketing
7 32 (2.28%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 27 (1.92%) Retail
9 22 (1.57%) Front Office
10 21 (1.50%) Investment Banking
11 18 (1.28%) Pharmaceutical
12 16 (1.14%) Documentation Skills
12 16 (1.14%) Manufacturing
13 14 (1.00%) Telecoms
14 12 (0.85%) Back Office
14 12 (0.85%) Billing
15 11 (0.78%) Influencing Skills
15 11 (0.78%) Military
16 10 (0.71%) Law
16 10 (0.71%) Publishing
Job Titles
1 647 (46.08%) Data Engineer
2 217 (15.46%) Senior
3 163 (11.61%) Lead
4 152 (10.83%) Architect
5 141 (10.04%) Senior Data Engineer
6 80 (5.70%) Data Architect
7 79 (5.63%) Developer
8 69 (4.91%) AWS Engineer
9 60 (4.27%) Analyst
10 59 (4.20%) AWS Data Engineer
11 57 (4.06%) Databricks Engineer
11 57 (4.06%) Snowflake Engineer
12 53 (3.77%) Azure Engineer
13 48 (3.42%) Lead Data Engineer
14 46 (3.28%) Snowflake Data Engineer
15 45 (3.21%) Databricks Data Engineer
16 39 (2.78%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
17 35 (2.49%) Consultant
18 34 (2.42%) GCP Engineer
19 33 (2.35%) Azure Data Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 219 (15.60%) Terraform
2 203 (14.46%) PySpark
3 89 (6.34%) Kafka
4 52 (3.70%) REST
5 32 (2.28%) React
6 27 (1.92%) .NET
7 26 (1.85%) JSON
8 20 (1.42%) Pandas
9 15 (1.07%) LangChain
9 15 (1.07%) PyTorch
10 12 (0.85%) FastAPI
10 12 (0.85%) pytest
10 12 (0.85%) TensorFlow
11 11 (0.78%) Microsoft Graph
11 11 (0.78%) NumPy
11 11 (0.78%) RabbitMQ
11 11 (0.78%) scikit-learn
12 10 (0.71%) RESTful
13 9 (0.64%) Apache Avro
13 9 (0.64%) Great Expectations
Miscellaneous
1 189 (13.46%) Cloud Native
2 74 (5.27%) Onboarding
3 69 (4.91%) Data Structures
4 59 (4.20%) Product Ownership
5 48 (3.42%) Legacy Systems
6 47 (3.35%) AI Agents
7 40 (2.85%) Distributed Systems
8 22 (1.57%) Data Protection Act
9 19 (1.35%) Distributed Computing
9 19 (1.35%) Enterprise Software
10 18 (1.28%) Virtual Team
11 17 (1.21%) Management Information System
11 17 (1.21%) NHS
12 15 (1.07%) Greenfield Project
12 15 (1.07%) Life Science
13 14 (1.00%) Algorithms
13 14 (1.00%) Analytical Mindset
14 13 (0.93%) Clustering
14 13 (0.93%) Data Fabric
15 11 (0.78%) Taxonomies
Operating Systems
1 28 (1.99%) Linux
2 23 (1.64%) Unix
3 7 (0.50%) 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
1 691 (49.22%) Data Pipeline
2 658 (46.87%) Analytics
3 553 (39.39%) Data Modelling
4 513 (36.54%) CI/CD
5 483 (34.40%) ETL
6 446 (31.77%) AI
7 354 (25.21%) Agile
8 341 (24.29%) DevOps
9 322 (22.93%) Business Intelligence
10 309 (22.01%) Data Governance
11 259 (18.45%) Stakeholder Management
12 242 (17.24%) Machine Learning
13 227 (16.17%) Data Architecture
14 225 (16.03%) Data Transformation
15 222 (15.81%) Infrastructure as Code
16 217 (15.46%) Validation
17 215 (15.31%) Migration
18 214 (15.24%) Problem-Solving
19 202 (14.39%) Decision-Making
20 193 (13.75%) Data Integration
Programming Languages
1 777 (55.34%) SQL
2 732 (52.14%) Python
3 95 (6.77%) Java
4 41 (2.92%) Scala
5 38 (2.71%) Data Analysis Expressions
6 37 (2.64%) PowerShell
7 33 (2.35%) C#
8 32 (2.28%) Bash
9 29 (2.07%) JavaScript
10 20 (1.42%) R
11 18 (1.28%) T-SQL
12 16 (1.14%) PL/SQL
13 13 (0.93%) Bicep
13 13 (0.93%) TypeScript
14 12 (0.85%) Kusto Query Language
15 10 (0.71%) Shell Script
16 8 (0.57%) SAS Macro
17 7 (0.50%) Go
17 7 (0.50%) Korn
17 7 (0.50%) SPARQL
Qualifications
1 256 (18.23%) Security Cleared
2 214 (15.24%) SC Cleared
3 72 (5.13%) Degree
4 35 (2.49%) Computer Science Degree
5 33 (2.35%) DV Cleared
6 31 (2.21%) AWS Certification
6 31 (2.21%) Azure Certification
7 26 (1.85%) BPSS Clearance
8 19 (1.35%) Master's Degree
9 14 (1.00%) DBS Check
10 9 (0.64%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
10 9 (0.64%) SnowPro
11 8 (0.57%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
11 8 (0.57%) Microsoft Certification
12 5 (0.36%) PMI Certification
12 5 (0.36%) PMP
12 5 (0.36%) TOGAF Certification
13 4 (0.28%) Microsoft Certified Professional
13 4 (0.28%) PhD
13 4 (0.28%) Tableau Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 471 (33.55%) Data Quality
2 74 (5.27%) QA
3 56 (3.99%) GDPR
4 26 (1.85%) Accessibility
5 12 (0.85%) SLA
6 5 (0.36%) GRC
7 4 (0.28%) Disclosure Scotland
7 4 (0.28%) NCSC
7 4 (0.28%) PMO
8 3 (0.21%) Actionable Recommendations
8 3 (0.21%) EU AI Act
8 3 (0.21%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 3 (0.21%) MiFID
8 3 (0.21%) NIST
9 2 (0.14%) 21 CFR Part 11
9 2 (0.14%) California Consumer Privacy Act
9 2 (0.14%) GxP
9 2 (0.14%) IFRS
9 2 (0.14%) ISO/IEC 42001
9 2 (0.14%) Sarbanes-Oxley
System Software
1 117 (8.33%) Docker
2 5 (0.36%) Active Directory
3 1 (0.071%) Virtual Machines
Systems Management
1 94 (6.70%) Kubernetes
2 23 (1.64%) Ansible
3 20 (1.42%) Grafana
4 10 (0.71%) Prometheus
5 8 (0.57%) Kibana
6 7 (0.50%) Control-M
7 3 (0.21%) logstash
8 2 (0.14%) Argo
8 2 (0.14%) Puppet
9 1 (0.071%) Cilium
9 1 (0.071%) HAProxy
9 1 (0.071%) IBM Guardium
9 1 (0.071%) Kustomize
9 1 (0.071%) Nagios
9 1 (0.071%) Progress Chef
9 1 (0.071%) QRadar
9 1 (0.071%) Single Sign-On
Vendors
1 386 (27.49%) Databricks
2 244 (17.38%) Microsoft
3 83 (5.91%) Google
4 70 (4.99%) Oracle
5 54 (3.85%) Informatica
6 26 (1.85%) Foundry
7 25 (1.78%) SAP
7 25 (1.78%) Talend
8 24 (1.71%) Palantir
8 24 (1.71%) Salesforce
9 18 (1.28%) OpenAI
10 14 (1.00%) Teradata
11 13 (0.93%) Cloudera
12 12 (0.85%) Trend Micro
13 11 (0.78%) Adobe
14 10 (0.71%) ServiceNow
15 8 (0.57%) Denodo
16 7 (0.50%) Hitachi
16 7 (0.50%) Splunk
17 6 (0.43%) MicroStrategy