Data Engineer Contract Job Trends in London

Data Engineer
England > London

The median Data Engineer daily rate in London is £525, according to job vacancies posted in the 6 months leading up to 29 April 2026.

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

6 months to
29 Apr 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 48 64 77
Rank change year-on-year +16 +13 +16
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 800 460 501
As % of all contract jobs in London 4.53% 3.66% 2.83%
As % of the Job Titles category 4.88% 3.92% 3.03%
Number of daily rates quoted 580 348 409
10th Percentile £375 £400 £350
25th Percentile £456 £455 £438
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year - - -8.70%
75th Percentile £614 £638 £638
90th Percentile £725 £800 £700
England median daily rate £500 £500 £510
% change year-on-year - -1.96% -7.27%
Number of hourly rates quoted 3 8 9
10th Percentile £23.72 £48.25 £48.75
25th Percentile £30.30 £51.25 £49.25
Median hourly rate £42.50 £65.00 £51.75
Median % change year-on-year -34.62% +25.60% -19.14%
75th Percentile £49.75 £81.56 £61.75
90th Percentile £53.35 £93.75 £66.13
England median hourly rate £52.50 £65.00 £67.50
% change year-on-year -19.23% -3.70% +5.47%

All Contract IT Job Roles
London

For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all contract IT job vacancies in 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 London with a recognized job title 16,387 11,743 16,513
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.80% 93.49% 93.21%
Number of daily rates quoted 10,914 8,049 11,936
10th Percentile £350 £341 £325
25th Percentile £425 £431 £443
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -4.55% - -4.35%
75th Percentile £650 £675 £675
90th Percentile £752 £800 £788
England median daily rate £510 £525 £525
% change year-on-year -2.86% - -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 272 146 337
10th Percentile £18.75 £20.45 £16.01
25th Percentile £24.03 £24.30 £20.02
Median hourly rate £37.50 £35.00 £27.50
Median % change year-on-year +7.14% +27.27% -21.43%
75th Percentile £63.16 £50.75 £43.75
90th Percentile £76.58 £64.38 £65.00
England median hourly rate £46.50 £31.70 £35.83
% change year-on-year +46.69% -11.53% -20.38%

Data Engineer
Job Vacancy Trend in 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 London.

Data Engineer job vacancy trend in London

Data Engineer
Daily Rate Trend in London

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

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

Data Engineer
Daily Rate Histogram in London

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Data Engineer in London over the 6 months to 29 April 2026.

Daily rate histogram for Data Engineer in London

Data Engineer
Hourly Rate Trend in London

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

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

Data Engineer
Hourly Rate Histogram in London

Hourly rate distribution of jobs citing Data Engineer in London over the 6 months to 29 April 2026.

Hourly rate histogram for Data Engineer in London

Data Engineer
Contract Job Locations in 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 London region over the 6 months to 29 April 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
Central London +30 116 £550 +10.00% 30
West London +1 29 £603 +6.73% 2
South London -13 8 £500 +3.90% 1
East London -1 2 £425 -15.00% 4
Data Engineer
England

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

For the 6 months to 29 April 2026, 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 London region featuring Data Engineer in the job title.

1 461 (57.63%) SQL
2 454 (56.75%) Python
3 353 (44.13%) Data Pipeline
4 346 (43.25%) Azure
5 323 (40.38%) Data Engineering
6 321 (40.13%) ETL
7 303 (37.88%) Analytics
8 287 (35.88%) Data Modelling
9 258 (32.25%) AWS
10 241 (30.13%) Databricks
11 233 (29.13%) Data Quality
12 221 (27.63%) CI/CD
13 193 (24.13%) Security Cleared
14 180 (22.50%) DevOps
14 180 (22.50%) SC Cleared
15 172 (21.50%) Business Intelligence
16 169 (21.13%) Data Warehouse
17 159 (19.88%) Power Platform
18 149 (18.63%) Power BI
19 148 (18.50%) Data Governance
20 144 (18.00%) Agile
21 139 (17.38%) PySpark
22 136 (17.00%) Azure Data Factory
23 130 (16.25%) Terraform
24 121 (15.13%) Data Science
25 120 (15.00%) AI
26 119 (14.88%) Microsoft
27 118 (14.75%) Data Lake
28 106 (13.25%) Apache Airflow
29 105 (13.13%) Amazon S3

Data Engineer Skill Set
Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities in 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
1 106 (13.25%) Apache Airflow
2 103 (12.88%) Apache Spark
3 55 (6.88%) Apache
4 8 (1.00%) Confluence
4 8 (1.00%) Palantir Foundry
5 5 (0.63%) Jupyter
5 5 (0.63%) Microsoft Exchange
6 4 (0.50%) SAS
7 2 (0.25%) SharePoint
8 1 (0.13%) Appian
8 1 (0.13%) Camunda
8 1 (0.13%) Luigi
8 1 (0.13%) R Markdown
Applications
1 15 (1.88%) Microsoft Excel
2 3 (0.38%) Spreadsheet
3 2 (0.25%) Chatbot
Business Applications
1 2 (0.25%) Aladdin
1 2 (0.25%) BambooHR
1 2 (0.25%) SAP BPC
2 1 (0.13%) Actimize
2 1 (0.13%) Dynamics CRM
2 1 (0.13%) iTrent
2 1 (0.13%) Maximo
2 1 (0.13%) SAP Business ByDesign
2 1 (0.13%) SimCorp Dimension
Cloud Services
1 346 (43.25%) Azure
2 258 (32.25%) AWS
3 159 (19.88%) Power Platform
4 136 (17.00%) Azure Data Factory
5 105 (13.13%) Amazon S3
5 105 (13.13%) Snowflake
6 102 (12.75%) Azure Synapse Analytics
7 94 (11.75%) Azure DevOps
7 94 (11.75%) GCP
8 88 (11.00%) dbt
9 84 (10.50%) GitHub
10 67 (8.38%) Serverless
11 60 (7.50%) AWS Lambda
12 41 (5.13%) GitHub Actions
13 29 (3.63%) AWS CloudFormation
14 23 (2.88%) Amazon Kinesis
15 21 (2.63%) Dagster
16 18 (2.25%) AWS Step Functions
17 16 (2.00%) Amazon SQS
18 15 (1.88%) Collibra
Communications & Networking
1 3 (0.38%) SAN
2 2 (0.25%) Firewall
2 2 (0.25%) Structured Cabling
3 1 (0.13%) 4G
3 1 (0.13%) 5G
3 1 (0.13%) Network Security
3 1 (0.13%) Software-Defined Networking
Database & Business Intelligence
1 169 (21.13%) Data Warehouse
2 149 (18.63%) Power BI
3 118 (14.75%) Data Lake
4 83 (10.38%) SQL Server
5 67 (8.38%) BigQuery
6 61 (7.63%) Azure SQL Database
6 61 (7.63%) Delta Lake
7 57 (7.13%) Metadata
8 50 (6.25%) Tableau
9 46 (5.75%) Amazon Redshift
10 45 (5.63%) NoSQL
11 42 (5.25%) Snowflake Schema
12 40 (5.00%) Amazon Athena
13 39 (4.88%) Big Data
14 37 (4.63%) PostgreSQL
15 36 (4.50%) SQL Server Integration Services
16 26 (3.25%) Star Schema
17 24 (3.00%) Relational Database
18 23 (2.88%) MongoDB
19 21 (2.63%) Spark SQL
Development Applications
1 88 (11.00%) Git
2 26 (3.25%) JIRA
3 22 (2.75%) GitLab
4 19 (2.38%) Jenkins
5 16 (2.00%) MLflow
6 2 (0.25%) SonarQube
6 2 (0.25%) Sonatype Nexus
6 2 (0.25%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
7 1 (0.13%) Jaeger
7 1 (0.13%) Poetry
7 1 (0.13%) Selenium
7 1 (0.13%) Team Foundation Server
7 1 (0.13%) Terragrunt
General
1 188 (23.50%) Finance
2 119 (14.88%) Social Skills
3 96 (12.00%) Analytical Skills
4 52 (6.50%) Public Sector
5 46 (5.75%) Banking
6 26 (3.25%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 13 (1.63%) Telecoms
8 12 (1.50%) Pharmaceutical
9 11 (1.38%) Marketing
10 10 (1.25%) Front Office
10 10 (1.25%) Retail
11 9 (1.13%) Publishing
12 6 (0.75%) Documentation Skills
12 6 (0.75%) Investment Banking
13 5 (0.63%) Games
14 4 (0.50%) Back Office
14 4 (0.50%) Corporate Banking
15 3 (0.38%) Law
15 3 (0.38%) Manufacturing
15 3 (0.38%) Military
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 139 (17.38%) PySpark
2 83 (10.38%) Kafka
3 34 (4.25%) Pandas
4 23 (2.88%) YAML
5 22 (2.75%) Great Expectations
6 16 (2.00%) Spring
6 16 (2.00%) Spring Boot
7 14 (1.75%) REST
7 14 (1.75%) scikit-learn
8 12 (1.50%) Matplotlib
9 10 (1.25%) JSON
9 10 (1.25%) PyTorch
10 9 (1.13%) GeoJSON
10 9 (1.13%) NumPy
10 9 (1.13%) Polars
11 7 (0.88%) React
11 7 (0.88%) Spark Streaming
11 7 (0.88%) XML
12 6 (0.75%) HTML
12 6 (0.75%) TensorFlow
Miscellaneous
1 78 (9.75%) Cloud Native
2 24 (3.00%) Legacy Systems
3 19 (2.38%) Data Structures
3 19 (2.38%) Product Ownership
4 16 (2.00%) Greenfield Project
5 11 (1.38%) Distributed Systems
5 11 (1.38%) Onboarding
5 11 (1.38%) Reinsurance
6 9 (1.13%) Self-Motivation
7 8 (1.00%) Replication
8 7 (0.88%) Clustering
8 7 (0.88%) Life Science
8 7 (0.88%) Public Cloud
9 6 (0.75%) AI Agents
9 6 (0.75%) Derivative
9 6 (0.75%) NHS
10 5 (0.63%) Data Protection Act
10 5 (0.63%) Distributed Computing
10 5 (0.63%) Reference Data
10 5 (0.63%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 21 (2.63%) Linux
2 11 (1.38%) Unix
3 3 (0.38%) Windows
4 2 (0.25%) Windows Server
5 1 (0.13%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 353 (44.13%) Data Pipeline
2 323 (40.38%) Data Engineering
3 321 (40.13%) ETL
4 303 (37.88%) Analytics
5 287 (35.88%) Data Modelling
6 221 (27.63%) CI/CD
7 180 (22.50%) DevOps
8 172 (21.50%) Business Intelligence
9 148 (18.50%) Data Governance
10 144 (18.00%) Agile
11 121 (15.13%) Data Science
12 120 (15.00%) AI
13 101 (12.63%) Infrastructure as Code
14 100 (12.50%) Data Architecture
15 92 (11.50%) Migration
16 90 (11.25%) Problem-Solving
17 86 (10.75%) Validation
18 84 (10.50%) Machine Learning
19 76 (9.50%) Decision-Making
20 71 (8.88%) Data Transformation
Programming Languages
1 461 (57.63%) SQL
2 454 (56.75%) Python
3 76 (9.50%) Scala
4 69 (8.63%) Java
5 30 (3.75%) C#
6 24 (3.00%) Data Analysis Expressions
7 17 (2.13%) T-SQL
8 14 (1.75%) R
9 13 (1.63%) Bicep
10 11 (1.38%) JavaScript
11 10 (1.25%) Bash
11 10 (1.25%) Shell Script
12 9 (1.13%) PL/SQL
13 8 (1.00%) PowerShell
14 5 (0.63%) TypeScript
15 3 (0.38%) C
16 2 (0.25%) Korn
16 2 (0.25%) LookML
16 2 (0.25%) Ruby
16 2 (0.25%) VB
Qualifications
1 193 (24.13%) Security Cleared
2 180 (22.50%) SC Cleared
3 25 (3.13%) Azure Certification
3 25 (3.13%) Degree
4 17 (2.13%) BPSS Clearance
5 12 (1.50%) Computer Science Degree
6 10 (1.25%) AWS Certification
7 6 (0.75%) Microsoft Certification
8 5 (0.63%) DBS Check
9 4 (0.50%) DV Cleared
9 4 (0.50%) Master's Degree
10 3 (0.38%) CTC Cleared
10 3 (0.38%) SnowPro
11 1 (0.13%) BICSI Certification
11 1 (0.13%) CISA
11 1 (0.13%) CISM
11 1 (0.13%) CISSP
11 1 (0.13%) City & Guilds
11 1 (0.13%) Tableau Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 233 (29.13%) Data Quality
2 39 (4.88%) GDPR
3 26 (3.25%) QA
4 6 (0.75%) Accessibility
5 4 (0.50%) MiFID
6 3 (0.38%) SLA
7 2 (0.25%) EMIR
7 2 (0.25%) GMP
7 2 (0.25%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 1 (0.13%) GRC
8 1 (0.13%) GxP
8 1 (0.13%) HIPAA
8 1 (0.13%) PCI DSS
8 1 (0.13%) PMO
8 1 (0.13%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 1 (0.13%) SNOMED CT
8 1 (0.13%) WCAG
System Software
1 53 (6.63%) Docker
2 4 (0.50%) Virtual Machines
3 1 (0.13%) Active Directory
3 1 (0.13%) RACF
Systems Management
1 130 (16.25%) Terraform
2 37 (4.63%) Kubernetes
3 10 (1.25%) Grafana
4 4 (0.50%) Kibana
4 4 (0.50%) Kubeflow
5 2 (0.25%) Ansible
5 2 (0.25%) EMC NetWorker
5 2 (0.25%) Prometheus
5 2 (0.25%) Thomson Reuters DACS
5 2 (0.25%) Tivoli Storage Manager
Vendors
1 241 (30.13%) Databricks
2 119 (14.88%) Microsoft
3 44 (5.50%) Google
4 36 (4.50%) Informatica
5 28 (3.50%) Oracle
6 13 (1.63%) IBM
7 11 (1.38%) Foundry
7 11 (1.38%) SAP
8 9 (1.13%) Denodo
8 9 (1.13%) Palantir
8 9 (1.13%) ServiceNow
9 8 (1.00%) Talend
10 6 (0.75%) Cloudera
10 6 (0.75%) MuleSoft
11 5 (0.63%) Bloomberg
11 5 (0.63%) Splunk
12 4 (0.50%) Alteryx
12 4 (0.50%) Hortonworks
12 4 (0.50%) OpenAI
12 4 (0.50%) Salesforce