Data Engineering Contract Job Trends in the North of England

Data Engineering
England > North of England

The table below provides summary statistics and contractor rates for jobs advertised in the North of England requiring Data Engineering skills. It covers contract job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 12 February 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
12 Feb 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 131 117 144
Rank change year-on-year -14 +27 +25
Contract jobs citing Data Engineering 93 45 47
As % of all contract jobs in the North of England 1.80% 1.34% 0.96%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 2.05% 1.51% 1.10%
Number of daily rates quoted 80 25 38
10th Percentile £343 £419 £425
25th Percentile £363 £450 £475
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £450 £550 £548
Median % change year-on-year -18.18% +0.46% -8.75%
75th Percentile £519 £638 £600
90th Percentile £575 £717 £622
England median daily rate £525 £570 £550
% change year-on-year -7.89% +3.64% -8.33%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2 5 1
10th Percentile £69.92 - -
25th Percentile £70.65 £22.72 -
Median hourly rate £71.85 £26.50 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +171.13% -59.23% -
75th Percentile £73.06 £28.75 -
90th Percentile £73.78 £29.50 -
England median hourly rate £63.97 £26.50 £42.31
% change year-on-year +141.40% -37.36% -43.59%

All Process & Methodology Skills
North of 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 the North of England.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for process or methodology skills 4,529 2,977 4,278
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the North of England 87.47% 88.57% 87.02%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,999 1,777 2,721
10th Percentile £250 £263 £275
25th Percentile £370 £375 £400
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £470 £475 £500
Median % change year-on-year -1.05% -5.00% -
75th Percentile £550 £575 £588
90th Percentile £650 £656 £675
England median daily rate £500 £525 £525
% change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 273 140 309
10th Percentile £15.27 £15.00 £11.77
25th Percentile £21.25 £18.10 £13.99
Median hourly rate £41.94 £27.50 £22.50
Median % change year-on-year +52.51% +22.22% -10.00%
75th Percentile £60.00 £46.18 £46.18
90th Percentile £74.26 £73.85 £53.75
England median hourly rate £25.77 £35.00 £35.00
% change year-on-year -26.37% - -

Data Engineering
Job Vacancy Trend in the North of England

Historical trend showing the proportion of contract IT job postings citing Data Engineering relative to all contract IT jobs advertised in the North of England.

Data Engineering job vacancy trend in the North of England

Data Engineering
Daily Rate Trend in the North of England

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the North of England citing Data Engineering.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the North of England citing Data Engineering

Data Engineering
Daily Rate Histogram in the North of England

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Data Engineering in the North of England over the 6 months to 12 February 2026.

Daily rate histogram for Data Engineering in the North of England

Data Engineering
Hourly Rate Trend in the North of England

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the North of England citing Data Engineering.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the North of England citing Data Engineering

Data Engineering
Contract Job Locations in the North of 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 North of England region over the 6 months to 12 February 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
North West +3 52 £450 -10.00% 51
Yorkshire -48 24 £500 -20.00% 24
North East -3 17 £450 -23.08% 10
Data Engineering
England

Data Engineering
Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities in the North of 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 26 (27.96%) Apache Airflow
2 14 (15.05%) Apache Spark
3 11 (11.83%) Apache
4 1 (1.08%) Confluence
Applications
1 3 (3.23%) Microsoft Excel
1 3 (3.23%) Microsoft PowerPoint
2 2 (2.15%) Chatbot
Cloud Services
1 39 (41.94%) Azure
2 36 (38.71%) AWS
3 18 (19.35%) GCP
4 16 (17.20%) Power Platform
5 14 (15.05%) dbt
6 12 (12.90%) Serverless
7 10 (10.75%) AWS Lambda
7 10 (10.75%) Azure Data Factory
8 9 (9.68%) Amazon S3
8 9 (9.68%) Prefect
8 9 (9.68%) Snowflake
9 8 (8.60%) Azure Synapse Analytics
10 7 (7.53%) Azure DevOps
11 6 (6.45%) Amazon SageMaker
11 6 (6.45%) GitHub
11 6 (6.45%) GitHub Actions
11 6 (6.45%) OpenShift
12 5 (5.38%) Amazon EC2
12 5 (5.38%) Amazon ECS
13 3 (3.23%) AWS CloudFormation
Database & Business Intelligence
1 20 (21.51%) Data Warehouse
2 13 (13.98%) Data Lake
3 12 (12.90%) Power BI
4 9 (9.68%) Big Data
5 8 (8.60%) Delta Lake
5 8 (8.60%) Snowflake Schema
6 7 (7.53%) Amazon Redshift
7 5 (5.38%) Amazon RDS
7 5 (5.38%) Azure SQL Database
7 5 (5.38%) Hadoop
8 4 (4.30%) BigQuery
8 4 (4.30%) Metadata
8 4 (4.30%) NoSQL
8 4 (4.30%) Spark SQL
9 3 (3.23%) Apache Hive
9 3 (3.23%) HBase
10 2 (2.15%) MongoDB
10 2 (2.15%) PostgreSQL
10 2 (2.15%) SQL Server
10 2 (2.15%) Tableau
Development Applications
1 17 (18.28%) Git
2 7 (7.53%) GitLab
2 7 (7.53%) Jenkins
3 5 (5.38%) MLflow
4 4 (4.30%) JIRA
5 2 (2.15%) Visual Studio Code
6 1 (1.08%) Visual Studio
General
1 24 (25.81%) Social Skills
2 18 (19.35%) Analytical Skills
2 18 (19.35%) Public Sector
3 7 (7.53%) Documentation Skills
3 7 (7.53%) Finance
4 3 (3.23%) Banking
4 3 (3.23%) Influencing Skills
5 2 (2.15%) Health Technology
5 2 (2.15%) Manufacturing
6 1 (1.08%) Advertising
6 1 (1.08%) Inclusion and Diversity
6 1 (1.08%) Law
6 1 (1.08%) Presentation Skills
6 1 (1.08%) Retail Banking
6 1 (1.08%) Telecoms
Job Titles
1 54 (58.06%) Data Engineer
2 11 (11.83%) Senior
3 9 (9.68%) AWS Engineer
3 9 (9.68%) Lead
4 8 (8.60%) Analyst
4 8 (8.60%) AWS Data Engineer
4 8 (8.60%) Senior Data Engineer
5 6 (6.45%) Business Analyst
5 6 (6.45%) Data Scientist
6 5 (5.38%) Azure Data Engineer
6 5 (5.38%) Azure Engineer
6 5 (5.38%) DevOps Engineer
6 5 (5.38%) Lead Data Engineer
7 4 (4.30%) Snowflake Data Engineer
7 4 (4.30%) Snowflake Engineer
8 3 (3.23%) Developer
8 3 (3.23%) Hadoop Engineer
8 3 (3.23%) Python Data Engineer
8 3 (3.23%) Python Engineer
8 3 (3.23%) Security Analyst
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 16 (17.20%) PySpark
2 13 (13.98%) Kafka
3 6 (6.45%) Apache Avro
3 6 (6.45%) JSON
3 6 (6.45%) OpenTelemetry
3 6 (6.45%) Protocol Buffers
3 6 (6.45%) RESTful
3 6 (6.45%) XGBoost
4 5 (5.38%) Flask
5 4 (4.30%) FHIR
5 4 (4.30%) HTML
6 3 (3.23%) Spark Streaming
7 2 (2.15%) LangChain
7 2 (2.15%) Pandas
7 2 (2.15%) pytest
7 2 (2.15%) REST
8 1 (1.08%) ARM Templates
8 1 (1.08%) FastAPI
8 1 (1.08%) JWT
8 1 (1.08%) Streamlit
Miscellaneous
1 9 (9.68%) Clustering
2 6 (6.45%) Cloud Native
3 5 (5.38%) Hybrid Cloud
3 5 (5.38%) NHS
4 4 (4.30%) Data Protection Act
5 3 (3.23%) Data Centre
5 3 (3.23%) Greenfield Project
6 2 (2.15%) Algorithms
6 2 (2.15%) Data Structures
6 2 (2.15%) Distributed Computing
6 2 (2.15%) Onboarding
6 2 (2.15%) Product Ownership
7 1 (1.08%) AI Agents
7 1 (1.08%) Analytical Mindset
7 1 (1.08%) Data Fabric
7 1 (1.08%) Distributed Systems
7 1 (1.08%) Enterprise Software
7 1 (1.08%) Legacy Systems
7 1 (1.08%) Reinsurance
7 1 (1.08%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 3 (3.23%) Linux
2 1 (1.08%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 50 (53.76%) Analytics
2 46 (49.46%) Data Pipeline
3 42 (45.16%) ETL
4 40 (43.01%) Data Modelling
5 39 (41.94%) CI/CD
6 26 (27.96%) Data Science
6 26 (27.96%) Problem-Solving
7 24 (25.81%) Machine Learning
8 19 (20.43%) Agile
8 19 (20.43%) Business Intelligence
8 19 (20.43%) Continuous Improvement
8 19 (20.43%) DevOps
9 18 (19.35%) AI
9 18 (19.35%) Data Governance
10 15 (16.13%) Performance Tuning
11 11 (11.83%) Data Transformation
11 11 (11.83%) Validation
12 10 (10.75%) Data Integration
12 10 (10.75%) Infrastructure as Code
13 9 (9.68%) Resource Management
Programming Languages
1 60 (64.52%) Python
2 46 (49.46%) SQL
3 9 (9.68%) PL/SQL
4 3 (3.23%) Bicep
4 3 (3.23%) Java
4 3 (3.23%) Shell Script
5 2 (2.15%) Data Analysis Expressions
6 1 (1.08%) C#
6 1 (1.08%) JavaScript
6 1 (1.08%) TypeScript
Qualifications
1 21 (22.58%) Security Cleared
2 17 (18.28%) SC Cleared
3 6 (6.45%) Degree
4 5 (5.38%) BPSS Clearance
5 4 (4.30%) Master's Degree
6 3 (3.23%) Computer Science Degree
7 2 (2.15%) AWS Certification
8 1 (1.08%) Azure Certification
8 1 (1.08%) CBAP
8 1 (1.08%) DV Cleared
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 27 (29.03%) Data Quality
2 3 (3.23%) GDPR
3 2 (2.15%) Accessibility
3 2 (2.15%) HL7
4 1 (1.08%) GRC
4 1 (1.08%) HIPAA
4 1 (1.08%) NCSC
4 1 (1.08%) QA
System Software
1 17 (18.28%) Docker
2 3 (3.23%) HDFS
Systems Management
1 21 (22.58%) Kubernetes
2 18 (19.35%) Terraform
3 9 (9.68%) Prometheus
4 3 (3.23%) Ansible
4 3 (3.23%) Hadoop YARN
4 3 (3.23%) Puppet
5 2 (2.15%) Control-M
5 2 (2.15%) Grafana
Vendors
1 24 (25.81%) Databricks
2 10 (10.75%) Microsoft
3 6 (6.45%) Splunk
4 3 (3.23%) Oracle
5 2 (2.15%) Brio
5 2 (2.15%) Google
5 2 (2.15%) Virgin Media
6 1 (1.08%) Informatica
6 1 (1.08%) OpenAI
6 1 (1.08%) SnapLogic
6 1 (1.08%) Talend