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

6 months to
29 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 80 149 198
Rank change year-on-year +69 +49 +1
Contract jobs citing Data Engineering 1,388 521 422
As % of all contract jobs in England 3.10% 1.89% 1.24%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.63% 2.09% 1.44%
Number of daily rates quoted 977 337 308
10th Percentile £389 £363 £386
25th Percentile £449 £450 £475
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £525 £585
Median % change year-on-year - -10.26% -6.40%
75th Percentile £638 £650 £703
90th Percentile £750 £800 £775
UK median daily rate £525 £520 £575
% change year-on-year +0.96% -9.57% -8.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 21 7 11
10th Percentile £21.25 £27.00 £30.37
25th Percentile £35.00 £34.48 £33.13
Median hourly rate £70.00 £52.50 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +33.33% -12.50% -23.08%
75th Percentile £75.00 £59.38 -
90th Percentile £87.50 £83.00 -
UK median hourly rate £69.44 £52.50 £35.00
% change year-on-year +32.27% +50.00% -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 38,210 24,959 29,249
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 85.22% 90.75% 85.85%
Number of daily rates quoted 23,914 15,999 19,151
10th Percentile £325 £300 £313
25th Percentile £425 £405 £419
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £512 £525
Median % change year-on-year +2.54% -2.48% -4.55%
75th Percentile £625 £630 £650
90th Percentile £738 £738 £756
UK median daily rate £525 £500 £525
% change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -4.11%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,406 1,365 1,791
10th Percentile £15.05 £14.22 £13.87
25th Percentile £21.00 £17.88 £17.75
Median hourly rate £46.62 £25.15 £41.50
Median % change year-on-year +85.35% -39.40% -2.35%
75th Percentile £69.49 £51.65 £65.00
90th Percentile £83.00 £70.10 £75.00
UK median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £40.00
% change year-on-year +74.79% -37.13% -5.88%

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 July 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 July 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 July 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 +54 820 £550 - 387
North of England +30 178 £475 -2.56% 121
Midlands +37 149 £481 +4.79% 38
West Midlands +33 124 £475 +10.21% 28
South East -23 85 £525 +11.94% 99
South West +29 84 £505 -12.17% 43
Yorkshire +14 82 £475 +2.70% 35
North West -18 58 £500 +5.26% 61
North East -12 40 £425 -15.00% 26
East of England -4 29 £575 +35.29% 10
East Midlands -3 22 £525 +13.94% 10
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
1 178 (12.82%) Apache Spark
2 154 (11.10%) Apache Airflow
3 111 (8.00%) Apache
4 42 (3.03%) SAS
5 29 (2.09%) Confluence
6 23 (1.66%) Jupyter
7 21 (1.51%) Palantir Foundry
8 11 (0.79%) SharePoint
9 8 (0.58%) Apache Superset
10 3 (0.22%) Apache Solr
10 3 (0.22%) ArcGIS
11 2 (0.14%) Appian
11 2 (0.14%) Microsoft Exchange
12 1 (0.072%) Apache Synapse
12 1 (0.072%) CICS
12 1 (0.072%) IBM HTTP Server
12 1 (0.072%) PowerExchange
Applications
1 17 (1.22%) Microsoft Excel
2 7 (0.50%) Spreadsheet
3 6 (0.43%) Microsoft Office
4 5 (0.36%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 4 (0.29%) Chatbot
6 2 (0.14%) MS Visio
7 1 (0.072%) Notion
Business Applications
1 12 (0.86%) 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%) SAP BPC
5 2 (0.14%) Temenos T24
5 2 (0.14%) Workday HCM
6 1 (0.072%) FIS Private Capital Suite
6 1 (0.072%) Markit EDM
6 1 (0.072%) MIS ActiveH
6 1 (0.072%) SAP ECC
6 1 (0.072%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
Cloud Services
1 583 (42.00%) Azure
2 524 (37.75%) AWS
3 285 (20.53%) Power Platform
4 202 (14.55%) Snowflake
5 192 (13.83%) GCP
6 172 (12.39%) dbt
7 160 (11.53%) Azure Data Factory
8 147 (10.59%) Amazon S3
9 141 (10.16%) Azure Synapse Analytics
10 122 (8.79%) Azure DevOps
11 116 (8.36%) Serverless
12 104 (7.49%) GitHub
13 96 (6.92%) AWS Lambda
14 60 (4.32%) GitHub Actions
15 37 (2.67%) Amazon EMR
16 29 (2.09%) Azure AI
16 29 (2.09%) Azure Cosmos DB
17 28 (2.02%) Amazon Bedrock
18 27 (1.95%) Amazon SageMaker
18 27 (1.95%) AWS Step Functions
Communications & Networking
1 5 (0.36%) Firewall
2 3 (0.22%) RTP
3 2 (0.14%) Network Security
4 1 (0.072%) 4G
4 1 (0.072%) 5G
4 1 (0.072%) MIMO
4 1 (0.072%) MQTT
Database & Business Intelligence
1 267 (19.24%) Data Warehouse
2 265 (19.09%) Power BI
3 195 (14.05%) Data Lake
4 134 (9.65%) Metadata
5 92 (6.63%) Amazon Redshift
6 91 (6.56%) BigQuery
6 91 (6.56%) Delta Lake
7 85 (6.12%) Big Data
8 84 (6.05%) Tableau
9 70 (5.04%) SQL Server
10 62 (4.47%) NoSQL
11 59 (4.25%) Amazon Athena
12 56 (4.03%) Snowflake Schema
13 52 (3.75%) Relational Database
14 50 (3.60%) PostgreSQL
15 42 (3.03%) Azure SQL Database
16 35 (2.52%) Hadoop
16 35 (2.52%) Star Schema
17 32 (2.31%) SQL Server Integration Services
18 31 (2.23%) Looker
Development Applications
1 141 (10.16%) Git
2 62 (4.47%) GitLab
3 56 (4.03%) JIRA
4 28 (2.02%) MLflow
5 19 (1.37%) Jenkins
6 6 (0.43%) SonarQube
7 5 (0.36%) Bitbucket
7 5 (0.36%) ERwin
8 3 (0.22%) Artifactory
8 3 (0.22%) ER Studio
8 3 (0.22%) Postman
8 3 (0.22%) Selenium
8 3 (0.22%) Snyk
8 3 (0.22%) Sonatype Nexus
9 2 (0.14%) Yeoman
10 1 (0.072%) Atlassian Bamboo
10 1 (0.072%) git-flow
10 1 (0.072%) Octopus Deploy
10 1 (0.072%) Robot Framework
10 1 (0.072%) RStudio
General
1 331 (23.85%) Social Skills
2 323 (23.27%) Finance
3 228 (16.43%) Analytical Skills
4 156 (11.24%) Public Sector
5 103 (7.42%) Banking
6 36 (2.59%) Marketing
7 33 (2.38%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 31 (2.23%) Retail
9 27 (1.95%) Documentation Skills
10 24 (1.73%) Telecoms
11 23 (1.66%) Front Office
12 17 (1.22%) Investment Banking
13 14 (1.01%) Financial Institution
13 14 (1.01%) Manufacturing
14 13 (0.94%) Pharmaceutical
15 11 (0.79%) Influencing Skills
15 11 (0.79%) Law
16 10 (0.72%) Legal
17 8 (0.58%) Billing
17 8 (0.58%) Military
Job Titles
1 641 (46.18%) Data Engineer
2 194 (13.98%) Senior
3 163 (11.74%) Lead
4 162 (11.67%) Architect
5 115 (8.29%) Senior Data Engineer
6 88 (6.34%) Data Architect
7 81 (5.84%) Developer
8 66 (4.76%) AWS Engineer
9 64 (4.61%) Analyst
10 60 (4.32%) Lead Data Engineer
11 55 (3.96%) AWS Data Engineer
12 52 (3.75%) Azure Engineer
13 51 (3.67%) Snowflake Engineer
14 46 (3.31%) Azure Data Engineer
15 44 (3.17%) Solutions Architect
16 43 (3.10%) Snowflake Data Engineer
17 42 (3.03%) Data Scientist
18 40 (2.88%) Consultant
19 38 (2.74%) Data Analyst
20 32 (2.31%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 194 (13.98%) PySpark
2 118 (8.50%) Kafka
3 41 (2.95%) REST
4 34 (2.45%) Pandas
5 33 (2.38%) JSON
6 27 (1.95%) React
7 25 (1.80%) scikit-learn
8 22 (1.59%) PyTorch
9 21 (1.51%) Spring
10 20 (1.44%) .NET
10 20 (1.44%) NumPy
11 16 (1.15%) TensorFlow
12 15 (1.08%) OpenTelemetry
13 14 (1.01%) RESTful
13 14 (1.01%) Spring Boot
14 13 (0.94%) Apache Avro
15 12 (0.86%) LangChain
15 12 (0.86%) Microsoft Graph
16 11 (0.79%) Node.js
17 10 (0.72%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 182 (13.11%) Cloud Native
2 59 (4.25%) Data Structures
3 58 (4.18%) Legacy Systems
4 56 (4.03%) Distributed Systems
5 49 (3.53%) Product Ownership
6 40 (2.88%) Onboarding
7 33 (2.38%) AI Agents
8 26 (1.87%) Data Protection Act
9 25 (1.80%) Distributed Computing
10 21 (1.51%) Greenfield Project
11 19 (1.37%) NHS
12 17 (1.22%) Algorithms
13 16 (1.15%) Clustering
14 15 (1.08%) Virtual Team
15 14 (1.01%) Analytical Mindset
15 14 (1.01%) Life Science
16 12 (0.86%) Fixed Income
17 11 (0.79%) Management Information System
17 11 (0.79%) Reference Data
17 11 (0.79%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 32 (2.31%) Linux
2 24 (1.73%) Unix
3 7 (0.50%) Windows
4 4 (0.29%) VMS
5 2 (0.14%) Windows Server
6 1 (0.072%) Ubuntu
Processes & Methodologies
1 708 (51.01%) Analytics
2 669 (48.20%) Data Pipeline
3 539 (38.83%) Data Modelling
4 479 (34.51%) CI/CD
5 471 (33.93%) ETL
6 385 (27.74%) AI
7 352 (25.36%) Agile
8 346 (24.93%) Business Intelligence
9 318 (22.91%) DevOps
10 298 (21.47%) Data Governance
11 255 (18.37%) Machine Learning
12 234 (16.86%) Problem-Solving
13 230 (16.57%) Data Science
14 205 (14.77%) Validation
15 201 (14.48%) Migration
16 200 (14.41%) Data Architecture
17 197 (14.19%) Decision-Making
18 184 (13.26%) Data Transformation
19 172 (12.39%) Stakeholder Management
20 169 (12.18%) Infrastructure as Code
Programming Languages
1 752 (54.18%) SQL
2 713 (51.37%) Python
3 116 (8.36%) Java
4 43 (3.10%) Data Analysis Expressions
5 36 (2.59%) Scala
6 33 (2.38%) C#
7 30 (2.16%) Bash
8 25 (1.80%) T-SQL
9 24 (1.73%) PowerShell
10 19 (1.37%) JavaScript
11 18 (1.30%) Bicep
11 18 (1.30%) R
12 16 (1.15%) PL/SQL
13 15 (1.08%) Shell Script
14 12 (0.86%) SAS Macro
15 11 (0.79%) TypeScript
16 7 (0.50%) SPARQL
17 6 (0.43%) Cypher
18 5 (0.36%) Kusto Query Language
19 4 (0.29%) Gremlin
Qualifications
1 275 (19.81%) Security Cleared
2 236 (17.00%) SC Cleared
3 87 (6.27%) Degree
4 40 (2.88%) Computer Science Degree
5 31 (2.23%) BPSS Clearance
6 29 (2.09%) Azure Certification
7 27 (1.95%) DV Cleared
8 26 (1.87%) Master's Degree
9 17 (1.22%) AWS Certification
10 13 (0.94%) DBS Check
11 7 (0.50%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
11 7 (0.50%) Microsoft Certification
11 7 (0.50%) SnowPro
12 5 (0.36%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
12 5 (0.36%) Tableau Certification
13 3 (0.22%) PhD
14 2 (0.14%) CSPO
14 2 (0.14%) Microsoft Certified Professional
14 2 (0.14%) PMI Certification
15 1 (0.072%) PMP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 407 (29.32%) Data Quality
2 76 (5.48%) QA
3 73 (5.26%) GDPR
4 22 (1.59%) Accessibility
5 10 (0.72%) SLA
6 4 (0.29%) NIST
6 4 (0.29%) Sarbanes-Oxley
6 4 (0.29%) Solvency II
7 3 (0.22%) Actionable Recommendations
7 3 (0.22%) GxP
7 3 (0.22%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 3 (0.22%) ISO/IEC 42001
7 3 (0.22%) MiFID
7 3 (0.22%) PMO
8 2 (0.14%) 21 CFR Part 11
8 2 (0.14%) California Consumer Privacy Act
8 2 (0.14%) EMIR
8 2 (0.14%) GRC
9 1 (0.072%) COPPA
9 1 (0.072%) IFRS 17
System Software
1 119 (8.57%) Docker
2 4 (0.29%) Active Directory
3 3 (0.22%) Virtual Machines
4 2 (0.14%) HDFS
Systems Management
1 179 (12.90%) Terraform
2 104 (7.49%) Kubernetes
3 20 (1.44%) Prometheus
4 14 (1.01%) Ansible
4 14 (1.01%) Grafana
5 5 (0.36%) Kibana
6 3 (0.22%) Argo
6 3 (0.22%) logstash
6 3 (0.22%) Rancher
7 2 (0.14%) Kubeflow
7 2 (0.14%) Nagios
7 2 (0.14%) Thomson Reuters DACS
8 1 (0.072%) Cilium
8 1 (0.072%) Control-M
8 1 (0.072%) Hadoop YARN
8 1 (0.072%) HP Fortify
8 1 (0.072%) IBM Guardium
8 1 (0.072%) Kustomize
8 1 (0.072%) Oozie
8 1 (0.072%) QRadar
Vendors
1 339 (24.42%) Databricks
2 240 (17.29%) Microsoft
3 72 (5.19%) Informatica
4 61 (4.39%) Oracle
5 59 (4.25%) Google
6 31 (2.23%) Foundry
7 30 (2.16%) Palantir
7 30 (2.16%) SAP
7 30 (2.16%) Talend
8 22 (1.59%) Splunk
9 21 (1.51%) OpenAI
10 18 (1.30%) Salesforce
11 15 (1.08%) Cloudera
12 14 (1.01%) ServiceNow
13 12 (0.86%) Trend Micro
14 8 (0.58%) Denodo
14 8 (0.58%) Workday
15 7 (0.50%) Adobe
15 7 (0.50%) InterSystems
16 6 (0.43%) Bloomberg