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 5 October 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
5 Oct 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 85 135 189
Rank change year-on-year +50 +54 +28
Contract jobs citing Data Engineering 1,400 572 441
As % of all contract jobs in England 3.04% 2.05% 1.36%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.59% 2.25% 1.57%
Number of daily rates quoted 977 359 326
10th Percentile £389 £350 £395
25th Percentile £447 £413 £468
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £525 £575
Median % change year-on-year - -8.70% -6.12%
75th Percentile £650 £641 £676
90th Percentile £738 £738 £775
UK median daily rate £525 £513 £550
% change year-on-year +2.44% -6.82% -8.33%
Number of hourly rates quoted 18 5 5
10th Percentile - £36.73 £23.35
25th Percentile £21.25 £38.96 £26.50
Median hourly rate £62.45 £52.50 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +18.95% -12.50% -20.53%
75th Percentile £71.13 £65.00 -
90th Percentile £76.71 £92.00 -
UK median hourly rate £59.95 £58.75 £43.25
% change year-on-year +2.04% +35.84% -40.75%

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 39,045 25,398 28,013
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 84.68% 90.94% 86.36%
Number of daily rates quoted 23,601 16,100 17,122
10th Percentile £325 £300 £313
25th Percentile £425 £405 £419
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £510 £525
Median % change year-on-year +2.94% -2.86% -4.55%
75th Percentile £638 £625 £643
90th Percentile £738 £730 £750
UK median daily rate £525 £500 £525
% change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -2.78%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,948 1,574 1,187
10th Percentile £13.81 £14.42 £15.00
25th Percentile £17.50 £17.87 £20.30
Median hourly rate £40.00 £25.15 £43.00
Median % change year-on-year +59.05% -41.51% -3.37%
75th Percentile £67.47 £45.75 £66.61
90th Percentile £78.75 £67.25 £75.00
UK median hourly rate £38.25 £25.15 £41.50
% change year-on-year +52.09% -39.40% -2.35%

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 5 October 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 5 October 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 5 October 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 +45 859 £550 - 1,256
North of England +31 187 £475 +7.34% 320
Midlands +26 123 £475 +2.70% 132
West Midlands +21 101 £475 -13.64% 91
South East -10 92 £513 +15.17% 256
Yorkshire +32 90 £500 +5.26% 92
South West +34 87 £525 -8.70% 111
North West -19 61 £525 +23.53% 173
North East -6 38 £425 -5.56% 58
East Midlands +2 22 £503 +15.57% 41
East of England -17 21 £550 +15.79% 68
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 (12.36%) Apache Airflow
2 157 (11.21%) Apache Spark
3 131 (9.36%) Apache
4 30 (2.14%) Confluence
5 29 (2.07%) SAS
6 20 (1.43%) Jupyter
7 15 (1.07%) Palantir Foundry
7 15 (1.07%) SharePoint
8 5 (0.36%) Apache Solr
9 4 (0.29%) ArcGIS
9 4 (0.29%) nginx
10 3 (0.21%) Apache Superset
11 2 (0.14%) PowerExchange
12 1 (0.071%) Apache Pulsar
12 1 (0.071%) CICS
12 1 (0.071%) Microsoft Exchange
12 1 (0.071%) Oracle Workflow
Applications
1 9 (0.64%) Microsoft Excel
2 7 (0.50%) Chatbot
3 6 (0.43%) 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 8 (0.57%) Dynamics CRM
3 4 (0.29%) NetSuite
3 4 (0.29%) Sage X3
4 3 (0.21%) SAP S/4HANA
5 2 (0.14%) BambooHR
5 2 (0.14%) Cloudability
5 2 (0.14%) Endur
5 2 (0.14%) Oracle Assets
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%) Salesforce CRM
6 1 (0.071%) SAP Oil and Gas
6 1 (0.071%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
Cloud Services
1 586 (41.86%) Azure
2 516 (36.86%) AWS
3 259 (18.50%) Power Platform
4 238 (17.00%) Snowflake
5 218 (15.57%) dbt
6 217 (15.50%) GCP
7 165 (11.79%) Amazon S3
8 162 (11.57%) Azure Data Factory
9 127 (9.07%) Serverless
10 123 (8.79%) Azure DevOps
11 114 (8.14%) Azure Synapse Analytics
12 105 (7.50%) GitHub
13 103 (7.36%) AWS Lambda
14 66 (4.71%) Azure Databricks
15 53 (3.79%) GitHub Actions
16 40 (2.86%) Amazon EMR
17 35 (2.50%) Amazon CloudWatch
18 34 (2.43%) Amazon Bedrock
18 34 (2.43%) Microsoft Purview
19 30 (2.14%) Azure AI
Communications & Networking
1 8 (0.57%) Network Security
2 7 (0.50%) DNS
3 5 (0.36%) Firewall
4 2 (0.14%) Broadband
5 1 (0.071%) HTTP
5 1 (0.071%) HTTPS
5 1 (0.071%) Internet
5 1 (0.071%) MIMO
5 1 (0.071%) MQTT
5 1 (0.071%) Radio Access Network
5 1 (0.071%) Reverse Proxy
5 1 (0.071%) SMS
5 1 (0.071%) SSL
5 1 (0.071%) TCP/IP
5 1 (0.071%) tcpdump
5 1 (0.071%) Wireshark
Database & Business Intelligence
1 288 (20.57%) Data Warehouse
2 247 (17.64%) Power BI
3 170 (12.14%) Metadata
4 167 (11.93%) Data Lake
5 115 (8.21%) BigQuery
6 97 (6.93%) Amazon Redshift
7 96 (6.86%) Delta Lake
8 72 (5.14%) Big Data
9 62 (4.43%) Amazon Athena
9 62 (4.43%) Tableau
10 54 (3.86%) SQL Server
11 49 (3.50%) Snowflake Schema
12 45 (3.21%) PostgreSQL
13 42 (3.00%) NoSQL
14 41 (2.93%) Relational Database
15 37 (2.64%) Looker
16 31 (2.21%) Amazon RDS
16 31 (2.21%) Azure SQL Database
17 29 (2.07%) Data Vault
18 26 (1.86%) Parquet
Development Applications
1 152 (10.86%) Git
2 86 (6.14%) GitLab
3 54 (3.86%) JIRA
4 24 (1.71%) Jenkins
5 22 (1.57%) 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 (0.43%) ERwin
9 4 (0.29%) ER Studio
9 4 (0.29%) Postman
10 3 (0.21%) Artifactory
10 3 (0.21%) Atlassian Bamboo
10 3 (0.21%) Cucumber
10 3 (0.21%) SonarQube
10 3 (0.21%) TeamCity
11 2 (0.14%) Sonatype Nexus
11 2 (0.14%) Yeoman
General
1 371 (26.50%) Social Skills
2 318 (22.71%) Finance
3 219 (15.64%) Analytical Skills
4 144 (10.29%) Public Sector
5 130 (9.29%) Banking
6 44 (3.14%) Marketing
7 32 (2.29%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 26 (1.86%) Retail
9 24 (1.71%) Front Office
10 23 (1.64%) Investment Banking
11 18 (1.29%) Pharmaceutical
12 16 (1.14%) Documentation Skills
12 16 (1.14%) Manufacturing
13 14 (1.00%) Telecoms
14 13 (0.93%) Billing
15 12 (0.86%) Back Office
15 12 (0.86%) Financial Institution
16 11 (0.79%) Law
16 11 (0.79%) Military
17 10 (0.71%) Publishing
Job Titles
1 646 (46.14%) Data Engineer
2 220 (15.71%) Senior
3 164 (11.71%) Lead
4 146 (10.43%) Architect
5 144 (10.29%) Senior Data Engineer
6 80 (5.71%) Developer
7 76 (5.43%) Data Architect
8 66 (4.71%) AWS Engineer
9 63 (4.50%) Analyst
10 57 (4.07%) Snowflake Engineer
11 56 (4.00%) AWS Data Engineer
11 56 (4.00%) Databricks Engineer
12 52 (3.71%) Azure Engineer
13 47 (3.36%) Lead Data Engineer
14 46 (3.29%) Snowflake Data Engineer
15 45 (3.21%) Databricks Data Engineer
16 38 (2.71%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
17 36 (2.57%) GCP Engineer
18 35 (2.50%) Consultant
18 35 (2.50%) Data Analyst
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 222 (15.86%) Terraform
2 203 (14.50%) PySpark
3 92 (6.57%) Kafka
4 59 (4.21%) REST
5 29 (2.07%) React
6 28 (2.00%) .NET
7 26 (1.86%) JSON
8 21 (1.50%) Pandas
9 15 (1.07%) LangChain
9 15 (1.07%) PyTorch
10 14 (1.00%) pytest
11 12 (0.86%) Apache NiFi
11 12 (0.86%) FastAPI
11 12 (0.86%) NumPy
11 12 (0.86%) scikit-learn
11 12 (0.86%) TensorFlow
12 11 (0.79%) Microsoft Graph
12 11 (0.79%) RabbitMQ
13 9 (0.64%) Apache Avro
13 9 (0.64%) RESTful
Miscellaneous
1 193 (13.79%) Cloud Native
2 76 (5.43%) Onboarding
3 69 (4.93%) Data Structures
4 60 (4.29%) Product Ownership
5 48 (3.43%) AI Agents
6 47 (3.36%) Legacy Systems
7 41 (2.93%) Distributed Systems
8 24 (1.71%) Data Protection Act
9 20 (1.43%) Distributed Computing
9 20 (1.43%) Enterprise Software
10 18 (1.29%) Algorithms
10 18 (1.29%) Virtual Team
11 17 (1.21%) Management Information System
12 15 (1.07%) Life Science
12 15 (1.07%) NHS
13 13 (0.93%) Analytical Mindset
13 13 (0.93%) Data Fabric
13 13 (0.93%) Greenfield Project
14 12 (0.86%) Clustering
14 12 (0.86%) Taxonomies
Operating Systems
1 29 (2.07%) Linux
2 22 (1.57%) Unix
3 8 (0.57%) 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
1 692 (49.43%) Data Pipeline
2 653 (46.64%) Analytics
3 555 (39.64%) Data Modelling
4 524 (37.43%) CI/CD
5 484 (34.57%) ETL
6 449 (32.07%) AI
7 364 (26.00%) Agile
8 353 (25.21%) DevOps
9 327 (23.36%) Business Intelligence
10 311 (22.21%) Data Governance
11 264 (18.86%) Stakeholder Management
12 250 (17.86%) Machine Learning
13 227 (16.21%) Validation
14 224 (16.00%) Data Transformation
15 222 (15.86%) Data Architecture
15 222 (15.86%) Infrastructure as Code
16 216 (15.43%) Problem-Solving
17 214 (15.29%) Migration
18 205 (14.64%) Decision-Making
19 202 (14.43%) Data Integration
Programming Languages
1 789 (56.36%) SQL
2 737 (52.64%) Python
3 90 (6.43%) Java
4 41 (2.93%) Scala
5 40 (2.86%) Data Analysis Expressions
6 39 (2.79%) PowerShell
7 36 (2.57%) C#
8 32 (2.29%) Bash
9 29 (2.07%) JavaScript
10 21 (1.50%) R
11 18 (1.29%) T-SQL
12 16 (1.14%) PL/SQL
13 15 (1.07%) TypeScript
14 14 (1.00%) Kusto Query Language
15 13 (0.93%) Bicep
16 10 (0.71%) Shell Script
17 8 (0.57%) Korn
17 8 (0.57%) SAS Macro
18 7 (0.50%) Go
18 7 (0.50%) SPARQL
Qualifications
1 256 (18.29%) Security Cleared
2 208 (14.86%) SC Cleared
3 77 (5.50%) Degree
4 38 (2.71%) DV Cleared
5 37 (2.64%) Computer Science Degree
6 33 (2.36%) AWS Certification
7 30 (2.14%) Azure Certification
8 25 (1.79%) BPSS Clearance
9 19 (1.36%) Master's Degree
10 14 (1.00%) 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 (0.36%) Microsoft Certified Professional
13 5 (0.36%) PMI Certification
13 5 (0.36%) PMP
13 5 (0.36%) TOGAF Certification
14 4 (0.29%) PhD
15 3 (0.21%) Tableau Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 480 (34.29%) Data Quality
2 73 (5.21%) QA
3 55 (3.93%) GDPR
4 28 (2.00%) Accessibility
5 11 (0.79%) SLA
6 6 (0.43%) GRC
7 4 (0.29%) California Consumer Privacy Act
7 4 (0.29%) Disclosure Scotland
7 4 (0.29%) EU AI Act
7 4 (0.29%) NCSC
7 4 (0.29%) NIST
7 4 (0.29%) PMO
8 3 (0.21%) Actionable Recommendations
8 3 (0.21%) IFRS
8 3 (0.21%) IFRS 9
8 3 (0.21%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 3 (0.21%) MiFID
9 2 (0.14%) Basel III
9 2 (0.14%) ISO/IEC 42001
9 2 (0.14%) Sarbanes-Oxley
System Software
1 114 (8.14%) Docker
2 5 (0.36%) Active Directory
3 1 (0.071%) Virtual Machines
Systems Management
1 100 (7.14%) Kubernetes
2 29 (2.07%) Ansible
3 21 (1.50%) Grafana
4 12 (0.86%) Prometheus
5 8 (0.57%) Kibana
6 7 (0.50%) Control-M
7 3 (0.21%) logstash
8 2 (0.14%) Progress Chef
8 2 (0.14%) Puppet
9 1 (0.071%) Argo
9 1 (0.071%) Cilium
9 1 (0.071%) HAProxy
9 1 (0.071%) Kubeflow
9 1 (0.071%) Kustomize
9 1 (0.071%) QRadar
9 1 (0.071%) Single Sign-On
Vendors
1 387 (27.64%) Databricks
2 248 (17.71%) Microsoft
3 84 (6.00%) Google
4 70 (5.00%) Oracle
5 52 (3.71%) Informatica
6 25 (1.79%) Foundry
6 25 (1.79%) SAP
7 23 (1.64%) Palantir
7 23 (1.64%) Salesforce
7 23 (1.64%) Talend
8 18 (1.29%) OpenAI
9 14 (1.00%) Teradata
10 12 (0.86%) Cloudera
10 12 (0.86%) Trend Micro
11 11 (0.79%) Adobe
12 10 (0.71%) ServiceNow
13 8 (0.57%) Denodo
14 7 (0.50%) Hitachi
14 7 (0.50%) Splunk
15 6 (0.43%) Bloomberg