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

6 months to
6 Oct 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 88 137 185
Rank change year-on-year +49 +48 +36
Contract jobs citing Data Engineering 1,412 567 438
As % of all contract jobs in England 3.05% 2.04% 1.36%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.60% 2.25% 1.58%
Number of daily rates quoted 983 354 325
10th Percentile £388 £350 £400
25th Percentile £446 £413 £468
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £525 £575
Median % change year-on-year - -8.70% -8.00%
75th Percentile £650 £638 £676
90th Percentile £738 £738 £775
UK median daily rate £525 £514 £550
% change year-on-year +2.19% -6.59% -8.33%
Number of hourly rates quoted 19 5 5
10th Percentile - £36.73 £23.35
25th Percentile £21.25 £38.96 £26.50
Median hourly rate £62.50 £52.50 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +19.05% -12.50% -20.53%
75th Percentile £72.08 £65.00 -
90th Percentile £83.94 £92.00 -
UK median hourly rate £62.40 £58.75 £43.25
% change year-on-year +6.21% +35.84% -40.75%

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 39,251 25,237 27,768
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 84.73% 90.91% 86.39%
Number of daily rates quoted 23,728 16,010 16,947
10th Percentile £325 £297 £313
25th Percentile £425 £404 £419
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £510 £525
Median % change year-on-year +2.94% -2.86% -4.55%
75th Percentile £638 £625 £642
90th Percentile £738 £725 £750
UK median daily rate £525 £500 £525
% change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -2.78%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,965 1,563 1,177
10th Percentile £13.82 £14.50 £15.00
25th Percentile £17.57 £17.87 £20.30
Median hourly rate £40.00 £25.15 £43.00
Median % change year-on-year +59.05% -41.51% -3.37%
75th Percentile £67.47 £45.75 £66.61
90th Percentile £78.75 £67.25 £75.00
UK median hourly rate £38.50 £25.15 £41.08
% change year-on-year +53.08% -38.77% -3.91%

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 6 October 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 6 October 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 6 October 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 +46 867 £550 - 1,293
North of England +26 189 £475 +7.34% 325
Midlands +25 124 £475 +2.70% 132
West Midlands +23 102 £475 -13.64% 93
South East -9 93 £513 +15.17% 276
Yorkshire +29 91 £488 +2.63% 95
South West +35 87 £525 -8.70% 103
North West -20 61 £525 +23.53% 180
North East -3 39 £425 -5.56% 53
East Midlands +4 22 £503 +15.57% 39
East of England -19 21 £550 +15.79% 55
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
1 172 (12.18%) Apache Airflow
2 158 (11.19%) Apache Spark
3 132 (9.35%) Apache
4 30 (2.12%) Confluence
5 29 (2.05%) SAS
6 20 (1.42%) Jupyter
7 17 (1.20%) Palantir Foundry
8 15 (1.06%) SharePoint
9 5 (0.35%) Apache Solr
10 4 (0.28%) ArcGIS
10 4 (0.28%) nginx
11 3 (0.21%) Apache Superset
12 2 (0.14%) PowerExchange
13 1 (0.071%) Apache Pulsar
13 1 (0.071%) CICS
13 1 (0.071%) Microsoft Exchange
13 1 (0.071%) Oracle Workflow
Applications
1 10 (0.71%) Microsoft Excel
2 7 (0.50%) Chatbot
2 7 (0.50%) Spreadsheet
3 3 (0.21%) Microsoft Office
4 2 (0.14%) MS Visio
5 1 (0.071%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 1 (0.071%) Notion
Business Applications
1 10 (0.71%) Aladdin
2 8 (0.57%) Dynamics CRM
3 4 (0.28%) NetSuite
3 4 (0.28%) Sage X3
4 3 (0.21%) SAP S/4HANA
5 2 (0.14%) Cloudability
5 2 (0.14%) Endur
5 2 (0.14%) Oracle Assets
5 2 (0.14%) Temenos T24
5 2 (0.14%) Workday HCM
6 1 (0.071%) BambooHR
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%) Salesforce CRM
6 1 (0.071%) SAP Oil and Gas
6 1 (0.071%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
Cloud Services
1 590 (41.78%) Azure
2 519 (36.76%) AWS
3 260 (18.41%) Power Platform
4 238 (16.86%) Snowflake
5 221 (15.65%) GCP
6 217 (15.37%) dbt
7 165 (11.69%) Amazon S3
8 163 (11.54%) Azure Data Factory
9 127 (8.99%) Serverless
10 123 (8.71%) Azure DevOps
11 114 (8.07%) Azure Synapse Analytics
12 105 (7.44%) GitHub
13 103 (7.29%) AWS Lambda
14 68 (4.82%) Azure Databricks
15 53 (3.75%) GitHub Actions
16 40 (2.83%) Amazon EMR
17 35 (2.48%) Amazon Bedrock
17 35 (2.48%) Amazon CloudWatch
18 34 (2.41%) Microsoft Purview
19 30 (2.12%) Azure AI
Communications & Networking
1 8 (0.57%) Network Security
2 7 (0.50%) DNS
3 5 (0.35%) Firewall
4 2 (0.14%) Broadband
5 1 (0.071%) HTTP
5 1 (0.071%) HTTPS
5 1 (0.071%) Internet
5 1 (0.071%) MIMO
5 1 (0.071%) MQTT
5 1 (0.071%) Radio Access Network
5 1 (0.071%) Reverse Proxy
5 1 (0.071%) SMS
5 1 (0.071%) SSL
5 1 (0.071%) TCP/IP
5 1 (0.071%) tcpdump
5 1 (0.071%) Wireshark
Database & Business Intelligence
1 288 (20.40%) Data Warehouse
2 248 (17.56%) Power BI
3 171 (12.11%) Metadata
4 168 (11.90%) Data Lake
5 115 (8.14%) BigQuery
6 96 (6.80%) Amazon Redshift
6 96 (6.80%) Delta Lake
7 72 (5.10%) Big Data
8 62 (4.39%) Amazon Athena
9 61 (4.32%) Tableau
10 55 (3.90%) SQL Server
11 49 (3.47%) Snowflake Schema
12 46 (3.26%) PostgreSQL
13 43 (3.05%) NoSQL
14 41 (2.90%) Relational Database
15 36 (2.55%) Looker
16 31 (2.20%) Amazon RDS
16 31 (2.20%) Azure SQL Database
17 29 (2.05%) Data Vault
18 26 (1.84%) Semantic Layer
Development Applications
1 153 (10.84%) Git
2 87 (6.16%) GitLab
3 54 (3.82%) JIRA
4 24 (1.70%) Jenkins
5 22 (1.56%) 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 (0.42%) ERwin
9 4 (0.28%) ER Studio
9 4 (0.28%) Postman
10 3 (0.21%) Artifactory
10 3 (0.21%) Atlassian Bamboo
10 3 (0.21%) Cucumber
10 3 (0.21%) SonarQube
10 3 (0.21%) TeamCity
11 2 (0.14%) JMeter
11 2 (0.14%) Yeoman
General
1 374 (26.49%) Social Skills
2 321 (22.73%) Finance
3 223 (15.79%) Analytical Skills
4 146 (10.34%) Public Sector
5 131 (9.28%) Banking
6 44 (3.12%) Marketing
7 33 (2.34%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 26 (1.84%) Retail
9 25 (1.77%) Front Office
10 24 (1.70%) Investment Banking
11 18 (1.27%) Pharmaceutical
12 16 (1.13%) Documentation Skills
12 16 (1.13%) Manufacturing
13 13 (0.92%) Billing
13 13 (0.92%) Telecoms
14 12 (0.85%) Back Office
14 12 (0.85%) Financial Institution
15 11 (0.78%) Aerospace
15 11 (0.78%) Law
15 11 (0.78%) Military
Job Titles
1 651 (46.10%) Data Engineer
2 220 (15.58%) Senior
3 166 (11.76%) Lead
4 146 (10.34%) Architect
5 144 (10.20%) Senior Data Engineer
6 80 (5.67%) Developer
7 76 (5.38%) Data Architect
8 66 (4.67%) AWS Engineer
9 64 (4.53%) Analyst
10 57 (4.04%) Databricks Engineer
10 57 (4.04%) Snowflake Engineer
11 56 (3.97%) AWS Data Engineer
12 52 (3.68%) Azure Engineer
13 48 (3.40%) Lead Data Engineer
14 46 (3.26%) Snowflake Data Engineer
15 45 (3.19%) Databricks Data Engineer
16 41 (2.90%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
17 37 (2.62%) GCP Engineer
18 36 (2.55%) Consultant
18 36 (2.55%) Data Analyst
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 222 (15.72%) Terraform
2 204 (14.45%) PySpark
3 92 (6.52%) Kafka
4 59 (4.18%) REST
5 29 (2.05%) React
6 28 (1.98%) .NET
7 26 (1.84%) JSON
8 21 (1.49%) Pandas
9 17 (1.20%) LangChain
10 15 (1.06%) PyTorch
11 14 (0.99%) pytest
12 12 (0.85%) Apache NiFi
12 12 (0.85%) FastAPI
12 12 (0.85%) Microsoft Graph
12 12 (0.85%) NumPy
12 12 (0.85%) scikit-learn
12 12 (0.85%) TensorFlow
13 11 (0.78%) RabbitMQ
14 10 (0.71%) LangGraph
15 9 (0.64%) Great Expectations
Miscellaneous
1 195 (13.81%) Cloud Native
2 77 (5.45%) Onboarding
3 71 (5.03%) Data Structures
4 61 (4.32%) Product Ownership
5 50 (3.54%) AI Agents
6 48 (3.40%) Legacy Systems
7 41 (2.90%) Distributed Systems
8 25 (1.77%) Data Protection Act
9 21 (1.49%) Enterprise Software
10 20 (1.42%) Distributed Computing
11 19 (1.35%) Algorithms
12 18 (1.27%) Virtual Team
13 17 (1.20%) Management Information System
14 15 (1.06%) Life Science
14 15 (1.06%) NHS
15 13 (0.92%) Analytical Mindset
15 13 (0.92%) Clustering
15 13 (0.92%) Data Fabric
15 13 (0.92%) Greenfield Project
15 13 (0.92%) Reference Data
Operating Systems
1 29 (2.05%) Linux
2 22 (1.56%) Unix
3 9 (0.64%) 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
1 697 (49.36%) Data Pipeline
2 657 (46.53%) Analytics
3 559 (39.59%) Data Modelling
4 529 (37.46%) CI/CD
5 489 (34.63%) ETL
6 455 (32.22%) AI
7 371 (26.27%) Agile
8 354 (25.07%) DevOps
9 329 (23.30%) Business Intelligence
10 312 (22.10%) Data Governance
11 267 (18.91%) Stakeholder Management
12 256 (18.13%) Machine Learning
13 227 (16.08%) Validation
14 224 (15.86%) Data Transformation
15 223 (15.79%) Infrastructure as Code
16 222 (15.72%) Data Architecture
16 222 (15.72%) Problem-Solving
17 215 (15.23%) Migration
18 206 (14.59%) Data Integration
19 204 (14.45%) Decision-Making
Programming Languages
1 796 (56.37%) SQL
2 742 (52.55%) Python
3 90 (6.37%) Java
4 41 (2.90%) Data Analysis Expressions
4 41 (2.90%) Scala
5 39 (2.76%) PowerShell
6 36 (2.55%) C#
7 32 (2.27%) Bash
8 29 (2.05%) JavaScript
9 21 (1.49%) R
10 19 (1.35%) T-SQL
11 17 (1.20%) PL/SQL
12 15 (1.06%) TypeScript
13 14 (0.99%) Kusto Query Language
14 13 (0.92%) Bicep
15 11 (0.78%) Shell Script
16 8 (0.57%) Korn
16 8 (0.57%) SAS Macro
17 7 (0.50%) Go
17 7 (0.50%) SPARQL
Qualifications
1 260 (18.41%) Security Cleared
2 212 (15.01%) SC Cleared
3 78 (5.52%) Degree
4 38 (2.69%) Computer Science Degree
4 38 (2.69%) DV Cleared
5 34 (2.41%) AWS Certification
6 31 (2.20%) Azure Certification
7 27 (1.91%) BPSS Clearance
8 19 (1.35%) Master's Degree
9 14 (0.99%) 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 (0.35%) Microsoft Certified Professional
12 5 (0.35%) PMI Certification
12 5 (0.35%) PMP
12 5 (0.35%) TOGAF Certification
13 4 (0.28%) PhD
14 3 (0.21%) Tableau Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 483 (34.21%) Data Quality
2 74 (5.24%) QA
3 54 (3.82%) GDPR
4 28 (1.98%) Accessibility
5 11 (0.78%) SLA
6 6 (0.42%) GRC
7 5 (0.35%) NCSC
8 4 (0.28%) California Consumer Privacy Act
8 4 (0.28%) Disclosure Scotland
8 4 (0.28%) EU AI Act
8 4 (0.28%) NIST
8 4 (0.28%) PMO
9 3 (0.21%) Actionable Recommendations
9 3 (0.21%) IFRS
9 3 (0.21%) IFRS 9
9 3 (0.21%) ISO/IEC 27001
9 3 (0.21%) MiFID
10 2 (0.14%) 21 CFR Part 11
10 2 (0.14%) GxP
10 2 (0.14%) Sarbanes-Oxley
System Software
1 114 (8.07%) Docker
2 5 (0.35%) Active Directory
3 1 (0.071%) Virtual Machines
Systems Management
1 101 (7.15%) Kubernetes
2 29 (2.05%) Ansible
3 21 (1.49%) Grafana
4 12 (0.85%) Prometheus
5 8 (0.57%) Kibana
6 7 (0.50%) Control-M
7 3 (0.21%) logstash
8 2 (0.14%) Progress Chef
8 2 (0.14%) Puppet
9 1 (0.071%) Argo
9 1 (0.071%) Cilium
9 1 (0.071%) HAProxy
9 1 (0.071%) Kubeflow
9 1 (0.071%) Kustomize
9 1 (0.071%) QRadar
9 1 (0.071%) Single Sign-On
Vendors
1 389 (27.55%) Databricks
2 251 (17.78%) Microsoft
3 86 (6.09%) Google
4 73 (5.17%) Oracle
5 53 (3.75%) Informatica
6 27 (1.91%) Foundry
7 26 (1.84%) SAP
8 25 (1.77%) Palantir
9 24 (1.70%) Talend
10 23 (1.63%) Salesforce
11 19 (1.35%) OpenAI
12 14 (0.99%) Teradata
13 12 (0.85%) Cloudera
13 12 (0.85%) Trend Micro
14 11 (0.78%) Adobe
15 10 (0.71%) ServiceNow
16 8 (0.57%) Denodo
17 7 (0.50%) Hitachi
17 7 (0.50%) Splunk
18 6 (0.42%) Bloomberg