Data Engineer Contract Job Trends in London

Data Engineer
England > London

The median Data Engineer daily rate in London is £514, according to job vacancies posted in the 6 months leading up to 21 February 2026.

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

6 months to
21 Feb 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 62 66 80
Rank change year-on-year +4 +14 +25
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 664 472 536
As % of all contract jobs in London 4.24% 3.49% 2.90%
As % of the Job Titles category 4.58% 3.73% 3.12%
Number of daily rates quoted 472 348 426
10th Percentile £363 £400 £372
25th Percentile £425 £463 £450
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £514 £550 £525
Median % change year-on-year -6.59% +4.76% -8.70%
75th Percentile £614 £650 £638
90th Percentile £725 £800 £700
England median daily rate £500 £525 £525
% change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 3 8 11
10th Percentile £38.85 £57.88 £35.63
25th Percentile £44.25 £65.00 £48.00
Median hourly rate £54.50 £83.75 £52.50
Median % change year-on-year -34.93% +59.52% -17.97%
75th Percentile £82.88 £94.69 £63.14
90th Percentile £99.15 £97.50 £68.00
England median hourly rate £64.50 £70.00 £62.36
% change year-on-year -7.86% +12.26% -2.57%

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 14,510 12,646 17,206
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.64% 93.61% 93.19%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,685 8,217 12,412
10th Percentile £350 £333 £325
25th Percentile £425 £435 £450
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -4.55% - -5.17%
75th Percentile £650 £675 £675
90th Percentile £750 £800 £780
England median daily rate £500 £525 £525
% change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 227 144 338
10th Percentile £18.07 £20.83 £16.00
25th Percentile £23.55 £24.66 £19.05
Median hourly rate £35.00 £36.75 £29.36
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% +25.17% -16.11%
75th Percentile £59.86 £53.75 £49.00
90th Percentile £76.58 £78.65 £66.30
England median hourly rate £33.17 £35.00 £35.00
% change year-on-year -5.23% - -12.50%

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 21 February 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 21 February 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 21 February 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 +17 84 £517 -1.48% 40
West London -2 27 £603 +5.93% 5
South London -8 10 £500 +1.27% 3
Data Engineer
England

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

For the 6 months to 21 February 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.

1 397 (59.79%) SQL
2 393 (59.19%) Python
3 313 (47.14%) Azure
4 296 (44.58%) Data Pipeline
5 278 (41.87%) ETL
6 277 (41.72%) Data Engineering
7 245 (36.90%) Analytics
7 245 (36.90%) Databricks
8 242 (36.45%) Data Modelling
9 218 (32.83%) AWS
10 197 (29.67%) Data Quality
11 183 (27.56%) CI/CD
12 166 (25.00%) Security Cleared
13 161 (24.25%) Business Intelligence
14 149 (22.44%) SC Cleared
15 145 (21.84%) Data Warehouse
16 141 (21.23%) Power Platform
17 135 (20.33%) DevOps
18 133 (20.03%) Power BI
19 123 (18.52%) Azure Data Factory
19 123 (18.52%) PySpark
20 122 (18.37%) Data Governance
21 120 (18.07%) Agile
22 115 (17.32%) Data Science
23 108 (16.27%) Terraform
24 99 (14.91%) AI
25 96 (14.46%) Snowflake
26 95 (14.31%) Data Lake
27 93 (14.01%) Infrastructure as Code
28 92 (13.86%) Microsoft

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 85 (12.80%) Apache Spark
2 75 (11.30%) Apache Airflow
3 52 (7.83%) Apache
4 12 (1.81%) Palantir Foundry
5 11 (1.66%) Confluence
6 4 (0.60%) Microsoft Exchange
7 3 (0.45%) SAS
8 2 (0.30%) ArcGIS
8 2 (0.30%) Jupyter
8 2 (0.30%) SharePoint
9 1 (0.15%) Appian
9 1 (0.15%) Camunda
9 1 (0.15%) IIS
9 1 (0.15%) Luigi
9 1 (0.15%) Oracle Application Server
9 1 (0.15%) Oracle SOA Suite
Applications
1 7 (1.05%) Microsoft Excel
2 1 (0.15%) Chatbot
2 1 (0.15%) Microsoft Office
2 1 (0.15%) Microsoft PowerPoint
Business Applications
1 2 (0.30%) Dynamics CRM
1 2 (0.30%) SAP BPC
2 1 (0.15%) Actimize
2 1 (0.15%) Aladdin
2 1 (0.15%) iTrent
2 1 (0.15%) Maximo
2 1 (0.15%) Oracle BPM
2 1 (0.15%) SAP Business ByDesign
2 1 (0.15%) SAP ERP
Cloud Services
1 313 (47.14%) Azure
2 218 (32.83%) AWS
3 141 (21.23%) Power Platform
4 123 (18.52%) Azure Data Factory
5 96 (14.46%) Snowflake
6 86 (12.95%) Azure Synapse Analytics
7 84 (12.65%) GCP
8 82 (12.35%) Amazon S3
9 65 (9.79%) Serverless
10 64 (9.64%) GitHub
11 63 (9.49%) dbt
12 60 (9.04%) Azure DevOps
13 49 (7.38%) AWS Lambda
14 34 (5.12%) GitHub Actions
15 26 (3.92%) AWS CloudFormation
16 20 (3.01%) Amazon Kinesis
17 19 (2.86%) AWS Step Functions
18 15 (2.26%) SaaS
19 14 (2.11%) Amazon SQS
19 14 (2.11%) Collibra
Communications & Networking
1 4 (0.60%) Firewall
2 3 (0.45%) SAN
3 1 (0.15%) 4G
3 1 (0.15%) 5G
3 1 (0.15%) Network Security
3 1 (0.15%) Software-Defined Networking
3 1 (0.15%) Structured Cabling
Database & Business Intelligence
1 145 (21.84%) Data Warehouse
2 133 (20.03%) Power BI
3 95 (14.31%) Data Lake
4 83 (12.50%) SQL Server
5 50 (7.53%) Delta Lake
6 49 (7.38%) BigQuery
7 48 (7.23%) Azure SQL Database
8 47 (7.08%) Metadata
9 41 (6.17%) SQL Server Integration Services
10 39 (5.87%) Amazon Redshift
11 37 (5.57%) NoSQL
12 33 (4.97%) Tableau
13 32 (4.82%) Amazon Athena
14 31 (4.67%) Big Data
14 31 (4.67%) PostgreSQL
15 26 (3.92%) Snowflake Schema
16 23 (3.46%) Relational Database
17 17 (2.56%) Mixpanel
18 16 (2.41%) Data Vault
19 15 (2.26%) Star Schema
Development Applications
1 81 (12.20%) Git
2 20 (3.01%) JIRA
3 19 (2.86%) Jenkins
4 17 (2.56%) GitLab
4 17 (2.56%) MLflow
5 2 (0.30%) Selenium
5 2 (0.30%) SonarQube
6 1 (0.15%) Bitbucket
6 1 (0.15%) DBeaver
6 1 (0.15%) Gradle
6 1 (0.15%) Jaeger
6 1 (0.15%) Poetry
6 1 (0.15%) Team Foundation Server
6 1 (0.15%) TeamCity
6 1 (0.15%) Terragrunt
6 1 (0.15%) Visual Studio
General
1 133 (20.03%) Finance
2 116 (17.47%) Social Skills
3 69 (10.39%) Analytical Skills
4 41 (6.17%) Public Sector
5 35 (5.27%) Banking
6 26 (3.92%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 13 (1.96%) Front Office
8 11 (1.66%) Pharmaceutical
8 11 (1.66%) Retail
9 10 (1.51%) Investment Banking
10 8 (1.20%) Marketing
10 8 (1.20%) Telecoms
11 6 (0.90%) Publishing
12 4 (0.60%) Back Office
12 4 (0.60%) Corporate Banking
13 3 (0.45%) Documentation Skills
13 3 (0.45%) Law
13 3 (0.45%) Military
13 3 (0.45%) Organisational Skills
14 2 (0.30%) Manufacturing
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 123 (18.52%) PySpark
2 74 (11.14%) Kafka
3 29 (4.37%) Pandas
4 18 (2.71%) YAML
5 13 (1.96%) Great Expectations
6 12 (1.81%) REST
7 11 (1.66%) NumPy
7 11 (1.66%) PyTorch
8 10 (1.51%) Matplotlib
8 10 (1.51%) scikit-learn
9 9 (1.36%) XML
10 8 (1.20%) Apache NiFi
11 7 (1.05%) JSON
11 7 (1.05%) RabbitMQ
11 7 (1.05%) TensorFlow
12 6 (0.90%) GeoJSON
12 6 (0.90%) Polars
12 6 (0.90%) pytest
13 5 (0.75%) Middleware
13 5 (0.75%) RESTful
Miscellaneous
1 58 (8.73%) Cloud Native
2 22 (3.31%) Data Structures
3 17 (2.56%) Legacy Systems
4 12 (1.81%) Onboarding
4 12 (1.81%) Product Ownership
4 12 (1.81%) Reinsurance
5 9 (1.36%) Greenfield Project
6 6 (0.90%) Distributed Computing
6 6 (0.90%) Life Science
6 6 (0.90%) Public Cloud
6 6 (0.90%) Replication
7 4 (0.60%) Algorithms
7 4 (0.60%) Credit Risk
7 4 (0.60%) Derivative
7 4 (0.60%) Distributed Systems
7 4 (0.60%) Equities
7 4 (0.60%) Genomics
7 4 (0.60%) Linux Command Line
7 4 (0.60%) Virtual Team
7 4 (0.60%) Wiki
Operating Systems
1 9 (1.36%) Linux
2 1 (0.15%) Unix
2 1 (0.15%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 296 (44.58%) Data Pipeline
2 278 (41.87%) ETL
3 277 (41.72%) Data Engineering
4 245 (36.90%) Analytics
5 242 (36.45%) Data Modelling
6 183 (27.56%) CI/CD
7 161 (24.25%) Business Intelligence
8 135 (20.33%) DevOps
9 122 (18.37%) Data Governance
10 120 (18.07%) Agile
11 115 (17.32%) Data Science
12 99 (14.91%) AI
13 93 (14.01%) Infrastructure as Code
14 91 (13.70%) Problem-Solving
15 90 (13.55%) Data Architecture
16 83 (12.50%) Machine Learning
17 76 (11.45%) Migration
18 72 (10.84%) Data Integration
19 71 (10.69%) Data Transformation
20 61 (9.19%) Performance Tuning
Programming Languages
1 397 (59.79%) SQL
2 393 (59.19%) Python
3 73 (10.99%) Scala
4 41 (6.17%) Java
5 22 (3.31%) C#
6 18 (2.71%) Data Analysis Expressions
7 16 (2.41%) T-SQL
8 12 (1.81%) Bicep
9 11 (1.66%) Bash
9 11 (1.66%) JavaScript
10 10 (1.51%) R
11 9 (1.36%) PL/SQL
11 9 (1.36%) PowerShell
12 5 (0.75%) Shell Script
13 3 (0.45%) Korn
14 2 (0.30%) C
14 2 (0.30%) C++
14 2 (0.30%) Ruby
14 2 (0.30%) TypeScript
14 2 (0.30%) VB
Qualifications
1 166 (25.00%) Security Cleared
2 149 (22.44%) SC Cleared
3 21 (3.16%) Degree
4 20 (3.01%) Azure Certification
5 13 (1.96%) BPSS Clearance
5 13 (1.96%) DV Cleared
6 12 (1.81%) AWS Certification
7 11 (1.66%) Computer Science Degree
8 5 (0.75%) Microsoft Certification
9 4 (0.60%) Master's Degree
10 3 (0.45%) CTC Cleared
10 3 (0.45%) DBS Check
11 2 (0.30%) SnowPro
12 1 (0.15%) Microsoft Certified Professional
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 197 (29.67%) Data Quality
2 35 (5.27%) GDPR
3 18 (2.71%) QA
4 7 (1.05%) Accessibility
5 3 (0.45%) HIPAA
5 3 (0.45%) MiFID
6 2 (0.30%) Dodd-Frank
6 2 (0.30%) EMIR
6 2 (0.30%) GMP
6 2 (0.30%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 1 (0.15%) EU AI Act
7 1 (0.15%) GRC
7 1 (0.15%) NIST
7 1 (0.15%) PMO
7 1 (0.15%) Sarbanes-Oxley
7 1 (0.15%) SLA
7 1 (0.15%) SOC 2
System Software
1 34 (5.12%) Docker
2 5 (0.75%) Virtual Machines
3 4 (0.60%) zsh
4 1 (0.15%) Active Directory
4 1 (0.15%) HDFS
Systems Management
1 108 (16.27%) Terraform
2 32 (4.82%) Kubernetes
3 4 (0.60%) Grafana
4 3 (0.45%) Kubeflow
4 3 (0.45%) Prometheus
5 2 (0.30%) EMC NetWorker
5 2 (0.30%) Tivoli Storage Manager
6 1 (0.15%) Ambari
6 1 (0.15%) Argo
6 1 (0.15%) Puppet
6 1 (0.15%) ZABBIX
Vendors
1 245 (36.90%) Databricks
2 92 (13.86%) Microsoft
3 37 (5.57%) Google
4 30 (4.52%) Oracle
5 21 (3.16%) Informatica
6 15 (2.26%) SAP
7 14 (2.11%) Foundry
8 13 (1.96%) Palantir
9 11 (1.66%) ServiceNow
10 9 (1.36%) Talend
11 8 (1.20%) Cloudera
11 8 (1.20%) IBM
12 5 (0.75%) Virgin Media
13 4 (0.60%) Alteryx
13 4 (0.60%) Denodo
13 4 (0.60%) MuleSoft
14 3 (0.45%) Cisco
14 3 (0.45%) EMC
14 3 (0.45%) Isilon
14 3 (0.45%) OpenAI