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

6 months to
26 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 89 139 192
Rank change year-on-year +50 +53 +18
Contract jobs citing Data Engineering 1,412 554 435
As % of all contract jobs in England 3.03% 1.98% 1.33%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.58% 2.18% 1.54%
Number of daily rates quoted 981 351 318
10th Percentile £400 £350 £400
25th Percentile £450 £413 £468
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £525 £575
Median % change year-on-year - -8.70% -4.17%
75th Percentile £638 £644 £676
90th Percentile £738 £748 £775
UK median daily rate £525 £515 £570
% change year-on-year +1.94% -9.65% -5.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 16 5 6
10th Percentile - £36.73 £23.88
25th Percentile £21.25 £38.96 £34.88
Median hourly rate £66.25 £52.50 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +26.19% -12.50% -20.53%
75th Percentile £74.06 £65.00 -
90th Percentile £80.81 £92.00 -
UK median hourly rate £65.00 £58.75 £60.00
% change year-on-year +10.64% -2.08% -17.81%

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 39,398 25,390 28,245
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 84.63% 90.87% 86.25%
Number of daily rates quoted 23,997 16,126 17,350
10th Percentile £325 £300 £313
25th Percentile £425 £405 £423
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £510 £525
Median % change year-on-year +2.94% -2.86% -4.55%
75th Percentile £638 £625 £645
90th Percentile £738 £738 £750
UK median daily rate £525 £500 £525
% change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -2.78%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,849 1,543 1,244
10th Percentile £13.90 £14.41 £15.00
25th Percentile £17.60 £17.87 £20.00
Median hourly rate £41.56 £25.15 £43.00
Median % change year-on-year +65.23% -41.51% -1.94%
75th Percentile £67.70 £47.50 £66.61
90th Percentile £79.00 £67.50 £75.00
UK median hourly rate £40.00 £25.15 £42.50
% change year-on-year +59.05% -40.82% -

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 26 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 26 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 26 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 +42 862 £550 - 1,252
North of England +27 187 £475 +7.34% 288
Midlands +26 124 £475 +2.70% 122
West Midlands +27 101 £475 -13.64% 95
Yorkshire +29 95 £500 +5.26% 82
South East -18 92 £525 +19.32% 213
South West +31 87 £525 -3.45% 102
North West -22 58 £513 +19.19% 168
North East -7 36 £425 -17.07% 40
East of England -23 25 £550 +22.22% 53
East Midlands -3 22 £503 +15.57% 27
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
1 168 (11.90%) Apache Airflow
2 157 (11.12%) Apache Spark
3 122 (8.64%) Apache
4 33 (2.34%) SAS
5 31 (2.20%) Confluence
6 21 (1.49%) Jupyter
7 16 (1.13%) Palantir Foundry
8 15 (1.06%) SharePoint
9 5 (0.35%) Apache Solr
9 5 (0.35%) Apache Superset
10 4 (0.28%) ArcGIS
11 3 (0.21%) nginx
12 2 (0.14%) PowerExchange
13 1 (0.071%) Apache Synapse
13 1 (0.071%) CICS
13 1 (0.071%) Microsoft Exchange
13 1 (0.071%) Oracle Workflow
Applications
1 9 (0.64%) Microsoft Excel
2 7 (0.50%) Chatbot
3 6 (0.42%) Spreadsheet
4 3 (0.21%) Microsoft Office
5 2 (0.14%) MS Visio
6 1 (0.071%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 1 (0.071%) Notion
Business Applications
1 10 (0.71%) Aladdin
2 7 (0.50%) Dynamics CRM
3 4 (0.28%) NetSuite
3 4 (0.28%) Sage X3
4 3 (0.21%) SAP S/4HANA
5 2 (0.14%) BambooHR
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%) Markit EDM
6 1 (0.071%) MIS ActiveH
6 1 (0.071%) Oracle EBS
6 1 (0.071%) SAP Oil and Gas
6 1 (0.071%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
Cloud Services
1 586 (41.50%) Azure
2 529 (37.46%) AWS
3 259 (18.34%) Power Platform
4 233 (16.50%) Snowflake
5 216 (15.30%) dbt
6 211 (14.94%) GCP
7 163 (11.54%) Amazon S3
8 162 (11.47%) Azure Data Factory
9 131 (9.28%) Serverless
10 125 (8.85%) Azure DevOps
11 115 (8.14%) Azure Synapse Analytics
12 108 (7.65%) AWS Lambda
13 105 (7.44%) GitHub
14 66 (4.67%) Azure Databricks
15 56 (3.97%) GitHub Actions
16 42 (2.97%) Amazon EMR
17 37 (2.62%) Amazon CloudWatch
18 35 (2.48%) Amazon Bedrock
19 32 (2.27%) Microsoft Purview
20 30 (2.12%) Azure AI
Communications & Networking
1 6 (0.42%) DNS
2 4 (0.28%) Firewall
2 4 (0.28%) Network Security
3 2 (0.14%) Broadband
4 1 (0.071%) HTTP
4 1 (0.071%) HTTPS
4 1 (0.071%) Internet
4 1 (0.071%) MIMO
4 1 (0.071%) MQTT
4 1 (0.071%) Radio Access Network
4 1 (0.071%) SMS
4 1 (0.071%) SSL
4 1 (0.071%) TCP/IP
4 1 (0.071%) tcpdump
4 1 (0.071%) Wireshark
Database & Business Intelligence
1 290 (20.54%) Data Warehouse
2 245 (17.35%) Power BI
3 177 (12.54%) Data Lake
4 167 (11.83%) Metadata
5 114 (8.07%) BigQuery
6 97 (6.87%) Delta Lake
7 94 (6.66%) Amazon Redshift
8 74 (5.24%) Big Data
9 67 (4.75%) Tableau
10 66 (4.67%) Amazon Athena
11 53 (3.75%) SQL Server
12 48 (3.40%) Snowflake Schema
13 46 (3.26%) PostgreSQL
14 44 (3.12%) Relational Database
15 43 (3.05%) NoSQL
16 37 (2.62%) Looker
17 31 (2.20%) Data Vault
18 30 (2.12%) Azure SQL Database
19 29 (2.05%) Amazon RDS
20 25 (1.77%) Spark SQL
Development Applications
1 150 (10.62%) Git
2 83 (5.88%) GitLab
3 56 (3.97%) JIRA
4 24 (1.70%) Jenkins
5 22 (1.56%) MLflow
6 8 (0.57%) Bitbucket
6 8 (0.57%) RStudio
6 8 (0.57%) Terragrunt
7 7 (0.50%) Claude Code
7 7 (0.50%) Selenium
8 6 (0.42%) ERwin
9 4 (0.28%) ER Studio
9 4 (0.28%) SonarQube
10 3 (0.21%) Artifactory
10 3 (0.21%) Atlassian Bamboo
10 3 (0.21%) Postman
11 2 (0.14%) Cucumber
11 2 (0.14%) Sonatype Nexus
11 2 (0.14%) TeamCity
11 2 (0.14%) Yeoman
General
1 361 (25.57%) Social Skills
2 322 (22.80%) Finance
3 225 (15.93%) Analytical Skills
4 144 (10.20%) Public Sector
5 129 (9.14%) Banking
6 45 (3.19%) Marketing
7 32 (2.27%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 27 (1.91%) Retail
9 22 (1.56%) Front Office
10 21 (1.49%) Investment Banking
11 18 (1.27%) Documentation Skills
11 18 (1.27%) Pharmaceutical
12 16 (1.13%) Manufacturing
12 16 (1.13%) Telecoms
13 12 (0.85%) Back Office
13 12 (0.85%) Billing
13 12 (0.85%) Influencing Skills
14 11 (0.78%) Law
15 10 (0.71%) Financial Institution
15 10 (0.71%) Publishing
Job Titles
1 649 (45.96%) Data Engineer
2 217 (15.37%) Senior
3 164 (11.61%) Lead
4 154 (10.91%) Architect
5 139 (9.84%) Senior Data Engineer
6 81 (5.74%) Data Architect
7 80 (5.67%) Developer
8 69 (4.89%) AWS Engineer
9 59 (4.18%) Analyst
9 59 (4.18%) AWS Data Engineer
10 57 (4.04%) Snowflake Engineer
11 56 (3.97%) Databricks Engineer
12 52 (3.68%) Azure Engineer
13 48 (3.40%) Lead Data Engineer
14 45 (3.19%) Snowflake Data Engineer
15 44 (3.12%) Databricks Data Engineer
16 38 (2.69%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
17 36 (2.55%) Consultant
18 35 (2.48%) DevOps Engineer
19 34 (2.41%) Solutions Architect
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 222 (15.72%) Terraform
2 201 (14.24%) PySpark
3 88 (6.23%) Kafka
4 52 (3.68%) REST
5 32 (2.27%) React
6 28 (1.98%) .NET
7 26 (1.84%) JSON
8 19 (1.35%) Pandas
9 13 (0.92%) LangChain
9 13 (0.92%) PyTorch
10 12 (0.85%) FastAPI
10 12 (0.85%) pytest
11 11 (0.78%) Microsoft Graph
11 11 (0.78%) NumPy
11 11 (0.78%) RabbitMQ
12 10 (0.71%) RESTful
12 10 (0.71%) scikit-learn
12 10 (0.71%) TensorFlow
13 9 (0.64%) Apache Avro
13 9 (0.64%) Great Expectations
Miscellaneous
1 192 (13.60%) Cloud Native
2 74 (5.24%) Onboarding
3 70 (4.96%) Data Structures
4 59 (4.18%) Product Ownership
5 48 (3.40%) Legacy Systems
6 47 (3.33%) AI Agents
7 41 (2.90%) Distributed Systems
8 21 (1.49%) Data Protection Act
9 20 (1.42%) Distributed Computing
10 19 (1.35%) Enterprise Software
11 18 (1.27%) NHS
11 18 (1.27%) Virtual Team
12 17 (1.20%) Management Information System
13 15 (1.06%) Analytical Mindset
13 15 (1.06%) Greenfield Project
13 15 (1.06%) Life Science
14 13 (0.92%) Algorithms
14 13 (0.92%) Clustering
14 13 (0.92%) Data Fabric
15 11 (0.78%) Taxonomies
Operating Systems
1 28 (1.98%) Linux
2 24 (1.70%) Unix
3 7 (0.50%) Windows
4 1 (0.071%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 1 (0.071%) Robot Operating System
4 1 (0.071%) Ubuntu
4 1 (0.071%) Windows Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 696 (49.29%) Data Pipeline
2 667 (47.24%) Analytics
3 559 (39.59%) Data Modelling
4 516 (36.54%) CI/CD
5 486 (34.42%) ETL
6 447 (31.66%) AI
7 354 (25.07%) Agile
8 348 (24.65%) DevOps
9 324 (22.95%) Business Intelligence
10 315 (22.31%) Data Governance
11 256 (18.13%) Stakeholder Management
12 244 (17.28%) Machine Learning
13 228 (16.15%) Data Architecture
14 224 (15.86%) Data Transformation
14 224 (15.86%) Infrastructure as Code
15 221 (15.65%) Validation
16 220 (15.58%) Problem-Solving
17 217 (15.37%) Migration
18 203 (14.38%) Decision-Making
19 192 (13.60%) Data Science
Programming Languages
1 781 (55.31%) SQL
2 732 (51.84%) Python
3 95 (6.73%) Java
4 40 (2.83%) Scala
5 38 (2.69%) Data Analysis Expressions
6 37 (2.62%) PowerShell
7 34 (2.41%) C#
8 32 (2.27%) Bash
9 29 (2.05%) JavaScript
10 20 (1.42%) R
11 19 (1.35%) T-SQL
12 17 (1.20%) PL/SQL
13 13 (0.92%) Bicep
13 13 (0.92%) TypeScript
14 12 (0.85%) Kusto Query Language
15 11 (0.78%) Shell Script
16 9 (0.64%) SAS Macro
17 7 (0.50%) Go
17 7 (0.50%) Korn
17 7 (0.50%) SPARQL
Qualifications
1 260 (18.41%) Security Cleared
2 218 (15.44%) SC Cleared
3 72 (5.10%) Degree
4 35 (2.48%) Computer Science Degree
5 33 (2.34%) DV Cleared
6 30 (2.12%) Azure Certification
7 29 (2.05%) AWS Certification
8 24 (1.70%) BPSS Clearance
9 19 (1.35%) Master's Degree
10 14 (0.99%) DBS Check
11 9 (0.64%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
11 9 (0.64%) SnowPro
12 8 (0.57%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
12 8 (0.57%) Microsoft Certification
13 5 (0.35%) PMI Certification
13 5 (0.35%) PMP
13 5 (0.35%) TOGAF Certification
14 4 (0.28%) Microsoft Certified Professional
14 4 (0.28%) PhD
14 4 (0.28%) Tableau Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 473 (33.50%) Data Quality
2 75 (5.31%) QA
3 57 (4.04%) GDPR
4 26 (1.84%) Accessibility
5 12 (0.85%) SLA
6 5 (0.35%) GRC
7 4 (0.28%) Disclosure Scotland
7 4 (0.28%) PMO
8 3 (0.21%) Actionable Recommendations
8 3 (0.21%) EU AI Act
8 3 (0.21%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 3 (0.21%) ISO/IEC 42001
8 3 (0.21%) MiFID
8 3 (0.21%) NCSC
8 3 (0.21%) NIST
9 2 (0.14%) 21 CFR Part 11
9 2 (0.14%) California Consumer Privacy Act
9 2 (0.14%) GxP
9 2 (0.14%) IFRS
9 2 (0.14%) Sarbanes-Oxley
System Software
1 118 (8.36%) Docker
2 5 (0.35%) Active Directory
3 1 (0.071%) Virtual Machines
Systems Management
1 94 (6.66%) Kubernetes
2 23 (1.63%) Ansible
3 20 (1.42%) Grafana
4 10 (0.71%) Prometheus
5 8 (0.57%) Kibana
6 7 (0.50%) Control-M
7 3 (0.21%) logstash
8 2 (0.14%) Argo
8 2 (0.14%) Puppet
9 1 (0.071%) Cilium
9 1 (0.071%) HAProxy
9 1 (0.071%) IBM Guardium
9 1 (0.071%) Kustomize
9 1 (0.071%) Nagios
9 1 (0.071%) Progress Chef
9 1 (0.071%) QRadar
9 1 (0.071%) Single Sign-On
Vendors
1 384 (27.20%) Databricks
2 251 (17.78%) Microsoft
3 84 (5.95%) Google
4 69 (4.89%) Oracle
5 55 (3.90%) Informatica
6 27 (1.91%) Foundry
7 26 (1.84%) SAP
8 25 (1.77%) Talend
9 24 (1.70%) Palantir
10 23 (1.63%) Salesforce
11 18 (1.27%) OpenAI
12 14 (0.99%) Teradata
13 13 (0.92%) Cloudera
14 12 (0.85%) Trend Micro
15 11 (0.78%) Adobe
16 10 (0.71%) ServiceNow
17 8 (0.57%) Denodo
17 8 (0.57%) Splunk
18 7 (0.50%) Hitachi
19 6 (0.42%) MicroStrategy