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 26 January 2026.

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

6 months to
26 Jan 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 67 71 81
Rank change year-on-year +4 +10 +27
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 580 468 512
As % of all contract jobs in London 3.99% 3.39% 2.77%
As % of the Job Titles category 4.31% 3.63% 2.98%
Number of daily rates quoted 414 341 392
10th Percentile £363 £375 £385
25th Percentile £425 £463 £454
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £565 £525
Median % change year-on-year -7.08% +7.62% -8.70%
75th Percentile £625 £650 £638
90th Percentile £738 £800 £700
England median daily rate £513 £525 £525
% change year-on-year -2.38% - -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 4 8 13
10th Percentile £28.19 £57.88 £35.13
25th Percentile £32.73 £65.00 £46.75
Median hourly rate £39.50 £92.50 £52.50
Median % change year-on-year -57.30% +76.19% -9.48%
75th Percentile £61.06 £97.50 £64.50
90th Percentile £90.43 - £67.31
England median hourly rate £37.50 £92.50 £60.50
% change year-on-year -59.46% +52.89% -13.57%

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 13,448 12,904 17,194
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.61% 93.56% 93.03%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,933 8,274 12,424
10th Percentile £350 £338 £325
25th Percentile £425 £450 £450
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -4.55% - -6.14%
75th Percentile £650 £675 £675
90th Percentile £750 £800 £778
England median daily rate £505 £525 £525
% change year-on-year -3.81% - -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 216 140 302
10th Percentile £18.25 £20.68 £16.02
25th Percentile £23.55 £24.09 £19.05
Median hourly rate £33.73 £35.00 £29.61
Median % change year-on-year -3.63% +18.20% -8.89%
75th Percentile £63.10 £51.50 £50.63
90th Percentile £76.58 £78.95 £65.98
England median hourly rate £30.00 £35.00 £37.50
% change year-on-year -14.29% -6.67% +7.14%

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 26 January 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 26 January 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 26 January 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 +15 71 £517 -10.04% 41
West London -4 18 £603 +9.55% 11
South London -5 6 £500 +1.27% 9
Data Engineer
England

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

For the 6 months to 26 January 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.

1 352 (60.69%) Python
2 347 (59.83%) SQL
3 273 (47.07%) Azure
4 262 (45.17%) Data Pipeline
5 243 (41.90%) Data Engineering
5 243 (41.90%) ETL
6 229 (39.48%) Databricks
7 216 (37.24%) Data Modelling
8 198 (34.14%) Analytics
8 198 (34.14%) AWS
9 175 (30.17%) Data Quality
10 170 (29.31%) CI/CD
11 156 (26.90%) Security Cleared
12 143 (24.66%) Business Intelligence
13 140 (24.14%) SC Cleared
14 126 (21.72%) Data Warehouse
15 124 (21.38%) DevOps
16 120 (20.69%) Power BI
16 120 (20.69%) Power Platform
17 115 (19.83%) PySpark
18 112 (19.31%) Azure Data Factory
19 109 (18.79%) Agile
20 103 (17.76%) Data Governance
21 99 (17.07%) Data Science
22 89 (15.34%) AI
23 88 (15.17%) Snowflake
23 88 (15.17%) Terraform
24 84 (14.48%) Amazon S3
25 83 (14.31%) Data Lake
26 80 (13.79%) Apache Spark

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 (13.79%) Apache Spark
2 75 (12.93%) Apache Airflow
3 44 (7.59%) Apache
4 9 (1.55%) Confluence
5 4 (0.69%) Microsoft Exchange
6 3 (0.52%) SAS
6 3 (0.52%) SharePoint
7 2 (0.34%) ArcGIS
7 2 (0.34%) Jupyter
7 2 (0.34%) Luigi
8 1 (0.17%) Apache Pig
8 1 (0.17%) Appian
8 1 (0.17%) IIS
8 1 (0.17%) Oracle Application Server
8 1 (0.17%) Oracle SOA Suite
Applications
1 8 (1.38%) Microsoft Excel
2 1 (0.17%) Chatbot
2 1 (0.17%) Microsoft Office
2 1 (0.17%) Microsoft PowerPoint
2 1 (0.17%) MS Visio
Business Applications
1 2 (0.34%) Aladdin
2 1 (0.17%) Actimize
2 1 (0.17%) Dynamics CRM
2 1 (0.17%) Maximo
2 1 (0.17%) Oracle BPM
2 1 (0.17%) SAP ERP
Cloud Services
1 273 (47.07%) Azure
2 198 (34.14%) AWS
3 120 (20.69%) Power Platform
4 112 (19.31%) Azure Data Factory
5 88 (15.17%) Snowflake
6 84 (14.48%) Amazon S3
7 72 (12.41%) Azure Synapse Analytics
8 68 (11.72%) GitHub
9 65 (11.21%) GCP
10 62 (10.69%) dbt
10 62 (10.69%) Serverless
11 54 (9.31%) Azure DevOps
12 45 (7.76%) AWS Lambda
13 40 (6.90%) GitHub Actions
14 22 (3.79%) AWS CloudFormation
15 19 (3.28%) Amazon Kinesis
16 17 (2.93%) SaaS
17 16 (2.76%) AWS Step Functions
18 11 (1.90%) Microsoft Purview
19 10 (1.72%) Collibra
Communications & Networking
1 4 (0.69%) Firewall
2 3 (0.52%) SAN
3 1 (0.17%) Internet
3 1 (0.17%) Network Security
3 1 (0.17%) Software-Defined Networking
Database & Business Intelligence
1 126 (21.72%) Data Warehouse
2 120 (20.69%) Power BI
3 83 (14.31%) Data Lake
4 76 (13.10%) SQL Server
5 43 (7.41%) Metadata
6 41 (7.07%) Azure SQL Database
6 41 (7.07%) Delta Lake
7 38 (6.55%) NoSQL
8 35 (6.03%) Amazon Redshift
8 35 (6.03%) BigQuery
8 35 (6.03%) SQL Server Integration Services
9 33 (5.69%) Big Data
10 30 (5.17%) Amazon Athena
10 30 (5.17%) PostgreSQL
11 25 (4.31%) Tableau
12 24 (4.14%) Relational Database
13 23 (3.97%) Star Schema
14 18 (3.10%) Snowflake Schema
15 17 (2.93%) Hadoop
16 16 (2.76%) Amazon QuickSight
Development Applications
1 73 (12.59%) Git
2 19 (3.28%) Jenkins
3 18 (3.10%) JIRA
4 16 (2.76%) MLflow
5 15 (2.59%) GitLab
6 1 (0.17%) Bitbucket
6 1 (0.17%) DBeaver
6 1 (0.17%) ERwin
6 1 (0.17%) Gradle
6 1 (0.17%) Jaeger
6 1 (0.17%) Poetry
6 1 (0.17%) Selenium
6 1 (0.17%) Team Foundation Server
6 1 (0.17%) TeamCity
6 1 (0.17%) Terragrunt
6 1 (0.17%) Visual Studio
General
1 111 (19.14%) Finance
2 97 (16.72%) Social Skills
3 58 (10.00%) Analytical Skills
4 35 (6.03%) Public Sector
5 27 (4.66%) Banking
5 27 (4.66%) Inclusion and Diversity
6 14 (2.41%) Front Office
7 11 (1.90%) Investment Banking
8 9 (1.55%) Pharmaceutical
8 9 (1.55%) Retail
9 7 (1.21%) Marketing
9 7 (1.21%) Telecoms
10 4 (0.69%) Back Office
10 4 (0.69%) Corporate Banking
10 4 (0.69%) Military
11 3 (0.52%) Law
11 3 (0.52%) Organisational Skills
12 2 (0.34%) Financial Institution
12 2 (0.34%) International Banking
13 1 (0.17%) Retail Banking
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 115 (19.83%) PySpark
2 67 (11.55%) Kafka
3 20 (3.45%) Pandas
4 16 (2.76%) YAML
5 11 (1.90%) NumPy
5 11 (1.90%) REST
6 10 (1.72%) PyTorch
7 8 (1.38%) Apache NiFi
7 8 (1.38%) Great Expectations
7 8 (1.38%) XML
8 7 (1.21%) RabbitMQ
8 7 (1.21%) TensorFlow
9 6 (1.03%) JSON
10 5 (0.86%) Middleware
10 5 (0.86%) RESTful
11 4 (0.69%) GraphQL
11 4 (0.69%) OAuth
11 4 (0.69%) pytest
11 4 (0.69%) scikit-learn
11 4 (0.69%) Spark Streaming
Miscellaneous
1 47 (8.10%) Cloud Native
2 18 (3.10%) Data Structures
3 14 (2.41%) Legacy Systems
4 12 (2.07%) Onboarding
5 11 (1.90%) Product Ownership
5 11 (1.90%) Reinsurance
6 8 (1.38%) Greenfield Project
7 6 (1.03%) Public Cloud
7 6 (1.03%) Replication
8 5 (0.86%) Algorithms
8 5 (0.86%) Derivative
8 5 (0.86%) Equities
8 5 (0.86%) Linux Command Line
8 5 (0.86%) Virtual Team
9 4 (0.69%) AI Agents
9 4 (0.69%) Credit Risk
9 4 (0.69%) Genomics
9 4 (0.69%) Life Science
9 4 (0.69%) Management Information System
9 4 (0.69%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 8 (1.38%) Linux
2 1 (0.17%) Unix
2 1 (0.17%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 262 (45.17%) Data Pipeline
2 243 (41.90%) Data Engineering
2 243 (41.90%) ETL
3 216 (37.24%) Data Modelling
4 198 (34.14%) Analytics
5 170 (29.31%) CI/CD
6 143 (24.66%) Business Intelligence
7 124 (21.38%) DevOps
8 109 (18.79%) Agile
9 103 (17.76%) Data Governance
10 99 (17.07%) Data Science
11 89 (15.34%) AI
12 80 (13.79%) Data Architecture
13 75 (12.93%) Infrastructure as Code
13 75 (12.93%) Problem-Solving
14 74 (12.76%) Data Integration
15 71 (12.24%) Machine Learning
16 56 (9.66%) Data Transformation
17 55 (9.48%) Migration
18 47 (8.10%) Visualisation
Programming Languages
1 352 (60.69%) Python
2 347 (59.83%) SQL
3 72 (12.41%) Scala
4 39 (6.72%) Java
5 15 (2.59%) C#
6 12 (2.07%) Bash
6 12 (2.07%) Data Analysis Expressions
7 11 (1.90%) T-SQL
8 10 (1.72%) Bicep
8 10 (1.72%) JavaScript
8 10 (1.72%) PL/SQL
9 8 (1.38%) PowerShell
9 8 (1.38%) R
10 4 (0.69%) Shell Script
11 3 (0.52%) Go
11 3 (0.52%) Korn
11 3 (0.52%) TypeScript
12 2 (0.34%) VB
13 1 (0.17%) C
13 1 (0.17%) C++
Qualifications
1 156 (26.90%) Security Cleared
2 140 (24.14%) SC Cleared
3 18 (3.10%) Azure Certification
4 16 (2.76%) Degree
5 14 (2.41%) DV Cleared
6 11 (1.90%) AWS Certification
7 10 (1.72%) Computer Science Degree
8 5 (0.86%) BPSS Clearance
8 5 (0.86%) Microsoft Certification
9 4 (0.69%) Master's Degree
10 3 (0.52%) CTC Cleared
10 3 (0.52%) DBS Check
11 2 (0.34%) SnowPro
12 1 (0.17%) MCP
12 1 (0.17%) PhD
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 175 (30.17%) Data Quality
2 33 (5.69%) GDPR
3 10 (1.72%) QA
4 4 (0.69%) Accessibility
5 3 (0.52%) HIPAA
5 3 (0.52%) MiFID
6 2 (0.34%) Dodd-Frank
6 2 (0.34%) EMIR
6 2 (0.34%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 2 (0.34%) SLA
7 1 (0.17%) EU AI Act
7 1 (0.17%) GRC
7 1 (0.17%) ISO/IEC 20000
7 1 (0.17%) NIST
7 1 (0.17%) Sarbanes-Oxley
7 1 (0.17%) SOC 2
System Software
1 30 (5.17%) Docker
2 5 (0.86%) Virtual Machines
2 5 (0.86%) zsh
3 1 (0.17%) Active Directory
3 1 (0.17%) HDFS
Systems Management
1 88 (15.17%) Terraform
2 32 (5.52%) Kubernetes
3 4 (0.69%) Grafana
4 3 (0.52%) Kubeflow
5 2 (0.34%) EMC NetWorker
5 2 (0.34%) Prometheus
5 2 (0.34%) Puppet
5 2 (0.34%) Tivoli Storage Manager
6 1 (0.17%) Ambari
6 1 (0.17%) Ansible
6 1 (0.17%) Argo
6 1 (0.17%) NetBackup
6 1 (0.17%) ZABBIX
Vendors
1 229 (39.48%) Databricks
2 75 (12.93%) Microsoft
3 27 (4.66%) Oracle
4 25 (4.31%) Google
5 17 (2.93%) Informatica
6 16 (2.76%) Foundry
7 15 (2.59%) Palantir
8 11 (1.90%) ServiceNow
9 9 (1.55%) SAP
10 8 (1.38%) Cloudera
10 8 (1.38%) IBM
11 5 (0.86%) Talend
11 5 (0.86%) Virgin Media
12 4 (0.69%) Alteryx
12 4 (0.69%) Denodo
12 4 (0.69%) Salesforce
13 3 (0.52%) Cisco
13 3 (0.52%) EMC
13 3 (0.52%) OpenAI
13 3 (0.52%) Splunk