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

6 months to
3 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 83 155 198
Rank change year-on-year +72 +43 -4
Contract jobs citing Data Engineering 1,402 507 417
As % of all contract jobs in England 3.07% 1.85% 1.27%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.62% 2.04% 1.48%
Number of daily rates quoted 979 324 304
10th Percentile £400 £363 £366
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 £679
90th Percentile £750 £763 £779
UK median daily rate £525 £514 £575
% change year-on-year +2.19% -10.65% -4.17%
Number of hourly rates quoted 20 6 9
10th Percentile - £37.11 £28.55
25th Percentile £21.25 £42.03 £31.25
Median hourly rate £69.50 £52.50 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +32.38% -12.50% -23.08%
75th Percentile £75.75 £62.19 -
90th Percentile £85.48 £87.50 £61.75
UK median hourly rate £69.00 £52.50 £60.00
% change year-on-year +31.43% -12.50% -23.08%

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 38,735 24,846 28,143
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 84.90% 90.77% 85.87%
Number of daily rates quoted 23,900 15,805 17,939
10th Percentile £325 £300 £313
25th Percentile £425 £404 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £510 £525
Median % change year-on-year +2.94% -2.86% -4.55%
75th Percentile £634 £625 £650
90th Percentile £738 £738 £751
UK median daily rate £525 £500 £525
% change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -3.49%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,596 1,469 1,428
10th Percentile £14.22 £14.25 £14.16
25th Percentile £18.38 £17.87 £18.50
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 £65.01
90th Percentile £80.00 £69.65 £75.00
UK median hourly rate £41.00 £25.15 £42.50
% change year-on-year +63.02% -40.82% +2.41%

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 3 September 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 3 September 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 3 September 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 +62 869 £550 - 1,042
North of England +35 175 £469 -1.32% 206
Midlands +31 134 £478 +6.10% 63
West Midlands +29 110 £475 -6.31% 47
South East -14 91 £500 +8.93% 182
Yorkshire +17 83 £475 - 37
South West +20 71 £525 -8.70% 93
North West -17 57 £513 +5.13% 143
North East -9 37 £425 -20.93% 26
East of England -5 27 £575 +27.78% 56
East Midlands -9 21 £525 +20.62% 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
1 172 (12.27%) Apache Airflow
2 156 (11.13%) Apache Spark
3 118 (8.42%) Apache
4 37 (2.64%) SAS
5 30 (2.14%) Confluence
6 21 (1.50%) Jupyter
7 18 (1.28%) Palantir Foundry
8 14 (1.00%) SharePoint
9 7 (0.50%) Apache Superset
10 5 (0.36%) Apache Solr
11 4 (0.29%) ArcGIS
12 2 (0.14%) nginx
12 2 (0.14%) PowerExchange
13 1 (0.071%) Apache Synapse
13 1 (0.071%) CICS
13 1 (0.071%) Microsoft Exchange
Applications
1 16 (1.14%) Microsoft Excel
2 7 (0.50%) Spreadsheet
3 6 (0.43%) Microsoft Office
4 5 (0.36%) Chatbot
5 4 (0.29%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 2 (0.14%) MS Visio
7 1 (0.071%) Notion
Business Applications
1 11 (0.78%) Aladdin
2 6 (0.43%) Dynamics CRM
3 4 (0.29%) NetSuite
3 4 (0.29%) Sage X3
3 4 (0.29%) SAP S/4HANA
4 2 (0.14%) BambooHR
4 2 (0.14%) Endur
4 2 (0.14%) Oracle Assets
4 2 (0.14%) Salesforce CRM
4 2 (0.14%) Temenos T24
4 2 (0.14%) Workday HCM
5 1 (0.071%) FIS Private Capital Suite
5 1 (0.071%) MIS ActiveH
5 1 (0.071%) SAP ECC
5 1 (0.071%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
Cloud Services
1 595 (42.44%) Azure
2 528 (37.66%) AWS
3 267 (19.04%) Power Platform
4 224 (15.98%) Snowflake
5 192 (13.69%) GCP
6 190 (13.55%) dbt
7 158 (11.27%) Azure Data Factory
8 152 (10.84%) Amazon S3
9 134 (9.56%) Azure DevOps
10 125 (8.92%) Azure Synapse Analytics
11 124 (8.84%) Serverless
12 111 (7.92%) GitHub
13 100 (7.13%) AWS Lambda
14 68 (4.85%) Azure Databricks
15 56 (3.99%) GitHub Actions
16 35 (2.50%) Amazon EMR
17 31 (2.21%) Amazon Bedrock
17 31 (2.21%) Microsoft Purview
18 30 (2.14%) Amazon CloudWatch
19 26 (1.85%) Azure AI
Communications & Networking
1 5 (0.36%) Firewall
2 4 (0.29%) Network Security
3 3 (0.21%) DNS
4 2 (0.14%) RTP
5 1 (0.071%) Broadband
5 1 (0.071%) Internet
5 1 (0.071%) MIMO
5 1 (0.071%) MQTT
5 1 (0.071%) SMS
5 1 (0.071%) SSL
Database & Business Intelligence
1 286 (20.40%) Data Warehouse
2 254 (18.12%) Power BI
3 186 (13.27%) Data Lake
4 157 (11.20%) Metadata
5 102 (7.28%) BigQuery
6 100 (7.13%) Delta Lake
7 91 (6.49%) Amazon Redshift
8 79 (5.63%) Big Data
9 71 (5.06%) Tableau
10 62 (4.42%) Amazon Athena
11 61 (4.35%) SQL Server
12 50 (3.57%) Snowflake Schema
13 49 (3.50%) NoSQL
13 49 (3.50%) Relational Database
14 44 (3.14%) PostgreSQL
15 39 (2.78%) Azure SQL Database
16 35 (2.50%) Looker
17 33 (2.35%) Star Schema
18 31 (2.21%) Data Vault
19 27 (1.93%) Semantic Layer
Development Applications
1 139 (9.91%) Git
2 77 (5.49%) GitLab
3 60 (4.28%) JIRA
4 25 (1.78%) MLflow
5 22 (1.57%) Jenkins
6 8 (0.57%) RStudio
7 7 (0.50%) Terragrunt
8 6 (0.43%) Bitbucket
8 6 (0.43%) ERwin
8 6 (0.43%) Selenium
9 5 (0.36%) SonarQube
10 4 (0.29%) Claude Code
10 4 (0.29%) ER Studio
11 3 (0.21%) Artifactory
11 3 (0.21%) Snyk
11 3 (0.21%) Sonatype Nexus
12 2 (0.14%) Atlassian Bamboo
12 2 (0.14%) Postman
12 2 (0.14%) TeamCity
12 2 (0.14%) Yeoman
General
1 348 (24.82%) Social Skills
2 323 (23.04%) Finance
3 234 (16.69%) Analytical Skills
4 145 (10.34%) Public Sector
5 109 (7.77%) Banking
6 46 (3.28%) Marketing
7 34 (2.43%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 29 (2.07%) Retail
9 22 (1.57%) Front Office
10 21 (1.50%) Documentation Skills
10 21 (1.50%) Investment Banking
11 19 (1.36%) Telecoms
12 15 (1.07%) Manufacturing
13 13 (0.93%) Financial Institution
13 13 (0.93%) Pharmaceutical
14 12 (0.86%) Billing
14 12 (0.86%) Influencing Skills
15 11 (0.78%) Law
16 9 (0.64%) Military
17 8 (0.57%) Aerospace
Job Titles
1 646 (46.08%) Data Engineer
2 208 (14.84%) Senior
3 159 (11.34%) Architect
4 157 (11.20%) Lead
5 130 (9.27%) Senior Data Engineer
6 86 (6.13%) Data Architect
7 77 (5.49%) Developer
8 65 (4.64%) AWS Engineer
9 63 (4.49%) Analyst
10 55 (3.92%) AWS Data Engineer
11 52 (3.71%) Snowflake Engineer
12 51 (3.64%) Databricks Engineer
12 51 (3.64%) Lead Data Engineer
13 46 (3.28%) Azure Engineer
14 41 (2.92%) Databricks Data Engineer
15 40 (2.85%) Consultant
15 40 (2.85%) Snowflake Data Engineer
15 40 (2.85%) Solutions Architect
16 36 (2.57%) Data Analyst
17 34 (2.43%) Data Scientist
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 206 (14.69%) PySpark
2 200 (14.27%) Terraform
3 99 (7.06%) Kafka
4 54 (3.85%) REST
5 33 (2.35%) React
6 26 (1.85%) .NET
6 26 (1.85%) JSON
6 26 (1.85%) Pandas
7 16 (1.14%) scikit-learn
8 15 (1.07%) NumPy
8 15 (1.07%) PyTorch
8 15 (1.07%) Spring
9 13 (0.93%) TensorFlow
10 11 (0.78%) Great Expectations
10 11 (0.78%) LangChain
10 11 (0.78%) Microsoft Graph
11 10 (0.71%) FastAPI
11 10 (0.71%) pytest
12 9 (0.64%) Apache Avro
12 9 (0.64%) Spring Boot
Miscellaneous
1 185 (13.20%) Cloud Native
2 60 (4.28%) Data Structures
3 59 (4.21%) Onboarding
4 57 (4.07%) Legacy Systems
5 55 (3.92%) Product Ownership
6 46 (3.28%) Distributed Systems
7 39 (2.78%) AI Agents
8 22 (1.57%) Data Protection Act
9 21 (1.50%) Greenfield Project
10 18 (1.28%) Distributed Computing
11 17 (1.21%) NHS
12 16 (1.14%) Virtual Team
13 15 (1.07%) Clustering
13 15 (1.07%) Enterprise Software
14 14 (1.00%) Algorithms
14 14 (1.00%) Analytical Mindset
14 14 (1.00%) Management Information System
15 13 (0.93%) Life Science
16 12 (0.86%) Reference Data
17 10 (0.71%) Marketing Technology
Operating Systems
1 33 (2.35%) Linux
2 30 (2.14%) Unix
3 8 (0.57%) Windows
4 2 (0.14%) Windows Server
5 1 (0.071%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 1 (0.071%) Robot Operating System
5 1 (0.071%) Ubuntu
5 1 (0.071%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 680 (48.50%) Analytics
1 680 (48.50%) Data Pipeline
2 531 (37.87%) Data Modelling
3 497 (35.45%) CI/CD
4 483 (34.45%) ETL
5 415 (29.60%) AI
6 345 (24.61%) Agile
7 340 (24.25%) Business Intelligence
7 340 (24.25%) DevOps
8 314 (22.40%) Data Governance
9 241 (17.19%) Machine Learning
10 233 (16.62%) Problem-Solving
11 224 (15.98%) Migration
12 221 (15.76%) Stakeholder Management
13 219 (15.62%) Data Transformation
14 217 (15.48%) Data Architecture
15 211 (15.05%) Validation
16 206 (14.69%) Data Science
17 200 (14.27%) Decision-Making
18 194 (13.84%) Infrastructure as Code
Programming Languages
1 760 (54.21%) SQL
2 706 (50.36%) Python
3 102 (7.28%) Java
4 44 (3.14%) Data Analysis Expressions
5 38 (2.71%) Scala
6 37 (2.64%) PowerShell
7 34 (2.43%) Bash
8 31 (2.21%) C#
9 27 (1.93%) JavaScript
10 21 (1.50%) R
10 21 (1.50%) T-SQL
11 17 (1.21%) PL/SQL
12 15 (1.07%) Shell Script
13 12 (0.86%) Bicep
13 12 (0.86%) TypeScript
14 10 (0.71%) Kusto Query Language
15 9 (0.64%) SAS Macro
16 7 (0.50%) SPARQL
17 6 (0.43%) Cypher
17 6 (0.43%) LookML
Qualifications
1 274 (19.54%) Security Cleared
2 234 (16.69%) SC Cleared
3 79 (5.63%) Degree
4 42 (3.00%) Computer Science Degree
5 29 (2.07%) DV Cleared
6 27 (1.93%) Azure Certification
7 23 (1.64%) BPSS Clearance
8 21 (1.50%) AWS Certification
8 21 (1.50%) Master's Degree
9 14 (1.00%) DBS Check
10 9 (0.64%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
10 9 (0.64%) SnowPro
11 8 (0.57%) Microsoft Certification
12 5 (0.36%) Tableau Certification
13 4 (0.29%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 4 (0.29%) PMI Certification
14 3 (0.21%) PhD
14 3 (0.21%) PMP
15 2 (0.14%) CSPO
15 2 (0.14%) TOGAF Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 446 (31.81%) Data Quality
2 71 (5.06%) QA
3 66 (4.71%) GDPR
4 25 (1.78%) Accessibility
5 12 (0.86%) SLA
6 4 (0.29%) Sarbanes-Oxley
7 3 (0.21%) GRC
7 3 (0.21%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 3 (0.21%) ISO/IEC 42001
7 3 (0.21%) MiFID
7 3 (0.21%) NIST
7 3 (0.21%) PMO
8 2 (0.14%) 21 CFR Part 11
8 2 (0.14%) Actionable Recommendations
8 2 (0.14%) California Consumer Privacy Act
8 2 (0.14%) Disclosure Scotland
8 2 (0.14%) EMIR
8 2 (0.14%) IFRS
8 2 (0.14%) IFRS 9
8 2 (0.14%) Solvency II
System Software
1 120 (8.56%) Docker
2 5 (0.36%) Active Directory
3 1 (0.071%) Virtual Machines
Systems Management
1 97 (6.92%) Kubernetes
2 24 (1.71%) Ansible
3 17 (1.21%) Grafana
4 8 (0.57%) Prometheus
5 6 (0.43%) Control-M
5 6 (0.43%) Kibana
6 3 (0.21%) logstash
7 2 (0.14%) Argo
7 2 (0.14%) Puppet
8 1 (0.071%) Cilium
8 1 (0.071%) IBM Guardium
8 1 (0.071%) Kubeflow
8 1 (0.071%) Kustomize
8 1 (0.071%) Nagios
8 1 (0.071%) Progress Chef
8 1 (0.071%) QRadar
8 1 (0.071%) Single Sign-On
8 1 (0.071%) Thomson Reuters DACS
Vendors
1 366 (26.11%) Databricks
2 257 (18.33%) Microsoft
3 69 (4.92%) Informatica
4 64 (4.56%) Google
5 62 (4.42%) Oracle
6 28 (2.00%) Foundry
7 27 (1.93%) SAP
8 26 (1.85%) Palantir
8 26 (1.85%) Talend
9 22 (1.57%) Salesforce
10 16 (1.14%) Cloudera
11 14 (1.00%) OpenAI
12 13 (0.93%) ServiceNow
13 12 (0.86%) Teradata
13 12 (0.86%) Trend Micro
14 9 (0.64%) Adobe
15 7 (0.50%) Bloomberg
15 7 (0.50%) Hitachi
15 7 (0.50%) InterSystems
15 7 (0.50%) Splunk