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 4 June 2026.

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

6 months to
4 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 47 77 79
Rank change year-on-year +30 +2 +17
Contract jobs requiring a Data Engineer 848 412 498
As % of all contract jobs in London 4.61% 3.41% 2.86%
As % of the Job Titles category 4.96% 3.65% 3.05%
Number of daily rates quoted 612 310 397
10th Percentile £390 £400 £350
25th Percentile £453 £454 £438
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year - - -8.70%
75th Percentile £625 £625 £650
90th Percentile £713 £800 £738
England median daily rate £500 £500 £500
% change year-on-year - - -9.09%
Number of hourly rates quoted 6 5 7
10th Percentile £27.09 - £48.25
25th Percentile £34.84 £51.25 £49.25
Median hourly rate £38.67 £52.50 £50.50
Median % change year-on-year -26.34% +3.96% -29.86%
75th Percentile £52.75 £77.50 £53.94
90th Percentile £64.75 £87.25 £61.48
England median hourly rate £52.50 £52.50 £67.50
% change year-on-year - -22.22% -10.60%

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 17,096 11,297 16,308
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.97% 93.53% 93.62%
Number of daily rates quoted 11,294 7,644 11,765
10th Percentile £356 £350 £325
25th Percentile £433 £425 £440
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £530 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -3.64% - -4.35%
75th Percentile £650 £675 £676
90th Percentile £763 £800 £800
England median daily rate £518 £517 £525
% change year-on-year +0.10% -1.52% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 275 157 325
10th Percentile £18.75 £20.24 £16.00
25th Percentile £24.59 £24.66 £20.22
Median hourly rate £37.50 £32.00 £27.81
Median % change year-on-year +17.19% +15.07% -22.75%
75th Percentile £63.10 £50.00 £47.50
90th Percentile £76.72 £63.10 £67.60
England median hourly rate £45.00 £29.27 £38.00
% change year-on-year +53.74% -22.97% -15.56%

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 4 June 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 4 June 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 4 June 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 +24 118 £550 +10.00% 37
West London -1 28 £603 +6.73% 4
South London -8 7 £500 +5.26% 1
East London - 4 £450 - 4
Data Engineer
England

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

For the 6 months to 4 June 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.

1 482 (56.84%) SQL
2 464 (54.72%) Python
3 382 (45.05%) Data Pipeline
4 338 (39.86%) Data Engineering
5 335 (39.50%) ETL
6 331 (39.03%) Azure
7 320 (37.74%) Analytics
8 302 (35.61%) Data Modelling
9 292 (34.43%) AWS
10 238 (28.07%) Data Quality
11 225 (26.53%) Databricks
12 222 (26.18%) CI/CD
13 200 (23.58%) Security Cleared
14 188 (22.17%) SC Cleared
15 175 (20.64%) DevOps
16 171 (20.17%) Business Intelligence
17 166 (19.58%) Data Warehouse
18 161 (18.99%) Power Platform
19 151 (17.81%) Power BI
20 141 (16.63%) Agile
21 138 (16.27%) PySpark
22 136 (16.04%) Data Governance
23 135 (15.92%) Azure Data Factory
24 128 (15.09%) AI
25 127 (14.98%) Microsoft
26 123 (14.50%) Terraform
27 121 (14.27%) Data Lake
28 116 (13.68%) Apache Airflow
29 112 (13.21%) Migration
30 110 (12.97%) Snowflake

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
1 116 (13.68%) Apache Airflow
2 98 (11.56%) Apache Spark
3 63 (7.43%) Apache
4 9 (1.06%) Confluence
5 7 (0.83%) Palantir Foundry
6 4 (0.47%) Jupyter
6 4 (0.47%) Microsoft Exchange
7 3 (0.35%) SAS
8 1 (0.12%) Appian
8 1 (0.12%) Camunda
8 1 (0.12%) Luigi
8 1 (0.12%) R Markdown
8 1 (0.12%) SharePoint
Applications
1 10 (1.18%) Microsoft Excel
2 3 (0.35%) Spreadsheet
3 1 (0.12%) Chatbot
Business Applications
1 6 (0.71%) Aladdin
2 3 (0.35%) SAP BPC
2 3 (0.35%) SimCorp Dimension
3 2 (0.24%) BambooHR
4 1 (0.12%) Dynamics CRM
4 1 (0.12%) iTrent
4 1 (0.12%) Oracle EBS
4 1 (0.12%) Raiser’s Edge
4 1 (0.12%) SAP Business ByDesign
4 1 (0.12%) SAP CAR
4 1 (0.12%) SAP EWM
Cloud Services
1 331 (39.03%) Azure
2 292 (34.43%) AWS
3 161 (18.99%) Power Platform
4 135 (15.92%) Azure Data Factory
5 110 (12.97%) Snowflake
6 109 (12.85%) Amazon S3
7 106 (12.50%) dbt
8 101 (11.91%) Azure DevOps
9 100 (11.79%) Azure Synapse Analytics
10 94 (11.08%) GCP
11 86 (10.14%) GitHub
12 66 (7.78%) Serverless
13 63 (7.43%) AWS Lambda
14 41 (4.83%) GitHub Actions
15 22 (2.59%) Amazon Kinesis
15 22 (2.59%) AWS CloudFormation
16 21 (2.48%) Dagster
17 16 (1.89%) AWS Step Functions
18 15 (1.77%) Matillion
19 14 (1.65%) Azure Monitor
Communications & Networking
1 2 (0.24%) Structured Cabling
2 1 (0.12%) 4G
2 1 (0.12%) 5G
2 1 (0.12%) Firewall
Database & Business Intelligence
1 166 (19.58%) Data Warehouse
2 151 (17.81%) Power BI
3 121 (14.27%) Data Lake
4 86 (10.14%) SQL Server
5 66 (7.78%) BigQuery
5 66 (7.78%) Delta Lake
6 55 (6.49%) Metadata
7 50 (5.90%) Azure SQL Database
7 50 (5.90%) Tableau
8 49 (5.78%) Snowflake Schema
9 48 (5.66%) Amazon Redshift
10 44 (5.19%) Amazon Athena
11 41 (4.83%) NoSQL
12 40 (4.72%) PostgreSQL
13 36 (4.25%) Big Data
14 35 (4.13%) SQL Server Integration Services
15 25 (2.95%) Relational Database
15 25 (2.95%) Spark SQL
15 25 (2.95%) Star Schema
16 23 (2.71%) MongoDB
Development Applications
1 77 (9.08%) Git
2 28 (3.30%) JIRA
3 21 (2.48%) GitLab
4 11 (1.30%) Jenkins
5 8 (0.94%) MLflow
6 3 (0.35%) SonarQube
7 2 (0.24%) Sonatype Nexus
7 2 (0.24%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
7 2 (0.24%) Terragrunt
8 1 (0.12%) Atlassian Bamboo
8 1 (0.12%) Bitbucket
8 1 (0.12%) Claude Code
8 1 (0.12%) Selenium
General
1 215 (25.35%) Finance
2 123 (14.50%) Social Skills
3 98 (11.56%) Analytical Skills
4 52 (6.13%) Public Sector
5 50 (5.90%) Banking
6 23 (2.71%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 15 (1.77%) Pharmaceutical
8 14 (1.65%) Retail
9 12 (1.42%) Marketing
10 11 (1.30%) Front Office
10 11 (1.30%) Telecoms
11 10 (1.18%) Publishing
12 6 (0.71%) Documentation Skills
13 5 (0.59%) Back Office
13 5 (0.59%) Manufacturing
14 4 (0.47%) Corporate Banking
14 4 (0.47%) Financial Institution
14 4 (0.47%) Games
14 4 (0.47%) Investment Banking
14 4 (0.47%) Military
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 138 (16.27%) PySpark
2 85 (10.02%) Kafka
3 32 (3.77%) Pandas
4 20 (2.36%) Great Expectations
4 20 (2.36%) Spring
4 20 (2.36%) Spring Boot
5 14 (1.65%) REST
5 14 (1.65%) YAML
6 11 (1.30%) Matplotlib
6 11 (1.30%) scikit-learn
7 9 (1.06%) Apache Beam
7 9 (1.06%) GeoJSON
7 9 (1.06%) Polars
8 7 (0.83%) JSON
8 7 (0.83%) PyTorch
9 6 (0.71%) Middleware
9 6 (0.71%) NumPy
9 6 (0.71%) React
9 6 (0.71%) XML
10 5 (0.59%) OpenID
Miscellaneous
1 94 (11.08%) Cloud Native
2 27 (3.18%) Legacy Systems
3 25 (2.95%) Data Structures
4 19 (2.24%) Reinsurance
5 18 (2.12%) Greenfield Project
6 17 (2.00%) Product Ownership
7 15 (1.77%) Onboarding
8 12 (1.42%) Distributed Systems
9 8 (0.94%) Reference Data
10 7 (0.83%) Clustering
10 7 (0.83%) Derivative
10 7 (0.83%) Distributed Computing
10 7 (0.83%) Replication
10 7 (0.83%) Self-Motivation
11 6 (0.71%) Data Protection Act
11 6 (0.71%) Life Science
11 6 (0.71%) NHS
12 5 (0.59%) Algorithms
12 5 (0.59%) Public Cloud
13 4 (0.47%) Wiki
Operating Systems
1 23 (2.71%) Linux
2 13 (1.53%) Unix
3 3 (0.35%) Windows
4 2 (0.24%) Windows Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 382 (45.05%) Data Pipeline
2 338 (39.86%) Data Engineering
3 335 (39.50%) ETL
4 320 (37.74%) Analytics
5 302 (35.61%) Data Modelling
6 222 (26.18%) CI/CD
7 175 (20.64%) DevOps
8 171 (20.17%) Business Intelligence
9 141 (16.63%) Agile
10 136 (16.04%) Data Governance
11 128 (15.09%) AI
12 112 (13.21%) Migration
13 106 (12.50%) Data Science
14 97 (11.44%) Data Architecture
14 97 (11.44%) Infrastructure as Code
15 93 (10.97%) Validation
16 89 (10.50%) Problem-Solving
17 84 (9.91%) Decision-Making
18 76 (8.96%) Machine Learning
19 72 (8.49%) Data Transformation
Programming Languages
1 482 (56.84%) SQL
2 464 (54.72%) Python
3 79 (9.32%) Java
4 65 (7.67%) Scala
5 25 (2.95%) C#
6 23 (2.71%) T-SQL
7 20 (2.36%) Data Analysis Expressions
8 15 (1.77%) PL/SQL
9 12 (1.42%) Bicep
9 12 (1.42%) R
10 11 (1.30%) Shell Script
11 7 (0.83%) Bash
11 7 (0.83%) PowerShell
12 6 (0.71%) JavaScript
13 5 (0.59%) TypeScript
14 4 (0.47%) Go
15 2 (0.24%) C
15 2 (0.24%) Korn
15 2 (0.24%) Ruby
15 2 (0.24%) VB
Qualifications
1 200 (23.58%) Security Cleared
2 188 (22.17%) SC Cleared
3 23 (2.71%) Degree
4 22 (2.59%) Azure Certification
5 18 (2.12%) BPSS Clearance
6 11 (1.30%) Computer Science Degree
7 10 (1.18%) DBS Check
8 8 (0.94%) AWS Certification
9 6 (0.71%) Microsoft Certification
10 3 (0.35%) Master's Degree
10 3 (0.35%) SnowPro
11 2 (0.24%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
11 2 (0.24%) DV Cleared
12 1 (0.12%) BICSI Certification
12 1 (0.12%) CISA
12 1 (0.12%) CISM
12 1 (0.12%) CISSP
12 1 (0.12%) CTC Cleared
12 1 (0.12%) Postgraduate
12 1 (0.12%) Tableau Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 238 (28.07%) Data Quality
2 34 (4.01%) GDPR
3 32 (3.77%) QA
4 6 (0.71%) Accessibility
5 4 (0.47%) MiFID
5 4 (0.47%) Sarbanes-Oxley
6 2 (0.24%) EMIR
6 2 (0.24%) GMP
6 2 (0.24%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 2 (0.24%) SLA
7 1 (0.12%) GRC
7 1 (0.12%) GxP
7 1 (0.12%) IFRS
7 1 (0.12%) IFRS 17
7 1 (0.12%) IFRS 9
7 1 (0.12%) PCI DSS
7 1 (0.12%) PMO
7 1 (0.12%) SNOMED CT
7 1 (0.12%) WCAG
System Software
1 50 (5.90%) Docker
2 3 (0.35%) Virtual Machines
3 1 (0.12%) RACF
Systems Management
1 123 (14.50%) Terraform
2 31 (3.66%) Kubernetes
3 9 (1.06%) Grafana
4 4 (0.47%) Kibana
5 2 (0.24%) Ansible
5 2 (0.24%) Thomson Reuters DACS
6 1 (0.12%) Kubeflow
6 1 (0.12%) Prometheus
Vendors
1 225 (26.53%) Databricks
2 127 (14.98%) Microsoft
3 44 (5.19%) Google
4 39 (4.60%) Informatica
5 36 (4.25%) Oracle
6 13 (1.53%) SAP
7 10 (1.18%) Denodo
7 10 (1.18%) Foundry
7 10 (1.18%) Talend
8 9 (1.06%) IBM
9 8 (0.94%) ServiceNow
10 7 (0.83%) Alteryx
10 7 (0.83%) Bloomberg
10 7 (0.83%) Palantir
11 6 (0.71%) MuleSoft
12 5 (0.59%) Cloudera
12 5 (0.59%) Salesforce
13 4 (0.47%) Hortonworks
13 4 (0.47%) Splunk
14 3 (0.35%) MicroStrategy