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

6 months to
29 May 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 84 153 207
Rank change year-on-year +69 +54 -14
Contract jobs citing Data Engineering 1,219 443 424
As % of all contract jobs in England 2.91% 1.85% 1.16%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.43% 2.03% 1.34%
Number of daily rates quoted 857 304 314
10th Percentile £400 £400 £375
25th Percentile £450 £450 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £530 £550 £569
Median % change year-on-year -3.64% -3.30% -9.00%
75th Percentile £625 £679 £684
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 14 10 13
10th Percentile £52.90 £22.45 £30.55
25th Percentile £65.00 £22.72 £35.00
Median hourly rate £70.00 £28.75 £48.50
Median % change year-on-year +143.48% -40.72% -35.33%
75th Percentile £82.31 £50.05 £60.00
90th Percentile £89.25 £54.88 -
UK median hourly rate £70.00 £28.75 £35.00
% change year-on-year +143.48% -17.86% -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 35,508 21,848 31,547
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 84.90% 91.31% 85.95%
Number of daily rates quoted 22,529 14,223 20,659
10th Percentile £325 £305 £300
25th Percentile £413 £410 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £514 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -2.10% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £622 £638 £650
90th Percentile £725 £750 £750
UK median daily rate £512 £513 £525
% change year-on-year -0.10% -2.38% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,216 949 2,294
10th Percentile £15.25 £14.20 £12.84
25th Percentile £20.50 £18.10 £16.00
Median hourly rate £47.00 £28.18 £36.84
Median % change year-on-year +66.78% -23.51% -1.29%
75th Percentile £68.00 £60.00 £61.30
90th Percentile £81.05 £75.00 £72.50
UK median hourly rate £42.30 £27.59 £36.50
% change year-on-year +53.34% -24.42% +1.04%

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 May 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 May 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 May 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 +60 755 £550 -4.35% 236
North of England +15 138 £478 -4.50% 100
Midlands +23 125 £500 +8.11% 32
West Midlands +22 103 £500 -1.09% 21
South West +24 74 £500 -16.67% 26
South East -12 66 £550 +15.79% 98
Yorkshire -4 64 £480 -12.73% 21
North West -9 51 £506 +1.25% 56
North East -5 25 £450 -5.26% 24
East of England -19 22 £575 +54.08% 13
East Midlands -17 19 £525 +13.51% 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
1 173 (14.19%) Apache Spark
2 130 (10.66%) Apache Airflow
3 86 (7.05%) Apache
4 32 (2.63%) SAS
5 16 (1.31%) Confluence
6 15 (1.23%) Palantir Foundry
7 12 (0.98%) Jupyter
8 8 (0.66%) Appian
9 7 (0.57%) Apache Superset
10 4 (0.33%) Microsoft Exchange
10 4 (0.33%) SharePoint
11 2 (0.16%) Apache Synapse
12 1 (0.082%) ArcGIS
12 1 (0.082%) Camunda
12 1 (0.082%) CICS
12 1 (0.082%) CMS
12 1 (0.082%) IBM HTTP Server
12 1 (0.082%) PowerExchange
Applications
1 24 (1.97%) Microsoft Excel
2 7 (0.57%) Microsoft Office
2 7 (0.57%) Spreadsheet
3 6 (0.49%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 3 (0.25%) Microsoft Project
4 3 (0.25%) MS Visio
4 3 (0.25%) Trello
5 2 (0.16%) Chatbot
Business Applications
1 5 (0.41%) Aladdin
1 5 (0.41%) BambooHR
2 4 (0.33%) Dynamics CRM
3 3 (0.25%) Salesforce CRM
4 2 (0.16%) Oracle Assets
4 2 (0.16%) SAP BPC
4 2 (0.16%) SAP S/4HANA
5 1 (0.082%) Endur
5 1 (0.082%) Markit EDM
5 1 (0.082%) SAP ECC
Cloud Services
1 544 (44.63%) Azure
2 448 (36.75%) AWS
3 281 (23.05%) Power Platform
4 177 (14.52%) GCP
5 175 (14.36%) Azure Data Factory
6 160 (13.13%) Snowflake
7 134 (10.99%) Azure Synapse Analytics
8 132 (10.83%) dbt
9 125 (10.25%) Amazon S3
10 118 (9.68%) GitHub
11 112 (9.19%) Azure DevOps
12 91 (7.47%) Serverless
13 73 (5.99%) AWS Lambda
14 71 (5.82%) GitHub Actions
15 36 (2.95%) AWS CloudFormation
16 26 (2.13%) AWS Step Functions
17 25 (2.05%) Azure AI
17 25 (2.05%) Dagster
18 24 (1.97%) Azure Cosmos DB
19 23 (1.89%) Collibra
Communications & Networking
1 5 (0.41%) RTP
2 4 (0.33%) Firewall
3 2 (0.16%) Kerberos
4 1 (0.082%) 4G
4 1 (0.082%) 5G
4 1 (0.082%) MIMO
4 1 (0.082%) Network Security
4 1 (0.082%) SAN
4 1 (0.082%) SMS
4 1 (0.082%) TCP/IP
4 1 (0.082%) VPN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 259 (21.25%) Power BI
2 227 (18.62%) Data Warehouse
3 201 (16.49%) Data Lake
4 104 (8.53%) Metadata
5 85 (6.97%) SQL Server
6 84 (6.89%) Big Data
7 82 (6.73%) Delta Lake
8 75 (6.15%) BigQuery
8 75 (6.15%) Tableau
9 69 (5.66%) NoSQL
10 65 (5.33%) Amazon Redshift
10 65 (5.33%) Snowflake Schema
11 59 (4.84%) Azure SQL Database
12 50 (4.10%) Relational Database
13 48 (3.94%) Amazon Athena
14 42 (3.45%) PostgreSQL
15 40 (3.28%) Hadoop
16 37 (3.04%) SQL Server Integration Services
17 33 (2.71%) Spark SQL
18 28 (2.30%) Star Schema
Development Applications
1 136 (11.16%) Git
2 58 (4.76%) GitLab
3 44 (3.61%) JIRA
4 34 (2.79%) MLflow
5 25 (2.05%) Jenkins
6 6 (0.49%) SonarQube
7 5 (0.41%) Postman
7 5 (0.41%) Selenium
8 3 (0.25%) Artifactory
8 3 (0.25%) Robot Framework
8 3 (0.25%) Snyk
8 3 (0.25%) Visual Studio
9 2 (0.16%) Bitbucket
9 2 (0.16%) ERwin
9 2 (0.16%) Terragrunt
10 1 (0.082%) Ant
10 1 (0.082%) JUnit
10 1 (0.082%) Maven
10 1 (0.082%) REST Assured
10 1 (0.082%) SoapUI
General
1 314 (25.76%) Finance
2 276 (22.64%) Social Skills
3 180 (14.77%) Analytical Skills
4 104 (8.53%) Public Sector
5 74 (6.07%) Banking
6 31 (2.54%) Marketing
7 27 (2.21%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 27 (2.21%) Retail
8 20 (1.64%) Documentation Skills
9 18 (1.48%) Front Office
10 15 (1.23%) Telecoms
11 14 (1.15%) Financial Institution
12 13 (1.07%) Investment Banking
13 11 (0.90%) Influencing Skills
14 10 (0.82%) Legal
15 6 (0.49%) Back Office
15 6 (0.49%) Law
15 6 (0.49%) Military
15 6 (0.49%) Pharmaceutical
16 5 (0.41%) Manufacturing
Job Titles
1 587 (48.15%) Data Engineer
2 169 (13.86%) Senior
3 132 (10.83%) Lead
4 126 (10.34%) Architect
5 109 (8.94%) Senior Data Engineer
6 64 (5.25%) Data Architect
7 63 (5.17%) Developer
8 55 (4.51%) Lead Data Engineer
9 54 (4.43%) Analyst
10 50 (4.10%) AWS Engineer
11 47 (3.86%) Azure Engineer
12 44 (3.61%) Data Scientist
12 44 (3.61%) Snowflake Engineer
13 43 (3.53%) AWS Data Engineer
14 42 (3.45%) Solutions Architect
15 41 (3.36%) Azure Data Engineer
16 39 (3.20%) Snowflake Data Engineer
17 36 (2.95%) Consultant
18 30 (2.46%) Data Analyst
19 28 (2.30%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 169 (13.86%) PySpark
2 123 (10.09%) Kafka
3 50 (4.10%) Pandas
4 38 (3.12%) scikit-learn
5 34 (2.79%) PyTorch
5 34 (2.79%) REST
6 31 (2.54%) NumPy
7 27 (2.21%) JSON
8 26 (2.13%) TensorFlow
9 23 (1.89%) React
9 23 (1.89%) Spring
10 17 (1.39%) Great Expectations
10 17 (1.39%) YAML
11 16 (1.31%) LangChain
11 16 (1.31%) RESTful
11 16 (1.31%) Spring Boot
12 15 (1.23%) pytest
13 14 (1.15%) FastAPI
14 12 (0.98%) Flask
14 12 (0.98%) Hugging Face
Miscellaneous
1 158 (12.96%) Cloud Native
2 43 (3.53%) Distributed Systems
2 43 (3.53%) Legacy Systems
3 41 (3.36%) Product Ownership
4 36 (2.95%) Data Structures
5 28 (2.30%) AI Agents
6 27 (2.21%) Distributed Computing
7 22 (1.80%) Onboarding
8 20 (1.64%) Greenfield Project
9 19 (1.56%) Data Protection Act
10 18 (1.48%) Analytical Mindset
11 17 (1.39%) Algorithms
12 13 (1.07%) Fixed Income
13 12 (0.98%) Clustering
14 11 (0.90%) NHS
14 11 (0.90%) Self-Motivation
15 10 (0.82%) Equities
15 10 (0.82%) Hybrid Cloud
16 9 (0.74%) Data Fabric
16 9 (0.74%) Reinsurance
Operating Systems
1 29 (2.38%) Linux
2 25 (2.05%) Unix
3 5 (0.41%) VMS
4 3 (0.25%) Ubuntu
4 3 (0.25%) Windows
5 2 (0.16%) Windows Server
6 1 (0.082%) CentOS
6 1 (0.082%) Debian
Processes & Methodologies
1 619 (50.78%) Analytics
2 559 (45.86%) Data Pipeline
3 474 (38.88%) Data Modelling
4 454 (37.24%) ETL
5 415 (34.04%) CI/CD
6 355 (29.12%) AI
7 315 (25.84%) Business Intelligence
8 305 (25.02%) Agile
9 302 (24.77%) DevOps
10 261 (21.41%) Data Governance
11 231 (18.95%) Machine Learning
12 202 (16.57%) Problem-Solving
13 200 (16.41%) Data Science
14 169 (13.86%) Data Architecture
15 160 (13.13%) Decision-Making
16 155 (12.72%) Migration
17 153 (12.55%) Validation
18 128 (10.50%) Infrastructure as Code
19 127 (10.42%) Data Transformation
20 116 (9.52%) Use Case
Programming Languages
1 672 (55.13%) SQL
2 637 (52.26%) Python
3 104 (8.53%) Java
4 50 (4.10%) Scala
5 40 (3.28%) Data Analysis Expressions
6 37 (3.04%) C#
7 29 (2.38%) Bash
8 23 (1.89%) T-SQL
9 20 (1.64%) PowerShell
10 18 (1.48%) JavaScript
11 17 (1.39%) R
12 16 (1.31%) PL/SQL
13 15 (1.23%) Bicep
14 12 (0.98%) Shell Script
15 10 (0.82%) TypeScript
16 7 (0.57%) SAS Macro
17 6 (0.49%) Go
18 5 (0.41%) Korn
19 3 (0.25%) Kusto Query Language
20 2 (0.16%) SPARQL
Qualifications
1 230 (18.87%) Security Cleared
2 204 (16.74%) SC Cleared
3 79 (6.48%) Degree
4 34 (2.79%) Computer Science Degree
5 33 (2.71%) Azure Certification
6 26 (2.13%) Master's Degree
7 19 (1.56%) BPSS Clearance
8 14 (1.15%) DBS Check
9 12 (0.98%) DV Cleared
10 11 (0.90%) AWS Certification
11 8 (0.66%) Microsoft Certification
12 5 (0.41%) PhD
13 4 (0.33%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 4 (0.33%) SnowPro
14 3 (0.25%) Microsoft Certified Professional
15 2 (0.16%) PMI Certification
15 2 (0.16%) Tableau Certification
16 1 (0.082%) CISSP
16 1 (0.082%) OCP
16 1 (0.082%) Oracle Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 332 (27.24%) Data Quality
2 83 (6.81%) GDPR
3 63 (5.17%) QA
4 12 (0.98%) Sarbanes-Oxley
5 8 (0.66%) SLA
6 5 (0.41%) Accessibility
6 5 (0.41%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 4 (0.33%) HIPAA
7 4 (0.33%) MiFID
7 4 (0.33%) Solvency II
8 3 (0.25%) California Consumer Privacy Act
8 3 (0.25%) GRC
8 3 (0.25%) PMO
9 2 (0.16%) EMIR
9 2 (0.16%) GxP
9 2 (0.16%) NIST
10 1 (0.082%) 21 CFR Part 11
10 1 (0.082%) Basel II
10 1 (0.082%) HL7
10 1 (0.082%) SNOMED CT
System Software
1 111 (9.11%) Docker
2 4 (0.33%) HDFS
2 4 (0.33%) Virtual Machines
3 1 (0.082%) Active Directory
3 1 (0.082%) Apache ZooKeeper
Systems Management
1 151 (12.39%) Terraform
2 104 (8.53%) Kubernetes
3 23 (1.89%) Prometheus
4 10 (0.82%) Grafana
5 9 (0.74%) Ansible
6 5 (0.41%) Argo
7 3 (0.25%) Kibana
7 3 (0.25%) Kubeflow
7 3 (0.25%) Nagios
7 3 (0.25%) Rancher
8 2 (0.16%) Hadoop YARN
8 2 (0.16%) logstash
8 2 (0.16%) Thomson Reuters DACS
9 1 (0.082%) Apache Ranger
9 1 (0.082%) Control-M
9 1 (0.082%) HP Fortify
9 1 (0.082%) IBM Guardium
9 1 (0.082%) Oozie
Vendors
1 308 (25.27%) Databricks
2 204 (16.74%) Microsoft
3 57 (4.68%) Google
3 57 (4.68%) Informatica
4 48 (3.94%) Oracle
5 26 (2.13%) OpenAI
5 26 (2.13%) Talend
6 22 (1.80%) Foundry
6 22 (1.80%) SAP
7 19 (1.56%) Splunk
8 17 (1.39%) Palantir
9 16 (1.31%) Cloudera
10 12 (0.98%) ServiceNow
11 10 (0.82%) Salesforce
12 9 (0.74%) UiPath
13 8 (0.66%) Automation Anywhere
13 8 (0.66%) Denodo
14 7 (0.57%) InterSystems
15 5 (0.41%) Workday
16 4 (0.33%) Alteryx