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

6 months to
17 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 85 156 205
Rank change year-on-year +71 +49 -13
Contract jobs citing Data Engineering 1,400 502 409
As % of all contract jobs in England 3.06% 1.81% 1.23%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.60% 1.99% 1.44%
Number of daily rates quoted 976 319 303
10th Percentile £400 £363 £378
25th Percentile £450 £450 £475
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £525 £575
Median % change year-on-year - -8.70% -8.00%
75th Percentile £638 £650 £700
90th Percentile £750 £775 £775
UK median daily rate £525 £520 £575
% change year-on-year +0.96% -9.57% -8.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 22 6 11
10th Percentile £21.25 £30.73 £30.37
25th Percentile £24.69 £42.03 £33.13
Median hourly rate £70.00 £52.50 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +33.33% -12.50% -23.08%
75th Percentile £77.25 £62.19 -
90th Percentile £87.13 £87.50 -
UK median hourly rate £70.00 £52.50 £35.00
% change year-on-year +33.33% +50.00% -55.13%

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 38,847 25,245 28,472
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 85.01% 90.81% 85.90%
Number of daily rates quoted 24,107 16,076 18,544
10th Percentile £325 £300 £313
25th Percentile £425 £404 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £513 £525
Median % change year-on-year +2.44% -2.40% -4.53%
75th Percentile £626 £627 £650
90th Percentile £738 £738 £756
UK median daily rate £525 £500 £525
% change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -3.31%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,555 1,444 1,611
10th Percentile £14.28 £14.20 £14.16
25th Percentile £19.33 £17.87 £18.25
Median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £43.00
Median % change year-on-year +74.79% -41.51% +4.83%
75th Percentile £68.55 £50.75 £65.00
90th Percentile £82.25 £70.00 £75.00
UK median hourly rate £42.00 £25.15 £40.97
% change year-on-year +67.00% -38.61% -1.28%

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 17 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 17 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 17 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 +49 829 £550 - 602
North of England +31 181 £475 -5.00% 165
Midlands +53 149 £487 +8.03% 51
West Midlands +42 124 £481 +11.48% 41
South East -8 95 £525 +12.18% 138
Yorkshire +25 87 £475 +11.76% 36
South West +19 77 £506 -12.09% 66
North West -7 58 £500 - 99
North East -9 38 £425 -20.93% 31
East of England -4 28 £575 -4.17% 30
East Midlands -3 22 £525 +15.01% 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
1 173 (12.36%) Apache Spark
2 168 (12.00%) Apache Airflow
3 114 (8.14%) Apache
4 41 (2.93%) SAS
5 26 (1.86%) Confluence
6 22 (1.57%) Jupyter
7 18 (1.29%) Palantir Foundry
8 12 (0.86%) SharePoint
9 7 (0.50%) Apache Superset
10 5 (0.36%) Apache Solr
11 4 (0.29%) ArcGIS
12 2 (0.14%) Microsoft Exchange
12 2 (0.14%) PowerExchange
13 1 (0.071%) Apache Synapse
13 1 (0.071%) CICS
13 1 (0.071%) nginx
Applications
1 16 (1.14%) Microsoft Excel
2 7 (0.50%) Spreadsheet
3 6 (0.43%) Microsoft Office
4 5 (0.36%) Chatbot
5 4 (0.29%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 2 (0.14%) MS Visio
7 1 (0.071%) 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 (0.071%) FIS Private Capital Suite
6 1 (0.071%) MIS ActiveH
6 1 (0.071%) SAP ECC
6 1 (0.071%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
Cloud Services
1 587 (41.93%) Azure
2 527 (37.64%) AWS
3 280 (20.00%) Power Platform
4 216 (15.43%) Snowflake
5 191 (13.64%) GCP
6 179 (12.79%) dbt
7 159 (11.36%) Azure Data Factory
8 146 (10.43%) Amazon S3
9 134 (9.57%) Azure Synapse Analytics
10 132 (9.43%) Azure DevOps
11 114 (8.14%) GitHub
12 111 (7.93%) Serverless
13 94 (6.71%) AWS Lambda
14 61 (4.36%) GitHub Actions
15 34 (2.43%) Amazon EMR
16 30 (2.14%) Amazon Bedrock
17 26 (1.86%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 26 (1.86%) Azure AI
17 26 (1.86%) Microsoft Purview
18 25 (1.79%) AWS Step Functions
Communications & Networking
1 5 (0.36%) Firewall
2 3 (0.21%) DNS
2 3 (0.21%) Network Security
3 2 (0.14%) RTP
4 1 (0.071%) Internet
4 1 (0.071%) MIMO
4 1 (0.071%) MQTT
Database & Business Intelligence
1 277 (19.79%) Data Warehouse
2 262 (18.71%) Power BI
3 190 (13.57%) Data Lake
4 145 (10.36%) Metadata
5 100 (7.14%) BigQuery
6 93 (6.64%) Delta Lake
7 91 (6.50%) Amazon Redshift
8 87 (6.21%) Big Data
9 78 (5.57%) Tableau
10 64 (4.57%) SQL Server
11 61 (4.36%) Amazon Athena
11 61 (4.36%) NoSQL
12 52 (3.71%) Snowflake Schema
13 48 (3.43%) PostgreSQL
14 47 (3.36%) Relational Database
15 41 (2.93%) Azure SQL Database
16 36 (2.57%) Looker
17 35 (2.50%) Star Schema
18 34 (2.43%) Data Vault
19 33 (2.36%) Hadoop
Development Applications
1 133 (9.50%) Git
2 76 (5.43%) GitLab
3 55 (3.93%) JIRA
4 25 (1.79%) Jenkins
5 22 (1.57%) MLflow
6 7 (0.50%) SonarQube
7 6 (0.43%) Bitbucket
8 5 (0.36%) ERwin
8 5 (0.36%) Selenium
8 5 (0.36%) Terragrunt
9 3 (0.21%) Artifactory
9 3 (0.21%) Claude Code
9 3 (0.21%) ER Studio
9 3 (0.21%) Postman
9 3 (0.21%) Snyk
9 3 (0.21%) Sonatype Nexus
10 2 (0.14%) Yeoman
11 1 (0.071%) Octopus Deploy
11 1 (0.071%) Robot Framework
11 1 (0.071%) RStudio
General
1 336 (24.00%) Social Skills
2 322 (23.00%) Finance
3 223 (15.93%) Analytical Skills
4 143 (10.21%) Public Sector
5 105 (7.50%) Banking
6 41 (2.93%) Marketing
7 36 (2.57%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 32 (2.29%) Retail
9 25 (1.79%) Telecoms
10 22 (1.57%) Front Office
11 21 (1.50%) Documentation Skills
12 19 (1.36%) Investment Banking
13 15 (1.07%) Manufacturing
14 14 (1.00%) Pharmaceutical
15 13 (0.93%) Financial Institution
16 11 (0.79%) Influencing Skills
17 9 (0.64%) Law
17 9 (0.64%) Legal
17 9 (0.64%) Military
18 8 (0.57%) Aerospace
Job Titles
1 647 (46.21%) Data Engineer
2 195 (13.93%) Senior
3 168 (12.00%) Lead
4 159 (11.36%) Architect
5 118 (8.43%) Senior Data Engineer
6 88 (6.29%) Data Architect
7 77 (5.50%) Developer
8 71 (5.07%) AWS Engineer
9 64 (4.57%) Analyst
10 60 (4.29%) AWS Data Engineer
11 57 (4.07%) Lead Data Engineer
12 52 (3.71%) Snowflake Engineer
13 51 (3.64%) Azure Engineer
14 43 (3.07%) Solutions Architect
15 42 (3.00%) Snowflake Data Engineer
16 40 (2.86%) Azure Data Engineer
16 40 (2.86%) Consultant
17 38 (2.71%) Data Analyst
18 36 (2.57%) Data Scientist
19 35 (2.50%) Python Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 200 (14.29%) PySpark
2 103 (7.36%) Kafka
3 42 (3.00%) REST
4 29 (2.07%) React
5 26 (1.86%) Pandas
6 25 (1.79%) JSON
7 22 (1.57%) .NET
8 19 (1.36%) scikit-learn
9 17 (1.21%) PyTorch
10 16 (1.14%) Spring
11 15 (1.07%) NumPy
12 13 (0.93%) TensorFlow
13 12 (0.86%) pytest
14 11 (0.79%) Microsoft Graph
15 10 (0.71%) Great Expectations
15 10 (0.71%) RESTful
15 10 (0.71%) Spring Boot
16 9 (0.64%) FastAPI
16 9 (0.64%) LangChain
16 9 (0.64%) Node.js
Miscellaneous
1 185 (13.21%) Cloud Native
2 60 (4.29%) Data Structures
3 58 (4.14%) Legacy Systems
4 54 (3.86%) Product Ownership
5 50 (3.57%) Distributed Systems
6 45 (3.21%) Onboarding
7 33 (2.36%) AI Agents
8 23 (1.64%) Data Protection Act
9 22 (1.57%) Greenfield Project
10 19 (1.36%) Distributed Computing
11 18 (1.29%) NHS
12 16 (1.14%) Clustering
12 16 (1.14%) Virtual Team
13 15 (1.07%) Algorithms
13 15 (1.07%) Life Science
14 14 (1.00%) Analytical Mindset
15 12 (0.86%) Management Information System
15 12 (0.86%) Reference Data
16 11 (0.79%) Enterprise Software
17 10 (0.71%) Fixed Income
Operating Systems
1 36 (2.57%) Linux
2 29 (2.07%) Unix
3 8 (0.57%) Windows
4 2 (0.14%) VMS
4 2 (0.14%) Windows Server
5 1 (0.071%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 1 (0.071%) Robot Operating System
5 1 (0.071%) Ubuntu
Processes & Methodologies
1 694 (49.57%) Analytics
2 676 (48.29%) Data Pipeline
3 535 (38.21%) Data Modelling
4 488 (34.86%) CI/CD
5 478 (34.14%) ETL
6 400 (28.57%) AI
7 359 (25.64%) Agile
8 343 (24.50%) Business Intelligence
9 333 (23.79%) DevOps
10 311 (22.21%) Data Governance
11 245 (17.50%) Machine Learning
12 238 (17.00%) Problem-Solving
13 215 (15.36%) Data Science
14 209 (14.93%) Data Architecture
15 207 (14.79%) Migration
16 206 (14.71%) Decision-Making
17 203 (14.50%) Validation
18 202 (14.43%) Data Transformation
19 197 (14.07%) Stakeholder Management
20 175 (12.50%) Infrastructure as Code
Programming Languages
1 758 (54.14%) SQL
2 704 (50.29%) Python
3 109 (7.79%) Java
4 41 (2.93%) Data Analysis Expressions
5 38 (2.71%) Bash
5 38 (2.71%) Scala
6 33 (2.36%) PowerShell
7 31 (2.21%) C#
8 24 (1.71%) JavaScript
9 21 (1.50%) T-SQL
10 17 (1.21%) PL/SQL
10 17 (1.21%) R
11 14 (1.00%) Shell Script
12 13 (0.93%) Bicep
13 12 (0.86%) SAS Macro
14 11 (0.79%) TypeScript
15 8 (0.57%) Kusto Query Language
16 7 (0.50%) SPARQL
17 6 (0.43%) Cypher
18 5 (0.36%) Go
Qualifications
1 271 (19.36%) Security Cleared
2 232 (16.57%) SC Cleared
3 83 (5.93%) Degree
4 41 (2.93%) Computer Science Degree
5 28 (2.00%) Azure Certification
6 26 (1.86%) DV Cleared
7 24 (1.71%) BPSS Clearance
8 22 (1.57%) Master's Degree
9 16 (1.14%) AWS Certification
10 13 (0.93%) DBS Check
11 8 (0.57%) Microsoft Certification
12 7 (0.50%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
12 7 (0.50%) SnowPro
13 5 (0.36%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 5 (0.36%) Tableau Certification
14 3 (0.21%) PhD
14 3 (0.21%) PMI Certification
15 2 (0.14%) CSPO
15 2 (0.14%) PMP
16 1 (0.071%) (ISC)2 CCSP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 421 (30.07%) Data Quality
2 74 (5.29%) QA
3 71 (5.07%) GDPR
4 24 (1.71%) Accessibility
5 10 (0.71%) SLA
6 5 (0.36%) Sarbanes-Oxley
7 4 (0.29%) Solvency II
8 3 (0.21%) GxP
8 3 (0.21%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 3 (0.21%) ISO/IEC 42001
8 3 (0.21%) MiFID
8 3 (0.21%) NIST
8 3 (0.21%) PMO
9 2 (0.14%) 21 CFR Part 11
9 2 (0.14%) Actionable Recommendations
9 2 (0.14%) California Consumer Privacy Act
9 2 (0.14%) EMIR
9 2 (0.14%) GRC
9 2 (0.14%) IFRS
9 2 (0.14%) IFRS 9
System Software
1 119 (8.50%) Docker
2 5 (0.36%) Active Directory
3 2 (0.14%) Virtual Machines
Systems Management
1 187 (13.36%) Terraform
2 99 (7.07%) Kubernetes
3 21 (1.50%) Ansible
4 16 (1.14%) Grafana
5 9 (0.64%) Prometheus
6 6 (0.43%) Control-M
7 5 (0.36%) Kibana
8 3 (0.21%) logstash
9 2 (0.14%) Argo
9 2 (0.14%) Puppet
9 2 (0.14%) Rancher
9 2 (0.14%) Thomson Reuters DACS
10 1 (0.071%) Cilium
10 1 (0.071%) IBM Guardium
10 1 (0.071%) Kubeflow
10 1 (0.071%) Kustomize
10 1 (0.071%) Nagios
10 1 (0.071%) QRadar
10 1 (0.071%) Single Sign-On
Vendors
1 350 (25.00%) Databricks
2 247 (17.64%) Microsoft
3 72 (5.14%) Informatica
4 65 (4.64%) Google
5 64 (4.57%) Oracle
6 31 (2.21%) SAP
7 29 (2.07%) Foundry
8 28 (2.00%) Talend
9 27 (1.93%) Palantir
10 20 (1.43%) Salesforce
11 18 (1.29%) Cloudera
12 14 (1.00%) OpenAI
12 14 (1.00%) Splunk
13 13 (0.93%) ServiceNow
14 12 (0.86%) Trend Micro
15 9 (0.64%) Teradata
16 8 (0.57%) Denodo
16 8 (0.57%) Workday
17 7 (0.50%) Hitachi
17 7 (0.50%) InterSystems