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 19 February 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
19 Feb 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 131 114 137
Rank change year-on-year -17 +23 +23
Contract jobs citing Data Engineering 97 40 45
As % of all contract jobs in the North of England 1.84% 1.21% 0.92%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 2.11% 1.36% 1.05%
Number of daily rates quoted 83 23 36
10th Percentile £344 £414 £425
25th Percentile £381 £424 £466
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £450 £500 £535
Median % change year-on-year -10.00% -6.54% -10.83%
75th Percentile £519 £625 £615
90th Percentile £575 £698 £638
England median daily rate £525 £550 £550
% change year-on-year -4.55% - -8.33%
Number of hourly rates quoted 3 5 1
10th Percentile £65.89 - -
25th Percentile £67.22 £22.72 -
Median hourly rate £70.00 £26.50 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +164.15% -59.23% +85.71%
75th Percentile £74.63 £28.75 -
90th Percentile £74.85 £29.50 -
England median hourly rate £69.72 £26.50 £42.31
% change year-on-year +163.09% -37.36% -14.96%

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 4,607 2,946 4,267
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the North of England 87.29% 88.87% 87.08%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,024 1,776 2,695
10th Percentile £252 £261 £275
25th Percentile £372 £363 £400
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £470 £475 £500
Median % change year-on-year -1.05% -5.00% -
75th Percentile £550 £575 £587
90th Percentile £650 £650 £672
England median daily rate £500 £525 £525
% change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 276 136 312
10th Percentile £15.25 £15.24 £11.77
25th Percentile £21.19 £18.51 £13.99
Median hourly rate £42.31 £27.50 £22.50
Median % change year-on-year +53.86% +22.22% -13.14%
75th Percentile £60.15 £46.18 £46.18
90th Percentile £74.26 £76.13 £53.75
England median hourly rate £26.78 £35.00 £35.00
% change year-on-year -23.49% - -

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 19 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 19 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 54 £445 +0.28% 60
Yorkshire -44 24 £500 -16.67% 37
North East +1 19 £450 -23.08% 11
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 (26.80%) Apache Airflow
2 16 (16.49%) Apache Spark
3 11 (11.34%) Apache
4 1 (1.03%) Confluence
Applications
1 3 (3.09%) Microsoft Excel
1 3 (3.09%) Microsoft PowerPoint
2 2 (2.06%) Chatbot
Cloud Services
1 40 (41.24%) Azure
2 39 (40.21%) AWS
3 18 (18.56%) GCP
3 18 (18.56%) Power Platform
4 16 (16.49%) dbt
5 12 (12.37%) Azure Data Factory
5 12 (12.37%) Serverless
6 10 (10.31%) AWS Lambda
7 9 (9.28%) Amazon S3
7 9 (9.28%) Azure Synapse Analytics
7 9 (9.28%) Prefect
7 9 (9.28%) Snowflake
8 8 (8.25%) Azure DevOps
9 7 (7.22%) OpenShift
10 6 (6.19%) Amazon SageMaker
10 6 (6.19%) GitHub
10 6 (6.19%) GitHub Actions
11 5 (5.15%) Amazon EC2
11 5 (5.15%) Amazon ECS
12 3 (3.09%) AWS CloudFormation
Database & Business Intelligence
1 21 (21.65%) Data Warehouse
2 14 (14.43%) Data Lake
3 13 (13.40%) Power BI
4 11 (11.34%) Big Data
5 9 (9.28%) Delta Lake
6 8 (8.25%) Snowflake Schema
7 7 (7.22%) Amazon Redshift
8 6 (6.19%) Hadoop
9 5 (5.15%) Amazon RDS
9 5 (5.15%) Azure SQL Database
10 4 (4.12%) Metadata
10 4 (4.12%) NoSQL
10 4 (4.12%) Spark SQL
11 3 (3.09%) BigQuery
11 3 (3.09%) Data Vault
12 2 (2.06%) Apache Hive
12 2 (2.06%) DynamoDB
12 2 (2.06%) HBase
12 2 (2.06%) MongoDB
12 2 (2.06%) Tableau
Development Applications
1 17 (17.53%) Git
2 7 (7.22%) GitLab
2 7 (7.22%) Jenkins
3 5 (5.15%) MLflow
4 4 (4.12%) JIRA
5 2 (2.06%) Visual Studio Code
6 1 (1.03%) Visual Studio
General
1 26 (26.80%) Social Skills
2 18 (18.56%) Analytical Skills
2 18 (18.56%) Public Sector
3 8 (8.25%) Documentation Skills
4 7 (7.22%) Finance
5 3 (3.09%) Banking
5 3 (3.09%) Influencing Skills
6 2 (2.06%) Health Technology
6 2 (2.06%) Manufacturing
7 1 (1.03%) Advertising
7 1 (1.03%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 1 (1.03%) Law
7 1 (1.03%) Presentation Skills
7 1 (1.03%) Retail
7 1 (1.03%) Retail Banking
7 1 (1.03%) Telecoms
Job Titles
1 60 (61.86%) Data Engineer
2 11 (11.34%) Senior
3 9 (9.28%) AWS Engineer
3 9 (9.28%) Lead
4 8 (8.25%) Analyst
4 8 (8.25%) AWS Data Engineer
4 8 (8.25%) Senior Data Engineer
5 6 (6.19%) Azure Data Engineer
5 6 (6.19%) Azure Engineer
5 6 (6.19%) Business Analyst
5 6 (6.19%) Data Scientist
5 6 (6.19%) Lead Data Engineer
6 5 (5.15%) DevOps Engineer
7 4 (4.12%) Python Data Engineer
7 4 (4.12%) Python Engineer
7 4 (4.12%) Snowflake Data Engineer
7 4 (4.12%) Snowflake Engineer
8 3 (3.09%) Developer
8 3 (3.09%) Hadoop Engineer
8 3 (3.09%) Security Analyst
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 17 (17.53%) Kafka
1 17 (17.53%) PySpark
2 7 (7.22%) Apache Avro
2 7 (7.22%) JSON
2 7 (7.22%) OpenTelemetry
2 7 (7.22%) Protocol Buffers
3 6 (6.19%) RESTful
3 6 (6.19%) XGBoost
4 5 (5.15%) Flask
5 4 (4.12%) FHIR
5 4 (4.12%) HTML
6 2 (2.06%) LangChain
6 2 (2.06%) Pandas
6 2 (2.06%) pytest
6 2 (2.06%) REST
6 2 (2.06%) Spark Streaming
7 1 (1.03%) Node.js
7 1 (1.03%) NumPy
7 1 (1.03%) OAuth2
7 1 (1.03%) React
Miscellaneous
1 9 (9.28%) Clustering
2 6 (6.19%) Cloud Native
2 6 (6.19%) Hybrid Cloud
3 5 (5.15%) NHS
4 4 (4.12%) Data Protection Act
5 3 (3.09%) Greenfield Project
6 2 (2.06%) Algorithms
6 2 (2.06%) Data Centre
6 2 (2.06%) Data Structures
6 2 (2.06%) Distributed Computing
6 2 (2.06%) Onboarding
6 2 (2.06%) Product Ownership
7 1 (1.03%) AI Agents
7 1 (1.03%) Analytical Mindset
7 1 (1.03%) Data Fabric
7 1 (1.03%) Distributed Systems
7 1 (1.03%) Enterprise Software
7 1 (1.03%) Legacy Systems
7 1 (1.03%) Reinsurance
7 1 (1.03%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 2 (2.06%) Linux
2 1 (1.03%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 54 (55.67%) Analytics
2 49 (50.52%) Data Pipeline
3 44 (45.36%) ETL
4 43 (44.33%) Data Modelling
5 42 (43.30%) CI/CD
6 28 (28.87%) Problem-Solving
7 26 (26.80%) Data Science
8 24 (24.74%) Machine Learning
9 22 (22.68%) Agile
10 21 (21.65%) DevOps
11 20 (20.62%) Business Intelligence
11 20 (20.62%) Data Governance
12 19 (19.59%) AI
12 19 (19.59%) Continuous Improvement
13 16 (16.49%) Performance Tuning
14 12 (12.37%) Validation
15 11 (11.34%) Data Integration
15 11 (11.34%) Data Transformation
16 10 (10.31%) Infrastructure as Code
17 9 (9.28%) Observability
Programming Languages
1 63 (64.95%) Python
2 48 (49.48%) SQL
3 9 (9.28%) PL/SQL
4 3 (3.09%) Bicep
4 3 (3.09%) Java
5 2 (2.06%) Data Analysis Expressions
5 2 (2.06%) Shell Script
6 1 (1.03%) C#
6 1 (1.03%) JavaScript
6 1 (1.03%) TypeScript
Qualifications
1 21 (21.65%) Security Cleared
2 17 (17.53%) SC Cleared
3 7 (7.22%) Degree
4 5 (5.15%) BPSS Clearance
5 4 (4.12%) Master's Degree
6 3 (3.09%) Computer Science Degree
7 2 (2.06%) AWS Certification
8 1 (1.03%) Azure Certification
8 1 (1.03%) CBAP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 29 (29.90%) Data Quality
2 3 (3.09%) GDPR
3 2 (2.06%) Accessibility
3 2 (2.06%) HL7
4 1 (1.03%) GRC
4 1 (1.03%) HIPAA
4 1 (1.03%) NCSC
4 1 (1.03%) QA
System Software
1 17 (17.53%) Docker
2 2 (2.06%) HDFS
Systems Management
1 22 (22.68%) Kubernetes
2 18 (18.56%) Terraform
3 10 (10.31%) Prometheus
4 2 (2.06%) Ansible
4 2 (2.06%) Control-M
4 2 (2.06%) Grafana
4 2 (2.06%) Hadoop YARN
4 2 (2.06%) Puppet
Vendors
1 26 (26.80%) Databricks
2 11 (11.34%) Microsoft
3 7 (7.22%) Splunk
4 3 (3.09%) Oracle
5 2 (2.06%) Brio
5 2 (2.06%) Virgin Media
6 1 (1.03%) Google
6 1 (1.03%) Informatica
6 1 (1.03%) OpenAI
6 1 (1.03%) SnapLogic
6 1 (1.03%) Talend