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 19 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
19 Sep 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 95 84 97
Rank change year-on-year -11 +13 +22
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 401 467 563
As % of all contract jobs advertised in London 2.98% 2.86% 2.57%
As % of the Job Titles category 3.21% 3.05% 2.72%
Number of daily rates quoted 295 343 418
10th Percentile £382 £413 £413
25th Percentile £450 £481 £500
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £575 £586
Median % change year-on-year -8.70% -1.92% +1.96%
75th Percentile £611 £650 £675
90th Percentile £700 £750 £750
England median daily rate £504 £550 £550
% change year-on-year -8.36% - -
Number of hourly rates quoted 10 4 7
10th Percentile £34.24 - £35.00
25th Percentile £42.25 £49.25 £35.32
Median hourly rate £52.50 £72.75 £60.50
Median % change year-on-year -27.84% +20.25% +20.40%
75th Percentile £60.31 £97.50 £64.75
90th Percentile £110.00 - £73.00
England median hourly rate £52.50 £80.00 £61.75
% change year-on-year -34.38% +29.55% +23.50%

All Contract IT Job Vacancies
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 12,486 15,331 20,692
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.71% 94.03% 94.41%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,366 10,240 15,087
10th Percentile £331 £340 £350
25th Percentile £425 £450 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £540 £550 £575
Median % change year-on-year -1.82% -4.35% -
75th Percentile £675 £675 £690
90th Percentile £775 £800 £800
England median daily rate £508 £525 £550
% change year-on-year -3.33% -4.55% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 206 180 230
10th Percentile £17.00 £17.48 £18.15
25th Percentile £23.00 £23.80 £22.26
Median hourly rate £30.25 £35.00 £36.94
Median % change year-on-year -13.57% -5.25% +15.44%
75th Percentile £51.81 £56.38 £63.44
90th Percentile £66.54 £72.19 £76.38
England median hourly rate £25.15 £46.18 £45.00
% change year-on-year -45.54% +2.62% +73.08%

Data Engineer
Job Vacancy Trend in London

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

Job vacancy trend for Data Engineer 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 19 September 2025.

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 19 September 2025.

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 19 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
Central London +10 60 £525 -4.55% 36
West London -14 4 £525 -4.55% 5
South London -7 2 £458 -10.73% 2
East London +8 1 - - 5
Data Engineer
England

Data Engineer Skill Set
Top 30 Co-occurring Skills and Capabilities in London

For the 6 months to 19 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 London region featuring Data Engineer in the job title.

1 271 (67.58%) Python
2 247 (61.60%) SQL
3 192 (47.88%) Data Pipeline
4 189 (47.13%) Azure
5 162 (40.40%) Data Engineering
6 150 (37.41%) AWS
7 147 (36.66%) ETL
8 140 (34.91%) Data Modelling
9 133 (33.17%) Databricks
10 118 (29.43%) Analytics
11 102 (25.44%) Security Cleared
11 102 (25.44%) CI/CD
12 89 (22.19%) Finance
13 87 (21.70%) Data Quality
14 86 (21.45%) Agile
14 86 (21.45%) SC Cleared
15 83 (20.70%) Social Skills
16 82 (20.45%) Azure Data Factory
17 81 (20.20%) Apache Airflow
18 78 (19.45%) DevOps
19 76 (18.95%) Data Warehouse
20 75 (18.70%) Business Intelligence
20 75 (18.70%) Power Platform
21 74 (18.45%) Power BI
22 73 (18.20%) PySpark
23 71 (17.71%) Data Science
24 68 (16.96%) Analytical Skills
25 67 (16.71%) Terraform
25 67 (16.71%) dbt
26 65 (16.21%) Problem-Solving

Data Engineer Skill Set
Co-occurring Skills and Capabilities in London 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 81 (20.20%) Apache Airflow
2 52 (12.97%) Apache Spark
3 37 (9.23%) Apache
4 15 (3.74%) Confluence
5 6 (1.50%) Jupyter
6 4 (1.00%) Luigi
6 4 (1.00%) SharePoint
7 3 (0.75%) Oracle SOA Suite
7 3 (0.75%) SAS
8 2 (0.50%) ArcGIS
9 1 (0.25%) Apache Pig
9 1 (0.25%) IIS
9 1 (0.25%) nginx
Applications
1 11 (2.74%) Microsoft Excel
2 4 (1.00%) Microsoft Office
3 1 (0.25%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 1 (0.25%) MS Visio
Business Applications
1 3 (0.75%) Oracle BPM
2 1 (0.25%) Aladdin
2 1 (0.25%) Dynamics CRM
2 1 (0.25%) Endur
2 1 (0.25%) SAP BPC
2 1 (0.25%) SAP ERP
2 1 (0.25%) SAP Oil and Gas
Cloud Services
1 189 (47.13%) Azure
2 150 (37.41%) AWS
3 82 (20.45%) Azure Data Factory
4 75 (18.70%) Power Platform
5 67 (16.71%) dbt
6 60 (14.96%) Azure Synapse Analytics
7 51 (12.72%) Snowflake
8 47 (11.72%) GCP
9 45 (11.22%) GitHub
10 37 (9.23%) Amazon S3
11 32 (7.98%) Azure DevOps
12 28 (6.98%) GitHub Actions
13 24 (5.99%) Serverless
14 12 (2.99%) Microsoft Purview
15 11 (2.74%) AWS Lambda
16 10 (2.49%) Amazon Kinesis
17 9 (2.24%) Collibra
18 7 (1.75%) Amazon EMR
18 7 (1.75%) AWS CloudFormation
18 7 (1.75%) Cloud Composer
Communications & Networking
1 4 (1.00%) SSH
2 3 (0.75%) Internet
3 1 (0.25%) Firewall
3 1 (0.25%) Structured Cabling
3 1 (0.25%) Wi-Fi
Database & Business Intelligence
1 76 (18.95%) Data Warehouse
2 74 (18.45%) Power BI
3 61 (15.21%) Data Lake
4 39 (9.73%) SQL Server
5 36 (8.98%) Big Data
6 32 (7.98%) Hadoop
7 30 (7.48%) Delta Lake
8 24 (5.99%) Metadata
9 23 (5.74%) BigQuery
9 23 (5.74%) PostgreSQL
9 23 (5.74%) Relational Database
10 19 (4.74%) Amazon Redshift
10 19 (4.74%) NoSQL
10 19 (4.74%) Tableau
11 16 (3.99%) Apache Hive
11 16 (3.99%) Azure SQL Database
12 14 (3.49%) Star Schema
13 13 (3.24%) Snowflake Schema
14 12 (2.99%) Amazon QuickSight
14 12 (2.99%) SQL Server Integration Services
Development Applications
1 46 (11.47%) Git
2 27 (6.73%) JIRA
3 9 (2.24%) Jenkins
4 5 (1.25%) GitLab
4 5 (1.25%) MLflow
4 5 (1.25%) Terragrunt
5 4 (1.00%) RStudio
6 3 (0.75%) Bitbucket
7 1 (0.25%) ERwin
7 1 (0.25%) GoCD
7 1 (0.25%) JUnit
7 1 (0.25%) Mockito
7 1 (0.25%) Poetry
7 1 (0.25%) Selenium
7 1 (0.25%) SonarQube
7 1 (0.25%) Subversion
7 1 (0.25%) TeamCity
7 1 (0.25%) Visual Studio Code
General
1 89 (22.19%) Finance
2 83 (20.70%) Social Skills
3 68 (16.96%) Analytical Skills
4 33 (8.23%) Public Sector
5 26 (6.48%) Banking
6 11 (2.74%) Investment Banking
7 10 (2.49%) Retail
8 8 (2.00%) Marketing
9 6 (1.50%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 5 (1.25%) Police
10 5 (1.25%) Telecoms
11 4 (1.00%) Financial Institution
11 4 (1.00%) Pharmaceutical
11 4 (1.00%) Retail Banking
12 3 (0.75%) Corporate Banking
12 3 (0.75%) Documentation Skills
12 3 (0.75%) Front Office
12 3 (0.75%) Legal
12 3 (0.75%) Organisational Skills
13 2 (0.50%) Military
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 73 (18.20%) PySpark
2 48 (11.97%) Kafka
3 13 (3.24%) Apache NiFi
4 10 (2.49%) JSON
4 10 (2.49%) RabbitMQ
5 9 (2.24%) Jinja
5 9 (2.24%) YAML
6 8 (2.00%) XML
7 7 (1.75%) REST
8 6 (1.50%) pydantic
9 5 (1.25%) pytest
9 5 (1.25%) PyTorch
10 4 (1.00%) Apache Avro
10 4 (1.00%) Apache Beam
10 4 (1.00%) GeoPandas
10 4 (1.00%) GraphQL
10 4 (1.00%) HTML
10 4 (1.00%) Pandas
10 4 (1.00%) PostGIS
11 3 (0.75%) .NET
Miscellaneous
1 16 (3.99%) Cloud Native
1 16 (3.99%) Data Structures
2 11 (2.74%) Legacy Systems
3 10 (2.49%) Distributed Computing
3 10 (2.49%) Linux Command Line
4 7 (1.75%) Algorithms
4 7 (1.75%) Self-Motivation
5 6 (1.50%) Product Ownership
5 6 (1.50%) Reference Data
5 6 (1.50%) Reinsurance
6 5 (1.25%) Greenfield Project
7 4 (1.00%) Onboarding
7 4 (1.00%) Virtual Team
8 3 (0.75%) AI Agents
8 3 (0.75%) Derivative
8 3 (0.75%) IoT
8 3 (0.75%) N-Tier
9 2 (0.50%) Data Protection Act
9 2 (0.50%) Life Science
9 2 (0.50%) NHS
Operating Systems
1 14 (3.49%) Linux
2 6 (1.50%) Unix
3 1 (0.25%) Windows
Processes & Methodologies
1 192 (47.88%) Data Pipeline
2 162 (40.40%) Data Engineering
3 147 (36.66%) ETL
4 140 (34.91%) Data Modelling
5 118 (29.43%) Analytics
6 102 (25.44%) CI/CD
7 86 (21.45%) Agile
8 78 (19.45%) DevOps
9 75 (18.70%) Business Intelligence
10 71 (17.71%) Data Science
11 65 (16.21%) Problem-Solving
12 57 (14.21%) Data Governance
13 53 (13.22%) Artificial Intelligence
13 53 (13.22%) Infrastructure as Code
14 50 (12.47%) Data Ingestion
15 47 (11.72%) Data Integration
16 43 (10.72%) Migration
17 42 (10.47%) Visualisation
18 40 (9.98%) Data Transformation
19 39 (9.73%) Machine Learning
Programming Languages
1 271 (67.58%) Python
2 247 (61.60%) SQL
3 42 (10.47%) Scala
4 35 (8.73%) Java
5 14 (3.49%) Bash
6 7 (1.75%) C#
6 7 (1.75%) JavaScript
6 7 (1.75%) T-SQL
7 6 (1.50%) R
8 5 (1.25%) Data Analysis Expressions
8 5 (1.25%) PL/SQL
9 4 (1.00%) PowerShell
10 3 (0.75%) Go
10 3 (0.75%) Shell Script
10 3 (0.75%) TypeScript
11 1 (0.25%) C
11 1 (0.25%) C++
11 1 (0.25%) HiveQL
11 1 (0.25%) PROC SQL
11 1 (0.25%) SAS Macro
Qualifications
1 102 (25.44%) Security Cleared
2 86 (21.45%) SC Cleared
3 25 (6.23%) Degree
4 20 (4.99%) DV Cleared
5 9 (2.24%) Azure Certification
5 9 (2.24%) Computer Science Degree
6 4 (1.00%) AWS Certification
6 4 (1.00%) BPSS Clearance
6 4 (1.00%) Master's Degree
7 3 (0.75%) MCPD
7 3 (0.75%) MCSD
7 3 (0.75%) Microsoft Certification
8 1 (0.25%) DBS Check
8 1 (0.25%) IBM Certification
8 1 (0.25%) PhD
8 1 (0.25%) SnowPro
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 87 (21.70%) Data Quality
2 22 (5.49%) GDPR
3 8 (2.00%) QA
4 5 (1.25%) Accessibility
5 3 (0.75%) SLA
6 2 (0.50%) HIPAA
6 2 (0.50%) ISO/IEC 20000
6 2 (0.50%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 2 (0.50%) NIST
7 1 (0.25%) HL7
7 1 (0.25%) MiFID
7 1 (0.25%) Sarbanes-Oxley
System Software
1 15 (3.74%) Docker
2 4 (1.00%) zsh
3 1 (0.25%) HDFS
3 1 (0.25%) Virtual Machines
Systems Management
1 67 (16.71%) Terraform
2 18 (4.49%) Kubernetes
3 4 (1.00%) Puppet
4 3 (0.75%) Ambari
4 3 (0.75%) Grafana
4 3 (0.75%) ZABBIX
5 2 (0.50%) Ansible
5 2 (0.50%) Kubeflow
6 1 (0.25%) Argo
6 1 (0.25%) NetBackup
6 1 (0.25%) Prometheus
Vendors
1 133 (33.17%) Databricks
2 49 (12.22%) Microsoft
3 28 (6.98%) Palantir
4 23 (5.74%) Foundry
4 23 (5.74%) Oracle
5 15 (3.74%) Google
6 13 (3.24%) Cloudera
7 11 (2.74%) Informatica
7 11 (2.74%) SAP
8 6 (1.50%) MicroStrategy
9 3 (0.75%) Teradata
10 2 (0.50%) Alteryx
10 2 (0.50%) IBM
10 2 (0.50%) Salesforce
10 2 (0.50%) Splunk
10 2 (0.50%) Workday
11 1 (0.25%) MuleSoft
11 1 (0.25%) PayPal
11 1 (0.25%) ServiceNow
11 1 (0.25%) SnapLogic