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

6 months to
28 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 84 153 205
Rank change year-on-year +69 +52 -8
Contract jobs citing Data Engineering 1,402 507 413
As % of all contract jobs in England 3.06% 1.84% 1.24%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.61% 2.03% 1.45%
Number of daily rates quoted 977 323 304
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 £688
90th Percentile £750 £775 £779
UK median daily rate £525 £520 £575
% change year-on-year +0.96% -9.57% -8.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 20 6 10
10th Percentile - £37.11 £29.46
25th Percentile £21.25 £42.03 £32.19
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 £60.88
UK median hourly rate £69.00 £52.50 £47.50
% change year-on-year +31.43% +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 38,831 25,009 28,459
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 84.83% 90.78% 85.78%
Number of daily rates quoted 23,961 15,919 18,268
10th Percentile £325 £300 £313
25th Percentile £425 £404 £421
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £510 £525
Median % change year-on-year +2.94% -2.86% -4.55%
75th Percentile £631 £625 £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 2,587 1,463 1,501
10th Percentile £14.22 £14.25 £14.00
25th Percentile £18.68 £17.87 £18.11
Median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year +74.79% -40.82% -
75th Percentile £68.00 £50.00 £65.00
90th Percentile £80.00 £69.47 £75.00
UK median hourly rate £41.00 £25.15 £40.50
% change year-on-year +63.02% -37.90% -4.71%

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 28 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 28 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 28 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 +49 859 £550 - 950
North of England +30 179 £469 -1.32% 221
Midlands +39 139 £478 +6.10% 67
West Midlands +31 114 £475 -6.31% 51
South East -7 92 £513 +11.66% 196
Yorkshire +18 85 £475 +5.56% 40
South West +27 69 £525 -8.70% 89
North West -12 59 £513 +2.50% 139
North East -8 37 £425 -20.93% 43
East of England -4 27 £575 -4.17% 37
East Midlands -6 22 £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
1 170 (12.13%) Apache Airflow
2 154 (10.98%) Apache Spark
3 113 (8.06%) Apache
4 39 (2.78%) SAS
5 29 (2.07%) Confluence
6 22 (1.57%) Jupyter
7 18 (1.28%) Palantir Foundry
8 13 (0.93%) 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 5 (0.36%) BambooHR
4 4 (0.29%) NetSuite
4 4 (0.29%) Sage X3
4 4 (0.29%) SAP S/4HANA
5 2 (0.14%) Endur
5 2 (0.14%) Oracle Assets
5 2 (0.14%) Salesforce CRM
5 2 (0.14%) Temenos T24
5 2 (0.14%) Workday HCM
6 1 (0.071%) FIS Private Capital Suite
6 1 (0.071%) MIS ActiveH
6 1 (0.071%) SAP ECC
6 1 (0.071%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
Cloud Services
1 593 (42.30%) Azure
2 530 (37.80%) AWS
3 276 (19.69%) Power Platform
4 225 (16.05%) Snowflake
5 191 (13.62%) dbt
5 191 (13.62%) GCP
6 158 (11.27%) Azure Data Factory
7 154 (10.98%) Amazon S3
8 129 (9.20%) Azure DevOps
9 127 (9.06%) Azure Synapse Analytics
10 124 (8.84%) Serverless
11 109 (7.77%) GitHub
12 102 (7.28%) AWS Lambda
13 55 (3.92%) GitHub Actions
14 35 (2.50%) Amazon EMR
15 30 (2.14%) Amazon Bedrock
16 29 (2.07%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 29 (2.07%) Microsoft Purview
17 25 (1.78%) Azure AI
18 24 (1.71%) AWS Step Functions
Communications & Networking
1 5 (0.36%) Firewall
2 3 (0.21%) DNS
2 3 (0.21%) Network Security
3 2 (0.14%) RTP
4 1 (0.071%) Broadband
4 1 (0.071%) Internet
4 1 (0.071%) MIMO
4 1 (0.071%) MQTT
4 1 (0.071%) SMS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 287 (20.47%) Data Warehouse
2 262 (18.69%) Power BI
3 188 (13.41%) Data Lake
4 157 (11.20%) Metadata
5 105 (7.49%) BigQuery
6 99 (7.06%) Delta Lake
7 98 (6.99%) Amazon Redshift
8 78 (5.56%) Big Data
9 77 (5.49%) Tableau
10 65 (4.64%) Amazon Athena
11 60 (4.28%) SQL Server
12 52 (3.71%) Snowflake Schema
13 49 (3.50%) NoSQL
14 48 (3.42%) Relational Database
15 45 (3.21%) PostgreSQL
16 39 (2.78%) Azure SQL Database
17 38 (2.71%) Looker
18 35 (2.50%) Star Schema
19 33 (2.35%) Data Vault
20 28 (2.00%) Semantic Layer
Development Applications
1 133 (9.49%) Git
2 77 (5.49%) GitLab
3 59 (4.21%) JIRA
4 24 (1.71%) MLflow
5 22 (1.57%) Jenkins
6 7 (0.50%) RStudio
6 7 (0.50%) Terragrunt
7 6 (0.43%) Bitbucket
7 6 (0.43%) ERwin
7 6 (0.43%) Selenium
8 5 (0.36%) SonarQube
9 4 (0.29%) Claude Code
9 4 (0.29%) ER Studio
10 3 (0.21%) Artifactory
10 3 (0.21%) Snyk
10 3 (0.21%) Sonatype Nexus
11 2 (0.14%) Atlassian Bamboo
11 2 (0.14%) Postman
11 2 (0.14%) Yeoman
12 1 (0.071%) Deequ
General
1 345 (24.61%) Social Skills
2 319 (22.75%) Finance
3 231 (16.48%) Analytical Skills
4 143 (10.20%) Public Sector
5 106 (7.56%) Banking
6 46 (3.28%) Marketing
7 34 (2.43%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 29 (2.07%) Retail
9 22 (1.57%) Front Office
9 22 (1.57%) Telecoms
10 20 (1.43%) Documentation Skills
11 19 (1.36%) Investment Banking
12 16 (1.14%) Manufacturing
13 14 (1.00%) Pharmaceutical
14 13 (0.93%) Financial Institution
15 11 (0.78%) Billing
15 11 (0.78%) Influencing Skills
16 10 (0.71%) Law
17 9 (0.64%) Legal
17 9 (0.64%) Military
Job Titles
1 651 (46.43%) Data Engineer
2 204 (14.55%) Senior
3 162 (11.55%) Architect
4 157 (11.20%) Lead
5 128 (9.13%) Senior Data Engineer
6 88 (6.28%) Data Architect
7 75 (5.35%) Developer
8 68 (4.85%) AWS Engineer
9 63 (4.49%) Analyst
10 57 (4.07%) AWS Data Engineer
11 54 (3.85%) Snowflake Engineer
12 52 (3.71%) Lead Data Engineer
13 45 (3.21%) Azure Engineer
14 42 (3.00%) Snowflake Data Engineer
15 40 (2.85%) Solutions Architect
16 39 (2.78%) Consultant
17 35 (2.50%) Data Analyst
18 34 (2.43%) Azure Data Engineer
19 33 (2.35%) Python Engineer
20 32 (2.28%) Data Scientist
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 208 (14.84%) PySpark
2 197 (14.05%) Terraform
3 100 (7.13%) Kafka
4 50 (3.57%) REST
5 32 (2.28%) React
6 25 (1.78%) JSON
6 25 (1.78%) Pandas
7 24 (1.71%) .NET
8 16 (1.14%) scikit-learn
9 15 (1.07%) NumPy
9 15 (1.07%) PyTorch
9 15 (1.07%) Spring
10 13 (0.93%) TensorFlow
11 12 (0.86%) Great Expectations
12 11 (0.78%) Microsoft Graph
13 10 (0.71%) FastAPI
13 10 (0.71%) pytest
14 9 (0.64%) LangChain
14 9 (0.64%) Spring Boot
15 8 (0.57%) RESTful
Miscellaneous
1 184 (13.12%) Cloud Native
2 59 (4.21%) Legacy Systems
3 58 (4.14%) Data Structures
4 56 (3.99%) Product Ownership
5 55 (3.92%) Onboarding
6 47 (3.35%) Distributed Systems
7 36 (2.57%) AI Agents
8 23 (1.64%) 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
14 14 (1.00%) Enterprise Software
14 14 (1.00%) Life Science
15 13 (0.93%) Algorithms
15 13 (0.93%) Analytical Mindset
15 13 (0.93%) Management Information System
16 12 (0.86%) Reference Data
17 11 (0.78%) Marketing Technology
Operating Systems
1 35 (2.50%) 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
1 688 (49.07%) Analytics
2 679 (48.43%) Data Pipeline
3 535 (38.16%) Data Modelling
4 486 (34.66%) CI/CD
5 484 (34.52%) ETL
6 414 (29.53%) AI
7 348 (24.82%) Business Intelligence
8 338 (24.11%) Agile
9 332 (23.68%) DevOps
10 313 (22.33%) Data Governance
11 239 (17.05%) Machine Learning
12 233 (16.62%) Problem-Solving
13 221 (15.76%) Data Transformation
14 218 (15.55%) Migration
14 218 (15.55%) Stakeholder Management
15 216 (15.41%) Data Architecture
16 210 (14.98%) Validation
17 205 (14.62%) Decision-Making
18 201 (14.34%) Data Science
19 190 (13.55%) Infrastructure as Code
Programming Languages
1 767 (54.71%) SQL
2 706 (50.36%) Python
3 103 (7.35%) Java
4 43 (3.07%) Data Analysis Expressions
5 37 (2.64%) Bash
5 37 (2.64%) PowerShell
6 36 (2.57%) Scala
7 30 (2.14%) C#
8 27 (1.93%) JavaScript
9 20 (1.43%) R
9 20 (1.43%) T-SQL
10 17 (1.21%) PL/SQL
11 16 (1.14%) Shell Script
12 13 (0.93%) Bicep
13 11 (0.78%) TypeScript
14 9 (0.64%) Kusto Query Language
14 9 (0.64%) SAS Macro
15 7 (0.50%) SPARQL
16 6 (0.43%) Cypher
16 6 (0.43%) LookML
Qualifications
1 266 (18.97%) Security Cleared
2 229 (16.33%) SC Cleared
3 79 (5.63%) Degree
4 40 (2.85%) Computer Science Degree
5 27 (1.93%) Azure Certification
6 26 (1.85%) DV Cleared
7 24 (1.71%) BPSS Clearance
8 21 (1.50%) Master's Degree
9 19 (1.36%) AWS Certification
10 14 (1.00%) DBS Check
11 9 (0.64%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
12 8 (0.57%) Microsoft Certification
12 8 (0.57%) SnowPro
13 5 (0.36%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 5 (0.36%) Tableau Certification
14 4 (0.29%) PMI Certification
15 3 (0.21%) PhD
15 3 (0.21%) PMP
16 2 (0.14%) CSPO
17 1 (0.071%) TOGAF Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 437 (31.17%) Data Quality
2 70 (4.99%) GDPR
2 70 (4.99%) QA
3 25 (1.78%) Accessibility
4 13 (0.93%) SLA
5 4 (0.29%) Sarbanes-Oxley
6 3 (0.21%) GxP
6 3 (0.21%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 3 (0.21%) ISO/IEC 42001
6 3 (0.21%) MiFID
6 3 (0.21%) NIST
6 3 (0.21%) PMO
6 3 (0.21%) Solvency II
7 2 (0.14%) 21 CFR Part 11
7 2 (0.14%) Actionable Recommendations
7 2 (0.14%) California Consumer Privacy Act
7 2 (0.14%) EMIR
7 2 (0.14%) GRC
7 2 (0.14%) IFRS
7 2 (0.14%) IFRS 9
System Software
1 118 (8.42%) Docker
2 5 (0.36%) Active Directory
3 1 (0.071%) Virtual Machines
Systems Management
1 95 (6.78%) 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
7 2 (0.14%) Thomson Reuters DACS
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
Vendors
1 363 (25.89%) Databricks
2 254 (18.12%) Microsoft
3 71 (5.06%) Informatica
4 65 (4.64%) Google
5 62 (4.42%) Oracle
6 28 (2.00%) SAP
7 27 (1.93%) Foundry
8 26 (1.85%) Palantir
8 26 (1.85%) Talend
9 22 (1.57%) Salesforce
10 16 (1.14%) Cloudera
11 13 (0.93%) ServiceNow
12 12 (0.86%) OpenAI
12 12 (0.86%) Teradata
12 12 (0.86%) Trend Micro
13 9 (0.64%) Adobe
14 8 (0.57%) Bloomberg
14 8 (0.57%) Workday
15 7 (0.50%) Hitachi
15 7 (0.50%) InterSystems