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

6 months to
25 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 84 151 203
Rank change year-on-year +67 +52 -6
Contract jobs citing Data Engineering 1,374 511 415
As % of all contract jobs in England 3.01% 1.86% 1.25%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.55% 2.04% 1.46%
Number of daily rates quoted 959 324 307
10th Percentile £400 £363 £375
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 £694
90th Percentile £750 £775 £775
UK median daily rate £525 £516 £575
% change year-on-year +1.69% -10.22% -8.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 19 7 10
10th Percentile - £30.15 £29.46
25th Percentile £21.25 £37.11 £32.19
Median hourly rate £69.00 £52.50 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +31.43% -12.50% -23.08%
75th Percentile £75.00 £59.38 -
90th Percentile £84.39 £83.00 £60.88
UK median hourly rate £67.00 £52.50 £47.50
% change year-on-year +27.62% +10.53% -39.10%

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 38,748 25,020 28,500
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 84.82% 90.83% 85.77%
Number of daily rates quoted 23,949 15,925 18,341
10th Percentile £325 £300 £313
25th Percentile £425 £404 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £511 £525
Median % change year-on-year +2.74% -2.67% -4.55%
75th Percentile £630 £627 £650
90th Percentile £738 £738 £753
UK median daily rate £525 £500 £525
% change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -3.67%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,582 1,471 1,520
10th Percentile £14.25 £14.25 £14.05
25th Percentile £19.00 £17.87 £18.13
Median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £43.00
Median % change year-on-year +74.79% -41.51% +1.18%
75th Percentile £68.00 £50.00 £65.00
90th Percentile £81.05 £70.00 £75.00
UK median hourly rate £41.56 £25.15 £40.94
% change year-on-year +65.23% -38.57% -3.67%

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 August 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 August 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 August 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 +49 831 £550 - 225
North of England +31 176 £469 -3.85% 92
Midlands +31 140 £481 +5.37% 26
West Midlands +34 115 £475 -6.31% 23
South East -17 91 £525 +14.38% 121
Yorkshire +24 85 £475 +11.76% 23
South West +14 70 £525 -3.45% 53
North West -9 56 £525 +5.00% 45
North East -7 37 £425 -20.93% 26
East of England -5 28 £575 -4.17% 12
East Midlands -6 22 £525 +16.54% 3
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
1 166 (12.08%) Apache Airflow
2 158 (11.50%) Apache Spark
3 108 (7.86%) Apache
4 38 (2.77%) SAS
5 29 (2.11%) Confluence
6 22 (1.60%) Jupyter
7 18 (1.31%) Palantir Foundry
8 13 (0.95%) SharePoint
9 6 (0.44%) Apache Superset
10 5 (0.36%) Apache Solr
11 4 (0.29%) ArcGIS
12 2 (0.15%) Microsoft Exchange
12 2 (0.15%) PowerExchange
13 1 (0.073%) Apache Synapse
13 1 (0.073%) CICS
13 1 (0.073%) nginx
Applications
1 16 (1.16%) Microsoft Excel
2 7 (0.51%) Spreadsheet
3 6 (0.44%) Microsoft Office
4 5 (0.36%) Chatbot
5 4 (0.29%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 2 (0.15%) MS Visio
7 1 (0.073%) Notion
Business Applications
1 11 (0.80%) Aladdin
2 6 (0.44%) 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 (0.15%) Endur
5 2 (0.15%) Oracle Assets
5 2 (0.15%) Salesforce CRM
5 2 (0.15%) Temenos T24
5 2 (0.15%) Workday HCM
6 1 (0.073%) FIS Private Capital Suite
6 1 (0.073%) MIS ActiveH
6 1 (0.073%) SAP ECC
6 1 (0.073%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
Cloud Services
1 588 (42.79%) Azure
2 513 (37.34%) AWS
3 269 (19.58%) Power Platform
4 216 (15.72%) Snowflake
5 187 (13.61%) GCP
6 183 (13.32%) dbt
7 153 (11.14%) Azure Data Factory
8 145 (10.55%) Amazon S3
9 129 (9.39%) Azure Synapse Analytics
10 128 (9.32%) Azure DevOps
11 116 (8.44%) Serverless
12 106 (7.71%) GitHub
13 96 (6.99%) AWS Lambda
14 55 (4.00%) GitHub Actions
15 33 (2.40%) Amazon EMR
16 30 (2.18%) Amazon Bedrock
17 28 (2.04%) Azure AI
18 27 (1.97%) Amazon CloudWatch
18 27 (1.97%) Microsoft Purview
19 23 (1.67%) Amazon SageMaker
Communications & Networking
1 5 (0.36%) Firewall
2 3 (0.22%) DNS
2 3 (0.22%) Network Security
3 2 (0.15%) RTP
4 1 (0.073%) Internet
4 1 (0.073%) MIMO
4 1 (0.073%) MQTT
Database & Business Intelligence
1 278 (20.23%) Data Warehouse
2 255 (18.56%) Power BI
3 188 (13.68%) Data Lake
4 152 (11.06%) Metadata
5 103 (7.50%) BigQuery
6 96 (6.99%) Amazon Redshift
7 94 (6.84%) Delta Lake
8 81 (5.90%) Big Data
9 76 (5.53%) Tableau
10 61 (4.44%) Amazon Athena
10 61 (4.44%) SQL Server
11 55 (4.00%) NoSQL
12 49 (3.57%) Snowflake Schema
13 48 (3.49%) Relational Database
14 47 (3.42%) PostgreSQL
15 39 (2.84%) Azure SQL Database
16 34 (2.47%) Looker
17 33 (2.40%) Star Schema
18 31 (2.26%) Data Vault
19 28 (2.04%) Semantic Layer
Development Applications
1 128 (9.32%) Git
2 76 (5.53%) GitLab
3 59 (4.29%) JIRA
4 22 (1.60%) Jenkins
4 22 (1.60%) MLflow
5 6 (0.44%) Bitbucket
5 6 (0.44%) ERwin
5 6 (0.44%) RStudio
5 6 (0.44%) Terragrunt
6 5 (0.36%) SonarQube
7 4 (0.29%) Claude Code
7 4 (0.29%) ER Studio
7 4 (0.29%) Selenium
8 3 (0.22%) Artifactory
8 3 (0.22%) Snyk
8 3 (0.22%) Sonatype Nexus
9 2 (0.15%) Atlassian Bamboo
9 2 (0.15%) Postman
9 2 (0.15%) Yeoman
10 1 (0.073%) Deequ
General
1 336 (24.45%) Social Skills
2 314 (22.85%) Finance
3 224 (16.30%) Analytical Skills
4 144 (10.48%) Public Sector
5 102 (7.42%) Banking
6 44 (3.20%) Marketing
7 37 (2.69%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 30 (2.18%) Retail
9 22 (1.60%) Telecoms
10 21 (1.53%) Front Office
11 20 (1.46%) Documentation Skills
12 19 (1.38%) Investment Banking
13 15 (1.09%) Manufacturing
14 14 (1.02%) Pharmaceutical
15 13 (0.95%) Financial Institution
16 11 (0.80%) Billing
16 11 (0.80%) Influencing Skills
17 9 (0.66%) Law
17 9 (0.66%) Legal
17 9 (0.66%) Military
Job Titles
1 634 (46.14%) Data Engineer
2 201 (14.63%) Senior
3 164 (11.94%) Architect
4 155 (11.28%) Lead
5 124 (9.02%) Senior Data Engineer
6 89 (6.48%) Data Architect
7 73 (5.31%) Developer
8 65 (4.73%) AWS Engineer
9 64 (4.66%) Analyst
10 55 (4.00%) AWS Data Engineer
11 53 (3.86%) Lead Data Engineer
12 52 (3.78%) Snowflake Engineer
13 47 (3.42%) Azure Engineer
14 42 (3.06%) Snowflake Data Engineer
15 41 (2.98%) Solutions Architect
16 40 (2.91%) Consultant
17 36 (2.62%) Azure Data Engineer
17 36 (2.62%) Data Analyst
18 33 (2.40%) Data Scientist
19 32 (2.33%) Python Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 205 (14.92%) PySpark
2 190 (13.83%) Terraform
3 100 (7.28%) Kafka
4 47 (3.42%) REST
5 30 (2.18%) React
6 25 (1.82%) Pandas
7 24 (1.75%) JSON
8 22 (1.60%) .NET
9 16 (1.16%) scikit-learn
10 15 (1.09%) NumPy
10 15 (1.09%) PyTorch
10 15 (1.09%) Spring
11 13 (0.95%) TensorFlow
12 11 (0.80%) Microsoft Graph
13 10 (0.73%) Great Expectations
14 9 (0.66%) FastAPI
14 9 (0.66%) pytest
14 9 (0.66%) Spring Boot
15 8 (0.58%) Node.js
15 8 (0.58%) RESTful
Miscellaneous
1 180 (13.10%) Cloud Native
2 58 (4.22%) Legacy Systems
3 57 (4.15%) Data Structures
4 53 (3.86%) Product Ownership
5 52 (3.78%) Onboarding
6 47 (3.42%) Distributed Systems
7 35 (2.55%) AI Agents
8 23 (1.67%) Data Protection Act
9 21 (1.53%) Greenfield Project
10 18 (1.31%) Distributed Computing
11 17 (1.24%) NHS
12 16 (1.16%) Virtual Team
13 15 (1.09%) Clustering
14 14 (1.02%) Life Science
15 13 (0.95%) Algorithms
15 13 (0.95%) Analytical Mindset
15 13 (0.95%) Enterprise Software
15 13 (0.95%) Management Information System
16 12 (0.87%) Reference Data
17 10 (0.73%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 34 (2.47%) Linux
2 30 (2.18%) Unix
3 8 (0.58%) Windows
4 2 (0.15%) Windows Server
5 1 (0.073%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 1 (0.073%) Robot Operating System
5 1 (0.073%) Ubuntu
5 1 (0.073%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 674 (49.05%) Analytics
2 662 (48.18%) Data Pipeline
3 519 (37.77%) Data Modelling
4 475 (34.57%) CI/CD
5 469 (34.13%) ETL
6 403 (29.33%) AI
7 340 (24.75%) Agile
8 338 (24.60%) Business Intelligence
9 326 (23.73%) DevOps
10 307 (22.34%) Data Governance
11 237 (17.25%) Machine Learning
12 229 (16.67%) Problem-Solving
13 212 (15.43%) Migration
14 211 (15.36%) Data Transformation
15 210 (15.28%) Data Architecture
16 207 (15.07%) Validation
17 206 (14.99%) Stakeholder Management
18 201 (14.63%) Data Science
19 200 (14.56%) Decision-Making
20 180 (13.10%) Infrastructure as Code
Programming Languages
1 743 (54.08%) SQL
2 685 (49.85%) Python
3 101 (7.35%) Java
4 40 (2.91%) Data Analysis Expressions
5 36 (2.62%) Scala
6 35 (2.55%) Bash
7 34 (2.47%) PowerShell
8 28 (2.04%) C#
9 24 (1.75%) JavaScript
10 21 (1.53%) R
11 20 (1.46%) T-SQL
12 17 (1.24%) PL/SQL
13 16 (1.16%) Shell Script
14 13 (0.95%) Bicep
15 10 (0.73%) TypeScript
16 9 (0.66%) SAS Macro
17 8 (0.58%) Kusto Query Language
18 7 (0.51%) SPARQL
19 6 (0.44%) Cypher
20 5 (0.36%) Go
Qualifications
1 264 (19.21%) Security Cleared
2 227 (16.52%) SC Cleared
3 79 (5.75%) Degree
4 40 (2.91%) Computer Science Degree
5 28 (2.04%) Azure Certification
6 25 (1.82%) DV Cleared
7 24 (1.75%) BPSS Clearance
8 21 (1.53%) Master's Degree
9 18 (1.31%) AWS Certification
10 14 (1.02%) DBS Check
11 9 (0.66%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
12 8 (0.58%) Microsoft Certification
12 8 (0.58%) SnowPro
13 5 (0.36%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 5 (0.36%) Tableau Certification
14 3 (0.22%) PhD
14 3 (0.22%) PMI Certification
15 2 (0.15%) CSPO
15 2 (0.15%) PMP
16 1 (0.073%) CISSP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 427 (31.08%) Data Quality
2 70 (5.09%) GDPR
2 70 (5.09%) QA
3 25 (1.82%) Accessibility
4 13 (0.95%) SLA
5 4 (0.29%) Sarbanes-Oxley
6 3 (0.22%) GxP
6 3 (0.22%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 3 (0.22%) ISO/IEC 42001
6 3 (0.22%) MiFID
6 3 (0.22%) NIST
6 3 (0.22%) PMO
6 3 (0.22%) Solvency II
7 2 (0.15%) 21 CFR Part 11
7 2 (0.15%) Actionable Recommendations
7 2 (0.15%) California Consumer Privacy Act
7 2 (0.15%) EMIR
7 2 (0.15%) GRC
7 2 (0.15%) IFRS
7 2 (0.15%) IFRS 9
System Software
1 117 (8.52%) Docker
2 5 (0.36%) Active Directory
3 2 (0.15%) Virtual Machines
Systems Management
1 96 (6.99%) Kubernetes
2 20 (1.46%) Ansible
3 15 (1.09%) Grafana
4 7 (0.51%) Prometheus
5 6 (0.44%) Control-M
6 5 (0.36%) Kibana
7 3 (0.22%) logstash
8 2 (0.15%) Argo
8 2 (0.15%) Puppet
8 2 (0.15%) Thomson Reuters DACS
9 1 (0.073%) Cilium
9 1 (0.073%) IBM Guardium
9 1 (0.073%) Kubeflow
9 1 (0.073%) Kustomize
9 1 (0.073%) Nagios
9 1 (0.073%) QRadar
9 1 (0.073%) Rancher
9 1 (0.073%) Single Sign-On
Vendors
1 351 (25.55%) Databricks
2 249 (18.12%) Microsoft
3 71 (5.17%) Informatica
4 61 (4.44%) Google
4 61 (4.44%) Oracle
5 28 (2.04%) Foundry
5 28 (2.04%) SAP
6 26 (1.89%) Palantir
6 26 (1.89%) Talend
7 21 (1.53%) Salesforce
8 16 (1.16%) Cloudera
9 13 (0.95%) OpenAI
9 13 (0.95%) ServiceNow
10 12 (0.87%) Trend Micro
11 11 (0.80%) Teradata
12 9 (0.66%) Splunk
13 8 (0.58%) Adobe
13 8 (0.58%) Denodo
13 8 (0.58%) Workday
14 7 (0.51%) Hitachi