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 30 April 2026.

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

6 months to
30 Apr 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 48 65 78
Rank change year-on-year +17 +13 +12
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 801 455 506
As % of all contract jobs in London 4.53% 3.63% 2.84%
As % of the Job Titles category 4.88% 3.88% 3.04%
Number of daily rates quoted 579 343 411
10th Percentile £374 £400 £350
25th Percentile £455 £455 £438
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year - - -8.70%
75th Percentile £613 £639 £638
90th Percentile £725 £800 £700
England median daily rate £500 £500 £510
% change year-on-year - -1.96% -7.27%
Number of hourly rates quoted 3 8 9
10th Percentile £23.72 £48.25 £48.75
25th Percentile £30.30 £51.25 £49.25
Median hourly rate £42.50 £65.00 £51.75
Median % change year-on-year -34.62% +25.60% -19.14%
75th Percentile £49.75 £81.56 £61.75
90th Percentile £53.35 £93.75 £66.13
England median hourly rate £52.50 £65.00 £67.50
% change year-on-year -19.23% -3.70% +5.47%

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 16,422 11,735 16,636
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.81% 93.50% 93.24%
Number of daily rates quoted 10,940 8,042 12,035
10th Percentile £350 £343 £325
25th Percentile £425 £431 £444
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -4.55% - -4.35%
75th Percentile £650 £675 £675
90th Percentile £755 £800 £799
England median daily rate £510 £525 £525
% change year-on-year -2.86% - -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 272 146 337
10th Percentile £18.75 £20.45 £16.01
25th Percentile £24.03 £24.05 £20.02
Median hourly rate £37.50 £34.83 £27.50
Median % change year-on-year +7.68% +26.64% -21.43%
75th Percentile £63.16 £50.75 £43.75
90th Percentile £76.58 £64.38 £65.00
England median hourly rate £47.00 £31.64 £35.96
% change year-on-year +48.55% -12.01% -20.09%

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 30 April 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 30 April 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 30 April 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 +31 116 £550 +10.00% 31
West London 0 29 £603 +6.73% 3
South London -10 8 £500 +3.90% 2
East London -2 2 £425 -15.00% 2
Data Engineer
England

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

For the 6 months to 30 April 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.

1 463 (57.80%) SQL
2 453 (56.55%) Python
3 355 (44.32%) Data Pipeline
4 347 (43.32%) Azure
5 323 (40.32%) Data Engineering
5 323 (40.32%) ETL
6 305 (38.08%) Analytics
7 288 (35.96%) Data Modelling
8 257 (32.08%) AWS
9 240 (29.96%) Databricks
10 232 (28.96%) Data Quality
11 222 (27.72%) CI/CD
12 192 (23.97%) Security Cleared
13 180 (22.47%) DevOps
14 179 (22.35%) SC Cleared
15 174 (21.72%) Business Intelligence
16 168 (20.97%) Data Warehouse
17 161 (20.10%) Power Platform
18 151 (18.85%) Power BI
19 147 (18.35%) Data Governance
20 144 (17.98%) Agile
21 140 (17.48%) PySpark
22 135 (16.85%) Azure Data Factory
23 130 (16.23%) Terraform
24 122 (15.23%) AI
25 121 (15.11%) Data Lake
25 121 (15.11%) Data Science
25 121 (15.11%) Microsoft
26 106 (13.23%) Apache Airflow
27 105 (13.11%) Amazon S3

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
1 106 (13.23%) Apache Airflow
2 104 (12.98%) Apache Spark
3 55 (6.87%) Apache
4 8 (1.00%) Confluence
4 8 (1.00%) Palantir Foundry
5 5 (0.62%) Jupyter
5 5 (0.62%) Microsoft Exchange
6 4 (0.50%) SAS
7 2 (0.25%) SharePoint
8 1 (0.12%) Appian
8 1 (0.12%) Camunda
8 1 (0.12%) Luigi
8 1 (0.12%) R Markdown
Applications
1 15 (1.87%) Microsoft Excel
2 3 (0.37%) Spreadsheet
3 2 (0.25%) Chatbot
Business Applications
1 2 (0.25%) Aladdin
1 2 (0.25%) BambooHR
1 2 (0.25%) SAP BPC
2 1 (0.12%) Actimize
2 1 (0.12%) Dynamics CRM
2 1 (0.12%) iTrent
2 1 (0.12%) Maximo
2 1 (0.12%) SAP Business ByDesign
2 1 (0.12%) SimCorp Dimension
Cloud Services
1 347 (43.32%) Azure
2 257 (32.08%) AWS
3 161 (20.10%) Power Platform
4 135 (16.85%) Azure Data Factory
5 105 (13.11%) Amazon S3
5 105 (13.11%) Snowflake
6 104 (12.98%) Azure Synapse Analytics
7 94 (11.74%) Azure DevOps
8 93 (11.61%) GCP
9 88 (10.99%) dbt
10 84 (10.49%) GitHub
11 67 (8.36%) Serverless
12 60 (7.49%) AWS Lambda
13 41 (5.12%) GitHub Actions
14 29 (3.62%) AWS CloudFormation
15 23 (2.87%) Amazon Kinesis
16 21 (2.62%) Dagster
17 18 (2.25%) AWS Step Functions
18 16 (2.00%) Amazon SQS
19 15 (1.87%) Collibra
Communications & Networking
1 3 (0.37%) SAN
2 2 (0.25%) Firewall
2 2 (0.25%) Structured Cabling
3 1 (0.12%) 4G
3 1 (0.12%) 5G
3 1 (0.12%) Network Security
3 1 (0.12%) Software-Defined Networking
Database & Business Intelligence
1 168 (20.97%) Data Warehouse
2 151 (18.85%) Power BI
3 121 (15.11%) Data Lake
4 84 (10.49%) SQL Server
5 66 (8.24%) BigQuery
6 61 (7.62%) Delta Lake
7 60 (7.49%) Azure SQL Database
8 57 (7.12%) Metadata
9 50 (6.24%) Tableau
10 46 (5.74%) Amazon Redshift
11 44 (5.49%) NoSQL
12 42 (5.24%) Snowflake Schema
13 40 (4.99%) Amazon Athena
14 39 (4.87%) Big Data
15 37 (4.62%) PostgreSQL
16 36 (4.49%) SQL Server Integration Services
17 26 (3.25%) Star Schema
18 24 (3.00%) Relational Database
19 23 (2.87%) MongoDB
19 23 (2.87%) Spark SQL
Development Applications
1 88 (10.99%) Git
2 26 (3.25%) JIRA
3 22 (2.75%) GitLab
4 19 (2.37%) Jenkins
5 16 (2.00%) MLflow
6 2 (0.25%) SonarQube
6 2 (0.25%) Sonatype Nexus
6 2 (0.25%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
7 1 (0.12%) Jaeger
7 1 (0.12%) Poetry
7 1 (0.12%) Selenium
7 1 (0.12%) Team Foundation Server
7 1 (0.12%) Terragrunt
General
1 188 (23.47%) Finance
2 119 (14.86%) Social Skills
3 96 (11.99%) Analytical Skills
4 52 (6.49%) Public Sector
5 46 (5.74%) Banking
6 26 (3.25%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 13 (1.62%) Telecoms
8 12 (1.50%) Pharmaceutical
9 11 (1.37%) Marketing
10 10 (1.25%) Front Office
10 10 (1.25%) Publishing
10 10 (1.25%) Retail
11 6 (0.75%) Documentation Skills
11 6 (0.75%) Investment Banking
12 5 (0.62%) Games
13 4 (0.50%) Back Office
13 4 (0.50%) Corporate Banking
14 3 (0.37%) Law
14 3 (0.37%) Manufacturing
14 3 (0.37%) Military
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 140 (17.48%) PySpark
2 82 (10.24%) Kafka
3 34 (4.24%) Pandas
4 23 (2.87%) YAML
5 22 (2.75%) Great Expectations
6 16 (2.00%) Spring
6 16 (2.00%) Spring Boot
7 14 (1.75%) REST
7 14 (1.75%) scikit-learn
8 12 (1.50%) Matplotlib
9 10 (1.25%) JSON
9 10 (1.25%) PyTorch
10 9 (1.12%) GeoJSON
10 9 (1.12%) NumPy
10 9 (1.12%) Polars
11 7 (0.87%) React
11 7 (0.87%) Spark Streaming
11 7 (0.87%) XML
12 6 (0.75%) HTML
12 6 (0.75%) TensorFlow
Miscellaneous
1 78 (9.74%) Cloud Native
2 24 (3.00%) Legacy Systems
3 19 (2.37%) Data Structures
3 19 (2.37%) Product Ownership
4 16 (2.00%) Greenfield Project
5 12 (1.50%) Distributed Systems
6 11 (1.37%) Onboarding
6 11 (1.37%) Reinsurance
7 9 (1.12%) Self-Motivation
8 8 (1.00%) Replication
9 7 (0.87%) Clustering
9 7 (0.87%) Life Science
9 7 (0.87%) Public Cloud
10 6 (0.75%) AI Agents
10 6 (0.75%) Data Protection Act
10 6 (0.75%) Derivative
10 6 (0.75%) NHS
11 5 (0.62%) Distributed Computing
11 5 (0.62%) Reference Data
11 5 (0.62%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 21 (2.62%) Linux
2 11 (1.37%) Unix
3 3 (0.37%) Windows
4 2 (0.25%) Windows Server
5 1 (0.12%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 355 (44.32%) Data Pipeline
2 323 (40.32%) Data Engineering
2 323 (40.32%) ETL
3 305 (38.08%) Analytics
4 288 (35.96%) Data Modelling
5 222 (27.72%) CI/CD
6 180 (22.47%) DevOps
7 174 (21.72%) Business Intelligence
8 147 (18.35%) Data Governance
9 144 (17.98%) Agile
10 122 (15.23%) AI
11 121 (15.11%) Data Science
12 101 (12.61%) Infrastructure as Code
13 98 (12.23%) Data Architecture
14 94 (11.74%) Migration
15 89 (11.11%) Problem-Solving
15 89 (11.11%) Validation
16 85 (10.61%) Machine Learning
17 75 (9.36%) Decision-Making
18 73 (9.11%) Data Transformation
Programming Languages
1 463 (57.80%) SQL
2 453 (56.55%) Python
3 75 (9.36%) Scala
4 69 (8.61%) Java
5 30 (3.75%) C#
6 24 (3.00%) Data Analysis Expressions
7 17 (2.12%) T-SQL
8 14 (1.75%) R
9 13 (1.62%) Bicep
10 11 (1.37%) JavaScript
11 10 (1.25%) Bash
11 10 (1.25%) Shell Script
12 9 (1.12%) PL/SQL
13 8 (1.00%) PowerShell
14 5 (0.62%) TypeScript
15 3 (0.37%) C
16 2 (0.25%) Korn
16 2 (0.25%) LookML
16 2 (0.25%) Ruby
16 2 (0.25%) VB
Qualifications
1 192 (23.97%) Security Cleared
2 179 (22.35%) SC Cleared
3 25 (3.12%) Azure Certification
3 25 (3.12%) Degree
4 17 (2.12%) BPSS Clearance
5 12 (1.50%) Computer Science Degree
6 10 (1.25%) AWS Certification
7 6 (0.75%) Microsoft Certification
8 5 (0.62%) DBS Check
9 4 (0.50%) DV Cleared
9 4 (0.50%) Master's Degree
10 3 (0.37%) CTC Cleared
10 3 (0.37%) SnowPro
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%) Tableau Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 232 (28.96%) Data Quality
2 39 (4.87%) GDPR
3 26 (3.25%) QA
4 6 (0.75%) Accessibility
5 5 (0.62%) MiFID
6 3 (0.37%) SLA
7 2 (0.25%) EMIR
7 2 (0.25%) GMP
7 2 (0.25%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 1 (0.12%) GRC
8 1 (0.12%) GxP
8 1 (0.12%) HIPAA
8 1 (0.12%) PCI DSS
8 1 (0.12%) PMO
8 1 (0.12%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 1 (0.12%) SNOMED CT
8 1 (0.12%) WCAG
System Software
1 54 (6.74%) Docker
2 4 (0.50%) Virtual Machines
3 1 (0.12%) Active Directory
3 1 (0.12%) RACF
Systems Management
1 130 (16.23%) Terraform
2 38 (4.74%) Kubernetes
3 10 (1.25%) Grafana
4 4 (0.50%) Kibana
4 4 (0.50%) Kubeflow
5 2 (0.25%) Ansible
5 2 (0.25%) EMC NetWorker
5 2 (0.25%) Prometheus
5 2 (0.25%) Thomson Reuters DACS
5 2 (0.25%) Tivoli Storage Manager
Vendors
1 240 (29.96%) Databricks
2 121 (15.11%) Microsoft
3 44 (5.49%) Google
4 36 (4.49%) Informatica
5 28 (3.50%) Oracle
6 13 (1.62%) IBM
7 11 (1.37%) Foundry
7 11 (1.37%) SAP
8 9 (1.12%) Palantir
8 9 (1.12%) ServiceNow
9 8 (1.00%) Denodo
9 8 (1.00%) Talend
10 6 (0.75%) Cloudera
10 6 (0.75%) MuleSoft
11 5 (0.62%) Bloomberg
11 5 (0.62%) Splunk
12 4 (0.50%) Alteryx
12 4 (0.50%) Hortonworks
12 4 (0.50%) OpenAI
12 4 (0.50%) Salesforce