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

6 months to
4 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 83 150 198
Rank change year-on-year +67 +48 +2
Contract jobs citing Data Engineering 1,395 514 418
As % of all contract jobs in England 3.09% 1.86% 1.25%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.63% 2.05% 1.45%
Number of daily rates quoted 983 333 305
10th Percentile £390 £363 £394
25th Percentile £449 £449 £475
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £525 £585
Median % change year-on-year - -10.26% -6.40%
75th Percentile £638 £650 £713
90th Percentile £750 £800 £778
UK median daily rate £525 £520 £575
% change year-on-year +0.96% -9.57% -8.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 22 6 12
10th Percentile £21.25 £30.73 £22.59
25th Percentile £24.69 £42.03 £31.03
Median hourly rate £70.00 £52.50 £47.50
Median % change year-on-year +33.33% +10.53% -39.10%
75th Percentile £77.25 £62.19 £60.00
90th Percentile £87.13 £87.50 -
UK median hourly rate £70.00 £52.50 £35.00
% change year-on-year +33.33% +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 38,456 25,047 28,792
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 85.21% 90.72% 85.94%
Number of daily rates quoted 23,987 16,039 18,801
10th Percentile £325 £300 £313
25th Percentile £425 £405 £420
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £513 £525
Median % change year-on-year +2.44% -2.38% -4.55%
75th Percentile £625 £630 £650
90th Percentile £738 £738 £758
UK median daily rate £525 £500 £525
% change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,460 1,391 1,685
10th Percentile £15.00 £14.20 £14.05
25th Percentile £20.69 £17.87 £18.16
Median hourly rate £45.00 £25.15 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year +78.93% -40.82% -
75th Percentile £68.75 £50.88 £65.00
90th Percentile £83.00 £70.16 £75.00
UK median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £40.50
% change year-on-year +74.79% -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 4 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 4 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 4 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 +57 830 £550 - 513
North of England +40 181 £463 -2.63% 127
Midlands +42 149 £486 +5.98% 35
West Midlands +33 124 £475 -0.63% 27
South East -22 87 £525 +11.94% 129
Yorkshire +15 85 £475 +2.70% 43
South West +20 80 £505 -7.13% 53
North West -19 59 £500 +5.26% 58
North East -6 39 £425 -20.93% 27
East of England -4 28 £575 +35.29% 17
East Midlands +2 22 £525 +14.38% 8
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
1 174 (12.47%) Apache Spark
2 159 (11.40%) Apache Airflow
3 112 (8.03%) Apache
4 42 (3.01%) SAS
5 29 (2.08%) Confluence
6 23 (1.65%) Jupyter
7 19 (1.36%) Palantir Foundry
8 11 (0.79%) SharePoint
9 9 (0.65%) Apache Superset
10 3 (0.22%) Apache Solr
10 3 (0.22%) ArcGIS
11 2 (0.14%) Microsoft Exchange
12 1 (0.072%) Apache Synapse
12 1 (0.072%) Appian
12 1 (0.072%) CICS
12 1 (0.072%) IBM HTTP Server
12 1 (0.072%) PowerExchange
Applications
1 18 (1.29%) Microsoft Excel
2 7 (0.50%) Microsoft Office
2 7 (0.50%) Spreadsheet
3 5 (0.36%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 4 (0.29%) Chatbot
5 2 (0.14%) MS Visio
6 1 (0.072%) Notion
Business Applications
1 12 (0.86%) 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%) SAP BPC
5 2 (0.14%) Temenos T24
5 2 (0.14%) Workday HCM
6 1 (0.072%) FIS Private Capital Suite
6 1 (0.072%) Markit EDM
6 1 (0.072%) MIS ActiveH
6 1 (0.072%) SAP ECC
6 1 (0.072%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
Cloud Services
1 587 (42.08%) Azure
2 530 (37.99%) AWS
3 287 (20.57%) Power Platform
4 211 (15.13%) Snowflake
5 190 (13.62%) GCP
6 176 (12.62%) dbt
7 159 (11.40%) Azure Data Factory
8 143 (10.25%) Amazon S3
9 141 (10.11%) Azure Synapse Analytics
10 129 (9.25%) Azure DevOps
11 111 (7.96%) Serverless
12 109 (7.81%) GitHub
13 92 (6.59%) AWS Lambda
14 63 (4.52%) GitHub Actions
15 35 (2.51%) Amazon EMR
16 28 (2.01%) Amazon Bedrock
17 27 (1.94%) Azure AI
17 27 (1.94%) Azure Cosmos DB
18 26 (1.86%) AWS Step Functions
19 25 (1.79%) Amazon CloudWatch
Communications & Networking
1 5 (0.36%) Firewall
2 2 (0.14%) Network Security
2 2 (0.14%) RTP
3 1 (0.072%) 4G
3 1 (0.072%) 5G
3 1 (0.072%) MIMO
3 1 (0.072%) MQTT
Database & Business Intelligence
1 274 (19.64%) Data Warehouse
2 267 (19.14%) Power BI
3 190 (13.62%) Data Lake
4 134 (9.61%) Metadata
5 94 (6.74%) BigQuery
5 94 (6.74%) Delta Lake
6 91 (6.52%) Amazon Redshift
7 84 (6.02%) Big Data
8 81 (5.81%) Tableau
9 68 (4.87%) SQL Server
10 62 (4.44%) NoSQL
11 60 (4.30%) Amazon Athena
12 55 (3.94%) Snowflake Schema
13 50 (3.58%) Relational Database
14 45 (3.23%) PostgreSQL
15 40 (2.87%) Azure SQL Database
16 33 (2.37%) Looker
16 33 (2.37%) Star Schema
17 32 (2.29%) Hadoop
17 32 (2.29%) SQL Server Integration Services
Development Applications
1 141 (10.11%) Git
2 71 (5.09%) GitLab
3 57 (4.09%) JIRA
4 25 (1.79%) MLflow
5 23 (1.65%) Jenkins
6 7 (0.50%) SonarQube
7 6 (0.43%) Bitbucket
8 5 (0.36%) ERwin
9 3 (0.22%) Artifactory
9 3 (0.22%) ER Studio
9 3 (0.22%) Postman
9 3 (0.22%) Selenium
9 3 (0.22%) Snyk
9 3 (0.22%) Sonatype Nexus
9 3 (0.22%) Terragrunt
10 2 (0.14%) Yeoman
11 1 (0.072%) git-flow
11 1 (0.072%) Octopus Deploy
11 1 (0.072%) Robot Framework
11 1 (0.072%) RStudio
General
1 338 (24.23%) Social Skills
2 326 (23.37%) Finance
3 228 (16.34%) Analytical Skills
4 152 (10.90%) Public Sector
5 105 (7.53%) Banking
6 40 (2.87%) Marketing
7 34 (2.44%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 33 (2.37%) Retail
9 25 (1.79%) Documentation Skills
9 25 (1.79%) Telecoms
10 24 (1.72%) Front Office
11 19 (1.36%) Investment Banking
12 15 (1.08%) Financial Institution
12 15 (1.08%) Manufacturing
13 13 (0.93%) Pharmaceutical
14 10 (0.72%) Influencing Skills
14 10 (0.72%) Law
15 9 (0.65%) Legal
16 8 (0.57%) Billing
16 8 (0.57%) Military
Job Titles
1 647 (46.38%) Data Engineer
2 196 (14.05%) Senior
3 165 (11.83%) Lead
4 162 (11.61%) Architect
5 119 (8.53%) Senior Data Engineer
6 85 (6.09%) Data Architect
7 82 (5.88%) Developer
8 69 (4.95%) AWS Engineer
9 67 (4.80%) Analyst
10 59 (4.23%) Lead Data Engineer
11 58 (4.16%) AWS Data Engineer
12 52 (3.73%) Snowflake Engineer
13 51 (3.66%) Azure Engineer
14 45 (3.23%) Solutions Architect
15 43 (3.08%) Azure Data Engineer
15 43 (3.08%) Snowflake Data Engineer
16 40 (2.87%) Data Analyst
17 39 (2.80%) Data Scientist
18 38 (2.72%) Consultant
19 32 (2.29%) Python Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 194 (13.91%) PySpark
2 113 (8.10%) Kafka
3 41 (2.94%) REST
4 33 (2.37%) Pandas
5 31 (2.22%) JSON
6 24 (1.72%) React
6 24 (1.72%) scikit-learn
7 21 (1.51%) Spring
8 19 (1.36%) .NET
8 19 (1.36%) NumPy
9 18 (1.29%) PyTorch
10 14 (1.00%) Spring Boot
10 14 (1.00%) TensorFlow
11 13 (0.93%) OpenTelemetry
11 13 (0.93%) RESTful
12 12 (0.86%) Apache Avro
13 11 (0.79%) Microsoft Graph
14 10 (0.72%) YAML
15 9 (0.65%) Node.js
15 9 (0.65%) XML
Miscellaneous
1 184 (13.19%) Cloud Native
2 59 (4.23%) Data Structures
2 59 (4.23%) Legacy Systems
3 54 (3.87%) Distributed Systems
4 52 (3.73%) Product Ownership
5 41 (2.94%) Onboarding
6 30 (2.15%) AI Agents
7 26 (1.86%) Data Protection Act
8 21 (1.51%) Greenfield Project
9 20 (1.43%) Distributed Computing
10 19 (1.36%) NHS
11 16 (1.15%) Algorithms
11 16 (1.15%) Clustering
11 16 (1.15%) Virtual Team
12 15 (1.08%) Analytical Mindset
13 13 (0.93%) Life Science
14 12 (0.86%) Fixed Income
14 12 (0.86%) Management Information System
15 11 (0.79%) Reference Data
15 11 (0.79%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 30 (2.15%) Linux
2 28 (2.01%) Unix
3 7 (0.50%) Windows
4 3 (0.22%) VMS
5 2 (0.14%) Windows Server
6 1 (0.072%) Ubuntu
Processes & Methodologies
1 700 (50.18%) Analytics
2 675 (48.39%) Data Pipeline
3 535 (38.35%) Data Modelling
4 485 (34.77%) CI/CD
5 477 (34.19%) ETL
6 383 (27.46%) AI
7 355 (25.45%) Agile
8 346 (24.80%) Business Intelligence
9 329 (23.58%) DevOps
10 303 (21.72%) Data Governance
11 247 (17.71%) Machine Learning
12 240 (17.20%) Problem-Solving
13 220 (15.77%) Data Science
14 208 (14.91%) Decision-Making
15 205 (14.70%) Migration
15 205 (14.70%) Validation
16 202 (14.48%) Data Architecture
17 192 (13.76%) Data Transformation
18 186 (13.33%) Stakeholder Management
19 171 (12.26%) Infrastructure as Code
Programming Languages
1 753 (53.98%) SQL
2 705 (50.54%) Python
3 112 (8.03%) Java
4 43 (3.08%) Data Analysis Expressions
5 35 (2.51%) Bash
5 35 (2.51%) Scala
6 33 (2.37%) C#
7 30 (2.15%) PowerShell
8 27 (1.94%) T-SQL
9 20 (1.43%) JavaScript
10 18 (1.29%) Bicep
10 18 (1.29%) R
11 15 (1.08%) PL/SQL
12 14 (1.00%) Shell Script
13 12 (0.86%) SAS Macro
14 9 (0.65%) TypeScript
15 7 (0.50%) SPARQL
16 6 (0.43%) Cypher
17 5 (0.36%) Korn
17 5 (0.36%) Kusto Query Language
Qualifications
1 274 (19.64%) Security Cleared
2 236 (16.92%) SC Cleared
3 86 (6.16%) Degree
4 41 (2.94%) Computer Science Degree
5 30 (2.15%) BPSS Clearance
6 28 (2.01%) Azure Certification
7 25 (1.79%) DV Cleared
8 24 (1.72%) Master's Degree
9 17 (1.22%) AWS Certification
10 13 (0.93%) DBS Check
11 7 (0.50%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
11 7 (0.50%) Microsoft Certification
11 7 (0.50%) SnowPro
12 5 (0.36%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
12 5 (0.36%) Tableau Certification
13 3 (0.22%) PhD
14 2 (0.14%) CSPO
14 2 (0.14%) Microsoft Certified Professional
14 2 (0.14%) PMI Certification
15 1 (0.072%) CISSP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 405 (29.03%) Data Quality
2 76 (5.45%) QA
3 71 (5.09%) GDPR
4 22 (1.58%) Accessibility
5 10 (0.72%) SLA
6 4 (0.29%) NIST
6 4 (0.29%) Sarbanes-Oxley
6 4 (0.29%) Solvency II
7 3 (0.22%) GxP
7 3 (0.22%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 3 (0.22%) ISO/IEC 42001
7 3 (0.22%) MiFID
7 3 (0.22%) PMO
8 2 (0.14%) 21 CFR Part 11
8 2 (0.14%) Actionable Recommendations
8 2 (0.14%) California Consumer Privacy Act
8 2 (0.14%) EMIR
8 2 (0.14%) GRC
9 1 (0.072%) COPPA
9 1 (0.072%) IFRS 17
System Software
1 121 (8.67%) Docker
2 4 (0.29%) Active Directory
3 3 (0.22%) Virtual Machines
4 1 (0.072%) HDFS
Systems Management
1 183 (13.12%) Terraform
2 108 (7.74%) Kubernetes
3 18 (1.29%) Prometheus
4 16 (1.15%) Ansible
5 13 (0.93%) Grafana
6 5 (0.36%) Kibana
7 3 (0.22%) logstash
8 2 (0.14%) Argo
8 2 (0.14%) Control-M
8 2 (0.14%) Kubeflow
8 2 (0.14%) Rancher
8 2 (0.14%) Thomson Reuters DACS
9 1 (0.072%) Cilium
9 1 (0.072%) IBM Guardium
9 1 (0.072%) Kustomize
9 1 (0.072%) Nagios
9 1 (0.072%) QRadar
Vendors
1 345 (24.73%) Databricks
2 243 (17.42%) Microsoft
3 71 (5.09%) Informatica
4 60 (4.30%) Google
5 59 (4.23%) Oracle
6 31 (2.22%) SAP
7 29 (2.08%) Foundry
8 28 (2.01%) Palantir
8 28 (2.01%) Talend
9 20 (1.43%) Splunk
10 18 (1.29%) Cloudera
10 18 (1.29%) Salesforce
11 17 (1.22%) OpenAI
12 14 (1.00%) ServiceNow
13 12 (0.86%) 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%) Teradata