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 1 January 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
1 Jan 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 147 126 151
Rank change year-on-year -21 +25 +29
Contract jobs citing Data Engineering 74 41 39
As % of all contract jobs in the North of England 1.55% 1.17% 0.84%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 1.76% 1.34% 0.95%
Number of daily rates quoted 60 25 27
10th Percentile £343 £419 £420
25th Percentile £363 £431 £469
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £450 £550 £575
Median % change year-on-year -18.18% -4.35% -4.17%
75th Percentile £506 £613 £600
90th Percentile £553 £708 £624
England median daily rate £520 £573 £550
% change year-on-year -9.17% +4.09% -8.33%
Number of hourly rates quoted 1 3 1
Median hourly rate £74.26 £25.43 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +192.02% -60.88% -
England median hourly rate £74.26 £25.43 £53.65
% change year-on-year +192.02% -52.60% -28.46%

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 4,204 3,052 4,089
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the North of England 88.23% 87.18% 88.35%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,797 1,740 2,710
10th Percentile £220 £263 £293
25th Percentile £363 £381 £400
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £463 £475 £500
Median % change year-on-year -2.63% -5.00% -
75th Percentile £550 £575 £600
90th Percentile £644 £669 £675
England median daily rate £500 £525 £540
% change year-on-year -4.76% -2.78% -1.82%
Number of hourly rates quoted 257 144 199
10th Percentile £15.50 £15.07 £15.21
25th Percentile £19.75 £17.08 £17.72
Median hourly rate £29.60 £27.26 £30.05
Median % change year-on-year +8.60% -9.30% +33.56%
75th Percentile £55.00 £44.92 £46.18
90th Percentile £69.25 £66.98 £62.35
England median hourly rate £25.15 £35.00 £45.00
% change year-on-year -28.14% -22.22% +26.76%

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 1 January 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 1 January 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 -2 48 £440 -10.66% 53
Yorkshire -51 14 £500 -9.09% 24
North East 0 12 £425 -28.87% 14
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 22 (29.73%) Apache Airflow
2 9 (12.16%) Apache Spark
3 8 (10.81%) Apache
4 1 (1.35%) Confluence
Applications
1 3 (4.05%) Microsoft Excel
1 3 (4.05%) Microsoft PowerPoint
2 2 (2.70%) Chatbot
Cloud Services
1 30 (40.54%) Azure
2 28 (37.84%) AWS
3 15 (20.27%) GCP
4 13 (17.57%) dbt
5 11 (14.86%) Power Platform
6 9 (12.16%) Serverless
6 9 (12.16%) Snowflake
7 8 (10.81%) Azure Synapse Analytics
7 8 (10.81%) Prefect
8 7 (9.46%) AWS Lambda
9 6 (8.11%) Amazon S3
9 6 (8.11%) Amazon SageMaker
9 6 (8.11%) Azure DevOps
10 5 (6.76%) Amazon ECS
10 5 (6.76%) Azure Data Factory
10 5 (6.76%) GitHub
10 5 (6.76%) GitHub Actions
11 4 (5.41%) Amazon EC2
12 3 (4.05%) Amazon CloudWatch
12 3 (4.05%) AWS CloudFormation
Database & Business Intelligence
1 11 (14.86%) Data Lake
1 11 (14.86%) Data Warehouse
2 10 (13.51%) Power BI
3 8 (10.81%) Snowflake Schema
4 6 (8.11%) Big Data
4 6 (8.11%) BigQuery
5 5 (6.76%) Amazon Redshift
5 5 (6.76%) Azure SQL Database
6 4 (5.41%) Amazon RDS
6 4 (5.41%) Hadoop
6 4 (5.41%) NoSQL
7 3 (4.05%) Apache Hive
7 3 (4.05%) Delta Lake
7 3 (4.05%) HBase
7 3 (4.05%) Metadata
7 3 (4.05%) Spark SQL
8 2 (2.70%) DynamoDB
8 2 (2.70%) MongoDB
8 2 (2.70%) Tableau
9 1 (1.35%) Parquet
Development Applications
1 15 (20.27%) Git
2 6 (8.11%) GitLab
2 6 (8.11%) Jenkins
3 4 (5.41%) MLflow
4 3 (4.05%) JIRA
5 2 (2.70%) Visual Studio Code
General
1 17 (22.97%) Analytical Skills
1 17 (22.97%) Social Skills
2 12 (16.22%) Public Sector
3 7 (9.46%) Finance
4 3 (4.05%) Influencing Skills
4 3 (4.05%) Telecoms
5 2 (2.70%) Automotive
5 2 (2.70%) Health Technology
5 2 (2.70%) Manufacturing
6 1 (1.35%) Banking
6 1 (1.35%) Documentation Skills
6 1 (1.35%) Inclusion and Diversity
6 1 (1.35%) Legal
6 1 (1.35%) Pharmaceutical
6 1 (1.35%) Presentation Skills
Job Titles
1 45 (60.81%) Data Engineer
2 9 (12.16%) AWS Engineer
2 9 (12.16%) Senior
3 8 (10.81%) AWS Data Engineer
4 7 (9.46%) Analyst
4 7 (9.46%) Lead
4 7 (9.46%) Senior Data Engineer
5 6 (8.11%) Azure Data Engineer
5 6 (8.11%) Azure Engineer
6 5 (6.76%) Business Analyst
6 5 (6.76%) DevOps Engineer
6 5 (6.76%) Lead Data Engineer
7 4 (5.41%) Data Scientist
7 4 (5.41%) Snowflake Data Engineer
7 4 (5.41%) Snowflake Engineer
8 3 (4.05%) Architect
8 3 (4.05%) Data Architect
8 3 (4.05%) Hadoop Engineer
8 3 (4.05%) Python Data Engineer
8 3 (4.05%) Python Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 15 (20.27%) PySpark
2 6 (8.11%) RESTful
3 5 (6.76%) Flask
4 4 (5.41%) HTML
4 4 (5.41%) Kafka
4 4 (5.41%) Spark Streaming
4 4 (5.41%) XGBoost
5 3 (4.05%) FHIR
6 2 (2.70%) pytest
6 2 (2.70%) REST
7 1 (1.35%) .NET
7 1 (1.35%) Apache Beam
7 1 (1.35%) Django
7 1 (1.35%) Node.js
7 1 (1.35%) NumPy
7 1 (1.35%) OAuth
7 1 (1.35%) OAuth2
7 1 (1.35%) Pandas
7 1 (1.35%) React
7 1 (1.35%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 8 (10.81%) Cloud Native
1 8 (10.81%) Clustering
2 4 (5.41%) Data Protection Act
3 3 (4.05%) Algorithms
3 3 (4.05%) Data Centre
3 3 (4.05%) Data Structures
3 3 (4.05%) Greenfield Project
3 3 (4.05%) Legacy Systems
3 3 (4.05%) NHS
4 2 (2.70%) Data Fabric
4 2 (2.70%) Distributed Computing
4 2 (2.70%) Onboarding
5 1 (1.35%) Distributed Systems
5 1 (1.35%) Freedom of Information
5 1 (1.35%) Hybrid Cloud
5 1 (1.35%) Product Ownership
5 1 (1.35%) Reinsurance
5 1 (1.35%) Replication
Operating Systems
1 3 (4.05%) Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 34 (45.95%) Analytics
1 34 (45.95%) Data Pipeline
2 30 (40.54%) CI/CD
3 29 (39.19%) ETL
4 25 (33.78%) Data Modelling
5 20 (27.03%) Problem-Solving
6 19 (25.68%) Data Science
7 17 (22.97%) DevOps
8 16 (21.62%) Business Intelligence
8 16 (21.62%) Machine Learning
9 15 (20.27%) Agile
9 15 (20.27%) Continuous Improvement
10 14 (18.92%) AI
11 12 (16.22%) Data Governance
12 10 (13.51%) Data Architecture
12 10 (13.51%) Data Transformation
12 10 (13.51%) Infrastructure as Code
13 9 (12.16%) Data Integration
13 9 (12.16%) Performance Tuning
14 8 (10.81%) Resource Management
Programming Languages
1 44 (59.46%) Python
2 39 (52.70%) SQL
3 8 (10.81%) PL/SQL
4 3 (4.05%) Bicep
4 3 (4.05%) Java
4 3 (4.05%) Shell Script
5 1 (1.35%) C#
5 1 (1.35%) Data Analysis Expressions
5 1 (1.35%) JavaScript
5 1 (1.35%) Scala
5 1 (1.35%) TypeScript
Qualifications
1 12 (16.22%) Security Cleared
2 11 (14.86%) SC Cleared
3 3 (4.05%) Degree
4 2 (2.70%) AWS Certification
4 2 (2.70%) Azure Certification
4 2 (2.70%) Computer Science Degree
4 2 (2.70%) Master's Degree
5 1 (1.35%) BPSS Clearance
5 1 (1.35%) CBAP
5 1 (1.35%) DV Cleared
5 1 (1.35%) Tableau Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 22 (29.73%) Data Quality
2 3 (4.05%) GDPR
3 2 (2.70%) Accessibility
3 2 (2.70%) QA
4 1 (1.35%) GMP
4 1 (1.35%) HIPAA
4 1 (1.35%) HL7
4 1 (1.35%) NCSC
System Software
1 16 (21.62%) Docker
2 3 (4.05%) HDFS
Systems Management
1 17 (22.97%) Terraform
2 14 (18.92%) Kubernetes
3 3 (4.05%) Ansible
3 3 (4.05%) Hadoop YARN
3 3 (4.05%) Prometheus
3 3 (4.05%) Puppet
4 2 (2.70%) Control-M
4 2 (2.70%) Grafana
Vendors
1 21 (28.38%) Databricks
2 10 (13.51%) Microsoft
3 5 (6.76%) Google
4 2 (2.70%) Brio
4 2 (2.70%) Hitachi
4 2 (2.70%) Oracle
4 2 (2.70%) Virgin Media
5 1 (1.35%) OpenAI
5 1 (1.35%) SnapLogic