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 28 June 2026.

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

6 months to
28 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 49 83 82
Rank change year-on-year +34 -1 +16
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 852 416 506
As % of all contract jobs in London 4.44% 3.25% 2.88%
As % of the Job Titles category 4.78% 3.47% 3.06%
Number of daily rates quoted 618 311 403
10th Percentile £389 £400 £350
25th Percentile £450 £455 £450
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £525 £538
Median % change year-on-year - -2.33% -6.52%
75th Percentile £625 £625 £650
90th Percentile £704 £750 £738
England median daily rate £500 £500 £513
% change year-on-year - -2.44% -6.82%
Number of hourly rates quoted 8 7 7
10th Percentile £26.80 £47.65 £48.25
25th Percentile £30.00 £51.25 £49.25
Median hourly rate £34.84 £52.50 £50.50
Median % change year-on-year -33.64% +3.96% -29.86%
75th Percentile £46.75 £70.00 £53.94
90th Percentile £61.15 £84.00 £61.48
England median hourly rate £43.75 £52.50 £67.50
% change year-on-year -16.67% -22.22% -6.25%

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 17,812 11,975 16,510
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.88% 93.47% 93.81%
Number of daily rates quoted 11,742 8,095 11,834
10th Percentile £358 £336 £325
25th Percentile £438 £425 £444
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £538 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -2.27% - -4.35%
75th Percentile £650 £675 £688
90th Percentile £762 £790 £800
England median daily rate £525 £513 £525
% change year-on-year +2.44% -2.38% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 302 183 315
10th Percentile £18.07 £18.87 £16.00
25th Percentile £25.25 £23.23 £20.12
Median hourly rate £40.48 £32.89 £27.50
Median % change year-on-year +23.08% +19.60% -26.51%
75th Percentile £63.10 £50.50 £45.62
90th Percentile £81.13 £63.75 £67.60
England median hourly rate £45.00 £28.50 £39.55
% change year-on-year +57.89% -27.94% -10.23%

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 28 June 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 28 June 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 28 June 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 +21 115 £553 +10.50% 15
West London -3 23 £603 +9.15% 3
South London -1 7 £500 +5.26% 2
East London +4 4 £450 - 1
Data Engineer
England

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

For the 6 months to 28 June 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.

1 482 (56.57%) Python
2 472 (55.40%) SQL
3 388 (45.54%) Data Pipeline
4 343 (40.26%) Data Engineering
5 329 (38.62%) Analytics
6 324 (38.03%) Azure
7 323 (37.91%) ETL
8 304 (35.68%) AWS
9 299 (35.09%) Data Modelling
10 239 (28.05%) Data Quality
11 227 (26.64%) CI/CD
12 206 (24.18%) Databricks
13 187 (21.95%) Security Cleared
14 180 (21.13%) DevOps
15 177 (20.77%) SC Cleared
16 165 (19.37%) Business Intelligence
17 162 (19.01%) Data Warehouse
18 158 (18.54%) Power Platform
19 148 (17.37%) Power BI
20 147 (17.25%) Agile
21 138 (16.20%) PySpark
22 134 (15.73%) AI
23 133 (15.61%) Data Governance
23 133 (15.61%) Migration
24 128 (15.02%) Terraform
25 126 (14.79%) Azure Data Factory
26 122 (14.32%) Snowflake
27 120 (14.08%) dbt
27 120 (14.08%) Microsoft
28 118 (13.85%) Apache Airflow

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
1 118 (13.85%) Apache Airflow
2 87 (10.21%) Apache Spark
3 60 (7.04%) Apache
4 15 (1.76%) Confluence
5 8 (0.94%) SharePoint
6 7 (0.82%) Palantir Foundry
7 5 (0.59%) Microsoft Exchange
8 4 (0.47%) Jupyter
9 3 (0.35%) SAS
10 1 (0.12%) Appian
10 1 (0.12%) Camunda
10 1 (0.12%) Luigi
10 1 (0.12%) R Markdown
Applications
1 10 (1.17%) Microsoft Excel
2 3 (0.35%) Spreadsheet
3 1 (0.12%) Chatbot
Business Applications
1 7 (0.82%) 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
1 324 (38.03%) Azure
2 304 (35.68%) AWS
3 158 (18.54%) Power Platform
4 126 (14.79%) Azure Data Factory
5 122 (14.32%) Snowflake
6 120 (14.08%) dbt
7 116 (13.62%) Amazon S3
8 100 (11.74%) Azure DevOps
9 94 (11.03%) GCP
10 93 (10.92%) Azure Synapse Analytics
11 81 (9.51%) GitHub
12 66 (7.75%) Serverless
13 65 (7.63%) AWS Lambda
14 38 (4.46%) GitHub Actions
15 24 (2.82%) Amazon EMR
16 21 (2.46%) Dagster
17 20 (2.35%) AWS CloudFormation
18 19 (2.23%) Amazon Kinesis
19 16 (1.88%) Amazon SQS
20 15 (1.76%) Amazon CloudWatch
Communications & Networking
1 2 (0.23%) Structured Cabling
2 1 (0.12%) 4G
2 1 (0.12%) 5G
2 1 (0.12%) Firewall
Database & Business Intelligence
1 162 (19.01%) Data Warehouse
2 148 (17.37%) Power BI
3 113 (13.26%) Data Lake
4 74 (8.69%) SQL Server
5 68 (7.98%) BigQuery
6 63 (7.39%) Delta Lake
7 59 (6.92%) Metadata
8 54 (6.34%) Amazon Redshift
9 51 (5.99%) Tableau
10 46 (5.40%) Snowflake Schema
11 45 (5.28%) Amazon Athena
11 45 (5.28%) PostgreSQL
12 39 (4.58%) Azure SQL Database
13 36 (4.23%) Big Data
14 35 (4.11%) NoSQL
15 29 (3.40%) Relational Database
15 29 (3.40%) SQL Server Integration Services
16 24 (2.82%) MongoDB
16 24 (2.82%) Star Schema
17 23 (2.70%) Spark SQL
Development Applications
1 74 (8.69%) Git
2 32 (3.76%) JIRA
3 27 (3.17%) GitLab
4 9 (1.06%) Jenkins
5 4 (0.47%) MLflow
6 3 (0.35%) SonarQube
7 2 (0.23%) Atlassian Bamboo
7 2 (0.23%) Bitbucket
7 2 (0.23%) Sonatype Nexus
7 2 (0.23%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
7 2 (0.23%) Terragrunt
8 1 (0.12%) Claude Code
8 1 (0.12%) Octopus Deploy
8 1 (0.12%) Selenium
General
1 231 (27.11%) Finance
2 134 (15.73%) Social Skills
3 100 (11.74%) Analytical Skills
4 59 (6.92%) Banking
5 58 (6.81%) Public Sector
6 24 (2.82%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 15 (1.76%) Pharmaceutical
7 15 (1.76%) Retail
8 11 (1.29%) Marketing
9 10 (1.17%) Publishing
9 10 (1.17%) Telecoms
10 9 (1.06%) Front Office
11 6 (0.70%) Documentation Skills
12 5 (0.59%) Manufacturing
13 4 (0.47%) Billing
13 4 (0.47%) Financial Institution
13 4 (0.47%) Games
14 3 (0.35%) Corporate Banking
14 3 (0.35%) Investment Banking
14 3 (0.35%) Legal
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 138 (16.20%) PySpark
2 81 (9.51%) Kafka
3 27 (3.17%) Pandas
4 22 (2.58%) Spring
4 22 (2.58%) Spring Boot
5 18 (2.11%) Great Expectations
6 16 (1.88%) REST
7 13 (1.53%) YAML
8 11 (1.29%) scikit-learn
9 10 (1.17%) JSON
9 10 (1.17%) Matplotlib
10 9 (1.06%) Apache Beam
10 9 (1.06%) GeoJSON
10 9 (1.06%) Polars
10 9 (1.06%) XML
11 8 (0.94%) Microsoft Graph
12 6 (0.70%) PyTorch
12 6 (0.70%) React
13 5 (0.59%) OpenID
13 5 (0.59%) Spark Streaming
Miscellaneous
1 98 (11.50%) Cloud Native
2 37 (4.34%) Legacy Systems
3 27 (3.17%) Data Structures
4 24 (2.82%) Reinsurance
5 20 (2.35%) Onboarding
6 18 (2.11%) Greenfield Project
7 17 (2.00%) Distributed Systems
8 13 (1.53%) NHS
9 12 (1.41%) Product Ownership
10 9 (1.06%) Virtual Team
11 8 (0.94%) Clustering
11 8 (0.94%) Reference Data
12 7 (0.82%) Life Science
13 6 (0.70%) Data Protection Act
13 6 (0.70%) Derivative
13 6 (0.70%) Distributed Computing
13 6 (0.70%) Self-Motivation
14 5 (0.59%) Algorithms
14 5 (0.59%) Public Cloud
14 5 (0.59%) Replication
Operating Systems
1 23 (2.70%) Linux
2 13 (1.53%) Unix
3 3 (0.35%) Windows
4 2 (0.23%) Windows Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 388 (45.54%) Data Pipeline
2 343 (40.26%) Data Engineering
3 329 (38.62%) Analytics
4 323 (37.91%) ETL
5 299 (35.09%) Data Modelling
6 227 (26.64%) CI/CD
7 180 (21.13%) DevOps
8 165 (19.37%) Business Intelligence
9 147 (17.25%) Agile
10 134 (15.73%) AI
11 133 (15.61%) Data Governance
11 133 (15.61%) Migration
12 110 (12.91%) Data Science
13 101 (11.85%) Infrastructure as Code
14 94 (11.03%) Decision-Making
15 92 (10.80%) Validation
16 89 (10.45%) Problem-Solving
17 87 (10.21%) Data Architecture
18 76 (8.92%) Data Transformation
19 74 (8.69%) Machine Learning
Programming Languages
1 482 (56.57%) Python
2 472 (55.40%) SQL
3 79 (9.27%) Java
4 53 (6.22%) Scala
5 23 (2.70%) C#
5 23 (2.70%) T-SQL
6 20 (2.35%) Data Analysis Expressions
7 12 (1.41%) PL/SQL
7 12 (1.41%) R
8 11 (1.29%) PowerShell
8 11 (1.29%) Shell Script
9 9 (1.06%) Bicep
10 7 (0.82%) Bash
10 7 (0.82%) JavaScript
11 6 (0.70%) TypeScript
12 4 (0.47%) Go
13 2 (0.23%) C
13 2 (0.23%) Korn
13 2 (0.23%) Ruby
13 2 (0.23%) SPARQL
Qualifications
1 187 (21.95%) Security Cleared
2 177 (20.77%) SC Cleared
3 24 (2.82%) BPSS Clearance
3 24 (2.82%) Degree
4 22 (2.58%) Azure Certification
5 12 (1.41%) Computer Science Degree
6 10 (1.17%) AWS Certification
7 8 (0.94%) DBS Check
8 6 (0.70%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
8 6 (0.70%) Microsoft Certification
9 4 (0.47%) SnowPro
10 2 (0.23%) DV Cleared
10 2 (0.23%) Master's Degree
11 1 (0.12%) BICSI Certification
11 1 (0.12%) CISA
11 1 (0.12%) CISM
11 1 (0.12%) CISSP
11 1 (0.12%) City & Guilds
11 1 (0.12%) Postgraduate
11 1 (0.12%) Tableau Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 239 (28.05%) Data Quality
2 32 (3.76%) GDPR
2 32 (3.76%) QA
3 8 (0.94%) Accessibility
4 4 (0.47%) MiFID
4 4 (0.47%) Sarbanes-Oxley
5 2 (0.23%) EMIR
5 2 (0.23%) GMP
5 2 (0.23%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 2 (0.23%) SLA
6 1 (0.12%) GRC
6 1 (0.12%) GxP
6 1 (0.12%) IFRS
6 1 (0.12%) IFRS 17
6 1 (0.12%) IFRS 9
6 1 (0.12%) PCI DSS
6 1 (0.12%) PMO
6 1 (0.12%) SNOMED CT
6 1 (0.12%) WCAG
System Software
1 53 (6.22%) Docker
2 3 (0.35%) Virtual Machines
3 1 (0.12%) Active Directory
3 1 (0.12%) RACF
Systems Management
1 128 (15.02%) Terraform
2 34 (3.99%) Kubernetes
3 9 (1.06%) Grafana
4 4 (0.47%) Kibana
5 2 (0.23%) Ansible
5 2 (0.23%) Thomson Reuters DACS
6 1 (0.12%) Kubeflow
6 1 (0.12%) Prometheus
Vendors
1 206 (24.18%) Databricks
2 120 (14.08%) Microsoft
3 50 (5.87%) Informatica
4 41 (4.81%) Google
5 38 (4.46%) Oracle
6 13 (1.53%) Palantir
7 11 (1.29%) SAP
8 10 (1.17%) Denodo
8 10 (1.17%) Foundry
8 10 (1.17%) Salesforce
8 10 (1.17%) Talend
9 9 (1.06%) IBM
10 8 (0.94%) Bloomberg
11 7 (0.82%) Amplitude
12 6 (0.70%) Alteryx
12 6 (0.70%) MuleSoft
13 5 (0.59%) ServiceNow
14 4 (0.47%) Cloudera
14 4 (0.47%) Hortonworks
14 4 (0.47%) Splunk