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

6 months to
4 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 84 158 203
Rank change year-on-year +74 +45 -5
Contract jobs citing Data Engineering 1,409 506 414
As % of all contract jobs in England 3.09% 1.86% 1.27%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.64% 2.05% 1.48%
Number of daily rates quoted 985 323 303
10th Percentile £400 £363 £365
25th Percentile £450 £450 £468
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £525 £575
Median % change year-on-year - -8.70% -8.00%
75th Percentile £638 £650 £676
90th Percentile £750 £763 £779
UK median daily rate £525 £515 £560
% change year-on-year +1.94% -8.04% -6.67%
Number of hourly rates quoted 20 6 8
10th Percentile - £37.11 £27.63
25th Percentile £21.25 £42.03 £52.59
Median hourly rate £69.50 £52.50 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +32.38% -12.50% -23.08%
75th Percentile £75.75 £62.19 -
90th Percentile £85.48 £87.50 £62.63
UK median hourly rate £69.00 £52.50 £60.00
% change year-on-year +31.43% -12.50% -23.08%

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 38,742 24,707 27,973
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 84.90% 90.77% 85.89%
Number of daily rates quoted 23,892 15,711 17,811
10th Percentile £325 £300 £313
25th Percentile £425 £404 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £508 £525
Median % change year-on-year +3.45% -3.33% -4.55%
75th Percentile £636 £626 £650
90th Percentile £738 £738 £751
UK median daily rate £525 £500 £525
% change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -3.67%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,598 1,453 1,393
10th Percentile £14.22 £14.25 £14.41
25th Percentile £18.34 £17.87 £20.00
Median hourly rate £43.56 £25.15 £43.00
Median % change year-on-year +73.20% -41.51% +1.18%
75th Percentile £68.00 £50.00 £66.50
90th Percentile £80.00 £68.75 £75.00
UK median hourly rate £41.00 £25.15 £42.50
% change year-on-year +63.02% -40.82% +2.41%

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 4 September 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 4 September 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 4 September 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 +50 873 £550 - 1,058
North of England +22 175 £475 - 208
Midlands +37 135 £484 +7.33% 68
West Midlands +34 111 £475 -6.31% 48
South East -16 91 £500 +11.11% 177
Yorkshire +16 84 £475 - 37
South West +15 72 £525 -8.70% 97
North West -18 57 £513 +5.13% 145
North East -5 36 £425 -20.93% 26
East of England -2 27 £575 +27.78% 56
East Midlands -11 21 £525 +20.62% 20
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
1 175 (12.42%) Apache Airflow
2 156 (11.07%) Apache Spark
3 119 (8.45%) Apache
4 37 (2.63%) SAS
5 31 (2.20%) Confluence
6 21 (1.49%) Jupyter
7 18 (1.28%) Palantir Foundry
8 14 (0.99%) SharePoint
9 7 (0.50%) Apache Superset
10 5 (0.35%) Apache Solr
11 4 (0.28%) ArcGIS
12 2 (0.14%) nginx
12 2 (0.14%) PowerExchange
13 1 (0.071%) Apache Synapse
13 1 (0.071%) CICS
13 1 (0.071%) Microsoft Exchange
Applications
1 16 (1.14%) Microsoft Excel
2 7 (0.50%) Spreadsheet
3 6 (0.43%) Microsoft Office
4 5 (0.35%) Chatbot
5 4 (0.28%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 2 (0.14%) MS Visio
7 1 (0.071%) Notion
Business Applications
1 8 (0.57%) Aladdin
2 6 (0.43%) Dynamics CRM
3 4 (0.28%) NetSuite
3 4 (0.28%) Sage X3
3 4 (0.28%) SAP S/4HANA
4 2 (0.14%) BambooHR
4 2 (0.14%) Endur
4 2 (0.14%) Oracle Assets
4 2 (0.14%) Salesforce CRM
4 2 (0.14%) Temenos T24
4 2 (0.14%) Workday HCM
5 1 (0.071%) FIS Private Capital Suite
5 1 (0.071%) MIS ActiveH
5 1 (0.071%) SAP ECC
5 1 (0.071%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
Cloud Services
1 596 (42.30%) Azure
2 530 (37.62%) AWS
3 270 (19.16%) Power Platform
4 225 (15.97%) Snowflake
5 196 (13.91%) GCP
6 193 (13.70%) dbt
7 161 (11.43%) Azure Data Factory
8 151 (10.72%) Amazon S3
9 135 (9.58%) Azure DevOps
10 126 (8.94%) Azure Synapse Analytics
11 123 (8.73%) Serverless
12 113 (8.02%) GitHub
13 99 (7.03%) AWS Lambda
14 68 (4.83%) Azure Databricks
15 58 (4.12%) GitHub Actions
16 35 (2.48%) Amazon EMR
17 31 (2.20%) Amazon Bedrock
17 31 (2.20%) Microsoft Purview
18 30 (2.13%) Amazon CloudWatch
19 26 (1.85%) Azure AI
Communications & Networking
1 5 (0.35%) Firewall
2 4 (0.28%) Network Security
3 3 (0.21%) DNS
4 2 (0.14%) RTP
5 1 (0.071%) Broadband
5 1 (0.071%) Internet
5 1 (0.071%) MIMO
5 1 (0.071%) MQTT
5 1 (0.071%) SMS
5 1 (0.071%) SSL
Database & Business Intelligence
1 290 (20.58%) Data Warehouse
2 257 (18.24%) Power BI
3 188 (13.34%) Data Lake
4 162 (11.50%) Metadata
5 106 (7.52%) BigQuery
6 101 (7.17%) Delta Lake
7 91 (6.46%) Amazon Redshift
8 79 (5.61%) Big Data
9 71 (5.04%) Tableau
10 62 (4.40%) Amazon Athena
11 61 (4.33%) SQL Server
12 49 (3.48%) Relational Database
12 49 (3.48%) Snowflake Schema
13 48 (3.41%) NoSQL
14 44 (3.12%) PostgreSQL
15 39 (2.77%) Azure SQL Database
16 36 (2.56%) Looker
17 32 (2.27%) Data Vault
17 32 (2.27%) Star Schema
18 27 (1.92%) Semantic Layer
Development Applications
1 140 (9.94%) Git
2 78 (5.54%) GitLab
3 61 (4.33%) JIRA
4 25 (1.77%) MLflow
5 23 (1.63%) Jenkins
6 8 (0.57%) RStudio
6 8 (0.57%) Terragrunt
7 6 (0.43%) Bitbucket
7 6 (0.43%) ERwin
7 6 (0.43%) Selenium
8 5 (0.35%) SonarQube
9 4 (0.28%) Claude Code
9 4 (0.28%) ER Studio
10 3 (0.21%) Artifactory
10 3 (0.21%) Snyk
10 3 (0.21%) Sonatype Nexus
11 2 (0.14%) Atlassian Bamboo
11 2 (0.14%) Postman
11 2 (0.14%) TeamCity
11 2 (0.14%) Yeoman
General
1 352 (24.98%) Social Skills
2 321 (22.78%) Finance
3 233 (16.54%) Analytical Skills
4 145 (10.29%) Public Sector
5 109 (7.74%) Banking
6 47 (3.34%) Marketing
7 34 (2.41%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 30 (2.13%) Retail
9 21 (1.49%) Documentation Skills
10 20 (1.42%) Front Office
11 19 (1.35%) Investment Banking
11 19 (1.35%) Telecoms
12 15 (1.06%) Manufacturing
13 13 (0.92%) Financial Institution
13 13 (0.92%) Pharmaceutical
14 12 (0.85%) Billing
15 11 (0.78%) Influencing Skills
15 11 (0.78%) Law
16 10 (0.71%) Legal
17 9 (0.64%) Military
Job Titles
1 650 (46.13%) Data Engineer
2 209 (14.83%) Senior
3 160 (11.36%) Architect
4 158 (11.21%) Lead
5 131 (9.30%) Senior Data Engineer
6 88 (6.25%) Data Architect
7 76 (5.39%) Developer
8 65 (4.61%) AWS Engineer
9 63 (4.47%) Analyst
10 55 (3.90%) AWS Data Engineer
11 52 (3.69%) Snowflake Engineer
12 51 (3.62%) Databricks Engineer
12 51 (3.62%) Lead Data Engineer
13 47 (3.34%) Azure Engineer
14 40 (2.84%) Consultant
14 40 (2.84%) Databricks Data Engineer
14 40 (2.84%) Snowflake Data Engineer
14 40 (2.84%) Solutions Architect
15 36 (2.56%) Data Analyst
16 34 (2.41%) Data Scientist
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 205 (14.55%) PySpark
2 202 (14.34%) Terraform
3 98 (6.96%) Kafka
4 55 (3.90%) REST
5 33 (2.34%) React
6 27 (1.92%) JSON
7 26 (1.85%) .NET
8 24 (1.70%) Pandas
9 16 (1.14%) scikit-learn
10 15 (1.06%) NumPy
10 15 (1.06%) PyTorch
11 14 (0.99%) Spring
12 13 (0.92%) TensorFlow
13 11 (0.78%) Great Expectations
13 11 (0.78%) LangChain
13 11 (0.78%) Microsoft Graph
14 10 (0.71%) Apache Avro
14 10 (0.71%) FastAPI
14 10 (0.71%) pytest
15 9 (0.64%) Spring Boot
Miscellaneous
1 185 (13.13%) Cloud Native
2 62 (4.40%) Data Structures
3 60 (4.26%) Onboarding
4 57 (4.05%) Legacy Systems
5 55 (3.90%) Product Ownership
6 46 (3.26%) Distributed Systems
7 39 (2.77%) AI Agents
8 21 (1.49%) Data Protection Act
9 20 (1.42%) Greenfield Project
10 18 (1.28%) Distributed Computing
11 17 (1.21%) NHS
12 16 (1.14%) Virtual Team
13 15 (1.06%) Enterprise Software
14 14 (0.99%) Algorithms
14 14 (0.99%) Analytical Mindset
14 14 (0.99%) Clustering
14 14 (0.99%) Management Information System
15 13 (0.92%) Life Science
16 11 (0.78%) Reference Data
16 11 (0.78%) Taxonomies
Operating Systems
1 33 (2.34%) Linux
2 30 (2.13%) Unix
3 8 (0.57%) Windows
4 2 (0.14%) Windows Server
5 1 (0.071%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 1 (0.071%) Robot Operating System
5 1 (0.071%) Ubuntu
5 1 (0.071%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 689 (48.90%) Data Pipeline
2 686 (48.69%) Analytics
3 538 (38.18%) Data Modelling
4 500 (35.49%) CI/CD
5 484 (34.35%) ETL
6 417 (29.60%) AI
7 344 (24.41%) Agile
8 343 (24.34%) Business Intelligence
9 339 (24.06%) DevOps
10 320 (22.71%) Data Governance
11 244 (17.32%) Machine Learning
12 236 (16.75%) Problem-Solving
13 227 (16.11%) Migration
14 224 (15.90%) Data Architecture
15 223 (15.83%) Stakeholder Management
16 221 (15.68%) Data Transformation
17 211 (14.98%) Validation
18 206 (14.62%) Data Science
19 199 (14.12%) Decision-Making
20 198 (14.05%) Infrastructure as Code
Programming Languages
1 764 (54.22%) SQL
2 710 (50.39%) Python
3 101 (7.17%) Java
4 44 (3.12%) Data Analysis Expressions
5 39 (2.77%) Scala
6 38 (2.70%) PowerShell
7 36 (2.56%) Bash
8 31 (2.20%) C#
9 26 (1.85%) JavaScript
10 21 (1.49%) R
10 21 (1.49%) T-SQL
11 17 (1.21%) PL/SQL
12 15 (1.06%) Shell Script
13 13 (0.92%) Bicep
14 12 (0.85%) TypeScript
15 11 (0.78%) Kusto Query Language
16 9 (0.64%) SAS Macro
17 7 (0.50%) LookML
17 7 (0.50%) SPARQL
18 6 (0.43%) Cypher
Qualifications
1 276 (19.59%) Security Cleared
2 236 (16.75%) SC Cleared
3 75 (5.32%) Degree
4 38 (2.70%) Computer Science Degree
5 30 (2.13%) DV Cleared
6 27 (1.92%) Azure Certification
7 23 (1.63%) BPSS Clearance
8 22 (1.56%) AWS Certification
9 21 (1.49%) Master's Degree
10 14 (0.99%) DBS Check
11 10 (0.71%) SnowPro
12 9 (0.64%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
13 8 (0.57%) Microsoft Certification
14 5 (0.35%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
14 5 (0.35%) Tableau Certification
15 4 (0.28%) PMI Certification
16 3 (0.21%) PhD
16 3 (0.21%) PMP
17 2 (0.14%) CSPO
17 2 (0.14%) TOGAF Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 453 (32.15%) Data Quality
2 71 (5.04%) QA
3 66 (4.68%) GDPR
4 25 (1.77%) Accessibility
5 12 (0.85%) SLA
6 4 (0.28%) Sarbanes-Oxley
7 3 (0.21%) GRC
7 3 (0.21%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 3 (0.21%) ISO/IEC 42001
7 3 (0.21%) MiFID
7 3 (0.21%) NIST
7 3 (0.21%) PMO
8 2 (0.14%) Actionable Recommendations
8 2 (0.14%) California Consumer Privacy Act
8 2 (0.14%) Disclosure Scotland
8 2 (0.14%) EMIR
8 2 (0.14%) IFRS
8 2 (0.14%) IFRS 9
8 2 (0.14%) NCSC
8 2 (0.14%) Solvency II
System Software
1 121 (8.59%) Docker
2 5 (0.35%) Active Directory
3 1 (0.071%) Virtual Machines
Systems Management
1 97 (6.88%) Kubernetes
2 24 (1.70%) Ansible
3 17 (1.21%) Grafana
4 8 (0.57%) Prometheus
5 7 (0.50%) Control-M
6 6 (0.43%) Kibana
7 3 (0.21%) logstash
8 2 (0.14%) Argo
8 2 (0.14%) Puppet
9 1 (0.071%) Cilium
9 1 (0.071%) IBM Guardium
9 1 (0.071%) Kubeflow
9 1 (0.071%) Kustomize
9 1 (0.071%) Nagios
9 1 (0.071%) Progress Chef
9 1 (0.071%) QRadar
9 1 (0.071%) Single Sign-On
9 1 (0.071%) Thomson Reuters DACS
Vendors
1 369 (26.19%) Databricks
2 257 (18.24%) Microsoft
3 69 (4.90%) Informatica
4 68 (4.83%) Google
5 62 (4.40%) Oracle
6 28 (1.99%) Foundry
7 27 (1.92%) SAP
8 26 (1.85%) Palantir
8 26 (1.85%) Talend
9 22 (1.56%) Salesforce
10 16 (1.14%) Cloudera
11 14 (0.99%) OpenAI
12 13 (0.92%) ServiceNow
13 12 (0.85%) Teradata
13 12 (0.85%) Trend Micro
14 9 (0.64%) Adobe
15 7 (0.50%) Bloomberg
15 7 (0.50%) Hitachi
15 7 (0.50%) InterSystems
15 7 (0.50%) Splunk