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

6 months to
16 Oct 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 84 132 197
Rank change year-on-year +48 +65 +29
Contract jobs citing Data Engineering 1,453 607 427
As % of all contract jobs in England 3.10% 2.15% 1.33%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.65% 2.37% 1.54%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,004 381 318
10th Percentile £393 £358 £404
25th Percentile £445 £425 £475
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £525 £575
Median % change year-on-year - -8.70% -4.17%
75th Percentile £663 £650 £676
90th Percentile £750 £763 £775
UK median daily rate £525 £525 £550
% change year-on-year - -4.55% -8.33%
Number of hourly rates quoted 20 5 5
10th Percentile - £36.73 £23.35
25th Percentile £21.25 £38.96 £26.50
Median hourly rate £62.45 £52.50 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +18.95% -12.50% -23.08%
75th Percentile £71.79 £65.00 -
90th Percentile £83.78 £92.00 -
UK median hourly rate £59.95 £58.75 £43.25
% change year-on-year +2.04% +35.84% -44.55%

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 39,797 25,656 27,726
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 85.00% 90.96% 86.48%
Number of daily rates quoted 24,013 16,263 16,907
10th Percentile £325 £296 £313
25th Percentile £425 £405 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £510 £525
Median % change year-on-year +2.94% -2.86% -4.55%
75th Percentile £638 £625 £638
90th Percentile £738 £725 £750
UK median daily rate £525 £500 £525
% change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -2.42%
Number of hourly rates quoted 3,100 1,620 1,099
10th Percentile £13.54 £14.64 £15.00
25th Percentile £17.25 £17.87 £20.30
Median hourly rate £38.13 £25.15 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year +51.59% -40.82% -5.56%
75th Percentile £67.25 £45.00 £66.80
90th Percentile £79.00 £67.55 £74.09
UK median hourly rate £37.24 £25.15 £40.00
% change year-on-year +48.07% -37.13% -10.11%

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 16 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 16 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 16 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 +40 880 £550 - 861
North of England +34 199 £475 +6.15% 221
Midlands +24 128 £475 -6.31% 79
West Midlands +27 107 £475 -17.39% 56
South East -5 101 £525 +17.98% 129
South West +38 93 £528 -18.85% 53
Yorkshire +32 93 £500 +5.26% 57
North West -13 70 £488 +12.07% 129
North East -9 36 £425 -5.56% 35
East Midlands +5 21 £481 +10.51% 23
East of England -23 19 £550 +15.79% 34
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
1 181 (12.46%) Apache Airflow
2 169 (11.63%) Apache Spark
3 144 (9.91%) Apache
4 38 (2.62%) SAS
5 32 (2.20%) Confluence
6 19 (1.31%) Jupyter
7 17 (1.17%) Palantir Foundry
8 15 (1.03%) SharePoint
9 5 (0.34%) Apache Solr
9 5 (0.34%) ArcGIS
10 4 (0.28%) nginx
11 3 (0.21%) Apache Superset
12 2 (0.14%) PowerExchange
13 1 (0.069%) Apache Pulsar
13 1 (0.069%) GeoServer
13 1 (0.069%) Microsoft Exchange
13 1 (0.069%) Oracle Workflow
Applications
1 12 (0.83%) Microsoft Excel
2 7 (0.48%) Chatbot
2 7 (0.48%) Spreadsheet
3 3 (0.21%) Microsoft Office
4 2 (0.14%) MS Visio
5 1 (0.069%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 1 (0.069%) Notion
Business Applications
1 10 (0.69%) Aladdin
2 5 (0.34%) Dynamics CRM
2 5 (0.34%) SAP S/4HANA
3 4 (0.28%) NetSuite
3 4 (0.28%) Sage X3
4 3 (0.21%) Cloudability
5 2 (0.14%) Endur
5 2 (0.14%) Temenos T24
5 2 (0.14%) Workday HCM
6 1 (0.069%) FIS Private Capital Suite
6 1 (0.069%) Markit EDM
6 1 (0.069%) MIS ActiveH
6 1 (0.069%) Oracle Assets
6 1 (0.069%) Oracle EBS
6 1 (0.069%) Salesforce CRM
6 1 (0.069%) SAP ECC
6 1 (0.069%) SAP Oil and Gas
6 1 (0.069%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
Cloud Services
1 615 (42.33%) Azure
2 536 (36.89%) AWS
3 266 (18.31%) Power Platform
4 241 (16.59%) Snowflake
5 227 (15.62%) GCP
6 220 (15.14%) dbt
7 170 (11.70%) Amazon S3
8 168 (11.56%) Azure Data Factory
9 135 (9.29%) Azure DevOps
10 127 (8.74%) Serverless
11 119 (8.19%) Azure Synapse Analytics
12 108 (7.43%) GitHub
13 103 (7.09%) AWS Lambda
14 72 (4.96%) Azure Databricks
15 54 (3.72%) GitHub Actions
16 42 (2.89%) Amazon EMR
17 36 (2.48%) Amazon Bedrock
17 36 (2.48%) Amazon CloudWatch
18 33 (2.27%) Microsoft Purview
19 30 (2.06%) Azure AI
Communications & Networking
1 8 (0.55%) Network Security
2 7 (0.48%) DNS
3 5 (0.34%) Firewall
4 2 (0.14%) Broadband
5 1 (0.069%) DSL
5 1 (0.069%) HTTP
5 1 (0.069%) HTTPS
5 1 (0.069%) Internet
5 1 (0.069%) MQTT
5 1 (0.069%) Radio Access Network
5 1 (0.069%) Reverse Proxy
5 1 (0.069%) SMS
5 1 (0.069%) SSL
5 1 (0.069%) TCP/IP
5 1 (0.069%) tcpdump
5 1 (0.069%) Wireshark
Database & Business Intelligence
1 293 (20.17%) Data Warehouse
2 254 (17.48%) Power BI
3 175 (12.04%) Metadata
4 172 (11.84%) Data Lake
5 112 (7.71%) BigQuery
6 102 (7.02%) Delta Lake
7 98 (6.74%) Amazon Redshift
8 71 (4.89%) Big Data
9 63 (4.34%) Amazon Athena
10 56 (3.85%) SQL Server
10 56 (3.85%) Tableau
11 46 (3.17%) NoSQL
12 45 (3.10%) PostgreSQL
12 45 (3.10%) Snowflake Schema
13 40 (2.75%) Relational Database
14 36 (2.48%) Looker
15 34 (2.34%) Azure SQL Database
16 32 (2.20%) Amazon RDS
17 30 (2.06%) Pentaho
18 29 (2.00%) Semantic Layer
Development Applications
1 163 (11.22%) Git
2 93 (6.40%) GitLab
3 52 (3.58%) JIRA
4 35 (2.41%) Jenkins
5 23 (1.58%) MLflow
6 8 (0.55%) Bitbucket
6 8 (0.55%) Claude Code
6 8 (0.55%) RStudio
6 8 (0.55%) Terragrunt
7 7 (0.48%) Selenium
8 6 (0.41%) ERwin
9 5 (0.34%) Postman
10 4 (0.28%) Cucumber
10 4 (0.28%) ER Studio
11 3 (0.21%) Applitools
11 3 (0.21%) Atlassian Bamboo
11 3 (0.21%) JMeter
11 3 (0.21%) Newman
11 3 (0.21%) REST Assured
11 3 (0.21%) TeamCity
General
1 386 (26.57%) Social Skills
2 325 (22.37%) Finance
3 229 (15.76%) Analytical Skills
4 147 (10.12%) Public Sector
5 135 (9.29%) Banking
6 44 (3.03%) Marketing
7 32 (2.20%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 26 (1.79%) Retail
9 25 (1.72%) Investment Banking
10 24 (1.65%) Front Office
11 19 (1.31%) Pharmaceutical
12 18 (1.24%) Documentation Skills
13 16 (1.10%) Manufacturing
14 15 (1.03%) Aerospace
15 14 (0.96%) Billing
15 14 (0.96%) Law
16 13 (0.89%) Financial Institution
16 13 (0.89%) Telecoms
17 12 (0.83%) Back Office
17 12 (0.83%) Influencing Skills
Job Titles
1 680 (46.80%) Data Engineer
2 221 (15.21%) Senior
3 168 (11.56%) Lead
4 147 (10.12%) Senior Data Engineer
5 142 (9.77%) Architect
6 80 (5.51%) Developer
7 70 (4.82%) Data Architect
8 69 (4.75%) Analyst
9 66 (4.54%) AWS Engineer
10 63 (4.34%) Databricks Engineer
11 60 (4.13%) Snowflake Engineer
12 56 (3.85%) AWS Data Engineer
13 52 (3.58%) Azure Engineer
14 51 (3.51%) Lead Data Engineer
15 50 (3.44%) Snowflake Data Engineer
16 49 (3.37%) Databricks Data Engineer
17 41 (2.82%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
18 40 (2.75%) Data Analyst
19 39 (2.68%) GCP Engineer
20 36 (2.48%) Data Scientist
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 220 (15.14%) Terraform
2 217 (14.93%) PySpark
3 93 (6.40%) Kafka
4 61 (4.20%) REST
5 31 (2.13%) .NET
6 29 (2.00%) React
7 27 (1.86%) JSON
8 23 (1.58%) Pandas
9 18 (1.24%) LangChain
10 16 (1.10%) pytest
11 15 (1.03%) PyTorch
12 14 (0.96%) RabbitMQ
13 13 (0.89%) Apache NiFi
13 13 (0.89%) FastAPI
13 13 (0.89%) NumPy
13 13 (0.89%) scikit-learn
14 12 (0.83%) Microsoft Graph
14 12 (0.83%) TensorFlow
15 11 (0.76%) YAML
16 10 (0.69%) LangGraph
Miscellaneous
1 204 (14.04%) Cloud Native
2 79 (5.44%) Onboarding
3 69 (4.75%) Data Structures
4 67 (4.61%) Product Ownership
5 48 (3.30%) AI Agents
5 48 (3.30%) Legacy Systems
6 42 (2.89%) Distributed Systems
7 26 (1.79%) Data Protection Act
8 22 (1.51%) Algorithms
8 22 (1.51%) Management Information System
9 21 (1.45%) Distributed Computing
9 21 (1.45%) Enterprise Software
9 21 (1.45%) Virtual Team
10 16 (1.10%) Life Science
11 15 (1.03%) Clustering
12 13 (0.89%) NHS
12 13 (0.89%) Reference Data
13 12 (0.83%) Analytical Mindset
13 12 (0.83%) Data Fabric
13 12 (0.83%) Taxonomies
Operating Systems
1 32 (2.20%) Linux
2 22 (1.51%) Unix
3 9 (0.62%) Windows
4 1 (0.069%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 1 (0.069%) Robot Operating System
4 1 (0.069%) Ubuntu
4 1 (0.069%) Windows Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 725 (49.90%) Data Pipeline
2 679 (46.73%) Analytics
3 584 (40.19%) Data Modelling
4 558 (38.40%) CI/CD
5 514 (35.38%) ETL
6 459 (31.59%) AI
7 384 (26.43%) DevOps
8 381 (26.22%) Agile
9 338 (23.26%) Business Intelligence
10 330 (22.71%) Data Governance
11 275 (18.93%) Stakeholder Management
12 260 (17.89%) Machine Learning
13 250 (17.21%) Validation
14 235 (16.17%) Data Transformation
15 234 (16.10%) Problem-Solving
16 226 (15.55%) Migration
17 225 (15.49%) Infrastructure as Code
18 221 (15.21%) Data Integration
19 217 (14.93%) Data Architecture
20 205 (14.11%) Decision-Making
Programming Languages
1 828 (56.99%) SQL
2 778 (53.54%) Python
3 92 (6.33%) Java
4 45 (3.10%) Data Analysis Expressions
5 40 (2.75%) Scala
6 39 (2.68%) C#
6 39 (2.68%) PowerShell
7 30 (2.06%) Bash
8 28 (1.93%) JavaScript
9 18 (1.24%) R
10 17 (1.17%) T-SQL
10 17 (1.17%) TypeScript
11 16 (1.10%) PL/SQL
12 14 (0.96%) Kusto Query Language
13 13 (0.89%) Bicep
13 13 (0.89%) Shell Script
14 9 (0.62%) Korn
15 8 (0.55%) SAS Macro
16 7 (0.48%) Go
16 7 (0.48%) SPARQL
Qualifications
1 284 (19.55%) Security Cleared
2 233 (16.04%) SC Cleared
3 85 (5.85%) Degree
4 46 (3.17%) AWS Certification
5 44 (3.03%) Computer Science Degree
5 44 (3.03%) DV Cleared
6 40 (2.75%) Azure Certification
7 30 (2.06%) BPSS Clearance
8 18 (1.24%) Master's Degree
9 14 (0.96%) DBS Check
10 10 (0.69%) SnowPro
11 9 (0.62%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
12 8 (0.55%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
12 8 (0.55%) Microsoft Certification
13 7 (0.48%) TOGAF Certification
14 6 (0.41%) PMI Certification
14 6 (0.41%) PMP
15 5 (0.34%) Microsoft Certified Professional
16 4 (0.28%) PhD
17 3 (0.21%) CISSP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 517 (35.58%) Data Quality
2 82 (5.64%) QA
3 62 (4.27%) GDPR
4 31 (2.13%) Accessibility
5 11 (0.76%) SLA
6 6 (0.41%) GRC
7 5 (0.34%) Disclosure Scotland
7 5 (0.34%) NCSC
8 4 (0.28%) California Consumer Privacy Act
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
9 3 (0.21%) Sarbanes-Oxley
10 2 (0.14%) 21 CFR Part 11
10 2 (0.14%) PCI DSS
System Software
1 126 (8.67%) Docker
2 5 (0.34%) Active Directory
3 1 (0.069%) Virtual Machines
Systems Management
1 114 (7.85%) Kubernetes
2 29 (2.00%) Ansible
3 24 (1.65%) Grafana
4 15 (1.03%) Prometheus
5 8 (0.55%) Control-M
6 6 (0.41%) Kibana
7 2 (0.14%) Progress Chef
7 2 (0.14%) Puppet
8 1 (0.069%) Argo
8 1 (0.069%) Cilium
8 1 (0.069%) HAProxy
8 1 (0.069%) Kubeflow
8 1 (0.069%) Kustomize
8 1 (0.069%) logstash
8 1 (0.069%) QRadar
8 1 (0.069%) Single Sign-On
Vendors
1 415 (28.56%) Databricks
2 266 (18.31%) Microsoft
3 90 (6.19%) Google
4 73 (5.02%) Oracle
5 53 (3.65%) Informatica
6 29 (2.00%) SAP
6 29 (2.00%) Talend
7 27 (1.86%) Foundry
7 27 (1.86%) Palantir
8 24 (1.65%) Salesforce
9 20 (1.38%) OpenAI
10 17 (1.17%) Denodo
11 15 (1.03%) Cloudera
11 15 (1.03%) Teradata
12 12 (0.83%) Trend Micro
13 11 (0.76%) Adobe
14 9 (0.62%) ServiceNow
15 8 (0.55%) Dynatrace
15 8 (0.55%) Splunk
16 7 (0.48%) Hitachi