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

6 months to
19 Mar 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 88 157 219
Rank change year-on-year +69 +62 -1
Contract jobs citing Data Engineering 1,086 451 420
As % of all contract jobs in England 2.93% 1.84% 1.11%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.40% 2.03% 1.28%
Number of daily rates quoted 757 322 316
10th Percentile £398 £400 £413
25th Percentile £450 £460 £473
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -4.55% - -8.33%
75th Percentile £625 £676 £688
90th Percentile £749 £838 £750
UK median daily rate £525 £525 £550
% change year-on-year - -4.55% -8.33%
Number of hourly rates quoted 11 11 10
10th Percentile £56.75 £22.00 £29.51
25th Percentile £65.00 £22.25 £32.19
Median hourly rate £70.00 £25.43 £35.00
Median % change year-on-year +175.27% -27.34% -36.36%
75th Percentile £79.38 £29.38 £48.56
90th Percentile £90.00 £65.00 £60.88
UK median hourly rate £69.44 £25.43 £35.00
% change year-on-year +173.06% -27.34% -

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 31,979 22,196 32,870
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 86.42% 90.71% 86.92%
Number of daily rates quoted 20,491 14,461 21,766
10th Percentile £313 £313 £300
25th Percentile £413 £413 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £504 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.05% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £613 £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 1,970 819 2,143
10th Percentile £15.34 £15.08 £13.00
25th Percentile £18.87 £21.00 £16.06
Median hourly rate £31.45 £33.40 £32.50
Median % change year-on-year -5.84% +2.77% -10.41%
75th Percentile £65.00 £65.00 £57.50
90th Percentile £75.00 £77.50 £70.63
UK median hourly rate £30.00 £32.50 £32.12
% change year-on-year -7.69% +1.20% -8.24%

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 19 March 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 19 March 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 19 March 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 +63 710 £550 -4.35% 265
Midlands +19 110 £513 +2.50% 45
North of England -7 108 £463 -7.50% 111
West Midlands +16 88 £523 +4.50% 40
South West +15 64 £550 -15.38% 35
North West -6 49 £463 - 48
South East -33 44 £550 +10.00% 121
Yorkshire -35 37 £475 -17.39% 51
North East +13 22 £450 -10.00% 14
East Midlands -21 21 £447 -12.78% 5
East of England -20 16 £575 +79.69% 19
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
1 171 (15.75%) Apache Spark
2 112 (10.31%) Apache Airflow
3 76 (7.00%) Apache
4 20 (1.84%) SAS
5 19 (1.75%) Palantir Foundry
6 10 (0.92%) Confluence
7 8 (0.74%) Appian
8 4 (0.37%) Apache Superset
8 4 (0.37%) Microsoft Exchange
9 3 (0.28%) Jupyter
10 2 (0.18%) SharePoint
11 1 (0.092%) Apache Synapse
11 1 (0.092%) Camunda
11 1 (0.092%) CMS
11 1 (0.092%) IBM HTTP Server
Applications
1 20 (1.84%) Microsoft Excel
2 11 (1.01%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 8 (0.74%) Microsoft Office
4 4 (0.37%) MS Visio
5 3 (0.28%) Chatbot
5 3 (0.28%) Microsoft Project
5 3 (0.28%) Spreadsheet
5 3 (0.28%) Trello
Business Applications
1 6 (0.55%) Aladdin
2 3 (0.28%) BambooHR
2 3 (0.28%) SAP BPC
3 2 (0.18%) Salesforce CRM
4 1 (0.092%) Actimize
4 1 (0.092%) Markit EDM
4 1 (0.092%) Maximo
4 1 (0.092%) Misys Midas
4 1 (0.092%) SAP S/4HANA
4 1 (0.092%) Workday HCM
Cloud Services
1 513 (47.24%) Azure
2 387 (35.64%) AWS
3 248 (22.84%) Power Platform
4 187 (17.22%) Azure Data Factory
5 157 (14.46%) GCP
6 132 (12.15%) Snowflake
7 127 (11.69%) Azure Synapse Analytics
8 122 (11.23%) GitHub
9 116 (10.68%) Amazon S3
10 100 (9.21%) Serverless
11 96 (8.84%) dbt
12 92 (8.47%) Azure DevOps
13 80 (7.37%) AWS Lambda
14 74 (6.81%) GitHub Actions
15 46 (4.24%) AWS CloudFormation
16 28 (2.58%) AWS Step Functions
17 25 (2.30%) Collibra
18 24 (2.21%) Azure Machine Learning
19 22 (2.03%) Amazon EMR
19 22 (2.03%) Amazon Kinesis
Communications & Networking
1 5 (0.46%) RTP
2 4 (0.37%) Cisco IPT
2 4 (0.37%) Kerberos
2 4 (0.37%) Network Security
3 3 (0.28%) VPN
4 1 (0.092%) 4G
4 1 (0.092%) 5G
4 1 (0.092%) Firewall
4 1 (0.092%) SAN
4 1 (0.092%) SMS
4 1 (0.092%) TCP/IP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 227 (20.90%) Power BI
2 215 (19.80%) Data Warehouse
3 164 (15.10%) Data Lake
4 100 (9.21%) Metadata
5 78 (7.18%) Big Data
5 78 (7.18%) SQL Server
6 76 (7.00%) NoSQL
7 71 (6.54%) Delta Lake
8 60 (5.52%) Azure SQL Database
9 58 (5.34%) Amazon Redshift
9 58 (5.34%) Relational Database
9 58 (5.34%) Snowflake Schema
10 55 (5.06%) Tableau
11 51 (4.70%) BigQuery
12 46 (4.24%) Amazon Athena
12 46 (4.24%) PostgreSQL
13 43 (3.96%) Hadoop
14 34 (3.13%) SQL Server Integration Services
15 31 (2.85%) Spark SQL
16 22 (2.03%) Mixpanel
Development Applications
1 152 (14.00%) Git
2 45 (4.14%) GitLab
3 42 (3.87%) MLflow
4 41 (3.78%) Jenkins
5 22 (2.03%) JIRA
6 6 (0.55%) Selenium
7 4 (0.37%) SonarQube
7 4 (0.37%) Visual Studio Code
8 3 (0.28%) JUnit
8 3 (0.28%) Maven
8 3 (0.28%) Postman
8 3 (0.28%) Robot Framework
8 3 (0.28%) Terragrunt
9 2 (0.18%) Bitbucket
9 2 (0.18%) Cucumber
9 2 (0.18%) ERwin
9 2 (0.18%) Mockito
9 2 (0.18%) Visual Studio
10 1 (0.092%) Ant
10 1 (0.092%) SoapUI
General
1 288 (26.52%) Social Skills
2 271 (24.95%) Finance
3 163 (15.01%) Analytical Skills
4 92 (8.47%) Public Sector
5 63 (5.80%) Banking
6 28 (2.58%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 19 (1.75%) Front Office
8 18 (1.66%) Investment Banking
9 17 (1.57%) Retail
10 15 (1.38%) Influencing Skills
10 15 (1.38%) Marketing
11 14 (1.29%) Documentation Skills
12 12 (1.10%) Financial Institution
13 11 (1.01%) Legal
13 11 (1.01%) Telecoms
14 10 (0.92%) Pharmaceutical
15 8 (0.74%) Publishing
16 6 (0.55%) Back Office
16 6 (0.55%) Manufacturing
16 6 (0.55%) Military
Job Titles
1 521 (47.97%) Data Engineer
2 144 (13.26%) Lead
3 137 (12.62%) Senior
4 98 (9.02%) Senior Data Engineer
5 88 (8.10%) Architect
6 70 (6.45%) Azure Engineer
6 70 (6.45%) Developer
7 58 (5.34%) Azure Data Engineer
8 55 (5.06%) Lead Data Engineer
9 53 (4.88%) Analyst
10 46 (4.24%) Data Architect
11 45 (4.14%) Data Scientist
11 45 (4.14%) Snowflake Engineer
12 42 (3.87%) AWS Engineer
13 39 (3.59%) Snowflake Data Engineer
14 35 (3.22%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
15 31 (2.85%) Data Analyst
16 30 (2.76%) Consultant
16 30 (2.76%) Principal Engineer
17 28 (2.58%) AWS Data Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 183 (16.85%) PySpark
2 141 (12.98%) Kafka
3 59 (5.43%) Pandas
4 47 (4.33%) scikit-learn
5 46 (4.24%) PyTorch
6 41 (3.78%) NumPy
7 35 (3.22%) TensorFlow
8 29 (2.67%) JSON
9 26 (2.39%) FastAPI
10 25 (2.30%) pytest
10 25 (2.30%) YAML
11 23 (2.12%) Flask
11 23 (2.12%) React
11 23 (2.12%) RESTful
12 21 (1.93%) LangChain
12 21 (1.93%) REST
13 18 (1.66%) Great Expectations
13 18 (1.66%) Spring
14 14 (1.29%) Hugging Face
15 13 (1.20%) Node.js
Miscellaneous
1 140 (12.89%) Cloud Native
2 40 (3.68%) Product Ownership
3 37 (3.41%) Distributed Systems
4 35 (3.22%) Algorithms
5 31 (2.85%) Legacy Systems
6 29 (2.67%) Distributed Computing
7 23 (2.12%) Hybrid Cloud
8 21 (1.93%) Data Structures
9 20 (1.84%) Data Protection Act
10 18 (1.66%) Onboarding
11 17 (1.57%) AI Agents
11 17 (1.57%) Greenfield Project
12 16 (1.47%) Analytical Mindset
13 14 (1.29%) Fixed Income
14 12 (1.10%) Clustering
15 11 (1.01%) Derivative
15 11 (1.01%) Management Information System
16 10 (0.92%) Equities
16 10 (0.92%) NHS
16 10 (0.92%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 29 (2.67%) Linux
2 13 (1.20%) Unix
3 7 (0.64%) VMS
4 3 (0.28%) Windows
5 2 (0.18%) Ubuntu
5 2 (0.18%) Windows Server
6 1 (0.092%) CentOS
6 1 (0.092%) Debian
Processes & Methodologies
1 530 (48.80%) Analytics
2 491 (45.21%) Data Pipeline
3 442 (40.70%) ETL
4 432 (39.78%) Data Modelling
5 380 (34.99%) CI/CD
6 284 (26.15%) Agile
7 283 (26.06%) AI
8 282 (25.97%) Business Intelligence
9 281 (25.87%) DevOps
10 272 (25.05%) Data Governance
11 226 (20.81%) Machine Learning
12 215 (19.80%) Problem-Solving
13 203 (18.69%) Data Science
14 176 (16.21%) Data Architecture
15 131 (12.06%) Decision-Making
16 124 (11.42%) Infrastructure as Code
17 119 (10.96%) Validation
18 109 (10.04%) Performance Tuning
19 106 (9.76%) Data Transformation
20 105 (9.67%) Data Integration
Programming Languages
1 647 (59.58%) Python
2 603 (55.52%) SQL
3 85 (7.83%) Java
4 67 (6.17%) Scala
5 45 (4.14%) C#
6 36 (3.31%) Data Analysis Expressions
7 30 (2.76%) Bash
8 29 (2.67%) PowerShell
9 24 (2.21%) JavaScript
10 20 (1.84%) T-SQL
11 19 (1.75%) Bicep
12 16 (1.47%) Go
13 15 (1.38%) R
13 15 (1.38%) TypeScript
14 10 (0.92%) C++
15 9 (0.83%) PL/SQL
15 9 (0.83%) Shell Script
16 6 (0.55%) Korn
17 5 (0.46%) Rust
18 3 (0.28%) SAS Macro
Qualifications
1 218 (20.07%) Security Cleared
2 184 (16.94%) SC Cleared
3 87 (8.01%) Degree
4 45 (4.14%) Azure Certification
5 40 (3.68%) Computer Science Degree
6 35 (3.22%) Master's Degree
7 21 (1.93%) DV Cleared
8 15 (1.38%) BPSS Clearance
9 13 (1.20%) AWS Certification
10 10 (0.92%) PhD
11 8 (0.74%) Microsoft Certification
12 4 (0.37%) DBS Check
12 4 (0.37%) Microsoft Certified Professional
13 2 (0.18%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 2 (0.18%) SnowPro
14 1 (0.092%) (ISC)2 CCSP
14 1 (0.092%) CCSP
14 1 (0.092%) OCP
14 1 (0.092%) Oracle Certification
14 1 (0.092%) Tableau Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 303 (27.90%) Data Quality
2 86 (7.92%) GDPR
3 41 (3.78%) QA
4 11 (1.01%) Sarbanes-Oxley
5 10 (0.92%) Accessibility
6 8 (0.74%) HIPAA
7 5 (0.46%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 5 (0.46%) PERC
7 5 (0.46%) SOC 2
8 4 (0.37%) California Consumer Privacy Act
9 3 (0.28%) GRC
9 3 (0.28%) SLA
9 3 (0.28%) WCAG
10 2 (0.18%) HL7
10 2 (0.18%) MiFID
10 2 (0.18%) NIST
10 2 (0.18%) PCI DSS
10 2 (0.18%) PMO
10 2 (0.18%) Solvency II
11 1 (0.092%) NCSC
System Software
1 131 (12.06%) Docker
2 5 (0.46%) HDFS
3 3 (0.28%) Virtual Machines
4 1 (0.092%) Apache ZooKeeper
Systems Management
1 157 (14.46%) Terraform
2 130 (11.97%) Kubernetes
3 25 (2.30%) Prometheus
4 13 (1.20%) Grafana
5 4 (0.37%) Ansible
5 4 (0.37%) Argo
6 3 (0.28%) Kubeflow
6 3 (0.28%) Rancher
7 2 (0.18%) Hadoop YARN
7 2 (0.18%) Kibana
7 2 (0.18%) Nagios
7 2 (0.18%) Thomson Reuters DACS
8 1 (0.092%) Apache Ranger
8 1 (0.092%) Control-M
8 1 (0.092%) HP Fortify
8 1 (0.092%) Oozie
Vendors
1 311 (28.64%) Databricks
2 155 (14.27%) Microsoft
3 59 (5.43%) Google
4 40 (3.68%) Informatica
5 32 (2.95%) Oracle
6 25 (2.30%) Talend
7 24 (2.21%) Foundry
8 23 (2.12%) Palantir
9 22 (2.03%) OpenAI
10 18 (1.66%) Splunk
11 14 (1.29%) Cloudera
11 14 (1.29%) SAP
12 10 (0.92%) Denodo
12 10 (0.92%) Salesforce
13 9 (0.83%) ServiceNow
13 9 (0.83%) UiPath
14 8 (0.74%) Automation Anywhere
15 6 (0.55%) MicroStrategy
16 5 (0.46%) Charles River
16 5 (0.46%) Murex