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

6 months to
25 Feb 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 91 153 214
Rank change year-on-year +62 +61 +5
Contract jobs citing Data Engineering 992 455 416
As % of all contract jobs in England 2.81% 1.78% 1.11%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.22% 1.97% 1.27%
Number of daily rates quoted 685 320 313
10th Percentile £363 £400 £413
25th Percentile £435 £463 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -4.55% - -8.33%
75th Percentile £615 £676 £675
90th Percentile £733 £838 £738
UK median daily rate £524 £550 £550
% change year-on-year -4.77% - -8.33%
Number of hourly rates quoted 7 11 8
10th Percentile £61.70 £22.00 £31.02
25th Percentile £65.00 £22.36 £35.00
Median hourly rate £70.00 £26.50 £35.32
Median % change year-on-year +164.15% -24.96% -29.02%
75th Percentile £79.38 £29.38 £45.19
90th Percentile £86.25 £65.00 £54.68
UK median hourly rate £69.00 £25.97 £35.32
% change year-on-year +165.74% -26.48% +0.90%

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 30,789 23,051 32,723
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 87.31% 90.11% 87.31%
Number of daily rates quoted 19,727 14,450 21,724
10th Percentile £313 £308 £300
25th Percentile £413 £413 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £501 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.67% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £615 £638 £650
90th Percentile £725 £750 £750
UK median daily rate £500 £525 £525
% change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 1,908 755 2,031
10th Percentile £15.18 £15.62 £13.41
25th Percentile £18.50 £21.25 £16.25
Median hourly rate £27.50 £35.00 £34.25
Median % change year-on-year -21.43% +2.19% -2.14%
75th Percentile £63.75 £65.00 £59.95
90th Percentile £72.15 £75.40 £71.90
UK median hourly rate £25.94 £33.00 £33.07
% change year-on-year -21.39% -0.20% -5.53%

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 25 February 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 25 February 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 25 February 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 +54 661 £550 -4.35% 224
North of England -4 103 £450 -10.00% 97
Midlands +7 89 £513 +2.50% 48
West Midlands 0 69 £520 +4.00% 37
South West +3 55 £550 -15.38% 29
North West -5 55 £445 +0.28% 47
South East -19 41 £550 +7.32% 107
Yorkshire -43 29 £500 -16.67% 41
East Midlands -14 20 £447 -12.78% 11
North East 0 19 £450 -23.08% 10
East of England -21 15 £551 +72.45% 16
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
1 152 (15.32%) Apache Spark
2 105 (10.58%) Apache Airflow
3 67 (6.75%) Apache
4 19 (1.92%) Palantir Foundry
5 16 (1.61%) SAS
6 11 (1.11%) Confluence
7 8 (0.81%) Appian
8 3 (0.30%) Apache Superset
8 3 (0.30%) Microsoft Exchange
9 2 (0.20%) Jupyter
9 2 (0.20%) SharePoint
10 1 (0.10%) Apache Synapse
10 1 (0.10%) ArcGIS
10 1 (0.10%) Camunda
10 1 (0.10%) CMS
10 1 (0.10%) IBM HTTP Server
10 1 (0.10%) Luigi
Applications
1 18 (1.81%) Microsoft Excel
2 10 (1.01%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 6 (0.60%) Chatbot
4 5 (0.50%) Microsoft Office
5 4 (0.40%) MS Visio
6 3 (0.30%) Microsoft Project
6 3 (0.30%) Trello
7 2 (0.20%) Spreadsheet
8 1 (0.10%) Adobe XD
Business Applications
1 4 (0.40%) Aladdin
2 3 (0.30%) SAP BPC
3 2 (0.20%) Dynamics CRM
3 2 (0.20%) Salesforce CRM
4 1 (0.10%) Actimize
4 1 (0.10%) Markit EDM
4 1 (0.10%) Maximo
4 1 (0.10%) Misys Midas
4 1 (0.10%) SAP ERP
4 1 (0.10%) SAP S/4HANA
4 1 (0.10%) Workday HCM
Cloud Services
1 465 (46.88%) Azure
2 349 (35.18%) AWS
3 219 (22.08%) Power Platform
4 187 (18.85%) Azure Data Factory
5 146 (14.72%) GCP
6 120 (12.10%) Snowflake
7 109 (10.99%) Azure Synapse Analytics
8 104 (10.48%) GitHub
9 103 (10.38%) Amazon S3
10 94 (9.48%) Serverless
11 88 (8.87%) dbt
12 84 (8.47%) Azure DevOps
13 76 (7.66%) AWS Lambda
14 70 (7.06%) GitHub Actions
15 42 (4.23%) AWS CloudFormation
16 26 (2.62%) AWS Step Functions
17 25 (2.52%) Azure Machine Learning
18 23 (2.32%) Amazon SageMaker
19 22 (2.22%) Amazon EMR
19 22 (2.22%) Microsoft Purview
Communications & Networking
1 5 (0.50%) Network Security
2 4 (0.40%) Cisco IPT
2 4 (0.40%) Kerberos
3 3 (0.30%) RTP
3 3 (0.30%) VPN
4 1 (0.10%) 4G
4 1 (0.10%) 5G
4 1 (0.10%) Firewall
4 1 (0.10%) SAN
4 1 (0.10%) SMS
4 1 (0.10%) TCP/IP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 199 (20.06%) Power BI
2 193 (19.46%) Data Warehouse
3 138 (13.91%) Data Lake
4 83 (8.37%) Metadata
5 69 (6.96%) SQL Server
6 67 (6.75%) Big Data
7 63 (6.35%) NoSQL
8 59 (5.95%) Delta Lake
9 55 (5.54%) Snowflake Schema
10 52 (5.24%) Azure SQL Database
11 51 (5.14%) Relational Database
12 49 (4.94%) Amazon Redshift
13 46 (4.64%) BigQuery
14 41 (4.13%) PostgreSQL
15 40 (4.03%) Tableau
16 39 (3.93%) Amazon Athena
17 35 (3.53%) Hadoop
18 32 (3.23%) SQL Server Integration Services
19 28 (2.82%) Spark SQL
20 22 (2.22%) Elasticsearch
Development Applications
1 146 (14.72%) Git
2 46 (4.64%) GitLab
3 41 (4.13%) Jenkins
4 39 (3.93%) MLflow
5 21 (2.12%) JIRA
6 6 (0.60%) Selenium
6 6 (0.60%) Visual Studio Code
7 4 (0.40%) SonarQube
8 3 (0.30%) JUnit
8 3 (0.30%) Maven
8 3 (0.30%) Postman
8 3 (0.30%) Robot Framework
8 3 (0.30%) Terragrunt
9 2 (0.20%) Cucumber
9 2 (0.20%) ERwin
9 2 (0.20%) Mockito
9 2 (0.20%) TeamCity
9 2 (0.20%) Visual Studio
10 1 (0.10%) Bitbucket
10 1 (0.10%) SoapUI
General
1 273 (27.52%) Social Skills
2 234 (23.59%) Finance
3 142 (14.31%) Analytical Skills
4 83 (8.37%) Public Sector
5 66 (6.65%) Banking
6 24 (2.42%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 18 (1.81%) Investment Banking
7 18 (1.81%) Retail
8 16 (1.61%) Influencing Skills
9 14 (1.41%) Front Office
10 13 (1.31%) Marketing
11 12 (1.21%) Documentation Skills
12 10 (1.01%) Publishing
13 9 (0.91%) Legal
13 9 (0.91%) Pharmaceutical
14 8 (0.81%) Financial Institution
15 6 (0.60%) Back Office
15 6 (0.60%) Military
15 6 (0.60%) Telecoms
16 5 (0.50%) Presentation Skills
Job Titles
1 456 (45.97%) Data Engineer
2 130 (13.10%) Lead
3 122 (12.30%) Senior
4 87 (8.77%) Senior Data Engineer
5 74 (7.46%) Azure Engineer
6 71 (7.16%) Architect
7 66 (6.65%) Developer
8 57 (5.75%) Azure Data Engineer
9 50 (5.04%) Analyst
10 43 (4.33%) Lead Data Engineer
10 43 (4.33%) Snowflake Engineer
11 42 (4.23%) Data Scientist
12 39 (3.93%) AWS Engineer
13 37 (3.73%) Data Architect
14 36 (3.63%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
14 36 (3.63%) Snowflake Data Engineer
15 28 (2.82%) Data Analyst
16 27 (2.72%) Python Engineer
17 26 (2.62%) AWS Data Engineer
18 25 (2.52%) Principal Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 170 (17.14%) PySpark
2 124 (12.50%) Kafka
3 54 (5.44%) Pandas
4 51 (5.14%) PyTorch
5 44 (4.44%) scikit-learn
6 41 (4.13%) NumPy
7 40 (4.03%) TensorFlow
8 32 (3.23%) FastAPI
9 31 (3.13%) RESTful
10 30 (3.02%) JSON
11 29 (2.92%) Flask
12 27 (2.72%) pytest
13 25 (2.52%) YAML
14 24 (2.42%) React
15 22 (2.22%) LangChain
16 19 (1.92%) REST
17 15 (1.51%) Django
17 15 (1.51%) Great Expectations
17 15 (1.51%) Hugging Face
18 13 (1.31%) ARM Templates
Miscellaneous
1 114 (11.49%) Cloud Native
2 33 (3.33%) Algorithms
2 33 (3.33%) Product Ownership
3 30 (3.02%) Distributed Computing
3 30 (3.02%) Distributed Systems
4 23 (2.32%) Data Structures
5 21 (2.12%) Hybrid Cloud
6 19 (1.92%) Data Protection Act
6 19 (1.92%) Legacy Systems
7 17 (1.71%) AI Agents
7 17 (1.71%) Onboarding
8 16 (1.61%) Analytical Mindset
9 13 (1.31%) Clustering
10 11 (1.11%) Fixed Income
10 11 (1.11%) Greenfield Project
11 10 (1.01%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
11 10 (1.01%) NHS
12 9 (0.91%) Derivative
12 9 (0.91%) Hedge funds
12 9 (0.91%) Management Information System
Operating Systems
1 24 (2.42%) Linux
2 7 (0.71%) VMS
3 6 (0.60%) Unix
4 2 (0.20%) Ubuntu
5 1 (0.10%) CentOS
5 1 (0.10%) Debian
5 1 (0.10%) Windows
Processes & Methodologies
1 452 (45.56%) Data Pipeline
2 451 (45.46%) Analytics
3 392 (39.52%) ETL
4 389 (39.21%) Data Modelling
5 352 (35.48%) CI/CD
6 260 (26.21%) AI
7 259 (26.11%) Agile
8 257 (25.91%) DevOps
9 243 (24.50%) Data Governance
10 242 (24.40%) Business Intelligence
11 221 (22.28%) Machine Learning
12 207 (20.87%) Data Science
13 201 (20.26%) Problem-Solving
14 156 (15.73%) Data Architecture
15 126 (12.70%) Infrastructure as Code
16 109 (10.99%) Decision-Making
17 102 (10.28%) Validation
18 100 (10.08%) Visualisation
19 99 (9.98%) Data Integration
20 96 (9.68%) LLM
Programming Languages
1 608 (61.29%) Python
2 528 (53.23%) SQL
3 74 (7.46%) Java
4 64 (6.45%) Scala
5 45 (4.54%) C#
6 30 (3.02%) JavaScript
7 28 (2.82%) Data Analysis Expressions
8 26 (2.62%) PowerShell
9 23 (2.32%) Bicep
10 22 (2.22%) Bash
11 20 (2.02%) TypeScript
12 19 (1.92%) T-SQL
13 16 (1.61%) R
14 15 (1.51%) Go
15 14 (1.41%) C++
16 11 (1.11%) PL/SQL
17 8 (0.81%) Rust
18 6 (0.60%) Korn
18 6 (0.60%) Shell Script
19 3 (0.30%) SAS Macro
Qualifications
1 199 (20.06%) Security Cleared
2 163 (16.43%) SC Cleared
3 81 (8.17%) Degree
4 49 (4.94%) Azure Certification
5 37 (3.73%) Computer Science Degree
6 36 (3.63%) Master's Degree
7 22 (2.22%) DV Cleared
8 14 (1.41%) BPSS Clearance
9 13 (1.31%) AWS Certification
10 11 (1.11%) Microsoft Certification
10 11 (1.11%) PhD
11 4 (0.40%) DBS Check
11 4 (0.40%) Microsoft Certified Professional
12 1 (0.10%) ACCA
12 1 (0.10%) CBAP
12 1 (0.10%) CIMA
12 1 (0.10%) CISM
12 1 (0.10%) ISTQB
12 1 (0.10%) OCP
12 1 (0.10%) Oracle Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 273 (27.52%) Data Quality
2 82 (8.27%) GDPR
3 34 (3.43%) QA
4 13 (1.31%) Accessibility
5 12 (1.21%) Sarbanes-Oxley
6 9 (0.91%) HIPAA
7 6 (0.60%) California Consumer Privacy Act
7 6 (0.60%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 5 (0.50%) PERC
8 5 (0.50%) SOC 2
9 3 (0.30%) GRC
9 3 (0.30%) WCAG
10 2 (0.20%) HL7
10 2 (0.20%) MiFID
10 2 (0.20%) NIST
10 2 (0.20%) PCI DSS
10 2 (0.20%) Solvency II
11 1 (0.10%) NCSC
11 1 (0.10%) PMO
11 1 (0.10%) SLA
System Software
1 137 (13.81%) Docker
2 8 (0.81%) HDFS
3 2 (0.20%) Active Directory
3 2 (0.20%) Virtual Machines
4 1 (0.10%) Apache ZooKeeper
Systems Management
1 163 (16.43%) Terraform
2 135 (13.61%) Kubernetes
3 25 (2.52%) Prometheus
4 13 (1.31%) Grafana
5 6 (0.60%) Ansible
6 5 (0.50%) Argo
7 4 (0.40%) Hadoop YARN
8 3 (0.30%) Control-M
8 3 (0.30%) Kubeflow
9 2 (0.20%) Kibana
9 2 (0.20%) logstash
9 2 (0.20%) Nagios
9 2 (0.20%) Oozie
9 2 (0.20%) Rancher
9 2 (0.20%) Single Sign-On
10 1 (0.10%) Apache Ranger
10 1 (0.10%) HP Fortify
10 1 (0.10%) Puppet
Vendors
1 287 (28.93%) Databricks
2 134 (13.51%) Microsoft
3 50 (5.04%) Google
4 31 (3.13%) Oracle
5 29 (2.92%) Informatica
6 23 (2.32%) Foundry
6 23 (2.32%) Palantir
7 22 (2.22%) Talend
8 21 (2.12%) OpenAI
9 16 (1.61%) SAP
10 14 (1.41%) Splunk
11 11 (1.11%) Salesforce
12 10 (1.01%) Cloudera
13 8 (0.81%) Automation Anywhere
13 8 (0.81%) Denodo
13 8 (0.81%) UiPath
14 7 (0.71%) Virgin Media
15 6 (0.60%) MicroStrategy
15 6 (0.60%) ServiceNow
16 5 (0.50%) Guidewire