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

6 months to
7 Oct 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 86 139 188
Rank change year-on-year +53 +49 +29
Contract jobs citing Data Engineering 1,425 574 438
As % of all contract jobs in England 3.06% 2.05% 1.36%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.61% 2.26% 1.58%
Number of daily rates quoted 991 357 325
10th Percentile £388 £350 £400
25th Percentile £445 £413 £468
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £525 £575
Median % change year-on-year - -8.70% -4.17%
75th Percentile £650 £644 £676
90th Percentile £738 £742 £775
UK median daily rate £525 £515 £550
% change year-on-year +1.94% -6.36% -8.33%
Number of hourly rates quoted 19 5 5
10th Percentile - £36.73 £23.35
25th Percentile £21.25 £38.96 £26.50
Median hourly rate £62.50 £52.50 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +19.05% -12.50% -20.53%
75th Percentile £72.08 £65.00 -
90th Percentile £83.94 £92.00 -
UK median hourly rate £62.40 £58.75 £43.25
% change year-on-year +6.21% +35.84% -40.75%

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 39,476 25,411 27,744
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 84.80% 90.93% 86.39%
Number of daily rates quoted 23,882 16,117 16,935
10th Percentile £325 £295 £313
25th Percentile £425 £404 £419
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £510 £525
Median % change year-on-year +2.94% -2.86% -4.55%
75th Percentile £638 £625 £642
90th Percentile £738 £725 £750
UK median daily rate £525 £500 £525
% change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -2.78%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,976 1,567 1,167
10th Percentile £13.81 £14.50 £15.00
25th Percentile £17.50 £17.87 £20.50
Median hourly rate £40.00 £25.15 £43.00
Median % change year-on-year +59.05% -41.51% -3.37%
75th Percentile £67.47 £45.75 £67.01
90th Percentile £78.75 £67.35 £75.00
UK median hourly rate £37.87 £25.15 £41.50
% change year-on-year +50.56% -39.40% -2.92%

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 7 October 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 7 October 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 7 October 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 +43 874 £550 - 1,286
North of England +28 192 £475 +7.34% 292
Midlands +26 124 £475 +2.70% 115
West Midlands +21 102 £475 -13.64% 82
South East -12 97 £513 +15.17% 259
Yorkshire +28 91 £488 +2.63% 83
South West +30 88 £525 -8.70% 94
North West -10 64 £525 +23.53% 167
North East -6 39 £425 -5.56% 44
East Midlands -5 22 £503 +15.57% 33
East of England -20 19 £550 +15.79% 49
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 (12.28%) Apache Airflow
2 161 (11.30%) Apache Spark
3 135 (9.47%) Apache
4 30 (2.11%) Confluence
5 29 (2.04%) SAS
6 20 (1.40%) Jupyter
7 17 (1.19%) Palantir Foundry
8 15 (1.05%) SharePoint
9 5 (0.35%) Apache Solr
10 4 (0.28%) ArcGIS
10 4 (0.28%) nginx
11 3 (0.21%) Apache Superset
12 2 (0.14%) PowerExchange
13 1 (0.070%) Apache Pulsar
13 1 (0.070%) CICS
13 1 (0.070%) Microsoft Exchange
13 1 (0.070%) Oracle Workflow
Applications
1 11 (0.77%) Microsoft Excel
2 7 (0.49%) Chatbot
2 7 (0.49%) Spreadsheet
3 3 (0.21%) Microsoft Office
4 2 (0.14%) MS Visio
5 1 (0.070%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 1 (0.070%) Notion
Business Applications
1 10 (0.70%) Aladdin
2 8 (0.56%) Dynamics CRM
3 5 (0.35%) SAP S/4HANA
4 4 (0.28%) NetSuite
4 4 (0.28%) Sage X3
5 2 (0.14%) Cloudability
5 2 (0.14%) Endur
5 2 (0.14%) Oracle Assets
5 2 (0.14%) Temenos T24
5 2 (0.14%) Workday HCM
6 1 (0.070%) BambooHR
6 1 (0.070%) FIS Private Capital Suite
6 1 (0.070%) Markit EDM
6 1 (0.070%) MIS ActiveH
6 1 (0.070%) Oracle EBS
6 1 (0.070%) Salesforce CRM
6 1 (0.070%) SAP ECC
6 1 (0.070%) SAP Oil and Gas
6 1 (0.070%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
Cloud Services
1 595 (41.75%) Azure
2 526 (36.91%) AWS
3 260 (18.25%) Power Platform
4 240 (16.84%) Snowflake
5 222 (15.58%) GCP
6 220 (15.44%) dbt
7 167 (11.72%) Amazon S3
8 163 (11.44%) Azure Data Factory
9 128 (8.98%) Serverless
10 125 (8.77%) Azure DevOps
11 114 (8.00%) Azure Synapse Analytics
12 106 (7.44%) GitHub
13 104 (7.30%) AWS Lambda
14 68 (4.77%) Azure Databricks
15 54 (3.79%) GitHub Actions
16 40 (2.81%) Amazon EMR
17 35 (2.46%) Amazon Bedrock
17 35 (2.46%) Amazon CloudWatch
18 34 (2.39%) Microsoft Purview
19 30 (2.11%) Azure AI
Communications & Networking
1 8 (0.56%) Network Security
2 7 (0.49%) DNS
3 5 (0.35%) Firewall
4 2 (0.14%) Broadband
5 1 (0.070%) HTTP
5 1 (0.070%) HTTPS
5 1 (0.070%) Internet
5 1 (0.070%) MIMO
5 1 (0.070%) MQTT
5 1 (0.070%) Radio Access Network
5 1 (0.070%) Reverse Proxy
5 1 (0.070%) SMS
5 1 (0.070%) SSL
5 1 (0.070%) TCP/IP
5 1 (0.070%) tcpdump
5 1 (0.070%) Wireshark
Database & Business Intelligence
1 290 (20.35%) Data Warehouse
2 248 (17.40%) Power BI
3 171 (12.00%) Metadata
4 169 (11.86%) Data Lake
5 115 (8.07%) BigQuery
6 98 (6.88%) Amazon Redshift
7 97 (6.81%) Delta Lake
8 72 (5.05%) Big Data
9 63 (4.42%) Amazon Athena
10 61 (4.28%) Tableau
11 55 (3.86%) SQL Server
12 49 (3.44%) Snowflake Schema
13 45 (3.16%) NoSQL
13 45 (3.16%) PostgreSQL
14 41 (2.88%) Relational Database
15 36 (2.53%) Looker
16 31 (2.18%) Amazon RDS
16 31 (2.18%) Azure SQL Database
17 29 (2.04%) Data Vault
18 26 (1.82%) Semantic Layer
Development Applications
1 152 (10.67%) Git
2 87 (6.11%) GitLab
3 54 (3.79%) JIRA
4 24 (1.68%) Jenkins
5 22 (1.54%) MLflow
6 8 (0.56%) Bitbucket
6 8 (0.56%) RStudio
6 8 (0.56%) Terragrunt
7 7 (0.49%) Claude Code
7 7 (0.49%) Selenium
8 6 (0.42%) ERwin
9 4 (0.28%) ER Studio
9 4 (0.28%) Postman
10 3 (0.21%) Artifactory
10 3 (0.21%) Atlassian Bamboo
10 3 (0.21%) Cucumber
10 3 (0.21%) SonarQube
10 3 (0.21%) TeamCity
11 2 (0.14%) Applitools
11 2 (0.14%) JMeter
General
1 376 (26.39%) Social Skills
2 324 (22.74%) Finance
3 223 (15.65%) Analytical Skills
4 147 (10.32%) Public Sector
5 133 (9.33%) Banking
6 44 (3.09%) Marketing
7 33 (2.32%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 26 (1.82%) Retail
9 25 (1.75%) Front Office
9 25 (1.75%) Investment Banking
10 18 (1.26%) Pharmaceutical
11 16 (1.12%) Documentation Skills
11 16 (1.12%) Manufacturing
12 13 (0.91%) Aerospace
12 13 (0.91%) Billing
12 13 (0.91%) Telecoms
13 12 (0.84%) Back Office
13 12 (0.84%) Financial Institution
14 11 (0.77%) Law
14 11 (0.77%) Military
Job Titles
1 657 (46.11%) Data Engineer
2 223 (15.65%) Senior
3 166 (11.65%) Lead
4 148 (10.39%) Architect
5 146 (10.25%) Senior Data Engineer
6 79 (5.54%) Developer
7 76 (5.33%) Data Architect
8 67 (4.70%) AWS Engineer
9 66 (4.63%) Analyst
10 58 (4.07%) Databricks Engineer
10 58 (4.07%) Snowflake Engineer
11 57 (4.00%) AWS Data Engineer
12 52 (3.65%) Azure Engineer
13 48 (3.37%) Lead Data Engineer
14 47 (3.30%) Snowflake Data Engineer
15 46 (3.23%) Databricks Data Engineer
16 41 (2.88%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
17 38 (2.67%) GCP Engineer
18 37 (2.60%) Data Analyst
19 36 (2.53%) Consultant
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 223 (15.65%) Terraform
2 206 (14.46%) PySpark
3 93 (6.53%) Kafka
4 60 (4.21%) REST
5 29 (2.04%) .NET
5 29 (2.04%) React
6 26 (1.82%) JSON
7 21 (1.47%) Pandas
8 17 (1.19%) LangChain
9 15 (1.05%) PyTorch
10 14 (0.98%) pytest
11 12 (0.84%) Apache NiFi
11 12 (0.84%) FastAPI
11 12 (0.84%) Microsoft Graph
11 12 (0.84%) NumPy
11 12 (0.84%) scikit-learn
11 12 (0.84%) TensorFlow
12 11 (0.77%) RabbitMQ
13 10 (0.70%) LangGraph
14 9 (0.63%) Great Expectations
Miscellaneous
1 196 (13.75%) Cloud Native
2 78 (5.47%) Onboarding
3 71 (4.98%) Data Structures
4 65 (4.56%) Product Ownership
5 49 (3.44%) AI Agents
5 49 (3.44%) Legacy Systems
6 41 (2.88%) Distributed Systems
7 25 (1.75%) Data Protection Act
8 21 (1.47%) Enterprise Software
9 20 (1.40%) Algorithms
9 20 (1.40%) Distributed Computing
9 20 (1.40%) Management Information System
10 18 (1.26%) Virtual Team
11 15 (1.05%) Life Science
11 15 (1.05%) NHS
12 13 (0.91%) Analytical Mindset
12 13 (0.91%) Clustering
12 13 (0.91%) Data Fabric
12 13 (0.91%) Greenfield Project
12 13 (0.91%) Reference Data
Operating Systems
1 30 (2.11%) Linux
2 22 (1.54%) Unix
3 9 (0.63%) Windows
4 1 (0.070%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 1 (0.070%) Robot Operating System
4 1 (0.070%) Ubuntu
4 1 (0.070%) Windows Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 703 (49.33%) Data Pipeline
2 657 (46.11%) Analytics
3 563 (39.51%) Data Modelling
4 533 (37.40%) CI/CD
5 493 (34.60%) ETL
6 458 (32.14%) AI
7 374 (26.25%) Agile
8 357 (25.05%) DevOps
9 328 (23.02%) Business Intelligence
10 314 (22.04%) Data Governance
11 267 (18.74%) Stakeholder Management
12 256 (17.96%) Machine Learning
13 231 (16.21%) Validation
14 226 (15.86%) Data Transformation
15 225 (15.79%) Problem-Solving
16 223 (15.65%) Infrastructure as Code
17 221 (15.51%) Data Architecture
18 217 (15.23%) Migration
19 207 (14.53%) Data Integration
20 203 (14.25%) Decision-Making
Programming Languages
1 802 (56.28%) SQL
2 751 (52.70%) Python
3 91 (6.39%) Java
4 41 (2.88%) Data Analysis Expressions
4 41 (2.88%) Scala
5 39 (2.74%) PowerShell
6 36 (2.53%) C#
7 32 (2.25%) Bash
8 29 (2.04%) JavaScript
9 21 (1.47%) R
10 19 (1.33%) T-SQL
11 17 (1.19%) PL/SQL
12 15 (1.05%) TypeScript
13 14 (0.98%) Kusto Query Language
14 13 (0.91%) Bicep
15 11 (0.77%) Shell Script
16 9 (0.63%) Korn
17 8 (0.56%) SAS Macro
18 7 (0.49%) Go
18 7 (0.49%) SPARQL
Qualifications
1 266 (18.67%) Security Cleared
2 217 (15.23%) SC Cleared
3 82 (5.75%) Degree
4 42 (2.95%) Computer Science Degree
5 41 (2.88%) DV Cleared
6 36 (2.53%) AWS Certification
7 35 (2.46%) Azure Certification
8 27 (1.89%) BPSS Clearance
9 19 (1.33%) Master's Degree
10 14 (0.98%) DBS Check
11 9 (0.63%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
11 9 (0.63%) SnowPro
12 8 (0.56%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
12 8 (0.56%) Microsoft Certification
13 7 (0.49%) TOGAF Certification
14 5 (0.35%) Microsoft Certified Professional
14 5 (0.35%) PMI Certification
14 5 (0.35%) PMP
15 4 (0.28%) PhD
16 3 (0.21%) CISSP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 486 (34.11%) Data Quality
2 76 (5.33%) QA
3 55 (3.86%) GDPR
4 28 (1.96%) Accessibility
5 11 (0.77%) SLA
6 6 (0.42%) GRC
7 5 (0.35%) NCSC
8 4 (0.28%) California Consumer Privacy Act
8 4 (0.28%) Disclosure Scotland
8 4 (0.28%) EU AI Act
8 4 (0.28%) NIST
8 4 (0.28%) PMO
9 3 (0.21%) Actionable Recommendations
9 3 (0.21%) IFRS
9 3 (0.21%) IFRS 9
9 3 (0.21%) ISO/IEC 27001
9 3 (0.21%) MiFID
9 3 (0.21%) Sarbanes-Oxley
10 2 (0.14%) 21 CFR Part 11
10 2 (0.14%) GxP
System Software
1 114 (8.00%) Docker
2 5 (0.35%) Active Directory
3 1 (0.070%) Virtual Machines
Systems Management
1 103 (7.23%) Kubernetes
2 29 (2.04%) Ansible
3 21 (1.47%) Grafana
4 12 (0.84%) Prometheus
5 8 (0.56%) Kibana
6 7 (0.49%) Control-M
7 3 (0.21%) logstash
8 2 (0.14%) Progress Chef
8 2 (0.14%) Puppet
9 1 (0.070%) Argo
9 1 (0.070%) Cilium
9 1 (0.070%) HAProxy
9 1 (0.070%) Kubeflow
9 1 (0.070%) Kustomize
9 1 (0.070%) QRadar
9 1 (0.070%) Single Sign-On
Vendors
1 390 (27.37%) Databricks
2 256 (17.96%) Microsoft
3 87 (6.11%) Google
4 73 (5.12%) Oracle
5 53 (3.72%) Informatica
6 28 (1.96%) SAP
7 27 (1.89%) Foundry
8 26 (1.82%) Palantir
9 24 (1.68%) Talend
10 23 (1.61%) Salesforce
11 19 (1.33%) OpenAI
12 14 (0.98%) Teradata
13 12 (0.84%) Cloudera
13 12 (0.84%) Trend Micro
14 11 (0.77%) Adobe
15 10 (0.70%) ServiceNow
16 8 (0.56%) Denodo
16 8 (0.56%) Splunk
17 7 (0.49%) Hitachi
18 6 (0.42%) Bloomberg