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 10 August 2026.

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

6 months to
10 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 54 95 84
Rank change year-on-year +41 -11 +5
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 853 395 459
As % of all contract jobs in London 4.23% 2.89% 2.84%
As % of the Job Titles category 4.55% 3.11% 3.01%
Number of daily rates quoted 633 291 346
10th Percentile £392 £400 £375
25th Percentile £450 £450 £469
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year - -4.55% -4.35%
75th Percentile £625 £600 £650
90th Percentile £712 £700 £750
England median daily rate £500 £500 £525
% change year-on-year - -4.76% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 7 7 3
10th Percentile £25.74 £42.25 -
25th Percentile £30.00 £46.75 £49.25
Median hourly rate £34.84 £52.50 £50.50
Median % change year-on-year -33.64% +3.96% -21.71%
75th Percentile £39.30 £58.13 £51.75
90th Percentile £55.75 £81.50 -
England median hourly rate £43.75 £52.50 £80.00
% change year-on-year -16.67% -34.38% +23.08%

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 18,760 12,713 15,236
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 93.12% 92.97% 94.14%
Number of daily rates quoted 12,229 8,604 10,759
10th Percentile £363 £325 £350
25th Percentile £450 £425 £450
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £545 £550
Median % change year-on-year +0.92% -0.91% -4.35%
75th Percentile £656 £675 £688
90th Percentile £775 £775 £800
England median daily rate £525 £513 £525
% change year-on-year +2.44% -2.38% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 352 203 201
10th Percentile £17.60 £17.98 £17.25
25th Percentile £21.93 £22.95 £22.00
Median hourly rate £37.50 £30.00 £33.07
Median % change year-on-year +25.00% -9.28% -15.66%
75th Percentile £58.94 £49.88 £53.75
90th Percentile £78.75 £63.75 £71.88
England median hourly rate £42.65 £25.30 £45.00
% change year-on-year +68.58% -43.78% +5.88%

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 10 August 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 10 August 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 10 August 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 +9 110 £560 +6.67% 38
West London -15 12 £625 +13.22% 12
South London -10 5 £500 +9.29% 2
East London +5 4 £450 - 3
Data Engineer
England

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

For the 6 months to 10 August 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.

1 465 (54.51%) SQL
2 462 (54.16%) Python
3 404 (47.36%) Data Pipeline
4 371 (43.49%) Data Engineering
5 323 (37.87%) Analytics
6 308 (36.11%) Azure
7 307 (35.99%) ETL
8 300 (35.17%) Data Modelling
9 291 (34.11%) AWS
10 240 (28.14%) Data Quality
11 233 (27.32%) CI/CD
12 194 (22.74%) Security Cleared
13 190 (22.27%) Databricks
14 180 (21.10%) SC Cleared
15 175 (20.52%) DevOps
16 168 (19.70%) Data Warehouse
17 161 (18.87%) Agile
18 145 (17.00%) dbt
19 142 (16.65%) AI
19 142 (16.65%) Business Intelligence
20 141 (16.53%) PySpark
21 139 (16.30%) Apache Airflow
22 135 (15.83%) Migration
22 135 (15.83%) Power Platform
23 133 (15.59%) Data Governance
24 127 (14.89%) Power BI
24 127 (14.89%) Snowflake
25 124 (14.54%) Azure Data Factory
26 121 (14.19%) Microsoft
27 115 (13.48%) Data Science

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
1 139 (16.30%) Apache Airflow
2 92 (10.79%) Apache Spark
3 77 (9.03%) Apache
4 15 (1.76%) Confluence
5 11 (1.29%) Palantir Foundry
6 8 (0.94%) SharePoint
7 5 (0.59%) SAS
8 4 (0.47%) Jupyter
9 2 (0.23%) Microsoft Exchange
10 1 (0.12%) Luigi
10 1 (0.12%) R Markdown
Applications
1 12 (1.41%) Microsoft Excel
2 3 (0.35%) Chatbot
2 3 (0.35%) Spreadsheet
Business Applications
1 11 (1.29%) Aladdin
2 3 (0.35%) SAP BPC
2 3 (0.35%) SimCorp Dimension
3 2 (0.23%) BambooHR
3 2 (0.23%) Maximo
4 1 (0.12%) Dynamics CRM
4 1 (0.12%) iTrent
4 1 (0.12%) NetSuite
4 1 (0.12%) Oracle EBS
4 1 (0.12%) Raiser’s Edge
4 1 (0.12%) Sage X3
4 1 (0.12%) SAP Business ByDesign
4 1 (0.12%) SAP CAR
4 1 (0.12%) SAP EWM
Cloud Services
1 308 (36.11%) Azure
2 291 (34.11%) AWS
3 145 (17.00%) dbt
4 135 (15.83%) Power Platform
5 127 (14.89%) Snowflake
6 124 (14.54%) Azure Data Factory
7 112 (13.13%) GCP
8 99 (11.61%) Amazon S3
9 96 (11.25%) Azure DevOps
10 92 (10.79%) Azure Synapse Analytics
11 73 (8.56%) GitHub
12 62 (7.27%) Serverless
13 58 (6.80%) AWS Lambda
14 28 (3.28%) GitHub Actions
15 25 (2.93%) Amazon EMR
16 24 (2.81%) Dagster
17 18 (2.11%) Amazon Kinesis
18 17 (1.99%) Amazon CloudWatch
18 17 (1.99%) Fivetran
19 16 (1.88%) Prefect
Communications & Networking
1 1 (0.12%) 4G
1 1 (0.12%) 5G
1 1 (0.12%) Firewall
1 1 (0.12%) Structured Cabling
Database & Business Intelligence
1 168 (19.70%) Data Warehouse
2 127 (14.89%) Power BI
3 100 (11.72%) Data Lake
4 79 (9.26%) BigQuery
5 58 (6.80%) Delta Lake
6 56 (6.57%) Metadata
7 50 (5.86%) Amazon Redshift
7 50 (5.86%) SQL Server
8 44 (5.16%) PostgreSQL
9 42 (4.92%) Amazon Athena
9 42 (4.92%) Tableau
10 41 (4.81%) Snowflake Schema
11 40 (4.69%) Big Data
12 33 (3.87%) NoSQL
13 30 (3.52%) Azure SQL Database
14 29 (3.40%) Relational Database
15 24 (2.81%) Spark SQL
15 24 (2.81%) SQL Server Integration Services
15 24 (2.81%) Star Schema
16 22 (2.58%) MongoDB
Development Applications
1 76 (8.91%) Git
2 25 (2.93%) GitLab
2 25 (2.93%) JIRA
3 8 (0.94%) Jenkins
4 6 (0.70%) MLflow
5 5 (0.59%) SonarQube
6 4 (0.47%) Bitbucket
7 2 (0.23%) Atlassian Bamboo
7 2 (0.23%) Sonatype Nexus
7 2 (0.23%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
8 1 (0.12%) Claude Code
8 1 (0.12%) ER Studio
8 1 (0.12%) ERwin
8 1 (0.12%) Octopus Deploy
8 1 (0.12%) Selenium
8 1 (0.12%) Terragrunt
General
1 234 (27.43%) Finance
2 133 (15.59%) Social Skills
3 108 (12.66%) Analytical Skills
4 68 (7.97%) Banking
5 62 (7.27%) Public Sector
6 21 (2.46%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 15 (1.76%) Front Office
8 14 (1.64%) Pharmaceutical
9 13 (1.52%) Marketing
10 10 (1.17%) Retail
11 9 (1.06%) Telecoms
12 7 (0.82%) Back Office
12 7 (0.82%) Financial Institution
12 7 (0.82%) Publishing
13 6 (0.70%) Manufacturing
14 5 (0.59%) Documentation Skills
15 4 (0.47%) Billing
15 4 (0.47%) Games
15 4 (0.47%) Legal
15 4 (0.47%) Local Government
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 141 (16.53%) PySpark
2 74 (8.68%) Kafka
3 20 (2.34%) Pandas
4 19 (2.23%) Spring
4 19 (2.23%) Spring Boot
5 17 (1.99%) REST
6 15 (1.76%) Great Expectations
7 13 (1.52%) Apache Beam
7 13 (1.52%) YAML
8 10 (1.17%) Microsoft Graph
8 10 (1.17%) React
9 9 (1.06%) JSON
9 9 (1.06%) scikit-learn
10 8 (0.94%) PyTorch
10 8 (0.94%) XML
11 7 (0.82%) pytest
11 7 (0.82%) Spark Streaming
12 6 (0.70%) GeoJSON
12 6 (0.70%) Matplotlib
12 6 (0.70%) RESTful
Miscellaneous
1 94 (11.02%) Cloud Native
2 44 (5.16%) Legacy Systems
3 29 (3.40%) Data Structures
4 23 (2.70%) Onboarding
5 19 (2.23%) Distributed Systems
5 19 (2.23%) Reinsurance
6 15 (1.76%) Greenfield Project
6 15 (1.76%) Product Ownership
7 14 (1.64%) NHS
8 9 (1.06%) AI Agents
8 9 (1.06%) Reference Data
9 8 (0.94%) Algorithms
9 8 (0.94%) Clustering
9 8 (0.94%) Virtual Team
10 7 (0.82%) Life Science
11 6 (0.70%) Data Protection Act
11 6 (0.70%) Derivative
11 6 (0.70%) Replication
11 6 (0.70%) Self-Motivation
12 5 (0.59%) Analytical Mindset
Operating Systems
1 27 (3.17%) Linux
2 17 (1.99%) Unix
3 3 (0.35%) Windows
4 2 (0.23%) Windows Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 404 (47.36%) Data Pipeline
2 371 (43.49%) Data Engineering
3 323 (37.87%) Analytics
4 307 (35.99%) ETL
5 300 (35.17%) Data Modelling
6 233 (27.32%) CI/CD
7 175 (20.52%) DevOps
8 161 (18.87%) Agile
9 142 (16.65%) AI
9 142 (16.65%) Business Intelligence
10 135 (15.83%) Migration
11 133 (15.59%) Data Governance
12 115 (13.48%) Data Science
13 113 (13.25%) Data Transformation
14 105 (12.31%) Validation
15 96 (11.25%) Machine Learning
16 95 (11.14%) Decision-Making
17 87 (10.20%) Infrastructure as Code
18 85 (9.96%) Data Architecture
19 84 (9.85%) Performance Optimisation
Programming Languages
1 465 (54.51%) SQL
2 462 (54.16%) Python
3 80 (9.38%) Java
4 50 (5.86%) Scala
5 20 (2.34%) T-SQL
6 18 (2.11%) C#
6 18 (2.11%) Data Analysis Expressions
7 17 (1.99%) PowerShell
7 17 (1.99%) Shell Script
8 13 (1.52%) PL/SQL
9 12 (1.41%) JavaScript
10 11 (1.29%) R
11 8 (0.94%) Bicep
12 6 (0.70%) Bash
12 6 (0.70%) TypeScript
13 5 (0.59%) Go
14 3 (0.35%) Korn
15 2 (0.23%) Cypher
15 2 (0.23%) Ruby
15 2 (0.23%) SPARQL
Qualifications
1 194 (22.74%) Security Cleared
2 180 (21.10%) SC Cleared
3 20 (2.34%) Azure Certification
3 20 (2.34%) BPSS Clearance
3 20 (2.34%) Degree
4 11 (1.29%) Computer Science Degree
5 8 (0.94%) AWS Certification
5 8 (0.94%) DBS Check
6 6 (0.70%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
7 5 (0.59%) DV Cleared
8 4 (0.47%) Microsoft Certification
8 4 (0.47%) SnowPro
9 2 (0.23%) Master's Degree
10 1 (0.12%) BICSI Certification
10 1 (0.12%) CISA
10 1 (0.12%) CISM
10 1 (0.12%) CISSP
10 1 (0.12%) City & Guilds
10 1 (0.12%) Postgraduate
10 1 (0.12%) Tableau Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 240 (28.14%) Data Quality
2 38 (4.45%) QA
3 26 (3.05%) GDPR
4 10 (1.17%) Accessibility
5 4 (0.47%) Sarbanes-Oxley
6 3 (0.35%) MiFID
7 2 (0.23%) EMIR
7 2 (0.23%) GMP
7 2 (0.23%) SLA
8 1 (0.12%) GxP
8 1 (0.12%) IFRS
8 1 (0.12%) IFRS 17
8 1 (0.12%) IFRS 9
8 1 (0.12%) PCI DSS
8 1 (0.12%) PMO
8 1 (0.12%) SNOMED CT
8 1 (0.12%) WCAG
System Software
1 65 (7.62%) Docker
2 3 (0.35%) Virtual Machines
3 2 (0.23%) Active Directory
4 1 (0.12%) RACF
Systems Management
1 109 (12.78%) Terraform
2 45 (5.28%) Kubernetes
3 9 (1.06%) Grafana
4 5 (0.59%) Control-M
5 4 (0.47%) Kibana
6 3 (0.35%) Ansible
7 2 (0.23%) Thomson Reuters DACS
8 1 (0.12%) Kubeflow
8 1 (0.12%) Puppet
Vendors
1 190 (22.27%) Databricks
2 121 (14.19%) Microsoft
3 51 (5.98%) Google
4 47 (5.51%) Informatica
5 34 (3.99%) Oracle
6 18 (2.11%) Palantir
7 16 (1.88%) Foundry
8 12 (1.41%) Salesforce
8 12 (1.41%) SAP
9 10 (1.17%) Denodo
9 10 (1.17%) Talend
10 9 (1.06%) Bloomberg
10 9 (1.06%) Splunk
11 8 (0.94%) IBM
12 7 (0.82%) MuleSoft
13 6 (0.70%) Amplitude
14 5 (0.59%) Alteryx
14 5 (0.59%) Cloudera
14 5 (0.59%) New Relic
15 4 (0.47%) Hortonworks