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

6 months to
22 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 79 151 199
Rank change year-on-year +72 +48 -11
Contract jobs citing Data Engineering 1,375 512 438
As % of all contract jobs in England 3.06% 1.88% 1.24%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.59% 2.07% 1.44%
Number of daily rates quoted 969 337 321
10th Percentile £384 £365 £375
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 £658 £700
90th Percentile £750 £800 £775
UK median daily rate £525 £525 £575
% change year-on-year - -8.70% -6.12%
Number of hourly rates quoted 20 6 13
10th Percentile £21.25 £26.25 £30.55
25th Percentile £47.19 £32.24 £35.00
Median hourly rate £70.00 £45.73 £48.50
Median % change year-on-year +53.07% -5.71% -37.82%
75th Percentile £75.75 £53.75 £60.00
90th Percentile £87.75 £59.38 -
UK median hourly rate £67.00 £45.73 £35.00
% change year-on-year +46.51% +30.66% -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 38,278 24,745 30,322
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 85.32% 90.65% 85.73%
Number of daily rates quoted 24,038 15,865 19,799
10th Percentile £325 £300 £310
25th Percentile £420 £405 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £513 £525
Median % change year-on-year +2.44% -2.38% -4.55%
75th Percentile £625 £635 £645
90th Percentile £737 £738 £751
UK median daily rate £520 £500 £525
% change year-on-year +4.00% -4.76% -4.11%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,361 1,324 1,984
10th Percentile £15.25 £14.23 £13.25
25th Percentile £21.00 £17.95 £17.00
Median hourly rate £47.50 £25.15 £40.00
Median % change year-on-year +88.87% -37.13% -6.98%
75th Percentile £69.50 £53.56 £63.75
90th Percentile £83.00 £70.16 £74.31
UK median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £38.12
% change year-on-year +74.79% -34.02% -10.31%

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 22 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 22 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 22 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 +48 800 £550 - 383
North of England +24 175 £475 -5.00% 99
Midlands +45 158 £475 +2.70% 37
West Midlands +37 133 £469 +8.82% 23
South West +28 85 £500 -8.05% 32
South East -21 83 £525 +11.70% 104
Yorkshire +14 82 £478 +3.24% 26
North West -16 56 £513 +5.13% 48
North East -4 39 £425 -15.00% 25
East of England -3 30 £575 +39.39% 8
East Midlands -1 22 £525 +13.51% 14
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
1 173 (12.58%) Apache Spark
2 153 (11.13%) Apache Airflow
3 109 (7.93%) Apache
4 41 (2.98%) SAS
5 29 (2.11%) Confluence
6 23 (1.67%) Jupyter
7 18 (1.31%) Palantir Foundry
8 11 (0.80%) SharePoint
9 8 (0.58%) Apache Superset
10 3 (0.22%) Appian
10 3 (0.22%) ArcGIS
11 2 (0.15%) Apache Solr
11 2 (0.15%) Apache Synapse
11 2 (0.15%) Microsoft Exchange
12 1 (0.073%) Camunda
12 1 (0.073%) CICS
12 1 (0.073%) IBM HTTP Server
12 1 (0.073%) PowerExchange
Applications
1 19 (1.38%) Microsoft Excel
2 7 (0.51%) Microsoft Office
2 7 (0.51%) Spreadsheet
3 6 (0.44%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 3 (0.22%) Chatbot
5 2 (0.15%) MS Visio
6 1 (0.073%) Notion
Business Applications
1 11 (0.80%) Aladdin
2 6 (0.44%) Dynamics CRM
3 5 (0.36%) BambooHR
3 5 (0.36%) SAP S/4HANA
4 4 (0.29%) NetSuite
4 4 (0.29%) Sage X3
5 2 (0.15%) Endur
5 2 (0.15%) Oracle Assets
5 2 (0.15%) Salesforce CRM
5 2 (0.15%) SAP BPC
5 2 (0.15%) Temenos T24
6 1 (0.073%) FIS Private Capital Suite
6 1 (0.073%) Markit EDM
6 1 (0.073%) MIS ActiveH
6 1 (0.073%) SAP ECC
6 1 (0.073%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
6 1 (0.073%) Workday HCM
Cloud Services
1 578 (42.04%) Azure
2 521 (37.89%) AWS
3 280 (20.36%) Power Platform
4 200 (14.55%) Snowflake
5 186 (13.53%) GCP
6 168 (12.22%) dbt
7 162 (11.78%) Azure Data Factory
8 153 (11.13%) Amazon S3
9 138 (10.04%) Azure Synapse Analytics
10 121 (8.80%) Azure DevOps
11 118 (8.58%) Serverless
12 104 (7.56%) GitHub
13 99 (7.20%) AWS Lambda
14 60 (4.36%) GitHub Actions
15 38 (2.76%) Amazon EMR
16 29 (2.11%) Azure Cosmos DB
17 28 (2.04%) AWS CloudFormation
17 28 (2.04%) Azure AI
18 27 (1.96%) Amazon Bedrock
18 27 (1.96%) Amazon SageMaker
Communications & Networking
1 5 (0.36%) Firewall
1 5 (0.36%) RTP
2 1 (0.073%) 4G
2 1 (0.073%) 5G
2 1 (0.073%) MIMO
2 1 (0.073%) MQTT
2 1 (0.073%) Network Security
Database & Business Intelligence
1 268 (19.49%) Data Warehouse
2 259 (18.84%) Power BI
3 196 (14.25%) Data Lake
4 134 (9.75%) Metadata
5 95 (6.91%) Amazon Redshift
6 90 (6.55%) BigQuery
7 88 (6.40%) Delta Lake
8 84 (6.11%) Big Data
9 81 (5.89%) Tableau
10 73 (5.31%) SQL Server
11 62 (4.51%) NoSQL
12 61 (4.44%) Amazon Athena
13 55 (4.00%) Snowflake Schema
14 51 (3.71%) Relational Database
15 49 (3.56%) PostgreSQL
16 42 (3.05%) Azure SQL Database
17 35 (2.55%) Hadoop
18 34 (2.47%) SQL Server Integration Services
19 32 (2.33%) Star Schema
20 29 (2.11%) Looker
Development Applications
1 143 (10.40%) Git
2 62 (4.51%) GitLab
3 58 (4.22%) JIRA
4 30 (2.18%) MLflow
5 18 (1.31%) Jenkins
6 6 (0.44%) SonarQube
7 5 (0.36%) Bitbucket
7 5 (0.36%) ERwin
8 3 (0.22%) Artifactory
8 3 (0.22%) ER Studio
8 3 (0.22%) Postman
8 3 (0.22%) Selenium
8 3 (0.22%) Snyk
8 3 (0.22%) Sonatype Nexus
8 3 (0.22%) Visual Studio
9 2 (0.15%) Yeoman
10 1 (0.073%) Atlassian Bamboo
10 1 (0.073%) git-flow
10 1 (0.073%) Octopus Deploy
10 1 (0.073%) Robot Framework
General
1 329 (23.93%) Social Skills
2 322 (23.42%) Finance
3 232 (16.87%) Analytical Skills
4 156 (11.35%) Public Sector
5 102 (7.42%) Banking
6 36 (2.62%) Marketing
7 34 (2.47%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 31 (2.25%) Retail
9 28 (2.04%) Documentation Skills
10 22 (1.60%) Telecoms
11 20 (1.45%) Front Office
12 17 (1.24%) Investment Banking
13 14 (1.02%) Financial Institution
13 14 (1.02%) Manufacturing
14 11 (0.80%) Law
14 11 (0.80%) Pharmaceutical
15 10 (0.73%) Influencing Skills
15 10 (0.73%) Legal
16 8 (0.58%) Billing
17 7 (0.51%) Military
Job Titles
1 635 (46.18%) Data Engineer
2 198 (14.40%) Senior
3 159 (11.56%) Architect
4 153 (11.13%) Lead
5 115 (8.36%) Senior Data Engineer
6 86 (6.25%) Data Architect
7 81 (5.89%) Developer
8 65 (4.73%) Analyst
8 65 (4.73%) AWS Engineer
9 60 (4.36%) Lead Data Engineer
10 53 (3.85%) AWS Data Engineer
10 53 (3.85%) Azure Engineer
11 51 (3.71%) Snowflake Engineer
12 47 (3.42%) Azure Data Engineer
13 46 (3.35%) Data Scientist
14 45 (3.27%) Solutions Architect
15 43 (3.13%) Snowflake Data Engineer
16 41 (2.98%) Consultant
17 38 (2.76%) Data Analyst
18 31 (2.25%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 190 (13.82%) PySpark
2 121 (8.80%) Kafka
3 42 (3.05%) REST
4 34 (2.47%) JSON
5 32 (2.33%) Pandas
6 26 (1.89%) React
7 25 (1.82%) scikit-learn
8 22 (1.60%) Spring
9 20 (1.45%) PyTorch
10 19 (1.38%) .NET
10 19 (1.38%) NumPy
11 15 (1.09%) OpenTelemetry
11 15 (1.09%) RESTful
11 15 (1.09%) Spring Boot
11 15 (1.09%) TensorFlow
12 14 (1.02%) Apache Avro
13 13 (0.95%) Microsoft Graph
14 12 (0.87%) Great Expectations
14 12 (0.87%) YAML
15 11 (0.80%) XML
Miscellaneous
1 179 (13.02%) Cloud Native
2 58 (4.22%) Data Structures
2 58 (4.22%) Legacy Systems
3 52 (3.78%) Distributed Systems
4 46 (3.35%) Product Ownership
5 39 (2.84%) Onboarding
6 31 (2.25%) AI Agents
7 26 (1.89%) Distributed Computing
8 25 (1.82%) Data Protection Act
9 20 (1.45%) Greenfield Project
9 20 (1.45%) NHS
10 19 (1.38%) Algorithms
11 17 (1.24%) Analytical Mindset
12 16 (1.16%) Clustering
13 15 (1.09%) Virtual Team
14 12 (0.87%) Fixed Income
14 12 (0.87%) Life Science
15 11 (0.80%) Management Information System
15 11 (0.80%) Reference Data
15 11 (0.80%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 33 (2.40%) Linux
2 26 (1.89%) Unix
3 6 (0.44%) Windows
4 4 (0.29%) VMS
5 2 (0.15%) Windows Server
6 1 (0.073%) Ubuntu
Processes & Methodologies
1 702 (51.05%) Analytics
2 667 (48.51%) Data Pipeline
3 534 (38.84%) Data Modelling
4 478 (34.76%) CI/CD
5 472 (34.33%) ETL
6 382 (27.78%) AI
7 351 (25.53%) Agile
8 335 (24.36%) Business Intelligence
9 319 (23.20%) DevOps
10 290 (21.09%) Data Governance
11 252 (18.33%) Machine Learning
12 237 (17.24%) Problem-Solving
13 231 (16.80%) Data Science
14 204 (14.84%) Validation
15 202 (14.69%) Migration
16 197 (14.33%) Data Architecture
17 190 (13.82%) Decision-Making
18 170 (12.36%) Data Transformation
19 168 (12.22%) Infrastructure as Code
20 167 (12.15%) Stakeholder Management
Programming Languages
1 744 (54.11%) SQL
2 709 (51.56%) Python
3 118 (8.58%) Java
4 41 (2.98%) Data Analysis Expressions
5 36 (2.62%) Scala
6 34 (2.47%) C#
7 30 (2.18%) Bash
8 24 (1.75%) T-SQL
9 23 (1.67%) PowerShell
10 19 (1.38%) R
11 18 (1.31%) Bicep
11 18 (1.31%) JavaScript
12 16 (1.16%) PL/SQL
13 15 (1.09%) Shell Script
14 12 (0.87%) SAS Macro
15 11 (0.80%) TypeScript
16 7 (0.51%) SPARQL
17 6 (0.44%) Cypher
18 5 (0.36%) Kusto Query Language
19 4 (0.29%) Gremlin
Qualifications
1 270 (19.64%) Security Cleared
2 232 (16.87%) SC Cleared
3 88 (6.40%) Degree
4 40 (2.91%) Computer Science Degree
5 31 (2.25%) BPSS Clearance
6 27 (1.96%) Azure Certification
6 27 (1.96%) DV Cleared
6 27 (1.96%) Master's Degree
7 16 (1.16%) AWS Certification
8 13 (0.95%) DBS Check
9 7 (0.51%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
9 7 (0.51%) Microsoft Certification
10 6 (0.44%) SnowPro
11 5 (0.36%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
12 3 (0.22%) Tableau Certification
13 2 (0.15%) CSPO
13 2 (0.15%) PhD
13 2 (0.15%) PMI Certification
14 1 (0.073%) CCSP
14 1 (0.073%) Microsoft Certified Professional
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 402 (29.24%) Data Quality
2 75 (5.45%) GDPR
2 75 (5.45%) QA
3 22 (1.60%) Accessibility
4 10 (0.73%) SLA
5 5 (0.36%) Sarbanes-Oxley
6 4 (0.29%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 4 (0.29%) NIST
6 4 (0.29%) Solvency II
7 3 (0.22%) Actionable Recommendations
7 3 (0.22%) California Consumer Privacy Act
7 3 (0.22%) GRC
7 3 (0.22%) GxP
7 3 (0.22%) ISO/IEC 42001
7 3 (0.22%) MiFID
7 3 (0.22%) PMO
8 2 (0.15%) 21 CFR Part 11
8 2 (0.15%) EMIR
9 1 (0.073%) Basel II
9 1 (0.073%) SNOMED CT
System Software
1 117 (8.51%) Docker
2 4 (0.29%) Active Directory
3 3 (0.22%) Virtual Machines
4 2 (0.15%) HDFS
Systems Management
1 178 (12.95%) Terraform
2 103 (7.49%) Kubernetes
3 23 (1.67%) Prometheus
4 14 (1.02%) Grafana
5 13 (0.95%) Ansible
6 5 (0.36%) Kibana
7 3 (0.22%) logstash
7 3 (0.22%) Rancher
8 2 (0.15%) Argo
8 2 (0.15%) Kubeflow
8 2 (0.15%) Nagios
8 2 (0.15%) Thomson Reuters DACS
9 1 (0.073%) Control-M
9 1 (0.073%) Hadoop YARN
9 1 (0.073%) HP Fortify
9 1 (0.073%) IBM Guardium
9 1 (0.073%) Kustomize
9 1 (0.073%) Oozie
9 1 (0.073%) QRadar
Vendors
1 330 (24.00%) Databricks
2 240 (17.45%) Microsoft
3 73 (5.31%) Informatica
4 59 (4.29%) Oracle
5 56 (4.07%) Google
6 30 (2.18%) SAP
7 29 (2.11%) Talend
8 28 (2.04%) Foundry
9 27 (1.96%) Palantir
10 23 (1.67%) Splunk
11 21 (1.53%) OpenAI
12 18 (1.31%) Salesforce
13 15 (1.09%) Cloudera
14 14 (1.02%) ServiceNow
15 12 (0.87%) Trend Micro
16 7 (0.51%) Adobe
16 7 (0.51%) Denodo
16 7 (0.51%) InterSystems
16 7 (0.51%) Workday
17 5 (0.36%) Amplitude