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

6 months to
21 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 85 149 202
Rank change year-on-year +64 +53 -4
Contract jobs citing Data Engineering 1,393 506 412
As % of all contract jobs in England 3.05% 1.84% 1.24%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.59% 2.02% 1.44%
Number of daily rates quoted 973 322 304
10th Percentile £400 £363 £393
25th Percentile £450 £449 £473
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £525 £575
Median % change year-on-year - -8.70% -8.00%
75th Percentile £638 £650 £700
90th Percentile £750 £775 £779
UK median daily rate £525 £513 £575
% change year-on-year +2.44% -10.87% -8.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 19 6 11
10th Percentile - £30.73 £30.37
25th Percentile £21.25 £42.03 £33.13
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 £84.39 £87.50 -
UK median hourly rate £67.00 £52.50 £35.00
% change year-on-year +27.62% +50.00% -55.13%

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 38,779 25,035 28,563
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 84.92% 90.85% 85.79%
Number of daily rates quoted 24,017 15,949 18,476
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 £630 £626 £650
90th Percentile £738 £738 £756
UK median daily rate £525 £500 £525
% change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -3.58%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,559 1,455 1,574
10th Percentile £14.25 £14.22 £14.05
25th Percentile £19.25 £17.92 £17.80
Median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year +74.79% -40.82% +3.61%
75th Percentile £68.00 £50.75 £65.00
90th Percentile £81.05 £70.00 £75.00
UK median hourly rate £42.00 £25.15 £40.50
% change year-on-year +67.00% -37.90% -1.22%

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 21 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 21 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 21 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 +52 843 £550 - 219
North of England +29 177 £463 -2.63% 95
Midlands +45 142 £486 +7.93% 24
West Midlands +32 117 £475 +1.28% 20
South East -12 92 £525 +11.94% 116
Yorkshire +21 86 £475 +11.76% 26
South West +8 72 £523 -3.91% 45
North West -13 56 £525 +5.00% 45
North East -4 37 £425 -20.93% 26
East of England +2 28 £575 -4.17% 12
East Midlands -4 22 £525 +16.54% 4
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
1 167 (11.99%) Apache Airflow
2 161 (11.56%) Apache Spark
3 109 (7.82%) Apache
4 40 (2.87%) SAS
5 29 (2.08%) Confluence
6 22 (1.58%) Jupyter
7 19 (1.36%) Palantir Foundry
8 13 (0.93%) SharePoint
9 6 (0.43%) Apache Superset
10 5 (0.36%) Apache Solr
11 4 (0.29%) ArcGIS
12 2 (0.14%) Microsoft Exchange
12 2 (0.14%) PowerExchange
13 1 (0.072%) Apache Synapse
13 1 (0.072%) CICS
13 1 (0.072%) nginx
Applications
1 16 (1.15%) 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 (0.072%) 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 (0.072%) FIS Private Capital Suite
6 1 (0.072%) MIS ActiveH
6 1 (0.072%) SAP ECC
6 1 (0.072%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
Cloud Services
1 590 (42.35%) Azure
2 519 (37.26%) AWS
3 270 (19.38%) Power Platform
4 215 (15.43%) Snowflake
5 191 (13.71%) GCP
6 182 (13.07%) dbt
7 156 (11.20%) Azure Data Factory
8 146 (10.48%) Amazon S3
9 131 (9.40%) Azure Synapse Analytics
10 129 (9.26%) Azure DevOps
11 116 (8.33%) Serverless
12 107 (7.68%) GitHub
13 96 (6.89%) AWS Lambda
14 55 (3.95%) GitHub Actions
15 34 (2.44%) Amazon EMR
16 31 (2.23%) Amazon Bedrock
17 28 (2.01%) Azure AI
18 27 (1.94%) Amazon CloudWatch
18 27 (1.94%) Microsoft Purview
19 24 (1.72%) Amazon SageMaker
Communications & Networking
1 5 (0.36%) Firewall
2 3 (0.22%) DNS
2 3 (0.22%) Network Security
3 2 (0.14%) RTP
4 1 (0.072%) Internet
4 1 (0.072%) MIMO
4 1 (0.072%) MQTT
Database & Business Intelligence
1 280 (20.10%) Data Warehouse
2 256 (18.38%) Power BI
3 189 (13.57%) Data Lake
4 153 (10.98%) Metadata
5 104 (7.47%) BigQuery
6 95 (6.82%) Amazon Redshift
7 92 (6.60%) Delta Lake
8 83 (5.96%) Big Data
9 76 (5.46%) Tableau
10 62 (4.45%) Amazon Athena
10 62 (4.45%) SQL Server
11 57 (4.09%) NoSQL
12 51 (3.66%) Snowflake Schema
13 49 (3.52%) PostgreSQL
14 48 (3.45%) Relational Database
15 39 (2.80%) Azure SQL Database
16 34 (2.44%) Looker
16 34 (2.44%) Star Schema
17 31 (2.23%) Data Vault
18 28 (2.01%) Semantic Layer
Development Applications
1 135 (9.69%) Git
2 76 (5.46%) GitLab
3 59 (4.24%) JIRA
4 22 (1.58%) Jenkins
4 22 (1.58%) MLflow
5 6 (0.43%) Bitbucket
5 6 (0.43%) Terragrunt
6 5 (0.36%) ERwin
6 5 (0.36%) RStudio
6 5 (0.36%) Selenium
6 5 (0.36%) SonarQube
7 4 (0.29%) Claude Code
8 3 (0.22%) Artifactory
8 3 (0.22%) ER Studio
8 3 (0.22%) Snyk
8 3 (0.22%) Sonatype Nexus
9 2 (0.14%) Atlassian Bamboo
9 2 (0.14%) Postman
9 2 (0.14%) Yeoman
10 1 (0.072%) Deequ
General
1 336 (24.12%) Social Skills
2 319 (22.90%) Finance
3 221 (15.87%) Analytical Skills
4 146 (10.48%) Public Sector
5 106 (7.61%) Banking
6 44 (3.16%) Marketing
7 38 (2.73%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 31 (2.23%) Retail
9 22 (1.58%) Telecoms
10 21 (1.51%) Documentation Skills
10 21 (1.51%) Front Office
11 20 (1.44%) Investment Banking
12 15 (1.08%) Manufacturing
13 14 (1.01%) Pharmaceutical
14 13 (0.93%) Financial Institution
15 11 (0.79%) Influencing Skills
16 10 (0.72%) Billing
17 9 (0.65%) Law
17 9 (0.65%) Legal
17 9 (0.65%) Military
Job Titles
1 642 (46.09%) Data Engineer
2 202 (14.50%) Senior
3 164 (11.77%) Architect
4 159 (11.41%) Lead
5 124 (8.90%) Senior Data Engineer
6 90 (6.46%) Data Architect
7 74 (5.31%) Developer
8 66 (4.74%) AWS Engineer
9 64 (4.59%) Analyst
10 56 (4.02%) AWS Data Engineer
11 54 (3.88%) Lead Data Engineer
12 52 (3.73%) Snowflake Engineer
13 48 (3.45%) Azure Engineer
14 42 (3.02%) Snowflake Data Engineer
14 42 (3.02%) Solutions Architect
15 41 (2.94%) Consultant
16 37 (2.66%) Azure Data Engineer
17 36 (2.58%) Data Analyst
18 35 (2.51%) Data Scientist
19 33 (2.37%) Python Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 209 (15.00%) PySpark
2 191 (13.71%) Terraform
3 100 (7.18%) Kafka
4 46 (3.30%) REST
5 31 (2.23%) React
6 26 (1.87%) Pandas
7 25 (1.79%) JSON
8 22 (1.58%) .NET
9 17 (1.22%) scikit-learn
10 15 (1.08%) NumPy
10 15 (1.08%) PyTorch
10 15 (1.08%) Spring
11 13 (0.93%) TensorFlow
12 11 (0.79%) Microsoft Graph
13 10 (0.72%) FastAPI
13 10 (0.72%) Great Expectations
14 9 (0.65%) LangChain
14 9 (0.65%) pytest
14 9 (0.65%) RESTful
14 9 (0.65%) Spring Boot
Miscellaneous
1 181 (12.99%) Cloud Native
2 58 (4.16%) Legacy Systems
3 57 (4.09%) Data Structures
4 53 (3.80%) Product Ownership
5 52 (3.73%) Onboarding
6 49 (3.52%) Distributed Systems
7 36 (2.58%) AI Agents
8 23 (1.65%) Data Protection Act
9 22 (1.58%) Greenfield Project
10 19 (1.36%) Distributed Computing
11 17 (1.22%) NHS
11 17 (1.22%) Virtual Team
12 15 (1.08%) Clustering
12 15 (1.08%) Life Science
13 14 (1.01%) Algorithms
14 13 (0.93%) Analytical Mindset
14 13 (0.93%) Enterprise Software
14 13 (0.93%) Management Information System
15 11 (0.79%) Reference Data
16 10 (0.72%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 35 (2.51%) Linux
2 31 (2.23%) Unix
3 8 (0.57%) Windows
4 2 (0.14%) VMS
4 2 (0.14%) Windows Server
5 1 (0.072%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 1 (0.072%) Robot Operating System
5 1 (0.072%) Ubuntu
Processes & Methodologies
1 684 (49.10%) Analytics
2 670 (48.10%) Data Pipeline
3 525 (37.69%) Data Modelling
4 484 (34.75%) CI/CD
5 473 (33.96%) ETL
6 412 (29.58%) AI
7 345 (24.77%) Agile
8 339 (24.34%) Business Intelligence
9 329 (23.62%) DevOps
10 309 (22.18%) Data Governance
11 245 (17.59%) Machine Learning
12 230 (16.51%) Problem-Solving
13 211 (15.15%) Data Architecture
14 210 (15.08%) Data Transformation
14 210 (15.08%) Migration
15 207 (14.86%) Data Science
16 206 (14.79%) Validation
17 205 (14.72%) Decision-Making
18 204 (14.64%) Stakeholder Management
19 180 (12.92%) Infrastructure as Code
Programming Languages
1 752 (53.98%) SQL
2 698 (50.11%) Python
3 105 (7.54%) Java
4 40 (2.87%) Data Analysis Expressions
5 37 (2.66%) Scala
6 35 (2.51%) Bash
7 34 (2.44%) PowerShell
8 29 (2.08%) C#
9 24 (1.72%) JavaScript
10 20 (1.44%) R
10 20 (1.44%) T-SQL
11 17 (1.22%) PL/SQL
12 16 (1.15%) Shell Script
13 13 (0.93%) Bicep
14 11 (0.79%) TypeScript
15 10 (0.72%) SAS Macro
16 8 (0.57%) Kusto Query Language
17 7 (0.50%) SPARQL
18 6 (0.43%) Cypher
19 5 (0.36%) Go
Qualifications
1 267 (19.17%) Security Cleared
2 228 (16.37%) SC Cleared
3 80 (5.74%) Degree
4 41 (2.94%) Computer Science Degree
5 28 (2.01%) Azure Certification
6 26 (1.87%) DV Cleared
7 25 (1.79%) BPSS Clearance
8 21 (1.51%) Master's Degree
9 18 (1.29%) AWS Certification
10 14 (1.01%) DBS Check
11 9 (0.65%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
12 8 (0.57%) Microsoft Certification
12 8 (0.57%) SnowPro
13 5 (0.36%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 5 (0.36%) Tableau Certification
14 3 (0.22%) PhD
14 3 (0.22%) PMI Certification
15 2 (0.14%) CSPO
15 2 (0.14%) PMP
16 1 (0.072%) TOGAF Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 431 (30.94%) Data Quality
2 71 (5.10%) GDPR
2 71 (5.10%) QA
3 25 (1.79%) Accessibility
4 12 (0.86%) SLA
5 4 (0.29%) Sarbanes-Oxley
6 3 (0.22%) GxP
6 3 (0.22%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 3 (0.22%) ISO/IEC 42001
6 3 (0.22%) MiFID
6 3 (0.22%) NIST
6 3 (0.22%) PMO
6 3 (0.22%) Solvency II
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
System Software
1 118 (8.47%) Docker
2 5 (0.36%) Active Directory
3 2 (0.14%) Virtual Machines
Systems Management
1 97 (6.96%) Kubernetes
2 20 (1.44%) Ansible
3 15 (1.08%) Grafana
4 7 (0.50%) Prometheus
5 6 (0.43%) Control-M
6 5 (0.36%) Kibana
7 3 (0.22%) logstash
8 2 (0.14%) Argo
8 2 (0.14%) Puppet
8 2 (0.14%) Rancher
8 2 (0.14%) Thomson Reuters DACS
9 1 (0.072%) Cilium
9 1 (0.072%) IBM Guardium
9 1 (0.072%) Kubeflow
9 1 (0.072%) Kustomize
9 1 (0.072%) Nagios
9 1 (0.072%) QRadar
9 1 (0.072%) Single Sign-On
Vendors
1 352 (25.27%) Databricks
2 251 (18.02%) Microsoft
3 71 (5.10%) Informatica
4 64 (4.59%) Google
5 63 (4.52%) Oracle
6 30 (2.15%) Foundry
7 29 (2.08%) SAP
8 27 (1.94%) Palantir
9 26 (1.87%) Talend
10 21 (1.51%) Salesforce
11 16 (1.15%) Cloudera
12 14 (1.01%) OpenAI
13 13 (0.93%) ServiceNow
14 12 (0.86%) Trend Micro
15 11 (0.79%) Splunk
15 11 (0.79%) Teradata
16 9 (0.65%) Denodo
17 8 (0.57%) Adobe
17 8 (0.57%) Workday
18 7 (0.50%) Hitachi