Data Engineer Contract Job Trends in the Thames Valley

Data Engineer
South East > Thames Valley

The median Data Engineer daily rate in the Thames Valley is £525, according to job vacancies posted in the 6 months leading up to 20 September 2025.

The table below provides contractor rate benchmarking and summary statistics, comparing them to the same period in the previous two years.

6 months to
20 Sep 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 91 89 101
Rank change year-on-year -2 +12 +49
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 22 37 45
As % of all contract jobs advertised in the Thames Valley 1.34% 1.65% 1.61%
As % of the Job Titles category 1.48% 1.81% 1.71%
Number of daily rates quoted 14 18 39
10th Percentile £411 £173 £405
25th Percentile £413 £248 £466
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £538 £525
Median % change year-on-year -2.33% +2.38% -4.55%
75th Percentile £573 £634 £614
90th Percentile £663 £660 £643
South East median daily rate £481 £525 £525
% change year-on-year -8.33% - -

All Contract IT Job Vacancies
Thames Valley

For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all contract IT job vacancies in the Thames Valley. Most job vacancies include a discernible job title that can be normalized. As such, the figures in the second row provide an indication of the number of contract jobs in our overall sample.

Contract vacancies in the Thames Valley with a recognized job title 1,488 2,044 2,639
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 90.90% 91.33% 94.52%
Number of daily rates quoted 933 1,156 1,775
10th Percentile £250 £256 £250
25th Percentile £381 £406 £400
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £505 £500
Median % change year-on-year -0.89% +0.90% -
75th Percentile £588 £608 £615
90th Percentile £650 £686 £700
South East median daily rate £500 £510 £500
% change year-on-year -1.96% +2.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 84 101 96
10th Percentile £14.20 £18.50 £16.25
25th Percentile £15.12 £27.50 £20.56
Median hourly rate £25.15 £58.49 £49.07
Median % change year-on-year -57.00% +19.21% +181.50%
75th Percentile £56.88 £70.39 £66.00
90th Percentile £87.43 £90.00 £74.90
South East median hourly rate £25.15 £57.50 £51.42
% change year-on-year -56.26% +11.82% +114.25%

Data Engineer
Job Vacancy Trend in the Thames Valley

Job postings that featured Data Engineer in the job title as a proportion of all IT jobs advertised in the Thames Valley.

Job vacancy trend for Data Engineer in the Thames Valley

Data Engineer
Daily Rate Trend in the Thames Valley

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for Data Engineer job vacancies in the Thames Valley.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for Data Engineer job vacancies in the Thames Valley

Data Engineer
Daily Rate Histogram in the Thames Valley

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Data Engineer in the Thames Valley over the 6 months to 20 September 2025.

Daily rate histogram for Data Engineer in the Thames Valley

Data Engineer
Hourly Rate Trend in the Thames Valley

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for Data Engineer job vacancies in the Thames Valley.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for Data Engineer job vacancies in the Thames Valley

Data Engineer
Contract Job Locations in the Thames Valley

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing Data Engineer within the Thames Valley region over the 6 months to 20 September 2025. 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
Berkshire +6 18 £475 -20.83% 20
Buckinghamshire +5 4 £555 +0.91% 2
Data Engineer
South East

Data Engineer Skill Set
Top 30 Co-occurring Skills and Capabilities in the Thames Valley

For the 6 months to 20 September 2025, Data Engineer contract job roles required the following skills and capabilities in order of popularity. The figures indicate the absolute number co-occurrences and as a proportion of all contract job ads across the Thames Valley region featuring Data Engineer in the job title.

1 14 (63.64%) Python
2 11 (50.00%) AWS
3 9 (40.91%) Social Skills
3 9 (40.91%) CI/CD
4 8 (36.36%) Data Pipeline
4 8 (36.36%) Azure
4 8 (36.36%) SQL
5 7 (31.82%) Platform Engineering
6 6 (27.27%) dbt
6 6 (27.27%) Data Engineering
6 6 (27.27%) AWS Lambda
6 6 (27.27%) Terraform
6 6 (27.27%) Apache Airflow
6 6 (27.27%) Databricks
6 6 (27.27%) Serverless
6 6 (27.27%) Infrastructure as Code
6 6 (27.27%) Kafka
6 6 (27.27%) Amazon Redshift
6 6 (27.27%) High Availability
6 6 (27.27%) Data Modelling
6 6 (27.27%) ETL
7 5 (22.73%) IBM
7 5 (22.73%) Shell Script
7 5 (22.73%) Unix
7 5 (22.73%) Linux
7 5 (22.73%) Data Warehouse
7 5 (22.73%) Replication
7 5 (22.73%) Performance Tuning
7 5 (22.73%) Jenkins
7 5 (22.73%) Amazon RDS

Data Engineer Skill Set
Co-occurring Skills and Capabilities in the Thames Valley by Category

The follow tables expand on the table above by listing co-occurrences grouped by category. The same employment type, locality and period is covered with up to 20 co-occurrences shown in each of the following categories:

Application Platforms
1 6 (27.27%) Apache Airflow
2 2 (9.09%) SharePoint
3 1 (4.55%) Apache Spark
Applications
1 2 (9.09%) Windchill
Cloud Services
1 11 (50.00%) AWS
2 8 (36.36%) Azure
3 6 (27.27%) AWS Lambda
3 6 (27.27%) dbt
3 6 (27.27%) Serverless
4 5 (22.73%) AWS CloudFormation
4 5 (22.73%) GCP
4 5 (22.73%) OCI
5 4 (18.18%) Cloud Computing
5 4 (18.18%) Power Platform
6 2 (9.09%) Entra ID
6 2 (9.09%) Fivetran
6 2 (9.09%) PaaS
6 2 (9.09%) Snowflake
7 1 (4.55%) AWS Step Functions
7 1 (4.55%) Azure Data Factory
7 1 (4.55%) Azure DevOps
7 1 (4.55%) Azure Synapse Analytics
7 1 (4.55%) GitHub
7 1 (4.55%) GitHub Actions
Database & Business Intelligence
1 6 (27.27%) Amazon Redshift
2 5 (22.73%) Amazon RDS
2 5 (22.73%) Couchbase
2 5 (22.73%) Data Warehouse
2 5 (22.73%) NoSQL
3 4 (18.18%) Power BI
3 4 (18.18%) Relational Database
3 4 (18.18%) Tableau
4 3 (13.64%) Big Data
5 1 (4.55%) Amazon Athena
5 1 (4.55%) Delta Lake
Development Applications
1 5 (22.73%) Jenkins
2 1 (4.55%) Bitbucket
General
1 9 (40.91%) Social Skills
2 4 (18.18%) Analytical Skills
2 4 (18.18%) Telecoms
3 2 (9.09%) Finance
4 1 (4.55%) Aerospace
4 1 (4.55%) Public Sector
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 6 (27.27%) Kafka
2 5 (22.73%) PySpark
3 1 (4.55%) JSON
3 1 (4.55%) OpenTelemetry
3 1 (4.55%) XML
Miscellaneous
1 5 (22.73%) Replication
2 2 (9.09%) Distributed Architecture
2 2 (9.09%) Distributed Systems
3 1 (4.55%) Data Protection Act
3 1 (4.55%) Onboarding
Operating Systems
1 5 (22.73%) Linux
1 5 (22.73%) Unix
Processes & Methodologies
1 9 (40.91%) CI/CD
2 8 (36.36%) Data Pipeline
3 7 (31.82%) Platform Engineering
4 6 (27.27%) Data Engineering
4 6 (27.27%) Data Modelling
4 6 (27.27%) ETL
4 6 (27.27%) High Availability
4 6 (27.27%) Infrastructure as Code
5 5 (22.73%) Data Transformation
5 5 (22.73%) Performance Tuning
5 5 (22.73%) Problem-Solving
5 5 (22.73%) Security Patching
6 4 (18.18%) Actionable Insight
6 4 (18.18%) Business Intelligence
6 4 (18.18%) Data Management
6 4 (18.18%) Decision-Making
6 4 (18.18%) Validation
6 4 (18.18%) Visualisation
6 4 (18.18%) WFM
6 4 (18.18%) Workflow
Programming Languages
1 14 (63.64%) Python
2 8 (36.36%) SQL
3 5 (22.73%) Shell Script
4 2 (9.09%) Scala
5 1 (4.55%) Java
5 1 (4.55%) TypeScript
Qualifications
1 4 (18.18%) Degree
1 4 (18.18%) Master's Degree
1 4 (18.18%) SC Cleared
1 4 (18.18%) Security Cleared
2 2 (9.09%) AWS Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 5 (22.73%) Data Quality
2 1 (4.55%) GDPR
System Software
1 2 (9.09%) Active Directory
Systems Management
1 6 (27.27%) Terraform
Vendors
1 6 (27.27%) Databricks
2 5 (22.73%) Confluent
2 5 (22.73%) IBM
3 1 (4.55%) Foundry
3 1 (4.55%) Oracle
3 1 (4.55%) Palantir
3 1 (4.55%) Virgin Media