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

6 months to
2 Feb 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 132 123 141
Rank change year-on-year -9 +18 +33
Contract jobs citing Data Engineering 82 42 50
As % of all contract jobs in the North of England 1.64% 1.26% 0.99%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 1.88% 1.42% 1.14%
Number of daily rates quoted 71 22 40
10th Percentile £344 £419 £423
25th Percentile £363 £438 £456
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £450 £560 £550
Median % change year-on-year -19.64% +1.82% -8.33%
75th Percentile £519 £675 £600
90th Percentile £575 £719 £617
England median daily rate £525 £570 £550
% change year-on-year -7.89% +3.64% -8.33%
Number of hourly rates quoted 1 5 1
Median hourly rate £74.26 £26.50 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +180.23% -59.23% -
England median hourly rate £54.88 £26.50 £42.25
% change year-on-year +107.09% -37.27% -43.67%

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 4,367 2,953 4,391
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the North of England 87.43% 88.33% 87.14%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,911 1,721 2,815
10th Percentile £230 £263 £275
25th Percentile £364 £375 £400
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £468 £475 £500
Median % change year-on-year -1.47% -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 258 140 300
10th Percentile £15.31 £15.00 £11.77
25th Percentile £20.82 £17.25 £13.99
Median hourly rate £41.94 £27.50 £22.31
Median % change year-on-year +52.51% +23.29% -5.51%
75th Percentile £57.50 £46.18 £46.18
90th Percentile £70.75 £73.68 £53.75
England median hourly rate £25.15 £35.00 £35.50
% change year-on-year -28.14% -1.41% +1.43%

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 2 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 2 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 0 51 £450 -10.00% 46
Yorkshire -52 17 £500 -14.89% 23
North East -4 14 £425 -28.87% 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 24 (29.27%) Apache Airflow
2 11 (13.41%) Apache Spark
3 9 (10.98%) Apache
4 1 (1.22%) Confluence
Applications
1 3 (3.66%) Microsoft Excel
1 3 (3.66%) Microsoft PowerPoint
2 2 (2.44%) Chatbot
Cloud Services
1 35 (42.68%) Azure
2 33 (40.24%) AWS
3 16 (19.51%) GCP
4 15 (18.29%) Power Platform
5 13 (15.85%) dbt
6 11 (13.41%) Serverless
7 9 (10.98%) AWS Lambda
7 9 (10.98%) Snowflake
8 8 (9.76%) Amazon S3
8 8 (9.76%) Azure Data Factory
8 8 (9.76%) Azure Synapse Analytics
8 8 (9.76%) Prefect
9 7 (8.54%) Azure DevOps
10 6 (7.32%) Amazon SageMaker
10 6 (7.32%) GitHub
10 6 (7.32%) GitHub Actions
11 5 (6.10%) Amazon EC2
11 5 (6.10%) Amazon ECS
12 3 (3.66%) AWS CloudFormation
12 3 (3.66%) AWS Step Functions
Database & Business Intelligence
1 16 (19.51%) Data Warehouse
2 12 (14.63%) Data Lake
2 12 (14.63%) Power BI
3 8 (9.76%) Big Data
3 8 (9.76%) Snowflake Schema
4 6 (7.32%) Amazon Redshift
4 6 (7.32%) Azure SQL Database
4 6 (7.32%) Delta Lake
5 5 (6.10%) Amazon RDS
6 4 (4.88%) BigQuery
6 4 (4.88%) Hadoop
6 4 (4.88%) NoSQL
7 3 (3.66%) Apache Hive
7 3 (3.66%) HBase
7 3 (3.66%) Spark SQL
7 3 (3.66%) Tableau
8 2 (2.44%) DynamoDB
8 2 (2.44%) Metadata
8 2 (2.44%) MongoDB
9 1 (1.22%) Power Query
Development Applications
1 16 (19.51%) Git
2 7 (8.54%) GitLab
2 7 (8.54%) Jenkins
3 5 (6.10%) MLflow
4 4 (4.88%) JIRA
5 2 (2.44%) Visual Studio Code
6 1 (1.22%) Visual Studio
General
1 20 (24.39%) Social Skills
2 17 (20.73%) Analytical Skills
3 16 (19.51%) Public Sector
4 6 (7.32%) Finance
5 3 (3.66%) Banking
5 3 (3.66%) Influencing Skills
6 2 (2.44%) Documentation Skills
6 2 (2.44%) Health Technology
6 2 (2.44%) Manufacturing
7 1 (1.22%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 1 (1.22%) Presentation Skills
7 1 (1.22%) Retail Banking
7 1 (1.22%) Telecoms
Job Titles
1 48 (58.54%) Data Engineer
2 11 (13.41%) Senior
3 9 (10.98%) AWS Engineer
4 8 (9.76%) AWS Data Engineer
4 8 (9.76%) Senior Data Engineer
5 7 (8.54%) Analyst
5 7 (8.54%) Lead
6 6 (7.32%) Azure Data Engineer
6 6 (7.32%) Azure Engineer
6 6 (7.32%) Business Analyst
6 6 (7.32%) Data Scientist
7 5 (6.10%) DevOps Engineer
7 5 (6.10%) Lead Data Engineer
8 4 (4.88%) Snowflake Data Engineer
8 4 (4.88%) Snowflake Engineer
9 3 (3.66%) Developer
9 3 (3.66%) Hadoop Engineer
9 3 (3.66%) Python Data Engineer
9 3 (3.66%) Python Engineer
9 3 (3.66%) Security Analyst
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 15 (18.29%) PySpark
2 7 (8.54%) Kafka
3 6 (7.32%) RESTful
3 6 (7.32%) XGBoost
4 5 (6.10%) Flask
5 4 (4.88%) FHIR
5 4 (4.88%) HTML
5 4 (4.88%) Spark Streaming
6 2 (2.44%) JSON
6 2 (2.44%) LangChain
6 2 (2.44%) pytest
6 2 (2.44%) REST
7 1 (1.22%) Apache Avro
7 1 (1.22%) Django
7 1 (1.22%) OAuth
7 1 (1.22%) OAuth2
7 1 (1.22%) Pandas
7 1 (1.22%) Protocol Buffers
7 1 (1.22%) React
7 1 (1.22%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 8 (9.76%) Clustering
2 7 (8.54%) Cloud Native
3 5 (6.10%) NHS
4 4 (4.88%) Data Protection Act
5 3 (3.66%) Data Centre
5 3 (3.66%) Distributed Computing
5 3 (3.66%) Greenfield Project
6 2 (2.44%) Algorithms
6 2 (2.44%) Data Structures
6 2 (2.44%) Onboarding
7 1 (1.22%) AI Agents
7 1 (1.22%) Data Fabric
7 1 (1.22%) Enterprise Software
7 1 (1.22%) Freedom of Information
7 1 (1.22%) Hybrid Cloud
7 1 (1.22%) Legacy Systems
7 1 (1.22%) Life Science
7 1 (1.22%) Reinsurance
7 1 (1.22%) Replication
7 1 (1.22%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 3 (3.66%) Linux
2 1 (1.22%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 40 (48.78%) Analytics
2 39 (47.56%) Data Pipeline
3 36 (43.90%) CI/CD
3 36 (43.90%) ETL
4 31 (37.80%) Data Modelling
5 24 (29.27%) Data Science
6 21 (25.61%) Machine Learning
6 21 (25.61%) Problem-Solving
7 18 (21.95%) Agile
7 18 (21.95%) Business Intelligence
7 18 (21.95%) Continuous Improvement
7 18 (21.95%) DevOps
8 15 (18.29%) AI
8 15 (18.29%) Data Governance
9 12 (14.63%) Performance Tuning
10 10 (12.20%) Data Transformation
10 10 (12.20%) Infrastructure as Code
11 9 (10.98%) Containerisation
11 9 (10.98%) MLOps
12 8 (9.76%) Data Integration
Programming Languages
1 52 (63.41%) Python
2 41 (50.00%) SQL
3 8 (9.76%) PL/SQL
4 3 (3.66%) Bicep
4 3 (3.66%) Java
4 3 (3.66%) Shell Script
5 1 (1.22%) C#
5 1 (1.22%) Data Analysis Expressions
5 1 (1.22%) JavaScript
5 1 (1.22%) Scala
5 1 (1.22%) TypeScript
Qualifications
1 17 (20.73%) Security Cleared
2 15 (18.29%) SC Cleared
3 5 (6.10%) Degree
4 3 (3.66%) Computer Science Degree
4 3 (3.66%) Master's Degree
5 2 (2.44%) Azure Certification
6 1 (1.22%) AWS Certification
6 1 (1.22%) BPSS Clearance
6 1 (1.22%) CBAP
6 1 (1.22%) DV Cleared
6 1 (1.22%) Tableau Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 23 (28.05%) Data Quality
2 3 (3.66%) GDPR
3 2 (2.44%) Accessibility
3 2 (2.44%) HL7
4 1 (1.22%) GRC
4 1 (1.22%) HIPAA
4 1 (1.22%) NCSC
4 1 (1.22%) QA
System Software
1 18 (21.95%) Docker
2 3 (3.66%) HDFS
Systems Management
1 17 (20.73%) Kubernetes
1 17 (20.73%) Terraform
2 4 (4.88%) Prometheus
3 3 (3.66%) Ansible
3 3 (3.66%) Hadoop YARN
3 3 (3.66%) Puppet
4 2 (2.44%) Control-M
4 2 (2.44%) Grafana
Vendors
1 21 (25.61%) Databricks
2 9 (10.98%) Microsoft
3 2 (2.44%) Brio
3 2 (2.44%) Google
3 2 (2.44%) Oracle
3 2 (2.44%) Virgin Media
4 1 (1.22%) OpenAI
4 1 (1.22%) SnapLogic
4 1 (1.22%) Splunk