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 30 July 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
30 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 79 149 198
Rank change year-on-year +70 +49 +1
Contract jobs citing Data Engineering 1,408 521 422
As % of all contract jobs in England 3.12% 1.89% 1.24%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.65% 2.09% 1.44%
Number of daily rates quoted 993 337 308
10th Percentile £390 £363 £386
25th Percentile £447 £450 £475
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £525 £585
Median % change year-on-year - -10.26% -6.40%
75th Percentile £638 £650 £703
90th Percentile £750 £800 £775
UK median daily rate £525 £520 £575
% change year-on-year +0.96% -9.57% -8.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 21 7 11
10th Percentile £21.25 £27.00 £30.37
25th Percentile £35.00 £34.48 £33.13
Median hourly rate £70.00 £52.50 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +33.33% -12.50% -23.08%
75th Percentile £75.00 £59.38 -
90th Percentile £87.50 £83.00 -
UK median hourly rate £69.44 £52.50 £35.00
% change year-on-year +32.27% +50.00% -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 38,532 24,959 29,249
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 85.26% 90.75% 85.85%
Number of daily rates quoted 24,105 15,999 19,151
10th Percentile £325 £300 £313
25th Percentile £425 £405 £419
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £512 £525
Median % change year-on-year +2.54% -2.48% -4.55%
75th Percentile £625 £630 £650
90th Percentile £738 £738 £756
UK median daily rate £525 £500 £525
% change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -4.11%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,433 1,365 1,791
10th Percentile £15.05 £14.22 £13.87
25th Percentile £21.00 £17.88 £17.75
Median hourly rate £45.00 £25.15 £41.50
Median % change year-on-year +78.93% -39.40% -2.35%
75th Percentile £68.75 £51.65 £65.00
90th Percentile £83.00 £70.10 £75.00
UK median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £40.00
% change year-on-year +74.79% -37.13% -5.88%

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 30 July 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 30 July 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 30 July 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 +56 837 £550 - 380
North of England +27 178 £475 -2.56% 115
Midlands +36 149 £481 +4.79% 38
West Midlands +29 124 £475 +10.21% 28
South East -24 86 £525 +11.94% 100
South West +30 85 £503 -12.61% 44
Yorkshire +10 82 £475 +2.70% 33
North West -20 58 £500 +5.26% 57
North East -11 40 £425 -15.00% 26
East of England 0 30 £575 +35.29% 11
East Midlands -2 22 £525 +13.94% 10
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
1 181 (12.86%) Apache Spark
2 156 (11.08%) Apache Airflow
3 112 (7.95%) Apache
4 42 (2.98%) SAS
5 29 (2.06%) Confluence
6 23 (1.63%) Jupyter
7 21 (1.49%) Palantir Foundry
8 11 (0.78%) SharePoint
9 8 (0.57%) Apache Superset
10 3 (0.21%) Apache Solr
10 3 (0.21%) ArcGIS
11 2 (0.14%) Appian
11 2 (0.14%) Microsoft Exchange
12 1 (0.071%) Apache Synapse
12 1 (0.071%) CICS
12 1 (0.071%) IBM HTTP Server
12 1 (0.071%) PowerExchange
Applications
1 18 (1.28%) Microsoft Excel
2 7 (0.50%) Microsoft Office
2 7 (0.50%) Spreadsheet
3 5 (0.36%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 4 (0.28%) Chatbot
5 2 (0.14%) MS Visio
6 1 (0.071%) Notion
Business Applications
1 12 (0.85%) Aladdin
2 6 (0.43%) Dynamics CRM
3 5 (0.36%) BambooHR
4 4 (0.28%) NetSuite
4 4 (0.28%) Sage X3
4 4 (0.28%) SAP S/4HANA
5 2 (0.14%) Endur
5 2 (0.14%) Oracle Assets
5 2 (0.14%) Salesforce CRM
5 2 (0.14%) SAP BPC
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%) SAP ECC
6 1 (0.071%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
Cloud Services
1 595 (42.26%) Azure
2 532 (37.78%) AWS
3 288 (20.45%) Power Platform
4 207 (14.70%) Snowflake
5 193 (13.71%) GCP
6 177 (12.57%) dbt
7 166 (11.79%) Azure Data Factory
8 148 (10.51%) Amazon S3
9 142 (10.09%) Azure Synapse Analytics
10 126 (8.95%) Azure DevOps
11 116 (8.24%) Serverless
12 106 (7.53%) GitHub
13 96 (6.82%) AWS Lambda
14 62 (4.40%) GitHub Actions
15 37 (2.63%) Amazon EMR
16 29 (2.06%) Azure AI
16 29 (2.06%) Azure Cosmos DB
17 28 (1.99%) Amazon Bedrock
18 27 (1.92%) Amazon SageMaker
18 27 (1.92%) AWS Step Functions
Communications & Networking
1 5 (0.36%) Firewall
2 3 (0.21%) RTP
3 2 (0.14%) Network Security
4 1 (0.071%) 4G
4 1 (0.071%) 5G
4 1 (0.071%) MIMO
4 1 (0.071%) MQTT
Database & Business Intelligence
1 274 (19.46%) Data Warehouse
2 268 (19.03%) Power BI
3 196 (13.92%) Data Lake
4 134 (9.52%) Metadata
5 93 (6.61%) Amazon Redshift
6 92 (6.53%) BigQuery
6 92 (6.53%) Delta Lake
7 87 (6.18%) Big Data
8 84 (5.97%) Tableau
9 70 (4.97%) SQL Server
10 62 (4.40%) NoSQL
11 60 (4.26%) Amazon Athena
12 56 (3.98%) Snowflake Schema
13 53 (3.76%) Relational Database
14 50 (3.55%) PostgreSQL
15 42 (2.98%) Azure SQL Database
16 35 (2.49%) Hadoop
16 35 (2.49%) Star Schema
17 32 (2.27%) SQL Server Integration Services
18 31 (2.20%) Looker
Development Applications
1 143 (10.16%) Git
2 66 (4.69%) GitLab
3 56 (3.98%) JIRA
4 28 (1.99%) MLflow
5 22 (1.56%) Jenkins
6 6 (0.43%) SonarQube
7 5 (0.36%) Bitbucket
7 5 (0.36%) ERwin
8 3 (0.21%) Artifactory
8 3 (0.21%) ER Studio
8 3 (0.21%) Postman
8 3 (0.21%) Selenium
8 3 (0.21%) Snyk
8 3 (0.21%) Sonatype Nexus
9 2 (0.14%) Terragrunt
9 2 (0.14%) Yeoman
10 1 (0.071%) git-flow
10 1 (0.071%) Octopus Deploy
10 1 (0.071%) Robot Framework
10 1 (0.071%) RStudio
General
1 339 (24.08%) Social Skills
2 329 (23.37%) Finance
3 232 (16.48%) Analytical Skills
4 157 (11.15%) Public Sector
5 106 (7.53%) Banking
6 39 (2.77%) Marketing
7 33 (2.34%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 33 (2.34%) Retail
8 27 (1.92%) Documentation Skills
9 25 (1.78%) Telecoms
10 23 (1.63%) Front Office
11 18 (1.28%) Investment Banking
12 15 (1.07%) Financial Institution
12 15 (1.07%) Manufacturing
13 14 (0.99%) Pharmaceutical
14 11 (0.78%) Influencing Skills
14 11 (0.78%) Law
15 10 (0.71%) Legal
16 8 (0.57%) Billing
16 8 (0.57%) Military
Job Titles
1 648 (46.02%) Data Engineer
2 197 (13.99%) Senior
3 166 (11.79%) Lead
4 164 (11.65%) Architect
5 117 (8.31%) Senior Data Engineer
6 88 (6.25%) Data Architect
7 81 (5.75%) Developer
8 66 (4.69%) Analyst
8 66 (4.69%) AWS Engineer
9 60 (4.26%) Lead Data Engineer
10 55 (3.91%) AWS Data Engineer
10 55 (3.91%) Azure Engineer
11 51 (3.62%) Snowflake Engineer
12 47 (3.34%) Azure Data Engineer
13 44 (3.13%) Solutions Architect
14 43 (3.05%) Snowflake Data Engineer
15 42 (2.98%) Data Scientist
16 41 (2.91%) Consultant
17 39 (2.77%) Data Analyst
18 32 (2.27%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 195 (13.85%) PySpark
2 120 (8.52%) Kafka
3 43 (3.05%) REST
4 34 (2.41%) Pandas
5 33 (2.34%) JSON
6 27 (1.92%) React
7 25 (1.78%) scikit-learn
8 22 (1.56%) PyTorch
9 21 (1.49%) Spring
10 20 (1.42%) .NET
10 20 (1.42%) NumPy
11 16 (1.14%) TensorFlow
12 15 (1.07%) OpenTelemetry
13 14 (0.99%) RESTful
13 14 (0.99%) Spring Boot
14 13 (0.92%) Apache Avro
15 12 (0.85%) LangChain
15 12 (0.85%) Microsoft Graph
16 11 (0.78%) FastAPI
16 11 (0.78%) Node.js
Miscellaneous
1 187 (13.28%) Cloud Native
2 59 (4.19%) Data Structures
3 58 (4.12%) Legacy Systems
4 57 (4.05%) Distributed Systems
5 50 (3.55%) Product Ownership
6 40 (2.84%) Onboarding
7 33 (2.34%) AI Agents
8 26 (1.85%) Data Protection Act
9 25 (1.78%) Distributed Computing
10 21 (1.49%) Greenfield Project
11 19 (1.35%) NHS
12 17 (1.21%) Algorithms
13 16 (1.14%) Analytical Mindset
13 16 (1.14%) Clustering
13 16 (1.14%) Virtual Team
14 14 (0.99%) Life Science
15 12 (0.85%) Fixed Income
15 12 (0.85%) Management Information System
16 11 (0.78%) Reference Data
16 11 (0.78%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 32 (2.27%) Linux
2 24 (1.70%) Unix
3 7 (0.50%) Windows
4 4 (0.28%) VMS
5 2 (0.14%) Windows Server
6 1 (0.071%) Ubuntu
Processes & Methodologies
1 715 (50.78%) Analytics
2 678 (48.15%) Data Pipeline
3 543 (38.57%) Data Modelling
4 488 (34.66%) CI/CD
5 482 (34.23%) ETL
6 390 (27.70%) AI
7 357 (25.36%) Agile
8 349 (24.79%) Business Intelligence
9 326 (23.15%) DevOps
10 300 (21.31%) Data Governance
11 258 (18.32%) Machine Learning
12 243 (17.26%) Problem-Solving
13 232 (16.48%) Data Science
14 205 (14.56%) Validation
15 203 (14.42%) Decision-Making
16 202 (14.35%) Migration
17 201 (14.28%) Data Architecture
18 188 (13.35%) Data Transformation
19 180 (12.78%) Stakeholder Management
20 174 (12.36%) Infrastructure as Code
Programming Languages
1 763 (54.19%) SQL
2 719 (51.07%) Python
3 119 (8.45%) Java
4 43 (3.05%) Data Analysis Expressions
5 38 (2.70%) Scala
6 35 (2.49%) C#
7 30 (2.13%) Bash
8 26 (1.85%) PowerShell
9 25 (1.78%) T-SQL
10 21 (1.49%) JavaScript
11 19 (1.35%) R
12 18 (1.28%) Bicep
13 16 (1.14%) PL/SQL
14 15 (1.07%) Shell Script
15 12 (0.85%) SAS Macro
16 11 (0.78%) TypeScript
17 7 (0.50%) SPARQL
18 6 (0.43%) Cypher
19 5 (0.36%) Korn
19 5 (0.36%) Kusto Query Language
Qualifications
1 276 (19.60%) Security Cleared
2 237 (16.83%) SC Cleared
3 89 (6.32%) Degree
4 41 (2.91%) Computer Science Degree
5 31 (2.20%) BPSS Clearance
6 29 (2.06%) Azure Certification
7 27 (1.92%) DV Cleared
7 27 (1.92%) Master's Degree
8 17 (1.21%) AWS Certification
9 13 (0.92%) DBS Check
10 7 (0.50%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
10 7 (0.50%) Microsoft Certification
10 7 (0.50%) SnowPro
11 5 (0.36%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
11 5 (0.36%) Tableau Certification
12 3 (0.21%) PhD
13 2 (0.14%) CSPO
13 2 (0.14%) Microsoft Certified Professional
13 2 (0.14%) PMI Certification
14 1 (0.071%) PMP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 411 (29.19%) Data Quality
2 76 (5.40%) QA
3 74 (5.26%) GDPR
4 22 (1.56%) Accessibility
5 10 (0.71%) SLA
6 4 (0.28%) NIST
6 4 (0.28%) Sarbanes-Oxley
6 4 (0.28%) Solvency II
7 3 (0.21%) Actionable Recommendations
7 3 (0.21%) GxP
7 3 (0.21%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 3 (0.21%) ISO/IEC 42001
7 3 (0.21%) MiFID
7 3 (0.21%) PMO
8 2 (0.14%) 21 CFR Part 11
8 2 (0.14%) California Consumer Privacy Act
8 2 (0.14%) EMIR
8 2 (0.14%) GRC
9 1 (0.071%) COPPA
9 1 (0.071%) IFRS 17
System Software
1 122 (8.66%) Docker
2 4 (0.28%) Active Directory
3 3 (0.21%) Virtual Machines
4 2 (0.14%) HDFS
Systems Management
1 183 (13.00%) Terraform
2 110 (7.81%) Kubernetes
3 20 (1.42%) Prometheus
4 14 (0.99%) Ansible
4 14 (0.99%) Grafana
5 5 (0.36%) Kibana
6 3 (0.21%) Argo
6 3 (0.21%) logstash
6 3 (0.21%) Rancher
7 2 (0.14%) Kubeflow
7 2 (0.14%) Nagios
7 2 (0.14%) Thomson Reuters DACS
8 1 (0.071%) Cilium
8 1 (0.071%) Control-M
8 1 (0.071%) Hadoop YARN
8 1 (0.071%) HP Fortify
8 1 (0.071%) IBM Guardium
8 1 (0.071%) Kustomize
8 1 (0.071%) Oozie
8 1 (0.071%) QRadar
Vendors
1 348 (24.72%) Databricks
2 243 (17.26%) Microsoft
3 72 (5.11%) Informatica
4 62 (4.40%) Oracle
5 59 (4.19%) Google
6 31 (2.20%) Foundry
6 31 (2.20%) SAP
7 30 (2.13%) Palantir
7 30 (2.13%) Talend
8 22 (1.56%) Splunk
9 21 (1.49%) OpenAI
10 18 (1.28%) Salesforce
11 17 (1.21%) Cloudera
12 14 (0.99%) ServiceNow
13 12 (0.85%) Trend Micro
14 8 (0.57%) Denodo
14 8 (0.57%) Workday
15 7 (0.50%) Adobe
15 7 (0.50%) InterSystems
16 6 (0.43%) Bloomberg