Data Engineer Contract Job Trends in Central London

Data Engineer
London > Central London

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

The table below compares current contractor rates and summary statistics with the previous two years.

6 months to
20 Dec 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 69 83 73
Rank change year-on-year +14 -10 +35
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 63 52 76
As % of all contract jobs in Central London 3.14% 2.22% 2.79%
As % of the Job Titles category 3.36% 2.40% 2.96%
Number of daily rates quoted 51 31 64
10th Percentile £325 £463 £393
25th Percentile £413 £512 £472
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £575 £570
Median % change year-on-year -8.70% +0.88% +3.64%
75th Percentile £613 £638 £666
90th Percentile £700 £738 £796
London median daily rate £525 £575 £550
% change year-on-year -8.70% +4.55% -4.35%

All Contract IT Job Vacancies
Central London

For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all contract IT job vacancies in Central London. 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 Central London with a recognized job title 1,876 2,168 2,571
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 93.43% 92.73% 94.38%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,303 1,369 1,855
10th Percentile £329 £363 £340
25th Percentile £425 £463 £456
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £575 £570
Median % change year-on-year -4.35% +0.88% -0.87%
75th Percentile £675 £675 £688
90th Percentile £763 £775 £800
London median daily rate £530 £550 £563
% change year-on-year -3.64% -2.22% -3.02%
Number of hourly rates quoted 27 25 20
10th Percentile £19.42 £19.66 £17.00
25th Percentile £25.47 £31.25 £20.67
Median hourly rate £26.50 £35.00 £24.99
Median % change year-on-year -24.29% +40.08% -23.12%
75th Percentile £35.75 £61.25 £47.25
90th Percentile £50.00 £112.00 £65.88
London median hourly rate £29.65 £35.00 £35.00
% change year-on-year -15.30% - -

Data Engineer
Job Vacancy Trend in Central London

Historical trend showing the proportion of contract IT job postings featuring 'Data Engineer' in the job title relative to all contract IT jobs advertised in Central London.

Data Engineer job vacancy trend in Central London

Data Engineer
Daily Rate Trend in Central London

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for Data Engineer job vacancies in Central London.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for Data Engineer job vacancies in Central London

Data Engineer
Daily Rate Histogram in Central London

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Data Engineer in Central London over the 6 months to 20 December 2025.

Daily rate histogram for Data Engineer in Central London

Data Engineer
Hourly Rate Trend in Central London

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for Data Engineer job vacancies in Central London.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for Data Engineer job vacancies in Central London

Data Engineer
Contract Job Locations in Central London

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 Central London region over the 6 months to 20 December 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
City of London +1 59 £525 -8.70% 18
Data Engineer
London

Data Engineer Skill Set
Top 30 Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities in Central London

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

1 35 (55.56%) Python
1 35 (55.56%) SQL
2 32 (50.79%) Data Pipeline
3 30 (47.62%) Azure
4 28 (44.44%) ETL
5 26 (41.27%) AWS
6 25 (39.68%) Databricks
7 22 (34.92%) Data Quality
8 20 (31.75%) Data Engineering
8 20 (31.75%) Data Modelling
9 18 (28.57%) Analytics
9 18 (28.57%) CI/CD
10 16 (25.40%) Data Warehouse
11 15 (23.81%) Security Cleared
12 13 (20.63%) Business Intelligence
12 13 (20.63%) Data Science
13 12 (19.05%) Apache Airflow
13 12 (19.05%) Data Governance
13 12 (19.05%) SC Cleared
13 12 (19.05%) Snowflake
14 11 (17.46%) DevOps
14 11 (17.46%) Power BI
14 11 (17.46%) Power Platform
14 11 (17.46%) PySpark
15 10 (15.87%) Azure Synapse Analytics
15 10 (15.87%) Data Lake
15 10 (15.87%) Data Transformation
15 10 (15.87%) Microsoft
16 9 (14.29%) Amazon S3
16 9 (14.29%) dbt

Data Engineer Skill Set
Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities in Central London 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 12 (19.05%) Apache Airflow
2 6 (9.52%) Apache
3 5 (7.94%) Apache Spark
4 1 (1.59%) Confluence
4 1 (1.59%) Oracle SOA Suite
4 1 (1.59%) SAS
Applications
1 2 (3.17%) Microsoft Excel
2 1 (1.59%) Microsoft Office
2 1 (1.59%) Microsoft PowerPoint
Business Applications
1 1 (1.59%) Aladdin
1 1 (1.59%) Maximo
1 1 (1.59%) Oracle BPM
Cloud Services
1 30 (47.62%) Azure
2 26 (41.27%) AWS
3 12 (19.05%) Snowflake
4 11 (17.46%) Power Platform
5 10 (15.87%) Azure Synapse Analytics
6 9 (14.29%) Amazon S3
6 9 (14.29%) dbt
7 8 (12.70%) Azure Data Factory
8 7 (11.11%) GCP
9 5 (7.94%) Serverless
10 4 (6.35%) AWS Lambda
10 4 (6.35%) Azure DevOps
11 3 (4.76%) GitHub
12 2 (3.17%) Dagster
12 2 (3.17%) GitHub Actions
12 2 (3.17%) Microsoft Purview
12 2 (3.17%) Prefect
13 1 (1.59%) ChatGPT
13 1 (1.59%) Collibra
13 1 (1.59%) GitHub Copilot
Communications & Networking
1 1 (1.59%) Software-Defined Networking
Database & Business Intelligence
1 16 (25.40%) Data Warehouse
2 11 (17.46%) Power BI
3 10 (15.87%) Data Lake
4 5 (7.94%) Amazon QuickSight
4 5 (7.94%) Delta Lake
4 5 (7.94%) Relational Database
5 4 (6.35%) Amazon Athena
5 4 (6.35%) Amazon Redshift
5 4 (6.35%) DataStage
5 4 (6.35%) Metadata
5 4 (6.35%) PostgreSQL
5 4 (6.35%) Snowflake Schema
6 3 (4.76%) SQL Server
6 3 (4.76%) Tableau
7 2 (3.17%) Apache Iceberg
7 2 (3.17%) Azure SQL Database
7 2 (3.17%) Big Data
7 2 (3.17%) Star Schema
8 1 (1.59%) MySQL
8 1 (1.59%) PowerCenter
Development Applications
1 9 (14.29%) Git
2 3 (4.76%) Jenkins
3 2 (3.17%) JIRA
3 2 (3.17%) MLflow
4 1 (1.59%) Bitbucket
4 1 (1.59%) Jaeger
General
1 19 (30.16%) Finance
2 13 (20.63%) Social Skills
3 6 (9.52%) Banking
4 5 (7.94%) Analytical Skills
4 5 (7.94%) Front Office
4 5 (7.94%) Public Sector
5 4 (6.35%) Back Office
5 4 (6.35%) Inclusion and Diversity
5 4 (6.35%) Investment Banking
6 2 (3.17%) Law
7 1 (1.59%) Documentation Skills
7 1 (1.59%) Games
7 1 (1.59%) International Banking
7 1 (1.59%) Manufacturing
7 1 (1.59%) Organisational Skills
7 1 (1.59%) Pharmaceutical
7 1 (1.59%) Retail
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 11 (17.46%) PySpark
2 5 (7.94%) XML
3 2 (3.17%) JSON
3 2 (3.17%) Kafka
4 1 (1.59%) ActiveMQ
4 1 (1.59%) ADO
4 1 (1.59%) AWS CDK
4 1 (1.59%) EDI
4 1 (1.59%) LangChain
4 1 (1.59%) Loki
4 1 (1.59%) Middleware
4 1 (1.59%) OpenTelemetry
4 1 (1.59%) PyTorch
4 1 (1.59%) XSLT
4 1 (1.59%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 5 (7.94%) Cloud Native
2 2 (3.17%) Data Structures
2 2 (3.17%) Derivative
2 2 (3.17%) Equities
2 2 (3.17%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
3 1 (1.59%) AI Agents
3 1 (1.59%) Distributed Computing
3 1 (1.59%) Enterprise Software
3 1 (1.59%) Greenfield Project
3 1 (1.59%) Hedge funds
3 1 (1.59%) IoT
3 1 (1.59%) Legacy Systems
3 1 (1.59%) Media Streaming
3 1 (1.59%) Onboarding
3 1 (1.59%) Online Games
3 1 (1.59%) Product Ownership
3 1 (1.59%) Replication
3 1 (1.59%) Taxonomies
Operating Systems
1 1 (1.59%) Linux
1 1 (1.59%) Unix
1 1 (1.59%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 32 (50.79%) Data Pipeline
2 28 (44.44%) ETL
3 20 (31.75%) Data Engineering
3 20 (31.75%) Data Modelling
4 18 (28.57%) Analytics
4 18 (28.57%) CI/CD
5 13 (20.63%) Business Intelligence
5 13 (20.63%) Data Science
6 12 (19.05%) Data Governance
7 11 (17.46%) DevOps
8 10 (15.87%) Data Transformation
9 8 (12.70%) Data Integration
10 7 (11.11%) Agile
10 7 (11.11%) Machine Learning
10 7 (11.11%) Performance Tuning
10 7 (11.11%) Problem-Solving
11 6 (9.52%) AI
11 6 (9.52%) Asset Management
11 6 (9.52%) Computer Science
11 6 (9.52%) Migration
Programming Languages
1 35 (55.56%) Python
1 35 (55.56%) SQL
2 6 (9.52%) Scala
3 4 (6.35%) Java
4 2 (3.17%) T-SQL
5 1 (1.59%) Data Analysis Expressions
5 1 (1.59%) Go
5 1 (1.59%) JavaScript
5 1 (1.59%) PL/SQL
Qualifications
1 15 (23.81%) Security Cleared
2 12 (19.05%) SC Cleared
3 6 (9.52%) Degree
4 4 (6.35%) Computer Science Degree
5 2 (3.17%) AWS Certification
5 2 (3.17%) Master's Degree
5 2 (3.17%) SnowPro
6 1 (1.59%) BPSS Clearance
6 1 (1.59%) DBS Check
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 22 (34.92%) Data Quality
2 1 (1.59%) Accessibility
2 1 (1.59%) Dodd-Frank
2 1 (1.59%) EMIR
2 1 (1.59%) GDPR
2 1 (1.59%) MiFID
2 1 (1.59%) NIST
System Software
1 1 (1.59%) Docker
Systems Management
1 6 (9.52%) Terraform
2 3 (4.76%) Kubernetes
3 1 (1.59%) Ambari
3 1 (1.59%) Grafana
3 1 (1.59%) Prometheus
3 1 (1.59%) Puppet
3 1 (1.59%) ZABBIX
Vendors
1 25 (39.68%) Databricks
2 10 (15.87%) Microsoft
3 2 (3.17%) Oracle
3 2 (3.17%) Palantir
4 1 (1.59%) Foundry
4 1 (1.59%) IBM
4 1 (1.59%) Informatica
4 1 (1.59%) Splunk
4 1 (1.59%) Teradata
4 1 (1.59%) Virgin Media
4 1 (1.59%) Workday