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

6 months to
5 May 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 83 152 199
Rank change year-on-year +69 +47 -9
Contract jobs citing Data Engineering 1,177 454 432
As % of all contract jobs in England 2.90% 1.86% 1.17%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.42% 2.04% 1.35%
Number of daily rates quoted 828 323 322
10th Percentile £400 £400 £400
25th Percentile £450 £450 £475
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £550 £561
Median % change year-on-year -4.55% -2.00% -8.37%
75th Percentile £625 £688 £675
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 14 12 12
10th Percentile £52.90 £22.00 £30.46
25th Percentile £65.00 £22.38 £34.06
Median hourly rate £70.00 £26.47 £38.65
Median % change year-on-year +164.50% -31.53% -48.46%
75th Percentile £82.31 £53.75 £60.00
90th Percentile £89.25 £63.88 -
UK median hourly rate £70.00 £25.43 £35.00
% change year-on-year +175.27% -27.34% -52.05%

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 34,426 22,233 31,934
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 84.84% 91.20% 86.61%
Number of daily rates quoted 21,983 14,556 20,949
10th Percentile £318 £310 £300
25th Percentile £413 £413 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £510 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -2.86% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £615 £638 £650
90th Percentile £725 £750 £750
UK median daily rate £500 £520 £525
% change year-on-year -3.85% -0.95% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,140 928 2,245
10th Percentile £15.38 £14.65 £12.92
25th Percentile £20.35 £18.50 £16.00
Median hourly rate £45.46 £30.00 £36.05
Median % change year-on-year +51.53% -16.77% -2.97%
75th Percentile £67.50 £63.75 £60.00
90th Percentile £80.00 £75.00 £72.50
UK median hourly rate £41.94 £29.00 £35.83
% change year-on-year +44.62% -19.06% -0.47%

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 5 May 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 5 May 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 5 May 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 +61 733 £550 -4.35% 262
Midlands +20 125 £500 +5.26% 57
North of England +9 122 £480 -4.00% 109
West Midlands +19 100 £500 - 42
South West +17 76 £506 -17.47% 31
South East -22 60 £550 +10.00% 82
Yorkshire -8 57 £490 -10.91% 28
North West -17 47 £500 +2.56% 49
East of England -32 23 £575 +54.08% 10
East Midlands -18 22 £450 -4.00% 15
North East 0 20 £475 - 32
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
1 178 (15.12%) Apache Spark
2 111 (9.43%) Apache Airflow
3 74 (6.29%) Apache
4 30 (2.55%) SAS
5 16 (1.36%) Palantir Foundry
6 13 (1.10%) Confluence
7 8 (0.68%) Appian
8 7 (0.59%) Apache Superset
9 6 (0.51%) Jupyter
10 4 (0.34%) Microsoft Exchange
11 2 (0.17%) Apache Synapse
11 2 (0.17%) SharePoint
12 1 (0.085%) ArcGIS
12 1 (0.085%) Camunda
12 1 (0.085%) CICS
12 1 (0.085%) CMS
12 1 (0.085%) IBM HTTP Server
Applications
1 24 (2.04%) Microsoft Excel
2 8 (0.68%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 7 (0.59%) Microsoft Office
4 6 (0.51%) Spreadsheet
5 4 (0.34%) Chatbot
6 3 (0.25%) Microsoft Project
6 3 (0.25%) MS Visio
6 3 (0.25%) Trello
Business Applications
1 5 (0.42%) Aladdin
1 5 (0.42%) BambooHR
2 4 (0.34%) Dynamics CRM
3 3 (0.25%) Salesforce CRM
3 3 (0.25%) SAP BPC
4 2 (0.17%) SAP S/4HANA
5 1 (0.085%) Actimize
5 1 (0.085%) Markit EDM
5 1 (0.085%) Misys Midas
5 1 (0.085%) Oracle Assets
5 1 (0.085%) SAP ECC
Cloud Services
1 536 (45.54%) Azure
2 419 (35.60%) AWS
3 270 (22.94%) Power Platform
4 180 (15.29%) Azure Data Factory
5 174 (14.78%) GCP
6 140 (11.89%) Azure Synapse Analytics
7 137 (11.64%) Snowflake
8 122 (10.37%) Amazon S3
8 122 (10.37%) GitHub
9 111 (9.43%) dbt
10 98 (8.33%) Azure DevOps
11 95 (8.07%) Serverless
12 77 (6.54%) AWS Lambda
13 73 (6.20%) GitHub Actions
14 42 (3.57%) AWS CloudFormation
15 28 (2.38%) AWS Step Functions
16 25 (2.12%) Collibra
16 25 (2.12%) Dagster
17 23 (1.95%) Amazon SageMaker
17 23 (1.95%) Amazon SQS
Communications & Networking
1 5 (0.42%) RTP
2 4 (0.34%) Firewall
3 3 (0.25%) Kerberos
4 2 (0.17%) Cisco IPT
4 2 (0.17%) VPN
5 1 (0.085%) 4G
5 1 (0.085%) 5G
5 1 (0.085%) MIMO
5 1 (0.085%) Network Security
5 1 (0.085%) SAN
5 1 (0.085%) SMS
5 1 (0.085%) TCP/IP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 248 (21.07%) Power BI
2 227 (19.29%) Data Warehouse
3 195 (16.57%) Data Lake
4 108 (9.18%) Metadata
5 84 (7.14%) Big Data
6 83 (7.05%) SQL Server
7 78 (6.63%) Delta Lake
8 75 (6.37%) NoSQL
9 71 (6.03%) Tableau
10 66 (5.61%) Amazon Redshift
10 66 (5.61%) BigQuery
11 64 (5.44%) Azure SQL Database
12 60 (5.10%) Snowflake Schema
13 56 (4.76%) Relational Database
14 51 (4.33%) Amazon Athena
15 43 (3.65%) PostgreSQL
16 41 (3.48%) Hadoop
17 38 (3.23%) SQL Server Integration Services
18 35 (2.97%) Spark SQL
19 26 (2.21%) Star Schema
Development Applications
1 136 (11.55%) Git
2 48 (4.08%) GitLab
3 40 (3.40%) MLflow
4 37 (3.14%) JIRA
5 31 (2.63%) Jenkins
6 6 (0.51%) SonarQube
7 5 (0.42%) Selenium
8 3 (0.25%) Postman
8 3 (0.25%) Robot Framework
8 3 (0.25%) Snyk
9 2 (0.17%) Artifactory
9 2 (0.17%) Bitbucket
9 2 (0.17%) Terragrunt
9 2 (0.17%) Visual Studio
10 1 (0.085%) Ant
10 1 (0.085%) ERwin
10 1 (0.085%) JUnit
10 1 (0.085%) Maven
10 1 (0.085%) Octopus Deploy
10 1 (0.085%) SoapUI
General
1 312 (26.51%) Finance
2 267 (22.68%) Social Skills
3 183 (15.55%) Analytical Skills
4 98 (8.33%) Public Sector
5 64 (5.44%) Banking
6 24 (2.04%) Inclusion and Diversity
6 24 (2.04%) Retail
7 21 (1.78%) Marketing
8 17 (1.44%) Documentation Skills
8 17 (1.44%) Front Office
9 15 (1.27%) Telecoms
10 13 (1.10%) Financial Institution
10 13 (1.10%) Influencing Skills
11 12 (1.02%) Legal
12 11 (0.93%) Investment Banking
13 8 (0.68%) Military
14 6 (0.51%) Back Office
14 6 (0.51%) Law
15 4 (0.34%) Pharmaceutical
16 3 (0.25%) Manufacturing
Job Titles
1 563 (47.83%) Data Engineer
2 159 (13.51%) Senior
3 128 (10.88%) Lead
4 120 (10.20%) Architect
5 106 (9.01%) Senior Data Engineer
6 68 (5.78%) Developer
7 61 (5.18%) Data Architect
8 55 (4.67%) Azure Engineer
9 52 (4.42%) Analyst
10 49 (4.16%) Lead Data Engineer
11 47 (3.99%) Azure Data Engineer
12 45 (3.82%) AWS Engineer
13 43 (3.65%) Snowflake Engineer
14 42 (3.57%) Data Scientist
15 38 (3.23%) Solutions Architect
16 37 (3.14%) Snowflake Data Engineer
17 35 (2.97%) AWS Data Engineer
18 34 (2.89%) Consultant
19 31 (2.63%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
20 29 (2.46%) Data Analyst
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 183 (15.55%) PySpark
2 135 (11.47%) Kafka
3 50 (4.25%) Pandas
4 41 (3.48%) scikit-learn
5 40 (3.40%) PyTorch
6 32 (2.72%) NumPy
7 31 (2.63%) TensorFlow
8 25 (2.12%) JSON
8 25 (2.12%) REST
9 23 (1.95%) Spring
10 22 (1.87%) React
10 22 (1.87%) YAML
11 20 (1.70%) LangChain
11 20 (1.70%) pytest
12 19 (1.61%) RESTful
13 18 (1.53%) Great Expectations
14 16 (1.36%) FastAPI
14 16 (1.36%) Spring Boot
15 14 (1.19%) Flask
16 13 (1.10%) Hugging Face
Miscellaneous
1 156 (13.25%) Cloud Native
2 41 (3.48%) Distributed Systems
3 39 (3.31%) Product Ownership
4 37 (3.14%) Legacy Systems
5 34 (2.89%) Data Structures
6 31 (2.63%) Distributed Computing
7 27 (2.29%) AI Agents
8 20 (1.70%) Algorithms
8 20 (1.70%) Data Protection Act
8 20 (1.70%) Greenfield Project
9 18 (1.53%) Analytical Mindset
10 17 (1.44%) Onboarding
11 15 (1.27%) NHS
12 14 (1.19%) Fixed Income
12 14 (1.19%) Hybrid Cloud
13 13 (1.10%) Self-Motivation
14 12 (1.02%) Clustering
15 10 (0.85%) Equities
15 10 (0.85%) Management Information System
16 8 (0.68%) Derivative
Operating Systems
1 27 (2.29%) Linux
2 20 (1.70%) Unix
3 7 (0.59%) VMS
4 3 (0.25%) Windows
5 2 (0.17%) Ubuntu
5 2 (0.17%) Windows Server
6 1 (0.085%) CentOS
6 1 (0.085%) Debian
Processes & Methodologies
1 598 (50.81%) Analytics
2 535 (45.45%) Data Pipeline
3 464 (39.42%) Data Modelling
4 461 (39.17%) ETL
5 394 (33.47%) CI/CD
6 327 (27.78%) AI
7 308 (26.17%) Business Intelligence
8 304 (25.83%) Agile
9 291 (24.72%) DevOps
10 269 (22.85%) Data Governance
11 226 (19.20%) Machine Learning
12 209 (17.76%) Problem-Solving
13 201 (17.08%) Data Science
14 174 (14.78%) Data Architecture
15 158 (13.42%) Decision-Making
16 142 (12.06%) Validation
17 138 (11.72%) Migration
18 129 (10.96%) Infrastructure as Code
19 122 (10.37%) Data Transformation
20 114 (9.69%) Use Case
Programming Languages
1 645 (54.80%) SQL
2 625 (53.10%) Python
3 99 (8.41%) Java
4 62 (5.27%) Scala
5 42 (3.57%) Data Analysis Expressions
6 36 (3.06%) C#
7 24 (2.04%) Bash
8 23 (1.95%) R
9 22 (1.87%) JavaScript
9 22 (1.87%) T-SQL
10 21 (1.78%) PowerShell
11 16 (1.36%) Bicep
12 11 (0.93%) Shell Script
13 10 (0.85%) Go
13 10 (0.85%) PL/SQL
13 10 (0.85%) TypeScript
14 7 (0.59%) SAS Macro
15 4 (0.34%) Korn
16 2 (0.17%) C++
17 1 (0.085%) Ruby
Qualifications
1 234 (19.88%) Security Cleared
2 204 (17.33%) SC Cleared
3 78 (6.63%) Degree
4 39 (3.31%) Azure Certification
5 34 (2.89%) Computer Science Degree
6 27 (2.29%) Master's Degree
7 15 (1.27%) BPSS Clearance
7 15 (1.27%) DV Cleared
8 12 (1.02%) AWS Certification
9 8 (0.68%) Microsoft Certification
10 6 (0.51%) DBS Check
11 5 (0.42%) PhD
12 4 (0.34%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
12 4 (0.34%) Microsoft Certified Professional
13 3 (0.25%) SnowPro
14 2 (0.17%) Tableau Certification
15 1 (0.085%) (ISC)2 CCSP
15 1 (0.085%) CCSP
15 1 (0.085%) Cisco Certification
15 1 (0.085%) CISSP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 330 (28.04%) Data Quality
2 86 (7.31%) GDPR
3 51 (4.33%) QA
4 13 (1.10%) Sarbanes-Oxley
5 6 (0.51%) Accessibility
6 5 (0.42%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 5 (0.42%) MiFID
6 5 (0.42%) SLA
7 4 (0.34%) HIPAA
7 4 (0.34%) Solvency II
8 3 (0.25%) California Consumer Privacy Act
8 3 (0.25%) GRC
8 3 (0.25%) PMO
9 2 (0.17%) EMIR
9 2 (0.17%) HL7
9 2 (0.17%) NIST
9 2 (0.17%) PCI DSS
9 2 (0.17%) PERC
10 1 (0.085%) SNOMED CT
10 1 (0.085%) WCAG
System Software
1 115 (9.77%) Docker
2 5 (0.42%) HDFS
3 3 (0.25%) Virtual Machines
4 1 (0.085%) Active Directory
4 1 (0.085%) Apache ZooKeeper
Systems Management
1 157 (13.34%) Terraform
2 116 (9.86%) Kubernetes
3 24 (2.04%) Prometheus
4 11 (0.93%) Grafana
5 8 (0.68%) Ansible
6 5 (0.42%) Argo
7 4 (0.34%) Kubeflow
8 3 (0.25%) Kibana
8 3 (0.25%) Nagios
8 3 (0.25%) Rancher
9 2 (0.17%) Hadoop YARN
9 2 (0.17%) logstash
9 2 (0.17%) Thomson Reuters DACS
10 1 (0.085%) Apache Ranger
10 1 (0.085%) Control-M
10 1 (0.085%) HP Fortify
10 1 (0.085%) IBM Guardium
10 1 (0.085%) Oozie
Vendors
1 313 (26.59%) Databricks
2 192 (16.31%) Microsoft
3 60 (5.10%) Google
4 57 (4.84%) Informatica
5 38 (3.23%) Oracle
6 28 (2.38%) Talend
7 23 (1.95%) Foundry
8 22 (1.87%) OpenAI
9 20 (1.70%) SAP
10 19 (1.61%) Splunk
11 17 (1.44%) Palantir
12 15 (1.27%) Cloudera
13 12 (1.02%) ServiceNow
14 11 (0.93%) Salesforce
15 9 (0.76%) UiPath
16 8 (0.68%) Automation Anywhere
17 7 (0.59%) InterSystems
18 6 (0.51%) Denodo
19 5 (0.42%) IBM
19 5 (0.42%) Workday