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 11 November 2025.

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

6 months to
11 Nov 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 98 82 93
Rank change year-on-year -16 +11 +14
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 414 465 519
As % of all contract jobs in London 2.99% 3.02% 2.55%
As % of the Job Titles category 3.23% 3.21% 2.72%
Number of daily rates quoted 302 330 379
10th Percentile £380 £413 £400
25th Percentile £446 £488 £475
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £575 £550
Median % change year-on-year -8.70% +4.55% -4.35%
75th Percentile £638 £659 £650
90th Percentile £725 £751 £738
England median daily rate £513 £550 £550
% change year-on-year -6.82% - -0.72%
Number of hourly rates quoted 8 5 8
10th Percentile £32.23 £44.45 £35.00
25th Percentile £40.50 £49.25 £35.47
Median hourly rate £48.00 £95.00 £61.75
Median % change year-on-year -49.47% +53.85% +45.29%
75th Percentile £74.38 £97.50 £65.75
90th Percentile £110.00 - £73.10
England median hourly rate £43.50 £72.75 £63.00
% change year-on-year -40.21% +15.48% +8.62%

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 12,819 14,481 19,056
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.48% 93.94% 93.80%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,517 9,361 13,829
10th Percentile £333 £338 £344
25th Percentile £425 £450 £455
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £543 £550 £571
Median % change year-on-year -1.27% -3.67% -0.70%
75th Percentile £663 £675 £688
90th Percentile £775 £788 £793
England median daily rate £510 £525 £535
% change year-on-year -2.86% -1.87% -2.73%
Number of hourly rates quoted 232 151 227
10th Percentile £17.50 £17.25 £18.26
25th Percentile £21.87 £24.15 £21.75
Median hourly rate £26.68 £37.50 £37.50
Median % change year-on-year -28.87% - +19.05%
75th Percentile £47.63 £58.75 £60.00
90th Percentile £69.94 £80.75 £73.75
England median hourly rate £25.15 £40.00 £45.00
% change year-on-year -37.13% -11.11% +53.19%

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 11 November 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 11 November 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 11 November 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 +4 55 £525 -8.70% 158
West London -14 6 £575 +4.55% 7
South London -8 3 £479 -18.55%
East London +2 1 - - 6
Data Engineer
England

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

For the 6 months to 11 November 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 London region featuring Data Engineer in the job title.

1 283 (68.36%) Python
2 261 (63.04%) SQL
3 209 (50.48%) Data Pipeline
4 191 (46.14%) Azure
5 178 (43.00%) Data Engineering
6 161 (38.89%) ETL
7 160 (38.65%) AWS
8 153 (36.96%) Data Modelling
9 149 (35.99%) Databricks
10 126 (30.43%) Analytics
11 121 (29.23%) CI/CD
12 105 (25.36%) Data Quality
13 96 (23.19%) Data Warehouse
14 95 (22.95%) Business Intelligence
14 95 (22.95%) Security Cleared
15 90 (21.74%) Agile
16 88 (21.26%) DevOps
17 83 (20.05%) Azure Data Factory
18 82 (19.81%) SC Cleared
19 81 (19.57%) Data Science
20 80 (19.32%) Apache Airflow
21 78 (18.84%) Power Platform
22 77 (18.60%) Power BI
23 75 (18.12%) PySpark
24 68 (16.43%) Terraform
25 66 (15.94%) Infrastructure as Code
26 65 (15.70%) Data Governance
26 65 (15.70%) Data Lake
26 65 (15.70%) Snowflake
27 61 (14.73%) AI

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 80 (19.32%) Apache Airflow
2 61 (14.73%) Apache Spark
3 40 (9.66%) Apache
4 15 (3.62%) Confluence
5 4 (0.97%) SharePoint
6 3 (0.72%) Oracle SOA Suite
7 2 (0.48%) ArcGIS
7 2 (0.48%) Jupyter
7 2 (0.48%) Luigi
7 2 (0.48%) SAS
8 1 (0.24%) Apache Pig
8 1 (0.24%) IIS
8 1 (0.24%) Oracle Application Server
Applications
1 7 (1.69%) Microsoft Excel
2 2 (0.48%) Microsoft Office
2 2 (0.48%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 1 (0.24%) MS Visio
Business Applications
1 3 (0.72%) Oracle BPM
2 2 (0.48%) Aladdin
3 1 (0.24%) Dynamics CRM
3 1 (0.24%) Endur
3 1 (0.24%) Maximo
3 1 (0.24%) SAP BPC
3 1 (0.24%) SAP ERP
3 1 (0.24%) SAP Oil and Gas
Cloud Services
1 191 (46.14%) Azure
2 160 (38.65%) AWS
3 83 (20.05%) Azure Data Factory
4 78 (18.84%) Power Platform
5 65 (15.70%) Snowflake
6 60 (14.49%) GCP
7 58 (14.01%) Amazon S3
7 58 (14.01%) dbt
8 55 (13.29%) Azure Synapse Analytics
9 48 (11.59%) GitHub
10 38 (9.18%) Serverless
11 31 (7.49%) Azure DevOps
12 27 (6.52%) GitHub Actions
13 23 (5.56%) AWS Lambda
14 15 (3.62%) Amazon Kinesis
15 14 (3.38%) Amazon EMR
15 14 (3.38%) AWS CloudFormation
15 14 (3.38%) SaaS
16 7 (1.69%) AWS Step Functions
16 7 (1.69%) GitHub Copilot
Communications & Networking
1 4 (0.97%) Firewall
2 3 (0.72%) Internet
2 3 (0.72%) SAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 96 (23.19%) Data Warehouse
2 77 (18.60%) Power BI
3 65 (15.70%) Data Lake
4 36 (8.70%) Big Data
4 36 (8.70%) SQL Server
5 32 (7.73%) BigQuery
6 30 (7.25%) Hadoop
7 27 (6.52%) PostgreSQL
8 26 (6.28%) Amazon Redshift
9 24 (5.80%) Delta Lake
10 21 (5.07%) Relational Database
10 21 (5.07%) Tableau
11 20 (4.83%) Metadata
11 20 (4.83%) SQL Server Integration Services
12 19 (4.59%) Star Schema
13 18 (4.35%) Amazon QuickSight
14 17 (4.11%) Azure SQL Database
15 15 (3.62%) NoSQL
16 13 (3.14%) Amazon Athena
17 11 (2.66%) DataStage
Development Applications
1 55 (13.29%) Git
2 16 (3.86%) JIRA
3 12 (2.90%) Jenkins
4 7 (1.69%) MLflow
5 6 (1.45%) GitLab
6 3 (0.72%) Bitbucket
7 1 (0.24%) DBeaver
7 1 (0.24%) ERwin
7 1 (0.24%) GoCD
7 1 (0.24%) Gradle
7 1 (0.24%) Selenium
7 1 (0.24%) SonarQube
7 1 (0.24%) TeamCity
7 1 (0.24%) Terragrunt
7 1 (0.24%) Visual Studio
General
1 92 (22.22%) Finance
2 88 (21.26%) Social Skills
3 52 (12.56%) Analytical Skills
4 30 (7.25%) Public Sector
5 22 (5.31%) Banking
6 12 (2.90%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 11 (2.66%) Investment Banking
7 11 (2.66%) Pharmaceutical
8 10 (2.42%) Front Office
9 8 (1.93%) Retail
10 6 (1.45%) Marketing
11 4 (0.97%) Telecoms
12 3 (0.72%) Corporate Banking
12 3 (0.72%) Documentation Skills
12 3 (0.72%) Financial Institution
12 3 (0.72%) Organisational Skills
12 3 (0.72%) Retail Banking
13 2 (0.48%) International Banking
13 2 (0.48%) Legal
13 2 (0.48%) Presentation Skills
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 75 (18.12%) PySpark
2 53 (12.80%) Kafka
3 12 (2.90%) Apache NiFi
3 12 (2.90%) XML
4 11 (2.66%) RabbitMQ
5 8 (1.93%) Jinja
5 8 (1.93%) Pandas
6 7 (1.69%) pytest
7 6 (1.45%) GraphQL
7 6 (1.45%) PyTorch
8 5 (1.21%) HTML
8 5 (1.21%) JSON
8 5 (1.21%) NumPy
8 5 (1.21%) REST
8 5 (1.21%) YAML
9 4 (0.97%) CSS
9 4 (0.97%) OAuth
9 4 (0.97%) RESTful
9 4 (0.97%) Spark Streaming
9 4 (0.97%) TensorFlow
Miscellaneous
1 23 (5.56%) Cloud Native
2 15 (3.62%) Legacy Systems
3 14 (3.38%) Data Structures
4 11 (2.66%) Onboarding
5 9 (2.17%) Distributed Computing
6 8 (1.93%) Algorithms
6 8 (1.93%) Product Ownership
7 6 (1.45%) Greenfield Project
7 6 (1.45%) Life Science
7 6 (1.45%) Reinsurance
7 6 (1.45%) Virtual Team
8 5 (1.21%) Genomics
8 5 (1.21%) Linux Command Line
9 4 (0.97%) Credit Risk
9 4 (0.97%) Data Protection Act
10 3 (0.72%) Derivative
10 3 (0.72%) EMC VNX
10 3 (0.72%) Equities
10 3 (0.72%) Hedge funds
10 3 (0.72%) IoT
Operating Systems
1 7 (1.69%) Linux
2 4 (0.97%) Unix
3 1 (0.24%) Windows
Processes & Methodologies
1 209 (50.48%) Data Pipeline
2 178 (43.00%) Data Engineering
3 161 (38.89%) ETL
4 153 (36.96%) Data Modelling
5 126 (30.43%) Analytics
6 121 (29.23%) CI/CD
7 95 (22.95%) Business Intelligence
8 90 (21.74%) Agile
9 88 (21.26%) DevOps
10 81 (19.57%) Data Science
11 66 (15.94%) Infrastructure as Code
12 65 (15.70%) Data Governance
13 61 (14.73%) AI
14 60 (14.49%) Problem-Solving
15 56 (13.53%) Machine Learning
16 54 (13.04%) Migration
17 47 (11.35%) Data Integration
17 47 (11.35%) Data Transformation
18 43 (10.39%) Data Architecture
19 39 (9.42%) Data Ingestion
Programming Languages
1 283 (68.36%) Python
2 261 (63.04%) SQL
3 40 (9.66%) Java
3 40 (9.66%) Scala
4 11 (2.66%) Bash
5 9 (2.17%) PowerShell
6 8 (1.93%) JavaScript
7 7 (1.69%) C#
7 7 (1.69%) Data Analysis Expressions
8 6 (1.45%) PL/SQL
9 5 (1.21%) T-SQL
10 4 (0.97%) Shell Script
10 4 (0.97%) TypeScript
11 3 (0.72%) Go
11 3 (0.72%) R
12 2 (0.48%) C++
12 2 (0.48%) Korn
13 1 (0.24%) Bicep
13 1 (0.24%) C
13 1 (0.24%) HiveQL
Qualifications
1 95 (22.95%) Security Cleared
2 82 (19.81%) SC Cleared
3 24 (5.80%) Degree
4 18 (4.35%) DV Cleared
5 11 (2.66%) AWS Certification
5 11 (2.66%) Azure Certification
6 9 (2.17%) Computer Science Degree
7 4 (0.97%) BPSS Clearance
7 4 (0.97%) Master's Degree
8 2 (0.48%) SnowPro
9 1 (0.24%) DBS Check
9 1 (0.24%) MCP
9 1 (0.24%) PhD
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 105 (25.36%) Data Quality
2 23 (5.56%) GDPR
3 10 (2.42%) QA
4 6 (1.45%) Accessibility
5 4 (0.97%) SLA
6 3 (0.72%) HIPAA
6 3 (0.72%) NIST
7 2 (0.48%) Dodd-Frank
7 2 (0.48%) EMIR
7 2 (0.48%) ISO/IEC 20000
7 2 (0.48%) MiFID
8 1 (0.24%) EU AI Act
8 1 (0.24%) HL7
8 1 (0.24%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 1 (0.24%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 1 (0.24%) SOC 2
System Software
1 17 (4.11%) Docker
2 5 (1.21%) Virtual Machines
2 5 (1.21%) zsh
3 1 (0.24%) HDFS
Systems Management
1 68 (16.43%) Terraform
2 20 (4.83%) Kubernetes
3 4 (0.97%) Puppet
4 3 (0.72%) Ambari
4 3 (0.72%) Grafana
4 3 (0.72%) Kubeflow
4 3 (0.72%) ZABBIX
5 2 (0.48%) Ansible
5 2 (0.48%) EMC NetWorker
5 2 (0.48%) Tivoli Storage Manager
6 1 (0.24%) Argo
6 1 (0.24%) NetBackup
6 1 (0.24%) Prometheus
Vendors
1 149 (35.99%) Databricks
2 49 (11.84%) Microsoft
3 25 (6.04%) Foundry
3 25 (6.04%) Palantir
4 23 (5.56%) Google
5 19 (4.59%) Oracle
6 13 (3.14%) Cloudera
7 9 (2.17%) SAP
8 8 (1.93%) Informatica
9 5 (1.21%) IBM
9 5 (1.21%) Virgin Media
10 4 (0.97%) Denodo
11 3 (0.72%) EMC
11 3 (0.72%) Isilon
11 3 (0.72%) ServiceNow
11 3 (0.72%) Teradata
12 2 (0.48%) Alteryx
12 2 (0.48%) Cisco
12 2 (0.48%) MicroStrategy
12 2 (0.48%) Salesforce