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 15 March 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
15 Mar 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 124 124 146
Rank change year-on-year 0 +22 +20
Contract jobs citing Data Engineering 108 38 40
As % of all contract jobs in the North of England 1.91% 1.16% 0.82%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 2.21% 1.30% 0.95%
Number of daily rates quoted 86 21 33
10th Percentile £345 £413 £425
25th Percentile £413 £419 £438
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £458 £500 £520
Median % change year-on-year -8.50% -3.85% -13.33%
75th Percentile £524 £638 £615
90th Percentile £584 £700 £633
England median daily rate £525 £550 £550
% change year-on-year -4.55% - -8.33%
Number of hourly rates quoted 7 5 1
10th Percentile £53.00 £22.59 -
25th Percentile £65.00 £22.72 £66.25
Median hourly rate £70.00 £25.43 £67.50
Median % change year-on-year +175.27% -62.33% +92.86%
75th Percentile £82.50 £28.75 £68.75
90th Percentile £90.00 £29.50 -
England median hourly rate £70.00 £25.43 £35.00
% change year-on-year +175.27% -27.34% -

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 4,881 2,934 4,213
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the North of England 86.25% 89.78% 86.19%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,165 1,838 2,618
10th Percentile £259 £263 £279
25th Percentile £380 £375 £400
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £475 £475 £493
Median % change year-on-year - -3.65% -1.40%
75th Percentile £556 £575 £575
90th Percentile £650 £650 £671
England median daily rate £505 £525 £525
% change year-on-year -3.81% - -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 308 155 368
10th Percentile £15.50 £15.09 £11.05
25th Percentile £22.63 £20.60 £12.81
Median hourly rate £45.00 £28.75 £18.00
Median % change year-on-year +56.52% +59.72% -38.25%
75th Percentile £66.25 £50.00 £44.74
90th Percentile £74.26 £79.35 £53.07
England median hourly rate £30.50 £34.06 £32.50
% change year-on-year -10.44% +4.78% -12.16%

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 15 March 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
Hourly Rate Histogram in the North of England

Hourly rate distribution of jobs citing Data Engineering in the North of England over the 6 months to 15 March 2026.

Hourly rate histogram for Data Engineering in the North of England

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 15 March 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 -1 51 £450 -2.70% 45
Yorkshire -34 36 £475 -20.83% 42
North East +8 21 £450 -10.00% 12
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 25 (23.15%) Apache Spark
2 17 (15.74%) Apache Airflow
3 9 (8.33%) Apache
4 1 (0.93%) Confluence
Applications
1 3 (2.78%) Microsoft Excel
1 3 (2.78%) Microsoft PowerPoint
2 1 (0.93%) Chatbot
Cloud Services
1 41 (37.96%) Azure
2 38 (35.19%) AWS
3 18 (16.67%) GCP
4 17 (15.74%) dbt
4 17 (15.74%) Power Platform
5 14 (12.96%) Azure Data Factory
6 13 (12.04%) OpenShift
7 11 (10.19%) Serverless
8 10 (9.26%) Azure Synapse Analytics
9 9 (8.33%) Amazon S3
9 9 (8.33%) Snowflake
10 8 (7.41%) AWS Lambda
10 8 (7.41%) Azure DevOps
11 6 (5.56%) Prefect
12 5 (4.63%) Amazon EC2
13 4 (3.70%) Amazon SageMaker
13 4 (3.70%) GitHub
13 4 (3.70%) GitHub Actions
14 3 (2.78%) Amazon ECS
14 3 (2.78%) AWS CloudFormation
Database & Business Intelligence
1 22 (20.37%) Data Warehouse
2 15 (13.89%) Data Lake
2 15 (13.89%) Hadoop
3 12 (11.11%) Big Data
3 12 (11.11%) NoSQL
3 12 (11.11%) Power BI
4 10 (9.26%) Delta Lake
5 6 (5.56%) Data Vault
6 5 (4.63%) Amazon RDS
6 5 (4.63%) Amazon Redshift
6 5 (4.63%) Snowflake Schema
6 5 (4.63%) SQL Server
7 4 (3.70%) Azure SQL Database
7 4 (3.70%) Metadata
7 4 (3.70%) Spark SQL
8 3 (2.78%) BigQuery
8 3 (2.78%) MySQL
9 2 (1.85%) DynamoDB
9 2 (1.85%) Enterprise Data Warehouse
9 2 (1.85%) Relational Database
Development Applications
1 16 (14.81%) Git
2 5 (4.63%) GitLab
2 5 (4.63%) Jenkins
3 3 (2.78%) MLflow
4 2 (1.85%) JIRA
5 1 (0.93%) Visual Studio
General
1 31 (28.70%) Social Skills
2 24 (22.22%) Analytical Skills
3 19 (17.59%) Public Sector
4 8 (7.41%) Documentation Skills
4 8 (7.41%) Finance
5 3 (2.78%) Influencing Skills
6 2 (1.85%) Banking
6 2 (1.85%) Health Technology
6 2 (1.85%) Inclusion and Diversity
6 2 (1.85%) Manufacturing
7 1 (0.93%) Advertising
7 1 (0.93%) Law
7 1 (0.93%) Retail
7 1 (0.93%) Retail Banking
Job Titles
1 72 (66.67%) Data Engineer
2 19 (17.59%) Lead
3 12 (11.11%) Lead Data Engineer
4 11 (10.19%) Senior
5 8 (7.41%) Senior Data Engineer
6 7 (6.48%) AWS Engineer
7 6 (5.56%) Analyst
7 6 (5.56%) AWS Data Engineer
8 5 (4.63%) Azure Engineer
8 5 (4.63%) Business Analyst
8 5 (4.63%) Data Scientist
8 5 (4.63%) DevOps Engineer
8 5 (4.63%) Python Data Engineer
8 5 (4.63%) Python Engineer
9 4 (3.70%) Azure Data Engineer
10 3 (2.78%) Consultant
10 3 (2.78%) Hadoop Engineer
10 3 (2.78%) Lead Consultant
10 3 (2.78%) Snowflake Data Engineer
10 3 (2.78%) Snowflake Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 26 (24.07%) Kafka
2 14 (12.96%) PySpark
3 7 (6.48%) Apache Avro
3 7 (6.48%) JSON
3 7 (6.48%) OpenTelemetry
3 7 (6.48%) Protocol Buffers
4 5 (4.63%) XGBoost
5 4 (3.70%) FHIR
5 4 (3.70%) RESTful
6 3 (2.78%) Flask
6 3 (2.78%) Pandas
7 2 (1.85%) HTML
7 2 (1.85%) LangChain
7 2 (1.85%) REST
8 1 (0.93%) .NET
8 1 (0.93%) ARM Templates
8 1 (0.93%) FastAPI
8 1 (0.93%) JWT
8 1 (0.93%) PyArrow
8 1 (0.93%) PyTorch
Miscellaneous
1 7 (6.48%) Cloud Native
2 6 (5.56%) Clustering
2 6 (5.56%) Hybrid Cloud
3 5 (4.63%) NHS
4 4 (3.70%) Data Protection Act
5 3 (2.78%) Distributed Computing
5 3 (2.78%) Greenfield Project
5 3 (2.78%) Legacy Systems
5 3 (2.78%) Product Ownership
6 2 (1.85%) Algorithms
6 2 (1.85%) Data Structures
6 2 (1.85%) Reinsurance
7 1 (0.93%) AI Agents
7 1 (0.93%) Analytical Mindset
7 1 (0.93%) Enterprise Software
7 1 (0.93%) Life Science
7 1 (0.93%) Management Information System
7 1 (0.93%) Replication
7 1 (0.93%) Self-Motivation
7 1 (0.93%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 1 (0.93%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 62 (57.41%) Analytics
2 58 (53.70%) Data Pipeline
3 55 (50.93%) ETL
4 46 (42.59%) CI/CD
5 44 (40.74%) Data Modelling
6 35 (32.41%) Problem-Solving
7 30 (27.78%) Agile
8 26 (24.07%) Business Intelligence
9 25 (23.15%) Data Governance
10 22 (20.37%) Data Science
10 22 (20.37%) DevOps
10 22 (20.37%) Machine Learning
11 16 (14.81%) AI
11 16 (14.81%) Continuous Improvement
12 14 (12.96%) Performance Tuning
12 14 (12.96%) Site Reliability Engineering
13 12 (11.11%) Data Integration
13 12 (11.11%) Observability
14 11 (10.19%) Validation
15 9 (8.33%) Scrum
Programming Languages
1 67 (62.04%) Python
2 54 (50.00%) SQL
3 6 (5.56%) PL/SQL
4 3 (2.78%) Bicep
4 3 (2.78%) Java
4 3 (2.78%) JavaScript
5 2 (1.85%) Data Analysis Expressions
6 1 (0.93%) C#
6 1 (0.93%) TypeScript
Qualifications
1 23 (21.30%) Security Cleared
2 18 (16.67%) SC Cleared
3 6 (5.56%) BPSS Clearance
3 6 (5.56%) Degree
4 3 (2.78%) Master's Degree
5 2 (1.85%) Computer Science Degree
6 1 (0.93%) AWS Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 29 (26.85%) Data Quality
2 5 (4.63%) GDPR
3 2 (1.85%) HL7
4 1 (0.93%) Accessibility
4 1 (0.93%) GRC
4 1 (0.93%) HIPAA
4 1 (0.93%) NCSC
4 1 (0.93%) Solvency II
System Software
1 13 (12.04%) Docker
Systems Management
1 20 (18.52%) Kubernetes
2 16 (14.81%) Terraform
3 10 (9.26%) Prometheus
4 2 (1.85%) Grafana
Vendors
1 25 (23.15%) Databricks
2 15 (13.89%) Splunk
3 12 (11.11%) Microsoft
4 2 (1.85%) Brio
5 1 (0.93%) Google
5 1 (0.93%) Informatica
5 1 (0.93%) Oracle
5 1 (0.93%) SnapLogic
5 1 (0.93%) Talend